Here we are again.
In the New York Times Book Review, Meg Wolitzer takes up the matter of “women’s fiction,” in her essay, “The Second Shelf.” She does a fine job of addressing the ongoing, fraught conversation about men, women, the books we write and the disparity in the consideration these books receive.
It is a shame that I can point to any number of essays that take up the issues of gender, literary credibility and the relative lack of critical acceptance and attention women receive from the (male) literary establishment, with equal skill and precision. It is absurd that talented writers continue to have to spend their valuable time demonstrating just how serious, pervasive, and far reaching this problem is instead of writing about more interesting topics.
When we look beyond publishing, when we see that we’re in a country where we’re having an incomprehensible debate about contraception and reproductive freedom, it becomes clear women are dealing with trickle down misogyny. What starts with the legislature reaches everywhere. Just this week, the co-creator of Two and a Half Men flippantly said, with regard to women-oriented television, “Enough, ladies. I get it. You have periods,” and, “…we’re approaching peak vagina on television, the point of labia saturation.” The 2012 National Magazine Award finalists have been announced and there are no women included in several categories—reporting, feature writing, profile writing, essays and criticism, and columns and commentary. Every single day there’s a new instance of gender trouble. Some men aren’t interested in the concerns of women, not in society, not on television, not in publishing, not anywhere.
The time for outrage over things we already know is over. The call and response of this debate has grown tightly choreographed and tedious. A woman dares to acknowledge the gender problem. Some people say, “Yes, you’re right,” but do nothing to change the status quo. Some people say, “I’m not part of the problem,” and offer up some tired example as to why this is all no big deal, why this is all being blown out of proportion. Some people offer up submission queue ratios and other excuses as if that absolves responsibility. Some people say, “Give me more proof,” or, “I want more numbers,” or, “Things are so much better,” or, “You are wrong.” Some people say, “Stop complaining.” Some people say, “Enough talking about the problem. Let’s talk about solutions.” Another woman dares to acknowledge this gender problem. Rinse. Repeat.
The solutions are obvious. Stop making excuses. Stop saying women run publishing. Seriously. Stop justifying the lack of parity in prominent publications that have the resources to address gender inequity. Stop parroting the weak notion that you’re simply publishing the best writing, regardless. There is ample evidence of the excellence of women writers. You aren’t compromising anything by attempting to achieve gender parity. Publish more women writers. If women aren’t submitting to your publication or press, ask yourself why, deal with the answers even if those answers make you uncomfortable, and then reach out to women writers. If women don’t respond to your solicitations, go find other women. Keep doing that, issue after issue after issue. Read more widely. Create more inclusive measures of excellence. Ensure that books by men and women are being reviewed in equal numbers. Ensure gender parity in the critics reviewing those books. Nominate more deserving women for the important awards. Deal with your resentment. Deal with your biases. Vigorously resist the urge to dismiss the gender problem. Make the effort and make the effort and make the effort until you no longer need to, until we don’t need to keep having this conversation.
Change requires intent and effort. It really is that simple.
***
The term “women’s fiction” is so wildly vague as to be mostly useless. “Women’s fiction,” is a label designed to sell a certain kind of book to a certain kind of reader. As writers, we have little control over how our books are marketed. And let’s be clear—“women’s fiction,” is a marketing term meant to either encompass the subject matter of a book or its author, or both. These conversations are so difficult because we are forced to deal in gross generalizations like, “women’s fiction.” We are beholden to these arbitrary categories that are, in many ways, insulting to men, women, and writing.
There are books written by women. There are books written by men. Somehow, though, it is only books by women, or books about certain topics, that require this special “women’s fiction,” designation, particularly when those books have the audacity to explore, in some manner, the female experience which, apparently, includes the topics of marriage, suburban existence, and parenthood, as if women act alone in these endeavors, immaculately conceiving children and the like. Women’s fiction is often considered small fiction, a more intimate brand of storytelling that doesn’t tackle the big issues found in men’s fiction. Anyone who reads well knows this isn’t the case but that misperception lingers. As Ruth Franklin notes, “The underlying problem is that while women read books by male writers about male characters, men tend not to do the reverse. Men’s novels about suburbia (Franzen) are about society; women’s novels about suburbia (Wolitzer) are about women.”
