Lecture notes
BLOCK 1. CHAPTER 1
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Lecture notes of 8 pages for the course Género Y Literatura En Los Países De Habla Inglesa at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (BLOCK 1. CHAPTER 1)
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BLOQUE 1CAPÍTULO 1. GENDERING THE CANON
This chapter explores the historical forma-on of the literary canon, looking at the ways it has been defined and
shaped and examining the extent to which its boundaries have been drawn to exclude women. This incorporates
discussion of the emergence in Victorian Britain of the concept of a canon in ‘great literature’ as well as its
subsequent problema-za-on by feminist literary cri-cs. It also examines the arguments made around literary
‘gatekeeping’ and the problems presented by a male-dominated review press, taking as a case study the Modern
Classics Series published by feminist press Virago since the 1970s as an aGempt to counter this masculinist bias as well
as provide tangible evidence of a rich history of excellent female authorship.
The phenomenon of feminist publishing is itself invesHgated, since what we read is, of course, in part dictated by the
producHon processes that lie behind the creaHon of any literary arHfact. The emergence during feminism’s first wave
of a range of pro-suffrage presses was mirrored in the 1970s and 1980s by a raM of second-wave feminist publishers,
who transformed the literary landscape and succeeded in ‘mainstreaming’ not only individual authors but also whole
literary genres. In addiHon, the role of the publisher is important in considering how a text becomes canonical, since
the commissioning of any literary work is always culturally and temporally situated, and its ‘value’ is likewise produced
in and by those specific paradigms.
THE CANON
The contemporary formula-on of the literary canon is built on a set of principles, first explicated by Ma@hew Arnold
(1822-88). According to him, literary worth was located in a text’s ability to communicate truths, and the consumpHon
of ‘great’ literature should illuminate moral certainHes, leading to a more civilized society, as he wrote in his book
Culture and Anarchy (1869).
Arnold’s wriHng reveals as much about his ideas of reading as a means of adding ‘value’ to one’s intellectual life as it
does about the social, educa-onal and cultural paradigms of Victorian Britain. He is clear that the pursuit of
knowledge through the consumpHon of literature is a task for men, reflecHng the naturalised assumpHons that women
were intellectually inferior. This aWtude is exemplified in other influenHal pieces of wriHng of the era, for example that
of Henry Maudsley, who argued in his book Sex in Mind and Educa5on (1874):
“it is not a ques5on of two bodies and minds that are in equal physical condi5on, but of one body and mind capable of
sustained and regular hard labour, and of another body and mind which for one quarter of each month, during the best
years of life, is more or less sick and unfit for hard work.
The idea of a ‘canon’ of great literary works was insHtuted at a Hme when women were largely excluded from the
academy, and from intellectual and public life. For instance, Girton College (Cambridge) did not allow women actually
to receive degrees unHl 1948.
This fact had repercussions for the kinds of texts considered worthy of canonical inclusion, which excluded women,
with the excepHon of George Eliot and Jane Austen, who were given the go-ahead in The Great Tradi5on by F.R.
Leavis, a text in which the author took up Arnold’s idea of literature as a civilizing tool, narrowing the focus of this
approach to works of ficHon. It helped to define with greater precision the literature in English and limits of the canon,
so that university and school syllabuses adhere to similar-looking lists of culturally sancHoned ‘great’ writers.
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, BLOQUE 1
Challenging the hegemony of this male literary canon became an important target of second-wave feminist acHvity as
the women’s movement emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s, as a new feminist literary criHcism revealed the ways
that the canon was not representaHve of all great literature. In this regard, two of the earliest texts that were
suggested to criHqued this male bias were Kate MilleG’s Sexual Poli5cs (1969) and Germaine Greer’s The Female
Eunuch (1970), both using literary analysis to show the confinement of women in culture, economics, poliHcs and
elsewhere. These two texts were the foundaHon texts of second-wave feminism; and although they are inarguably
polemical, and in many ways flawed, they were the first texts to really be consistent with a new feminist audience,
being a starHng point for feminist literary criHcism. This is evidenced by the huge amount of a@en-on they generated
on publicaHon, which helped situate them as ‘important’.
In the 1970s, feminist scholars in the US also began to point out the omission of female writers from the canon,
staHng that “of all the reading and study material available for stylisHc imitaHon, inspiraHon, and sHmulaHon of ideas,
over ninety per cent is prepared and wriHen by men”. In this regard, Elaine Showalter, who would go on to become
one of the most prominent feminist literary criHcs of the 1970s and 1980s, wrote that the very term “feminine”,
applied to literature, has been a pejora-ve. Her soluHon was to teach new syllabuses for female-authored texts, to act
as a ‘decontaminaHon chamber’ to counter this systemaHc devaluaHon of women’s wriHng and women writers.
In addiHon, feminist academic Cora Kaplan has pointed out that this emergence of a feminist criHque of the canon
began first in US insHtuHons and took longer to establish a foothold in the UK as in Britain, English literature and
humaniHes departments were the ‘last bas-on of resistance’ against incorporaHng women writers into its teaching
programmes. BriHsh works such as Ian WaG’s 1957 study of ‘the rise of the novel’ reinforced that women’s
engagement with literature was only ever as readers, not writers, having been excluded. Against this long history of
exclusion, a conclusion was reached: the literary records of women’s lives had been lost or hidden. However, aMer a
century of literary learning in which their efforts had been devalued, overlooked or deliberately omiGed, women
began to set the record straight.
Indeed, by the mid-1970s there was a groundswell of feminist cri-cal wri-ng that interrogated the formaHon of the
English canon of literature, indicaHve of the dynamic and symbioHc nature of UK and US feminism at that Hme. Ellen
Moers, a US academic, argued that ‘literature is the only intellectual field to which women have made an
indispensable contribu-on’, and she argued that women’s limited role in public life throughout history had not limited
their scope as writers, but had in fact allowed them to flourish.
Rediscovering historical literature consequently became a vital task, a way of proving the validity of these arguments.
One of the ways this was effected was by the republishing of ‘lost’ historical works by women, such as ‘Virago Modern
Classics’, alongside new invesHgaHons into when and why these works had been allowed to go out of print. Thanks to
an exhausHve research, Dale Spender observed that women has been wriHng novels for more than 150 years before
Jane Austen, and that returning to the early days of women’s relaHonship to ficHon meant to go back to the
seventeenth, and not to the nineteenth. This evidenced what Moers had previously argued: women had always
wri@en, had wri@en well, and had enjoyed success and some acclaim in doing so. Their disappearance from view was
because of this very success, a backlash against their dominance of the literary scene. Echoing the previous idea,
Spender argued that this had led to a deliberate suppression of women’s literary efforts as a means to suppress their
involvement in public life more generally.
On the other hand, the feminist challenge to the ‘review tradi-on’, a lasHng basHon of male judgement and privilege,
was in progress. For example, there was found evidence that one of the most important works of US ficHon of the
nineteenth century had been deliberately understood as ‘senHmental’ as part of a concerted effort to smother its
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