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Shot/Countershot
Film Tradition and Women's Cinema
By Lucy Fischer PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-04756-0
CHAPTER 1
Pre/Texts: An Introduction
I believe that feminine artistic production takes place by means of a complicated process involving conquering and reclaiming, appropriating and formulating, as well as forgetting and subverting. In the works of ... female artists ... one finds artistic tradition as well as the break with it.
— Silvia Bovenschen
Talking Back
Over the past decade, feminist criticism in the arts has followed two major paths. One route has examined works in the male canon, rereading them for patriarchal presuppositions masked by traditional scholarship. In literature, this perspective characterizes Simone de Beauvoir's pioneering analyses of Montherlant, Lawrence, Claudel, Breton, and Stendhal in The Second Sex and Kate Millett's methodology in Sexual Politics. In the field of cinema, this approach forms the basis of such studies as Molly Haskell's From Reverence to Rape, Marjorie Rosen's Popcorn Venus, Sumiko Higashi's Virgins, Vamps and Flappers, E. Ann Kaplan's Women in Film Noir, and Mary Ann Doane's The Desire to Desire. Other critics have found it equally fruitful to address the male-authored classics from a radically different vantage point, reading them (in a deconstructionist spirit) "against the grain" for their feminist moments or for textual "weak spots" where contradictions are revealed. Such an approach informs Tania Modleski's essay on Letter from an Unknown Woman(1948), Lucie Arbuthnot and Gail Seneca's discussion of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes(1953), and Lea Jacobs's piece on Now, Voyager (1942).
The other broad path traversed by feminist critics has entailed the study of female artists in an attempt to underscore their existence or to establish consciousness of a woman's tradition. In the field of art history, Germaine Greer has adopted this stance in The Obstacle Race, as have Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris in Women Artists: 1550–1950. In literary studies, this perspective informs Patricia Meyer Spacks's The Female Imagination, Ellen Moers's Literary Women: The Great Writers, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic, and Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own. In the area of cinema, Claire Johnston has drawn critical attention to Dorothy Arzner, one of the few female directors to work in Hollywood during the classical era.
Even when one concentrates on the artwork of women, however, the male canon does not simply disappear. Contemporary criticism has reformulated the notion of literary history as a dynamic interplay of texts, and the feminist critic who focuses on the creations of female artists must yet decide how to position them, what intertextual network to assume. Again, the theorist confronts a fork in the road, a critical choice. Shall the work of women artists be situated within the preexistent male discourse? Or should it be constituted as a separate province, an alternate heritage?
Taking the first path are those theorists who claim that women's art should be integrated within the male canon, since female authorship is not a significant organizing principle. This position seeks to minimize the role of sexual difference, asserting that the art of women and of men are, fundamentally, the same. Minda Rae Amiran, for example, calls the current interest in women's writing "degrading" and its teaching "a subversion of women's liberation." "The whole point of leaving the doll's house," she continues, "was to become a person among people."
Choosing the other broad critical road are those who argue that women's artwork can be bracketed from patriarchal culture — who embrace the notion of sexual difference and stress the "special" features of women's creative production. Annis Pratt, for example, speaks of her desire to investigate novels by women as "a self contained entity following its own organic principles." Ultimately, she finds the works evincing a "core of feminine self-expression" and attributes the repeated patterns she detects to women's oppressed political standing. Patricia Meyer Spacks also examines women's work as a separate enclave and finds "evidence of sharing ... persistent ways of feeling," "patterns of self-depiction that survive the vagaries of change": "Women writing directly about their own lives in letters, journals, autobiographies, or indirectly in ... fiction, demonstrate that the experience of women has long been the same, that female likenesses are more fundamental than female differences." Like Pratt, she sees this woman's perspective as arising from social conditioning but finds it "an outlook sufficiently distinct to be recognizable through the centuries."
French feminist critics have recently offered a more radical rationale for configuring women's artwork as a separate field. They see shared properties as arising not simply from common social influences or lived experiences but from inherent psychological and biological factors. Thus French psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray argues for the existence of a feminine mode of discourse, based on woman's unique sexual/anatomical make-up:
Woman has sex organs more or less everywhere. She finds pleasure almost anywhere. ... The geography of her pleasure is much more diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle, than is commonly imagined — in an imaginary rather too narrowly focused on sameness.
