PSYCHOANALYTICAL APPROACH
Questions to answer about the approach.
1. Who is Sigmund Freud and what is his tripartite model of the human mind?
2. According to Freud, how are dreams related to the human psyche?
3. When did psychoanalytical theory become popular?
4. How do psychoanalytical critics see or understand a text?
5. What do psychoanalytical critics look for when they read a text?
6. As a psychoanalytical critic, what might you look for in Heart of Darkness?
7. What do you think are the strengths of this approach? The weaknesses?
Psychoanalysis and Sigmund Freud
We started by talking about what you already know about Sigmund Freud and his ideas. He's one
of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, if only because versions of his ideas have
permeated popular culture; it's unlikely that anyone in this class has never heard of, or used, a
Freudian idea--such as a Freudian slip, dream analysis, or even the word "unconscious."
Freud was both a medical doctor and a philosopher. As a doctor, he was interested in charting
how the human mind affected the body, particularly in forms of mental illness, such as neurosis
and hysteria, and in finding ways to cure those mental illnesses. As a philosopher, Freud was
interested in looking at the relationship between mental functioning and certain basic structures
of civilization, such as religious beliefs. Freud believed, and many people after him believe, that
his theories about how the mind worked uncovered some basic truths about how an individual
self is formed, and how culture and civilization operate.
When Freud looks at civilization (which he does in Civilization and its Discontents), he sees two
fundamental principles at work, which he calls the "pleasure principle" and the "reality
principle." The pleasure principle tells us to do whatever feels good; the reality principle tells us
to subordinate pleasure to what needs to be done, to work. Subordinating the pleasure principle
to the reality principle is done through a psychological process Freud calls SUBLIMATION,
where you take desires that can't be fulfilled, or shouldn't be fulfilled, and turn their energy into
something useful and productive. A typical Freudian example of this would focus on sex. Sex is
pleasurable; the desire for sexual pleasure, according to Freud, is one of the oldest and most
basic urges that all humans feel. (The desire for sexual pleasure begins in early infancy,
according to Freud. We'll get to that in a bit). But humans can't just have sex all the time. If we
did, we'd never get any work done. So we have to sublimate most of our desires for sexual
pleasure, and turn that sexual energy into something else--into writing a paper, for example, or
into playing sports. Freud says that, without the sublimation of our sexual desires into more
productive realms, there would be no civilization.
The pleasure principle makes us want things that feel good, while the reality principle tells us to
channel the energy elsewhere. But the desire for pleasure doesn't disappear, even when it's
sublimated to work. The desires that can't be fulfilled are packed, or REPRESSED, into a
particular place in the mind, which Freud labels the UNCONSCIOUS.
Because it contains repressed desires, things that our conscious mind isn't supposed to want, and
isn't supposed to know about, the unconscious is by definition inaccessible to the conscious
mind--you can't know what's in your unconscious by thinking about it directly. However, there
are some indirect routes into the contents of the unconscious.
The first, and perhaps most familiar, is dreams. According to Freud in The Interpretation of
Dreams), dreams are symbolic fulfillments of wishes that can't be fulfilled because they've been
repressed. Often these wishes can't even be expressed directly in consciousness, because they are
forbidden, so they come out in dreams--but in strange ways, in ways that often hide or disguise
the true wish behind the dream.
Dreams use two main mechanisms to disguise forbidden wishes: CONDENSATION and
DISPLACEMENT. Condensation is when a whole set of images is packed into a single image or
statement, when a complex meaning is condensed into a simpler one. Condensation corresponds
to METAPHOR in language, where one thing is condensed into another. "Love is a rose, and
you'd better not pick it"--this metaphor condenses all the qualities of a rose, including smell and
thorns, into a single image. Displacement is where the meaning of one image or symbol gets
pushed onto something associated with it, which then displaces the original image. Displacement
corresponds to the mechanism of METONYMY in language, where one thing is replaced by
something corresponding to it. An example of metonymy is when you evoke an image of a
whole thing by naming a part of it--when you say "the crown" when you mean the king or
royalty, for example, or you say "twenty sails" when you mean twenty ships. You displace the
idea of the whole thing onto a part associated with that thing. You might think of condensation
and metaphor as being like Saussure's syntagmatic relations, which happen in a chain (x is y is
z), and displacement and metonymy being like Saussure's associative relations.
Another way into the unconscious besides dreams is what Freud calls PARAPRAXES, or slips
of the tongue; he discusses these in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Such mistakes,
including errors in speech, reading, and writing, are not coincidences or accidents, Freud says.
Rather, they reveal something that has been repressed into the unconscious. A third way into the
unconscious is jokes, which Freud says are always indicative of repressed wishes. He discusses
this route to the unconscious in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.
You can probably tell from these three routes into the unconscious--dreams, parapraxes, and
jokes--that psychoanalysis asks us to pay a lot of attention to LANGUAGE, in puns, slips of the
tongue, displacements and condensations, etc. This suggests how psychoanalysis is directly
related to literary criticism, since both kinds of analysis focus on close readings of language.
Psychoanalytic literary criticism--or at least the kind that's based on Freud's ideas--often fits
better with the humanist models of literary production than with the structuralist and poststructuralist models.
Whatever route is taken into the unconscious, what you find there, according to Freud, is almost
always about sex. The contents of the unconscious consist primarily of sexual desires which have
been repressed. Freud says that sexual desires are instinctual, and that they appear in the most
fundamental acts in the process of nurturing, like in a mother nursing an infant. The instincts for
food, warmth, and comfort, which have survival value for an infant, also produce pleasure,
which Freud defines specifically as sexual pleasure. He says our first experiences of our bodies
are organized through how we experience sexual pleasure; he divides the infant's experience of
its body into certain EROTOGENIC ZONES. The first erotogenic zone is the mouth, as the baby
feels sexual pleasure in its mouth while nursing. Because the act of sucking is pleasurable (and,
for Freud, ALL pleasure is sexual pleasure), the baby forms a bond with the mother that goes
beyond the satisfaction of the baby's hunger. That bond Freud calls LIBIDINAL, since it
involves the baby's LIBIDO, the drive for sexual pleasure.
These erotgenic zones are the ORAL, the ANAL, and the PHALLIC, and they correspond to
three major stages of childhood development. They take place roughly between the ages of 2 to
5, though Freud was often revising his estimate of the ages when these stages occurred; later
psychoanalysts argue that the oral stage begins soon after birth, with the first experience of
nursing, and that the phallic stage ends somewhere between ages 3 to 5. The exact ages at which
an infant goes through these stages are less important, in understanding psychoanalysis as theory,
than what those stages represent. The oral stage is associated with incorporation, with taking
things in, with knowing no boundaries between self and other, inside and outside. The anal stage
(which Freud says has a lot to do with toilet training) is associated with expelling things, with
learning boundaries between inside and outside, and with aggression and anger. The phallic
stage--and Freud argues that "phallic" refers to both penis and clitoris, and is common to both
boys and girls--leads a child toward genital masturbation, and hence to the gateway of adult
sexuality.
