The figure of the male creative genius is an overrepresented one. Archetypes of tortured writers or great thinkers are all deeply linked with masculinity. But in the modern day, creative industries are dominated by women, so why is creative genius still such a masculine concept?
REPRESENTATION IN EDUCATION
Within the University of Bristol, during my first-year English curriculum, I have studied roughly equal numbers of works by men and women. Iâve noticed an effort on the part of the department to include female writers in the curriculum. While studying a whole module on early modern women writers, I can see the work that goes into rediscovering and celebrating the women writers of the past that had been pushed aside to instead study Donne, Chaucer, or Shakespeare. This, of course, isnât to say that these male writers shouldnât be studied; their contributions to literature are incredibly important. They produced so much work and have been written about so much that it is easy, and necessary, to offer whole modules on them.
In contrast, when studying early modern women writers, each writer is studied two weeks before moving on, both because they produced a limited amount of work, and there is not much criticism written about them, and because there is a need to create space for many women writers within the module, in order to rediscover them and do them justice. But this in itself exemplifies the problem of the overrepresented male genius: although there are many female writers in the past, we are still in the early stages of popularising them in university, so the classic male writers still take up the most space in popular imagination when thinking about âthe greatsâ. Itâs not that there werenât female geniuses, itâs just they often didnât have the resources to write a lot and get published, which means their work was not preserved as well as, say, Shakespeareâs. Despite these challenges, important work is being done within universities to expand the curriculum to include more women writers. This effort needs to continue to popularise these female geniuses.
WHY ARE THERE NO ‘GREAT’ FEMALE ARTISTS?
In the modern day, women in the UK increasingly have the means to enter creative industries. Despite the fact that women make up the vast majority of students in the creative fields within university – according to the higher education statistics agency, almost double the number of women studied âdesign, and creative and performing artsâ than men, there is still a tendency to overrepresent male creatives. Forbes list of 101 best writers of all time contained 78 men, and only 23 women. In a list published by The Atlantic of the top 10 works of the 20th century, 8 of the 10 novelists were male. Virginia Woolf and Flannery OâConnor only just made it in, taking spots 8 and 9. So, despite efforts in university curricula, and the fact that in the modern day women dominate creative fields, popular perception of what constitutes creative genius is still overwhelmingly male.
This myth needs to be debunked. It can start at universities, but to influence the wider population, more work needs to be done to celebrate the voices of women writers. Increasingly, people are aware of womenâs voices that have been lost: more writers in the past are being discovered, and it is becoming common knowledge that male writers have plagiarised the works of women, for example F. Scott Fitzgerald plagiarising his wife, Zeldaâs, diary. Looking back past literature like this is important to do justice to female creatives, though I would also say itâs necessary to also have a forward-looking approach.
MOVING FORWARD…
Doing this involves continuing to recognise contemporary women writers. Zadie Smith, Elena Ferrante, Margaret Atwood, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Isabelle Allende, Sally Rooney, and Donna Tartt all come to mind, though these are some of the most celebrated and renowned writers, both by critics and the general public. There needs to be a continued and conscious effort to popularise the voices of women writers.
Though within the UK, women make up the majority of those pursuing creative degrees, this issue is not just a national one. Many women do not have access to education or the resources to have their work published, and with this lack of opportunity these women miss out on fulfilling their potential, and we miss out on experiencing their perspectives. Debunking the overrepresentation of the male genius begins with ensuring all women have the chance to share their own creative genius. Beyond that, it is about continuing to foreground and talk about the work of women so that female genius can be recognised and celebrated as frequently as male genius is.