Little Lord Fauntleroy- male vs. female authorship

When it comes to authorship, it really shouldn’t make much of a difference if an author is male or female because it doesn’t change the actual text or the ideas being put forth through the text. Although the story is still the same, our analysis of the literature may change with information of whether the author it a girl or a boy. I think we all get in our mind what the author’s sex is based on how the story is written and what it is about. Women tend to write more about relationships, love stories, and things women could relate to while men seem to write more action and heroic tales. That is the stereotype at least, and some of the works we have written fall under these categories, like Washington Irving, a male, writing “Rip Van Winkle” about a crazy adventure of waking up after 20 years of sleeping and “The Wide Wide World” being written by Susan Warner, a woman, which is about domestic life and involves many emotions and a whole lot of crying. We have come to expect these different writing styles by men and women, and so it screws us up and we don’t know exactly what to think of writings that are exceptions to this general rule. It makes me think of Nicolas Sparks that writes all the love novels like The Notebook. It’s not that guys cannot write great love stories, it’s just more uncommon. Out of the works we’ve read I think the second half of “A Whisper in the Dark” seems like something that a man would be more apt to write but Louisa May Alcott is a woman.

In Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy, I got the impression that the author was a girl by the wording like “he was so beautiful to look at that he was quite a picture” (Burnett 445). I didn’t picture a male talking about a little boy and describing him as “beautiful,” so it didn’t surprise me too much that Burnett was a woman. Ceddie seems a little girly to me too, with his long hair and clothes, and it seems less likely that a male would have made a boy character like this.

I think the main thing that changes when we find out that an author is male or female is our expectations of what the story will be about. I think that’s one reason why a man might go under a woman’s name or vice versa during this time period. People want to read a domestic fiction written by a woman who would seem to have more experience with the home life they are writing about while a man would have more experience about the outside world and people would be interested in what adventures they could come up with based on that experience. If we can’t tell if it’s a girl or a boy writing the story then there seems to be an even playing field where the author has no expectations they are set under and they can write what they want. The audience might not trust the work as much, however, because they would not have the additional information that is helpful in analyzing the literature.