LECTURE SEVEN

ALI 201: MODERN THEORIES OF LITERATURE

FEMINIST/GENDER CRITICISM
Objectives
At the end of this unit, you should be able to:
a) provide a background to gender/feminist criticism
b) discuss the emergence of gender/feminist criticism
c) describe the stages in feminist/gender criticism
d) outline the key assumptions of feminist criticism
e) discuss the theoretical postulations of feminist/gender criticism
f) draw a summary of feminist/gender criticism.

a) Introduction
 Feminist criticism grew out of the women‘s movement that followed World War II.
 Feminist criticism seeks to analyse the role of gender in works of literature.
 A leading feminist critic, Elaine Showalter, describes two purposes of feminist criticism:
i) feminist critique: the analysis of works by male authors, especially in the depiction of
women‘s writing; and
ii) gynocriticism: the study of women‘s writing.
 Feminist critics have also focused on recovering neglected works by women authors through
the ages and creating a canon of women‘s writing.
 Gender issues play a part in every aspect of human production and experience, including the
production and experience of literature, whether we are consciously aware of these issues or
not.
 Feminist/gender criticism examines how sexual identity influences the creation and reception
of literary works.
 A feminist critic sees cultural and economic disabilities in a "patriarchal" society that have
hindered or prevented women from realising their creative possibilities
 A feminist critic sees women's cultural identification as a merely negative object, or "Other,"
to man as the defining and dominating "Subject."

b) The Emergence Of Gender/Feminist Criticism

 Feminist or gender criticism bases its interpretations on ideas about the nature of females and
female experience.
 With the rise of feminism in the 1950s and 1960s, feminist critics claimed that, over the
years, men had controlled the most influential interpretive communities.
 Men decided which conventions made up "literature" and judged the quality of works.
 Men wrote the literary histories and drew up the lists of "great" works - the literary canon.
 Because works by and about women were omitted from the canon, women authors were
ignored, and women characters misconstrued.
 Since the 1960s, however, feminist literary critics have successfully challenged these
circumstances.
 Far more women now teach, interpret, evaluate, and theorise about literature than ever
before.

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 Literary genres practiced by women, such as diaries, journals, and letters, have gained more
respect.
 Numerous anthologies, literary histories, and interpretive studies explore women's
contributions to literature.
 Today, a new movement, "gender studies," has evolved out of feminist studies in order to
address broader issues; notably, the nature of femininity and masculinity, the differences
within each sex, and the literary treatment of men and homosexuals.
 Feminist criticism is political in that it argues for the fair representation and treatment of
women.

c) Stages of Development of Feminist Criticism

1. The First Stage
 Began with two influential books: Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) and Kate
Millet's Sexual Politics (1970).
 Both authors criticised the distorted representation of women by well-known male authors.
 Their work laid the foundation for the most prevalent approach of this stage, the "images of
women" approach.
 After de Beavouir and Millet, feminist critics called attention to the unjust, distorted, and
limited representation (images) of females in works of literature, especially works authored
by males.
 They celebrated realistic representations of women and brought to light neglected works by
and about women.
 They sought to expose the "politics" of self-interest that led people to create stereotypical and
false images of women.

2. The Second Stage/Gynocriticism

 Began in the early 1970s.
 Critics shifted away from works by males to concentrate on works by females.
 Elaine Showalter, a prominent critic from this period, called this approach "gynocriticism."
 Gynocritics urged women to become familiar with female authors and to discover their own
female "language," a language that supposedly enters the subconscious before the
"patriarchal" language of the dominant culture.
 They tried to delineate a female poetics, a use of literary conventions and genres that seems
typically "female."
 Some critics based feminist poetics on the possible connection between writing and the
female body.
 Because women's bodies have more fluids than men's, they argued, women's writing is more
"fluid":
i) It is less structured,
ii) less unified,
iii) more inclusive of many points of view,
iv) less given to neat endings, and
v) more open to fantasy than writing by men.
 It rejects or undermines the "marriage plot" and the "happy ending," in which a strong female
protagonist submits to a male by marrying him.

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 Female poetics seeks to understand why female authors tend to favour certain genres (lyric
poetry, novel, short story, tale, letters, diaries, memoirs) over others (epic, martial romance,
drama, satire).

3. The Third Stage

 Rebelled against the "essentialist" assumptions of Gynocriticism
 Its focus is on the cultural creation of identity.
 The third stage of feminist criticism attempts to distinguish between "sex" and "gender."
 While sex is the biological difference between males and females, gender is the cultural
difference.
 Culture determines the traits and behaviour that set masculinity apart from femininity.
 Western culture, for example, has seen women as passive rather than active, irrational rather
than rational, subjective rather than objective, at home rather than at "work," spiritual rather
than material, and impractical rather than practical.
 It has ruled that certain kinds of behaviour are "abnormal" and "unnatural" for females to
practice, such as pursuing careers, doing construction work, being pastors or priests, wearing
"male" clothes, or being assertive.
 Such gender distinctions, feminist critics claim, are arbitrary and almost always give women
less power, status, and respect than men.
 They argued that many women are "trapped" by the gender traits assigned to them by culture.
NB: The three "stages" of feminist criticism highlighted have overlapped and coexisted, and
continued to be practiced.
d) The Key Assumptions Of Feminist Critics
1. Our civilisation is pervasively patriarchal.
2. The concepts of "gender" are largely, if not entirely, cultural constructs, effected by the
omnipresent patriarchal biases of our civilisation.
3. This patriarchal ideology also pervades those writings that have been considered great
literature.
4. Such works, feminist critics aver, lack autonomous female role models, and are implicitly
addressed to male readers, leaving the woman reader an alien outsider or else solicit her to
identify against herself by assuming male values and ways of perceiving, feeling, and acting.

e) Theoretical Postulations of Gender/Feminist Criticism

 Feminist criticism covers almost anything that has to do with female emancipation and
empowerment.
 Feminist criticism is an attempt by the women-folk to universally liberate itself from male
chauvinism and patriarchy.
 The shift is not intended to cause gender terrorism; it aims at making the position of women
at home, at work, at school, in the street etc. more challenging to themselves and their men-
folk in the social phenomenon.
 The theoretical postulations of feminist/gender criticism are summarised as:
1. dissatisfaction with the place of women in global social and cultural situations; it proposes a
dynamic ideological commitment.
2. pursue the cause of women in literary texts. This is accomplished by encouraging women
authors to write novels, plays and poems.
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3. feature and make women characters and ideas dominant in works.
4. propagate feminist thought, female concerns, ideas ―and accomplishments and to recover
the largely unrecorded and unknown history of women in earlier times.
5. examine the ways in which literary texts reinforce patriarchy because the ability to see when
and how patriarchal ideology operates is crucial to one’s ability to resist it in one‘s life.
6. the belief that men are superior to women has been used to justify and maintain the male
monopoly of positions of economic, political, and social power, in other words, to keep
women powerless by denying them the educational and occupational means of acquiring
economic, political, and social power. That is, the inferior position long occupied by women
in patriarchal society has been culturally, not biologically, produced.
7. patriarchal ideology works to keep women and men in traditional gender roles and thereby
maintain male dominance.
8. women are oppressed by patriarchy economically, politically, socially, and psychologically
and patriarchal ideology is the primary means by which they are kept so. In every domain
where patriarchy reigns, a woman is the other: she is objectified and marginalised, defined
only by her difference from male norms and values, and by what she (allegedly) lacks but
which men (allegedly) have.

f) Summary of Feminist/Gender Criticism

1. Feminist criticism examines the ways in which literary texts reinforce patriarchy because the
ability to see when and how patriarchal ideology operates is crucial to one’s ability to resist it
in one‘s life.
2. The duty of the feminist literary critic is to pursue the cause of women in literary texts. This
is accomplished by encouraging women authors to write novels, plays and poems.
3. Furthermore, the feminist literary writer endeavours to feature and make women characters
and ideas dominant in her works.