1.

Feminist Approaches to
Literature
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By:
Kate O'Connor
Date Published:03 August 2012
This essay offers a very basic introduction to feminist literary theory, and a
compendium of Great Writers Inspire resources that can be approached from a
feminist perspective. It provides suggestions for how material on the Great
Writers Inspire site can be used as a starting point for exploration of or
classroom discussion about feminist approaches to literature. Questions for
reflection or discussion are highlighted in the text. Links in the text point to
resources in the Great Writers Inspire site. The resources can also be found via
the 'Feminist Approaches to Literature' start page . Further material can be
found via our library  and via the various authors and theme pages.

The Traditions of Feminist Criticism

According to Yale Professor Paul Fry in his lecture The Classical Feminist
Tradition  from 25:07, there have been several prominent schools of thought in
modern feminist literary criticism:
 First Wave Feminism: Men's Treatment of Women
In this early stage of feminist criticism, critics consider male novelists'
demeaning treatment or marginalisation of female characters. First wave
feminist criticism includes books like Marry Ellman's Thinking About
Women (1968) Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1969), and Germaine Greer's The
Female Eunuch (1970). An example of first wave feminist literary analysis
would be a critique of William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew for
Petruchio's abuse of Katherina.
 Second Wave Feminism: Gynocriticism
Elaine Showalter pioneered gynocriticism with her book A Literature of Their
Own (1977). Gynocriticism involves three major aspects. The first is the
examination of female writers and their place in literary history. The second is
the consideration of the treatment of female characters in books by both male
and female writers. The third and most important aspect of gynocriticism is the
discovery and exploration of a canon of literature written by women;
gynocriticism seeks to appropriate a female literary tradition. In Showalter's  A
Literature of Their Own, she proposes the following three phases of women's
writing:
1. The 'Feminine' Phase - in the feminine phase, female writers tried to adhere to
male values, writing as men, and usually did not enter into debate regarding
women's place in society. Female writers often employed male pseudonyms
during this period.
2. The 'Feminist' Phase - in the feminist phase, the central theme of works by
female writers was the criticism of the role of women in society and the
oppression of women.
3. The 'Female' Phase - during the 'female' phase, women writers were no longer
trying to prove the legitimacy of a woman's perspective. Rather, it was assumed
that the works of a women writer were authentic and valid. The female phase
lacked the anger and combative consciousness of the feminist phase.
Do you agree with Showalter's 'phases'? How does your favourite female writer
fit into these phases?
 The Madwoman Thesis
Made famous by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the
Attic (1979), the eponymous madwoman is Bertha Jenkins of Charlotte
Brontë's Jane Eyre , Rochester's mad wife hidden away in the attic of Thornfield
Hall. Gilbert and Gubar's thesis suggests that because society forbade women
from expressing themselves through creative outlets, their creative powers
were channelled into psychologically self-destructive behaviour and subversive
actions. A great example of the madwoman thesis in action is in Charlotte
Perkins Gilman's 1892 short story The Yellow Wallpaper .
Read Jane Eyre  with the madwoman thesis in mind. Are there connections
between Jane's subversive thoughts and Bertha's appearances in the text?
How does it change your view of the novel to consider Bertha as an alter ego
for Jane, unencumbered by societal norms? Look closely at Rochester's
explanation of the early symptoms of Bertha's madness. How do they differ
from his licentious behaviour?
 French Feminism
French Feminism, led by critics such as Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixousx, and
Luce Irigaray, relies heavily on Freudian psychology and the theory of penis
envy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis_envy ). French feminists postulate the
existence of a separate language belonging to women that consists of loose,
digressive sentences written without use of the ego.
How does Jane Austen fit into French Feminism? She uses very concise
language, yet speaks from a woman's perspective with confidence. Can she be
placed in Showalter's phases of women's writing?
Dr. Simon Swift of the University of Leeds gives a podcast titled 'How Words,
Form, and Structure Create Meaning: Women and Writing' that uses the works
of Virginia Woolf and Silvia Plath to analyse the form and structural aspects of
texts to ask whether or not women writers have a voice inherently different from
that of men (podcast part 1  and part 2 ).
In Professor Deborah Cameron's podcast English and Gender , Cameron
discusses the differences and similarities in use of the English language
between men and women.
In another of Professor Paul Fry's podcasts, Queer Theory and Gender
Performativity , Fry discusses sexuality, the nature of performing gender
(14:53), and gendered reading (46:20).
How do more modern A-level set texts, like those of Margaret Atwood, Zora
Neale Hurston, or Maya Angelou, fit into any of these traditions of criticism?

