Women's Fiction Research Articles

Men Without Women: Exploring the Literal and Literary Phallocentrism in Murakami’s Works

This paper aims at exploring the texts of Haruki Murakami, namely his novels Norwegian Wood (1987) and Kafka on the Shore (2002), and an anthology of short stories Men Without Women (2014), to observe with a close eye the phallocentric tongue, literary devices, characters, and plot; the depiction of a man’s world through a quintessential male gaze. Studying his art of characterization and the recurrent motifs he employs towards that very realization are a key reference point to understand the covert stance of Murakami, which appears to be misogynistic in its stead. Murakami creates his fictional women with certain key characteristics omnipresent in almost all of them, their exhibition of ludicrously unnatural and overt sexuality as if deliberately strengthening a stereotype of the seemingly new “modern woman” who has no qualms in expressing her sexuality even to near-strangers. While his protagonists, in most cases heterosexual men, in every literary creation of his are blueprints of the same man, most probably either Murakami himself or someone he aspired to be like but failed and compensated for it by creating numerous men in that lonely ideal nihilistic image, one around whom women lose all sense of autonomy and give themselves up entirely, to what Murakami literarily depicted as a mysterious muscular charm. In Murakami’s literary world, the men are there to fulfill their destinies whereas the women are there for the men.

Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843, ed. Misty Krueger

<i>Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843</i>, ed. Misty Krueger

Authors of Slender Means? Female Authorship in Mid-Twentieth-Century British Fiction

Abstract This article examines women writers as characters in British novels and stories by women writers from the 1940s to the early 1960s. In works by Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Taylor, Mary Renault, and others, there is a reflection on the social and artistic positions available to female authors. Given the gender segregation of the literary field at mid-century, in which ‘womanly’ writing was associated with the commercial form of romance and ‘manly’ writing with seriousness, the predicament of female authorship is rarely explored in fiction. But when it is, fictional women authors point up the constraints and limits of a ‘feminine’ literary aesthetic in illuminating ways. The article reconstructs how mid-twentieth-century British women authors thought about the act of writing, how they viewed the fields of literary creation and production, and which narrative strategies they used to negotiate this difficult terrain.

Penalties for Going Against Type: How Sexism Shapes Voters’ Perceptions of Candidate Character

Although women are increasingly represented in elected office, little is known about how a female candidate's gender influences voter approval when her messaging emphasizes her strong leadership ability—a character trait generally regarded as masculine. Drawing from theories of social cognition and gender stereotypes, we examine in this article how citizens react to male and female politicians who emphasize particular character traits. After synthesizing relevant literature, we report on a study conducted to see whether women lose public support for emphasizing their leadership ability—thus “going against type.” In a survey of more than 800 American adults, we found that respondents penalized a fictional woman running for Congress when her messaging to voters emphasized the core character trait of leadership, as opposed to compassion (a trait traditionally associated with women) or no character trait at all. In contrast, respondents viewed a fictional man more favorably when his messaging to voters went against type by highlighting compassion than when he emphasized leadership. These findings suggest that female candidates have fewer options than men do when selecting which personal characteristics to present in their messaging to gain the approval of the voting public. This result underscores the need for policies and programs that promote female leadership in all walks of life, thereby leading the public to associate leadership skill with both genders equally.

The role of women in STEM disciplines. A multimodal analysis of crowdfunding project videos for the iGEM science competition.

The gender gap in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) is a matter of growing social concern: although the female presence in these disciplines has grown during the last decades, men still outnumber women (Corbett &amp; Hill, 2015). It has been shown that this is partly because of the lack of visibility that the work of women scientists has had along history, which has led to unconscious beliefs and stereotypes about gender and professional careers, and therefore, the disinterest in science on the female side (Nimmesgern, 2016). Previous research has shown that these stereotypes are reinforced through television programs depicting fictional women characters in STEM scenarios (Steinke, 2017; Davis &amp; Coleman, 2018), and the present study aims to explore the representation of real female and male scientists on the Internet. By applying a multimodal analysis from a social semiotic perspective, I examine how gender identities are represented in eight crowdfunding project videos of science created by undergraduate students for an international science competition, the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM). Relying on the Swalesian move-step analysis genre approach for the verbal content (Swales, 1990, 2004), and Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar (VG) model for the visual content (Kress &amp; van Leeuwen, 2006), the analysis intends to uncover ideological purposes and meanings about gender roles within a context of scientific research. The results are compatible with previous studies that confirm that women are underrepresented in STEM, highlighting the ideologies that lead to the reinforcement of gender bias at the scientific workplace.

