The Da Vinci Code: A Pseudo-Feminist Text ()
ABSTRACT
Dan Brown is able to compress extensive intellectual and religious arguments
into quickly accessible sound bites, and his story takes place essentially in
one twenty-four-hour period like James Joyce’s Ulysses. Women are a large
constituency of The Da Vinci Code, and the book responds in many ways to new thinking about women in western
culture. In the novel’s estimation, Mary Magdalene was a strong, independent
figure, patron of Jesus, cofounder of his movement, his only believer in his
greatest hour of need, author of her own Gospel, his romantic partner, and the
mother of his child. Based on these descriptions of the novel, some scholars
assert The Da Vinci Code is a feminist novel, which opens everyone’s eyes to a startlingly different view of the powerful role of women in
the birth of Christianity. Contrary to the dominating criticism of the novel,
the thesis relies on feminist literary theory to scrutinize the patriarchal
traces and hidden sexual discrimination in the phallogocentric text of Dan
Brown. By inferring the allegory of the Holy Grail indicated in the novel,
approaching the discourse inscribed with sexual discrimination, and revealing
the distortion of female images in the phallogocentric text, the author
concludes that The Da Vinci Code is a pseudo-feminist text, which embodies repression and manipulation of
the self-consciousness of women. The feminist interpretation of the novel is
not to reduce its literary value to political value but to be of great help to
further studies on this novel.
Share and Cite:
Zhao, P. (2020)
The Da Vinci Code: A Pseudo-Feminist Text.
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
8, 35-53. doi:
10.4236/jss.2020.85004.
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