Introduction

High fantasy fiction is full of chivalrous warriors, fantastical magic, divine monarchs, and an evil that foils the heroic protagonist. Most high fantasy fiction is set in a medieval landscape, along with the governing law and technology of the era, this literature adopts the historical ideology about race, religion, gender, and more. More so than other genres, high fantasy fiction seems to follow stricter gender roles than other genres. This seems to be the case for the exposition of many high fantasy fiction novels; as the characters go on their journey, they slowly break gender stereotypes.

In Naomi Novik’s Uprooted and Taran Matharu’s The Novice, both protagonists follow their gender roles in the exposition of the story. The purpose of this essay is to examine how is gender conveyed in the grammar of the story? I will examine the introduction of both stories because as aforementioned, gender roles are more strictly enforced in the exposition. There are a few elements of Novik’s Uprooted and Matharu’s The Novice to be considered before examining the grammar for gender roles. The first is that Novik’s work is intended for an older audience than Matharu’s whose novel is either considered Middle Grade or YA depending on the seller.  The second is that Novik’s work is written in the first person while Matharu’s is in the third person. Both point-of-views have their respective limitations and therefore will not be compared, but will be considered in the author’s ability to evoke gender roles through grammar.

To start with, I want to lay out the beliefs of how gender is performed in prose. When writing a male protagonist, the male is typically concerned more with the present, the tangible world, and the action taking place in front of him. While male prose can be descriptive, the use of description is more informative (need-to-know) than it is explanatory (what you might need to know). When writing a female protagonist, a female is typically concerned with the context both material and immaterial of a situation she faces. Female prose has a tendency to be wordy and lengthy, the description is very much explanatory.

Both authors’ style and grammatical choices reveal how their protagonists perform their gender. By contrasting one author’s choices to show gender, the other author’s gendered grammar is reciprocally revealed.

Phrases

Matharu masterfully uses verb and noun phrases to create a gendered grammar. Matharu arranges his sentences in such a way that the emphasis is on the verbs—the action that is taking place. In the sentence,

“The young elk had just finished rubbing its antlers against a tall pine, scraping the soft velvet that coated them to leave the sharp tines beneath (Matharu 1).”

Matharu uses a gerund, which functions as nouns, conjunctively. In doing so, he has changed the weight of the verb and gave it more emphasis by doing so. The rhetorical effect of a noun is that it has greater importance than the verb, after all, a verb needs to be acted on by a noun. However, Matharu places emphasis on the verbs, the action of the text, which can arguably be considered masculine to do so. Additionally, the number of verb phrases Matharu utilizes is greater than Novik’s. Phrases like “would go hungry,” “was already running,” “had just finished” are more lengthy than Novik's use of shorter, simple verbs. This really allows the readers to linger and experience the verb longer than they would with Novik’s text.

In terms of noun phrases, Matharu uses more than Novik does. This is, however, because Novik creates description through the number of adverbial and adjectival clauses in her writing. Whereas Matharu relies on the simpler construction of noun phrases to serve as descriptions. The example above reveals 5 noun phrases: The young elk, its antlers, a tall pine, the soft velvet, and the sharp tines. Admittedly, this is more so because Matharu’s work is intended for a younger audience than Novik’s, but this device also reveals how Fletcher, the protagonist, performs his gender. One of the paraments I set up for male characters that perform their gender and fit the mold of hegemonic masculinity, is that their description is more need-to-know than explanatory. Similarly, it seems that Fletcher is only providing the most relevant details, in a succinct and precise manner which gives the prose a more masculine feel.

Clauses

If we follow the expectations of hegemonic femininity that women are more expressive and more explanatory than men, then Novik’s protagonist Agnieszka certainly performs her gender. Novik’s sentence constructions are more complex than Matharu’s; her use of adverbial clauses and adjectival clauses reveals how her protagonist performs her gender. Matharu builds his description with a strong noun and verb phrases. Novik, on the other hand, excels at constructing adverbial and adjectival clauses to provide a description. Novik’s device is, of course, more complex than Matharu’s due to the older intended audience, but it also successfully highlights Agnieszka’s femininity.  See the passage below:

“Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through.  (Novik 1).”

