Gendered Authorship and Cultural Authority in Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World

Siri Hustvedt’s sixth novel, The Blazing World (2014), takes as its subject the sexism prevalent in the contemporary visual arts market. In this article, we seek to demonstrate how the hoax perpetrated by the novel’s central protagonist, Harriet (Harry) Burden, works to capture the complex differences between how creative works by women and those by men are interpreted and valued in contemporary culture. We begin by acknowledging the contribution of Margaret Cavendish, from whose seventeenth-century work of philosophical fiction Hustvedt’s novel draws its title. We highlight how Cavendish’s ideas on knowledge and cultural authority remain useful as a way of reading and responding to ongoing struggles with gender and authority in patriarchal culture. We move on to examine the tensions and complications created by each of the three living masks Hustvedt’s protagonist Harry employs as part of her series of hoaxes in The Blazing World. In and through this illustration, we contend that the visual arts industry represented in the novel can be read as a metaphor for the literary industry in which the author Siri Hustvedt, is an active participant. In writing The Blazing World, Hustvedt draws from numerous literary examples, most importantly the hoax perpetrated by the writer Alice Sheldon. The central question in this paper becomes the notion of gender and its relation to cultural authority. Given that the struggles of feminism, as Seán Burke has written, have been primarily a struggle for authorship, how should the erasure and belittlement of women’s work be responded to by women artists and authors? Is it enough to demonstrate it, to call it out, to parody it, as Harriet Burden does in The Blazing World, or should we come to terms with a form of making and meaning that is outside the dominant, commercial mode of success

Aesthetics · Art · Feminism · Hoax · Literature · Media studies · Metaphor · Political science · Print culture · Reading (process · Sociology · Subject (documents · The arts · Visual arts · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy

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