Fictional Feminism: How American Bestsellers Affect the Movement for Women's Equality

236 Pages·2003·1.01 MB·English

by  Kim Loudermilk

LITERARY CRITICISM AND
CULTURAL THEORY

Edited by

William E.Cain
Professor of English
Wellesley College
A ROUTLEDGE SERIES
LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL
THEORY
WILLIAM E.CAIN, General Editor
DEATH, MEN, AND MODERNISM
Trauma and Narrative in British Fiction from Hardy to Woolf
Ariela Freedman
THE SELF IN THE CELL
Narrating the Victorian Prisoner
Sean Grass
REGENERATING THE NOVEL
Gender and Genre in Woolf, Forster, Sinclair, and Lawrence
James J.Miracky
SATIRE AND THE POSTCOLONIAL NOVEL
V.S.Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie
John Clement Ball
THROUGH THE NEGATIVE
The Photographic Image and the Written Word in Nineteenth-Century American
Literature
Megan Williams
LOVE AMERICAN STYLE
Divorce and the American Novel, 1881–1976
Kimberly Freeman
FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS OF THE 1970S
Joanna Russ and Dorothy Bryant
Tatiana Teslenko
DEAD LETTERS TO THE NEW WORLD
Melville, Emerson, and American Transcendentalism
Michael McLoughlin
THE OTHER ORPHEUS
A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality
Merrill Cole
THE OTHER EMPIRE
British Romantic Writings about the Ottoman Empire
Filiz Turhan
THE “DANGEROUS” POTENTIAL OF READING
Readers and the Negotiation of Power in Nineteenth-Century Narratives
Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau
INTIMATE AND AUTHENTIC ECONOMIES
The American Self-Made Man from Douglass to Chaplin
Thomas Nissley
REVISED LIVES
Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Authorship
William Pannapacker
LABOR PAINS
Emerson, Hawthorne, and Alcott on Work and the Woman Question
Carolyn Maibor
NARRATIVE IN THE PROFESSIONAL AGE
Transatlantic Readings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Stuart
Phelps
Jennifer Cognard-Black
THE REAL NEGRO
The Question of Authenticity in Twentieth-Century African American Literature
Shelly Eversley
FICTIONAL FEMINISM
How American Bestsellers Affect the Movement for Women’s Equality
Kim A.Loudermilk

Routledge
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Published in 2004 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001
http://www.routledge-ny.com/
Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE
http://www.routledge.com/
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of
thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.”
Copyright © 2004 by Taylor & Francis, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted orreproduced or utilized in any form or
by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without permission
in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts from The World According to Garp by John Irving, copyright © 1976, 1977, 1978 by
John Irving. Used by permission of Dutton, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Excerpts from The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike, copyright © 1984 by John Updike. Used
by permission of Alfred A.Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Excerpts from The Women’s Room by Marilyn French, copyright © 1977 by Marilyn French, and
from The Bleeding Heart by Marilyn French, copyright © 1980 by Marilyn French, are reprinted
with the permission of Simon & Schuster.
Excerpts from The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Copyright © 1985 by O.W.Toad, Ltd.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin and by McClelland & Stewart Ltd., the Canadian
publishers. All rights reserved.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data Loudermilk, Kim A. 1956 Fictional feminism: how American
bestsellers affect the movement for women’s equality/by Kim A.Loudermilk. p. cm.—(Literary
criticism and cultural theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-96806-
2(alk. paper) 1. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Feminism and
literature—United States—History—20th century. 3. Atwood, Margaret Eleanor, 1939-
Handmaid’s tale. 4. Feminist fiction, American—History and criticism. 5. Irving, John, 1942—
World according to Garp. 6. Feminism and motion pictures—United States. 7. French, Marilyn,
1929—Women’s room. 8. Updike, John. Witches of Eastwick. 9. Best sellers—United States. 10.
Women’s rights in literature, 11. Feminism in literature. 12. Sex role in literature. I. Title. II.
Series. PS374.F45L68 2004 810.9′3522–dc22 2003021640
ISBN 0-203-48517-3 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-57922-4 (Adobe e-Reader Format)
ISBN 0-415-96806-2 (Print Edition)
Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1
Chapter One Out of the ’70s: Feminist Politics and Popular Fiction 15
Chapter Two From The Women’s Room to the Bedroom: Marilyn French’s 38

