Elaine Showalter’s seminal essay “Towards a Feminist Poetics” (1979) stands as one of the most influential contributions to feminist literary criticism. Published during a time when feminist perspectives were marginalized in academic circles, Showalter’s work provided a comprehensive framework for understanding women’s literature and their relationship to literary culture. Instead of simply adapting existing male-dominated theories, Showalter boldly proposed new models centered on female experience, giving voice to perspectives that had long been silenced in the literary canon.
This essay explores Showalter’s groundbreaking concepts, particularly her division of feminist criticism into two distinct approaches—”feminist critique” and “gynocritics“—and her identification of three historical phases in women’s writing. More than just literary theory, Showalter’s work represents a revolutionary step toward legitimizing women’s literature as a field worthy of serious academic study.
Historical Context of Feminist Literary Criticism
The Marginalization of Feminist Perspectives
In the 1970s, when Showalter was developing her theories, feminist literary criticism was largely isolated from mainstream academic discourse. Most prominent literary critics of that era were openly hostile to feminist perspectives, dismissing them as political propaganda masquerading as criticism. Showalter identifies this prejudice as stemming from the fact that feminist criticism lacked a clearly articulated theoretical foundation at the time.
As Showalter points out in her essay, critics like Robert Partlow described feminist criticism as “women’s lib propaganda masquerading as literary criticism,” while Robert Boyers assumed feminist critics were “obsessed with destroying great male artists.” These dismissals highlighted the urgent need for a structured theoretical framework that could legitimize feminist literary analysis.
The Problem of Theory in Feminist Criticism
Another significant obstacle to the development of feminist critical practice was what Showalter terms the “suspicion of theory.” Many feminist critics were hesitant to engage with established literary theory because it was largely developed by men and reflected masculine perspectives. Literary quarterlies primarily featured male experiences presented as universal, making it difficult for feminists to rely on theories that were fundamentally patriarchal.
This suspicion created a catch-22 situation: without theory, feminist criticism wasn’t taken seriously by academia, but existing theory often excluded or marginalized women’s experiences. Showalter recognized that for feminist criticism to flourish, it needed its own theoretical foundation—one that didn’t simply adapt male models but created new frameworks centered on women’s experiences.
Key Concepts in Showalter’s Feminist Poetics
Woman as Reader (Feminist Critique)
One of Showalter’s most significant contributions is her categorization of feminist criticism into two distinct types. The first, which she calls “feminist critique,” focuses on woman as a reader of male-produced literature. In this approach, the female reader analyzes how male authors represent women, examining stereotypes, misrepresentations, and the ideological assumptions underlying literary texts.
Feminist critique investigates:
- Stereotypical portrayals of women in literature
- The marginalization of women in literary history
- Misconceptions about women in male criticism
- Gaps in male-constructed literary theory
While valuable, Showalter notes that feminist critique has limitations. It remains inherently male-oriented, as it focuses on how men depict women rather than on women’s authentic experiences. As she explains, if we limit our study to examining male representations of women, “we will never be able to learn about women’s experiences. We will only be able to know what men have taught women to be and feel.”
Woman as Writer (Gynocritics)
To address the limitations of feminist critique, Showalter introduces “gynocritics,” a term she coins to describe the study of women as writers. This approach shifts the focus from women as consumers of male literature to women as producers of their own texts and meanings. Rather than adapting male literary models, gynocritics aims to construct a female framework for analyzing women’s literature based on female experience.
Gynocritics examines:
- The psychodynamics of female creativity
- Linguistics and the problem of a female language
- The trajectory of individual or collective female literary careers
- Literary history from a female perspective
- Studies of particular women writers and works
Showalter explains that gynocritics “begins at the point when we free ourselves from the linear absolutes of male literary history, stop trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition, and focus instead on the newly visible world of female culture.” This approach allows for the emergence of what Showalter calls a “female subculture” that includes “not only the ascribed status and internalized constructs of femininity but also the occupations, interactions, and consciousness of women.”
