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caitriSo I'm making my way through Harold Love's The Culture and Commerce of Texts, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England, which goes something like this: BORING BORING BORING DUH KNEW THAT BORING FASCINATING ANALYSIS OF SHAKESPEARE THEN WOMEN'S WRITING BORING BORING. Um, yeah. And I'm only halfway through.
But!! That section on Shakespeare!
So it's from a chapter on reading and Love pulls out a discussion by John Thompson on the number of dialogues from Shakespeare where women are literally read/to be read by men. Eg. Leonato of Hero, "The story that is printed in her blood," Othello on Desdemona, "Was this fair paper / this most goodly book / made to write 'whore' upon?" There's a number of other examples, by Shakespeare and others, including Fuller's "Indeed the Press, at first a Virgin, then a Chast Wife, is since turned Common, as to prostitute her self to all Scurrilous Pamphlets." Basically there's a direct tie of women and sex, eg. women to be "read" (passive), and the sexualization of objects of production.
Even John Donne does this in his Latin Poem to Dr. Andrewes, the translation of which is typically obfuscated: "What presses give birth to with sodden pangs is acceptable, but manuscripts are more venerated. A book dyed with the blood of the press departs to an open shelf where it is exposed to moths and ashes,; but one written by the pen is held in reverence and flies to the privileged shelf reserved for the ancient fathers." This is of course fascinating too because women helped preserve scribal culture--for a number of reasons, including authorial control and "the stigma of print" women from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries circulated their writings among their small circles of friends. (Women who published during this time were open to attack not unlike women today.) So Donne is here feminizing a masculine culture of production, and masculinizing what was becoming feminine culture--which, fascinating.
For reference, couple weeks ago I posted briefly about how women and writing are also sexualized in our terminology--eg, a "hack" was a term for a prostitute that became the code word for a cheap/bad writer, and "streetwalker" which still exists as a term for prostitute now originally referenced women who published and sold pamphlets. In short, the second you leave those private spheres allocated to you, you are open to sexual attack real and metaphorical.
Anyways, back to "reading women." What this really makes me think of is how men like to assign identities and roles to women and women writers. There are actual narratives, eg. in movies/television you have the usual contrast of the predatory woman/femme fatale (maybe best articulated currently by Julian Fellowes in Downton Abbey with what Todd likes to call the "maid fatales"--because we all just *know* those poor men of rank were constantly being seduced by their women emplyees *coff*bullshit*coff*) and the damsel/saintly mother/what have you. (This is also why we always get excited about genuine strong women, because we've had to deal with SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS OF THE SAME ROLES.) And then you have the narratives of our culture, best discussed by Chimamanda Ngozi in "The Danger of the Single Story":
This also reminds me of the problems of when you're critiquing writing in class with friends and you can see so much internalized misogyny on the pages and you have to weigh between giving an honest opinion and saying "Can we take a break for some social justice and consciousness raising?" and just saying "Well this is technically well-written but everyone seems rather rather flat--what's going on here?" (I tended to say the latter because I am often that Awful Nice Person and I really wish I wasn't.)
Anyways, the point of this ramble is really just considering how odd/horrible it is that we've had five hundred years to work on this and not much has changed. Over the weekend, a friend of mine posted on Facebook about how she hates when she posts about her daughter or feminism and whatnot and then men have to comment about how she was "wrong"--so of course a bunch of men posted about how she was wrong. *snort* I of course just left this link.
Really I need to reread Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing, because it doesn't matter if you write fanfic, romance novels, poetry, and anything else--we're still going to be sidelined, we're going to create our own communities of our own--and then be denigrated for those same activities.
In short : AUGH.
But!! That section on Shakespeare!
So it's from a chapter on reading and Love pulls out a discussion by John Thompson on the number of dialogues from Shakespeare where women are literally read/to be read by men. Eg. Leonato of Hero, "The story that is printed in her blood," Othello on Desdemona, "Was this fair paper / this most goodly book / made to write 'whore' upon?" There's a number of other examples, by Shakespeare and others, including Fuller's "Indeed the Press, at first a Virgin, then a Chast Wife, is since turned Common, as to prostitute her self to all Scurrilous Pamphlets." Basically there's a direct tie of women and sex, eg. women to be "read" (passive), and the sexualization of objects of production.
Even John Donne does this in his Latin Poem to Dr. Andrewes, the translation of which is typically obfuscated: "What presses give birth to with sodden pangs is acceptable, but manuscripts are more venerated. A book dyed with the blood of the press departs to an open shelf where it is exposed to moths and ashes,; but one written by the pen is held in reverence and flies to the privileged shelf reserved for the ancient fathers." This is of course fascinating too because women helped preserve scribal culture--for a number of reasons, including authorial control and "the stigma of print" women from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries circulated their writings among their small circles of friends. (Women who published during this time were open to attack not unlike women today.) So Donne is here feminizing a masculine culture of production, and masculinizing what was becoming feminine culture--which, fascinating.
For reference, couple weeks ago I posted briefly about how women and writing are also sexualized in our terminology--eg, a "hack" was a term for a prostitute that became the code word for a cheap/bad writer, and "streetwalker" which still exists as a term for prostitute now originally referenced women who published and sold pamphlets. In short, the second you leave those private spheres allocated to you, you are open to sexual attack real and metaphorical.
Anyways, back to "reading women." What this really makes me think of is how men like to assign identities and roles to women and women writers. There are actual narratives, eg. in movies/television you have the usual contrast of the predatory woman/femme fatale (maybe best articulated currently by Julian Fellowes in Downton Abbey with what Todd likes to call the "maid fatales"--because we all just *know* those poor men of rank were constantly being seduced by their women emplyees *coff*bullshit*coff*) and the damsel/saintly mother/what have you. (This is also why we always get excited about genuine strong women, because we've had to deal with SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS OF THE SAME ROLES.) And then you have the narratives of our culture, best discussed by Chimamanda Ngozi in "The Danger of the Single Story":
This also reminds me of the problems of when you're critiquing writing in class with friends and you can see so much internalized misogyny on the pages and you have to weigh between giving an honest opinion and saying "Can we take a break for some social justice and consciousness raising?" and just saying "Well this is technically well-written but everyone seems rather rather flat--what's going on here?" (I tended to say the latter because I am often that Awful Nice Person and I really wish I wasn't.)
Anyways, the point of this ramble is really just considering how odd/horrible it is that we've had five hundred years to work on this and not much has changed. Over the weekend, a friend of mine posted on Facebook about how she hates when she posts about her daughter or feminism and whatnot and then men have to comment about how she was "wrong"--so of course a bunch of men posted about how she was wrong. *snort* I of course just left this link.
Really I need to reread Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing, because it doesn't matter if you write fanfic, romance novels, poetry, and anything else--we're still going to be sidelined, we're going to create our own communities of our own--and then be denigrated for those same activities.
In short : AUGH.
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Date: 2014-02-05 07:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-05 07:41 pm (UTC)I just finished a chapter that talked about sites of reading and there was a section on coffeehouses. Which, you know, one of my fav tropes in fic is the coffeeshop AU, and I think it's interesting how there's that transformation there from a male-dominated space of business and news to what we could consider a more feminized space of community and writing, esp. as is fetishized (how many women have crushes real or theoretical baristas, which is back to sexualizing production?). Dammit, there's a paper in there, isn't there?