Elizabeth Eshelman | September 2010

NOTES

At a recent annual Fall for the Book Festival hosted by George Mason University, Charles Baxter and Richard Bausch gave a joint reading. As with many readings, this one allowed for a question and answer session at the end. One audience member posed the oft-heard question of what to make of the proliferation of MFA programs: is it a good thing, or, as Flannery O'Connor famously noted, is it a phenomenon that doesn't discourage enough writers?

For those of us who are a student or teacher in an MFA program, the question is a familiar one, as it is for the writing world at-large. (Pick up a copy of Poets & Writers and chances are there will be at least one MFA-related article.) But Baxter's answer was memorable, not least for the conviction with which he delivered it: years from now, people will look back on the flourishing of writing programs at the end of the 20th century and remark on what a wonderful moment of civilization it was, that so many people should express such interest and spend time cultivating their love of literature and writing.

I could have leapt from the audience and kissed him for his optimism! But then, too, there have been just as many or more days when I have felt the depressing weight of seeing so many books published and so many literary magazines circulating and so much writing of mediocre quality and wondered about my own worth as a writer in a dime-a-dozen MFA world.
Like it or not, graduate programs in creative writing have increased at least fivefold since the 1970s, and no matter how fixed your view on the O'Connor/Baxter scale, the question remains because it is all but impossible to take a clear-sighted view of recent or current trends-whether that trend is in literature, politics, science, or any other field imaginable. But with the February 2009 publication of established literary critic Elaine Showalter's A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, I propose that there is now a thirteenth way of looking at this MFA blackbird: by tracing the correspondences between the women's literary history Showalter provides and the arc of a contemporary individual in the MFA scene.

Showalter has taken on a formidable task and followed through with bravura typical of the Princeton professor emerita whose corpus of groundbreaking feminist criticism began more than thirty years ago with a literary history of British women writers. Simply picking up A Jury of Her Peers will make any reader feel that she or he has encountered something important. And it's not just the heft of the 600-page behemoth that gives the impression; skimming the introduction will tell you that this is the first literary history of its kind, presenting women authors from the earliest pilgrims to the present moment.

Looking at the co-ed MFA scene through women's literary history-as I propose doing-may seem like using an apple to describe an orange. But in following Showalter through the broad sweep of American women's writing, I began to see similarities between the development of a literary history and of the individual writer who follows an MFA path. The similarities are strong enough to warrant looking at the evolution of women's writing as a paradigm for the evolution of the contemporary MFA writer; observing the arc of literary history might thus help us more clearly see where the arc of MFA programs will have American writers land.

Although Showalter divides the book into chronological chapters and not into any larger parts, I see a distinct three-part movement in the literary history she presents. From early pilgrim writers like Anne Bradstreet and Mary Rowlandson up through post-Civil War-a good two-hundred years' worth of literary history-the central issue that plagued women who wanted to write was permission to do so. In a society that believed women should be fulfilled with housework and childrearing, this was hard to come by. But as things changed with the New Woman movement near the turn of the 20th century, Showalter shows us literary women in increasing community, and along with that, increasing professionalism. Part three of my system of division follows on the heels of permission and community-once those were in place, women began to build their audience, and America at last had a sense of women writers as an integral part of American literary culture.

These three conditions-permission to write, community, and audience-are at the core of what it has meant for women to advance in American literature, and interestingly, it is these same three specific needs that MFA programs meet for the contemporary individual writer who wishes to advance.

