Feminist Literary Criticism and Theory, Slides of Literature

Download Feminist Literary Criticism and Theory and more Slides Literature in PDF only on Docsity! 334 Language Representation and Feminist Approaches UNIT 3 FEMINIST INTERVENTIONS IN THEORY Piyas Chakrabarti Structure 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Objectives 3.3 Feminism: A Basic Overview 3.4 Trends in Feminist Literary Criticism 3.5 Feminist Resistance to Theory 3.6 New Criticism and Feminist Literary Criticism 3.7 Formalism and Feminist Literary Criticism 3.8 Reader Response Theory and Feminist Literary Criticism 3.9 New Historicism and Feminism 3.10 Structuralism and Feminist Literary Criticism 3.11 Poststructuralism and Feminist Literary Criticism 3.12 Let Us Sum Up 3.13 Unit End Questions 3.14 References 3.15 Suggested Readings 3.1 INTRODUCTION In other units like MWG 001, Block 5, Unit 2 (Feminism and Psychoanalysis), MWG 003, Block 1, Unit 4 (Feminism and Deconstruction) and MWG 007 (Reading Gender with/in Structuralism) we have already seen how feminist theories have made a significant contribution towards creating a more aware reader, capable of viewing both literary texts and society through a gendered perspective. Now we will try to see how feminist literary criticism, itself a product of “women’s movement” of the 1960s, interacts with and critiques other schools of theory such as New Criticism, Formalism, Reader Response theory, New Historicism, Structuralism and Poststructuralism. A major debate within feminist criticism has been about the amount and kind of theory that should feature in it. The ‘Anglo-American’ feminist school has been skeptical about the efficacy of recent critical theory in helping the concerns of feminism and feminist literary criticism, while the “French” feminists have not at all been loathe to adopting and adapting a significant amount of post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theory in formulating their arguments. In this unit we will try to see the contributions made by both sides in developing feminist literary discourses. 335 Feminist Interventions in Theory3.2 OBJECTIVES After reading this unit you will be able to: • Describe the basic ideas of feminism; • Discuss feminism’s resistance to theory; • Provide an overview of different schools of theory; and • Analyse the relationship of feminist literary criticism with these schools of theory. 3.3 FEMINISM: A BASIC OVERVIEW The ‘women’s movement’ that was initiated in the 1960s was not the beginning of feminism. ‘Feminist’ ideas can be found in literary works throughout the ages, from ancient times to modern era..The roots of feminism can be traced back to ancient Greece; in the work of Sappho and arguably in Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata. In the ancient Greek play, Lysistrata women come to control the treasury in the Acropolis, the female chorus is presented as the physical and intellectual better of the male chorus, and women employ their sexuality to disrupt the essentially masculine project of the Peloponnesian War. Later, during the Middle Ages, Goeffrey Chaucer’s play Wife of Bath, feminist concerns can once again be discerned as the protagonist values ‘experience’ over authority and is clearly more than a match for each of her five husbands. There was however, a growing awareness among prominent women thinkers of the time about the necessity of women finding their own voice, becoming capable of addressing their own issues. In France, following the French Revolution, Mary Wollstonecraft asserted the importance of extending the ideals of Revolution and Enlightenment to women, especially through access to education. In the 19th century a large number of major female literary figures like the Brontes, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson (to name a few) came to the forefront in both Europe and America to provide impetus to a growing concern with the rights of women. Their work was taken further forward by modernist women writers like Gertrude Stein, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf. Thus, we can see the feminist literary criticism that developed from 1960s cannot deny the contribution of those who paved the way before them. During this long history women had to struggle against a biased educational system and financial dependence on the male members. They had to contend against a patriarchal ideology that forced on them a culture of silence and obedience, and also struggle against a literary tradition that belittled their literary endeavours. In most cases, the representation of women in literature written by men perpetuated certain gender stereotypes that aided and 338 Language Representation and Feminist Approaches 3.4 TRENDS IN FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM Feminist literary criticism, although developing from the ‘women’s movement’ of the 1960s, had a distinctly literary angle from the beginning and was therefore distinct from feminism. Toril Moi draws a clear distinction between ‘feminist’, ’female’ and ‘feminine’. She argues that the first is a political stance, the second a biological reality while the third is a set of culturally defined characteristics. The representation of women in literature was seen by feminists as a patriarchal means of constructing acceptable role models for women. For example, feminist critics argued that in the novels of nineteenth century women were rarely seen to be working for a living, thereby propagating the idea that the happiness of a woman lay within the domestic ambit of a