The Canonical Apple Cart: Reloaded

In January 2010 I was teaching an interim term course in Paris when I took advantage of a free afternoon to visit the Pompidou Center and the newly mounted exhibition Elles. Here, one of the preeminent modern art museums in the world had upset its canonical apple cart, taking down almost all of its works by male artists and replacing them with pieces from their formidable catalogue of works by women. I almost danced through the two floors at the top of the Beaubourg that day, revisiting every Sonia Delauney, Natalia Goncharova, and Joan Mitchell that I loved, paintings that had sometimes disappeared from the Pompidou’s walls for years. I also found new pieces that surprised and delighted me, including works by Yoko Ono, Kara Walker, Marie Laurencin, and Louise Bourgeois.

But here’s my dirty little secret: I hated a lot of that exhibition. And that was the best part of the whole experience.

I don’t have to tell you that our most famous art museums, the keepers of our canonical aesthetic artifacts, are overwhelmingly white and masculine. The Guerilla Girls have been telling us that since 1985. Remember the 1989 poster that asked, “Do women have to be nude to get into the Met Museum?” because fewer than 5 percent of the artists in the Metropolitan Museum’s modern arts section were women—but 85 percent of the nudes were female? In 2012 it was 4 percent and 76 percent.¹ And while the Louvre claims 21 women artists in their cache of 35,000 works of art, most of them, beyond Marie Antoinette’s favorite, Vigée le Brun, are seldom displayed.² I have spent half my life seeking out the women artists in the Musee d’Orsay, the Tate, Uffizi, Florence’s Accademia, the Prado, Reina Sophia, MOMA, and the National Galleries in DC. That’s the same half my life I have spent as a feminist literary critic.

That is why I keep coming back to Maurice Lee’s data showing that women writers make up only 24.5 percent of survey class time. We’re coming up on fifty years of feminist literary criticism, and this is what we have to show for it? Really?

I think it’s fair to ask why we have failed.

After that Pompidou exhibition, Germaine Greer wrote in The Guardian:

The effect of offering a sampler of the work of 200 women is to diminish the achievement of all of them. By lumping the major with the minor, and by showing only minor works of major figures, elles@centrepompidou managed to convince too many visitors to the exhibition that there was such a thing as women’s art and that women artists were going nowhere. Wrong, on both counts.³

“By lumping the major with the minor,” she wrote. I realize that these categories push buttons for most scholars of American literature. Many of us work hard to debunk such hierarchies and to expose their colonial, racist, sexist, elitist underpinnings—because there are underpinnings. But indulge me as I set these categories aside for a moment to consider Greer’s argument. What if feminist literary criticism’s determined focus on expanding the canon with attention to identities, representation, and inclusion, placed alongside its deep skepticism of aesthetic considerations (it’s those underpinnings), has led literature teachers to a response like Greer’s? What if too little sorting produces a sense of general mediocrity, and everyone is left wishing the Picassos and Matisses would come back?

What standards of literary merit place Melville and Hawthorne so solidly at the center of our nineteenth-century American literary canon? We know, from years of research in our field, that these standards are located, contingent, and, for some of us, corrupt. And yet the standards stand, and Melville and Hawthorne are like “man-spreaders” on the subway who continue to take up all the space because they can. Because they have. (“Why? Is there a problem?”)

And here is the principal problem—those old standards continue to dominate routinely. The recent rise of Vida...