If there is a hero in The Female Man, I would guess it might be Joanna, simply because she most often serves as an observer of the others and raises questions/challenges to the other characters. She questions Jeannine about her source of unhappiness, for example, and Jael about the necessity of killing the man in Manlander (although they all seem to question it). If there is an “everyman” (or, more accurately, an “everywoman”) in this novel, it seems to be Joanna, who is, not uncoincidentally the same name as the author. Through Joanna we get the various and most cogent “speeches” about the unfairness of (and the need to resist) the male world, male domination, male expectations. This is outlined particularly in the final section, the “Book of Joanna,” which has the most human-like “voice” of the novel. It also seems to be written more like a feminist essay than a novel.

One other possible “hero” of this novel is the novel itself. The last chapter seems to turn toward the role of the novel in expressing both the author’s views and those of all the characters, and gives a certain voice to the power of literary expression (I don’t think it’s very good in this novel, but that’s another issue). In a way, the novel “liberates” Russ and the broader feminine world that she speaks for by alllowing her to create characters and situations that are imagined but that express real-world frustrations, anger, etc.