跨界太极学术 | Marion Gymnich：Gender and Narratology

Gender and Narratology

Marion Gymnich

Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn

Literature Compass 10/9 (2013): 705–715

Abstract

In contrast to structuralist narratology, feminist narratology, which emerged in the 1980s as one of the first ‘postclassical’, context-oriented approaches within narrative theory and was pioneered by Susan Lanser, is based on the assumption that gender is a category that is relevant to the analysis of the structural featuresof narratives. Seeking to link feminist theory and narratology, this branch of narrative theory has revealed blind spots and pitfalls of the supposedly gender-neutral analyses of structuralist narratology. Moreover, feminist narratology has sought to relate textual features to relevant cultural contexts and has modified and reinterpreted narratological categories from a feminist perspective. Since the 1990s, feminist narratology has significantly broadened its scope by paying attention to a wider range of text types and media, and by drawing upon approaches and insights from linguistics. In addition, the shift from feminist theory to gender studies has left its traces in gender-conscious approaches to narrative theory. In particular, Judith Butler’s revisionist approach to gender and sex has rendered the categories that feminist narratology draws upon significantly more complex. Although a number of scholars have contributed to the challenging project of developing a feminist narratology, the validity of gender-conscious approaches to the study of narrative structures is still contested today.

Judith Butler

Gender is beyond doubt a category that literary critics generally consider to be important for an interpretation of literary narratives. But is gender likewise a category that is relevant to the analysis of the structural features of narrative texts? Should we, for instance, pay attention to processes of gendering when we identify the types of narrators that appear in a text? Depending on the theoretical framework one is working in the answers to these two questions may vary considerably. Traditionally, narratology (i.e. the study of the structure of narratives) has sought to analyse the formal features of narratives without referring to gender (or any other social or cultural categories for that matter). Focusing on general textual structures and properties of narrative texts, approaches which were developed by Gérard Genette, Franz Stanzel, Seymour Chatman and others in the 1970s and that are usually subsumed under labels such as ‘structuralist narratology’ and ‘classical narratology’ did not make an endeavour to look beyond textual structures. Instead, they systematically excluded all contextual factors (including gender) from their text-centred analyses. Since the 1980s, however, a considerable range of so-called ‘postclassical narratologies’ have emerged, including ‘contextualist narratology’ (pioneered by Seymour Chatman), cognitive narratology (Monika Fludernik, Manfred Jahn, Ansgar Nünning and others) and postcolonial narratology (Monika Fludernik, Roy Sommer and others). Many of these postclassical approaches are based on the assumption that one needs to contextualise analyses of narrative structures in order to pay tribute to the fact that the production and the reception of literary texts are inevitably shaped by the cultural and historical contexts in which those texts are written, distributed and read, as the contributions in the volume Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (edited by David Herman in 1999) demonstrate. In other words ‘cultural narratologies’ or ‘context-oriented’ narrative theories consider narrative structures to be informed by extratextual factors and to be in a dialogue with the relevant cultural context(s).

One of the first context-oriented approaches to the study of narrative texts that have been put forward since the 1980s is feminist narratology, a branch of narrative theory that was pioneered by Susan Lanser and that was fuelled by the growing interest in feminist theory since the 1970s, in the wake of the Second Women’s Movement. Anglo-American feminist literary theory, which seeks to identify how patriarchal power structures have shaped the representation of women in literary texts and to analyse the impact of gender on the production and reception of literature, was very much influenced by scholars such as Elaine Showalter, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Due to the fact that many of the postclassical narratologies seek to link the methods and insights of classical, structuralist narratology with another theoretical framework, new approaches to narrative theory such as feminist narratology, postcolonial narrative theory and cognitive narratology have also been referred to as ‘hybrid narratologies’. Feminist narratology thus can be seen as a ‘hybrid’ of feminist theory and narratology. In a programmatic article called ‘Toward a Feminist Narratology’, which was published in 1986, Lanser addresses the shortcomings of traditional narratology and argues that these could be remedied by adopting gender as a narratological category; Lanser holds that “until women’s writings, questions of gender, and feminist points of view are considered, it will be impossible even to know the deficiencies of narratology” (Lanser, ‘Toward a Feminist Narratology’ 343–344). Her articles ‘Toward a Feminist Narratology’ and ‘Shifting the Paradigm: Feminism and Narratology’ (1988) have come to be seen as the founding texts of feminist narratology, although there were of course predecessors of this specific branch of narrative theory, who were motivated by similar concerns, for instance Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Writing Beyond the Ending (1985) and Nancy K. Miller’s ‘Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s Fiction’ (1981) to mention just two examples. Another influential early representative of feminist narratology is Robyn Warhol, who presented important stimuli for developing a systematic approach to gender as a narratological category in her article ‘Toward a Theory of the Engaging Narrator: Earnest Interventions in Gaskell, Stowe, and Eliot’ (1986) as well as in her book Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel (1989).

