SOURCE: French, Marilyn, and Janet Todd. “Marilyn French.” In Women Writers Talking, edited by Janet Todd, pp. 69-78. New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1983.

[In the following interview, French discusses her body of work, the masculinity of language, and the critical reception of her novels.]

The room was elegant, expensive, overlooking Central Park; the interview formal, businesslike. It was my first meeting with Marilyn French and there was no intimacy or memories in our conversation.

I asked her about her first published book—on James Joyce's Ulysses—and why she chose to write on this topic. “It was my doctoral dissertation,” she replied, “and it was a problem. I love Joyce, but if you're going to write a dissertation on something that's been written on a thousand times it's no fun; yet nobody had ever really been able to talk about what lies at the center of Ulysses or even seriously addressed the styles. It was interesting and something that I could get done in a year.” She'd been planning another topic: images in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, on which she is working now. She has just finished the first volume on Shakespeare. “It's taken me five years,” she laughed, “so I'm very glad I didn't do that for a dissertation.” Joyce, Marilyn French felt, had not influenced her thematically. “I was much too old when I read him seriously,” she explained. “I'd already written five novels, finished two, although nothing was published. I think I learned things about writing from Joyce—about control of tone and so forth.” She paused a moment. “But I think I'd already set out to learn that for myself long before as well. I got more knowledge from Joyce.”

I wondered, however, whether she had not reacted against Joyce in one instance, since he seemed through guides to distance himself more and more from his characters, where she had moved nearer to hers between her two novels The Women's Room and The Bleeding Heart. No, she thought not, and she brought up the subject that intruded more than once into our conversation: the direct expression of emotion. “We live in a culture in which emotion is really looked down on,” she pointed out. “If a work of art deals with human emotion as we feel it—which Ulysses does—it's going to be called sentimental and I think Joyce was extremely sentimental and knew it.” Yet Joyce did not write a sentimental book—he was also very ironic. “If you look at Dubliners, his first book, it's cold eye and cold heart, except maybe a little bit in The Dead; then his next book is all emotion—Stephen Daedalus—really a little bit much and I think he really was split between those things. Because he was so brilliant, he came up with an absolutely unique and brilliant form. But it has nothing to do with me—it's from a different world and a different gender. It's from a different attitude. I have serious respect for emotion.”

Emotion came up again when we spoke of Marilyn French's best-known novel The Women's Room, which repeatedly details the extreme feelings of women. “I do think emotion is more accessible to women than men,” she declared. “They're more aware of it. When men start to feel something, they immediately turn on the TV set and watch a ball game, go out and argue at a political meeting, get rid of their emotions there so they don't have to be aware they have them. I don't think men are less emotional than women. I think they're simply less aware of their emotion, and, when it does come out, it comes out in a very childish way—fourteen-year-old temper tantrums, or five-year-old jealousies.” She waited a moment, then added emphatically, “I think women are terribly emotional. Emotion is as much a part of one's self as mind or body.”

I admitted to being uncomfortable with the amount of feeling presented in The Bleeding Heart, where the main character Dolores manages to remain vulnerable and undeadened after a life of emoting and horrors. Marilyn French grew impatient. “That's just why she's in pain—because she isn't deadened. She wouldn't be a very interesting character if she was.” She went on to note the similarity between The Women's Room and The Bleeding Heart in the progression from the statement of intense emotion to an investigation of its cause. She hadn't, she confessed, been aware of that progression in the first book, but in the second she was perfectly so. “A friend told me that when she first started to read the narrative sections [that took place] on the beach in The Women's Room, she thought that the amount of emotion, the sense of tragedy that this narrative had was way out of whack with what you knew. But by the time you'd finished reading the whole book, you realized that the emotions were nowhere near what they could have been.”

I had read the reviews of Marilyn French's two novels. Most were favorable, but several had made very similar criticisms; that she loaded her books with extraneous detail which buried her themes and characters and, even more frequently, that she was too polemical, and—related to this—that her characters became exemplars, not living people. She seemed a little irritated by these charges. To the first she replied, “I don't think that this has been made as a negative criticism. I don't think the detail is ever extraneous. When that's been mentioned, it's been positive. I think that is how you create the texture of a day, a life, or an event. I don't think you do it by describing it in large historical terms. It seems to me that is the very technique of poetry.”

The second criticism, she admitted, bothered her to the point that she thought about it; yet she felt it unjust. “When you're working against a current, against the very basic assumptions of the culture, if you don't get polemical, if you don't say what you have to say, no one is going to hear you. People can say, ‘But that's damaging to your literature.’ And maybe they're right but maybe they're not right. The one writer who means more to me than any other writer—and always has from the very first time I ever wrote a book a lot of years ago—was Dostoevsky. I recently reread The Brothers Karamazov and found he was writing on the other side of the same question I'm writing about. He's talking about patriarchy, he's talking about what does God mean and if a thing called God exists, why. And that huge district attorney's summing-up of the case against Mitya is essentially a defense of a primal being which is masculine, narrow-minded, insists on certain sexual and moral codes, and so forth. I never thought of that as polemical.”

