UKL: I suppose it comes down in some ways to the brute and simple fact that a woman conceives, carries a child, and bears it. Women can perform this enormous natural act that men can’t. So how much of this is male compensation? How much of a lot of human behavior is male compensation, claiming generative power as the only power, and calling any other power or ability inferior? That is a theme that goes through a lot of my writing, because it goes through a lot of our lives.
DN: In a previous conversation we talked about the erasure of women writers from the canon, or women not being considered for the canon in the first place. We talked about Grace Paley as one example since she passed away, and also about C. J. Cherryh in relation to William Gibson, how they were both winning awards at the same time, both seeming to shape the conversation of the moment, but flash forward a couple of decades and everyone knows who William Gibson is and far fewer people have even heard of Cherryh. So I was happy to see your essay in Words Are My Matter called “Disappearing Grandmothers,” where you enumerate four ways women are erased from the canon, or diminished in the conversation of literature: denigration, omission, exception, and disappearance.
You took the title “Disappearing Grandmothers” from a letter of Wallace Stegner’s. The story you relate about Wallace Stegner, and what he did to the writer Mary Foote, was quite a shocking tale, and an egregious example of the disappearance of a woman writer.
Exception
A novel by a man is very seldom discussed with any reference to the author’s gender. A novel by a woman is very frequently discussed with reference to her gender. The norm is male. The woman is an exception to the norm, from which she is excluded.
Exception and exclusion are practiced both in criticism and in reviewing. A critic forced to admit that, say, Virginia Woolf is a great English novelist may take pains to show her as an exception—a wonderful fluke. Techniques of exception and exclusion are manifold. The woman writer is found not to be in the “mainstream” of English novels; her writing is “unique” but has no influence on later writers; she is the object of a “cult”; she is a (charming, elegant, poignant, sensitive, fragile) hothouse flower that should not be seen as competing with the (rugged, powerful, masterful) vigor of the male novelist.
Joyce was almost instantly canonized; Woolf was either excluded from the canon or admitted grudgingly and with reservations for decades. It is quite arguable that To the Lighthouse, with its subtle and effective narrative techniques and devices, has been far more influential on later novel-writing than Ulysses, which is a monumental dead end. Joyce, choosing “silence, exile, cunning,” led a sheltered life, taking responsibility for nothing but his own writing and career. Woolf led a fully engaged life in her own country in an extraordinary circle of intellectually, sexually, and politically active people; and she knew, read, reviewed, and published other authors all her grown life. Joyce is the fragile person, Woolf the tough one; Joyce is the cult object and the fluke, Woolf the continuously fertile influence, central to the twentieth-century novel.
But centrality is the last thing accorded a woman by the canoneers. Women must be left on the margins.
Even when a woman novelist is admitted to be a first-rate artist, the techniques of exclusion still operate. Jane Austen is vastly admired, yet she is less often considered as an exemplar than as unique, inimitable—a wonderful fluke. She cannot be disappeared; but she is not fully included.
Denigration, omission, and exception during a writer’s lifetime are preparations for her disappearance after her death.
UKL: Mary Foote was a novelist and short story writer of no particular literary distinction but some popularity. She wrote some very good stories. Fairly well-known in her own lifetime, which was basically two generations before Wallace Stegner’s. She wrote a very fine autobiography, which was not published during her lifetime. [Note: It was published in 1972 under the silly and misleading title A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West.] Stegner was given a copy of this book and some of Foote’s letters by her grandchildren. He took it and built his novel Angle of Repose on it, on her book, her life story. I believe he took even his title from it. It’s a geologist’s term. It’s the angle of a hill at which a rock can come to rest. Beautiful title. And the only credit he gave to Mary Hallock Foote was to thank her grandchildren for the “loan” of their grandmother. He didn’t even name her. I hold this as unforgiveable. I cannot forgive Wallace Stegner, who was very well-known, very popular, very much adored by the intelligentsia, who easily could afford to give credit where credit was due. And he didn’t. I do not forgive.
DN: Back when we were talking about imagining the inner life of your cat, you mentioned some of the possible pitfalls of writing across difference. You participated in a project with Pharos Editions where authors were asked to pick an out-of-print book that they felt particularly deserved to be back in print and you chose a book by Charles L. McNichols called Crazy Weather, a book you read as a teenager and then some seventy years later. It raises some interesting questions about writing across difference too, given that McNichols is white and writing about the Mojave people and their myths. Writing across difference has been a hot topic in the literary world the last couple of years, with Lionel Shriver’s notorious speech asserting her right to do whatever she wants regardless of how it is received, a speech she gave while provocatively wearing a Mexican sombrero, as just the latest part of that ongoing conversation. What are your thoughts on writing across difference, writing as a different race, gender, or otherwise, the risks and potential rewards of it?
UKL: Oh, David, that’s a real can of worms. People have been talking about this for decades now. How far can you speak for a person of a culture not your own? My father was an anthropologist and ran smack into this. When does an attempt to understand become co-optation? This was of course extremely, egregiously visible when white people wrote in the person of Indians, from Fenimore Cooper on. They were co-opting the voice of the Indians, who had no literary voice at that time, but certainly had their own oral literature, their own voice and their own opinions. Those went unheard. They had to be interpreted through the whites. This goes on. Men have been speaking for women for thousands of years, when women had no voice whatsoever, in literature or anywhere else. And that still goes on. But then, okay, if you politicize that to the extent that you say nobody can speak for anybody else, then you get into a mess. Because what we need to say is nobody can speak for anybody who doesn’t have a voice. Of course this is where it gets sticky with animals. Of course, they don’t have a voice. That is their being. They don’t use language as we do. So to what extent can we speak for them? To a very limited extent. On the other hand you don’t have to be like the behavior scientists who say that because we don’t understand their feelings they don’t have any, because we don’t understand how they think they don’t think. Or even to say, as Wittgenstein does, that if a lion could talk we wouldn’t understand him. That’s not necessarily true. But all we can do is imagine our way into the other. And be very, very, very careful at every step, that we are not co-opting that other. Taking it over and putting our voice where we are trying to imagine what its voice is or would be. Eternal vigilance is required.