Introduction: Feminism as a Crisis of Definition
Feminist literary theory emerges not merely as a movement for rights, representation, or revisionary reading, but as one of the most profound intellectual crises within modern literary theory. At its core lies a deceptively simple yet philosophically destabilizing question: What is a woman? Unlike Marxism, which presupposes class as a historical category, or psychoanalysis, which theorizes the subject through lack and desire, feminism is confronted with the instability of its own foundational term. The category “woman” is simultaneously biological, social, historical, symbolic, and discursive—yet reducible to none of these alone.
This difficulty is not accidental; it is constitutive. Feminist literary theory belongs to the broader modern theoretical project that dismantles universals. Just as poststructuralism questions meaning, and postcolonialism questions culture, feminism questions identity itself. Literary texts become a privileged site for this inquiry because literature not only represents women but participates in producing femininity as a cultural and linguistic construct.
While feminism is often grouped with gender and queer theory in contemporary discourse, such grouping risks obscuring its specific historical and philosophical trajectory. Feminist literary theory precedes both gender theory and queer theory and addresses a more foundational problem: the conditions under which “woman” becomes intelligible as a subject of discourse, history, and literature.
The First Wave: Political Rights and the Silence of Text
The first wave of feminism, emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was primarily political and legal in orientation. Its central concern was suffrage, legal identity, and civil rights. While literature was not absent from this phase, it was not yet theorized as a site of epistemological struggle. Woman was understood largely as a juridical subject excluded from public life, rather than as a textual or symbolic construction.
From a literary-theoretical perspective, the limitation of first-wave feminism lies in its implicit humanism. It assumed a universal subject whose exclusion was contingent rather than structural. Literature was seen as reflecting social injustice rather than producing it. It is only with the second wave that feminism begins to interrogate language, narrative, and representation themselves.
The Second Wave: From Experience to Text
The second wave of feminism marks the decisive theoretical turn. It is here that feminism enters fully into dialogue with modern literary theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. The personal becomes political—but also textual. Experience itself becomes suspect, mediated, and structured by discourse.
Two works are emblematic of this shift: The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan and The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. Though often grouped together, they represent two distinct trajectories within second-wave feminism.
Friedan’s work is grounded in lived experience. Her critique of domestic confinement exposes how cultural narratives of femininity produce psychic dissatisfaction. Literature, media, and popular discourse are shown to function as ideological apparatuses that normalize female subordination. Friedan does not question the category “woman” itself; she assumes it as a stable subject whose oppression can be diagnosed and remedied.
Beauvoir, by contrast, introduces a radical philosophical rupture. Her famous assertion—one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman—shifts feminism from biology to ontology, from nature to construction. Woman is not a natural fact but a historical situation. Literature, in this framework, becomes one of the primary mechanisms through which woman is produced as Other. Myths, narratives, and archetypes do not merely represent femininity; they constitute it.
This distinction is crucial for feminist literary theory. With Beauvoir, feminism becomes a critique of representation itself. Woman is no longer simply misrepresented; she is structurally positioned as secondary, derivative, and relational. Literary texts are therefore not innocent artifacts but active participants in the production of gendered meaning.
Practical and Theoretical Feminism: America and France
From the second wave onward, feminist thought develops along two broadly distinguishable—though overlapping—paths: practical feminism and theoretical feminism. This distinction is not geographical alone, but epistemological.
American Practical Feminism
American feminism tends toward praxis. It is institutionally grounded, historically attentive, and oriented toward recovery and revision. Feminist literary criticism in this tradition focuses on:
- Rediscovering forgotten women writers
- Revising the literary canon
- Analyzing images of women in literature
- Examining the material conditions of women’s authorship
Works by feminist critics recover voices silenced by patriarchal literary history and expose gender bias in evaluative standards. The underlying assumption remains that women exist as a coherent social group whose experiences, though diverse, can be collectively articulated.
This approach aligns with liberal humanism and cultural materialism. Its strength lies in its empirical rigor and political clarity. Its limitation, however, lies in its relative reluctance to interrogate the category “woman” itself. The subject of feminism is largely taken for granted.
French Theoretical Feminism
French feminism, by contrast, is suspicious of coherence. Drawing on psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and linguistics, it interrogates the very foundations of identity, language, and subjectivity. Central figures include Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray.
At the heart of French feminist theory lies the problem of essentialism. If woman is defined, does that definition not reproduce the very structures feminism seeks to dismantle? Yet if woman is indefinable, on what basis can feminism speak?
Cixous responds to this dilemma through the concept of écriture féminine—a mode of writing that resists phallocentric logic, linearity, and closure. Feminine writing is not writing by women but writing that disrupts masculine symbolic order. Language itself becomes the battleground.
Irigaray, more confrontationally, exposes how Western philosophy constructs femininity as lack, mirror, or absence. She does not seek inclusion within masculine discourse but demands a radical rethinking of sexual difference. Literature, in this view, is a site where symbolic violence is enacted through metaphor, grammar, and narrative voice.
