Book Review: Communities of Women

[osprey_archer]

I decided that life is too short to read Henry James, particularly Henry James’ The Bostonians, so I went ahead and finished reading Nina Auerbach’s Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction, despite my earlier decision to read all the main works that she talks about before finishing the book.

As it turns out, Auerbach ends up discussing what feels like James’ entire oeuvre and also quite a number of Muriel Spark’s early works (Auerbach’s book was published in 1974 so it must perforce focus on Spark’s early works; I’m honestly a little baffled by her choice to discuss Spark’s The Abbess of Crewe at some length, while mentioning Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede in only a single sentence.), so my preparation would have been far from complete even if I had finished The Bostonians.

What a peculiar book this is. It’s been over fifty years since its published, which must account for a good deal of it: academic publishing has undoubtedly changed, because I don’t think I’ve read a book more recently published whose thesis is basically “This is a thing that exists.”

Auerbach has no overarching argument about communities of women in fiction - she’s not arguing that they’re always good, or always bad, or whatever, but simply that they’re there and that literary criticism rarely focuses on them, so she’s giving them that critical attention. (Critical in the sense of thoughtful, not necessarily critical in a negative sense.) It’s a novel angle for a critic even now, and it must have been even more so in the seventies, given how many times I’ve seen this book referenced in more recent books.

One specific criticism she does venture is that books focused on communities of women often have an air of unreality about them - specifically Cranford and Little Women, in which the female community (the town of Cranford, or the March family) functions as a quasi-utopian space.

Now, in terms of those particular books, this observation makes sense, but I feel it’s shaky on a wider scale - you couldn’t really describe the pensionnat in Villette as a quasi-utopian space, could you? - but it also seems to grow out of a sense, which I encountered also in Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture (also published in the 1970s, so perhaps this is a common thought in the time period?) that the masculine sphere is by its nature real and solid, while the feminine one is somehow shaky and unreal. Perhaps in the women’s sphere babies are born and mothers die in childbirth and sickbeds are tended and sixty pounds of pickles are put up for the winter, but none of these things will never be as real as an office building or a railroad.

It strikes me that these books assume a tautological connection between the real and the male, or perhaps the real and the public? (and the public, in separate-spheres fashion, is assumed to be male) and the private is gauzy and half-imaginary even though for centuries we all would have starved to death without those pickles.

Comments

[sartorias]

I grew up in that atmosphere, and found that babies and childbirth were an alien matter that belonged somewhere with nature and non-sentience. Male concerns had to do with running the world, power, authority, solidity. Women were by nature weak, dependent, their literary interests frivolous, at their very best supportive of men in their important work. They liked "nurse novels"--even when a novel by a woman was demonstrably not about nurses or romance, it was still only worth reading by other women.

[ancientreader]

Apropos of the gauzy unrealities of feminine life, I'm pretty sure it was in Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites I read that until the advent of the rifle, childbirth was deadlier than combat. Which I suppose even a few cursory visits to old churchyards etc. might lead a person to suspect.