Girly man
It began round about page 5 of Siri Hustvedt’s What I loved. I stopped, said Huh? and re-read the paragraph that began “I bent over her and kissed the freckles on her shoulders…”
Up until then, I’d been certain that the narrator was a woman. The book itself went on to be rather good, and in parts truly fine, but this drove me to distraction throughout – and made for unintended ambiguities.
I felt the same discomfort throughout Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea, having to remind myself every three pages that the narrator was a man, which kept me from full pleasure (although I can’t say that any Murdoch has ever brought me full pleasure, she’s so darn cerebral, and sometimes annoying with clinical restraint).
I’m aware of the algorithms devised that claim to have found the keys to identifying an author’s sex based on their use of pronouns and conjunctions and an unspoken rapport with the reader, and suppose that there is some real pertinence.
In Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides’s hermaphrodite narrator wonders whether his/her writing is more masculine (linear) or feminine (circular), and offers up a lovely ambiguous blend – while another character concludes: “sex is biological; gender is cultural.”
Perhaps it does come down to different hardwiring in male and female brains – I expect that there are nature vs. nurture studies out there that endeavour to shed more light – but still I suspect that even if a writer were to apply the science, they would still struggle to disguise their sex. (Although I confess that I’ve been wrong a few times when reading online journals, certain that he was a she – but curiously enough, never the other way round.)
So I’ve been trying to think of a book by a female author who successfully inhabits a male voice as first person narrator, and vice-versa, and haven’t come up with much… but recall some spectacular failures, with honourable mention going to Martin Amis’s Nicola Six in London Fields. Dear lord.
(I’m reminded too of the inevitable panic when translating a male voice, always hopeful that I will not betray with my gender.)
I suppose that ultimately I’d like to think that, in spite of all scientific probing, there remains an element of mystery in our voices – something that no algorithm can measure.
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Comment
- Have you tried Clara Callan by Richard B. Wright? I thought he did a good job of portraying a woman. Obviously, it’d have to be a woman’s judgment at the end of the day, though.
Cheers,
Simon
— Simon Fodden Jan 6, 12:23pm # - jeanette winterson’s written on the body is an interesting experiment in disguising gender as well. back and forth with hints until maybe the middle of the book where you have a good idea, but you never really know for sure the sex of the narrator.
it’s good, but maddening at times.
~degan.
— degan Jan 6, 12:29pm # - I had the exact same experience reading What I Loved, and probably at the same point in the text. For me, I think it was the kinds of things the narrator noticed, especially about other people, other men, and the way he described those things.
Glad you enjoyed the book.
— Andru Matthews Jan 6, 12:32pm # - Wally Lamb’s “She’s Come Undone” supposedly does a good job of disguising the author’s gender, but I haven’t read it, so it’s all heresay.
Joyce does well with Molly’s soliloquy, but then that’s not sustained.
And then, of course, on my all time favourite “there’s no way this is a man” book is Larry’s Party. I love Shield’s work, and it was good book, but Larry was not a man.
— August Jan 6, 2:22pm # - Now, it may just be me talking, but seeing the description “I bent over her and kissed the freckles on her shoulders…” wouldn’t make me think that the narrator was a man. I think it makes for a better story if you assume the opposite at that point :)
— Pat Jan 6, 3:31pm # - I think Anne Bronte captures the male narrator of “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” beautifully.
But then I disagree about the pertinence of prose gender-mappers, which, it seems to me, simply verify that cultural stereotypes have a measurable effect on cultural products. What seems more interesting is the weakness of those measurable effects—how often the mappers are wrong and by how slim a margin they’re right—which indicates either some considerable counter-force being exerted against the effects of this essential division, or the not-so-essential nature of the division.
— Ray Jan 6, 5:08pm # - Didn’t someone, maybe Harold Bloom, write a book about how the Bible, or at least part of it, was written by a woman? The Book of J? (That’s one of those stupid things I remember, if indeed I remember it and didn’t just make it up, from reading reviews of books I’ll never read.)
— ep Jan 6, 5:22pm # - The book by Harold Bloom is indeed called The Book of J, and purports the idea that the first part of the Pentateuch was written by a woman. I’m biased in my opinion, being a Christian, but I hold to the Mosaic authorship as is indicated in scripture itself, but that’s neither here nor there.
— Jason Wall Jan 6, 6:36pm # - When I read the Just William books as a child, I assumed the author, Richmal Crompton, was a man. She had me fooled.
I was too bored to read much of White Teeth by Zadie Smith, but that started off with a male protagonist losing the will to live, followed soon by this reader. The voice rang fairly true though, until he started thinking something about hoovering. I’d be very surprised if any man ever thought anything about hoovering unless it was in a book which he was about to stop reading.
— Ossian Jan 6, 7:28pm # - Jack Nicholson’s character in As good as it gets is a successful writer, approached by a female fan in one scene who asks him how he is able to write such believable female characters. ‘It’s easy,’ he replies, ‘I write them as men and then remove reason and accountability.’ It’s a cheap, chauvenistic joke, mainly intended to develop Nicholson’s irracsible character, but recently a friend of mine applied this approach in his own novel and was rather horrified when several women friends said they found the resulting dialogue to be believable.
— John Hudson Jan 6, 7:35pm # - I know this is the opposite of what you asked, but I immediately think of Robert Hellenga’s The Sixteen Pleasures. It has a female protagonist and I had to keep reminding myself that the author was male. There was only one small part where I remember feeling like he got it wrong – it was like one line post-coital that I thought, nah I don’t buy her reaction here. I can’t even think off-hand of any female authors I’ve read that have a male protagonist. Whereas I can go to my bookshelf and find male writers with female protagonists. Hmm.
