What Is Feminist Criticism?

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Laura and today I'm going to talk to you about what is feminist criticism. Feminist criticism is criticism that has to deal with literature, art or anything else and dealing with primarily or in fact only the female viewpoint and women's issues. I have an example here of a book of feminist criticism on Feminist Theater. In this particular book we only have criticism written about plays that were written by women for women, usually all female cast. So that's one example. Another example is you can say, oh well, I've either been assigned to or I've been instructed to write a feminist criticism paper about let's say the play, Hamlet. O.k., so you're going to take Hamlet's cast list which I have right here and you're going to look at it and it has almost entirely men. In fact there are only two ladies out of the you know, twenty plus people in the play. So, you're going to actually want to write your paper in the feminist critic's mode on either Ophelia or Gertrude. And so you're going to, in a feminist criticism paper, you're going to concentrate completely on the female roles and how women are presented. In a play like Hamlet, which is of course named after Hamlet who is a man, you're not going to be writing your paper about him, but if you want to mention him, you're probably only going to mention him in correlation with his relationship to Ophelia, his relationship to Gertrude, his mother. And then go on to talk about how Ophelia is sort of this girl, girlish crazy you know, archetype of a woman whereas Gertrude is this sort of overbearing mother archetype and talk about how that affects the world of the play and how the men in the world of the play see females and how females see themselves and stuff like this. So you're actually going to be concentrating on really the smallest part of the play which are the female leads in the play as opposed to all the other, the males in the play. So you can apply feminist criticism not just to plays and books that only about women but to other things as well. And that in a nutshell is what feminist criticism is."