Elaine Showalter on a favorite feminist heroine and dealing with critics

Sponsored by [Yale University Press]( On the NYR Daily this week Monday, Memorial Day in the United States, we published [Elaine Showalter’s essay]( about the American poet, abolitionist, and suffragist Julia Ward Howe. Monday also happened to be precisely two hundred years since Howe’s birthday—May 27, 1819—an anniversary that gave rise to the essay’s subtitle, “A Tale of Three Bicentennials,” since part of Showalter’s theme in the piece was to note the disparity in commemorative celebrations for Howe’s literary contemporaries Walt Whitman and Herman Melville (Whitman’s birthday was also this week; Melville’s is in August). This redoubtable woman, who found her aspirations as a poet frustrated by her husband’s opposition to her literary career, is more famous today as the author of the lyrics for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” When I corresponded with Elaine, who was in London this week, I was curious to know what had propelled her—best known for a string of influential studies in feminist literary criticism, books such as The Female Malady (1985), Sexual Anarchy (1990), and Hystories (1997)—to venture into biographical writing with her most recent book, The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe (2017). And why Howe, particularly? “I discovered Julia Ward Howe’s long battle for creative freedom when I was researching my [2009] literary history of American women writers, A Jury of Her Peers,” she explained. “But I was also drawn to her longevity—ninety-one, working up to the last week—when so many of my literary heroines, from Eleanor Marx to Sylvia Plath, died young.” Showalter’s first piece for the NYR Daily, last year, was [a review]( of a show about Plath at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. “And I liked her combination of what critics disapprovingly called ‘saintliness and friskiness,’” Elaine went on. “She was too fun-loving, too interested in fashion, food, parties, games, and humor to suit the sober suffragists, too intellectual, feminist, and radical for Boston society.” Photo by English Showalter, at the Jewish Museum, New York City It strikes me that there was a distinct note of identification for Showalter in this description—it would be apt for herself. Now aged seventy-eight, and professor emerita from Princeton since retiring in 2003, Showalter can legitimately be described as an original second-wave feminist, a legacy of which she is proud: “Being in the women’s movement in the US and UK in the late 1960s and 1970s was an unadulterated blessing intellectually, socially, and politically. Truly the beginning of my adult thinking life.” For all the hopes of sisterhood, “solidarity forever” was not exactly the slogan second-wave feminism lived by. Perhaps because of her high profile as a pioneer of the academic practice that she called “gynocriticism,” Showalter attracted some harsh criticism of her own. Notably, the literary critic and theorist Toril Moi attacked Showalter’s work for its “essentialism.” “When I was first attacked by other feminists about being untheoretical, I was startled and upset,” she told me. “But I decided early not to waste time defending my ideas, and repeating old critical arguments. I also discovered that I wasn’t frightened by controversy, and over time found it energizing.” Showalter also upset some other “sober suffragists” by taking newsstand magazine assignments like writing about fashion for Vogue. It seems absurd now but in the 1980s and 1990s, doing the high-low thing was regarded as unseemly for a serious scholar. “When I was a TV critic for People—a wonderful experience—my academic colleagues were either so unaware of it or so disapproving of my love of popular culture that no one mentioned it to me at all, although my students were interested,” she recalled. “One man in Princeton asked my husband if he knew that the TV critic in People had the same name as his wife.” I heard there another little echo of the prejudice Julia Ward Howe encountered. In her essay, Showalter relates how impressed Nathaniel Hawthorne was with Howe’s first published volume of poetry, grading her “the first of American poetesses.” But the poems’ frank exploration of Howe’s unhappiness in her marriage gave Hawthorne pause: “What does her husband think of it?” Elaine, of course, has faced no such obstacles with her husband, English Showalter, who was a professor of French at Rutgers. And her generous “friskiness” of spirit seems always to have won out, as she notes wrily: “Some of the people who have attacked me have regularly asked me for blurbs and letters of recommendation—and I write them.” For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the [NYR Daily](. And let us know what you think: send your comments on articles or this newsletter to Lucy McKeon and me at daily@nybooks.com; we do write back. Matt Seaton Editor, NYR Daily You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from The New York Review. 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