Introduction to Feminist Literary Criticism

In order to be able to read and interpret a text from a feminist

literary critical perspective, one needs to understand the ideological
and theoretical premises of the feminist political and cultural
movement, what it tries to analyse and change in society. Most
feminist objectives are transferred into the way we interpret texts,
that is, what we want to find in a text when we read it. Feminist
literary criticism can be applied to literary texts written by male or
female authors, although there is a specific branch of feminist
criticism that is focused just on literature written by women, as we
will see.
According to Pam Morris, feminism is a political perception
based on two premises: 1) that gender difference creates a structural
inequality between men and women where women suffer a
systematized social injustice; 2) that inequality between the sexes is
not a result of biological needs but it is produced by a cultural
construction of gender differences. Its agenda involves two
objectives: 1) to understand the social and psychological
mechanisms that build up and perpetuate gender inequality; 2) to
change these mechanisms.
What is literature for feminism? Literature, as you may know by
now, is a body of texts with aesthetic and social value, an institution
found in the education and publishing system, and a cultural practice
that includes reading, writing, evaluating and teaching the literary
canon. Writing as a creative form can offer a singular vision and
understanding of human experience, deepening in our perception of
social reality. Literary texts, therefore, can provide with a precise
picture of how society works against women’s advantages. The
emotional impact of literary texts can generate indignation towards
this social inequality, raising consciousness about this issue.
Positive images of women’s qualities and experiences can influence
women’s self-perception suggesting new models and generating
authority and empowerment (Morris). And above all, literature, as all
cultural practices, helps create a human imaginary corpus (the
symbolic structure that underlies in Western society and culture) that
could build authority and an equal position of power for women. De
Beauvoir has already studied how the mythical and imaginary
Western apparatus is a patriarchal invention, she wrote this in 1949.
Therefore it could be revised, rewritten and modified (a feminist
literary practice regarding this is “revisionist myth-making”, for
example, rewrite the story of the Odyssey from Penelope’s point of
view):

A myth always implies a subject who projects his hopes and his
fears toward a sky of transcendence. Women do not set
themselves up as Subject and hence have erected no virile myth
in which their projects are reflected; they have no religion or
 poetry of their own: they still dream through the dreams of men.
Gods made by males are the gods they worship. […] Thus, as
against the dispersed, contingent, and multiple existences of
actual women, mythical thought opposes the Eternal Feminine,
unique and changeless. If the definition provided for this concept
is contradicted by the behavior of flesh-and-blood women, it is
the latter who are wrong: we are told not that Femininity is a false
entity, but that the women concerned are not feminine. (de
Beauvoir 143, 253)

Literature is the only artistic practice that uses language as

medium. Language constructs gender identity through the formation
of subjectivity and cultural discourses. Therefore, this is a powerful
and vital tool for feminist activism and objectives. If women take
control of language from a cultural and imaginative position new
meanings, values, discourses, ideologies and identities can emerge.
As Waugh says “the objective of feminism must be to break or
destabilize gender divisions and cultural binaries (woman/man,
femininity/masculinity, body/mind, nature/culture, emotion/reason,
private/public). It must find a political language that can articulate a
radically different vision about gender and society” (144). Literary
texts are important cultural and creative practices to achieve this.
Feminist literary criticism believes that there is no art without relation
with society, that literature is eminently political, and that this
interpretative tool helps reveal this in texts not only as theory, but as
an action and practice that generates an influence in society. As
Felski suggests:

Literature does not merely constitute a self-referential and

metalinguistic system […] but it is also a medium which can
profoundly affect and influence individual and cultural self-
understanding in the sphere of the everyday, identifying concerns
in social groups through symbolic fictions and thus giving
significance and meaning to experience. (en Robbins)

Here is a text that can give you a general scope of the basis and
variations within feminist criticism. Remember the focus of
formalists, New Criticism and close text analysis that believed the
text must be approached isolated from society, history, and ideology.
The criticism we are studying in this unit is a complete break from
this understanding of literature, as other kinds of critical theory
during the second half of the 20th century until our time. The text
below will also provide you with definitions, common points and
differences between Women’s and Gender studies, theories and
criticism.
 WOMEN AS READERS, WOMEN AS WRITERS, AND
WOMEN’S WRITING

Many of the previous notions found in Feminist Literary Criticism can

be applied to literature written by male or female authors. However,
there are 3 specific objectives that are related to literature written by
women.

