Yesterday, Peter Karsten of Katoomba Book Exchange shared some thoughts on the question "Do men and women write differently?" Today author Caron Eastgate Dann gives a woman's perspective (unedited).
Eastgate Dann writes:
If you’d
asked me the question “Is women’s writing different from men’s” in the 1990s, I
would have told you I believed so, but I didn’t have any current information on
this topic, because I hardly ever read any fiction by men.
It wasn’t a
conscious decision to read novels written by women only, but something that
evolved and took over my recreational reading habits almost as if by stealth. I
don’t see it as discriminatory: after all, I’d spent a childhood reading
through my father’s collection of books, top-heavy with thrillers by the likes
of Wilbur Smith and Peter Benchley on the advice of teachers at my school when
I did a reading test as a nine-year-old. “Don’t give her children’s books, she
should be reading adult books,” they said. I’m not sure if the raunchy,
bloodthirsty novel Jaws was
quite what they had in mind, but oh well.
This was
followed by an undergraduate degree in literature that emphasised the great
British canon, mostly by men. Oh yes, there were your Austens, your Brontës,
your (George) Elliot, but nothing unexpected. No discoveries, no long-lost or
little-known masterpieces by underrated women writers. At the risk of being
labeled a philistine by traditionalists, I have to admit that much of this
canon I found unspeakably boring: Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene that went on and on and on; Sir
Walter Scott’s tedious tome Waverley of Scottish highland bleakness and war; and any
of the many supercilious rants by Samuel Johnson. For some reason, I still
have, from those student days, my copy of selected works by Johnson, and when I
picked it up while writing this article, I turned to his The History of
Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. On the third page, I’ve written a word of marginalia: “bored”, it
says.
I am not
questioning the greatness of any of those writers, and I may feel different
about them today. But as an 18-to-20-year-old female student in New Zealand,
the British canon seemed to have little of relevance for me, though I did enjoy
the Romantic poets. I liked American writers better: Mark Twain, Hemingway. We
didn’t study a single Australian writer, by the way.
To break the
monotony of that British canon, I also studied New Zealand literature and a
wonderful subject about the 20th century novel that focused on writers in
exile. While these subjects at least got away from the all-white
middle-to-upper-class writers, our reading lists were still sadly lacking in
writing by females. In NZ literature, I can remember studying Katherine
Mansfield and Patricia Grace, but most of the others were men. In the 20th
century novel subject, there were Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Gabriel García Márquez,
Kurt Vonnegut. But I can’t remember studying a single female writer. I can
excuse studies of writing from previous centuries for being malecentric,
because many more male writers were published in those days. But in the late
20th century, there was no excuse for women not making up 50% of any fiction
reading list.
Anyhow, in
the 1990s, I found myself purposely always selecting novels by women. I wanted
to read authentic stories with strong female characters, realistic language and
sensitively handled love scenes from a female point-of-view. I didn’t want to
read about violence, torture, hunting or soldiers (even though I would go on to
write about those things in my own novel). If I read a war story, I wanted it
to be about what the women did, not the men. I wanted details of quotidian life
in days gone by or in cultures different to my own. I was a young woman shaping my own writerly identity and I
needed role models, I see now.
By 1992, I
was acknowledging to myself and others that I avoided novels written by men.
This could be difficult. For four years during the 1990s, I lived in Thailand,
and naturally, there weren’t as many English language book shops as back in
Australia or New Zealand. The wonderful Asia Books shop on Sukhumvit Rd was a
sanctuary for me, with thousands of English-language books, packed into four
narrow storeys up rickety staircases. In the fiction department, the shop
concentrated on blockbusters and novels written by local expatriates, so it
could be a challenge to find something that was both literary and had a female
author. I ended up reading a lot of mass-market fiction, but I’m not adverse to
an easy, fast read, either.
One exception
I remember from the 1990s was the Cairo Trilogy, by Naguib Mahfouz, a Nobel Prize for Literature
winner in 1988. The first in the series, Palace Walk, is still in my bookcase (most of my
other paperbacks from that time being long given away). First published in 1956
in Arabic, it was translated to English in 1990 and, interestingly, the English
version was edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. I remember marveling at the sensitive way Mahfouz
constructed his female characters. Indeed, Palace Walk begins with an atmospheric scene of a
woman who wakes at midnight, as she has done all her long married life, to
await her husband’s return “from his evening entertainment”, when she would
have to serve him food and drink “until he went to sleep”.
I returned
permanently to Australia in 1999, and around 2000, I set up a women’s book club
in the small seaside community where I was based, which continued for about six
years. I started to keep a book reading diary at this stage, and it’s interesting
to look back on my reading habits. It reveals that in 2000 and 2001, only one
in every 10 books I read was by a man. My book club members—who were all
personal friends, as well—encouraged me to relax my stance and read some male
writers as well. By 2002, about half the books I was reading were written by
men.
