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realism, naturalism, and modernism . Certainly, there were wavelets
during the twenties, when the Woman's Christian Temperance
Union spearheaded the drive for Prohibition . As she charged into a
Wichita bar, Carrie Nation wrote, "The first thing that struck me
was a life-size picture of a naked woman, opposite the mirror. ...
It
is very significant that pictures of naked women are in saloons ... .
The motive for doing this is to suggest vice , animating the animal in
man and degrading the respect he should have for the sex to whom
he owes his being, yes, his Savior also!" She threw her first two
stones at the painting, her third at the mirror; then she began to
smash bottles with an iron rod . And now that womanist writing is
once again in full flood , Carrie Nation's descendants are spear–
heading a drive against pornography- and for the same reasons .
For all that, it would be unseemly for men to grouse about
womanist fiction . Whatever else it is, literature , says Kenneth
Burke, is equipment for living, although some equipment is better
than other kinds . And if womanist fiction helps equip anybody to
live , it more than justifies its existence.
If
men need to equip
themselves , there is already more male chauvinist fiction around
than anyone could read in a lifetime. Just the same, every contribu–
tion so far by American fiction writers to world literature has been
an assault on the womanist complex of values. The fiction of
Cooper, Poe , Melville, Twain, London, Crane, Dreiser, Stein,
Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald is all antiwomanist. (The ex–
ceptions are Hawthorne, Edith Wharton, and Henry James, who
appropriated womanist sentiments and situations for ulterior pur–
poses.)
So, until recently, was the fiction of Roth, Bellow, and Heller,
for example . But Roth's last three novels constitute an extended
apology for the treatment of women in his best two novels,
When She
Was Good
and
Portnoy's Complaint.
Saul Bellow's last novel has no
hero; but its flighty male protagonist (who reminded every reviewer
of Saul Bellow) is chastened and domesticated by the courage and
dignity of his wife and mother-in-law - as the flighty and philander–
ing hero of Joseph Heller's next to last novel is chastened and
domesticated by his virtuous wife Belle . There's a failure of nerve
there, perhaps even a craven impulse to curry favor, certainly a
reknotting of the apron strings these writers had once gleefully cut in
the characteristic American male writer's gesture of self-definition .
It's too bad, because craven fiction never equipped anybody for
anything.
