Books: Postfeminism: Playing for Keeps

From novels to humor, women are moving beyond doctrine

At the end of the 1970s, Joyce Carol Gates was hardly alone in wishing for more than a feminist monotone from a number of American women writers. "I anticipate, in my idealism," she wrote in a 1980 contemplation of the future, "novels by women that are not women's novels."

The waiting is over. While some, like Marilyn French (The Women's Room), continue to dissect the feminine psyche and situation, a growing cadre of women has enlarged and honored the literary mainstream. Their books, characterized by less dogmatic treatments of both men and women, and with themes expanded to include family, children and political events, are what New York City Literary Agent Lynn Nesbit calls "postfeminist writings."

That work is attracting a new and concentrated attention. The last time a constellation of equal prominence appeared was in the Great Depression era, when talents as varied as Pulitzer-Prizewinning Novelist Edna Ferber, Poet Marianne Moore and Experimentalist Gertrude Stein were among the decade's most prominent literary celebrities. But they worked in an era less obsessed by the politics of gender. Today, says Simon & Schuster Editor in Chief Michael Korda, "women writers are being noticed more because more attention is being paid to women as a group."

The astonishingly prolific Joyce Carol Gates (35 books of fiction, short stories and poetry in 19 years) leads the way. Perhaps the best-known serious woman novelist in the nation, she made the bestseller list last year with A Bloodsmoor Romance, a lengthy parody of 19th century genteel genre writing. Sample: "Having no capability, and, indeed, no desire, so far as graphic descriptions of 'love embraces' are concerned, I shall make no attempt to sketch for the repelled reader precisely how The Beast (sexual desire) emerged to make a loathsome mockery of the love declarations, kisses, caresses, and other amorous indulgences which transpired between Malvinia and Mr. Twain, in Malvinia's sumptuously appointed bedchamber." Gates, 44, outdistanced feminism long before it was fashionable to do so, taking her themes from headlines. Them (1969) explored the roots of violence by reconstructing the 1967 Detroit race riots. "War, rape, murder and the more colorful minor crimes," she complained then, "evidently fall within the exclusive province of male action." Now a professor at Princeton, after years of teaching in western Ontario, Gates is currently at work on a mystery novel. A book of her essays, The Profane Art, will appear later this year. The author of Wonderland (in which a medical student cannibalizes a cadaver) has not identified with feminine fantasy since childhood. "I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice."