Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. [Vol. 5.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 25)

Studies - András Tarnóc: Voices From the Wild Zone: Three Versions of the Feminist Aesthetic in American Culture

"One ever feels his two-ness,

—An American, A Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body." (1013) Thus the true meaning of women's writing is located at the interstices. Du Plessis offers the following definition of the female aesthetic: ....the production of formal, epistemological, and thematic strategies by members of the group Woman

, strategies possibly born in contradiction, overdetermined by two elements of sexual diff erence

—by women 's psychosocial experiences of gender asymmetry and by women's historical status in an (ambiguously) nonhegemonic group. (139-140) This definition is essentialist, and in its vagueness is reminiscent of Maulana Karenga's view of the Black Aesthetic, and Raymund A. Paredes' definition of Chicano literature. For Karenga, the determining factors are race and social relevance, for Paredes ethnicity and ethnic experience (74). A logical extension of Du Plessis's theory offers itself as the female aesthetic, a nonhegemonic marginal school of thought, can be applied to other nonhegemonic, marginal groups (149) supported by the fact that both blacks and Chicanos have had a subordinated historical status and have suffered from racial and ethnic asymmetry as well. The term "epistemological" refers to the dominance of theory, compared to the higher degree of tangibility of the black feminist and Chicana feminist aesthetics. The emphasis on marginality makes woman the symbol of all oppressed groups expanding Zora Neale Hurston's notion of the black woman as the "mule uh de world" (14). Paralleling the black aesthetics' committed and detached schools, the white female aesthetic can be divided into a radical and a more inclusive version. Carolyn Heilbrun and Catherine Stimpson point out that two types of female literary criticism exist. Following biblical analogy, demonstrated by its "righteous, angry and admonitory tone," the radical trend adheres to the lines of the Old Testament, and the New Testament view seeks "the grace of imagination" (Showalter 243). 101