FEMINISM
Second –wave feminism was inspired by the
political activism of the 60s and connected
historically with the first-wave feminism
which produced the Declaration of Women’s
Rights in 1848 and culminated in the
campaign for women suffrage during the
early twentieth century.
 Feminist study of literature has generated a
commitment to recovering forgotten,
ignored, silenced or disguised past women
writers.
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This recovery has led to the re-reading of
literary texts by men.
 Writing by men is explored by feminist readers
for the ways in which it incorporates replicates
or perpetuates the patriarchally inflected
relationships between men and women.
 Kate Millet’s attack on the writings of Freud and
Lawrence in her Sexual Politics is a classic
example.
 Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own or
Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic
produced pioneering works of second-wave
feminism.
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These identified the presence of a literary history
pertaining to women and promoted both a feminist
critique (concerned with women readers) and a
gynocritics (concerned with women writers).
New French Feminism is a group of French
feminists who celebrated the specificity of
feminine discourse as a way of contesting
traditional patriarchal constructs of sexual
difference.
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Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic
argue that Jane Austen created a paradigm of
the double text which paid lip-service to
patriarchal literary standards even while it
subverted them.
They also address the reality of women authors’
exclusion from the predominantly male
pantheon of literary works.
They challenge male-centered theories of
literary creativity such as Harold Bloom’s
“anxiety of influence” theory, by proposing an
alternative anxiety of authorship.
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre problematizes the
female stereotypes of angel (Jane) or monster
(Bertha or the madwoman in the attic).
 They have been criticized for over-emphasizing the
narrative of female victimization
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and for focusing of other determinants in the lives too
narrowly on writing to the exclusion of women: class,
ideology, sexuality, history, etc.
or for ignoring other concerns as well as literary
output, as regards women authors of colour.
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Concern with language, the textualizing of sex
or gender: whether or not one can speak of
gender in language.
The masculine text and its divergence from the
feminine text, already addressed by Woolf in A
Room of One’s Own re-emerged in the 60-70s
coinciding with the post-structuralist
exploration of signification through textuality
and the influential language-based theories of
Lacan.
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Cixous, one of the members of The New French
Feminism (Kristeva, Irigaray) coined the term
écriture féminine in The Laugh of the Medusa
where she advocates a type of writing that
challenges language patterns expressive of male
totalizing assumptions and practices and
advocates (defends)the de-emphasizing of the
gender of the writer (female) in favour of the
writing effect” of the text (feminine).
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Male textual practice has favoured an abstract
analytical discourse from which women have
been excluded on the grounds of their supposed
inferior capacity for these forms of expression
and thought.
Cixous claims that the problem is not the barren
of women from theoretical language but the low
value placed on feminine discourse.
Écriture féminine places emphasis on the
gendering of writing rather than on the gender
of the writer.
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Men are not barred from this practice; Joyce is a
writer close to this. The greatest impediment to
women’s recognition in literature lies in the
nature of their relationship to language.
Kristeva, close to Derrida, Barthes and other
structuralists and post-structuralists, accepts
Lacan’s proposition that in order for the child to
gain mastery of the language with all its
associations of definition and control, the child
must enter the Symbolic order which is malegendered and phallocentric.
GILBERT AND GUBAR
THE MADWOMAN IN THE ATTIC: THE WOMAN WRITER AND THE
19TH CENTURY LITERARY IMAGINATION
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Strengths and limitations of second –wave
feminism.
Pulled between separatists and assimilationist
tendencies (disavow the given order and form
their own communities or striving for equal
treatment.
The Madwoman in the Attic reflects the
pressures from both sides.
All parties assumed that all women shared a set
of similar experiences and that patriarchy is
essentially the same everywhere.
This has been challenged later on by Barbara
Smith or Judith Butler.
The Madwoman in the Attic is a reference to
Bertha, Rochester’s hidden first wife.
 She stands for everything the woman writer
must try to repress to write books acceptable by
male standards.
 Psychological approach to literature.
 Focus on the psychic cost of repression and on
bodily symptoms resulting from that societal
oppression.
 The woman who speaks out is branded an
“active monster”, the woman that remains silent
risks madness.
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Gilbert and Gubar attended to the strategies
women had adopted to survive in a male
dominated society, thus focusing on the world
that most women inhabit.
Recovery of women’s histories and celebration of
women’s successes.
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They opposed Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of
influence” according to which a male author felt
fear he was not his own creator.
Strong poets were at war with their precursors.
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Literary Oedipal struggle model, typically
patriarchal.
He describes literary history as a warfare of
fathers and sons. The poetic process defined as a
sexual encounter between a male poet and his
female muse. It doesn’t fit women.
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Gilbert and Gubar talk about: Anxiety for
authorship: an isolation that felt like illness, an
alienation that felt like madness as women
writers of the 19th century wrote in defiance of
the social injunction that writing wasn’t a
woman’s work.
A fear that she cannot create, because she
cannot become a precursor, writing can
destroy/isolate her.
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Women’s battle is not against their male
precursors’ reading of the world but against his
reading of them (women).
In order to define herself as an author she must
redefine the terms of her socialization, what
Adrienne Rich has called re-vision: the act of
looking back, of entering an old text from a new
critical direction.
