(Cross-posted from Sarah Ditum)

Catherine Storr’s novel Marianne Dreams is a story about a girl whose drawings have the ability to direct her dreams – and whose dreams in turn have the ability to direct real life, though they do so in obscure and unpredictable ways. She has the problem of all responsible artists: her work doesn’t only represent the world, it alters it too, and though her acts of creation are powerful, she cannot control that power absolutely. (When I was casting around for my blog title, I came up with the name Paperhouse, after the film adaptation of Marianne Dreams, partly because at the time I thought I’d be writing mostly about journalism, partly because that strange relationship between representations and the things represented has always seemed to me the most important thing in the world to write about.)

Sometimes, explains Marianne, as she tries to comprehend the rules of the pencil-drawn world she has created, it’s as though the thing she draws has existed in advance of her drawing it – I imagine she means this in the same way that saying the word “cat” pulls a string of referents behind it, ideas of cats and cattishness that have been established long before the user of language ever shaped their palate around that collection of sounds. “So if I drew anyone, whatever it looked like, it would have to turn out to be you, because somehow or other you’re already here – I mean, you were here before I ever drew you, only I couldn’t see you till I’d drawn it,” she explains to Mark, the real-life boy who has been summoned into her dream-world.

But Mark is dismayed by this. He doesn’t like considering himself a part of someone else’s dream – and worst of all, the deepest insult to his dignity, that someone else is a girl:

“Oh, shut up,” Mark said. “Don’t be so beastly apologetic and so sure you’ve done everything. You seem to think this world belongs to you and that everything that happens here happens because you’ve made it. I don’t believe it, anyway. Look at you – you’re only a little girl.”

Only a little girl. The idea that he might be an object in someone else’s subjectivity upturns Mark’s sense of his importance, so he belittles Marianne and attacks her abilities. It is not tolerable to him that she should be the authority in this world of which he is a part, so he proclaims that her sex makes it impossible for her to have such powers. Nor is he alone as a male disturbed by the force of female imagination. A decade or so after I read Marianne Dreams, I read another book that, like Storr’s, presents the work of fiction as the creation of another country where strangers can meet and commune. “The art of writing is a very futile business if it does not imply first of all the seeing of the world as the potentiality of fiction,” writes Vladimir Nabokov – the book is his Lectures on Literature, based on the course he taught at Wellesley and Cornell in the 1940s and 50s. He continues:

The material of this world may be real enough (as far as reality goes) but does not exist at all as an accepted entity: it is chaos, and to this chaos the author says ‘go!’ allowing the world to flicker and to fuse. It is now recombined in its very atoms, not merely in its visible and superficial parts. The writer is the first man to map it and to name the natural objects it contains… Up a trackless slope the master artist climbs, and at the top, on a windy ridge, who do you think he meets? The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and are linked forever if the book lasts that long.

Like Mark in Marianne’s dream, the reader is somehow there already in the new world of the master artist, waiting to be clasped. But like Mark also, Nabokov cannot imagine at all that the artist could be other than male. When he says “the writer is the first man to map it”, that “man” is eminently sexed. The neutral human subject, to Nabokov’s mind, had a penis; his image of greatness is strictly drawn to exclude anyone with a vulva. Of the seven authors addressed in the lectures, only one is a woman – Austen – and she was included only because of faculty pressure. “”I … am prejudiced, in fact, against all women authors. They are in another class,” Nabokov grumbled in a letter to Edmund Wilson.

And even when persuaded that Mansfield Park could stand alongside Ulysses and Metamorphosis as a work of literary genius, Nabokov had to make it clear that Austen could never be considered part of the very first order of writers: “Novels like Madame Bovary or Anna Karenin are delightful explosions admirably controlled. Mansfield Park, on the other hand, is the work of a lady and the game of a child. But from that workbasket comes exquisite needlework art, and there is a streak of marvelous genius in that child,” he says, cloyingly patronising. It can hardly be inadvertent that Nabokov chose to compare Austen’s work with two novels by men about eponymous female characters of famed depth and vividness. Men can write women, is the message; but women can barely be believed to write at all in the true sense, whatever that is.

Exquisite needlework art. The game of a child. Only a little girl. Such gentle slanders against women’s work persist, as Phyllis Rose describes in her essay Prospero’s Daughter, often using the charge of privilege to imply triviality: “Women, who might well be considered a class in themselves, are attacked for belonging to the middle class – or, even worse, the upper class – by male critics who are themselves usually middle class but speak as though they were working a 12-hour shift in a steel mill.” Yet the truth is that, on our samplers and with our black sketching pencils, women’s art has always been able to comprehend the inner world of men. Men, after all, are people, and for women who see themselves as people too, the imaginative step from her subjectivity to his is not so very far. But for men who see women as strange subordinates, our interiority is inaccessible – possibly even entirely unimaginable. For misogynists (and a very great many male authors, including many of the very great ones, were and are misogynists) the humanity of female people is literally unthinkable.

