Women Writers: Hybridizing Creative Gentility and Gender
On March 29th of this year, the Daily Princetonian published a letter from alumna Susan A. Patton stating that those female students whom do not find a boyfriend by freshman year will not be successful in life. She blatantly addressed the young women, stating “For most of you, the cornerstone of your future and happiness will be inextricably linked to the man you marry, and you will never again have this concentration of men who are worthy of you.” Patton claims to be giving these young women the advice no one else is willing to share with them. She goes on to say “As freshman women, you have four classes of men to choose from. Every year, you lose the men in the senior class, and you become older than the class of incoming freshman men.” Patton is encouraging the young women of Princeton to find their soon-to-be husbands before they graduate high school. This unconventional story challenges the basic fundamentals of feminism; how can women expect to be treated as equals with men when women themselves begin to change their stances on the issue? As this recent story conveys, the issues of gender equality now exist through the stereotypical lifestyle of women serving as housewives. This issue of feminism is displayed otherwise through the work of Amy Tan, Rita Dove, and Sylvia Plath.
Like the great American writer Mark Twain, female writers have struggled, even since ancient times, to gain recognition and a receiving audience. Similar to the great man himself, Rita Dove, Amy Tan, and Sylvia Plath shared in such struggles as each of their works, For the Love of Books, Mother Tongue, and “Daddy”, were inspired by their personal lives, experiences, relationships, and cultures. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn did not initially receive the widespread appreciation that it does today; however, as the book explored the social justice issue of slavery, Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” breathes life into the issue of feminism. That poem being one of Plath’s contributions to American Literature, Rita Dove has also contributed through her work as an advocate, being named US Poet Laureate. Similarly, Amy Tan was part of a movement of Asian-American writers as she contributed to the development of modern Asian-American Literature.
Rita Dove, Amy Tan, and Sylvia Plath each have upbringings and lives unique to her; each of these women have found success beginning in her childhood extending through her early adulthood. Rita Dove is an American poet and author who was born in Akron, Ohio in 1952. She was often motivated by her parents to read extensively and do well in school, which resulted in her being named a Presidential Scholar as she went on to attend Miami University. After she graduated she attended the University of Tubingen in West Germany, where she met her husband Fred Viebahn. One of her most famous works, Thomas and Beulah, was loosely based on her grandparents andachieved Dove the Pulitzer Prize. Also born in the United States that year, Amy Tan is an American writer known for her exploration of the difficulties of mother-daughter relationships: “I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person as well” (1). Tan was born in Oakland, California on February 19th to two Chinese immigrants. Tan’s childhood was one full of strife and tragedy. Her father and oldest brother both died of brain tumors, leading Tan’s mother to move the family to Switzerland. Tan was in constant conflict with her mother, which escalated when she decided to run away with her eventual husband Louis DeMattei to San Jose State University. Her early career found success writing as a business woman, until her mother’s recovery from illness drove the two to China. There, Tan became a changed woman, and the trip inspired her to write The Joy Luck Club, which would eventually confirm her reputation as a major novelist.
The only one among the three of these women who is dead, and has let alone taken her own life, Sylvia Plath was perhaps the most dynamic and admired of the three. As World Socialist reporter said about the late Sylvia Plath:
Whether Plath wrote about nature, or about the social restrictions on individuals,
she stripped away the polite veneer. She let her writing express elemental forces
and primeval fears. In doing so, she laid bare the contradictions that tore apart
appearance and hinted at some of the tensions hovering just beneath the surface of
the American way of life... (1)
Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Boston to a German immigrant college professor and his student. Her life suddenly changed when her father died only eight years later, in which she later reflected in her most famous poem “Daddy”. The family then moved to Wellesley, where the undergraduate began to suffer symptoms of severe depression, including bipolar disorder: “It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative—whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it” (1). Soon afterward she attempted to take her own life at the young age of nineteen. After her recovery, Plath returned to Smith College where she met her husband, Ted Hughes. The end of their marriage in 1962 however, left Plath to care for her two young children. She committed suicide shortly afterward by inhaling gas from a kitchen oven.
Before the great American writers Rita Dove, Amy Tan, and Sylvia Plath resided in the annals of American Literature, they struggled in their individual ways; like Mark Twain, these three women were influenced both positively and negatively on their roads to success. The great American writer Mark Twain was influenced by the Civil War in which he saw institutions uprooted and social life transformed: “I was a soldier two weeks once in the beginning of the war, and was hunted like a rat the whole time” (1). Rita Dove was influenced by Shakespeare, Boccaccio, and her grandparents. She took the ideas of the white literary world and interpreted them in the culture of the black people. In an interview with The Book Report on April 8, 1997, Dove discussed her “refusal to be bound by history, gender, race, circumstance” (1), and where this aspect of her character came from:
As a child, I was told by my mother and father, "Don't assume anything. Look at
the situation as clearly as you can... then do the best you can with what you know." The point was not to rely on friends or circumstances. I also think that
reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had
the ability to make utter strangers come alive. That expanded my sense of what
differences there can be in a human being. (1)
Similarly, Amy Tan was influenced by her mother and grandmother, and often wrote about feelings concerning life and death. Perhaps more interesting, however, are the not-so-known influences of Amy Tan. As Tan explained in an interview two years ago, she has had a number of different influences: fairy tales, the Bible, the writer Nabokov, and the book Jane Eyre. She saw connections between fairy tales and stories like “David and Goliath” in the Bible which fostered a wild imagination in her. All of this is credited ultimately to the way she was raised, an intelligent literary Christian.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn delved into the issue of slavery through the character Jim; similarly, Sylvia Plath delved into the social justice issue of feminism in her poem “Daddy”. In Mark Twain’s revolutionary novel, Jim is a slave who runs away with the protagonist Huckleberry Finn to find freedom in the north of the United States of America by traveling up the Mississippi River. Through this character Mark Twain addressed the issue of slavery, pointing out that slaves are in fact people, people who have feelings and emotions. The issue of slavery was one that Mark Twain felt true disgust and misunderstanding of: “Our Civil War was a blot on our history, but not as great a blot as the buying and selling of Negro souls.” Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” is a reflection of the damaged and fearful relationship between the narrator and her late father. Plath depicts the narrator as a madwoman who confronts her own rage toward her father by later murdering him. Despite the emotionally charged phrases and strong use of words, the madwoman of this poem seems to successfully overcome the oppressing nature of her father, as shown in the last line “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through” (3) of the poem. Her hatred of her evil father becomes more and more evident as the poem unfolds, yet she struggles with her undying love for him. She does not quite understand how she can love a man who put her through years of fear and anxiety, and this same uncertainty takes hold again when she marries a man just like her father: “I made a model of you, A man with a Meinkampf look/ And a love of the rack and the screw” (2). According to Sandra A. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s theory of feminism, “Plath was only channeling her emotions as way for her to come to terms with the oppression she has faced as a woman, and possibly struggles of being a female author” (1). Through the poem “Daddy” Sylvia Plath has shown that women do not need the help and guidance of a man, proving it when the narrator of the poem so chose to kill both her father and her newly-wed.
