Sandra M. (Mortola) Gilbert – Sunday 27 December 1936 – still living as of this post and Susan Gubar – 1944 – still living as of this post

Introduction

The first volume (The War of the Words) of Sandra M. Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s three-volume opus – overall title No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century - on women and writing, was a present from a long-time friend, Kathryn. I was so inspired by this first volume, that on a visit to London, I bought volumes two (Sexchanges) and three (Letters From the Front) from a bookstore on famed Charing Cross Road. My experience with actual writing is a hate/love one (hated writing papers in college/loved the positive feedback). Even though I am primarily a visual woman, I do enjoy a well-turned phrase and without the pressure of academic deadlines, I someday may turn some phrases – well I hope.

Dedication in The War of the Words

“In memory of Alexis J. Mortola and Frank W. David”

Excerpt from Chapter 5 – Sexual Linguistics, Women’s Sentence, Men’s Sentencing of The War of the Words

“In this chapter, attempting to integrate the divergent forces of power, language, and meaning, we will examine this relationship between sexual difference and the symbolic contract in an effort primarily to trace the permutations of the modern battle over language and secondarily to place recent ideas about sexual linguistics in a larger historical context. For, as we shall suggest, contemporary language theorists-female and male-participate in a long, bifurcated tradition of feminist and masculinist linguistic fantasy. That such a tradition demonstrably exists, moreover, implies an intuition of the primacy of the mother rather than the father in the process of language acquisition that assimilates the child into what Kristeva calls the “symbolic contract.” Thus questioning Kristeva’s identification of the symbolic contract with the social contract, we will draw upon precisely the complex literary history that we have already discussed-the history of the last one hundred years in England and America-to argue that the female subject is not necessarily alienated from the words she writes and speaks.

Significantly, the English woman who most publicly entered into the linguistic fray by defining a female literary tradition saw gender-marked words as potentially central to that tradition’s vitality. In one of the most famous yet opaque passages in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf introduces her notoriously puzzling concept of “a woman’s sentence.” Remarking that the early nineteenth-century woman novelist found that “there was no common sentence ready for her use,” she declared that the “man’s sentence” inherited by “Thackeray and Dickens and Balzac” from “Johnson, Gibbon and the rest” was as alien to her mind as “the [hardened and set] older forms of literature” were to her imagination (78-80). Her comment, like the literary history in which it is embedded, seems appealingly empirical. Those of us who wish to understand the relationship between genre and gender, Woolf seems to imply-even those who wish to examine the more ontological connection between sexuality and creativity-need merely analyze and classify linguistic structures.”


Yesterday’s writer – Marilyn French
Tomorrow’s writer – Doris Kearns Goodwin

Source: Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan. The War of the Words. Yale University Press, 1987. ISBN 0-300-04587-5. Dedication: page v, Excerpt: pages 228-229.

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of The War of the Words

Center Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar from the website virtual.clemson.edu