In March of 2009, I wrote to Elaine Showalter on behalf of The Rumpus, saying she inspired me as a writer, editor, and feminist. She agreed to an interview, the focus of which would be her latest book, A Jury of Her Peers. Ranging from the instigators to contemporary innovators, Jury is the first (yeah, first) history of American women writers. It was published in 2009. In it, Showalter catalogues the forgotten and the famous, resurrects the women disappearing from literary history, and encourages new writers to discover our own power, deepen our understanding of it, and move beyond it to create a space of our own.

Elaine wrote back:

“Dear Elissa,

You have really written something besides a set of interview questions; this is more like a short story, a dialog you are having with yourself with me as a sort of half-fictional figure…”

After I cried, I thought: My God, what a brilliant idea.

She didn’t answer three-fourths of the questions I asked her—because I gave her over thirty paragraph-length questions, because I read seven of her books, because she is the leading feminist literary critic of our time and introduced women’s studies into college curriculums and makes me want to be her, inhale her, and impress her—when she didn’t answer all my questions and tumbled just short of my dreams, I stepped into her own persona, as per her implicit suggestion. What follows is Showalter’s actual responses (in quotation marks) and those I imagined for her (in brackets).

***

The Rumpus: You published A Jury of Her Peers in 2009, but I’m sure it took an incalculable number of years to dream up, outline, research, write, rewrite, get frustrated, battle depression, question your life, and settle permissions. Can you discuss what’s been happening in the literary scene since Jury went to press: which writers are becoming great sources of excitement via claiming contemporary feminist intellectual heritages? If you could have an addendum to Jury, whom would you spotlight?

Elaine Showalter: “If I could have an addendum to the book, I might add the recognition of Marilynne Robinson, [who won] the Orange Prize this summer.”

Rumpus: [I like Marilynne Robinson; reading her is like eating chocolate cake. To me, she is a symbol of evolution in novel writing. Magazine writing seems less evolved.] You say that at the turn of the 19th century, “[women] had begun to edit periodicals whose titles, [included] gender-marked terms like ‘Ladies,’ ‘Mother,’ and ‘Home.’” What do you think about women’s magazines today? George Saunders writes for Esquire; why aren’t his female counterparts writing for Cosmopolitan? You ask it better than I do: is “the feminization of the literary market a good thing or a bad thing?” (And why does “feminization” translate into beauty tips and celebrity-diet-poop secrets and doing [explicative deleted] to men?)

Showalter: “I am a voracious reader of women’s magazines in the United States and United Kingdom, and I think they are a lot more interesting than Esquire. . . . A lot of very good women writers can be found in magazines like O, Vogue, Elle, and English magazines like Red. Their range goes beyond fashion, sex, and diets, but I suspect that our cultural-internalized disdain for such topics is part of the problem, whatever the quality of the writing.”

Rumpus: Maybe it’s a question of money: what makes money and who makes money. In her review of Jury, Sarah Churchwell (who studied with you at Princeton) said you gave her “the single most influential piece of professional advice [she’s] ever received: ‘Write to get paid.’” Writing for money seems inconceivable to me; your advice encourages me, but most magazines and the Internet deflate me. If more writers are writing a) disposable content and b) for free, how can women find valuable writing work that pays?

Showalter: “I told Sarah Churchwell (and all my graduate students), ‘Learn to write so well that you can be paid for it, rather than so badly that someone has to be paid to read your work.’ Many graduate students in English deliberately make their writing so obscure and pedantic that it is unreadable. But actually getting paid as a freelance journalist demands hard work and luck, as you know, and these days the market is tighter than ever.”

Rumpus: Back to novel writing, which depresses me less. You say, “The Awakening, which Chopin subtitled ‘A Solitary Soul,’ may be read as an account of Edna Pontellier’s evolution from romantic fantasies of fusion with another person to self-definition and self-reliance.” My friend asked me, “Can I be a woman without reading The Awakening?” I said, “No. The answer is no.” Do you agree?