WOMEN AS READER
According to Elaine Showalter this aspect marks the first phase of
Anglo-American feminist literary criticism:

The first type is concerned with . . . women as the consumer of male-

produced literature, and with the way in which the hypothesis of a
female reader changes our apprehension of a given text, awakening
us to the significance of its textual codes . . . Its subject includes
images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions of and
misconceptions about women in criticism, and the fissures in male-
constructed literary history. (in Bertens 75)

Within the position of “women as readers” feminist literary criticism

works on developing these following aspects. How do we apply
feminist literary criticism when we read literature?

1. QUESTIONING THE CANON AND PATRIARCHAL

LITERARY HISTORY: Where are women in literary
history?

One of the most important aspects and objective of

feminist literary criticism is to analyze how the literary canon is
created and who prescribes the value and authority of literary works.
This is crucial because the works included in the literary canon of a
specific culture will later become models and representations for
future writers and they will also be emblematic representations of a
historical and cultural moment. Why have women authors and their
works been generally invisibilized, silenced and excluded from the
literary canon? These are objectives that are achieved by a deep
practice of feminist critical reading. The first step of contemporary
Anglo-American feminist criticism in the early 70s mainly
contemplated women are “readers”.

It also studied the history of Reception of works: how women’s works

were valued, received, and interpreted in the period they were written.
Also how they were later revised and revalued by women’s criticism.
Regarding this aspect The Awakening is a good example.

Part of this feminist criticism of women as readers studied masculine

aesthetic values and how creativity is understood at a specific
moment in literary history. These values have generally excluded
women from creativity because the artistic act has been related to
masculinity throughout history and women have been seen as object
or muses for male writers and artists. The question then is, how did
women’s works undermine and subvert this patriarchal understanding
of creativity? How did they manage to become creative subjects and
debunking their role of muses?

And finally, a specific worry of this first stage was to identify

archetypes, stereotypes and images of women and femininity
represented in literature written by men.

Virginia Woolf, for example, tells us in A Room of One’s Own (chapter

2) that, in order to answer this question the narrator goes to research
to the British Museum. She asks herself how women have been
represented in literature, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and
literature throughout history. What has been written about them?
Reflecting on the results she finds she suggests that women are not
seen as individuals that can create anything valuable.

Battersby studies in Gender and Genius how the myths of creativity

before feminism, and the understanding of artistic and literary
creativity, were related to masculinity and to men in different cultural
periods since the Greeks. Up to very recently, the understanding of
literary genius was based on the attributes of the Romantic hero, a
myth of creativity that exalted a tormented self, the disorder of
emotions, and isolation from society. This myth excluded women even
if part of the characteristics could be considered “feminine”, because
those attributes in women were related to insanity and not to a
creative spirit.

A first stage of Anglo-American feminist criticism, called “Images of

Women” criticism, focused on androcentric texts (literary works
written by men). Kate Millet in Sexual Politics studied how literature
written by male authors such as Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, or D.H.
Lawrence, objectify and portray women from a degrading position. It
shows how they perceive and represent women in literature. For her,
patriarchal culture is a political institution. The sexual politics of
patriarchal domination is also found in literature. She reveals how
most canonical writers portray a male perspective that she considers
“misogynist” and that most people and women have been taught to
ignore. Miller, therefore, train women to “read” critically the
represented images of women in main narratives.

WOMEN AS WRITERS
According to Elaine Showalter this second step in the evolution of
feminist literary criticism focuses on:

Women as producer of textual meaning, with the history, genres and

structures of literatures by women. Its subjects include the
 psychodynamics of female creativity; linguistics and the problem of
female language; the trajectory of the individual or collective literary
career; literary history; and of course, studies of particular writers and
works. (in Bertens 75)

This later stage proposed two main approaches to the literature

written by women. One was related to the socio-cultural and historic
framework, with a particular interest in the mechanisms of literary
tradition. The other issue was related to aesthetics and poetics, the
way women wrote, if there were specific differences or not. The latter
was particularly researched by French feminist literary criticism.

2. LITERATURE BY WOMEN, RECOVERING THEIR

OWN TRADITION. What are the characteristics of the
literature written by women? Is there a female literary
tradition?

Those questions above describe the main objectives of a second

phase of Anglo-American feminist literary criticism called
“Gynocriticism” (explained in detail later) that formed in the late 70s
and early 80s. Feminist critics were interested in finding out common
traits in the literature written by women, in the same historical and
cultural period or in general. They wanted to study how their
literature reflected women’s real lives and their social situation in the
period it is being represented in the work.

