A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women

by Siri Hustvedt

  There is an irony, of course. The outside becomes the inside. Every book that changes me becomes me. Its foreign music, rhythms, thoughts, and story settle into my body and may reappear in my own writing, but by then I no longer know they are there.

  “No Competition”

  * * *

  IN her 1856 essay, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” George Eliot wrote, “Happily, we are not dependent on argument to prove that Fiction is a department of literature in which women can, after their kind, fully equal men.” Would anyone argue with this today? Is writing an activity that depends on the sex of the writer? If it does, what does that mean? A survey in 2015 by Goodreads revealed that on average 80 percent of a woman writer’s audience is female as opposed to 50 percent for a man writer’s. In other words, men who write fiction have an audience representative of the world as a whole while women don’t. No doubt there are particular writers who defy that average. Many more women read fiction than men. Still, a literary text is just that—pages of print. If that print has a male narrator, is it masculine? Does a female protagonist make it feminine? Is there some other quality that marks a book as sexed?

  I am a woman writer married to a man writer (Paul Auster), and I have often been thrown into situations that have forced me to ask whether I am encountering sexism (either conscious or unconscious) or something else. Was the Chilean journalist who insisted that my husband had “taught” me both psychoanalysis and neuroscience (even after I told him this was most definitely not true, that my husband had little interest in either) a sexist idiot or just a man who wanted to believe his literary hero was more or less responsible for his wife’s education? The man wasn’t in the least bit hostile. He just seemed puzzled that in these subjects I was far better read than my spouse. What about the grand old man of French publishing who had read my third novel and, with a magisterial wave of his hand, said, “You should keep writing”? Was he being pompous or condescending? In the summer of 2015, I received a fan letter from a woman heaping praise on my novel The Blazing World. There are nineteen different first-person narrations in that novel—both male and female. She had several questions, but one of them flabbergasted me. She wanted to know whether my husband had written the sections of the book that belong to one of the male characters, Bruno Kleinfeld. I know she asked me this in all innocence, but what does it mean?

  Numbers tell part of a story but rarely all of it. It is interesting to keep tabs on the percentages of male and female readers of fiction, on how many books by men and women are reviewed and so forth, because they alert us to aspects of literary culture that would be hard to detect without them. And yet, the statistics don’t explain why it happens. Unconscious prejudice is now written about continually, but the interesting question is not that it exists but why it exists and how it works in all of us. Reading novels is one activity among many in the culture, and the way ideas of the feminine and the masculine infect our literary habits cannot be siphoned off from the larger culture, nor is it easy to discuss that culture as if it were an unvariegated block of consensus.

  In 1968, Philip Goldberg conducted a now famous study using college women as his subjects. He gave two groups of students the same essay, authored by either John T. McKay or Joan T. McKay, to evaluate. John’s was rated superior in all respects. As with every study, repetitions of this one have come up with different results. Nevertheless, since then, study after study has demonstrated what I call “the masculine enhancement effect.” A 2012 randomized double-blind study from Yale found that when science faculty judged credentials that had been assigned either a male or female name, the phantom man was offered a higher salary and more career mentoring than the phantom woman. Men and women were equally biased. Surely, few of these professors were aware they gave men a better deal. Am I aware of my own biases? Is objectivity possible in these cases? How can human beings rid themselves of qualities of which they have no consciousness? And again, why do men have the advantage?

  In her book, Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women, the linguist and psychologist Virginia Valian discusses what she calls “implicit gender schemas,” unconscious ideas about masculinity and femininity that infect our perceptions and that tend to overrate the achievements of men and underrate those of women. Women in positions of power are routinely evaluated less highly than their male counterparts even when there is no difference in performance. A 2008 study found that when academic papers were subject to double-blind peer review—neither the author nor the reviewer was identified—the number of female first-authored papers accepted increased significantly. A 2004 study by Madeline E. Heilman et al., “Penalties for Success: Reactions to Women Who Succeed at Male Gender-Typed Tasks,” tells the story in its title. A 2001 study by Laurie Rudman and Peter Glick concluded with these words: “The prescription for female niceness is an implicit belief that penalizes women unless they temper their agency with niceness.” In order to be accepted, women must compensate for their ambition and strength by being nice. Men don’t have to be nearly as nice as women.

  I do not believe women are natively nicer than men. They may learn that niceness brings rewards and that naked ambition is often punished. They may ingratiate themselves because such behavior is rewarded and a strategy of stealth may lead to better results than being forthright, but even when women are open and direct, they are not always seen or heard. During a discussion that followed delivery of a paper at a scholarly meeting I attended, I watched a woman begin to ask a question. After a few words had escaped her mouth, a man interrupted her, took the floor, and expounded at some length. After that, she launched into her point again, and another man chopped her off in midsentence. At final count, four men had swooped into her remarks before she finally barged in and spoke her mind. By that time, her frustration had grown, and having gained the stage at last, she made a forceful, aggressive critique of the paper. After the meeting was over, I left the room with a male colleague who, referring to the woman, said, “She was really mean.”