Showalter: “The Awakening: certainly one of the most important feminist novels about romantic illusion, although not so good on what comes next.”

Rumpus: Like Edna, I’ve learned the main thing is a make fuss. Susan Sontag taught me this (indirectly). Through reading you, what she believes becomes clearer: 1) “Ironizing about the sexes is one step toward depolarizing them”; 2) “Writing comes from a kind of restlessness and dissatisfaction”; 3) “I never thought, ‘There are women writers, so this is something I can be. No, I thought, There are writers, so this is something I want to be.’” I think of Susan Sontag as one of my enduring teachers. Who do you consider your teachers?

Showalter: “My teachers—dozens, including critics and scholars and journalists as well as literary artists. I admire a number of contemporary British newspaper journalists, columnists, and book reviewers, including Simon Jenkins and India Knight, and literary essayists including Michael Holroyd. The most inspiring teacher/scholar/writer in my life was the British historian Roy Porter who died very young. I think Joyce Carol Oates is a brilliant book reviewer.”

Rumpus: [I think Joyce Carol Oates is a brilliant six-word memoirist: Revenge is living well, without you.]

Showalter: [Mine would be: Born with vagina; wrote; changed world.]

Rumpus: It has not been easy for us. Even Edith Wharton and Willa Cather were “against women’s writing.” You discuss “their commitment to an art beyond the limitation of gender. . . . Paradoxically, American women’s writing could not fully mature until there were women writing against it.” Today we have “chick lit.” Do you believe this is the evolution of a Brontë/Austen tradition, or is this genre more like a parodic side effect of a new women’s media (one that extols the sexy new zeitgeist who is precocious yet mature, strong with weakness, and alone but never lonely)? Is “chick lit” hurting the integrity of women’s writing?

Showalter: “Chick lit is a very belittling label for a genre of women’s romantic realism, but the books themselves have to looked at individually. I think many of the best-selling writers in this genre are very talented.”

Rumpus: [It seems you and I got off the same page for a moment. You should know I didn’t coin the phrase “chick lit,” and I hate the person who did. Tone is difficult to decipher in writing, so please understand I was being totally ironic. I have to know: what do you think of Oprah’s Book Club?]

Showalter: “Oprah’s Book Club is wonderful. Also the book reviews in O.”

Rumpus: [But what about those glaring OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB stickers on classic books? It’s hard to remove those stickers if you’d like to (like mattress tags), and her name is so big that it looks there are two authors of each book. I don’t want to read a book by William Faulkner and Oprah.]

Showalter: [—]

Rumpus: [Anyway. Perhaps I’ve offended you and my gender by making assumptions about “chick lit” and “Oprah.” I failed in these questions. My simpering intolerance of that which lies outside the academic sphere is humiliating. Thank you for making me reconsider what I’ve refused to consider.]

Showalter: [No problem.]

Rumpus: [We’re cool?]

Showalter: [Sure. You and I are like “this” (crosses her index and middle finger).]

Rumpus: [Back to the interview.] Women as lovers and servants. Women as writers. Women as activists. Grace Paley “insisted that storytellers must first be story hearers, open to all narratives of suffering and survival,” including (but not limited to) women’s liberation, political upheavals, and protest movements. Can you speak about contemporary women as storytellers and story hearers? I’m thinking about such writers/listeners/recorders as Naomi Klein, Rachel Maddow, Terry Gross, and Ariel Levy (among countless others).

Showalter: [—]

Rumpus: [Was that not a very interesting question? Fine.] Margaret Fuller said, “‘If she followed her womanhood, her heart, she had to keep her feelings private. If she followed her intellect, her writing would seem stiff, artificial, and cold.’ As Fuller perceived it, the essential problem for women writers was finding, or inventing, a suitable form: not traditional poetry, not the romantic novel, not the philosophical essay, but some combination and transformation of them all.” What would Margaret Fuller have said about the Internet?