happy married life. The feminist criticism of the 1970s was majorly involved in exposing the mechanisms of patriarchy, that is, the cultural mind-set in people that allow the perpetuation of sexual inequality. In the 1980s, however, feminist criticism began to draw upon the findings of other schools of criticism. It switched its focus from challenging male versions of the world to exploring the qualities of the female world and trying to reconstruct the suppressed or lost annals of female experience. It also tried to create a canon of women’s writing so that neglected women writers come to be recognized and appreciated. Elaine Showalter argued that this transformation in late 1970s can be seen in the shift in attention among feminist critics from ‘androtexts’ (books by men) to ‘gynotexts’ (books by women).She used the term ‘gynocritics’ to refer to feminist critics who study the gynotexts. Showalter also divides the history of women’s writing into three distinct phases: the feminine phase (1840-80, in which women writers endeavoured to emulate male aesthetic standards; the feminist phase (1880-1920) in which there was an effort to be radically different from male standards; and finally a female phase (1920 onwards) in which the focus was on female writing and experience. Since the 1970s there have been a number of ongoing debates within feminist critics, one of which being the role of theory in feminist criticism. Check Your Progress: i) What, according to Toril Moi, is the difference between ‘feminist’, ‘female’ and ‘feminine’? 339 Feminist Interventions in Theoryii) What is the difference between ‘androtexts’ and ‘gynotexts’? iii) What are the three phases in which Showalter divides women’s writing? Let us now read about what is understood by feminist resistance to theory. 3.5 FEMINIST RESISTANCE TO THEORY Throughout its long history, feminism has tried to disrupt the complacent certainties of a patriarchal culture that accords a superior position to man and by extension to characteristics considered masculine. In the past, a popular idea harboured by men was that their sperm was the active seed that gave form to the passive ovum lacking in identity. Mary Ellman in Thinking AboutWomen (1968), deconstructs such a view by arguing that it wasthe sperm that was conformist and sheep-like which obediently went to the confident and daring ovum. Feminism in its various manifestations, a reason why we now study ‘feminisms’, attempts to free itself from naturalized patriarchal notions. This is often manifest in its refusal to be incorporated into any particular ‘approach’ and challenge and subvert received theoretical practices. Some feminists resist ‘theory’ altogether since they find the theoretical parameters 340 Language Representation and Feminist Approaches to be informed by fraudulent male and macho concerns. Freud’s theories, for example, have been castigated by feminist schools and feminist literary critics for their inherent sexism. In recent times, however, feminist literary criticism has found common concerns in the Lacanian and Derridean models of poststructuralist thinking, partly because they resist masculine notion of authority and truth (Please, see other units for more detailed discussion on this: MWG 003, Block I, Unit 4 and MWG 001, Block 5 , Unit 2, section 2.4). Mary Eagleton, in the introduction to her Critical Reader, Feminist Literary Criticism (1991) argues that feminism has always displayed a suspicion towards ‘theory’ which empowered the male ‘impersonal’ over the female ‘personal’ experience. The resistance towards objective, logical and impersonal mode of thinking is evident in the feminist celebration of the ‘personal’. However, she also notes that since there is hardly any free position left outside theory, it is important to engage in debates with other critical theories, as indeed many feminist critics have been doing. Over the past forty years, feminist literary criticism has been innovatively challenging and changing not only other (male oriented) theories but also its own position and agenda. Check Your Progress: i) Why does Feminist literary criticism show a distrust of theory? ii) Why has feminist literary feminist criticism found common concerns with Lacanian and Derridean models of thinking? You can substantiate your answer by reading other units from the earlier courses also. In the following section you will need about new criticism and its understanding within feminist literary criticism. 343 Feminist Interventions in Theory3.7 FORMALISM AND FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM Formalism as a discipline was quite similar to New Criticism. Both schools of criticism wish to explore what is specifically ‘literary’ in texts and favour a detailed and empirical approach to reading. However, it needs to be noted that compared to the New Critics, the Russian Formalists were much more concerned with establishing a ‘method’ and a ‘scientific’ basis for the study of literature. The approach of the New Critics was fundamentally humanistic e.g. Cleanth Brooks insisted that Andrew Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’ was not a political statement of Marvell’s attitude to Civil War but simply a demonstration of opposed ideas, unified in a poetic whole. In contrast, Russian Formalists argued that human ‘content’ (emotions, ideas and ‘reality’ in general) had no literary significance in general, but merely provided a setting for the workings of literary ‘devices’. Their effort was to outline model and hypotheses (in a scientific manner) to explain