A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

by Siri Hustvedt

  Such differences of opinion are usually understood as a matter of taste. A book that tastes good to you doesn’t have the same flavor for me. Literature is not science; there are no experiments that can be run again and again to see if we will get the same results. André Gide is famously credited with rejecting Proust, but Proust’s housekeeper, Céleste Albaret, claimed that she and Proust suspected that Gide never even opened the manuscript.15 This may be the worst literary mistake, not bothering to read a book because of some vague prejudice, which, like so much in our lives, is often subliminal. We all have them, I’m afraid: “You mean that giggling girl over there with the low-cut sweater and the beautiful breasts is doing her second postdoc at Rockefeller?”

  Prejudices against women writers run deep, and yet, all novelists of both sexes are read by women far more than by men. My friend Ian McEwan once said, “When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.”16 I quote the ironic narrator of my novel The Summer Without Men, Mia Fredricksen, who has been making jokes about genitals and sexual difference throughout her tale.

  Lots of women read fiction. Most men don’t . . . If a man opens a novel, he likes to have a masculine name on the cover; it’s reassuring somehow. You never know what might happen to that external genitalia if you immerse yourself in imaginary doings concocted by someone with the goods on the inside. Moreover, men like to boast about their neglect of fiction: “I don’t read fiction, but my wife does.”17

  In my experience, the line that follows “I don’t read fiction but my wife does” is: “Would you sign the book for her?” In other words, a novel can taste bad before it is eaten simply because it has been written by a woman. Of course, I often wonder what those men are doing at my reading in the first place. Why didn’t your wife come? A young man, a writer himself, once said to me, “You know, you write like a man.” He was not referring to the books I had written in the voice of a man, but to all of my work, and this statement was intended as a high compliment. Women are not immune to this prejudice either. A young woman once approached me at an art opening to say, “I never read books by women, but a friend of mine insisted I try one of yours, and I loved it!” I did not feel particularly grateful. A literary editor in New York, Chris Jackson, admitted rather sheepishly in a blog that he could not remember the last time he had read a novel by a woman.18

  The work of the human imagination, it seems to me, is about becoming another, looking at the world from another perspective, even if, as in Proust, the writer becomes another Marcel, a kind of second literary self who narrates the story. But, for many of us, it means traveling farther, becoming a person of another sex or class or background or just someone funnier, tougher, and stranger than we are. I have argued that the multiple selves of an author’s inner geography are created at the deep levels of her being, which includes the bodily music of her earliest forgotten interactions, as well as all the books she’s read, the people she’s loved and hated, and her memories, fantasies, hopes, and fears. Can we say then that the process of writing is fundamentally different for a woman than for a man? Is the question “Why one story and not another?” bound to one’s sex?

  If we internalize the sexism of the world, and we all do, how can it be escaped? Do women inevitably write differently from men because they have different bodies, menstruate, and can potentially give birth to children? Is Frankenstein a womanly book and The Portrait of a Lady a manly one? Margaret Cavendish’s works were viewed as so masculine in her time that many refused to believe she had written them. Even Virginia Woolf was unable to see Cavendish’s genius. In A Room of One’s Own she refers to the seventeenth-century writer as “a vision of loneliness and riot . . . as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death.”19 Should women writers follow the French feminist Hélène Cixous’s famous exhortation in “The Laugh of the Medusa”: “Woman must write herself”?20 She advises women to disrupt syntax and all the forms of language that have been created by a phallocentric, logocentric patriarchal world. But what does this really mean? Could I ever get all those great books written by men out of me even if I tried? I doubt it. Would I want to? Haven’t I always felt that men and women are a lot more the same than they are different? Am I wrong? Don’t I find male characters lurking in me all the time? Should I not write about them, too? If I borrow the terms of our culture with its stark divisions between masculine and feminine, do I not have aspects of both? Should I deny my masculinity for my femininity? Can’t I be at once feminine and masculine?

  Or, more ominously, there are those who claim that the female sex is doomed to literary mediocrity or underrepresentation in literature for bio-evolutionary reasons. Brian Boyd is a university distinguished professor in the Department of English at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He is an expert on the works of Vladimir Nabokov, and his book On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction was published in 2009 by Harvard University Press. His book received wide attention and acclaim. I bought the book because the title sounded promising. I, too, am deeply interested in puzzling out the biological roots of fiction. Boyd has done his research in science and is eager to show how evo-criticism can supplant the high-flown theory of cultural constructivism that has been so popular in literature departments around the world. In the book he argues that art, fiction included, is an adaptation, a heritable trait that helps the species to survive, which he links to animal play behavior.

