Feminist Approaches to Literature

by:
Kate O'Connor
This essay offers a very basic introduction to feminist literary theory, and a compendium of
Great Writers Inspire resources that can be approached from a feminist perspective. It provides
suggestions for how material on the Great Writers Inspire site can be used as a starting point for
exploration of or classroom discussion about feminist approaches to literature. Questions for
reflection or discussion are highlighted in the text. Links in the text point to resources in the
Great Writers Inspire site. The resources can also be found via the ' Feminist Approaches to
Literature' start page . Further material can be found via our library and via the various authors
and theme pages.

The A-level context

For both the A2 Reflections in Literary Studies unit and the extended comparative essay, it is
helpful to approach a collection of texts from a thematic rather than period or writer-based
approach.
One example of such an angle is to examine literature by or depicting women, and to consider
the development of feminist literature, in no small part because 'feminist perspectives' is one of
the suggested ways of grouping texts for the A2 Unit 'Texts in Time.'

The Traditions of Feminist Criticism

According to Yale Professor Paul Fry in his lecture The Classical Feminist Tradition from 25:07,
there have been several prominent schools of thought in modern feminist literary criticism:

First Wave Feminism: Men's Treatment of Women

In this early stage of feminist criticism, critics consider male novelists' demeaning treatment
or marginalisation of female characters. First wave feminist criticism includes books like Marry
Ellman's Thinking About Women (1968) Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1969), and Germaine
Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970). An example of first wave feminist literary analysis would
be a critique of William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew for Petruchio's abuse of Katherina.

Second Wave Feminism: Gynocriticism

Elaine Showalter pioneered gynocriticism with her book A Literature of Their Own (1977).
Gynocriticism involves three major aspects. The first is the examination of female writers and
their place in literary history. The second is the consideration of the treatment of female
characters in books by both male and female writers. The third and most important aspect of
gynocriticism is the discovery and exploration of a canon of literature written by women;

gynocriticism seeks to appropriate a female literary tradition. In Showalter's A Literature of

Their Own, she proposes the following three phases of women's writing:
1.

The 'Feminine' Phase - in the feminine phase, female writers tried to adhere to
male values, writing as men, and usually did not enter into debate regarding women's place in
society. Female writers often employed male pseudonyms during this period.

2.

The 'Feminist' Phase - in the feminist phase, the central theme of works by female
writers was the criticism of the role of women in society and the oppression of women.

3.

The 'Female' Phase - during the 'female' phase, women writers were no longer
trying to prove the legitimacy of a woman's perspective. Rather, it was assumed that the
works of a women writer were authentic and valid. The female phase lacked the anger and
combative consciousness of the feminist phase.

Do you agree with Showalter's 'phases'? How does your favourite female writer fit into these
phases?

The Madwoman Thesis

Made famous by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), the
eponymous madwoman is Bertha Jenkins of Charlotte Bront's Jane Eyre , Rochester's mad
wife hidden away in the attic of Thornfield Hall. Gilbert and Gubar's thesis suggests that
because society forbade women from expressing themselves through creative outlets, their
creative powers were channelled into psychologically self-destructive behaviour and subversive
actions. A great example of the madwoman thesis in action is in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's
1892 short story The Yellow Wallpaper .
Read Jane Eyre with the madwoman thesis in mind. Are there connections between Jane's
subversive thoughts and Bertha's appearances in the text? How does it change your view of the
novel to consider Bertha as an alter ego for Jane, unencumbered by societal norms? Look closely
at Rochester's explanation of the early symptoms of Bertha's madness. How do they differ from
his licentious behaviour?

French Feminism
French Feminism, led by critics such as Julia Kristeva, Hlne Cixousx, and Luce Irigaray, relies
heavily on Freudian psychology and the theory of penis envy
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis_envy ). French feminists postulate the existence of a
separate language belonging to women that consists of loose, digressive sentences written
without use of the ego.
How does Jane Austen fit into French Feminism? She uses very concise language, yet speaks
from a woman's perspective with confidence. Can she be placed in Showalter's phases of
women's writing?

Dr. Simon Swift of the University of Leeds gives a podcast titled 'How Words, Form, and Structure
Create Meaning: Women and Writing' that uses the works of Virginia Woolf and Silvia Plath to
analyse the form and structural aspects of texts to ask whether or not women writers have a
voice inherently different from that of men (podcast part 1 and part 2).
In Professor Deborah Cameron's podcast English and Gender , Cameron discusses the differences
and similarities in use of the English language between men and women.
In another of Professor Paul Fry's podcasts, Queer Theory and Gender Performativity , Fry
discusses sexuality, the nature of performing gender (14:53), and gendered reading (46:20).
How do more modern A-level set texts, like those of Margaret Atwood, Zora Neale Hurston, or
Maya Angelou, fit into any of these traditions of criticism?

