A narrative intended as masculine can be overtaken by its female characters

Evidence

I had thought, before I began, that what I had on my hands was an almost excessively masculine tale…. But the women seem to have taken over; they marched in from the peripheries of the story to demand inclusion of their own tragedies, histories and comedies, obliging me to couch my narrative in all manner of sinuous complexities, to see my ‘male’ plot refracted, so to speak, through the prisms of its reverse and ‘female’ side. It occurs to me that the women knew pecisely what they were up to – that their stories explain, and even subsume, the men’s. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 687

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: The idea of characters ‘taking over’ a plot, with women marching in from the peripheries to subsume the male story, is a strong device for a metafictional novel about authorial control.
• XREF: connects to: Fairy tales encode gendered roles of active seeker and passive captive. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 706; Sartre’s concept of the slimy encodes a gendered fear of feminine appropriation — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 133; Sixties male texts commodified women yet produced proto-feminist representations — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 276 (+1 more)