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Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism
Making a Difference An invaluable overview of feminist critical thinking. The esssays address a wide range of topics the politics of language; feminist readings of the canon; psychoanalysis and feminism; French theories of the feminine. Full description
288 pages, Paperback
First published November 21, 1985
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August 31, 2014
A. “Feminist Scholarship and the Social Construction of Women,” Green and Kahn
1. In general feminist scholarship has two main foci: to deconstruct male patterns of thought, and then to reconstruct the hidden female experience. This chapter examines this effort in history, and literature.
2. Feminist literary criticism holds two premises about gender: the inequality of the sexes is not a biological given but a cultural construct, and the male perspective have dominated the fields of knowledge. Thus, feminist literary critics focus on the ways this male ideology is inscribed in literary forms. They attempt to decipher the myth.
3. History: Since history has been a record of male experience written by men, historians of women attempt to reconstruct the female experience. Their first efforts were to examine exceptional women (compensatory history). The next stage was to examine the daily lives of more common women. One of the most important contributions of these historians is to reshape traditional periodization.
4. Literature: Feminist literary critics review the cannon of established great works and uncover the male ideology within them.
B. “Varieties of Feminist Criticism,” Sydney Kaplan
1. Feminist criticism begins with the personal response of women readers to women writers. It then branches into three paths which this essay examines.
2. Revisionary criticism of the cannon. The main criticism against the cannon was a reactions against the New Criticism. One of the main sources of energy and power of feminist criticism is its association with the women writers.
3. The study of lost or neglected women writers. The Feminist Press worked n this recovery issue. But, some argued that this rediscovery could only go so far.
4. The articulation of a distinctive feminist literary tradition. This is based on understanding relationships between women (mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, and lesbians).
C. “Inscribing Femininity: French Theories of the Feminine,” Ann Rosalind Jones
1. French theories of women’s writing are based on Derridian deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis. They explore language to see how men have established the dominant pole in the binary opposition between women and men. Phallocentrism (the structuring of man as the center of all thought) is the main target of Franco-Feminist criticism. This essay looks at four women writers who adopt this critique
2. Julia Kristeva: Posits the concept of the semiotic, a rhythmic free play which she relates to mother-infant relationships. This relationship breaks down the binary opposition between self/other.
3. Hélène Cixous: Celebrates women’s sexual capacities. She calls for an écriture féminine through which women will bring their bodily energies into view.
4. Luce Irigaray: She emphasizes différence which are all the feminine characteristics which are defined against masculine norms. She also imagines a feminine language or a parlerfemme.
5. Monique Wittig: Rejects the emphasis on différence that three previous women have held. Women must be understood not in contrast to men but in historical terms as subjected to oppression.
D. “Mind Mother: Psychoanalysis and Feminism,” Judith Kegan Gardinar
1. There are two main analogies in psychoanalytic literary criticism. First, the literary text can be understood as the human mind. Second (“mother”) all relationships, including literary ones between reader and text, are based on the associations with ones childhood family ties. Why is psychoanalysis useful to feminists? Because it can be used to tell what gender means--how persons become psychologically feminine or masculine.
2. Freud. There are three categories of psychoanalytic criticism which are important for the literary critic. The unconscious. The sexual origin of human motivation in repressed incestual infantile desires. The symbolic manifestations of unconscious wishes in dreams, jokes, errors, and art. This can be applied to literary criticism in several ways. (1) Themes in an authors work represent their own biography (Mary Shelly and fear of childbirth and new life).
3. Jung and Piaget. Jung makes every persons bisexuality a tenet of his philosophy. Each person needs to incorporate aspects of the opposite sex into his or her personality. Piaget believed that a child’s mental structure went through different stages.