Depictions of Women by Men

Students could begin approaching Great Writers Inspire by considering the range of women
depicted in early English literature: from Chaucer's bawdy 'Wife of Bath' in The Canterbury
Tales to Spenser's interminably pure Una in The Faerie Queene .
How might the reign of Queen Elizabeth I have dictated the way Elizabethan writers were
permitted to present women? How did each male poet handle the challenge of depicting women?
By 1610 Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl presented at The Fortune a
play based on the life of Mary Firth. The heroine was a man playing a woman dressed as a man.
In Dr. Emma Smith's podcast on The Roaring Girl , Smith breaks down both the gender issues of
the play and of the real life accusations against Mary Frith.
In Dr. Emma Smith's podcast on John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi , a frequent A-level set text,
Smith discusses Webster's treatment of female autonomy. Placing Middleton or Webster's female
characters against those of Shakespeare could be brought to bear on A-level Paper 4 on Drama
or Paper 5 on Shakespeare and other pre-20th Century Texts.
Smith's podcast on The Comedy of Errors from 11:21 alludes to the valuation of Elizabethan
comedy as a commentary on gender and sexuality, and how The Comedy of Errors at first seems
to defy this tradition.
What are the differences between depictions of women written by male and female novelists?
Students can compare the works of Charlotte and Emily Bront or Jane Austen with, for example,
Hardy's Tess of the d'Ubervilles or D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover or Women in Love .
How do Lawrence's sexually charged novels compare with what Emma Smith said about
Webster's treatment of women's sexuality inThe Duchess of Malfi?
Dr. Abigail Williams' podcast on Jonathan Swift's The Lady's Dressing-Room discusses the ways in
which Swift uses and complicates contemporary stereotypes about the vanity of women.

Rise of the Woman Writer

With the movement from Renaissance to Restoration theatre, the depiction of women on stage
changed dramatically, in no small part because women could portray women for the first time.
Dr. Abigail Williams' adapted lecture, Behn and the Restoration Theatre , discusses Behn's use and
abuse of the woman on stage.
What were the feminist advantages and disadvantages to women's introduction to the stage?
The essay Who is Aphra Behn? addresses the transformation of Behn into a feminist icon by later
writers, especially Bloomsbury Group member Virginia Woolf in her novella/essay A Room of
One's Own .
How might Woolf's description and analysis of Behn indicate her own feminist agenda?
Behn created an obstacle for later women writers in that her scandalous life did little to
undermine the perception that women writing for money were little better than whores.
In what position did that place chaste female novelists like Frances Burney or Jane Austen ?
To what extent was the perception of women and the literary vogue for female heroines
impacted by Samuel Richardson's Pamela ? Students could examine a passage from Pamela and
evaluate Richardson's success and failures, and look for his influence in novels with which they
are more familiar, like those of Austen or the Bront sisters.
In Dr. Catherine's Brown's podcast on Eliot's Reception History , Dr. Brown discusses feminist
criticism of Eliot's novels. In the podcast Genre and Justice , she discusses Eliot's use of women
as scapegoats to illustrate the injustice of the distribution of happiness in Victorian England.
Professor Sir Richard Evans' Gresham College lecture The Victorians: Gender and Sexuality can
provide crucial background for any study of women in Victorian literature.

Women Writers and Class

Can women's financial and social plights be separated? How do Jane Austen and Charlotte Bront
bring to bear financial concerns regarding literature depicting women in the 18th and 19th
century?
How did class barriers affect the work of 18th century kitchen maid and poet Mary Leapor ?
Listen to the podcast by Yale's Professor Paul Fry titled "The Classical Feminist Tradition" . At
9:20, Fry questions whether or not any novel can be evaluated without consideration of financial
and class concerns, and to what extent Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own suggests a female
novelist can only create successful work if she is of independent means.

What are the different problems faced by a wealthy character like Austen's Emma, as opposed to
a poor character like Bront's Jane Eyre ?

FEMINISM IN LITERATURE
Overview
Feminism has gradually become more far-ranging and subtle in its attacks on male-dominated society.
Many injustices still need to be corrected, but equally necessary is a more down-to-earth, tolerant and
compassionate view of fellow human beings.

