From: msmorris@watsci.waterloo.edu (Mike Morris)
Subject: Re: The Literary Canon & Women
Organization: University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1992 17:05:03 GMT

                                    Tuesday, the 18th of August, 1992

Francis Muir writes:
 Maureen Wilkes writes:
  
  	Mike Morris writes:
  
  		But the thing I think is unfair overwhelmingly is past 
  		societal discrimination between men and women, past
  		discouragement that women should even think of trying to 
  		be writers--- not any present desire to exclude women 
  		from canonization because they are women.
  
  Will you present some evidence for this notion please?

Well, I'll let Maureen present some evidence for the notion that
I wrote this, but, assuming you really want evidence that there has been
some sort of discrimination against women, I think you need only
start listing canonical writings of men and women.

I tried this off the top of my head in a posting you no doubt
missed, Francis, but again:
18th & 19th C English novelists:
    Men:
       Sterne, Defoe, Fielding, Dickens, Hardy, Thackeray, Conrad
    Women
       Austen, Bronte sisters (3), George Eliot, Mary Shelley 

[i.e., I think you are right, Francis, that women do rather well *in this
category*, for which I can dig out references to the fact that for
much of the century novels were not considered a haute genre]

But, England not being the center of God's creation (the centre, I'll
grant you) how about American novels?-
    Men
       Melville, Twain, Hawthorne, Cooper, Crane, James
    Women
       Stowe, Alcott, Cather 

[i.e., here I think women trail men, though they make up a significant
contribution]

France-
    Men
      Flaubert, Balzac, Stendhal, Dumas, Hugo, Zola
    Women
      ?

Russia-
    Men
      Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy
    Women
      ?

Poets (all whens, all wheres)-
    Men
      Homer, Pindar, Hesiod, Virgil, Horace, Shakespeare, Marlowe,
      Dante, Goethe, Villon, Byron, Basho, Tu Fu, Li Po,
      Keats, Shelley, Wordworth, Hopkins, Pound, etc., etc.
    Women
      Sappho, Corinna, Sei Shonagon, Emily Dickinson, Homer
      and J (if you buy the two respective theories about these)

Playwrights-
    Men
      Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plautus,
      Terence, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Racine, Corneille, Moliere,
      Sheridan, etc., etc.
    Women
      ?

Philosophy-
    Men
      Herakleitos, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca,
      Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus, St. Augustine, Boethius,
      St. Thomas Aquinas, etc., etc. 
    Women
      Hypatia and Mary Wollstonecraft (immediately reminding me
      to include Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke, Thomas
      Paine, and William Godwin on the male list)

History-
    Men
      Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Livy, Tacitus,
      Bede, Gibbon, Von Ranke, etc., etc.
    Women
      ?

Now, Francis, I've stuck deliberately with pre-20th century.
I also forgot to mention Christine de Pisan, Marie de France, Marguerite de
Navarre, Christina Rosetti, and Lady Murasaki.

I would claim, though, 2 facts are clear: (1) Women have been
underrepresented in the canon with respect to population; and (2) In the
one genre where women have written alot, women are canonized
about equally with men (19thC English novels).

For an explanation of (1), you have your pick of (I think Dani
Zweig first listed these as the three choices):
 (A) There is a deliberate conspiracy among modern white male professors
     not to read all the many works that women actually produced.
 (B) Past discrimination (when *I* say ``discrimination'' I do
     not mean necessarily to imply some intolerable injustice---there
     are many reasons for discrimination to take place) against
     women being authors.
 (C) Unconscious discrimination against female authors by the same
     white male professors in (A).
I've seen no one here arguing (A) very seriously. Personally, I think
that (B) overwhelms (C). I also think (2) provides some evidence for this
(more evidence to be had when you start considering what happens with
canonizing 20th C works). 
 
Francis writes:
                The fact of the matter is that by the time the 19th Century
  rolled around, there were, and continued to be, a number of women writing
  (I'm talking about England, of course. Christ knows what was happening in 
  the Cradle of Democracy and Liberty). 

I think the U.S. trailed England in this. But, it was also true
that these women wrote mostly novels (women certainly
did much to develop the form), and novels were not taken as seriously
as other forms of literature.

                 Mike Morris
          (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)