Skip to main content

Many literary critics express concern that male authors are unable to authentically reproduce female voice in their writing. What are your thoughts...

This is a difficult question, and the answer depends in part upon the experience and sensitivity of the reader. Consequently, two different readers may have two different thoughts on the matter. Since you ask for personal thoughts, I will feel free to state my personal thoughts as being that Hill has varying success in producing a female voice for Aminata.

In the opening paragraphs, the voice is dominantly male even though there are key words and phrases that are intended to suggest a female mental orientation and a female narrator through such things as a reference to cooking and a simile employing food: "stew of chicken necks ... in the iron pot" and "like pumpkin mush."

While the accumulation of key words and phrases, such as "our shared moments had grown like corn stalks in damp soil," point to a female character (as does the feminine ending on the name Aminata), it is not until Aminata actually speaks with the girl at the school that the voice Hill produces is authentically female, as in, for example, "I eat what you eat, I told her. Do you suppose I’m going to find an elephant walking about the streets of London?"

Hill also produces an authentically female voice in early passages that disclose Aminata's deepest emotions and longings, as in, for example, when she speaks of longing for an infant's nearness:



Sometimes, I wake in the morning with the splash of sunlight in my small room, and my one longing, ... is to lie back into the soft, bumpy bed with a child to hold. To listen to an infant’s voice rise and fall.



In between these instances of authenticity (using the opening pages for analysis for this is where a first-person narrator's voice is established) are other instances where Hill's tendency is toward a male voice or toward a neutral voice.

The strongest support for presenting a case that, throughout the narrative, Hill succeeds in producing a female voice for Amanata comes from the three items discussed: (1) key words and phrases associating the narrator with the feminine; (2) dialogue that successfully produces a female voice through cadence, wit, tone and relationship with the character(s) spoken to; (3) passages that disclose deep emotion and longings:



  1. Key words and phrases: "I have wondrously beautiful hands. I like to put them on things. I like to feel the bark on trees, the hair on children’s heads,...."


  2. Dialogue: "Honey, I said, my life is a ghost story. Then tell it to me, she said."


  3. Deep emotion: "In the earliest days, when I was free and knew nothing other, I used to sneak outside our walled compound, climb straight up the acacia tree...."

Interestingly, the question of authentic voice across sexes of author and character also applies to female authors who develop male protagonists. An example resides in Anne Brontë's novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Most critics agree that the common reaction to Brontë's opening paragraphs is first confusion, then surprise when it is understood that the first-person narrator is indeed a man--not a woman--named Gilbert Markham: it is generally agreed that Anne Brontë does not succeed in producing a male voice for her male narrator and hero.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...
Post a Comment
Read more

What warning does Chuchundra issue to Rikki?

Chuchundra, the sniveling, fearful muskrat who creeps around walls because he is too terrified to go into the center of a room, meets Rikki in the middle of the night. He insults Rikki by begging him not to kill him. He then insults him by suggesting that Nag might mistake Chuchundra for Rikki. He says, "Those who kill snakes get killed by snakes."  He issues this warning to Rikki not to help keep Rikki safe but as a way of explaining why Rikki's presence gives him, Chuchundra, more reason to fear.  Chuchundra starts to tell Rikki what Chua the rat told him--but breaks it off when he realizes he might be overheard by Nag. He says, "Nag is everywhere, Rikki-Tikki." Rikki threatens to bite Chuchundra to get him to talk. Even then, Chuchundra won't overtly reveal any information. But he does say, "Can't you hear, Rikki-Tikki?" This is enough of a clue for the clever mongoose. He listens carefully and can just make out the "faintest scratch-s...
Post a Comment
Read more