feminist studies from becoming a pink-collar ghetto. And it hints at the speed with
which feminist theory is changing— something I’ll try to track.
In keeping with feminist critic Jane Gallop’s cryptic caution to remember that ‘history
is like a mother’ (1992:206–239), I’m going to focus on three broad areas of academic
children’s literature criticism influenced (unanxiously) by feminist theory: the rereading
of texts for previously unrevealed interpretations; the reclaiming of texts that had been
devalued or dismissed; and the redirection of feminist theory into providing a welcoming
climate for texts by people marginalised by patriarchal colonial societies. The titles in
each of my three sections in this essay, ‘Rereading’, ‘Reclaiming’ and ‘Redirection’ take
their cue from Adrienne Rich’s ideas that feminist poetics are about ‘revision’ (Rich 1976).
RereadingThe desire for feminist rereading comes from an understanding of the ways ideological
assumptions about the constitution of good literature (or criticism for that matter) work.
By the early 1970s, feminist critics like Kate Millett had made it common knowledge
that assumptions about good literature had been predicated on the belief that the adult
white male was normal, while virtually everyone else was deviant or marginal. And so
was born a critical desire to see if a feminine literary tradition, and feminine culture
could be made visible. By using techniques from deconstruction (derived largely from
Derrida) and from contemporary discussions of ideology (from Althusser and Pierre
Bourdieu) and subjectivity (largely derived from Lacan), feminist critics began to look at
the ways ideological assumptions are played out in the text. They searched for a
feminine tradition of ‘other’ stories: mother, daughter, sister stories (Chodorow, Hirsch);
a preference for survival tactics over honour (Gilligan); a search for a ‘both/and’
feminine plot rather than an ‘either/or’ oedipal plot (Hirsch); a preference from
multiplicity, plurality, jouissance and a valuing of pro-creations, recreations and new
beginnings (Cixous, Gallop, Rich). Feminist children’s literature critics also participate in
this recovery of a female literary tradition (Paul 1987/1990; 1990). The following small
sketches of reinterpretation, rehabilitation and re-creation demonstrate the range of
ways in which that tradition is being revealed.
ReinterpretationFeminist reinterpretations of familiar classics like The Secret Garden and Little Women
turn stories we thought were about struggles to conform to the social order into stories
about women’s healing and successful communities of women (Bixler, Nelson,
Auerbach). Little Women—as read by Edward Salmon (a nineteenth-century authority on
children’s literature) in his 1888 obituary of Alcott in Atalanta—is a story about
instructing girls to be ‘the proper guardians of their brothers’ and to be ‘all-powerful for
good in their relations with men’ (449). But for Nina Auerbach, in Communities of
Women (1978), it is the story of ‘the formation of a reigning feminist sisterhood whose
exemplary unity will heal a fractured society’ (37). The critical rereading turns it from a
story about women learning how to serve men into a story of women supporting each
other.
100 THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES