Read Laura Miller’s review essay on Elaine Showalter’s new book, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, and then read the letters.

The comments are almost all terrifying examples of why contemporary American men and women are, in their culturally-produced differences, so fucking stupid. But the scariest thing is the way in which the stupidity of the men reproduces the patriarchal consensus in business and science while the stupidity of the women reproduces the institutionalized feminism of the English and history departments. In short, though I as a rule try to avoid striking the elitist note of besieged intelligence, we are ruled by, if not the foolish, then certainly the complacent.

The patriarchal complaint I have dealt with elsewhere on this blog and its shortcomings are too obvious to merit commentary: women are narrow, unambitious and stupid, Darwin and/or God said so, only men can be geniuses, etc. Boring.

The feminist complaint is more interesting because more widespread in literary circles. This says that women’s writing is neglected because women’s concerns (childrearing, domesticity, being a victim of something, etc.) are neglected. And not only this, but also that aspects of literary art such as experimentalism in structure and language, metaphysical speculation and a concern for ideas rather than plot have been concocted by some male conspiracy against women’s natural desire to read domestic romances in plain prose.

I’ve stated the case rather hyperbolically, but I do intend to reveal the egregious sexism of this “feminist” position. Indeed, how can we even distinguish it from a patriarchal argument? Duh, chicks like love stories and big ideas hurt their little brains. That’s what I hear when self-appointed academic feminists say that “women’s concerns and interests” are neglected by literary culture.

Their solution to this problem over the course of the last thirty years has been to construct the spurious category of “women’s literature” (“a literature of their own,” in the Woolf-hating Showalter’s earlier formulation), a category that mixes female geniuses like Emily Dickinson (the greatest U.S. poet of the nineteenth century) and George Eliot (the greatest British novelist of the nineteenth century) with a pack of boring hacks (Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, etc.) In my darker moments, I perceive two consequences of this logic in the future: 1.) a men’s rights movement will emerge and demand on comparable terms the canonical reinstatement of bores like Longfellow and Whittier; 2.) we will eventually be congratulating ourselves on the recovery of that great neglected twentieth-century female voice, Ayn Rand.

Here’s the thing: the kind of women who are ambitious to become great writers don’t tend to share a conservative conception of “women’s interests” (dinner, diapers, the holy home) because these things are prisons to which patriarchy unjustly consigned all women by robbing them of any choice in the matter. The freedom to experiment in art, politics, philosophy, should be for everyone; not everyone can be great, but no one should be excluded from the effort. There is no “women’s literature” because Emily Dickinson and George Eliot and Colette and H.D. and Hannah Arendt and Flannery O’Connor and Elizabeth Bishop and Zora Neale Hurston and Nadine Gordimer and Susan Sontag do not want to sit at the ladies’ table or come to a tea party. And if feminism is not about that, then what is it good for?

Two quotes to finish, first from Sontag herself:

If Rich (hardly as ferociously as some of our sisters) is going to start baiting that heavy bear, the intellect, then I feel obliged to announce that anyone with a taste for “intellectual exercise” will always find in me an ardent defender. Truth has need of all kinds of exertion. Although I defy anyone to read what I wrote and miss its personal, even autobiographical character, I much prefer that the text be judged as an argument and not as an “expression” of anything at all, my sincere feelings included.

Adrienne Rich, whom I have always admired as poet and phenomenologist of anger, is a piker compared to some self-styled radical feminists, all too eager to dump the life of reason (along with the idea of authority) into the dustbin of “patriarchal history.” Still, her well-intentioned letter does illustrate a persistent indiscretion of feminist rhetoric: anti-intellectualism. “One imagined Sontag not to dissociate herself from feminism,” Rich observes. Right. But I do dissociate myself from that wing of feminism that promotes the rancid and dangerous antithesis between mind (“intellectual exercise”) and emotion (“felt reality”). For precisely this kind of banal disparagement of the normative virtues of the intellect (its acknowledgement of the inevitable plurality of moral claims; the rights it accords, alongside passion, to tentativeness and detachment) is also one of the roots of fascism—what I was trying to expose in my argument about Riefenstahl.

And the second from Marilynne Robinson’s interview in The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers:

There were very great women in the nineteenth century, and I’m afraid it would be hard to come up with their equivalent in this enlightened time, which is a frightening thought. But they were women who were well and optimistically educated with the assumption that they certainly could be great. Which I think is not really by any means characteristic now. Instead I think that women are being very largely educated, frankly, to plead a case against the world at large, as if what they have to do is be fascinated by what has happened that ought to disturb or anger them, rather than by the possibility of doing something else. They’re not making the space that other women I think in another two generations will want to occupy. [...] I think that things are being ascribed to gender that are not gender determined, and it’s tending toward limiting distinctions in the same way that people were doing in 1810.