Feminism - Genealogy

Feminism concerns itself in showing women as a different gender from males. In literature, women are usually portrayed as the non-significant ‘other’ that is oppressed and belittled. Feminists assert that women must not be dependent creatures who without question or doubt accept the commands of their patriarchal society. They have to take an active part in creating and determining their own lives and future. They must therefore reject many of the cultural stereotypes of women such as weak, dependent, and mindless creatures. Whereas sex is biologically determined, gender is culturally determined. All women must therefore reject the patriarchal standards of society and become persons in their own right. In essence, the central issues of feminism, are:
That men have oppressed women, allowing them little or no voice in the political, social, or economic issues of their society;
That by not giving voice and value to women's opinions, responses, and writings, men have therefore suppressed the female, defined what it means to be feminine, and thereby de-voiced, devalued, and trivialized what it means to be a woman; and that, in effect, men have made women the "nonsignificant Other."
Feminism's goal is to change this degrading view of women so that all women will realize that they are not a nonsignificant Other, but that each woman is a valuable person possessing the same privileges and rights as every man. Women, feminists declare, must define themselves and assert their own voices in the arenas of politics, society, education, and the arts. By personally committing themselves to fostering such change, feminists hope to create a society in which not only the male but also the female voice is equally valued.
According to feminist criticism, the roots of prejudice against women have long been embedded in Western culture. Such gender discrimination may have begun, say some feminists, with the biblical narrative that places the blame for the fall of humanity on Eve, not Adam. Century after century, men's voices continued to articulate and determine the social role and cultural and personal significance of women. In the late 1700s, a faint voice crying in the wilderness in opposition to such patriarchal and defaming opinions against women arose and began to be heard. Believing that women along with men should have a voice in the public arena, Mary Wollstonecraft authored A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). Women, she maintained, must stand up for their rights and not allow their male-dominated society to define what it means to be a woman. Women themselves must take the lead and articulate who they are and what role they will play in society. More importantly, they must reject the patriarchal assumption that women are inferior to men.
In 1919, the British scholar and writer Virginia Woolf laid the foundation for present-day feminist criticism in her work A Room of One's Own. In this text, Woolf declares that men have and continue to treat women as inferiors. It is the male, she asserts, who defines what it means to be female and who controls the political, economic, social, and literary structures. Agreeing with Samuel T. Coleridge, one of the foremost nine-teenth-century literary critics, that great minds possess both male and female characteristics, she hypothesizes in her text the existence of Shakeare's sister, one who is equally as gifted as a writer as Shakespeare iself. Her gender, however, prevents her from having "a room of her own." Because she is a woman, she cannot obtain an education or find profitable employment. Her innate artistic talents will therefore never flourish, for she cannot afford her own room. Woolf's symbol of the solitude and autonomy needed to seclude one's self from the world and its social constraints in order to find time to think and write. Ultimately, Shakespeare's sister dies alone without any acknowledgment of her personal genius.
With the 1949 publication of The Second Sex by the French writer Simone de Beauvoir, however, feminist interests were once again surfacing. Heralded as the foundational work of twentieth-century feminism, Beauvoir's text declares that French society (and Western societies in general) are patriarchal, controlled by males. Like Woolf before her, Beauvoir believed that the male in these societies defines what it means to be human, including, what it means to be female. Since the female is not male, Beauvoir asserted, she becomes the Other, an object whose existence is defined and interpreted by the male, the dominant being in society. Always subordinate to the male, the female finds herself a secondary or nonexistent player in the major social institutions of her culture, such as the church, government, and educational systems. Beauvoir asserts that a woman must break the bonds of her patriarchal society and define herself if she wishes to become a significant human being in her own right and defy male classification as the Other. She must ask herself, "What is a woman?" Beauvoir insists that a woman's answer must not be "mankind," for such a term once again allows men to define women. This generic label must be rejected, for it assumes that "humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him." Beauvoir insists that women see themselves as autonomous beings. Women, she maintains, must reject the societal construct that men are the subject or the absolute and that women are the Other.