Elaine Showalter

In their groundbreaking contributions to the project of developing a feminist narratology, Lanser and Warhol, who are still among the leading feminist narratologists today, claim that ‘gender’ is a category that is highly relevant to the analysis of narrative structures and thus needs to be integrated into the discussion of narratives from a primarily structural point of view. In other words, they argue that it is indeed important whether the narrator and the narratee of a text are constructed as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ by readers. Likewise it turns out to be significant whether readers are confronted with ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ perspectives in a literary text, i.e. whether character focalisers (the characters whose thoughts, emotions, perceptions and memories readers are confronted with) are shown to be ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’. Yet the necessity of gendering categories that are applied in the structural analysis of narrative texts certainly is not limited to narrators and focalisers. As various contributions to feminist narratology (e.g. the articles in the volume Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers edited by Kathy Mezei in 1996a) have demonstrated, one may benefit from regarding all structural features of narrative texts as gendered. Although many feminist narratologists have focussed on the level of narrative transmission in their contributions to feminist narrative theory, some have examined the ways of gendering the analysis of plot patterns, the time structure of narratives and textual representations of the spatial dimension.

Based on what was said above about the conflicting goals of structuralist narratology and feminist narrative theory, it should come as no surprise that the introduction of feminist narratology as a separate branch of narrative theory did not initiate a major paradigm shift in narratology as such. Instead, feminist narratology has met with at times radical criticism concerning its aims and premises. Some structuralist narratologists have in fact argued that what has been referred to as feminist narratology actually neglects the ‘real’ task of narratology, namely the supposedly ‘objective’ description of narrative structures. In an article entitled ‘Narratology and Feminism’ (1988), Nilli Diengott, for instance, severely criticises the attempt to establish a feminist narratology, claiming that the questions Lanser raises are a matter of “interpretation and not poetics” (Diengott 48). The negative (and somewhat polemical) reaction to Lanser’s outline of a feminist narratology culminates in Diengott’s conclusion that “[o]bviously Lanser is interested in interpretation, but narratology is a totally different activity” (Diengott 49). This serves as a reminder of the fact that feminist narratology is more than an attempt to bridge the gap between narrative theory and feminist criticism. Feminist narratology departs from classical narrative theory in so far as it is based on the assumption that the close scrutiny of textual structures ought to be combined with interpretation, since textual, structural features inevitably generate meaning, whether one is aware of this process or not.

Since its inception feminist narratology has tried to reveal the pitfalls of supposedly genderneutral approaches to the structural analysis of narratives, demonstrating that gender neutrality, which is more or less taken for granted by classical narratology, usually turns out to be an illusion: “[F]ar from providing ‘objective’ analyses of texts, the disregard of gender in fact promotes a privileged attention to narrative strategies employed by male writers” (Allrath, ‘A Survey of the Theory, History, and New Areas of Research of Feminist Narratology’ 391). Examining specifically the mechanisms of gender marking that are operating in literary criticism with respect to the classification of the overt heterodiegetic narrator in Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice (1813), Lanser argues that the way gender is assigned to the narrator certainly appears to be anything but gender-neutral:

Several modern critics [...] have referred to the narrator of Pride and Prejudice as ‘he’ not simply in passing, but explicitly to distinguish the narrator from the author. Gregorio argues, for example, that this move is necessary ‘for the sake of clarity.’ But these critics do not, ‘for the sake of clarity’ sex the narrators of men’s novels as female, a difference which suggests that the need to make such a distinction is a function of gender as well as genre. I believe these attributions of masculinity constitute a way of according the highest authority to a narrator; to the extent that Jane Austen’s novels receive canonical status, their narrators are ‘rewarded’ with the status of men. (Lanser, ‘Sexing Narratology’ 176)

What Lanser alludes to here is the impact that the gendering of textual features by readers in general and by literary critics in particular may have on interpretations of individual texts as well as on literary history and canon formation. According to Lanser, it is the task of feminist narratology to correct the blind spots regarding gender which are characteristic of traditional narrative theory and which are apparent in interpretive moves such as the ones sketched in the quotation above. In order to integrate gender as an analytical category into narratological approaches it is vital to relate textual structures to the contexts of production and reception, an idea that is made necessary by the insights of feminist theory and feminist literary criticism but that contradicts the exclusive focus on textual features that is typical of classical narratology.

In order to achieve its goals feminist narratology needs to implement its own set of analytical categories. One of the core concepts of feminist narratology is the notion of (narrative) authority, i.e. the idea that narrative structures are informed by social and cultural power relations.Despite the fact that the notion of authority has been criticised within feminist theory it seems to be necessary to fall back on this concept, even if one eventually aims at undermining it, as Lanser points out:

[E]ven novelists who challenge this authority are constrained to adopt the authorizing conventions of narrative voice in order, paradoxically, to mount an authoritative critique of the authority that the text therefore also perpetuates. (Lanser, Fictions of Authority 7)

The constellations involving various speakers and focalisers in a literary text may of course react to cultural power structures in different ways: On the one hand, the textual arrangement of focaliser(s) and narrative voice(s) may challenge existing power structures by privileging the perspectives and voices of those narrators/characters whose views tend to be neglected in public discourses in a particular cultural context. Thus, the use of female narrators and/or focalisers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels can be regarded as a subversive strategy, as a way of symbolically empowering female voices and perspectives in a period when women were all but excluded from public discourse and largely restricted to the domestic sphere. On the other hand, narrative structures (in texts by both male and female authors) may of course confirm and perpetuate existing power relations. Finally, literary texts may turn out to be highly ambivalent in terms of their response to cultural power structures.

In Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1847), for example, the narrator’s voice is feminine and it repeatedly expresses a critical attitude towards traditional gender roles. Yet there is also a minor female character in the novel who is doubly marginalised according to the cultural discourses of the time and who seems to be deprived of every opportunity of expressing her voice: Bertha Mason/Rochester, Mr Rochester’s first wife, who is hidden away in a locked room of the mansion, is marginalised both as a woman and as a Caribbean Creole, as numerous literary critics, including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Carolyn Vellenga Berman and Trenton Hickman, have observed. The fact that this particular character appears neither as a narrator nor as a focaliser throughout the novel and does not even utter a single word in scenes where she appears is in accordance with the predominant power structures in Victorian England. The literary text, thus, at least with respect to this minor character, largely seems to support power structures that were predominant at the time when the text was written. From a feminist perspective, Bertha’s laughter, which is referred to repeatedly in the course of the novel, may be read as a subversive disruption of the patriarchal discourse, from which she is systematically excluded. More than one hundred years after the publication of Jane Eyre, the Caribbean author Jean Rhys tried to highlight what appear to be significant omissions in the light of feminist as well as postcolonial criticism. In her well-known ‘prequel’ to Brontë’s novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Rhys complements the Victorian novel by giving a voice to the doubly marginalised female character and thus drawing attention to her plight.

