The XX Factor: What women really think.

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.