Page 290 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes 26.2 The Text

26.2.1 Its Constituency
‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,’ it seems to me addresses women and men within the
academy — who are anxious about a specific problem. Should feminist theories concern themselves
with constructing a common methodology or should they not ? The constituency then is a small
specific one comprising literary theorists. Of course not all are feminists. Some are primarily
Marxists who prioritise class over other factors when discussing the ways in which books are
written. Others may be theorists either from amongst African-Americans or from the developing
world who feel their cultural histories are excluded from theoretical work since hitherto this work
has been carried out by Caucasian women from the developed world. All share an interest in
theory of one kind or another. All are exercised by one central issue. Should feminist theories
continue to remain open-ended and refuse to commit themselves to any one structural framework?
The advantage of this methodicide or ‘murder of method’ is that it allows feminist theories to
retain their pluralism or spirit of free interpretation which — theorists claim — is the characteristic
strength of women’s speech over men’s. The disadvantage is that by remaining unstructured,
feminist theories get marginalised or made unimportant by other, more organised schools of
critical theory. The alternative to methodicide is methodolatry or worship of method. The
constituency thus includes theorists whose preferences vary but can be grouped under either of
these responses.

26.2.2 Its Thesis and Data
The thesis of this essay is one which Showalter formulates more discursively in the 1979 essay
‘Toward a Feminist Poetics,’ to which 5.1 alludes. Showalter argues that there are essentially two
kinds of feminist theory. The first concerns itself with the woman as reader and may be called the
feminist critique.
... like other kinds of critique is a historically grounded inquiry which probes the ideological
assumptions of literary phenomena. Its subjects include the images and stereotypes of women in
literature, the omissions of and misconceptions about women in criticism, and the fissures in
male-constructed literary history. It is also concerned with the exploitation and manipulation of
the female audience. (Showalter, 128)
The second concerns itself with the woman as writer and may be called gynocritics. It deals with
... woman as the producer of textual meaning, with the history, themes, genres and structures of
literature by women. Its subjects include the psychodynamics of female creativity; linguistics and
the problem of a female language; the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary
career; literary history; and of course, studies of particular writers and works, (ibid.)
Comparing the two modes of theory Showalter writes
The feminist critique is essentially political and polemical, with theoretical affiliations to Marxist
sociology and aesthetics; gynocritics is more self-contained and experimental with connections to
other modes of new feminist research ....[We may] compare the feminist critique to the Old
Testament, ‘looking for the sins and errors of the past,’ and gynocritics to the New Testament,
seeking ‘ the grace of the imagination.’ Both kinds are necessary...for only the Jeremiahs of the
feminist critique can lead us out of the ‘Egypt of female servitude’ to ‘the promised land of the
feminist vision’ (ibid.,129)
Let me suggest an example of these two kinds of writing. Suppose I write an essay ‘Stereotypes of
women in Middle march.’ I might discuss Dorothea as a failed theorist, Rosamond as a dumb
blonde and Mary Garth as a wise governess. I might go on to speak of them as being prisoners of
both class and gender due to the constraints of Victorian society. The essay would be primarily a
feminist critique that analysed cultural and aesthetic stereotypes in class-based terms borrowed
probably from Marxist theory. Supposed instead my essay were to be titled ‘The silencing of
George Eliot in Middlemarch’ I might look at the constraints placed on Eliot by patriarchy : her
thwarted attempts to shape a sentence suitable to her needs and so on. I would probably need to

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