Critical Overview
Jean Auel's novels have met with much popular success. Yet most literary critics and scholars have problems with her work on several different levels. Some reviewers find her work lightweight in terms of character, plot, and style. In addition, many popular culture scholars, who seem to be the only ones who will address Auel's work directly, find her foreshadowing heavy-handed and boring.
There are similar problems with her mixture of fact and fiction. Lindsay Van Gelder questions Auel's commitment to both feminism and racial equality. She is particularly troubled with the idea that boys become men when they do something (hunt) yet girls do not become women until something is done to them (menstruation begins for Clan women and loss of virginity for Other women). Bernard Gallagher also suggests that Auel failed to create a truly feminist female hero because she allowed the Clan to break and destroy her. Clyde Wilcox contends that Auel's feminism does not fail outright nor along the lines Gallagher describes, because Auel is looking at a bigger picture than just one girl in one unhappy situation.
Many of the standard anthropology works published after 1980 address The Clan of the Cave Bear. James Shreeve mentions Auel's novel in the introduction to The Neanderthal Enigma, but he does not go into specifics. He does refute many of the scientific and cultural claims Auel makes about Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon society.
Other anthropologists do give Auel credit for increasing the popularity of prehistoric peoples, particularly woman. However, some cringe at the Hollywood overtones in the novel. For example, the Clan wears animal hide wraps that have no form of sewing or weaving in them. Yet, as Elizabeth Wayland Barber asserts, woven textiles have been found in salt mines that date to the periods that Auel is writing about. Other archeologists and anthropologists have found evidence of domesticated animals and woven textiles thousands of years older than Auel's Clan. Olga Soffer says that the old way of looking at prehistoric cultures has changed since the early 1980s, and suggests that the type of fiction Auel writes might be an influence.
There are times that Auel seems to outguess the scientists. In 1998, researchers suggested that, according to DNA evidence, the Neanderthal race did not contribute to modern human genetics and therefore are not related to modern humans in any real way. Not five months later, archeologists made two discoveries: one, a child's skeleton that had both Neanderthal features and Cro-Magnon features (much like Durc in the novel) and two, that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons coexisted in Europe for over 10,000 years. The evidence of interbreeding between the human species was not available to Auel in the 1970s—she made it up. As Wilcox suggests, Auel is much more interested in exploring contemporary society than accurately investigating prehistoric cultures.
There is no dismissing the popular appeal of The Clan of The Cave Bear. It sold over one-hundred-thousand copies in its first three months. Auel's popularity, particularly among women, has grown in the years since the first novel's publication.
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