Four Noted Male Novelists Have Cloaked Themselves in Female Voices, Fueling a Literary Debate: Can Men Really Think and Write Like Women? : The Falsetto Novelists

Say you ran into these four characters, clustered by the punch bowl at a party. Notice anything peculiar?

Alison Poole, just turned 21, is, like, this totally cool but scatterbrained connoisseur of New York City’s cocaine-propelled club scene.

Sara Worth, 45 and renamed Ma Prem Kundalini, recently fled what she saw as the shallow and constricting life of the New England doctor’s wife to develop her spiritual side in an ashram.

Dalva Northridge, also 45, is a free-spirited lover of good men and horses, as comfortable in Paris as she is swimming naked in a remote stream.

And Kate Vaiden, 57, is a North Carolina gal “with strong eyes and teeth” and a life story so tough and twisted that people she tells it to look at her “like the first woman landed from Pluto.”

A talented observer would quickly detect the radical differences and subtle similarities between these women. It’s debatable, though, whether anyone would notice their one key shared trait.

What in their clothing or hair or their casual talk about men and sex would tip someone off that these four women all are creations of well-known male novelists who’ve taken up the technical and psychological challenge of writing in a woman’s voice?

Feminist Critique of Art

Attempting this sort of artistic transvestism is hardly new. The poet Ovid assumed a lyrical woman’s voice as early as the 1st Century BC. Samuel Richardson looked at the world through a woman’s eyes in “Pamela,” which is generally considered the first English novel.

But coming after the feminist revolution, this recent batch of men’s fictional women focuses new attention on the issue of just how inscrutable the inner recesses of one gender’s consciousness are. Without knowing it, or perhaps without caring, Jay McInerney, John Updike, Jim Harrison and Reynolds Price have plunged into one of the hottest vats of academic inquiry--the feminist critique of art in a male dominated culture.

For Jim Harrison, finding and keeping the distinctive voice of Dalva, the woman he created in the 1988 book of that title, was at times “brutal.”

“It was like a courtship thing,” he said, talking from a pay phone at the Bluebird Bar in northern Michigan, where he’s known as a huntin’, fishin’, drinkin’ kind of guy.

“I couldn’t get her voice. If I didn’t achieve a certain spirit, she would go away. . . .” he said. “If I got harsh or geometrical, her voice would disappear. I had to stay very limber. I hardly got to drink at all, and I like to drink.”

Reynolds Price found the process of creating Kate Vaiden easier, even with his self-imposed constraints. “I made one rule: I would never ask a woman. If I got to a questionable passage, if I had to get across the chasm on a tight wire, I wouldn’t ask a woman ‘How would women feel in these circumstances?’ ” he said.

Updike told a United Press International interviewer earlier this year, “I am convinced that the sexes are not so different that we are shut out of the other sex’s thoughts. . . . I suppose ‘S’ is my tribute to the female voice.”

But critics have had mixed feelings about how successful the authors were in their attempts to tap into a female consciousness.

“As written by Mr. Updike, these letters not only seem oddly contrived--he has Sarah refer to her gender so frequently that she starts to sound like a broken record of Helen Reddy singing ‘I Am Woman’--but they also reveal a decidedly unlikable person . . .,” a New York Times reviewer wrote of the novel, written as a series of letters and audio tapes sent by Sarah to those she left behind when she abruptly moved to the ashram.

“Instead of gaining an understanding of her conflicts as a woman, we are given magazine cliches about the woes of being a housewife and noisy diatribes about the piggish ways of men. All in all, Sarah emerges as a selfish and unthinking hypocrite. . . .”

Most critics were equally repelled by McInerney’s Alison in “Story of My Life,” a poor little rich girl who wants to be an actress but spends more time whiffing cocaine and lusting after equally vacuous young men than she does in her Strasberg acting classes.

Most reviewers dismissed Alison’s monologue as the prattle of an “hysterical airhead,” to use one description. But not all disliked the book.

P. J. O’Rourke called Alison’s yada yada yada ramblings “note-perfect, vacant-cranium, Manhattan brat chatter.” A Mademoiselle reviewer said: “It’s rare for a male writer to conjure the first-person voice of a female character as believably as McInerney has done here.”

And a Glamour writer projected: “Whether McInerney is fond of his ‘party girl’ is a tough call. . . . I thought I glimpsed some male remorse for being the sort of guy who didn’t call back a girl like Alison.”

