In a course I took last semester entitled “Women and Gender in Latin American History, gender was presented as a useful category of analysis for understanding power relationships within society. Literature, as a human creative pursuit grounded in the relationships between writer and reader, can also be examined using gender as an analytical tool. Dan Miron, in his piece “Why Was There No Women’s Poetry in Hebrew Before 1920?” writes, “A revolutionary social ambience encouraged the literary expression of cultural elements that until then had been marginalized or silent” (Miron, 66). This is an important claim: when society is in flux, so, too, are its power relationships; consequently, so are the tools that are used to understand these relationships. As Jewish identities changed with the creation of a new language and new national identities, Hebrew poetry was opened to new analysis of the role of gender within literature, as well as the role of literature in society.

Literature certainly does not exist outside of the influence of society. Dan Miron, the above quoted author, appears to ignore literature’s, and especially poetry’s, exposed position when he writes, “In short, misogyny and male chauvinism are not the issue here”, and later, “the discrimination, if it existed, was not in the ill will of the literary establishment. Instead it manifested itself in the cultural and aesthetic tastes, and in the norms and restrictions these determined” (Miron, 70). Miron fails to understand that patriarchy can present itself in many different forms: expecting the literary establishment to be solely—and uniquely— at fault for discrimination assumes a disconnection between social influences and realities, and writers. Literature is influenced both by the individual author and the social experiences of the author and the reader, which are perhaps less clear. Social experiences at the time of the poets in question, at the time Miron wrote his article, and in the present moment are inherently gendered. How do we begin to approach poetry with the knowledge that literature is not immune to gendered binaries, and has a long history of privileging the male mind?

Gilbert and Gubar, in their piece “Infection in the Sentence”, further address this centricity of male experience within Hebrew literature. Within the idea of ‘anxiety of authorship’, Gilbert and Gubar find a way to classify the almost crushing importance placed on the poetry of the first female poets; without female predecessors, each woman was creating something new, something that could be taken from her and turned to symbolize something unintended. The act of authorship opened the door wide for destruction. Women were not only writing poetry, but were attempting to do so in the ‘language of men’—was this an instance of triumphant ownership of language, or of women’s conformance and ultimate submission?

I see the bottom line as the following: Women poets recognize in themselves the “other”; whether or not we agree with Miron’s claims that there was no discrimination, intentional or vaguely patriarchal, is irrelevant. In early Israel’s literary atmosphere, a firmly established, male-dominated literary tradition did exist that fundamentally made women’s participation “unnatural” and prevented women from easily joining the canon of Hebrew poetry. Women’s poetry, therefore, could understandably be polemical in nature. Ultimately, gender is a useful tool for understanding women’s engagement with literature, a pursuit that cannot avoid the influences of gendered society.

Gender is an important category of critical analysis, because it’s a relevant part of life, and poetry reflects any and all aspects of life.  Critical analysis without a gendered approach would not be a holistic or fully-rounded approach.  Gendered readings often seem to separate, distinguish, and deconstruct the experiences and work of men from those of women (and also from those of other gender identities that exist beyond the binary, though the scholarship on this topic does not address this issue as much).  Analysis through a gendered lens, however, can also allow readers to see certain similarities in experience or perspective, which might not have been revealed without this focus.  Readers may, for example, attribute a certain quality or element of a literary work to a writer’s gender, whereas a gendered analysis can reveal that this specific aspect is actually a function of something else.  Of course, gender is certainly not the only category that is important for critical analysis.  It works in tandem with many other categories and lenses of analysis, and the intersection of these categories enhances the reading overall.

In the realm of poetry a gendered analysis brings to the reader’s consciousness the weight of tradition that has preceded the writer.  As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar write inInfection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship, “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”” (290).  

