What is it about Feminist Text? By: David Kane

While I fully expected to be a part of an ironic minority in this Women Writers class, I was a little taken back at how small of a minority I really was.

Despite my inherent maleness, I have always enjoyed reading novels by women writers, many of whom are considered to be authors of feminist text. I read The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood in 11th grade, and The Bell Jar in 12th. I have an extensive collection of novels by Austin, Woolf, Wharton and two-thirds of the Bronte sisters. But the question that has dogged me for years remains: What is it about feminist writing?

Feminist text, for me, is like any text written by a minority. The tone of the work is directly proportional to where the movement is in the real world. If it is an early piece, it is meant to highlight the need to bring the minority group on a level playing field with its unfairly superior counterpart. Blacks need more rights, women need more rights, homosexuals need more rights. The tone is sharp, if not obvious.

Later in the movement, the tone not only softens, but becomes more refined. The goal of the work is to highlight differences in the groups, and becomes less about raising one group up, but establishing a harmony and equality between the two groups. More recent feminist texts, in my opinion, tackle the issues gender roles provide, and is less about women's rights, and more about gender equality, because legally, there is equality. Women are no longer trapped in a gilded cage, a cult of domesticity, to such a clear degree.

But where the need for screaming no longer becomes necessary, the whispers are ripe with brilliant prose, that is enough for any reader, male or female, to be drawn in. And when one is drawn in by the refined, more contemporary work, the reader is led back in time to authors like Woolf and Wharton, and the cycle starts all over again.

~DK