In the August 5, 2009 issue of Newsweek, Jennie Yabroff has an article called “Is Richard Russo a Misogynist?” in which she claims to show that Pulitzer Prize-winning, best-selling novelist Richard Russo…is a misogynist. (I believe this makes her title rhetorical, but I will leave that for composition teachers to debate.)
Before I look at Yabroff’s article, let me then respond simply to its title. I’ve read and studied and devoured a lot of literature, and done a great deal of all three within the auspices of what we call “the academy.” In The Academy, one pays a great deal of attention to a work’s biases. Is the author racist? Ageist? Hate little dogs too? No author is safe from the scrutiny of grad students, nor should any author be. While those writing dissertations on literature may not be rocket scientists, they do serve a function within reading society: To ferret out authorial context, prejudice, and weakness, so that we know Ernest Hemingway was a member of the He-Man Woman Haters Club.
All right, all right, I’m taking things a little too far, but you get my drift. It actually is useful, and sometimes even important, for us to know how a particular poet or novelist regards “the other.” Since the two largest human groups of otherness are men and women, it stands that we all might be interested in how writers of stature regard the opposite gender.
I say this all to make it clear that I take no umbrage with Yabroff’s motivation in challenging a high-profile novelist’s take on women. We should look at how Richard Russo creates, develops, and treats female characters; this is a premise that has launched hundreds of thousands of dissertations. We should also look at how Richard Russo treats his male characters.
Yet Jennie Yabroff doesn’t much bother with Russo’s treatment of men, whom he treats “pretty roughly” as she says Philip Roth and “a lot of Updike” do. She skips straight to calling Russo’s novels “fuzzy, golly-gee” books instead of talking about what he actually does do with male characters. Without going into a dissertation-like mode, let’s just say these characters wind up kidnapped, terrorized, haunted, and stuck head-first into a prickly hedge. There aren’t any angelic men in Russo’s novels.
Similarly, there aren’t any “single-minded” women in Russo’s novels, as Yabroff says – but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me first address a Yabroffian trope: She claims that the women in Russo’s novels are like Deborah, the wife in television’s “Everybody Loves Raymond” sitcom: “Smart, competent, emotionally mature but still fabulous-looking women act as foils for immature, self-deluded schmucks, then roll their eyes and sigh good-naturedly as they wait for their lesser halves to get with the program.” Yabroff says that Russo’s women “aren’t afforded the luxury of conflict or shortcomings.”
There are so many ways I could deal with this blanket and inaccurate generalization. Should I machine-gun quotes from “Empire Falls,” “Straight Man,” “The Whore’s Child,” and “Bridge of Sighs,” among other works by Russo? Or should I simply note that Russo has many different types of female characters, including villains, doormats, spitfires, and ingénues? Perhaps I’ll note that I read Russo differently than Yabroff does. Where she sees foils, I see detailed portraits of women whose lives have been forever changed and sometimes ruined by the actions of men they’ve chosen to love and live with (both in bleak blue-collar towns and in cosmopolitan cities). Where Yabroff sees men simmering with resentment towards women, I see men who can’t live without women and know it – they’re trying mightily to figure out what lack in themselves causes them to need women yet also not treat them on an equal level.
Russo, to this reader, grapples with the twentieth century’s conflict about gender roles in an honest and yes, masculine way. Russo doesn’t always understand women. What man does? But Yabroff truly goes too far in the following passage from her article:
“In That Old Cape Magic, for example, there is a passage describing Griffin’s father’s decision to write his (dumb, bovine) fiancée’s Ph.D. dissertation for her. ‘Granted, this was something she should’ve been able to do for herself, but so what? It could be their secret. She’d be so grateful her frozen p—y would thaw.’ Aside from the tired characterization of the fiancée as using sex as a bartering tool (a common tactic of Russo’s perfect bitches), this passage is troubling because it’s impossible to tell who’s speaking. Griffin’s father’s point of view is not expressed anywhere else in the book, so it can’t be his voice. Griffin himself couldn’t know these details of his father’s sex life. It must be the author himself.”
Um, Ms. Yabroff, it’s called “third-person narration.” Many authors use it! It allows a certain omniscience – i.e., one can know Griffin’s father’s views – without a character speaking. Griffin is, in a sense, translating his father’s “tired” characterization of his fiancé, a characterization that infuriates the son. Griffin wants nothing more, in “That Old Cape Magic,” than to understand the ineffable, transcendent something that makes a man and a woman hold on to a relationship despite not understanding each other in the slightest. Is that the author himself? I think so.