Harold Bloom’s notion of the “anxiety of influence” is one that all literary artists are subject to.  With a gendered analysis of this concept, readers discover that while the anxiety is universal, it stems from different points for men than it does for women.  Gilbert and Gubar articulately demonstrate, “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 audience together with her fear of the antagonism 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 these phenomena of “inferiorization” mark the woman writer’s struggle for artistic self-definition and differentiate her efforts at self-creating from those of her male counterpart” (292).  While men struggle with the anxiety of displacing their predecessors, women face this slew of challenges, and a reader would not be able to discover this without a gendered approach to the work.

Anita Norich makes a particular statement in “Jewish Literatures and Feminist Criticism: An Introduction to Gender and Text” that caught my attention. After describing the differences between the French and Anglo-American schools of thought on feminist criticism, she suggests moving beyond the dichotomy and highlights the question that many feminist critics ask: how “differences in race, ethnicity, class, or sexuality may determine the construction of gender.” (p. 2) I was struck by this statement- of course the different factors that comprise our identities contribute to the way that our gender is expressed (or repressed)! For some reason, though, it is often excluded from conversations on gender.

Kate Bornstein highlights this reality with an exercise in “My New Gender Workbook” in which she asks readers to rate a number of identity markers on a scale of -5 to +5 on how deeply each affects their lives. (p. 60) Factors include race, age, sexuality, religion, disability, political ideology, and several others. From this exercise she concludes that not only do these factors contribute to one’s gender identity, but also in essence lead to a multiplicity of unique genders. In other words, my experience as a white, able-bodied, liberally leaning woman is much different from that of a self-identified woman who is black, has a disability, and/or is politically conservative. Because of those different circumstances, we cannot claim to have the same gender.

I think about this exercise in the context of gender analysis of Jewish literature in particular. Circumstances particular to women of Eastern European origins writing in Hebrew and Yiddish led to a much different experience than that of women in Western Europe, Africa, or other region/socioeconomic backgrounds (as well as from each other), which led to a unique identity, which in turn led to a particular sort of literary production. No, women did not carry the oral tradition in Judaism, as did black women in America, because Jewish oral tradition is very intimately tied into the religious patriarchal culture. (p. 12) Similarly, there are a number of reasons which Norich highlights for why Eastern European Jewish women turned to poetry more readily than prose, each of which is inextricably tied into one of the specific aspects of this gender identity.

I had not previously considered viewing Jewish women’s writers through the lens of their own unique gender, but now I can’t take those glasses off. I think this is particularly useful and crucial when reading this literature (and any other literature), because it enables me, as the reader, to be mindful of the complex web of factors that could have contributed to this woman writing this piece in this particular way. This tool enables me to complicate, sharpen, and enrich the picture.

I’d like to focus on the way that Anita Norich uses the term goldene keyt, in her Jewish Literatures and Feminist Criticism: An Introduction to Gender and Text.

Norich (p. 6) discusses how Hebrew is, as she puts it, the “Father Tongue,” in that it has been more influenced than Yiddish by “the tradition,” which “signals the patriarchal domain.” To paraphrase Norich, since women were historically denied access to the tradition, how could they possibly join in the conversation? Further, how could they “rewrite” and “subvert” without “access to the already written?”

Norich uses the Yiddish goldene keyt (“golden chain,” a traditional formulation) to describe this tradition of male study and commentary in Hebrew.

Her usage is interesting to me, in that this term, goldene keyt, in my secular Yiddishist experience, has always signified the overall Jewish/Yiddish tradition of culture, artistic expression and yes, religious (but not exclusively religious) tradition.

For example, in Kadya Molodowsky’s poem “Efnt dem toyer,” 


Efnt dem toyer, efnt im breyt,
S’vet do durkhgeyn a goldene keyt:
Der tate,
Di mame,
Der bruder,
Di shvester,
Khosn-kale in mitn
Af a goldenem shlitn.

Open the gate, throw it wide open,
Through it must pass a chain that is golden:
Papa
And Mama,
Brother
And Sister,
And among them, a bride and groom, happy and gay,
Riding upon a golden sleigh.

