Showalter, Elaine

Education and Career

Elaine Cottler was born in 1941 in Boston, Massachusetts. Her father worked in the wool business and her mother was a housewife. Her parents disowned her when she married English Showalter in 1962. The Showalters have two children: Michael Showalter and Vinca Showalter LaFleur. Showalter earned her bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr College, a master's degree from Brandeis University, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis in 1970. In her essay “Twenty Years on: ‘A Literature of Their Own’ Revisited,” Showalter recounts receiving her Ph.D. the same month that she gave birth to her second child. She began teaching at Princeton University in 1984 and retired in 2003. Her Ph.D. thesis, The Double Critical Standard, formed the basis of A Literature of Their Own, her foundational extension and reworking of the feminist literary theory set up in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929).

As Showalter imagined it, gynocriticism functions as an attempt to create a female framework for analyzing women's literature rooted in female experience and liberated from male literary history. She explains in “Toward a Feminist Poetics” that studying stereotypes of women, sexism in male-authored literary criticism, and the limitations of women's roles in literary history only reinscribes these inequalities and neglects the lived experience of women writers, readers, and subjects. Her project engendered a tremendous interest in recovery work and led to the canonization of many forgotten female authors.

Moreover, gynocriticism provided a much-needed corollary to the images of women criticism typical of Mary Ellmann and Kate Millet. Showalter's writing, along with Ellen Moer's Literary Women (1976), helped identify clear trends and trajectories in women's literary history; they also opened up and enriched the study of women's lives and experiences by suggesting ways of dismantling literary and cultural hierarchies. However, gynocritics’ emphasis on biological essentialism led many feminist literary theorists (notably Toril Moi) to critique it; Margaret J. M. Ezell also exposed many of the sedimented biases toward 19th-century literature in Showalter's work as well as in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's roughly contemporaneous study The Madwoman inthe Attic (1979).

Some of Showalter's other major works of feminist literary theory include The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (1985), Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle (1990), Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing (1991), Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997), and Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (2001). She has also written academic novels and articles for popular publications, ranging from the Guardian and the Nation to People magazine.

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