Dror Abend-David

By entitling her article "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness", Elaine Showalter
presents feminist criticism--which she renames "gynocritics" (335)--as a unique
phenomenon which sprang in the empty desert of theory about women. While
Showalter's notion of the "wilderness" may point out the fact that feminist theories
of literature are the product of the last decade, it may be dangerous to interpret her
metaphor of "an empirical orphan in the theoretical storm" (331) as a statement
about female history, ignoring earlier discussions of feminism such as those of
turn-of-the-century Virginia Woolf, and late-nineteenth-centuryMary Wollstone-
craft, Maria Mulock, Florence Nightingale, and Sara Stickney Ellis. Showalter
certainly distinguishes between the past of feminist criticism and that of women's
history, actually referring to some of the discussions just mentioned in her article,
particularly to Woolf. Nevertheless, the "wilderness" is a dangerous term which, in
her title, as well as in that of Geoffrey Hartman Criticism in the Wilderness, draws
on the old Puritan concept of the American wilderness, a domain free of past
histories and traditions and, consequently, one that is flexible to new ideologies,
theories, and orders.

But as history teaches us--and American history in particular--the idea
of wilderness is very often an illusion which ignores the prior inhabitants of a
domain, only to be forced to acknowledge them at a later stage. Therefore, without
ignoring the significance of feminist theories in the last twenty years nor of
Showalter's summaries of such theories, it is likely that feminist readings of
contemporary texts that ignore the "prior inhabitants" of female history and thought
run the risk of misjudging the achievements of such texts, awarding them with credit
of their precursors.

While feminist readings of pre- twentieth-century texts are necessarily
aware of the fact that every work that is written either by a woman or about a
woman enhances the possibility that women have spent as much time on this planet
as men, it is the occupational hazard of contemporary readings, such as the one

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