With a Feminist Eye

Let me start by saying when I first read "Things Fall Apart" I was in the 8th grade. Never did I stop to think I was reading it from one point of view and that I could read it from several. In order to read literature as a feminist based o what I read, one has to be able to cite the pangs of women in the book. According to the text "women's experience, many feminist critics claims, will lead them to value works differently from their male counterparts, who may regard the problems women characteristically encounter as of limited interest." though this was noted as a tool needed to read the material as a woman it seemed slightly sexist and derogatory to me. Yes it is correct that on a personal level as a woman you would be able to relate to the experiences of female characters better than men would but the way the author has referenced them makes it seem like they are solely there for just for the sake of being there as nothing more than to help their husbands and produce suitable Aires. Furthermore after he cites them he goes on to blame women themselves for the state of how they are represented in literature. This was seen in the quotation

women have been steeped in self-derogatory societal stereotypes...while being constantly pitted against each other for the favors of the reigning sex

This brought me back to the Ekwefi's resentment towards the first wife. Since Ekwefi is unable to produce male children that can survive child birth she resents her. It is a well known notion that in certain cultures boys hold more value than girls and are used to carry on their father’s name. This idea was most likely perpetuated by patriarchal societies which would make originally a man's idea. So the stereo type that woman have supposedly been "steeped" with isn’t necessarily their fault but an expectation of men. Culler referenced this as "the phallocentric notion that women must produce many hardy male progenies to be valued within their cultural milieu" So far based on the first reading in order to read like a Feminist you must be able to cite female problems where they may have been over looked by a male reader, sympathize with what the female characters my go through, and understand that circumstantially female characters and women as well are prone to or supposed to experience certain things in order to be identified as such. Now with the second reading "His Coy Mistress" one of the clear themes in this text to me before it was even mentioned was the objectification of the mistress. Supported by the quote

a verbal inventory of a woman’s physical attributes, is certainly problematic for the way in which it objectifies the female body, and Marvell takes this objectification further by negating even the pretension of romantic sincerity that exists in the Petrarchan tradition

He isolates and discusses each of her body parts while using her virginity and comparing it to morality making the mistress itself seeming disposable since they are not in "deserts of vast eternity" this ultimately made the idea of women in texts seem frivolous and devalued. Though the poem may have been meant to praise the mistress in some aspects it ends up dehumanizing her, going back to "Things Fall Apart" the overlooking of females as a male reader and the place of women in the book makes them just as drone like as the mistress. Using everything I have learned so far in order to properly critique literature as a feminist, I do have to wonder why was this particular reading chose to be examined with that lens? The author "mocks contemporary notions of virginity and expresses disgust at the female body as a symbolic place of death" One would think that if you were going to read something from a different point of view that particular point of view would paint its chosen subject in a better light. Instead no matter where I seem to look I still see the same archetype being portrayed in different ways. Women are either disposable and at the sexual mercy of men, or seen as baby making drones used to fill a quota based on the sex of children. In the "The Marxist-Feminist Collective" The idea that most cemented my ideas on the treatment and classification of women as writers, and examining text as a feminist was "gender criticism" which according to the text was defined according to the author it was written by. Automatically there is a label placed on the work, which limits how it can be viewed. Viewing a work as feminist would mean that we are looking at it one way and discarding another, I don’t want to be deemed bias but by looking at it this way aren’t we excluding other views and playing favorites with this particular one?