I do know what point I'm trying to make here, honest.
For those of you who don’t know, I have recently managed to
plough my way through a fairly horrific diet of university exams. For roughly a
month I was in a state of fairly constant panic (which still didn’t motivate me
to do anything), trying frantically to learn for the first time the things I
should have learned back when i was lying under a duvet – occasionally my own –
promising Jesus that if he only would kill me now, I’d never drink again. Rubble
piled up in my bedroom, library fines piled up online and I suddenly developed
a keen interest in dozens of subjects completely irrelevant to what I would
have to answer questions on that nevertheless had to be satisfied NOW. However,
somewhere in the midst of the mess that was my life a couple of things seeped
through and stuck. One of these was that the town where I was born held the
record for highest number of back-to-back houses in the mid-nineteenth century.
Another thing that crept into the recesses of my mind and started itching was a
question; one of the more general essay questions on a literature past paper:
“Do you think that the publishing of ‘chick-lit’ is a worthwhile endeavour in
Scottish Gaelic literature?”.
My initial reaction was “Of course – Gaelic is just as
capable of providing a wide range of literature as any other language,
chick-lit is light reading, good for learners, good for young people, probably
be a good seller, might encourage new young writers and help native speakers
whose literacy is poor” followed swiftly by the slightly less well-thought out
“But chick-lit just seems so rubbish
next to something like Moladh Beinn
Dobhrain ”. As I thought about it, though, I realised that the question
itself was inherently loaded (although I will try and answer it). To me, ‘chick-lit’ actually has some quite
offensive implications.
I should say now that this is not my way of criticising
the state of modern literature. My argument is with the designation of these aspects as female, not with their very
existence; but I take the term ‘chick-lit’ to generally mean some or all of the
following:
- - a book which is not particularly difficult to read
- - a book which has a heavily female influence, either through female authorship or mostly female characters
- - some sort of romance involved (with an inevitable happy ending)
- - not a great deal of action
- - concentrating on the female experience at any stage of life
- - description of emotion, constant presence of emotional variation
- - quite a ‘transitional’ book, one which is never going to be a seminal work of literature but will do for the beach
The first point that springs to mind is a fairly practical
one: why would women and men enjoy reading different things to such a huge
extent that their books have to be kept apart from each other, as if for fear
of cross-contamination? Even if indeed there are (natural or socialised) differences
in taste between men and women, what’s
wrong with dividing books by subject or
author and allowing people – shock horror – to read the back and decide for
themselves if they want it?
The concept of 'chick-lit makes a linguistic distinction between
‘literature’ and ‘female literature’ – what de Beauvoir referred to as the
‘othering’ of the female; the setting apart of domains where women are allowed
or expected to roam. The distinction carries
an idea of inferiority along with it. Chick-lit is books dealing with ‘girly
stuff’, written (largely – although there are notable exceptions to this) by
women, for women, about things that concern women.
To me, the idea that a book would be written about something
that mostly affects women is not
inherently offensive. In society there are gender divisions, whether we think
those are justified or not, and it would be strange if art and literature did
not mirror these divisions. Such a book (for example, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall) could act as an exposé and a political
statement – or serve the equally important purpose of making a reader feel that
they are not alone. It is also not true to say that every book authored by a
woman or concerning women is designated to the ‘chick-lit’ category – however
the existence of such a genre risks this happening on both an individual and
general basis; that the sight of a female name, a watercolour cover, or a recommendation from
Jodi Picoult will result in a conscious or unconscious categorisation as
‘girly’.
Chick-lit is typically often emotional, because as we all
know, women are essentially walking bags of tears and angst, usually
hormone-related. The effect of
relegating most emotionally-charged literature to the ‘chick-lit’ shelf is
twofold. Firstly it reinforces the idea that expression of emotion is
exclusively female – something that I believe is as harmful to the men keeping
a stiff upper lip as their mental health crumbles as it is to the women who are
written off as inhuman for being strong. Again, I should clarify my position
here – expecting every book, no matter the genre or subject, to be a
tear-jerking emotional roller coaster would be ridiculous and restrictive of
character constructions and artistic expression. However it should equally not
be the case that books which do contain emotional exploration are designated as
‘female’, or that books which do not are ‘manly’.
