from the editor's perspective: "between women: women critics on women writers"

University of Tulsa

From the Editor's Perspective: "Between Women: Women Critics on Women Writers"Author(s): Shari BenstockSource: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 189-198Published by: University of TulsaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/463695 .

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From the Editors Perspective

"Between Women: Women Critics on Women Writers"

Un train peut en cacher un autre.

Une femme peut en cacher une autre.

The first of these headnotes is the sign posted by the French railways at

crossings where two sets of tracks run parallel to each other and thereby pose a possible danger to those traversing the intersection: "One train may hide another," The second statement is a form of graffiti found scrawled on the side of public buildings in France and now inscribed on small, handpainted enamel plaques?suitable for mounting on doors or serving as paperweights on desks. The second statement reads the first?"One woman may hide another"?in ways that suggest an inherent doubleness, a duplicity, in woman's nature. Indeed, the patriarchal inscription of woman insists on

defining her in duality. The statement is thus a warning of the intrinsic

dangers posed by these doubled selves, dangers that also constitute an

inviting intrigue: the woman you see before you hides another, secret, self who invites you to traverse the intersection of these personalities.1 Danger lies ahead, but so does the dream of a latent, dark, sensuality?an entice? ment all the more inviting because it is doubled. Discovery of the second woman will change one's perspective on the first woman who hides her. The French perfume industry has successfully capitalized on this "hidden"

woman, whose charming allure can be called out?signalled?by perfumes with names like Paradoxe or Opium, Woman's second identity is doubly marked by one of the most popular perfumes of the season: Anais Anais,

One should note in this reading exercise that the offical notice warning that "one train may hide another" has been internalized by a public that now makes jokes premised on the warning, jokes whose referrent is immediately recognizable to the French. In playing on the original notice, the statement "one woman may hide another" both calls forth and covers up the prior statement. And, one might add, this second statement shifts the narrative

perspective from which the prior statement might be read and through which it writes itself: the former is an address to the general public (man, woman, child), while the second is a commentary in which woman is the

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object under investigation. She does not make this comment about herself; rather she is defined by the man whose interest in her rests in his desire for her. Doubled, she simultaneously represents danger and a call to trespass. But this observation, like woman herself, opens itself to more than one

interpretation. Woman may be by nature doubled (as the saying suggests), inviting the possibility of treachery and deceit, a playing of one self against another, but she may also be used as the double in an economy of desire in which the presence of one woman serves to conceal man's desire for another. The fear that desire may rest elsewhere, that like woman it hides its own doubled nature, that it is not transparent or honest, threatens all rela?

tionships within this economy?this suspicion of the doubled other disturbs both men and women. Just as man can use one woman to hide his affections for another, he can also find himself the victim of a doubled female nature that he assumes to be inherent in woman. (Presumably he would never ask in what ways he himself has created the necessity for this double identity by placing woman in an economy in which she may be forced to conceal one

part of herself.) But it is such a stripping away of deceptions that the meeting of man and woman invites and also risks: one train may hide another (one woman may hide another), but it is not always true that such is the case, as

anyone who has looked twice before crossing a French railway line well knows. Rather it is the possibility of the double that makes such a crossing dangerous: thus the first notice both reads the second and is read through it.

Two recent collections of essays have examined the unspoken assump? tions that support the kind of double reading I have just risked. Ruth Perry and Martine Watson Brownley's Mothering the Mind: Twelve Studies of Writers and Their Silent Partners, and Between Women, edited by Carol Ascher, Louise

DeSalvo, and Sara Ruddick, examine relationships between women and their artistic subjects, between women in their roles as mothers, daughters, sisters, lovers, and wives, and?perhaps most importantly?between women as writers and readers of each other.2 In some interesting ways, these two texts?both published in 1984?read each other and in so doing rewrite each other. Each poses woman as doubled, that is, as a participant in sets of dialectical relations that require her to act simultaneously as mother-

daughter, wife-sister, lover-friend, reader-writer. Rather than reading in the statement "one woman may hide another" the threat of a patriarchal sentencing or the invitation to treachery, these texts open the question of woman's doubled nature to reveal the imaginative and energizing pos? sibilities that unfold from woman doubled. Woman's nature offers itself to a double reading?of her role in relationships external to her; of her participa? tion in relationships that are internalized by her. Woman's self-conception is

produced through these sets of relations.

