Jane Austen Noir

By Cornelia

I got to attend Left Coast Crime in Seattle last weekend, which was wonderful. Andi Shechter and all the volunteers did a fantastic job running everything, and a good time was had by all.

I took part in two panels on Saturday. The first was titled "Noir is the New Black," with Megan Abbott, Con Lehane, and Edward Wright, which was moderated by my old writing group pal Tim Wohlforth. I've been thinking a lot about the history of noir writing because of that, in conjunction with a few other things.

One of these things is a forthcoming short story anthology which Megan Abbott is editing for Busted Flush Press, and which she asked me to submit a story for. The title is A Hell of a Woman: An Anthology of Female Noir, and the premise is that each story should center on a female character who might have been on the sidelines in a typical pulp novel.

While I working on my piece for Megan, I was reading Brian Boyd's honking big two-volume biography of Vladimir Nabokov, whose work I have long admired. A great deal of Nabokov's writing could be classified as noir--not least his most famous novel, Lolita, which is of course told from the POV of pedophile/murderer Humbert Humbert.



I have to admit being brought up short by a quotation cited on page 166 of the second volume, however (Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years).

In April of 1950, Nabokov was preparing to teach a literature course at Cornell. He sought advice from Edmund Wilson:

Next year I am teaching a course called "European Fiction" (XIX and XXc.) What English writers would you suggest? I must have at least two....

According to Boyd, Wilson "recommended Austen and Dickens as incomparably the greatest English novelists, along with the Irishman Joyce."

Nabokov's reply to this suggestion is what brought me up short:

"I dislike Jane, and am prejudiced, in fact, against all women writers. They are in another class."

I was reminded of something I'd copied into my book of collected quotations during college--an excerpt from a speech given in 1902 by Carrie Chapman Catt:

This world taught women nothing skillful and then said her work was valueless. It permitted her no opinions and said she did not know how to think. It forbade her to speak in public, and said the sex had no orators. It denied her the schools, and said the sex had no genius. It robbed her of every vestige of responsibility, and then called her weak.

It taught her that every pleasure must come as a favor from men, and when to gain it she decked herself in paint and fine feathers, as she had been taught to do, it called her vain.



This was the woman enshrined in literature.

I wonder what Nabokov would have thought of Jane Austen's writing had she been writing today--had her close observations of society and the sexes not been constrained by the gender roles of her own era.

Austen has been called the original chick lit author, but I disagree with that classification. I think her work was noir, in that it portrayed the claustrophobia of life as a woman in that time... the all-or-nothing necessity of making a good marriage, for a young woman. The lack of options, the futility of trying to buck the system, the likelihood of death during childbirth.

I think she would've been prone to the use of profanity in her fiction, if such had been allowed. I think she would've tackled the darkest topics, were she writing with the freedom of today's authors, male and female.

Raymond Chandler's famous quotation about detective fiction can also describe for me the world Jane Austen's protagonists had to navigate:

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid... He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

She too was common and yet unusual, she too had "honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it."

There's been a lot of discussion recently about women writing ultra-violent crime fiction, at the moment. (Mega hat-tip to the inimitable Sarah Weinman, for discussing both of the following quotes on her Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind blog).

Danuta Kean, in an article for The Independent, quoted Ian Rankin as having said:

"The people writing the most graphic violence today are women," he says when I ask what he thinks of them. "If you turn that off," he looks nervously at my tape recorder, but continues regardless, going public about one of the great unsaids among crime writers, "I will tell you that they are mostly lesbians as well, which I find interesting."

In what might be considered a followup commentary, Julie Bindel quoted Val McDermid as follows in The Guardian:

As one of Britain's bestselling crime writers, Val McDermid, (creator of ITV's Wire in the Blood), believes that reading and writing violent fiction is about admitting the existence of inhuman cruelty, and examining its causes and consequences. "Women are far more in tune with violence than men," she says. "As a result of 24-hour news, we are more aware than ever before of the atrocities that are happening to women all over the world, and, to make sense of what is going on, we turn to art and fiction."

All of this was moiling around my head during that noir panel, as was Ruth Jordan's response to the controversy sparked by Kean's article, on the Central Crime Zone blog back in November:

Does our sex and sexuality have something to do with what we can write and what we can’t?.... Of course it does. Men and women are different. We’re raised differently, are exposed to different options in our early development, have been given different attitudes towards sex and violence just through the cautionary tales we are given as youngsters. It is a truism that females are exposed to violence personally in middle class society at a rate of four to one over their male counterparts. We see the resulting behaviors of victims far more frequently than the men who are our contemporaries....

Not many male authors have had their door knocked upon at four in the morning by a friend, beaten and terrified, blaming themselves. Nor have they been railed upon by someone they loved in the dark, in the post coitis position. Subjected to an unfounded jealousy and slapped so hard they saw sparks. Most women have, or it’s so close they can feel it. There are different truths for boys and girls. Because, well, we’re boys and girls....

Girls are raised with a knowledge that the threat of violence is there. It determines how we walk down the street, where we’ll go alone, what we wear and how we behave. We are raised trying to not become victims while men are raised trying to save victims. Different realities make for different psyches. In the end the parts equal the whole.

I replied to that in the comment section:

I think you're absolutely right that men and women experience violence (and the threat of it) differently, and that it can influence the way we depict it.

You reminded me of the time I tried explaining to my husband why I didn't want to walk alone at night to a convenience store in our old scary neighborhood in Syracuse.

"Why not?" he asked. "I walk down there all the time and nobody's ever hassled me."

"Yeah," I replied, "because you're six-five and weigh 210 and you're usually wearing a motorcycle jacket."

A few weeks later, I saw Ruth Orkin's photograph "An American Girl in Italy" for the first time, when he and I were in a bookstore together.

[click on the image above to see a larger version in another window]

I dragged him over to check out the poster of it, saying, "THAT'S why I don't want to walk to the Kleen Food at night by myself, okay?"

I don't think he really understood the connection until our daughters were born. Now he gets it so profoundly he wants them to take karate lessons.

I'd love to edit an anthology myself someday, modeled on the one Megan's doing for Busted Flush. It would be called Jane Austen Noir.