روش تحقیق در انگلیسی ( LITERATURE, GENDER, FEMINISTCRITICISMby Richard Allen )

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LITERATURE, GENDER, FEMINIST CRITICISM by Richard Allen 

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Defining terms * To be engaged with questions about gender and literary texts is to be engaged with gender politics, with difference and with discrimination. + What we rather dispassionately call ‘literary theory’ comes close to our lives here for we are all in some way involved from day to day in the politics of gender—given that politics is about power. * sex: is to do with an individual's biology / ۶ ۵6 6اع) ۷ * Gender: describes a set of qualities that are defined or socially constructed in a particular society or culture ¥ masculine Y feminine 

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+ Putting literature and gender together allows us to think, for example, about how individual texts or genres represent, and reflect on, these social processes. + We can use Bildungsroman to describe a novel such as Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations ¥ The development of Pip as a ‘gendered subject’ an individual with a developing masculine identity is surely at the heart of the novel, and his masculine route to adulthood is plainly different from the feminine route portrayed in Estella or Biddy ¥ Although Pip is plainly male, there is no description of his biological maleness, no mention of his unclothed body, of his shaving, of his voice being deep in pitch * ‘feminist criticism’: work written by people who think that learned gender differences especially and sometimes exclusively those which mark out women’s experiences as writers and readers. 

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¥ Histories of English literature will regularly lead one to the conclusion that poetry is men’s work ¥ when women are involved in literature, it is far more likely to be as writers of novels. Y The idea of feminist criticism as a common endeavour, championing women’s writing as an apparently single thing, allows for a sense of solidarity and a sense of being empowered Y Literary criticism, apparently ungendered, seems somehow to include feminist criticism just as a gendered subcategory rather than leading equally to masculinist and feminist criticism. Y The idea of masculinist literary criticism that overtly celebrates men’s dominance, makes most people uneasy ¥ masculinist criticism often follows the paradigm of feminist criticism in looking for ways of presenting masculinity as somehow involving lack of power. 

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Thinking about women’s writing + Feminist criticism is concerned, perhaps above all, with writing by women. + In the nineteenth century, many novelists were women, but the names of a limited number are listed * Questions that arise in research about this course are: Y about the valuing and canonizing of writings Y about the actual numbers of novels in the period written by women ¥ Another set of questions is likely to focus much more on the way in which the | novels are written. \ * Conventional criticism might aim to answer the following: Y how is the writing ,the characterization, the plotting and so on inferior to what we find in novels we have canonized 

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Feminist criticism would perhaps aim to reassess the way in which texts have been described and valued, and promote more texts by women into the canon. Perhaps women’s issues, written about by women, must just have a lower status be discriminated against in a patriarchal culture? If one is led to think in this way, the feminist slogan ‘different therefore equal’ might offer a way forward. We should ask, for example, not how such a text is inferior to something in the male/masculine canon, but how it is different from male/masculine writing. how do these works by women now hidden from history show a specifically female imagination at work which will find expression in a particularly female language and a particularly female way of writing? Questions concerning the female and/or feminine imagination have great importance in feminist criticism 

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* There is an example in an article by Mary Jacobus, ‘ThThe Difference of View’. Jacobus is discussing Mary Wollstonecraft, but | think her conclusions can interestingly be applied to the 1890s ¥ Her answer turns into an argument about the separate nature of women. ¥ Patriarchy values the masculine, which is identified with the language of reason, government and administration the language of realism. ‎In contrast, the feminine is identified with sentiment, feeling, emotion, the‏ ”ا ‎irrational even madness.‏ ‎¥ If a woman writes in something akin to the language of men makes herself even an honorary man as in the case of George Eliot she may be admitted to the masculine dominated canon of high literature. ‎if she writes in a way that foregrounds emotion, coincidences etc., she will be ۱‏ ”ا ‎relegated to the feminine and to the popular and forgotten.‏ 

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¥ Imagining a non patriarchal world is so difficult that it is hardly surprising if t results are sometimes marked by features that conventionally appear to be confusions and evasions ¥ Jacobus sees as the transgression of literary boundaries moments when the structures are shaken, when language refuses to lie down meekly, or the marginal is brought into sudden focus, or intelligibility itself refused reveals not only the conditions of possibility within which women’s writing exists, but what it would be like to revolutionize them. ¥ two forms the Gothic and the realist novel predominantly associated with women are superseded by a style mostly associated with male writers ‎notices too, that the Gothic style had a continuing life alongside realism.‏ ”ا 

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* discussion in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire , Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes the basis on which Gothic writing has been revalued by feminist critics. + Far from being escapist, the Gothic seems to offer a privileged view of individual and family psychology. * Certain features of the Oedipal family are insistently foregrounded there: ¥ absolutes of licence and prohibition, ¥ a preoccupation with the possibilities of incest ‏”ا‎ a fascinated proscription of sexual activity ¥ an atmosphere dominated by the threat of violence between generations. 

