In Praise of Messy Lives (9 page)

The same crusading feminist critics who objected to Mailer, Bellow, Roth, and Updike might be tempted to take this new sensitivity or softness or indifference to sexual adventuring as a sign of progress (Mailer called these critics “the ladies with their fierce ideas”). But the sexism in the work of the heirs apparent is simply wilier and shrewder and harder to smoke out. What comes to mind is Franzen’s description of one of his female characters in
The Corrections:
“Denise at 32 was still beautiful.” To the esteemed ladies of the movement I would suggest this is not how our Great Male Novelists would write in the feminist utopia.

The younger writers are so self-conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex. Even the mildest display of male aggression is a sign of being
overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically untoward. For a character to feel himself, even fleetingly, a conquering hero is somehow passé. More precisely, for a character to attach too much importance to sex, or aspiration to it, to believe that it might be a force that could change things, and possibly for the better, would be hopelessly retrograde. Passivity, a paralyzed sweetness, a deep ambivalence about sexual appetite, are somehow taken as signs of a complex and admirable inner life. These are writers in love with irony, with the literary possibility of self-consciousness so extreme it almost precludes the minimal abandon necessary for the sexual act itself, and in direct rebellion against the Roth, Updike, and Bellow their college girlfriends denounced. (Recounting one such denunciation, David Foster Wallace says a friend called Updike “just a penis with a thesaurus.”)

This generation of writers is suspicious of what Michael Chabon, in
Wonder Boys
, calls “the artificial hopefulness of sex.” They are good guys, sensitive guys, and if their writing is denuded of a certain carnality, if it lacks a sense of possibility, of expansiveness, of the bewildering, transporting effects of physical love, it is because of a certain cultural shutting down, a deep, almost puritanical disapproval of their literary forebears and the shenanigans they lived through.

In a vitriolic attack on Updike’s
Toward the End of Time
, David Foster Wallace said of the novel’s narrator, Ben Turnbull, that “he persists in the bizarre adolescent idea that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for ontological despair,” and that Updike himself “makes it plain that he views the narrator’s impotence as catastrophic, as the ultimate symbol of death itself, and he clearly wants us to mourn it
as much as Turnbull does. I’m not especially offended by this attitude; I mostly just don’t get it.”

In this same essay, Wallace goes on to attack Updike and, in passing, Roth and Mailer for being narcissists. But does this mean that the new generation of novelists is not narcissistic? I would suspect, narcissism being about as common among male novelists as brown eyes in the general public, that it does not. It means that we are simply witnessing the flowering of a new narcissism: boys too busy gazing at themselves in the mirror to think much about girls, boys lost in the beautiful vanity of “I was warm and wanted her to be warm,” or the noble purity of being just a tiny bit repelled by the crude advances of the desiring world.

After the sweep of the last half century, our bookshelves look different than they did to the young Kate Millett, drinking her nightly martini in her downtown apartment, shoring up her courage to take great writers to task in
Sexual Politics
for the ways in which their sex scenes demeaned, insulted, or oppressed women. These days the revolutionary attitude may be to stop dwelling on the drearier aspects of our more explicit literature. In contrast to their cautious, entangled, ambivalent, endlessly ironic heirs, there is something almost romantic in the old guard’s view of sex: it has a mystery and a power, at least. It makes things happen.

Kate Millett might prefer that Norman Mailer have a different taste in sexual position, or that Bellow’s fragrant ladies bear slightly less resemblance to one another, or that Rabbit not sleep with his daughter-in-law the day he comes home from heart surgery, but one can’t deny that there is in these old paperbacks an abiding interest in the sexual connection.