The dominating voice of feminist criticism throughout the 1980s is that of Elaine Showalter. In her text A Literature of Their Own, Showalter chronicles what she believes to be the three historical phases of evolution in female writing. The "feminine" phase (1840-1880), the "feminist" phase (1880-1920), and the "female" phase (1970-present). During the "feminine" phase, writers such as Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and George Sand accepted the prevailing social constructs of their day on the role and therefore the definition of women. Accordingly, these female authors wrote under male pseudonyms, hoping to equal the intellectual and artistic achievements of their male counterparts. During the "feminist" phase, female authors dramatized the plight of the "slighted" woman. More often than not, these authors depicted the harsh and often cruel treatment of female characters at the hands of their more powerful male creations. At present, in the "female" phase, women reject the imitation prominent during the "feminine" phase and the protest that dominated the "feminist" phase. Showalter points out that feminist critics now concern themselves with developing a peculiarly female understanding of the female experience in art, including a feminine analysis of literary forms and techniques. Such a task necessarily includes the uncovering of misogyny in male texts, a term Showalter uses to describe the male hatred of women.
Showalter asserts that female authors were consciously and therefore deliberately excluded from the literary canon by those male professors who first established the canon itself. Showalter urges that such exclusion of the female voice must stop. She thus coins the term gynocritics to refer to the process of "constructing a female framework for analysis of women's literature to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt to male models and theories." Showalter's term gynocriticism has now become synonymous with the study of women as writers and provides critics with four models that address the nature of women's writing and help answer some of the chief concerns of feminist criticism: the biological, the linguistic, the psychoanalytic, and the cultural. Each of Showalter's models are sequential, subsuming and developing the preceding model(s). The biological model emphasizes how the female body marks itself upon a text by providing a host of literary images and a personal, intimate tone. The linguistic model concerns itself with the need for a female discourse. This model investigates the differences between how women and men use language. It asserts that women can and do create a language peculiar to their gender and addresses the way in which this language can be utilized in their writings. The psychoanalytic model, based on an analysis of the female psyche and how such an analysis affects the writing process, emphasizes the flux and fluidity of female writing as opposed to male rigidity and structure. The cultural model investigates how the society in which female authors work and function shapes women's goals, responses, and points of view.

Believing that women are oppressed both in life and art, French feminism, typically stresses the repression of women. As a whole, French feminism is closely associated with the theoretical and practical applications of psychoanalysis. Believing that penis is power, Freud viewed women as incomplete males. All women, he thought, were envious of a male's power, as symbolized by the penis. Wanting this power, all women possess penis envy, desiring to gain the male phallus and thereby obtain power.

Fortunately for feminist criticism, Jacques Lacan rescues psychoanalysis from some of Freud's mysognistic theories. Lacan, argues that language ultimately shapes and structures our conscious and unconscious minds and thus shapes our self identity, not the phallus. He maintains that it is language that ultimately denies women the power of language and therefore the power of literature and writing. Lacan believes that the human psyche consists of three parts, or what he calls orders: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. Each of these orders interacts with the others. From birth to six months or so, we primarily function in the Imaginary Order, a preverbal state that contains our wishes, our fantasies, and our physical images. In this state, we are basically sexless, for we are not yet capable of differentiating ourselves from our mothers. Once we successfully pass through the Oedipal crisis, we pass from a biological language to a socialized language and thus into the second of the Lacanian orders: the Symbolic Order. On entering this order, the father becomes the dominant image. At this stage of psychic development, both the male and the female fear castration by the father. For the male, fear of castration means obeying and becoming like the father, while simultaneously repressing the Imaginary Order that is most closely associated with the female body. The Imaginary Order with its pre-Oedipal male desires becomes a direct threat for the male in the third Lacanian order, the Real Order, or the actual world as perceived by the individual. Similarly for the female, entrance into the Symbolic Order means submission to law of the father. Such submission unfortunately means subservience to the male. Being socialized to a subordinated language, the female becomes a second-class citizen.

Other French feminists, such as Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous, further develop and apply Lacan's theories to their own form of feminist criticism. Kristeva, for example, posits that the Imaginary Order is characterized by a continuous flow of fluidity or rhythm, which she calls chora. On entering the Symbolic Order, both males and females are separated from the chora and repress the feelings of fluidity and rhythm. Similar to a Freudian slip in which an unconscious thought breaks through the conscious mind, the chora can, at times, break through into the Real Order and disturb the male-dominant discourse. On the other hand, Helene Cixous chooses to explore an entirely different mode of discourse that arises from the Symbolic, not the Imaginary Order. Cixous maintains that there exists a particular kind of female writing that she calls Lecriture feminine. Characterized by fluidity, this particularly feminine discourse will, when fully explored, transform the social and cultural structures within literature.

To free themselves from definitional oppression, say feminist critics, women must analyze and challenge the established literary canon that has helped shape the images of female inferiority and subordination ingrained in our culture. Women themselves must create an atmosphere that is less oppressive by contesting the long-held patriarchal assumptions about their sex. Through a re-examination of the established literature in all fields, by validating what it means to be a woman, and by involving themselves in literary theory and its multiapproaches, women can legitimatize their responses to texts written by both males and females, their own writings, and their political, economic, and social positions in their culture.