The impact of feminism in the field of literary
criticism has been deep and extensive but literary criticism did not emerge
fully formed. Women’s writing has been around for several centuries. Women of
all generations had natural felicity to write and put forth their experiences
in letters, diaries, songs and stories. Nevertheless, lack of education,
financial and personal dependence, fear of social norms, and suppression in
patriarchal system urged women to conceal their writing. Moreover, due to lack
of originality and experience, they had little success. Education boosted their
self-confidence to transmute their experiences into fictional forms. It gave
impetus to feminist consciousness, which had been around for several decades.
Gill and Susan suggest “...its eventual
self-conscious expression was the culmination of centuries of women's writing,
of women writing about women writing, and of women- and men - writing about
women’s minds, bodies, art and ideas.”(Plain, 2007) Literature and literary
criticism gained importance in the movement as women realised their importance
in subverting the male hegemony. It brings to mind Muddupalani’s Radhika Santwanam
and the ban of it in 1911 by the British Government, convinced that it would
damage the health of the Indian subjects. In actuality, it reveals an unwritten
history of feminist criticism in India, the unasked questions of the woman
reader, and what she seeks in a literary text.
Tharu says though the ban on the book was lifted in
1947 and the book reprinted in 1952, copies could not be found in the late
1980s. Tharu suggests, “The story of Muddupalani’s life, her writing, and the
misadventures of Radhika Santwanam could well be read as an allegory of the
enterprise of women’s writing and the scope of feminist criticism in India, for
it raises, in an uncanny way, many of the critical questions that frame women’s
writing.” (Tharu, 1991:11). It raises
questions about the contexts, ideologies of class, gender, and empire in which
women read and wrote the policies, both sexual and critical that decided the
reception of their work, and the radical strategies and subversions that went
into making their (woman’s) writing.
Traditional literary study looks at woman’s writing
as too different to be included in the canon of literature. It posits that
‘great literature’ represents ‘universal’ experiences. But as Elaine Showalter
argues, “… “ male critical theory” is a concept of creativity, literary
history, or literary interpretation based entirely on male experience and put
forward as universal.” (Showalter, 1981:183) Maggie Humm concurs, “The literary
canon in the West is a means by which ‘women’ and ‘men’ are imaginatively
constructed.” When people of diverse ethnic and class background study
literature, how can the concept of what was “universal”, what was defined as
“great” still hold good? Maggie Humm further comments:
“Literature, in feminist light, is not made up of
universal values. It is an organised, aesthetic representation of what society
wants politically, which inevitably focus on borders, as limits to the power of
others. Feminist criticism locates the relation of women’s literary experience
to her life experience in a place of struggle: on the border between literary
constructions and the turn towards transformation.” (Humm, 1991).
Robyn throws more light on the discussion by
emphasizing Joanna Russ’s point, “…
“(literary study) explicitly connects ‘exclusion’
from the literary canon with ‘difference’ (Quotes/Parenthesis mine) … People
are profoundly threatened by difference and are apt to characterize it as
inferiority; the threat offered by women’s writing...was effectively suppressed
for decades...that we must dispel the notion of absolute values when it comes
to judging literary value...When we all live in the same culture (of
egalitarianism), then it will be time for one literature.” (Robyn, 1997).
It is absurd how the “canon” which protects
traditional ideas about what makes for greatness in art, literature, music,
etc, almost always seems to exclude women. But as Tharu and Lalita suggest:
If we restrain ourselves from
enthusiastically recovering
Women’s writing to
perform the same services to society and to
nation that mainstream
literature over the last hundred years has
been called upon to do,
we might learn to read them not for the
moments in which they
collude with or reinforce the dominant
ideologies of gender,
class, nation or empire but for the gestures
of defiance or
subversion implicit in them. (Tharu,
1991:35).
Pioneering
Feminist texts:
It was in 1919 that Virginia Woolf in her book A Room of One's Own (1929) shows up how
it is men who define what it means to be a woman and rule the social,
political, economic, and literary arena while paving the way for modern
feminist criticism. Historically, this “freedom of the mind” for women was
pioneered by Aphra Behn, the first female writer to earn her living by writing.
It was she who earned for women “the right to speak their minds” (Woolf, ch.4).
Woolf hypothesizes the existence of Shakespeare’s sister, who was equally
talented as Shakespeare, but her gender prevents her from having “a room of her
own”, or name and fame and she would ultimately, unsung, die a lonely death.
Woolf equates “a room of her own” with privacy and economic independence needed
for women to think and write. In the meantime, the French writer and Theorist,
Simone de Beauvoir laid the groundwork for twentieth-century feminism with her
revolutionary text The Second Sex (1949), which proclaimed French and Western
society to be patriarchal, proscribed by males; “Virile aggressiveness seems
like a lordly privilege only within a (patriarchal) system…” Since woman is not
man, she becomes the “Other”, an object whose existence is defined by its
extension to the male, the second sex. Like Woolf before her, Beauvoir
asserted, “… woman cannot be transformed unless society has first made her
really the equal of man.” (Beauvoir, 1983).
The pioneering texts, Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex (1949), Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1969), Germaine Greer’s
The Female Eunuch (1971), and Betty
Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1982),
“set out to address the key need of feminist criticism: how to describe and
subvert the cultural repression of women in contemporary society.” (Humm,
1986). They ask why woman is stereotypically represented in texts. Why do women
allow them? So the first task was to examine the stereotypical depiction of
female in male texts as witches or angels. Sarla Palkar informs that the three
texts: The troublesome Helpmate (1966), Thinking about women (1968), The
sexual politics (1969), by Katherine M Roger, Mary Ellmann and Kate Millett
respectively laid the foundation to “images of women approach to literature”,
which deals with woman as a reader. Elaine Showalter’s and Sandra Gilbert and
Susan Gubar’s texts: A literature of
their own (1977) and The madwoman in the attic (1979), deal with woman as a
writer. This is called “Gynocriticism”, a term coined by Elaine Showalter in Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness (1978).
