"The Return of the Poetess and Other Gynocritical Anachronisms: the Portuguese Context" (original) (raw)

The gynocritical paradigm in feminist theory and criticism, as defined by Elaine Showalter in her influential essay, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness" (1978), and fleshed out in what can be described as its founding texts, Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (1977) and Sandra M. Gilbert's and Susan Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic (1979), has become over the last two decades an empowering framework for a considerable number of critical studies aiming to trace a specifically female literary tradition in various national and transnational contexts. To give but one among many possible examples, monographs published in the series Women in Context (Athlone Press) are historical investigations (dating back to mid-nineteenth century) of women's writing in, respectively, Norway, Italy, France, Sweden, and so on. Showalter herself had projected that feminist studies proceeding from gynocritical postulates would aim to investigate and theorize such subjects as "the psychodynamics of female creativity; linguistics and the problem of the female language; the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career; literary history; and, of course, studies of particular writers and works" (1992, 382). Some of these pathways of inquiry-especially those dependent on the potentially essentializing and homogenizing notions of "female creativity" and "female language"-were soon to be accused, on the one hand, of relying on a naively tautological assumption "that a 'feminine' identity is one which signs itself with a feminine name" (Kamuf 285) and, on the other, of ignoring or diminishing the constitutive importance of racial, ethnic and geopolitical differences among women writers. By contrast, socially and historically contextualized investigations focusing on the politics of canonicity and the symbolic and ideological constructs shaping national literary histories were energized by the gynocritical call to arms, while at the same time remaining relatively immune to the charges of theoretical and political nearsightedness. In her own recent (1998) contribution to the series Women in Context, Spanish Women's Writing 1849-1996, Catherine Davies recognizes that the last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed "a surge of books on the culture and history of Spanish women" and of "excellent critical studies" on the literary production by women in Spain (1). While it is debatable to what extent this dynamic publishing activity (rooted largely, although not exclusively, in Anglo-American academic environments) has affected canonical constructs of critical and literary-historical writing in Spain itself, it appears that the gynocritical model (as represented, among others, by Susan Kirkpatrick's pioneering study Las Románticas: Women Writers and Subjectivity in Spain, 1835-1850 [1989] or John C. Wilcox's more recent Women Poets of Spain, 1860-1990. Toward a Gynocentric Vision [1997]), has interfaced well with the Spanish literary and cultural contexts, especially of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is through an examination, however cursory, of this contrastive Iberian setting that we can perceive with greater clarity the unique challenges that arise when the gynocritical paradigm of historical-literary investigation is tentatively deployed in the Portuguese context and the urgent need for a wide-reaching, theoretically grounded debate on actual and potential directions that feminist criticism of Portuguese literature has taken and/or may be hoped to take. As a theoretical and pragmatic viewpoint, gynocriticism is dependent on historical depth; it is only against the background of longues (or at least medium-sized) durées that explicit or implicit genealogical plotting of patterns of intertextual or metaliterary connectedness among individual women writers or literary generations can occur. In formal terms, such studies rely on relational and developmental modes of inquiry; they emphasize patterns of historical (dis)continuity and foreground such key concepts as trajectory, evolution, recovery, reinterpretation, or rewriting. Yet, the archaeological excavation that provides the foundation for Isabel Allegro de Magalhães's O tempo das mulheres (1987)-the first (and to date only) book-length essay published in Portugal Klobucka Fall 2003 Volume 23.2 35