At a meeting
in 2004, a friend suggested I read A Special Relationship, by Douglas Kennedy. “It’s about
postnatal depression,” she said enthusiastically, “But don’t let that put you
off—it’s really good.” Now, not only did I have no children myself, but I had
seen my mother go through post-natal depression after my brother was born, and
I didn’t think I needed to read about it, too. However, I took the book from my
friend and decided to give it a go. I was hooked. I was amazed that a writer
could “get” a female character so well. I couldn’t put the book down, and at
the end I knew I had been very wrong about male writers not being able to write
female protagonists authentically.
The statistics,
however, may be a little misleading. One of the reasons my records show that
50% of the books I read are by men, is due to one male writer: Alexander McCall
Smith. Basically, I read everything he writes, more for his wonderfully quirky
female characters than for the strength of the plots. Precious Ramotswe, the “traditionally
built” hero of The No. One Ladies’ Detective Agency series, is one example.
People
reacted with surprise when I used to tell them I read only female writers. Even
women found my decision strange. Yet really, I was only doing what many men do:
being sexist in my choice of reading material.
There is a
lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest men read mainly books written by men,
while women read books written by men and women. It was the subject of a panel
discussion in June, 2011 at the Women’s Word Literary Festival at Lucy
Cavendish College, Cambridge University: “Why Don’t Men Read Books By Women?”. And it’s widely reported that J. K. Rowling used
initials rather than her first name, Joanne, because her publisher told her
boys wouldn’t read books written by women. On its website, Esquire magazine has a list of “The 75 books
every man must read”; only two are written by women (To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, and A Good Man is
Hard to Find, by
Flannery O’Connor).
There is also
some research that supports this premise. In
2005, research into gendered reading habits was carried out by two British
academics, Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins, of Queen Mary College in London.
They interviewed 100 writers, academics and critics, asking them whether the
last novel they read was by a woman or a man. Seventy-five per cent of the men named
a male writer, whereas women were as likely to have read a book by a woman as a
man. From this, they concluded that “Men who read fiction tend to read fiction by
men, while women read fiction by both women and men.” For more on the study,
see “Women are still a closed book to men”, by David Smith of The Observer, May 29, 2005.
While I
believe my decade focusing on women writers redressed the balance of my earlier
years reading a traditional canon, I am happy today to say that I seem to have
a gender balance in my personal reading choices. In fact, some of the best
books I’ve read lately are by men: The Stolen Child, by Keith Donohue, a retelling of the
changeling legend and an examination of the link between mother and child, is a
favourite. The biggest surprise for me was probably Jane Bites Back, by Michael Thomas Ford. Looking at
the premise, it seems outrageously silly: Jane Austen becomes a vampire so is
still alive in the 21st century and running a small bookshop in upstate New
York; in swings Lord Byron, who is also a vampire and her former lover, and who
is not to be trusted. However, it’s an incredibly witty read that really works.
Neither of these fine male writers writes about traditionally ‘male’ subjects
and I’m sure they’d be rarely included on lists of books men should read.
Three of my
favourite Australian writers at the moment are all women and, I’ve just
realised, all write historical novels and all have first names beginning with “K”:
Kate Moreton for her unputdownable and beautifully worded historical sagas;
Kate Grenville for her devastatingly tragic stories of colonial Australia;
Kerry Greenwood for her sumptuous and rollicking Phryne Fisher series set in
1920s Melbourne. In fact, I’m trying to think of any male Australian writers
I’ve read recently. OK, Alex Miller. Brilliant.
Caron Eastgate Dann is a Melbourne writer,
journalist and lecturer. She is the author of a novel, The Occidentals (under the name Caron Eastgate James),
and a non-fiction book, Imagining Siam: A Traveller’s Literary Guide to
Thailand. She has a
PhD in literary studies and currently lectures in Print Cultures at the School
of English, Communications and Performance Studies at Monash University.
Previously, she was an entertainment industry journalist, working for Woman’s
Day, the Sunday Herald
Sun and TV Week, among others.
AWW writes:
Dr Eastgate Dann's books don't appear to be available from AWW supporting bookshops as ebooks (nor, in the ones checked, do they appear in their print catalogues available online). The following links are to Google, which will be launching the #aww2012 challenge to its Google+ circles for International Women's Day.
Imagining Siam
The Occidentals
Another Aussie Bookshop which has recently joined the challenge is
Foster's Little Bookshop in South Gippsland, Vic.
If you have any thoughts on this post or on the question of whether men and women write differently, please feel free to comment below.
The
year before last, I wrote a Rapunzel story. It began with the prince arriving
at Rapunzel's tower to find her severed plait of golden hair tumbled in a pile
on the grass. As he mourned over it, the witch rode up. She captured him, took
him to her castle and imprisoned him in a dungeon. There, the single strand of
hair that he had souvenired sprang to life, insinuated itself into the padlock
and released him, and led him through the castle to rescue Rapunzel from her
prison room.
