Gendered Authorship and Cultural Authority in Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World

Abstract

Siri Hustvedt's sixth novel, The Blazing World (2014), takes as its subject the sexism prevalent in the contemporary visual arts market. In this article, we seek to demonstrate how the hoax perpetrated by the novel's central protagonist, Harriet (Harry) Burden, works to capture the complex differences between how creative works by women and those by men are interpreted and valued in contemporary culture. We begin by acknowledging the contribution of Margaret Cavendish, from whose seventeenth-century work of philosophical fiction Hustvedt's novel draws its title. We highlight how Cavendish's ideas on knowledge and cultural authority remain useful as a way of reading and responding to ongoing struggles with gender and authority in patriarchal culture. We move on to examine the tensions and complications created by each of the three living masks Hustvedt's protagonist Harriet employs as part of her series of hoaxes in The Blazing World. The central question in this article is the notion of gender and its relation to cultural authority. Given that the struggles of feminism have been primarily a struggle for authorship, how should the erasure and belittlement of women's work be responded to by women artists and authors? Is it enough to demonstrate it, to call it out, to parody it, as Harry does in The Blazing World, or should we come to terms with a form of making and meaning that is outside the dominant, commercial mode of success?