PART II: Chauvinism, Feminism, and Misogyny

© 2002 by Gavin Keulks

             Few authors in England or America have rivaled the Amises’ abilities to inflame gender controversy.  As have other authors before them -- Hemingway, Mailer, Roth, Larkin, Lawrence, to name but a few -- the Amises both write from a decidedly male perspective.  They are particularly masculinist authors whose works challenge genteel assumptions about morality and character.  In many respects, gender relations were always Kingsley’s grand theme but his less reserved, often blatantly honest, depictions of women differentiated him from his contemporaries.  Similar to his father, albeit with different methods, Martin is an archeologist of shifting sensibilities, a diagnostician of contemporary social mores who refuses to temper his dark treatments of modern decay, whether they occur within men or women.  Of course, both Amises wrote during some of the most politicized decades in the late twentieth century, complicating matters.

            As do most good writers, the Amises fictionally incorporate the social issues of their time, assimilating them to illuminate complexities and contradictions.  If previous works depicted the Amises engaged in a struggle over the nature of modern reality, then Stanley and the Women and Money elevated gender relations to a primary status within their social and literary debates.  Because questions of chauvinism (or misogyny) are so central to each author’s critical reception, the subject deserves extended treatment.  However, these issues are best seen in the context of the Amises’ literary negotiations, especially their deliberations over character, aesthetic distance, and realism.  As analysis of Money will reveal, Martin enacts narrative measures to distance himself from his controversial protagonists.  Kingsley, however, does not, embracing a form of moral realism that is less fabulistic, less involuted than Martin’s more experimental brand.  In many ways, these technical differences help contextualize the charges of chauvinism that encircle the Amises’ work.  As one will see, however, Stanley and the Women and Money both present difficult problems of sympathy, which problematize the dismissal of such charges.

            In contrast to literary conventions, both romantic and comic, Kingsley’s later work, (beginning with Jake’s Thing in 1978), began to portray women as self-interested and spiteful, vindictive and mean.  Of course, he had portrayed men in the same light for years, beginning with Lucky Jim, but with the exception of Jim’s uncharitable “Filthy Mozart” remark, no one had seemed to mind all that much.  By the late 1970s, however, Kingsley found himself once more at the wrong end of the political spectrum, charged with another version of militant philistinism:  a gleeful chauvinism, or more seriously, a misogynist eagerness to endorse the attitudes of his embittered male protagonists.  To an increasing number of readers, including Martin himself, Kingsley’s humor on this issue had ceased to be funny.  Lamentably, he seemed to have let personal prejudice taint his work, imbuing his disillusioned heroes with intonations of his own failed marriages.  As did Kingsley, Martin never shied from questioning convention, especially when it came to literature.  In his earlier novels, he surpassed his father’s stylistic propriety, affording readers an honest (and often sometimes disturbing) glimpse into his characters’ private thoughts and sexual escapades.  Moreover, in a mature work of fiction such as Money, Martin overturned many romantic and comic conventions, tricking misinformed readers into confusing John Self’s narratorial perversions with Martin’s authorial endorsement.  Critics on both sides of the Atlantic worked valiantly to re-classify the Amises’ novels as misanthropic (instead of misogynist), but questions about the Amises’ attitudes towards their female characters continued to expand, repudiating the convenience of the misanthropy tag.

            It would be easy to gloss over such issues, accepting the exemption misanthropy affords, but the topic is so central to each author’s fiction that it should not be so simply ignored.  Few novels interrogate these issues as aggressively as do Martin’s Money and Kingsley’s Jake’s Thing and Stanley and the Women, and not surprisingly, they are among the most frequently cited instances of the Amises’ alleged misogyny.  One tonal development is notable, however, within these three works:  whereas Kingsley and Martin are both concerned with reworking conventional depictions of their female characters, Martin’s novel achieves a narrative distance and humor that Kingsley’s two works do not.  For the first time in their familial competition, Kingsley’s representations of modern reality seemed spurious at best or patently false, something that Martin had previously noted and worked to displace.  Whereas Martin had earlier revaluated his father’s efforts, now, unfortunately, literary tradition began to do so as well, much as both Amises had witnessed with Larkin.