Identity Crisis

After reading the Marxist-Feminist collective, I think that critics tend to be drawn to the female identity in their readings. More specifically they have an interest in the male perception of the female identities in the characters themselves. Additionally, Linda Strong-Leek believes that "before beginning this feminist analysis, we must review the historical and cultural context in which Things Fall Apart was written." I agree with her in that history plays a very important role in how we judge things. Women's roles in society have changed tremendously over the last hundred years, and so reviewing a literary work in 1920 would be very different from a review of the same piece in 1990. "The tradition into which the woman novelist entered in the mid-19th century could be polarized as at once that of Mary Wollstonecraft and of Jane Austen, with the attendant polarization of politics-between revolutionary feminism and conservatism-and of genre-between romanticism and social realism." In Things Fall Apart, "Culler (1982) writes 'For a woman to read as a woman is not to repeat an identity or an experience that is given but to play a role she constructs with reference to her identity as a woman, which is also a construct..." This is where history does come into meaning when feminist critics are reviewing literature. I think it's natural. You cannot help or deny what you've learned over the course of your life and I think that it is always in your subconscious. The criticism must incorporate this to a certain extent (however big or minute).