Towards a Feminist Poetics

Feminist literary critics analyze women's roles as characters, readers, and writers in literature. According to Elaine Showalter in ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics’, “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.”

The role of a feminist literary critic can be broken down into two equally important approaches.

In the first approach, feminist literary critics must analyze women’s roles in literature as dictated by the male hierarchy. They must document the female experience and role as prescribed by the males dominating the literary landscape. They must also take into consideration that the male dominated literary landscape has less to do with an outnumbering of female writers (because there are indeed many female writers and a valid statistical ratio is difficult to find) and more to do with documenting the dominant role men play in publishing and literary theory. Feminist literary critics must explore the female novelists who have been widely published, accepted, and studied. Do these women incorporate the dominating male ideology? Are these women’s credentials as writers based on their works or based on their gender? That is, do classrooms approach works by these women as works of literature, or works by women?

The second approach a feminist literary critic must operate under is analyzing women’s roles in literature according to women. This approach involves how female writers document their own experience.

Showalter’s own divisions are based on women as reader and women as writer, and while the second approach is vital to a feminist literary critic, the first approach offers a limited scope. Showalter strays away from analyzing how men portray women in literature because, “If we study 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 should be.” However, it is the feminist literary critic’s role to separate these possible misconceptions from the feminist experience and to illustrate how these notions have shaped the larger body of literature and even women’s role in society.

Why is all of this important? Gender is a dominating force in society. From the moment we are born, we are thrust into a world consisting of pink blankets or blue blankets, and the blue blankets have managed to form a dominating hierarchy throughout history. It’s important because literary criticism, the publishing world, and higher academia, the main filters of literature, have all been dominated by men