From The Sunday Times May 24, 2009
A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter
The Sunday Times review by Stephen Amidon: Authors prone to self-pity should spare a thought for Phillis Wheatley. As a teenage slave in colonial Boston, the African-born girl showed such prodigious poetic talent that a special tribunal was called to determine if her writing was authentic. After a gruelling cross-examination by a jury composed of “18 prominent Massachusetts public figures”, it was determined that she was indeed author of her own work. After that sort of scrutiny, a bad review would have seemed like a walk in the park. That bizarre public trial sets the tone for Elaine Showalter’s superb survey of American women writers. According to Showalter, the author of a definitive book about British female writers, American women have al-ways been judg-ed by a harsher set of standards than men. In the years leading up to the civil war, female authors were expected to be ladies first, artists second. As the satirist Caroline Kirkland claimed in 1843, “A lady always feels under a certain degree of restraint when she feels that the world is looking her in the face all the time — many a thought ‘funny, free, and flashy’ is checked through a feeling of diffidence.” Nathaniel Hawthorne himself asserted that “ink-stained women are, without a single exception, detestable”. Transgressors of this code could be punished severely, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who after a bout of depression in 1887 was subjected by a doctor to a “rest cure” in which she was ordered to “live as domestic a life as possible” and “have your child with you all the time”, and “never to touch pen, brush, or pencil as long as you live”. Authorial insecurity was reinforced by comparisons with British cousins such as Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, who benefited from working in a nation that did not so greatly favour “outdoor” male virtues. In fact, so great was Eliot’s sway over American female writers that several saw her death “as the exorcism of an oppressive ghost”. Related Internet Links * Buy the book here Of course, many were able to break free of these chains, notably Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was arguably the most important American novel of the 19th century. But it wasn’t until the early 20th century that authors such as Willa Cather and Edith Wharton could refuse “to be defined as women at all”. Showalter brilliantly demonstrates how the remainder of the century saw a steady liberation of the American female literary voice, from the suffrage movement through leftist politics and several waves of feminism, culminating in the great unzipping of the 1960s and 1970s that allowed Erica Jong to produce Fear of Flying. We have now entered an era where women no longer, in the words of Ursula Le Guin, “have to write like an honorary man”. As Annie Proulx asserts, female authors “can write about anything they want, any sex they want, any place they want”. Although the central virtue of A Jury of Her Peers is its vast scope, it also provides compelling glimpses into the lives of nearly forgotten artists, such as Anzia Yezierska, the “Sweatshop Cinderella”, and Shirley Jackson, whose macabre novels are now experiencing a renaissance. (The book’s only notable omission is Ayn Rand — one wishes that Showalter, who can be wonderfully acerbic, had held her nose and dealt with this wildly popular right-wing icon.) None of the book’s authors proves more compelling, though, than Gilman, who escaped her crippling “cure” to write a great short story about the experience, The Yellow Wallpaper. You might be able to send a good woman to bed, but you can’t keep her down.
Virago £22.50 pp400