Supplemental Material for Women in Fiction: Bechdel-Wallace Test Results for the Highest-Grossing Movies of the Last Four Decades

Supplemental Material for Women in Fiction: Bechdel-Wallace Test Results for the Highest-Grossing Movies of the Last Four Decades

On Second Thought

On Second Thought

The disappearance as a way of living: Reconciliation with the loss and the paradoxes of human memory in the works of Ogawa Yōko and Kawakami Hiromi

The article deals with the representation of the problem of memory in contemporary Japanese fiction. Ogawa Yōko’s novel «The Memory Police» and Kawakami Hiromi’s story «To Disappear», chosen for the analysis, demonstrate similar approaches and some parallels in terms of plot structure. In «The Memory Police», there is a young writer in the center of the narration, who lives on an island where things and memories about them disappear, whereas some people are «immune» to forgetting things and are prosecuted. The main character of «To Disappear» lives in a strange world where people go missing, change their shapes, and communicate with the mystical forces. The memories about those who disappeared vanish, and the main character is the only one who keeps the fragments of the past. For these women, the contact with something missing becomes a tool to form so-called «postmemory», recollection of the events they have not witnessed, as well as a device to fight the unfair social system (the Police and the patriarchal community respectively). Disappearance in Ogawa and Kawakami’s works is also connected with the bodies’ deformation and the following loss of self-identity. Finally, the problems of memory and corporeality loss are linked to the women’s question in the works mentioned above. The loss of voice by the main character in «The Memory Police», the history of family disappearance in «To Disappear» – all these plot lines correspond with the main issues represented in contemporary Japanese women fiction. To sum up, these two works represent a new type of world-view and existence, moving away from the usual model of «personal space». Escapism is hyperbolized, disappearance becomes a way of living, and the written narration is the only chance to leave a trace and to connect to memories and one’s own history.

Harley Manuscript Geographies: Literary History and the Medieval Miscellany

Harley Manuscript Geographies: Literary History and the Medieval Miscellany

A PORTRAYAL OF GENDER INEQUALITY AND DISCRIMINATION IN ANITA DESAI’S FASTING, FEASTING

Anita Desai is one of the most prominent Indian women fiction writers who has produced a plethora of masterpieces majorly depicting the condition of women in Indian society. Desai’s Fasting, Feasting, first published in 1999 and was in the same year shortlisted for the Booker Prize for fiction. Her novel portrays a typical Indian family where gender inequality and discrimination are customary. The deep-rooted patriarchal mind set and male-biased attitude of Indian society are presented through the characters of the novel. The novel through the female protagonist, Uma, highlights the fate of a single woman who lacks financial security and independence. Desai in her novel portrays woman as an embodiment of sacrifice and selfless service. Fasting, Feasting also offers typical Oriental and Occidental anecdotes regarding gender inequality, sensitivity, and culture. The present study deals with Anita Desai’s portrayal of gender inequality and discrimination in the selected novel. The paper tries to analyze the psychological plights and traumatic experiences of the women in our gender biased society. It also highlights the role of the family in the foundation of a child and in instilling moral values. The paper is also an attempt to question gender disparity and age-old patriarchal norms.

What’s the Story with “fictional” Women Rabbis?

Although women have been continuously ordained as rabbis since 1972, fictional depictions of these women rabbis did not appear for several years. Now, some five decades on, there are over four dozen works of fiction that mention women rabbis. As in real life these rabbis lead congregations and work in the wider community. This article surveys the fictional descriptions of women rabbis. Those rabbis are compared and contrasted with some data concerning real-life women rabbis. There are six sections: “The development of women rabbis as fictional characters;” “An overview of the presence and professional choices of fictional women rabbis”; “Balance, Intimacy, and Empowerment”; “Encountering God”; “Coping with double standards and harassment”; and “Rabbinic spouses/partners.”

