Date: Fri, 14 Jun 1996 08:35:58 -0700
From: dwalter-AT-ucla.edu (don walter)
Subject: Woolf et al.


S Sliwinski's meditations included V.Woolf, which woke me up slightly.  I am
a male and a moderate feminist (more so than my wife, who gets annoyed with
the stridency of some current writers). Both my wife & I are Old, having
grown up in the 30's and WWII, so we are more aware than younger folks are,
of Woolf and other early feminists, such as Heilbrun (alias Cross).  One of
the good things about Heilbrun (and, in a different way, about Sayers) is
that, in their "murder mystery" series, they wrote about successful
marriages, in which the wife had her own persona and importance, sometimes
greater than her husband's. It seems odd to me, that _only_ in mystery-story
series does anyone (as far as I have discovered) write about long, happy
marriages, as important features of the stories.  P.D.James remarked in a
lecture that the readers of mystery stories were extremely law-abiding, and
no doubt appreciated the structure in which a traumatic break in the pattern
of order initiates the story-- and order is restored by its denouement.
This seems to me a natural setting for also writing about successful
marriages.  But I would be grateful if anyone on this list could direct me
to other novels (or plays or other narratives) in which a successful
marriage is one of the important characters.
I suppose that successful marriage is not a big concern with most French
Feminist writers; the connection seems to me to come only through a belief I
would also attribute to FF writers, that writing is important, and can
change the world (slightly, at least).

Don Walter
dwalter-AT-ucla.edu