Women's Utopian and Dystopian Fiction [1 ed.] 9781443864435, 9781443848947

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Women’s Utopian and Dystopian Fiction

Women’s Utopian and Dystopian Fiction

Edited by

Sharon R. Wilson

Women’s Utopian and Dystopian Fiction, Edited by Sharon R. Wilson This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Sharon R. Wilson and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4894-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4894-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Utopian, Dystopian, Ustopian, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction Sharon R. Wilson I Doris Lessing An Opening in the Wall and Lessing’s Utopia in Memoirs of a Survivor ................................................................................................ 6 Sun Hwa Park Storytelling in Lessing’s Mara and Dann and Other Texts ....................... 23 Sharon R. Wilson The Exegesis of Doris Lessing’s The Cleft: Rethinking Being and Time .................................................................................................... 30 Bootheina Majoul Aouadi II Other American and English Fiction The Hand that Cradles the Rock: Nature, Gender and Subalternatives in the Works of Carol Emshwiller and Ursula Le Guin............................. 48 Richard Hardack Fay Weldon’s The Cloning of Joanna May as a Feminist Dystopian Burlesque ................................................................................................... 72 Zeynep Z. Atayurt Power, Surveillance and Reproductive Technology in P.D. James’ The Children of Men .................................................................................. 88 Soo Darcy Inclusion and Exclusion in Some Feminist Utopian Fictions .................. 112 Karen F. Stein

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Gendered Travel and Quiescence in Toni Morrison’s Paradise.............. 133 Kristin Distel III Margaret Atwood Breaking the Circle of Dystopia: Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale ......... 156 Adelina Cataldo Layers of Time: Margaret Atwood’s Handling of Time in The Handmaid’s Tale .......................................................................... 174 Charlotte Templin Screen Memories: Maternal After-Images in Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Novels .................................................................................... 186 Katherine V. Snyder Contributors ............................................................................................. 204 Further Reading ....................................................................................... 207 Index ........................................................................................................ 209

INTRODUCTION UTOPIAN, DYSTOPIAN, USTOPIAN, SCIENCE FICTION, AND SPECULATIVE FICTION

According to Jameson, Utopias, Dystopias, and Speculative Fiction all began at about the same time, either with Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) or earlier with Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). In most calculations, however, all of these genres and their fictional parallels have existed for hundreds of years, from Plato’s Republic to Sir Thomas More’s Utopia to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. The content of Utopian form, a subset of science fiction and in opposition to fantasy, emerges from the fairy tale (Jameson 33, 85). This may be one of the reasons that current utopias and dystopias frequently use fairy tale intertexts. The words “utopia” and “dystopia” have more specific meanings than the term “speculative fiction.” Although one may speculate about all sorts of things, like the other terms, speculative fiction is usually about the nature of the world. To think about utopia, however, one must think about the ideal or perfect. Dystopia involves utopia’s opposite: a nightmare, the ultimate flawed world, or “a society worse than the existing one,” such as Brave New World and 1984 (Moylan, Demand 9). Ironically, utopias unconsciously beget their own dystopias, a combination of the word “utopia” and its opposite that Atwood in her recent In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination calls “ustopias” (66). According to Moylan, oppositional utopian vision infused with politics of autonomy, democratic socialism, ecology, and especially feminism continue to challenge the industrial consumer society (Moylan 11), as is evident in many of the authors discussed in this book. As Jameson says, feminist, Marxist, and socialist projects still imagine utopia differently (355, qtd. Moylan, Scraps 247). Post 9/11, “Now it appears we face the prospect of two contradictory dystopias at once—open markets, closed minds—because state surveillance is back again with a vengeance” (Atwood, In Other 148). Although little agreement exists about distinctions among science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, utopia, and dystopia, Atwood’s In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination both clarifies and magnifies

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the controversy. Atwood refers to science fiction, too often confused with realism, as “a mode of romance with a strong tendency towards myth,” and as “not of this here-and-now Earth.” Speculative fiction could happen but hasn’t yet and fantasy could not happen (5-7). Although Atwood refers to her own The Handmaid’s Tale as speculative fiction, however, she points out that this book does contain incidents that have already happened. Significantly, because she and Ursula Le Guin do not agree on their definitions, the different genres overlap.

Women’s Utopian and Dystopian Fiction Women’s Utopian and Dystopian Fiction is about how utopia and dystopia create new worlds, establish genre, and critique gender roles, traditions, and values. Like its subject, it is a book that promises to have wide appeal among college students and professors. Utopian and Dystopian texts are taught in most English programs, and their larger genres, science fiction and fantasy, are often required courses. Furthermore, even nonEnglish majors and professors choose utopian and dystopian literature as leisure reading. Two of the writers covered in this book, Doris Lessing and Toni Morrison, are Nobel Prize winners, and two others are already classic writers (Margaret Atwood and Ursula Le Guin). Modernism, Postmodernism, Intertextuality, Folklore, Eugenics, and other significant topics are covered as utopia and dystopia are defined, compared, and analyzed. A distinctive aspect of this book is the authors’ international perspectives, with writers teaching in Korea, Tunisia, England, Italy, and the US.

I Doris Lessing Three of the essays in this book are about the Nobel-prize winning, under-appreciated writer, Doris Lessing. While people liked her early impressionistic stories about Africa, she was initially considered a “traditional” writer too interested in women and politics. Critics dismissed her science fiction and even ridiculed her final novel, The Cleft. Sun-Hwa Park’s essay, “An Opening in the Wall: Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor as Autobiography,” takes seriously Lessing’s claim that Memoirs is her autobiography and offers insights about Lessing’s childhood, particularly her relationship with her father, of which Lessing herself may not have been aware. She integrates the autobiographical reading with mythical aspects of the novel.

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Sharon R. Wilson writes about story-telling in Mara and Dann and reveals storytelling as a preservation of knowledge, a way of learning, and a satire of culture. Mara and Dann is viewed as an ustopic text, a combination of utopian and dystopian features that satirize civilizations of past, present, and future while revealing multicultural greediness and blindness. Here Lessing uses the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale to warn humanity of its foolishness. Noting irony and parody, Bootheina Majoul Aouadi’s “The Exegesis of Doris Lessing’s The Cleft: Rethinking Being and Time,” investigates the much misunderstood The Cleft. Lessing satirically portrays creation myths and gender stereotypes. “The Cleft is thus a utopian fable denouncing dystopian realities.” Because the Roman historian narrator raises doubts even about his own conclusions, he questions how history portrays “truths.”