P
SYCHOANALYTICAL CRITICISM aims to show that a literary or cultural work is
always structured by complex and often contradictory human desires. Whereas New Historicism
and Marx-inspired Cultural Materialism analyze public power structures from, respectively, the
top and bottom in terms of the culture as a whole, psychoanalysis analyzes microstructures of
power within the individual and within small-scale domestic environments. That is, it analyzes
the interiority of the self and of the self's kinship systems. By analyzing the formation of the
individual, however, psychoanalysis also helps us to understand the formation of ideology at
large—and can therefore be extended to the analysis of various cultural and societal phenomena.
Indeed, for this reason, psychoanalysis has been especially influential over the last two decades
in culture studies and film analysis.
Psychoanalysis is complicated by the fact that it has undergone numerous transformations at
the hands of highly influential individual psychoanalysts. It is therefore necessary, as with many
of the theories currently influencing scholarship and teaching, to differentiate between individual
thinkers. For the purposes of studying literature and culture, the most influential theorists today
are Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), and Julia Kristeva (1941-?). The
links on the left will lead you to modules explaining in more detail specific concepts by these
individual thinkers; however, you might like to begin with a quick overview:
Example Essay
The scientist Freud was concerned to analyze logically the seeming illogic, the apparent
irrationality, of dreams and, on occasion, of nightmares. Both he and Conrad penetrated into
the darkness, the darkness entered into when people sleep or when their consciences sleep,
when they are free to pursue secret wishes, whether in dreams, like Freud's analysands
[patients], or in actuality, like Kurtz and his followers. The key word is darkness; the black of the
jungle for Conrad is the dark of the sleeping consciousness for Freud.
In still another sense, Marlow, in his trip up the Congo, has suffered through a nightmare, an
experience that sends him back a different man, now aware of depths in himself that he cannot
hide. The tale he narrates on the Nellie is one he is unable to suppress; a modern version of
Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, he has discovered a new world and must relate his story to regain
stability. The account is a form of analysis--for him and for Conrad. In a way, it provides a
defense against Kurtz's vision.
--From "Introduction to the Danse Macabre: Conrad's Heart of Darkness." by Frederick R. Karl
POST-COLONIAL APPROACH
Questions to answer about this approach.
1. What was the scramble for Africa? What European countries were involved? What African
countries became colonized?
2. What country colonized the Congo? Why was this country interested in the Congo?
3. Describe three ways life for the native Congolese changed under this occupation.
5. What is a post-colonial critic and how might he or she understand or read a text?
6. As a post-colonial critic, what might you look for in Heart of Darkness?
7. What do you think are the strengths of this approach? The weaknesses?
At the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, King Leopold of Belgium gained international support
for his creation of the Congo Free State through proposals to end slavery in the Congo, protect
the rights of the natives, and guarantee free trade. In the popular media he was often portrayed as
a philanthropist who was selflessly devoting his efforts to rescue and "civilize" the peoples of
central Africa. Five years later, a young writer, inspired to adventure by the celebrated travels of
Henry M. Stanley and believing the glowing reports of Leopold's rule, got a job on a steamer
headed up the Congo River. Joseph Conrad turned his Congo experiences into Heart of
Darkness, published in 1899. During the next decade, Leopold's rule of the Congo would
increasingly become viewed with reference to the last words of Conrad's fictional ivory company
agent, the depraved Mr. Kurtz: "The horror! The horror!"
Reports of slave labor, mutilations and other forms of torture used to increase the collection
of ivory and rubber were highlighted by the Congo Reform Association in efforts to end
Leopold's rule of the Congo. Founded in England in March of 1904 with an American branch
created later that year, the Congo Reform Association gained support from leading political and
cultural figures in both countries, including Arthur Conan Doyle in England, and Mark Twain
and Booker T. Washington in the United States. Although formed to protest a brutal colonial
regime, the Association was not an anti-imperialist organization. Its proposed solutions to the
crisis in the Congo included various forms of unilateral and international intervention, including
the partition of the Congo among other European powers. At the beginning of the twentieth
century, the Congo reform movement raised uncomfortable issues of international responsibility
for addressing atrocities through "humanitarian intervention" that are still debated today.
Post-colonial theory deals with the reading and writing of literature written in previously or
currently colonized countries, or literature written in colonizing countries which deals with
colonization or colonized peoples. It focuses particularly on
1. the way in which literature by the colonizing culture distorts the experience and realities,
and inscribes the inferiority, of the colonized people
2. on literature by colonized peoples which attempts to articulate their identity and reclaim
their past in the face of that past's inevitable otherness.
It can also deal with the way in which literature in colonizing countries appropriates the
language, images, scenes, traditions and so forth of colonized countries.
This page addresses some of the complexities of the post-colonial situation, in terms of the
writing and reading situation of the colonized people, and of the colonizing people.
The literature(s) of the colonized
Postcolonial theory is built in large part around the concept of otherness. There are however
problems with or complexities to the concept of otherness, for instance:
1. otherness includes doubleness, both identity and difference, so that every other , every
different than and excluded by is dialectically created and includes the values and
meaning of the colonizing culture even as it rejects its power to define;
2. the western concept of the oriental is based, as Abdul JanMohamed argues, on the
Manichean allegory (seeing the world as divided into mutually excluding opposites): if
the west is ordered, rational, masculine, good, then the orient is chaotic, irrational,
feminine, evil. Simply to reverse this polarizing is to be complicit in its totalizing and
identity-destroying power (all is reduced to a set of dichotomies, black or white, etc.);
3. colonized peoples are highly diverse in their nature and in their traditions, and as beings
in cultures they are both constructed and changing, so that while they may be 'other' from
the colonizers, they are also different one from another and from their own pasts, and
should not be totalized or essentialized -- through such concepts as a black consciousness,
Indian soul, aboriginal culture and so forth. This totalization and essentialization is often
a form of nostalgia which has its inspiration more in the thought of the colonizers than of
the colonized, and it serves give the colonizer a sense of the unity of his culture while
mystifying that of others; as John Frow remarks, it is a making of a mythical One out of
many...
4. the colonized peoples will also be other than their pasts, which can be reclaimed but
never reconstituted, and so must be revisited and realized in partial, fragmented ways.
