Abstract

Is there really such a thing as a masculine style of writing? What are its characteristics and why just these characteristics? Can we distinguish the masculine style from the explicit masculine content? The writers I will examine in this context are necessarily a selection from the number of those who might be included. They are all twentieth-century authors. Perhaps, as Woolf suggests in A Room of One's Own, it is because of the beginnings of the women's movement in the preceding century that "virility has now become self-conscious."1 At any rate there seems to be little explicit questioning of the male role, in literature or outside it, until our own century. I do not mean to suggest, however, that these writers only question the received images of maleness; often they set out to validate those images or, through such images, to validate themselves. Their explorations of maleness are not abstract but intensely individual. They are not straightforward but riddled with contradictions and paradoxes. As a result, it is difficult to extract didactic points from their works. Always knowledge is rooted in experience and inseparable from it. The masculine mode is above all an attempt to render a certain maleness of experience. · 1. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own , p. 105. Peter Schwenger, assistant professor of English at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, has written Phallic Critiques, which examines the relation between masculinity and literary styles. See also: "Virginia Woolf's Criticism: A Polemical Preface" by Barbara Currier Bell and Carol Ohmann in Vol. 1, No. 2