If on a winter's night a traveler Gender Quotes

The speaker of this passage draws a connection between your expectation as a reader and the manly expectation that comes with hearing that there's a lone woman in a room full of men. In this instance, Calvino sets up a dynamic that will pop up a bunch of times throughout the novel, showing the male reader's eye turning a woman into a sexual object. As a male reader (like it or not), you come to the book with certain expectations, and these expectations become especially strong when a female presence starts to "take shape on the written page."

As you wonder about Professor Uzzi-Tuzii's relationship with Ludmilla, you begin to realize that your attraction to her is similar to your attraction to the female characters in the books you've been trying to read. Hmmm. Also, check out how the passage refers to women as shadows, suggesting that it is their evasiveness that makes them so desirable to you. Calling them shadows, however, also happens to rob women of their humanity.

Sure, Lotaria is a foil to the "innocent" reader, Ludmilla. But the book gives a view of Lotaria's feminist politics that is pretty stinkin' critical, lumping these politics into a pile of agenda-driven reading practices that just end up ruining everyone's enjoyment of things. The concern about academic reading often comes up in instances when Calvino takes jabs at feminism. The book strongly suggests that readers, and particularly female readers, should remain "shadows." Those who are too vocal, Calvino portrays as angry and annoying.

Here, we're reading from the novel called Without fear of wind or vertigo. A woman named Irina grabs a gun, and after saying that she feels tempted to kill herself, aims it at the two men near her. She's making a statement that is beyond feminist, saying that women should rule the world rather than being equal with men.

Since this passage is in one of the fictional novels, it doesn't adopt that same scathing tone toward Irina's feminism as it does for Lotaria's. So is Calvino suggesting that being feminist is okay, as long as it never trespasses on the sacred ground of "innocent" reading pleasure?

In Looks down in the gathering shadow, the main character, Ruedi the Swiss, reflects on his young lover, a former enemy turned accomplice. Ruedi believes that Bernadette hasn't just sided with him because she loves him, but because she finds him to be an improvement on her former love interest. Since this is a novel embedded in another novel, we can't necessarily pinpoint a view on gender. But what is clear is that, like all of the other novels that hope to elicit our desire to read on, this one tries to get our attention by making a woman into a sexual object for a manly protector.

Ladies and books—the two best things on this planet, apparently. If on a winter's night a traveler draws a direct connection between the desire you have to finish the books you've started and the desire you have for Ludmilla. As the novel unfolds, you sense that Calvino is actually talking about a general form of human desire; the sex drive and the drive to keep reading are just particular cases of it. It's all connected to the thrill of pursuing something, and the satisfaction you think you will feel when this pursuit is over. You know very little about Ludmilla, and that's exactly what makes you attracted to her. Similarly, you know little about the books you've started reading, and that's what makes you want to keep reading. Isn't it all so tantalizing?

By watching the woman through his spyglass, Flannery is basically doing the same thing that you're doing with Ludmilla throughout this book: turning a woman into an object and fantasizing about how you'll be able to fulfill your frustrated desires by owning her. Great!

Notice, though, that Flannery's gaze is completely one-way. The woman likely doesn't know she's being watched—and that's actually part of the reason Flannery watches her. He wants to see her natural reactions to the book she's reading so he can try to write something that can give her the same pleasure. But what goes missing in all of this is the fact that Flannery's acting like a creep. In this sense, it can sometimes be hard to tell if Calvino is actually poking fun at Flannery's peeping-Tom habit or actually celebrating it as a metaphor for the tortured writer.

Finally, the book seems to call you (and itself) out on all the sex that's been going on. The narrator literally asks you "how much is enough?" The moot answer might be that just as there is never an end to reading, there is never an end to this kind of sexual appetite (at least for men). That said, Calvino might also, for the first time, be offering you the possibility of sexual restraint.

In the second-to-last of Calvino's fictional novels, the pursuit of women reaches its most aggressive level as Nacho tries to force himself on Amaranta, a young girl who might be his sister. As if this scene weren't enough, Nacho tries the exact same thing only a few pages later with another young girl named Jacinta, who might also be his sister. Blah.

Male sexual aggression toward women is a part of this book from its earliest stages, and it reaches an almost absurd level in this later novel. But in these scenes, it still isn't clear if Calvino is using Nacho to criticize the expectations of an average male reader or simply catering to these expectations when it comes to sex and women. Maybe Calvino thinks that if he gives you enough sex, you'll go along with his more challenging points about the reading process. It's best to hope not, but it's uncomfortably vague at moments like this.

Congratulations! You're married! Yep—in the book's final scene, you discover that you and Ludmilla have gotten married. Your marriage symbolizes that you've come to accept Ludmilla's open-minded approach to reading as better than your "normal" approach, and this acceptance has made you and Ludmilla into "Reader and Reader."

Up to this point, the story has always referred to you as the Reader and Ludmilla as the Other Reader. The phrasing of this final scene, though, demonstrates that you and Ludmilla have become equal, and that rather than having two distinct styles of reading, your approaches to books are parallel. Your education as a reader is complete, and Calvino finally allows you to enjoy a sense of closure in your story, uniting you with the woman you love.