Perhaps it's English literature, especially the modern novel that has tended to avoid the polemical, I began. I meant this as English-language literature, but in her answer Marilyn French focused on the country. “English literature isn't polemical, especially the present day. The writers most popular in England today, like Drabble and Weldon, Bernice Rubens and Kingsley Amis, John Osborne and so forth …” She dismissed them expressively. “It's all very light. It's hesitant ever to be thought that it takes itself seriously.” Certainly, I interrupted, it values the ironic mode. “Yes, ironic, a little distanced from things, never making large claims. That's not the tradition of English literature. Eliot, Dickens, Shakespeare …” As for her characters being exemplars, she considered that “most people do feel those characters and they live on the page. I think Mira of The Women's Room lives on the page—to the point where everyone thinks it's direct autobiography. What I say to them is ‘Have you ever read an autobiography that was dead all the way through?’ Because God knows there are lots of them. And the reason my books feel autobiographical and alive is that I'm a good writer, not because these things are real. I think the characters are very much alive.”

We turned then to specific topics from Marilyn French's books. I felt she caught wonderfully the sense of loneliness in life, remembering the passage referring to Dolores's past in The Bleeding Heart—how she would “sigh her way to bed alone and be there feeling it, the pain that was with her always, so familiar and accustomed a guest that it could be ignored for long stretches. It shuffled around her house in bedroom slippers, and made its own tea.”

“I don't see how you can really know who you are unless you allow yourself to be alone, which means feeling lonely on occasion. Loneliness is as much a part of life as togetherness … I think that, if you're alone and you've been with people and there's a lot of loneliness going on and they go home and the door shuts, the sense of loneliness at that moment is really overwhelming; but within an hour you're perfectly contented. I think you could have exactly the same sense of loneliness if there was a body in the bed.”

Which brought us to sexuality, so much a male topic in literature. I asked her how she managed to write about sex, since sexual vocabulary is overwhelmingly male. (One critic unkindly said that her sex scenes are copies from old semipornographic models.) “It's difficult to write a sex scene, period,” she replied. “I think there's really only one in The Women's Room and in The Bleeding Heart there aren't many.” She hesitated. “There are, but I use metaphors from other areas rather than bodily terms to describe the sex. I thought about it—I mean I had to think about how to depict female experience itself, which has traditionally been rendered by men as a surrender to, a vanquishing, a giving into, a being taken, and so forth. But I think that's not necessarily how women feel. I try to find the right language when there isn't any other. A lot of things in our experience have no words.”

From sexuality we moved to marriage, which, The Bleeding Heart suggests, is an outdated and hopeless institution. Marilyn French thought it just a word. “You enter a marriage with the expectations of your period. Some people are entering marriage nowadays with a different set of expectations from people of my generation. I think for us, it's finished. I know one or two marriages of people in my generation that don't have the usual power relation underlying them, but I don't know many, and most of the people I know of my age are not married and never will marry again—in fact find it difficult to find men because the men of our age are all so hollow and mechanical, emotional zombies. But I think there are some, a handful of younger men, who are a little bit better.” I mentioned the view of traditional marriage in The Bleeding Heart, emblematized by Edith, wrecked and immobile, with no legs. This, for Marilyn French, was indeed marriage.

I raised the problem of children in an age of separations. In French's books, they appear blighted by their parents' breakings. Marilyn French disagreed with this, feeling that the blight comes not from the breaking of a marriage but from the marriage itself. “It's not the fact of the divorce but all that leads up to it,” she went on, “the quarreling, the hatred that suddenly fills the house that is so bad for the children. But even when parents stay together, people are so terribly crippled by their childhoods, people whose parents didn't get divorced, it didn't make any difference; what was done to them as children was so horrendously cruel and you don't really ever get over it.” There is then nothing traumatic about having only one parent? “No, I think that when you don't have to have these miserable marriages, people might have a little better chance for personal fulfillment and may not be so miserable, and if they're not so miserable, they're not going to be quite so miserable to their children.”

I wanted to go back to her earlier point about the absence of language for women's experiences, and I asked her if she felt prose had a gender, whether there was such a thing as a female style. “There must be because when I get mail—and I get an awful lot of fan mail—I know within two sentences whether a man or a woman wrote it and I'm always right. In fact one time I got a letter which started out in the usual pompous way that male letters begin and I thought, this has to be a man, and I looked at the name and it was a woman's name. I thought, wow, this is unusual and I went back and read the letter and, though he had a woman's name—maybe it was Evelyn or something like that—he said ‘I am a man’ at some point in the letter, so that I knew and, indeed, I was right. But in prose I think it would be hard to tell. The only way you could really say that is if you could get sentences that no one knew and laid them out to test people—which you can't do because people who know literature would know where they came from.”