As Susan Lanser, Ina Schabert (e.g. in ‘The Authorial Mind and the Question of Gender’) and other feminist narratologists have pointed out, in past centuries women writers frequently employed genres as well as narrative strategies that have conventionally been associated with a relatively low level of narrative authority:

Traditionally speaking, the sanctions against women’s writing have taken the form not of prohibitions to write at all but of prohibitions to write for a public audience. As Virginia Woolf comments, ‘Letters did not count’: letters were private and did not disturb a male discursive hegemony.(Lanser, ‘Toward a Feminist Narratology’ 352)

In politics, the long struggle for obtaining the vote for women has shown that it has not always been easy for women to make their voices heard. In literature, the restrictions imposed on women’s rights to speak for themselves in public may for example appear in the guise of assigning specific genres to female authors. Genres which were traditionally considered ‘appropriate’ for women writers included the novel-in-letters and other genres with private overtones, drawing upon the restriction of women to the domestic sphere embodied most clearly in the Victorian gender stereotype of the ‘Angel in the House’.

The application of the concept of narrative authority to the analysis of literary texts is also based on the premise that the act of storytelling with its basic juxtaposition of a narrator on the discourse level and characters on the story level implies the notion of a hierarchical organisation within the text. Lanser assumes that readers tend to ascribe more authority to the narrator than to the characters simply because the narrator is regarded as the ‘source’ of the story. Even though the narrator is of course only a fictitious persona, a textual element, he/she is the one who appears to select what is told and who, moreover, may comment more or less extensively on (all of) the characters and the action. Thus, as Lanser puts it,

[N]arratologists have often noted the privileged status of narrators vis-à-vis narrated characters: because the narrator’s acts literally bring the story into existence, his or her word carries greater authority than the word of a character. Structurally, this means that the narrator always stands at a level ‘above’ the narrated events by virtue of narrating them. (Lanser, ‘Sexing Narratology’ 171)

In her influential study Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (1992) Lanser draws upon the concept of narrative authority and simultaneously exemplifies the strategy of combining traditional narratological categories with feminist concerns by developing a revisionist typology of narrators. Lanser distinguishes three different types of narrators largely on the basis of their narrative authority, labelling these three types ‘authorial voice’, ‘personal voice’ and ‘communal voice’. Lanser’s typology of narrative voices, which I would like to sketch in the following, illustrates the attempt to bridge the gap between the categories provided by traditional, structuralist narratology on the one hand and feminist interests on the other hand.

The first type of narrative voice identified by Lanser is the ‘authorial voice’, a term which refers to narrative situations where the narrator is not identical to any of the characters, consequently appears exclusively in her/his role as narrator and comments on the characters and the action (cf. Lanser, Fictions of Authority 15). The authorial voice basically corresponds to the category of the overt heterodiegetic narrator as defined in structuralist narratology. While the identification of this type of narrator in purely structural terms seems to be nothing new in and of itself, Lanser’s conclusions with respect to the authority associated with this particular kind of narrator provide the kind of insight that can be achieved by means of feminist narratological approaches. According to Lanser, the ‘authorial voice’ is typically associated with the highest possible degree of narrative authority by readers, since it appears to control the story in all respects (cf. Lanser, Fictions of Authority 16). Traditionally, authorial voices tended to be marked as ‘masculine’, as the example of the narrator in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice referred to above already illustrated. In Austen’s novels, the narrator’s authority is not merely based on the reader’s impression that the narrative voice is the ‘source’ of the story; the explicit criticism of both female and male characters which is regularly expressed by Austen’s narrators reinforces the notion that the narrative voice has a high degree of authority in these texts. Given the long-standing nexus between (narrative) authority and masculinity, marking an authorial voice as ‘feminine’ should make it possible to defy the readers’ expectations with respect to gender roles and to claim narrative authority for a female voice.

