M.A. (English) Part-II Course - XI (Opt.

i)
Semester-III Literature and Gender
Lesson No. 17 Author : Dr. Swaraj Raj

“Feminisms” by Fiona Tolan : An Analysis

Introduction to the author Fiona Tolan:
A Senior Lecturer in English at Liverpool John Moores University, Fiona
Tolan specializes in contemporary fiction, particularly British and Canadian
fiction, and contemporary women's writing. She is the author of Margaret
Atwood: Feminism and Fiction and co-editor of Writers Talk: Conversations with
Contemporary British Novelists, Literature, Migration and the 'War on Terror' and
Teaching Gender. She has also written numerous journal articles and book
chapters on contemporary authors such as Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith and Kate
Atkinson.
Introduction to the essay:
The very title of Tolan’s essay being “Feminisms” and not feminism, it is
evident that she believes, and rightly so, that ‘feminism’ as an umbrella term is
not sufficient to account for such a dynamic enterprise as feminism which is a
diverse collection of social theories, political movements, and moral philosophies,
largely motivated by or concerning the experiences of women, especially in terms
of their social, political, and economic situation. Feminism cannot be construed
as a single, over-arching theory, though as a social movement, feminism largely
focuses on limiting or eradicating gender inequality and promoting women's
rights, interests, and issues in society.
In accepting differences within the dynamic and vibrant discourse of
feminism, in her essay Tolan points out where the roots of these differences lie.
She also underscores the multilogic nature of the feminist discourse in
articulating women’s experiences, desires, aspirations and rights as social beings,
in terms of both equality with and difference from the males. While giving a brief
overview of the waves of the feminist movement, she discusses various significant
theoretical inputs which have come from psychoanalysis, French feminism,
Deconstruction, Poststructuralism and the like. All these inputs have enriched
the discourse of feminism, though mutually contradictory stances of various
feminist thinkers have often prompted many unsympathetic critics to declare
that feminism cannot be an emancipatory project as it lacks a coherent theory.
Actually this lack of coherence only, as Tolan points out, is suggestive of the fact
M.A.(English) Part-II (Semester-III) 25 Course-XI (Opt. i)

that feminism avoids the essentialst trap which cannot accommodate differences.
We will talk more about essentialism later on.
Most feminist thinkers agree that apart from many recent developments,
the history of the feminist movement can be divided into two major stages, the
first wave dating from 1830-1920 and the second wave dating from 1960 to the
present day. Tolan also refers to these two waves, contextualizes the path-
breaking contribution of Simone de Beauvoir and then discusses literary
feminisms in detail.
Tolan presents her ideas under several subheads which are: 1) Simone de
Beauvoir and the Second Sex. 2) The Essentialism Debate. 3) Literary Feminisms.
4) New French Feminisms. 5) Overview. This lesson will concern itself with the
first two sections, that is, Simone de Beauvoir and the Second Sex and The
Essentialism Debate in the main. The other sections of Tolan’s essay will be
discussed in the next lesson.
Main arguments of the essay
Simone de Beauvoir and the Second Wave
Tolan begins her essay by suggesting that the roots of difference of various
feminist thinkers from each other can be traced back to Simone de Beauvoir’s
book The Second Sex which was published in 1949. In suggesting that sex is
biological but gender roles are social and cultural constructs, Beauvoir claimed
that ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’ There is no doubt that
Beauvoir’s famous sentence has become a sort of catechism of feminism, yet this
very sentence, according to Tolan, has led to “questions as simple and complex
as ‘What is a woman?’ In the attempt to address this question, feminism has
become fractured, divided, and contradictory. It has also strengthened,
developed, and evolved.” (319). Tolan contends that feminism can no longer be
accurately described as a theory. No single and coherent trajectory of thought
can encompass all the issues feminist thinkers grapple with. According to Tolan,
“feminism should be understood as a discourse: a discussion of multiple related
ideas.” (319).
Infact, the distrust of feminism as a single theory stems from rejection of
all theory by many feminist thinkers on the ground that theory is an essentially
male-dominated sphere and it draws heavily on ideas of male thinkers only.
According to this view, theory being essentially the male domain embraces the
male/female binary and its aim is all-encompassing objectivity. Contrary to this
impersonal and objective theory, feminist thinkers tend to emphasize the female
world of subjectivity and primal experience. Apart from this, the prevalence and
far-reaching influence of postmodernism with its radical distrust of all
M.A.(English) Part-II (Semester-III) 26 Course-XI (Opt. i)

overarching theories and big emancipatory projects has also caused feminist
thinkers to develop an attitude of incredulity towards feminism of a singular
kind.
Tolan then goes on to foreground the importance of Beauvoir’s
contribution to the development of the discourse of feminism by situating her on
the cusp of the two waves of feminism.
Two waves of feminism
The first wave of feminism was influenced by the social and economic
reforms which resulted from women’s rights and suffragette movements. (For a
detailed understanding of the suffragette movement, read Margaret Walters’s
Feminism: A Very Short Introduction. pp. 75-85).
Virginia Woolf is a first wave feminist who stands out in this period for
raising many issues which are relevant to the discourse of feminism even today.
Her two works A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) are her
major contributions to the evolution of the feminist thought. In A Room of One’s
Own she contends that women’s writing should stop drawing comparisons with
the situation in a society dominated by men; women’s writing must explore
female experience. She was among those early feminist thinkers who believed
that gender is a social construct, and hence it is not predetermined. She
suggested that if women were to develop their artistic abilities, then they needed
social and economic equality with men. However, she did not advocate a direct
confrontation with men for gender role reversal; she thought of man-woman
relationship in terms of a balance of power which could address female concerns.
The second wave feminism, on the other hand, was influenced mainly by
various liberationist movements during the 1960s. This is when the idea of
sexual difference occupied the central place in gender debates. Most of the
second wave theorists rejected the idea of women’s inferiority because of their
biological difference from men. However, some other feminist thinkers celebrated
the biological difference as a source of positive values. To them women must
nurture this difference in their art and literature and in their daily lives too.
Another contentious issue raised during this period was whether specifically
female languages and female culture existed as distinctly different from male
language and culture. A major reason for all this emphasis on language was
because it was increasingly understood that the male dominance of language was
a very significant reason for oppression of women. Some feminists went to the
extent of advocating rejection of all man-made language and favoured a
revolutionary linguism (Elaine Showalter). Another area of debate during this
period was concerned with whether white women perceived the world in the same
M.A.(English) Part-II (Semester-III) 27 Course-XI (Opt. i)

way as the women of colour did. All this emphasis on difference ignited a serious
debate about where this difference is located, in biology, culture or psyche. Thus
we see that the second wave of feminism raised many issues which foregrounded
the divergence of opinion within the feminist circles to such an extent that the
adequacy of ‘feminism’ as an omnibus term came under a question mark.
Simone de Beauvoir’s is a very peculiar case as her The Second Sex
appeared in interim of the first and the second wave of feminism. Fiona Tolan is
aware of the difficulty of situating Beauvoir in the feminist history. According to
Tolan, Beauvoir is sometimes “situated as the concluding chapter of the first
wave, whilst at other times she is termed ‘pre-feminist', or positioned at the
opening of the second wave. However, despite the confusion, she can be best
understood as a bridge between the two waves: combining the progressive social
vision of the first, and beginning to articulate some of the suspicions about
femininity and gender that would come to concern proponents of the second.”
(319). Thus Beauvoir’s text, while encapsulating the first wave feminist thought
makes important gestures towards the second wave feminisms. Hers is the
mother text which carries in its womb myriad possibilities.
At a time when abortion was illegal, Beauvoir was a staunch champion of
women’s reproductive rights. She was of the view that biological difference of
women from men cannot be held responsible for their oppression; it was rather
the reproductive function which “placed women at a disadvantage by tying them
to the domestic sphere and associating them with the body and thus with
animals and nature.” (321). Hence, she actively fought for women’s reproductive
rights and highlighted and attacked various forms of women’s oppression
throughout history. She examined biological, psychological, religious, historical
and cultural explanations which were employed to subjugate women. She came
out with startling views about how women were always regarded as the ‘other’,
the second or inferior sex. At that time, Beauvoir’s ideas were quite scandalizing
but extremely valuable to feminist thinkers as these very ideas made them move
beyond the demand for equal rights and educational opportunities which were
the cornerstone of the first wave feminism.
Beauvoir sought women’s freedom from discrimination on the basis of
biology and rejected the whole idea of femininity as a false ideology which was
perpetuated in various ways to reproduce not only stereotypes of women but
stereotypical thinking about women as well. Tolan very rightly suggests that in
voicing her rejection of the idea of femininity, she was deeply influenced by
existentialism. Beauvoir was a great friend of Sartre’s and like Sartre she did not
believe that there is any pre-ordained human nature per se. According to the
M.A.(English) Part-II (Semester-III) 28 Course-XI (Opt. i)

basic tenets of the existential philosophy, a person has the freedom to make
choices which can help him or her create him/herself as an autonomous
individual. Thus the very idea of an essential feminine nature is alien to
existentialism. We are what we are because of the choices we make and we are
free to make our choices. The onus is on the individual to be free and self-
governing.
Beauvoir delves into how we come to have an identity of our own. For an
understanding of this process, she first invokes the German thinker Hegel and
then reconfigures his ideas to stress how women come to have their identity.
According to Hegel, in the self’s relation with the other, the self is always the
essential subject and the other is just an inessential object. This is because we
need an object against which to define ourselves as subjects. It is a process of
struggle for self-recognition. Beauvoir, however, suggests that the woman is
always situated as a pre-given other to man. “The man is always the subject-self,
the ’I', whilst the woman is always the object, the other” (321). This thinking that
woman is already presumed to be the other to man is what informs, according to
Beauvoir, the entire Western philosophy. This idea of otherness of woman
permeates Freudian psychology too because Freud thought of woman to be a
defective male because of her lack of phallus. Therefore, a woman’s identity is
constituted in lack because she lacks the phallus which confers the subjectivity
on man.
If we pay critical attention to paintings of women by male artists, and if we
examine critically most of the TV advertisements which promote consumer goods
even for men (such as shaving creams, perfumes, motorbikes etc.), we will see
how women are represented as objects of men’s desires. They are never
represented as complex autonomous individuals. We often find that most of the
women in films – both Indian and Western – fall generally into two broad
categories; they are either vamps and whores or pious virgins. This is exactly
what Beauvoir found in art and literature. Women are represented as objects;
they are otherised through their stereotypical images. They are represented as
being passive bodies whereas men are shown to have very active and sharp
minds. The prevalence of such myths both in art and science, however, does not
throw much light on why women “so readily conceded the struggle for
subjectivity” (321). What was it that made women concede this struggle? It is by
way of an answer to this question that Beauvoir claims that it is woman’s
reproductive function which is responsible for this.
According to Beauvoir, woman’s reproductive functions and motherhood
confine her to four walls of domesticity. Thus excluded from the public sphere,
M.A.(English) Part-II (Semester-III) 29 Course-XI (Opt. i)

women are unable to form meaningful alliances the way men can. For this very
reason Beauvoir found marriage to be an exploitative economic arrangement
which is detrimental not only to female bonding but to women attaining
autonomous subjectivity also. It is the marriage bond only which has driven a
wedge between the transcendent man and immanent woman. Freed from the
chores of domesticity, men love their liberty and pursue their quest for knowledge
and doing more than satisfying their subsistence needs. This sets them up as
transcendent beings in contradistinction to immanent women whose main
function is to produce the next generation and to be happy in being provided for
by their husbands. Women are excluded from the pursuit of knowledge and the
limits to their freedom are set by men. The identification of women with their
bodies has been the root cause of their subjugation. The way forward for women
is only through their disidentification from their bodies, which is very much
possible if women pursue their full emotional and intellectual potential. This is
how they can pursue transcendence like men.
Beauvoir was of the opinion that with the development of new
technologies, women would be freed from their domestic and reproductive
functions which would enable them to be equal to men in everything they do.
Thus Beauvoir’s utopian vision sees future woman as a transcendent subject:
“She would think and work and act like a man, and instead of bemoaning her
inferiority to men, she would declare herself their equal” (322).
It would be pertinent to add here that, as Tolan points out, Beauvoir
invokes the mind-body duality in suggesting how it is their biology which is
responsible for women being treated as the inferior sex. This mind-body duality
was posited by Descartes (his famous dictum ‘Cogito ergo sum’ – ‘I think
therefore I am’) and obviously he attached priority to the mind. In a similar vein,
Beauvoir also attaches priority to mind over body. In a way, she favours culture
to nature.
Points to ponder:
1. Can we say that in invoking mind-body duality and then following it up
with privileging mind over body, isn’t Beauvoir walking into the familiar
Cartesian trap which underpins patriarchy, as many feminist thinkers
have suggested? What is your view?
2. Argue for or against the idea that biology has been woman’s destiny.
The Essentialism debate
According to Fiona Tolan, essentialism “is a single identifiable theme
running through every feminist debate” (322). Early feminist readings of The
Second Sex were determined by the acceptance or rejection of Beauvoir’s anti-
M.A.(English) Part-II (Semester-III) 30 Course-XI (Opt. i)

essentialism. However, before we proceed ahead, we would do well to understand

what the term ‘essentialism’ means.
Essentialism, as Peter Brooker defines it in his A Glossary of Cultural
Theory (Oxford University Press; New York. 2003), is a “term describing the
assumption that human beings, objects or texts possess underlying essences
that define their ‘true nature’. An ‘essence’ is fixed and unchanging, but has
double existence: as both the inherent or innate property of an individual object
or being, and the abstract, external essence governing the type to which all
examples conform” (89). In the feminist debate, the theme of essentialism hovers
around the issue of women’s difference from or equality with men. Many
essentialist feminists opine that since women are biologically different from men,
they are also psychologically and emotionally different. This difference is a pre-
given essential difference and cannot be overcome. According to this school of
thought, women should not be ashamed to be women; they should be proud of
their difference and celebrate their womanhood. Essentialist feminists argue “that
feminism should work to liberate women from a system of male-centred values
and beliefs, and should empower them to discover their own uniquely female
identity. This identity is frequently described as being more empathetic and
cooperative, more connected to others, and more accepting of multiple
viewpoints, unlike male identity, which is monolithic, authoritarian, and founded
in a rationalist belief in one truth” (323).
The problem with essentialism is that it invokes popular notions of what is
natural in men and women and as such, it ends up underpinning gender
stereotypes. Contrary to this essentialist stance is the social constructionist view
according to which the body itself, which is understood as the essential, originary
source of difference, is thought to be materially shaped by social ideologies and
personal histories. In other words, the anti-essentialist stance emphasizes that
sexual difference is a result of social and cultural conditioning. This is the view
which Beauvoir espouses. According to Beauvoir, “Society has created woman as
other, and the means by which this difference has been created must be exposed
and discredited, so that women can achieve their full potential as the equals of
men” (323). The essentialists counter this argument in favour of equality by
stressing that insistence on equality leads only to assimilation of women into a
patriarchal society whereby essential feminine values are undermined. The anti-
essentialist response to this argument is that since the idea of biological
difference was only mobilized in the past to exclude women from the male sphere,
the emphasis on difference tends to merely reproduce misogynist exclusion and
marginalization of women.
M.A.(English) Part-II (Semester-III) 31 Course-XI (Opt. i)

Shulamith Firestone is one of the most ardent advocates of Beauvoir’s

anti-essentialist view. Her The Dialectic of Sex published in 1970, is considered to
be a manifesto of the second wave feminism. Like Beauvoir, she accepted that
culture was gender neutral. Firestone carried forward many arguments advanced
by Beauvoir. Like Beauvoir, she stressed that technology could free women from
the constraints imposed upon them by their biology. She not only favoured
abortion and contraception, she advised artificial gestation and communal child
rearing. This would free women from her reproductive function and would lead to
overcoming of cultural difference premised upon biological difference. The way to
equality would be paved by overcoming difference. She was aware of biological
determinism inherent in her argument and she tried to evade it by suggesting
that “it was not biological difference in itself that created inequality — 'man’ and
‘woman’ were for her neutral categories of difference — but rather it was the
reproductive function that happened to fall to the female body” (323). For this
very reason she recommended the use of technology to ‘lift the task of
reproduction from women’. This was the surest recipe to attain equality.
Many feminist thinkers, however, were not comfortable with Firestone’s
portrayal of femininity as negative and an unnecessary state. They were critical of
her for ignoring the emotional ties of a mother to her child. They questioned
Firestone’s advocacy of women’s pursuit of an aggressive male rationality. In
doing so and in assimilating into a society dominated by masculine values,
women would have to give up being women. The kind of equality envisaged by
Beauvoir and Firestone meant that women would have to adopt all male values;
in other words, it implies “that to gain equality in such a society means to
become a man” (324). The critics of Beauvoir and Firestone argued that the way
out of the impasse was to accept the difference and reclaim the feminine heritage
which had been suppressed by the masculine culture for a long time. Tolan calls
such thinking essentialist ‘difference feminism’.
One of the most important essentialist feminist accounts of gender
relations comes from Mary Daly in her book Gyn/Ecology : The Mathematics of
Radical Feminism first published in 1978. She agrees with Beauvoir that most
social institutions including religion and science are patriarchal and have been
used to define and limit women. However, unlike Beauvoir she does not consider
that transcending femininity would lead to emancipation of women. Contrariwise,
it is the celebration of femininity, of the immanence which will liberate women.
As Tolan points out, “in Gym/Ecology, Daly advised women to reject the tools of
patriarchy, including religion and language, and ’wildize’ themselves” (324). She
suggested a kind of insurrectionary tactic to disrupt the flow of patriarchal
M.A.(English) Part-II (Semester-III) 32 Course-XI (Opt. i)

discourse from within by using excessive puns which would disrupt and fragment
meaning.
Following her example, many second wave feminists started paying
attention to language as a tool of patriarchy. Some radical feminists advocated a
complete rejection of man-made language, a stance which can at best be a
utopian gesture only.
The very title of Daly’s book Gyn/Ecology alludes to the intimate
relationship between women and ecology. She believes that women have a
“natural tendency toward pacifism and nurture that enabled them to live in
harmony with the environment, unlike men, who compete with nature, struggling
to dominate the environment as they dominate women” (325). Daly’s ideas linking
nature and women opened up the space for ecofeminism. The ecofeminists argue
that all kinds of violence, whether against women or nature or even war which is
against humanity, is an expression of male aggression and the male desire to
colonize women, nature and other men and lands. For this very reason,
ecofeminists have been in the forefront of anti-war protests. Ecofeminists have
been severely criticized by many ‘difference feminists’ for their essentialism
which, in a way, perpetuates patriarchal equation of women with nature.
In opposition to ecofeminists, feminist thinkers like Betty Friedan advocate
entry into all domains which are dominated by men, for she believes that such a
step would lead to equality. Ecofeminists, who propound radical separatism
cannot reconcile to Friedan’s quest for seeking equality by behaving like males.
It is interesting to recall here that Beauvoir herself had fought against
connecting women to nature since such a connection would be a tactic to define
women as less than human.
One thing which is very clear from the ongoing discussion is that Beauvoir’s
question “what is a woman?” has spawned a lively debate among feminist thinkers
which has diverged into several directions including feminist analysis of literary
works.
Important short questions:
1. What is ecofeminism?
2. What is meant by the term essentialism?
3. What is meant by the term ‘essentialist difference feminism’ ?
4. What do you understand by the term stereotype?
5. What is first wave feminism?
6. Which political movements had influenced second wave feminism the
most?
7. What did the suffragettes fight for, in the main?
M.A.(English) Part-II (Semester-III) 33 Course-XI (Opt. i)

8. Why ‘feminism’ as a singular noun is inadequate today?

Important long questions:
1. Discuss in detail different trajectories of feminist thought arising from
seeking answers to Beauvoir’s very simple question ‘What is a woman?’.
2. Discuss the essentialism debate in the context of feminist thought and
bring out the limitations of difference feminism and equality feminism.
3. Do you think that divergence of views in the discourse of feminism rules
out the possibility of thinking feminism as a single, unified emancipatory
project? Discuss in detail.
Suggested Reading
Baron, Dennis. Grammar and Gender. Yale Univ. Press, 1986.
Cameron, Deborah, ed. The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader. Second
Edition. Routledge, 1998.
de Beauvoir, Simon. The Second Sex. London: Vintage, 1997
Dworkin, Andrea. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. New York: The Women’s
Press Ltd, 1981.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. London and New York: Penguin, 2010.
Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer
and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination. Yale: Yale Nota Bene, 2000.
Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics. London: Methuen, 1984.
Morris, Pam. Literature and Feminism: An Introduction. 1993.
Sellers, Susan, ed. Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice. Univ. of Toronto Press,
1991.
Showalter, Elaine. ‘Toward a Feminist Poetics.’ Feminist Literary Theory: A
Reader. Ed. Mary Eagleton. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1986.
M.A. (English) Part-II Course - XI (Opt. i)
Semester-III Literature and Gender
Lesson No. 18 Author : Dr. Swaraj Raj

“Feminisms” by Fiona Tolan : An Analysis (contd.)

From your reading of Lesson 16, you must have realized that as Fiona
Tolan has argued, the second wave feminism was marked by lively and often
contentious debate around the fundamental question raised by Beauvoir: “What
is a woman?” These debates branched off into different directions, which led to
questioning of established ideas about ideologies and representation of women in
popular culture, religion, literature, films, TV programmes, philosophy,
psychology and discourses of science. Literary feminisms also emerged from
these debates only. All varieties of literary feminisms persistently question age-
old beliefs about literature, authorship, language, literary representation,
readership, literary canon and the whole machinery of canon formation. In this
sense, all literary feminists are revolutionary.
Literary Feminisms:
A casual glance at what goes under the rubric ‘history of English literature’
is sufficient to reveal that barring a few exceptions like Jane Austen, George Eliot
and Charlotte Bronte, the history of English literature is dominated by male
authors only. Why is the literary canon dominated by male authors only?
Answers to these questions will lead us to several explanations, all of which are
tangled with many other issues pertaining to the structural and ideological
aspects of our society. However, before we look at how this question is tackled by
literary feminists, we would do well to look at the idea of canon and canon
formation.
Etymology of the word ‘canon’ reveals that its roots lie in religion. The term
‘canon’ as defined by Online Etymology Dictionary comes from:
“Church law," Old English canon, from Old French canon or directly from
Late Latin canon "Church law," in classical Latin, "measuring line, rule,"
from Greek kanon "any straight rod or bar; rule; standard of excellence,"
perhaps from kanna "reed" (see cane (n.)). Taken in ecclesiastical sense for
"decree of the Church." General sense of "standard of judging" is from c.
1600. Harold Bloom writes that "The secular canon, with the word
meaning a catalog of approved authors, does not actually begin until the
middle of the eighteenth century ...” ["The Western Canon," 1994].
(http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=canon)
M.A.(English) Part-II (Semester-III) 35 Course-XI (Opt. i)

Going by this etymological definition of canon in regard to literature, we

can see that canon refers to a list of authors which has received the approval of
readers and critics alike. Inclusion in the canon confers status, aesthetic,
political, social and economic. The literary canon also acts as a measure against
which new authors are judged. In fact, the idea of literary canon as a standard by
which new writers are judged brings to our mind Matthew Arnold’s concept of
‘touchstone’ and T. S. Eliot’s concept of literary tradition also.
The questions that automatically come to our mind when we think of the
literary canon are: Who authorizes the canon? Who decides which literary work
has the required merit in it for it to be canonized? A related, but equally
important question is: Who are the arbiters of what constitutes literary excellence
and merit?
Answers to these questions will reveal to us that the tenets by which
canonical texts are selected favour those who are in power. This means that the
powerless and marginalized are excluded from the canon irrespective of the merit
of their works. In a way, canon formation naturalizes merit as a property
associated with the powerful and those who have the authority. By implication,
the quality of merit is supposedly unavailable to the powerless. Hence, lacking
merit, they cannot be included in the canon. In the same way, the arbiters of
aesthetic taste are also those who are in power. Those who help in forming canon
are generally well-reputed literary critics, scholars, teachers and literary authors
as well whose judgements regarding literary texts are respected. The literary
canon thus formed tends to perpetuate and reproduce dominant values which
are the values of the dominant classes.
Now we must remember that writing literary works is not merely an
innocent aesthetic activity aimed at providing delight to the readers. Literary
works are also powerful tools of creating and perpetuating entire belief systems.
In our unequal world, literature is deeply enmeshed in power relations which
legitimize, perpetuate and reproduce existing power relations. The literary canon
too is a tool for bestowing prestige and power on a few while excluding others
who equally deserve to be a part of the canon. Thus the literary canon is not an
unbiased, objective representation of the best work that has been produced.
Conversely, the canon is distorted, exclusionary, and discriminatory and it tends
to fossilize its subject.
Feminist critics, especially those belonging to the second wave, realized
how the established literary canon excluded women writers except a few. The
exclusion of a majority of women writers from a supposedly gender-neutral
canon, as Fiona Tolan suggests, implied “that if few women managed to attain
M.A.(English) Part-II (Semester-III) 36 Course-XI (Opt. i)

the highest standards of literary production, it was because they rarely wrote,
and when they did, they simply did not write as well as men” (326). Hence, the
first task of feminist criticism was to reject this damagingly spurious implication
and to posit a plausible explanation for the absence of women. This work was
begun first by Virginia Woolf in her essay “A Room of One’s Own”. Woolf suggests
that lack of mental freedom and financial autonomy have kept women away from
literature. Underlining the structural imbalances – social, cultural and economic
– which constrain women, she very forcefully argues that women writers are in no
way inferior to their male counterparts; it is their material circumstances
obtaining from a masculinist social structure that have been the culprit.
Woolf tries to construct a history of women writers. She critically examines
the careers of several women authors such as Aphra Behn, Bronte sisters, Jane
Austen, Anne Finch, George Eliot and Rebecca West in particular. She concludes
that it is the lack of freedom which constrains women from becoming writers.
Once Woolf showed the way to construct a history of women authors, the
second wave feminists “continued Woolf’s analysis and combined it with new,
more gender-sensitive ways of reading both the traditional literary classics and
also the increasingly prominent emergent literature by women” (Tolan 326).
Points to ponder:
1. Can we say that Matthew Arnold in his essay “The Function of Criticism at
and Present Time” and T. Eliot in “Tradition and Individual Talent” are
making attempts at constructing a literary canon? Do they include any
woman writer in their canon? If not, then why?
2. Do you agree with Virginia Woolf’s argument that women had to live under
many constrains which deprived them of the opportunities they required to
become authors? Could you think of any other reasons also?
Initially, one limitation of the second wave feminist critics was the
unavailability of sufficient number of works by women. Hence they turned their
attention towards texts by male authors and began probing critically how women
were represented in them. This practice of analysing male authors from a
feminist perspective paid rich dividends in terms of exploring and pointing out
how women were misrepresented by the male authors in their texts and how
these texts sought to legitimize female subordination. This kind of criticism came
to be known as ‘phallocentric criticism’ since its aim was to expose masculine
bias in literature authored by men. Such literature which overtly or covertly
endorses the symbolic power of the male over the female and reinforces the
inequalities of patriarchy is called ‘phallocentric literature’.
M.A.(English) Part-II (Semester-III) 37 Course-XI (Opt. i)

Phallocentric Literature and Phallocentric Criticism

Simone de Beauvoir was the pioneer in exposing masculine biases in
literature. She underscored the fact that “all literature was subject to implicit
social ideas about the roles of men and women” (326). This is a position which is
akin to classical Marxist position which considers that literature, being a part of
the superstructure of a society, is contingent upon economic forces and relations
of production.
It was Kate Millettt in her very influential Sexual Politics (1969) who,
following the lead provided by Beauvoir, exposes the male bias against women in
phallocentric literature. She held patriarchal ideology responsible for the
oppression of women. Patriarchy is ubiquitous in society and it has a profound
impact on how men and women relate to each other. Patriarchy treats women as
inferior to men both in the private and public sphere. Thus man-woman
relationship is deeply enmeshed in power relations having political implications.
‘Sexual politics’ is the name she gives to the interaction between unequal
relations of domination and subordination between men and women.
According to Millettt, male superiority is drilled into the minds of people
through many overt and covert ways. All aspects of society and culture function
in accordance with the prevailing sexual politics and women internalize their own
inferiority till it becomes ingrained in their psyche. Literature, as a tool of
dominant patriarchal ideology, helped in reinforcing patriarchy.
In Sexual Politics, Kate Millett demonstrates that a close reading of the
works of male canonical authors such as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman
Mailer and Jean Genet, reveals how these texts are misogynistic and male-
centric. The recurring patterns of imagery and language in these phallocentric
texts reveal concealed attitudes towards femininity. Millett employed Freudian
ideas to suggest that like a dream a literary work operates on two levels –
manifest and latent, the latent being much more important than the manifest. In
fact, she even subjected Freud’s texts to Freudian analysis to come out with the
claim that Freud’s psychoanalysis was a product of culturally ingrained misogyny
and was an unreliable tool for feminist critics. The kind of phallocentric criticism
Kate Millett made current had a profound impact on feminist literary criticism
since it permanently influenced the way in which male writers were subsequently
read and perceived. She promoted a radical rereading of male texts. This kind of
counter-hegemonic, resistance reading inaugurated by Kate Millett brought to the
foreground woman as a reader. Earlier women were forced to read as men and to
identify with the male perspective.
M.A.(English) Part-II (Semester-III) 38 Course-XI (Opt. i)

Following Kate Millett’s example that literature is a product of patriarchy

and it undergirds patriarchal values, Germaine Greer in her Female Eunuch
(1970) systematically exposes patriarchal biases in canonical literary texts and
popular culture. In very cleverly juxtaposing canonical texts with popular writing,
she raises serious questions about conventional literary hierarchy. Hers was
perhaps the first serious attempt to interrogate the predominantly male literary
canon. What followed Greer was a systematic attempt by many feminist critics to
demolish the universalist claims of the literary canon, the claims which could be
proved false when subjected to sustained scrutiny.
From Phallocentric Criticism to Gynocriticism
One serious drawback of phallocentric criticism was that “it did little to
address the lack of women in the canon” (Tolan 328). This lacuna opened up the
space for development of an alternative, committedly female-centred criticism
known as ‘gynocriticism’. ‘Gynocriticism’ was a term introduced by Elaine
Showalter in her essay “Towards a Feminist Poetics” (1979). Prior to this, in her
very influential book A Literature of Their Own (1977) Showalter had brought to
the fore an extended tradition of women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The book also foregrounds the works of many forgotten or ignored women
writers. Gynocriticism extends the idea further by seeking to draw a map of
women writers and to understand female creativity. The aim is not only to
construct a counter canon but to promote the work of women authors. As Fiona
Tolan argues, “The predominantly Anglo-American practice of gynocriticism was
founded on the belief that the established male literary tradition had suppressed
an alternative female tradition, which remained hidden and waiting to be
discovered.” (328).
Showalter not only helped to expose how the seemingly objective literary
analyses were utterly subjective, she also gave a new direction to the feminist
literary criticism. Her most important contribution, however, lies in
demonstrating that women not only wrote differently from men, they should also
be read differently. She argued that women’s writing formed a subculture within
the larger literary tradition. Women’s writing being different from that of men
demanded critical reading which was gender-specific because only such a reading
could do justice to women’s writing. Gynocriticism aims at placing women’s
literature in the context of female experience.
Showalter’s formulations were also attacked from within feminism for its
latent essentialism. Although she tried to stay clear from any essentialist idea of
a cohesive or unified women’s movement or a collective female imagination by
arguing that it was “a network of shared influences, situated in time and culture,
M.A.(English) Part-II (Semester-III) 39 Course-XI (Opt. i)

resulted in common themes and shared motifs” (Tolan 331), yet many critics like
Toril Moi criticized Showalter for the essentialist trajectory implicit in her concept
of ‘female experience’.
Points to ponder:
1. One major criticism of phallocentric criticism is that it perpetuates identity
of women as victims. Do you think that feminist critics like Simone de
Beauvoir and Kate Millett are concerned chiefly with how women have
been victims of male ideologies? Do you think that in promoting women’s
identity only as victims, phallocentric criticism does not break any new
ground for women’s emancipation?
2. What do you think is the major difference between phallocentric criticism
and gynocriticism? Do you agree with Toril Moi’s charge that Showalter
walks unwittingly into the essentialist trap?
3. If we accept that women write differently from men, then we have to
confront the vital question of location of this difference: Is this difference
located in language, body, psychology or culture? Showalter herself raises
this question in her essay “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness.” You
would do well to read this essay to find out a plausible answer to this
vexed question.
Dissenting Black, Lesbian and Third World Feminist Voices
While there were many disagreements between second wave feminist
critics, dissenting voices were also heard from several other quarters too.
Lesbians, working class women, women from third world countries, and women
of colour (especially black women) protested that the second wave feminist critics
represented the views of only a privileged minority. The universalist claims made
on behalf of all women by the second wave feminists were rejected since such
claims tended to ignore differences between women.
Black feminists and third world feminists were of the view that women’s
oppression did not result from gender difference only. To them, the imbrication of
race, gender, caste and culture problematizes their gender identity. They argued
that terms such as ‘black’ and ‘third world’ were contested categories and
lumping together all women of colour into a single, monolithic category of ‘non-
white’ tended to erase their national and cultural identities. Apart from this, such
labelling tended to construct women of colour as ‘other’ to the white women.
Indian postcolonial feminist critic Chandra Talpade Mohanty in her very
influential 1988 essay “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial
Discourses” makes this point very forcefully. According to Talpade, the
discourses of western feminism have constructed an image of the ‘Third World
M.A.(English) Part-II (Semester-III) 40 Course-XI (Opt. i)

woman’ who is poor, uneducated and religious, and is a victim of male and
colonial oppression. This monolithic image of a ‘Third World woman’ not only
erases cultural differences between women from different nations comprising the
so-called ‘Third World’, this image also perpetuates racial prejudices by making
sweeping generalizations. Many black feminist authors, most prominent among
them being Jean Rhys and Alice Walker have voiced similar concerns in their
novels. Later on, the American black feminist critic bell hooks became a
trenchant critic of white feminism. In the very opening lines of her Feminist
Theory: From Margin to Center (2000), she declares that “Feminism in the United
States has never emerged from the women who are most victimized by sexist
oppression; women who are daily beaten down, mentally, physically, and
spiritually – women who are powerless to change their condition in life. They are
a silent majority” (1). Celebrated feminist texts like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine
Mystique (1963), which was hailed as heralding the contemporary feminist
movement, received the greatest flak from bell hooks. She found that white
feminists often adopted a condescending attitude towards black women and they
hid their racism and classism in speaking for all women.
Second wave white feminism came under attack from lesbian feminists
also. Lesbian feminists found that feminist critics like Showalter supported
heterosexism, a patriarchal construct, as a norm. Lesbian feminists like Mary
Daly suggested that by rejecting heterosexuality as a norm, feminists could very
effectively undermine patriarchy.
French Feminisms: Kristeva, Cixous and Irigaray
The biggest challenge to the second wave feminism as a movement,
however, was posed by French feminism. As against Anglo-American feminism
which was activism-oriented, French feminism developed from a philosophical
tradition and is considered to be largely theory-oriented. The engagement of
French feminists with linguistics, linguistic analysis, psychoanalysis and
philosophy resulted in many new insights which both challenged second wave
feminism and also provided much needed theoretical succour to it. They largely
agree with Beauvoir and others that patriarchy has a long tradition and most
institutions of the society, be it science and technology, religion, education or
politico-legal systems, are not gender-neutral; not only do they represent
masculine world-view, they also perpetuate the existing gender relations and
hence secure masculine authority. Their point of departure from Beauvoir, as
Fiona Tolan argues “is in their emphasis on language as the means of encoding
and maintaining the dominant patriarchal order” (333). Thus language occupies
central position in the critical formulations of French feminist thinkers.
M.A.(English) Part-II (Semester-III) 41 Course-XI (Opt. i)

Three French thinkers, Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray
(though none of them was born in France) are in the forefront of expanding the
boundaries of feminist thought by incorporating psychoanalytic ideas. They draw
many ideas from the psychoanalysis, radicalize them and also reject the
masculinist and misogynistic streak in psychoanalytic thought. Kate Millett, as it
has already been pointed out, had argued that psychoanalysis perpetuated the
idea of inferiority of women: For Freud, women are ‘defective males’. To him
phallus is the source of men’s power and superiority. This misogynistic streak in
psychoanalysis was repugnant to feminist critics. Nevertheless, Juliet Mitchell in
her 1974 text Psychoanalysis and Feminism has argued that psychoanalysis does
not present any defence of patriarchy, rather it examines how patriarchy
functions. According to her, Freud was not a biological determinist since he laid
stress on social construction of identity through internalization of the law of
patriarchy. Freud’s idea that identity is formed by social influences precludes any
conception of essential self. Hence there was much that was progressive and
anti-essentialist in Freudian thought which was of significance to feminists
interested in developing a psychoanalytically-oriented feminist theory. The route
for feminism to Freud was, however, opened by Lacan’s linguistic interpretation
of Freud. It is Lacanian intervention that we have to understand.
In reinterpreting Freud through Saussurean linguistics, Lacan accorded
great importance to language in psychoanalysis. According to him, sexual
difference is founded in language. He theorized three conceptual spaces in which
the individual psyche develops: the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. The
first one of these is the realm of the ‘Imaginary’. This develops during the early
phase of infancy spanning the period of six months to eighteen months. Lacan
called this phase ‘mirror phase’. During this phase the child’s psyche functions
through the currency of images. This phase, is pre-Oedipal. The child recognizes
its image in the mirror and this image remains a part of individual consciousness
all through the life. The second of these spaces or realms is the ‘Symbolic Order’
which the child enters through apprehension of language. This is the phase when
ego develops. Ego is structured like language. The entry into the Symbolic Order
also marks oedipalization of personality. The child acquires a separate
personality based on a perception of the difference between itself and others.
Thus personality, consciousness and ego are secondary phenomena determined
by the logic of the language or the Symbolic Order. The Real is the reality outside
the subject’s consciousness. The Real can never be apprehended because
individual cognition of everything has to pass through the psychological logic of
the Imaginary and the Symbolic, both of which subject it to distortion. The Real
M.A.(English) Part-II (Semester-III) 42 Course-XI (Opt. i)

is beyond symbolization and hence outside the grasp of individual’s

consciousness.
Fiona Tolan very rightly suggests that Lacan’s opening psychoanalysis to
ideas about language proved extremely fruitful for feminism. Kristeva, Cixous and
Irigaray develop their feminisms by deploying Lacanian ideas to varying degrees
and in diverse ways.
Let us now move on to these three thinkers and find out what they have to
say.
Julia Kristeva:
Julia Kristeva combines Lacanian psychoanalysis with politics and
feminism. In her Revolution in Poetic Language, which was her doctoral thesis
published in English translation in 1984, Kristeva redefines and renames Lacan’s
concept of the ‘Imaginary’ from a feminist perspective. In Lacan, the Imaginary is
prelinguistic but contrary to this, Kristeva posits that a form of language exists
already in Lacan’s Imaginary, pre-Oedipal stage, which she calls the ‘semiotic’
stage. This semiotic stage, Kristeva asserts, is also associated very closely with
the body of the mother. The female child is identified with pre-Oedipal, pre-
discursive incoherence. To her Lacan’s ‘symbolic’ stage in a child’s development
is the root cause of male dominance. When a child learns language, it also
recognises principles of order, law and rationality associated with a patriarchal
society. Thus, the semiotic, the pre-Oedipal stage is the psychic register when the
rhythms and drives of the Imaginary are not broken up by artificial symbolic logic
of language. The incoherence of children, the language used by the mentally ill,
and language in certain kinds of poetry, such as that of the French Symbolists is
revolutionary because it is not the language on which patriarchal symbolic logic
has worked its magic. Women’s literature can tap the emancipatory potential of
the anarchic language of the semiotic stage to upstage patriarchy. Kristeva’s
ideas are fascinating though shrouded in obscure utopianism at times.
Helene Cixous:
Helène Cixous in her 1796 essay The Laugh of the Medusa advocates a
positive representation of femininity in women’s writing. She posits the notion of
ecriture feminine, by which she means specifically women’s writing, a kind of
writing practice which subverts the symbolic logic of masculine language.
Woman, she argues, must write in a way so that her body is heard. Hers is,
nevertheless, a very intriguing stance towards women’s writing. Like Kristeva she
also links women’s writing to the pre-Oedipal Imaginary phase. But she rejects all
theory since she believes that the women’s writing practice can never be
theorized and encoded. Cixous’s writing is marked by many contradictions; but
M.A.(English) Part-II (Semester-III) 43 Course-XI (Opt. i)

we need to ponder and reflect on these contradictions and ask this question: Are
these contradictions not a part of that very writing practice which rejects the
linear logic of the symbolic order? Perhaps these contradictions are intentional
and demonstrate what Cixous advocates.
Luce Irigaray
In her text Speculum of the Other Woman published in English translation in
1985, Luce Irigaray rejects Freud’s idea that women’s identity is negatively
constituted. She lambasts Freud for positing that women do not exist
independently but only as negative virtual images of men. According to her,
women gain pleasure from physical contact whereas visual sense is what defines
male perception. She believes that women’s eroticism is different from that of
men. She advocates that women should celebrate their radical otherness from
men. Women can free themselves from the grip of male perception of women by
celebrating their difference from men.
Moving Towards ecriture feminine
By now we have come to understand how and why language is important
to French feminists. We have seen that French feminist thinkers want to defy the
male linguistic code because according to them, whenever a woman, situated
within the masculine symbolic order says ‘I’, she assumes the position of a male.
The main question that needs to be addressed is: How can a woman speak? This
is a question which was not addressed either by Anglo-American feminists or
gynocritics. It is in grappling with this question that French feminist thinkers
posit and endorse the idea of ecriture feminine.
The term ecriture feminine has been translated into ‘feminine writing;
which is not a very adequate translation of the French term. The French ecriture
feminine actually connotes a uniquely feminine writing which challenges the
discourse of the symbolic order. It is a language appropriate to feminine
difference and desire. It is inherently antagonistic to conventional, patriarchal
writing and its codes. It is characterized, as Tolan suggests, by “disruptions in
the text; gaps, silences, puns, rhythms . . .” (335). Ecriture feminine is “eccentric,
incomprehensible, and inconsistent, and if such writing is difficult or frustrating
to read, it is because the feminine voice has been repressed for so long, and can
only speak in a borrowed language, that it is unfamiliar when it is heard” (335).
Poetry of Emile Dickinson gives us glimpses of ecriture feminine. There are
strange images in her poetry, and gaps and breaks therein disrupt the easy,
expected flow of language. Many avant garde modernist poets also employed such
language when they consciously rejected older, conventional forms and styles
and experimented with new ways of expression.
M.A.(English) Part-II (Semester-III) 44 Course-XI (Opt. i)

Such radical linguism, French feminists suggest, has revolutionary

political implications which suit women the most because they have nothing to
lose by disrupting the masculine symbolic order. Irigaray suggests that female
exclusion is unavoidable within a male-oriented world-view, hence instead of
seeking their inclusion into the mainstream, women should act as anarchist
saboteurs and subvert the mainstream. Ecriture feminine can be fatally
subversive in this sense.
What is important for us to know is that French feminists do not propose
femininity as the binary opposite of masculinity. They reject all kinds of binary
logic as such binarist logic is the hallmark of patriarchal thinking.
Apart from avoiding falling into the binarist trap, idea of ecriture feminine
helps French feminists from falling into essentialist trap also. Fiona Tolan very
rightly suggests that the way ecriture feminine has been theorized, it is presented
as a “mode of writing that could be appropriated by either sex. Cixous, for
example, worked to undermine the deeply held idea that a man is masculine and
a woman feminine by arguing that masculinity and femininity were
characteristics that held no real relationship to biological sex, and with this, she
was being consciously anti-essentialist. Similarly, Kristeva described an ’anti-
phallic’ writing which is fragmentary rather than unified; by calling it anti-phallic
rather than feminine, she removed the emphasis on femininity that seemed to
associate it exclusively with women... For Cixous and irigaray, the unthinkable
space that écriture feminine offers is a new alternative future, where the two
sexes define two ideas of truth, and where difference is celebrated.” (337)
French feminism signals its revolutionary stance in focussing on the body,
feminine characteristics and feminine difference, and by defining ‘femininity’ as a
position that can be appropriated by women and men.
Overview: from The Second Sex to Gender Trouble and Post-feminism
Since the earliest days of Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone and
Kate Millett, feminism has travelled a very long distance indeed; from calls for
gender equality to Judith Butler’s questioning of the category of gender in her
Gender Trouble (1990), feminism has covered much ground. This journey of
feminism witnessed struggle for equality with men, then a reaction against
equality for recognition of difference, and finally the rejection of the difference
between masculine and feminine as metaphysical. The third movement which
marks rejection of the difference between masculine and feminine has been
sometimes known as post-feminism. This is where the category of gender itself is
sought to be deconstructed.
M.A.(English) Part-II (Semester-III) 45 Course-XI (Opt. i)

Such questioning of the category of gender is to be found in Judith

Butler’s Gender Trouble. In fact, Butler’s Gender Trouble makes trouble for the
very idea of a subject which is often understood in metaphysical terms. To her a
subject is a subject-in-process. This is a concept that privileges become over
being. The subject-in-process is constructed in discourse by the acts it performs.
Hence, in suggesting that the subject is a performative construct, Butler opens
up the category of gender identity to serious questioning. According to her, there
are ways of doing one’s identity. Therefore, existing oppositions such as
male/female, masculine/feminine, gay/straight and so on are untenable to
maintain. She argues that it is artificially imposed, so-called norm of
heterosexuality which supported constructs such as masculinity and femininity.
This subverting of gender norms and refusal to assign certain socially defined
characteristics to a particular biological sex opens up multiple gender positions.
Fiona Tolan very rightly concludes her essay by suggesting that the debates
generated by the second wave feminism suggest that “the feminist discourse
must continue” (338).
Important short questions:
1. What is phallocentric literature?
2. What is phallocentric criticism?
3. What is meant by the term gynocriticism?
4. What do you understand by Lacan’s concept ‘Symbolic Order’?
5. What do you understand by Julia Kristeva’s notion of ‘the semiotic’?
6. How would you define ‘ecriture feminine’?
7. Why did Juliet Mitchell suggest that psychoanalysis could be an effective
tool for feminist critics?
8. What is canon? Why are feminist critics suspicious of the established
literary canon?
Important long questions:
1. Discuss in detail how feminist thinkers move from phallocentric criticism
to gynocriticism.
2. Examine critically the contribution of French feminism to the discourse of
feminism.
3. In the light of Judith Butler’s ideas, what future do you foresee for feminist
literary criticism?
4. Do you think black feminists, third world feminists and lesbian feminists
are justified in criticizing white Anglo-European feminism? Give a well-
argued answer.
M.A.(English) Part-II (Semester-III) 46 Course-XI (Opt. i)

Suggested Reading
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity London,
New York: Routledge, 1999
Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” In Marks, Elaine and de Coutiviron,
Isabelle (eds), Keith and Cohen, Paula (trans.), New French Feminisms: An
Anthology. New York: Schocken Books. Pp. 245-64
de Beauvoir, Simon. The Second Sex. London: Vintage, 1997
hooks, bell. Feminist Theory. London: Pluto Press. 2000
Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Tr. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, New York:
Cornell University, Press. 1987
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. trans. A Sheridan. London: Tavistock. 1985
Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. New York: Doubleday. 1970
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Under the Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and
Colonial Discourses. In Williams, Patrick and Laura Chrisman (eds) Colonial
Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. Edinburgh: Prentice Hall. 1993
Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics. London: Methuen, 1984
Morris, Pam. Literature and Feminism: An Introduction. 1993
Sellers, Susan, ed. Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice. Univ. of Toronto Press,
1991
Showalter, Elaine. ‘Toward a Feminist Poetics.’ Feminist Literary Theory: A
Reader. Ed. Mary Eagleton. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1986.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt.
1929. 1981.