Houston’s main character has an active role. She is the one who searches for meaning, tries to understand the man she is in a relationship with, and looks for the answers to questions that bother her. The reader accompanies her in these explorations as a silent and invisible witness. In contrast, in Lessing’s work the sunbathing woman is a blank space. Everything we know about her is through the observations of men working on the roof adjoining hers and their discourses about her. She does not lead the narrative; instead her silence invites the reader to ask questions, understand and analyze the behavior of men. Through the narrative positions assumed by the two female characters, the reader is made aware of the different social positions and behaviors that define them. Houston portrays a woman whose views are shaped by social and cultural conditions according to which women “attract men by whose name she will be known, by whose status she will be defined” (Gilligan 396). Despite her intelligence, self-awareness and complete understanding of her situation, the main character of Houston’s work stays in the relationship with the man who “cannot speak the same language” with her, whose values differ from hers, and who is unfaithful to her (Houston 709). The hunter appeals to her primal urges that he embodies. His life and he himself is basic and simple, as her desires for protection, sexual pleasure and commitment are. She is longing for a commitment and commitment from the man she is involved with, because she is “threatened by separation,” and “comes to know herself through the relationships with others,” and because she needs to gain security (Gilligan 396). The male character, on another hand, tries to avoid binding himself in the relationship and therefore “forms the sentences so it will be impossible to tell if [the narrator] is included in his plans” (Ho...