Showalter: [—]

Rumpus: [Still no good? You said we were cool. Perhaps you are bored? Perhaps I am stupid? Perhaps a combination of the two?]

Showalter: [Perhaps.]

Rumpus: [I wish I had the confidence to tell you now what Sylvia Plath told her mother years ago: “I have it in me [to be a] genius of a writer.” Plath received a fellowship to write. Similarly, one Christmas, Harper Lee’s friends invited her to open presents, and the “surprising and generous gift to her was a kind of private fellowship—a year off to write” (the one string attached was to write with a “19th Century regimen of discipline”). Beyond godsends and benefactors, do you have advice for women like me seeking the time and money to write for a living? (I’d like to add an important nota bene that Lee ran out of money during her many rewrites; let us be warned.)]

Showalter: [At what point in this interview did you stop being white and privileged with a hefty inheritance? Just kidding. I empathize. My advice is to be good. Have confidence. Write to connect.]

Rumpus: Five-part question. Women had to change language to be included in it, to allow it to carry their voices. Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814) was one of the first to rebel: “Warren was unable to express herself so vividly in iambic pentameter burdened with ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and ‘ne’er’ and ‘o’er.’” You say, “language is a fundamental issue,” and wonder, “is the dominant language adequate to express the experience and reality of muted or marginal groups?” You asked this rhetorically in A Jury of Her Peers, but I’ll answer it earnestly now: no. Contemporary women expanding language include Lydia Davis, Miranda July, Kelly Link, Mary Karr, Kathy Acker, Michelle Tea, and artist/writer Maira Kalman (to name a few). These women, and more like them, explode literary genres with experimental plays on language and meaning. Beyond the interest of time and space, why leave them out? Have you been thinking about them? And further, similar to having a language of our own, many reviewers question the idea that women need a literature of our own. Can you suggest a short reading list of authors we need to read—I’m interested in those who make you think the most, the few who alter your internal life, and the ones who inspire you to write. Which books are the most influential to you in terms of style, content, and representing women as dynamic individuals?

Showalter: “I posted a list on Amazon.com of my ten recommended women’s novels—it’s still there.”

Rumpus: [Yeah, I’ll check that out. I’m sure it’s great. So, Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre shared the same lovers. This isn’t a question; I just can’t believe it.] Here’s a question: in her memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings, “[Eudora] Welty acknowledged that she had had a sheltered life, but ‘a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.’” As someone who enjoys writing, I find it’s a luxury and necessity to remain confined in my house. I relate to the madness of the attic, a popular place in women’s literature, because of what my thoughts do to me when I’m alone. In this way, I’ve come full circle and agree, beyond hesitation, that women need to get out of the house, if only to avoid depression, consumptive dipsomania, and schizophrenia.

Showalter: [Think about how you’d describe the smell of winter, capturing the colors and ecology and small things making the big things go right. Can you explain how it made you feel? How it quieted your mind? How it touched the standing hairs on your body? Can you remember the air, smelling not unlike smoked bacon, settling in your nose? No. You cannot if you remain inside your apartment. Get out of the goddamn house.]

Rumpus: Do you believe there could be a section in Jury for funny women writers? This is not to say any of the women you highlight aren’t often witty, wry, and hilarious. But some say women aren’t funny. How much do you disagree with that wrong sentiment? For a more appropriate question: what do you think of the connection between humor and women’s writing?

Showalter: “I’m a big fan of humorous women’s writing, but I wouldn’t want to make it a literary category. Lorrie Moore is very funny.”

Rumpus: [This is a strictly rhetorical question: why the hell not make it a literary category?] The first hundred pages of The Bell Jar make me laugh aloud; both Sylvia Plath and Lorrie Moore combine humor with literariness. My favorite women writers take pieces from various genres and rearrange the familiar, like Gertrude Stein: “To many in the avant-garde, [Stein] was the very essence of modernism, writing in a combination of babble, nonsense, ‘chanting, automatic writing, Cubist painting, and atonal music.’” Stein can be unreadable, incomprehensible, self-indulgent, boring, difficult, and obscure. Joyce Carol Oates uses the full range of language (read as: obscenity) in her writing, which I enjoy. Do you consider these women major innovators of a “woman’s language”?

