Crosscurrents

Writing Gender

CROSSCURRENTS

A current which cuts across another, evoking fluidity, movement, intersections, perhaps contradictory encounters or even antagonist oppositions.

Overview

• Gender, Feminism and Women Writers

• Gendering Modernism

• Gendered Readings

Gender, Feminism and Women Writers

Gender ‘[A] category constructed through cultural and social systems. Unlike sex, it

is not a biological fact determined at conception. [...] Gender is more fluid, flexible, and multiple in its options than the (so far) unchanging biological binary of male and female.’ (Bonnie Kime Scott)

‘[G]ender proves to be performative – that is, constituting the identity it is imported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed.’ (Judith Butler)

‘One is not born a woman, one becomes one’ (Simone de Beauvoir)

‘The Angel in the House’Man must be pleased; but him to please Is woman's pleasure; down the gulfOf his condoled necessitiesShe casts her best, she flings herself.How often flings for nought, and yokesHer heart to an icicle or whim,Whose each impatient word provokesAnother, not from her, but him;While she, too gentle even to forceHis penitence by kind replies,Waits by, expecting his remorse,With pardon in her pitying eyes;And if he once, by shame oppress'd,A comfortable word confers,She leans and weeps against his breast,And seems to think the sin was hers.

Coventry Patmore (1854)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Suffragette,-Emily-Wi.jpg

The Angel in the HouseThese then were two very genuine experiences of my own. These were two of the adventures of my professional life. The first--killing the Angel in the House--I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful--and yet they are very difficult to define. Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against.

Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), Russian poet Isabel Allende (born 1942), Chilean-American novelist Djuna Barnes (1892–1982), American novelist, playwright, etc. Kay Boyle (1902–1992), American novelist, poet, short story writer Mary Butts (1890–1937), British novelist Kate Chopin (1851–1904), American novelist, short story writer H.D. (1886–1961), American poet, novelist, memoirist Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943), British novelist, poet Lillian Hellman (1905–1984), American playwright, memoirist Ada Verdun Howell (1902–1981), Australian poet Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), American novelist Marie-Elena John (b. 1963), Antiguan novelist, Africanist Amy Lowell (1874–1925), American poet Mina Loy (1882-1966), British poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), American poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972), American poet and essayist Toni Morrison (born 1931), American novelist Silvina Ocampo (1903 - 1994), Argentine poet, short-fiction writer Jean Rhys (1890-1979), Caribbean novelist Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957). British novelist Edith Sitwell (1887–1964), British poet and critic Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), American poet, playwright, essayist, etc. Edith Wharton (1862–1937), American novelist, short story writer Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), British novelist, essayist, short-fiction writer

Modernism, as we were taught it at midcentury was perhaps halfway to truth. It was unconsciously gendered masculine. The inscriptions of mothers and women, and more broadly of sexuality and gender, were not adequately decoded, if detected at all…Typically both the authors of original manifestos and the literary historians of modernism took as their norm a small set of its male participants, who were quoted, anthologised, taught, and consecrated as geniuses.

Bonnie Kime Scott, The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology

Gendering Modernism ‘The Men of 1914’

• ‘Modernism as caught in the mesh of gender is polyphonic, mobile, interactive, sexually charged; it has wide appeal, constituting an historic shift in parameters.’ (Bonnie Kime Scott)

• ‘Shifts in gender relations at the turn of the century were a key factor in the emergence of Modernism’. (Marianne Dekoven)

• ‘The radical implications of the social-cultural changes feminism advocated produced in modernist writing an unprecedented preoccupation with gender, both thematically and formally. Much of this preoccupation expressed a male modernist fear of women’s new power, and resulted in a combination of misogyny and triumphal masculinism that many critics see as central, defining features of modernist work by men’. (Marianne Dekoven)

A Crisis of Masculinity?

• ‘And indeed there will be time

To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair –

(They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin –

(They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’)

‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ by T.S Eliot

A Crisis of Masculinity?

‘Mr Craigan had gone to work when he was nine and every day he had worked through most of the daylight til now, when he was going to get old age pension. So you will hear men who have worked like this talk of monotony of their lives, but when they grow to be old they are more glad to have work and this monotony has grown so great that they have forgotten it.’

Henry Green, Living

A Crisis of Masculinity?

‘To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: It has not been easy, nor quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under your gaze; from our size you have nothing to fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgement.’

‘Alberto and I went back to the hut, and we could not look each other in the face. That man must have been tough, he must have been made of another metal than us if this condition of ours, which has broken us, could not bend him. ‘

Primo Levi, If This is a Man

‘Indeed she had the whole of the other sex under her protection; for reasons she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance; finally for an attitude towards herself which no woman could fail to find agreeable, something trustful, childlike, reverential.’

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Woolf’s To the Lighthouse ends as Lily Briscoe finishes her painting with a ‘line there, in the centre.’ The closing “line” of Lily’s, and the novel’s, final “vision” is a line of simultaneous separation and union: separation and union of the (devastated /freed) postwar modernist present and the (murderous/fructifying) Victiorian-Edwardian realist past; separation and union of disillusioned but freer adulthood and idealized but oppressed childhood; separation and union of empowered/enchained, inspiring/inhibiting Victorian mother, Mrs. Ramsey, and cramped/autonomous modernist daughter, Lily; separation and union of tyrannical/visionary patriarchal male, Mr. Ramsey, and fecund/murdered patriarchal female, Mrs. Ramsey.’

Marianne Dekoven

 

Bibliography• Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London:

Routledge, 1990.• De Beuvoir, Simon. The Second Sex. Trans. H.M Parshley. London: Penguin, 1972.• Dekoven, Marianne. ‘Modernism and Gender.’ The Cambridge Companion to

Modernism. Ed. Michael Levenson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.• Roper, Michael and John Tosh, eds. Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain

Since 1800. London: Routledge, 1991. • Scott, Bonnie Kime, ed. The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. N.P:

Indiana UP, 1990.• ---, ed. Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections. Chicago:

U of Illinois P, 2007.• Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë

to Lessing. London: Virago, 1977.