The Feminine Mode in Literature and Criticism

The Female Imagination, by Patricia Meyer Spacks, is a study of three centuries of prose fiction and autobiography by women in English. It focuses on ways the life of the imagination emerge in the works of women writing prose directly as women.1 To this end it combines interpretations of works by women with an analysis of the social forces that mold women's lives. Spacks sees the art that women have created as both revealing and resulting from these forces. Because of her awareness of the interrelationship between the social, the psychological, and the literary fact, Spacks performs on a level that genuinely enriches our understanding of women and their art. Yet Spacks also insists upon a separation between psychological and literary awarenesses and ones (p. 7), maintaining that criticism need not be political in order to be aware (p. 6). There are serious weaknesses in her work, and I think that her refusal to acknowledge the political dimensions of the kind of that she has undertaken is a major cause for their existence. Looking to see how a writer's problems and patterns affect her readers (p. 3), Spacks includes the responses of her students at Wellesley. In their reactions--immediate, intense, emotional, naive--the students relate this literature to their own lives

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