GENDER ROLES IN NUTSHELL: theory, concepts and

analysis.
Biological determinism, by definition, refers to the ”idea that all human behaviour is
innate, determined by genes, brain size, or other biological attributes.” It completely
disregards the role of social and cultural environment in influencing behaviours and
characteristics. This essentialist philosophical view uses the idea of ‘inherent’ characteristics
to account for male superiority and reflects the idea that men are naturally stronger, and
rational and thus inherently smarter than women, and a person is born either as a male or a
female only, with defined masculine and feminine characteristics.
In the introduction of Susan Speer’s book, Gender-talk, Feminism Discourse and
Conversation Analysis, she mentions that many feminists problematize essentialism on the
grounds that it sustains and reproduces ‘binary thinking’. Essentialist studies will
always support arguments that men and women are fundamentally different, because they
start from the assumption that the sex of the speaker both causes and accounts for
malefemale linguistic differences. In order to avoid this kind of circular reasoning, the
approach Speer adopts in her book is, by contrast, a constructionist one. In a
constructionist analysis, both sex and gender are treated as fluid accomplishments.
Gender is something one does rather than as something that one has. Researchers who
adopt a constructionist perspective focus on how gender identities are achieved, and treat
the coherence of gender as something which is produced and reproduced in the course of
social interaction.
But from reading Speer (2005) we learn that “From a
constructionist perspective, our gender identities are not ready made, nor are they ever
perfect or complete” So in order to be gendered as a woman or as a man we have to
continuously perform the given gender through a performative display of the characteristics
attributed to that gender. With this in mind, we may think that nowadays we have absolute
free will to choose how we want to be gendered and how we want to perform that election
but, unfortunately, society keeps imposing genders from an essentialist perspective. As
Speer (2005) said “statements of gender like ‘it’s a girl’ do not just describe a state of affairs.
They are also prescriptive: they bring into play a whole host of pre-existing and normative
ideas about what a girl is and how a girl
should behave, thus requiring the recipient to act in gender normative ways.”

In chapter 15 of the book, after the narrator has noticed a protuberance between
the legs, he questions the prototypicality of gender roles:

“No one exclaims at the moment of one’s dazzling coming-out, It’s a person! Instead: It’s a
girl, It’s a boy. Pink or blue – a minimal improvement on Henry Ford’s offer of cars of any
colour so long as they were black. Only two sexes. I was disappointed. If human bodies,
minds, fates are so complex, if we are free like no other mammal, why limit the range?”
 So from the moment someone is born with one biological sex or the other, they are
doomed to behave in certain way. But if you happen to be born as a “girl” the expectations
you will have to fulfill are much more constraining because in our society women are seen
as less intelligent, physically weaker, less aggressive, and more emotional and, of course,
women are supposed to be submissive to men and what they desire.
Throughout “Nutshell” we can find several instances of those gendered
expectations, particularly on Trudy, who has to bear on her shoulders all the expectations
that being a woman carries, having the unequal power relation that she has with her
husband, John, and with his lover, Claude, and the fact that she is pregnant but not so sure
if she wants to be a mother, the two more predominant examples of this:
● Power relations:
Power relations are not reducible to class relations. There are power relations
between social groupings and institutions and there are power relations
between women and men, between ethnic groupings, between young and
old, which are not specific to particular institutions. Power relations are
always relations of struggle. All social developments take place under
conditions of social struggle.
Fairclough suggests that power is exercised and enacted in discourse, and
also that there exist relations of power in and behind discourse. In both
cases, power is won, held and lost in social struggles.
Power in discourse refers to the fact that it is discourse itself the site of
power struggles. It is to do with powerful participants controlling and
constraining the contributions of non-powerful participants.

As Fairclough suggests, one characteristic of hidden power in written

discourse is the one-sidedness of it. As it usually happens whenever we are
confronted with a story,- and Nutshell is no exception- we are told a series of
events by a narrator whose point of view we have no option but to believe in.
What is more, the power exercised by the narrator may even make us take
sides with the baby and his father, without us being able to defy the truth as
it is presented. Also, who wouldn’t take the side of a baby? Mc Ewan plays
with our common shared knowledge. In our chauvinist society, it is not only
that men and women act in different ways, but also that they ought to do so.
To behave inappropriately for one’s gender is seen as sanctionable,
immoral or taboo, such as when Trudy drinks and acts as if she wasn’t
expecting a baby.

