Gynocriticism or gynocritics is the term coined in the seventies by

Elaine Showalter Elaine Showalter (born January 21, 1941) is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She influenced feminist literary criticism in the United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocr ...

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 also ...

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, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Woolf was born i ...

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, and even th ...

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. It took place throughout the Western world, and aimed to increase equality for women by building on previous feminist gains. Wh ...

had explored

phallocentrism Phallocentrism is the ideology that the phallus, or male sexual organ, is the central element in the organization of the social world. Phallocentrism has been analyzed in literary criticism, psychoanalysis and psychology, linguistics, medicine and ...

and

sexism Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on one's sex or gender. Sexism can affect anyone, but it primarily affects women and girls.There is a clear and broad consensus among academic scholars in multiple fields that sexism refers primari ...

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 that differentiates itself from the parent culture to which it belongs, often maintaining some of its founding principles. Subcultures develop their own norms and values regarding cultural, poli ...

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 conceptual material accepted as official in a fictional universe by its fan base * Literary canon, an accepted body of works considered as high culture ** Western ca ...

where a female identity is sought free from the

masculine Masculinity (also called manhood or manliness) is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles associated with men and boys. Masculinity can be theoretically understood as socially constructed, and there is also evidence that some behaviors con ...

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 A virago is a woman who demonstrates abundant masculine virtues. The word comes from the Latin word ''virāgō'' ( genitive virāginis) meaning vigorous' from ''vir'' meaning "man" or "man-like" (cf. virile and virtue) to which the suffix ''-ā ...

, as well as producing such feminist classics as ''

The Madwoman in the Attic ''The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination'' is a 1979 book by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in which they examine Victorian literature from a feminist perspective. Gilbert and Gubar draw th ...

''. However its very successes left it open to new challenges from within feminism. Poststructuralists complained that it fetishized the role of the

author An author is the writer of a book, article, play, mostly written work. A broader definition of the word "author" states: "''An author is "the person who originated or gave existence to anything" and whose authorship determines responsibility f ...

, 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 Essentialism is the view that objects have a set of attributes that are necessary to their identity. In early Western thought, Plato's idealism held that all things have such an "essence"—an "idea" or "form". In ''Categories'', Aristotle si ...

, and omitted differences and divisions among women, leaving out

lesbian A lesbian is a Homosexuality, homosexual woman.Zimmerman, p. 453. 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 n ...

s and

women of color The term "person of color" (plural, : people of color or persons of color; abbreviated POC) is primarily used to describe any person who is not considered "White people, white". In its current meaning, the term originated in, and is primarily a ...

, 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 In physics and mathematics, a sequence of ''n'' numbers can specify a location in ''n''-dimensional space. When , the set of all such locations is called a one-dimensional space. An example of a one-dimensional space is the number line, where the ...

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 an iteration of the feminist movement that began in the early 1990s, prominent in the decades prior to the fourth wave. Grounded in the civil-rights advances of the second wave, Gen X and early Gen Y generations third-wav ...

, the ''practices'' and canon establishment of gynocriticism continues to underpin

feminist literary criticism Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or more broadly, by the politics of feminism. It uses the principles and ideology of feminism to critique the language of literature. This school of thought seeks to an ...

.I. Buchanan, ''A Dictionary of Critical Theory'' (2010) p. 215

References

External links

vitualLit Fiction page on Feminist Criticism
{{Litcrit Literary criticism Feminist terminology Feminist theory Postmodern feminism

History

Development as a literary critique

Achievements and limitations

See also

References

Further reading

External links