Lanser begins by admitting that feminism and narratology would seem to be strange bed-fellows, the one being "impressionistic, evaluative and political" (610), the other being "scientific, descriptive and non-ideological" (610). Indeed, she admits that "no contemporary theory . . . has exerted so little influence on feminist theory as formalist-structuralist narratology" (611). Lanser posits that there are many reasons for this distrust of narratology on the part of feminism:

• the complex and alienating vocabulary of narratology,
• the distrust of binaristic thinking to which Structuralism is prone,
• the fact that "no work in the field of narratology has taken gender into account" (612),
• the fact that narratologists have based their theories on the study of men’s texts as a result of which the "masculine text stands for the universal text" (612), and
• the fact that structuralist narratology has "suppressed the representational aspects of fiction and emphasised the semiotic" (613) (this tendency being related to a predisposition to "isolate texts from the context of their production and reception), while feminist criticism is predicated upon the view that "narrative texts . . . are profoundly . . . referential . . . in their representations of gender relations" (613), hence their concern with characterisation in particular.

Lanser’s goal here (see also her The Narrative Act), however, is to ask whether

feminist criticism, and particularly the study of narratives by women, might benefit from the methods and insights of narratology and whether narratology, in turn, might be altered by the understandings of feminist criticism and the experience of women’s texts. (611)

Lanser’s point is that "until women’s writings, questions of gender, and feminist points of view are considered, it will be impossible to even know the deficiencies of narratology" (612).

Lanser proposes that a feminist narratology would begin "with the recognition that revision of a theory’s premisses and practices is legitimate and desirable" (614). There are some elements of narrative which might not be affected by a consideration of gender (e.g. the passage of time), but others would be, Lanser argues, some of which she goes on to identify, such as voice and plot. She argues that a feminist narratology would synthesise the mimetic with the semiotic, and seek to study narrative "in relation to a referential context that is simultaneously linguistic, literary, historical, biographical, social, and political" (614). In short, the "valuable and impressive" (614) work already done in the field would benefit from a "critique and supplement in which feminist questions were understood to contribute to a richer, more useful, and more complete narratology" (614). In turn, a "re-formed narratology" (614) would "provide invaluable methods for textual analysis" (614) and thereby "clarify other, relevant issues and provide insights which otherwise remain vague" (Bal qtd. in Lanser, 614). Last but not least, a feminist narratology might answer the question whether there is such a thing as a distinctively feminine form of writing, so-called ‘écriture feminine.’

Using a letter entitled "Female Ingenuity" that appeared in a nineteenth century anthology called Atkinson’s Casket to ground her claims and utilising categories drawn from Gerard Genette’s seminal study Narrative Discourse in particular, Lanser argues that there are three areas in which a narratology revised from a feminist perspective might make useful contributions:

• Voice: a "comprehensive theory of voice" (625) which would develop a "framework for describing the elements that constitute polyphony and would formulate a linguistically based theory of narrative tone" (625);
• Context: a grasp of the "rhetorical context of narrative--its generic status and the public or private level of the narration" (625); and
• Plot: a re-examination of "theories of plot and story" (625) in order to "find alternatives to the notion of plot as active acquisition or solution and to incorporate the plot that may be generated by the relationship between narrator and narratee" (625).

As Genette points out, narratives often have several levels, each giving rise to a different voice. In the letter in question, Lanser identifies a surface level, a sub-text and even a third narrative level:

The [surface] text designed for the husband conceals an undertext (the text designed for the [female] confidante), but the undertext, in turn, creates a new reading of the surface text and hence a third text designed . . . for yet another addressee. This third text is the one constituted by the public ‘display-text’ that is the letter as it appeared in Atkinson’s Casket. Its addressee is the literary reader; she is neither the duped male nor the sister-confidante but the unidentified public narratee of either sex who can see beyond the immediate context of the writer’s epistolary circumstance to read the negative discourse as covert cultural analysis. (619)

Narratives, from this point of view, are "polyphonic" (617), or multi-voiced, a term which she borrows from Mikhail Bakhtin. Narrative tone is, she argues, "in part a function of the relationship" (617) between the different levels of the narrative as a result of which there is a relationship between the judgement that a given text may express and the language in which it is expressed.

Arguing that "Genette’s notion of levels provides a precise way of speaking about such embedded narratives" (619), Lanser suggests that it is possible to think of these three narrative levels as extradiegetic, intradiegetic, and metadiegetic. ‘Extradiegetic narrators’ are most often synonymous with "author-narrators" (619), ‘intradiegetic’ and ‘metadiegetic narrators’ with characters such as Rochester in Jane Eyre who tell stories within the text and address a narratee. 

Lanser contends that this schema of Genette’s should be complemented by her distinction between "public and private narration" (620), a distinction important for women writers especially at this time. By ‘public narration,’ Lanser means "narration (implicitly or explicitly) addressed to a narratee who is external . . . to the textual world and who can be equated with a public readership" (620). By ‘private narration,’ she means narration addressed to an "explicitly designated narratee who exists only within the textual world" (620). The former evokes a "direct relationship between the reader and the narratee and clearly approximates most closely the non-fictional author-reader relationship" (620), while in the latter the "reader’s access is indirect, as it were ‘through’ the figure of a textual persona" (620). This distinction is important for the study of women’s writing, according to Lanser, because traditionally women were not forbidden from writing per se but from writing for a public audience. By supplementing structuralist narratology with such additions, Lanser hopes to stress the "difference between purely formal and contextual approaches to meaning in narrative" (621). Her point is, like that of Speech-Act theorists, that the "minimal unit of discourse" (621) is "not the sentence but the production of the sentence" (621).

With regard to the question of plot, Lanser does not proclaim herself to be an authority but argues that women’s narratives are often described as ‘plotless,’ i.e. predominantly static by contrast to men’s narratives. Traditionally, plots are seen as structured in terms of "units of anticipation and fulfilment or problem and solution" (623). This definition assumes that

textual actions are based on the (intentional) deeds of protagonists; they assume a power, a possibility, that may be inconsistent with what women have experienced both historically and textually, and perhaps incompatible even with women’s desires. (623)

Such male-oriented schemas define plot as a "discourse of male desire recounting itself through the narrative of adventure, project, enterprise, and conquest" (623). As a result, conventional, masculinist definitions of plot are not applicable to either women’s experiences or writing as result of which a "radical revision in theories of plot" (624) is necessary.

Lanser argues, however, that there is another level to narratives written by all persons but which may be particularly relevant to women’s experience: the

act of writing becomes the fulfilment of desire, telling becomes the single predicated act, as if to tell were to resolve, to provide closure. Récit and histoire, rather than being separate elements, converge, so that telling becomes integral to the working out of story. Communication, understanding, being understood, becomes not only the objective of the narration but the act that can transform . . . the narrated world. In a universe where waiting, inaction, reception predominate, and action is only minimally possible, the narrative act itself becomes the source of possibility. (624)

There is, in short, a "plot behind women’s ‘plotless’ narrative, the additional plot of sharing an experience so that the listener’s life may complete the writer’s tale" (624-625).