Some 25 years ago, Hélène Cixous provocatively anticipated a distinctly female practice of writing. She declared that écriture féminine would be marked by characteristics which challenge the logic of writing within the "phallocentric" tradition, by its focus on the female body, glorying in a femininity too long repressed, and breaking up received truth through laughter. Her argument, based on her view of the poetic, implies a form of "false consciousness" in that not all women would, or even could, produce texts from this alternative practice. Further, she declared that écriture féminine cannot be defined or identified outside of itself:

It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, encoded, coded -- which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. But it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system: it does and will take place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophical-theoretical domination. It will be conceived of only by subjects who are breakers of automatisms, by peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate.¹

It is unfortunate that so important a declaration would be auto-marginalized by positing its own epistemological and social indefinability. While Cixous may be right, that a practice of women's writing would be hard to identify, she carries her attack of "phallocentric systems" of knowledge -- rationality and logic -- to such an extreme that any attempt to demonstrate the possibility of the existence of, or isolate some of the characteristics of, an écriture féminine is invalidated. I would argue, however, that any putative feminine practice of writing should be identifiable as recessive traits in the literary production of women who predate Cixous's declaration and that these traits may be detected using systematic methodologies.

A considerable body of recent work on gender marking in language use shows important, even critical, differences in male and female use of language. ² While much of this work has been restricted to less formal forms of communication -- speech, e-mail, and student essays -- there is some evidence that gender is an important discriminant in more formal literary texts. For example, Minna Palander-Collin finds in her study of 17th century private letters that there are marked differences between female and male writing, suggesting that the women's letters are more interactional, personal and "involved" than letters by men, which are common features of women's communication in Present-Day English.³ More generally, recent studies by Moshe Koppel, Shlomo Argamon and Anat Shimoni have detected a wide variety of simple lexical and syntactic feature differences in literary texts by men and women in the British National Corpus (BNC). Using machine learning techniques, they are able to infer the gender of an author of an unseen document with approximately 80% accuracy, with moderately better performance for works of fiction than nonfiction.⁴ The success of text categorization techniques to identify modern literary texts by gender of author suggests that there are gendered practices of writing and that these gendered traditions are grounded in the history of literary culture and would be an important component of Cixous' prospective écriture féminine.

In the early 1990s, I attempted to examine the question of écriture féminine using the ARTFL database, only to be confronted by the very significant gender bias of the TLF database as it was then constituted, concluding that the sample of texts by women (3.8% of the titles) was too limited to allow for useful comparisons. This limitation led directly to our ongoing effort to digitize a large collection of French literary texts by women, ARTFL's French Women Writers Project⁵ to redress the gender bias of the corpus which was used to compile the TLF dictionary. The gender bias in the data used to compile a massive and "definitive" dictionary is itself an important example of one mechanism of how patriarchal language is propagated and authorized.⁶ My initial studies of gender representation in early modern and modern French -- based exclusively on male writers describing the feminine -- produced some striking examples of long-term shifts in the use and meaning of common gender terms, such as femme.⁷ Age categorization of women -- young/old -- becomes one of the most notable patterns only towards the end of the 18th century, reflecting both the rise of the romantic novel and a new politics of desire. Equally important are long-term continuities, such as the collocation of femme with possessives, suggesting that the semantic field of the feminine begins with putting her "in her place," being possessed by a male.⁸ Cixous' complaint that "woman has always functioned 'within' the discourse of man" simply because women must express themselves in "the language of men and their grammar"⁹ is a position that is certainly implied by my initial studies and needs to be taken into account when characterizing earlier examples of feminine writing.

In order to examine possible earlier practices of écriture féminine, I am assembling two corpora of about 350 literary texts each by male and female authors from the 17th to the early 20th century, balanced by time period, genre, and subject matter (or collection). The women's texts are drawn from a variety of current holdings at ARTFL, including 110 texts in French Women Writers, 70 from the ARTFL database, 40 from BASILE (Editions Champion), and 130 from various collections produced by Editions Bibliopolis.¹⁰ The comparative male corpus will be selected from the same sources. Comparisons of the two corpora will be based on several distinct types of analysis.

• A comparative overview of the two corpora using the combination of some of the relatively simple lexical and syntactic features used by Koppel and his team, broken down by time period;
• A comparison of collocations of gender terms (femme, homme, mari, mère, etc.), loosely based on results from my earlier studies, effectively looking at how men and women represent themselves and the other gender, again broken down by period and genre.
• Examination of the "agency" of male and female actors as represented by the tense and the functional status of selected verbs associated with gender denoting terms.
• And a general assessment of the pragmatics associated with literary writing by males and females, by looking at use of hedges as well as the density of pronouns and adjectives.

The continued expansion and improvement of electronic text holdings, in terms of the quality of the data as well as coverage of wider ranges of literatures well outside of established national canons, allows us to revisit theoretical and substantive problematics that we could not address previously. Women's writing is surely a case-in-point of this laudable development, facilitating systematic examinations of propositions made by critics and theorists like Hélène Cixous. Identification of the practices and distinguishable characteristics of écriture féminine in the centuries predating her "call to the pen" may help situate the traditions of gendered discourse the past as well as their relationship to current feminine writing.

1. Hélène Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa" in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1:4 (1976) 883.

2. See for example, Deborah Tannen, You just don't understand: Women and men in conversation (Ballantine, 1990) and Gender and discourse (Oxford, 1994).

3. Minna Palander-Collin, "Male and female styles in 17th century correspondence: I THINK", in Language Variation and Change, 11 (1999), 123-141.

4. Moshe Koppel, Shlomo Argamon, Jonathan Fine and Amat Shimoni, "Automatically Categorizing Written Texts by Author Gender", forthcoming in Literary and Linguistic Computing (2003) and Moshe Koppel, Shlomo Argamon, Jonathan Fine and Amat Shimoni, "Differences in Writing Style Between Male and Female Authors" (paper submitted for publication).

5. ARTFL's French Women Writers Project is one of many projects to digitize neglected literary and non-literary texts by women, most inspired by the Brown Women Writers Project, including the University of Chicago Library's Italian Women Writers and commercial products such as Alexander Street Press' North American Women's Letters and Diaries. See http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/ets/efts/Women.html for a partial list of current projects and products.

6. "Gender representation and histoire des mentalités: Language and Power in the Trésor de la langue française," in Histoire et measure VI (1991): 349-73.

7. "Quantitative Linguistics and Histoire des mentalités: Gender Representation in the Trésor de la langue française,, in R. Köhler and B. B. Rieger (eds.), Contributions to Quantitative Linguistics (Kluwer, 1993), pp. 361-381.

8. See also Tuija Pulkkinen, "The History of Gender Concepts: The Concept of Woman", in History of Concepts Newsletter, 5 (2002), 2-5.

9. Cixous, p. 887.

10. Links to the ARTFL/PhiloLogic implementations of these collections may be found at http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/newhome/texts/.

11. "Enlightened Nationalism in the Early Revolution" The nation in the Language of the Société de 1789, in Canadian Journal of History (24), 1994, p. 28ff