Feminism-Elaine Showalter and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Elaine Showalter

"From Mary Wollstonecraft to Naomi Wolf, feminism has often taken a hard line on fashion, shopping, and the whole beauty Monty.... But for those of us sisters hiding Welcome to Your Facelift inside The Second Sex, a passion for fashion can sometimes seem a shameful secret life.... I think it's time I came out of the closet."

- From Article Vogue (1997)

Elaine Showalter is an American Literary Critic, Feminist and writer of Cultural and Social issues. She is known as the Founder of Feminist Literary Criticism theory in United States of Academia. She had written several articles from Feminist Literary Criticism to Fashion, including various topics. She is known for her creative work in the field of Madness and Hysteria and 'Modern' illness. Her noteworthy works are…

• A Literature of their Own (1977)
• Towards a Feminist Poetics (1979)
• The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture (1985)
• Histories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997)
• Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (2001)

What is Feminist Criticism?

Feminist Criticism is very confused and misunderstood term which is hard to define. Lois Tyson tries to give definition for it…

"Feminist criticism examines the ways in which literature reinforces or undermines the economic, political, social and psychological oppression of women."

Feminist criticism started against the male dominant in literature. The basic view of Feminist Criticism is that How Patriarchal society construct the male centric ideology in literature also,which binds women to think above it and also considered as great literature.  It is a politics of Feminism which inquires about the oppression of women in Literary Text. Feminist Criticism opens the lens that how women are portrayed amd represented in Literature by man through the eyes of Feminism. It uses the principles and ideology of Feminism to criticise the language of Literature. There are some of the basic tenets about what Feminist Criticism do…

• Examine the representation of women in literature
• Examine language as a tool of Gender Construction
• Examine and Challenge Patriarchal world
• Rediscover text written by women
• How women write their own experience through the lenses of patriarchal society
• How women read about themselves from literature
• How to make Feminist reading visible to reader

Example

Perhaps the most chilling example...is found in the world of modern medicine, where drugs prescribed for both sexes often have been tested on male subjects only.

Elaine Showalter's Towards a Feminist Poetics

In the essay Showalter advocates a new way of reading Feminist criticism. Showalter said that there is a need of new theory to read Feminism in literature, language which is full of patriarchal world cannot be significant for the Feminist Criticism. Feminist critic themselves do not know that…

"What it is that they mean to

 profess and defend."

Hinting a solution for the same problem Elaine Showalter divided Feminist Criticism in two parts…

1) Women as Reader (Feminist Critique) 

"Women as the consumer of the male produced literature."

# Here woman as reader not producers. Elaine argues that the female reading of the text is capable to change our idea or conception about the text, so for this kind of analysis she gave term "Feminist Critique." 

# It includes study images and symbols and stereotypes, which are used for women in literature and also inquire misconceptions about women in criticism.

# Feminist Criticism is also connected with Cultural studies. So, Feminist critiques are also concerned about the exploitation and manipulation of woman in popular culture, film or in any kind of Artefact.

Examples…

# If we see any Movie, Advertisement or Serial women appear in different poses, exhibiting her body parts. Women are always shown as doing only Household work. So called Shopping is the only hobby of women etc..

"I need to talk to the Secretary is

She is in the office."

Profession and Occupation are also gender stereotyped. So these are some examples of how women are read in such stereotypical ways.

One of problem with Feminist Critique is that it is Male-oriented. If we study how women are portrayed in a stereotypical way and the common limited role played by women, then we are focusing more on what men thought about woman should be and ignored what might have women had experienced and felt.

2) Women as Writer (Gynocritics)

"Gynocritics begins at the point when we free ourselves from the leaner absolutes of male literary theory, stop trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition."

Here, women are as producers of textual meaning. It focuses on themes, genres and structure of literature which is produced by women writers. It includes the following subjects…

• The psychodynamic of a female creativity.
• Linguistic and the problem of Female Language
• The collective female Literary Career

The prime focus of Gynocritic is to provide a framework for analysis of Women Literature. Gynocritic is more self contained and experimental. To create new models and theory based on the study of female experience is the integral part of it. It totally refuses to accept the ideas of Male models and theories. Women's writing makes use of four different models..

• Women's Writing and Women's Body
• Women's Writing and Women's Language
• Women's Writing and Women's Psyche
• Women's Writing and Women's Culture

Examples of Gynocritic texts are…

• The Female Imagination by Patricia Meyer Spacks
• Literary Women by Ellen Moers
• The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
• A Literature of their own by Elaine Showalter

Three Phases in Evolution of Female Tradition

1) The feminine

The feminine phase is dated from 1840 to 1880. In this phase women used to write by using Male Pseudonym. Women are in effort to make equal intellectual achievements of male culture.

• George Eliot name used by Mary Ann Evans
• Cotton Mather Mills used by Elizabeth Gaskell
• Currer by Charlotte Bronte
• Ellis by Emily Bronte
• Acton Bell by Ann Bronte

2) The Feminist Phase

From 1882 to 1920 in which the women's movement gained strength and also won the right to vote. Women writers started using literature to portray their unpleasant and painful experience of wrong womanhood.

3) The Female Phase

Ongoing from 1920 in which we find that women rejecting both protest and imitation. Women who show a more independent attitude also began to think on forms and techniques of Art and Literature. Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Wolf are examples written about…

• Masculine Journalism
• Feminine Fiction

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a noteworthy theorist, mainly known  for her theories in Post colonial as well as for Cultural studies. Her most famous piece "Can Subaltern Speak" looks at the way people of certain classes are treated and intellectuals like Foucault and Deleuze view these people. She uses the concept of deconstruction to see postcolonial and post-structuralist ways of looking.

In her essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Spivak deconstructs the concept by giving voice to silencing. The goal of Postcolonial study is to hell or create a platform for "The Other" Women are Double Marginalized in Postcolonial study, One by Colonizers and other by Male dominant society.

She is also interacting with Sigmund Freud's theory of Scapegoat. Spivak points out a common stereotype  that…

"white men are saving brown women from brown men."

In this example whiteman are saviours of brown women from brown men. But actually Brown men are scapegoats of Whiteman and Brown Man as well as Women both are Scapegoats. Spivakine Feminist epistemology elucidate three different categories…

• Subalternity
• Marginality
• Planetarity

Postcolonial study insists on giving voice to Colonized people who are marginalized and exploited by Colonial masters. But when the same thing comes to Women, who are double marginalized. So Colonialism and Male-dominated society prevents women from speaking, and raises their voice against it.

Women in Third world countries are also double marginalized as well. Race also plays a major role in Feminism because Women with "Chocolate Colour" are seen as Inferior and they are Inferior to white people as well as in control of the Patriarchal world. So, Gayatri Spivak argues that when a person from outside wrote a story about that then it became imagination or the writer's own illustrations, because they did not experience what women had felt. So, It became One sided story.

Thank You…..