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Sexual/Textual Politics:Feminist Literary Theory

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Simone de Beauvoir and Marxist feminism

Simone de Beauvoir is surely the greatest feminist theorist ofourtime. Yet in 194-9,when she published TheSecondSex,she wasconvinced that the advent of socialism alone would put an endto the oppression of women and consequently considered her-self a socialist, not a feminist. Today her position is somewhatdifferent. In 1972 she joined the MLF (Women's LiberationMovement) and publicly declared herself a feminist for the firsttime. She eXplained this belated recognition of feminism bypointing to the new radicalism of the women's movement: 'Thewomen's groups which existed in France before the MLF wasfounded in 1970were generally reformist and legalistic. I had nodesire to associate myself with them. The new feminism isradical, by contrast' (SimonedeBeauvoirToday,29).This changeof emphasis has not however led her to repudiate socialism:

At the end of TheSecondSexI said that I was not a feministbecause I believed that the problems of women would resolvethemselves a~t~matically in the context of socialist develop-~ent. .Byfemmlst, I meant fighting on specifically feminineIssues mdependently of the class struggle. I still hold the sameview today. In my definition, feminists are women - or evenmen, too - who are fighting to change women's condition inassociation with the class struggle, but independently ofi; as

92 Sexual/Textual PoliticsFrom Simone de Beauvoir toJacques Lacan 93

well, without making the changes they strive for totallydependent on changing society as a whole. I would say that,in that sense, I am a feminist today, because I realised that wemust fight for the situation of women, here and now, beforeour dreams of socialism come true.

(Simone deBeauvoir Today, 32)

In spite ofits commitment to socialism, TheSecondSexis basednot on traditional Marxist theory, but on Sartre's existentialistphilosophy. Beauvoir's main thesis in this epochal work issimple: throughout history, women have been reduced to objectsfor men: 'woman' has been constructed as man's Other, deniedthe right to her own subjectivity and to responsibility for herown actions. Or, in more existentialist terms: patriarchal ideol-ogy presents woman as immanence, man as transcendence.Beauvoir shows how these fundamental assumptions dominateall aspects of social, political and cultural life and, equallyimportant, how women themselves internalize this objectifiedvision, thus living in a constant state of'inauthenticity' or 'badfaith', as Sartre might have put it. The fact that women oftenenact the roles patriarchy has prescribed for them does notprove that the patriarchal analysis is right: Beauvoir's uncom-promising refusal of any notion of a female nature or essence issuccinctly summed up in her famous statement 'One is not borna woman; one becomes one'. I

Though most feminist theorists and critics of the 1980sacknowledge their debt to Simone de Beauvoir, relatively fewofthem seem to approve of her espousal of socialism as thenecessary context for feminism. In this respect it would seemthat her most faithful followers are to be found in Scandinaviaand in Britain. In the Scandinavian social democracies thedebate within the women's movement has never explicitlypitted non-socialist against socialist feminists, whereas con-siderable energy has been spent arguing over the kind ofsocialism feminists ought to adopt. Thus in the early 1970SinNorway there was a considerable degree ofhostility between thecentralized Maoist 'Women's Front' and the more anti-hierarchical 'Neo-feminists' whose adherents representedeverything from right-wing social democracy to more radical,left-wing forms of socialism and Marxism.2 Scandinavian

feminist criticism reflects this emphasis on socialism, particu-larly in its tendency to situate the textual analysis within athoroughly researched account of class structures and classstruggle at the time of the literary text's production.3 The recentrise to power of conservative political parties in many of theScandinavian countries has only superficially modified thispicture: in spite of the emergence of some 'light-blue' Establish-ment feminists, the overwhelming majority of Scandinavianfeminists still feel at home somewhere on the political Left.