The Three Phases of Women’s Literature
Building on her framework, Showalter identifies three historical phases in the development of women’s writing, each characterized by different attitudes toward gender identity and literary tradition:
- The Feminine Phase (1840-1880):
- Women writers imitated dominant male artistic standards
- Internalized prevailing assumptions about female nature
- Often published under male pseudonyms (George Eliot, Currer Bell, etc.)
- Focused on competing intellectually with male writers
- Writing was typically oblique, subversive, and ironic
- The Feminist Phase (1880-1920):
- Writers rejected traditional views of femininity
- Literature dramatized injustices and wrongs done to women
- Writers redefined the female artist’s role in terms of responsibility toward suffering sisters
- Included works like the “Amazon utopias” that challenged male governance
- Emphasized protest against male standards and advocated for autonomy
- The Female Phase (1920-present):
- Writers rejected both imitation and protest, seeing both as forms of dependency
- Turned to female experience as a source for autonomous art
- Focused on discovering a distinct female voice
- Writers like Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson thought in terms of “male” and “female” sentences
- Extended feminist analysis to literary forms and techniques
These phases aren’t strictly chronological—elements of each can appear in different periods—but they represent an evolution in how women writers related to the male-dominated literary tradition and their own gender identity.
Gynocriticism: Creating a Female Literary Tradition
Building a Framework Based on Female Experience
Showalter emphasizes that gynocriticism isn’t just concerned with individual women writers but aims to establish a collective female literary tradition. Unlike conventional literary history that jumps “from Great Woman to Great Woman,” Showalter advocates for building a continuous female tradition that spans “from decade to decade,” revealing patterns of influence and response from one generation to the next.
This approach challenges the established periodization of literary history and its canonized notions of achievement. By studying women’s writing collectively rather than in isolation, critics can discover recurring patterns and trace the evolution of a female literary tradition that reflects the developmental phases of any subcultural art.
The Challenges of Defining Female Writing
While promoting gynocriticism, Showalter acknowledges the difficulty of “defining the unique difference of women’s writing,” which she calls “a slippery and demanding task.” She recognizes that gynocritics may never fully understand the special characteristics of women’s writing or establish a distinct female literary tradition.
However, she maintains that with solid grounding in theory and historical research, gynocriticism offers a way to “learn something solid, enduring, and real about the relation of women to literary culture.” The goal isn’t to erase differences between male and female writing but to understand women’s writing not as a product of sexism but as a fundamental aspect of female reality.
The Importance of Cultural Context
Showalter insists that gynocriticism must consider the political, social, and personal histories that influence women’s literary choices and careers. She cites Virginia Woolf’s observation that “in dealing with women as writers, as much elasticity as possible is desirable; it is necessary to leave oneself room to deal with other things besides their work, so much has that work been influenced by conditions that have nothing whatever to do with art.”
To illustrate this point, Showalter discusses Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Aurora Leigh,” noting how critics often missed the influence of her relationship with Robert Browning on her work. Marriage between two artists, Showalter observes, often created internal conflicts and sometimes led to self-erasure for women. Without understanding “the framework of the female subculture,” critics risk misunderstanding the themes and structures of women’s literature.
From Suffering to Liberation in Women’s Writing
The Pain of Feminist Awakening
Showalter explores how pain and suffering have been central themes in women’s literature. She quotes Florence Nightingale, who viewed the discomfort of feminist awakening as essential for progress: “Give us back our suffering… for out of suffering may come the cure. Better to have pain than paralysis.” Waking from the comfortable sleep of Victorian womanhood was necessarily painful.
This suffering appears prominently in works by authors like George Eliot, Edith Wharton, and Kate Chopin, where female protagonists often die rather than achieving their aspirations. Showalter notes that female suffering has been consumed by both men and women as a literary commodity, with many significant novels culminating in a male mourner visiting a heroine’s grave.
