Feminism : Elaine Showalter and Gayatri spivak

Hello readers!

Elaine Showalter and Gayatri Spivak play a vital role in feminism. Here is am going to write about her views on feminism. What exactly they think about feminism . How they differ from others. This movement feminism is started by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The first gathering devoted to women's rights in the United States was held July 1848, in Seneca Falls, New York. The principal organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention were Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a mother of four from upstate New York, and the Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott.

So let's think and Know about Showalter and Gayatri Spivak about feminism. Let's take one by one.

• Elaine Showalter :

 Who has better known as American literary critic, Feminist and writer on cultural and social issues. And also known for Gynocriticism. Showalter has been a television critic for people magazine and a commentator on BBC radio and television. She had faced many problems , easily did not get this position, and fought with her parents.A school of feminist criticism concerned with “woman as writer…with the history, themes, genres, and structures of literature by women.”

• Her works :

- Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977),

- The Female Malady (1985)

- Towards a feminist Poetics (1979)

- Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (1990)

- Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing (1991)

- Hystories: Historical Epidemics and Modern Culture (1997),

- Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (2001),

 - A Jury of Her Peers (2009),

- The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe (2016)

This Toward a Feminist Poetics Showalter best known work. It is divides feminist criticism into two sections:

• The Woman as Reader or Feminist Critique :

So in the first part we find that the women as a reader. Male writers written and the women who just go through the reading. So we can say that male writers can't express female thinking , female psychology. One of the problems of the feminist critique is that it is male–orientated. How women are manipulating and exploiting. in literary work. If we study stereotypes of women, the sexism of male critics. Writers are not learning what women have felt and experienced, but only what men thought women should be.

They used women as a sign. As many popular literature and add. Women show work in the house , to care for their children. Unconsciously women also believe that idea, women are for doing household work. She also treats her girl as the same ideas. In many advertisements we saw that mother and daughter work together at home instead of the boy who goes outside and plays. So in this way think about feminist critique.

Here one proverd and related that one story is here. In which the narration is very problematic. Here we can see that how male writer think about woman's psychology and thinking.

• The Woman as Writer or Gynocritics : 

Gynocriticism attempts to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature and focus on female subjectivity, female language and female literary career. She says that gynocritics may never succeed in understanding the special differences of women’s writing, or realize a distinct female literary tradition.

"Gynocritics begins at the point when we free ourselves from the linear absolutes of male literary history, stop trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition, and focus instead on the newly visible world of female culture."

So that through bwe understand that the Gynocritics main aim is to understand the specificity of writing not as a product of sexism but as a fundamental aspect of female reality. Language  and the theories all are man dominated. There is a concept like the otherness of language.Many female writer like Meena kandaswami, Maya Angelou's poem "Still I Rise" written in her way.

• Three phases :

1)    The ‘feminine phase’ 

It dates from about 1840-1880. Women, in this stage, wrote to level standards of intellectual achievements with that of male culture. Use of male pseudonyms on the part of female writers is one of the most unique aspects of this stage. For example women like George Eliot who started writing with pennames

2)      The ‘feminist phase’  :

 It ranged from 1882 to 1920.  It followed the efforts to win rights for women. The New Women Movement had become quite strong and women had won the right to vote. During this stage, women writers expressed their feelings regarding sufferings of women in the society.

3)      The ‘female phases:

The Female phases has been continuing since 1920.  Showalter considers imitation and protest to symbolize the dependence of females on male. Thus, women rejected both these ideas. Here women depend on their own attitude and experiences to participate in the literary process. Writers like  Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley who represent this stage, also identified the uniqueness of female experience. They went to the extent of identifying differences between male and female sentences.Women, in general, began to be more aware about forms and techniques of art and literature.

• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak :

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (24 February 1942) is an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the establishment's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.

Her famous essay is "Can the subaltern speak ?Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her essay “Feminism and Critical Theory”, describes the relationship between feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction through her own thoughts, critical literary works of others and a image of the present state of these areas of thought.

Her essay is divided into four parts :

 “The first section of the essay is a version of a talk I gave several years ago.  The second section represents a reflection on that earlier work. The third section is an intermediate moment.  The fourth section inhabits something like the present.”

In the second part she says that :

“In a matter of race-sensitive analyses, the chief problem of American feminist criticism is its identification of racism as such with the constitution of racism in America.” 

Thank you.....