John Stuart Mill - male chauvinist pig
I have been reading The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill. I don't know if he is one of the greatest philosophers, but he must have been one of the most influential. Generally, in the essay, he has been a good feminist, but I thought he might have been a bit unfair here:
If we consider women’s works in modem times, and
contrast them with men’s, either in literary or in the fine
arts, the inferiority that we can see boils down to one thing—a
very significant thing—namely a lack of originality. Not a
total lack; for any production that has any substantive value
has an originality of its own—is a conception of the mind
that produced it, not a copy of something else. The writings
of women abound in thoughts that are ‘original’ in the sense
of being not borrowed but derived from the thinker’s own
observations or intellectual processes. But women haven’t
yet produced any of the great and luminous new ideas that
form an era in thought, or any of the fundamentally new
conceptions in art that open a vista of possible effects not
before thought of, and found a new school. Their composi-
tions are mostly based on the existing fund of thought, and
their creations don’t deviate far from existing types. This is
the sort — the only sort —of inferiority that their works do
manifest. There is no inferiority in execution , the detailed
application of thought, the perfection of style. In respect of
composition and the management of detail, our best novelists
have mostly been women; and modern literature doesn’t
contain a more eloquent vehicle of thought than the style
of Madame de Staël, or a finer specimen of purely artistic
excellence than the prose of Madame Sand, whose style
acts on the nervous system like a symphony of Haydn or
Mozart. What is mainly lacking, I repeat, is high originality
of conception.
The essay was published about 1866/7. I can think of five female authors who had written something original by then:
- Jane Austen - credited with inventing free indirect speech;
- Mary Shelly - arguably the first science fiction book;
- Charlotte Brontë - first book for adults written from a child's perspective in the first person (so I've heard);
- Emily Brontë - surely nothing like Wuthering Heights had been written before;
- Elizabeth Gaskell - the portrayal of realistic working class people and their political opinions must have been fairly original in a novel.
