Page 278 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes operate to re-inforce gender-stereotypes. They compel readers, writers and publishers to demand
and produce such stereotypes endlessly. Unless alerted by feminist theorists subsequent readers
of the text — who may go on to teach and prescribe it — will share its own inadequacies and
ideology. ‘Ideology is that never fully articulated system of assumptions by which a society operates,
and which permeates everything it produces, including of course what is deemed to be literature’.
At which points can feminist theories engage with patriarchal ideology so as to challenge it ? Are
these areas themselves problematic?

24.2 Concerns of Feminist Theories

24.2.1 While Reading
Reading — which includes studying and teaching — is a cultural practice organised and mediated
by the academy. The academy controls reading by means of the syllabus it constructs. This syllabus
reflects in turn the canon : the body of texts it values enough to recommend. Like all other
structures of power, the canon projects and confirms the cultural biases of those who construct it.
‘... canons are complicit with power; and canons are useful in that they enable us to handle
otherwise unmanageable historical deposits. They do this by affirming that some works are more
valuable than others, more worthy of minute attention ...’. In 24.1.2, I suggested how patriarchy
might influence and shape a single text. Now try to imagine how patriarchy might determine a
body of texts down the ages. It might suggest that only texts which had an arbitrarily determined
value — say in terms of grandeur or length — ought to be included. This in turn would ensure the
inclusion of certain genres such as the epic—with its emphasis on public action and high cultural
significance — and the exclusion of others — the short story, say, with its emphasis on private
space and domesticity. Now try to think of what this exclusion means. Traditionally women have
used the short story which requires a brief absence only from work, and a (relatively) less format
or ‘classical’ education which have frequently been all they can afford. The exclusion of a genre in
which women have often been ahead of men is only one way in which the canon confirms patriarchy.
Try now to think of other ways. The canon may include in a syllabus only texts of confirmed
‘greatness’ as compulsory and include women’s writing in an optional paper which may be omitted.
In this course you and I are. lucky to have a ‘well-established’ romantic like Wordsworth along
with Wollstonecraft who is one of those rescued from oblivion by feminist theorists and almost
forcibly brought to the notice of the academy. Feminist theories try to ‘take over’ the canon and
rescue it from patriarchy by helping readers scan texts, genres or movements so as to relentlessly
make visible the components of gender and gender-bias in the academy which has so far tried to
conceal them.
24.2.2 While Writing
The best-known articulation of this problem comes from Elizabeth Barrett Browning a Victorian
poet who said in 1845 ‘England has had many learned women ... and yet where are the poetesses?...
I look everywhere for grandmothers and see none’ (Walder 27). Another poet Emily Dickinson
lamented over a similar problem in the United States of 1862 ‘They shut me up in Prose — As
when a little Girl /They put me in the closet / Because they liked me “still”’ (ibid). There are two
problems with reference to these gaps in literary ancestry. For one thing it can make women
writers feel at a disadvantage when compared to their male counterparts because to not feel part
of a tradition can breed a sense of impoverishment and deprivation. As a contemporary poet
Adrienne Rich complains ‘this is one of the ways ... in which women’s work and thinking has been
made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own’ (Ruthven 124). For another,
movements lose their radical capacity for change when they are made to seem sporadic and
unorganised. As Dickinson points out, to be restricted to a genre which is not of one’s choice—
prose as against verse in her case — is to reduce a writer’s potential for creatively rebellious
writing. By rewriting histories of literature so as to free these of gender bias, by reconstructing
syllabi ( so that say, Premchand and Ismat Chugtai get read in a course on Indian writing), by

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