what is feminist literary theory essay

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Feminist theory.

Pelagia Goulimari Pelagia Goulimari Department of English, University of Oxford
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.976
Published online: 19 November 2020

Feminist theory in the 21st century is an enormously diverse field. Mapping its genealogy of multiple intersecting traditions offers a toolkit for 21st-century feminist literary criticism, indeed for literary criticism tout court. Feminist phenomenologists (Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Marion Young, Toril Moi, Miranda Fricker, Pamela Sue Anderson, Sara Ahmed, Alia Al-Saji) have contributed concepts and analyses of situation, lived experience, embodiment, and orientation. African American feminists (Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Hortense J. Spillers, Saidiya V. Hartman) have theorized race, intersectionality, and heterogeneity, particularly differences among women and among black women. Postcolonial feminists (Assia Djebar, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Florence Stratton, Saba Mahmood, Jasbir K. Puar) have focused on the subaltern, specificity, and agency. Queer and transgender feminists (Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, Susan Stryker) have theorized performativity, resignification, continuous transition, and self-identification. Questions of representation have been central to all traditions of feminist theory.

continuous transition
heterogeneity
intersectionality
lived experience
performativity
resignification
self-identification
the subaltern

Mapping 21st-Century Feminist Theory

Feminist theory is a vast, enormously diverse, interdisciplinary field that cuts across the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. As a result, this article cannot offer a historical overview or even an exhaustive account of 21st-century feminist theory. But it offers a genealogy and a toolkit for 21st-century feminist criticism. 1 The aim of this article is to outline the questions and issues 21st-century feminist theorists have been addressing; the concepts, figures, and narratives they have been honing; and the practices they have been experimenting with—some inherited, others new. This account of feminist theory will include African American, postcolonial, and Islamic feminists as well as queer and transgender theorists and writers who identify as feminists. While these fields are distinct and while they need to reckon with their respective Eurocentrism, racism, misogyny, queerphobia, or transphobia, this article will focus on their mutual allyship, in spite of continuing tensions. Particularly troubling are feminists who define themselves against queer and transgender theory and activism; by way of response, this article will be highlighting feminist queer theory and transfeminism.

On the one hand, literary criticism is not high on the agenda of many 21st-century feminist theorists. This means that literary critics need to imaginatively transpose feminist concepts to literature. On the other hand, a lot of feminist theorists practice literature; they write in an experimental way that combines academic work, creative writing, and life-writing; they combine narrative and figurative language with concepts and arguments. Contemporary feminist theory offers a powerful mix of experimental writing, big issues, quirky personal accounts, and utopian thinking of a new kind.

Feminists have been combining theory, criticism, and literature; Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Hélène Cixous, and Alice Walker have written across these genres. In African Sexualities: A Reader ( 2011 ), Sylvia Tamale’s decision to place academic scholarship side by side with poems, fiction, life-writing, political declarations, and reports is supported by feminist traditions. 2 Furthermore, the border between feminist theory, literature, and life-writing has been increasingly permeable in the 21st century , hence the centrality of texts in hybrid genres: theory with literary and life-writing elements, literature with meta-literary elements, and so on. Early 21st-century terms such as autofiction and autotheory register the prevalence of the tendency. This is at least partly a question of addressing different audiences—aiming for public engagement and connection with activism outside universities and bypassing the technical jargon of academic feminist theory. Another reason is that feminist theorists, especially those from marginalized groups, have found some of the conventions of academic scholarship objectionable or false—for example, the assumption of a universal, disembodied, or unsituated perspective.

Nevertheless, recent feminist experiments with genre—for example, by Anne Carson, Paul B. Preciado, Maggie Nelson, or Alison Bechdel—nod toward an integral part of women’s writing and feminist writing. 3 Historic experiments in mixed genre, going back to Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s poem-novel Aurora Leigh , include: Virginia Woolf’s critical-theoretical-fictional A Room of One’s Own ; Julia Kristeva’s poetico-theoretical “Stabat Mater”; Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time , oscillating between speculative science fiction and naturalist novel; Audre Lorde’s “biomythography,” Zami ; the mix of theory, fiction, and life-writing in Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick ; or Qurratulain Hyder’s Fireflies in the Mist , hovering between historical fiction and romance. 4

Twenty-first-century feminist theory also tends to be thematically expansive and more than feminist theory narrowly understood, in that it is not only about “women” (those assigned female at birth or socially counted as women or self-identifying as women). It is a mature field that addresses structural injustice, social justice, and the future of the planet. As a result, cross-fertilization with other academic fields abounds. Relatively new academic fields such as feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and critical race theory—emerging since the 1960s, established in the 1980s, and having initially to cement their distinctiveness and place within the academy—have been increasingly coming together and cross-fertilizing in the 21st century . Distinct feminist perspectives (phenomenological, poststructuralist, African American intersectional, postcolonial, Islamic, queer, transgender) have also been coming together and variously informing 21st-century feminist theory. While this article will introduce these perspectives, it will aim to show that feminist theorists are increasingly difficult to put in a box, and this is a good thing.

Feminist Phenomenology (Beauvoir, Young, Moi, Fricker, Anderson, Ahmed, Al-Saji): Situation, Lived Experience, Embodiment, Orientation

Simone de Beauvoir initiates feminist phenomenology, her existentialism emerging within the broader tradition of phenomenology. While the present account of feminist theory begins with Beauvoir, it is important to acknowledge the continuing influence of older feminists and proto-feminists, as “feminism” only acquired its current ( 20th- and 21st-century ) meaning in the late 19th century , according to the Oxford English Dictionary. See, for example, Christine de Pizan, “Jane Anger,” Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Mary Astell, Anne Finch, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Davies, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, and Virginia Woolf.

All contemporary feminist theory has been influenced by Beauvoir, in some respect or other. Her famous claim that “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman,” opening volume 2 of The Second Sex ( 1949 ), points to the asymmetrical socialization of men and women. 5 In her philosophical terms, man is the One, the universal, subject, freedom, transcendence, mind, spirit, culture; woman is the Other, the particular, object, situation, immanence, body, flesh, nature. Patriarchy for Beauvoir is a system of binary oppositions, whose terms are mutually exclusive: the One/the Other, the universal/the particular, subject/object, freedom/situation, transcendence/immanence, mind/body, spirit/flesh, culture/nature. Men have been socialized to aim for—indeed to become—the valued terms in each binary opposition (the One, the universal, subject, freedom, transcendence, mind, spirit, culture); while the undesirable terms (the Other, the particular, object, situation, immanence, body, flesh, nature) are projected onto women, who are socialized to become those terms—to become object, for example. Emerging from this system is the illusion of a transhistorical feminine essence or a norm of femininity that misconstrues, disciplines, and oppresses actual, historical women. Women for Beauvoir are an oppressed group, and her aim is their liberation. 6

Beauvoir critiques the social aims and myths of patriarchy, pointing to the pervasiveness of patriarchal myths in philosophy, literature, and culture. But she also critiques the very forms of patriarchy—binary opposition, dualistic thinking, essentialism, universalism, abstraction—while not completely able to free her own analysis from them. Instead of them, Beauvoir advocates attention to concrete situation and close phenomenological description; indeed The Second Sex abounds in vivid and richly detailed descriptions of early 20th-century French women’s lives. Such close attention and description allow her to demonstrate that all humans are, potentially, both subject and object, free and situated, transcendent and immanent, spirit and flesh, hence the ambiguity of the human condition. 7

The philosophy of existentialism and the broader philosophical movement of phenomenology, within which Beauvoir situates her work, claim to offer radical aims and methods. Phenomenology (Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon) is committed to the phenomenological description of the particular in order to avoid the abstractions of scientism. It aims to avoid traditional philosophical dualisms such as mind/body. It re-describes human beings not as disembodied minds but as intentional beings engaged with the world, being-in-the-world (Heidegger’s term), situated in a particular time and place; as lived bodies that are centers of perception, action, and lived experience rather than mere objects; and as being-with and being-for others in inter-subjective relationships rather than just subject/object relationships. Human beings immerse themselves in their projects, using the world and their own bodies—with all their acquired skills, competencies, and sedimented habits—as instruments. While these instruments are indispensable to their projects, they are usually unperceived and remain in the background. They are the background against which objects of perception and action objectives come into view. And yet what is backgrounded can always come to the foreground, suddenly and rudely—when the world resists one, when a blunt knife does not cut the bread, when one’s body is in pain or sick and intrudes, interrupting one’s vision and plans. 8

Without minimizing the novelty of Beauvoir’s theorization of patriarchy, the present quick sketch of phenomenology ought to have highlighted its suitability for feminist appropriations. Nevertheless, Sartre, Beauvoir’s closest collaborator, for example, continues to think that one is distinctively human only to the extent that they transcend their situation. This arguably universalizes Sartre’s particular situation as a member of a privileged group determined to be free, while effectively blaming the situation of oppressed groups on their members, blaming the victims for lacking humanity. 9 By contrast, Beauvoir sheds light on women’s social situation and lived experience: men have “far more concrete opportunities” to be effective; women experience the world not as tools for their projects but as resistance to them; their “energy” is “thrown into the world” but “fails to grasp any object”; a woman’s body is not the “pure instrument of her grasp on the world” but painfully objectified and foregrounded. 10 Beauvoir goes on to distinguish between a variety of unequal social situations with different degrees of freedom inherent in them. Yes, on the whole, French men are freer, less constrained than French women. But Beauvoir discusses the “concrete situation” of other groups “kept in a situation of inferiority”—workers, the colonized, African American slaves, her contemporary African Americans, Jews—while explicitly acknowledging that women themselves are socially divided by class and race. 11

Beauvoir outlines impediments to women’s collective and individual liberation and sketches out paths to collective action and to the “independent woman” of the future, placing literature center stage. She claims that women lack the “concrete means” to organize themselves “in opposition” to patriarchy, in that they lack a shared collective space, such as the factory and the racially segregated community for working-class and black struggles, instead living dispersed private lives. 12 While white middle-class women “are in solidarity” with men of their class and race, rather than with working-class and black women, Beauvoir calls for solidarity among women across class and race boundaries. 13 She addresses white middle-class women like herself, who benefit materially from their connection to white middle-class men, asking them to abandon these benefits for the precarious pursuit of women’s solidarity and freedom. To the extent that women lack freedom by virtue of their social situation qua women, they need to claim their freedom in collective “revolt.” 14 Beauvoir’s 1949 call to organized political action was “the movement before the movement,” according to Michèle Le Doeuff. 15

However, Beauvoir also advocates writing literature as a means of liberation for women and considers all her writing—philosophical, literary, life-writing—a form of activism. Beauvoir devotes considerable space to literary criticism throughout The Second Sex . She shows how writers have reproduced patriarchal myths, often unwittingly. 16 But her future-oriented, crucial chapter “The Independent Woman” centers on a discussion of women writers and even addresses women writers. Having sketched out a history of women’s writing, she turns to young writers to offer advice, based on her analysis of women’s “situation.” 17 To overcome women’s socially imposed apprenticeship in “reasonable modesty,” they need to undertake a counter-practice of “abandonment and transcendence,” “pride” and boldness; they need to become “women insurgents” who feel “responsible for the universe.” 18 Her call, “The free woman is just being born” energizes new women writers to live and write freely—and has been answered by many. 19 But this is not triumphalist empty rhetoric; women writers also need to understand the “ambiguity” of the human condition and of truth itself. 20

Iris Marion Young returns to Beauvoir’s description of women’s social situation and lived experience in “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality” ( 1980 ). Young takes Beauvoir’s description as the starting point for her own phenomenology of women’s project-oriented bodily movement in “contemporary advanced industrial, urban, and commercial society,” arguing that their movement is inhibited, ambiguous, discontinuous, and ineffective. 21 Women exhibit a form of socially induced dyspraxia. Young contends that women’s movement “exhibits an ambiguous transcendence, an inhibited intentionality, and a discontinuous unity with its surroundings.” 22 Young turns to women’s bodies in their “orientation toward and action upon and within” their surroundings, particularly the “confrontation of the body’s capacities and possibilities with the resistance and malleability of things” when the body “aims to accomplish a definite purpose or task.” 23 It will be remembered that the phenomenological tradition theorizes the human body as a lived body that is the locus of subjectivity, perception, and action, a capable body extending itself into the world rather than a thing; this is especially the case with Merleau-Ponty. Young’s description of the deviation of women’s bodily experience from this norm is a powerful indictment of women’s social situation.

Firstly, Young identifies that women experience their bodies as ambiguously transcendent: both as a “capacity” and as a “ thing ”; both striving to act upon the world and a “burden.” 24 Secondly, they experience an inhibited intentionality: while acting, they hesitate, their “hesitancy” resulting in “wasted motion . . . from the effort of testing and reorientation.” 25 Thirdly, they experience their bodies as discontinuous with the world: rather than extending themselves and acting upon their surroundings, which is the norm, they live their bodies as objects “ positioned in space.” 26 Or rather, the “space that belongs to her and is available to her grasp and manipulation” is experienced as “constricted,” while “the space beyond is not available to her.” 27 In other words, she experiences her surroundings not as at-hand and within-reach for her projects but as out-of-reach. This discontinuity between “aim and capacity to realize” it is the secret of women’s “tentativeness and uncertainty.” 28 Even more ominously, they live the “ever-present possibility” of becoming the “object of another subject’s . . . manipulations.” 29 In the very exercise of bodily freedom—for example, in opening up the “body in free, active, open extension and bold outward-directedness”—women risk “objectification,” Young argues. 30

Young describes the situation of women as one in which they have to learn “actively to hamper” their “movements.” 31 If this has been the norm of genderization in modern Western urban societies, is it still at work and is it lived differently depending on one’s class, race, sexuality, and so on? 32 Similarly with Beauvoir’s theorization of the situation of women: does it continue to be relevant and useful?

The emergence of “sexual difference” feminism or écriture féminine in France in the mid-1970s, with landmark publications by Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, brought with it a critique of Beauvoir. 33 In view of the present discussion of Beauvoir, one might argue that Beauvoir’s aim is the abolition of gender. Her horizon is the abolition of gender binarism and an end to the oppression of women. However, in “Equal or Different?” ( 1986 ) Irigaray reads this as a pursuit of equality through women’s adoption of male norms, at a great cost, that of “suppress[ing] sexual difference.” 34 In Irigaray’s eyes, Beauvoir’s work is assimilationist, while her own work is radical—it aims to redefine femininity in positive terms. Irigaray insists on the political autonomy of women’s struggles from other liberation movements and, controversially, the priority of feminism over other movements because of the priority of gender over class, race, and so on. Gender is “the primary and irreducible division.” 35

In 1994 feminist literary critic Toril Moi compares Beauvoir to Irigaray and Frantz Fanon, one of the founders of postcolonial theory. Like Fanon who redefined blackness positively and viewed anticolonial struggles as autonomous, Irigaray aims to redefine femininity and mobilize it autonomously, while Beauvoir failed to “grasp the progressive potential of ‘femininity’ as a political discourse” and also “vastly underestimated the potential political impact of an independent woman’s movement.” 36 However, Moi sides with Beauvoir against Irigaray and other “sexual difference” feminists, when comparing their aims. Beauvoir’s ultimate aim is the disappearance of gender, while difference feminists “focus on women’s difference, often without regard for other social movements,” claiming that “women’s interests are best served by the establishment of an enduring regime of sexual difference.” 37

Aiming toward the disappearance of gender does not mean blinding oneself to the situation and lived experience of women. In a 2009 piece on women writers, literature, and feminist theory, Moi turns to Beauvoir to analyze the social situation of women writers. Importantly, Beauvoir focuses on what happens “ once somebody has been taken to be a woman ”—the woman in question might or might not be assigned female at birth and might or might not identify as a woman. 38 While the body of someone taken to be a man is viewed as a “direct and normal connection with the world” that he “apprehends objectively,” the body of someone taken to be a woman is viewed as “weighed down by everything specific to it: an obstacle, a prison.” 39 Concomitantly, male writers and their perspectives and concerns are associated with universality—women writers associated with biased particularity. But if women writers adopt male perspectives and concerns to lay claim to universality, they are alienated from their own lived experience. This is how a “sexist (or racist) society” forces “women and blacks, and other raced minorities, to ‘eliminate’ their gendered (or raced) subjectivity” and “masquerade as some kind of generic universal human being, in ways that devalue their actual experiences as embodied human beings in the world.” 40 All too often women writers have declared “I am not a woman writer,” but this has to be understood as a “ defensive speech act”: a “ response ” to those who have tried to use her gender “against her.” 41

In 2001 feminist philosopher and Beauvoir scholar Michèle Le Doeuff announces a renaissance in Beauvoir studies, in her keynote for the Ninth International Simone de Beauvoir Conference: “It is no longer possible to claim, in the light of a certain New French Feminism, that Beauvoir is obsolete.” 42 She prioritizes the need for scholarship on the conflicts between Sartre and Beauvoir, with a view to making the case for Beauvoir’s originality as a philosopher, in spite of Beauvoir’s self-identification as a writer and reluctance to clash with Sartre philosophically.

