Female Authors Excluded in Literary Criticism

The Absence of Women in the History of New Criticism

Jun 26, 2009

From the beginning literary criticism has been done by males, beginning with the likes of ancient philosophers Plato and Aristotle. How does this effect female writers?

Literary criticism has been almost exclusively a men's club since its creation in ancient times. The New Criticism developed and popularized in the 1950s was no different.

What Is New Criticism?

The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms tells us that New Criticism is “a type of formalist literary criticism…New Critics perform a close reading, concentrating on the relationships within the text that give it its own distinctive character” (293). This focus and emphasis on the actual text of a work is a hallmark of New Criticism, which does not utilize other forms of interpretation such as historicism, “reader’s response [or] the author’s stated intentions” (293). These other interpretations, not utilized by New Criticism, may have been better for female readers and writers.

New Criticism's Foundation

The formalist ideas and standards of New Criticism were formed by white males who were “[g]enerally Southern, religious, and culturally conservative” (“New Criticism” 293). These males included the likes of T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, and Cleanth Brooks (293), whose definition of perfect poetry puzzled the writer and poet Sylvia Plath throughout her writing career. There were, however, other major contributors to the school of New Criticism, but all the names are male: “John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and William K. Wimsatt” (293). While New Criticism rose to popularity in the 1950s, many of the ideas had been around for a decade or more.

Women had been writing in those decades, yet they were not included in one of the most prominent schools of literary thought of their time.

New Criticism's Approach to Female Writers

Even now, in more modern times, many researchers and scholars still analyze poetry from writers of all genders through the lens of male literary critics.

While Anthony Easthope’s article, “Reading the Poetry of Sylvia Plath” is certainly an interesting and occasionally informative article, it reads her poetry through the perspective of earlier male literary critics and the idea of Romanticism. While Romanticism, with its “[i]dentification of poem with author… [and the] author’s personal experience” (Easthope 224) is more allowing of the female experience and expression than New Criticism with its highly masculine standards promoted by males, Romanticism, as shown in Easthope’s article, was dominated by males and this domination extends even today.

Out of sixteen different people cited in the notes to Easthope's article on Plath only two are women! And one of them is Plath herself, and the other, Jacqueline Rose, is the author of another work on Plath, not one of the many male writers and literary figures which Easthope employs such as Roland Barthes, William Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, Eliot, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Sigmund Freud.

While Easthope’s article explores Plath’s poetry it does so through other men and their standards and expectations and is an extension of the problem Plath encountered as a female poet during her lifetime.

Can Feminist Literary Criticism Counteract the Damage of New Criticism?

Today there is a call in many fields of analysis, specifically the various fields of scientific research and analysis, for a feminist interpretation of science and the scientific method. Literary analysis and criticism has already seen the birth of feminist literary criticism in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

While feminist literary criticism has gained attention and brought forth works which would have otherwise been unheard of, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short stories and the diaries of Anaïs Nin, it has been unable to prevent the works of females from being caught under the lens of the male gaze. Easthope’s article is a prime example of how female writers are still subjected to largely male standards for writing and Sylvia Plath is a prime example of the devastating impact this can have when women try to live up to standards that do not take into account their different experiences, expressions, and interpretations.

Although it is clichéd, it is much like attempting to fit a square peg into a round hole, oftentimes it doesn’t work and when it does it is at the expense of the peg who is forced to mutate its shape into something acceptable and fitting. While Plath’s poetry is astonishingly beautiful, intelligent, and well-crafted, its paradoxes and grim images tell of the difficulties in trying to write as a woman in a man’s world.

Sources

Easthope, Anthony. “Reading the Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” English 43:177 (1994): 223-235.

Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Criticism: Major Statements. Eds. Charles Kaplan and William Davis Anderson. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000. 404-410.

Gerisch, Benigna. “’This Is Not Death, It Is Something Safer’: A Psychodynamic Approach to Sylvia Plath.” Death Studies 22 (1998): 735-761.

Graham, Vicki. “Reconstructed Vase: Sylvia Plath and New Critical Aesthetics.” Texas Review 15 (1994): 44-65.

“New Criticism.” The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. Eds. Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.

The copyright of the article Female Authors Excluded in Literary Criticism in Feminist Literature is owned by Tracey Carter. Permission to republish Female Authors Excluded in Literary Criticism in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.