Feminist criticism

Abstract

Beginning perhaps with Virginia Woolf’s revolutionary plea for social justice for women in A Room of One’s Own [1928] and stimulated by Simone de Beauvoir’s classic polemic The Second Sex [1949], there has developed, especially in the years following the publication of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics [1970], an identifiable political school of feminist criticism. However, as Terry Eagleton has put it, the feminist critic is ‘not studying representations of gender simply because she believes that this will further her political ends. She also believes that gender and sexuality are central themes in literature and other sorts of discourse, and that any critical account which suppresses them is seriously defective’ [1983, p. 209]. Naturally Lawrence’s novels have been a major focus of feminist interest. He has been praised for his intuitive understanding and sensitive portrayal of women by critics as different in period and style as Anaïs Nin [1932] and Lydia Blanchard [1975], who have vigorously defended Lawrence’s sympathy for the social plight of intelligent women trapped in a male-dominated society. However, feminist criticism on the whole has been severe on Lawrence. John Middleton Murry, in Son of Woman, published in 1931 [Casebook, pp. 95–105], was the first to accuse Lawrence of wishing in his fiction to annihilate the female and rehabilitate the male; but Simone de Beauvoir was the first feminist critic to attempt to politicise the reader’s response to what she regarded as Lawrence’s faith in male supremacy, his feeling that a woman’s role is primarily sexual, and his fear of the modern woman’s raised consciousness. And in Sons and Lovers she sees Paul expecting first Miriam and then Clara to give up personal, individualised love for an impersonal force in which the female worships the male.