Elaine Showalter

One of the more useful side-effects of the widely-publicised troubles at the International PEN Congress held this January in New York may ironically have been the new timeliness which Norman Mailer’s outbursts bestowed on feminist consideration of masculinity, misogyny and writing. Mailer, president of PEN and chief organiser and fundraiser for the huge writers’ conference, shed his new persona as serene literary statesman when he was confronted with an angry protest from women PEN members about the under-representation of women on the programme (16 out of 117 panelists). ‘There are countries in the world,’ he retorted, ‘where there are no good women writers.’ Furthermore, he told a large audience, ‘there are not that many women, like Susan Sontag, who are intellectuals first, poets and novelists second.’ Since ‘more men … are deeply interested in intellectual matters than women,’ he concluded, to have invited more women simply for the sake of fairness would have meant ‘lowering the level of discussion’, risking ‘mediocrity’.

In an uncharacteristic moment of playfulness during her affair with Nelson Algren, Simone de Beauvoir called herself his ‘frog wife’. Although it echoed his tough-guy slang about their Paris-Chicago romance, the phrase has the ring of feminist fable. Like Hans Christian Andersen’s little mermaid, whose story Beauvoir wept over as a child, the frog wife is a changeling, unlike other women; pebbly and awkward, she cannot wed the prince. She is only his night-time consort in what Sartre and Beauvoir grandly termed their ‘morganatic’ marriage, waiting to be loved and released into her true kingdom of the body and mind.

On 13 December 1938, the young writer Jean Stafford, visiting Boston from her hometown, Boulder, Colorado, agreed to go for a ride in his father’s Packard with her 21-year-old suitor Robert Lowell. They had met the year before at a Colorado Writers’ Conference, and Lowell had been courting her intensely through the mails. When she refused to marry him, however, Lowell went into a rage and crashed the car into an embankment. He was unhurt (the court later charged him with driving while intoxicated), but Stafford sustained massive injuries to her skull, nose and jaw that required five painful operations to repair. After the accident, she would always look battered, her eyes teary and ‘permanently welled-up’. As Lowell’s friend Blair Clark remarked, ‘there was about a 25 per cent reduction of the aesthetic value in her face.’

If Kate Chopin’s The Awakening had not existed, feminist criticism must have invented it. Here was a lost and indeed fallen 19th-century novel, an orphan of the critical storm, whose rescue in the 1960s captured all the themes of the emerging women’s liberation movement. Chopin’s heroine, Edna Pontellier, awakens from the New Orleans marriage in which she is a pampered chattel, first to her own sexuality, and ultimately to the claims of a selfhood beyond romance, family, even maternity, which impels her to defy ‘the soul’s slavery’ by walking naked into the sea: ‘She felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known … The water was deep, but she lifted her white body and reached out with a long, sweeping stroke. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.’

We all know the story. A brilliant, neurotic young American woman poet, studying on a fellowship at Cambridge, meets and marries the ‘black marauder’ who is the male poet-muse of her fantasies. Doubled and twinned – ‘one skin between us’, as she says; ‘two feet of one body’, as he says – they launch on the hard labour of poetic careers, supporting themselves on writing prizes and intermittent teaching jobs. She dreams that they will divide the kingdom of poetic fame; she will be ‘The Poetess of America’, as he will be ‘The Poet of England and her dominions’. But the marriage frays. Tied down to their two babies, frustrated at the slowness of success, she discovers that he is having an affair, and they separate. In the following months, she writes the greatest and angriest poems of her life, perhaps the greatest of her generation: but they are rejected by literary editors as ‘too extreme’. In the coldest winter of the century, at the age of 30, she commits suicide by gassing herself.’