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Reading as a Woman: The Effects of Gender and Race Marginalization within Literature on the Dynamic Between Reader and Text WOMAN It is being somewhat like a well. When you drop a well bucket you will find restlessness deep in the well... That she is herself is more difficult than water is water just as it’s difficult for water to go beyond water she and I are linked in mutual love who once betrayed each other two mirrors who reflected each other When I escape from her, I incessantly am forced to be her and when I confront her instead I become him... Kora Kumiko1 Writing is communication. It is the telling of life, sometimes factual accounts, sometimes fictitious, metaphoric. It is the stringing together of words to recreate images, to recreate feelings, that mirror the real world in which we live and experience. Words contain power to which we have become bound, in the desperate seeking of truth and meaning. There is a search for reason, for the meaning to which we live our lives, and through words do we recount these experiences, analyze and interpret. We read the accounts of others, outside of ourselves, to compare to our own and better analyze and interpret through this comparison. The factors that affect this interpretation are many. For me, as a white female reader, my experience of life, and my own account of that experience, calls for my own personal search for meaning and reason. To where I look is in literature, in the experience of the others. By others, I mean those outside of my own body space, a person with a different lived experience than I, and thus a different perspective to which I am made to analyze and interpret through reading. Within the institution of the novel, I do not exist. In searching for a voice to understand and compare to my own, I am at a significant loss. I am made to identify myself with the other, being predominantly defined as male, leaving no room to compare to my own lived experience, and thus defeating my own intention of finding truth and meaning of myself within the context of my world. The interpretation I am presented with is that the world I have made to be an extension of myself is not mine at all, but a world which denies me any existence, any voice. It offers me the choice between silence or falsity. It offers me a voice which is not of my own, which I can only hear from the outside, and not within. I am a female recreated by literary culture to be indefinitely male. The way I must recreate myself within this context presents me with an experience defined by difference. Within this difference, must I analyze the truths of history, and dismantle these so called truths in a way that allows my self to survive. Through my experience of this class, I was faced with the question of how to survive the literary experience. “In trying to tell something, a woman is told, shredding herself into opaque words while her voice dissolves on the walls of silence.”(Trinh T. Minh-ha).2 Literature is a power struggle between male and female. The female is seldom represented, not being allowed to participate in the content of definitions, for she is defined without question. She is made to identify against herself, within male terms, to speak as male, which, to a female, as a gender and not as a sexual biological definition, is for that female voice to be silenced. What is the value of literature, when a whole category is denied existence? What is the use of truth when it devalues other truths? What is the use of experience when it denies the experience of others? In a world where female experience is devalued to of a lesser importance, and at times deleted from existence, the female voice must strive to be heard, or else the female reading experience may go on, indefinitely, lacking trust in the accounts of others, in the accounts of history, and in the personal experiences of the self. In this lies a powerlessness, than can result in debilitating silence. When the self is in constant question, when the self is in constant division, how can any female trust in her own experience? The result of this is self doubt. In Judith Fetterley’s Introduction: On the Politics of Gender from The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction, she quotes Elaine Showalter with the following: “Women are estranged from their own experience and unable to perceive it’s shape and authenticity... they are expected to identify as readers with a masculine experience and perspective, which is presented as the human one...
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