Feminist Criticism
As a distinctive approach to analyzing and interpreting literature, feminist criticism did not appear until late in the 1960's. Two centuries of struggle for the recognition of women's cultural roles and achievements and for women's social and political rights preceded the critical approach. Since its inception there continues to be an interrelation of feminist literary criticism with political feminism: the fight for cultural, social and legal freedoms and equalities.
An important precursor of feminist criticism was Virginia Woolf, who wrote A Room of One's Own
(1929) and other essays on female authors and on the cultural, economic and educational disabilities within patriarchal societies that have been hindering or preventing women from the realization of their productive and creative possibilities. A more radical critical mode was launched in France by Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex
(1949)--a wide-ranging critique of the cultural identification of women as merely the negative objects to men, the dominant subjects who represent humanity in general. The book also reveals the collective myths of women in the works of many male writers. In the United States, modern feminist criticism was inaugurated by Mary Ellman's discussion, in Thinking about Women
(1968), about the derogatory stereotypes of women in literature written by men and about alternative and subversive points of view in some writings by women. Even more influential was Kate Millett's Sexual Politics
, published the following year. She analyzes Western social arrangements and institutions as covert ways of manipulating power to establish and to perpetuate the dominance of men and the subordination of women.Since 1969 there continues to be an explosion of feminist writings without parallel in previous critical innovations. This current criticism is not a unitary theory or procedure. The various feminisms, however, share certain assumptions and concepts that underlie the diverse ways that individual critics explore sexual difference and privilege in the production, the content, the reception, and the critical analysis and evaluation of literary works.
- The basic view is that Western civilization is pervasively patriarchal--that is, male-centered and controlled in such a way as to subordinate women to men in all cultural domains: familial, social, religious, political, economic, legal and artistic. Throughout Western literary history, the definition of female tends to be the negative of male. That is due to the lack of the identifiable male organ, of male powers, and of the male character traits that, in the patriarchal view, have been achieving the most important scientific and technical innovations and have been creating the major works of civilization and culture. Because women are taught, throughout the process of socialization, to internalize the dominant patriarchal ideology (the conscious and unconscious presuppositions about male superiority), they derogate their own sex and cooperate in their own subordination.
- Although one's anatomy determines one's sex, gender (the traits that constitute masculinity and femininity with respect to identity and behavior) are cultural constructs that the pervasive patriarchal biases of our civilization have been generating. By this cultural process, we identify masculinity with activity, dominance, adventure, rationality and creativity; and we identify femininity with passivity, acquiescence, timidity, emotionality and conventionality.
- Such patriarchal ideology pervades those writings that have been considered great and have been written mainly by men for men. Typically the most highly regarded literary works focus on male protagonists who embody masculine traits and emotions and pursue masculine interests in masculine fields of action. The female characters, when they play a role, are marginal and subordinate, and their representations are either complimentary to or in opposition to masculine desires and enterprises. Such works, lacking autonomous female role models and implicitly addressing male readers, either leave the female reader an outsider or solicit her to identify against herself by taking the position of the male subject and so assuming male values and ways of perceiving, feeling and acting.
- Feminist critics also believe the traditional aesthetic categories and criteria for analyzing and appraising literary works--although standard critical theory represents them as objective, disinterested and universal--contain masculine assumptions, masculine interests, and masculine ways of reasoning. Thus, the standard selections, rankings, and critical treatments of literary works have been gender-biased.
focuses on a conversation between an American man and a young woman, Jig, as they wait for a train to Madrid, where she will have an abortion. The conversation is tense because the man is pressuring her to have the procedure. However, Jig feels the child will bring stability and will add meaning to their relationship. The resolution of the conflict occurs when the man asserts his will and she denies her feelings. Thus, the plot is the vulnerability and defeat of Jig. The symbolism and imagery suggest that the woman's position is the affirmation of life. The relationship between the theme and the setting is important because the setting establishes a dichotomy of fertility and infertility, which makes implicit references to Jig's reluctance to have the abortion and the man's desire for the procedure. Renewal is possible only through her victory over the man. The ending of the story, however, suggests that Jig is powerless to change the nature of their relationship. She does not assert herself, and she does not express explicitly her desires. Gay and Lesbian Studies
Both gay and lesbian studies began as liberation movements--in parallel with the feminist and African American movements--during the anti-Vietnam War, anti-establishment, and countercultural ferment of the late 1960's and early 1970's. Since that time gay and lesbian studies have been maintaining a relation to the movements to achieve political, economic and legal rights equal to those of the heterosexual majority. The two movements were primarily separate throughout the 1970's. Gays thought of themselves as quintessentially male, whereas lesbians, who aligned themselves with the feminist movement, characterized the gay movement as a part of the patriarchy. Recently, however, the two groups have been recognizing their joint history as a despised and suppressed minority, and they have been sharing common political and social goals.
In the 1970's, researchers assumed there was a fixed, unitary identity as a gay man or as a lesbian woman that has remained stable throughout human history. A major endeavor of gays and lesbians was to identify and reclaim the works of such gay writers as Plato, Whitman, Proust, Gide, Auden and Baldwin and such lesbian writers as Sappho of Lesbos, Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde. The list included writers--William Shakespeare and Christina Rossetti, for examples--who represented homoerotic subject matter but whose own sexuality the available biographical evidence has left uncertain. In the 1980's and 1990's, because of the assimilation of the viewpoints and analytic methods of poststructuralists--Derrida, Foucault and others--the earlier assumptions about a unitary and stable gay or lesbian identity were questioned, and historical critical analyses became increasingly subtle and complex.