Violence against women in contemporary Finnish audio-visual fiction: The decision-making process

Violence against women (VAW) in Finnish audio-visual fiction had a significant peak in 2018. The article examines the financiers’ and filmmakers’ decision-making processes that resulted in scenes containing brutal VAW in Finnish TV series and films. Were the decisions rational or emotional, and were these different decision modes separable? The article draws from a study based on two sets of data: first, sequences from Finnish films and TV series that portray VAW, and second, interviews and questionnaire responses from the makers of these scenes covering various stages in the film and TV productions. The results provide insights into the themes of identification, empathy and the normalization of filmic violence, pose a question about the demand for brutalization in AV productions and give suggestions for future research in audio-visual decision-making.

Sexsation and the Neo-New Woman in Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith (2002)

Marie-Luise Kohlke’s concept of neo-Victorian ‘sexsation’ characterises the project of contemporary novelist Sarah Waters to explore sensational representations of the Victorians’ sexual lives. In Fingersmith, Waters re-imagines patriarchal Victorian pornography rife with masculine stereotypes of male domination and female subjugation embodied in the pornographic archive of Mr Lilly. Subverting the structures of subjugation, however, she describes Maud and Susan’s own discovery of lesbian sexuality; a sexual awakening accompanied with Maud’s journey towards literary creativity for she eventually emerges as a writer of erotica in her own right, thus recalling New Woman figures of the 1890s. The aim of this essay will be first to explore how such a sexsational narrative enables a radical revision of patriarchal discourses on sexuality. Then we shall examine to what extent Waters’s plot of lesbian creativity is indebted to the artist’s novel of the 1890s and to the late-Victorian New Woman novel. With its emphasis on ‘dissident’ sexualities and woman’s emancipation through writing, can Waters’s Fingersmith be considered as neo-New Woman fiction?

Early American Women, the Novel, and God

Early American Women, the Novel, and God

An Idle Heroine in Industrious Times: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Story of Avis

An Idle Heroine in Industrious Times: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ <i>The Story of Avis</i>

Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843 ed. by Misty Krueger

Reviewed by: Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843 ed. by Misty Krueger Alison Tracy Hale (bio) Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843 misty krueger, editor Bucknell University Press, 2021 234 pp. Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843 relocates its peripatetic female subjects from the periphery to the center of our vision in order to expand our generic and geographical horizons. The ten essays assembled here traverse the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth and consider genres from natural science to letters to fiction and regions from Peru to Newfoundland to Calcutta. They address a rich variety of primary sources featuring historical and fictional women whose experiences enlarge our sense of the possibilities transatlantic journeys provided for women's identity, for their interpretations of new cultures and interventions into their own, and for the scope of what might constitute a "feminine" sphere. Several decades in, twenty-first-century literary and historical studies continue to shift away from the kinds of nation-state focused approaches that dominated much of twentieth-century scholarship, embracing transnational texts, figures, and methodologies. Krueger's explicit purpose here is to center transatlantic movement by women, to "trace accounts of women's encounters in environments foreign to them and with people seemingly unlike themselves" (16). Atlantic travels provided space and occasion for new modes of acting in the world; European women's out-sider status in the far-flung locations of empire often served as a vantage point from which to challenge established systems and values. Diana Epelbaum's "'Little Atlas': Global Travel and Local Preservation in Maria Sibylla Merian's The Metamorphoses of the Insects of Surinam" considers the German-born entomologist's illustrations, which emphasize the magnificent fecundity of Surinam's local environments. Her folio-sized volume, [End Page 259] which featured her images and descriptions of Surinam's species, expands the parameters of seventeenth-century natural history practice by deconstructing established distinctions between history, science, and narrative. As Epelbaum notes, The Metamorphosis gained Merian a presence in the Royal Society journals, yet her work challenged the epistemological foundations of the practices the Society espoused. Her "proto-ecological" illustrations of Surinam's flora and fauna enact the tensions of globalization; her insistence on local context resists and reinforces the universalizing tendencies of the masculine, colonial taxonomic project in which she participated. Anna Maria Falconbridge's epistolary narrative Two Voyages to Sierra Leone (1794) similarly stretches generic boundaries, offering "an early model for imagining how climate could function as an instrument of state violence, where environments are used to discipline or control unwanted populations" (50). Falconbridge, an apologist for the necessity of slavery, was moved to sympathy by the sight of suffering Black settlers; her narrative indicts the British bureaucracy whose negligence and incompetence intensified their plight. Not all cultural critiques emanated from women of relative privilege; in "Busty Buccaneers and Sapphic Swashbucklers on the High Seas," Ula Lukszo Klein explores the exploits of eighteenth-century female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, whose trial transcripts served as material for their initial appearance in Captain Charles Johnson's A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724). Assuming male garb, these women navigated the interstices between piracy and legitimacy and masculinity and femininity. Their highseas transgressions, what Klein calls their "outlaw mobility," allowed them new modes of economic and erotic agency. Alongside discussions of literary texts one might expect to encounter in a volume dedicated to women travelers—Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), Unca Eliza Winkfield's The Female American (1767), Samuel Jackson Pratt's Emma Corbett (1780), Leonora Sansay's The Secret History (1808)—additional essays explore eyewitness travel accounts of Peru and Mexico by Frances ("Fanny") Erskine Inglis Calderón de la Barca and Flora Tristan, respectively, as well as epistolary narratives both autobiographical and fictional. The range of primary sources asserts a larger scope for what might count as "feminine discourse," affirming that women of the transatlantic world occupied themselves with concerns that extended well [End Page 260] beyond their own comfort and domestic and familial situations. As naturalists, political critics, pirates, colonizers, and revolutionaries, the women at the center of these essays unsettle masculine empiricist agendas, seek common...