II Other British and American Fiction In "The Hand that Cradles the Rock: Nature, Gender and Subalternatives in the Works of Carol Emshwiller and Ursula Le Guin," Richard Hardack suggests that science fiction “can estrange the everyday” and that Le Guin and Emshwiller do so with empathy. Exploring the kinship between victimized women and victimized animals in these women’s works, he notes that frequently animals evolve into women and women become animals, finally with no fixed borders. Zeynep Z. Atayurt, in “Fay Weldon’s The Cloning of Joanna May as a Feminist Dystopian Burlesque,” discusses another dystopia that warns against the repercussions of current social and political trends and reveals their anxiety over the female body. Thus, Atayurt shows how Weldon’s feminist dystopian burlesque mocks and challenges the objectification of women by satirizing the implications of technoscientific methods of reproduction and reconstruction. Soo Darcy’s “Power, Surveillance and Reproductive Technology in P.D. James' The Children of Men” explores dystopian power and control in reference to reproduction and the body, suggesting the role of Western medicine and science in creating but not solving the problem. The pregnant woman, Julian, was constructed as unstable, marginal, and in need of medical treatment and surveillance. Ultimately, James shows the body is appropriated by technology. Karen Stein’s “Inclusion and Exclusion in Some Feminist Utopian Fictions” surveys the twentieth-century feminist utopian and dystopian fiction of Gilman, Charnas, Gearhart, Russ, Piercy, and others. She explores the Janus face, the idea of inclusion and exclusion, other

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paradoxes in utopias, and concludes wondering what utopias might be written in today’s atmosphere of cynicism. In Kristin Distel’s “Gendered Travel and Quiescence in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” she investigates the novel’s appearance vs. reality theme, recognizing that neither the towns of Ruby nor Convent are true utopias for most of the novel. She sees the novel’s “whitespace” and controversial ending—are the women alive or not?—in relationship to the Isis myth and implies that this novel most closely reaches toward “utopia.”

III Margaret Atwood Margaret Atwood’s recent fiction and her non-fiction book, In Other Worlds: Science Fiction and the Human Imagination, have by themselves stimulated renewed discussion of utopias and dystopias. After her forthcoming third volume that began with Oryx and Crake appears in 2013, the time will be suitable for a book on Atwood’s utopias, ustopias, and dystopias. Adelina Cataldo’s “Breaking the Circle of Dystopia: Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale,” offers an original reading of The Handmaid’s Tale through Atwood’s early poem, “The Circle Game.” Few of Atwood’s admirers, particularly recent ones, are aware of Atwood’s long and prestigious career as a poet. Through exploring circle/enclosure symbolism, Cataldo shows how The Handmaid’s Tale breaks the boundaries represented by the circle of the narrator’s dystopian society and even by the genre within which Atwood writes. Charlotte Templin, in “Layers of Time: Margaret Atwood’s Handling of Time in The Handmaid’s Tale,” discusses Atwood’s “layers of time” to explore how Atwood creates strangeness in familiarity, or familiarity in strangeness, and avoids any easy dating of events in the novel. This “structuring of time,” often disputed by critics, is how Atwood created her cautionary tale. Katherine V. Snyder’s “Screen Memories: Maternal After-Images in Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Novels” discusses films and photographs as mediated memories, maternal after-images, and departures for seeing the future in The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood. After we read the forthcoming end of Atwood’s trilogy, Snyder encourages us to envision a hopeful future.

I DORIS LESSING

AN OPENING IN THE WALL: LESSING’S THE MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY SUN HWA PARK

Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) is a transitional novel from realistic narrative to space narrative. Lessing began to distrust the realistic narrative in the 1960s, which led her to explore experimental writing in the early 1970s. As Lynn Hanley mentions, she as a marginal writer has been unwilling to follow the main stream or literary trends (919) and so she tries to invent new styles to describe the multi-layered aspects of the circumstances in modern society. In such a transitional period, The Memoirs of a Survivor was classified as science fiction or fantasy. Alvin Sullivan and Bernard Duyhuizen call this the “future-history” novel (Sullivan 158; Duyfhuizen 150), Guido Kuns calls it a “utopian novel” (80), and Heba Hosni sees this as a “post-apocalyptic fiction” (1). On the other hand, since the fact that Lessing received some counseling (Rubenstein 32), some Lessingian researchers such as Lorelei Cederstrom and Marilyn Charles have approached The Memoirs of a Survivor from the psychological perspectives to the exclusion of the genre of science fiction or fantasy. Other interpretations of this novel have caused confusion to readers as well as critics, and resulted in its being called “a ghost story of the future” (Maddocks 58). On the contrary, it is to be noted that Lessing used the subtitle, An Attempt at Autobiography in 1974, which was later deleted by a publishing company without any explanation (Arntsen 21). In the interview with Claire Tomalin, Lessing mentions her attempt to write about her autobiographical story, and she is surprised that no one recognizes this. When I wrote The Memoirs of a Survivor, I said that I was trying to write my autobiography. No one is remotely interested in this, nor ever has been, unfortunately. I was trying to write an autobiography in this form, because at some point in my life I thought it would be interesting to write an autobiography of dreams, in dream form. That is so difficult that I’ve given up on it – it really would take the whole rest of my life. In part I was

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writing an autobiography in terms of metaphors- behind the dissolving wall is the most ancient symbol you possibly can find. I always use these old, hoary symbols, as they strike the unconscious. Behind the wall, there are three different kinds of things going on: the personal memories and the dreams, a lot of which come from my own, and the third is the impersonal. (Ingersoll 174)

