READING WRITING BY WOMENI 

Harry AveUngl 

AbstrGd: Differences in gender may produce differences in the style 
of writing. It is my intension here to show that the style used by 
female in contrast to male writers results in a number of significant 
differences. Some of them are caused by the writers' cultural 
background. Being a teacher, I would like to share with others how 
the gender andfeminist theories can be applied to analyse writings 
by women. 

Key words: women s writings. literature. translation 

I This paper was delivered in the 2nd International Seminar on English Language 
Studies held by Sanata Dharma University. Yogyakarta, Indonesia with Ateneo 
de Manila University. Philippines; held on 5-6 May 2003. ·1 request it to be 
published by Celt journal so that many more can take advantage of the discussion 
offered. This paper owes much to my teaching in the course" Applications of 
Literary Theory in EFL Contexts" on behalf of La Trobe University at the Vietnam 
National University, Hanoi, in January 2003. I am grateful to both institutions for 
this opportunity. 

2 Harry AveHng, PhD.<h.aveling@latrobe.edu.au> is a regular contributor to Celt 
journal. His home base is at the Department of Asian Studies at La Trobe 
University, Melbourne, Australia. and is also Adjunct Professor of Southeast 
Asian Literature at Ohio University and at the Graduate Studies of Universitas 
Indonesia. He has translated extensively from Malay and Indonesian Literature. 
His recent book, the bilingual anthology Secrets Need Words: Indonesian Poetry 
1966-1998 (Ohio University Press, Athens Ohio, 2(01). has been short-listed for 
this year's New South Wales Premier's Prize in Translation. He holds the degrees 
of Doctor of Philosophy, in Malay Studies, from the National University of 
Singapore, and Doctor of Creative Arts, in Writing, from the University of 
Technology, Sydney. 



104 Celt, Volume 6. Number 2, December 2006: 103 -121 

INTRODUCTION 

There are many reasons for including the study of Literature as a part 
of the English syl1abus. Literature in English' provides examples of the English 
language used in its "most effective, subtle and suggestive" forms (Povey 
1987:4). It can give important insights into social behaviour and attitudesof 
English-speaking and other societies. It can present our students with some 
of the major questions about life which confront all hwnan beings. Although 
students are sometimes afraid that Literature is "difficult", careful1y chosen 
literary texts can be used with both developing and highly proficient students. 
Such texts can be used for their own intrinsic merit, and as a means of 
encouraging the four basic language skills of reading, writing, listening and 
speaking. 

In this paper I would like to address some gender issues relating to 
femininity (and masculinity) which are connected with the teaching of 
literature. The questions I hope to set for our consideration are these: 
1. Are there significant differences between writing by women and writing 

by men? What are these differences? 
2. If there are differences, how can we deal with them in our teaching? 
3. Are there cultural factors which will impede or assist our female 

students in responding to these differences? 
4. Are there cultural factors which will impede or assist our male students 

in responding to these differences? 

My concern with these questions is that of a teacher of literature, 
interested in gender and feminist literary theory, the majority of whose students 
are women. (I. am also a translator, and most of the best writers I have 
translated over the past five years have been women). I have to say in 
advance that I do not think that the paper will provide definitive answers to 
any of these questions. It is, nevertheless. important to raise them in this 
Seminar setting, in the hope that other participants may have comments and 
insights based on their own experience which can help us together to reach 
better answers. My approach depends on European theoretical texts but it is 

, I use this term deliberately. It includes literature from Great Britain and the 
United Kingdom. America, the former British colonies, and writing translated 
into English 



H. AvelJng, Reading by Women 105 

important that these questions should also be contextualised within a 
framework of Southeast Asian thought and daily practice. 

WOMEN AND WRITING 

"A man's book is a book. A woman's book is a woman's book," 
Christiane Rochefort has noted (cited in Marks and de Courtivron 1980: 183). 
The tendency to classify writing by women as "women's writing", and to 
extend to it the same attitudes which society shows towards women, is a 
persistent fact in many cultures. It has the effect of marking this writing off 
as different from, and often inferior to, writing by men which is commonly 
considered normative. "[Woman] is defined and differentiated with reference 
to man, .. Simone de Beauvoir has written, "and not he with reference to her; 
she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the 
Subject, he is the Absolute - she is the Other" (cited in Sellers 1991 :5). This 
is part of a wider mode of perceiving and organising the world - history, 
philosophy, government, laws, and religion - which is specifically masculine 
(Sellers 1991 :xiv). 

