A Resolution

Warning: this week's Feminist Sunday post will be 2/3 pure, undiluted rant and 1/3 a New Year's resolution I can get behind. It started with a post I read earlier this week on Blog of a Bookslut. Jessa Crispin talks about how she's never read some of the so-called great male authors:

It's not like if you decide not to read any John Updike, because it just sounds like being trapped in a car with a narcissist with his dick out, it's not like you run out of books. For a while I thought I should read everything, back when I was trying to be a book critic. So I read that dreadful Franzen, I read that dreadful Messud. I had opinions about Dale Peck reviews! God help me, why did I do that. And then I remembered again, that one could decide not to read things. (...) And I'm beginning to think that this stance of non-participation might be a more important one than, you know, this bores me I don't want to read it.

Feminist Sundays: "It had to be uttered once in a life, to adjust the lopsidedness of the world."

This is going to be the laziest post ever, but, in our defense, we let Claudia read François Poulain de la Barre and she was sucked into the depths of early modern feminism never to be seen again with no chance of getting out in time to write this week's post. So instead you'll get one of the nicest ways to describe what's in essence a feminist speech we've ever encountered. Like most nice things on our blog lately, it comes courtesy of E.M. Forster. The speech was Margaret's speech to Henry in Howards End, a very satisfying cry against double standards. We will quote it here in all its glory, but it might be spoiler-ish,  so cover your eyes if you haven't read the book and plan to:

“Not any more of this!” she cried. “You shall see the connection if it kills you, Henry! You have had a mistress—I forgave you. My sister has a lover—you drive her from the house. Do you see the connection? Stupid, hypocritical, cruel—oh, contemptible!—a man who insults his wife when she’s alive and cants with her memory when she’s dead. A man who ruins a woman for his pleasure, and casts her off to ruin other men. And gives bad financial advice, and then says he is not responsible. These men are you. You can’t recognise them, because you cannot connect. I’ve had enough of your unneeded kindness. I’ve spoilt you long enough. All your life you have been spoiled. Mrs. Wilcox spoiled you. No one has ever told what you are—muddled, criminally muddled. Men like you use repentance as a blind, so don’t repent. Only say to yourself, ‘What Helen has done, I’ve done.’”

The speech in itself was perfection. But the words Forster found to describe it were even better.

Feminist Sundays: "Girls, forget what you've read. It happened like this -"

For this week's Feminist Sunday, we thought we'd share one of our favorite poems with you: Carol Ann Duffy's Eurydice. But first a few words on the remarkable volume this poem is part of: The World's Wife. The World's Wife relies on a simple but effective idea: it takes familiar stories of male heroes, from history or fiction, and retells them from the perspective of a female counterpart. The refashioned narratives range from Greek mythology to Freud's biography, and from Grimms' Fairy Tales to Hollywood blockbusters. In most cases, the woman whose voice we hear is the wife or mistress of the hero (hence the book's title), but there are a few stories retold from the point of view of a sister, and a couple that break the mold entirely, by relating two female perspectives and mentioning a man only indirectly (Demeter), or by exploring a gender-swapped version of the original narrative (like in the awesome Queen Kong).
 

You can easily see why we'd love this book. Our favorite stories are in there - and getting a new twist on them is always nice - but there is more to it than that. Giving a voice to a neglected female character, making her front and center and letting her give her take on the hero, is more than an addition to the original story - it's a vindication. And what is awesome about it is that we don't simply get the same old stories told by a different narrator. Duffy engages with these narratives by bringing women's experiences and women's concerns to the table, making us aware of the patriarchal conventions that underlay the originals. In most cases, getting her side of the story doesn't complete the story, it changes it altogether (in poignant, funny, raunchy ways).

One of the most satisfactory aspects of this book is the subversion of the idea that the hero's love interest is awestruck by him and happy to be part of his story. This is the central point in Eurydice, the poem we have unanimously settled on as our favorite. We've always suspected that if the muse talked back, what she'd say wouldn't be particularly kind to the poet. And it isn't. It's funny (a lot of poems in this volume are), it's biting, it's not without its beautiful moments despite this ("Please let me stay./ But already the light had saddened from purple to grey.") - it's, in a word, perfect and you should all read it below.

Feminist Sundays: Books with Openly Feminist Characters

Hello and welcome to our very first Feminist Sunday! Feminist Sundays is a weekly meme started by Elena of Books and Reviews. It is supposed to be a space where we can discuss all sorts of things that might fall under the larger umbrella of feminism: from important female figures in history to the portrayal of women in fiction, and everything in between. We're very excited to join and we hope to participate every week (and perhaps have some of you join us as well). For now we thought we'd kick off this series by discussing - and hopefully getting some recommendations for - books with openly feminist characters.

What counts as an openly feminist character? 

We are not great readers of contemporary literary fiction. (And yes, that is a thing we are trying to fix.) We do know our media, though, and we are somewhat familiar with contemporary romance novels, too. Openly feminist characters are rarer in them than you might think, considering that feminism did change the world and in some cases made the plot of said books or movies possible. And much too often, when a feminist character does appear, she turns out to be a stereotype - the man-hating workaholic that needs to be tamed/defeated/abandoned by the hero or some variation thereof. (We say "she turns out to be" because there doesn't seem to be a parallel trope for male allies/feminist men.) So what are the features we are looking for in an openly feminist character?