Reading Through Four Lenses: Applying Marxist, Feminist, Ecocritical, and Queer Criticism with GenAI

This blog is a task assigned by Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad, Department of English, MKBU. In this task, I have worked according to the worksheet provided, which focuses on using GenAI to understand and apply four major literary theories : Marxist, Feminist/Gender, Ecocritical, and Queer Criticism. 

The main objective of this activity was to explore not just the definitions of these theories, but how a critic actually uses them while reading a literary text, and to test this understanding by applying all four lenses to a novel of my choice.

For Worksheet Click here :  Literary Criticism and Gen AI


For this activity, I have used the following source as my primary reference: Dilip Barad's article, "On Marxist, Feminist, Ecocritical, and Queer Criticism."

"Reading Through Four Lenses: Applying Marxist, Feminist, Ecocritical, and Queer Criticism with GenAI"

Step 1: Give GenAI the Source

Comparative Analysis of Four Critical Lenses: Marxist, Feminist/Gender, Ecocritical, and Queer Criticism

Critical Lens	What does the critic look for?	What does the critic DO?	Illustration	Question the critic asks
Marxist	Class structures, economic conditions, ideology, the author's social background, and how power/hegemony operate through culture	Examines how a text reflects or reinforces class conflict; identifies how characters embody or resist economic systems; exposes how ideology naturalizes inequality	In Hard Times, Gradgrind's obsession with "facts" and Stephen Blackpool's suffering as a factory worker expose how industrial capitalism dehumanizes labor and suppresses imagination	Whose economic interests does this text serve, and whose labor or suffering does it make invisible?
Feminist/Gender	Patriarchal structures, representation of women, gender as a social construct, and the literary canon's biases	Questions how women are depicted (often as "Other," passive, or nature-aligned); challenges texts that reinforce male dominance; reinterprets or recovers marginalized women's writing	In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator's forced "rest cure" and descent into madness reveal how patriarchal medicine strips women of intellectual and bodily autonomy	Whose voice is silenced or pathologized in this text, and why?
Ecocritical	Representations of nature, the human/nature binary, anthropocentrism, and how ecological harm intersects with class, race, and gender	Interrogates whether a text treats nature as a resource, character, or ethical presence; uncovers anthropocentric assumptions; connects ecological themes to social justice	In Frankenstein, Victor's attempt to "conquer" nature by creating life symbolizes human hubris and disregard for ecological/ethical consequences	Does this text treat the natural world as something to dominate, or as something to be in relation with?
Queer	Heteronormative assumptions, coded or subtextual queer identity, and gender as performance rather than fixed essence	Uncovers homoerotic subtext; questions rigid gender/sexual boundaries; reinterprets "normal" relationships as constructed rather than natural	In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Basil's infatuation with Dorian carries homoerotic undertones that critique Victorian repression and demand for conformity	What does this text assume is "normal" about desire or gender, and who is punished for deviating from it?

What is the difference between knowing a critical theory and actually using a critical theory?

Knowing a theory vs. using a theory 

Knowing a critical theory means being able to define its vocabulary  hegemony, patriarchy, anthropocentrism, performativity  and recall which thinkers are associated with it. It is knowledge held at a distance from any actual text. Using a theory is different: it means bringing that vocabulary to bear on specific words, characters, and scenes, and showing how the concept changes what you notice. A student who "knows" Marxism might say a novel is "about class." A student who "uses" Marxism traces exactly how a character's speech, labor, or fate reveals ideology at work  and can point to the passage that proves it. Practice requires evidence, precision, and restraint: not forcing every text into the same conclusion, but letting the theory sharpen observation. The difference, in short, is the gap between reciting a lens and actually looking through one.

My attribution note:

When I checked the AI's answer against Barad's article, I found that the core content matches the source closely. The key concepts under each theory  ass struggle and ideology for Marxism, patriarchy and representation of women for Feminism, anthropocentrism and human-nature relations for Ecocriticism, and heteronormativity and gender performativity for Queer criticism  are all directly supported by the article. The same is true for the four literary illustrations the AI used: Hard Times, The Yellow Wallpaper, Frankenstein, and The Picture of Dorian Gray  these are the exact examples Barad uses in his "Application" sections, so the AI didn't invent them.

