Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory

SUSAN M. GRIFFIN The Discourse Within: Feminism and Intradisciplinary Study In this essay, I want to bring the history of feminist theory and scholarship to beat on a specific problem in literary studies, a problem symptomatic of a larger pattern in academic discourse. In particular , I will argue that there is a relation between the structuring of the academic discipline of American literary studies and the way American literary texts are understood and valued. Although feminism has become a part of academic discourse only in the last few decades, feminists have tried since theit initial entry into the academy to change its structure. From its inception, feminist study has been interdisciplinary. The 1976 inaugural issue of Signs, for example , states that its first purpose "is to publish the new scholarship about women from both the United States and other countries" (Stimpson, et al. ?). Having defined this comparativist task, the editors continue, "Signs has a second purpose as well: to be interdisciplinary" (v). Women's histories, literature, culture, and lives had fallen between the cracks of traditional academic disciplines; interdisciplinary study would allow scholars to recapture them. In addition, an interdisciplinary perspective would foster new attention to, and critical evaluation of, the methodologies employed by various disciplines. This critique of methodology proved especially important in the humanities where the very use of method was often unacknowledged. The results of the feminist call for a broad restructuring of traditional disciplines and approaches have been widespread. For example, the new literary history that has Arizona Quarterly Volume 44 Number 4, Winter 1989 Copyright © 1989 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 004-1610 Susan M. Griffin been recently embraced by American critics owes a real debt to feminism's program of historicizing our reading of literature and of tracing the wotking of ideology in texts and theit critical treatment. I think that the interdisciplinary nature of feminist studies can be used to address a particular problem in American literary criticism. The specific case I wish to investigate is that of the nineteenth-century novel. Critical discussion of these texts has been structured around a dichotomy described by Nina Baym in an article which has been crucial to feminist understanding of both American literature and American literary studies, "Melodramas of Beset Manhood." Baym argues that for American literary critics "the quality of Americanness,' whatever it might be, constituted literary excellence for American authors" (126). Through a study of major critics and their influential wotks, Baym shows that this definition of literary excellence as 'Americanness" is not only "subjective, circular, and in some sense nonliterary or even antiliterary, " but also excludes wotks by women writers from the literaty canon (129). What comes to count as 'Ametican" for these critics is the presence of a particular myth: "The myth narrates a confrontation of the American individual, the pure American self divorced from specific social circumstances, with the promise offered by the idea of America. . . . The myth also holds that, as something artificial and secondary to human nature, society exerts an unmitigatedly desttuctive pressure on individuality" (131-32). Further, and crucially for Baym, "In these stories, the encroaching, constticting, destroying society is represented with particular urgency in the figure of one or more women" (133). In this "melodrama of beset manhood," the entrapper is female, as is her unthreatening counterpart, the all-accepting, nurturing landscape. Critics assume that all serious American novels tell the story of this myth of escape and rebellion; other fictions are merely "popular" stories which replicate, and thus teinfotce, prevailing societal values. Since to qualify as a great American novel, a fiction has to follow a misogynist pattern, it is, as Baym points out, no accident that no woman has written a "great American novel." Recent feminist scholarship and criticism have helped to modify this paradigm of serious male novel of individual rebellion vs. popular, conservative female fiction of society both by expanding the field of Ametican literary study and by changing its methodology. Books like Freibert Feminism and lntradisciplinary Study and White's critical anthology of the works of nineteenth-century women novelists have made previously hard-to-find texts available. And, feminist analyses by critics like Baym, Fetterley, Kolodny, and Tompkins of...