Literary Forgery and Écriture Féminine in Lee Israel’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?

It is explained in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (2000/1979) that the experience of being a female writer has always been significantly different than that of being a male writer since, in the history of Western literature, “authorship” has singularly been defined as a male practice. The feminist literary criticism within which Madwoman is also located, on the other hand, increasingly sought new canons of female writing as well as new methods for its production and evaluation, which explains the emphasis placed on the concept of écriture féminine by second wave feminists such as Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva. Informed by these early yet crucial conceptions on the issue of gender in canon, literature, and authorship, this paper will study American writer Lee Israel’s autobiographical memoir Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2008) and its film adaptation of the same title (2018) to argue that Israel’s scandalous acts of literary forgery may be considered attempts at imagining a new form of female canon and authorship, one in which the notion of writerly “female” sociability is explored to the point of denying the notions of female authority/authorship that écriture féminine seems to demand from the female writer. As such, Israel’s preference to produce her single work (her memoir and the totality of her forgeries combined) in the form of literary forgery and through the adoption of other literary voices will be interpreted as her critique both of the concept of authorship and the singular/central subject position it implies. By working in the “feminine” and private genre of epistolary writing that is characterized by the female writer’s double voice, and also inhabiting the literary personality of her fellow writers, Israel will finally be shown to be a writer figure who adopts a queer and performative approach toward writing and subjectivity, whose acts of literary forgery constitute a brave new form of écriture féminine outside the boundaries of the “anxiety of influence” and the symbolical authority of authorship.