While Oliver Sacks has recently written on the problem
of the blindspot in fields of science [see "Scotoma: Forgetting
and Neglect in Science" in Robert B. Silvers, ed., Hidden Histories
of Science (New York, 1995), pp. 141-179], the classic feminist
work is Nancy K. Miller, "Emphasis Added: Plot and Plausibilities
in Women's Fiction" (originally published in PMLA 96, 1 January,
1981 and reprinted in Miller's Subject to Change: Reading Feminist
Writing, Columbia University Press, 1988). Miller discusses the
reception of Madame de Lafayette's The Princess of Cleves. Though
now a "classic" and often credited with being the first true novel,
this novel for centuries was considered by men (though not women)
to be implausible and lacking in credibility. Miller summarizes
the problem very neatly near the end of her article:
The blind spot here is both political (or philosophical) and literary.
It does not see, nor does it want to, that the fictions of desire
behind the desiderata of fiction are masculine and not universal
constructs. It does not see that the maxims that pass for the
truth of human experience and the encoding of that experience,
in literature, are organizations, when they are not fantasies,
of the dominant culture. To read women's literature is to see
and hear repeatedly a chafing against the "unsatisfactory reality"
contained in the maxim.
One can read any alternative literature or even cultural genre,
such as hiphop, to take one very obvious example, in the same
way-- as "a chafing against the unsatisfactory reality" contained
in what passes for "the truth of human experience" dominating
us all.
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