Elaine Showalter

Creative Juices

Seek My Face

By

Hamish Hamilton 276pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

IN A CLASSIC feminist essay, the art historian Linda Nochlin asked ‘Why Are There No Great Women Artists?’ The answers, she concluded, lay in social institutions rather than the nature of genius: family, class, the sexual division of labour, myths of divine masculine creativity, and women’s internalised belie6 about nurturance and self-subordination being feminine attributes. In his twentieth novel, John Updike could be posing the same question, but answering it in much more traditional ways. For Updike, great art is ultimately about male sexuality, commitment, daring and ambition. Women are simply not equipped by nature to create it, and thus must find ways to serve and worship it.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Darley’s book is not a mad dash through this most compelling and complex of English counties. Nor is it another ti… ,
    • 'Moser’s book offers such a gripping account of a profoundly damaged human being, trapped in a cycle of repetition,… ,
    • 'Ideas that I’d thought were set down in full continue to smoulder ... this book is only a snapshot of some larger… ,
    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    Follow Us