FEMINIST CRITICISM

Introducction: In the introducction to his classic study "The Mirror and the Lamp", M.H. Abrams argued that any literary theory that tries to be complete must account for four basic aspects of Literature: the author, the text, the audience and the universe (or "reality"). Abrams' list can be usefully suplemented by adding a fifth category: the role or function of the critic herself. Any reasonably well developed theory, in other words, will be a theory about all this factors and relations among them. The assumptions a theorist makes about the author for example, will inevitably affect (and be affected by) the assumptions he makes about the text, the audience, "reality" and the purposes of criticism. Indeed, Abrams argues that each theory will tend to emphasize one of these aspects as crucial or most important.


Because feminist critics assume that our experience of reality is inevitably affected by categories of sex and gender (such as divisions between male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, etc.), and because they assume that (heterosexual) males have long enjoyed dominant social power, they believe that writers, texts and audience will all be afected (usually negatively) by "patriarchal" forces. The critic's job will be to study (and even attempt to counter act) the impact of patriarchy.