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Are men better writers than women?
A HARPER'S ESSAY TAKES UP THE TOUCHY QUESTION OF WHETHER SIZE IN LITERATURE MATTERS. BY LAURA MILLER | It's a long-standing argument. Are novels by men and women fundamentally different? And if so, can one be considered more "important" than the other? The latest volley, fired by Francine Prose in an essay called "Scent of a Woman's Ink: Are Women Writers Really Inferior?" in the June 1998 issue of Harper's, has revived the debate among the literati. Prose (author of "Guided Tours of Hell") insists that, despite the sales success of middlebrow "women's fiction" -- as epitomized by Oprah Winfrey's hugely successful television book club -- women writers of "serious literary fiction" can't get no respect. Not, at least, from "the more cerebral book-review pages and the literary prizes." At the core of this old contention lies the question of framing. Critics have maintained that women writers narrow their concerns to the intimate and familial while men gravitate toward grander, epic themes. For ages, this dubious observation justified the lower status awarded to women authors by (mostly male) critics. In the title bout between Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy, Leo always walked away carrying the big, shiny, golden championship belt with "Great Novelist" printed on its medallion buckle. Virginia Woolf had many bones to pick with this ranking system, and in the 1970s, feminist literary scholars joined her with a vengeance. Who, they raged, says the situations depicted by women novelists are necessarily more trivial than those chosen by men? Prose quotes Woolf's tart, perceptive summing up of this critique: "This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room." Questioning that valuation was one of feminist literary criticism's keystones, and it's still a solid one: Otherwise, after all, Tom Clancy would be a more "significant" writer than Henry James. Prose, however, adds a deft new twist. Are women writers really more prone to "diminutive fictions, which take place mostly in interiors, about little families with little problems," and are they really more inclined toward a soft, self-absorbed emotionality? Actually, Prose maintains, male writers do all of that, just as women produce works that are "fiercely unsentimental, sharply observed, immensely ambitious and inclusive." Readers -- and especially critics -- are the ones who persist in seeing a novel as inevitably colored by its author's gender, as if they slip on blue or pink tinted reading glasses depending on the name printed on a book's spine. To demonstrate as much, Prose juxtaposes passages from pairs of male and female writers (Frederick Exley and Flannery O'Connor; Ernest Hemingway and Deborah Eisenberg; John Updike and Mary Gaitskill). OK, these matches are a bit rigged, but Prose is absolutely right about the human propensity to seize upon traits that confirm our beliefs about "innate" gender roles and screen out and ignore those that don't; it happens, daily, in the course of everything from child-rearing to romantic conflict to, yes, literary criticism. But Prose also misses something important: The list of women writers she brandishes as proof of the sex's literary boldness, while undoubtedly of high caliber, hardly makes the word "epic" spring to mind. Gaitskill and Eisenberg (along with Alice Munro, who Prose also admires) do tend to focus on interpersonal dramas, perhaps because they specialize in short stories. Others, like Diane Johnson and Mavis Gallant, are brilliant and eclectic rather than epochal. Does this mean that women writers don't, after all, create big, grand books that tackle social forces, ideas and politics as well as the provinces of the heart? Hardly. In this matter, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Iris Murdoch and Doris Lessing are names to conjure with, and for full-fledged enfant terrible precocity and untrammeled literary ambition, there's no need to look further than Jeanette Winterson. These women, however, will never produce the Great American Novel for one simple reason: They aren't American. What Prose sees as a dilemma of women writers is in fact a problem pretty specific to America. I'm the kind of reader who has a weakness for fat, brainy, sweeping novels that struggle mightily to sum up their age (what George Eliot, the ur-practitioner, called books "you can get the whole world into"), but even I have to cop to the patent goofiness of the Great American Novel concept. The legacy of a cultural inferiority complex we ought to have gotten over by now, the quest for the GAN has possessed the imaginations of many American writers and critics, all of them seeking the chimerical single book that will capture the spirit and history of our polyglot nation. And think about it: The Great American Novel, should it ever appear, could never be written by a woman. It's somehow inherent in the myth of the thing that there only be one, and that it be written by a man. As a result, while the possibility of writing the GAN is a brass ring that has driven America's male writers to produce some truly magnificent, if imperfect, books (Thomas Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" and David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" are two recent examples), it seems to have shrunk the ambitions of our women novelists. Why even reach for the brass ring if you're de facto disqualified from succeeding -- why not stick to doing interesting work around the edges, sneaking genius through the back door when it can't get in the front? As for America's critics, the review editors and prize-givers Prose challenges, these are often the ones most deeply invested in the GAN ideal. It makes their role (bestowing the title) that much more momentous. Meanwhile, in Britain (even in Canada, Atwood's homeland), women proceed to write about ideas, take up a lot of space on the shelves, set their work on a wide stage -- without having to worry about playing King of the Hill with Roth, Updike or Mailer.
Prose is right to say that the literary establishment merits some scolding for this sorry state of affairs, but America's women novelists need some rousing as well. The Great American Novel, after all, is just a fairy tale we tell ourselves about what America means -- and about what writing means in America. It's a story we've grown out of and it's high time we had a new one. And aren't you, ladies, in the business of telling stories?
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