DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A FEMINIST

LITERARY PERSPECTIVE

Susan Koppelman Cornillon

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

August 1975

Graduate School Representativ

BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY a.

© 1975

SUSAN KOPPELMAN CORNILLON

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii 610310

-SM» A'W

VMi .^00 ABSTRACT

This study examines the need for feminist criticism and how best to fill it. Feminist criticism is needed to restore objectivity to a literature and criticism distorted by sexism. The most pernicious effects of masculine bias upon the cre­ ation and consumption of literature are expressed through the literary-critical establishment--publishers, critics, profes­ sors, and librarians.

Sexist criticism in its most insidious form masks biased evaluations as objective description, and removes literature and criticism from its socio-historical context. The subjec­ tive distortion implicit in a sexist perspective is fundamen­ tally hierarchical; it imposes a vertical evaluative structure upon a multi-faceted socio-historical reality. A critical per­ spective that divorces evaluative distinctions from a socio- historical rationale, whilst claiming that these idealistic dis­ tinctions are anything more than objectifications of subjective bias, and uses that structure to determine the creation and con­ sumption of literature, seriously censors writers' and readers' perception of history and society, censorship that for women has proven spiritually crippling and murderous. So traditionally evaluative literary categorizations have been ignored.

To liberate the literary-critical establishment from con­ trol by the masculino-centric critical conspiracy, means must be provided to unite feminist critics in creating and propaga­ ting feminist perspectives. An anthology of feminist criticism was an obvious stage in that program. Examination of crucial areas in Joyce Carol Oates' work provided the basis for dis­ covering concerns central to a nascent feminist criticism, con­ cerns that served to inform editorial considerations of femi­ nist critical essays to be included in an anthology. Summaries of essays included show the expanding range of developing femi­ nist criticism.

Implementing the feminist critical vision, an examination of feminist literary courses revealed the need for a literary information retrieval system appropriate to feminist concerns. A model for such a system was outlined and illustrated. Ill

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The book, Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, which served as an important background to this paper was in many ways a joint venture. Without the encouragement, support, and kind­ ness of Ray Browne the book would still be a dream. I also wish to thank Louis Howe, Lee Levine, and Dorothy Betts for their endless good humor and technical assistance, and Pat Browne, Dick Fillion, and Nora Erb for their help. My thanks to Larry Anderson and Nancy

Stepp for their help with proofreading, and to Linda Harden, Dawn

Anderson, and Wayne and Toni Trainer for many hours of child care.

I am, of course, eternally grateful to the contributors to this vol­ ume for their cooperation, enthusiam, and good work.

In writing this paper and helping me with the book that came be­ fore it, I am grateful to the man I live with, John Cornillon, for re­ lieving me of hours of my share of housework and child care called for in our contract, for endless hours of help with editing and proof­ reading and listening to me think out loud. Thank you for your faith in me, tenderness and love. And thank you Edward Nathan Koppelman Cor­ nillon for helping with Mommy’s book and Susan's dissertation, for helping me test my ideas in perspective and patting me on the head when I got too tired. And thanks to Helen Mehler for her diligent typing, proofreading, comments, love, strength, and devoted persistence despite hectic working conditions. And finally, thanks to the assis­ tance and persistence, criticism and support of the members of my dis- iv

sertation committee: Professors Paul Haas, Jim Harner, Howard McCord, f Phil O’Connor, and the Chairman, Ray Browne. V •

i

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page INTRODUCTION ...... I

A brief examination of censorship ...... 1

Notes toward a theory of literature ...... 11

The need for Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives...... 21

THE FICTION OF FICTION...... 28

INTRODUCTION TO SUMMARIES OF ESSAYS. INCLUDED IN IMAGES OF WOMAN IN FICTION: FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES...... 58

What Can a Heroine Do? Of Why Women Can't Write...... 59

Popular Literature as Social Reinforcement: The Case of Charlotte Temple...... 61

The Gentle Doubters: Images of Women in English­ women's Novels, 1840-1920 ...... 63

The Servility of Dependence: The Dark Lady in. Trollope...... 65

Gentle Truths for Gentle Readers: The Fiction of Elizabeth Goudge...... 67

The Image of Women in Fiction...... 70

Silences: When Writers Don't Write ...... 73

Why Aren't We Writing About Ourselves?...... 76

The Women of Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales ...... 77

The Abuse of Eve by the New World Adam...... 79

Sex Roles in Three of Hermann Hesse's Novels...... 82

Humanbecoming: Form & Focus in the Neo-Feminist Novel...... 85 vi

A Case for Violet Strange ...... 88

Fictional Feminists in The-Bostonians and The Odd Women...... 91

Heroism in To The Lighthouse...... 93

May Sarton’s Women...... 95

Feminism and Literature ...... 97

Modernism and History...... 100

The Value and Peril for Women of Reading Women Writers ...... 102

The Other Criticism: Feminism vs. Formalism...... 104

Sexism and the Double Standard in Literature...... 107

Feminist Style Criticism...... 109

SOME BIBLIOGRAPHICAL EXCURSIONS...... Ill

The black woman in literature...... 132

Feminist fiction...... 135

Growing up female: the drama of emergent consciousness...... 138

The jewish woman in literature...... 142

Prostitution in literature...... 145

The rural woman in literature...... 146

Woman and madness in literature...... 148

The woman as writer in literature...... 150

Work in women's lives...... 153

BIBLIOGRAPHY 158 1

INTRODUCTION

A Brief Examination of Censorship

Female Studies I-IV lists over 800 new courses in women's

studies in the past few years, and more than half of these are being

taught with a focus on literature. Those of us who have looked to

. literature, and especially fiction, for answers, for models, for clues

’ ’ 4 ’ s’ _ to the universal questions of who we are or might become are beginning

to understand why the answers we have sought have not been there. We

are now beginning to understand how we have been alienated from our­

selves and from the literature we loved, or hoped to love, and still

do half love, by the biases of what we have been taught and the biases

incorporated into the works.

People--both women and men--are beginning to see literature in

new perspectives opened by the Women’s Liberation Movement. The criti­

cal and creative writings of feminists can enlighten our understanding

by helping us distance ourselves from the literature; prevent us from

accepting the implications’and prescriptions for behavior, for the li­ miting self-images and aspirations for women embodied in most of the

literature we have been taught is important or great. People have be­ gun to question and challenge the value structures that insist that certain kinds of writing, certain kinds of experiences and characters,

are worthy of serious consideration while others--often those that we have been taught to disdain--are beneath contempt as well as contempla­

tion. Obviously there is desperate need for re-evaluation of all our 2

shibboleths.

The power exerted by those who have been permitted to assume the

roles of arbiters of literary taste has been great. It has affected

what has been published, reviewed, read by whom, which reading flaunted

and which hidden. The arbiters of taste have exercised a control over

literature that has been even more insidious than censorship, because

it has given people the illusion that the literary world was free from

censorship; it has given people the illusion that their reading was

freely selected from a free market. But the tax on foreign goods has

been so exorbitant that they rarely have reached the marketplace.

When I talk of foreign goods, I do not intend to refer to litera­

ture from different nationalities, but rather to literature written

from the perspective of and out of the experience of persons, classes, groups foreign to those perspectives and experiences of the powerful in our culture. Those foreigners--women, blacks, third world people, working class people, gay people--have not only often not had the equipment available to them for transforming the raw material of their lives into literature, but even when the equipment has been there-- « leisure, literacy, a belief in the possibility of creating literature— the import duties have most often been too heavy for x^riting to seem worthwhile. Even when there were no explicit laws to deter the liter­ ary creativity of the foreigner--as was the case xtfith blacks during the period of their slavery in America, when it was a capital offense in many states for them to read or write--the implicit pressures were strong enough, as is indicated by this passage from Madame Manon 3

Roland’s Mémo ires, written only when there was no longer any hope for

continued life, written while in prison awaiting the guillotine:

Never did I have the slightest intention of one day becoming a writer; I saw very early that a woman who earned that title lost much more than she gained. Men no longer liked her, and her own sex criticizes her: If her works are bad, she is ridiculed . . . if they are good, they are taken from her. If one is forced to acknowledge that she produced the better part of the work, her character, habits, conduct, and talents are picked apart so that the reputation of her creative intelligence can be balanced against the scandal created by her faults. 2

In effect, the conditioning of victims of oppression in our cul- -

ture has been the most powerful censor ever known. But we tend not

to see conditioning as a tool of censorship. We must, however, be­

come aware of the many and insidious forms that censorship has taken.

Liberal intellectuals express contempt for those who espouse

censorship. Their contempt seems to be based on a belief that the

contents of art are "harmless," i.e., without significant influence

either for good or for bad. Those who scoff at censorship have played

what to them has evidently appeared to be the game demanded by legal

proceedures, giving proof that certain works of art--fiction, movies,

etc.--have enough artistic merit to warrant their salvation from the

book fires of the protectors of public morals. The phrase used about

Allen Ginsberg's Howl, James Joyce's Ulysses and various books by

Henry Miller to rescue those who sold and published the books from

heavy fines and/or imprisonment is "The books have redeeming literary value." Mark Schorer, in his testimony at the Howl obscenity trial,

spoke in defense of the work claiming that it had "literary value," by which he meant that because the book was "artistic" it couldn't corrupt, 4

3 i.e., change the behavior of its readers.

The First Amendment to the Constituion of the United States guar­ antees freedom of speech. The guarantee is not qualified. And yet those who defend the rights of individual books, individual persons, to exercise that right almost always base their defense on the claim that in this case, the free speech exercised is all right because it couldn’t and wouldn't really hurt anyone. Almost always the court transcripts make fascinating reading because one sees over and over persons who make their livelihood from teaching literature claiming that literature is "harmless." There is an implication in all these cases that if it could hurt anyone, then the censors would be justi­ fied in banning it.

Literary censorship has had a long, painful, shameful history:

When the church ruled, heresy was warred against. ... According to Tacitus, Emperor Augustus was the first ruler who undertook to punish spoken or written words. He ordered the works of Labienus, who criticized the Government, to be burned. The historian Corns, who was too outspoken to please Tiberius, was left to starve to death, and his books were burned. Thinking him­ self libeled, Emperor Domitian ordered that Hermogenes, and all those who had circulated his writings, be crucified. The English Crown forbade all printing except by royal license. . . . Political and religious control of books preceded sex censorship by hundreds of years. 4

There are official and semi-official censors. Official censors are those empowered by law to exercise powers of supervision and suppression. . . . The semi-official censors are groups that have no specific powers under the law, but have been organized for the express purpose of 'moral uplift.1 The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, fathered by Anthony Comstock, the Boston Watch and Ward Society, and the Clean Amusement Association of America, belong in this category. Some of these agencies possess limited police powers. They work in co-operation with the authorities, ferret out alleged violations, act as complaining witnesses, and prod the police and the district attorneys. The New York Society claimed that it was responsible for the confiscation of nearly 5

200,000 books and other printed materials running into millions of copies. 5

So goes the official version of the history of censorship in the

righteously indignant introduction to the transcript of the Howl ob­

scenity trial by J. W. Ehrlich, defense lawyer for Lawrence Ferlin­

ghetti in this famous case. Ehrlich includes a list of some of the

hundreds of famous books at one time censored. He introduces his list

with the following statement: "It is. ironic that the suppressed books

in one age in many cases become part of the accepted literature or even the venerated classics of the next."^ His list includes the following:

Elizabeth Barret Browning’s "Aurora Leigh," H. G. Well's Ann Veronica,

Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Zola's Nana,

Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Mary Ann Evan's Adam Bede, Radcliffe

Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Defoe's Moll Flanders.

Aside from the "official and semi-official censors" Ehrlich directs

our attention to, there is anotherclass of censors whose powers are

rarely acknowledged in discussions of the topic. This class includes

publishers, critics, literature professors, and librarians. This class

differs from Ehrlich's class of "semi-official censors" because they

have not been organized "for the express purpose of 'moral uplift.'"

They claim to be gloriously unorganized, as a matter of fact. And in

their non-organization they claim to be bound together only by the highest principles: the interpreting and disseminating of all that is best in literature. Although Matthew Arnold has been unfashionable

both as a critic and as a poet for a number of decades, I think that

his definition of criticism is still that definition which most critics 6

and literary professionals hold to when they are in good faith:

" [Criticism'sj business is . . . simply to know the best that is known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas. . . . with inflexible honesty, with due ability . . . [andj to do no more."

This class of censors is, I believe, the most effective and least recognized group of censors to exist in the history of literature, al­ though they may have been outclassed by the Church since its period of influence was longer than this group has had so far. But this group’s success will be limited, too, as is becoming increasingly evident. The Black, Women's, Third World, and Gay Liberation Movements are all characterized by a sensitivity to this brand of censorship, and each group has taken effective action to overcome it. The action of these groups has ranged from the rediscovery, reprinting, and re­ distributing of fine works of literature representing the perspectives of these groups of people through the creation of many new works through the establishment of new literary curricula, new publishing facilities, and new distribution modes. All liberation groups seem to realize, with KNOW, Inc., a Feminist publishing house who.has taken it as their motto, that "Freedom of the Press belongs to those who own the presses."

That this class of censors recognizes that literature is, in fact, not harmless is demonstrable over and over historically. We need only look at some of the episodes surrounding the publication of various feminist works to see how publishers have often been willing to sacri­ fice their own commercial best interests to what they perceived as the demands of morality and the need of the public to be protected. When 7

Charlotte Perkins Gilman submitted her long story about a woman's mental breakdown and the sexual politics motivating her tortured des­ truction by her husband/physician, "The Yellow Wallpaper," to the

Atlantic Monthly, "then the most prestigious magazine in the United

States, Jits editor, Henry I Scudder rejected the story, according to

Gilman’s account in her autobigraphy, with a curt note: ’Dear Madam. . .

I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have 8 9 made myself.”" When Walter Lionel George’s first novel, Bed of Roses,

(the story of an upper middle class Edwardian woman left penniless, driven to despair, ill-health, and a choice between the dirty Thames and a career of prostitution, who chooses 'better dishonor than death* and retires a wealthy woman by the time she is thirty-five) was pub­ lished, it was reviewed with rage by critics in two countries, preached against on both sides of the Atlantic, and finally withdrawn--as it was on the point of breaking sales records--by both American and English publishers in deference to the demands of morality. Such also was the 10 case with Frances Newman s A Hard-Boiled Virgin, a stylistically brilliant examination of her own sexuality by a sardonic intellectual

Southern Belle.

I doubt that publishers are quite so willing to put their finan­ cial interests second to their moral convictions these days, primarily because of the change in the pattern of publishing company ownership and the development of new and threatening technologies for "informa­ tion retrieval and reproduction." But that doesn’t really make pub­ lishers any more anxious to publish literature that would defy the 8

values of that literary/critical establishment most people deny the existence of, because that literary/critical establishment has a tre­ mendous power over literary sales figures. A book that gets even a bad review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review section--which now

sells separately from the rest of the paper--will sell more copies

than a book that gets a rave review in the Bowling Green Sentinal

Tribune and no mention in the Times. A book that gets the powerful

seal of approval of the Important Critics may even wind up a required

text in freshperson composition courses. So the tastes, the biases,

the socio-psychic vested interests of the men who have the power to make or break a book are catered to, are taken into consideration when

the decisions are being made about which books to publish and, almost

as important, what the advertising budget will be for each one that is

published. This kind of power in the literary world is seldom recog­ nized as censorship, but I cannot think of a more appropriate term for

it.

The most insidious censorship is that which is expressed by those who eschew censorship, who shun dogma and ideological authoritarianism,

and talk instead about "taste'' and "style" and "art;" those who say that Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying^ is a "better piece of literature"

12 than Kate Millet's Flying, instead of saying that they like the Jong book better than the Millett book because Erica likes men and Kate prefers women; those who say that Alix Kate Shulman's Memoirs of an Ex- 13 Prom Queen is a "sloppy work of art" rather than acknowledging that

they find her dissection and exposure of her sexist upbringing dis­

turbing (especially the exposure of the oppression of women by univer- 9

sities); those who say that Mary McCarthy was a "brilliant craftswoman" 14 until she lost her sense of style and wrote The Group, by those who say that Grace Metalious' first novel, Peyton Place^ was "shabby sensa­

tionalism" and "tasteless" because one of the major sub-plots of this

kunstlerroman deals with a murder in self-defense committed by a young

woman whose step-father repeatedly raped her, while at the same time 16 claiming that Ernest Hemingway in his first novel, The Sun Also-Rises,

speaks "with stunning power" of "the ills of our time" when he details

the problems of his impotent hero. Those critics and I evidently don't

live in the same time. Their problem may be impotence. Mine has been

rape.

All the while that the literary critical establishment has been

simultaneously claiming that "reading books can't hurt anyone" and

repudiating censorship, it has been practicing censorship by denying

serious consideration in the form of reviews and scholarly examination

and classroom consideration of those books that threatened their vision

of society. All the while that they have been claiming that literature

is harmless, writers have been building up the case against them. We

know that literature affects the ide'as about reality of those who read

It. "It is in literature that Emma seeks the excitement her environment

almost never provides, and Madame Bovary is obviously a novel about the dangers of reading novels."I? Over and over in the novel itself, we

see Emma trying to find in her life what she has read about in fiction.

When she read those romantic novels, she thought she was learning about reality and so, "she tried to find out exactly what was meant in life by the words 'bliss,' 'passion' and'rapture,' which had seemed so 10

18 beautiful to her in books." Critics have been mocking Emma for having been duped since 1857. It is time that they ceased to laugh.

Bersani continues his discussion of this "novel about reading novels" as follows:

Flaubert’s work is not a very serious attack on romantic fiction. . . . Emma can hardly bear the burden of serious reflection about romanticism; any cultural or spiritual style can be made to appear absurd if it is 'studied' through someone who doesn't understand it. 19

I find such an elitist attitude not only politically offensive, but critically irresponsible.

Literature hasn’t been read only by trained specialists ever since

Luther claimed for all people the right to read and interpret the Bible by and for themselves. The established Church claimed, with horror and vigor, that untrained people would be harmed by reading the Bible with- f out Ecclesiastical guidance. It seems to me that critics today go them one better. They claim now that either people can't be influenced by reading because art is "harmless," or they claim that If untrained readers are influenced by their reading, it doesn't matter, because they aren't very important anyway. Bersani writes:

Instead of giving us a certain kind of sensibility in its most distinguished and abstractly typical form, Flaubert depicts the trivial but pervasive ways in which a powerful style of being comes to affect the expectations which the most unremarkable people have of life. 20

In a truly democratic society, people won’t think of each other that way, won't think that some people are "unremarkable." That we haven’t yet reached that society is clear when one reads the works of literary critics. Some of us are special--meant to understand, sus­ ceptible to being trained; others of us are "unremarkable" and there- 11

fore our vulnerability to what we read is a matter of indifference.

In fact, there are even hints that the literature to which we are vulnerable in some way indicates to those in the know whether or not we are capable of belonging to the class of remarkable persons.

Those of us who are vulnerable to "bad" literature are not.

But some of those persons traditionally•considered "unremarkable" have begun to write about their experience. In doing so, they bring us back to the questions about why people read. Some of us read for

"escape" (although I've always found that term somewhat mysterious), some of us read to find material to write publishable papers about, and some of us read to*learn about Life:

I read every book I could get my hands on, I wanted answers to all the man-woman questions and my mother wasn't going to give them. Sure, she took me to a stupid film about menstruation, and as we walked to the car, I asked her, 'Mommy, I understand everything in the movie except HOW DOES THE SPERM GET TO THE EGG?' There was a gulp and a long pause. '. . . you'll find out when you fall in love.' Together with a friend I got hold of some 'dirty' books and we pored over them searching for straight answers. From Here to Eternity came close, but was too vague. Ulysses was far too long and hard to understand. The Naked and the Dead sounded dirty when you thought about it, but that wasn't much help. Peyton Place provided what we wanted. 21

Notes Towards _a Theory of Literature

I refer to literature from the categories "elite" and "popular" without making any distinctions between them for a number of reasons.

One is that I don't any longer trust the reasons for writers and their books being considered as belonging to one category or the other. When

I was younger and more naive, it never occurred to me to question those neat categories my professors provided me with--major, minor, and third 12

rate; great, competent, and popular or "women's"; serious and trash; art and pabulum. It only came to me after my first three degrees that the writers who spoke most clearly to me, who reflected most carefully the experiences of me and people like me, i.e., woman, first generation American, Jew, midwesterner, etc., but most especially woman, were writers who were usually categorized as "minor but lacking in real vision or grandeur or breadth, too rooted in specifics, out of touch with the eternal verities," etc.

It is interesting to me to look carefully at the word most often used to dismiss the fiction I devoured with as much appetite as I did the "Great" writers. Pabulum or PABLUM is the earliest solid food an infant is fed. The ingestion of pabulum by an infant represents a-’sig- nificant developmental phase. As a food, it is one of the most nutri­ tious foods available to anyone in our culture. It is literally rich and symbolically significant. It strikes me, therefore, as ironic that it should be used as a pejorative metaphor. The irony becomes even sharper when one examines the definition of the word given in the

Second Edition of Webster's New International Dictionary:

the means of sustenance to animals or plants . . . hence, that which feeds or sustains, as fuel for a fire; also that on which the mind or soul is nourished. . . . pabulum denotes mental diet or food for the mind. ... 22

The Second Edition was first published in 1934. During the early nineteen forties, during one of those periods in our history when that ever-present spare labor pool--women--was needed to run the war machine­ ry while the men were off in Europe and Asia dying in another war, con­ venient, instant foods were developed--to feed the men between battles, 13’

and the baby when Rosie the Riveter got home from her day in the factories. One of those first instant foods had the name PABLUM.. It was with the introduction of this new instant baby food that the word

"pabulum" first began to take on such perjorative connotations. And by the time Webster's Third International Dictionary of the English

Language Unabridged was published in 1966, the definition of pabulum had taken on a new meaning: "a rudimentary or insipid piece of writing .23 4t'he kind of sentimental'^'-' which it offered its readers--PMLA Since the cereal was introduced, the word "pabulum"-has become inextricably associated with women and children, two of the most deval­ ued groups in our society.. As students of the psychology and sociol- 24 ogy of oppression have so clearly demonstrated the works and con­ cerns associated with devalued groups are also accorded little value.

When members of a devalued group move in to areas from which they have previously been excluded, the areas become devalued. That is true of residential areas as we have all been able to observe from the decay of our major cities from the center outward. The devaluation comes not from the devalued group moving in, but from the value-creating group moving out. This is true of occupational areas, as we can see from looking at the studies of what has happened to the status of med­ icine as a profession since women became the majority of doctors in

Russia. The occupational area has steadily lost prestige, status, and income command. And this is true with language. When xjords, phrases, and expressions become associated with devalued groups, the language takes on perjorative connotations, overtones of "bad taste" or "poor style." Thus we see how the word "pabulum" moved from meaning 14

sustenance for the mind or soul to rudimentary or insipid writing, simply by becoming associated with babies.

One of the distinctions between kinds of literature that has caused the most pain for me is that between "universal" and "domestic," a distinction clearly made along gender class lines. As an under­ graduate student at Barnard College in the late fifties, with ambitions to be a novelist, I found my self-confidence (what little I had managed to salvage from the pressures of adolescent sex-role conformity pres- • sures) as an artist and my ambition just about totally destroyed by the discouraging words of a distinguished, famous, critically well-received man who taught creative writing to us "girls." He told us that women could never be Great Writers because we had no access to those Impor­ tant Experiences that Matured one as an Artist, that gave one access to Life, that caused Real Suffering out of which comes True Wisdom.

He explained to us the fluke of Jane Austen by pointing out her ab­ solute adherence to the Domestic Realm in her writing. The Important

Experiences he referred us to are War, the jungle-like world of

Business and Commerce, the adventuresome work of Exploration and the

Conquering of Nature. He did acknowledge that Travel was available to women, but such a limited kind of travel that it hardly counted.

He compared for our edification the results of the travels of Mrs.

Trollope and Henry James.

The man I am talking about was not alone in his beliefs. And he disabused us of our dreams as gently as he could. Certainly he was motivated by a desire to profess the truth, and not a desire to eliminate competition. Had my experience with him been unique in my 15

life, it probably wouldn’t have been as influential; rather it would

have been eccentric and perhaps even amusing. But, unfortunately,

the experience was of a piece with my whole experience of growing up.

At the 1974 MLA convention Erica Jong told of an experience she

had that matched the one I have described, not word for word, but

nuance for nuance. Erica was at Barnard when I was, only she was a year

younger. I asked her after the session who her teacher had been,

assuming it to have been the same man I had had for a teacher. She

named someone else.

So now I question the categories I was brought up to believe

were revealed and unchangeable. And I feel free to draw on any and

all works of literature that capture my imagination, regardless of how

they have been heretofore categorized by others. The debate about

what constitutes "good" literature is, at this point, too far from a

resolution for me to confine myself to any of the old modes.

Besides, in this paper I intend to examine certain kinds of

events in stories. As John Cawelti writes in "The Concept of Formula

in the Study of Popular Literature," "I will be concerned primarily

with stories and with understanding the various cultural significances „25 of these stories. And earlier in the same essay, he warns against

"inextricably ¡confusing j normative and descriptive problems."

Cawelti defines literary conventions as: . . . elements which are known to both the creator and his [sic] audience beforehand--they consist of things like favorite plots, stereotyped characters, accepted ideas, commonly known metaphors, and other linguisitc devices, etc. 26

He continues: 16

Inventions, on the other hand, are elements which are uniquely imagined by the creator such as new kinds of characters, ideas, or linguistic forms. . . . familiarity with a group of literary works will usually reveal what the major conventions are and therefore, what in the case of an individual work is unique to that creator. 27

Cawelti does not suggest a method for most appropriately deciding what constitutes a "group of literary works," although he moves on to discuss groups that are similar in their formulae, i.e., westerns, mysteries, spy stories, etc.

Cawelti concludes his discussion of literary convention and in­ vention with a reference to the critical problems posed by the relation­ ship between the two elements. He writes:

So long as cultures were relatively stable over long periods of time and homogeneous in their structure, the relation between con­ vention and invention in works of literature posed relatively few problems. Since the renaissance, however, modern cultures have become increasingly heterogeneous and pluralistic in their struc­ tures and discontinuous in time. .28

He suggests that the increasing number of works that are almost entirely conventional as well as the number of works that are "as far as possible along the continuum toward total invention as it is pos- 29 sible to go without leaving the possibility of shared meanings behind" are both reflections of the necessity to deal with this increasing heterogeneity.

But the particular conventional element which I am addressing my consideration to in this paper--the death of women--is one which does not, I believe, reflect cultural pluralism. There is no culture, no sub-culture, that has existed since the defeat of the mythical matri­ archy, that produces literature, that does not also oppress women. 17

Therefore, those elements of literature that deal with the images,

roles, and acts of and towards women need not be dealt with in terms

of the dichotomy between conventional and inventive literature, inso­

far as the two kinds exist as a reflection of the response to cultural

change. This element is unchanged.

The most ancient and basic cultural convention, although frequently

challenged, has been unshaken until the last half of the twentieth

century. The oppression of women, the repression of female sexuality,

the exploitation of female labor, the degradation of female intellect

has been the basis of cultural stability for millenia. But in the , 30 middle 1940 s the washing machine was invented and became available-

for mass consumption, in the fifties came the Pill, Peyton Place and

The Feminine Mystique, and in the sixties came Pampers and the Women's

Liberation Movement. So in the seventies, critics are faced with an

imposing problem of arriving at a new understanding of the relation­

ship between convention and invention in relationship to this particu­

lar element of imaginative literature.

I decline to make traditional distinctions between "good" and "bad"

literature because my interest is in the extrinsic function of the

material embodied in literature, rather than in any intrinsic merit it

might be claimed to possess. I have been inspired by Joanna Russ' "digres­

sion on the artistic advantages of working with myths, i.e. material V31 “ that has passed through other hands, that is not raw-brand-new, to

see the common functional value of "good" and "bad" literature.

When so much of the basic work has already been done, the artist may either give the myth its final realization or stand it on its 18

head, but in any case what he £sicj .does will be neither tentative nor crude and it will not take forever; it can simply be well done. 32

Professor Russ’ ideas here are certainly not new, although her use of

them is not the use traditionally made of such understanding. Matthew

Arnold said essentially the same thing in 1864, more than a hundred

years earlier, when he wrote:

This creative power works with elements, with materials. . . . Now in literature . . . the elements with which the creative power works are ideas; the best ideas, on every matter which literature touches, current at the time. . . . The grand work of literary genius is a work of synthesis and exposition, not of analysis and discovery; its gift lies in the faculty of being happily inspired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere, by a certain order of ideas, when it finds itself in them; of dealing divinely with these ideas, presenting them in the most effective and attractive combinations,--making beautiful works with them, in short. 33

I am interested in examining the rich compost with as much care as the grown plant. I am interested in the "bad" literature, the pop­ ular, the new, the stylistically experimental, the exploratory forms-- all of which eventually create the soil from which the "ultimate" work will grow. I believe, along with Professor Russ, that what we think of and tend to or have been taught to recognize as the "ultimate" work or the masterpiece is only the most sophisticated possible use that can be made of thoroughly worn materials, materials that have been so shaped and tamed by all the waves of what we call human creativity that have previously washed over them, that there is nothing about them that can any longer hurt anyone, cut anyone's fingers when she handles them. But as quickly as new materials are invented or discovered or recognized, the "ultimate" work of the past begins to become compost in its turn. What makes this dynamic process of the creation of a 19

culture's literature slow down, or, if not slow down, what mystifies

and makes unnoticeablethis process in action, is the fact that certain

groups have vested interests in maintaining a cultural/literary status

quo. Our educational institutions tend to grant degrees on the basis

of the command of a body of knowledge that includes specific content

and temporally localized stylistics rather than sensitivity to and knowledge of process, so those whose degrees were granted for and whose

expertise is measured by knowledge of and ability to manipulate a specific content have a vested interest in having that content remain culturally valuable.

While reading recently one of my favorite critics, Matthew Arnold,

I came across a passage in his essay, "The Study of Poetry," in which he discusses the same question that I have been just addressing, i.e., the question of whether or not it is possible, assuming that it is desirable, to arrive at a "real" and "true estimate" of a work of art.

He warns of two fallacies that might impede one's ability to arrive at such an estimate. He warns us against "the historic estimate and the personal estimate, both of which are fallacious."

A poet or a poem. . . . may count? to us historically. The course of development of a nation's language, thought, and poetry, is profoundly interesting; and by regarding a poet's work as a stage in this course of development we may easily bring ourselves to make it of more importance as poetry than in itself it really is, we may come to use a language of quite exaggerated praise in criticizing it; in short, to overrate it. So arises in our poetic judgments the fallacy caused by the estimate which we may call historic. Then, again, a poet or a poem may count to us on ground personal to ourselves. Our personal affinities, likings, and circumstances have great power to sway our estimates of this or that poet's work, and to make us attach more importance to it as poetry than in itself it really possesses, because to us it is, or has been, of high importance. Here also we overrate the object of our interest, and apply to it a language of praise which is 20

quite exaggerated. And thus we get the source of a second fallacy in our poetic judgments--the fallacy caused by an estimate which we may call personal. 34

I believe it is impossible to arrive at a "true estimate" of a

work of art i.e., I believe that it is impossible to arrive at a

judgment of a work of art that does not decline in validity as it

increases in distance and time, both personal and geographical, from

the person who made the judgment. I believe that there is no "ulti­

mate" "classic" that speaks to all times and all "men." I think

that the final resting place of human superstition in this age of

science and technology is in the minds of those who profess that a

human work, i.e., a piece of literature, can be "a work for all time."

The belief that such a work can or even ought to exist is, to me,

nothing more-or-less-than another of the many examples we have of fear

and denial of death. This irony was. most clearly brought home to me

when the professor in my Romantic Poetry course introduced us to

Shelley's "Ozymandias" calling it an "immortal poem."

Therefore, I believe that ultimately all literary work is eventu­

ally compost for the literary work that will come after it, that Harold « Robbins, Jacqueline Susann, Ernest Hemingway, and Joyce Carol Oates will all look remarkably alike from the vantage point of the twenty- second century. I also believe that those in a position to see that most clearly, i.e., literary critics, scholars, and teachers, have the greatest vested interest in not seeing it.

My concern then shall not be with the relative merits of the com­ posting materials in their living state; rather, my concern shall be with the nutriment or lack thereof that writers and readers derive from 21

that literature that preceded them.

The Need for Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives

The Women's Liberation Movement, from its beginnings in the middle

sixties, has shunned what we have called "the star system" in all fields

of endeavor. We saw the star system--the acquisition of great amounts

of power and influence, the naming of some as spokespersons for others,

the empowering of some to send others on trips they'd rather not have

taken--and the macho commitment to it of the leaders of the New Left

corrupt the socio-political movement we had looked to for social re­

form, regeneration, liberation. So, when women separated from the

New Left and when other women left the kitchens and beauty parlors

and mental asylums and graduate schools to join together to create

the Women's Liberation Movement, we committed ourselves to communal efforts, to collectivity. And, despite our academic training towards the maximization of individualism, our conditioning to be paranoidally competitive, our terror of plagiarism, we have begun to learn how to work in ways that mirror that commitment to cooperation. Perhaps that is why the Women's Liberation Movemeht has been so particularly charac­ terized by anthologies in the publishing world.

Feminist criticism has been as involved in the effort to get away from critical stars as has feminist politics, feminist sociology, femi­ nist publishing, feminist living. The belief in our ability to work together to create new, more humanistic modes of critical thought has resulted in a body of work that is tightly interconnected.

I began teaching Women's Studies in 1967 and have taught various 22

courses for and about women ever since. In all the courses, I felt a desperate need for books that would study literature as being writings

about people by people and read by people, a collection that would pay some attention to the relationship between writer and reader, work and reader, work and writer. This volume is an effort to supply that need.

This collection of essays deals with new forms of analysis growing out of the new consciousness. I have limited the panorama, to fiction because to have attempted to cover other forms of literature would have made a huge task unmanageably large. These essays illustrate the beginnings of new directions for women in reading and understanding fiction, and therefore new directions and depths for women in their personal paths. These essays lead us into fiction and then back out again into reality, into ourselves and our own lives.

This book will be useful in several ways. It will help in class­ rooms where investigations about the real meaning of fiction and the role of romen in and out of it are being undertaken. In choosing these essays I have brought together some of the important conclusions reached so far. One of the best ways we grow is by listening to one another and building on the ideas others share with us. This book will be a useful tool for raising consciousness not only in classrooms, but for those not involved in the academic world who are committed to personal growth. Hopefully it will be valuable in other ways, too.

This book is divided into four sections depicting the roles women have been forced to assume in society and are now beginning to occupy, beginning with the most desiccated and lifeless traditional stereotype of woman as heroine, and as invisible person, progressing through an 23

awakening to reality, wherein the woman is treated as person, and

ending with the newest insistence by women that we are equal in all

respects to men.

Woman as Heroine.--This section consists of analyses of traditional

views of women, of the "sugar 'n' spice and everything nice" stereo­

type that insults most fiction. There are discussions of traditional

women, of myths about women, stereotypes of women's roles, needs, attri­

butes, and potentials.

The Invisible Woman.--This investigation covers the roles women are

forced to play in much fiction: as the Other, the thing, as non-cog-

nating phenomenon for the hero to test himself against as he would

against hurricane or high mountain or disease, as symbol. In these

essays we search for the women we cannot find in literature, either as

authors or characters for the experiences not recorded in belles

lettres, and we recognize the weird distortions of the meanings of women's experience.

The Woman as Hero.--These essays investigate the fiction in which women are portrayed as whole people or as people in the process of t creating or discovering their wholeness, of women seeking and finding other metaphors for existence than men, or martyrdom, or selflessness, or intrinsic worthlessness. Women are revealed as working, being political, creating, as living in relationships, with other women, as being alive, adventuresome, self-determining, growing, making signifi­ cant choices, questioning and finding viable answers and solutions-~as being, in other words, human beings.

Feminist Aesthetics.--In these determined and courageous statements 24

are revealed portions of the credo and manifesto of women, in which is made patently clear women's desires and determinations and their abi­ lities to achieve, at least as much as men do, their goals.

The people who have written this book range in age from twenty one to the late sixties. Some of us haven't gone in formal education beyond high school and some of us have Ph.D.'s. Some have been pub­ lished before and some of us have never written before. Some are married, some single, some divorced. All of us are trying to belong to ourselves. About half of us are parents with children ranging from infancy through adulthood. Many of us are teachers, some are students, some are writers, some librarians, some waitresses, some full-time mothers at home. We are from all over the country and are all excited and happy to have found one another. We are all grateful for the opportunity to share our ideas. 25

NOTES

These volumes are available from the Clearinghouse on Women’s Studies, SUNY/College at Old Westbury, The Feminist Press, Box 334, Old Westbury, New York, 11568. They are constantly being updated and reissued. I would also refer the reader to their most recent series of publications, The Guide to Current Female Studies I - III and Who* s Who and Where in Women1s Studies.

Madame Roland, Mémoires (1795; rpt. Paris: Editions de Saint- . Clair, 1967), p. 120. The passage cited was translated by John Cornillon. 3 J. W. Ehrlich, ed., "HOWL" of the Censor (California: Nourse, 1961), pp. 28-35.

Ibid., p. viii.

Ibid., pp. xii-xiii.

6 Ibid., PD x-xi.

Matthew Arnold, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," in Essays in Criticism, 2nd ed. (London: Everyman’s Library, 1964), p. 20.

& Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (1899; rpt. New York: The Feminist Press, 1973), p. 40. 9 W. L. George, A Bed of Roses (London: The Modern Library, 1919). 10 Frances Newman, A Hard-Boiled Virgin (New York: Liveright, 1924).

11 Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (New York: Holt Rhinehart, 1973). 12 Kate Millet, Flying (New York: . Ballantine, 1974).

13 Alix Kates Shulman, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972).

14 Mary McCarthy, The Group (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1954).

15 Grace Metalious, Peyton Place (New York: Dell, 1956).

16 Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Bantam, 1949). 26

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Lowell Bair (New York: Bantam, 1972), p. xi, j. Bersani, ed. , 18 Ibid., p. 30.

19 TK-a Ibid., p. xm. 20 , Ibid., p. xm. 21 Francie Schwartz, Body Count (New York: Pyramid Books, 1972), p. 9. 22 The complete entry from, Webster1s New International Dictionary 2nd ed. (Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1934), p. 1749, is as follows: "pabulum--the means of sustenance to animals or plants; food; nourishment; hence, that which feeds, or sustains, as fuel for a fire; also that on which the mind or soul is nourished; as, intellectual pabulum. Syn.--Sustenance, support.--pabulum, aliment, nutriment are here compared in their figurative senses. Pabulum denotes mental diet or food for the mind; aliment suggests esp. sustenance or support; that is nutriment which nourishes, or which promotes growth; as ’The new celestial manna . . . this thrice-refined pabulum of transcendental moon­ shine’ (Carlyle).w 23 Webster* s New International Dictionary, 3rd ed. (Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1966), p. 1616.

See: Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice, 2nd ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1958) ; Readings on the Psychology of Women, ed. Judith Barcfcdck (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); The Radical Therapist, ed. Jerome Agel (New York: Ballantine, 1971). 25 John Cawelti, "The Concept of Formula in the Study,of Popular Culture," The Journal of Popular Culture, 3, No. 3 (1969), 383. 26 Ibid., p. 384 27 Ibid., p, 384 8 Ibid., p. 384

29 Ibid., p. 385 30 This fact was first mentioned to me by Tillie Olsen when she was speaking at Washington University to a Fiction Writer’s Workshop on April 12, 1975. She inspired the succeeding line of thought.

31 Joanna Russ, "What Can a Heroine Do? . Or Why Women Can’t Write," in Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Susan Koppel- man Cornillon (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Popular Press, 1972), p. 10. 32 Ibid., p. 32. 27

33 Arnold, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,:p. 11.

3^ Ibid., "The Study of Poetry," pp. 237-38.. 28

THE FICTION OF FICTION

For the most part, women in our culture experience themselves and their lives in terms of and in response to masculine centered values and definitions. We are conditioned from earliest infancy to think of ourselves in specific ways by strong social expectations of, reinforcements of, and demands for gender-typed behavior. We internal­ ize that conditioning to such an extent that most of us have little or no sense of our selves apart from the ways we have been conditioned to perceive ourselves in terms of the kinds of genitals we have. Thus, it is true for most of us, that anatomy is destiny--because of our culture’s self-fulfilling prophecy that it shall be so.

If I claim that women internalize the male idea of the feminine and create themselves in the shape of that idea, then it would appear to follow that there would be no difference between perceptions of the female by male and by female novelists, and that there would be no difference between the idea of the feminine and the reality of the female. But there are differences in both cases. The difference is that in the male culture the idea of the feminine is expressed, defined, and perceived by the male as a condition of being female, while for the female it is seen as an addition to one’s femaleness, as a status to be achieved.1

This difference between the idea of the feminine and the reality of the female may be experienced in a number of ways, but for almost every woman this gap is perceived in terms of personal inadequacy.. . . because she fails "in the raw" to live up to the culture’s image of 29

of the feminine. She usually interprets the fact that she does not

correspond to the cultural definition of the feminine as an exposure

of her failure to be "normal," her failure to be what she is supposed

to be, her own falling short--a cause for shame rather than a trans­

cendence of it or a cause for redefining or throwing out received

definitions. She is conditioned to see herself at fault, and not the

cultural idea. And she is taught to feel shame (guilt, modesty, etc.)

for her deviation, enough shame so that she strives to hide and will

not discuss her deviation. Because the recognized personal deviations

cause too much shame to allow for their revelation to others, women

never "blow" their own or each other’s "cover stories" of "normal

feminity," and they even collaborate in the destruction of their '

daughters by raising them to be grotesque, half-real schizoids like

themselves. Women frequently go to self-crippling, self-denying,

self-distorting lengths to force themselves into the mold. They are,

in effect, involved in a struggle to "cure" themselves of personhood.

In the fiction of even our most talented women novelists, the

writers fail to communicate this secret, usually shame-filled, inner

life of women on an overt, artistically self-conscious level. They

reinforce female shame by not discussing women’s deviation from the

cultural myths of what is supposed to be feminine. There are bits

and pieces of this kind of reality that slip out occasionally, but

there is no detectable pattern to the inclusion of details that tell

of this reality. We must seek for this level of reality in their

fiction in a manner similar to that applied by psychoanalytic critics who chase Oedipus through Shakespeare, i.e., a belief that the artist 30

is not consciously responsible for all that we can find in the artifact.

What I am saying, basically, is that certain types of feelings and experiences common to women in our culture are not represented in our fiction by male or by female novelists, or, if these phenomena are mentioned, it is in a context that reinforces our alienation from 2 ourselves and the mystification of our humanness.

The physical "chores" of a man’s life have been invested with symbolic meaning. The novels of recent years are filled with men taking philosophical shits, introspective pisses, transcendental middle-aged inventories of wrinkles and flab in front of private mirrors, and engaging in metaphysical masturbation. These things 3 happen in highbrow novels, the ones analyzed in Ph.D. seminars.

And in middle and low brow novels we have had countless symbolic encounters between man and his mirror with the razor as medium and mediator. Innumerable heroes have shied away from praises or thanks with a diffident, "Well, hell, I have to look myself in the eye when

I shave." The simple act of shaving one’s face took on all sorts of symbolic overtones; we might call it the "mug in the mirror" motif. 4 It was a moment when a man faced himself, measured himself, took stock.

It was a profound moment.

If one is willing to recognize the novel as functioning in our culture as, among other things, an instrument for education and so­ cialization, one can see the kind of service such episodes as the ones mentioned above provide for young males. We are all aware of the agony of adolescence in our culture, the evasive fumblings as we attempt to communicate about our fears and our needs and our anxieties 31

without actually ever mentioning to anyone what they really are; the

creation of elaborate private symbologies that enable us to grieve about our pimples, our sexual fantasies, our masturbation, the strange changes happening to our bodies. But boys outgrow this secretiveness soon--because there is a vast wealth of literature for them to stumble on, both great and popular, classical and contemporary, pious and lewd, that assures them that, indeed, they are normal. Or even better, their suffering is portrayed as a prerequisite for maturity, if not a prelude to greatness.

Women, too, have physical "chores" to perform. Among others, women (in order to look "clean" and "neat" and "feminine") must periodically (and for a great many women that period is daily) rid our bodies of all hair considered "not feminine." We must depilate our legs, our armpits, our chests, our chins, cheeks, upper lips and eyebrows. We women must "meet our ugly mugs" in a daily mirror, too.

But, typically, this daily confrontation has been invested with no symbolism, no lofty philosophical overtones, no speculative undertones, no theological sidelights. 1 Women in our culture are expected to prepare their bodies to be socially visible an

These duties are disguises, transformations, that we know are only 32

temporary and must be performed again and again, although it is the disguised self and the transformed self that is recognized as the authentic self.

When a woman is still a young girl and cannot yet perform these operations of transformation and disguise without concentration (if she ever can), perhaps she thinks about them, about what they mean, about who she is before and after, but most of all we think about how there must be something wrong with us that we have all this hair to get rid of.

Those of us who recognize our beautified, "transformed" selves as inauthentic representations of our Self inevitably feel alienated from responses to and those responding to our "beauty." There is a certain ironic self-satisfaction to be derived from a successful con job, but it is always accompanied by anxiety that the con will be dis­ covered, and loneliness and a sense of isolation when it isn’t.

We don't complain about this sometimes painful, usually uncomfor­ table, and always tedious necessity to transform our bodies into some­ thing acceptable because we aren't sure that every woman has to do it and none of us wants to be the first to admit her inadequacy. (Does

Theda do it? Does Greta do it? ;Does Rita do it? Does Marilyn do it?

Does Raquel do it?) It must surely be that somewhere there is a woman born with glossy lips, purple eyelids, a hairless body, and odorless genitals. And it is she, that one in a billion, that never to be dis­ covered or known, perfect woman, it is she who is normal and not me

(or any of my friends). And when you first start to shave your legs, although you do it partly for the thrill of being grown up, all the 33

time that you are scraping that razor across your calf, you are won-■=• dering if those first gashes will scar you for life; you are panicking because someone told you that the more often you shave, the faster and thicker the hair will grow, and part of you is horrified to think of the time when you will have to do it twice a day and still have a five o’clock shadow below the knee. You begin to look at older women and you wonder where they find all the time to make themselves even minimally presentable on a day-to-day basis.

And yet, with all this that attaches itself to female leg-shaving slavery, I have never seen any fictional female character either shave or pluck a hair until recently.American fiction is not devoid of reference to female depilation. For instance, in Joyce Carol Oates' novel them, we can assume that the Wendall women shave from a comment that Loretta, the mother, makes about her difficulties with a welfare worker: "He asked me why I. needed razor blades, who's in the family to use them, he said. Is there a man in the family not reported? 6 The smart-ass bastard, I don't know if he was kidding or not."

