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Dr.

Richard Clarke LITS3304 Notes 06B


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SUS AN LANSER “TOW ARD A FEMINIST NARRATOLOGY”

Lanser begins by adm itting that feminism and narratology would seem to be strange bed-fellows, the one
being “impressionistic, evaluative and political” (610), the other being “scientific, descriptive and non-
ideological” (610). Indeed, “no contemporary theory . . . has exerted so little influence on feminist theory as
formalist-structuralist narratology” (611). Lanser posits that there are many reasons for this distrust of
narratology on the part of feminism:
C the complex and alienating vocabulary of narratology,
C the distrust of binaristic thinking to which Structuralism is prone,
C the fact that “no work in the field of narratology has taken gender into account” (612),
C the fact that narratologists have based their theories on the study of m en’s texts as a
result of which the “masculine text stands for the universal text” (612), and
C the fact that structuralist narratology has “suppressed the representational aspects of
fiction and emphasised the semiotic” (613) (this tendency being related to predisposition to
“isolate texts from the context of their production and reception), while fem inist criticism is
predicated upon the view that “narrative texts . . . are profoundly . . . referential . . . in their
representations of gender relations” (613), hence their concern with characterisation in
particular.
Lanser’s goal here (see also her The Narrative Act), however, is to ask whether
feminist criticism, and particularly the study of narratives by women, might benefit from the
methods and insights of narratology and whether narratology, in turn, might be altered by
the understandings of feminist criticism and the experience of women’s texts. (611)
Lanser’s point is that “until women’s writings, questions of gender, and fem inist points of view are
considered, it will be impossible to even know the deficiencies of narratology” (612).
Lanser proposes that a feminist narratology would begin “with the recognition that revision of a
theory’s premisses and practices is legitim ate and desirable” (614). There are som e elem ents of narrative
which might not be affected by a consideration of gender (e.g. the passage of time), but others would be,
Lanser argues, som e of which she goes on to identify. A fem inist narratology would synthesise the
mimetic with the semiotic, and seek to study narrative “in relation to a referential context that is
simultaneously linguistic, literary, historical, biographical, social, and political” (614). In short, the “valuable
and impressive” (614) work already done in the field would benefit from a “critique and supplement in which
feminist questions were understood to contribute to a richer, more useful, and more complete narratology”
(614). A “re-form ed narratology” (614) w ould “provide invaluable m ethods for textual analysis” (614) and
thereby “clarify other, relevant issues and provide insights which otherwise rem ain vague” (Bal qtd. in
Lanser, 614). Last but not least, a fem inist narratology m ight answer the question whether there is such a
thing as distinctively feminine form of writing, the so-called ‘écriture feminine.’
Using a letter entitled “Female Ingenuity” that appeared in a nineteenth century anthology called
Atkinson’s Casket to ground her claims and utilising categories drawn from Gerard Genette’s seminal study
Narrative D iscourse in particular, Lanser argues that there are three areas in which a narratology revised
from a feminist perspective m ight make useful contributions:
C Voice: a “comprehensive theory of voice” (625) w hich would develop a “fram ework for describing the
elem ents that constitute polyphony and would form ulate a linguistically based theory of narrative
tone” (625);
C Context: a grasp of the “rhetorical context of narrative--its generic status and the public or private
level of the narration” (625); and
C Plot: a re-examination of “theories of plot and story” (625) in order to “find alternatives to the notion
of plot as active acquisition or solution and to incorporate the plot that m ay be generated by the
relationship between narrator and narratee” (625).

Voice:
As Genette points out, narratives often have several levels, each giving rise to a different voice. In the letter
Dr. Richard Clarke LITS3304 Notes 06B
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in question, Lanser identifies a surface level, a sub-text and even a third narrative level:
The [surface] text designed for the husband conceals an undertext (the text designed for
the [female] confidante), but the undertext, in turn, creates a new reading of the surface
text and hence a third text designed . . . for yet another addressee. This third text is the
one constituted by the public ‘display-text’ that is the letter as it appeared in Atkinson’s
Casket. Its addressee is the literary reader; she is neither the duped m ale nor the sister-
confidante but the unidentified public narratee of either sex who can see beyond the
immediate context of the writer’s epistolary circumstance to read the negative discourse as
covert cultural analysis. (619)
Narratives, from this point of view, are “polyphonic” (617), or multi-voiced, a term which she borrows from
Mikhail Bakhtin. Narrative tone is, she argues, “in part a function of the relationship” (617) between the
different levels of the narrative as a result of which there is a relationship between the judgement that a
given text may express and the language in which it is expressed.

Context:
Arguing that “Genette’s notion of levels provides a precise way of speaking about such embedded
narratives” (619), Lanser suggests that it is possible to think of these three narrative levels as extradiegetic,
intradiegetic, and metadiegetic. ‘Extradiegetic narrators’ are most often synonym ous with “author-narrators”
(619), ‘intradiegetic’ and ‘metadiegetic narrators’ with characters such as Rochester in Jane Eyre who tell
stories within the text and address a narratee. Lanser contends that this schema of Genette’s should be
complemented by her distinction between “public and private narration” (620), a distinction important for
women writers especially at this time. By ‘public narration,’ Lanser means “narration (implicitly or
explicitly) addressed to a narratee who is external . . . to the textual world and who can be equated with a
public readership” (620). By ‘private narration,’ she means narration addressed to an “explicitly designated
narratee who exists only within the textual world” (620). The former evokes a “direct relationship between
the reader and the narratee and clearly approximates most closely the non-fictional author-reader
relationship” (620), while in the latter the “reader’s access is indirect, as it were ‘through’ the figure of a
textual persona” (620). This distinction is important for the study of wom en’s writing, according to Lanser,
because traditionally women were not forbidden from writing per se but from writing for a public audience.
By supplementing structuralist narratology with such additions, Lanser hopes to stress the “difference
between purely formal and contextual approaches to meaning in narrative” (621). Her point is, like that of
Speech-Act theorists, that the “minimal unit of discourse” (621) is “not the sentence but the production of
the sentence” (621).

Plot:
W ith regard to the question of plot, Lanser does not proclaim herself to be an authority but argues that
wom en’s narratives are often described as ‘plotless,’ i.e. predominantly static by contrast to men’s
narratives. Traditionally, plots are seen as structured in terms of “units of anticipation and fulfilment or
problem and solution” (623). This definition assumes that
textual actions are based on the (intentional) deeds of protagonists; they assume a power,
a possibility, that may be inconsistent with what women have experienced both historically
and textually, and perhaps incompatible even with women’s desires. (623)
Such male-oriented schem as define plot as a “discourse of male desire recounting itself through the
narrative of adventure, project, enterprise, and conquest” (623). As a result, conventional, masculinist
definitions of plot are not applicable to either women’s experiences or writing as result of which a “radical
revision in theories of plot” (624) is necessary.
Lanser argues, however, that there is another level to narratives written by all persons but which
may be particularly relevant to women’s experience: the
act of writing becom es the fulfilment of desire, telling becomes the single predicated act,
as if to tell were to resolve, to provide closure. Récit and histoire, rather than being
separate elements, converge, so that telling becom es integral to the working out of story.
Dr. Richard Clarke LITS3304 Notes 06B
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Communication, understanding, being understood, becomes not only the objective of the
narration but the act that can transform . . . the narrated world. In a universe where
waiting, inaction, reception predominate, and action is only minimally possible, the
narrative act itself becomes the source of possibility. (624)
There is, in short, a “plot behind w omen’s ‘plotless’ narrative, the additional plot of sharing an experience so
that the listener’s life may complete the writer’s tale” (624-625).

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