Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

8.5 The female sentence: a woman’s writing?
Unit 8 Language and gender
Section 2 Language variation

Work on female speech has been echoed by work on women’s writing, since many theorists claim that women’s writing is qualitatively different from men’s writing. For example, Virginia Woolf proposed that Dorothy Richardson’s writing had developed a new way of using language, which Woolf termed ’a woman’s sentence’. Woolf did not describe in detail what this ’psychological sentence of the feminine gender’ consisted of, but, if we compare the following two extracts by Anita Brookner and Malcolm Lowry, it seems quite easy to argue that Brookner is using a ’feminine’ style, while Lowry is using a ’masculine’ style:

From the window all that could be seen was a receding area of grey. It was to be supposed that beyond the grey garden, which seemed to sprout nothing but the stiffish leaves of some unfamiliar plant, lay the vast grey lake, spreading like an anaesthetic towards the invisible further shore, and beyond that, in imagination only, yet verified by the brochure, the peak of the Dent d’Oche, on which snow might already be slightly and silently falling.

(Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac, 1984)

Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaux. Overlooking one of these valleys, which is dominated by two volcanoes, lies, six thousand feet above sea-level, the town of Quauhnahuac. It is situated well south of the Tropic of Cancer, to be exact on the nineteenth parallel, in about the same latitude as the Revillagigedo Islands to the west in the Pacific, or very much farther west, the southernmost tip of Hawaii - and as the port of Tzucox to the east on the S. Atlantic seaboard of Yucatan near the border of British Honduras, or very much farther east, the town of Juggernaut, in India, on the Bay of Bengal.

(Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1967)

The Brookner passage describes the landscape from a particular point of view, that is, as seen from a character’s perspective rather than from an omniscient narrator’s standpoint. This personalized account consists of descriptions of colours, and the effect these colours have on the character. There seems to be a certain vagueness about the description; instead of facts, this account is concerned with what ’was supposed to be’, what ’seemed’ and what ’might be’ happening. This modification or tentativeness is conventionally said to characterize a feminine style. In contrast, the Lowry passage seems far more distanced; the narrator dispenses facts, using a scientific objective passive voice (’it is situated . . .’ and ’the town . . . is dominated’). The information emanates thus not from an identifiable character but from a seemingly objective, omniscient narrator. In fact, the style used is reminiscent of the register (see Unit 7) of guidebooks or of geographical descriptions.

For many readers, these two passages may seem to characterize a feminine and masculine style respectively - one a personalized style, describing in detail relationships and the actions of characters, and the other more concerned with factual descriptions of the world. This accords with assertions made by Deborah Tannen that women tend to adopt certain strategies in speech that she calls rapport talk (talk that is concerned with maintaining relationships), while men adopt those strategies that she terms report talk (talk concerned with giving information and establishing hierarchies) (Tannen, 1991). However, it is clear that these distinctions, although fairly easy to make, are based on stereotypical notions of gender difference (women are supposed to be vague and concerned with relationships, whereas men are supposed to be precise and interested in facts). Not all male writers write like Lowry, and not all women writers write as Brookner does here. Iris Murdoch, for example, often writes in a manner more akin to Lowry’s writing, and frequently uses a male narrator. Also, it should be noted that much of the imprecision of the Brookner passage arises from the fact that she is focusing on the impressions of a character who is unfamiliar with the landscape (the character has a ’brochure’ of the area).

Thus, the idea that there is a masculine style and a feminine style appears to be based more on stereotypical notions of sexual difference than on any inevitable textual difference in the way men and women write. Although the way a person uses language (in writing as in speech) will be influenced by conventional stereotypes about gender, and although readers often apply those same stereotypes when reading literature, it is important to remember that these stereotypes are neither natural nor inevitable. If women do sometimes use language differently, this is related to the way that women are derogated in language and the way that social pressures may encourage them to adopt certain speech styles. It may also be the case that women may choose to adopt feminine styles because that may be strategically more effective in a particular context. At the same time, however, women writers (like their male counterparts) may adopt different linguistic styles for particular artistic and political ends. Feminist critics and writers often employ language in ways that challenge the gender biases embedded in language and resist the derogation and disempowering of women. On the other hand, early twentieth-century writers, such as Woolf, Richardson and Rosamond Lehmann, can be seen as adopting a ’feminine’ style precisely in order to subvert or question the assumptions of ’masculine’ objectivity. Thus, it is important to be able to recognize masculine and feminine elements within language but to be aware that these may have different objectives and interpretations depending on the context.