Good For Her: On the Reductive Meta-Storylines About Women’s Writing

Though cliché, the “good for her” genre has provided something pleasingly cathartic to the woman reeling in her oppression: Man inflicts harm on woman. Woman internalizes said harm and suffers silently. Man commits the final straw, and woman fights back. The story often ends with woman covered in blood, smiling, the consequences of her actions seemingly inconsequential to her. Books like Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, Animal by Lisa Taddeo, as well as films like Midsommar and Promising Young Woman extrapolated the femme fatale trope into its own cultural phenomenon. The “good for her” trope implies an overcoming, a relieving finitude to a woman’s pain.

Far less flashy than the murderous, blood-thirsty feminine is the trope of the female writer. It is no coincidence that the most memorable women writers in history at one point in their career invented characters that assumed the same profession as the author, alluding to her own personal biography. Think of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women featuring the spunky Jo March who spends her youth writing plays and stories for her sisters and strives against all odds to become a published writer, or Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar which tells the semi-autobiographical story of Esther Greenwood, an aspiring writer who navigates her depression while attending school.

And how far these young women have come! Since the 1970s, the publishing industry has undergone a feminine boom; female novelists have conquered the literary world, and as of 2020, women are publishing more books than men. With the potential for success women writers now hold, one would expect creative writing to act as a cathartic outlet for dealing with the woman author’s pain; in the 21st century, she can put pen to paper with more freedom than she has ever experienced thus far. Yet, close readings of modern and contemporary literature paint us a more complicated story of the female author.

Unlike the femme fatale movie protagonist, for the female writer, there is not a defined finitude to her pain. Constance Fenimore Woolson noticed the gendered double standard of criticism, and in her 1880 short story “Miss Grief” tells the tale of a male narrator who holds a successful career as a writer. Admitting that he is conceited, he proudly states, “But, candidly, can it be helped…. if upon this foundation [of conceit] rests also the pleasant superstructure of a literary success?” He is approached by Miss Crief (nicknamed “Miss Grief”), who presents to the narrator for critique her works of raw creative genius. While acknowledging her talent and depth, he cannot uplift her work into the publishing sphere when Miss Crief refuses to make changes to her work. The narrator is, ironically, astonished at her steadfast principles in keeping her literary creation as-is. Upon attempting to revise her work, the narrator fails to rewrite the story as soulfully and completely as Miss Crief did. Before Miss Crief dies, and the narrator promises that he will bury her manuscripts with her. A returned manuscript and death do go so well together.

Though Woolson was at the time of writing well-published and praised for her literary contributions, it is likely that her own anxieties about her legacy may have influenced her characters’ terminal fate. For a woman writing in the late 19th century, fashioning such a dismal story is not surprising, perhaps even obvious in the historical context of feminine domestication. And yet, contemporary examples show that the “doppelganger author” is repeatedly utilized by women to express the same centuries-old anxieties of judgment toward their creative work.

Well into her own celebrated writing career, Elena Ferrante gave the protagonist of her Neopolitan Novels the same vocation and first name as her pseudonym. Elena “Lenu” Greco, the Naples-born pauper turned famous novelist, repeatedly expresses the pains of literary creativity over the course of the four-part novel series. In the second book of the series, The Story of a New Name, Lenu, a depressed university student, self-therapizes herself through writing—“I spent twenty days writing this story…I found I was calmer, as if the shame had passed from me to the notebook.”

Lenu achieves catharsis in the peace of her bedroom by rewriting her own history into a semiautobiographical narrative. Her notebook story is eventually published as her debut novel, but new anxieties appear. At her first book talk, male critics attach cold, didactic, and allegorical interpretations to the novel, leaving Lenu feeling inadequate to speak on her own work. The irony found in the critics’ comments is the degree of abstraction that is taken from Lenu’s novel, which, unbeknownst to her readers, was based primarily off her own life story. When Lenu wrote her story in her dorm room, there was no intent of politicizing her childhood rape, which she recounts with detail in the published novel; her only goal was to relieve herself of the trauma that remained and allow herself the final word on the subject.

In the fourth Neapolitan Novel installment The Story of The Lost Child, now a famous author well into her midlife, Lenu’s published work about the city of Naples is spoken of, “as if it were a city of the imagination, similar to those of intrepid explorers brought news of.” Again, her created stories become detached from her own positionality. Lenu, now self-conscious of her ability to write work that will establish a formidable legacy, reflects on her oeuvre: “Those books originated in the climate in which I had lived, in what had influenced me, in the ideas that had impressed me. I had followed my time, step by step, inventing stories, reflecting.” Ferrante’s narrator recognizes that her work does not exist out of time and place. Ferrante herself, by grounding her novel series in the particulars of her home of Naples, does not let the reader forget the material reality of Lenu’s narrative, and by extension, of Ferrante’s presumed biography.

