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By Pankaj Mishra

Cultural authority has been endowed on those who document men in full.

Image Pankaj Mishra Credit... Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

“The American Will,” George Santayana wrote in 1911, “inhabits the skyscraper; the American Intellect inhabits the colonial mansion. The one is the sphere of the American man; the other, at least predominantly, of the American woman.” Like many turn-of-the-century thinkers, Santayana was worried about the marginal nature of intellectual and creative work in the United States; he couldn’t help defining it as essentially feminine and contrasting it to the “aggressive enterprise” of men in industry and business.

A split between the public sphere of action and the private one of emotions and feelings characterizes life in the secularized modern world. Santayana witnessed its extreme manifestation in a society predicated on endless expansion — a continuous exertion of the will to action that has made “domestic fiction” long seem interchangeable with “woman’s fiction.” By 1911, the roles of women in post-Civil War America had already moved far away from the prescriptions of “Little Women.” In “The House of Mirth” (1905), Edith Wharton had exposed a growing restlessness even within the more luxurious mansions. But the stereotypes of the expansionist New World — the gendering of the home for women, and the world for men — have stubbornly persisted.

Biology was also deemed to be destiny in the Old World. But the norms devised and imposed by Victorian imperialists were eloquently contested, producing two of the greatest novels of English literature: “Middlemarch” and “To the Lighthouse.” Today, Hilary Mantel belongs to a long line of women writers who were indisputably essential to the making of English literary culture.

In the United States, however, the male myths of proud autonomy and self-­reliance have made for a hypermasculine intellectual and literary culture. Its custodians have ranged from Hemingway, the war reporter and boxer manqué, to today’s TV anchors lying about their proximity to war. Its insidious prejudices make men seem naturally equipped to tackle complex ideas, chart tectonic geopolitical shifts, summarize the diverse American condition and erect literary skyscrapers like the Great American Novel. Regional, racial and ethnic labels have obscured the reputations of, among others, Carson McCullers, Zora Neale Hurston and Maxine Hong Kingston. Paula Fox and Mary McCarthy, shrewd observers of the liberal imagination’s insincerities, must suffer oblivion in between occasional revivals. At the same time, cultural authority has been endowed on those who document the men in full (Tom Wolfe) as well as warn against the American will’s enslavement by technology (Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo). Novels about suburban families are more likely to be greeted as microcosmic explorations of the human condition if they are by male writers; their female counterparts are rarely allowed to transcend the category of domestic fiction.

Happily, as Santayana pointed out, “American orthodoxy, though imperious, is not unyielding.” Its grudging concessions to women and minorities have slowly weakened our inherited notions of private and public life. And there are signs that the old literary presumptions are fading: for instance, the general acclaim for Shirley Hazzard’s “The Great Fire,” a triumph of the moral imagination; the recognition of formal and intellectual resourcefulness in the novels of Jennifer Egan and Rachel Kushner, and in the short fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri, Deborah Eisenberg and Lorrie Moore. The old colonial mansion is being rebuilt on a wholly different foundation. Appropriately, its most ingenious architects seem to be ostensible practitioners of domestic fiction — such as Barbara Kingsolver (“The Poisonwood Bible”), Jane Smiley (“A Thousand Acres”) and Marilynne Robinson (“Housekeeping” and “Home”) — who know that the house of intellect and feeling can be more spacious, when left unlocked, than the tallest skyscraper.

Pankaj Mishra is the author of several books, including “The Romantics: A Novel,” which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and “From the Ruins of Empire,” a finalist for the Orwell and Lionel Gelber Prizes in 2013. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and contributes essays on politics and literature to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Guardian of London and The London Review of Books.