Page 124 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Style 123
AVOID SEXIST TERMINOLOGY
Literature is written and read by women as well as men. Your
prose, if it is to be accurate, must reflect this simple truth. Do
not use the masculine pronouns (‘he’, ‘him’, ‘his’) to denote
either the typical author or the typical reader. Ezra Pound spoilt
a thoughtful remark with one thoughtless pronoun: ‘You can
spot the bad critic when he starts by discussing the poet and not
the poem’ (A.B.C. of Reading, London, 1951, p. 84). This
exclusion of women from the ranks of bad critics is not some
outmoded gallantry. It smuggles in an ignorant insult by
suggesting that women are not worth considering as critics at
all. However, substituting ‘he or she’ may introduce a
clumsiness. One solution is to pluralize: ‘You can spot bad
critics when they start by discussing the poet and not the poem.’
Alternatively, an abstract noun can embrace both genders: ‘You
can spot bad criticism when it starts by discussing the poet and
not the poem.’ So do not write of ‘the reader’ and ‘his
response’. Write of ‘readers’ and ‘their’ response or of ‘the
readership’ and ‘its response’.
In many cases the problem can be side-stepped by rearranging
syntax or by simply identifying and removing a redundant
phrase without which there is no need of a possessive pronoun:
‘The bad critic starts by discussing the poet and not the poem.’
Prune terms of gender wherever gender is meaningless or
irrelevant and you will often gain a bonus in finding ways of
making a sentence sound more graceful and less wordy.
Student essays sometimes deploy ‘lady’ as a patronizingly
polite evasion of ‘woman’. If you are going to refer to male
characters in fiction as ‘men’, you should call female ones
‘women’. ‘Lady’, like ‘gentleman’, is only useful where you wish
to stress a character’s advantages of wealth, power or social
status in the hierarchy of a class-conscious text. So do not be
tempted to write of a ‘lady novelist’, a phrase which may
acknowledge the charming amateur only to deny the impressive
professional.
Some feminists would argue that ‘mankind’ as a collective
noun for women as well as men sounds unbalanced. Certainly
the blunter term of ‘Man’ can seem startlingly inappropriate:
‘Gulliver’s Travels also offers a hideously detailed description of
the skin on a female giant’s breasts. This passage is perhaps the