Men Who Write About Women

Can male novelists portray female protagonists convincingly?

This is the question I had in mind when reading Proust and Larsson side by side for the past couple of weeks. To compare Larsson's Lisbeth Salander to Proust's character the Duchesse de Guermantes is to compare an alienated, fiercely boyish outcast to a voluptuous social insider, privy to the upper echelons of Parisian high society.

Lisbeth, with her piercings and tattoos, has odd looks compared to the more conventionally beautiful Duchesse de Guermantes, whose eyes "captured like a picture the blue sky of an afternoon in the French countryside, broad and expansive, drenched in light even when there was no sun." Instead of old t-shirts with quirky statements printed across them and leather pants, the Duchesse wears a "ballooning skirt of painted blue silk."

Yet, Salander has a strong moral code that leaves the petty-minded Duchesse in the dirt. "I thought at least that, when she spoke, her conversation would be profound and mysterious, strange as a medieval tapestry or a Gothic window," Proust writes. Instead, "'What a bird-brained woman!' I thought to myself, still smarting from the icy greeting she had given me. 'So this is the woman I walk miles to see every morning, and out of the kindness of my heart!'"

Does the male author's sexual orientation help or hinder him when conjuring up his female characters?

Proust, as a homosexual, is often accused of having created female characters by simply prettifying the men in his life. In fact the (heterosexual) English critic Cyril Connolly wrote in his 1938 book Enemies of Promise that "homosexual novelists who are able to create mother-types and social mother-types (hostesses) and occasionally sister-types (heroines) have trouble with normal women and may often make them out worse or better than they are."

Hogwash! Think of Henry James' Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady or Michael Cunningham's Clarissa Vaughn in The Hours--the first two examples that come to mind. They may be heroines, not "normal women," but they are characters I've lived in.

As Edmund White wrote, "It would be a mistake to see all of Proust's women as disguised men...some of the female characters are unquestionably, quintessentially womanly, such as Odette...or the Duchesse de Guermantes or the actress Berma."

Is Larsson's Lisbeth Salander a man disguised as a woman?

Luisita Lopez Torregrosa writes for Politics Daily, "She's set a new standard: a lesbian/bisexual geeky girl with a bad attitude, a knack for violence, a steel-trap mind, and best of all, she's not a vampire. Could it be that androgynous, industrial-strength macho girls will become role models for women in the second decade of the 21st century?"

And what does it mean that it took a man to create a 21st century feminist icon?

Maybe it shouldn't come as a surprise that a Swedish man created Lisbeth, as Nordic countries like Sweden are the most egalitarian when it comes to gender roles. You wouldn't have a character like Lisbeth spring from a more traditional society like Nigeria or Pakistan or India.

That brings me to a question from Gender Studies 101: What does it mean to be a woman? Does womanhood=motherhood? Pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding...these are foreign territories for me. Am I any less a woman?

At forty, I am "unmarried and childless," which sounds like a wail of misery, but really suits me for the moment. Am I a spinster or a bachelorette? The origins of the word "spinster" go back to the Middle Ages when women who spun wool were able to support themselves on a decent wage. "Bachelorette" brings up images of reality television shows with ten women piled high in a hot tub vying for the attention of the alpha male.

Neither am I Eleanor Rigby who "picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been" and "waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door...who is it for?"

Still, I yearn to find...someone. The tenderness of a long partnership.

In sum, I don't identify fully with either character. I am neither an aggressive loner like Lisbeth nor conventionally "womanly" in conduct or appearance like the Duchesse. Yet I find these female characters compelling enough to keep reading, no matter that they leapt out fully formed from the minds of men.