(Hellerstein, Kathryn, trans. Paper Bridges: Poems of Kadya Molodowsky. Pages 206-207.)

By goldene keyt, is Molodowsky referring to the exclusively male tradition of Hebrew/Aramaic study and commentary?

I certainly don’t think so. Here, the goldene keyt refers to the family (including the female members of the family). By extension, I think, she’s writing about the “chain” of Jewish generational continuity.

Actually to me, (and yes, it’s subjective), di goldene keyt means something veryyidishlekh, in the sense of referring to Yiddish secular culture, and not the “male” Hebrew traditional culture.

There is more to all this in Moldowsky’s poem that relates to class as well as gender, but that’s for another blog post.

A parallel phenomenon would be the varied ways that the term yidishkeyt would be used, on one hand, by a Satmar Hasid, or on the other hand, by the KlezKanada Institute of Jewish/Yiddish Arts, a largely secular Yiddishist enterprise (where I used to be the artistic director). The same Yiddish term has wildly different meanings in the two contexts.

I’m not quibbling with the way Norich is using the term goldene keyt.  I’m sure that she knows what she’s talking about when she uses it to refer to the religious literary tradition.

But thankfully the current Yiddish secular scene (often referred to as yidishland) is a much more socially wide-open place than most parts of the traditional Hebrew religious study world (with, let’s be grateful, some exceptions, such as JTS).

Women within the Yiddishist goldene keyt are not only accepted but celebrated. That’s agoldene keyt that I’m very happy to be a part of.

There are two ways to use gender when analyzing literature. The first way is to use it to understand an author. The second way is to use gender to read and interpret the poem. In a male dominated 1920s world, women had to fight for their own voice in order to be accepted as remotely equal to their male counterparts. Gilbert and Guber say that a women writer generally, “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” (292). Women writers also had to come to terms with men like Dan Morin who defends the argument that lessening poetic standards resulted in the influx of women writers. Women had to fight against this stigma by ultimately proving their worth. Therefore, when reading the Hebrew and Yiddish poetry of Jewish women during the early twentieth century, it is fundamental to analyze the text by considering the role of gender.

Norich says that, “the tendency to read women’s texts as confessional or unself-consciously autobiographical” could potentially lead to “the female writer [becoming] less the writing subject than the object being written.” If we see gender as a way to understand society and interpret Norich’s statement in the same manner, I think Norich’s statement would be more applicable to today’s world, where women are given more equal opportunity than they were in the 1920s. A woman writer in the early twentieth century would inherently strongly consider gender in her pieces because of the significant role gender played in the ease of a writer’s exposure and acceptance in society. If we apply Norich’s statement to the reading of a poem, she is completely correct—we cannot solely use gender to interpret a poem.

Because women poets such as Ra’hel wrote during a time when women were just beginning to create a voice for themselves as poets, gender can be considered to have a significant impact on not only their writings, but also on the way their poetry was perceived.These women writers must constantly compare themselves to other male poet legends, and if there is one obvious difference between women poets and, let’s say, Bialik, it is gender.

Keeping Norich’s warning in mind, critical analysis using gender is also a way to better understand the literature. As Gilbert and Guber discuss, because of a patriarchal society, women writers dealt with a lot of darker subjects. They state, “[The female anxiety of authorship] is in many ways the germ of a disease or, at any rate, a disaffection, a disturbance, a distrust, that spreads like a stain throughout the style and structure of much literature by women” (293). Without looking at gender we would not pick up on such a motif in the writing.

When reading Rachel, I begin to imagine that she has 1,000 words for silence: the silence of a calm blue sky, the silence of the wounded animal, the silence of the banks of the Jordan, the silence of knowing too many words.  Her range of vocabulary for the shades of silence, from the quiet of peace to the muteness of agony speaks to the soundproof room to which she and other modern women poets were relegated.

