Paper
204: Contemporary Western Theories and Film Studies
Smt.S.B.Gardi Department of English, M.K.Bhavanagar University.
Vachchhalata Joshi
Vachchhalatajoshi.14@gmail.com
Roll no – 20
Words: 2054
Paragraphs: 15
Topic: Feminist Criticism
Feminist Criticism
“I hate to hear you
talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures.
None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.”
― Persuasion
As a distinctive and concerted approach to literature, feminist criticism was not inaugurated until late in the 1960s. Behind it, however, lie two centuries of struggle for the recognition of women’s cultural roles and achievements, and for women’s social and political rights, marked by such books as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), and the American Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century
In the years after 1969, there was an explosion of feminist
writings without parallel in previous critical innovations, in a movement that
in its earlier stages, as Elaine Showalter remarked, displayed the urgency and
excitement of a religious awakening. Current feminist criticism in America,
England, France, and other countries is not a unitary theory or procedure. It
manifests, among those who practice it, a great variety of critical vantage
points and procedures, including adaptations of psychoanalytic, Marxist, and
diverse poststructuralist theories, and its vitality is signalized by the vigor
(sometimes even rancor) of the debates within the ranks of professed feminists
themselves.
The various feminisms, however, share certain assumptions
and concepts that underlie the diverse ways that individual critics explore the
factor of sexual difference and privilege in the production, the form and
content, the reception, and the critical analysis and evaluation of works of
literature:
1.
The basic view is that
Western civilization is pervasively patriarchal that is, it is
male-centered and -controlled, and is organized and conducted in such a way as
to subordinate women to men in all cultural domains: familial, religious,
political, economic, social, legal, and artistic. From the Hebrew Bible and
Greek philosophic writings to the present, the female tends to be defined by
negative reference to the male as the human norm, hence as an Other, or
non-man, by her lack of the identifying male organ, of male capabilities, and
of the male character traits that are presumed, in the patriarchal view, to
have achieved the most important scientific and technical inventions and the major
works of civilization and culture.
2.
It is widely held that while one’s sex as a
man or woman is determined by anatomy, the prevailing concepts of gender—of the
traits that are conceived to constitute what is masculine and what is feminine
in temperament and behavior—are large, if not entirely, social constructs
that were generated by the pervasive patriarchal biases of our civilization. As
Simone de Beauvoir put it, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
3.
The further claim is that this patriarchal ideology
pervades those writings which have been traditionally considered great
literature, and which until recently have been written mainly by men for men.
Typically, the most highly regarded literary works focus on male
protagonists—Oedipus, Ulysses, Hamlet, Tom Jones, Faust, the Three Musketeers,
Captain Ahab, Huck Finn, and Leopold Bloom—who embody masculine traits and ways of
feeling and pursuing masculine interests in masculine fields of action.
A major interest of feminist critics in English-speaking countries has been to reconstitute the ways we deal with literature in order to do justice to female points of view, concerns, and values. One emphasis has been to alter the way a woman reads the literature of the past so as to make her not an acquiescent, but The Resisting Reader; that is, one who resists the author’s intentions and design in order, by a “revisionary rereading,” to bring to light and to counter the covert sexual biases written into a literary work.
Feminism and feminist criticism
“Men
are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill
them.”
―
The 'women's movement' of the 1960s was not, of course, the
start of feminism. Rather, it was a renewal of an old tradition of thought and
action already possessing its classic books which had diagnosed the problem of
women's inequality in society, and (in some cases) proposed solutions. These
books include Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women
(1792), which discusses male writers like Milton, Pope, and Rousseau; Olive
Schreiner's Women and Labour (1911); Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One's Own
(1929), which vividly portrays the unequal treatment given to women seeking
education and alternatives to marriage and motherhood; and Simone de Beauvoir's
The Second Sex (1949), which has an important section on the portrayal of women
in the novels of D. H. Lawrence. Male contributions to this tradition of
feminist writing include John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Woman (1869) and
The Origin of the Family (1884) by Friedrich Engels. The feminist literary
criticism of today is the direct product of the 'women's movement' of the
1960s. This movement was, in important ways, literary from the start, in the
sense that it realized the significance of the images of women promulgated by
literature, and saw it as vital to combat them and question their authority and
their coherence.
