International Journal Advances in Social Science and Humanities
Available online at: www.ijassh.com
CASE STUDY
Role of Women Novelists and Feminist Criticism in English Literature
with Special Reference to Toni Morrison’s the Bluest Eyes
Roshni Duhan*
Teaching Assistant, IGNOU, Study Centre, Rohtak, India.
*Corresponding Author:Email:[email protected]
Abstract
Feminist literary criticism, arising in conjunction with sociopolitical feminism, critiques patriarchal language and literature by exposing how these reflect masculine ideology. It examines gender politics in works and traces the subtle construction of masculinity and femininity and their relative status within works. There were many women novelists as well as there was Feminist Criticism due to Feminism prevalent in the society. In the West, the second wave of feminism prompted a general revelation of women's historical contributions, and various academic sub-disciplines, such as women's history and women's writing, developed in response to the belief that women's lives and contributions have been underrepresented as areas of scholarly interest. Much of this early period of feminist literary scholarship was given over to the rediscovery and reclamation of texts written by women. Studies like Dale Spender's Mothers of the Novel (1986) and Jane Spencer's The Rise of the Woman Novelist (1986) were ground-breaking.
Keywords: Feminist criticism, Feminism, Literary theory, Philosophical Discourse.
Introduction
Earlier discussion of women's broader cultural contribution can be found as far back as the 8th century BC, when Hesiod compiled Catalogue of Women, a list of heroines and goddesses. Plutarch listed heroic and artistic women in his Moralia. In the medieval period, Boccaccio used mythic and biblical women as moral exemplars in De mulieribus claris (1361–1375), directly inspiring Christine de Pisan to write The Book of the City of Ladies (1405). Women writers themselves have long been interested in tracing a "woman's tradition" in writing. Mary Scott's The Female Advocate: A Poem Occasioned by Reading Mr Duncombe's Feminead (1774) is one of the best known such works in the 18th century, a period that saw a burgeoning of women's publishing. In 1803, Mary Hays published the six volumes of
Female Biography. Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) exemplifies the impulse in the modern period to explore a tradition of women's writing. Woolf, however, sought to explain what she perceived as an absence; by the mid-century scholarly attention turned to finding and reclaiming "lost" writers. And there were many to reclaim: it is common for the editors of dictionaries or anthologies of women's writing to
refer to the difficulty in choosing from all the available material. Trade publishers have similarly focused on women's writing: since the 1970s there have been a number of literary periodicals such as Fireweed and Room of One's Own which are dedicated to publishing the creative work of women writers. There are a number of dedicated presses, such as the Second Story Press and the Women's Press. In addition, collections and anthologies of women's writing continue to be published by both trade and academic presses.
Women Novelists
Baroness Orczy (1865 – 1974) was of Hungarian birth. She settled in England and became immensely popular for her romantic stories of the Scarlet Pimpernel. The hero, an indolent man of fashion rescues the nobility from the terrors of the French Revolution. Besides the many sequels to Scarlet Pimpernel she wrote other historical romances. Her last novel Links in the Chain of Life (1946) is autobiographical. Countess Russel (1866-1941), gentle satirist made her name by ridiculing the Germans in “Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898)” and in several other volumes. May Sinclair (1879-1946) produced her most ambitious work in The Divine Fire (1904), a study of a poetic genius, which does not quite succeed. The same failure marked her psycho-analytical Mary Olivier (1919). Mary Webb (1883 -1927) was a gifted writer of country life, but her novels Precious Bane, Gone to Earth and others were never popular because of a highly conscious and intense style. Katherine Mansfield (1888- 1923). Wife of Middleton Murray, was born in New Zealand. She won high reputation as a writer of short stories: Bliss (1920), Garden Party (1921), The Dove’s Nest (1923), and Something Childish (1924). Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical or philosophical discourse. It aims to understand the nature of gender inequality. It examines women's social roles, experience, interests, and feminist politics in a variety of fields, such as anthropology and sociology, communication, psychoanalysis, [1] economics, literature, education, and philosophy [2].Feminist theory focuses on analyzing gender inequality. Themes explored in feminism include discrimination, objectification (especially sexual objectification), oppression, patriarchy,[3][4] stereotyping, art history and contemporary art and aesthetics. Feminist theories first emerged as early as 1792 in publications such as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft, “The Changing Woman”, “Ain’t I a Woman”[5], “Speech after Arrest for Illegal Voting” and so on. “The Changing Woman” is a Navajo Myth that gave credit to a woman who, in the end, populated the world [6]. In 1851, Sojourner Truth addressed women’s rights issues through her publication, “Ain’t I a Woman”. Sojourner Truth addressed the issue of women having limited rights due to men's flawed perception of women. Truth argued that if a woman of color can perform tasks that were supposedly limited to men, then any woman of any color could perform those same tasks. After her arrest for illegally voting, Susan B. Anthony gave a speech within court in which she addressed the issues of language within the constitution
documented in her publication, “Speech after Arrest for Illegal voting” in 1872. Anthony questioned the authoritative principles of the constitution and its male gendered language. She raised the question of why women are accountable to be punished under law but they cannot use the law for their own protection (women could not vote, own property, nor themselves in marriage). She also critiqued the constitution for its male gendered language and questioned why women should have to abide by laws that do not specify women.
