Feminist Literary

Criticism

Dr. Shaimaa El-Ateek

 Introduction
• It is an approach to textual analysis that examines ways in which literature
reinforces or undermines the oppression of women economically, socially,
politically, and psychologically.
• Feminists assert that Western societies are patriarchal, being controlled
by men.
• Patriarchy is any culture that privileges men by promoting traditional
gender roles.
• Men, either unconsciously or consciously, have oppressed women by not
giving voice and value to women’s opinions, responses, and writings.
• Men have made women the nonsignificant Other.
• Patriarchy is by definition sexist as it promotes the belief that women are
innately inferior to men.
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 Introduction
• Women can begin to challenge the concept of male superiority
and work toward creating equality between the sexes:
– By debunking stereotypical images of women found throughout the
literary canon
– By rediscovering and publishing texts written by females but suppressed
by men
– By rereading the canonised works of male authors from a woman’s point
of view
– By engaging in the discussion of literary theory.
• There is a difference between sex and gender:
– Sex is biologically determined as female or male.
– Gender is culturally determined as feminine or masculine.
• The inferior position long occupied by women in a patriarchal
society has been culturally, not biologically, produced.
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 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
 Mary Wollstonecraft:
• Wollstonecraft, in her A Vindication of the Rights of Women
(1792), maintained that:
– Women must stand up for their rights and not allow their male-
dominated society to define what it means to be a woman.
– Women must take the lead and articulate who they are and what role
they will play in society.
– Women must reject patriarchal assumption that women are inferior to
men.

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 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
 Virginia Woolf:
• Woolf laid the foundation for feminist criticism in her seminal work A
Room of One’s Own.
– She declares that men have and continue to treat women as inferiors.
– The male, she argues, defines what is means to be female and controls
the political, economic, social and literary structures.
– She hypothesises the existence of Shakespeare’s sister, equally as
gifted a writer as he.
• Gender prevents her from having “a room of her own”.
• She cannot obtain an education or find profitable employment because
she is a woman.
• Her innate artistic talents will therefore never flourish, for she cannot
afford a room of her own.
• This kind of loss of artistic talent and personal worthiness is the direct
result of society’s opinion of women: they are intellectually inferior to
men.

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 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
 Virginia Woolf:
• Woolf argues that women must reject this social construct and
establish their own identity.
• They must challenge the prevailing, false cultural notions
about their gender identity.
• They must develop a female discourse that will accurately
portray their relationship “to the world of reality and not to
the world of men.”

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 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
 Simone de Beauvoir :
• Beauvoir is a central French feminist.
• Her text, The Second Sex (1949), is the “foundational work of 20th
century feminism”
• She declares that Western societies are patriarchal, controlled by males.
• Like Woolf, she believed that the male defines what it means to be human,
including, therefore, what it means to be female.
• Since the female is not the male, she becomes the Other, finding herself a
non-existent player in church, government, and educational systems.
• She asserts that a woman must :
– break the bonds of her patriarchal society
– Define herself as a significant human being in her own right.
– Defy male classification as an Other.
– See herself as an autonomous being.
– Ask herself, “What is a woman?” Her answer must not be “mankind”.

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 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
 Kate Millett:
• Millett’s book is entitled Sexual Politics (1970).
• Conforming to the prescribed sex roles dictated by society is what Millett
calls sexual politics.
• She argues that “a female is born and a woman is created”.
– One’s sex is determined at birth (male or female)
– One’s gender is a social construct created by cultural ideals and norms
(masculine or feminine).
– This means that culture and society determine one’s gender.
• Millett challenges the social ideological characteristics of both the male
and the female:
– Women and men (consciously and unconsciously) conform to the cultural
ideas established for them by society.
– Cultural norms and expectations are transmitted through media.
– Boys must be aggressive, self-assertive, domineering.
– Girls must be passive, meek, humble.

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 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
 Kate Millett:
• For Millett, women must revolt against the power centre of their culture:
male dominance.
• She argues that women must establish female social conventions for
themselves.
• They should articulate female discourse, literary studies, and feminist
theory.

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 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
 Elaine Showalter:
• Showalter’s main book is A Literature of Their Own (1977).
• She chronicles three historical phases of female writing:
– The feminine phase:
 Female authors accepted the prevailing social constructs of their day on
the role and the definition of women.
 They wrote under male pseudonyms.
– The feminist phase:
 Female authors dramatized the plight of the “slighted” woman.
 These authors depicted the harsh and often cruel treatment of female
characters as a kind of protest.
– The female phase:
 Women reject the imitation prominent during the feminine phase and the
protest that dominated the feminist phase.
 Feminist critics concern themselves with developing a peculiarly female
understanding of the female experience in art.
 They uncover the misogyny (the male detestation and stereotypical view
of women) in male texts.
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 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
 Elaine Showalter:
– Showalter coins the term Gynocriticism to:
 Refer to the process of constructing a female framework for analysis of
women’s literature;
 Develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than
to adapt male models and theories.
– A gynocritic should be completely aware of four models:
– The Biological Model:
 It emphasises how the female body marks itself upon a text by providing a
host of literary images and a personal, intimate tone.
– The Linguistic Model:
 It concerns itself with the need for a female discourse and a language
peculiar to their gender.
 This female language can be utilised in their writings.

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 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
 Elaine Showalter:
– The Psychoanalytic Model:
 It analyzes the female psyche and how it affects the writing process.
 It emphasizes the flux and fluidity of female writing as opposed to male
rigidity and structure.
– The Cultural Model:
 It investigates how the society in which female authors work and function
shapes women’s goals, responses, and points of view.

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 ASSUMPTIONS
• Feminists possess a collective identity:
 They are struggling to discover who they are, how they arrived at their present
situation, and where they are going.
 In this patriarchal world, the feminists declare that it is man who defines what it
means to be human.
 Feminist critics want to show humankind the errors in this way of thinking.
 Women, they pronounce, are people in their own right; they are not incomplete or
inferior men.

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A Feminist Reading of Cinderella
• From a feminist point of view:
 Cinderella is not simply an innocent love story of a girl and a prince.
 Like many fairy tales, Cinderella establishes the ideologies of the patriarchy.
 It oppresses girls to think that they have to depend on a man.
 Cinderella is being abused by her step-mother and step-sisters.
 She is forced to do traditional woman roles such as cleaning the house, and
cooking for her family.
 Cinderella lives in the attic of their monstrous house.
 She wears rags.
 She is the innocent girl who is mistreated;
 She needs a way to escape.
 The fairy Godmother turns Cinderella’s rags into a ball gown;
 The fairy Godmother enforces the idea that men only want beautiful women.
 Cinderella finally gets to the ball and meets the prince who immediately notices
her beauty.
 The prince “falls in love” with her.
 He is just staring at her beauty which also reinforces the idea that beauty matters to
him. (Male Gaze)

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A Feminist Reading of Cinderella
 When the clock strikes twelve Cinderella has to leave and her shoe falls behind.
 The prince only finds her by letting her put the glass slipper on
 He decides to marry her because the shoe fits her foot.
 Cinderella accepts the prince’s proposal to escape her abusive home life.
 The prince is in love with Cinderella’s beauty.
 He marries her to make her his property. (the object of male gaze).
 Cinderella is not just a fairy-tale of dreams coming true for an innocent girl.
 It is a story about the control and power of the patriarchy.
 The story shows the underlying ideologies and oppressions of women.

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