Traditionally, British feminism has been more open to social-ist ideas than has its American counterpart. Most Marxist-feminist work in Britain, however, is not carried out within thespecific field of literary theory and criticism. In the 1980sit iswom~n working within the recently developed areas of culturalstudies, film studies and media studies, or in sociology orhistory, who are producing the most interesting political andtheoretical analyses. Though Marxist or socialist feminists likeRosalind Coward, Annette Kuhn,Juliet Mitchell, Terry Lovell,Janet Wolff and Michele Barrett have all written on literarytopics, their most important and challenging work neverthelessfalls outside the scope of this book.4 My project has been todevelop a critical presentation of the current debates withinfeminist literary criticism and theory. It is a sad fact thatMarxist-feminist concerns have not been central in this debate,and it is also, perhaps, an indictment of this book that its basicstructure does not represent a more radical challenge to thecurrent dominance of the Anglo-American and the Frenchcritical perspectives.

In the specific field ofliterary studies, the Marxist-FeministLiterature Collective's pioneering article 'Women's writing:Jane Eyre,Shirley, Villette,AuroraLeigh' draws on the theories ofthe French Marxists Louis Althusser and Pierre Macherey inorder to develop an analysis of the marginalization of thewoman writer and her work in terms of both class and gender.This approach has been followed up and developed by PennyBoumelha in her excellent analysis of sexual ideology inThomas Hardy's work (ThomasHardy and Women),which alsofinds its basic theory of ideology in Althusser. Cora Kaplan, anerstwhile member of the Collective, continued its approach inher introduction to AuroraLeighand OtherPoems.In America,

94 Sexual/Textual Politics

Judith Lowder Newton's Women,Power,andSubversionfocuses onthe conjuncture of class and gender in British nineteenth-century literature.

The Machereyan approach adopted by Penny Boumelha andThe Marxist-Feminist Literature Collective in particular seemsto open up a productive field of enquiry for feminist critics. ForMacherey, the literary work is neither a unified whole, nor theunchallengable 'message' of the Great Author/Creator. Indeed,for Macherey, the silences, gaps and contradictions of the textare more revealing ofits ideological determinations than are itsexplicit statements. Terry Eagleton has given a succinct sum-mary of Macherey's arguments on this point:

I t is in the significant silencesof a text, in its gaps and absencesthat the presence of ideology can be most positively felt. It isthese silences which the critic must make 'speak'. The text is,as it were, ideologically forbidden to say certain things; intrying to tell the truth in his own way, for example, the authorfinds himselfforced to reveal the limits of the ideology withinwhich he writes. He is forced to reveal its gaps and silences,what it is unable to articulate. Because a text contains thesegaps and silences, it is always imomplete.Far from constitutinga rounded, coherent whole, it displays a conflict and contra-diction of meanings; and the significance of the work lies inthe difference rather than unity between these meanings. . . .The work for Macherey is always 'de-centred';there is nocentral essence to it, just a continuous conflict and disparityof meanings.

(MarxismandLiteraryCriticism,34-5)

The study of the silences and contradictions of the literarywork will enable the critic to link it to a specific historicalcontext in which a whole set of different structures (ideological,economic, social, political) intersect to produce precisely thosetextual structures. Thus the author's personal situation andintentions can become no more than one of the many conflictingstrands that make up the contradictory construct we call thetext. This kind of Marxist-feminist criticism has thus beenparticularly interested in studying the historical construction ofthe categories of gender and in analysing the importance ofculture in the representation and transformation of those cat-

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From Simone de Beauvoir toJacques Lacan 95

egories. In this perspective, Marxist-feminist criticism offersanalternative both to the homogenizing author-centred readingsof the Anglo-American critics and to the often ahistorical andidealist categories of the French feminist theorists.

It is, however, only fair to say that much Marxist-feministcriticism, whether British, American or Scandinavian, simplyadds 'class' as another theme to be discussed within the generalframework establis4ed by Anglo-American feminist criticism.And it is unfortunately equally true that, so far, few feministcritics have attempted to examine the work of Marxist theoristssuch as Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin or Theodor Adornoin order to see whether their insights into the problems ofrepresenting the tradition of the oppressed can be appropriatedfor feminism.

French feminism after 1968

The new French feminism is the child of the student revolt ofMay 1968 in Paris, which almost toppled one of the morerepressive of the so-called Western democracies. For a while, therealization that 'May '68' had almost managed the apparentlyimpossible inspired an exuberant political optimism amongleft-wing intellectuals in France. 'Les evenements' enabledthem to believe both that change was at hand and that intellec-tuals had a real political role to play within it. At the end of the1960s and in the early 1970s,political activism and interventionthus seemed meaningful and relevant to students and intellec-tuals on the Left Bank.