Feminist Fiction
Chapter Three Sexual Suspects: Feminism According to Garp 65
Chapter Four “Weak Sisters”: Feminism and The Witches of Eastwick 94
Chapter Five “Consider the Alternatives”: Feminism and Ambivalence in 119

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
Conclusion Into the ’90s: Fictional Feminism and Feminist Politics 146

Notes 171
Bibliography 206
Index 222
Acknowledgments
During the years I have worked on this project, I have benefited from the help and advice
of many people. Several Emory University faculty members provided guidance and
insight throughout this process, especially Amy Lang, Angelika Bammer, Kate
Nickerson, and Bob Detweiler. Woody Hunter, Harriet King, Bobby Paul, and Rose-mary
Magee allowed me the time and resources I needed to complete this work.
The Visiting Scholars program at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York
City provided me with the space and materials I needed to complete my discussion of The
Women’s Room. I could not have completed Chapter One without the use of the vast
collection of women’s movement materials in Special Collections at the Northwestern
University Library in Evanston, Illinois. A very special thanks to the NUL librarians, who
cheerfully retrieved file after file from the archives.
Members of my writing group all devoted much time and intellectual energy to this
project: Martha McCormick, Janet Jakobsen, Annie Merrill Ingram, Carole Mey-ers,
Maria Pramaggiore, and Kim Whitehead. They read my drafts closely, critiqued them
both carefully and kindly, and pushed me when I needed pushing. My colleagues in
Emory’s Provost’s Office helped me in more ways than I can name. Molly McGehee,
Kirsten Rambo, Donna Troka, and Tiffany Worboy all cheerfully edited, proofread, and
critiqued my work. Amy Benson Brown’s careful and thorough comments improved this
project immeasurably, and Jennifer Stocking went above and beyond the call of duty,
taking care of all the details. This book was enriched by the help of all of these talented
women.
Many friends and colleagues at Emory and elsewhere offered encouragement along
the way: Allison Adams, Saralyn Chesnut, Christi Craig, Brenda Crosby, Kelly Eberhart,
Martha Ebener, Elizabeth Goodstein, Mimi Kirk, Julie Kubala, Cris Levenduski, Andrew
McAllister, Karen Poremski, Linda Taylor, and Kimberly Wallace-Sanders. I would
especially like to thank Ann Frellsen, who provided constant and consistent support.
Thanks, too, to my family: my parents John and Pat Van Steenhuyse and my siblings,
Sherri, Steve, and Beth, for teaching me to love reading and learning and for always
believing in me.
Finally, this project would have been unthinkable without the constant love and
encouragement of my husband, Dan Loudermilk. He gave me invaluable gifts—time to
think and write, financial support, emotional and intellectual confidence—without which
I could never have finished this project.
Introduction
During the 1980s, the media sounded the death knell for second-wave feminism. In his
syndicated column, James Kilpatrick crowed that “militant feminism is on the decline,”
and Time wondered “Is there a future for feminism?” Mary Anne Dolan, writing for The
New York Times Magazine, claimed that feminism had failed, and Kathleen Parker of the
Chicago Tribune was even more forceful, stating “feminism is dead.”1 According to the
media of the decade, feminist activity took place almost solely in academia, and it was
barely holding on there. In the 1990s, however, these same media sources declared a
renewed interest in feminism. The early ’90s saw the publication of a number of
bestselling books about feminism, a flurry of reviews of and responses to these books,
several polls about attitudes toward feminism and dozens of magazine and newspaper
articles that analyzed feminist politics in 1990s culture.2 This media attention has been a
mixed blessing for feminism as a movement. While the renewed attention instigated a
lively and invigorating cultural debate about feminism, it also helped to form an
increasingly negative and bleak picture of feminism and feminist politics.3
Media attention in the ’90s focused on a few specific debates concerning feminism—
the battle over “political correctness,” the idea of “postfeminism,” and the “backlash”
phenomenon. While some of these debates involved academics, they were not confined to
the towers of academe; rather, they were carried out in the pages of Newsweek, Harper’s,
and The New York Times, among others. For the most part, the media images of feminism
and feminists that grew out of these debates are not kind. For example, bestselling
authors Katie Roiphe and Naomi Wolf suggested that feminists are anti-sex and obsessed
with victimhood.4 Although some of these authors are themselves feminists engaging in
useful and productive debate, as their messages became popularized even further through
reviews and media commentary, the images of feminism deteriorated. Thus, Newsweek
called feminists “thought police,” while Elle accused feminism of acting as an Orwellian
“big sister.”5 And it got much worse—radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, as an extreme
example, referred to feminists as “feminazis.” In general, the media pictured feminists as
hairy-legged, humorless, man-hating harpies.
It was, in fact, these cultural debates and the images they spawned that spurred my
interest in this project. Everything I read about these debates talked about a kind of
feminism that I didn’t recognize, and I wanted to find the sources of this rhetoric.
Although these debates took place primarily in the 1990s, I see their roots in the politics
and popular culture of the 1980s. This study, then, examines the ways in which feminism
was represented in 1980s popular culture, specifically in bestselling novels and their film
adaptations as particularly influential vehicles of representation. I in-vestigate, through
close readings of five novels and four films, the effect popular representations have had
on prevailing myths and stereotypes about feminism, and I question feminists’ ability to
represent themselves in popular culture or to present their ideas in popular forms. And
while form—especially generic form—plays an important part in my analysis, I will
focus specifically on narrative, on the stories we tell and are told about feminism and
Literary criticism and cultural theory 2
feminists through popular culture. I argue that these stories not only influenced the
debates about political correctness, backlash and postfeminism, but also affected and
continue to affect feminist politics and rhetoric on both an academic and a grassroots
level.
PC POLITICS
Perhaps one of the most acerbic accusations leveled at feminism during the ’90s was that
feminism had become too “politically correct” or “PC.”6 Although this accusation began
in the academy and academics remain its principle targets, the debate quickly began to
pervade the popular press. This debate is complex and encompasses a number of issues,
but the main thrust of these accusations comes from politically conservative professors
and others in the educational hierarchy who maintain that universities have become too
“political” in general, too liberal in specific and too worried about issues of diversity.
Because of this trend, according to conservative scholars, college courses ignore Western
classics in favor of ideological tracts by women and Third World writers. Allegedly, such
courses are taught by leftist professors who refuse to admit opposing views and who
force their political agenda on students. As a result, conservative scholars claim, students
are denied both a quality education and their right to free speech.
Although according to anti-PC forces multiculturalism is the primary problem,
feminism also takes a great deal of the blame. For example, Dinesh D’Souza, one of the
primary critics of political correctness, claims that feminists and other leftist academics
strive to change “the college classroom from a place of learning to a laboratory of
indoctrination for social change.”7 Newsweek accuses a broad spectrum of “minority
students, feminists and gays” of practicing a “New McCarthyism.”8 And John Taylor,
writing in New York magazine, included feminists among those “new fundamentalists”
who believe not only that “Western culture and American society are thoroughly and
hopelessly racist, sexist, oppressive” but also that “the doctrine of individual liberties it-
self is inherently oppressive.”9 Humanities scholars take most of the heat; Jeffery Hart,
for example, in his snidely titled essay “Wimmin [sic] Against Literature,” calls feminist
literary critics “the new Stalinists in the academy [who] believe that there are
commanding grudges, which are more important than truth, fairness, intelligence, and
good writing.”10 The sciences don’t escape completely, however. For example, Brigette
Berger, in an issue of Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of
Scholars, criticizes the work of feminist scholar Evelyn Fox Keller (who was trained in
physics and works on the intersection of biology and physics) as fascist.11
The facts, however, indicate that few of the frightening scenarios posed by the anti-PC
pundits have come to pass. Although those who oppose PC fear “a generation of campus
radicals who grew up in the ’60s and are now achieving positions of academic
influence,”12 conservative or moderate faculty continue to dominate the university. In
fact, a survey of professors conducted in 1984 showed that 5.8 percent of faculty
members defined themselves as leftists, 33.8 percent as liberal, 26.6 percent as moderate,
29.6 percent as moderately conservative and 4.2 percent as strongly conservative.13 And
despite the fear of feminist influence, the fact is that there are few women in positions of
power at most universities, let alone feminists. Rosa Ehrenreich, who graduated from