ABSTRACT
In a 1989 essay entitled "Gendered Doubleness and the 'Origins' of Modernist Form," Marianne DeKoven writes that modernism "is an ideal literary territory for the feminist critic to rechart"(19). In similar terms (and also in the late '80s) we have the memorable assertion by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar that in order to produce No Man's Land they "had to rethink everything [they] had ever been taught about twentieth-century literature" (italics in both quotations mine). Looking back over the impressive feminist work of the '80s-work by Benstock, DuPlessis, Friedman, Gilbert and Gubar, Marcus, and DeKoven, to name only a few of our best and most prominent feminist critics of modernism-it is possible to document the production of a formidable and hard-won piece of turf, now occupied by "female modernism." With others,l however, I want to wonder about such recharting and rethinking and the extent to which it has affected or can affect any significant or productive transformation in our understanding of or relationship to modernism. To my mind, the above-mentioned works constitute less a recharting than an enlarging of the same old chart, less a rethinking than a
revaluation of a formerly neglected or disparaged half of the same old modernist thought.
