SOURCE: Durham, Joyce R. “Anne Tyler's Vision of Gender in Saint Maybe.” Southern Literary Journal 31, no. 1 (fall 1998): 143-52.

In the following essay, Durham explores the shifting gender roles in Saint Maybe.

In a 1982 lecture at Waterloo University on “Writing the Male Character,” Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood suggested to male and female writers alike: “Maybe it's time to do away with judgement by role-model and bring back The Human Condition, this time acknowledging that there may in fact be more than one of them” (422). Over a decade has passed since this indictment of gender-related role models, and certainly the study of sexual stereotyping and gender shifts in American literature is no longer a new pursuit. In a chapter called “Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Fiction” from Feminine Fictions (1989), Patricia Waugh calls for a more complicated analysis of gender stereotypes in today's culture that will ultimately allow both men and women to...