Lessing makes it clear that the story of The Memoirs of a Survivor is based on her own experiences but some critics, nevertheless, think of this novel as a science fiction or fantasy and then undertake to find out Lessing’s ideas related to the genre. The confusion starts with “the dissolving wall.” This novel has the similar device to Alice in Wonderland where Alice travels to a wonderland through a rabbit hole. The narrator, who lives in a city in the future in The Memoirs of a Survivor, goes and comes out of the other world through “the dissolving wall.” Here, Lessing reveals she uses “the dissolving wall” as a tool of the “dream form,” not a device of fantasy or science fiction. She just makes the most use of the form of fantasy or science fiction so as to express her “personal memories and dreams.” At first, it seems that The Memoirs of a Survivor employs the devices of fantasy or science fiction using Emily Cartright, a twelve-year-old girl, who pops out of the wall before a middle-aged woman narrator without providing any information and clues about the route. Even Emily grows quickly from a baby to a girl and a woman crossing time zones. With these aspects, the “unrealistic elements” (Ingersoll 201) in The Memoirs of a Survivor cannot be disregarded. However, it should be considered that Lessing uses these devices to describe her childhood experiences. There are some reasons why this can be read as Lessing’s autobiographical story. Emily as “the narrator’s double” (Dooley 160) reflects the process of development of the narrator. Through “the dissolving wall,” the narrator visits the dream region and meets twelve-year-old Emily, Emily in childhood, Emily in adolescence, and middle-aged Emily. The narrator tells readers the story of Emily, which is the same or similar to that of Lessing (Dooley 160). The name of Emily is Lessing’s mother’s and grandmother’s Christian name (Arntsen 22). The narrator sees Emily’s mother, that is, Lessing’s mother in childhood, with Emily in childhood in the dream world. Lessing says, “In The Memoirs of a Survivor, what the narrator believes that she is seeing behind the wall, that apparent dream world, actually represents her own life, her own childhood” (Ingersoll 148). In Under My Skin (1994), Lessing again mentions, “For years I had wondered if I could write a book, a personal history, but told through dreams” (29), and thereby she creates the dissolving wall. At this point,

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readers might have interest in her story described in the dream form, not in realistic style. What she tells of, using this form, is probably connected to “accounts of lives that are a little too good to be true” (Abbott 138).

Narrator as a Focalizer and Emily in the Wonder Room The first person narrator in The Memoirs of a Survivor explains an event which occurs in an English city in the future. In the city public service such as electricity and water is cut. On the street where lots of ruins abound, loafers come and go, and some abandoned children fight against each other. The family life is broken in a society, where immorality and self-indulgence as well as chaos, disorder, and malice are prevalent. People cannot be sure whether inauspicious news which they receive through broadcasting and rumors is certain. People’s individuality and dignity are destroyed and, to make matters worse, it is said that some eat people’s flesh. The authorities the narrator call “They” (5) are just talkers who spend their lives in their eternal and interminable conferences, talking about what is happening and what should happen. They cannot take any action about what happened. The police only break up people’s gathering and disappear quickly after dispersing the crowd. The air is so contaminated that people have difficulty in breathing. In this situation, the narrator is stressed with whether she has to leave the city or not even though she has no alternative place to go. She just lives in an apartment complex with few remaining residents all hoping to leave. The narrator describes the future city as a dystopia where “gangs, disorder, pollution, defective public services, and an increasing paucity of goods and resources are not completely unknown” (Kuns 80-81). The Memoirs of a Survivor presents the apocalyptic vision of the breakdown of civilization which is indicated in The Four-Gated City (1969) among the Children of Violence series. The anonymous narrator, who is only known as a middle-aged woman, is a survivor in the city which faces into the abyss and the “end” (3) or the ending and talks to “us” (3) about her experiences. She, however, has no idea of what the ending means. The city looks as if it were one in a SF movie and science fiction that is destroyed and remains desolate by the highly mechanized civilization. With this description The Memoirs of a Survivor can be considered a science fiction novel. Thereby it is likely to see the narrator as a survivor from the catastrophe, such as a nuclear war or an earthquake, and thereby some critics, like Alvin Sullivan, Bernard Duyhuizen, Guido Kuns and Heba Hosni, analyze The Memoirs of a Survivor with this perspective. It is noted that the narrator talks about the atmosphere of the ending, but she remains silent to the end about what the

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ending is about. Then, what is she a survivor from? The narrator calls the crisis or the symptom of anxiety “it” (150). The “it” seems to hint the accident which is identical to the destruction of civilization. Perhaps it might even have been more correct to have begun this chronicle with an attempt at a full description of “it.” But is it possible to write an account of anything at all without “it” - in some shape or another – being the main theme? Perhaps, indeed, “it” is the secret theme of all literature and history, like writing between the lines in invisible ink, which springs up, sharply black, dimming the old print we knew so well, as life, personal or public, unfolds unexpectedly and we see something where we never thought we could – we see “it” as the ground-swell of events, experience. (150-51)

The “it” is a force taking the form of earthquake or it is a comet whose balefulness hangs closer step by step. When it becomes visible, it is like fear which distorts all thoughts. It can be “a war, the alteration of climate, a tyranny that twists men’s minds, the savagery of a religion” (151). The “it” can be helpless ignorance or “a consciousness of something ending” (151). Here, it is certain that the narrator tries to describe the meaning of “it” in detail but in vain. The “it” is an indicator of a dramatic change or a transitional event in her life which she has experienced as an inexplicable and personal thing. Her personal memory is likely to spring up without expectation, or it can pop up as an experience on an unexpected moment. The memory of “it” that is latent in her unconscious “unfolds unexpectedly,” and it can take over her consciousness, which makes her feel disturbed. The narrator can not be able to listen to what she is told when she is involved in the outer things, and even she refuses to listen to “it” repeatedly. She comes to believe that “it” has something to do with her personal thing that she is unaware of though she knows it and she forgets it though she knows what “it” is. It is time to face into the moment she has to accept “it.” So, she makes it clear that she is going to talk “not about the public pressures and events . . . but my own private discoveries” (7). In this aspect, the “it” is about her story where her “secret theme of all literature and history” (151) can pop up through the opening of the wall. It is difficult for the readers to understand the opening of the wall. It is complicated to explain the way the narrator goes and comes through the wall. One day, the narrator catches the outlines of flowers, leaves, birds under the paint of the wallpaper (11). With the recognition of “it,” in the mornings the narrator starts to look at the wall the sun falls on: . . . and then I was through the wall and I knew what was there. I did not, that first time, achieve much more than that there were a set of rooms. The

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An Opening in the Wall rooms were disused, had been for some time. Years, perhaps. There was no furniture. Paint had flaked off the wall in places, and lay in tiny shards on the floorboards with scraps of paper and dead flies and dust. I did not go in, but stood there on the margin between the two worlds, my familiar flat and these rooms which had been quietly waiting there all this time. (12-13)

