So, I am not really sure how much this book had to do with gender, as it did sexuality. Other than drunken curiosity, it seems as though sexual attraction has more to do here with convenience and proximity than any inherent preference for one sex over the other. I got thinking about homosexuality in these books a lot more after reading some queer theory on Teper’s novel for my final paper, and after I finished E. M. Forster’s Maurice this weekend. In that novel, the title character tries (and fails) to be ‘cured’ of his desires through hypnosis, just like the assumption in Haldeman (although it fails for Mandella) that medical intervention and counseling can convert people to the sexual orientation of their choice.  There was also that kind of outlook in Teper, although even more clinical, with homosexuality destroyed through pre-natal gene therapy. So what makes people what they are? It would seem in this term’s fictions, on the one hand, that we must be more than a mess of genes, because even the method of our conception makes a crucial difference in our responses as human beings, and yet we can be trained and made adaptable to almost anything. I am left confused, and less than hopeful.

Although, proudly, I totally saw it coming that the servitors got all the action they could wish for living with the ladies, I did not see the extent of women’s country’s genetic manipulation coming. There is just something so wrong, so inhuman about breeding out characteristics of unwanted people…were they not afraid of becoming as inbred and doomed to failure as the fundamentalists south of the sheep camp??

Anyway, trying desperately to muster an ounce of scholarly input this late in the term, I absolutely loved the play Iphegenia, which permeated  the entire novel. This hearkens back to what I loved so much about Houston, Houston Do you Read? with the journals from generation to generation. All the women in Women’s Country who are willing to really look to the literature they read, to apply it to their own lives, are able to come up with answers and feel like they are really a part of the society in which they have to function. There is such a power in books here, a power designed for women and non-warrior men, simply because it requires subtlety and patience in order to reap the rewards. I felt so bad for Chernon, always looking for something that he knew he couldn’t find in women… Of course, Chernon brings me to something. As it stands in Women’s Country for the course of the novel, the process of selection is still in progress, and warriors like Michael and Chernon and Barton are able to exist, although their kind is to be limited, we understand, in the future. The problem is that sensible, desirable people like Margot and Stavia are sexually attracted to, and feel a certain connection with, exactly those kind of warriors…what will the whole society be like when there is no eye candy, no flash in the pan manly youths to get the young women’s juices flowing? I smell disaster and jealousy here. Big time.

Also, as much as I enjoyed that the “power” of books and words in women’s country was a simple one of critical thinking and reflection, I was thrown off kilter by the mystical telepathic skills of the servitors. Where exactly did that come from? This is more fantasy than anything and I don’t really see how it fits in…and why don’t any other women than Kostia and Tonia even have it?

One thing is for sure, that I really wanted to know about these people, the women and the men, and I believed in their society. There were (not bodily ones, like in Charnas, though, but) so many little details about the way things were run and carried on that I bought into it all completely. I especially like that the ending, although arguably too much of an indication that there are books to follow, did not culminate in a monumental battle between the sexes. Instead there is a subtle co-existence of two immensely different worlds – and linguistic realities – living side by side.

Today, defined by my mucus, I am only bordering on humanoid myself (I know I could make infants explode just by looking at them…) and so I am, for once, going to be direct and to the point.

Looking at the continual debate in this course between gender as a product of nurture versus nature, Elgin is obviously leaning to the latter. In the world of her novel, there is of course the government-supported belief in a biological superiority of men to women, who differ in intellect though (curiously) not in the ability for language acquisition (it also struck me just now how refreshing it was that, although men considered women so inferior – and the women weren’t too keen on their men – there was absolutely no discussion of alternative strategies of reproduction. Truth be told, that was getting mighty tiresome) and we are made to understand that this is faulty reasoning. Nevertheless, the failed experiments with non-humanoid interface projects establish language and the construction of physical realities which it has the power to represent as something which is “hard wired” into us. Therefore, the need for women to have a language of their own in order to express the reality that  they experience makes a strong case for a great biological difference between what it means to be male vs. female. Still, because this is the reality within a political environment of gender division, it is impossible to say how much of the difference between the sexes is owed to innate variations in perception and a struggle against oppression and ignorance…I’m pooped…

Although I was really interested in what was going on in the first half of the first book, and I definitely enjoyed Servan d layo and even aloof, mad little Eykar (gotta say, I was hoping they would have some sort of happy ending…how silly of me!), the second book was much faster reading. I just can’t seem to help being more interested in the women’s side of the story, even if from strange, sub-conscious level.