Feminist philosopher Miranda Fricker returns more than once to the question of whether Beauvoir is a philosopher or a writer. In 2003 Fricker locates Beauvoir’s originality in her understanding of ambiguity and argues that life-writing has been the medium most suited to her thought, focusing on Beauvoir’s The Prime of Life ( La Force de l’age , 1960 ). 43 Beauvoir found in the institution of philosophy, as she experienced it, a pathological, obsessional attitude—a demand for abstract theorizing that divorces thinkers from their situation to lend their thought universal applicability. This imperious, sovereign role was seriously at odds with Beauvoir’s sense of reality, history, and the self. For Beauvoir, reality is “full of ambiguities, baffling, and impenetrable” and history a violent shock to the self: “History burst over me, and I dissolved into fragments . . . scattered over the four quarters of the globe, linked by every nerve in me to each and every other individual.” 44 Beauvoir uses narrative, particularly life-writing, to connect with her past selves but also to appeal to the reader: “self-knowledge is impossible, and the best one can hope for is self-revelation” to the reader. 45 Fricker claims that Beauvoir primarily addresses female readers; and Beauvoir’s alliance-building with her readers—her “feminist commitment to female solidarity”—promises to bring out, through the reader, “the ‘unity’ to that ‘scattered, broken’ object that is her life.” 46

An example of the role of the reader is Fricker’s 2007 reading of Beauvoir’s under-written account of an early epistemic clash with Sartre. 47 Beauvoir’s first-person narrative voice doesn’t quite say that Sartre undermined her as a knower, but Fricker interprets this incident as an epistemic attack by Sartre that Beauvoir had the resilience to survive, and which contributed to her self-identification as a writer rather than a philosopher. Here the violence of history and the institution of philosophy take very concrete, embodied, intimate form. But the incident also serves as a springboard for Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice and its two forms: testimonial injustice, and hermeneutical injustice and lacunas. For Fricker, Sartre in this instance does Beauvoir a “testimonial injustice” in that he erodes her confidence and her credibility as a knower. 48 This process might also be “ongoing” and involve “persistent petty intellectual underminings.” 49 Hermeneutical (or interpretive) injustice, on the other hand, has to do with a gap in collective interpretative resources, where a name should be to describe a social experience. 50 For example, the relatively recent term “sexual harassment” has described a social experience where previously there was a hermeneutic lacuna, according to Fricker. Such lacunas are often due to the systemic epistemic marginalization of some groups, and any progress (for example, in adopting a proposed new term) is contingent upon a “virtuous hearer” who will try to listen without prejudice but also requires systemic change. 51 In George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss Maggie Tulliver suffers both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. 52

This article will now turn to feminist phenomenology within queer theory and critical race theory. Sara Ahmed, in Queer Phenomenology ( 2006 ), offers not a phenomenology of queerness but rather a phenomenological account of heteronormativity as well as a feminist queer critique of phenomenology. In an important reversal of perspective, Ahmed denaturalizes being straight—denaturalizes heteronormativity—by asking: how does one become straight? This is not simply a matter of sexual orientation and choice of love-object. Rather heteronormativity is itself “something that we are oriented around, even if it disappears from view”; “bodies become straight by ‘lining up’” with normative “lines that are already given.” 53 Being straight is “an effect of being ‘in line.’” 54 Unlike earlier phenomenologists such as Heidegger, what is usually being backgrounded and thus invisible is a naturalized system that Ahmed hopes to foreground and bring “into view”: heteronormativity. 55 Ahmed thus extends Beauvoir’s and Young’s analyses of the systematic oppression and incapacitation of women, respectively. 56 Ahmed puts Young’s language to use in order to talk about lesbian lives: heteronormativity “puts some things in reach and others out of reach,” in a manner that incapacitates lesbian lives. Ahmed searches for a different form of sociality, “a space in which the lesbian body can extend itself , as a body that gets near other bodies.” 57 Her critique of even the most promising phenomenologists is that in their work “the straight world is already in place” as an invisible background. 58

Ahmed extends her analysis of the production of heteronormativity to the production of whiteness in “A Phenomenology of Whiteness” ( 2007 ), asking: how does one become white? Ahmed thus furthers her critique of phenomenology from within. Phenomenologists such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty define the body as “successful,” as “‘able’ to extend itself (through objects) in order to act on and in the world,” as a body that “‘can do’ by flowing into space.” 59 However, far from this being a universal experience, it is the experience of a “bodily form of privilege” from which many groups are excluded. 60 Ahmed does not here acknowledge Young’s analysis of women’s socially induced dyspraxia but turns instead to Fanon’s “phenomenology of ‘being stopped.’” 61 Ahmed calls “discomfort” the social experience of being impeded and goes on to outline its critical potential in “bringing what is in the background, what gets over-looked” back into view. 62 More than a negative feeling, discomfort has the exhilarating potential of opening up a whole world that was previously obscured. 63 Ahmed’s subsequent work has focused on institutional critique, especially of universities in their continuing failure to become inclusive, hospitable spaces for certain groups, in spite of their managerial language of diversity. 64

Where Ahmed calls for critical and transformative “discomfort,” Alia Al-Saji calls for a critical and transformative “hesitation” in “A Phenomenology of Hesitation” ( 2014 ). Al-Saji’s concept of hesitation revises the work of Beauvoir and Young and enlarges their focus on gender to include race. Beauvoir’s analysis of patriarchy as a system that projects and naturalizes fixed, oppositional, hierarchical identities is redeployed toward a “race-critical and feminist” project, though Al-Saji does not acknowledge Beauvoir explicitly but credits Fanon’s work. 65 The systematic and “socially pathological othering” of fluid, relational, contextual, contingent differences into rigid, frozen, naturalized hierarchies remains “hidden from view.” 66 Experience, affect, and vision, in their pathological form, are closed and rigid; in their healthy form, they have a “creative and critical potential . . . to hesitate”—they are ambiguous, open, fluid, responsive, receptive, dynamic, changing, improvisational, self-critical. 67 Al-Saji argues that the “paralyzing hesitation” analyzed by Young can be “mined” to extract a critical hesitation, as Young’s own work exemplifies. 68 By contrast, the “normative ‘I can’ – posited as human but in fact correlated to white, male bodies”—rigidly “excludes other ways of seeing and acting”; it is “objectifying – racializing and sexist[,] . . . reifying and othering .” 69 The alternative to both thoughtless action and paralyzing inaction is: “ acting hesitantly ” and responsively. 70

Feminist philosopher Pamela Sue Anderson’s last writings on “vulnerability” build on Michèle Le Doeuff’s critique of unexamined myths and narratives underlying the Western “imaginary.” One values and strives for invulnerability and equates vulnerability with exposure to violence and suffering. One projects vulnerability onto “the vulnerable” to disavow their own vulnerability: “a dark social imaginary continues to stigmatize those needing to be cared for as a drain on an economy, carefully separating ‘the cared for’ from those who are thought to be ‘in control’ of their lives and of the world.” 71 Furthermore, members of privileged groups often exhibit a “wilful ignorance” of systemic forms of social vulnerability and social injustice. 72 But Anderson also outlines “ethical” vulnerability as a capability for a transformative and life-enhancing openness to others and mutual affection—occasioned by ontological vulnerability. Ethical vulnerability is envisaged as a project where reason, critical self-reflexivity, emotion, intuition and imagination, concepts, arguments, myths and narrative all have a role to play, while also needing to be reimagined and rethought.

African American Feminisms (Morrison, Lorde, Walker, Spillers, Hartman): Race, Intersectionality, Differences among Women and among Black Women

African American and postcolonial feminists have struggled to create space for themselves, caught between a predominantly white women’s movement on the one hand, and male-led civil-rights and anticolonial struggles and postcolonial elites on the other hand. They have fought against assumptions that “All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men” and that white women are “saving brown women from brown men.” 73 African American and postcolonial writers and thinkers (from Toni Morrison to Chandra Talpade Mohanty) have hesitated to self-identify with a primarily white movement that, they argued powerfully, effectively excluded them in unthinkingly prioritizing the concerns of white, middle-class women. Some have avoided self-identifying as a feminist, self-identifying as a “black woman writer” instead. Alice Walker invented the term “womanism” to signal black feminism. “Intersectionality” was coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, and other African American feminists to highlight the intersections of gender and race, feminist and antiracist struggles, creating a space between the white women’s movement and the male-led civil-rights movement. 74 Postcolonial feminists (Assia Djebar, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty) similarly created a space between Western feminists and male-led anticolonial struggles and postcolonial elites.

African American feminists have been critical of Beauvoir and of the women’s movements of the 1960s. They have been reconstructing oral, written, and activist traditions of black women such as abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Harriet Jacobs, and modernists Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen—all previously neglected and marginalized. 75 These traditions prioritize: collectivism; the need to critique and resist internalized but unlivable white middle-class norms; waywardness or willfulness rather than individualism; differences among women; difference among black women; and friendship and solidarity among black women across their differences. (By contrast, contemporary white American feminist critics such as Elaine Showalter emphasized self-realization and self-actualization. 76 ) African American women writers—rather than literary critics—have led the way, inspired by orators, musicians, and collective oral forms, as critics have acknowledged. 77

Toni Morrison, as a self-identified black woman writer, announces these strategic priorities in her first novel, The Bluest Eye ( 1970 ). 78 In The Bluest Eye she revises Beauvoir’s analysis of patriarchy as a binary opposition—man/woman—that projects onto “woman” what men disown in themselves. She examines a related binary opposition: white, light-skinned, middle-class, beautiful, proper lady vs. dark-skinned, poor, ugly girl (the racialized opposition between angelic and demonic woman). The first novel to focus on black girls, The Bluest Eye shows the systemic propagation and internalization of white norms of beauty and femininity, leading to hierarchical oppositions between black and white girls as well as between black girls (light-skinned middle-class Maureen, solidly working-class Claudia and Frieda, and precariously poor Pecola). The projection, by everyone, of all ugliness onto poor, dark-skinned Pecola, combined with white norms that are impossible for her, lead to Pecola’s madness. Her attempts at existential affirmation are crushed by the judgment of the world. Pecola’s Bildungsroman turns out naturalist tragedy. However, Claudia, the narrator, develops anagnorisis and shares her increasingly complex critique with the readers.

In “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib” ( 1971 ) Morrison uses Beauvoir’s language to bring attention both to the situation of African American women and to their traditions of resistance. Reminding readers of two segregation-era signs—“White Ladies” and “Black Women”—she asserts that many black women rejected ladylike behavior and “frequently kicked back . . . [O]ut of the profound desolation of her reality” the black woman “may very well have invented herself.” 79 Black women have been working and heading single-parent households in a hostile world. If ladies are all “softness, helplessness and modesty,” black women have been “tough, capable, independent and immodest.” 80

Audre Lorde explores similar themes. Her poem, “Who Said It Was Simple” ( 1973 ) illustrates the hierarchy between white “ladies,” in their feminist struggle for self-realization, and black “girls” on whose work they rely. Sister Outsider , Lorde’s essays and speeches from 1976 to 1984 , theorizes intersections of race, sexuality, class, and age that are particularly binding and threatening for black lesbian women. 81 White feminists are ignorant of racism and wrongly assume their concerns to be universally shared by all women, thus replicating the patriarchal elevation of men to the universal analyzed by Beauvoir; they need to drop the “pretense to a homogeneity of experience,” educate themselves about black women, read their work, and listen. 82 In “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” delivered during a Beauvoir conference, Lorde argues that Beauvoir’s call to know “the genuine conditions of our lives” must include racism and homophobia. 83 Black men misdirect their anger for the racism they encounter toward black women, who, paid less and more socially devalued, are easy targets. Falsely equating anti-sexist with anti-Black, black men are hostile to black feminists and especially lesbians; so black men’s sexism is different from the sexism of privileged white men analyzed by Beauvoir. 84 Black women have also been hostile toward each other, due to internalized racism and sexism, projected toward the most marginalized among them; identifying with their oppressors, black women suffer a “misnaming” and “distortion” in their understanding of their situation. 85

But Lorde also exalts traditions of black women’s solidarity across their differences. Once differences among women and among black women are properly understood and named, they can be creative and generative. To achieve this, she extols recording, examining, and naming one’s experience, perceptions, and feelings, as a path to clarity, precision, and illumination, leading to concepts and theories but also to empowerment. Anger, unlike hatred, is potentially both full of information and generative. 86 Affect, more broadly, can be a path to understanding, as affect and rationality are not mutually exclusive: “I don’t see feel/think as a dichotomy.” 87 Particularly innovative is Lorde’s theorization of the “erotic.” In contrast to the pornographic, the erotic is a power intrinsically connected to (and cutting across) love, friendship, self-connection, joy, the spiritual, creativity, work, collaboration, and the political—especially among black women. 88 But relations of interdependence and mutuality among women are only possible in a context of non-hierarchical differences among equals and peers, Lorde stresses repeatedly. 89

Alice Walker attends to many of these themes in Color Purple ( 1982 ). 90 In her collection of essays, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose ( 1983 ), she pays tribute to black women’s traditions of resistance, due to which “womanish” connotes “outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior.” 91 Her term “womanism” honors these collectivist traditions and their commitment to the “survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.” 92 But she also calls for the reconstruction of a written tradition of forgotten black women writers, resurrecting Zora Neale Hurston from oblivion in “Looking for Zora,” initially published in Ms . magazine in 1975 . 93

In 1979 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination established the enforced privatization and entrapped idleness of 19th-century white middle-class women. 94 In 1987 Hortense J. Spillers powerfully added that this was made possible by the enforced hard labor of black women, as house or field slaves and later as domestic servants who often headed single-parent households. 95 Furthermore, the gender polarization within the white middle-class family was accompanied by the ungendering of African American slaves, who were not allowed to marry and raise their children, and the structural rape of black women. In the late 1980s Crenshaw and Collins formally introduced the concept of intersectionality, though intersectionality-like ideas—that the black woman is the “mule uh de world”—have been a part of black women’s thought for a long time. 96

“Slavery and gender” has been a core topic since the 1980s, with publications such as Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death ( 1982 ), Toni Morrison’s Beloved ( 1987 ) and Playing in the Dark ( 1992 ), and Saidiya V. Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection ( 1997 ). 97 Hartman’s abiding topic has been a lost history of black girls and women that can only partially be retrieved and that requires new methodologies. Archives and official records are full of gaps, systematically “dissimulate the extreme violence” of slavery, and “disavow the pain” and “deny the sorrow” of slaves. 98 Even while reading them “against the grain,” Hartman underlines the “ impossibility of fully recovering the experience of the enslaved.” 99 In Lose Your Mother ( 2006 ) Hartman’s concept of the “afterlife of slavery” describes the persistence of “devalued” and “imperiled” black lives, racialized violence, “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery.” 100 In “Venus in Two Acts” ( 2008 ), Hartman defines her method as “critical fabulation”: mixing critical use of archival research, theorization, and multiple speculative narratives, in an experimental writing that acknowledges its own failure and refuses “to fill in the gaps” to “provide closure.” 101 This writing is:

straining against the limits of the archive . . . and . . . enacting the impossibility of representing the lives of the captives precisely through the process of narration . . . [in order] to displace the . . . authorized account, . . . to imagine what might have happened[,] . . . to listen for the mutters and oaths and cries of the commodity[,] . . . to illuminate the contested character of history, narrative, event, and fact, to topple the hierarchy of discourse, and to engulf authorized speech in the clash of voices. 102

In “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner” ( 2018 ) Hartman returns to “critical fabulation” and offers a “speculative history” of Esther Brown, her friends, and their life in Harlem around 1917 . 103 Their experiments in “free love and free motherhood” were criminalized as “Loitering. Riotous and Disorderly. Solicitation. Violation of the Tenement House Law. . . . Vagrancy.” 104 Questions such as “ Is this man your husband? Where is the father of your child ?”—meant to detect the “likelihood” of their “future criminality” and moral depravity—might render them “three years confined at Bedford and . . . entangled with the criminal justice system and under state surveillance for a decade.” 105 In official records, these measures were narrated as rescuing, reforming, and rehabilitating, therapeutic interventions for the benefit of young black women.

Reading such records against the grain, Hartman tells the story of a “ revolution in a minor key ”: of “ too fast girls and surplus women and whores ” as “social visionaries, radical thinkers, and innovators.” 106 Their “wild and wayward” collective experiments, at the beginning of the 20th century , were building on centuries of black women’s “mutual aid societies” conducted “in stealth.” 107 Their aspiration has been “singularity and freedom”—not the “individuality and sovereignty” coveted by white liberal feminists. 108

Hartman’s work emerges out of African American feminist traditions but also out of postcolonial feminists, whose work pays particular attention to impossibility, failure, aporia, and the limits of representing the subaltern, as well as the heterogeneity and specificity of women’s agency.

Postcolonial Feminisms (Djebar, Spivak, Mohanty, Stratton, Mahmood, Puar): The Subaltern, Specificity, Agency

Colonized women had to contend not only with the “imbalances of their relations with their own men but also the baroque and violent array of hierarchical rules and restrictions that structured their new relations with imperial men and women.” 109 Furthermore, they were central to powerful orientalist fantasies that rendered their actual lives invisible. The relation of colonized land to colonizer was figured as that of a nubile, sexually available woman waiting for her lover, as in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines where the map of the land centers around “Sheba’s Breasts” and “Mouth of treasure cave.” 110 Algerian writer Assia Djebar exposes this colonial fantasy in Fantasia ( 1985 ). 111 The city of Algiers is seen by the arriving colonizers as a virginal bride waiting for her groom to possess her. She is an “Impregnable City” that “sheds her veils,” as if this was “mutual love at first sight” and “the invaders were coming as lovers!” 112 The Victorian patriarchal, hierarchical nuclear family, ruled by a benign and loving husband and father, was key to the colonial “civilizing mission” because it was the perfect metaphor for the relation between colonizer and colonized in colonial ideology. 113 However, in Women of Algiers in Their Apartment ( 1980 ; mirroring the title of Eugène Delacroix’s orientalist paintings) Djebar reminds her readers that women took part in large numbers in the Algerian anticolonial struggle and suffered torture, rape, and loss of life, but that their contribution was marginalized in post-independence narratives, while they were expected to return to a patriarchal mold ostensibly for the good of the new nation. 114 By contrast, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment foregrounds Algerian women’s heterogeneity but also the intergenerational transmission of their socially repressed, traumatic history, which cannot be fully recovered—hence the self-conscious aporia of Djebar’s project.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” ( 1983 , 1988 , 1999 ) is a subtle theorization of what remains outside colonial, anticolonial, postcolonial, neocolonial, and even “liberal multiculturalist” elites and discourses. 115 Spivak’s starting point is the unpresentability of the “subaltern” (those most marginalized and excluded). The subaltern exceeds any representation treating it as a full identity with a fixed meaning. The subaltern is an inaccessible social unconscious that can only be ethically presented in its unpresentability—fleetingly visible in fragments.

Rather than documenting “subaltern” resistance in its “taxonomic” difference from the elite and rather than assuming that political forces are self-conscious and already constituted identities, Spivak assumes that political identities are being constituted through political action. 116 Many subaltern groups are highly articulate about their aims and their relations to elites and other subaltern groups, but Spivak understands the “subaltern” as singular acts of resistance that are “irretrievably heterogeneous” in relation to constituted identities. 117 Rather than asking for the recognition of “subjugated” and previously “disqualified” forms of knowledge, Spivak is intent on acknowledging her privileged positionality and insists that what she calls the “subaltern” is irretrievably silenced; the “subaltern” is what escapes—or is excluded from—any discourse. 118

Spivak’s heterogeneous subaltern is a (Derridean) singularity that cannot be translated fully or repeated exactly but can only be repeated differently. 119 The singularity in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is Talu’s suicide, as retold by Spivak. Spivak interprets it as a complex political intervention, by a young middle-class woman activist, that remained illegible as such. Entrusted with a political assassination in the context of the struggle for Indian independence, Spivak claims that Talu’s suicide was a complex refusal to do her mission without betraying the cause. Talu questioned anticolonial nationalism, sati suicide, and female “imprisonment” in heteronormativity, but her “Speech Act was refused” by everyone because it resisted translation into established discourses. 120 Spivak iterates Talu’s singularity differently: as a postcolonial feminist heroine. She does not present her version of Talu’s story as restoring speech to the subaltern. Speech acts are addressed to others and completed by others; they involve “distanced decipherment by another, which is, at best, an interception.” 121 To claim that Talu has finally spoken through Spivak would be a neocolonial “missionary” claim of saving the subaltern. 122 To avoid this, Spivak self-dramatizes her privileged institutional “positionality” and calls for “unlearning” one’s privilege. 123

Postcolonial feminists have been telling the story of the marginalization of women of color within anticolonial movements, postcolonial states, and within Western feminist movements. In “Three Women’sTexts and a Critique of Imperialism” ( 1985 ), Spivak argues that Gilbert and Gubar, in their reading of Jane Eyre in Madwoman in the Attic , unwittingly reproduce the “axioms of imperialism.” 124 For Spivak, in Jane Eyre Bertha, a dark colonial woman, sets the house on fire and kills herself so that Jane Eyre “can become the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction”; she is “sacrificed as an insane animal” for her British “sister’s consolidation” in a manner that is exemplary of the “epistemic violence” of imperialism. 125 Gilbert and Gubar fail to see this and only read Jane and Bertha in individual, “psychological terms.” 126 By contrast, Jean Rhys’s rewriting of Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea ( 1966 ) makes this visible and enables Spivak’s critique. 127 Rhys allows Bertha to tell her story and keeps Bertha’s “humanity, indeed her sanity as critic of imperialism, intact.” 128 In “Does the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak articulates the value of postcolonial feminism but refuses to defend it as a redemptive breakthrough. Instead she issues a call for self-reflexivity.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, in “Under Western Eyes” ( 1984 ), calls for studies of local collective struggles and for localized theorizing by investigators. 129 The category of “Third World Woman” is an essentialist fabrication reducing the irreducible “heterogeneity” of women in the Third World. 130 Mohanty’s call for specificity is a rejection of white middle-class feminists’ generalizations on “women” and “Third World women” as neocolonial:

Women are constituted as women through the complex interaction between class, culture, religion and other ideological institutions and frameworks. . . . [R]eductive cross-cultural comparisons result in the colonization of the conflicts and contradictions which characterize women of different social classes and cultures. 131

Mohanty is here remarkably close to African American feminists. What is at stake for Mohanty is for groups of marginalized women to represent themselves and to retrieve forms of agency within their own traditions. As she stresses in Feminism without Borders ( 2003 ): the “application of the notion of women as a homogeneous category to women in the Third World colonizes and appropriates the pluralities” of their complex location and “robs them of their historical and political agency .” 132