The narrator goes through the wall, following her own discovery which “became so urgent and which [was] making such a claim on me” (7) before she recognizes it. She realizes that she knows “a set of rooms” where “there were many windows and doors,” and that it is a “large, light, airy, delightful flat or house” (13). The narrator has a close relationship with the world she visits, and she is sure that something is going to happen in the “spaces that are familiar and seem reminiscent of ‘home,’ but are not home” (Charles 7). And, she is visited by Emily. One morning a man is standing in her living room with Emily and he is gone quickly after saying, “She’s your responsibility” (15). He disappears without a sign. She cannot understand how the two suddenly appear in her place, nor can the readers. The narrator regards this as “extraordinary” and “impossible” (17), and at the same time she accepts the irrelevant and impossible. Finally, she decides to take in Emily. Yes, it was extraordinary. Yes, it was all impossible. But, after all, I had accepted the “impossible.” I lived with it. I had abandoned all expectations of the ordinary for my inner world, my real life in that place. (17-18)

The events and characters in The Memoirs of a Survivor are viewed through the eyes of the narrator, in which the readers follow the story. Then, is the narrator in charge of all the narratives? In The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, H. Porter Abbott points out that the narrator is just “an instrument, a construction, or a device” (68) used by the author, agreeing that narrators should not be confused with authors. Abbott presents three tools such as “voice,” “focalization” and “distance” in order to explain the device of the narrator. First, Abbott focuses on the important feature of “voice” in narration. It is important to determine what kind of person is used for a narrator because this lets the readers know how the narrator injects her own needs, desires and limitations into the narration, and whether the readers trust the information given by the narrator. Abbott introduces the coined term, “focalization,” rather than the vaguer and more disputed term “point of view.” It refers to the lens through which the readers see events and characters in the narrative, that is to say, the readers hear the narrator’s voice and see the actions through the narrator’s eyes. Abbott uses the term “distance” which refers to the narrator’s degree of involvement in the narrative. Depending on the extent to which the

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narrator plays a part in the narrative, the readers are influenced when they assess what the narrator says. Abbott’s tools which are used to identify the narrator in the story are closely related to the narrator’s reliability. As Wayne Booth refers to the unreliable narrator, the readers face the challenge to what extent they can rely on the narrator who gives them the information of the story and, when they are sure of the information, to what extent they can respect the narrator’s opinions which she gives to them. Then, why does the author create the unreliable narrator? The author places the responsibility of the narration on the unreliable narrator in which the author has skillful obscurity. At the same time, the author obtains her desired result by presenting the narration itself which can be subverted by the readers’ “interests, prejudices and blindnesses” (Abbott 76) as the theme of the narration. When the narrator’s reliability is open to challenge and the narrative of the narrator arouses distrust, the narrator, paradoxically, gets more attention. The reliability of the narrator leads to the relation between the (real) author who creates the narrative and the implied author who is “a sensibility behind the narrative” (Abbott 84) in each narrative. With the implied author identified in the narrative, the readers understand how the narrative is constructed and what the narrative delivers to them. Abbott points out that the author is a complex and continually changing individual in whom the readers may not have any trust. The author may be equally uncertain as a guide in the narrative like the unreliable narrator. Here, the narrator, the author and the implied author in the narrative make “gaps” (Abbott 90) in reading the narrative. So the readers have to fill in the gaps in order to follow the narrative they read. The narrative comes alive as the readers fill in its gaps, and it also gains life by leaving some of the gaps unfilled. The Memoirs of a Survivor has the most gaps in Lessing’s novels, which gives rise to multiple opinions not only in the form and but also in the subject. One of the reasons may have something to do with the roles which the author, the implied author and the narrator play in The Memoirs of a Survivor. The gap, which in The Memoirs of a Survivor is willingly unfilled by the author or the implied author, begins to be recognized as soon as the narrator stands on “the margin” (13) between the flat and the rooms behind the wall. The gap is similar to the rabbit hole that is a path to the underworld Alice visits in Alice in Wonderland and it looms clearly as Emily comes over to the flat through “the dissolving wall” where the narrator stays. As the wonderland in Alice in Wonderland is described in dream form, the author in The Memoirs of a Survivor insinuates that the encounter between Emily and the narrator is made “in dream form”

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(Ingersoll 174). The author has the narrator accept “the impossible” like the showing up of Emily and then the narrator makes the readers believe this. In the dream world the impossible is possible. In the long run, the readers hear about Emily’s story which is developed in the dream world through the narrator’s eyes. Behind the story the implied author suggests that the narrator is expecting the encounter with Emily consciously or unconsciously. In part of her consciousness the narrator starts to recognize “the consciousness of that other life, developing there so close to me, hidden from me, was a slow thing . . . Such an opening, a growing, may be an affair of weeks, months, years” (7). Once the narrator listens to it, she realizes what it is. This “inner preoccupation” (7) predates the “it” event that the narrator mentions as the opening of the wall. Let’s go into the world behind the dissolving wall.

Reconstruction of the Past: Personal/ Impersonal Experiences behind the Wall In Turning Her Life into Fiction, Ann-Christin Arntsen believes that all of the different characters in The Memoirs of a Survivor represent different aspects of the narrator. Emily is a younger version of the narrator, and Lessing uses the narrator as a tool with the intention to tell the story of her own childhood (5-6). With this device, the readers have difficulty following the story of the narrator, Emily and Lessing. The mixed-voice of the three characters causes some confusion. Emily pops up before the narrator as if she uses magic and then the narrator visits the world behind the wall, and the readers have the moment they consider Emily and the narrator as the same character. And then the role of the narrator as a focalizer who sees and describes Emily is obscure because the narrative of the narrator and Emily is mixed, so the readers feel they do not have to distinguish the narrator from Emily. The narrator meets twelve-year old Emily in her flat, and after that she repeatedly sees four-year old Emily, Emily in adolescence, Emily in her early forties in the world behind the wall. Here, it is noted that the narrator sometimes sees or listens to Emily through the “looking-glass land” (Ackroyd 797) and sometimes she joins the events with Emily. At first, the narrator feels unfamiliar to Emily. As time goes by, the narrator realizes that she knows Emily very well and Emily is the reflection of her own past. The narrator forgets her role as a focalizer in the narrative in which she becomes Emily, or she sometimes plays her role as a focalizer with keeping her distance from Emily. In this aspect, this part is discussed on the premise that the story of Emily is that of the narrator and furthermore Lessing.

