quotes from “How To Suppress Women’s Writing”

One of the things that I enjoy most about writer’s residencies and workshops, even as I publish more, is hearing about other books that I haven’t read. Sometimes, it’s a bit like cracking open a watch to examine its gears, or even better yet, positing another portal or thread in the growing webs of narratives and ideas in my head.

While attending VONA, author Aurora Levins Morales suggested Joanna Russ’ book “How to Suppress Women’s Writing” which is a thinly-veiled science fiction treatise about the “Glotolog” who use various stratagems and threadbare reasons for why another group’s presence and language is faulty. As the book progresses, Russ leans more toward her own voice and struggles in placing women within the canon in terms of getting access to books and dismissal by colleagues who doubt the validity of women writing a variety of texts. Although this book is dated in parts, it has some strong quotes that I’d like share that strike me as resonant decades after the original publication of this particular book.

“The idea that any art is achieved ‘intuitively’ is a dehumanization of the brains, effort, and the traditions of the artist, and a classification of said artists as subhuman.” (p.91)

“When the memory of one’s predecessors is buried, the assumption persists that there were none and each generation of women believes itself to be faced with the burden of doing everything for the first time.” (p.93)

“Without models, it’s hard to work; without a context, difficult to evaluate; without peers, nearly impossible to speak.” (p.95)

“To read the visionary’s blazes of illumination as faulty structure, fantasy as if it were failed realism, to read subversion, as if it were nothing but its surface, is automatically to condemn minority writing, among which is the writing of women. When critics have to deal with a different English, there is also the ploy of reading the difference as if it were failure.”
(p. 127-28)

“There is a false center to ‘literature.’ It’s not only male, white, and middle class (or above) but also European East Coast. Whatever happened to that splendid burst of conscious American-ness which produced people like Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Sinclair Lewis, and (somewhat later) Thomas Wolfe? Criticism seems to find them embarrassing nowadays and prefers the expatriate Hemingway, the expatriate Eliot, and the expatriate Pound. It seems that the ‘universal’ does not include ‘American.’” (p. 128)

“But remember, one can’t get minority work into the canon by pretending it’s about the same things or uses the same techniques as majority work. It probably isn’t and doesn’t. (I would argue it does at times but plays with the constraints.) It may very well look like nothing ever seen before on earth. When science fiction first entered academia, the mistakes made about it by critics were grotesque. They continue to be, from time to time. This was due not only to a lack of scientific background–for example, some critics saw classic alien-background stories as nightmares, being unaware of the accuracy of the background and the delight in this as the story’s point–but also to a lack of any knowledge of the field’s history and conventions (including lack of the knowledge that it had a history and conventions). (p. 130, The first note in parentheses is mine and the italics in the last line are ones that I emphasize here.)

“If you don’t like my book, write your own.” (p. 130 It sounds a bit like teasing, but I think more of us should, whether sanctioned by academia or publishing houses, or not. In any case, it stresses the point that we should be finding as many ways as possible to document our work and our presence.)