Some feminist critics have focused on how male authors' attitudes have held women back, while others have discovered women writers overlooked in a male dominated culture. French feminist critics focus on language, analyzing the ways meaning is produced in what they call a male realm. Influenced by Lacan, the dialectic that privileges masculinity is present in language and forces women to choose whether to represent themselves as men, or be silent, or adopt a feminine language, which is not symbolic, but semiotic, rhythmic and unifying, but is a threat to culture. Not all agree a specific theory is needed, debating whether feminism either weakens or fortifies itself by emphasizing its separateness. British feminists see a counterstereotyping of feminine virtues that ignore class, race and cultural differences among women, and thus disguise women's oppression by highlighting sexual difference.
British theory emphasizes historicity in order to promote social change.
Walton's discussion of the gazes constructed in the narrative reveal how they serve as a marker of sexuality and control. Her discussion of Flora as a battleground for overcoming patriarchal definitions of womanhood dramatizes the slippage of gender roles, which for the period are limited to mother, whore or lunatic. A literary work is a product of work that does identifiable work of its own. Terry Eagleton has pointed out the complex web of social and economic relationships that cause the work to be created. He says Marxist criticism is not a passage from text to reader, but an attempt to show the text as it cannot know itself.