To read the canon is perforce to identify as male. It insists on its universality in specifically male terms. As she puts it aptly, "Feminist criticism is a political act whose aim is not simply to interpret the world but to change it by changing the consciousness of those who read and their relation to what they read. . . [The first act of a feminist critic is] to become a resisting rather than an assenting reader and, by this refusal to assent, to begin the process of exorcizing the male mind that has been implanted in us."1 .
On the thematic level, then, the reader rejects stereotypes and examines woman as a theme in literary works. The feminist reader should identify with female characters and their concerns. The object is to provide a critique of phallocentric assumptions and an analysis of patriarchal visions or ideologies inscribed in a literature that is male-centered and male-dominated. Such a reader denounces and refuses to accept the cult of masculine virility and superiority that reduces woman to a sex object, a second sex, a submissive other. .
On the ideological level, the reader seeks to learn not to accept the hegemonic perspective of the male and refuses to be co-opted by a gender-biased criticism. Gender is largely a cultural construct, as are the stereotypes that go along with it: that the male is active, dominating, and rational, whereas the female is passive, submissive, and emotional. .
In her book, Lé Deuxiéme Sexe (1949; The Second Sex)2, Simone de Beauvoir argued that associating men with humanity more generally (as many cultures do) relegates women to an inferior position in society. From here, subsequent French Feminist critics focused on language as a tool of male domination, analyzing the ways in which it represents the world from the male point of view and arguing for the development of a feminine language and writing. .
North American feminist critics of the 70s and early 80s took it a step further and began analyzing literary texts via close textual reading and historical scholarship3.
