An Irate Accent

By Martha Duffy

By God, if wommen hadde

written stories

As clerkes han with-inne hir

oratories,

They wolde han writen of men

more wikkednesse

Than al the mark of Adam may

redresse.

When Chaucer's earthy Wife of Bath made that ill-veiled threat, literature was still largely in the hands not only of men but monks. It was more than four centuries before women in any numbers began to write fiction; but almost as soon as they did, it was clear that writing talent has no gender. Jane Austen is one of the supreme geniuses of the novel, and only a handful of writers have exceeded the accomplishment of George Eliot, the Brontes, Virginia Woolf. For years, though, criticism has been full of daffy generalizations uttered with patriarchal assurance about women as miniaturists, delicate sensibilities, custodians of domestic custom.

That kind of remark is going out of fashion, but the mark of Adam is still quite visible. Anthony Burgess, a first-rate commentator on fiction, still "gains no pleasure from serious reading that lacks a strong male thrust and a brutal intellectual content." Louis Auchincloss once paused in the course of a critical essay on Jean Stafford to express awe that she was resourceful enough to hail a cab.

It is true that women have generally excelled in the "cottage industries" of publishing--mysteries and romantic escape fiction. From Charlotte Bronte to Colette, they have been most widely admired for their writing about love. Today, however, a good deal of serious women's fiction is echoing to the cadences of hate, or at least anger. There are enough stories about the wickedness of men and descriptions of male lapses in courage and feeling to delight the Wife of Bath.

As never before, female biology and sexuality are being used as raw material for fiction. The trend did not appear overnight. Among the lonely precursors of the new irate accent in fiction was Christina Stead's

The Man Who Loved Children, one of the most virulent portraits of male delusion and domestic agony ever created. Though it has become a minor classic, it was all but unnoticed when it came out in 1940. In the 1950s Simone de Beauvoir's She Came to Stay and Mary McCarthy's A Charmed Life introduced to a wide audience the intelligent, exacting female who assumes that all the best minds are androgynous and finds nothing but trouble as a result. Now the growing list includes Doris Lessing, Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Margaret Atwood, Marge Piercy, Cynthia Buchanan and Joyce Carol Gates.

No book is more important to understanding the new perspective than Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, published in 1962. It is an ambitious, cerebral work about a generous, brave and intelligent woman named Anna Wulf, a writer, leftist, divorcee, analysand who, like the author, emigrated from South Africa to London. Anna thinks of herself as "a free woman," independent of marriage contracts and numerous other social conventions, really interested only in people "who have tried the frontiers."

The Golden Notebook is an investigation of that kind of woman's experience, in and out of love, particularly after she is no longer young.

It turns out that old bonds are at least as important as new freedoms. Though she is hardly an average housewife, Anna wakes up one morning beside her lover with what she calls "housewife's disease." It is a tension, "an unavoidable tension resentment. Resentment against what? An unfairness. That I should have to spend so much of my time worrying over details, that he will spend his day served by women in all kinds of capacities. I learned that the resentment is impersonal. It is the disease of women in our time. I can see it in women's faces, their voices."

Society serves its men better than its women. But Anna--and the author --are large-spirited enough to conquer mere resentment. A greater problem, and one that, unlike Anna, many free women do not care to acknowledge, concerns love. The fact is that Anna's lovers leave her not because of fights or faults, but because their need for her is gone. Anna's need remains--to a painful degree. An old-fashioned dilemma indeed for a free woman, and Lessing does not miss the irony. At the end of the book Anna says ruefully, "Here lies Anna Wulf, who was always too intelligent. She let them go."

A lethal Lessing story is One Off a Short List, about a failed novelist who decides he must "have" a successful woman. He chokes with jealousy watching her work calmly with her peers, but he mistakes his tears for libido. Gleaming icicles of detail fall from the page. Sizing up the woman's pleasant study, the man thinks, "I wouldn't like it if my wife had a room like this." Like a weary warrior goddess, Lessing views the seduction step by monstrous step. The woman gives in out of pity for the lout. "The stupid cow, the slut," he concludes.

