"Towards A Feminist
poetics" is Showalter’s important critical essay. Showalter discusses the following topics in
this essay. They are:
1. Woman as reader
[Feminist Critique],
2. Woman as writer
[Gynocritics],
3. The problems of
Feminist Critique,
4. Program of Gynocritics,
and,
5. Feminine, Feminist and
Female Stages.
1) Woman as reader [Feminist Critique]
According to Elaine Showalter feminism can be divided
into two distinct varieties. The first
type is concerned with ‘woman as reader’.
In this concept woman is considered as the consumer of literature
produced by male-writers. She calls it
male-produced literature. Elaine argues
that a female reading may change our idea of a given text. Elaine calls this kind of analysis the
feminist critique. It is a historically
grounded inquiry. Its subjects include
the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and
misconceptions about women in criticism.
It also look into the fissures in male constructed literary
history. For example Cleopatra, the
queen of Egypt, at the time of Julius Caesar has been treated differently by
Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw. Bernard Shaw
gives her the role of Caesar’s adopted daughter, whereas Shakespeare considers
her Caesar’s concubine. Feminist
critique also concerned with the exploitation and the manipulation of the
female audience, especially in popular culture and film. We find advertisements in which women appear
in different poses exhibiting part of their body to get more publicity to
various consumer products.
2)Woman as writer [Gynocritics]
The second type of feminist criticism is concerned
with woman as writer. In this concept
woman is the producer of textual meaning.
It looks into and discusses themes, genres and structures of literatures
by woman. Woman as writer includes the
following subjects:
a)
The psychodynamics of a female creativity,
b)
Linguistics and the problem of a female language,
c)
The collective female literary career,
d)
Literary history, and,
e)
Studies of particular female writers and their works.
As there is no particular term in English for such a
branch, Elaine has adopted the French term la gynocritique and
modified it as Gynocritics.
The Feminist critique is essentially political and
polemical. It is theoretically
affiliated to Marxist sociology and Aesthetics.
Gynocritics is more self contained and experimental.
3) The problems of the Feminist critique
One of the problems of the Feminist critique is that
it is male-oriented. If we study
stereotypes women, the sexism of male critics and the limited role the women
play in literary history, we are not learning what women have felt and
experienced. We get only experience of
whaat men have felt. In some fields of
specialization apprenticeship to the male-theoretician is essential. That poses another problem, the problem of
reluctance or resistance to questioning.
The critic has a tendency to naturalize women’s victimization by making
it the inevitable.
4) Program of Gynocritics
The program of Gynocritics is to construct a female
frame work for the analysis of women’s literarature. Another task is to develop new models based
on the study of female experience. It doesn’t
support the idea of adopting male models and theories. Showalter remarks “Gynocritics begins at the
point when we free ourselves from the lenear absolutes of male literary theory,
stop trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition. Elaine hopes to establish a visible world of
female culture.
5)Feminine, Feminist and
Female stages
In her book
“A Literature of Their Own” Elaine Showalter writes on English women
writers. She says that we can see patterns and phases in the evolution of
a female tradition. Showalter has divided the period of evolution into
three stages. They are: the Feminine,
the Feminist, and, the Female stages.
1) The first phase, the feminine
phase dates from about 1840-1880. During that period women wrote in an
effort to equal the intellectual achievements of the male culture. The
distinguishing sign of this period is the male pseudonym. This trend was
introduced in England in the 1840’s. It became a national characteristic
of English women writers. During this phase the feminist content of feminine
art is typically oblique, because of the inferiority complex experienced by
female writers.
2) The feminist phase lasted about
38 years; from 1882 to 1920. The New Women movement gained strength—women
won the right to vote. Women writers began to use literature to dramatize
the ordeals of wrong womanhood.
3) The latest phase or the third
phase is called the female phase ongoing since 1920. Here we find women
rejecting both imitation and protest. Showalter considers that both are
signs of dependency. Women show more independent attitudes. They realize
the place of female experience in the process of art and literature. She
considers that there is what she calls autonomous art that can come from women
because their experiences are typical and individualistic. Women began to
concentrate on the forms and techniques of art and literature. The
representatives of the female phase such as Dorothy Richardson and Virginia
Woolf even began to think of male and female sentences. They wrote about
masculine journalism and feminine fiction. They redefined and sexualized
external and internal experience.
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