One work that didn’t even obtain the status of needlework in Nabokov’s eyes is George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Nabokov is persistently snooty about the pursuit of “truth” in fiction, so perhaps this is why Eliot’s high realism holds little appeal for him; but the veracity of Eliot’s characters is one of her greatest charms. All of them, male or female, sympathetic or not so sympathetic, obtain the vividity and substance of convincing humans. They have an internal logic that means their actions are never quite predictable yet always consistent with what we know of them. Casaubon’s agonies of vanity and frustration, Caleb Garth’s self-abnegating honesty, Lydgate’s fine mind and spots of commonness – all these are recognisable as types of humanity. They are so much more than lines on paper: like Mark in Marianne’s dream, they seem to have existed in advance of and independently of the author invoking them.

Compare this with a densely-plotted Victorian triple-decker that Nabokov does think worthy of his attentions – Bleak House by Dickens. Nabokov loves Dickens: he urges his students to “embrace”, “bask in” and “surrender to” Dickens. (The eroticised submission in this approach is perhaps not unrelated to Nabokov’s relief at leaving the “porcelain and the minor arts” of feminine Austen behind for a properly masculine writer.) There is of course a lot to enjoy and admire about Bleak House, and Nabokov delineates it expertly, but there is at least one way in which it falls staggeringly short of Middlemarch: Dickens is hopeless at illuminating the inner worlds of his female characters. Even to call them characters is something of an overstatement. Esther, who narrates a substantial portion of the book, doesn’t have even so much subjectivity that you could call her a central consciousness: her personality, inasmuch as it exists, is a pure distillation of insipidity.

There is no female author of any reputation who writes men as badly as Dickens writes women, and yet Dickens’ stark incompetence with imaginary women is seen as no demerit to his genius at all. At most, it’s alluded to in a tone of light-hearted ribbing, as though it were a distinctive foible that added to his charm. But really, it is evidence that one of the most esteemed literary minds in our history was incapable of conceiving that women were people more or less like him. Consider a version of Middlemarch written under similar privations of cross-sex sympathy, with a listless wibbling jelly-form in place of Lydgate, and it should become obvious how appalling a shortcoming this is in Dickens. Yet it goes largely unremarked, because the idea that women are people – whole people, interesting people, active and complicated people – continues to be a radical innovation at the very edges of culture.

Some male writers acknowledge their own stuntedness when it comes to imaginary women. In the fantastical Lanark, Alasdair Gray’s eponymous hero is trying to rescue unwilling Euridice figure Rima from a hellish place called the Institution. Before he can take her away, however, he must cure her of a disease called dragonhide, which is a sort of metaphorical manifestation of emotional coldness. To do this, he reads to her, and although most of the books available in the Institution are unsatisfactory to her, she takes great pleasure in scandal-and-sensation novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish:

Once or twice he asked, “Are you enjoying this?” and she said, “Go on.”
At last she interrupted with a harsh rattle of laughter. “Oh yes, I like this book! Crazy hopes of a glamorous, rich, colourful life, and then abduction, slavery, rape. That book, at least, is true.”
“It is not true. It is a male sex fantasy.”
“And life for most women is just that, a performance in a male sex fantasy. The stupid ones don’t notice, they’ve been trained for it since they were babies, so they’re happy. And of course the writer of that book made things obvious by speeding them up. What happens to the Blandish girl in a few weeks takes a lifetime for the rest of us.”

Rima, even when her dragonhide is cured, remains inaccessible to both Lanark and the author. After a male-voiced omniscient figure called the oracle has spent half the book narrating Lanark’s pre-descent life (in which he was a young Glaswegian man called Thaw) Lanark turns to Rima and asks what she thought of his story. But Rima has heard something else entirely: “In the first place, that oracle was a woman, not a man. In the second place her story was about me. You were so bored you fell asleep and obviously dreamed something else.” Gray knows that the woman’s story exists. He understands that she has a self that is not subsumed within the hero’s subjectivity – and yet Gray cannot tell that story. It is lost to us, because she is a she. At their last encounter, Rima teasingly says to Lanark: “You always found it hard to recognise me.”

When I first read Nabokov’s Lolita, I thought the gradual vanishing of Lolita herself was a terribly good literary effect, and a proof of the novel’s moral intelligence: poor Lo, consumed by Humbert, shrouded in his pederast fantasy like the “Haze” of her surname, until she winks out of existence in the tragically obscure town of Gray Star. “Yes,” I thought, as a young woman of 17 keen to prove my own urbanity to this imperiously clever book, “Nabokov is telling us that the real Dolores was always there, obscured and despoiled as she was by her abuser.” But I think, now I have read many more books and found so few men capable of sympathy with their women characters, I was too generous to Nabokov – who after all shows little enough sign of being able to write or even read women.

If we want to know our own selves, women will have to tell our own stories, listen to our own oracles. We must ignore the voices of the men who declaim our triviality, remembering that for those who would control us, our humanity is the most dangerous thing about us. “It’s decent of you to allow that I may be a real person after all, and not just part of your scribblings,” says Mark to Marianne, with much sarcasm, in Marianne Dreams. How many male authors have afforded that much decency to the women they write? How many male critics and readers have been so decent to women writers? They always found it hard to recognise us. Women cannot be content with working for a place in this man’s world. Instead, we must illustrate our own dreams, write to invent new worlds altogether; and there, on a windy ridge at the top of a trackless slope, we will find our sisters and embrace.

I thought I was going to be a journalist for as long as I can remember. Then I had children and thought I was going to be an academic instead (because there’s a stable and lucrative business). Then I crashed out of a DPhil in 2008 and started working at a doomed craft magazine startup that year. I lasted six months before going freelance. I’m currently a columnist for The Guardian and operations editor forTechRadar.com.

I’m also a regular contributor to New Statesman and New Humanist, and my work has appeared in Elle, Psychologies,Runner’s World and many other outlets. I write about feminism, family, fitness and some things that don’t begin with F but I can’t remember right now. And if that’s not enough, you can read more on my blog, Paperhouse (part of the Mumsnet Bloggers Network).

(Cross-posted from Ramblings of a Zen Kitten)

Valley of the Dolls is a Hollywood thrill-ride from start to finish and, as commentator Julie Birchill posits, is ‘the most fun you can have without a prescription!’

Author Jacqueline Susann took her chances at the American Dream by trying, and failing, to become an actress. Susann’s subsequent seen-it-all attitude became the base note for writing a thick novel in the style of a gossip column, in which she intricately weaves the debaucherous exploits of her three heroines. It is fantastically rumoured that Valley of the Dolls was written on a hot-pink typewriter.

However, the pressure of fame, screen tests and sexuality can be very daunting. The ‘dolls’ referred to in the title are a metaphor for prescription drugs and uppers; little red, yellow and green pills which tranquilize, energize and down-size the girls. Not that Anne, Jennifer or Neely are particularly concerned about the traditional ideals of what it means to be ‘feminine’ in 1940s America. Femininity in this cultural and time sphere has connotations of demureness, chastity, maternity, obedience, beauty and innocence. All but Anne are unconcerned about the (society-created) disadvantages of losing their virginity, and Anne, the anti-Venus, is labelled ‘frigid’ and worries that there is something wrong with her.
The character of Jennifer North, too, is completely against what the patriarchal standards of femininity believe to be ‘normal’. We learn, from her first third person perspective within the book, that she was involved in a lesbian relationship with a girl named Maria for several years, who divided her time between an innocent friendship role and sexual deviant. Maria not only initiated the sexual acts with Jennifer, but taught Jennifer how to explore and enjoy her own body. This is something Jennifer very much keeps to herself throughout the rest of the novel; potentially through fear of what her other friends would say.

Set in the 1940-1960s, the reader follows the strive for glittering stardom with our ingénue protagonists Anne Welle (secretary-turned-model), Jennifer North (all-American beauty), and Neely O’Hara (hot-headed actress). The novel follows their journey from the savage fight to kick start their careers in the most world-coveted setting, where thirst for fame and fortune plagues the teens’ minds. Watching washed-up stars like Helen Lawson fall from grace only encourages them, as the girls are determined to avoid her mistakes.

The cut-throat nature of the agency business means that friendships are brought to their limit; after all, there is only room for one at the top. Moral qualities such as loyalty, chivalry and honesty are thrown to the wind in this dog-eat-dog world of Susann’s lavish creation.

More than just a fast-paced swipe at the media industry, Valley of the Dolls is essentially a feminist novel. If you are to take one message from it, let it be the one she screams at you: “Guys will leave you… your looks will go, your kids will grow up and leave you and everything you thought was great will go sour; all you can really count on is yourself and your talent”.

The character of Helen Lawson is the complete antithesis of what it means to be feminine. She is loud, abrasive, arrogant, sexually available and selfish. However, this apparent lack of consideration for all others around her is essentially the key which brings her much success and happiness. Albeit rather alone at the top, she is at the top and ensures that all of her (self-centred) dreams come true.

Jennifer is also notorious for her ‘European’ films where she appears in many roles completely naked; an artistic vision which the other girls label brazen and condemn her for. Femininity places a strong emphasis on a girl’s need and want to become a mother. We learn that Jennifer has seven abortions; the ultimate abhorrent act of disinterest towards the ‘natural’ mothering instincts she should possess. Her carefree attitude towards the abortions, as a medical inconvenience rather than any source of moral, philosophical or religious turmoil, further isolates Jennifer as deviant from the ideals of motherhood and, in turn, femininity.

The ultimate betrayal of the patriarchy, and probably the biggest feminist comment made by Susann in the whole novel, comes when Jennifer commits suicide. Before the final act, Jennifer is inches away from the happiness she has so eagerly sought her whole life. She is to be married to a Senator who, through the nature of their meeting and falling in love, convinces Jennifer he loves her for the person she is inside rather than the body so popular with cinema fans. When it is uncovered that Jennifer has breast cancer and is to undergo a mastectomy, her Republican husband-to-be enthuses about how much he cares for her breasts because they are in essence herself and he could not stand anything happening to them. This pushes Jennifer to silence and, after sneaking out of the hospital and home, overdoses on her dolls to leave the perfect embalment of the perfect body.

The reliance on stimulants for comfort has been likened to little girls clutching their dolls. Furthering the feminist theme, Susann’s, albeit subtle and implicit, use of the word ‘dolls’ could symbolise the treatment the girls receive by their male counterparts in patriarchal America.

With the creation of the television an ever-present threat and husbands becoming notoriously hard to hold onto, the search for happiness, and the discovery of what ‘happiness’ even means, for each girl becomes more and more difficult.

Addiction, ageing and (medical) affliction are inherent concerns for Susann. Unexpected twists and gruesome ends; this book is exhilarating and incredibly difficult to put down. If Carlsberg made novels about glamorous Hollywood hyperreality…

Ramblings of a Zen Kitten: I am a feminist and have been for some years, even more so after doing a gender studies module at university. My blog often contains feminist comments upon books I have read as well as current events happening in the world. I also write articles about beauty products, and the occasional poem. My Twitter handle is @JennyRaRaRaw.

(Cross-posted from Katharine Edgar)

I had this book in my ‘Young Adult Historical’ folder for a while but it was only when I was a few chapters in that I realised it wasn’t historical: Collins has set her story in an imagined country at a time that is never made clear. There are televisions, but many of the people still live a peasant lifestyle, so it’s some time in the late twentieth century.

She’s written historical before (The Broken Road, a story about the Children’s Crusade, based in medieval Germany) and a ghost story with a brilliantly realised partly historical setting (Tyme’s End). But the refusal to tie Love in Revolution to a particular time or place is a very successful decision. It gives it a mythical quality that makes the story resonate, it increases the sense of isolation and thus the intensity, and finally, it allows Collins to create a national sport, pello, which the characters are fanatical about.

Pello sounds a lot of fun. It’s a brutal, aggressive game involving two players bouncing a ball against a wall, hard enough to do each other considerable damage. It can kill. Every year the top players compete for the King’s Cup. One of the most famous pello players, known as The Bull, comes from the village where the main character, Esteya, lives, and the story begins when he returns for a visit and is challenged to a game.

Present at the game are Esteya, her brother, Leon, who has revolutionary sympathies, and Skizi, a young outcast from persecuted, gipsy-like community.

Through the summer Esteya’s secret relationship with Skizi grows stronger. But Communists like Leon are fomenting revolution, and when it comes, the consequences are bloody.

Love in Revolution is a moving, gripping, haunting book. Collins’ writing is plain and expressive all at the same time – ‘I felt like a chocolate bar left in the sun, all sticky and oozing’ ‘Skizi nodded, once, her eyes on my face as if I’d caught her doing something illegal’. (I wish I could write with such unpretentious beauty as she does.) It’s a coming-of-age story which fits seamlessly with the story of the coming-of-age in a country, as it abandons optimism and faces the reality of the post-revolution world. This is a book which deserves more attention, and should be read by teens and adults alike.

Love In Revolution by B.R.Collins, published by Bloomsbury Children’s, 2013.

Katharine Edgar: is a Yorkshire-based feminist who writes young adult fiction, including the forthcoming Five Wounds. She blogs about her historical fiction writing: Tudor history, women’s history, crafts and writing.