However, this oblique reference to female depilation behavior is not intended to bring to our attention anything about women shaving their legs or armpits or whatever; nor is it intended to call to our attention that one of the ways men humiliate women in our.society is by referring to their shameful secrets (hairy bodies) in accusing or derogatory • manners; rather, the passage is apparently being used to say something about the.relationship between the poor and the welfare system, the poor and the more well-off; namely, that the poor are harassed, humi­ liated, distrusted, and confused. 34

Those of us who mistake our transformed selves for our real Self

are destined to a schizoid experiencing of life, destined to perpetual

and intensifying disappointment in our situations and in our relation­

ships. We constantly feel cheated and deprived. Our lives are never

real to us when we mistake a cultural stereotype for our self.

Let us look again at them for an example of this kind of mistake.

Early in the book, Oates tells us about Loretta’s identifying herself

with the cultural myth of femininity, experiencing a sense of common­

ality with all young females for whom the story is and ever will be

"they got married and lived happily ever after." But never once

during the thirty years we spend with Loretta do we see her exper­

iencing the discrepancy between the idea of femininity and her sense

of self; never once do we see her doubt that that story was meant to

be her story. We see her disappointment, at times her anguish and

rage, that the dream does not come true for her, but we never see her

experience herself as someone other than that ideal of the feminine

for whom the dream, that particular romantic Hollywood fariy tale

dream.is supposed to come true. In fact, so thoroughly does Loretta

identify herself with the myth that she perceives everything in her

life that does not conform to the myth as not "her life," and weeps, when she is thirty-six years old, has borne four children, won and lost

two husbands, at this age and after all this living, none of which she

had expected to be "like that," she weeps and says, "What about my

life? When is it going to begin?"

This obvious example of female schizoid life serves another pur­

pose for Oates. It would appear that she is using the episode to tell 35

us something about her vision of human destiny, of the human condition and its inevitable tendency towards illusion; and not that she is aware of something special about the female human condition. We are with two of Loretta’s children, Jules and Maureen, from the very be­ ginnings of their lives, but we are never given a glimpse of the con- 8 ditioning process that turns them from the psychosexual neutrals they are at birth into the recognizably sex-typed "normal" male and female persons they are almost thirty years later. We see a well crafted deliniation of the differences in their lives based on the differences in their genitals, but there is no attempt on the part of the author to bring to any level of consciousness the ontogenesis of these differences. For instance, when Loretta’s son Jules is twelve and her daughter Maureen a year younger, we are given this des­ cription of their after-school life:

Then came the hours after school. . . . Maureen . . . would straggle home and Jules would be out for a few hours running loose, until, exhausted and sometimes bloody, he showed up at the house . . . around six. (p. 95)

We are never told why it is that male children are free to "run loose" while female children "straggle home" after school.

It is possible for a writer to present fictionally the kind of sexist child-rearing that Jules and Maureen obviously undergo without allying herself with it. In other words, a writer can portray the un­ conscious perpetration of socialization on her characters without her­ self reinforcing the attitudes being internalized by her characters. 9 Mary Ann Evans, writing The Mill on the Floss, filled her pages with evidence of Maggie Tolliver's sexist upbringing without at any time 36

approving of or aligning herself with those attitudes. Evans' ability to separate herself from the attitudes of some of her major characters was greatly facilitated by the kind of structuring common to Victorian fiction, which allowed the writer to step back from her omniscient silent role and address her audience directly. But it was not only this technique that enabled Miss Evans to separate herself from the mistaken notions of her characters. It was a clear-minded knowledge in her own head that, indeed, she did not share those ideas. One is uncertain, while reading the works of Miss Oates, whether or not she does, in fact, separate her own attitudes and opinions on the issue of sex role from her characters.

We are frequently presented with generalizations about the nature of women and the nature of men in which the point of view being ex­ pressed is not made explicit. It would appear to be the expanded con­ sciousness of a narrator sharing the point of view of a less articu­ late character, and, insofar as it is appropriate in the detailing of one’s characters to convey their prejudices and misunderstandings of reality,.it is appropriate for Oates to include passages such as the following:

Off to themselves, safe and lively, women always talked about men; their eyes and their voices seized hungrily upon men. (p. 181) and

A woman grows up to take all the shit she can from men, then she breaks down, that's the way it is. . . . (p. 223)

Although it may be appropriate (i.e., in keeping with who Oates has shown them to be) for her characters to express ideas like the above, 37

it is not appropriate for Oates to share them.

. Oates seems to think she is commenting on the human condition, either twentieth century technological "man" or eternal "man." When she writes, however, she disconnects herself from her perceptions of herself as a female and thus writes out of a castrated sensibility.

She is castrated as a writer because she knows she is not a man and has been conditioned to accept that women are not creative, do not write. She writes out of that in her which rejects her femaleness and at the same time acknowledges her non-maleness.

There is no indication in her books or short stories that she does not fully participate in the myths of our culture about the

"basic natures" of men and women. Her women are anatomically deter­ mined; her men have at least an illusion of freedom. No one in Miss

Oates' world escapes this gender-role stereotyping--except Miss Oates.

She has said in an interview that her male protagonists are autobio- 10 graphical, but that she feels no sense of identification with her 11 female characters. And at no time does Miss Oates separate herself from her characters and say, "This sexism, like their racism, their inarticulateness, their poverty, is part of their victimization."

The sexist attitudes that control (and destroy) their lives might really be manifestations of genetic genderal realities for all that we are allowed to see of their insidious origins.

The second major example of "skillful avoidance or unconscious­ ness of the specialness of the female condition in our culture" present in a great deal of fiction is evidenced by the peculiar way 38

female sexuality is portrayed. The events of female physical being-

in- the-world are mentioned but are accorded no more significance than

any other peculiarly female experience or occupation in a culture where significance is derivative of a male value structure.

Turning again to them, we see that although two of the major and

one of the important minor characters in the book are women, and the

author is a woman, we are never permitted to share the experiencing of any of the physical phenomena that are uniquely female. We share only those physical experiences that are in no way gender related and

that male authors have already established patterns for the telling

about. But the fact is that Maureen and Nadine and, one has reason to believe although it is nexer. made explicit, Loretta (whose sexuality per se is no part of the story and therefore not necessary for us to know about), are frigid. Maureen is not capable of experiencing any sensation when she is engaged in some sort of physical encounter, and

Nadine, who is capable of great heights of sexual excitation and arousal, is unable to achieve orgasm.

Maureen has been conditioned to believe that she cannot escape marriage, pregnancy, subjection and submission to male whim:

She would have a baby someday. She would get married and have a baby, dress herself in the puffy big blouses her mother wore, the same kind, a woman like her mother; she could not escape. She did not want to get married but there was no other way. She did not want to live with a man, sleep with a man. It made her angry to think of a future in which she waited . . . for a man. . . . (p. 184)

She dreams constantly about escape, about freedom, and finally begins to believe that if she had enough money, she could escape. While she 39

is loitering home after school one day, a man approaches her, and she

understands the age old connection between sex and money. She begins

to "go with men" for money. And when she is with the first man,

"Freedom came to her like air from the river, not exactly fresh, but chilly and strong; she was free and she had escaped" (p. 199). But

the price she is paying for this freedom is the integrity of her. self. Because, as she asserts over and over again, with a sense of awe and confusion, as various men touch and enter her body, she doesn't feel anything at all. She has divorced her sense of self from her physical being.

Her stepfather discovers the money and beats her half to death, presumably because he knows, how she got the money, and he keeps it.

Although her body recovers from the beating quickly enough, she lies in bed for thirteen months in a catatonic state. And then, one day, she "wakes up." Some ability to live is healed in her, but her will to escape has been destroyed. So now, with as little feeling as when she was whoring, she sets out to secure what she is now willing to accept as the best available to her in this life. Now, she asks only to:

see myself like this: living in a house out of the city, a ranch house or a colonial house, with a fence around the back, a woman working in the kitchen, wearing slacks maybe, a baby in his crib in the baby's room, thin white gauzy curtains, a bedroom for my husband and me, a window in the living-room looking out onto the lawn and the street and the house across the street. Every cell in my body aches for this! My eyes ache for it, the balls of my eyes in their sockets, hungry and aching for this, my God how I want that house and that man, whoever he is. (p. 335-36)

This reads to me like the end of 1984 when the hero starts yelling:

HURRAY FOR BIG BROTHER.' LONG LIVE BIG BROTHER.' 40

Maureen perceives her body as an object to be manipulated, as an object that is inevitably subject to men, and as an object she can control only insofar as she can choose the male(s) to whom it shall be subject, by whom it shall be used, and what shall accrue to her as a result of its use. It is a weapon she can aim, an instrument she can perform on, but her physical experiences are not a part of her sub­ jective reality; she cannot apprehend that which happens to her body as that which happens to Maureen Wendall, as part of Maureen's ex­ perience.

They entered my body in its most secret place, those strangers, and the space between us was only a slick surface of skin and sweat. Is it different with love? What is it like to give yourself with love? Or do you lie there and feel terror to know that, love or not, a husband or a stranger, it is all the same and no words can change it? I was never in love. They did not love me. They embraced me again and again; in my mind I will always see a man embracing a girl who is me. I can see a man's hands upon her body but the bodies are strangers, (p. 337)-

She does not experience herself as being co-extensive with her body.

Like her mother, Loretta, her life is lived according to a schizoid modality.

Oates would have us believe that this is somehow a danger of slum

1 life, that Maureen's tragedy is-a result of her socio-economic condi­ tion. But Maureen has less in common with her own brother Jules than she does with Nadine, daughter of great wealth and privilege.

Jules could not understand her £.Nadine3 . The slightest wedge between them opened at once to a great gusty distance, and he had the idea that, at a distance, she hated him. Because he did not believe in her? in her terror? Because, like his sister Maureen, she was a woman who had to lie down to terror, submit to it, not having enough strength to escape? (p. 392) 41

Both Maureen and Nadine experience the same brand of ontological in­

security. Nadine tries and fails to communicate her sense of suffering

to her lover, Jules, who can’t believe that rich people suffer.

Nadine complains bitterly to him:

You love me but you don't listen to me. All your life you’ll take refuge in having been poor, having been kicked around, to make you superior to people like me. You don’t want to think that we're real. (p. 390)

But one knows that Maureen would be able to understand the fear that

Nadine is talking about. What happens to their bodies is a hiatus

in their experiencing of life.

Jules lives through his body as well as through his mind. Each serves the other and in all his dimensions he feels a sense of wholeness.

It is only a severe illness that ever disturbs his sense of integrity, and that disturbance is not only temporary but it serves to reinforce his satisfaction with his wholeness once health is recovered. That temporary disturbance does not serve as a broadening experience, one that gives him the opportunity to empathize with the sense of divided life that tortures the women he loves. His experience of wholeness is one that he is able to translate into the ability to hope, to plan for escape from the sordid life he was born into, to imagine another life in which he is free and powerful and loved. He can imagine trans­ cendence; he can contemplate victory. The women, on the other hand, can only at best contemplate escape.

Both the women and the men are chained, but the women know it and

Jules does not. Jules and Maureen each have little hope to rise above the squalor and ignorance and poverty of their youth, but Maureen, who 42

is a "successfully" conditioned women, i.e., a woman who accepts that a woman "ought to be" passive, dependent, powerless, and always waiting, has fewer illusions. Jules, however, precisely because he has. been successfully conditioned to be.a "man" doesn’t believe that his situ­ ation is hopeless. He has learned that men are active, aggressive, take control of their destinies; he has learned that a man is strong and has the ability to triumph and the freedom to try.

Because the women perceive themselves in ways that Jules cannot share, they become increasingly unable to communicate, to share, to plot together against a world that would destroy them. Oates never clarifies any of this; she only records the results. If one read the book without a feminist consciousness one would be unable to see these divisive and destructive forces of sexism operating because they are buried too deeply under her more conscious and deliberate attempts to explore other elements of social tragedy: poverty and ignorance.

There is one more factor obscuring the cancer of sexism; that factor is racism. For, although the Wendalls are portrayed as a white family, in his fictoir (memoir thinly disguised as fiction) about his decade long friendship-hatred with Joyce Carol Oates, Daniel Curzon, writing in a recent issue of Gay Literature, is quite persuasive in his suggestion that the book is actually based on the experience of a black woman:

He even considered it clever of her that she had taken the story of one of his students, a black girl who had been raped and then gone into a period where she lived like an animal, growing obese and bestial in her bedroom, and transformed it into a novel. He had hopes that Joan would dedicate the novel to him, since she had gotten the germ of it from him and from the tour of the ugly 43

East Side of the city, where Dean had grown up, on which: he took Joan. 12

Nadine, the wealthy white girl that Jules eventually falls in

love with and has an affair with, experiences a divorce between her body and her self just like the one Maureen experiences. However, instead of accepting the sense of unwholeness, of alienation from her own experience, in a passive, despairing manner or trying to use it to find a more tolerable life for herself, Nadine experiences the hiatus as something horrible. Jules’ response to her experience is not one designed to help her achieve transcendence over it:

He caressed her vainly, feeling the numbness in: her pass over into himself. He understood why ordinary men--gas-station at­ tendants, taxi drivers--killed women, feeling the numbness in them flow violently into themselves, bringing it all to an end. (p. 289)

This moment, when they are both in their late teen years, is followed by another about ten years later when, supposedly adults, and both having,collected a great deal more experience with their years:

'. . . I want you to- make love to me, I’m driven out of my mind with wanting you.’ She spoke quickly, with a faint, des­ perate urgency. ...

He felt her calling up the excitement in him, her nervous, warm body moving against his, as if challenging him.- He ran his hands hard down the length of her body, as if assessing her, fixing her. He felt himself taking shape beside her, the power of his lust giving shape to his entire body, outlining him in the dark. There was a strange clarity to his sensations. His mind flashed to him an image of himself and Nadine, entwined together, a woman's long, pale arms lashed about his body, and Jules's strong back arched over her, in a grip of death. Hadn't he always put his faith in such bizarre images? Jules risking this, Jules leaping to that, Jules plunging in? He was the hero of countless stories. The conclusion of one story faded into the beginning of another, all of it imagined. That had been his life. But through these endless chapters he had been pursuing a woman who turned out to be this woman, a woman under an enchantment like his own, fated to wrap herself about him and give everything to him.

. . . The clarity of his lu^t pinpointed all that was unreal. Nadine, his beloved, his mistress, a woman who had somehow married another man, drew him to her and put an end to all his questions, but not to the wonder behind them, ’I love you, I'm crazy about you,' he said in anguish, entering her, losing the shape of his words. He was afraid of what he felt, inside her. He felt as if his soul might be lost, drawn out by her love, her. hunger. I can't stop it. I_ can't control it, he thought.

She strained against him. It was a terrible tension, the tension of her legs and arms. A power like the power of lightning rested in her graceful bones and was drawing them to the breaking point, but still they would not break, nothing broke, nothing re­ leased her. Jules kissed her. They struggled together, grappled together. In her desperation she began to claw at his back. The divinity in him, so violently aroused, was distant to her, and she could do nothing but claw at him, wanting it, in a hellish agony.,' 'I love you, I love you,' she moaned, but her body seemed to fight him and held no love for: him, only a kind of baffled dread. Jules stayed with her, holding her. The moment was so strange that he was able to draw back from it, on the brink of climax and yet guiding this woman, able to direct them both in spite of the heavy, quick pulsation of his lust, which she now sensed and wanted. She seemed to sense in him a rich, violent power that should have been hers, since it came from her body, but somehow was not hers--it was denied her, mysteriously. She drew her teeth hard against the side of his face.

'Jules, don't leave me!'

'It's all right.'

Her cries were high, terrified, like the cries of ocean birds. He felt her turning into a wild, cruel bird. He felt her sinking and rising and sinking again in the frenzy of her own mind, unable to draw herself up, weighed down to insensibility. He wanted to turn his face away from her. But he kissed her instead, hungrily and wildly himself, in imitation of her passion and out of courtesy, to hide it from them both. If she were able to smile, Jules thought, a thin, sinister smile would illuminate her face--how she wanted him, how she needed every part of his body! What he had thought elegant in her was only her distance from him, a female distance. Really they were trapped together, struggling together. They were enemies. He imagined her body lacerated with deep red gashes, the frantic maniacal slashes of a dog, and the idea of her blood, the sight of her blood excited him. He knew he was hurting her, though she could not feel any pain. He knew that her face and body were already rubbed raw by him, but he hadn't the strength for this, for 45

this cruelty. He was sorry for her. He did not really want to hurt her, though she wanted him:to; hurt her, she wanted her blood spilled by him, but Jules could not keep it up, he did not want to be shaped out of the air by her violent imagination. She said, pleading, 'Jules . . .' and it was already too late, he buried himself in her with a cry of pleasure and defeat.

*0h, don't leave me! How can you leave me?' She wept.

He felt as if she had struck him with these words. He had failed her again. Exhausted, almost insensible himself, he could say nothing, he could not think at all. His body was fading from him. He could not imagine himself or Nadine. Her frustration, the desire she felt for him, was now beyond his imagination. He felt that he was near to dying while Nadine, miserable with life, still clung to him and pressed her damp, contorted face against his, accusing him.

. . . The idea of twenty or thirty years, the marriage of Jules and Nadine, struck him now as unlikely. He was afraid he had mis­ understood her. And now, thinking him distant from her, unloving, she was prepared to reject him. He could not understand how he had failed her. Her own body had failed her, but her body was in his keeping, in his trust. He was her lover and yet could not make love to her, not truly, fpr everything was secret in her, tense and hidden. He could not understand. Every part of her, every cell of her brain, was infatuated with him and had given itself up to him; he could have sucked the very essence of her sweet blood, everything had been so open to him, and yet there was failure be­ tween them. Her body took on a kind of sinister radiance to him. It opened and closed upon him, driving him to an excess of lust, almost of madness, but still he had failed. It numbed him. He was exhausted, heavy. Even the faint light from the street hurt his skin.

This lengthy passage can be translated very simply into an explora­ tion of sexual ineptitude on the part of a woman who has been conditioned to believe that her sexuality is mysterious; that the responsibility for her sexual satisfaction is her lover's, and not hers; and that her body is only in her keeping and not in her possession and therefore she has no right to self-discovery. The man, similarly, has been conditioned to believe that he is responsible for her sexual satisfaction, and that satisfaction can be achieved by a proper combination of phallic mechanics 46

on his part and a generous attitude of surrender on hers. She would

have an orgasm if only he could stay, hard and active long enough and

if only she wasn’t such a sick, masochistic, withholding woman. Di­

gital manipulation of her clitoris would solve their problem faster

than psychoanalysis, no doubt. However, both are apparently too ig­

norant and too inhibited to find that out. (One wonders if Oates

shares that ignorance and inhibition, or if perhaps her anatomy is

shaped more in accordance with Freudian fantasy.)

Nadine is portrayed as having been always strange and eventually

she is seen as insane. Her orgasmic deprivation is used as the para­

digmatic analogy for her emotional sickness. But despite the fact

that Oates is doing to a female character what it is traditional to

do to women in our society, i.e., blame the victim for her own suf­

fering, portray the torture and the torturer as if they are wish ful­

fillments of the tortured, view the graceless agony of the victim as

evidence of the victim’s guilt, Oates is still so nervous about dealing with that level of feeling in a woman in terms of how it feels to the woman experiencing it, that she makes the perceiving consciousness of

Nadine's sexual frustration Jules. And then Nadine shoots Jules, an

act which does not seem consistent with the character of Nadine as she

has been developed through the book. Perhaps only that violent and in­

sane a response to Nadine's own orgasmic frigidity, only that bizarre

a denouement, makes Oates feel safe in being so explicit about the-

agony of Nadine's sexual disappointment. Nadine had to have been mad

to have been allowed to express her rage and disappointment about her

orgasmic frigidity instead of feeling shame and guilt, all of which 47

she would have had to hide, had she been sane.

This timorousness in describing the existential realities of fe­ male life

. . . the various sordid and shocking events of slum life, detailed in other naturalistic works, have been understated here, mainly because of my fear that too much reality would become unbearable. (P. 12)

Unbearable for whom? I would guess unbearable for Miss Oates--a reader can close a book and refuse to contemplate further what becomes unbearable. If Miss Oates finds the sordid realities of slum life too unbearable to record, it would follow that she would find the sordid realities of female life too unbearable to record also, for females

in our culture dwell in the slums of personhood. We see that when

"too much" of the "reality" of the condition of women is experienced by her female characters, they have been portrayed as deranged by the experiencing of this reality. This serves a dual purpose for the writer: on the one hand, this insanity serves as a warning to those who might, the author included, examine the reality of the condition of women too closely, and, on the other hand, it serves to divorce

these women from all us "normal" women, so that when we examine the reality of their condition, we are shielded from too great a temptation

to identify since they, unlike ourselves, are insane.

This tendency to mask explicit agony with madness is not peculiar

to Oates. None of the literary behavior I have described In here is peculiar either to them among all the works of Oates, or to Oates her­

self. She lacks a vision of the lives of women as lives related to

each other by the common oppression of women in our culture. She can­ 48

not but portray bits and pieces of that oppression, because the stories she tells have all the marks of reality, and in reality the evidence of women’s oppression is unavoidable. But she narrates those bits and pieces as if each was peculiar to the woman whose life it is part of, as if each was an expression of that woman's unique experience, rather than as if each was part of a larger pattern; or as if those bits and pieces of women's oppression was an inevitable manifestation of natural law. In other-words, her portrayal of female characters is totally conventional, i.e., reflects the habits of the collective imagination of a culture, rather than reflective of either an en­ lightened socio-political vision, or a personal insight. She is, as a writer, a slave to convention in her portrayal of women.

We see that sexual frigidity in women is almost always dealt with, explored, portrayed as co-existent with madness, homosexuality,

"unawakenedness" (i.e., the implication here being that there is no self-generating female sexuality), or bitchiness (i.e., the implica­ tion here being that women derive greater pleasure from withholding from a man the pleasure of sexually satisfying her than they do from being sexually satisfied), or some other form of "unnaturalness" (such as ambition, aggressiveness, creativity, or dissatisfaction with the social/political order she find herself a part of). 13 For instance, in Jeanne Rejaunier's The Beauty Trap, one of the major female characters is quite explicit about all the failures of technique, the anatomical ignorance, the inconsiderateness, insen­ sitivity, selfishness, ineptness, etc. she has suffered at the hands of men. There is no doubt that such experiences are part of a great 49

many more women’s sexual histories than one would ever guess from a 14 ... careful reading of all the fiction ever written. But all that this character and the Vassar classics major who runs the stud house have to tell us about female sexual disappointment is undercut by writing that at this point in the book is so bad that the characters become ridiculous and unbelievable. The "truth" this woman tells about female experience is even further and more brutally undercut by her portrayal as an insensitive, greedy, hard woman who discovers at the end of the book that she is a lesbian. The implication of the linking of this type of unpleasant character with unfortunate sexual experiences is that her sexual disappointments are the result of characterological deficiencies rather than sexual politics. Her unreliability as a per­ ceiving consciousness is further undermined by her lesbianism. The implicit message here is: "since she is a lesbian, no man could ever satisfy her. Therefore her criticisms of their performance are not trustworthy. And, furthermore, if I share them, it must mean I am a lesbian." If lesbianism was a culturally respected and safe life style option for a woman, such a conclusion would not be dangerous enough for most women to avoid. But we live in a homophobic culture. The character is created so unsympathetically that readers will be unable to identify with her and at the same time retain any self-esteem.

