By EMILY EAKIN

When the Princeton University feminist scholar and president-elect of the Modern Language Association (MLA) Elaine Showalter confessed to a lifelong love of shopping in the pages of Vogue last December, few colleagues were taken in by the piece’s lighthearted, gamely self-mocking tone. Here, masquerading as a paean to lipstick and Loehmann’s, was nothing less than a political manifesto. "From Mary Wollstonecraft to Naomi Wolf, feminism has often taken a hard line on fashion, shopping, and the whole beauty Monty," Showalter wrote. "But for those of us sisters hiding Welcome to Your Facelift inside The Second Sex, a passion for fashion can sometimes seem a shameful secret life.... I think it’s time I came out of the closet."

In academic circles, the backlash was fierce. Throughout the month of December, a Cornell University—based women’s studies discussion list debated the article’s merits on-line. What did it mean for a leading academic feminist to come out in favor of hair extensions, nail polish, and Armani outlets–dubious symbols all of consumer capitalism and traditional femininity? Even those list members who rose to Showalter’s defense were careful to maintain their critical distance. "I worry about arguments that associate a type of dress with the contents of one’s mind and one’s political persuasion," wrote one Showalter supporter. "The only name I have for regimes that require one to do so is FUNDAMENTALISM." Yet this same participant began her post by stressing that she herself did not subscribe to Vogue; she had perused the article "at a newsstand."

As the Cornell feminists raged on, Showalter was also rankling legions of anxious graduate students and jobless Ph.D.s with her pronouncements about the academic profession. Inaugurated as MLA president in January, Showalter turned briskly to the labor crisis now sweeping the humanities. In her first column in the association’s quarterly newsletter, she suggested that doctoral candidates face up to their hard prospects and prepare themselves for nonacademic careers. Ph.D. programs, she argued, should ensure that "all graduate students in literature learn to write well enough to get paid for it," provide seminars "on educational organization, management, and negotiation," and offer "training in public speaking, small-group dynamics, [and] new media." Such skills, she insisted, are "as useful and transferable to those who will work in media, business, not-for-profits, or government as to future professors."

The MLA’s Graduate Student Caucus was appalled. In a scathing response to Showalter titled "Tripping Over Our Gowns: Elaine’s World," published in Workplace, the caucus’s on-=line journal, editor Marc Bousquet attacked the MLA president’s "blame the victim pronouncements (graduate students write badly)," "embarrassing enthusiasm for the corporatization of the academy (graduate students need training in organization and management)," and "economically naive effort to get hold of our working lives and prospects with low-rent market metaphors." Bousquet quoted a line from Showalter’s Vogue article: "For years, I’ve been trying to make the life of the mind coexist with the day at the mall." This, evidently, was a smoking gun. How could an MLA president who spent her spare time at Bloomingdale’s be anything but hopelessly out of touch with the graduate student labor predicament?

But the angry feminists and graduate students were not the only or even the most populous of Showalter’s unhappy constituencies. By the time she took up the helm of the MLA, she had spent nearly a year fending off hate mail and death threats inspired by her latest work of scholarship. This time, however, her antagonists weren’t academics at all. For the most part they were tired and ill, sufferers of chronic fatigue and Gulf War syndromes. When Showalter’s Hystories (Columbia) appeared last spring, dozens of irate patients turned up at book signings and on talk shows to protest the work’s central thesis: that the debilitating symptoms of their own and several other contemporary afflictions are in fact "hysterical" disorders, in the old-fashioned Freudian sense of the word. Not just chronic fatigue sufferers and sick Gulf War veterans, but alien abductees, women possessed of multiple personalities and recovered memories, as well as survivors of satanic ritual abuse–all these people, Showalter argued, were latter-day Doras. Their suffering, she told them, was serious and real, but it was also entirely in their heads. So infuriating was this diagnosis to some of her readers that Showalter had to be escorted in and out of Barnes & Noble by armed guard.

Thus a middle-aged English professor became a lightning rod for controversy, provoking an outpouring of antipathy that few could have predicted. For unlike, say, Camille Paglia or Henry Louis Gates, Showalter was not known for personal flamboyance or empire building, had never appeared in Vanity Fair or on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, and did not regularly arouse extreme emotions in either her students or her colleagues. True, she was a frequent contributor to the popular press, wrote a lot of book reviews, and had even spent a year moonlighting as a TV critic for People. But none of these activities seemed to have left much of a mark on her academic reputation. For more than a decade, the epithets usually attached to her name connoted not modishness or iconoclasm but straightforward respectability ("one of the doyennes of American literary feminism" is a typical description). In her own words, Showalter was simply "not a person around whom legend accrues. I’m very much on the margins of that particular kind of academic celebrity. I’m not a topic of hot gossip."