  I am in complete agreement that art develops in part out of play and have written about the relation between the two from a different perspective, which combines neurobiological and psychoanalytic thought.21 Boyd is on rather shaky ground when it comes to art as an adaptation. The arguments about what traits are adaptations and which aren’t continue to trouble evolutionists. Stephen Jay Gould argued against seeing adaptations everywhere. What he called “spandrels” are the by-products of adaptations taken over by natural selection for other purposes. “Reading and writing are now highly adaptive for humans,” Gould writes, “but the mental machinery for these crucial capacities must have originated as spandrels that were co-opted later, for the brain reached its current size and conformation tens of thousands of years before any human invented reading and writing.”22 Boyd, however, is convinced that the making of art is connected to reproductive fitness, and that is how he arrives at an answer to the question of sex and literature.

  He informs his reader that men have a stronger competitive drive than women, and he goes on to tell the now familiar story that originated with Darwin of the coy female choosy about her mates and the promiscuous male out to impregnate as many females as possible. While few females don’t become mothers, competition among males for females means that strong males may be so successful with females that they produce offspring right and left and deprive other males of reproductive opportunity altogether, therefore creating greater reproductive variance in men. Boyd ignores considerable scientific evidence that the picture is by no means so simple. There are innumerable species that do not fit into this neat scheme. Female promiscuity among various species is far more prevalent than was once thought. There are also many examples of role reversal: the female is the showy creature and the male tends the nest. The diversity of mating habits in the animal world is great, but Boyd does not mention this.

  For Boyd, the male desire to dominate other males extends to the art of storytelling. “From a tribal storyteller or Homer to Shakespeare or Tolkien,” men, Boyd claims, have the edge. They are so intent on crushing their rivals, in fact, that they are more likely than women to “engage in extreme behaviors,” which in turn explains why they are “overrepresented at both extremes—success and genius, as well as failure.”23 This narrative has become a mantra among evolutionary psychologists. “Despite Murasaki, Jane Austen, and J. K. Rowling,” Boyd writes, “males outnumber females as classic and even popular storytellers . . . while at the other end of the spectrum, males outnumber females by more tha
n four to one in autism, which correlates highly with poor performance in social cognition and pretend play. But females, while on average they do not seek status as urgently as males, also on average invest more in childrearing, and are the principal tellers of fictional stories, of folk tales and nursery rhymes, to their children.”24 There are several dubious assumptions in this little section of Boyd’s book.

  First, neither Boyd nor anybody else knows that men were the anointed storytellers back in the Pleistocene epoch. Nobody knows what their speech was like, and the details of their social arrangements are far from clear. We seem to know a lot about the weather back then, but that will not help us divine anything about storytelling culture. Second, arguing from numbers is a curious strategy. Does the fact that male storytellers “outnumber” female ones in recorded history really serve as evidence of male competition? Is Boyd saying that the fact that women, even those of privileged classes, were largely excluded from the education granted to men has nothing to do with the numbers of male storytellers in literary history? And what about the fact that when literacy became widespread in eighteenth-century Europe, women began to write and publish in much larger numbers? Third, Boyd admits that women are storytellers, but their lack of a fierce competitive urge seems to have doomed them to the nursery. What exactly does this mean? Does it mean that women’s stories are suitable for nurturing the undeveloped minds of children within the confines of domestic life, but the tales can’t survive outside it in the agonistic literary world of bruising masculine competition?

  Boyd’s argument is typical of the neo-Darwinist approaches to contemporary culture made by evolutionary psychologists. This is not to say that Darwin was wrong or evolutionary considerations are unimportant in understanding human beings—far from it—but rather because the simplistic yoking of the idea of greater male reproductive variance to the fact that there have been (and perhaps still are) more men making literature than women may be a story to explain and justify why things are the way they are.

  Boyd’s use of autism, the etiology of which is unknown, is worrisome. No one knows why there appear to be more boys with the syndrome, although some believe it is underdiagnosed in girls. Implicit in Boyd’s argument, I believe, is Simon Baron-Cohen’s “extreme male brain” theory of autism. Baron-Cohen proposes genetic causes for psychological sex differences, according to which the female brain is “hardwired” for empathy and the male brain for systematizing. Autistic people, who have been stereotyped as “unfeeling geeks,” fall into the extreme male category. It is not obvious that autistic people lack empathy for others. Furthermore, autism is a highly varied condition that includes many people who never acquire language. It is rather hard to think of such persons as extreme systematizers.25 Although autism has been linked to a number of genes, it is generally regarded as a syndrome that partakes of both genetic and environmental factors.26 The expression and suppression of genes is a complex interactive process that is dependent on both the cellular environment and the environment external to the organism as a whole. To explain the higher rates of autism among boys as due to sexual selection via genes seems to me to be unwarranted. Further, the idea that “genius,” literary or otherwise, is a male trait is founded on measurements, such as IQ testing, that have repeatedly been shown to have a sociological bias.

  Every evolutionary psychologist should recognize the role social differences play in human societies and what a highly evolved and plastic neocortex (the most recently evolved part of our brains, which continually changes in relation to experience) has made possible in human beings. There are a thousand rebuttals to thinking of this kind, most of which come from within science itself, but that does not make such arguments any less numerous. Throughout his book Boyd makes claims that are controversial within science, and critics have taken him to task for some of them. Although there may be a person out there who noted Boyd’s claim that women are “on average” better suited for telling bedtime stories than for literary genius, I have been unable to find a critical word written about it.

