Marilyn French
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Works by Marilyn French
(b. 1929)
| 1977 | The Women's Room. French's controversial bestseller tells a composite story of middle-class women betrayed by their men and their society. Some critics complain about the book's relentless accumulation of injustices, but the emotion of French's novel plainly appeals to a large segment of women readers. A New York City native, French received a graduate degree from Harvard and published a scholarly examination of James Joyce's Ulysses in 1976. |
| 1980 | The Bleeding Heart. The novel centers on Dolores, a divorced feminist, and Victor, a married executive, whose illicit relationship reveals much about themselves and the society they live in. Dolores realizes how much women are expected to bear suffering. Victor realizes that he is the one who is expected to express anger and wield power. Although it does not receive the accolades equal to those greeting The Women's Room, it furthers French's reputation as a feminist novelist. |
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Marilyn French
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Marilyn French
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"I hate discussions of feminism that end up with who does the dishes, she said. So do I. But at the end, there are always the damned dishes."
"Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can't even think straight."
"Marriage accustomed one to the good things, so one came to take them for granted, but magnified the bad things, so they came to feel as painful as a grain in one's eye. An open window, a forgotten quart of milk, a TV set left blaring, socks on the bathroom floor could become occasions for incredible rage. And something happened sexually in marriage --the swearing to forsake all others, despite its slight observance, had a profound effect. Some people felt trapped by it, impelled to assert what they called freedom. Some accepted it like a rein, and in the effort to avoid pain in the form of hopeless desire, cut off occasions of desire, avoided having long talks at parties with attractive members of the opposite sex. In time, all feeling for the opposite sex was cut off, and intercourse limited to the barest politesses. But something happened to you when you did that, a kind of death seeped up from the genitals to the rest of the body, till it showed in the eyes, the gestures, in a certain lifelessness."
"Whatever they may be in public life, whatever their relations with men, in their relations with women, all men are rapists and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, their codes."
"To nourish and raise children against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons."
"One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear."
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Marilyn French
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Marilyn French
| Marilyn French | |
|---|---|
| Born | November 21, 1929 Brooklyn, New York, U.S. |
| Died | May 2, 2009 (aged 79) Manhattan, New York, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Hofstra University, Harvard University |
| Occupation | Author, lecturer |
Marilyn French (née Edwards) (November 21, 1929 – May 2, 2009) was an American author.
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Contents
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Biography
French was born in Brooklyn to E. Charles Edwards, an engineer and Isabel Hazz Edwards who worked as a department store clerk. She received a bachelor's degree from Hofstra University (then Hofstra College) in 1951, on Long Island and studied philosophy and English literature. She also received a master's degree in English in 1964 from Hofstra. She married Robert M. French Jr. in 1950; the couple divorced in 1967. She later attended Harvard University, earning a Ph.D in 1972.[1] She was an English instructor at Hofstra from 1964 to 1968 and was an assistant professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., from 1972 to 1976.[2]
In her work, French asserted that women's oppression is an intrinsic part of the male-dominated global culture. For instance one of her first non-fiction works, Beyond Power: On Women, Men and Morals (1985), is a historical examination of the effects of patriarchy on the world.
French's 1977 novel, The Women's Room, follows the lives of Mira and her friends in 1950s and 1960s America, including Val, a militant radical feminist. The novel portrays the details of the lives of women at this time and also the feminist movement of this era in the United States. At one point in the book the character Val says "all men are rapists". This quote has often been incorrectly attributed to Marilyn French herself. French's first book was a thesis on James Joyce.[1]
French was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 1992. This experience was the basis for her book A Season in Hell: A Memoir (1998). She survived cancer and later died from heart failure at age 79 on May 2, 2009, in Manhattan, New York City.[2]
Political Views and Works
French took issue with the expectations of married women in the post-World War II era and become a leading, if controversial, opinionmaker on gender issues who decried the patriarchal society she saw around her. “My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of Western civilization, to make it a feminist world,” she once declared.[2]
Her first and best-known novel, The Women’s Room, released in 1977, sold more than 20 million copies and was translated into 20 languages. Gloria Steinem, a close friend, compared the impact of the book on the discussion surrounding women’s rights to the one that Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man had had on racial equality 25 years earlier.
Critics accused Marilyn French of being anti-male, frequently citing a female character in The Women’s Room who declares, after her daughter has been raped: “All men are rapists, and that’s all they are."[2]
Her most significant work in later life was the four-volume From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, published by The Feminist Press in 2002 and built around the premise that exclusion from the prevailing intellectual histories denied women their past, present and future. Despite carefully chronicling a long history of oppression, the last volume ends on an optimistic note, said Florence Howe, who recently retired as director of the publishing house. “For the first time women have history,” she said of Ms. French’s work. “The world changed and she helped change it.”
While Ms. French was pleased by significant gains made by women in the three decades since her landmark novel, 'The Women's Room, she was also just as quick to point out lingering deficiencies in gender equality.[2] Marilyn French is mentioned in the lyrics of "The Day Before You Came" by ABBA. The lyric says ..."I must have read a while, the latest one by Marilyn French or something in that style".
Selected works
- The Book as World: James Joyce's Ulysses (1976)
- The Women's Room (1977)
- The Bleeding Heart (1980)
- Shakespeare's Division of Experience (1981)
- Beyond Power: On Women, Men, and Morals (1985)
- Her Mother's Daughter (1987)
- The War Against Women (1992)
- Our Father (1994)
- My Summer with George (1996)
- A Season in Hell: A Memoir (1998)
- Introduction: Almost Touching the Skies (2000)
- Women's History of the World (2000)
- From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in Three Volumes (2002)
- In the Name of Friendship (2006)
- The Love Children (2009)
Notes
- ^ a b Biodata
- ^ a b c d e Sulzberger, A. G.; Mitgang, Herbert (May 4, 2009). "Marilyn French, Novelist and Champion of Feminism, Dies at 79". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/arts/04french.html.
External links
- Works by or about Marilyn French in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
- Marilyn French - Daily Telegraph obituary
- Obituary by the Associated Press on Legacy.com
- Marilyn French at the Internet Movie Database
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
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Houghton Mifflin Chronology of US Literature
The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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