Constructing Gender Roles in Literature and Criticism: Elaine Showalter and Anglophone Women’s Literary History

Abstract

Gynocriticism constructs a new perspective of women’s literary history and explores the creativity of women against the male-oriented literary canon. As the main representative of this critical practice, Elaine Showalter advocates the intention to study the production of women’s writing in relation to female experience, and the new perspectives of gender roles in literature. Th is paper focuses on literary representations of gender in the 1990s, the decade that, according to Showalter, is a watershed of women’s struggle to be accepted in the literary canon, but also the period of the flowering of postfeminism. Sarah Waters, Ann Beattie and Gloria Cigman are those contemporary women writers whose work is outlined in order to parallel Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, an insightful narrative of female confinement which needed decades for a breakthrough but has persisted as a unique metaphor of the women’s literary tradition in the making.