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

The white female aesthetic, like its other minority counterparts, was a response to a historical exclusion of women from American public discourse. Nina Baym asserts that the barring of women from literary theory was motivated by sexist male bias, and the prevailing contention that women were unable to produce "great works" (64). The excellent or great works were books replete v/ith classical references, and the exclusion of women from higher education denied the former the opportunity of being familiarized with the classics. Also, just as the black male writer was forced to carry the stigma of eternal childhood, mainstream America had foisted on the white woman writer a similar image. In Charlotte Perkins Oilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" the author, suffering from post-partum depression, is locked into the nursery, deprived of intellectual activities, and is condescendingly treated by her doctor husband, who believes that her disease is partly caused by her "imaginative power," and "habit of story making" (Baym 1532). Furthermore, as Leslie Fiedler argues, women writers' incessant production of "flagrantly bad best-sellers" against which male authors, the best of "our fictionists"(Baym 69) had to struggle, and Hawthorne's oft-quoted statement: "America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash" (qtd. in Tompkins 101), underlined the woman writer as the enemy. In this view authorship was equaled with fathering a text and if literature was considered an attempt to achieve fatherhood on the part of the author, "then every act of writing by a woman is both perverse and absurd, and of course, it is bound to fail"(Baym 78). Thomas Jefferson's condescending rejection of Phil lis Wheatley's poetry based on the prevailing concept of Anglo-Saxon superiority and Hume's guidelines making the "taste of an intelligent man" an adequate basis of criticism is not only an example of racism, but of contemporary sexism as well (Baker 149). Du Plessis asserts that women's exclusion from public discourse and education led to the development of "an aesthetics which in many respect was feminine" (147) and gave rise to a "mother tongue" (148), a form of linguistic resistance to male scholarly discourse. As Heilbrun argues feminist criticism and by expansion the female author faced three types of reception: "has been scorned, ignored, fled from, at best reluctantly embraced" (qtd. .in Gilbert 37). J. Hillis Miller's comments reflect the first two of these approaches: 102