WILLIAM PHILLIPS
505
Helen Vendler is to be commended for her excellent and coura–
geous review of several books of feminist literary theory, including books by
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in
The New York Review of Books.
It is a
model of critical writing: moderate,just, exact, not polemically triumphant,
and patient in its presentation of facts and arguments.
It
is courageous be–
cause though there is a good deal of privately expressed disdain by many
writers and critics of the more extreme feminist literary theories, there has
been very little sophisticated and informed examination of the field. There
have been occasional hard-core polemics, but most writing on the subject has
consisted of celebration and mutual praise. On the other hand, radical femi–
nists are not very receptive to criticism; they usually consider it to be an
expression of male-oriented thinking and, even though they might disagree
among themselves, they often close ranks in response to outside criticism.
Sure enough, Gilbert and Gubar replied to Vendler's criticism of their
books in a long, rambling letter in
The New York Review of Books
that is badly
argued, badly written, bad-tempered, question-begging, and personal. They
begin by wondering why Vendler has deteriorated as a critic. Then they
accuse her of being aged, of having been brought up on the New Criticism,
and of being uncomfortable in the community of women. Finally, they
attribute her criticism of them to flaws in her personality. But they fail to un–
derstand Vendler's main point, that much feminist theory, including Gilbert
and Gubar's books, reduces works of literature to their manifest, explicit
content, to polemical tracts, and that it treats characters in fiction not as
imaginative projections, typifYing complex and enduring human conflicts,
myths, and mores, but as real people ofwhom one approves or disapproves.
Vendler's rejoinder, it is worth noting, is admirably restrained.
*
*
*
The polarization was bound to happen.
It
is an old story. For one
of the lessons of history is that the right and left feed offand need each other.
The campaign by the left to pressure the government to award NEA grants
to pornographic material and performances was sure to create a backlash.
And the backlash, as expected, goes to the other end of the political spectrum.
Patrick Buchanan, for example, in
The New York Post,
inveighed against all
modernist art and literature.
The right, as the past has shown, does not always need a left target;
but it finds it easier to justifY itself when it has one. So the political merry-go–
round continues: the left provokes the right, and the right's excesses are used
to justifY those of the left. Both exclude the middle ground: the left sees
nothing between itself and the opposite extreme; the right takes the position
of the left as typical of everything in between. Thus the supporters of
Mapplethorpe argue that any criticism of his work applies to all modern art;