The ‘personal voice’ is essentially the equivalent of the type of narrator that is classified as autodiegetic in the typology of narrative voices established by Genette. This type of narrator is identical to one of the characters on the story level and thus appears to be telling her or his own story (cf. Lanser, Fictions of Authority 18). In comparison to the authorial voice, the personal voice can only claim a substantially lower degree of narrative authority, since it is by definition bound to a subjective and limited perspective. The personal voice thus certainly seems “less formidable for women than authorial voice, since an authorial narrator claims broad powers of knowledge and judgment, while a personal narrator claims only the validity of one person’s right to interpret her experience” (Lanser, Fictions of Authority 19). Still, the personal voice may be seen as a particularly apt instrument for highlighting the impact the cultural context may have on the life of an individual. In other words, this type of voice may for instance lend itself to emphasising problems and concerns from a feminine perspective. The personal voice associated with the feminine narrator in Brontë’s Jane Eyre, who repeatedly utters explicit criticism of cultural assumptions concerning gender roles, is a case in point.

The concept of the ‘communal voice’ is different from the two types of narrators described above in so far as it does not corresponds to any category that was already established by structuralist narratology. In fact, the term ‘communal voice’ is used by Lanser to refer to what classical narratologists would classify as a whole range of different narrative structures. Lanser argues that a communal voice may appear in at least three different guises. Firstly, the impression of a communal voice may be created by a narrator who uses the first person plural pronoun ‘we’ to refer to himself/herself, in this manner expressing her/his status as a representative of a particular community and his/her claim to speak for a group rather than for an individual position (cf. Lanser, Fictions of Authority 21). Secondly, Lanser considers an alternation between several different narrators who are members of a particular community or group to be a communal voice. The different autodiegetic narrators appearing in the novel The Joy Luck Club (1989) by Chinese American writer Amy Tan can be seen as an example of this particular type of communal voice. The different stories that are told by first-generation and second-generation Chinese American women in this novel complement each other and jointly offer a panoramic picture of the experience of Chinese American women. Thirdly, the communal voice may appear in the guise of a single speaker, provided this voice is marked as being representative of a particular community. By creating a communal voice, writers employ a technique that can serve as a strategy of empowering those who are marginalised in a particular society, for instance female voices. Likewise, communal voices may seek to bridge the gap between different groups, uniting what is usually regarded as opposites. The narrator in the novel Witchbroom by the Caribbean writer Lawrence Scott is a case in point. The narrative voice in this novel is characterised as an embodiment of hybridity, thus representing all of the different groups in the Caribbean and the collective memory of the region: ‘S/he [the narrator] hung between genders. [...] S/he was pigmented between races. S/he stretched her young body between continents and hung about her neck this archipelago of islands.’ (Witchbroom 12) The category of the communal voice is obviously a far cry from the clear-cut distinctions based on formal criteria that structuralist narratology strives for. Yet, from Lanser’s point of view, these different phenomena do in fact constitute an identifiable category. After all, they fulfil essentially the same function in terms of generating meaning. This suggests that feminist narratology implies a functional turn for narratological studies.

The modification and reinterpretation of traditional narratological categories and terminology is not the only way in which feminist narrative theory has approached the task of gendering the analysis of narrative structures. In ‘Sexing Narratology: Toward a Gendered Poetics of Narrative Voice’ (1999), Lanser argues that feminist narratology is facing new challenges, which result from changes within the field of feminist theory and in particular from the emergence of gender studies:

In continuing the dialogue between feminist theory and narratology, I draw here on recent work within the intersecting fields of feminism, gender studies, and ‘queer theory’ which has been concerned not only with revisionist constructions of sex, gender, and sexuality, but also with questions of propriety, denotation, categorization, and fixity. (Lanser, ‘Sexing Narratology’ 168)

Feminist narratology may benefit from incorporating Judith Butler’s assumption that both gender and sex are culturally constructed in reiterated performative acts. In other words, feminist narratology needs to embrace the paradigm shift from feminist theory to gender studies, which was fostered by Butler’s groundbreaking study Gender Trouble (1990):

Texts, like bodies, perform sex, gender, and sexuality, and it is the interplay of these categories – the ways in which they converge and diverge in normative and transgressive ways – that may yield the most interesting material for narratology. (Lanser, ‘Sexing Narratology’ 171)