All of which leads, strangely enough, straight into the convoluted depths of high-brow academic debate.

‘A Remarkable Achievement’

The age-old question of men writing as women was revived in this century by James Joyce’s character, Molly Bloom, whose lusty stream-of-consciousness soliloquy in the 1922 novel “Ulysses” inflamed the literati and moral censors alike.

“There’s a lot of scholarly debate about how true to feminine consciousness the Bloom voice is,” said Vincent Cheng, associate professor of English and resident Joycian at USC. “Many think what Joyce wrote is a male fantasy of what man would like a woman’s mind to be like. But usually, women and men alike feel it’s a remarkable achievement at capturing how a feminine consciousness works.”

Lately, however, feminist scholars have been breaking things down a bit more, pondering what if anything is “essential” about a woman’s consciousness, and if there is an essence, whether it can be retrieved or replicated in literature.

Some argue that it may be impossible for any man to accurately portray the psyche of a woman, what with all the cultural and ideological contaminants cluttering his own brain.

‘Fourth-Grader Value System’

“We all fall into the traps that language has already set for us,” said Thais E. Morgan, an assistant professor of English at Arizona State University in Tempe, who will be chairing a panel discussion of related issues at the annual Modern Language Assn. conference this month.

“Even the composition of a fourth-grader carries with it a value system and an ideological stance or voice,” Morgan said. “Any writer at any age or at any time in any culture takes a position when he or she writes. Which makes men writing as women a very interesting and potentially alarming development.”

Alarming, because it raises the question: “Can women not speak for themselves?” and more basically, “Why are men writing as women?” she said. “Why are they writing through women’s voices and not their own? What can a male novelist achieve or say if he writes as a woman that he might not be willing to say as a man?”

Morgan is now editing a collection of essays, “Men Writing as/Through the Feminine.” While a man who truly tries to write as a woman--if that is possible--is OK by her, she said, “a man who writes through a woman’s voice, is suspect on the grounds that he is taking on the woman’s voice in order to perpetuate certain masculinist assumptions about women. I think Updike may be a good example of this. May be,” she said.

No Alarming Motives

The same might be said of the stream of 18th- and 19th-Century novelists who tried it, said Jann Matlock, an assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Rochester in New York.

Often these authors weren’t writing to explore recesses of the female mind, but rather, Matlock said, “to write bawdy novels, to have a good time, to fantasize about what women really want. . . . That kind of cross-writing rarely winds up being much of an exploration of ‘the other.’ ”

For their part, the writers in question detect no alarming or even particularly interesting motives behind their decisions to write in women’s voices.

“I just got tired of the young male protagonists who populated my first two books,” McInerney said. Since the voices were “essentially stand-ins for me, I sometimes cannibalized myself for parts. You kind of exhaust your resources that way. . . .

‘It’s Like Method Acting’

“If fiction is to be anything more than autobiography, one of the challenges has to be to put yourself into shoes other than your own, to imagine yourself in other realms of experience. The great sexual divide is the one we’re always looking across with great fascination.”

So, for eight hours a day, McInerney became, in a sense, the character one critic called a “Post-Modern boy toy.” “It seems presumptuous, but. . . . I think it’s like method acting. It’s like really immersing yourself in a role,” he said.

“I dreamed about her a couple times,” Harrison said of his inspiration for Dalva. After that, he had to let himself believe he could create her in the way Sioux shamans believe they can transform themselves into a man or woman at will, he added.

“It was a tremendous, almost threatening challenge to look at the world through (Dalva’s) eyes,” but “if approached with the proper humility,” any character will speak through an author, he said.

Price, whom critics have long praised for his strong, independent female characters, found the process less forbidding. “The classical thing to say is ‘Gosh, I won’t ever understand women.’ You don’t hear women saying that. They don’t claim to be as puzzled by male behavior. . . .”

The only real difference Price sees between men and women is that women can bear children and that their sexuality may be constrained by that. “Everything else is role playing. Women playing with dolls and men getting shotguns on their 10th birthday. Any sensible, sensitive person should be able to see past roles foisted upon them in childhood.”

So Price wasn’t surprised that he found no deep feminine mysteries.

“I think women are capable of almost anything, and I think men are,” Price said. “All you have to do is watch Oprah Winfrey to see that there’s an enormously wide range of behavior in all human beings, from great cruelty to tremendous generosity. . . . Our whole human soul is basically a single thing.”

