Mary McCarthyのThe Group再読 : 女性雑誌用小説/「新しい女」たちの挫折物語/早すぎたパワー・フェミニズム小説

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Since the 1970s, when feminist criticism began to have a great impact on the academy, woman writers and their works have been reconsidered. In the 1980s cultural studies broke through the barriers of the genres that we were expected to investigate. Thus popular writers, forgotten and underevaluated, proved their significance in society and literature. New perspectives in feminism and cultural studies led us to find new aspects of Mary McCarthy, the Dark Lady of New York Intellectuals, one of the most popular and controversial woman writers that U. S. A. has ever produced. Lillian Hellman called her "a lady magazine writer." Norman Mailer reviewed The Group as "the best lady magazine novel." Apparently The Group is "95% female gossip" among the priviledged and enlightened Vassar girls in 1930s. This novel is also stuffed with female matters: "an interminable catalogue of facts" or "surface reproduction of the thirties" from the "female sphere." McCarthy believed that "gossip" and "facts" are essential components of fictions. Ironically because she succeeded in imbuing it with these two basic elements that all great novels should share, The Group has been with the label Mailer put on itself. The present readers should note a feminist aspect that the historical configuration of the eight Vassar girls in the novel implies. The 1930s Depression affected feminist viewpoints as well as the economic. The first wave of feminism risen from the middle of nineteenth century had already subsided during the 1920s. The feminist movement had lost its political target, its central agenda since they realized woman suffrage in 1920. Especially in the Jazz Age women turned inward, abondoning collective actions for women's liberation. This movement toward individualism resulted in a conformity to snobbery and banality: clinging to modern materialism and consumption without higher visions and idealism. The Group can be read as the vivid description of how the young "New Women" fell and went astray from Vassar College, a symbol of the first wave of feminist movement in America. There is a similarity between the women's situation in the 1930s and that in the 1990s. This novel appears to be a prophecy. Now the educational and economical opportunities that only elite girls enjoyed in 1930s are open and available to ordinary women. This means that the failure and disillusion of the contemporary women is reflected in the struggle and collapse of Vassar girls of the novel. Another feminist aspect of The Group is deduced from its ambivalent narration. The narrator deeply understands the characters but keeps an ironical, detached and sarcastic attitude toward them throughout the novel. The author seems to forbid the narrator to pay pathetic and emotional attentions to the characters. McCarthy seems to think that sympathy for her female characters is dangerous. Clearly she looks at the negative side of compassion. Generally compasssion and sympathy are given to the weak and the oppressed; victims cannot go without compassion and sympathy. In The Group, there is a persistent refusal to present women as victims. Victims are too vulnerable to be responsible for their own lives. To define women as victims is to deny their autonomy and possibility. To treat women severely is to respect and esteem them. Very often to be fair may appear to be cold. This idea is "power feminism." The development of feminism has taken women to the point where there is no excuse for belittling themselves, disguised as being oppressed by the male-centered society. No excuse is left. But some women fear taking responsiblity for their own life. Some still want even a poor excuse. Social and cultural circumstances and political situations have changed, but an old ideology remains and haunts people. Above all, The Group must be read by victim feminists. This pre-power feminist novel encourages us to confront severe but real aspects of women's situations.
1997-12-20

Mary McCarthyのThe Group再読 : 女性雑誌用小説/「新しい女」たちの挫折物語/早すぎたパワー・フェミニズム小説

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