Compared with the new purity, the self-conscious paralysis, the self-regarding ambivalence, Updike’s notion of sex as an
“imaginative quest” has a certain vanished grandeur. The fluidity of Updike’s Tarbox, with its boozy volleyball games and adulterous couples copulating alfresco, has disappeared into the Starbucks lattes and minivans of our current suburbs, and our towns and cities are more solid, our marriages safer; we have landed upon a more conservative time. Why, then, should we be bothered by our literary lions’ continuing obsession with sex? Why should it threaten our insistent modern cynicism, our stern belief that sex is no cure for what David Foster Wallace called “ontological despair”? Why don’t we look at these older writers, who want to defeat death with sex, with the same fondness as we do the inventors of the first, failed airplanes, who stood on the tarmac with their unwieldy, impossible machines, and looked up at the sky?

It may be surprising that there’s been no comprehensive history of women’s writing in America, but Elaine Showalter has undertaken this daunting venture with her vast democratic volume,
A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx
, in which she energetically describes the work of long-forgotten writers and poets along with that of their more well-known contemporaries. In the 1970s, Showalter wrote
A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing
, which established an alternative canon of British women writers at a moment when feminist studies were very much in vogue, and her new book is an attempt to do the same thing for American literature. Showalter was, for nearly two decades, a professor in the department of English literature at Princeton (she was the head of the department when I was a graduate student there), and she remains a grande dame of feminist literary studies.

It’s worth noting that many of the most talented writers she discusses—Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Joan Didion—objected to being categorized as
women writers and preferred to think of themselves simply as writers. As Elizabeth Bishop put it, “art is art and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc., into two sexes is to emphasize values that are not art.” Showalter handles these rebels by corralling them into special subchapters with titles like “Dissenters.” One of the dissenters, Cynthia Ozick, argued against expecting “artists who are women … to deliver ‘women’s art,’ as if 10,000 other possibilities, preoccupations, obsessions, were inauthentic, for women, or invalid, or worse yet, lyingly evasive.”

A Jury of Her Peers
announces its inclusiveness with its size and heft, and the breadth of Showalter’s research is indeed impressive; it seems there are women scribblers under every apple tree, in every city street and small-town café across our great nation. In fact, the encyclopedic nature of the book is both its satisfaction and its limitation. The entries are brisk, informative, and often less than a page long. There are too many writers here to go into much depth about any of them, and one finds oneself, in many of the more absorbing passages of the book, wanting more. Of course, distilling any writer’s lifework into a brief entry entails a certain amount of glossing over. To cover so much territory necessitates a kind of breezy simplification, and that very breezy simplification is also the pleasure of this kind of ranging, inclusive history.

Although she refers to
A Jury of Her Peers
as literary history, Showalter is less attentive to artistic merit, to what separates good fiction from bad, than to cultural significance; she is less concerned with the nuances of style or art than with the political ramifications of a book, or the spirited or adventurous behavior of its lady characters. Like other feminist scholars of her ilk, she
is not interested in whether the writers she discusses are good
writers
, or in the question of how their best writing works, but in whether they are exploring feminist themes. And so she ends up rooting through novels and poems for messages and meanings about women’s position in society, for plots that criticize domesticity or that expound on the narrowness of women’s lives. (She once coined the term “gynocritic” for critics freed “from the linear absolutes of male literary history.”) This exploration of subversive plots and spunky heroines may be fruitful from a purely historical or political point of view, but it doesn’t always feel like literary criticism at its most sophisticated. One thinks of Joan Didion’s line about feminists: “That fiction has certain irreducible ambiguities seemed never to occur to these women, nor should it have, for fiction is in most ways hostile to ideology.”

Showalter is occasionally prone to bouts of reductionist readings that belong to a faded era of bell-bottoms and consciousness-raising groups, as when she declares the intricately drawn characters Gus Trenor, Percy Gryce, and Simon Rosedale in Edith Wharton’s
House of Mirth
to be “products of their own crisis of gender,” or when she writes that Sylvia Plath’s richly nuanced poem “Daddy” “embodied women’s rejection of patriarchal mythologies.” But on the whole her writing is clear and lively and mercifully free of the fashionable jargon of academic criticism.

