Rajesh James

Department of English
SH College, Thevara, Cochin

Feminism(s)
Feminism, the longest revolution as Juliet Mitchell called, is
both a political stance and a theory that focuses on gender as a
subject of analysis and as a platform for women to demand
equality, rights and justice. According to Toril Moi feminist
criticism is a specific kind of political discourse, a critical and
theoretical practice committed to the struggle against patriarchy
and sexism. It analyses prevalent gender roles as they are
represented in cultural forms like literature, cinema, and
advertisement. Feminism has four principal concerns, which are
to:
Elucidate the origins and causes of gender inequality.
Explain the operation and persistence of this state of
affairs.
Delineate effective strategies to either bring about full
equality between sexes or at least ameliorate the effects
of ongoing inequality.
Imagine a world in which sexual inequality no longer
exists.
The feminist literary criticism of today is the direct product of the
womens movements of 1960s which was a renewal of an old
tradition of thought and action already possessing its classic
books which had diagnosed the problems of womens inequality
in society and the proposed solutions. These books include Mary
Wollstonecrafts a Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792),
Margaret Fullers Women in the Nineteenth Century (1845),John
Stuart Mills The subjection of women (1869),Virginia Woolfs A
Room of Ones Own (1929),Simon de Beauvoirs The Second Sex
(1949).The womens movement was literary from the start in the

Rajesh James
Department of English
SH College, Thevara, Cochin

sense that it realized the significance of the images of women

promulgated by literature and saw it as vital to combat them and
question their authority and their coherence. In this sense the
womens movement has always been crucially concerned with
books and literature .So feminist criticism should not be seen as
an off-shoot or spin- off which is remote from the ultimate aims
of the movement but as one of its most practical ways of
influencing every day conduct and attitudes.
Feminist criticisms in the 1970s exposed the mechanisms of
patriarchy, that is, the cultural mind set in men and women
which perpetuated sexual inequality. Critical attention was given
to books by male writers in which in which typical images of
women were constructed. Necessarily, the criticism which under
took this work was combative and polemical. Then, in 1980s, in
feminism as in other critical approaches, the mood was changed.
Firstly, feminist criticism became much more eclectic-drawing
upon the findings and approaches of other kinds of criticisms like
Marxism, structuralism, linguistics and so on.
Secondly, it switched its focus s from attacking male versions of
the world to exploring the nature of the female world and outlook
and reconstructing the lost or suppressed records of female
experience.
Thirdly, attention was switched to the need to construct new
canon of womens writing by rewriting the history of the novel
and poetry in such a way that neglected women writers were
given new prominence.
Elaine Showalter described the change in the late 1970s as a
shift of attention from androtexts (books by men) to gynotexts
(books by women).She coined the term gynocritics, meaning the

Rajesh James
Department of English
SH College, Thevara, Cochin

study of the gynotexts. Showalter classifies the history of

womens writing in to three phases:
Feminine

phase

(1840-80):

women

writers

imitated

dominant artistic norms and aesthetic standards.

Feminist phase (1880-1920): radical and separatist
positions are held.
Female phase (1920 onwards): looked particularly at
female writing and female experience
But feminist criticism since 1970s has been remarkable for the
wide range of positions that exist within it. Debates and
disagreements have centered on the following three particular
areas.

I)

Feminist criticism and the role of theory

A major division within feminist criticism has concerned

disagreements about the amount and type of theory that should
feature in it. Thus we have three major divisions within feminist
literary criticism based on the role of theory featured in it.
Anglo American feminism: The Anglo Americans tends
to be more skeptical about recent critical theory. They
maintain a major interest in traditional critical concepts like
theme, motif and characterization. They seem to accept the
conventions of literary realism and treat literature as a
series of representations of womens lives and experiences
which can be measured and evaluated against reality. They
see close reading and explication of individual literary texts
as the major business of feminist criticism.The American
critic Elaine Showalter is usually taken as the major
representative of this approach, but other exemplars would
be Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Patricia Stubbs and
Rachel Brownstein.

Rajesh James
Department of English
SH College, Thevara, Cochin

English

feminist

criticism:

unlike

Anglo

American

feminist criticism, English feminist criticism tends to be

more socialist feminist in orientation and is aligned with
cultural materialism or Marxism. So it rejects all non
theoretical categorization and arguments and values theory
as its major tool in accomplishing the perceived aim.
French feminism: in contrast to the Americans the work
of French feminism is more overtly theoretical, taking as its
starting points the insights of the major poststructuralists
like Lacan, Derrida and Foucault. For these feminists
critics, the literary text is never primarily a representation
of reality or a reproduction of a personal voice expressing
the minutiae of personal experience. Indeed, the French
theorist often deal with concerns other than literature: they
write about language, representation, and psychology as
such and often travel through detailed treatments of major
philosophical issues of this kind before coming in to the
literary text itself. The major figures on this French side of
the divide are Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous and Luce
Irigaray.

II)

Feminist criticism and language

Another fundamental issue, on which opinion is just as polarized,

is the question of whether or not there exists a form of language
which is inherently feminine. Virginia Woolf in her polemical
essay A Room of Once Own suggests that language use is
gendered, so that when a woman turns to novel writing she finds
that there is no common sentence ready for her use. The female
writer is seen as suffering the handicap of having to a medium
which is essentially a male instrument fashioned for male
purposes. This thesis that language is masculine in this sense is
developed by Dale Spender in the early 1980s in her book Man

Rajesh James
Department of English
SH College, Thevara, Cochin

Made Languages (1981).She also argues that language is not a

neutral medium but one which contains many features which
reflects its role as the instrument through which patriarchy finds
expression. Since there was a general consideration that
normative language was male oriented, French feminists sought
for a language which is free from this bias or in some way
oriented towards the female. They posited the existence of an
ecriture feminine (term is coined by Cixous in The laugh of the
Medusa), associated with feminine, and facilitating the free play
of meaning within the frame work loosened grammatical
structure. Since it is impossible to define a feminine practice of
writing, the user of ecriture feminine seems to exist in a realm
beyond logic. The user of such language is as a kind of perennial
freedom fighter in an anarchic realm of perpetual opposition
sniping at the centers of powers. For Cixous this kind of writing
is somehow uniquely the product of female physiology, which
women must celebrate in their writing. The notion of ecriture
feminine as put forwarded by Cixous raises many problems. The
essentialist arguments of cixous, in which the realm of body is
seen as somehow immune to social and gender conditioning, is
difficult to square with a feminism which emphasizes femininity
as a social construct. According to this femininity is not a given
entity which is which is somehow just mysteriously there.
Further expression of the notion of the ecriture feminine is found
in the writing of Julia Kristeva. She uses the terms the symbolic
and the semiotic to designate two different aspects of language. In
her essay The Systems and speaking subjects the symbolic
aspect is associated with authority, order, fathers, repression and
control. This symbolic facet of language maintains the fiction that
the self is fixed and unified. By contrast, the semiotic aspect of
discourse is characterized not by logic and order but by

Rajesh James
Department of English
SH College, Thevara, Cochin

displacement, condensation, slippage which suggests a much

looser and more randomized way of making connection.

III) Feminist criticism and psychoanalysis

The relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis is simple
in outline and complex in nuance. In fact such relationship had
its root in Kate Millets sexual politics in which she condemns
Freud as a prime source of the patriarchal attitudes against
which feminist must fought. But Freud was defended by Juliet
Mitchells Psychoanalysis and Feminism(1974).This book defends
Freud against Millet by using Millets own terms and concepts
like the difference between sex and gender, the former being a
matter of biology and the latter a construct, which is so crucial
to feminism .This distinction is what Simone de Beauvoir
invokes when she writes in her Second Sex one is not born a
women; rather, one becomes a women She echoed Mitchells
defense of Freud that he doesnt present feminine as something
simply given and natural. Female sexuality is not just there
naturally from the start but is formed by early experiences and
adjustments. It follows that gender roles must be malleable and
changeable .thus the Freudian notion of penis envy need not be
taken as simply concerning the male physical organ itself, but
concerning that organ as an emblem of social power and the
advantages which go with it. Jane Gallops Feminism and
psychoanalysis (1982) continues the rehabilitation process of
psycho analysis but by switching from Freudian to Lacanian
variety, especially in its assertion that phallus is not the
physical biological object but a symbol of power which goes with
it. Lacanian representation of men as powerless though men are
more

advantaged

than

women

and

his

way

of

writing

(notoriously abstruse, playful, punning and paralogical) seem to

embody the feminine or semiotic aspect of language rather than

Rajesh James
Department of English
SH College, Thevara, Cochin

masculine or symbolic aspects. A critic like Jacquiline Rose also

employs certain psychoanalytical tools in her feminist criticisms.
In general the defense of Freud and Lacan has been more
favourably received by French and British feminists than by
Americans.

Feminism and its Three Waves

It is customary to divide the history of feminism in to First,
second and Third Wave, with each period signaling a different era
in the struggle to attain equality between sexes. The First Wave
(1820-1920) feminism advocates for womens political rights and
pleads against obvious and manifest iniquities in societys
treatment of women. First wave feminists fought against three key
injustices:
Absence of legal protection against sexual violence.
Discrimination of women in working places.
Restriction on women in terms of the ownership of
property.
The key texts of the First Wave includes Mary

Wollstonecrafts

a Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792),Margaret Fullers

Women in the Nineteenth Century(1845),John Stuart Mills The
subjection of women (1869).
The Second Wave feminism (1960-80) reignites the demands of
the first wave in its continuations of the political struggle. Betty
Friedans The Feminine mystique (1963) is generally credited as
the tipping point for this second round of political struggle.
Echoing Wollstonecraft, she argues that women are victims of
false belief in the promise of femininity and urges them to look
beyond their domestic situation for fulfillment. Second Wave
feminism also takes the view that equality between the sexes will
only come about if there is a sea change in cultural attitudes on

Rajesh James
Department of English
SH College, Thevara, Cochin

the part of both men and women. Authors like Germaine Greer
and Kate Millet call for a sexual liberation. They argue that
women can alter their status as the second sex (to borrow the
title of Simone de Beauvoirs important book) by overturning the
double standards applied to their sexuality and behavior.
Third Wave feminism (1980- ) is against the problems within
feminism. Feminist scholars of colour, particularly those from the
Third World, argue that feminism neglects race and class. Issues
of racism and class difference form the spotlight of the Third
Wave feminism.