You can't go home again.
Postcolonial theory is also built around the concept of resistance, of resistance as subversion,
or opposition, or mimicry -- but with the haunting problem that resistance always inscribes the
resisted into the texture of the resisting: it is a two-edged sword. As well, the concept of
resistance carries with it or can carry with it ideas about human freedom, liberty, identity,
individuality, etc., which ideas may not have been held, or held in the same way, in the colonized
culture's view of humankind.
On a simple political/cultural level, there are problems with the fact that to produce a literature
which helps to reconstitute the identity of the colonized one may have to function in at the very
least the means of production of the colonizers -- the writing, publishing, advertising and
production of books, for instance. These may well require a centralized economic and cultural
system which is ultimately either a western import or a hybrid form, uniting local conceptions
with western conceptions.
The concept of producing a national or cultural literature is in most cases a concept foreign to
the traditions of the colonized peoples, who (a) had no literature as it is conceived in the western
traditions or in fact no literature or writing at all, and/or b) did not see art as having the same
function as constructing and defining cultural identity, and/or c) were, like the peoples of the
West Indies, transported into a wholly different geographical/political/economic/cultural world.
(India, a partial exception, had a long-established tradition of letters; on the other hand it was a
highly balkanized sub-continent with little if any common identity and with many divergent sub-
cultures). It is always a changed, a reclaimed but hybrid identity, which is created or called forth
by the colonizeds' attempts to constitute and represent identity.
The very concepts of nationality and identity may be difficult to conceive or convey in the
cultural traditions of colonized peoples.
There are complexities and perplexities around the difficulty of conceiving how a colonized
country can reclaim or reconstitute its identity in a language that is now but was not its own
language, and genres which are now but were not the genres of the colonized. One result is that
the literature may be written in the style of speech of the inhabitants of a particular colonized
people or area, which language use does not read like Standard English and in which literature
the standard literary allusions and common metaphors and symbols may be inappropriate and/or
may be replaced by allusions and tropes which are alien to British culture and usage. It can
become very difficult then for others to recognize or respect the work as literature (which
concept may not itself have relevance -- see next point).
There other are times when the violation of the aesthetic norms of western literature is
inevitable,
1. as colonized writers search to encounter their culture's ancient yet transformed heritage,
and
2. as they attempt to deal with problems of social order and meaning so pressing that the
normal aesthetic transformations of western high literature are not relevant, make no
sense.
The idea that good or high literature may be irrelevant and misplaced at a point in a culture's
history, and therefore for a particular cultural usage not be good literature at all, is difficult for us
who are raised in the culture which strong aesthetic ideals to accept.
The development (development itself may be an entirely western concept) of hybrid and
reclaimed cultures in colonized countries is uneven, disparate, and might defy those notions of
order and common sense which may be central not only to western thinking but to literary forms
and traditions produced through western thought.
The term 'hybrid' used above refers to the concept of hybridity, an important concept in postcolonial theory, referring to the integration (or, mingling) of cultural signs and practices from the
colonizing and the colonized cultures ("integration" may be too orderly a word to represent the
variety of stratagems, desperate or cunning or good-willed, by which people adapt themselves to
the necessities and the opportunities of more or less oppressive or invasive cultural impositions,
live into alien cultural patterns through their own structures of understanding, thus producing
something familiar but new). The assimilation and adaptation of cultural practices, the crossfertilization of cultures, can be seen as positive, enriching, and dynamic, as well as as oppressive.
"Hybridity" is also a useful concept for helping to break down the false sense that colonized
cultures -- or colonizing cultures for that matter -- are monolithic, or have essential, unchanging
features.
The representation of these uneven and often hybrid, polyglot, multivalent cultural sites
(reclaimed or discovered colonized cultures searching for identity and meaning in a complex and
partially alien past) may not look very much like the representations of bourgeois culture in
western art, ideologically shaped as western art is to represent its own truths (that is, guiding
fictions) about itself.
To quote Homi Bhabha on the complex issue of representation and meaning from his article in
Greenblatt and Gun's Redrawing the Boundaries,
Culture as a strategy of survival is both transnational and translational. It is transnational
because contemporary postcolonial discourses are rooted in specific histories of cultural
displacement, whether they are the middle passage of slaver and indenture, the voyage
out of the civilizing mission, the fraught accommodation of Third World migration to the
West after the Second World War, or the traffic of economic and political refugees within
and outside the Third World. Culture is translational because such spatial histories of
displacement -- now accompanied by the territorial ambitions of global media
technologies -- make the question of how culture signifies, or what is signified by culture
, a rather complex issue. It becomes crucial to distinguish between the semblance and
similitude of the symbols across diverse cultural experiences -- literature, art, music,
ritual, life, death -- and the social specificity of each of these productions of meaning as
they circulate as signs within specific contextual locations and social systems of value.
The transnational dimension of cultural transformation -- migration, diaspora,
displacement, relocation -- makes the process of cultural translation a complex form of
signification. the natural(ized), unifying discourse of nation , peoples , or authentic folk
tradition, those embedded myths of cultures particularity, cannot be readily referenced.
The great, though unsettling, advantage of this position is that it makes you increasingly
aware of the construction of culture and the invention of tradition.
The literature(s) of the colonists:
In addition to the post-colonial literature of the colonized, there exists as well the postcolonial
literature of the colonizers.
As people of British heritage moved into new landscapes, established new founding national
myths, and struggled to define their own national literature against the force and tradition of the
British tradition, they themselves, although of British or European heritage, ultimately
encountered the originating traditions as Other, a tradition and a writing to define oneself against
(or, which amounts to the same thing, to equal or surpass). Every colony had an emerging
literature which was an imitation of but differed from the central British tradition, which
articulated in local terms the myths and experience of a new culture, and which expressed that
new culture as, to an extent, divergent from and even opposed to the culture of the "home", or
colonizing, nation.
The colonizers largely inhabited countries which absorbed the peoples of a number of other
heritages and cultures (through immigration, migration, the forced mingling of differing local
cultures, etc.), and in doing so often adapted to use the myths, symbols and definitions of various
traditions. In this way as well the literature of the hitherto colonizers becomes 'post-colonial'. (It
is curiously the case that British literature itself has been colonized by colonial/postcolonial
writers writing in Britain out of colonial experiences and a colonial past.)
In this regard a salient difference between colonialist literature (literature written by
colonizers, in the colonized country, on the model of the "home" country and often for the home
country as an audience) and post-colonial literature, is that colonialist literature is an attempt to
replicate, continue, equal, the original tradition, to write in accord with British standards;
postcolonial literature is often (but not inevitably) self-consciously a literature of otherness and
resistance, and is written out of the specific local experience.