Moving Beyond Victimhood
While acknowledging this tradition of suffering, Showalter argues that women’s literature should transcend themes of death, madness, and compromise. She identifies a shift in contemporary women’s literature of the 1970s, which began to place the transformational pain in historical context rather than presenting it as inevitable.
Writers like Adrienne Rich challenged the traditional rejection of mothers by daughters (what Rich termed “matrophobia”), while works like Margaret Atwood’s “Surfacing” and Lisa Alther’s “Kinflicks” attempt to recover from this mother-daughter alienation. Just as a father’s death represented a significant moment in male protagonists’ development, women’s literature began treating a mother’s death with equal gravity and meaning.
Feminist Criticism and Its Relationship to Literary Theory
The Limitations of Adapting Male Theories
While creating a female tradition, feminist criticism inevitably interacted with existing theories, particularly Marxist aesthetics and structuralism. Feminists attempted to revise these approaches, altering their vocabulary and methods to include gender. However, Showalter cautions that feminist criticism cannot survive on “men’s ill-fitting hand-me-downs” and must develop its own methodologies.
She notes that both Marxism and structuralism emerged during a period of scientific competition in the 1950s, when male humanists sought to make literary studies as “aggressive and masculine as nuclear physics.” This scientific approach to literature, with its focus on difficult terminology and specialized knowledge, created a two-tiered system of “higher” and “lower” criticism—the higher concerned with form and structure, the lower with content and interpretation.
Integrating Intellect and Experience
Showalter argues that while scientific literary theories attempt to eliminate subjectivity, feminist criticism asserts the “Authority of Experience.” Women’s experiences can easily vanish in the diagrams of structuralism or the class conflicts of Marxism. She challenges the equation of femininity with irrationality and insists that questions about women’s repressed messages in history, psychology, and anthropology cannot be answered by science alone.
In the essay’s conclusion, Showalter calls for “a new language, a new way of reading that can integrate our intelligence and our experience, our reason and our suffering, our skepticism and our vision.” This enterprise, she maintains, should not be limited to women but should include all literary scholars. Her final assertion—”feminist criticism is not visiting. It is here to stay, and we must make it a permanent home”—solidifies her vision of feminist criticism as a permanent and essential part of literary study.
The Relevance of Showalter’s Framework Today
Expanding the Canon and Recovering Lost Voices
Showalter’s call to “reconstruct the past and rediscover large amount of literature—novels, poems, plays—by women that have been ignored” remains highly relevant in contemporary literary studies. Her work helped spark a major recovery project that has dramatically expanded the literary canon to include previously marginalized women writers.
This recovery effort has gone beyond “going from Austen, Brontës, Eliot,” as Showalter urged, to include hundreds of ignored works by women. This expansion has revealed the patterns and phases in the evolution of female literary tradition that Showalter predicted would emerge when women’s writing was studied collectively rather than in isolation.
Intersectionality and Diverse Female Experiences
While Showalter’s original framework focused primarily on gender, contemporary feminist criticism has expanded to embrace intersectionality—examining how gender interacts with race, class, sexuality, and other aspects of identity. This approach acknowledges that “female experience” is not monolithic but varies greatly depending on these intersecting factors.
This development represents an evolution of Showalter’s work rather than a rejection of it. Her emphasis on understanding women’s writing in its cultural, social, and historical context provided a foundation for more nuanced approaches that consider multiple dimensions of identity and experience.
Digital Humanities and New Approaches to Women’s Writing
The digital humanities have opened new possibilities for implementing Showalter’s vision of studying women’s writing collectively. Digital archives, data analysis, and visualization tools allow researchers to map connections between women writers, identify patterns across large corpora of texts, and trace the development of themes and techniques over time.
These digital approaches expand the methodological toolkit available to feminist critics while remaining true to Showalter’s fundamental goal of establishing a continuous female tradition and challenging conventional literary periodization.
