Feminist Literary Criticism and Theory

The Enlightenwork forcet environment in which Mary Wollstonecraft published her pamphlet titled Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792 was contemporary with the success of the American and French Revolutions. This first manifesto of feminism, produced in the period of the French Reign of Terror, was itself hardly revolutionary, if considered from all a modern perspective or the milieu of the American and French Revolutions in the eighteenth century and the revolution of 1848 in Europe. As Weigel puts it, "It is obvious why thither was an increase in the number of women who took to the pen at the end of the eighteenth century, at the time when new possibilities in poetic expression were brought by the aesthetic of the Romantics" (Weigel 67). To put it another way, what was to become modern tender revolutionary thinking had to start somewhere, and from that period onward there have been ebbs and flows in the feminist social critique.

It is this social critique, evince or implied but fully informed by contemporary experience, that forms the basis of any meaningful examination of feminism in contemporary American novels. Modern-day feminists have noted and authenticated in various ways how resilient and in some ways unchanging that critique has been since 1792--suffused as it is with the concern to couple social and economic opportunity and status between men and women.

It was while she was in this absent state, waiting for the clock to strike, that Thea at last made up her mind what she was breathing out to try to do in the world, and that she was going to Germany to study without further loss of time. Only by the merest put on the line had she ever got to Panther Canon. There was certainly no companionable Providence that directed one's life; and one's parents did not in the to the lowest degree care what became of one, so long as one did not misbehave and endanger their comfort. One's life was at the mercy of invention chance. She had better take it in her profess hands and drop off e very(prenominal)thing than meekly draw the plough under the rod of enatic guidance. . . . Yet she had clung fast to whatever was left of Moonstone in her mind. No more of that! The Cliff-Dwellers had lengthened her past.

She had older and higher obligations (Cather 382-3).

This tendency was to shew decisive for the course of feminism as an intellectual or sociological force in American society and literature. scorn the successes of tardy Victorian suffragettes in England and America, the power of a sentimentalized finish persisted until well after World War II, and it was against this tendency that late twentieth-century feminism very much reacted. Indeed, contemporary feminist scholarship, endorse up by the authority of history and public policy, very much holds that the residue of sentimentality even today pervades the cultivation of the mass market. Were this otherwise, feminism as a sociological or literary phenomenon would have little more claim to oversight than as a historical curiosity.

The most decisive American exemplar of the period is Willa Cather, who died in 1947. Not all of Cather's kit and boodle can be said to exhibit affinities with the late-twentieth-century feminist ideology. However, Cather's own life as a professional writer suggests an proportion for full independence: She never married or had children, and as a student at the University of Nebraska she comported herself as Mr. William Ca
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