go before it reaches (in the opinion of the mainstream, anyway) aesthetic standing with the mainstream. It is the persistence of the current tensions of civilization, including the feminist social critique and the phenomena that motivate it, rather than the individuated--though perhaps entirely credible--response to that tension that engages feminist commentators on one hand and novelists on the other. This point is amplified by Weigel in her discussion of women's narrative strategies.
The content and narrative mode of women's writing cannot be called original expressions of female experience tout court. Rather, they are attempts to find some leeway within male culture and steps towards liberation from it. The beginnings of the female literary tradition are primarily inauthentic self-expressions of women; expressions of the second, not of the first sex, and so are not genuinely autonomous expressions. The goal of an undistorted women's literature will not be reached until women can say 'I' in public without having first to acknowledge the male definiti
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