“High” literature is so often pressured to have a timeless quality, to be metaphorically understood by those completely alien to the conditions of the story. Toni Morrison wrote in Playing in the Dark, “Criticism is capable of robbing literature not only of its implicit and explicit ideology but of its ideas as well; it can dismiss the difficult, arduous work writers do to make an art that becomes and remains part of and significant within a human landscape.” Morrison herself watched critics dissect her works, which painted real, historical realities into metaphors and allegories about race and trauma, sidelining the specific experiences of her characters which resonated with so many.

Virginia Woolf experienced something similar a century prior, writing that this kind of fictionalizing is inherent to the female condition—to be regarded as an imaginative fantasy, rather than a person with a corporal body. She writes on female characters in the second chapter of A Room of One’s Own, “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.” Women in fiction often function symbolically or allegorically rather than being represented as complex, autonomous individuals. If historically, women characters are made so fiction as not to be real, then it is only to be expected that the same would happen for women authors.

There is, of course, the other common reaction to the artistry of women—that they are too self-involved, too narcissistically close to their own art to separate themselves from it. Kate Zambreno’s part-memoir/part-literary criticism Heroines weaves her own story with the stories of modernist female writers. Zambreno tells of her own anxieties when confronted with an ex-boyfriend who is about to publish his first novel: “Of the two of us only one of us can be called an artist. He would be viewed as the artist, I, the scribbling sister. I will be called solipsistic. But a thousand-page first-person narrative is not solipsistic?”

Zambreno attributes this elitist disdain for the personal element to the literary standards set by modernists. Zambreno shares of Zelda Fitzgerald’s “suppression of one’s first person in a literary marriage… [Scott] would yell at her—Who is this “I”? Scott also scratched out the first person in her articles.” And yet, the male philosophical canon—Socrates, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, take your pick— has for centuries repeated “know thyself” as the basis to ethics. And never mind those male characters in canonized works of modernist fiction, like Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, who carries significant autobiographical threads and allusions to Joyce’s life. The “rule” of high literature is broken, time and time again—only men are granted the grace of forgiveness.

To publish as a woman means to anticipate a negotiation between two interpretations of one’s writing: one as a vanity project and the other as allegorical, a constant battle between non-existence and ego-centered narratives. The tendency to allegorize or abstract women’s works arises from a patriarchal critical tradition that struggles to see women’s experiences as worthy of direct engagement. Consciously and subconsciously, her semi-real (and often totally real) story threatens the reader. So, he turns it into a mythology. The bodies become caricatures and archetypes, drawn blood and stolen virginities become metaphors, and shed tears become motifs, and nothing more. There are times, however, when he cannot mythologize her story, when she makes the personal aspect to the work too explicit to ignore. So, when biography and historical context become unavoidable to the critic, he deems her unimaginative and demotes her work to a personal blog, reduced from the status of art.

When woman’s identity is so bound to her work, or on the other hand, completely separated from it, what is to be done? Sheila Heti’s newest experimental memoir-novel, Alphabetical Diaries, shares ten years’ worth of her anxieties related to romance, friendship, and—naturally—creative writing. Heti writes in a string of alphabetically ordered aphorisms, “The book is difficult. The book is good. The book is not done yet, but that’s okay. The book is working its way through me. The book says that everything will lead you back to writing—everything will lead you to the core of your heart.”

There is something both masochistic and healing in writing. The point in which creative dread turns into bliss is found in the same moment when Sisyphus reaches the top of mountain. The female writer recognizes the absurdity of her work, that it will be torn apart no matter what, and by decree of the little voice in her head, she must keep writing. One must imagine the writer happy.

Zambreno ends Heroines with a poignant call-to-action for aspiring female writers: “write and refuse erasure while we’re living at least—and to use up all the channels possible through which to scream, to sing, to singe.” The Ferrantes, Hetis, Zambrenos of the contemporary literary world have created meta-storylines, inserting themselves, one way or another, into their work to reject centuries-old dismissal of the feminine personal. They critique the patriarchal debasement of autobiography through other genres—pseudonymous historical fiction, experimental alphabetizing, the blending of literary criticism and personal history.

Leaning into the exact tradition that has kept women out of the canon has the potential to rewrite the canon itself, and even perhaps deconstruct the notion of a canon completely. If literature is meant to unveil the human condition, then we ought to be reminded that the human condition is both universal and particular; meaning ought to be derived from the unspecific and specific. This is why the female writer writes about her vocation. And to that, we must say, “good for her!”