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The other element was the emergence of powerful, sometimes shocking
female voices. By now it’s pretty clear that I hold Edna O’Brien in high regard.
So do a great many readers, and for precisely those qualities in her fiction that
got her work banned in Ireland, novel after novel. O’Brien refuses to write about
“good” Irish girls, or to be one. Her Country Girls Trilogy violated a lot of
taboos, one of which was that Irish women ought not be pictured as openly
sexual. Showing Irish men as withdrawn, emotionally stunted, or violent
probably didn’t help, but it was the sexuality that did in the saga of Kate and
Baba. Yet whatever the censors may have thought in the early 1960s, the sex
wasn’t there for prurient interest. It was an idea, and a very basic one at that:
until women are accorded their full humanity, bodies and sexuality included,
they can never be accorded their full rights as human beings. Male writing had
tended to present Irish women as variants of some combination of nun, mother,
the Countess Cathleen, and the Shan Van Vocht, or Poor Old Woman, who is
symbolic of Mother Ireland herself. These are not people but emblems, and it’s
really hard, insists O’Brien, to live one’s life as an emblem. She even has a crow
to pluck with Joyce’s Molly Bloom, who is perhaps more like a real person, and
certainly more sexual, than any of Yeats’s women, for instance. In the short
novel Night (1972), she offers her version of a woman’s night meditation. Her
protagonist, Mary Hooligan, is as engaging, full-blooded, sexual, and profane as
Molly, but she also comes across as a more completely realized human being and
less of an artistic conception. That’s an idea at work.
Nor is O’Brien alone. At roughly the same historical moment, Doris Lessing,
the Margarets Drabble and Atwood, Muriel Spark, Erica Jong, and a host of
slightly younger writers such as Barbara Kingsolver have been writing about
what were once called “women’s issues,” but which are really human issues.
Dignity, the right to live freely and express oneself, equal treatment by one’s
fellow creatures, self-determination, the right to make one’s own mistakes—
those all sound pretty basic to me. What matters, of course, is that these are
novelists rather than essayists or polemicists (at least, when they are writing
novels), so their fiction must succeed as fiction. Which it has, splendidly.
Lessing packs ideas and issues—about social justice, women’s rights and men’s
wrongs, sanity and madness—into The Golden Notebook (1962) and her
Children of Violence novels (1952–1969). The first work in particular is one of
the great achievements of twentieth-century writing, at once complex and direct,
encompassing the personal and the political, the emotional and historical. One of
the most interesting features of the novel, which is structured as four differently
colored notebooks recording various aspects of a writer’s life, along with a
framing gold-colored notebook, is the way that a series of compartments, the
notebooks, ultimately defeat the effort to compartmentalize, arguing for unity in
existence. Since the novel is concerned with the life of a fictional novelist, Anna
Wulf, it ultimately reflects on the process of its own creation and the way that
everything in a writer’s life comes together and exerts pressure or influence on
the written work.
Both Atwood and Kingsolver have achieved great popular success while
addressing important issues as well. What they ultimately reveal is that
“women’s” issues simply form one thread of the broader issues that make up
fiction. Atwood’s Booker-winning The Blind Assassin (2000), for example, plays
with multiple narrative frames, with novels within novels and truth within
fiction, even as it explores issues of female identity and personal history. From
Surfacing (1966) forward, Atwood has been a major feminist voice in the world
of fiction, but she is perhaps never as simultaneously subtle and pointed as in
The Blind Assassin. The play among truth, falsehood, guilt, redemption,
authorship, unknowability, fiction, and identity is fascinating, perhaps the more
so when the novel is paired with Ian McEwan’s idea-laden Atonement, which
appeared the very next year. That two such remarkable, similar, and yet very
distinct novels would appear so close together probably says something very
profound about our age, although we’re likely too close to it to know what that
statement might be. At the very least, we can note that metafiction in these two
writers has long ceased to be a mere sleight-of-pen and become a major
constituent of fiction’s larger program. Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible
(1998) is on one level clearly concerned with the wrongs committed by United
States and European powers during and after African colonialism, but those
concerns blend with the damage suffered by girls and women at the hands of
colonizing male power. That the colonizer is at both the imperial and familial
levels at least slightly mad goes perhaps without saying, that the damage leaves
permanent scars is both expected and shocking. From her first novel, The Bean
Trees (1988), Kingsolver has married the personal to the political and shown
ethical behavior toward the world to be indistinguishable from responsibility for
the self. Just as Taylor Greer, in finding her own way, must do right by the native
child who is thrust into her care in that novel, so the Price girls must carve out a
relationship with the world, and particularly with Africa, as they strive to sculpt
their own lives.