Literary Analysis - About Feminist Criticism

Jane Eyre, Eva Luna, Pride and Prejudice and Fairy-tales:
Way more than stories allowing for identification.

Just like Jane Eyre, Eva Luna travels from town to town meeting new characters and their lifestyles. After each journey, a new stage in Jane and Eva's lives begins and their personalities evolve.

Along their lives they create life, their lives, and they create the world, guided by their inner force, that force which G. B. Shaw talked about. But they create two worlds which are miles apart, one of them is in the north hemisphere and the other one in the south. However, these characters grow up in a similar way, experiencing similar feelings and learning to fight and defend themselves from those who are prejudiced against them.

When talking about prejudice, we cannot help to allude to Elizabeth's clashes with Lady Catherine or Mr. Darcy and so we can infer that prejudice against women must be something taking place around the globe.

Although Isabel Allende must have read Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen's novels, I don't really think she was inspired in such stories when she wrote Eva Luna at all. Yet, the similarities among all the women in these works are there, quite explicitly displayed. This might indicate that women's experiences are basically quite the same regardless their age, nationality or ethnicity. We can even compare these characters to those from fairy tales and other short stories; all of them suffer from prejudice: the princess who loves whistling, Cinderella for being poor and an orphan, the little mermaid for being a day dreamer who will not settle for life under the sea, Desiree for being thought not to be purely white, the Wife of Bath for being considered a prostitute, etc. Now, talking about fairy tales and short stories, the difference between them is, basically, that one is aimed to allow for identification, and the other one is not.

But can we help feeling identified with these princesses at any extent? We might feel tempted to sort of force the similarities between our lives and these heroines' but somehow, those similarities are there and can be seen, identification inevitably takes place.

Reading all these works helped me appreciate this brunch of literary criticism which I was so prejudiced against: feminist criticism, and it now seems to me a most fascinating world, apart from a wonderful way of reading allowing for identification to take place.