Showalter's essentialist theorizing, and the search for a "woman's literature" with special characteristics, put her in bed with the wrong people. According to Moi,

[there is a] fundamental complicity between this empiricist and humanist variety of feminist criticism and the male academic hierarchy it rightly resists.... The humanist believes in literature as an excellent instrument of education: by reading "great works" the student will become a finer human being.... The literary canon of "great literature" ensures that it is this "representative experience" (one selected by male bourgeois critics) that is transmitted to future generations, rather than those deviant, unrepresentative experiences discoverable in much female, ethnic and working class writing. Anglo-American feminist criticism has waged war on this self-sufficient canonization of middle-class male values. But they have rarely challenged the very notion of such a canon.... But a new canon would not be intrinsically less oppressive than the old.

As the poststructuralist critique of identity politics took hold over the following decade and more, it became unfashionable, in ideas and in dress, it seemed, for the avant-garde of the female professoriate to identify with either men or women, which must have made it harder than ever to figure out what to wear to teach a class (unless, luckily, you were a public cross-dresser or male to female gender-bender, armed with queer theory--the only ones allowed, in a sort of campy way, to have fun with frippery). Basic black might be the obvious answer, but some confident women rejected that straitjacket and had the chutzpah to break the taboos.

Elaine Showalter was one of them, enjoying fashion and even flaunting her "political incorrectness" in Vogue in 1997, when she was president of the MLA. In a feature for Lingua Franca ("Who's Afraid of Elaine Showalter?") Emily Eakin wrote,

few colleagues were taken in by the piece's lighthearted, gamely self-mocking tone. Here, masquerading as a paean to lipstick and Loehman's, was nothing less than a political manifesto. "From Mary Wollstonecraft to Naomi Wolf, feminism has often taken a hard line on fashion, shopping, and the whole beauty Monty," Showalter wrote [in Vogue]. "But for those of us sisters hiding Welcome to Your Facelift inside The Second Sex, a passion for fashion can sometimes seem a shameful secret life.... I think it's time I came out of the closet."

That took some admirable nerve, and Eakin's article (which first led me back to Moi) reports that the backlash was fierce in academic circles. "What did it mean for a leading academic feminist to come out in favor of...symbols...of consumer capitalism and traditional femininity?" Eakin says that at Cornell University, feminists raged for a month in online debates.

Incisive as Moi's critique was at the time, one has to have sympathy, too, with what Showalter was rebelling against later, especially to the degree that it became another form of timid conformity. Moi and Showalter could each accuse the other of political correctness of different kinds. A feminism that is insufficiently self-critical and requires a reverent attitude toward women, without even being able to give an adequate definition of "women," must be shallow and doctrinaire, and that is the charge against Showalter. Moi had predicted that her lack of critical thinking would put Showalter in the "painful position" of colluding with the "patriarchal elite" she thought she was resisting. This would mean that Showalter privileged a "pro-woman" perspective at the cost of excluding other points of view, and remained willfully ignorant of the flaws in her theory.

On the other hand, a feminism that loses sight of real women who come to it with a sense of their needs and desires, and occupies itself instead with nervous philosophical hairsplitting, could be a charge leveled against the postmoderns. Moi, with her egalitarian Norwegian background, could probably not appreciate what it was like for American feminists to take on the educational establishment. Showalter scolds her critics: "We needn't fall into postmodern apocalyptic despair about the futility of political action or the impossibility of theoretical correctness as a pre-condition for action." (It's good to remember, as these feminists face off, that in the current climate, a conservative antifeminist like Lynne Cheney would lash them together and toss them both overboard.)

Still, this book leaves us at the scene of the shrine where Showalter intones her eulogy to Princess Diana: "Her elegance, taste and style were truly exceptional even in a beauty-conscious age," writes Showalter. "She was a feminist who championed feminine values." The question for us is, has Showalter's frustration with the (say it slow) po-mo-fem/lit/crit hellhounds on her trail driven her around the bend? Or, had Toril Moi's old prediction proved true? Moi had predicted that, as the reader also produces the text, eventually feminist critics would give "irreverent scrutiny" to the work of women writers, and cast doubt on Showalter's essentialist biases. Curious thought--could it be that I, a feminist critic of a feminist critic, with my unflattering opinion that Showalter's veneration of Princess Di represents an intellectual crack-up, am partially the author of that crackup and hence an unwitting agent helping to make Moi's 1985 prediction come true? Such are the headachy ideas that wandering among lit/crit texts can give you.

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