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THE GREAT DOMESTIC DUST-UP

From ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ to Half of a Yellow Sun women writers have mined domestic settings for written gold. What, argues Zoe Lambert, is so wrong with that?

There was yet another media furore when last year’s Orange Prize judge Muriel Gray suggested women should ‘drop domestic themes’ in their fiction. Why did Gray decide to denigrate the ‘domestic’ and why has women’s writing that draws on domestic themes become so entwined with the attitude that such fiction deals with ‘unimportant’ issues. Why don’t men get tarred with the same brush? And why shouldn’t women write about domestic themes anyway?

In a Guardian blog, Gray complained about the volume of writing on ‘small-scale domestic themes such as motherhood, boyfriend troubles and tiny family dramas.’ Women should free themselves from the constraints of the domestic, she advised, in order to be equal to their male rivals. For a prize that prides itself on celebrating and promoting women’s writing, there has been a history of similar complaints from its judges. In 1996, its first year, judges Val Hennessey and Susan Hill claimed that British women’s writing was parochial and dreary. For Hill, so many books were about ‘domestic obsessions, marriages...and boring lives.’ In 1999, British women’s writing (in contrast to American fiction) was described as ‘insular’ and ‘parochial,’ with ‘no sense of the bigger picture’ by the Chair of Judges Lola Young. Likewise, in 2005, there was a media controversy after Ali Smith and Toby Litt claimed that most of the women’s submissions for New Writing 13 were ‘dull, domestic and depressed.’

Is this all simply media-generated cat fighting? That might be a factor. But why does it resurface again and again? I’ve read the recent articles and blogs by leading writers, editors and journalists, and trawled through the comments on blogs, and comments on comments. I’ve taken notes in a suitably academic fashion, and spent the last year writing a PhD thesis on domestic space in British women’s short stories. What seems to be at stake is a pigeon-holing – and perhaps inadvertent – dismissal of women’s writing. Or, I should say ‘writing by women’ – as A L Kennedy reminds us in her response to the New Writing 13 comments, that the term ‘women’s writing...is repeatedly used as a stick to beat women who write.’ So is ‘domestic.’ The labels of ‘dull, domestic and depressed’ might just have been plastered onto the foreheads of the New Writing 13 submissions, but, as novelist, television and radio writer Jane Rogers argues, these claims are dangerous because they end up labelling all women writers.

These labels and sticks are not new. They stand in a long line of dismissals of ‘women’s writing’ and the domestic.

These labels and sticks are not new. They stand in a long line of dismissals of ‘women’s writing’ and the domestic. In A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf famously noted that ‘this is an important book, the critics assume, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with feelings of women in a drawing room. A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop.’ The domestic is somehow only seen as particular to women, while men’s experiences and writing are supposedly universal. George Eliot’s partner, GH Lewes can give us an example: in 1852, he surveyed ‘the lady novelists’ and surmised that ‘the domestic experience which forms the bulk of women’s knowledge finds an appropriate form in novels.’ In the 19th Century, women’s largely ‘domestic’ experience was seen as ‘appropriate’ to what was then a popular and ‘low’ cultural form – the novels written by women anyway. The novel is like soap opera, he was claiming. Kitchen-sink drama. Chick lit. (Note how genres popular with women nowadays are still not viewed as ‘high’ culture). But now that the novel can be both a popular and supposedly ‘high’ cultural form, domestic experience is not viewed as important or interesting enough for serious literary fiction. To compete with male writers, the judges imply, women have to get out the big guns. They have to write like men, and show some muscle. But the depiction of the domestic in men’s writing is never questioned.

Since Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson, novelists have known that the home is where the important stuff of life goes on. But in the 19th Century, while women novelists in Britain and America were being tagged ‘domestic’ and dismissed, many male writers were busy scribbling very domestic dramas. There’s Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Bleak House, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Would you have told Flaubert to stop writing domestic drivel? Or told Hardy to stop writing domestic dramas? More currently, we don’t ask Richard Ford to get out more or Raymond Carver to scrap suburbia and see the bigger picture. The domestic goes unquestioned in men’s writing. It is a valid literary starting point. It is celebrated and canonised.

In relation to women’s writing, domestic is a ‘dirty’ word. It’s cleaning, housework, nappy-changing and boyfriend troubles. Domesticity is mundane, boring, trivial. It is used to denigrate women’s creative expression, women’s experiences and women writers themselves to an insubstantial and disproportionate extent.

‘I would only ever use the term ‘domestic’ when talking about cleaning products,’ says novelist Maggie O’Farrell. ‘Never about literature. I don’t see or recognise it as a subject matter. My dictionary defines it as “belonging to the house: private; tame; not foreign.” Anyone who thinks this aptly describes what women write about needs to be locked in a library for a prolonged period of time.’

The label ‘domestic’ is used, in fact, to ‘domesticate’ women, to keep them in their place, to ‘tame’ them. It is assumed that writing about the domestic does not involve any imagination – it’s obviously first-hand experience. But men who write thinly-veiled autobiography are hailed as literary heroes: Charles Bukowski, James Joyce, Jack Kerouac, Anthony Burgess. Perhaps because it’s about young men’s fantasies: drugs and prostitutes and finding yourself while speeding on a motorbike in the great outdoors. Not as interesting as losing a sense of yourself in a kitchen while – to paraphrase Independent on Sunday literary editor Suzy Feay – you are sponging baby sick off your shoulder.

Any serious look at literature tells us that the domestic is not a dull subject, nor is it a ticket to writing boring, safe fiction.

