What a Strange World We Live In- "Woman on the Edge of Time" by Marge Piercy

Source: Wikipedia

Marge Piercy creates a detailed portrait of a poor minority female who is constantly trying and hoping for a better life that never comes. For most of her life, Connie has been oppressed in every way imaginable. She has suffered at the hands of male and  government institutions. She has never known real power, not even over her own body.

During her second incarceration in a mental institution, visits from a time traveler become more insistent. At first, Connie is convinced the traveler is in her imagination, but as the visits transport her to an androgynous utopia in the future, the legitimacy of the traveler is indisputable, and it is the present which seems more like a surreal nightmare.

Luciente is the traveler that shows Connie another world, a better world. Luciente is described as a male, at least in Connie’s eyes. From Luciente’s movements, confidence, and attitude, Connie is sure she is dealing with a man. She even forms the beginnings of romantic feelings for Luciente, but they fade after she discovers Luciente is actually a woman.

While visiting the future with her time-traveling friend, Connie is confronted with other non-traditional forms of society. For example, men can petition to be mothers. Children in the future are no longer born, they are grown. As such, babies are assigned to those that request them, and men commonly request to be mothers alongside women. Each child has three mothers (male or female), and is separated from their mothers at age twelve to foster independence.

Towns are kept small, so as to remain self-sustainable. A town models itself after past cultures of a certain time. The town Luciente is a part of follows the traditions of the Wampanoag Native Americans, and different races are purposefully bred, with racism having been bred out of human beings.

Sexually, Luciente and her friends are quite liberal. Homosexual relationships are normal, as are polyamorous or monogamous relationships. When Luciente is recalling her most passionate relationship, she tells Connie it was with a woman, a concept Connie cannot grasp.

The separation of gender, especially through the eyes of the lead female character Connie, are analyzed throughout the novel. The validity of power structures in society (like police, social workers, and doctors) are also questioned, as all the structures Connie encounters only take advantage of her position in society as a female, low-income, minority citizen.

The capitalist life style Connie is on the fringes of seems barbaric in comparison with the rich and happy life Luciente exposes her to. Piercy brings a disconnect to the modern world, and certainly evokes Suvin’s infamous theory of “cognitive estrangement” in science fiction writing with Woman on the Edge of Time.

The Idea of Gender Divides in LeGuin's "The Dispossesed"

The Dispossesed (1st Ed. Hardcover)
1974, Harper & Row Cover
Source: Wikimedia

Somewhere in a similar galaxy is a planet much like Earth, called Urras. On Urras, a group of settlers were sent to colonize the moon, Anaress. Cut-off from their home planet, the Anarresti built a different society than the one they came from, one in which there is no central government, no real form of currency, and gender equality isn’t even a thought, it just is.

Shevek, a theoretician from the colonized moon, is invited by a university on the home planet to come and study. When he does, his entire worldview is shaken, as he is exposed to alien concepts, like class divides, crime, money, and ego. Once Shevek understands that the home planet society is driven by profits (i.e. capitalism), he chews on his assumption “that if you removed a human being’s natural incentive to work--his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy--and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker […] The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe.” (82). LeGuin is answering  a central question here about the details of a utopian society quite simply: if a citizen is given all they need by the State, they will not become lazy, because their own creativity will be their drive. She also answers the question about innovation in an utopian society, a concept assumed to stagnate in any imagined utopia, because only suffering can foster innovation (the need to make something bad into something better), but if creativity is its own reward, then even in a utopian society citizens will know of and promote innovation.

There are many gender divides Shevek encounters on the home planet. He argues with many of the Urrasti about how they treat their women and why they feel the need to treat women differently at all. Several times, he asks the Urrasti men “Where are the women?” They are amused at the question, and they tell him that women make great wives, but terrible scientists: “[Women] can’t do the math; no head for abstract thought; don’t belong. You know how it is, what women call thinking is done with the uterus! Of course, they’re always a few exceptions, God-awful brainy women with vaginal atrophy.” (73).

When Shevek reveals that 50% of the scientists (and workers in all fields) on his world are women, the Urrasti men become very uncomfortable. They cannot imagine a world in which a man is not made to feel “manly” and a woman is not kept as a feminine object and an object alone.

At the end of one of these gender arguments, Shevek concludes “that he had touched in these men an impersonal animosity that went very deep. Apparently they, like the tables on the ship, contained a woman, a suppressed, silenced, bestialized woman, a fury in a cage. He had no right to tease them. They knew no relation but possession. They were possessed.” (74).

Soon, Shevek comes to realize that the very design of the planet Urras, and the syntax of the Urrasti speech, all help to maintain the binary gender divide, however unintentional (or intentional) the design might be. Aboard his first starship, Shevek notes that the curves and lines on the ship are soft, supple. Even his bunk bed on the star ship is soft and inviting, and he cannot help but have erotic thoughts of yielding women. The language of the Urrasti is as possessive as their nature, as they refer to things as “my hankerchief” or “my wife”, when an Anarresti would say “the hankerchief that I use” or “the woman I share life with”. Shevek does not know of a translation in his language for the possessive pro-nouns Urrasti people are so fond of using.

