Género y Literatura en los Países de Habla Inglesa

GLOSSARY UNIT 1

Sources:
Baym, Nina (ed.). The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol C. New York & London: W.
W. Norton, 2003.
Beasley, Christine. Gender and Sexuality. Critical Theories, Critical Thinkers. London: SAGE
Publications, 2005.
Dictionary of Literary Characters. Edinburgh: Harraps, 2005.
Drabble, Margaret (ed.). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford: O.U.P., 2000.
Encarta World English Dictionary. London: Bloomsbury, 1999.
Goodman, Lizbeth (ed.). Literature and Gender. London: The Open University, 1996.
Pearsal, Judy (ed.). The New Oxford Dictionary of English. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.

A “feminine sentence”: In the Times Literary Supplement (1923), Virginia Woolf decided that her
contemporary Dorothy Richardson had found a sentence that we might call the ‘psychological sentence’
of the feminine gender. It was a woman’s sentence, but only in the sense that it is used to describe a
woman’s mind by a writer who is neither proud nor afraid of anything that she may discover in the
psychology of her sex. [Goodman]

Androcentric: A view of theory that is male-centred. Focused or centred on men. [Beasley, Encarta]

Anon: Anonymous. In a famous quotation, Virginia Woolf emphasizes that many women wrote in
previous generations, but that social factors to do with gender kept many writers “anonymous,” hidden,
silenced or otherwise excluded from the “canon.” [Goodman]

“An Obstacle”: A poem by Charlotte Perkins Gilman that can be read as a piece about the “obstacles” of
gender stereotypes and prejudices which blocked the progress of women writers for so long. The narrator
and author of the poem has experienced a lack of cooperation and support from the social world,
characterized by “Prejudice.” Gilman shows women striving to move ahead, patriarchal attitudes standing
in the way. “Prejudice” faces all writers who do not conform to some “norm” of acceptability or
importance. The author recognizes the joy of moving beyond an obstacle, whether personal or general.
[Goodman]

Bachelor: positive masculine category set against feminine equivalents like “spinster.” “Buddy” from
brother is also a good thing in opposition to “sissy” derived from sister. [Beasley]

Domestic fiction: The term alludes to traditional representations of women’s roles in the home, and then
with reference to the feminist writing which challenged and continues to challenge such traditions.
[Goodman]

“Female writing” (“écriture feminine”): A term coined by Hélène Cixous to refer to women’s writing,
which derives from women’s unique experience. [Goodman]

Feminism: A recognition of the historical and cultural subordination of women and a resolve to do
something about it. The advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes. It is a
critical theory that refuses what it describes as the masculine bias of mainstream Western thinking on the
basis that this bias renders women invisible/marginal to understanding of humanity and distorts
understandings of men. Feminism is a critical stance that de-centres the assumptions of the mainstream in
terms of centre (men)/periphery (women). For the Feminists the notion of woman is placed centre stage.

The issue of rights for women first became prominent during the French and American
revolutions in the late eighteenth century. [Goodman, Drabble, Beasley, Oxford]
Feminist literary criticism: An academic approach to the study of literature which applies feminist
thought to the analysis of literary texts and the contexts of their production and reception. A modern
tradition of literary commentary and controversy devoted to the defence of women’s writing or of
fictional female characters against the condescensions of a predominantly male literary establishment.

The growth of feminist literary criticism has helped us to study gender as it is represented in
literature and other art forms. The beginnings of this movement are to be found in the journalism of
Rebecca West from about 1910. Early European feminist writings began with the work of Simone de
Beauvoir, while Anglo-American writing is often associated with Virginia Woolf. Feminist criticism has
become a varied field of debate rather than an agreed position. Its substantial achievements are seen in the
readmission of temporarily forgotten women authors to the literary canon in modern reprints and newly
commissioned studies by feminist publishing houses such as Virago (1977) and the Women’s Press
(1978), in anthologies and academic courses. [Goodman, Drabble]

Feminist literature: The literary corpus written by contemporary women within the context of “second
wave” or even “third wave” (that is, current) feminist awareness. Feminist authors have a political and
ideological agenda in the writing of their work. Thus, some knowledge of the author’s intentions is
necessary. Literature may have a feminist impact even if its authors do not identify themselves as
feminist. [Goodman]