Non-feminist women writers seem more willing to take their cues for the portrayal of female sexuality from the latest male psycothera- pist or sex manual writer than from their own experiences or the ex­ periences of other women. They are willing enough to present female characters who are sexually unhappy, unfulfilled, disappointed, con­ 50

fused, etc., but the vision of their condition is always filtered

through some "attitude" about such "female problems" that exonerates

men and isolates woman. Even Doris Lessing, one of our most highly-

praised writers, tends to mystify female sexuality. In The Four Gated City,15 we are presented with a woman we are encouraged to perceive

as insane throughout more than half the book--and accompanying her in­

sanity (we are not told whether this is a result or a symptom of in­

sanity, but that there is a -connection between the two is implicit) is

frigidity. No matter how much her husband desires her, no matter how

long he waits faithfully for her to be "cured" so she can enjoy his

embrace she can't stand to have him touch her. The fact that there

has already been a child of this marriage would lead us to suspect

that the "insane" character has had some unwilling and unpleasant

sexual experiences with her husband which we can be sure she did not

initiate. And yet despite this evidence of marital rape her husband

is portrayed throughout the book as a touching sympathetic person. In Rona Jaffe's Away From Home^ we find a long and painful ac­

count of that kind of female frigidity that arises from a woman's

preternaturally extended state of unawakenedness. What this usually means, and means here, is that the "right" man hasn't come into Margie's

life yet. She is twenty-five years old and she's never felt "anything"

until Mort comes into her life and teaches her to feel. Here we have

the old story of woman-as-child, woman-as-student. If we believe what we read in novels, we would never know that "normal" women have sexual

feelings without and before the tutelage of the penis.

In the fiction of women writers as well as men writers, female 51

frigidity is always seen as a problem of the individual woman, a per­ sonal problem rather than a socio-political problem. The only books

I can ever remember reading from before the new wave of feminist fiction where there is an attempt to demystify female orgasm are the Peyton

Place^ books. Alison spends a weekend with her publisher off at some sort of romantic hide-away and he introduces her to the pleasures of the flesh. She has been impressed and excited by him for the duration of their relationship, and when she finally has an orgasm in his bed, she’s certain it’s love. However, she discovers that he is married, that he thought she knew it and that for him the weekend had a meaning and a value totally different from its meaning for her. She then spends a considerable period of time separating her feelings about sex from her feelings about love, thinking about technique, sexual satis­ faction., anatomical ignorance, and good relationships. She is allowed to think all of this through without being portrayed as insane, corrupt, homosexual, or dying of cancer. She is allowed to think it all through and emerges enriched in her understanding of human behavior, human needs, herself, her relationships, and even--taboo of all taboos being broken--her art and her commitment to that art. She emerges from ado­ lescence a strong, sensitive, richly maturing young woman. And you know what the reviewers had to say about all that! 18 Jessamyn West has written a book, Leafy Rivers, in which the major character, a female, is allowed to think about her sex life and reminisce about how she learned about her own anatomy and the techniques for sexual satisfaction and the enrichment of her marital bed adventures. But throughout the whole book, Leafy is lying in a bed, trying to deliver a 52

child who won't come out, being given inaccurate obstetrical directions, and practically dying. One has a sense that the physical torture of

the extended labor is somehow a punishment for all that sexual knowledge and pleasure.

Women in fiction only very rarely either deal with (i.e., touch, perform acts upon) their own bodies or experience their bodies directly, unless they are putting the finishing touches on a make-up job or suf­ fering either labor pains or some non-genderally related agony. In fiction female bodies do not belong to females; they are male accessories, male possessions or rejections. Perhaps one of the most significant'. bits of evidence we have of this state of affairs is the fact that women do not masturbate in fiction. Boys do--we know about the tender narcissistic self-explorations, self-consolations of many a young iden­ tity-seeking hero. Old men do--we know what’s happening under the hats

in the laps of the old men in the front rows of the burlesque shows be­ cause we've read about it in fiction. And we even know about the sym­ bolic significance of a middle aged married man's self-satisfaction.

It's usually an act of hostility or aggression towards some bitchy fe­ male. Or else an act of defiant freedom, an assertion of self-possession.

But the closest our young heroine ever gets to self-love is a modest running of her hands over her budding breasts or down the sides of her newly curving body in front of a mirror that tells her that, finally, men will find her desirable. Her appreciation of her physical being is only her anticipation of his potential appreciation.

The invisibility in fiction of the kinds of experiences and reali­ ties of women I have been discussing lead to a number of speculations 53

about the kind of people who write fiction, the kinds of pressures they I are working under, the schizoid modalities that they work out of.

Many women writers, operating out of the myth of individualism, fail to recognize themselves as members of a discriminated against class or group. Frequently, as was the case with Gertrude Stein, who left the entertainment of the wives and mistresses of the artists who 19 visited her to Alice B. Toklas, they separate themselves from,other women thinking of themselves as better than, or different from other women.

They identify with men, as we saw Joyce Carol Oates doing earlier. Or they explain away the deviation from the received definition of woman that their writing represents by telling themselves and others that their work isn’t something they are serious about. It’s just a hobby, they say, or just something they do to earn some badly needed money— 20 both excuses offered time and again by Mary Roberts Rinehart, Faith rn-T, Baldwin^" and, I am sure, others. Or else they might say, as do so many, that they aren’t "just" women, but persons who are women in whom ' 22, a young boy is locked up--and it is he who is responsible for the work.-—'

Some excuse their unfeminine creativity by explaining it as a baby- substitute. These women don’t usually stay around to answer the ques­ tion of why they don’t just have babies instead, unless they are piti- ously but triumphantly and definitely sterile. But only rarely and recently have women writers tried to expand the limits of definition or to transcend the definitions altogether.

And when their xrork fails to be recognized or is criticized harshly, or is recognized only by other xromen whom the female artists cannot re­ spect because, after all, they are only other women, then the kinds of 54

self-doubt, self-torture they suffer as artists are endless and un­ answerable.

There are those female novelists who write about the things that happen in their lives, in their guts, to their bodies as things that happen in their minds. They report on the places that their bodies go as spiritual trips. And when they do this, when they disguise the feeling-location of their reality, they are euphemizing as surely as when they call fucking "sleeping together." This dislocation of feeling and being realities is common in the work of a great many fe­ male fiction writers. They would rather be second-rate artists, guilty of sentimentalism, mawkishness, circumlocution, evasiveness, frothiness, anything--rather than open themselves up to the awful charge of "unnat­ ural." They have risked enough by daring to write at all.

Perhaps most tragic are those women writers who do not ever write because they only know how to write about what they know, what is real for them. And what is real for them has never been fictionalized and they are afraid to be the first. They discover about themselves things that violate the cultural notions of "femininity" and they are afraid to expose themselves as "unnatural women." 55

NOTES

1 Males suffer similarly from stereotypic mythologies about the nature and essence of masculinity. I do not in this paper intend to depict men as evil victimizers and women as simply victims. Surely it is obvious by now that both men and women are equally enslaved by the Procrustean bed of genderal stereotyping. It is long since that both blacks and whites have come to recognize that racism distorts life, cripples the self, and mystifies reality for whites as well as for blacks. Just so do men and women both wriggle on the end of sexist identity pins. However, as in the case of poor southern whites who were duped by racist distortions into seeing their "common cause" as one with whites and not as one with poor people, so is it the case with men and sexism. Although we all, men and women, are victimized by the sexist myths of our culture, although we are all puppets, those whose strings make of them potential if not actual lynchers, rapists, Playboy executives earning $50,000 a year, etc., tend to be slower to notice let alone protest, their strings, to object to their victimiza­ tion, than do the puppets being threatened with or actually lynched, raped, sentenced to twelve years of diaper changing, twenty years of typing someone else’s letters, etc. 2 I will not attempt to deal with the reasons male novelists mis­ represent female characters in their work, i.e., create inauthentic females (much has been said about this topic, particularly in relation to the fiction of Hemingway), but I will attempt to deal with this problem in the work of female novelists. 3 The following novels come immediately to mind: Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946); Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Direc­ tions, 1964); James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1961); Phillip Roth, Portnoy1s Complaint (New York: Random House, 1969); Saul Bellow, Herzog (New York: Fawcett World, 1974); J. P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man (New York: Berkeley Pub. Co., 1971).

Such an interpretation sheds a possible new light on the beards so many men are wearing these days. Could it be that they can't face themselves in the mirror any longer?

Many of the new novels published in the last three or four years are by women who have been either directly and consciously inspired by the Women's Liberation Movement or indirectly freed to write about a wider range of phenomena. For instance, Alix Kates Shulman, in Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), tells poignantly of Sasha's encounter with her own fledgling mustache. £ Joyce Carol Oates, them (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1969), p. 230. Subsequent references to this book appear in the text. 56

For discussion of the relationship between membership in a vic­ timized group, class, or caste, and schizophrenia, see R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (New York: Pantheon, 1969); Gordon Allport, "Traits Due to Victimization," The Nature of Prejudice, 2nd ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1958); Meredith Tax, Woman and Her Mind (Boston: New England Free Press, 1970); The Radical Therapist, ed. Jerome Agel (New York: Ballantihe'j 1971) . - : •’ 8 J. L. Hampson and Joan G. Hampson, in "The Ontogenesis of Sexual Be­ havior in Man, "in Sex and Internal Secretions, ed. W. C. Young (Balti­ more: Williams & Wilkins, 1967), Vol. II, discuss this concept (psy- chosexual neutrality) at length. 9 Despite the fact that "everyone knows" that "George Eliot" is really Mary Ann Evans, most people continue to refer to her by the masculine pseudonym. I find the practice lazy and politically repre­ hensible, not to mention inconsistent. The same people refer to the author of Jane Eyre as Charlotte Bronte* when "everyone knows" the book was published under the name Currer Bell. 10 Linda Keuhl, "An Interview with Joyce Carol Oates," Commonweal, 5 Dec. 1969, p. 308.

11 Daniel Curzon, in "Hatred," Gay Literature, 1, No. 2 (Spring 1975), ¡15-32, discusses at length Oate's rejection of any identification with her female characters.

12 Ibid., pp..22-23.

13 Jeanne Rejaunier, The Beauty Trap (New York: Pocket Books, 1970). 14 But certainly there is abundant evidence to indicate that sexual disappointment rather than sexual satisfaction tends to be the norm in our society. Witness the sales records of sex technique manuals, the literature of the Women's Liberation Movement, and the income tax re­ turns of sexual dysfuction therapists. 15 Doris Lessing, The Four Gated City (New York: Bantam, 1969).

16 Rona Jaffee, Away From Home (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960).

I2 Grace Metalious, Peyton Place (New York: Dell, 1956); Grace Me- talious, Return to Peyton Place (New York: Dell, 1959).

Jessamyn West, Leafy Rivers (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967). 19 Gertrude Stein, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1933), has Alice comment over and over, througout the book, that she left the geniuses to Gertrude while she talked with 57

the wives and mistresses. For instance, we see her coming to know and then parting from one of Picasso's mistresses after another, while, over the years, he and Gertrude develop and deepen their friendship and artistic colleagueship. 20 This protestation of innocence in the matter of serious artis­ tic intention is one of the major themes in the autobiography of Mary Roberts Rinehart, My Story (New York: Farrar & Rhinehart, 1931). 21 Evidence of a disparaging attitude towards her own work and even a mild contempt for those who bothered to read it was presented by Peggy Allison in a report she made to a Popular Culture graduate seminar at Bowling Green State University in the fall quarter, 1971, of the personal interview she had taped with Faith Baldwin that fall. 22 Such an attitude is expressed many times in the work of May Sarton, but most clearly, in Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (New York: Norton, 1965). 58

INTRODUCTION TO SUMMARIES OF ESSAYS INCLUDED IN

IMAGES OF WOMEN IN FICTION: FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES

The essays herein summarized are a beginning in setting to right

the literary and critical misrepresentations of reality resulting from

sexist bias. The essays seek to rectify those misrepresentations in

four different ways:

1. The essays from "What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can't

Write" through "The Image of Women in Science Fiction" point out how

literature and criticism distort the reality of woman's condition.

2. The essays, "Silences: When Writers Don't Write" to "Sex Roles

in Three of Hermann Hesse's Novels," point out what aspects of women's

reality is not represented at all.

3. In the essays, "Humanbecoming: Form &, Focus in the Neo-Feminist

Novel" to "May Sarton's Women,"credit is given to those literary works

that do capture traditionally ignored or misrepresented aspects of woman's reality.

4. And finally, the essays, "Feminism and Literature" to "Feminist

Style Criticism," point out the fundamental deficiencies of traditional

literary criticism that have contributed in the creation of a sexist

literature and, most unfortunately, have contributed in warping the vision of students of literature. The essays in this section not only discuss problems of traditional literary criticism, but also offer

tentative approaches for ennabling feminist liteiary criticism to bring about a restoration of literary critical objectivity free of sexist bias. 59

WHAT CAN A HEROINE DO? OR WHY WOMEN CAN'T WRITE

Joanna Russ

Culture, according to Joanna Russ, is male, i.e., it sees itself from a male point of view. Since that is so, myths, the material with which a writer works, do not account for the female experience. A writer works with pre-existing myths, which embody what a culture be­ lieves to be true, would like to be true, or is mortally afraid may be true. A writer chooses to work with myths because they incorporate already developed materials. They are not brand new. They have been smoothed down by their passage through many hands. Myths are the spine of a work of art, that an artist uses to structure her experience and which a reader carries away to use to structure her.'s. Therefore to use male myths in a female context is difficult, if not impossible for the woman writer, and dangerous for the woman reader. Images of women, not real womens appear in literature. At their best they are images of the social roles women are supposed to play; at their worst they are projections of what men want, hate, or fear. The traditional

I roles are deadly, leading to ecological disaster, war, and overpopula­ tion. The myths that serve them are fatal.

What can a heroine do? What myths, plots, actions are available to the female protagonist?

A writer who does not want to make her character the protagonist in a love story or a How She Went Crazy story might abandon female pro­ tagonists, but in so doing she would invalidate her own experience, and 60

be forced to adopt a Self in which her true self must be viewed as the

Other. She can adopt the lyric mode, in which there is no real plot

as such, but rather an associative working of images, events, scenes,

passages, and words woven around an emotional center. Such a mode has no chronology or causation. Male critics denigrate such novels as being formless and messy, having no movement, or action, "unlike life,"

they claim.

Certain genres, however, Russ writes, are more amenable to a woman

author than others. Detective fiction with its genuine intellectual puzzles of finding out who did it lends itself to a woman's perspective.

Supernatural fiction with its myth of the intrusion of something strange, and not natural to one’s world offers many opportunities for the em­ ployment of knowledge and character that transcend mundane gender con­ siderations. Science fiction offers at least three myths that can be of use: 1) I find myself in a new world, not knowing who I am or where

I came from. I must find these out, and also find out the rules of the world I inhabit (the journey of the soul from birth to death).

2) Society needs something; I must find it (the quest). 3) We are miserable because our way of life is out of whack. We must find out what is wrong and change it (the drama of sin and salvation).

Aside from working with these possibilities, it is imperative for ourselves and for writers and readers to come, to create and find new myths that grow out of our own real lives. 61

POPULAR LITERATURE AS SOCIAL REINFORCEMENT:

THE CASE OF CHARLOTTE TEMPLE

Kathleen Conway McGrath

McGrath attempts to account for the immense popularity of Susanna

Rowson's Charlotte Temple, which, published in 1791, went through over two hundred editions. Northrop Frye’s analysis of what accounts for popularity in literature attributes that popularity to the universal appeal of recurrent events in the story line of the work. McGrath, on the other hand, suggests that popularity derives from theaithor’s ability to formulate an idealized conception of the civilized structure as it is perceived by the society and to identify those social forces that threaten the structure.

In Charlotte Temple we have the classical tale of the good girl seduced from virtue and abandoned to die. Charlotte Temple, a young

British girl of fifteen, is influenced by Mme. LaRue, an amoral French woman, to act upon her love for a young British officer. Thus begins her tragedy. Acting outside the conventions of society, the relation­ ship runs its course outside that society. In the telling of the story,

Rowson chooses, despite other options, to uphold her society’s ideas about the value of its institutions. In the course of so doing Rowson morally instructs her young readers and supports the status quo making essentially three major points: 1) the family is sacred, 2) contentment is the highest virtue, and 3) whoever detracts from the sanctity of either one is villainous.

That the fact that a work's popularity is historically limited 62

suggests that its appeal rests upon its reinforcement of a particu­ larized vision of society rather than upon the universality of the appeal of its recurrent events. To determine the reasons for the popularity of a dated work of popular culture, statements about how society "ought to be" should be isolated from the recurrent events.

This same method could be carried out with contemporary works, thus forming a basis for a comparison and contrast of society as viewed in modern and dated popular literature.

She concludes:

Popular literature tends to support society's ideas about itself, and therefore is subject to the same inability to see the full complexity of the truth about its social reality as society is subject to that inability. I would suggest that only literature which sees more about society than society sees about itself can endure the test of time. 63

THE GENTLE DOUBTERS:

IMAGES OF WOMEN IN ENGLISHWOMEN'S NOVELS, 1840-1920

Susan Gorsky

Most characters in Englishwomen's novels from 1840 to 1920 fit stock roles, for their authors had to deal with established ideals of' female behavior adhered to by their upper and middle class readership.

Real women and thus fictional heroines were expected to be obedient, chaste, pious, to look forward to marriage as their proper goal, and to allow their husband's authority to replace their fathers'.

The typical Victorian heroine while conforming to a whole list of minute physical, characterological, and behavioral attributes neverthe­ less was individualized by her departure from some of these attributes, unlike secondary female figures in the novel.

Some stock figures in the novels of this period are the Angel,

Saint^ Martyr, Ingenue, Independent Woman, Romp, Coquette, Flirt, Jilt,

Schemer, Bad Woman, and Fallen Woman. Angels and Saints are charac- ; terized, according to Professor Gorsky, "by being above earthly con­ cerns, generous, self-sacrificing, quiet, forgiving, and capable of ab­ solutely self-less love." The Martyrs are of two types: those whose self-sacrifice leads them to patiently accept sufferings and an early death, and those who fight back and refuse to destroy themselves. The causes of martyrdom for these women are, usually, the bondage of marriage to a tyrannical husband, overwork, excessive childbearing, the rigor of childrearing, broken engagements, and faithless lovers. The Ingenue 64

was usually a very young, gullible, innocent, child-woman, who so ab­

solutely conforms to the Victorian standard that her function is often

that of being a caricature or satirization of that standard. The In­ dependent Woman ranges from such women who eventually give up their in­ dependence for marriage and their preordained lot and those women such

as Frances Crimsworth in Charlotte Bronte's The Professor who are able

to function in their careers and also to conform to the role of submis­

sive wife. The Romp is Professor Gorsky's categorization that includes

the tomboy, daring girl, Coquette, Flirt and Jilt. Minor infractions of the social code of accepted feminine behavior very often lead to the loss of a girl's reputation, while major infractions such as smoking or going on evening boat rides with men can earn a girl the reputation of a Bohemian, for which she usually pays through unrequited loves and early death. Bad Women usually gain that reputation by being sexually free or for considering adultery, running away with a man, having an illegitimate child, or becoming pregnant before marriage.

The Fallen Woman is usually thoroughly punished and redeemed if she is repentant. But in the works of Mrs,. Gaskell, Mary Ann Evans, and the

Brontes there appear many female characters whose complexity defies categorization and who have a life beyond the stereotypes.

In conclusion, although marriage is shown as the goal for a young girl, the portrayal of unhappy marriages brings that goal into question.

By showing the difficulty of adjustment to marriage they call the ideal of absolute innocence into question. Thus, by fitting characters into familiar molds, these authors frequently tested the mold for flaws. 65

THE SERVILITY OF DEPENDENCE: THE DARK LADY IN TROLLOPE

Charles Blinderman

Trollope adapts, according to Professor Blinderman, the Dark Lady-

archetype whose representatives "stole through Arcadian forests, . . .

were burned at the stake throughout Renaissance Europe, and . . . re­

appear in bad dreams weilding scissors." By contrasting his adapta­

tion of this arctetype with his fairer heroines, he is able to high­

light the virtues and qualities of the ideal Victorian wife, a woman whose excellence is in direct proportion to her self-abnegation.

The Dark Lady for Trollope is his equivalent for the Victorian

feminist. She is temperamental, physically attractive to the point of being threatening, and then, arousing men's rivalry, she puts the prize, herself, out of their reach. She is cynical, intelligent, remote and narcissistic. Her desire is unto her own ends not her husband's, a closed circle that men try in vain to break. While the Victorian Wife finds fulfillment in her subservience to her husband in all things, the

Dark Lady is invigorated by the superiority she exerts over men intel- lectually, creatively, and, (this is hinted at) sexually.

The extreme, or reductio ad absurdum of the Dark Lady archetype for Trollope is the Jewess. In her obscurity, timelessness, and intel­ ligence she conforms to other Dark Lady Jewess's of fiction: Hawthorne's

Miriam, Scott's Rebecca, and Lawrence Durrell's Justine, to name a few.

The Jew for Trollope undermines those qualities of sincerity and honesty that hold a central place in his fiction. Thus, the deceitful Jew is 66

dangerous to decent society and because of the female's great beauty, sexuality, and intellectual prowess uncommon in a woman, is more dan­ gerous than the male.

Probably Trollope's attitude towards the Dark Lady is summarized in the comment he makes about one of them, Rachel O'Mahoney, an American actress appearing in his book Land-Leaguers: "She lacks feminine weak­ ness, which of all her gifts is most valuable to an English woman, till she makes the mistake of bartering it away for women's rights." 67

GENTLE TRUTHS FOR GENTLE READERS: THE FICTION OF ELIZABETH GOUDGE

.Madonna Marsden

Elizabeth Goudge, although characterizing herself as an escapist writer, offers works, which, despite their happy endings and remote settings, primarily deal with war, changing ideologies, and threats to the established myth-structure. The women in her work, according to Professor Marsden, are governed by a dialectic between the paradigm that models their happiness around their biology and their own experi­ ence that puts the paradigm into question.

Women in her books have essentially five possible life choices:

1) to accept destiny, marry and live happily ever after; 2) marry, question, and rebel against destiny, but be reabsorbed into the value system; 3) refuse to marry and find happiness with family surrogates;

4) refuse happiness and find happiness in a career; or 5) reject the system entire and be damned.

The women who make the second life choice are the most popular with her readers and populate most of her work. Nadine Eliot, a charac­ ter that appears in the trilogy The Bird in the Tree. (1940)', Pilgrim1 s

Inn (1948), and The Heart of the Family (1953), is one of these heroines who does not find satisfaction in marriage and motherhood and whose _ archetypal quest for self turns in on itself unlike the male adventure hero. Estranging herself from her husband and indifferent to her ' children, she sets about becoming economically independent and falls in love with a younger man. Her self-assertion only brings chaos and 68

unhappiness into her life and she learns from her mother-in-law that

"creative love meant building up ... a habit of service that might

become at last a habit of mind and feeling as well as of body."

Marsden equates this formula to pietistic and mystical techniques

aimed at achieving religious transcendence, but here the transcen­

dence involved is a reaffirmation of the traditional social order

against which the heroine had been rebelling. Nadine eventually finds

happiness and integration by capitulating to the conventional social

pattern.

The only heroines in Goudge’s fiction who find happiness without marriage or a surrogate family to nurture are historical figures, such

as Jane Austen, whose very fame proves them exceptions to the rule, whose distance in the past removes them from being contemporary threats,

and whose historical reality shows, retrospectively, that they were a

part of the grand pattern after all. And they too are also nurturant women because they are presented as nurturing creative "dreams."'