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The first of these enabling roles is motherhood. In her introductory essay, Ruth Perry conceptualizes "mothering the mind" as an instrument to foster

creativity. The mothering figure places herself on the margins of the child's

imaginative universe even as the knowledge of her presence is central to the child's ability to "play," to negotiate the space between inner and outer

reality?the space occupied by art:

I do not want to imply that by "mothering the mind" I mean a smothering, self- sacrificing, one-way devotion on the part of one person for another?the enslavement of one person to another's purposes. As the ego psychologists seem to understand, "good enough" mothers have other things on their minds and do not focus their attention exclusively on their children. Present but not necessarily attentive, a mother can also function as a background for her children's foreground activity, a sheltering canopy upon which they can project fantasies, desires, and thoughts. (4-5)

Initially, "mothering the mind" is discovered in the creation of a free space? the child is near the mothering figure but not dependent on her?in which the distinctions between the "real" and the "imaginative" can be explored. "Mothering the mind" is, in Perry's words, a way of "aiding and abetting another's creation" (5), but as she admits?and as the essays in this collection attest?there is no single formula by which this process takes place. It seems

clear, however, that the process develops through trust in a safe and benign external environment in which the child can explore the complexities of selfhood. In creating this space, the mothering figure gives tacit approval to the child's desire to explore the self, an exploration to which the mothering figure will remain an external, approving presence even as she is internalized

by the infant's imaginative play. To measure the distance between external and internal, between dreaming and real life, is the crucial movement of this

experience: "'mothering the mind' means providing the conditions, both

space and support, for explorations that simultaneously take the artist inward and outward" (14). The country the child discovers?and in discover?

ing re-maps?is language, which itself bears a double relation to the develop? ing human consciousness: language is both external to the human (who is "born into" linguistic constructs) and is internalized by the human, who makes language an instrument of perception and expression. And it is here?on the territory of linguistic space?that the concept of "mothering the mind" offers its most fascinating possibilities.

It is not accidental, I think, that those women most attentive to this relation between "mothering" and language are not white and middle-class but often black and poor. In this volume, it is Mary Alice Washington's essay, "I Sign My Mother's Name," which brings the questions of gender, language,

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and race to a cross-roads, a place at which Washington can comment on the interconnectedness of these issues:

With so many active and brutal restrictions against female creativity, particularly against the creativity of black women, it is remarkable that these black mothers? denied power in nearly every realm of their lives?arrogated to themselves and their daughters the power to create through language, to define themselves by the written word, to become witnesses to the special sensibility of black women. (144)

Washington is writing here of the mothers of Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, and Dorothy West, women whose "mothering" capacities allowed the release of their daughters' creative energies. Importantly, Washington's own terms

suggest the doubled power of the external and internal in the female creative

process: these daughters were given "the power to create through language, to define themselves by the written word" (that is, they internalized lan?

guage, making it the tool by which they defined themselves); simul?

taneously?and through the very language they used?these women "be? came witnesses to the special sensibility of black women" (144). Washing- tons argument is that the "mothering" process opens the way for black women to discover the oral tradition of black culture that has been hidden

by the written tradition of white culture; significantly, this discovery is made

by listening to the sounds of their mothers' voices. Here, indeed, one woman

may hide another (a daughter hides her mother in the very process of

internalizing that mothers voice) and one tradition hides another: the "silent" tradition of white writing erases the sounds of a black, oral, and? one may surmise from the evidence provided by all four of these black women writers?female tradition.

How does the young black woman unveil this secret tradition? What are the consequences of this unveiling?for herself, for her mother? According to Mary Helen Washington, the oral tradition of black womens culture is discovered through the mother; it is a discovery of the mother's central place in that culture:

I think that with the aid of these oral testimonies about their mothers as artists, black women writers are beginning to piece together the story of a viable female culture, one in which there is generational continuity, in which one's mother serves as the female precursor who passes on the authority of authorship to her daughter and provides a model of the black woman's literary presence in this society. (147)

The price of this discovery is often painfully high, as the daughters experi? ence takes her beyond the circle of "safe space" created by the mother. The mother is threatened, as Paule Marshall describes: "Because of all my great ambitions she used to call me 'poor-great.' She wanted me to get a job as a

