The XX Factor: What women really think.

Why I Don't Yawn When I Talk About Women Writers

E.J., it was actually W.H. Auden who wrote that "poetry makes nothing happen," and the line you cite is perhaps one of the misinterpreted and misquoted lines of our time. Auden, I believe, meant the opposite of what you imply in your post; he was, in fact, arguing that literature (including poetry) is crucial to our self-conception as humans, as cultures. That is, it is influential, even if few of us can say that reading a novel has, say, gotten us a job or stopped a country from going to war. The line you quoted is from his elegy for W.B. Yeats, and the rest of the stanza is quite relevant to our discussion:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

That is, a poem is a "way of happening," something that survives by being read and absorbed by the culture.

Another poetic quote came to my mind while reading your post: Marianne Moore, who famously wrote "I, too, dislike it." She was talking about poetry, but I thought of it in relationship to our discussion. Yes, like you, I'm not crazy about the discussion of Why Aren't There as Many Great Female Novelists, etc. But I don't think I can just yawn either. "Best-of" lists may be the province of geeks, but I think it's important to keep asking whether women writers get short shrift. Because even if prize-giving and list-making is highly subjective, prizes and honors help give you the financial freedom to write (either directly, by handing out $$$ or, indirectly, by helping you get a good job with a low teaching load). Call me selfish, but I'll be pissed if in my poetic career I have to do twice the work as my male peers to get half the salary and concurrent freedom.

I guess that means I should be all for your idea of a special prize for female writers—except that it bugs me that women might still need to be considered separate but equal. Why not just equal?

Women and the Quest to Write the Great American Novel

Noreen, Nina, and Bonnie were discussing the vexed question of why so few women have produced what might be called “the great American novel,” and I want to jump in belatedly. Maybe the problem is, as Laura Miller suggested, that that few (white) women take on "big novels." But the reasons behind this are complicated. First, until recently, most women didn't have the social and economic wherewithal to make a life for themselves as artistic writers; read the big new Elaine Showalter history of American women's writing, A Jury of Her Peers, and you’ll be struck by how many of what Nathaniel Hawthorne called "that damned mob of scribbling women" were writing to support themselves and their families—which is different from writing to fulfill ambition. Second, Noreen, I think you’re right to suggest that the way we define "ambition" in the novel skews toward a, well, masculinist project—a bias toward the big and sprawling novel, an adventurous quest novel, rather than anything that can be defined as "domestic." (I touched on this indirectly on a piece praising the “small novel.”) Third, it’s been hard for female novelists to persuade critics of the seriousness of their endeavor.

But I think we do have some great American novels by women. Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, in my mind, is not just a good novel, but one of the most important novels of the latter half of the 20th century. It's the first female quest novel of any real stature. And, paradoxically, it is also a domestic novel. It's just that the heroine chooses to break free of the routinized monotony of "housekeeping" in order to be a itinerant, a traveler. The novel is profound on its own terms. But it's also a powerful critique about how we think about the novel in America. By no means is Housekeeping an explicitly "feminist novel," and yet on a certainly level it's the most feminist novel I can think of: one that decisively complicates some very tired gender categories.

Her Great American Novel

"Why Can't a Woman Write the Great American Novel?" Others here have weighed in already on why the literary canon seems to be lacking when it comes to Great American Novels written by women. What struck me about Laura Miller's essay was the same line Noreen pulled out:

Prose is right that many 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.

Male authors also fetishize writing the Great American Novel. Somehow, I get the sense Miller finds all this male ambition problematic. Is it? Or is there a serious lack of female writers who aspire to write the Great American Novel? That, I find, would be problematic.

Women, Writing, and Work

... surveying this history, it seems that before the 1970s there was nothing more conducive to a[n American] woman's literary success than the failure of the men in her life. More often than not, what prompted these writers to sit down at their desks and send out their manuscripts to magazines and book publishers was the bankruptcy, desertion, idleness or death of her husband or father. When the touted sanctuary of the nuclear family let them down, and they needed the money to feed their children and keep a roof over their heads, their talents were finally loosed.