The woman, however, who seeks power and rejects altogether her biolo­ gically destined nurturant role is always utterly and irretrievably damned.

The fiction of Elizabeth Goudge tells women who are dissatisfied with their conventional female roles that the fault does not lie with

the model but with dissatisfied individuals. The public vision of

traditional social roles are upheld as meaningful, while private desires for self-assertion are shown to be self-destructive if not held in check. 69

Marsden writes:

Basically, her novels save us from the embarrassment of having to admit that honest anarchy may be more personally fulfilling than the organized lie. But the organized lie has always managed to find room, through popular culture, for the threats which would ex­ pose it. Bloody cultural revolutions are prevented through the bloodless ones which are gradually fought in our mass media every day. 70

THE IMAGE OF WOMEN IN SCIENCE FICTION

Joanna Russ

Science fiction shows the world as it might be. Usually science fiction tales are set in the very distant future. One would think the genre an excellent mode for exploring our assumptions about what is essential to human nature, about innate personality difference be­ tween men and women, about family structure, about sex, in short about - gender roles. But, so far, this exploration has not taken place.

Societies projected in sophisticated ¿science fiction to exist hundreds of thousands of years in the future, although technologically advanced beyond the point of recognition, perpetuate the genderal re­ lations of middle-class suburbia. In less than sophisticated science fiction, the space operas, one does not see a projection of today’s gender roles into the future, but a return to an exaggerated or idealized version of these roles as they existed in the past. In the latter fiction women are often prizes over which men fight. They are supernaturally beautiful. Often they are pictured as weak and kept offstage. When women in space operas have powers, they are of a passive and involuntary quality--telepathic, clairvoyant, etc.-- qualities which cannot be developed or controlled, in a woman, but not possessed by a woman. The real focus of these stories is not on the women at all, but on the daring and adventuresome exploits of their he- man heroes. The audience of this fiction, Russ observes, are mostly shy, nervous, sensitive, intelligent boys, who are talkative and awkward 71

with people, who find their self-images flattered by these virile men

{ and the world surrounding them. In these stories masculinity equals power and femininity powerlessness.

In stories that make a pretense of showing egalitarian relations between the sexes, one usually finds that significant features are left out, such as: the characters’ personal and erotic relations, child-rearing arrangements, and for that matter children themselves.

Of stories that make changes in gender roles we have those stories of evil matriarchies that abound in space opera fiction.

Here, normal, red-blooded men enter a world of cold, cruel, domineering women contemptuous of their cringing, servile men. The normal men easily defeat the warlike, but highly inefficient matriarchs and over­ throw the matriarchy, restoring the world to the "normal" order of things. The men of that society are now joyful and the women admit that indeed they are much happier now. Matriarchies in more literate science fiction are usually presented as being static, hierarchical, and insect-like. If they are good they embody "innate" female qualities such as serenity, tolerance, love and pacifism. If bad, they are threatening to men.

Women authors of science fiction conform to the stereotypes as do the men, although their female characters are more active and lively, and their portrayal of genderal relations tend to be more egalitarian than those of male authors.

Ursula LeGuin makes an attempt at overcoming this stereotyping in

The Left Hand of Darkness by creating a hermaphroditic world in which 72

the individuals adopt the gender of their choice during mating. But, by and large, her attempt fails. The people are referred to through­ out by the generic "he;" there is an absolute lack of interest in child-raising, although the author is a mother of three; and the story concentrates on work, leaving us with a world of men in thinly disguised form. The women are not women, but rather female men.

In summary, there are plenty of images of women in science fic­ tion, but hardly any women. 73

SILENCES: WHEN WRITERS DON'T WRITE*

Tillie Olsen

Tillie Olsen writes at the beginning of her essay:

Literary history and the present are dark with silences; some the silences for years by our acknowledged great; some silences hidden; some the ceasing to publish after one work appears; some the never coming to book form at all.

She is speaking here not of those natural silences, the periods of lying fallow and gestation that are a part of the creative process, but those silences that represent a thwarting of the creative process.

She speaks of Hardy's abandonment of prose after Jude the Obscure, of Rimbaud's abandonment of poetry, of Melville's thirty year silence after Pierre, his work coming to a standstill because what he most wanted to write would not pay, but unable to totally conform to market requirements, resulting in what he called "a hash." She writes of censorship silences imposed by publishers, relatives, governments, society, religion. Then there are the silences that follow the pub­ lication of a memorable work and the author is never heard from again.

Foreground silences: the silences that precede the first work.

But the major portion of this essay deals with the silences of lives never expressed in writing: "those whose waking hours are all struggle for existence; the barely educated; the illiterate; women."

To understand the silences of women throughout history one must first come to an understanding of the requirements of the creative process.

Writing, if we are to trust the journals of outstanding writers, 74

demands constant toil, long periods of uninterrupted time, a full in­ volvement of self. The history of literature testifies that writing, for the most part, requires a full-time writer. Periods of waiting are required in writing, but they are a special kind of receptive, patient waiting and when the creative spark comes, it must instantly be kindled. But what of people who do not have this time, this freedom from interruption, this opportunity for total dedication of self? To answer this question leads us directly into a discussion of why so few women have written.

Nearly all women whose achievements endure never married. Many married in their thirties. Of those who married and had children as young women, all had servants. In this century the same holds true.

Of those women writers that married, most were childless. Few had one child; and even fewer more than one. Nearly all had household help.

The implication is not that writing takes the place of frustrated maternal longings, but that motherhood is a demanding and time-consuming occupation that leaves little time’for writing. Women are traditionally trained to put other's needs first, to feel these needs as their ox-m, deriving their fulfillment from ennabling others to create. "It is distraction," Olsen writes, "not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil."

She concludes by describing her own life as a vzriter of fiction to bear out the points she makes about the difficulties experienced 75

by women who would write.

* This article is adapted from a talk entitled "Death of the Creative Process," given at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study in 1963. Copyright© 1965 and all rights reserved by Tillie Olsen. Reprinted from Harper1s, Oct. 1965. Used by permission of the author. Olsen’s "Writers Who Are Women in Our Century--One Out of Twelve," a talk given to the MLA in 1971 and reprinted in College English, 34, No. 1 (Oct.’ 1972), 6-18, concerns itself further with circumstances affecting women as writers. 76

WHY AREN'T WE WRITING ABOUT OURSELVES*

Carole Zonis Yee

Despite the enormous contribution of Jewish women writers as

pamphleteers and writers in women's movement papers, Jewish women,

modern Jewish women, anywhere between fifteen and fifty, are a rare

phenomenon in modern fiction, poetry or plays, either as characters

or authors.

The few that appear, such as Mrs. Portnoy or Brenda Potemkin in

the work of Philip Roth, or Helen Bober in Malamud's The Assistant,

and others, are portrayed as castrators who destroy a man's masculinity

and keepers of the home with its concomittant self-sacrifice. Let the

world fall apart, but protect the Jewish Mama's kitchen at all costs.

For as long as the kitchen survives cultural change intact, so then do

the home, the children, and the Jewish people survive.

But this all too limited portrayal fails to take into account the

reality of life for modern Jewish women, Yee writes. Today's Jewish

woman delivers papers at the MLA, writes articles for the movement,

teaches in the highest academies in the land, lives on communes, has

non-Yiddishe babies, in short lives a life incredibly more rich than

that life pictured in contemporary literature. It is about time that

the richness of that life be put into print.

* From Off Our Backs (Feb.-Mar. 1972). This whole issue was devoted to Jewish women. Copies of this special issue can be obtained by writing to Off Our Backs, 1346 Connecticut Ave., N. W. , Washington, D. C. 20036. 77

THE WOMEN OF COOPER'S LEATHERSTOCKING TALES*

Nina Baym

Professor Nina Baym takes issue with critics who discount Cooper's women as mere formulaic devices or as projections of male fears and desires. Women, in Cooper's tales, she argues serve to reflect or high­ light the performance of woman's role as social glue in a stratified patriarchal society, the mortar in civilization's brick structure.

"Marriage rather than love is the matrix of his 'romances?'"

Marriage, "the interaction between men where women are simply the ex­ changed goods," establishes society. It is meant to take place only within the boundaries of the group, to confirm rather than extend or modify the social structure.

Filially obedient to the patriarchal order, Cooper's female heroines willingly conform to what their society requires of them. Weak, help­ less, dependent, and refined, the cultural worth of these women lies in their very uselessness. They are "precious burdens," whose packaged aristocracy exalts the nobility of their spouse-master) whose chival- ric love expresses itself in the courteous pretense of submitting his superior will and strength to the service of her weakness and whose manhood is predicated on the successful defense and maintenance of that civilizing dependence and everything necessary to it. Their ex­ istence then is a pioneering force in that it necessarily brings "high" civilization in its wake, thus truly taming the wilderness.

Contrasted with the characteristics of these women are those which

Cooper's, maybe more democratically influenced, imagination cannot con­ 78

tain in the rigid, hierarchical society to which he was intellectually

committed. Mabel Templeton, to whose hand Natty Bumppo aspires, is

characterized by stamina, boldness, resourcefulness, and enterprise as

well as some refinement. Cora, of The Last of the Mohicans, tainted

with black blood, is strong-minded and too voluptuously beautiful.

She is both too flawed and too perfect to fulfill her social function.

The illegitimate Judith Hutter, whose love is rejected by Natty, is

rebellious, bitter, doesn’t know her place or refuses to accept it,

restless, intelligent, experienced, impatient, moody; the most in-.

teresting of his characters is "a woman who manipulates her opportuni­

ties in a man's world." In a way she and Natty are similar types,

sexual freedom being for a woman socially equivalent to chastity in

a man. Hester Bush, the only mother in the series, emerges as a strong,

impressive, full partner of her husband whose membership in the property­

less clan represents society in its pre-patriarchal form. On the other

end of the socio-evolutionary continuum is Ellen Wade, fatherless, neither wife nor daughter, who in Baym's view, represents woman in post- patriarchal society. She is the only Cooper female who can make signi­

ficant choices, e.g., whether or not to leave the Bush's, or whose ro­ mance is a love story rather than a patriarchal chess game. Baym writes:

Only in Ellen Wade and Paul Hover do we get a hint that a liberated human being might be the center of a viable social order; otherwise, in the Leatherscocking Tales, order is achieved only at the cost of a social submission that falls with particular completeness and severity on the women.

* Reprinted from American Quarterly, 23, No. 5 (1971), 698- 709. CopyrightQ1971, Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania. Used by permission. ■79

THE ABUSE OF EVE BY THE NEW WORLD ADAM

' Linda Ray Pratt

Linda Pratt finds two flaws in feminist literary criticism:

1) while female characters in American novels are accused of being two

dimensional, they are not compared to male characters who are often

just as two dimensional; and 2) that feminist critics do not make ade­

quate use of the "understood" literary critical vocabulary, and speak

of characters in the context of the larger society, failing to consider

them in the context of the work itself.

She examines the major women characters in Cooper, Hawthorne, and

James in terms of the ubiquitous Edenic myth, equating the conventional

light-dark classification of female characters with the concept of a

pre- and post-lapsarian Eve. Her thesis is that as long as the novelist

insists on the Adamic innocence of the male hero, the pre-lapsarian

Eve must remain static and ignorant, and the post-lapsarian Eve, although humanized by her contact with evil, must suffer rejection by the Adamic hero and ostracization by a society in thrall to its Edenic illusions.

To preserve his Edenic innocence Natty Bumppo rejects the beauti­

ful, intelligent, spirited, morally complex, but tainted Judith Hutter

to retreat into his own virginity and the virgin forest. Only in a

post-lapsarian woman such as Judith Hutter, who rejects self-delusion and seeks the life of the world, does Cooper achieve a human character.

In Hawthorne there are two forms of innocence: the ignorant, un­ compassionate innocence of the pre-lapsarian Eve, and the "higher" in- ■ ■. :'f '7' ' t '■' t ' ' ■ : 80

nocencesborn of passion, experience and suffering of the post lap-

sarian Eve. .While the pre-lapsarian Hilda and Priscilla find happi­

ness in this world, the post-lapsarian Miriam, Hester, and Zenobia

earn their humanity. In Hilda's rejection of Miriam in The Marble

Faun we see exposed an innocence whose mercilessness is more sinful

than Miriam's guilt. It is Miriam's very passions which ultimately

prove redemptive for her and her post-lapsarian Adamic companion. In

the story of Zenobia in The Blithdale Romance we have the account of

the sacrifice of post-lapsarian Eve to the self-deluded fallen Adam.

For Coverdale it is a hint of sexual experience, the loss of virginity^

that dooms Zenobia in his eyes; for Holligsworth, it is Zenobia's

frontal attack upon his illusion of innocence. Both turn to the pre-

lapsarian Priscilla, whose very ineptness is a powerful force, for men will fight to the death to defend her slavery. These forces contribute

in effecting Zenobia's suicide. The men in Hawthorne's tales do not retain their innocence but only engineer their own damnation by re­ jecting Zenobia, Miriam, and Hester, condemning themselves to self- deception and moral infancy.

When Henry James' Isabel Archer rejects the Adamic Caspar's offer

to return to an Edenic state, many critics read into her fear of his

"hard manhood" a fear of sexuality. Few critics point out the violent possessiveness of this "hard manhood," a possessiveness that desires to rob her of her very personality. She rejects Caspar's "hard manhood," then her husband's more sophisticated circumscription of her freedom,

to pursue her post-lapsarian purpose in a world of confounded Adams. 81

By denying the validity of American Innocence, James frees his women i characters from having to conform to pre- and post-lapsarian dichotomies freeing them to grow into moral and intellectual personhood, free from subservience to men.

The example of James may explain why women in English novels seemed more fully human. Their problem was not so much to develop full humanity as it was to find a fuller role in a repressive society. This may also account for why America spawned fewer woman writers. Commit­ ment to the myth of Edenic innocence precluded American women from knowledge of the world; ignorance was a virtue. Women expressing such knowledge of that world incurred nothing but censure from a culture mad with the illusion of its own innocence. 82

SEX ROLES IN THREE OF HERMAN HESSE'S NOVELS I • ■ ; Johanna Leuchter

Traditional sex roles prevail in Herman Hesse's- Siddhartha, The

Journey to the East, and Magister Ludi.

In Siddhartha only males are involved in seeking "the Way." The major female character, Kamala, is an ex-courtesan who has changed her life in order to become a benefactress or hostess to pilgrims of

Gotama. Siddhartha, the hero, courts and wins her in order to learn about love. In doing a post mortem on the subject he describes her tranquility and other mystical attributes. She, characteristic of

Hesse's view of females, can only say that he is the best lover she ever had. It is made clear in this work that women are considered much less worthy than men in Indian culture, which is held up as a spiritually exemplary culture; thus, they are not tolerated among the pilgrims. There are nunneries, but these are not as highly regarded as the monasteries.

In Journey to the East women are mentioned only five times. Ninon and the Princess Fatima, the "objects" (note well) of H. H.'s-quest are probably one in the same. While the males in the tale are described in terms of the goals of their journey, or what they do, Princess

Fatima is described as "dark eyes" that "gleamed beneath black hair."

One must conclude from this work that few women are spiritually in­ clined or that few women exist. Having little room for sex and roman­ tic love in the tale, Hesse seems to have little room for women. 83

Magister Ludí, a futuristic novel, concerns itself primarily with the story of a monastic order that governs Castalia. Women are denied membership to this exemplary spiritual order and the men are required to be bachelors, but not celibate. The students of the Order are looked upon as excellent, lovers by the "daughters of the citizenry"

(notice they do not exist as women in their own right, but only as daughters). For, since the students have no money, they repay the women by giving more of themselves, the implication being that men need to pay women for their company and that most men do not give much of themselves in love relationships. The only woman in the narrative is the wife of the hero’s friend, who participates in a discussion i; 1 about' sending the son to the Order to be educated. After deciding not to, she admits that "she would not have been able to part with her child since he was all that made her life worth living." For

Hesse, a woman’s ultimate fulfillment is in her son.

In a second part of the book which presents the posthumous writings of Knecht there is the story of a matriarchy: "When women ruled. In tribe and family, mothers and grandmothers were revered and obeyed." But, after this, auspicious beginning, the story falls back into the same old sexist clichés. A little girl, not boy, gets lost in the woods, and the young men, not women, are sent out after her.

The hero protects his wife and children and orders them about, despite the fact that women supposedly are "obeyed" in this society. The title of tribal mother, the highest in the Village, is not capitalized, while Rainmaker, a male profession is. The fact that Hesse makes these 84

artistic blunders of conception in a supposed representation of a matri­

archy, shows how deep are his patriarchal assumptions.

A novel that deals with the future fails when it limits the repre­ sentation of a woman’s human nature to mistress, wife, and/or mother roles. 85

HUMANBECOMING: FORM & FOCUS IN THE NEO-FEMINIST NOVEL

Ellen Morgan

Neo-feminism is reflecting its influence literarily in the re- casting of three old forms: the bildungsroman, the historical novel, and the propaganda novel.

The bildungsroman, the apprenticeship novel has tended to be a male form since most women's lives have, been viewed as static. Female protagonists-"have traditionally grown up to the point that they were physically, rather than intellectually or spiritually, mature and then, before reaching transcendent self-hood, have "grown down." But neo­ feminists are re-assessing this form for expressing what authentic self-hood is and how to achieve it. Woman, as neo-feminism conceives her, is a creature in the process of becoming, struggling against the oppressive forces of patriarchal culture.

The historical novel is an important form to help women learn their cultural identity and to discover historic models that will shed light.on their own search for self-hood.

The propaganda novel, in which message is more important than style, functions to teach women valuable things about their conditioning and to help them make choices about their lives. Its artistic value lies in magnitude of conception. Critical standards that tend to deni­ grate it prove themselves to be realistically inadequate.

Two novels written prior to, but showing on many levels an idealo- gical solidarity with, neo-feminism are Virginia Woolf's Orlando and 86

June Arnold's Applesauce, both fantastic, not realistic works, each a bildungsroman.

Orlando is an individual whose life spans some three hundred years, undergoing changes in sexual identity, while never aging more than thirty six years old. Woolf uses this plot to protest the sexism of historical figures, and to show how the sex-role system limits women's lives. The story reveals that sex is not fundamental to identity, but only functions to limit one's destiny. She shows how men use power to enforce the sex-role system and women's dependence. Orlando seeing the disadvantages of the system, rejects it, and is able to move com­ fortably back and forth between the male and female role, dressing as

(s)he likes and loving whomever or whatever sex (s)he wills.

Liza Durach, the hero of Applesauce, goes through three female identities: Eloise, the sexmate; Rebecca,the intellectual: and Lila, the earth-mother. After throwing them all off, she becomes Gus, the husband, finally rejecting this role to proclaim, "I AM LIZA.'" The book reveals that roles are the enemies of woman's emergent self­ hood, that a woman must release herself from femaleness as well as female roles before humanity can be claimed. Arnold deals with the alienation of women from their physical selves as a result of men's view of them as primarily sexual beings.

Both Orlando and Liza succeed in achieving transcendant self-hood.

Alix Kates Shulman's Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen is the first neo­ feminist novel in the full sense of the word, i.e., a work written during and influenced by the current Women's Liberation Movement. This realistic story of Sasha Davis, in a period of time ending when the neo­ 87

feminist movement begins, combines the bildungsroman with the historical novel. Three ideas seem central to the work: conditioning, power structured relationships between the sexes, and the humanity of women.

Liza and Sasha achieve self-hood only as the book closes. We : have yet to read a realistic novel in which a woman achieves self-hood and then continues to live in a patriarchal society. These novels are, hopefully, yet to come. 88

A CASE FOR VIOLET STRANGE

John Cornillon

In The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange (1915) we have the story of sisterhood triumphing over patriarchy. Anna

Katherine Green, the author of these stories, has been shamefully ne­ glected by students of both elite and popular culture. She published her first detective novel, a book whose popularity spanned thirty years, ten years before the first Sherlock Holmes book, and was considered by

Publisher's Weekly to have popularized the detective story.

Violet Strange, a young society lady, superficially appears as a slightly demythologized version of the stereotypical upper-class woman whose physical insubstantiality signifies spiritual insignificance.

Being sequestered from the work world and cultivated for "higher things" usually meant for these xromen social irrelevance, historical invisi­ bility, intellectual condescension, and economic powerlessness.

Publicly, Violet upholds the myth, but privately (she is a detec­ tive) she is in rebellion against the stereotype. This secret identity points out the validity of Allport’s observation that "from time imme­ morial slaves have hidden their true feelings behind a facade." One of Violet’s victories over the patriarchal system is that she turns to her own ends patriarchal society's inability to see the woman beyond the stereotype. She is, in that sense, an invisible woman with a ven­ geance.

Social oppression of women is primarily enforced by rigid, repres­ 89

sive, domineering fathers. Violet's own father who is described as

having a "closed, prejudiced mind" would disinherit his daughter were

he to discover that she was earning money. Violet is earning money in

order to help her older sister, whom she refers to as her sister-mother.

This sister-mother was disinherited by the father and condemned to

poverty and obscurity for not marrying according to his wishes. Using

her own inadvertently discovered gifts at logical deduction, a tradi­

tionally male ability, Violet helps her sister-mother out of poverty

by getting her voice lessons.

In allying herself with her rebellious sister-mother against pat­

riarchy, Violet also helps, as a detective, women who are not sisters

by blood, but by shared sexist oppression. The eight principal char­

acters she helps in nine stories are women. She helps women as a group

survive the threats of romantic exclusivity and patriarchal possessive­

ness. Anna Katherine Green shows the difficulty of infant care, the

domestic oppression of men, the vulnerability of and heroism of elderly women, the irrational jealousies born of an exclusive romantic love,

the hatred that can be spawned by marriage, and the torture and bitter-

I ness of poverty and economic dependence.

Although a love relationship is a convention, this particular re­

lationship is not. The man Violet chooses to marry is one who himself has been ostracized by society and is aware of its insensitivity to the oppressed. He is a man of egalitarian temperament, humanized by suf­

fering. Having suffered an unhappy marriage and cared for his own children, he has few illusions about parent-hood or romantic love; he 90

has neither the strength nor desire to impinge upon what he assumes shall be Violet's continued flouting of the sex-role system. They commit themselves to a non-exclusivistic relationship.

It is a pleasure to read in a work of popular culture of two women, one helping the other, succeeding in triumphing over patriar­ chal restrictions. The sister-mother despite her defiance of the patriarchal order achieves happiness, fame, and love, not the tradi­ tionally dished out love of a prince charming, but the love of her sisters and brother. The book has a happy ending through the machina­ tions of no man, but through the self-affirmation of women. 91

FICTIONAL FEMINISTS IN THE BOSTONIANS AND THE ODD WOMEN

Nan Bauer Magi in

This essay compares and contrasts Henry James’ The Bostonians

(1886) and George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893). Through an account of the political and personal struggles of a pair of women, both novels present a picture of late nineteenth-century feminism.

The Bostonians presents an anti-feminist view of the women’s struggle for the vote in America. The Odd Women gives a pro-feminist picture of women establishing a school to train women to be autonomous.

In both novels the pairs are drawn from different socio-economic classes so that economic dependency creates an aping of traditional male-female relationships.