Feminist and Masculinity Studies: they tend to line up together and focus on the significance of gender
(sexed identities). [Beasley]

“Firing the canon”: The phrase means a revaluation of the standards by which authors and texts have
been singled out and “canonized”, followed by an active search for other authors and texts for inclusion.
[Goodman]

“First-wave feminism”: The syntagm often refers to the Suffragists who believed in fighting for
women’s rights rallied around one central cause: women’s right to vote. In Britain it was not until the
emergence of the suffragette movement in the late nineteenth century that there was a significant political
change. It was marked by its critique of dominant Western thinking of the time, that is, its critique of
Liberalism. However, eighteenth and nineteenth-century Liberalism, though using the gender neutral
language of “humanity,” “individual,” and “reason,” rested in practice upon a notional man and was
indeed confined to men. Early Liberal feminists proposed women’s inclusion in the Liberal universal
conception of a human common nature as well as a common action political agenda. [Goodman, Encarta,
Beasley]

Gender: Social or cultural category based on the ways of seeing and representing people and situations
influenced by sex difference. Typically refers to the social process of dividing up people and social
practices along the lines of sexed identities. Frequently involves creating hierarchies between divisions. In
modern Western societies, it usually refers to the categories of men and women and the social practices
which associate men with public life and women and domestic life. Some commentators see it more in
terms of social interactions and institutions that from groups, thus, as a structuring process. Although it is
commonly linked to notions of reproduction, some analysts reject its connection to social interpretation of
reproductive biological distinctions. [Goodman, Beasley]

Gender and creative work: In the nineteenth century, women and girls in fiction are occupied with
certain kinds of creative work. Weaving, sewing and needlework represent those forms of work and a
metaphor for female expression which operates on many levels simultaneously. However, some other
women use writing as a way to express creative freedom. That is the case of Charlotte Perkins Gilman
who, both in her story “The Yellow Newspaper” and in her own life, writes as a process of healing and
emotional release. She values creative freedom and intellectual stimulation over the domestic. [Goodman]
Gender and language: All writing is gendered so far as all authors use language. Language is created in
so far as all authors use language, and language is created, spoken and written in culture, where each of us
has a sex and a gender.

A way of texting the “gender-relevance” of a text is deciding what relationships of power and
authority are conveying through the language and characterization of a text. Feminist commentators note
that in Western thought to speak of men is taken as speaking universally. [Goodman, Beasley]

Gender/Sexual Difference thinking: Writers such as Nancy Chodorow, Mary Daly, Carol Gilligan, and
Luce Irigaray speak for an alternative worldview which recognizes and highlights difference. Like the
Emancipatory feminists, they argue that universal presumptions are in fact not neutral but derived from
men or notions of the masculine and constitutes women as outsiders. The aim of Gender Difference
feminists is to acknowledge difference positively by revaluing the marginal, by revaluing the feminine.
Sexual Difference theorists do not assume that women have any particular qualities that can be contrasted
with those of men, but revalue the Feminine as representing in cultural terms “difference” from the
(masculine) norm. By revaluing the Feminine, they envisage plurality in society.

Gender/Sexual Difference approaches share with Feminist Identity Politics the common theme of
the incommensurability of the sexes and the importance of celebrating rather than suppressing difference
in social life. [Beasley]

Gender, language and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865): Alice is ahead of its time because it is
an example of children’s fiction with a female protagonist. Unlike the other children’s stories written in
the previous generation, the central character is active, inquisitive, intelligent and engaging. Most of the
fantastic creatures encountered by Alice are gendered male and they are male for a reason: they serve a
function to do with language and power in a male-dominated world. The language of the piece and the
gendering of the other characters in the story reveal that Alice is at odds in a male-dominated, male-
controlled world. Most of the creatures encountered by the fictional Alice are male or endowed with
masculine power and authority, often expressed through their “mastery” of, and experimentation with
language. [Goodman]

