"It may be surprising that there’s been no comprehensive history of women’s writing in America. But Elaine Showalter has now undertaken this daunting venture with her vast democratic volume, “A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx,” in which she energetically describes the work of long-forgotten writers and poets along with that of their more well-known contemporaries. In the 1970s, Showalter wrote “A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing,” which established an alternative canon of British women writers at a moment when feminist studies were very much in vogue, and her new book is an attempt to do the same thing for American literature. Showalter was, for nearly two decades, a professor in the department of English literature at Princeton (she was the head of the department when I was graduate student there), and she remains a grande dame of feminist literary studies.
It’s worth noting that many of the most talented writers she discusses — Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Joan Didion — objected to being categorized as women writers and preferred to think of themselves simply as writers. As Elizabeth Bishop put it, “art is art and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc. into two sexes is to emphasize values that are not art.” Showalter handles these rebels by corralling them into special subchapters with titles like “Dissenters.” One of the dissenters, Cynthia Ozick, argued against expecting “artists who are women . . . to deliver ‘women’s art,’ as if 10,000 other possibilities, preoccupations, obsessions, were inauthentic, for women, or invalid, or worse yet, lyingly evasive.”
It’s worth noting that many of the most talented writers she discusses — Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Joan Didion — objected to being categorized as women writers and preferred to think of themselves simply as writers. As Elizabeth Bishop put it, “art is art and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc. into two sexes is to emphasize values that are not art.” Showalter handles these rebels by corralling them into special subchapters with titles like “Dissenters.” One of the dissenters, Cynthia Ozick, argued against expecting “artists who are women . . . to deliver ‘women’s art,’ as if 10,000 other possibilities, preoccupations, obsessions, were inauthentic, for women, or invalid, or worse yet, lyingly evasive.”
“A Jury of Her Peers” announces its inclusiveness with its size and heft, and the breadth of Showalter’s research is indeed impressive; it seems there are women scribblers under every apple tree, in every city street and small-town cafe across our great nation. In fact, the encyclopedic nature of the book is both its satisfaction and its limitation. The entries are brisk, informative and often less than a page long. There are too many writers here to go into much depth about any of them, and one finds oneself, in many of the more absorbing passages of the book, wanting more. Of course, distilling any writer’s life work into a brief entry entails a certain amount of glossing over. To cover so much territory necessitates a kind of breezy simplification, and that very breezy simplification is also the pleasure of this kind of ranging, inclusive history.
Though she refers to “A Jury of Her Peers” as literary history, Showalter is less attentive to artistic merit, to what separates good fiction from bad, than to cultural significance; she is less concerned with the nuances of style or art than with the political ramifications of a book, or the spirited or adventurous behavior of its lady characters. She is not interested in whether the writers she discusses are good, or in the question of how their best writing works, but in whether they are exploring feminist themes. And so she ends up rooting through novels and poems for messages and meanings about women’s position in society, for plots that criticize domesticity or that expound on the narrowness of women’s lives. (She once coined the term “gynocritic” for critics freed “from the linear absolutes of male literary history.”) This exploration of subversive plots and spunky heroines is fruitful from a purely historical point of view, but it doesn’t always feel like literary criticism at its most sophisticated. One thinks of Joan Didion’s line about feminists: “That fiction has certain irreducible ambiguities seemed never to occur to these women, nor should it have, for fiction is in most ways hostile to ideology.”
Showalter is occasionally prone to bouts of reductionist readings that belong to a faded era of bell-bottoms and consciousness-raising groups, as when she says the elaborately drawn characters Gus Trenor, Percy Gryce and Simon Rosedale in Edith Wharton’s “House of Mirth” are “products of their own crisis of gender,” or when she writes that Sylvia Plath’s richly nuanced poem “Daddy” “embodied women’s rejection of patriarchal mythologies.” But on the whole her writing is clear and lively and mercifully free of the fashionable jargon of academic criticism.
Showalter’s wide net draws in writers like Dorothy Canfield Fisher, whose novel, “The Home-Maker,” written in 1924, includes the abysmally written passage: “What was her life? A hateful round of housework, which, hurry as she might, was never done. How she loathed housework! The sight of a dishpan full of dishes made her feel like screaming. And what else did she have? Loneliness; never-ending monotony; blank, gray days, one after another full of drudgery.” Very few people, I imagine, would argue for the elegance of the prose, but the passage is undoubtedly interesting from a feminist point of view. And so the question becomes: Is this capacious, political way of looking at writing a flawed way to view the mysteries of literature? Willa Cather put it this way: “The mind that can follow a ‘mission’ is not an artistic one.”
Showalter’s final section on modern women writers, with headings like “From Chick Lit to Chica Lit,” is the flimsiest in the book. Where, one wonders, are some of the quirkier and more interesting talents of the past few decades, from Paula Fox to Mary Gaitskill to Claire Messud? Showalter spends too much time on frothy entertainments like Jennifer Weiner’s “Good in Bed” and Terry McMillan’s “Waiting to Exhale” at the expense of more serious literary work.
Toward the end of this ambitious book, Showalter concludes that one “must be willing to assume the responsibility of judging. A peer is not restricted to explaining and admiring; quite the contrary.” But one wishes there was more judgment in this book, more selection. The idea of resurrecting women’s writing from the neglect of previous eras is a project of ’70s feminism, but is the mere fact of being a woman and jotting down words in a notebook and then publishing them worthy of quite so many drums and trumpets? It may not be sensitive to say that some, just some, of the writers in this generous volume might have rightfully been relegated to obscurity, but one can’t help thinking, at times, that literary history may have passed them over for a reason, just as it has passed over mediocre male writers. One also wonders about the sheer democracy of the project, the fair-minded curiosity about nearly every woman who thought to pick up a pen. Does Dorothy Canfield Fisher really merit as much space as Elizabeth Bishop? It is a vexed and knotty question: Is Showalter in some way devaluing the achievements of the greatest American writers by giving equal or greater space to the less talented? Is she slighting women writers by holding them to a standard that is not about artistic excellence, but about the political content or personal drama of their writing? In her brilliant essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” George Eliot wrote, “the severer critics are fulfilling a chivalrous duty in depriving the mere fact of feminine authorship of any false prestige which may give it a delusive attraction, and in recommending women of mediocre faculties — as at least a negative service they can render their sex — to abstain from writing.”
Still, this comprehensive record of American women’s attempts at literary achievement holds its own fascination; the small, vivid portraits of women’s lives are extremely readable and enlightening. Writing about times when women’s stories were too often ignored, Showalter offers a series of vignettes about what their struggles consisted of and how difficult it was for a woman to forge a professional identity as a writer. She is concerned with the drama of women writing; the lives she describes are filled with abortions, divorces, affairs, unhappy marriages, postpartum depressions and suicides. Her short, incisive biographies offer a glimpse into the exotic travails of the past and the eternal concerns of female experience; and, of course, from a purely biographical standpoint the literary mediocrities can be as interesting as the successes.
“A Jury of Her Peers” is likely to become an important and valuable resource for anyone interested in women’s history. It outlines the rich and colorful history of women struggling to publish and define themselves, and the complex and tangled tradition of women’s writing in this country. It also leaves us with many memorable moments, like Dorothy Parker praying, “Dear God, please make me stop writing like a woman.”
A JURY OF HER PEERS
American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx
By Elaine Showalter