Literary narratives provide virtually ideal opportunities for withholding a straightforward marking of the narrator’s sex, since “a narrator, as narrator, is much more able than any narrated character to operate without denoted sex” (Lanser, ‘Sexing Narratology’ 172); after all, in English and many other languages the narrator can refer to herself/himself throughout the entire text by using the first person singular pronoun ‘I’, which does not indicate whether the speaker is female or male. Novels such as Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body (1992), where the sex of the autodiegetic narrator is never identified in the course of the novel and, consequently, “efforts to sex the narrator are repeatedly foiled” (Lanser, ‘Sexing Narratology’ 173), and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), where the male title character suddenly turns into a woman, lend themselves to questioning the implications of both gender and sex. By defying the readers’ attempts to identify a central character as either male or female both texts are very likely to undermine assumptions about the ways in which sex, gender and sexual orientation are linked. Moreover, such narratives reinforce the idea that “sex constitutes a necessary and important element of a formal – i.e., structural and descriptive – poetics of narrative” (Lanser, ‘Sexing Narratology’ 168). Texts such as Winterson’s Written on the Body, which draw the readers’ attention to the construction of the category ‘sex’ and to the implications this has for our notions of ‘sexuality’ by means of narrative strategies, provide also an ideal starting point for the development of ‘queer narratology’, an approach that has been pioneered by Judith Roof in her study Come As You Are: Sexuality and Narrative (1996) and by Lanser in an article called ‘Queering Narratology’ (1996).

As was pointed out above, in the 1980s feminist narratology certainly did not cause the majority of narratologists to rethink their approach to the study of narrative structures. To what extent has this changed since the 1990s? Throughout the 1990s, a number of scholars contributed to the project of developing a fully fledged feminist narratology, for instance Susan Stanford Friedman in ‘Spatialization, Narrative Theory, and Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out’ (1996), Monika Fludernik in ‘The Genderization of Narrative’ (1999), Margaret Homans in ‘Feminist Fictions and Feminist Theories of Narrative’ (1994), Alison Lee in ‘De/EnGendering Narrative’ (1996), and Kathy Mezei in ‘Free Indirect Discourse, Gender, and Authority in Emma, Howards End, and Mrs. Dalloway’ (1996b). In 1999 Warhol claimed that

The combination of ‘feminism’ with ‘narratology’ may no longer seem odd or unnatural, and the practice of ‘feminist narratology’ may now be taken for granted as one among many possible approaches within narrative theory. (Warhol, ‘Guilty Cravings’ 342)

In the same year, however, Lanser provided a somewhat less optimistic assessment of the status of feminist narratology within narrative theory, arguing that “despite a decade of attention by a few narratologists, the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality have remained on the margins of narratological inquiry” (Lanser, ‘Sexing Narratology’ 168). On the whole, one presumably has to agree with Lanser’s assessment; feminist narrative theory still appears to be discussed and practiced merely by a comparatively small group of scholars. Presumably this is largely due to the fact that feminist narratology has always had to face considerable opposition within academic discussions. On the one hand, there appears to be a fairly widespread reluctance to draw upon narratological approaches in the field of cultural studies. On the other hand, narrative theory still has not embraced feminist narratology wholeheartedly; there seems to be no general consensus among narratologists that feminist narratology in particular and context-oriented approaches to the study of narrative texts in general are desirable, let alone necessary. Thus the validity of gender-conscious approaches to the study of narrative structures is still contested.

