Silences (47 page)

Ozick’s instance
was 1969. A 1928 version is quoted in Virginia Woolf’s
A Room of One’s Own,
as is Dr. Johnson’s of two hundred years before, the (in)famous

            
Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all

and the four hundred years ago (Shakespeare’s time) original, Nick Greene’s: “a woman acting puts me in mind
of a dog dancing.” Its current descendant is: breadth—or strength—or knowledge—or power—(or whatever) “
surprising in a woman
.”

Reviewers

            
A man who reviewed my
Procedures for Underground
. . . talked about the “domestic” imagery of the poems, entirely ignoring the fact that seven-eighths of the poems take place outdoors. . . . In his case, the theories of what women ought to be writing
about, had intruded very solidly between reader and poems, rendering the poems themselves invisible to him.

—Margaret Atwood

“Sexual Bias in Reviewing”
(condensed from a study by Margaret Atwood’s students, 1973):

            
. . . by which we meant not unfavorable reviews, but points being added or subtracted by the reviewer on the basis of the author’s sex and supposedly associated characteristics,
rather than on the basis of the work itself. . . . Writers, half of them male, half female [were asked] had they ever experienced sexual bias . . . in a review? A large number of reviews from a wide range of periodicals and newspapers [were surveyed].

                  
Of the men, none answered Yes, a quarter answered Maybe, and three-quarters: No. Of women, half were Yeses, a quarter Maybes,
and a quarter No’s. The women replying Yes often wrote long
detailed letters, giving instances and discussing their own attitudes. All the men’s letters were short. . . .

                  
When we got round to the reviews, we discovered they [the women] were justified.

Areas of bias found included:

                  
Assignment of reviews:

                  
“Masculine” adjectives still most
likely to be applied to the work of male writers; to female writers, . . . some version of “the feminine style” or “feminine sensibility” whether their work merits it or not. (Called the Quiller-Couch Syndrome after a turn-of-the-century essay defining masculine and feminine styles in writing.)

                  
She Writes Like a Man:—a pattern in which good equals male, bad equals female. Meant
as a compliment. . . . If a woman writer happens to be a good writer, she should be deprived of her identity as a female and provided with higher (male) status.
^*

                  
The (usually male) habit of concentrating on domestic themes in the work of a female writer, ignoring any other topic she might have dealt with, then patronizing her for “interest in domestic themes.” Critical space
taken up with discussion of appearance.
^**
Points for attractiveness. (Called the Sexual Compliment/Put-down Syndrome)

—Atwood’s
Paradoxes and Dilemmas, The Woman as Writer,
1973

Critical Attitudes: Major Art Is
. . .

            
“Major Art is about the activities of men.” That’s why so much of it is about women. But not by them. “Major Art includes where women can’t go, or shouldn’t, or never
have.” Childbed is not a place or an event; it is merely what women do. “Major Art is never
about the activities of women.” Except when it’s by men. “Women are household artists.” . . . Let’s face it, dear ladies—a house is not a cosmic home. . . .

                  
. . .“And look at women writer’s
style!”
Critics of this type always know what major art is—and wish to discuss only major artists.
That’s how they know they’re major critics. A Major Artist writes only in a “masculine” style. “Which uses short words.” Like Faulkner. “Whose sentences don’t inch forward on little iambs but are rough and clumsy.” Like Hemingway’s. “What a masculine and major art must never be is jeweled—beg pardon, lapidary. A jeweled fancy is always feminine.” Like Shakespeare’s. And Melville’s. And Sir Thomas
Browne’s.

                  
Most symptomatic of all, when I, or any woman, complains of male injustices—we must joke.

—Hortense Calisher, “No Important Woman Writer”

            
. . . Literature has never been so sexually polarized as it is today, and women, as subjects, images, and artists, have never been so inconsequential in the realms of high literary culture. There is not even a Dark
Lady, a token, a high priestess to satisfy affirmative action requirements in the new lineup of Pynchon, Barth, Heller, Barthelme, Hawkes, Coover, Vonnegut, Elkin. In symposia like the one on “Ongoing American Fiction” in
Triquarterly
(Spring 1975), one searches in vain for female names. And the problem is not simply that women are not writing in the abstract, discontinuous, parodistic manner
of postmodernist fiction; female fabulists and experimentalists like Susan Sontag,
^*
Rosellen Brown, Rosalyn Drexler, and Carol Emshwiller seem not to be noticed. While we have been out looking for androgyny, a new regional literature, whose region is the library, has quietly taken over, and its subjects and themes—apocalypse, war, entropy, cybernetics, baseball, computers, and rockets—are not
androgynous at all. As this new virtuoso fiction becomes the yardstick of what is serious and important in contemporary writing, women writers are being crowded once more into that snugly isolated inner space of art which they have often described as “the living centre,” a space which always looks disturbingly like the kitchen.

—Elaine Showalter,
Signs,
Vol. 1, No. 2, 1976

Remember that “eclipsing,
devaluation, are the result of critical judgments, a predominantly male domain. The most damaging, and still prevalent, critical attitude remains ‘that women’s experience, and literature written by women are, by definition, minor.’ Indeed, for a sizable percentage of male writers, critics, academics, writer-women are eliminated from consideration, consciousness, altogether.”

