FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM

Generally, feminist literary criticism exists to counter, resist, and eventually eliminate the traditions and conventions of patriarchy­the ideology or belief system which sees as "natural" the dominance and superiority of men over women in both private and public contexts--as it exists in literary, historical, and critical contexts. As we have seen in our discussions of Marxism and ideology, the fact that the goals of feminist criticism are "literary" does not necessarily limit its effects to the arena of "culture" or the academy. If, as in Althusser's theory, the "superstructural" elements of a given society (such as its literature) are needed to "educate" a population to reproduce its present economic relations, feminist literary criticism may be seen to intervene in the process of culture's self-reproduction to make visible the injustices of present relations between men and women, and perhaps, keep them from being reproduced in the future.

Feminist interventions in literary and literary-critical modes have taken any number of shapes over the past two centuries. While Western literature has (at least since the romantic period) taken for granted that its reader, writer and critic is male, feminist criticism has shown that male and female readers bring different perspectives to texts and thus (after the notion introduced in reader-response and strengthened in post-structuralism) "produce" very different interpretations­and thus very different "texts"--even in the act of reading. Feminist critics have also called attention to unique female literary traditions and modes of reading informed, if not wholly determined by, women's historical oppression in patriarchal society. These traditions may be overt (as in, say, the actual allusions of Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich to a figure such as Emily Dickinson), or covert, legible, for example, only through post-Freudian psychological analyses. In all cases, feminist criticism makes space for and listens to women's voices previously muted or drowned out by dominant patriarchal literary-critical practices.

In practice, feminist literary criticism is not limited to texts written and read by women, for its interest is not only how 'women' have been treated in books per se, but how notions of gender and sexuality, generally, have determined or enforced an inferior place for many different voices­of women, of racial and ethnic minorities, and of gay and lesbian writer and readers of literature. Its target may include stereotypes of any of these groups as seen as inferior from the point of view of an established patriarchal order, or the exclusion of such groups created by such a point of view (or ideological bias) in literary history.

There are no "rules"­-no "recipe"-­to doing feminist criticism. Rather, feminist literary critics may employ, for example, reader-response criticism to present a reading of a text in which female characters are traditionally ignored, or to reveal how the text itself (in an Iserian view), seems to "imply" or elicit a feminist reading, or, conversely, how the text seems to beg for a reading that ignores the full humanity of its female characters.  Likewise, a feminist literary critic might deconstruct any text whose chief binary opposition implies a hierarchy in which the masculine elements are predominant. Many recent feminist critics have exposed the patriarchal nature of Freud's psychoanalytic theory, but rather than abandon it altogether they have expanded its models to include and acknowledge, for example, those homoerotic relations between mother and daughter or between female subjects that Freud's theory would ignore or discount as mere "perversions."