Feminism and Literature

What is the job of the feminist literary critic? What does it mean to read and write as a woman?

From the readings, the best answer I can come up with is that a feminist literary critic attempts to both examine how female characters are presented in a work and how a work performs in the context of a larger social-sexual dynamic. Linda Strong-Leek’s reading of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart shows us this by not deriding Achebe for his androcentric story but instead pointing out the areas in which he shows the importance of women to the story.

What I’d like to know is what would feminist critics like to see in stories? Do women have to be central figures in a story in order for it to be “legitimate” in their eyes? Does every portrayal have to be sympathetic to woman? Surely, this sort of protective depiction wouldn’t be a fair and complete view of women either.

Another thing I’m confused about is the line she quotes from Culler. If reading like a woman entails not reading like a man, what the heck does reading like a man mean? I’m a man and the only works I’ve ever expressly read “as a man” are works that I’ve told to do so because they were written by women. Is it just my privilege a member of the winning team or is there really no way to read as a man?

de Beauvoir and Woolf

The argument that seems to permeate both these works seems to center around the issue of the identity of women as women. In Woolf’s writing she is approaching this through the lens of writing and fiction and what it means for a woman to be a writer. A rather large hint to her mindstate can be found here.

“The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like, or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them, or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light.”

Understand that this is more than her mere confusion at a question. The first and third presumptions actually fit neatly into what de Beauvoir is referring to in “myth of the woman”. To say “women and what they are like” is a form of fiction conveys a sense that women aren’t as they seem. What are women like? At the time they would have had to appear demure, gossipy, flighty, moody and concern with home matters and nothing else. This is a fiction because of course women were not inherently this way but rather they acted like this because they’d been told to. Some were completely counter to this image but had to maintain it in order to function in society. The third presumption: “women and the fiction that is written about them” relates as fiction is one of the main tools a society uses to reinforce social moirés. The idea of women appears in fiction and is manifested in thesociety in which the writers of fiction draw their idea of women from.

De Beauvoir and Woolf both seem to hint that education would be the best solution for this issue and the first step would be expanding the educational opportunities for women. Education is just part of the social revolution that will have to come in dealing with the sexes. The mold of a “woman” would have to be broken in order for women to redefine themselves and that will change the image of women in all levels of society.