LITERARY CRITICISM: A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie ProulxBy Elaine Showalter Virago
IT'S OVER 30 years since literary scholar Elaine Showalter did the British scene with her seminal A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing;now the professor emerita of English at Princeton turns her critical eye on her compatriots with A Jury of Her Peers, the first literary history of American women writers – ever. Hard to believe, isn't it? But cutting a swathe through 350 years of lit-crit is not for the faint-hearted. Maybe it took so long because it required someone of Elaine Showalter's grit and pre-eminence to take it on.
Showalter comes out fighting in her introduction: “I tell a story with a beginning, middle and end and I make selections, distinctions and judgements. In my view the female tradition in American literature is not the result of biology, anatomy or psychology. It comes from women’s relations to the literary marketplace, and from literary influence rather than essential sexual difference . . . Therefore I have chosen to discuss women who wrote for publication, rather than women who wrote diaries, letters, recipes or wills.”
She goes on to take a side-swipe at feminist critics who have questioned whether women writers can be fairly judged by male-defined standards – such as intellectual quality, imaginative force, originality, formal and technical mastery, and literary influence. “Rather than risk creating hierarchies among women writers, judging them as ‘major’ or ‘minor’, many feminist scholars preferred to abolish literary history altogether,” says Showalter. She quotes one (unnamed) feminist critic who has confessed that there has been “an unspoken agreement not to submit nineteenth century American women’s novels to extended analytical evaluation” for fear of prematurely undoing the patient work of recovery.
No such pussyfooting around for Showalter. Hers is an essentially conservative literary history with the emphasis on history rather than overextended analysis. Partly this is due to the amount of ground she has to cover. Anne Bradstreet, who opens this volume, was a poet charting the domestic agonies of the Mayflowersettlers in 1650; Annie Proulx, who closes it out, is alive and well and situated in, ironically, the same pioneering territory as Bradstreet – while taking on that most male of genres, the Western, in the late 1990s. So Showalter's potted essays on the careers of more than 250 writers have of necessity to be pithy. As a writer, Showalter has always straddled the divide between a specialist and general readership, so her style is both learned and bracing and there are plenty of gossipy asides here to keep the enthusiastic amateur reader happy.
While the book is necessarily twinned with a timeline, Showalter’s genius is in pairing unlikely contemporaries. Thus in a chapter entitled “Against Women’s Writing”, she places the hoity-toity Edith Wharton alongside the high-plains lesbian Willa Cather, though it’s unlikely the two met or would have had any time for one another. While Wharton was the product of a tightly-knit upper-crust east-coast world where the lives of both men and women were socially circumscribed, Willa Cather was strutting about the University of Nebraska with shorn hair, wearing suits and braces. But both were vehement in their dislike of gender limitations. Wharton rejected the category ‘woman writer’ outright; Cather found it so demeaning she dubbed the lady writers of her day “authorines”. “Sometimes I wonder why God even trusts talent in the hands of women. They usually make such a mess of it,” she wrote in 1895.
ANOTHER UNLIKELY PAIRINGis of Eudora Welty (1909-2001) with Nadine Gordimer on the thorny issue of race. Welty enjoyed national treasure status in the 1970s as "the Eleanor Roosevelt of literature", Showalter notes. South African Gordimer considered her the greatest American short story writer of all time and saw parallels between their backgrounds as white women growing up in unjust and segregated societies. But critics felt otherwise. Claudia Roth Pierpoint saw Welty's work as "morally simplified" and evasive and patronising about racism in the American South. Showalter's verdict is that Welty's work will stand on its language and be continually re-evaluated for its historical and social context.
She has a particular eye for such literary spats; the book bristles with back-biting. Here is Hemingway on Willa Cather's One of Ours. "Wasn't that last scene in the lines wonderful?" he writes to Edmund Wilson. "Do you know where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation. I identified episode after episode. Catherized. Poor woman, she had to get her war experience somewhere."
And the bad-mouthing wasn’t confined to the men. Yaddo, the writers’ colony in upstate New York that opened in 1926 under the stewardship of Elizabeth Ames, was particularly keen to seek out women artists. It represented another first – the first literary community in which women lived and worked together. The pioneers of this experiment included Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty. But being part of a beleaguered literary minority did not make for either solidarity or harmony. “Over the years the female artists at Yaddo always got along better with the men than with each other,” Ames remarks sadly.
Even when they were getting on – the famously bisexual McCullers took a shine to Katherine Anne Porter while both were at Yaddo. “McCullers followed her around like a stalker, pledging her undying love and threw herself on the floor across Porter’s threshold,” Showalter writes, but Porter received these gestures coolly. “I merely stepped over her and continued on my way to dinner.”
NO AMERICAN LITERARYhistory would be complete without the elephant in the room – the Great American Novel – getting a mention. The phrase was first coined in 1868 by John William De Forest, who defined it as "the picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence". He nominated Uncle Tom's Cabinby Harriet Beecher Stowe for the big prize. (Showalter rightly points to its epic range and complex structure.) Somewhere along the way, though, the demand for a mighty theme got added to the prerequisites, and Nathaniel Hawthorne believed that such a beast could only be written by a master genius. Given that he dismissed his female contemporaries as that "damned mob of scribbling women", it seems unlikely a woman would be considered up to the job. Showalter has her own ideas on that score – it's clear that in her eyes Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, Jane Smiley and Annie Proulx would certainly qualify.
The danger with an overview like Showalter’s is that the reviewer can get bogged down with the choices made – why was this writer deemed worthy of mention while that one was excluded? A more fruitful question is where can the reader find those names that are not so familiar – such as Caroline M Kirkland (1801-1864), who wrote comic satires of pioneer life in Michigan, or James Tiptree jnr, praised for his lean, muscular and ineluctably masculine style, who was outed as Alice Bradley Sheldon in 1976.
Gender aside, though – which is, after all, part of her thesis (“A peer is not restricted to explaining and admiring”) – Showalter has triumphed in producing a highly readable and provoking survey of the American literary scene. It shouldn’t be viewed as the end of an old debate, but the first round in a new one.
- A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie ProulxBy Elaine Showalter Virago, 586pp. £22.50
Mary Morrissy is the
Jenny McKean Moore Writer in Washington
at George Washington University