The XX Factor: What women really think.

Women and the "Great American Novel"

Nina, maybe you're right that more women might pick up a pen during this recession (though I'd imagine the free time offered by unemployment is more likely to be the impetus than money, as Bonnie notes). What struck me, though, about that Laura Miller Salon essay "Why can't a woman write the Great American Novel?" is encapsulated in this bit:

[M]any critics and editors, especially male ones, make a fetish of "ambition," by which they mean the contemporary equivalent of novels about men in boats ("Moby-Dick," "Huckleberry Finn") rather than women in houses ("House of Mirth"), and that as a result big novels by male writers get treated as major events while slender but equally accomplished books by women tend to make a smaller splash.

Meghan wrote about this phenomenon a couple of years ago, when the New York Times polled critics to find out what they thought the most important books of the last 25 years were, and big novels by men dominated the results. America's big, and any novel that represents it has to be big, or so that line of thinking goes. Even Norman Mailer, the most macho of all the 20^th-century literary macho men, seemed cowed by how big a "Great American Novel" would have to be, saying once that "The Great American Novel is no longer writable. We can't do what John Dos Passos did. His trilogy on America came as close to the Great American Novel as anyone. You can't cover all of America now. It's too detailed."  (If you'll allow me a moment of blatant gender stereotyping, that sort of literal-mindedness—I must capture every single detail!—seems pretty classically male.)

The term "Great American Novel" first appeared in 1868 in an essay in The Nation when, America was trying to define itself, culturally and otherwise, against still-dominant Europe. The original coinage definitely didn't exclude women—George Sand was one of the European authors namechecked, and Harriet Beecher Stowe was cited as the closest thing we'd had to date.  It also called for the Great American Novel to be "the picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence." On the face of it, that's a pretty humble definition, and one that wouldn't seem to exclude those "domestic" novels we think of as typically female literature. So when did we decide that we couldn't beat Europe by merely painting the ordinary?  (This all might just be the simple fact that women usually don't go in much for pissing contests, literary or otherwise.) Or was American life so gender-fragmented in the 20^th century that it became hard to have a shared "ordinary"? Jezebel and Esquire seem to think so—their wildly different lists of the books every man and every woman ought to read certainly suggest that. I've read far more on Jezebel's list. So, XXers, should I be mad at myself because my reading habits have tended toward the stereotypically female, or should I be mad that more books on Jezebel's list haven't gotten wide-ranging critical acclaim?