Via American Prospect: Barry Gewen, preview editor for the New York Times Book Review, said that the reason there are so few women reviewers is that apparently women are unable to write for general audiences on certain topics—military history is one that Gewen gave, but I suspect there existed latent and unspoken others in his mind. The Harvard Crimson has an article about the lecture in which Gewen said this (it took place at Radcliffe). Money quote:

A longtime editor at The New York Times Book Review said yesterday that his publication isn’t “doing the outreach they should” in order to recruit more women and minorities to the staff.

But preview editor Barry Gewen, who gave a talk at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, said he didn’t want to pursue potential staffers strictly for diversity’s sake.

“Looking for reviewers of a certain ethnicity simply because of an ethnicity makes me a little squeamish,” Gewen, a 17-year veteran of the Book Review, said.

Gewen has since apologized for these unfortunate comments and described it as a “Larry Summers moment”. What is amazing me, however, is not that he said it at all, but that someone in his position might still be clinging, however tenuously, to the silly and outdated notion that particular people simply can’t reach general audiences because of their identities. Do men really have nothing to learn from a woman author? Or vice versa? Or white people from black authors? What is a “general audience” anyway?

Frequently, when this kind of disgraceful statement is made, there’s a lot of furious backpedaling and “I didn’t mean it” and “I was taken out of context”. If that happens in this case—as it seems to be doing—it will represent yet another instance of a man in a position of intellectual power trying to protect that power from the evil interlopers that are somehow Not Like Him. This is, of course, morally and ethically reprehensible. Write to the NYTRB and demand that they disassociate themselves from Gewen’s remarks. Or better yet—especially if you’re a woman—become a book reviewer and write about military history. I bet there’s a general audience out there who’d love to read your perspective. You could make millions!

This blog got started when Kate and I read an essay by Annette Kolodny, entitled “Dancing Through the Minefield.” We were both struck by the following statement:

The (usually male) reader who, both by experience and by reading, has never made acquaintance with those [unique literary traditions and sex-related] contexts — historically, the lying-in room, the parlor, the nursery, the kitchen, the laundry, and so on — will necessarily lack the capacity to fully interpret the dialogue or action embedded therein; for, as every good novelist knows, the meaning of any character’s action or statement is inescapably a function of the specific situation in which it is embedded. Virginia Woolf therefore quite properly anticipated the male reader’s disposition to write off what he could not understand, abandoning women’s writings as offering “not merely a difference of view, but a view that is weak, or trivial, or sentimental because it differs from his own.”

Sitting together, we exclaimed over how well it summed up what we had wished to tell people time and again. Upon reading Mrs. Dalloway in class and having to defend the story of a woman’s ordinary day, I wanted to say just this to my (male) detractors; I wanted to point out to them that their world view was necessarily different from mine simply due to the fact that I have been categorized as “woman,” with all its attendant duties and expectations, from the moment of my birth.

This is not to say that men do not have the capacity to understand a feminine view — quite the opposite. Women have been taught to understand a male view for time immemorial, in the ivory towers of this world. It is not to say that the female view ought to be privileged above the male, though there would be a poetic justice in that, after three thousand years. Instead, it is to say that men have the obligation to attempt to understand women’s writers and women’s concerns, and that we must recognize that as academics we do not exist in a genderless vacuum.

There are other important issues tied up in this too. Kate and I are classicists; we exist in a vacuum, all right, and that’s a vacuum in which there are no women. Medea, Electra, Helen, Antigone, Dido — these are the women we find in the classics. Occasionally a philosopher has a dialogue with a hetaera, a high-class prostitute, and that’s about the extent of our knowledge of a woman who might possibly have been a real person (and even then, a prostitute and a philosopher discussing the world was likely a rhetorical strategy). Historical women, like Cleopatra and Clodia Metelli, are reviled; the ones for whom the evidence is less biased, like Tullia (daughter of Cicero), are largely absent from scholarly work. In archaeological digs, women’s relics have been ignored, packed away in boxes because they are “insignificant.”

But the study of classics is important, and not only for old white men. I believe (and here I’m definitely not speaking for Kate; I have no idea how she feels on this issue) that one must understand the dominant culture before one can fight it. In certain circles, the circles that are often reviled by feminists as “academented ivory towers,” that means understanding classics. The Western canon that today includes so few women was created on a foundation of classical education. What’s more, the Roman empire provides an eerie foreshadowing of the modern U.S.A. (see Kate’s post on the Quiverfull movement). As Santayana said, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

I hope we can remember it, and effect positive change using the lessons we learn. I hope we can somehow create not a feminist poetics but a female poetics, and also a female history, one which does not attempt to artificially inflate women’s influence on politics nor marginalize them but instead redefine, to some extent, what is important about history — what is worth our notice. Something that can stand along side men’s history and the male poetics that has historically been our outlook on literature. Something that, someday, will be unnecessary, as we move towards a holistic view of humanity.

Then,
terrified by her faith, tragic Dido prays for death,
sickened to see the vaulting sky above her.
And to steel her new resolve to leave the light,
she sees, laying gifts on the altars steaming incense –
shudder to hear it now — the holy water going black
and the wine she pours congeals in bloody filth.
(Aeneid, Virgil, trans. Robert Fagles)

The title of this blog comes from the Aeneid — specifically the fourth book of the Aeneid. It’s no surprise to anyone that classical literature is sexist, but the story of the widow Dido in particular encapsulates many of the topics we want to cover here.

If you are unfamiliar with the story, it follows from the Iliad: Greece has just conquered the city of Troy, and Aeneas leads the survivors of the city’s sack away from the ruin. He is fated to found Rome and a new empire, but before he does so he travels around the ancient world. The most significant place he and his followers halt is Carthage in North Africa, a city which was to become arch-rivals with Rome. It has just been founded and is ruled by a queen, Dido. Her husband, whom she loved dearly, had been killed by her brother (with whom she shared rulership of their father’s kingdom), and therefore she and her followers had fled her homeland to found a new city. The kings surrounding all want to marry her in order to control her kingdom, but she rejects them. But when Aeneas lands on her shores, she takes him in; she lives with him as though they were married, though no ceremony takes place. Ultimately, the gods tell Aeneas to move on and found Rome, although he’s begun a life with Dido. He does so, and in her despair (since she rejected the surrounding kings for Aeneas, they will probably attack her city now) she commits suicide.

The largest problem with this story is that the onus of the tragedy is all put on Dido. In a tragic play, the point of this story would be that Aeneas (as the tragic hero) was overcome by lust; lust would have been his tragic flaw, or possibly hubris, in that he believed he could escape his destiny and stay at Carthage. But Aeneas is the epic hero of the Aeneid. He is supposed to be emulated. He is described as “pious Aeneas,” celebrating his actions in leaving Dido.*

This story has been told and retold throughout history. Dido is condemned to the second circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno — the circle of the lustful. But it also was a piece of commentary on history when Vergil wrote it. Dido’s story echoes Cleopatra’s: she is a beautiful, powerful African queen, the effective sole ruler of her people. A Roman leader falls in love with her. Ultimately, she commits suicide. The two queens are the major symbols of Africa in Roman literature; they represent Africa as female and therefore penetrable and conquerable (to the Roman mind, to the Western mind; we all know their feelings about women).

So, Dido revisited. This time, with 100% more feminism.**

*Aeneas, to be fair, doesn’t get a great deal either. The gods kind of use him as a foosball. But at least he gets to live.

**Which is not to say that this blog is only about feminism. But it is about gender interactions and we’re coming at gender from a feminist perspective.