4. Post-Freudian psychoanalysis. Four main theories. First, ego psychology and identity theory. Erik Erikson explored the concept of life stages and identity. These life stages are associated with different desires for social accomplishments. This could be studied by examining how Shakespeare represents male characters at different points in his life. Second, transference and counter-transference phenomena. This is studies through reader-response. How does the reader associate with the text. This is studied in literature by examining how each sex accuses the other of vanity. Third, theories of narcissism. Fourth, object-relations school. This explains how a child becomes a person. The self is constructed through social relationships, rather than through instinctual drives. The ‘objects’ are everything that are not the self. For example, the mother object is no the mother but the child’s representation of the mother. The child’s primary task in its first years is achieving separation-individuation. This is the process by which the child becomes separate from the mother and gains its own sense of self.
5. Feminist physchanalytical theories are proposed by Chodorow, Dinnerstein, and Rich. Their theories which discuss the differences between women and men help account for the differences in literature written by men and women.
E. “Pandora’s Box: Subjectivity, Class, and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism,” Cora Kaplan
1. She argues that there has been a split in feminist criticism. On the one side there are liberal humanists who believe that psychosexual experience is more meaningful for women than social oppression. On the other there are socialist feminists who place emphasis on the social and economic elements in the creation of texts. She argues for a criticism that can come to terms with female subjectivity and class identity.
F. “What has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Criticism,” Bonnie Zimmerman
1. Beginning in the 1970s lesbian critics began to explore the way they wrote and read differently. They asked questions like does a woman’s sexual preference affect the way she reads? Should lesbianism be in the classroom? Should a lesbian cannon be established? Many argue that a woman’s sexual orientation profoundly affects creativity. This essay explores current lesbian scholarship and how they are exercising their unique world view
2. One way this world-view takes shape is as a “critical consciousness about heterosexual assumptions.” Heterosexism is the mentioning in biographies of heterosexual relationships but the hiding of homosexual relationships.
3. The most important task for lesbian critics is to develop a lesbian feminist perspective. Some argue that certain works are “innately” lesbian. Some read Toni Morrison’s work Sula as a lesbian novel even though she is not because here characters are so strong. But this can be dangerous equating traits like female strength to a lesbian perspective.
4. Another task is to provide lesbians with a literary tradition. What is the lesbian cannon?
5. Once this tradition is defined the next step is to analyze the images of lesbians in fiction.
G. “Black Women Writers: Taking a Critical Perspective,” Susan Willis
1. There are 3 central concerns in black women’s writing: community, journey, and sexuality
2. Community. Capitalist society seeks to isolate the individual. Toni Morrison’s Sula fights against this isolation. She argues that places and communities used to exist but now there are just “separate houses with separate televisions and separate telephones and less and less dropping by.” The telephone denies women the possibility of sharing domestic toil. Paule Marshall in Praise Song for the Widow has her female character confronting community. As a secretary married to a upwardly mobile husband she partakes in the ultimate bourgeoisie leisure activity--a Caribbean cruise. There she reflects on the solitude of her life as she visits traditional communal African culture in the Caribbean islands. No where in black women’s writing is the workplace seen as the place of community. Unlike proletarian fiction.
3. The journey. Major journeys in a black persons life included the journey to slavery, and the escape out of slavery. These were life transforming events developing a person’s consciousness. This concept of the journey (the Caribbean cruise) is also seen in Marshall’s work.
4. Sensuality and sexuality. Black women write about the erosion of sexuality as it is stifled by male desire and domestic life. The repression of black women’s sexuality is related to their assimilation into bourgeoisie life (the commodification of experience). Thus, black women’s sexuality is not their own. It is defined by their husbands.
5. There are utopian visions of how social space can be rearranged. This is the three woman household. In Morrison’s The Bluest Eye three female prostitutes live together sharing clothes, food, and conversation. They live their lives off men and not controlled by them.
H. “Notorious signs, feminist criticism and literary tradition,” Adrienne Munich
1. She argues that male authored works in the cannon are as much the object of feminist criticism as women’s writing. First she turns to a traditional reading of Genesis as a myth of male dominance and she shows how male authority denies the power of women. Next she gives a feminist reading of Don Quixote and shows how literature mythologizes women and man’s desire for women.
2. Genesis as male authority. Adam was given the power of language to name the creatures of the world. This was done before Eve was created thus signifying her lack of power. This patriarchal naming left no voice for women.
1. In general feminist scholarship has two main foci: to deconstruct male patterns of thought, and then to reconstruct the hidden female experience. This chapter examines this effort in history, and literature.
2. Feminist literary criticism holds two premises about gender: the inequality of the sexes is not a biological given but a cultural construct, and the male perspective have dominated the fields of knowledge. Thus, feminist literary critics focus on the ways this male ideology is inscribed in literary forms. They attempt to decipher the myth.
3. History: Since history has been a record of male experience written by men, historians of women attempt to reconstruct the female experience. Their first efforts were to examine exceptional women (compensatory history). The next stage was to examine the daily lives of more common women. One of the most important contributions of these historians is to reshape traditional periodization.
4. Literature: Feminist literary critics review the cannon of established great works and uncover the male ideology within them.
B. “Varieties of Feminist Criticism,” Sydney Kaplan
1. Feminist criticism begins with the personal response of women readers to women writers. It then branches into three paths which this essay examines.
2. Revisionary criticism of the cannon. The main criticism against the cannon was a reactions against the New Criticism. One of the main sources of energy and power of feminist criticism is its association with the women writers.
3. The study of lost or neglected women writers. The Feminist Press worked n this recovery issue. But, some argued that this rediscovery could only go so far.
4. The articulation of a distinctive feminist literary tradition. This is based on understanding relationships between women (mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, and lesbians).
C. “Inscribing Femininity: French Theories of the Feminine,” Ann Rosalind Jones
1. French theories of women’s writing are based on Derridian deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis. They explore language to see how men have established the dominant pole in the binary opposition between women and men. Phallocentrism (the structuring of man as the center of all thought) is the main target of Franco-Feminist criticism. This essay looks at four women writers who adopt this critique
2. Julia Kristeva: Posits the concept of the semiotic, a rhythmic free play which she relates to mother-infant relationships. This relationship breaks down the binary opposition between self/other.
3. Hélène Cixous: Celebrates women’s sexual capacities. She calls for an écriture féminine through which women will bring their bodily energies into view.
4. Luce Irigaray: She emphasizes différence which are all the feminine characteristics which are defined against masculine norms. She also imagines a feminine language or a parlerfemme.
5. Monique Wittig: Rejects the emphasis on différence that three previous women have held. Women must be understood not in contrast to men but in historical terms as subjected to oppression.
D. “Mind Mother: Psychoanalysis and Feminism,” Judith Kegan Gardinar
1. There are two main analogies in psychoanalytic literary criticism. First, the literary text can be understood as the human mind. Second (“mother”) all relationships, including literary ones between reader and text, are based on the associations with ones childhood family ties. Why is psychoanalysis useful to feminists? Because it can be used to tell what gender means--how persons become psychologically feminine or masculine.
2. Freud. There are three categories of psychoanalytic criticism which are important for the literary critic. The unconscious. The sexual origin of human motivation in repressed incestual infantile desires. The symbolic manifestations of unconscious wishes in dreams, jokes, errors, and art. This can be applied to literary criticism in several ways. (1) Themes in an authors work represent their own biography (Mary Shelly and fear of childbirth and new life).
3. Jung and Piaget. Jung makes every persons bisexuality a tenet of his philosophy. Each person needs to incorporate aspects of the opposite sex into his or her personality. Piaget believed that a child’s mental structure went through different stages.
4. Post-Freudian psychoanalysis. Four main theories. First, ego psychology and identity theory. Erik Erikson explored the concept of life stages and identity. These life stages are associated with different desires for social accomplishments. This could be studied by examining how Shakespeare represents male characters at different points in his life. Second, transference and counter-transference phenomena. This is studies through reader-response. How does the reader associate with the text. This is studied in literature by examining how each sex accuses the other of vanity. Third, theories of narcissism. Fourth, object-relations school. This explains how a child becomes a person. The self is constructed through social relationships, rather than through instinctual drives. The ‘objects’ are everything that are not the self. For example, the mother object is no the mother but the child’s representation of the mother. The child’s primary task in its first years is achieving separation-individuation. This is the process by which the child becomes separate from the mother and gains its own sense of self.