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secretary, not go to college. She wanted me to get along in a kind of minimal

way and she disapproved of my ambitions. She was always telling me I

looked as if I were living my old days first."3 The daughter's journey toward selfhood takes her into a hostile, racist world where she must learn on her own terms the lessons her mother has already internalized. This process of

moving beyond the mother allows the daughter to see her mother differ?

ently?as someone separate from her?to imagine her, and to recognize the mother's place within the community: "Paradoxically, [the daughter] must

disrupt the community's destructive and constricting circle while preserving the power of its rugged endurance in a hostile white world. The task parallels the one she must also perform with the mother?separating from her while

acknowledging that part of herself which is truly her mother's child" (159). Washington's argument challenges the accuracy of descriptions that place

woman in a position of "dread of the patriarchal authority of art." She

suggests that such descriptions of woman's relation to the cultural tradi? tion?and therefore to art?have nothing to say about black women's experi? ence.4 In black women's culture, the power of creative authority comes

through the mother?it is her gift and it is a "given"?and, according to

Washington, "the connection between the mother and daughter and the

daughter's decision to be a writer are essentially interrelated" (161), It is the mother's name rather than the father's which is signed by the daughter's writing?a writing that some of these mothers may, in fact, be unable to read, but a writing that nonetheless preserves the mother's language, her mem?

ories, and myths. The effect of the daughter's inevitable move away from the

mother?through education and experience in the world?is to bring her back to the mother's place, a place where the powers of imagination and the liberation through language were first learned,

Mary Helen Washington's commentary on contemporary black women's

writing poses disturbing questions for feminist literary theory, which most often takes white woman's experience as the standard for all women; it is, in

fact, a field of scholarship dominated by white middle-class women. But the most potentially powerful claim that Washington's critique might take? that the written word of white culture has effectively silenced the spoken word of black culture, effacing a powerful oral tradition that is just now being recuperated in writing by black women?is skirted, Washington's comments

open the way to an analysis of written culture as the product of institutions of higher learning (and those who have access to them), but for the moment she is silent on the power of the spoken word and its relation to the written word. This question of ties between the spoken and the written, the examination of the ways in which one culture masks another, awaits further

commentary.

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Between Women?a collection of essays that examines the relation of women biographers, novelists, critics, teachers, and artists to their female

subjects?takes up many of the questions posed in Mothering the Mind: these

essays often examine the "silent partnership" inherent in the biographical or critical act, and they address the issue of "mothering" as an intellectual

activity, (Importantly, both collections are dedicated to mothers.) Again, women writers posit the forms of women's community?generational as well as contemporary?that underwrite woman's creativity. The artistic subject holds the capacity to "mother the mind" of the biographer, critic, or novelist who would write about her; these essays analyze the attractions held by the female subject for the women who would write about her. Mothers, sisters, daughters, lovers?real and imagined?speak in these pages. As the title of the volume suggests, these women writers and their subjects exist in relation to each other; as one woman writer after another attests, the writing process brings the literary subject out of the past?out of the grave?and into the

present. The dead speak through the living, as Erlene Stetson discovers

through her work on black women's history and culture:

They empower me to speak. I am no longer merely content to feel sheer bafflement and frustration when I think that I have suffered or that I am oppressed. It is precisely that Black women's history?from servitude and slavery to freedom?tells me how to live, how to survive, and how to be. To survive, Black women had to invent themselves and did. They defined the terms of their existence and much more. (238)

In an essay entitled "Silence: Access and Aspiration," Stetson takes up the unanswered questions posed by Mary Helen Washington. The issue is that of

literary silence and its relation to the written tradition:

Silence is imposed and maintained by a self-serving, aristocratic, patriarchal canon that has always preferred to believe that writing is a divine gift bestowed on the seismographically sensitive and worthy white male. Writing is mystified into "art," sacred and inviolable object, immortal beyond its creator. The canon refuses to acknowledge that the impulse to write is varied and occurs without respect to an individual's race or sex. The literary histories of numerous Black women suggest that whether a voice speaks or remains silent is determined largely by external conditions. (245)

Stetson's commentary directs itself to the mystical (and mystifying) notions of artistic practice described by the dominant culture?a culture that defines itself as white, male, and aristocratic, a culture whose powers are God-given. But that which would be defined as God-given (the impulse to artistic

creativity) is discovered to be socially constrained. Those who speak are

given the authority to do so by the society in which they live. The question is

not, "Who is artistically gifted?" but rather, "Who is socially sanctioned to

speak and write on behalf of Art?"

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We return, again, to the question of cultural relations, to the ways in which one culture dominates, masks, and silences another, to the culture- bound interactions of speech and writing. Contemporary feminist theory often concerns itself with these issues of language?speech and writing?in an effort to chart woman's position in language, to discover the ways in which her relation to language may be different from that of men. One

predominant?and powerful?reading of Western culture argues that the "divine gift bestowed on the seismographically sensitive and worthy white male" described by Stetson (245) is not writing, but rather speech?the word of God made manifest in man. Writing is derivative of speech, an aid to

memory that recalls the power and presence of speech, a suspect aid to communication because it opens a space between the creator and the created. Writing opens the way to forgery, to mis-representation, to pretense and deceit. This reading of Western culture from Plato to the present moment would have it that the hierarchy that establishes man over woman also authorizes speech over writing, and that woman and writing stand in relation to each other as degraded doubles in a culture that honors God's Word in the power and authority of male speech. Thus writing always puts into question the authority on which it grounds itself, assuring its validity, honesty, and worthiness through the signature to that writing, through the name that underwrites it. The authority of writing, then, rests in this name, a name that women (especially black women) have not legally possessed for most of the years encompassed by Western culture. And even now, one name hides another: woman signs her father's name or her husband's name, writing her message under their legal authority. And it was the very ways in which writing could play tricks, passing off the counterfeit under the guise of

legal tender, that insured the "mystification" of writing, that made it into a "sacred and inviolable object, immortal beyond its creator" (245). Writing was itself mystifying, carried on in secret; the effort to guarantee its author?

ity only assured its immortal and sacred powers. Writing came to mask the

spoken or, rather, to summon up the power and presence of the spoken word in the silence of the written word. Writing stood in place of speech.

As Mary Helen Washington might argue, such a reading of Western culture has nothing to say to or about black culture, where disenfranchise- ment blocked access to the written word (illiteracy guaranteed subservience to a law that remained incomprehensible). It was speech that could not be

controlled, that could not be denied, and it was through speech that black

people kept their culture alive. This oral tradition was not considered to be "culture" among the dominant white community, however, as white defini? tion of culture rested in the written word. Thus the properties of black cultural experience are defined (not surprisingly) in inverse relation to those of white culture, preserving the traditional power of speech against the

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mysterious and mystifying effects of writing. Rather than having been denied access to the power of the spoken word as their sisters have often

been, black women are protectors and practitioners of a spoken art that is now being preserved?being made a "sacred and inviolable object, immortal

beyond its creator"?by the daughters of this tradition. The ironies are all too obvious, as the title of Mary Alice Washington's essay suggests: "I Sign My Mother's Name" un writes the premises of the white, literate culture

against which it poses itself while using the tools of that culture to reinscribe the powers of the oral tradition. The mother's name inscribes authority.

In Between Women, women writers reinscribe the authority of their

literary subjects under their own signature. In so doing, these women writers?critics and subjects?revise the traditional terms of literary schol?

arship and invert the conditions of critical authority. Those writers who most clearly articulate this new mode of scholarly endeavor are black women who cut away, in Erlene Stetson's words, "the myths, the deliberate

distortions, and the half-truths" that surround women's lives and literary works. Gloria T. Hull even provides a model for this feminist literary scholarship. She places her schema in terms of black feminist criticism, but its working methods are crucial as well?perhaps especially?for those of us who might still take white woman's experience as the model against which all experience?lived and written?might be measured. Hull's fundamental tenets constitute a radical critique of literary critical practice as it has been

taught and practiced through most of the twentieth century:

(1) everything about the subject is important for a total understanding and analysis of her life and work; (2) the proper scholarly stance is engaged rather than "objective"; (3) the personal (both the subject's and the critic's) is political; (4) description must be accompanied by analysis; (5) consciously maintaining at all times the angle of vision of a person who is both Black and female is imperative, as is the necessity for a class-conscious, anti-capitalist perspective; (6) being principled requires rigorous truthfulness and "telling it all"; (7) research/criticism is not an academic/intellectual game, but a pursuit with social meanings rooted in the "real world." (109)

