How our critical terminology prevents women writers from accessing the highest echelons of literary recognition.
by Emma Winsor Wood
There is a certain type of novel that few enjoy but many admire. You know the type: a hefty tome of dense prose that skinny male students lug between coffee shops for weeks before declaring, inevitably, its brilliance. Critics describe it using words like daring, intelligent, epic, and, inevitably, ambitious, before comparing it to one, two, or all three of the novels that comprise the highest tier of snob fiction: Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Infinite Jest. Only a year or two after publication, a hip young professor puts it onto the syllabus for an English course in postmodern literature. Although the book is often cited and highly esteemed, it is rarely read in full outside of the university. Its author is, inevitably, male.
As girls, we are taught from an early age that it is unattractive to occupy too much space. We learn we are supposed to be thinner and shorter than men, our arms and legs smooth sticks unmarred by the curves of muscle. We are told to sit with our ankles crossed, our hands in our laps, our knees pressed together. We play with dolls and stuffed animals, toys that can be neatly put away. Boys, on the other hand, are not merely allowed, but encouraged to take up space. To grow tall and bulk up, they drink glass after glass of chocolate milk and eat spoonfuls of peanut butter straight from the jar. When they sit down, they emulate the postures of men seen on the street and in films: their legs spread wide, their arms stretched across the backs of adjacent chairs. At home, their Lego structures spill out from their bedrooms into the living room, the dining room, the kitchen. It is these same boys, assured of their right to fill empty space with their limbs, ideas, and Legos, who have gone on to write the expansive, messy, and difficult fiction that defines literary ambition in the Western world today.
The definition of literary ambition has barely developed since 1918, when James Joyce began publishing Ulysses in serial format in The Little Review. With Ulysses, Joyce established not only a new mode of reading and writing, but a new yardstick for ambition—one that elevated the arcane over the accessible, verbosity over economy, the development of language over character and plot. After Ulysses, the most esoteric books became the most admired. As Woolf writes in her 1929 treatise A Room of One’s Own (which is still, tellingly, quoted as a keystone text in articles about the state of fiction and gender today), “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in the drawing room.” Woolf might have said with the same accuracy, “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it is a long and difficult read. This is an insignificant book because it is a pleasant, quick read.”
By either definition, this critic should have deemed Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans—a non-linear, linguistically experimental, syntactically inventive, hermetic, metafictional epic—a work of genius, worthy of a spot in the Joyce-Pynchon-Foster Wallace pantheon. Instead, in spite of the fact that Stein is rarely read even among intellectual circles, to call her boring is a truth so widely accepted it is frequently received as a quip. Given this snubbing of Stein, a woman who was not afraid to take up her share of space either in a room or on the page, it grows difficult to maintain that the author’s gender is an attribute incidental to a book’s inclusion in the anthology of ambitious fiction.
The Industrial Revolution, which lowered printing costs, split fiction into two categories: literary and commercial. As the number of women writers and readers multiplied over the course of the following decades, this division has grown increasingly gendered. The phrase women’s fiction is now synonymous with commercial. In reality, almost all mainstream contemporary fiction could be accurately described as women’s fiction. Women comprise the bulk of fiction readers in the U.S. today. The men who do read novels tend to reside on the literary end of the spectrum and choose their books accordingly. Which means story-driven fiction, regardless of the quality of the writing, is now associated almost exclusively with women readers and women writers; and by extension, lowbrow commercialism. In this new marketplace, it is conceivable that so-called ambitious writers would employ rarefied language, opaque prose, and labyrinthine plots simply in order to mark their books as literary, i.e. not women’s fiction. It also follows that it would be easier for men, whose books cannot be as easily marketed to the core woman reader, to earn the labels of literary and ambitious.
Our critical terminology further complicates the problem. When identifying and praising literary fiction, we tend to select words long associated with men and masculinity—words like vigorous, muscular, epic, daring, and, yes, even ambitious. Other words, more feminine ones, such as subtle, restrained, elegant, and spare, are also used in praise, but their effect is muted. The adjective elegant does not possess the same infectious purchasing power as muscular. But the Mobius strip of cause-and-effect does not end here; we do not choose such words in a vacuum. Our knowledge of the author, whether it be the photo on the jacket flap or a whole biography gleaned from review fragments, shapes our description of her writing. In this way Hemingway becomes reticent and economical rather than graceful or precise. Such descriptors should have no bearing on our understanding of ambition, and yet they do. We can’t change our terminology overnight, but we can begin by changing our understanding of the available lexicon. We can begin by expanding our definition of ambition. We can begin by teaching girls how to take up space.
Emma Winsor Wood is a poet and freelance writer. She writes the Women and Words column for TheRiveterMagazine.com. You can find her on Twitter @EmmaWinsorWood.
