Feminist criticism
Encyclopedia
Feminist criticism is a type of literary criticism, which was developed in the late 1960s, focusing on the role of women in literature. Two important representatives are Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir who claim that women are a subject and no object.
There are several different views and approaches within feminist criticism from the 1970s onwards.
As a self-aware and concerted approach to literature, feminist criticism was not inaugurated until late in the 1960s. Behind it, however, lie two centuries of struggle for women's rights, marked by such books as Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women (1869), and the American Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). Feminist literary criticism continues in our time to be closely interrelated with the movement by political feminists for social, economic, and cultural freedom and equality.
An important precursor in feminist criticism was Virginia Woolf, who, in addition to her fiction, wrote 'A Room of One's Own' (1929) and numerous other essays on women authors and on the cultural, economic, and educational disabilities within what she called a "patriarchal" society that have hindered or prevented women from realizing their creative possibilities.
A much more radical critical mode was launched in France by Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949), a wide-ranging critique of the cultural identification of women as merely the negative object, or "Other" to man as the defining and dominating "Subject" who is assumed to represent humanity in general; the book dealt also with "the great collective myths" of women in the works of many male writers. In America, modern feminist criticism began with Mary Ellman's deft and witty discussion, in Thinking about Women (1968), about the derogatory stereotypes of women in literature written by men, and also about the alternative and subversive points of view in some writings by women. Even more influential was Kate Millett
's polemical and hard-hitting Sexual Politics, published the following year. By "politics", Millett refers to the mechanisms that express and enforce the relations of power in society; she represents Western social arrangements and institutions as covert ways of manipulating power so as to establish and perpetuate the dominance of men and the subordination of women. In her book she attacks the male bias in Freud's psychoanalytic theory, and also analyzes selected passages by D.H.Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet as revealing the ways in which their authors, in fictional fantasy, aggrandize their aggressive phallic selves and degrade women as submissive sexual objects.
There are several different views and approaches within feminist criticism from the 1970s onwards.
Feminist Critique
The main interest of the Feminist Critique is to explore the extent of patriarchal ideology in literature, namely to explore the material forms of social, economic and political discrimination of women. Furthermore it examines the representations of and by women, men, and homosexuals to show how Gender (in contrast to biological sex) is culturally constructed and how therefore masculinity and femininity are depicted in literature.Gynocriticism
While the 1970s focused on exposing the mechanism of patriarchy, in the 1980s the focus changed: there was a shift from androtexts (texts by men) to gynotexts (texts by women). The main focus of gynocriticists is to retrieve forgotten literature by women, so they can participate in literature and not only accept the constructs of femininity developed by men. The examination of those new found texts testifies how women viewed themselves and the role that gender plays in society.As a self-aware and concerted approach to literature, feminist criticism was not inaugurated until late in the 1960s. Behind it, however, lie two centuries of struggle for women's rights, marked by such books as Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women (1869), and the American Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). Feminist literary criticism continues in our time to be closely interrelated with the movement by political feminists for social, economic, and cultural freedom and equality.
An important precursor in feminist criticism was Virginia Woolf, who, in addition to her fiction, wrote 'A Room of One's Own' (1929) and numerous other essays on women authors and on the cultural, economic, and educational disabilities within what she called a "patriarchal" society that have hindered or prevented women from realizing their creative possibilities.
A much more radical critical mode was launched in France by Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949), a wide-ranging critique of the cultural identification of women as merely the negative object, or "Other" to man as the defining and dominating "Subject" who is assumed to represent humanity in general; the book dealt also with "the great collective myths" of women in the works of many male writers. In America, modern feminist criticism began with Mary Ellman's deft and witty discussion, in Thinking about Women (1968), about the derogatory stereotypes of women in literature written by men, and also about the alternative and subversive points of view in some writings by women. Even more influential was Kate Millett
Kate Millett
Kate Millett is an American lesbian feminist writer and activist. A seminal influence on second-wave feminism, Millet is best known for her 1970 book Sexual Politics.-Career:...
's polemical and hard-hitting Sexual Politics, published the following year. By "politics", Millett refers to the mechanisms that express and enforce the relations of power in society; she represents Western social arrangements and institutions as covert ways of manipulating power so as to establish and perpetuate the dominance of men and the subordination of women. In her book she attacks the male bias in Freud's psychoanalytic theory, and also analyzes selected passages by D.H.Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet as revealing the ways in which their authors, in fictional fantasy, aggrandize their aggressive phallic selves and degrade women as submissive sexual objects.