  We have all heard these stories. They have been reported again and again in many forms and in many places. What fascinated me about this incident was that the men who interrupted the woman did not seem to recognize they were behaving badly. It was as if she were an invisible person with an inaudible voice, a disembodied phantom in the room. She was not young, shy, feeble voiced, or hesitant. In fact, she had none of the qualities that are often blamed for women’s failure to be heard in meetings such as this one. Women are too meek. Women prefer a give-and-take style. Women are less aggressive than men and more socially oriented. They care about the feelings of others. This woman did not lack confidence, nor did she give a hoot about whether her comments offended the author of the paper. She just had a hard time getting a word in edgewise. Had she shouted her question from the start, she might have gained the floor, but at a cost. After grotesquely rude treatment, made even more grotesquely rude by the fact that the rude people were oblivious to their rudeness, she understandably delivered her pent-up words in a loud, emphatic tone, which was subsequently assigned the quality of meanness.

  It made me sad. No, such behavior does not draw blood. It is just business as usual, but the effects of this form of annihilation should not be taken lightly either. To speak and be not just ignored but talked over as if you do not exist is a terrible thing for anyone. It is an assault on a person’s selfhood, and year after year of such treatment leaves ugly marks on the psyche. But how is it that those men were actually blind to that woman’s presence and deaf to her words? What is actually going on? Once mastered, learning of all kinds becomes unconscious and automatic. Consciousness, it seems, is parsimonious, reserved for dealing not with routine and predictable perceptions in our lives but with what is novel and unpredictable. Rote activities call for minimal consciousness, but if while standing in my kitchen, I turn and see a gorilla pounding on the window, full awareness is imperative.

  Perception is by its very nature conservative and biased, a form of typecasting
that helps us make sense of the world. More often than not, when gorillas are not pounding on our kitchen windows, we see what we expect to see. We do not passively receive information from the world but are rather creative interpreters of it. We learn from the past through emotionally important events, perceive the present in light of that learning, and then project the lesson into the future. Somehow, that woman became imperceptible to the men who were speaking in that room. I am wholly convinced that the men who talked over her would have been amazed and embarrassed had they seen a film of the proceedings. Beneath this common occurrence—men interrupting women—there have to be a number of experiences that become expectations, or what some scientists call “priors,” which are strong enough to make an entire person disappear, at least for a while, but what are those assumptions or unconscious ideas exactly and what might they have to do with reading literature?

  Another personal story holds some promise of an answer or at least a partial answer. I once interviewed the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard in New York in front of an audience. It was soon after the first volume of his massive autobiographical work, My Struggle, had been published in English. I am an admirer of the book, or rather books, both in Norwegian and in its excellent English translation (so far), and was happy to interview the writer. I had prepared questions, and he answered them sincerely and intelligently. Near the end of our talk, I asked him why in a book that contained hundreds of references to writers, only a single woman was mentioned: Julia Kristeva. Were there no works by women that had had any influence on him as a writer? Was there a reason for this rather startling omission? Why didn’t he refer to any other women writers?

  His answer came swiftly: “No competition.”

  I was a little taken aback by his response and, although I should have asked him to elaborate, we were running out of time, and I didn’t get a chance to do it. And yet, his answer has played in my head like a recurring melody. “No competition.” I don’t believe that Knausgaard actually thinks Kristeva is the only woman, living or dead, capable of writing or thinking well. This would be preposterous. My guess instead is that for him competition, literary and otherwise, means pitting himself against other men. Women, however brilliant, simply don’t count, with the possible exception of Kristeva, who I happen to know was all the rage during the time Knausgaard attended the University of Bergen, and she may have slipped into his book for that reason. Had he lived in another place at another time, Virginia Woolf or Simone Weil might have held the position of “literary or intellectual woman.” Knausgaard is not alone in his dismissal of women as competition. In fact, he may simply be more honest than many male writers, scholars, and other menfolk who don’t see or hear a woman because she is not competition. I do not think this is the only reason for disappearing women in a room or in the broader zone of literature, but it is surely an interesting thought, one that should be addressed. Is Knausgaard simply conscious of an attitude that other men and women implicitly believe but cannot or do not articulate?

  In an interview with a journalist from the English newspaper the Observer, Knausgaard acknowledged that as a child he was teased, called “jessie” (gay), and admits he never recovered from it. “I don’t talk about feelings,” he said in the interview, “but I write a lot about feelings. Reading, that’s feminine, writing, that’s feminine. It is insane, it’s really insane but it still is in me.” The notion that reading and writing are tainted by the feminine has lodged itself deeply in the collective Western psyche. And Knausgaard is right, there is something insane about this idea. What does it mean that literacy, the grand and recent advance in the history of humanity, should be denigrated (Knausgaard makes it clear this is what he means) as a fey, womanly business? When for centuries only a certain class had access to the privilege of reading and writing, and in that privileged class boys were the ones given superb educations, not girls, something Virginia Woolf wrote about in A Room of One’s Own with notable bitterness, how have we landed in this curious cultural zone? And further, if literature itself is somehow feminine, why would women be pushed out of literary competition?