Narratives about certain experiences are somehow legitimized when mediated through a man’s perspective.
Consider the work of John Updike or Richard Yates. Most of their fiction is grounded in domestic themes that, in the hands of a woman, would render the work “women’s fiction.” While these books may be tagged as “women’s fiction,” on Amazon.com, they are also categorized as literary fiction. They receive the accolades. They garner the respect. These books are allowed to be more than what they are by virtue of the writer’s gender while similar books by women are forced to be less than what they are, forced into narrow, often inaccurate categories that diminish the content of the book.
I recently read James Salter’s excellent short story collection Last Night, a book filled with stories about men and women and marriage and the infinite ways people can fail each other. It is a gorgeous book, one that is often concerned with the experiences of women. In one story, a wife demands her husband ends an affair with his gay lover and the muted agony of the situation is palpable for all involved. In another story, a group of friends catch up on their lives and at the end, we learn that one of them is dying, doesn’t know how to share that news, and so she tells a stranger, her cab driver, who in the wake of her confession, frankly assesses her appearance. A woman meets a poet at a party and becomes fixated on his dog, starts behaving strangely. These stories are not so radically different from stories by, say, Joan Didion.
I continue to find that there are more similarities between the writing of men and women than there are differences. Aren’t we all just trying to tell stories? How do we keep losing sight of this?
***
When did men become the measure? When did we collectively decide writing was more worthy if men embraced it? I suppose it was the “literary establishment” that made this decision when, for too long, men dominated the canon, and it was men whose work was elevated as worthy, who received the majority of the prestigious literary prizes and critical attention.
Male readership shouldn’t be the measure to which we aspire. Excellence should be the measure and if men and the establishment can’t (or won’t) recognize that excellence, we should leave the culpability with them instead of bearing it ourselves. As long as we keep considering male readership the goal, we’re not going to get anywhere. We’re going to remain trapped in the same terrible place where we measure women’s writing against an artificial, historically compromised standard.
***
The label “women’s fiction,” is often used with such disdain. I hate how woman has become a bad word. I hate how some women writers twist themselves into knots to distance themselves from, “women’s fiction,” as if we have anything to be ashamed of as women who write what we want to write.
I don’t care if my fiction is labeled as women’s fiction. I know what my writing is and what it isn’t. Someone else’s arbitrary designation can’t change that. I don’t care if men don’t read my books. Don’t get me wrong. I very much want men to read my books. I want everyone to read my books but I’m not going to desperately pine for readers who aren’t interested in what I’m writing.
If men discount certain topics as unworthy of their attention, if men are going to judge a book by it’s cover, or feel excluded from a certain kind of book because the cover is, say, pink, the failure is with the reader, not the writer. To read narrowly and shallowly is to read from a place of ignorance and women writers can’t fix that ignorance no matter what kind of books we write or how those books are marketed.
This is where we should start focusing this conversation—how men (as readers, critics, and editors) can start to bear the responsibility for becoming better, broader readers.
***
Reading remains one of the purest things I do. As anyone who follows me on Twitter knows, I derive a great deal of joy from reading—high brow, low brow, I’m into all of it. Nearly every day I chatter happily about the books I’m reading to my Twitter feed and it’s great to be able to talk about books without worrying about all the problems of publishing. It’s great to always remember that reading is my first love.
I don’t want us to lose sight of the joy of reading because we’re all too focused on the bitter realities of how our reading material finds its way into the world and struggles to have a fighting chance.
Two of the best books I’ve read this year have reminded me that when we spend more time talking about publishing than we talk about books themselves, we’re forgetting what matters most.