Literature teachers can sometimes feel that most of the texts we 
teach are by male authors, about the effects of the actions of men - on other 
men and women, and are somehow intended for male readers. Throughout 
much of history, women have been restricted in their right to create written 
works of art and, commonly, to read or listen to them as well. Mary Eagleton 
(1986) lists a long catalogue of "reasons why this might be so": "inequalities 
in the educational system, lack of privacy, the burdens of child bearing and 
rearing, domestic obligations", and "equally decisive", she suggests, "were 
the constrictions of family and social expectations". As a consequence of 
these restrictions, even though the amount of writing about women by men 
is very extensive in many cultures (in Indonesian literature, for example, it 
almost forms the basis of the modem canon), the amount of available writing 
by women appears in most cases to be very sntall. As Vrrginia Woolf remarks 
at the beginning of A Room of One ~ Own: 

;,. 



106 Celt, Volume 6, Number 2, December 2006: 103 -121 

When you asked me to speak about women and 
fiction ... [I] began 

to wonder what the words meant. They might mean 
simply a few remarks 

about Fanny Burney; a few more about Jane 
Austen; a tribute to the 

Brontes and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage under 
snow; some witticisms 

ifpossibIe about Miss Mitford; a respectful allusion 
to George Eliot; a 

reference to Mrs Gaskell and one would have done 
(Woolf2000). 

The full extent of this absence is, in fact, open to debate. In a rather 
striking metaphor, Elaine Showalter has claimed that, with a new historical 
awareness of the importance of writing by women, ''the lost continent of 
female tradition has arisen like Atlantis from the sea of English tradition" 
(Eagleton 1986: 11). The biased reception of writing by women, however, 
admits of no such uncertainty. Critical reviewing of women's writing has 
frequently tended to belittle it as intellectually light, "domestic", and essentially 
trivial. In a review of Wuthering Heights published in The Atheaeum in 
1850, for example,· the reviewer stated simply in one sentence: "To those 
whose experience of men and manners is neither extensive nor various, the 
construction of a self-consistent monster is easier than the delineation of an 
imperfect or inconsistent reality." Then Eagleton (1986:72) repeated again 
his kind remark that the publication of the novel, together with its 'Biographical 
Note', to which most of his remarks in the two thousand word article had 
actually been devoted, is "a more than usually interesting contribution to the 
history of female authorship in England" - as if works by female authors 
were normally not interesting at all. 

We can see today that this attitude is obviouSly unfair to women writers. 
It is also unfair to women and men readers, including our students. How did 
it ,<orne about? 

.', ~ .. 
Let me rehearse some of the basic principles of feminist literary 

criticism. They begin with the recognition that "female" and "male" are 



H. Al'e/ing, Reading by Women 107 

biological characteristics, while "femininity" and ""masculinity" are acquired, 
learned, cultural gender identities, As Stimpson writes: ""we cannot understand 
history, politics and culture until we have recognized how influential the 
structures of gender and sexual difference have been." Further, "men, as 
men, have controlled history, politics, culture. They have decided who will 
have power, and who will not; which realities will be represented and taught, 
and which will not. In so doing, men have relegated women, as women, to 
the margins of culture, if not to silence and invisibility" (Stimpson 1987). 

If we as teachers are to challenge this situation, it is important that 
women's lives and experience be seen differently from those of men and 
addressed in their own terms. To this end, we need a new awareness of the 
validity of women 's subjectivities, bodies and bodily functions (Mezei 1988). 

Recent feminist Writing has placed an emphasis on six areas of 
women's lives and SUbjectivity which have an influence on writing by women. 
The first is that of women's bodily experience (1) itself: sexuality, 
menstruation, childbirth, child-rearing, breastfeeding, reverential attentive love, 
connection (rather than separation), menopause, and, frequently, rage. These 
topics, so often unspoken in men's literature, have a central relevance for 
women's writing. In an interview with Xaviere Gauthier, Julia Kristeva has 
suggested that ""women generally write in order to tell their own family story 
(father, mother and/or their substitutes). When a woman novelist does not 
reproduce a realfamily of her own, she creates an imaginary story through 
which she constitutes an identity: narcissism is safe, the ego becomes eclipsed 
after freeing itself, purging itself of reminiscences" (Marks and de Courtivron 
1980:166). 