Secondly, emotional literature (when done well) has
always served me as a form of empathy; the next best thing to having been
through it yourself to enable you to start to understand what someone else is
feeling .The gendering of literature therefore removes one of the best ways in
which the issues of one gender can be shown and described to the other (note: the best way is just to talk to each other).
As ‘chick-lit’ is quite a derogatory term it also removes
the idea from people’s minds that these books might actually have something
important to say. This ties in with the point made above but can also move away
from the idea of emotional empathy and into a more ‘public’ political point; if
at least half the population would feel a vague sense of shame at buying the
majority of books authored by women then what will follow is female disempowerment.
Yes, if you have a burning political
agenda to put forward then publishing a novel might not be the best way to go
about it. But social commentary has long been a spark for social change; and
for obvious reasons – how is consciousness to be raised of an issue if nobody’s
talking about it? You might not start a revolution with a fiction book, but you
might make a few people think, which is a good first step. But essentially
writing off a huge corpus of female-weighted literature is removing any power
that this literature might have to provoke thought, or to be taken seriously. I
remember before the 2010 general election a woman who worked in a hairdresser’s
was being interviewed on the news. She was putting forward opinions which
wouldn’t have sounded out of place at a Socialist Worker’s meeting and I
remember being quite surprised at how radical she was. My mother, on the other
hand, said to me “Well of course she is. She listens to women’s problems all
day long.” Just as being a fly on the wall in a hairdresser’s might, chick-lit
could provide valuable insights into social issues - power balances in a
relationship, the social standards women (and men) are expected to conform to,
economic issues, power balances in the family, etc. etc. But it’s written off,
designated as trashy; ‘chick-lit’ books might briefly flash on the bestseller
list but rarely if ever make it into Modern Classics.
The label and associated
stereotypes take away much of the power of female expression and ensure that the
products of this expression will probably only ever make it into the hands of
other women, who are conditioned to view it as rubbish.
The original question, though, is also interesting. Scottish
Gaelic is a minority language and one in which prose has traditionally played
second fiddle to poetry, song and the oral tradition. For a long time only
religious books were published but recent decades have seen a greater output of
less traditional literature, perhaps epitomised by the Ùr-Sgeul series.
To
oversimplify, prose is still the ‘poor relation’ of poetry but it is becoming
more popular. In my view, this means that Gaelic literature is in a fantastic
position to be able to structure production and classification of prose in a
new way – for a variety of reasons it has potentially escaped from the
constraints imposed on English-medium literature; a simple lack of production
of prose means that trends in this area have not changed so much in Scottish
Gaelic as they have even in Irish. While the song and story traditions do have
more traditionally ‘female’ spheres, these generally do not suffer the same
relegation as they might in English – we potentially see a genuine example of ‘equality
through difference’. Issues of class have traditionally been less important in
the production of Gaelic literature; or rather, important in different ways.
Different social strata could be expected to produce different types of poetry
and song, but the largely oral transmission of this work meant that levels of
education were not used, as they were in English medium literature, as a
barrier for the lower classes to compose poetry or songs; even the highest
classes of bard did not write poetry
and much of the corpus of work surviving today was not composed by an ‘upper
class’. We see the interesting paradox
of an obviously patriarchal society, but a more egalitarian output of music and
culture.
I believe that whether or not Gaelic prose starts to include
‘chick-lit’ is one aspect of a bigger question; will Gaelic culture and literature
maintain older traditions, or will it adopt the parameters of Western,
English-medium literature, culture and society; just using different words to
express the same values and social norms? The answer to that question could
provide us with a significant (potentially terrifying) insight into how far
capitalism, patriarchy and cultural colonisation can actually reach.
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