The Anxiety over Tradition

Ruth Blandon
Ph.D. student, English, University of Southern California

Literary critic, Jane Tompkins targets the "male-dominated scholarly tradition that controls both the canon of American literature - and the critical perspective that interprets the canon for society" (502), in her exploration of the canonical exclusion of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, written in 1899, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper."  Tompkins further notes that "the tradition of Perry Miller, F.O. Matthiessen, Harry Levin, Richard Chase, R.W.B. Lewis, Yvor Winters, and Henry Nash Smith has prevented even committed feminists from recognizing and asserting the value of a powerful and specifically female novelistic tradition" (502-3).  Tompkins' criticism of the scholarly tradition not only asserts the existence of a male-dominated literary paradigm and exclusivity but, with this literary 'gate keeping', also questions how tradition becomes imprinted upon us so as to color our judgment.

Tradition becomes the constant, the thing we write, read, rebel against and, interestingly, the thing we supplant with a new tradition once we are excluded from the established boys' club. But how does a so staunchly established tradition, which determines the inclusion and exclusion of literary works, come to be?

Tompkins posits the existence of a male-centered agenda that masks its biases as "universal standards of aesthetic judgment" (503).  These "universal standards" of aesthetics are subsequently biased against domains which have traditionally been declared feminine.  Tompkins indeed contends that "twentieth-century critics have taught generations of students to equate popularity with debasement, emotionality with ineffectiveness, religiosity with fakery, domesticity with triviality, and all of these, implicitly, with womanly inferiority" (503).  Annette Kolodny also remarks that "we are calling attention to interpretive strategies that are learned, historically determined, and thereby necessarily gender-inflected" (452).  Not only does Kolodny aver the way in which a male-biased tradition is necessarily inculcated, but she also elucidates the necessary imitation and repetition that facilitates the masking and apparent transformation of literary influence to literary tradition.

For an idea or an influence to become something as imposing and looming as tradition, however, the targeted public must be willing to accept the premises that move the idea forward.  Uptake and acceptance are requisite, and the public must be willing first to recognize the superiority, dominance, and power of a group and then be willing to accept the ideologies of the dominant community as truth.  In so doing, the less dominant group tacitly accepts its own marginalization and accepts these so-called truths--along with all edifying premises--as "tradition," the way things are.  Harold Bloom asks the question, "what happens if one tries to write, or to teach, or to think or even to read without the sense of a tradition?"  Nothing happens, he argues, for "your relation to what informs that person is tradition, for tradition is influence that extends past one generation, a carrying-over of influence" (32).

Bloom brings up an interesting point in arguing that we need a source of reference against which we judge literary works, but upon what ground, which premises is this necessary reference built?  Bloom assumes a reference point irrefutably white, male, heterosexual, and Euro-centric that passes itself off as "tradition."  In accepting a white, heterosexual male-biased literary canon as the traditional canon, both men and women have been and are guilty of tacitly concurring with a view that relegates works such as the sentimental or romance novel to the status of the trivial and inferior, unworthy of being taken as serious and important work.

So called "female literature" is thus relegated to the margins of the literary world; Nina Baym states, "[W]omen were expected to write specifically for their own sex and within the tradition of their women's culture rather than within the Great Tradition" (178).  Women found literary expression and affirmation in the formation of a literary subculture which, ironically, reinforced what it was to write in the "female tradition."  Kolodny comments, "while this vast new audience must certainly be credited with shaping the features of what then became popular women's fiction, it is also the case that the writers in their turn both responded to and helped formulate their readers' tastes and habits" (455).  Kolodny rightly asserts the formation of a literary subculture and tradition as a "means of accepting (or at least coping with) the barred entryway that was to distress Virginia Woolf so in the [twentieth] century" (455).

