What are the strengths and weaknesses of feminist literary criticism?
Feminist literary criticism argues that literature plays a central role in the development of social attitudes towards women and of women’s attitudes towards themselves and it focuses on patriarchal (male) biases in literature. There are two major schools of feminist criticism, the French and the American. The American school tends to focus on the negative stereotypes of women found in literature or the entire absence of women except as objects of abuse, sexual release, servitude, or debasement. The French school has been more concerned with discovering and promoting a “l’ecriture feminine” or women’s writing. They suggest women and men speak differently, view events from different perspectives, and have different experiences even when the actual events might be exactly the same (Large example would be the birth of a child– the father’s experience is much different from the mother’s). Rather than focusing on what is “wrong” with the way men view women, they focus on giving equal voice