It was in this politicized intellectual climate, dominated byvarious shades of Marxism, particularly Maoism, that the firstFrench feminist groups were formed. In many ways, the directexperience that led to the formation of the first French women'sgroups in the summer of 1968 was strikingly similar to that ofthe American women's movement.5 In May, women had foughtalongside men on the barricades only to find that they were stillexpected to furnish their male comrades with sexual, secretarialand culinary services as well. Predictably enough, they tooktheir cue from American women and started to form their ownwomen-only groups. One of the very first of these groups choseto call itself'Psychanalyse et Politique'. Later, when the politics

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o.ddfounded the influential publishingwomen'), renamed itself 'politique et psy-

, .oeversing the priorities of politics and psycho-..s and dropping the hierarchical capitals once and for

_d. The concern with psychoanalysis signals a central preoccu-pation in the Parisian intellectual milieux.Whereas the Amer-ican feminists of the 1960s had started by vigorously denounc-ing Freud, the French took it for granted that psychoanalysiscould provide an emancipatory theory of the personal and apath to the exploration of the unconscious, both of vital import-ance to the analysis of the oppression of women in patriarchalsociety. In the English-speaking world, the feminist argumentsin favour of Freud were not heard until Juliet Mitchell pub-lished her influentialbook PsychoanalysisandFeminismin 1974,which was translated and published in France by desfemmes.

Though French feminist theory was already flourishing by1974, it has taken a considerable period to reach women outsideFrance. One of the reasons for the relatively limited influence ofFrench theory on Anglo-American feminists is the 'heavy'intellectual profile of the former. Steeped as they are inEuropean philosophy (particularly Marx, Nietzsche andHeidegger), Derridean deconstruction and Lacanian psycho-analysis, French feminist theorists apparently take for grantedan audience as Parisian as they are. Though rarely wilfullyobscure, the fact that few pedagogical concessions are made tothe reader without the 'correct' intellectual co-ordinates smacksof elitism to the outsider. This holds for Helene Cixous'sintricate puns and Luce lrigaray's infuriating passion for theGreek alphabet, as well as forJulia Kristeva's unsettling habitof referring to everyone from St Bernard to Fichte or Artaud inthe same sentence. That the exasperated reader sometimes feelsalienated by such uncompromising intellectualism is hardlysurprising. Once the Anglo-American reader has overcome theeffectsof this initial culture-shock, however, it doesn't take longto discover that French theory has contributed powerfully to thefeminist debate about the nature of women's oppression, theconstruction of sexual difference and the specificity of women'srelations to language and writing.

One problem for the English-speaking reader, however, is

From Simone de Beauvoir toJacques Lacan 97

caused by the French word 'feminin'. In French there is onlyone adjective to 'femme', and that is 'feminin' ,6whereas Englishhas two adjectives to 'woman': 'female' and 'feminine'. It haslong been recognized usage among many English-speakingfeminists to use 'feminine' (and 'masculine') to represent socialconstructs (gender) and to reserve 'female' (and 'male') forpurely biological aspects (sex). The problem is that this fun-damental political distinction is lost in French. Does icriturefeminine,for instance, mean 'female' or 'feminine' writing? Howcan we know whether this or any other such expression refers tosex or to gender? There is of course no standard answer: in thefollowing presentations my readings of the French 'feminin' areinterpretations based on the context and on my overall under-standing of the works in question.

For the Anglo-American feminist critic, the fact that there isverylittle feministliterarycriticismin Francemay be disconcert-ing. With a few exceptions, such as Claudine Herrmann andAnne-Marie Dardigna,7 French feminist critics have preferredto work on problems of textual, linguistic, semiotic or psycho-analytic theory, or to produce texts where poetry and theoryintermingle in a challenge to established demarcations of genre.Despite their political commitment, such theorists have beencuriously willing to accept the established patriarchal canon of'great' literature, particularly the exclusively male pantheon ofFrench modernism from Lautreamont to Artaud or Bataille.There can be no doubt that the Anglo-American feministtradition has been much more successful in its challenge tothe oppressive social and political strategies of the literaryinstitution.