In Forgotten Country, Catherine Chung tells an inexpressibly beautiful story about a Korean family with a complex history, a family with secrets, a father who is dying, a sister, Hannah, who has disappeared, and a sister, Janie, who dutifully stays with her parents, who follows them back to Korea to watch over her dying father and who must, reluctantly, try to bring her family back together before it is too late. The story builds quietly, meticulously, and Chung does a masterful job of weaving the past with the present, incorporating mythology and memory in ways that both captivate and haunt.
I became so immersed in the sensuous, powerful writing, I found myself holding my breath over and over because I wanted nothing to interrupt my reading experience. The way Chung uses language is lyrical and entrancing. More than once I was moved to tears by the simplicity and the poignancy of how Chung detailed the intimacies of this family. After the narrator, Janie, is injured in an incident at school, she and her family by “unspoken consensus” sleep in the same bed, find solace in one another. After they say goodnight, and all is quiet, there is this: “I listened to my family breathe, steady and warm. I fell asleep quickly, shielded by the fortress of their bodies, their fragile bones.” Time and again, Chung crafts these lovely phrases that reveal such moments, such moving juxtapositions.
Forgotten Country is also about the difficulties of the world that force people to leave the only home they know. The novel is an immigrant story about trying to find home in more than one place and the price the search for home can exact. When the narrator, Janie, reflects on her family first leaving Korea, she says, “My mother did not want to go to America: this much I knew. I knew it by the way she became distracted and impatient with my sister, by the way she stopped tucking us into bed at night. I knew it from watching her feet, which began to shuffle after my father announced the move, as though they threw down invisible roots that needed to be pulled out with each step.” As her family tries to plant roots in their new homes, Janie realizes, “I had always retained a keen sense of what had been denied our family, of what we had lost.” In this regard, Forgotten Country is also about a family trying to recapture what they have lost, trying to find their forgotten country.
This is a novel of layers, where each layer reaches toward the novel’s satisfying conclusion. There is the mystery of why Hannah has removed herself from her family. At first you don’t even realize how that mystery is unfolding and then, suddenly, you do realize the immensity of what has happened. That moment takes your breath away while it breaks your heart. In its own way, Forgotten Country is about the unfortunate things that happen to girls and young women and the far reaching effects. Throughout the story, we also see how sisters can be cruel to one another before they can understand the magnitude of that cruelty. We see the burdens sisters carry for one another and how certain bonds are indelible. The novel seems quiet but when you consider the complexity of the novel, the intricacy of the layers Chung has crafted, Forgotten Country is anything but quiet. If you read one novel this spring, let it be Forgotten Country. I cannot overstate the joy this book brings.
The twelve stories in Megan Mayhew Bergman’s Birds of a Lesser Paradise, are, at first glance, stories that reflect anxieties about motherhood, marriage, and mortality. In many of the stories, women are more willing to commit to themselves than the men in their lives and in that these stories reveal women who possess both vulnerability and a fierce, uncompromising independence. This makes for a refreshing combination. The stories are deceptive, though, because each story also engages the natural world in some way and reveals the natural world for the violent, uncontrollable place it often is. Each story reveals how we are all animals surrounded by animals, how we can barely manage to be tame together.
At first, you don’t realize what has befallen the narrator in, “Saving Face.” Lila, a veterinarian, has two things to accomplish—a visit to a prison farm and dinner with her fiancé, Clay. And then we learn that a wolf hybrid “had taken most of her lip.” She was beautiful and then she wasn’t and in the aftermath of the accident, Lila has to make sense of moving through the world with her new face and she had to make sense of her relationship with Clay when she no longer looks like the woman with whom he fell in love. When Lila reflects on what happened with the wolf hybrid, she realizes, “There were no promises, no obligations between living things… Not even humans. Just raw need hidden by a game of make-believe.” This lack of promises or obligations between living things is revealed in some way in each of these stories. Birds of a Lesser Paradise is a fine example of writing that is both intimate and vast in cope. There is always more to each of these stories than meets the eye.