Anyway, I really liked that there was no ideal here. No perfect situation or race of people that could over-ride the flaws of human nature, whether they be male or female. I’m not really sure how realistic it is to make nature/nurture decisions about gender in this work, because the two genders really did seem to be examined exclusive of each other. Still, with the nearly patriarchal system of the Free Fems, and the Riding Women who played violent games for sport had a lot of the man about them.

What I would really like to focus on, and what I found most consistently interesting about this book was the concept of eating, and of what significance it is to ingest certain things. The phrase “you are what you eat” is written all over this (these) novels. Because famine is such a defining feature of the Holdfast, we are constantly reminded of the seaweed and grasses they live on, and dark deeds are able to be carried out in the city because of the intense ritual which surrounds the intake of Manna…as though the hallucinatory dreams it induced would really induce manly characteristics…that was a sad assumption. I was also startled by Servan’s intense reaction to Magomass’s idea to eat all of the slain fems. With all the other atrocities they were willing to commit on the women, why was this such a big stubling block?

Of course the most lion-king-esque style of living was that of the riding women, who were a real flashback to any of the borderline utopic societies of women we have seen so far – probably most like from  Houston, Houston Do you Read. What a stretch for Allderra, who had eaten her fellow fems in milky cakes at the holdfast, to be told that she couldn’t eat animals who ate their dead. I would argue, however, that those little creatures excrete unusable remains of the dead, which fertilize the grass, which is eaten by the horses – WITH WHICH THEY COPULATE!!! Come on now, how picky can they afford to be???

A constant concern for me is to look for metatextual elements in things I read, and, despite being the typical astronaut jargon “do you read me” got me thinking. Language was so important for these futuristic Earth women, with their multigenerational concept of identity. I love the idea of keeping a journal as it is – imagine keeping one along through various cloned selves for hundreds of years. Sweet. I think that kind of system of thinking of themselves, as links in a Judy or Connie chain really breaks down some nature/nurture barriers. I mean, they all fit into the ‘types’ from which they are cloned, but their existence in time, each of their environments, yields different personalities. With respect to gender, I was rolling my eyes, thinking ‘Herland, anyone?’ for a while there, lamenting with Lorimer that there were no “love affairs, children’s troubles, jealousy squabbles, status, possessions, money problems, sickness” (198), but really they just had long enough, with the help of written texts, to be the same person that there were new problems to conquer all the time, and there were (as with the unrequited love of Connies) persistent struggles through the types. I also found it comforting that the women were able to get up the courage and anger and emotion to actually do away with the men. I’m not saying it was right, but that maybe its very wrongness did something to go against the stereotype of women as more just and gentle and even reasonable than men. They too are rash and do what has to be done. Of course, I am disappointed that the only one who gets to exclaim with glee that she felt “physical anger” was Andy, the androgen-treated specimen…perhaps there is quite the nod given to nature here…I hadn’t thought of that until now…

Anyway, back to words. Texts are such a different thing for the men of the past and the women of the future in this text, and I really like what Tiptree did with that. There is such a structure to the men’s world, where everything is bottled up until it can be filtered and edited and put out in an acceptable way – even with only three of them on the ship, Dave we are told censored any of Bud’s more lude anecdotes. As a result, the female ‘habit’ of ‘constant chatter’ is a threat to them, which Lorimer articulates when he says “Women have no self-respect. Say anything, no sense of the strategy of words, the dark danger of naming” (193). What makes this so satisfying is that the women use this very idea of uninhibited speech, without “strategy” to reveal what the men are trying so desperately to hide, being their barbarous fantasies of rape. The women can read them al right. I also find it interesting that Dave’s attempt to use “the Word” against the women, what he believes is the holy word of God to be deferred to, they shoot him and he’s truly damned. They were stale words, taken out of context to fit a world that didn’t exist anymore. In short, ish, I like the fluidity of the women’s words, the living-text kind of society that made them work.

