A Bad Year for Écriture Féminine?

"And it's damned what a sensitive man is brought to," he said, talking to the swinging body, "when he's racked with women, and with beasts."

--Djuna Barnes

The fallout from the Harvey Weinstein revelations has so far been that rarest of things: a revolution with no particular downside, the presidential aspirations of Al Franken notwithstanding. But if nothing has been lost, something in feminist theory may have been settled.  

The style and structure of this revolution (or, at least of its first three months) have left no place for the kind of writing that was once in the vanguard of academic and artistic feminism: the style or mode (or experiment) called écriture féminine. Rather, this revolution has been written in a journalistic, objective mode more constrained by institutional and ideological limits than almost any other form of writing. If feminism might finally triumph in this historical moment, it looks to do so without its house style. 

Two examples might suffice to make the point. 

First, take Djuna Barne's Ryder, an experimental novel originally published in 1928. Chapter 5 of the novel is written in the mode of a sermon decrying the moral "damage" done to victims of rape and strongly implying that women too often bring sexual violence upon themselves: "A Girl is gone! A Girl is lost! A simple Rustic Maiden but Yesterday swung upon the Pasture Gate, with Knowledge nowhere, yet is now, to-day, no better than her Mother, and her Mother's Mother before her! Soiled! Despoiled! Handled! Mauled!" (21).  The 8-page chapter is written entirely in this fashion without any explanation of how this chapter relates to the previous one or who this sermonising narrator might be: "Who told you, Hussy, to go ramping at the Bit, and laying about you for Trouble? What thing taken from your Father's Table turned you Belly up?" (23).

Chapter 6, switches gears entirely and with devastating satirical effect: "In the small British country seat of Tittencote (described in the last chapter) in the year 1869, John Johannes de Grier lay dying" (30). To be clear, the town of Tittencote has not been described at all in the previous chapter. Or, at least, it has not been described in any way that would usually be labelled "description." Instead, the entire previous chapter is given over to the sermonising excerpted above. What Barnes does here is use the structure of the novel and her abrupt shifts in style to make a polemical point: All one needs to know about the village of Tittencote is that it is the kind of place that treats women as they are treated by the previous chapter's sermon; everything else about its existence can be inferred from the attitudes on display there. 

This, I think, is an example of what poststructuralist feminism means by "écriture féminine." On the level of style and structure, Barnes here displays all of the openness to interpretation, subversion of narrative conventions, humour, and raw difficulty of a writer out to subvert the phallogocentrism of, at least, the realist novel. And on the level of politics, that stylistic experiment is yoked to an expressly feminist position: the satirising of sexist stereotypes and their relationship to sexual violence.  Barnes here (and throughout Ryder) creates what many forms of feminism once imagined to be the future of anti-patriarchal writing. It is a riotous, polyglot, carnivalesque prose that uses more staid genres against themselves. This is writing aimed squarely at the heart of an Apollonian order.  

If Barnes is as good an example as any of what feminist writing was once thought to look like, the Oct. 5 New York Times story by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey that began the Harvey Weinstein era reads like its polar opposite.  

Admittedly, the article begins with a double narrative lead, one story about the actor Ashley Judd and a second about a former Weinstein Company employee named Emily Nestor. By the standards of daily reporting, this is a fairly significant departure from the "inverted pyramid" structure in that the lead does not directly summarise the key events. In the context of prose in general, however, this lead is still written in the terse, objective tone of mainstream American journalism.  

And following the lead, the story returns to the precise tone and structure expected of formal news writing: "An investigation by The New York Times found previously undisclosed allegations against Mr. Weinstein stretching over nearly three decades, documented through interviews with current and former employees and film industry workers, as well as legal records, emails and internal documents from the businesses he has run, Miramax and the Weinstein Company." Here are the hallmarks of what in some quarters was once derided as logocentric, patriarchal prose: the grammatical accuracy, the cautious and precise claims, the careful compiling of evidence to support those claims, and, of course, the reference to the institutional authority of The New York Times itself. There is not a hint here of Barnes' Bacchanal.  

But it is, obviously, the The New York Times' version of feminist writing that has created a revolution (to the extent that we are really living through a revolution). The precise, methodical collection of data and the recording of that data in blank, declarative sentences seems utterly foreign to the French feminism that once heralded a revolution in personal expression. At that level, the level of pure style, an argument may not have been won, exactly, but a question seems to have been settled: As it turns out, one need not overthrow the patriarchy's style; one need only overthrow the patriarchy itself.