So how within the last year she had become such a person–an object of feminist opprobrium, graduate student hostility, patient protest, and frequent media attention–requires some explaining. Was it possible that behind Showalter’s bold language–in her book, in Vogue, as MLA president–was a calculated P.R. move, an attempt to jump-start a flagging career, to counter the whispers of intellectual irrelevance ("Elaine is this parody of the modern academic, a woman who spends her time writing for People and jet setting")? Or was Showalter–a professor protected by tenure, a history of pathbreaking scholarship, and years of service to her profession–merely speaking from personal conviction regardless of the political advisability of doing so?

One way to begin answering these questions might be with the story of Showalter’s gold briefcase. The year was 1985–what Showalter terms "the fag end of the dress-for-success movement." She had recently arrived at Princeton from Douglass College, the women’s division at Rutgers University, where she had distinguished herself as a pioneering feminist scholar, establishing one of the country’s first programs in women’s studies and publishing one of the first major works of feminist criticism, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing (1977), as well as several important articles on feminist theory. Along the way, she had racked up a number of impressive political bona fides, including a year as president of the New Jersey chapter of the National Organization for Women. These were the boom years for feminist literary criticism; credentialed professors were in demand, and Princeton was fortunate to snag Showalter from Douglass as well as Sandra Gilbert, co-author, with Susan Gubar, of the 1979 classic The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, for its English department.

Despite her considerable reputation in the field, however, Showalter says that initially she had little to do with Princeton’s women’s studies program. "The last thing the women who started it wanted was some big hotshot coming in and telling them what to do," she explains. Still, she was invited to attend a weekly seminar for feminist graduate students, which she did–accompanied by a gold briefcase.

"I had bought a couple of them at a street market in London," she recalls. "Big, glittery, gold leather briefcases. And at the end of that year, the students in the seminar published the equivalent of an academic slam book–an anonymous thing that satirized the faculty in a very cruel way. It was particularly hard on the women; it was quite vicious. There was this paragraph about me, saying I was a suburban tootsie, a Long Island JAP. It singled out my gold briefcase and said I spent too much time having coffee with men: Here comes the big-deal feminist with all the hoo-ha, and she has a gold tote bag and coffee with men."

Shocked and humiliated, Showalter went home and threw the gold briefcase away.

"Years later," she says now, "I got another one. But it’s not the same." Showalter is telling this story in the living room of her London flat, a modest two-bedroom in the heart of the city’s bustling retail district. It’s June and unseasonably hot for London, but Showalter appears not to notice. Listening to her talk, her ample body draped casually across the sofa, her bare feet resting on a cushion, her bright-blue fingernails wrapped around a can of Diet Coke, it is difficult to imagine her succumbing to self-doubt or bowing to the demands of a cabal of anonymous feminists. A warm, brash, effusive woman with an easy laugh, Showalter projects only extraordinary confidence and good humor. More remarkably, she seems to exist at a great remove from the contemplative quiet and humdrum pace of scholarly life.

Although she has been in London on unpaid leave from Princeton since January, officially devoting herself to the MLA and research for her next book, Showalter’s daily routine is anything but academic: a whirlwind of television and radio appearances, newspaper deadlines, and phone calls–from her agent, publicist, editors, and producers. My visit falls on one of the few weekends all summer when Showalter doesn’t have a speaking engagement out of town. Even so, when I arrive at her flat on Friday morning, she is wrapping up a feature article for the Guardian on why stress is passé. Fifteen minutes later, she is accepting an invitation to discuss hooliganism and soccer on a BBC Sunday morning news program. In the days ahead, she will host a BBC discussion of an exhibition at the Tate by the British abstract painter Patrick Heron, comment on a new play by Paula Vogel, and complete a lengthy review of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s posthumous novel Shadows on the Hudson for the London Review of Books.

Testimony to her prolificness, the walls in the kitchen of her flat are decorated with covers of issues of the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books in which her essays have appeared, flyers for conferences at which she has spoken, and one large poster for a prestigious British fiction contest for which she served as a juror.

"I was once a compulsive reader of academic theory and journals," she tells me. "But it’s not part of my routine anymore. Instead, I read three daily newspapers, all the British magazines and many of the American ones, as well as a tremendous amount of contemporary fiction and nonfiction." The reading material in Showalter’s living room, which doubles as her home office, supports this claim; there are several glossy hardbacks on the coffee table and stacks of magazines like In Style, Entertainment Weekly, Tatler and Vogue.