  We, all of us, men and women, encode masculinity and femininity in implicit metaphorical schemas that divide the world in half. Science and mathematics are hard, rational, real, serious, and masculine. Literature and art are soft, emotional, unreal, frivolous, and feminine. In a paper advising teachers on methods that encourage boys to read, I came across the following sentence that echoes Knausgaard’s painful childhood memories of being called girlish: “Boys often express distaste for reading as a passive, even feminine activity.” Understanding and manipulating numbers doesn’t carry the same stigma. Is doing arithmetic more active? Doesn’t a child also have to master reading and writing? Isn’t a mastery of reading and writing vital to negotiating the world? And since both numbers and letters are abstract signs, genderless representations, the prejudice against reading as feminine is nothing short of stupefying, or, as Knausgaard put it, “insane.” But the bias is associative. Anything that becomes identified with girls and women loses status, whether it is a profession, a book, a movie, or a disease. But the deep question here turns on the problem of feelings. What is it that made Knausgaard move straight from feelings to femininity?

  Knausgaard might be called the contemporary king of automatic writing. My Struggle is an uncontrolled text. That is the nature of the project. I asked him about automatic writing in the interview, but he knew nothing about its history in either psychiatry or Surrealism. He also knew nothing about the French genre I queried him about: autofiction. In autofiction, a term coined by Serge Doubrovsky, the book’s hero and the author’s name must be identical, and the material for the book, although it can use the devices of fiction, must come from autobiographical sources. (Interestingly, in France, Knausgaard’s book was largely ignored, as it was in Germany, where its title was not translated as Mein Kampf.) In the interview with me, he insisted that he never edited the book, never altered a word once it was written, and I have no reason to doubt him. The work is a raw, uncensored flood of words issuing from a vulnerable, bruised self, a self most of us recognize to one degree or another but choose to protect. It is the novel as an unchecked, autobiographical, often highly emotional outpouring, which nevertheless borrows the conventions of the novel form—explicit description and dialogue, which no human being actually remembers. This loose and baggy form means the reader must tolerate inevitable longueurs—meandering passages in which very little happens. There are also semi-philosophical digressions, musings on art and writers and ideas, some of them vibrant, others flat.

  Knausgaard writes a lot about his “feelings,” and he persists at it even when he is humiliated in the process, when he looks like a fool and a ninny. Such fearless openness is fascinating in anyone but may be more fascinating in a man because a man who reveals his feelings is at greater risk of being shamed for those revelations. He has farther to fall. The book shocked its Norwegian audience. Well before the English translation appeared, my Norwegian relatives and friends reported on the sudden Knausgaard frenzy. Misery memoirs are not fashionable in Norway; with the exception of diaries, usually published posthumously, there is no tradition for the I-am-an-oozing-sore confession. The current legacy in the United States and England, if not in France and Germany, of the writer’s tell-all, soul-bearing volumes is not shameful but heroic. Although Knausgaard has admitted to his own tortured qualms about the people in his family he hurt by writing his massive novel, critics have not regarded My Struggle as a morally compromised work. There are many ironies in all this, however, and they must be approached delicately if the “no competition” clause in the contract of the world of letters is to be understood with any subtlety.

  Emotion and its open expression have long been associated with femininity and the corporeal. The novel has always been a vulgar, even despised form, closely linked to domestic life, women, and their feelings. George Eliot’s anonymous essay was in part an attempt to distinguish
her own serious, intellectual, and realist position on the novel from the ladies writing silly, unrealistic books with perfect heroines in overripe prose. This need for distance from feminine gewgaws was nothing new. In the eighteenth century, the novel, especially novels written by women and addressed to women, novels “for the Ladies,” were held in low regard by critics. In “Gendered Strategies in the Criticism of Early Fiction,” Laura Runge quotes Ambrose Philips, who advertised his periodical, the Free-Thinker, as “an elevating alternative” to “the insipid Fictions of Novels and Romances in which most women indulged.” Runge further notes that the prefaces of these early novels encouraged “a bonding between the female reader and the female heroine, or . . . between the reader and the text personified as a woman.” The novel has long been sneered at as a girly thing.

  For the Romantics, feeling, which was regarded as a feminine principle, was bound to all of the arts, and we continue to live under their spell. The feminine man or man of feeling was a staple of the period. No one has forgotten Goethe’s sensation, young Werther, his tender, aching sensibility, or his suicide that set off a rash of imitations. In his book Men Writing the Feminine: Literature, Theory, and the Question of Genders, Thais E. Morgan notes the dangers involved for the Romantic poet who found himself on female terrain. Although Morgan’s prose is awkward, his point is well taken. “If imagining female voices of feeling opens an exciting resource for a male poet of feeling, Wordsworth’s texts report a disturbing apprehension: that a man writing the feminine may be discovering and engendering more complex involvements of gender than he first imagined.” In other words, becoming woman or allowing woman to creep into one’s writing self may be dangerously transformative.