I’m currently re-reading Unpopular Opinions, Dorothy L. Sayers’ superb selection of essays, and have been blown away once again by her sheer genius. The essays on the Christian Aesthetic and the Creative Mind, reflecting her discusison of these issues in her seminal Mind of the Maker, are simply and profoundly sublime. And whilst I’m singing her praises, I should also laud her masterful notes to her own translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which are the epitome of Thomistic applicability and succinctness.
My present pleasure in the presence of the incomparable Miss Sayers has caused me to ponder the difference between the sort of feminine genius that she possesses in abundance and the ideological constraints of feminism and its po-faced political correctness.
Over ten years ago I edited an anthology of poetry for HarperCollins entitled Flowers of Heaven: A Thousand Years of Christian Verse. It represented my own small effort to inject a little Christian presence into the hedonistic debauch that accompanied the turn of the Millennium in sordidly secular England. To my intense irritation, the editors at HarperCollins felt that my original selection did not contain enough poetry by female poets and insisted that I increase the female presence irrespective of the objective quality of the poetry. I complied in the spirit of grudging compromise in the belief that it was the only way I would get HarperCollins to proceed with publication. Needless to say, this inferior poetry was removed in the second edition of the book published by Ignatius Press. By way of explanation, if such is needed, I might add that my omission of these female poets had nothing to do with a prejudice against women writers, and the decision to exclude these poetesses was taken on strictly literary and not “sexist” gounds. I don’t know why there have been relatively few women poets of merit down the centuries, but the absence of the feminine presence in the field of prosody (except in its presence as the inspiration for much of the finest verse written by male poets) is more than rectified by the towering feminine presence in the field of fiction. Jane Austen is perhaps the greatest novelist who ever lived, and she certainly merits a place alongside Dickens and Dostoyevsky. Similarly, the Brontë sisters are true giantesses, as is George Eliot. Amongst American writers, Flannery O’Connor has earned her place in the presence of other great American short story writers, such as Hawthorne, Poe and Twain. And as for the greatest detective fiction, doesn’t the aforementioned Dorothy L. Sayers warrant a place alongside Conan Doyle or Chesterton?
In the presence of such feminine genius, the phantom of feminism fades into the fogs of the muddle-headed political imagination of which it is a figment.
Joseph,
You touch on something here that sometimes causes me to bristle, even to say things I might later regret. Specifically, I refer to the political correctness of the HarperCollins editors and to that righteous and illogical demand that equal representation equate equality. (I think I may have one-upped you on alliteration there!)
I taught Eng Lit Survey I (Beowulf to the Renaissance) years ago at a school with a 98 percent black student population. The principal called me into the office to discuss my syllabus. It seems there had been protests from the students that I had included no black writers, and she wanted an explanation.
A few years before that, a fellow graduate student made a presentation denouncing Chaucer’s anti-Semitism in a class on Medieval English. The other students, in a fit of righteous rage, demanded that Chaucer be eliminated from the syllabus. They almost succeeded.
Nothing is more insane than anachronistic political correctness except political correctness itself.
As a woman, I have been more profoundly offended by the kind of pandering stupidity the HC editors revealed than I have ever been by sexism. And sometimes the offense causes me to say or do things I regret. Back in the early 70’s, I was nominated as a Danforth Fellow. Later, I discovered that someone else–a man–was better qualified and had been the faculty’s first choice, but I’d been nominated because I was a woman. I wrote a downright acidic letter refusing the nomination. I said the nomination by those who preferred trends over truth had no meaning.
If you want to accuse me of being a brat, I wouldn’t argue the point, yet it still gets to me. I sometimes think women writers of the past chose masculine pseudonyms not so much to avoid what is now called the “sexism” of publishers as to avoid the kind of gender exploitation that political correctness necessarily involves.