Let's begin by looking at a woman who did not have permission to write. Although there are many to choose from, Showalter's tone becomes particularly elegiac when it comes to Julia Ward Howe, whose name Americans recognize, if at all, as the poet behind "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Showalter-whose critical opinion is not to be taken lightly-describes Howe as "a poet with the daring and subversive intellect of an Emily Dickinson, the political and philosophical interests of an Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the passionate emotions and gifts of a Sylvia Plath, who might have been an American female bard." Might have been is the key phrase: Howe's husband, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, was prominent, well-educated, and a leading doctor for the blind, but he was also an indifferent and domineering partner. Howe secretly wrote and anonymously published Passion-Flowers in 1853, a collection of poetry that sold well and received critical acclaim. But when Howe was revealed as the author, her irate husband demanded she never again publish work of a personal nature. He threatened not only divorce but also that she would never again see her children if she continued to write. Howe made, in her own words, "the greatest sacrifice I can ever be called upon to make" by giving up her literary ambition to save her family life. Still, her husband forced the family to move away from Boston to a secluded institution for the blind where Howe lived in effective isolation. As Showalter puts it, Howe's husband "like the Duke in Robert Browning's My Last Duchess (...) gave orders and all passion ceased."1

Howe was not given permission to write-neither was her husband's view atypical. Quite the opposite, Dr. Howe embodied the 19th-century attitude that it was unseemly for women to write because it was too public an act for creatures of the domestic sphere, and because it detracted from their real work, which was housekeeping. Against such widespread societal belief, writer after writer became crippled in her literary work or turned to writing domestic advice books.

A beginning writer today likewise runs up against widespread societal values that stand in opposition to literary endeavors-a society that values the visual, the immediate, the material, and the disposable has little room for that which takes place in the imagination, begs a time commitment and intellectual engagement, and stands to endure the test of time. As novelist and NPR book reviewer Alan Cheuse explains, we live in an age of "digitization," whereas reading and writing are activities that call on our minds to work in analog mode-that is, by making analogy. In this digital world, literature is at best considered a frivolous leisure activity and at worst a form made obsolete by movies, Internet, and other instant-gratification modes of entertainment. These facets of contemporary life deny permission, in a sense, to those who would devote themselves to literature. A life spent producing literature is of no recognized value in a society that expects even a liberal arts education to be purposeful and pragmatic, rather than based on knowledge for knowledge's sake.
By drawing the analogy between the societal beliefs that today deny writers permission and the societal beliefs that yesterday denied women any role beyond housekeeping, I do not wish to downplay or belittle the struggle of those more than two centuries of women writers who were stifled by a sexist society. In some ways, it does seem too bold a claim to liken our current position to systems past which our society has progressed. But my hope is that this essay might inspire people to read Showalter's book, and, if they do, they won't be able to resist feeling a sense of loss as they witness talented woman after talented woman hindered and even silenced in the hands of patriarchy. In this way, Showalter's book has the potential to awaken people like me-who has, in the past, been quick to dismiss feminism as a politicized academic movement-to a new understanding of why it is important to look back on our literary mothers.

So despite the difficulty of the claim, it is clear that when a writer must struggle for permission, his or her potential for putting forth literary work of real value is diminished if not done away with entirely. Even for the now-canonical Edith Wharton, whose upper class New York society surroundings denied her permission to write, a sense of permission made all the difference; Showalter points to Wharton's first collection of short stories as a "breakthrough to a new professional identity" and lets Wharton speak for herself in quoting an excerpt from Wharton's autobiography:

At last I had groped my way through to my vocation, and thereafter I never questioned that story-telling was my job...I felt like some homeless waif who, after trying for years to take out naturalization papers, and being rejected by every country, has finally acquired a nationality. The Land of Letters was henceforth to be my country, and I gloried in my new citizenship. The publishing of The Greater Inclination broke the chains which had held me so long in a kind of torpor. For nearly twelve years I had tried to adjust myself to the life I had led since my marriage; but now I was overmastered by the longing to meet people who shared my interests.2

You can practically hear Wharton giving herself permission to write, and that feeling of relief at finding a place and a group where one belongs is strikingly similar to the feeling that compels a contemporary writer to apply for an MFA program. An MFA program grants permission to write by giving students a tangible and valid reason for making writing a central focus of their life-after all, our society looks approvingly on a higher degree, and so not only does an MFA provide a socially acceptable end-goal towards which students can work, but many programs offer support along the way that makes the writing endeavor viable financially.