READER RESPONSE APPROACH
Questions to answer about this approach.
1. What is the central focal point of reader response theory?
2. What is an interpretive community? Why do different interpretive communities produce
different readings of texts?
3. Explain the difference between understanding the reader as a consumer and understanding the
reader as a producer of meaning.
4. Does reader response theory suggest that any interpretation is valid? Explain why or why not.
5. What does a reader response critic pay attention to when she reads a text?
6. As a reader response critic, how might you create meaning from Heart of Darkness?
7. What do you think are the strengths of this approach? The weaknesses?
Reader-Response Criticism
In the reader-response critical approach, the primary focus falls on the reader and the process of
reading rather than on the author or the text.
Theoretical Assumptions:


Literature is a performative art and each reading is a performance, analogous to
playing/singing a musical work, enacting a drama, etc. Literature exists only when it is read;
meaning is an event (versus the New Critical concept of the "affective fallacy").
The literary text possesses no fixed and final meaning or value; there is no one "correct"
meaning. Literary meaning and value are "transactional," "dialogic," created by the
interaction of the reader and the text. According to Louise Rosenblatt, a poem is "what the
reader lives through under the guidance of the text."
Varying Emphases:
How readers interpret texts: Sometimes called "subjective." May deal with published "readings" of
texts and/or study nonprofessional readings (e.g., students). These critics explain similarities in
readings in varying ways:



"styles" or "identity themes" of readers are similar (Norman Holland--psychoanalytic
approach): cf. George Dillon's classification of students' responses to Faulkner's "A Rose for
Emily":
o "Character-Action-Moral Style" ("connected knowers")--treat literature as
coextensive with experience
o "Diggers for Secrets"--find hidden meanings in literature, psychoanalyze motives of
characters, etc.
o "Anthropologists"--look for cultural patterns, norms, values [e.g. feminists, New
Historicists].
readers belong to same "interpretive communities" (Stanley Fish) with shared reading
strategies, values and interpretive assumptions (i.e., shared "discourse"); concept of the
"informed reader."
readers are situated in a common cultural/historical setting and shaped by dominant
discourses and ideologies (New Historicist emphasis). "Reception theory/aesthetics" studies
the changing responses of the general reading public over time.
How texts govern reader: Focus on how texts guide, constrain, control reading; often use linguistic,
stylistic, narratological methods of analysis. Wolfgang Iser argues that the text in part controls the
reader's responses but contains "gaps" that the reader creatively fills. There is a tension between


"the implied reader," who is established by the "response-inviting structures" of the text; this
type of reader is assumed and created by the work itself
"the actual reader," who brings his/her own experiences and preoccupations to the text
CRITICISM AND
RESOURCES
Those who work with children and young people inevitably concern themselves with
readers' responses to literature. In fact, Louise Rosenblatt's classic work on reader
response literary criticism, Literature as Exploration first published in 1938 and in
multiple editions over the years, has served as a model for the teaching of literary texts
for more than fifty years.
A group of readers together in a reading environment, often a classroom or a library,
sometimes for extended periods of time may be thought of as an interpretive
community. Although this is a community of readers, a particular reader's initial
engagement with a text is ordinarily a private event with meanings internally
experienced in the consciousness of that reader and not necessarily shared. No one
else can participate in that first act of meaning-making even if all are listening to a
reading of the same story. If an adult intermediary is reading aloud, the quality (tone,
emphasis, enthusiasm, etc.) of the reading may influence young people's meaningmaking. One fruitful area of research is to study responses to different readings of the
same text.
Whether or not the text is read aloud, after the reading, the adult intermediary uses all
personal knowledge about individual readers and brings all available literary,
educational, sociological, and communications knowledge to bear in studying the
meaning-making situation. The task of the adult intermediary is to help develop and
maintain the interpretive community and to ensure that each participant finds both
private and public space within that community. The intermediary will observe outward
behaviors for clues to literary response, provide ample time for the experiencing of
personal felt meanings, and encourage young people to enter into discussion with
confidence in and respect for both their own initial meanings and those of others.
Once the process of meaning-making moves from the private to the public domain, the
role of the adult intermediary is both to keep the discussion going and make certain
there is time for reflection, to encourage young people to share their own meanings and
to listen to the meanings of others; and, finally, to refer readers back both to the text and
to their own lives in an effort to track their own processes of meaning-making. The
entire procedure then is one of metacognition in which participants are assisted in
gaining an awareness of their own thought processes as meanings grow and are
shaped both personally and socially. There is ordinarily a movement toward some kind
of shared meaning, but not all will ascribe to it. Even if it were unanimously shared, that
meaning itself would be an event in time and would shift and change to some degree,
even within the same interpretive community.
Reader-response criticism:
The systematic examination of the aspects of the text that arouse, shape, and guide a reader's
response. According to reader-response criticism, the reader is a producer rather than a consumer
of meanings. In this sense, a reader is a hypothetical construct of norms and expectations that can
be derived or projected or extrapolated from the work and may even be said to inhere in the
work. Because expectations may be violated or fulfilled, satisfied or frustrated, and because
reading is a temporal process involving memory, perception, and anticipation, the charting of
reader-response is extremely difficult and perpetually subject to construction and reconstruction,
vision and revision.
Reader-response criticism, however, does not denote any specific theory. It can range from the
phenomenological theories of Wolfgang Iser and Roman Ingarden -- both of whom argue that
although the reader fills in the gaps, the author's intentional acts impose restrictions and
conditions -- to the relativistic analysis of Stanley Fish, who argues that the interpretive strategy
of the reader creates the text, there being no text except that which a reader or an interpretive
community of readers creates. (See also Constance School of Reception Aesthetics, Implied
reader, Reception theory.)
Reader-Response Criticism
Reader-Response criticism is not a subjective, impressionistic free-for-all, nor a legitimizing of
all half-baked, arbitrary, personal comments on literary works. Instead, it is a school of criticism
which emerged in the 1970s, focused on finding meaning in the act of reading itself and
examining the ways individual readers or communities of readers experience texts. These critics
raise theoretical questions regarding how the reader joins with the author "to help the text mean."
They determine what kind of reader or what community of readers the work implies and helps to
create. They also may examine the significance of the series of interpretations the reader
undergoes in the reading process.
