Showing posts with label victoria smith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label victoria smith. Show all posts

Monday, 17 October 2016

entirely correct observations

Q. What is the best thing that you hope readers could take away from your work?
A. That even if we’re constantly tempted to lower our guard — out of love, or weariness, or sympathy or kindness — we women shouldn’t do it. We can lose from one moment to the next everything that we have achieved.
Q. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
A. No.

from: ‘Writing Has Always Been a Great Struggle for Me’Q. and A.: Elena Ferrante


When a male author tells half-truths or plays with facts we don't call this 'lying'; we call it 'being postmodern' and consider it very clever indeed. When a woman does the same, cleverness suddenly becomes deviousness. If she was never prepared to give us the whole story, then she should not have told us anything at all. Gatti describes Ferrante as "the very first person to violate Elena Ferrante's privacy." It is an absurd statement to make, rooted in the belief that a woman must be either wholly invisible or public property.

The same male entitlement leads to women being told that if they don't like abuse on social media, they should deactivate; if they don't like being victims of revenge porn, they shouldn't take photos of themselves; if they don't like having their body ridiculed on the cover of Closer, they shouldn't do anything that could remotely lead to them being considered famous. It is a way of controlling women by limiting the space they will dare to claim for themselves. And it happens to all women writers, including mummy bloggers, mocked for their focus on the personal – because that's not real life, just 'mummy stuff' – while simultaneously accused of being dishonest or smug. The problem here is not what women write, it is that they write at all.

Guest post: "The unmasking of Elena Ferrante shows women writers can't win" by Victoria Smith


Memoir, you may have noticed, has lost considerable prestige as it's become feminized. There are plenty of reasons for this (some memoirs are very bad, and there are a lot of them!). But here's a big one: Male confessions are coded artistic, philosophical, and experimental. Women's are coded as brave, conventional, and unworked. Myths of male and female "genius" follow our dumb scripts for male and female life. Men fashion their lives and stories. Women survive them. This has consequences for how we think of male and female artistry. At best, we seem to think women bleed what happened to them bravely onto the page. At worst, they're over-sharing or "doing it for the attention." [...]
Knausgaard and Ferrante were twin publishing phenomena. Knausgaard was able to name his own genre and rise above it; Ferrante's novels were (despite their author's anonymity!) in continual danger of being "downgraded" to mere memoir. Knausgaard could occupy his name without being reduced to it. Ferrante could not.

The outing of Elena Ferrante and the power of naming by Lili Loofbourow


The gendered angle of this exposé is impossible to ignore, especially for anyone who has read Ferrante’s work itself. In her novels, men often brutishly quash the best opportunities that arise in the lives of women close to them. Though the bulk of the Neapolitan novels are set in decades recently passed, the dynamic they depict between men and women is very much alive. As Ferrante put it when an interviewer for the Financial Times asked why there are “few positive male characters in [her] books”: “I still think the men who can really be trusted are a minority … male power, whether violently or delicately imposed, is still bent on subordinating us.” This move by Gatti, NYRB, and the other complicit publications is an attempt at putting a woman in her place. As Katherine Angel writes, it arises from “a belief that women never have a right to privacy … and an urge to deliberately destroy an artist’s and a woman’s attempt to create conditions for sanity in a misogynistic world.”
Gatti’s defense of his piece continues to echo the most chilling claims of men who physically violate a woman while claiming the resisting woman wanted it and had it coming. On the BBC, he reiterated his conviction that readers have “a right” to know about her personally by virtue of purchasing her (fictive) work. He then added, “Most importantly, I believe that Ferrante and her publishers agree.” Ferrante and her publishers reiterated numerous times, including directly to him when he sought comment for his article, that she did not want her legal identity confirmed. This is one man deciding his desires are so imperative that they more than negate the wishes of others—they remake the will of others to align with his own.
What’s most overlooked in the immediate aftermath of Sunday’s article is what my friend Meaghan observed in her tweet; Ferrante’s anonymity was a precondition for her work. She’d even said that if her pseudonymity were compromised, she would stop publishing. Many men admire and enjoy Ferrante’s work but it is acutely significant to women. Article after article has welled with relief and gratitude and incredulity that our generation has a writer of her skill who delves so devotedly into the depths of female friendships, bodies, motherhood and other blood relations.
But Gatti and his accomplices decided that no matter how widely appreciated or critically lauded a woman’s work, it is ultimately expendable. For them, what’s worth more than some of the finest writing the world has known is a moment to remind a successful woman that she still must play by society’s misogynist rules. It’s possible that the Neapolitan novels’ concluding lines will now serve as the tombstone for Elena Ferrante’s writing career. As the narrator Lenu says while reflecting on her separation from her most cherished childhood friend: “Now that Lila has [been] seen so plainly, I must resign myself to not seeing her anymore.”

The Sexist Big Reveal -- Charlotte Shane


The punitive edge to Gatti’s intrusion speaks of a desire to make some writers offer up a pound of flesh for their success – to make them pay some penance for it. Why should we feel we can extract this price? It is significant that Ferrante’s ‘unmasking’ has occurred in the context of tiresome debates about whether she is really a woman or, in fact, a man. This persistent preoccupation is suggestive of the tendency to measure a writer’s literary worth in relation not just to the work, but also to other markers: of gender, race, class. The urge to uncover the ‘real’ Ferrante enacts an imperative to locate her in these systems – and finally, perhaps, to decide on her literary significance. The crime that Ferrante has committed, in Gatti’s eyes, is that of witholding the signs by which he might read her as a “woman writer”.
Ferrante’s insistence on anonymity has given her a freedom ill-afforded to women writers in particular: a freedom from having their work’s merit entangled with their public persona as women, a persona with little space to navigate. Gatti’s insinuation that Ferrante has been playing with us – giving us hints, telling us lies – completely misunderstands the politics of representation, image and power that Ferrante engages with in her refusal of authorial identity. He can only imagine this act as one of cheap deceit, as an affront to the expectation that writers – and women – owe us their identities, their public selves, their personal lives. Gatti has hunted Ferrante down from a feeling of entitlement to ‘unmask’ a woman, a belief that women never have a right to privacy – that women are essentially publicly owned creatures – and an urge to deliberately destroy an artist's and a woman's attempt to create conditions for sanity in a misogynistic world. He’s done so, what’s more, indulgently, with no compelling result – merely a sorry reflection on literary journalism. We still have to confront the work: the work with its own silences, mysteries, and refusals.

A Pound of Flesh -- Katherine Angel