NO MAN'S LAND: The Place
of the Woman Writer in the
Twentieth-Century

Volume 1: The War of the Words

Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

Terri Doughty

The title of Sandra M. Gilbert's and Susan Gubar's long-awaited sequel to The Madwoman in the Attic carries powerful images of both the battle-scarred terrain of twentieth-century literature, site of bitter war between creative men and women, and the more idealistic landscape of a female utopia, along the lines of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland. The War of the Words is the first volume in a projected trilogy, to include Exchanges and Letters From the Front, which explores these two poles of women's experiences in the world of modem letters. Gilbert and Gubar present the first volume as "an overview of social, literary, and linguistic interactions between men and women from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present." An ambitious undertaking, certainly, and at times the scope of their task results in the co-authors being unable to elaborate on different propositions; nonetheless, their wide-ranging approach has much to recommend it, as they tantalize and provoke their readers with a radical revision of literary history, which claims that many of the features we associate with literary "modernism" have their roots in "an ongoing battle of the sexes that was set in motion by the late nineteenth century rise of feminism and the fall of Victorian concepts of 'femininity.'"

Sex antagonism is a central topic in No Man's Land, and despite their profession of description over prescription, Gilbert's and Gubar's text itself becomes an antagonist in the sex war of the twentieth century by engaging with (male) literary history, as well as by exchanging a sexually monolithic canon for a dialogue between the sexes. The first two chapters relate "The Men's Case" and "The Women's Cause," describing how male anxiety in response to the developing feminist movement engenders misogynistic texts, which in turn produce a complex female response. In terms of male writers, Gilbert and Gubar trace a linear development of hostility to women's aspirations beginning with Tennyson's The Princess, continuing through writers like Eliot, Nathanael West and Henry Miller, on to Ted Hughes today. However, despite the optimism of turn-of-the-century feminist polemicists like Christabel Pankhurst, women writers from Emily Dickinson to Sylvia Plath display unease with matching the directness of male antagonism, and they also have difficulty imaging women triumphing over men's brutality. Only with the second wave of feminism, particularly in the genres of science fiction, fantasy and lyric poetry, do Gilbert and Gubar see a revival of belief in the possibility of female triumph.

The field of literary history is the most difficult for women to assail, as not only must they face the resistance of male writers safely entrenched in tradition, but they must also contend with what Gilbert and Gubar term the "female affiliation complex." That is, modern women writers have to resolve their relationship to their literary mothers and sisters as well as to their fathers and brothers. Gilbert and Gubar take Freud's family model in "Female Sexuality" as their paradigm for the experience of the woman writer. Although this gives them three paths for the female artist - adoption of the father's tradition, claiming the mother's tradition, or a "frigid" rejection of both (and of aesthetic ambitions) - the Freudian model proves problematic, as Gilbert an Gubar admit, for his analysis of female sexuality is itself determined in part by sex antagonism. Moreover, the Freudian paradigm is limiting, as the woman artist's interaction with literary forebears is more complicated than the model allows. Finally, by working from Freud, Gilbert and Gubar are at times placed in the position of claiming that women are guilty of their own silencing. In some cases this may be so, but the argument is more palatable when it also takes into consideration economic and social factors rather than just psychosexual ones.

One of the more thought-provoking areas of sexual warfare that Gilbert and Gubar discuss is the battleground of language. Wisely, they avoid passing judgment on whether biology or anatomy actually determine linguistic power; instead, they focus on the interesting issue of how both male and female writers work with fantasies of linguistic primacy. Whereas the language play of Joyce, Pound and Eliot simultaneously devalues women's words as hysterical or incoherent and excludes women from the "civilized" father speech (Walter Ong's patrius sermo, cited p. 243), linguistic experimentation by Djuna Barnes, Woolf, Stein, and other women writers is aimed at achieving a true "mother tongue," achieving linguistic autonomy from the male tradition. Women's drive for linguistic freedom is further considered in terms of the importance of "naming" for such writers as H.D., Rebecca West and Isak Dinesen. What clearly matters here is not that men and women write differently out of different bodies, but that both sexes feel the need to distinguish their language from the other. It is to be hoped that this "war of words" receives further attention in the succeeding volumes of No Man's Land.

Although it has some of the problems of an introductory volume, generally stemming from too much to cover in too little space, The War of the Words augers well for the rest of No Man's Land. Gilbert and Gubar may at times frustrate the reader, but they are never dull, nor do they fail to challenge the reader's preconceptions of twentieth-century literary history. Their wit and fresh perceptions demand the reader's engagement with their text. Just as The Madwoman in the Attic necessitated a new reading of nineteenth-century literature, so No Man's Land will generate much debate over the next years, revising our understanding of literary: modernism.