January 3, 2017 | By Venetia Welby
A few weeks ago, I found my carefully honed work/childcare balance compromised when some emergency editing came up and I had to take a (generally preserved for mothering) Friday to do it. A woman I had not met before stepped in as babysitter and at some point asked about my novel.
‘Is it about us?’ she asked.
I stopped short. Was there an us? So soon?
‘The women!’ she cried, incredulous.
I felt a sudden misgiving that Mother of Darkness was not about ‘the women’, and at the implicit suggestion of a sisterhood that I had somehow betrayed. The book, I realised, might even be seen by some as aggressively masculine. Far from exploring the female condition, I had inhabited the male psyche so fully that a man, Matty, had become my misogynistic, womanising main character, my eyes for the novel and the splintered lens through which the whole story unfolds.
So I lied and said, ‘Of course it’s about us.’
She left happy, but she also left me uneasily considering the notion that perhaps I was hiding behind a male mask. Was it even some sort of cultural appropriation? Would a man writing from a female perspective be shot down for it? How could he, he of the patriarchy, possibly begin to understand what it’s like to be a woman in a man’s world?
There’s a whole school of thought that claims no voice should speak for another, particularly if that other is oppressed. White must not write for black, man cannot write for woman, nor able-bodied for disabled; it’s offensive and damaging, they say, for a man to fabricate the voice of a female rape victim. Earlier this year the American writer Jonathan Franzen suggested that he could not write a black character since he had never been in love with a black woman: “I feel like if I had, I might dare… I write about characters, and I have to love the character to write about the character. If you have not had direct first-hand experience of loving a category of person – a person of a different race, a profoundly religious person, things that are real stark differences between people – I think it is very hard to dare, or necessarily even want, to write fully from the inside of a person.”
Franzen has a point, certainly about the potential for upset in claiming the position of someone whose cultural history and suffering is far removed from your own. But we all have some understanding of what it is to suffer. We must strive to use the feelings and experience we do have as a basis for empathy. As writers we can reach beyond our own worlds with sensitivity, imagination and assiduous research to unveil the universal; the tales we share as humans that enable us to envisage what it is to be someone else.
Surely it is the role of a writer to take that leap of imagination and empathy into another body and soul, and in doing so, show that it is possible to see through another’s eyes, though we may be different. We may find in doing so that we are not even that different. We are all humans inhabiting Earth, are we not? We know each other through what we empirically observe as ‘other’, but also through what we recognize as the same in ourselves. And if there’s a characteristic that utterly revolts you in someone else, that you feel you could never possess, let alone comprehend, it’s a pretty safe bet it’s because that very trait lies lurking somewhere in your own psyche. It is a writer’s job to animate those shadows.
In my novel, I wanted to explore what the love of women means – how it can become an addiction, how its removal can feel like drug withdrawal; how abandonment and grief can drive us to seek love in all the wrong places and take us beyond the borders of sanity. Matty’s mother dies giving birth to him and this is at the heart of all that comes after; she is ever present in her absence. Certainly I am not, nor have I ever loved, a man such as Matty who believes himself to be the Second Coming, but I know that by writing him, I have come to better understand love, loss, men, madness… and women too.
Though we may start off blind to the vagaries and concerns of another soul – and anything outside our own selves is ultimately hard to understand – I think the very process of writing, the return again and again to considering the same story through another’s eyes in different worlds and from every conceivable angle, is what opens up genuine insight into other characters and situations.
No man is a male island, no woman independent of male qualities and so much of our perception of the complex world of gender is rigid, outdated and facile. Perched in the eye of a man may well be a pretty good place to reflect upon ‘the women’.