feminist criticism in essay

Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism

Thirty years ago, in a lecture at the Radcliffe Institute, Tillie Olsen first addressed the problem of silences in literature--paving the way for future explorations of the subject, including her landmark work,  Silences. The subject of silences and silencing--as fact, as trope, as lens through which to understand literary history--has been central to feminist criticism ever since.

In  Listening to Silences, a group of distinguished feminist literary critics reevaluates Olsen's heritage to reassert, extend, redefine, and question her insights, and to probe the dynamics of silence and silencing as they operate today in literature, criticism, and the academy. The book traces for the first time the genealogy of an important American critical tradition, one that still influences contemporary debates about feminism, multiculturalism, and the literary canon.

Contributors to Listening to Silences include Kate Adams, Norma Alarcon, Joanne Braxton, Sharon Zuber, King-Kok Cheung, Constance Coiner, Robin Dizard, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Diana Hume George, Elaine Hedges, Carla Kaplan, Patricia Laurence, Rebecca Mark, Diane Middlebrook, Carla L. Peterson, Lillian Robinson, Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt, Judith L. Sensibar, and Judith Bryant Wittenberg.

About the Author

Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Shelley Fisher Fishkin's principal concern throughout her career has been literature and social justice. Much of her work has focused on issues of race and racism in America, and on recovering and interpreting voices that were silenced, marginalized, or ignored in America's past. 

Her broad, interdisciplinary research interests have led her to focus on topics including the challenge of doing transnational American Studies; the place of humor and satire in movements for social change; the role literature can play in the fight against racism; the influence of African American voices on canonical American literature; the need to desegregate American literary studies; the relationship between public history and literary history; literature and animal welfare;  the ways in which American writers' apprenticeships in journalism shaped their poetry and fiction; American theatre history; and the development of feminist criticism.   Although many of her publications have centered on Mark Twain, she has also published on writers including Gloria Anzaldúa, John Dos Passos, Frederick Douglass, Theodore Dreiser, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Theresa Malkiel, Tillie Olsen, Tino Villanueva, and Walt Whitman.  

After receiving her B.A.from Yale College ( summa cum laude, phi beta kappa ), she stayed on at Yale for a masters degree in English and a Ph.D. in American Studies, and was Director of the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism there. She taught American Studies and English at the University of Texas at Austin from 1985 to 2003, and was Chair of the Department of American Studies. She is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, England, where she was a Visiting Fellow,  has twice been a Visiting Scholar at Stanford's Institute for Research on Women and Gender and has been a Faculty Research Fellow at Stanford's Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and at Stanford's Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.  She has been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, was a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in Japan, and was the winner of a Harry H. Ransom Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Texas.

Dr. Fishkin is the author, editor, co-author,  or co-editor of forty-eight books and has published over one hundred fifty articles, essays, columns, and reviews. Her work has been translated into Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Georgian, and Italian, and has been published in English-language journals in China, Turkey, Japan, and Korea.

Her most recent monograph is  Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee  (named runner-up for the best book award in the general nonfiction category, London Book Festival, 2015) (Rutgers University Press, 2015; paperback, 2017), a book that Junot Díaz called "a triumph of scholarship and passion, a profound exploration of the many worlds which comprise our national canon....a book that redraws the literary map of the United States." She is also the author of:  From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America  (winner of a Frank Luther Mott/Kappa Tau Alpha Award for outstanding research in journalism history) (Johns Hopkins, 1985);  Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices  (selected as an "Outstanding Academic Book " by  Choice ) (Oxford, 1993);  Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture  (Oxford, 1997);  and  Feminist Engagements: Forays Into American Literature and Culture  (selected as an "Outstanding Academic Title" by  Choice ) (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009).  She is the editor of the 29-volume  Oxford Mark Twain  (Oxford, 1996; Paperback reprint edition, 2009) - an edition that  Modern Language Review  called "an act of genius." She is also editor of the  Oxford Historical Guide to Mark Twain  (Oxford, 2002),  "Is He Dead? " A New Comedy by Mark Twain  (University of California, 2003),  Mark Twain's Book of Animals  (University of California Press, 2009), and  The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on his LIfe and Work  (Library of America, 2010).

She helped guide  Is He Dead?,  a neglected play by Mark Twain that she uncovered in the archives, to Broadway.  She was a producer of  Is He Dead?,  adapted by   David Ives, which had its world debut on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre in 2007, and was nominated for a Tony Award. Since it closed on Broadway, it has had 478 productions in 48 states and Australia, Canada, China, Romania, Russia, Sri Lanka, and the United Kingdom.

She is the co-editor, most recently, of  The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad  (Stanford University Press, 2019), as well as  Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism  (Oxford, 1994);  People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity  (Wisconsin, 1996);  The Encyclopedia of Civil Rights in America  (3 vols., M.E. Sharpe, 1997);   'Sport of the Gods' and Other Essential Writing by Paul Laurence Dunbar  (Random House, 2005),  Anthology of American Literature, ninth edition  (Prentice-Hall, 2006),  Concise Anthology of American Literature, seventh edition  (Prentice-Hall, 2011), a special issue of  Arizona Quarterly  on  Mark Twain at the Turn of the Century, 1890-1910  (2005);and a special issue of  African American Review  devoted to the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar (autumn 2007). From 1993 to 2003 she co-edited Oxford University Press's  "Race and American Culture "  book series with Arnold Rampersad.

She has served as President of the American Studies Association and of the Mark Twain Circle of America. She was co-founder of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman society, and was chair of the MLA Nonfiction Prose Division.   She has given keynote talks at conferences in Basel, Beijing, Cambridge, Coimbra, Copenhagen, Dublin, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Jiangmen, Kolkata,  Kunming, Kyoto,  La Coruña, Lisbon, Mainz, Nanjing, Regensburg, Seoul, St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Taipei, Tokyo, and across the U.S. Her research has been featured twice on the front page of the  New York Times,  and twice on the front page of the  New York Times  Arts section.

In 2023, she was awarded the Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for “Lifetime Achievement And Outstanding Contribution to American Studies” by the American Studies Association.

In June 2019, the American Studies Association created a new prize, the "Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies." The prize honors publications by scholars outside the United States that present original research in transnational American Studies. In its announcement of the new award, the ASA said, "Shelley Fisher Fishkin's leadership in creating a crossoads for  international scholarly collaboration and exchange has transformed the field of American Studies in both theory and practice. This award honors Professor Fishkin's outstanding dedication to the field by promoting exceptional scholarship that seeks multiple perspectives that enable comprehensive and complex approaches to American Studies, and which produce culturally, socially, and politically significant insights and interpretations relevant to Americanists around the world."

In 2022, she was awarded the Olivia Langdon Clemens Award for “Scholarly Innovation and Creativity” by the Mark Twain Circle of America. In 2017, she was awarded the John S. Tuckey lifetime achievement award by the Center for Mark Twain Studies (the first woman to receive this award, which was established in 1991, and is given every four years). The award announcement recognized her efforts "to assure that a rigorous, dynamic account of Twain stays in the public consciousness," and stated that "Nobody has done more to recruit, challenge, and inspire new generations and new genres of Mark Twain studies." In 2009 she was awarded the Mark Twain Circle's Certificate of Merit "for long and distinguished service in the elucidation of the work, thought, life and art of Mark Twain."  

The Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at Stanford, she is Director of Stanford's American Studies Program. She served as  a member of the Board of Governors of the Humanities Research Institute of the University of California, and was a member of the international jury for the 2013 Francqui Prize (awarded to an outstanding young scholar in Belgium). In 2009 she co-founded the online, open-access, peer-reviewed  Journal of Transnational American Studies.  

She is co-founder and co-director of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project  with Gordon H. Chang, the Olive H. Palmer Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Stanford.  The Project is a  collaborative transnational, bilingual research project dealing with the Chinese Railroad Workers whose labor helped establish the wealth that allowed Leland Stanford to build Stanford University.  Its goal is to try to recover their experience and their world more fully than ever before, and to understand how these workers have figured  in cultural memory in the U.S. and China. Her recent publications related to this project include “Seeing Absence, Evoking Presence: History and the Art of Zhi Lin ”  in   Rock Hushka, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and Shawn Wong,  Zhi LIN: In Search of the Lost History of Chinese Migrants and the Transcontinental Railroads.  Tacoma, Washington: Tacoma Art Museum, (2017);   從天使城到長島：美洲橫貫鐵路竣工後在美國的鐵路華工[“From Los Angeles to Long Island: Chinese Railroad Workers in America after the Transcontinental”] in  北美鐵路華工：歷史、文學與視覺再現 [ Chinese Railroad Workers in North America: Recovery and Representation ], edited by Hsinya Huang [黃心雅] Taipei: Bookman  [台北：書林出版社]  (2017); and "The Chinese as Railroad Workers after Promontory" in  The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental,  edited by Fishkin and Chang (Stanford University Press, 2019).  Her edition of  Why and How the Chinese Emigrate, and the means they adopt for the purpose of reaching America  by Russell Conwell (1871), was published in China  in 2019 as  《为何与如何：中国人为何出国与如何进入美国》 (1871)   edited, with original introduction, notes and appendices, by Fishkin,  and translated by YAO Ting [姚婷]  (Beijing: China Overseas Chinese Publishing House). It is the first Chinese translation of this important but neglected nineteenth-century text which is a surprising precursor to  the New Journalism of the 1960s.

The Chinese Railroad Workers Project has received support from the President of Stanford, the UPS Fund at Stanford, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  In 2019, a jury of top professionals in architecture, engineering, planning and history awarded a  60-panel bilingual  Chinese Workers and the Railroad Traveling Exhibit  organized by the Project  a Preservation Design Award and a Trustees' Award for Excellence from the California Preservation Foundation. (The exhibit, which debuted at Stanford, has traveled to venues around the US including Boston City Hall and the Utah State Capital; public libraries in California, Ohio, Michigan, and Utah; San Diego State University and Menlo College; the California State Railroad Museum and the Stanford Mansion in Sacramento; the Niles Canyon Railway Museum (Fremont, CA), and Blackhawk Museum (Danville, CA); community centers and Asian festivals around the country; and Wuyi University (Jiangmen, China). 

Two other current projects involve collaborations with colleagues in translation studies and computer science at the Université de Lille in France (Ronald Jenn and Amel Fraisse).  One is a transnational print and digital project that tracks  the global circulation of Mark Twain's  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn    and the cultural work the novel performs in a wide range contexts, a project supported by Maison Européenne des Science de l’Homme et de la Société (MESHS). A Special Forum entiitled "Global Huck: Mapping the Cultural Work of Translations of Mark Twain's  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"  was published in the  Journal of Transnational American Studies , co-edited by Fishkin and Jenn with Tsuyoshi Ishihara (Uniiversty of Tokyo), Holger Kersten (University of Halle-Wittenberg), and Selina Lai-Henderson (Duke Kunshan University).    The second is the ROSETTA Project - Resources for Endangered Languages Through Translated Texts, a project designed to develop resources for digitally under-resourced languages through translations of  Huckleberry Finn , a project supported by the France-Stanford Center. The ROSETTA Project recently organized a workshop at Stanford's Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) on Digital Humanities to Preserve Knowledge and Cultural Heritage that will become a special issue of the  Journal of Digital Humanities and Data Mining.  The ROSETTA Project and Global Huck are also supported by Huma-Num (la TGIR des humanités numériques).

She has two current book projects. One is a book entitled  Jim (Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade),  which will appear in the “Black Lives” biography series edited by David Blight, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Jacquelyn Goldsby for Yale University Press. The other is a book about how Hal Holbrook made Mark Twain a social critic for our time.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin is interviewed by CGTN about the history of Chinese immigrants in the U.S.

New American Studies Prize named for Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Giving Voice to Chinese Railroad Workers

Chinese Railroad Workers on the Long Island Railroad

Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Website

Lifetime Achievement Award in Mark Twain Studies

Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee

Featured Interview in Inside Higher Education

The Oxford Mark Twain

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Feminist Engagements

Mark Twain's Book of Animals

The Mark Twain Anthology

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"Is He Dead?" Production History

Feminist Literary Criticism

Feminism Definition

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Feminist literary criticism (also known as feminist criticism) is the literary analysis that arises from the viewpoint of feminism , ​ feminist theory , and/or feminist politics.

Critical Methodology

A feminist literary critic resists traditional assumptions while reading a text. In addition to challenging assumptions that were thought to be universal, feminist literary criticism actively supports including women's knowledge in literature and valuing women's experiences. The two main features of feminist literary criticism include:

• Identifying with female characters: By examining the way female characters are defined, critics challenge the male-centered outlook of authors. Feminist literary criticism suggests that women in literature have been historically presented as objects seen from a male perspective.
• Reevaluating literature and the world in which literature is read: By revisiting the classic literature, the critic can question whether society has predominantly valued male authors and their literary works because it has valued males more than females.

Embodying or Undercutting Stereotypes

Feminist literary criticism recognizes that literature both reflects and shapes stereotypes and other cultural assumptions. Thus, feminist literary criticism examines how works of literature embody patriarchal attitudes or undercut them, sometimes both happening within the same work.

Feminist theory and various forms of feminist critique began long before the formal naming of the school of literary criticism. In so-called first-wave feminism, the "Woman's Bible," written in the late 19th century by Elizabeth Cady Stanton , is an example of a work of criticism firmly in this school, looking beyond the more obvious male-centered outlook and interpretation.

During the period of second-wave feminism, academic circles increasingly challenged the male literary canon. Feminist literary criticism has since intertwined with postmodernism and increasingly complex questions of gender and societal roles.

Tools of the Feminist Literary Critic

Feminist literary criticism may bring in tools from other critical disciplines, such as historical analysis, psychology, linguistics, sociological analysis, and economic analysis. Feminist criticism may also look at intersectionality , looking at how factors including race, sexuality, physical ability, and class are also involved.

