Female Chauvinism
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing FEMALE CHAUVINISM BY PEARL K. BELL There is an air of hectic dishevelment about Ellen Moers' Literary Women {Doubleday, 336 pp., $10), making me suspect that she set out to...
...The new feminism has been a blight on the novel, as the torrent of whining, self-contemptuous Women's Lib fiction has made clear...
...In a well-informed, judicious section of Literary Women she demonstrates how the social and economic evils of the late-18th and 19th centuries—in the slave plantations of the American South and the factories of Manchester—aroused the outraged literary energy of such crusading novelists as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Gaskell and Harriet Martineau...
...But when Moers extends the meaning of female gothic to our own time, she succumbs to the worst mythmaking vulgarities of Women's Lib...
...So notional is Moers' view of the intricate conjunctions between femaleness and literature that she peremptorily dismisses as "simplistic theories" some alarming data about women's fear of success gathered by present-day psychologists...
...Browning...
...In a probing analysis of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, she reads the novel not only as a singularly sophisticated specimen of the romantic-horror genre but, more significantly, as the fantastically enacted response of a very young, precocious and intensely imaginative woman to the trauma of maternity, the "revulsion against newborn life, and the drama of guilt, dread, and flight surrounding birth and its consequences...
...And it is sexist to contend that "money and its making were characteristically female rather than male subjects in English fiction...
...Of George Sand and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, those inexhaustible fountains of romantic excess, Moers burbles: "what positively miraculous beings they were...
...Yet Moers is an intelligent and reflective scholar when schematic feminism isn't grabbing her by the throat...
...Her adoration can lead to embarrassingly fulsome prose...
...Instead, with that combative word "ruthless" laced like a whalebone corset around her subject, she imperiously anoints her particular heroines...
...Moers apparently subscribes to the humiliating idea that women are such a herd of like-minded, inarticulate sheep, they must be grateful for the Austens and Eliots and Brontes and Woolfs who put the words into their mouths that enable them to express their inchoate conformities...
...Moers' didactic pursuit of general principles and lessons leads her into oddly sexist postures...
...Interestingly, Moers is so carried away by Sand's staggering industry—thousands of pages a year, written through the night while the world slept—she momentarily forgets her feminist credo and admits that "physiological bias to the night hours probably accounted for more in George Sand's development than the fact of her sex...
...Precisely how this metamorphosis was effected remains vague, but she nonetheless declares with unconditional finality that "If ever there was a time which teaches that one must know the history of women to understand the history of literature, it is now...
...Surely Moers must be aware of Elizabeth Hardwick's essay on Plath in Seduction and Betrayal, which says it all: "In Sylvia Plath's work and in her life the elements of pathology are so deeply rooted and so little resisted that one is disinclined to hope for general principles, sure origins, applications, or lessons...
...Hmmm...
...It is scarcely the work I would have expected from the author of The Dandy, an excellent account of that elegant and pitiable figure as he recurs in French and English literature of the past three centuries...
...She portrays the redoubtable Sand as a precursor of "the efficient, versatile, overworked, modern mother," whose country household at Nohant was "just like yours and mine...
...If consciousness-raising means intelligence-lowering for an able scholar like Ellen Moers, her brand of feminism has reached the point of no return...
...Before she saw the light, Moers confesses, "Mrs...
...I could barely read Mary Shelley and Mrs...
...Neither taste nor facts disturb her admiration for "Arraignment," Robin Morgan's worthless poem about Sylvia Plath as feminist martyr, a false and crudely manipulative revision of Plath's life and suicide...
...The unhappy result, as Virginia Woolf said of early-19th-century women novelists, is a mind "slightly pulled from the straight, and made to alter its clear vision in deference to external authority...
...At some point in her reading of the complicated abundance of women writers, it would seem Moers was converted to the cause of radical feminism, whose revisionist belligerence swiftly appropriated her book...
...Now, addled by the segregationist, sexist feminism of the '60s and '70s, Moers exultantly embraces the literary sexual apartheid that in a less tendentious time was quite properly scorned...
...Not so long ago, the term "women writers" was bitterly resented by female novelists as a patronizing form of male contempt: not bad for a woman (child, dog...
...Why is it permissible for her to cherish the uniquely feminine qualities of women writers but reprehensible for Lionel Trilling to betray "a sign of the masculinity of the critic" in writing about Jane Austen...
...If Moers is blessed with the sort of domestic staff that was taken for granted by a 19th-century French aristocrat, she is one lucky woman...
...It is sexist for her to assert that illiteracy "is plainly a woman's theme," as though Dickens and Hardy had vanished from living memory...
...Moers no sooner brings this up, though, than she withdraws behind the nearest fig leaf with the prim rationale that "even to raise the subject would tend to insult the memory and downgrade the writing of the greatest among women writers...
...Once she learned to approach them "as women writers," however, her yawns turned to rapture...
...That Trilling deplores this is unmistakably clear, but Moers chooses to think otherwise and, foot in mouth, damns "the disgrace of that paragraph...
...The real gains in work and money and dignity have been too easily attributed by militant women to acrimonious ideology and whatever the word is for the female of misogyny...
...Yet when a certain literal-mindedness is called for, she affects the evasive timidity of a prude...
...As for the great women writers "who speak for us all"—the hell they do, and the best of them would have angrily decried that reductive view of their intentions and art...
...In a book devoted to literary women, one would expect the author to consider the crucial matter of biological imagery...
...She quotes a mar-velously subtle and astute passage from Lionel Trilling's essay on Emma, in which he points to the unjust social presumption "that women's moral life is not as men's...
...This is exactly the kind of female experience—one destiny of anatomy—that a woman knows as a man can not...
...Emily Dickinson was an irritating puzzle, as much as a genius...
...the rest of us are not so fortunate...
...My tale," she writes with a polemical clang, "is one of triumph, not quest for failure, and literary women provide no evidence of female passivity, for if there is one ruthless activity that seeks to dominate and shape life itself, it is writing...
...When Auden wrote "We must love one another or die,' he enclosed within the plural pronoun not men and not women but the fertile indivisible wholeness of humankind...
...Moers should know from her reading of Kipling, Trollope, Conrad, and Bennett that money and work, besides being very different themes, have been written about in England at least as much by men as by women...
...Writers & Writing FEMALE CHAUVINISM BY PEARL K. BELL There is an air of hectic dishevelment about Ellen Moers' Literary Women {Doubleday, 336 pp., $10), making me suspect that she set out to write something very different than this mishmash of feminist manifesto, literary criticism, social history, and girlish gush...
...Since Moers is anything but stupid, it is hard to be charitable about her flagrant misreading...
...At one point she proves beyond all cavil that ideology impoverishes critical intelligence by robbing it of the one talent it is death to lose: the ability to grasp the intended meaning of written words...
...It is ironic that in Literary Women, conceived as "a celebration of the great women writers who speak for us all," Moers has brought the wheel of feminist history full circle—and back, alas, to where much of our discontent began...
...When Moers ceases her giddy generalizing and turns her erudite, intuitive scrutiny loose on specific examples of "Female Gothic"—her most brilliantly original chapter—she can be perceptive and moving...
...Martineau spoke the plain truth for many of these gifted, frustrated women when she wrote: "I want to be doing something with the pen, since no other means of action in politics are in a woman's power...
...Where this leaves those hard-working literary women like Fanny Burney who ground out their novels to support their families, with no thought "to dominate and shape life," Moers fails to explain...
...Gaskell and Anne Bronte . . . bored me...
...As she is fond of remarking, this will not do...
Vol. 59 • April 1976 • No. 9
