WOMEN AND FICTION: THE LIMITS OF CRITICISM

Any critical theory contains within its very strengths potential for failure. Necessarily selective, a critical approach gains its vitality through rigor with which it imposes a pattern on work under consideration, allowing us, by its heightening of certain elements, to see that work in a new way. But pattern, of necessity, also blocks out other elements, and after we have learned from what has been emphasized, we become increasingly conscious of what has been minimized or lost. When critics of novel began to apply techniques of New Criticism, for example, their work excited. As readers of fiction, our heightened perception that novel might be as carefully formed as a sonnet, that following through a pattern of images might work for George Eliot as well as for Wallace Stevens, led to a number of excellent studies by critics like David Lodge. The influence of structuralism has been equally productive. But recent concentration of new books dealing with general subject of fiction and women, many of them responses to increasingly sophisticated aesthetics of a feminist literary criticism,1 is testimony that such close textual analysis has become increasingly unsatisfactory for many, that we sense in it a loss of touch with certain broader areas of concern. When D. H. Lawrence called novel the one bright book of life, he was directing attention to complexity of subject matter that novelist considers. All art transforms experience into new patterns, but fiction alone gains its greatest strength from tension it sustains through juxtaposing man's highest aspirations with reality of everyday as we experience it, through repetition and flux. Poetry concentrates our most acute religious and aesthetic questionings into an image; drama crystallizes in a moment of climax man's triumph or defeat. But few of us achieve in our own lives intensity of poet or moment of crystallization of theater. As we try to answer our own questions and ar? ticulate our own desires, we find that our ambitions and our hopes are constantly being tested against realities, confinements, and inevitably mediocrities of everyday life. Whatever our most profound religious, philosophic, aesthetic ideas, we must work them out, as fiction does, within reality of dirty