What Do Women Want? (8 page)

It’s ironic that the critic—the late Anatole Broyard—should have identified “blood and guts” as the quality that women writers supposedly lacked, since clearly women are the sex most in tune with the entrails of life. But we can better understand the critic’s condemnation if we remember that in the nineteenth century, women writers were denigrated for their delicacy, their excessive propriety (which supposedly precluded greatness), while in the past couple of decades they have been condemned by male critics for their impropriety—which also supposedly precludes greatness. Whatever women do or don’t do precludes greatness, in the mind of the chauvinist. We must see this sort of reasoning for what it is: prejudice.

In the beginning of the “second wave” of the women’s movement (late sixties, early seventies), there was so
much
blood and guts in women’s writing that one wondered if women writers ever did anything but menstruate and rage. Released from the prison of propriety, blessedly released from having to pretend meekness, gratefully in touch with our own cleansing anger, we raged and mocked and menstruated our way through whole volumes of prose and poetry. This was fine for writers who had a saving sense of irony, but in many cases the rage tended to eclipse the writing. Also, as years went by, literary feminism tended to ossify into convention. Rage became almost as compulsory to the generation of writers who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies as niceness and meekness had been to an earlier generation. Feminists proved with a vengeance that they could be as rigidly dogmatic as any other group. They did not hesitate to criticize works of art on political grounds, or to reject poems and novels for dealing with supposedly counterrevolutionary subjects.

This was unfortunate. It was also, I suppose, inevitable. Anger against the patriarchal stifling of talent had been so proscribed for so many centuries that in letting it loose, many women writers completely lost their sense of humor. Nor could anyone maintain that getting in touch with anger was unimportant. It was, in fact, a vitally important phase of women’s writing. Nothing is more destructive of the spirit and ultimately of creativity than false meekness and anger that does not know its own name. Nothing is more freeing for a woman or for a woman writer than giving up the pleasures of masochism and beginning to fight. But we must always remember that fighting is only a first step. As Virginia Woolf points out in
A Room of One’s Own,
many women’s books have been destroyed by the rage and bitterness at their own centers. Rage opens the doors into the spirit, but the spirit must then be nurtured. This is hardly easy—because women writers tend to be damned no matter what they do. If we are sweet and tender, we are damned for not being “powerful” enough (not having blood and guts), and if we rage, we are said to be “castrating,” amazonian, lacking in tenderness. It is a real dilemma. What is the authentic voice of the woman writer? Does anyone know? Does anyone know what the authentic voice of
woman
is? Is it sweet and low like the voice of Shakespeare’s Cordelia, or is it raging and powerful like the voice of Lady Macbeth?

The problem is, I suppose, that women have never been left alone to
be
themselves and to find out for themselves. Men need us so badly and are so terrified of losing us that they have used their power to imprison us—in castles of stone as long as that was possible, and in castles of myth thereafter. The myths, most of them ways of keeping us out of touch with our own strength, confused many generations of women. We were told we were weak; yet as we grew older, we increasingly knew that we were strong. We were told that men loved us for our dependency; yet as we grew older, we observed that, despite themselves, they loved us for our independence—and if they didn’t, we found we didn’t always care. We discovered that we could grow only by loving ourselves a little, and loving our strengths, and so, paradoxically, we found we could grow up only by doing the opposite of all the things our culture told us to do. We were told our charm lay in weakness, yet in order to survive, we had to be strong. We were told we were by nature indecisive, yet our survival often seemed to depend on our own decisions. We were told that certain mythic definitions of women were immutable natural laws, biological “facts,” but often our very endurance depended upon changing those supposedly unchangeable things, even upon embracing a life credo of change.

In fact, when I look back on the years since I left college and try to sum up what I have learned, it is precisely that: not to fear change, not to expect my life to be immutable. All the good things that have happened to me in the last several years have come, without exception, from a willingness to change, to risk the unknown, to do the very things I feared most. Every poem, every page of fiction I have written has been written with anxiety, occasionally panic, and always with uncertainty about its reception. Every life decision I have made—from changing jobs to changing partners to changing homes—has been taken with trepidation. I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me. I have accepted fear as a part of life, specifically the fear of change, the fear of the unknown. I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: Turn back, turn back; you’ll die if you venture too far.

I regard myself as a fairly typical member of the female sex. In my fears and feelings, I am just like my readers. Writing may propel me into places and situations where I wouldn’t otherwise find myself, but in the dark of night, insomniac, I think the thoughts any woman thinks. I am impatient with successful women who feel that their success has lifted them out of the ordinary stream of women’s lives. I cringe when I hear them say to their fearful, unfledged sisters:
I did it against the odds. You can, too.
As a writer, I feel that the very source of my inspiration lies in my never forgetting how much I have in common with other women, how many ways in which we all are similarly shackled. I do not write about superwomen who have transcended all conflict. I write about women who are torn, as most of us are torn, between the past and the future, between our mothers’ frustrations and the extravagant hopes we have for our daughters. I do not
know
what a writer would write about if all her characters were superwomen, cleansed of conflict. Conflict is the soul of literature.

I know I would not mind a world in which my daughter were free
not
to be a feminist, were free (if she chose to be a writer) not to write about women’s conflicts, not to assume that the accident of her gender compelled her work to have a specific creative bias. I would welcome a world in which feminism were obsolete. But I would also like to see a world in which male writers wrote without masculine bias, in which phallocentric mythologies were perceived to be as bizarre as the most absurd excesses of militant feminist rhetoric, and in which consciousness had become so truly androgynous that the adjective “feminist” itself would be puzzlingly obsolete. I wish I thought our culture was heading in this direction. But it is not. After a brief flirtation with egalitarianism brought about by what has been termed the “second wave” of the women’s movement, the culture is sliding back into its habitual sexism—with, of course, some trendy new terminology.

Some radical feminists have abetted this process of backsliding by becoming quite as simplemindedly dogmatic as the most dogmatic male chauvinists, by disassociating themselves from the anchors of most women’s lives: children they love and men they learn to live with. It is unrealistic to assume that after living in families and tribes for millions of years of human evolution, women will suddenly cease being gregarious animals and become either reclusives or feminist communards. The human need for companionship and sexuality is far stronger than any intellectual theory. So the point should be not to keep women from establishing families but rather to make their
position
in families less that of semislaves and more that of autonomous individuals.

Where does all this leave the woman writer of our age? Usually in a quandary. As a sharp observer of her society, she cannot fail to see that it still discriminates against women (often in emotionally crippling and physically murderous ways), but as an artist she cannot allow her vision to be polluted by the ephemeral dogmas of political movements. It is simply not possible to write a good book that “proves” the essential righteousness of either lesbianism or heterosexuality, childbearing or its avoidance, man-loving or man-hating. Righteousness has, in fact, no place in literature. Of course, the keen observer of her culture will feel deeply about the oppression she sees around her, the inhumanity of man to man, of man to woman, of woman to woman, but her vision must be essentially personal, not abstractly political. Books are not written by committees—at least not good books. And the woman writer has as much right as any other artist to an essentially individual and idiosyncratic vision. If we judge her books according to their political “correctness,” we are doing her as great a disservice as if we judged them according to her looks or her behavior in the voting booth. Certainly human history is full of such judgmentalism—most of it not coming from women—but always it is antithetical to the creation of works of art.

After saying this, I must also gratefully acknowledge that the second wave of the feminist movement liberated my writing and my life. Not by supplying me with dogma, but by making it easier for me to assume that what I felt was shared by others. Literature, as we previously knew it, was the literature of the white, the affluent, the male. Female experience had been almost completely omitted. Because of the second wave, I learned to assume that my thoughts, nightmares, and daydreams were the same as my readers’. I discovered whenever I wrote about a fantasy I thought wholly private, bizarre, kinky, that thousands of other people had experienced the same private, bizarre fantasy. I have learned, in short, to trust myself.

It seems to me that having now created an entire literature of female rage, an entire literature of female introspection, women writers are beginning to enter the next phase: the phase of empathy. Without forgetting our hard-won rage, without forgetting how many puritanical voices would still like to censor our sexuality, we are starting to be free to explore the whole world of feeling in our writings—and not to be trapped forever in the phase of discovering buried anger. Anger is a strong propellant to creation, but it is hardly the only propellant. Stronger even than anger is emotional curiosity, the vehicle through which we enter into other states of being, other lives, other historical periods, other galaxies.

Curiosity is braver than rage. Exploration is a nobler calling than combat. The unknown beckons to us, singing its siren song and making our hearts pound with fear and desire. I see us entering a world where women writers no longer censor themselves for fear of criticism, but I rarely see the critics catching up. Sometimes I think the response to women’s books is still back in the age of
Virility,
even while a new generation of young women writers forges ahead without restraints. Literature as well as life is in the midst of an unfinished revolution. The explorers have set out to sea without life preservers. But pirates are still coming after them to board their decks and try to sink their ships. And some of these pirates, I must sadly say, are other women.

—ELIZABETH RIGBY

 

 

 

When a book is beloved
by readers and hated by contemporary critics, we should suspect that a revolution in consciousness is in progress. This was certainly the case with
Jane Eyre.
The pseudonymous author, Currer Bell, was blamed for committing the “highest moral offence a novel writer can commit, that of making an unworthy character interesting in the eyes of a reader.” The book was said to be mischievous and vulgar, pandering to the public’s taste for “illegitimate romance.” As for the character of the heroine, “Jane Eyre is throughout the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit . . . she has inherited in fullest measure the worst sin of our fallen nature—the sin of pride.”

These criticisms were put forth by a woman reviewer, Elizabeth Rigby, in the
Quarterly Review
in 1848, the year after the novel was published, when it was already a roaring success. The same critic took pains to dispute the rumor that “Currer Bell” was a woman, explaining that the descriptions of cookery and fashion could not have come from a female pen. She also argued that the book would do more harm than good to governesses, and for good measure, she condemned Jane Eyre as one “whom we should not care for as an acquaintance, whom we should not seek as a friend, whom we should not desire for a relation, and whom we should scrupulously avoid for a governess.”

Such character assassinations would be too absurd to quote if they did not foreshadow the charges against every important novel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that depicted a woman as a complex human being rather than a stereotype. More than that, they foreshadow contemporary assaults on women’s anger, rebellion, and nonconformity—whether exemplified in fiction or in life. For Jane is nothing if not a rebel. She will not lie even if lies would smooth her progress. From the moment we meet her, she is struggling against the injustice of her lot and she refuses to be convinced that humility is her only option. In many ways, she is the first modern heroine in fiction.

The perennial popularity of
Jane Eyre
with readers is surely based on Jane’s indomitable spirit. Given every reason to feel crushed, discouraged, beaten, Jane’s will remains unbroken. Neither beautiful nor rich nor supplied with a cosseting family, Jane seems to be possessed of the greatest treasure a woman can have: self-respect. That alone makes her an inspiring heroine. No one can take away her inner esteem. It is apparent from the very start of the book, when ten-year-old Jane tells her supposed “benefactress,” Mrs. Reed (who has unjustly punished her by secluding her from her cousins): “They are not fit to associate with me.” We love Jane because she seems to know her own worth—an unforgivable thing in girls and women.