How does The Wasp Factory deal with the issue of gender
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How does The Wasp Factory deal with the issue of gender?"
Throughout Iain Banks' novel The Wasp Factory, there is evidence of numerous references to the differences between the male and female genders. Along with the more obvious issue that Frank or Francis is in fact a girl and not male as both the character and the reader are led to believe for the majority of the novel, The Wasp Factory also contains many subtler and intriguing links to male and female character.
Perhaps the most symbolic and most prominent reference to gender and the differences in the expectations of men and women come from Banks' discussion of the ideas of certainty and uncertainty.
Chapter 12 of The Wasp Factory entitled "What happened to me" is an important expression of the way in which Francis interprets the events that have and may happen to her in the future. The final few paragraphs of "The Wasp Factory" on page 184 contain the quotation:
"I thought one door had snicked shut behind me years ago; in fact I was still crawling about the face. Now the door closes, and my journey begins."
This is a demonstration of how even though Francis believed that her certainty and destiny to spend her life as a male had been so strong and concrete for all of her life, it was possible that one moment in time could effectively reset the interpretations of previous events in life. As a male Francis had been certain of her life, of her actions and as shown above that her future had already been planned, the "door closing" on a set path like a wasp caught inside the Wasp Factory. Yet when the truth is revealed about Francis, the fact being that she is female and not male as she believed that uncertainty becomes a factor in her ideas...