American Women Writers and the Marketplace

It's time to move on to the next stage of assessing women's literature. That's Elaine Showalter's message in her new book, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (Knopf), a 600-page survey of known and not-so-known authors. The title comes from an early 20th-century play-turned-short story by a Des Moines reporter, Susan Glaspell. In it, two farm women accompany county officials to the home of a miserly recluse who has been strangled in his bed. The men look for clear signs of whether the victim's wife killed him - physical evidence, an obvious motive, weapons. The women spot more subtle indications of psychological abuse: erratic sewing indicating her state of mind, a half-cleaned table, a murdered pet canary stuffed in a sewing basket. Understanding what drove Minnie, the wife, to the madness of murder, they act as a jury of her peers - and hide the evidence.

Why was that story forgotten until the 1970s? Why are so many works by women, best sellers in their day, still unknown?

Because, says Showalter, despite almost four decades of feminist criticism and the "recovery" of women's literature and rediscovery of individual authors, there's been little attempt to pull together writing by women into a defined literary tradition. As a result, female American writers, for the most part, aren't as widely known as might be expected, at least outside of academe.

Showalter is a doyenne of feminist literary studies: professor emerita of English at Princeton University, a past president of the Modern Language Association, author of several pathbreaking books. In her introduction, she writes in the tone of a manifesto: "I believe that women writers no longer need specially constituted juries, softened judgment, unspoken agreements, or suppression of evidence in order to stand alongside the greatest artists in our literary heritage." That, she acknowledges, may not sit well with some literary critics, men and women. The Chronicle Review talked with her about why she thinks the time is right for the kind of broad survey she's undertaken and why it's taken so long to get it.

Q. What do you mean by a women's literary history?

It's a narrative that selects, organizes, and evaluates literary works over a period of time: a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And a point of view, an argument. That approach has been unpopular in literary studies, in general, and in feminist literary studies, in particular.

Q. Why?

Literary histories, themselves, have become unpopular. There's a whole theoretical debate, for example, about whether it's even possible to combine genres, to write about history and literature together.

Then many feminist critics are very much opposed to any kind of selection, ranking, even chronology. They think it's premature to establish a canon. Especially in the beginning of feminist literary studies, the feeling was: Women can't get a fair evaluation ? so let's not have a trial.

Americanists aren't even sure there is an overview. They talk about postnationalism, and the idea that there may be a unifying vision of national identity is highly suspect. Where do you start? With the Spanish? The Native Americans? The Puritans?

Inasmuch as we have literary histories, they primarily include men. When John Updike died, there was a lot of speculation about who the next Great American Novelist would be. Most of the names were male. American women writers, as individuals, have been addressed. But the impact of all the work feminist critics have done is more limited than many had hoped for.

Q. What is the beginning, middle, and end of your story?

Women's writing is not determined by biology, anatomy, or psychology. It comes from women's relation to the literary marketplace, from pressures to live public and private lives, from literary influence. That's a more limited approach than trying to look at every kind of verbal expression. It's why I start with the Puritans.

American women writers were influenced in the beginning by European writing. Then gradually, as the men wrote sermons, women's literature began to follow its own themes. Look at a poet like Anne Bradstreet. Her poetry starts out very formal, very classical in its structures and themes. But living in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, she begins to write out of her own experience ? about pregnancy, childbirth, marriage, grandchildren. Her work is still readable today and is emotionally affecting.

With Mary Rowlandson, you see the beginning of the American novel. She's not a highly educated woman, and she might never have become an author had she not been captured, along with her three children, by the Narragansett Indians and held hostage. But she was a born writer. Her memoir of captivity and ransom really is a novel. She's observant, has an eye for detail, an ear for dialogue, a sense of suspense and of characters. And ? this is very American ? she has courage and resilience.

The middle period of American women's writing runs roughly from the 1850s to the Civil War. The critic F.O. Matthiessen once called the 1850s the American Renaissance. He meant it was a period when writing came of age aesthetically ? in the work of men (Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman). The concept applies to women, too. New themes, like abolition and the image of the household as a prison, emerge. But in 1857, The Atlantic Monthly was founded. While it published women writers, it drew the line between what it considered elite and popular literature, and increasingly women were seen as "popular" and left out.

In the 1850s, you had the emergence of different types of women writers: the American Brontes - Laura Curtis Bullard, who edited her own newspaper in New York; Mary Virginia Hawes Terhune, who grew up in Richmond, Va., and published stories, essays, and even her autobiography under pseudonyms; domestic novelists like Susan Warner, whose The Wide, Wide World, about the claustrophobic world of a little girl, was a great best seller. By the end of the decade, African-American writers appear - some of whom were published and widely read, some ignored. It was only in the 1970s that we found out that Harriet Jacobs was the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself.

This was also a period when women's poetry flowered, although in a way that revealed the constraints women worked under. Few of Emily Dickinson's poems were published. Julian Ward Howe's Passion-Flowers, about her unhappy marriage, was brought out anonymously; when her husband found out, he threatened her with divorce.