Michael Gluzman illustrates the problematic historical perspective of multiple literary critics.  He quotes Bloom, who explains the role of women in the creative process: “what is the Primal Scene, for a poet as poet? It is his Poetic Father’s coitus with the Muse.”  (Gluzman, “The Exclusion of Women from Hebrew Literary History,” 264.)  In Bloom’s outlook, the only room for a female archetype is the Muse, objectified, sexualized, and, of course, silent.  Certainly the Muse’s influence cannot be through her own intellectual or creative pursuits.  If Bloom’s perspective seems to minimize the role of women in the arc of poetic history, his co-critics erase women from the sphere of poetics completely, creating locked worlds of male poets in a never-ending cycle of rejecting and/or building upon their (also male) predecessors and contemporaries.

It is clear that those commentators overlook the contribution of women poets to the trajectory of the Hebrew (and, ultimately world) poetic tradition.  Reading excerpts from Nathan Zach’s 1966 manifesto, also included in Gluzman’s article (Gluzman, 270, 272-3), it seemed as if he had studied Rachel’s own manifesto, Al Ot haZman, and yet he does not cite her.  Her insistence on “simple expression” as a poetic value seeped into the poetic cannon, and yet her marginal status as a woman meant that it did so without recognition, as if by coincidence, the aesthetic was discovered somewhat later by someone who rescued it from the hands of those who ought not to be wielding a pen in the first place.

Rachel’s striking repetition of words for silence in so many of her poems speaks to the reflexive influence of the exclusion of women poets on the poetry of women.  She developed a vocabulary to describe not simply her autobiographical experience, but, like other poets female and male, a vocabulary that described the world in which she lived.  For Rachel, it was a world of simple phrases that described both ordinary and sublime experiences in a realm of endless noiselessness.

I felt the anxiety of authenticity when I was applying to rabbinical school. I didn’t know if I fit into to this profession that had been created and shaped by men and for men. Did I have to try and be a man in order to be a good rabbi? Was there a such thing as a ‘woman rabbi,’ and was it entirely different than a ‘regular’ (read: male) rabbi ? Could there just be rabbis irrespective of gender? I learned that the answer to this question was no, and I’ve been thinking about these questions for the past four years since I’ve entered school.

Gilbert and Gubar ask this same question but regarding women holding authority of authorship, particularly in poetry. I’m struck by the question of what it means for women to enter the world of poetry that was shaped and dominated by men. Is poetry a gendered enterprise? They introduce Harold Bloom’s literary history, and write that his model is “intensely (even exclusively) male, and necessarily patriarchal. For this reason it has seemed, and no doubt will continue to seem, offensively exist to some feminist critics” (Gilbert and Gubar 290). This seems to indicate that the way Bloom tells the story is gendered. I’m still not sure if this means that poetry was itself masculine, or if was just dominated by masculinity. Regardless, the question remains of how women poets fit into this model, particularly if they have no models or precursors, as Giblert and Gubar remind us, to guide her way.

Last week I raised the question of women entering this world of poetry and their possible dilemma of owning versus conforming. If women act like men in order to ‘prove’ they can succeed in poetics, they are conforming to a standard that isn’t authentic to themselves. Alternatively, given a standard set by men, if women carve out their own voice and write in a distinctly feminine manner, are they waving their white flag of inadequacy? Gilbert and Gubar’s answer suggests that women cannot simply just slip into the genre of male poetry and “fit in” (291). She struggles over the authenticity of her poetic voice. The woman stands out. She can then become objectified and tokenized, not seen as a creator of text but as a gendered body who entered poetry as an Other.