Climate
^▴

Writers know the importance of respect for one’s vision and integrity; of comradeship with other writers; of being taken seriously; of being dealt with on the basis of one’s work and not for other reasons. . . . Nearly all writers who are women are at a disadvantage here.

Appearance

Yes, it has a place here in the hidden blight.

Scarcely at all a factor for the man writer.

But for nearly all
writers who are women, its harmful importance (enforced since infancy through unspoken penalties, or meretricious approvals—also a penalty). Admitted, unadmitted; acceded to—or fought to proportion—its toll in
time,
concentration, wholeness.

Its weaponry against un-self consciousness, naturalness; against based sense of self-worth.

Its use to demean or lessen achievement.

Appearance and Singleness

Patriarchal attitudes last century, with application to this.

            
The poor little woman of genius! The fiery little eager brave tremulous homely-faced creature! I can read a great deal of her life as I fancy her in her book [
Villette
] and see that rather than have fame, rather than any other earthly good or mayhap heavenly one, she wants some Tomkins or another to love her and be in love
with. But you see she is a little bit of a creature without a pennyworth of good looks, thirty years old I should think, buried in the country, and eating up her own heart there and no Tomkins will come. You girls with pretty faces will get dozens of young fellows fluttering about you—whereas here is one genius, a noble heart longing to mate itself and destined to wither away into old maidenhood
with no chance to fulfil the burning desire.

—Eminent novelist, Wm. Thackeray, explaining the pitiful situation of Charlotte Brontë—and her own infinitely preferable one—to a young friend, 1853

            
There was but little feminine charm about her, and of this fact she was herself uneasily and perpetually conscious. . . . I believe she
would have given all her genius and all her fame to
have been beautiful.

—Brontë’s publisher, George Smith, summing her up in a reminiscence in 1900, forty-five years after her death

“Insights” unsupported by her work or life. Blinded by commonplace male attitudes, they did not see (missed!) the actual Charlotte Brontë. The little bit of a creature lacking feminine charm and perpetually conscious of it; eating up her heart because no Tomkins
will come; as the Brontë glad to give up all her genius and fame to be thought beautiful and charming, are conjures, bred out of “judging by a standard of what is deemed becoming in her sex” and the (sexist) preconception that single women aren’t complete and, being women, what they must really care about, would give up anything for, is to be deemed attractive and to snare a man.

Think of Charlotte
Brontë, that proud, lonely writer-self, coming to London “hungry for equals”; encountering instead this blindness to her actual being; this patronizing, subtle discounting of her very source-motivations, achievement, stature.

She knew this reductiveness well. In her work, as in her personal conduct, she fought it. The novels are, among so much else, proud, conscious refutations of it. Remember:
it was
Jane Eyre
that first challenged the judging a woman on the basis of appearance or singleness; indeed the very standards for beauty, charm—and created the first heroine—fascinating and of substance—who was “plain.”

            
She once told her sisters that they were wrong—even morally wrong—in making their heroines beautiful as a matter of course. [When] they replied that it was impossible
to make a heroine interesting on any other terms, her answer was “I will prove to you that you are wrong. I will show you a heroine as small and as plain as myself who shall be as interesting as any of yours.” Hence Jane Eyre . . . but she is not myself, any further than that.

—Harriet Martineau, a conversation with Brontë

Nevertheless:
“Her mind must have been strained and her vitality lowered
by the need to oppose this.”

Climate: This Abasement

            
Then why did she mind what he said? “Women can’t write, women can’t paint.” . . . Why did her whole being bow, like corn under a wind, and erect itself again from this abasement only with a great and painful effort?

—Virginia Woolf,
To the Lighthouse

Without the semblance of a suspicion that I may be busy
. . .

            
And the egotism of men surprises and shocks me, even now. Is there a woman of my acquaintance who could sit in my armchair from 3 to 6:30 without the semblance of a suspicion that I may be busy, or tired or bored; and so sitting could talk, grumbling and grudging, of her difficulties, worries; then eat chocolates, then read a book, and go at last, apparently self-complacent and wrapped in a kind of
blubber of misty self-salutation?

—Virginia Woolf,
A Writer’s Diary

“Obliged to shut off three-fourths of their being”: 1816–1916

1816: A woman, especially

            
Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person should always wish to avoid. A woman,
especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.

—Jane Austen,
Persuasion

1916: The Literary Lion and young women writers

            
With a flash of insight. . . she saw how very slight, how restricted and perpetually baffled must always be the communication between him and anything that bore the name of woman. Saw the price each one had paid
with whom he had been intimate either in love or friendship, in being obliged to shut off . . . three-fourths of their being.

                  
What could any one of them be for him, beyond the fact that they
were providers of what he regarded as vitalizing physical contacts, or sounding-boards for his ideas; admirers, supporters? Either they were disciples . . . and were therefore not women
at all, but the “intelligent emancipated creatures” for whom he expressed so much admiration while fighting shy of them in his leisure hours because of their awful consistency and conscientiousness . . . “a rush of brains to the head usually made them rather plain in the face”; or they played up whenever they were with him, . . . and lived for the rest of their time in their own deep world. . . .