<i>The Da Vinci Code</i>: A Pseudo-Feminist Text

Abstract

Dan Brown is able to compress extensive intellectual and religious arguments into quickly accessible sound bites, and his story takes place essentially in one twenty-four-hour period like James Joyce’s Ulysses. Women are a large constituency of The Da Vinci Code, and the book responds in many ways to new thinking about women in western culture. In the novel’s estimation, Mary Magdalene was a strong, independent figure, patron of Jesus, cofounder of his movement, his only believer in his greatest hour of need, author of her own Gospel, his romantic partner, and the mother of his child. Based on these descriptions of the novel, some scholars assert The Da Vinci Code is a feminist novel, which opens everyone’s eyes to a startlingly different view of the powerful role of women in the birth of Christianity. Contrary to the dominating criticism of the novel, the thesis relies on feminist literary theory to scrutinize the patriarchal traces and hidden sexual discrimination in the phallogocentric text of Dan Brown. By inferring the allegory of the Holy Grail indicated in the novel, approaching the discourse inscribed with sexual discrimination, and revealing the distortion of female images in the phallogocentric text, the author concludes that The Da Vinci Code is a pseudo-feminist text, which embodies repression and manipulation of the self-consciousness of women. The feminist interpretation of the novel is not to reduce its literary value to political value but to be of great help to further studies on this novel.