WRITING MEN IMAGINING WOMEN

Abstract

The following piece is a summary of a talk given to address the subject of women writing about male protagonists and from a male point of view, arguing that in Gunn’s own work traditional male characters are posited at the centre of texts that are actually female in perspective, so allowing for the reader to have the experience of a sort of inversion of reading. She does this by prioritizing female agency: thus the traditional male becomes someone else, the male gaze transported to another kind of looking that instead of containing and exerting power over the women who are seen, rather reflects them back as powerful influential figures. Gunn defines what she calls this “breaking open (of) the gaze,” the fracturing of a singular point of view into a multiple one, a seeing and a being seen, as a key feature of her own fictions, energizing and transforming the roles of both male and female characters in her work.

Keywords:

• multiveillant
• Being-in-the-world
• male gaze
• parler femme
• The Big Music
• Featherstone

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This phrase comes with reference to and in honour of Gabriel Josipovici’s great The World and the Book, a work that has been of enormous influence and help in understanding and defining my own writing life.

2 Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Friday 4 Jan. 1929, 3: 128.

3 I lecture and speak informally at a variety of literary events about the importance of “narrative finish,” as I call it, which is how I describe responsibility to the unity and truth of a fictive project or alternatively “integrity of the picture plane” – to borrow a term from my sister, the painter Merran Gunn, who in turn uses it to read paintings – that one section of a work may be as complete and thought through and executed as any other. Some of these talks are available online – and one essay in particular, “On Style and Content,” can be found at <www.edinburghworldwritersconference.org> and in a subsequent publication, The 21st Century Novel – Notes from the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference.

4 The minute you have a character acting outside him- or herself, speaking in a way they wouldn’t or claiming deeper knowledge of something they could not claim to understand or know (all those children who talk as though they were literary novelists! All those women who speak and relay their experiences in full unbroken paragraphs of dialogue! All those men who have become suddenly omniscient in the middle of a first-person point-of-view novel and for no reason now know everything about everyone who inhabits the story with them! I could go on and on …), is the minute that, for me, no matter how deep that book’s themes, how riveting its story, it goes into the bin.