Why Gender in Literature Is Relevant
And why we only wish it weren’t.
Note: this post is a direct response to Josh Guilar’s post “Does the Author Matter?”
- I do not read books written by women.
- Excuse me?
- I do not read them. I find them boring.
- Is there a specific reason for this or is it just their genitalia?
- Men write about everything, women only write about themselves.
The above is an actual conversation taken from a friend’s Facebook page, which I translated from the original Italian for clarity. (My friend, not coincidentally, is a female author.) It is followed by a number of comments deploring the attitude of the speaker who claims they do not read books by women: among these comments there is one which I will also translate for clarity.
I admit I have said the same in the past. I did so deliberately. Then I decided to make exceptions. With moderation. When I feel particularly inclined to do so. The fact is that women talk so much that (when in doubt) in the silence of reading I choose men.
Does gender in literature matter?
Of course we wish it didn’t, just like we wish it didn’t in any other field: we wish gender were irrelevant in science, sports, politics, childrearing, family, health. We wish it were, until we don’t because we still believe there should be a difference, even where that difference is a social construct that is indifferent to the individual’s specific skills and inclinations. Hillary Clinton is running for President but we still talk about her clothes, because women care about such things. Don’t they?
Again: does gender in literature matter? Josh Guilar thinks it doesn’t.
Whether the author is male or female shouldn’t matter. In fact, it does not matter. People don’t buy novels because of the author’s gender, they buy novels to be entertained. If a novel does that then good, if not then you’ve probably wasted your time.
This is wishful thinking on so many levels that it took me days to muster up the strength to write this post. So here’s where I place my disclaimer: I am not a neutral observer. I am an author and a woman, and this matters to me. It matters to me because it has a direct influence on how my books are marketed, how they’re sold and to whom, what the covers will look like and if they will be taken seriously enough to merit a review in respected publications.
So I thought: drop it.
Just drop it. This subject is trouble.
Gender — particularly in my native Italy — is still a taboo subject. Pointing out sexism in any field is guaranteed to get you a slew of indignant responses and counter-accusations; you will be told you’re playing the victim, you will be labelled an old-school feminist, a man-hater and a crybaby. Saying that there is a gender bias in literature (or, more specifically, in publishing) will get you in trouble, particularly if you’re a writer.
And yet, there it is: the publishing industry is biased against women. It has always been. Female authors, on average, are undersold, undermarketed and underestimated.
Just ask Catherine Nichols, who tried to sell her novel under her own name and was ignored by all the agents she contacted; when she tried again, under a male name, she received mostly positive responses. Ask Laura Albert and her alter ego Savannah Knoop, who played (ostensibly) male writer J.T. Leroy in public. If you believe in such things, call a séance and ask George Sand, and while you’re at it talk to Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, now better known as the Brontë sisters, or Karen Blixen, who rose to literary fame as Isak Dinesen, or even (for good measure) P.D. James. Ask J.K. Rowling, who became wildly popular by omitting her full name, and who still publishes under the male name of Robert Galbraith. Ask Fred Vargas. Or Elena Ferrante, who is largely assumed to be a man writing under a pen name, because let’s face it: what woman would be capable of writing such robust literary fiction? And even when the female author has a name and a face, men can and will try to appropriate her popularity, albeit for satirical purposes: case in point, Melissa P. (author of international bestseller One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed) and Giuseppe Genna, who at some point claimed to be the true author of Melissa’s books.
Your name — and by extension, your gender — plays into how you’re considered by your peers, too. Jennifer Weiner’s long-running feud with Jonathan Franzen is all about recognition: Weiner, a “commercial” writer, has several valid points to make about what is considered “literary” and what is “commercial” and how the latter is treated very differently when the author is male. Whether or not you appreciate her work, her criticism is still valid, particularly in light of the treatment received by Jeffrey Eugenides’s underwhelming The Marriage Plot (a love triangle between rich white kids: we can only imagine how it would’ve been marketed and talked about had the name on the cover been “Janice Eugenides”. My guess is: not at all) or, as Weiner points out, every single review of John Grisham books.
In the past year I have had difficult conversations with people who found it normal that an article containing opinions by writers on a certain subject that wasn’t male health issues only quoted men. Men, it appears, can speak for everybody; women can only speak for themselves. Any article containing solely female voices will necessarily be about some aspect of femaleness and the female experience. Our voices only matter when they are confined to what we know, and heard by our peers. In order to be taken seriously on any other subject we need to be surrounded by men, validated by them.
This affects how women are marketed, too. Female authors are more likely to be sold directly to female readers: there is no male equivalent for “Women’s fiction”, and the understanding is that anything sold in that section is inherently non-literary, escapist and (often) poorly written. This distinction does not seem to apply to writers like the aforementioned Grisham or Dan Brown, whose prose, while serviceable, is hardly literary.
Young Adult fiction, which is mostly the domain of women (with a few exceptions, like John Green) suffers from a similar bias: yet there is no reason why Louise O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours, a dystopian novel with a strong feminist subtext, should only be read by women. Its strong story, masterful use of language and underlying message are for everybody. So is Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, which deals with rape. What pertains to the female experience also pertains to the human experience: unless you think that females are any less than human, that is.
Readers are made complicit in this bias: most often, they are unaware of it. Those who do realize this are often unbothered by it, because it plays into their pre-conceptions of female writing and the female mind. At any rate, readers are more or less at the mercy of the publishers’ marketing departments and the booksellers’ view of women as writers. This affects female readers, too, who drive the market (as the enormous success of Fifty Shades of Grey and Twilight can attest) but are still being sold the idea that female authors somehow mean less than male authors because they often choose to write about feelings. As though men never wrote about feelings (D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and Henry James are all masters of the art of writing about feelings; in more recent times, Armistead Maupin and Augusten Burroughs have done a splendid job of writing about themselves) and feelings didn’t matter at all when talking about the human experience.
Should gender in literature matter? It shouldn’t. Does it? It does. There is no point in pretending otherwise. Even if we wish that female authors received the same treatment as male authors, they don’t. As readers, even more than as writers, we need to be aware of this bias and keep it in mind.
