Abstract
Abstract: This paper explores Grace Paley's A Conversation with my Father, which was first published in the New American Review (1972), from a feminist perspective precisely using terms by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. A Conversation with my Father is about storytelling; the daughter entertains her father by telling him a story; hence, storytelling as an art is at the center of this study. The main theme of the story is considered to be a generation gap between the female author and her father, yet it mainly deconstructs the image of the father and the daughter into a dialectical female and male binary opposition. Consequently, this leads to a new meaning that shows the intricacy of the art of storytelling which informs a re-construction of gender roles. Therefore, it is crucial to focus on the complex role of the female narrator who verbally informs her father of her artistic creation of the story, and the complex role of her father who criticizes her story, and asks her to re-write it from his male perspective. Through the narrator's storytelling, women’s roles as subject/object shed light on the perceived image of women in literature by a patriarchal system.
Highlights
This paper explores Grace Paley’s A Conversation with my Father, which was first published in the New American Review (1972), from a feminist perspective precisely using terms by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
Women’s suffrage rights movement started around the nineteenth century, women’s criticism to the inequality between the sexes is traced back to the eighteenth century starting with Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797); in her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), she called for the equality of education between men and women and she questioned women’s role in society
Other great authors who contributed to the feminist movement are John Stuart Mill’s the Subjection of a Woman (1869) and the American Author, Margaret Fuller’s Women in The Nineteenth Century (1845) (Abrams, p. 110)
Summary
This paper explores Grace Paley’s A Conversation with my Father, which was first published in the New American Review (1972), from a feminist perspective precisely using terms by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Hammad female authors for centuries in the patriarchal society especially in the nineteenth century as stated by Elaine Showalter in her book A Literature of their own: British Women Novelist (1977, 1982) she says: “Victorian feminine novelists found themselves in a double bind.
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