Of course no one wants to write ‘boring,’ safe fiction. We want to experiment and imagine. But lack of experiment has to be divorced from any notion of the domestic. The problem is that the domestic, the everyday, is traditionally caught up in notions of ‘realism’ and the 19th Century novel, but writing about the domestic does not necessarily mean the text is not experimental in form or content. Consider, for example, Wuthering Heights, whose structure and modes of narration are complex, or Mrs Dalloway, or Alain Robbe-Grillet’s nouveau roman Jealousy or Katherine Mansfield’s ground-breaking story ‘The Prelude.’ The list goes on. Any serious look at literature tells us that the domestic is not a dull subject, nor is it a ticket to writing boring, safe fiction. Make it new, Ezra Pound said. Not ‘write about new things,’ or ‘write about the latest fashionable subject.’

In recent women’s fiction, the domestic is rarely portrayed in a bog-standard way. Think of the play with the boundaries between novel and short stories in the work of Rachel Cusk and Tessa Hadley. In their work, form is paramount. The notion of the domestic as dull and boring is exploded in Helen Simpson’s humour and imagery. In these writers, as well as Jackie Kay, Maggie O’Farrell, Margaret Forster, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Carol Shields, to name just a few, any ideas of the domestic as goddesses baking cakes or of it being dull, safe fiction is debunked. In these stories and novels the domestic is not ‘domesticated.’ It is a raw, dangerous space. The home is where women’s identity is troubled as women struggle with roles of motherhood and caring while maintaining an autonomous sense of self. In the above writers’ work, I’d argue that the personal is political. They just don’t shout about it.

The political importance of writing about domesticity has not gone away, as reactionary tabloids would like us to believe. It is more of a complex issue than in the 50s and 60s.

In feminist criticism, which has always argued that the personal is political, the domestic also has a complicated history. ‘The rejection of domesticity,’ the critic Rachel Bowlby claims, ‘has seemed a principal, if not the principal, tenet of feminist demands for freedom.’ Early second wave feminism praised women’s writing that charted women’s liberation from the home. But this ended up denigrating the domestic in women’s writing just as much as GH Lewes did. The home was later re-appraised by critics such as Elaine Showalter and Nancy Armstrong, who questioned the male-dominated literary canon and placed women and the domestic at centre stage. Recently, critic, Chiara Brigganti has shown how ‘domestic’ novels in the 30s used experimental narrative techniques, though these were not as obvious as those of Joyce and Woolf. Critics such as Emma Parker have directly challenged the assumption that an interest in everyday life and domesticity means a text is devoid of depth. The political importance of writing about domesticity has not gone away, as reactionary tabloids would like us to believe. It is more of a complex issue than in the 50s and 60s.

A quick look at a lot of contemporary women’s fiction shows that the domestic in women’s writing is never just boyfriend troubles and small family dramas. The home is a gateway to other epic, ‘political’ themes. Think of how race and ethnicity is refracted through Maggie Gee’s The White Family and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane; issues of sexuality in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are Not the Only Fruit and Jackie Kay’s Wish I Was Here; legacies of colonialism in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, and war in Half of a Yellow Sun. In these novels the domestic as theme and setting cannot be disentangled from other political issues. Then there is Nobel-winner Doris Lessing. From her short story ‘To Room Nineteen’ in which a suffocated housewife commits suicide, to The Golden Notebook to her recent novels focusing on older people, the home is not cut off from the ‘bigger picture.’ Indeed, the Nobel judges describe her in terms that do not separate aspects of women’s lives, and therefore perhaps, the domestic, from politics: ‘That epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.’

Taking an example from Doris Lessing, women should write about what they want, whether it’s Russian trapeze artists, a future ice age, battling the dishes, or heartache. We don’t need to be patronised and told what to write about. Being given writing instructions is confining; being labelled ‘domestic’ is confining. It’s time to stop telling women they must escape ‘the domestic’ and start teaching ourselves to take pride in writing that embraces and defends it. The equation of the domestic with mediocrity is spurious. It confuses form with content, and the quality of the writing with the subject matter. And besides, to quote Maggie O’Farrell, ‘surely everyone knows that it’s possible for almost anything to happen in a house?’ We should be confident about domesticity as a literary starting point, to give it the same respect it has in men’s writing. We should stand up and be ‘house proud.’

ZOE LAMBERT is published in Ellipsis 2 (Comma Press). She lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Bolton and is working on a PhD on British Women’s Short Stories.

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From Issue 36 ◊ Jan/Feb/Mar 2008

Domestic Greats

• ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892). Quintessential story of domestic imprisonment as a wife is confined by her husband and doctors.
• The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905). A woman’s tragic tumble down the social ladder, mirrored by her move from high-class houses to boardinghouse death.
• ‘Prelude’ by Katherine Mansfield (1918). The short story is forever changed in this beautiful evocation of a family in New Zealand.
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927). Poignant portrait of the transience of family life, examining how family members never reach each other’s cores.
• The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing (1950). Terrifying analysis of colonialism and racial politics through the breakdown of a woman’s marriage to a white farmer.
• The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta (1979). Searing insight into women’s roles in the face of colonialism and Nigerian tradition and polygamy.
• Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987). Known as the greatest American novel of the past 25 years, Beloved questions motherhood, slavery and violence.
• A Chorus of Mushrooms by Hiromi Goto (1994). An exquisite novel about Japanese-Canadian identities and belonging, told through interweaving stories of a mother, daughter and grandmother.
• Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson (1995). Offbeat, poignant portrait of the demise of a family – and their ancestors – above a pet shop in York.
• PHOTO © PHYLLIS CHRISTOPHER