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Feminist criticism is the most widely applicable critical perspective on the AQA A-Level English Literature A (7712) syllabus. Almost every text you study — from Othello to The Handmaid's Tale — can be illuminated by asking how it represents and constructs gender. This lesson teaches the lens itself: how feminist criticism reads, what its key thinkers actually argued (verified, because the canonical formulae are frequently misquoted), and how to apply it to specific textual detail without collapsing a text into a slogan.
As a lens, feminist criticism serves AO5 directly: it gives you a body of "different interpretations" — competing as well as complementary — to think with. But it earns marks only in concert with the other objectives. You build feminist readings out of close analysis of the writer's methods (AO2), anchored in precise textual evidence and advanced in your own informed voice (AO1); where the paper rewards it, the historical position of women — in law, marriage, and authorship — supplies essential context (AO3), and feminist concerns can structure illuminating connections between texts (AO4). The discipline this lesson insists on is that a feminist concept must always be fastened to a feminist reading of words on the page.
Feminist criticism examines how literature represents gender — how it constructs, reinforces, challenges, or subverts ideas about masculinity and femininity, and how power relations between the sexes are inscribed in literary form. It is not a single, unified theory but a family of related approaches with overlapping concerns:
| Approach | Focus |
|---|---|
| Images-of-women criticism | How are women represented in literature, especially by male writers — stereotyped, idealised, demonised? |
| Gynocriticism | The study of women as writers and of a distinct female literary tradition (Elaine Showalter's term and programme) |
| Écriture féminine | "Women's writing" — writing that inscribes feminine experience in its very form: rhythm, syntax, imagery (Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray) |
| Gender as performance | Gender as not a natural essence but a culturally enforced, repeated performance (Judith Butler) |
| Intersectional feminism | Gender oppression as inseparable from race, class, and sexuality (Kimberlé Crenshaw, bell hooks) |
These approaches sometimes conflict — a structuralist-influenced écriture féminine and a materialist images-of-women approach rest on different premises about whether there is a "feminine" essence at all. That internal disagreement is itself useful for AO5: feminist criticism is a debate, not a doctrine.
Feminist literary criticism did not arrive fully formed, and knowing its broad development helps you use it with discrimination rather than as a single undifferentiated "feminist reading." It is conventional, if rough, to speak of waves.
The intellectual ground was laid by Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929), which argued that women's literary silence had material causes — the want of money, education, and "a room of one's own" — and imagined "Shakespeare's sister," a woman of equal genius destroyed by a world with no place for her. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) supplied the philosophical engine: woman, she argued, has been constructed as man's "Other," the second sex against which the male defines himself as the norm — hence her foundational claim that "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."
The first major phase of academic feminist criticism, from roughly 1969 into the 1970s, was largely an images-of-women and critique phase: Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970) exposed the patriarchal assumptions encoded in revered male authors, reading D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer against the grain to show how literature naturalises male dominance. This was criticism as unmasking — turning the canon's own prestige into evidence against it.
The second phase, which Elaine Showalter named gynocriticism, turned from the male-authored image of woman to women as writers. Rather than only critiquing the patriarchal tradition, critics set out to recover a neglected female one — to map, in Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (1977), the phases through which women's writing had passed and the conditions under which it was produced. Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) belongs here: a vast study of how nineteenth-century women writers wrote within and against the patriarchal images available to them.
A third, more theoretically radical strand arrived from France — the écriture féminine of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, which sought not to recover women's writing but to imagine a writing that would inscribe the feminine body and desire and so escape patriarchal logic altogether. And from the late 1980s onward, two decisive interventions reshaped the field: intersectionality (Crenshaw, hooks), which insisted that gender cannot be analysed apart from race and class, and Judith Butler's theory of performativity (Gender Trouble, 1990), which questioned whether there is any stable "woman" for feminism to speak about in the first place.
You do not need to recite this lineage in an essay. But it explains why "a feminist reading" is never one thing: an images-of-women critic, a gynocritic, a French theorist of écriture féminine, and a Butlerian theorist of performativity would read the same text very differently — and that spread of possibilities is precisely what makes feminist criticism so rich a resource for AO5.
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, and can also expose and contest them.
Application: In Shakespeare's Othello, patriarchal assumptions structure the action. Brabantio treats Desdemona's elopement as theft, demanding "where hast thou stowed my daughter?" — the verb makes her property mislaid rather than a woman choosing. Iago weaponises the patriarchal axiom that a wife's fidelity is the guarantor of a husband's honour, so that the mere suggestion of Desdemona's infidelity is enough to unmake Othello's identity.
Definition: Laura Mulvey's concept, from the essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975): visual culture characteristically positions women as objects to be looked at and men as the bearers of the look. Transposed to literature, "the male gaze" names the way female characters are framed, described, and evaluated through a desiring male perspective, so that the reader is invited to occupy that perspective too.
Application: In Keats's "The Eve of St Agnes," Madeline is watched by the concealed Porphyro as she undresses ("Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees"). The narrative positions the reader alongside the hidden male observer. A feminist reading asks whose pleasure the scene serves and how it constructs Madeline as the object, rather than the subject, of desire.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), argued that nineteenth-century patriarchal literary culture offered women two reductive images: the "angel in the house" (passive, pure, self-sacrificing) and the monster (sexual, rebellious, mad). Crucially, they argued that women writers internalised and then rewrote these images, using monstrous female figures to express a rage and creativity their culture forbade them to own directly.
Application: In Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason — the literal madwoman in the attic — can be read as the angelic Jane's monstrous double, embodying the anger and sexuality Jane must suppress to survive within patriarchal society. On Gilbert and Gubar's account, Bertha's "madness" is not merely individual pathology but the symptom of patriarchal confinement; her famous nocturnal destructiveness enacts a fury the heroine cannot voice.