Another important objective of this second critical development is to

visibilize and recover forgotten or silenced women authors and their
work. With this, these critics want to show that there were more
women than it was first thought that were good writers, deserving to
belong in the literary tradition. Also, this also probed that the
patriarchal construction of the institution of literature (the canon) had
excluded them.

Adrienne Rich does not only share the need for this recovering of
forgotten female authors through a method of feminist archeology,
but she also suggests to “look back” and revise the literary history
and works women have learned from in order to create a new writing.
This act of “re-vision” leading to re-writing (not reading) will provide
women with tools to stop feeling unable to become authors and
unable to write, because this practice will help them find new sources
of empowerment. She suggests women writers should learn from
past writing (male and female) and stop falling prey of victimization.

Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of

entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more
than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we
understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot
know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more
than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-
 destructiveness of male-dominated society. (In Rich “When we Dead
Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision”, 35)

Gynocriticism intended to show the existence of a literary tradition

by women, identifying the way they write or what they write about
and marking their position in literary history. It was made possible by
foregrounding women authors’ contributions and characteristics to
strengthen female authorship and literary authority. To achieve this,
the institutionalization of the authorship of women writers and their
work was needed, so they could then become new models for future
women writers, building a continuum of a female literary tradition.
Thus, women writers will have literary mothers to look back at.

As Rooney suggests, this feminist criticism not only tries to create

the possibility of a new literary tradition or a kind of contra-canon to
the one institutionalized as normative, but also contributes to disrupt
the very idea of canon, because it questions its origin and structure.

Are there any common elements in the way women write or in what
they write about? These critics start with this hypothesis analyzing
how women, in general, show a greater interest in writing about
experiences mainly lived by women up to contemporary times
(maternity, marriage, conflict with creativity, subjugation to
patriarchal domination, love, relation to nature, consciousness of the
body, etc.) Up to the 60s or 70s (the upheaval of the feminist
movement) this was a way to undermine and subvert the obstacles
to their creativity installed by a patriarchal model of authorship and
literary value, which considered these were not literary topics. For
example, in the 19th century women authors, as some critics have
studied, used a poetics of ambivalence and duplicity, armoring their
message so it was not clearly exposed. Literary strategies such as
irony, word play, a timid self or language ambiguity in fact hid an
empowering questioning of rules and self-representation (an
example of this is Emily Dickinson).

Some other aspects feminist literary criticism at this point studied

was, for example, the relation between gender and genre. Is there
any specific genre women preferred to write in some particular
historical period? It is extensively probed that the rise of the novel as
entertainment in the 19th c. came by the hand of women authors,
who were experts in emotions, romance and the intimate side of
human nature. Poetry, for example, was a preferred genre in the
feminist movement period in order to vindicate female experiences
and voices through the expression of self-assertion.

Finally, the study of writing as a profession in relation to women was

also reviewed, their participation in the literary career. When did they
start writing professionally? Was Kate Chopin a professional writer?

As Virginia Woolf advised women writers, in order to be able to write

they needed first adequate material conditions (space and time;
money), they needed “a room of one’s own”. She also referred to a
psychological space, for reflecting, learning and creating without
interference and with the help of models to look back at. The
importance of the acknowledgement of a female literary tradition is
found in her idea that “we have to think back through our mothers”.

Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontës and George
Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have
written without Marlow, or Marlowe without Chaucer…For
masterpieces are not single and solitary birds; they are the outcome
of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the
people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single
voice…Indeed, since freedom and fullness of expression are of the
essence of the art, such a lack of tradition such a scarcity and
inadequacy of tools, must have tolled enormously upon the writing of
women.

Alice Walker is one of the first to claim the importance of recuperating

and studying previous women writers and their works as past models
for black feminist writers in her pioneering work In Search of Our
Mothers’ Gardens.

Even though it seems a long way, feminist literary criticism has done
the work of building a tradition of literature by women for less than a
century now.

WOMEN’S WRITING

3. LITERARY CREATIVITY AND POETICS. How do

women write? What is the relation between gender and
literary language?

A big effort has been devoted by feminist literary critics to study

whether there are particular aesthetic elements in women’s writing.
They tried to find out if there are common creative strategies in their
style and the use of literary language. The ways literature and literary
language works, their characteristics and systems are called
“poetics”.

