[hildea]

I'm reminded of a scene in Houses of Stone by Barbara Michaels (a gothic novel about, among other things, gothic novels). The protagonist is an English professor who has been voluntold to talk about Jane Austen for a local literary society.

The faces of Mrs. Fowler and the Colonel blended into the mass. With a few exceptions most of them might have been blood relatives, not because of a particular physical resemblance but because they bore the same stamp of complacency. Well-fed, well-dressed, warm and comfortable, they now awaited the confirmation of their own self-satisfied sense of intellectual superiority. Half of them would doze off before it was over. The other half wouldn’t understand what she was talking about.

It felt like a sudden rush of water pouring into a container, filling something that had been empty before, rising from feet to body to throat till it overflowed her parted lips—anger, cold as melted snow, consuming as flame. It was unlike anything she had ever felt before, but it was not alien. It felt…right. Clearing her throat, she said, slowly and deliberately, “The Pen as Penis.”

She paused, expecting a gasp of collective outrage from the audience. There was no sound at all. The faces that stared back at her were like masks, unblinking, frozen. She saw Peggy clap her hand over her mouth.

“In 1886 Gerard Manley Hopkins—he was a poet, by the way—wrote, in a letter to a friend, ‘The Male quality is the creative gift.’ Ruskin—I’m sure you’ve all heard of Ruskin—was more direct. He described the ‘Penetrative Imagination’ as a ‘piercing mind’s tongue.’

“This image of the male quality, symbolized by the male member, as the only true source of literary and artistic creativity permeated nineteenth-century criticism and nineteenth-century attitudes.

“It is such an obvious pun, such a childishly irresistible symbol, that modern critics have been unable to abandon it. A book review that appeared in The New York Times in 1976 remarked that women writers ‘lack that blood-congested genital drive which energizes every great style.’ Well, of course they do, don’t they? Castrated by nature, lacking that essential instrument, they are by definition incapable of originality or a great style. Another critic, writing a decade later, employs an even more emphatic metaphor. Creativity, he says, arises from ‘the use of the phallic pen on the pure space of the virgin page.’ That metaphor certainly excludes women writers; it makes literature a variety of rape.”

Two women at a table near the door pushed their chairs back and stood up. Their faces were crimson with rage or embarrassment, or a blend of the two. Karen half expected they would rush at her, swinging their big black purses like clubs. Instead they turned as one and stamped out of the room.

Karen’s eyes moved coolly over the faces of the audience. Most were the same angry shade as those of the defectors, and their expressions were equally outraged. No one else left the room, though. They’re waiting to hear more dirty words, Karen thought. I mustn’t disappoint them.

“But what, you may ask,” she went on, “does all this have to do with Jane Austen? According to certain giants of criticism, her novels are not worthy of inclusion in the lofty canon of true literature. They lack—and I quote—‘a strong male thrust.’”

The paralysis that had held the Colonel immobile snapped; his face swelled like a big red balloon and he leaned toward Mrs. Fowler, muttering in her ear. Across the table Peggy sat quietly, hands folded, eyes fixed on Karen’s face. Meyer’s face was equally impassive, but the corners of his mouth were quivering.

The lecture was one Karen had given on several occasions, tailoring it, as experienced speakers do, to the particular audience. The only concession she made to this audience was that of simplification. They wouldn’t have recognized the names of the modern critics she had quoted, so she didn’t mention them. She gave them Jane from a feminist perspective—the subtle digs at male vanity, the cynical resignation of women who were passed from one male guardian to the next, without independence or legal identity—and ended by quoting one of Jane’s few overt protests against masculine domination. “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their story…The pen has been in their hands.”

She didn’t have to belabor the point. Dirty old man, she thought, smiling sweetly at the Colonel, whose complexion had darkened from crimson to purple. With a polite “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen,” she gathered up her unused notes.