Showalter's North American Zionist Impulse

George Hartley


I need to unpack the Zionist impulse behind this passage from Elaine Showalter's “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” Critical Inquiry 8.2 (Winter1981): 179-205.

The concluding paragraph:

I began by recalling that a few years ago feminist critics thought we were on a pilgrimage to the promised land in which gender would lose its power, in which all texts would be sexless and equal, like angels. But the more precisely we understand the specificity of women's writing not as a transient by-product of sexism but as a fundamental and continually determining reality, the more clearly we realize that we have misperceived our destination. We may never reach the promised land at all; for when feminist critics see our task as the study of women's writing, we realize that the land promised to us is not the serenely undifferentiated universality of texts but the tumultuous and intriguing wilderness of difference itself. (205)