One of the main issues in this aspect has been to figure out whether
there are singular literary creative mechanisms in women authors, or
characteristics of a feminine literary creativity or a feminist poetics
that can be deployed by women or men authors alike.

Through the study of women’s literary texts we may appreciate

elements of a feminine aesthetics that give voice and presence to a
female imagination and perception of the world in the literary
discourse. What are these elements and characteristics? Through
the use of particular literary strategies women authors may
undermine the patriarchal assumptions about women and the
normative and acceptable literary way of writing.
Rooney says that one of the objectives of feminist criticism and
women’s literature should be to criticize and disrupt hegemonic and
normative aesthetic values (a style we consider normal, prescriptive,
acceptable); also to foreground what is considered minor genres
(autobiography, diaries, testimonial literature, letters, memoirs); and
finally, to promote an avant-garde style and experimental literature
that disrupt accepted uses of narrative, poetic and dramatic
language (e.g. writing against a logical narrative sequence).

In A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf already suggested that the

main characteristic that showed that contemporary women writers
started to write away from victimization and in their own terms,
finding a voice and language of their own in literature was that “they
broke the sentences, and then they broke the sequence”. This
means that finding their own literary style may imply the use of a
singular rhythm, cadence and tone; a particular use of language and
literary strategies. Also, Woolf insists that new ideas about women’s
lives and emotions should shock the reader so the classical
representations of women are shaken (more on this below).

French feminist literary critics, such as Helen Cixous, Luce Irigaray

and Julia Kristeva have treated this issue from a psychoanalytical
and poststructuralist perspective. Their approach is very different to
Anglo-American gynocriticism and its objective was not to see
women writers in relation to literary history and the reflection of their
position and experience in society within literary texts. They
approached women’s identity and femininity as constructions
created from cultural discourses and language. For these critics, and
other feminists from the 1990s on, the self or subject is not a unitary
concept but multiple, fragmented, embodied and moving in a process
beyond patriarchal binaries.

Cixous coined the concept of “écriture féminine” in order to define

how women could recover a style of writing that had been blocked in
them and that is primarily in contact with the body.

The call for a feminine literature, écriture féminine, that “writes the
body” by imitating the rhythms and sexuality of women. Disrupting
conventional narrative, this writing is nonlinear, polyphonic, open-
ended, subverts hegemonic forms. (Cixous in Friedman and Fuchs)

I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman
must write her self: must write about women and bring women to
writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from
their bodies. (Cixous in Wharhol and Price134)

Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the
impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and
rhetorics, regulations and codes. (Cixous in Marks and Courtivron)

We haven´t been taught, nor allowed, to express multiplicity. To do

that is to speak improperly. Of course, we might—we were supposed
to?—exhibit one “truth” while sensing, withholding, muffling another.
 (Irigaray in Wharhol and Price 351)

Cixous also signals a basic notion in feminist writing and women’s

discourse, that focus on disrupting the binaries that have regulated
patriarchal discourse and culture. This logic works through
opposition, understanding, as de Beauvoir suggests, one side of the
opposite as dominating in the hierarchy. Where do you think “the
feminine” is placed in the following imaginary and cultural binaries?

Where is she?
Activity/Passivity
Sun/Moon
Culture/Nature
[Mind/Body]
Day/Night
If we read or speak, the same thread is leading us through literature,
philosophy, criticism, centuries of representation and reflection.
Thought has always worked through opposition. Organization by
hierarchy makes all conceptual organization subject to man. Male
privilege, shown in the opposition between activity and passivity,
which he uses to sustain himself. (Cixous)

The proposition of women’s writing, a female imaginary and

understanding of one’s position, according to these critics, is not on
one side or the other but on the border or on none or on the mixing
of both opposites or binaries. They advocate multiplicity, irreverence,
and a new logic, principally based on the body.

According to Kaplan one of the main elements of women’s narratives

and aesthetics is precisely the right of access to language and
creativity in a patriarchal culture. She describes it as the “profound
split” in subjectivity that is reflected in style and content.

A very high proportion of women’s poems are about the right to

speak and write. The desire to write imaginative poetry and prose
was and is a demand for access to and parity withing the law and
myth-making groups of society … To be a woman and a poet
presents many women poets with such a profound split between their
social sexual identity (their “human” identity) and their artistic
practice that the split becomes the insistent subject, sometimes
overt, often hidden or displaced, of much women’s poetry. (Kaplan)

Kristeva considers that women’s literature suggests a use of

narrative time that is not linear but cyclical, a constant return instead
of a linear sequence from beginning to end.