It is around this focus on ""a shared and increasingly secretive and 
ritualized physical experience" that female subculture has developed in many 
societies, including those of Southeast Asia. This domestic subculture (2) 
offers common values, conventions, experiences and behaviours, to its 
members. IIi nineteenth century England, for example, women followed the 
roles of daughter, wife and mother; they practised the doctrines of evangelical 
Christianity, with its strong emphasis on duty and suspicion of imagination; 
and there were strong legal and economic constraints on their mobiiity 
(Showalter cited in Eagleton 1986: 14). The bonds of this subculture relied on 
intimate and deep female friendships. Within this sphere, the rhythm of 
women's lives was assumed to be non-progressive, repetitive, static (rather 



108 Celt, Volume 6, Number 2, December 2006: 103 - 121 

than public, competitive, aggressi ve, egocentric, like their husbands ).It offered 
a smaller range of characters and had the potential, in Kathryn Rabuzzi's 
interesting insight, to be differently oriented towards the idea of plot (Donovan 
cited in Benstock 1987:105). 

The technical term used to describe this condition of oppression is 
"patriarchy". Patriarchy (3) privileges traditional gender roles. It describes 
men as rational, strong, protective and decisive, and women as emotional, 
weak, nurturing and submissive. Patriarchy justifies giving women less access 
to leadership and decision-making procedures, less economic opportunity, 
less education and fewer religious roles, as a natural consequence of their 
more limited abilities. As Lois Tyson (whom I am following closely here) 
notes: "patriarchy continuaily exerts forces that undermine women's self-
confidence and assertiveness, then point to the absence of these qualities as 
proof that women are naturally, and therefore correctly, self-effacing and 
submissive" (Tyson 1999:85). In this way, women's bodies are subverted, 
undermined, deformed, and betrayed, while women's experience, and writing, 
is relegated to oblivion. 

For some critics, the existence of a separate feminine subculture, 
dominated by patriarchy, has led to a different sense of morality (4). Judith 
Kegan Gardiner in her essay "Gender, Values and Lessing's Cats" suggests 
that: ''the good, the true, the beautiful, love, freedom and justice all traditionally 
mean different things for men and women", because they are embedded in 
larger, sexist ideology systems, in different ways. For a woman to be beautiful 
means one thing to her and another to the man who observes or possesses 
that beauty. Truth suggests sexual fidelity (otherwise women are dismissed 
as deceitful, changeable and unreliable). Love, Gardiner suggests, "is the 
center of a woman's life, her joy, her vocation, and her duty; for men, it is 
either a fringe benefit or a noble distraction from a full and accomplished 
life". Freedom, or independence, for men is associated with work and 
adventure. She quotes the words from a song, "freedom's just another word 
for nothing left to lose", and asks whether a woman could ever think this 
(Gardiner cited in Benstock 1993:87). Norine Voss even suggests, as a 
consequence of her study offeminiDe autobiographies, that: ''to be successfully 
feminine me~.to learn concealment, dec~it, the graceful falsehood. Hiding 
the signs of agirig, flattering a boss, suppressing unfeminine emotions of 
anger or rebellion, deprecating or concealing intellectual and athletic ability, 



H. Avellng, Reading by Women 109 

playing roles that have little connection with the real person - all these are 
part of almost any woman's repertoire" (Voss 1986:229). . 

Nevertheless, for some theorists being "both outside of dominant values 
and inside the society that lives by them" (Gardiner cited in Benstock 
1993: 112) can also seen in a positive way. Ellen Bayuk Rosenman suggests 
that exclusion gives women a critical perspective, a new angle of vision on 
their society. Their lack of privilege enables them to question the apparent 
naturalness of patriarchy (1995:38) This outsider status is, in fact, "a form of 
integrity" (1995:44) As Christine Rochefort proudly declared: "we don't belong 
to the same civilization" Marks and de Courtivron 1980: 186). 

A further consequence of the separate spheres inhabited by men and 
women is the sense that men and women use language (5) differently. The 
male usage is frequently the norm, while the female use is downgraded or 
derogated. Men, it is sai~ are more concerned with factual descriptions of 
the world; their voices are capable, direct, rational, humorous, unfeeling, 
strong (in tone and word choice) and blunt. Women's speech is more 
personalised, and more interested in describing in detail relationships and 
human actions. Men, in Deborah Tannen's terms, use "report talk", women 
use "rapport talk" (Montgomery et. at 1992:84-85). 

