The Mary McCarthy Case

Abstract

With the publication of The Group, Mary McCarthy became the first major American author to publish a collective novel written entirely about the lives of women. Norman Mailer was the critic who came the closest to discerning the stakes of her shrewd aesthetic gambit. The novel, Mailer grudgingly admitted, had “something new in it,” namely its “method” of exploring “everything in the profound materiality of women.” This feminine maximalism was indeed a point of pride for McCarthy, who had boasted that “[n]o male consciousness is present in the book; through these eight points of view, all feminine . . . are refracted all the novel ideas of the period concerning sex, politics, economics, architecture, city-planning, house-keeping, child-bearing, interior decoration, and art.” Mailer perceived that, insofar as it recuperated the multifarious focalization and documentary aesthetics of the collective novel, The Group implicitly laid claim to GAN status.