Few Important Women Novelists
Jane Austen: Who hasn’t read Sense and
Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice? The English writer first gave the novel its distinctly modern character through her treatment of ordinary people in everyday life, creating the comedy of manners of middle-class life in the England of her time in her novels.
Colette: The French writer’s best novels are
remarkable for their command of sensual description. Her greatest strength as a writer is an exact sensory evocation of sounds, smells, tastes, textures, and colors of her world.
Emily Dickinson
:
The American lyric poetlived in seclusion and commanded a singular brilliance of style and integrity of vision. With Walt Whitman, Dickinson is widely considered to be one of the two leading 19th-century American poets.
Zora Neale Hurston : The American folklorist
and writer, whose work celebrated the African American culture of the rural South was associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
Alice Munro : The Canadian short-story writer
gained international recognition with her exquisitely drawn stories, usually set in southwestern Ontario, peopled by characters of Scotch-Irish stock. Munro’s work is noted for its precise imagery and narrative style, which is at once lyrical, compelling, economical and intense, revealing the depth and complexities in the emotional lives of ordinary individuals.
Verginia Woolfe: The English writer’s novels,
Feminist Criticism
Feminist criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory or by the politics of feminism more broadly. It can be understood as using feminist principles and ideological discourses to critique the language of literature, its structure and being. This school of thought seeks to describe and analyze the ways in which literature portrays the narrative of male domination in regard to female bodies by exploring the economic, social, political, and psychological forces embedded within literature [7].
Its history has been broad and varied, from classic works of nineteenth-century women authors such as George Eliot and Margaret Fuller to cutting-edge theoretical work in women's studies and gender studies by "third-wave" authors. In general, feminist literary criticism before the 1970s-in the first and second waves of feminism-was concerned with women's authorship and the representation of women's condition within literature; including the depiction of fictional female characters. In addition, feminist criticism was concerned with the exclusion of women from the literary canon. The 1980s can be characterized as a decade in which feminist literary critics looked both backward, to earlier feminist critical work, and outward, to the work of feminist in other disciplines [8]. Sometimes the earlier work was developed relatively uncritically; sometime it was rigorously attacked and found to be lacking. The work in other disciplines often forced literary critics to adopt their own approaches in order to incorporate the most interesting and effective aspects of these alternative approaches. One of the critics who reviewed some the earlier work was Torli Moi (1985).
She broke down the perceived opposition between the Anglo-American and French traditions through a summary and analysis of the main kinds of these criticisms, albeit with the notable exclusion of black studies. Moreover, she introduced the possibility of incorporating the two traditions. Subsequently, others, including Sara Mills and her coeditors (1989), have drawn on her work to bring a combined approach to a number of well-known literary texts.
However, at the same time, other critics still worked mainly in one of these two traditions. Following on from Showalter’s exploration of nineteenth and twentieth century novelists, Jane Spencer (1986) explored the work of a number of neglected women writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This exploration of an
earlier period enabled her to claim that women writers played a much more important role in the development of the novel than had been allowed by other (male) historians of the genre [9-10]. However, whilst some feminists were developing and reacting against existing feminist criticism, others were questioning the definition of theory itself. Barbara Christian (1987) argued that defining theory as abstract logic privileged a Western philosophical tradition and excluded the theoriuring of people of color which is found in story making and telling, riddles, and proverbs.
