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Sunday 15 March 2020

Idle musings on male and female writers

As I read about the relationship between a charming, dominating woman and a naïve, inexperienced younger man in My Cousin Rachel, I can’t help idly wondering: what if the stories by Daphne du Maurier, Edith Wharton, or Jane Austen had been written by a man? 
Whilst the differences between men and women are sometimes exaggerated (like the idea that men can’t write women, for example), men and women are certainly different, biologically and socially, especially if we’re talking about the 19th century and early 20th century, when women don’t have equal rights.  
I’m not talking about a difference in prose or style. I don’t really believe in the idea of masculine prose vs feminine prose, certainly not the idea that by looking at a few sentences, you can tell if the author is a man or a woman.    
In terms of scope, there are male writers who work on a small canvas, focus on one strand of story, and pay attention to every detail and nuance, such as Henry James or Flaubert, just as there are female writers such as Jane Austen or Edith Wharton; and if some male writers such as Tolstoy or Dickens work on a larger canvas and tell multiple strands of stories, so does George Eliot. 
The difference I’m talking about is that books by women have a woman’s perspective, and a woman’s sensibilities, especially when we’re talking about the context of the 19th century and early 20th century, when women have less freedom, fewer rights, and fewer options. It’s hard to explain what I mean by “a woman’s sensibilities”, but I can see that in the works of Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Edith Wharton, etc. there is more sympathy for women, and more comment on gender inequality and women’s limited options. Even when there is a deeply unpleasant character, such as the shallow, selfish Rosamond Vincy in Middlemarch or the ignorant, frivolous, and opportunistic Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country, the authors still let us see that, as a woman, they have limited options and narrow experience, and the men who love them, Lydgate and Ralph Marvell respectively, have a narrow, mistaken view of women and share the blame in their conflicts.   
There’s something else. In The Custom of the Country, the protagonist Undine Spragg is very ignorant, but she has social instinct and is extremely good at playing the game and using marriages to her advantage—she chews Ralph up and spits him out, then uses other men in the same way, and always gets what she wants. Now I’m reading Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel, in which a naïve, inexperienced man with a sheltered experience falls prey to an older woman and gets manipulated.  
I can’t help wondering, what if the stories of The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, Middlemarch, Mansfield Park, My Cousin Rachel, or Jane Eyre had been written by a male writer—say, Tolstoy, Dickens, or Flaubert? 
Also, how do you define a woman’s sensibilities?

2 comments:

  1. I have a book set in the seventeenth century that's releasing on Tuesday--unfortunate pandemic books!--and I had to think about the ways in which people of that time regarded women as heroic. A major emphasis among English and American populations was a focus on courage and faith during childbirth, something that was a kind of test that women were often regarded as having passed with great and unusual heroism and fortitude.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ah congratulations.
      Regarding childbirth, I don't want children, so I guess I won't have any opportunity to be praised for heroism and fortitude, haha.

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