Chapter 7 women and fiction

The title of this article can be read in two ways: it can refer to women and the fiction they write; it can also refer to women and fiction about women.The author is intentionally vague and ambiguous because, in dealing with women as writers, it is best to be as flexible as possible; Because, the work is affected to a considerable extent by environmental conditions that have nothing to do with art. The most superficial survey of women's writing immediately raises a cascade of questions.We're about to ask: why didn't women write consistently before the eighteenth century?Why, in the eighteenth century, were they almost as accustomed to writing as men, and in the process of writing, produced one succession of the classics of English fiction?Why did their art then—and, to some extent, still do today—take the form of fiction?

After a little reflection, we can see that the questions we ask can only be answered by more fictions.This answer is currently locked in ancient diaries, stuffed in ancient drawers, half forgotten in the memory of the elderly.The answer is to be found in the lives of the lowly and unknown--in the almost unlit corridors of history, where, dimly and flickeringly, generations can be seen. images of contemporary women.Because, very little is known about the situation of women.British history is the history of men, not women.We have always known some facts, some characteristics, about our parents.They were soldiers or sailors; they used this office or made that law.But what about our mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers?Nothing but a certain tradition.One of them was beautiful; one had red hair; one was kissed by the queen.Apart from their names, dates of marriage and number of children, we know nothing.

So if we want to know why women at certain times do this or that, why they sometimes write nothing, why they sometimes write immortal masterpieces, it is extremely difficult to answer.Anyone who rummages through old papers, who turns history upside down to form a portrait of the everyday life of an ordinary woman in the age of Shakespeare, Milton, and Johnson, will not only write an astonishingly entertaining book, but will give critics a weapon they currently lack.Extraordinary women depend on ordinary women.Only when we know the average living condition of the average woman—how many children she has, whether she has money of her own, a room of her own, whether she helps support the family, whether she employs a servant, whether she does some of the housework—only if we can We can tell whether the extraordinary woman, as a writer, succeeds or fails when she assesses the possible ways of life and life experiences that ordinary women may have had.

Strange, silent blank periods seem to separate active periods in history.In 600 BC, Sappho and a small group of women were writing poetry on a Greek island.Then they fell silent.Around 1000 A.D., there was a court lady, Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote a beautiful novel in Japan.But in sixteenth-century England, when dramatists and poets were alive, women were silent.Elizabethan literature was the literature of masculinity.Then, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we find women writing again—in England this time—with great prosperity and success. These silences alternated strangely with speeches, and were, of course, largely due to law and custom.In the fifteenth century, when a woman disobeyed her parents and refused to marry the spouse they had chosen for her, she was likely to be beaten and dragged around the room, the spiritual atmosphere, It is not conducive to the creation of works of art.During the Stuarts, a woman was married without her own consent to a man who was thereafter her husband and lord "at least as far as law and custom permitted" and probably had little time for her to come. to write, and she received even less encouragement.We are now living in the century of psychoanalysis, beginning to understand the enormous influence of the environment and its implications for the mind.And, with the help of memory and words, we begin to understand: what extraordinary effort is required to create a work of art, and what kind of protection and support the artist's mind requires.The lives and literature of such male writers as Keats, Carlyle, and Flaubert testify to us of these facts.

It is clear, therefore, that the forerunner of the extraordinary mass of novels which sprung up in nineteenth-century England must have been a myriad of slight changes in law, custom, and custom.Nineteenth-century women had a little leisure; they got a little education.It is no longer a rare exception for middle- and upper-class women to choose their own husbands.None of the four major women writers—Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot—had any children, and two of them did not. Marriage is a fact of great significance. However, although the ban on women's writing has been lifted, there still seems to be considerable pressure on women to write fiction.In genius and character, these four women could never have been more dissimilar.Jane Austen has nothing in common with George Eliot; George Eliot is the exact opposite of Emily Brontë.Yet their life training led them to the same profession; when they wrote, they both wrote novels.

Fiction was, and still is, the easiest thing for women to write.The reason is not hard to find.Fiction is the least focused art form.A novel is more likely to come and go than a play or a poem.George Eliot left her job to nurse her father.Charlotte Bronte put down her pen and went to peel potatoes.Although she lives in an ordinary living room, surrounded by people, a woman is trained to use her mind to observe and analyze her characters.Her training made her a novelist, not a poet. Even in the nineteenth century a woman lived almost exclusively within her family and her affections.And those nineteenth-century novels, brilliant as they are, were profoundly affected by the fact that the women who wrote them were excluded from certain kinds of human experience because of their sex.It is an indisputable fact that life experience has a great influence on the novel.For example, if Conrad could not become a sailor, some of his best novels would be ruined.If Tolstoy is deprived of the knowledge about war that he gained as a soldier, and the various experiences that his education as a rich man gave him, as well as the knowledge about life and society he gained from it, would become unbelievably sterile.

