THE SPECTACLE presented in the woman’s novel, in that fictional act that I call [auto]biography, is not that “transcendental representation” of the “actual features” of the woman’s life or consciousness, in which the “finite, individual self is transmuted into an infinite, aesthetic self.”1 The woman’s novel, her [auto]biography, does not posit a mirror-imaging of the world through the “passive instrument” of the “symbolic hero” (or heroine).2 Neither is the woman’s novel a romanticizing device for her readers, or for the writer herself. The writer is not assumed to be a mirror image for her audience and her novel is not held up as a mirror of their lives. Reading a woman’s novel is not so philosophically narcissistic an enterprise. Rather, we glimpse a being not unlike ourselves; a being who is in a basic way like us. In this being’s movement, her making of something, we are taken by what we see and give ourselves up to further observation of the being whose similarity to us has forcefully “caught our eye”; our eye is caught by her vigorous immersion in her task, the action of her text.
Thus it is the product of the writer’s work, her presentation of it, that concerns us. Her work is given to our view, and if the text contains and makes visible the signal or gesture we recognize, the writer’s intentions no longer pertain as a matter of the first order. The book is in our hands; the initial gesture is fixed in our gaze. The novel’s beauty or usefulness is, indeed, in the beholder’s eyes, yours and mine. Our response becomes the measure of such a novel. We do not look into a mirror. We see with our own eyes not a universal, idealistic, or infinite self; rather, we see an object of another woman’s making, and it is the making that we see in process, the making that presents itself to us in the shape of the woman’s text.
INTIMATELY CONNECTED with the form of any text is the question of genre. At the outset I will restate that the mark of the twentieth-century “woman’s novel,” as I describe it, is a mixing of genres: the novel—the fictional narrative—and autobiography. “Narrative” has received much attention in the last several decades; similarly, “autobiography” is at present under scrutiny.3
In The Autobiographical Act: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre, Elizabeth Bruss writes:
If our task is to capture living generic distinctions, and not simply to “herd books into groups” [a reference to an epigraph from Virginia Woolf], then we must seek for any further specifications—on the relationship between autobiographer and audience, for example—in the context where they emerge and within the literary community which animates them. Definitions of what is appropriate to the autobiographical act are never absolute: they must be created and sustained. The rules I have sketched simply reflect major distinctions which have survived and which continue to be observed.4
Her task, as she outlines it, is not to point to the “absolute”; rather, definitions and distinctions appropriate to the autobiographical act must be “created and sustained.” “Created and sustained” by whom? We are given no answer to this question. The prescription, the exhortation, remains modestly non-specific, non-attributable, a passive imperative. The ghost of an immutable law seems to float somewhere in the vicinity of this emanating statement.
In an essay entitled “Women’s Autobiography and the Male Tradition,” Estelle Jelinek makes a comparison basic to her discussion and relevant to ours:
Recent reviews of two autobiographical works, one Buck-minster Fuller’s Synergetics (1975), the other Kate Millett’s Flying (1974), demonstrate the continuation of this bias [“social bias against the condition or the delineation of their (women’s) lives” that “seems to predominate over critical objectivity”] to our present decade. O. B. Hardison, Jr., critiquing Fuller’s work, writes,
It is alternately brilliant and obscure, opaque and shot through with moments of poetry. What becomes clear with patience is that the virtues and the liabilities are one. . . . Primary dissociation occurs in language. Words carry with themselves a vast clutter of attitudes, myths, errors, and sloppy approximations that have nothing to do with what we recognize, on reflection, as reality. Hence Fuller’s style. It is not an accident. It is as carefully and self-consciously formed as the style of James Joyce, and its purpose is similar to the purpose of poetry: to tell the truth, neither more nor less, as far as possible. Properly understood it is not English but an artificial language with—let it be admitted—all of the liabilities associated with the first version of any complex invention. With hardly a change of wording, this review could have been describing Flying, but typical of the ruthless attacks on that work are Louise Montague Athern’s remarks, which annihilate the intention and style of Flying in one devastating condemnation. ... a book? No. It is the personal outpouring of a disturbed lady—albeit genius—whose eclectic life is of more interest to her than to the reader. There is no story line, no plot, no continuity. Her writing is a frantic stringing together of words without any thought for the ordinary arrangement of noun and verb. It is hard reading. ... It is utter confusion.5
Jelinek’s point is that women are “reviewed” differently from men. And indeed that is often a valid accusation. More important is that the difference in response to what is, or can be, “expected” of a woman is founded in the anticipation of conformity. The male (masculinist) writer, on the other hand, is praised for nonconformity, for expanding a genre as it exists, particularly if the “stretching” can be found to originate in an acceptable progenitor (Joyce in the case of Fuller’s book).6 Jelinek further observes:
More significant are discrepancies between the critical canon and women’s autobiographies on matters relating to their form and content. Despite the fact that women’s life studies are excluded from the evidence from which the characteristics of the genre are drawn, it is assumed that they will either conform to them or else be disqualified as autobiographies. One may reasonably question whether including women’s autobiographies in critical studies might force modifications in their definitions and theories. Or we might find that different criteria are needed to evaluate women’s autobiographies, which may constitute, if not a subgenre, then an autobiographical tradition different from the male tradition.7
(Note here, by way of comparison, that Bruss’s examples of the mutability and yet the maintenance of autobiography are four, all men: John Bunyan, James Boswell, Thomas De Quincey, and Vladimir Nabokov.)8
I suggest that women writers are likely to be subjected by “objective” critics and reviewers to an especially rigorous examination of their credentials, including their adherence to the genre they are attempting, as their professional readers (critics, reviewers, academicians) define it. Such definitions of genre and the evaluation of a writer’s “generic credentials” are likely to obey the “immutable laws” that we might call “shadow genres.” “Shadow genres,” the ghosts of the law, are with us yet. And women’s writing is more likely than men’s to be subjected to this sub-law, to this “sub-genre” of the “immutable laws” to which Alice James responded with such vehemence.
In response to the shadow of the law, rather than to the law itself, the woman’s novel stretches the genre of the novel. Just as Jelinek suspects that women’s autobiography “may force modifications in . . . definitions and theories,”9 so I suspect that the mixing of two traditional genres, the novel (prose fiction of an extended length) and autobiography, may modify our expectations of the novel.
Some of this law-breaking is deliberate; much of it is not. Most of us recognize that we ourselves have broken the icon, stepped out of their frame and into ours, only after we have committed the act. But having stepped forward, we cannot step backward. The act begins in innocence; after we have seen its effects, we take the law into our own hands.
A woman is making something. That is what we see in a woman’s novel: this display is framed for our attention. The writer frames the space and gives it the contours that allow us to fix our gaze on the performance of her text. An implicit, finally explicit and mutual, recognition of our proprietorship of the womanly gaze occurs in this context—the context of women watching other women in the act of making their texts.
Our literature helps us in “deciphering other highly specialized realms of meaning—in this case, women’s conceptual and symbolic worlds.”10 The concepts and the symbols themselves are continuous, and the architectural (archi-textual?) meanings of our literature, the shapes that it regularly and characteristically assumes, represent a continuum of concepts and symbols. Moreover, I suggest that an established, formal recognition of the aesthetic shapes these concepts assume can be of practical as well as theoretical help to us.
We have our own patterns of perception, be they constituted by history or by sexual or gender difference. Recognition and codification of these patterns for our own purposes, in life and in art, work in tandem. The sooner we establish a common frame of reference—artistic, theoretical, and practical—the sooner any of our enterprises will flourish. It is a matter of establishing and maintaining communication in its most basic, communal sense. In recognizing one another in our aesthetic constructs, in coming to reknow one another, we come to reknow ourselves as well. Thereby, we gain knowledge on two fronts and of (our) many selves. If we look at the woman’s novel in this context, we can see it operating in the interest of the constitution of a community while, concomitantly, it strengthens each of us.
IF THE woman’s novel promotes formation of a community of readers and if that community, in turn, offers the novelist commonly held patterns of perception and recognition through which she develops the form of her novel, then we are talking about a distinct reading and writing community. As I observed earlier, this is a joint enterprise: no patterns in the aesthetic sense could exist without our artists’ formalization of them. The artistic enterprise is in this sense “autobiographical”; at the same time, the collective endeavor might more reasonably be called “biographical” in that it is a collective “writing” of what is common to both reader and writer, despite the individual differences of their contextually specific life stories. Thus we might more accurately refer to women’s novel writing and reading as [autobiographical. If the woman’s novel can be said to work toward the constitution of community, as, at the same time, it emerges from that community, so the acknowledged community, in developing its own conventions, encourages the development and assertiveness of any individual woman’s sense of “self.”
A “displaying text,” then, is the formalization of the mutual act of display and anticipated and anticipatory recognition. The form of the display, the novel’s prominent pattern or structure, can itself be considered an allegorical presentation of the woman’s gaze—the woman reader’s, the woman writer’s—and the novel the point at which they meet. The form of the displaying text makes visible this meeting of their gaze, makes the “invisible” visible; it allows the structure of the text to “speak,” to carry the author’s voice as well as our own.
