Anything she can do, would he do differently?

Though I apologize for stealing Barry’s quote from White Teeth, I think he touches on a very important topic with that particular scene of Alsana, Clara, and Neena sitting on the park bench discussing marriage. Appearing a few lines prior to Barry’s quote is the line, “The truth is, for a marriage to survive you don’t need all this talk, talk, talk…you do not want to know what is slimy underneath the bed and rattling in the wardrobe” (Smith 65). This message provides an easy transition into the following lines of Alsana, in which she states, “when you are from families such as ours you should have learned that silence, what is not said, is the very best recipe for family life” (65), which relates directly into both the Authorship and Feminist styles of criticism. As Showalter addresses in her work “Feminist criticism in the wilderness”, “Feminist criticism has gradually shifted its center from revisionary readings to a sustained investigation of literature by women. The second mode of feminist criticism engendered by this process is the study of women as writers, and its subjects are the history, styles, themes, genres, and structures of writing by women” (335). Within the work Zadie’s own undertones become hinted and suggested at, conveying her comments on the males and females in the British society. At the same time though, contrary to what it appears Barthes suggests, the “genius” of Zadie emerges as opposed to just the “performance” she gives, to which Barthes appears to suggest the opposite. My question is therefore, how would the story differ had the author been in fact a man writing on the same situations in the same time period?