Gynocritical Impulses in the Novels & Short Stories of Ifeoma Okoye

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The operational concept in the title of this article, gynocriticism, demands some urgency of description if not outright definition. So we shall describe the term gynocriticism which is the major plank that underpins the framework of this article. But definitions bring their own challenges especially for a concept dredged up from the critical core of a larger and equally problematic literary superordinate, feminism, whose outlines are complex and extremely jagged depending on the practitioner's perspective. Elaine Showalter, an American feminist literary critic coined the term gynocriticism in 1979 to describe the strand of feminist literary criticism devoted essentially to the study of women's issues by women and devoid of male-induced distractions, prejudices, patronage and pretensions: ‘a female framework for the analysis of women's literature’ (‘Toward a Feminist Poetics’: 131) ‘By expanding the historical study of women writers as a distinct literary tradition, gynocritics sought to develop new models based on the study of female experience to replace male models of literary creation, and so, “map the territory” left unexplored in earlier criticism’ (Wikipedia ‘Gynocriticism’).

Showalter originally drew the term from French ‘la gynocritique’ because she believed it encapsulated the brand of feminism she envisioned and desired to espouse (Dahiya ‘ELAINE SHOWALTER: Towards a Feminist Poetics’). This was obviously her reaction to what she considered to be the inadequate and the unsatisfactory maleorchestrated kind of feminist literary criticism that still pandered to phallocentric methods, assumptions, values and directions of female literary criticism by both male and female writers. For her, the new design and interest of feminist literary criticism should be one by a woman championing a new literary template for the study of the woman, fully equipped with its own literary canons, analytical methods and temperaments. Showalter distinguishes her gynocriticism from the works of other feminist critics who include and analyse the works of male authors, even when they do so from a feminist perspective. She believes in the purity of her brand because it captures authentic female experience, history, psychology, and sociology of the woman without the woman needing to look over her shoulders for male approval, excuses or legitimacy.