Like New Critics, reader-response critics focus on what texts do; but instead of regarding texts as
self-contained entities, reader-response criticism plunges into what the New Critics called the
affective fallacy: what do texts do in the minds of the readers? In fact, a text can exist only as
activated by the mind of the reader. Thus, where formalists saw texts as spacial, reader-response
critics view them as temporal phenomena. And, as Stanley Fish states, "It is not that the presence
of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of
attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities. . . . Interpretation is not the art of
construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not decode poems; they make them" (326327).
Example Essay
Heart of Darkness, again taking our critical topic as our theoretical example, is rather obviously trying to
do something to its reader, to change him or his mind in some way. For one thing, as almost every critic
has recognized, the work is obviously--if complexly--critiquing late nineteenth-century imperialism. But
Heart of Darkness, even as it mounts this explicit critique, also explicitly practices the dogma of
disinterestedness, a paradoxical feat accomplished primarily by making Marlow's act of tale-telling adhere
to Shelley's image: the tale seems more like meditation than speech, and the audience seems less
hearing than overhearing. There Marlow sits, almost invisible in the deepening darkness, simply thinking
aloud. Or so it seems. The presence of his immediate audience seems almost if not entirely incidental,
almost unnecessary to the telling of his tale.
A reader response critic would observe that so many "seemings" should make us wary, suspicious of
what we seem to be seeing. He might also observe that one of the tale's "actions" is not only the usual
conflict of characters, but also the less usual conflict of aesthetics and rhetoric here being discussed. Put
otherwise, different definitions of literature are at war in Heart of Darkness, and the reader is being asked
to sit in judgment on this agony as well as on that being narrated by Marlow, the most obvious instance of
which is his struggle with Kurtz or, if you will, himself. All that we can be certain of, given Conrad's
superior artistry, in this work and in his others, is that each request for the reader's judgment is designed
to prompt rethinking of his conventional or received ways of thinking about and valuing art--and of the
"persons" it fabricates.
--From "Darkening the Reader: Reader Response Criticism and Heart of Darkness" by Adena Rosmarin.
DECONSTRUCTIONISM
Questions to answer about this approach.
1. Who is Jaques Derrida and when did deconstruction gain popularity?
2. What do deconstructionists believe about meaning in a text?
3. What are binary oppositions and how are they important to deconstruction?
4. Explain how one term in a binary opposition can be considered privileged.
5. What does a deconstructionist look for when reading a text?
6. As a deconstructionist, what might you look for in Heart of Darkness?
7. What do you think are the strengths of this approach? The weaknesses?
DECONSTRUCTION
What is it?
Deconstruction: A school of philosophy that originated in France in the late 1960s, has
had an enormous impact on Anglo-American criticism. Largely the creation of its chief
proponent Jacques Derrida, deconstruction upends the Western metaphysical tradition.
It represents a complex response to a variety of theoretical and philosophical
movements of the 20th century, most notably Husserlian phenomenology, Saussurean
and French structuralism, and Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis.
[First paragraph of a seven-page explanation in the Encyclopedia of
Contemporary Literary Theory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).]
Deconstruction: The term denotes a particular kind of practice in reading and,
thereby, a method of criticism and mode of analytical inquiry. In her book The
Critical Difference (1981), Barbara Johnson clarifies the term:
"Deconstruction is not synonymous with "destruction", however. It is in fact much
closer to the original meaning of the word 'analysis' itself, which etymologically
means "to undo" -- a virtual synonym for "to de-construct." ... If anything is
destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to
unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive
reading is a reading which analyses the specificity of a text's critical difference
from itself."
[First paragraph of a four-page definition of the term deconstruction in J.A.
Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, third ed. (London:
Blackwell, 1991)].
Deconstruction: School of philosophy and literary criticism forged in the writings
of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the Belgium/North American
literary critic Paul De Man. Deconstruction can perhaps best be described as a
theory of reading which aims to undermine the logic of opposition within texts.
[Start of a four-page definition of deconstruction in A Dictionary of Critical Theory
(London: Blackwell, 1996).]
Deconstruction: Rarely has a critical theory attracted the sort of dread and
hysteria that deconstruction has incited since its inception in 1967.
[Beginning of an eleven-page entry in A Dictionary of Critical Theory (New York:
Greenwood Press, 1991).]
"Deconstruction" as incorporated without meaning into everyday language,
associated with "grunge"
...We think we speak the English, or French, of today. But our English or French
language of today is of yesterday and elsewhere. The miracle is that language
has not been cut from its archaic roots -- even if we do not remember, our
language remembers, and what we say began to be said three thousand years
ago. Inversely language has incorporated our own times, before even we know,
the most recent elements, linguistic and semantic particles blown by the present
winds.
Here is an example, which I find magnificent and comic, magnificently comic and
comically magnificent, that I have taken from an American magazine destined for
the public dated April 1993. It is the beginning of an illustrated fashion article:
Deconstruction may be the darling of Europe but in the U.S. it's a love-hate
thing. Creases are ironed out, raw edges refined, grunge given a touch of
polish.
In New York, memories are not only short, they are entirely selective.
Grunge -- the so-called fashion revolution which has launched a thousand
headlines in the past six months -- seemed, at the American collections
last week, never to have happened.
Here, in these few lines, treasures snatched from the most noble, the most
elaborate, the most complex thoughts and discourses of our century and the
sixteenth century imperceptibly touch and are exchanged.
Here, "deconstruction" (though does the woman who goes to buy a dress know
what this is?) has become a term that adds a "commercial" mark, a surplus value
of "modernism" to domains totally unforeseen by the author of the thinking of
deconstruction. Here is a word derived from philosophical thinking, that of
Derrida, which no longer resides in philosophy, but "launches" fashion products,
bathroom items, sports equipment, political attitudes. In brief a word which,
having left its native shore, henceforth circulates in the world's blood.
And so this magical word made banal meets (does it know?) another formula
equally magical and rendered banal, this on centuries ago, that reverberates
under a made-up form in the phrase quoted: The revolution which has launched a
thousand headlines. What makes a comeback here in fashionable dress is
Marlowe's beautiful Helen...
[From the Preface written by Hélène Cixous (trans. by Susan Sollers) in The
Hélène Cixous Reader (London: Routledge, 1994): xx-xxi.]
Deconstructionist Theory By Richard Rorty. Excerpted from The Cambridge
History of Literary Criticism -- vol.8 From Formalism to Poststructuralism.
Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Deconstruction in the Encyclopaedia Britannica Online.
1
Identify a Binary Opposition
1.A> Notice what a particular text or school of thought takes to be
natural, normal, self-evident, originary, immediately apparent, or
worthy of pursuit or emulation:






Group x (whites, middle class, Americans, etc.) is "inherently
virtuous"
Group x (darker skinned people, youths, etc.) is "natural and
spontaneous"
Men are naturally x (rational, aggressive, desirous of women,
etc.)