Let me use myself as an example: for my third year in George Mason's MFA program, I was awarded a comprehensive fellowship that allowed me to treat writing my first novel draft as a full-time job. Imagine if I had gone about it another way: suppose I was not in an MFA program, but I had saved enough money to take a year off and write a novel draft. Such a move is not sanctioned in our society-I would have had to explain it as a period of unemployment; family and friends would watch in horror as I actually spent a whole year not bringing in any income; and jaws would drop when all I had to show for a year of "work" was 500 pages in need of revision. Besides, no one really takes you seriously when you say you're writing a novel because those who aren't writers tend to think it's not real work, and those who are writers regard you with suspicion for not having yet published and thereby proven your worth.

An acceptance letter to an MFA program is equivalent to permission to write, for even if the financial support does not come through the degree program, it is still a contract that says the student will make writing a priority for the next two or three years. It also gives a sense of personal permission; just as Wharton felt her worth as a storyteller bolstered by the publication of her stories, so too do graduate acceptances suggest that an individual's literary work has worth, or at the very least, potential to have worth.

As Wharton's case shows, only after one achieves a sense of permission can the truly great literary accomplishments come. And as Wharton naturally turned from permission to wanting to find "people who shared my interests," the next step after gaining permission is finding community.
Once the New Woman movement of the late 19th century increasingly permitted women to write, female writers' friendships and participation in the literary community became more frequent through the 20th century. One of Showalter's irresistible anecdotes, which she labels "Two Gertrudes," recounts Gertrude Atherton-a novelist who lived from 1857-1948 and favored bold, Californian protagonists (not unlike herself)-and Gertrude Stein, the famous Modernist expatriate writer who, as Showalter puts it, "was so sure she was a genius that she convinced everyone around her."3 Here's Showalter's version of the encounter:

The two Gertrudes could hardly have been more different. Stein was a massive, crop-haired, mannish lesbian; Atherton kept up her hyperfeminine blond coiffures, designer gowns, and elaborate makeup through her eighties. They also detested each other's writing. Stein found Atherton's popular novels pathetically old-fashioned; Atherton regarded Stein's prose as a "clever hoax." But when they met in Paris in 1925, they liked each other.4

After some years of friendship, however, Stein asked Atherton to help organize part of a tour she was taking in the United States-and while Stein enjoyed herself, Atherton felt put out: "I thought Mary Austin was about as conceited and swollen in the head as a writer could be, but Gertrude Stein goes her one better."5

The two Gertrudes are an uneasy attempt at community, to be sure, and a look at community beyond Showalter's female limits show that Stein's real community was the bohemian "geniuses" she hung around with in Paris, like Picasso. But this anecdote shows how women with strong personalities were increasingly beginning to form connections. Showalter touches on the close friendship of novelists Josephine Herbst and Genevieve Taggard; of poets Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elinor Wiley (Millay even refused to be honored by the League of American Pen Women because they had withdrawn Wiley's invitation to the same honor as a way of censuring her divorce); and of women who found places in co-ed literary groups, like Dorothy Parker in the Algonquin Round Table or H.D., who was part of the expatriate group that included Ezra Pound.

Thanks to Showalter's broad and chronological sweep, we can see a sense of community evolve before our very eyes-from the isolated housewife novelists of the 19th century, to the tempestuous, devoted, and sometimes catty friendships of women in the early 20th century, to Yaddo, the artist colony that Showalter cites as "probably the first literary community in which women lived and worked together."6 Despite the emphasis Showalter gives to Yaddo-she even uses it as an organizing principal of her chapter covering the 1950s-she doesn't succumb to painting an idealized picture of women in community. Even though writers like Jean Stafford found Yaddo "a luxurious respite from her domestic chores and anxieties,"7 it was equally a place where idiosyncrasies collided, as in the anecdote of the drunken Carson McCullers flinging herself across Katherine Anne Porter's doorway and proclaiming her fierce love (Porter, in her own words, "merely stepped over her and continued on my way to dinner").8

