Page 309 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 27: Elaine Showalter: Four Models of Feminism in “Feminist Criticism in Wilderness”—Biological...

Sandra Gilbert: at its most ambitious, she asserts, Feminist Criticism: Notes
“wants to decode and demystify all the disguised questions and answers that
have always shadowed the connections between textuality and sexually,
genre and gender, psychosexual identify and cultural authority.”
• What Showalter mean here by “male critical theory” is a concept of creativity, literary history,
or literary interpretation based entirely on male experience and put forward as universal.
• Perhaps more than any other mode of criticism, Feminist theory has cut across and drawn on
multiple and contradictory traditions which by presenting what is arguably one of the most
fundamental challenges to previous critical orthodoxies in its revolution of subjectively and
the category of experience. Like Marxism, Feminism is rooted in the political discourses of
modernity. Not only Marxism, but also psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan
and post structuralist views, especially deconstruction of Jacques Derrida are considered
crucial in Feminism. Feminist Criticism as a self aware and concerted approach to literature
was not inaugurated until late in the 1900’s. Mary Wolls Tonecraft’s A vindication of the
Rights of women (1792), John Stuart Mill’s, the subjection of women (1869) and Margaret
Fuller’s women in Nineteenth century are such texts, which are indubitably the landmark in
the history of Feminist movement. But what is most important to note that Virginia Woolf
was an outstanding precursson of Feminist Criticism. In her fictions and essays, most notably
in A Room of one’s own, she attack the patriarchal bias which prohibited women’s creative
possibility, A seminal text is indeed, Simonede Beuvior. The second sex, which identifies
women as cultural construct and reveals the fact that women are regarded as merely negative
object or ‘other’, while men are defined as dominating subject. Similarly, Mary Ellaman’s
Thinking doubt women-with which Feminist Criticism began in America shows the derogatory
stereotypes of women in literature written by women. Another important text which attacks
the sexual bias in Freud’s psycho analytical theory is Kota Millet’s sexual politics.
• Although early second time Feminist Criticism drew extensively on de Deauviars works and
on kate Millet’s “sexual politics” and concentrated its analysis on the images of women
represented in and constructed through cultural forms such as literature, it has been viewed
by later Feminist as often failing to offer an adequate analysis of the relationship between
ideology and representation. But in spite of the difference in their pointsof view and procedures
some assumptions and concerts are quite basic in this critical mode, western civilization is
patriarchal. Just as logo centricism emphasis the extent to which metaphysical assumption
about the superiority of speech over writing are built into language itself, phantasmagorical
implies that masculine biases are profoundly related to the structures of meta physics. Even
the patriarchal ideology is dominant in those writings which we consider great literature.
For example, Oedipus, Ulysses, Hamlet, Tom Jones, Captain Ahab - some well known male
protagonists in some highly regarded literary works - embody masculine traits and ways of
feeling and pursue masculine interests in masculine fields of action. As Simone de Beauvoir
remarked, ‘one is not barn but rather becomes, a woman....’. While male is identified as
active, dominative and rational Feminine is identified as passive, submissive and emotional.
If Kate Mallet attack D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer etc., by analyzing some
selected passages of their works for degarding women as submissive sexual objects, most of
Feminists praise Chaucer, Shakespeare and G.B. Shaw who rise above sexual prejudice.
• A great impetus is given to their critical approach when Flaine Showalter proposes
gynocriticism which is mare self contained and experimental and which is concerned with
developing and specifically female frame work for dealing with works written by men, and
with Feminine subject matters in literature written by woman and also with an attempt to
specify the traits of a woman’s language. Elaine showalter, however, led much emphasis on
woman as a writer rather than woman as a reader. Elaine showalter’s A Literature of their
own: British women Novelist from Brontel to lessing, patricia Meyer spacks’s The Female
imagination Ellen Moers’s Literary women, Sandra Gillert and Susan Gular’s The Madowomen
in the Attic are some notable works in their made. To evade the dilemma, namely women’s

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