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| WOMEN NOVELISTS | |
 May 6, 1999 
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ROGER ROSENBLATT: The occasion of Mother's Day presents an excuse for celebrating women who may or may not be mothers in the strict definition, but who are mothers of invention, women writers, mothers of us all, who are doing most of the best writing in America these days. Time was when women writers, serious writers, were hard to find. In the beginning, they survived as local curiosities. Emily Dickinson hid out in Western Massachusetts. Sarah Orne Jewett stayed close to the country of the pointed firs in Maine. Marianne Moore played the Brooklyn card, Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty the song of the South. Edith Wharton, and later Willa Cather, made deservedly wide reputations, and by the 1960's, one could detect a growing line of women writers in American literature, especially with poets such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich. But even then, women seemed to be given a small, decorated chair in a corner of monumental libraries built by monumental men: Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman; who were later joined by TS Eliot and Henry James, and then by Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe. And then the male line of succession began to thin out. There was Bellow, Malamud, Ellison, Lowell, Baldwin, Updike, Snodgrass, and some others, but nothing that promised a new age of kings. As the male royal line wore thin, however, women began taking over the palaces, until now -- with the exceptions of Tim O'Brien, Russell Banks, and a few others -- the most interesting writing in America is done by the ladies. Among writers of fiction, the ruling class consists of Anne Tyler, Joyce Carol Oates, Bobbie Ann Mason, Bharati Mukerjee, Cynthia Ozick, Toni Morrison, Alice McDermott, Jane Smiley, Sue Miller, Rosellen Brown, Amy Tan, Kate Lehrer, Judith Rosner, Alice Adams, Anne Beattie, and on and on. The essay shines in the imaginative hands of Annie Dillard, Gayle Pemberton, Susan Sontag, Molly Haskell and others. The best American poetry is produced by Rita Dove, Rachel Hadas, Jane Shore, Maxine Kumin. So, what has happened, one might ask - how did the mamas take over the papas? Of course, women have taken over a lot of male territory in the past 30 years, but I don't think that's the reason for their literary ascendancy; nor do I think the male talent gene pool has simply dried up. Apart from individual gifts, the reason that American women writers have come to power is their subject matter. They deal in manageable worlds. Men are used to writing about big deals, wars, and whale hunts, all of which have today been assumed by nonfiction. If you want to read about a war, try a TV docudrama, or better yet, try the news itself. Want a hero? Try a Steven Spielberg movie. What used to be the province of male creativity has been taken over by reality; whereas the microcosmic life, the life of the family, dialogue and detail, always the province of women, has now become the life we want to dream about and understand. It may be that we know the big deal stories a bit too well and that we never adequately grasped the life of the village, the street and the kitchen. Maybe American literature, like much of the rest of the country, has joined the Communitarian movement. It is no longer interested in big, creative government. In any case, it was no fluke that the jurors for this year's National Book Award found Alice McDermott's "Charming Billy" more appealing than Tom Wolfe's "A Man in Full." People have had their fill of men in full. The women give us things that we appear to know, yet yearn to imagine: The demi-smile, the word unsaid, the bed. Another recent successful novel by a woman is Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things." Women writers seem to know that these days, the God of small things is the deity who counts. In a life that explodes with scientific breakthroughs, tyrannical breakthroughs, refugees in the rain, hurricanes, floods, big trouble, the small things are the reeds we cling to, to try to learn how to live in the world. American women writers are telling us how to live in the world. I'm Roger Rosenblatt. |
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