However, ,, "Veretti" and "Middlemarch" were written by women.They were forcibly deprived of all experience beyond what could be encountered in a middle-class living room.For them, any first-hand experience of war, navigation, politics, or business was out of reach.Even their emotional life is strictly restricted by laws and customs.There was an outrage in public opinion when George Eliot risked the world's disgrace to live with Mr. Lewis without marrying.Under this pressure, George Eliot retreated to the suburbs and lived in isolation, which inevitably had the most adverse effects on her writing.She wrote: Unless people voluntarily ask to come and visit her, she never invites them.Meanwhile, on the other side of Europe, Tolstoy, as a soldier, lived a life of freedom, associating with men and women of all classes, which no one criticized, and from which his novels gained astonishing breadth and vigor.

But fiction written by women is not only influenced by the necessarily narrow lived experience of women writers.At least in the nineteenth century, they display another characteristic that may be attributed to the gender of the writer.In Middlemarch and , we are not only aware of the author's character, as we are aware of his character in Dickens, but we are also aware of the presence of a woman - someone condemning the consequences of her gender. injustice and advocated for her rights.This injects into women's writing an element that is totally absent from men's.Unless he happens to actually be a worker, black, or for some other reason aware of his own inadequacy.It induces a distortion of reality and often leads to some kind of defect.The appeal for personal reasons, or the desire to make a character the mouthpiece of some personal grievance or complaint, always has a disastrous effect: the focus of the reader's attention, it seems, Suddenly changed from single to double.

Jane Austen and Emily Bronte had the courage to ignore such pleas and appeals, not to be disturbed by censure or condemnation, and to stick to their old ways.There could never be a more convincing proof of their genius than this.However, it takes a very calm or strong mind to resist the temptation to vent anger.The kind of ridicule, censure, and belittling that are indiscriminately inflicted on women engaged in the arts evokes such a reaction quite naturally.One sees this influence in the resentment of Charlotte Bronte and the reticence of George Eliot.One finds it again and again in the writings of lesser women writers—their choice of subject, their unnatural obstinacy, their awkward submissiveness, all reflect this sentiment.Not only that, but a sense of insincerity permeates the work almost unconsciously.They take a point of view that differs from that of authority.That kind of artistic imagination is either too masculine or too feminine; it loses its perfect integrity, and at the same time, it loses the most basic elements of being a work of art.

In women's writing a great change has quietly taken place; it seems to be a change of attitude.Women writers no longer suffer.She is no longer angry.When she writes, she stops calling and protesting.We are approaching, if we have not already reached, the time when women's writing will be disturbed with little—or hardly ever—from outside influences.She will be able to focus on her artistic imagination without being distracted by outside factors.This detachment, which used to be possible only for writers of genius and originality, is only now attained by women in general.Therefore, an average novel written by a woman writer today is far more sincere and interesting than a novel written by a woman a hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago.

