A Matricentric Narrative Gem

Essay review of Daniel Dervin, Matricentric Narratives: Recent British Women’s Fiction in a Postmodern Mode. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 1997. ISBN 0773486445, iii, 279 pp., $89.95. Winner of the Adelia Mellon Prize for “its distinguished contribution to scholarship.”

Matricentric Narratives is a polished gem reflecting so many glints as to dazzle the reader. Its substance is made to seem clear, but the surfaces and refractions are so many and so complex as to pose the reader with no easy task. We are too close to the recent efflorence of women’s fiction, feminism, post-modernist “theory,” and revised psychoanalysis to hope for full clarity. Dervin is remarkable for his determination to face these interconnected manifestations and to try to make sense of them. His guidance is deft and often illuminating. If he has not completely made sense, it is not for want of vigorous address to the leading critical questions in the culture of our time. Future historians of Western culture and society will turn to this book as they try to explain the explosion of feminine consciousness into the creative arts and the critical reaction to that explosion.

I would have hoped for more to be said about fear of women and of heterosexuality. I am greatly impressed by two books by Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (1986) and Evil Sisters: The

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Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (1996), both of which reveal the power with which misogyny fuels representations of women as lethal seductresses in 19th and 20th-century art and literature. Dijkstra may not explain analytically the reasons for male terror, sadistic control, or avoidance of sexually arousing women, but he certainly does document its occurrence in imagery created by men. Dervin no doubt knows all about culturally pervasive fear of women, but he chooses a less alarmist, more mollifying, even meliorist tack without being sanguine about the outcome. Dervin comes across as a decent, caring male with no wish to pick fights with feminists, nor does he try to argue away their attacks on patriarchal suppression of women. He is too well grounded in psychoanalysis to think that winning public disputes can relieve suffering. Instead of addressing the tragic record of men trying to outmaneuver and control females, too often by idealizing only to demonize them, he sets about to appreciate their recent cultural achievement in writing fiction.

At least the book began that way, as a sort of social scientist’s investigation of the remarkable productions of British women writers from the 1960s, such as Margaret Drabble, to those of the 1980s, such as Anita Brookner. But ideological disputes, arising from Parisian intellectual disruptions in 1968 and flooding into all subsequent literary criticism, broke up this plan, deflecting Dervin into grappling with the critical nihilism he so disliked. Somebody of lesser intellect would have given up the project, but not Dervin who knows that as a psychohistorian he has something special to offer. How much of lasting value for thinking about creativity in our disturbed age comes out of this book? Quite a bit, I believe. First, the term “matricentric” is a good one, avoiding as it does the too clinical suggestion of “gynocentric,” or the politically inflamed “feminist.” Matrix, or creative womb, incorporates the biological, psychoanalytic, and sociological aspects of novels by women (pp. 18, 186). This classification opens a discussion virtually unmanageable in one book, yet there is no going forward without at least sketching the issue of female creativity. This is done with telling accuracy and Dervin’s example is exemplary for male critics.

Central to the problem facing literary critics is how to use, or what to say about, “theory,” that harsh anti-bourgeois doctrine that seeks to undermine the claims of art to coherence and meaning. Not only did its proponents claim that literary texts can always be made to contradict themselves, they asserted that, by “intertextuality,” texts write themselves, and that the agency of authors should be downgraded. Roland Barthes proclaimed the “death of the author,” while Michel Foucault theorized a mere “author function” in place of the pervasive living presence of authors in their texts assumed by liberal humanists. Suddenly, the writer, with all his or her conflicts, was expelled from the text, with linguistic transactions substituted for the interplay of feelings. Memory, intrapsychic and interpersonal conflict, and affect itself were ruled out of criticism, depersonalized techniques of reading for the ambiguities of language put in their place. Little wonder that a critic such as Dervin, interested in Eriksonian identity quests by women writers in their fiction, should be disconcerted by the new critical dogmatics. If there is no such thing as an author seeking to clarify feeling in however a displaced way, then what is the use of literary studies in the humanities?

Dervin knows that something went very wrong when “theory” started the flight from affect and reflection upon lived experiences. He also knows how intimidatingly pervasive in the academy the new “deconstructionist” or “postmodern” ideology became and at what risk to professional reputation one tried to counteract it in the name of humane values. By the late 1990s the worst of dogmatic distortions of creativity may have passed, but the lingering bitterness of conflicts among teachers and critics has yet to subside. Perhaps for this reason Dervin’s response on behalf of psychoanalysis seems more like a quick riposte than a considered re-working of basic questions.

In part, the reason is that, among the most powerful postmodern theorists, Jacques Lacan is still regarded, especially among literary critics, as a reliable guide to Freud. When Lacan asserted that the unconscious is structured like a language, literary critics took notice, appropriating a whole set of fanciful Lacanian assumptions, including some derogatory to women and others, such as the chimerical “mirror stage” of infantile misrecognition, a concept quite contrary to recent research in infant development.

Dervin rightly deplores the relativizing of psychoanalysis in “cultural studies,” the fashionable postmodern academic pursuit.

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Psychoanalysis is misunderstood when it is given primacy amongst the tools of criticism. Yet this is no easy task when the Oedipus complex, motive hunting, and psychobiographical narratives have themselves been called to question. Freudians were less helped than dislocated by Lacanians, and both are challenged by object relations revisionists and attachment theorists. Postmodern “cultural politics” warp psychoanalysis, which for Dervin is basically about “how male/female children engage common and special development conflicts to become infinite varieties of men and women” (p. 177). It is not a metalanguage by which to address historical uses of power, nor a weapon that can be responsibly used in gender wars. Dervin would like to rescue psychoanalysis for what it uniquely contributes to understanding creativity and the cultural manifestations of the individual and group unconscious. So occluded have its legitimate uses become that there is less of the skilled psychohistorian in this book than the embattled Dervin clearing away ideological misconceptions so that the real work of criticism can begin. It would be good to have his extended reading of, say, the novels of Margaret Atwood, to which he could bring the scholarship and sensitivity of his work on D.H. Lawrence; incommensurables to be sure, but my wish is clear. (See A “Strange Sapience”: The Creative Imagination of D.H. Lawrence, 1987.) As it is, Dervin is to be thanked for his vigorous examination of the critical detritus which is easily overwhelming without someone of his range to sort it. Dervin’s critical priorities seem exactly right. I have seen nothing better than his plea on pages 184-5 of Matricentric Narratives for returning to the history of children as the starting place for understanding social conflicts and creativity in any era.

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