The collection explores not only the world as it is but the world as it might soon be. The year is 2050 in “The Artificial Heart,” and the place is South Florida, the Keys. Through subtle details we can see how the world has changed and not for the better. People mostly avoid the sun. There are few fish left in the polluted waters. And yet. While the environment suffers, a daughter is caring for her elderly father who is being kept alive by an artificial heart. He is looking for love even though he is losing his mind and his girlfriend is more interested in his daughter’s partner than her own boyfriend. It’s a story that reveals how no matter how the world might change or fall apart, some things will remain the same. The human heart won’t change.
In “Yesterday’s Whales,” Lauren learns she is pregnant and struggles with what to do. Her partner, Malachi, believes in the extinction of the human race, believes that through the extinction of mankind, nature can reclaim the earth. At the same time, he is a vegetarian who eats bacon. He is a man, it seems, who is selective about his unwavering principles. As Lauren tries to rationalize her pregnancy, she thinks, “Maybe the universe was making an example out of me: You are an animal. You are a mammal. This is what your body wants.” Lauren tries to figure out what she wants and how that fits with what she believes and what her partner believes. The tension of the story builds slowly with Malachi insistent about his most fundamental beliefs and Lauren realizing that perhaps her belief in herself, her body and the child it could produce, is the most fundamental thing of all. The story ends with Lauren facing Malachi to have the difficult conversation. “I looked down and saw the hope within my body as I began to explain, my raw and stupid hope.”
Despite the dark edge in these stories, an edge that reminds us of the baseness of the world, of the difficulty of having to share the world with other animals, the writing in Birds of a Lesser Paradise offers the reader so much, “raw and stupid hope.” This collection, in tone and content, reminds me of ecology, the study of how living organisms relate to each other and their environment. Within the book itself, Mayhew Bergman has created her own ecology. Each story belongs to the book as a whole and could not exist as successfully without the other stories, could not exist as successfully in a different ecology. Most impressive of all is how Mayhew Bergman’s writing is unflinching but tender. She allows that unexpected combination to coexist and in doing so, she has written one of the finest short story collections I’ve read.
***
Here we are again.
I have to believe we keep having these difficult conversations about gender and publishing, no matter where we stand, because we carry a raw and stupid hope that someday we will have acted with enough intent and effort, we will have created enough change, we will have created better measures. I have to believe we continue having these conversations so someday there is nothing left to talk about but the joy and complexity of the stories we write and read. I want that joy to be the only thing that matters.
Can you just imagine?
31 responses
Thank you, Roxane Gay. This is beyond excellent. I really hope male and female readers and writers alike read this essay, there are some incredibly good points.
Yup.
And my debut novel is PINK and not sorry.
Excellent.
As a small town librarian this article challenges me to find ways to get women writers into the hands of male readers. By limiting themselves, men are missing out on some great literature, and I wonder how much we have hampered their choices with the recommendations we make, the displays we put together etc. I’m sure I can do better.
I look forward to reading the books you mentioned. Thanks.
“Change requires intent and effort. It really is that simple.”
What drives me bonkers is the notion that even attempting parity is somehow not okay, as if it will dilute the quality. I’m running into this with a poetry project I’m working on (not my own) that I was pleased to see a pretty much even number of submissions from men and women. I want to see that reflected in the final product. But I’m worried it won’t. And when I brought up this issue with the Editor (a woman), I was given the “best work” excuse.
Okay. Hmm. Feeling quite riled right now. 😉
I think a large problem is the lack of better terminology. I would put into one category David Mitchell and Tea Obreht, and then into another category John Updike and Joan Didion, but what are those categories? The former is more investigative and dramatic, while the latter is more emotive and contemplative, but how do I describe that?
Lacking any viable options, the best I can do is to stupidly default to gender norms by calling the former more “men’s” work and the latter more “women’s” —- even though I have know doubt that Mitchell/Updike are more read by men and Obreht/Didion are more read by women.
I think that “literature” will remain male-dominated for some time due to issues broader than terminology, but it would help if we could find some way to start categorizing works that wasn’t gender-based. I’ve perpetuated this by mentioning to people that McCarthy’s “The Road” is a “men’s book” while Larsson’s “Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” is a “woman’s book,” which I bet is true in terms of readership, because I really don’t know how else to describe the difference. “Apocalypse porn versus torture porn” doesn’t quite cut it.
