Mar
12
Subtlety is maddening.
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Katha Pollitt puts into words my frustrations with the (book) world in a way I haven’t managed yet with her review of Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers. I need to smirk for a moment that the New York Times recruited a self identified feminist to review it who then subsequently dismissed it as something for the age of “bellbottoms” and “conscious-raising” for using such tired words as patriarchy.
Showalter sees women’s writing as a story of progress toward self-definition: from feminine (imitation of prevailing modes) to feminist (protest) to female (self-discovery), and, finally, free. “American women writers in the twenty-first century can take on any subject they want, in any form they choose.” We have indeed come a long way, but I’m not so sure we’ve reached nirvana yet. The marketplace, with its many gendered strictures and codes, has not disappeared. Thus, it matters that girls and women will buy fiction by and about both sexes, but boys and men—the relative few who buy fiction at all—stick to their own gender. (There was a reason that J.K. Rowling used her initials instead of her name, and that her student magician hero was not Harriet Potter.) It matters that the Great American Novel for which critics are always hunting is imagined as a modern Moby-Dick, not The House of Mirth. It means there’s a certain kind of critical receptivity, a hope of greatness for certain kinds of books by men that hardly ever comes into play with books by women, no matter how wonderful they are. Moreover, in literature as in life, men have much more license to display their whole unlovely selves and be admired for it, as the career of Norman Mailer shows.
Many women writers have complained that fiction by women is undervalued because we undervalue the domestic and the personal as opposed to big manly subjects like war and whaling. It’s an important point, but I think there’s something deeper going on. In fact, there are men who write about intimate life and women who take on big public subjects. More different than the books themselves is the gendered framing of how we read them. Nobody says Henry James is a less ambitious writer because he wrote The Portrait of a Lady and not The Portrait of a Sea Captain. If The Corrections had been written by Janet Franzen, would it have been seen not as a bid for the Great American Novel trophy, but as a very good domestic novel with some futuristic flourishes that didn’t quite come off? If the most prolific serious American writer was John Carroll Oates, would critics be so disturbed by the violence in his fiction? Perhaps we emphasize different elements in similar books and only notice the evidence that confirms our gender biases—and give men more benefits of more doubts, too. Gertrude Stein is a difficult and frustrating writer, but so is the Ezra Pound of The Cantos and the James Joyce of Finnegans Wake, and nobody serious calls them (as Showalter does Stein) basically frauds.
Try it yourself with the novels and poems on your bookshelf. Jane Updike? John Smiley? And while you’re at it, picture a literary America in which women were not just the major purchasers and readers of imaginative writing but also controlled the world of reviewing, prizes, awards, fellowships, relevant academic jobs, important panels, readings, international festivals, and those infernal best-book-of-the-year/decade/century lists. That this would be a highly speculative exercise suggests that Showalter is a bit overoptimistic. Women writers have come a very long way since Anne Bradstreet, Julia Ward Howe, and Mary Austin, but the jury of their peers has yet to be empaneled.
For those who don’t know, Norman Mailer (man, masculine, strong, innovative, thinker, honest) nearly murdered his wife at a party by stabbing her. I have heard his works are towering displays of misogyny, just what’s wrong with women but you know, he’s one of literature’s greats. I’d like to see Valerie Solanas (woman, feminine, crazy, emotional, pmsing, psychotic, man hater) honored in the same fashion! It’s endlessly fascinating to me how we’re taught to think and the subtle shadings that occur based on all the different social cues we pick up. I just wish I had the words to describe it.
As for the book I’m reading now, Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty I barely have the words to describe that either. I just feel like I need to hand every single person a copy and say READ IT, because I can’t even begin to ponder how to contain all of the important things in a single blog post. (Perhaps this is one of my biggest problems with writing. Who knows.) Yeah, “lazy black welfare queens” my ASS! They work(ed) harder than any of us so the next time you want to parrot that myth, STFU, sit back and really think if you have any sort of clue or just picked that up in our racist/sexist cultural milieu by OSMOSIS. (And oh my goodness, I guess the new one in vogue is the lazy Mexicans. Yeah, out picking crops you wouldn’t ever deign to touch for cents a day. MMMHMMM. Gotta love the fucked up mythologies we create so we can be ok with the way both we as a society and we as individuals subjugate people.)
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