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 gulf
Of his condoled necessities
She casts her best, she flings herself.
How often flings for nought, and yokes
Her heart to an icicle or whim,
Whose each impatient word provokes
Another, not from her, but him;
While she, too gentle even to force
His 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)
The Angel in the House
These 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.
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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
Gendering Modernism
‘The Men of 1914’
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
• ‘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
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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.