“Best work” has long felt like a dodge to me, because it presumes (whether it’s intended this way or not) that there’s some objective standard of “best” that everyone can agree on. But that’s ridiculous, and everyone knows it is. So much of this is a matter of personal taste that it seems like nothing more than a copout to not take gender (along with many other factors) into account when deciding what pieces to include when putting together a project.
This is one of the best essays on this topic that I have read, in part because it invites heart back into the conversation. The rhetoric gets so antiseptic and airless and theoretical and loaded, we forget we’re talking about the human impulse toward story–telling them, reading them, loving them. Thank you for bringing that back to the fore.
I wake up every day imagining this.
What a smart, succinct and beautifully written piece. I’m going to share it with my workshops in the future. Thank you
Once again, many, many thanks, Roxanne! Beautifully written – beautiful hopes. Yes, please, please, please.
Well, let’s face it, not that many people read very seriously at all. Women read more than men. Most of what anyone reads is junk. Most of what women read is romance. If they read literary fiction, it’s on the lighter side. When I talk to people at parties and mention that I write, the first book that comes up is Harry Potter, and the second one is Dragon Tattoo. Then the husband usually says he doesn’t read any fiction at all. When I ask what he does read he might say he hasn’t read much in a while because he is “too busy” (implication: too important) to read, and he has a stack of New York Times to catch up on. Of course, I live in Boulder, which is not the reading capital of the world, but the wife often belongs to a book club, so she at least reads a book per month, if she keeps up. Anyhow, this is anecdotal, but a consistent experience over the years. I’ve tried joining a few book clubs but have given up because the level of conversation is so low, and because people can’t manage to keep up with reading one book per month. (I read several per week.) Anyway, often the attitude from the men in these conversations is that fiction in general is entirely the province of women, and that serious people read nonfiction. And not that memoir crap either.
I try not to despair.
Great article. I have noticed in practice that much of the sexism seems completely unconscious and institutionalized, so that these editors actually mean it when they say they are merely publishing the best writing. Today, I listened to an editor at the New Yorker speak with a group of about 12 female and 2 male writers, however, whenever a question was posed by one of these female writers (“So are there standard questions you have for an essay when it is turned i?”), the answer referred to a hypothetical male writer (“Well, it depends if he is a staff writer, and it depends on the subject of his essay”). I am certain the editor was completely unaware that she was doing this, and would probably be very bothered if she was, but it was interesting to me because it reveals how ingrained these associations and gender issues are. I really do believe that is why an overtly deliberate choice needs to be made to achieve some gender balance, until thinking of professional writers does not automatically come with an unconscious assumption.
I think the biggest problem is that we have allowed the notion of “best” to dominate the conversation. With the yearly lists and awards, subjectivity gets sucked right out of the equation and a what amounts to literary cronyism takes over.
There really is no better way of saying it than Roxane already has:
“Aren’t we all just trying to tell stories? How do we keep losing sight of this?”
May I just say
as much as I understand on the macro level that sexism in authorship is a serious and real thing—and believe me, I get it. women’s writing is delegated to the domestic, the man’s voice is inherently more authoritative in the cultural imagination; this is all textbook—I am happy to report that I have never experienced it on a personal level. I’m a writer, and I’m a woman, and I never think about this stuff unless I’m reading an essay about it. I know gender inequality exists, but I don’t know what it looks or feels like in practice.
I don’t bring this up to be difficult or contrary. If anything, this should be good news, right?
All I can do is describe my own experience. I got healthy enough funding for my MFA program, along with several other bright, talented women writers in my class. I never once in workshop felt like my voice was being discounted or marginalized because of my sex, and I’ve never felt like my stories were misunderstood or pigeonholed. Admittedly, my voice may be a tad testosterone heavy, but this isn’t something I deliberately don in order to get by in an unfair man’s world; that’s just how I talk and act in real life. For my journalism/personal essays, I’ve written about, among other things, drug addiction, magic and food. These are gender neutral topics, and I don’t think I’m being naive or delusional when I say that I feel like the work was taken just as seriously as it would be had it were written by a dude. And when I’ve written a little about body image and sex, nobody ever called it “women writing.” At least not to my face.
