Wuuh! Man
Notes on Feminist Literary Criticism
One of the most developed critical movements towards the second half of the 20th century, feminist literary criticism has appropriated gender studies to its own field in the wake of its being co-opted in the academe and its existence in the mainstream literary criticism.
A part of the broader feminist political movement that seeks to rectify sexist discrimination and inequalities, it allows for no single feminist literary criticism—only half-dozen interrelated projects, namely—exposing masculinist stereotypes, distortions and omissions in male-dominated literature; studying female creativity, genres, styles, themes, careers, and literary traditions; discovering and evaluating lost and neglected literary works by women; developing feminist theoretical concepts and methods; examining the forces that shape women’s lives, literature and criticism, from psychology to cultural history; and creating new ideas of and roles for women, including new institutional arrangements.
In the history of feminist criticism, the following areas roughly correspond with these tasks previously said. From “Women reading men reading women, to “Women reading” to “Women talking” to “Women writing” to “on the margins, ”or the heterogeneity of women,” on and on and on, women’s issues have since gradated like never before.
New [Image of] Woman in Gilbert and Gubar
In Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s “Infection in the Sentence: Anxiety of Authorship,” the woman in feminist literary rhetoric has been given a new perspective. Considering that the female is “dis-eased” by patriarchy, G & G claim that the anxiety of authorship compels a woman to write in lesser genres—such as diary, children’s books, merely mimicking men’s writing styles. There is the woman’s tendency is to hide herself in the guise of male when writing the major genres. Such concealment is strategy to confront fear brought about by dis-ease. Particularly significant is the madwoman image of Bertha Mason rendered in Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Rebellious energies are channeled through the character of the “madwoman in the attic.”
Here, the madwoman is considered the alter ego of the author. She is virtually the projection of the rebellious impulses not found in the usual heroine. It also enunciates the female writer’s self-division—torn to either accept patriarchy on the surface, or totally reject patriarchy underneath.
Gilbert and Gubar also say women also play hide-and-seek with the reader in an effort to work towards social acceptance. In brief, G & G tried to articulate how women could escape male ways of discourse.
Since G & G, female mythological characters are being re-studied and appropriated to this concept of the madwoman—and being thus given different interpretation. It is said that dominant images in women’s writing—pervasive in fiction—all promote the idea of imprisonment—enclosures, or similar ways of containing.
Reading Gilbert and Gubar, Toril Moi attacks the limitation of the former’s contentions, saying, “that all texts written by women become feminist texts.” In addition, G & G assume that patriarchy’s ideology is unitary and coherent. Coming from a contemporary feminist perspective, Moi say that like all ideology, patriarchy is incoherent and fragmentary.
In a similar vein, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” for instance, there are pervasive images of delusions of liberation or freedom. There is a part in the story where images of imprisonment fill to the brim. There are also significant traces of illustrating the womb as tomb—which strikes as another image of enclosure, imprisonment, and restriction.
A Feminist Poetics Project
Meanwhile, there had been attempts to shed light on the feminist criticism through the historization or periodization of the feminist literary tradition. One of which is Elaine Showalter’s “Toward a Feminist Poetics” which roughly maps out the history of women’s literature into three phases.
Showalter’s feminist poetics project was brought about by the absence of a clearly articulated theory of writing by women; and in the light of activists’ hostility to theory [which they consider all male, or male-dominated.
In the Feminine Phase [1840-1880] women wrote to equal intellectual achievement of the male culture and rather only internalized its assumptions about female nature. This stage is largely characterized by imitation of male writing. In the Feminist Phase [1880-1920] women’s writing protested against male standards and values, also advocating women’s rights and values, including a demand for autonomy. Protest and advocacy ruled the day here. In the Female Phase [1920 onwards], women are said to reject both imitation and protest—which they now consider dependencies—and instead turn to female experience as the source of autonomous art, extending its analysis of culture to forms and techniques of literature. The last phase can be considered self-discovery, which considers studying the female literary tradition not in isolation but in co-existence with the male tradition.
After mapping such terrain, Showalter comes to two ways to look at it. First, in the feminist critique, she acknowledges women as victims since when woman as reader comes to receive only images and stereotypes—which are considered misconceptions in literature. Then, she looks to gynocriticism, which considers woman as writer, and which carries with it the psychodynamics of female creativity.
According to Showalter, feminist critics must use cultural analysis as ways to understand what women write, rather than dictate what they ought to write. She recognizes that the critical task is to nurture a new feminine cultural perspective within a feminist tradition that exists within the male tradition—but on which it is not dependent and to which it is not answerable.
Showalter rejects both imitation and protest and approaches criticism from a cultural perspective of the current Female Phase—and not from psychoanalytic and biological theories. She suggests that approaching women’s writing from a cultural perspective is one among many valid perspectives that will uncover female traditions.
Showalter rather coins gynocriticism one that’s based in a feminine perspective that seeks 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 adopt male models and theories.” Showalter enjoins gynocritics to “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.” Furthermore, in Showalter’s consideration gynocriticism is not to erase the differences between male and female writing—but to aim to understand the specificity of women’s writing not as a product of sexism but as a fundamental aspect of female reality.
Though she acknowledges that gynocritics may never succeed in understanding the special differences of women’s writing, or realize a distinct female tradition, Showalter sees it as “a way to lean something solid, enduring, and real about the relation of women to literature.”
Feminist Thought Integrates with Other Theories
Through time, the feminist literary has integrated with Marxism and similar strains of thought that seek to debunk domination by class or gender or race. Here it is important to note the Marxist-feminist collective which renders clearer reading to works written by men and women authors alike.
In particular, nineteenth century women writing exhibited the polarization of politics [revolutionary vs. conservatism] and genre [romanticism vs. social realism] through the works of such women authors as Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Bronte. In Jane Eyre, for instance, there had been tendencies in the women’s writing in this period that characterizes tensions. Pierre Macherey’s not-said element contributes to the essence of the story—the transformation, if any, of Jane Eyre’s character in Bronte’s novel.
In a Marxist-feminist reading of Jane Eyre, we see that feminism is in the not-said, or virtually the unconscious of the text. As overt manifestation, the sexuality is integrated within the symbolic patriarchy. On the surface, sexuality is tamed and appropriated within the social order or marriage. “Reader, I married him” is Jane Eyre’s outright expression of submission to patriarchy.
While a Marxist perspective will think Jane Eyre’s class or social mobility is of primary interest in the novel, the liberal feminist thought will recognize that Jane Eyre’s conviction and struggle to get educated, and direct her efforts to make herself a fuller woman—totally independent of a male—these all tell us in these contexts that openings and spaces are given for women to liberate themselves from the patriarchal order.
One of the most developed critical movements towards the second half of the 20th century, feminist literary criticism has appropriated gender studies to its own field in the wake of its being co-opted in the academe and its existence in the mainstream literary criticism.
A part of the broader feminist political movement that seeks to rectify sexist discrimination and inequalities, it allows for no single feminist literary criticism—only half-dozen interrelated projects, namely—exposing masculinist stereotypes, distortions and omissions in male-dominated literature; studying female creativity, genres, styles, themes, careers, and literary traditions; discovering and evaluating lost and neglected literary works by women; developing feminist theoretical concepts and methods; examining the forces that shape women’s lives, literature and criticism, from psychology to cultural history; and creating new ideas of and roles for women, including new institutional arrangements.
In the history of feminist criticism, the following areas roughly correspond with these tasks previously said. From “Women reading men reading women, to “Women reading” to “Women talking” to “Women writing” to “on the margins, ”or the heterogeneity of women,” on and on and on, women’s issues have since gradated like never before.
New [Image of] Woman in Gilbert and Gubar
In Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s “Infection in the Sentence: Anxiety of Authorship,” the woman in feminist literary rhetoric has been given a new perspective. Considering that the female is “dis-eased” by patriarchy, G & G claim that the anxiety of authorship compels a woman to write in lesser genres—such as diary, children’s books, merely mimicking men’s writing styles. There is the woman’s tendency is to hide herself in the guise of male when writing the major genres. Such concealment is strategy to confront fear brought about by dis-ease. Particularly significant is the madwoman image of Bertha Mason rendered in Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Rebellious energies are channeled through the character of the “madwoman in the attic.”
Here, the madwoman is considered the alter ego of the author. She is virtually the projection of the rebellious impulses not found in the usual heroine. It also enunciates the female writer’s self-division—torn to either accept patriarchy on the surface, or totally reject patriarchy underneath.
Gilbert and Gubar also say women also play hide-and-seek with the reader in an effort to work towards social acceptance. In brief, G & G tried to articulate how women could escape male ways of discourse.
Since G & G, female mythological characters are being re-studied and appropriated to this concept of the madwoman—and being thus given different interpretation. It is said that dominant images in women’s writing—pervasive in fiction—all promote the idea of imprisonment—enclosures, or similar ways of containing.
Reading Gilbert and Gubar, Toril Moi attacks the limitation of the former’s contentions, saying, “that all texts written by women become feminist texts.” In addition, G & G assume that patriarchy’s ideology is unitary and coherent. Coming from a contemporary feminist perspective, Moi say that like all ideology, patriarchy is incoherent and fragmentary.
In a similar vein, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” for instance, there are pervasive images of delusions of liberation or freedom. There is a part in the story where images of imprisonment fill to the brim. There are also significant traces of illustrating the womb as tomb—which strikes as another image of enclosure, imprisonment, and restriction.
A Feminist Poetics Project
Meanwhile, there had been attempts to shed light on the feminist criticism through the historization or periodization of the feminist literary tradition. One of which is Elaine Showalter’s “Toward a Feminist Poetics” which roughly maps out the history of women’s literature into three phases.
Showalter’s feminist poetics project was brought about by the absence of a clearly articulated theory of writing by women; and in the light of activists’ hostility to theory [which they consider all male, or male-dominated.
In the Feminine Phase [1840-1880] women wrote to equal intellectual achievement of the male culture and rather only internalized its assumptions about female nature. This stage is largely characterized by imitation of male writing. In the Feminist Phase [1880-1920] women’s writing protested against male standards and values, also advocating women’s rights and values, including a demand for autonomy. Protest and advocacy ruled the day here. In the Female Phase [1920 onwards], women are said to reject both imitation and protest—which they now consider dependencies—and instead turn to female experience as the source of autonomous art, extending its analysis of culture to forms and techniques of literature. The last phase can be considered self-discovery, which considers studying the female literary tradition not in isolation but in co-existence with the male tradition.
After mapping such terrain, Showalter comes to two ways to look at it. First, in the feminist critique, she acknowledges women as victims since when woman as reader comes to receive only images and stereotypes—which are considered misconceptions in literature. Then, she looks to gynocriticism, which considers woman as writer, and which carries with it the psychodynamics of female creativity.
According to Showalter, feminist critics must use cultural analysis as ways to understand what women write, rather than dictate what they ought to write. She recognizes that the critical task is to nurture a new feminine cultural perspective within a feminist tradition that exists within the male tradition—but on which it is not dependent and to which it is not answerable.
Showalter rejects both imitation and protest and approaches criticism from a cultural perspective of the current Female Phase—and not from psychoanalytic and biological theories. She suggests that approaching women’s writing from a cultural perspective is one among many valid perspectives that will uncover female traditions.
Showalter rather coins gynocriticism one that’s based in a feminine perspective that seeks 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 adopt male models and theories.” Showalter enjoins gynocritics to “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.” Furthermore, in Showalter’s consideration gynocriticism is not to erase the differences between male and female writing—but to aim to understand the specificity of women’s writing not as a product of sexism but as a fundamental aspect of female reality.
Though she acknowledges that gynocritics may never succeed in understanding the special differences of women’s writing, or realize a distinct female tradition, Showalter sees it as “a way to lean something solid, enduring, and real about the relation of women to literature.”
Feminist Thought Integrates with Other Theories
Through time, the feminist literary has integrated with Marxism and similar strains of thought that seek to debunk domination by class or gender or race. Here it is important to note the Marxist-feminist collective which renders clearer reading to works written by men and women authors alike.
In particular, nineteenth century women writing exhibited the polarization of politics [revolutionary vs. conservatism] and genre [romanticism vs. social realism] through the works of such women authors as Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Bronte. In Jane Eyre, for instance, there had been tendencies in the women’s writing in this period that characterizes tensions. Pierre Macherey’s not-said element contributes to the essence of the story—the transformation, if any, of Jane Eyre’s character in Bronte’s novel.
In a Marxist-feminist reading of Jane Eyre, we see that feminism is in the not-said, or virtually the unconscious of the text. As overt manifestation, the sexuality is integrated within the symbolic patriarchy. On the surface, sexuality is tamed and appropriated within the social order or marriage. “Reader, I married him” is Jane Eyre’s outright expression of submission to patriarchy.
While a Marxist perspective will think Jane Eyre’s class or social mobility is of primary interest in the novel, the liberal feminist thought will recognize that Jane Eyre’s conviction and struggle to get educated, and direct her efforts to make herself a fuller woman—totally independent of a male—these all tell us in these contexts that openings and spaces are given for women to liberate themselves from the patriarchal order.
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