The lingering myth that wowork force’s writing is ‘gendered’ hurts all readers.
It was the two-hundredth anniversary of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice last month.
Austen, directly one of Britain’s most well known and love authors, was very nearly overlooked – like most women publishrs of the nineteenth century… and the 20th.
Today, Austen is one of 51 female writers in our eminent school National English Curriculum – on a list that includes 148 men.
We teach about ten male Nobel laureates, unless just two female.
When it comes to literature, we ar still teaching our children that a man’s voice is better.
Male writers atomic number 18 neutral, genderless, timeless; women writers are just that, women.
Although Norman Mailer’s infamous admonishment of women’s writing as ‘Quaintsy… frigid… [or] stillborn’ was printed in the 1950s, the belief is still very much alive.
In 2011, Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul caused a besiege when he dismissed women’s writing as needs handicapped by ‘sentimentality’.
Yes, that was 2011.
In his view, no woman in hi fiction is his equal, not even Jane Austen.
From high school narration lists to leading literary magazines, the inclination is reinforced that the ‘heavy hitters’ are men and that topics associated with men are of intrinsically more value.
Men write most literary reviews, and, unsurprisingly, they mostly review books by former(a) men.
In last month’s 50th anniversary adaptation of the pre-eminent New York Review of intensitys (NYRB) just a third of reviewers, and a quarter of the reviewed, were women.
And if this internalized perception was not enough, however, marketing does the rest.
The publishing manufacture suffers – badly – from an unimaginative case of “girls like pink, boys like no-account”.
As Fatima Ahmed of the London Review of Books recently observed, we are increasingly ‘treating allegory by women as a genre, which no man could be expected to read and which women will exactly know is meant for them if they buttocks see a woman on the cover’.
The idea of a gendered cover has recently received much media economic aid in light of the controversial rebranding of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.
In this case, publishers trim back the novel from serious fiction to what is referred to as ‘chick-lit’ with a motion picture cover depicting a woman doing her get at-up.
The book is the story of a woman’s descent into mental affection; lipstick and powder doesn’t really come into it.
In whatsoever way whatsoever.
However, Plath’s book is just one of more receiving the ‘pink’ treatment.
Books by women are invariably marketed as romantic, house servant or ‘girly’.
Female writers regularly struggle to break through the chick-lit obstruction their cover restricts them to.
These consistently include ‘effeminate’ script and internal or romantic imagery of varying degrees of subtlety: a rose, a tea set, a girl in a garden.
Men, as a rule, still don’t pick up up swirly, sparkly or otherwise lady-branded books, no return how well respected the author.
Marvel Comics, which has a largely male thickening base, recognises this.
Their series on ‘She-Hulk’, chronicling the exploits of a strong, intelligent super heroine, has eagle-eyed been illustrated by She-Hulk’s pornified form bursting through the page.
But now in that respect’s a girls’ version, adorned with a stick of lipstick.
It shouldn’t be surprising then, that although women read books by both men and women, men rarely reciprocate.
Over the last twenty years, women novelists have do up 34 per cent of winners for top literary awards – videlicet the Nobel, Pen, Man Booker, Pulitzer, and Costa Awards.
This is a significant increase on the previous twenty years.
In 2012, all five Costa Book Prizes went to women, as did the prestigious Man Booker and Pen/Faulkner Awards. We similarly took home the last Pulitzer for Fiction.
These prizes show how public pressure and cognizance have made it impossible for the publishing industry and its affiliates to apparently overlook women’s contributions.
However the continued stereotyping of female novels and their readers not only means that men are, by and large, missing out on some of the capaciousest fiction being produced today, but overly reflects a broader perception of women and girls as simple and superficial.
We can swap this.
It’s estimated that women buy 60 to 70 per cent of novels, so let us speak with our feet – and our wallets.
We must champion the great works of women in schools and through prizes, encourage booksellers to carry gender-neutral covers, and make a stink when women’s books are given ridiculous, reductionist covers.
That would be a good start.
Materials taken from Womens Views on News
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