"The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction", a thought-provoking essay by Ursula K. LeGuin

LeGuin’s essay begins by explaining the gender dynamics of the early humans from the Paleolithic and Neolithic time periods. She describes the average life of an early human as one that began as gatherer, not hunter as many have assumed. As part of that description, she brings with her the theory that the first cultural device used by humans was a container (LeGuin 150). Again, it has been an assumption, an assumption perpetuated by the media (as LeGuin notes), that the first device used by humans had to be a weapon.

To LeGuin, the invention of the weapon was most likely a man-made invention, and one that men used to hold over women in a way, as to say, “Ha, look, men made the first invention that just happened to be violent, and women hate violence, therefore, women aren’t really human.” As Russ says of the men in her short story “When It Changed”, they didn’t consider the women they found on planet Whileaway to be human. They kept asking the women, “Where are all the people?” People, to them, meaning men.

Using the idea of the container as the first human invention, LeGuin goes on to say that finally, she can be counted as human now too: “If it is a human thing to do to put something you want […] into a bag […] and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it […] and then next day you probably do much the same again, if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all.” (LeGuin 152). What LeGuin is saying is that women invented the first relevant piece of culture, but I think it could have been both the container and the weapon, all at once. Human beings could have started out as both the hunter and the gatherer, as we also began as women and men. Still, the point that LeGuin makes is fascinating: the invention of the container is one of the most important inventions to man, and being an assumed female invention, it brings women into the arena of humanity in a way she wasn’t before.

The rest of the essay changes directions. LeGuin begins to equate the idea of grafting a good novel by using a container of words, instead of a spear of words. LeGuin mentions how some authors have described writing a book to be a mock-battle, when she believes it to be the lugging of a container full of words, thoughts, and story elements waiting to be used up.

LeGuin, Kroeber, Ursula. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literacy Ecology. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty, Harold Fromm. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1996. 149-154. Print.

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.

"Brave New World"- So Close Yet So Far from Utopia

A picture of Richard Stallman, in the style of Che Guevara. 
The title is a play on
"O brave new world / that has such people in it"
from The Tempest and Brave New World.
Date: October 2006
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Huxley’s speculative tale of London in the year A.F. 632 is a Utopian world except for a few distinctive differences. There is the matter of a class system determined even before birth. Fertilized human eggs are chemically treated to be Epsilons, Betas, Alphas, or other derivatives. Once the egg becomes a full-fledged human being, the mental and physical conditioning begins. Children are raised in wards by the State, taught that their god is Ford (as in the Ford that invented the automobile assembly line), and also taught repetitive reasoning in their sleep, such as “Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today” (Huxley 93).

In place of love, there is the pursuit of fun in the form of “the feelies” and drugs like soma. Like in The Giver, the public is unaware of the implications of death or what it really entails, another way to shield citizens from feeling anything real. Similar to both Anthem and The Giver, this dystopia is ruled by a handful of individuals known as Directors. Directors are always male, therefore the gender equality implied by Huxley is severely lacking. The reader need only analyze the sexual dynamic between the genders to come to the conclusion that in Brave New World, women are still beneath men in the social ladder.

Women are required to be sexually available at every turn, and part of that is maintaining a fit and “pneumatic” body. Another burden the women must abide is the responsibility of safe sex. All women carry a belt around, a belt full of different contraceptives. In the book, it is never mentioned that a man must upkeep his body for women, or remember to use contraceptives. Huxley leaves that up to the women.

If a woman (or man) chooses not to be promiscuous, they are seen as socially inept. Given that, there is no marriage in Huxley’s world. If two people are considered a couple, it is prudent for them to begin coupling with anyone and everyone else they can, the sooner the better.

The main female characters in the novel, Lenina and Lydia, are both insipid and promiscuous, a product of their society. Two main male characters in the novel, Bernard and Helmholtz, are likewise products of their society, however, Huxley allows them to question their surroundings and long for a better world. Helmholtz confides in his friend Bernard that he is unhappy, even though he is at the top of the class system as an Alpha and women literally line up to sleep with him: “I’m thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I’ve got something important to say and the power to say it---only I don’t know what it is, and I can’t make any use of the power” (Huxley 69). Bernard tries to explain to Lenina what is lacking in their society after she repeats the mantra learned in their childhood, Everybody’s happy nowadays. “Yes," Bernard tells her, "‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We begin giving the children that at five. But wouldn't you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way.” (Huxley 91).

Aldous Huxley
Date: (original upload) May 2007
Transferred from Wikipedia
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Happiness is the main objective of Huxley’s alternative London, but as Bernard and Helmholtz illustrate, their world is far from perfect. Even though there is no war, disease, or poverty, not everyone feels happy because they are too controlled. Everyone’s absolute place in the world is chosen from birth, down to what they’re going to look like, their place in the class system, and where they’re going to work. There are no creative freedoms, and that is what is most stifling about Huxley’s dystopia. Everything else, such as gender and class disparities, follows in the wake of that.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. London: Chatto and Windus, 1932. Print.