This week at Progressive Book Club, we're honored to host a discussion between Elaine Showalter and Erica Jong. Showalter is a professor emerita at Princeton University and the author A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx and numerous other works, including the groundbreaking A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontė to Lessing. Erica Jong--novelist, poet, and essayist--has published 20 books and is the recipient of many awards. She is a member of the Progressive Book Club editorial board. In the coming days they'll be discussing A Jury of Her Peers and, more broadly, the place of women in the American literary tradition. (Note that the posts appear in reverse-chronological order, so that the most recent dispatch is at the top.)

From: Erica Jong
To: Elaine Showalter
Date: Friday, March 20, 2009

Dear Elaine--

You raise an interesting point: media snarkiness and academic  
backwardness trail way behind readers' acceptance.

I have always found readers far more open than critics. Readers are  
very open to the expansion of women's writing. They are less  
concerned with niggling about genres. They understand that fiction  
and memoir have come ever closer in our time.

Do you have any idea why this split between readers and critics  
occurs? Is it just further proof of the old Chinese proverb "Those  
in the free seats hiss first"? Or is it because readers want a real  
experience and critics are more concerned with proving literary  
theories?

I'm so glad you are having the invaluable experience of connecting  
with readers. I've often wished that publishers could come with me  
and listen to what the readers say. The make the whole process of  
writing and publishing worthwhile.

Best to you on your travels,
Erica


From: Elaine Showalter
To: Erica Jong
Date: Friday, March 20, 2009


Dear Erica,

I've been travelling around this week talking about JURY OF HER  
PEERS, heading for Seattle this morning. And I've been impressed  
by the enthusiasm of audiences, their interest in and wide  
knowledge of women writers. At every stop I've been asked about at  
least one writer I didn't include, from Anna Mary Green to Ayn  
Rand and Diane Di Prima.  I could easily imagine a second volume--
although realistically, I'm going to edit an anthology both to  
accompany the book and to add to it.

I think  readers are more than ready to incorporate women's  
writing into the American tradition, and are baffled by the  
slowness of change in academia and by the continuing snarkiness of  
the media. Have you seen, for example, the letters to the New York  
Times Book Review about the condescending review of the biography  
of Flannery O'Connor? And if Flannery O'Connor is still  
ridiculed,what kind of treatment can other women writers expect?

I also don't think this is the attitude prevailing in the rest of  
the world. Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro, and Indian, Russian,  
and Croatian women novelists have just been short-listed for the  
Man Booker International Fiction Prize for lifetime achievement,  
along with Mario Vargas Llosa, Vidia Naipaul, Peter Carey and  
others. Americans can take pride in our history of women's  
writing. It's time to learn about it and honor it.

best,
Elaine

From: Erica Jong
To: Elaine Showalter
Date: Thursday, March 19, 2009

Dear Elaine,

I did not find John Updike's widows repellent at all. In fact I thought he was brave to attempt the depiction of cast-off women. I thought the critics who found his point of view repellent were failing to examine an automatic prejudice against older women. The book did not succeed entirely and was hardly as much fun as the Witches of Eastwick, but in writing about older women he assailed a taboo. Except for mysteries starring Miss Marple, we like our heroines youthful and nubile. He was questioning that and so were his protagonists.

Yes, another writer from another culture could parody a particular identity, but would it feel authentic? And what would be the point--other than proving it could be done?

But your last question is by far the most interesting: what does a writer give up by giving up her literary brand? Is the freedom you obtain worth it?

The truth is, I have never succumbed to this temptation. I assume that readers of "Erica Jong" want vivid insights about women, just as readers of "John Le Carre" want international intrigue in brilliant language. Once you have a literary brand, it's very hard to leave it. Look how mad readers got when Doris Lessing embarked on what people thought was sci fi.

Perhaps we dream of giving up our brand as we dream of traveling through time and space. Perhaps we are not as free as we imagine.


From: Elaine Showalter
To: Erica Jong
Date: Thursday, March 19, 2009

What was repellent was the language and point of view, rather than the aging body.

I think that once a writer has represented an identity (for lack of a better word) another writer could imitate or imagine it. A Japanese man could write as an American woman and vice versa. That's the postmodernist Catch-22.
 
But our sense of literary nationality and gender is also about a history, collective experience, tradition, and marketplace.

The writer behind the persona would still face these differences. You could write as an Italian but you would publish as an American.

And would freedom be worth giving up your name, your signature,your literary brand?


From: Erica Jong:
To: Elaine Showalter
Date: Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Dear Elaine--

These are great questions.

Why are aging women repellent? And are aging men equally repellent? Is it denial of aging, denial of death? Or is it an attempt to kill the mother and think of one's self as born out of one's own ambition?

This ties in with your American question. Americans want to see themselves as self-created.

Success often means breaking with the family.

I see myself very much as an American writer. I am always surprised when my books strike such a responsive chord in other countries. Fear of Flying especially surprised me. Japanese women, Russian women, Serbian women all said "I am Isadora Wing." There was something about her attempt at self-definition that made for profound identification. We are living through a time in which women are struggling to define themselves. And this has been an international phenomenon.

Despite this, I feel very American.

Best, Erica


From: Elaine Showalter
To: Erica Jong
Date: Wednesday, March 18, 2009

John Updike wrote about the bodies and sexual longings of aging women in Witches of Eastwick and reviews were mixed. It seemed repellent.

But I think the problem is less reception and reviewing, and more how women fit into a decade or a national tradition, and how they are remembered in a literary canon.

Do you think of yourself as an American writer?


From: Erica Jong
To: Elaine Showalter
Date: Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Elaine--Nobody can prove the number of women who have been silenced by hostile criticism. But since we are often mocked for being somehow unnatural women, the criticism is crushing.

I am trying to imagine a female version of Philip Roth's EXIT GHOST, which begins with a long description of incontinence after prostate surgery. Imagine the equivalent honesty by a woman character who had become incontinent. Can one even imagine the jibes and mockery compared to the uniform praise of Roth's honesty?  Maleness is still somehow considered the norm and femaleness the aberration. That is the real issue.

Or try to imagine a female version of Singer's Enemies: A Love Story in which we come to empathize with a male protagonist who has three female partners. A woman character so involved would be considered beyond the pale. I don't think that even a male nom de plume could save a female author who attempted such transgressions.

But it's possible that a male nom de plume might liberate one to tell these tales.  Perhaps I should try it as an experiment!

Eric Jong might be able to write marvelously well about the interior of women's lives. But because they are women's lives, would they be considered less canon-worthy?


From: Elaine Showalter
To: Erica Jong
Date: Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Do you think women are more silenced or intimidated by hostile criticism than men? And. Has feminist criticism affected your reputation? For good or bad? I'm trying to imagine a novel by Eric Jong and wondering how it would be different to write or read.
Or would a female pseudonym give you more freedom?

Best, Elaine

From: Erica Jong
To: Elaine Showalter
Date: Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Hi Elaine--

I cannot count the number of times I have wished for a pseudonym. To be known as a woman writer is often to be exposed to a particularly cruel form of prejudice. One critic went on and on about how I wasn't Joan Didion--which I think I know. He loved Didion for her terseness which is, I think, another way of saying "she writes like a man." Even Doris Lessing was tempted, in the Diary of Jane Sommers, to write under a pseudonym, albeit a female one. She explained it thus: a reputation is a death mask. I wanted to smash the mask.

I often find myself pretending nobody will ever read me--or I cannot write. More and more, I find I fear self-exposure.

And yet I feel that women have a freshness of subject matter as a result of having been silenced for so long. I think of Edith Wharton's autobiography, a strangely sterile book, especially when compared to her unpublished notes on her affair with Morton Fullerton. In some sense I believe that women writers should rejoice in exposing personal things that have never been exposed till now. We have a unique claim to these things. We own the underground life.

But none of this comes without pain. Women writers are in the curious position of having fresh subject matter but subject matter that guarantees criticism.

All Best, Erica


From: Elaine Showalter
To: Erica Jong
Date: Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Dear Erica,

The devil has many advocates even today when it comes to women's writing, but I am in favor of their speaking to the jury of readers.
 
I do not believe that male and female writers have fundamentally different subject matter--which is not to say that each has written from the persepctive of their own gender much of the time. But it is absolutely possible for a man to write brilliantly about domestic life and women characters, and for a woman to write about Tennessee farmers,  teen-age boys coming of age in Texas,  Wyoming cowboys, or adventurous space-men from a completely convincing and moving  male point of view--witness "Charles Egbert Craddock" (Mary Murfree), S.E. Hinton (Susan Eloise Hinton), Annie Proulx, or "James Tiptree, Jr." (Alice Sheldon).
 
American women writers rarely used male pseudonyms, like their English and European contemporaries; even their pseudonyms were proudly feminine. And perhaps that was a problematic precedent. Readers of American literature after 1850 were taught (by critics and scholars) to notice the gender of the writer, and to judge the work accordingly, and have never really gotten over that. In a review of Jury of Her Peers on  Slate, Katha Pollitt suggests that we read men and women through different gender frames, and that the works of many celebrated writers would strike us differently if they were signed "Henrietta James," "Jane Updike," "Janet Frantzen," or "John Carroll Oates." Furthermore, she argues, male authors get the benefit of more doubts whatever kind of subjects they choose  and whatever techniques they use.
 
While women writers in general  do not  being restricted to "feminine" topics, or held to different standards, only a  tiny handful over the past 350 years have forcefully objected to being identified as women writers  in the same way that they are described and identified as "American" or "Jewish" writers. In a few notable cases--Gertrude Stein and Elizabeth Bishop, for example, are often mentioned by reviewers who don't want women writers to be discussed as a group in any way--these writers were exempt from many of the personal pressures faced by other women of their time; they had lost their parents early and did not have to seek parental permission to write; they did not have husbands or children; Stein even had a wife of her own. In other cases, like Cynthia Ozick or Joan Didion, they often wrote themselves about the problems they had faced as women in the literary marketplace. "Woman writer" is a perfectly legitimate historical category, and does not have to imply any prescribed or proscribed content and style.
 
I do think, however,  the time will come when writing will transcend gender (and race and ethnicity), and  I believe that the internet will hasten it. Fine by me!
 
best, Elaine


From: Erica Jong
To: Elaine Showalter
Date: Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Dear Elaine,

Does A JURY OF HER PEERS dispel the notion that women and men have different subject-matter? Both women and men were abolitionists. Both women and men wrote formal poetry when it was in fashion. Could a reader  tell the difference between women's and men's writing if the names of the writers did not betray their gender?

I ask this question because it has always been assumed, to the detriment of women writers, that male and female subject-matter will necessarily be different. Did you see any evidence of this?

I am moved by your assertion that women writers have never really been judged by their peers. And I agree that a peer is one who "is willing to understand the codes and contexts of literary writing." Do you think we are close to finding such peers?

Many women writers have bristled at the notion of being categorized as women-writers. I'm sure you understand why. Can we ever divorce writing from gender and would it be desirable to do so?

Of course you understand that I am playing devil's advocate by asking these questions!

Erica


From: Elaine Showalter
To: Erica Jong
Date: Monday, March 16, 2009

Hi Erica--
 
Let me start with your second question, about organization and selection. I knew that I wanted the book to be one volume, a manageable read, and that I would have to choose significant writers and place them in a meaningful American historical context. I start with chapters on the 17th century (1650-1700), and the 18th century. But from 1820 on, I proceed decade by decade, and for the very rich period of the 1850s,  I have two chapters.
 
I did not begin with a complete list of writers, although I had some names of important poets, novelists, and playwrights to consider. Instead I started with Anne Bradstreet, and used a variety of sources--histories, biographies, anthologies, essays and articles--to follow up on early American women's writing, and to read as much of it as I could. I spent five years doing the formal research and writing of the book, in additon to the 30-plus years I had spent teaching and writing and American women's literature at Princeton and other universities. I pursued a similar pattern for each decade; as you can imagine, the reading lists became enormous as I came up to the present.
 
My principles of selection evolved as I went on, although  I had some guidelines to begin with. First, I would look at fiction, poetry, and drama, published or written for publication, rather than diaries, letters, and other private genres, because I wanted to focus on American women's interaction with the literary marketplace. I would include important best-sellers, important books for children, and genres of popular fiction like the detective novel and science fiction, as well as avant-garde and "serious" fiction. Organizing the material by decades gave me the chance to see what themes and approaches characterized American women's writing across the board in each historical period.
 
I tried to balance a historical viewpoint--i.e. what kinds of literary developments during this period of women's writing were important for the American  tradition overall? --with critical and aesthetic judgments--i.e., which books or poems or plays  by which women writers show intellectual power, imaginative vitality, originality, emotional resonance, technical innovation, social insight? I've defended my choices one by one in the book. Obviously, readers will disagree with some of my selections or critical  judgments. But I believe that  lively argument and debate, rather than reverence, is what keeps literature alive. And women's writing does not need to be handled with kid gloves or given special treatment; it is strong enough to withstand tough criticism.
 
Your other question is much more open-ended. I too am often discouraged by the uninformed, biased, and repetitive reception of women's writing in the mass media. Academic research on individual women writers has not had the impact on the larger narratives of American literature that feminists hoped it would. I wrote this book to provide an overview that would help general readers as well as academics recognize women's  contributions over 350 years. I'm optimistic that knowledge of  women writers' place in the American  literary territory will help individuals break out of that ghetto.


From: Erica Jong
To: Elaine Showalter
Date: Monday, March 16, 2009

Dear Elaine,

Since I started publishing fiction, I have been unpleasantly aware that however diverse women's writing may be, however industrious we are, we cannot seem to escape from a ghetto designed for women writers. Readers may be women, but judges of literature are either male or male identified women. I do not think we are judged by our peers. Rather, I think we are judged by our gender. And our gender prejudices everything.

Will we ever break free of this and be seen merely as writers?

I was also surprised to discover that this book is the first survey of women's writing from the 17th century to the present. It must have been difficult to find organizing principles for this vast a selection of work. What were they? How did you decide what to include and what exclude?

Erica Jong