The Great American Novel--Authored By a Woman?

Salon's Laura Miller turns to a provocative topic about the literary canon, one I've mulled myself for more time than you want to know.

Every few years, someone counts up the titles covered in the New York Times Book Review and the short fiction published in the New Yorker, as well as the bylines and literary works reviewed in such highbrow journals as Harper's and the New York Review of Books, and observes that the male names outnumber the female by about 2 to 1. This situation is lamentable, as everyone but a handful of embittered cranks seems to agree, but it's not clear that anyone ever does anything about it. The bestseller lists, though less intellectually exalted, tend to break down more evenly along gender lines; between J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer alone, the distaff side is more than holding its own in terms of revenue. But when it comes to respect, are women writers getting short shrift?

The question is horribly fraught, and has been since the 1970s. Ten years ago, in a much-argued-about essay for Harper's, the novelist and critic Francine Prose accused the literary establishment -- dispensers of prestigious prizes and reviews -- of continuing to read women's fiction with "the usual prejudices and preconceptions," even if most of them have learned not to admit as much publicly.

I've taken my turn to wonder about why nearly all books translated into English are by men and the gendered side to literary ambition, not to mention doing some byline counting here at Isak and reflecting over at WIMN's Voices. I've learned if nothing else what a many-sided issue this is--there is a troubling systemic, traditional, quiet sexism that absolutely is at play in our literary landscape and will not go away without publishers, editors, critics, professors, agents, grant-givers, and other 'canon-makers' of all genders taking a true account of their assumptions and being pro-active and creative about changing the pattern.

At the same time, there is what I'll call an internal sexism in many women as well, leading them to not take themselves as seriously as writers, and to not be as persistent or ambitious in their submissions or projects. There's nothing that will solve this piece of the problem except serious self-responsibility and nerve. (It is this conclusion that I came to in the article for Bitch Magazine on ambition.)

A new entry into this thorny public conversation about how literature and gender intersect, and the cue for Laura Miller's article, is Elaine Showalter's new book: A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.

Miller approves of Showalter's cultural history and literary analysis.

Showalter is certainly the woman for the job. ... Unquestionably erudite, she has always striven to communicate with nonacademic readers, and her prose is clear, cogent and frequently clever. She has insisted that themes central to women's lives -- marriage, motherhood, the tension between family and individual aspirations -- constitute subject matter as "serious" and significant as traditionally masculine motifs like war and travel. Yet she rejects the preference of many feminist literary scholars for emphasizing "culture importance rather than aesthetic distinction," and she doesn't hesitate to describe some of the writers discussed in "A Jury of Her Peers" as artistically limited, if historically interesting.

What's more, it seems that Showalter offers provoking questions--and answers--that frankly had never occurred to me:

Why, for example, did Britain produce several women novelists of genius during the 19th century -- Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontës, as well as accomplished lesser artists like Elizabeth Gaskell -- while America did not? That question could (and sometimes does) lead to a lot of speculation on the national characters of the English-speaking peoples, but Showalter mentions an equally plausible, practical cause: "While English women novelists, even those as poor as the Brontës, had servants, American women were expected to clean, cook and sew; even in the South, white women in slaveholding families were trained in domestic arts."

Showalter (as I understand her via Miller) makes a fascinating connection with the American dream of pioneering individualism and originality and how this led American women to understand that doing anything other than keeping home for those rugged individuals was a crime not only against family and culture, but also Nation and God. It was a burden unequal to their sisters in Britain--and so: "No wonder, then, that much of American women's writing before the 1960s can seem cramped and apologetic compared to their more entitled sisters across the Atlantic, let alone compared to a rampant (if charming) egoist like Walt Whitman."

Perhaps we are now poised at a moment of evolution. Miller points out that the last generation of "old-fashioned androcentric Great American Novel practitioners will die out with Philip Roth" and "literary men under 45 are as likely to idolize Joan Didion or Flannery O'Connor as Norman Mailer or John Updike."

I have pleaded for an end to this era of Literary Giantdom (or, as David Foster Wallace put it, the Great Male Narcissists), and all signs to its demise gives me great hope.

Perhaps it is this moment, then, where authority will become available to writers of all genders if they have the will, the talent, and the work ethic to justify it.

Miller and I seem to agree in the twin catalysts that are necessary to meeting our moment:

(Francine) 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.

The great exception to this rule is women of color -- most notably Toni Morrison, but Prose also singles out the Native-American novelist Leslie Marmon Silko -- whose work became mainstream in the 1980s. Apart from their own considerable talent, these writers have been politically liberated to claim a big swath of territory that white male novelists could not make a feasible bid for anyway; Don DeLillo knows better than to attempt the Great American Novel about slavery. Morrison's black male counterparts, on the other hand, have raised an infamous ruckus over her apotheosis, which suggests that winning the right to speak for an entire people is still, in some minds, a prerogative of men.

Indeed, on all accounts. Aside from the Jane Smiley reference (who I'm no fan of, with the single exception to "The Age of Grief"), it sounds like Showalter's book is a must-read for someone has invested and curious in this ongoing story of gender and literature as I am--and who desperately wants to see (help create?) a new pattern of whose voices have space to speak.