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In the world behind the wall, the narrator continues to open the doors of the rooms or is turning the corners of the long corridors in order to find empty rooms. There is room after room after room. Every room is crammed with objects which seem to need some attention from the narrator. There the narrator finds out one room that seems to be hers. She likes the tidy room. However, she feels depressed at realizing that every object and piece of furniture has to be replaced, mended or cleaned. Every thing is dirty and impaired. She thinks that the whole place should be emptied, burned or thrown away. While the narrator visits the rooms behind the wall again and again, the narrator has the “personal” and “impersonal” experiences. The two kinds, “personal” (though not necessarily, to me) and the other, existed in spheres quite different and separated. One, the “personal,” was instantly to be recognized by the air that was its prison, by the emotions that were its creatures. The impersonal scenes might bring discouragement or problems that had to be solved – like the rehabilitation of walls or furniture, cleaning, putting order into chaos – but in that realm there was a lightness, a freedom, a feeling of possibility. Yes, that was it, the space and the knowledge of the possibility of alternative action. One could refuse to clean that room; one could walk into another room altogether, choose another scene. But to enter the “personal” was to enter a prison, where nothing could happen but what one saw happening, where the air was tight and limited, and above all where time was a strict unalterable law and long. (41-42)

As the narrator cooks, cleans and arranges her flat, she is allowed to do the same things in the impersonal realm behind the wall. She has the choice to mend old sofas or chairs and wash dusty curtains. Nevertheless, the narrator comes to feel frustrated, rather than the expectation and vitality she has at the first time when she discovers the rooms behind the wall. However hard she cleans the rooms, she sees that she has to do the same things again and again whenever she visits the rooms. The narrator recognizes that in a six-sided room the carpet is able to come to life when a piece of material from the jumble on the trestles is matched with the carpet, but she fails in carrying out her task because of some pressure when she thinks she finds out the right fragment for the carpet (79). Or, she cannot be satisfied even after eating up a sugar house like termites with Emily who “breaks off whole pieces of the roof and cramming them into her healthy mouth” (142). On the contrary, possibilities and alternatives abound in this realm, where the narrator has freedom (41). She makes progress through her repeated actions, and thereby the rooms she visits in the impersonal realm are changing. In a room, she removes some rotten

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planks away for insects that are busy at their work of re-creation, and pulls back heavy curtains to let the sunlight in. Then, the smell of growth comes up from the stuffy old room. In such progress and development, she is also changing. Her rage of protest “(but against what?)” (100) with a restlessness and a hunger is relieved. In the personal realm where “nothing can happen but what one sees happening” and like “a prison” closure, despair, anxiety and loneliness are prevalent, the narrator slowly and painfully recalls that Emily feels guilty because her mother sees her as an obstacle. The narrator watches the scene where Emily who on a white bed is covered with her excrement is caught by her mother, and then she hears a loud angry voice, slaps, low mutters and exclamations of disgust and the child screaming. The mother puts Emily in an over-hot bath and scrubs her, which leaves her skin red. The mother keeps exclaiming in disgust because of a faint tainted stink of shit. “You are a naughty girl, Emily, naughty, naughty, naughty, disgusting, filthy, dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty, a dirty girl, Emily, you are a dirty naughty – oh, disgusting, you a filthy dirty dirty girl, Emily” (144). In another scene, the narrator perceives strong waves of painful emotion from Emily who receives her mother’s talking to a woman visitor in the form of warnings, threats and messages of dislike. This is guilt that is connected to both Emily and the narrator’s uncomfortable self-reproach. The narrator often hears such painful complaints in the personal realm, and even in her flat she catches the voice coming from one of the rooms behind the wall. About this point, the readers can have this doubt: why do the narrator and Emily’s mother see the daughter as naughty, and thereby condemned all the time? Why does the narrator fruitlessly clean and arrange the old rooms in the impersonal realm? Is it related to her past which is willingly not deleted? The more often she visits the rooms behind the wall, the more signs of the world behind the wall the narrator has in her flat. This sign is related to the sobbing of a child. This “sound of a child’s crying” (144) plays an important role as a main motif in the narration of the narrator. The sound of crying is faint, distant, and sometimes inaudible. On the other hand, even when she talks to Emily, the narrator hears the child’s crying. In fact, the narrator is drawn by “a child crying” (12) among sounds and voices in the rooms behind the wall while she puts her ear to the wall and waits for something. The sound of crying is a catalyst to the narrator who begins her journey to the rooms behind the wall. The point is that the sound of crying seems familiar to the narrator who thinks she has been hearing the sound all her life. With the sound of crying in the personal realm, the narrator cannot help having the “personal” which is with “dismay and a not-wanting” (66). This emotion of embarrassment may

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have to do with the narrator’s remark that Emily has “an invisible deformity, a hump on her back” (70), which is perhaps visible only to Emily and herself. In a large chair set against the curtains, the soldier-like man sat with his knees apart, gripping between them the small girl who stood shrieking. On his face, under the moustache, was a small tight smile. He was “tickling” the child. This was a “game,” the bedtime “game,” a ritual. The elder child was being played with, was being made tired, was being given her allowance of attention, before being put to bed, and it was a service by the father to the mother, who could not cope with the demands of her day, the demands of Emily. The child wore a long nightie, with frills at wrists and at the neck. Her hair had been brushed and was held by ribbon. A few minutes ago she had been a clean neat pretty little girl in a white nightdress, with a white ribbon in her hair, but now she was hot and sweating, and her body was contorting and twisting to escape the man’s great hands that squeezed and dug into her ribs, to escape the great cruel face that bent so close over her with its look of private satisfaction. The room seemed filled with a hot anguish, the fear of being held tight there, the need for being held and tortured, since this was how she pleased her captors. She shrieked: “No, no, no, no . . . helpless, being explored and laid bare by this man. (8687)

Next to the mother who is indifferent and who has no idea about what is going on with the little girl, the father lets his knees go slack, pretends to release the child and again reaches for a knee to steady her, and then, before the child can be freed from his knees, the father claps his knees on either side of the child. The torture begins again and the child screams. While the child suffers from the uncomfortable smell of unwashed clothes, the father’s fingers recklessly dig into her sides. The mother is ignorant of this “tickling” game because the game is right, healthy and licensed based on her experiences from her own childhood. The narrator watches this scene where the father looks at his wife with “a wonderfully complex expression” (87), and points out the mother’s indifference about this task. The father knows this game is wrong and should be stopped and, at the same time, because of this, he has a strange and unspeakable attraction to the game. He is surprised at the fact that this game is allowed and moreover encouraged by his wife. The father, with the guilt, looks down at the sleeping child. He went into the nursery room, it’s white, white, white everywhere. . . . He stood at the foot of it and looked at the little girl, now asleep. Her cheeks flamed scarlet. Beads of sweat stood on her forehead. She was only lightly asleep. She kicked off the bed clothes as he watched, turned herself,

