Women's Literature

Crescat Sententia's Amy Lamboley posts about an issue involving literature by women: "Just about everything either written by a woman or featuring a woman protagonist is assumed to be chick lit of one sort or another. When a man writes a novel about a man, it's assumed to be a statement on the human condition, but when a woman writes a novel about a woman, it's assumed to be a statement on the female condition, and hence largely irrelevant to half the population."

I think that's pretty much true. I wrote my English senior seminar on Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek in which I treated it as an artist's coming-of-age novel in the vein of Hermann Hesse, and not a few people treated it as a really strange thing to do. At a wedding over the summer I mentioned I'd just read Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, the reply was, "I haven't read much women's literature lately." And to be honest, when I look at my own perceptions, I tend to be aware of reading literature by women as "women's literature," even if I'm not looking for feminist themes.

I'm not sure I agree that this is an insurmountable crisis, however. Look at the way the teaching of history has developed: "Black history" originally developed as a topic because it was overlooked in the overall White narrative. Now, do to a self-consciousness about trying to include it, textbooks and courses regularly include it at all levels of education, causing a new perception to seep through society. Hildegard of Bingen now makes medieval courses with no one even blinking. Women writers are at a stage where to many people, the fact they are women is the most important thing, but the mere fact people are aware of women and reading them will ultimately change perceptions. I know in high school opinions on Silas Marner were relatively unaffected by the author's gender.

At the same time, as long as there are socially constructed gender differences, men and women will likely be attracted to topics in different numbers. And as long as high school girls get into the romance of Pride and Prejudice, guys will be less willing to sample the social criticism therein. But as long as men and women are themselves held to be equally valuable, perceptions of the relative worth of their chosen topics will also change. And even the differences in popular genres Amy cites may be changing: The two most recent fantasy authors I've discovered and liked are by Robin Hobb and Terry McGerry, while two of the three 20th-century mystery writers I've read are Agatha Christie and P.D. James. And these works, I think, can easily appeal to genre fans regardless of gender.