I’m worried it might appear as though I’m trying to invalidate the need for writing essays like these at all, when what I really want to do is offer some good news to anyone who might be feeling confused or conflicted about the situation, as I am.
I wonder if anybody else has thoughts on how to reconcile these contradictory realities: “Best of” lists are unfairly skewed, and yet, as far as I’m concerned, these lists have nothing at all to do with my art and how it is or is not appreciated.
It is interesting to observe the habits of readers. As a library worker, I notice these habits daily. Genre seems to divide things quite a bit…mystery/thriller are equal opportunity; general fiction certainly has a gender divide, while biography and non-fiction depend more on name recognition, which can, of course, come from the award/pub/review sector allocating their nod in the same general direction. Your take is refreshing; though, I do wonder if you would support a female rejection of those institutions that make VIDA’s list over and over of ignoring women writers. Is there still power in the almighty dollar? PEW just reported the increase of eBooks/eReaders, the stats are another disheartening measure..as the economic divide continues, may we support all story tellers; may we also continue to publish the hardbound written word ~
Excellent, and (alas) timely. “Change requires intent and effort. It really is that simple.” That sentence alone is worth the price of admission, and it applies in all areas of our lives.
Molly, I think it’s great that you’ve had positive experiences as a woman who writes. There’s absolutely room in the conversation for a multitude of experiences. MFA programs are actually very well represented by women. It’s what happens after where there are challenges. I’ve had some pretty great experiences myself. That doesn’t change the fact that once you get to the big leagues, the problems women face are real. It’s about equity and fairness as far as I’m concerned. It’s about women getting the same respect and recognition as men regardless of what they write or how they write. Best of lists, sure, they don’t affect us in our own worlds, but they do matter as measures of excellence, and when those measures are too narrow, and too exclusive, we’re all shortchanged whether we feel it or not. Until your experience or mine is the rule rather than an exception, we’re all shortchanged whether we feel it or not. My concern is for the collective.
Angela, you ask a good question. I don’t know that some of these publications would even care if women boycotted. I think both men and women would have to boycott, demonstrate that kind of solidarity, for such a move to have an impact.
Roxane, have you ever read Valerie Trueblood? I know that she’s run into the issue of being pigeon-holed as a “women’s writer,” even thought she’s just an excellent short story writer, period. Her last collection, Marry or Burn, was short-listed (along with luminaries such as Yiyun Li, Colm Toibin, and eventual winner Edna O’Brien) for the 2011 international Frank O’Connor story prize. Yet she remains relatively unknown here.
Outstanding essay, Roxane. Thank you.
You wrote, “When did men become the measure? When did we collectively decide writing was more worthy if men embraced it?†I think part of this issue comes down to internalization, which others mentioned, and it’s still perpetuated. Many women, including myself, were sent to schools where we read men’s stories written by men almost exclusively. That fed into a greater matrix of messages that being a man is “the norm.†Connecting to a story that is male-focused is easier for women because we’ve been conditioned to do so. In general, many men haven’t had that experience.
After my first novel came out, I received several beautiful e-mails from men who enjoyed the book. A good number of them provided disclaimers (“usually I wouldn’t read something like this†or “I tend to like thrillersâ€) or told me outright that they removed the book jacket or hid the cover somehow (it’s light blue with the image of a woman’s back). This really made me think about what’s perceived as acceptable for a man to read, at all and certainly in public.
Publishing more women writers and giving their work more review space aren’t the only solutions. There also has to be a shift among readers—a willingness to read something one otherwise wouldn’t. Reading can be an act of empathy, an attempt to understand another human being’s world that is different from one’s own.