Women are naturally x (nurturing, connected to the earth, etc.)
"Everybody knows that" x is true
Everybody wants x, it is natural to want x, x is an inherent trait
of human nature
1.B> Notice those places where a text is most insistent that there is a
firm and fast distinction between two things:








Men and women, black and white, straight and gay, subject and
object
x precedes y (text: interpretation, Adam: Eve, heterosexuality:
homosexuality)
x is more natural than y (female: male, heterosexuality:
homosexuality)
y is derivative of x or a perversion of x (Milton's Satan: Christ,
"normal" sex: fetishes, criticism: fiction)
y has a parasitic relation to x (fiction: truth, criticism: fiction,
interpretation: text)
x is original and y is imitative (the book: the movie, life: heaven)
y is a manifestation or effect of x (culture: economics, surface:
deep structure, gender: anatomy, practice: theory).
y is an exception or special case and x is the rule
2 Deconstruct the Opposition
2.A > Show how something represented as primary, complete &
originary is derived, composite, and/or an effect of something else.



Because writers always write in relation to prior writers they
learn about in school, fiction is a result of criticism. It depends
on criticism, and is derived from criticism.
Our sense of Winnie the Pooh when we read books about him is
shaped by our memories of the movies. The voices we hear
when we read are the movie voices, and the "original" text is
partially an effect of the movie.
Because consciousness is actually "self-consciousness," (i.e. a
self and a consciousness) consciousness is always already
divided, never simply present to itself.
and/or 2.B> Show how something represented as completely different
from something else only exists by virtue of defining itself against that
something else. In other words, show how it depends on that thing. For
example:



Mulder and Scully do not so much pursue "the Truth" as
uncover errors. If they ever find the whole truth, the show will
end.
Heterosexual only makes sense when opposed to homosexual.
Without homosexuals, there would be no heterosexuals. .
Truth depends on error. Without the concept of error, truth does
not exist.
and/or 2.C> Show how something represented as normal is a special
case.



"Truth" is a story that people find especially convincing.
"Normal" sexual reproduction is the result of several
components that, taken alone, would be called perversions. Thus
normal sex is in fact a specialized perversion.
Whiteness is an ethnicity that disguises the fact it's an ethnicity.
The General Way It Works
In general, as Jonathan Culler puts it, deconstruction works "within an
opposition," but "upsets [its] hierarchy by producing an exchange of
properties." This disrupts not only the hierarchy, but the opposition
itself.
Note how this is different than simply reversing an opposition. For
example consider these reversals of a culturally prevalent opposition:




The Pooh movies are better than the books (reverses the usual
assumption that the book is better & more original than the
movie).
The Joker is cooler than Batman (reverses notion of the hero).
Women are smarter than men (reverses chauvinistic "common
knowledge").
Native Americans are more heroic than cowboys (reverses the
Western).
Reversal is a valuable move, but deconstruction is after bigger game,
because it "deconstructs" the underlying hierarchy. For example:




Our sense of Pooh books is derived from the movies,
Batman is a special kind of villain called a vigilante
Men's sense of their intelligence is dependent on a belief that
women are bimbos
"Cowboy heroism" cannot exist without "bad Indians."
Notice how these statements cripple the underlying hierarchy by
"deconstructing" the opposition that it depends on. Deconstruction
doesn't simply reverse the opposition, nor does it destroy it. Instead it
demonstrates its inherent instability. It takes it apart from within, and
without putting some new, more stable opposition in its place. If you
want to really mess with something, deconstruct it.
A Note On Practicalities
In Stanley's Fish's words, we can deconstruct anything in theory, but not
in everyday practice. The fact that in principle we can deconstruct
anything doesn't mean that we can deconstruct everything, all the time,
and still communicate. We can, however, deconstruct things that annoy
us, point out where a text already deconstructs an opposition, focus on
oppositions authors and poets try (often with difficulty) to keep intact,
and gain insight into how our own sense of ourselves (as well as the
way the culture tries to interpret us) depends on oppositions that can be
deconstructed.
Deconstruction, a critical practice introduced by French philosopher and critic Jacques Derrida,
ostensibly serves to interrogate the assumptions of Western thought by reversing or displacing
the hierarchical "binary oppositions" that provide its foundation. In "Structure, Sign, and Play in
the Discourse of the Human Sciences," a pathbreaking lecture delivered at Johns Hopkins
University in 1966, Derrida challenges the metaphysical premises that shape Western science
and philosophy. Derrida argues that the "structure" determining these discourses (including
"structuralist" theory itself) always presupposes a "centre" that ensures a point of origin,
meaning, being, or presence. What troubles Derrida is that the centre determines a given
systemÕs structure but is itself strangely above or transcendent of such structural analysis or
scrutiny. According to Derrida, "the centre, which is by definition unique, constituted that very
thing within a structure which while governing the structure, escapes structurality" (trans. Bass,
Modern Literary Theory: A Reader 150). Logocentrism, as Derrida codifies this phenomenon,
establishes the metaphysical imperatives of truth, consciousness, and essence that underwrite
Western literature, theology, and science. Derrida foregrounds the following paradox: any
attempt to interrogate and destroy the center invariably causes the production of another center.
"The entire history of the concept of structure," Derrida argues, "...must be thought of as a series
of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the center" (Bass 151).
One consequence of deconstruction, then, is that a theorist's criticism of a given system is limited
in that it is always dependent upon (and complicit with) the prevailing terms of that system.
Deconstruction's suggestion of the critic's complicity with dominant social formations has
translated in the decades following Derrida's work into the pedagogical responsibilities of
colonial, postcolonial, and transnational cultural studies of imperialism and the struggle for
decolonization. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a leading postcolonial critic, uses deconstruction to
problematize the privileged, academic postcolonial critic's unknowing participation in the
exploitation of the Third World.
