#51 = Volume 17, Part 2 = July 1990
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NOTE
Elizabeth Cummins
The Land-Lady's Homebirth: Revisiting Ursula K. Le
Guin's Worlds
Abstract.--Ursula K. Le Guin's latest collection of non-fiction, Dancing
at the Edge of the World (1989), appears to be a record of change, of the birth of a
more outspoken, self-critical womanself. However, a reconsideration of Le Guin's fiction
about her four primary worlds (Orsinia, Earthsea, the Hainish universe, and the future
American West Coast) reveals that this woman author who has attached such significance to
the connection between place and person--this land-lady--has been undergoing changes of
mind all along. Furthermore, these changes are particularly evident in the fiction about
her home--the fiction about Orsinia, the Central European home of her parents' families,
and the fiction about the future West Coast where she actually resides. In her home-world
settings, she breaks through cultural assumptions about gender, society, and narration.
Reading her fiction world by world allows us to follow a journey in which Le Guin has
periodically come home to give birth to a new sense of herself as writer and as woman.
Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis
The Marriage of Inner and Outer Space in Doris Lessing's
Shikasta
Abstract.--The structure of Shikasta not only conveys Lessing's
increasingly comprehensive view of reality; it also makes for a reading experience that
can both educate and change her readers. She presents two different, complementary
perspectives on her fictional world. One, the "inner-space vision," centers on Shikasta (a skewed version of Earth) and deals with the inner growth and development of
its inhabitants. The other centers on the planet Canopus and deals with its longer range,
more all-encompassing view which includes Shikasta and other planets and empires--the
"outer-space vision." The interaction between these two perspectives--the effect of
each on the other--is what determines the meaning of the book. Each perspective has one
main narrative voice (although that voice is embedded in numerous other accounts, reports,
and histories): Johor's in the outer-space vision, Rachel Sherban's in that of inner
space. While Rachel fails to understand and accept Canopean help in the form of her
brother George (the incarnation of Johor on Shikasta), the book's analysis of her
inability to escape her distracting emotions and to listen and respond to George's words
leads the reader to consider other alternative attitudes and modes of behavior.
In the outer-space perspective of the first half of the book, the gloomy perception of
Shikastans as helpless victims of a cosmic accident is found mainly in Johor's memories of
his first two visits. During his third visit, his reports gradually move from cold,
impersonal accounts of terrorists to more tolerant reports, which also better capture the
atmosphere and "feel" of Shikasta. Furthermore, the reader gradually becomes aware that
this change in attitude on the part of Johor is reflected not only in the altered style of
his reportage but also in the whole structure of the book, which is a tribute to the
Canopeans' new understanding of Shikasta. The archivists who are responsible for compiling
Shikasta have not only recognized the new perception of Shikasta embodied in Johor's
reports; they have also added to them the accounts of other agents and the long final
section that reveals--through Rachel's diaries and other documents--how Shikastans
themselves perceive their world and relate to George Sherban. Ideally, by the end of
Shikasta the reader has a new understanding of the interrelationship among all peoples and
the connection between a deep knowledge of the self and of the cosmos.
Robin Roberts
Post-Modernism and Feminist Science Fiction
Abstract.--Feminist SF of the 1980s can be discussed most usefully in the
terms of post-structuralism and post-modernism. Post-structuralist feminist SF
problematizes language in respect both to its acquisition and the gendered and
hierarchical structures embedded in it. Many works of feminist SF published in the 1980s
focus on language and reveal a post-structuralist sensibility to the power and
contradiction inherent in communication. Most significantly, their authors criticize the
use of language as a means to hierarchy and domination. At the same time, they use
language to expose hierarchies of dominance embedded in the practice of science.
The range of post-modernist elements in contemporary feminist SF is considerable; some
texts contain few, while others are permeated with them. The first category comprises
texts containing trenchant feminist analysis but relying only tangentially on a
post-modern sensibility toward language. Joan Slonczewski's A Door into Ocean (1986)
and Sheila Finch's Triad (1986) can be considered representative of this type,
sharing an emphasis on language, science, and a masculine-feminine societal conflict. A
second group of texts develop post-modernist aesthetics further through the form of the
books themselves. Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home (1985) and, to a
lesser degree, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1986) exhibit a non-linearity and
self-reflexiveness that together effect a breakdown of traditional distinctions, including
generic ones. Le Guin's work in particular stretches the shape and definition of what is
called fiction, and does so to criticize the narrow-mindedness of patriarchal Western
culture. Her text is the most thoroughly post-modernist of the four because of the way in
which it radically subverts conventional novelistic structure.