Showalter: “I don’t believe that there is a ‘women’s language.’ American women have had to fight for access to the full range of language, and until very recently were subject to more censorship and criticism for their language experiments than men.”

Rumpus: [Really? No “women’s language”?]

Showalter: [Maybe there’s a “women’s language.”]

Rumpus: [I couldn’t agree more.] I admire you not only for your commitment to women’s writing, but also your commitment to improving women’s lives. You speak of your friend Adrienne Rich, who “avowed at a memorial service for [Anne] Sexton,” that women’s writing “could not be in ‘self-trivialization, contempt for women, misplaced compassion, addiction.’ It could not be in suicide.” She said this in the 1970s, followed by, “Women writers would need the will to change.” How have you seen this change manifest since Rich asserted her wish?

Showalter: [I know women are still hurting and dealing with self-trivialization, contempt for women, misplaced compassion, addiction, and suicide, whether they’re writers or not. I ask women to empathize and understand we can sometimes change into fuzzy uneducated versions of ourselves. We as humans must have some right to be out of bounds a few times a year and remain unpunished by others and ourselves. While it’s an admirable goal for women’s writing to no longer be anchored in addiction and suicide, I allow that many women’s writing must be, for them; I cannot deny them their feelings or mode of expression, but art need not imitate life.]

Rumpus: Even so, women writers have had to disguise their writing as “private postscripts to letters or alleged ‘parodies’; their content was too bitter, intimate, and dark, their language too free and direct.” Because both life and writing about life can be unbearably difficult, some writers choose to hide behind fiction to mask what others consider madness. I struggle with writing about my personal life because much of it is humiliating. Better to bare it all, write the truth, and without shame call it the truth? Or is it better to preserve one’s dignity to sacrifice a story rich in honesty and vulnerability?

Showalter: [Better to preserve one’s dignity? Bitch, please.]

Rumpus: [Well said.] Gertrude Stein once said, “‘It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.’” I spend a lot of time doing nothing, so I’m encouraged. Stein wrote stories after looking at paintings of Cézanne and reading Flaubert; perhaps she proves that a rich interior life is all we need. When you write about women, how much of your writing comes from what is inside you and from what moves you, especially during the heights of nothingness?

Showalter: [For every nothing there is a something. If only for every Gertrude Stein there were an Alice B. Toklas.]

Rumpus: [Speaking of notorious couplings,] I want to talk about the “fundamental alliance” between femininity and insanity. You talked about it first: “these dual images of female insanity—madness as one of the wrongs of women; madness as the essential feminine nature unveiling itself before scientific male rationality—suggest the two ways that the relationship between women and madness has been perceived.” Why does our culture reinforce the link between femininity and insanity as women’s downfall? Examples of our culture doing this include: films such as He’s Just Not That into You, political figures like Sarah Palin, and my ex-boyfriends.

Showalter: [To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. Your ex-boyfriend’s professor said that to him once, and he said this to you in a similar discussion about madness, while breaking your heart. The two-dimensional men you’ve dated want to talk about the fundamental alliance between black and white, doubt and immobility, femininity and insanity; I do not.]

Rumpus: The House of Mirth depicts a heroine past thirty, unmarried, and ultimately dead of an overdose. Your astute observation of a woman’s place in such novels is succinctly well-said: “These novels pose the problem of female maturation in narrative terms: What can happen to the heroine as she grows up? What plots, transformations, and endings are imaginable for her? Is she capable of change at all?” I think these questions are poignant yet hopeful, and I want to ruminate on them. [Can you say more things like this?]

