The Female Man Analysis

The Female Man has four distinct settings, each of them an alternate version of our very own Earth.Home Sweet HomeJoanna's Earth is ours, more or less. The events of the novel take place between 19...

Pinning down the narrative techniques and points of view in The Female Man can be tricky, what with four protagonists and one omniscient narrator who both are and aren't the same person. But the un...

Science FictionThe Female Man is a lot of things, but the genre that makes it possible for so much weirdness to come together in one place is the fantastic, the marvelous, the out-of-this-world sci...

The Female Man can be laugh-out-loud funny, but most of its jokes depend on our ability to recognize the novel's ironic and satirical tones. The scripted scenes that appear throughout the novel are...

Fragg-ment RockReading The Female Man can feel a lot like trying to discover the picture on a puzzle without having the box to go by, and without actually putting the pieces together. But what bett...

The Female Man's title is our biggest clue that this book is about Joanna, first and foremost: after all, she's the one who tells us about the time she turned into a "female man." Like the book its...

If Jack succeeds in forgetting something, this is of little use if Jill continues to remind him of it. He must induce her not to do so. The safest way would be not just to make her keep quiet about...

In the final chapter of The Female Man, the distinctions that separate Janet, Jeannine, Joanna, the omniscient narrator, and Jael from one another are shaken off once and for all. As the four alter...

Even tougher to get through than the music video for Katy Perry's "Birthday" (yeah, we went there), The Female Man is a challenging read for sure. The intersecting personalities of the omniscient n...

Girl Meets World, Meets World, Meets WorldThe Female Man doesn't fit neatly into a classic plot analysis, because the novel actively resists a clear-cut narrative. On top of that, the Exposition an...

If you've already taken a look at our other plot analyses for The Female Man, you'll know that it's not easy to match this novel up with conventional forms. Not only is it all over the place, its s...

Janet, Jeannine, and Joanna are brought into and out of one another's worlds, without knowing how or why. Although they slowly come to learn a lot about one another, things are very muddled and con...

When Joanna Russ was an undergrad at Cornell University, she studied with Vladimir Nabokov, the man who penned the controversial Lolita. (Source.) Richard T. Foster's "Round House" isn't just an ar...

Sexual relationships are a hot topic in The Female Man, and the novel doesn't shy away from explicit scenes. Some of them, like Janet's first time with Vittoria, Laura's first time with Janet, and...

Martin Luther (4.3.2) (8.10.30)Friedrich Engels (4.5.1)Sigmund Freud (4.10.16) (6.6.9) (7.2.10)Christopher Marlowe (5.9.2)William Shakespeare (5.9.2) (7.1.20)Irving Howe (5.9.10)Thomas Hardy (5.9.1...