More importantly, there is a great need, in all
intellectual disciplines, to establish a sense of progress, enabling early and
cruder examples of (in this case) feminist criticism to be given their rightful
credit and acknowledgment while at the same time making it clear that the
approach they represent is no longer generally regarded as a model for
practice. But feminist criticism since the 1970s has been remarkable for the
wide range of positions that exist within it. Debates and disagreements have
centered on three particular areas, these being:
1. The role of theory;
2. The nature of
language, and
3. The value or
otherwise of psychoanalysis.
Feminist criticism and the role of theory
A major division within feminist criticism has concerned disagreements about the amount and type of theory that should feature in it. What is usually called the 'Anglo-American' version of feminism has tended to be more skeptical about recent critical theory, and more cautious in using it, than have the 'French' feminists, who have adopted and adapted a great deal of mainly post-structuralist and psychoanalytic criticism as the basis of much of their work. The 'Anglo-Americans', not all English or American maintain a major interest in traditional critical concepts like a theme, motif, and characterization.
Feminist criticism and language
Another fundamental issue, on which opinion is just as polarized, is the question of whether or not there exists a form of language which is inherently feminine. There is a long-standing tradition of debate on this issue within feminism. For instance, Virginia Woolf, suggests that language use is gendered so that when a woman turns to novel writing she finds that there is 'no common sentence ready for her use. The great male novelists have written 'a natural prose, swift but not slovenly, expressive but not precious, taking their own tint without ceasing to be common property'. She quotes an example and says 'That is a man's sentence'. She doesn't make its qualities explicit, but the example seems to be characterized by carefully balanced and patterned rhetorical sequences. But 'it was a sentence unsuited for a woman's use', and women writers trying to use fared badly. Jane Austen rejected it and instead 'devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use', but this is not described or exemplified. Presumably, though, the characteristics of a 'woman's sentence' are that the clauses are linked in looser sequences, rather than carefully balanced and patterned as in male prose associated with the feminine, facilitating the free play of meanings within the framework of loosened grammatical structures. The heightened prose of the Cixous essay both demonstrates and explains it: It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility which will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded ... it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system; it does and will take place in areas other than those subordinated to Philo-Sophio-theoretical domination.
Feminist criticism and psychoanalysis
“Feminism
is the radical notion that women are human beings.”
The story so far of feminism's relationship with
psychoanalysis is simple in outline but the tendency of American feminists
to be unconvinced by the rehabilitation of psychoanalysis can perhaps be
explained by the fact that psychoanalysis has been more an accepted part of
middle-class life in the USA than it ever became in Europe. Hence, it is more
difficult for Americans to see it as still possessed of radical potential,
least of all for women. Further, there was a new emphasis in the 1990s on the
culturally-specific nature of psychoanalysis, and hence a reluctance to claim
any kind of universal validity for it. In Rose's own work, as elsewhere, there
is a strong and growing interest in listening to the voices of the hitherto
excluded 'Other', particularly those of the cultures and races which had no
place in the work of Freud or Lacan.
STOP and THINK
What do feminist critics do?
1. Rethink the canon, aiming at the rediscovery of texts written by women.
2. Revalue women's experience.
3. Examine representations of women in literature by men and women.
4. Challenge representations of women as 'Other', as 'lack', as part of 'nature'.
5. Examine power relations which obtain in texts and in life, with a view to breaking them down, seeing reading as a political act, and showing the extent of patriarchy.
6. Recognise the role of language in making what is social and constructed seem transparent and 'natural'.
7. Raise the question of whether men and women are 'essentially' different because of biology, or are socially constructed as different.
8. Explore the question of whether there is a female language, an ecriture feminine, and whether this is also available to men.
9. 'Re-read' psychoanalysis to further explore the issue of female and male identity.
10. Question the popular notion of the death of the author, asking whether there are only 'subject positions ... constructed in discourse', or whether, on the contrary, the experience (e.g. of a black or lesbian writer) is central.
11. Make clear the ideological base of supposedly 'neutral' or 'mainstream' literary interpretations.
Work Cited
Abrams, Meyer Howard, and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Cengage Learning, 2015.
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