Using concepts from feminist theory to understand literature

As we saw in Chapter 4 , psychoanalytic theory asks us to examine the ways in which our personal identity is formed by our early emotional experience within the family. In Chapter 5 , we saw that Marxist theory asks us to examine the ways in which our personal identity is formed by the socioeconomic system in which we live. Feminist theory asks us to examine, instead, the ways in which our personal identity is formed by our culture’s definitions of what it means to be a man or a woman. For from a feminist perspective, our experience of ourselves, our family, and the socioeconomic system in which we live depends to a large extent on our sex: on the ways in which men and women are treated differently and on the ways in which men are socialized to be masculine and women are socialized to be feminine.