This was the book my feminist book club chose for February
and it lent itself to one of our best discussions! The book is definitely academically focused
and can be dry at times. I do not think
I would recommend it for pleasure reading, but if you want another way to think
about the classics, then this book may be for you. In it, Miller focuses on the “Great” female
writers and looks at how they wrote about men.
I’m going to share the ideas and quotes that I think are the most
interesting and intriguing.
Miller introduces the concept of “learned androgyny”-
that women writers in order to be successful must try to write “like a man” in
order to be taken seriously. Women who
are known as women have a lot more to fear. “Let us pause to consider androgyny
and the possibility that women have been schooled in androgyny. Any such notion must be permeable, for they
have also been schooled to be women and to be women for men. They must avoid mannishness and
monstrousness, they must keep their cool.
Yet women readers who have unlearned their androgyny, or have at least
started on the process, become attuned to the expression of danger and of fear
in women writers. They learn to
recognize fear about writing as a fear about love.” Furthermore, in order to be
the “right sort of woman,” the woman writer should be able to detach from her
identity as a woman. (24)
One of the most notable ideas is that a woman’s adventure
ends with marriage, while a man’s adventure lasts throughout his life. It’s a sad narrative that is extremely
familiar-we saw it with Austen and we see it today with Disney. It’s a narrative that made all of us very
mad, for we are tired of missing out on adventure-we want a life and to read
about lives that are just as full as any man’s!
I want to read about women that do not complete themselves by becoming
married, but by having adventures and experiencing life in all its fullness,
with or without a man by her side.
Miller also said that mother’s experiences are silenced;
that they don’t speak for themselves, but for their sons and husbands
(110). This made me think about the
prevalence of “mommy bloggers” and I wondered if this dynamic has changed with
this new medium, or is framing it as a “mommy blogger” still silencing? In a way, I think so, because the concerns
and joys of mommy bloggers are often considered less important or frivolous to
any other kind. I would love to hear
your thoughts!
Miller had some interesting insights on heroes and I agreed
with them:
If a woman loves a hero that is more likely to make her a
wife of a mistress than a heroine. This,
I think, has presented male readers with difficulties, for if they approve of a
heroine they would like her to marry a man’s hero. They are disconcerted to find that women do
not propose such men as the husbands for their heroines. Indeed, many women’s novels centre on the
dangers for a young woman of loving or marrying her hero.
On George Eliot: They expected this phenomenally intelligent
writer to recommend that her heroines marry men’s heroes rather than their own,
and they have ignored the possibility that it was her intelligence, which was a
woman’s intelligence, not a male accretion, which demanded that a woman
understand her own sexual nature and needs when she offered to spend her life
with a man. Hanging about, alertness to
the needs of a remarkable man, are not good enough for George Eliot’s
heroines. […]Critics who judge that
Stephen Guest or Will Ladislaw are unworthy of these complex moral women ignore
the fact that both Stephen and Will have what the other men in their novels
notably lack: they have a direct, instinctive, powerful sexual presence, and in
matters of sex they are driven to know what they desire and to develop love
from desire. Both behave well to the
women they come to love, though both are in positions where their love is
substantially prohibited by custom, social propriety, good taste. They are sexually honest, and they
communicate their sexual feelings clearly to the women they love, and they
develop morally through contact with them.
(141)
Basically, women's heroes are
good, moral, and sexually mature, which is as much of a hero as I want. What most men do not understand is that if a
man treats a woman with equal respect to anyone else then he is hero enough,
for that is not a truly common practice.
A book like Miller’s is important, because as she says on
page 31, “Projecting women’s problems as apolitical, as personal and
untheorised, has made women vulnerable to kinds of masculine political
analysis, whether reactionary or revolutionary, which subsume women’s concerns
into more general ones, concealing their specificity and ignoring women’s
accounts of them.” But if men’s works and problems can be seen as political and
All Important, then surely our culture can one day turn around and do the same
for subjects written by women.
And how do we do that?-By not pooh poohing women writing
about women’s issues (mommy bloggers, victims of domestic violence, fashionistas,
feminists, for example) and by holding up the concerns of women to equal
importance as those typically of concern to men. Only then will the right to bodily autonomy
be seen as automatic as the right to buy Viagra.
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