Women’s Writing: Some Issues, Old and New

Christine de Pizan, one of the first chroniclers of women’s writing

Throughout history, women have written. But it has only been at the far end of the twentieth century, the tiniest sliver of a second on the great clock of time, that their writing has been seen to be in any way equivalent to that of men. Oh for sure, there was the occasional ‘miraculeuse’ as the social theorist Pierre Bourdieu termed women like George Sand and Simone de Beauvoir, women who made it through the ranks in a way that looked as if it might be possible for anyone to do so. When of course it wasn’t, and they were startling anomalies. And in the present day, the category of women’s writing, with its subdivisions of chick-lit and mommy-lit and light romance and historical romance, is often considered more frivolous and lightweight than the thriller or science fiction novel. All of which is to say that the literary world has never really been a place that welcomed women in, and it does so with reservations even now.

And yet stories have had a great deal more power over women’s lives than over men’s. As soon as we begin to look into the past, it’s obvious how constrained women have been by the story of the ‘good’ woman, who she is, how she behaves, what she may expect. The stories available to women as guidelines for living have traditionally been few and uncompromising: women were supposed to be quiet, well-behaved, charming, gentle, tender. They were destined to be faithful wives and devoted mothers. The romance was their only socially permitted adventure, and so they had to make the most of it (one of George Sand’s heroines delays her engagement for 8 years, about 250 pages of incident-filled narrative, before succumbing to marriage and motherhood in the final chapter, which Sand recognised would be the end of her freedom and interest to the reader). Those who deviated from these rules were severely punished by ostracism from the community, confinement in mental hospitals, excommunication from the church, public disgrace, scandal and death. All this because of stories handed down from generation to generation! So much constraint, so much restriction, because of this dreadful paucity of narrative possibility.

But still, women wrote. They wrote because writing was compatible with confinement in domesticity. What they wrote, however, was inevitably marked by the differences imposed upon them. They wrote out of a completely different relationship to power than men enjoyed. They wrote out of exclusion from the places in society where decisions were taken. They wrote out of a narrower view of the world and the things people could do in it. And where exceptions arose and amazing women found ways to travel and organise and become pioneers in a field, they deserve our awe and admiration while taking nothing away from the others who did not find those precious loopholes. They were not easy to come by. Today, in many countries across the world, the situation for women is still one of restriction, too often accompanied by suffering and fear. The obstacles may vary, but consistently, across time and space, women have found their conditions of life, the options open to them, to be different to those enjoyed by men. It’s an ongoing reality, and one brought home to us most vividly and powerfully by the stories women get to tell. We need every story, and each one asks us to listen, not to judge.

The consciousness raising campaign of the 60s and 70s

These past few weeks, reading for a whole month of blogging about women’s writing has been quite fascinating. I’ve been almost shocked by the differences between the feminist writing that came out of the 70s and 80s and the genre fiction of today. Whilst the feminists fought for the right to be free of domestic chores, to be less confined by marriage, to have the choice of meaningful work, to bring up children in less constricted environments, the genre fiction of today paints a world in which women have rushed back to the realm of the Stepford wife. A successful marriage, a pretty house, lots of nice material things, these are the hard-won goals. And motherhood remains the country that feminism forgot; it demands the absolute sacrifice of women’s personal needs, desires and activities. I’m not saying this is necessarily wrong or lacking in value – but what does the radical swing in social aspirations mean?

What has remained consistent throughout the recent period of literary history when women have been much more free to write whatever they chose, and to have lives lived according to their own principles, is the difficulty women have with accepting that other women may behave differently. In almost all the fiction and non-fiction I’ve been reading, the conflicts arise because women find it hard to live and let live. The choices and behaviours of others, if they run counter to their own, are too often understood to be offensive, wrong, threatening. This difficulty is very obvious in the reception of women’s writing, too. How often are female characters damned for not being ‘sympathetic’? For not behaving, in other words, the way that the woman reader wants them to? Still there remains the tendency to prescribe female behaviour – and it’s most noticeably done by other women. If the great historical battle of feminism was the right to be something other than a gentle nursemaid and competent housekeeper, why on earth should we spend so much time and energy squabbling over a new definition of how women should be? And worst of all, why should the mirage of ‘strength’ be the quality that dominates these prescriptions? ‘Strength’ if we mean constant energetic, fearless engagement in life, is an unlivable idea. Real strength, achievable and sustainable strength, is about flexibility, gentle discipline, understanding, compassion, and the acceptance of weakness.