Gender, language and Pygmalion (1916): Professor Higgins undertakes his task in order to win a bet
and to prove his own points about English speech and the class system: he teaches Eliza Doolittle to
speak standard English and introduces her to a successfully social life. Eliza Doolittle is a woman
constructed, imagistically and linguistically, by a man. The male playwright –G. B. Shaw– shows the
brutality of the patriarchal system of language and power which entraps her. For Eliza Doolittle language
is inextricably tied to gender and class issues. The knowledge she has acquired of language and social
relations makes her enter a new culture, a new language. Her previous ways of using language, and of
seeing herself, are no longer open to her. The political and social views of G. B. Shaw are expressed
through the mouths of his characters. [Goodman, Drabble]

Gender, language and “The Lady of Shalott” (1832): In this Victorian poem of Arthurian echoes, the
Lady of the title is disempowered by language itself. She is not the subject of active verbs but a passive
presence in contrast with an active man and an active landscape. The word “bold” is used in the poem in
relation to Sir Lancelot. It is only used in relation to the Lady by way of analogy to a seer, gendered male.
[Goodman]

Gender, language and “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892): male power determines meaning by assuming
the right to designate “correct” uses of language and rules for female behaviour. The female narrator
describes her feelings of frustration at being told not to write, and implicit in that frustration is a desire to
be the one who writes her own story, who uses language to represent her own self. Gilman is critical of
Doctor John, the female narrator’s husband, but her criticism is not expressed in any direct terms within
the text but through our sympathy with the confined woman. The entire narrative becomes the expression
of a stifled creative voice in the form of a secret journal. Gilman uses language to create a picture of
reality: to show what is presented as “reason” by men. [Goodman]

“Gender on the agenda”: The process of reading with a concern for gender issues that affects the
writing or reading of texts. It means paying attention to factors such as women’s relative lack of access to
higher education, women lower economic status, women’s domestic responsibilities, and the conflict
between nurturing roles such as motherhood and domestic work. It involves the reader in an active
process of imagination and interpretation. [Goodman, Drabble]

Gender/Sexuality Theories: includes a full range of major subfields of gender/sexuality theory―that is,
Feminist, Masculinity, and Sexuality Studies. These subfields tend to focus on only two sexes, but
recently have begun to allow for more plural sexual identities. All the subfields are characterized by an
inclination to challenge the notion of a proper, appropriate, natural “norm” in relation to gender and
sexuality. Gender/Sexuality theories and all its subfields are committed to social reform, or at least social
destabilisation. The subfields show a concern with some level of social change that resists the existing
hierarchy of sex and power. Beasley outlines five main directions spreading across the Modernist-
Postmodern continuum that focus on the Human –Modernist (Emancipatory/Liberationsit) feminisms–,
(Singular) Difference –Identity Politics to “Sexual Difference” feminisms–, (Multiple) Differences –race,
ethnicity, imperialism and feminism–, Relational Social Power –Feminist Social Constructionism–, and
Fluidity/Instability –Postmodern feminism. Some critics have distinguished two major groupings or
standards within the field of Feminist Studies, such as “relational” and “individualist” feminisms and
“equality” and “difference” feminisms. [Beasley]

Gender Studies: A concern with the representation, rights and status of women and men. Academic
courses in sociology, history, literature, and psychology which focus on the roles, experiences, and
achievements of women in society. Teaching programmes centrally focused on Masculinity under the
rubric of gender studies also pay attention to sexuality, while Sexuality Studies programmes discuss
writers who, at the very least, debate gender matters. [Goodman, Encarta, Beasley]

Genre: Term used to distinguish between distinct types of writing, art or thought. The three major literary
genres are poetry, prose fiction, and drama. [Goodman]

“Gestalt” view of literature and gender: It analyses the patterns involved in reading and interpreting
literature. [Goodman]

Gynocentric: centred on or concerned exclusively with women; taking a female (or specifically a
feminist) point of view. [Encarta]

Hegemonic masculinity: refers to the most valuable and most rewarded form of masculinity, which
provides a widely accepted model legitimizing masculine social dominance. [Beasley]

Identity politics: reflects the idea that characteristics derived from gender, race or sexuality produce a
shared experience and a related commonality. [Beasley]

Literature: Body of writing that aims to be creative. It includes poetry, prose fiction, and drama.
[Goodman]

“Literary canon”: It is the body of writings generally recognized as “great” by some “authority.” A body
of approved works, comprising either writings genuinely considered to be those of a given author, or
writings considered to represent the best standards of a given literary tradition. [Goodman, Drabble]

Madness in literature: From a gendered perspective, this topic often relates to the conflict between
artistic and domestic sensibilities. In some occasions madness is a means of escape, of liberation for
women. For Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar the frequency with which women have written about
madness is to be seen as one of the most revealing symptoms of their own feelings of entrapment and
oppression. [Goodman]

Madness in Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë: Both Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Jane Eyre
(1847) resists romanticizing mental breakdown, insisting on the degree to which the literary fashion for
ornamental female insanity debilitated and degraded women. The novels resist the depiction of madness
as the product of a naturally unstable femininity.

Brontë manipulates Bertha Mason’s character and depicts her as different from the sentimental
madwomen usually found in preceding novels. Jane Eyre is antithetical to Victorian ideals of femininity
in a way which can be interpreted as feminist. [Goodman]

Madness in Moods: In her novels, the American writer Louisa May Alcott wrote about depressions
connected with the struggle to balance artistic creativity with domesticity. [Goodman]

Madness in The Female Malady: In her influential study, Elaine Showalter notes that madness is the
price women artists have to pay for the exercise of their creativity in a male-dominated culture.
[Goodman]

Madness in “The Yellow Wallpaper”: In this representative story what drives the narrator mad is the
confinement of her creative imagination. Madness could be an escape from one kind of cage into another.
[Goodman]

Masculinity Studies: offers a critical stance on sex and power but, rather than focusing on the
marginalized, attends to those that are traditionally central to Western thinking―that is, men and
masculinity. Indeed, while this subfield has become more attentive to diversity, it still primarily attends to
white middle-class heterosexual men. [Beasley]

Patriarchy: In Feminism, systemic and trans-historical male domination over women. A system or
society of government in which the father or eldest male is head of the family and descent is reckoned
through the male line. System or society of government in which men hold the power and women are
largely excluded from it. Along with “compulsory heterosexuality,” the term “patriarchy” indicate the
negative nature of power, its quality of repression. [Oxford, Beasley]

Postmodern feminism: offers the multiplication of difference that appears in the group difference(s)
approaches. There is an expansion of difference towards differences, towards a plurality that resists any
set identities. Post-modern feminists intent to destabilize the very conception of identity (human or group)
and the binary identities (such as men and women). They assert that there is no “truth” behind identity.
For them, gender is a masquerade and there is nothing behind or before this “mask.” Postmodern views
are even more strongly but have had limited impact on Masculinity Studies. [Beasley]

“Pro-feminist”: Still debated by feminist criticism, it is a term sometimes used for men sympathetic to
feminist concerns. Such literary works as Jane Eyre and Pygmalion can be defined as pro-feminist. The
story of Jane Eyre exhibits the bright independent heroine, a woman who struggles with learning, work
and desire. Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion escapes her creator and becomes a character with more integrity
and humanity than Professor Higgins, her male counterpart. [Goodman]

Queer theory: typically focused upon the question of individual identity, and upon cultural/symbolic and
literary/textual issues, aims to destabilize identity through the construction of a supposedly “inclusive,”
non-normative (almost invariably non-heterosexual) sexuality and a simultaneous dismantling of gender
roles. [Beasley]
Race/ethnicity/imperialism feminists: they wish to revalue and affirm group difference and identities.
For them, categories of men and women cannot be seen as self-evident identities that are always the same
and bear the same social consequences everywhere.

“Second-wave feminism”: “movement” focused particularly on women’s rights with an emphasis on

unity and sisterhood. It began during the political upheaval in England, Europe and America in the 1960s
and 1970s, and attempted to combat social and cultural inequalities. Seminal figures included Betty
Friedan and Germaine Greer. Popular renderings of Feminism often presuppose the politics of Liberal
feminism during this second wave. However, in feminist writings the second wave refers to at least four
main directions: (reworked versions of) Liberal, Marxist, Socialist feminisms and additionally Radical
feminism. Like first-wave feminism, it has an “emancipatory” orientation or Modernist approach which
consists of assimilating women into society, a fact they would necessarily transform that society. Its aim
is to throw off macro structures of power that oppress women and other subordinated groups as far as to
propound a particular notion of the self less tied to a particular account of competitive masculinity.
Women must be assimilated into an enhanced view of the social world, participating in social tasks as
men do. During the second wave of feminism gender difference was increasingly promoted: the focus
was more upon women’s difference than from men, upon affirming women as a group and gynocentrism.
[Oxford, Beasley]

