Book of The Week: Eve Bites Back

Anna Beer on two reasons why women have been told they can’t write literature

You are physically incapable of being an author.

Medicine and philosophy, astronomy and theology all combined for millennia to insist that the female body is intrinsically faulty, cold, wet, irrational, changeable and above all fallen: unfit for the task of authorship. You can see why people questioned whether Trota of Salerno, a female doctor in 11th-century Italy, actually wrote a number of texts about diseases and health conditions affecting women. Surely a woman could not possess the intelligence and expertise to have written the works?

The obvious first step was to ascribe the works to male authors and the follow-up was to suggest that she never existed at all. Job done. It didn’t help that, back in the day, although the word “author” could and did suggest “writer”, it was more usually a synonym for authority (auctorite in Middle English). Greek and Roman writers were authorities. So were the patriarchs of the Church. All of the latter, and almost all of the former, were male. Even when the word “author” becomes separated from “authority”, that older sense lingers as a ghost reminding women of their place.

The underlying paradigm of women and words goes back, as so many things do, to the Book of Genesis. Adam is not only the first man, but he is the first namer of things. Eve is the first woman – and thus named. Women are created by, not creators of, words. Since God is, obviously, the ultimate author/authority, and men are made in the image of God, it is equally obvious that women should not usurp the powers of either God or Man.

While we are on the subject, don’t get any ideas about being a genius. A simple Google search will demonstrate that almost all humans with exceptional abilities happened to be born male. Beliefs about women’s innate abilities, and, in particular, a woman’s capacity for “genius”, are impressively enduring. The philosopher Christine Battersby argued back in 1989 that the word itself is “utterly contaminated by past usage, and by the way that the male (still) provides the paradigm for both the normal and supernormal personality-types, consciousness-types, and energy- types”. We still like our geniuses male, with a side order of women.

Thank you for taking that on board. If you are very good, we might allow you to write, but only about certain things and in certain ways and for certain people.

The successful novelist Fanny Trollope, mother to the more famous Anthony, picked up on a line from (male) French writer Beaumarchais to comment, wryly, on the ways in which her writing was circumscribed:

It is said that providing I don’t speak about authority, culture, politics, morality, people, the opera or other entertainments, nor about anyone who believes anything, then I can print freely.

Like all good irony, it works because it reveals a universally understood truth about women and writing. Most topics are off-limits, but not all. A conventional take on religion is usually a safe bet. Perhaps instructing other women as to how to be a good woman.

Because, as a woman, if you are given the gift of education, your literacy is not a means of opening doors to different ways of being, but designed to prepare you better for your decreed role in life. Your task is to provide moral guidance, not to entertain, since for you to provide pleasure to your reader would make you little more than a courtesan. If you do have to write about sex and desire, then bear in mind that religious and literary traditions link women’s sexuality to subjection rather than authority.

A question from the back? The Guerrilla Girls are asking, having noticed the absence of female artists on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, whether a woman needs to be naked to be displayed. The simple answer is yes, ladies, you do. Do not represent your own bodies and desires: leave that to the men who will disclose and gaze upon the dark secrets of your sex. Do not write about the messy, sometimes painful, bodily experiences of periods, pregnancy, miscarriage, birth – let alone bad sex or the menopause. In other words, steer well clear of Genesis and the apple incident. Head for the Virgin Mary, a good, sexless, immaculate mother devoted to her son.

This extract is from Anna Beer’s new book Eve Bites Back: An Alternative History of English Literature.

Anna is joining us on A Drink with the Idler at 6pm on Thursday 27 October. Book your tickets here. Free for subscribers.

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