.
| Hearsay: |
An article on, yet again, why The Orange Prize is necessary.
The prize is necessary because the most prestigious prize-giving culture in Britain still often shows itself weirdly unable to recognise and reward the greatest writing, and for some reason books by women are still often the ones that lose out. When Zadie Smith’s ferocious and heartfelt novel On Beauty lost out in the Booker race last year to John Banville’s desiccated The Sea, it was only what one has come to expect from the Booker prize. From time to time the panel gets it right and finds a winning book that is truly a work of great imagination, but all too often it steers towards an easy consensus. The differing opinions, often refereed by an academic or politician, tend to cancel each other out, leaving the panel on the polite middle ground. What you get as a winner is a book that will be accepted by all the judges, rather than one passionately espoused by any of them.
Okay, in the Olympics women and men compete separately because of obvious biological differences. No one suggests that woman compete there separately because we’d otherwise be under-represented. The winner of any prize, including The Orange Prize, is decided very similarly, from prize to prize. As everyone seems to know in the industry, the prize is a crap shoot. The liking of this book over that is a matter of educated opinion, yes, but also (egad!) taste, and so Banville might indeed win over Smith because the judges that year preferred ‘dessicated’ to ‘ferocious and heartfelt’. Truthfully, I find it appalling for my sex that this sort of argument even sees the light of day. Okay, I’m in a bit of a mood, but is it gaining anything to suggest that women writers tend to lead from the heart, and men from the head? Is it possible that The Orange Prize is made necessary because of this mentality or that possibly we are holding ourselves down in a self-imposed gender apartheid? If The Orange Prize is necessary, I suggest it is not because of the type of books women write compared to the type of books men write, but that, culturally, the prize juries are conditioned to favour heady intellectual ‘dessicated’ writing over the stirring up of ‘passion and heat.’ Indentured sexism you may say and you may be right. So, how to change that?
January 2006
December
2005
November
2005
October
2005
September
2005
August
2005
July
2005
June
2005
May
2005
April
2005
March
2005
February
2005
January
2005
December
2004
November
2004
October
2004
September
2004
August
2004
July
2004
June
2004
May
2004
April
2004
March
2004
February
2004
January
2004
December
2003
November
2003
October
2003
September
2003
August
2003
Bookninja © Copyright
The opinions expressed on this site are those of individual participants
and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the site owners,
organizers, or other participants.
[powered by WordPress.]
April 27th, 2006 at 12:25 pm
“Okay, in the Olympics women and men compete separately because of obvious biological differences. No one suggests that woman compete there separately because we’d otherwise be under-represented. ”
I agree with most of what you said, but I’m not sure about the above. Isn’t the whole reason for gender segretation in things because one gender or the other would be “under-represented.” In this case, women would simply fail to qualify for olympic events. It would be entirely men except maybe in a few random events like Synchronised swimming. Women’s sport would be pretty much nonexistant without gender segregation.
In many Olympic sports, men and women do compete outside of the olympics and when trounaments or events have no gender segregation, the winners are all men.
Of course, this is body not mind, like writing, so I’m not saying there are implications on fiction prizes here or not.
April 27th, 2006 at 4:39 pm
I think it’s easy for us late-sixties babies to forget that the world wasn’t always so receptive to efforts of mere women. My copy of The Diviners has, as its highest praise on the back cover, a quotation that says that it’s a wonderful books for women, that it will resonate with women everywhere (something to that effect, I don’t have it with me to quote verbatim.) It was printed in 1973, not so long ago.
So while I agree that it’s repugnant to have women recognized as a separate class (better to be judged on merit alone, no question) , It’s still important to recognize that not everyone thinks that way. In 1990, right after I finished my Master’s degree, I lived in England for a couple of years, working as an office temp because that’s what my visa would allow and so I’d have some money to travel. One afternoon, a man I was working with thought he was making jolly good conversation with me, not knowing I had a Master’s degree, by telling me that the best money he’d ever spent was on secretarial school for his daughter. This was 1990.
Maybe in another 20 years the Orange Prize will be unnecessary, once all those sexist white British guys are dead.
April 28th, 2006 at 6:56 am
If the history of the Booker prize is the fulcrum here, then I think the locus of the focus is a little misplaced. Sure, in the corporate world, women still have to fight for equal pay, and sure, the nastiness of sexism is still rampant in many corridors of public and private life, but the time when women authors were under-represented in the book world has been over for quite some time now.
From where I sit, in the trenches of retail bookselling, more women buy and read more books written by women than anything else. Women authors are getting published (often by women publishers and editors) and reaching their audience (often quite successfully) and there really isn’t much to stand in their way (excpet such things as might stand in the way of any author, regardless of sex).
Basically, I’ve started to see these women-only book prizes as a self-imposed gender ghetto.
April 29th, 2006 at 7:23 am
Ah yes, but we were talking about book prizes, not book selling or even publishing.
May 23rd, 2006 at 4:15 am
But the publishing industry and book prizes are related: There are women’s novel bought by women after reading about them in woman’s own and women’s sections of the paper, hearing them reviewed on woman’s hour, and seeing them nominated for the prize for women’s fiction.
If there is a ghetto, it’s massive and it’s made up of beachfront property.
Paul is right, there is a publishing female only fast-track completely locked off from men. The women’s publishers publish books by women and get them reviewed in women’s magazines. The real reason for the Orange prize is £’s: Women publishers know that a nomination for a female-only book award will get them plenty of publicity in the vast numbers of ‘women’s’ sections across the media
And as for justifying the need for the Orange prize by quoting what someone said to you 16 years ago: Ask any man who’s worked in a predominantly female environment and they’ll tell you that sexism is a two-way street, and women practice it as much as men. It isn’t a justification to say “I’ve met sexist men”. So what? I’ve met sexist women. There should simply be no discrimination at the starting post: There should be no women-only prizes, just as there should be no men-only prizes, unless there are clear-cut (usually physical) reasons why (such as the Olympics).
Should the Orange prize exist? No. Is it sexist? Yes. Should there be a men-only prize? No. Could there be? After the Orange maybe, before – no
March 19th, 2007 at 6:56 pm
You know the biggest irony about this prize is that it is simply designed to plug mobile phones. They are a nuisance, you try reading a book on the tube or bus with some idiot next to you babbling inanely into this infernal device. Orange is to literature what the Black and White Minstrel Show is was to race relations. They don’t mix!