Feminist Literary Criticism

Feminist literary criticism, according to Michael Delahoyde, “critiques patriarchal language and literature by exposing how these reflect masculinity ideology” (Delahoyde). It was in the late 1970s, when feminist criticism became a strong literary criticism in the Western studies (Murfin). The aim of this paper is to analyse some of the main points between two feminist criticisms: the French criticism and the Anglo-American criticism.

French feminists were highly influenced by Simone de Beauvoir. In her book entitled The Second Sex (1949), de Beauvoir, influenced by Sartre’s existencialism, states that ‘one is not born a woman; one becomes one’ (qtd in Moi, p. 92). Therefore, de Beauvoir argues that woman is culturally constructed as man’s Other (Moi, p. 92). During the late 1970s, French feminist criticism accepted de Beauvoir’s ideas and applied them to ‘language as a tool of male domination’ (Murfin).

The influence of psychoanalisys was also significant in this criticism. During the 1960s, psychoanalysis was accepted by the French feminism because it ‘could provide an emancipatory theory of the personal and a path to the exploration of the unconscious’, both important to the explanation of the oppressive situation of women in patriarchies (Moi, p. 97). On the contrary, the Anglo-American feminists did not accept psychoanalytic theories until the publication of Juliet Mitchell’s book Psychoanalysis and Feminism in 1974 (Moi, p. 97).

With respect to literary genders, French feminists Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous believe that the sexuality of the woman is directly related to the production of poetry, ‘con los impulsos psicosomáticos que desbaratan la tiranía del significado y el discurso logocéntrico...’ (Selden, p. 170). Julia Kristeva argues that poetry is the privileged place for analysis because, there, desire and fear function out of rational systems (Selden, pp. 170-1). Besides, Kristeva considers that feminists should create a sort of anarchism that corresponds to the ‘vanguard speech’; and, by means of anarchism, the feminist movement will be able to control the ‘phallocentrism’[1] (Selden, p. 172).

With regard to the Anglo-American feminist criticism, Virginia Woolf is one of its most important feminist critics of its first period (Course Book). As well as Simone de Beauvoir, Woolf argues that ‘gender identity is socially constructed’; and adds that it ‘can be challenge and transformed’ (Selden, qtd in Course Book). Also, Woolf wrote an essay where she analyses the ability of women in composing work of Shakespeare’s quality (Wikipedia). In the second period, Anglo-American feminist criticism dedicates to the analysis of female characters in fiction, the response of the readers, and ‘the lifestyles of the woman writers’, using the close textual reading method and ‘historical scholarship’ (Course Book).

Among its, most representative feminist critics, we have Kate Millet and Elaine Showalter. Millet wrote Sexual Politics (1970), where she criticises patriarchy in Western culture and literature (Wikipedia). However, she has never recognised the influence she received from de Beauvoir’s theory about patriarchal politics (Moi, p. 25). And Elaine Showalter, in an article entitled ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics’ (1979), develops the concept of ‘gynocritics’ which refers to the woman as writer, ‘as producer of textual meaning, with the history, genres and structures of literatures by women’; and its topics include ‘the psychodynamics of female creavity, … literary history and … studies of particular writers and works’ (Showalter qtd in Bertens, pp. 96-7).

In conclusion, we have seen that both literary feminist theories critique patriarchy reflected in the Western culture, especially in literature. However, the influence of psychoanalysis did not arrive at the same time. The Anglo-American feminist criticism waited until the publication of Mitchell’s book, in 1974, for the acceptance of psychoanalysis.

Erika Giselle Wilson Cantariño