cultural interpretation of the body as distinguished from the physical characteristics that make people male or female.
One of the most prominent feminist critics is Elaine Showalter. She discusses the history, styles, genres, and structures
of women writing, as well as the psychodynamics of female creativity. Showalter divides literary works into two
categories: Gynotexts (books by women) and Andro-texts (books by men. Critics like Showalter study literary texts
through a realist lens and treat literature as a series of realities. They researched written diaries, memoirs, and social
and medical history. One of the terms used by Elaine Showalter in A Literature of Their Own (1977) is “gynocriticism,” a
term intended to indicate her concern with the history of women as authors. In A Literature of Their Own Showalter
posited the idea of a feminine period of literary history (1840–80) in which the experiences of women such as the
Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot—notably their use of male pseudonyms and
imitation of male standards—demonstrate the obstacles women writers have tended to face. Showalter then described
a second phase (1880–1920) that comprised so-called New Woman writers (e.g., Vernon Lee, George Egeron, Ella D’Arcy)
dedicated to protest and minority rights.
One of the founders of this kind of approach was Virginia Woolf, who showed in her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own
how women’s material and intellectual deprivation were obstacles to authorship. Woolf illustrated her case with the
abortive artistic aspirations of Shakespeare’s fictitious sister Judith. In another essay, Professions for Women Woolf
also announced the necessity for women writers to kill the angel in the house taking her cue from Coventry Patmore’sShare with your friends: |
