Criticism: Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness

Elaine Showalter was born in 1941 and has worked as a professor of English at Princeton University. Showalter's work was a major contribution to the project of feminist criticism. Her article 'Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness' was first published in 'Critical Inquiry' in 1981. She finds Feminist Criticism no  more unified but more adventurous in assimilating and engaging with theory.

In the beginning of the article Elaine Showalter talks about the two modes of feminist literary Criticism.
i) Righteous, angry and admonitory compared to the Old  Testament
ii) Disinterested seeking the grace of imagination compared to the New Testament.

The well known critic Geoffrey Hartman tells that all criticism is in wilderness. It is also observed that the feminist literally criticism appeared more like a set of interchangeable strategies than any coherent school. Black Critics protest the 'massive silence' of the feminist criticism regarding the black and also the third world women writers and call for the black feminist aesthetic that would deal with both the racial and sexual politics.

All the above observation suggest that feminism is a vague term and feminist criticism includes numberless ideologies. One of the chief quality of feminist criticism is openness to all outside factors.
Feminist Critics like Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Riche, Marguerite Duras are advocates of the anti-theoretical position in feminist criticism.

There are two distinct modes of feminist criticism.The first is ideological; it is concerned with the feminist as a reader and it offers feminist reading of text which considered the images and stereotypes of women in literature. The second mode of feminist Criticism is engendered by the study of women as writers and its subjects are the history, styles, themes, genres and structures of writing by women.

Gynocritics

Showalter gives new critical term 'Gynocritics' and says that unlike the feminist critique, Gynocritics offer many theoretical opportunities. All feminist criticism in some sense revisionist, question in the adequacy of accepted conceptual structures. Patrician Meyer Spacks was the first academic critic to notice the shift from Androcentric to a Gynocentric feminist criticism.

Four models of difference:
i) Biological
ii) Linguistic
iii) Psychoanalytic
iv) Cultural

Each model is an effort to define and differentiate the qualities of the woman writer and her text. Each model is also offers a school of Gynocritics feminist criticism with its own favourite texts, styles and methods.