| If you haven't noticed by now, this site is under new management, and it has been for a few months. Please pay attention to drastic changes in layout. But, you might as well be learndin' a little while you're here. Gender and Formalism
20 February 2007 The most basic function of the formalist mode of literary criticism is to find meaning in a literary text by examining the text itself. This includes figurative language, grammar and syntax idiosyncrasies, irony and tension, and characterization, among other things. Many formalists will acknowledge other approaches to literature, such as examining historical context or the reader’s response to the text; it is these areas that most commonly harbor feminist theories. However, consideration of gender in the formalist approach can be applied to the text, albeit in a very limited manner. Feminist methods of criticism typically appear at odds with formalism, which contributes to a near disregard of gender matters in the latter tradition. Annette Kolodny, in her article “A Map for Redreading: Or, Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts” stresses that a lack of consideration of a reader’s gender leads often to misinterpretation. Her approach to literature focuses on the impact of gender on each individual’s response to a text, as applied to Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Cixous goes as far as to imply that men and women must both create literary traditions specific to, and interpreted solely by, their own gender, and she also gives no favor to the content of the text. Donovan cries that a text that ignores a woman’s “moral reality” is sexist. Though the text may not withstand time, its sexism does not necessarily affect its meaning. From a formalist point of view, these approaches focus too much on peripheral contexts and not enough on the inner workings of the text itself. Therefore, if formalism is to include gender, it must be applicable to the mechanisms of the text. Most formalists concede that at the very least, the reader brings his own interpretive devices to the text, the most pervasive of which is his understanding of basic language. I have demonstrated in the previous sentence that a gender bias exists in the English language’s lack of a neuter pronoun – the male pronoun is used instead. Language causes its users to perceive gender in terms of black and white: either a character is male or a character is female, and the natural instinct is to automatically assign one of these genders to literary characters despite context clues that discourage gender assignment. As a result, a narrator intended to be sexless or beyond gender confines may be incorrectly viewed as male, even when any pronoun is absent. Though in many cases this may not affect the meaning of the text, there are still some cases where assigning gender - and subsequently, the perceived cultural roles of that gender – is a fatal limitation to understanding the text. For example, a poem wherein God speaks to the universe may intentionally leave God free of gender attributes so the poem applies broadly to any possible conception of God. A reader may faultily assume, due to biases brought by language, that this God is male; then, that this God is of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and that the poem is about the creation in the book of Genesis, and so on and so forth until the reader has severely compromised his perception of the poem before he has even begun to examine the inner workings of the text. The examination itself will be a frustrating experiment of trying to prove an inadequate hypothesis. Beyond the idea of no-gender, a specific gender is oftentimes important in making sense of a text. The text may describe an event that is interpretively problematic for one gender, but makes more sense in light of the other. For example, the narrator of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “The Mother” speaks in second person in the first stanza: “Abortions will not let you forget. / You remember the children you got that you did not get.” If a reader assumed that the speaker was a male, then the speaker would be discussing a distant subject, one that he could never physically or emotionally experience. The speaker has no apparent attachment to the subject, and the distant speaker leads to a weak interpretation since the unity of the poem is destroyed. However, considering the speaker a woman significantly alters the meaning of this stanza. Suddenly, the speaker becomes a complex character who has experienced an abortion, and because of her conflicting emotions, she is projecting this experience onto a hypothetical other person rather than directing them towards herself. The “breasts [her dim killed children] could never suck” in the second stanza are her own; they would appear as disembodied appendages without grounding in a specific character (and thus meaning) if the speaker was a male. Knowing the gender of the speaker is absolutely essential to understanding the poem and forming a fulfilling, all-encompassing interpretation. Consideration of the historical views of gender and gender roles – which have become embedded in the Western literary tradition in nearly every genre and era – also contributes to a broader interpretation of the text; to defend this statement lest it be construed as deviating from formalism, allusion and other forms of figurative language also use outside knowledge to illuminate the text. Gilman’s narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is obviously under control by her husband, and she deteriorates because of this lack of control over her own life. When a reader understands that women were historically viewed as subordinate to men, the narrator becomes a symbol of all womanhood, or all oppressed people, and a challenge to any existing oppressive orthodoxy. If the schoolboys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies were schoolgirls instead, the parallels to the Bible would not be as apparent, if not lost altogether. Symbols may also be gender-specific, in which case they would either be inapplicable to the other gender or their use in conjunction with the other gender would highlight an important concept in the text. Attaching a phallic symbol to a male character will not gain much attention, but attaching it to a female character may imply a number of things ranging from empowerment to displacement, depending upon the context. Hedda Gabler’s set of pistols, inherited from her war general father, emphasizes her distance from the stock character of the weak, dependent wife and puts her on par with men in terms of autonomy.* Even though in recent years there has been widespread rebellion against the traditional ideas of gender and gender superiority, the two genders are often posed as oppositions. Many poems metaphorically describing the act of sex will play with these oppositions and combine them, as the act of sex physically combines the two opposite genders. In Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Miranda’s role as a foil to Prospero resonates deeply when considering gender and the tensions between the two genders. Miranda is naïve, pure, and young, whereas Prospero is older, world-weary, and somewhat vengeful. The consideration of gender and the additional oppositions encompassed by gender, such as the feminine versus the masculine, emphasizes this foil. Many of these points may appear to border on other approaches of criticism; however, a large number of formalists will incorporate ideas from these same approaches and still focus primarily on the text itself. True feminist theory cannot exist within formalism because it relies too heavily upon historical context and reader response according to gender. This is not to say that all dealings with gender are to be held strictly under feminist criticism, as was demonstrated. Nevertheless, gender consideration is greatly limited within the context of formalist criticism to how gender works in terms of textual constructs. * Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler. Hedda stands in great contrast to Nora from A Doll House. |
