ABSTRACT
The notion of a modernist avant-garde has proven troublesome in much recent feminist writing. For a start, as Susan Suleiman points out, the term is annoyingly imprecise and even slightly ridiculous:
To say the word ‘avant-garde’ today is to risk falling into a conceptual and terminological quagmire. Is ‘avant-garde’ synonymous with, or to be subtly distinguished from, the experimental, the bohemian, the modern, the modernist, the postmodern? Is it a historical category or a transhistorical one? A purely aesthetic category or a philosophical/political/existential one? Is it still to be taken seriously, or does it ‘conjure up comical associations of aging youth’? In short, does the word have specific content or has it become so vague and general as to be virtually useless?
(Suleiman, 1988:148) Equally disturbing is the conspicuous shortage of women writers and artists who have been classified as avant-garde in the standard literary and art historical surveys of the early twentieth century. Even though women have traditionally occupied marginal spaces in patriarchal culture, it seems that (despite a few exceptional exceptions, like Gertrude Stein and Meret Oppenheim) they have frequented the wrong margins. Instead of appearing as strikingly original and fashionably vanguard, the work of women writers and artists has, more often than not, been described as derivative, deviant, old-fashioned, and second-rate. Evidently, mainstream bourgeois culture draws important distinctions between those privileged outsiders who are recognized as daringly advanced and a whole host of insignificant ‘others’ whose differences are simply uninteresting.