More appealing even than fashion magazines are fashion outlets. Showalter’s idea of a good lunch place is the food court in the mall on Oxford Street: It is air-conditioned and strategically poised at the center of a row of trendy women’s boutiques, whose window displays she follows much more closely than the debates in Victorian Studies. And as a reward for completing her hectic week of journalistic assignments, she proposes a trip to a discount couture warehouse on the other side of town, where, after a couple of hours spent blissfully browsing the racks, she buys a sky-blue caftan for herself and a copper-colored raw-silk cocktail dress on huge markdown for her good friend back at Princeton, the novelist Joyce Carol Oates.

If the image of Showalter dutifully discarding her gold briefcase seemed incongruous at first, her apparent indifference to academic culture was in some ways just as puzzling. After all, there was plenty of evidence that Showalter cared deeply about academic life, was devoted to her teaching and her graduate students, and, as MLA president, seriously concerned about their diminishing prospects. Then again, this was a woman who had worked her way to the top of a profession that, at least when she had joined it, couldn’t have been more indifferent to her fate. Insular, snobbish, and sexist, American academe had hardly extended Showalter a warm welcome, and yet she had succeeded again and again, despite the odds. Would it be surprising if she did not harbor feelings of great warmth and gratitude toward her profession? The story of her complex, often contradictory professional allegiances turns out in some ways to be the story of American literary feminism itself.

In the late 1960s, when Showalter was writing her dissertation on Victorian responses to women’s writing, almost no one, including professors on her dissertation committee at UC-Davis, was interested in feminist criticism–let alone in hiring female English professors. When, after following her husband, a professor of French, to New Jersey in 1966, she tried to apply for teaching positions at Princeton and Rutgers, she was curtly informed that neither institution hired women. So Showalter got a part-time job writing test questions for Princeton’s Educational Testing Service and slowly completed her thesis while raising a family. Soon she found more interesting work at Douglass College, where she taught a course on the image of the educated woman in English and American literature. The subject was an obvious choice for a scholar who was herself a graduate of a women’s college (Bryn Mawr), a politically active feminist, and a student of women’s literature. At Douglass and at most other American colleges, however, no one had ever attempted such a course.

Then, abruptly, the academic climate changed, and the advent of feminist criticism began to seem not just inevitable but desirable, an untapped gold mine for literary studies. In 1970, the British scholar Kate Millett published Sexual Politics, arguably the world’s best-selling Ph.D. thesis, which did much to establish feminism as a viable and important new approach in English departments. Yet although her work addressed power relations between the sexes, Millett focused exclusively on male modernists–D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet. For women scholars on the other side of the Atlantic, Showalter prominent among them, Millett’s book was just the first step. Showalter argued for the recognition of a separate female literary canon. "Women writers," she wrote in 1971, "have a special history susceptible to analysis, which includes such complex considerations as the economics of their relation to the literary marketplace; the effects of social and political changes in women’s status upon individuals; and the implications of stereotypes of the woman writer and restrictions of her artistic autonomy."

Six years later, when Showalter published A Literature of Their Own, the field was still wide open. Her book was one of the first to trace the development of a female literary tradition and, along with Ellen Moers’s Literary Women (1976) and The Madwoman in the Attic, figures as a founding document of literary feminism. Retrieving from obscurity dozens of women writers, such as Elizabeth Gaskell (1810—1865) and Olive Schreiner (1855—1920), Showalter proposed a neat historical framework to explain their thematic and stylistic concerns. In her view, women’s writing had progressed through a series of stages, from an early Victorian feminine phase, much indebted to the dominant male tradition, to a turn-of-the-century feminist phase, characterized by rebellion against this tradition and the exploration of alternatives, and, finally, to the current female phase, marked by the successful assertion of authentic female experience.

Showalter showed herself to be a bold and original critic. In one particularly polemical chapter, she took feminists to task for embracing Virginia Woolf as a heroine and role model. The androgynous imagery that pervades Woolf’s novels and essays, from Orlando to A Room of One’s Own, Showalter argued, should be understood not as the product of an emancipated sensibility, one in which the limitations of female identity had been triumphantly overcome, but, rather, as a doomed, utopian fantasy. Considered against the circumstances of her life–and in particular her suicide at the age of fifty-nine–Woolf’s literary feminism rang hollow, and Showalter judged her severely. "Androgyny was the myth that helped her evade confrontation with her own painful femaleness and enabled her to choke and repress her anger and ambition," she wrote. "The ultimate room of one’s own is the grave."

The book was innovative in other ways as well. There, on page 28, for example, is the analysis of Jane Eyre that two years later, in The Madwoman in the Attic, would become a feminist commonplace: "The mad wife locked in the attic symbolizes the passionate and sexual side of Jane’s personality, an alter ego that her upbringing, her religion, and her society have commanded her to incarcerate."

