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 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 ’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 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 from Little Women goes beyond what would be expected in a survey of American women writers. Alcott’s name pops up a lot, but it's not until you look up her name in the book's index and trace all the occurrences that you become aware of how much. From mentioning Gertrude Stein and Simone de Beauvoir’s appreciation of Jo March to an offhand reference to Alcott’s desire to teach at the Sea Islands while discussing black feminist writer Gloria Naylor, Showalter manages to slip LMA in at almost fifty page intervals within five hundred pages of text. Having never personally succumbed to the charms of Jo March, this was a bit much. And frankly, this might be one aspect of A Jury of Her Peers that would send male readers to the scotch bottle for solace.

I was more than a little pleased, and comforted, to find there is a category for my kind of feminism – the kind of feminism practiced by and where there is a commitment to ―an art beyond the limitation of gender.‖ Showalter cleverly juxtaposes these two writers in one chapter entitled ―Against Women's Writing: Wharton and Cather.‖ So much has been written about each of these writers, however the comparison and contrast of these writers turns the hackneyed into the original.

Wharton was the daughter of New York high society; Cather the prairie dweller; Wharton was the product of tutors and governesses, Cather the classicist and university graduate; Wharton was photographed in Parisian fashions, Cather in her famous middy blouse. ... But both were determined to transcend the stereotypes and expectations of women's writing. Both admired but did not want to be linked with George Eliot, found their own literary influences in European writers and artists, and shared an intense aesthetic admiration for Henry James, whose shadow both had to escape in order to find a personal voice.

Notice also, that Showalter has slipped in an integration tidbit for Wharton and Cather by defining their literary influence as Henry James. Additionally, it is in this chapter at the approximate midpoint of the book where Showalter reminds us of the thematic roadmap we are following.

For any literary subculture, I would argue, aesthetic maturity requires a rejection of special categories, and an insistence on access to any subject, any character, and any style. Paradoxically, American women’s writing could not fully mature until there were women writing against it.

This idea of ―aesthetic maturity‖ ripples outward until its progress finally becomes clear and so much more tangible in the book's final profiles of such contemporary women authors as Joan Didion, , Joyce Carol Oates, and Annie Proulx. While these contemporary author profiles are slimmer and developed in content than the chapter on Wharton and Cather, Showalter makes a strong case for the argument that we're well on our way to a gender-neutral literary culture.

In the category of writer not given enough pages in A Jury of Her Peers is Dorothy Parker. Showalter slaps the title ―Pessimist‖ next to Parker’s name, gives her one page which starts with the anemic sentence ―Dororthy Parker was another admirer of Millay‖ and somehow manages to make Parker’s life sound a lot less interesting than Louisa May Alcott’s. What Showalter misses by giving Parker such short shrift is Parker’s views on feminism and women writers. Thankfully, I found this gem of an interview with Parker from the Paris Review Interviews: Women Writers at Work. Parker gets to the heart of the matter about women writers who are in it for art and who are in it to pay the bills when the interviewer questions her about her short story ―Big Blonde.‖

INTERVIEWER: What about ―Big Blonde‖? Where did the idea for that come from? PARKER: I knew a lady – a friend of mine who went through holy hell. Just say I knew a woman once. The purpose of the writer is to say what he feels and sees. To those who write fantasies – the Misses Baldwin, Ferber, Norris-- I am not at home. INTERVIEWER: That's not showing much respect for your fellow women, at least not the writers. PARKER: As artists they're not, but as providers they're oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter. And that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on the floor for three days looking for the right word. I'm a feminist, and God knows I'm loyal to my sex, and you must remember that from my very early days, when this city was scarcely safe from buffaloes, I was in the struggle for equal rights for women. But when we paraded through the catcalls of men and when we chained ourselves to lampposts to try to get our equality-- dear child, we didn't foresee those female writers. Or Clare Boothe Luce, or Perle Mesta, or Oveta Culp Hobby.

