Friends, I ripped through that essay and also gave you little time to say anything about it. So this is just an open invitation: what interested you, what seemed helpful (or not) as a working theory? Brief comments and longer analysis all welcome.
with apologies to Benstock
I think what I found most affecting about the essay is its criticism of the tendency in … well, in criticism (I am not at peak eloquence, perhaps) to assign tendencies of women’s modernist writing to failure. The line about Virginia Woolf being perceived to use dashes “when words fail her” feels so revealing to me, though maybe that’s because I’ve spent this week trying and probably failing to do meta-analysis of a hundred years of Woolf criticism. It feels like a generic critical term, but is struggling against the language and losing language that we’d use to describe a male writer’s experience? Suddenly going on a train of regarding how we talk about struggling with/against language and the potential gendered meanings this has. Can we be exiled from language, too, even as our exile manifests in it?
Yes, Benstock would say (and many others also). And it begs the “can we use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house?” question.