Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers sounds right on:
She has insisted that themes central to women’s lives — marriage, motherhood, the tension between family and individual aspirations — constitute subject matter as “serious” and significant as traditionally masculine motifs like war and travel. Yet she rejects the preference of many feminist literary scholars for emphasizing “culture importance rather than aesthetic distinction,” and she doesn’t hesitate to describe some of the writers discussed in “A Jury of Her Peers” as artistically limited, if historically interesting.
She also offers an interesting explanation as to why there were great female authors in 19th century England, but not so much in America.
I think that books by, about and concerning women are certainly unfairly trivialized, but I also think that, in service to some mistaken idea of diversity, insignificant works do tend to be dredged up to represent women’s voices during historical periods when women were mostly silenced. Historical revisionism is no help to feminism – if women were uneducated and unliberated, and so unable to write literature or compose music, or do anything other than work, breed and die, we shouldn’t pretend it wasn’t so.
I did feel alienated all through school by reading novel after novel that portrayed women as clingy, irrational, two-dimensional fools – either virgins who sucked the lifeblood out of the protagonist, or predatory ho-bags who first enticed and then suffocated him. I think teachers understand how tiresome this is and want to provide a brief respite, and, while that is important, the solution is not to elevate something substandard just to provide an alternate point of view, because that further convinces those already convinced that all points of view other than theirs are substandard.