Feminist literary criticism may use any of the following methods:

• Deconstructing the way that female characters are described in novels, stories, plays, biographies, and histories, especially if the author is male
• Deconstructing how one's own gender influences how one reads and interprets a text, and which characters and how the reader identifies depending on the reader's gender
• Deconstructing how female autobiographers and biographers of women treat their subjects, and how biographers treat women who are secondary to the main subject
• Describing relationships between the literary text and ideas about power, sexuality, and gender
• Critique of patriarchal or woman-marginalizing language, such as a "universal" use of the masculine pronouns "he" and "him"
• Noticing and unpacking differences in how men and women write: a style, for instance, where women use more reflexive language and men use more direct language (example: "she let herself in" versus "he opened the door")
• Reclaiming women writers who are little known or have been marginalized or undervalued is sometimes referred to as expanding or criticizing the canon—the usual list of "important" authors and works. Examples include raising the contributions of early playwright ​ Aphra Behn and showing how she was treated differently than male writers from her own time forward, and the retrieval of Zora Neale Hurston 's writing by Alice Walker .
• Reclaiming the "female voice" as a valuable contribution to literature, even if formerly marginalized or ignored
• Analyzing multiple works in a genre as an overview of a feminist approach to that genre: for example, science fiction or detective fiction
• Analyzing multiple works by a single author (often female)
• Examining how relationships between men and women and those assuming male and female roles are depicted in the text, including power relations
• Examining the text to find ways in which patriarchy is resisted or could have been resisted

Feminist literary criticism is distinguished from gynocriticism because feminist literary criticism may also analyze and deconstruct the literary works of men.

Gynocriticism

Gynocriticism, or gynocritics, refers to the literary study of women as writers. It is a critical practice of exploring and recording female creativity. Gynocriticism attempts to understand women’s writing as a fundamental part of female reality. Some critics now use “gynocriticism” to refer to the practice and “gynocritics” to refer to the practitioners.

American literary critic Elaine Showalter coined the term "gynocritics" in her 1979 essay “Towards a Feminist Poetics.” Unlike feminist literary criticism, which might analyze works by male authors from a feminist perspective, gynocriticism wanted to establish a literary tradition of women without incorporating male authors. Showalter felt that feminist criticism still worked within male assumptions, while gynocriticism would begin a new phase of women’s self-discovery.

Resources and Further Reading

• Alcott, Louisa May. The Feminist Alcott: Stories of a Woman's Power . Edited by Madeleine B. Stern, Northeastern University, 1996.
• Barr, Marleen S. Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond . University of North Carolina, 1993.
• Bolin, Alice. Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession . William Morrow, 2018.
• Burke, Sally. American Feminist Playwrights: A Critical History . Twayne, 1996.
• Carlin, Deborah. Cather, Canon, and the Politics of Reading . University of Massachusetts, 1992.
• Castillo, Debra A. Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism . Cornell University, 1992.
• Chocano, Carina. You Play the Girl . Mariner, 2017.
• Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, editors. Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader . Norton, 2007.
• Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, editors. Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets . Indiana University, 1993.
• Lauret, Maria. Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America . Routledge, 1994.
• Lavigne, Carlen. Cyberpunk Women, Feminism and Science Fiction: A Critical Study . McFarland, 2013.
• Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches . Penguin, 2020.
• Perreault, Jeanne. Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography . University of Minnesota, 1995.
• Plain, Gill, and Susan Sellers, editors. A History of Feminist Literary Criticism . Cambridge University, 2012.
• Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, editors. De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography . University of Minnesota, 1992.

This article was edited and with significant additions by Jone Johnson Lewis

• What Is The Speech Act Theory: Definition and Examples
• Emma Watson's 2014 Speech on Gender Equality
• Stylistics and Elements of Style in Literature
• Womanist: Definition and Examples
• Feminist Philosophy
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Feminist Criticism and The Turn of the Screw

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Feminist criticism comes in many forms, and feminist critics have a variety of goals. Some are interested in rediscovering the works of women writers overlooked by a masculine-dominated culture. Others have revisited books by male authors and reviewed them from a woman’s point of view to understand how they both reflect and shape the attitudes that have held women back.

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Introduction

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James, H., Beidler, P.G. (1995). Feminist Criticism and The Turn of the Screw . In: Beidler, P.G. (eds) The Turn of the Screw. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13713-8_8

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Cambridge University Press 9780521852555 - A History of Feminist Literary Criticism - Edited by Gill Plain and Susan Sellers Excerpt

Introduction

Gill Plain and Susan Sellers

The impact of feminism on literary criticism over the past thirty-five years has been profound and wide-ranging. It has transformed the academic study of literary texts, fundamentally altering the canon of what is taught and setting a new agenda for analysis, as well as radically influencing the parallel processes of publishing, reviewing and literary reception. A host of related disciplines have been affected by feminist literary enquiry, including linguistics, philosophy, history, religious studies, sociology, anthropology, film and media studies, cultural studies, musicology, geography, economics and law.

Why is it, then, that the term feminist continues to provoke such ambivalent responses? It is as if the very success of the feminist project has resulted in a curious case of amnesia, as women within and without the academy forget the debt they owe to a critical and political project that undid the hegemony of universal man. The result of this amnesia is a tension in contemporary criticism between the power of feminism and its increasing spectrality. Journalists and commentators write of ‘post-feminism’, as if to suggest that the need to challenge patriarchal power or to analyse the complexities of gendered subjectivities had suddenly gone away, and as if texts were no longer the products of material realities in which bodies are shaped and categorised not only by gender, but by class, race, religion and sexuality. This is not a ‘post-feminist’ history that marks the passing of an era, but rather a ‘still-feminist’ one that aims to explore exactly what feminist criticism has done and is doing from the medieval era to the present. It is a history that both records and appraises, examining the impact of ideas in their original contexts and their ongoing significance for a new generation of students and researchers. Above all, A History of Feminist Literary Criticism regards the feminist critical project as a vital dimension of literary studies, and it aims to provide an accessible introduction to this vast and vibrant field.

DEFINING FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM

Feminist literary criticism properly begins in the aftermath of ‘second-wave’ feminism, the term usually given to the emergence of women’s movements in the United States and Europe during the Civil Rights campaigns of the 1960s. Clearly, though, a feminist literary criticism did not emerge fully formed from this moment. Rather, its eventual self-conscious expression was the culmination of centuries of women’s writing, of women writing about women writing, and of women – and men – writing about women’s minds, bodies, art and ideas. Woman, as Virginia Woolf observes in A Room of One’s Own , her formative text of feminist literary criticism, is ‘the most discussed animal in the universe’ (1929/1977: 27). 1 Whether misogynist or emancipatory, the speculation excited by the concept of woman, let alone by actual women and their desires, created a rich history upon which second-wave feminism could be built. From the beginning feminist literary criticism was keen to uncover its own origins, seeking to establish traditions of women’s writing and early ‘feminist’ thought to counter the unquestioning acceptance of ‘man’ and male genius as the norm. A History of Feminist Literary Criticism thus begins by illustrating the remarkable ‘protofeminist’ writing that would eventually form the basis of modern feminist thought.

