Saint or sinner, spiritual or sensual, self-sacrificing or selfish, irrational or calculating, the world’s best hope or man’s ruination…
Those are just some of the contradictory words and phrases that have been used over the years to describe a woman’s nature. Every one of them was once considered an eternal “truth,” and every one of them profoundly influenced the lives of women–as do today’s different definitions.
One of the best ways to understand those conscious or unconscious assumptions–which in large measure determined what women could or couldn’t be, could or couldn’t do–is to look at the novels people have read over the years, for novels show what lies behind the obvious. By examining more than 160 bestselling and sometimes critically admired American novels, written by 80 men writing about women and women writing about themselves, and by putting those novels into their social context, Fictional Females illuminates through the stories of make-believe characters what was happening in the real world as women either accepted or challenged the rules of their day and lived with–or sometimes died from–the consequences of their choices.
Not a feminist tract but an investigation of American fiction from 1789 to 1939 focusing on the portrayal of women, the book explores the intersection of life and literature, offering a fresh perspective on both. Some of the authors are still well-known, others have recently been “rediscovered,” and still others will probably always remain obscure because their style is too dated and their heroines’ problems too removed from today’s.
The famous Cooper, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway; the infamous (in their time) Elizabeth Stoddard, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser; the forgotten Susan Warner, Margaret Deland, and Floyd Dell; the rediscovered Kate Chopin and the more recently rediscovered Dawn Powell, as well as the scores of other well-known, little-known, and today unknown writers–all show in retrospect how the changing definition of “woman’s nature” is a result of history, a reflection of it, and one of the forces that sometimes alters it.
The novels, often fascinating in themselves, map the long and winding trail that allows us to see how women got from then to now and from there to here–and how much or how little has changed over the years. Regardless of plots that may now seem bizarre, they all tell a story, and those stories help us make sense of the varied paths by which each generation of women tried to find solutions to such enduring problems as love, marriage, family, and one’s place in the world as well as to such slowly emerging ones as premarital chastity, postmarital fidelity, abortion, and the juggling of or choice between a career and a domestic life.
Novels provide readers with reflections of their lives, insights into their problems–and sometimes a sense of how they might shape their futures. This particular tour of older fiction helps us understand how women got from there to here and from then to now–and just how big or small the changes have been. And besides, most of the novels are great fun to read about.
—Eleanor Hochman
