Double Standards Within Double Standards
Feb. 26th, 2009 03:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_pretentiousI'm not going to take on all the points in this review of Elaine Showalter's new chunky tome on women in literary history, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. It used to be my job to read exactly that kind of chunky scholarly tome--I've got a bunch of Showalter's older books on my shelves--but right now I don't have a lot of time to read stuff that doesn't have immediate bearing on my fiction, my teaching, or my kid.
Which is too bad, because I always thought Showalter was one of the sane ones, and this book actually sounds intriguing, even now that I don't have to read literary history.
Showalter's always been interested in the interplay of gender and genre, especially in the way novels by women about women's experiences get categorized as non-literary fiction. My recollection, and my impression from this review, is that while Showalter looks at the heavily policed boundary between literary fiction and romance/chick lit/women's fiction, aside from the inescapable Mary Shelley, she doesn't look much at women's contributions to science fiction, fantasy, horror, or mystery. I wonder if I'm wrong about that.
If Showalter had looked at women in sf/f, surely the reviewer, Laura Miller, would not have accepted and passed along the dichotomy she fixates on in this passage:
[Francine] Prose maintained that the authorities in charge of these goodies [awards, teaching gigs, grants, etc.] still harbored the tacit assumption that "women writers will not write anything important -- anything truly serious or necessary, revelatory or wise." 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. One response to this situation is to argue that the novel of psychological nuance focused on a small number of characters shouldn't be regarded as less significant than fiction painted on a broader social canvas.
Another is for America's women writers to seize their share of those big canvases. Showalter seems to feel that they are now doing so, and lists authors like Annie Proulx and Jane Smiley as examples. It's difficult, however, to think of the equivalent -- both in attempt and reputation -- of "Underworld" or "Infinite Jest" by an American woman. By contrast, with examples ranging from Iris Murdoch to Doris Lessing, British women are perfectly at home with the capacious novel of ideas; after all, George Eliot practically invented the thing.
Laura Miller has difficulty imagining an American woman writing a long, sprawling book with a large cast of characters who actually leave their houses and get mixed up in adventures, wars, and affairs of state, with implications that make readers consider big what if questions? I could name half a dozen American women writers consistently able to work on that scale, and I wouldn't even have to look beyond my livejournal friends list...but they're all writing science fiction or fantasy, so their work is inadmissible in this discussion of whether women can write ambitious fiction. Because, hey, if they were really ambitious or literary, they wouldn't be writing genre fiction, would they?
Anybody who wants to know where the women with a calling to write epics went can wander over to our section of the bookstore anytime.
The reason it's hard to publish a vast novel with a large cast painted, as it were, on a broad social canvas has lot more to do with the costs of printing and binding a book more than 200,000 words long than it does with the difficulty of writing the damn thing, regardless of authorial gender. Not that I have any baggage about writing sprawling epics...
Which is too bad, because I always thought Showalter was one of the sane ones, and this book actually sounds intriguing, even now that I don't have to read literary history.
Showalter's always been interested in the interplay of gender and genre, especially in the way novels by women about women's experiences get categorized as non-literary fiction. My recollection, and my impression from this review, is that while Showalter looks at the heavily policed boundary between literary fiction and romance/chick lit/women's fiction, aside from the inescapable Mary Shelley, she doesn't look much at women's contributions to science fiction, fantasy, horror, or mystery. I wonder if I'm wrong about that.
If Showalter had looked at women in sf/f, surely the reviewer, Laura Miller, would not have accepted and passed along the dichotomy she fixates on in this passage:
[Francine] Prose maintained that the authorities in charge of these goodies [awards, teaching gigs, grants, etc.] still harbored the tacit assumption that "women writers will not write anything important -- anything truly serious or necessary, revelatory or wise." 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. One response to this situation is to argue that the novel of psychological nuance focused on a small number of characters shouldn't be regarded as less significant than fiction painted on a broader social canvas.
Another is for America's women writers to seize their share of those big canvases. Showalter seems to feel that they are now doing so, and lists authors like Annie Proulx and Jane Smiley as examples. It's difficult, however, to think of the equivalent -- both in attempt and reputation -- of "Underworld" or "Infinite Jest" by an American woman. By contrast, with examples ranging from Iris Murdoch to Doris Lessing, British women are perfectly at home with the capacious novel of ideas; after all, George Eliot practically invented the thing.
