262 American Literature
A serious reassessment of Hemingway. It might even lead to his demotion. For this to occur, however, feminist critics are going to have to do a good deal more than they have done so far. And even if their work on writers such as Hemingway is more faithful to the text than has been the case, there remains the question of whether their approach is one that should lead to realignment of these writers within the canon. In my concluding section I hope to clarify what I mean by this question.
II
“Lest we throw out some fine babies with the bathwater, I ask for a skeptical and even suspicious reexamination of our inherited critical tools and canons. But to expose and reexamine is not always to replace.”
“We may expect that our next decade will see even more vigorous feminist questioning of our criteria of aesthetic value, and even more drastic reestimations of the old masters.” In this statement Elaine Showalter introduces what I take to be two of the three major concerns of feminist criticism. The third, unmentioned concern is to resurrect or to reinterpret women writers who have not received their due from the literary establishment. Like most critics, feminist and non-feminist, I believe that feminism’s achievements in this area have been profound and permanent. The two cited concerns are more problematical. I have already that re-estimations of the old masters may be drastic indeed, if the evidence to date is a good indication of things to come. Let us hope that Showalter’s goal- “a complete revolution in the understanding of our literary heritage”- is not achieved by misreading as well as remoting writers such as Hemingway. Even more important, though, because it is central
Mark Spilka’s recent work on Hemingway is a good start. See especially “Hemingway and Fauntleroy: An Androgynous Pursuit,” in American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Fritz Fleischmann (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982) pp. 339-70. I would also recommend several other essays in this volume: Nina Baym on Hawthorne, Nina Auerbach on James, and Judith Bryant Wittenberg on Faulkner.
Annette Kolodny, “The Feminist as Literary Critic,” Critical Inquiry, 2 (1976), 829.
Elaine Showalter, “Introduction: The Feminist Critical Revolution,” The New Feminist Criticism, p. 6.
Showalter, p. 10.