Gender in Fowles and McEwan
[Woman] is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute -- she is the Other. -- Simone de Beauvoir.
Simone de Beauvoir's influential analysis of gender difference as somehow implying gender deference -- that the mere fact of defining male in opposition to female somehow implies placing one in an inferior or subaltern position -- becomes especially interesting when examining how fiction by male authors approaches questions of gender. I propose to examine in detail two British novels of the post-war period -- The Collector by John Fowles, published in 1963, and The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan, published in 1981 -- and hope to demonstrate that, in point of fact, the existence of the feminist movement has managed to shift the portrayal of gender in the work of male novelists. To some extent, I think we can see Fowles' The Collector as a pre-feminist novel, which employs a traditional set of gendered associations in order to approach a topic which is actually quite different, and McEwan's Comfort of Strangers as a post-feminist novel, self-aware in its handling of the issue of representing gender issues.
Fowles' The Collector is an early work by a novelist better known for more subtle structural and metafictional construction. Here, there is some effort at metafictionality -- the novel's two central characters both compose their own diaries -- but the overall central scenario is so lurid that it feels nearly pornographic, and has earned substantial ire from feminist critics as a result. But it is worth noting that Fowles has already asked the reader to consider his or her own complicity in a sort of criminality that the novel depicts: the parallel between Clegg's sexualized voyeurism, and the sort of voyeurism entailed in reading someone else's diary, is fully exploited by Fowles, and seems to invite the reader to consider the morality of the aesthetic (or indeed pornographic) experience unsparingly. If Fowles' is an anti-feminist work in some way, it cannot be called a morally or ethically uncomplicated book, or a book in which substantial thought and analysis are taking place. However it is true that the novel is about a man who stalks, kidnaps, and sexually torments an attractive woman -- but it is worth mentioning that it should be possible to treat such subjects without indulging them. To a certain degree, this is the reason Fowles adopts a detached tone in narration to a certain extent: as Katherine Tarbox puts it, in Clegg's "camera eyes, he sees everything from a distance, voyeuristically" (Tarbox 48). This may be a late ramification on the willingness of modernist writers in the 20s and 30s to permit film techniques to influence fictional composition: the detached cool gaze of Clegg is meant to be one that invokes a whole environment of mediated detachment, above and beyond the sort of sexual objectification at the heart of the book.
To a certain degree, we must regard The Collector as a pre-feminist novel. Obviously this is not entirely true, as John Fowles writes well after earlier writers who can be characterized as feminist, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Virginia Woolf to Simone de Beauvoir herself (who was active in 1963 but had emerged as a public intellectual substantially earlier). But it is worth noting that the year of publication for The Collector was also the year of publication for Betty Friedan's noteworthy best-selling feminist work The Feminine Mystique. In other words, ideas of objectification were very much in the air -- but Fowles does not have the benefit of writing after Friedan. Instead, we must try to understand both these writers as expressing something in the early 1960s which would be borne out by subsequent events, and the emergence of a full-scale women's movement in the 1970s. Certainly Clegg views Miranda purely in terms of beauty, but that beauty is likened to the butterflies he collects -- the divide between himself and her is almost one of species. This bears out Fowles' own interpretation of the book as being intended to capture more a difference in social class than a difference in gender....
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