Page 280 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes but immediately suggests how apart from the public arena is the private world of the woman
writer. Look at the way the problems of cultural difference appear. ‘I am Indian, very brown born
in / Malabar I speak three languages, write in / Two, dream in one...’ An inhabitant of this world
of power-structures (the world of politics) is a mockery of meaning as a mindless catalogue of
days or months would be. The woman writer is condemned to a history she has not helped shape
by an education she has not had, isn’t she ? Look also at the relationship indicated between sex
and gender. Sex is the category based on natural or biological instinct : ‘I was child and later they
/ Told me I grew for I became tall...’ In contrast gender is a culture-conditioned construct which
has everything to do with the expectations and rules imposed by society on the individual ‘I wore
a shirt and my / Brother’s trousers, cut my hair short...’ I think the pressures of the academy are
worked in rather cleverly. A chorus of self-styled literary critics try to tell poet the way in which
she should position herself. ‘Be Amy, or be Kamala or better /Still, be Madhavikutty ...’ Each of
these literary identities has specific choices and implications which shape it, I think there is the
western role-model, the autobiographical and the poet who writes in the regional language
respectively mentioned here. The poet thus finds people attempting to choose her literary ancestors
for her, and this choice in its turn is an effort to force her present and future into manageable
categories. How do you think a patriarchy pressures the individual woman writer in this poem to
conform? See 24.2.2 for the parallel with any of the poets cited there and also look out for the pun
on ‘still’ (don’t move and don’t rebel) which is the same as that in the quotation from Dickinson.
Self-Assessment
1. Choose the correct options:
(i) Jane Ansten’s last completed novel was ............... .
(a) imma (b) pride and prejudice
(c) persuasion (d) none of these
(ii) The votes for women movement in the Britain took place in ............... .
(a) 1920s (b) 1930s
(c) 1940s (d) none of these
24.5 Summary

• Feminist theories begin — it seems to me — as one manifestation of an ongoing dialogue
between women and men. They illustrate the way in which the world and the academy
intervene in the lives and processes of each other.
• The revolutions that make feminist theories possible (and vice versa) do not always happen
in the public domain.
• Education, history and literature — which are public institutions have belonged to men for
much longer than to women. Feminist literary theories identify the gender-biases of literature
and thus help both women and men defeat these biases by reading against them.
• The argument is not so much between women and men as it is between feminists and anti-
feminists. One pair of components recurring in feminist theories is that of sex (based on
biological difference) and gender (the result of culture-conditioning).
• Politics refers to the power structures feminist theories try to combat and ideology to the
invisible but inherent theoretical assumptions that govern a society. Patriarchy is the ideology
committed to male supremacy and is combated by feminist theories which show up gender
biases in the reading and writing of literatures.
• Feminist theories negotiate problems of cultural difference and of relationship with other
forms of criticism such as marxism and new historicism. These use class and race respectively
as means to scan literature rather than gender.

274 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY