What I did today - the role of gender in books
I am mentally enhausted. I wrote and applied for jobs. Lots of jobs. Lots. It was annoyingly hard. But one job asked for samples og my writing. So thins is what I did today.
The role of gender in books
The role of gender in books is a hotly debated topic. On one hand women writers and female-centric books dominate the YA market (An interesting phenomenon given the “general knowledge” that a girl will read a book by or about any gender, but most boys will only read books about-or sometimes by-males.) On the other hand there is a lot of sexism.
Female characters are held to ridiculous standards, especially by female readers and vilified for having faults. Male writers are showered with praise and awards while comparable books written by female writers are not. In a recent blog post Lizzy Skurnick argued that while a short list may be evenly split along gender lines, a pattern eventually emerges.
Some books, it seemed, were “ambitious.” Others were well-wrought, but somehow … “small.” “Domestic.” “Unam -” what’s the word? “- bititous.”
Many of Jane Austen’s contemporary male authors weren’t such huge fans of her work (Nabokov, Emerson and Twain to name a few). And while Nabokov ‘could never see anything in Pride and Prejudice’, Edmund Wilson, a literary critic argued that ‘her [Austen’s] greatness is due precisely to the fact that her attitude toward her work is like that of a man…and quite unlike that of a typical woman novelist, who exploits her feminine day dreams’.
So she is good, but only because she writes like a man. Because no male writer has ever based a great work of literature on a day dream. Austen’s heroines don’t have super powers or tortured souls - they are normal, ordinary women. However another famous critic of Austen’s, Ralph Waldo Emerson argued that her work was ‘narrow’ and concerned only with ‘marriageableness’.
It seems that he forgot that the women in Austen are concerned about marriage because that was the only ‘business’ that they were allowed to conduct. The onset of marriage goes hand in hand with the onset of respect (Elizabeth Bennet’s friend Charlotte decides the stigma of being an old maid is more humiliating than being married to a fool with good prospects.)
But even if it can be argued that Austen is too ‘narrow’ for readers today, the criticism still somehow holds for women working in media today. Nancy Meyers, a famous writer/director/producer of films such as Something’s Gotta Give, The Holiday, It’s Complicated, writes about affluent women and their families and their romances.
So Austen is narrow. But it doesn’t stop in the 18th century. Recently Daphne Merkin wrote a profile of Meyers in the New York Times. She calls Meyer’s women - centric films ‘retro’ and ‘post-feminist’, labels I disagree with. The women in Meyers’s films are successful and (usually) wealthy from their own accomplishments. Diane Keaton’s character in Something’s Gotta Give is a hit playwright with a tenured professor (in Women’s Studies, yet!) for a sister. Cameron Diaz’s character in Holiday owns her own movie trailer production company (and a mansion in Beverly Hills). Diaz puts it bluntly in that film when she tells Jude Law’s single-dad character that she feels comfortable telling him about her success because she knows he won’t be intimidated, having been raised by a mother who was a high level executive editor at Random House. The romantic elements of the film do not detract from the feminist ones.
At one point the writer agrees saying ‘when men do appear on the scene…they awaken dormant desires that nevertheless have to be fit into pre-existing, busy lives’ but then argues that the whole genre is ‘inherently fuzzy’ and that Meyers films are ‘sweet little middle-class romances’
The idea that anyone living in the Hamptons mansion in Something’s Gotta Give is middle class is laughable. But this is just a side point. In Merkin’s criticism of Meyers I can hear Emerson’s and Nabkov’s dismissal of Austen. Can’t you? Why is domestic a dirty word? Why is a character driven movie about a successful person dealing with their personal lives a Best Picture nominee if it stars George Clooney, but not if it stars Meryl Streep? Would an article by Merkin have been written if Nancy was Ned?
Live long and prosper!
xoxo
I am going to bathe my eyes.
The role of gender in books
The role of gender in books is a hotly debated topic. On one hand women writers and female-centric books dominate the YA market (An interesting phenomenon given the “general knowledge” that a girl will read a book by or about any gender, but most boys will only read books about-or sometimes by-males.) On the other hand there is a lot of sexism.
Female characters are held to ridiculous standards, especially by female readers and vilified for having faults. Male writers are showered with praise and awards while comparable books written by female writers are not. In a recent blog post Lizzy Skurnick argued that while a short list may be evenly split along gender lines, a pattern eventually emerges.
Some books, it seemed, were “ambitious.” Others were well-wrought, but somehow … “small.” “Domestic.” “Unam -” what’s the word? “- bititous.”
Many of Jane Austen’s contemporary male authors weren’t such huge fans of her work (Nabokov, Emerson and Twain to name a few). And while Nabokov ‘could never see anything in Pride and Prejudice’, Edmund Wilson, a literary critic argued that ‘her [Austen’s] greatness is due precisely to the fact that her attitude toward her work is like that of a man…and quite unlike that of a typical woman novelist, who exploits her feminine day dreams’.
So she is good, but only because she writes like a man. Because no male writer has ever based a great work of literature on a day dream. Austen’s heroines don’t have super powers or tortured souls - they are normal, ordinary women. However another famous critic of Austen’s, Ralph Waldo Emerson argued that her work was ‘narrow’ and concerned only with ‘marriageableness’.
It seems that he forgot that the women in Austen are concerned about marriage because that was the only ‘business’ that they were allowed to conduct. The onset of marriage goes hand in hand with the onset of respect (Elizabeth Bennet’s friend Charlotte decides the stigma of being an old maid is more humiliating than being married to a fool with good prospects.)
But even if it can be argued that Austen is too ‘narrow’ for readers today, the criticism still somehow holds for women working in media today. Nancy Meyers, a famous writer/director/producer of films such as Something’s Gotta Give, The Holiday, It’s Complicated, writes about affluent women and their families and their romances.
So Austen is narrow. But it doesn’t stop in the 18th century. Recently Daphne Merkin wrote a profile of Meyers in the New York Times. She calls Meyer’s women - centric films ‘retro’ and ‘post-feminist’, labels I disagree with. The women in Meyers’s films are successful and (usually) wealthy from their own accomplishments. Diane Keaton’s character in Something’s Gotta Give is a hit playwright with a tenured professor (in Women’s Studies, yet!) for a sister. Cameron Diaz’s character in Holiday owns her own movie trailer production company (and a mansion in Beverly Hills). Diaz puts it bluntly in that film when she tells Jude Law’s single-dad character that she feels comfortable telling him about her success because she knows he won’t be intimidated, having been raised by a mother who was a high level executive editor at Random House. The romantic elements of the film do not detract from the feminist ones.
At one point the writer agrees saying ‘when men do appear on the scene…they awaken dormant desires that nevertheless have to be fit into pre-existing, busy lives’ but then argues that the whole genre is ‘inherently fuzzy’ and that Meyers films are ‘sweet little middle-class romances’
The idea that anyone living in the Hamptons mansion in Something’s Gotta Give is middle class is laughable. But this is just a side point. In Merkin’s criticism of Meyers I can hear Emerson’s and Nabkov’s dismissal of Austen. Can’t you? Why is domestic a dirty word? Why is a character driven movie about a successful person dealing with their personal lives a Best Picture nominee if it stars George Clooney, but not if it stars Meryl Streep? Would an article by Merkin have been written if Nancy was Ned?
Live long and prosper!
xoxo
I am going to bathe my eyes.