As the title of the book indicates, in this history of feminism our principal emphasis is on literary criticism and textuality. However, as the reader progresses through the volume, it will become clear that the boundaries between literature and politics, activism and the academy, are fluid and, consequently, can be difficult to determine. Although these blurred boundaries are frequently productive, we would argue that feminist literary criticism can be distinguished from feminist political activism and social theory. Most obviously, the difference lies in the dimension of textuality. From Carolyn Dinshaw’s account of medieval symbolism, to Mary Eagleton’s consideration of patriarchal critique, to Heather Love’s analysis of queer bodies, debates around representation underpin all the chapters in this book. Across the centuries woman has been the subject of innumerable reconfigurations, and with every reinscription comes the necessity of re-reading. In the space of the text woman can be both defamed and defended, and it is here that the most persuasive possibilities can be found for imagining the future of the female subject.

USING A HISTORY OF FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM

The book is divided into three parts, each of which is prefaced by an introduction explaining the rationale behind the territory covered. The chapters themselves have been produced by experts in the diverse fields of feminist literary criticism, and have been written in an accessible manner to provide orientation in the subject area for the beginner. However, because each chapter has been freshly commissioned for this project, and the contributors asked to return to the original sources, the resulting essays do more than provide an overview – they also offer new insights into the material, its history, reception and ongoing relevance, and these new readings will be of interest to scholars working in all areas of literary practice. Feminist literary criticism is a field characterised by the extensive cross-fertilisation of ideas. A number of key thinkers and their essays will appear in different contexts, and it is important to acknowledge these productive overlaps. Texts such as Adrienne Rich’s ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, Hélène Cixous’ ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble did not simply influence one school of feminist thought, but rather resonated across the entire spectrum of critical activity. The index will guide readers to the multiple locations in which discussions of key thinkers, essays, articles and books can be found. We recommend reading ‘across’ the book as well as through it in order to experience the divergent, dissonant and challenging encounters that characterise the feminist enterprise.

Despite the battles and the bad press, feminist literary criticism is a source of pleasure, stimulation, confirmation, insight, self-affirmation, doubt, questioning and reappraisal: it has the potential to alter the way we see ourselves, others and the world. A History of Feminist Literary Criticism is indebted to the many wonderful studies of women, gender and writing that have enriched our understanding of the potentialities of feminist enquiry. In looking afresh at this material we are both taking stock and embracing the emergence of new critical possibilities. Feminist literary criticism is a subject with a future and it deserves the considered reflection of a substantial history. We hope this volume will contribute to that process.

1. Virginia Woolf (1929/1977), A Room of One’s Own , London: Grafton.

Pioneers and protofeminism

Introduction to part i.

The history of feminist literary criticism properly begins some forty or fifty years ago with the emergence of what is commonly termed second-wave feminism. The history of this critical movement and its impact on culture and society will be charted in the second and third parts of this volume, but it is important to recognise that this story has a prequel. To write of pioneers and protofeminism is to explore the diverse texts, voices and lives that articulated feminist ideas and feminist critical positions before such categories existed. Medieval women were not ‘feminists’ and they had few opportunities to be critics, but as Carolyn Dinshaw observes in the opening essay, ‘texts affect lived lives, and … if women had relatively little opportunity to author texts, they nonetheless felt their effects’ (Dinshaw, 15). The history of women’s engagement with texts and textuality far exceeds the parameters of second-wave feminism, and this history is integral to contemporary understandings of feminist practice.

Yet the history of the representation of women, their writing, their reading and their literary critical acts would in total need not a single volume but a library of texts, and in consequence Part I of this book sets out a combination of overview and example that indicates the complexity of feminism’s origins without attempting an exhaustive survey. The overview begins with the first two chapters, Carolyn Dinshaw’s ‘Medieval Feminist Criticism’ and Helen Wilcox’s ‘Feminist Criticism in the Renaissance and Seventeenth Century’, which together establish the conditions of pre-Enlightenment female subjectivity. These chapters illustrate that ‘woman’ was a site of intense literary and critical activity that examined the power of the feminine as symbol even as it worked to contain and constrain women in practice. For Dinshaw, the tension between literary embodiments and lived reality is at the heart of the often fraught debates that surrounded narrative practice. These debates in many cases prefigured the concerns of contemporary feminist enquiry, but ultimately Dinshaw concludes that ‘medieval critical gestures’ cannot straightforwardly be regarded as ‘protofeminism’. Nonetheless, there are important historical continuities that need to be acknowledged, and a recognition of the relationship between gender and textuality is integral to understanding the literature and culture of the medieval period, from Chaucer’s iconic Wife of Bath to Margery Kempe’s autobiographical acts of self-construction.

By the early modern period, however, it is possible to trace a significant shift in women’s relationship to textual culture. Helen Wilcox observes that it is now possible to describe women as ‘feminists’, and to define a range of ‘phenomena’ that might be termed feminist literary criticism. Indeed, she argues that a woman writer could ‘play the part of a protofeminist simply by virtue of her decision to write’ (Wilcox, 31). This was a period in which ‘continuing constraints as well as new freedoms’ provoked ‘an outburst of writing by women’ (37), and although in general women’s literacy levels remained low, they nonetheless acquired far greater visibility as both producers and consumers of texts. From pamphlets to poetry and from devotional literature to advice books, women became active participants in literary culture. Their position, however, was not uncontested, and Wilcox traces the dominant debates that circulated around women’s character, her writing, her place in society and her relationship to the legacy of Eve. Drawing on a remarkable range of often anonymous publications, Wilcox finds a dynamic political engagement taking shape in women’s licensed and unlicensed engagement with the practices of reading and writing.

Dinshaw and Wilcox together provide a crucial mapping of the often evasive and unexpected territory of women’s textual encounters, and their work gives a clear indication of the historical embeddedness of literary critical practice. The remaining chapters of Part I, however, adopt a contrasting but supplementary approach. Across the historical expanse of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many women could have stood as pioneers of ‘protofeminism’: writers and activists whose thinking, writing and ‘living’ challenged the tenets of patriarchal social organisation and questioned the prescriptive norms of gender. In Britain writers such as Mary Shelley, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Brontë, Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot produced unconventional texts – and in some cases lived unconventional lives – which have long since been recognised as prefiguring the concerns of later feminist enquiry. Similarly political ‘feminist’ activists from Frances Power Cobbe to Millicent Garrett Fawcett produced groundbreaking journalism, polemics and cultural criticism. Much of this work has slipped from view, but it stands as a pertinent reminder of the symbiotic relationship between feminist politics and textual practice. 1 Even the seemingly conventional Jane Austen can be seen as a contributor to a history of pre-feminist writing, producing in Northanger Abbey (1803/1818) both a witty demonstration of the value of women’s education and a powerful defence of that most ‘female’ of literary forms, the novel.

