Page 123 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

FEMINISM

women’s writing. Again, there is no real counterpart within
contemporary Marxist cultural theory to this practice of the
discovery and celebration of the literatures of the oppressed. Marxist
writers seem surprisingly uninterested in the creativity of proletarian
culture, an indifference which speaks volumes, surely, about the
actual distance between their interests and those of the class they may
occasionally claim to represent.
I suggested above that anglophone feminisms of the type represented
by Showalter’s work were frequently deeply implicated in often
unacknowledged culturalist theoretical assumptions. Let us return to
this matter for a moment. Culturalism, we have seen, typically posits
an organicist notion of culture, incorporating both anthropological
and literary understandings of culture as, respectively, the embodiment
of a whole way of life and a repository of superior value. For all her
antipathy to the French masters, Showalter’s work clearly incorporated
each of these elements. For her, both the culture of women and the
culture that women share with men have each to be conceived in
holistic and organicist terms: “women’s culture forms a collective
experience within the cultural whole, an experience that binds women
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writers to each other over time and space”. Her model of culture
was derived quite explicitly from anthropology, and though literary
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value is simply assumed, rather than argued for, in much of her work,
there can be little doubt that she displays a penchant for “completeness,
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even as an unattainable ideal”, at least as Arnoldian as anything in
Raymond Williams. Her self-confessed textualism presumably derived
from a similar source.
For a culturalist thinker, such as Showalter in some significant
respects most certainly has been, the question of literary and cultural
value is a matter of very real importance. Perhaps the central
culturalist argument for the value of culture is that it somehow
reveals or expresses some vital “truth” or another. In Leavis, though
not in Eliot, this had led to a positive valorization of “life” which
came dangerously close to a theory of aesthetic realism. Much early
second wave anglophone feminism in fact subscribed to an aesthetic
of this kind. When American feminists began to articulate their own
criteria of literary value, they typically tended towards either the
notion of subjective authenticity, or that of objective realism, or some
combination of both. As Josephine Donovan concluded, “it is…clear
that one of the primary criteria by which feminist critics are judging

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