1

Literary Criticism
LESSON 06 – FEMINISM
PREPARED BY MR. JONATHAN M. AYSON
Introduction 2

“If Shakespeare had a sister, what

would have become of her?”
What is Feminist Literary 3
Criticism?
 This
is a specific kind of political discourse: a critical
and theoretical practice committed to the struggle
against patriarchy and sexism
 Itfocuses on two kinds: one is concerned with
unearthing, rediscovering or re-evaluating women’s
writings and the other one with reading literature
from the point of view of women rather than men
 Feminism asks why women have played a
subordinate role to men in human societies
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 Women are either on a pedestal or they are whores
 Theories
having an essentialist focus (cultural
conditioning-the mirror image of biologism which for
centuries justified the oppression of women by
proclaiming the natural superiority of men)
 Androgyny- it suggests a world in which sex-roles are
not rigidly defined, a state in which the man in every
woman and the woman in every man could be
integrated and freely expressed
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 Patriarchy-sexism is perpetuated by systems of
patriarchy where male-dominated structures and
social arrangements elaborate the oppression of
women
 Theories aimed at defining or establishing a feminist
literary canon or theories seeking to re-interpret and
re-vision literature from a less patriarchal slant
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 Theories focusing on sexual difference and sexual
politics (including gender studies, lesbian studies,
cultural feminism, radical feminism, and
socialist/materialist feminism)
 Feminists obstacles are socially constructed
Three Waves of Feminism 7
FIRST WAVE - Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir
(The Second Sex)
 The book questions the “othering” of women by
western philosophy
 Women’s rights become the focus of the first wave

 Woolf - women as writers

 de Beauvoir - women as written
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Second Wave - Kate Millet, Betty Friedan (Sexual
Politics)
 This refers to a period of feminist thought that
originated around the 1960s and was mainly
concerned with independence and greater political
action to improve women’s rights. It focuses on the
inclusion of women in traditionally male-dominated
areas
 Women’s reproductive rights become the focus of
the second wave
 9
Third Wave - is a feminist movement that arguably
began in the early 1990s. It seeks to challenge and
expand common definitions of gender and sexuality
Sexual Politics (Kate Millet) 10
 Millet’s argument-ranging over history, literature,
psychoanalysis, sociology, and other areas-is the
ideological indoctrination as much as economic
inequality is the cause of women’s oppression. The
acting-out of sex-roles in the unequal and repressive
relations of domination and subordination is what
Millett calls “sexual politics”
 Her book provided a powerful critique of patriarchal
culture
Gynocriticism or Anglo-American
11
Feminist Criticism(Elaine Showalter)
 This concentrates on the specificity of women’s
writing, on recuperating a tradition of women authors,
and on examining in detail women’s own culture
 Showalter outlines a literary history of women writers
(many of whom had, indeed, been hidden from
history) and promotes both a feminist critique
(concerned with women readers) and a gynocritics
(concerned with women writers) in her book A
Literature of Their Own (1977)
 This is the study of women writers by women
French Feminist Critical Theory or Gynesis
(Julie Kristeva, Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray) 12
 This emphasizes not the gender of the writer
(female) but the writing effect of the text (feminine)-
hence “lecriture feminine”. Alice Jardine has named it
gynesis-the textualizing of women
 French feminist theoreticians, in seeking to break
down conventional, male-constructed stereotypes of
sexual difference, have focused on language as at
once the domain in which such stereotypes are
structured, and evidence of the liberating sexual
difference which may be described in a specifically
“women’s language”
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Marxist Feminism
 This
sought to extend Marxism’s analysis of class into
a women’s history of their material and economic
oppression, and especially how the family and
women’s domestic labor are constructed by and
reproduce the sexual division of labor
 Marxist
feminism’s primary task was to open up the
complex relations between gender and the economy
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 TheMarxist feminist argument is that the conditions
under which men and women produce literature are
materially different and influence the form and
content of what they write
 The ideology of gender affects the way the writings
of men and women are read and how canons of
excellence are established
Conclusion 15

“If Shakespeare had a sister, she

would have become the luckiest
girl in Stratford-Upon-Avon for she
has a brilliant brother who respects
and loves women very dearly”.
References 16

Montealegre, A. (2003). Applying literary theories in

the major genres. Manila: Philippine Normal
University.

Selden, R. (1993). Contemporary literary theory.

London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.