Simultaneously and paradoxically, the female literary tradition produced parallel barriers, obstacles, and stifling parameters as that of the male literary tradition.  If the work did not fit the traditional paradigm of "female" literature, it would either be immediately dismissed or, at best, the author would have difficulty in having her work printed.  Kolodny elucidates the confusion caused by Kate Chopin's The Awakening, "because [Chopin's] elaboration of [female sensuality and extramarital sexuality] deviated radically from the accepted norms of women's fiction out of which her audience so largely derived its expectations" (455).  In stepping outside the "norms" and tradition of women's fiction, Chopin implicitly questioned what it meant to write women's fiction and what it meant to write anyone's fiction.  Most importantly, she explored what it meant to write within a tradition and questioned the very notion of tradition by stepping outside expectations and imposed constraints.

Tradition is a source of anxiety because it is inextricably linked with identity, whether individual or communal.  To know who we are somehow means being able to look back toward a set point of reference and extract our identity from a past and tradition that, for the most part, is unquestioned.  In not questioning our tradition as well as the very notion of tradition, however, we accept the premises on which tradition is built.  In the case of the literary canon formation, our refusal to question it as our source of identity and tradition translates to accepting the essentialized notion of what it means to be female or "ethnic."  The male-dominant literary community must not only inculcate the norms and parameters of the literary canon, but it must also establish itself as the ultimate authoritative gatekeeper.  Only if we recognize and acquiesce to this literary authority and wait anxiously for the canonizing nod, does this community remain the all-powerful authority.  To a large degree, we are subsequently complicit in maintaining and reinforcing a tradition that keeps us out.

I do not believe that we are always cognizant of the premises we assimilate or ingest when we accept the validity of tradition.  In legitimizing tradition and in accepting the inherent premises, we accept our tacit inferiority, so that instead of fighting the establishment, we simply form literary subcultures.  I have explored the formation of the female literary subculture, the ironic evolution and imposition of its own tradition.  I agree that the emergence of the subculture allowed for female literary expression and the birth of several genres, but I must wonder if this somewhat self-imposed and cloistered marginalization resulted in a female literary tradition that is generally eschewed and trivialized.  I don't necessarily know what the alternative to a subculture formation would have been, but my instincts scream for a questioning of tradition, its premises, its forced and formulaic paradigms, and its conflation with identity.  The need to create a sub-cultural literary niche known as "Ethnic Literature," I believe, parallels the crisis that led to the formation of a female literary tradition.  The cartoonish images and simplistic assumptions of what it means to be "American" are reinforced and indoctrinated to the degree that we accept the image and definition as something specific to a group and exclusionary to others.  Subsequently and unconsciously, "minorities" and "the majority" accept the status quo of the traditional "American" literary canon.

We must buy into all that this supposed tradition includes and excludes.  We must be willing to accept a xenophobic hierarchy of traditions and cultures, and be willing to "feminize" anyone and any work that is not Anglo-centered.  What results is that we ghettoize "Ethnic Literature" and implicitly declare it not quite "American," unworthy of being canonized and subsequently, never to be considered "traditional," if traditional means accepted.  We remain cloistered in our marginalization, while we await anxiously the canonizing nod, tacitly acknowledging and paying homage to the powers that we keep in power, all in the name of tradition.  Tradition is a paradox, for it oftentimes seems bigger than us; our own creation becomes a wall, seemingly insurmountable and impenetrable, that indeed crumbles by our own questioning and refutation.

Baym, N. (1978).  Woman's Fiction:  A Guide to Novels By and About Women in America 1820 – 1870.
    Ithaca:  Cornell U.P.
Bloom, H. (1975).  A Map of Misreading.  New York:  Oxford U.P.
Kolodny, A. (1980).  A map for rereading:  Or, Gender and the Interpretation of   Literary Texts.
    New Literary History:  A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 11, 451-67.
Tompkins, J. P.(1985) Sentimental power:  Uncle Tom's cabin and the politics of  literary history.
    Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860, New York: Oxford U.P.

Academic Exchange Extra invites reader responses to any writings in this issue--especially articles advancing the scholarly debate of issues raised.

Page Viewed:   / Created: April 2001 / Updated: Tuesday, 10 April 2001