However, it remains true that a woman faces many difficulties before she can write exactly as she wishes.First, there were the technical difficulties—so simple on the outside; so confusing in practice—that even the form of the sentence didn't suit her.It's a male-created formula; it's too loose, too clumsy, too exaggerated for a woman to use.But in a novel, which occupies such a wide area, it is necessary to find a common, habitual type of sentence pattern which will carry the reader from one point of a book to the other with ease and ease.And this is the work a woman has to do for herself: to vary and adapt the current fashions of sentences until she writes one that holds her thought in its natural form without crushing or distorting it. sentence. But, after all, that is only a means to an end, and that end can only be reached if a woman has the courage to overcome opposition and is determined to be true to herself.For, after all, a novel describes hundreds of different objects—human, natural, divine; it is an attempt to relate them to each other.In every novel worthwhile, these various elements are put into place by the writer's artistic imagination and given their proper place.But they have another order, which empirical custom imposes upon them.Because men are the masters of that traditional habit, because they have established a set of values ​​​​in their lives, and since most novels are based on real life, these values ​​occupy a large part of the novel. Advantage. It is quite possible, however, that women's values ​​differ from men's, both in life and in art.When a woman sets out to write a novel, she finds that she is always wishing to change established values—to give seriousness to what seems dismissive to a man, to give seriousness to what he considers important. Things seem insignificant.For this, of course, she will be criticized; for the male critic is naturally genuinely puzzled and surprised when he sees an attempt to change the existing hierarchy of values ​​in which he not only sees A different point of view, and sees a weak, petty, or sentimental point of view because it is so different from his own. Now, however, women are beginning to be more independent in their views as well.They come to respect their own values.Therefore, the themes of their novels began to show some changes.The subjects themselves seemed less interesting; on the other hand, they were more interested in other women.In the early nineteenth century, most fiction written by women was autobiographical.One of the motives that led them to write novels was a desire to expose their own suffering and defend their own cause.Now that this desire is less urgent, women have begun to explore their own sex, to describe women in a way that had never been done before; for, of course, the image of women in literature, until recently, was created by men. Here again there are difficulties to be overcome, for, if you may generalize, women are not only less open to observation than men, but their lives are much less tempered and tested by the ordinary routines of life.Women's lives in a day often leave them with nothing of substance.The food they cooked has been eaten; the children they have reared have escaped into the outside world.Where is the point?What is the salient point that the novelist must grasp?It's hard to say.A woman's life has an intriguing character, it is extremely elusive and confusing.For the first time ever, this dark realm was explored in fiction; at the same time, women writers had to document the changes in women's thinking and habits that resulted from the opening of careers to women.She had to see how their lives had come out of the underground; now that they were exposed to the outside world, she had to discover what new colors and shades showed in them. Well, if you try to characterize women's fiction at the moment, you'll say: it's bold; it's sincere; it's true to women's sensibility.It's not painful.It doesn't insist on its femininity.At the same time, however, a woman's book is never written in the same way as a man's.These qualities are much more common in women's fiction than they were in the past, and they endow even second- and third-rate works with real value and genuine interest. In addition to these excellent qualities, however, there are two other qualities that deserve a little discussion.The transformation of the Englishwoman from a wavering, ambiguous and elusive influence to a voter, a wage earner, and a responsible citizen turned her, in her life and in her art, towards the personalize.Her various relationships with the outside world are now not only emotional, but also intellectual and political.The old social system that condemned her to squint and see things indirectly, through the eyes or interests of her husband or brother, has given way to the direct, practical interest of the individual who must act for herself , not just to influence the actions of others.As a result, her attention shifted from the formerly domestic and personal center to an impersonal direction, and her novels naturally became more socially critical and less personal life analytical. We might expect that the gadfly-hungry and sharp criticism of national affairs, hitherto the prerogative of men, will now be granted to women.Their novels will expose the evils of society and propose remedies.The male and female characters in their novels will not be seen as individuals who are exclusively emotionally related to each other, but as cohesive and conflicting people grouped into races, classes, and groups.This is a change of some importance.There is, however, another, more interesting change for people who would rather have butterflies than gadflies—in other words, artists rather than social reformers.A greater impersonalization of women's lives would encourage the development of poetic qualities, of which women's fiction is still the weakest.This causes them to be less absorbed in the facts, and no longer content to register with astonishing acuity the details that unfold before their eyes.They will look beyond personal and political relationships to see broader questions that poets are trying to address—questions about our destiny and the meaning of life. That poetic attitude, of course, is mostly based on material foundations.It depends on leisure time and a little money, and the opportunity that money and leisure give us to observe the world impersonally and dispassionately.Given money and leisure, it was natural for women to devote themselves to literature more than ever.They will use that instrument of writing more fully and more skillfully.Their skills will be bolder and richer. The virtue of women's novels in the old days often lay in their natural spontaneity, like the song of a thrush.It's not hand-trained; it's purely from the heart.Yet it also tends to chatter like a bird's chirp--mere gossip spilled on paper, left with smears of ink waiting to dry.In the future, with time and books and her personal corner of the house, literature will be an art to be studied for women as for men.The genius of women will be trained and strengthened.Fiction is no longer a dump of personal emotions.It will be more of a work of art than it is now, like any other kind of art, and its various artistic means and limitations will be explored. From here, it is only a small step into the cutting edge of the arts hitherto few women have ventured into—writing essays and criticism, history and biography.This is also advantageous if we consider it for the sake of the novel; for, besides improving the quality of the novel itself, it will weed out those absent-minded dissidents to dabble in other literary styles, who have learned to read novels simply because they are easy to read. attracted by it.The novel thus excises those excesses of history and fact which, in our time, have bloated the novel. Hence, if we are allowed to prophesy, in the ages to come women will write fewer and better novels; and not only novels, but poetry, criticism, and history as well.But to get there, we have no doubt to look forward to that perhaps mythical golden age, when women will have what they have been deprived of for so long—leisure, money, and a room. her own room.