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Reviewed by:
  • How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ
  • Ann M. Ciasullo
How to Suppress Women's Writing. By Joanna Russ. With a new foreword by Jessa Crispin. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture Series. xvii + 199 pp. $19.95 paper. Reprint.

Every few years I have the opportunity to teach an upper-division literature course titled "Women Writers." Two texts consistently appear on the syllabus: Virginia Woolf's feminist classic A Room of One's Own (1929) and Joanna Russ's superb essay "What Can a Heroine Do? Or, Why Women Can't Write" (1972). Though Woolf and Russ lived in different eras and belonged to different literary traditions, each felt compelled to answer the same seemingly simple question: In the realm of literature, where is women's writing? Written more than forty years apart, these two texts powerfully underscore how literary histories, narrative conventions, and aesthetic ideals have worked—sometimes indirectly, but often explicitly—to exclude women writers from the canon. The reality and consequences of this gendered exclusion were significant enough that Russ, best known for her pioneering work as a feminist science fiction writer, returned to the subject eleven years later in a book-length analysis titled How to Suppress Women's Writing. Originally published in 1983, and reprinted in 2018 on the occasion of its thirty-fifty anniversary, How to Suppress Women's Writing is a brilliant work of literary criticism, offering an incisive examination of why women haven't written, and how, when women have written, their work has been denigrated in myriad ways. While clearly inspired by A Room of One's Own, Russ forges her own distinct argument about women's writing, an argument meant at once to inform, to irritate, and to infuriate—and it does all of these things dazzlingly.

Russ begins her analysis by delineating the scope of her project: "What follows," she writes, "is not intended as a history. Rather, it's a sketch of an analytic [End Page 310] tool: patterns in the suppression of women's writing" (4). Focusing on literature from both the British and American traditions, Russ meticulously outlines eight ways that women's writing has been stifled at best and silenced at worst. Each an independent tactic of suppression and yet each building off or relying upon the other, the eight patterns include, among others, prohibition (the woman is not allowed to write); denial of agency (whatever the text, the woman didn't write it; some greater creative force spoke through her); pollution of agency (she wrote it, but look at how "improper, ridiculous, abnormal" it is [45]); the double standard of content (she wrote it, but it's about something insignificant, like domesticity); and isolation (she wrote it, but she wrote only one of them, so it's anomalous). What connects the threads of these chapters is Russ's insistence that suppression be understood not as the result of a strictly organized system but rather as an assemblage of quotidian practices. As Russ observes: "At the level of high culture with which this book is concerned, active bigotry is probably fairly rare. It is also hardly ever necessary, since the social context is so far from neutral. To act in a way that is both sexist and racist, to maintain one's class privilege, it is only necessary to act in the customary, ordinary, usual, even polite manner" (21).

Russ's exploration of the eight patterns of prohibition is extraordinary in its thoroughness; indeed, throughout her analysis she quotes widely and extensively from literature and criticism alike, illustrating the processes, both simple and elaborate, by which female authors have been excluded from the canon. Early in the book, Russ observes that "the absence of formal prohibitions against committing art does not preclude the presence of powerful, informal ones" (6), and in the final chapters she examines the implications of these prohibitions. Among the most devastating of consequences is the belief among aspiring women writers that no one has come before them, so they are all alone, without foremothers or peers in their artistic pursuits. As Russ so eloquently states, "When the memory of one's...

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