The Importance of Feminist Literature

Where to begin when a young girl sees in herself a resistance to the posturing of females? Realizes her peers regard her resistance as an ‘inadequacy’ to evolve into the socially accepted masquerade? The woman on stage; this series of games and keeping of appearances? She resists without knowing precisely what it is she is resisting. And she agonizes, knowing not what she resists nor that she is not alone in her resistance. But that being denied the knowledge and consequently the proper dialogue in which to express her inner being, she turns on herself, holding her resistance as an abnormality, forever viewing her ‘deficiency’ as ‘abomination’, resisting the status quo and resenting herself for her ‘inability’ to adhere to it.

How conflicting! Is it any wonder she thinks herself crazy? She cuts her skin daily, resorting to infantile and destructive manners* in a desperate search for self and recognition? She succumbs to melancholy, finds in it a solace not yet found in a society. Solace in self and thought, no ‘other’ but her own, no ridicule but her own, no expectations but her own. In an attempt to find acceptance in self, only to be told once again that this is abnormal, that she is abnormal, that it is ‘not right’, to be denied the depression that brings freedom from the sexless femininity she so desperately and ineffectively rejects. For selfish thought brings awareness and awareness truth and truth freedom which femininity seeks to destroy. She is taught that she is rejecting a valuable piece of her identity, but having found a taste for self-thought and in so being acutely aware of self, knows these ideals as foreign. Her self will not accept these rules of femininity and so femininity rejects her. And because she does not understand her instinctive protest toward femininity, she feels pained and isolated, rejecting the society that first rejected her; manifesting itself in a masochistic hatred for women, or rather, the women who succumb to femininity flawlessly and without argument.

And here, a dire rift forms, where she looks to the bond of the men who first repressed the women she hates because they hated her. They saw abnormality in her and shunned her, so that she has no companions other than her captives. And being unaware of wolves, embraces them, becoming enemy to her own kind.

* ”Sometimes she feels that she is being catapulted into a sort of shameful womanhood, and resists desperately, to the point of regressing into infantile and destructive behavior.” Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch, pg 91