This is going a few weeks back, but I thought it was really interesting discussing the essay on queer narration in Tipping the Velvet. One thing that I found particularly interesting in this essay was the distinction between third person omniscient narratives as being inherently male, while first person narratives are supposedly inherently female. I can see, as we discussed in class, how some might think a third person omniscient narrator may seem more male because those types of narratives are somewhat “God-like”, which can carry with it connotations of maleness, while the first person narrative may seem like journal entries (which might be seen as gendered female). However, I don’t think that I have ever had these reactions to novels that I have read. I tend to associate the gender of the narrator (third person omniscient or not) with the gender of the main character of the novel. Talking about the gendered narrators, however, made me think about how the gender of the author plays into this. I took a gender studies class last year, and in it we talked about whether there is an inherently masculine or feminine way to write, and if you would be able to discern the gender of a writer based purely on his or her prose. For instance, in the case of novels with a third person omniscient narrator, does the gender of the writer color what gender we think of the narrator as being? Can male writers accurately depict a female voice, and vice versa? I’m not sure that I actively think about how the gender of the author affects how we view the narrator or the overall tone or voice of the novel, but I think it’s interesting regardless and I do wonder if these things subconsciously affect how we read novels.