  There are many scholars who take a theoretical model—it matters little whether it’s social constructionism or evolutionary theory—and squeeze all of life, literature, and the kitchen sink into it. They ask poor questions because they have assumed far too much already. Assumptions are, after all, unexamined answers. “Why one story and not another?” is at the least a good question. Obviously, being a woman has influenced the stories I tell. I am a daughter, a sister, a wife, and a mother, and these roles have shaped who I am, along with the geography of that subliminal psychobiological terrain I mine for my fiction, but my stories have also been molded by my quirky nervous system, my ranging intellectual passions, my insatiable reading habits, and, evolutionary psychology notwithstanding, my rank ambition and iron will to master whatever ideas come my way.

  The great enemy of thought and creativity is the received idea. The writer who gets his material from the ready-made platitudes of contemporary culture, no matter how famous he is, is doomed to oblivion. As readers, we must be careful about bringing those same platitudes to the books we read. They can make us blind. The great force of literature lies precisely in its evocation of a particular life or lives. We are able to experience these intimate narratives through the protection of the “aesthetic illusion.” In reading a novel, as in writing one, we shift our perspective and enter the world of another person to travel with her or him for the duration of the book. The story’s truth or falseness lies in a resonance that is not easily articulated, but it is one that lives between reader and text—and that resonance is at once sensual, rhythmic, emotional, and intellectual. And this is possible because we are not rats but imaginative beings who can leap out of ourselves and, for a while at least, become someone else, young or old, sane or mad, woman or man.

  I Wept for Four Years and When I Stopped I Was Blind

  * * *

  IN the mid-1980s, Gretchen Van Boemel, director of clinical electrophysiology at the Doheny Eye Institute at the University of Southern California began seeing dozens of patients who came to her complaining of blindness or severely compromised vision. A number of them had already paid visits to optometrists and ophthalmologists who had accused them of malingering. Although Van Boemel could find no explanation for their failing vision, the women—they were all women—had a shared story.1 They were Cambodian refugees living in California who had survived Khmer Rouge atrocities. One woman who had seen her family forcibly taken away to their deaths in 1975 reported that she had cried for four years, and when she stopped, she was blind.2 Another woman had been forced to gather fellow inmates to watch executions in a Khmer work camp. The soldiers insisted that the witnesses show no emotion while their family members and friends were beaten to death, disemboweled, beheaded, or hanged. She attributed her blindness to the fact that she had been beaten so often by the Khmer Rouge, her spirit had left her body.3

  Van Boemel and her coauthor, the psychologist Patricia Rozee-Koker, saw 150 Cambodian women suffering from varying degrees of hysterical blindness, also referred to these days as a functional, somatoform, or conversion disorder. In the current psychiatric literature, the point is made again and again that conversion is a nonorganic, psychogenic illness.4 The word “hysteria” has embraced many symptoms over time, has been traced to myriad causes, and has gone in and out of fashion as a diagnosis, but it reached its apex in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when it was studied intensely, then fell into decline and was covered over with new names. The patients did not vanish, but hysteria became an embarrassment in both neurology and psychiatry, tainted by its past connections to hypnosis and psychoanalytic ideas that had fallen from favor, as well as the unpleasant truth that no one even had a hypothesis about what the phenomenon might mean in biological terms. It did not help, of course, that it was also considered a woman’s disease.

  The truth is that the history of hysteria, particularly in its heyday, provides rich ground for its reformulatio
n today. Despite shifting medical classifications and various cultural and scientific prejudices that are inevitably part of disease descriptions, hysteria has long been characterized as an ailment that takes on the appearance of other ailments, can spread from one person to another, and is somehow related to strong emotions. In his 1682 Epistolary Dissertation, Thomas Sydenham described the disease as “proteiform and chameleon-like” and linked it to a person’s “antecedent sorrows.”5 Breaking with earlier theorists, he argued that men can have it, too. Two hundred years later, Jean-Martin Charcot made the disease both famous and sensational at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris and held public demonstrations in which his hypnotized, hysterical patients performed their disease in front of fascinated audiences.6

  The spectacles Charcot staged have, I think, obfuscated his scientific contributions to understanding hysteria and created an idea among scholars, especially in the humanities, that hysteria was a medical invention in which ideology and the use of photography collided to create a cultural disease.7 In her book Medical Muses, a study of life at the Salpêtrière and three of the women in Charcot’s care, my sister Asti Hustvedt succinctly articulates the problem that continues to haunt the illness: “I am convinced,” she writes, “that Blanche, Augustine, and Geneviève were neither frauds nor passive receptacles of a sham diagnosis. They really did ‘have’ hysteria. Located on the problematic border between psychosomatic and somatic disorders, hysteria was a confusion of real and imagined illness.”8 She is right, and that confusion bears scrutiny.