sense of the term. Moving grandly among those long-established monuments, he is cool, superior, a godlike museum guide discoursing on the virtues and defects of each chiseled sonnet, each well-wrought novella. . . .
The Reader, on the other hand, is hot and human—and therefore somehow imperfect. Afflicted by texts, she or he struggles to understand them . . . Enclosed in contexts, embarrassed by pretexts, the Reader devours poems, inhales syntax, exhales codes, and is in fact assaulted by so many and such various messages that she or he may eventually come to feel that they are inscribed on her or his skin.19
Gilbert’s expression of the desire to write as a Reader—“hot and human,” “[a]fflicted by texts,” “[e]nclosed in contexts, embarrassed by pretexts”—within an academy characterized by the disembodied (yet male), objective Critic, is an example of the perceived personal tone of feminist criticism. In 1981, Jean Kennard noted the general impression “that large numbers of feminist critics employ an overtly personal tone and that this in some significant way separates feminist criticism stylistically, if not methodologically, from other literary criticism.”20
Despite this general impression, Kennard’s detailed study of feminist literary criticism published in journals in the previous few years revealed only seven (including Gilbert’s) that employ an overtly personal voice. Kennard also notes that the personal material is usually positioned at the beginning of the article and then it returns to a more traditional, detached critical style; a tendency Elspeth Probyn identifies as “a general pattern within feminist criticism of merely using the personal at the outset” before “plodding off into the usual disembodied type of argument.”21
If the use of the personal voice is not actually as common in feminist criticism as she and others had thought, why, wonders Kennard, is it perceived to be so? One conclusion she makes is that the few examples that there are of personal criticism leave such a strong impression that they are thought to be more numerous than they are in actuality.22 I would think that this is due to the deeply felt need, as expressed in Gilbert’s article, for making explicit one’s personal engagement with texts—thus instances of personal criticism occupy a significant place in the memory of those who read them. It is also a simple result of feminist theory’s criticism of the dualistic, rational accounts of knowledge and modes of speaking. Yet however much feminists may think that they ought to write from a personal standpoint, it is not easy to actually do so.
An instance of writing in a personal voice, while simultaneously considering the difficulties of that process, is Jane Tompkins’s “Me and My Shadow,” an essay of virtually iconic status in discussions of personal criticism. It opens with the words “[t]here are two voices inside me . . . One is the voice of a critic who wants to correct a mistake in the essay’s view of epistemology. The other is the voice of a person who wants to write about her feelings . . . These beings exist separately but not apart. One writes for professional journals, the other in diaries, late at night.”23 What follows is a phenomenological consideration of how she might go about reconciling those two voices, how to “move away from academic conventions that segregate intellectual concerns from meditations on what is happening outside my window or inside my heart.”24 It is difficult for Tompkins to integrate these voices: firstly because she is embarrassed to be writing about her “feelings,” because it seems self-indulgent, yet her feminist convictions require her to resist this sense of shame.
In Tompkins’s piece her emotional voice, struggling with the nature of academic discourse, is then joined by a resolutely embodied voice, with the sentences which provoked the most comment in response to the piece: “[m]ost of all I don’t know how to enter the debate without leaving everything else behind—the birds outside my window, my grief over Janice, just myself as a person sitting here in stockinged feet, a little bit chilly because the windows are open, and thinking about going to the bathroom. But not going yet.”25 This collapsing of the public/private dichotomy to such an extent—making reference to a friend’s suicide as well as needing to go to the toilet—marked a shift in the use of the personal voice in literary studies. The academic writer’s personal testimony became truly engaged rather than anecdotal or rhetorical.
The personal criticism of which Jane Tompkins’s “Me and My Shadow” is exemplary is routinely attacked for being emotional, uncontrolled, ‘too much information,’ ‘gossipy.’ There is, as Nancy Miller notes, a gendered element to this: “[b]y going/not going to the bathroom in public, Tompkins crosses the line into the dangerous zone of feminine excess.”26 This “calling attention to oneself” will more often than not embarrass the academic audience or reader; exhibitionism that leads to social discomfort may be regarded as ‘impolite.’ Miller asserts that the reader’s embarrassment provoked by the appearance of the personal voice in academic discourse is not a reason to avoid it; rather, it is “a sign that it is working.”27 Miller also notes—as does Tompkins—that she herself gains enjoyment from autobiographical detail in an academic piece of writing, preferring “the gossipy grain of situated writing.”28 Those who are discomforted by the immensely revelatory tone of Tompkins’s essay, Miller suggests, may be bothered more by her display of feminist anger, than by her reference to her bladder: “[i]t is her anger, that is ‘not supposed’ to show, but it does. ‘She’ is making a spectacle of herself. ‘She,’ as has often been said of me, is ‘being emotional.’”29
The use of the personal voice in academic writing makes one vulnerable to attack that goes deeper than the intellectual. More unpleasant than a male audience member’s comment on Elspeth Probyn’s paper on eating disorders—that her speaking of her personal experience of anorexia made him “nervous”—was a feminist’s response to the printed version, that Probyn’s “weighty words” of confession “lacked sweat and blood” in their invocation of the female body.30 This insensitivity to the point of cruelty in choice of vocabulary is a reminder why so many choose not to write from a personal perspective. The use of the impersonal tone in academic discourse serves to distance oneself from one’s own intellectual positions, a distance that ensures that—however violent the assault—no one will get hurt.
Autobiography and Selfhood
While objections to personal criticism on the grounds that it is ‘embarrassing’ may rightly be dismissed, there are more profound problems with the presence of the personal voice in academic writing. Tompkins acknowledges her anxiety over the use of the personal voice: “[t]he voice in which I write about epistemology is familiar. I know how it ought to sound. This voice, though, I hardly know. I don’t even know if it has anything to say. But if I never write in it, it never will.”31 These words are inspiring, but what is troubling is the notion of a distinct “voice,” a unified essence that has been obscured by the conventions of patriarchal scholarship, struggling to break through. Here the turn to autobiographical criticism runs the risk of implying that the personal voice is invested with inherent authority, because it is implicitly associated with a ‘person’ in a way that ‘objective’ writing is not. In the words of H. Aram Veeser, it can be argued that personal criticism “builds on the hypothesis of liberal authenticity: ‘I felt it, therefore it is true.’”32 Aside from questions of validity
