Have to accept that no matter how hard they try they can never have breasts or a womb or produce children...in this specific sense boys/men are not creative and have to create other things outside themselves to compete with the potent symbol and actuality of women’s biological and emotional creativity. Unresolved, unconscious male envy (and we need to remember that this does not necessarily apply to all men) may be a critical reason why women have been debarred from so much cultural creativity and been confined predominantly to the private sphere, to their biological capacity to bear children...An identification with reason, knowledge, and culture becomes a way in which men control their envy...Unconscious womb-envy helps to explain the familiar, value-laden opposition between ‘nature’ (identified with women) and ‘culture’ (identified with men). Men have no choice but to opt for culture because nature, in the sense of giving birth and feeding children from their own bodies, is simply unavailable to them (Minsky, 1996, pp. 100-1).
As Suzette Henke writes in ‘A Portrait of the Artist
as a Narcissist’ when discussing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
"It is not enough, however, to repudiate the female: the artist must successfully
usurp her procreative powers. Stephen seems to consider the aesthetic endeavour a
kind of couvade - a rite of psychological compensation for the male inability
to give birth" (Henke, 1997, p. 138). But not only has patriarchy controlled
who gets to write; it also has influenced to no small degree what writers
write about and how. So not only have females been discouraged from being
the authors, they have also been condemned to seeing females as objects in male art
and literature who either fit the passive ‘feminine’ role patriarchy has determined
for them or who are punished in some way for not conforming to the patriarchal program.
Females have traditionally had to read male authors, often males with patriarchal
values, writing about male concepts of the female. As Eavan Boland writes in Object
Lessons about reading works from the canon in which males are subjects and females
are objects, "I was entering a beautiful and perilous world filled with my own
silence, where I was accorded the unfree status of an object" (Boland, 1996,
p. 237). The male creations of the ‘feminine’ are frozen forever in art and literature
from which future readers and future writers form their views about females. Females
themselves are exposed to this patriarchal propaganda from an early age. If strong,
assertive, active, powerful, self-determining women are culturally depicted as ‘bad’,
as they traditionally have been for the most part in Western civilisation, then there
is a cultural bias for males to continue depicting them as such and for females to
buy into that point of view. As Ross C Murfin writes in the introduction to the chapter
on ‘Feminist and Gender Criticism of Ulysses’ in A Companion to James Joyce’s
Ulysses, deconstructing the "male constructed literary history" can
only happen "by closely examining canonical works by male writers, exposing
the patriarchal ideology implicit in such works and arguing that traditions of systematic
masculine dominance are indelibly inscribed in our literary tradition", according
to North American feminist critics (Murfin, 1998, p. 131). It is important for readers
and writers, both male and female, to be conscious of patriarchal bias when analysing
portrayals of females in literature. What Boland writes about females in poetry also
applies to females in the other literary genres: "Image systems within poetry
are complex, referential, historic. Within them are stored not simply the practice
of a tradition but the precedent which years of acquaintance with, and illumination
by, that tradition offers" (Boland, 1996, pp. 209-210). In other words, the
female objects portrayed in literature are not only a product of the patriarchal
past but a prototype for future patriarchal representations of the ‘feminine’; they
result from a patriarchal literary tradition and, in turn, strengthen and perpetuate
that sexist tradition. Neither Boland nor I am advocating a boycott of the classic
literature of Western civilisation; instead, we are both advocating taking a closer
look at these classics, not to reject them as misogynistic, but rather to be aware
of latent messages encoded in them which could have misogynistic ramifications.
As Boland writes about works in the canon, "Had I followed the clear line of
feminism...I would have found [these] poems...either oppressive or disaffecting.
And I did not. On the contrary, I found many of them beautiful and persuasive. It
added both complexity and enrichment that these poems which I needed to reconsider
as a woman had shaped and delighted me as a poet" (Boland, 1996, p. 236). It
is this reconsidering which must be done, not to prune these works from the canon,
but rather to make sure that future literature is free of the misogynistic shackles
of patriarchal tradition. As Boland explains, "once I began to reconsider, I
could see these tropes and figures as both persuasive and unsettling. And then I
read more and with a growing sense of their recurrence in the traditional poem. And
once again this was the tradition as I had known it, as both a young woman and a
scholar. The works of the British canon. The poems read by the poets who wrote poems
which were read by other poets. In such downright ways traditions are made. In such
clear and complex ways their legislation is enacted" (Boland, 1996, p. 215).
Females in literature have to be portrayed in a more complex and diverse range that
is reflective of reality than just either passive feminine objects praised for their
"ornamental qualities" (Boland, 1996, p. 211) or active powerful threatening
women categorically condemned as ‘bad’ and ‘evil’. And when gifted writers such as
Joyce choose to make use of patriarchal symbols, such as the witch, close attention
must be turned to the ramifications of making such allusions.