Despite such debates, many other feminist critics still found the use of theory effective. However, the theories within the discipline of literature, even those which were feminist, were increasingly perceived as less than adequate and many feminist critics looked to work being written by feminists in other disciplines to compensate for this inadequacy. Whilst feminist criticism has traditionally been interdisciplinary, combining textual analysis with an interest in the social construction of gender, during the 1980s this interdisciplinary approach broadened to incorporate work in disciplines previously ignored. For example, feminist critics looked to gender theory in science, such as Evelyn Fox Keller’s (1992) feminist critiques of the construction of science; history, including Joan Scott’s (1992) discussions of an approach which is both feminist and poststructuralist; and queer theory, which identifies and reverses homophobic categories to link sexuality with and race political activism, as in Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s (1985) study which identifies the links between homophobia and misogyny. The legacy of such incorporations plus the revisions of the earlier feminist criticism meant that feminist literary critics writing in the 1990s inherited a rich legacy on which they could base their work. The combining of existing feminist criticism with feminist theory from other disciplines proved to be a productive dynamic in the 1990s.
Toni Morrison
Morrison’s Life and Art
The American writer, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, is noted for her examination of black experience (particularly black female experience) within the black community. Her Beloved (1987), based on the true story of a runaway slave who, at the point of recapture, kills her infant daughter in order to spare her a life of slavery, won a Pulitzer.
Toni Morrison was born and brought up in Lorain, Ohio, which is in the north but her maternal grandparents had emigrated from Alabama to Ohio in order to escape racism and poverty and to find greater opportunities for their children. Her father likewise left Georgia to escape the racial violence rampant there. She grew up in what has been called “a vibrant African American culture.” In her interview Toni Morrison talks of the rich cultural and imaginative life of her family.
Morrison and Women Characters
In a 1986 interview Toni Morrison explained that she came to writing fiction because she felt that “There were no books about me, I didn’t exist in all the literature I had read . . . This person, this female, this black did not exist . . .” So she stepped in to fill the vacancy.
In the beginning she was “just interested in . . . placing black women center stage in the text, and not as the all-knowing, infallible black matriarch but as a flawed here, triumphant there, mean, nice, complicated woman, and some of them win and some of them lose. I’m very interested in why and how that happens, but here was this vacancy in the literature that I had any familiarity with and the vacancy was me, or the women I knew. So that preoccupied me a great deal in the beginning” [11].
This explains her focus on Pecola and Claudia and Frieda in The Bluest Eyes (1970) and on Sula and Nel in Sula (1973). Later on she was also to be “onterested in the relationship of black men and black women and the axes on which those relationships frequently turn, and how they complement each other, fulfil one another or hurt one another and are made whole or prevented from wholeness by things that they have incorporated into their psyche”
The Bluest Eyes
The Bluest Eyes novel is about growing up black and female and poor in racist American. Pecola
Breedlove who is the central character ironically comes from a loveless poor home which is almost
raping her. Claudia lastly laments on her belief that the whole community, herself included, have used Pecola as a sort of scapegoat to make themselves feel prettier. Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls Toni Morrison’s writing “an anomaly,” because it is both popular and difficult. “A subtle craftsperson and a compelling weaver of tales,” he writes, “she ‘tells a good story,’ but the stories she tells are not calculated to please” [12].
The reader encounters both these features in the initial pages of The Bluest Eye. First to contend with is an extract from the now discredited Dick and Jane reader, which millions of American schoolchildren, up until approximately the 1970s, used to learn how to read. For varying reasons, the primer fell out of favor approximately four decades ago. Prior to that, it was part of the American educational establishment, and many older adults readily recognize the characters and are able to recite specific sentences. The first sentences of the novel replicate a brief and conventionally written passage from the primer, followed by the same sentences minus all marks of punctuation, and finally, the same passage repeated with all spaces between the words eliminated.
