Don’t Judge a Book by the Author’s Gender

Knowing the gender of an author tends to trigger preconceived notions about a book before reading it.  During the Victorian period, Mary Ann Eliot changed her name to George Eliot in order to ensure that her work be taken seriously.  It wasn’t that female writers couldn’t get their work published but that society stereotyped women authors as only capable of writing lighthearted romances.  Not much seems to have changed, with 20^th century authors such as S.E Hinton, J.K. Rowling, Harper Lee all writing under gender-ambiguous pseudonyms in order for their books to reach a larger audience of both men and women since it is assumed that men are less likely to read “chick lit” by women.  This raises the question of whether women should adapt to the social construct of only men writing “important” fiction by taking male pseudonyms or attempt to challenge societal expectations by writing insightful fiction under their actual names.

Anna North of Jezebel states, “I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book - in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention.”  North references Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Good Squad as a genius piece of speculative fiction that deserves just as much literary recognition as Jonathan Franzen or Michael Chabon.  When Franzen earned a spot on Oprah’s Booklist, a list consisting predominantly of women writers, Franzen voiced his disdain for being placed on a list among other “schmaltzy” selections, a remark that could be interpreted as sexist.  It can be argued that both Franzen’s Freedom and Allegra Goodman’s Cookbook Collector address similar areas such as family troubles, corporate corruption, and extreme environmentalism in the 21^st century, yet it is not the content of the book that dictates its “importance” but the author’s gender.  Franzen is compared to the likes of Nobel Prize-nominated Leo Tolstoy whereas Goodman gets touted as the 21^st century Jane Austen, who was considered one of the “lighthearted romantic” writers during the 19^th century.  North continues, “There are really two problems at work here. One is the consistent devaluing of women's experiences (a woman's ‘domestic fiction’ is a man's ‘sweeping family saga;’ a woman's ‘self-absorption’ is a man's ‘moving memoir’). The other, though, is the persistent and pernicious need to identify what is and isn't serious.”  It should be noted that today there are males writing romance fiction and feel just as much stigma over their gender.  To categorize fiction into dichotomies of “literary” and “genre” and assigning genders to either binary is oversimplifying the complexity of the writers’ voices and undermining the value of their stories.