Postfeminism: Playing for Keeps

By J.D. Reed

From novels to humor, women are moving beyond doctrine

At the end of the 1970s, Joyce Carol Gates was hardly alone in wishing for more than a feminist monotone from a number of American women writers. "I anticipate, in my idealism," she wrote in a 1980 contemplation of the future, "novels by women that are not women's novels."

The waiting is over. While some, like Marilyn French (The Women's Room), continue to dissect the feminine psyche and situation, a growing cadre of women has enlarged and honored the literary mainstream. Their books, characterized by less dogmatic treatments of both men and women, and with themes expanded to include family, children and political events, are what New York City Literary Agent Lynn Nesbit calls "postfeminist writings."

That work is attracting a new and concentrated attention. The last time a constellation of equal prominence appeared was in the Great Depression era, when talents as varied as Pulitzer-Prizewinning Novelist Edna Ferber, Poet Marianne Moore and Experimentalist Gertrude Stein were among the decade's most prominent literary celebrities. But they worked in an era less obsessed by the politics of gender. Today, says Simon & Schuster Editor in Chief Michael Korda, "women writers are being noticed more because more attention is being paid to women as a group."

The astonishingly prolific Joyce Carol Gates (35 books of fiction, short stories and poetry in 19 years) leads the way. Perhaps the best-known serious woman novelist in the nation, she made the bestseller list last year with A Bloodsmoor Romance, a lengthy parody of 19th century genteel genre writing. Sample: "Having no capability, and, indeed, no desire, so far as graphic descriptions of 'love embraces' are concerned, I shall make no attempt to sketch for the repelled reader precisely how The Beast (sexual desire) emerged to make a loathsome mockery of the love declarations, kisses, caresses, and other amorous indulgences which transpired between Malvinia and Mr. Twain, in Malvinia's sumptuously appointed bedchamber." Gates, 44, outdistanced feminism long before it was fashionable to do so, taking her themes from headlines. Them (1969) explored the roots of violence by reconstructing the 1967 Detroit race riots. "War, rape, murder and the more colorful minor crimes," she complained then, "evidently fall within the exclusive province of male action." Now a professor at Princeton, after years of teaching in western Ontario, Gates is currently at work on a mystery novel. A book of her essays, The Profane Art, will appear later this year. The author of Wonderland (in which a medical student cannibalizes a cadaver) has not identified with feminine fantasy since childhood. "I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice."

So have a number of her colleagues. In Final Payments, Mary Gordon broke through the hermetic world of the American Irish-Catholic family. Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men) has revealed the Amerasian experience from the inside. Novelist Toni Morrison (Tar Baby and Song of Solomon) marched past the sit-ins to the kitchens and bedrooms where black men and women battle and lose. Another talented black writer, Alice Walker, 38, has won attention with her third novel, The Color Purple. The Sarah Lawrence College-educated daughter of a Georgia sharecropper structures her tale as powerful "letters addressed to God," recorded over a 40-year span by a nearly illiterate heroine. Raped by her father and beaten by her husband, she writes: "It all I can do not to cry. I can make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how come I know trees fear men." Walker, a former New York City welfare department worker, regards storytelling as a means of survival. "I am intrigued by mystery," she says. "Without mystery there is nothing."

Joan Didion, 48 (A Book of Common Prayer, The White Album), shuttles with supersonic ease from novel to reportage. Her next nonfiction, Salvador, is certain to rattle corridors both north and south of the border. In the terse, dispassionate style she uses to describe Los Angeles freeways and Beverly Hills burnouts, Didion recounts a painful trip to two embattled arenas: El Salvador and the U.S. embassy there.

