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Feminist criticism is the most widely applicable critical perspective for A-Level English Literature. Almost every text you study — from Shakespeare to Atwood — can be illuminated by feminist analysis. This lesson introduces the key concepts, thinkers, and methods of feminist literary criticism and shows you how to apply them with precision and confidence.
Feminist criticism examines how literature represents gender — how it constructs, reinforces, challenges, or subverts ideas about masculinity and femininity, and how power relations between genders are reflected in literary texts.
It is not a single, unified theory but a collection of related approaches with shared concerns:
| Approach | Focus |
|---|---|
| Images of women criticism | How are women represented in literature written by men? Are they stereotyped, idealised, demonised? |
| Gynocriticism | The study of women writers and a female literary tradition (Elaine Showalter's term) |
| Écriture féminine | Writing that embodies feminine experience in its very form — rhythm, syntax, imagery (Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray) |
| Gender as performance | Gender is not biological but culturally constructed and performed (Judith Butler) |
| Intersectional feminism | Gender oppression intersects with race, class, sexuality, and other axes of identity (Kimberlé Crenshaw) |
Definition: A social system in which men hold primary power — in government, law, property, the family, and culture. Feminist criticism argues that literature both reflects and reinforces patriarchal values.
Application: In Shakespeare's Othello, patriarchal assumptions structure the entire plot. Desdemona's elopement is presented as a theft — Brabantio accuses Othello of "stealing" his daughter, as if she were property. Iago manipulates Othello's jealousy by exploiting the patriarchal logic that a wife's infidelity destroys a husband's honour.
Definition: Laura Mulvey's concept (from film theory, 1975): the way visual culture positions women as objects to be looked at by a male viewer. In literature, the "male gaze" refers to the way female characters are described, presented, and evaluated through a male perspective.
Application: In Keats's "The Eve of St Agnes," Madeline is observed by Porphyro as she undresses — the reader is positioned to share his desiring gaze. A feminist reading would ask: whose pleasure is served by this scene? How does the narrative position Madeline as object rather than subject?
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), argued that Victorian literature offered women only two roles: the angel (passive, pure, self-sacrificing) and the monster (sexual, rebellious, mad). Women who conformed were rewarded; women who transgressed were punished or destroyed.
Application: In Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason is the "madwoman in the attic" — the monstrous double of the angelic Jane. Gilbert and Gubar argued that Bertha represents the anger and sexuality that Jane must repress in order to succeed within patriarchal society. Bertha's madness is not individual pathology but the product of patriarchal confinement.
Definition: Hélène Cixous argued (in "The Laugh of the Medusa," 1975) that women should write in a way that reflects feminine experience — fluid, bodily, transgressive, resistant to the binary logic of patriarchal thought.
Application: Carol Ann Duffy's poetry in Feminine Gospels can be read as écriture féminine — her surrealist transformations of the female body ("The Diet," "Tall"), her fluid narrative structures, and her insistence on the body as a site of meaning all correspond to Cixous's vision of a feminine writing that refuses patriarchal categories.
Definition: Elaine Showalter's term for the study of women as writers — recovering a female literary tradition, examining the conditions under which women have written, and analysing the distinctive characteristics of women's writing.
Application: Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale can be read as a gynocritical act. Offred's narrative — recorded on cassette tapes, hidden, reconstructed — represents the struggle to preserve women's stories in a culture that seeks to erase them. The Historical Notes, in which a male academic appropriates and trivialises Offred's testimony, dramatise the very problem gynocriticism seeks to address.
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