Separate Development

Patricia Craig

• The Female Form by Rosalind Miles
  Routledge, 227 pp, £15.95, July 1987, ISBN 0 7102 1008 6
• Feminism and Poetry by Jan Montefiore
  Pandora, 210 pp, £12.95, May 1987, ISBN 0 86358 162 5
• Nostalgia and Sexual Difference by Janice Doane and Devon Hodges
  Methuen, 169 pp, £20.00, June 1987, ISBN 0 416 01531 X
• Reading Woman by Mary Jacobus
  Methuen, 316 pp, £8.95, November 1987, ISBN 0 416 92460 3
• The New Feminist Criticism edited by Elaine Showalter
  Virago, 403 pp, £11.95, March 1986, ISBN 0 86068 722 8
• Reviewing the Reviews
  Journeyman, 104 pp, £4.50, June 1987, ISBN 1 85172 007 3

The fuss about gender continues. Feminist criticism has gone off in several odd directions lately, resorting more and more to jargon of the gynocentric, phallogocentric variety, and positing a peculiarly feminine way of looking at things, a mode consistently belittled in the patriarchal conditions that have always prevailed. What started as a legitimate scrutiny of past mistreatment of women, in life and in books, seems to have turned into an assertion of some intangible feminine principle. True, a similar principle was being evoked in the early Thirties by John Cowper Powys, when he commended Dorothy Richardson for having dredged up her novels ‘out of the abyss of feminine consciousness’; and there’s Virginia Woolf’s famous comment on the same set of novels, when she noted their author’s mastery over what she termed ‘the psychological sentence of the feminine gender’. However, we should bear in mind another remark of Virginia Woolf’s: that ‘a woman’s writing is always feminine ... the only difficulty lies in defining what we mean by feminine.’ What we don’t mean, surely, is a special way with words. ‘If anatomy is not destiny,’ says Mary Jacobus in her rigorous, scholarly collection of essays, Reading Woman, ‘still less can it be language.’