Some concluding thoughts re: women in early british lit

I'm really glad I chose to focus my readings in class this year on women and the feminine in the texts. Looking over my posts, I'm not sure I completely realized all of my original goals for the project, but I did come away from it feeling much more capable of feminist criticism. When I started out, I think I was mostly interested it because I liked reading with a chip on my shoulder, but by the end, I realized that I, and anyone, can engage in feminist criticism without any sense of anger or ill-will. I think the solution is relatively simple actually, and requires a simple shift in thought. That is, it requires me, as a critic, to remind myself that the author whose work I am analyzing is a human being, as were they people he interacted with and was influenced by. Whether they had ideas about women that were unjust or unfair, there is little accomplished by casting blame or castigation or by hurling insults at writers and societies, but rather to see that they, like we do, have limitations and are susceptible to being blinded by their own interests and desires. If there were a book being written about my life, I certainly wouldn't be comfortable with some of the feminist critics I've been reading talking about it--even if I do consider myself a "feminist." Experimenting in a world where it's easy to cast blame and make judgments about wrongs done and people hurt helped me to see the differences the two connotations we typically associate with the word "criticism" and to realize how easy it is get them confused.

some meta-criticsm re: pope and misogyny

I spent more time in the scholarship on this poem than any of the other texts I've read thus far, mostly because of the strong language, and the associations we make with the word "rape" nowadays. There were a few critics I came across who, in years past, made the argument that Belinda's rape was her own fault, essentially, and that she invited it to happen. That sort of thinking doesn't exactly fly these days, at least in my experience engaging in women-related dialogue. On the other hand, I found a fair amount of opinion in the scholarship and the blogosophere where critics call Pope a "misogynist" or woman-hater or defender of the patriarchy, or what have you. While I can certainly see their point--I find the "hair as phallic" argument pretty interesting--I'm not ready to jump onto the bandwagon that is making judgements about Pope and his actual sensibilities toward women. The sense I get from a couple of these critics is that they are seriously, unapologetically angry about Alexander Pope and his poem, even though they know little of his mind or intents. They know little of his influences, nor his circumstances.

Which brings me to what I want to flesh out in the post a little: what I've learned about literary criticism from my feminist project for this class. Since feminist critics are interested in responding to wrongs intended and unintended by writers of the past, it seems fairly reasonable to assume that there is a certain amount of blame to be dolled out in their work. In other words, in discussing a wrong, there is likely to be a discussion of when and how the wrong came to be. So in reference to "The Rape of the Lock" I can understand how much of the criticism is directed toward Alexander Pope's character and sensibilities, considering the title and energy of the poem's narrative. Although I think it's a reasonable stance on occassion, I don't feel particularly convinced that Pope was presenting a misogynist narrative in order to draw attention to some injustice in the way his contemporaries treated women. There's just nothing to say that's any more viable than his being an unabashed chauvinist.

Even so, I think it's very intellectually irresponsible for someone to begin making judgments about the author of text, no matter the author's actual intent (even if they expressed it), because it is a cheap and unreliable way to go. Cheap because it can't exactly be refuted without an Omniscient being reading the mind of a dead man and communicating it to us, and unreliable for a related reason--that human beings are far too complex to be pinned down by something they wrote or said. There's far too much wiggle room and room for error. That's why I think any discussion of an author's sensibilities should be indistinguishable from a discussion about his society's sensibilities: focused on the observable, although conscious of there being room for error by generalization (a society's sensibilities does not describe the sensibilities of each of its members.) I think to do otherwise by making judgements about an author's character and its influence on the text is to mistkenly assume that people are something. It is it mistakenly assume that they do not change, that they do not want or feel different things from one minute to the next. It is also a fairly unforgiving and destructive way to think about any other human being. To assign culpability and blame to an individual, to call them evil for what they have done means one has to dash all thoughts of the writers circumstances and raising and environment and culture and how they have shaped in, and instead place all the blame on him alone. Ok, that's all I have for now. But I think,all I'm saying is that the author is dead, and feminists who seek to redress wrongs ought to be careful of the human tendency to blame and accuse, even when everything indicates it would probably be a safe move to make.

Eve in Paradise Lost

After reading Paradise Lost (with the gendered lens, of course), I had some mixed feelings like I did with the Wife of Bath. I guess I'll attempt to keep this short and sweet, despite how many times I went back and forth during my reading. I think there's something really incredible about the way Milton imagines the story in Eden, and particularly Eve's role in all of it. He seems to have been somewhat of a outsider, theologically speaking, seeing as he presents Eve as capable of making a choice, and intelligent enough to choose something that is ultimately in the interest of human kind. In other words, there is somewhat of a victory for women in Milton rendition of the Eden story in that for once woman is perceived as man's equal in intelligence and/or autonomy. The problem I have with it, however, is the assumption it perpetrates that although Eve is intellectualy capable, she simply does not have the moral fortitude of Adam. Where Adam is concerned with obedience and is more or less Christlike, Eve is the one who (fortuitously, of course) does not have the moral strength to resist temptation. Even though her mistake is good for mankind, she is the one--out of she and adam--to make the mistake.

Now, I feel like exploring my own thoughts a little, and what this means for the veracity of the Adam and Eve narrative. I cannot accept that the plan of salvation is both a perfect plan on the one hand, and a plan that requires woman to be less morally capable than her male partner for it to even work. I mean, let's be honest here, if there really was a man and woman in the Garden, based on what we know about men and women historically, who would've been more likely to eat the fruit, and who more likely to exhibit some self-control. History tells us that men, of course, are the ones who take what they want and leave what's left for women and children, which suggests to me that only a very male-centered view of the world could inspire such a view of humanity so disconnected with reality. I guess I'm not saying I don't believe that Adam and Eve existed--although I'm not really in a position to say either way--but I would definitely say that the story we learn from the Bible needs to be seriously qualified if I'm going to see in a value in it. I think there needs to be some recognition that the people who wrote the story down, did so long after the fact, with the self-assuredness granted by prophethood, and the male-centric-ness granted by male-hood. So to get back to Milton, I have to say I appreciate the progress Paradise Lost represents, in relation to the worldview Milton would've been indoctrinated with, but there are certainly some assumptions at work her that continue to undermine the good qualities and capacity of women to be virtuous, rather than scapegoats for the world's problems.