Sleeping With the Boss: Female Subjectivity and Narrative Pattern in Robert Penn Warren

by Lucy Ferriss

To her self-posed questions “What is a woman’s narrative?” and “Why Warren?” Lucy Ferriss responds with an acutely perceptive examination that is groundbreaking in two regards. Sleeping with the Boss opens up the feminist critical project by showing that author gender has no bearing on the creation of feminine-structured narrative. Moreover, by exposing a considerable “female consciousness” in the major fictional works of Robert Penn Warren, it departs dramatically from previous criticism of Warren.

Ferriss, a novelist as well as a critic, expands on narrative poetics to suggest that female subjectivity is the central concept in defining a woman’s narrative. Specifically, the subjective voice of a female character is present to such a degree that the traditional structures of masculine narrative (described as linear, forward moving, and authoritative) can no longer hold. Leapfrogging over existing feminist theory, she asserts that such female consciousness may permeate the writing of men as well as women.

Within Warren’s traditional masculine narrative style, Ferriss detects the complicating presence of female voice, with its potential to alter the focus and direction of the plot. As she demonstrates, the degree to which Warren distances himself from or steps inside his female characters’ consciousness varies enormously across his career. Still, his novels reveal the consistent pattern of a major woman character in a liaison with a wealthy or powerful man; those sexual relationships, Ferriss maintains, are pivotal in establishing female personae whose subjective effect on the narrative disturbs or overturns conventional readings of the novels’ meaning. For example, she presents a startlingly subversive analysis of the character Amantha Starr ( Band of Angels ), heretofore viewed as a simpering victim by critics.

In addition to nine of Warren’s novels, Ferriss critiques his book-length poem, Brother to Dragons, which in the powerful voice of Lucy Lewis exhibits the moral and narrative limitations of the male speakers even as that female voice is itself thwarted and cut off. She also explores Warren’s frequent motif of the female empty-handed gesture, reading in it the author’s own assumption of the feminine perspective by expressing his abdication of narrative authority and ambivalence toward ascribing meaning.

Sleeping with the Boss represents a new generation of Warren scholarship, revitalizing the poet-novelist’s complex oeuvre in light of contemporary concerns. It provokes a radical rethinking of some of the plot elements taken for granted by other critics of Warren’s work and offers a wide range of new ways to encounter his female characters.

156 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1997

About the author

"Vivid, compelling, as ineluctable as a Greek tragedy." So writes Claire Messud (THE WOMAN UPSTAIRS) of Lucy Ferriss's forthcoming novel, A SISTER TO HONOR.

Born in St. Louis, Lucy has lived on both coasts, in the middle, and abroad. Her recent novel THE LOST DAUGHTER was a Book of the Month pick and a Barnes & Noble bestseller. Her memoir UNVEILING THE PROPHET was named Best Book of the Year by the St. Louis Riverfront Times; her collection LEAVING THE NEIGHBORHOOD won the Mid-List First Series Award. She lives with Don Moon in the Berkshires and in Connecticut, where she is Writer-in-Residence at Trinity College. She has two strong sons and abiding passions for music, politics, travel, tennis, and wilderness. To research A SISTER TO HONOR, she traveled to the northwest provinces of Pakistan and came to know its people, their hopes and their challenges both at home and in America.