Yates and women

Sorry I have been quiet for so long; just too much going on. However, let’s get down to business now…..I would welcome your thoughts on Yates’s portrayal of women. I will have a go at considering this myself but feel free to chip in, criticize and/or argue with my observations.

Yates’s writing displays a prescient awareness of gender politics but, as with all his political commentary, his expression of this consciousness is fused into his broader narratives. In his early work, work written up to and including Revolutionary Road‘s publication in 1961, Yates’s depiction of the struggles men, and more particularly women, encounter, both within and outside the home, prefigure some of the concerns adopted by the second wave of feminism.  Although Yates’s work was not propelled by an interest in sexual politics, he wrote about what he knew and observed, thus producing insights that now seem ahead of their time and at cross-purposes with how America wanted to see itself.  Although he was not alone in doing this, the issues he drew attention to did not become part of mainstream thinking until after the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 – even if, as several contemporary social historians suggest, the ideas Friedan included in her book had been around long before 1963; Friedan gave voice and recognition, so they now argue, to attitudes already quite established. Yates’s early work, written during the mid-fifties (as all but one of the stories in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness were), seems to suggest our contemporary historians are right; the ideas were around and Yates picked up on them, incorporating many quite radical ideas into his fiction.

In his later work, he went on to develop his investigation into how women inhabit a proscribed space in life.  The Easter Parade (1976), his fourth novel, suggests his increasing awareness of this issue as his story is centred on the struggles of his female protagonist, Emily Grimes, and her older sister Sarah.  Both sisters try to become writers and for different reasons fail in this ambition.  Since the only consolation Yates ever seems to find in life is in writing, it seems doubly significant that these women fail in their ambition to be writers. Being prevented from writing, as Sarah is, would seem to be tantamount to stealing the soul of an individual in Yates’s eyes, stealing not just their imaginative potential but the dreams that give them hope.

In the course of his narrative Yates suggests how men, threatened by female ambition, hold back the women they live with.  At the same time, Yates also weaves into this novel his awareness of domestic violence, suggesting an understanding of the vulnerability of women within marriage that should be noted.  Furthermore, Yates’s inclusion of abortion in several stories, notably Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade, suggests attentiveness to, and sensitivity towards, the political debate about the rights of women.  However, I do not, and could not, argue that Yates was a proto-feminist: he was not.  There are bad young mothers in his fiction too – look at ‘Saying Goodbye to Sally’. There is a real split between Yates’s intellectual appreciation of how life is peculiarly difficult for women within marriages that constrain them or diminish them and his emotional distaste for anything that smacks of a political move to address those issues.  Blake Bailey draws some attention to Yates’s feelings on the subject, when, in the early 1970s, his second wife Martha was thinking of leaving him:

Largely to spare his feelings, she’d spoken in rather vague terms about wanting to “find herself,” and Yates concluded that she’d become a “womens’-libbing bitch” as he sometimes put it.  He couldn’t speak calmly on the subject; partly, perhaps, because his mother’s “independence” had caused him so much grief, Yates’s hatred for all “feminist horseshit” bordered on the pathological. (Bailey, p.429)

And then, of course, there are all the failing older women of his fiction. Coming from his emotional dislike and resentment of his own mother, the portraits of these women – Pookie, Gloria Drake et al – they seem to dominate but shouldn’t obscure what he is also saying about the politics of womanhood.