Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
46. "that writers assimilate and then consciously or unconsciously affirm or deny the achievements of their predecessors is, of course, a central fact of literary history....more recently, some literary theorists have begun to explore what we might call the psychology of literary history--the tensions and anxieties, hostilities and inadequacies writers feel when they confront not only the achievements of their predecessors but the traditions of genre, style, and metaphor that they inherit from such 'forefathers.' increasingly, these critics study the ways in which, as j. hillis miller has put it, a literary text 'is inhabited...by a long chain of parasitical presences, echoes, allusions, guests, ghosts of previous texts.'"
46-8. harold bloom's paradigm for literary achievement--the new poet configures himself as the son of the older poet(ic tradition) & is in an automatic oedipal struggle whereby he has to kill the father to achieve his own glory. he's been critiqued for how there are no women in this story, but the g&g think his "oversight" is important/good--there are no women in that story, & the plight of woman writers has always been that there is such a dominant story and they don't fit into it.
48. the woman writer doesn't have the same "anxiety of influence" men do, as writers, because her predecessors are "almost exclusively male, and therefore significantly different from her" & influential in very different ways: "not only do these precursors incarnate patriarchal authority...they attempt to enclose her in definitions of her person and her potential which, by reducing her to extreme stereotypes (angel, monster) drastically conflict with her own sense of self--that is, of her subjectivity, her autonomy, her creativity. on the one hand, therefore, the woman writer's male precursors symbolize authority; on the other hand, despite their authority, they fail to define the ways in which she experiences her own identity as a writer. more, the masculine authority with which they construct their literary personae...semm to the woman writer to directly contradict the terms of her own gender definition. thus the 'anxiety of influence' that a male poet experiences is felt by a female poet as an even more primary 'anxiety of authorship'--a radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a 'precursor' the act of writing will isolate or destroy her."
50. "the woman writer...searches for a female model not because she wants dutifully to comply with male definitions of her 'femininity' but because she must legitimize her own rebellious endeavors"; "thus the loneliness of the female artist, her feelings of alienation from male predecessors coupled with her need for sisterly precursors and successors, her urgent sense of her need for a female autience together with her fear of the antagomism of male readers, her culturally conditioned timidity about self-dramatization, her dread of the patriarchal authority of art, her anxiety about the impropriety of female invention" all bog her efforts down.
51. this "anxiety of authorship" = "an anxiety built from complex and often barely conscious fears of that authority which seems to the female artist to be by definition inappripriate to her sex....this anxiety of authorship is quite distinct from the anxiety about creativity" male writers feel; "indeed, to the extent that it forms one of the unique bonds that link women in what we might call the secret sisterhood of their literary subculture, such anxiety in itself constitutes a crucial mark of that subculture"; "if contemporary women do now attempt the pen with energy and authority, they are able to do so only because their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century foremothers struggled in isolation that felt like illness, alienation that felt like madness, obscurity that felt like paralysis to overcome the anxiety of authorship that was endemic to their literary subculture"
73. "when we consider the 'oddity' of women's writing in relation to its submerged content, it begins to seem that when women did not turn into male mimics or accept the 'parsley wreath' ["of self-denial, writing in 'lesser' genres--children's books, letters, diaries--or producing what george eliot called 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists'"] they may have attempted to transcend their anxiety of authorship by revising male genres, using them to record their own dreams and their own stories in disguise. such writers, therefore, both participated in and--to use one of harold bloom's key terms--'swerved' from the central sequences of male literary history, enacting a uniquely female process of revision and redefinition that necessarily caused them to seem 'odd.' at the same thime, while they achieved essential authority by telling their own stories, these writers allayed their distinctively female anxieties of authorship by following emily dickinson's famous (and characteristically female) advice to 'tell all the truth but tell it slant--.'"; "thus these authors managed the difficult task of achieving true female literary authority by simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary standards."