Week 5- Post 2- Taryn

I know we talked about this in Melanie's class last semester, but regardless of how many times we bring it up, the male dominance in canonized books never ceases to amaze me...

Most books assigned to me in high school were written by white-male authors; similarly, their main protagonists were usually males. Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men and Invisible Man were just a few that I can think of off the top of my head. Even looking at those titles after I type them, I realize how much male domination is taking place…Of Mice and Men, Invisible Man, The Great Gatsby. (And Gatsby is a man; therefore making him great, right?) The only book that I remember reading that had a female as the main character was To Kill a Mockingbird. Even then though, the narrator is very tomboyish; even her name sounds male.

The only book that we read with a female character was The Handmaid’s Tale, and all I can remember is the guys rolling their eyes and groaning in their chairs because the book gave “too many implications on the suppression of women.” My boyfriend barely made it through the first chapter before he started to look for the Sparknotes. On the contrary, he loved One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Brave New World: both of which had male characters as their leads. It never really hit me that the sex of the characters could be one of the reasons why the male students didn’t seem to like certain books as much. The Handmaid’s Tale was a completely different style than the usual books we were assigned, but I never “put two and two together” and realized that this could stem from the main character’s sex.

My question is, what do we plan to do about this gender dominance in literature? I know I'm stereotyping here, but, for the most part, girls seem more capable of relating to male character leads than boys can relate to female character leads. Does this mean we should really only pick novels with male character leads? If we can get all students to be interested in these books without too big of a fight and the girls can adapt to the male dominance, then why not? Are we ignoring good books because we don't know how to get the boys interested in them? Should we? Just some food for thought...