Difference Between Sexes

McInerney, on the other hand, said he decided to evoke Alison’s voice in part to shed light on what he saw as basic differences between the sexes.

“I think you can claim to have succeeded in creating a believable woman without being an authority on the opposite sex,” he said. “Alison is a very specific character. Any woman could come up to me and say, ‘I’m not like that.’ I’d say ‘That’s true. I’m not like Jake Barnes, but I still believe him.’ ”

As the author eavesdropped on young women’s conversations to learn “the tribal dialect” Alison speaks, he “began to question the the idea that men are more frank and open about sex. I began to feel that exactly the opposite was true--that men are liars and mythologizers when they talk about sex. . . . Men tend to be more outer-directed. Less reflective. Less attuned to their emotions.”

But Alison lets her frequent thoughts about sex pour out with an orgasmic abandon that Molly Bloom might appreciate.

“I’ve known a number of girls like Alison,” McInerney said. “And seen many. . . . It’s frightening how many young women come up to me and say they’re just like Alison.”

Still, McInerney would have had a hard time thinking from within Alison’s head if he hadn’t cared for her, he said. “I like Alison Poole a lot. . . . Which is not to say I admire her. It’s not to say I’d want to go out with her. Well, I might want to go out with her. I don’t think I’d want to marry her at this point.”

Whatever one thinks of the characters, all are sufficiently well-realized so that it’s easy to imagine them clustered together at a party. Eavesdropping on their conversation would shed considerable light on, if not the way women think, then at least the way men think women think.

“Maybe that is an essential difference between male and female--I see my life abstractly in terms of interlocking spirals, circles, gyres, while (men are) more linear and geometric,” Dalva, who winds up looking for the child she gave up for adoption, might say to Kate, who writes her book as a sort of introduction to the son she abandoned at birth and now hopes to meet.

“For a girl of my age at the time, experiencing what I had, the emotional ‘burnout,’ as it is rather glibly called, was actually a vital emptiness, a time when life was so poignant, and full of what is understood as suffering but is really only life herself making us unavoidably unique,” she might say to Alison, a young woman as familiar with emptiness and burnout as any in literature, perhaps.

To which Kate Vaiden might add: “Don’t let any human being ever tell you that a female child, just turned 16, can’t hurt as hard and deep at a crossroads in eastern Carolina as a one-eyed leper in the dust of Judah.”

A couple years ago, Price did some research and found that it’s much less common for women to write with the voice of a man than vice-versa. A former instructor gave Price a theory about why that is.

Because fathers in most societies are out in the world all day, then come home preoccupied and tired, “most girls have very little of what we now call ‘quality time’ with men until they get to an age where they’re having romances with them,” Price said.

But male writers, like women writers, need only to think about their mothers to call up a feminine voice, Price said. “They’re fairly young women when we’re born. If we have the attentive and sensitive minds of those who are going to be writers anyway, we’re watching our surroundings more closely than we’re aware we’re doing. We gather more information than other human beings who don’t become writers are able to store. So we know about the intimate, emotional lives of women, who reveal more of themselves to their male and female children than to anyone else in world.”

Not so, said author and poet Marge Piercy, who has written from a man’s voice in short stories, and whose novels often include male points of view in the third person. She argues that women evoke men’s voices better than vice-versa.

“Creating a character that’s real is a complicated, partly rational, partly irrational partly magical process in any case,” she said. But “people with less power are generally required in a society to know what’s going on--the ideology and the psychological drive of people with more power.”

Women not only are socialized to nurture and understand better than men are, but they also must be aware of what men are up to from a survival standpoint, to avoid the rape and violence men commit against women, she said.

Her advice to men who want to write from the consciousness of a woman is to read more women writers. But she sees hope in the fact that men try at all. “Through the capacity of empathy and imagination, morality grows up, it becomes more adult, more mature,” she said.

Which doesn’t mean that something won’t be lost in translation when men try to speak through the imagined voice of a woman.

Psychologist Carl Jung--the great explorer of the anima-animus, femininity-masculinity--was so impressed with Joyce’s depiction of Molly Bloom’s interior landscape that he wrote Joyce a letter declaring the passage “a string of veritable psychological peaches,” Cheng of USC said.

Joyce was flattered. But his wife, Nora Barnacle, the main inspiration for the women Joyce created, expressed another view.

“He knows nothing at all about women,” she said.