Women’s Voices
By slm young
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” asks Muriel Rukeyser.
Her answer: “The world would explode.”
How do we categorize a writer such as Joan Didion? Or M.F.K. Fisher? Or Anais Nin? We try to place them all into a genre, or a pigeon-hole; we say that Joan Didion is a New Journalist and M.F.K. Fisher was a food writer. Anais Nin was a diarist. Diane Ackerman is a nature writer; Virginia Woolf was an essayist; Caroline Knapp, a columnist. We strip all we can away from their writing to place it somewhere we understand, under a heading that makes sense to us. It is not enough to say they can all be categorized as writers of nonfiction, or creative nonfiction, especially since that moniker has a difficult enough time on its own trying to be defined and respected. The larger question, however, seems to be why we feel the need to categorize them at all. Will the bestowing of a genre, or a sub-heading within some genre, give these women respect or legitimacy in their writing? Or is this naming merely one more way women can be objects rather than subjects, one more way to deny a woman’s being and her ability to say, “I”?
Do we ask what James Joyce was trying to pull writing The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? How could he expect people to believe this book to be true? The truth of the matter is we do not question Joyce’s methods for telling his story. In fact, there are many who hail him and his methods. We certainly do not call him a liar. We call him a novelist, one who uses his life as subject for his writing. Women writers, however, who use their lives as subject, are, for some reason, called liars.
When I took my first nonfiction class, we began by reading the “big guns”: we started with the father of essay, Michel de Montaigne, progressed through Lamb and Hazlitt, read Phillip Lopate and Virginia Woolf and Joan Didion, but it was not until we began reading a woman named M.F.K. Fisher that I truly understood the meaning of nonfiction. I used to say that the teacher of this class taught me to write, but now I know he just opened the door. Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher taught me how to write. She was a writer her entire life and made her living from writing. Certain pigeon-holers call her a food writer, but the smart critics and readers know she was more than that. In her book, The Gastronomical Me, she put it best:
People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do? They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft. The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it . . . and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied . . . and it is all one.
Fisher was a woman who wrote about life as she saw it, felt it. She wrote about pleasure and pain, food and drink, love and death. She wrote the truth as she knew it.
This, truth, is the basis for nonfiction; it must be. I teach my students that truth and fact are not the same thing. Fact is undeniable. Fact is cold. Fact is, on the whole, uninteresting. Truth, on the other hand, is necessarily different for each person. It is dependent on one’s history and experiences and perspective. Truth is personal.
I believe the writers of nonfiction make a contract with their readers. They say, I am telling you the truth, as I know it to be. I am not promising that my memory is infallible, but I am also not creating people or events to write a better story. If I wanted to do that, I would just write a novel.
Historically, the idea of man as writer and subject, woman as listener and object, seems simple. It is the idea of expectations. Men are conquerors, rulers, and warriors, and it makes perfect sense that men write their stories down. Men do important things, things that need to be remembered. Barrett John Mandel states in “The Autobiographer’s Art” that “the appeal of great men vanishes by degrees if they do not leave something memorable behind them.” Women do housework, raise children, and take care of men. What could women possibly have to write about that anyone would want to read? Despite the fact that women, biologically, are creators, they are not valued as creators. To be valued, means to be respected, to be viewed as someone with something important to say, and it seems as if women will always be considered as other, as less than men.
Much of what is at question here is not just the writer, or her purpose, but the audience, or how a piece of writing is received. Men-as-subject is easily and readily received into academia. The canon is proof of this. My academic career, which was made up of reading upon reading written by old, white men, is proof of this. Men and women, whether as a cause of biology or societal influence, perceive the world differently. Much of what is at stake for us is not just category—whether a book is autobiography or fiction—but value. Throughout history, it has always been more difficult for a woman and her thoughts and her words to be considered valuable. I believe this, in part, has to do with the difference in perspective between men and women, but also in our definition of what autobiography is: the means by which we tell our stories.
According to Barrett John Mandel, “Autobiography is a retrospective account of a man’s whole life (or a significant part of a life) written as avowed truth and for a specific purpose by the man who lived the life.” I would posit that the purpose of autobiography as defined above is to record a life, to document it, and to provide evidence in the argument that one’s own life has meaning. The autobiography works to add permanence to a life through the process of writing it down, but I believe it also works to make sense of a life. The process of writing aids in creating a distance by which we can hope to view our lives from the perspective of an outsider, which may help us and others to interpret it, to find meaning in its events, our actions and decisions, the relationships we have had, and the accomplishments and failures we have produced. By looking critically at the aspects of our lives, we may hope to understand ourselves and to have others remember us. This act of remembering is the main purpose of autobiography.