Overall, LeGuin uses the analogy of a visitor to an Earth-like world to illustrate the cognitive estrangement of Earth-like customs. Through Shevek’s eyes, the reader sees everything backwards, gender included. Everything that is “normal” is odd to Shevek, and the simple nature in which he explains his world makes it seem as real as the Earth-like planet of Urras.

LeGuin, Kroeber, Ursula. The Dispossessed. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Print.

The Importance of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Herland"

Photographic portrait of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
American author, c. 1900. This is a cropped version
of the digital image from the Library of Congress online
collection, as identified below. Copyright has expired on this image.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was many things: a writer, a feminist, and at times, fan of eugenics based on her staunch racism. Aside from her failings, Gliman managed to write a groundbreaking novel called Herland that went unnoticed until it gained popularity in the 1970's. First appearing as a serial in 1915, Herland is one of the first works of feminist Utopian fiction.

Three young students set out to explore a legend shared by the locals of the foreign country that they are residing in. The legend is of a hidden community comprised solely of women. Since the three students are also young men, their interest is more than piqued.

All three men have different views on women, ranging from the extreme to the sympathetic. Jeff  is the biologist, and an idolizer of women. The narrator, Van, stays neutral on most every subject as a sociology major. Terry is a geologist, and straddles the line between gentleman and chauvinist pig.

Before they find out that the legend of Herland is indeed true, the three men surmise on what sort of civilization could arise if maintained by only women. Their prejudices and sexist views come to the fore during these discussions; “We mustn’t look to find any sort of order and organization […] Also we mustn’t look for inventions and progress; it’ll be awfully primitive.” (p. 8-9).

The civilization the three men discover is far beyond anything they could have imagined. Herland is a beautiful country, with gardens and forests that are carefully tended to yield the most food (there is no room for crops or cattle in Herland's tiny strip of territory). Men are nowhere to be found. In fact, the arrival of Terry, Jeff, and Van mark the civilization’s first sighting of men in two-thousand years.

Though Herland is not a distant planet, it might as well be for the all the differences Van takes note of in his journal. At first, Van believes his ‘world’ to be more advanced, but as he learns more and more about the women of Herland, he becomes ashamed at the state of his world in comparison to their paradise.

Many notions of femininity come into question in this short novella from Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The women of Herland keep their hair cropped short, wear clothes free of adornment, are intelligent, and work hard doing things that the three men considered only for men. Not every woman is young, giggling, and beautiful: [Van’s perspective]- ‘Woman’ in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. […] Most men do think that way, I fancy.” (p. 21). By the end of the story, Van and Jeff come to see that Terry’s view about women is entirely wrong, that indeed all their thoughts about women are entirely based on their society’s perception of gender roles.

Gilman, Perkins, Charlotte. Herland. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979. Print.

Mizora: The Secret Society Founded by Women

Mary Bradley's novel, Mizora: A Prophesy, reads like a less publicized and earlier version of Gilman's Herland. It is a country of women located in a hidden pocket of the Earth (the Arctic instead of Africa), discovered by a regular citizen. After that, comparisons between Mizora and Herland are not so easy to come by.

The explorer who stumbles upon Mizora is alone, Russian, and a woman. Through the narrator's perspective, the reader views gender hypocrisy in a new way. The female narrator time and time again cannot understand how a society of women can get along without men, beliefs that were enforced by her own binary culture.

Mizoran women raise their children themselves, like in “When It Changed”, but unlike the communal parenting seen both in Herland and A Princess of Mars. While Mizoran women value their children greatly, the thing they hold to the greatest esteem is education. They believe that when they made education (including college) free for all, many of their social problems solved themselves. For example, the poverty rate is extremely low. Due to an influx of students, more mathematicians and scientists graduated, producing people capable of engineering affordable food, fuel, and most any commodity. A Mizoran educated populace also saw a decline in crime, and by the time the narrator finds Mizora, the most heinous crime committed by a citizen was the striking of their child almost a century before.

While reading Mizora, the parallels between a strictly female society and a peaceful society are argued in detail. Once men are out of the equation, more important societal questions are pursued that aid in harmonizing a populace. One stark trait of the Mizorans is their exaggerated femininity. In Herland, the women are spoken of as being beautiful, but in a more neutral, androgynous way. In Mizora, their delicacy is emphasized. All Mizorans have blond hair, a product of the eugenics practice that was perfected centuries before. Silk, flowing dresses and artfully made up faces are staples among the Mizorans, though in other all-female (or androgynous) populations found in the Left Hand of Darkness and Herland, beauty is a natural part of the citizens, not something artificially constructed through the use of exaggerated clothing and make-up.

          While Bradley sought to undermine gender roles in Mizora, some parts of her novel only reinforce them. The most illuminating part of the novel is when the female narrator is in disbelief over the roles of women in Mizora, and her ideas of a woman’s place (below that of a man’s) as opposed to theirs (women as human beings, not as a separate entity from men). The narrator’s point of view about women is one that is still present today. Plenty of women believe that the station they are currently in, (whether it be mother, daughter, wife, sister) is a station they cannot ascend beyond, and that they in fact should not strive to ascend beyond that station. Men are not the only oppressors of women. As Bradley illustrates, women can be their own worst enemies in the fight for gender equality, especially when women believe that the fight is not a valid one.

Bradley, Mary. Mizora: A Prophesy. New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1890. Print.