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A note on Freud Gender-based criticism regularly operates in a kind of dialogue with the ideas of Sigmund Freud, the dialogue is sometimes friendly but sometimes vigorously hostile. the ideas of Freud remain largely the basis of thinking about these issues in the West. Freud worked mostly in a medical framework, as a modern psychiatrist might, seeing individual people and attempting to ‘cure’ them. Since his death, Freud’s ideas have been as it were generalized, or seen as metaphors that explain how society as a whole works. Relations within an individual family become ways of understanding society: the rule of the father becomes the rule of patriarchy. Among those who have developed Freud's ideas, Jacques Lacan can be mentioned because of his emphasis on language structures in understanding gendered development. <? 

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٠ Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: ¥ An Introduction ¥ 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) + for example, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) * Two Short Accounts of Psychoanalysis (1909) + the case studies of ‘Dora’ and ‘Little Hans’. Elizabeth Abel, Brighton: Harvester, 1982. + Joseph Bristow, Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1997) deals with both Freud and Lacan + Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990) 

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Feminist criticism + The sheer amount of specifically feminist criticism is both exciting and daunting Under ‘Selected reading’ (pp. 129-30) Elizabeth Abel Mary Eagleton Mari Evans Mary Jacobus Toril Moi Elaine Showalter. " كيه بابوايد يه Most anthologies of literary theory now contain a section on feminist theory. \ ۲ To take an example, there is a chapter on ‘Feminism’ in Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh, 3rd edn (London: Edward Arnold, 1996). + This contains ‘extracts from a piece by Elaine Showalter, and from ‘Women Writing: a ca ae aa a aa a lS a i ‏وو سمت ون من‎ 

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+ Aurora Leigh shows a number of characteristics of earlier feminist criticism. ¥ it is set out in a way that is distinctly ‘different’ from most literary criticism, providing a series of paragraphs that are quite weakly linked ¥ this is an expression of the feminist critique of the dominant orthodox style of writing as male and rational. * There is a clear emphasis on intellectual enquiry in the use of the French critic Pierre Macherey the attention paid to social structures, and the use of analysis of the text but there is a comparable emphasis on feeling. ۷ It is the work of a collective rather than a single individual ‎In introducing the extract from Showalter’s article, Towards a Feminist Poetics’,‏ ”ا ‎Rice and Waugh seem to suggest that Showalter stands apart from this‏ ‎emphasis on the collective‏ ‎* they say that she works within an ‘orthodox humanist belief in literature as the expression of a universal unity’. 

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* British Women Novelists from Bronté to Lessing , Showalter explores writing by women Y in relation to the idea that ‘women...have constituted a subculture within the framework of a larger society ¥ have been unified by values, conventions, experiences, and behaviours impinging on each individual’ ¥ suggested that women writers had a separable history of their own Ellen Moers’ Literary Women + The Showalter extract is important because : ۷ it shows her attempting to develop a distinct conceptual structure for feminist criticism ۷ ۱۲ can define itself quite separately from other critical methods and give a fuller meaning to the term ‘feminist critique’. * Showalter divides feminist criticism into two kinds; ‎On the one hand there is a criticism based on ‘historically grounded inquiry’‏ ”ا ‎” on the other a criticism based on ‘the psychodynamics of female creativity, linguistics and the problem of a female language 

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Showalter’s categories might also be described by reference to books that have acted as ‘mother-figures’ to feminist criticism Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex In more philosophical terms the distinction is between a UK and US empirical tradition a French theoretical tradition—particularly associated with psychoanalysis. Both ways of thinking focus on language, power and control but they do so in different ways. empirical and materialist feminist ways of thinking are likely to construe ‘language’ as physical words on the page to gain power and control here involves overcoming barriers in education, publishing, contemporary ideas of what is acceptable 

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+ Feminist writers and critics who draw on psychoanalytic thinking conceive of language in a different and, they might say, ‘deeper’ way. ٠ Particular emphasis is given to the notion that a child develops his or her identity through the process of learning to use language. Y This is not a neutral process ¥ the child learns to understand, to think and to speak what is described as a general symbolic language ¥ she or he takes on a powerless or powerful role as a woman or a man just as naturally as we talk to members of our own families, colleagues at work + The gendered power process is so ‘natural’ that conceiving an alternative is extremely difficult. ¥ Striking against it can involve women in attempting to recover some kind of equal powerful semiotic language embodying femininity and matriarchy 