In this, as in later phases of her career, Showalter’s importance had a good deal to do with her having been among the first, a trailblazer whose arrival on virgin soil was a signal to dozens of more cautious, deliberative scholars that it was safe to follow. From A Literature of Their Own, she plunged into theory, a domain that American feminists, unlike the French, had strenuously avoided. In a 1979 essay, for example, Showalter enumerated the liberatory aims of "gynocriticism," her alternative to male-dominated literary theory. Indebted to French feminist discussions of écriture féminine–writing that in its grammar, logic, and silences was purely female–gynocriticism sought to elucidate elements of an authentic female experience in writing by women, as opposed to the less reliable, often sexist representations of female experience found in male fiction and criticism. As one of the first attempts at feminist theory building in the United States, gynocriticism enjoyed a brief vogue (and then vanished from sight).

In the late 1970s, Showalter turned her feminist gaze on the psychiatric profession. She was once again in uncharted territory. Her book The Female Malady (1985) was an unflinching account of British psychiatry’s historical mistreatment of women, including its use of such concepts as hysteria to label and even institutionalize women whose only symptom was intellectual or political ambition. The book provided a factual basis for feminist complaints about patriarchal culture’s pathologization of women and became an instant classic. Although Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1961) had produced a surge of academic interest in insanity during the 1970s, few scholars had attempted a history of modern psychiatry, let alone a history that took gender as its guiding principle. "Elaine’s book was pioneering," says Andrew Scull, a sociologist at UC-San Diego who has written extensively on the history of madness. "Nobody had looked at these things through the prism of gender before. She launched a number of people on that trail."

Beginning with the Victorian era, Showalter argued, insanity became a quintessentially female disorder; by the 1850s, women patients far outnumbered men in asylums and clinics–a trend that continued well into this century. What she found was shocking: a British doctor who performed clitoridectomies on five women "whose madness consisted of their wish to take advantage of the new Divorce Act of 1857"; a British home secretary who brought in psychiatrists to treat suffragettes incarcerated at Holloway Gaol; and the medical rationale for why more women than men were given lobotomies in postwar Britain–"the operation is potentially more effective with women because it is easier for them to assume or resume the role of housewife."

Even the French psychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot, whom Showalter credits with refusing to treat hysteria as a physical illness requiring sexual surgery, turns out, in her account, to be something of a quack: an egomaniac who ran a human freak show from his clinic at Salpêtrière, pressing anxious, impressionable young women–some ill, some not–into service as expert swooners during his standing-room-only public lectures. "Throughout the history of psychiatry, there have been many male liberators–Pinel, Conolly, Charcot, Freud, Laing–who claimed to free madwomen from the chains of their confinement to obtuse and misogynistic medical practice," Showalter declared. "Yet when women are spoken for but do not speak for themselves, such dramas of liberation become only the opening scenes of the next drama of confinement." Still, she was not entirely pessimistic: The best hope for the future, she wrote on the last page of her book, lay in what she referred to vaguely as "the feminist therapy movement."

The Female Malady was Showalter’s most ambitious book to date. Yet before she had a chance to savor her achievement, she suffered an unexpected shock. The feminist professor who only recently had been ostracized for her fashion sense suddenly found her scholarship under intense and disparaging scrutiny.

The source of the attack was an obscure young scholar of French literature named Toril Moi, who in 1985 published Sexual/Textual Politics (Routledge), a terse, opinionated survey of the state of feminist literary criticism in France and the United States. The book sold thirty-three thousand copies, became required reading in introductory women’s studies courses, and turned Moi into a star lecturer on the theory circuit. It also made a passionate case for why Elaine Showalter was, disciplinarily speaking, a dinosaur.

Beginning with her introduction, in which Showalter’s discussion of Woolf in A Literature of Their Own becomes an object lesson in the deficiencies of a politically retrograde and theoretically uninformed feminist criticism, Moi treats the Princeton professor to a singularly harsh scolding:

In New York, I appeared on Rolonda, a morning show.... We began with me on stage with the alien therapist, a stunning brunette in a purple mini-skirt, who gave me sisterly tips on eye make-up off the air.... Posey, one of the alien abductees, was a 400-pound black man who claimed to have been floated out of his apartment window in the Bronx by ETs. ‘I didn’t know there were aliens in the hood!’ Rolonda exclaimed. Bob, the Texas evangelist, got rounds of applause when he called me a ‘godless feminist’, but after the show he invited me for a drink and thought we made a terrific team. My hands-down favourites were pretty blonde Deborah of the multiple-personalities, decked out like Heidi in a girlish dirndl, and her therapist Dr. Jim, a nerdy guy who hovered protectively over her.

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