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To substantiate my only-partially-substantiated claims and expand on yesterday's comment, I offer treatise part two regarding my reading of Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls. From yesterday:
I know, I know, I'm supposed to be embarrassed about liking Valley of the Dolls. And I understand why: I'm not going to nominate Susann for a Pulitzer, you know? But I really enjoyed it, and I can tell you why. Valley of the Dolls is a feminist novel when novels weren't allowed to be feminist. Think about it: the book was published in 1966 and covers the late fifties and early sixties. At that time, were women allowed to opt out of marriages and try to make it, all alone, in the big city? Were they allowed to make more than their husbands thanks to acute business acumen? Were they allowed to admit that they (gasp!) liked sex? No.
It's not pinnacle feminist literature, obviously; it's not the equal of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (which, by the way, was not published until 1985, long after the first-wave feminists made their mark and literature caught up). The characters are markedly not feminists by our standards: Jennifer North sleeps her way to the top, Anne Wells is too weak-hearted to leave her cheating husband, etc. But the crux of the novel is not the typical man-written morality tale about how wicked (read: non-chaste) women get their sins punished and only after repenting are saved by a valiant man. It is about women struggling to earn better places in a patriarchal society that wants nothing more than to keep them down and punish any inch they step out of line.
I like books with strong female characters. Not exclusively: obviously I do not limit myself to a certain type of literature, a particular version of events, a narrowly ideological view of the world expressed in any one genre of literature. But there's something to the strong female character's outlook on life being... feminist. Even if there are no words for it.
Hundreds of years of literature came modeled on things like Richardson's Pamela. The subtitle of the novel is Virtue Rewarded, for god's sake. If girls are good, by men's standards, then despite all the terrible things that happen to them, they will survive. Chaste, quiet, clean, pretty girls will have all sorts of trials and travails, but they will still no doubt be swept up by a man and given what only a man can provide: money, status, a pathway to God. By contrast, women who don't — I think of an early example in Becky from Thackeray's Vanity Fair — will be eternally punished for sins like self-confidence and self-preservation. The moral of these morality fables is clear: women must not do anything other than mind their station.
This was perhaps less true, or at least true in a different fashion, in 20th century America, but do you really think that in 1966, when Valley of the Dolls was published, readers weren't scandalized by Jennifer North's claim that she loved sex with her Senator boyfriend? Or Neely O'Hara's shameless interest in advocating for her own blossoming Hollywood career? Doubtful.
You could argue that it was meant to be scandalizing, written solely to shock and without the intent of empowering women to accept their own ideas about the life of "something more." This is a perfectly fair claim, and I don't know enough about the writing of the novel to say definitively what the author's intent was. But the fact remains that at a time when women weren't societally capable of such activities without the entire town aflutter with gossip, the novel's characters forge ahead in a male-dominated industry, in male-dominated cities, under chauvinistic superiors male and female, their entire lives. Things don't magically get better; their societal problems aren't magically solved. They can't tear down the brick walls set up against them. But they still fight.
I am not looking for feminism in everything I read, or listen to, or watch. I can read John LeCarre spy novels nearly without female characters — or, at the very least, without female characters that are more than one-dimensional, secondary support — and enjoy them. I do not subscribe to the idea that a story without women is an anti-woman story. Rather, I think that just as some stories have only female main characters, some have only male main characters. It is how those characters act that dictates my judgment of whether or not a story is anti-woman.
I was trying to explain this to A--- today in the context of the HBO show "Entourage." I had never seen it before this summer; he and several of our friends watch the show each week, though, so I think I saw four-ish over the last couple months. It is the sort of thing that I can't enjoy, in part because of its portrayal of women. The characters are all shallow jackasses who see women only as sets of breasts and legs. The women with speaking parts are, with a few exceptions, interested only in the fame of fucking a star. There's an eyeroll-inducing amount of gratuitous boobs: meetings at strip clubs, topless pool parties, low-cut workout suits. The only female character with any depth at all, in the episodes I watched, is a bitchy career woman who we are meant to disdain for her self-centeredness and refusal to take no for an answer.
It isn't merely that I dislike the show for its views of women; I find the plotlines kind of boring, too. It's clearly a show meant for guys, and as I told A---, there's nothing wrong with that. Shows can target only male audiences; we all know plenty of shows that target only female audiences. But the anti-woman sentiment, the objectification, the easy, palatable chauvinism that everyone seamlessly adopts — that's what I find unacceptable.
Valley of the Dolls is fighting that. It doesn't necessarily win: let's face it, Susann is not the best writer to grace women's lit, and the plotline doesn't really zing off the page. It isn't classic literature, nor is it the sort of thing you'd teach to students, nor would it make a feminist reading list over Atwood or Woolf. But I enjoyed it. And I'm not even embarrassed.
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Content Rating Notice: GC -- May Contain Graphic Content
— and I want to know what it really means, and who wrote it. Derrida? Foucault? Depressing, I think, even for a literary fiction story.
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