ACL 1001. Lecture Week Six

1. ACL 1001. Lecture Week Six The Summer without Men

2. Lecture Format • Reading The Summer without Men • The novel as a non-realist text • NB Donald Barthelme’s ‘The Balloon’ • http://www.massey.ac.nz/massey/fms/Colleges/College%20of%20Humanities%20and%20Social%20Sciences/EMS/Readings/139.105/Additional/The%20Balloon%20-%20Donald%20Barthelme.pdf

3. The Summer without Men • The story is narrated in first person perspective (the ‘I’ pronoun is used throughout). • It is a fairly short novel about a woman (Mia) whose husband (Boris) has asked for a ‘pause’ in their marriage, so that he can pursue an affair with a female colleague. • After suffering a nervous breakdown, Mia leaves their home in New York and goes back to her hometown of Bonden. In Bonden she spends time with her ageing mother, teaches a creative writing workshop, and thinks about her marriage.

4. The Summer without Men: Plot • In terms of plot, we can argue (perhaps) that not a lot happens in the novel. It is certainly not as action-intense as Blood which features two children on the run from dangerous men who are intent on killing them.

5. The Summer without Men: Plot • However, if you look at Jesse and Mia’s journeys, they are both quite similar. • Both novels begin with central protagonists in crisis, both those characters go on a journey of sorts, and both characters come to a new understanding about the world and their place in it. • Yet, to say that the plot of Summer is simple is misleading, and we’ll look at the way the book is structured in the second half of the lecture.

6. The Summer without Men: A feminist text? • Who considers The Summer without Men to be a feminist text? • Why might it be read as a feminist text?

7. The Summer without Men: A feminist text • In last week’s lecture I mentioned the three main phases of second wave feminist literary criticism. • 1) The misrepresentation of women within literary history and literary texts (or in those texts which constitutes the literary canon). For Showalter, this meant ‘exposing the misogyny of literary practice’ (1985, p.5), in particular, the stereotypical portrayal of women in fiction as either angelic or monstrous.

8. Representation of Female characters • Firstly, there are a lot more female characters than male ones in the novel. • Women of all ages are portrayed – not just young, desirable women. • Women are shown to be complex and multifaceted. Many are shown completely independent of their relationships with men. • Mia (the narrator) also points out how women have been misrepresented – in ‘scientific’ fields such as neuroscience and psychology, as well as in the literary canon.

9. Representation of Female characters • For example, Mia vigorously disagrees with Dr. Renato Sabbatini’s ideas about the biological difference between women and men’s minds. ‘This may account, scientists say, for the fact that there are many more (male) mathematicians, airplane pilots, bush guides, mechanical engineers, architects and race car drivers than female ones’ (p.150). • Is Sabbitini right?

10. The Summer without Men: A feminist text • 2) The second phase of feminist criticism was the discovery that women writers had a literature of their own, whose historical and thematic coherence, as well as artistic importance, had been obscured by the patriarchal values that dominate our culture.

11. The Summer without Men: A feminist text • It is important to recognise that the central character of this novel is a woman writer - and a successful one at that. • Abigail is also an artist. Her ‘craftwork’ is shown to have a much deeper subtext, and literally contains layers of hidden meanings. • The girls in Mia’s group are engaged in their own writing. • Mia also narrates a book club gathering in which the members debate Jane Austen’s Persuasion, as well as Austen’s place in literary history.

12. Jane Austen and the canon • ‘Both loved and detested she has kept the critics hopping. “Any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen,” said America’s literary darling Mark Twain. “Even if it contains no other book.” Carlyle called her books “dismal trash” but today, too, she is accused of “narrowness” and “claustrophobia” and dismissed as a writer for women. Life in the provinces, unworthy of remark? Women’s travails, of no import? It’s okay when it’s Flaubert, of course. Pity the idiots’ (p. 173)

13. From ‘Persuasion’ • Anne Elliot: ‘Please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much a higher degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything’ (p.178)

14. The Summer without Men: A feminist text • 3) The third point that Showalter makes is that second wave feminist literary criticism ‘demanded not just the recognition of women’s writing but a radical rethinking of the conceptual grounds of literary study, a revision of the accepted theoretical assumptions about reading and writing that have been based entirely on male literary experiences’. • What does this mean?

15. The Summer without Men: A feminist text • This may be the most complex idea in contemporary criticism: that the structure of the novel, and the ways in which we have traditionally read it, inhibits or suppresses certain stories. • Yet, if we look at most mainstream media that is exactly what we see: female characters of certain ages in minor roles, and whose place in the film is dependent upon a relationship with a male character. • As I’ve mentioned, Summer already challenges these notions, but it also challenges the realist text through its very structure.

16. Structure and Plot • The text challenges the traditional (beginning, middle and end) realist text. • It lacks closure: it is literally up to each reader to decide how the text ends. • There is no drama, or any real kind of suspense. • Yet, by undoing the realist structure, it provides a different kind of story

17. Structure and Narration • One of the most interesting things about the text is the way it is told. • Everything is filtered through Mia; she narrates the text. Is she a reliable narrator? • Mia has, as she tells us, recently suffered a nervous breakdown, but at the same time, she proves her self to be intelligent, articulate and able to engage with scientific thought, philosophy and literary criticism at a pretty high level.

18. Narration and Binaries • In fact, I would say that Mia inhabits both sides of Cixous’ binary oppositions. Sane/Insane. • Boris too, can be seen as being defined by opposing characteristics. He is, after all, a very scientific and rational man who walks out on a long and happy marriage to pursue an affair with a younger woman. Rational/Irrational. • Hustvedt’s narrative weaves intimate thought, scribbles, drawings, (such as we would expect in a diary) as well as vigorous intellectual debate. Personal/Political

19. The novel as a non-realist text • As I’ve already mentioned, Summer challenges a lot of the conventions of realism. • There are no chapters in the book, or a clear narrative structure. • Not all characters are easily explained – who is Mr Nobody? • There are times when the narrator addresses the reader directly, and comments on the text explicitly.

20. The novel as a non-realist text • ‘Soon, you are saying, we shall come to a pass or a fork in the road. There will be ACTION. There will be more than the personification of a very dear, ageing penis, more than Mia’s extravagant tangents onto this or that, more than presences and Nobodies and Imaginary Friends . . .” (p.105)

21. The novel as a non-realist text • ‘Around the same time, give or take a few days, even weeks, backward and forward, the following events were taking place beyond my immediate phenomenal consciousness, not necessarily in the order presented. They cannot be unscrambled by me or perhaps by anyone . . .’ (p. 139). • What does this do to us, as readers?

22. The novel as a non-realist text • What’s interesting is that rather than allowing us to submerge fully into the fictional world of the text, the narrative voice actually interrupts and comments on it. This reminds us that we are engaging with fiction and fictional characters. • This mode of narration reminds the reader that life does not move in one direct line, life is not like the plots of most novels and that as human beings we are often thinking about very different things at the same time.

23. For Next week: • Next week we’ll be looking at how modernism, post-structuralism and post-modernism changed the ways in which we have read and written novels (as well as other texts). • Please bear these ideas in mind when reading the two fiction pieces set for you in the Unit Reader!