Four Critical Lenses or The Four Faces of
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Four Critical Lenses or The Four Faces of Cinderella Marxist Feminist Deconstructionist Psychoanalytical
The Four Faces of Cinderella • The four most popular critical lenses used in literary criticism are: a Marxist lens, a Feminist lens, a Deconstructionist lens, and a Psychoanalytical lens. • We will be using the fairy tale of Cinderella to demonstrate how these lenses can unpack a text.
How to Use the Lenses • Most theories, or lenses, don’t require that you completely understand the philosophy behind them. • It’s important for you to understand the basic ideas. • The easiest way to use theory is to think of it as a set of questions that can help you better understand a text. Each theory has a different set of questions.
Formalist Theory • We’ve actually been using this theory all year. • Sometimes this theory is called New Critical • Formalist theory is concerned with formal elements of literature, such as: • • Character Point of View Setting Theme Symbolism Irony Poetic Devices
Feminism/Gender • Origins: originated in the Women’s Suffrage Movement of the late nineteenth century that fought for the rights for women to vote. • In the 1970’s, the movement shifted to having legal rights for women such as legal abortions, legal birth control, and laws ensuring women had the same rights in the work force as men. • In the 1990’s, the lens opened to include gender and GLBT studies, opening the door to investigating how male gender and GLBT people are presented. • Gender critics “see the masculine/feminine divide as a social construct and not innate. ”
The Feminist/Gender Literary Lens Thesis: Women are dominated by men and thus are stereotyped. Typically male authors include a gender bias in their writing that demeans women (or men, in some cases). Characteristics: • Male characters are strong/dominant, and female characters are weak/passive. • Negative stereotypes regarding women and sexuality. • Women striving to survive in a maledominated society. • Power struggle between men and women. • Negative stereotypes regarding men and sexuality – what it means to be a man. • GLBT characters struggling to become equal in a heterosexual society.
As you read, questions to Consider… • When using Feminist/Gender Theory, you might ask the following questions: • How are the lives and relationships of men and women portrayed in the work? Do the men and women in the work accept or reject their roles? • Does the work challenge or affirm traditional ideas about men and women and their sexual relationships? • Is the form and content of the work influenced by the author's gender? • How does the language used to describe women/men affect our understanding of them as character? • Is there a woman’s voice heard in the writing, and if so, what does it say? • What are the power relationships between men and women? • Do characters take on traits from opposite genders? How so? How does this change others’ reactions to them? • What does the work reveal about the operations (economically, politically, socially or psychologically) of patriarchy?
A Feminist/Gender Reading of Cinderella • Cinderella’s happiness depends on men. • After Cinderella’s father dies, she is forced to live with the evil stepsisters. • Cinderella lives in competition with her step-sisters and step-mother and must vie for attention of men. • She becomes happy after she marries the prince. • In order to attract the prince, she must impress him with her looks. • The prince only knows her by her beauty and the missing glass slipper. • Without men, Cinderella has no control over her life. • The dichotomy of the Madonna and the whore, good vs. evil.