Christiane Makard puts this attitude to language in far more positive 
terms. Women's speech, she suggests, is "open, nonlinear, unfinished, fluid, 
exploded, polysemic, attempting to speak the body i.e., the unconscious, 
involving silence, incorporating the simultaneity oflife as opposed to or clearly 
different from pre-conceived, oriented, masterly or 'didactic' languages" 
(Baym in Benstock 1987 :22). Perhaps as a consequence of these qualities, 
the positive, subversive, stylistic attributes of a specific women's language in 
literature may include the greater use of irony, ellipsis, euphemism, litotes, 
reticence, pretermission, digression, and so on. Women's voices are also 
quite capable of assuming power. She can be angry, strong, decisive, sure of 
her judgements, acutely aware of male deficiencies and her own lost 
opportunities (Lanswer 1993:511 and Ozick cited in Eagleton 1986 :85-86). 
There is a dark side of this presumed openness to the unconscious. Throughout 
the ages, women have been consistently identified with maooess, anti-reason, 
primitive darkness, mystery; this new excitement about the primordial powers 
of women may simply serve to reinforce traditional 'feminine' stereqtypes 
(Clement in Sellers 1991 :118). 



110 Celt, Volume 6, Number2,December 2006: 103 -121 

These different dimensions offemale experience bring us to our fmal 
area, writing by women (6). In some cultures, the very idea of a woman who 
creates or writes literature for public consumption is an anomaly. In French, 
for example, the word "writer" does not have a feminine form. There is the 
word "poetess", but Gauthier describes it as being "a ridiculous word ... 
synonymous with foolish innocence, nature ... or old-lady, respectability" 
(Elaine and Courtivron 1980: 161) 

Tentatively, Pam Morris suggests: "many feminist critics have argued 
that women writers encode their experiences differently from men, that their 
imaginative world is articulated by means of a different range of symbolism 
and imagery, that their structures have been developed from different sources 
and traditions to those of male writers" (Morris 1993). .. 

Other writers are more emphatic. Marguerite Duras ties writing by 
women to the female body: 

I think 'feminine literature' is an organic, translated 
writing ... translated from blackness, from darkness. Women 
have been in darkness for centuries. They don't know 
themselves. Or only p'oorty. And when women write, they 
translate this darkness ... Men don't translate. They begin 
from a theoretical platform that is already in place, already 
elaborated. The writing of women is really translated from the 
unknown, like a new way of communicating rather than an 
already formed language. But to achieve that, we have to turn 
away from plagiarism. (Husserl-Kapit cited in Marks and 
Courtivron 1980:174). 

Still the most authoritative account is that of Helene Cixous' powerfully 
lyrical essay "The Laugh of Medusa" (Marks and Courtivron 1980:245-264)4, 
which, as Jane Gallop says, ''more than any other text •.. defmes ecritur~ 
feminine" (1992:42). In prophetic mode, the essay opens: 

4 Originally published in French in L'arc, 1975, the essay was translated into 
English in Signs, Summer 1976, and is reprinted in New French Feminisms, pp. 
245-264. For simplicity, page references are included in the text above. Also 
included in this book is a translation ofCixous' "Sorties", pp. 90-98. 



H. Avellng, Reading by Women 111 

I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do. 
Woman 

must write her self: must write about women and bring 
women to writing, 

from which they have been driven away as violently as 
from their bodies 

for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal 
goal. Woman must put herself into the text - as into the world 
and into hiS\Ory - by her own movement (Gallop 1992:245). 

Cixous writes "as a woman, toward women ... woman in her inevitable 
struggle against conventional man" (Gallop 1992:245). It is man who has 
repressed women, made them afraid and ashamed, "led them to hate women, 
to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against 
themselves, to be the executants of their virile needs" (Gallop 1992:248). 
The history of reason is one with "the phallocentric tradition". Woman must 
"Write [her] self. [Her] body must be heard. Only then will the immense 
resources of the unconscious spring forth." (Gallop 1992:250). For Cixous, 
"women are body" (Gallop 1992:257). Therefore: 

Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the 
impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and 
rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut 
through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-<iiscourse, including 
the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word 
"silence", the one that aiming for the impossible, stops short 
before the word "impossible" and writes it as "the end". 
Such is the strength of women that, sweeping away syntax. 
breaking that famous thread Gust a tiny little thread, they say) 
which acts for men as a surrogate umbilical cord, assuring 
them - otherwise they couldn't come - that the old lady is 
always right behind them, watching them make phallus, women 
will go right up to the impossible (Gallop 1992:256). 

