women and writing

I’ve been thinking again about chick lit vs. lit lit since reading this Salon review of Elaine Showalter’s history of American women writers, A Jury of Her Peers. (That the book is called “monumental” in this review is, frankly, a deterrent for me to take it on. Some words just scare me off a book: monumental, lyrical, postmodern, magical realism. I’m stodgy that way. And linear. But I am interested so I might give it a shot.)

One interesting point Showalter makes, as discussed in the review, is that historically, European women writers tended to create greater works of literature because they had servants. American women writers were so busy with housework, they had less time for writing and their field of experience was proscribed by the demands of their lives. Reviewer Laura Miller writes:

The obvious subject for such women was what they knew: home life. But, as Showalter observes, "Domestic fiction has been the most controversial genre in the literary history of American women's writing, an easy target for mockery and an embarrassment to feminist critics who wish to change the canon." Margaret Fuller articulated that ambivalence when she announced that she wanted to "not write, like a woman, of love and hope and disappointment, but like a man, of the world of intellect and action"; she never managed to pull it off. … Even socially influential writers, like Harriet Beecher Stowe (teased by Abraham Lincoln for starting the Civil War), got sniffed at by the critical establishment, and it only got worse when the 20th century ushered in the cult of the he-man novelist as personified by Ernest Hemingway. (The leftist writer Meridel Le Sueur complained that an editor rejected one of her stories for lacking the requisite amount of what she called "fishin', fightin' and fuckin'.")

And 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.

This is clear and obvious to me—and the review points out that critical acclaim leads to the kinds of grants and gigs that allow writers to support themselves to write, and those go primarily to men.

I’m still sorting out in my mind, though, the difference between women’s literature and chick lit and what allows traditionally told female-centric stories to transcend the chick lit label. Jane Smiley has broken out, has Anne Tyler? Annie Proulx, definitely, although I struggle with her. I read her book Postcards on a trip once and found it relentlessly bleak. I left it in an airport when I was finished (I often do that when I travel) and then felt guilty because someone else would pick it up and end up as depressed as I.

Is Nick Hornby chick lit? Was Edith Wharton chick lit in her day? As I recall from the monumental biography of her that I half read, she saw greater success than her friend and contemporary Henry James, but did she get the same critical respect? (I don’t remember off the top of my head. Anyone? She certainly has my respect. I adore her.)

And I recall a friend telling me about being told by agents and publishers that because her novel was about a teenaged girl, it could not be sold as an adult novel and needed to be recast as a young adult novel. Yet the male coming-of-age novel is a literary institution.

I’m confused.

Of course, Showalter points out that changing attitudes about domestic fiction is only one way for women writers to gain more respect. The other is for us to seize the big canvases.

Sigh. I don’t think I have the big canvas in me. (And of course you realize, this is all about me. It’s my blog.) Maybe I do. Maybe I have to get all my little stories out of me first and eventually the big story I have to tell will coalesce.

I guess I just have to live long enough and keep writing.