How the female paired relationship is treated by each author clearly reveals James' anti-feminist bias on the one hand and Gissing’s pro-feminist stand on the other. Olive Chancellor, an aristocrat, is portrayed as a morbid woman out to seek revenge on men to compensate for her personal sickness, an implied latent lesbianism. Olive exerts an evil hypnotic influence over Verena Tarrant, the daughter of a mes­ meric healer of little means. By contrast Gissing does not ridicule nor suggest there is anything unhealthy in the alliance of the wealthy

Mary Barfot and the not-so-wealthy Rhoda Nunn, two women fighting a common cause, but rather shows their relationship as an alternative to the unnatural and confining nature of the institution of marriage as it existed then. Both relationships are confronted with the con­ 92

quering male suitor, but while Verena succumbs to her suitor, Rhoda does

not.

James seeks to defame the women's movement by portraying feminists

as dull misfits. While James perceives feminism as a movement that

threatens the social order, and whereas he gives the reader only an

inadequate and confusing picture of late nineteenth-century feminism,

Gissing portrays it as a heroic movement of women in rebellion against

a crippling social order. Rhoda Nunn and Mary Barfot convinced "what­

ever men can do women can do as well" set up a school to teach women

new social skills.

Both Basil Ransom and Edmund Widdowson, the suitors, give a clear

picture of the anti-feminist, male chauvinist attitudes of the day.

The two novels portray fairly faithfully the upper and middle class

nature of the feminist leadership, both convey a sense of the excite­ ment, passion, and power of movement in that day. In the words of

Professor Maglin, the difference between the two novels lies:

. . . in the attitude of the authors towards independent women, the women's movement, and women in general. James' attitude is that of disgust and mockery (perhaps with the exception of women in the 'proper' place); Gissing'.s attitude is one of support and concern for women striking out on their own. 93

HEROISM IN TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

Judith Little

Too often in literature, as in life, women are portrayed as having meaning only in terms of how much they advance or retard a man’s ambition. It is men who do, achieve, and learn. We have in Virginia

Woolf’s portrait of the Victorian Ramseyb a picture of the awful contra­ dictions and anguish such a conjunction of roles implies for a woman.

The unfolding of the book starts perhaps with Mrs. Ramsey's startling vision of the incongruity between her self-know’ledge and her continual active support of the supposed happiness of others.

Both the Ramsey's adhere to a code a great extent of the time that dictates that Mrs. Ramsey must protect her husband while giving him the illusion that he is protecting her. She must feig ignorance of the harsher realities of life, and neither see nor speak the truth, but cultivate a certain "vagueness" in her mind, a quality that her husband finds comforting. She must provide a retreat from that harsh world in which he performs his self-dramatized heroics. She must « falsify her own vision and her desires to fulfill the prescribed role of 'other'--the landscape of Mr. Ramsey's postured heroism. For Mrs.

Ramsey part of fulfilling this role means conducting an intricate social symphony in which she "suspects there is more motion than music."

Professor Little writes:

The irony is extreme; they cannot share what they do share: the knowledge of a world which, in their eyes, tends to deal rather harshly with human hopes and endeavors. Both of them see this. And both are capable of searching themselves, of casting aside 94

vanity and self-deceit; Mr. Ramsy recognizes that his books will not be remembered for long, and Mrs. Ramsey can perceive the ele­ ment of self-interest in her efforts for everybody's happiness. Both are intelligent, courageous human beings; but both pretend that all the intelligence and courage belong only to Mr. Ramsey. 95

MAY SARTON'S WOMEN

Dawn Holt Anderson

May Sarton provides the reader, according to Professor Anderson, with women who serve as positive role models for women readers in terms of their relationships and their life-styles. Her characters are soli­

tary individuals who do not depend upon others for their sense of iden­

tity but create it for themselves.

. Most of her female characters find their creativity fertilized and catalysed by their relationships with other women. Sarton shows us intense and fulfilling female friendships: women playing, talking, working together. Sarton emphasizes the importance of meaningful friendships and, while not discounting sexuality among women, repeatedly claims that sexual relationships as such are not as conducive to crea­ tive growth as the larger culture maintains. In fact, she goes on to claim that living with someone in a sexual relationship, be it a man or a woman, is creatively debilitating. For her, the best relation­ ships are not those of lifelong duration, but those that run a course of beginning, enriching, and then ending, each individual being strength­ ened to return to her/his work in solitude. Solitude is a necessary medium for the individual's relationship with herself. It is only in solitude that the individual can relate to the natural world, that relationship draws out the natural in the self.

As well as relationships with other women and with nature and solitude, work is a major factor in Sarton's heroine's discovery of fulfillment and self-possession. Her women find that only in integra­ 96

ting their womanhood with their work does work become a truly joyful and fulfilling life-experience. The!significance of work taks a central place in her novels. For example, the dramatic question in The Small

Room is how to define the most valid relationship between teacher and student. The women in the school meet repeatedly to discuss this question; their conversations are profound, insightful, and real. It is obvious that their ideal of excellence lies in the fulfillment and not in the sacrifice of their potential. 97

FEMINISM AND LITERATURE

Florence Howe

Mary Wollstonecraft, author in 1791 of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and Margaret Fuller, more than fifty years later the author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century have "both suffered extraordinary abuse or neglect, both as subjects of biographers and as writers," writes Professor Howe. In our own century Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir have been treated shabbily by critics. But these four women have played a gigantic role in illuminating women's consciousness

Their books are more than tracts, because they relate their lives to their work, in itself a revolutionary thing for a woman to do, since only men are expected to have work while women are expected to be satis fied with having a man. Their volumes express "personal" philosophy and politics. Howe believes that in the consciousness of relating life to work is the connection we each can make between feminism and litera ture. To illustrate this principle, she gives an account of her own life. Taught, despite the Orthodox, Jewish belief that girls are un- teachable, only because her grandfather had no grandson to teach,

Howe went on to major in English at college where her heroes were all male. After four years of graduate school, and many honors, her am­ bition was to be a professor's wife. And then one day, she realized that she was the professor and that the professor's wife was dead.

During the Freedom Summer of 1964 the process of her liberation con­ tinued. She realized that to liberate one's self one not only needed 98

to want to be free, but to have a clear understanding of the forces keeping one oppressed. From this experience she returned to college teaching and asked herself and her students: "How does one learn to love one's self as a woman so that one will want liberation enough to struggle for it?"

She and her students turned to literature for a better under­ standing of the forces oppressing them and what it was in the woman's condition that they were willing to struggle for.

In Joyce they discovered that the male artist defines himself in contradistinction to the female: he is active, while she is passive; he can fly, while she is earthbound; he is master, while she is ser­ vant. In D. H. Lawrence they discovered that women who wish to be artists are called "death-dealing;" women who allow their work to take up more than a small part of their lives will be unfulfilled; a woman without a man, a marriage, a monogamous, heterosexual relationship is not complete.

In contrast with these writers she discusses Richard Wright who teaches them about the crippling and explosive effects of oppression;

Kate Chopin, who teaches them the difficulties of liberation without a movement or ideology; and Tillie Olsen, whose work and personality helped them to experience sisterhood and to discover what there was to love about being a woman. And in their classes they are rediscovering more women writers in their past each day: Tess Slesinger, Christina

Stead, Harriette Arnow, Toni Morrison, Rebecca Harding Davis, Agnes

Smedley, Paule Marshall, Olive Schreiner and Elizabeth Madox Roberts. 99

She ends with a quote from Margaret Fuller: "Tremble not before the free man, but before the slave who has chains to break." 100

MODERNISM AND HISTORY*

Lillian S. Robinson and Lise Vogel

Robinson and Vogel attack the assumptions made by the "modernist” I approach in art and criticism. Discussing the term itself, they say that to make an "ism" out of a period of time has the effect conceptually and semantically of detaching culture from history and of invoking a critical attitude that has no regard for the socio-historical context out of which came both the work of art under consideration or the critical perspective that is considering it. The purpose of the mod-? ernist method, which often uses the vocabulary of a discipline to cri­ ticize that discipline, is not to undermine that discipline, but to entrench it more firmly.

This critical approach often ignores important questions such as the economic conditions under which the work was produced and the in­ tended audience of the work. Contextual critics, who have sought to avoid such criticisms, have instead often implicitly accepted only certain social and material circumstances while ignoring racial, gen­ deral, and class considerations. Since mainstream art and criticism pretend to represent the whole of culture and to be raceless, classless, and genderless, to be conscious of any of these categories is to be conscious, by definition, of one’s exclusion. The perspective of each excluded group dictates a different criticism.

Race, class, and sex are fundamental to our existence and experi­ ence and must be recognized as such in our art and criticism if either 101

is to have social validity. To critically and creatively ignore the truth of this is to willingly support the dominant race, sex and class, tt and to support its oppressive practice of trying to make its racial, genderal, and class values appear to be supra-historical ideals.

Art and criticism are not only molded by historically determined values, but also mold values. By accepting a sexist poem, a woman is acquiescing to the distorting effects it has upon her psyche and is tacitly permitting the poem's further entry into, and continued effect upon, the culture in which she lives. But if a woman criticizes a work of art for its sexism, she is accused of lacking objectivity.

Robinson and Vogel write, "The 'over-sensitivity' of those who are slighted is a biased position to be sure, but so is acceptance of their subordination." Nor are works whose subject matter only peripherally touches upon sex, race, and class immune from representing racist, sexist, and classist biases. For whatever the subject matter may be, the tone with which it is treated and the style with which it is ex­ ecuted are conditioned by these three determinants of race, class, and sex, our very consciousness being itself a social product.

In bourgeois literature and criticism, the ideal, absolute, and private are emphasized over and against the material, the fluid, and the collective. R.obinson and Vogel argue however for perceiving lit­ erature as part of a real rather than ideal world, and viewing the critic as an historical being with gender, race, and class.

* From New Literary History, 3, No. 1 (Autumn 1971), 177-97. Used by permission. 102

THE VALUE AND PERIL FOR WOMEN OF READING WOMEN WRITERS

Nancy Burr Evans

Nancy Evans relates how, as an undergraduate student of litera­ ture, she was intimidated by the authority traditionally ascribed to the sex and role of her male professors. She, like other women, re­ sponded as a faceless, sexless, student. She avoided the taboo first- person in her term papers and spoke in-a language foreign to her every­ day life. In her senior year, as the result of reading Sylvia Plath's

The Bell Jar, Virginia Woolf’s "How Should One Read a Book?," and

Nancy Hoffman's "A Class of Our Own," she was more compelled to respect her own vision than the one that had been dispensed to her. Central to this newly emerging vision was the realization that literature ought to be related to rather than divorced from life, her life.

The primary function of reading women writers is to realize the commonality between the woman author and woman reader. In reading

Plath, Evans saw in Esther, the protagonist of The Bell Jar, a woman also confused by the separation between her public and private self, someone who had shared her socialization, someone who shared her am­ bitions and her neurosis. She realized that what she had considered personal neurosis was public socialization. The sharing of insanity lent her a greater sanity.

But this sharing process, which is the greatest value of reading women writers, is also its greates peril. The reader must beware, amidst the new-found joy of finding a soul-mate,to not become dependent 103

upon her heroine for a definition of herself. The object is to learn from tragedy, not to repeat it. It is important that the reader apply a discernment which will differentiate her own ego from the character about whom she is reading, to carefully judge what false choices that character she has learned to love has made, what false depictions of reality the author she so admires is guilty of.

Reading women authors, reading of the oppression women have suf­ fered, should strengthen our resolve to oppose that oppression, not weaken us into indulging in our victimization. 104

THE OTHER CRITICISM: FEMINISM VS. FORMALISM

Fraya Katz-Stoker

In the 1970's we are beginning to see the dissolution of formalism

as a literary critical approach. Under its sway students were taught

to treat and teach literature as if it existed unrelated to the real

world. Formalism supported the status quo by either ignoring or deni­

grating those criticisms of it, and by'limiting the range of acceptable

thoughts and feelings to a narrow, one-dimensional scope.

Criticism constitutes the teaching of literature, and those who

teach,control the minds of the young. Formalist criticism turned the

experience of art into a meaningless aesthetic exercise so that students would not be tempted to apply any of its more revolutionary insights

to an examination of their own lives.

The history of criticism in this country is closely inter-related

to political history. The rise of formalism can in fact be directly

related to the rise of fascism. The New Criticism exemplifies the

thoroughness with which anti-communism and anti-sovietism have per­ meated academia. The rise of New Criticism occurred at the time that

American and English businessmen were arming Hitler against communism,

and it arose at the expense of a then vigorous sociological criticism.

The most influential new critics, Brooks, Warren, Ransom, and Tate, all

came from ultra-conservative Vanderbilt University. Their books—An

Approach to Literature, Reactionary Essays, The World's Body, and Under-

standing Poetry--all were published in the years 1936 through 1938. The 105

New Criticism reached its zenith with the rise of Senator McCarthy.

The left-wing professors he did not ferret out were purged by the universities themselves.

In the classroom, formalism is used politically to denigrate pro­ letarian and female literature. Sexism is a major force in this crit­ icism,, and sexism of a particularly virulent and viscious kind. This does not seem so strange when one takes into account that the very causes that led to the rise of New Criticism were the same causes that crushed the feminist revolution and the sociological approach to lit­ erature. "Both were seen as radical political movements attempting to undermine and expose the ideology of established power relationships,"

Stoker writes. Both taught that freedom was not a mental attitude, but a material condition that all had a right to.

Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics pointed out a correlation between reactionnary and sexist politics and literature, identifying Miller,

Mailer, and Lawrence as part of a male reactionary backlash. For having made such a critique, she incurred the wrath of many an ensconced critic. But the very fact that she aroused such enmity only points to the fact that what she said must have held some painful truth.

Feminist criticism rejects formalism because women realize that literature is a powerful weapon and that it is part of a process that shapes a person's destiny. Thus, in exposing and opposing patriarchal ideology, feminist criticism is a political act. Feminist critics re­ ject the formalist illusion that literature is divorced from life, but take the materialist position that it is spawned by a specific cultural 106

reality. "Reality, above all,” Stoker writes, "is the concern of femi­ nist criticism, for until the grotesqueness of a reality distorted by t \ prejudice is perceived, it cannot be corrected. " 107

SEXISM AND THE DOUBLE STANDARD IN LITERATURE

Marcia R. Lieberman

The job of the feminist critic is to expose the prejudice affecting

the portrayal of women in literature. This prejudice expresses itself

in three ways: in criticism, in authorial judgements, and in literary

conventions.

Taking Anna Karenina as a case in point, she is presented by the

author as beautiful, passionate, and tragic, one of that long line of

great tragic (or pathetic) heroines whose lives all end with murder, or

suicide. Unlike male tragic heroes, female tragic heroes often die without attaining illumination. In fact one can ask if the heroine's death is not often more an expression of literary convention or authorial

prejudice, i.e., the expression of a social double-standard, than it

is anything logically motivated from the character's point of view.

It is clear that literary conventions exist which function to punish

the adulterous transgressions of female characters with death.

It might be argued here that not all adulteresses in the book are

punished, as the case of Princess Betsy illustrates. But Princess

Betsy is frivolous; she does not take the affair seriously and is not morally offended by the hypocrisy that she must assume. Anna is; she is destroyed for taking herself seriously and for rejecting a social code that demands discreet hypocrisy. But Vronsky too is serious; he, however, survives. No chain of events necessarily compells Anna to take her life. It seems rather she is being killed merely for having 108

outraged society and, one can imply from Tolstoy’s epigraph, for having

outraged God. Tolstoy is not merely depicting social realities but is

actively intervening on the world's side against Anna; he does not

merely portray the double standard, but applies it. The double stan­

dard is a structural element of the work as we see in the relationship

of Stiva and Dolly Oblonsky. Stiva feels it is his right to have a

beautiful mistress now that seven pregnancies have marred his wife's

beauty. When his wife discovers his affair, he suffers no misfortune,

but only experiences several days of domestic discomfort. Critics re­ veal their sexist bias when they treat the poignancy of Dolly's ex- 1 pression of sorrow and shame as a comic episode, squeezing her into,

the stereotype of Humorless Deceived Wife, while Stiva is described as

a charming figure of farce, who throughout "remains delightful."

Ian Watt reveals his ignorance; of the difference between sex and role when he criticizes Defoe's characterization of Moll Flanders;

Defoe has given her characteristics such as toughness and strength of character which Watt claims are unlikely in a female. We see this same kind of mistake in Irving Howe's critique of Sexual Politics by Kate

Millet of which he writes, "there are times when one feels the book was written-by a female impersonator," despite the fact that a little later he describes her as "a little girl who knows nothing about life."

One of the most important jobs presently facing feminist critics

is to establish the validity of feminist criticism in the literary cri­

tical world, which, out of sexist and formalist attitudes and habits, disparages it. 109

FEMINIST STYLE CRITICISM

Josephine Donovan

In the nineteenth century, Virginia Woolf says in A Room of One*s

Own, the women novelists wrote with male sentences. Their writing

lacked a feminine tradition in style. Woolf assumes then, according

to Donovan, that there is a female "mind" and that there should be a literary style appropriate to it.

Analyzing examples Woolf has given of male sentences, Donovan points out that they are characterized by a "lofty arrogance," "a cer­

tain sureness," "indeed smugness" of style. This attitude, of someone confident of his own authority, is an attitude that could only be ex­ pressed by a member of the ruling class, and is thus a tone foreign to the writing of women. Mary Ellman, when talking about the male style, isolated the tone as one of "confidence, reason, adjustment, efficacy

. . . firmness, directness." Dorothy Richardson, a pioneer in developing the stream-of-consciousness style, corroborates in her observations on male style the previous observations. Leon Edel finds that the male style leaves out "whole areas of feeling, the self-absorbing reverie, combined with acute perceptual experience."

A woman’s sentence, Woolf writes, citing Richardson’s style as a case in point, is "of a more elastic fibre . . . suspending the frailest particles . . . enveloping the vaguest shapes." Both Richardson and

Woolf maintain that there is a female consciousness for which an appro­ priate style should be involved. That consciousness then appears to 110

be one primarily concerned with psychological events rather than either

abstract philosophical assertions or outer dramatic occurrences. The

style most appropriate to such a consciousness would be the interior monologue.

Natalie Sarraute’s remarksjalthough not explicity about female

style, are closely in line with Richardson's, Woolf's and Edel's. She

argues for a style that captures a "subterranean" reality, a reality

lying beneath surface conversation and events. She feels the novelist must resist the tendency to classify and analyze but record the sub­

terranean movement as it occurs in the moment. Taking this position necessarily entails the rejection of the authoritative, objective, and analytic mode and the objective narrator as well.

A woman's prose style then should be one that enables the writer to deal with the psychic, personal, emotional inner details of life in neither an analytic or authoritarian manner. Woolf's genius as a stylist resides perhaps in her ability "to create the effect that the world she is describing is a world of the 'inside' where no assertive authoritarian distance could possibly exist." Since women, in their life as outsiders, have learned the under-life well, their style should make room for this "topismic" level of awareness, this knowledge "of the inner mind of the world's reality." Ill

SOME BIBLIOGRAPHICAL EXCURSIONS

Women's studies courses have been growing in number with amazing speed during the past five years. To give you some idea of the enor­ mity of this growth, let me quote briefly from an article that appeared in MS magazine in September, 1973, in which Florence Howe, unofficial historian of the academic women's movement, asks: "How did two women’s studies programs in 1970 become 72.in 1973? How did 100 courses (on approximately 60 campuses) become 2,000 (on about 500 campuses)?" A careful reading of all the syllabi from women's 2 studies courses published in the various volumes of Female Studies I-X reveals that well over one-third of these courses are being taught in literature departments. And from my wide acquaintance and correspon­ dence with people all over the country teaching interdisciplinary introductory women's studies courses, I have the impression that per­ haps as many as half of them have their formal academic training in literature.

Despite the fact that there are all these courses in women and literature (called variously "Feminist Perspectives on Literature,"

"Women and Literature," "Women in Literature," "The Literature of

Women," "Literature by Women," etc.) being taught in English depart­ ments, there has apparently been no attempt to order the field, to pro­ vide for some sort of progression of knowledge and insight in this new field. Just as one would expect a student in Shakespeare to begin her studies with some broad survey course of the man's work and period, and only then begin to progress to more specialized studies, such as 112

"The Early Comedies," "The Tragedies'," "The Sonnets and Other Non-

Dramatic Works of Shakespeare," etc., and then onto even more spe­

cialized and specific courses, such as "Freudian and Neo-Freudian

Approaches to Hamlet," "The Roman Plays and Their Antecedents in

Roman Literature," and "Textual Problems in Titus Andronicus and

other Apocryphal Shakespearean Plays," so might one begin to expect

a similar progression from survey to specialization in the consi­

derations of women and literature.

I have studied several hundred syllabi for courses in the field

and I find in them no particular concern for such a progression, even

in the syllabi of several courses from the same department. It seems

instead that the content of the courses is influenced by the following

group of considerations:

(1) What does the teacher already know the most about? If she

is a specialist in Victorian fiction, the course will inevitably in­

clude The Mill on the Floss and at least two Bronte" novels. If she

is a Chaucerian, the course will begin with a consideration of "The

Wife of Bath." If poetry is her love and her speciality, it’s poetry

that her students will read.

(2) What are the politics of the teacher? If she is a reformist,

the course will be filled with "re-examinations" of Milton, Shakespeare,

Hawthorne, James, and the rest of the Big Boys, with insights into how

they have really been feminist all along and we have been too stupid or blind to read them that way, and confidential asides to the effect

that Leslie Fiedler was the first feminist critic of them all. The

people these teachers are most adamant about "re-examining" are those 113:

on whom they've written their dissertations. If the course has been

introduced by a bright young female'Ph.D. who was already on her way

into a safe niche in the ivory tower before the WLM hit the EEOC, the course is likely to be restrained and restricted to considerations of

"classical" feminism: Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Virginia

Wolf. These are the courses that will make use of By; a Woman Writt,

the anthology of literature from six centuries by and about women, edited by Joan Goulianos, which was published only last year and which includes as the most interesting examples of women writing, in the twentieth century only Anais Nin, Dilys Laing, Margaret Walker, I Sylvia Ashton-Warner, and Muriel Rukeyser. And, if the course is being taught by a woman who identifies with the radical feminists, the course will include Robin Morgan's Monster, a great number of non­ fiction prose works that some might call political polemics, and many biographical and autobiographical works, as well as journals and diaries.

(3) What has been the ontogenesis of the course? If, for in­ stance, it is a course that has been introduced into the curriculum as a result of radical feminist student demands, and if the demands have included an insistence on participation in the design of the course and the choice of teacher, the course content tends to be filled with extremely contemporary work, more poetry than fiction, culled from the dozen or two new feminist periodicals that have been initiated in the last half dozen years. These courses are charac­ terized by their use of the zerox and ditto machines.

(4) What are the students like? Are they a homogenous group? 114

What are their intellectual capabilities, their educational and socio­

economic backgrounds? How old are they? Where are they in terms of

their experiencing of the possibilities of female biology? If they are married mothers returning to school, or beginning school but rich with experience of the "real world" the reading list tends to be heavy with the novels of Kate Chopin, Doris Lessing, Sue Kauffman, and

that fine novel, The Journal of Ella Priee--books about women in a similar condition, women coming to grips with their own dissatisfac­ tion with prescribed sex-role patterns and a shakey sense of identity.

On the other hand, if the students are unmarried females, nineteen or twenty years old, white, middle class, the syllabus probably will include Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen and Sylvia

Plath’s The Bell Jar.

(5) What is the size of the course? (This question.is, in a sense, another way of approaching question three.) Is it a cozy seminar, limited to a dozen or so dedicated, responsible students, a course being run in a traditionally rigorous and demanding way, a course in which each one of the students is required to contribute, respond, interact--in short, take responsibility for the success or failure of the experience? Or is it one of that growing list of lecture courses designed to fill a group level requirement and to boost the department's enrollment figures, one of those courses into which students are lured with the promise of little work and much entertainment, one of those courses in which a recalcitrant department chairperson or curriculum committee is reluctantly persuaded to jump on the women's studies bandwagon (by throwing this new preparation to 115

the department’s workhorse--a woman with a Ph.D. hired twenty years ago

and still teaching only Freshperson composition--who is most definitely

not a feminist but likes to think of herself as a humanist) because it will mean money for the departmental budget, enough in the budget to

justify continuing to support the rapidly diminishing graduate seminar

in Spenser? In that case, although the course will be classified as

a women’s study course, the teacher will be careful to spend equal

time discussing the role of both sexes, and the reading list is likely

to include Thurber.

I suppose it really doesn't matter what content people begin with in developing their understanding of what sex role stereotyping has inflicted on literary personna, the kinds of patterns for action and character development that have become standard, even "classic’’ to the literature of a sexist culture. What is important is that.the understanding begin. And, further, I suppose that the more the course content is selected with the beliefs, background, and abilities of the student in mind, the more effective such a course will be. I know that it is easier for a young, unmarried, childless, white female to « identify with Alix Kates Shulman's Sasha as she agonizes through adolescence, her loss of virginity, the conflict between her ambitions and her conditioning than it is for them to identify with Lutie

Johnson or Edna Pontellier. But, on the other hand, given the proper circumstances, Edna is dynamite in the classroom, Florence Howe testi- 3 fied in her essay, "Feminism and Literature" in recounting her ex­ perience with teaching Kate Chopin's The Awakening to a class "of sixteen women, mostly my own age, a few older, a few younger, and most 116

with one to eight children.... the class exploded as only rare classes do."

Besides all these "Women and/in/by/through Literature" courses, .

I have noticed some period and genre courses, such as "Medieval Woman as She Appears in Literature" or "Women in Nineteenth Century American

Fiction." But on close examination, they appear to conform, in terms of their effect as educational and consciousness-raising experiences,

to the more generally denominated women and literature courses. They do, however, seem to be concerned with a more systematic presentation of the "literature" side of woman and/in/etc. literature. They also

3 seem to be, generally, among the most conservative of the courses being offered in that they tend to ask fewer questions about what literature is and what criteria ought to be used to judge it and what questions ought to be asked of it.

I have talked with women all over the country who have taken a course called "Women and Literature" or one of the variants of that title, and I have visited about a dozen campuses where such courses were in session. The general impression I have gathered is that these courses are drastically unlike one another, no matter how comparable their titles. There are some similarities: all of them involve at least some brief dissection of sexist language and imagery; brief dis­ cussion of the concept, implication for character of, and literary function of the concept of stereotype; and some brief analysis of the difficulties female writers face both internally as a result of their conditioning to marry and bear children regardless of their personal needs, temperments, or inclinations, and externally as a result of 117

economic inequities and critical prejudices. More often than not,

however, the similarities end there. There is just as probably to be

absolutely no overlapping in literary content or of literary criteria

or feminist concern among the courses.

In discussions with the students, I frequently found them enthu­

siastic about their experience in the course, but uncertain and some­ what embarrassed when asked to communicate about it. They felt un­

easy, having learned from visits home and comparisons with friends at other schools, that their experience--in terms of content--had not been duplicated by others in other courses with similar or identical 5 titles on other campuses. They worry that somehow what they have learned or read has been inadequate or inappropriate. It is, of course, the ugly spector of conditioning, rising again to warn these young women that their experience must have been inferior because whatever women do, whether alone or together, is inferior. It is for this reason, I think, that they tend to talk about their experience in such classrooms in such vague and general terms. When questioned closely, however, I find that they reject--quite rightly, I think--any sugges­ tion of national standardization.

Nevertheless, I have found that when we talked further, they were all responsive to the idea of a thematic approach to women and litera­ ture. I have also found, after teaching one of these general courses three quarters in a row, that when students were given an assignment to write a term paper and given up to twenty-five options on types of papers (a biography of a female literary artist, an in-depth study of any author of their choice, a critical study of any piece of litera­ 118

ture they are interested in along with a choice of some dozen critical

approaches, a paper tracing the history of the criticism of a particu­

lar writer or important work of literary art by a woman, the freedom

to develop and justify a system for making literary judgements, etc.)

the type of paper most frequently, enthusiastically, and successfully

chosen by the women in any of my classes was a thematic study, such

as woman and madness in literature, or women and suicide in American

fiction, or post-adolescent identity crises in female characters in

novels by women, or lesbianism in British and American fiction in the

twentieth century, or poor working women in nineteenth-century

British fiction, etc. They use the historical and national element only to limit their thematic inquiry.

Another point I would like to address myself to for the moment

is the interdisciplinary nature of all women's studies courses, re­ gardless of their titles or departmental affiliations. These courses have all been interdisciplinary at least in spirit since the inception of such courses in 1965. They--the good ones, that is--involve not only teaching some specific content and a new consciousness or new way s of perceiving, but also involve teaching about the development of criteria for making judgements, making choices, developing priorities.

And such courses involve not only teaching about women, but also teaching about the discipline under consideration. A student whose first course in literature or sociology is a course called "The Socio­ logy of Women" or Women in Literature" must learn literature or socio­ logy, must learn whole new vocabularies. And what is most specifically necessary to teach about a discipline, from the perspective of a femi­ 119

nist, is the biases of that discipline. In order to look at the disci­ pline in terms of its biases, one must step outside it. It is as much this stepping outside in order to examine the biases that is respon­ sible for the 'interdisciplinary spirit of such courses, as the well documented tendency toward person and/or issue orientation that has become prevalent in American higher education as a result of the demand for "relevance" in the sixties.

Having said all this, I want to return to the point I made at the beginning of this essay about my noticing that there has been

"relatively little attempt to order the field., to provide for some sort,of progression of knowledge and insight in this new field." I think that it is time to begin to provide this order and that the process of searching for an appropriate order will be as consciousness- raising as all the other work we have done so far. Perhaps I ought to justify my call for order. It might, or course, just be some paranoid obsession on my part, but if you are willing to exclude that possibi­ lity, I certainly am. In the first place, teachers usually plan their courses in accordance with what they understand their prospective students’ level of learning, background, experience, competence, expectations, etc., etc., to be. In the second place, students are extremely bored, turned off, resentful, and alienated by sitting through a semester or quarter that repeats the? work of the previous semester or quarter, especially when they have absorbed a great deal of that work with enthusiasm and excitement the first time and are entering this next quarter or semester with the hopes and expectations of being further enlightened and educated. Imagine their disappoint­ 120

ment, however, when they find that what was last semseter’s satori is

this semester’s drill.

It is for these reasons, i.e., the often covert interdisciplinary

nature of the courses, the teacher’s need for knowledge of her students’

previous experience with a subject, and the students’ need for a con­

tinuously growing instead of randomly repetitious experience, that I

propose a serious consideration and debate over the adoption of the .

thematic approach to women and literature. It more than adequately

allows for the inherent interdisciplinary nature of the courses by making such considerations over and integral to the curriculum’s

design. It allows for the accidental overlapping of content from one quarter ot semester to another presumably without disappointment to

the student, because the theme or themes under consideration will be

different and clearly stated in the courses’ descriptions. And,

the more thematically rich a book is, the better a work of literature

it is, the more worthy of repeated consideration it is. For instance, reading a book such as May Sarton’s Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids

Singing for a class discussion of the woman as artist is a wholly different experience than reading it for a discussion of lesbianism.

The different thematic perspectives allow for the emergence of

separate patterns of imagery as well as different dimensions of char­

acter.

What I propose to offer in the next few pages are some sample

annotated bibliographies of the sort I think we need to begin developing and filing in the form of computer programs. These bibliographies are compiled not just from my research, although 121

I have verified all the items contained on them, but from the research

of dozens of people working and writing all over the country: graduate

students, free-lance workers, teachers, undergraduate students,

librarians, and scholars. In cases where the bibliographies are

limited intentionally by period or nationality, I shall indicate that

limitation in the title of the bibliography. All bibliographies will be limited to works written by women. In all cases, the lists are

confined to fiction, and, in almost every instance, to novel-length

fiction. This work represents a considerable extension of the biblio­

graphical work originally compiled for my anthology, Images of Women

in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green

Popular Press, 1972).

I would hope that the computer programs would allow for instan­ taneous integration of new entries and that the original excitement ' of primary research that enlivened all the original women’s studies courses will be maintained by the openness of these computerized bibliographies to the addition of new entries from anyone who chooses to contribute. And I would hope, further, that if a student wished to take a third or fourth course in women and literature, having already had thematic courses called "Growing up Female" and "Woman .and Madness in Literature", not to mention a general introductory course, and that third or fourth course was a thematic course called "The Woman as

Artist in Literature", I would hope that the student would be spared a third or fourth reading of The Bell Jar and be allowed to choose another title from one of these computerized bibliographies to read in its place. 122

I would like to note in closing that at this time I am aware of the existence of a number of anthologies of literary criticism and/or multi-generic readings that take up this thematic approach. Among these anthologies, some already at the press, some still in manuscript, some still being collected, are anthologies about menstruation and literature; rape and literature; women and madness in literature; women, the law, and literature; and one called Femicide, a study of the destruction of female characters in literature from the perspective of eight disciplines.

,The computerized lists of bibliographical material will be ar­ ranged alphabetically by title and the title will be followed by the author's name. The code will include information about the following seven categories: (I) type of literature, (II) copyright status,

(III) language of original compostion and/or country of origin,

(IV) author information, (V) availability for classroom use, (VI) pe­ riod of compostion, and (VII) themes or topics by which the work can be grouped with others. The number of themes or topics by which each work can be categorized will be limited to twenty per work to keep programming costs and data bank storage costs reasonable. The cate­ gories will be arranged as follows:

I. Type of literature (The purpose of this category is to give syllibi

builders a chance to judge the material they wish to include in

terms of what they know the quantitative reading abilities of their

students to be. It also makes it possible for them to design cur- 123

ricula that make use of traditional genre distinctions.)

A. short story

B. novel with fewer than 150 pages

C. novel with between 150 - 250 pages

D. novel with 250 - 350 pages

E. novel longer than 350 pages

F. one act play

G. three act play

H. five act play

J. opera libretto

K. poem sonnet length or shorter

L. poem sonnet length to fifty lines

M. poem fifty lines to one hundred fifty lines

N. poem 150 - 300 lines

P. poem longer than 300 lines

Q. autobiography or memoir under 200 pages

R. autobiography or memoir over 200 pages

S. biography under 200 pages

T. biography over 200 pages

U. collection of letters by one author

V. collection of correspondence between two persons

W. journal or diary

X. fictoir (Daniel Curzon's term for fictionalized autobiography)

II. Copyright information (The purpose of this category is to provide

information to curriculum designers about their legal right to 124

photocopy or otherwise reproduce materials for classroom use.)

A. Protected by United States Copyright

B. Protected by International Copyright Agreement

C. In the Public Domain

III. Language of original composition and/or country of origin (This in

formation will make it possible to incorporate women's work into

national literature courses as well as to design cross-cultural

women’s literature courses.)

A. American

B. English 1 c. Canadian

D. Irish

E. South African English

F. Australian/New Zealand English

G. Other nationality originally written in English

H. French

J. Russian

K. German

L. Italian

M. Spanish from Spain

N. Spanish/American

0 . Japanese

P,. Chinese

Q. Other Asian

R. Hebrew 125

S. Scandanavian

T. Greek--Classical

U. Greek--Modem

V. African

W. Portuguese- from Portugal

X. South American Portuguese

Y. American Indian

Z. Other

IV., Author information (This category will enable curricula to be de­

signed about the total works of a single author, the works of living

authors only, women writers whose origins were working class, etc.)

A. female, alive

B. female, dead

C. male, alive

D. male, dead

E. author unknown

F. married

G. . had children

H. working class origins

J. bourgeois origins

K. aristocratic/monied origins

L. single

M. childless

N. experienced at least some college

P. further information about author unavailable/unknown 126

Q. contained in book

V. Availability for classroom use (This, one of the most important

categories for curriculum designers, will require the most fre­

quent updating.)

A. available in hardcover anthology

B. available in paperback anthology

C. available in hardcover

D. available in paperback

E. out of print

VI. Period of composition (In part this set of categories follows

traditional period distinctions. For the most part, however, the

periods are designed to coincide with significant periods in the

history of women. This approach makes it easily possible to co­

ordinate women's history and literature courses or to design

interdisciplinary women's studies courses.)

A. 1966 - Present (literature written since the contemporary re­

vival of feminism)

B. 1946 - 1965 (literature written during the period of "the femi­

nine mystique")

C. 1929 - 1945 (literature written during the period of the rein­

stitutionalization of sex-discrimination clauses in public and

private employment; the period when depression and then war

eroded the gains of the women's rights struggle.)

D. 1920 - 1928 (The flowering of feminist literature following the

American enfranchisement of women.) 127

E. 1865 - 1920 (Abolition to Women's Suffrage

F. 1845 - 1864 (Seneca Falls Convention to Abolitionist Compromise)

G. 1795 - 1845 (Vindication of the Rights of Women to Seneca Falls

Declaration)

H. 1750-1795 (Industrial Revolution; destruction of domestic

factory; dislocation of family life)

J. 1660 - 1750 (Restoration to Industrial Revolution: period of

increased opportunity for women)

K. 1642 - 1660 (Puritan Revolution: increased restrictions on

women's employment.)

L. 1400 - 1660 (European Renaissance)

M. 600 - 1400 (Middle Ages: Christian Institutionalization of

woman-hatred)

N. 500 b.c.e. - 599 c.e. (Classical ages)

P. pre-500 b.c.e.

VII. Themes, topics, and character types significant in the' work (This

category will also require periodic updating and will no doubt be

the most vulnerable to criticismi because it is, unfortunately or

fortunately the most arbitrary, .

A. conscious feminist content

B. madness

C. suicide

D. murder

E. rape

F. sexual molesting 128

G. female childhood

H. female adolescence

J. being a daughter

K. marriage .

L. heterosexuality

M. lesbianism

N. childbirth

P. abortion

Q. motherhood

R. divorce

S. -virginity crisis

T. middle-age

U. widowhood

V. old age

W. death

X. breast cancer

Y. crippledness

Z. deformity a. body image b. fatigue c. other illness d. food e. being a student f. poverty g- solitude 129

h. unpaid domestic work in the. home j. domestic work for wages k. non-professional, non-domestic work for wages ni. prostitution n. business • p. medicine q. teaching r. woman as writer s. woman as other kind of artist t. other professional work u. rural/farm life for women v. factory life for women w. small town life for women x. urban life for women y. being a grandmother z. identity crises l. black woman experience

2. white woman experience

3. native American woman experience

4. Asian-American woman experience

5. Chicano experience

6. Puerto Rican/Cuban/Caribbean woman experience

7. European immigrant woman experience

8. non-feminist conscious political content

9. depression • 4 130

10. Jewish

11. Catholic

12. Fundamentalist

13. Liberal Protestant

14. other religion

15. Orthodox Protestant

16. physical assault

17. other crime

18. infidelity

19. young womanhood

20. psychotheraphy

21. pregnancy

22. : suburban life for women

23. travel

24. female friendships

25. family life

26. economics of dependence

27. vengeance

28. jealousy

29. war

30. menstruation

31. alcoholism

32. drug use

33. drug addiction

34. mental institutions 131

35. electroshock therapy

36. secretarial work 132

The Black Woman in Literature

(an example of a bibliography that represents a racial grouping of the material)

VII. 1.

Coming of Age in Mississippi. Ann Moody.

I. R; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, Q; V. D; VI. A; VII. G,. H, e, f, j, 1, 8, 19, 21.

Daddy Was a Runners Number. Louise Meriwether.

I. C; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A; V. D; VI. A; VII, D, E, F, G,

H, f, m, x, 1.

Gemini. Nikki Giovanni.

I. Q; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, G, J, L, Q; V. G. D; VI. A;

VII. G, H, J, N, r, 1, 8, 9.

"Her Sweet Jerome." Alice Walker.

I. A; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, P ; V. B; VI. A; VII. B, C,

K, k, 1, 8, 16, 28.

_I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Maya Angelou.

I. R; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, G, L, N, Q; V. D, VI. A;

VII. G, H, J, N, Q, S, b, d, j, s, w, 1.

Jubilee. Margaret Walker.

I. E; ?II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, P; V. C, D; ' VI. ; VII. H,

K, Q, f, h, j, U, 1, 9, 19, 21, 23, 29. 133

Maud Martha. Gwendolyn Brooks.

I. D; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, P; V. E; VI. B; VII. G, H,

N, 1, 19, 21, 24, 25.

Quicksand. Nella Larson.

I. C; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, P; V. D; VI. D; VII. L, P,

S, x, z, 1, 8, 19, 23.

"Really, Doesn* t Crime Pay?" Alice Walker.

I. A; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, P; V. A, B; VI. A; VII. B,

K, L, a, r, 1, 9, 17.

Southbound. Barbara Anderson.

I. C; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, P; V. E; VI. B; VII. G, H,

V, f, j, w, y, 1.

(The) Street. Ann Petry.

I. D; II. A, B; III. A; IV. P; V. D; VI. C; VII. G, f, g, x, 1, 9, 19, 24.

Sula. Toni Morrison.

I. C; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, H, N, P; V. D; V. D; VI. A

VII. H, K, L, W, 0, W, Y, 1, 18, 19, 24, 28.

"(The) Survivor." Toni Cade Bambara.

I. A; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, F, P; V. D; VI. A; Vii. B,

N, U, W, s, 1. 134

Their Eyes Were Watching God. Zora Neale Hurston. 1 I. D; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, P; V. D; VI. C; VII. A, H,

K, Q, U, f, u, 1, 19, 24. 135 *

Feminist Fiction

(an ideological;grouping)

VII. A.

(A) Bed of Roses. Walter Lionel George.

I. D; II. D; III. B; IV. D; V. E; VI. E; VII. A, b, c, f,

g, k, m, n, x, z, 9, 19, 26.

Ella Price's Journal. Dorothy Bryant. .

I. C; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, P; V. C: VI. A; VII. A, K,

L, P, Q, e, n, x, z, 2 , 9.

Ernestine Rose and the Battle for Human Rights. Yuri Suhl.

I. T; II. A, B; III. A; IV. c, P; V. E; VI. B; VII. A, e,

f, v, x, 7, 8, 10, 23, 24, 25, 26.

Fear of Flying. Erica Jong.

I. C; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, F, J, M, N , p; V. C, D; VI.

A; VII. A, L, r, 10, :18, 20, 23.

Labyrinth. Helen Hull

I. D; II. A, B; III. A; IV. p;- V. E; VI . D; VII. A, K, Q

t, x, 2, 9, 23, 24.

Lives of Girls and Women. Alice Munro.

I. D; II. A, B; III. C; IV. A, P; V. C; VI. A; VII. A, G,

H, J, S, a, e, k, u, w, 2. 136

Living My Life. Emma Goldman.

I. R; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, H, Q; V. D: VI. C; VII. G,

H, L, f, k, v, 7, 8, 10.

Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. Alix Kates Shulman.

I. D, X; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, F, G, J, Q; V. D; VI. A;

VII. A, F, G, H, Ks L, Q, R, S, a, e, h, k, r, z, 9, 10, 20, 21, 24,

26.

(The) Queen Is in the Garbage. Lila Karp.

I. B; II. A, B: III. A; IV. A, F, J, N. P: V. D; VI. A;

VII. A, F, H, J, K, L, N, P, R, 9, 10, 16.

Red Damask. Emanie Sachs.

I. D; II. D; III. A; IV. B; V. E: VI. D; VII. A, J, K, L, d, n, s, 10, 25, 26.

Small Changes. Marge Piercy.

I. E; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, J, N, P; V. C, D; VI. A;

VII. A, F, K, L, M, Q, a, d, e, f, g, h, s, x, z, 2, 9, 10, 13, 19, 20,

21, 24.

(The) Story of an African Farm. Olive Schreiner.

I. E; II. D; III. E; IV. B, F, J, P; V. D; VI. D; VII. A,

G, H, K, g, u, 2, 8, 19.

Talk. Emanie Sachs.

I. D; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, P; V. E; VI. D; VII. A, B,

H, K, Q, T, a, b, h, n, u, w, z, 19, 21, 26. 137

Their Eyes Were Watching God. Zora Neale Hurston.

I. D; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, P; V. D; VI. C; VII. A, H,

K, Q, U, f, u, 1, 19, 24.

(A) Woman of Genius. Mary Austin.

I. E; II. D; III. A; IV. B; V. E; VI. E; VII. A, J, K, F, g, h, s, w, x, z, 9, 23, 24, 26.

"^The) Yellow Wallpaper." Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

I. A; II. C; III. A; IV. B, F, J; V. B, D; VI. E; VII. A, B, K, r, 20, 26. .138

Growing Up Female: The Drama of Emergent Consciousness

(a developmental grouping)

VII. G, H.

(The) Bell Jar. Sylvia Plath.

I. D; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, F, G, J, N, P; V. C, D;

VI. B; Vii. B, C, H, S, r, x, z, 2, 20.

(The) Changleings. Jo Sinclair.

I. E; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, H, L, M; V. E; VI. B; VII.

F, G, H, J, a, c, z, 1, 2, 10, 25.

Coming of Age in Mississippi. Anne Moody.

t I. R; II. A, B; III. A; Iv. A, Q, D; VI. A; VII. G, H, e, f, j, 1, 8, 19, 21.

Daddy Was a Numbers Runner. Louise Meriwether.

I. C; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A; V. D; VI. A; VII. D, E, F,

G, H, f, m, x, 1.

Daughter of Earth. Agnes Smedley.

I. D, X; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, Q. V. D; VI. D; VII. E,

G, H, K, L, e, g, q, u, 2, 8, 19, 26.

Gemini. Nikki Giovanni.

I. Q; II. A, B; III. A, IV. A, G, J, L, Q; V. C, D; VI. A;

VII. G, H, J, N, r, 1, 8, 9. 139

(The) Hard Boiled Virgin. Frances Newman.

I. D; II. A; III. A; IV. B. V. E; VI. D; VII, G, H, J, L,

S, a, r, x, 2, 15, 19, 23.

(A) House Is Not a Home. Polly Adler.

I. R; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, Q; V. E; VI. B; VII. G, H, a, f, k, m, x, 7, 9, 10, 19.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Maya Angelo u.

I. R; II. A, B; III. A; Iv. A,-G, L, N, Q; V. D; VI. A;

VII. G, H, J, N, Q, S, b, d, j, s, w, 1.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Hannah Green. (Joanne Greenberg)

L. X; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, P; V. D; VI. B; VII. B, G,

H, 2, 20.

Islanders. Helen Hull.

I. D; II. A, B; III. A; IV. P; V. E; VI. D; VII. H, J, T.

V, c, h, u, 2, 19, 25, 26.

Jubilee. Margaret Walker.

I. E; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, P; V. C, D; VI. A; VII. H,

K, Q, f, h, j, u, 1, 9, 19, 21, 23, 29.

Lives of Girls and Women. Alice; Munro.

I. D; II. A, B; III. C; IV. A, P; V. C; VI A; VII. A, G, H

J, S, A, e, k, u, w, 2. 140;

Living My Life. Emma Goldman.

I. R; II. A, B; III. A; IV.,B, H, Q; V. D; VI. C; VII. G,

H, L, f, k, v, 7, 8, 10.

Maud Martha. Gwendolyn Brooks.

1. D; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, P; V. E; Vi. B; VII. G, H,

N, 1, 19, 21, 24, 25.

(The) Member of the Wedding. Carson McCullers.

I. D; II. A, B; III. A; IV.. B, F, J, N, P; V. D; VI. B;

VII. G, H, F, w, z.

Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. Alix Kates Shulman.

I. D, X; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, F, G, J, Q; V. D; VI. A;

VII. A, F, G, H, K, L, Q, R, S, a, e, h, k, r, z, 9, 10, 20, 21, 24,

26.

Peyton Place. Grace Metalious.

I. D; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, E, J, N; V. D; VI. B; VII.

D, E, G, H, J, L, P, S, r, n, w, 24.

(The) Promised Land. Mary Antin.

I. R; II. D; III. A; IV. B, Q; V. E; VI. E; VII. G, H, J, b, e, f, k, r, w, x, 7, 10, 23.

(The)- Queen Is in the Garbage. Lila Karp.

I. B; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, F, J, N, P; V. D; VI. A;

VII. A, F, H, J, K, L, N, P, R, 9, 10, 16. 141 '■

Southbound. Barbara Anderson.

I. C; XI. A, B; III. A; IV. A, P; V. E; VI. B; VII. G, H,

V, f, j, w, y, 1.

(The) Story of an African Farm. Olive Schreiner.

I. E; ..‘II. D; III. E; IV'. B, F, J, P; V. D; VI. D; VII. A,

G, H, K, G, u, 2, 8, 19.

Sula. Toni Morrison.

I. C; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, 'H, N, P; V. D; VI. A ; VII.

H, K, L, W, c, w, y, 1, 18, 19, 24, 28.

Talk. Emanie Sachs.

K D; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, P; V. E; VI. D; VII • A, B,

H, K, Q, T, a, b, h, n, u, w, z , 19 , 21, 26.

Their Eyes Were Watching God. Zora Neale Hurston -

'I. D; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, P; V. D; VI. C; VII • A, H,

K, Q, U, f, u, 1, 19, 24.

Tortoise By Candlelight. Nina Bawden.

I. C; II. A, B. III. B; IV. A, F, G, J, N , P; v • D; VI. B;

VII. G, H, J, L, z.

To the Precipice. Judith Rossner.

I. C; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, p; V. D; VI. A; VII • 0» G,

H, J, K, Q, e, f, k, x, 10, 26. 142

The Jewish Woman in Literature

(an ethnic grouping)

VII. 10. .)

Anna Teller. Jo Sinclair.

I. E; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, H, L, M; V. E; VI. B; VII.

K, L, Q, T, V, f, k, n, u, w, x, y, z, 7, 10, 19, 25, 29. .

(The) Changelings. Jo Sinclair.

I. E; II. A, B: III. A; IV. A, H, L, M; V. E; VI. B; VII. F,

G, H, J, a, c, z, 1, 2, 10, 25.

Diary of a Mad Housewife. Sue Kaufman.

I. C; II; A, B; III. A; IV. A, P; V. C, D; VI. A; VII. K,

L, Q, h, x, z, 2, 9, 10, 18, 20.

Ernestine Rose and the Battle for Human Rights. Yuri Suhl.

I. T; II. A, B; III. A; IV. C, p; V. E; VI. b; VII. A, e, f, v, x, 7, 8, 10, 2?, 24, 25, 26.

Fear of Flying. Erica Jong.

I. C; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, F, J, M, N, P; V. C, D ; vi.

A; VII. A, L, r, 10, 18, 20, 23.

(A) House is Not a Home. Polly Adler.

I. R; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, Q; V. E; VI. b; VII. G, H, a, f, k, m, x, 7, 9, 10, 19. 143

"I Stand Here Ironing. " Tillie Olsen.

I. A; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, F, G, H; V. B; VI. B; VII.

Q, b, f, h, 7, 10, 25.

Living My Life. Emma Goldman.

I. R; II. A, 3; III. A; IV. B, H, Q; V. D; VI. C; VII. G,

H, L, f, k, v, 7, 8, 10.

Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. Alix Kates Shulman.

I. D, X; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, F, G, J, Q; V. D; VI. A;

VII. A, Q, F, G, H, K, L, Q, R, S, a, e, h, k, r, z, 9, 10, 20, 21, 24,

26.

(The) Promised Land. Mary Antin.

I. R; II. D; III. A; IV. B, Q; V. E; VI. E; VII. G, H, J, b, e, f, k, r, w, x, 7, 10, 23.

(The) Queen Is in the Garbag e. Lila Karp.

I. B; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, F, J, N, P; V. H; VI. A; VII

A, F, H, J, K, L, N. P, R, 9 , 10, 16.

Red Damask. Emanie Sachs.

I. D; 'II. D; III. A; IV. B; V. E; VI. D; VII • A, J, k, 1, d, n, s, 10, 25, 26.

Small Changes. Marge Piercy.

I. E; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, J, N. P; V. C, D; VI. A;

VII. A, F, K, L, M, Q, a, d, e, f, g, h, s, x, z, 2, 9, 10, 13, 19, 20,

21, 24. 144

."Tell Me A Riddle." Tillie Olsen.

I. A; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, F, G, H, P; V. B;B; VII. K, Q,

V, W, h, y, z, 7, 10, 23.

To the Precipice. Judith Rossner.

I. C; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, P; V. D; VI. A; VII. C, G,

H, J, K, Q, e, f, k, x, 10, 26.

Wasteland. Jo Sinclair.

I. C, X; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, H, L, M; V. EE;; VI. B;

VII. L, M, d, f, h, r, 7, 10, 20, 25, 28, 29. 145

Prostitution in Literature

(a professional -grouping)

VII. m.

(A) Bed of Roses. Walter Lionel George.

I. D; II.. D; III. B; IV. D; V. E; VI. E; VII. A, b, c, f, g, k, m, n, X, z, 9, 1.9, 26.

"Big Blonde. ii Dorothy Parker.

I. A; II., A, B; III. A; IV. B, F, J, N, P; V. B; VI. D;

VII. C, K, T, a, g, k, m, 9, 18, 24, 26, 31.

Daddy Was a numbers Runner. Louise Meriwether.

I. C; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A; V. D; VI. A; VII. D, E, F,

G, H, f, m, x, 1.

(A) House Is not a Home. Polly Adler.

I. R; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, Q; V. E; VI. B; VII. G, H, a, f, k, m, x, 7, 9, 10, 19.

Nana. Emile Zola.

I. D; II. C; III. H; IV. D; V. D; VI. E; VII. W, c, f, m, s, x, 19, 24, 26. 146

The Rural Woman in Literature

(an environmental grouping)

VII. u.

Anna Teller. Jo Sinclair.

I. E; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, H, L, M; V.. E; VI. B; VII.

K, L, Q, T, V, f, n, u, w, x, y, z, 7, 10, 19, 25, 2: 9.

Daughter of Earth. Agnes Smedley.

I. D, X; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, Q; V. D;; VI. D; VII. E,

G, H, K, L, e, g, q, u, 2, 8, 19, 26.

(The) Dollmaker. Harriet Arnow.

I. E; II, A, B; III. A; IV. A, J, N, P; V.. D; VI. B; VII.

J, K, Q, b, d, f, h, u, x, s, 2, 15.

Islanders. Helen Hull.

I. D; II. A, B; III. A; IV. P; V. E; VI. D;I VII. H, J, T.

V, c, h, u, 2, 19, 25, 26.

Jubilee. Margaret Walker.

I. E; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, P; V. C, D;; VI. A; VII. H,

K, Q, f, h, j, u, 1, 9, 19, 21, 23, 29.

Lives of Girls and Women. Alice Munro.

I. D; II. A, B; III. C; IV. A, P; V. C; VVII. A; VII. A, G,

H, J, S, a, e, k, u, w, 2. 147

"(A) Man and Two Women." Doris Lessing.

I. A; II. A, B; III. B, IV. A, P; V. B; VI. B; VII. K, L, M,

N, g, u, 2, 18, 21.

Patience and Sarah. Isabel Miller.

I. B; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, P; V. D; VI. A VII. M, u, 2,

23.

(The) Story of an African Farm. Olive Schreiner.

I. E; II. D; III. E; IV B, F, J, P; V. D; VI. D; VII. A, G,

H, K, g, u, 2, 8, 19.

Their Eyes Were Watching God^, Zora Neale Hurston

I. D; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, P; V. D; VI. C VII. A, H,

K, Q, U, f, u, 1, 19, 24. 148

Women and Madness in .Literature

(an issue grouping)

VII. B.

(The) Bell Jar. Sylvia Plath.

I. D; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, F, G, J, N, P; V. C, D; VII.

B, C, H, S, r, x, z, 2, 20.

(The) Four Gated City. Doris Lessing. •

I. C; II. A, B; III. B; IV. A, P; V. C, D; VI. A; VII. B,

C, E, L, Q, T, V, W, j, x, 2, 18, 20.

(The) Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing.

I. E; II. A, B; III. B; IV. A, P; V. C, D; VI. B; VII. B,

L, Q, r, s, x, z, 2, 8, 9, 20.

"Her Sweet Jerome." Alice Walker.

I. A; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, P: V. B; VI. A; VII. B, C,

K, k, 1, 8, 16, 28.

I Uever Promised You a. Rose Garden. Hannah Green. (Joanne Greenberg)

I. X; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, P; V. D; V£: B; VII. B, G,

H, 2, 20.

Play it as it Lays. Joan Didion.

I. C; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, P; V. C, D; VI. B; VII. B,

C, K, L, Q, 2, 9, 18, 20. 149

"Really, Doesn* t Crime Pay?" Alice Walker.

I. A; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, P; V. A, B; VI. A; VII. B,

K, L, a, r, 1, 9, 17.

"Rima the Bird Girl." Rona Jaffee.

I. A; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, J, N, P; V. b; VI. A; VII.

B,a, z, 2.

(The) Summer Before the: Dark. Doris Lessing.

I. C; II. A, B; III. B; IV. A, ‘P; V. c, D; VI. A; VII. B,

K, L, Q, T, t, x, z, 2, 9, 18, 23.

"(The) Survivor." Toni. Cade Bambara.

I'. A; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, F, P; V. 0; VI. A; VII. B,

N, U, W, s, 1.

Talk. Emanie Sachs.

I. D; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, P; V. E; VI . D; VII. A, B,

H, K, Q, T, a, b, h, n, u, w, z, 19, 21, 26,

"To Room 219." Doris Lessing.

I. A; II. A, B; III. B; IV. A, P; V. B; VI. B; VII. B, C,

K, Q, b, g, h, 2, 9.

"(The) Yellow Wallpaper." Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

I. A; II. C; III. A; IV. B, F, J; V. B, D; VI. E; VII. A,

B, K, r, 20, 26. 150 E

The Woman as Writer in Literature

(an ability grouping) A'-

VII. r. I

(The) Bell Jar. Sylvia Plath.

I. D; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, F, G, J, N, P; V. C, D; VI.

B; VII. B, C, H, S, r, x, z, 2, 20.

Ella Pricess Journal. Dorothy Bryant.

I. C; II. A, B; III... A; IV. A, P; V. C; VI. A; VII. A, K,

L, P, Q, e, r, x, z, 2, 9.

Fear of Flying. Erica Jong.

I. C; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, F, J, M, N, P; V. C, D;

VI. A; VII. A, L, r, 10, 18, 20, 23.

Gemini. Nikko Giovanni.

I. Q; II. A, B; III. A, IV. A, G, J, L, Q; V. C, D; VI. A;

VII. G, H, J, N, r, 1, 8, 9.

(The) Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing.

I. E; II. A, B; III. B; IV. A, P; V. C, D; VI. B; VII. B,

L, Q, r, s, x, z, 2, 8, 9, 20.

(The) Hard Boiled Virgin. Frances Newman.

I. D; II. A; III. A; IV. B; V. E; VI. D; VII. G, H, J, L,

S, a, r, x, 2, 15, 19, 23.

Life Among the Savages. Shirley Jackson.

I. R; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, F, G, J, Q; V. A, B; VI. B; 151

VII. K, Q, h, r, w, 2.

Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. Alix Kates Shulman.

I. D, X; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, F, G, J, Q; V. D; VI. A;

VII. A, F, G, H, K, L, Q, R, S, a, e, h, k, r, z, 9, 10, 20, 21, 24,

26.

Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. May Sarton.

I. c; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, J, L, M, N; V. C; VI. B;

VII. K, M, u, g, r, z, 24.

My Friend Says it1s Bullet-Proof. Penelope Mortimer.

I. B; II. A, B; III. B; IV. A, P; V. E; VI. A; VII. L, X,

a, r, z, 2, 9, 23.

Peyton Place. Grace Metalious.

I. D; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, F, J, N; V. D; VI. B; VII.

D, E, G, H, J, L, P, S, r, n, w, 24.

(The) Promised Land. Mary Antin.

I. R; II. D; III. A; IV. B, Q; V. E; VI. E, VII. G, H, J, b, e, f, k, r, w, x, 7, 10, 23.

"Really, Doesn1t Crime Pay?" Alice Walker.

I. A; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, P; V. A, B; VI. A; VII. B,

K, L, a, r, 1, 9, 17. 152

"Tell Me A Riddle," Tillie Olsen. -

I. A; II. A, B; III. A, IV. A, F, G, H, P; V. B; VI. B;

VII. K, Q, V, W, h, y, z, 7, 10, 23.

To the Precipice. Judith Rossner.

I. C; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, P; V. D; VI. A; VII. C, G,

H, J, K, Q, e, f, k, x, 10, 26.

(A) Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Betty Smith.

I. D, II. A, B; III. A; IV. A; V. D; VI. C, VII. G, H, a, f, j, r, v, 2, 11, 24, 23, 30.

Wasteland. Jo Sinclair.

I. C, X; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, H, L, M; V. E; VI. B;

VII. L, M, d, f, h, r, 7, 10, 20, 25, 28, 29.

"(The) Yellow Wallpaper." Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

I. A; II. C; III. A; IV. B, F, J; V. B, D; VI. : VII. A,

B, K, r, 20, 26. 153

Work in Women's Lives

(a multiple topic grouping)

VII. j, k, m, n, p, q, t, 34.

Anna Teller, Jo Sinclair.

I. E; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, H, L, M; V. E; VI. B; VII.

K, L, Q, T, V, f, k, n, u, w, x, y, z, 7, 10, 19, 25, 29.

(A) Bed of Roses. Walter Lionel George.

I. D; II. D; III. B; IV. D; V. E; VI. E; VII. A, b, c, f,

g, k, m, n, x, z, 9, 19, 26.

"Big Blond." Dorothy Parker,

I. A; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, F, J, N, P; V. B; VI. D;

VII. C, K, T, a, g, k, m, 9, 18, 24, 26, 31.

Coming of Age in Mississippi. Anne Moody.

I. R; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, Q, D; VI. A; VII. G, H, e, f,

j, 1, 8, 19, 21.

Daddy Was a. Numbers Runner. Louise Meriwether.

I. C; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A; V. D; VI. A; VII. D, E, F,

G, H, f, m, x, 1.

Daughter.of Earth. Agnes Smedley.

I. D, X; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, Q; V. D; VI. D; VII. E,

G, H, K, L, e, g, q, u, 2, 8, 19, 26. 154

(The) Four Gated City. Doris Lessing.

I. C; II. A, B; III. B; IV? A, P; V. C, D; VI. A; VII. B,

C, E, L, Q, T, V, W, j, x, 2, 18, 20.

"(The) Gentle Lena." Gertrude Stein.

I. A; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, J, F, M; V. B; VI. E; VII.

T, g, j, 7.

"(The) Good Anna." Gertrude Stein.

I. A; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, J, F, MJ: V. B; VI. E; VII.

T, g, j, 7.

"Her Sweet Jerome." Alice Walker.

I. A; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, p; V. B; VI. A; VII. B, C,

K, k, 1, 8, 16, 28,

(A) House Is Not a Home!. Polly Adler.

I. R; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, Qi V, E; VI. B; VII. G, H, a, f, k, m, x, 7, 9, 10, 19.

I. Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Maya Angelou.

I. R; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, G, L, N, Q; V. D; VI. A;

VII. G, H, J, N, Q, S, b, d, j, s, w, 1.

Jubilee. Margaret Walker.

I. E; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, P; V. C, D; VI. A; VII. H,

K, Q, f, h, j, u, 1, 9, 19, 21, 23, 29. 155-

Labyrinth. Helen Hull.

I. D; XI.. A, B; III. A; IV. P; V. E; VI. D; VII. A, K, Q,

t, x, 2, 9, 23, 24.

Lives of Girls and Women. Alice Munro.

I. D; II. A, B; III. C; IV. A, P; V. C; VI. A; VII. A, G,

H, J, S, a, e, k, u, w, 2.

Living My Life. Emma Goldman,

I. R; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, H, Q; V. D; VI. C; VII. G,

H, L, f, k, v, 7, 8, 10.

Lummox, A Fanny Hurst.

I. c; II. A, B; III. A; IV.. B, P; B. E; VI. D; VII. T, b,

f, g, j , K, x, 2, 8, 9.

Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. Alix Kates Shulman.

I. D, X; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, F, G, J, Q; v. D; VI. A;

VII. A, F, G, H, K, L, Q, R, S, a, e, h, k, r, z, 9, 10, 20, 21, 24,

26.

Nana. Emile Zola.

I. D; II. C; III. H; IV. D; V. D; VI. E; VII. W, C, f, m,

s, x, 19, 24, 26.

Peyton Place. Grace Metalious.

I. D; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, F, J, N; V. D; VI. B; VII.

D, E, G, H, J, L, P, S, r, n, vr, 24. 1563

/

(The) Promised Land. Mary Antin.

I. R; II. D; III. A; IV. B, Q; V. E; VI. E; VII. G, H, J, b, e, f, k, r, w, x, 7, 10, 23.

Red Damask. Emanie Sachs.

I. D; II. D; III. A; IV. B; V. E; VI. D; VII. A, J, K, L, d, n, s, 10, 25, 26.

(The) Small Room. May Sarton.

I. D; II. A, B;III. A; IV. A, J, L, M. N. P; V. C; VI. B;

VII. M, 1, g, q, z, 2, 9, 19, 20, 24.

Spinster. Sylvia Ashton Warner.

I. C; II. A, B; III. F; IV. A, P; V. D; VI. B; VII. T, g, q, z, 2, 9, 19, 23.

(The) Summer Before the Dark. Doris Lessing.

I. C; II. A, B; III. B; IV. A, P; V. C, D; VI. A; VII. B,

K, L, Q, T, t, x, z, 2, 9, 18, 23.

Talk. Emanie Sachs.

I. D; II. A, B; III. A; IV. B, P; V. E; VI. D; VII. A, B,

H, K, Q, T, a, b, h, n, u, w, z, 19, 21, 26.

To the Precipice. Judith Rossner.

I. C; II. A, B; III. A; IV. A, P; V. D; VI. A; VII. C, G,

H, J, K, Q, e, f, k, x, 10, 26. 157

NOTES

I Florence Howe, "No Ivory Towers Need Apply: Women’s Studies," Ms., Sept. 1973, pp. 46-47, 78-80.

These volumes are available from the Clearinghouse on Women’s Studies, SUNY/College at Old Westbury, The Feminist Press, Box 334, Old Westbury, New York, 11568. They are constantly being updated and reissued. I would also refer the reader to their most recent series of publications: The Guide to Current Female Studies I - III and Who’s Who and Where in Women1s Studies. o ■ Florence Howe, "Feminism and Literature," in Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillon (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Popular Press, 1972), pp. 253- 77. 158

A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allport, Gordon. The Nature of Prejudice. 2nd ed., New York: Double­ day, 1958.

Arnold, Mathew. Essays in Criticism. 2nd ed., London: Everyman’s Library, 1964.

Bellow, Saul. Herzog. New York: Fawcett World, 1974.

Camus, Albert. The Stranger. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946.

Cawelti, John. "The Concept of Formula in the Study of Popular Culture." The Journal of Popular Culture, 3, No. 3 (1969), 381-90..-

Curzon, Daniel. "Hatred." Gay Literature, 1, No. 2 (Spring 1975), 15- 32.

Donleavy, J. P. The Ginger Man. New York: Berkeley Pub. Co., 1971).

Female Studies I-IV. Ed. Carol Ahlum, Florence Howe, Carol Ohrmann, and Shelia Tobias. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: KNOW, Inc., 1970-17.

Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Trans. Lowell Bair, New York: Bantam, 1972.’ ;

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. 1899; rpt. Old West­ bury, New York: The Feminist Press, 1973.

George, Walter Lionel. A Bed of Roses. London: The Modern Library, 1919.

The Guide to Current Female Studies I-III. Ed. Carol Ahlum, and Florence Howe. Old Westbury, New York: The Feminist Press, 1970-71.

Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives. Ed. Susan Koppel- Cornillon. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Popular Press, 1972.

Hampson, J. L. and Hampson, J. G. "The Ontogenisis of Sexual Behavior in Man." Sex and Internal Secretions. Ed. W. C. Young. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1967. Vol. II.

"Howl" of the Censor. Ed. J. W. Ehrlich. California: Nourse, 1961. 159

Howe, Florence. "No Ivory Towers Need Apply: Women's Studies." Ms., Sept. 1973, pp. 46-47, 78-80.

Howe, Florence. "Feminism and Literature." Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives. Ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillon. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Popular Press, 1972. pp. 253-77.

Jaffee, Rona. Away From Home. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960.

Jong, Erica. Fear of Flying. New York: Holt Rhinehart, 1973.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1961.

Keuhl, Linda. "An Interview with Joyce Carol Oates." Commonweal, 5 Dec. 1969, pp. 307-10.

Laing, R. D. The Divided Self. New York: Pantheon, 1969.

Lessing, Doris. The Four Gated City. New York: Bantam, 1969.

McCarthy, Mary. The Group. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1954.

Metalious, Grace. Peyton Place. New York: Dell, 1956.

Metalious, Grace. Return to Peyton Place. New York: Dell, 1959«

Millet, Kate. Flying.' New York: Ballantine, 1974.

Newman, Frances. A Hard-Boiled Virgin. New York: Liveright, 1924.

Oates, Joyce Carol. them. New York: The Vanguard Press, 1969.

The Radical Therapist. Ed. Jerome Agel. New York: Ballantine, 1971.

Readings on the Psychology of Women. Ed. Judith Bardwick. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

Rejaunier, Jeanne. The Beauty Trap. New York: Pocket Book, 1970.

Rinehart, Mary Roberts. My Story. New York: Farrar & Rhinehart, 1931.

Roland, Manon. Mémoires. 1795; rpt. Paris: Editions de Saint-Clair, 1967.

Roth, Phillip. Portnoy1s Complaint. New York: Random House, 1969.

Russ, Joanna, "What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can't Write." Images of Women in Fiction : Feminist Perspectives. Ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillon. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Popular Press, 1972. pp. 3-21. 160

Sarton, May.. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaid Singing. New York: Norton, 1965.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nauseai. Trans. Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions, 1964.

Schwartz, Francie. Body Count. New York; Pyramid Books, 1972.

Shulman, Alix Kates. Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.

Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1933.

Tax, Meredith. Woman and Her Mind. Boston: New England Free Press, 1970.

Webster1s New International Dictionary of the English Language Un­ abridged. 2nd ed., Springfield, Mass«-: ■ Merriam-Webster, 1934.

Webster* s New International Dictionary of the.English Language Un­ abridged. 3rd ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1966.

West, Jessamyn. Leafy Rivers. New York: Harcout, Brace & World, 1967.

Who* s Who and Where in Women * s StudiesEd. Berkowitz, Mangi, Tamar, and Williamson. Old Westbury, New York: The Feminist Press, 1974.