Introduction to Feminist Literary Criticism

1. Introduction to Feminist Literary Criticism Nóra Séllei University of Debrecen, Hungary

2. Gender 1 • sex – gender • male/female – masculine/feminine • feminist – masculinist • second-wave feminism • women’s studies • gender studies • feminist literary criticism

3. Gender 2 A crucial determinant in the production, circulation and consumption of all kinds of social discourses, including the literary and cultural establishment in its totality.

4. Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken” “Re-vision, the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction — is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive for self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.”

5. Feminism • Questioning, problematising, subverting, challenging and perhaps even reversing the whole discursive system; • The social, political, legal, educational, historiographical, literary (etc.) system that have formed and do shape our life and existence in their interrelatedness and mutual impact on one another; • An all-pervading social critique, relevant in all fields of investigation; • Subject areas: sociology to linguistics, ecology to history and theology, even sciences.

6. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex • “One is not born but becomes a woman.” • “It is civilization that produces this creature.” • “She is defined and differentiated with reference to man, and not he with reference to her; she is the inessential, the incidental as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other.”

7. Gender 3 • The social, cultural and psychological meaning imposed upon biological and sexual identity. • Gender difference: comes about through language, and the inscription of cultural practice.

8. Hélène Cixous Where is she? Activity/Passivity Sun/Moon Culture/Nature Day/Night

9. Father/Mother Head/Heart Intelligible/Palpable Logos/Pathos Form, convex, step, advance, semen, progress Matter, concave, ground – where steps are taken, holding- and dumping ground Man —— Woman

10. Sophocles: “Silence gives the proper grace to woman” • Aristotle: “The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities” • Biblical story of creation: primacy: man; woman: out of the supernumary bone • Suppressed creation story: Lilith:apocryphal • St. Thomas Aquinas: woman: “imperfect man” • Sigmund Freud: woman as lack

11. “Unclean, taboo. The Devil’s Gateway. Three steps behind; the girl babies drowned in the river; the baby strapped to the back. Buried alive with he lord, burned alive on the funeral pyre, burned as witch on the stake. Stoned to death for adultery. Beaten, raped. Bartered. Bought and sold. Concubinage, prostitution, white slavery. The hunt, the sexual prey, ‘I am a lost creature, O, the poor Clarissa.’ Purdah, the veil of Islam, domestic confinement. Illiterate. Denied vision. Excluded, excluded, excluded from council, ritual, activity, learning, language, when there was neither biological nor economic reason to be exclued.

12. “Religion, when all believed. In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children. May thy wife’s womb never cease from bearing. Neither was the man created for the woman but the woman for the man. Let the woman learn in silence and in all subjection. Contrary to biological birth fact: Adam’s rib. The Jewish male morning prayer: thank God, I was not born a woman. Silence in holy places, seated apart, or not permitted entrance at all; castration of boys beacuse women too profane to sing in church.

13. “And for the comparative handful of women born into the privileged classes: being, not doing; man does, woman is; to you the world says work, to us it says seem. God is thy law, thou mine. Isolated. Cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d, the private sphere. Bound feet: corseted, cosseted, bedecked, denied one’s body. Powerlessness. Fear of rape, male strength. Fear of aging. Soft attractive graces; the mirror to magnify man. Marriage as property arrangement. The vices of slaves: dissembling, flattering, manipulating, appeasing.

14. “Bolstering. Vicarious living, infantilization, trivialization. Parasitism, individualism, madness. Shut up, you’re only a girl. O, Elizabeth, why couldn’t you have been born a boy? For twentieth-century woman: roles, discontinuities, part-self, part-time, conflict; imposed ‘guilt’; ‘a man can give full energy to his profession, a woman cannot.’ How is it that women have not made a fraction of the intellectual, scientific, or artistic-cultural contributions that men have made?” (Tillie Olsen: Silences)

15. “The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.” (Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own) • “in order to bring out — along with the singularity of each person, and, even more, along with the multiplicity of every person’s possible identifications […] — the relativity of his/her symbolic as well as biological existence, according to the variation in his/her specific symbolic capacities.” (Kristeva, “Women’s Time”)

16. “If women lived in a different country from men, and had never read any of their writings, they would have a literature of their own.” (John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women) • At its most ambitious, feminist criticism “wants to decode and demystify all the disguised questions and answers that have always shadowed the connections between textuality and sexuality, genre and gender, psychosexual identity and cultural authority” (Sandra Gilbertqu. Showalter, “Feminist Criticism” 246)

17. Feminist critique: “concerned with the feminist as reader, and it offers feminist readings of texts which consider the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and misconceptions about women in criticism, and woman-as-sign in semiotic systems” (Showalter, “Feminist Criticism” 245); • “women as words.” • Gynocriticism: “a special history in terms of the economics of [women’s] relation to the literary marketplace, the effects of social and political changes in women’s status upon the individuals, and the implications of stereotypes of the woman writer and restrictions of her artistic autonomy” (Showalter quoted in Moi 50)

18. Ellen Moers,Literary Women (1976) • Elaine Showalter,A Literature of Their Own (1977) • Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar,The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination (1979) • Dickinson: “Tell the truth, but tell it slant.”

19. “Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the War of the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write.” (Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own [1928]). • “We may safely assert that the knowledge that men acquire of women, even as they have been and are, without reference to what might be, is wretchedly imperfect and superficial, and will always be so until women themselves have told all they have to tell.” (John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women)

20. Paul’s letter to Timothy • “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, not to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” • Politics of voice

21. “Literary men and women began to wage war not only with but over words themselves. Indeed, the shape of literary history and the nature of language out of which that history is constituted became crucial combat zones, since both the man’s case and the woman’s cause had to be based not only on redefinitions of female and male nature but also on revisions of the aesthetic assumptions and linguistic presumptions of patriarchal culture.” (Gilbert and Gubar, No Man’s Land)

22. “French” feminist criticism: Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva • “A feminine textual body is recognised by the fact that it is always endless, without ending, there’s no closure, it doesn’t stop, and it’s this that makes the feminine text so difficult to read.” (Hélène Cixous: The Laugh of the Medusa) • “It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice will never be theorised, enclosed, encoded—which does not mean that it does not exist.” (Cixous)

23. Thank you for your attention!