Women, Philosophy and Literature

238 Pages·2007·1.05 MB·English

by  Jane Duran

WOMEN, PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE
Jane Duran’s stimulating book uniquely brings together five women authors
simultaneously through the lenses of philosophy, feminism and literature. Her
book problematizes the ancient struggle between philosophy and literature through
a contemporary, feminist philosophical reading of these authors. Duran’s book
thus reads against the grain of both contemporary literary theory and philosophical
accounts of literature. In addition to these provocations, Duran brings together two
women of color, Toni Cade Bambara and Elena Piniatowski, along with feminist
standbys Woolf and Beauvoir, and the less often philosophically read author, Margaret
Drabble. In doing so, she provides a productive interrogation of standard feminist
readings of literary philosophers. The result will be of interest to philosophers,
feminists, and literary theorists.
Ann E. Cudd, Director of Women’s Studies,
Professor of Philosophy, University of Kansas, USA.
For the members of the Society for the Study of
Women Philosophers
Women, Philosophy
and Literature
JANE DURAN
University of California – Santa Barbara, USA
© Jane Duran 2007
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Jane Duran has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as the author of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
Gower House Suite 420
Croft Road 101 Cherry Street
Aldershot Burlington, VT 05401-4405
Hampshire GU11 3HR USA
England
Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Duran, Jane
Women, philosophy and literature
1. Women authors - 20th century 2. English fiction - Women
authors - History and criticism 3. English fiction - 20th
century - History and criticism 4. Philosophy in literature
5. Feminism in literature
I. Title
809.3’9384’082
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Duran, Jane.
Women, philosophy, and literature / Jane Duran.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-7546-5785-9 (hardcover) 1. Literature--Women authors--History and
criticism. 2. Women and literature--History--20th century. 3. Women and literature--
History--19th century. 4. Literature, Modern--20th century--History and criticism. 5.
Literature, Modern--19th century--History and criticism. 6. Philosophy in literature.
I. Title.
PN471.D87 2007
809.3’9384082--dc22
2006034416
ISBN: 978 0 7546 5785 9
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire.
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements xi
Part 1 The View 1
Chapter One Introduction 3
Part II The Europeans 21
Chapter Two Margaret Drabble and Philosophy 23
Chapter Three The Feminist Drabble 41
Chapter Four Woolf, Metaphysics and Life 59
Chapter Five The Body à la Woolf 77
Chapter Six Beauvoir’s Philosophy and Literature 95
Chapter Seven Écriture and the Other 113
Part III The New World 131
Chapter Eight Toni Cade Bambara and the Black Vision 133
Chapter Nine Afrocentric Womanism 151
Chapter Ten El Mundo de Poniatowska 169
Chapter Eleven Las Mujeres de Mexico 187
Part IV Closings 205
Chapter Twelve Wrapping it Up 207
Index 219
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Preface
Work on novelists, literary genres and the like might be thought to be the province of
a department of literature, or of an academic program dealing in those issues; work
in feminist theory has been done by philosophers and a number of thinkers from a
number of disciplines, but there is little work available at the moment that addresses
the intersection of such issues. This work aims to fill this particular gap—if an
argument can be made that the work of women writers merits discussion in the vein
of feminist thinking, and if another sort of claim can be made that some literature is
philosophical (and this claim has, indeed, been successfully made), then it ought to
be an intriguing exercise to try to discern the philosophical and feminist elements in
women’s writing.
Another set of questions asks us what literature is worth pursuing, who the
authors in question might be, and what tacks toward the literature might be taken.
In this work, I have taken for granted the now somewhat disputed notion that a
good deal of the literature of European origin—or written originally in European
languages, including, of course, English as such a language—might be worthy of
investigation, and hence, using the novel as an exemplary genre, my first three women
writers are from Great Britain or the Continent. The work of Margaret Drabble has
always received attention, and although it might be argued that she is not currently
as well known as her sister A.S. Byatt, Drabble’s carefully-constructed novels not
only repay close reading, but lead the reader on a number of conceptual pursuits.
That the work of Virginia Woolf might be worthy of investigation in a philosophical
context seems indisputable—works such as To the Lighthouse and The Waves seem
drenched in unusual notions of time and the construction of the real. There is, of
course, no dearth of commentary on the work of Virginia Woolf. Finally, to round
out a somewhat traditionally-oriented triad, the work of Simone de Beauvoir cannot
be ignored, clearly, if the project is a philosophical investigation of the work of
women novelists.
But what of work of women of color? Although the Black American novelist
Toni Cade Bambara wrote in English, her work is filled with allusions to the West
African cultures, and a novel such as The Salt Eaters cannot genuinely be understood
without knowing something about the African continent. Elena Poniatowska’s work
is in Spanish, and not all of it is currently available in translation. Nevertheless, she
continues to draw attention for her stellar writing about the Mexican Revolution, the