"She" is definitely other in herself. This is doubtless why she is said to be whimsical, incomprehensible, agitated, capricious — not to mention her language in which "she" sets off in all directions leaving "him" unable to discern the coherence of any meaning.
In a similar vein, Helene Cixous sees women's writing as evincing the mark of the feminine unconscious: "Things are starting to be written ... that will constitute a feminine Imaginary, the site, that is, of identifications of an ego no longer given over to an image defined by the masculine."
There is, clearly, no single approach to the study of women's art; it is the critic's choice to assume the context germane to the reading proposed. Women's art has relevance to work created by males and females; each frame will provide its own fruitful insights. While asserting the worth of various perspectives, it is also crucial to see their limitations. To deny sexual difference and integrate women's work into the established tradition may prevent its marginalization, but it may ignore its noteworthy features — be they culturally, psychologically, or biologically determined. On the other hand, to emphasize sexual difference may highlight what is unique in women's art, but it can encourage essentialist thinking and the false impression that female artists operate outside of broader cultural history.
Perhaps there is a way to bridge the gap between these two opposing critical stances, to find a crossroads at which they intersect, allowing us to extract what is most valuable in each. Myra Jehlen argues for this perspective in "Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism" and offers a possible trail. Using a geographical metaphor, she suggests that rather than view women's artwork as a separate "territory," we see it as "one long border" and concentrate on its fluid "interacting juxtaposition" with the patriarchal domain. This translates into a methodology of "radical comparativism," whereby the work of female artists is related to that of men:
Comparison reverses the territorial image along with its contained methodology and projects instead, as the world of women, something like a long border. The confrontation along that border between, say, Portrait of a Lady and House of Mirth, two literary worlds created by two gods out of one thematic clay, can light up the outer and most encompassing parameters (perimeters) of both worlds.
But to say that feminist studies should take a comparative approach is not to indicate what the precise nature of that comparison might be.
Other theorists have offered leads in that direction — critics who differ greatly in their ideological positions. Art historian Linda Nochlin rejects the notion of an essential feminine mode but sees women's art as unified by a shared subversion of the established order:
I often see woman's style as being partly conditioned by opposition, as having meaning in the context of being opposed to existing styles — I find analogies in how [women artists] invent in opposition to what's prevailing, but I don't find a common thread and I don't think that's necessary.
French critic Julia Kristeva has called woman "a perpetual dissident" who is "here to shake up, to disturb, to deflate masculine values and not to espouse them." For her, "a feminist practice can only be negative, at odds with what already exists."
What critics as diverse as Nochlin and Kristeva are arguing is not only to view women's artwork diacritically (its meaning seen as difference from the male standard) but to regard it as aggressively establishing a counter-heritage. This perspective allows the theorist to note common features in women's artwork while still asserting its relation to the dominant mode. There is no need, then, to look for static, innate patterns in women's creations or for a universal feminine style. Yet one need not abandon the idea of a female artistic tradition. Rather, a unity may be found in women's collective dissension from the mainstream culture — a revolt that arises from historical rather than archetypal exigencies.
The elaboration of a feminist counter-heritage contains certain assumptions. In much criticism, an equation is made between dominant and patriarchal culture, with a further implication that the practitioners of that mode are male. Not all works by men will replicate conventional structures; there are always some artists who gravitate toward the avant-garde. And the work of all male artists need not be patriarchal; being a man does not necessarily commit one to that position.
But what literary and film criticism of the past decade has revealed is the regrettable likelihood of that equation's being sustained — the sheer magnitude of cases in which the established male canon has reflected masculine values. Feminist theorists can thus be excused for taking on the terminology as a kind of "shorthand," assuming that feminist artists will be women countering sexist works by men. Though the terms are not synonymous, they have all too frequently coincided. In truth, it would be more precise to use the label "patriarchal" for the mode against which women artists have rebelled, for that epithet is devoid of any association with a particular sex or creative practice.
