Anxiety of Influence or Authorship, Which more Dramatic?

I believe it was in Wednesday's class that this question was posed: Which is a more dramatic issue -- anxiety of authorship or anxiety of influence? I starred this question in my notes as it is something I would like to explore more. Anxiety of influence is an author's fear that "he is not his own creator and that the works of his predecessors, existing before and beyond him, assume essential priority over his own writings" (450). A woman do not experience "anxiety of influence" in the same way a man because by and large, precursors are men, and "significantly different from her" (451). Instead, "anxiety of authorship" is "a radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a 'precursor' the act of writing will isolate or destroy her" (451). It seems that through the language used, Gilgert and Gubar would likely make the argument that "anxiety of authorship" is more troublesome. "Anxiety of influence" is said to be "even more primary," meaning that anxiety of authorship is more complex (451). Furthermore, the anxiety of authorship states that the act of writing could potentially "isolate or destroy" a woman (451). This long segment is evidence of the complexity of the anxiety of authorship:

"Thus the loneliness of the female artist, her feelings of alienation from male predecessors coupled with her need for sisterly precursors and successors, her urgent sense of her need for a female audience together with her frear of the antagonism of male readers, her culturally conditioned timidity about self dramatization, her dread of the patriarchal authority of art, her anxiety about the impropriety of female invention -- all these phenomena of 'inferiorization' mark the woman writer's struggle for artistic self-definition and differentiate her efforts at self-creation from those of her male counterpart" (452).

As "male writers seem increasingly to have felt exhausted by the need for revisionism," I can imagine that someone could argue that the "anxiety of authorship" is less problematic because women have a nearly clear slate and have to create themselves. Men, on the other hand, have to create a self that is entirely unique and original, which is more difficult since there are so many more precursors. However, Gilbert and Gubar's argument serves to say that "anxiety of authorship" is more troublesome because of the ways this effects a woman's writing and personal life.

With "anxiety of authorship," women have to create themselves. With "anxiety of influence," men do not need to create themselves, but simply fear that they will be too heavily influenced by their precursors. Women