The New Feminist Criticism

Abstract

sociate, it beareth no sway, it possesseth nothing during coverture. A woman as soon as she is married, is called covert, in Latin, nupta, that is veiled, as it were, clouded and overshadowed, she has lost her streame.... To a married woman, her new self is her superior, her companion, her master.' Is it a fear of losing one's psychic streame, one's unique identity as a human being, that is working deep in the bone of Clarissa Harlowe, Sue Bridehead, Maggie Tulliver, Mrs. Ramsay, Anna Wulf and their American sisters, and can a comprehension of this malaise help or hinder our understanding of the literature by and about women? It is hardly surprising that there is emerging a new feminist criticism to approach such questions. Its pitfalls are so immediately obvious that it seems imperative to consider as dispassionately as possible a typical field that such criticism might survey, the strictures it should impose upon itself and its principal modes of attack. In fiction the field would range from feminist literature narrowly defined as works in which the author's explicit intention is to expose some aspect of sexism, to feminine literature broadly defined as by and about women. At the narrow end of the spectrum we have novels, for example, which probe into woman's situation in the same manner that Steinbeck examined the