Parable of the Sower by Butler - Book Report/Review Example

They are portrayed normally carrying their day to day chores doing nothing extra ordinary. Only few stories portray women as leaders and victorious. One of these cases is the Parable of the Sower by Butler. Her story is different as it goes against androcentrism which is a major theme in most of the stories of the past and even today. In looking at the issue on androcentrism as discussed by Schweikart, we can see that she is a feminist who is interested in the question, on the difference brought about by the fact that the reader is a woman (Schweikart 529).

The criticism on reader response mainly puts its focus on the two questions: the first is whether the controls the reader or vice versa (Schweikart 529) and what the text contains (Schweikart 539). The two questions refer to the subject-object relation that comes up between reader and text (Schweikart 539). The writer then talks about a difference between the feminist critique and gynocriticism put forward by Showalter. She states that the feminist critique is, "counter-ideological in intent and concerned with the feminist as a reader" (Schweikart 530).

Schweickart argues that if "it is possible to formulate a basic conceptual framework for disclosing the 'difference' of women's writing, surely it is no less possible to do so for women's reading" (Schweikart 531). The major question for majority of critics is the meaning of when a woman expresses herself in writing. How does a woman write as a woman" (Schweikart 541). Schweickart goes on to say that feminist critiques should also look at the correlative process of reading: by looking at what it means for a woman to read through a text without criticizing herself to somebody else's position and what it means, for a woman being herself or else a woman while she reads to go through a piece of literature written by a woman who has written as a woman (Schweikart 541).

Her point is not mainly on the difference between women writers and readers but on the process through which women read works written by both men and women writers. Her argument is that reader-response theorists both reject any belief in critical objectivity. She believes that it is "but from a small step from the thesis that the reader is an active producer of meaning to the recognition that there are many different kinds of readers" (Schweikart 531). She writes that believes that feminist criticism is a political thing with the goal of not only being able to understand literature but to bring a change to the world through the understanding.

In the case of feminist reading of male-authored texts, the female reader will link how she reads to what she reads because of androcentric literary canon which has a damaging effect on women readers. Androcentric literature makes the experience of reading different depending on whether the person reading is a man or a woman. The effect of the canon on men is to create a sense of affinity with the typical human being while the effect on women is to implant something similar to schizophrenia. In simpler terms, feminist readers of text written by men are primarily resisting readers.

Reading of texts written by male authors is similar to class welfare. In the case of feminist reading of women-authored texts, Scheickart starts by putting a caution against