culture
IFOA 2011: Home Economics
Three female novelists discuss the implications of tackling "women's subjects" in their work.
Author, columnist, and round-table moderator Katrina Onstad. Photo courtesy of IFOA.
Writing about the domestic is risky business for women. When a male novelist like Jonathan Franzen opts to delve into the subject (see: Freedom), he is met with nearly universal acclaim, while a woman writing a comparable novel is more likely to be relegated to an unspoken Lady Lit ghetto—at least, according to the authors featured in Saturday’s International Festival of Authors round table on personal and political choices made for love and marriage by the female characters in three women novelists’ works. But the conversation, hosted by the Globe and Mail‘s Katrina Onstad, turned out to be more about the implications of the authors choosing these subjects than the characters themselves.
“Male authors are reviewed by men and women writers are reviewed by women. Since the male reviewers have higher status than the women reviewers, on the whole it means that the endorsements look very different on the book jacket,” mused Orange Prize–winning English author Linda Grant, one of three featured novelists. “Seventy-five per cent of male readers of novels will not read a novel by a woman.”
This theme of gender relations within the literary world permeated Saturday’s discussion, and with good reason: if women’s writing is inherently less marketable than that of their male counterparts, then there’s a real incentive for women novelists to avoid broaching traditionally female subjects in their work—or, at least, to change their names à la A.S. (Antonia) Byatt and Lionel (Margaret) Shriver.
“Even when women are not writing about domestic life, they’re still regarded as somehow smaller,” noted Grant. “I will always remember someone, an academic, saying, ‘War is general, childbirth is particular.'”
“I say, ‘tough.’ I don’t know how else to do it,” replied Toronto-based author Tessa McWatt, whose book Dragons Cry was nominated for both a Governor General’s Literary Award and a Toronto Book Award in 2001. “I wouldn’t write differently. I wouldn’t choose different subjects. My subjects are absolutely domestic and intimate and relationship-based, and they also try to involve particular [personal] and cultural politics. If that isn’t big enough, I don’t know what is.”
“While that’s true about women’s voices, things have changed enormously since I was teaching women’s studies and women’s literature in the ’70s,” said Australian-Canadian author Gayla Reid, whose latest novel, Come From Afar, examines the personal and the political against a Spanish Civil War setting. “It was much more of a struggle for women, a tremendous obstacle to overcome to be published and be considered a serious writer.” Yet, Reid also recalled how certain authors’ careers accelerated after the theme of the domestic was swapped out for grander, more prototypically masculine subjects—Margaret Atwood’s transition from feminist examinations of romantic relationships into dystopian fiction was cited as one example.
But, as McWatt pointed out, narrowing in on individual relationships also provides a broader snapshot of society. “It’s the human condition we’re dealing with. How much bigger can we get?”