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Ful) is truly informed by the criterion of literary excellence. As I understand it, such a criterion might well lead us to dismiss a writer no matter how “representative” he or she is (as I would dismiss Susan Warner, Frankly, no matter how popular she was in her own time and no matter how many interesting “ideas” Tompkins finds in her books).
Indeed, the real problem with a feminist literary history is that it does not so much replace the faulty procedures of Marx, Smith, et al., as it offers an even more thoroughgoing cultural approach to the study of literature. Again, the question is not whether this is a legitimate enterprise. The question is whether it is the best approach for a truly literary history of American writing. If one agrees with Tompkins and other feminists that literary works should be studied as “attempts to redefine the social order,” or as efforts (conscious or unconscious) to embody the cultural codes of a particular time, then one will find feminist literary history an exciting prospect. Those of us who do not value all (or even most) works of literature for these reasons will hardly share Buell’s enthusiasm for a feminist revisionism. Aesthetic standard may be elitist and they are certainly relative. But they do allow us to assess the writer’s success in embodying his or her intentions, didactic or otherwise. And this, for many of us, will remain the primary, if by no means the only, goal of literary history.
I will close by quoting from Cathy N. Davidson’s Revolution and the Word. This book is one of the best products of the feminist movement; anyone interested in the origins of American fiction will find it invaluable. Yet there is something missing in this otherwise excellent study, and I think the missing element is suggested by a late passage in which Davidson lists the reasons many Americans are excluded from American literary histories: “Moreover, a uniform American literature defines a uniform American and, by extension and implication, excludes those who do not fit the definition by reasons of gender, race,
On the question of what a truly literary approach to literary history should be, see R.S. Crane, Critical and Historical Principles of Literary History (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971).
Tompkins, p. xi. To be fair, Tompkins here refers to the formal purpose behind a specific body of works, so-called women’s fiction of the nineteenth century. But I think these is a strong tendency in feminist criticism to see most all literature in this light.