Pen 15

As I read Gilbert and Gubar’s article from The Madwoman in the Closet, I was struck by how I’ve never thought of a pen as a penis, which is probably healthy in many ways but I can see how that was the male in me not seeing the pen for what the pen is. 

However, according to Gilbert and Gubar, that is far too reductive. They preface their argument by citing the actual references to the pen as a penis and the many allusions made by male authors ranging in time from medieval philosophers to the Romantics (not surprising) and then to Freud (again, not surprising). The argument they are making is that in a very real way the pen, like the penis, has the ability to not only “generate life”, but to “ create a posterity to which he [the author] lays claim” (154). This spilling of the authorial ink onto the paper is an act of creation where, and these are telling metaphors, the author is said to have a “penetrating imagination” or a “piercing” quality. Women then, are unable of true creation but are thought of as kind of carriers.

They add that for male artists there is an “anxiety of influence” stemming from the achievements of their predecessors. Female authors, rather, are under an “anxiety of authorship” which they define as a “radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a ‘precursor’ the act of writing will isolate or destroy her” (157).

This anxiety is further followed by other anxieties that the literary forefathers will subdue her voice and identity as a writer escape the dilemma she faces in defining her subjectivity and potentials. Bloom claims that a young poet suffers from the anxiety of belatedness, thereby being unable to successfully rival his literary fathers. But Gilbert and Gubar revised Bloom’s male centered model to make into account the experience of literary daughters. They argue that women writers like Jane Austin, Emile Dickinson do not fit into Bloom’s theory, as there are no material precursors under the male literary tradition. So the literary daughters have the anxiety of authorship imposed by the pervasive view of writings as only male activity- the pen as a metaphorical phallus.

It seems then, that unlike the literary sons who suffer from anxiety of influence, the literary daughters’ anxiety of authorship is positive, and creative, offering them less competition and more grateful connection to their foremothers. However, the literary daughters’ deep sense of insecurity of writing can be found in their infected sentences of uneasiness and repression. But their creativity free from the anxiety of influence helps them to begin new and unique women writing tradition with freshness, novelty, radically making distinct from male writing. They create their own poetics because of the anxiety of authorship.

I wonder how this applies to today’s female writers. There seems to be a number of successful foremothers to rely on. Where does the 21st century woman writer fit into this theory? I guess there are now mothers of the 20th century, grandmothers of the 19th century, great grandmothers of the 18th century, maybe some great-great grandmothers. Their work may not date back to ancient Rome, but still it is an impressive congregation of a female tradition. Do today’s women have enough material to “revise”? Does that mean they now experience the “anxiety of influence”?