-
sponsorship
Ann, I think you're right that the Times article on gender bias in the theater may have leaned a bit hard on the women-keeping-their-sisters-down aspect of the original study. (I also think you're right that the best thing we can do, as audience members, is actually get out there and support quality work by buying tickets.)
But I also think there are elements of this study that should give us pause. When Sands sent those scripts out to producers, directors, and literary managers, she found that both female and male respondents were likely to rate a play with a female writer's name attached to be of lower quality—not just less economically viable, but actually of lower artistic merit—than the same script with a man's name attached ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
-
sponsorship
Well, I'm glad the famous ones have off-days, too. Susan Orlean (staff writer at The New Yorker, author of The Orchid Thief, Meryl Streep muse) has been tweeting this morning about how hard it is to be an at-home writer—especially if you're a woman and a mother. She first posted: "When I was pregnant people said, Yr job is so flexible—perfect w/a baby! Clearly, they knew nothing about writing and/or kids."... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
Meghan, Sam, how embarrassing to be caught mixing up Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden! Clearly, it's time to revoke my poetic license. But Meghan, I did understand perfectly well that "making nothing happen" was intended as a declaration of importance; the Buddha declares nothing to be of supreme importance. And it is, in the inner world—but not necessarily in the outer world. I used to have, over my poetry-writing desk, Shelley's declaration that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. It took me years to recognize how utterly silly that was. I'm not saying literature is worthless, by any means. I'm saying its worth is, quite naturally, overstated by the literarily inclined who believe that everyone is affected by their discipline and passion as much as they are. It's just not so.
Still, all of you have beaten me into a slight retreat from my tongue-in-cheek stance that I just don't care anymore about the "great women writers" debates. Of course, it does matter that men acknowledge female writers. Yes, of course, money, prizes, jobs, opportunities to write, and other kinds of influence (influence on the literary-minded, if no one else) are distributed based on such recognition. I guess I'm suggesting that we knock the men down to size by pointing out that they're not as all-important as some of them like to think and that it's ridiculous to declare that men and women will necessarily appreciate imaginative renderings of one another's worlds in equal measure. For instance, I would pick Alice Munro as a greater writer than John Updike, hands down. And David Foster Wallace never did anything to me that even came close to what Jhumpa Lahiri can do (although I would drop just about anything else to read Dave Eggers). The Orange Prize has helped knock the importance of the (Man) Booker Prize down to size. If women and men had two equal sets of writing awards, wouldn't it help us all acknowledge that men's writing is necessarily limited by their maleness?
-
sponsorship
But E.J., if we make too many of these niche prizes ("Best Sestina by a Black Poet," "Best Article Written by a Gay Man in February"), don't we risk further ghettoizing the people who have historically been kept out of the great canons, and continue to hamper their ability to reach that more universally accepted level of greatness? I certainly found that to be the case in terms of reading material in college. Once black and female authors become the stuff of Africana studies or gender studies courses, it's like a free pass to professors in the good old-fashioned English department to keep packing the syllabus with white men. It's a detriment to the system to have an implied "white, male" in front of any major prize or course, and I think that's likely to happen if we slap "black" or "female" in front of too many other ones.
And a minor quibble, E.J.: it was W.H. Auden, not Pound, who wrote that "poetry makes nothing happen." Although I guess the fact that you forgot who said it only furthers your (and Auden's) point about the power of poets.
-
sponsorship
No yawning allowed? Noreen, I'd like to see you enforce that. It'll take a lot of IV-delivered caffeine. Sure, maybe it's easier for me to yawn at the literary canon now that I've switched over to journalism and no longer hope for prizes in fiction and poetry. And as far as your argument that same-sex marriage and equal pay depend on equal representation in literature ... well, I'm sorry, but I switched over because I don't actually believe literature is all that influential. As Ezra Pound wrote, "poetry makes nothing happen." Nothing is very important, the Buddha would tell you. And yes, I do want more women's imaginations and tastes recognized. But I don't think it has to happen by forcing men to like The House of Mirth more than Brideshead Revisited (although I'll pick Wharton first any time, thank you). Literature is just too subjective for that.
Which is my point. I think I'm suggesting a proliferation of lists and prizes precisely because I don't respect the ones that exist; prize committees include a carousel of people handing out back-pats to their friends and back-stabs to their enemies. We don't have to pretend that there really is a Best Writer or a List of Best Books or a Bestest and Most Sophisticated Literary Sensibility that can Best Detect the Platonic Best Novel. That concept always makes me think of that movie that made Jack Black famous—can anyone remember what it was called?—in which a bunch of loser dudes who work in a music store are constantly making lists about such things as the five best bass guitar lines in a rock album ever. Oh, please. Yes, I believe in being transported by literature and art; I survived adolescence because of Tolstoy, picked up girls by reciting poetry from memory (Shakespeare sonnets and Japanese tankas ... the practical benefits of an MFA degree!), and regularly worship at MOMA. But I want more lists, more prizes, less pretense that we can definitively declare the Best One Ever and more reality-checking about how different our tastes all are, shaped by our varied experiences.
