Those who came before us — Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Flannery O’Connor — “illuminat[ed] precedents for women writers,” and became our heroines, our literary guides, our inspirations and paragons. Carlin Romano follows such icons in A Good Role Model Is Easy to Find.
Of each he says:
“Jean Rhys, whose precise, exacting novels of womanly decline include the prize-winning Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), captures for many a young woman the evocative sorrow of being defeated by men and life.” [Ed. note: Read this book if you’re interested in Jane Eyre’s feminist alter-ego, Bertha Mason’s, haunted side of the story. Which you should be.]
“The proliferations” of Virginia Woolf “transformed the writer into a powerful and powerfully contested cultural icon, whose name, face, and authority are persistently claimed or disclaimed in debates about art, politics, sexuality, gender, class, the ‘canon,’ fashion, feminism, race, and anger.”
Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960) “have led many critics to declare her the greatest Southern woman writer of the 20th century. . . . It is, of course, in such superlatives that O’Connor’s force as a role model rests. If a writer is the best there is, shouldn’t one emulate her? Conversely, if a writer, however excellent, is just one accomplished artist among many, and an odd one at that, the contours of her life, the choices made in everything but fiction itself, may be taken in, but resisted as a road map.”
For your full-text reading pleasure: A Good Man Is Hard to Find. [Ed. note: This no-adjective-can-adequately-describe short story made me want to become a writer . . . reading it also marks the first time I felt my heart break.]
These are just three, and critics like Elaine Showalter in A Literature of Their Own and A Jury of Her Peers [interview with Showalter forthcoming on The Rumpus] explore the gamut, one that is continually expanding. Romano says: “All it will take for O’Connor and Rhys [Final Ed. note: and “all it will take for” any female author] to rise to goddess level is for the literary and intellectual masses of women to demand it.”
(portrait of Virginia Woolf by Vanessa Bell)
