cMary McCarthy: Gender, Politics, and the Postwar Intellectual and editor of Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers and Literature of New York. She is founder and cochair of the Mary McCarthy Society and Associate Editor of Studies in American Humor.
Fuchs Abrams applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century, and reported the following:
New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century shows how female humorists use satire and irony as an indirect form of social protest in questioning traditional gender roles in American society. In particular, I look at American women writers in the interwar period who were on the periphery of male-dominated New York intellectual circles, including Edna St. Vincent Millay among the Greenwich Village writers, Dorothy Parker among the Algonquin wits, Tess Slesinger and the Menorah Journal group, Jessie Redmon Fauset and the Harlem Renaissance writers, Dawn Powell and the Lafayette circle, and Mary McCarthy among the Partisan Review crowd.Learn more about New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century at the Penn State University Press website.
Page 99 brings us to chapter 3: “Tess Slesinger, the Menorah Journal Group, and the Feminist Socialist Satire of 1930s America.” In it, I show how Slesinger’s 1934 novel, The Unpossessed, satirizes the failure of New York intellectuals to put their ideas into action and their inability to engage in matters of the heart due to an over reliance on matters of the head. She further explores the conflicted identity of the woman intellectual, in this case the autobiographically-based Margaret Flinders, who is shamed by her Marxist husband for wanting to engage in the “bourgeois” act of having a family. Like her character, Tess Slesinger was pressured by her then husband, leftist intellectual Herbert Solow, to have an abortion, which became the basis of one of the first works of fiction to address the controversial subject of abortion. Slesinger uses modernist techniques of stream of consciousness and multiple narration to explore the identity of another female character, Elizabeth Leonard, the sexually liberated New Woman who defies traditional expectations of marriage and motherhood in her embrace of physical and intellectual freedom.
On page 99, I discuss how Slesinger uses satire to expose the leftist male intellectual’s lack of feeling and the modern woman’s struggle to assert her multiple identities:In Slesinger’s use of gendered language and her differentiation of traditional gender roles, she is considered by some critics to be “conservative.” However, her presentation of the conflicted identity of the modern woman and the validity of multiple expressions of gender identity—from wife and mother to free lover and independent intellectual—anticipate more contemporary modes of feminism moving beyond a single definition of womanhood. For Margaret, like Slesinger, being a modern woman of intellect does not necessitate a refusal of life, of maternal instincts, and the possibility of domestic happiness. By forcing an opposition between thinking and feeling, between art and life, Slesinger implies through her satiric lens that the 1930s leftist intellectual is relegated to an “unpossessed” life without living.On page 99, I also raise the important issue of the resistance to women’s humor by predominantly male critics and the double bind that many female humorists face for being seen as too serious in their social critique and not serious enough in their treatment of “domestic” subjects of love, marriage, and motherhood. On page 99, we see how Murray Kempton among others considered Slesinger’s novel a failed document of political realism based on the radical intellectuals of the Menorah Journal in the 1930s. As literary critic Lionel Trilling pointed out in defense of Slesinger, the novel was not intended as a roman a clef but instead used historical realities to draw a broader social satire. Mary McCarthy made a similar defense against those who attacked her social satire of radical idealists of the 1940s in The Oasis observing: “What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.” It was not until the women’s movement of the 1970s that critics were able to appreciate the blending of the personal with the political by these authors in what can be seen not as failed works of social realism but as successful works of feminist socialist satire.
The Page 99 Test is a success in that it offers a window through the works of Tess Slesinger into the book’s larger structure, showing how humor is used by twentieth century female satirists to partially dismantle what Audre Lorde terms “the master’s house.”
--Marshal Zeringue
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