Ann Beattie, 35 (Falling in Place, Chilly Scenes of Winter), has become a new and powerful influence on fiction, especially at The New Yorker. There, her droll, present-tense stories follow the disaffected narcissism of the Viet Nam generation into middle age. Humor, always a favorite of women as disparate as Dorothy Parker and Jean Kerr, has a new comedian: Fran Lebowitz, whose hip urbanity enlivens Metropolitan Life and Social Studies. As a child of the tube, her arch advice goes to more than the lovelorn. To parents: "Educational television should be absolutely forbidden. It can only lead to unreasonable expectations and eventual disappointment when your child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out of books and dance around the room with royal blue chickens." To teens: "Stand firm in your refusal to remain conscious during algebra. In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra."

From Harriet Beecher Stowe to Judith Krantz, women writers have made it to bestseller lists. But the growing recognition of women as artists, concludes Harper & Row Editor Ted Solotaroff, responds to a new need: "Women not only have a subject but they have a sense of necessity about it. They want other women to know about this awareness, this knowledge."

A growing number of women writers are making the message familiar. In nine books in twelve years, Anne Tyler, 41, has populated an imaginary Maryland town with characters as memorable as those of Faulkner country. The hero of Morgan's Passing is a loud, daffy, unfathomable presence, as unexplainable as an Ahab. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, her most recent novel, uses an eatery as a metaphor for family life, in which food is the stuff of history, and patrons are constantly eating and running away. The wife of an Iranian child psychiatrist who is also a novelist, Tyler still bristles at being described as "a mother of two." Says she: "For me, writing was the only way out. Is John Updike a father of four who writes?"

Novelist Gail Godwin, 45, has taken up the theme of self-sufficient women with passion and precision. In four earlier works she offered that rarest literary character, the female rogue. This time, in A Mother and Two Daughters, her first bestseller, she soars through nearly 600 pages to modernize the message of Jane Eyre: would-be Rochesters stand back and let the heroines manage the estates. Godwin's women face their trials with refreshing distance, like the author. When a female interviewer asked, "Why do you feel a need to modulate suffering with sweet reasonableness and humor?" the author mused, "Honey, that's what they call character."

Shiloh and Other Stones, an important first volume of fiction by Bobbie Ann Mason, 42, introduces a Kentucky of disabled truckers and Rexall waitresses. Her view produces achingly accurate pictures of the commonplace. These tales neither judge nor mystify, but shine like a Formica countertop. "I'm writing about ordinary people rather than alienated superior sensibilities," she explains. "I'm writing about people who are trying desperately to get into the society rather than out of it."

Getting into the future once proved just as difficult. The science-fiction field, formerly a gentlemen's club run by the likes of Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert and Arthur C. Clarke, now has a woman at the top of the charts. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin, 53, won both Hugo and Nebula prizes, sci-fi's Pulitzers. Le Guin also won the National Book Award for her children's novel The Farthest Shore in 1972. Her 22 books, most of which are science fiction, have en livened the hardware-oriented genre with emotional immediacy, much as Ray Bradbury's haunting tales once brought a Midwest folksiness to the future. The Lathe of Heaven (1971) imagines the year 2002 and a hero whose dreams become reality. Along with the fantasies, Le Guin textures her tales with poetic leaps. When a jellyfish is flung on the beach, she writes, "What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?" Like many contemporary women authors, Le Guin, married with three grown children, is not an amateur who regards her craft as a pastime. Early on, the Fulbright scholar decided on fiction as a career. Says she:"It's like music. Are you just going to play the piano in the basement, or is it for real?"

The answer is evident. Women writers are playing for keeps. Two generations ago, Isak Dinesen wrote, "Only when women are old enough to have done with the business of being women can they let loose their strength." Women today can remain at that business while retaining their strength. Bobbie Ann Mason reflects: "Being a woman is not at the center of my thinking when I write. I'd like to think that I and a lot of writers are freer now that the battle is half won." As for the other half of that struggle, women writers will be faced with the problem that attends all artists. Poet Louise Bogan observes that from now on, "no woman should be shamefaced in attempting, through her work, to give back to the world a portion of its lost heart. " -- --ByJ.D. Reed.

Reported by Janice C. Simpson/New York

With reporting by Janice C. Simpson/New York This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.