MFA community, as I have observed from my own experience, is as troubled and fruitful as the women's experience of it. Since the workshops that form the core of any MFA program offer a built-in community atmosphere, where the material for the class is one another's writing and all are participants in writing and in offering constructive criticism, it is not surprising that community is one of the most frequently cited reasons for entering an MFA program. In the MFA sense, community means both a shared study of writing and literature, and simply a group where friendships might flourish; just as Atherton and Stein disliked one another's writing, I have found that some of my closest MFA friends are writers whose material I might typically pass over on the Barnes & Noble shelf.

Opponents of MFA programs-or those who fall on the O'Connor side of the scale, believing that these programs don't discourage enough writers-claim that the MFA homogenizes writing into a neatly uniform product blander than skim milk. When they express this fear, or their disdain of the "workshop story," they are really making a comment about the dangers of community. When brought into close and frequent contact with a similar group of people, trends inevitably occur and a shared vocabulary develops. To be honest, by the end of the third and final year of my degree, I had tired of hearing the same "workshop comments" of "Maybe you should rewrite it in third person" or "I wanted to see more dialogue"; "I wanted to see less dialogue." Phrases like "tip of the iceberg," "continuous waking dream," or that old axiom "show, don't tell" quickly lose their luster when they resurface almost as frequently as stories about adultery or stories about a protagonist discovering a shattering family secret.

Clearly, trends and rules are the last thing a writer should follow if he or she wants to produce great literature since it is the particularity of an author that makes the work great. (Who but Faulkner could have such a world-view and such lush language to express it? Who but Austen could so seamlessly marry decorous and elegant prose with biting satire?) And there will always be some-maybe even many-who use community as a cover for their individual lack of achievement; it is, after all, far easier to be involved with the community than one who shapes it. But for those who will continue to write and to achieve after completing their MFA, community, even (and perhaps especially) with its baggage of shared trends and habits, acts as something against which to define oneself as a writer. There is much truth in the tired phrase that you must first learn the rules in order to break them; knowing the kind of writing being produced likewise allows the perceptive MFAer to see how his or her own work might break from the pack.

Yet, even before a writer is ready to gain a sense of self, learning the conventions of fiction provides a great step in the right direction, and MFA programs speed up the rate at which writers learn these conventions. I will never forget Tim O'Brien's visit to my undergraduate university my senior year; I had just finished applying to a formidable round of MFA programs and had encountered a lot of debate over the value of MFA programs. While escorting O'Brien from an academic building where he had been speaking to the president's house for dinner, I had about five minutes to talk with this beacon of contemporary literature. The one question I chose to ask was where he weighed in on the MFA debate. Knowing that he didn't have an MFA, I felt sure he would say something about how normalizing and mainstream their effects, but instead he answered immediately that he thought MFAs provided a great opportunity, and that if he had gone to an MFA program, he might have saved himself about ten years of learning the ropes on his own.

Ten years. While he may have been exaggerating for the sake of expressing his support, I would guess, based on my experience, that he was not far off the mark. All aspects of community-as a place to learn how to speak the vocabulary of reading like a writer, a place to be exposed to a variety of styles, a place to make unlikely friends, even as a place of convention, which one might use as a springboard to define him- or herself-come together to provide one of the greatest benefits of an MFA: that of launching beginning or amateur writers to a new level of professionalism.

Here, MFA critics are likely shouting that this is exactly what's wrong-too many amateurs are encouraged to be professionals. But what critics forget is that writing is a self-selecting field. Those who really do have a professional spirit about their work will continue to write after graduation. They are likely the ones who feel energized and excited by their thesis of creative work, rather than regard it as an ordeal that they're glad to have finished. I have heard students in both camps. I have also heard from my peers the difficulty of continuing to write post-MFA, and only the truly dedicated manage to continue. This post-graduation slump got recent attention in Poets & Writers as well; their November/December 2008 issue included the article "Regrouping after the MFA," which chronicles a group of Sarah Lawrence MFA graduates who struggle to maintain their writing outside of the womb-like safety of the writing program; many admit to long periods of not writing at all, and the reader gets the sense that most are on a slow downslide from their MFA heights.

