Clementine Ford speaks back to a recent column by Sydney Morning Herald regular Elizabeth Farrelly, who prefers ‘writing with a higher IQ and lower pH than most women can manage’. Citing Jeanette Winterson, Drusilla Modjeska and others, Clementine argues in defence of women’s writing – and of domestic, interior lives as valid subjects for literature.
It’s been almost two weeks since Sydney Morning Herald columnist Elizabeth Farrelly wrote her frankly bizarre treatise on modern feminism. Alongside some fairly cardboard concerns about modern feminism ‘legitimising girliness’ (quelle horreur!) and how annoying it is that an abundance of websites exists that cater to women (with no acknowledgement of the fact that this in part is due to women being the primary producers and consumers of content online), Farrelly wrote the following:
I don’t usually read women authors but not because they’re women. Because they’re boring. My female friends are shocked by this, urging me to revisit my Margaret Atwood or Jeanette Winterson. But I tell you, if I never read another intelligent female devoting her first page to how she felt when her husband left her it’ll be too soon.
Farrelly’s blindingly ignorant attack on women’s writing is by turns tedious and hysterically funny. Women have enough difficulty being considered ‘real’ writers as it is, such is the disdain for female perspective on interior life (or indeed, anything of real note). But the positioning of Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Atwood as women who navel-gaze about the breakdown of marriage is so far off the mark that it only reinforces the irony of her critique of laziness in women’s writing.
Farrelly’s feminist columns often seem to be driven by unexamined frustration, rather than any kind of thoughtful insight into the changing modes of social movements – but in this particular piece, her ability to align readers’ heads with their desks was truly showcased.
Enough has been written about how women’s writing is undervalued that I’ll refrain from delving into it here. I’m more interested in why interior and ‘domestic’ concerns are so offensive to readers like Farrelly, who makes a point of excluding writers like Ruth Ozeki, Barbara Kingsolver and Hilary Mantel from her general assessment that writing by women is inherently naff. Farrelly writes:
In part this is an aesthetic thing. I like writing with a higher IQ and lower pH than most women can manage: tougher, edgier, stringier. But it’s also, unavoidably, political. To my mind it is the task of writing to lace the personal into the supra-personal – bridging from the self to the political, the abstract, the cosmic. To fail in this, to wallow about in the personal, is a muscular dystrophy of the mind.
Leave aside for a moment the outrageous suggestion that ‘most women’ are unable to ‘manage’ writing that is both intellectual and acerbic. The personal as it pertains to female experience is marginalised because that personal experience is widely considered to be meaningless. It’s not so much that women ‘can’t manage’ tough, intellectually stimulating writing. It’s that their basic experience as women, domestic or otherwise, is not considered to be challenging enough to deserve or inspire tough, intellectual thought.
Women who write with intensity about lives that exist in the-day-to-day, with keen insight, humour and quietly observant truth – writers like Melissa Bank, Curtis Sittenfeld and Julie Orringer – have to contend with publishing companies selling their books as ‘chick lit’, because we’re yet to accept the fact that writing about something like love doesn’t always mean writing about Mr. Right.
Farrelly’s disdain for anything she sees as being beneath the proper aspirations of womanhood and feminism seems to be less about her wanting women to strive for greatness, and more to do with her assuming that greatness can’t exist within the interior of a daily female experience that refuses to apologise for itself.
Funnily enough, one of the subjects of Farrelly’s off-hand criticism, the brilliant Jeanette Winterson, includes in her latest memoir the following passage:
I am an ambitious writer – I don’t see the point of being anything; no, nothing at all, if you have no ambition for it. 1985 wasn’t the day of the memoir – and in any case, I wasn’t writing one. I was trying to get away from the received idea that women always write about ‘experience’ – the compass of what they know – while men write wide and bold – the big canvas, the experiment with form. Henry James misunderstood Jane Austen’s comment that she wrote on four inches of ivory – i.e. tiny observant minutiae. Much the same was said of Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. Those things made me angry. In any case, why could there not be experience and experiment? Why could there not be the observed and the imagined? Why should a woman be limited by anything or anybody? Why should a woman not be ambitious for literature? Ambitious for herself?