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An Opening in the Wall and lay, her nightgown around her waist, showing small buttocks and the backs of pretty legs. The man bent lower and gazed, and gazed. (89)

Focused on the father’s concealed satisfaction, Jeanie Warnock in “Unlocking the Prison of the Past: Childhood Trauma and Narrative in Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor” maintains that Lessing reveals her trauma hidden in her personal history in The Memoirs of a Survivor (12). Warnock points out that, beside the mother-daughter relationship between Lessing and her mother which has attracted considerable attention, the relationship of father and daughter has to be rereviewed through the narrator who is not only a representative of Lessing, but also a mediator who draws the experiences, which are latent in her unconscious, into her consciousness from Lessing’s own childhood. This is associated with Lessing’s double-faced reaction to her father in that in Under My Skin she mentions her father is her supporter and at the same time she indicates that her father makes her “one of the walking wounded” (25) with the impact of the “tickling” game. Considering that the child is vulnerable and weak, it is likely for the daughter to idealize her father when she is unable to get over her father’s influence. Emily shows that through the narrator she thinks that being tortured with the tickling game by her father, even though she does not want it, is one way how she can make her “captors” (87) pleased. In one thing or another way, the child has to follow the parents who lead the games. However, as it is shown in Lessing’s confession in Under My Skin that the “tickling game” has shown up in her nightmares and she has clear memories of the nightmares (31), some games such as tickling, hugging and kissing can possibly provide children with over-stimulation, entrapment and helplessness (Davies 60; Warnock 13). In The Memoirs of a Survivor, the narrator becomes aware of potential wrongfulness of the tickling game which seems simple and interesting and the game nevertheless burdens Emily. The narrator perceives this experience drags Emily into the dark. So the narrator really waits for Emily to step off the “merry-go-round,” that is, the “escalator carrying her from the dark into the dark” (93). As the uncomfortable memory about the father is open, the narrator attempts to re-define the “it” event and unsuccessfully tries to identify its meaning with a long-winded explanation. She mentions the “it” is like a cloud or an emission, but is invisible, and exists like the air in the room or the vapor of the air. The “it” cannot be defined easily or understood. It is unstable. It can be an illness, a tiredness, a boil. Then, the “it” can be “what you experienced . . . and was in the space behind the wall, moved the players behind the wall” (155). So, when the narrator comes to wonder if Emily remembers “anything of her memories or experiences” (45),

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Lessing’s voice seems to be reflected in the voice of the narrator. The narrator takes the place of the eyes and ears of Emily, through which the narrator seems to see and hear one part of Lessing’s personal history, and then the narrator discovers “my[her] own private discoveries” (7) which are concealed until they come out, but unexpectedly pop out. The discoveries are hard to touch as well as painful to open, and, in spite of that, they need to be told. The discoveries are too much to describe in an autobiographical form, which is the reason The Memoirs of a Survivor has to be written in a science fiction or a fantasy genre and, in addition, unfolded with the double narrative style using Emily and the narrator. In the narrative that springs out from her inner preoccupation again and again, Lessing’s “lost self, lost consciousness” (Sullivan 160) appears.

Autobiographical Writing as a Confession Betsy Draine in Substance under Pressure indicates that Lessing’s intention to intersect the dream world and the real world in The Memoirs of a Survivor is not carried out smoothly (133), and in “Changing Frames” she points out that the ending part of The Memoirs of a Survivor is, literally, a failure (61). With multitudes of gaps in the form and in the subject, it is true that The Memoirs of a Survivor attracts various approaches and particularly the ending part draws extreme responses, like Draine’s. As mentioned above, when Lessing writes The Memoirs of a Survivor in a dream form, the readers expect that like in the case of Alice in Alice in Wonderland, the narrator or Emily has to come back to the real world, waking from her dream, and have time to review what she dreams or share her dream with someone around her. While Alice talks to her sister about her dream after returning to her real world, Emily and the narrator walk across to another world in a critical situation where they are surrounded by a group of previously vicious young people. Then, one morning, a weak yellow stain lay on the wall, and there, brought to life, was the hidden pattern. . . . Emily with Hugo walked through the screen of the forest into . . . and now it was hard to say exactly what happened. . . . and on the lawn a giant black egg of pockmarked iron but polished and glossy, around which, stood Emily, Hugo, Gerald, her officer father, her large laughing gallant mother and little Dennis, . . . That world was folding up as we stepped into it, was parcelling itself up, was vanishing, dwindling and going -all of it, trees and streams, grasses and rooms and people. But the one person I had been looking for all this time was there; there she was. . . . She was beautiful. I only saw her for a moment. . . . Beside her, then, as she turned to walk on and away and ahead while the world folded itself up around her, was Emily, and beside

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An Opening in the Wall Emily was Hugo. Emily, yes, but quite beyond herself, transmuted, and in another key, and the yellow beast Hugo fitted her new self: a splendid animal, handsome, all kindly dignity and command, he walked beside her and her hand was on his neck. Both walked quickly behind that One who went ahead showing them the way out of this collapsed little world into another order of world together. Both, just for an instant, turned their faces as they passed that threshold. They smiled. (211-13)