And the end of the story? In an earlier work, I talked about the phases of British women's literature: "feminine" (bowing to male expectations), "feminist" (rebelling), and "female" (articulating women's experience). By the 1980s and 90s, I think, we'd entered a new stage: "free." Women had joined the juries, as publishers, critics, reviewers, authors. No longer restricted to certain subjects, they could, for example, write about violence and boxing, as Joyce Carol Oates does. They could, like Raymond Carver, be minimalists (look at the understated style of Amy Hempel or Ann Beattie). They could write from any perspective, even a male one. They were multiculturalists.

That doesn't mean that their work has become fully integrated into our literary culture: That's why I wrote the book.

Q. What is distinctly American in this tradition?

From the beginning, women writers were interested in the interactions of race and culture - romance with Native Americans, abolition, and slavery. And more than male writers, they engaged with those issues in terms of their everyday lives: What did it mean - for domestic life, for children, for relationships - to live at the juncture of cultures?

There's also a real difference from the British literary tradition that I wrote about some time ago. There, the women writers had servants or some kind of household help. In the United States, women did the housework, or at least they were expected to know how it should be done. That gets transformed into questions about how the house imprisons women. And you get complaints. American women hated housework.

Q. You say a literary history has to make judgments. Give us an example of whom you see as overrated, whom underrated?

Overrated: Gertrude Stein. She played an important role in the development of modernism, but she played it for men. And she is just not readable. She became viewed as a "sister": That doesn't sanctify her work. We can criticize it.

I look with a critical eye at contemporary poetry, too. There are a great many talented woman poets today, but I don't think any of them measure up to a Sylvia Plath or Adrienne Rich. I don't feel any male poets do either.

Underrated: In the 19th century, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her reputation got overwhelmed by the political debates over Uncle Tom's Cabin, but you need to look at Stowe as a novelist. Dred is a powerful analysis of the possibilities of violence and insurrection.

In the 20th century, Jean Stafford has become known for her venomous attacks on the women's movement in the 1970s. (I once got a really rabid letter from her denouncing my work.) But accounts of her frustrations, childhood anxieties, bewilderment over finding her own voice are worth reading. We also need to pay more attention to Shirley Jackson. She wore the public face of a best-selling novelist, wife of a distinguished literary critic, happy mom. But the private face of a "bad girl" - morbidly obese, alcoholic, agoraphobic - revealed in a series of her writings is compelling.

Q. What was it like to work on such a huge survey?

When I did my book on English women writers, I had been working on it since my dissertation. I spent time in England, traveling all over to archives and libraries. A lot of the material wasn't even indexed. Sometimes it was indexed under a husband's name. It was an adventure: It was something you had to do when you were young.

I've got to admit that the prospect of writing about an American women's tradition seemed overwhelming. To start with, America is so much larger than England. But working on the book turned out to be much easier than I expected. Everything's indexed; much is digitized - you can sit at your computer, call up a text, and there it is! I found that this was, indeed, a project I could do at this point in my career.

Q. You're in the middle of a book tour. How are people responding?

This may be the right moment for this kind of book. We're in a new century. Some of the old taboos of political correctness have receded. It's possible to say, "This is someone who has talent, and this is someone who doesn't." The quality of women's writing is such that it can take that kind of criticism.

I've been going to both bookstores and college campuses. Particularly at the bookstores, I find that people are "getting it." They're asking about books by authors from their region, about what to read in their book clubs. But so far, especially when I talk to nonacademics, I find myself mainly talking to women. I think we need literary history to break that boundary down.

Academic reaction develops more slowly. When I speak on college campuses, people are responsive. But it takes a while for academic reviews to come out. That's when the debates will start.

People can dispute my choices. They can argue with my narrative. But at least they have something to contend with. That's a start.

EXCERPTS

I had eight birds hatcht in one nest,
Four Cocks were there, and Hens the rest.
I nurst them up with pain and care,
No cost nor labour did I spare
Till at the last they felt their wing,
Mounted the Trees and learned to sing.
Chief of the Brood then took his flight
To Regions far and left me quite.
My mournful chirps I after send
Till he return, or I do end.

Anne Bradstreet, From "In Reference to Her Children" (1659)
___

One might almost imagine that there were no such thing as absolute truth, since a change of situation or temperament is capable of changing the whole force of an argument. We have been accustomed, even those of us who feel most, to look on the arguments for and against the system of slavery with the eyes of those who are at ease. We do not even know how fair is freedom, for we were always free. We shall never have all the materials for absolute truth on this subject, till we take into account, with our own views and reasonings, the views and reasonings of those who have bowed down to the yoke, and felt the iron enter into their souls.
___

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred: A Tale Of The Great Dismal Swamp (1856)

I always wanted a brother and I liked the things that men did; when I was growing up, women didn't go skiing, or hiking, or have adventurous canoe trips, or any of that sort of thing. I felt the lack of a brother whom I imagined could introduce me to the vigorous outdoor activities that my sisters were not particularly interested in. If you live in a woman's world and that's all there is, the other side of the equation looks pretty interesting. ...

I find male characters interesting. Because much of my writing is set in an earlier period, they do things that women could not appropriately do.

E. Annie Proulx, quoted in "A Conversation with E. Annie Proulx," by Katie Bolick, The Atlantic online (November 12, 1997)


 - Karen J. Winkler

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