French women critics never tire of pointing out that up to now women have had to write male writing and that they have had a subservient relationship to language itself. Marilyn French took this point, agreeing that the English sentence, like the French or German, is masculine. “That is, the structure is subject, verb, object—he fucks her. You have a doer and a done-to. I think language will change. For instance in seventeenth-century English prose or twentieth-century poetry, particularly of people like Yeats, you find a lot of verbals. The subject is not necessarily clear and there is no object. There is a doing. I find it in Sir Thomas Browne and even in Bacon. I think that the syntax of sentences will change in time, as women have more influence not only on what gets done in the world, but what gets felt and thought. Meantime, I do not myself choose to experiment with other forms of prose because, frankly, I want to be understood and, if I have to use a male sentence to do it, I will do it.”

If one can see gender cutting through language and syntax, can one, I wondered, see it affecting tradition? Is there a female tradition of the type American feminist critics have tried to isolate? Marilyn French thought not and found it a dangerous idea. “Whenever one isolates a tradition,” she explained, “I start to worry, because a tradition is a hierarchy, a passing on, a continuity of a particular line. So if you're F. R. Leavis and you say ‘This is the Great Tradition in English literature,’ you have to leave out some of the most interesting things that were done in English literature in order to say it. I find that a terrible thing to do—as though Blake or Sterne were somehow extraneous to other things. I don't think they are.

“I think that the woman writer who wants to write about women's experience in some typical way almost has to break with the tradition of the past. The great novelists of the past dealt with women who were unmarried, who were about to make the one choice they were allowed to make in their whole lives: whom to marry. The novel ends with them marrying or perhaps marrying anew as with Dorothea Brooke. A woman must be sexually chaste no matter what she thinks or does. She can rebel, but only so far. Male supremacy is it. And even if you're someone like Charlotte Brontë who, as Virginia Woolf says, breaks into her novel to complain (I've no problems with that in the way Woolf did—it's clearly related to the rest of her novel because what does Jane Eyre do to Rochester at the end in order to be an equal? She has to blind and cripple him), she's writing about male supremacy. I think if you want to write about women now, you have to break forcefully these conventions. You can't just ignore them or go round them—you really have to break with them directly. So you're breaking with the past, period.”

If, then, she felt no community with past writers, did she feel part of a community of contemporary ones? “Not of female writers particularly. I have been part of a female community always—ever since I was an adult. I didn't like girls when I was a girl. I thought they were silly: they talked about nail polish and dresses and I was reading Schopenhauer. There was just no communication. There was only a little communication with boys in those days but there was some. You could at least sing Mozart together. But when I became a woman I had absolutely a community of women and have never been without one—since in fact some of my present friends are the friends I had then. As I've gotten older and met different kinds of women it does happen that a lot of my friends write. They aren't necessarily novelists. Since The Women's Room was published, I've come to know other female writers, whom I like very much, but life is at a different point now and I don't have the time to spend hours and hours—and neither do they—getting to know someone; so they're not as close to me as my other friends are.”

I asked her if she'd always had the urge to write and, if she had, whether this grew out of some childhood loneliness or unhappiness. She thought this a negative way of looking at it. “I was lonely and unhappy but I think most children are and I don't think I read or wrote because I was lonely. I did other things. I played the piano, I drew. I could have spent all my time doing these things and not reading and writing.” I was interested in her childhood unhappiness. “My parents are still married and they're both very sweet people. They didn't abuse me. It was a sad childhood but it wasn't horrible. It was sad because my mother was so moody and she was so unhappy because she hated her life. She didn't take it out on me, but you come home and this woman is there and she's put away the washboard and put the clothes on the line and she's got a mind but she doesn't even know it. She was unhappy, that's all. And that's not good.”

With her independent views, I wondered how Marilyn French had got into the academic routine and come to take a Ph.D. “I'd always wanted to. I started on a master's when I was first married, but then I got pregnant. I stayed home with the children and I wrote novels and short stories and so forth. And after about ten years I was pretty lonely and very unsuccessful and I thought, I've got to get out, I've got to talk to other people with my own interests. And I'm not going to make it as a writer—I don't know what's wrong, but I'm not. So I went back. I'd always been good at academics and one-half of my desire had been to teach—the other half was to write.”

Now that fame had come, did she feel at all unworthy of it? “No, I think I felt very bad at one point—which was, after twenty years of writing and publishing one book and teaching and being very good at what I did, I was out of work. I didn't think The Women's Room was going to get taken and I was feeling pretty despairing. But once it did, everything was all right again.”

