Dancing with mines

As I read Annette Kolodny's "Dancing Through the Minefield," it made me think about the fact that no one really created literature with the intention of privileging men over women. It wasn't that Shakespeare intentionally thought, "Hey, I'm going to focus on the male heroes and only portray women in my plays as they exist in relationship to men." And no literary theorist way back in the day wrote an essay about the way that men deserve to dominate literature. Rather, it seems that literature grew out of a reflection of life; the way that women were viewed in life became the way that they were portrayed in literature.

Kolodny addresses idea such as these by claiming that "all literary history is a fiction which we daily recreate as we reread it" (2155). She argues that without access to some kind of magical time machine to take us back to speak with Shakespeare or Milton, there really is no way to know the meaning of what they wrote in the context in which they wrote it. Despite what we believe we're doing when we study literary works and their contexts, Kolodny thinks that "we never really reconstruct the past in its own terms" (2154-5). Instead, our supposed reconstructions turn out to be only "an approximation of an already fictively imputed past made available, through our interpretive strategies, for present concerns" (2155). Although I understand that we only have the capability of viewing literature from our present context, there is something to be learned about the past in studying literature that was highly regarded in the past. Although we can't see England as George Eliot did, we can get a better idea of her England than we might through a history book. I think this is one of the most vital aspects of literature; it reflects the context of the life in which it was written--perhaps not perfectly, but in some way, it does. So we can wonder why Shakespeare didn't create plays based around strong female roles and relationships, but from this we can also see that culture at that time did not envision stories in that way. However, if most of the works in the literary cannon display a male "sense of power and significance," then I agree that it makes sense to increase the width of the cannon to include works by women that portray women in different kinds of ways.

I found Kolodny's writing much less approachable than Cixous' and Woolf's, and it could be related to the fact that they write in a more feminist fashion while Kolodny constructs her argument through a patriarchal tradition of clear-cut argumentation. However, I really appreciated her title image of "dancing through the mine field." It sums up well the types of freedom that women need to have to function in a literary field that always holds some kind of restrictive danger for women. I found these wonderful Banksy images of a woman hugging a bomb and a group of women dancing around a bomb. They seem to illustrate the quote that Kolodny ends on well:

It is a fine thing for many of us, individuals, to have traversed the minefield; but that happy circumstance will only prove of lasting importance if, together, we expose it for what it is (the male fear of sharing power and significance with women) and deactivate its components, so that others, after us, may literally dance through the minefield (2165).