Of the authors Parker mentions, only Kathleen Norris, an author of 93 romantic best sellers about American women, and Clare Booth Luce, a playwright of the satiric comedy The Women, are mentioned, albeit briefly, in A Jury of Her Peers. I turned to Gordon Hunter’s recently released What America Read: Taste, Class and the Novel 1920-1960 and discovered that Faith Baldwin was a romance fiction writer and a popular novelist and Pulitzer winner of 1925 whose books sold millions of copies in her day. This worries me. Isn't A Jury of Her Peers the definitive edition of American women writers?

As it turns out, one must read Hunter’s book after finishing A Jury of Her Peers. While Showalter has given us all the American women writers with the seal of feminist literary critic approval, she hasn’t done much to give us other popular American women writers Showalter even manages to omit some American women Pulitzer winners from A Jury of her Peers, namely: Caroline Miller (A , 1934), (, 1935), and Margaret Wilson (The Able McLaughlins, 1924) and (, 1965). According to Hunter, these novels have probably been forgotten not because of the gender of their authors but ―are neglected because they appealed primarily to readers of middle-class taste, an identity premise near the bottom of most revisionist agendas, and were unredeemed by great popularity.‖

Back to that velvet gauntlet of Showalter’s, her plea that literary peers step forward to judge the works of American women writers based on ―the codes and contexts of literary writing.‖ While A Jury of her Peers is an excellent primer for those studying the history of American women writers, it is a less than excellent primer for those wanting a complete history of American women writers. The forgotten women Pulitzer winners are especially disappointing. Who are the literary peers who will step forward to assess Caroline Miller, Josephine Johnson, Margaret Wilson or Shirley Ann Grau?

It’s a new century and it’s time to reframe the gender question vis-à-vis American literature. As Showalter herself argues, women are free to write about any subject, any character, any style. In an essay in the Christmas 2000 edition of The New Yorker, Annie Proulx writes:

When people ask me why women are rarely the major protagonists in my stories and novels, I try to explain absent presence. I am interested in the rural world, and in that world it is men and men's work, whether logging or fishing or running cattle or growing soybeans, that dominate the culture and the history of the region. Yes, women do drive tractors, load steers, haul nets, run ranches, but more commonly theirs is an absent presence in rural events.

Clearly, by ending A Jury of Her Peers with Annie Proulx, Showalter believes that American women have attained the kind of freedom in their writing for which they always yearned. Now what? Well, if the gender issue were truly resolved, wouldn’t we have had men reviewing A Jury of Her Peers in addition to women? Of course, Michael Krasny’s surprised response upon learning he was one of the few men interested in A Jury of Her Peers could be seen as a hopeful sign, a sign that the gender of an author or the main character isn’t our primary interest when we choose a book. Ultimately, women read and write about what they are interested in and men read and write about what they are interested in; it is our personal taste that has brought about the breakdown along gender lines, not necessarily indifference or condescension. Now we’ve arrived back at Gordon Hunter’s marvelous book on taste, class and the novel. Do readers’ economic class have a greater, lesser or equal impact on their reading choices than their gender? Based on the answer to that question, perhaps the next stop along literature’s integration highway should be class integration. Oh, but can we really let socialism or, God forbid, communism creep into our assessments of our literature! When it comes to how Americans assess their literature, shouldn’t we stay true to our democratic political tenets and abandon capitalism’s inequitable economic tenets? As is the case with our nation’s shift towards a public health care system, the goal of a more equitable system that’s free of gender, race and class biases, even when assessing American literary achievements, is a worthy one.

Works Cited

Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000.

Hunter, Gordon. What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel 1920-1960. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Plimpton, George, ed. The Paris Review Interviews: Women Writers at Work. New York: The Modern Library, 1998.

Proulx, Annie. ―Big Sky, Empty Places.‖ The New Yorker. Christmas, 2000.

Showalter, Elaine. A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.

Karen Vanuska lives in Northern California. She writes for Open Letters Monthly Arts and Literature Review and The Quarterly Conversation.