Political Reading (2)
Marxist Literary Criticism and Feminist Criticism
The Hungarian critic George Lukcs, prefers the panoramic novels of such
conservative writers to the fragmentary avant-garde products of the
sometimes fiercely leftist artists of the 1920s because it is only in the wide-
ranging panorama, and in the merging of individual life stories with the
larger movements of history, that the reader is confronted with the historical
truth.
The narratives in which these characters appear are to some
extent independent of their authors political convictions and accurately
reflect historical reality. They effectively overcome their authors
ideological limitations and they do so because they offer a total overview of
all the social forces involved. (For Marxists, such an approach, which takes
all parties and positions and their dynamic relationships into account and
thereby allows a fuller understanding of the whole, is dialectical. In the
words of Lukcs: The literature of realism displays the contradictions
within society and within the individual in the context of a dialectical unity
Ideology is seen as such a strong presence in the text that we more or less
have to break down its resistance to get at a truer picture of the reality the
text pretends to present.
The Text Says What It Does Not Say). In order expose a texts also political in the more traditional sense of trying to intervene in the
ideology, interpretation must paradoxically focus on what the text does not
say, on what the text represses rather than expresses. We find what the text
does not say in gaps, in silences where what might have been said remains
unarticulated. Literature, reveals the gaps in ideology. The text might
almost be said to have an unconscious to which it has consigned what it
cannot say because of ideological repression.
The politics of gender: feminism
The work of female writers has so obviously been under a number of
serious historical constraints that it is now hard to understand why the odds
they faced were virtually ignored in literary discussions (except by some of
these writers themselves: Virginia Woolf, for instance). The answer surely
has to do with the general blindness of (male-dominated) Western culture to
its treatment of women as second-rate citizens.
Feminism saw very clearly that the widespread negative stereotyping of
women in literature and film (we can now add rock videos) constituted a
formidable obstacle on the road to true equality. At least as important is that
in the work of the male writers she discusses Millett finds a relationship
between sex and power in which the distribution of power over the male
and female partners mirrors the distribution of power over males and
females in society at large. In other words, in terms of power, acts that we
usually think of as completely private turn out to be an extension of the
public sphere. The private and the public cannot be seen as wholly separate
on the contrary, they are intimately linked. Since this is the case, Millett
argues, the private sphere is, just like the public realm, thoroughly political:
it is a political arena where the same power-based relations exist as in the
public world. Feminism and feminist criticism are profoundly political in
claiming that the personal and the political cannot be separated. They are
social order with a programme that aims to change actually existing social
conditions.
Feminism seeks to change the power relations between men and women
that prevail under what in the late 1960s and the 1970s usually was called
patriarchy, a term that referred to the (almost) complete domination of men
in Western society (and beyond).

Feminist literary studies
In its first phase, feminist literary studies focused on the woman as reader
and on the woman as writer. The American feminist critic Elaine
Showalter, from whom I am borrowing these formulations, put it as follows
in her 1979 essay Towards a Feminist Poetics:
The first type is concerned with woman as the consumer of male-
produced literature, and with the way in which the hypothesis of a female
reader changes our apprehension of a given text, awakening us to the
significance of its textual codes . Its subjects include images and
stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions of and misconceptions
about women in criticism, and the fissures in maleconstructed literary
history. (Showalter [1979] 1985: 128)
When feminist criticism focuses on the woman as writer it concerns itself
with woman as the producer of textual meaning, with the history, genres
and structures of literatures by women. Its subjects include the
psychodynamics of female creativity; linguistics and the problem of female
language; the trajectory of the individual or collective literary career;
literary history; and, of course, studies of particular writers and works.
(128)
female writers, came under close scrutiny and were regularly found
to have succumbed to the lure of stereotypical representations. Since the
way female characters were standardly portrayed had not much in common
with the way feminist critics saw and experienced themselves, these
characters clearly were constructions, put together not necessarily by the
writers who presented them themselves, but by the culture they belonged to
to serve a notso-hidden purpose: the continued social and cultural
domination of males. If we look at the four examples I have given we see
immediately that female independence (in the seductress and the shrew)
gets a strongly negative connotation, while helplessness and renouncing all
ambition and desire are presented as endearing and admirable. The message
is that dependence leads to indulgement and reverence while independence
leads to dislike and rejection.
Gender
Gender has to do not with how females (and males) really are, but with the
way that a given culture or subculture sees them, how they are culturally
constructed. To say that women have two breasts is to say something about
their biological nature, to say something about what it is to be a female; to
say that women are naturally timid, or sweet, or intuitive, or dependent, or
self-pitying, is to construct a role for them. It tells us how the speaker wants
to see them. What traditionally has been called feminine, then, is a
cultural construction, a gender role that has been culturally assigned to
countless generations of women. The same holds for masculinity, with its
connotations of strength, rationality, stoicism, and self-reliance. Like
femininity, traditional masculinity is a gender role that has far less to do
with actual males than with the wishful thinking projected onto the heroes
of Westerns, hard-boiled private eyes, and British secret agents.
Masculinity, too, is a cultural construction.
Feminism, then, has been focused right from the beginning on gender
because a thorough revision of gender roles seemed the most effective way
of changing the power relations between men and women.
Feminism has politicized gender by showing its constructed nature
Since the mid-1960s women writers, drawing on their personal
experiences, have increasingly brought female sexuality, female anguish,
childbirth, mothering, rape, and other specifically female themes into their
work. Still, the feminist criticism and writing that I have so far discussed is
in some ways fairly traditional, for instance in its view of the subject. In
this (mostly American) feminist criticism of the 1970s and 1980s the
female subject, like its male counterpart, is essentially free and
autonomous. Once the social and cultural restraints on women have been ..
lifted, women will be as autonomous and self-determining as men.
Moreover, in its earlier stages this feminism assumes that it speaks for all
women, regardless of culture, class, and race. This is undeniably more
modest than liberal humanisms (male) assumption that it speaks for all of
humankind, but it still ignores the often rather different experience of
women who, unlike virtually all early feminists, are not white,
heterosexual, and middle class. As early as 1977 the AfricanAmerican
critic Barbara Smith argued that black women writers were ignored by
academic feminism (Towards a Black Feminist Criticism).

Marxist Feminism

[it] is interested in the material conditions of real peoples lives, how

conditions such as poverty and undereducation produce different signifying
systems than works produced and read in conditions of privilege and
educational plenty. This kind of approach is likely to be most interested in
the content of a literary text as symptomatic of the conditions of its
production. (Robbins 2000: 13)

However, after its heyday in the early 1980s, Marxist feminism, too, was
increasingly charged with being insensitive to difference, and came to be
seen as the product of a white academic elite