Gender and Narrativity

Elisabeth Anne MacDonald-Murray is an assistant professor of English at
the University of Western Ontario.

This collection of essays, produced by Carleton University’s Centre
for Textual Analysis, Discourse, and Culture, arose out of the
International Colloquium on Gender and Narrativity that was held at
Carleton in 1987. While some of the essays were originally presented at
the conference, others were written later in response both to the
colloquium proceedings and to subsequent developments in
gender-narrativity research. The resulting volume provides an excellent
survey of the ongoing discussion, both theoretical and practical,
surrounding an issue that has attracted increasing academic interest in
the past decade.

As Barry Rutland points out in his introductory essay, “Telling
Difference,” the essays in this collection do not represent a common
theoretical stance or pursue a common thesis; rather, “a network of
filiations produces an effective unity in terms of a critique of the
received gender-narrativity nexus.” The first two essays examine the
theory of how gender is constructed and expressed, while the remaining
seven papers discuss the narrative construction of gender in specific
texts and genres. The volume as a whole explores a wide variety of
perspectives and approaches to the subject. John Verdon’s
biological/anthropological view of an epistemology of gender as a
process of evolutionary semiotics is complemented by Robert Richard’s
Lacanian examination of the political-correctness debate, in which he
declares that “[f]emininity is all in the telling.” On the other
hand, Barbara Gabriel’s argument for the relationship between
psychoanalysis and detective fiction, in which she likens the “journey
into selfhood” of the female protagonist of Timothy Findley’s The
Telling of Lies to Freudian case histories, appears in striking contrast
to Iain Prattis’s Jungian discussion of the transformation of
masculine energy in the Parsifal legend.

Ranging from feminism to deconstructionism to new historicism, these
essays present too broad and diverse a perspective for the average
undergraduate. For the more advanced scholar, however, they provide a
revealing look at the many alternatives to the traditional views of how
gender is read and written.