You've probably noticed a difference between what Sandra Gilbert is saying in her essay "Literary Paternity" and what Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray are talking about in "The Laugh of the Medusa" and "This Sex Which is Not One." Part of that difference lies in the fact that Gilbert is a pragmatic feminist coming largely out of a humanist tradition as a literary critic, and Cixous and Irigaray are poststructuralist theoretical feminists. They represent two distinct (different but related) branches of contemporary feminist theory. Gilbert's piece represents what we might call a "pragmatic" American feminist school of thought. Emerging from a tradition called "liberal feminism", this American pragmatic feminism is interested in looking at how systems of female oppression have been perpetuated and elaborated; such analysis usually pays a lot of attention to history (and hence is not based on structuralist principles of synchronic analysis). Liberal/American feminism often emphasizes understanding origins of social practices, in order to understand how to intervene in them, to change them. That's why I call it "pragmatic": much American feminist thought is oriented toward getting things done, toward theorizing so that some kind of social action or change can take place. (This kind of theorizing-for-application has its roots in a number of political movements and theories, including Marxism and socialism, civil rights, and, of course, the "women's liberation" movement). Gilbert's article represents the historical aspect of this kind of American feminist theory; her article looks specifically at literary history to find that an overwhelming number of male authors have attributed their creative capacity directly to their bodily configuration: the pen, as Gilbert documents, is a metaphoric penis, and vice-versa. This metaphoric equation between pen and penis is important, Gilbert asserts, because such metaphors shape how we are able to think about the process of writing, and about creativity in general. By linking writing with having a penis, these authors insist that writing, being creative, is a biological act, one rooted in the body--and specifically in the male body. Her article shows that this equation is not an isolated incident, something that just a few jerks thought, but rather is one of the dominant metaphors of creativity in Western culture, for both male and female writers. Now, we can critique this stance pretty easily--how come these guys thought that penises were the physical model or analog for creating, when it's just as "logical" (and even more self-evident) to say that creativity comes from a female body, since that is, after all, the body that actually gives birth? But that is precisely Gilbert's point: throughout Western cultural history, women have been confined solely to the role of giving birth, of being mothers of human beings; men, meanwhile, have signified their creativity as giving "birth," as being fathers/progenitors, of immortal things, like books, and not being connected to beings that perish (like people). There are lots of ways to read this assertion of male creative fatherhood/authorship/authority. We can see it as an anxious response to the male inability to know for sure that they really are the father of biological children (since only the mother knows for sure who the parents of the child are). We can see it as a reaction-formation (in psychoanalytic terminology) to the threat of castration, by asserting the predominance of the penis (as presence) as creative organ. We can see it as an attempt to reduce what Harold Bloom calls "the anxiety of influence," the feeling that one will never be as good as (as powerful as) one's father, and particularly as good as one's literary forebears, one's literary "fathers." Or we can see it as a conscious attempt on the part of male authors deliberately to exclude women writers (and women in general) from membership in their exclusive club, by defining the only "good" writing as coming from men. However we decide to interpret the phenomenon Gilbert is describing, it is clear--from her voluminous documentation--that this equation between pen and penis has been a powerful metaphor in Western thought--one which many women authors internalized (and which countless women who might have been authors may have internalized and believed, and allowed it to prevent them from attempting to wield the pen). Gilbert concludes that the exclusion of women from the tools of the trade meant that women writers found alternate methods of writing--if they couldn't use pens/penises, what did they write with? Perhaps with milk, with blood, and on leaves and bark. She means this metaphorically, just as the pen=penis image is a metaphor, but also literally, as the pen=penis image is also meant literally. She means that we must look for women's writing in places, and using instruments, not traditionally associated with writing, because those traditions are defined by m

France. And hunting and killing the perp who registered Brandon Anderson.

Frodo