In the following presentation of French feminist theory I havechosen to focus on the figures of Helene Cixous, Luce lrigarayandJ ulia Kristeva. They have been chosen partly because theirwork is the most representative of the main trends in Frenchfeminist theory, and partly because they are more closelyconcerned with the specific problems raised by women's rela-tion to writing and language than many other feminist theoristsin France. Thus I have decided not to discuss the work ofwomen like Annie Leclerc, Michele Montrelay, EugenieLemoine-Luccioni, Sarah Kofman and Marcelle Marini. ManyAmerican feminist critics have also found their richest source

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98 Sexual/Textual Politics

of inspiration in the theories of Jacques Lacan and JacquesDerrida, but lack of space prevents me from doing justiceto the suggestive work of women such as Jane Gallop,Shosbana Felman and Gayatri Spivak.8

It has often been claimed that the new generation of Frenchfeminist theorists have rejected Simone de Beauvoir's existen-tialist feminism entirely. Turning away from Beauvoir's liberaldesire for equality with men, the argument goes, these feministshave emphasized difference. Extolling women's right to cherishtheir specifically female values, they reject 'equality' as a covertattempt to force women to become like men.9 The picture,however, is somewhat more complex than this. For all herexistentialism, Simone de Beauvoir remains the great mother-figure for French feminists, and the symbolic value of her publicsupport for the new women's movement was enormous. Nor is ittrue to say that her brand of socialist feminism remains withoutfollowers in France. In 1977 Beauvoir and other womenfounded the journal Questionsjiministes, which aims to providea forum precisely for various socialist and anti-essentialistforms offeminism. 10The Marxist-feminist sociologist ChristineDelphy, who holds that women constitute a class, was, forexample, one of its founding members.

In spite of her very different theoretical orientation, many ofJulia Kristeva's central preoccupations (her desire to theorize asocial revolution based on class as well as gender, her emphasison the construction offemininity) have much more in commonwith Beauvoir's views than with Helene Cixous's romanticizedvision of the female body as the site of women's writing.Similarly, Luce Irigaray's impressive critique of the repressionof woman in patriarchal discourse reads at times like a post-structuralist rewriting of Beauvoir's analysis ofwoman as man'sOther. (Given that Heidegger seems to be the common source ofboth Lacan's psychoanalytic 'Other', which influenced lrigar-ay's study, and Beauvoir's existentialist 'Other', this is hardlysurprising.) Though existentialism in general was marginalizedby the shift to structuralism and post-structuralism in the1960s,it wouldseemthat nothingdates TheSecondSexmore,inrelation to the new women's movement in France, than

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Beauvoir's rejection of psychoanalysis. Cixous, Irigaray andKristeva are all heavily indebted to Lacan's (post-) structuralistreading of Freud, and any further investigation of their worktherefore requires some knowledge of the most central Lacanianideas. 11

Jacques Lacan

The Imaginary and the Symbolic Order constitute one of themost fundamental sets of related terms in Lacanian theory andare best explained in relation to each other. The Imaginarycorresponds to the pre-Oedipal period when the child believesitself to be a part of the mother, and perceives no separationbetween itself and the world. In the Imaginary there is nodifference and no absence, only identity and presence. TheOedipal crisis represents the entry into the Symbolic Order.This entry is also linked to the acquisition of language. In theOedipal crisis the father splits up the dyadic unity betweenmother and child and forbids the child further access to themother and the mother's body. The phallus, representing theLaw of the Father (or the threat of castration), thus comes tosignify separation and loss to the child. The loss or lack sufferedis the loss of the maternal body, and from now on the desire forthe mother or the imaginary unity with her must be repressed.This first repression is what Lacan calls the primary repressionand it is this primary repression that opens up the unconscious.In the Imaginary there is no unconscious since there is no lack.