Introduction
Many feminists dislike theory. Sharp intellectual categories, argumentation, seeming objectivity, and
the whole tradition they grow out of are just what feminists are seeking to escape. And if their
reasoning seems unsystematic they can draw support from the psychoanalysis ofLacan and Julia
Kristeva, from Derrida's deconstruction, and from Rorty's view that philosophy should model itself on an
edifying conversation seeking rapprochement rather than no-holds-barred gladiatorial combat. {1}

Androgynist Poetics
Critics, being generally male, had not generally concerned themselves with gender issues. Most of the
world's great literature had been written by men. Sappho, Austen, the Bronts and Emily Dickinson
apart, it was difficult to think women really had it in them to write at the highest level. Literature was
literature, and critics saw no need to distinguish a specifically feminine way of writing or responding to
a text.
Virginia Woolf was herself a refutation of that thesis, though her mental breakdown was perhaps
brought on by the strain of balancing male self-realization with female abnegation. But in her
essay Professions for Women, Woolf complained only that women's social obligations hindered a writing
career. Their lives gave them a different perspective, but women were not fundamentally different
from men in their psychological needs and outlooks.

Gynocriticism
The gathering feminist movement very much disagreed, and argued that women's writing expressed a
distinctive female consciousness, which was more discursive and conjunctive than its male
counterpart. Such consciousness was radically different, and had been adversely treated. Simone de
Beauvoir in The Second Sex documented the ways "Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers and
scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of women is willed in heaven and
advantageous on earth." Women had been made to feel that they were inferior by nature and, though
men paid lip-service to equality, they would resist its implementation. Some men might be sympathetic
to women's issues, but only women themselves knew what they felt and wanted. {2}
And perhaps they always knew. The essays collected in Susan Cornillon's 1972 anthology Images of
Women in Fiction all suggested that nineteenth and twentieth century fiction was simply untrue to
women's experience. Rather than search for the essentially feminine, critics now turned to the social
context of women's writing, to the ways a male-orientated society had formed or deformed individual
novels, plays and poems written by women. Adventure and romance, whoever written for, seemed to

stress the male competitive element, and even the submissive partner of gay literature only imitated
the female stereotype.
Not all agreed, of course. Norman Mailer's The Prisoner of Sex: disliked the blanket criticism of Kate
Millet's Sexual Politics, arguing its examples were too selective chosen. {3}

Gynesis
Nonetheless, by the early eighties, feminists had advanced to a much more confrontational attack on
male hegemony, advocating a complete overthrow of the biased (male) canon of literature. French
feminists argued that women should write with a greater consciousness of their bodies, which would
create a more honest and appropriate style of openness, fragmentation and non-linearity. Parallel
studies in the visual arts stressed a feminine sensibility of soft fluid colours, an emphasis on the
personal and decorative, and on forms that evoked the female genitalia.
And the problem lay deeper still, in the language itself. Words had been coined to express a male point
of view, and that was indeed misogynist. Some 220 words exist in English for the sexually promiscuous
woman, but only 22 for promiscuous men. And in the sexual matters that really concerned them, the
vocabulary was hopelessly restricted. {4} Discourse was power, said Foucault, and psychoanalysts
likeLacan and Kristeva stressed the liberating role that literature should play, particularly to allow the
semiotic flux of the unconscious in early childhood, i.e. before the symbolic world of public discourse
imposed its male-favouring rules. Poets worked on the boundaries of the two realms, and Kristeva
urged them to engender political and feminist revolutions by dissolving the conventions of normal
discourse.{5}

Gender Theory
Five years later the debate had moved on, from exclusively feminine concerns to the wider issues of
gender in social and cultural contexts. Patriarchy and capitalism should be examined more closely,
perhaps as Althusser had attempted, and sophisticated models built to integrate the larger web of
economics, education, division of labour, biological constraints and cultural assumptions.
Michle Barrett demanded facts, research. How does gender stereotyping arise in various social
contexts? How are the canons of literary excellence actually established? What is the practical effect
on literature? Shouldn't we remember that attitudes are struck within a fictional framework, and can't
be simply pulled out and convicted by a kangaroo court of feminist morals? {6}

Critique
Literature will often reflect the cultural assumptions and attitudes of its period, and that of course
includes attitudes towards women: their status, their roles, their expectations. But a literature
doctored of male-orientated views would be failing in its first requirement, to present a realistic or
convincing picture of the world. Moralizing, which includes political correctness, has its dangers.
Feminists have argued for positive discrimination as the only way to correct centuries of bias.
Nonetheless, the consensus emerging among black Americans is that positive discrimination is counterproductive. Disadvantaged minorities desperately need the odds levelled, but not patronizingly tilted
in their favour. {7}
Psychoanalysis has little scientific standing, and Lacanian theory is further disputed within the
psychoanalytical community itself. Feminism does itself few favours by relying on these supports.
A more damaging criticism is the concept of the feminine itself. Does it really exist? There are very real
differences in the psychological make-up between the sexes, {8} but testing also indicates what
anthropologists have long accepted: the expression of those differences is more determined by cultural

factors than sexuality per se. Feminists who argue for a more understanding, fluid, and delicate
attitude are not so much advocating qualities native to women but for attitudes still repressed by
society. That in turn suggests society itself needs exploring rather than sex differences per se, which is
indeed a view more recognized in contemporary feminist studies. {9}

