WUNRN
Feminist Literary Criticism
Introduction
China Women's University
Professor Tobe Levin, Ph.D.
levin@em.uni-frankfurt.de
If a woman has her Ph.D. in physics, has mastered quantum theory, plays
flawless Chopin, was once a cheerleader, and is now married to a man who plays
baseball, she will forever be “former cheerleader married to star athlete.”
Maryanne Ellison Simmons, wife of Milwaukee Brewers’ catcher Ted Simmons,
quoted in Ann B. Dobie. Theory into
practice. An Introduction to Literary Criticism. London: Thomason, 2002.
97.
Feminist criticism, a rich blend of various approaches, continues to evolve and
for that reason is difficult to define. It has been inspired by, and
incorporated into itself, elements of deconstruction, cultural studies,
post-colonial studies, Marxist approaches and queer theory. Like the third
women’s movement ignited in the sixties, it is inspired by struggles of
minority groups for their civil rights. Women in the USA, who fought for more
than eighty years before receiving suffrage in 1919, are believed subject to
patriarchal relations of power, a subordination that sometimes trumps other
differences among women, such as ethnicity and class, though these elements are
often also taken into account.
The field’s fluid contours notwithstanding, we can point to several important,
sometimes pioneering strands.
Noting that the university canon in literature consisted, into the sixties, of
nearly all white males, a first move was compensatory:
let’s bring women writers into the classroom. (Our course results from such
considerations.) Reading more women writers inevitably raises issues of content
and style. Are there characteristic differences between male and female
writers, all else being equal? An examination can extend to genre, plot,
characterization, theme, etc.
A second prime focus for feminist critics is female experience as revealed by women’s writing. This risks
assigning eternal status to the feminine, a set of behaviors actually under
challenge, but it can be useful to accept the constructedness of female gender
and move on from there.
A third approach looks at male and
female writers and concentrates on theme.
In many cases, what we find revealed is an imbalance of power between men and
women, the novels and stories coming down either on the side of conservatism --
in favor of maintaining the status quo – or change.
A last modus vivendi privileges the
female body. Also a content-centred method, it is based on the political
notion that social relations as we have inherited them derive from sexual
double standards. Freedom for women means liberation from the judgment of men
(and other women) that a woman who disposes of her body as freely as a man does
loses status. In this regard, we have only to look at the sociology of
fundamentalist cultures (I include here Moslem, Jewish and Christian
orthodoxies, and Hindu as well) to see how fear for a woman’s ‘purity’ or
‘virginity’ leads to her entrapment in a patriarchal limitation of options.
As Ann Dobie sums it up:
“Three major groups of feminist critics are those who study difference, those
who study power relationships, and those who study female experience” (104).
These are also often merged.
As a jumping off point, prepare to share your thoughts about the following
poems in terms of (a) difference (from men or male experience, or among groups
of women based on ethnicity, class, etc.); (b) power relationships; (c) female
experience.
Metaphors
by Sylvia Plath
I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.
The
Mother by Gwendolyn Brooks http://www.poemhunter.com/
Abortions will not let you
forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.
I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed
children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?--
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.
Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.