Gynocriticism or gynocritics is the term coined in the seventies by
Elaine Showalter to describe a new
literary project intended to construct "a female framework for the analysis of women's literature".
By expanding the historical study of
women writers
Women have made significant contributions to literature since the earliest written texts. Women have been at the forefront of textual communication since early civilizations.
History
Among the first known female writers is Enheduanna; she is al ...
as a distinct literary tradition, gynocritics sought to develop new models based on the study of female experience to replace male models of literary creation, and so "map the territory" left unexplored in earlier literary criticisms.
History
While previous figures like
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf (; ; 25 January 1882 28 March 1941) was an English writer and one of the most influential 20th-century modernist authors. She helped to pioneer the use of stream of consciousness narration as a literary device.
Vir ...
and
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir (, ; ; 9 January 1908 – 14 April 1986) was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist activist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, nor was she ...
had already begun to review and evaluate the female image in literature,
and
second-wave feminism
Second-wave feminism was a period of feminist activity that began in the early 1960s and lasted roughly two decades, ending with the feminist sex wars in the early 1980s and being replaced by third-wave feminism in the early 1990s. It occurred ...
had explored
phallocentrism and
sexism
Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on one's sex or gender. Sexism can affect anyone, but primarily affects women and girls. It has been linked to gender roles and stereotypes, and may include the belief that one sex or gender is int ...
through a female reading of male authors, gynocriticism was designed as a "second phase" in feminist criticism – turning to a focus on, and interrogation of female authorship, images, the feminine experience and ideology, and the history and development of the female literary tradition.
[Xu, Y 2007, 'Contribution of gynocriticism to feminist criticism', US – China Foreign Language, vol. 5, no. 5, pp. 1 – 5.][Barry, P 2009, Beginning theory; An introduction to literary and cultural theory, Manchester University Press, Manchester.]
Development as a literary critique
Gynocriticism also examines the female struggle for identity and the social construct of gender.
According to Elaine Showalter,
gynocritics is the study of not only the female as a gender status but also the 'internalized consciousness' of the female. The uncovering of the female
subculture
A subculture is a group of people within a culture, cultural society that differentiates itself from the values of the conservative, standard or dominant culture to which it belongs, often maintaining some of its founding principles. Subcultures ...
and exposition of a female model is the intention of gynocriticism,
comprising recognition of a distinct female
canon
Canon or Canons may refer to:
Arts and entertainment
* Canon (fiction), the material accepted as officially written by an author or an ascribed author
* Literary canon, an accepted body of works considered as high culture
** Western canon, th ...
where a female identity is sought free from the
masculine
Masculinity (also called manhood or manliness) is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with men and boys. Masculinity can be theoretically understood as socially constructed, and there is also evidence that some beh ...
definitions and oppositions.
Gynocriticism accordingly challenged a Freudian psychoanalytic perspective whereby the female inherently suffers envy of men and feelings of inadequacy and injustice,
combined with feelings of intellectual inferiority.
[Frager, R & Fadiman, J 2005, Personality and personal growth 6th ed, Pearson Prentice Hall, New Jersey.] Arguing that male 'phallic prejudice'
itself creates a female consciousness that demands a critique,
and that prejudice against the female incites a specific noesis that gets attributed to the female,
Gynocriticism stressed that this prejudice has concealed the female literary tradition to the point of imitating the masculine.
[Friedman, Susan Stanford. Mappings : Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998]
Achievements and limitations
Gynocriticism helped reclaim from obscurity a vast body of early female writings, often published in
Virago, as well as producing such feminist classics as ''
The Madwoman in the Attic''. However its very successes left it open to new challenges from within feminism. Poststructuralists complained that it fetishized the role of the
author
In legal discourse, an author is the creator of an original work that has been published, whether that work exists in written, graphic, visual, or recorded form. The act of creating such a work is referred to as authorship. Therefore, a sculpt ...
, at the expense of the reader and the text, and that its grand narrative, setting up a female canon in opposition to the male, was
essentialist, and omitted differences and divisions among women, leaving out
lesbian
A lesbian is a homosexual woman or girl. The word is also used for women in relation to their sexual identity or sexual behavior, regardless of sexual orientation, or as an adjective to characterize or associate nouns with female homosexu ...
s and
women of color, for example.
Race, class, social interest, political inclination, religion and sexuality
all arguably come into play in the construction of identity.
Separating out such properties would create a
one-dimensional view of the female, yet if gender and identity are merely constructs then it becomes difficult to assign any inherent qualities of nature or language to found a critique.
Despite such limitations, gynocriticism offers a valuable interrogation of 'female' literature, through the study of sameness and difference in gender.
While the term is rarely used in
third-wave feminism
Third-wave feminism is a feminist movement that began in the early 1990s, prominent in the decades prior to the fourth-wave feminism, fourth wave. Grounded in the civil-rights advances of the second-wave feminism, second wave, Generation X, Gen X ...
, the ''practices'' and canon establishment of gynocriticism continues to underpin
feminist literary criticism.
[I. Buchanan, ''A Dictionary of Critical Theory'' (2010) p. 215]
See also
References
Further reading
*Groden, Michael and Martin Kreiswurth, eds. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
External links
virtuaLit Fiction page on Feminist Criticism
{{Litcrit
Feminist terminology
Feminist theory
Literary criticism
Postmodern feminism