6 December, 2007 | Leave a Comment
The Washington Post and the New York Times have both released their lists of the top books of 2007 (as if we wait all year with breathless excitement to see what these bunch of hosers will recommend). Neither newspaper chose a single novel by a woman. That’s right. In the year 2007, you had to have a penis to write a great novel.
The nation’s two most prestigious newspapers apparently had no qualms whatsoever about excluding women from their Top 5 “best of” fiction lists. Anyone who knows anything about the literary establishment knows that it is terribly misogynist. This is not news, which is probably why the female-free lists have not made news that I have seen. We just expect it.
Well, as a woman who is writing a novel, I cannot let this pass without comment. At least once a year I have to do a post on the sorry state of affairs in the literary world and since 2007 is almost over, voila.
As we all know, art is subjective. These “best of” lists are really a waste of time because you can’t rank books or movies or any art form this way, not that this stops anyone from doing it. Now, I’m sure the editors of these newspapers will claim that they just sat down with the novels they have reviewed this year and chose what they think are the best ones, that they didn’t tick a box that said male or female, that the gender of the author was not taken into consideration and that, quite coincidentally, they just ended up with a list of male writers. After all, the people who work at these papers are all liberal and progressive (ahem).
What do I say to these claims? I believe them. Completely. I believe them because their sexism exists on a much deeper level. It exists on a level that they are not aware of.
To me, literature is about life. Serious literature is a reflection of life and of the world that we live in. Men tend to write about men, women tend to write about women, African-Americans tend to write about African-Americans, Caucasians tend to write about their own race, etc. etc. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this — in fact, it’s the way I write. The books that touch us often have one thing in common — they contain a larger truth that speaks to us as a reader in some way. For a writer, it’s much easier to get at this truth if we write from our own personal experiences.
As such, books by men reflect the male experience. The male experience (not just in books, but in life in general) is taken more seriously and valued more than the female experience. Not to sound like a cultural studies teacher, but men’s experiences are considered to be universal and in comparison, women are considered “other.” It’s why a female novelist is called a “woman writer” and a [white] male novelist is called, simply, a “writer.” Men do important things (run governments, run industry, earn money, bomb each other’s countries, play football) and what women do is not as important. We’re just behind the scenes, having kids, cooking, wearing lingerie. This is how many people think about life. And literature is a reflection of life.
With this in mind, it’s quite easy to see why all the best novels of 2007 in WaPo and the NYT were written by men. The editors did not deliberately choose male authors. No, they chose the most important books. And not surprisingly, the most important books to them were about the lives of men and thus were written by men. Men’s stories have more value than women’s. A book about the Vietnam War is big and important and speaks universal truths. A book about the lives of women is not universal — it just appeals to women, who are not half of the human race but just a special interest fringe group. Almost a century ago, Virginia Woolf lamented that books about war are considered to be important, but books about women in a drawing room are not. Sadly, we’ve not really moved forward much since Woolf’s day.
I should point out that I do not know the genders of the people who chose these books. They could all be women (but I doubt it). I have no idea and it doesn’t matter. Many women internalize these ideas and often perpetuate them. In publishing, unlike in Hollywood or the art world, there are many powerful women. There are more female readers than male readers, more female editors, plenty of female novelists getting published (perhaps more than men?) and there are women running top publishing houses. I doubt, however, that there are as many women working as book critics (but that’s just a hunch). Yet time and again, despite women’s involvement, those getting reviewed in the big papers, those getting the top prizes, are disproportionately men. These “best of” lists I’m writing about are representative of a much larger problem. This year, Doris Lessing was only the 11th woman (out of 106) to win the Nobel Prize for literature. And there were people who actually claimed or implied (hello, Harold Bloom) that her award was just a token because she’s a woman. Such is life in the literary world.
For any of this to change, we (men and women alike) have start valuing the stories of women just as much as we value the stories of men. But that can’t happen until the world at large values the life experiences of women just as much as it values the life experiences of men. If even many women can’t see that writing about motherhood is just as important as writing about a soldier in Vietnam, then we clearly have a long way to go.
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Gadfleye Says:
December 7th, 2007 at 2:38 pmI am shocked at the Washington Post and New York Times. I thought Oprah was supposed to tell us which books to read?
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Oprah probably has better taste!
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Caroline Says:
December 7th, 2007 at 11:36 pmWho would you recommend, Anglofille? What books by women in 2007 should win a prize?
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This year saw new books by Alice Munro, Ann Patchett, Lydia Davis, Annie Dillard, Amy Bloom and so many others. I think these Top 5 lists are a waste of time. It’s impossible to judge novels in this way and I wouldn’t even try, but those who do choose to make such lists need to examine their own biases.
As for the writer who made the biggest impact on me in the year 2007, that would be Virginia Woolf.
I need to do a post on Woolf sometime soon. She got me writing again and changed my life.
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Anita Says:
December 8th, 2007 at 3:36 amHey, I’m excited that there was a black man on the list. When’s the last time a black man has been named best of anything except basketball. Of course, the story is about being married to a white woman.
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SpliceGirl Says:
December 8th, 2007 at 7:00 amIt’s the same thing in Hollywood. Movies about the male experience in life are made by the hundreds, respected, critically lauded, revered, nominated for awards by the dozens. DECENT movies about the life experiences of women (that don’t involve falling in love with their best guy friend or mooning over some jerk loser womanizer) are few and far between and immediately labeled “chick flicks” and dismissed as useless cinema before the movie is even released. Just once I would love to go to the movies and see a meaningful film about a bunch of girls life experiences in high school (that doesn’t include a crush on the football star) or a film about a woman’s life experience that doesn’t sum up into a timeline of which men she loved that made her who she is but what she DID that made her a great character. I think I have a very long time to wait…