Showalter: [When I lost my first love (“lost” is not the most precise word here and neither is “love”), I told a friend, “I feel like I lost my arm.” She said, “Start writing with your left hand.” As we grow up, we learn about pain, which we feel is an ending. But it’s more. Pain is when someone craps on your soul. Pain is when someone turns out bad. Pain is failed expectation, again and again. We learn love is not enough. We learn, I hope, that enough is eventually enough.]

Rumpus: What makes you love the heroines in your favorite books? Individuality, autonomy, enthusiasm, avoidable flaws?

Showalter: [I love the weight of a character—the physical burden of life choices, hoarded and distorted regrets and triumphs—the details the body betrays, like fat around the stomach, dried blood from bitten lips, the unobserved piles of chewed nails; each character could weigh a million pounds if beauty never insisted.]

Rumpus: I write like a girl. Regarding her inability to finish The Events Leading Up to the Tragedy, Dorothy Parker said: “‘Dear God, please make me stop writing like a woman. For Jesus Christ’s sake, amen.’” I write about my life experiences, and that usually comes out as unfiltered emotion, unrequited love, and eventual discussion of my vagina as metaphor. You coined the term “gynocriticism,” which supports a female context for analysis and criticism of women’s literature, and encourages new literary models based on the female experience, rather than regurgitation of male theories and tradition. When will we start saying, “Dear God, thank you for making me write like a woman”? With contributions like Jury, is that time now?

Showalter: “The problems with ‘writing like a woman’ exclusively are a) that men can do it too if they want to, and b) it limits your range of creative expression.” [Allow me to discuss some other things. I believe women have a unique perspective. The fear of being read like a woman precedes writing like a woman. I wish you’d stop believing no one is going to read your writing or appreciate it; this makes your writing restrained, lackluster, and full of the hollow fear of what other people will think. Women are smart. They are funny. They can write about anything. Their writing is of consequence, for worse and for better. I wish your anxiety away, but only you can move it, with your hands, with your heart, with the sheer force of your bones and your thoughts and your words and the tangible within you and the intangible outside you; just move, force it, push your hands out in front of you, fingers spread, palms in full contact with that which obstructs your path. Push. Harder, faster, stronger. One foot in front of the other. Walk forward, hands forward, rock forward. You’re moving. Look at you go.]

Rumpus: Your book Inventing Herself (a book I intend to buy for every woman I know) is “not a history of perfect women, but of real women, whose mistakes and even tragedies are instructive and inspiring for women today who are still trying to invent themselves”; you follow the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret Mead, Simone de Beauvoir, Zora Neale Hurston, Susan Sontag, and beyond. These women boldly worked, loved, and altered the world via their individual will and unbounded determination; yet they met tragic ends. I often explain to my mother that to be a writer means to suffer mercilessly and experiment with prescription medication. She pleads with me: can’t it be different? What means can contemporary women take to meet different ends than their sisters and saints?

Showalter: [I can’t answer these questions as you’d like. This is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive. And it’s just starting.]

Rumpus: [There are a few final notes I’d like to address. I believe within your work is a call for inspiration. You write, “By the end of the 18th century…novels have been dangerous, [because they] perverted judgment, mislead affections, and blinded understanding”; it was these novels that encouraged women to become dangerous, perverted, misled, and blinded writers themselves. How wonderful is that?]

Showalter: [Very.]

Rumpus: I am a nice Jewish girl with a college education. I’m of child-rearing age and aptitude. I don’t have plans for Rosh Hashanah this year. How do you feel about inviting me over to meet your son?

Showalter: “Elissa, if I celebrated Rosh Hashanah you would be high on my guest list! Mike [as in comedian Michael Showalter], however, is In a Relationship.” [Capitalization hers.]

Rumpus: [—]

Showalter: “I know this is a belated and very brief reply to your questions but hope you can make some use of it.”

Rumpus: [—]

***

Rumpus original art by Ilyse Magy.

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