Lockrem 1

Kaylan Lockrem

ENGL 123 - 5008

Lisa Orta

13 May 2019

Beyond The Male Lens

According to ​ThoughtCo’s ​article “Feminist Literary Criticism” by Linda Napikoski, it is

important to analyze literary works through the point of view or lens of a feminist. One of the

tools of the feminist criticism is deconstructing how women are described, especially when the

story is being told by a male. This form of criticism is crucial to take into consideration when

reading Fae Myenne Ng’s novel ​Steer Toward Rock​. Although this novel is written by a female

author, much of the story is told through the lens of a male narrator, therefore lending itself to the

misrepresentation of the female characters within the story. Past experiences with people tend to

determine how we interact with others in the future and the narrator of this story allows his past

experiences with women to cloud his judgement and present analysis of them as he tells it to us

throughout the novel. The past will affect our present only if we let it, but sometimes, especially

when choosing whether to rely on past experiences with certain groups of people, it is best to let

go and live in the present.

Jack Moon Szeto, the narrator in much of this story, began his life being given up by his

blood mother to be taken care of by another woman. This experience proved to be important in

determining the way in which Jack viewed women for the rest of his life - incapable of truly

loving one person and lacking both deep emotions and feelings of their own. While working as a

butcher, Jack had many interactions with women who would come in to buy only the best meats
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to feed their farmer husbands who would come home every few months. Instead of focusing on

the fact that these women were without their significant other, a very lonely way to live after

anticipating living with the person you married, the narrator hones in on the fact that he believes

that it is their “empty beds” that bothered them the most (Ng 11). With looking through his lens

in this particular situation, it is implied that the women are more concerned with their lack of sex

life when their husbands are gone instead of dissecting the fact that they are left to live without

the people they vowed to live the rest of their lives with. This takes away from the fact that these

women have actual feelings. Sex is not all that they think about, but with the male narrator as the

only source for information about these women, it appears to be the truth, misrepresenting all of

these women and their intentions.

Even when describing the woman that he claimed to love, Jack uses language to describe

her that implies a certain female weakness and ultimately deems her to be more of an object

instead of a woman, a human being with feelings and emotions. In one of his initial descriptions

of her, Jack claims that Joice resembled a “captured bird” (Ng 14). Immediately, Joice is

represented as weak, being caged in by society and more specifically, by the men in her society.

As the story goes on, Jack delves into what he seems to assume to be the best way to describe the

women in his stories, their sexual identity and sex-lives. We do not know anything about Joice

outside of what is told to us by the narrator, and according to his description of her, she is

“familiar with men” and leans on her sexual connections with them rather than any deeper

emotional connection through regular conversation and spending time together. With only this

male description of her, we are left with little to no insight into her female point of view on these

particular things and only one side of the story.

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Until the last part of the novel, most of the story is told through only Jack’s point of view.

With this, there is a question as to whether we are getting the whole story. In the last portion of

the novel though, Ng utilizes the female voice to point out to us the discrepancies in Jack’s

retelling of stories and from where exactly those thoughts and feelings that he expressed

stemmed. Veda, Jack and Joice’s daughter, is the narrator for the last portion of the novel. When

revealing to us how her dad was portrayed to her through the eyes of her mother as a young

woman, she noticed that his stories tended to be the ones in which he was “favored and pursued

and preferred” because he had never been told that he was loved and had to tell these stories in

order to convince himself that he was. With this female lens, it is made clearer as to why Jack

perceived women the way he did. In his past, the women that he encountered never showed any

kind of true love towards him and this unfortunate truth bled into his present relationships with

women and, in the end, clouded his perceptions of them. Jack allowed his past relationships with

women to dictate his present and future relationships. Because of this, he would never tell the

whole story, but only the parts that aligned with how he felt he must relay them in order to fill a

void that he’s had since childhood.

When reading a novel that is told through the male lens and point of view, it is important

to remember that there is another side to the story being told - the female voice. ​ThoughtCo

points out in the article “Feminist Literary Criticism” by Linda Napikoski that one tool to the

feminist criticism is to deconstruct the way the women are described within a literary work,

especially when the only point of view being presented is that of a male. This proves to be true

when reading Fae Myenne Ng’s novel ​Steer Toward Rock​ as it is mainly told through a male

perspective and contains a female voice later in the novel that reveals to us the underlying causes
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of the thoughts and feelings of the male perspective. Jack, the narrator of much of the story, has

an outlook on women that stems from negative experiences and a lack of love with them in his

past, therefore clouding his present perceptions of women. The past will dictate our present only

if we let it and the lack of love in Jack’s past relationships with women cause him to tell stories

in a way that he could convince himself that he was truly loved by them as revealed by his

daughter, Veda, in later chapters.

Works Cited

Napikoski, Linda. “What Is Feminist Literary Criticism?” ​Thoughtco.​, Dotdash, 30 Jan. 2019,

www.thoughtco.com/feminist-literary-criticism-3528960​.

Ng, Fae Myenne. ​Steer Toward Rock​. Hyperion, 2008.