Having just gone back to The Academy to start on my long-postponed Master’s degree, I’ve just been introduced to the wide world of literary theory, and frankly, I’m not impressed. The most important tidbit I have gleaned is that the reviewer often has a stronger bias than they accuse the author of spouting, and this is an obvious case. Ms. Yabroff obviously found what she went looking for, and nothing more.
It’s fine to have opinions, strong opinions, and to publish them, however I believe we have a responsibility to fairness when it comes to making sweeping judgments about an author’s personality and character. Yes, it is revealed in their writings, but we have an obligation to look for, note and publish both sides of the issue. Readers are intelligent people. They can figure out the truth without being beaten over the head with the reviewer’s opinions.
I feel like I need to go read Russo now just so I can form an opinion. It’s funny, I am actually on a similar journey (I may never have the answer) to defend Hemingway. I don’t think that any particular male or female intends to outright lash out at “the other” although, I’m sure some certainly do and of course, when hunting, critics can find anything, intended or not.
What I have found, so far, is that no writer is safe from portraying women in a negative light. There are several “woman” paper doll templates to chose from regardless of the story line. Either they are smart women not living up to their potential, either in a dead end relationship or a dead end job or they are cookie cutter beauties without a brain cell or the god awful scenario, the riot-torch wielding feminist who is successful but would be so much “happier” if she’d just have a cocktail and let her hair down. I don’t think this is a fault, so much as a habit. If we were so hard on the characterization of men, we’d find some pretty unflattering molds by male and female writers.
Speaking of female writers, I think, the way in which Hemingway and others blamed woman haters characterizes their lady subjects can often be more feminist leaning than the myriad chick-lit novels which put women in a box from a woman’s POV. Of course, again, I think this is the art of writing. Writers, regardless of what is between their legs, tend to write what they see from their own experience fogged goggles. That is not to say that it’s true but not to say that it’s wholeheartedly wrong on a page, either.
This is a fun topic that I don’t think I’ll ever be done with. Thanks for the thoughtful post. Off to read some Russo!
Excellent post. As I am a PhD candidate writing a dissertation in dramatic literature, I am so all over your assessment of how we define scholarship currently.
The thing is–there IS a service provided in that approach but the approach is so DOMINATING as to be suffocating. And we’ve all learned how to take art a part so well, we’ve lost the ability to APPRECIATE it, or to value appreciation as a scholarly mode.
EXCELLENT.
Okay…have to admit. This blog scared me as a writer. It’s like going to the spa to have a microdermabrasion done and looking up at a television screen to see what your skin looks like close up under a magnifying glass–truly terrifying.
From the perspective of a writer, we all put bits and pieces of our lives and who we meet in our novels. Look at Jane Austen and Pride and Predjudice–you can see with her life story the simularities. In a few recent stories, mothers were portrayed as bad all the time. In the midst of writing one story, I changed the mother’s personality. I made her flawed and lovable. I don’t believe you can judge an author totally by their books as it only gives a shattered picture of the personality behind the book.
I meant in the second paragraph, “In a few recent stories…,” I meant a few of my recent stories.
Topics of misogynist male authors are always interesting ones to me. I haven’t read Russo (beginning to think I should) but this blog post sent me off on a parelell tangent of thought- There seems a fascinating trend in “Gender Studies”, literary or otherwise: They are dominated by women. Where women decry the abuse of their images as portrayed in shows such as “Everybody Loves Raymond” (as in Yabroff’s ““Smart, competent, emotionally mature but still fabulous-looking women act as foils for immature, self-deluded schmucks, then roll their eyes and sigh good-naturedly as they wait for their lesser halves to get with the program.””) there is no similar outcry from male circles (or female, for that matter) of the abuse of the male image as being inherently immature, stupid, callous, slovenly, and slow-witted.
It is sexist to say that women are family oriented- it is not to say that men are NOT family oriented. It is sexist to say that women should know how to cook- it is NOT to say that men don’t know how to cook. It’s a fascinating double standard.
Me, I think it’s just that men haven’t had their movement yet. Maybe one day that will come. Perhaps all the well pressed, articulate, intelligent, caring men in the world will one day step forward and take their power. Regardless, I’ll end my parallel tangent here and extend my gratitude for well-written, enjoyable blogs that encourage me try to stretch my mind around difficult topics and express them on the page.