Saba Mahmood, in “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival” ( 2001 ), argues that rather than reading a specific cultural phenomenon through an established conception of agency, agency should be theorized through the specific phenomenon studied. 133 Her target is the Western feminist equation of feminist agency with secularism, resistance, and transgression, which she finds unhelpful when studying the “urban women’s mosque movement that is part of the larger Islamic revival in Cairo.” 134 While in some contexts feminist agency might take the form of “dramatic transgression and defiance,” for these Egyptian women it took the form of active participation and engagement with a religious movement. 135 It would be a neocolonial gesture to understand their involvement as due to “false consciousness” or internalized patriarchy. 136 Mahmood’s “situated analysis” thus endorses plural, local theories and concepts. 137

Florence Stratton focuses on gender in African postcolonial literature and criticism. She analyses the multiplicity of “ways in which women writers have been written out of the African literary tradition.” 138 They have been ignored by critics, marginalized by definitions of the African canon that universalize the tropes and themes of male writers, and silenced by “gender definitions which . . . maintain the status quo of women’s exclusion from public life.” 139 Particularly pernicious has been the “iteration in African men’s writing of the conventional colonial trope of Africa as female.” 140 Stratton discerns a ubiquitous pattern in African postcolonial men’s writing. Women are cast as symbols of the nation, in sexualized or bodily roles: as nubile virgin to be impregnated or as mother (Stratton calls this the “pot of culture” trope); or, alternatively, as degraded prostitute (the “sweep of history” trope). 141 So women are figured either as embodiments of an ostensibly static traditional culture (trope 1) or as passive victims of historical change (trope 2). This is coupled with a male quest narrative, where the male hero and his vision actively transform prostitute into mother Africa. Underlying this is a patriarchal division of active/passive and subject/object, which denies women as artists and citizens and neglects women’s issues (so actual sex work is totally obscured by its metaphorical role). Stratton goes on to show how African women writers have been “initiators” of “dialogue” with African male writers in order to self-authorize their work and make space for it in the African literary canon. 142 Stratton is also critical of white feminists who read African women writers through their own formal and thematic priorities, oblivious to African feminist traditions. 143

Jasbir K. Puar analyses how the “war on terror” and rising Islamophobia in the West, particularly the United States, have coopted feminist and queer struggles. While colonial orientalist fantasies projected sexual license onto the Middle East, 21st-century orientalist fantasies are “Islamophobic constructions” othering Muslims as “homophobic and perverse,” while constructing the West as “‘tolerant’ but sexually, racially, and gendered normal.” 144 On the one hand, Muslims are presented as “fundamentalist, patriarchal, and, often even homophobic.” 145 On the other hand, a “rhetoric of sexual modernization” turns American queer bodies into “normative patriot bodies.” 146 This involves the loss of an intersectional perspective and the “fissuring of race from sexuality.” 147 Muslims are seen as only marked by race and “presumptively sexually repressed, perverse, or both,” while Western queers are seen as only marked by sexuality and “presumptively white,” male, and “gender normative.” 148

Queer and Transgender Feminisms (Butler, Halberstam, Stryker): Performativity, Resignification, Continuous Transition, Self-Identification

Queer theory emerged in the period from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, in the midst of the outbreak of HIV/AIDS. 149 Queer theory, as an academic field, can be located at the intersection of poststructuralism (especially the work of Michel Foucault, but also Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze), Francophone feminism from Beauvoir to Irigaray, and African American feminism. Queer theorists have negotiated this genealogy variously; some are predominantly influenced by Foucault, less by feminist thought. The present account will focus on feminist queer theory, especially the work of Judith Butler, and its relation to earlier and subsequent feminist, queer, and transgender thought. As queer theory evolved, postcolonial feminists also became increasingly influential.

In brief, feminist queer theory, while indebted to “sexual difference” feminists such as Irigaray, critiques them through African American feminism. A core theoretical insight of African American feminism is that gender must not be considered on its own or as primary in relation to other social categories and hierarchies. Queer theorists adopt this insight. For queer theorists, sexual orientation is at least as important as gender. Indeed, they contend that what underpins the gender binary (the polarization of two genders) is the institution of “compulsory heterosexuality” or heteronormativity.

Transgender theory emerged in the mid to late 1990s, within the orbit of queer theory but also through its critique. The crux of this critique is that, despite queer theorists’ best intentions, the queer subject is primarily or implicitly white, Western, gender-normative, and cisgender. In attending to sexual orientation, queer theory neglected the spectrum of gender identities and translated issues of gender identification into issues of sexual orientation. Strands of queer activism—for example, figures such as Sylvia Rivera or Stormé DeLarverie in the United States—were marginalized by a politics of respectability led by affluent, white, cisgender queers. 150 This is particularly ironic, given the aspirations invested in the term “queer.”

In queer theory, the term “queer” was intended as an appropriation and resignification of a term of abuse but also as a floating signifier without a fixed meaning or definition and thus open to multiple and changing uses, in keeping with poststructuralist theory. “Queer” has been defined as beyond definition, transgressive, excessive, beyond polar opposites, and exceeding false polarization. So “queer” is both a particular social identity but also exemplary of a potential for openness, fluidity, and transformation in all identities (what poststructuralist theory calls the infinite deferral of the signified). It is important to point out that Spivak defined the “subaltern” and Irigaray the “feminine” in similar terms, also within a poststructuralist frame. A problem with such terms is that, though they are intended to be inclusive, they are exclusive in some of their effects. The chosen term is privileged as the only term that stands for marginality, potential for change, or openness to the past or future. In the process, the privileged term also loses specificity and becomes a metaphor. This is perhaps replicated in some uses of the term “trans” or “trans*,” where once again the term becomes a metaphor for the element of fluidity and openness in all identities.

Retracing one’s steps back to the beginnings of queer theory, while Beauvoir called for equality and the disappearance of gender, “sexual difference” feminists, such as Irigaray and Cixous, called for autonomous women’s struggles and a radical, utopian revisioning of the “feminine” to be performed by their écriture féminine . Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity ( 1990 ), one of queer theory’s inaugural texts, questions Irigaray’s utopianism and takes as her starting point Beauvoir’s “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.” 151 Forty years after The Second Sex , Butler contends that societies continue to systematically produce two “discreet and polar genders,” as a prerequisite of heteronormativity; two “[d]iscreet genders are part of what ‘humanizes’ individuals within contemporary society; indeed, we regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right.” 152 One is produced as a recognizably human individual in their very repetition of genderizing practices, performance of gender norms, and iteration of speech acts that bring about gender and its effect of timeless naturalness. But the performativity and iterability of gender show up the “ imitative structure of gender ” and its historical “ contingency .” 153 In spite of the pervasiveness of genderizing practices and the unavailability of a position outside gender, the very performativity and iterability of gender open up the possibility of repeating it slightly differently. Butler hopes for destabilized and constantly resignified genders: “a fluidity of identities,” “an openness to resignification,” and “proliferating gender configurations.” 154 While gender is a normalizing, disciplinary force, it is possible to engage consciously with gender norms and open them to resignification. However, the success or failure of an attempt at resignification also depends on its audience or addressees and the authority they are prepared to attribute to it.

In the context of feminist theory, Butler’s call for continuous resignification takes the form of resignifying “woman” and “feminism” itself. As part of her “radical democratic” feminist politics, she aims to “release” the term “woman” into a “future of multiple significations.” 155 In resignifying feminism, she writes against those feminists who assume that there is an “ontological specificity to women. . . . In the 1980s, the feminist ‘we’ rightly came under attack by women of color who claimed that the ‘we’ was invariably white.” 156 Not only heterogeneity but contentions among feminists ought to be valued: “the rifts among women over the content” of the term “woman” ought to be “safeguarded and prized.” 157 Furthermore, Butler distrusts the utopianism of those feminists who believe they are “beyond the play of power,” asking instead for self-reflexive recognition of feminists’ inevitable embeddedness in power relations. 158

One of the targets of Butler’s critique is Irigaray. Her nuanced reading of Irigaray in Bodies That Matter defends her from accusations of essentialism but rejects the primacy of sexual difference over other forms of difference—race, class, sexual orientation, and so on—in Irigaray’s work. For example, Butler finds that Irigaray’s alternative mythology of two labial lips touching and being touched by each other is a self-conscious textual “rhetorical strategy” intended to counter established understandings of women’s genitals as a lack, a wound, and so on. 159 Rather than describing an essential sexual difference, Irigaray’s reparative, positive figuration of the two lips is a deliberately improper and catachrestic form of mimicry akin to Butler’s resignification; it is “not itself a natural relation, but a symbolic articulation.” 160 Irigaray distinguishes between the false feminine within gender binaries and a true feminine “excluded in and by such a binary opposition” and appearing “only in catachresis .” 161 The true feminine is an “ excessive feminine” in that it “exceeds its figuration”; its essence is to have no essence, to undermine binary oppositions and their essences, and to exceed conceptuality. 162 Irigaray’s textual practice is intended as the “very operation of the feminine in language.” 163 Butler seems to endorse Irigaray’s purely strategic essentialism. However, it is troubling that Irigaray’s true feminine is a name for all that escapes binary oppositions and social hierarchies.

Butler’s critique of Irigaray is that her exclusive focus on the feminine is an implicitly white, middle-class, heterosexual position attending to the marginalization of women qua women but neglecting other forms of social marginalization. Since Irigaray’s true feminine is “exactly what is excluded” from binary oppositions, it “monopolizes the sphere of exclusion,” resulting in Irigaray’s “constitutive exclusions” of other forms of difference. 164 For Irigaray “the outside is ‘always’ the feminine,” breaking its link to race, class, sexual orientation, and so on. 165 By contrast, Butler embraces intersectionality. Whereas for Irigaray sexual difference is “autonomous” and “more fundamental” than other differences, which are viewed as “ derived from” it, for Butler gender is “articulated through or as other vectors of power.” 166

Butler acknowledges her debt to African American literature and feminist thought, in a rare foray into literary criticism, her close reading of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing . She also pays tribute to feminists of color, such as Chicana feminist Norma Alarcón, who similarly theorized women of color as multiply rather than singly positioned and marginalized. In Passing and in related African American literary criticism by Barbara Christian, Hazel Carby, Deborah McDowell, and others, Butler finds valuable theoretical insights that “ racializing norms ” and gender norms are “articulated through one another.” 167 But these texts also identify the value of solidarity among black women and the many obstacles to this solidarity. Versions of “racial uplift” adhering to the white middle-class nuclear family have been obstructive; they have been “masculine uplift” whose disproportionate “cost . . . for black women” has been the “impossibility of sexual freedom” for them. 168 Larsen’s critique of “racial uplift”—and its promotion of white middle-class gender norms, marriage, nuclear family, and heteronormativity—grasps the interimplication of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. By contrast, Larsen’s Passing and Toni Morrison’s Sula uphold the precarious “promise of connection” among black women. 169

If “racial uplift” has been obstructive, Irigaray’s exclusive focus on the feminine is equally obstructive, according to Butler. Irigaray seems to assume that sexual difference is “unmarked by race” and that “whiteness is not a form of racial difference.” 170 By contrast, Larsen highlights historical articulations “of racialized gender, of gendered race, of the sexualization of racial ideals, or the racialization of gender norms.” 171 In Passing Clare passes as white, and Butler’s reading particularly traces the convergence of race and sexuality. Clare’s “risk-taking” takes the dual form of “racial crossing and sexual infidelity” that undermines middle-class norms, questioning both the “sanctity of marriage” and the “clarity of racial demarcations.” 172 Sexual and racial closeting are also interlinked: “the muteness of homosexuality converges in the story with the illegibility of Clare’s blackness.” 173 The word “queering” in Passing is “a term for betraying what ought to remain concealed,” in relation to both race and sexuality. 174

If some early commentators interpreted Butler’s theory of the performativity of gender and her call for gender resignification as a voluntarist, individualist, consumerist lifestyle choice for privileged Westerners, this article has tried to show just how constrained gender resignification is, and how inextricable from other social struggles. In Butler’s more recent work, issues of gender and sexual orientation are situated in interlocking frames of social exclusion and social precarity. Neither gender nor sexual orientation on their own can determine what counts as a human, livable, and grievable life. 175

Susan Stryker, one of the founders of transgender theory, addresses her first publication, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix” ( 1994 ), to feminist and queer communities and exposes their exclusion and abjection of the “transgendered subject” as a monster. 176 Through a close reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , she expresses her affinity with Frankenstein’s monster. 177 She criticizes the medical discourse that “produced sex reassignment techniques” for its “deeply conservative attempt to stabilize gendered identity in service of the naturalized heterosexual order” and insists on the disjunction between the “naturalistic effect biomedical technology can achieve” and the “subjective experience” of this transformation. 178 She rejects the continuing pathologization of the transgendered subject by psychiatrists, with the effect that “the sounds that come out of my mouth can be summarily dismissed.” 179 Notable here is an emphasis on self-identification and lived experience, which inherits the insights of phenomenological feminists that the body is not an object but a center of perception. To honor this emphasis, Stryker enlists a mixed form that combines criticism, diary entry, poetry, and theory.

Jack Halberstam’s 1998 Female Masculinity is a complex negotiation between feminist theory, queer theory, and the emerging field of transgender theory. While in medical discourse the approved narrative for the authorization of hormones and gender confirmation surgery is that of being in the wrong body and transitioning toward the right body, Halberstam warns that the “metaphor of crossing over and indeed migrating to the right body from the wrong body merely leaves the politics of stable gender identities, and therefore stable gender hierarchies, completely intact.” 180 Indeed he endorses the very “refusal of the dialectic of home and border” in Chicana/o studies and postcolonial studies. 181 Taking a broadly intersectional position, he argues that “alternative masculinities, ultimately, will fail to change existing gender hierarchies to the extent to which they fail to be feminist, antiracist, and queer.” 182

In his 2018 “Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition” of Female Masculinity Halberstam defines “female masculinity” and “the butch” in a manner that bears a family resemblance to Irigaray’s “feminine,” Spivak’s “subaltern,” and queer theory’s “queer.” “Female masculinity” includes “multiple modes of identification and gender assignation” without “stabilizing” their “meanings.” 183 “The butch” is a “placeholder for the unassimilable, for that which remains indefinable or unspeakable within the many identifications that we make and that we claim”; “let the butch stand as all that cannot be absorbed into systems of signification, legitimation, legibility, recognition, and legality.” 184 The butch is “neither cis-gender nor simply transgender” but a “bodily catachresis . . . the rhetorical practice of misnaming something for which there would otherwise be no words.” 185 In Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability ( 2018 ) Halberstam defines trans* in similar terms. In keeping with his commitment to gender identity as “continuous transition,” the term trans* “embraces the nonspecificity of the term ‘trans’ and uses it to open the term up to a shifting set of conditions and possibilities rather than to attach it only to the life narratives of a specific group of people”; the asterisk “keeps at bay any sense of knowing in advance what the meaning of this or that gender variant form may be.” 186 His 2018 “Theory in the Wild,” co-written with Tavia Nyong’o, folds a “range of concerns” in addition to gender and sexuality—“race, coloniality, ecology, anarchy”—in a language that stretches from academic to creative writing. 187

In “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin” ( 2004 ), Susan Stryker launches transgender studies as an academic field “born of the union of sexuality studies and feminism” but distinct from them. The rationale for this autonomization is that “all too often queer remains a code word for ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian,’” while “transgender phenomena are misapprehended through a lens that privileges sexual orientation.” 188 Transgender studies is intended to disrupt the “privileged . . . narratives that favor sexual identity labels” at the expense of “gender categories.” 189 But Stryker is keen to acknowledge her own Western privilege: transgender studies is “marked by its First World point of origin” and the new field risks reproducing the “power structures of colonialism by subsuming non-Western configurations of personhood into Western constructs of sexuality and gender.” 190

In “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies” ( 2006 ), Stryker continues to argue that, within queer theory, “the entire discussion of ‘gender diversity’” was “subsumed within a discussion of sexual desire—as if the only reason to express gender was to signal the mode of one’s attractions.” 191 While the term transgender “began as a buzzword of the early 1990s,” in the 21st century it is established as the name for a “wide range of phenomena that call attention to the fact that ‘gender,’ as it is lived, embodied, experienced, performed, and encountered, is more complex and varied” than previously thought. 192 As this definition suggests, transgender studies draws on the insights of all the strands of feminist theory discussed in this article—phenomenological, poststructuralist, intersectional, and postcolonial. Stryker reminds readers that, since at least Sojourner Truth, “fighting for representation within the term ‘woman’ has been . . . a part of the feminist tradition,” and “the fight over transgender inclusion within feminism is not significantly different.” 193 As with African American and postcolonial feminisms, transgender theory calls for feminists’ examination of their “exclusionary assumptions.” 194 In turn, transgender theorists need to reckon with the “whiteness” of their academic field and the “First World origin” of the term transgender, as it is being exported globally across “racial, ethnic, linguistic, and socioeconomic communities.” 195 Arundati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness explores the clash, in India, between the terms of transgender theory—emanating from the United States and disseminated by NGOs, magazines, and other publications—and the terminology, self-understanding, and practices of hijras . 196

Stryker is particularly critical of the modern Western correlation of biological or bodily sex (particularly genital status) and gender identity, where gender is taken to be merely the “representation of an objectively knowable material sex.” 197 Stryker is adamant that “Sex . . . is not the foundation of gender.” 198 Nor is sex as self-evident as it appears to be, in that the different components of sex—chromosomal, anatomical, reproductive, and morphological—do not necessarily line up. (For example, one’s chromosomal status might not line up with their anatomical sex.) This supposedly “objective” correlation is based on the “assumed correlation of a particular” component of “biological sex with a particular,” normative “social gender,” with the result that transgender people (among others) are forever viewed as making “false representations of an underlying material truth.” 199 Many feminist strands have shed light on the correlation of biological sex and “gender normativity,” and Stryker promises that transgender theory will continue to analyze the “operations of systems and institutions that simultaneously produce various possibilities of viable personhood, and eliminate others.” 200 In recognizing diversity beyond “Eurocentric norms,” Stryker notes that “relationships between bodily sex, subjective gender identity, social gender roles, sexual behaviors, and kinship status” have varied greatly. 201 Of central importance to transgender theory is subjective gender identity, which Stryker understands within the tradition of feminist phenomenology.

It is important to distinguish between gender as a social category within social classifications and hierarchies and gender as one’s self-identification and sense of self. Stryker focuses on the latter and connects it to the body, as the “contingent ground of all our knowledge.” 202 The antidote to fake objectivity is the recognition of “embodiment,” “embodied experience,” and “experiential knowledge”; one’s “gendered sense of self” and “lived complexity” of gender are “inalienable.” 203 All voices are embodied and no voice should be allowed to “mask” its “particularities and specificities” under the cloak of “false universality.” 204 It is therefore imperative to either speak from “direct experience” or to represent others “in an ethical fashion.” 205 It is equally vital to include forms of knowledge previously “disqualified as nonconceptual[,] . . . naïve” and “hierarchically inferior.” 206 Once again, Stryker here joins several strands of feminist theory that have practiced formal innovation—for example, in mixing theory, literature, and life-writing—not for its own sake but in the pursuit of truth and justice.

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Julie Rak and Jean Wyatt for their suggestions for revision, John Frow for his comments, and Ian Richards-Karamarkovich for his in-house editorial support.

guide to feminist literary theory

#metoo in the classroom or book club: how to read unreliable female narrators like a feminist.

According to recent bestseller lists, unreliable female narrators are having a heyday. Popular titles like A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl are set in the present moment, but they contain echoes of much older works of literature commonly used in the classroom, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper .

In all of these works of literature, and many more, a female narrator goes through a confusing experience; her reactions to the experience are documented in her narration, but something about her renders her voice untrustworthy to the reader. Sometimes, she is too young to be taken seriously, or she is under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or physically unwell. Often, however, her most unreliable quality may be her gender, which is why these works of literature (see the Book List at the end of this article) make for rich study when discussed through the lens of feminist literary theory.

What is Feminist Literary Theory?

Readers unfamiliar with literary theory, or literary criticism, as an academic pursuit may benefit from learning that literary theory is simply the practice of applying a specific frame of reference to the study of a work of literature. Anyone can engage in this scholarly practice and discover new meaning in the books they read. If you’re looking for more guidance, see our Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism .

Here, we’ll examine how to apply established principles of feminist theory to works of literature. Feminist literary theory is the practice of examining a book from a feminist perspective — that is, with issues of gender inequities in mind. In the 1960s and 70s, feminism, a political and social movement that advocated for women’s rights, gathered momentum in America; this movement continues to inspire scholars to examine literature as a reflection of both society at large and of the political and social ideology of specific writers. Here’s how:

Feminist critics examine literary portrayals of women to expose the ways in which writers misrepresent, underrepresent, or marginalize women. The writers need not always be male.
Feminist critics explore the nature of being female, seeking to illuminate the experiences of women who have been suppressed, silenced, or ignored.
Feminist literary theory also concerns itself with power; in the case of female unreliable narrators, they lack power because their voices are considered inconstant or untrue.

Resources:

Feminism : Get your bearings with this definition and history of feminism.
Literary Theory : This comprehensive discussion includes examples of several different literary theories.
Feminist Literary Theory : Here, learn about what feminist theory is and how it is often applied to literature.
Key Events in the History of Feminism : See this timeline for a broad overview of the feminist movement in America.
Feminist Approaches to Literature : Peruse this essay to learn about the traditions of feminist literary criticism.

Conversation Starter : Ask a group of readers or students to write down what they think of when they think of a feminist. Group members can continue writing independently, or, if they prefer, discuss with a partner what it might feel like to talk about feminism in a group setting. What worries them about the process and what excites them?

What is an Unreliable Narrator?

According to literary critic Wayne C. Booth , who coined the term, an unreliable narrator is the narrator of a work of literature who does not speak or act “in accordance with the norms of the work” ( The Rhetoric of Fiction, pages 158–59).

The norms of a literary work might involve the reporting of events and conversations, the interpretation of characters’ acts and behaviors, and/or the evaluation of situations that involve the narrator.

Clues that you’re in the hands of an unreliable narrator:

The narrator’s reports of events include a subtext that may or may not accurately reflect the thoughts and feelings of the individuals involved, such as in Ian McEwan’s Atonement .
The narrator interprets another character’s behavior as dangerous or transgressive though the circumstances surrounding the behavior appear anodyne to others, or vice versa.
The narrator evaluates an objectively positive situation as negative, or, as in Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller , an objectively negative situation as positive. The unreliability of the narrator is compounded by the unexpected or “inappropriate” nature of the narrator’s evaluation as viewed by other characters.
What is Subtext? Read this thorough definition and set of examples of subtext.
Lesson Plan: Evaluating Legitimate Sources : Common Sense Education offers this set of teaching resources for evaluating the reliability of sources in real-world media.
Lesson Plan: Women in Literature : This resource provides inspiration for classroom activities that examine how women are portrayed in literature.
The Cult of the Unreliable Female Narrator Must Be Stopped : In this opinion piece, the author discusses the phenomenon of unreliable female narrators in a real-world setting.
“ What Does It Mean to Be a Woman? It's Complicated ”: This thought-provoking Time article examines the experience of being a woman in modern society.

Conversation Starter : Have the group reflect on the notion of “norms” for a few minutes. In a classroom setting, students can write their responses in journals or discuss the questions with a partner. Ask: What norms do you observe in school, at work, or in other community settings? And what happens when someone violates those norms?

Feminism, Power, and Voice

Feminist literary scholars often explore a work of literature in terms of power. In the case of an unreliable female narrator, her power, or rather, her lack of power, lies in the matter of her voice. She lacks authority over her own story, so when she uses her own voice to seek help, for example, she is often denied the assistance she needs.

When a female narrator’s judgment is impaired, she becomes more vulnerable: drugs or alcohol, or emotions like fear and anger, or other concerns like mental health problems or physical illness often afflict female narrators, which weaken them in the eyes of the male characters and sometimes, the readers themselves. In many cases, the male characters of a novel have more authority, more knowledge, and, therefore, more confidence and credibility than their female counterparts.

Power as a resource or an asset: Some unreliable female narrators are deemed unworthy of a voice while others find that when they talk, no one listens. See discussion of The Yellow Wallpaper in the “Book List” section below.
Power as a controlling force: At times, when an unreliable female narrator attempts to impact a person or a situation, her attempts may appear incoherent, sloppy, ineffectual, or even disastrous. See discussion of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine in the “Book List” section below.
Power as having the potential to act: Unreliable female narrators sometimes seize power in ways that upset or offend other characters, and their energy is sometimes misconstrued as melodrama, a form of attention-seeking, or female emotion gone awry. See discussions of Gone Girl and My Sister, the Serial Killer in the “Book List” section below.
Feminist Perspectives on Power : This academic paper discusses power as domination, as resource, and as tool of empowerment.
A Guide to Feminist Pedagogy: Power & Authority : The Vanderbilt Center for Teaching provides this resource for applying key feminist theory questions such as “Who has the power here?” in a classroom setting.
How Power Makes People Selfish : In this brief video, University of California Berkeley psychologist Dacher Kelter explains the “The Cookie Monster Study” and what he’s learned about power in society.
How “Strong Female Characters” Still End Up Weak And Powerless : This article explores how to write female characters, and poses: “Do they pass the action figure test?”
#MeToo Brought Down 201 Powerful Men. Nearly Half of Their Replacements Are Women : The New York Times has documented how #MeToo actually shifted power dynamics.

Conversation Starter : Ask the group to reflect on the idea of power within the context of relationships: Think of a relationship that can exist between two people (younger brother/older sister, boss/employee, etc.) and how power might impact that relationship. For example, what does it mean for the older sister to have power over her little brother?

Reading the #MeToo Movement

Many feminists assert that the phenomenon of the unreliable female is not just a literary one, especially in light of the revelations of the #MeToo Movement. Despite an increased awareness around the world of the oppression of women, past and present, the words of women are often still doubted, dismissed, and denigrated, especially when the women are involved in conflicts with men.

By applying tenets of feminist literary criticism to the sampling of titles discussed in the next “Book List” section , students and the general reader will be better able to appreciate the links between literature and real-world issues of gender discrimination, abuse, and harassment.

Do Works by Men Implicated by #MeToo Belong in the Classroom? ( New York Times, October 7, 2019)
Two Years on, the Literature of #MeToo Is Coming of Age ( The Guardian , October 14, 2019)
One Year of #MeToo: ‘He Said, She Said’ Is a Literary Problem, Too ( The New Yorker , October 10, 2018)
#MeToo Is All Too Real. But To Better Understand It, Turn To Fiction (New York Times, May 1, 2019)

Conversation Starter : Present the group with a real-world news article to help individuals understand and reflect on the link between feminist readings of texts and the #MeToo movement. Refer to the list above for ideas; one or more of these articles may prompt rich discussion of the books you are reading.

Book List: Read These 8 Books (and More) Like A Feminist

All the texts listed below are appropriate for classroom study and book club discussions. Readers will quickly observe that all are narrated in the first person by an unreliable female. In these novels, authored by both men and women, when a woman or a young girl attempts to assert her power with her voice, efforts to discredit her move the events in the plot line forward.

1) The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Synopsis: In ten diary entries, the narrator of this short story writes openly about her postpartum struggles, which are exacerbated by her lack of agency over her own medical treatment. Published in 1892 in New England, the story is semi-autobiographical; Charlotte Perkins Gilman herself was forced to endure the rest cure prescribed to her by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell , and her narrator’s mental decline reflects Gilman’s own struggle to have some authority over her experience as a patient.

Power dynamic: The narrator experiences a severe mental decline, and as she writes about her symptoms, they increase in severity and the details in her written narrative grow more terrifying. The narrator documents how her husband, a doctor, ignores her when she expresses what she needs, demonstrating to readers that her voice has been muted.

Discussion point: What do the consequences of the narrator’s silencing reveal about the gender norms of the author’s time?

Quote: “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.” (Page 131)

The narrator appears to accept disrespectful treatment as a condition of marriage. Her resigned tone reveals the writer’s negative attitude toward marriage, a social institution at this time in American history that Gilman herself found unsatisfactory ; she divorced her husband soon after writing “The Yellow Wallpaper,” inviting criticism and disparagement from members of her society.

2) Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Synopsis: This 2012 thriller by author Gillian Flynn is often described as “ domestic ,” which is a term budding feminist scholars might enjoy exploring in its own right. The enraged anti-heroine, Amy Dunne, takes turns with her husband Nick to tell the story of Amy’s disappearance five years to the day after their wedding. Neither narrator is being completely honest, so the reader must attempt to read between the lines to find the truth.

Power dynamic: As the reader learns that Amy’s rage stems from her discovery of Nick’s affair with a young, attractive female student, Amy’s desire to toy with Nick and punish him for his infidelity makes more sense. As well, when Nick narrates his side of the story, his descriptions of Amy reveal that he believes Amy is a hysteric ; Amy uses these assumptions about her character in devious ways, suggesting that the power in their relationship may actually be in her hands.

Discussion point: Does Amy’s rage make her a stronger female character with a more compelling, more authentic story or does she exhibit signs of what the patriarchy might identify as “female problems”?

Quote: “My wife had a brilliant, popping brain, a greedy curiosity. But her obsessions tended to be fueled by competition: She needed to dazzle men and jealous-ify women: Of course Amy can cook French cuisine and speak fluent Spanish and garden and knit and run marathons and day-trade stocks and fly a plane and look like a runway model doing it. She needed to be Amazing Amy all the time.” ( Part One, Page 45 )

This passage appears in one of Nick’s sections of the novel, through which he narrates the story of Amy’s disappearance. In his description of Amy, he employs several negative stereotypes of heterosexual women that include an inherent need to impress men and to look attractive as well as a competitive approach to her relationships with other women. Nick does not address the possibility that Amy’s impulse to excel in so many aspects of her life may be fueled by a need to prove to the world that she is not merely an object and that she is, in fact, a capable, intelligent, multi-talented woman.

3) The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn

Synopsis: Dr. Anna Fox, the protagonist of this 2018 novel, is a smart, well-educated child psychologist. Though she is a mental health professional herself, her self-sabotage and other effects of a traumatic experience lead others in her life to question her attachment to reality when she witnesses a murder. When Anna asks her friends and the police to believe her, they refuse to take her words to heart. Even the reader becomes complicit as Anna’s unreliable narration is fueled by a dangerous mixture of wine and psychotropic medications that renders her voice erratic as the events of the plot unfold.

Power dynamic: Anna is vulnerable and her observations are accurate, but the stigma of mental illness exacerbates her distressing situation. The police detectives and others in her life dismiss her fears as unfounded paranoia, and she is left to fend for herself. Ultimately, Anna’s voice is heard, but only after she saves herself from a potentially fatal attack and the evidence that proves her right is indisputable.

Discussion point: Does the resolution of the novel suggest that women have the potential to defy convention and be their own rescuers, or is Anna just one of the lucky ones?

Quote: “Once more Jane enters the frame—but walking slowly, strangely. Staggering. A dark patch of crimson has stained the top of her blouse; even as I watch, it spreads to her stomach. Her hands scrabble at her chest. Something slender and silver has lodged there, like a hilt.” ( Chapter 32, Page 144 )

In this passage, Anna sees that Jane has been stabbed in the chest, but she does not yet know that Jane’s killer is her son, Ethan. Later, Anna learns the truth about Ethan, and the location of the stab wound suggests maternal tropes that enhance the shock value of Ethan’s murder of his own mother. For example, Jane is killed after sustaining a wound to the chest, which is the location of both her heart and her breasts; stereotypes of motherhood often place a child’s life at the center of the mother’s emotional world, represented by her heart, and they also often assume that a mother will nourish her child with her body, specifically, with her breasts. Ethan’s attack on his mother is all the more horrifying for the maternal stereotypes in play.

4) Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Synopsis: Kathy is the protagonist and narrator of Never Let Me Go, a work of dystopian literature published in 2005. She tells the story of her past nostalgically, focusing on her personal experience of the events that mark her early life and upbringing. Kathy is a clone, so her understanding of herself and her role in the world has not been shaped by a childhood in a traditional family environment; instead, Kathy is influenced primarily by the adults who run Hailsham, the institution for young clones where she was brought up.

Power dynamic: In her role as a carer for other clones whose organs have been harvested to save the lives of humans, Kathy falls into a stereotypical gender role , nurturing and caring for others in a maternal way. Kathy has some agency over herself, but her muddled self-perceptions lend her storytelling an untrustworthiness characteristic of unreliable narrators.

Discussion point: Kathy’s depth of emotion and her ability to think philosophically about art and life give her an unexpected humanity, but is her lack of credibility her fault, or the fault of the society that created her?

Quote: “There were other buildings, usually the outlying ones, that were virtually falling down, which we couldn’t use for much, but for which we felt in some way responsible.” ( Chapter 10, Page 71 )

From a young age, Kathy has been trained to be maternal by the guardians at Hailsham who assign her the role of carer. She and other carers look after clones who have been designated as organ donors, establishing that clones who function as mothers are essential to the organ donation industry that created the clones in the first place. When Kathy acknowledges that she and the other residents of the Cottages felt a sense of duty towards buildings that were in disrepair, she suggests that she felt genuine emotion towards the inanimate objects. Her memory of her emotional connection to the outbuildings reveals that Kathy’s impulse to nurture and to take care of others according to culturally-accepted maternal stereotypes has been ingrained into her character.

5) Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

Synopsis: In modern day Glasgow, Eleanor Oliphant, the title character of the novel published in 2017, is an eccentric 29-year-old woman whose mother is apparently in prison. Eleanor has an alcohol problem, a propensity towards social awkwardness, and a crush on a pop star; her infatuation with this singer inspires her to reinvent herself, but when the object of her affection proves to be unreachable, Eleanor is forced to face the reality of her painful past.

Power dynamic: Eleanor describes her experience with loneliness in clear, affecting prose, revealing her mental health struggles with humor and self-deprecation . The reader sees Eleanor as she sees herself, which is often the object of a darkly funny punchline.

Discussion point: Eleanor’s use of humor to dispel the harshness of her reality may make her less reliable as a narrator, as she seems to protect her sensitivities with the distance of jokes, but what are her other options in a world that judges people who are lonely, preferring to look the other way?

Quote: “A philosophical question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? And if a woman who’s wholly alone occasionally talks to a potted plant, is she certifiable? I’m confident that it is perfectly normal to talk to oneself occasionally. It’s not as though I’m expecting a reply. I’m fully aware that Polly is a houseplant.” ( Chapter 6, Page 51 )

In this passage from the novel, Eleanor reveals that her houseplant’s name is Polly and that she has one-sided conversations with Polly, which she regards as a “perfectly normal” and acceptable behavior. Eleanor’s choice to anthropomorphize her houseplant by giving the houseplant a stereotypically female name suggests that Eleanor believes that a woman would offer Eleanor, in her loneliness, more sympathy than a man. Women are often stereotyped as talkative, which makes Polly’s role as a sympathetic listener even more poignant; as well, Polly’s inability to respond to Eleanor emphasizes the silence that characterizes Eleanor’s life on weekends, when she speaks to no one else.

6) My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Synopsis: Korede, the protagonist of this 2019 satirical novel set in Lagos, Nigeria, takes care to cover the bloody tracks of her murderous sister Ayoola, whose sociopathic tendencies may stem from the abuse she sustained at the hands of their father. Braithwaite presents the themes of her debut novel with dark humor, examining the close relationship between the sisters through a love triangle that has the potential to go horribly wrong.

Power dynamic: Korede’s attachment to Ayoola and her impulse to protect her suggest she is a loving and selfless sister, but her narration of the events concerning Ayoola may not be trustworthy as a result of Korede’s sisterly loyalty. The setting of the story further complicates matters; in Lagos, violence against women is alarmingly commonplace, which means that Ayoola’s murderous impulses could reflect an overreactive fight or flight response to any interaction with any man.

Discussion point : How much does the culture of abuse and harassment into which the sisters are born contribute to their behaviors? Does the author’s satirical tone enhance the cautionary tone of this novel or detract from it?

Quote: “She didn’t mean to kill him; she wanted to warn him off, but he wasn’t scared of her weapon. He was over six feet tall and she must have looked like a doll to him, with her small frame, long eyelashes and rosy, full lips.

(Her description, not mine.)

She killed him on the first strike, a jab straight to the heart. But then she stabbed him twice more to be sure. He sank to the floor. She could hear her own breathing and nothing else.”

( Chapter 4, Page 7 )

In this passage, Koreda recalls Ayoola’s comparison of herself to a doll. This comparison juxtaposes Ayoola’s violent act of stabbing with what she believes is her perceived weakness as a young woman. By focusing the reader’s eye on stereotypically feminine details like her diminutive size in comparison to most men and her delicate, sexually alluring facial features, Koreda shocks the reader into realizing that this seemingly vulnerable young woman is actually a cold-hearted killer. Ayoola defies many stereotypes that surround women, all of which suggest that femininity is weakness.

7) Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

Synopsis: This 2012 novel opens as a young woman named Queenie, which is another alias for the protagonist also known as Verity and as Lady Julie Beaufort-Stuart, acknowledges to the reader, and to her Nazi captors, that she has a particular skill: pretending. From the start of the novel, Lady Julie warns the reader that she may or may not be telling the truth, which is a direct circumstance of her wartime duties as a spy. In this young adult novel set during World War II, unreliability and untrustworthiness are Julie’s superpowers and the keys to Julie’s survival.

Power dynamic : As Julie writes the confession that makes up the entirety of the epistolary novel , she manipulates her Nazi captors, demonstrating that her ability to work as a double-agent is not merely a stereotypical feminine wile, but a life-saving strength. As well, the novel’s focus on Lady Julie’s friendship with another heroic young woman, Maddie examines the role of power between two equals.

Discussion point: Is the focus on the friendship between Lady Julie and Maddie enough to label Code Name Verity a feminist novel ? What other elements of the novel make it feminist?

Quote: “I am no longer afraid of getting old. In fact I can’t believe I ever said anything so stupid. So childish. So offensive and arrogant.

But mainly, so very, very stupid. I desperately want to grow old.” ( Part 1, Page 114 )

Verity scolds her younger self in this passage for being so vain as to worry about the natural processes of aging; she criticizes her own youthful arrogance and her immature assumption that old age would negatively affect her. Young Verity’s fears can be explained by her existence in a culture that places inordinate amounts of value on a woman’s youth and appearance . As a product of that culture, Verity understandably places value on her own youth and appearance, lamenting the time when her youth will fade. Now, at this point in the novel, when Verity understands that her life is in danger, she finally appreciates the fact that living to an old age is a blessing.

8) We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

Synopsis: Cady, the rebellious 17-year-old narrator of this young adult novel published in 2014, is 15 years old when she suffers a mysterious accident she cannot remember. As she struggles with painful headaches in the years that follow her injuries, her mother refuses to tell her what happened to her, forcing Cady to draw up hazy memories of the incident on her own.

Power dynamic : Cady’s resistant attitude towards her upbringing mirrors, in some ways, the experience of all young people as they seek to individuate themselves from their families. Cady’s unwillingness to live according to the norms set by her grandfather, however, diverges from typical adolescence when her rebellious ways cause a disaster from which she will never wholly recover.

Discussion points : What effect does Cady’s patriarchal family have on her development from a young girl into a woman with her own opinions about the world? Some critics describe Cady’s voice as authentic for its messiness, but does this reading of her character support difficult stereotypes of young women or challenge them?

