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Feminist criticism 117
nist theorists and literary critics concerning, for example, how (and how much)
women are programmed by patriarchal ideology; whether or not there is a distinctive
way of writing that might be called feminine; whether or not the work
of women writers should be interpreted along different lines than writing by
men; the ways in which various cultural factors intersect with sex and gender in
creating women’s experience; and as we have just seen, the new horizons offered
by the efforts of gender theorists to enlarge and problematize our conception of
gender. Our purpose here is merely to introduce you to the main ideas and the
general principles you need to know in order to read feminist theorists and literary
critics with some understanding of the issues they raise.
Feminism and literature
Naturally, some literary works will lend themselves more readily than others to
feminist analysis or at least to certain kinds of feminist analyses. For students
new to the field, I think it useful to examine the ways in which literary texts
reinforce patriarchy because the ability to see when and how patriarchal ideology
operates is crucial to our ability to resist it in our own lives. This approach,
applied to literary works in the male canon, was the dominant mode of feminist
literary analysis in America during the 1970s, and it usually requires reading
“against the grain” of the text’s apparent intention, for patriarchal literature is
usually unconscious of the sexist ideology it promotes, or perhaps more precisely,
patriarchal literature sees nothing wrong with its own sexism.
A feminist analysis of the patriarchal ideology operating in Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman (1949), for example, might examine three related areas:
(1) the ways in which the female characters (Biff’s and Happy’s various “conquests,”
the woman Willy meets in the Boston hotel room, and Linda Loman)
function as tokens of male status; (2) the ways in which the “good-girl”/“bad-girl”
view of women validates the Loman men’s sexism; and (3) the ways in which
Linda Loman has internalized patriarchal ideology. A feminist reading would
also note that the play reinforces patriarchal ideology through its sympathetic
portrayal of Willy and apparent approval of Linda’s support for his patriarchal
attitude. Such a reading would also relate the play’s patriarchal ideology to the
period in which it was written and is set: post–World War II America. This was a
time when American patriarchy attempted to counteract the war-time freedom
of women who took on the jobs and family responsibilities of their absent men
by reestablishing the belief that “the (good) woman’s place is in the home.”
Of course, it is also important to be able to recognize when a literary work depicts
patriarchal ideology in order to criticize it or invite us to criticize it. For example,
a feminist reading of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) might examine the