Each of these women have found success in the literary world; in particular, Amy Tan and Rita Dove have each influenced and contributed in her own way to American Literature. Beginning with her astounding book The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan has achieved enormous political and critical acclaim through her stories reflecting her past. Upon the book’s publication in 1989, Tan’s work has won enthusiastic reviews and spent eight months on The New York Times bestseller list. The international bestseller has since then also been translated into 17 languages. Tan is a member of a movement of Asian-American writers, and her widespread popularity is perhaps one of her greatest contributions to the modern Asian-American literary boom. Maxine Hong Kingston, a member of this movement, believed back in 1991 that “...American fiction has gone minimalist, readers have turned to our stories for the pleasure of reading about relationships and communities” (1). It is for this reason that there was such a boom in Chinese-American literature in the spring of 1991; Amy Tan, along with her fellow Chinese-American writers, contributed to that sudden rise in popularity. Rita Dove, on the other hand, contributed to American Literature through her work as US Poet Laureate. Holding that position for two years, Rita Dove brought writers together to explore the African diaspora through the eyes of its artists. She wrote about being alive and stands as a socialist for women and African Americans. Some of her greatest contributions are through her poetry, and poetry itself. She described to The Book Report in an interview about particular experiences serving as Poet Laureate:
I took Washington kids into the Library of Congress to read their poems and to be
recorded for the Archives. ... I brought Crow Indian children to Washington. They
told their Congressmen what poetry meant to them. They forced their
Congressmen to listen to them. I had an evening of poetry and jazz to join those
Rita Dove seemed in this position to care very little for her own interests, and rather for poetry as a whole and the continuity of its affect on people, particularly those of the younger generation. As she described in that interview, Rita Dove is a woman who attempted to nurture the growth of poetry’s relevance in the world, and will continue to do so for the rest of her writing career.
Rita Dove’s For the Love of Books, Amy Tan’s Mother Tongue, and Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” are reflective works which describe an aspect of influence that defined what these women chose to write about throughout their careers. Rita Dove’s For the Love of Books depicts an aspect of childhood, particularly her love of books and how that made her want to be a writer. Amy Tan’s Mother Tongue talks about a particular time Tan spent with her mother, and how she could not speak English very well. In this story Tan emphasizes that what really matters is what the words coming out of her mouth mean rather than what the words sound like. Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” recounts Plath’s memory of her father, the oppression and fear she experienced growing up under his care. Each of these works describe a particular event in that woman’s life, and how that later shaped the type of writer these women were to become. For example, Rita Dove talks about her love of books, ranging from works by Shakespeare to fairy tales like A Thousand and One Nights. This inevitably drove her to want to be a writer herself, and what it truly meant to her: “...I realized that writers were real people and how it was possible to write down a poem or story in the intimate sphere of one’s own room and then share it with the world” (1011). Similarly, Amy Tan talks about her fascination with language, and how her varying uses of language in the form of literacy drove her to be a writer. Tan talks about how language and how one speaks it can act as limitations; as she describes, this thought of having limitations only drove her to want to become a writer even more: “I started writing nonfiction as a freelancer the week after I was told by my former boss that writing was my worst skill and I should hone my talents toward account management” (1015). These three works relate in that they each reflect a certain aspect of these writers’ influences on their lives, whether it be the love of books or the abuse from a father.
Rita Dove, Amy Tan, and Sylvia Plath each contributed to American Literature in her own way; Rita Dove with her work as US Poet Laureate and advocate of poetry, Amy Tan with her astounding works such as The Joy Luck Club depicting the struggles in mother-daughter relationships, and Sylvia Plath with her work in “Daddy” showing the strength of women and the true meaning of their individualism. Like the great American writer Mark Twain, each of these women will be remembered for generations to come for their unique writing characteristics, and the mass appeal of their works. Despite these three writers being women, an inevitable state of being that has served as a limitation for much of history, Rita Dove, Amy Tan, and Sylvia Plath do so much more than write short stories and poems. Within these works lie their hopes, dreams, fears, memories, beliefs, and influences. As Mark Twain believed in equality for all during the period following the Civil War, Amy Tan believed in the power of language, Rita Dove in the affects of poetry, and Sylvia Plath in the power of women. These are undoubtedly the reasons why society, especially today, look up to these women and their lives as they serve as symbols of strength and feminism in a world that has been for the majority of its history dominated by the influence of men.
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