SOURCE: Briganti, Chiara. “Mirrors, Windows and Peeping Toms: Women as the Object of Voyeuristic Scrutiny in Bernard Malamud's A New Life and Dubin's Lives.¹” Studies in American Jewish Literature 3 (1983): 151-65.

In the following essay, Briganti contends that women in Malamud's fiction generally exist only to provide the momentum or impetus for the male characters to reach self-knowledge.

It is generally acknowledged that it is through the abandonment of egocentrism that the protagonists of Malamud's novels arrive at self-definition. Any attempt to escape reality is doomed to failure and solipsism, and the individual who conjures up his own interior world condemns himself to impotence because he does not have a world to act in any more. Malamud's characters are presented in the act of self-creation which involves reconciliation with their own past and giving up false notions of freedom; they become accomplished individuals, with a commitment to a profound...