As a parting thought, I just wanted to say that reading this (for much of the first part, slogging through it) reminded me of my favourite childhood movie – “Barbie and the Rockers”. First of all, just like the worlds of Gilman and Tiptree, the 1980s of Barbie’s world was one in which people can achieve a kind of moral evolution, and there is at last world peace (due almost completely to the appeal of Barbie, a completely emasculated Ken, and their painfully obvious attempt at a racially-inclusive back up band). Long story short, after a ground-breaking concert in space, the group disturbs time and comes back to Earth in the 1950s…what a journey…maybe Ken and his man friend were Andys…that’s why Barbie has no babies…what did Midge find that Barbie couldn’t…

But, underneath all of the incessant philosophizing and “open-minded” yearning for a realistic embodiment of human life as it was meant to be, was the ignorance of what (it seems to me, at least) cannot be taken out of human nature, if for no other reason than we don’t want it to go. Example? Possession. The big notion in this book, not so far removed from the laughably altruistic tribe in Herland as I suspect Wylie would have liked, is that life would be great and truly liberating were we all without possession. Now, this seems strange and dangerous in the communist-as-four-letter-word climate of 1950s America, but Wylie calls for a more spiritual kind of socialism. He isn’t so starry-eyed, as the scenes of looting and shooting show, to assume that we can live productively in a share and share alike workforce. Although it isn’t the smartest move, Gaunt is motivated to fight by the thoughts of his home being invaded. And Wylie shows an understanding toward the violent scavengers themselves. What Wylie seems to want of the world is a sharing of our humanity, of our ‘spiritual’ resources. He is adamant, with  the positive view of open marriages, that people cannot be owned or possessed and should not be limited in their ideas, experiences, or sexuality by any other person. This is the same with the whole atomic bomb debate. Gaunt’s line, which I assume (however correctly or incorrectly) to be Wylie’s is not that it was evil to make the atomic bomb, or even the cardinal sin to detonate it. The greatest turning point away from successful humanity is the attempt to keep it secret, to possess the knowledge and hoard it all to one nation.

Anyway, what I found most undermined this book for me, for all its strides against the constraints of conservatism and mindless idolatry, were the unfortunate hallmarks of its age.  Yes, for all the ‘progressive’ ideas in this book, there is nothing said against the blatant racism, which, even amid all the social upheaval and personal revelations, remains the unquestioned status quo. Wow. And none of them even complain. THEY SLEEP IN TENTS IN PAULA’S BACK YARD! Lovely. I have to say, naive as it makes me sound, I was shocked! Women’s rights, sexual liberation, and probing into a greater understanding of the collective human soul – but such consideration cannot be for the “Negros” – they are too busy cutting the wood for log cabins to replace their fallen tents post-hurricane. I am shocked at the oversight here…unless there is the mention of the colour divide so often in this book in order to point out that such a status quo is okay in the minds of these characters in this setting, not Wylie’s himself, just to show another example of human vanity at work to sabotage it all again…or maybe I’m giving him too much credit.

Anyway, I got to thinking as I commented on Ashley’s blog, so far  (okay, after only 2 books) in a world with one sex, homosexual activity is either a) unnecessary and so unthought-of or b) a childish replacement for the real deal. There is no place for homosexuals in Wylie’s view of the complete bi-sexual personality –  is there? I wonder how this issue will develop in the next texts…

Of course, I cannot get away from my own personal feelings toward this text, above and beyond any literary significance, and if I can’t rant a little about my biases in a blog, then what’s the use of having one? Now, as some people may have noticed about me (if it said “Annie’s blog” when you linked to this) I am a woman, but I have to say that this female world of harmony and order is a load of crap. Still, though, I have actually heard some feminists I know make serious arguments for the superiority of an all female society in terms of peace and good will – where is the logic for this? It’s really a more demeaning view for women (like the constant “humility” and deference to male, worldly authority of the herlanders in this book) to say that they are held back from being good and friendly people by the presence of men. To say that all of the negative parts of our natures come from jealousy and patriarchal constraints and could only be removed when men are gone really says little for our personal strengths of will and character to overcome such difficulties when actually faced with them. And, really now, I understand that there is some altered, scientifically sketchy new way of making babies here, but is there no such thing as estrogen and all the lovely things it brings in Herland? However, to give Gilman her due, I was impressed by the fact that, even knowing all of the inadequacies of the “bi-sexual world”, Ellador still goes and stays there with her new-found love. I guess that does put some intangible something wonderful back in our flawed, patriarchal world…

Now, I know it is often dangerous territory to look at a work framed by the author’s biography, but I couldn’t help but wonder here if Gilman was in a sense defending herself in this book against claims of “un-motherliness” after giving over the care of her own child to another woman whom she deemed more fit, as here the entire concept of maternity is blatantly (and constantly) redefined to be a communal, altruistic experience…

In “short”, I was shocked at the lack of ease I had in reading this almost scientific narrative, and yet it finally charmed me in the end as it became clear that, for all that Gilman can gouge holes in the fabric of the world we live in, she does not condemn it and seems to have some sense of optimism ( and realism) after all.