Why Would a Woman Write a Male Protagonist?
A few weeks ago, I found my carefully honed work/childcare balance compromised when some emergency editing came up and I had to take a (generally preserved for mothering) Friday to do it. A woman I had not met before stepped in as babysitter and at some point asked about my novel.
‘Is it about us?’ she asked.
I stopped short. Was there an us? So soon?
‘The women!’ she cried, incredulous.
I felt a sudden misgiving that Mother of Darkness was not about ‘the women’, and at the implicit suggestion of a sisterhood that I had somehow betrayed. The book, I realised, might even be seen by some as aggressively masculine. Far from exploring the female condition, I had inhabited the male psyche so fully that a man, Matty, had become my misogynistic, womanising main character, my eyes for the novel and the splintered lens through which the whole story unfolds.
So I lied and said, ‘Of course it’s about us.’
She left happy, but she also left me uneasily considering the notion that perhaps I was hiding behind a male mask. Was it even some sort of cultural appropriation? Would a man writing from a female perspective be shot down for it? How could he, he of the patriarchy, possibly begin to understand what it’s like to be a woman in a man’s world?
There’s a whole school of thought that claims no voice should speak for another, particularly if that other is oppressed. White must not write for black, man cannot write for woman, nor able-bodied for disabled; it’s offensive and damaging, they say, for a man to fabricate the voice of a female rape victim. Earlier this year the American writer Jonathan Franzen suggested that he could not write a black character since he had never been in love with a black woman: “I feel like if I had, I might dare… I write about characters, and I have to love the character to write about the character. If you have not had direct first-hand experience of loving a category of person – a person of a different race, a profoundly religious person, things that are real stark differences between people – I think it is very hard to dare, or necessarily even want, to write fully from the inside of a person.”
Franzen has a point, certainly about the potential for upset in claiming the position of someone whose cultural history and suffering is far removed from your own. But we all have some understanding of what it is to suffer. We must strive to use the feelings and experience we do have as a basis for empathy. As writers we can reach beyond our own worlds with sensitivity, imagination and assiduous research to unveil the universal; the tales we share as humans that enable us to envisage what it is to be someone else.
Surely it is the role of a writer to take that leap of imagination and empathy into another body and soul, and in doing so, show that it is possible to see through another’s eyes, though we may be different. We may find in doing so that we are not even that different. We are all humans inhabiting Earth, are we not? We know each other through what we empirically observe as ‘other’, but also through what we recognize as the same in ourselves. And if there’s a characteristic that utterly revolts you in someone else, that you feel you could never possess, let alone comprehend, it’s a pretty safe bet it’s because that very trait lies lurking somewhere in your own psyche. It is a writer’s job to animate those shadows.
In my novel, I wanted to explore what the love of women means – how it can become an addiction, how its removal can feel like drug withdrawal; how abandonment and grief can drive us to seek love in all the wrong places and take us beyond the borders of sanity. Matty’s mother dies giving birth to him and this is at the heart of all that comes after; she is ever present in her absence. Certainly I am not, nor have I ever loved, a man such as Matty who believes himself to be the Second Coming, but I know that by writing him, I have come to better understand love, loss, men, madness… and women too.
Though we may start off blind to the vagaries and concerns of another soul – and anything outside our own selves is ultimately hard to understand – I think the very process of writing, the return again and again to considering the same story through another’s eyes in different worlds and from every conceivable angle, is what opens up genuine insight into other characters and situations.
No man is a male island, no woman independent of male qualities and so much of our perception of the complex world of gender is rigid, outdated and facile. Perched in the eye of a man may well be a pretty good place to reflect upon ‘the women’.
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Venetia Welby is a writer and editor who has lived and worked on four continents. She studied at Oxford University and now lives in Bow, east London, with her husband, son and Bengal cat.
Mother of Darkness is published by Quartet Books, 23rd February 2017:
https://bookshop.theguardian.com/mother-of-darkness.html
Tweet her @venwelby
About Mother Of Darkness
The age of late capitalism, and the raffish world of old Soho is being torn down to make way for a millionaire’s playground. Caught in the crossfire is Matty Corani, who, from his pokey studio flat, harbours a longing for the recent past. But when Matty wakes up next to a stranger one morning to find his life in tatters, the bulldozers and money men are the least of his worries.
His family has been ripped apart by a sudden catastrophe, his busybody lawyer says he’s wanted in court and he is being tormented by strange and savage dreams. Luckily his friend Fix is on his way over with the promise of a good time. As the debauchery intensifies over the coming days and Matty’s mental state becomes increasingly precarious, his story is splintered by a series of psychotherapy sessions, erratic life writings, hallucinations and visions.
Soon enough, Matty realises he is destined for far greater prospects than what is left of the grimy glamour and earthly delights of Soho.
A lyrical, wry and darkly comic debut that navigates the no man’s land of loss, addiction and religious zeal, Mother of Darkness is a dazzlingly original work from an unmistakeable new voice.
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips
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Beautiful piece, Venetia, and so articulately put.
I completely agree. On all your points. As human beings, most of us live and interact with people of every gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed and color, and if—as the observant chroniclers all good writers must be—we witness and retain the information, the perspective, we gain from those interactions, we have a wealth of detail and insight with which to create and infuse characters who are not “like us.”
The “male mask”?? For God’s sake, men have been writing about women since time immemorial, so the purported conundrum of the reverse becomes its own form of creative sexism!
Like you, I believe we can learn a lot about our own gender, our own female proclivities, by climbing inside the thought mechanics, the emotional bent, of men. They are as varied, as individual, specific and nuanced, as women, and getting beyond stereotypes and generalities to dig deep into the male psyche can offer a rich and illuminating foundation for powerful narrative.
I’ve explored this arena as well. My second novel, HYSTERICAL LOVE, is written completely from the male perspective. It’s a story gleaned from a funny, touching anecdote shared with me by a man, so there was never any question it would be told from a man’s point of view… which I thoroughly enjoyed exploring! After it came out, certain interviewers asked the same question you’re analyzing in this piece, to which I always replied some form of the following: “I have five brothers, a son, a husband, countless male friends, worked intensely with men, even spent years on the road in rock bands… I got my male bona fides!” And really, what woman doesn’t? If we’re paying attention to the world around us, a place FILLED with men, we should be able to write from a man’s perspective as expertly as any character whose persona, drives, personality traits, etc., are different from our own.
As for crossing cultures, while there may be some merit to Franzen’s point about not being able to write a black character without having been in love with someone of that ethnicity, I largely disagree. Any good writer driven to get beneath the surface of his/her characters does so by using tools of observation, awareness, listening, engagement, empathizing, and yes, experiencing. Many good writers have written about characters with whom they’ve had little personal experience, relying instead on research and all the above mentioned tools… which can get you to the heart of things pretty quickly.
There are also “sensitivity readers,” editors and readers of the culture about which you’re writing who can go through your work to clarify that you’ve stayed true and authentic to that culture’s embodiments and expressions. My current novel, A NICE WHITE GIRL, is written in third person but through the lives of both the white female protagonist and the black male protagonist, and while my own personal experiences, research, and observations left me confident in how elements of the culture of which I am not a part are depicted, I have engaged the services of a “sensitivity reader” to confirm that.
And, in some way, with my “male book” I did the same thing. Many of my pre-publication readers were men. They gave me all the clarification I needed to know their gender had been ably and authentically captured… even the parts where they blundered around with the women in the story! 🙂
It all comes down to perspective and creative urge. We must write about what moves us to write. If a man’s perspective best tells the story we’re moved to write, our only obligation is to write that story the way it is best told.
Thank you for an excellent piece.
Most books would never be written if we afraid to write things we don’t know. Be sensitive, research, don’t claim expertise when asked. But write.
Absolutely loved this article.
I think we, as writers, should write what we feel we should. Sometimes it’s us, and so we offer what we know in terms of experience. Sometimes is the ‘other’, and so we offer our discovery as we try to understand what we will never be.
I actually think, as you suggest, that the point of storytelling is expanding our experience, and putting ourselves (as storytellers or as listeners) in someone else’s shoes is exactly what this is all about. Placing us in that unknown place teaches us that we must not be afraid, that there are always connections, that there is no real ‘other’.
Personally, I’m a bit scared of writers who think that there are characters we should not write. There might be characters we don’t feel like writing, but that’s a different thing.
I’m an Italian woman living in XXI century Italy, writing an undying spirit incarnated into a black man living in 1926 Chicago. It was scarying at the beginning, but I learned to know my character and love him.