For Feminist Narratology

Abstract

Narratology, the structuralist analysis ofnarrative, 1 can specify in formal terms the ideological commitment, conscious ornot, ofa narrative text. Feminist narratology can identify gender-determined forms in traditional narrative and analyze feminist revision of narrative grammar. Ultimately, feminist narratology may help correct the ethnocentrism of narratology itself by clarifying that a certain dominant sense of story is culturally determined. Every feminist knows that too many stories end with fantasy marriages or with barely concealed threats directed at women. The latter type of story features fascinating, transgressive women: Guenevere, whose love brought down Camelot; Eve, whose curiosity exiled 'man' from Paradise; or Clytemnestra, who murdered her husband to revenge their daughter, and whose Furies hounded her son and murderer until the other Gods intervened. Their's are the stories of Camelot, of 'man's' fall from grace, and of the founding of the Athenian City State. Yet each heroic female figure has been rewritten; from a subject who dared to act, she has become anobstacle to the stabil