Quote: “He married Tipper and kept her in the kitchen and the garden. He put her on display in pearls and on sailboats. She seemed to enjoy it.” ( Chapter 3, Page 6 )

Cady describes the relationship between her grandparents with cynicism, revealing her awareness that her grandfather’s treatment of her grandmother as a decorative object is objectionable. Cady scorns her grandmother for “enjoying” her life as a stereotypical “trophy wife,” which is a sexist term in its own right; that Cady describes her grandmother without using the term reflects her thoughtfulness and her resistance to the patriarchal norms that characterize the society of her grandparents.

Social Media and Digital Resources

On Twitter, follow feminist authors Roxane Gay ( @rgay ) and Margaret Atwood ( @MargaretAtwood ), among others — as well as hashtags associated with feminist discussion, such as #WomensReality and #EverydaySexism.
Follow #Readwomen and the push for equal treatment for women writers.
Find inspiration among these “ 6 Blogs And Podcasts For Book-Loving Feminists ” — including the Reading Women Podcast .
View this TED Talk by author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “ We Should All Be Feminists .”
The documentary This Changes Everything explores underrepresentation of women in the entertainment industry.

This essay offers a very basic introduction to feminist literary theory, and a compendium of Great Writers Inspire resources that can be approached from a feminist perspective. It provides suggestions for how material on the Great Writers Inspire site can be used as a starting point for exploration of or classroom discussion about feminist approaches to literature. Questions for reflection or discussion are highlighted in the text. Links in the text point to resources in the Great Writers Inspire site. The resources can also be found via the ' Feminist Approaches to Literature' start page . Further material can be found via our library and via the various authors and theme pages.

The Traditions of Feminist Criticism

According to Yale Professor Paul Fry in his lecture The Classical Feminist Tradition from 25:07, there have been several prominent schools of thought in modern feminist literary criticism:

First Wave Feminism: Men's Treatment of Women In this early stage of feminist criticism, critics consider male novelists' demeaning treatment or marginalisation of female characters. First wave feminist criticism includes books like Marry Ellman's Thinking About Women (1968) Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1969), and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970). An example of first wave feminist literary analysis would be a critique of William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew for Petruchio's abuse of Katherina.
The 'Feminine' Phase - in the feminine phase, female writers tried to adhere to male values, writing as men, and usually did not enter into debate regarding women's place in society. Female writers often employed male pseudonyms during this period.
The 'Feminist' Phase - in the feminist phase, the central theme of works by female writers was the criticism of the role of women in society and the oppression of women.
The 'Female' Phase - during the 'female' phase, women writers were no longer trying to prove the legitimacy of a woman's perspective. Rather, it was assumed that the works of a women writer were authentic and valid. The female phase lacked the anger and combative consciousness of the feminist phase.

Do you agree with Showalter's 'phases'? How does your favourite female writer fit into these phases?

Read Jane Eyre with the madwoman thesis in mind. Are there connections between Jane's subversive thoughts and Bertha's appearances in the text? How does it change your view of the novel to consider Bertha as an alter ego for Jane, unencumbered by societal norms? Look closely at Rochester's explanation of the early symptoms of Bertha's madness. How do they differ from his licentious behaviour?

How does Jane Austen fit into French Feminism? She uses very concise language, yet speaks from a woman's perspective with confidence. Can she be placed in Showalter's phases of women's writing?

Dr. Simon Swift of the University of Leeds gives a podcast titled 'How Words, Form, and Structure Create Meaning: Women and Writing' that uses the works of Virginia Woolf and Silvia Plath to analyse the form and structural aspects of texts to ask whether or not women writers have a voice inherently different from that of men (podcast part 1 and part 2 ).

In Professor Deborah Cameron's podcast English and Gender , Cameron discusses the differences and similarities in use of the English language between men and women.

In another of Professor Paul Fry's podcasts, Queer Theory and Gender Performativity , Fry discusses sexuality, the nature of performing gender (14:53), and gendered reading (46:20).

How do more modern A-level set texts, like those of Margaret Atwood, Zora Neale Hurston, or Maya Angelou, fit into any of these traditions of criticism?

Depictions of Women by Men

Students could begin approaching Great Writers Inspire by considering the range of women depicted in early English literature: from Chaucer's bawdy 'Wife of Bath' in The Canterbury Tales to Spenser's interminably pure Una in The Faerie Queene .

How might the reign of Queen Elizabeth I have dictated the way Elizabethan writers were permitted to present women? How did each male poet handle the challenge of depicting women?

By 1610 Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl presented at The Fortune a play based on the life of Mary Firth. The heroine was a man playing a woman dressed as a man. In Dr. Emma Smith's podcast on The Roaring Girl , Smith breaks down both the gender issues of the play and of the real life accusations against Mary Frith.

In Dr. Emma Smith's podcast on John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi , a frequent A-level set text, Smith discusses Webster's treatment of female autonomy. Placing Middleton or Webster's female characters against those of Shakespeare could be brought to bear on A-level Paper 4 on Drama or Paper 5 on Shakespeare and other pre-20th Century Texts.

Smith's podcast on The Comedy of Errors from 11:21 alludes to the valuation of Elizabethan comedy as a commentary on gender and sexuality, and how The Comedy of Errors at first seems to defy this tradition.

What are the differences between depictions of women written by male and female novelists?

Students can compare the works of Charlotte and Emily Brontë or Jane Austen with, for example, Hardy's Tess of the d'Ubervilles or D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover or Women in Love .

How do Lawrence's sexually charged novels compare with what Emma Smith said about Webster's treatment of women's sexuality in The Duchess of Malfi ?

Dr. Abigail Williams' podcast on Jonathan Swift's The Lady's Dressing-Room discusses the ways in which Swift uses and complicates contemporary stereotypes about the vanity of women.

Rise of the Woman Writer

With the movement from Renaissance to Restoration theatre, the depiction of women on stage changed dramatically, in no small part because women could portray women for the first time. Dr. Abigail Williams' adapted lecture, Behn and the Restoration Theatre , discusses Behn's use and abuse of the woman on stage.

What were the feminist advantages and disadvantages to women's introduction to the stage?

The essay Who is Aphra Behn? addresses the transformation of Behn into a feminist icon by later writers, especially Bloomsbury Group member Virginia Woolf in her novella/essay A Room of One's Own .

How might Woolf's description and analysis of Behn indicate her own feminist agenda?

Behn created an obstacle for later women writers in that her scandalous life did little to undermine the perception that women writing for money were little better than whores.

In what position did that place chaste female novelists like Frances Burney or Jane Austen ?

To what extent was the perception of women and the literary vogue for female heroines impacted by Samuel Richardson's Pamela ? Students could examine a passage from Pamela and evaluate Richardson's success and failures, and look for his influence in novels with which they are more familiar, like those of Austen or the Brontë sisters.

In Dr. Catherine's Brown's podcast on Eliot's Reception History , Dr. Brown discusses feminist criticism of Eliot's novels. In the podcast Genre and Justice , she discusses Eliot's use of women as scapegoats to illustrate the injustice of the distribution of happiness in Victorian England.

Professor Sir Richard Evans' Gresham College lecture The Victorians: Gender and Sexuality can provide crucial background for any study of women in Victorian literature.

Women Writers and Class

Can women's financial and social plights be separated? How do Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë bring to bear financial concerns regarding literature depicting women in the 18th and 19th century?

How did class barriers affect the work of 18th century kitchen maid and poet Mary Leapor ?

Listen to the podcast by Yale's Professor Paul Fry titled "The Classical Feminist Tradition" . At 9:20, Fry questions whether or not any novel can be evaluated without consideration of financial and class concerns, and to what extent Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own suggests a female novelist can only create successful work if she is of independent means.

What are the different problems faced by a wealthy character like Austen's Emma , as opposed to a poor character like Brontë's Jane Eyre ?

Also see sections on the following writers:

Jane Austen
Charlotte Brontë
George Eliot
Thomas Hardy
D.H. Lawrence
Mary Leapor
Thomas Middleton
Katherine Mansfield
Olive Schreiner
William Shakespeare
John Webster
Virginina Woolf

If reusing this resource please attribute as follows: Feminist Approaches to Literature at http://writersinspire.org/content/feminist-approaches-literature by Kate O'Connor, licensed as Creative Commons BY-NC-SA (2.0 UK).

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Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s newest collaboration, Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader , is the first collection to trace the historical evolution of feminist writing about literature in English from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century.

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4.2: Feminist Theory: An Overview

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Let’s whet our appetite for literature in a different, maybe more peculiar way. Let’s read a different text, this one from a local Wisconsin cookbook, the Amberg Centennial 1890–1990 Cookbook .American Legion Auxiliary #428, Amberg Centennial 1890–1990 Cookbook (n.p.: n.d.).The two recipes come from the section “Game.”

Duck with Wild Rice

Boil duck, onion, and celery until tender. Remove meat from bones. Set aside. Cook rice. Set aside. Melt butter and sauté onion. Stir in flour and half-and-half to make cream sauce. Add parsley and seasonings. Add cooked duck, rice, mushrooms, and almonds to cream sauce. Bake mixture in a casserole at 350 ° for 30–45 minutes. Serves 6–8.

—Mrs. Charles T. Dekuester (Doris Van Vleit)

Bessie’s Birds

Sauté salted and floured birds in small amount of butter or bacon drippings to brown well. Put rice in bottom of buttered oblong casserole dish. Place birds on top of rice. Sprinkle peppers and onion on top. Pour consommé and onion soup over casserole. Cover casserole with aluminum foil and bake at 350 ° for 45 minutes. Serves 6.

Chicken may be substituted for the birds.

—Mrs. Hugh Guy (Viola Barette)

CLASS PROCESS

Put students in groups of three or four.
Have them read the recipes carefully.
Have them interpret the recipes as they would examine a story or poem.
What “themes” can they find in the recipe text?
Generate class discussion, as you are guided by the discussion following the excerpt.

The recipes reflect a particular view of women and their role in the domestic space. In other words, the woman’s domain is in the house, her workspace the kitchen, where she will cook for her husband (and by extension the children). Notice that each recipe privileges the male name, with the woman’s maiden name—her original name and identity—put in parenthesis. Even the use of Mrs. denotes her married status, whereby Mr. does not tell us the married status of the male. We are in the realm of patriarchy , the condition that demonstrates male domination over women. The recipes are even more interesting, for the section of this cookbook is “Game,” further suggesting particular gender roles: men, the sportsmen, go hunting for this game, while the women, remaining at home, cook up that game for the family. If we interpret these recipes as we might a piece of literature, we can identify particular themes that represent feminist criticism: women are inferior to men in patriarchy; women’s space is the private place of domesticity, the man’s space is public (in this case the rugged wild); the woman’s identity is determined by her husband’s identity (she, like Eve, is dependent on her husband’s rib, so to speak).

Now let’s look at a literary use of the kitchen as a domestic space. Here is the cast of characters and opening set description for Susan Glaspell’s one-act play, Trifles (1916). The play was first performed by the Provincetown Players in Massachusetts, with Glaspell playing the role of Mrs. Hale. A year later, Glaspell turned the play into a short story, “A Jury of Her Peers,” partly to reach a larger reading audience. The inspiration for the play came from a murder reported in the Des Moines Register .Articles on case: www.midnightassassin.com/sgarticles.html .

GEORGE HENDERSON (County Attorney)
HENRY PETERS (Sheriff)
LEWIS HALE, A neighboring farmer

SCENE: The kitchen is the now abandoned farmhouse of JOHN WRIGHT , a gloomy kitchen, and left without having been put in order—unwashed pans under the sink, a loaf of bread outside the bread-box, a dish-towel on the table—other signs of incompleted work. At the rear the outer door opens and the SHERIFF comes in followed by the COUNTY ATTORNEY and HALE . The SHERIFF and HALE are men in middle life, the COUNTY ATTORNEY is a young man; all are much bundled up and go at once to the stove. They are followed by the two women—the SHERIFF ’s wife first; she is a slight wiry woman, a thin nervous face. MRS HALE is larger and would ordinarily be called more comfortable looking, but she is disturbed now and looks fearfully about as she enters. The women have come in slowly, and stand close together near the door. Susan Glaspell, Trifles (1916; Project Gutenberg, 2011), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10623/10623-h/10623-h.htm#TRIFLES .

The following excerpt is the opening of the short story “A Jury of Her Peers”:

WHEN Martha Hale opened the storm-door and got a cut of the north wind, she ran back for her big woolen scarf. As she hurriedly wound that round her head her eye made a scandalized sweep of her kitchen. It was no ordinary thing that called her away—it was probably farther from ordinary than anything that had ever happened in Dickson County. But what her eye took in was that her kitchen was in no shape for leaving; her bread all ready for mixing, half the flour sifted and half unsifted.

She hated to see things half done; but she had been at that when the team from town stopped to get Mr. Hale, and then the sheriff came running in to say his wife wished Mrs. Hale would come too—adding, with a grin, that he guessed she was getting scarey and wanted another woman along. So she had dropped everything right where it was.Susan Glaspell, “A Jury of Her Peers,” in The Best Short Stories of 1917 , ed. Edward J. O’Brien (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1918; University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center, 1996), etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin...ublic&part=all .

Have the students read Trifles .
Ask the students to make a chart on a piece of paper: label the left side “men,” the right side “women.”
Students should then fill in the chart: what symbols are associated with the men and women?

When we turn to the Trifles example, we see how a writer uses this domestic space and its implications to create a symbolic statement about gender. The men all have first and last names and are given an occupation (attorney, sheriff, or farmer); the women are only known by their husband’s names—they are not even given first names. This naming becomes important in the play, for the suspected murderer Minnie Wright is referred to as Minnie Foster by Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, suggesting that she had lost her identity by marrying her husband, who was a cold and cruel man, even preventing her from singing in the choir or having a telephone in the house (see Gretchen Panzer’s sample paper on voice in The Great Gatsby later in the chapter).

Furthermore, the setting of the play is important—all the action on stage takes place in the kitchen, a kitchen that is in disarray. The men, of course, view the messy kitchen as a fault of Minnie’s: she just isn’t a very good housewife and housekeeper, for that is her primary role according to the men. To be a housewife, in addition, means that women are only concerned with “trifles,” insignificant things. Later in the play and the short story we find out that Minnie’s canning—her preserves—have been ruined because the jars have frozen and burst. Again, the men see this as sloppy housekeeping, while the women view the preserves as Minnie’s hard work to care for her family. The idea of “preserves” or “preservation” becomes a central theme in Glaspell’s work, for Minnie must preserve her dignity as a woman, even if it means that she must murder her husband. The great irony of the play and short story is that the women discover the evidence—the strangled bird—that would be enough to convict Minnie of murder, but they withhold this evidence, thus implying that Minnie will be set free. The women create their own justice system, becoming a jury of their peers: women.

Feminism is a powerful literary theory that is dedicated to social and political change. “How to define feminism? Ah, that is the question,” a befuddled Hamlet might ask. A useful definition can be found in Michael Kimmel and Thomas Mosmiller’s Against the Tide: Pro-Feminist Men in the United States, 1776–1990: A Documentary History (1992). They focus on four central points:

There is evidence that women are treated differently and unequally.
Women are not treated equally in the private and public sphere.
If these points are true, then that’s wrong and becomes a moral problem.
Thus feminism is a commitment to change.Michael Kimmel and Thomas Mosmiller, Against the Tide: Pro-Feminist Men in the United States, 1776–1990 a Documentary History (Boston: Beacon, 1992).
On the blackboard or whiteboard, have the students generate examples for points 1 and 2 of the list. This should lead to a spirited discussion.

Two other definitions will be useful to you: Barbara Smith argues that “feminism is the political theory and practice that struggles to free all women: women of color, working-class women, poor women, disabled women, Jewish women, lesbians, old women—as well as white, economically privileged, heterosexual women. Anything less than this vision of total freedom is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement.”from A History of U.S. Feminisms by Kory Dicker (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008), p. 7. Noted feminist author bell hooks adds, “Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels, as well as a commitment to reorganize society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.”bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center , 2nd ed. (London: Pluto, 2000).

Feminist literary criticism is also about this commitment to equality, to change, and it works its way by arguing that literature is a powerful cultural force that mirrors gender attitudes. Feminist literary criticism can be categorized into three stages: patriarchal criticism, gynocriticism, and feminine writing.

Patriarchal criticism examines the prejudices against women by male writers. Such criticism analyzes the way that canonical authors—mostly men—create images of women. For example, Gretchen Panzer’s sample paper in this chapter explores how F. Scott Fitzgerald silences Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby , further reinforcing the notion that this great American novel depicts women in demeaning ways.F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 2003). This criticism is often focused on close textual study since it will examine how men and women are depicted in literary texts. Patriarchal criticism will be central to this chapter.

Gynocriticism is concerned with women writers, particularly in the ways that women writers have become included within the canon. In American literature, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God are classic examples;Kate Chopin, The Awakening , 2nd ed., ed. Nancy A. Walker (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000); Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: HarperCollins, 2000). these texts, now part of the canon of American literature, have only been seen as such for the past twenty-five years or so. Another interesting example is the evolution of The Norton Anthology of English Literature , which reflects the insertion of women into the canon. The edition for 1968,M. H. Abrams, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature , rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968). which covers the Middle Ages, the seventeenth century, the Restoration and the eighteenth century, the Romantic period, the Victorian age, and the twentieth century, includes no women. That’s right—not one single woman! The latest (eighth) edition of this anthology,Stephen Greenblatt and M. H. Abrams, eds., The Norton Anthology of English Literature , 8th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996). published thirty-eight years later, includes the following women writers:

Middle Ages : Marie De France and Margery Kempe
Sixteenth and seventeenth centuries : Queen Elizabeth, Mary (Sydney) Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Wroth, Katherine Philips, and Margaret Cavendish
Restoration and eighteenth century : Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Frances Burney
Romantic period : Anna Letitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Felicia Dorothea Hemans
Victorian age : Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Christina Rossetti
Twentieth century : Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys, Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro, and Anne Carson

What does it mean, consequently, when there are no representations of women? Historically, if women didn’t exist in the canon, then we did not—we could not—study them. But with the rise of the field of women’s studies in the 1960s, which introduced the idea of feminist literary criticism, we now value the study of women and their accomplishments, as well as thinking about how gender is constructed and perpetuated generally. This evolution about women and literature is mirrored in the evolving contents of the Norton anthology, which also reflects the evolving canon that is more inclusive, particularly to women writers.

Feminine writing explores the notion that women may write differently than men, suggesting that there may be a “women’s writing” that is an alternative to male writing. Elaine Showalter in A Literature of Their Own (1977)Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). traces women’s writing into three stages. The first stage is Imitation or Feminine (1840–80), where women imitated men. The classic examples of this are Charlotte and Emily Brontë (of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights fame, respectively), who took on male names—Currer Bell and Acton Bell.Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre , ed. Richard J. Dunn (New York: Norton, 2001); Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights , ed. Richard J. Dunn (New York: Norton, 2003). To give another famous example, George Eliot, who wrote the Victorian classic Middlemarch , was actually Mary Ann Evans.George Eliot, Middlemarch , ed. Bert G. Hornback (New York: Norton, 2000). The second stage of women’s writing is Protest or Feminist (1880–1920), which sees women becoming much more political as writers, reacting directly to male domination in society and literature. Kate Chopin is an example of this stage, as is Virginia Woolf. Finally, the third stage, Self-Discovery or Female (1920–), becomes more radical as women turn inward toward the female, toward the body, creating works that mirror a writing particular to women.

As you can see, to narrowly define feminist literary criticism is difficult, for there are a myriad of approaches to take. Feminism is often referred to in the plural—feminisms—because there is such diversity within feminism about core terms and philosophies. A useful starting point is Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism , edited by Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl .Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, eds., Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism , rev. ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997). You can examine the table of contents at www.amazon.com/Feminisms-Anthology -Literary-Theory-Criticism/dp/0813523893#reader_0813523893 .

