Anne Enright · Diary · LRB 21 September 2017
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n18/anne-enright/diary
[...] men and women are read differently, even when they write the same thing. If a man writes ‘The cat sat on the mat’ we admire the economy of his prose; if a woman does we find it banal. If a man writes ‘The cat sat on the mat’ we are taken by the simplicity of his sentence structure, its toughness and precision. We understand the connection between ‘cat’ and ‘mat’, sense the grace of the animal, admire the way the percussive monosyllables sharpen the geometrics of the mat beneath. If the man is an Irish writer we ask if the cat is Pangúr Ban, the monk’s cat from the ninth-century poem of that name – the use of assonance surely points to the Gaelic tradition – in which case the mat is his monk’s cell, a representation of the life of the mind, its comforts and delineations. The cat, female and probably white, is the secret sensuality of the ascetic life; not in the monastery garden, or out in the bog, but sitting in its proper, bounded place. Or the mat is Ireland itself, if this is not too much of a stretch, in the age of saints and scholars, that golden, undivided time before the Norman invasion, in which case the cat could be anything at all: the playful cipher, sitting on a very inert, territorial mat. No – scratch all that – this is just a very truthful, very real sentence (look at those nouns!) containing both masculine ‘mat’ and feminine ‘cat’. It somehow Says It All.
If, on the other hand, a woman writes ‘The cat sat on the mat,’ her concerns are clearly domestic, and sort of limiting. Time to go below the comments line and make jokes about pussy … I am kidding, of course. These are anxieties, projections, phantasmagoria – things to which women are particularly prone.