Feminist Approaches

• Sees the exclusion of women from the literary canon as a political as well as aesthetic act
• Works to change the language of literary criticism
• Examines the experiences of women from all races, classes, cultures
• Feminist criticism reasserts the authority of experience
• Exposes patriarchal premises and resulting prejudices to promote discovery and reevaluation of
literature by women
• Examines social, cultural, and psychosexual contexts of literature and criticism
• Describes how women in texts are constrained in culture and society
• Gender is conceived as complex cultural idea and psychological component rather tan as strictly tied to
biological gender
• Always political and always revisionist
• Feminist literary criticism has most developed since the women’s movement beginning in the early
1960s

Advantages
• Women have been somewhat underrepresented in the traditional canon; a feminist approach to
literature helps redress this problem

Disadvantages
• Feminist critics turn literary criticism into a political battlefield and overlook the merits of works they
consider “patriarchal.”
• When arguing for a distinct feminine writing style, feminist critics tend to regulate women’s literature to
ghetto status; this in turn prevents female literature from being naturally included in the literary canon.
• Often too theoretical

Checklist of Feminist Critical Questions

• To what extent does the representation of women (and men) in the work reflect the place and time in
which the work was written?
• How are the relationships between men and women or those between members of the same sex
presented in the work? What roles do men and women assume and perform and with what
consequences?
• Does the author present the work from within a predominantly male or female sensibility? Why might
this have been done, and with what effects?
• How do the facts of the author’s life relate to the presentation of men and women in the work? To their
relative degrees of power?
• How do other works by the author correspond to this one in their depiction of the power relationships
between men and women?

Checklist of Mythological Critical Questions

• What incidents in the work seem common or familiar enough as actions that they might be considered
symbolic or archetypal? Are there any journeys, battles, falls, reversals of fortune, etc.?
• What kinds of character types appear in the work? How might they be classified?
• What creatures, elements of nature, or man-made objects playing a role in the work might be
considered symbolic?
• What changes do the characters undergo? How can those changes be characterized or named? To
what might they be related or compared?
• What religious or quasi-religious traditions might the work’s story, characters, elements, or objects be
compared to or affiliated with? Why?