Attempting to Verbalize Gilbert and Gubar Arguments

Okay, I wasn't able to convey my points on this reading as well as I would have liked....so here's me trying to do so again!

Gilbert and Gubar's argument was fundamentally a battle of the sexes.  Right from the beginning, G&G discuss the Snow White fairytale with the angel/monster binary.  What initially intrigued me to their argument was the idea that "If the Queen's looking glass speaks with the King's voice, how do its perpetual kingly admonitions affect the Queen's own voice?" (G&G 449).  Now, I annotated that agreed with the first point offered by G&G, that the Queen tries to sound like the king, and as such, becomes a monster.  The vengeful Queen wages a battle between Snow White, acting (in my opinion) like a King would in trying to protect territory.  The aggressive nature of this "monster" comes from her trying to sound like her main influencer--the King's voice.  Though G&G then shift their argument to predecessor problem, they have shown that women in 19th century literature are easily categorized into one of these two binaries, depending on who they allow to influence them.  Women that take on male characteristics are portrayed as monsters (Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty is another example of a woman in power), and woman that stay feeble and helpless become angels (all fairytale princesses).

Now let's make a parallel: if male authors "consciously or unconsciously affirm or deny the achievements of their predecessors" (G&G 449), could female authors then consciously or (more likely) unconsciously affirm or deny stereotypes of their literature counterparts?  That is, I think that women will read literature and hold themselves to a certain set of values and actions that will somehow define them as the women they want to be.  [Yes, I know some reading this are thinking "no way!" (dont we all love to think we're the exception)...yet, there are women out there who grew up reading fairytales and want that fantastical "happy ending".] So if we (as women) are trying to model ourselves after these "predecessors", then we stray away from independent, bold choices.  However, perhaps there are some that are the exception to this idea, and they do not follow the "woman model of literature".  These women, then, would have no other set of standards to hold themselves to than the male model.  (If not one, then the other...gotta love binary relationships)

This is where I started to stray from G&G.  They state that "Bloom's male-oriented theory of the "anxiety of influence" cannot be simply reversed or inverted in order to account for the situation of the woman writer" (G&G 451).  Why not, exactly?  Why can't it simply be reversed?  I would say that they do not think it can because they think that women hold themselves to standards different from those of men (as they say when they split hairs to create the different anxieties that plague each sex), so women have to fit into some other binary.  However, as all things are not black and white, I'm sure that some women out there hold themselves to standards of men, or feel like they can relate to males more than females, so that they do follow this inverted male-oriented theory.  For them, they see this as a struggle to "invalidate [her] poetic father" (G&G 450) by writing something original.  I really think it's possible....so why the whole talk about the eating disorders, then?

Female writers would not feel this "anxiety of authorship" if it weren't for critics like G&G (assuming they're probably not the first who think this way) that think women and men cannot be grouped into the same category as authors.  Critics create the tensions of female authors--by pointing out all these differences, they create a problem that was unbeknown to female author, this notion that she cannot be grouped with all authors, only female authors, so that she has to find another way to prove herself to her peers, critics, and suddenly superior, male counterpart.  This is why (yes, finally bringing it back up), I mentioned the phallus in class.  G&G state, "both children desire to be the phallus for the mother.  Again, only the boy can fully recognize himself in his mother's desire. Thus, both sexes repudiate the implications of femininity..." (G&G 451).  The act of writing as a female, and neither expecting nor wanting to be compared to female authors, but rather, authors as a whole--that is, accepting the "anxiety of influences" and saying that yes, you can invert situations for males and females, is the female author's way of being recognized as the phallus to the mother.  Her actions create her gender--so that if she wants to be gendered "male", then she does so.  After all, women published under male pseudonyms and were then subjected to the same "anxiety of influences" the *real* men were subjected to.  G&G mention on page 453 that the "'anxiety of authorship' [is] an anxiety built from complex and often only barely conscious fears of that authority which seems to the female artist to be by definition inappropriate to her sex".  Yet, we still have female authors, and we still had females pretending to be men in order to get their work published.  The fear was created by publishers not wanting to publish female works if they were not of a certain type of writing--again, this created problem is what has affected female authors.  However, that is not to say that they are unable to be categorized as men--for they are if they chose to be...and again we end up at the point that yes, Bloom's theory can be inverted.  The only reason it can't be is because other authors (like G&G--female authors, interestingly enough), have determined it can't be.  There's always room for change, though.

There's still so much of this piece that I can comment on to help my argument, but overall, I'm hoping this made more sense than my statements last week!