Winterson, a writer of enormous breadth and depth, has never once begun a book by delving into the tale of her husband leaving her. Nor have many of the other female writers I love who excavate the personal, or just tell a ripping good yarn – Drusilla Modjeska, Zoe Heller, Sarah Waters. For Farrelly to assume herself above such petty concerns isn’t merely arrogant – it’s mindnumbingly stupid.
As for the self meeting the political, the abstract and the cosmic – to paraphrase one of history’s keenest writers of the personal and the social, she of the four inches of ivory – if Elizabeth Farrelly doesn’t think Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson are up to the task of writing literature that both engages the personal and the political, then I’m no longer surprised she knows few women writers capable of enthralling her … in fact, I rather wonder at her knowing any writers who can do it at all.
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Thumbs up, Clementine. Farrelly's piece was quite exasperating in that I wanted to debate her points at almost every turn (and there are quite frequent turns). One small point - I (maybe hopefully) thought that Atwood and Winterson were mentioned as examples of women cited by her friends as worthy reads, rather than examples of those imbuing their work with "how she felt when her husband left her", which would be, well, a really weird claim.
Inasmuch as I can discern a thread winding through the whole thing though, I think what she's saying is: "Everybody stop writing and talking about feelings! It makes me want to scream!". Which is also, when you think about it, kind of weird.
Al
26 June at 03:09PM
I agree totally with Elizabeth Farrelly. I am really sick of the female carry on. We fought hard for women's rights in my day as a young woman and we made great progress in just getting on and doing things not rolling in some post modernist feminist "I want it all and to be admired for it." I joined a book club and was eventually put of by the insistence of the same tiype of female writers being read. When I recommended Romulus My Father it was universally disliked because of some lack of female perspective re a world issue that happened to be about men in this case. Surely we can now be people, and as Ms Farrelly says, women and not girls.
Anne Powles
26 June at 03:32PM
Hear hear! "I like writing with a higher IQ and lower pH than most women can manage: tougher, edgier, stringier." What the what?
Susanne
26 June at 03:35PM
Hearty agreement. When men write intensely (and well)* about their interior lives, it's read as a deeply significant discussion of what it means to be a person. When women write intensely about their interior lives, it's read as essentially irrelevant, usually, or what it means to be a woman, at best. There's a terrible sense that only men can write things that speak to human beings as human beings, whereas writers like Atwood and Byatt make that obviously incorrect. I'm not sure if Big Publishing doesn't allow there to be more writing by women aimed at all of us at once, or if we're just taught to believe that women's writing isn't that, or the tastemakers refuse to read and speak of women's stories as more universally relevant. Probably all those things are true.
While I often find it disappointing that 'mens' literature' is popularly conflated with 'wherein things get blown up by men', it's certainly worse that 'womens' literature' is so readily discarded as having no meaning to anyone beyond some kind of caricature of an intellectually flabby flibbertigibbet.
I suspect CF's writing has more toughness, edges and stringiness (is that a good thing?) than Farrelly could reasonably demand as a minimum, and certainly more than her own does, though that wasn't part of Farrelly's thesis.
*When men write intensely but not well about their interior lives, I suspect it doesn't get published. We have that to be thankful for, at least.
David
26 June at 04:21PM
Great piece Clementine - I cannot understand Farrelly's position at all. Why any woman writer would want to hold onto archaic gender ideas about what boys and girls do differently is beyond me.