Derrida's distrust of the logocentric assumption of "being as presence" stems in part from his
considerations of the differences that distinguish between signs within text. In Speech and
Phenomena, Derrida invents the term "differance," punning upon both spatial and temporal
meanings of the verb "differer"--to "differ" and to "defer." The ambiguities between these two
meanings become meaningful only on the written page; as Derrida notes, in spoken French
"differance" (with an "a") and "difference" (with an "e") are indistinguishable. In other words,
since "differance" inheres only in writing and not in speech, Derrida's deconstructive project
seeks to reverse the metaphysical presumption that speech (an indicator of presence or being)
precedes the written word that approximates it. In "Signature Even Context"--a paper that invited
a rather mendacious reply by critic John Searle and, in turn, Derrida's subsequent counterresponse--Derrida deconstructs the binary opposition of speech/writing and argues that writing
precedes speech rather than being its consequence or effect. Here arises one of the central
principles of deconstruction. Derrida examines a hierarchical binary opposition (in this example,
speech/writing) in which one term is privileged over the other. Derrida reverses the binary
opposition by re-privileging writing, but with the important caveat that this inversion is itself
unstable and susceptible to continual displacement. In terms of logocentrism, to privilege writing
over speech is to characterize writing as a new "centre" of meaning. Spivak, again, points toward
deconstruction's limitations in conceptualizing and sustaining an engagement with the politics of
domination. Since deconstruction involves the infinite displacement of hierarchical binary
oppositions (rather than their tacit reversal), the postcolonial critic aiming at substantive social
transformation or revolution finds herself with inadequate power to revise dominant power
structures.
Example Essay
The meanings of the stories of most seamen, says the narrator, are insidet he narration like the kernel of
a cracked nut. I take it the narrator means the meanings of such stories are easily expressed, detachable
from the stories and open to paraphrase in other terms, as when one draws an obvious moral: "Crime
doesn't pay," or "Honesty is the best policy," or "The truth will out," or "Love conquers all." The figure of
the cracked nut suggests that the story itself, its characters and narraive details,are the inedible shell
which must be removed and discarded so the meaning of the story may be assimilated. This relation of
the story to its meanin gis a particular version of the relation of container to thing contained. . . . The
meaning is adjacent to the story, contained with it as nut within shell, but the meaning has no intrinsic
similarity or kinship to the story . . . The one happens to touch the other, as shell surrounds nut, as bottle
its liquid contents.
It is far otherwise with Marlow's stories. Their meaning--like the meaning of a parable--is outside, not in. It
enveloops the tale rather than being enveloped by it. The relation of container and thing contained is
reversed. The meaning now contains the tale. Moreover, perhaps because of that enveloping
containment, or perhaps for more obscure reasons, the relation of the tale to its meaning is no longer that
of dissimilarity and contingency.
--From "Heart of Darkness Revisted" by J. Hillis Miller
FEMINIST APPROACH
Questions to answer about this approach.
1. When and where did the feminist movement begin?
2. Who are some famous feminists? List three historical examples.
3. In a general sense, what is the goal of feminist criticism?
4. What three crucial strategies do feminist critics use to achieve this goal?
5. What questions might a feminist critic ask when reading a text?
6. As a feminist critic, what might you look for in Heart of Darkness?
7. What do you think are the strengths of this approach? The weaknesses?
Feminist Theory -- An Overview
Elizabeth Lee '97
Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own, which describes three stages in the history of
women's literature, also proposes a similar multi-part model of the growth of feminist theory.
First, according to Showalter, comes an androgynist poetics. Next, a feminist critique and female
Aesthetic, accompanied by gynocritics, follows, and these are closely pursued by gynesic
poststructuralist feminist criticism and gender theory.
Androgynist poetics, having relations and perhaps roots in mid-Victorian women's writing of
imitation, contends that the creative mind is sexless, and the very foundation of describing a
female tradition in writing was sexist. Critics of this vein found gender as imprisoning, nor
believed that gender had a bearing in the content of writing, which, according to Joyce Carol
Oates is actually culture-determined. Imagination is too broad to be hemmed in by gender.
However, from the 1970s on, most feminist critics reject the genderless mind, finding that the
"imagination" cannot evade the conscious or unconscious structures of gender. Gender, it could
be said, is part of that culture-determination which Oates says serves as inspiration. Such a
position emphasizes "the impossibility of separating the imagination from a socially, sexually,
and historically positioned self." This movement of thought allowed for a feminist critique as
critics attacked the meaning of sexual difference in a patriarchal society/ideology. Images of
male-wrought representations of women (stereotypes and exclusions) came under fire, as was the
"'division, oppression, inequality, [and] interiorized inferiority for women.'"
The female experience, then, began to take on positive affirmations. The Female Aesthetic arose
-- expressing a unique female consciousness and a feminine tradition in literature -- as it
celebrated an intuitive female approach in the interpretation of women's texts. It "spoke of a
vanished nation, a lost motherland; of female vernacular or Mother Tongue; and of a powerful
but neglected women's culture." Writers like Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, emerging
out of the Victorian period and influenced by its writings were perhaps the first women to
recognize this. In "Professions for Women," Woolf discusses how a woman writer seeks within
herself "the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber," inevitably
colliding against her own sexuality to confront "something about the body, about the passions."
The French feminists of the day discussed this Mother Tongue, calling it l'écriture feminine.
Accessible to men and women alike, but representing "female sexual morphology," l'écriture
feminine sought a way of writing which literally embodied the female, thereby fighting the
"subordinating, linear style of classification or distinction." Showalter finds that whether this
clitoral, vulval, vaginal, or uterine; whether centered on semiotic pulsions, childbearing, or
jouissance, the feminist theorization of female sexuality/textuality, and its funky audacity in
violating patriarchal taboos by unveiling the Medusa, is an exhilarating challenge to phallic
discourse.
There are problems with the Female Aesthetic, which feminist critics recognized. Even its most
fervent fans avoided defining exactly what constituted the style of l'écriture feminine, as any
definition would then categorize it and safely subsume it as a genre under the linear patriarchal
structure. Its very restlessness and ambiguity defied identification as part of its identity. Needless
to say, some feminists and women writers could feel excluded by the surreality of the Female
Aesthetic and its stress on the biological forms of female experience, which, as Showalter says,
also bears close resemblance to sexist essentialism. Men may try their hand at writing woman's
bodies, but according to the feminist critique and Aesthetic, only woman whose very biology
gave her an edge, could read these texts successfully -- risking marginalization and ghettoization
of both women's literature and theory. Lastly, the Female Aesthetic was charged with racism, as
it rarely referred to racial or class differences between women and largely referred to a white
woman's literary tradition.
Gynocritics, which developed shoulder-to-shoulder with the Female Aesthetic, attempted to
resolve some of these problems, by agreeing that women's literature lay as the central concern for
feminist criticism, but "rejected the concept of an essential female identity and style." One
branch of gynocriticism sought to revise Freudian structures and take the edge off of an
adversarial methodology of criticism. These critics emphasized a Pre-Oedipal phase wherein the
daughter's bond to her mother inscribes the key factor in gender identity. Matriarchal values
desolve intergenerational conflicts and build upon a female tradition of literature rather than the
struggle of Oedipus and Lais at the crossroads.
Poststructuralism eventually influenced the course of feminist theory with the idea of a
motherless as well as fatherless text. The female experience, as it relates to texts, only occurs in
the feminine subjectivity of the reading process. "Gynesis" or "gynetic disruptions" occur in texts
when the reader explores "the textual consequences and representations of 'the feminine.'" These
considerations or interruptions in the discourse indicate a consideration or interruption of the
patriarchal system.
Lastly and most recently are developments of an over-arching gender theory, which considers
gender, both male and female, as a social construction upon biological differences. Gender
theory proposes to explore "ideological inscription and the literary effects of the sex/gender
system," and as many advantages, opening up the literary theory stage and bringing in questions
of masculinity into feminist theory. Also, taking gender as a fundamental analytic category
brings feminist criticism from the margin to the center, though risks depoliticizing the study of
women.
Feminist criticism:
A criticism advocating equal rights for women in a political, economic, social, psychological,
personal, and aesthetic sense. On the thematic level, the feminist reader should identify with
female characters and their concerns. The object is to provide a critique of phallocentric
assumptions and an analysis of patriarchal visions or ideologies inscribed in a literature that is
male-centered and male-dominated. Such a reader denounces the outrageously phallic visions of
writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer, refusing to accept the cult of
masculine virility and superiority that reduces woman to a sex object, a second sex, a submissive
other. As Judith Fetterley puts it, "Feminist criticism is a political act whose aim is not simply to
interpret the world but to change it by changing the consciousness of those who read and their
relation to what they read. . . [The first act of a feminist critic is] to become a resisting rather
than an assenting reader and, by this refusal to assent, to begin the process of exorcizing the male
mind that has been implanted in us." On the thematic level, then, the reader rejects stereotypes
and examines woman as a theme in literary works.
On the ideological level, the reader seeks to learn not to accept the hegemonic perspective of the
male and refuses to be coopted by a gender-biased criticism. Gender is largely a cultural
construct, as are the stereotypes that go along with it: that the male is active, dominating, and
rational, whereas the female is passive, submissive, and emotional. Gynocritics strive to define a
particularly feminine content and to extend the canon so that it might include works by lesbians,
feminists, and women writers in general. According to Elaine Showalter, gynocriticism is
concerned with "woman as the producer of textual meaning, with the history, themes, genres,
and structures of literature by women. Its subjects include the psychodynamics of female
creativity; linguistics and the problem of a female language; the trajectory of the individual or
collective female literary career; literary history; and, of course, studies of particular writers and
works."
On the deconstructionist level, the aim is to dismantle and subvert the logocentric assumptions of
male discourse -- its valorization of being, meaning, truth, reason, and logic, its metaphysics of
presence. Logocentrism is phallocentric (hence the neologism "phallogocentrism"); it
systematically privileges paternal over maternal power, the intelligible over the sensible.
Patriarchal authority demands unity of meaning and is obsessed with certainty of origin. The
French feminists in particular construe "woman" as any radical force that subverts the concepts,
assumptions, and structures of traditional male discourse -- the realism, rationality, mastery, and
explanation that undergird it. By contrast, the American and British feminists mainly engage in
empirical and thematic studies of writings by and about women.
Feminism
To speak of "Feminism" as a theory is already a reduction.
However, in terms of its theory (rather than as its reality as a
historical movement in effect for some centuries) feminism
might be categorized into three general groups:
1. theories having an essentialist focus (including
psychoanalytic and French feminism);
2. theories aimed at defining or establishing a feminist
literary canon or theories seeking to re-interpret and
re-vision literature (and culture and history and so
forth) from a less patriarchal slant (including
gynocriticism, liberal feminism); and
3. theories focusing on sexual difference and sexual
politics (including gender studies, lesbian studies,
cultural feminism, radical feminism, and
socialist/materialist feminism).
Further, women (and men) needed to consider what it meant
to be a woman, to consider how much of what society has
often deemed inherently female traits, are culturally and
socially constructed. Simone de Beauvoir's study, The
Second Sex, though perhaps flawed by Beauvoir's own body
politics, nevertheless served as a groundbreaking book of
feminism, that questioned the "othering" of women by
western philosophy. Early projects in feminist theory
included resurrecting women's literature that in many cases
had never been considered seriously or had been erased over
time (e.g., Charlotte Perkins Gilman was quite prominent in
the early 20th century but was virtually unknown until her
work was "re-discovered" later in the century). Since the
1960s the writings of many women have been rediscovered,
reconsidered, and collected in large anthologies such as The
Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. However, merely
unearthing women's literature did not ensure its prominence;
in order to assess women's writings the amount of
preconceptions inherent in a literary canon dominated by
male beliefs and male writers needed to be re-evaluated.
Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique (1963), Kate Millet's
Sexual Politics (1970), Teresa de Lauretis's Alice Doesn't:
Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (1984), Annette Kolodny's
The Lay of the Land (1975), Judith Fetterly's The Resisting
Reader (1978), Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their
Own (1977), or Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The
Madwoman in the Attic (1979) are just a handful of the
many critiques that questioned cultural, sexual, intellectual,
and/or psychological stereotypes about women.
Example Essay
What men have said so far, for the most part, stems from . . . the power relation between a
fantasized obligatory virility meant to invade, to colonize, and the consequential phantasm of
woman as a "dark continent" to penetrate and to pacify. (Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the
Medusa")
A story about manly adventure narrated and written by a man, Heart of Darkness might seem
an unpropitious subject for feminist criticism. As my epigraph suggests, however, a feminist
approach to Conrad's story of colonizing can interrogate its complex interrelation of patriarchal
and imperialist ideologies. By examining the women in Marlow's narrative, we can identify the
patriarchal-imperialist blend that requires the kinds of women he creates. To do so is to
engage in a feminist critique of ideology, for, as Myra Jehlen puts it, "Feminist thinking is really
rethinking, an examination of the way certain assumptions about women and the female
character enter into the fundamental assumptions that organize all our thinking."
Such rethinking about Heart of Darkness reveals the collusion of imperialism and patriarchy:
Marlow's narrative aims too "colonize" and "pacify" both savage darkness and women.
Silencing the native laundress and symbolizing the equally silent savage woman and the
Company women, Marlow protects himself from his experience of the darkness they stand for.
The two speaking women he creates, his aunt and the Intended, perform a similar function. As
we will see later, Marlow, by restricting unsatisfactory versions of imperialist ideology to them,
is able to create his own version, a belief to keep the darkness at bay.
--From "Too Beautiful Altogether: Patriarchal Ideology in Heart of Darkness" by Johanna M.
Smith