The Politics of the FEMINIST NOVEL

The Politics of the FEMINIST NOVEL

Judi M. Roller

CONTRIBUTIONS IN WOMEN'S STUDIES, NUMBER 63

GREENWOOD PRE

NEW YORK WESTPORT, CONNECTICUT LONDON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Roller, Judi M. The politics of the feminist novel.

(Contributions in women's studies, ISSN 0147-104X; no. 63)

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. American fiction--Women authors--History and criticism. 2. Feminism in literature. 3. English fiction--Women authors--History and criticism. 4. American fiction--20th century--History and criticism. 5. English fiction--20th century--History and criticism. 6. Politics in literature. 7. Women in literature. 8. Sex role in literature. I. Title. II. Series.

PS374.F45R65 1986 813′.009′9287 85-12718

ISBN 0-313-24663-7 (lib. bdg.: alk paper)

ISBN 0-313-25445-1 (pbk.)

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 85-12718

ISBN: 0-313-24663-7

ISBN: 0-313-25445-1 (pbk.)

ISSN: 0147-104X

First published in 1986

Greenwood Press, Inc. 88 Post Road West Westport, Connecticut 06881

Printed in the United States of America

∞ + ⃝TM

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

1. The Awakening / 3
2. Authority and Autobiography / 33
3. Fragmentation Versus Unity: The Shattered Novel / 67
4. The Endings / 101
5. Portrayals of Slavery and Freedom / 137
6. Conclusion / 181
Appendix: Critical Literature on the Political Novel / 189
Bibliography / 195
Index

The Politics of the FEMINIST NOVEL

1
The Awakening

The argument that accurate character portrayals are a result of an author's greatness, not an outcome of his or her sex, 1 can lead to the conclusion that there is no need to focus on an author's sex. This viewpoint may have a certain validity, but one must add that many women agree with Isadora Wing that the women characters men create never represent anyone with whom the female reader can identify. 2 Differences in the development of female characters are only one of many disunities between novels written by male and female authors. These divergences result in part from women's separation from their societies and from a subsequently altered vision, a vision that argues against Simone de Beauvoir's statement that woman cannot oppose positive truths and values of her own to those asserted and upheld by males; she can only deny them." 3 Not only can she assert them; she is doing so. Perhaps there are some benefits to be derived from having been separated from a dominant culture. Possibly it is because of this separation that de Beauvoir can observe of Stendhal's characters: "The socalled serious man is really futile, because he accepts readymade justifications for his life; whereas a passionate and profound woman revises established values from moment to moment." 4 Perhaps, too, female authors can say of their societies

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as Lessing's Anna says of recent European history, "I wasn't part of it, and haven't had something destroyed in me." 5

If one views the nation as an abstraction and sees its character as formed by the groups within it, 6 then it is possible that the same groups of people in different countries may exhibit many similarities as well as differences. For example, women everywhere live in more or less patriarchal societies; and women everywhere are more or less discriminated against. For this reason, female ideologies, such as feminism, may not be as culturally bound as other political beliefs, and it is likely that nationalistic influences may be of less importance in feminist novels than in other political works. Critics have suggested that in women's writings in general nationality may not be as important as it is elsewhere; 7 and, even further, that the human component to literature is more easily discussed by women nationally foreign to one another than by any woman with any man. 8 Because of this international quality in the experience of women, in the political attitudes they hold, and in feminism itself, studies of feminist novels need not be restricted only to those written by women sharing a common nationality nor even necessarily a common language. The American, British, Canadian, and Australian feminist novels included here do have a cohesion afforded by a joint language; but the authors' cultures also share a capitalistic economic system, a political heritage based upon the ideal of equal representation, and a similar patriarchal and hierarchical social system.

Perhaps the feminist novel has developed at least in part because "Neither the psychological nor the sociological novel is a form adequate to express the neo-feminist conception of woman, for she is not only a psyche, but a political being; not only a product and victim of her culture, but also a personal being who transcends it." 9 Whatever the reasons for the appearance of the feminist novel in the twentieth century, it has several characteristics that bind it together as a type of political novel. As one critic states, "feminist novels may perhaps be distinguished from androgynous novels in at least one way: in androgynous novels, the reader identifies with the male and female characters equally; in feminist novels, only with the female hero." 10 In fact, the central character or characters in

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a feminist novel must be female and must represent women generally as well as a woman specifically. In so drawing their characters, all the authors of feminist novels implicitly or explicitly portray women as a group oppressed. The best have somehow avoided attributing all meaning and importance either to the group alone or to the sole concerns of the private individual. They have dealt "with the disparity between the overwhelming problems of war, famine, poverty, and the tiny individual who [tries] to mirror them." 11 The implication is that human problems are collective as well as individual.

In addition, struggles between individuals, especially between individual men and women, illuminate or suggest the power relationships existing between groups. Such grapplings for control between characters can be called political battles when the characters function as representatives of men and women in general. The experiences of the women in the novels reviewed here do not support the genial notion that women really rule everything and that sex can buy power. Rather, in patriarchal societies where one group, men, controls another group, women, individual relationships between men and women are shown to be power-structured.