The essay is filled with those qualities of "rashness, daring, mockery, 
sudden alternations of the reckless and the sly, the wildly voluble and the 
laconic" which can so thoroughly undercut 'the male mode' (Eagleton 
1986:201). For, having afl'mned "feminine writing", Cixous also insists: 



112 Celt, Volume 6, Number2,December 2006: 103 -121 

It is an impossibility to define a feminine practice of writing, 
and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice 
can never be theorized, enclosed, coded - which doesn't mean 
that it doesn't exist. But it will always surpass the discourse 
that regulates the phallocentric system; it does and will take 
place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophico-
theoretical domination. It will be conceived of only by subjects 
who are breakers of automatisms, by peripheral figures that no 
authority can ever subjugate (Gallop 1992 :25 3). 

TEACHING WRITING BY WOMEN 

Let there be no misunderstanding. Feminism is not only an "an 
intellectual and social movement, an a heuristic tool"; it offers itself as a 
complete "redefinition of knowledge and power" (Green and Kahn 1993: 1). 
It questions ''the most basic institutions of literary studies: how we evaluate 
literature, how we constitute knowledge about it, how its study is determined 
by the structure of the academy, and how it is separated from other disciplines" 
(Wardhol and Hemdl 1993). Ultimately it is not about equality for men and 
women within the present system, but the complete "transcendence or 
transformation ofthe present over-rigid defmition of gender as difference" 
(Morris 1993:5). 

In rethinking how we do literary criticism, and how we teach it to our 
students, feminist criticism can encourage us to undertake various new 
responsibilities. A first task is to 'retrieve' the past by rediscovering the scores 
of novelists, poets and dramatists whose work has been obscured by time. 
In doing so, we need to rediscover the continuity between these writers 
from one decade to another - not just from one Great Woman to the next. 
As a part of this expansion ofthe curriculum, we should be including more 
women writers within our syllabi, not only our own regional writers who 
already write in English but also by the translation of our own indigenous-
language writers. Literature in English is a place where this can take happen. 

Secondly, we need to be more aware in our examination of existing 
texts. many of which are written by men. We should not only be able to 
analyse the images of women in the works we are studying;"the existing 
criticism of the female authors who have been studied in some detail, and 
reassess the standards of literature we consider to be "good" (Donovan 



H. AveUng, Reading by Women 113 

1989:2). We must also be able to see the gaps and omissions that have to do 
with women in texts, the absences, as well as the stereotypes and unfair 
assumptions, the denials and destructive forces that are also inscribed there. 
In Mineke Schipper'S words: "who is not speaking? Who has no right to 
speak? Who does not see? Whose view is not expressed? Who does not 
act? Who has been deprived of the right to act? Who is powerless to act, to 
take the initiative; who is forced to submit to the acts of others?" (1985: 15). 
We need to teach our students how to read texts in their ideological contexts 
(Donovan 1989:xvii). 

Thirdly, as Elaine Showalter suggests, the next phase of feminist 
criticism is one that focuses on "women as writers ... its subjects are the 
history, styles, themes, genres and structures of writing by women, the 
psychodynamics of female creativity; the trajectory of the individual or 
collective female career; and the evolution or laws of a female literary 
tradition" (Donovan cited in Benstock 1987:99). We need to develop courses 
that are about women writers, just as there have always been courses which 
have been exclusively about men writers. Some at least of the following 
names - Emily Dickinson, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Hannah 
Arendt, Margaret Mead, Suzanne Langer, Rachel Carson, Dorris Lessing, 
Margaret Drabble, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya 
Angelou, Maxine Hong Kingston - as well as Indonesian writers such as 
Toeti Heraty, Dorothea Rosa Herliany, Ayu Utami, Dewi Lestari, Oka 
Rusmini, Malaysian writers such as Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Beth Yahp, 
Philippine writers such as Linda Ty Caspar, Edith Tiempo, Marjorie Evasco, 
Merlinda Bobis, Ma. Luisa Aguilar-Carino, Vietnamese writers such as Ho 
Xuan Huong, Nguyen Thi Thu Hue, Pham Thi Hoai and Duong Thu Huong 
... the possibilities are many - should be familiar to all, and not just the best, 
of our students. 

