Page 279 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 24: Features of Feminist Criticism

retrieving genres in which women have excelled (diary-writing, the short story) and by publishing Notes
women’s writing (the Virago Press in the U.K, the Feminist Press in the U.S and Kali for Women
in India, to name a few) feminist theories create a space for women writers.

24.3 Grey Areas in Feminist Theories

24.3.1 While Practising
There are certain areas which are problematic or grey areas in feminist theories. Ought these
theories to be applied across all cultures ? After all women as a class account for at least fifty
percent of all cultures and there is an irreducible minimum of women’s experience common to all
times and places. At the same time is it not culturally unacceptable to market theory constructed
by the Western academy as if it is equally valid across the Indian subcontinent as if theory were
another multinational product ? Look at the following remark : ‘How then, can one learn from and
speak to the millions of illiterate rural and urban women who live “in the pores of capitalism
inaccessible to the capitalist dynamics that allow us our shared channels of communication, the
definition of common enemies?
Gayatri Chakravarti Spivak, who made this comment has been herself described as a ‘Marxist
feminist American academic, trained in literary deconstruction, [who] was born in India, and thus
writes at the intersection of cultural and intellectual tensions’ (Morris 166). In other words the
experience of women is not wholly the same across all cultures. Some cultures are capitalistic or
free-enterprise cultures which provide the illusion at least of choice. Others are state controlled.
Literacy levels vary both within and across cultures. Feminist theorists approach the discipline
from a variety of other theoretical backgrounds [of which more will be said in 23.3.2] All these
points suggest that no easy essentialism should enter feminist criticism or create a totalising
narrative that wipes out cultural difference or even set up the experience of the Western academy
as normative. At the same time this problem should not inhibit theorists or cause theory to retreat.
For to do this Would mean that the very conspiracy of silence patriarchy creates around genres,
movements or cultures that are women-centred will be continued. Feminist theories I think should
articulate such silences. Even if it means acknowledging they cannot speak for or to a culture with
any great authority, they should speak of it however haltingly. What do you feel ?
24.3.2 While Theorising
Feminist criticism — like other forms of literary theory — relates across critical boundaries as well.
Simone de Beauvoir always claimed for instance that as a marxist she was primarily interested in
a class-based analysis which treated women as a class among the oppressed all over the world
rather than in the condition of women in itself. New historicists — of whose work Edward Said’s
Orientalism is an example — have a vexed relationship with feminist theories. On the one hand a
colleague of Said’s found it useful to build a parallel between his work and hers : ‘I realised, in
reading his book that ...far more than Arabs internalised the western view [of their inferiority]
women have internalised the male view of themselves’ (Showalter 26). On the other Aijaz Ahmad
a marxist has criticised Said for limiting his focus to race while erasing class and gender as factors
of oppression. Feminist theories then, cannot only develop an ethic of suffering. They must think,
intervene and reshape the academy and the world.
24.4 Possible Application

Now turn to the poem by Kamala Das please and give it a quick read, keeping in mind the
theoretical issues discussed in this unit. For instance take a look at the opening : ‘I don’t know
politics but I know the names / Of those in power, and can repeat them like / Days of the week
or names of months, beginning with / Nehru ... I think the ironic opening (along with the title)
works on the level of an ironic disclaimer. It sets itself out as an introduction to the woman writer

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