The function of this primary repression becomes particularlyevident in the child's use of the newly acquired language. Whenthe child learns to say 'I am' and to distinguish this from 'youare' or 'he is', this is equivalent to admitting that it has taken upits allotted place in the Symbolic Order and given up the claim toimaginary identity with all other possible positidns. The speak-ing subject that says 'I am' is in fact saying 'I am he (she) whohas lost something' - and the loss suffered is the loss of theimaginary identity with the mother and with the world. Thesentence 'I am' could therefore best be translated as 'I am thatwhich I am not', according to Lacan. This re-writing empha-sizes the fact that the speaking subject only comes into existence.because of the repression of the desire for the lost mother. To

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100 Sexual/Textual-Politics From Simone de Beauvoir toJacques Lacan 101

of the signifier, the Symbolic Order or any third party in atriangular structure. Another, slighdy different way of puttingthis is to say that the Other is the locus of the constitution of thesubject or the structure that produces the subject. In yetanother formulation, the Other is the differential structure oflanguage and ofsocial relations that constitute the subject in thefirst place and in which it (the subject) must take up its place.

If, for Lacan, it is the entry into the SymbolicOrder that opensup the unconscious, this means that it is the primary repressionof the desire for symbiotic unity with the mother that createstheunconscious. In other words: the unconscious emerges as theresult of the repression of desire. In one sense the unconscious isdesire. Lacan's famous statement 'The unconscious is struc-tured like a language' contains an important insight into thenature of desire: for Lacan, desire 'behaves' in precisely thesame way as language: it moves ceaselessly on from object toobject or from signifier to signifier, and will never find full andpresent satisfaction just as meaning can never be seized as fullpresence. Lacan calls the various objects we invest with ourdesire (in the symbolic order) objeta ('objet petit a' - 'a' herestanding for the other (autre) with a small 'a'). There can be nofinal satisfaction of our desire since there is no final signifier orobject that can bethat which has been lost forever (the imagin-ary harmony with the mother and the world). Ifwe accept thatthe end of desire is the logical consequence of satisfaction (ifweare satisfied, we are in a position where we desire no more), wecan see why Freud, in BeyondthePleasurePrinciple,posits death asthe ultimate object of desire - as Nirvana or the recapturing ofthe lost unity, the final healing of the split subject.

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speak as a subject is therefore the same as to represent theexistence of repressed desire: the speaking subject is lack, andthis is how Lacan can say that the subject is that which it is not

To enter into the Symbolic Order means to accept the phallusas thp.representation ofthe Law of the }<'ather.All human cul-ture and"all lite in society is dominated by the Symbolic Order,and thus by the phallus as the sign oflack. The subject mayormay not like this order of things, but it has no choice: to remainin the Imaginary is equivalent to becoming psychotic andincapable of living in human society. In some ways it may beuseful to see the Imaginary as linked to Freu~'s pleasureprinciple and the Symbolic Order to his reality principle.

This -exposition of the transition from the Imaginary to theSymbolic Order requires some further comments. The Imagin-ary is, for Lacan, inaugurated by the child's entry into theMirror Stage. Lacan seems to follow Melanie Klein's views ofchild development in so far as he postulates that the child'searliest experience of itself is one of fragmentation. One mighthave said that at first the baby feels that its body is in pieces, ifthis wouldn't give the mistaken impression that the baby hasasense of 'its' body at this early stage. Between the ages of6 to 8months the baby enters the Mirror Stage. The principal func-tion of the Mirror Stage is to endow the baby with a unitarybody image. This 'body ego', however, is a profoundly alienatedentity. The child, when looking at itselfin the mirror- or at itselfon its mother's arm, or simply at another child - only perceivesanother human being with whom it merges and identifies. Inthe Imaginary there is, then, no sense of a separate self, since the'self' is always alienated in the Other. The Mirror Stage thusonly allows for dual relationships. It is only through the tri-angulation of this structure, which, as we have seen, occurswhen the father intervenes to break up the dyadic unitybetween mother and child, that the child can take up its place inthe Symbolic Order, and thus come to define itself as separatefrom the other.

Lacan distinguishes between the Other (Autre) with a capital'0' and the other with a small '0'. For our purposes it is useful tolook at a few of the many different significations these conceptstake on in Lacan's texts. The most important usages of theOther are those in which the Other represents language, the site