UCI Professor’s Life and Studies Converge in Women’s Program

“My mother brought me up to think, ‘You don’t need men.’ And that’s so ironic!” said Juliet Flower MacCannell, a UC Irvine associate professor of English and comparative literature.

It’s ironic because most of MacCannell’s more traditionally raised friends remained single, or married but later divorced, yet MacCannell has been married to the same man for 20 years.

A tall woman with short, dark hair and a strong chin, MacCannell said that she has always been determined to be “the best” in her chosen research fields. Now she is a UCI professor, although her husband and two sons live in Davis, where Dean MacCannell is head of the UC Davis community studies program.

Usually the MacCannells are a family unit from Friday to Monday, and from Tuesday to Thursday the UCI professor commutes to work from a rented room in Costa Mesa. That schedule, which involves two airplane rides each week, has grown wearying, she said.

She and her husband would “like to get together again, as our bodies get older and more tired,” the professor said, laughing. But the alternative to commuting--not working, or being a “faculty wife” who’s employed as a UC Davis instructor but not given “the compensations of professorship”--are routes Juliet MacCannell has already tried and found unsatisfactory.

MacCannell is a specialist in 18th- and 19th-Century English and French literature who has a particular interest in semiotics (a discipline that views the world as a system of “signs”--words are one such sign--whose meanings are determined only by their relation to other signs). She is also director of two new UCI programs: women’s studies, an interdisciplinary humanities program, and a “gender-focused” research project into how females are perceived in art, literature, history and other disciplines.

Known to her colleagues as a hard-working academic who writes and publishes many articles, MacCannell co-authored (with her husband) a 1982 book on semiotics called “The Time of the Sign, “ which she calls “an introduction to the field of semiotics, with an emphasis on its applications to literature, philosophy and the social sciences.” (The first edition of that book has sold out, and it’s about to be translated into Spanish.) These days MacCannell is often invited to speak at conferences.

But for most of the decade before UCI hired her, she couldn’t find a satisfactory job anywhere in the country. She said that this was true partly because her academic focus was on “deconstructive criticism, a kind of criticism that builds upon semiotics . . . so the distinctions we make among things becomes the focus of attention.” Deconstructive criticism, which was not then widely used, was found “threatening” by many established professors, MacCannell said.

Some male professors also found her threatening because she was a married woman who wanted to work, MacCannell said. Being rejected so many times on these grounds made her more aware of sex-based inequities, she said.

As a graduate student in the 1960s, MacCannell had been inspired by a conference that featured political theorists Betty Friedan and Kate Millett, but her own political activity centered on anti-Vietnam War, rather than pro-feminist, protest. However, “I felt as I grew more and more aware of the real (employment) barriers to women, that it was up to me to keep the pressure up” and not accept unfair treatment, she said.

‘I Didn’t Quit’

As she neared completion of her doctoral work, “there was a real sense of ‘stop, stop, stop, stop,’ I kept getting all the time--not from my close friends, but from the world at large,” said MacCannell. One by one she watched her women friends in Cornell University’s doctoral program leave their studies to have children, or because they thought they were just not good enough to earn a degree, she said.

“I didn’t quit, I didn’t stop writing my thesis despite the pressures and counter-pressures,” she said.

Just before she finished her doctoral dissertation in 1969, MacCannell landed a job teaching French language and literature at Haverford College, a prestigious Philadelphia school. That position ended after one year. From 1970 to 1977 she was unwillingly unemployed, despite having been an honors student and the protege of the late, internationally known literary critic Paul De Man. In interview after interview she was asked: “What would your husband do if we hired you?”

Positions Given to Men

“I’d say: ‘Well, I’m sure he’d follow along and land on his feet somehow,’ ” MacCannell remembered. (Her husband, she added, has for years been “trying to be unemployed” so he can write full time.) Once, she said, the head of a department responded to this by shaking his finger at her and saying: “The wife follows the husband!”

Usually, according to MacCannell, the positions she sought were given to men. Sometimes these men were less academically qualified than she was. Meanwhile, Dean MacCannell, who’s an anthropologist and sociologist, was never without work.

In 1977 Juliet MacCannell took the first of three one-year positions as a UC Davis instructor. She was not happy, however, with the job’s insecurity, pay and workload. In late 1979 she applied for the UCI opening. Now she is one of five women professors in UCI’s 28-professor English department. (She is also one of the three female English professors to have tenure.)

