Legitimate Aesthetic Grounds

...Now Showalter has produced a new groundbreaking study, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (Knopf, 568 pp., $30.00...

...And conversely, in a society that values democracy, is the literature of an elite automatically more worthy of serious study...

...In the mid-20th century, writers like Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Shirley Jackson were still torn between a visceral hatred of housework and the old idea that they were supposed to be fulfilled by their domestic role...

...A few are available from Virago, which publishes some American authors along with its mostly British list...

...I have no theoretical, political or visionary idea of what women ought to write...

...It took an outand-out rebel like Adrienne Rich to admit she was made furious by “raising children and being almost continuously angry...

...In the three decades of unprecedented social change since that book was written, Showalter proposes, we have entered a fourth phase, one she calls “free...

...And there is Marilynne Robinson, an admirer of the Women’s Movement who nevertheless aspired to produce, with Housekeeping, “a book about women that was not a feminist book...

...Showalter herself has compiled a nice collection in her Scribbling Women: Short Stories by 19th-Century American Women (Rutgers, 1997...

...The opposite turned out to be the case...

...Her 1824 novel Hobomok “anticipated [Nathaniel] Hawthorne,” Showalter notes, in its “use of real historical characters and . . . portrayal of Salem’s obsession with savagery, the devil, and witchcraft as a dark reflection of itself...

...Though one of the premiere feminist scholars of the “raceclass-gender”-obsessed late 20th century, Showalter writes a sparklingly clean prose almost completely shorn of academic buzzwords like “patriarchy” or “agency...

...It is the first comprehensive history (believe it or not...

...Showalter’s history makes you long to read the works of those writers...

...She presents several writers as crucial transitional figures...

...Could it really be that their work just did not stand up against that of male authors...

...Fancy any woman’s attempting a portrait of a gentleman...

...asks Showalter...

...Cooked 362 breakfasts...

...The social upheaval caused by two World Wars, women’s suffrage, and the labor-saving devices of the 20th century eventually changed this situation, but only slowly...

...or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, a narrative that Showalter says “opposed the lingering romanticism of even [Harriet Beecher] Stowe’s writing about black women, especially in her mixture of religious piety and blunt language...

...Besides innumerable jobs too small to be mentioned...

...In 1650, just three and a half centuries ago, the idea of a learned authoress was so startling that Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, the first book written by a woman living in America, had to be vouched for by her brother-in-law, who “stood guarantee that Bradstreet herself had written the poems, that she had not initiated their publication, and that she had neglected no housekeeping chore in their making...

...In A Literature of Their Own, Showalter identified three phases in the development of women’s writing “that were akin to those of any other literary subculture...

...First came the feminine phase, a prolonged period of imitation of the culture’s dominant modes...

...And what about Constance Fenimore Woolson, the well-known author of sophisticated, disturbing psychological tales that rivaled those of Henry James...

...There is Toni Morrison, who brought a certain type of black experience to mainstream literature: “Aggression is not as new to black women as it is to white women...

...has called “the primal scene of African-American letters...

...Swept and dusted sitting-room & kitchen 350 times...

...The strains of housework and childrearing often absorbed all their energy...

...Repeatedly, in looking at studies and biographies of individual American women writers, I came upon the same question...

...But such attacks are rare...

...more have been put out by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center...

...of its kind...

...According to its editors, four years later the appearance of Elaine Showalter’s first book, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton), which brought to light a legion of forgotten writers, moved the English publishing house to enormously expand and enrich its list...

...But far too many are either out of print or available only in expensive editions from obscure publishers...

...James had an adverse effect on the careers of several gifted women: Faint praise was his weapon of choice, and with its aid he sowed permanent critical doubts about the excellent work of Woolson, Edith Wharton and Sarah Orne Jewett, all of whom wrote work competitive with his, and sometimes superior...

...One hopes it will have the same impact on this side of the Atlantic that her maiden volume had on the other side, for it reveals a plethora of fascinating writers unfamiliar to modern readers...

...In 1864 Child recorded a list of her employments over the past year: Cooked 360 dinners...

...IT HAS BEEN a hectic journey, though in historical terms a short one...

...By the 19th century it could no longer be doubted that women were capable of writing, and could even make a living doing so...

...It seems to me, in a way, that is the ultimate feminism...

...Filled lamps 362 times...

...second, the feminist phase, a period of protest against these modes...

...Emily Dickinson wrote to a friend that there were “so many wants—and me so very handy—and my time of so little account—and my writing so very needless,” she felt guilty even taking the time to dash off a note...

...A century later the young slave Phyllis Wheatley, an intellectual prodigy, underwent a far more humiliating ordeal...

...and finally the female phase, a period of “self-discovery, a search for identity and a specific aesthetic...

...Male writers like Hawthorne and Henry James implied that commercial popularity denoted inferior work, a perfunctory judgment that has been thoughtlessly accepted by the would-be highbrow ever since...

...Black women seem able to combine the nest and the adventure...

...Another is Julia Ward Howe, famous as the author of the lyrics to The Battle Hymn of the Republic but forgotten as the brilliant poet whose dark 1853 volume Passion-Flowers moved Hawthorne, no fan of what he called “scribbling women,” to deem her “beyond all comparison the first of American poetesses...

...One is Lydia Maria Child, the rebellious abolitionist and feminist...

...Showalter invites us to question it: “Does literary popularity preclude artistic greatness...

...There is Erica Jong, whose Fear of Flying (1973) led New York Times critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt to write: “I can’t remember ever before feeling quite so free to identify my own feelings with those of a female protagonist...

...Showalter’s pages are full of talented writers whose careers fizzled out: Howe, Child, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Dunbar-Nelson...

...Why did this woman disappear from literary history...

...She was grilled by a panel of white male experts to determine whether she could actually have written the work published under her name—an event Henry Louis Gates Jr...

...W AS SECOND-WAVE FEMINISM a transitional stage leading to full self-expression for women, or another ideology limiting writers to a woman’s preserve...

...Privately, they could challenge him: “How did you ever dare write a portrait of a lady...

...It took physical and mental strength to function both domestically and professionally...

...Or perhaps these women writers, among many others, needed a critical jury of their peers to discuss their work, to explicate its symbols and meanings, and to demonstrate its continuing relevance to all readers...

...Unlike too many academics, Showalter is clearly motivated by a real love of her subject matter, and her enthusiasm infuses every page of A Jury of Her Peers...

...Still another is the boldly realistic African-American writer Harriet E. Wilson, author of Our Nig...

...Then there is the colorful Mary Wilkins Freeman, whose 1891 story “A New England Nun” sounds utterly outrageous and fabulous...

...Wouldn’t there be a storm of ridicule...

...When she expresses dislike of an author it is always on legitimate aesthetic grounds rather than political ones...

...Her present-day fame derives almost solely from her having been the model for the slightly pathetic Maria Gostrey in James’ The Ambassadors...

...Sara Teasdale, raised to be the angel in the house, worried that she might love marriage so much she would stop writing...

...Showalter asks about Susan Glaspell, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the story “A Jury of Her Peers,” whose title she has appropriated...

...Women writers in the 21st century finally feel free to tackle any subject they choose, and from any point of view, male or female—as the last writers in her study, Jane Smiley and Annie Proulx, have proven...

...I have looked at what women actually wrote,” she says...

...That did not please their male counterparts, who tended to retaliate by branding the women’s creations “sentimental...

...indeed, their work was comprising an ever larger portion of the market for fiction and poetry...

...It is for artistic fraud that she attacks Gertrude Stein, for example, not political inadequacies...

...marriage was a prison to her, and she committed suicide...

...And she answers the question with her celebration of the “female” phase of 20th-century writing...

...Swept and dusted chamber & stairs 40 times...

...Showalter cites the scholar Judith Fetterley’s very persuasive argument that “sentimental” was actually a code word for “female subject and woman’s point of view and particularly for the expression of women’s feelings...

...Woolson once breezily asked...