“Oh, mah Gawd,” my inner cranky b*tch moaned as I opened the “Style” section of this morning’s WaPo, only for my eye to fall on a review of yet another novel with the word “wife” in the title. This one was called The Aviator’s Wife. Novelists, are you listening?
Women are MORE than just wives, daughters, and sisters! Many of us are not wives at all and are perfectly content with that status. We have lives, hobbies, careers, and interests, just as men do. We are presidential candidates, senators, professors of mathematics, teachers, sewing instructors, dress designers, actresses, and linguists. So will you kindly use your brains and come up with an original title of your very, very own?
Of course, I know what started this reprehensible trend. Amy Tan started it with her novel, The Kitchen God’s Wife. (Why was a deity associated with the kitchen a “god,” anyway, if we’re hell-bent on stereotyping? Shouldn’t the title have been The Kitchen Goddess?) Then there were The General’s Daughter and The Zookeeper’s Wife. My late mother lent me the latter, which I read in a moment of weakness. The novel could equally have been called The Zookeeper’s Husband. They were both zookeepers, for goodness’ sake!
For the record, novelists, I won’t buy or read any novel with the word “wife” or “daughter” in the title. It wouldn’t even make me happy if the aviator in question were a woman married to another woman who somehow managed to be more interesting than the aviator herself.
It’s sheer intellectual laziness that perpetuates this deplorable habit. And why isn’t it applied to men? Have you ever heard of a novel called The Secretary of State’s Husband or The Transvaginal Governor’s Son-in-Law? No? Wonder why? Is it because in our society men do, women are? This is the twenty-first century. Why are women still defined by their relationships? I can’t believe that in the year 2013 I have to ask such a question.
I am a woman. As it happens I am a wife. I’m also a mother, a grandmother, a sister, a mother-in-law, an aunt, a cousin, a niece, and when my parents were both living, I was their daughter. But I don’t write “wife” on the blank line of a form that invites me to fill in my occupation. At one time I was a marketing services manager. At other times I was variously called a technical editor, proposal specialist, proofreader-editor, technical aide, and so on. Although I’m retired now, I blog. I write fiction and nonfiction. I’m about to volunteer for a political campaign. That’s what I do.
Of course, my dear novelist friends, it’s much easier to riff on someone else’s title than to think up your own. I know that. And that is why I fully expect to pick up the book review section of the daily paper some morning only to find such monstrosities as Fifty-Two Shades of Purplish Blue, or Eighty-Eight Shades of Gooseturd Green.
And that concludes this rant. If you've borne with me thus far, please accept my thanks.