You’d think after reading House of Leaves we’d all find the weird and erratic narrative structure of The Female Man a piece if cake. I personally had trouble understanding some parts of it, and the multiple narrators and the ambiguous “I” got me very confused at certain points. I don’t know if the division of the narrative into so many passages, pointing the shifts in times and places helped make it easier or made it more confusing. One thing I notice about the structure is its division into 9 parts; an interesting choice Russ makes, since the number nine is usually associated with maternity and, perhaps, femininity. In her demonstrations of possible worlds where the boundaries of gender are destroyed, there is only one thing females have that males still can’t have: babies! Women in Whileaway are able to conceive without needing male partners, while men in the other three worlds can’t make their own babies.
I find the ironic and aggressive tone of the book to be interesting. Russ is very much in your face, and I can imagine it being a buzz killer for some readers. She is really funny when she’s being ironically bitter. My personal favorite is on page 148:
Narrator to Jeannine on the danger of communication device: “It will explode in your brains and drive you crazy. You will never be the same again. You will be lost to respectability and decency and decorum and dependency and all sorts of other nice, normal things beginning with a D… You will be dead, dead, dead.”
With an emphasis on the D’s, I see an implied association between these things starting with a D and men. Jeannine is also threatened by her relationship with her boyfriend and struggles throughout the book to find her independence. “Dead, dead, dead” confirms the association, as men are all dead in Janet’s world. This makes me even more curious about the J’s and what it means to give all four female characters names that start with a J.
Finally, I want to briefly mention an important point the narrator makes in Part One- VI where she begins to introduce Whileaway to the reader. She explains that since there might be an infinite number of possible universes, and that there isn’t a single and clear line of probability, “the paradox of time travel ceases to exist, for the past one visits is never one’s own Past but always somebody else’s; or rather, one’s visit to the Past instantly creates another Present” (7). I think this and the rest of the passage says a lot about the treatment of time in postmodern works. Modernist writers, as Virginia Woolf, talk about the importance of time in manifesting realism in literature and explain that time is not linear, but must take the reader to the past as well as the present to provide insight on the histories of the characters, giving them a more realistic portrayal. Postmodernism takes this principle to a different level, as the treatment of time is more imaginative. It attempts to explore several possible pasts, presents and futures, and therefore generating numerous realities. The importance modernism places on the concept of realism is not only absent in postmodernism but is disparaged and rejected through this use of inconsistent and multiple time lines.