The textual voice of the woman’s novel can be seen to move in that place where the writer’s gaze meets the reader’s, in their mutual focus. The meeting of their “eyes” is also the meeting of the “I’s” of reader and writer, as well as the blending of their voices. Here the “individual” I of the masculine literary tradition brackets itself out for the duration of the meeting, the reading of the novel. This aesthetic generosity allows the meeting to reinforce the sense of community and relation to others that the woman’s novel attempts to achieve.
We might return to the metaphor of theater. We can mark the place of meeting as the stage of the theater displayed by the frame, the arch of the proscenium: voice, text, reader, and writer are joined at just this point. The relationships and the process that are melded into a single image on this stage characterize what I am calling the “displaying text” of the woman’s novel. Such a rendering allows us a visual representation of the theater of the text of the novel. It is a metaphor dependent precisely on our visual apprehension of the space, the context, in which we live, and write, our lives. As Adrienne Rich writes, “I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle.”11 So we place ourselves unequivocally in our novels by a paradoxical inscription of ourselves in the scene, the place, of our lives, in order to expand and share both the inscription and the living.
IN AN ESSAY called “Women’s Autobiography in France: For a Dialectics of Identification,” Nancy K. Miller asks, “To the extent that autobiography, as Diane Johnson has put it, ‘requires some strategy of self-dramatization,’ and ‘contains, as in fiction, a crisis and a denouement,’ what conventions . . . govern the production of a female self as theater: that which literally is given to be seen? How does a woman writer perform on the stage of her text? What, in a word, is a one-woman show?”12 I began my inquiry with nearly identical questions. Although Miller’s approach to the relation between women’s autobiography and women’s fiction diverges from my own, her essay serves a complementary purpose.
Miller proposes
a dialectical practice of reading which would privilege neither the autobiography nor the fiction, but take the two writings together in their status as text. . . . [N]ot to perform an expanded reading, not, in this instance, to read the fiction with the autobiography is to remain a prisoner of a canon that bars women from their own texts. ... [A woman writer’s] textual “I” is not bound by genre. . . . The historical truth of a woman writer’s life lies in the reader’s grasp of her intratext: the body of her writing and not the writing of her body.13
I am in perfect agreement with Miller’s thesis concerning thorough critical reading of a woman writer. It is the woman writer’s inscription of self, not a textual rendering of her biology or body, that is of primary importance. At the same time, I stress the “common reader’s” meeting with a text, a novel or a professed autobiography. Such a meeting is likely to take place between (or on the stage of) a single volume and the reader. Such a reader may have neither the opportunity nor the motivation for reading the whole text of a given writer—a circumstance that, in Miller’s terms, seems to preclude an involvement with, or a reading of, the “intratext” of the writer, the “body of her work.”
The trace of the autobiography, the autobiographical self, will appear in the writer’s fiction. If the choice were between autobiography and fiction, fiction offers us a more intimate connection with other women than does the typically more decorous and constrained facti-city of autobiography. In speculating on useful readings of any woman’s novel, particularly perhaps those of women who have written fiction exclusively, I must proceed as if the fictional text is all there is. I suggest that it is enough.
My concern is the meeting of reader and writer, which, in my view, is most fully accomplished through the medium of fiction; that is, in the theater of a woman’s fictional text. The aesthetic experience of an individual novel, as opposed to the critical study that concerns itself with the whole of a woman’s work, is bounded by the single stage of one novel’s performance, which is framed for the individual text’s display. The meeting is singular; the performance, discrete. However, the practical aesthetic advantage of the fictional text is its capacity for textual theatrics.
The textual voice of the woman’s novel blends speech and sight, reader and writer, to show us those things that have been left “unsaid,” literally unspoken, in all likelihood, within traditional modes of masculine discourse. But in the theater of the woman’s novel the “unsaid things” are marked all the more clearly to allow us to say “I see.” What we see are our own patterns of response, recognition, and building. In the realm of fiction we remain in the realm of what we have been taught to think opposes itself to “fiction”: the context of our common life.
Indeed, the woman writer’s textual “I” is not bound by the literary contexts and borders of genre. By shedding one kind of “generic” identification—the autobiographical “I”—for the meeting on the stage of another woman’s text, we find ourselves engaged in a fundamental conversation. In reading a woman’s novel we commit ourselves not only to a dialectics of identification, but also to the conversation that will expand into an articulation of our differences.