— leslee Jan 6, 9:05pm # - Larry (of “Larry’s Party”) never came alive for me – but I’m not sure exactly why. Too sanitized, too nice perhaps. Not first person though, but the only male protaganist/female author combo I can think of offhand.
And I harbour suspicions that both the female narrator/protaganist in Hellenga’s “The Sixteen Pleasures” and the (much younger, female) narrator in Norman Rush’s “Mating”were created solely to embody the (late-middle-age, male) authors’ fantasies of how nubile young women should (but rarely do) respond sexually to late-middle-age men…
— Michael Jan 6, 10:58pm # - When I read Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, I completely forgot that the writer was male. Michael Cunningham writes both as a male and female narrator in A Home at the End of the World, and I thought he was very successful there.
I am hard-pressed to think of a female author writing as a male first person narrator, nevermind one that is successful (I may be one of the few Canadians who didn’t read Larry’s Party). Donna Tart writes as a man in her novel The Secret History, and I don’t remember being distracted by the knowledge that it was really a woman who wrote the book. That said, I don’t remember loving the book either.
Barbara Gowdy wrote a wonderful novel, The White Bone, told from the perspective of an elephant. Although, not being an elephant myself, I probably wouldn’t recognize any inconsistencies.
— kerry Jan 7, 3:50am # - Ann Coulter has been doing yeoman work as a dead white male for years.
And now she has someone nipping at her heels: Vancouverites will recall the batshit insane Rachel Marsden, now evidently a republican babe.
— Dean Allen Jan 7, 9:00am # - ... not in terms of books, but strolling around in comment areas of various weblogs for a certain period of time, one soon realises that whosoever posts under a gender-unrevealing nickname is automatically treated as a man. this may be different in special interest blogs for knitting housewives or ironing transvestites, though.
— katatonik Jan 7, 8:34pm # - The teen books “Rumble Fish”, “That Was Then, This Is Now” and “The Outsiders” by S.E. Hinton were always assumed to be written by a man, and the publisher made sure the writer never had a public face lest the young male audience disappear.
I remember my shock and surprise a few years ago when it was revealed that she was a woman. I’m positive that my male-ness would have been threatened had I known that as a teenager.
Geez.
— Marshall Jan 7, 8:45pm # - Does is count if it’s a boy not a man? Because you have J.K. Rowling with Harry Potter (I haven’t read them, but I hear they’re very well written). Maybe a kid’s book is still considered “girly” work. Of course she did use initials instead of a female first name, presumably since she started out – was this so boys wouldn’t know?
— leslee Jan 7, 10:38pm # - Regarding who we’ve read, it’s worth remembering that literary history isn’t just a matter of what’s written but what filters let what through.
Thus, regarding anonymous works which were rethought after the author’s sex was disclosed, it struck me that the narrator of “Wurthering Heights”, although not a lead character, was as thoroughly convincing a comfortable early Victorian male as I’ve ever encountered.
And regarding work which has been safely hidden away as genre, Patricia Highsmith’s male leads, although they aren’t narrators, seem more convincingly male to me than the male leads written by virtually any male authors.
— Ray Jan 8, 12:39am # - I was thinking Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, too (noticing that I’m seconding that opinion above). It’s been a while since I read the book, but I remember being impressed that he’d so successfully pulled off a convincing voice & motivation in a narrarator who was not only a woman but was also the victim of domestic violence.
— Chantelle Jan 8, 6:16pm # - A while ago, I and several of my female friends ran our blog entries through this gender guessing engine.
We were almost always assumed to be male, which made me wonder how much the engine’s gender criteria are region/nationality-specific. (We’re all New Zealanders.)
— iona Jan 8, 7:52pm # - The tricky thing concerning your experience of Hustvedt’s novel is that in you had prior knowledge of the authors’ sex. What we need is a control – a few manuscripts from unknown writers. And we also need a placebo, which in this case would be a book made entirely of sugar.
— palinode Jan 9, 10:59am # - I was also thinking that Harry Potter might be a good example of a woman writing through a believable male point of view, but when I thought more closely about it, it occurred to me that if you strip Harry’s, Ron’s, and Hermione’s names away from their dialogues Harry and Ron pretty much become interchangeable, whereas Hermione carries a very distinct and much more emotionally rich content. Perhaps it works opposite to Nicholson’s character’s formula: take out empathy and equanimity and you have a male character?
— butuki Jan 10, 12:32am # - hold on, Richmal Crompton, was a woman ? i’m going to need a cup of tea and a lie down. i’m almost afraid to ask, but, anthony buckeridge ?
— alex Jan 18, 4:59am # - Brigid Brophy’s In Transit kicks off with a person in an airport having no idea what sex they are – (s)he decides to go in the bathroom to unzip and check, but is flummoxed because, which bathroom?
As to Murdoch, my favourite is the first, Under the Net, not too cerebral and mostly about the physical world thank god.
— bhikku Jan 19, 6:24am # - Baine Kerr’s novel Wrongful Death (2003) is a case where a man writes women with clarity and insight. Don’t let the title throw you off, this is far more than a legal thriller. Even cranky old Kirkus said “a tour de force cross-examination and a provocative meditation on vanity, betrayal, and evil.”
— Sara Donati Jan 19, 1:08pm #
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