In so doing, we should not "essentialise" all women, in all places and 
times, as being ''the same", or get caught up in harsh prescription ("a woman 
must ... be like this, do that, etc. "). There is a place, however, for a "strategic 
essentialism", which can recognize "multiple selves, identifications, and 
instabilities in the self' as a way of exploding ''the rigid boundaries of traditional 
gender roles~' as well as ''the potentially claustrophobic rooms an identity 
politics relies on for personal and political empowerment" (Neely 2000: 186).s 



114 Celt, Volume 6, Number 2, December 2006: 103 -121 

Finally, the mere study of such ideas is insufficient. Robert Scholes 
has suggested that: "Our true aims as English teachers can be summed up 
as a desire to increase the textual competence of our students: to help them 
gain the ability to read with interpretive and critical acumen and to write with 
clarity, power, and grace. In short, we would like our students to be able to 
function textually in a society that constantly bombards them with texts." 
(Scholes 1990). As a thoughtful teacher of English, Scholes is interested 
both in helping students to understand how texts work and in "giving them 
practice in the generation of texts themselves", in both reading and writing, 
theo!)' and practice. within the educational institution as a way of living more 
intelligently in society. Catherine Stimpson puts this more forcefully when 
she insists that: "We must also act, politically and culturally, in order to change 
history. Theory and practice must meet, engage each other, wed." (Stimpson 
in Benstock 1987). 

IN THE CLASSROOM 

I find Scholes' statement extraordinarily reassuring, as I'm sure you 
do. A sensitivity towards issues of gender, both feminine and masculine, in 
literature and society does not require us to confront the Dean, divorce our 
spouse, or destroy our underwear. Rather, it is a way of doing better what 
we already claim to be doing: teaching students to read and write in better 
and more sensitive ways. 

Over the past two decades, Reader Response Theories have 
challenged the way in which we teach, in general, and the way in which we 
teach students to read texts, in particular. These theories are interested in 
encouraging stud~nts to examine the ways in which they themselves read 
texts. Lois Tyson has pointed out some of the ways in which different Reader 

S Carol Thomas Neely. "Loss and recovery: homes away from home", in Changing 
Subjects, p.186. An extremely important essay on dealing with student concerns 
about their ignorance ofthe cultural backgrounds of writers from societies with 
which they are not familiar is Sally McWilliams: "Trajectories of Change: The 
Politics of Reading Postcolonial Women's Texts in the Undergraduate 
Classroom", in (ed.)AmaJ Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj (2000): Going Global: 
The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers, Garland Publishing, 
New York, pp. 252-283. 



H. Avellng. Reading by Women 115 

Response Theories focus on different points in the interaction between the 
text and the reader Tyson 1999: 153-173). Wherever we rest in this discussion, 
however, it seems clear that the emphasis in the teaching process should 
move from us, the teacher, to the student, the reader. Students read in d.ifferent 
ways, because they come from a variety of genders, classes and ethnic 
communities. We can no longer dictate the one single ''true'' meaning of a 
text, which our students must learn and give back to us. If we are teaching 
the four basic skills, and can accept different content, properly presented, on 
its own merit, that should be no problem. (As one of my women students in 
Hanoi sagely said earlier this year: "The teacher must now know more than 
one answer, that's all.") 

Our teaching changes when we recognise and make room for the 
significant differences which exist among our students. We will be led to 
ask, for example, what difference does it make to the experience of literature, 
and thus to the meaning of literature, if the reader is a woman, and the 
experience of the reader is that of a woman? For too long women have been 
taught the way men read. 

As has often been said, "RRT needs feminist theory" (and other types 
of social theory as well) for it to be a complete account of the processes of 
reading. Feminist literary criticism is a way of allowing our women students 
to deal honestly with their own. responses to what they are reading. It enables 
them to be free to see texts more clearly from their own perspective and, 
where appropriate, ''to learn to read against the grain of emotional language 
and imagery, and to construct oppositional positions within the text from 
which to challenge its dominant values and gender assumptions" (Morris 
1993 :29). This way of reading can empower women for their future lives 
after the academy. 

But what about our men students? "Can a man read as a woman?" 
as Elaine Showalter asks - can he, in other words, surrender his "paternal 
privileges"? (Marcus cited in Benstock 1987:81) Can he ever "learn to be 
silent", as Marguerite Duras demands (Duras cited in Marks an Coutrivar 
1980:111). 

