[Work: The Woman who Walked into Doors, Roddy Doyle, 1996]
Not Himself:

Roddy Doyle’s The Woman who Walked into Doors and the Ethics of Representation

 

Introduction:

Roddy Doyle Sketch by M.R.P. - The Woman who Walked into Doors - representation abuse poverty

Sketch by M.R.P.

The Woman who Walked into Doors, written by Booker Award-winning Irish novelist Roddy Doyle, is a novel from 1996 with a strange pedigree. Its narrative began life as part of an award-winning 1994 television miniseries called Family, also written by Doyle. It was then partially ‘novelized’ to produce the work in question.

Despite being a novelization of a multimedia production—a strategy most well known for its overabundance of slapdash cash grabs—The Woman who Walked into Doors is an excellent novel. But its origin is not the subject of this article, and its quality is secondary to that subject; the subject of this article is the book’s representation of its narrator and protagonist, a working class woman who is abused by her husband, who cares deeply for her child, and who develops a drinking problem.

In particular, this article intends to consider a point of view which I have encountered over and over again in academic, professional, and casual discussions of different works of art. It is a point of view to which I am sympathetic, but with some serious reservations, and it is something that I can not help but think about when working on my own creative writing. It can be summed up relatively well as follows: ‘It is disingenuous or morally questionable for an artist to assume the perspective of a person with an identity the artist does not personally possess, especially when that identity is underprivileged, disadvantaged, or underrepresented in the artist’s culture.’ This is a delicate topic, and one I intend to give a fair consideration.

Continue reading

[Work: The Woman who Walked into Doors, Roddy Doyle, 1996]
Not Himself:

Roddy Doyle’s The Woman who Walked into Doors and the Ethics of Representation

was last modified: August 12th, 2022 by Daniel Podgorski