Why can't a woman write the Great American Novel?

The issue is: who decides who has written "The Great American Novel".

A related point: what makes a novel a "great, American" novel? (I wouldn't want to write one of those, myself.)

To answer RosaL, I think it is obviously "educated" men who decide these things and label them as such for the purposes of university courses, etc.  I remember when I took "Writing by Women 321" in university I was excited about all of the wonderful writing I was being exposed to and hadn't heard of, but also annoyed that this writing wasn't in the "general" English literature courses. Why were those courses not more aptly-named "writing by men"?

 More generally, I think what is a great novel is obviously going to be in the eye of the beholder.  One thing the course I took did discuss was why so many women choose Harlequin-type novels over more "serious" or "intellectual" ones. What are the sociological dimensions of this?

 Another example of a "Great American Novel" that is actually recognized as such by men and women alike is Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.

Edith Wharton wrote the Great American Novel twice. Well, the Great New York Novel, anyway. And then she taught F. Scott Fitzgerald how to write one too.

I think that's a neat article, and It's especially interesting how many dominant British (and, indeed, Canadian) women writers there have been through the years, and how that compares to American women. And how this paucity doesn't seem to apply to women of colour, particularly African-American women: Stowe, Toni Morrison, Nella Larsen, Alice Walker, and so many more.

It is certainly the book most often assigned by High School American Lit and Comp teachers. Just to throw in some other names though, Carson McCullers. Either Member of the Wedding, or the Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

Any thing by Louise Erdritch, anthing by Ursula K. LeGuinn

Perhaps the question SHOULD be:

"Why can't a woman get the Great American Novel PUBLISHSED?"

For all we know, someone may have written it already and it's sitting in a cd-rom on her desk.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________ Our Demands Most Moderate are/ We Only Want The World! -James Connolly

Folks reading Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings usually don't get past The Yearling, or her memoirs in Cross Creek.

They should try her shorter works, Cracker Chidlings and Jacob's Ladder for a very down to earth look at 1930s Florida backwoods, and I am going to try to find her South Moon Under, which she researched by living with a moonshiner for several weeks.

I think Marjorie's work was just too close to the world that America wanted to forget, too real to achieve prominence among the flag wavers.

And some women writers don't want that classification.

From NYTimes review of books this week:

It may be surprising that there’s been no comprehensive history of women’s writing in America. But Elaine Showalter has now undertaken this daunting venture with her vast democratic volume, “A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx,” in which she energetically describes the work of long-forgotten writers and poets along with that of their more well-known contemporaries. In the 1970s, Showalter wrote “A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing,” which established an alternative canon of British women writers at a moment when feminist studies were very much in vogue, and her new book is an attempt to do the same thing for American literature. Showalter was, for nearly two decades, a professor in the department of English literature at Prince­ton (she was the head of the department when I was graduate student there), and she remains a grande dame of feminist literary studies.

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A JURY OF HER PEERS

American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx

By Elaine Showalter

586 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30

It’s worth noting that many of the most talented writers she discusses — Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Joan Didion — objected to being categorized as women writers and preferred to think of themselves simply as writers. As Elizabeth Bishop put it, “art is art and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc. into two sexes is to emphasize values that are not art.” Showalter handles these rebels by corralling them into special subchapters with titles like “Dissenters.”