A route to modernism Book

Let me preface this by saying that I despised Wuthering Heights and feel that probably means I also despise Emily Bronte. That's important here only because the subtitle here is "British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing". I don't want anyone thinking that just because I read this book I automatically swoon over Wuthering Heights. 'Cause I don't.

Moving on. The purpose behind this book of Showalter's is to show that women are on a completely different plane than men. Not in a bad way, though there will certainly be readers out there who immediately think, "Oh, hellz yeah, women are crazy!" But those people probably aren't reading this particular review of this particular book so it really doesn't matter. Showalter begins in the 1800s in her discussion of literary tradition and discusses the different women writers over the years and their impact on the course of literature. She shows how this tradition has grown over the years, focusing her discussion on three specific phases: Feminine, Feminist, and Female.

In the Feminine phase (1840-1880) Showalter shows that women wrote in order to reach the same intellectual level as their fellow men writers. Women in this period especially often used pseudonyms in order to get their work published.

The Feminist phase (1880-1920) involved women writing as a way to fight back against the stereotypes of what a woman should or should not do. Clearly this is the time that women's rights were coming to the forefront.

In the third phase, Female (1920-present [or at least "present" when the book was published in 1977:]), women seem to, according to Showalter, stop caring what their fellow men-folk think, and stop using men in the equation of writing at all.

I'm intrigued by the three phases, but want to know more. Her focus here was British women with only a side comment about American counterparts such as Edith Wharton. (You knew I had to make a shout out to my lady friend, didn't you?) In case anyone forgot, Henry James really was a chauvinistic pig, and Showalter throws in a few jabs at him as well, which I fully support. Even though he's dead and really couldn't give a crap what a silly little woman like me thinks of him anyway. Pfft.