I like to think of myself as a young Hemingway

"I consider whether the phoenix of agency can emerge out of the ashes of the dead male author" (Campbell 1).

I want to explore this line further.  I feel like we didn't discuss it enough, and it seems to be the strongest line of Campbell's text.  If not, at least the most aesthetically evocative.  As I mentioned in class, when I first read that line I first thought of Gubar and Gilbert.  What a pair!  As I'm sure many of you recall, their text questioned feminine agency in Bloom's "intensely (even exclusively) male, and necessarily patriarchal" literary universe (Gilbert and Gubar 452).  Men suffer from the "anxiety of influence"--constantly trying to outdo or "invalidate" their literary forefathers.  I feel as if this theory evokes a sense of Roland Barthes The Death of the Author.  Barthes claims "The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book:  book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after.  The Author is thought to nourish the book" (Barthes 876).  If what Barthes says about the author "nourishing" the book is true than when applied to Gilbert and Gubar, the question of the Author's life depends on those male writers who come after the author.  

When a contemporary male author "invalidates" his forefather, the audience therefore no longer "believes" in the precursor who therefore dies at the hand of his modern counterpart.   Gilbert and Gubar suggest with their opener that women authors therefore "emerge out of the ashes of the dead male author."  I forget who it was, but someone in class suggested that the meaning of this line derives from the image of women as pioneers in the literary world.  I agree.  Campbell explains that "Woman is a serial collective defined neither by any common identity nor by a common set of attributes that all individuals in the series share" (4).  The notion that woman lack "any common identity" is not new.  Gubar and Gilbert say "woman writers participate in a quite different literary subculture from that inhabited by male writers, a subculture that does not have its own distinct literary traditions" (452).  In not having "its own distinct literary traditions," Gilbert and Gubar reinforce Campbell's ideas on the "serial collective" of women lacking a "common identity."

But what's the relevance?  Well...assuming that women "can emerge out of the ashes of the dead male author," and all the "male authors" are busy killing their forefathers...suddenly the women replace the men in an "intensely male and patriarchal" literary society.  Gilbert and Gubar call women "pioneers" in creative rhetoric.  I feel as though that is to what Campbell refers when constructing women as the phoenix of literature.  The constant deconstruction of masculinity in literature reconstructs femininity as the new "literature."  Food for thought.