Depictions of Women by Men

Students could begin approaching Great Writers Inspire by considering the
range of women depicted in early English literature: from Chaucer's bawdy
'Wife of Bath' in The Canterbury Tales  to Spenser's interminably pure Una
in The Faerie Queene .
How might the reign of Queen Elizabeth I have dictated the way Elizabethan
writers were permitted to present women? How did each male poet handle the
challenge of depicting women?
By 1610 Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl  presented
at The Fortune a play based on the life of Mary Firth. The heroine was a man
playing a woman dressed as a man. In Dr. Emma Smith's podcast on   The
Roaring Girl, Smith breaks down both the gender issues of the play and of the
real life accusations against Mary Frith.
In Dr. Emma Smith's podcast on John Webster's   The Duchess of Malfi, a
frequent A-level set text, Smith discusses Webster's treatment of female
autonomy. Placing Middleton or Webster's female characters against those of
Shakespeare could be brought to bear on A-level Paper 4 on Drama or Paper 5
on Shakespeare and other pre-20th Century Texts.
Smith's podcast on   The Comedy of Errors from 11:21 alludes to the valuation of
Elizabethan comedy as a commentary on gender and sexuality, and how  The
Comedy of Errors at first seems to defy this tradition.
What are the differences between depictions of women written by male and
female novelists?
Students can compare the works of Charlotte and Emily Brontë or Jane Austen
with, for example, Hardy's Tess of the d'Ubervilles  or D. H. Lawrence's Lady
Chatterley's Lover  or Women in Love .
How do Lawrence's sexually charged novels compare with what Emma Smith
said about Webster's treatment of women's sexuality in The Duchess of Malfi?
Dr. Abigail Williams' podcast on Jonathan Swift's The Lady's Dressing-
Room discusses the ways in which Swift uses and complicates contemporary
stereotypes about the vanity of women.

Rise of the Woman Writer

With the movement from Renaissance to Restoration theatre, the depiction of
women on stage changed dramatically, in no small part because women could
portray women for the first time. Dr. Abigail Williams' adapted lecture,  Behn and
the Restoration Theatre , discusses Behn's use and abuse of the woman on
stage.
What were the feminist advantages and disadvantages to women's introduction
to the stage?
The essay Who is Aphra Behn?  addresses the transformation of Behn into a
feminist icon by later writers, especially Bloomsbury Group member Virginia
Woolf in her novella/essay A Room of One's Own .
How might Woolf's description and analysis of Behn indicate her own feminist
agenda?
Behn created an obstacle for later women writers in that her scandalous life did
little to undermine the perception that women writing for money were little better
than whores.
 In what position did that place chaste female novelists like  Frances
Burney  or Jane Austen ?
To what extent was the perception of women and the literary vogue for female
heroines impacted by Samuel Richardson's Pamela ? Students could examine a
passage from Pamela and evaluate Richardson's success and failures, and
look for his influence in novels with which they are more familiar, like those of
Austen or the Brontë sisters.
In Dr. Catherine's Brown's podcast on Eliot's Reception History , Dr. Brown
discusses feminist criticism of Eliot's novels. In the podcast Genre and Justice ,
she discusses Eliot's use of women as scapegoats to illustrate the injustice of
the distribution of happiness in Victorian England.
Professor Sir Richard Evans' Gresham College lecture The Victorians: Gender
and Sexuality  can provide crucial background for any study of women in
Victorian literature.

