on a feminist critic

A feminist literary critic often helps one to see clearly what might have been indistinctive within works of literature before. By pointing out particular passages, analyzing and explaining them, she shows as to how certain contents in literary works can be interpreted yet so differently when one takes a view of a feminist. As two of the feminist readings suggest, the way in which a feminist critic would approach or understand literary works is significant in terms of claiming women’s position in both in and out of the literary world.

As the reading of “Chiua Achebe’s Falling Apart” would indicate, the author helps readers become aware of the insignificance of female characters within the story, despite of their seemingly dramatic life stories. Strong-leek states, in her feminist reading, “The characterization of Ekwefi, Okonkwo's second wife, almost seems insignificant to one reading from a patriarchal standpoint, but when reevaluated, one will find that she is a well of knowledge, love, and fierce independence. Though it was very much ignored, in the way most male critics observed the text, the manifestation of the female characters in this particular work, it was recognized by a feminist critic for it to have profound meanings as opposed to how it has been constructed on the surface." A feminist critic, then, identifies women’s status that has been oppressed within the literary works and tries to brings it out and shows the many disregarded values and their importance as human beings.

A feminist critic, again, recognizes the way in which women are considered as merely an object of persuasion out of men’s sexual desire. In the feminist reading of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” the author talks about the way in which the speaker of the poem holds his female subject, his persuasion of her with extravagant and vain words that focuses mostly on her body and dominating of it, and his way of degrading womanhood. As it was shown in, “The genre of the blazon, a verbal inventory of a woman’s physical attributes, is certainly problematic for the way in which it objectifies the female body…” and “this drastic shift from the language of praise to that of threat, from lust to disgust,
heightens the poem’s devaluation of its female subject as it showcases the speaker’s
verbal adroitness.”

From the fact that readers can learn to have an eye that is different and sharp as one takes a feminist view, the role of a feminist literary critic seems to emphasize the importance of the role of literary critics in general even more because of the way she provides new insights and thus brings a sharper vision on what has been formerly often invisible by male critics.