Reply to comment

I second commending Jessy for writing that all out, and agree with what she said about the value of remaining impersonal in the academic realm.

My first thought was Kauffman is being an outsider to the outsider's society, which I think would be agreeable to Woolf, at least for broadening the discussion's sake.

While I don't agree with everything Kauffman says, I think many of Kauffman's reasons for making such a shocking proposition are valid, and were unfortunately a little overshadowed by the proposition itself. She sees the bad effects of personalizing feminism working on a very global scale, beyond feminism, resulting in the degradation of civil rights for all people. She proposes that feminists and everyone else fight back by controlling their representation, and “critiquing the underlying assumptions about person and story” (273). For Kauffman, this means leaving the personal out of discussions. I don’t think Kauffman is directly and utterly opposed to what Sweickart believes feminism should do. Both still fight for the right to be heard. Maybe somehow they can be reconciled.

I don't agree with the idea that eliminating the personal from critical readings would narrow rather than widen the aperture of understanding and interpretation, because new ideas have always challenged my personal baggage and made me broaden my perspective. If we dismissed every idea that doesn't align with our own personal history, we would miss out on a lot and wouldn't learn as much, which is what we're all here for.

To respond to jrizzo's post, I don't think Kauffman was condemning the use of the personal in books, in the sense that characters have opinions and subjective experiences, and she doesn't bash Lessing, she actually gives the author's take on her own book.

I don’t think she was making a general statement about how novels should be written, she’s trying to prove that the feminist interpretation buys into and promotes the idea that the individual is all that matters by making the book only about one woman, when the message of the book (according to Kauffman) was the exact opposite, and when the book is about everything but the individual. It’s not that a reader isn’t allowed to see Anna Wulf as an individual, but it is dangerous, according to Kauffman, to give the book that reading alone.

She also asserts that the "novel is a sustained critique of subjectivity and of the individual's obsession with the person" (264).

Sorry for being long-winded!