Reply to Commentaries: Women Writers, Literary Historians, and Martian Readers

B ECAUSE OF its ongoing interest in a revisionist correction of traditional canons that either altogether omit women writers or relegate them to only minor status, feminist criticism, as practiced in the American academy, has inevitably engaged questions of literary history.1 Thus Jerome Beaty quite properly places my A Map for Rereading: Or, Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts within the context of that abiding feminist concern (although feminists, like other critics, arrive at that concern without necessarily being driven there, as he suggests, and certainly without all the unpleasant emotional baggage that such a verb implies). He errs, however, when he too narrowly identifies such of as exclusively searching for literary roots. Feminist explorations into literary history do not stop at the archeological function: that is, excavating lesser known precursors for the better known women writers of yesterday and today. Equally important is the feminist exploration of the various theories of literary history which have, at successive periods, resulted in something like our schoolbook anthologies of major authors. Here feminist critics are quick to point out that any theory of literary history is really a model, devised to satisfy an assumed need to chart the continuities and discontinuities, as well as the influences upon and the interconnections among works, genres, and authors; but it is always, we remind our colleagues, a model of our own making. It has taken very different shapes and explained its inclusions and exclusions in very different ways, when one ideological stance-Marxism, formalism, psychologismreplaced another as the groundwork of contemporary theory. In our own time, uncertain as to which, if any, model reflects anything like an accurate literary history or adequately accounts for our canonical choices, and pressured further by the feminists' call for some justification of the criteria by which women's writings have been so consistently excluded both from remembered history and from canon-