Appointed Director

In 1983, MacCannell was appointed director of the planned women’s studies program. That program was approved by the academic senate and began last spring; the gender-focused research program officially started last month.

MacCannell calls women’s studies “both an intellectual and a political (field that) came out of the women’s movement.” In women’s studies, “the phase we’re moving into now is really the research phase. We’re not so much caught up in the passions of the times. It’s time to reconstruct, time to do an archeology (of) what led into these movements (and) what’s changed” as a result of them, she said.

So far, only four UCI students have declared themselves women’s studies majors. In its two semesters of existence, the program has offered classes on such topics as “Women and Literature” and “Women in Latin America.” Future classes will be taught by film, fine arts, linguistics, philosophy, dance, literature and history professors. (A total of 35 professors have committed themselves to teaching women’s studies classes.) MacCannell hopes that someday the program will also be able to hire its own staff.

Projects Under Way

Several of the 35 professors have gender-focused research projects under way. Those projects include an examination of early women Expressionist painters’ relationships with their more-famous male counterparts, a study of how gender influences management style and a study of the effects of immigration on women who move to the United States. Also, Juliet and Dean MacCannell are studying the contrasting social messages sent to women by such publications as the popular “Dress for Success”-type books and 1960s-era feminist tracts.

As a professor of comparative literature and 18th-Century literature, MacCannell said that she sees a number of parallels between today’s literary views of women and the literary views of the Romantic period, which lasted from roughly 1789 to 1830.

Romantic Ideas

“In a sense we’re still living out the Romantic ideas,” she said. “We’re full of impasses, either-ors, dilemmas, problems,” as were the Romantics. And, MacCannell said, connecting threads can be seen between today’s “literature” of television and film and the Romantics’ writing.

In 18th-Century novels there was a “return toward sentimentalism, to a fiction in which women became central to the novel in a way they weren’t before . . . at a time when women were beginning to lose (economic) power in the real world, through segregation and separation of the sexes,” MacCannell said. In such novels, women’s limited power came from their zealous guarding of their sexual “purity,” which led to “virtue (becoming) something you buy and sell,” she said.

Cites Message of TV Shows

She cited such television shows as “Airwolf” and “Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer” as 20th-Century embodiments of such ideas. On such shows, “every woman who ever kissed a man has to die,” she said. While some current feature films, such as the recent “Choose Me,” run counter to this trend, in MacCannell’s view the message in many television shows and films is that women should be punished for being independent sexual beings.

Such ideas are widely, if unconsciously, accepted “structures we live out” but “don’t really recognize,” she said. Another such “structure” she wants to examine is the widespread awareness of possible nuclear annihilation.

“Is the thought of nuclear annihilation (always) in the back of our minds, has it affected things like the relationship between the sexes (because) we’re thinking of ourselves as little atoms bounding around (independently)?” she asked. Such an awareness might contribute to today’s “lack of permanence” in intimate relationships between men and women, she said.

Recently Completed Book

All the professor’s interests seem to tie into an examination of the interrelationship of the sexes in different cultures and times. MacCannell recently finished writing a book about Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst who examined repressed sexuality’s relationship to organized culture. Titled “Figuring Lacan: Criticism and the Cultural Unconsciousness,” MacCannell’s manuscript will be published next year by Croom Helm Limited Publishers, an English company.

Now MacCannell is returning to an earlier project, a study of women and couples in 18th- and 19th-Century literature. But despite her own substantial literary output, “I write to teach, not so much for the beauties of writing,” she said.

The teaching happens in Irvine, but the writing happens in Davis. A friend once asked MacCannell: “‘Where do you think--in Irvine or in Davis?’ ” She answered: “Davis.” At home, she and her husband collaborate on some projects and go their separate ways on others.

Not a ‘Traditional’ Marriage

One project they have in common, of course, is raising their two sons--now 11 and 14 years old-- within what has “never been a traditional marriage,” MacCannell said.

When they were both ambitious graduate students with little time or inclination for housekeeping, MacCannell said that she once told her husband: “You need a wife. What’s more, so do I!”

But neither piles of dirty socks nor intervening miles of California roads have split the two writer-teachers apart. Next fall, when her husband goes to Cornell University for a few months as a visiting professor, MacCannell is taking a sabbatical leave from her UCI post. The whole family will move East.

MacCannell looks forward to that temporary, full-time reunion with her mate. “We get along very well, and I think we complement each other,” she said. “I think we really like each other. And we really love each other, too.”