Further, the situations existing in these novels are presented as dependent, at least to some extent, upon economic, political, and social systems. The status of women with relation to these structures is that of a minority group. The relegation of a group to minority status does not depend upon its size or proportion of the population but upon its subordination. Similarly, a majority group need not be defined as a majority of a population but as a dominant social group equipped with the power to maintain its dominance. The stereotypes the majority group forms of various minority groups develop to fit its purposes and express its anxieties. 12 Because of the majority group's dominance and control over social, economic, and political institutions, the minorities are disadvantaged by those structures. This is the general view of the position of women implicitly or explicitly expressed in the feminist novel.

Frequently, the central character in the feminist novel is mad, but the character's personal madness is connected with public madness and does not stem solely from unique individual

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circumstances. In making this connection, the author manages to keep the reader from feeling separated from the character because of her insanity. If the mental illness is closely connected with society's illness and shown to be an expected and reasonable result of that public disease, then the mad character is explicable and the reader need not feel divorced from her.

Finally, the attitudes toward change and the ideas of progress inherent in these novels require for their fulfillment an economic, social, and political restructuring of society. All the novels suggest a need for basic change and restructuring in Western government, culture, and society, rather than simply reform or modification. They are not pragmatic strategy maps nor are they centered on the practical workings of government. They support Irving Howe's statement that Henry Adams' Democracy is not a political novel in the sense that The Possessed and Felix Holt are. That is, the former concerns itself basically with the procedures of government and with practical politics while the latter two focus on "classes in combat, voices threatening from the social depths, intellectuals yearning to reach 'the people.'" 13 The authors of these novels are not liberals. They do not cherish a belief in law and litigation as a route to fundamental change. 14 They neither value stability as a goal in itself nor show an interest in fighting off communism. 15 They do not place much value on property rights. They do not define equality as the equal right to take part in the contest for the advantages society offers the well-off. 16 In the political sphere, they see no usefulness or freedom proffered by the system of competing political parties and interest groups. 17 The value they do share with liberals is an interest in individuals and in human and civil rights. With one exception, these authors are not Communists, either. Rather, they present a different view, a combination of socialism, feminism, and humanism in search of a new kind of society. Some of them concentrate on the quality of life rather than on survival alone. Others focus on external necessity and on the control the material realm exercises over people's lives. Many of them do not consciously subscribe to any ideology. Nevertheless, they have all written feminist novels and appear to share the goal of a similar changed

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society. In fact, "The feminist demands are by no means unreasonable, but the hysterical reactions they have provoked attest to the fact that the changes they ask for would entail a radical revision in the way men and women think about each other and themselves." 18

Novels which are included under these criteria are the following: Kate Chopin The Awakening ( 1899), Virginia Woolf Orlando ( 1928), Agnes Smedley Daughter of Earth ( 1929), Christina Stead The Man Who Loved Children ( 1940), Mary McCarthy's The Company She Keeps ( 1942), Lillian Smith Strange Fruit ( 1944), Ann Petry The Street ( 1946), Doris Lessing's A Proper Marriage ( 1954), Harriette Arnow The Dollmaker ( 1958), Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook ( 1962), Margaret Atwood The Edible Woman ( 1969), Doris Lessing The Four-Gated City ( 1969), Anne Roiphe Up the Sandbox! ( 1970), Erica Jong Fear of Flying ( 1971), Helen Yglesias' How She Died ( 1971), Louise Meriwether Daddy was a Number Runner ( 1971), Marge Piercy Small Changes ( 1972), Judith Rossner's Looking for Mr. Goodbar ( 1975), Marge Piercy Woman on the Edge of Time ( 1976), Alice Walker Meridian ( 1976), Marilyn French The Women's Room ( 1977), Marilyn French's The Bleeding Heart ( 1980), Judith Rossner Emmeline ( 1980), Marge Piercy Braided Lives ( 1982), and Alice Walker's The Color Purple ( 1982).

Those novels that are feminist, like political novels in general, have an intellectual appeal and focus on ideas. Feminism itself is an ideology. When a literary work grows successfully out of feminism, however, it is difficult to isolate its various feminist aspects--its world view, values, goals, and tactics for social change. 19 There are identifiable implications but, rarely, stated goals and plans. These implications arise as often from stylistic elements as from situation and character. Certainly, the political attitudes and beliefs of an author are as likely to influence her style as her choice of subject and material. If the advent of socialism could and should profoundly modify American culture in form and style as well as in point of view, 20 then surely feminism can strongly affect the form and style of a novel as well as provide the basis of its thought. The formal

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elements of the feminist novel are central to its meanings because its stylistic features convey its ideology, its politics, and its values.

An understanding of the world view and values presented in the feminist novel can well begin with the example of The Awakening. As much as, if not more than any other feminist novel, The Awakening recalls a statement of Irving Howe's regarding the study of the political novel: "I had chosen to write about novels that seemed explicitly political in their reverberation, yet to my surprise and (at the time) uneasiness, I found that in all these books politics was not at the center of things." 21 In The Awakening, as in other feminist novels, human freedom seems to be what is at the center of things. The attainment of this freedom, it is implied in these novels, will be accompanied by the blessed disappearance of politics. Perhaps it is the evidence of this dislike for politics exemplified in The Awakening that causes some critics to label it neither feminist nor political. Of course, others apply to it either the first of these adjectives or both. Approaching The Awakening as a feminist novel reveals as much about it as looking upon it as a novel written by a southern wife and mother of six and prods speculation as to the interrelationships among Kate Chopin's thinking, writing, and biography.