Loyal to My Sex by Karen Vanuska

Loyal to My Sex By Karen Vanuska Loyal to My Sex by Karen Vanuska A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx By Elaine Showalter (Knopf, 2009) The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Salon, Slate. No, this isn’t a list of journals seeking government bailout funds. This is a list of journals in which women reviewed Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers earlier this spring. When Showalter commented about the lack of men reviewing her book during a Bay Area NPR radio interview with Michael Krasny, Krasny, at first, sounded incredulous, then worried. Perhaps Krasny hadn’t anticipated the finer points of the gender-issue when scheduling Showalter for the interview because he had been justifiably consumed by A Jury of Her Peers’ compendium of over three hundred years of profiles of American female writers. Or perhaps Krasny was as guilty as the rest of us when it came to assuming that the work of women writers is received equally to that of men? Didn't the battle-of-the sexes end with the era of bra burnings and the Equal Rights Amendment? Well, if all the speculation about which male authors would step forward to fill John Updike’s shoes as the Great American Novelist is any indication, the battle of the sexes still simmers in the literary world. Moreover, in the minds of many men, women remain the second sex. For the men who chose not to review A Jury of Her Peers, was it a matter of leaving it to the experts, the reader’s who cared -- women? Perhaps. I certainly hope that it wasn't a matter of indifference or condescension. Susan Glaspell’s short story ―A Jury of Her Peers‖ is about two women who, upon discovering evidence that proves that another woman killed her husband, opt not to betray that woman because they judge the husband guilty of habitual abuse of his wife; in their minds, the wife was justified in killing her husband and a court had no business in this matter. In naming her book after this story, Showalter throws down a velvet gauntlet daring peers, irrespective of gender, to step forward to evaluate the place these American women writers should hold in our complete gender-neutral literary annals. Reading women’s literature sympathetically and fairly is not simply a matter of being a woman reader. Nor must the reader exactly reproduce the writer’s nationality, race, religion, ethnicity, region, sexual orientation, or age, in order to be a suitable respondent. A literary peer is a reader who is willing to understand the codes and contexts of literary writing. But in addition, I believe, a peer must be willing to assume the responsibility of judging. A peer is not restricted to explaining and admiring; quite the contrary. Some feminists argue against evaluating or comparing works by women writers, and some claim that to judge and rank women’s literature is a betrayal of sisterhood, because all critical judgments are subjective and biased by cultural norms. Yet we need literary history, critical judgments, even a literary canon, as a necessary step toward doing the fullest justice to women’s writing. It is the next logical step, after all. If the works of women writers have achieved true equality with those of men, then it makes sense that feminist literary critics step back and that literary critics of both genders from inside and outside of academia should step forward and be as inclusive as possible in their assessments. In many ways, this has been happening. However, based on Showalter's lack of surprise in her interview with Krasny over the way most male reviewers have taken one giant step backwards when A Jury of Her Peers came their way, she probably believes that critics still need to be nudged forward on that road of integration. What better way to do that than to provide them with a Who's Who of three hundred years of American women writers. For a woman who coined the term gynocritics and has spent her career immersed in feminist literary theory and criticism, Showalter strikes an objective and very readable voice in A Jury of Her Peers. Unlike Gilbert and Gubar’s comparable work, The Madwoman in the Attic about primarily English women writers, A Jury of her Peers is not steeped in the kind of academic literary jargon that turns all but literature doctoral candidates pale. Take for example this excerpt from a sentence on George Eliot’s Middlemarch from The Madwoman in the Attic: Finally, then, the image of the key, from Casaubon’s mythical Key to Featherstone’s and Rigg’s physical keys, becomes a symbol of acquisitive and reductive monism which is all the more closely associated with coercion when we are shown Bulstrode handing a key to his servant and thereby empowering her to kill Raffles… Showalter addresses Eliot’s influence on American women writers but instead of using academic jargon, she includes a delightful excerpt from a letter Harriet Beecher Stowe sent to Eliot where Stowe conspiratorially says: ―Now, don’t show this to Mr. Lewes [Eliot’s husband] but I know by my own experience with my Rabbi that you learned how to write some of these things [in Middlemarch] by experience. Don’t these men go on forever getting ready to begin – absorbing learning like sponges—planning sublime literary enterprises which never have a now to them?‖ Showalter is at her best in A Jury of Her Peers when she makes each of the women writers she profiles jump from the pages of history and into our arms in just this way. Sadly, not all the women provide such delicious biographical tidbits as Stowe, but with most profiles, Showalter creates a narrative that engages and places the writer within a larger literary context. As expected, husbands, babies, and housework are acknowledged as writing hindrances to varying degrees for each of the women writers profiled. However, Showalter is quite equitable in her treatment of these hindrances; her prose does not veer to the melodramatic to portray these women as downtrodden victims. Instead, Showalter permits the small details of the woman’s lives speak in subtle ways. What emerge are depictions full of dignity rather than victimhood. Probably one of the more telling examples is Showalter’s treatment of Ted Hughes. Her narrative focuses on how Plath used her failed relationship to Hughes to fuel her creative endeavors, rather than engage in what has seemingly become the sport of Hughes-bashing. When Plath discovered in June 1962 that Hughes was having an affair, her new life shattered, but the poems came with unprecedented rapidity and volcanic ferocity. After she left Hughes in October 1962, and moved back to London with their children, she wrote twenty-five poems in a single month, sometimes several in a single day. This is typical of how Showalter handles all the men in A Jury of Her Peers; they are put in their proper place. Another example of Showalter's equanimity is in the treatment of Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) author of Hobomok, a novel that anticipated Hawthorne in Child's ―use of real historical characters and her portrayal of Salem's obsession with savagery, the devil, and witchcraft as a dark reflection of itself.‖ As was the case with quite a few husbands of American women writers in this volume, Child's husband was supportive of her work, yet lacking in other ways. Lydia married him [David Lee Child] in October 1828, and from then on she would be constrained by the need to earn money for them both – to pay his many debts and endless legal costs (he was such a reckless journalist that his nickname was David Libel Child)--and to redefine herself as a conventional woman writing out of economic necessity rather than artistic inspiration. The prose might border on sterile, but it is clear, objective and adds to the appeal of this volume as a primer for anyone studying American women writers. Notice also that the author's work, in this case Lydia Maria Child, was introduced in relation to a male writer of the time who wrote about similar themes, in this case Nathanial Hawthorne. This is emblematic of Showalter's not-so-subtle nudging of us along the road of literary integration. Apparently the study of Gertrude Stein is a feminist right of passage which, not having taken any feminist literature courses in college, I missed. Showalter surprised some critics in her dismissal of Stein. Although she is widely acknowledged to be unreadable, incomprehensible, self- indulgent, and excruciatingly boring, in the twentieth century Stein always had a cult of devotees …Stein seems more and more like the Empress Who Had No Clothes – a shocking sight to behold in every respect. I felt neither betrayed nor impressed by this assessment because, frankly, as in the case with many American writers in this book, I was unfamiliar with Stein’s works and I’m a bit at Showalter’s mercy here. Well, not completely. There is a marked shift in tone when Showalter discusses Stein that gives me the feeling she wants to use A Jury of Her Peers for her last words on the subject and those words do not originate from the same equitable place as her assessment of, say, Ted Hughes. No matter what Showalter would like, I’m fairly certain we’ve not heard the last on Stein. Showalter’s numerous references to the influence of Louise May Alcott and specifically her character of Jo March from Little Women goes beyond what would be expected in a survey of American women writers.

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