Annette Kolodny has argued that this is virtually impossible: "male 
readers who find themselves outside of and unfamiliar with the symbolic 
systems which constitute .female experience in women's writings, will 



116 Celt, Volume 6, Number 2, December 2006: 103 -121 

necessarily dismiss those systems as indecipherable, meaningless, or trivial." 
Men are at a disadvantage because they cannot understand the "sex related 
contexts out of which women write" (Kolodny 1980 cited in Adams and 
Searle 1986:502). (Kolodny includes in these contexts, "historically, the Iying-
in room, the parlor, the nursery, the kitchen, the laundry, and so on" (1986:507). 
Yet, as lenefer Robinson and Stephanie Ross point out, "When put this baldly, 
the argument can't be right. Many men do have experience of typically 
female tasks; many women lack this." This argument, too, is essentialising: it 
relies on stereotypes about the domestic world as essentially female, and 
economic and political worlds as essentially male. To read well is to read 
carefully and attentively; these may be feminine traits in many cultures, but 
they are not exclusively female traits (Robinson and Ross cited in Hein 
1993:105-118). 

The answer to the questions asked by Showalter and Duras calls, 
perhaps, for a different kind of question: "Can this man, with that background, 
and" - importantly for us as teachers, - "with this kind of training, learn to 
read that woman's writing in a more insightful, open, and less dominating 
way?" And I would suggest that it might end in the sense that a man does 
not need to learn to read as a woman at all, but rather as a more sensitive, 
less patriarchal man, who is capable of understanding his own masculinity 
and being at ease with it. There is no need for "critical cross-dressing", in 
either direction. We can also empower our men students in a totally different 
way from the old knightly armour-plating they have been used to wearing. 

CONCLUSION 

In conclusion, I offer you a small zen-like fragment from a session 
which I attended at the 2002 Conference of the American Literary 
Translators Association on "Translating Writing by Women". The words 
were these: 

"You mirror me. Where is the real you?" 
"Behind the mirror". 

The mirror is language. As teachers of language, it is our privilege to 
help students to begin to see how language, including the language ofliterature, 
articulates, shapes and defmes social as well as subjective experience, and 
to help them use language in more powerful, creative and liberating ways to 
get beyond the illusions which imprison us all. 



H. AveUng, Reading by Women 117 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

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Sellers, Susan. Language and Sexual Difference. Basingstoke Hamps: Macmillan, 
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120 Celt, Volume 6, Number 2, December 2006: 103 - 121 

APPENDIX 

How do I Love tbee? Let me count tbe ways 
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (England) 

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. 
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height 
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight 
For the ends of being and ideal grace. 
I love thee to the level of every day's 
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight 
I love thee freely, as men strive for right; 
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. 
I love thee with the passion put to use 
In myoid griefs, and with my childhood's faith. 
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose 
With my lost saints, - I love thee with the breath, 
Smiles, tears, of all my life! -and, if God choose 
I shall but love thee better after death. 

Silent Love 
Nguyen Baa Chan (Vietnam) 

You have never seen me. 
I'm the soft sunlight of dawn. 
You always wake up later 
Than my pure love. 

You have never heard me. 
I'm the whisper of the night 
In the buds on the tree. 
You are never alone. 

You have never recognised me. 
The faces of so many women. 
Remain in your memory. 
None of them is me. 



Many tiny petals 
Have fallen from your mind 
And one of them is me, 
Whom you never knew. 

H. Ave/lng, Reading by Women 121 

Translated by Nguyen Bao Chan and Harry Aveling. 

Nothing 
Dorothea Rosa Herliany (Indonesia) 

unending, ourbed is surrounded 
bysomesortofangels. unlit, our bedroom 
is like a coffm. uncovered, our house 
is like a grave. 

what do you hope to create from this clay? 
there is no sky. there are no windows 
in the walls. 

you prefer the floor. it is quiet. safe. 
I never thought 
I could live this way. 

JouiSSBnce 
Marjorie Evasco (Philippines) 

We have loved. 

We know from having survived 
Wars, betrayals, executions, 
Skulls hang around our necks 

. Like amulets or prayer beads. 

Flesh is fragile, intimate. 
Any moment touchlessness 
Can rend us fatal to festering. 
We must love, with body 
Even as sure decay sets in. 

1992 Translated by Harry Aveling 


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