The feminist movement and women’s impact in literature could have not been successful without women who went against the social norm and spoke of equal rights between men and women in society and even literature. Through these women’s ideas and beliefs women were able to write more freely. Remember, these are the two main women that were responsible for this movement but they were the most popular during the women’s movement period.
Virginia Woolf
In 1919, the British scholar and teacher laid the foundation for present day feminist criticism in her seminal work a lecture given at Cambridge University, A Room of One’s Own. In this text, Woolf declares that men have and continued to treat women as inferiors. It is the male, she asserts, who defines what it means to be female and who controls the political, economic, social, and literary structures. Virginia Woolf also used female authors such as Jane Austen and Emily and Charlotte Bronte, she examines women and their struggles as artists, their position in literary history and need for independence. She also invents a female counterpart of William Shakespeare, a sister named Judith to at times sarcastically get her point across. Woolf proved to be an innovative and influential 20th Century author. In some of her novels she moves away from the use of plot and structure to employ stream-of-consciousness to emphasize the psychological aspects of her characters. Themes in her works include gender relations, class hierarchy and the consequences of war. Woolf was among the founders of the Modernist movement which also includes T.S Elliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. Virginia Woolf is said to be one of the started in the historical development we now know of as feminist criticism.
Simone de Beauvior
With the publication of The Second Sex by the French author Simone de Beauvior, however feminist interests were once again surfacing. Beauvoir’s text declares that French society and western societies in general are patriarchal and controlled by males. Like Woolf, Beauvior believed that the male in these societies defines what it means to be human, including, therefore, what it means to be female. Since female is not male, Beauvior believed that she becomes other, an object whose existence is defined and interpreted by male, the dominant being in society. Always subordinate to the male, the female finds herself a secondary or nonexistent player in the major social institutions of her culture, such as church, government, and educational systems. Beauvior said that a woman must break the bonds of her patriarchal society and define herself if she wishes to become a significant human being in her own right and defy male classification as the Other. She must ask herself, “What is a woman?” Beauvior insists that a woman’s answers must not be “mankind,” for such a term once allows men to define women. This generic label must be rejected, for it assumes that “humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him.” Beauvior insists that women see themselves as autonomous beings. Women, she maintains, must reject the social construct that men are subject or the absolute and that women are the Other. Embedded in this false assumption is the suppression that males have the power and define cultural terms and roles. Accordingly, women must define themselves outside the present social construct and being labeled as the Other.
Through these ideologies we can see the similarities between their beliefs and the themes in literature that a reader can analyze a text through feminist criticism. These women are the two main women changed the way that women are viewed in literature and the way readers analyze it.
· The main text used in this entry is the book Literary Criticism by Charles E. Bressler
