Page 277 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 24: Features of Feminist Criticism

Please set aside the word ‘political’ for the moment [I will discuss it 23.1.2] and focus on the paired Notes
concepts of sex and gender. Sex here refers to the determining of identity on the basis of biological
category, while gender connotes ‘the cultural meaning attached to sexual identity. In other words,
gender is the product of culture-conditioning. Thus women may be stereotyped as being compelled
to have certain ‘womanly’ qualities which restrict them to a subordinate role. Celia in Middlemarch
finds happiness much quicker than Dorothea since for her life centres around her own hearth and
home like that of a much-petted kitten. Dorothea steps out of the role nineteenth-century English
provincial life offers her by trying to enter the homes of others, as a social worker or would-be
architect. As a result her own home-centred happiness is that much harder to find. Sex-difference
(the notion of the woman as reproducer) sanctions gender-difference (the notion that a woman
must set up a family as her chief priority) which in turn requires punishment. Middlemarch society
is that much more harsh to Dorothea because of her refusal to conform.
This is heart-rending. Simultaneously however even as feminist theorising — the sex-gender
distinction in this case — uncovers these biases in cultural history, by drawing the attention of
readers to these biases it helps resist them. Eliot’s own conclusion to the novel can be read as a sell-
out to culture-conditioning. Dorothea is perhaps the only one to believe in her own happiness. The
remake of Middlemarch for BBC television in the 1990’s though was interesting because it showed
a conclusion more resistant to gender-bias. The visuals were those of provincial placid society and
against this the conclusion of the novel was read out in a voice-over. This suggested an author
disturbed and disappointed by her society. The priority of making readers uncover hidden biases
in a text and in a sense thus re-writing a text is part of the revisionary imperative (or the need to
bring about change) that is crucial to feminist theories.
24.1.2 Politics and Ideology
How are such biases created and sustained ? More specifically what are the institutions that make
gender-bias possible ? The conversation cited in referred to education, history and literature. If
these forces are put together they suggest the collective presence of the academy : the collective
term to describe the study, teaching and publishing of the arts and the sciences. Feminist theories
range themselves against various structures and inter-relationships of power — the state, the
church, law and the academy — which they see as patriarchal. To be patriarchal is to sustain and
act out the belief that both nature and culture make men superior to women. To combat patriarchy
— which may be the basis of many institutions — is to call for action as the definition in 24.1.1
does. The definition I am going to put before you now, I think, sets out some of the action itself.
The first step is to recognise that politics is not the sole preserve of professionals called politicians.
On the contrary ... ‘everything is politics,’ especially those things which claim or are claimed to be
apolitical like those ‘truths’ which great literature is said to embody, and which still get labelled
‘universal’ .... ‘Politics’ in this wider sense means ‘power’ or rather ‘power relations’: who does
what to whom and in whose interests. And because human relationships are necessarily
interpersonal, ‘the personal is the political’ ... to read a canonical text in a feminist way is to force
that text to reveal its hidden sexual ideology ... (Ruthven 30-1)
I will try to apply these ideas to a novel you have studied so as to clarify them. Tom Jones is —
among other things — about a hero’s quest for wisdom symbolised in the name of the heroine
Sophia (meaning wisdom) whom he ultimately marries. A man’s quest for wisdom is usually
presented as a universal truth about life. Here it takes on the added dimension of the personal —
a lover’s quest for his beloved. Supposing though I argue that it is not universal and not merely
personal but political, I could say it deals with patriarchal structures of power and the relationships
between them. I might say that Fielding’s readers (both women and men) demanded novels that
re-inforced the gender-stereotypes that men can experiment but women must conform. Fielding’s
publisher (according to this reading) would want to give the readers what the latter would like to
buy and read. So of course Fielding the writer creates a loving, patient, wise woman and a man
who is eternally forgiven. Thus structures of power —which are therefore described as political —

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