I am going to briefly talk about the Feminist movement and about one of
her followers, Sylvia Plath.
Feminist theory
It is the extension of ‘feminism’ into theoretical ground. ‘It
encompasses work done in a borad variety of
disciplines, prominentyly including the approaches to
women’s roles and lives and feminist politics in anthropology and sociology,
economics, women’s and gender studies, feminist literary criticism and
philosophy’ (Feminist Theory – Wikipedia the free
Encyclopaedia, 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist
theory. Day of access, May 28 2006)
Feminist theory fights against the inequality of genders and about
women’s rights. The main aspects treated by the feminist movement are
discrimination, stereotyping, objectification, oppression and patriarchy. We
find different types of feminism movements, which are Psychoanalytic feminism,
Radical feminism, Liberal feminism, Socialist feminism, Marxist feminism and
Post-modern feminism. I am going to talk about the first one, Psychoanalytic
feminism.
Psychoanalytic feminism
This kind of feminism has a main theme,
and it is that gender ‘is not biological but is based on the psycho-sexual
development of the individual’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist
theory). Feminist women defending this movement believed that the gender
inequality appears while the situations we experience when we are children;
when boys are lead to be masculine and girls feminine. This situation leads to
a society in which women play a more insignificant role, while men are the
dominating ones.
Feminist literary criticism
Feminist literary criticism is literary
criticism informed by feminist theory. At the beginning of its story it was
concerned with the representation of women within literature. During this first
period some important feminist we find an important feminist author, Margaret
Fuller.
Some years after
this first period, Feminist literary criticism was concerned with the
importance of genre as a political investment.
Lisa Tuttle names
the main goals of feminist criticism:
- To develop and uncover a female tradition of
writing
- To interpret symbolism of women’s writing so
that it will not be ignored by the male point of view
- To rediscover old text
- To analyze women writers and their writings
from a female perspective
- To resist sexism in literature
- To increase awareness of the sexual politics
of language and style.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_literary_criticism
Now I am going to talk, as I have said before, of one of the main
twentieth-century feminist poetess, Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). She was one of
the main fighter figures in the feminist movement. She wanted people to be
aware of her thoughts, and her voice was heard along other writers of that
period.
Sylvia and other main women writers of the period, such as Virginia Woolf, had in common that they had experienced difficult
situations with men that lead them to becoming feminist writers. Sylvia had experienced
difficult situations with the two main men in her life, her father and her
husband, Ted Hughes, which was an important English poet.
The works of these feminist women
are written in a way that made people feel what they experienced. They felt
impressed by the touching words these writers used. They could imagine the
drama lived by these women. To make her thoughts get across the readers Sylvia
Plath used a powerful and significant language.
Opinions about Sylvia Plath as a feminist woman are wide and different.
For instance, David Holbrook says that she was ‘the most arrogantly feminine
poetess’, whereas Anne Cluysenaar describes her as a
‘typical survivor in the psychiatric sense’.
I think there will always be a feminist movement, since there will
always be men who feel superior to women in a lot of aspects, including
literature.