(Cross-posted from Du Erkennst Mich Nicht)

originally published in 2012

Caitlin Moran, author of How to be a Woman, is renowned as a comedic feminist. In laymen’s term, she’s the British Tina Fey. She often says that her insights give a fresh and “in your face” idea of what feminism actually means. But is her approach to feminism what society really needs to make the feminist movement evolve and move forward? The Feminist Texan says “No!”

Many topics Moran brings up in her book are very important to the feminist movement. These topics are the basic ones that most people know and often bring up, such as openness with the truth about abortion and the media’s distorted version of women.

Moran does get a bit away from every day feminism by quoting a well-known (and often times a bit strange) feminist named Germaine Greer. Though Greer is very interesting, when Moran uses ideas such as having a taste of your own menstrual blood, I’m sure it is easy to see how many people are lost and jump off of that bandwagon. She also puts down women who will not label themselves as a feminist even though the majority of them do have feminist values. Her idea of a feminist is best described from this description:

“Here is the quick way of working out if you’re a feminist. Put your hand in your underpants.

a. Do you have a vagina? and
b. Do you want to be in charge of it?

If you said “yes” to both, then congratulations! You’re a feminist.”

Another bad point to Moran’s approach to feminism is shown in her somewhat “White Privilege” attitude. This is seen in her response to an interview that she had with Lena Dunham, creater of the show “Girls.” Moran was interviewed by Bitch Magazine but the interview was killed and never ran in the magazine.

Moran was questioned on Twitter if she had asked Dunham about the lack of women of color depicted in the show. The response that Moran gave was definitely inappropriate and made her outlook definitely have a white privileged appeal. Her response: “Nope. I literally couldn’t give a shit aboutit [sic].”

Though I do find Moran quite interesting, I definitely can see where The Feminist Texan is coming from. For an introduction to feminism, I, personally, find Full Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti to be much more applicable to people’s lives and it is sassy and in your face, but it is truthful and gives good explanations to feminist topics and problems.

Du erkennst mich nicht: My blog ranges from anything and everything that could do with feminism. I also add in random articles that I find interesting, but the heart of the blog is about feminism.  (@CeliaHubbartt)

(Cross-posted from It’s Just Not Feminine)

I’ve read two Lucretia Grindle novels The Lost Daughter and The Villa Triste and enjoyed both immensely. Both books are modern day crime mysteries, set in Italy with the roots of the mystery in the past. In the case of The Lost Daughter the story centres around events of the 1970s and especially the murder of the politician Aldo Moro and the Red Brigades. In modern day a young woman goes missing while studying in Italy. Her father and stepmother have just arrived to celebrate her birthday and prove to be the link back to a 1970s conspiracy. The Villa Triste begins in 1943 and the Italian partisans. In the modern day a partisan hero has been killed in highly specific circumstances possibly related to his time as or because he was a partisan. Both have been well developed mysteries with decent female characters.

The two main investigating police officers in both books are in fact male but the stories and mysteries are most definitely female-centric. In fact the focus doesn’t really stray from the female lead roles even when the story switches to the investigation that is taking place.

She is a woman who clearly likes other women and has an understanding of why, even not so likeable women behave the way they do. She doesn’t follow the stereotypes, which is refreshing. The female characters all have faults and positives. There is no dwelling on how the female characters look, in fact their appearances are only mentioned to set an initial impression and if relevant. They are also all doingsomething. They aren’t just companions to men or facilitating men doing things. They are the stars of their own story.

Grindle shows a real awareness of abusive relationships in The Lost Daughter. She seems to understand how and why abuse begins and why women get caught up in it. In fact the two main female characters, stepmother and daughter are groomed when they are young. However, in addition to that the police officers also recognise the dynamics at play. There are no excuses made or minimising of the abuse.

In The Villa Triste Grindle writes about two sister’s experiences during WWII. Apart from being really interesting, punctuated with factual information and statistics, it is an account of the war through women’s eyes. As most of history has been written seen through men’s eyes I really enjoyed reading about the emotions and fears of the two women, even though it was a fictional account. But it was more than that. Grindle seems to have an awareness that women’s history has been largely eradicated and makes an effort to highlight that and fill in some gaps. For example, did you know that out of approximately 200,000 partisans, 55,000 were women and 35,000 of them fought in armed engagements. So much for women not fighting on the frontline. So much for women not being as capable or too weak or too high a risk. This is emphasised perfectly in this quote and also sums up quite nicely why I have enjoyed her books:

‘That even in that day and age,’ he said, ‘in any day and age, that people always insist on believing their heroes are men.’

ScallopsRGreat: Feminism, Sport and a little bit of life [@scallopsrgreat]