● Fairclough also points out that producers exercise power over the readers by
choosing what to say and how to say it. Power is also sometimes hidden in
face-to face discourse, as we can see in the following example from the novel
(Chp 1), in which we get to know about Trudy: “She’s been told many times
that she is beautiful, but she remains sceptical, which confers on her an
innocent power over men, so, my father told her one afternoon in the library.
 She replied that if this was true, it was a power she’d never looked for and
didn’t want. This was an unusual conversation for them and I listened
intently. My father, whose name is John, said that if he had such a power
over her or women in general, he couldn’t imagine giving it up. I guessed,
from the sympathetic wave motion which briefly lifted my ear from the wall,
that my mother had emphatically shrugged, as if to say, So men are different.
Who cares? Besides, she told him out loud, whatever power she was
supposed to have was only what men conferred in their fantasies.”
● When talking about power in Nutshell, it is also important to point out the
power relationship established between Claude and John. We see that
throughout the novel, they somehow fight for Trudy’s love, and Claude is
always presented as the winner in the dispute. He is a very wealthy man who
works as a property developer and owns a tower block in Cardiff, whereas
John is a poet without recognition, the only property he owns is his mother’s
mansion in which now Trudy lives, and besides all that, he suffers psoriasis,
which Trudy finds pretty disgusting. So, we can see that even though there is
a constant struggle for power, the power holder (Claude) will always win in a
capitalist world in which money and beauty are the things that matter.

Maternity

By virtue of their involvement in the biological reproduction of the species, in many

cultures, women are seen as closer to nature than men, on the other hand, men are
seen as closer to culture. Culture, in turn, is more highly valued by humans in
their efforts to distinguish themselves from the rest of the animal world. (John is a poet,
Claude is a wealthy man and Trudy is just a pregnant woman). These situations provide a
basis for the assertion of male superiority over women. This leads us to take into account
that both women and men have authority in the domestic sphere, but overwhelmingly men
have authority in the public sphere. Said asymmetry is based on women's reproductive
roles, which kept their activities tied to the domestic sphere. (Apparently Trudy doesn’t
have a job so she doesn’t have any other type of personal fulfillment but the pregnancy)

So, when taking into account gender roles in this novel, we see how ‘different’ they are from
the ones that are socially established. Susan A. Speer explains that in this society
motherhood is associated with ‘feminine fulfilment’. Even though this male definition is not
entirely false, since probably some women do feel that their goal in life is becoming a
mother, that is not the only meaning available. The problem appears because this
legitimized view of motherhood leaves women who feel differently aside, feeling
inadequate. We can compare this to the story narrated in Nutshell, which develops around
the life of a pregnant woman and her lover. In this novel, we can assume that Trudy does
not feel any kind of fulfilment with the idea of being a mother. She has other, ‘more
important’, things in her life to worry about, such as murdering her husband and getting his
money. So, we see how she puts herself aside from the socially established norm of enjoying
pregnancy and being a loving and caring mother. In fact, she doesn't even have a room
prepared for her unborn son, and she continues drinking alcohol.

An essentialist account of gender differences, with its binary thinking,

would explain that Trudy is expected to behave as a loving mother who
takes care of her unborn baby by not drinking alcohol because in our
culture that’s what mothers are supposed to do. But a contructionist
view, one which conceives gender as a complex social construct that
understands that gender is something people perform, do or accomplish,
would argue that Trudy, as a gendered subject continuously co-
constructing her gender, decided to avoid the performative display of
taking care of her unborn baby as an act of showing that that pregnancy
doesn’t fulfill her. It is an act of resistance to the iterability of how to
behave while pregnancy as an established norm of that culture. This
account still has some limitations, as it is a rather vague and abstract way
of accounting for the discursive construction of gender.

We can find examples of this in these passages taken from chapter 4:

“Nothing has changed on the balcony, except I find myself a tad drunker. As if to welcome
back, Trudy drains the bottle into her glass. The cubes have lost their cool, the wine is almost
warm, but she’s right, better to finish it now.” (p. 38)

“My mother is anxious to know. If she wasn’t drinking for two, if I wasn't sharing the load,
she’d be on the floor (…) My mother yelps as something crunches underfoot, we pitch and
yaw as she lunges at the banister.” (p. 38-39)

Another example can be found in chapter 13, when the narrator lets us know that:

“No preparations have been made for my arrival, no clothes, no furniture, no compulsive
nest-making. I’ve never been in a shop with my mother. The loving future is a fantasy.”
(p.131)