Ventriloquists' Conversations: The Struggle for Gender Dialogue in E. L. Doctorow and Philip Roth

Abstract

ender politics is a crucial issue in contemporary American Jewish literature. One of the things that separates writers like E. L. Doctorow and Philip Roth from earlier American Jewish writers is the growing pressure to renegotiate relations between the sexes. A historical opposition between feminism and Judaism presents Doctorow and Roth with problems insofar as they want to be both Jews and contemporary Americans. To become feminists may appear an exercise in assimilation; to resist feminism may appear to leave them in a patriarchal rut. For a long time, of course, there have been American Jewish women feminists, but the opposition between feminism and Judaism remains. As Elinor Lerner states, Until the revival of the feminist movement in the late 1960s the feminism of American Jewish women had been expressed in secular, rather than religious, terms (164). A new vision of what it means to be Jewish in America could result from the growing efforts-by women and men, theologians and secular writers-to reconcile feminism and Judaism, but the vision does not come easily. Emily Ellison and Jane B. Hill, in the introduction to their anthology Our Mutual Room: Modern Literary Portraits of the Opposite Sex, suggest that a sign of vitality in contemporary American is the wealth of cross-gender writing (v), in which the author enters the perspective of a character of the opposite sex. A similar route is proposed by Wendy Lesser in His Other Half: Men Looking at Women through Art. Talking about male artists whose work evokes the human figure and its surrounding world, Lesser claims that