FEMINIST

LITERARY
CRITICISM

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 FEMINIST
- is the emergence of
women’s movements in the
United States and Europe
during the Civil Rights
campaigns of the 1960s

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 WHAT IS FEMINIST CRITICISM?
Feminist criticism is a literary form
of criticism that gives the perspective of
writing through a feminist perspective. It
is a political form of literature that
analyzes the questions of how male and
females relate to each other and the
world, the repression of women and how
women are portrayed in literature.

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 EARLY FEMINISM
One of the earliest feminist writings is
Mary Wollstonescraft’s “Vindication of the
Rights of Women” (1792) in which she
criticizes stereotypes of women as
emotional and instinctive and argues that
women should aspire to the same
rationality prized by men. She believed
that women should enjoy social, legal and
intellectual equality with men.

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 John Stuart Mill’s essay on the
“Subjection of Women” (1869) is a
defense of gender equality in which
he attacks the idea that women are
naturally incapable of things that
men can do, and should, therefore,
be forbidden from doing them.

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 PICTURE
START
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 Basic methods of
Feminist Literary Criticism
• Identifying with female characters: This is a
way to challenge the male-centered outlook of
authors. Feminist literary criticism suggests that
women in literature were historically presented
as objects seen from a male perspective.
• Reevaluating literature and the world in
which literature is read: This involves
questioning whether society has predominantly
valued male authors and their literary works
because it has valued males more than females

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 TYPICAL QUESTIONS
• How is the relationship between men and
women portrayed?
• What are the power relationships between men
and women (or characters assuming
male/female roles)?
• How are male and female roles defined?
• What constitutes masculinity and femininity?
• How do characters embody these traits?

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• Do characters take on traits from opposite genders?
How so? How does this change others’ reactions to
them?
• What does the work reveal about the operations
(economically, politically, socially, or psychologically) of
patriarchy?
• What does the work imply about the possibilities of
sisterhood as a mode of resisting patriarchy?
• What does the work say about women's creativity?
• What does the history of the work's reception by the
public and by the critics tell us about the operation of
patriarchy?
• What role the work play in terms of women's literary
history and literary tradition?

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 Feminist literary criticism recognizes that since
literature both reflects culture and shapes it,
literary studies can either perpetuate the
oppression of women or help to eliminate it. Thus,
feminist literary critics are motivated to raise
questions about literature and literary criticism that
are basic to women’s struggle for autonomy: How
does literature represent women and define
gender relations? Why has literary criticism
ignored or devalued women’s writing? How does
one’s gender alter the way in which one reads
literature? Is there a feminine mode of writing.

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 What Feminist Critics Do
1. Rethink the canon, aiming at the rediscovery of texts
written by women.
2. Revalue women’s experience.
3. Examine representations of women in literature by men
and women.
4. Challenge representations of women as ‘Other’, as ‘lack’,
as part of ‘nature’.
5. Examine power relations which obtain in texts and in life,
with a view to breaking them
down, seeing reading as a political act, and showing the
extent of patriarchy.
6. Recognise the role of language in making what is social
and constructed.

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[Link] the question of whether men and women are
‘essentially’ different because of biology, or are socially
constructed as different.
8. Explore the question of whether there is a female
language, an ecriture feminine, and whether this is also
available to men.
9. ‘Re-read’ psychoanalysis to further explore the issue of
female and male identity.
10. Question the popular notion of the death of the author,
asking whether there are only ‘subject positions …
constructed in discourse’, or whether, on the contrary, the
experience (e.g. of a black or lesbian writer) is central.
11. Make clear the ideological base of supposedly ‘neutral’
or ‘mainstream’ literary interpretations.

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 The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir
 This book is one of the earliest attempts to confront human
history from a feminist perspective. Many regard this
massive and meticulously researched masterwork as not
only as pillar of feminist thought but of 20th century
philosophy in general.
 Book I, entitled “Facts and Myths”, she asks how female
humans come to occupy a subordinate position in the
society.
 Book II, entitled “Woman’s Life Today”, she turns to the
concrete realities of this situation. She traces female
development through its formative stages.

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 Book I, Facts and Myths
 She discussed instances of women being oppressed
throughout history.
 She attempted to assess women’s biological and historical
circumstances and the myths by which these have been
explained, denied or distorted.
 She recognized that men have been able to maintain
dominant roles in all cultures because women have resigned
themselves to, instead of rebelling against their assigned
subordinate roles.
 She discussed various mythical representations of women
and demonstrated how these myths have imprinted human
consciousness often to the disservice of women.

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 Book II, Woman’s Life Today
 She showed how at each stage of her upbringing, a girl is
conditioned into accepting passivity, dependence, repetition
and inwardness.
 That man, considering himself as the essential being or
subject has treated woman as the unessential being or
object.
 Much of woman’s psychological self is socially constructed,
with very few psychologically rooted feminine qualities or
values. She denied the existence of a feminine temperament
or nature---to her, all notions of femininity are artificial
concepts.

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 Calvino’s Cosmicomics, “Without Colors”
by Ronald Barthes
 Ayl, the female who is the object of Qfwfg’s pursuit,
represents a static, pre-symbolic world. Ayl totally rejects
Qfwfg’s desire for cage and identifies completely with her
mute, womblike world, finding in its uniform, unarticulated
surface the standard of beauty.
“…..Ayl was happy inhabitant of the silence that reigns where
all vibration is excluded; for her anything that looked likely to
break the absolute visual neutrality was a harsh discord,
beauty began for her only where the grayness had
extinguished even the remotest desire to be anything other that
gray.”

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 Calvino’s Cosmicomics, “Without Colors”
by Ronald Barthes
 Calvino’s portrayal of women in Cosmicomis opens itself up
to a feminist critique. Calvino represents women in
accordance with the traditional male/ female binary: men are
associated with Activity, Sun, Culture, Day, Father, Head,
Intelligible, Logos while women are associated with
Passivity, Moon, Nature, Night, Mother, Emotions, Sensitive,
Pathos.
 Ayl comlpletely colorless, lying on colorless sand represents,
unarticulated space, suggestive of the formless
undifferentiated flow of the semiotic chora.

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 THANK YOU
VERY MUCH
GOD BLESS 
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