Literature is Inevitably Political
It's time to vote--and to clap back to misogyny!
In the past, I have written in this space that I don't address pure politics very often because I defer to fellow writers who do so with much more facility and experience (
, , , , , and many others). I'm going to break from this tendency in the remaining days until November 5th for three reasons:The urgency of the situation: I feel obligated to use my small platform to do what I can—regardless of trolls and unsubscribes.
I have seen some writing on Substack recently urging people to avoid discussing literature in a political context. This is ludicrous. Literature is inevitably political, and to pretend otherwise is disingenuous. In fact, to avoid the political in literature is itself a political choice.
Though I have always had strongly held political values, recent changes in my own life have made this election even more personally relevant.
But what can I add? The purely political and historical arguments have all been made, and much more ably than I could by those I've listed above, most of whom have much larger readerships than I have. Indeed, if you want a running, continuous, historically informed argument about why it is so important to vote for Kamala Harris and down-ballot Democrats, then I urge you to read
's every day.I can add this: careful, empathetic readings of the majority of our most accomplished writers will lead one to principles that will align with democratic (small "d") values and that will reject fascism and oligarchy. And this year, that means that there is only one option on the ballot.
I'm not allowed to say this in a classroom setting, and I don't. I let the texts speak for themselves. But I can write it here. And what's more, I'll give you some examples. In the run up to the election, I will survey a few of my favorite writers in this way. While I generally don't like to reduce literary texts to a "message" (after all, what makes literature important is its ability to capture complexity and nuance), we can certainly discern overarching values in many cases.1
Madame de Staël2
The primary reason that I believe Kamala Harris will prevail in this election is the probability that women will be motivated to vote in record numbers in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to deprive them of their bodily autonomy. I could be wrong, of course, but the mainstream media seems to be underplaying this possibility, just as the establishment has underestimated women historically. While Trump’s racism has been apparent throughout his political career, his misogyny has been just as egregious, and the woman he is facing is living rebuke to his horrific tendencies. She is his worst nightmare—a strong, accomplished, brilliant black woman. Indeed, Kamala Harris is an example of many of the principles championed by one of France’s greatest writers more than two centuries ago.
English-speaking readers may not be familiar with Madame de Staël, but she was Jane Austen’s contemporary and was much more famous than the English writer in her own time.
On July 18th, 1817, Jane Austen died in Winchester at the age of 41, after a painful illness that may have been Addison’s disease or Hodgkin’s lymphoma—the jury is still out. Her final two completed novels, Emma and Persuasion, along with Sanditon, her work in progress, demonstrated such mastery of every element of prose fiction, as well as a spirit of technical innovation, that we can only shake our heads at what she may have accomplished had she been granted two more decades of life.
Four days earlier, on July 14th, in Coppet, Switzerland, another woman died. She was ten years older than Austen and in her time was much more famous—was, in fact, infamous according to some. Her name was Anne Louise Germaine Necker de Staël-Holstein, known to most as Germaine de Staël or Madame de Staël. It is difficult to imagine a woman more different from Austen in temperament and way of life. Austen never married; de Staël married twice and had a series of lovers, some of them famous. Austen was the daughter of a provincial clergyman of modest means; de Staël was the daughter of a Swiss banker (the famous Necker, who for a time was in charge of France’s finances in the run-up to the Revolution) and was wealthy. Austen spent most of her life in quiet obscurity; de Staël was at the center of French politics and the world-shaking events of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. Austen lived far (in spirit if not in distance) from literary society in London and knew none of her great poetic contemporaries; de Staël’s salons defined the cutting edge of literary culture on the continent, and she knew everyone who was anyone: Gibbon, Pitt the Younger, Talleyrand, Goethe, Jefferson, Schlegel, Wilberforce, and Byron. Napoleon too, though they did not approve of each other, to say the least.
Despite these differences, however, Austen and de Staël shared three things in common: a contempt for misogynistic men, a belief in the need for women’s education, and a commitment to the novel as the literary form with the potential to elevate women.
These commitments form a thread that runs through her work and through her actions in response both to the excesses of the French Revolution and to the hubris of Napoleonic imperialism. In the wake of the Revolution, she found herself in a precarious position, since she championed liberty but opposed extremism, and so she lived mostly in exile, a state which continued after the rise of Napoleon. She understood clearly the implications for women of their lives under male-controlled political systems of all kinds. In Literature’s Relationship to Social Institutions (1800) she writes: “In monarchies, women have ridicule to fear; in republics, hatred.”
