Voices and Values

I have decided that the biggest problem with my novel is that it is narrated by a man.

Previous to this novel, I had only written in a male voice twice: once as part of a cycle of poems for my Verse Writing class (in which I imagined my father discussing my great-grandmother's funeral), and once in a three-part poem that took as its subject the Biblical story of the Levite and his concubine (in which I imagined what could possibly possess a man to hand his lover over to a violent mob to be raped and killed). Outside of these two projects, I've always written in a voice that is decidedly female.

For one thing, writing as a woman allows me to say things about womanhood that I think are important, things that feel meaningful to the female experience. (Dammit, Vassar, look what you've done to me-- now I'm writing phrases like "the female experience.") For another thing... well, it's easier to write as a woman. I understand women much better than I've ever understood men. I was never one of those people who had a million guy friends, and I think maybe my affinity for female friendships is one of the reasons I tended to date guys without necessarily falling deeply in love with them. I've known I was attracted to men from an early age, but I've also always known that there's something confusing about men, something I never quite understood. That's how I knew Adam was the one for me: he's the only man I feel I can truly understand.

So I was surprised when, upon sitting down on November 1st to write, I automatically began thinking in the voice of the male main character, Simon. Simon's wife, Ada, is the subject of most of the novel, and she's so very much like me that I would have thought it'd be far more natural to write from her perspective. I was pleased, however, that I seemed to be trying something new, and that it appeared to be working fairly well, at that.

But now that I've finished the bulk of it, I'm starting to worry about the effect that this narrative is having on the novel's message. The story is only told from Ada's perspective three times; there are three sections to the book, and each section begins with a short poem in Ada's voice before switching back to Simon's prose narration. And I'm concerned that this objectifies Ada, that by preventing her from telling her own story, I'm somehow...I dunno, reinforcing gender inequality or something.

It might not be so bad if this wasn't a story about a crazy woman. After all, that's part of the reason I chose to continue narrating in Simon's voice; part of the mystery of the novel is that the nature of what is happening to Ada is unclear, so that the reader is never quite sure whether or not Ada is dangerously ill, harmlessly addled, or somehow inspired by something the rest of us can't hear. If I narrated the whole thing from her perspective, I'd have to get a lot more specific-- what the voice of God would sound like, what it would say to her, whether or not she thought she was actually crazy herself-- and the deliberate ambivalence towards her experience would be lost.

But is it right to let her husband speak for her?

I don't want to sound uptight about this, but: I'm a feminist, and I want this book to be an unabashedly feminist book. There are feminist themes in here (another reason I couldn't market this as a typical Christian book, I'm sure), but I want to make sure I'm not undoing all this by refusing to let the female characters speak in their own voices. And the only other main female characters are a secretary and a mean, bitter old woman, so it's not like there's a plethora of other women's voices in the work.

I don't know how to rectify this, though, without rewriting everything. Should I add another female character? Should I simply increase the number of Ada's poetic monologues to two per section instead of just one? Should I smack myself across the face and scream "GET A GRIP!"?