Feminist literary theory, like feminism itself, encompasses a range of attitudes and approaches. A Marxist feminist, for example, would assume that gender inequality flows from material economic conditions, and might examine how a work of literature challenges or upholds men’s ownership of women’s reproductive capacity. By contrast, a postmodern feminist would consider language itself key to gender inequality, and might question the way a work depicts womanhood or femininity (e.g. as a natural category, as inferior to masculinity, as intrinsically powerful). Feminist criticism may also consider the way gender interacts with other categories (race, sexual orientation, etc.), questioning the Western literary canon’s white male bent, examining how gender influences an individual’s experience as a writer or reader, and related questions.

What ties all these approaches together is the belief that literature needs to be understood within the context of patriarchy. From a feminist critical perspective, a given work might depict, critique, or uphold patriarchal norms, but it nearly always engages societal ideas about women and gender roles in some way. This is certainly true of Hamlet, which was written at a time when women weren’t even allowed to perform on stage, meaning that male actors would have portrayed both

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