Reading Literature Through a Feminist Lens: Questions Which Feminist Critics Ask about Literary Texts

1. Reading Literature Through a Feminist Lens: Questions Which Feminist Critics Ask about Literary Texts

2. In our discussion of Feminist Critical Theory, we’ll keep an eye on issues of identity, representation, and othering. These are important to other critical theories as well—including postcolonial crit. (which we’ll be talking about shortly).

3. They’re a problem because REAL women (and all human beings) are complex, unpredictable, and unique. Real people do not fit the tidy categories of these “types.” Expecting people to fit those types, or representing them in literature or film according to those types, is unfair, restrictive, and potentially harmful. We don’t want literature or film teaching children, for example, that all women are either “good girls” or “bad girls.” We want to teach them that every woman is a unique mixture of bad and good; on any given occasion, a single woman can be modest and passive, or bold and sexy, or protective and maternal. Real people even contradict themselves. A novel that represents all women as mother-figures isn’t necessarily bad, and maternal qualities are certainly positive ones. But if the novel never depicts women as anything else, then it is promoting a specific gender stereotype. How are women represented in any given work? Consider our cultural stereotypes: ALL WOMEN… • Are naturally nurturing (want to have kids) • Are naturally cooperative (naturally concerned about the welfare of the whole) • Live to get hitched (naturally monogamous) • Are bad drivers • Are emotional (illogical, moody, scatterbrained) • Are tidy housekeepers (nesting instinct) • Are passive (like to be dominated) • Come out of the womb knowing how to apply liquid eyeliner • Never shut up (talk a lot; gossip) • Offended by swearing, sex talk (delicate flowers) Why are these a problem? Note: another way to think of this: “A REAL woman…” The list might be a tad different.

4. Great Mother (Madonna, Matriarch, Florence Nightingale) • Nature Child(Virginal Maiden of the Woods , Snow White) • Sex Object (Babe, Fox, Hotty) • Faithful Assistant (Office Girls, Nurse, Receptionist, Groupy) • Butch; Lez Consider traditional TYPES: • Slut (Boy Toy, Whore) • Bimbo (Dumb Blonde, Floozy) • Bitch (Ballbreaker, Maneater, Bitch, Cat) • Daddy’s girl(JAP) • Spinster (Old Maid) • Tomboy (Misbegotten Man) • Witch • Dark Seductress (Eve, Witch-Bitch) Why are these a problem?

5. Ok, how are men represented in any given work? Consider the stereotypes: ALL MEN… • Would have sex with multiple sex partners 24/7 is only they were allowed • Are independent (won’t ask for directions at a gas station; avoid marriage as long as they can; want to live out on the range and smoke Marlboros while they go ramblin’) • Are naturally logical • Are naturally dominant (bad at cooperative activities) • Come out of the womb knowing how to tune up a car • Are sloppy housekeepers • Don’t know “what women want” • Dig sports • Are defensive • Are self-involved Note: another way to think of this: “A REAL man…”

6. And male TYPES? • Swinging Bachelor (boys will be boys) • Father (Patriarch, Leader, Master of the Universe) • Pansy (Fruit, Pink Team, Fag) • Sex Object (Hunk, Hottie) • Devil (Warlock, Rudolph Valentino, Cad) • Momma’s Boy (clueless about how to pick up a plate and carry it from kitchen to sink, much less wash it) • Nerd (Misbegotten Man, Brains No Brawn) • Smart Executive (Urban Star, Yuppie) • Grease Monkey • Master of Craft (World-Changing Genius)

7. In examining a literary text, one of the questions the feminist analyst asks is: are the female and male characters represented realistically, or only in terms of stereotypes? Are women represented as full, varied, complex and dynamic beings… or are they depicted as simplistic, static types?

8. Consider White Oleander and Modern Times How are women and men represented in White Oleander, relative to the stereotypes we’ve just examined? How are they depicted in Chaplin’s film?

9. How about in

10. Let’s take a feminist look more generally now at how men and women have been identified and represented in our culture, and why.

11. In Western culture since antiquity, and in important ways during the Enlightenment, it was men who defined what it meant to be human. Not surprisingly, they equated “humanness” with “maleness.” The male, in other words, has been regarded as …

12. THE STANDARD BY WHICH OTHERS ARE COMPARED AND MEASURED. This identification saturates our history and culture.

13. Consider: • Until recently we sent images of de Vinci’s “man” into space as a representative “human.” • In many times and places it is only men who have been regarded as “citizens.” Women were (and in many places still are) considered male property. • Men are the standard subjects of medical research. • In 17-1800s, “he” was designated the “neutral” pronoun. • Highly influential figures (Aristotle, Freud et al) considered women to be “castrated males,” or “incomplete men.” Aristotle said women lacked a moral faculty and could not reason. • Even the supposedly “neutral” language of science is full of gender bias (for example, textbook descriptions of conception at the molecular and cellular levels are couched in masculinist metaphors).

