A while back I wrote a couple of blog posts which included thoughts on the gendered nature of crying. It’s commonly accepted that women cry more than men. Then I happened upon a summary of a scientific study which put the gender difference down to both hormones and social conditioning.
Speaking of the power of social conditioning…
Last night I read the preface to a reprint of a lesser-known Larry McMurtry novel. (I have turned into a bone fide McMurtry fan, and now want to read ALL the books.) If you’ve ever seen the classic film Terms of Endearment you may, like me, have been unaware that this was based on a book, and that Terms of Endearment is only the third instalment of a much bigger, wonderfully capacious ‘Houston series’.
This is from the first in the series, Moving On*, written by McMurtry 18 years after the novel’s initial release:
The knottiest aesthetic problem I fumbled with in Moving On is whether its heroine, Patsy Carpenter, cries too much.
McMurtry explains that 1970s feminists hated Patsy Carpenter, which shocked him greatly because he loved writing her. He also explains:
I might say that I had not even the haziest consciousness of this problem while I was writing the book. Then it was published and I immediately started finding myself locked into arguments with women, all of whom resented Patsy’s tears.
Though the women I was arguing with were often on the verge of tears themselves, and occasionally brimmed over with them, they one and all contended that no woman worthy of respect would cry so much.
… The book was written in the late 60s and set less than a decade earlier. As arguments over Patsy’s tears persisted, I gradually came to regard it as essentially a historical novel…In that simpler era–as I explained to many sceptics–virtually all women had cried virtually all the time. The ones I knew were rarely dry-eyed, so it seemed to me that I was only obeying the severer tenets of realism in having Patsy sob through chapter after chapter.
My editor, Michael Korda, was evidently one of the few people alive in the late sixties whose memory for social and domestic history was as precise as mine. He too remembered a time not so long ago when virtually all women cried all the time. I believe he was as shocked as I was when half the human beings in the Western world treated the book with scorn. And it cannot have helped that the other half of the human beings–i.e., the males–ignored it completely.
So here are some questions i have about mcmurtry’s preface:
1. Is Larry McMurtry’s memory of the 50s accurate? When I watch the odd classic film from the 50s, sure enough the women cry easily, but I always thought this was a theatrical trend rather than a reflection of reality. It’s possible Larry grew up around unusually expressive women. I need to ask some really old people.
2. If women indeed cried all the time all over the place (in 1950s America, at least), is this because women were more unhappy back then? Tears can also be about anger and frustration. Perhaps 1950s women were less able to express these latter emotions in any other way. Tears may have been all they had?
3. Wouldn’t it have been safer if Larry McMurtry, when writing a novel about a woman, had worked with a female editor rather than one named Michael? I have yet to make it past chapter one of this huge novel (and for the record, Patsy has already cried) and I get the feeling this one will be just as good as any of his others, but from a marketing perspective alone, perhaps an effort should be made to mix different genders when working as a team on a book — or on anything, really — simply because a feminist female editor may have forewarned Larry about the crying thing in regards to marketing, even if Larry didn’t have his finger on the political pulse.
4. If women cry far less now, is this a good development? Or should men really be crying a bit more? Might angry-crying be the preferable alternative to violence?
5. If women cry far less now, that means we may cry even less in future. It’s also possible that in some hypothetical future culture, men start to cry more than women. Can we apply this fluidity to other things which are ‘inherent’ to males and females, imagining a vastly different life experience for all genders?
*Also interesting: McMurtry wanted to call the book Patsy Carpenter after the woman it’s about, but the publisher said no. Despite a few classics being named after their female characters, is it still unwise–sales wise–for publishers to release a book named after a woman? In films we see numerous examples of titles changed to avoid being named after a woman, and sometimes against all narrative logic. (Off the top of my head: Saving Mr Banks and Tangled.)
