The Womanish Novel

My boyfriend C. and I are always giving each other book recommendations. Or maybe I should say that we're always trying to recommend books to each other with little success. Again and again, he's tried to get me to read The Naked and the Dead or Blood Meridian, but I can't stomach the stuff. I don't want to read about trench warfare or scalped corpses or any world that is habitually saturated in violence. I think I paid my dues in college when I had to read All Quiet on the Western Front and The Last of the Mohicans and Beowulf. No more trenches and battle axes for me!

C. feels the same way about my suggestions. Wuthering Heights? "No way." Sense and Sensibility? "I think I'll pass." He calls these books “womanish.” When I press him about what, exactly, this means, he just says, “I don't know. They're about women and family and houses. 'Domestic spaces,'” he laughs. “I'm sure they're good books, I'm just not into them.”

I've always believed in the androgynous mind a la Virginia Woolf, that gender doesn't matter when it comes to writing or reading good literature. Female writers are just as good and as universally appealing as male writers, and vice versa. I'm a feminist, damn it, and I believe that brilliance trumps genitalia any day!

So why have I spent the last few weeks with Alice Monroe, Laura Moriarty, and Marilynne Robinson while C. has camped out with Norman Mailer and Tim O'Brien?

Our failed recommendations have made me realize that gender does matter, at least when it comes to a reader's taste. And while it's hard to hear C. calling my books “womanish” without feminist warning alarms going off in my brain, his preference for "mannish" books is only fair. Books written by and about men are usually different than those written by and about women. Female authors are often more interested in personal fulfillment than social or financial gain, in emotional survival and social acceptance more than physical survival, in love instead of conquest.

Perhaps the difference between “womanish” and “mannish” novels is just an off-shoot of the innate differences between men and women. Or maybe C. has been taught that war and adventure are cool while I've been trained to be hyper-aware of personal emotions and family interactions. Either way, I'm beginning to think that the gendering of literature is not a bad thing, as long as critiques of quality are kept out of the argument. I don't think masculine literature can be called “better” than feminine literature, and vice versa. Clearly, there are examples of good and bad writing in each: women may have chick lit and the Oprah Book Club and romance novels, but men have detective novels and westerns and sci fi, which provide more than enough pulp to balance us out. And, of course, each gender has been responsible for some universally beloved classics, including Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice and A Farewell to Arms and The Sound and the Fury.

Even though it's okay that C. and I keep our separate bookshelves, I think, too, that there should be some room for exchange, just for the sake of variety and open-mindedness. Maybe I'll trade my copy of Mrs. Dalloway for C.'s The Thin Red Line; perhaps he'll take Housekeeping if only I'll give No Country for Old Men one more try.