In raising the notion of rebellion in artistic creation, the work of Harold Bloom immediately comes to mind. In such books as The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, and Kaballah and Criticism, he articulates a theory of poetic influence that posits the artist as engaged in a struggle against some prior creator: "A poet ... is not so much a man speaking to men as a man rebelling against being spoken to by a dead man (the precursor) outrageously more alive than himself." According to Bloom, the artist achieves his personal style only by "misreading" the work of his central predecessor: "To live, the poet must misinterpret the father, by the crucial act of misprision, which is the re-writing of the father." Because of Bloom's view of the psychodynamics of authorship, his theory emphasizes the intertextual aspects of literary history. "Influence," as he conceives it, "means there are no texts, but only relationships between texts."
While some of Bloom's insights are quite relevant to our discussion, his position poses serious problems for feminists. The authors he examines are exclusively male, thus implying that female writers have never been part of true literary history. Even the language he uses to describe the psychology of creation has a decidedly masculine strain. He talks of poets as "men speaking to men" and of their process of rebellion as an Oedipal act of "re-writing the father." Finally, his notion of the struggle between artistic generations exudes a tone of machismo. He envisions poets "war[ring] against one another in the strife of Eternity" and conceives of "poetic strength" as arising from "a triumphant wrestling with the greatest of the dead."
What Bloom fails to confront is the possibility that the writer may be female. As Joanne Fait Diehl notes:
Although Bloom keeps alluding to the sexual aspects of the poet's dilemma, he repeatedly avoids the question raised by his own speculations, "What if the poet be a woman?" But how might the process of influence differ for women poets, and how do women poets perceive their relation to a male-dominated tradition?
When Bloom does concede the notion of female writers, he sees their presence as establishing a radical discontinuity, thus ignoring the possibility of their interacting with the canon itself:
I prophesy ... that the first true break with literary continuity will be brought about in generations to come, if the burgeoning religion of Liberated Woman spreads from its clusters of enthusiasts to dominate the West. Homer will cease to be the inevitable precursor, and the rhetoric and forms of our literature then may break at last from tradition.
While it is perhaps forward-thinking of Bloom to imagine an exclusively female tradition (where Homer could no longer function as primal progenitor), it is retrograde to assume that such an occasion would fracture historical lineage — that women writers could never engage in an intertextual dialogue with their male counterparts.
I will assert that they do. But I do not suggest that we simply invert Bloom's model — seeing women writers as creative "daughters" mired in Romantic, symbolic battle with their artistic "parents." Such a paradigm carries with it all the drawbacks of an individualistic and Freudian approach to creation. Rather, I argue that we envision women's art as engaged in an oppositional struggle with the patriarchal tradition — not out of some personalized Oedipal or Electral desire to replace the parent but, rather, out of a wish simply to speak at all. For the canon/ cannon has functioned aggressively to intimidate and silence women.
In The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar address Bloom's theories of influence. After analyzing the link between authorship and paternity, they note how the creative impulse is thwarted in women. They ask: "If the pen is a metaphorical penis, with what organ can females generate texts?" While male authors feel free to address tradition, women can only circulate as images in those canonical texts:
Implicit in the metaphor of literary paternity is the idea that each man ... has the ability, even perhaps the obligation, to talk back to other men by generating alternative fictions of his own. Lacking the pen/penis which would enable them similarly to refute one fiction by another, women in patriarchal societies have historically been reduced to mere properties, to characters and images imprisoned in male texts.
Thus Gubar and Gilbert reject Bloom's "anxiety of influence" as inapplicable to the female author. They envision her instead, as experiencing "an even more primary 'anxiety of authorship' — a radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a 'precursor' the act of writing will isolate or destroy her."
Contemporary French feminists agree that patriarchal discourse renders woman mute. Helene Cixous remarks how
the complete set of symbolic systems — everything said, everything organized as discourse — art, religion, family, language — everything that seizes us, everything that forms us — everything is organized on the basis of hierarchal oppositions which come back to the opposition man/woman.
Because language serves the male, feminists must "grab culture by the word, as it seizes us in its word." Cixous maintains "that political thought cannot do without ... work on language." If discourse is tainted with sexism, it follows that female artists must refuse the dominant tradition — must "destroy in order to create."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Shot/Countershot by Lucy Fischer. Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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