Feminism Elaine Showalter – Towards a Feministic Poetics

•Showalter discusses :

  Woman as reader (Feminist Critique)

  Woman as writer (Gynocritics)

  The Problems of Feminist Critique

  Program of Gynocritics

  Feminine, Feminist, and Female stages.

•Feminism can be divided into two distinct varieties:

ØThe first type is concerned with ‘woman as reader’.

ØWoman as reader (feminist Critique)

ØIn this concept woman is considered as the consumer of literature produced by male-writers.

ØShe calls it male-produced literature.

ØElaine argues that a female reading may change our idea of a given text. Elaine calls this kind of analysis the feminist critique.

 •Its subjects include the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and misconceptions about women in criticism.

•It also look into the fissures in male constructed literary history. For example, cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, at the time of Julius Caesar has been treated differently by shakespeare and Bernard Shaw.

•Bernard Shaw gives her role of caesar’s adopted daughter, whereas Shakespeare considers her Caesar’s concubine.

•Feminist critique also concerned with the exploitation and the manipulation of the female audience, especially in popular culture and film.

•We find advertisements in which women appear in different poses exhibiting part of their body to get more publicity to various consumer products.  

The second type of feminist criticsm is woman as writer (Gynocritics)

•In this concept woman is the producer of textual meaning.

•It looks into and discusses themes, genres and structures of literatures by woman. Woman as writer includes the following subjects: a) the psychodynamics of a female creativity, b) Linguistics and the problem of a female language, c) the collective female literary career, d) literary history, and e) studies of particular female writers and their works.

•As there is no particular term in English for such a branch, Elaine has adopted the French term la gynocritique and modified as Gynocritics.

•The feminist critique is essentially political and polemical. It is theoretically affiliated to marxist sociology and Aesthetics. Gynocritics is more self-contained and experimental.

The problems of Feminist critique

•One of the problems of the feminist critique is that it is male-oriented.

•We study stereotypes of women, the sexism of male critics and the limited role the women play in literary history, we are not learning what women have felt and experienced.

•We got only experience of what men have felt.

•In some fields of specialization apprenticeship to the male-theoretician is essential.

•The critics has a tendency to naturalize women’s victimization by making it the inevitable.

Program of Gynocritics

•The program of gynocritics is to construct a female frame work for the analysis of women’s literature.

•Another task is to develop new models based on the study of female experience. It doesn’t support idea of adopting male models and theories.

•Showalter remarks “gynocritics begins at the point when we free ourselves from the leaner absolutes of male literary theory, stop trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition.

•Elaine hopes to establish a visible world of female culture. 

Feminine, Feminist and Female stages

•In her book “ A Literature  of Their Own” Showalter has divided the period of evolution into three stages. i) The Feminine ii) The Feminist iii) The Female

•The Feminine 1840-1880: During that period women wrote in an effort to equal the intellectual achievements of the male culture.

•The distinguishing sign of this period is the male pseudonym. This trend was introduced in England in the 1840s.

•It became a national characteristic of english women writers. During this phase the feminist content of feminine art is typically oblique, because of the inferiority complex experienced by female writers.

The Feminist- 1882 to 1920

•The new women movement gained strength – women won the right to vote.

•Women writers began to use literature to dramatize the ordeals of wrong womanhood.

The Female – 1920

•Here we find women rejecting both imitation and protest.

•Showalter considers that both are signs of dependency. Women show more independent attitudes.

•They realize the place of female experience in the process of art and literature.

•She considers that there is what she calls autonomous art that can come from women because their experiences are typical and individualistic.

•Women began to concentrate on the forms and techniques of art and literature.

•The representatives of the female phase such as Dorothy Richardson and Virgina Woolf even began to think of male and female sentences.

•They wrote about masculine journalism and feminine fiction. They redefined and sexualized external and internal experience.