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Unit 23: Gynocriticism and Feminist Criticism: An Introduction

and limited in relation to men. Her most important work is probably The Second Sex (1949). Such Notes
limiting, de Beauvoir contends, cannot be avoided in a male-dominated culture; even women
perceived as "independent" are still negatively affected by the ideas and the relations of the male
society. Western society in general, for de Beauvoir, is patriarchal and denies freedom of expression
to women. In this patriarchal society, women become Others, viewed not as they are but as
projections of male needs and subordinate to male expectations. Her approach tends toward a
Marxist model in identifying an economic and political limiting of women with sexism in literature.
De Beauvoir finds in literature reflections of a more general socioeconomic oppression of women.
Her approach emphasizes art's mimetic quality: Through its powers of reflection, art yields valuable
insights into the sexism that is culturally prevalent.
The otherness examined by de Beauvoir and other feminist writers is a condition of women, so that
the characteristic of identity for women is separation. Constituted through a male gaze, the feminine
exists as something that is inexpressible. Women function as objects of the male gaze. Therefore,
women's bodies are vehicles for ambivalent feelings toward the mother. These problems extend into
the Western philosophical tradition, so that Western (usually male) thinkers express their philosophical
positions as essential and universal while embracing a center that is unexamined and male.
In her essay A Room of One's Own (1929), Virginia Woolf introduced many topics that have
become vital to feminist critics. She contends that art is a collective product, incorrectly romanticized
in theory as individual and personal. Woolf's conceptualization of a metaphorical "room," a female
place, merges the introspection often associated with female discourse and the social sanctuary
within which a woman may achieve her potential. Woolf helped to establish the broad range of
feminist criticism, from cultural critique to discourse. The most important portion of A Room of
One's Own ironically and satirically traces the lost career of "Shakespeare's sister," whose creativity
had no outlet in the sixteenth century. Woolf problematizes the structures of the male ego, its
rituals, titles, and institutions, which are created at the expense of Others. This ironic introduction
sets the stage in the text for a historical discussion of women writers and the problems they had
in pursuing their careers. Furthermore, in her discussion of women novelists of the nineteenth
century, especially George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, and Jane Austen, Woolf foreshadowed
contemporary research on language.
Woolf argued that a woman writer should write as a woman writer and as a woman who is not
self-conscious of her gender. She strove to be aware of the alienating and repressive effects of the
myths created around women and also to avoid creating alternative myths. She set forth the
attempt to discover a collective concept of subjectivity that would foreground identity constructs
and argued that such a concept of subjectivity is a characteristic of women's writing. Other women
writers, however, are more interested in the alienation created by structures that permit women
only very restricted and repressive roles, roles as Others, in society.
In her writing, Woolf is striving, like later feminists, to uncover the effects of a phallocentric
culture that idolizes the autonomous and rational ego. She also attempts to offer an alternative to
this idolatry, an alternative that emphasizes subjectivity and connectedness, if in a historically
fluid context. Through her struggle to redefine women, she tries to avoid simply reversing the
binary oppositions that polarize men and women into specific categories. She does not argue for
a reversal of the categories.
Gender Rules and Relations

Since de Beauvoir and Woolf, the naming and interrogating of phallocentrism has become more
assured. Feminist critics are challenging the stereotypical masculine virtues, no longer accepting
them as measures of virtue and excellence. One strategy many feminist critics adopt is to locate
both men and women within a larger context, as both being captives of gender in vastly different,
but interrelated, ways. Though men may appear to be the masters under the rules of gender, they
are not therefore free, for like women they remain under gender rules.
If both men and women are influenced by gender, then the conceptualizations of women and the
conceptualizations of men must be examined in terms of gender relations. Feminist critical models
are complex and often contradictory. Claims about the centrality of gender relations in the formation

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