What Hull's principles of feminist critical practice sketch, and what every essay included in Mothering the Mind and Between Women underwrite, is the doubled reading and writing process that every critic enters into through the act of literary criticism: one reads the literary subject and is read by it. One enters into a contract with that subject, so that all literary criticism is doubly signed: by the subject and by the critic. In the case of feminist literary criticism, the warning that "one woman may hide another" rewrites itself as

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the dictum that "one woman does hide another." There is no safe hiding place outside culture from which to objectively view the literary subject; there is no separation between the critic and her critical subject; the very attraction toward that subject, the need to "say something" about it, ac?

knowledges a complicity with (and, often, a resistance to) that subject. As feminist critics, we both hide and are hidden by our subjects, the interplay of these masked forms revealing more than might feel comfortable to us. In

articulating such a discomfort, Carol Ascher focuses on the question of relations?the between ground on which the critic engages her subject?that is always at issue in the critical act:

Why couldn't I have written a book whose clean, sleek surface lay unbroken, invulnera? ble, unruffled by the squirms of a conflicted "I"? The "I" of a woman still seems so much more naked on the page than that of a man. The aesthetic almost has a moral component: A good girl wouldn't expose herself that way, and in public! But then I imagine a new aesthetic (and a new morality) in which people, including myself, are more at ease with closeness, with uncertainty about truth, and with the confusing mix of subject and object that constitutes what is finally there to be seen?and what the reader's eye and mind take in with her or his own predispositions. I suspect that if such an aesthetic were to develop it would be accompanied by an easing of the stranglehold of fact and science, which in our day so often makes us fear a world beyond our control. It would likely be a nicer, more egalitarian, safer world all around?perhaps more beautiful as well. (102)

In such a world, the critic would not be hidden from view by the literary subject, erased and subtracted from the interpretive act, translated from the first person to the third, but would rather be brought into view by the literary subject, in company with that subject. The critic's authority would not hide itself behind the literary subject, drawing its power secretly and silently from that subject, writing under the signature of the subject (as women write under their husband's or father's name and through their legal authority), but rather would be revealed through the subject. Here it would be safe for woman to announce a doubled authority rather than hiding a secret self? that is, it would be safe to acknowledge the similarities between these two women rather than being circumscribed by the space of their difference.

Shari Benstock Paris

July 1985

NOTES

According to the Larousse Pluri dictionnaire, the verb cacher, in its primary meaning, suggests not a doubling of subjects (one of which hides, or protects, the other), but a reduction

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of or a replacement by the figure that stands in place of the other: Soustraire une chose ou un etre vivant a la vue, en les placant dans un lieu secret ou en les recouvrant. The action of hiding is also the action of subtraction: that which is hidden is the subtracted element of that which is visible. Other meanings of the term describe the visible object as that which is the obstacle to seeing something is hidden from view, a dissimulation, or the effort to keep something secret, to keep it for oneself alone, by subtracting the knowledge of its existence from someone else (soustraire a la connaissance de quelqu'un). The notion of the hidden presence masked by the apparent figure is also incorporated in descriptions of writing provided, for instance, by Jacques Derrida. The writing simultaneously reveals and erases as it writes, so that the notion of something which exists under erasure (an erasure effected by writing itself) is always part of the movement of writing. The shadow, or trace, is both covered over by the writing and recoverable through the writing?the play of diminution and supplementation at work in the writing itself. The feminist implications of this reading of Western culture are outlined by Barbara Johnson's "Translator's Introduction" to Jacques Derrida's Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), vii-xxxiii. They are explicated as well in Alice Jardine, Gynesis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).

2Mothering the Mind (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1984); Between Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).

3Mary Helen Washington, "Interview with Paule Marshall," October 24, 1981 (un? published), quoted in "I Sign My Mother's Name," 156.

4Washington quotes Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979) on the dread of patriarchal artistic authority, but she cites as well Mary Carruthers, "Imagining Women: Notes Toward a Feminist Poetic," Massachusetts Review 20 (1979), 281-307, as "another painful example of how white feminist writers cannot imagine the lives of black women" (162, fn. 17).

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from the editor's perspective: "between women: women critics on women writers"

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