ABSTRACT
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar What is the place of feminist criticism in the history of ideas? Five centuries ago Christine de Pizan declared that a utopian city of ladies was to be founded on the "field of letters"; some two hundred years later Mary Astell invited women to retreat into an intellectual community where they could partake of the hitherto forbidden fruits of knowledge; and still more recently Virginia Woolf proposed to establish "a new college, a poor college," a "Society of Outsiders" in which women excluded from male centers of learning could have not only rooms but institutions of their ow n.1 Have the dreams of these thinkers been realized with the rise of feminist criticism over the past two decades? And if so, ought feminist criticism to be seen as a theoretical school separate from (if equal to) other intellectual movements? In other words, should feminist literary analyses be viewed as products of, or ruptures with, what has heretofore been defined as our critical heritage? As our title is meant to suggest, we suspect that feminist criticism, as it is now practiced on both sides of the Atlantic, is very much a product of the central intellectual currents that have shaped modern western thought even while we also believe that such criticism inevitably seeks to disrupt the very traditions that have formed it.
