A very healthy sound: the rage a-broil behind that reticent smile. No person can deny another’s history; history comes into being as humans endure because all humans remember, and women’s history is remembered and broadcast by the mothers and the daughters who have lived it.

“But the very suffering that is God’s law women endure …” someone cries.

Well, man is very quick to label his most brutal whim “God’s law.” (All those “deaths in childbirth” that plagued the nineteenth century and infected the whole idea of motherhood well into the twentieth were not deaths from childbirth itself; the overwhelming majority were from puerperal fever, a complication that resulted because male doctors were too squeamish [or ignorant] to curette away the afterbirth that did not come out naturally—a complication that became prevalent, incidentally, only when midwives were replaced by male attending physicians.) The same voice again: “But you learn by your oppressions—”

No. Oppression teaches us nothing. It weakens us and demoralizes us, makes us shallow and coarse. Under it, we may be forced to learn the limits of the survival of the human in us. But it is the human that does the teaching, not the oppression. And the learning justifies the oppression not one bit.

And the novelist?

The lie that society has conditioned into the fictional practitioner is inchoate, sexual in genesis and political in effect—and practically opaque to intellectual analysis. Society, and the novels of others, constantly reiterate that the novelist’s is the normal sexual syndrome. It is condoned on every side. Bluntly, one who does not suffer from it—whether male or female, heterosexual or homosexual—in our society is not likely to become a novelist.

The great women writers of the nineteenth century came as close as anyone to escaping the syndrome.

Yet Emma Woodhouse must be humiliated. (And if Jane Austen came the closest of all, what a price she pays!)

Maggie Tulliver must drown.

So must the heroine of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, perhaps the most pathetic, because it is the suicide of a person who has everything to live for.

The novelistic lie seems inchoate to the medium of fiction. If one can enumerate its effects on the art’s great practitioners, one could fill encyclopedias with examples of how it has defaced the works of the unskilled and the clumsy, whose fifty-thousand-word-plus endeavors fall, by want of another name, under the heading, novel.

It affects me.

I am distressed when, writing a novel in which I am consciously struggling to deploy men and women characters among the incidents of my tale in some way that violates this moral template, I discover the development of what I first thought some innocent piece of stage business or decor suddenly demands the situation resolve completely faithful to this sexual determinism. When I think I have conquered even this—for one small section of my story—then to step back from it and discover I have set loose elements in my narrative which, in league with the basic structure of the narrative itself, conspire backwards and forwards through the plot to support this moral lie by the overall structure more firmly than before, I am frightened. Some of this, the honest critic must admit, is the attitude we bring, as readers, to the fictional gesture—so different from our attitude toward the same gesture in life—so that one action, performed by Joseph, gets a completely different interpretation when performed by Judith; though we change only the proper noun, a phrase of description previously neutral is at once pejorative; another, before purely praising, now takes on an ironic tone of censure. But much more frequently, it is simply the insidious workings of the writers’ own prejudices.