Fiction, then, was a crucial means through which women engaged with politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in America too the literary and the political were inescapably intertwined. As Elaine Showalter has observed, ‘there were few novels by English women in the nineteenth century as radical or outspoken with regard to the woman question as those by their American counterparts’ (1991: 3): from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Louisa May Alcott, from Margaret Fuller to Sojourner Truth, American women wrote, articulated and embodied a discourse that acknowledged the agency and independence of the female subject. The plenitude of pioneers around the world continues into the fin de siècle and the early twentieth century. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Olive Schreiner and Winifred Holtby were just some of the influential writers whose textual practice was profoundly political and whose fictions constituted vital acts of cultural criticism, women who left a legacy of argument and ideas that would enrich the later practice of feminist literary criticism. Yet, from this wealth of women writers and early feminist activists, one woman stands out as exemplary. The influence of Mary Wollstonecraft on over two hundred years of feminist enquiry cannot be overstated, and Susan Manly’s chapter offers a detailed analysis of Wollstonecraft as a literary critic and advocate of reason, who eloquently anticipated the concerns of second-wave feminism. At the heart of Wollstonecraft’s work is an attack on the authority of Edmund Burke, John Milton and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘fellow authors of a fictitious femininity, and patriarchal enemies in league against female emancipation’ (Manly, 49). Manly demonstrates the critical strategies through which Wollstonecraft exposed Burke’s sentimental ‘aestheticisation of beauty’, Rousseau’s construction of an ideal, objectified woman, and the flawed misogynistic construction of Milton’s Eve. In her detailed readings of these texts, Wollstonecraft reveals herself adept at the deployment of what would later be termed feminist critique. But this is not the limit of her achievement. As Manly illustrates, Wollstonecraft also struggled to escape the confines of gendered subjectivity by exposing ‘the fictionality of both femininity and masculinity’ (50). Wollstonecraft’s argument for the constructed nature of gender was a strategic one: if writing and thinking could demonstrably be seen to transcend the body, then there would be no argument for excluding women from the public sphere. Yet her eloquent exposure of gendered textuality makes more than a transient political point: it also makes explicit the extent to which textual constructions shape subjectivities. Wollstonecraft viewed the woman writer as rational, ethical and humane, the antithesis of ‘false sensibility’ (49), an achievement which, over a century later, would see her Vindication of the Rights of Woman acclaimed by Winifred Holtby as ‘the bible of the women’s movement in Great Britain’ (1934: 41).

Manly’s chapter traces the legacy of Wollstonecraft across the nineteenth century, exploring her often unacknowledged influence on writers from Maria Edgeworth to George Eliot. But it would not be until the twentieth century that another writer would leave a legacy of feminist thought and critical enquiry to rival that of Wollstonecraft. Our second ‘pioneer’, then, is Virginia Woolf, ‘the founder of modern feminist literary criticism’ (Goldman, 66). As Jane Goldman demonstrates, Woolf’s groundbreaking essay A Room of One’s Own constitutes a ‘modern primer’ for feminist criticism, and her influence on later generations of feminist thought has been immense. Woolf matters to feminist literary criticism not simply as a writer and critic, but also as a subject of critical enquiry. The rescuing of Woolf from the apolitical prisons of Bloomsbury and madness was one of the formative projects of second-wave feminist literary criticism (see Carr, Chapter 7), giving rise to a constructive relationship between the writer, her criticism and her critics. It is Woolf we must thank for the provocative concepts of thinking back through our mothers, the woman’s sentence and the androgynous mind. It is Woolf who wrote of killing the angel in the house and demanded the adaptation of the book to the body. Goldman’s chapter illustrates how, in Woolf’s creative contradictions and her disruptive boundary-crossing imagination, we find sources for the many, often conflicting, theoretical positions of contemporary feminist thought.

Finally, Part I of this book examines the legacy of Simone de Beauvoir. Like Woolf, Beauvoir has left feminism with a rich lexicon of images and ideas, not least of which is her definitive assertion that ‘one is not born a woman’. This concept is implicit in the work and debates surrounding all our protofeminists and pioneers, but in Beauvoir’s The Second Sex this fundamental idea receives explicit articulation. As discussed in the general introduction, the recognition of the social construction of gender and the coercive nature of gendered subjectivities has been at the centre of feminist literary criticism, enabling it as a discourse to challenge humanist assumptions about identity, nature and progress, and to scrutinise the potent mythical formations of femininity and masculinity. From Kate Millett to Judith Butler, feminist critics have been inspired by Beauvoir, but, as Elizabeth Fallaize argues, the full substance of her monumental work is hardly known. Since the 1990s, a new generation of feminist literary critics have been working to revise the limited perceptions of Beauvoir’s work, and Fallaize contributes to this vital process through a study of Beauvoir’s analysis of myth. Myth, claimed Beauvoir, was instrumental in ‘persuading women of the naturalness of their fate’, and Fallaize traces her examination of feminine archetypes from Stendhal to Sade, in the process finding an ecumenical methodology that anticipates later literary-critical movements from Marxism to structuralism to psychoanalysis. The Second Sex prefaces the point at which A History of Feminist Literary Criticism more obviously begins and, as with Wollstonecraft and Woolf, the echoes of Beauvoir’s influence will resonate throughout its pages.

1. See Barbara Caine (1997), English Feminism 1780–1980 , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Holtby, Winifred (1934), Women and a Changing Civilization , London: John Lane.

Showalter, Elaine (1991), Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Elaine Showalter as a Feminist Critic

Elaine Showalter as a Feminist Critic

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on September 24, 2016 • ( 7 )

Elaine Showalter is an influential American critic famous for her conceptualization of gynocriticism, which is a woman-centric approach to literary analysis, Her A Literature of their Own discusses the -female literary tradition which she analyses as an evolution through three phases. She observes that literary “subcultures” (black, Jewish, Anglo-Indian) tend to pass through these stages: 1) Imitation of the modes of the dominant tradition and internalization of the artistic and social values. 2) Protest against these standards and values and a call for autonomy, 3) Self discovery — turning inward free from’ some of the dependency of opposition, a search for identity.

Viewing the women’s literary tradition in terms of these phases, Showalter calls the first phase as “feminine” spanning from 1840 – 1880 (a phase of imitation, when women writers like George Eliot wrote with male pseudonyms); the second phase as the feminist phase (1880-1920, the phase of protest) when women won voting rights; the third phase as the female phase (1920- till around 1960) when women’s  writing entered a new phase of self-awareness.

Showalter points out that although women writers since the beginning have shared a “covert solidarity” with other women writers and their female audience; there was no expressive communality or self-awareness before the 1840s. Even during the feminine phase, women writers did not see their writing as an expression of their female experiences.Yet the repressive circumstances gave rise to innovative and covert ways to express their inner life, and thus we have the mad woman locked in the attic, the crippled artist and the murderous wife. Despite the restrictions,  the novel from Jane Austen to George Eliot talked about the daily lives and values of women within a family and community.

In the feminist phase which denotes political involvement, women writers questioned the stereotypes and challenged the restrictions of women’s  language, denounced the ethic of self-sacrifice and used their fictional dramatization of oppression to bring about social and political changes. They embodied a “declaration of independence” in the female tradition and stood up to the male establishment in an outspoken manner. Challenging the monopoly of the male press, many feminist journals came into being, and some like Virginia Woolf, controlled their own press.