But surely this goes a long way to explaining how come women survived – were complicit with – those endless centuries of history in which only a few stories were available for women’s lives. If there were one great overriding narrative, one way to be, women could measure themselves against it and feel secure, even superior to other women who did not match up so well. But that is to understand the meanness of women to one another as pure aggression, and I don’t believe that’s so. I think it’s actually about the unplumbed depths of women’s insecurity. When women fail to give each other the benefit of the doubt, it’s because the other’s difference awakens their insecurity. And by some twist of psychology, personal insecurity can easily become something that has to be avenged. If we could somehow alter this kink of mentality, if we could give women, not a vitamin pill, but a confidence pill, the unalloyed permission to be who they were without the constant fear of critical undermining by others, wouldn’t that make the world a better place? Forget the pill, we could do it if we somehow managed to make women better readers of one another. If they stopped looking for similarity and found in difference some interest, curiosity, learning. When women’s writing erupted into a glorious profusion of different, new, unheard voices back in the 70s, the sisterhood welcomed them all. We lost something vital when we believed we’d reached equality and started bickering over what it should look like.

Isn’t now the perfect moment to understand that each woman is her own story? And that the story is there to be listened to attentively for the pleasure of solidarity and curiosity, not judged for the pleasure of finding it wanting, or the fear that it might reflect badly on our own?

Yes, But I Don’t Like Him

I suppose if there was a message to the 20^th century, it was that there is no longer anyone trustworthy at the wheel. Not necessarily in a cosmic sense, but in an ordinary, human one. Politicians have lost almost all credibility, kings and queens are for gossip magazines, leaders of industry only make the news in the wake of some great catastrophe. We’ve lost faith in all kinds of authority. We’ve gone through the era of the hero, and through the era of the anti-hero and we’re out the other side in the land of the lowest common denominator. And that’s a place where Geoff Dyer is quite at home:

I had been drifting for years, and now – like the lone cloud we’d seen at Hadrian’s villa – I had drifted to a standstill. I may not have admitted it at the time – if that afternoon was a turning point, then I responded as one invariably does at such moments, by failing to turn – but at some level I knew I had been kidding myself: that all the intellectual discipline and ambition of my earlier years had been dissipated by half-hearted drug abuse, indolence and disappointment, that I lacked purpose and direction and had even less idea of what I wanted from life now than I had when I was twenty or thirty even, that I was well on the way to becoming a ruin myself, and that that was fine by me.’

As the title may hint – Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It – this is a book of travel writing for the world-weary and the disaffected. It’s about going to the four corners of the world and finding not a great deal to do in any of them. He has a horrible time in sullen, tourist-unfriendly Libya, visiting ancient monuments that fail to move him; gets marooned at midday in three foot of water in a vast lake in sweltering Cambodia, where raw sewage floats past; can’t put a new pair of trousers on in rain-soaked Amsterdam because he’s too out of it on magic mushrooms, and when incipient depression accompanies him to Detroit, he decides to take a tour around the desolate and abandoned areas of the city. Well it sounds like a rotten job, but I guess someone has to do it. The only really upbeat chapter is the one that bears the title, in which he falls in love with a lively American woman at a sanctuary in Thailand (his attraction is drawn by the way she copes so bravely with being stung by a fleet of jellyfish). It was, in consequence, the essay I liked best.

If all this sounds like travel writing to slit your wrists to, there is redemption in the form of a Beckettian dry, deadpan humour. Geoff Dyer really knows how to tap into the sheer cussedness of the human spirit, its refusal to cooperate with the imperative to enjoy oneself and our basic ability to allow potentially magical experiences to be ruined by small but insistent gripes. There is a fine honesty at the core of the book, in the recognition that an awful lot of travel does involve doing things or being in places that are dirty, dull or just not quite right at the time. And most admirable of all, there is a great deal of exquisite writing. Credit where it’s due, this really is a wonderfully written book, the voice flawless in its amusingly melancholic disdain, the descriptions original and highly perceptive. I really felt as if I was with Geoff Dyer in his far-flung locations, even if they weren’t places that either of us truly wanted to be.

I admired this book greatly, but could not bring myself to like it, because I could not bring myself to like Geoff Dyer. He made me think of the boys who’d sit at the back in the graduate seminars: dissimulating protective boredom, mocking and contemptuous and too clever for their own good. To be fair to Dyer, there are times, towards the end of the book, when he allows a little real emotion to soak through, and I liked him the better for it. But sometimes I just wanted to give him a boot up the backside and tell him to get over himself; there is no way an author of as many books – and award-winning ones at that – could ever be so hopeless, so lazy or so unfulfilled.

