In movies, menopausal women sweat during hot flashes and remove their clothes as they make the most important presentation of the year. Ha, ha! I assure you, nothing of the kind happened to me. It’s like the menstruation myths. You don’t turn into an emotional witch. And once your reproductive system doesn’t define you, you can change your life.
READ BETTER BOOKS, I wrote in my journal.
I went back to the classics. And since the canon has expanded to include women, there are even MORE great books to read.
The women’s canon is in flux, though. Mind you, I have a distorted idea of literary taste because of Anglophilia, cute blogs, internet forums, and all those English publications I read. There is a tendency today to throw everything together, the literary and pop culture. Virginia Woolf is in the canon, but can Elizabeth Gaskell, Viragos and Persephones possibly compete?
It would seem so, judging from enthusiastic posts on the internet.
Mind you, I love Gaskell to bits. North and South is a delightful read, but it is no Middlemarch . And Gaskell is not quite in the class of the other George, either: George Gissing, who is not, I fear, quite in the canon, though he wrote New Woman novels.
I don’t mean to start a riot when I say that Viragos and Persephones are overrated. I have read a lot of Viragos, the A list and the B list. Virago publishes the brilliant Elizabeth Taylor, Molly Keane, and Margaret Oliphant. But nothing would compel me to return to the plodding Sheila Kaye-Smith or Winifred Holtby. And though I enjoy Persephones, I do not remember a single Persephone title. What does that say about wonderful middlebrow reads?
Being an American, I have a clearer idea of the American women’s canon: Susanna Rowson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Dorothy Parker, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Jean Stafford, Katherine Anne Porter, Susan Sontag, Louise Erdfich…
But people quarrel constantly about the canon. Harper Lee and Laura Ingalls Wilder are now in question. The ALA demoted Wilder’s Little House books and took her name off an award, apparently because Pa was insensitive about Native Americans and blacks in the 19th century… Lee’s use of the “n” word in historical context has also caused a crisis.
Is censorship on the rise? Book-banning is always popular. The unexpurgated edition of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover wasn’t published until 1960. Not long ago, an upper-class white woman chided me because “Huckleberry Finn and Uncle Tom’s Cabin make black people feel bad.” Suburban white women don’t have the final say, though. Several African-American writers on the PBS show, The Great American Read, praised Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, which was voted the most popular American read.
In 2015, in a New York Times dialogue about who should be kicked out of the canon, Francine Prose wrote,
One problem with trying to decide who should be kicked out of the canon is that I’m never exactly sure who is in it. I’ve always felt that the canon was like the guest list to a secret party, a roster drawn up by covert hosts at some undisclosed location. I know that Harold Bloom wrote a book in which he ruled, quite definitively, on which writers do and don’t belong. But not having read his book, I have only some vague memory of the brief controversy that erupted when someone noted how few women Bloom included.
Before menopause, I would have been indignant about Bloom’s list. Fortunately, I read The Western Canon after menopause. My list has more women, but I like the traditional canon, too. Viva the hormone change!
One thing that stands out for me here is that I feel Francine Prose should have read Bloom’s list before commenting on it (she could have made the same point without referring to it if she didn’t want to promote his work further). Why is this so difficult, such a frequent occurrence, that writers hold other writers for task in some regard without having actually sussed out the pages themselves which are annoying/frustrating/disappointing? Despite that complaint, I suspect that I would have more in common with Prose’s imagined list than Bloom’s. But I also feel as though there are plenty of good books on Bloom’s list as well. (And I *did* read it, although a couple of decades ago.)
Yes, I enjoyed Bloom’s book, too. And I agree Prose didn’t need to mention the book, because of course she knows what the canon is. We readers figure that out early–is it by visiting bookstores? And the canon, flexible as it is, must be at least twice its size nowadays. People always argue about the content, and that’s fascinating and fun. And, yes, it can be frustrating. I think we women include twice as many writers as men do!
On Tue, Dec 18, 2018 at 1:25 PM Thornfield Hall: A Book Blog wrote:
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