The female phase was marked by courageous self-exploration and a return to more realistic modes of expression. Post 1960 writers like Doris Lessing , Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble undertook an authentic anger and sexuality as sources of creative power, while reasserting their  continuity with women writers of the past.

Showalter also posited that feminist criticism falls into two categories: woman as reader (Feminist Critique) and woman as writer (Gynocriticism). In the first category, women are consumers of a male-produced literature and this aspect of feminist criticism is concerned with the stereotypical representations of women, fissures in male-oriented literary theory and how patriarchy manipulated the female audiences. Gynocriticism attempts to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature and focus on female subjectivity, female language and female literary career.

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In her essay Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness (1981), Showalter says, “A cultural theory acknowledges that there are important differences between women as writers: class, race nationality, and history are literary determinants as significant as gender. Nonetheless, women’s culture forms a collective experience within the cultural whole, an experience that binds women writers to each other over time and space”. I want to understand this please ?

The theory of culture as a factor affecting women’s writing is inclusive of the theories of biology, language and psyche. The influence of all these factors is guided by the cultural situation of a woman. History has not included female experience. Thus, history is inadequate to understand women’s experience. Woman’s culture is not a sub-culture of main culture. They are part of general culture itself. If patriarchal society applies restraints on them, they transform it into complementarity. Thus, women experience duality of culture including general culture and women’s culture. Women form ‘muted group’ in society and men form ‘dominant group’. Ardener suggested a diagram with two circles representing these two groups respectively. All language of the dominant group is all acceptable language. So, the muted group has to follow the same language. The part of the circle representing the muted group which does not coincide with the other circle represents that part of women’s life which has not found any expression in history. It represents the activities, experiences and feelings of women which are unknown to men. Since they do not form part of men’s life, they do not get representation in history. This ‘female zone’ is also known as ‘wild zone’ since it is out of the range of dominant boundary. Women could not write on experiences belonging exclusively on the wild zone. They have to give representation to the dominant culture in their texts. There are other muted groups as well than women. For instance, literary identity of a black American poet is forced upon her by the trends of the dominant group. Feminist critics try to identify the aspects of women writers which do not follow the trends established by the male writers. For instance, Woolf’s works show tendencies other than those of modernism. However, these tendencies are visible in the sections which have so far been considered obscure or imperfect. Feminist critics should attempt ‘thick description’ of women’s writings. It is possible only when effect of gender and female literary tradition are considered among the various factors that affect the meaning of the text. Showalter concludes that the ‘promised land’ or situation when there would be no difference in the texts written by man and woman could not be attained. Attainment of that situation should not be the aim of feminist critics.

Thank you so much sir for generous help but does Showalter refer that women would be writing alike ? By having the same female literary tradition, would they supposedly write alike ?

What is value of gynocriticism in the context of feminist criticism?

https://literariness.org/2016/09/25/gynocriticism-a-brief-note/amp/

•  Gynocriticism A Brief Note – Literary Theory and Criticism Notes
• The Madwoman – Standplaats wereld

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The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism

Preface - Acknowledgements - Introduction: The Story So Far C.Belsey & J.Moore - Women and Literary History D.Spender - The True Story of How I Became My Own Person R.Coward - Disturbing Nurses and the Kindness of Sharks T.Morrison - Queer Desire in The Well of Loneliness L.Pouchard - The Difference of View M.Jacobus - Representing Women: Re-presenting the Past G.Beer - Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays H.Cixous - Feminist, Female, Feminine T.Moi - Women and Madness: the Critical Phallacy S.Felman - Promises: the Fictional Philosophy in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman J.Moore - Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism C.Spivak - Cross-dressing, Gender and Representation: Elvis Presley M.Garber - Feminism and the Postmodern: Theory's Romance D.Elam - Women's Time J.Kristeva - The Looking Glass, from the Other Side L.Irigaray - Summaries and Notes - Glossary - Suggestions for Further Reading - Notes on Contributors - Index

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Encyclopedia

Writing with artificial intelligence, feminist criticism.

• © 2023 by Angela Eward-Mangione - Hillsborough Community College

Feminist Criticism is

• a research method , a type of textual research , that literary critics use to interpret texts
• a genre of discourse employed by literary critics used to share the results of their interpretive efforts.

Key Terms: Dialectic ; Hermeneutics ; Semiotics ; Text & Intertextuality ; Tone

Foundational Questions of Feminist Criticism

• Consider stereotypical representations of women as the beloved, mothers, virgins, whores, and/or goddesses. Does the text refer to, uphold, or resist any of these stereotypes? How?
• What roles have been assigned to the men and women in the text? Are the roles stereotypical? Do gender roles conflict with personal desires?
• Does the text paint a picture of gender relations? If so, how would you describe gender relations in the text? On what are they based? What sustains them? What causes conflict between men and women?
• Are gender relations in the text celebrated? Denigrated? Mocked? Mystified? If so, how?

Discussion Questions and Activities: F eminist/Gender Studies

• Define gender, gender roles, patriarchy, and stereotypical representations of gender in your own words.
• Describe the relationship between culture and gender roles. How do culture and gender roles inform each another?
• Read “ Barbie Doll ” by Marge Piercy. Choose the stanza that you think most markedly represents how gender itself is socially constructed. What words, phrases, or lines in the stanza inform your choice?
• Compare and contrast how society treats and advises the girl in the poem with what she does after her good nature wears out “like a fan belt.” Does the poem present the socially constructed nature of gender as positive?
• Evaluate the role that the lines “Consummation at last, / To every woman a happy ending” play in the poem. Quote from the poem to support your interpretation.

Brevity - Say More with Less

Clarity (in Speech and Writing)

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44 Student Essay Example: Feminist Criticism

The following student essay example of femnist criticism is taken from Beginnings and Endings: A Critical Edition . This is the publication created by students in English 211. This essay discusses Ray Bradbury’s short story ”There Will Come Soft Rains.”

Burning Stereotypes in Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains”

By Karley McCarthy

Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” takes place in the fallout of a nuclear war. The author chooses to tell the story though a technologically advanced house and its animatronic inhabitants instead of a traditional protagonist. The house goes about its day-to-day as if no war had struck. It functions as though its deceased family is still residing in its walls, taking care of the maintenance, happiness, and safety of itself and the long dead family. On the surface, Bradbury’s story seems like a clear-cut warning about technology and humanity’s permissiveness. Given that the short story was written in the 1940s, it’s easy to analyze the themes present and how they related to women of the time. Bradbury’s apt precautionary tale can be used as a metaphor for women’s expectations and role in society after World War II and how some women may have dealt with the fallout of their husbands coming back home with psychological trauma.

To experience “There Will Come Soft Rains” from a feminist perspective, readers must be aware of the societal norms that would have shaped Bradbury’s writing. “Soft Rains” takes place in the year 2026. Yet the house and norms found throughout were, “modeled after concept homes that showed society’s expectations of technological advancement” (Mambrol). This can be seen in the stereotypical nuclear family that once inhabited the house as well as their cliché white home and the hobbies present. According to writer Elaine Tyler May’s book Homeward Bound, America’s view of women’s role in society undertook a massive pendulum swing during the World War II era as the country transitioned through pre-war to post-war life. For example, in a matter of decades support for women joining the workforce shifted from 80% in opposition to only 13% (May 59). Despite this shift, the men coming back from the war still expected women to position themselves as the happy housewife they had left behind, not the newfound career woman architype. Prominent figures of the 40s, such as actress Joan Crawford, portrayed a caricature of womanhood that is subservient to patriarchal gender roles, attempting to abandon the modern idea of a self-sufficient working-class woman (May 62-63). Keeping this in mind, how can this image of the 1940s woman be seen in Bradbury’s work?

Throughout Bradbury’s life he worked towards dismantling clichés in his own writing. A biography titled simply “Ray Bradbury” mentions that even in his earlier work, he was always attempting to “escape the constrictions of stereotypes” found in early science fiction (Seed 13). An example of him breaking constrictions could be his use of a nonhuman protagonist. Instead, Bradbury relies on the personification of the house and its robotic counterparts. Bradbury describes the house as having “electric eyes” and emotions such as a, “preoccupation with self-protection which bordered on a mechanical paranoia,” something that would make the house quiver at the sounds of the outside world (2-3). While these descriptions are interesting, Bradbury’s use of personification here is a thought-provoking choice when one breaks down what exactly the house is meant to personify.

One analysis of this story notes that the house’s personification, “replaces the most human aspects of life,” for its inhabitants (Mambrol). Throughout the story, the house acts as a caretaker, records a schedule, cooks, cleans, and even attempts to extinguish an all-consuming fire. While firefighting is not a traditionally feminine career or expectation from the 1940s (more on that later), most of the house’s daily tasks are replacing jobs that were traditionally held by a household’s matriarch. Expanding further on this dichotomy of male/woman tasks, a chore mentioned in the story that is ‘traditionally’ accepted as a masculine household duty—mowing the law—is still assigned as a male task. This is feels intentional to the house’s design as Bradbury is, “a social critic, and his work is pertinent to real problems on earth” (Dominianni 49). Bradbury’s story is not meant to commentate on just an apocalypse, but society at large.  Bradbury describes the west face of the house as, “black, save for five places” (Bradbury 1-2). These “five places” are the silhouettes of the family who had been incinerated by a nuclear bomb. The family’s two children are included playing with a ball, but the mother and father’s descriptions are most important. The mother is seen in a passive role, picking flowers, while the father mows the lawn. The subtext here is that the man is not replaceable in his mundane and tedious task. Only the woman is replaced. While this is a small flash into the owners’ lives, what “human aspect” or autonomy of the father’s life has been replaced by the house’s actions if the house is mainly personifying only the traditional 1940s female-held positions? The message here is that a man’s position in society is irreplaceable while a woman’s is one of mere support.

While this dynamic of husband vs subordinate is harmful, wives supporting their partners is nothing new. Homeward Bound explains that life after World War II for many women meant a return to their previous position as a housewife while many men came home irreparably damaged by years of warfare. PTSD, known then as shellshock, affected countless men returning from the war. Women were often expected to mend the psychological damage as part of their domestic responsibilities, even if they were unprepared for the realities of the severe trauma their husbands had faced (May 64-65). The psychological effects of the war came crashing into women’s lives the same way that the tree fell into the autonomous house in “Soft Rains”. As mentioned earlier, firefighting is not a task someone from the 40s would expect of women, but the house’s combustion and its scramble to save itself can be seen as a metaphor for women attempting to reverse the cold reality that the war had left them with. The picturesque family they had dreamed of would forever be scarred by the casualties that took place overseas. While Bradbury may not have meant for women to be invoked specifically from this precautionary tale, it’s obvious that him wanting his science fiction to act as, “a cumulative early warning system against unforeseen consequences,” would have impacted women of the time as much as men (Seed 22). The unforeseen consequences here is the trauma the war inflicted on families.

While men were fighting on the front lines, women back home and in noncombat positions would still feel the war’s ripples. In “Soft Rains” the nuclear tragedy had left, “a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles” (Bradbury 1). Despite the destruction, the house continues its routine as though nothing had happened. This can be seen as a metaphor for how women responded to the trauma their husbands brought back from the war. Women were urged to, “preserve for him the essence of the girl he fell in love with, the girl he longs to come back to. . .The least we can do as women is to try to live up to some of those expectations” (May 64). Following this, many could have put their desires and personal growth to the side to act as a secondary character in their husband’s lives.

The final line can be read as the culmination of similarities between post-war women and Bradbury’s house. The violence and destruction that fell upon the house in its final moments leaves little standing. What’s remarkable is how the house still attempts to continue despite its destruction. The final lines of the short story exemplify this: “Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam: ‘Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…’” (Bradbury 5). The house is acting just like the women from the 40s, clinging to their past in an attempt to preserve something that had already been lost, society’s innocence. One analysis points out that, “The house is depicted in this way because it represents both humanity and humanity’s failure to save itself” (Mambrol). While it might be wrong to say that women were unable to save themselves in this situation, this quote does touch on an idea present in the feminist metaphor for “Soft Rains”. The preservation of “the essence of the girl he fell in love with, the girl he longs to come back to” was a failure (May 64). The same way that the house cannot preserve itself from destruction, women cannot preserve an image of themselves that had already dissolved. As mentioned earlier, women had already entered the workforce, a huge step towards removing sexist stereotypes around women’s worth. After garnering work-based independence, it seems impossible that the idea of women solely as men’s support would not immolate.

While Bradbury’s “Soft Rains” can be viewed as an apt precautionary tale with real modern world issues at hand, in many ways it is a period piece. As a writer in the 1940s, it’s hard to imagine that Bradbury’s story would not have been influenced by the framework of a nuclear family and the stereotypical expectations of this time. Bradbury’s use of personification opens dialogue about gender roles in the 1940s and how war had complicated patriarchal expectations. Despite his attempt to bypass science fiction stereotypes, his story is full of metaphor for gender stereotypes. Using a feminist lens to analyze the story allows it to be read as a metaphor for war and its effects on married women. The standard analysis appears to say that, “machine no longer served humanity in “There Will Come Soft Rains”; there humanity is subservient to machinery” (Dominianni 49). From a feminist perspective, instead of machine, the house represents patriarchy and gender norms. While men suffered greatly during World War II, women often put their wants and futures on hold to support their husbands. This is a selfless act that shows the resilience of women despite their society’s wish to downplay their potential and turn them into mere support.

Works Cited

Bradbury, Ray. “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains.” Broome-Tioga BOCES, 1950, pp. 1-5. btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20by%20Ray%20Bradbury.pdf.