Putting her “gynocriticism” theory into practice, Showalter traced women’s
literary tradition from “female” to “feminist” and edited, The Anthology of
Women’s Literature, comprising essential excerpts of feminist literary study,
such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A
Vindication of the Rights of Women and Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll's House, thus paving a new way of understanding female
writing and literature. In the late 1970s, the three major studies on women
writers, Ellen Moers’, Literary Women
(1976), Elaine Showalter’s, A
Literature of Their Own (1977) and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), showed
them as a part of a female literary “sub-culture”, which asserted that it was
society, not biology that moulded a women’s literary perception of the world.
They saw a creative continuity in the cumulative production of women writers in
their themes, tribulations and experiences from generation to generation.
(Sarla Palkar, 1999). Singh feels that these three books are governed by a
certain sociological principle that shapes both the creative writer as well as
their work of art. (Singh, 1998). Betty Friedan, the founder and first
president of the National Organization for Women NOW (1966), and the National
Abortion Rights League, with her path breaking book, The Feminine Mystique
(1963), influenced Women’s movement enormously. The text with its origins in
Freudian thought, urged women to reflect on why they passively mould themselves
in the contemporary American cultural image of feminine fulfillment. It
discussed the predicament of American white middle class house-wives, who
somehow felt, incomplete and empty. Friedan’s significant efforts changed
American women’s perspectives and their lives. Betty Friedan reiterates,
“…women are no longer defined solely in terms of their relation - sexual,
maternal, or domestic - to men. They are defining their lives themselves by
their actions in society.” (Friedan, 1999).
Later, recognizing the value of families, Friedan in her 1980s book, The Second Stage, reached out to men who
had been alienated by feminism. (Robertson, 1981) While Katherine M Rogers in
The Troublesome helpmate wrote of the long tradition of literary misogyny, Kate
Millett’s Sexual politics (1968), defined the relationship between the sexes in
a political light, as “power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one
group of persons is controlled by another.”(Millett, 1970). Madsen points out that, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics analyses authoritative
male writers, revealing a pattern of masculine dominance and feminine
submission that Millett identifies as misogyny, in classic modern texts.
(Madsen, 1971). Rogers asserts that misogyny in the bible, classical Christian
and Greek literatures influenced the misogynistic sentiment, the female
stereotypes, in the modern novels. Rogers did a chronological survey of how
plays, poems, stories and novels of women reflect the fear and hatred of women
written in the English language for more than six centuries. (Rogers,
1966). Mary Ellmann's Thinking about Women (1968), published
before Sexual politics and a critique
of patriarchy; points out:
(culture/Societies)...classify almost all experience by means of sexual
analogy…
We see a man doing
what we would ordinarily think of as feminine, sitting still,
and manage to think of
it as masculine because a man is doing it… Only the
digestive system,
which is shared by the sexes, is not often sexually characterized.
(Ellmann, 1968).
While this habit of sexual analogy colors how we
perceive the world; Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970), argues:
The castration of women
has been carried out in terms of a
masculine-feminine
polarity, in which men have commandeered
all the energy and streamlined
it into an aggressive
conquistatorial power….
In a militant light she calls forth for action as:
Sexual liberation is
the key to women’s liberation…The first
exercise of the free
woman is to devise her own mode of revolt,
a mode which will
reflect her own independence and originality.
The more clearly the
forms of oppression emerge in her
understanding, the more
clearly she can see the shape of future
action. (Greer, 1970).
Juliet Mitchell rejects outright revolt. She
believes that for women to understand their status in the patriarchal society
and to challenge it, they must understand the psychology of women. Unlike
feminists who denounce Freud’s views on women, and believe it to be derogatory,
Mitchell in Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974),
welcomes Freud’s observations on women. She finds them not prescriptive but
perceptive. (Mitchell, 1974). Feminist
critic Patricia Meyer Spacks in The
Female Imagination (1975), trusts imagination as it depicts a separate
truth, one that is in variance with the truth of the society. It allows women
to have control of themselves in a patriarchal world, and extends to them the
chance to build on their own terms, their lives and their roles in a society.
She reiterates, “…the cliché that women, more consistently than men, turn
inward for sustenance seems to mean, in practice, that women have richly
defined the ways in which imagination creates possibility: possibility that
society denies. (Spacks, 1975).
Even as Ellen Moers’ pioneering work of feminist
criticism, Literary Women (1976),
helped revivify previously forgotten women writers, Gilbert and Gubar’s The
Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary
Imagination (1979), set a milestone
in Feminist literary criticism. Ellen Moers used the term “Female
Gothic” in Literary Women, to mean
“the work that women writers have done in the literary mode, since the
eighteenth century.”, “except that it has (also) to do with fear.” Moers’
deconstruction of “Female Gothic” texts as, an implicit expression of women’s
fear of being trapped in the female body, in the domestic maze, relived in
childbirth, influenced the critics, as a bold statement of dissatisfaction
against patriarchy. (Moers, 1976). Taking the stand forward, Gilbert and Gubar
examine the nineteenth century women writers Jane Austen, Mary Shelley,
Charlotte, Emily Bronte, George Eliot and Emily Dickinson from a feminist
perspective and scrutinize the stereotypical depiction of woman characters as
either angel or Madwoman/monster implying that madness is the personification
of repressed voices of the women, like for instance, Barthes in Jane Eyre. (Gilbert, 1984).
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