How about the jealousy that fame brings? Did she feel any from other women? “Not from my friends. I suppose there might be some, but if there is I don't get friendly with those people. I have a very rich life. I have a lot of good friends. In fact if I meet new people, it's hard to squeeze them into my life. There's so little time. And fame does make new relationships more difficult—you can't credit them.”

You seem a secure person now, I interrupted. “I liked what the French said when I was there—that I was serene, that I have a kind of equanimity because I've been through an awful lot in my life and I know I've survived.”

I questioned her then about her present work. “I have a book on Shakespeare coming out in March. In the following year there will be a book of essays in which my ideas will be laid out. I go about the country giving speeches a lot and women want the ten commandments of feminism. Not only don't I have them but if I had them I wouldn't give them to them. It's horrible—you may as well join the Communist party or the Catholic Church. But it is a thoughtful summary of what I see and I attempt to offer whatever vision I have. And then after that, there'll be another novel.”

Marilyn French is clearly a feminist writer. She judges herself so and reviewers use the phrase to praise or belittle depending on stance. I wanted therefore to ask her about feminism and its meaning to her. I began with the TV film of The Women's Room, which, instead of ending with a rape, a death, and the main character at a community college drinking brandy, sailed out on the high winds of a feminist speech. “I think the people involved in making the film tried very hard to get as much of the truth of the book into it as is permitted on American television. The networks did not want a rape; they did not want a death at the end; they did not want a downbeat ending—in fact they wanted Mira and Ben to marry at the end. What they did present is Eleanor Holmes Norton's words—in my book!”

In The Bleeding Heart, Marilyn French wrote of England, and I asked her about the very different feminist consciousness there. “I find almost no feminist consciousness,” she replied emphatically. “I find a class structure which separates one group of women from others. I find that the group of women who are doing the writing—for magazines, newspapers, and television—are enormously competitive with each other. I find them all deferential to men. I find them very, very threatened by feminism. I think this is largely the class system. I mean if you've got a group of women who are able to get to Oxford and Cambridge and are able to get jobs because they've connections and they know people and because they're in that upper elite, then you're going to have a hard time having them sympathize or identify with the women on the other level.”

When I pointed out that Americans too seem to distinguish between university feminism and activist feminism, she went on, “In the first place, the country's so much huger and there's so much more upward mobility—people from lower classes getting to positions of power. And there isn't the same kind of entrenched power structure. I'm not saying there isn't a tiny little elite class in America because there is, but people slip out of it and in all the time. It's a bigger, less stable country and because of that this situation is less severe. Which is not to say that I don't know any women in England who are feminists but the few I meet are very embattled, very untrusting, likely to be separatist—which is also true in Italy, Spain, and Germany. The most intense feminists are militant, socialist, separatist. If they're socialist they're working with the Marxists or they're separatist because they're dealing with a fascist tradition. And they know they have to raise the same kind of vigor and hatred against what they're encountering. It's a direct response to the entrenched governmental politics. Franco may be dead, but all the people who put him in office and the people who own the money are not. Hitler may be gone but Germany is the same and Italy is the same. So the feminism of a country has far more to do with the immediate situation of that country than it has with worldwide feminism, which is why feminists have such a hard time getting together across international barriers.”

Despite Marilyn French's last statements, I sensed a certainty in belief and purpose. Do you never fear the results of feminism, I asked, never feel that it is cold out there and that it might have been warmer if more suffocating indoors?

“It's very cold out there. It's war out there. When I go round the country I have to fight my way. In England too. Continually. And I get tired of it. I hate it. But I have a kind of certitude. That may be seen as ridiculous. But I don't see it as ridiculous. I think certain values are absolutely right. I think that my philosophy, which doesn't appear as much in the novels as it will in the nonfiction things, is right. There's no deciding to go back to some other way. What other way? I've always been this way—I've been this way since I was a child. To think that you have a handle on truth, to think that you have certitude about something is, of course, ludicrous. But I'm not claiming to have the truth about what human life means or where it began or where it ends up. I do claim to have a truth about how it should be led. It's a limited truth but it's absolute for me.

“To me feminism is not just about women,” Marilyn French went on, “it's about moral values, identified with women, though I don't think women have a gene for them. In this world at this moment, technology and the power people are becoming fewer and fewer and more and more powerful, so that you have essentially three huge centers of power which are capable of wiping out the world. Countries dedicated to profit are less and less concerned with the human life they destroy, about the nature they destroy. I don't see how you can be alive at a time like this and not devote your energies to countering that and it seems that feminism is the most cohesive and comprehensive philosophy opposing it. One could become an ecologist or an antinuclear person, all of which I'm sympathetic with—but feminism embraces all of it.”

And you never doubt. “Oh no, I never doubt.”