Sex: Biological category that distinguishes between male and female. Sex is ineluctably a matter of
human organization―that is, it is political, associated with social dominance and subordination, as well
as capable of change. [Goodman, Beasley]

Sexed regimes: identities and practices typically involving categories such as men and women. [Beasley]

Sexual difference: coverall term for the field of study of sexed identities. [Beasley]

Sexual embodiment: attends to critical analyses of gender and sexual relations. [Beasley]

Sexuality Studies: focus upon the organization of desire (not on having or doing sex per se, but upon
sexualities). Sexuality Studies is mostly (like Feminism) concerned with marginalized identities and
practices (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex) and/or Queer Studies. Nevertheless, more recently
there has been a growing body of work in Sexuality Studies concerned with heterosexuality, with
“mainstream” sexuality. [Beasley]

Sexuality: The realm of sexual experience and desire. Sometimes it refers to a person’s sexual orientation
as heterosexual, bisexual or homosexual. [Goodman]

Social Constructionist Feminists: they argue that “difference” does not adhere in the self/identity, is not
an inherent essence, but is created by relations of power. They describe truth and power in universal
macro terms and power is largely perceived as negative domination. Social Constructionism, along with
Postmodernism, offers a critique of both Emancipatory and Gender Difference approaches in that both of
the latter accounts stress relatively fixed notions of identity. [Beasley]

“The domestication of insanity”: With this phrase, Elaine Showalter suggests how she connects
domestic confinement and oppression with “madness.” [Goodman]

“The female malady”: Elaine Showalter has used this phrase to refer to both the female experience of
domestic confinement and to the identification of mental and emotional disturbances in women which
could be called “female disorders.” [Goodman]

“The Lady of Shallot”: A poem by Tennyson published in 1832, much revised for the 1842 Poems. The
Lady was one of the several enchanted or imprisoned maidens to capture the Victorian imagination, and
was the subject of many illustrations, including the notable ones by Waterhouse, Millais, Rossetti and
Holman Hunt. The lovely victim of an evil curse, she is bound to stick to her enchanted weaving task
night and day, without looking out of the window, a window that shows her the outside world to which
she cannot access directly. When Sir Lancelot rides past on his way to Camelot, the mysterious lady’s
self-discipline snaps and she resigns herself to her doom. [Drabble]

The “New Woman”: Goodman suggests that this phrase might have come into the minds of members of
the first audience of A Doll’s House by the end of the scene between Nora and Mrs Linde in Act I. It
suggests a new, more independent kind of woman who can act with self-determining, progressive views
and conduct. “New” signified ‘good’, the opening out of a new world order.

The poster of the performance of Sydney Grundy’s play The New Woman, performed at the
Comedy Theatre in London in 1894, shows a young woman in black in a cabinet with a large latchkey
and a smouldering cigarette, which became the infamous tokens of her “advanced” nature.

Both plays demonstrate an underlying hostility to the whole notion of the New Woman because
of the fact that these women could work or deal with money, which was a way of transgression of the
social boundaries that require middle-class women to be dependent on either father, husband of brother.

Ibsen influenced G. B. Shaw in Pygmalion (1913) and Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1931), the first
contributions to the new age of “New Women” in the theatre. The Norwegian playwright’s work was
instrumental in a developing trend for strong women on the stage, which later developed in the plays of
the suffrage movement. [Goodman]

“The woman’s masculine language”: Juliet Mitchell points out that there is not a female writing or a
woman’s voice but the hysteric’s voice who speaks “masculinely” in a phallocentric world talking about
feminine experience. [Goodman]

“The Yellow Wallpaper”: A short story written by Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman, and published in
May 1892 in the New England Magazine. It is the first person narration of a young mother isolated in a
country colonial mansion, under the supervision of a nurse. Supervised and compelled by the authority of
her physician husband John, she is largely confined to a room with paper of a “smouldering unclean
yellow,” in which she discerns sinister patterns and, eventually, the movements of imprisoned women.
The story chronicles the female character’s descend into madness, and may be read as a simple ghost
story or as a feminist text.