Morrison’s alteration and distortion of the words is jarring. The repetition duplicates our own early reading experiences where sentence following sentence yielded increasing detail and understanding, but along with the memory of the drill comes the recognition of the power of words and ideas. Awareness of hierarchy and exclusion are central issues in the novel, experienced minimally in the domestic life but as a pervasive and insidious influence outside the home. An example in the opening of the novel is embodied in the figure of Rosemary Vilanucci, the sisters’ next-door neighbor. The name “Vilanucci” identifies her as belonging to one of the white immigrant families that came to the industrial Midwest for the promise of employment. Rosemary taunts the sisters by sitting in the family Buick eating bread with butter on it. The scene is reminiscent of the dramas all children must endure in the early years of identity formation. It also functions as a portal into the divisions between people and classes and points to the destructive influence of internalizing the idealized images of the dominant culture. The black sisters are burdened with “double consciousness”-a term from the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois that refers to the two identities minority people carry with them-one of their actual self and the second as the “other” or the “object” as
rendered in the eyes (or gaze) of the white person. Women of color’s concerns and struggles have been marginalized, slighted and even ignored
within the agenda of women’s movement [13]. However, unlike the Womanist movement which ignores the problems of black women, Morrison in
Tar Baby argues both black women’s and white women’s suppression in male dominant society with class-sensitive manner. it becomes apparent that the upper-class characters discriminate against others feeling superior and avoid having close relationship with the poorest class. For instance, in The Bluest Eye, the upper-class family living close to the school playground humiliates Pecola who belongs to poorest class. A light-skinned, wealthy black girl, Maureen who is new at the local school, accepts everyone else’s assumption that she is superior and temporarily befriends her and makes fun of her. Pecola even raped by her father and she gets pregnant. With this trauma, Pecola begins to think that her father’s abuse is resulted from her ugliness and becomes convinced that beauty would make people respect her, and would solve all of her problems [14].
When she stays at the MacTeers, the only family that helped her and took care of her, she spends the happiest time in her life. Pecola wishes to have blue eyes obsessively since she feels that they will make her loved and accepted by the people in her life. Pereira states that Pecola's desire for blue eyes reflects a community absorbed by white ideas of what is beautiful. Both the beauty ideal and the "economic freedom" appeals to African American women since African American women "[are] denied access to the most ordinary kind of jobs”. So they believe that without beauty there is no way to earn their living or live a comfortable life. However, the African American women’s position in the society seems harsher than white women in general since they experience triple oppression as race, class and gender simultaneously. As long as they are exposed to the symbolic meanings attached to the devalued images created by society and media, black women will continue to suffer from discrimination and the male domination [15].
Conclusion
social structures are influenced by these conflicts. African-American female characters in both of Morrison’s novels are influenced bymultiple oppression and are triply marginalized on account of their race, gender and class. Racism plays a vital role as it oppresses inferior groups, especially in this case the black women who are a gendered subaltern. These issues of racism and being the second sex get more complicated in the context of a capitalist society where the poor black women are exposed to more repression and discrimination. Mostly, in white women narratives, there is a tendency to underestimate
black women’s oppression. As Feifer and Maher pointed out the fact that ‚there are prominent distinction between the black feminist and womanist movement from the modern feminist movement, and this has created a separation of ideologies from one another. Toni Morrison’s fiction is mostly concerned with racism, the black women’s oppression and class conflicts and how they interact to lead discrimination in the society. As she indicates that narrative has never been merely entertainment for me, it is, I believe, one of the principle ways in which we absorb knowledge [16].
References
1. Brabeck M, Brown L (with Christian, L., Espin, O., Hare-Mustin, R., Kaplan, A., Kaschak, E., Miller, D., Phillips, E., Ferns, T., and Van Ormer, A.) 'Feminist theory and psychological practice', in J. Worell and N. Johnson (eds.) Shaping the future of feminist psychology: Education, research, and practice (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1997), pp.15-35
2. Gilligan, Carol, 'In a Different Voice: Women's Conceptions of Self and Morality' in Harvard Educational Review (1977)
3. Gilbert Sandra M, Susan Gubar eds., The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory. London: Virago Press, 1989.
4. Gilbert Sandra M, Susan Gubar, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. 2 Vols. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989.
5. Truth, Sojourner. “Ain’t I a Woman”. Feminist Theory: A Reader. 2nd Ed. Edited by Kolmar, Wendy and Bartowski, Frances. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005. 79.
6. The Changing Woman” (Navajo Origin Myth). Feminist Theory: A Reader. 2nd Ed. Edited by Kolmar, Wendy and Bartowski, Frances. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005. 64.
7. Cott Nancy F (1887) The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
8. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, eds., Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.
9. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.
10. Annette Kolodny. "Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism."
11. Christina Davis:419
12. Preface, Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present,
13. The History of Black Feminism and Womanism: Their Emergence from the Modern Women's Movement
14. Trudier Harris, “The Bluest Eye: A Wasteland in Lorain, Ohio.” From Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison, pp. 27–31, 196–197. Published by the University of Tennessee Press. Copyright © 1991 by Trudier Harris.
15. Morrison, Toni. ‚What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib,‛ New York Times Magazine, 22 Aug. 1971, 63.