the manner in which aesthetic effects are produced by literary devices, and how the ‘literary’ is distinguished from and related to the ‘extra-literary’. While the new Critics considered literature as a form of human understanding, the Formalists thought of it as a special use of language. The history of Russian Formalism can be divided into three phases. • The first phase is governed by the model of the ‘machine’ which views literary criticism as a sort of mechanics and the text as a bundle of devices. • In the second or ‘organic’ phase literary texts are viewed as fully functioning ‘organisms’ with interrelated parts. • The third phase tries to see literary texts as part of a ‘system’ or ‘products’ of the entire literary system and even meta-system of interrelated literary and non-literary systems. The same principles that had led feminist literary critics to criticize the tenets of New Criticism hold good for their criticism of Formalism. The concept of a self-contained art-work cannot be accepted by any of the schools of theory that value literature’s social engagement. For the cross- disciplinary women’s studies courses, literature was intricately and inextricably connected to sociology and history. Literature, when viewed from a formalistic point of view, appeared to feminist critics as not just insufficient but complicit in a conspiracy of silence on issues of sexual politics. The feminist literary criticism of the 1970s in the United States was strongly anti-formalistic and committed to the notion that literature imitated, interacted and shaped life, and it was crucial to locate and critique the power structures that it helped to nurture and perpetuate. Its very materialistic and social reality rendered it impossible to confine a text only within its literary characteristics. Moreover, according to feminist literary 344 Language Representation and Feminist Approaches critics, the formalist effort to separate the text from its context was restrictive as it denied the plurality that a number of post-structuralist schools emphasized. Check Your Progress: i) What are the basic ideas of Russian Formalism? ii) What are the three phases in Russian Formalism? iii) Why do feminist literary critics object to Formalism? In the following section you will read about yet another theory, Reader Response Theory and its interaction with feminist literary criticism. 3.8 READER RESPONSE THEORY AND FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM Reader-Response criticism encompasses various approaches to literature that focus on the relationship between the text and the reader. It emphasizes the varied ways in which a reader participates in the course of reading a text and the multiple perspectives that can be generated out of this relationship. It challenges the text-oriented theories of Formalism and the New Criticism which ignores the reader’s contribution to a text. In Reader- Response Criticism the reader is taken not as merely a passive recipient of a given meaningbut as an active participant in the generation of meaning. Stanley Fish in Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics (1970) argued that a text has no real meaning until it is read. A reader completes its 345 Feminist Interventions in Theory meaning by reading it, and it is done by applying different codes and strategies. Since then various theories have been forwarded regarding the relation between the reader and the text. Wolfgang Iser in The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (1976) argued that all texts have ‘blanks’ or ‘gaps’ that have to be filled by the reader during interpretation. As literature exists meaningfully only in the mind of the reader, it is easy to understand the primacy that reader-response criticism accords to the reader. However, all texts are not equally receptive for an active participation on the part of the reader. In 1979, Umberto Eco, in The Role of the Reader distinguishes between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ texts. An ‘open’ text like T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland requires the reader’s active collaboration in the production of meaning, while a closed text like a scientific treatise or a whodunit by a mystery story writer does not require the same degree of participation from the reader for the production of meaning. Another reader-response theory offered by David Bleich, Norman Holland and Robert Crosman, argues that the reader’s response is not controlled solely by the text but also by some deep-rooted, personal, psychological needs. They view reading as some form of covert wish-fulfillment where the reader interacts with a text as with any other form of desire. Norman Holland in The Nature of Literary Response: Five Readers Reading (1975) and David Bleich in Subjective Criticism (1978) undertake a detailed analysis of reading habits and responses of individual readers. There is always a possibility that a shared set of concerns and values can control, to some extent, a reader’s response to a text. Even Stanley Fish partly shifted from his earlier position when he agrees that individual reading strategies employed by readers may be partly conditioned by their shared concerns. For example, he accepts that certain interpretive groups like American college students analyzing a novel as part of their class assignment may develop some common ‘interpretive strategies’. Recent reader-oriented critics, developing on Fish’s idea and responding to Hans Robert Jauss’s idea of ‘horizons of expectations’ have tried to assess the ways