In this scene, Emily and the narrator are about to enter into a new world, and there is a “beautiful” lady who shows them “the way out of this collapsed little world into another order of world” and there is even an event of the metamorphosis of an animal. The Memoirs of a Survivor consists of fourteen chapters that Lessing does not number. The readers may have a strong impression about the final chapter, as if reading a fantasy with a dramatic ending. The ending part of The Memoirs of a Survivor is exactly the same as the ending of a fantasy or science fiction in which, when they confront an unavoidable crisis, pursued by enemies, the characters enter a round tunnel or a hole formed with a light beam or sunlight at an unexpected, but well-timed, moment. Malcolm Cowley and Victoria Glendinning make cynical remarks about the ending of The Memoirs of a Survivor as “a cop-out” that is used to finish the ending without any burden or explanation, or “deus ex machina,” that is, an unnatural and unreasonable ending like a fairy who helps Cinderella transform with one touch (Sullivan 157). Jeanne Murray Walker mentions that the ending which uses a dramatic change to solve the confronted deadlock suggests Lessing’s escapism (108-09). As is well known, Lessing is the author of many different types of novels, and it can be contended that she is skillful in dealing with deadlock or obstacles, and furthermore she is likely to expect these kinds of criticisms and questions in advance. Therefore, the fact that Lessing should intend to create the ending in a fantasy fashion can be considered. The ending is connected to the matter of the structure of The Memoirs of a Survivor where the boundary of the personal and the impersonal realms has to be destroyed and then fused together. When the narrator watches “parceling itself up, vanishing, dwindling and going” scenes, the personal and impersonal realms are mixed and integrated. The “trees and streams, grasses and rooms and people” (212) fold up. Like the “dissolving wall,” the border of the two realms disappears, and Emily’s repressed “it” – “the almost unbearable memories or helplessness and inadequacy contained within her childhood” (Warnock 16) – is revealed and embraced and thereby Emily is able to accompany her father and mother into a new world.

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As Emily changes into a new state of being, another opening which is connected to a utopian world is formed. In this world, everyone seeks reconciliation and harmony. Emily gets over her uncomfortable memories of her own childhood, and especially embraces her father, including her mother. Alvin Sullivan points out that the ending of The Memoirs of a Survivor is the ultimate ending (160), which offers a chance to express the ultimate experience. That is, Lessing has to create her own utopian world that cannot be verbalized. When The Memoirs of a Survivor is read with the subject of the recovery of the lost self, the symbolic meaning of “a giant black egg” described in the ending part is also to be considered. It is interesting to review the mythological analysis of Sharon R. Wilson on the positive meaning of the black egg in order to draw the subject of the self-recovery of Lessing. She uses the positive meaning of the color of black and the meaning of rebirth which the egg represents in the Ukraine. Also, she emphasizes the motif of rebirth which the ending part implies, by interpreting Emily who crosses the world behind the wall, the flat and then the new world as Persephone (6). The cat, Hugo, who stands next to Emily, shows his loyalty to the end as her companion, transforms from “an ugly beast” (21) into “a splendid and handsome animal” (213) and joins the process of rebirth. Here, the journey of the three worlds as “multiple layers of both inner and outer” (Charles 2) can be seen as a symbol of Emily’s spiritual growth. Lessing mentions in an interview with Minda Bikman that “For a lot of women, when they start writing it’s a way of finding out who they are” (Ingersoll 60). So, most of Lessing’s novels are connected to selfrealization or self-recovery. In The Memoirs of a Survivor the narrator, who is a representative of Lessing, explores the multiple hidden rooms, which are linked with the symbolic meaning of rooms, for instance “self, . . . , birth” (Charles 6). The narrator runs along room after room and passages and corridors, and finally finds “the weeping child who remained there, sobbing hopelessly alone and disowned” (148) in one room. The narrator takes the weeping child up with her arms and rubs the child gently, and the child finds comfort in her arms and turns into a “pretty, fair little girl” (149). Now, this girl is “transmuted” (213) into a being beyond herself and goes into a new world with a big smile. In this point, Lessing attempts to recover her lost and unsaid past in The Memoirs of a Survivor in journeying into her most painful childhood and creating her utopia. The Memoirs of a Survivor is a memoir of Lessing’s “traumatic childhood” (Arntsen 8) and creates Emily who reconstructs her identity after reconstructing her memories in the world behind the wall. The

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“smiling” Emily is invented by the narrator who receives the authority of the narrative from the author. Here, it is uncertain that the author intends to reveal that Emily overcomes her childhood experiences, in particular, her uncomfortable memories related to her father. That is, the author, Lessing herself, is “a complex and continuously changing” (Abbott 84) individual. Then, can the narrator be a reliable individual? For all that, the narrator of an autobiography basically describes all the events that have impact on the author, in which the narrator cannot control what pops out from the mind. Without knowledge, the narrator exposes that which she is unaware of. Regardless of the intention of the author who wants to control the narrator, the narrator reveals the implied author’s intention. The intention may exist between the lines in the narrative that is described by the narrator, or it can be suggested, or skillfully exposed to only some readers, like Warnock and me. This is the same in The Memoirs of a Survivor. In the process of writing, proofreading and editing the author’s narrative, a concealed truth is revealed until the implied author exposes his or her voice. In this point, an autobiographical writing is related to writing a confession. If the act of confession is to have authority on the readers, the confessed story has to be proved true. An autobiography is naturally based on the fact that the author talks or writes about true things, in which the autobiography has power. It is true that some overlook autobiographical elements in The Memoirs of a Survivor and some, like Gillian Dooley, begin to consider them with more attention. The fact that Lessing gives power to the narrator by making an experimental writing of her autobiography is undeniable. Thirty years after the publication of The Memoirs of a Survivor, the voice of the implied author, who confesses one uncomfortable memory of Lessing’s childhood, is finally invested with power.

Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. California: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print. Ackroyd, Peter. “Future Imperfect.” Spectator 21 (December, 1974): 797. dspace.flinders. Web. 11 November, 2012. Arntsen, Ann-Christin. Turning Her Life into Fiction. Tromso: U of Tromso, 2008. Print. Charles, Marilyn. “Dreamscapes: Portrayals of Rectangular Spaces in Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor and in Dreams.” Psychoanalytic Review 90:1 (2003): 1-22. Print. Davies, Jody Messler. “Dissociation, Repression and Reality Testing in the Counter Transference.” Memories of Sexual Betrayal: Truth,