I’ve often complained before that readers are too bothered about liking characters in books, and I hold to this when it comes to fiction. Every character in a fictional universe has been created for a purpose. To get the most out of that universe, it’s best to accept that unsympathetic characters may just need to be that way for the story to unfold as it does. When it comes to personality-led non-fiction, though, I find the contact between reader and narrator to be too tight, too intimate, too real, to gain any sort of useful emotional distance. Geoff Dyer’s voice appeals to the piggy side of human nature, and he invites the reader to be okay with consistently low-level failure, out of our own idiocies and weaknesses. I am not okay with this. I am, for instance, completely out of patience with people who do drugs. I do not look upon it indulgently as the sort of thing anyone could fall into. If Geoff Dyer had the misfortune to read any non-fiction by me, he would find me a prissy, uptight, overachieving school ma’am type. Which I am. I disapproved of him and his silly magic mushrooms. But I suppose I suspected that his persona was at least partially false. For all that humans are destined to fail and mess up, we are equally hardwired to try and to aspire. Geoff Dyer obviously likes the waster persona he wears in his narratives, but I think I know his secret. I would put good money on there being a part of him that’s pure good boy, diligent, assiduous and hard-working. He would just consider it too uncool to be on view.

The Loveliest Month

It strikes me as a bit cheap on the part of the weather gods that we are only allowed one May in a calendar year. I love it so; the crisp new leaves bursting out of their buds, long, pink-tinged evenings, soft, mild light at dawn and dusk with vibrant blue skies in the bright stretch of the day. Just the right amount of heat. Yesterday was the first day that Mr Litlove and I could enjoy sitting outside in the garden. And so we did our yearly inventory, reclining on garden chairs with cups of tea, making our way around the borders plant by plant as if they were schoolchildren in class, deciding how each was coming along, whether they needed help and in what form.

the gorgeous Manteau d’Hermine

My main worry was a philadelphus, a gorgeous version called Manteau d’Hermine, which had been squeezed on either side by some rather boisterous ferns (and this is the only definition of ‘leaning in’ that I will countenance). So I had my eye on that, and on Mr Litlove generally, who sheds his gentle, mild-mannered nature to turn rogue with a pair of clippers in his hand. Anything that looks as if it might commit the crime of ‘getting beyond itself’ risks a severe scalping despite all my pleading. And for the first time in my life, I thought to myself, my goodness how incredibly middle-aged we have become. Normally, on the inside, I feel about 17, but there I was, regarding plants I had seen grow from seedlings into this mature garden, and it seemed so long since it had been just a vision in our minds.

When we first moved into the house the garden was a long, thin, isosceles triangle whose only beauty was a large cherry tree, all too near to the back windows. One dank and chilly autumn day, Mr Litlove hired a rotavator and dug all the scrubby, weedy grass up, shoulders straining against the handles, wellies sinking in the mud. Early in the afternoon there was a power cut, and when he went into the kitchen, now shrouded in darkness, the kitchen clock still read half past two. Mr Litlove then congratulated himself on having finished the job with so much of the afternoon still ahead of him, and I felt quite confirmed in my belief that he was an undiagnosed dyslexic. It’s funny to think we hadn’t been married that long then, three or four years at that point. We bought a climbing rose, the luscious Mme Alfred Carrière with clotted cream blooms that blushed charmingly pink as they burst their buds. And in the supermarket, my son – then an angel-faced toddler with white-blonde hair and dark blue eyes – picked out a red rose he liked the look of. I didn’t hold out much hope for it, but both plants grew and flourished on the sunny south-facing wall.

Mme Alfred Carriere in all her glory

Then we decided to have an extension on the house, and a garage and workshop at the far end of the plot. The garden shrank to a lop-sided square and the plants suffered. The cement mixer took up residence in the middle of a flowerbed, and bushes started to die mysteriously, until I put two and two together and stopped providing the builders with so much tea. We had to move the red rose and feared it had died, but the white fought gallantly against the chaos and flowered vigorously, scattering velvet petals over the garish headlines of The Sun that the workmen read in their breaks. Mr Litlove had his first stretch of unemployment, the difficult one, where we assured each other we would manage fine, while mentally totting up columns of figures in the restless small hours of the morning. We weren’t particularly fine at all, for I was beyond tired and working hard, both of us too aware that mine was the only incoming salary. And we didn’t like each other much, having swallowed all sorts of things we should have said in those anxious, frantic years of early parenting and new careers. Things were coming to a head, though we didn’t know it then. Instead, Mr Litlove used his time to lay a patio, and to pave the area outside the kitchen, and to construct a beautiful winding path in a herringbone pattern of grey brick.

