Yesterday in our class we started our discussion on Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. The book starts off with an anonymous voice that says "Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board." This voice goes on to talk about the difference between men's and women's minds. In our class most people assumed it was a women's voice as it seems as though it has an insight into the female mind, as it talks in more detail about women's thoughts. Even as I was typing that sentence I had to correct errors from me saying "she" instead of "it."
It's interesting how most people read this and assume one gender or another. I guess it is only human to do so, as we often judge people more by appearance than intellect, but there is something that almost doesn't seem right. Yes, the author is a woman and usually it is easier for a women to write in a women's point of view, and the main character is a women, so it is easy to assume that the narrator is also a women, but it never fully tells us one way for another.
In Native Son the narrator's gender is not determined either, but I assumed it was a man because the voice seemed to know what the male characters were thinking much more clearly than the what the women were thinking.
Although it is not necessarily a bad thing to gender the anonymous voice, I find it very interesting how we are so accustomed to automatically slapping a label on someone.
Absolutely, I think this is very interesting. Not only that we feel as though we must do this, but how we identify which gender to assign. I looked it up. There's this thing called the "gender genie" which can apparently predict gender of a writer fairly accurately, like 60- 80 percent or something like that, using algorithms that take word frequency and stuff into account. I've also heard that, in general, women use more pronouns but this could be wrong, I'm not sure. Of course all of this is statistical and more of a spectrum than a defined line between the genders. Interesting though that there probably actually is something of a difference between how women and men write. And, not that it's right to force a gender onto a narrator, but maybe at least there's something there we're actually seeing, not just making up.
ReplyDeleteAs I was reading this book, I didn't give it much thought as to the gender of the narrator, but I assumed that it was a female since it seemed to know Janie on a more intimate level. Whether this is a subconscious version of her, or merely a second voice to the story, I definitely considered it a powerful addition to the story. This "free indirect discourse," as we were told in class, not only makes the story more intriguing but also provides a broader spectrum of understanding. We get Janie's personal viewpoint on things, but we also have the luxury of the narrator filling in the details she couldn't possibly remember. If the story were told completely from Janie's perspective, I feel like the story would seem incomplete. Likewise, if it was constantly the narrator telling the story and occasionally paraphrasing Janie's words, we would be missing the main feel of the book.
ReplyDeleteThere are some 3rd person narrators that I don't necessarily gender, though. For example, in Harry Potter, the author is a woman and the protagonist is a man, but I've never given any thought to the narrator's gender. I think it depends on how involved the narrators are. In Harry Potter, the narrator shows a more panoramic view of the characters, and we don't hear much internal dialogue. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the narrator follows the characters closely, and slips into free indirect discourse often. Because the narrator follows the the thoughts of the main character, who is a woman, so closely, I assume the narrator is also a woman. The same applies for Native Son, which only follows Bigger's thoughts. The narrator places us in Bigger's head and portrays the other characters only through external dialogue, so we are aligned with a male voice.
ReplyDeleteIf there's any internal evidence from the text to "gender" this narrator (aside from the reflexive tendency to equate the narrator with the author--so the 3d person narrator in _Native Son_ is taken as "Richard Wright"), I'd say it's her access to the closed feminine space of Janie's kitchen, and her participation in this privileged transmission of an intimate and personal story between women (who are, significantly, friends). If Janie were declaring her story before the porch sitters, a mixed audience and also a less sympathetic one, our sense of the narrator's gender might be different. She has access to men's experience and men's thoughts and feelings, but she's *especially* attuned to Janie's experience, and in a world where men and women's experiences are kept so separate, this does gender her as "feminine."
ReplyDelete