This is a time change for women writing. There are a plethora of women writers who no longer write stories of characters whose goal is finding and keeping their love. On an inteenationaol scale, women are creating new forms, inventing new stories and assuming new roles as authors, as narrators. This is happening fast and happening everywhere.
Let’s use this thread to introduce new writers and say what each has contributed to a new way of writing wherever she/they is/are writing.
Somehow I came away from Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Eudora Welty, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolfe, Flannery O’Connor with more than “finding and keeping their love.”
I would say that “characters whose goal is finding and keeping their love” is more a trope of female protagonists, regardless of the gender of the writer. After all, it isn’t as though Harry Potter’s goal is to find and keep his love, just to name the best-selling fiction ever written by a female author.
Other than romance novels, women writers have always dealt with issues other than romance. In addition to those mentioned, there’s Shirley Jackson, Ursula K. Leguin, Agatha Christie, Daphne Du Maurier, Kate Wilhelm, Connie Willis, the Baroness Orczy (arguably the inventor of the first superhero, the Scarlet Pimpernel, and the first armchair detective), James Tiptree, Jr., Harriet Beecher Stowe, and many more.
There would be if women were confined to writing only those stories. However I don’t believe that has ever been the case. I was going to cite more examples, but it looks like that’s been done.
Many writers are not trying to write story anymore with a beginning middle and end.
So love or success in life as previous novels of development were no lomger are the standard.
Many women writers are trying new ways to write and to think. Novels have poems in them have clippings from newspapers are an assortment of many different perspectives instead of being one unified story.
Let’s say it all here. I like to read the defense of love (an uncurable romantic here)
Sarah Manguso has changed forever our idea of a diary in her book Ongoingness. She had written thousands of daily diary entries, tossed all of them, started over and it’s amazing. Check her out on line.
In the great women writers of the 19th and 20th century we can see ways they are changing the forms of the novel. Any ideas anyone?
I think this is one of the few areas where I’d agree with that sentiment. There are certainly genres and styles that “need” a gender perspective - I mean, I suppose a man could write a truly deep and moving lesbian love story and a woman could write a blood-n-guts combat novel (assuming she isn’t one of the very few women who have been in full-out front-line combat, a changing situation), but on the whole readers and critics would be right to be suspicious of the authenticity.
But if we haven’t reached the day when the gender of a writer for most… can’t think of what I want to say; let’s just make it “books”… the gender of most book writers doesn’t make a difference, then we should be very close.
It’s not at all hard to come up with numerous examples of female writers, past and present, who write about other things. What is really difficult is coming up with male writers who do “write stories of characters whose goal is finding and keeping their love.” I can’t think of any, though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are male romance novelists writing under female pseudonyms.
Too late to edit as I had to do a little research since I couldn’t remember the real names. Jennifer Wilde’s Love’s Tender Fury was one of the founding fathers of our 30 year long romance novel love affair. His real name is Thomas E. Huff. Leigh Greenwood is a best selling romance author who hid that the gender neutral name hid a man.
But the romance genre is dominated by women and men tend to hide their sex.
None of that’s particularly new, though. You’re basically describing post-modernist literature, which had it’s heyday in the middle of the last century. While there were certainly some very important women in that movement - you can’t really talk about stream-of-consciousness novels without mentioning Kathy Acker, for example - it was still largely a male dominated field, and you can’t really trace any one of those innovations to a single author of either gender.
There once was a writer named May Sinclair. In 1918 she was the first person to use the phrase “stream of consciousness.” (William James said ‘stream of thought’) Sinclair was reviewing (I think) the first three novels from Dorothy Richardson’s eventually nine-volume Pilgrimage.
Writing stream of consciousness in the novels was generally associated with men Modernists Faulkner, Proust, and Joyce. This is odd though because women are usually said to be so 'psychologically oriented."
Miller as bit earlier had a good point about postmodernist or poststructuralism as it’s sometimes called. That this idea of not having a story was said to be postmodernist.
Really now, I think that so many writers were trying to get further away from retelling a story, to try to touch things more intensely. We readers love to be kept in suspense. Genre is the form we read–like science fiction, fantasy, prose, poetry etc.
Now both women and men writers are working at blending these forms together, including blending in film and internet and history. It happens far more than in the middle of the 20th century. It’s everywhere.
I wonder what women writers you are reading now and what are you finding in their writing. I wonder too what you think about the things you’ve heard over and over again about women writing. Really interested in what people are writing here.
Wow! Failure. Being a phony. Materialism. Myths. Dreams. The violence of money. Money corrupting people’s souls. Heroism–Gatsby is a hero to Jay, the frustrated inner narrator of Gatsby. I’m leaving a whole lot out. What do others think?
Then are novels about anything? Or are they something?
Amy Yamada is the “bad girl” of contemporary Japanese fiction and writes from the perspective of prostitutes and dominatrixes (“Kneel Down and Lick My Feet,” from the Monkey Brain Sushi anthology) and Japanese women with black American boyfriends or husbands (Well, maybe that qualifies as chasing your love against all odds after all…). A taboo-breaker with some literary cred.
Baroness Orczy wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel, a proto-superhero type who wore a disguise and rescued doomed aristocrats from the guillotine in revolution-era France. She also wrote detective novels and other genre fluff around 1900.