I speak of myself to bring here the sense of those others to whom this is in the process of happening (unnecessarily happening, for it need not, must not continue to be) and to remind us of those (I so nearly was one) who never come to writing at all.
We must not speak of women writers in our century (as we cannot speak of women in any area of recognized human achievement) without speaking also of the invisible, the as-innately-capable: the born to the wrong circumstances—diminished, excluded, foundered, silenced.
We who write are survivors, “only’s.”* One-out-of-twelve.
I must go very fast now, telescope and omit (there has already been so much telescoping and omitting), move to work, professional circumstances.
Devaluation: Still in our century, women’s books of great worth suffer the death of being unknown, or at best a peculiar eclipsing, far outnumbering the similar fate of the few such books by men. I think of the writers Kate Chopin, Mary Austin, Dorothy Richardson, Henry Handel Richardson (Ultima Thule), Susan Glaspell (Jury of Her Peers), Elizabeth Madox Roberts (Time of Man), Janet Lewis, Ann Petry, Harriette Arnow (The Dollmaker), Agnes Smedley (Daughter of Earth), Christina Stead, Kay Boyle, Jean Rhys—every one of them absorbing, and some with the stamp of enduring.* Considering their acknowledged stature, how comparatively unread, untaught, are Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Elizabeth Bowen, Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Mansfield—even Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, and Katherine Anne Porter.**
Critical attitudes: Two centuries later, still what Cynthia Ozick calls “the perpetual dancing dog phenomena,”† the injurious reacting to a book, not for its quality or content, but on the basis of its having been written by a woman—with consequent misreading, mistreatment.‡
One addition to the “she writes like a man” “with masculine power” kind of “praise.” Power is seldom recognized as the power it is at all, if the subject matter is considered woman’s: it is minor, moving, evocative, instinctive, delicate. “As delicate as a surgeon’s scalpel,” says Katherine Anne Porter of such a falsifying description for Katherine Mansfield’s art. Instinctive?
I judge her work to have been to a great degree a matter of intelligent use of her faculties, a conscious practice of a hard won craftsmanship, a triumph of discipline. . . .*
Climate in literary circles for those who move in them: ** Writers know the importance of being taken seriously, with respect for one’s vision and integrity; of comradeship with other writers; of being dealt with as a writer on the basis of one’s work and not for other reasons; and how chancy is recognition and getting published. There is no time to speak of this today; but nearly all writers who are women are at a disadvantage here.
Restriction: For all our freer life in this century, our significantly greater access to work, education, travel, varied experience, there is still limitation of circumstances for scope, subject, social context, the kind of comprehensions which come only in situations beyond the private. (What Charlotte Brontë felt so keenly 125 years ago as a denial of “facilities for observation . . . a knowledge of the world” which gives other writers “Thackeray, Dickens . . . an importance, variety, depth greatly beyond what I can offer.”)† “Trespass vision” cannot substitute.
Constriction: not always recognized as constriction. The age-old coercion of women toward one dimension continues to be “terribly, determiningly” present. Women writers are still suspect as unnatural if they concern themselves with aspects of their experience, interests, being, beyond the traditionally defined women’s sphere. Hortense Calisher is troubled that women writers
straining toward a world sensibility, or one equivalent to the roaming consciences of the men . . . or dispens[ing] with whatever was clearly female in their sensibility or experience . . . flee from the image society projects on [them].*
But conscience and world sensibility are as natural to women as to men; men have been freer to develop and exercise them, that is all. Indeed, one of the most characteristic strains in literature written by women (however dropped out of sight, or derided) is conscience, concern with wrongs to human beings in their time—from the first novel in our language by a woman, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, that first by anyone against slavery, through Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Sand, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Rebecca Harding Davis, Helen Hunt Jackson, Olive Schreiner, Ethel Voynich, Charlotte Perkins Gilman—to our own century’s Gabriela Mistral, Virginia Woolf (the essays), Nelly Sachs, Anna Seghers, Rachel Carson, Lillian Hellman, Lorraine Hansberry, Theodora Kroeber (Ishi), Agnes Smedley, Harriette Arnow, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Sylvia Ashton-Warner.