14. To be considered fully “human,” then, women have basically had to become like men. I.e., to be admitted into the public sphere, to become visible, women have had to adopt the values, codes, and practices of male culture. This of course raises the question…

15. What does it mean to be a woman—just a woman—without comparison to a male standard? What does it mean to be human and a woman? What does it mean to be something other than just the Other of men? This is actually a very difficult and problematic question…

16. Consider the traditional binary categories which are integral to so much of Western culture and thought. Not only do we have a strong tradition of conceptualizing the world in terms of opposites, but we tend to CLUMP various qualities and values together on one side or the other of the binary poles.

17. the rational • the mind • the civilized • the technological • the public sphere • the political • the active and dynamic • the primary • the known • the linear • the spoken • the normal • the moral • the balanced • the clean • the firm • the boundaried • the present • the conscious • the center • the individual • the intellectual • the irrational • the body • the primitive • the natural • the private sphere • the domestic • the passive and static • the secondary • the mysterious • the circular or holistic • the silent • the deviant • the a- or immoral • the unbalanced • the dirty • the fluid • the open • the absent • the unconscious • the margin • the community • the emotional

18. The Western view contrasts rather sharply with the Eastern understanding of how differences interact. Notice in the Eastern yin/yang symbol how the wavy middle line suggests that the two sides of the binary are fluid and interconnected. Also notice how the white-circle-within-the-black and the black-circle-within-the white suggests that each side contains the other. This symbol suggests that male and female qualities are always part and parcel of each other and are balanced equals. Neither side, finally, appears superior nor inferior to the other. They are interconnected, necessary parts of the whole. Western culture, by contrast, has tended to see opposites as completely separate, and one as greater or more valuable than the other.

19. The tendency in the West to see the world in terms of polarities goes back at least as far as Plato. Especially significant were the ways in which 17th and18th century Europe understood these categories. The formulation of binaries that arose from the Enlightenment has influenced us profoundly, and still does.

20. Descartes, for example (“I think; therefore I am”) believed that the world consists of two basic substances: matter and spirit. According to the Cartesian model, spirit or mind interacts with, but can exist independently of, the body. This belief was key to Enlightenment thinking. But is it accurate? Are mind and body, matter and spirit, head and heart etc. really separate and/or should they be? Again, note that in some cultures these are actually considered to be interconnected.

21. The binaries which had underpinned Western thought and values came to be regarded as little hierarchies, with one side privileged over the other. Additionally, and following Descartes: 18th Century Enlightenment

22. Valued Denigrated & devalued (relative to the other)

23. The “other,” whatever form it took, became something to be denigrated, or avoided, or obliterated, or resisted. • If the valued side of the binary is REASON, LOGIC, and THE MIND, then “all which did not operate according to reason, according to mathematical principles of mechanism, was Other, that is, secondary, not significant, less than real, not nameable. Into this category fell women, according to the view of male liberal thinkers” along with nature, the passions, the intuition, the body (Donovan 19). • Identification of the RATIONAL with the PUBLIC, and the IRRATIONAL with the PRIVATE, plus social changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution, enforced a separation of women from public life and government. • “[I]nherent in the vaunting of human (male) reason is the idea that rational beings are the lords of creation and have the right to impose their ‘reason’ on all who lack it—women, nonhuman creatures, and the earth itself” (19).

24. Let’s look again at those binary categories…

26. Notice that, to be “female,” according to this binary thinking, means to be ABSENT. How does one define herself from such a starting place? How do you speak as “the other” if such a category is only understood as silence? How do you “speak silence”? How does a person define herself when for centuries she has primarily been defined by what she is not, or by what she lacks, relative to men? And how do you speak your unique woman’s experience when the only language you have is the patriarchal one you’ve inherited : linear, full of hierarchical presumptions, “phallocentric”?

