Page 283 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 25: Gynocriticism and Feminist Criticism: Analysis

become a theoretical branch. American poet and writer Adrienne Rich, Mary Ellmann; professors Notes
Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar and Elaine Showalter; French writer Helene Cixous and English
psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell also contributed a lot. In this period, feminist criticism transformed
from the "Female Aesthetic" to" Gynocritics." After 1980s, feminist literary criticism got to the way
of finding the self of female and affirming the self. The theorists in this period, for example, Julia
Kristeva and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak implied poststructuralism, psychoanalysis to explore
the gender theory. Till now, after a series of ideological trend, feministcriticism was to find a kind
of "discourse," which is neither masculine nor feminine, but exists in a "third" form. From the
history of theoretical feminism, we usually divided it into two parts, the Anglo-American and the
French. These two parts have different theoretical backgrounds, study objects and research methods:
American and English critics have for the most part engaged in empirical and thematic studies of
writings by and about women; on the other hand, the most prominent feminist critics in France,
have been occupied with the theory of the role of gender in writing, conceptualized within various
post-structural frames of, and above all Jacques Lacan's reworking of Freudian psychoanalysis in
terms of Saussure's linguistic theory. Here, we shall mainly go into the Anglo-American feminism,
which may be divided into three phases: criticism of male sexism in the "androtexts," discovery of
the women writers in history or spade works for "gynotexts," and feminist discourse for female
identity. The first phase is concerned with woman as reader with woman as the consumer of male-
produced literature, and with the way in which the hypothesis of a female reader changes our
apprehension of a given text, awakening us to the significance of its sexual codes.
25.1 A Brief Introduction to Gynocriticism

Towards a feminist poetics (1979) for an appropriate form of feminist criticism, namely, the type
which is concerned with woman as writer with woman as the producer of textual meaning, with
the history, themes, genres, and structures of literature by women. There is no term existing in
English for such a specialized discourse, so Showalter adapted the French term lagynocritique.

Why gynocriticism considered more positive if we compare it to feminism?

Gynocriticism is a criticism which concerns itself with developing a specifically female framework
for dealing with works written by women, in all aspects of their production, motivation, analysis,
and interpretation, and in all literary forms, including journals and letters. To be more specific,
according to Elaine Showalter, it is aprogram which " to construct a female framework for the
analysis of women's literature, to develop new modelsbased on the study of female experience,
rather than to adapt male models and theories" (Showalter, Towards a feminist poetics, 1979).
Notable books in this mode include Patricia Meyer Spacks' The female imagination (1975), on
English and American novels of the past three hundred years; Ellen Moers' Literary women
(1976), on major women novelists and poets in England, America, and France; Elaine Showalter's
A literature of their own: British women novelists from Bronte to Lessing (1977); and Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar' The madwoman in the attic (1979). Moers' Literary women (1976) was
"a preliminary sketching in or 'mapping' of this kind" (Selden 1997, p. 135). In Showalter's A
literature of their own (1977), she "outlines a literary history of women writers (many of whom
had, indeed, been 'hidden from history'); produces a history which shows the configuration of
their material, psychological and ideological determinant; and promotes both a feminist critique
(concerned with women readers) and a 'gynocritics' (concerned with women writers)" (Selden,
1997, p. 135). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar 's The madwoman in the attic (1979) stresses
especially the psychodynamics of women writers in the nineteenth century. Its authors propose
that the "anxiety of authorship," resulting from the stereotype that literary creativity is an exclusively

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