In contradiction to the compass of her own distinguished fiction, Calisher defines the “basic female experience from puberty on through childbed” as women’s natural subject:
For myself the feminism that comes straight from the belly, from the bed, and from childbed. A sensibility trusting itself for what it is, as the other half of basic life.
Constriction to the stereotypic biological-woman (breeder, sex-partner) sphere. Not only leaving out (what men writers usually leave out), ongoing motherhood, the maintenance-of-life, and other angel in the house so determiningly the experience of most women once they get out of bed and up from childbed, but other common female realities as well.*
And it leaves out the rest of women’s biological endowment as born human (including the creative capacity out of which women and men write). It was the denial of this endowment to live the whole of human life, the confinement of woman to a sphere, that brought the Women’s Rights movement into being in the last century—feminism born of humanism (and that prevented our Calishers from writing throughout centuries).
The acceptance of these age-old constrictive definitions of woman at a time when they are less true than ever to the realities of most women’s lives—and need not be true at all—remains a complex problem for women writing in our time. (Mary Wollstonecraft defined it as “the consciousness of being always female which degrades our sex.”)
So Anaïs Nin: accepting the constriction to a “feminine sensibility that would not threaten man.” Dwelling in the private, the inner; endless vibrations of mood; writing what was muted, exquisite, sensuous, subterranean. That is, in her fiction. In her Diaries (along with the narcissistic), the public, the social; power of characterization, penetrating observation, hard intellect, range of experience and relationship; different beauties. Qualities and complexities not present in her fiction—to its impoverishment.
The Bold New Women, to use another example (this from the title of a recent anthology), are the old stereotypic women, depicting themselves within the confines of the sexual-creature, biological-woman literary ghetto; mistaking themselves as new because the sex is explicit as in current male genre; the style and conception of female sexuality, out of Lawrence or Miller. “Whole areas of me are made by the kind of experience women haven’t had before,” reminds Doris Lessing. “Liberty is the right not to lie,” says Camus.
These pressures toward censorship, self-censorship; toward accepting, abiding by entrenched attitudes, thus falsifying one’s own reality, range, vision, truth, voice, are extreme for women writers (indeed have much to do with the fear, the sense of powerlessness that pervades certain of our books, the “above all, amuse” tone of others). Not to be able to come to one’s truth or not to use it in one’s writing, even in telling the truth having to “tell it slant,” robs one of drive, of conviction; limits potential stature; results in loss to literature and the comprehensions we seek in it.*
My time is up.
You who teach, read writers who are women. There is a whole literature to be re-estimated, revalued. Some works will prove to be, like the lives of their human authors, mortal—speaking only to their time. Others now forgotten, obscured, ignored, will live again for us.
Read, listen to, living women writers; our new as well as our established, often neglected ones. Not to have audience is a kind of death.<
br />
Read the compass of women writers in our infinite variety. Not only those who tell us of ourselves as “the other half,” but also those who write of the other human dimensions, realms.
Teach women’s lives through the lives of the women who wrote the books, as well as through the books themselves; and through autobiography, biography, journals, letters. Because most literature concerns itself with the lives of the few, know and teach the few books closer to the lives of the many. It should not be that Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker, Elizabeth Madox Robert’s Time of Man, Grace Paley’s Little Disturbances, are out of paperback print; that a Zora Neale Hurston is reprinted for the first time; that Agnes Smedley’s classic Daughter of Earth, ** has been out of print, unread, unknown, for forty years—a book of the greatest meaning, too, for those many students who are the first generation of their families to come into college.
Be critical. Women have the right to say: this is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades.