The woman writer experiences her gender as a
painful obstacle. She is victimized by the
inferiorized and alternative psychology of
women under patriarchy.
 As Elaine Showalter suggests: women writers
participate in a quite different subculture from
that inhabited by male writers.
 Contemporary women writers’ energy and
authority stems from the 18th and 19th century
foremothers who struggled in isolation that felt
the anxiety to authorship as an illness, an
alienation, a madness, a paralysis to overcome.
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Criticized by their treatment of women as a unitary
category and their omission of non-white women
writers.
Not all women had the same fundamental experiences
and women writers could not be judged according to
one universal standard.
The exploration of difference challenged the notion of
“sisterhood” (70s assumption that all women shared
certain similarities and would gain political unity
through their common experience of being oppressed).
FEMINIST AND QUEER THEORY
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Feminist criticism: part of the broader feminist
political movement that seeks to rectify sexist
discrimination and inequalities.
Feminist theory and criticism: revolutionary
change to literary and cultural studies by
expanding the canon, by critiquing sexist
representation and values, by stressing the
importance of gender and sexuality, by
proposing institutional and social reforms.
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Theorists of a “feminist aesthetic” argue that
women have a literature of their own, possessing
its own images, themes, characters, forms, styles,
and canons.
Elaine Showalter: Women writers form a
subculture sharing distinctive economic, politic,
and professional realities, all of which help
determine specific problems and artistic
preoccupations that mark women’s literature.
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Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar: 19th
women writers had to negotiate alienation
and psychological disease to attain literary
authority, which they achieved by
reclaiming the heritage of female creativity,
remembering their lost foremothers, and
refusing the debilitating cultural roles of
“angel” and “monster” assigned to them by
patriarchal society.
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Countering Bloom’s masculinist “anxiety of
influence”, their “anxiety of authorship” depicts
the precursor poet as a sister or mother whose
example enables the creativity of the latecomer
writer to develop collaboratively against male
literary authority.
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Diseases common among women in maledominated, misogynistic society include:
agoraphobia, anorexia, bulimia,
claustrophobia, hysteria, and madness in
general, and they recur in the images,
themes, and characters of women’s
literature.
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Judith Fetterley: Women read differently
than men. She examines classic American
fiction and points out that this is not
“universal” but masculine literature, which
forces women readers to identify against
themselves.
Such literature neither expresses nor
legitimates women’s experiences, and in
reading it women have to think as men,
identify with male viewpoints, accept male
values and interests, and tolerate sexist
hostility and oppression.
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Under such conditions, women must become “resisting
readers” rather than assenting ones, using feminist
criticism to challenge male domination of the
institutions of literature and to change society.
Psychoanalysis is fundamental to a great
deal of feminist theory and criticism.
 However, feminist psychoanalysis is
typically revisionist. It has had to work
through and criticize the phallo-centric”
presuppositions and prejudices of Freud,
Lacan, and others.
 Feminine anxiety of authorship, in its
opposition to the masculine anxiety of
influence, reconfigures the “oedipal”
relationship between writers as cooperative
and nurturing rather than competitive and
rivalrous.
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Écriture féminine transforms Lacan’s idea of
the Imaginary, casting it not simply as an
infantile sphere of primary drives superseded
(reemplazar) on the way to the patriarchal
Symbolic order, but as a liberating domain of
bodily rhythms and pulsations associated with
the mother that permeates literature, especially
modern experimental poetry.
The pre-Symbolic Imaginary order, a realm of
bisexual/ androgynous/polymorphous sexuality,
opens the possibility of sexual liberation from
the suffocating confines of the “compulsory
heterosexuality” that dominates patriarchal
culture.
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Within feminist circles, there are political
differences and conflicts of interests:
colour/white women, different classes, different
sexualities, different nations and groups.
The “politics of difference” opens onto a world of
differences and multiple identities among and
within women themselves. The politics of
difference promotes two ideas: there are many
women’s literatures across the globe and there
are many modes of resisting reading.
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Some criticise that the emphasis on the
multiplicity of female identities undermines the
united front of feminist but advocates (defiende) of
the politics of difference think that herding all
women into a homogeneous category is
reductive and unlikely to disturb the dominant
order.
FEMINISM VS QUEER THEORY
An influential field built on ideas from
feminist criticism, gender studies, women’s
studies, and lesbian and gay studies is
queer theory.
 It begins by criticizing the dominant
heterosexual binary, masculine/feminine,
which enthrones “the” two sexes and casts
other sexualities as abnormal, illicit or
criminal.
 Queer theory attacks the homophobic and
patriarchal basis of heterosexuality.
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It aims beyond lesbian and gay rights philosophies to
study other so-called perverse, deviant, and
alternative sexualities (sodomite, hermaphrodite,
homosexual…), stressing the socially constructed
character of sexualities.
 Of particular interest are transgressive phenomena
such as drug, camp, cross dressing and transexuality,
which highlight the nonbiological, performative
aspects of gender construction.
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To be masculine or feminine requires practicing an
array of rituals which cross-dressers parody in the
production of gender identity.