Natalie
26 June at 08:46PM
Thank you for dealing with EF's recent nonsense, I can only hope your article is printed in the SMH as a thoughful reponse to her very bizarre (to my ears) misogynist rant. I think this great chasm in thinking about feminism is generational having read a previous commenter agree wholeheartedly with Farelly and reminisce about fighting hard "for women's rights in my day as a young woman" and making "great progress in just getting on and doing things not rolling in some post modernist feminist 'I want it all and to be admired for it' ". But isn't that what creative expression is? Doing it, discussing it, dissecting it? I suspect younger women are utterly mystified by this negating of their freedom to express their 'female' experience in novels/artwork/film/architecture. A so-called 'humanist' perspective on producing work ie. just get on with it and if you're great you're great and if you're not be quiet - is just not engaging with the realities of being a female artist/writer/filmmaker/musician etc. Yes, the work must speak to be heard but its context is not irrelevant and creating work focusing on that feminist context is as relevant and interesting as any other life experience.
Megan
27 June at 09:28AM
Yeah Clementine. The thing that makes me laugh the loudest is the fact, it appears that Farrelly has forgotten something. If we took her advice, we would never read her work - after all she is one of those inferior species - a woman writer.....; 0
27 June at 11:57AM
'My female friends are shocked by this, urging me to revisit my Margaret Atwood or Jeanette Winterson. But I tell you, if I never read another intelligent female devoting her first page to how she felt when her husband left her it'll be too soon.'
Erm, okay. Except that Jeanette Winterson identifies as a lesbian, so while I'm not extenstively well-read in her work, I'm pretty sure she's never written about her husband leaving her.
e
27 June at 12:43PM
Thank you Elizabeth Farrelly - I agree totally. 'Girliness' in young women is on the increase - young women writers (YWWs) take note. I find that many YWWs either write with a 'Once upon a time' mentality or with a stringent harshness that makes reading uncomfortable . Give me more depth and breadth - more writing from Greer, Kingsolver and Mantel.
Denise
02 July at 12:28PM
Good job Clementine, there were so many issues in this article.
I don't think Farrelly is a misogynist, I think she just has a convoluted idea of feminism and women's writing in this century, and gets paid to write about her opinion. There were points where she seemed to be giving a valid point until she reached her actual conclusion - e.g. escape the sewing circles (What?!) - and it seems she has adopted so many different feminist arguements - because there is no one 'feminism' - that she contradicts herself and comes out as ranting and ignorant rather than the feminist warrior I'm sure she thinks she sounds like. To think, a woman calls herself a feminist and then insists that women's writing is not worth reading. That's not to say that there isn't some writing by women that establishes and reinforces patriarchal gender roles - and "girliness" - like the 'Twilight' series, and most of YA fiction after it, but to generalise women's writing as just not worth it, I think, is worse.
I cannot fathom a feminist who devalues "femininity" in favour of "masculinity". Feminism was a fight for empowerment and equality, not a simple swapping of heirarchies. Or the adoption of the "masculine" by the female population.
Also, If you refuse to read writing penned by women, then you clearly don't know what you're talking about because you don't read it. Clearly you've never read Winterson.
The arrogance! The attitude she displays - I'm right and I don't care about your opinion - is just infuriating. Why not legitimise and empower women who still occupy that space that was once oppressed and hidden? Wouldn't it be worse to not be heard at all?
Chelsea
03 July at 03:45AM
Thankyou Clementine for 'speaking back'.
I agree that Farrelly's critique and easy dismissal of women writers is ironic. Isn't Farrelly expressing the 'personal' in what is an expression of personal opinion and aesthetic preference? The personal/political divide is artificial and I thought it had been largely dismantled.
I'm with Jeanette Winterson. 'Why should a women be limited by anything or anybody?'
I remain in awe of Mary Shelley's work 'Frankenstein'. The first edition was published anonymously. Reviewers assumed it to be the work of a man because a young woman writer couldn't be 'that good'. When authorship became known critics attributed its success to Percy Shelley. 'Nothing but an absolute magnetizing of the brain...can account for her having risen so far her usual self
03 July at 10:42AM