Male Authors ...Female Voices

1) are really focused on the female character (rather unusual for a male author)...so it should be either first person or third person selective, with the focus on a single female character...or all female characters
2)do a good job of characterizing the female mind, speech, etc.

I'm curious about the Salinger text. I haven't read that in a very long time. Thanks for all of your help!

no idea what you're really looking for, but richard yates' the easter parade is one i read recently that might fit.

Moll Flandera and Sister Carrie are great ideas. (Already had Wings...and Bovary. Not sure if my professors would go for any King on the list.

Pete

:)

Argh! Of course, all you males think and react exactly alike. That's why it's so damn easy to manipulate y'all.

I guess it's been argued that this is Dickens's masterpiece, and from what I've read I wouldn't argue the point. I can't, however, claim to have a very extensive background in Dickens. It really is quite good, though, even taking into account the occasional dry patch. And of course it's about 1000 pages long. But the characters are really done very well, and for me it's been a pleasure see the similarity, in this respect, between Dickens and Mervyn Peake.

PBS recently aired the Masterpiece Theatre movie of Bleak House, with Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock. I heard that was pretty good, but I'm waiting to finish the book before seeing the movie.

Some of the authors with the best characterization ever reveal themselves to ba at heart unable to credibly pull this off.

it is if you are norman mailer.

I dunno. There was a sexy showering-with-her-female-friend scene with sharply observed lathering up that seemed a bit voyeuristic to me, and unlike something a woman would have written.

As a man, I guess it's harder for me to tell what comes off genuinely as female when written by a man. The other way around though - I've read plenty of novels by women from a male perspective (tons of crime fiction is like this) and I rarely feel it's convincing. The characters are always observing things I don't feel a man would observe and not observing the things they would. There's very often a feeling of a woman's mind in a man's body. Or alternatively, the author goes to the other extreme and makes the man just too cartoonly brutish. One author who I think gets it just right though is Patricia Highsmith, who rarely wrote from a woman's perspective.

Yep, that scene is often used as evidence that Warner is crap at "being a woman". The problem for me with this kind of thinking is that a character isn't supposed to be everyman or everywoman. If you're looking for insights into the way other people think, I don't think internal monologue or any other literary device is going to be much help. Sometimes, perhaps, they tell you how some people think other people think, if you see what I mean. But on the whole I don't like psychological readings of texts. In his defence, the author can say "I'm not saying all women think like this, but the character I created does", and how can you gainsay that?

What is a "convincing portrayal"? If there is a "skew", is it because of the gender shift, or because of the rules of the world being described, or because of the needs of the plot, or because of the interpretive focus you're bringing to it? (Example of that last one: If you find an instance of a man writing a story in which a woman is "unable" to do something, is this an example of misogyny, or are you looking for such moments to label as misogynistic despite the fact that if a character could do everything then there couldn't be much of a plot?)

But - to appropriate a little Adrienne Rich - all good writers should strive to be bisexual. Or at least all writers who want some veracity in their worldview. 'Bisexual' not in the sense of practicing out-and-out bisexuality, but in the sense of extending their own imaginative-creative-compositional faculties toward positions seperate and distinct from their own, and following them to (sometimes) threatening extremes. I think it's fear of this bisexuality that keeps many writers 'playing safe' and writing to convention, writing to gender lines, rather than extending their own craft with very simple extensions of thought.

For instance: the simple exercise of writing a seduction scene from the POV of the opposite gender. It's no great shakes if you actually try it, actually engage with the character, but so few writers will allow themselves this chance. Most of them (instead of writing the selective detail Mrs. X find charming "the little hair that curls from the mole on Mr. X.'s neck") will bow to a sort of crassly reductive telegenic convention ("Mrs. X. ran her fingers down the firmness of Mr. X's abdomen") as if they're afraid that by allowing themselves to be seduced by Mr. X, they're going to turn out gay or prove that they secretly have some anti-their-own-gender bias.

so if they're married howcome they're seducing each other?

also when i was reading ulysses recently i found myself starting to do little Bloomian summaries of activities to myself, the sorts of activities i'd never actively verbalise... ("Keys? .. ah. Not there. There. There!" ... i mean, does anyone?)

also, there are bits of molly bloom's monologue that match-pretty well with some of my more horn-doggy moments. but they're rare, and it's always exciting to me to read a rendering of thought that -- even loosely -- matches my own.

And this isn't true when writing someone of the same sex?

awesome. basically I agree, but to totally undermine this excellent rant, Norman Rush's Mating is a particularly good instance of dude writing in a woman's voice.

Taught in a "Women's Lit" course, much to the anger of the strident feminists.

Writing about the opposite gender is so impressive when somebody pulls it off, no?

Ain't evolution a most grand thing?