Feminine, feminist or written-by-women?

In A room of one’s own, Virginia Woolf highlights two factors of relevancy to explain what obstacles women have found to produce literature over the eras: On one hand, the impetuous subjugation exerted by men over women which relegated them to domestic life in such way that actually this have acquired a sort of 'feminine' identity all over its facets at a very profound level and which, moreover, have prevent women from experiencing what they need to know and live to enrich their minds and talents. On the other, women lack a proper literary tradition, one whose origin was feminine, which guide their creative efforts and allow them to continue or react to a subjectivity constructed by their ‘mothers’. It is in this point in which it raises my doubt: When Woolf tells us about ‘the lack of a tradition for female writers’, does she refer to a feminine, a feminist or a written-by-women literature? But before we delve into this question more deeply, let’s clarify what differentiates these three concepts.  

A feminine literature

Whatever the adjective, it diminishes literature,

Isabel Allende.

For Vicente Serrano (1991) to claim that it exists a feminine literature would imply to advocate in favor of difference, since the idea of a body of literary work whose essence is woman-related (and given that manifested in the features of what women have written) would lead us to separate inexorably this from masculine literature (p. 71). In turn, assuming it suggests that language development differs significantly from men to women due to biological differences, which would be evidenced in two opposite styles of writing. 

Nonetheless, literature cannot be explained with respect to techniques and procedures only, as it also involves a concern that constitute the core of a literary work: The particular way in which authors treat topics and the circumstances that surrounds them while they conceived a story. Therefore, feminine literature would suppose that women, in turn, understand the world distinctively, are concerned with issues proper of them and create representations and symbolizations which are easily contrastable to the ones that men do (Richard, 1994: 129-130; Vicente Serrano: 1991: 72-73).

Feminity (2010), by Nadine Viard

For some literary scholars the idea of determining that it exists a feminine literature as it does a feminine mind do not condition literary performance, so both women and men would produce, together, just one kind of ‘literature’ which (Vicente Serrano, 1991: 74). However, Richard (1994) points that this argument is held by people who are afraid that the concept of feminine literature were understood as a literature whose quality is below the masculine one’s, hence the motivation to claim that there is not literature associated to gender (p. 131). She agrees with it, though not because she is concerned for not diminishing women’s literary work, but because she considers that writers are equally called to reach quality and personal distinction in their literature, by constant invention of new identities, a sensitive comprehension of emotions and situations and use of language that demonstrates talent and technique, factors which are neither limited nor potentiated by gender but by writers’ passion to what they do (Richard, 1994: 136-138).

A feminist literature

We cannot say that something is feminist, just because it involves women,

Hélène Cixous

 

We can do it! or Rosie, the riveter (1943), by J. Howard Miller.

It was commonly used as a feminist icon during the post-war massive integration of women to the working world in the USA. 

Regarding feminist writing, it emerged as a reaction to male hegemony, a rupture with women’s submission (which, in the end, is what validates men’s exclusion), that would be why it became such relevant for women’s work as writers (Gillies & Mahood, 2007: 26). Nonetheless, this conclusion have been questioned by a subsequent debate: Is everything that women write is always feminist, either explicitly or implicitly? If what women write is mostly feminist or not isn't clear by now, however, that there is a literature that aims to explain what women are like, defends what they deserve and represents what they have to say, is difficult to deny.

 

A written-by-women literature

I don't believe that women write different from men, 

Marjane Satrapi.

A subject less controversial has to do with the notion of a written-by-women literature. The lack of debate about this might be because the pragmatic studies which this concept has emerged from, that is corpus analysis, or in other words, study of recurrent linguistic features that are decipherable in real samples of language as well as the abstract concepts that possibly explain this features (Richard, 1994: 129).

An example is the work of Matías López and Campillo (2009). In their article "¿Puede hablarse realmente de escritura femenina?" they analyze the work of four Latin American female writers and determine that they share a preferred use of first person, a sense of intimacy, crucial role of details, psychological analysis of characters, elucidation of essentiality, and precise, fluent, rhetorical language.

  

Woman writing in the garden (1965), by Daniel F. Gerhartz

Yet, there is a problem with analyzing what women write. This studies are conditioned by the characteristics of the particular group of women whose work is being adressed (such as nationality, age, ideology), thus, conclusion drawn by researchers are just ‘tentative’, thus they cannot be universalized to define the foundations of women’s writing (Richard, 1994: 132). 

This premise would lead us confirm that there would not be a properly feminine literature (or we have not been able to acquire a clear understanding of what that is about at least), but there would be feminist literature as well as several literatures written by women at different times, communities and circumstances (Richard, 1994: 133).

But then, what Virginia was talking about…

Virginia Woolf should have been aware of possible wrong interpretations of A room of one’s own if when she pointed that women lacked a literary inheritance, hence their assertiveness to talk about a "literary tradition for women". This is a rather holistic concept which includes all what we can find inside the literary universe of women, from how they write to what motivates them to do, what they do it for, about what and how their literary tradition is related to other traditions and other literatures through times and cultures. 

Perhaps in A room of one’s own we cannot define the kind of literature that Virginia Woolf were adressing to, but we can fin a pertinent question about a literary tradition which is absent in this field, even though it already counts with multiplicity of voices, except of the women's voice, not only to respond to the –hegemonic– masculine inheritance, but also to add to everything that have been already written, a female touch.    

References

Gillies, M. & Mahood, A. (2007). Modernist Literature: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Matías López, M. & Campillo, P. (2009). ¿Puede hablarse realmente de escritura femenina? Espéculo, vol. 14, no. 42.
Richard, N. (1994). ¿Tiene sexo la escritura? Debate Feminista, vol. 9, no. 1, p. 127-139.
Vicente Serrano, P. (1991). Aproximación a la polémica sobre “la literatura de mujeres”. Acciones e Investigaciones Sociales, vol. 1, no. 1, p. 69-80.