Kathleen L. Spencer
Rescuing the Female Child: The Fiction of Joanna Russ
Abstract.--Whereas, in a patriarchal culture, stories about a boy's maturation
process typically emphasize separation from parental figures, stories about a girl's
maturation tend to focus on her sexual initiation: his story is about individuation, hers
about a new sort of intimacy and a merging of identity with her mate. But because
feminists define female maturity in different terms, they need a different kind of story.
In the fiction of Joanna Russ we find such a story: in the repeated narrative pattern Russ
herself calls "the rescue of the female child." What the child is rescued from is
patriarchy. In Russ's fiction, the rescuer is always a middle-aged woman (35-45 years
old); the child is either about 12 (i.e., on the edge of puberty) or, more commonly, about
17 (on the edge of sexual awakening). There are five stages of this rescue, increasing in
complexity: (1) the physical removal of the child from a life-threatening situation in a
patriarchal culture; (2) the rescue of the child from the psychological crippling of a
culture which devalues her as female; (3) the rescue from "compulsory
heterosexuality"; (4) the rescue of the self, as the older woman in some kind of
time-loop goes back to help her younger self rebel against or survive patriarchal
restrictions; and (5) the rescue of the mother, accompanied by some significant gesture of
reconciliation with the woman who had earlier been seen only as the teacher and enforcer
of patriarchy's limits. All of these stages seem to be important parts of the feminist
awakening, and most can be more easily imagined and more fully represented in the mode of
SF than in realistic fiction.
The author's conclusion connects this pattern with the developmental theories of Carol
Gilligan and Nancy Chodorow as a way to further illuminate its significance for feminist
scholars and readers.
Nancy Steffen-Fluhr
The Case of the Haploid Heart: Psychological Patterns in
the Science Fiction of Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr)
Abstract.--Alice Sheldon's SF stories exhibit a psychological pattern in which
images of symbiosis are juxtaposed with images of extreme separation and estrangement.
This pattern is, in part, projective, linked to the unresolved gender conflicts in
Sheldon's childhood--and especially to her ambivalent relationship with her mother,
against whom she defined herself. The violent tensions in Sheldon's SF plots thus express
not only her overt sexual politics, but also a psychomachical struggle--the ongoing drama
of a personality at war with itself. Sheldon's yearning for integration, intimacy, and
surcease is evident throughout her work; but that wish is often defeated by an equal and
opposite fear of closeness, dependency, and helplessness...a fear of the loss of Self in
the Other. Whatever their initial trajectories, her stories tend to become vicious circles
which serve to validate an elemental self-division--the no-win war of Me against Her.
Sheldon's feminism is thus subtly limited. Although she empathetically represents women as
alienated, "toothless" victims, she is far less able to imagine characters who are
free and whole female selves. Nevertheless, her work constitutes a precious achievement.
She was never able to transcend her private pain and inner conflicts; but she was able to
express that pain and conflict in precise and memorable terms. And in that emotional
authenticity lies her enduring power.
Hoda M. Zaki
Utopia, Dystopia, and Ideology in the Science Fiction of
Octavia Butler
Abstract.--Octavia Butler advances notions of human nature and politics which
include the belief that human nature is violent and biologically determined. For her,
politics is incapable of improving the human condition. Her works are especially utopian
when she describes alien societies. The ideological elements in her works link her to many
other 1970s' feminist SF works which, although utopian, are essentially liberal. Butler
shares with them similar views on human nature, views which are rooted in an ideology of
gender difference developed in the late 19th century by opponents to women's equality. Her
works, however, contain one element of racial estrangement not found in most SF and
feminist SF: fully developed characters of color. This inclusion at once enriches and
rebukes liberal feminist ideology and SF.
Jane Donawerth
Lilith Lorraine: Feminist Socialist Writer in the Pulps
Abstract.--Mary Wright, who published two feminist socialist utopias under the
name Lilith Lorraine in Gernsback publications, offers proof both of women's authorial
presence in SF's "Golden Age" and of the continuance of a feminist utopian tradition
through the 1920s and into the 1930s. A poet, editor, teacher, radio lecturer, and traveler, Lorraine published poetry and SF under several pen names, some of them male. In
The Brain of the Planet, a dime novel published in 1929, Lorraine describes a
socialist utopia developing under the influence of a radical professor's thought-wave
machine. In "Into the 28th Century," she imagines a future feminist socialist utopia
resulting from a war between the generations. Her works are important to historians of SF
for her communitarian Christian socialism, her feminist analysis of the economics of
marriage, her presentation of an alternate technology of reproduction, her development of
the theme of mental telepathy, and her justification of racial prejudice in terms of a
science of eugenics.
.[A response by Eric Leif Davin appears in SFS
52 (November 1990).]
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