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These two different ways of thinking in feminism are excellently discussed b' Todd in her Feminist Literary History She writes in the introduction that ‘the confrontation of the two modes, the sociohistorical American and the French psychoanalytical, is an exciting spectato' sport...the fight is not yet over’ she argues that it is healthy if each pushes at the other so that each is enriched bi the other. Her own work, involves using historically based understanding to push against the trans historical and universal categories that psychoanalytically based thinking all too often uses. she aims ‘to turn history [loose] onto psychoanalysis, to historicize its discourse, methods and aims and to contextualize its functioning in the history it likes to allegorize and abstract’ What this might mean in practice can be gauged by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s classic study of predominantly nineteenth- century literature The Mad Woman in the Attic the three-volume sequel No Man's Land 4 

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+ The shelves of bookshops suggest that, especially in higher education, approaches that favor the psychoanalytical have achieved a very strong hold feminist criticism. + Since psychoanalysis ‘explains’ both masculine and feminine, the result will be to give feminist work a very wide reach. + there is also a risk that the political emphasis within feminism will be weakened or lost. * The risk can, to a degree, be seen in Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: Y An Introduction, which contains no substantive reference to Millett, Showalter or Todd and engages with feminism only under the heading of psychoanalysis. In the case of both Freud and Lacan, you will often find yourself picking through fierce arguments. ‎Some of the fiercest relate to their actual clinical practice as‏ ”ا ‎psychiatrists/analysts, seen regularly as wrong-headed, sexist, even damaging‏ ‎to their patients; for many critics, faults here are sufficient to damn all their‏ ‎work.‏ 

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+ Freud encourages a metaphorical way of reading, when writing about how individuals and families work ¥ he will often reach for a mythical or story book example to show that the pattern he is describing is not new but something quite familiar. ۷ Asan example, one might cite the ‘castration complex’, a set of ideas developed around 1908. ‎For the girl child, her ‘lack’ of a penis seems to indicate that she has been‏ ”ا ‎castrated.‏ ‎For the boy child, the threat of being castrated by his father is a source of‏ ”ا ‎deepest anxiety.‏ ‎¥ The idea that femininity is constructed in society around a lack of something is at the heart of feminist struggle and that something might just simply be called power. ‎¥ The notion that the son grows up threatened by his father and must overcome him is at the heart of the myths of many civilizations ‎¥ Less often foregrounded is the view that masculinity is itself constructed with threat and, as a result, has anxiety at its centre. 

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+ Great Expectations can again provide an example. Y The absence of Pip’s actual fatherallows Dickens more easily to describe a series of ‘fathers’ whom Pip must in some way supersede. ¥ Magwitch is the first to threaten to cut something from Pip’s body Y Orlick is the most threatening: ‘When | was younger, | had a general belief that if he had jiggered me personally, he would have done it with a sharp and twisted hook 

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Men, gender and queer criticism Men have been involved in the growth of contemporary gender-based literary study from the beginning, though in far smaller numbers than women. Broadly speaking their involvement is of two kinds work that shares the aims of second, work that came from the gay liberation movement that developed at the same time. One of the first examples of the former type of work is John Goode’s ‘Women and the Literary Text’ which appeared in a collection titled The Rights and Wrongs of Women using Tess of the D'Urbervilles, he discusses the relation of the representations of. women to Hardy’s male narrating voice in a most interesting way. there is no explicit reference to the possibility of a difference between the feminine and the masculine point of view. the critic is a gendered subject, and is a producer of texts as much as the writ she or he reads, and is as much engaged with gendered language and with play of power around genre. ۲ ۲ 

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+ women writing about being feminine will often use the pronoun ‘we’ to construct a sense of shared experience with their women readers in a way thi cannot + The gay studies perspective has been instrumental in developing the most distinct critical perspectives on the relation between literature and the masculine. + In the preface to Between Men: » English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, places herself within a community of ‘gay female and male scholars’ » Elaine Showalter places herself within a feminist group. + Sedgwick also regularly acknowledges the direct influence of feminist thinking in her work. > In the main body of Between Men, however, she adopts the detached tone of — ۲ academic discourse, no doubt because she wants her work to be read within thi mainstream of literary criticism 

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Sedgwick’s tone has changed to something more personal. these shifts of tt have gender-political significance. In Sedgwick's case, some say the gendered community that is invoked the meaning of ‘we’ as she might use it glosses over too much difference. For some, there is not so much a difference as a gap between being a woman (even a lesbian woman) and the gay masculinity about which she writes. for others, there is just as much a gap between Sedgwick’s avowed feminism and her subject-matter. Between Men tracks various formations of literary plots common since 1700 a heroine is caught between different men the plot is resolved when a correct choice between the men is made. these plots are about heterosexuality and the family they are myths of what is proper for women to choose and how they should behave. In the novels of Jane Austen the plots constitute a system of social control fo! women. VVVV 

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Both men and women readers are ‘put in place’ and their gender identity defined. From a gay perspective, however, although we know that there were immensely close sexual relations between men in certain classes of society, this fact is silenced. Sexuality is constructed only as part of the relations between men and women. Sedgwick in her later book Epistemology of the Closet, she focuses on the time around 1900 a period regularly explored by writers on male homosexuality and masculinity this was when the modern boundaries between the homosexual man and the heterosexual man were mostly built. For Sedgwick, this either/or way of defining sexuality has been a presiding master term of the past century one that has the same, primary importance for all modern Western identity and social organization...as do the more traditionally visible cruxes of gende! class, and race. ۲ اح ۲ 

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+ Henry James, a writer now regularly claimed as part of gay literary history. * The extract refers to James's story ‘The Beast in the Jungle’: ¥ For (the hero) Marcher, the presence or possibility of homosexual meaning attached to the inner, the future, secret has exactly the reifying, totalizing, the blinding effect ¥ in the view of his panic, one thing, and the worst thing ‘the superstition of the Beast’. Y His readiness to organize the whole of his life around the preparation for it—the defence against it + Adifferent approach, but with a focus on the same period, can be seen in Alan Sinfield's The Wilde Century: ¥ The main issue in the book is the modern construction of male homosexuality and the role of literary texts in that process. ¥ Summarizing his argument in the preface titled ‘Queer Thinking’, Sinfield deci that the villain of the piece is the masculine/feminine binary structure the supposition that masculinity and femininity are the essential, normati 

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+ Heterosexuals don’t fall tidily into masculine and feminine attributes * itis perverse that lesbians and gay men should be interpreted as some kind o1 contorted variation upon it. + Smollett has been accepted in a relatively minor way into the canon of the English novel largely on account of his comic skill and his realism * Sinfield picks out a scene in which ‘queer thinking’ and reading discover a sub- text peeping through the apparently easy comic surface * episode may point us towards some of the anxieties that the instability of effeminacy, as a concept, was provoking Pickle and Pallet wish to attend a masquerade because Pallet is a stranger to the town and might get lost, he is persuaded to dress as a woman ¥ on the altogether unconvincing pretext that this will oblige Pickle to attend him ‘with more care’ ¥ The upshot of this strange project is that Pallet is accosted by a nobleman who takes him for a woman. SAN 

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¥ In this incident (on the surface at least) no one is given to same-sex passion Y cross-dressing is a convenience and then a mistake. Y¥ There are legitimate reasons for cross-dressing ¥ the episode seems designed to say; it may be all good clean fun, and conducted by the very men who in the previous episode punish ‘abominable practices’ 

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Conclusion + Accritic focuses on > an apparently straightforward—often simply ‘realistic’—piece of writing to show not only that the text is shot through with gender issues > but that investigation of the text is bound up with investigation of gender and power issues in society. + Usually the critic is motivated by her or his own gendered position and agenda Y Sinfield writes that ‘my project of historical reconstruction has substantial implications for how we handle ourselves today’ ¥ Pamela Morris begins Literature and Feminism by declaring that her “emphasig is on feminist literary criticism as an empowering practice of reading’ 1 

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+ Ibsen's play A Doll’s House » the heroine, Nora, is caught in a trap built of the economic and social order of society and patriarchal language. » The play diagnoses the way in which femininity makes women subject to the power of father and then of husband. » It seems to allow Nora to escape, but the line of force that runs from Ibsen himself to his character remains in place. > That line of fo nature of femii coerces the reader and holds the woman and the ity at the centre of the stage, making it the ‘problem’. > Ina strong feminist play it seems natural that, in an early scene, Nora shares her story in an intimate conversation with a woman friend, who is herself a widow. » Nora's husband meanwhile talks with his friend off-stage. 

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» this scene assumed crucial significance: Y Ibsen's instructions for the design of the stage make the men’s conversation take place almost literally in the closet. The play allows us to think of a bond existing between the men, but goes no further ¥ we cannot think whether it is homosexual or homosocial. Y the nature of the relationship between men is silenced, and our attention is diverted because Nora is made the problem to be solved. ¥ Gender-based criticism is nothing if it does not empower the reader to reread texts and bring out new meanings, enabling the silenced to speak and making silences disruptive.