As a writer, it can be difficult to writer characters from a different perspective than your own. People of a different sexual orientation, gender, religion, race, and so on. Proper research, interviews, and advice from marginalized groups can help, but we can never truly understand the experiences and perspective of someone that experiences oppression on a daily basis. That doesn't mean that writers should only write characters like themselves, but it's best for us to avoid trying to speak for a marginalized group. This is a very fine line to walk, and I do feel that some of the stories we've read this semester stumble on this line. Even today, men and women have extremely different experiences through life, but during the Victorian era, women were considered second-class citizens that weren't even allowed to work.
To better explain, I would like to compare to readings from this semester. The first reading is Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti. I briefly covered this reading in the first week of class, but in this tale, we follow two young women that deal with the addiction to a mysterious goblin fruit that essentially forced on them by these goblins. They manage to pull through, but the struggle and the recovery is something not as many men could understand. As our professor was kind enough to instruct, an important aspect of this theme of addiction is the use of laudanum during this era. Laudanum was an opium-based painkiller popular in Britain during the Victorian era for both men and women, but it was heavily marketed and prescribed to women as a cure-all for "women’s troubles" including, "menstruation and childbirth, and even for fashionable female maladies of the day such as ‘the vapours’, which included hysteria, depression and fainting fits" (Opium in Victorian Britain, Historic UK). In the story, the goblins start seductively, but become very forceful, almost sexual in nature. This act represents not only the patriarchy that would force such addictive drugs on women for trivial issues, but the sexual assault and harassment that women have endured since the beginning of time.
Next I would like to compare this to Ulysses by James Joyce, or at least the Penelope section that we were assigned to read in class. This reading dealt with the character Molly, wife to the protagonist Leopold, and her laying in bed fantasizing about various sexual encounters and romantic liaisons she has experienced while married to her husband. She's portrayed as suspicious, unfaithful, and unable to make up her mind. She ultimate decides to stay with her husband, but her life and her existence seems to exist purely as an accessory to men. Being wanted and being a sexual object is her biggest personality trait and it really shows the difference between a woman written by a man and a woman written by a woman. The characters of Goblin Market are portrayed as actual human beings with depth and a real understanding of the perspective of women. Molly exists purely to be nothing more than a possession for men.
Objectification is the often the result when men attempt to write women purely from their own perspective. Women are described based on their sexual appeal, beauty, and value that they hold in the eyes of men. They're not equal people or character, they exist to be owned. Often, this objectification is all the character cares about as well. Women characters written like this are obsessed with their own appearance and their attractiveness. What's interesting, however, is how much more successful women are at writing men than men are at writing women. "By default, women have it easier than men when they attempt to craft characters of the opposite sex," says novelist Sally Koslow (The Late Lamented Molly Marx), "because our whole lives we've been reading vast amounts of literature written by men." |
Essentially, the normalization of male authors has made it far easier for women to write male characters because they are exposed to male characters far more than men expose themselves to female characters. Although sexism is still the norm, women writers are far more plentiful and far more accessible. It's not impossible for men to write a woman character, but it does take more research than some people are willing to do. When I personally write fiction, I try not to write from the oppressed perspective, because I do think it's far too easy for men to end up "mansplaining" systemic oppression. I tend to fall into my own pits of shying away from oppression altogether, which can have the opposite effect of creating a world where oppression doesn't exist. Because of this, I try to stick to high fantasy and write non-human characters with the best of my ability. I try to use metaphors for a more general view of racism and bigotry rather than pretending that a cis white male can speak on behalf of any marginalized groups.
Sources:
https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/03/the-mixed-results-of-male-authors-writing-female-characters/273641/
https://twitter.com/menwritewomen/status/1155824041082667010
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Opium-in-Victorian-Britain/#:~:text=Called%20the%20'aspirin%20of%20the,for%20babies%20and%20young%20children.
https://ruinmyweek.com/funny/men-writing-women-2019/
http://www.hopejennings.com/british-literature/previous/3
All images applicable for reuse and taken from Wikipedia.
Sources:
https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/03/the-mixed-results-of-male-authors-writing-female-characters/273641/
https://twitter.com/menwritewomen/status/1155824041082667010
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Opium-in-Victorian-Britain/#:~:text=Called%20the%20'aspirin%20of%20the,for%20babies%20and%20young%20children.
https://ruinmyweek.com/funny/men-writing-women-2019/
http://www.hopejennings.com/british-literature/previous/3
All images applicable for reuse and taken from Wikipedia.