Life & Background
Showalter was born in Massachusetts in 1941 and took her doctorate at the University of California, Davis, writing on Victorian women novelists at a time when the subject barely existed as a field. She taught at Douglass College, the women's college of Rutgers, where she developed one of the first courses in women's literature in the United States, and then at Princeton, where she was the first woman to hold a full professorship in the English department. She has written on Victorian fiction, on madness and its gendering in English culture, on hysteria, and on American women writers, and has also written for a general audience on television and popular culture. She served as president of the Modern Language Association in 1998.
A Literature of Their Own
A study of British women novelists from the Brontës to the present, arguing that they constitute a tradition with its own line of development rather than a series of isolated exceptions to a male canon. Showalter proposes a three-phase model. The Feminine phase, roughly 1840 to 1880, involves imitation of the dominant male tradition and the internalisation of its standards — the period of male pseudonyms. The Feminist phase, 1880 to 1920, is one of protest against those standards and advocacy of minority rights, running alongside suffrage. The Female phase, from 1920 onward, turns away from both imitation and protest toward self-discovery and a search for identity. She recovers dozens of forgotten novelists in the process.
Her key coinage, gynocriticism, is set out in Toward a Feminist Poetics: instead of feminist critique, which reads male-authored texts to expose their treatment of women and remains a reactive activity, gynocriticism studies women as writers — their history, themes, genres, and the conditions of their careers. The three-phase model has been criticised for tidiness and for its focus on white British novelists, and Showalter has been in open disagreement with French feminism, treating écriture féminine as insufficiently attentive to material history. That disagreement is exactly why the two are set against each other in examinations. The Female Malady extends her method to the gendering of madness in English culture from 1830 to 1980.
Key Concepts
Why Showalter Matters
Showalter named and defined the dominant Anglo-American mode of feminist literary study, and gynocriticism remains standard terminology. Her three-phase model of feminine, feminist, and female is one of the most frequently reproduced schemas in the field. She is normally examined against Cixous and the French theorists on one side and against Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic on the other.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- A Literature of Their Own1977
- Toward a Feminist Poetics1979
- The New Feminist Criticism (ed.)1985
- The Female Malady1985
- Sexual Anarchy1990
- Inventing Herself2001