> On this point, Dorin Schumacher makes the following observation:
One of the most interesting and perhaps ultimately the most significant contributions that feminist criticism may make is the understanding that the idea of sex may be seen as simply that--an idea in the mind of the writer, and not necessarily something that must be accepted as real. . . . [Like God], male and female can be seen as hypotheses, remnants of a primitive anthropomorphism and simplistic generalities no longer adequate to explain complex new information (36).
However, even though there are no biological or philosophical reasons for most of the differences between men and women, such differences do exist because of the cultural conditioning which creates them. There are other supposed differences that do not in fact exist, despite male assumptions that they do. One task of feminist criticism is to identify which sort of differences do exist and their actual etiology in social and cultural predispositions.
In their introduction, Diamond and Edwards give an informal definition:
If feminist literary criticism does not connote a school of criticism with a rigidly defined methodology, the term does imply a general orientation, an attitude toward literature which can turn a wide variety of existing techniques to its own ends. Like Annette Barnes, we accept as minimal criteria for feminist literary theory the assumptions ôthat women are not automatically or necessarily inferior to men, that role models for females and males in the current Western society are inadequate, that equal rights for women are necessary, that it is unclear what by nature either men or women are, that it is a matter for empirical investigation to ascertain what differences follow from the obvious physiological ones, that in these empirical investigations the hypotheses one employs are themselves open to question, revision, or replacementö (xviii; Barnes 9).
Annette Kolodn...