1. Rayat Shikshan Sanstha’s
Chhatrapati Shivaji College, Satara
Elaine Showalter’s views on ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’
Shubhada
Annasaheb Borate
(Roll No. 4007)
Komal Balakrishna Badadare
(Roll No. 4002)
Sharad Bharat Shinde
(Roll No. 4043)
Durga Balasaheb Raut
(Roll No. 4040)
Prashant Mahadev Patil
(Roll No. 4030)
Supervised by : Prof. R. S. Pale
Year :

2. CONTENT
Title
Background of the Critic
Two Poles of Feminist Criticism
Two Distinct Modes of Feminist Criticism
Four Models of Difference
Conclusion

3. <Elaine Showalter’s
Views on
‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’

4. Background of the Critic
One of the leading feminist
critics and theorists in the United States.
Born on 21st Jan. 1941, in Cambridge.
a gynocritic.
She is known for her book: ‘A Literature of
Their Own:British Women Novelists from
Bronte to Lessing’(1977).
Her famous paper “Feminist Criticism in the
Wilderness” first published in ‘Critical Inquiry’
in 1981, which presents the evolution of
feminist criticism.
Background of the Critic
Elaine Showalter

5. Two Poles of Feminist Criticism
identified by Carolyn Heilbrun and Catherine
Stimpson.
The first was righteous, angry and admonitory. It was compared to the Old Testament because it was looking for the sins and errors of the past.
2. The second mode was treated as disinterested. It was seeking the grace of imagination and was compared to the New Testament.
Mathew Arnold also thought that literary critics might perish in the wilderness.
According to Geoffrey Hartman all criticism is in the wilderness.
There was not theoretical framework for feminist criticism because of the unwillingness of many women to limit expressive enterprise. Thus it isolated from the mainstream criticism.

6. Two Distinct Modes of Feminist Criticism
The first mode is ideological, concerned with the
feminist as ‘reader’.
This is a mode of interpretation.
dependent on the pre-existing critical assumption and
formulation.
Showalter suggests about feminist criticism -
-it should depart from androcentric model of criticism.
-should be evolved their own model.
-it is women-centered, independent and intelectually
coherent.
-should find a usable past in the androcentric critical
tradition.
The second mode is concerned with the study of women
as ‘writers’.
Its subjects are the history, styles, themes, genres, and
structures of writing by women.

7. >Some gynocritics and their works<
For that Showalter invented the term ‘gynocritics’, which
concentrates on the difference of women’s writing.
>Some gynocritics and their works<
Patrica Meyer Spacks ‘The Female Imagination’.
Simon de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’.
Mary Ellmann’s ‘Thinking about Women’.
Kate Millett’s ‘Sexual Politics’.
Showalter’s ‘A Literature of Their Own’
Nina Baym’s ‘Woman’s Fiction’.
Ellen Moers’ ‘Literary Women’
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s ‘The Madwoman in the Attic’.
Margaret Homan’s ‘Women Writers and Poetic Identity’.
etc. books deals with feminist literary study.

8. Four Models of Difference
Showalter make use of four models : biological, linguistic, psychoanalytic and cultural.
Women’s writing and woman’s body :~
Biological difference between man and woman.
Victorian physicians believed that women’s
physiological functions diverted about twenty percent
of their creative energy from brain activity.
Victorian anthropologists believed that the frontal lobes
of male brain were inferior in intelligence.
Making biological difference a base once again
feminists reverse the theories, rejecting the woman as
subordinate construction and use this base for erecting
massive theoretical framework that privileges women’s
experiences.

9. exists is more suitable and convential to men than
2. Women’s Writing and Women’s Language:~
Gynocritics are of the view that language as it
exists is more suitable and convential to men than
to women. So it is called ‘the oppressor’s
language’.
Women take man’s language as ‘foreign’.
Women critics want to revise the language to suit
women writers.
There is no separate female language. Woman can
speak herself into existence through another
language.
The appropriate task for feminist criticism is to
concentrate on women’s access to language.
The problem is not that language is insufficiant to
express women’s consciousness but that woman
have been denied the full resources of language
and have been forced into silence.

10. 3. Women’s Writing and Women’s Psyche:~
Feminist criticism locates the difference of women’s
writing in the author’s psyche and in the relation of
gender to the creative process.
A class of feminists follows Freud’s theories and their
revisions. There is a link between female body and
creative impulse observing that women have fewer
writing blocks than men. The women writers suffer
from inferiority complex when they struggle for artistic
self definion.
A majority of women’s psychoanalytic criticism is based
on Freudian Theories.

11. The female psyche can be studied as the
4. Women’s Writing and Women’s Culture:
Women live in cultural environment.
The female psyche can be studied as the
product or construction of cultural forces.
Showalter’s cultural model places feminist
concerns in social context, acknowledging
class, racial, national and historical differences
and determinants among women, but offering
a collective experience that unites women over
time and space- a ‘binding force’.
In short all of the above models
linked with each other and shows the
wilderness of feminist criticism.

12. Conclusion
After studying the Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness, we can say that no one model, i.e. biological, linguistic, psychoanalytic, cultural is sufficient to assess a feminist text. No single theoretical model will be adequate. And it is a challenge before the feminist critic to evolve a model which will represent the wilderness which is yet to be identified and understood through a model.