The Significance of

Feminist Criticism with

Reference to the Essays:

-The Laugh of Medusa

-Towards a Feminist Poetics
-Towards a Black Feminist Criticism
 Feminism
The belief in social, economic, and
political equality of the sexes.

2
The Laugh of Medusa
- Helene Cixous
 The Laugh of Medusa
Cixous advocates
heavily for the idea that
women need to write.

“The Laugh of the

Claims that there is a very Cixous calls upon women
close relationship between to assert themselves in
women's bodies & their writing. writing and in the world by
leaving their literary
imprint, and she speaks in
Women beginning to write would also terms associated with
be the beginning of them reclaiming revolution.
their voices and their bodies.
Medusa” is also a call to
urge women to reclaim
their bodies and, by
extension, their desires
and identities through
writing.

Women should start writing

for themselves & not the The logic of Anti-Love
audience. & coined the term
“Ecriture Feminine”
• Advocates new ways of thinking and writing about women and literature :

The essay has become a staple of feminist criticism because of its incisive critique of
patriarchal politics, its endorsement of a feminist philosophy that is grounded in
poststructuralism and psychoanalytic theory, and its modeling or representation of
the possibilities of “Ecriture Feminine” (“feminine writing”)—what Cixous calls white
ink.

• Cixous puts into practice her theory of white ink :

In her notion of white ink, she embraces aspects of female experience that have
been denigrated: sexuality, sisterhood, and motherhood.
White ink, a metaphor for écriture féminine, is likened to the “good mother’s milk.”
In this way, white ink is marked writing; it designates the writing from the female
body. As such, white ink is associated with breast milk. It is nourishing although,
abstractly, difficult to define and read because it is almost invisible. White ink appears
as experimental writing because it thwarts traditional forms and subject matter in its
objective of capturing female experience, psychology, and desire.
• Females have been historically defined as "not men” :
Because females have been historically defined as "not men," their sense of self
has been determined by how they must lack something that men have.
Phallocentrism, a male-dominated, masculine-coded linguistic and philosophical
system—or, to put it more simply, male bias—keeps women from accessing
their own stories. Without this access, women lack knowledge of the multiple
ways to be; women, thus, have no body and are thus nobody.
Thus, her agenda in “The Laugh of the Medusa” is to call into question and
break from the existing literary and social order and to embrace a new vision
for women and literature.

( What is most classically feminist, about Cixous’s essay is her

admonition to women that they should have a choice. ) 6
 Significant Quotes
“I write as a woman, toward women. When I say "woman," I'm
speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against
conventional man; and of a universal woman subject who must
bring women to their senses and to their meaning in history.”

“You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her.

And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.”

7
Towards A Feminist Poetics
- Elaine Showalter
• The author dissects the history of women’s literature into three phases –
( The feminist criticism must be free from the divided
consciousness of ‘daughters’ and ‘sisters’. )
1840-1880 1920 Onwards
FEMININE 1880-1920
FEMALE
FEMINIST

1 • Feminist Critique
• Feminist criticism can be divided into two varieties.
2 • Gynocritics
 • During the Feminine phase, (1840 – 1880) women wrote in an
effort to equalize the intellectual achievements of the male culture
and internalized its assumptions of female nature. The distinguishing
sign of this period is the male pseudonym.
• In the Feminist phase (1880 – 1920) women reject the
accommodation postures of femininity and used literature to
dramatize the ordeals of wronged womanhood.
• In the Female phase (1920 onwards) women rejected both imitation
and protest. They considered these two as forms of dependence.
Instead, they turn to female experiences as the source of
autonomous art.

• Feminist Critique: It is a historical grounded inquiry. Its subjects include

the images and the stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions
and misconceptions about women in criticism, and the exploitation
and manipulation of the female audience in popular culture and film.
• The second type is concerned with a woman as a writer, that is with
a woman as the producer of literature; its subjects include the
psychodynamics of female creativity, linguistics, and the problems of
female language. Showalter calls this type of analysis - ‘gynocritics’. It is
a type of criticism designed by feminists to evaluate works by women
as feminist works. It takes into consideration the circumstances in
which a work of art is produced, the point of view of the author, and
the motivation and attitudes of the characters.
Presentation title
Towards a Black Feminist Criticism
-Barbara Smith
 Significant Quotes
“All segments of the literary
world - whether establishment,
progressive, Black, female, or
lesbian - do not know, or at least
act as if they do not know, that
Black women writers and Black
lesbian writers exist.”
“At the present time I feel that the
politics of feminism have a direct
relationship to the state of Black
women's literature. A viable,
autonomous Black feminist
movement in this country would
open up the space needed for the
exploration of Black women's lives
and the creation of consciously
Black woman-identified art.”
• The essay lays the groundwork for the effusions of both Black feminist critical theory
and the creative writings of African descent women of USA in the 1970s and 1980s.
Smith’s argument exposes the flaws of considering literature through either the
exclusive lens of race, as Black literary criticism tends to do, or the exclusive lens of
gender, as predominantly White feminist criticism tends to do.

• She propounds that it is Black women who are in the best possie to create an
effective criticism, that provides a non-discriminatory consideration of the roles played
by race, gender, class, and sexuality in literature.

• She proclaims that this critical move is necessary not only for the impact it will have on
literary criticism generally, but also to offer a deeper understanding of the literature of
Black women specifically.

• She wraps up her essay by doing a “Black feminist” reading of Toni Morrison’s novel
“Sula”.
Thank you

By: Umika Sambyal

Professor: Dr. Sonia Khajuria