Queer Theory
That term designates the combination of gay and lesbian studies as well as the theoretical and critical writings that concern all modes of variance, such as cross-dressing, from the normative models of biological sex, gender identity, and sexual desires. The term queer was originally derogatory, used to stigmatize male and female same-sex love as deviant and unnatural. Since the 1990's, however, queer has been adopted by gays and lesbians as a non-invidious term to identify a way of life and an area of scholarly inquiry.
The influence of feminist criticism has been reviving interest in Ernest Hemingway's life and work. Many of Hemingway's biographers have been responsive to such feminist revaluations. For example, the women in Hemingway's life are more prominent in biographies written since the 1980's. Scholarly inquiry reveals that Grace Hemingway's influence catastrophically influenced her son's personal life to the point where her nurturance of him and his feelings about her are inherent in some of his works. In particular she was responsible for his preoccupation with sexual identity and gender distinction, which made his work preternaturally alert to women's sensibilities and to the possibilities of androgyny. One of the earliest signs of Grace Hemingway's influence was the manner of her son's appearance. Although it was common at the turn of the century for infant boys to wear dresses and to have their hair left uncut, by the time they were two or two-and-a-half years old, most boys wore masculine clothing and had a distinctly masculine haircut. Grace Hemingway eschewed fashion, and Ernest continued to wear feminine clothing and/or a feminine hairstyle well after most boys his age were unambiguously masculine in appearance. Moreover, she frequently changed the outfits and hairstyles with the result that the manifestations of her son's sexual identity alternated uncertainly. Ernest's older sister was subjected to the same whimsies, and Grace Hemingway dressed and treated the two children as twins of the same sex--sometimes male and sometimes female.
Perhaps the cross-dressing Grace Hemingway imposed on her son determined Ernest's preoccupation with sexual identity. Perhaps the dresses he wore were an emblem of a pathology in their household, with normative sexual roles in disarray. Perhaps it does not matter. Grace Hemingway's impositions on her son--her carelessness with his masculine identity--mirrored her domination of her ineffectual husband.
The effects on Ernest were paradoxical. After he had recognized his father's subservience, he feared the same fate for himself and bullied women throughout his life. At the same time, however, he was utterly dependent on them. He created a ruggedly aggressive, masculine persona, but his fiction portrays sexually passive men and romantic situations in which sexual identity shifts and is unclear. Furthermore, he offers a woman's point of view as few male authors can, giving uncommonly perceptive voices to female experiences.
Racial and Ethnic Criticisms
The social issues that produce the greatest disagreement in literary criticism are gender, race and class. We have discussed what happens when the Other reads: the ways in which the androcentricity of canonical texts affect the self-images of heterosexual female and gay and lesbian readers. Toni Morrison proposes another way of reading literature. Morrison does not focus on the production of or lack of minority literature or on the definition of African American literature, and she only slightly concerns herself with the explicit images of African Americans in literature; rather, she fully explores the ways in which the African presence in America affected the ways European Americans viewed themselves and their worlds. Whereas the Palestinian theorist Edward Said uses the term Orientalism to refer to the ways in which European writers characterized darker colonial people as Other, Morrison uses the term Africanism to refer to the literal and figurative blackness that European immigrants found in America and the ways they represented such blackness in their literature.
Morrison views Africanism as pervasive--appearing in texts that feature important black characters, in texts in which blacks have only minor roles, and in texts that do not mention race and slavery. Morrison believes every major work of early American literature was shaped in part by the fact that, in the midst of a republic dedicated to freedom, there was a large population held in complete subjugation. Furthermore, all the major themes of American literature--individualism, masculinity, the conflict between engagement and isolation, moral dilemmas, the juxtaposition of innocence with death and/or hell--drew their mystic strength from the dark Other within American society. Thus, Africanism is everywhere--either explicitly or implicitly--in public discourse, and such Africanistic presence complicates the texts, sometimes contradicting them completely.
Morrison's critical approach can reveal much about literary texts. However, Africans were not the only group constituted as Other in American society and represented as the Other in American literature. European colonists had encountered Native Americans long before African slavery was institutionalized, and it is well documented how the encounter reshaped the imagination of Europe and of those Europeans who had immigrated to America. Furthermore, around the mid-nineteenth century, new immigrants from Europe (Irish) and Asia (Chinese) began to serve as representations of Otherness to native-born Americans only a few generations removed from their families' immigrations.
Marxist Criticism
Marxist critics vary in their approaches to literary texts, but they ground their theories and practices on the economic and cultural theory of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles, especially on the following claims.
- In the ultimate analysis, human history changes when the mode of human material production changes--that is, when the economic organization for producing and distributing material goods changes.
- Historical changes in the fundamental mode of material production effect changes in the class structure of a society, establishing in each era dominant and subordinate classes that engage in a struggle for economic, political and social advantages.
- An ideology constitutes human consciousness. In other words, beliefs, values, and ways of thinking and feeling compose reality. An ideology is the product of the position and interests of a particular class. In any historical era, the dominant ideology embodies, legitimizes and perpetuates the interests of the dominant economic and social class.
In accordance with some version of the views I just outlined, a Marxist critic will explain a literary work in any historical era, not as a work created in accordance with artistic criteria, but as a product of the economic and ideological determinants specific to that era. In other words, a contemporary literary work will have a direct correlation with the present stage of class struggle. More flexible Marxists, on the other hand, grant that contemporary literary works possess a degree of autonomy that enables some of them to transcend sufficiently the prevalent bourgeois ideology to represent or to reflect aspects of the objective reality of our time.
