The purpose of this research is to examine and critique the formalism of the kind of literary criticism known as structuralism from the point of view of feminist literary criticism. The plan of the research will be to set forth the principal tenets of structuralism and then to discuss ways in which feminist criticism can be said to respond, both affirmatively and negatively, to structuralist readings of literary texts.
The formalism embedded into the application of structuralism to texts can be discerned in the fact that structural critique is directed finding patterns of ideas that may be contained in a work, as well as the means or conventions, whether literary, linguistic, or social, by which the ideas are encoded and function toward making meaning. The pattern, which can also be called a structure or frame, constitutes the form, and the conventions are what determine the content.
Structuralism as literary criticism in the main derived from structural linguistics, associated with the work of Noam Chomsky (Eagleton 105; Culler 860). Structural linguistics relies on the idea that human beings possess a kind of internal grammar or innate adherence to linguistic convention that drives language development. Similarly, structuralism as literary criticism involves sorting out or organizing, much in the manner of a syntax, the internal grammar of textual production. Eagleton uses the phrase "literary system," citing "the whole system of codes, genres and conventions by which we identify and interpret literary works in the first place" (107). Thus in a broad sense it would appear that structuralism is an approach to text that sets the context for or enables interpretation, although as Eagleton also points out, the literary works themselves can be seen as of secondary importance to the system in which they were encoded. This approach is also suited to the task of comparative interpretation, inasmuch as looking at the literary system all...