The Extra 105
Investigation of literary history conceived in the broadcast sense as a field in which women’s and men’s writing seem inextricably intertwined in a play of symbiosis and contention. I say “give rise to” rather than “give place to,” because as long as literary historiography continues to be built upon normative generalizations about human experience that privilege men’s experience above women’s, and as long as women’s writing remains comparatively speaking a terra incognita, the first two types of investigation will be crucial. Their gains to date, however, should not be underestimated. Today’s scholarship on mid-nineteenth-century writing by American women, for example, is far more extensive and sophisticated than what is being done on their male counterparts.
The risk of directing more of the energy of gender-oriented studies to the intersection and confluence of men’s and women’s writing is that feminist scholarship might become relegated to a sort of handmaiden’s status. Such could become the case if, for example, the valuable work now being done on the influence of female significant others upon male canonical figures were to become the norm. But the risk of shying away from the subjects of intersection and confluence is even greater: namely that gender-oriented studies might too parochially limit their sights to the gender-specific aspects of women’s writing and the misogynistic aspects of men’s. If I am to give a full and satisfying account of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in my American Romanticism course, I must be prepared to represent it not only as an apogee/critique of domestic sentimentalism that attempts to claim a special sort of moral-political power for women, not only as a distinctively different sort of accomplishment from our classic male antebellum fictions, but also line it up together with (say) Moby-Dick as a post-Calvinist prophetic testament that scrutinizes the limits of American theological and cultural ethnocentrism using an array of comparable devices like idealized nonwhites and gothic hero-villians. –Or with Leaves of Grass, as the 1850s’ most ambitious literary attempt at synthesizing all strata of American society under the aegis of a
See for example, Ruth Perry and Martine Watson Brownley, eds., Mothering the Mind (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1984).