6.9 Elaine Showalter

Elaine Showalter's Background

Elaine Showalter is an American literary critic and feminist scholar whose work reshaped how we study women's writing. She's best known for coining the term gynocriticism and for mapping out a historical framework of women's literary development. Her influence on feminist literary criticism has been enormous, and her concepts remain central to the field.

Education and Career

Showalter earned her undergraduate degree from Bryn Mawr College and her PhD from the University of California, Davis. She held teaching positions at Rutgers University and Princeton University, among others, and has been a visiting professor at Cambridge and Oxford.

Major Works and Publications

• A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977) traces the history of British women writers and argues for a distinct female literary tradition. This is the book where Showalter lays out her three-phase model of women's writing.
• The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (1985) examines how mental illness has been gendered across two centuries, exploring the cultural links between femininity and madness.
• Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (1990) investigates literary and cultural representations of gender and sexuality during the late 19th century, a period of intense social upheaval around questions of identity.

Gynocriticism

Gynocriticism is Showalter's term for a mode of feminist criticism that shifts attention away from how women read male-authored texts and toward how women write. Instead of critiquing patriarchal literature, gynocriticism builds a female framework for analyzing women's literature on its own terms, accounting for the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which women produce their work.

Definition and Goals

The core goal is to establish a female literary tradition. Gynocritics ask: What themes, styles, and concerns recur across women's writing? How have women's contributions been marginalized or excluded from the canon? Rather than measuring women's work against male-authored benchmarks, gynocriticism evaluates it within its own tradition.

Contrast with Androcentric Criticism

Androcentric criticism centers male authors and treats male experience as universal. Women's writing, in this framework, tends to get dismissed as minor or peripheral. Gynocriticism directly challenges this by asserting that women's literary voices have their own specificity and value. Showalter argues that traditional criticism failed to address what makes women's writing distinctive because it was built on male-centered assumptions from the start.

Focus on Female Writers and Characters

Gynocriticism examines how women writers depict female experience, identity, and subjectivity. It looks at how they've challenged or worked within dominant gender roles, and how their historical and cultural circumstances shaped what and how they wrote. The focus stays on women as producers of literature, not just as characters or readers.

Uncovering Women's Literary Tradition

A central project of gynocriticism is recovery: finding and reinterpreting works by women writers who were forgotten, undervalued, or excluded from the canon due to gender bias. Showalter argues that once you trace these writers across generations, a clear sense of continuity and community emerges among women authors, even when they didn't know each other's work directly.

Showalter's Literary Periods

In A Literature of Their Own, Showalter divides the historical development of British women's writing into three phases. Each phase reflects a different relationship between women writers and the male-dominated literary world around them.

Feminine Phase (1840s–1880s)

During this phase, women writers imitated dominant male literary models and conventions. Many adopted male pseudonyms (think of George Eliot, whose real name was Mary Ann Evans) and gravitated toward genres considered acceptable for women, such as domestic fiction. The phase is marked by internalized inferiority and a desire to meet male standards of literary excellence rather than challenge them.

Feminist Phase (1880s–1920s)

Here, women writers began to rebel. They challenged the limitations on their artistic freedom and started exploring themes and forms that reflected their own experiences. This phase overlaps with the suffrage movement and broader fights for women's rights. The tone shifts toward anger, protest, and deliberate subversion of patriarchal values. Writers in this phase weren't just writing differently; they were writing against the tradition that had excluded them.

Female Phase (1920s–onward)

In the Female phase, women writers moved beyond simple opposition to male norms and began searching for a language and aesthetic rooted in female experience itself. This phase is characterized by experimentation, self-discovery, and an interest in the complexities of gender identity that go beyond a strict male/female binary. The goal was no longer to imitate or protest but to create something genuinely new.

Key Concepts in Showalter's Theory

Showalter introduced several concepts that have become standard reference points in feminist criticism. Each one addresses a different aspect of how gender shapes literary production.

Double-Voiced Discourse

Double-voiced discourse describes how women writers often speak in two registers simultaneously: one that conforms to dominant (male) literary conventions, and another that expresses a distinctly female perspective underneath. Their texts carry a surface meaning that fits within accepted norms and a subtext of female resistance or alternative meaning. This concept highlights the constant negotiation women writers have faced, working within a tradition that wasn't built for them while still finding ways to say what they needed to say.

Anxiety of Authorship

Showalter adapts this from Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence," which describes how male writers struggle to distinguish themselves from powerful literary predecessors. For women, the anxiety is different. It stems not from an overwhelming tradition to live up to, but from a lack of recognized tradition and from the fear of being judged as inferior simply for being female. This anxiety can lead to self-censorship, self-doubt, or strategies of disguise (like those male pseudonyms in the Feminine phase).

Wild Zone of Women's Culture

The wild zone is Showalter's metaphor for the space of female experience and creativity that exists outside male-dominated culture. It represents aspects of women's lives, knowledge, and expression that patriarchal frameworks can't fully access or describe. Showalter sees this zone as a source of authenticity and power for women writers, a space from which genuinely transformative literature can emerge.

Female Biological Experience

Gynocriticism also takes seriously the ways women's bodily experiences (menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, menopause) shape literary imagination. Showalter argues that male-dominated culture has either ignored or pathologized these experiences, leaving women writers to struggle for a language adequate to them. This focus challenges the mind/body split common in Western thought and insists that embodied experience is a legitimate source of creative knowledge.

Showalter's Critical Reception

Influence on Feminist Literary Criticism

Showalter's work helped establish the study of women's literature as a serious, distinct field. Her concepts (the three phases, double-voiced discourse, the wild zone) became foundational vocabulary for feminist critics. Her emphasis on recovery work inspired scholars to bring neglected women writers back into view and to argue for their inclusion in the literary canon.

Critiques and Limitations

Showalter's framework has drawn significant criticism on several fronts:

• Essentialism: Some critics argue gynocriticism assumes a universal female experience, flattening the real differences among women across cultures, classes, and historical periods.
• Oversimplified periodization: The three-phase model has been called too neat. Women's literary history is messier and more diverse than a linear progression from imitation to rebellion to self-discovery.
• Lack of intersectionality: Showalter's framework has been criticized for centering white, middle-class, heterosexual British women. The experiences of women of color, working-class women, and LGBTQ+ women don't map cleanly onto her phases.

These critiques don't invalidate gynocriticism, but they do suggest it works best when combined with intersectional and postcolonial approaches rather than used as a standalone lens.

Applications of Showalter's Theory

Analyzing Themes in Women's Literature

Gynocriticism gives you a framework for identifying recurring concerns across women's writing: the search for identity, struggles for autonomy, negotiation of gender expectations, and the tension between public and private life. Showalter's model has been applied to writers ranging from the Brontë sisters and Virginia Woolf to Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood.

Reevaluating the Literary Canon

One of gynocriticism's most concrete effects has been canon expansion. By recovering and reinterpreting marginalized women writers, gynocritics have pushed the boundaries of what counts as "important" literature. Showalter's argument that a whole female literary tradition had been overlooked gave scholars both the justification and the methodology to do this recovery work systematically.

Intersections with Other Critical Approaches

Gynocriticism doesn't have to stand alone. Its concepts connect productively with psychoanalytic criticism (especially around the anxiety of authorship), cultural studies (the wild zone as a site of alternative knowledge), and postcolonial feminism (which extends questions about marginalization beyond gender). Combining gynocriticism with these other lenses produces a richer, more nuanced analysis of how gender intersects with race, class, and sexuality in literary production.