I became a feminist critic of the renaissance in 1989, when a professor, in answer to my question about why there were no women on the syllabus, replied that there were no women writers in the seventeenth century. This comment took me to the library, where I discovered what he should have known but did not have to: not only were there women writers in the period, but feminist literary critics were retrieving them from the archives and rewriting literary history in the light of their contributions. One of these women writers was Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676), the author of a singularly massive amount of genealogical, historical, and personal writings and a subject of interest, long before the 1980s, for Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. In 1985, the Marxist feminist critic Katharine Hodgkin wrote an essay about Clifford's conflicted status as a woman (victim of patriarchy) and as a landlord (oppressor). Clifford has received different treatment in recent years, considered primarily as a diarist (with the attendant and often ahistorical assumptions the genre solicits [see Kunin]) and as a heroic resister of patriarchal forces. My goal here is to use Clifford as a case study for the role of feminist criticism today, not only because she has raised such complex issues for feminist critics of the Renaissance and early modern period but also because the issues her life and work raise about kinship and the household, property and political agency, and the intersectionality of determining forces of identity and power are of continuing relevance to feminist methodologies and politics. I am particularly concerned with feminist claims that have become axiomatic—for the early modern period as well as others—both at the level of historical progression (the march toward modernity) and in more synchronic analyses of social and cultural practices and relationships (including our assumptions that we know what patriarchy, kinship, and household mean). By unsettling these axioms and reconsidering the stories Clifford tells, I hope to illustrate the truth that feminist criticism is by its nature a reconsideration, a form of doing rather than being.

In the late seventies and early eighties (around 1981, in Jane Gallop's memorable formulation), utopia still seemed at hand. The energies of the defeated revolutionary political and counter cultural movements of the sixties seemed to have been channeled into feminism. For some feminist theorists and critics working in literary academia, the revolution of the word, that fabulous legacy of the twentieth-century avant-gardes, seemed to have become the revolution itself. Experimental writing—writing that disrupts conventional modes of signification and provides alternatives to them—was, for literature, the site of this revolution. Through the work of continental poststructuralists and psychoanalytic theorists, particularly Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, and Luce Irigaray, we (academic feminists, almost entirely Euro-American and white) assembled an arsenal of ideas and analyses that we thought would change the world, as sixties activism had failed to do.

In her essay “what feminism means to me,” the second-wave feminist vivian gornick describes her entry into 1970s feminism in terms that have become very familiar. First, there is the “exhilaration” that comes from feminist analysis, “the particular type of joy [that arises] when a sufficiently large number of people are galvanized by a social explanation of how their lives have taken shape and are gathered together … elaborating the insight and repeating the analysis” (64–65). Then there is the seemingly inevitable declension. “[A]round 1980,” Gornick reports, “feminist solidarity began to unravel. As the world had failed to change sufficiently to reflect our efforts, that which had separated all women before began to reassert itself now in us…. Personalities began to jar, conversations to bore, ideas to repeat themselves” (66–67). While Gornick's account may at this point seem routine, her perspective on the routine makes her description remarkable: in contrast to countless other such reports, Gornick places no blame on the internal politics of feminism itself, either in the form of the critique by radical women of color or in the turn to theory. And, in the absence of this blame laying, something else becomes visible: in Gornick's reckoning, the problem was not so much that feminist analysis was challenged and hence destabilized by internal critique but rather that it remained the same for too long, so that it stopped being exciting and came to feel boring and repetitive instead. In suggesting that repetition in and of itself may be a problem for feminism, Gornick's account gestures toward some of the complex and, I think, usually unexplored relations that feminist theory implies between the new, the politically useful, and the intellectually compelling.

In an undoubtedly misbegotten moment, some months ago i set out to protest widespread disregard or stereotyping of feminism (especially among those the age of my undergraduates) and to do so by means of the humor feminism supposedly dampens. It was to be a Cosmo-like or DailyCandy.com-type questionnaire that readers could fill out in the privacy of their own homes to ascertain whether they were vulnerable to any allegation that they were or could be considered feminists. The higher their score, the more secure they could feel.

When asked to reflect on the role of feminist criticism today, i immediately recalled the recent deaths of Betty Friedan and Andrea Dworkin. Friedan and Dworkin join an unfortunately growing list of well-known feminist thinkers who have died over the last few years. The passing of Friedan and Dworkin makes us think about the feminism they represented and indeed about the history of feminist thought itself, its ebbs and flows, its metaphoric births and deaths. Ideas, after all, are as living as people, with periods of growth, maturity, and decline.

For feminist criticism today it is, as perhaps it has always been, the best of times and the worst of times. When a critical school becomes the topic of a PMLA roundtable, it is safe to say that scholars currently consider it both solidly entrenched and dangerously diminished. Indeed, many would say that feminist criticism's success is the very sign of its failure, an indication that it has lost the renegade dynamism of its early days as an upstart outsider in the academy and declined into yet another stale paradigm on the verge of obsolescence, fit only to be recycled in anthologies or assessed in essays such as this one.

In responding to the title of this roundtable, i was determined to do two things. First, i did not want to revisit the metaphors of illness and death offered by Susan Gubar as indicative of the state of feminist criticism in 1998. It is clear to me that feminist criticism and what we mean by that term are changing, but I also want to acknowledge the continued significance of this methodology for my own work. Feminist criticism works for me as a mode of literary analysis and as a way of seeing the world, and I am reluctant to offer a doomsday scenario for its future.

If PMIA invites us to reflect on the state of feminist theory today, it must be because there is a problem. Is feminist theory thought to be in trouble because feminism is languishing? Or because there is a problem with theory? Or—as it seems to me—both? Theory is a word usually used about work done in the poststructuralist tradition. (Luce Irigaray and Michel Foucault are “theory” Simone de Beauvoir and Ludwig Wittgenstein are not.) The poststructuralist paradigm is now exhausted. We are living through an era of “crisis,” as Thomas Kuhn would call it, an era in which the old is dying and the new has not yet been born (74–75). The fundamental assumptions of feminist theory in its various current guises (queer theory, postcolonial feminist theory, transnational feminist theory, psychoanalytic feminist theory, and so on) are still informed by some version of poststructuralism. No wonder, then, that so much feminist work today produces only tediously predictable lines of argument.