The Powerpoint presentation analyses the theories of the Feminist theorist Elaine Showalter and her works in the field of literature.

1. Marxist Feminism
Analysis of Elaine Showalter’s idea of
woman’s creativity

2. What is Feminism
● Feminism is a range of social movements, political movements, and
ideologies that share a common goal to define, establish and achieve the
political economic, personal and social equality of the sexes.
● The feminist movement produced both feminist fiction and non-fiction and
created new interest in women’s writing.

3. Marxist Feminism
● Marxist feminism is a sub-type of feminist ideology which focuses on the
dismantling of capitalism as a way to liberate women.
● Marxism claims that individuals are under the oppression of a dominant
power structure. Marxist feminism points out the roll of capitalism in the
oppression of women.
● Marxist feminism states that economic inequality, dependence, political
confusion and unhealthy social relations between men and women are the
root of women’s oppression in the current social context.

4. About Elaine Showalter
● Elaine Showalter is an American literary
critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and
social issues.
● She is one of the founders of Feminist
literary criticism in United States academia,
developing the concept and practice of
gynocriticism.
● She is best known for her works : Towards
a Feminist Poetics (1979), The Female
Malady: Women, Madness, and English
Culture

5. ● She is a specialist in Victorian literature and her most innovative work in this
field is in madness and hysteria in literature, specifically in women’s writing
and in the portrayal of female characters.
● Showalter is concerned by stereotypes of feminism that see feminist critics
as being ‘obsessed with destroying male artists’ and wonders if such
stereotypes emerge from the fact that feminism lacks a fully articulated
theory.

6. Showalter has divided Feminist criticism
into two sections:
● The woman as Reader or Feminist Critique
● The woman as Writer or Gynocritic

7. The Woman as Reader or Feminist Critique
● The Feminist Critique envisions the women as the readers of those male
produced texts. The feminist thus, try to trace out the images and
stereotype of the women exposed in the male texts.
● This is also called traditional feminist criticism where women are the
consumers of the production in literary writing.

8. The Woman as Writer or Gynocritics
● “In contrast to an angry or loving fixation on male literature, the program of
gynocritics is to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s
literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience,
rather than to adapt male models and theories.”
● 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.

9. Gynocriticism
● Gynocriticism is concerned with woman as writer, with woman as the
producer of textual meaning
● Showalter presents gynocritics as a way to construct a female framework
for the analysis of women’s literature.
● It is an examination of female writers and their place in literary history along
with the discovery and exploration of a canon of literature written by
women.
● It is also concerned with the treatment of female characters in books by
both male and female writers.

10. Three Phases of Feminism
● The Feminine Phase (1840-1880)
● The Feminist Phase (1880-1920)
● The Female Phase (1920-)

11. The Feminine Phase
● “Women wrote in an effort to equal the intellectual achievements of the
male culture, and internalised its assumptions about female culture.” -
About Elaine Showalter Theory of Gynocriticism
● Women write female characters with male traits in order to show the
inequality between the genders.
● The distinguishing sign of this period is the male pseudonym which exerts
an irregular pressure on the narrative, affecting tone, diction, structure, and
characterization.

12. The Feminist Phase
● “Women are historical enabled to reject the accommodating postures of
femininity and to use literature to dramatize the ordeals of wronged
womanhood...a generation of New Women redefined the women artists role
in terms of responsibility to suffering sisters.” - About Elaine Showalter
Theory of Gynocriticism
● Women write about the struggles that woman face within their literature.
● This phase was characterised by women’s writing that protested against
male standards and values and advocated women’s rights and values.

13. The Female Phase
● “Women reject both imitation and protest- two form of dependency- and turn
instead to female experience as the source o f an autonomous art.” - About
Elaine Showalter Theory of Gynocriticism
● Rather than imitating men (feminine stage) or protesting (feminist stage),
women instead go through a stage of self discovery.

14. Thank you