Modern Language Association

The Counterdiscourse of the Feminine Author(s): Joanna Russ and Rita Felski Source: PMLA, Vol. 107, No. 2 (Mar., 1992), pp. 356-357 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/462648 Accessed: 22/03/2010 06:57
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The Counterdiscourse of the Feminine

To the Editor: In "The Counterdiscourseof the Feminine in Three Texts by Wilde, Huysmans, and Sacher-Masoch"(106 [1991]: 1094-105), Rita Felski doesn't emphasize the writers'conscious motives for the fin de siecle "cult of art and artifice"(1094) she otherwise treats so well. Of course, her forthcoming book may do just this, but I think her article scants the extent to which the writers involved knew what they were doing. First-and I don't think this can be emphasized too much-careers and lives could easily be smashed by any openness at all, and everyone knew it. Second-and Felski seems to me to de-emphasize this too-there is the formidabledifficultyof describing or envisioning oneself at all, given the culturalcounters available. How to describe-or even be-this manwho-is-not-a-man? How to do so especially at the particular time Felski notes? As Jonathan Ned Katz demonstrates (Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary,New York: Harper, 1983), the crucialbusiness of inventing "heterosexuality"-that new identity the European medical profession was so insistent aboutrequired for real success "homosexuality": a bad and deviant twin. The cult and the new identity fit precisely, too. Unnatural? Fine; we'll make a value of artifice. Immoral? We'll make a virtue of heartlessness. Feminine? We'll scorn women. Defective? We'll be aristocrats, either by birth or by taste. Without more emphasis on the reactive nature of the cult, readers of Felski's article may misinterpret such phrases as "a subtext of anxiety and repressed violence" (1102) and "deeper anxieties about sexuality and the body" ( 1101) and conclude that such anxieties result from homosexuality or that they cause it. When oppression is soft-pedaled, the connection between anxiety and oppression gets lost, as does the link between anxiety and outright persecution. When actual gay politics becomes active ratherthan reactive, so does cultural politics, of course. Some of this did happen in the period Felski describes. I look forward to her book, but I hope it will embrace more of the historicity of the phenomenon she studies and will face more squarely the problem of how conscious a strategy the decadent sensibility was and what sort of strategies were practical for writers whose earnings and living depended directlyor indirectlyon their work. Along with Katz, Sheila Jeffreys(The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880-1930, London: Routledge, 1985) and Lilian Faderman (Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and

Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present, New York: Morrow, 1981) are important sources for this period; that Felski doesn't use them here is a mistake, I think. A note on Huysmans's character Miss Urania: her name is a joke clearly aimed at those in the know. A German term, originating in the 1860s, uranism was used throughout the 1880s and 1890s (especially in the United States, says Katz) to mean homosexuality. Huysmans's brutal strong man at the fair reappearsin Quentin Crisp's Naked Civil Servant as the tall dark man and throughout Jean Genet's novels as just about everybody. JOANNARUSS University of Washington Reply: My primary concern was to explore the motif of the feminization of writing as exemplified in specific literary texts of the fin de siecle. This topic relates to my broaderinterestin the genderingof the aesthetic sphere during modernity and in the reasons why, since Romanticism, the artist has often been seen as a feminine man. A historical account of how this motif developed and of its convoluted politics has, in my view, significant implications for some contemporary claims that an experimentalwritingcodified as "feminine" is either necessarily revolutionary or linked to the interests of feminism. My discussion, in other words, seeks to address the aesthetic and political implications accompanying the literary subversion of gender categories (masculine/ feminine) rather than of sexual norms (homosexual/ heterosexual).I am thus somewhat surprisedby Joanna Russ's confident assumption that my argumentis really "about"homosexual men. Recent gay theory has, after all, expended a great deal of effort on demonstrating that there is no necessary connection between the homosexual and the "feminized" man. Nevertheless, I would agree with Russ that the cultural politics of homosexuality needs to be given greater weight in my argument, given the historically contingent intersections between (rather than identity of) the figures of the artist, the homosexual, and the feminine man that did emerge in the late nineteenth century, as exemplified in the public visibility of a figure such as Wilde. In the extended version of the article that forms part of my current book, I attempt to address some of the connections between a self-conscious aestheticism and the construction and circulation of a homosexual identity.

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My aim was thus not to present a condemnation of the fin de siecle cult of artificiality. Clearly, its questioning of the natural status of both gender and sexuality played a significant part in the construction of a variety of self-consciously oppositional identities duringthe period. (The writersI am thinking of include not only men but also women such as Rachilde.) I sought merely to demonstrate that the celebration of art over nature was not unproblematically subversive or free of ambiguity, given the intimate association

between the categories of nature and woman that prevailed in the discourses of the period. In this regard, I remain unconvinced by Russ's apparentbelief that the misogynistic dimensions of such discourses are alleviated in being deployed as part of a self-conscious rhetorical strategy.

RITAFELSKI Murdoch University