Showalter’s wide net draws in writers like Dorothy Canfield Fisher, whose novel
The Home-Maker
, written in 1924, includes the abysmally written passage: “What was her life? A hateful round of housework, which, hurry as she might, was never done. How she loathed housework! The sight of a dishpan full of dishes made her feel like screaming. And what else did she have? Loneliness;
never-ending monotony; blank, gray days, one after another full of drudgery.” Very few people, I imagine, would argue for the elegance of the prose, but the passage is undoubtedly interesting from a feminist point of view. And so the question becomes: Is this capacious, political way of looking at writing a flawed way to approach the mysteries of literature? Willa Cather put it this way: “The mind that can follow a ‘mission’ is not an artistic one.”

Showalter’s final section on modern women writers, with headings like “From Chick Lit to Chica Lit,” is the flimsiest in the book. Where, one wonders, are some of the quirkier and more interesting talents of the past few decades, from Paula Fox to Mary Gaitskill to Claire Messud? Showalter spends too much time on frothy entertainments like Jennifer Weiner’s
Good in Bed
and Terry McMillan’s
Waiting to Exhale
at the expense of more serious work.

Toward the end of this ambitious book, Showalter concludes that one “must be willing to assume the responsibility of judging. A peer is not restricted to explaining and admiring; quite the contrary.” But one wishes there was more judgment in this book, more selection. The idea of resurrecting women’s writing from the neglect of previous eras is a natural project emanating from 1970s feminism, but is the mere fact of being a woman and jotting down words in a notebook and then publishing them worthy of quite so many drums and trumpets? It may not be sensitive to say that some, just some, of the writers in this generous volume might have rightfully been relegated to obscurity, but one can’t help thinking, at times, that literary history may have passed them over for a reason, just as it has passed over mediocre, or truly terrible, male writers.

One also wonders about the sheer democracy of the project, the fair-minded curiosity about nearly every woman who thought to pick up a pen. Does Dorothy Canfield Fisher really merit as much space as Elizabeth Bishop? It is a vexed and knotty question: Is Showalter in some way devaluing the achievements of the greatest American writers by giving equal or greater space to the less talented? Is she slighting women writers by holding them to a standard that is not about artistic excellence, but about the political content or personal drama of their writing? In her brilliant essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” George Eliot wrote, “The severer critics are fulfilling a chivalrous duty in depriving the mere fact of feminine authorship of any false prestige which may give it a delusive attraction, and in recommending women of mediocre faculties—as at least a negative service they can render their sex—to abstain from writing.”

Still, this comprehensive record of American women’s attempts at literary achievement holds its own fascination; the small, vivid portraits of women’s lives are extremely readable and enlightening. Writing about times when women’s stories were too often ignored, Showalter offers a series of vignettes about what their struggles consisted of and how difficult it was for a woman to forge a professional identity as a writer. She is concerned with the drama of women writing; the lives she describes are filled with abortions, divorces, affairs, unhappy marriages, postpartum depressions, and suicides. Her short, incisive biographies offer a glimpse into the exotic travails of the past and the eternal concerns of female experience; and of course, from a purely biographical standpoint the literary mediocrities can be as interesting as the successes.

A Jury of Her Peers
is likely to become an important and valuable
resource for anyone interested in women’s history. It outlines the rich and colorful history of women struggling to publish and define themselves, and the complex and tangled tradition of women’s writing in this country. It also leaves us with many memorable moments, like Dorothy Parker praying, “Dear God, please make me stop writing like a woman.”

The biographies of great writers have been slowly overshadowed by the biographies of bystanders—usually female bystanders. These biographies interest themselves not with women who wrote great books, but with women who happened to be standing there as they were being written, women like Zelda Fitzgerald, Vera Nabokov, Georgie Yeats, Vivienne Eliot, and Nora Joyce. The latest engrossing contribution to the genre is Carol Shloss’s
Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake
. Once the genre served as an original, quirky feminist corrective, but now, as it becomes more prevalent, it panders to a culture more enamored of prurient gossip than of literature itself.