What I noticed as the AI's own addition is the structure of the answer  especially the "what does the critic DO" column, which uses active verbs (examines, questions, uncovers) to turn each theory into a method rather than a static definition. The sample questions in the last column, and the explanation of "knowing vs. using a theory," also aren't lifted from the article  they're the AI's own synthesis, built to answer the specific format the worksheet asked for.

Step 2: Test the Four Lenses on ONE Text 

Four Critics Read Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys)

Critic 1 – Marxist Reading

Textual evidence: Antoinette's family wealth comes directly from a slave-owning plantation economy; after Emancipation, the family's fortune collapses, and Antoinette's mother Annette is left socially humiliated and economically vulnerable, eventually remarrying Mr. Mason for financial security. Rochester, meanwhile, arrives in the Caribbean specifically because of his own economic disinheritance in England (as a second son with no land) and marries Antoinette largely for her dowry.

Critical concept: The novel exposes marriage and colonial wealth as economic transactions disguised as romance or family duty. A Marxist critic reads both Antoinette's and Rochester's situations as products of inheritance law and post-Emancipation economic collapse  neither character acts from pure feeling; both are driven by capital and its loss.

What this deepens: A conventional reading might see Rochester's coldness toward Antoinette as personal cruelty or cultural misunderstanding. A Marxist lens reframes the marriage itself as a transaction built on his need for her money and her family's need for a stabilizing alliance  the emotional catastrophe that follows is rooted in an economic arrangement neither party freely chose.

Critic 2 – Feminist/Gender Reading

Textual evidence: Antoinette is repeatedly named and renamed by others  Rochester insists on calling her "Bertha" rather than her own name, symbolically erasing her identity. She is eventually locked in the attic, declared mad, and denied any narrative voice of her own once Rochester's section of the novel begins.

Critical concept: The silencing and pathologizing of female identity by patriarchal and colonial authority  this is the novel's explicit rewriting of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, giving voice to the woman Brontë reduced to "the madwoman in the attic." A Feminist critic reads the renaming and confinement as literal acts of erasure, where male authority defines and controls female identity and sanity.

What this deepens: A surface reading might accept Antoinette's descent into "madness" as a psychological fact. A feminist lens instead shows madness as something imposed on her  produced by isolation, renaming, and loss of control over her own story  rather than an innate flaw, exposing how patriarchal structures manufacture female "insanity" as a means of control.

Critic 3 – Ecocritical Reading

Textual evidence: The Caribbean landscape in the novel is lush, vivid, and often described as overwhelming or threatening to Rochester, who repeatedly expresses discomfort with its intensity, calling it alien and excessive. Antoinette, by contrast, is deeply connected to this same landscape  it feels like home and safety to her.

Critical concept: The colonizer's anxiety toward an unfamiliar, "uncontrollable" nature, and the association of the colonized landscape with the colonized woman herself  both are seen by Rochester as excessive, sensual, and requiring domination. An Ecocritic reads Rochester's discomfort with the tropical environment as inseparable from his discomfort with Antoinette herself.

What this deepens: A typical reading treats the vivid Caribbean setting as exotic backdrop. An ecocritical lens shows that Rochester's fear and eventual attempt to control Antoinette mirrors his fear and attempted control of the landscape  the novel links ecological domination and patriarchal domination as two expressions of the same colonial impulse.

Critic 4 – Queer Reading

Textual evidence: Antoinette's identity is persistently unstable and hybrid  she is a white Creole, neither fully accepted by the Black Jamaican community nor by white English colonial society, and this instability extends to how her sexuality and desire are framed by Rochester as excessive, "impure," or racially suspect. Her friendship with Christophine and her fluid sense of self across the novel resist fixed categorization.

Critical concept: The destabilization of fixed racial, sexual, and identity categories  Antoinette occupies a liminal space that doesn't fit colonial binaries of white/Black, sane/mad, or respectable/deviant female sexuality. A Queer critic reads this in-betweenness as a challenge to the rigid categories colonial and patriarchal authority depends on.

