Feminist Literary Analysis
Feminist theory is an approach that focuses on the way women are represented in literature. This mode of interpretation is important not only to understanding how gender affects characters in a work, but also in understanding the societal values that are reflected by the work.
Since the world of academe has privileged the male sex for most of history, it is not surprising that the traditional literary canon mostly overlooks or ignores works by female authors. Hence, written women often adhere to traditional gender roles determined by patriarchal, or male dominated, society. Women are often depicted as submissive wives, dutiful homemakers, and selfless nurturers, considered virtuous by right of beauty and dominated by emotions. Feminist theory tries to answer the question of whether a character perpetuates traditional female stereotypes, and to what extent the text supports those views. Though much of feminist scholarship focuses on rediscovering and analyzing works by women authors, feminist theory can be applied to any work. Because of this, there are many varieties of feminist theory.
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Sub-types
Historical feminist criticism focuses on how a work correlates with women’s position at a certain point in time. By thinking about the work in its historical context, the reader can better analyze how the characters typify or transgress the gender norms of their society. For instance, a historical feminist approach could be effectively used to analyze “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” by Katherine Mansfield because the death of an unmarried woman’s father had much different consequences in the 1920s than it does today. Psychoanalytic feminist criticism focuses on the mental state and the unconscious impulses of a character and how they were formed by early life experiences. Feminist criticism is more specifically interested in the ways in which the social construct of gender have influenced their personality. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar would be a good novel for psychoanalytic feminist criticism because you could focus on the ways in which patriarchal oppression contributed to or interacted with the heroine’s mental illness. Marxist/socialist-feminist criticism focuses on the ways in which the socioeconomic system oppresses women based on both class and sex. In A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Feminist Literary Criticism, Maggie Humm explains that “Marxism offers both a way of linking historical evidence of women’s oppression with literary texts and understanding how writers consciously or unconsciously transpose that evidence into their text” (75). A Marxist feminist approach might look at the ways in which a woman is divested of social power by the inability to legally own property. You could use Marxist feminist approach when analyzing Kate Chopin’s The Awakening by looking at Edna’s perception of her husband’s wealth and her decision to leave the material comfort of his lavish house. Poststructuralism / deconstruction feminist criticism analyzes the ways in which language is ingrained with the ideologies of the ruling society. In the case of feminist theory, the interest is how language inherently supports patriarchal ideas and is oppressive to women. This is not only because the value judgement language implies, but also because it is an inadequate tool for women’s expression of their experience. For example, you might look at the ways active and passive sentence structures relate to Edna’s experience in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. Postructuralism feminist theory is a good approach to more modern works, where sexism or gender expectations might be subtly expressed by connotations. Black feminist criticism focuses on works both by and about African American women. It focuses heavily on their cultural traditions and history that make a black woman’ experience unique. Toni Morrison’s Beloved could be explored using black feminist criticism because the novel is deeply rooted in Afro-American culture and female characters struggle with both racism and sexism. |
Important Feminist Literary Figures  Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1972).
 Virginia Woolf, author of A Room of One’s Own (1929).
 Simone de Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex (1949).
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This Feminist Analysis section includes a step-by-step walkthrough for creating your own feminist analysis essay as well as specific examples for each step, following the composition of my essay analyzing Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers”.
Steps:
Reading
Asking Questions
Inventing
Big Idea
Research
Planning
Drafting
Revising
Finalizing
Archived Process for Feminist Analysis of Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of her Peers”