Literary Theory

Series 1: Handout #19

Sistera Catheter, “Just Lack a Woman” (Postmodern Pooh):

Q: Based on this caricature, how could you describe feminist criticism? What are its interests, political goals, methods of textual interpretation?

Barry, “Feminist Criticism”: Note the long pre-history of contemporary feminism (Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Margaret Fuller, Friedrich Engels, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Virginia Woolf, Emmaline Pankhurst, Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir); centrality of literary criticism to the women’s movement since the 1960s: showing how the representation of women in literature functions as role modeling/socialization; exposing the mechanisms of patriarchy (i.e., how sexual inequality is perpetuated); and recovering the lost, neglected world of women’s lives and writing.

Barry divides the debates within feminism into three areas:

1. The Role of Theory: there is a strain of popular feminism in Anglo-American literary criticism that resembles liberal humanism and old-fashioned historicism aimed at appreciation of women writers, the recovery of forgotten texts, and the representation of women’s experiences. Virginia Woolf and Gilbert and Gubar are examples of this, as is a lot of contemporary film and literature. English feminism tends to be inflected by socialism more than the American version. French Feminism (and its American emulators in the academy) is influenced by post-structuralism (especially Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault); figures such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Iragaray; tend to be less interested in literature per se than in larger philosophical issues.

2. The Nature of Language: Is language use gendered (as Woolf suggests—that men have more balance and structure, move less by intuition, etc.)? Does this mean that women are handicapped by the norms of masculine language (remember Lacan)? Is it possible to create a female language so women do not have to imitate male language (i.e., that “facilitates the free play of meanings within the framework of loosened grammatical structures,” an ecriture feminine free of male logocentrism, that is phallogocentrism)? French Feminists, in particular, have argued that this feminine language is an expression of the differences in the female body. It is inherently anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and consistent with the aims of post-structuralism, etc.

Along the above lines, Kristeva draws on Lacan to argue that masculine discourse is symbolic (Lacan’s Symbolic also; based on a fixed self, authority, order, patriarchal power, control, normativity, fascism, prose, the conscious), while feminine discourse is semiotic (Lacan’s Imaginary; based on displacement, slippage, condensation, random connections, open-endedness, socialist, poetry, the unconscious). Kristeva steers clear of essentialism by not assigning this gender duality to the sex of the writer (men can write femininely). Also, the two types of language are always simultaneously present; nothing is purely one or the other.

Q: Is there a difference between male and female language/ways of thinking? Is it oppressive for a male teacher to grade female writing (but not vice versa)? Or is this a reductive ESSENTIALISM if we accept that femininity and masculinity are SOCIAL CONSTRUCTS?

Q. How is language linked to politics? Why is language political (and relevant to feminism)? Consider the history of pronouns.

Q. If the “personal is political,” then what is not political? Does politics have meaning if it includes everything?

3. The Value of Psychoanalysis: Freud was abandoned by the late-60s as a misogynist. Writers such as Kate Millet and Simone de Bouvoir establish the distinction between sex and gender, the former being biological, the latter being socially constructed (nature vs. nurture). Freud is salvaged by Juliet Mitchell by arguing that “penis envy” is about the desire for the emblem of social power; women in this sense are socially castrated, they lack the symbol which gives access to power. Jane Gallop, among others, draw on Lacan’s notion of the phallus as a signifier rather than a biological organ, which does not necessarily belong to men. “Woman,” likewise, is a construct.

Q: What are some of the possible outcomes of an anti-essentialist feminism? What if men, also, are largely denied access to “the Phallus,” are symbolically emasculated on the basis of race, sexual orientation, class, appearance, etc. (if these categories can be said to exist.)