FEMINIST POETICS- Elaine Showalter

 FEMINIST POETICS

Elaine Showalter (1941---) is an American literary critic and feminist. She is one of the founders of feminist literary criticism in the US. Her well-known works include: ‘Towards Feminist Poetics’(1979), Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media(1997). And ‘Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (2001) Feminist criticism started as a revolt against male domination in literature. Behind it lies, two centuries of struggle for the recognition of women’s social and political rights. The basic view of feminist criticism is that Western civilization is pervasively patriarchal, the prevailing concepts of gender are largely cultural constructs generated by the pervasive patriarchal biases and that the patriarchal ideology pervades those writings which have been traditionally considered great literature.

In the essay, ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics’, Elaine Showalter advocates a new way of reading. The author traces the history of women’s literature and divides it into three phases----‘Feminine’(1840 -1880), “Feminist’ (1880-1920), and ‘Female” (1920 to the present)Women should turn to female experience as the source of an autonomous art. The feminist criticism, free from the divided consciousness of ‘daughters’ and ‘sisters’ is to be made a permanent home. Feminist criticism can be divided into two varieties. 

The first one is concerned with women as reader of male produced literature. Showalter calls this kind of analysis as ‘the feminist critique’. It is a historical grounded enquiry. Its subjects include the images and the stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and misconceptions about women in criticism, and the exploitation and manipulation of the female audience in popular culture and film. The second type is concerned with woman as writer, i.e with woman as the producer of literature; its subjects include the psychodynamics of female creativity, linguistics and the problems of female language. Showalter calls this type of analysis as ‘gynocritics’. It is a type of criticism designed by feminists to evaluate works by women as feminist works. It takes into consideration the circumstances in which a work of art is produced, the point of view of the author, and the motivation and attitudes of the characters.

One of the problems of feminist critique is that it is male-oriented. If we study the stereotypes of women, and the limited roles women play in literary history, we are trying to learn not what women have felt and experienced, but only what men have thought women should be. Showalter traces different phases in the evolution of a female tradition. He calls these phases as follows: the Feminine, the Feminist and the Female stages. During the Feminine phase, (1840 – 1880) women wrote in an effort to equalise the intellectual achievements of the male culture and internalized its assumptions of female nature. The distinguishing sign of this period is the male pseudonym. The feminist content of feminine is typically oblique, displaced, ironic and subversive; one has to read it between the lines, in the missed possibilities. In the feminist phase (1880 – 1920) women reject the accommodation postures of femininity and to use literature to dramatize the ordeals of wronged womanhood.

In the female phase (1920 onwards) women rejected both imitation and protest. They considered these two as forms of dependence. Instead, they turn to female experiences as the source of autonomous art. For example, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf begin to think in terms of male and female sentences and divide their work into ‘masculine’ journalism and ‘feminine’ fiction. The feminist criticism revised and even subverted related ideologies especially Marxist aesthetics and structuralism. It altered their vocabularies and methods to include the variable of gender.

The current theoretical impasse in feminist criticism comes from the dividedconsciousness of women, the split in each of them. Women are both the daughters of the male tradition, or their teachers, and professors, or publishers, a tradition which asks them to be rational, marginal and grateful. Women are also the sisters in a new women’s movement, which demands them to renounce the pseudo-success of token womanhood. The task of feminist critics is to find a new language; a new way of reading that can integrate women’s intelligence and experience their reason and their suffering. This enterprise should not be confined to women. Critics, poets and philosophers should share it with them. Showalter concludes saying that feminist criticism is not visiting. It is here to stay 

Feminist criticism is a theory and practice of analysing works of art, which undertakes recognize women’s cultural roles and other achievements and social and political rights.

An important work of feminist criticism was Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of one’s Own” . According to her, patriarchy prevented women from realising their creative potentialities. The “Second Sex” by Mary Elman, “Sexual Politics” by Late Millet, etc, are books which launched a much more radical criticism of the patriarchy. The assumptions and concepts of feminism:

I. Western civilization is pervasively patriarchal. Male domination subordinated women in all cultural domains: familial, religious, political, economic, social, legal and artistic.

II. It is recognized that while one’s sex is determined by anatomy, the prevailing concepts of gender are largely cultural constructs.

III. The patriarchal ideology pervades those writings which have been traditionallyconsidered great literature and which until recently have been written mainly bymen for men.A major interest of feminist critics is to reconstruct the ways we deal with literaturein order to do justice to female points of view, concerns, and values