Women Writers and Class

Can women's financial and social plights be separated? How do Jane Austen
and Charlotte Brontë bring to bear financial concerns regarding literature
depicting women in the 18th and 19th century?
How did class barriers affect the work of 18th century kitchen maid and
poet Mary Leapor ?
Listen to the podcast by Yale's Professor Paul Fry titled "The Classical Feminist
Tradition" . At 9:20, Fry questions whether or not any novel can be evaluated
without consideration of financial and class concerns, and to what extent
Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own  suggests a female novelist can only
create successful work if she is of independent means.
What are the different problems faced by a wealthy character like
Austen's Emma , as opposed to a poor character like Brontë's Jane Eyre ?

Also see sections on the following writers:

 Jane Austen
 Aphra Behn
 Charlotte Brontë
 George Eliot
 Thomas Hardy
 D.H. Lawrence
 Mary Leapor
 Thomas Middleton
 Katherine Mansfield
 Olive Schreiner
 William Shakespeare
 John Webster
 Virginina Woolf
In Collection(s):Aphra Behn , Charlotte Brontë , Virginia Woolf , Celebrating
women’s writing: the pen in their hands , George Eliot
2.Structuralism
A movement of thought in the humanities, widespread in anthropology, linguistics, and
literary theory, and influential in the 1950s and ’60s. Based primarily on the linguistic
theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, structuralism considered language as a system of signs and
signification, the elements of which are understandable only in relation to each other and to
the system. In literary theory, structuralism challenged the belief that a work of literature
reflected a given reality; instead, a text was constituted of linguistic conventions and situated
among other texts. Structuralist critics analyzed material by examining underlying structures,
such as characterization or plot, and attempted to show how these patterns were universal and
could thus be used to develop general conclusions about both individual works and the
systems from which they emerged. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was an important
champion of structuralism, as was Roman Jakobsen. Northrop Frye’s attempts to categorize
Western literature by archetype had some basis in structuralist thought. Structuralism
regarded language as a closed, stable system, and by the late 1960s it had given way
to poststructuralism.

Introduction
‘Structuralism’ now designates the practice of critics who analyze
literature on the explicit model of the modern linguistic theory. It is a
term of literary criticism related to language though it influenced a number
of modes of knowledge and movements like Philosophy, Anthropology,
Social Science, literature in Europe. Actually, “structuralism”, became a
major post-war intellectual movement in Europe and the United States.
But the fact is that ‘structuralism’ includes all kinds of communicative
ethods both verbal and non-verbal as well as sign and signification. As a
result, it relates all the forms of signs like smoke, fire, traffic-light, fly
beacon, body language, art facts, status symbol etc.
Even the study of the animal behaviour is also equally related with
‘structuralism‘ (Rashid Ashkari, Uttaradhunik Shahitya O Shamalachana
Tatta, Kashbon Prokashon, Dhaka, P–43).
Background
Though structuralism was marked and bloomed in the 1950s and
1960s, the salient of it was the Swiss Linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure(1857-1913). He instead of highlighting the historical
development of language chose to consider it in ‘a temporal term’ as a
system of differentiated signs which could have to mean within the
system of which they were part (Bijoy Kumar Das, Twentieth Century
Literary Criticism, Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, P-26 ).
He imposed importance on modern uses of the language system and its
activities, its grammatical structures and on the establishment of its
meaning. Saussure’s idea about linguistic structure can expatiate in three
ways:

1. Firstly, the imposed meaning of a word is absurd and it keeps on

only our traditional faith. There is no relation between a word and
its meaning. For example, the meaning of the word ‘hut’ might not be
what it traditionally implies. It would give another meaning. So, it’s
absurd to cherish a specific meaning fixed for a specific word.
2. Secondly, No word can be defined keeping it separate from its
related words. Every word depends on its synonymous words for
giving a meaning idea. So, word meanings depend on their
systematic arrangements. For this, when we say the word ‘Mansion’,
we make a comparison with its synonymous words like ‘house’,
‘palace’ etc. Not only the synonyms but also the antonyms of a word
help us to impose a meaning upon a word. As a result, the word ‘Man’
expresses such a meaning that the ‘woman’ does not, as ‘day’ does not
like ‘night’. So, all the words are netted with their comparative and
contrastive ideas.
3. Thirdly, the meaning of a word is always imposed on it by human
mind and idea. It is never universal. For example, there is no
impartial and real method for distinguishing two persons — one is a
‘terrorist’ and another is a ‘Freedom fighter’. They can be accepted by
various persons with various ideas and valuations. So, language is
arbitrary and relational and constitutive.
In fact, ‘structuralism’ refers to the works of structural linguists
like Saussure, Jacobson, structural anthropologists like Levi Strauss and
structural semioticians like Grimes and Barthes. These critics share a
characteristic way of thinking about structures.
Though Saussure restricted him within the linguistic theory only, the
anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss applied Saussure’s ideas in his studies
of Kingship, totemism, and myth. In doing so, Strauss promoted a new
interest in Saussure and became a focal point for the structuralist
movement of the 1960s (Bijoy Kumar Das, Ibid- P-26).
Strauss’ structuralism was an effort to reduce the enormous amount
of information about cultural systems to what he was/were the
essentials, the formal relationships among their elements.
He viewed cultures as systems of communication and constructed models
based on structural linguistics information theory and cybernetics to
interpret them.
According to Strauss, myths through the world are the
transformations of one another. The myths of different cultures may
appear to be different. But if the myths have the same structures, they may
actually be saying the same thing.
Complementary to Formalism
In another way, structuralism is complementary to formalism. A
structuralist critic views the works of literature as a kind of meeting
place for different systems of meaning. Strauss and Barthes have
given a new direction to structuralism in their practice of criticism.
They have followed the Saussurian principle of binary division like
nature/culture, raw/cooked, wet/dry and noise/silence etc.
Barthes denounces the romantic idea of genius ‘Author-God’. If
structuralism is taken to be an effort to link up the culture mind and
universe, then it has suggested that culture can be understood semiotically.
Cultures are structured sign-systems in their own ways. Kinships of
various cultures whether primitive or advanced function like semiotic
relations. For instance, the exchange of gifts and women have been taken
as keys leading to a whole network of Gurbhagat Singh–

4.structure ,sign,play in the discourse of human

sciences
Jacques Derrida, A French philosopher, critically engages 
with structuralism. He comments on what the structure is and engages with
the politics of the structure itself, what he terms as the “structurality of
structure”. This essay showcases the extent of limits of structuralism, which
provides the structures  but fails to examine the concept of structure itself.

Derrida explains that the concept of structure is as old as the concept of

episteme, but has never been discussed. On explaining the structure he first
defines what a center is- “an organizing principle that allows for limited
play”, i.e. center gives structure its structurality, “orients, balances and
organizes the structure”, but at the same time, inhibits play and allows a
limited discourse to take play within the structure itself, for with the center
comes  boundaries.  Another characteristic of center is that it is the part of the
yet at the same time it is unaffected by the changes taking place in it.
Therefore the center that leads coherence and structurality to a structure, it at
the same time escapes it.  Therefore, the paradoxical concept of center being
both inside and outside the structure, i.e. the center that governs the center
escapes its totality at the same time. For example: God is the center of human
life and dictates laws, yet at the same time he is not the part of this life. He is
absent from the play of human life. Derrida then chooses to call the center as
“a transcendental signifier.”  Lastly, he presents the very essence of the
center that by limiting play, it is mastering anxiety that free play leads to.