1) Showalter divides feminist criticism into two distinct types: feminist critique and gynocriticism.

2) She defines feminist critique as this sort of literary criticism which is concerned with women as readers and
consumers of male literature.

3) The main aim of this criticism is to depict how women were presented in male-produced literature. From
here, we can safely say that feminist critique and the Image of Women criticism are the same. But this sort
of criticism does not satisfy Showalter's hopes and ambitions about feminist criticism, simply because she
believes that feminist criticism should move towards the establishment of an especially female tradition
of writing .

4) Feminists should stop searching for how women were depicted in male produced literature because by
doing this feminists are just knowing how men want women to be, not how women want themselves to
be.

5) Showalter is calling for a female autonomy which depicts women's own experiences and feelings.

6) After proving that women have a literature of their own, to recall Showalter's sentence, through the
process of rediscovering lost or neglected texts written by women, it became a must for feminists to start
constructing a female-oriented literary criticism.

7) So that, and as a natural result, comes Showalter's call for applying the second type of feminist criticism
which is gynocriticism. It's the criticism which is concerned with woman as a writer and producer of literary
texts. Showalter calls for applying gynocriticism because she believes that it stands in contrast to the
feminist critique's loyalty and celebration of male texts. She emphasizes gynocriticism as a more useful
approach to feminist criticism than feminist critique.

Showalter's gynocriticism: it's a term adapted by Showalter for the first time in her essay "Toward a Feminist
poetics". This term stands for the study of female literary texts by female critics. It's the study of the themes,
language, styles, historical backgrounds, and structures of literature by women.

Gynocriticism has two important aims:

A. The first, is to construct a female framework for the analysis of women's literature.

B. The second, is to develop new models which depend on the study of the female experience, rather than to
apply male models, texts and theories.

According to Showalter, the departure point of gynocriticism is feminists' freedom from the impact of male literary
history.