Feminist literary theory and the woman reader

Abstract

The effects of reading on the reader have been remarkably little studied in literary criticism and theory. When, notably in the 1970s and 80s, reader-response theory brought the reader’s role in the construction of a text’s meaning to critical attention, that reader was largely deduced from the text itself and thus neither socially situated - in terms of class, ethnicity, degree of cultural capital - nor gendered. However feminist criticism, beginning in the 1970s though with significant antecedents, began from the premise that reading as well as writing mattered: that patriarchal culture was sustained and transmitted in part through its literature, which must be subjected to sceptical readings by women alert to the workings of masculinist ideology, while at the same time women’s own writing should be rescued from critical deprecation and its contemporary practice promoted. The woman reader became one central focus of feminist literary study, with a particular emphasis on the genre that women have most extensively practised and read from the nineteenth century on, namely the novel. This article traces the history of feminist theorising of the effects on the reader of reading narrative fiction, with reference mainly to anglophone and francophone feminist criticism, arguably the most influential in a large and multi-lingual body of work. It illuminates the ways in which feminist literary theory has made the reader a significant agent in the way that a text produces meaning, and has replaced the abstract, singular reader of reader-response theory with a plurality of readers whose relationship to the text differs according to their sex (and, by implication, other elements of identity including ethnicity and class).  By focusing on an interweaving chain of feminist writings, from Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir to contemporary work on the popular and middlebrow novel, this article shows how feminist critics have radically re-thought what it means to read a novel as a woman, and affirmed the political significance of reading.