This sort of epigrammatic style is typical of her work, though she usually goes on to elaborate and justify even her most strident claims, as she does here. The rigidity of monarchies, she explains, creates a context in which any break from social norms (like a woman preaching, for example) is treated with ridicule. In republics, on the other hand, the implied potential of égalité opens up the possibility of women in new, more powerful roles, which threatens the men in charge. One need only to consider the misogynistic responses to Kamala Harris’s campaign to understand that this is, unfortunately, still true.
What are women to do in such a sad state of affairs? Madame de Staël’s answer is all about education—about equipping women to engage in political and literary discussion and debate. She served as an example of this idea herself, as her salons in the various places where she lived attracted some of the most prominent intellectuals in all fields, and she debated with them with pleasure and verve. Byron would call her the continent’s greatest living writer, and Goethe wrote of her: “My obstinate contrariness often drove her to despair, but it was then that she was at her most amiable and that she displayed her mental and verbal agility most brilliantly.”
But as we continue to see in our own century, such education for women, or any sense of aspiration, may also create a backlash from resentful men: “if they try to gain any influence, this unofficial power is called criminal, while if they remain slaves their destiny is crushed.” The reader can hear the exasperation in her voice when she writes:
If we want the moving principle of the French Republic to be the emulation of enlightenment and philosophy, it is only reasonable to encourage women to cultivate their minds, so that men can talk with them about ideas that would hold their interest. Nevertheless, ever since the Revolution men have deemed it politically and morally useful to reduce women to a state of the most absurd mediocrity.
In response to such ideas, Napoleon reportedly quipped that women should stick to knitting; hence Madame de Staël’s continued exile. Like her contemporary Mary Wollstonecraft across the English Channel, she understood that the promises of the Revolution were strictly gendered, and that education for women must be the long-term goal in order to correct such inequity.
We have, of course, made much progress in terms of widely available education in the last two centuries; however, Republicans in the US want to roll this back by abolishing the federal Department of Education, by banning books, and by limiting academic freedom at all levels. They understand, of course, that a well-informed, educated population is much less likely to support them.
Madame de Staël also argued, in her Essay on Fictions (1795), for the hitherto unrealized educational potential of the novel—a literary form that provided a space for the documentation of female life and subjectivity. Like Jane Austen, she saw the novel as a form that could fill in the great gender gap left by the historians, and that “only the modern novel is capable of achieving the constant, accurate usefulness we can get from the picture of our ordinary, habitual feelings.” In reading the best novels, like those of Richardson and Fielding, “the feelings are so natural that the reader often believes he is being spoken to directly, with no artifice but the tactfulness of changing the names.”
She saw the limitations of the novel in her own time to be the form’s focus on romantic love, but she predicted the potential of the novel in the years to come to transcend this stricture and to incorporate the entire world of human experience, male and female. As it would for Jane Austen, the novel form would prove her right over the course of the rest of the nineteenth century, in the work of the Brontës, Dickens, Flaubert, Eliot, Balzac, Tolstoy, Melville, James, and many others. Madame de Staël’s voice is a prophetic one, and it is a voice that we would still do well to heed.
In a poignant passage in “On Women Writers,” a chapter from Literature’s Relationship to Social Institutions, she observes that the subjectivity of men has witnesses, that men’s voices may be heard, but this is not the case for the women of her time.
But where can a woman find any such witness? A few private virtues, hidden favors, feelings locked into the narrow circle of her situation, writings which may make her known in places where she does not live, in times when she will no longer exist.
This unheralded private perspective suggests a complex but obscure consciousness like those imagined by Austen in Fanny Price or Anne Eliot, or by Virginia Woolf when she posits Shakespeare’s hypothetical genius of a sister in A Room of One’s Own. Madame de Staël looks forward to a more complete “Revolution,” one in which the promise of égalité extends to the other half of humanity, in which hitherto hidden lives may find a witness.
While I stand by the claim that literature is inevitably political, it does not always follow that the political messages are clear or that literary texts will encourage particular political actions. But this year it’s different. If you subscribe to the values of liberty and equality, if you stand against misogyny along with Madame de Staël, if you believe in the values of a liberal education for all, then you will vote for Kamala Harris for president, for Tim Walz for vice president, and for Democrats up and down the ballot.
Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet ballot box to yours.
Please note: in some cases in this series, I will be quoting some of my earlier work in PCF. When I do so, I will include a footnote and a link.
Much of the prose below derives from this post from 2023.
Thank you for this excellent and informative piece. Would that millions would read it and heed your wise counsel
How interesting, John, since tomorrow I'm referencing Willa Cather's 1936 letter to the Commonweal, where she claims that enduring art cannot be created from a political motive alone. She'd been accused of being escapist, of not leaning hard enough into labor issues and such (and this after working for years at S.S. McClure's muckraking magazine). I rather like her thinking here. I'm fairly sure she would say much the same now.
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/escapism-letter-willa-cather