A look at this table of contents will show you the complexity of feminist literary criticism and provide you with some ideas to focus your feminist paper on.

Your Process

Choose a literary work to examine: either a male or female writer.
Look through the table of contents of Feminisms and choose three chapter areas that might lead to a focus for your paper.
Write down several possible working thesis ideas for your paper.
Remember, you may decide to focus your paper on gender criticism or masculinity studies, which are defined in the Key Terms.

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31 Feminist Theory

Jean Mills is Associate Professor of English Literature at John Jay College/CUNY. She is the author of Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison, and the Spirit of Modernist Classicism (2014) and is currently at work on her second book Literary Approaches to Peace. She recently edited and wrote the Introduction and Afterword for the late Jane Marcus’s unfinished manuscript, Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger (2020).

Published: 11 August 2021
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This chapter examines Virginia Woolf’s foundational role in the development of feminist theory, placing her theoretical positions on women’s lives and life-writing, privacy, the body, and self-expression in dialogue with a diverse and actively changing continuum of feminist thought. Focusing on the return of rage to the forefront of feminist discourse and social media’s effect upon feminist politics, the chapter chronicles the changing critical responses to Woolf’s feminisms, in relation to her positions on feminist identities and feminist community. The chapter also investigates the ways in which women of colour feminists disclosed Woolf’s racialized self and racist thinking to assess the place of Woolf’s feminism in contemporary political thought. From issues seeking to reconcile and value difference and diversity with the uses of ambivalence and calls for unity and integration, the chapter places the concepts and vocabulary of feminist theory within the context of Virginia Woolf’s work and example.

Whether as an icon, an invocation, or in the replication of her own work, Virginia Woolf has guided or been central to key conversations in feminist theory. In the discourses of women’s sexual liberation, Black and Latinx feminisms, lesbian feminism, trans feminism, and feminist pacifism, Virginia Woolf’s theoretical positions outlined in both her fiction and non-fiction work continue to shape feminist thought in relation to gender, sexuality, race, class, and the potential for peace. With a focus on Woolf’s inquiries into feminist identity, the limits and possibilities of feminist community, and the uses of feminist anger, this chapter delineates the arc of her influence on feminist theory as it also investigates the relevance and efficacy of her ideas in a twenty-first-century digital landscape across which much of feminist theory is now mediated and produced.

The historical trajectory of Virginia Woolf’s influence has been evident in feminist thinking generated in work by Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Carolyn Heilbrun, Adrienne Rich, and Sara Ahmed, as representative examples, from the 1940s to today. In documenting women’s cultural, sexual, social, and historical experiences in her classic, The Second Sex (1949), Beauvoir relied on Woolf’s fictional portrayal of Shakespeare’s sister in A Room of One’s Own (1929) to point to the disparities between ‘the meager and restricted life’ of a woman and Shakespeare’s ‘life of learning and adventure’. 1 In addition to her use of Woolf’s essay, Beauvoir deployed narrative examples from Woolf’s fiction, as well—Jinny in The Waves (1931) for her discussion of adolescent girls whose ‘dreams of the future hide its futility’, 2 and Woolf’s heroines in Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), to investigate the condition of women in relation to religion and revelation. In her analysis of women’s character and sense of identity in relation to spirituality within the context of patriarchal society, Beauvoir writes:

There is a justification, a supreme compensation, which society is ever wont to bestow upon woman: that is, religion. There must be religion for woman as there must be one for the common people, and for exactly the same reasons. When a sex or a class is condemned to immanence, it is necessary to offer it the mirage of some form of transcendence. 3

Revelations and spiritual ownership for women, as for many of Woolf’s protagonists in her novels, according to Beauvoir, ‘are those in which they discover their accord with a static and self-sufficient reality: those luminous moments of happiness [ … ] of supreme recompense’, are joy experienced not ‘in the free surge of liberty’ as men often experience religion, but in ‘a quiet sense of smiling plenitude’. 4 Man, Beauvoir writes, ‘enjoys the great advantage of having a God endorse the codes he writes; and since man exercises a sovereign authority over woman, it is especially fortunate that this authority has been vested in him by the Supreme Being’. 5 While Beauvoir sees religion and a woman’s turn towards religion as filling ‘a profound need’, she also argues that it is ‘much less an instrument of constraint than an instrument of deception’, 6 and she frames her discussion with allusions to Woolf’s fiction. In Mrs Dalloway , Clarissa loathes not so much Miss Kilman, her daughter’s tutor, herself, but Miss Kilman’s unquestioning devotion to God, ‘it being [Clarissa’s] experience that the religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes)’ ( MD 10). She views Miss Kilman’s attentions towards her daughter, Elizabeth, with jealousy and suspicion, accusing her of deceptively trying to convert her young mind to her religious beliefs. Highly critical of the institution of religion, Woolf nonetheless often explored the nature of her characters’ spirituality. Indeed, much of the spiritual joy experienced in Mrs Dalloway occurs between same-sex unions—the adolescent kiss between Clarissa and Sally Seton, for example, which she describes as ‘the revelation, the religious feeling!’ ( MD 32) or the bond between the traumatized war veteran Septimus Smith and his friend Evans. Written in the language of the spiritual ecstatic, these scenes offer examples of radical trespass and violations of patriarchal hierarchies, which helped guide Beauvoir in constructing her feminist positions on women and religion in The Second Sex .

In terms of feminist identity, Virginia Woolf has also been central to the work of Doris Lessing and her inquiries into sexual liberation and to Carolyn Heilbrun’s investigations into the implications of androgyny. Useful comparisons have been made between Lessing’s character Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook (1962) and Woolf’s Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse , each independent creative women whose struggles to maintain independence and establish a sense of identity in a male-dominated world are key themes to their respective narratives. In Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (1964) , Carolyn Heilbrun characterized androgyny as ‘a condition under which the characteristics of the sexes and the human impulses expressed by men and women are not rigidly assigned’, 7 a position that built upon Woolf’s exploration of the mind as potentially androgynous, possessive of ‘no single state of being’ in A Room of One’s Own ( ARO 73). Heilbrun also deployed Woolf’s biography as a means to rethink the genres of biography, memoir, and life-writing as a feminist methodology in Writing a Woman’s Life (1988). She drew upon Woolf’s writing career to demonstrate the pressure women writers experience to conform to a literary and cultural climate dominated by men, and the ways in which women writers, such as Woolf, rejected gendered scripts of women’s roles under patriarchy to develop and shape narratives more true to women’s lived experiences.

More recently, Sara Ahmed, whose work builds on decades of women of colour feminist research, also found Woolf’s fiction to be instructive in how one acquires a ‘feminist consciousness’. 8 Like Beauvoir, Ahmed uses the narrative arc of Mrs Dalloway herself as one example of a feminist path—one often filled with false starts, disappointments, obstacles, and changes in purpose and momentum. She counts Mrs Dalloway as a ‘feminist classic’ and a key component of her feminist ‘killjoy survival kit’. 9 Indeed, Ahmed’s blog The Feminist Killjoy resonates with Woolf’s Angel in the House, in A Room of One’s Own , whom Woolf argued women had metaphorically to kill in order to carve out the space and time to write. Like Woolf, Ahmed questions gendered prescriptions and expectations assigned to the trajectories of women’s lives. In The Promise of Happiness , she cautions that the processional path of women’s narratives from girlhood to adulthood must include ‘refusing to follow other people’s goods, or [ … ] refusing to make others happy’. 10 Ahmed’s plea insists that our negative feelings, be they rage, anger, or unhappiness, be deployed repeatedly by ‘the feminist killjoy’, to achieve feminist aims, maintain and sustain vigilance over women’s rights, and lead a feminist life.

In one of her more comedic and fantastical novels, the mock-biography, Orlando: A Biography , Woolf upends many of the assumptions about gender performance and expectations, across four centuries of historical context. She connects the relationship between women’s experiences in the home and the pressure to marry and bear children with the reach, both domestically and abroad, of state power. Woolf notes that England of the nineteenth century rises out of the damp, as the muffin and crumpet were invented and coffee replaced the drinking of port after dinner, but ‘[t]he sexes drew further and further apart’ ( O 209). Her biographer/narrator reports that, ‘The life of the average woman was a succession of childbirths. She married at nineteen and had fifteen or eighteen children by the time she was thirty; for twins abounded. Thus the British Empire came into existence’ ( O 209). Orlando, who has by this point in the novel transitioned into a woman, feels, but balks at, the social pressure to conform, repeat, and find a husband. She envisions ‘ “Life! A Lover!” not “Life! A Husband!” ’ ( O 222), challenging the predetermined progression of a woman’s life, which Ahmed and others have argued feminists need to re-examine and disrupt.

The novel, which depicts a gender transformation, while not a trans novel, has nevertheless been a notable part of new developments in feminist and trans theory for the ways in which it illustrates ideas of gender fluidity and outlines anti-patriarchal positions in favour of multiple perspectives. Though not a trans-authored text, nor a text with a trans protagonist, the novel can and has been read through a transgender theoretical lens. Pamela Caughie’s comparison between Woolf’s fantastical parodic novel and the real-life memoir of transsexual Elnar Wegener offers a pointed analysis of literature’s capabilities in an era of scientific experimentation to shape our understanding of feminist identities. She writes that, ‘By focusing on the nexus of scientific experimentation with the real and aesthetic experimentation with representation as reciprocal cultural forms, I uphold the power of literature, not just the promise of science, to reshape notions of gender and identity in the modernist era.’ 11 Enjoying a resurgence in attention, in 2019 the novel was also the focus of an edition of the fine art photography journal Aperture , entitled Orlando , and guest edited by Tilda Swinton, who played the lead in Sally Potter’s film version of the novel in 1992. The edition included ‘Inspired by Virginia Woolf’, which featured trans artists and trans subjects in conversation with the novel. Orlando continues to generate and guide discourses on notions of selfhood.

In the ever-changing evolution of feminist thought, Virginia Woolf’s exploration of feminist identity has raised questions about her own positionality and feminist politics in relation to class and race. Critics such as Jane Marcus have argued in favour of Woolf’s working-class credentials reading her depictions of charwomen in her novels such as Mrs McNab in To the Lighthouse and Crosby in The Years (1937), as not speaking for the working class, but in concert with them, and as blistering critiques of the ruling classes that created them. In a generative analysis, Marcus writes:

[T]he voices of the charwomen, the cooks and maids, the violet sellers and the caretaker’s children in The Years , [ … ] act as chorus in all her novels. We hear it in the ‘ee um fah um so/foo swee too eem oo’ of the tube station ancient singer in Mrs Dalloway to the pidgin Greek of the janitor’s children in The Years : ‘Etho passo tanno hai,/Fai donk to tu do,/Mai to, kai to, lai to see/To dom to tuh do.’ If women’s language, then lesbian language, is being made out of ‘words that are hardly syllabled yet’, every Woolf text suggests that other oppressed voices of race and class, of difference and colonial subjectivity, are beginning to syllable themselves, like the Kreemo, Glaxo, Toffe or KEY spelled by the mysterious sky-writing airplane in Mrs Dalloway . 12

Although highly critical of her own class, Woolf and her relationship to the servants she grew up with in the late Victorian age and the ones she reluctantly managed in her own intellectual middle-class British household have been the focus of studies, which have found Woolf’s positions on class to be problematic and indicative of the ways in which one’s politics can sometimes be at odds with one’s personal biases and blind spots. Despite these limitations, Alison Light points to the fact that Woolf ‘was highly unusual in examining many of her reactions and feelings, probing her sore spots, especially in her diaries’ 13 about her interactions and experiences with Britain’s servant class. As Adrienne Rich has claimed, when Woolf was writing about women’s poverty and lack of funding and support in A Room of One’s Own , she was ‘aware of the women who are not with us here because they are washing the dishes and looking after the children’. 14 But nearly five decades after its publication, in the early 1970s when Rich was writing, she noted that very little had changed to help fund and support women’s creative and intellectual lives. Rich added to Woolf’s inquiry into women and fiction, ‘thinking also of women whom she left out [ … ] women who are washing other people’s dishes and caring for other people’s children, not to mention women who went on the streets last night in order to feed their children’. 15 Ultimately, Virginia Woolf’s personal and public relationship to class has been both reclaimed and challenged by feminist scholarship, which has noted the ways she exposed the vagaries and cruelties of the British class system, while also being complicit in its advantages and privileges as a result of her class status.

In A Room of One’s Own , Woolf promoted women’s contributions to cultural and literary production, theorizing a tradition of women writers who ‘think back through our mothers’, an idea that feminist thinkers such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison found useful, but also, as women of colour scholars, and authors, exclusionary and in need of updating. It became important to many women of colour feminists to distance themselves from Woolf and push beyond her limitations, especially on issues of race. Indeed, Woolf’s omissions or audiences she refused to claim to speak for, sometimes justifiably, as she was often very clear about her own position as both an othered British subject and a white woman of privilege, but at other times, as a result of her own personal and historical racial and class biases, have created ellipses of their own, gaps in the text, to unpack and speak across. Alice Walker, for example, examined African American women’s experiences and contributions, invoking and extending Woolf’s argument that ‘Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman’, including women of colour creatives under the difficult aegis of anonymity ( ARO 38). Walker’s path-breaking work outlined her ‘womanist theory’ as ‘A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mother to female children and also a woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.’ 16 She was writing in response to a white, liberal feminist movement, which marginalized women of colour in its own bid for equality and freedom of expression. In 2007, characterizing the history of feminist thought, Gill Plain and Susan Sellers pointed out that within the women’s movement there was ‘a pretense to a homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist’, and that too often ‘white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class, and age’. 17 This myopic view of the circumference of feminist thinking has been questioned, challenged, rethought, and expanded upon by decades of Black, Latinx, lesbian, trans, and multicultural scholarship, which insists on feminism’s plurality and continues to invigorate and extend feminist theoretical discourse. In addition to Alice Walker, African American critics and authors such as bell hooks, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Tuzyline Allan have found Woolf’s work useful in disclosing her limitations regarding race and the racialized self.

This work delivered incisive critiques of both Woolf and the feminist movement in their own contemporary moments, while also demonstrating Woolf’s work as generative. By the late 1990s, African American women’s writing had begun to enjoy wider audiences, but, as Robyn Warhol-Down and Diane Price Herndl noted in 2009, African women’s writing was being eclipsed and ‘left out of histories and commentaries on African literature’. 18 Many African women writers, such as Beba Cameroonian author Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi, following Walker’s example, according to Warhol-Down and Price Herndl, ‘have hesitated to self-identify as “feminist” because of the Western roots of feminist theory and practice’. 19 Some prefer ‘womanist’ or other spellings of the word, as they use a feminist methodology to adapt to their own purposes. This rethinking of feminist identity resonates with Woolf’s own negotiation of the term ‘feminist’, when, in Three Guineas (1938), she ironically asks if we perhaps shouldn’t ‘write that word in large black letters on a sheet of foolscap; then solemnly apply a match to the paper’, because, with access to the professions achieved, there was no longer a need to fear that men and women wouldn’t work together for justice, equality, and freedom for all ( TG 179). The scene, however, is meant as a foil to her argument pointing to the ways in which other words such as ‘tyrant’ and ‘dictator’ remain current and alive, as well as the similarities between both the patriarchal state and the fascist state, a comparison that continues to make us uncomfortable today.

The questions and positions Virginia Woolf theorized about women’s privacy as well as the nature of feminist community and women’s relationship to the public sphere anticipate and sometimes reflect parallel development of similar questions feminist theorists face today in negotiating a relationship to social media. Indeed, any apprehension of her positions in relation to twenty-first-century feminist theory must inevitably involve a reckoning between feminist theory and social media, as conversations on feminist community are created, shaped, and reconsidered within its framework.

The fact that the discourse is both relentlessly replenished online and insatiably disseminated in a variety of social media platforms raises questions about both the content of the feminist conversation as well as the nature and efficacy of the methodology. As Urmila Seshagiri wrote in 2017, ‘Feminism is repetitive because patriarchy is undead.’ 20 She was pointing to a curious disjunction between a subject area that recognizes that women, feminists, and feminist women fundamentally shaped modernism and modernity and a body of scholarship responding to that subject, which continues to neglect women’s roles, experiences, and contributions. She was also writing within the political context of a rise in misogynistic rhetoric, an uptick in the commission of hate crimes, and policy initiatives aimed at rolling back women’s rights across the globe. Noting protest signs, such as ‘I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit’, displayed at the Women’s March in Washington, DC in January 2017, Seshagiri was also remarking upon a deep-seated frustration at having to repeat rationales to theoretical debates for women’s equity and equal treatment, many considered to have been won and translated into real policy decades earlier.

Since the political watershed of 2016 outlined a world leaning globally and with enthusiasm towards right-wing populist ideologies, resurgent nationalisms, and anti-feminist thought, feminist theory has increasingly been shaped and directed across a digital landscape of visual and verbal play in response. Indeed, the hashtag and the links and memes, GIFs, and images, which social media generate create their own kinds of feminist community, and, in my view, have become in and of themselves artefacts and indicators of a contemporary feminist zeitgeist. The spirit of the age, which Woolf satirized so incisively in Orlando as being much more varied and complex than the masculinist prescriptives of her father’s late Victorian age, in our own times finds us awash in an open-ended, infinite, and intersectional web of multiple interpretations and voices, similar to those ‘many thousand’ selves Woolf described in the final passages of the novel, as Orlando travels through centuries to her own contemporary time, and ‘now looked down into this pool or sea in which everything is reflected’ ( O 282, 295). The infinitude is both exhilarating and overwhelming, as Orlando, as a woman, must decide whether to submit to or resist its directives. Remarkably, Woolf’s embrace and interrogation of illegibility and ambivalence (sometimes in and of themselves as forms of resistance) throughout her work makes her somewhat of a twenty-first-century literary poster child for a digital generation, which very much sees itself as ‘a society for asking questions’ ( CSF 125) about which Woolf once fantasized for women in her 1921 short story ‘A Society’, which advocated for women’s reproductive freedom, access to education and the professions, and the inclusion of women’s voices and experiences in literary and cultural production.

Currently, as memes and hashtags are born and replicated, some, such as #MeToo, for example, dedicated to narratives of sexual assault and sexual harassment, gain traction and evolve to become phenomena, marking profound shifts in any given conversation. As in the case of #MeToo, a transition in theoretical discourse sparked several political movements and activism devoted to issues raised in the conversation. The phrase was first coined in 2006 by civil rights activist Tarana Burke on the social media platform Myspace, and later popularized on Twitter in October 2017 by American actress Alyssa Milano, in response to a widely publicized case of sexual assault and harassment by film producer Harvey Weinstein. Interestingly, even though it’s possible to discover the first mention of #MeToo on social media as a proliferating digital artefact, #MeToo is unencumbered by the boundaries of provenance, authorship, or origins.

While the feminist community generated by the MeToo hashtag far exceeds the reach of a twentieth century understanding of ‘the public’, social media’s democratization of the conversation speaks to Virginia Woolf’s challenges to and explorations of cultural gatekeeping, hierarchies, and pretentiousness. These she identified as male-driven and male-dominated, and as basic principles connected to egotism that she personally loathed. She rejected ‘the loudspeaker’ voice of the academy, was conflicted by both a desire for and a lack of formal education, (‘I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in’ ( ARO 19), and cautioned against using one’s influence, as women gained rights, the vote, and access to the professions, to re-enact the same power plays men in positions of authority often inflict upon women in the workplace. She wrote two collections of essays dedicated to everyday reading practices, entitled The Common Reader (1925) and The Second Common Reader (1932), as well as two major essays based on talks (not lectures), A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas , whose conversational and collaborative rhetorical styles are intimately bound up with their arguments, which investigate the architecture and hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion integral to a patriarchal society and its treatment of women.

