Campbell's Communal Agency in Relation to Gilbert and Gubar

In Karlyn Campbell's essay, Agency: Promiscuous and Protean, she talks in depth about the idea and function of agency. I found myself particularly interested in what she has to say on Michelle Ballif's critique of communal agency. Campbell writes, "agency is constrained by externals, by the community that confers identities related to gender, race, class, and the like on its members and by doing so determines not only what is considered to be 'true,' but also who can speak and with what force." (Campbell 3) I find it to be a really powerful, well articulated claim about agency, and it caused my mind to immediately make reference to Gilbert and Gubar's Infection in the Sentence. This idea of agency as constrained and contingent upon stereotypes to define "truth" or a certain standard reminds me of the idea that a woman's "anxiety of authorship" (Gilbert and Gubar 451) is the result of this constrained agency. Eighteenth and nineteenth century women's struggle to "find," or "release" their agency is marked by a distortion of what is "normal," or "true."

Although Campbell's first point on agency was not part of the assigned reading, I'd like to incorporate it into my analysis: "...agency is communal, social, cooperative, and participatory and, simultaneously, constituted and constrained by the material and symbolic elements of context and culture," writes Campbell (3). I think these claims Campbell is making about agency, basically that it functions within a given society, according to and constrained by the social norms, really resonates Gilbert and Gubar. Especially the idea of constraint. Throughout their essay, I think Gilbert and Gubar really emphasized the notion of social constraint on the woman and how it affected their articulation and agency. I am definitely engaged and in agreement with Campbell on this idea of communal agency, and the gendered repercussions for the female author are evidence of its impact.