There are two adjectival clauses and one adverbial clause in this passage. The adjectivals, “he takes,” and “from travelers passing through,” reveal a lot about Agnieszka. The first adjectival, which contains a silent “that he takes,” speaks to Agnieszka’s animosity towards the Dragon, almost as if it was pertinent to include that detail. This adjectival is followed by the adverbial clause “no matter what stories…;” the relative pronoun what marks this clause as an adverbial. The sentence could just as easily have been written with a preposition like despite or in spite of, the fact that it is adverbial shows Agnieszka being expressive and explanatory—after all the key to a great story is in the details. The same can be said of the adjectival “from travelers passing through;” it is already indicated in the adverbial clause that the stories are being spread by outsiders, here Agnieszka insists they are just travelers. These adverbials and adjectivals answer questions of who, what, where, when, and why. In essence, they are explanatory, as opposed to Matharu’s noun and verb phrases which are straight, need-t0-know, description.

Stylistic Devices

It is remarkable how different the continuity and flow of the two pieces are. Rhythmically, Novik’s work is more complex than Matharu’s. Novik alternates between two, three, and single-clause sentences. The pattern isn’t very rigid nor strictly enforced, which in turn creates a smoother rhythm. The smooth rhythm is achieved by Novik’s preference for coordinating conjunctions to connect her clauses.

“Her clothes are too fine and she talks like a courtier and she’s been living alone with a man for ten years, so of course she’s been ruined, even though the girls all say he never puts a hand on them (Novik 1).”

These conjunctions set the clauses as equals and therefore don’t stop or introduce a pause in the prose. I would argue that the power structure created by using coordinating conjunctions, as opposed to Matharu’s preference for gerunds, is feminine in nature. This passage also shows how Novik creates rhythm with repetition. The independent clauses connected by coordinating conjunctions are fairly equal in length and weighed the same due to the conjunctions. The flowing rhythm here allows the reader to become immersed in Agnieszka’s thoughts, and by applying the adverbial clause (“...even though...”) and the appositive (“...so of course…”), we can once again gleam into her expressive nature.

By contrast, Matharu’s sentences mostly follow a two-clause pattern with an occasional third. Originally, I assumed that the shorter sentence prose style would create a faster rhythm, but conversely, Matharu’s stylistic variations slow the pace of the prose and stress the verbs. The reader is meant to pause and absorb the action. Matharu’s use of cleft sentences, in particular, slows down the pace of the story.

“The thick coat would do well when the fur traders came by, especially as it was now winter. It would probably make at least five shillings. The antlers were in good condition, if a little small, they might fetch four shillings if he was lucky. It was the meat he craved the most, gamy red venison that would drip sizzling fat into his cooking fire (Matharu 1).”

This is the final passage of Matharu’s prose that was examined for this analysis and contains the most abundant use of cleft sentences. Cleft-sentences control where the stress of a sentence which, in Matharu’s case, is the content immediately following the verb. In the sentence, “It would probably make at least five shillings,” everything before the verb is less important than the outcome: FIVE shillings. This is an end-focus sentence; the author intentionally wants the reader to pay attention to the verb and the outcome. Another rhetorical effect of employing it-cleft sentences is using the pronoun “it.” This pronoun inherently draws a reader's attention to the content before it so that they know what “it” entails.  The cleft sentences force readers to pause and reorient themselves to wherever the author is directing their attention—effectively slowing the rhythm of the prose. This dominating directing of attention is historically thought of as a masculine trait.

Conclusion

The rhetorical effects of grammar are profound. It is both invisible and omnipresent in prose. It influences so much about the way we read and interpret a text, but by nature, it is invisible to us. When I began this course, I was baffled by the idea that grammar was gendered. We are drilled to learn proper grammar from a young age. So I understand the necessity and importance of basic grammatical structures like proper tense, agreement, and correctness. Somewhere along the way, I developed the idea that grammar was an unbiased, neutrally governing system that presided over language. That, of course, is not true. Taran Matharu’s controlled grammatical choice placed weight on the action-packed verbiage—a masculine trait if there ever was one. Naomi Novik’s lengthy clauses and descriptive prose drew out Agnieszka’s femininity by drawing readers closer to her psyche and letting them experience Agnieszka's keen observations— being female myself, I cannot deny that this is a feminine trait I am guilty of as well. Grammar has rules. But a true writer can produce remarkable words within the confines of those rules. Having done this research, I cannot say that grammar is gendered as so much as I can say grammar can show gender performance.