Dominianni, Robert. “Ray Bradbury’s 2026: A Year with Current Value.” The English Journal , vol. 73, no. 7, 1984, pp. 49–51. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/817806

Mambrol, Nasrullah. “Analysis of Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains.” Literary Theory and Criticism , 17 Jan. 2022.

May, Elaine Tyler. “War and Peace: Fanning the Home Fires.”  Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era.  20th ed., Basic Books, 2008, pp. 58-88.

Seed, David. “Out of the Science Fiction Ghetto.”  Ray Bradbury (Modern Masters of Science Fiction).  University of Illinois, 2015, pp. 1-45.

Critical Worlds Copyright © 2024 by Liza Long is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Feminist criticism : essays on theory, poetry, and prose

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Feminist Criticism in Literature: Character of Women in Books Essay

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Feminist criticism is a literature trait, which deals with the rights of women, and other issues concerning women. Feminist criticism is a trait that involves analyzing the picture and character of women in books. The trait is also a political campaign, which has an aim of influencing the way people see and take women. This is achievable when a book advocates for the rights of women or the book demonstrates the way a woman is undergoing oppression daily by her male counterpart. When one critically analyses all these issues the result is feminist criticism.

In the short play ‘Trifles’, feminism as a trait is a very important technique. The book shows how the man oppresses the woman figure. The role of the woman is to be led by the man and follow what the man wants. During that period, the word of man is final and whatsoever condition is an objection allowed coming from the woman. This treatment of women by their men counterparts is mean and selfish. The men cease to notice the hard work of women and their dedication to the various roles they carry out. The neighboring farmer, sheriff, and attorney demonstrate the superiority of men.

They criticize the work of Mrs. Wright saying that, it is not up to the expected standards. Considering that a farmer’s wife has a lot of work both in the house and in the farm, they fail to appreciate the work that she whole-heartedly achieves. It is for this reason that man and woman have taken separate sides. All sides are advocating for their rights and looking to justify their biased reasons. This leads to forming of alliances based on gender, an example in ‘Trifles’ the women form an alliance against the men, in which they hide the real truth from the men because they feel sympathy for Mrs. Wright (Cobrin)

The unimportance of women in the play is a critical factor for the women should follow all the things that their men counterparts impose on them. This means that women should follow all the orders even though they do not support the action. In demonstrating the unimportance of women, irony is in use extensively. The heading of the short play trifle means something that is small. It conveys that the woman is miniature creature with not much importance in the world. In the book “Minnie”, before she is in marriage, she is extraordinarily beautiful, and she sings and makes people happy. Then Minnie changes after her marriage to Wright. The process of changing in Winnie symbolically is in the form of an explanation where they use a bird and its cage. The bird describes Minnie and the birdcage signifies marriage, which changes the life of the bird. When Minnie enters into marriage, which is a lifelong commitment, the marriage changes her to another personality. The new personality is sad and hates the husband for changing her joyful personality.

Frequently men dictate for women, in doing this they are trying to show superiority. An example is a sheriff, and the county attorney, when they should be searching for evidence they are busy criticizing the misconduct of Winnie saying that she is not neat. An argument erupts when the men try to involve the women in the conversation looking down on Winnie because the women undoubtedly support her.

The book is an example of a murder case where Winnie’s husband decides that he does not want the family to socialize with the other people of the community. Before Winnie’s marriage, she is remarkably lively, joyful, and sings which makes people happy, but now she is remarkably different she is now Mrs. Wright. The bird is extremely valuable to Winnie because it is the only thing that reminds her of the good times before she is married. Therefore, she feels a lot of annoyance towards her husband when he kills the bird; the reaction is planning a plot to kill her husband. The reason to justify Winnie’s actions is that, Wright has changed her life to the worst for an exceedingly long time, and it is time he pays vividly for everything he has done.

It is during the 1900s period when women are heavily disregarded because they are homemakers. Men do not appreciate the work that women do though it is not an easy role. Despite the importance of the critical role women play in society, men still fail to appreciate them. In the book, the women have highly significant clues on the murder of Mr. Wright. The ignorance of the men hinders them from noticing this. If only they were keen, they would have been able to solve the case due in a very short time. When investigating a case a person needs to view all the possibilities. The investigator should give space for all possibilities that can lead to solving the case no matter the nature of the cause (Christakos)

The character traits of the men in the play are that there are very important, stern but in the real situation, the women portray a better picture. In that, during the investigation period in Mr. Wright’s house, the women are quick to notice issues that can be of help in the investigation towards finding the murderer of Mr. Wright. Some of the things they notice are that the house is very dull and disorganized. They guess that the house being in that situation is that, Mr. Wright has succeeded in changing her real characteristics to a very careless and sad character. The women decide to be loyal to their gender, and they hide the box with the dead bird from the men. At the same time, their stealing the box is an act that is illegal and coldhearted to society.

The character of Mrs. Hale is judgmental since she has not visited her neighbors the Wright’s for a whole year because the climate of the house is dull and cold. She is also human; this is because after the death of Mr. Wright, she feels guilty. After all, she might have done something to prevent this from happening. For example if they were friends with Winnie then maybe she would not be so sad leave alone being lonely, then probably she would be in a better position and the husband would still be alive.

Mrs. Peters is very sympathetic with the situation that they are facing a situation that she is in a relationship with. Mrs. Peters has lost her two-year-old child to stillness. This child was the firstborn, and until now, she has not forgotten the painful experience.

Mrs. Wright is previously known as Winnie before marriage. The marriage has made her a very sad, lonely and bitter woman. The dominating characteristics of the husband are the reasons for her drastic change. The man is the head of the family so; all that they say is a command no matter how unpleasant it is to the counterpart.

Feminism criticism is a critical style that is widely in use in the short play (Salas). The treatment of women by their male counterparts is one of the ways of demonstrating feminist criticism. The other method is where women form alliances that work against women, and in these alliances, the women discuss how men are unfair, mistreated and fail to appreciate the things that they do. The women also justify their actions saying that it’s the only means of survival, keeping in mind that the men counterparts are too dominating for women to bond naturally.

Works Cited

Christakos, George. Integrative Problem-Solving in a Time of Decadence. Newark, Delaware: Springer, 2010.

Cobrin, Pamela. From winning the vote to directing on Broadway: the emergence of women on the New York stage,. Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 2009.

Salas, Susan. Hispanic Literature Criticism: Guimarães Rosa-Viramontes. Farmington Hills, Michigan: Gale Group, 1999.

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IvyPanda. (2022, January 9). Feminist Criticism in Literature: Character of Women in Books. https://ivypanda.com/essays/feminist-criticism-in-literature/

"Feminist Criticism in Literature: Character of Women in Books." IvyPanda , 9 Jan. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/feminist-criticism-in-literature/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Feminist Criticism in Literature: Character of Women in Books'. 9 January.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Feminist Criticism in Literature: Character of Women in Books." January 9, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/feminist-criticism-in-literature/.

1. IvyPanda . "Feminist Criticism in Literature: Character of Women in Books." January 9, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/feminist-criticism-in-literature/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Feminist Criticism in Literature: Character of Women in Books." January 9, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/feminist-criticism-in-literature/.

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