The Approach through Context:

FEMINISM AND GENDER THEORY

The beginnings of feminist approaches to literature: the late 60s

Origins of feminist criticism: in the 18th and 19th century social and political movements concerned with
WOMENS RIGHTS attempts at emancipation

Mary Wollstonecrafts work A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)

John Stuart Mill and his wife Harriet Taylor liberal intellectuals pleaded for social
equality and condemned the modern slavery in which women had been kept through social
institutions (e.g. marriage)
The principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes the legal
subordination of one sex to the other is wrong itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human
improvement; [] it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or
privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other. (the essay The Subjection of Women 1869)

Margaret Fuller, in America: Woman in the 19th Century (1845)

We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to woman as
freely as to man then and then only will mankind be ripe for this, when inward and outward freedom
for woman as much as for man shall be acknowledged as a right, not yielded as a concession.

FIRST WAVE FEMINISM

The 19th and early 20th movements concerned mainly with womens social and political rights
especially the right to vote (suffrage/political franchise) the WOMAN QUESTION

The early 20th century: the SUFFRAGETTE MOVEMENT

Among the key figures: ELIZABETH CANDY STANTON and SUSAN B. ANTHONY (the United States)
founded the National Woman Suffrage Association

 E. Stanton: The Declaration of Sentiments The history of mankind is a history of

repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object
the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her

The NEW WOMAN movement end of 19th century: a new ideal of femininity, opposing the Victorian
stereotype of woman as confined to the domestic sphere and subordinated to male interests

The New Women: emphasis on education, intelligence and independence political reformers,
professional women, women novelists, students

Sometimes represented satirically

Women and literature

Major British and American writers of the first part of the 20 th century some of them: associated with
the rising literary modernism

Virginia Woolf
Gertrude Stein
Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)
Djuna Barnes
Katherine Mansfield
Edith Wharton
Dorothy Richardson
Willa Cather

They are not associated with political and social activism, but their writings questioned the way in
which a male-dominated culture controls the building of female identity concerned with the
position and role of women in society

Interest in the condition of woman as a writer, as an author

Virginia Woolf A Room of Ones Own, 1929

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction

Financial dependence of women, as well as unequal access to education, had prevented them
from free expression of personality

Women had been turned into flattering mirrors for men discouraged to speak the truth about
mens achievements
For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished.
How is he to go on giving judgement, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and
speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he
really is?

Woolf examines the conditions of womens literary success and recognition by inventing a sister for
William Shakespeare, Judith her talent equalled that of her brother, but she was denied education
and was not encouraged to assert herself she commits suicide

Judith: the tragic epitome of the woman writer annihilated by social discrimination and inequality

SECOND WAVE FEMINISM

Major influence: SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR French existentialist thinker, novelist, feminist critic

Le Deuxime Sexe (The Second Sex), 1949 (Engl. transl. 1953)

One is not born, but becomes a woman

 Woman is not essentially different from man, but is constructed by society as unequal, as
an Other social constructionism woman as second sex, trained by society into
subordination marginalized and alienated from herself

Woman is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to
her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he
is the Absolute she is the Other.

A book about the "the pervasiveness and intensity and mysteriousness of the history of
women's oppression

Beauvoir points to the difference between SEX (biological) and GENDER (social, cultural;
acquired/learned, not given)

A critique of Freudian psychoanalysis and its implicit misogynism Freud privileges the
masculine his theories: seen as justifying the PATRIARCHAL order of Western societies

PATRIARCHY: A social formation in which the father, or a father figure, is the supreme authority.

More commonly, the term refers to complex societies in which social and cultural institutions are
created and ruled by men, and in which women are accorded inferior or secondary status (Gregory
Castle)

Phallocentrism: the patriarchal foundations of Western thought, which privileges the masculine

Phallus (Jacques Lacan) the signifier of male or patriarchal power

Phallogocentrism (Jacques Derrida): emphasizes the implication of language and reason

(logos) in the constitution of patriarchal power (phallus+logocentrism)

Second wave feminism: the 60sthe early 80s emerged in the context of a social climate of
radicalism and contestation

e.g. the protests against the war in Vietnam; the student rebellions against oppressive institutions
(Paris, 1968)

In literature and culture, second wave feminism was concerned with:

A re-examination of the status of women and of their representations raising awareness of their

oppression the creation of positive images of woman

The re-examination of the literary and cultural CANON, denounced as phallocentric new

emphasis on women-writers ; the rise of a pop culture centered on female sensibility

Encouraging women to focus on their own EXPERIENCE as a source of authority for their acts of

literary creation and reception

Their own peculiar way of feeling, acting, thinking and speaking will lead them to write and
value literary works differently from their male counterparts

Feminism criticism of this kind assumes that there is a fundamental continuity between
womens experience of social and familial structures and their experience as writers and
readers

Feminism and Marxism

Feminist criticism shares with Marxism the CONFLICT MODEL of opposed identities struggling for
supremacy. the SOCIALIST orientation of much feminist criticism

The Marxist model applied to feminist discourse: women have been regarded as a class which
has been alienated from their distinct experience as women the victims of the most insidious kind
of oppression, that which alienates a group from its own interests as a group and encourages
it to identify with the interests of the oppressor (cf. J. Stuart Mill).

The man task of feminism: to examine and demolish those cultural and literary values considered as
male-centered (analogy with the Marxist idea of political struggle, which must be preceded by the
awakening of a class to its own interests)

Denouncing the strategies employed by a patriarchal culture to create and perpetuate such
alienating stereotypes of women

In the literary experience, such stereotypes lead women to adopt writing and reading positions
against their own interests as women and induce self-estrangement.

JUDITH Fetterly The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (1978)
feminist criticism=political criticism

She examines the condition of woman as reader in a patriarchal society

She analyses the male bias of some major texts of American literature (Washington Irving,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Henry James) all define universal values
in specifically male terms

Such texts constitute a series of designs upon the female reader she examines the way in
which the female reader is conditioned to read as a man, to adopt a male perspective and the
male values of the text

The female reader is co-opted into participation in an experience from which she is explicitly
excluded; she is asked to identify with a selfhood that defines itself in opposition to her, she is
required to identify against herself

The task of the feminist critic is to resist such strategies, to refuse the values defined in male
terms to begin the process of exorcising the male mind that has been implanted to us.

Affinity with Marxism: she argues that feminist criticism is a political act whose aim is not only
to interpret the world but to change it by changing the consciousness of those who
read.

KATE MILLETT (American critic) Sexual Politics (1970) analyses the sexual visions and ideologies in
the novels of D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer and Jean Genet discusses the relation
between sex and power as represented in their works

She exposes the sexism and the aggressive phallic vision of Henry Miller and Norman Mailer
counterrevolutionary sexual politicians; Mailer: accused of being a prisoner of the virility cult.

A fundamental critical-theoretical book for second wave feminism an essential role in the
expansion of feminism in the academia the spread of Women Studies programmes in
universities

She uses Max Webers concept of Herrschaft to describe the relation of dominance and
subordinance between sexes, throughout history the interior colonization of woman:
institutionalized, seen as a natural aspect of the social order

Millet:

Gender segregation: more rigorous than class stratification, more uniform, certainly more enduring.
However muted its present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the
most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power.
This is so because our society, like all other historical civilisations, is a patriarchy. The fact is evident at
once if one recalls that the military, industry, technology, universities, science, political office, and
finance - in short, every avenue of power within the society, including the coercive force of the police, is
entirely in male hands. As the essence of politics is power, such realisation cannot fail to carry impact.
What lingers of supernatural authority, the Deity, "His" ministry, together with the ethics and values, the
philosophy and art of our culture - its very civilisation - as T. S. Eliot once observed, is of male
manufacture.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/millett.htm

Feminism and Freud

Kate Millet condemns Freud for his contribution to the strengthening of patriarchal attitudes she
follows Simone de Beauvoir in her criticism of psychoanalysis

Later, Freud was defended by other feminists e.g. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism
(1974)

Mitchell shows that, in fact, psychoanalysis operates with the notion of gender as acquired
feminine sexuality: not a natural given, but formed during the early childhood experiences and
processes of socialization

Other feminist critics who rehabilitated psychoanalysis and made it relevant to feminism: Jane
Gallop, Jacqueline Rose, Elaine Showalter

Freud and Lacan: regarded more favourably by British and French feminists American feminism:
more critical of psychoanalysis

DOROTHY DINNERSTEIN The Mermaid and the Minotaur. Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise
(1976) psychoanalytical explanation of the phenomenon of a woman reader identifying herself with
the male voice

The cause of this identification: the nurturing arrangements in early childhood the childs total
dependence on his mother is a source for later vulnerability and disappointment

This sense of dependence creates a feeling of self-loathing in women and determines their rallying
with man as a truly independent figure, a real I.

Sandra GILBERT and Susan GUBAR The Mad Woman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979)

An application of Harold Blooms theory of the anxiety of influence to the analysis of the
relationship between women writers and their male predecessors, as well as their audiences, in the
19th century England and America

[H. Blooms Anxiety of Influence (1973): Freudian psychoanalysis applied to literary history the Oedipian
rivalry between writers and their great precursors]

Writers that Gilbert and Gubar discuss: Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Charlotte and Emily Bront,
George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson

They point out the divided self of the 19th century women writers, under the pressure of a
predominantly male tradition in fiction or poetry their polemic with the established male fictional
genres (e.g. the Bildungsroman)

Their representations of women: evidence of self-denial, concealment and doubleness division

between the impulse for self-assertion and their formation in the spirit of patriarchal values

E.g. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre this split nature of woman: dramatized in two female characters
(the protagonist and Bertha Mason) who represent two male perceptions of femininity in that age:
the woman as ANGEL (pure, submissive) vs. the woman as MONSTER (passionate, rebellious,
uncontrollable)

Anglo-American Feminism vs. FRENCH FEMINISM

Anglo-American feminist criticism of the second wave: strong political bias social and political
activism

Preoccupied mostly by the analysis of gender images in both male and female writings the
representations of femininity and masculinity

French feminism: more theoretical/philosophical -- highly interdisciplinary

The influence of Lacan and Derrida preoccupied by the question of language as an instrument of
patriarchy and by its relation with the body (the body as text; the text as body)

The concept of CRITURE FMININE a discourse which would be free from phallocentric values
an escape from phallogocentrism

HLNE CIXOUS, The Laugh of the Medusa (1975): a feminine practice of writing [] will
always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system; it does and will take place in
areas other than those subordinated to philosophico-theoretical domination. It will be conceived by
subjects who are breakers of automatisms, by peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate

Cixous Sorties (1975) [Fr: escapes; departures; outcomings]

Gender difference: constructed by means of binary oppositions, which are always hierarchical
one term is privileged

Masculine/Feminine corresponds, in the symbolic systems of Western culture, to oppositions such

as:

Activity/Passivity
Sun/Moon
Culture/Nature
Day/Night
Father/Mother
Head/heart
Intelligible/sensible
Logos/Pathos
LUCE IRIGARAY Speculum of the Other Woman (1974)

Focus on the exclusion of women from the discourses of both philosophy and psychoanalytic
theory

She questions Freuds theory of the Oedipus complex an example of the way in which
psychoanalysis entraps woman in the system of masculine representations

Women: traditionally associated with matter and nature denied a subject position

JULIA KRISTEVA influenced by Lacan

The opposition between the symbolic and the semiotic

The symbolic: associated with authority, order, control, normality; with the notion of a
unified, stable self with the Father-figure

The semiotic: associated with displacement, slippage, condensation a state of language

anterior to the Word (she goes back to Plato and his notion of chora = receptacle, womb, the
maternal the place of pre-Oedipal absence of boundaries)

THIRD WAVE FEMINISM

A new orientation in feminist thought: beginning with the late 70s80s

The rejection of universalist, abstract concepts of woman, which ignored issues related to race,
class, sexual orientation

More diverse and more nuanced approach to gender and its discursive construction

Feminisms a plural movement intersections with Ethnic Studies, Postcolonial Studies,

Postmodernism

JUDITH BUTLER poststructuralist approach to gender highly influential in political philosophy, lesbian
and gay studies, and literary theory

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) questions the identity
politics of previous feminist movements she conceives identity as social PERFORMANCE

Gender identity = a matter of PERFORMATIVITY (the discursive mode by which ontological

effects are installed; that aspect of discourse that has the capacity to produce what it names)

Identity is not something fixed and regulated by social norms, but something fluid, constituted
through the choice of discourses