in which the reading public’s expectations change over time Feminist literary criticism have interacted with ideas forwarded by reader- response criticism to assess whether there is a unique way of reading as a woman. Numerous works of literary history since the 1970s have tried to assess literary responses in relation to specific readerships. An early feminist endeavour of this can be seen in Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), Millet attacks the conventions where readers are assumed to be male, by positioning reader affronted by the violent phallicism in the works of D. H. Lawrence, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller and Jean Genet. Later feminist critics like Cora Kaplan and Toril Moi have pointed out serious flaws in some of the basic premises of Sexual Politics, but the fact that there was a growing awareness and necessity of approaching a text as a woman, as displayed in Sexual Politics, cannot be denied. 348 Language Representation and Feminist Approaches Check Your Progress: i) What is New Historicism? How is it different from Historicism? ii) What idea of Foucault influenced New Historicism? iii) Why did feminist literary critics criticize New Historicism? 349 Feminist Interventions in Theory3.10 STRUCTURALISM AND FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM Structuralism as a literary movement developed in Paris of the 1950s and 1960s ( For a previous discussion of Structuralism, see MWG 003) . There were many factors for its advent. It can be seen as a reaction against Sartre’s version of Existentialism, which also developed in Paris. Another factor that influenced structuralism was the growing force of the social or human sciences. Modernism, which had tried to keep social sciences at a distance, was already on the wane and Postmodernism was not yet a major force. During this time, Structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Structural Anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss ushered a new kind of critical thinking. The Structuralist linguists, like the Semioticians, were neither interested in promoting any particular literary movement nor in vouching for the importance of literature, but in explaining a text only in terms of language and its system of conventions. The focus in Structural linguistics, therefore, is the phono / lexico / grammatical constituents of any literary work and the differences between linguistic signs that create meaning. Structuralists , in their analysis of literary texts, are interested only in analyzing the structures that constitute a text. It espouses the view that no element in any system has any significance by itself and its full significance can only be perceived when it is integrated into the structure of which it is a part. Therefore, activity ranging from the actions within a narrative to action in real life occurs within a system of differences and hence has meaning only within that system. Meaning, therefore, emanates neither from nature or the divine but from the structure of the system itself. Structuralist approaches to literature challenged some of the conventional beliefs of the ordinary reader. It was long felt that the essential source of a literary work was the author and a text was the mode through which a reader entered into a communion with an author’s thoughts and feelings. Another assumption often made by readers is that a book tells us the truth about human life. However, Structuralists put forward the idea that the author is ‘dead’ and that a literary discourse does not need to have any truth-function. Structuralists always want to find the codes that according to them hold the text’s meaning. Since literary texts are part of a common system and words acquire connotations within a shared system, they cannot mean anything in isolation. In other words, meaning is “intertextual” and necessarily understood in accordance with other texts within the same system. You have already been introduced to the work of Ferdinand de Saussure in MWG 001 and MWG 003. Let us renew some of his ideas in the context of feminist literary criticism. 350 Language Representation and Feminist Approaches Ferdinand de Saussure’s book Course in General Linguistics (1916) has been a great influence on semiotics and structuralism. Saussure makes a fundamental distinction between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’. The former is the shared system which the speaker unconsciously draws upon while the latter is the realization of it in individual utterance. This is a crucial distinction as structuralism is interested in the system which forms the base of any human signifying practice, and not in the individual utterance. This essentially means that when a structuralist studies specific poems or myths or economic practices, she or he is interested not in the individual work but in the system of rules being employed to construct it. Saussure argued that a linguist’s objective should be to examine signs within a self-contained system and hence her/his focus should not be on ‘diachronic’ (changing over time) aspects of language but rather on ‘synchronic’ aspects (language as it exists at a particular moment of time in a specific community of people). The synchronic system can be evaluated in terms of two axes: the ‘paradigmatic’ and the ‘syntagmatic.’ The paradigmatic focuses on the “fixed” value of signs based on their immediate associations with other signs while syntagmatic is concerned with the “dynamic” meaning brought about by the order or sequence of signs. Although both are required in a structural analysis, the paradigmatic continues to be structuralism’s primary concern on the virtue of being systematizable. The rigorous textualism of the structuralist school was critiqued by feminists who felt that such an exercise systematically disregarded literature’s potential for social criticism. To view the text merely as a structure that had to be understood in terms of a shared set of rules was to disregard its social context. This was unacceptable to feminist literary critics as they felt that the structures themselves are often conditioned by patriarchal cultural stereotypes. The structural school was seen by feminist literary critics as an enterprise by professional elites to deny the connection between texts and the world beyond them. Moreover, drawing upon ideas that developed during Poststructuralism (for a detailed analysis of Poststructuralism and its relation to feminism see the next section), feminist literary critics showed that no social or linguistic structure can be completely stable and hence any desire to form a stable center and thereby fix its ‘Other’ is not possible. In a structuralist analysis of a literary text, it was the enonce (utterance) that was privileged over enunciation (the act of uttering in a specific material and social context), but this faces challenge from feminist critics who argued that the site of the discourse cannot be separated from the discourse itself. Any effort to do so is ultimately covertly or overtly complicit with silencing the voice of protest that denies the pluralism that is crucial to alternative modes of thinking. 353 Feminist Interventions in Theory As a poststructuralist-feminist critic, Kristeva argues that the body itself can be seen as the ultimate structure: systematized at various levels, elaborately cross-referenced and coded, but still immensely capable of challenging the codes. (For a detailed discussion of French feminism and psychoanalysis, also see MWG 004, Block 4 , Unit2 ) Check Your Progress: i) What is Poststructuralism? ii) How does Poststructuralism differ from Structuralism? iii) How does feminist literary critics interact with Poststructuralism? 354 Language Representation and Feminist Approaches 3.12 LET US SUM UP In this unit, we have tried to see the different ideas associated with feminism and feminist literary criticism and their course of development. We have also tried to see the feminist resistance to theory itself. There has been an effort to understand the complex manner in which feminist literary criticism interacts with different schools of theory. In order to do this we have critically analyzed the basic ideas associated with different schools of theory and their relation to feminist literary criticism. Many of these issues have also been dealt with in different contexts in some of your other courses, as mentioned within the unit. You will find it helpful to review the relevant sections provided in the cross references for a deeper understanding of the stated issues. 3.13 UNIT END QUESTIONS 1) Trace the development of feminism and the manner in which it challenges patriarchal views. 2) Analyze the different trends in feminist literary criticism. Why does it display a distrust of theory? 3) What is New Criticism? Why and how does feminist literary criticism critique it? Discuss. 4) What is Russian Formalism? Why does it face criticism from feminist literary critics? 5) What are the basic ideas of Reader Response Theory? How does feminist literary criticism interact with it? 6) What is New Historicism? How does feminist literary criticism interact with it? 7) What are the ideas associated with Structuralism and why does feminist literary criticism critique Structuralism? 8) What is Poststructuralism? How does feminist literary critics interact with it? 3.14 REFERENCES Barthes, Roland,(1968). “The Death of the Author” in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader ed. David Lodge and Nigel Woods (2000) New York, Pearson. Bressler, Charles E. (1994, rpt. 2007). Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice, New Jersey: Pearson. 355 Feminist Interventions in Theory Derrida, Jacques (1978). “Structure, Sign and Play” in Writing and Difference, Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge and Kegan. First published in French, 1966. Eagleton, Mary (1991). Feminist Literary Criticism: London, Longman. Eco, Umberto (1981). The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. London: Hutchinson. Ellman, Mary (1979). Thinking about Women (first published 1968). London: Virago. Fish, Stanley (1970). Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylisticsin The Stanley Fish Reader (1999). London: Blackwell. Holland, Norman (1975). The Nature of Literary Response: Five Readers Reading New Haven: Yale University Press. Iser, Wolgang (1976). The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response Baltimore: John Hopkins Press. Millett, Kate (1970). Sexual Politics. Garden City New York: Doubleday. Moi, Toril (1985). Sexual/Textual politics: Feminist Literary Theory (2nd ed. 2002) London and New York: Routledge. Showalter, Elaine (1982). A Literature of Their Own. London: Virago. 3.15 SUGGESTED READINGS Eagleton, Mary (1991). Feminist Literary Criticism. London: Longman. Gregory,Castle (2007). The Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory. Uk: Blackwell. M, A. R. Habib (2011). Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present. Uk: Wiley-Blackwell. Eagleton, T. (1996). Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.