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Literary Review
Comment
The gendered reader
SHASHI DESHPANDE
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Old prejudices still persist and men don’t take women authors seriously. It’s time we appreciated a writer for what she is.
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Anne Enright. Photo: AP
Redefining narrative space:
In an introduction to a new edition of The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing wrote that in the novel, she was making an assumption “that the filter which is a woman’s way of looking at life has the same validity as the fil
ter which is a man’s way”. When the Nobel Committee, in awarding her the Nobel Prize this year, referred to her as “the epicist of the female experience”, she seemed to have been vindicated and an experience, which had been either ignored or denigrated, was finally validated. The fact that Lessing is the oldest author to receive the prize makes, however, a telling statement about the difficulty the world had in accepting this idea. But Lessing had been more optimistic, saying in the same introduction that “everything we now take for granted will be utterly swept away in the next decade”. Something that seemed not impossible at the time she wrote this (1972), when the women’s movement was at its peak, and there was a flood of writing about women and by women.
Nevertheless, Lessing’s optimism has not been borne out. Things have changed, but even now, more than three decades later, too many of the old attitudes still remain. In 1997, American writer Francine Prose wrote an article (“The Scent of a Woman’s Ink”) about how serious literary fiction written by women was treated and proved through statistics that women’s stories rarely appeared in serious magazines, that their works were seldom reviewed in serious literary magazines and that few women figured in short lists or best-10 lists. Fast forward to 2007, the year of Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize and I read an article written by a British writer Joanna Kavenna (“Still not an equal partnership”) responding to a survey which confirmed that men don’t read women’s fiction (surely the greatest put-down of all times!) and that, to them, great writing is male writing. Even worse is the statement of an Orange Prize Judge quoted in the same article, that women authors don’t appeal to men, because they focus on “small-scale domestic themes, like motherhood, boyfriend troubles and tiny family dramas”!
These charges are as old as women’s writing itself and one wonders at their survival, even after all the arguments made against them in the last few decades. What happened? Were they, because most were written by women, not heard? Or were they cursorily dismissed as feminist talk? Have women been talking only to one another? Whatever the reason, there is something depressing about the necessity to bring out the same arguments all over again, to respond to the sweeping generalisations about women’s writing. To say that all women’s writing is sentimental, emotional, light-weight and about small issues is to imply that all male writing is large in scope, intellectual, tough and about important issues. Absurd, perhaps, but negative ideas about women’s writing are so pervasive, that women have looked for ways out: using a male pseudonym (popular once), not disclosing first names (A.S. Byatt, P.D. James), keeping their gender strictly out of their writing, sticking to male protagonists and so on. At times women may even have felt the need to ask themselves: if men are so averse to reading us, is there something wrong with our writing?
Locating the problem
I see another way of looking at it. In John Irving’s Cider House Rules we are told that in the orphanage, David Copperfield was read out to the boys at bedtime and Jane Eyre to the girls. But I am sure the girls would have enjoyed David Copperfield just as much as they did Jane Eyre. Didn’t I read both with the same fervour? Didn’t I enjoy Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn even though I was a girl? And are not Jane Austen and Tolstoy, classic examples of “big” and “small” in literature, equally meaningful to me? And therefore, does the problem lie, not with the fiction of women, but with male readers? Prose quotes Diane Johnson, an American writer, as saying that male readers “have not learned to make the connection between images, metaphors and situations employed by women”, whereas women, who read all writers from childhood, do it better. I am also convinced that the ideas about and stereotypes of women, as well as the pejorative nuances associated with the word “women”, enter into the male reading of women’s writing. Prejudices and a misreading naturally follow. Long ago, Nathaniel Hawthorne spoke of “a mob of scribbling women”; but he, so the story goes, was angry and frustrated because women’s books outsold his. What drove an Indian reviewer to speak of “novels written by bored housewives fantasizing about imaginary lovers”?
Primary identity
All writers think of themselves only as writers, not as belonging to a class, a gender, a nation. They write because they have something to say, and want their work to be taken seriously; certainly not automatically dismissed as insignificant only because they are about women, families or anything else. In fact, I am astonished that novels centred round the family are looked upon as “tiny family dramas”, since I have always held the family to be of greatest importance in human life; it is there that we learn about love and hate, about companionship and loyalty, about treachery and betrayal. When I read the Booker Prize-winning author Anne Enright’s statement that “the family is a hugely interesting place, it’s a place where stories happen”, I thought, maybe they’ll listen to her, maybe they’ll now hear what many of us have been saying. For, let’s admit it, it is not easy to go on writing with the pressure of having to prove that one’s writing is not insignificant. A writer needs to have faith in herself and in what she is saying; without it there can be, at the best, to use Orhan Pamuk’s words, “a troubled optimism, scarred by the anger of being consigned to the margin”.
No zenanas please
So much has been written about these things that a time comes when you tell yourself “enough! No more!” In any case, it seems to be time to celebrate now, with two women winning the major literary prizes this year. (Though prizes don’t change anything, except for that one individual.) But what do you do when a newspaper announces this year’s Literature Nobel as “a Nobel for a grandmother”? And what do you do with the chagrin you feel when you read that men don’t read women writers, because it means that at one stroke you have lost half your potential readers? You can do nothing, except say it yet again: women writers do not create a zenana. Writers want all readers to enter the world they create. For a reader to turn away from the door because of the writer’s gender is something that should never happen.
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