Perkins Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” after a severe nervous breakdown. A specialist
in mental diseases advised her to have two hours’ intellectual life a day but she cast his advice to the
winds and went to work again as she was so near the border line of utter mental ruin. Perkins Gilman
stated that the little book saved one woman from a similar fate. She also added that it was not intended to
drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked [Drabble, Norton]

“Third-wave feminism”: It started approximately in 1980, and lasted up to the early 1990s. It included
renewed campaigning for women’s greater influence on politics. This movement suggests the idea that
the goals of second wave feminism have been achieved and/or that his older form of feminism is now
outmoded because it is overly focused on women’s victimized status. It often positions itself in
antagonism to more established feminist projects and displays doubts about the concept of women as a
broad social grouping, arguing that this category is unhelpful. Sometimes it refers to recent feminist
thinkers who are attuned to differences between women and are dubious about collective political action.
[Drabble, Beasley]

Trans politics: showing a similar path to Queer Theory, increasingly critiquing and rejecting notions of
fixed identity, represents the specific avowal of gender and sexual ambiguity (the avowal of a positioning
as, for example, neither a man nor woman). Queer theorists, in particular, dismiss any assertions that
gender and sexuality are inevitably joined, and tend to ignore or reject gender. [Beasley]
Windows, doors and mirrors: In women’s fiction, they separate public and private spheres, real and
imaginary spaces where they are allowed to enter and to exit. Cracked mirrors often represent fractured
identities or horror of recognition. In “The Lady of Shalott” the mirror shows her the outside world to
which she can’t have access. In “The Yellow Newspaper” the narrator of the story sees herself reflected
in a symbolic mirror because the figures she sees moving behind the wallpaper are all versions of herself,
of other trapped women. [Goodman]

Writer/reader relationship: A relationship between author and reader can be established in the way that
a text and its context bridge the gap between one person, an author, and other people, who come to the
text at different times, in different cultural contexts and for different reasons.

As an example, in Pygmalion the political and social views of G. B. Shaw are expressed through
the mouths of his characters. Also, the female perspective of Jane Eyre brings readers inside Jane’s world
and encourages them to see things from Jane’s point of view. She offers an insight into the class and
gender divisions of the previous era and the continuing inequalities of society. [Goodman]

Wolf, Naomi: the author of The Beauty Myth (1990) and Misconceptions (2001) devotes considerable
attention to the social obstacles women face, urging social reform to these obstacles. Her political
programme is about individuals and criticizes what she calls “victim feminism” for saddling women with
an “identity and powerlessness.” She encourages women to form “power groups” to pool their resources
in the way men do and seeks to incorporate women and Feminism into a North American style of
capitalism. Wolf celebrates gun ownership among women as a sign of progress beyond victimhood.
[Beasley]

“Women’s Liberation”: Also known as the Women's Movement, Women's Liberation, or Women's
Lib, the term refers to a series of campaigns for reforms on issues such as reproductive rights, domestic
violence, maternity leave, equal pay, voting rights, sexual harassment, and sexual violence. On the whole,
it means the liberation of women from inequalities and subservient status in relation to men, and from
attitudes causing these. Unlike Gay Liberation thinkers, these feminist perceived sexuality as intimately
tied to normative power. [Encarta, Beasley]

Women’s Literature: Literature concerning women. Some women’s literature conveys feminist ideas
and affects readers in a “consciousness raising” style. Most contemporary authors have been influenced to
some degree by the “feminist literary critical revolution”. [Goodman]

Women’s Studies: They show a concern with the representation, rights and status of women. A course of
study examining the historical, economic, and cultural roles and achievements of women. Gender is
sometimes associated with attempts to excise the radical critique of Women’s Studies and with
prescriptive demands that they must be accompanied by a matched emphasis on men. [Goodman,
Encarta, Beasley]

Womyn: non-standard spelling of “women” adopted by some feminists in order to avoid the word ending
–men. [Encarta]