Key Takeaways
- Showalter divided feminist criticism into two approaches: feminist critique (woman as reader) and gynocritics (woman as writer)
- She identified three historical phases in women’s writing: Feminine (1840-1880), Feminist (1880-1920), and Female (1920-present)
- Gynocriticism aims to construct a female framework for analyzing women’s literature based on female experience
- Understanding women’s writing requires considering the political, social, and personal histories that shaped their careers
- Showalter called for building a continuous female literary tradition spanning “from decade to decade” rather than focusing solely on exceptional individuals
- Her work challenged the marginalization of feminist perspectives in academia and established feminist criticism as a legitimate field of study
- Showalter’s framework continues to influence contemporary approaches to women’s writing, including intersectional analysis and digital humanities methods
Conclusion
Elaine Showalter’s “Towards a Feminist Poetics” represents a watershed moment in the development of feminist literary criticism. By providing a structured theoretical framework for analyzing women’s writing, Showalter legitimized feminist perspectives in literary studies and created space for women’s voices in the academic conversation.
Her distinction between feminist critique and gynocritics, along with her identification of the three phases of women’s writing, offered practical tools for understanding the female literary tradition. Perhaps most importantly, Showalter insisted that women’s writing be understood on its own terms rather than as a deviation from male norms.
More than four decades after its publication, “Towards a Feminist Poetics” remains essential reading for anyone interested in feminist literary theory. Its core insights—that women’s writing emerges from distinct experiences, that it follows identifiable patterns of development, and that it demands appropriate analytical tools—continue to inform how we read and interpret literature by women. As Showalter herself declared, feminist criticism is “here to stay,” and her work helped ensure it found “a permanent home” in literary studies.
FAQ Section
Q: What is the main difference between “feminist critique” and “gynocritics” in Showalter’s theory?
A: Feminist critique focuses on woman as a reader of male-produced literature, analyzing how men represent women and examining stereotypes and misrepresentations. Gynocritics, on the other hand, focuses on woman as a writer, creating a female framework for analyzing women’s literature based on female experience rather than adapting male models.
Q: How did Showalter characterize the three phases of women’s literature?
A: Showalter identified three phases: the Feminine phase (1840-1880), where women imitated male standards and often used male pseudonyms; the Feminist phase (1880-1920), characterized by protest against male standards and advocacy for women’s rights; and the Female phase (1920-present), where women reject both imitation and protest to focus on female experience as a source for autonomous art.
Q: Why was Showalter’s work considered revolutionary in the field of literary criticism?
A: Showalter’s work challenged the marginalization of feminist perspectives in academia by providing a structured theoretical framework for feminist literary criticism. Instead of simply adapting existing male-dominated theories, she proposed new models centered on female experience, legitimizing the study of women’s literature as a serious academic pursuit.
Q: How does Showalter suggest we should study women’s writing?
A: Showalter advocates for studying women’s writing collectively rather than in isolation, building a continuous female tradition that spans “from decade to decade.” She emphasizes considering the political, social, and personal histories that shaped women’s literary careers and examining patterns of influence between generations of women writers.
Q: How is Showalter’s framework still relevant in contemporary literary studies?
A: Showalter’s framework continues to influence the recovery of overlooked women writers, expanding the literary canon beyond a few exceptional individuals. Her emphasis on understanding women’s writing in its cultural and historical context provides a foundation for intersectional approaches that consider how gender interacts with race, class, and sexuality. Additionally, digital humanities methods have enabled new ways to implement her vision of studying women’s writing collectively.
References
- Showalter, Elaine. “Towards a Feminist Poetics.” In The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, edited by Elaine Showalter. London: Virago, 1986.
- Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
- Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017.
- What is Literary Theory – An exploration of various theoretical approaches to literature.
- Feminist Literary Theory – Oxford Bibliographies overview of feminist literary theory.
- Coromandel Fishers Summary – Analysis of Sarojini Naidu’s poem through a feminist lens.
- Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973.
- Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton, 1976.
- Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Man-Made World; or, Our Androcentric Culture. New York: Charlton Company, 1911.
