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"I don't necessarily find women difficult to write about in the third person," says author Eli Gottlieb ( The Face Thief), "but to write them in the first person is to make a hubristic leap. Inhabiting their actual voice is even more so. "I doubt whether a female novelist who so obviously bungled/sidelined a major male character as Eugenides did, would get the same slack from readers and critics."īringing a complex female character to fictional life is daunting enough for one of the opposite sex. "The female lead in Eugenides' The Marriage Plot is the least interesting of the three major characters." Literary critic and writer Sarah Seltzer is a bit kinder, but agrees that a double standard endures. But their female characters? "Franzen's women are confused and masochistic," claims Pollitt. Two hugely popular authors, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides, for example, are known for full-bodied, decade-spanning novels. To their credit, they are not necessarily shying away from tackling women in their work, but are they 'getting' them? "By default, women have it easier than men when they attempt to craft characters of the opposite sex," says novelist Sally Koslow ( The Late Lamented Molly Marx), "because our whole lives we've been reading vast amounts of literature written by men." For male writers, trying to navigate the evolving battles of the sexes is more challenging. For women writers, it is about finally getting, if not even, at least equal time. However, we have had a few revolutions since, resulting in a lot of space on the shelves, the stage, and the screen devoted to feminine mystiques and mistakes. Tolstoy's classic was written a long time ago, of course, and, on the flip side, evergreen female authors like Jane Austen and the Brontes managed to give us fine portraits of men alongside their memorable heroines. To which others may respond, as did one friend, "I have two words for you. Where are the vivid, realistic and rounded portrayals of women in Roth, Bellow, Updike?"
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"You could not possibly be suggesting that! I think few men write female characters who are complex and have stories of their own. When Nation magazine writer and poet Katha Pollitt learned that I was pondering whether men write women better than women themselves, her response practically crashed my computer. No winners or losers on which sex writes the other better.
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"Let's not forget the Bible was written from a man's point of view," pointed out a scholar I watched on TV recently. Eve took a bite of that forbidden fruit and pretty much got blamed for every sinful deed since. If we want to investigate the way women have been "written" through the years by the opposite sex, we should return to the beginning. David Mamet Focus Features Jeffrey Eugenides