Life & Wisdom Quote by William Gass

Gass tosses off the line like a provocation, but it lands as a compact theory of how fiction has been policed. “If there were genders to genres” signals a thought experiment: imagine literary forms sorted the way societies sort people. The punchline - “unquestionably feminine” - isn’t a compliment so much as an exposure. In a culture that codes seriousness as masculine (fact, argument, proof, public record), the invented, the intimate, the stylized, and the “mere story” get shoved into the feminized bin: decorative, emotional, suspect.

The sentence works because it’s double-edged. On one level, it flatters fiction’s traits that patriarchal taste often devalues: voice, interiority, sensual language, attention to texture over thesis. On another, it stages the insult fiction has historically absorbed. Calling it “feminine” echoes the old dismissal of novels as parlor entertainment, gossip with better punctuation - a charge that tracked especially onto women readers and women writers. Gass, a modernist-leaning stylist obsessed with the sentence as an aesthetic object, is also defending fiction’s autonomy from the courtroom standards of “truth” that nonfiction pretends to own.

Context matters: writing in a late-20th-century American scene that loved “serious” masculine realism and lionized male authority, Gass is reminding us that the hierarchy between genres isn’t neutral. It’s social. The line smuggles in a critique of how literary prestige is gendered, and how “feminine” becomes shorthand for everything art does that can’t be audited.