Professionalism is at its core a heightened sense of permission; as Showalter summarizes at the beginning of her 1980s chapter, "A new confidence and assertiveness marked American women's attitudes toward their position as professional writers."9 In the greater scheme of American women's history, then, examples of women who are taken seriously as writers become more numerous. Writers like Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, and Lorrie Moore become serious presences not just through the awards they win-including Morrison's Nobel-but with the broad audiences they reach. And here the third piece of the arc falls into place: that, as Showalter says, "no longer constrained by their femininity, women were free to think of themselves primarily as writers, and subject to the same market forces and social changes, the same shifts of popular taste and critical fashion, the same vagaries of talent, timeliness, and luck, as men."10 While women's audiences may differ in makeup from men's, this freedom to participate in the same sphere is a claim that audience-on an abstract level-is equally open for men and for women.

The progression makes sense: after obtaining permission and finding footing in a community, writers seek to reach an audience. But here too, MFA programs deserve to be called a phenomenon in that they create a large audience of trained readers capable of approaching texts from both a broad, thematic angle and a more finely-tuned sense of prose and form. MFA programs also create audience through the literary magazines they circulate. Critics may point to the self-sustaining-and therefore normalizing-nature of these programs' publications: MFA program A produces students who submit work to any of many mid-tier journals published by programs like B, C, and D, while students from B, C, and D submit to A's journal or any journal in the mix, including-potentially-their own. Incestuous as the situation may appear, it seems to me that even this ultimately can't hurt, for if the MFA system produces a lot of writers, it is also producing an equal amount of readers, and though many of these journals have zero name recognition with the digitized majority of society, the fruits of these magazines follow stepping stones (like Best American Short Stories or Pushcart Prizes) into more mainstream publishers and broader audiences.

Through Showalter's women writers, we have observed a progression from permission to community to audience that lands us in Showalter's final chapter, which is titled "Anything She Wants." In some ways, Showalter might too quickly leap to a sense of total equality-men still seem to have a certain hold on the current literary scene, with the Richard Fords, Stuart Dybeks, and Richard Bausches more common than the Lorrie Moores or Amy Hempels. But still, her point is well-made: women have broken free of the censorship and notions of propriety that plagued their writing until surprisingly recent decades, and they have done this by gaining permission, forming community, and building audience. The idea of "anything she wants" doesn't guarantee that women will dominate the literary field or even that female greats will arise; women are simply in a position where opportunity is open and they can freely pursue literature.

Can we not, then, say that this will be the outcome of the MFA proliferation-that the many and perhaps too-many encouraged writers will at least be given the opportunity to build a literary life? Given these observations of permission, community, and audience, Showalter's literary history indirectly allows an explanation of why MFA programs proliferated to begin with as places where all three core requirements are met. These MFA advantages set individuals up in an unprecedented way to pursue a literary life; not necessarily to be the next Faulkner or Wharton but, as Baxter said, to be a lifelong and good reader, perhaps even to remain in an MFA atmosphere as a professor, and-most vitally-to have one's own small body of work as a last bastion against a digitized age.

AWP

Elizabeth Eshelman has an MFA in fiction from George Mason University, where she held the Thesis Fellowship. A freelance writer and editor based in Fairfax, Virginia, she worked on Literature: Craft and Voice (McGraw-Hill 2009) and is currently revising her first novel.

1. Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (New York: Knopf, 2009), 80.

2. Ibid., 274.
3. Ibid., 251.
4. Ibid., 253.
5. Ibid., 253.
6. Ibid., 367-8.
7. Ibid., 375.
8. Ibid., 370.
9. Ibid., 467.
10. Ibid., 494.