The process of remembering and then interpreting those memories for a reader, however, is not an infallible one. As a result of time and perspective and experience, our memories may change. It is for this reason that there is always some inherent doubt in the telling of one’s story and in the reading of someone else’s. Most of us are not journalists reporting on our own lives. We are busy with the living. It is impossible to remember everything—every person we have ever met, every word we have ever spoken, every experience we have ever had all through our lives. And for its purpose, autobiography does not attempt or claim to attempt such a feat. Autobiography merely attempts to record the important events of a life, and perhaps this is the reason why men are considered autobiographers, and women are not, because women do not live important lives.
A woman’s perspective, and a man’s perspective of a woman, is probably the most significant reason for women’s supposed inability to write autobiography. The way a woman’s mind works is different than a man’s. Perhaps this stems from the seemingly necessary act of a man to include a wide view of the world. For men, the world is seen through a wide lens, a telescopic lens. He sees the world as a political scape, whereas a woman sees the detail in the pattern on the curtain covering the world from her view. She sees the world through a microscopic lens, where all things are close up and personal to her. What a woman believes important seems inherently different from that of a man. Joan Didion describes this experience, this perspective, perfectly in her essay, “Why I Write”:
My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor.
My belief of what nonfiction writing is varies from Mandel’s belief mostly in the idea of interpretation. Mandel believes that “the autobiographer must limit himself to the retrospection.” I believe the very thing that is interesting about nonfiction is the moving beyond mere retrospection into interpretation. This is where women can truly force their way into the picture. The basis for their perspective, which seems to be the intimate and personal, suits women better for introspection, for the finding of meaning in one’s life, rather than a simple recollection of a life. As a result, if we must define personal writing done by women as anything, then perhaps we should cease attempting to call it autobiography, but something else, perhaps memoir. Memoir, another category within autobiography, is thought of as an eye-witness account. Vivian Gornick states that the goal of memoir is “emotional and not literal truth.” As a result of their intimate perspective, this truth is exactly what women seem more suited to seek. The solution then is not to re-categorize women’s writing from fiction to autobiography, but to redefine the term autobiography to be inclusive of the way women view the world and not limited to a man’s perspective of what and who is important.
Further complicating the categorization of women as autobiographers is the belief that in society a woman’s responsibility is to keep silent, to remain an object. If a woman is bold enough to speak her truth, to make her view of the world known, then men must face the reality of who we are, what we think, and that our place is not necessarily meant to be below them. If a woman’s “job” is to keep the family together, to keep the world together, then speaking of her life—an act that might be compared to letting go—she also forfeits her duty, her silence, and her submissiveness, in other words, she claims her life as her own and not as only a part of a man’s life. A woman who no longer upholds her responsibility as complicit in the male fantasy of supremacy and domination is dangerous. A woman writing of herself and her life is, therefore, also dangerous. Joan Didion, in her essay “Why I Write,” explains what it means to be subject, to be writer:
In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writers sensibility on the readers most private space.
A woman who writes is acting, according to Didion, aggressively, a behavior that is the opposite of what, at least traditionally, a woman should embody. If a woman is supposed to be pure, domestic, and submissive, then writing of herself would be seen as treachery, traitorous, and sinful in the face of her societal expectations. A woman who writes her own story must be willing to face the same problem she faces in society—the desire of others to silence her—a woman writer must be strong enough to say “I” and mean it.
A woman silenced is a woman victimized, and I believe making women’s writing illegitimate, by calling her a liar, we are silencing her voice. In therapy, in order to “forgive the unforgivable,” victims are instructed to name, claim, and blame: name their injury; claim their injury; and blame the injurer. This seems a perfectly reasonable approach to women’s writing. Women must give voice to their stories (name). Women must accept their voices as valuable (claim). Women must hold society responsible if it fails to listen (blame).
I am a woman writer of nonfiction. I tell the truth as I know it. A writer my entire life, I have not yet leapt over the hurdle of my own silence, the fear of my own voice, and my lack of confidence in my importance in and to the world. I have been silenced as all women have been silenced. My thesis advisor helped to silence me by stating that my view of the world was too insular, and therefore, too unimportant. My college boyfriend helped to silence me the night I said no, and he didn’t listen. My mother helped to silence me by never listening enough, never believing enough. I still work to rebel against silence. It is only in words that I am known. I am remembered of Rukeyser, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?”
Let’s find out. Let’s listen, and let us all find out.
