Defending the Domestic Drama

The teacups in the room

A recent episode of Jennifer Byrnes Presents called "Pens and Prejudice" was filmed at the Sydney Writers Festival and featured a panel of writers and critics discussing the issue of whether women's writing, fiction in particular, was being unfairly overlooked by the big literary prizes, and whether there was a need for special women's prizes such as the Orange and the Stella. As always, it was a worthwhile talk with an excellent panel, although in the half-hour time slot allocated for the television program, much of the original discussion would have been edited out, I imagine.
 
The issue of subject matter made the cut though, with the consensus being that anything to do with the tiny details of domestic life, so-called 'misery' fiction, and 'thinly veiled autobiography' made the (female) arbiters of such taste, want to 'slit their wrists'.
 
Now I'm not in favour of pumping out fiction as a cynical exercise to jerk tears from voyeuristic readers and I'm not a fan of angst for its own sake, but I do wonder about the assumptions behind the literary denigration of such stories. Humour, lightness, and optimism doesn't seem to come in for quite the same level of criticism, although often these too, tend not to make the cut for literary consideration, being seen as somehow less, when I’ve always thought it would be quite difficult to pull off humour well.

A particular brand of female suffering tends to come in for the biggest hit though, and I am wondering why. Is the expression of issues of suffering through storytelling seen as unseemly perhaps, especially if the sufferer (the central character) is drawn as ill-equipped to rise above it? In reality, preventable and unnecessary suffering does exist, often exists behind closed doors, and is not always 'handled' with the stoicism or aplomb that we imagine it should be. Unselfconscious neuroticism and self-examination are ubiquitous; could be the defining feature of our age, in fact, and is not all bad, in that it - well - encourages self-examination. Isn't this, in itself, a fit and proper subject for storytelling? 
 

The flowers in the room

Effectively, what we are being told is that, if you are a serious writer and want to be considered as such, there are some subjects that you write about at your peril. And yet, these are, to my mind, valid subjects for literary exploration precisely because they are resisted. And they are meaningful, because what happens in the domestic sphere translates to good health, or ill, in the society at large. 
 
The now clichéd and pejorative term 'thinly veiled autobiography' seems particularly inaccurate, because anyone who has given the process of writing any thought at all understands that whatever emerges from an author's pen or keyboard is going to be both autobiographical and fictional; autobiographical in the sense that it is filtered through their particular world view and honed by their peculiar imagination (unless it is heavily plagiarised). Works marketed as autobiography are largely fictional, for the same reason. Perhaps we also need to be reminded that whatever is traditionally published is going to be filtered through a number of sensibilities before it reaches print. To imagine that any book that is accepted for publication is anything other than highly constructed is to ignore what goes on in the lengthy editorial process. 
 
And doesn't 'thinly veiled' autobiographical content (as distinct from the more respectful 'semi-autobiographical' content) imply that there is such a thing as 'heavily veiled' autobiographical content? Is this more commonly called realism, that brand of fiction that reinforces the existing social structures and power relationships of the private and the public, of what is acceptable (non-confronting) to bring into the public sphere and what is not acceptable (inconvenient to talk about)? It is assumed that in realism there will be some borrowing from reality - setting and so forth - but it seems that borrowing needs to be of a kind that does not challenge the reader’s existing world view too much.
 
I wonder about the internalised sexism that underlies the idea that the domestic sphere is somehow not worth writing about, if it is written about by a female writer. Strangely, when men write about the domestic as it impacts them (as is right and proper - men live there too), the result can be considered exemplary (if it is well -written, of course, and the well-written part is understood here - I am talking purely of a subject matter hierarchy). The Great Gatsby was a domestic kind of book, and so was Women in Love. Weren't they? Wonderful books from a male sensibility.
 


The elephant in the room

It would be interesting to look at why female writers have their own hierarchy as far as it comes to subject matter, and why epic is considered so much more valuable than the intimate, why violence is considered to be a better subject to write about than love, and why those who decide prizes for women's literature appear to feel that they must use the very same criteria to judge women's literature as those which have been developed over time to privilege those power structures that made it necessary to have the prizes in the first place. To be considered as good as the Man Booker, do the Orange and the Stella need to be the same?
 
At the beginning of the program Jennifer Byrne mentioned the elephant in the room. My feeling is that the elephant is still there. I think it will take some shifting.