P.S. I remember the movie now! It was High Fidelity.
-
sponsorship
Well, Dayo, if the Guardian is making a reading list, you can bet it's going to be overwhelmingly male and European. How you've lived your life influences what you like to read. Am I the only one who thinks it's silly to pretend otherwise, that it's ridiculous to pretend that we can be Platonic Guardians deciding absolute merit?
Which brings me into the discussion of Why Are There No Great Women Writers—which I sat out last week, since it always makes me really, really sleepy. Maybe I just got worn out by the English dept. culture wars in the 1980s and 1990s. Or maybe it reminds me too much of the enraged fights my father and brothers used to have over who was the greatest baseball player of all time—fights that sent me off to my room, where (being a total nerd) I escaped into War and Peace. Is Edith Wharton better or worse than Herman Melville? Is Jane Austen better or worse than Evelyn Waugh? Are Great Pitchers Better or Worse than Great Catchers or Great Hitters or Great All-Around Players? Why even debate it, when we need all of them to enjoy the game?
But when it comes to the Platonic Guardians making their lists of 1,000 necessary books, well, whether because of nature, nurture, or culture, men and women—on average—have different interests and tastes in life. Not all of us, not all the time; I find reading chick lit to be as much fun as a bumpy flight in a tiny prop plane, while I couldn't put down Bleak House. But on average, over time, what women and men find more riveting tends to be different.
So here's a modest proposal. Why not have separate prizes—and lists—for male and female writers? The queer community realized long ago that we would slit one another's throats (figuratively speaking) if we had to decide whether Frank O'Hara was Better or Worse than Adrienne Rich—so our groups give prizes for Gay Poetry and Lesbian Poetry, and so on. Why can't all lit prizes—or lists of great literature—do the same?
Now I have to go take my nap.
-
sponsorship
As Meghan points out, until recently “most women didn't have the social and economic wherewithal to make a life for themselves as artistic writers.” But what about that “recently?” Allow me to suggest one minor culprit from my perch at Iowa: the rise of literary memoir. At the moment when it became plausible for a woman to write about major social issues in the context of a novel, writing mostly about one’s own history became massively marketable. We saw a convergence of gender norms and literary fashion; women had long been told that they could write competently about the domestic sphere, and suddenly literature that took family life as central was exactly what publishers wanted. American women could do what the culture assumed they were best suited for (and let’s not forget that our first national best-seller was a woman-authored memoir) while collecting a six-figure advance.
I don’t mean to denigrate literary memoirs or suggest that there is something small about taking a single life as a subject. But I do see the women around me devoting a tremendous amount of talent and creative energy to the crafting of memoir, and I wonder where that energy would go if we did not live in the age of Mary Karr.
I agree that we’re defining the ambitious novel in a suspect and narrow way—sprawling, thick—but I do not like the idea that male authors dominate the genre we are so defining. Major publishers don’t sell books; they sell “packages.” If a publishing house believes that it cannot market a woman writer as a credible author of an "ambitious" book, it won’t buy the book. This seems to me a case in which the implicit biases of the audience shape the market in a potentially ugly manner.
-
sponsorship
"Why Can't a Woman Write the Great American Novel?" Others here have weighed in already on why the literary canon seems to be lacking when it comes to Great American Novels written by women. What struck me about Laura Miller's essay was the same line Noreen pulled out:
Prose is right that many critics and editors, especially male ones, make a fetish of "ambition," by which they mean the contemporary equivalent of novels about men in boats ("Moby-Dick," "Huckleberry Finn") rather than women in houses ("House of Mirth"), and that as a result big novels by male writers get treated as major events while slender but equally accomplished books by women tend to make a smaller splash.
Male authors also fetishize writing the Great American Novel. Somehow, I get the sense Miller finds all this male ambition problematic. Is it? Or is there a serious lack of female writers who aspire to write the Great American Novel? That, I find, would be problematic.
-
sponsorship
Nina wonders if the financial downturn will force more women to pursue writing careers in order to become breadwinners, but I don't believe anyone turns to the life of letters to ward off economic calamity. While writing skills can indeed be marketable (a young stay-at-home mom I know takes projects translating academic research into coherent grant proposals and reports), nobody would choose a writing profession for the money. It has worse hourly wages than busing tables, and there's no tip out. Despairingly, as difficult and time-consuming the labor of prose, many writers consider it a gift to get paid at all. A writer writes, at the core, because she needs to hear her voice on the page and see her thoughts expressed on the computer screen. You write because the muse tells you that you must.
That said, I hope Emily's skepticism that Facebook "infantilizes" human brains and impairs attention spans is well-placed. I worry a little that cell-phone best-sellers popular in Japan are already a sign of the digital impact on the printed word, and tomorrow's written narrative will be 10 consecutive status updates.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?