27. According to a number of theorists, • to finally have a voice distinct from that of men and to assert their identities as fully human, women must draw on their pre-verbal relationships with their mothers and recover “the voice of the body.” Hélène Cixous calls such speech “écriture féminine”—a mode of writing which will enable women to overcome masculinist ideologies and create new discourses. • An écriture féminine would draw on the psychosexuality distinct to women: fluid, diffuse, uncentered, less focused on objects, more nurturing, process-oriented, dialogic, less intent on thesis-formation or assertion, and less rhetorical (in the sense of rhetoric as a form of competition). • For example: Feminist writers have been experimenting with new breeds of “research essay” which forgo the standard format of thesis-proof-obliteration of opposition. These “hybrid” essays mix the public with the personal, the intellectual with the intuitive, the academic with the domestic.

28. “She hates for things to get finally pinned down, for possibilities to be narrowed by the shabby impingement of facts.”

29. All of which is to say… • The feminist critic examines the literary work for possible stereotypes. But she also • …is interested in the work’s rhetorical properties and thematics, in how the thing is written. • …like the Marxist, is interested in what a literary text tries to make a reader do or believe.

30. Many problems are associated with “écriture féminine,” and we may discuss these at some point during the semester. For now, let’s take up another question:

31. What About Other “Others”? In recent years increasing attention has been turned to the ways in which groups besides women have been “Othered.” We might even re-identify the privileged item in the traditional binary system as, not just “Maleness,” but as White, Bourgeois Maleness because that is the particular kind of maleness which has traditionally been associated with privilege and power. This means that not only have women, as women, been identified with the “Other,” but so have ethnic minorities and the economically disenfranchised, both male and female. Some theorists in fact have wagered that categories of race, nationality, sexual preference, and economic class may finally be more important than that of gender in determining who is “human” and who is “less than human.”

32. Consider, for example, that African-American men have traditionally been stereotyped as primitive or animal-like by virtue of their race, and so have been held as property by white, affluent men. Being male did not automatically position African American men in the privileged side of the binary equation; their race was the telling characteristic.

34. In any case, attention to these issues has surged in recent years, and it’s hard to discuss gender or feminism without also, at some point, discussing the additional categories of race, nationality, economic class, etc. They are all controlled, after all, by the same dominant belief systems. as mentioned earlier, Feminist Critical Theory shares many concerns and critical principles with African-American and PostColonial Theory, which are also covered in our text. Thus,

35. Consider, yet again, our binary categories…

36. OTHER-THAN-WPM (WOMEN, ETHNIC MINORITIES, NON-CHRISTIANS, GAYS, SOCIALISTS, FOREIGNERS, THE DISABLED, THE POOR)

37. Is isn’t to hard to see how additional minority groups have been “othered” according to the binary categories we just examined.

38. How weird, say, for an Asian American of Korean, Indian, or Lebanese descent to constantly see herself represented as some dark, mysterious Other. What would consequently be her own self-view? Again, what are you when you are only what someone else is NOT? When you are identified, that is, with lack or absence itself? What kind of healthy, assertive, workable identity can be forged from such a starting place?

39. French harem fantasy with black eunuch servant. The “oriental” associated with libido, corruption, and lassitude. Consider the stereotype of the “exotic and mysterious Oriental,” for example… Mystique??? According to WHOSE perspective?! • The foreign here is associated with: • dreamstates • nighttime • music • danger • eroticism • the moon • the wild • the beastly • the exotic • the unconscious • the irrational …the Asian being identified with the irrational,the dark,the unknown, thedream, the unconscious.

40. Or the stereotype, once again, of the “naturally” athletic or rhythm-oriented Black: the identification of African-Americans with the body instead of the mind.(See again our binary chart) binary chart) Doesn’t this horrifying caricature sort of make you want to puke? I mean, holy shit.

41. So, as you can see, contemporary feminist criticism easily blurs into such fields as African-American criticism and what is called postcolonial criticism. It shares many concerns, methods, aims, and principles with these other critical camps. Also, because some of the injustices traditionally suffered by women are also experienced by men, fem crit is some ways these days is morphing into “Gender Studies.”

42. To get back to feminist critical theory, here are some further questions a feminist might ask regarding identity and representation in any literary work. That is, when examining a film, a book, a poem etc, the feminist critic would ask (and then attempt to answer) these questions about the text in question:

43. Who generally is being “Othered” in the work? • Is the point of view male or female? (Or Black or White etc.) Who controls “the gaze”? Who is at the center and who is at the margins? • Do women or subalterns in the work have agency? Do they have active, dynamic selves, or do they function primarily as static foils to men? • How are women and others represented in the work relative to traditional binary categories? • Does the work represent the world in terms of traditional binaries, or does it work to show the world in alternative ways? • What stereotypes are present, do they appear to dominate the works characterizations, and does the work ultimately seem to be promoting stereotypes?

44. The end . Sources for info and images available upon request: Cindy.Nichols@ndsu.edu