Women’s words

I read a fair bit but no more than friends who are avid readers. Maybe it is laziness or maybe it is a weakness of mind but the ability to concentrate on a book has eluded me for years. In the past four years only a few books have instantly gripped me.  There is Patti Smith’s Just Kids, an elegy to bohemian life in sixties New York,   Joan Didion’s Stumbling Towards Bethlehem, a classic of literary journalism, and Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, which surprises you with the fluidity of its prose, aside from its candid account of the making of a successful professional woman. 

I will add to that list two books that have pride of place on my bedside table – Penelope Fitzgerald’s A House of Air, a compendium of that self effacing master’s personal and published essays, and Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. The latter author is my age and, to my mind, the literary light of my generation.  Her essays range over an array of subjects — from the craft and discipline of writing, a glimpse into the NGO-world in Liberia, an excruciatingly erudite deconstruction of Nabokov to the challenge of living up to the varying and conflicting calls of mongrel blood.  

In coming up with the list of works above, I have surprised myself, as, upon review, my early literary education was almost completely dominated by the works of men.  In my youth I plowed through Shakespeare, Dickens, Balzac, Maupassant and Maugham, as well as the standalone classics of Hugo and Tolstoy. A little older, I fell, at different points in time, for Graham Greene, Herman Hesse, Thomas Mann and Cormac McCarthy though never, funny enough, for the macho writing of Hemingway.  In college I read Nietzsche, delighted in him, found a soul mate in that mad man who, at the end of the nineteenth century, foretold, as prophets do, in cryptic aphorisms, the disintegration on almost every level — intellectual, political and moral, of the century to come.  To this day it is through his moral and philosophical lens that I view life.  I read Rawls, Nozick, Walzer, Descartes, Hume, Schopenhauer and Kant, each with different levels of frustration and comprehension.  It wasn’t surprising then that among the parting words of my Russian history professor, a woman who gave you the impression of Stalin-like indomitability, was the simple observation: Have you noticed that all your mentors are men?

She meant it more in the way of my actual mentor-professors who were, it was true, predominantly male, but it encompassed so much more.  It encompassed the trend and substance of my entire intellectual life up to that point.  Despite growing up in a house full of women, despite having been educated from preparatory school onwards in women’s institutions, I neglected the perspective of women, their literary and intellectual contributions. It was only because of my Russian professor’s comment and only after I left my Amazonian bubble, matriculated in co-ed institutions and entered the rough and tumble world of corporate life, was confronted and then crushed by what I casually now like to call ‘structures of oppression’, meaning, the entire construct of modern life which, as any dyed in the wool feminist will tell you, was established by men, that I reassessed my vision of the world and began to take seriously the writing of Steinem, appreciate the despair of Plath and relish the cynicism of Austen, writers I had once dismissed as angry, hysterical and light, respectively.

According to the radical French philosopher Luce Irigaray, the masculine gaze is absolute in its sway over every aspect of our lives and we have history to thank for it.  Walk through any museum, study any era of history, take up any subject and you will see that up until maybe thirty years ago, every field has been ruled by men, as women were relegated to the domestic sphere.  There are exceptions of course — Queen Elizabeth the 1st, Marie Curie, Catherine the Great, Cleopatra, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf  — but they are islands in an ocean of male power and perspective.  Survey the sweep of world history and you will see how rare it is that a female political, literary or intellectual voice rises above the masculine din.

But when it does, what a voice it is.

Pick up any of the books I listed in the first paragraph of this essay and you will experience the world through prose so fine it hurts the heart.  They show you that greatness in writing or in anything else for that matter is not the sole province of men.  The writing in these works is disciplined, the observations are surprising, the control of the craft is complete, the words used have been chosen with precision and strung together with genius and they are the words of women. 

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