The Man‐Made World
Rochefoucauld, “There are thirty good stories in the world and twenty‐nine cannot be told to women.” There is a certain broad field of literature so grossly androcentric that for very shame men have tried to keep it to themselves. But in a milder form, the spades all named teaspoons, or at the worst appearing as trowels—the young woman is given the same fiction. Love and love and love—from
“first sight” to marriage. There it stops—just the fluttering ribbon of announcement, “and lived happily ever after.”
Is that kind of fiction any sort of picture of a woman‘s life? Fiction, under our androcentric culture, has not given any true picture of woman‘s life, very little of human life, and a disproportioned section of man‘s life.
As we daily grow more human, both of us, this noble art is changing for the better so fast that a short lifetime can mark the growth. New fields are opening and new laborers are working in them. But it is no swift and easy matter to disabuse the race mind from attitudes and
habits inculcated for a thousand years. What we have been fed upon
so long we are well used to, what we are used to we like, what we
like we think is good and proper.
The widening demand for broader, truer fiction is disputed by the slow racial mind: and opposed by the marketers of literature on grounds of visible self‐interest, as well as lethargic conservatism.
It is difficult for men, heretofore the sole producers and consumers of literature; and for women, new to the field, and following masculine canons because all the canons were masculine; to stretch their minds to a recognition of the change which is even now upon
us.
This one narrow field has been for so long overworked, our minds are so filled with heroes and heroes continually repeating the one‐act play, that when a book like David Harum is offered the publisher refuses it repeatedly, and finally insists on a “heart interest” being injected by force.
Did anyone read David Harum for that heart interest? Does anyone
remember that heart interest? Has humanity no interests but those of the heart?