2 Methodology

Aimed at discussing Ruth’s identity quest in The Homecoming, this paper applies feminism as chief research methodology. This chapter will introduce the definitions of feminist criticism, traces the history and importance of the literary theory and then focus on the interpretations of identity quest and the usage of this methodology for further textual analysis.

2.1 Feminist Criticism

The definition and implications of feminism get widened and extended with time. Compared with the third wave, the first and second waves of feminism before the 1970s, talked more about female identity as an author, and the portraiture of female in writing, regardless of fabled or non-fabled. The classic 19C feminist authors such as George Eliot shared little similarities with those feminist authors at the time of feminist “third wave”, whose works are breaking boundaries and unfettered by reality, in gender and women study field. What is also worth to be noticed is that back that time, normally the public considered these criticism as debarred from general literary standard. The idea holder Lois Tyson pointed out such phenomenon under the situation that female authors were minority and then their words counted little in the literature field at that time. 

Lois Tyson regarded feminism as the ways to strengthen or weaken women’s oppression from economic, political, social and psychological in literature and other cultural productions (1999:82-83). At the same year, David H. Richter delivered his idea about feminist criticism that is to tear apart the veil on men’s faces who discriminate against females in those men’s literature work when they write about women. (1999: 1346). 

With the help of third-wave feminism, feminist criticism has developed into a more complex and subjective school of theory and hence, feminist criticism pides into a number of new branches.  One of the dominating theory is from Peter Barry (2002) who combined the study of gender and the study of Freudian psychoanalysis to decompose the tension within Pinter’s plays. Such branch is influenced by emerging odd and whimsical theories. The later feminist criticism starts to direct attention from the harm in patriarchal society and to re-read classic works. Nevertheless, the classic feminist criticism which put more emphasis on the representation of women and their political rights, is still of prominent position.文献综述

2.2 Identity

Until the late 1950s, the concept of “identity” came into public though Erik Erikson, a psychologist. Starting from the World War II, many new social movements and identity politics sprang up and raised the question on identity to the public. As Paul Gilroy wrotes, “We live in a world where identity matters. It matters both as a concept, theoretically, and as a contested fact of contemporary political life” (1997: 301). The definition of “identity” is changing dynamically, with new emerging theories in social psychology and cultural studies.