The Trump Stories: A Feminist Narratology

Feminism forms the basis for Robyn Warhol's presentation of the second approach to narratology in Narrative Theory (2012) by Herman, et al. Warhol begins with a simple enough definition of feminism: "the conviction that dominant culture and society are organized to the disadvantage of everyone who does not fit a white, masculine, middle- or upper-class, Euro-American, not-yet-disabled, heterosexual norm" (Narrative Theory 9). She elaborates feminism with intersectionality "because white privilege, class privilege, heteronormativity, and other positions of relative power complicate hierarchies of gender" (9).

Feminist narrative theory, then, is a corrective to traditional critical approaches which "developed in a pointedly masculinist academic culture, based on theories developed by men who grounded their models in the study of male-written texts" (9). From its inception then and at its core, feminist narrative theory (Warhol objects to the term narratology which is too "cut off from questions of history and context") has been particularly sensitive to the position of the critic towards the work and to the relations between the author and reader — in other words, to social, political, economic, and intellectual contexts of the narrative. Warhol sees feminist narrative theory playing well with the rhetorical narratology of Phelan and Rabinowitz and with the antimimetic theory of those such as Brian Richardson. I, too, like the insistence of feminist narrative theory to place the narrative within a rich context of information, organization, material, and energy flows and at the nexus of social, political, economic, and intellectual relationships. I also like that feminist narrative theory places the critic within the narrative, always conscious of and accountable for her critical position. Warhol finds the least overlap with the mind-oriented theory of David Herman, which she considers too essentialist in its orientation.

As Warhol defines feminist narrative theory, then, it is primarily distinguished from other narrative theories by placing "at the center of the inquiry … gender, sexuality, class, or other politically significant and historically grounded differences" (11). In contrast, I place complexity theory at the center of my critique of narratives. Complexity theory, of course, includes the resources and insights of feminist theory, but does not limit itself to those issues.