G & G "Infection in the Sentence"--1979

G & G identify Harold Bloom's analysis of the patriarchal structure of "authorship"--that the writer (a male) must struggle against the "Anxiety of Influence" and that literature exhibits an Oedipal model (as defined by Freud) in which the son must identify with the father by standing in conflict with him. "Anxiety of influence" describes the fear that the author "is not his own creator and that the works of his predecessors, existing before and beyond him, assume essential priority of his own writings."... "Thus Bloom explains that a 'strong poet' must engage in heroic warfare with his precursor, for, involved as he is in the literary Oedipal struggle, a man can only become a poet by somehow invalidating his poetic father." Bloom's model is "not a recommendation but an analysis of the patriarchal poetics (and attendant anxieties) which underlie out culture's chief literary movements."

The question arises: Where does the female author fit into this model? How does Bloom's model offer a way into examining what G & G come to call, in refinement of the term "Anxiety of Influence"--an "Anxiety of Authorship"? G & G argue that Bloom's model cannot simply be revered or inverted to explain the female author's dilemma--just as Freud's Oedipal model is not neatly symmetrical in comparison with the female's "Electra" model. Like the male author, the female author, too, confronts forefathers--who were male and essentially unlike her. "Thus the 'Anxiety of Influence' that a male poet experiences is felt by a female poet as an even more primary 'Anxiety of Authorship'--a radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a 'precursor' the act of writing will isolate and destroy her."

This "Anxiety of Authorship" in women's writing is often expressed through an "Infection in the Sentence". "Unlike her male counterpart...the female artist must first struggle against the effects of socialization which makes conflict with the will of her (male) precursors seems inexpressibly absurd, futile, or even...self annihilating." It is an anxiety "built from complex and often only barely conscious fears pf that authority which seems to the female authorship to be by definition inappropriate to her sex." The symptom of this anxiety is expressed--and "breed[ed]" in an "infection in the sentence" (a reference to Dickinson's "Infection in the sentence breeds." So many women's texts (especially in the 19th century) exhibit an attention to illness. This illness can be read metaphorically as the female writer's fear that she is losing her mind or becoming ill in the process of defying the roles of her gender and writing. The writing itself is the cause of the malady because there are so few role models to provide a framework for their artistic struggles.

However, the writers of the 19th century did prove as models for women artists of today; while discomfort with bodies and socially prescribed roles continues to inform women's writing, these conflicts are being expressed and dealt with in new ways thanks to the foremothers.