Roxanne, you bring up so many excellent points: “literary cronyism” could fuel at least three or more articles because we all know a good deal of the publishing field–both book and magazine–is driven by it. Another assertion, ““Change requires intent and effort. It really is that simple,” is especially important and perhaps again worthy of its own article because what we often leave unspoken is that for more women to be published (and paid, that important corollary feature), there will need to be fewer men (need I add white?) published–and they simply aren’t going to be that altruistic. So how does one overcome that that very real obstacle? Perhaps everyone should be required to use non-gender initials when they submit?
Dear Roxane Gay,
I want to be you when I grow up.
Thanks.
Recently I was writing an essay and I needed a quote about mortality and the human condition. Originally I was going to use something from The Wasteland, and I knew that there was some good stuff that I could equally use by a whole host of male writers.
On a whim I decided to try and find something stirring by a woman writer. I started looking through some of my favorite important authors, Atwood, Lessing, Woolf, Morrison, Angelou, Allende, Ward… I will admit that I didn’t spend a lot of time on my search (maybe two hours) But the best I could do was find some Sylvia Plath that didn’t quite fit and some Emily Dickinson that didn’t quite fit.
I know it is out there, but I have to ask and this is extremely relevant to both this essay and the original NYTimes essay. Where are women writing about the big subjects. If I had been looking for stuff about family, or the struggle of women and minorities I could have found a million good quotes, but for something as simple and as boring as the subject “mortality” there seemed to be nothing.
No, I would say that women are writing bout about family or more domestic themes and big issues. They’re doing both at the same time. Cheryl Strayed’s Torch and her memoir Wild both take up this issue of mortality. Julianna Baggott’s Pure explores mortality. Both of the books I review in this essay deal with mortality. I mean…of all the things to look for, mortality is the easiest, so the better question might be, how are you defining mortality?
I suppose I should answer that. The essay was for an Art history paper where I was dealing with issues of Momento Mori in regards to an early body of photographs by a fairly obscure contemporary artist by the name of Diana Thorneycroft. My goal was to tie these works into a greater history of the sense of “We are born only to die, and along the way we suffer” which is arguably one of the earliest themes in literature. (Arguably this is the theme of the Illiad, the Bible, Hamlet, etc…)
Off hand I could think of a dozen really good quotes to meet this need. The last stanza of Dover Beach by Mattew Arnold, “Let me show you fear in a handful of dust” by T.S.Eliot. Hemmingway’s “The world breaks everyone…”, etc…
It seemed like such a fundamental existential issue that I figured there must be a million good lines I could use to fit by any number of women authors, and thus tie visual arts/photography to literature to a more broad history of the arts as a whole.
But like the books you referenced, all I could find by women were more personal death rather than over arching death. And like the Emily Dickinson “I could not stop for death, so it kindly stopped for me…” the concept of death for women seemed more familiar more comforting rather than something to fight against. Even something as stunningly beautiful as say Margaret Lawrence’s The Stone Angel, even though the main character is an elderly woman facing death and fighting against it, she does so in the context of looking backward at her choices, and accepting the full life she has lived.
Anyway, maybe I am missing something.
The well-off women writing of the gender issues have had to admit that they can write the books they want, get published by a major publisher, and see their book in major bookstores. It’s primarily an issue of being on the bottom shelf and not being as well regarded as men, which seems relatively privileged when compared to minority and gay authors.
There is so much cultural attention to this, but minority and gay authors are so marginalized that they’ve been pushed off the table for discussion. Black authors cannot write generic romance and see publishers start a bidding war.
It’s not said, but the gender discussion is really about WHITE women, not women in general. Writers of color usually have to write historical stories, narratives of oppression to be respected. Rarely, do they succeed writing domestic stories. That is beginning to change, but not enough to make you think the literary landscape is really broadening into something very inclusive.
I am sorry that certain female authors aren’t getting the respect they think they deserve, but they are getting the chance to see their works in print and are building vast readerships while getting a major space in the culture to discuss their issues. The same can’t be said for other disenfranchised groups, who can’t get their writing into print and into bookstores at all.