5. Feminist physchanalytical theories are proposed by Chodorow, Dinnerstein, and Rich. Their theories which discuss the differences between women and men help account for the differences in literature written by men and women.
E. “Pandora’s Box: Subjectivity, Class, and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism,” Cora Kaplan
1. She argues that there has been a split in feminist criticism. On the one side there are liberal humanists who believe that psychosexual experience is more meaningful for women than social oppression. On the other there are socialist feminists who place emphasis on the social and economic elements in the creation of texts. She argues for a criticism that can come to terms with female subjectivity and class identity.
F. “What has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Criticism,” Bonnie Zimmerman
1. Beginning in the 1970s lesbian critics began to explore the way they wrote and read differently. They asked questions like does a woman’s sexual preference affect the way she reads? Should lesbianism be in the classroom? Should a lesbian cannon be established? Many argue that a woman’s sexual orientation profoundly affects creativity. This essay explores current lesbian scholarship and how they are exercising their unique world view
2. One way this world-view takes shape is as a “critical consciousness about heterosexual assumptions.” Heterosexism is the mentioning in biographies of heterosexual relationships but the hiding of homosexual relationships.
3. The most important task for lesbian critics is to develop a lesbian feminist perspective. Some argue that certain works are “innately” lesbian. Some read Toni Morrison’s work Sula as a lesbian novel even though she is not because here characters are so strong. But this can be dangerous equating traits like female strength to a lesbian perspective.
4. Another task is to provide lesbians with a literary tradition. What is the lesbian cannon?
5. Once this tradition is defined the next step is to analyze the images of lesbians in fiction.
G. “Black Women Writers: Taking a Critical Perspective,” Susan Willis
1. There are 3 central concerns in black women’s writing: community, journey, and sexuality
2. Community. Capitalist society seeks to isolate the individual. Toni Morrison’s Sula fights against this isolation. She argues that places and communities used to exist but now there are just “separate houses with separate televisions and separate telephones and less and less dropping by.” The telephone denies women the possibility of sharing domestic toil. Paule Marshall in Praise Song for the Widow has her female character confronting community. As a secretary married to a upwardly mobile husband she partakes in the ultimate bourgeoisie leisure activity--a Caribbean cruise. There she reflects on the solitude of her life as she visits traditional communal African culture in the Caribbean islands. No where in black women’s writing is the workplace seen as the place of community. Unlike proletarian fiction.
3. The journey. Major journeys in a black persons life included the journey to slavery, and the escape out of slavery. These were life transforming events developing a person’s consciousness. This concept of the journey (the Caribbean cruise) is also seen in Marshall’s work.
4. Sensuality and sexuality. Black women write about the erosion of sexuality as it is stifled by male desire and domestic life. The repression of black women’s sexuality is related to their assimilation into bourgeoisie life (the commodification of experience). Thus, black women’s sexuality is not their own. It is defined by their husbands.
5. There are utopian visions of how social space can be rearranged. This is the three woman household. In Morrison’s The Bluest Eye three female prostitutes live together sharing clothes, food, and conversation. They live their lives off men and not controlled by them.
H. “Notorious signs, feminist criticism and literary tradition,” Adrienne Munich
1. She argues that male authored works in the cannon are as much the object of feminist criticism as women’s writing. First she turns to a traditional reading of Genesis as a myth of male dominance and she shows how male authority denies the power of women. Next she gives a feminist reading of Don Quixote and shows how literature mythologizes women and man’s desire for women.
2. Genesis as male authority. Adam was given the power of language to name the creatures of the world. This was done before Eve was created thus signifying her lack of power. This patriarchal naming left no voice for women.
March 6, 2020
Very comprehensive and easy to read collection of essays about feminist literary criticism.
However, it is best to read this after tackling some major 1960s and 1970s critics.
Most of the references and quotes are not throughly explained, it is implied that the reader must have general knowledge of feminist criticism.
However, it is best to read this after tackling some major 1960s and 1970s critics.
Most of the references and quotes are not throughly explained, it is implied that the reader must have general knowledge of feminist criticism.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews