claire m. tylee
the political power of language itself over consciousness. It also promoted the
importanceof imagination and of group political consciousness raising through
self-revelation. On the one hand it scrutinized the ideology implicit in popular
culture such as folk-tales and fairy stories; on the other hand, it demonstrated
the need to break the silence maintained over sexual abuse, taboo memories,
and repressed anger, if women’s decolonization was to be achieved. Feminist
psychoanalytic criticism has specifically related sexual trauma to war trauma and
Holocaust trauma.^65
The repression of Holocaust experiences and of women’s personal feelings
was doubly stultifying for Jewish women. Despite the success of early Holocaust
literature by women,^66 this was followed by a prolonged silence. Holocaust schol-
arship paid women’s experience very little attention until Jewish feminist scholars
broke ranks and started to explore gender differences in Holocaust experience
and writing, and ethnic difference in feminist analysis.^67 In this respect I agree
with Kerner that Plath’s example of ‘hysterical writing’^68 is empowering for Jewish
women poets, since Plath made so clear that the subordinated and abused figure
she was theatrically impersonating could be seen and heard as both Jewish and a
woman. Her divided identity as both a German- and an English-speaker in ‘Daddy’
may have provided an especially empowering model for German-Jewish refugees.
However, as with other persecuted ethnic minorities, the importance of the family
to individual survival would make it difficult for Jewish women to identify with
Plath’s attack on ‘the Father’, especially since he is figured as a Nazi. That would
obviously be particularly distasteful to refugees orphaned by the Nazis. Thus it is
significant that none of the threeKinder-poets started to publish poetry about their
state of alienation until well into their middle age—more than twenty years after
(^65) See e.g. Cathy Caruth (ed.),Trauma: Exploration and Memory(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1995), and Kal ́ıTal,Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma(Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996).
(^66) Anne Frank’sDiary of a Young Girl(1952) is a perennial best-seller. Early Holocaust memoirs
by women include Olga Lengyel’sFive Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz(1947).
The silencing of Holocaust memory, particularly in Britain, and its deleterious effect on survivors, and
even on the next generation, has been detailed by Anne Karpf,The War After(London: Heinemann,
1996).
(^67) The ground-breaking study was Esther Katz and Joan Miriam Rangeley (eds.),Proceedings of the
Conference: Women Surviving the Holocaust(New York: Institute for Research in History, 1983). The
bibliography of the field is now lengthy, but see also Marlene Heinemann,Gender and Destiny: Women
Writers and the Holocaust(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), and Dalia Ofer and Lenore J.
Weitzman (eds.),Women in the Holocaust(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). For an account
of Jewish feminisms, see Adrienne Baker,The Jewish Woman in Contemporary Society: Transitions and
Traditions 68 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993).
I use the technical term ‘hysterical writing’ to indicate the productions of ‘the woman writer who
must speak the discourse of the hysteric, whoboth refuses and is totally trapped within femininity’, as
in Juliet Mitchell’s exegesis of Julia Kristeva’s feminist psychoanalytic theories inWomen: The Longest
Revolution(London: Virago, 1984).