The two types of temporality—cyclical and monumental—are

traditionally associated with female subjectivity, when female
subjectivity is considered to be innately maternal. We must not forget,
however, that repetition and eternity serve as fundamental
conceptions of time in numerous experiences, notably mystical ones
… On the other hand, female subjectivity poses a problem only with
respect to a certain conception of time, that of time as planning, as
teleology, as linear and prospective development—the time of
 history. This sort of time is that of language, of the enunciation of
sentences (noun phrase and verb phrases, linguistic topic and
comment, beginning and end). (Kristeva in Warhol and Price 443)

KEY CONCEPTS in Feminist Literary Criticism

PATRIARCHY

The idea of patriarchy refers to a social order in which there is

recurrent and systematic domination of men over subordinated
women across a wide range of social institutions and practices. The
term gained currency during the second wave of the women’s
movement dating from the 1960s, clearly carries the connotations of
the male-headed family, mastery and superiority. As such, the
concept of patriarchy asserts that sex is a central organizing principle
of social life where gender relations are thoroughly saturated with
power.
Many feminists have argued that contemporary sexed subjectivities
are not universals but rather the consequence of the relations
between men and women that are formed in the context of
patriarchal arrangements which, if challenged, could be changed.
From a psychoanalytical point of view, patriarchy provides the
context in which through the identification with the father and
symbolic Phallus as the domain of social status, power and
independence boys take on a form of externally oriented masculinity
achieved at the price of emotional dependence on women. In
contrast, while girls acquire a greater surety with the communicative
skills of intimacy through introjection of, and identification with,
aspects of their mothers’ own narratives, they have greater difficulty
with externally oriented autonomy.
A criticism of the concept of patriarchy is its treatment of the category
of woman as an undifferentiated one. That is, all women are taken to
share something fundamental in common in contrast to all men. Thus
it can be argued that the concept obscures the differences between
individual women and their particularities in favour of an all-
embracing universal form of oppression. Not only do all women
appear to be oppressed in the same way but also there is a tendency
to represent them as helpless and powerless. (Barker 142)

THE OTHER

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological,

psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human
female presents in society. […] The terms masculine and feminine
are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal papers.
In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two
electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral,
as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human
beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative […]
Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as
 relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being …She
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.
(de Beauvoir)

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is the first contemporary

philosophical, cultural and sociological study about women
throughout history. It starts a second wave of feminist theory by
understanding that gender is a construct and by debunking the idea
that the “self” is a unitary, essential, natural and complete concept
related to identity. What is a woman? The answer to this question is
not in biology but in the way culture and other patriarchal systems
have made her perceive herself, her subjectivity, and her position as
a “Second Sex”. What has made women to be placed on a second
position in the history of humanity? There is nothing in women per
se that makes her become “second”, it has been a male discourse in
history, science and philosophy that has relegated Women to “the
Other”.

If the masculine is the self, the subject, the female becomes the
other, the object (both are fictions). If the masculine is the
neutral/positive pole, representative of humanity, the feminine
becomes the marked negative pole. The otherness and alterity is a
fundamental category of Western thought, the Other is necessary for
the One to exist. Women have been represented as the Other in
literature.
For de Beauvoir there is a constant hostility of power domination and
submission between the one and the other, and within the Other we
could include not only women but all minority groups in the margins.

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

This seminal book was a speech given by Woolf to the women of a

prestigious female university in England. At some point Woolf says:
“But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and
fiction—what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to
explain”. A Room, was written to encourage young women writers
and academic students and it wanted to generate debate on certain
issues on women and writing never raised before, issues whose
delicate public controversy she was aware of. This essay is probably
the first serious intellectual account to be published on literature and
gender.

Woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write
fiction … I pondered what effect poverty has on the mind …and of
the safety and prosperity of the one sex and the poverty and
insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the lack of
tradition upon the mind of a writer…What a change of temper a fixed
income will bring about … I need not hate any man, he cannot hurt
me. I need not fatter any man, he has nothing to give me…In a
hundred years, I thought, reading my own doorstep, women will have
 ceased to be the protected sex. (chapter 2)

Another important idea we find in Woolf is that of the “looking glass”.

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses

possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of
man at twice its natural size…That serves to explain in part the
necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain
how restless they are under her criticism…For if she begins to tell the
truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks…Under the spell of that
illusion, I thought, looking out the window, half the people on the
pavement are striding to work” (chapter 2).