Breathless: a state I rarely experience. Awe: at honest, I pray, taken to the dirt moist of culture.
Could send seven million supporting examples, but need not, truth opens all.
C. G.
Jess, it can be very dangerous to play Oppression Olympics. We should be able to talk about the marginalization of women without negating the experiences of writers of color and queer writers. I mean, it is not at all productive to say oh this is who has it worse. That said, I agree with the spirit of what you’re saying. I’m a writer of color so believe you me, I am well aware of the difficulty of getting a book published that doesn’t fall into a certain trope. I’m actually trying to muster the energy to write about the issues writers of color face but you know, one thing at a time. In the meantime, I still think its important not to discount one kind of marginalization because other kinds of marginalization also exist. There is and should continue to be room in this conversation for discussing multiple circumstances.
This is everything. You said everything that I want someone as smart as you to say!
Roxane, thank you. YES! For each of us, it’s about writing and reading; I wish I’d written this. And re “no” post of April 10 – since when are family and the struggles of minorities and women not big issues? Since when is Death with a capital D the important subject, while “personal” death is trivial? The great writers I know open the doors to abstract ideas by conveying intimate, personal truths. Incidentally, have you read Memento Mori by Muriel Spark?
well written. do take issue with the commenter who thinks “women mostly read ‘romance’ novels” — yet another trite example of compartmentalization. have never read a distinctly written ‘romance’ novel in my life– this yet again illustrates the problem the writer of this essay had in the first place…a great writer is a great writer. end of story…
No: It’s hard to imagine that there is no encompassing line about mortality in Eliot, Cather, Austen or Woolf or even Roy. But that seems like the wrong question anyway: shouldn’t the quote come before the argument, not the other way around?
Roxanne: I thought your essay was impassioned and beautiful and largely right, but I liked your comment about the Oppression Olympics better still. Why talk about the marginalization of certain kinds of writers without talking about the marginalization of certain kinds of writing? And in doing that, don’t we have to immediately acknowledge the difference between popularity and worthiness? And, since those are both very subjective, shouldn’t the focus be on increasing the number of reviews and awards and diversifying their interests and manner? By not thinking of our culture as a monolithic place in which the measures of success are apportioned, singularly, from the top down? This, I think, is happening as publications such as this one gain traction and readership, as new readers discover new venues in which to find new books. So my real question – and though I resent the necessity of such confessions, I confess that I am a white male author, one who would be really, really stoked to gain broad popular acclaim – is why do we continue to care what privileged white men believe are the most worthy literary productions? Your opening paragraphs hint at a frustration that I think is in keeping with my question, and my question isn’t rhetorical because I also feel stuck within this system whose values I question, a system which, I agree, not only gives undue consideration to ‘men’s’ writing, and, likely, is more inclined to publish books about big topics when they have been written by men, especially when those men write in an ethos that feels familiarly white, American male. I just wonder if there isn’t a way to step off a playing field in which the striving is to be accepted by taste that craves that ethos and, instead, privilege another set (or sets) of taste-making altogether.
Do you maybe think that there is a larger problem at play here? As someone involved in the academic world, don’t you notice the constant fragmentation of literature, especially in the way it is taught?
I had a long talk with one of my professors about the so-called modern way of teaching literature and the strong push for categories – African American Lit,”Queer Lit,” Caribbean Lit, the list goes on and on. Everyone is so divided and what I find is that most of my peers “hate” certain categories and embrace or only read within others mostly because of a certain ‘relateability’ factor. Maybe I am naive, but I find the whole thing sad. As someone who studies English, I am open to anything and everything. I do not read because something was written by a man or woman or “type” of person. I read it because I am willing to accept new ideas, which is the whole point of great literature to me, at least.
This is all just something I had not really given much thought to before, but now find myself coming back to. It all comes down to getting people to read (or maybe publishers to publish) what they otherwise would not. We cannot be restricted by categories. The canon is full of great work, so why can’t it be read as just that: great work?
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