Help create writers, perhaps among them yourselves. There is so much unwritten that needs to be written. There are others besides the silenced eleven-out-of-twelve who could bring into literature what is not there now. That first generation of their families to come into college, who come from my world which (in Camus’s words) gives “emotion without measure,” are a special hope. It does not matter if in its beginning what emerges is not great, or even (as ordinarily defined) “good” writing.
Whether that is literature, or whether that is not literature, I will not presume to say,
wrote Virginia Woolf in her preface to Life As We Have Known It, Memoirs of the Working Women’s Guild,
but that it explains much and tells much, that is certain.
The greatness of literature is not only in the great writers, the good writers; it is also in that which explains much and tells much* (the soil, too, of great literature).
Soil or blossom, the hope and intention is that before the end of our second writing century, we will begin to have writers who are women in numbers equal to our innate capacity—at least twelve, for every one writer-woman of recognized achievement now.*
*This is the poorer for such limitation.
*These are measured phrases, enormously compressed. Each asks an entire book or books, to indicate its enabling relationship to literature written by women in this century—including the very numbers of women enabled to write.
**Richard Altick in his “Sociology of Authorship” found the proportion of women writers to men writers in Britain a fairly constant one for the years 1800 to 1935: 20 percent. This was based on books published, not on recognized achievement.
*Added to text, 1976.
**Biologically, too, the change for women now is enormous: life expectancy (USA) seventy-eight years—as contrasted with forty-eight years in 1900. Near forty-eight years of life before and after one is “a woman,” that is: “capable of conceiving and bearing young.” (And childbearing more and more voluntary.)
*Olive Schreiner. Women and Labour.
*Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s phrase; other phrases throughout from the Bible, John Milton, Richardson’s Clarissa, Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Virginia Woolf, Viola Klein, Mountain Wolf Woman.
*True almost without exception among the writers who are women in Twentieth Century Authors and Contemporary Authors.
**College English, May 1971. A year later (October 1972), College English published an extensive report, “Freshman Textbooks,” by Jean Mullens. In the 112 most used texts, she found 92.47 percent (5,795) of the selections were by men; 7.53 percent (472) by women (One Out of Twelve). Mullens deepened Showalter’s insights as to the subtly undermining effect on freshman students of the texts’ contents and language, as well as the minuscule proportion of women writers.
†In keeping with his 1950s–60s thesis of a distinctly female “biological, evolutionary need to fulfil self through serving others.”
*
O Rose thou art sick./The invisible worm,
That flies in the night/In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed/Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love/Does thy life destroy.
—William Blake
*Plath. A letter when a graduate student.
**The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. III, 1939–1944.
†A statement that would have baffled Austen, the Brontës, Mrs. Gaskell, Eliot, Stowe, Alcott, etc. The strictures were felt by them in other ways.
‡Inadequate, for the writer-being (“muteness is sickness for me”) is not portrayed. By contrast, how present she is in Plath’s own Letters Home.
*“Them lady poets must not marry, pal,” is how John Berryman, poet (himself oft married) expressed it. The old patriarchal injunction: “Woman, this is man’s realm. If you insist on invading it, unsex yourself—and expect the road to be made difficult.” Furthermore, this very unmarriedness and childlessness has been used to discredit women as unfulfilled, inadequate, somehow abnormal.