Definition: In "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1975), Hélène Cixous called on women to "write the body" — to develop a writing that inscribes feminine experience and desire and so resists the rigid binary logic of patriarchal thought. Her exhortation is famous: "Woman must write her self... Woman must put herself into the text — as into the world and into history — by her own movement."
Application: Carol Ann Duffy's Feminine Gospels can be read in this light — its surreal transformations of the female body (a woman who grows ever taller in "Tall"; the bodily fixation of "The Diet"), its fluid, list-like structures, and its insistence on the body as a site of meaning all correspond to Cixous's vision of a writing that refuses to be disciplined by patriarchal categories. (Note that écriture féminine is contested: critics influenced by Butler object that it risks re-essentialising "the feminine.")
Definition: Elaine Showalter's term (introduced in "Towards a Feminist Poetics," 1979) for a criticism that studies women as writers — recovering a female literary tradition, examining the material conditions under which women have written, and analysing the distinctive concerns of women's writing. Gynocriticism turns from the male-authored image of woman to the woman as maker of texts.
Application: The Handmaid's Tale can be read as a gynocritical act in its own right. Offred's narrative — we learn it was reconstructed from cassette tapes found hidden after Gilead's fall — dramatises the struggle to preserve women's stories in a regime built to erase them. The "Historical Notes," in which the academic Pieixoto appropriates and jokes over Offred's testimony, stage the very obstacle gynocriticism was founded to confront: the reframing of women's words by male authority.
| Thinker | Key Work | Key Idea (verified) |
|---|---|---|
| Simone de Beauvoir | The Second Sex (1949) | "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" — woman is constructed as man's "Other," not born to a fixed feminine nature |
| Kate Millett | Sexual Politics (1970) | Sexuality is political; canonical male writers (Lawrence, Miller, Mailer) encode and naturalise patriarchal power |
| Elaine Showalter | A Literature of Their Own (1977) | Three phases of women's writing — Feminine (imitation of the dominant tradition), Feminist (protest), Female (self-discovery) — and the programme of gynocriticism |
| Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar | The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) | Nineteenth-century women writers split the patriarchal "angel/monster" image and used monstrous doubles to voice forbidden rage |
| Hélène Cixous | "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1975) | Écriture féminine — women must "write the body," creating a language that escapes patriarchal binaries |
| Judith Butler | Gender Trouble (1990) | Gender is performative: not an inner essence but "a stylized repetition of acts" — the effect of repeated, regulated performance, not its cause |
| bell hooks | Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984) | Mainstream feminism has centred white, middle-class women; feminism must be intersectional, addressing race and class as well as gender |
| Kimberlé Crenshaw | "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex" (1989) | Intersectionality — forms of oppression (race, gender, class) interlock and compound; they cannot be analysed in isolation |
A note on accuracy. The single most-mangled formula in student writing is Butler's. She does not write that gender is "a repeated stylization of the body" as a free-standing phrase; her precise formulations in Gender Trouble are that gender is "a stylized repetition of acts" and that it is instituted through "the stylized repetition of acts through time." The fuller sentence reads: gender is "the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being." Quote one of these verbatim or paraphrase the idea without quotation marks — never invent a hybrid.
| Feminist Concept | Application |
|---|---|
| Patriarchy | Gilead is patriarchy made literal — men legislate over women's bodies, movement, literacy, and reproduction; the Handmaids are reduced to "two-legged wombs" |
| The male gaze | The red habit and white wings control how Handmaids are seen: hyper-visible as a category, individually erased. Offred notes she is "a Sister, dipped in blood" |
| Performativity | Offred performs Gilead's prescribed femininity — the downcast eyes, the ritual greetings — while narrating an interior self the performance is meant to extinguish, exposing the gap between the regulated act and the subject |
| Gynocriticism | Offred's act of narration is the recovery of a woman's voice against systematic erasure; the "Historical Notes" then dramatise that voice being reframed by male scholarship |
| Feminist Concept | Application |
|---|---|
| Patriarchy | Desdemona passes from father's to husband's authority; her agency reduces, in effect, to choosing which man governs her |
| The angel / the monster | Desdemona is idealised as the faithful wife, then reconstructed by Iago as the "whore"; the play allows almost no stable position between the two images |
| The male gaze | Othello's jealousy fixes on what he imagines — "I had been happy if the general camp... had tasted her sweet body" — so that a fantasy of the female body, not any act, drives the catastrophe |
| Voice and silence | Emilia's late speech — "Let husbands know / Their wives have sense like them" — articulates a proto-feminist protest the tragic structure then silences with her death |
To see how a feminist concept becomes a reading rather than a label, take the quiet domestic scene in Act 4, Scene 3 of Othello, in which Desdemona prepares for bed and Emilia helps her. The scene is easy to overlook between the play's storms, but feminist criticism finds it central, because it is one of the very few moments where two women talk to each other about their condition, unwatched by men.
Desdemona, already half-resigned to death, sings the "Willow" song she learned from her mother's maid Barbary, "a maid called Barbary" who "was in love, and he she loved proved mad / And did forsake her." The detail matters: Desdemona reaches, in extremity, not for a man's words but for a female inheritance of grief — a small, buried instance of what gynocriticism means by a tradition of women's expression passed woman to woman. Against this, Emilia's worldly realism strikes a startling note. Asked whether she would betray her husband "for all the world," Emilia replies that "the world's a huge thing: it is a great price / For a small vice," and then delivers the play's most explicit protest:
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