Since the 1990s one can identify a number of significant changes in approaches that seek to integrate gender into the analysis of narrative structures. Firstly, as was suggested above, one can trace a development from the early stages of feminist narratology, which were indebted to the feminist theory emerging in the wake of the Second Women’s Movement, towards a gender-conscious narrative theory, which is informed by the paradigm shift associated in particular with Judith Butler’s works. This does not mean that the work done by feminist narratologists is outdated; the questions raised by feminist narrative theory are still valid, but have been enriched by the insights of gender studies. Secondly, there has been an obvious tendency to include a wider range of text types and media in studies investigating the processes of gendering and sexing in narrative texts. Robyn Warhol is among those scholars who have contributed very much to this widening of the scope of gender-conscious narrative theory. She explicitly seeks to link feminist narratology and cultural studies; in Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms (2003), for instance, she examines literary texts as well as films and TV series. Ruth E. Page (2008) likewise studies new digital genres, such as personal blogs, from a gender-conscious narratological perspective. Moreover, Page (2003, 2006, 2008) is one of the main representatives of attempts to combine feminist narratology with linguistic approaches. Given the fact that

Considerable work in sociolinguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis [...] has [...] interrogated similar issues to those posed by feminist narratology, such as whether or not gender makes a difference in the storytelling styles used by groups of women and men, (Page, Literary and Linguistic Approaches to Feminist Narratology 13)

an alliance between linguistics and gender-conscious narratology has opened up new and interesting perspectives for gender-conscious approaches within narrative theory.

Some of the most promising work in the field of gender-conscious narratology in recent years has focused on applying the ideas and principles of gender-conscious narrative theory to specific narrative phenomena as well as to specific literary texts. A number of book-length studies have shown what one gains by drawing upon a gender-conscious narratology as far as the interpretation of individual texts and the discussion of patterns of development are concerned. In her study, Feminist Metafiction and the Evolution of the British Novel (2002), Joan Douglas Peters provides highly illuminating readings of seven (canonical) British novels, including Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, from the point of view of feminist narratology. Gaby Allrath approaches the problem of unreliable narration in Anglophone women’s novels since the 1960s from the point of view of gender-conscious narratology in her book (En)Gendering Unreliable Narration: A Feminist-Narratological Theory and Analysis of Unreliability in Contemporary Women’s Novels (2005) and demonstrates that “narratorial unreliability can become relevant to a narrative staging of gender-specific concerns and experiences” (Allrath, (En)Gendering Unreliable Narration 238). By now, a considerable number of studies have shown that feminist/gender-conscious narratology may provide innovative insights into the ways in which narrative structures may generate meaning. Moreover, feminist narratology has prepared the ground for further approaches within narrative theory that seek to integrate cultural, social and political concerns into the analysis of narrative structures. Postcolonial narratology is presumably the most obvious case in point in this respect. Here, gender may also play a central role, but categories such as race, ethnicity and class are at least of equal importance. Ultimately, the category of gender is not sufficient for doing justice to the full potential of textual features for generating meaning and engaging with cultural contexts. Gender needs to be complicated by taking into consideration the interaction between gender and other social and cultural categories, since, as Lanser also emphasises,

[F]eminism has now vigorously deconstructed [...] essentialist notions by recognizing that gender is always experienced and performed in tandem with other aspects of identity (such as race, class, nationality, religion, and historical moment), that masculinity is likewise variable and needs to be studied from feminist vantage points, and that gender and sexuality are mutually constitutive. (Lanser, ‘Are We There Yet?’, 2)

Short Biography

Marion Gymnich’s research interests include gender studies, postcolonial studies, memory studies, feminist and postcolonial narratology as well as narratological approaches to audiovisual media. She has co-edited several collections of articles, e.g. Narrative Strategies in TV Series (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Gendered (Re)Visions: Gender in Audio-Visual Media (Bonn UP, 2010). In addition, she has authored and co-authored numerous articles on narratology. Her recent book publications include a study of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (2007) and an analysis of the use of language and metalinguistic reflections in postcolonial and intercultural literature (2007). Since 2007, she has been Full Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Bonn, where she was also Dean of Studies from 2008–2013. She was visiting lecturer at the University of Łodz and visiting professor at the University of Graz. She holds a PhD in English Literary Studies from the University of Cologne and did postdoctoral research at the University of Giessen, where she was Coordinator of the ‘International PhD Program Literary and Cultural Studies’, which was funded by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service).

Note

* Correspondence: Institut für Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Keltologie, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Regina-Pacis-Weg 5, 53113 Bonn, Germany. Email: [e-mail]

Works Cited

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