Laura Miller has difficulty imagining an American woman writing a long, sprawling book with a large cast of characters who actually leave their houses and get mixed up in adventures, wars, and affairs of state, with implications that make readers consider big what if questions? I could name half a dozen American women writers consistently able to work on that scale, and I wouldn't even have to look beyond my livejournal friends list...but they're all writing science fiction or fantasy, so their work is inadmissible in this discussion of whether women can write ambitious fiction. Because, hey, if they were really ambitious or literary, they wouldn't be writing genre fiction, would they?
Anybody who wants to know where the women with a calling to write epics went can wander over to our section of the bookstore anytime.
The reason it's hard to publish a vast novel with a large cast painted, as it were, on a broad social canvas has lot more to do with the costs of printing and binding a book more than 200,000 words long than it does with the difficulty of writing the damn thing, regardless of authorial gender. Not that I have any baggage about writing sprawling epics...
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no subject
Date: 2009-02-26 08:01 pm (UTC)Which reminds me. Is it possible for you to send me the most newest edited version of Hands of Beltressa in an electronic form? Now that we have the kindle, I can reformat, and finally read the damn thing without my ass stuck to my computer!
Loves
(PS, yes we do like the Kindle very much. Don't use it as much as we thought we would, but we do like it. Especially for friend's WIPs.)
no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 08:08 am (UTC)At some point I meant to snailmail you hard copy, but offered a choice between reading a 300K manuscript in hard copy or on the Kindle, I think anybody would choose the Kindle, sight unseen.
Anyhow, which electronic format would you prefer?
no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 06:38 pm (UTC)I remember you saying you had re-done the front half, from when I started reading it oh, so long ago and were going to send it - I may have it in hard copy, somewhere. Figure I'd get the freshest copy!
(If you finished Stisele, you could send that too!)
Three Cheers for the Sprawling Epic!
Date: 2009-02-27 12:10 am (UTC)I too would love to know the current state of the Hands of Beltressa, and whether you are ever going to write a closet sequel for those of us who yearn for such things.
Re: Three Cheers for the Sprawling Epic!
Date: 2009-02-27 08:30 am (UTC)I will eventually come back to that story, because I yearn for it, too, and it's really good to be reminded from time to time that I'm not the only one.
Right now, the Big Book is on hold. I need to get the third Rugosa story finished so the print volume can happen.
My notion is that, once that's squared away, I'll get back to the Little Book, a prequel set two centuries earlier. I don't know if you remember the Bastard Traitor of Imlen, that historical figure who keeps popping up as a folk hero of the Old Beltresins and as a cautionary tale among the Beltresin aristocracy. She's the one Laurebes is writing his history about. Anyhow, the Little Book is about her (with short interludes from Laurebes's biography between chapters from her POV).
I got it about two thirds of the way to a complete working draft when two things knocked me off the project: the Rugosa Coven project started taking off, and I had a catastrophic hard drive failure in the wake of which I discovered that backing up my files assiduously is only as good as the equipment I back them up on. Lost a year of work on the Little Book. That was a year ago. I'm still shell-shocked about it. Stuff I hadn't been working on in over two years, I could recover from a computer I'd retired but not recycled--all the notes and drafts toward the Big Book's sequels were safe there. Short stories I'd been sending out to magazines or my critique group, and the current version of the Big Book, which I'd been sending to agents, I was able to recover from attachments in my gmail sent folder. Anything I'd been working on in the previous two years that wasn't yet ready to show to anyone...all that stuff was just gone, despite the fact that I'd been backing up my work every day.
The Little Book has several jobs:
1) Be Fun.
2) Be Short.
3) Sell.
4) Sell the Big Book.
I think it can do all those things. I just need to do right by the Rugosa folks for a while first.
I tried getting into the new translation of War and Peace, since I've only read short stuff by Tolstoy before. I really liked it, but the physical difficulty of wrangling both a toddler and a 10 pound hardback proved daunting. Maybe later I can get back to Tolstoy.