Writing and Image

I have a good grounding in women’s writing and in feminism. I did an MA in Contemporary Women’s Writing and a PhD on Iris Murdoch (which I never finished . . . :-/). I have also mixed with a lot of feminist writers/bloggers/people in general and I have heard countless arguments and counterarguments about the female inferiority complex in the literary world.

There is a theory that women writers, either in defining themselves as women writers or simply as defining themselves on a lower level than “serious” men who write “serious” fiction. There is also a theory that women writers tend to play down their own status as writers, or cover up their gender in order to get people to read their work. Case in point, J.K. Rowling, who was famously told that she should use her initials instead of her name in order to secure a broader range of readers – male readers and boys being statistically less likely to read a book by a woman, thereby, as we can now see with the benefit of hindsight, depriving themselves of one of the best series of books in the history of literature.

Rowling has since received a bit of a backlash in feminist quarters for bowing to this command and I know several women in the literary/academic world who get quite hot-headed on the subject of women who sell out and try to make themselves fit in with misogynistic literary trends.

It’s an old argument; it’s been kicking around for a while and I’m only writing about it now really, because it keeps coming up in discussions – either with people I actually talk to, or just whenever I turn on the radio. There seems, always, to be somebody talking about it.

I had rather lost interest in the subject actually, until I noticed that, even though everyone seems to know about this problem, it has not gone away. I got out of my PhD a few months ago and have since junked most of the stuff I had that related to feminism or women’s writing. But I still remember it all and it seems that it’s still relevant to me because I, also, chose to use my initials when I self-published my work.

Nobody has accused me of inferiority complexes as yet, and it certainly hadn’t occurred to me that this was how it might be construed. But I thought about it more when I heard the old argument again on the radio – on a regular feminist/women oriented program that is on during the week in the UK – and, looking at my online pages. It seemed to me, then, that I had created a kind of writerly persona for myself online that might, to some, seem a little bit pretentious and maybe a bit aloof.

This was conscious in one way and not in another. And it’s not something I’m going to apologize for. I’m writing this, I suppose, to straighten out for myself, and anyone else who might be interested, the fact that I do not feel ashamed, as a woman, to write what I write, and neither do I write what I write because I am a woman. (If that makes sense?!) I don’t see that my writing is what it is because of my gender and I don’t think that the gender of the author is relevant when you look at the work they produce, (I mean, unless they conform very obviously and openly to a gender stereotype like, you know, Barbara Cartland, Andy McNab, Norman Mailer . . .). The reason I chose initials, rather than just using my name, was nothing to do with wanting to cover up my gender, it was just that I could not, for some strange reason, imagine using my own, ordinary, hum-drum name in conjunction with a piece of fiction. You can call that inferiority, if you like, but it has nothing to do with gender and it’s not in comparison with anybody else. It’s just that my name didn’t look like a writer’s name. Or it didn’t before anyway.
I was going to use a pen-name actually. I had one all picked out – Elizabeth Beaumont – because I thought that that would sound better. Maybe if I write something wildly different in future, or if I get an actual publishing deal, I can make use of that pen-name. But for now, I use initials.

And I know, for a fact, that this is something that other writers have done. A lot of my work at university was concerned with mid-twentieth century British writers, Iris Murdoch, A.S. Byatt, people like that; I’m very familiar with the kind of old-school, staid British novelist who just tried to write quite good novels that would provide light entertainment. They were only interested in doing it because it was a kind of highbrow amusement that might, in some circles, be appreciated as an art form. It had nothing to do with image, or money, or trying to get famous.
One of the things that A.S. Byatt always says about her own choices as a writer, was that she opted for initials because it gave her a more serious sounding presence as an author; it was just what people (men AND women) did before feminism came along and mucked it all up by questioning the gender politics of everything. Because then writing was a craft, practiced by quiet, usually fairly studious people who had no expectation that the media would pay them any attention whatsoever; the publishing world was not tainted by a million and one genres and subgenres that have now sprung up in response to who wrote the books, what political standpoints they take, and who or what they were copying when they constructed their work.

Now it’s all about image. The writing world used to be considered to be male, that’s true, but it could also be androgynous, and people, in the main, just believed that writing should speak for itself. Now everyone seems to believe that it has to advertise something. Women’s writing has to be female identified, men’s writing is expected to be masculine and feature spies or police or action heroes. If men write “women’s books” that’s ok, but then that’s another sub-genre in itself and has to be identified as such. If a woman writes a spy thriller then that’s probably another category as well.

My point is that we’re all so hung up now on getting writers to say what they stand for and bawling them out if they look like they’re avoiding something. So if J.K. Rowling didn’t want to be obviously female by publishing as “Joanne Rowling” then that’s bad because, apparently, she’s let down a lot of other women writers who do use their full names and who then have to continue struggling against a maintained prejudice. Somehow people always want to point the finger at people who let the side down while they go about the individual process of bucking a trend. But can’t it just be that people write what they write and do what they do because that’s what suits them?

I don’t like genres any more, or categories that go beyond the basic – crime, thriller etc. – because I think that, in this day and age, we’ve kind of moved beyond the need for them. Now we’re moving into an age of writing where everything can morph and mutate into new, pastiched, or, as I sometimes think of them, cut-and-shut forms; where everything can be patched and stitched together, with scraps from different books coming to make something else.

It’s not new exactly, because it’s all recycled and given a new twist. But it does spell the beginning of an age where people can write whatever the hell they like, basically, and where anything can mean anything and be made to be anything, and people will always be able to find a medium for it.

Because it’s all opening up now. Social media is opening up people’s ability to publish anything, to collaborate on anything, to make new things out of old stories and have the ability to re-write and overwrite and get feedback on what they write. Nothing is fixed any more. So how can we have genres?

When I wrote my first novel, “Jewel”, I tried to define it as a bit like Terry Pratchett and a bit like Gormenghast, and it is . . . sort of. Or at least it was going to be when I was writing it – it was going to be like a lot of things to be honest. But that was as much as I could come up with to describe it, genre wise. Because it’s that sort of fantasy . . . the kind of undefinable fantasy that is set in another world, a lot like our own, but not quite, and it features fairy tale princesses and all that. But it’s not sci-fi. There’s no magic, there’s no aliens, there’s no turtle with a giant flat disc on its back. It’s not THAT sort of fantasy. And it’s not, as I said, gendered in any particular way, because, although it has princesses in it and has some pretty heavy references to feminism, it’s not really a fairy-tale or a didactic feminist utopia/dystopia. I think it has just as much male content as female. So what is it? I don’t know, exactly, it’s just broadly fantasy.

And that’s kind of the way of things now, unless you want to write to a fixed format, which a lot of people don’t, then it’s hard to define who and what you are as a writer, or what your books are in terms of content. I think that soon, if we are going to continue to try to define things, we are going to have to accept that there is a genre for just about every individual writer – because nobody does exactly the same thing as anybody else now do they? The only thing most books have got in common is the fact that they ARE books.

And I don’t know what I do want my books to be defined as, actually; I always supposed that I could leave that up to my readers. Let them decide what they think it is. I reckon that’s what Terry Pratchett did with his Discworld books; he’s said countless times that he often finds his books shelved in different parts of the book shops he goes into, and, as far as I know, he never really argues one way or the other. I’m ok to let people think what they like, but I do, actually, really hope that people don’t try to work out MY standpoint on women based on the persona I’ve chosen for myself as a writer or the books that I write.

NB. That’s not inferiority or some feminist move to get you to see me as androgynous, it’s just a little piece of individualized vanity, I think. I’m of the same mind as A.S. Byatt. For me, initials sound better. That’s all.