The story illustrates one of the most popular themes in current women's fiction--the way men use women. Customarily the man is seen as pompous, competent in a petty way and callous. Sue Kaufman's Diary of a Mad Housewife, a shrewd and graceful comedy, shows an ambitious lawyer husband telephoning orders to his shaking wife, who has just nearly been mugged, about packing his suitcase: "Have you got a pencil? I want my tan cowhide two-suiter, not the one from Mark Cross, the new one from T. Anthony. Then I'll need two suits--the gray Glen-plaid Dacron-and-worsted from Brooks, and the oxford-gray basket-weave polyester-worsted from Press. Then six ties, use your own judgment, keeping the suit in mind . . ." And so it goes. After taking down a veritable mail-order catalogue, the wife also throws in underwear, handkerchiefs and a belt --items her peacock forgot.

Irony, rather than the frontal anger of the Women's Lib movement, has turned out to be the way novelists approach advertising and consumer myths that try to keep a girl in front of a mirror or a stove or send her chasing after a husband and material possessions. Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman is a wise little novel about a nice girl named Marian who works for a firm of market analysts, spending her time investigating people's reactions to ad slogans. As the date of her wedding to an equally nice young lawyer approaches, she gags on anything she tries to eat. Relief comes only when she bakes a woman-shaped cake, decorates it to resemble herself and sends it off to her fiance. The message is to leave her alone to find out who she is and what she wants.

Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, published nine years ago, has become a cult book in part because it turned out to be a compendium of free woman's complaints. None is more devastating than her lampoon of the Boy Friend, Buddy Willard, who is afflicted with the hauteur born of a doting mother and a medical education. Whether conferring upon the heroine the privilege of becoming Mrs. Buddy Willard or asking her upstate to compete with a nurse he thinks he is "infatuated with," Buddy is the ultimate soap-sculpture man.

Extremists in Women's Lib confront the possibility of doing without men altogether, or using them sparingly for breeding purposes, but few women novelists have gone so far. Monique Wittig's Les Guerilleres, which describes an almost mythological society of Amazons, is the exception. Part of the reason for this restraint, probably, is that a novel, unlike politics, needs emotional complexity to flourish. Women's deep malaise, moreover, is more amorphous, more tangled with emotional and cultural roots than polemicists can afford to contemplate.

During her lectures, the insouciant Gertrude Stein used to pose a general question: "How do you like what you have?" That is close to the heart of the women's dilemma. Many do not seem to want what they have in life; and not coincidentally, it is getting harder for them to know what they do want. The result, as portrayed in fiction, is an ambivalent state of free-floating anxiety and dissatisfaction.

One of the best descriptions of this not uniquely feminine complaint is Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays, a novel about a minor actress named Maria Wyeth. Maria is having what used to be called a nervous breakdown. She drives the Los Angeles freeways as if she were sailing in a regatta, listens to call-in shows, broods over ghastly newspaper items about toddlers locked in burning cars. Much of what she has done with her life is repugnant or meaningless to her. The various sequences in her considerable sexual experience are even hard to differentiate: "At times it seems as if her life had been a single sexual encounter, no beginnings or endings, no point beyond itself." Maria's only child is mentally unbalanced, a fact she can not cope with. She flees her exasperated husband, seeks out old lovers and then repels them, goes to parties she hates and behaves badly, is finally a passive accomplice in a suicide.

Given charity, she could merely be called a woman both too careless and too fastidious emotionally for her own good. She can make no kind of accommodation. When she takes a psychiatric test, she writes NOTHING APPLIES across the questions. She concludes,"They will misread the facts, invent connections, will extrapolate reasons where none exist."

For enduring persuasive power a novel customarily needs to be freer of self-pity than most recent fiction by women writers--more like Doris Lessing, that is, than some of the others. But these books may well be more en lightening and less misleading than many of the militant feminist tracts. They provide nuances and perspective. They talk about people in the context not of politics but of life and death, love and time. Away from the polemics and the rhetoric, the underlying problem of women may be one of specifics--or a vast mosaic. Fiction cannot--and should not--supply answers to problems or define them simply. Still, few writers have more justly or modestly stated the feminist case than Maria in Play It As It Lays: "Whatever arrangements were made, they worked less well for women." Amen.

Martha Duffy

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