One of the other major problems stemming from this male dominated arena is the characterization of women. “It is debilitating to be any woman in a society where women are warned that if they do not behave like angels they must be monsters” (Gilbert and Gubar 294). This problem doesn’t allow women to be themselves, and it reinforces the notion that they were not shapers of the field. It reminds women that they are outsiders and must conform to the norms set by men. Raising these questions is frustrating and even angering, and in a somewhat subversive way, it also feels empowering. It means, to me at least, that women have the opportunity to define something new and shape what their own poetry can look like, without the confines of a masculine-defined poetic world.

Gender as a category of literary analysis is largely important when one takes into consideration the highly patriarchal society we are slowly evolving out of yet still reside.  As men have held clear authority over women in most instances for all but the last century, women have struggled to make their voices heard above the male dominated din.  Indeed, for this very reason, as women here and there gained the courage and agency to publish their works, many such women used male pseudonyms.  They would have done this so their work could join the preexisting literary cannon instead of having to confront what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar refer to as the “anxiety of authorship” (Gubar and Gilbert).

In Gubar and Gilbert’s piece “Infection in the Sentence: the woman writer and the anxiety of authorship” they discuss and analyze the woman writer’s position, reality, and literary dynamic in our male dominant society.  They explain male writers experience what Harold Bloom theorized as the “anxiety of influence,” a fear that their works will never be as influential as their precursor’s works (Gilbert and Gubar 290).  Gubar and Gilbert explain women, however, not only have this fear to worry of, but also first and foremost must confront the basic fear of authorship.  The woman, socially conditioned as authoritatively second to men, doubts her ability to “become a ‘precursor,’” and imagines that trying to adopt the masculine literary persona in “the act of writing will isolate or destroy her” (Gilbert and Gubar 291).  Nevertheless, women have indeed paved their own way in the literary cannon, creating for themselves a subculture of sorts.  This subculture has allowed for women to find and rely on the support of fellow female authors, and has allowed for a sense of creative pioneering men cannot experience because of their precursors (Gilbert and Gubar 293).  Since the women literary tradition has such few precursors in relation to the male literary tradition, the female writer can delight and find motivation in her ability to contribute to the building of a “viable tradition” (Gilbert and Gubar 293).

In light of the difference of anxieties writers experience based on gender, we are forced and greatly benefit to read works of each gender in their respective perspectives.  Understanding the psychological challenges an author must tackle to write can reveal a great deal about both their writing style and content of their writing.  Men are primarily concerned with creative literary innovations to outdo their precursors while women’s work must be read with the respect and understanding of the anxiety of authorship that had to be overcome.

In my previous home, my husband complained that we had a lack of doors.  The only room that had a door to separate it from the rest of the apartment was the bathroom, which then became the room in which we could make late night phone calls to the West Coast or do work while the other slept.  It had been my apartment since I was single, and the entire thing felt like an extension of myself.  The books, the mismatched thrift store furniture, the rug that had been a birthday present from my mom, the hutch I got in a bartered transaction, the artwork, and a Jennifer Convertibles loveseat, my first full priced furniture I had purchased, were all mine.  When my husband moved in, he oozed in one duffel bag at a time on the Bolt Bus from Boston, and his minimal possessions barely made a dent in my crowded studio.

When we upgraded to an apartment with doors (so many glorious doors!), I was eight months pregnant and had limited energy for home improvement.  Anyway, the fresh eggshell paint seemed so perfect and fragile.  The apartment was too pristine for my messy influence, and I felt afraid to damage it with so much as a mezuzah.  Our apartment is still a work in progress, still “new,” though now far from pristine.

While I was home with my daughter, I started to take a few risks to crack the shell of our apartment.  In addition to our ketubah, I put up a series of nudes I had painted years ago.  They were unframed, and seemed unbounded.  While my daughter slept and my husband was at work, I painted a frame directly onto the wall.  The next project was painting a flower garden close to the floor, incorporating mirror decals for my daughter to look into.  Both of these projects were met with delight and requests for more, even to add one more, taller flower-mirror to our garden for our growing baby.  But, as I have increased my time outside the house, those projects, like our living space itself, remain works in progress.