The internet’s unbridled posturing, its freedom, and lack of curatorial concision are also marked by gender, race, and class, which paradoxically replicate and often reify many of the same biases women bristled at and resisted for years. While the online conversation in feminist theory has in many ways been invigorated by social media’s reach and efficacy, in other ways, it has led to an extraordinary loss of privacy and personal control and a documented increase in unfiltered and shameless hostility and hatred towards women. On the one hand, forewarned is forearmed, and certainly 2016 with the help of social media served as an unveiling and public airing of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and personal invective on a scale that made locating one’s enemies easy. On the other hand, the pool of widespread and unapologetic extremism is so vast that a sense of urgency, which begins around an issue of gross, disturbing, even unprecedented injustice and wrong-doing, too often quickly deteriorates into a lack of social engagement and a debilitating sense of being overwhelmed by information, misinformation, and disinformation.

Virginia Woolf’s involvement in as well as her ambivalence about public political discourses has been noted by critics such as David Bradshaw and Clara Jones, among others, especially in relation to Woolf’s responses to political changes during the 1930s. The decade of the 1930s, that earlier global turn towards fascism and nationalism, Anna Snaith notes, ‘saw Woolf battling with her “repulsion from societies” and yet her abhorrence of political developments at home and abroad’. 21 While part of Snaith’s aim in ‘ “Stray Guineas”: Virginia Woolf and the Fawcett Library’ is to outline Woolf’s anti-fascist positions and political support and involvement on behalf of women’s suffrage, refugees, and intellectual freedom, her investigation into the ways in which Woolf negotiated her responses to political causes also reveals a frustration on Woolf’s part—a frustration that resonates with today’s struggle to construct feminist community amidst relentless requests (whether via email or social media) to sign, donate, join, and protest. Snaith writes, ‘Her feeling of bombardment during the ’30s also involved awareness of the commodification of her signature. Desire for anonymity made her question public endorsement per se, regardless of the cause.’ 22 A desire for privacy, personal control, and a respite from the din of ceaseless public pressure concerned Woolf as she investigated its effects upon feminist thinking. She also recognized the ways in which capital, culture, and war combine to perpetuate patriarchy and its entrenched persecution of women, a system that Woolf sought to dismantle.

Three Guineas is relevant to anyone’s contemporary moment due to its subject matter, the need to prevent and end war. Yet it also remains current due to its inquiries into methodology. The essay outlining Woolf’s pacifism and patriarchy’s connection to women’s oppression in both the private and public spheres, is also, as Snaith points out, ‘a deliberation on the complexities and implications of various kinds of political and charitable support’. 23 In other words, in addition to its analysis of the complexities of pacifism and its usefulness and interconnectedness to feminist theory and activism, Three Guineas resonates with the challenges we face today as we grapple with the advantages and disadvantages of the political post-card versus the phone call to a representative, the online donation to Change.org, for example, versus a birthday fundraising appeal for a personal cause on Facebook. But within the panoply of these various media and the questions it raises about method, Three Guineas is, as Snaith claims, ‘an enactment of her preferred form of resistance: the text’. 24

Virginia Woolf used both her fiction and non-fiction work to question the nature of this vast public conversation, as she tried to identify and navigate her own role in relation to it. In the essay, she is very clear about her own positionality, as a white woman of a certain class, collectively ‘the daughters of educated men’, as she identifies herself in Three Guineas ( TG 180). In another characteristic interactive, collaborative stylistic signature, she begins as if in the middle of a conversation, theorizing a relationship between feminist interconnectedness in the public sphere and the need to maintain a specific, localized methodology in advancing a feminist agenda:

‘But,’ she may say, ‘ “the public”? How can that be reached without putting my own mind through the mincing machine and turning it into sausage?’ ‘ “The public,” Madam,’ we may assure her, ‘is very like ourselves; it lives in rooms; it walks in streets, and is said moreover to be tired of sausage. Fling leaflets down basements; expose them on stalls; trundle them along streets on barrows to be sold for a penny or given away. Find out new ways of approaching “the public”; single it into separate people instead of massing it into one monster, gross in body, feeble in mind.’ ( TG 176)

In an essay whose premise is framed around a response to a male correspondent asking her to sign a manifesto for peace, donate money, and join a society, her narrator investigates ‘some of the active ways in which you [ … ] can put your opinions into practice’ on behalf of a cause, while noting the challenges women face in particular in building coalitions in the public sphere ( TG 176). She points out how men and women are similarly appalled at the horrors of war. She returns again and again to the ‘photographs of dead bodies and ruined houses’ in the war-torn landscape of the Spanish Civil War, verbal images of destruction, the responsibility for which she lays at the feet of men in power ( TG 150). But our differences based on gender, she reminds us, are ‘profound and fundamental’, making a request of support and funds from a member of the patriarchy that oppresses, dismisses, and marginalizes women, difficult to satisfy ( TG 181).

In outlining and identifying the structure of patriarchy, she is also making suggestions, devising feminist strategies and theories about ways to subvert it. She writes that even ‘[t]he very word “society” sets tolling in memory the dismal bells of a harsh music: shall not, shall not, shall not. You shall not learn; you shall not earn; you shall not own; you shall not’, which complicates her relationship to the public request for funds ( TG 182). Her challenge to what seems a simple and obvious solicitation on behalf of peace becomes an intricate and deeply thought-out meditation on the consequences of systemic oppression, until ‘inevitably we ask ourselves, is there not something in the conglomeration of people into societies that releases what is most selfish and violent, least rational and humane in the individuals themselves? Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will’ ( TG 182).

We face similar challenges today as we struggle to engage with the internet as a tool both for constructing and maintaining a genealogy of feminist thought and for supporting feminist activism, only to realize that the echoes of the past continue to remind and sometimes to admonish us in the present. Not only do the size, scale, and scope of the internet work both for and against the advancement of feminist theory, but many of the issues and the movement’s aims, with few exceptions, have largely remained the same. Co-creating a feminist tradition of theory and activism with the past, while also pointing to the brutal, barbaric, and often life-threatening realities of the treatment of women under patriarchy, Woolf ultimately aligns the nineteenth-century fight for women’s rights by ‘those queer dead women in their poke bonnets and shawls’ with the twentieth-century fight against fascism.

Woolf’s narrator in Three Guineas , albeit conditionally, agrees to sign the manifesto and to send money for the peace effort, but she refuses to join his society, recording a separate tradition of feminist community and activism and instructing future generations of women by theorizing potential pathways for organizing resistance. She writes, ‘we believe that we can help you most effectively by refusing to join your society; by working for our common ends—justice and equality and liberty for all men and women—outside your society, not within’ ( TG 183). She famously creates the Society of Outsiders, which has no hierarchies, no oaths, no offices, no secretaries, no meetings, and no conferences, but values ‘elasticity’ and ‘secrecy’ instead and insists on achieving peace, intellectual liberty, and justice ‘by the means that a different sex, a different tradition, a different education, and the different values which result from those differences have placed within our reach’ ( TG 189). Instead, she calls on women to build their coalitions and advocacy efforts outside of the establishment, to maintain and practice indifference and disinterest, to offer her brothers ‘neither the white feather of cowardice nor the red feather of courage, but no feather at all’, to refuse to take part in patriotic displays and refuse to bear arms. In other words, she has been asked by her male correspondent to sign a peace manifesto, which she does, but only as she re-writes and posits, instead, one of her own. Woolf’s essays, but her entire body of work, in both the diaries and letters, her fiction, and journalism, as well, not only have created, but continue to create feminist communities of their own, as her arguments, investigations, images, and examples return to remind us of the need for sustained vigilance as well as new methods, new theories, and new ways of looking at the world.

As the methodologies of the internet work both for and against feminist aims, rage, too, is a multivalent sword. Feminist anger has acted both as an important tool for resistance and invigoration of a cause as well as a justification for committing acts of violence against women. In the wake of a widespread increase in right-wing ideologies, nationalism, fascism, racism, and anti-feminist thought, women’s rage has returned to the forefront of feminist theoretical discourse. As one leading feminist journal Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society states quite plainly in its most recent call for papers for a special issue devoted to the complexities of rage to be published in Summer 2021: ‘Feminists are raging’, and for good reason. In addition to running the online Feminist Public Intellectual Project, the journal will now be airing their site, Ask a Feminist, as a podcast with its first episode featuring recent titles fuelling the debate. Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (2018), for example, argues that ‘a society that does not respect women’s anger is one that does not respect women; not as human beings, thinkers, knowers, active participants, or citizens’ 25 and Charlene A. Carruthers’s Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements (2018) provides a manifesto and manual for activism and effective organization from a Black, queer, and feminist perspective seeking to counter a ‘mainstream narrative propped up by patriarchy and misogyny (straight-up hatred of women)’. 26

Virginia Woolf’s work, biography, and example have figured prominently in the feminist uses of anger and its efficacy as political currency. Anger, and the ways in which she navigated her anger both on the page and in her personal life, became a key focus for women reading her work both in English and in translation throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In 1971, Adrienne Rich wrote about re-reading A Room of One’s Own and of recognizing, but also being struck by what she characterized as Woolf’s suppression of her anger in the text:

I was astonished at the sense of effort, of pains taken, of dogged tentativeness, in the tone of that essay. And I recognized that tone. I had heard it often enough, in myself and in other women. It is the tone of a woman almost in touch with her anger, who is determined not to appear angry, who is willing herself to be calm, detached, and even charming in a roomful of men where things have been said which are attacks on her very integrity. 27

While Woolf was addressing women in her ‘talk’, Rich claimed that she felt acutely the implied male presence in the room, because the political climate had not changed to the point ‘when women can stop being haunted, not only by “convention and propriety” but by internalized fears of being and saying themselves’. 28 This suppression of women’s anger is further investigated by Jane Marcus, who sought to encourage women to ‘spit out’ their ‘rage and savage indignation’, 29 as Marcus wrote in an essay, which she anthologized ten years later in her collection of essays Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman (1988), noting the typical prolepsis that often occurs in the development of women writers, as feminist literary criticism strives to catch up to feminist politics as goals were achieved within the movement. Marcus admits that some of the earlier essays in the collection seem ‘too polite and well-mannered, now that Woolf is the subject of so much critical debate’ and hardly worth ‘the uproar it caused at the 1975 MLA’. 30 With one of the aims accomplished, to reshape the male-driven critical response to her work in the 1940s and 1950s as the ‘lyrical British novelist’ Mrs Woolf, feminists now were ‘paying attention to Woolf’s politics’. 31 Marcus noted an adjustment in the tenor of the debate, which focused very much on women’s personal anger and the need for women to express their emotions. She wrote that her interest in Woolf’s anger ‘clearly grew out of my own anger and the anger of my generation of feminist critics, who were trying to change the subject without yet having developed a sophisticated methodology’, 32 marking the importance of women’s anger as a resource and rationale for devising approach, strategy, and action in response to oppression. She characterized the trajectory of change indicated in the form of address: ‘Now that the subject has been changed, we can record the history of that process.’ 33 The earlier criticism on Woolf ‘address[es] the establishment with a clenched fist [ … ] cursing the literary hegemonic fathers. The later essays address a discursive community of feminist readers.’ ‘Now’, she writes ‘we look forward to the work of the “daughters of anger” ’ 34 in a bid to secure the future of feminism in a more forthright posture, implying confidence and a freedom of expression of anger.

Virginia Woolf was perhaps more ambivalent, or at least more realistic about the complexities and uses of rage and the size and scope of the burden of resistance upon the shoulders of future generations of feminists. In the 1921 ‘A Society’, after the women’s collective (representative of the feminist movement) has been truncated by the guns and battle cries of World War I, the women reconvene at the end of the story to assess the accomplishments of the group, but now, against the backdrop of the ‘proper explosion of the fireworks’ ( CSF 136), for peace. Woolf also identified these ‘proper’ celebrations as complicit in the cycles of war and remembrance, issues that she saw as intersecting with the experiences of women and children, and as consequential relationships she questioned and hoped to break. In the final scene of the satire, Woolf’s narrator, Cassandra, aptly named for the prophetess who spoke the truth, which no one believed or could understand, says, referring to one of the member’s daughters, whom they hope to carry on the legacy of the collective, ‘It’s no good [ … ] Once she knows how to read there’s only one thing you can teach her to believe in—and that is herself’ ( CSF 136). Castalia agrees, noting that, ‘that would be a change’. The women gather the papers and minutes of their society, and ‘though Ann was playing with her doll very happily, we solemnly made her a present of the lot and told her we had chosen her to be President of the Society of the future—upon which she burst into tears’ ( CSF 136).

Succeeding generations of feminist scholars have both questioned or built upon this earlier characterization of Woolf’s rage as being ‘suppressed’. Recently, conceptions of Woolf’s anger and how we understand it in relation to her feminist theoretical positions and strategies for future activism have been challenged by investigations into affect theory. In ‘After Anger: Negative Affect and Feminist Politics in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas ’, Margot Kotler argues that Woolf’s Society of Outsiders and her juxtaposing of image and text outline her ‘impersonal method’, which ‘provides a model for collective feminist politics that complicates the teleological narrative of feminism in which emotion operates as a site of truth’. 35 Kotler’s aim is not to dismiss or ignore our emotions, but to rethink the ‘personal is political’ as ‘the personal is factual’. 36 In an instructive essay that insists we read Woolf’s feminist uses of anger more strategically, Kotler writes that Woolf:

[ … ] demonstrates the danger of a feminist politics that uncritically exploits the personal and the emotional as a source of truth and makes them the first step of a political project that will end in its own obsolescence. Instead, Woolf maintains that feminists would be better served by both transforming personal emotions into collective negative feelings, as shown in her use of impersonal anger as a feminist methodology, and harnessing this attributed anger and unhappiness to launch collective critique, via unsympathetic and indifferent response, of the emotionally exploitative rhetoric and imagery of the fascist and patriarchal state. 37

Understood in this way, rage becomes not personally exhausting as an emotion, but as a key tool and resource ‘that supports a more sustainable feminist politics’, 38 one that is more useful and effective moving forward, because, as Kotler claims in the essay, for Woolf, there really is no such thing as ‘after anger’. 39 Woolf, in an earlier era, strove to carve out a way forward for future generations of women readers, writers, and thinkers through a commitment to art and language, and through the transformation of her anger into an effective political tool of feminist thought.

In the historical documentation of her influence on feminist identity and community and in the replenishment of her work across new digital methodologies, Virginia Woolf continues to be a major vitalizing force in feminist theory, as states and individuals continue to attempt to police and regulate women’s lives. In seeking to dismantle patriarchy and theorize a world we have yet to create, Virginia Woolf exposed the cruelty of hierarchies, while also noting the repetitive nature of oppression that continues to sing the same old song as in the children’s nursery rhyme ‘Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush’, a refrain she used in Three Guineas to illustrate the same hypocrisies and injustices born on the backs of women’s unpaid labour. Challenges to feminist essentialism, female chauvinism, heterosexist assumptions overlooking lesbian and trans texts, and ableist bias have invigorated feminist theoretical discourse and activism on behalf of feminist causes. Both the embraces of and challenges to Virginia Woolf’s work, I would argue, have led to a more explicit acceptance of difference among women, and created a myriad of feminist approaches, which continue to enrich and diversify an ongoing feminist narrative and critical debate.

Selected Bibliography

Ahmed, Sara , Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017 ).

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Ahmed, Sara , The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010 ).

Carruthers, Charlene A. , Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements (New York: Beacon Press, 2018 ).

Caughie, Pamela , ‘The Temporality of Modernist Life Writing in the Era of Transsexualism: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Elnar Wegener’s Man into Woman ’, in Modern Fiction Studies 59, no. 3 ( 2013 ): 501–25.

Chemaly, Soraya , Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2018 ).

De Beauvoir, Simone , The Second Sex [1949] (New York: Bantam Books, 1964 ).

Heilbrun, Carolyn , Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Knopf, 1964 .

Jones, Clara , Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016 ).

Kotler, Margot. ‘ After Anger: Negative Affect and Feminist Politics in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas ’, Woolf Studies Annual 24 ( 2018 ): 35–54.

Light, Alison , Mrs Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008 ).

Lorde, Audre , ‘ The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism ’, Keynote Address to Women’s Studies Association Conference, Storrs, CT, 1981 .

Marcus, Jane , Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1988 ).

Marcus, Jane , Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy . (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987 ).

Morrison, Toni , The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (New York: Knopf, 2019 ).

Nfah-Abbenyi, Juliana , Gender in African Women’s Writing: Identity, Sexuality and Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997 ).

Plain, Gill , and Susan Sellers , eds, A History of Feminist Literary Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007 .

Rich, Adrienne , ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision (1971)’, in Sandra M. Gilbert , ed., Adrienne Rich: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry, Essential Essays (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2018 ), 3–19.

Seshagiri, Urmila. ‘Mind the Gap! Modernism and Feminist Praxis’, in Modernism/Modernity , vol. 2, cycle 2 (7 August 2017), https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0022 .

Snaith, Anna , ‘ “Stray Guineas”: Virginia Woolf and the Fawcett Library ’, Literature and History 12, no. 2 (November 2003): 16–35.

Walker, Alice , In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983 ).

Warhol-Down, Robyn , and Diane Price Herndl , eds, Feminisms Redux (Rutgers University Press, 2009 ).

Simone de Beauvoir , The Second Sex , rev. ed. (1949; repr., New York: Bantam Books, 1964), 98 .

Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 344.

Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 585.

Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 584.

Carolyn Heilbrun , Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964) .

Sara Ahmed , Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 47 .

Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life , 235.

Sara Ahmed , The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 60 .

Pamela Caughie , ‘The Temporality of Modernist Life Writing in the Era of Transsexualism: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Elnar Wegener’s Man into Woman ’, Modern Fiction Studies 59, no. 3 (Autumn 2013), 501–25, at 502 .

Jane Marcus , Introduction to Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987), 11 .

Alison Light , Mrs Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), xviii .

Adrienne Rich , ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision (1971)’, in Adrienne Rich: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry, Essential Essays , ed. Sandra M. Gilbert (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018), 3–19, at 7 .

Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken’ , 7.

Alice Walker , In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983) .

Gill Plain and Susan Sellers , eds, A History of Feminist Literary Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 269 .

Robyn Warhol-Down and Diane Price Herndl , eds, Feminisms Redux: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009) .

Warhol-Down and Herndl, Feminisms Redux , 7.

Urmila Seshagiri , ‘Mind the Gap! Modernism and Feminist Praxis’, Modernism/Modernity Print Plus 2, no. 2 (August 2017) .

Anna Snaith , ‘ “Stray Guineas”: Virginia Woolf and the Fawcett Library’, Literature and History 12, no. 2 (November 2003), 16–35, at 16 .

Snaith, ‘Stray Guineas’ , 18.

Snaith, ‘Stray Guineas’ , 18–19.

Snaith, ‘Stray Guineas’ , 16.

Soraya Chemaly , Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018) .

Charlene A. Carruthers , Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements (New York: Beacon Press, 2018) .

Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken’ , 6.

Jane Marcus , Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1988) .

Marcus, Art and Anger , xiv.

Marcus, Art and Anger , xxi.

Margot Kotler , ‘After Anger: Negative Affect and Feminist Politics in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas ’, Woolf Studies Annual 24 (2018), 35–54, at 37 .

Kotler, ‘After Anger’ , 41.

Kotler, ‘After Anger’ , 53.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Gender Studies › Feminist Novels and Novelists

Feminist Novels and Novelists

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 7, 2019 • ( 0 )

Feminist long fiction features female characters whose quest for self-agency leads to conflict with a traditionally masculinist and patriarchal society. These novels have been harshly criticized and dismissed—and even ridiculed—for their nontraditional female characters.