*Among those with children: Harriette Arnow, Mary Lavin, Mary McCarthy, Tess Slesinger, Eleanor Clark, Nancy Hale, Storm Jameson, Janet Lewis, Jean Rhys, Kay Boyle, Ann Petry, Dawn Powell, Meridel LeSueur, Evelyn Eaton, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Pearl Buck, Josephine Johnson, Caroline Gordon, Shirley Jackson; and a sampling in the unparalleled last two decades: Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Margaret Laurence, Grace Paley, Hortense Calisher, Edna O’Brien, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Pauli Murray, Françoise Mallet-Joris, Cynthia Ozick, Joanne Greenberg, Joan Didion, Penelope Mortimer, Alison Lurie, Hope Hale Davis, Doris Betts, Muriel Spark, Adele Wiseman, Lael Wertenbaker, Shirley Ann Grau, Maxine Kumin, Margaret Walker, Gina Barriault, Mary Gray Hughes, Maureen Howard, Norma Rosen, Lore Segal, Alice Walker, Nancy Willard, Charlotte Painter, Sallie Bingham. (I would now add Clarice Lispector, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, June Arnold, Ursula Le Guin, Diane Johnson, Alice Munro, Helen Yglesias, Susan Cahill, Rosellen Brown, Alta, and Susan Griffin.) Some wrote before children, some only in the middle or later years. Not many have directly used the material open to them out of motherhood as central source for their work.
*Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil.
**This does not mean that these full-time writers were hermetic or denied themselves social or personal life (think of James, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Balzac, Joyce, Gide, Colette, Yeats, Woolf, etc. etc.); nor did they, except perhaps at the flood, put in as many hours daily as those doing more usual kinds of work. Three to six hours daily have been the norm (“the quiet, patient, generous mornings will bring it”). Zola and Trollope are famous last-century examples of the four hours; the Paris Review interviews disclose many contemporary ones.
Full-timeness consists not in the actual number of hours at one’s desk, but in that writing is one’s major profession, practiced habitually, in freed, protected, undistracted time as needed, when it is needed.
*Professions for Women.
**As must many women writers.
*Among them: Harriette Arnow, Willa Cather, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, H.H. Richardson (of Ultima Thule), Ruth Suckow, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Sarah Wright, Agnes Smedley; Emily Dickinson, pre-eminently; Sylvia Plath, sometimes Christina Stead, Doris Lessing. (I would now add Edith Summers Kelley (Weeds and The Devil’s Hand), the Marge Piercy of Small Changes, and my own fiction.)
*In the long tradition of early rising, an hour here and there, or late-night mother-writers from Mrs. Trollope to Harriette Arnow to this very twenty-four hours—necessarily fitting in writing time in accordance with maintenance of life, and children’s, needs.
**Phrases, lines, throughout from Plath’s Ariel, letters, BBC broadcasts.
*Richard Howard, in The Art of Sylvia Plath, edited by Charles Newman.
*Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, edited by Annie Fields.
**Compared to men writers of like distinction and years of life, few women writers have had lives of unbroken productivity, or leave behind a “body of work.” Early beginnings, then silence; or clogged
late ones (foreground silences); long periods between books (hidden silences); characterize most of us. A Colette, Wharton, Glasgow, Millay, Lessing, Oates, are the exceptions.
*For myself, “survivor” contains its other meaning: one who must bear witness for those who foundered; try to tell how and why it was that they, also worthy of life, did not survive. And pass on ways of surviving; and tell our chancy luck, our special circumstances.
“Only’s” is an expression out of the 1950s Civil Rights time: the young Ralph Abernathy reporting to his Birmingham Church congregation on his trip up north for support:
I go to Seattle and they tell me, “Brother, you got to meet so and so, why he’s the only Negro Federal Circuit Judge in the Northwest”; I go to Chicago and they tell me, “Brother, you’ve got to meet so and so, why he’s the only full black professor of Sociology there is”; I go to Albany and they tell me, “Brother, you got to meet so and so, why he’s the only black senator in the state legislature . . .” [long dramatic pause] . . . WE DON’T WANT NO ONLY’S.
Only’s are used to rebuke (“to be models”); to imply the unrealistic, “see, it can be done, all you need is capacity and will.” Accepting a situation of “only’s” means: “let inequality of circumstance continue to prevail.”
*1976: At least some of these writers are now coming out of eclipse. But Glaspell, Mary Austin, Roberts, and H.H. Richardson are still out of print. So is most of Christina Stead.
Silences Page 9