difficulties of the mestizaje, and so forth. Perhaps more important, writing that is
partially of non-European origin or inspiration helps us to ask important questions
about matters postcolonial, and about canon formation. Not so very long ago, it
would have been difficult if not impossible to write a work with the investigatory
viii Women, Philosophy and Literature
aims of this project inclusive of women of color. The questions raised by Bambara
and Poniatowska are not only urgent—they are philosophical.
This work is constructed in such a way that the enterprising reader can probably
skip to her or his favorite author without too much difficulty. The opening chapter,
recapitulating lines of argument made by the many now working in the area of
philosophy and literature, asks both conceptual and historical questions about this
area, and about the time-honored dispute between the poets and the philosophers.
But many with extensive training in either literature or philosophy will already be
familiar with these sorts of problems, and the chapters on the individual authors are
placed in such a way that the opening material can be omitted. For each author, two
separate chapters raise the questions that a philosophical and philosophical/feminist
project demands. The first chapter for the given author addresses the writing in
question from the standpoint of traditional categorizing in philosophy; one might,
for example, expect metaphysical or ontological concerns (however metaphorically
expressed) to be prominent, and so each section of the first chapter in the relevant pair
covers an area of either philosophical thought, literary criticism, or some combination
of the two. Both Continental and more standardly analytical lines are employed and,
where possible, criticism that might already have a similar flavor (if such criticism
exists) is alluded to. The second chapter of the two on a given writer is the chapter
specifically concerned with feminist theory; here the idea is to explore the feminist
themes—the presence of which, of course, varies from author to author—with an
eye to such contemporary issues as écriture and possible intersections with feminist
epistemology.
The volume closes with a concluding chapter designed not only to summarize the
issues but to reinvestigate such questions as putative essentialism with respect to the
status of work done by women, and so forth. If literature can indeed be philosophical
(and a spate of recent journal articles in several publications seems to attest to the
fact that it can be so thought of, even in current philosophical conceptual schemes),
then one might well wonder why it is that the area seems to be so problematized,
and why so little work has been done in this particular intersection, that of feminism,
philosophy and literature. Perhaps one answer to this question is that trying to come
up with categories that allow us to do work on this topic is more difficult than might
at first be thought—there is a great deal that hinders feminism as a philosophical
category, according to some, let alone feminism, or philosophy, as expressed in a
novel with a female author. In any case, a great deal of analysis is needed, and at
least some of that analysis has been done here.
One of the foci of the current wave of feminist theory has been global, and still
another focus is probably best characterized as historical. A work in global feminist
epistemologies, for example, might want to help us fill in the blanks on why it is
that the temptation to employ first-world categorization schemes is so great when
dealing with other cultures, even though we, as investigators, may strongly suspect
that such conceptualization patterns are off the mark. Another work—one written
primarily from a historical point of view—may encounter similar difficulties with
conceptual schemes, even if it addresses almost entirely work done in European
cultures. The present work, dealing with material that is not overtly intended to be
philosophical, runs up against not only the problems of the first and second sorts of
Preface ix
works (particularly since Woolf’s writing, for example, is no longer contemporary),
but a whole new host of problems. It proves virtually impossible to avoid a certain
tendentiousness in analysis—the point, after all, is to try to pull philosophical themes
out of the various novels and the other literary works. But all of these projects
would seem to be worthy ones. If we can find recent publications addressing the
philosophical significance of work by Melville or Walt Whitman, it would seem to
be a valuable effort to examine writing by Drabble—or Poniatowska—not only for
the same sorts of issues, but for that very difficult issue, the existence of a feminist
pattern or aim in the work itself.
The resurgence of feminist theory demands that we use every possible method
of investigation in our desire to come to grips with women’s thought and feminist
concerns. Since it is clear that philosophy and literature as a whole, although
burgeoning, still remains an underinvestigated area, this somewhat rarely-addressed
intersection asks for more analysis. There have always been women writers in the
various literary traditions, just as there have always been women philosophers. Anne
Conway and Mary Astell speak to us in one way; the new work done by feminists
in Tamil Nadu or Nepal in another. An exciting approach for feminist theory would
seem to be to scrutinize the work of well-known women writers, at least some of
which has already been the topic of extended criticism. We serve feminism—and
philosophy—poorly if we fail to make as many investigations as we might, especially
given the richness of the material. The present work has as its goal the opening of
new territory, and the establishment of new lines of argument about the work of
women writers, and women’s thought in general.