The Literary Criticism Web

"What unites and repeatedly invigorates feminist literary criticism, then, is neither dogma nor method but [ . . . ] an acute and impassioned attentiveness to the ways in which primarily male structures of power are inscribed (or encoded) within our literary inheritance; the consequences of that encoding for women -- as characters, as readers, and as writers; and, with that, a shared analytic concern for the implications of that encoding not only for a better understanding of the past, but also for an improved reordering of the present and future as well."

-- Annette Kolodny, "Dancing Through the Minefield" (1397-98)

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The feminist response to culture that has coalesced in the last half of the twentieth century recognizes a deeply ingrained prejudice against women. Sometimes borrowing from both Marxist and structuralist methodology, feminist critics have explored a pervasive binary opposition built around gender which subordinates women to objects by which the power and value of all that is male is affirmed. This cultural web of power and privilege is the patriarchy.

The feminist critique of patriarchal culture actually has a long tradition. Among the early voices in this critique was Mary Wollonecraft. In 1792 she argued in A Vindication of the Rights of Women that women must challenge society's assumption of female inferiority and must strive to articulate their own identities and roles in society. Among the important twentieth-century voices further articulating the feminist critique of culture have been Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own, 1919), Simone de Beavoir (The Second Sex, 1949), Kate Millett (Sexual Politics, 1969), and Elaine Showalter (A Literature of Their Own, 1977).

Feminist critics share with Marxists and others an awareness of the literature as an ideological force in culture. From this general awareness, several distinct areas of focus have developed in feminist criticism of literature. Some critics have focused on rediscovering and rearticulating previously disenfranchised or suppressed female voices. Others have reassessed traditional literary texts with an attention to their inherently engendered elements of content or form. Still others have explored the awakening female consciousness often dramatized in literature. All of these emphases, however, explore literature as a product of an on-going patriarchal power struggle in society.

Critical Assumptions

Succinctly put, here are some common assumptions of feminist criticism:

1. All literature, like all culture, dramatizes implicitly or explicitly the difference between the masculine and the feminine.
   
2. Alll literature, like all history, records the struggle of women and men with the social forces of patriarchy.
   
3. Criticism functions, as does reading itself, to facilitate the awakening of human consciousness to the gender-delimiting elements of human experience.

Critical Strategies

The applications of these assumptions generally fall into one of three broad feminist approaches:

As all three of these approaches reflect, feminist criticism is not based upon an objective or scientific aesthetic assessment of formal elements. Rather, as David Cowles has noted, one important feminist motto is that "'the personal is political'"; hence, feminist criticism is self-consciously ideological, seeking "to change individual readers and society itself" (218-19). This imperative for personal and social change is not only acknowledged but also embraced by Elaine Showalter in "Toward a Feminist Poetics" and Josephine Donovan in "Beyond the Net: Feminist Criticism as a Moral Criticism."

Works Cited

Cowles, David, et al. The Critical Experience. 2^nd ed. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1994.

Kolodny, Annette. "Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism." Feminist Studies 6 (1980). Rpt. In The Critical Tradition: Classic Text and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford, 1998. 1386-399.

updated 07/23/99