Female Literary Criticism

Elaine Showalter’s “Towards a Feminist Poetics’” presents two approaches to Feminist literary criticism. First is the analysis she labels, Feminist Critique, which studies the woman as a Reader of male produced works. Alternatively, the second study she presents is the woman as a writer, dubbed Gynocritics, and this criticism is concerned with the woman’s point of view.
The Feminist Critique although studying the woman’s perspective is still couched within a man’s perception. “Its subjects include the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and misconceptions about women in criticism and the fissures in male-constructed literary history.” (146) A woman studying these male texts makes these subjects apparent in her feminist criticism. This criticism “probes the ideological assumptions of literary phenomena” (146). However, Showalter points out the danger to this method of criticism. “One of the problems of the feminist critique is that it is male-oriented. If we study the stereotypes of women, the sexism of male critics, and the limited roles women play in literary history, we are not learning what women have felt and experienced but what men have thought women to be.” (148) Obviously then, the literary works are biased. This is interestingly, made evident by the distinctions created by the male producer between women betrayed by men, versus the women who betray men.
A feminist literary critique may also utilize the Gynocritics approach. The female viewpoint is considered here, with an effort “to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt male models and theories” (149). This approach heralds the recognition of a “female culture”. Gynocritics “developed hypotheses of a female subculture including not only the ascribed status and the internalized constructs of femininity, but also the occupations, interaction and consciousness of women” (149). Woman’s literature, unlike men’s, has suffered “the influence [of] conditions that have nothing whatever to do with art” (150). Showalter discusses examples of marriages between artists because the female writers have always been predisposed to the “aesthetic standards and values of the male tradition” (150).