Woolf emphasized the notion that women writers should have a room
of their own also in the psychic space of their creativity, being on their
own without the interference of voices that come from male literary
tradition, or the perspectives of herself she finds in the
representations of women there. But more importantly women would
be able to write good fiction, to get in contact with their creativity, if
they write without anger and without the objective and effort of
confronting all those aspects of oppression.

Here is a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without
bitterness, without fear, without protest …That was how
Shakespeare wrote…They wrote as women write, not as men
write….They alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the
eternal pedagogue—write this, think that. They alone were deaf to
that persistent voice. She may be beginning to use writing as an art,
not as a method of self-expression.

The way Woolf describes writing by women is contained in the

phrase “first she broke the sentence, then she broke the sequence”.
Studying the narrative and the literary language of a hypothetical
woman writer she realizes what she thinks is singular in her writing:
a particular use of language away from the masculine logic of
discourse and fiction, a different approach to the description of the
“self” and subjectivity and the revealing of experiences and topics of
women’s lives that have been ignored before.

So I tried a sentence or two on my tongue. Soon it was obvious that

something was not quite in order. The smooth gliding of sentence
after sentence was interrupted. Something tore, something
scratched; a single word here and there flashed its torch in my
eye…Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these—
“Chloe like Olivia…” Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the
privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen.
Sometimes women do like women…Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for
the first time in literature. For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary
Carmichael [the writer] knows how to express it she will light a torch
in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been. (chapter 5)

In order to explain the difference she perceives in women writers in

relation to subjectivity and the “self”, Woolf describes the “self/I” she
can read in a piece of writing by a male author:
 After reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the
page. It was a straight bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter
“I”. One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the
landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman
walking I was not quite sure. Back one was always hailed to the letter
“I”. One began to be tired of “I”. (chapter 6)

GYNOCRITICISM

Elaine Showalter describes “Gynocriticism,” a second step in the

evolution of feminist literary criticism, this way:

Feminist criticism has gradually shifted its center from revisionary

reading to a sustained investigation of literature by women. The
second mode of feminist criticism engendered by this process is the
study of women as writers, and its subjects are the history, styles,
themes, genres and structures of writing by women; the
psychodynamics of female creativity; the trajectory of the individual
and collective female career; and the evolution and laws of a female
literary tradition. No English term exists for such a specialized critical
discourse, and so I have invented the term “gynocritics”. How can we
constitute women as a distinct literary group? What is the difference
of women’s writing? (in “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness” )

This critic that coined the term “gynocriticism,” divides the periods of
women writing in Anglo-American culture in three. These systematic
order helps build the foundations of a female literary tradition.

First the prolonged phase of imitation of the prevailing modes of the

dominant tradition, and internalization of its standards of arts and its
views on social roles. Second, there is a phase of protest against
these standards and values and advocacy of minority rights and
values, including a demand for autonomy. Finally there is a phase of
self-discovery, a turning inward freed from some of the dependency
of opposition, a search of identity. An appropriate terminology for
women writers is to call these stages: Feminine, Feminist and
Female.(Showalter in Eagleton 14)

Here is a summary and the historical dates of Showalter’s three

phases of women’s writing: A Feminine Phase (1840-1880): writers
imitate and assimilate the characteristics of male literary tradition and
male aesthetics; a Feminist Phase (1880-1920): writers protest
against previous models and want to separate from them searching
for their own autonomy; a Female Phase (1920-now): it starts in the
inter-war period when writers wrote about women’s consciousness
and experiences that could be represented through the strategies of
multiple points of view or perspectives, form and stance against a
defined univocal self, and elliptical and fragmented sentences and
voices.

Showalter in “Towards a Feminist Poetics” considers that

Gynocritics’ work is to build a framework of analysis for women’s
literature, so new models based on the study of women’s experience
can emerge instead of masculinist models and theories. It starts the
moment that we get rid of masculine literary history and we focus on
the visible world of women’s culture. It seeks to visibilize the
experience of the other half of society through the feminist
investigation of history, anthropology, psychology and sociology.
These are fields that have developed hypotheses about a subculture
of women alone, which includes the interiorized constructs of
femininity and also women’s occupations, interactions and
consciousness. The anthropological perspective also studies the
relationship between women with other women, women’s sexuality
and reproduction, ideas about the body, myths, rites of passage, so
they can show that female values subvert and undermine the
masculine systems where they are contained (in Eagleton 254).