What this deepens: A conventional reading might see Antoinette simply as a tragic, passive victim. A queer-theoretical lens instead reads her hybrid, uncategorizable identity as itself a kind of resistance her refusal (even unconsciously) to fit neatly into the categories Rochester and colonial society demand is precisely what marks her as threatening and "other" to him.

What becomes visible when the same text is viewed through four different lenses?

Read together, the four lenses reveal that Antoinette's tragedy cannot be reduced to any single cause. Economic collapse and inheritance (Marxist), patriarchal silencing and the manufacture of "madness" (Feminist), colonial anxiety projected onto both land and woman (Ecocritical), and the threat posed by unstable, hybrid identity (Queer) all intersect in her story. Wide Sargasso Sea becomes visible not as one woman's isolated descent into madness, but as the convergence point of colonial, economic, patriarchal, and identity-based systems of control  each lens exposing a different mechanism by which she is named, owned, and ultimately erased.

Step 3: Human Verification

 My Observation

Is the AI's explanation consistent with the source article, or has it added claims not found in Barad's text?

Mostly yes, it matches the source. The basic ideas  like class and ideology for Marxism, patriarchy for Feminism, nature for Ecocriticism, and heteronormativity for Queer theory  are the same as in Barad's article. But Barad's article never talks about Wide Sargasso Sea specifically, so applying these theories to this novel is something the AI did on its own, not something copied from the source.

Has the AI reduced any theory to a stereotype?

Not really, and that's a good sign. For Marxism, it didn't just say "rich vs poor"  it talked about inheritance and marriage as a kind of economic deal, which is more accurate. For Feminism, it focused on how Antoinette is renamed and locked away, not just "women are treated badly." Ecocriticism was a bit weaker though  it mostly connected nature to Rochester's feelings, and didn't go very deep into bigger ideas like humans controlling nature.

 Has the AI provided real, verifiable textual evidence?

Yes. I checked the details  like Rochester calling her "Bertha" instead of her real name, the dowry and money issues, and Christophine's character  and all of these are actually in the novel. Nothing felt made up or vague. but sometime it cannot capture exact things.

Has the AI invented anything?

I didn't find anything invented. All characters, events, and details used are real parts of the story. but sometimes it may happens that AI add its own.

Which reading did I find most convincing, and which felt like a stretch?

I found the Feminist reading the most convincing  the way Antoinette is renamed and confined really does show how she loses control over her own identity. The Queer reading felt like more of a stretch, though. The AI connected "queerness" to Antoinette's mixed, unstable identity, but the novel doesn't show any clear same-sex desire, so this felt like the theory being applied a little too loosely.

Final Student Reflection

 My Experience and understanding

Doing this activity really helped me understand the difference between just knowing a theory and actually using it. Before this, I could tell someone what Marxism or Feminism means in simple words, but I never really tried to apply it to a real story and find proof from the text. When I used GenAI to read Wide Sargasso Sea through four lenses, I saw how each theory notices something different in the same story  like how Feminism focused on how Antoinette gets renamed and locked away, while Ecocriticism looked at how nature and Rochester's fear are connected.

One thing I really learned is that criticism is not just opinion, it needs real evidence from the text. But I also had to question the AI a little. Its Queer reading connected "queerness" to identity confusion, but I felt this was a bit forced since the novel doesn't clearly show that. This taught me that even AI answers need to be checked, not just accepted directly. Overall, this activity made theory feel more real and useful to me.

Note: For generating the AI responses in this activity, I have used Claude

Work Cited:

Barad, Dilip. “On Marxist, Feminist, Ecocritical, and Queer Criticism.” ResearchGate, Nov. 2024, doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.16827.02082. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385739537_On_Marxist_Feminist_Ecocritical_and_Queer_Criticism. Accessed 22 Sept. 2026.

Barad, Dilip. “Literary Criticism and Gen AI.” ResearchGate, Sept. 2026, doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.29601.36964. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/414530437_Literary_Criticism_and_Gen_AI. Accessed 22 Sept. 2026.