Several years later, when Mr Litlove was made redundant for the second time, our lives had completely turned around. The crisis had passed and now I was off work too, the first of three years I would take out with chronic fatigue. I can remember the feel of the grey brick path beneath my bare feet as I ventured outside after months laid up indoors, still weak and unwell but silently comforted by the beauty of the flowers, the orange blossoms of the philadelphus, the dancing buds of the fuchsia, the bough of the white rose, heavy with unfurling flowers, that was big enough now to reach out to me from its spot on the back wall. And the red rose we feared lost was starting to grow again, its tentative feelers offering hope. This time around Mr Litlove painted the house. To the extent that I believe in past lives, I feel convinced he must once have been a Lord of the Manor. It would be such a perfect job for him, to have a whole estate to tend to, one that he would survey from the saddle of a fine black stallion, issuing grand orders about the guttering on his tenants’ cottages. He would have married a version of me, one whose nature would have led her, not to teach, but to strap on a bonnet and go visiting the sick and the poor. From whom I daresay Regency-me would have caught diptheria and died. So there is much to be said for the 21^st century and having reached the era of self-indulgent middle age.

Imagine him weatherbeaten and mossy, with a bird on his head, and you’ll have our version

The last change in our garden was the arrival of Hermes – or Mercury, I never know which to call him. He stands on one leg as if he had just bowled a googly, though one arm is raised above his head with a beckoning finger (happily, the first), while his other hand holds a strange implement the size of a very large spatula, which I believe may be the Greco-Roman prophecy of a television ariel. He came from the grand and lovely garden of Mr Litlove’s grandparents, and I vividly recall his arrival in the back of a moving truck. Two men arrived with him, papers in hand. ‘One small garden statue – Mercury,’ one of them read. ‘I’m not sure ‘e made it intact, luv. Ever since Bury we’ve ‘eard somefink rolling around in the back.’ His mate tipped me a wink. ‘Makes you wonder what dropped orf.’ I confess I held my breath as they went to unload him, fearful of the ribaldry he might unleash in the delivery men, and so I was most relieved when the loose item in question turned out to be the television ariel, which has never quite sat right in his hand ever since.

And now here we were, all these years later, with our son grown, and the university behind me, but still together and (for me) in better health than I had been in pretty much all that time. ‘I can remember planning this garden,’ Mr Litlove told me, ‘imagining what it would look like as I sat here, or stood in the kitchen at the sink. And it looks very much as I hoped it would.’ And I thought of our entwined lives that had suffered their own versions of frost and drought, disease and blight, but were still growing strongly together. I would never have imagined the road we would take to get here, but yes, our life looked pretty much like I’d hoped it would. How beautiful, how precious, how terrifying that felt.

A Letter I’ll Never Send

To my lovely son,

So, my darling, it turns out to be harder than we think to find the right words to say, and the right time to say them. So much is happening for you right now and you have no idea how much we long to be able to help you, at this point in your life when all your instincts – quite rightly – are insisting you push us away and find your own strength. But if I could, these are the things I would tell you:

Most of the truly difficult problems in life arise from personality flaws, not mistakes or unfortunate events. Or perhaps it’s better to say they arise from making the same mistakes and creating the same situations over and over again. Fear the world less than the unresolved parts of you.

We have more choices, always, than we like to admit to ourselves (because it takes a lot of courage to admit this).

Poverty, starvation, long term illness, early death, war, these are disasters worthy of the name. The rest may be called setbacks, disappointments and obstacles. Be careful to treat them accordingly.

The real key to a good life is learning to deal with those disappointments, frustrations and losses.

It is very hard to take full responsibility for oneself. Don’t allow taking responsibility for others to look like a substitute. It isn’t. And try very hard not to give your power away to people you love; this is also trickier than it seems.

Your best qualities will turn out to be, also, your worst ones. Tenacity and loyalty are also stubbornness and wilful blindness. This will trip you up.

Experience changes everything. The difference between imagining something and living it is vast, so try not to judge others or pre-judge yourself.

But remember that language stays the same. We have to make an extra effort to convey the before and after effect, which is why, for instance, the platitudes that your father and I spout still seem fresh and urgent to us. We are attaching experience to our worries that is hard to express.

We know you think you know everything. We know you know nothing. But then, we probably know a great deal less than we think we do. Humility all round would be good here.

We have to learn that our cherished memories of you are not yours, and that our hopes and dreams for you will not match those you hold for yourself. This is the final knot to untie in the long process of letting you go – giving you back your independent past, your surprising self, your unguessable desires. We will need to learn who you are all over again. This is a perennial lesson life offers, as you’ll find, this extraordinary realisation that what is inside our heads is not the same as what is outside.

We all need to ask more questions, and listen properly to the answers.

And too often the questions parents ask are simply the base promptings of our fears and insecurities. I do know that any advice I give you based on my own fears is worthless. This is our problem, and you shouldn’t have to deal with it. Believe me, I’m working on it.

I realise how inconsequential and valueless parental love appears, now you stand on the threshold of the world. But that love is completely unconditional and you can always depend on it. I know it is the part of me that will never grow old, never weaken or fail. I don’t want anything from you in return, except perhaps that you not be too proud to ask for that love, if ever you need it. Dad and I will always be here for you.