Feminist Interpretations of Selected Women's Fiction in The Classics of Chinese Literature

Feminist Interpretations of Selected Women's Fiction in The Classics of Chinese Literature

The representation of women in Spanish fiction. Proposal for classifying roles and stereotypes from a gender perspective

La necesidad de profundizar sobre el papel de las mujeres en la industria audiovisual resulta urgente. Tanto la participación directa en el sector como la representación que se realiza de ellas en los contenidos generados han demostrado ser un elemento básico para la mejora de su papel social. De hecho, se confirma cómo la implicación de las mujeres en el audiovisual tiene consecuencias en la construcción de historias y narrativas e incluso en la selección y enfoque de temas, la construcción de personajes, de estereotipos, la asignación de roles y la asociación de valores, entre otros. Partiendo de esa premisa, en este caso proponemos recoger los avances realizados en torno a la generación de un modelo de clasificación de roles y estereotipos de género en la ficción. La revisión bibliográfica y el estudio de campo nos permitirá realizar una propuesta concreta que sirva de aplicación en el caso de la ficción española. De una forma concreta, como resultado del trabajo desarrollado, contamos con una herramienta funcional en forma de una tabla de roles y estereotipos que debería servir para clasificar de forma objetiva la representación de las mujeres en contenidos audiovisuales. El resultado es amplio y complejo entre otras cosas debido al sesgo negativo de las categorías. Esta visión supone una realidad recogida de los trabajos de las autoras analizadas y, por extensión, es un reflejo de la realidad analizada durante varias décadas.

Woman against Woman in Post-colonial Fiction: Rethinking African Feminist Discourses in Lola Shoneyin's The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives

Woman against Woman in Post-colonial Fiction: Rethinking African Feminist Discourses in Lola Shoneyin's The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives

Philosophy of the Female Image in the Context of Social Circumstances in Fiction

The philosophy of the image of a woman, her behaviour and functions in society have changed over time. The processes of transformation of the philosophy of the female image can be observed in fiction, which is a means of comprehending the life of previous generations. Therefore, female images help to know better the national character, national spirit, even the national idea of the philosophy of each nation. The study?s main goal is to reveal the philosophy of the female image in the context of the social circum- stances of fiction. For a better understanding of the evolution and development of the philosophy of the female image in world literature, we have formed a morphological analysis of the image of a woman in fiction and a matrix of structural elements of the image of a woman in fiction in the context of different timeframes.