Elaine Showalter
Elaine Showalter (born January 21, 1941)[1] is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She influenced feminist literary criticism in the United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics, a term describing the study of "women as writers".
Elaine Showalter
Showalter has written and edited numerous books and articles focused on a variety of subjects, from feminist literary criticism to fashion, sometimes sparking controversy, especially with her work on illnesses. Showalter has been a television critic for People magazine and a commentator on BBC radio and television. She is a recipient of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.
Criticism and controversy[edit]
Feminist theory and criticism[edit]
Duke University-based Toril Moi, in her 1985 book Sexual/Textual Politics, described Showalter's as a limited, essentialist view of women. Moi particularly criticized Showalter's ideas regarding the Female phase, and its notions of a woman's singular autonomy and necessary search inward for a female identity. In a predominantly poststructuralist era that proposes that meaning is contextual and historical, and that identity is socially and linguistically constructed, Moi claimed that there is no fundamental female self.
According to Moi, the problem of equality in literary theory does not lie in the fact that the literary canon is fundamentally male and unrepresentative of female tradition, rather the problem lies in the fact that a canon exists at all. Moi argues that a feminine literary canon would be no less oppressive than the male canon because it would necessarily represent a particular socio demographic class of woman; it could not possibly represent all women because female tradition is drastically different depending on class, ethnicity, social values, sexuality, etc. A female consciousness cannot exist for the same reasons. Moi objects to what she sees as an essentialist position – that is, she objects to any determination of identity based on gender. Moi's criticism was influential as part of a larger debate between essentialist and postmodern feminist theorists at the time.
Hysteria and "modern" illnesses[edit]
Showalter's controversial take on illnesses such as dissociative identity disorder (formerly called multiple personality disorder), Gulf War syndrome and chronic fatigue syndrome in her book Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997) has angered some in the health profession and many who suffer from these illnesses. Writing in The New York Times, psychologist Carol Tavris commented that "In the absence of medical certainty, the belief that all such symptoms are psychological in origin is no improvement over the belief that none of them are."[3] Showalter (who has no formal medical training) admits to receiving hate mail, but has not been deterred from her position that these conditions are contemporary manifestations of hysteria.[4]
Popular culture[edit]
Showalter also came up against criticism in the late 1990s for some of her writing on popular culture that appeared in magazines like People and Vogue. Deirdre English, in the American magazine The Nation, wrote:
Summaries of major works[edit]
Showalter's Ph.D. thesis is called The Double Critical Standard: Criticism of Women Writers in England, 1845–1880 (1969) and was later turned into the book A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1978), which contains a lengthy and much-discussed chapter on Virginia Woolf.
The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (1985) discusses hysteria, which was once known as the "female malady" and according to Showalter, is called depression today. Showalter demonstrates how cultural ideas about proper feminine behaviour have shaped the definition and treatment of female insanity from the Victorian era to the present.
Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle (1990) outlines a history of the sexes and the crises, themes, and problems associated with the battle for sexual supremacy and identity.
In the 1990s, Showalter began writing for popular magazines, bringing her work further into the public sphere than it ever had been during her academic career. Showalter was the television critic for People magazine in 1996. She explains her impetus to do popular cultural work: "I've always really loved popular culture, but it wasn't something serious intellectuals were supposed to be concerned about. … I would like to be able to bring my background and my skills to subjects that do reach a wide audience" (Plett).
In Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997) Showalter argues that hysteria, a medical condition traditionally seen as feminine, has persisted for centuries and is now manifesting itself in cultural phenomena in the forms of socially and medically accepted maladies. Psychological and physical effects of unhappy lives become "hysterical epidemics" when popular media saturate the public with paranoid reports and findings, essentially legitimizing, as Showalter calls them, "imaginary illnesses" (Hystories, cover). Showalter says: "Hysteria is part of everyday life. It not only survives in the 1990s, but it is more contagious than in the past. Newspapers, magazines, talk shows, self-help books, and of course the Internet ensure that ideas, once planted, manifest themselves internationally as symptoms" (Plett). This view has caused Showalter to be criticized by patient's rights groups and medical practitioners, who argue that Showalter, with no formal medical training, is not qualified to make this determination.
Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (2001) surveys feminist icons since the 18th century, situated mostly in the US and the United Kingdom. Showalter covers the contributions of predominately intellectuals like Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Camille Paglia. Noting popular media's importance to the perception of women and feminism today, Showalter also discusses the contributions of popular personalities like Oprah Winfrey and Princess Diana.
Teaching Literature (2003) is essentially a guide to teaching English literature to undergraduate students in university. Showalter covers approaches to teaching theory, preparing syllabi and talking about taboo subjects among many other practical topics. Showalter says that teaching should be taken as seriously and given as much intellectual consideration as scholarship.
Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents (2005) is a study of the Anglo-American academic novel from the 1950s to the present.
A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (2009) makes a claim for a literary tradition of American women writers. This book won the 2012 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.[5]
The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe (2016) is a biography of American feminist pioneer Julia Ward Howe, best known for writing the words to "The Battle Hymn of the Republic".
Personal life[edit]
Born Elaine Cottler in Boston, Massachusetts, Showalter pursued an academic career against the wishes of her parents. She earned a bachelor's degree at Bryn Mawr College, a master's degree at Brandeis University, and a PhD in 1970 at the University of California, Davis. Her first academic appointment was at Douglass College at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She joined Princeton University's faculty in 1984, and took early retirement in 2003.
Her father was in the wool business and her mother was a housewife. At the age of 21, Showalter was disowned by her parents for marrying outside the Jewish faith. Her husband, English Showalter, is a Yale-educated retired professor of 18th-century French literature who taught at Rutgers University-Camden. The Showalters have two children, Michael Showalter, an actor and comedian, and Vinca Showalter LaFleur, a professional speechwriter.
Archives[edit]
Papers of Elaine Showalter are held at the Women's Library at the Library of the London School of Economics,[6] and at the Pembroke Center Archives, Brown University (MS.2020.007).[7]