References
1. Chapter 6 of Raman Selden's A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (1985,
1989),Feminist Criticism entry in David Cooper's (Ed.) A Companion to Aesthetics (1995).
2. Cooper 1995, and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1974).
3. Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1977), Gayle Green and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The
Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979).
4. pp. 376-384 in Jessie Bernard's The Female World (1981).
5. Toril Moi's Sexual/Textural Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985), Helene Cixous's The Laugh of
the Medusa (1976), and Dale Spender's Man-Made Language. For psychoanalytical aspects see Juliet
Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1975), Elizabeth Wright's (Ed.) Feminism and
Psychoanalysis(1992) and Toril Moi's The Kristeva Reader (1986).
6. Michele Barrett's Women's Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis (1980), Judith
Newman and Deborah Rosenfelt's (Eds.) Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class and Race in
Literature and Culture (1985), Elaine Showalter's (Ed.) The New Feminist Criticism: Essays of Women,
Literature and Theory (1985), Hester Eisenstein's Contemporary Feminist Thought (1984), Christine
Battersby's Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (1989, 1994), and Ann Garry and Marilyn
Pearsall's Women, Knowledge and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy (1989).
7. Bernard 1981, and Janet Radcliffe Richards's The Sceptical Feminist: A Philosophical Enquiry (1980).
8. Donald Symmons's The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1979).
9. Miriam Lewin's (Ed.) In the Shadow of the Past: Psychology Portrays the Sexes (1984) and Janet
Spence and Robert Helmreich's Masculinity and Femininity: Their Psychological Dimensions, Correlates,
and Antecedents (1978), Sarah Dunant's The War of the Words: The Political Correctness Debate (1994)
and Miln Mac an Ghaill's Understanding Masculinity (1996).

Internet Resources
1. Feminist Theory An Overview. Elizabeth Lee.
1997.http://www.victorianweb.org/gender/femtheory.html. Short article in The Victorian Web.
2. Feminism and Canons. Cynthia Freeland. Jan. 1999.http://www.uh.edu/
%7Ecfreelan/courses/femcan.html. A survey of the movement through topic headings.
3. How Feminism Is Re-writing the Philosophical Canon. Charlotte Witt.
1996.http://www.uh.edu/~cfreelan/SWIP/Witt.html. Essay outline outlining implications.
4. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797). Garth Kemerling. Aug.
2002.http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/woll.htm. Short article, references and links.
5. Julia Kristeva. May 2003. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Kristeva. Wikipedia entry, with links.
6. Hlne Cixous. Mary Jane Parrine. 1998. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/cixous/index.html.
Lectures, articles, bibliography and links.
7. Feminisms and Gender Studies. http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/
Literary_Criticism/feminism/index.html. Notes and listings relating to feminism and literature.
8. Topics in Feminism. Sally Haslanger and Nancy Tuana. Feb.
2003.http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-topics/. Detailed article with excellent bibliography
and listings.
9. Feminism and Women's Studies. http://eserver.org/feminism/index.html. Slow site but extensive
resources, including online texts.
10. Women's Studies Resources. Karla Tonella. Jan. 2003. http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/

wstudies/theory.html. Sites and online articles.

11. Women Writers. Akihito Ishikawa. Sep. 2000. http://www.nagasaki-gaigo.ac.jp/ishikawa/
amlit/general/women.htm. Good listing, part of American Literature on the Web.
12. Feminist Science Fiction. Laura Quilter. Oct. 2003. http://www.feministsf.org/femsf/. Excellent
resources, including guides, bibliographies, videos and teaching material.
13. Gender Inn. http://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/englisch/
datenbank/e_index.htm. Searchable database of over 7,500 records on feminist theory, criticism and
gender studies: listings only.
14. Literary Resources Feminism and Women's Literature. Jack
Lynch.http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Lit/women.html. Short list of sites on women's
literature, feminist criticism, and gender studies.
15. Feminism and Literature/Feminist Literary Criticism. http://www.stfx.ca/academic/womenstudies/bibliographies/Feminism_Literature.html. Book listing.
16. Feminist Literary Criticism and Theory. Kristin Switala.
1999.http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/lit.html. A good listing by key writers and category.
17. Literary Criticism and Theory: 1970-1990. http://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/WomensStudies/
bibliogs/fem_aesthetics/aesthet2.html. Listings and brief notes.
18. A Celebration of Women Writers. http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/. Mary Mark Ockerbloom.
Jan. 2004. Literature by women, grouped by author and category.
19. Feminism Resources. http://www.datehookup.com/content-feminism-resources.htm . Short list of
links, with emphasis on the practical.