[...] the lessons of Wilde, Mirbeau and their ilk can help us understand how the act of storytelling is, necessarily, an exertion of power – of the voiced over the voiceless – that we can view through a political lens. We can see this already in the earlier 19th-century examples, which are – with the rule-proving case of the ‘feminised’ Dorian Gray – constructed along gender lines. Men tell stories about themselves; women are formed by the stories men tell about them. Men create themselves; women are creations.
More than a century after Kierkegaard, feminist critics have argued that our understanding of narrative conventions are governed by vectors of sexual inequality. And by the predominant understanding of the linguistic, narrative act as male, even as the un-narrativised world is always female: just look at Genesis, where God’s speech colonises the feminised waters of the void.
The American literary critic Nancy Miller points out that the very way we judge the events of novelistic narrative as plausible or implausible is rooted in social codes (and patriarchal expectation). When it comes to identifying with a character and understanding her behaviour, ‘verisimilitude’ measures conformity to a social ideal. Novels, Miller
says, do ‘not imitate life but
reinscribe received ideas about the representation of life in art. To depart from the limits of common sense… is to risk exclusion from the canon.’
