Feminist Literary Criticism

 

Rebecca West's work on women suffrage from approximately 1910, can be traced as the beginning of the feminist criticism movement. In addition to West's work, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own from 1929 is an integral text to the movement. Prominent feminist literary critics include Isobel Armstrong, Nancy Armstrong, Barbara Bowen, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Laura Brown, Margaret Anne Doody, Eva Figes, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Annette Kolodny, Anne McClintock, Anne K. Mellor, Nancy K. Miller, Toril Moi, Felicity Nussbaum, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Hortense Spillers, Gayatri Spivak, Irene Tayler, Marina Warner.

Modern feminist literary criticism finds its roots in the 1960s second-wave feminist movements. Beginning with the interrogation of male-centric literature that portrayed women in a demeaning and oppressed model, theorist such as Mary Ellman, Kate Millet and Germaine Greer challenged past imaginations of the feminine within literary scholarship.

Elain Showalter became a leading critic in the gynocritical method with her work A Literature of their Own in 1977. By this time, scholars were not only interested in simply demarcating narratives of oppression but also creating a literary space for past, present and future female literary scholars to substantiate their experience in a genuine way that appreciates the aesthetic form of their works.

Feminist literary criticism is literary analysis that arises from the viewpoint of feminism, feminist theory and/or feminist politics. Basic methods of feminist literary criticism include:

Identifying with female characters: This is a way to challenge the male-centered outlook of authors. Feminist literary criticism suggests that women in literature were historically presented as objects seen from a male perspective.

Reevaluating literature and the world in which literature is read: This involves questioning whether society has predominantly valued male authors and their literary works because it has valued males more than females.

A feminist literary critic resists traditional assumptions while reading. In addition to challenging assumptions which were thought to be universal, feminist literary criticism actively supports including women's knowledge in literature and valuing women's experiences.

Elaine Showalter

Showalter is concerned by stereotypes of feminism that see feminist critics as being ‘obsessed with the phallus’ and ‘obsessed with destroying male artists. Showalter wonders if such stereotypes emerge from the fact that feminism lacks a fully articulated theory.

Another problem for Showalter is the way in which feminists turn away from theory as a result of the attitudes of some male academics: theory is their property. Showalter writes: ‘From this perspective, the academic demand for theory can only be heard as a threat to the feminist need for authenticity, and the visitor looking for a formula that he or she can take away without personal encounter is not welcome’. In response, Showalter wants to outline a poetics of feminist criticism.

In Toward a Feminist Poetics Showalter divides feminist criticism into two sections:

The Woman as Reader or Feminist Critique : ‘the way in which a female reader changes our apprehension of a given text, awakening it to the significance of its sexual codes’; historically grounded inquiry which probes the ideological assumptions of literary phenomena’; ‘subjects include the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions of and misconceptions about women in criticism, and the fissures in male–constructed literary history’; ‘concerned with the exploitation and manipulation of the female audience, especially in popular culture and film, and with the analysis of woman–as–sign in semiotic systems’; ‘political and polemical’; like the Old Testament looking for the errors of the past.

One of the problems of the feminist critique is that it is male–orientated. If we study stereotypes of women, the sexism of male critics, and the limited roles women play in literary history, we are not learning what women have felt and experienced, but only what men thought women should be. […] The critique also has a tendency to naturalize women’s victimization by making it the inevitable and obsessive topic of discussion.

The Woman as Writer or Gynocritics (la gynocritique):

Showalter coined the term 'gynocritics' to describe literary criticism based in a feminine perspective. Probably the best description Showalter gives of gynocritics is in Towards a Feminist Poetics:

“In contrast to [an] angry or loving fixation on male literature, the program of gynocritics is to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt male models and theories. Gynocritics begins at the point when we free ourselves from the linear absolutes of male literary history, stop trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition, and focus instead on the newly visible world of female culture.”

This does not mean that the goal of gynocritics is to erase the differences between male and female writing; gynocritics is not “on a pilgrimage to the promised land in which gender would lose its power, in which all texts would be sexless and equal, like angels”. Rather gynocritics aims to understand the specificity of women’s writing not as a product of sexism but as a fundamental aspect of female reality. Its prime concern is to see ‘woman as producer of textual meaning, with the history themes, genres, and structures of literature by women’. Its ‘subjects include the psychodynamics of female creativity. It studies linguistics and the problem of a female language in literary text. It reviews the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career. It proposes ‘to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on women’s experience’. Its study ‘focuses on the newly visible world of female culture’; ‘hypotheses of a female sub–culture’; ‘the occupations, interactions, and consciousness of women’.

Showalter traces the evolution in female writing, and for literature by and about women she finds three different stages. She labels the stages into Feminine, Feminist, Female phases.

Feminine Phase (1840-1880)

Declares that it is characterized by “women [writing] in an effort to equal the intellectual achievements of the male culture, and internalized its assumption about female nature. The distinguishing sign of this period is the male pseudonym… [which] exerts an irregular pressure on the narrative, affecting tone, diction, structure, and characterization.” Marry Ann Evans is George Elliot’s pseudonym to get access to the male literary world.

The Feminist phase (1880–1920)

A phase wherein “women are historically enabled to reject the accommodating postures of femininity and to use literature to dramatize the ordeals of wronged womanhood.” This phase is characterized by “Amazon Utopias,” visions of perfect, female-led societies of the future. This phase was characterized by women’s writing that protested against male standards and values, and advocated women’s rights and values, including a demand for autonomy. Elizabeth Gaskell posted her protest toward the sexiest and exclusive values of male literary world through her novels and short stories.

 

The Female phase (1920— ) is one of self-discovery. Showalter says, “women reject both imitation and protest—two forms of dependency—and turn instead to female experience as the source of an autonomous art, extending the feminist analysis of culture to the forms and techniques of literature”. This is a phase where female writers can bring an autonomous female aesthetic to exist side by side with androcentric world. Virginia Woolf is name to remember from this phase.

Bressler elaborates Showalter’s ideas about studying women’s writing. He says that:

“provides critics with four models concerning the nature of women’s writing that help answer some of the chief concerns of feminist criticism: the biological, linguistic, psychoanalytic, and cultural. Each Showalter’s model is sequential, subsuming and developing the preceding model. The biological emphasizes how the female body marks itself upon a text by providing a host of literary images and a personal, intimate tone. The linguistic model concerns itself with the need for a female discourse. This model investigates the differences between how men and women use language. It asserts that women can and do create a language peculiar to their gender and how this language can be used in their writings. The psychoanalytic model, based on an analysis of the female psyche and how such an analysis affects the writing process, emphasizes the flux and fluidity of female writing as opposed to male rigidity and structure. And the cultural model investigates how the society in which female authors work and function shape women’s goals, responses, and point of view.”