French feminism thus transforms feminist literary theory into a critique of metaphysics. Woman is no longer merely excluded; she is structurally impossible within existing symbolic systems.
Virginia Woolf and the Question Beyond Gender
No figure bridges practical and theoretical feminism more profoundly than Virginia Woolf. Woolf’s feminist thought resists categorization. While deeply attentive to material conditions—education, income, space—she ultimately gestures beyond gender itself.
In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf exposes how literary history has systematically silenced women. Yet her most radical insight lies elsewhere: the concept of the androgynous mind. Woolf suggests that great literature transcends rigid gender identity, not by erasing difference but by refusing its absolutization.
This move is neither anti-feminist nor proto-queer. It is philosophical. Woolf recognizes that defining woman too rigidly risks reproducing exclusion. Her vision anticipates later theoretical anxieties about identity without dissolving feminism into abstraction.
Literature, for Woolf, becomes a space where subjectivity can exceed social categorization. The writer must be neither man nor woman, but fully human—yet this humanity is only accessible once the historical oppression of women is acknowledged and dismantled.
Woolf thus offers a resolution without closure. Woman must be named politically, yet loosened aesthetically. Feminism must speak, yet resist final definitions.
The Third Wave: Fragmentation, History, and Difference
The third wave of feminism emerges from dissatisfaction with universal womanhood. Postcolonial feminism, Black feminism, and transnational feminism challenge the implicit whiteness, Westernness, and middle-class orientation of earlier feminist discourse.
Woman is no longer singular. She is multiply positioned by race, class, nation, language, and history. Feminist literary theory expands accordingly, engaging with:
- Colonial discourse
- Cultural hybridity
- Intersectionality
- Diasporic narratives
Yet even here, the foundational question persists. If woman is endlessly differentiated, does feminism lose coherence? The third wave does not resolve this tension; it inhabits it. Feminism becomes plural, contingent, and self-critical.
Conclusion: Feminism and the Open Question
Feminist literary theory, when viewed across its waves, does not progress toward a stable definition of woman. Instead, it deepens the question. From political exclusion to textual construction, from experience to language, from identity to difference, feminism reveals that woman is not a thing to be defined but a problem to be thought.
This is not a failure. It is feminism’s theoretical strength. Like modern literary theory itself, feminism dismantles certainty in order to expose power. Literature remains central to this project because it is where identities are imagined, normalized, resisted, and transformed.
To ask what is a woman is ultimately to ask how meaning, subjectivity, and history are made—and who gets to speak within them.
Feminist Literary Theory: Historical Phases, Theoretical Orientations, and the Problem of “Woman”
| Phase / Orientation | Historical Moment | Central Concern | View of “Woman” | Relation to Literature | Key Figures / Texts | Theoretical Significance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| First Wave Feminism | Late 19th – early 20th century | Legal rights, suffrage, civil equality | A juridical and political subject excluded from public life | Literature reflects social injustice | Mary Wollstonecraft; suffrage writings | Establishes political visibility but leaves language and representation largely untheorized |
| Second Wave Feminism (Practical / American) | 1950s–1970s | Social roles, domestic ideology, lived experience | A socially oppressed but coherent subject | Literature and media reproduce patriarchal norms | Betty Friedan – The Feminine Mystique | Introduces culture and representation but retains an experiential model of womanhood |
| Second Wave Feminism (Theoretical / French) | 1960s–1980s | Ontology, language, symbolism, essentialism | Woman as historically produced and symbolically constructed | Literature produces femininity through discourse | Simone de Beauvoir – The Second Sex | Shifts feminism from experience to theory; inaugurates the question “what is a woman?” |
| French Feminist Theory | 1970s–1980s | Language, sexuality, symbolic order | Woman as structurally excluded from phallocentric discourse | Writing becomes a site of resistance | Hélène Cixous; Luce Irigaray | Problematizes essentialism; transforms feminism into a critique of metaphysics |
| Practical vs Theoretical Feminism (Comparative) | Ongoing | Action vs abstraction | Woman as social group vs discursive problem | Canon revision vs language critique | American vs French traditions | Reveals feminism’s internal tension between politics and philosophy |
| Virginia Woolf’s Intervention | Early 20th century modernism | Material conditions and aesthetic freedom | Woman as historically constrained yet not ontologically fixed | Literature as a space beyond rigid gender | Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own | Anticipates post-identity thought without abandoning feminism |
| Third Wave Feminism | Late 20th century onward | Difference, intersectionality, postcoloniality | Woman as plural, contingent, historically located | Literature stages intersecting identities | Postcolonial and Black feminisms | Expands feminism globally while intensifying the crisis of definition |
| Feminist Literary Theory (Overall) | Modern literary theory | Definition, representation, subjectivity | Woman as an open theoretical problem | Literature both produces and contests femininity | Across waves |