Page 124 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

SOCIALIST FEMINISM

works of literature is by what one might call the ‘truth criterion’…
there are truths and probabilities about the female experience that
form a criterion against which to judge the authenticity of a literary
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statement about women”. Toril Moi was surely right to detect a
similar such conception in Showalter, especially in the latter’s
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objections to Woolf’s modernism. Moi herself pointed by way of
evidence to Showalter’s passing reference to Lukács. But much more
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significant, surely, is the reference to Q.D.Leavis: what we find in
Showalter is a genuinely feminist culturalism, centred around a
notion of authenticity indicative of a kind of politically charged,
female, (Q.D.?) Leavisism. That this is so does not in itself invalidate
Showalter’s position, as Moi appears to imagine it might. It does
suggest, however, that for feminists, as for others, there is simply no
such thing as a theoretically innocent reading.

Socialist feminism

Where the majority of Anglo-American, and especially American,
feminists had found culture, a female literary tradition and female
realism, those mainly British feminists who had attempted to work
with concepts drawn from the Marxist tradition discovered ideology
and the subsequent impress within ideology of the mode of material
production. As the Marxist-feminist Literature Collective announced
at Essex University in 1977: “Literary texts are…ideological in the
sense that they cannot give us a knowledge of the social formation;
but they do give us…an imaginary representation of real relations”. 28
This was almost exactly the Althusserian formulation of the theory
of ideology. It should come as little surprise, then, that the Collective’s
preferred reading strategy, which sought to “analyse the incoherences
and contradictions in the texts”, and to relate these to historical
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developments in the social formation, derived explicitly from that of
the French Althusserian literary theorist, Pierre Macherey The point
to note is that the literary texts under discussion here were themselves
by women writers, that is, that they were all, in fact, examples of
precisely that female tradition which Showalter by implication exempted
from such “ideological” analysis. As in Althusserian Marxism, so
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too in much British Marxist feminism, experiential authenticity was
simply, or perhaps even complexly, reduced to ideology.

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