Emily Bronte says it all in Wuthering heights:

“…the thing that irks me the most is this shattered prison. I'm tired, tired of being enclosed here. I'm wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there, not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it, and in it…”

The above are thoughts and conventions that we have ingrained in our children since the days of yore. Little do we realize that the female gender i

This brings us to the definition of feminist literary criticism. How can one define it to do it justice? Well, it can be stated as a criticism advocating equal rights for women in a political, economic, social, psychological, personal, and aesthetic sense.

As all three of these approaches reflect, feminist criticism is not based upon an objective or scientific aesthetic assessment of formal elements. Rather, as David Cowles6 has noted, one important feminist motto is that "'the personal is political'"; hence, feminist criticism is self-consciously ideological, seeking "to change individual readers and society itself"

From here we see that feminist criticism is by definition gender criticism because of its focus on the feminine gender. However, the relationship between feminist and gender criticism is, in fact, complex; the two approaches are certainly not polar opposites but, rather, exist along a continuum of attitudes toward sex, sexuality, gender, and language.

2. Marxist feminism – Links specific female oppressions to the larger structures of capitalism and to oppressions of other groups — gays, minorities, the working classes, and so on.

By the early 1990s, the French, American, and British approaches had so thoroughly critiqued, influenced, and assimilated one another that nationality no longer automatically signalled a practitioner’s approach. Today’s critics seldom focus on "woman" as a relatively monolithic category; rather, they view "women" as members of different societies with different concerns. Feminists of colour, Third World (preferably called postcolonial) feminists, and lesbian feminists have stressed that women are not defined solely by the fact that they are female; other attributes (such as religion, class, and sexual orientation) are also important, making the problems and goals of one group of women different from those of another.

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