Page 270 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes of self, knowledge, and power relations, and the relationships of these areas to one another,
continue to be debated. Feminist critics have developed many theories on how gender systems are
created, continue, dominate, and maintain themselves. Each of the theories, however, identifies a
single process or set of processes as vital to gender relations. Influential feminist theorists have
suggested the centrality of the sexual division of labor, childbearing and child-rearing practices,
and various processes of representation (including aesthetic and language processes, for example).
Such positions address the meanings and nature of sexuality and the relationship of sexuality to
writing, the importance and implications of differences among women writers, and the effects of
kinship and family organizations. Each of these many theories and debates has crucial implications
for an understanding of knowledge, gender, power, and writing.
Juliet Mitchell has argued for the importance of Freudian theories to feminist theories of gender
relations. Her work entails a defense of Lacanian psychoanalysis. She argues that Sigmund Freud's
work on the psychology of women should be read as a description of the inevitable effects on
feminine psychic development of patriarchal social power. Dorothy Dinnerstein and Nancy
Chodorow contribute to this psychoanalytical approach a larger account of the unconscious and
its role in gender relations. They also examine the traditional sexual division of labor in the West,
how this tradition has been passed on, and how it influences male-female relations.
Male vs. Female Discourse
Helen Cixous and Luce Irigaray find fundamental psychological differences between men and
women. They have concluded that women are more influenced by pre-Oedipal experience and
believe that the girl retains an initial identification with her mother, so that the relationship
between mother and daughter is less repressed than that of the mother and son. This retention
affects women's selves, so that they remain fluid and interrelational. As a result of this difference
between men and women, masculine writing has an ambivalent response to women. Women tend
to remain outside or on the fringes of male discourse, and feminine pleasure poses the greatest
challenge to masculine discourse. Masculine discourse is also logocentric and binary; its meaning
is produced through hierarchal, male-dominated, binary oppositions. Masculine discourse creates
a situation in which feminine discourse is characterized by omissions and gaps. Latent in these
gaps and omissions are conflicting feelings regarding sexuality, motherhood, and autonomy.
An important question raised by feminist criticism iswhether there is a gender-based women's
language that is significantly and inevitably different from the language of men. In Language and
Woman's Place (1975), Robin Lakoff argues that there is more to "speaking like a woman" than
vocabulary. Examining syntactical patterns of a typical female and evaluating the frequency with
which women use tag questions, she concludes that the traditional powerlessness of women in a
Western society is reflected in many aspects of women's language. Other theorists who are interested
in differences between male and female languages explore sociolinguistic issues, such as the
practice of women assuming their fathers' names at birth and their husbands' names when married,
the frequency with which women are addressed by familiar names, the frequency of interruption
in speech between men and women, and the large number of pejorative terms applicable to
women. Writers interested in these latter linguistic areas are Cheris Kramarae and Julia Penelope
Stanley.
In this conflict between male and female discourse, writing may be an anticipatory, therapeutic
experience of liberation. Writing may return woman's repressed pleasure to her. It may also create
a collective space in which women writers may speak of and to women. Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak explores discourse and literature in general as discursive practices. In In Other Worlds
(1987) she shows the tendency in Western cultures to universalize particular examples into human
examples. Spivak examines feminism in relation to British imperialism in India and then situates
feminist criticism within middle-class academia. This approach argues that what has been assumed
to be universal truth is in fact the Western colonial or male conception of truth, a perspective that
distorts or ignores the experiences of Others. The goal of such a critical perspective is to authenticate
the expression of Others based on individual experience and shared understanding and to call
into question the accepted definitions of truth and meaningful discourse.

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