Feminist ideology in the Western world traces its roots to the late eighteenth century. One particular work considered foundational to feminism is A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792), by English writer Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797). Not until the twentieth century, more than one hundred years later, would women begin to reap some of the benefits of a long campaign for basic human rights. Feminism led to radical changes for women in politics, the public sphere, the workplace, the home, and the cultural realm, including the arts and literature. Popular literature, especially, began to reflect women’s previously silenced voices.

As early as the end of the seventeenth century, however, women were publishing works of literature. Aphra Behn (1640-1689), likely the first Englishwoman to support herself through writing, published the highly popular Oroonoko: Or, The History of the Royal Slave (1688), a prose romance. This novel was the first in English to express sympathy for the plight of slaves.

The Eighteenth Century

Fiction, a genre that did not fully develop until the eighteenth century, provided a perfect vehicle for women who sought a voice through writing. The first long fiction in England consisted of what may generally be termed “romances.” Men traditionally received credit for developing long fiction and, eventually, the novel form. Touted examples include Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel, Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740- 1741), and Henry Fielding ’s The History of Tom Jones , a Foundling (1749). However, earlier novels were written by women, a fact not widely acknowledged until the twentieth century. Mary de la Rivière Manley (c. 1670- 1724) published The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zaraziansin the early eighteenth century (1705). The novel is a version of the roman à clef. This type of fiction featured real-life personalities thinly disguised as its characters. Eliza Haywood (c. 1693-1756), a highly political figure, also wrote romances, including The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753). She is now frequently mentioned as an important figure in the development of the novel.

Jane Austen

The Nineteenth Century

The nineteenth century became a golden age of writing for women. Jane Austen (1775-1817) wrote seven novels, often called novels of manners, that parody the ludicrous activities of genteel society and criticize inequitable social rules. Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Persuasion (1818), and Sanditon (1925) uncover the oppressive lives of women, including confining environments, a shameful lack of education, and pitiful dependence upon male relatives for survival. Austen’s Northanger Abby (1818) satirizes as sentimental its heroine’s love for the gothic genre, fiction that offers readers mysterious castles or mansions with secret passages, dark shadowy beings, a damsel threatened by death, a hero with an obscure past, and visions and ghosts.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) would rejuvenate the public’s appreciation for the gothic in her 1818 novel Frankenstein . Rather than emphasize the traditional elements of the gothic, Shelley produced a complex psychological study of her characters, imbuing her horror and science-fiction story with disturbing imagery of aborted creations and multiple deaths. Feminist critics link these elements to Shelley’s real-life experiences.

By midcentury, Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) and Emily Brontë (1818-1848) were producing novels featuring a new hero based on the Romantic ideals of the English poet Lord Byron (1788-1824). Named for the poet and the heroes of his poetry, the Byronic hero most generally had a brooding, dark, independent, and sometimes abusive personality. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) includes a Byronic hero in the form of Edward Rochester. More important, however, the novel introduces a never-before-seen heroine in the shape of a plain, small governess, whose values for truth and justice lead to her rejection of the romantic attentions of Rochester, her master. The character of Jane undercuts the popular female stereotypes of fiction: the angel of the house, the “invalid,” or the whore.

Although Charlotte Brontë’s novel was well received by her contemporaries, Emily Brontë’s masterpiece, Wuthering Heights , also published in 1847, was not. With its metaphysical suggestions that bordered on the gruesome and with an abusive, vengeful Byronic hero, its messages proved too strong for its time (especially so because they came from a woman). By the next century, however, this novel took its rightful place in the canon not only of feminist long fiction but also long fiction in general.

The Twentieth Century

Feminist fiction writer Kate Chopin (1851-1904) published The Awakening in 1899, a novel that many libraries refused to shelve, despite Chopin’s earlier popularity as a writer of “traditional” fiction. Her book shocked readers with its heroine who took pleasure in sexual relations and its suggestion of the connections between the imagination, the artist, and sex. The hostile criticism it received centered on its heroine’s rejection of the traditional oppressive role of wife and mother, causing even Chopin’s hometown library in St. Louis, Missouri, to ban the book.

In 1920, the year women won the vote in the United States, Edith Wharton (1862-1937) published The Age of Innocence . She became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in fiction for the novel in 1921, even though the work focuses on society’s inequitable treatment of women.

Virginia Woolf

As Wharton’s career flourished in the United States, the English feminist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), who was also an essayist and editor, also enjoyed popularity. She began her publishing career in 1915 with the novel The Voyage Out , which required seven years of work. In early adulthood, Woolf studied Greek, an unusual subject for a young woman of her time; taught at a college for working women; performed menial chores for the suffrage movement; and wrote for the Times Literary Supplement , a prestigious publication. All these experiences influenced her feminism.

In Night and Day (1919), Woolf shaped a heroine not unlike herself, who had experienced the trials of a young female writer. After Jacob’s Room (1922), Woolf produced a highly influential novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Departing from traditional novel structure, Woolf designed an analysis of post-World War I London society by moving, over a twenty-four-hour period, from her heroine’s point of view to that of Septimus Warren Smith, a kind of insane alter ego for Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), often studied by feminist critics, critiques the Victorian social mores that create an environment at once suffocating and stimulating for young women.

Woolf’s intimate relationship with writer Vita Sackville-West likely inspired her 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography . Orlando is written as a biography of a character who lives more than four hundred years, during which time her gender evolves from that of a man to that of a woman. The novel represents the history of the aristocratic Sackville-West family and also the development of English literature. In 1929, Woolf produced a long essay published as A Room of One’s Own , which focuses on the writing life of women; historians agree it represents the first major work of feminist criticism in English. Her most experimental novel, The Waves (1931), was labeled by Woolf herself a “poem-play.” Made up of a number of monologues, the novel presents six characters, all lamenting the death of a young man named Percival, supposedly fashioned on Woolf’s own brother, Thoby, who died many years before.

Additional works by Woolf include the nonfiction Three Guineas (1938), considered the most radical of her feminist writings in its examination of social oppression. Her final novel, Between the Acts, appeared in 1941, following Woolf’s suicide in the same year.

Woolf’s contemporary, English writer Rebecca West (1892-1983), was an actor, journalist, and suffragist. Born Cicily Isabel Fairfield, West adopted as her name that of a radical feminist character from Henrik Ibsen’s play Rosmersholm (pb. 1886; English translation, 1889). Although much of West ’s work is in journalism and nonfiction, she published several important fictional works, despite some negative reactions to her writings and to her as an individual. Accounting for a portion of the hostility was her love affair with English novelist H. G.Wells, an affair that led to an illegitimate son. The two writers’ relationship challenged the conservative values of their society. After West gave birth to her son in 1914, she took a great interest in the situation of unwed mothers, leading her to write The Judge (1922). This novel featured the suffragist struggle with additional consideration of issues such as rape, illegitimacy, and motherhood.

In 1930, West produced more novels, expressing an enthusiasm for writings by Woolf. West ’s The Harsh Voice (1935), a collection of novellas, concerned economic and financial matters and focused on the 1929 global economic crisis. Many reviewers of the book declared its subject too harsh and its tone too pessimistic for a female writer. Others, however, noted with interest that West shaped female characters who differed from those in her earlier works. These heroines were strong, taking an active part in the determination of their own fate, something women were not encouraged to do in real life. This same strength of character informed West’s most popular novel, The Thinking Reed (1936). Although some found the novel’s heroine, Isabelle, ruthless, the book garnered much critical acclaim. In the novel, West criticized French, English, and American societies in a manner that some found offensive but most declared accurate.

By the 1950’s, West departed from her feminist-socialist view to take up a conservative anticommunist stance. Her political reversal earned her the title of Dame Commander of the British Empire, a somewhat ironic circumstance for a writer who earlier had deeply criticized imperialism in print.

A Female Aesthetic

With the exodus of men fighting the two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century, American and English women entered the workforce in record numbers to occupy positions other than that of the traditional nurse, teacher, or secretary. As women’s roles in the world changed, so did the characterizations of women in novels. Female writers began to connect their work and their lives. They discovered a number of disparities between their own ambitions, ingenuity, and creativity on one hand and the limited, often secondary, roles assumed by the majority of traditional female fictional characters on the other hand. This reality was easily explained, as the majority of novelists were white men. By the mid-twentieth century, a plethora of long fiction by women began to appear, with realistic female characters. Women’s fiction transformed from products of imitation of a male aesthetic to protests against that aesthetic, eventually becoming self-defining works of literature.

The success of these new novelists was propelled by the work of feminist literary critics , especially scholars in academia. In the 1960’s, critics began questioning the characterizations of women as either angels or monsters. They also questioned the representation of women in popular literature written by men and, most important, refused to accept the exclusion of women from literary history. Their diligence in rediscovering female novelists from previous centuries and decades helped propel authors such as Woolf , George Sand (1804-1876), George Eliot (1819-1880), and West to their rightful place in the literary canon.

Feminist critics also traced the historical connections of recurring images, themes, and plots in women’s writing that reflected their social and psychological experience in a culture dominated by men. One recurring image, for example, is that of the caged bird, which represents the suppression of female creativity or the physical and emotional imprisonment of women in general. Slowly, writings by women began to be accepted not only in the classroom but also the marketplace. Virago Press , which publishes the writings of women, reprinted, for instance, West’s novels in affordable editions. While her work in its own day was deemed “too intellectual,” feminist critics helped define a new study and a new appreciation of these works. In addition, the critical analyses of the aesthetic values that appeared in many of the novels that had long been considered classics led to a newly defined feminist novel.

Closely related to the formation of a feminist aesthetic was the development of a black women’s aesthetic. Novels by African American women from the first half of the twentieth century, such as Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), were reissued after decades of neglect. Hurston ’s novel—which tells the story of a young black woman involved in three abusive marriages who eventually finds redemption through her own strength and beliefs and through the support of her female friend—gained an important place in the feminist canon. Hurston’s work prefigured that of Toni Morrison (born 1931), the first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (1993). One of America’s foremost novelists, Morrison is celebrated for her acute analyses of the dynamics of race and gender. Often framing her fiction in the fantastic and the mystical, Morrison is known for The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), the Pulitzer Prize winning Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1998), Love (2003), A Mercy (2008). Home (2012), and God Help the Child (2015).

Like Morrison, Alice Walker (born 1944) explores the cultural inheritance of African Americans by examining universal moral issues and by celebrating supportive communities of women. In her critically acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple (1982), Walker presents her story in epistolary form, emphasizing her characters’ struggles with articulating their feelings of identity from the perspective of African American experience. In her 1983 work of nonfiction, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose , Walker coined the term “womanist” to describe the particular perspectives of feminist women of color.

By the 1950’s, writers such as Iranian-born Doris Lessing (1919 – 2013) were publishing works that feminists claimed as supportive of their cause. In Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962), heroine Anna Wulf struggles with being a creative woman who fights solitude, has self-destructive impulses, and who practices selfcensorship to conform to society. These are themes repeated in many of Lessing’s novels. Lessing also is known for her vision of the writer as a morally responsible person, who criticizes capitalist inequities through a socialist philosophy.

Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007. The Nobel Academy described her as “that epicist [writer of epics] of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.”

Erica Jong (born 1942) wrote the widely popular Fear of Flying (1973). Even with its frank treatment of female sexuality, the novel sold more than five million copies by 1977 and prompted an avalanche of letters to Jong from women responding to the work as a revelation of emotions they had never encountered in fiction. The book caused a flurry of mixed critical response as well, partly in reaction to its provocative cover images and to its content, which some labeled pornographic. Expressing in no uncertain terms the anger and energy of the women’s rights movement, the novel also garnered praise for its frankness but also received criticism for what some called a banal tone and weak writing style.

Maxine Hong Kingston

The second half of the twentieth century saw feminist novels addressing race and ethnicity. This focus developed out of the work of feminists of color, who argued that race, gender, and class were inextricably linked. Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940), born to Chinese immigrants, published The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), which combines autobiography and fiction in a tale of “a girl-hood among ghosts.” These ghosts emerge from Chinese myth to show how the definition of “feminine” is shaped in that culture. Frankly oppressive for women, ancient Chinese culture allows Kingston to investigate challenges to female physical and emotional survival. Louise Erdrich (born 1954), who is part American Indian, interrogates the social, economic, and emotional pressures suffered by dislocated women in her novel Love Medicine (1984). The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Novelist Julia Alvarez (born 1950), in her novel In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), tells the story of the historic Mirabal sisters and their resistance to Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.

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Other feminist novelists who write from a multiethnic and multicultural perspective include Yvonne Vera (1964-2005). Her novel Butterfly Burning (2000) examines gender inequality in Zimbabwe. Monica Ali (born 1967), a British writer of Bangladeshi descent, tells the story of a woman in an arranged married in Brick Lane (2003). Chinese novelist Wang Anyi (born 1954) has had several of her short novels translated into English, including those examining women’s lives in contemporary China (Xiao cheng zhi lian, 1988; Love in a Small Town , 1988). Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh (born 1945) is the author of Misk al-ghaza l (1988; Women of Sand and Myrrh , 1989), a novel that was banned in several countries in the Middle East for its harsh criticism of patriarchy; it was well-received in English translation. Many writers from India have immensely contributed to the growth of feminist fiction. Nayantara Sehgal, Kamala Das, Anita Nair, Jhumpa Lahiri, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Manju Kapur, Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, Kamala Markandaya, Shobha De are a few of them.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was no longer remarkable that stories about women’s lives were indeed serious literature. However, much of the “seriousness” also has translated into increased sales and profits for publishers, especially because women surpassed men in terms of buying and reading novels. Books by women about women still are considered attractive primarily for female readers, whereas books by men about men are considered to have universal appeal.

Arundhati Roy

Source : Rollyson, Carl. Critical Survey Of Long Fiction . 4th ed. New Jersey: Salem Press, 2010 Bibliography Acampora, Christa Davis, and Angela L. Cotten, eds. Unmaking Race, Remaking Soul: Transformative Aesthetics and the Practice of Freedom. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the NineteenthCentury Literary Imagination. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979. _______, eds. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English. 3d ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. Lauret, Maria. Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America. New York: Routledge, 1994. Makinen, Merja. Feminist Popular Fiction. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women: The Great Writers. 1976. Reprint. London: Women’s Press, 1986. Robbins, Ruth. Literary Feminisms. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Whelehan, Imelda. The Feminist Bestseller: From “Sex and the Single Girl” to “Sex and the City.” New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Feminism and Feminist Literary Theory

It was not an easy task to convince the patriarchal society to give women the same rights and opportunities as men. Women struggled for ages and have been fighting for almost a century for their rights. The term “Feminism” highlights their oppression, and this term has been used in every campaign that calls to abolish women’s suffrage during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Feminism is one of the most influential movements and dynamic philosophies in history, for it made an impact on literary works, politics, and all aspects of society. It started before the 1960s with major literary works, such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Olive Shreiner’s Women and Labour, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.

Waves of Feminism

Feminism can be described in a series of waves. What was here discussed is the nature of the difference between the two genders, the relation between cultural symbols and material processes, and the unconscious reproduction of patriarchy. The first wave of feminism started with Simone de Beauvoir’s "The Second Sex." Beauvoir’s major work criticized male dominance and exposed sexism. Although it wasn’t originally meant to be written as a feminist text, it reflects a profound understanding of women’s desires and needs. It rejected the notions of an “eternal feminine” nature as the determinant of women’s fates. In this sense, women's subordination referred to the inferior position of women, their lack of access to resources, and decision making. This was a situation in most societies. The work remains one of the most influential works for contemporary feminists.

Second-wave feminism emerged in the 1960s, coinciding with the sexual revolution of the era. The contraceptive pill was just introduced, which gave women control over their bodies and power over their choices on whether they wanted to have children. Second-wave feminists were more outspoken than the ones preceding them, and they started confronting workplace and education inequalities, domestic violence, as well as laws concerning divorce and child custody.

Third-wave feminists adopted law professor and civil rights activist Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality. For example, a black woman’s experiences of sexism may differ from those of white or Latina women. Third-wave feminists also argued that gender could be socially constructed. Now, transgender issues have become feminist causes. Transgender women and men have increasingly gained acceptance and are advocates for the feminist cause. Like second-wave feminists before them, many third-wave feminists continued with efforts to secure equal employment and education opportunities.

Fourth-wave feminism aims to liberate all people from the diminishing forces of socially constructed masculinity and femininity. Fourth-wave feminism emerged in the early twenty-first century and continues many of the traditions and tactics of earlier waves. Fourth-wave feminism is best distinguished from its predecessors for its engagement with technology and is closely identified with online activism. It deals with concepts such as body positivity, women’s representation in the media, and sexist advertisements.

What is Feminist Criticism?

Literature was the main source that indicated what was an acceptable representation of femininity. During the 1970s, feminist criticism explored the mechanisms of patriarchy and the cultural mindset that resulted in sexual inequality. It delves into works of literature and tries to analyze them through a feminist lens, to uncover truths hidden in the work and questions such as misogyny or patriarchal dominance. It was a consequence of the women’s movement of the 1960s, and it helped critics realize the significance of the images of women promoted by literature.

One of the most prominent feminist critics is Elaine Showalter. She discusses the history, styles, genres, and structures of women writing, as well as the psychodynamics of female creativity. Showalter divides literary works into two categories: Gynotexts (books by women) and Andro-texts (books by men). Critics like Showalter study literary texts through a realist lens and treat literature as a series of realities.

They researched written diaries, memoirs, and social and medical history. Another important feminist critic is Virginia Woolf. Her main theory is based on a statement that language is gendered. She argues that the characteristics of a women’s sentence are that the clauses are linked in looser sequences, rather than carefully balanced and patterned as in male prose. When taking a closer look at a wide range of literary texts, we can notice that her theory is accurate.

Finally, Helene Cixous was also interested in the feminist analysis of literary texts and she ranks as one of the most important feminist critics of her era. She introduces two main concepts concerning feminist criticism: “Ecriture feminine” and “The Laugh of the Medusa.” “Ecriture feminine,” or feminine writing, is a theory expressing that writing is the product of female physiology that women should celebrate in their writing. Women must write through their bodies and invent a language that will wreck classes, rules, regulations, and codes, laughing at the very idea of “silence.” It is transgressive and rules transcending. In her text “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous compares Medusa to powerful female characters in literary works. In her theory, these powerful women are aware of their power and are not afraid to use it against patriarchal dominance. However, in most literary texts, these women end up being exiled or persecuted because they are feared. Men prefer women when they are nothing but their weak subordinates and despise anything that defies their authority.

In conclusion, feminist criticism helps us reinterpret old texts and view them from a modernized lens. It adheres to portraying women from a new perspective and establishes the importance of female representation in literature. It contributes to breaking gender stereotypes and archaic ideas of the feminine while shedding the light on the history of female subjugation under patriarchal norms. In addition, it helps us take a closer look at women’s realities whether social, economic, or political. Feminists have undergone numerous obstacles throughout their journey to claim their freedom and rights. Feminism is connected with feminist criticism since they both grew simultaneously and depended on one another. Feminist criticism is a constant reminder for us that women are men are still unequal in society. It raises awareness and aids us to fight discrimination one step at a time. References Showalter, E. (1981). Feminist criticism in the wilderness. Critical Inquiry, 8(2), 179-205.

Aneja, A. (1992). The Medusa's slip: Hélène Cixous and the underpinnings of écriture féminine. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 4(1), 17-27. Cixous, H. (1975). The laugh of the Medusa. Feminisms Redux: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, 416-431. Simons, M. A. (Ed.). (2010). Feminist interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir. Penn State Press. Black, N. (2018). Virginia Woolf as a feminist. Cornell University Press. De Beauvoir, S. (2010). The second sex. Knopf. Bellafante, G. (1998). Feminism. Time, 151(25), 54-60. Freedman, E. (2007). No turning back: The history of feminism and the future of women. Ballantine Books. Wollstonecraft, M. (2007). Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: And, The Wrongs of Woman, Or, Maria. Longman Publishing Group.

Thank you mam.. very effective... to understand the concept of feminism

Gaelle Abou Nasr

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