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Fantasy, Repression and Dissociation. Ed. Richard B. Gartner. Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson Inc., 1997. 45-76. Print. Dooley, Gillian. “Autobiography of Everyone?” English Studies 90:2 (2009): 157-66. Print. Draine, Betsy. Substance under Pressure. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1983. Print. Duyfhuizen, Bernard. “On the Writings of Future-History: Beginning the Ending in Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor.” Modern Fiction Studies 26:1 (1980): 147-156. Print. Gunn, James. Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction. London: The Scarecrow P, 2005. Print. Hanley, Lynne. “Sleeping with the Enemy.” The Columbia History of the British Novel. Ed. John J. Richetti. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Print. Hosni, Heba. “Memoirs of a Survivor: The City and Apocalypse.” Buzzle. 5 October, 2008. Web. 15 October, 2012. Ingersoll, Earl G. Doris Lessing. New York: Ontario Review P, 1994. Print. Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. Print. Kuns, Guido. “Apocalypse and Utopia in Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor.” The International Fiction Review 7:2 (1980): 79-84. Print. Lessing, Doris. The Memoirs of a Survivor. New York: Vintage Books, 1988. Print. —. Under My Skin. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994. Print. —. Walking in the Shade. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997. Print. Maddocks, Melvin. “Ghosts and Portents.” Psychology Today 9 (June 1975): 12. dspace.flinders. Web. 11 November, 2012. Rubenstein, Roberta. The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1979. Print. Sullivan, Alvin. “The Memoirs of a Survivor: Lessing’s Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 26:1 (1980): 157-62. Print. Walker, Jeanne Murray. “Memory and Culture Within the Individual: The Breakdown of Social Exchange in Memoirs of a Survivor.” Doris Lessing: The Alchemy of Survival. Ed. Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose. Athens: Ohio UP, 1988. 93-114. Print. Warnock, Jeanie. “Unlocking the Prison of the Past: Childhood Trauma and Narrative in The Memoirs of a Survivor.” Doris Lessing Studies 23:2 (2004): 12-16. Print.

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Wilson, Sharon R. “The Cosmic Egg in Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor.” hichumanities.org. Web. 10 October, 2012.

STORYTELLING IN LESSING’S MARA AND DANN AND OTHER TEXTS SHARON R. WILSON

Much of the recent work of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and numerous contemporary writers has been dystopic, about the breakdown of societies through irresponsible science (including genetic engineering), worship of technology, social and gender conditioning, rigid class distinctions, warring tribes, and environmental disaster. Both Atwood and Lessing write apocalyptic fiction about the environment, the struggle for survival, and although less recognized, the nature of stories themselves. Mara and Dann; The Story of Colonel Dann, and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog; Oryx and Crake; and The Year of the Flood are dystopian novels that use myths, fairy tales, and other folklore to dramatize the power of storytelling. With allusions to other works, I will focus on Mara and Dann (1999). Atwood’s recent In Other Worlds: Science Fiction and the Human Imagination theorizes what Atwood calls speculative fiction so that we can appreciate its history, distinctiveness, and uniqueness in examining twentieth-century women writers of utopias and dystopias, or as Atwood refers to this combination, “Ustopias.” An Ustopia is about us: it contains a latent version of its opposite (Atwood, In Other Worlds 66), and Mara and Dann is an excellent example of an Ustopia. Lessing’s dystopias or ustopias and their folkloric intertexts have received little critical attention. Set thousands of years in the future, Mara and Dann is about a brother and sister in continuous movement through the second ice age in Ifric (Africa), complete with drought, floods, desert, thirst, and hunger. Mara and Dann is centered on a strong character. “Mara‘s perspective grows in a traditional way as she experiences near starvation and death, alternating kinship and isolation, home and nothome, and identity and split on her and her brother Dann’s quest for a better place, a place further north” (Wilson 71-72). According to Mona Knapp, Mara

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Storytelling in Lessing’s Mara and Dann and Other Texts is an ice-age Martha Quest who,. . . .not wanting to change the world if she can just watch it go by from a safe place, is as unable to challenge her environment as was Mary Turner in the 1950 novel The Grass is Singing. With her very small personal voice, Mara brings fifty years of Lessing full circle (366).

“In this novel and its sequel, however, although the environment appears to rule everything as much as colonialism with its racism, sexism, and cultural conditioning ruled the worlds of Martha Quest and Mary Turner, the only realities are change and loss and the attempts to save knowledge, construct home and kinship, and tell the story” (Wilson 72). But Mara does tell the story. And, formerly Princess Shahana, she is a more sympathetic character than Dann in either book or than Mary Turner and Martha Quest. The memory of her and her values provides the second book with hope. “It is Mara who notices that women are not free, that tribes such as the Mahondis will die out, that power rules relationships, that people mistakenly believe what they have will continue, that the truth won’t be believed unless someone has experienced it” (Wilson 72), and that people and “cities are as temporary as dreams” (Mara and Dann 361). It is Mara who learns to value the uniqueness of different kinds of people, hears the flowers screaming for water (72; Mara 143), worries about species becoming extinct, and tries to pass on learning. With Lessing’s advancing years, after “the sweetest dream” of Marxism and the end of the British Empire, the destruction and recreation of the world in Memoirs of a Survivor, and her excursions into space fiction, her perspective has broadened so that, like Mara, Dann, and later Griot, she tells what she has seen, revealing all tyrannies and triumphs and even life on earth as shortlived” (Wilson 72). According to Theresa Crater, Lessing wrote Mara and Dann in part as a Sufi teaching story, “a corrective to the massive spiritual illness of the 1990s” (17). As early as her 1988 interview with Claire Tomalin, Lessing says her interviewer (and readers) have not seen what she has seen, including “the angry and destructive hoards” of migrating people also depicted in Memoirs, and take as permanent ideas or structures, such as the white regime in Rhodesia, that suddenly vanish (Tomalin Interview 174-75). As Lessing’s “Author’s Note” indicates, in Mara and Dann she is consciously building upon “the oldest story in Europe” and in most cultures of the world (1). Both brother and sister may be heroic in such tales (Thompson VI 100-101, 709)1 but, as in Mara and Dann, often there is a loyal, clever sister and an alternately loyal and betraying brother. The 1

Folklorists number tale types and motifs. See Aarne and Thompson.

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motifs of starvation, struggle for survival, cannibalistic greediness and archetypal characters in both this novel and its sequel, The Story of Colonel Dann, suggest Aarne Tale Type 327A, the Grimms’ “Hansel and Gretel,” about abandoned, often incestuous, orphans trying to outwit ogres and find their way. The Grimms’ “The Juniper Tree” and the similar Scottish tale, “Applie and Orangie” (Type 720; Dorson 37-40), which feature children eaten and reincarnated as birds and a punished stepmother, and Tale Type 4502 about a brother and sister who escape a cruel stepmother to live in a forest, also seem related. Some of these tales have sisters who search for or rescue brothers, brothers who betray and rescue sisters from the devil, and brothers who magically transform. Sisters in fairy tales, folktales, or myths may be driven from home or become cannibals, may rescue or be rescued by their brother, may plot against him, or may work with him to heal the king (Aarne 551, 580). In the Russian tale, “Sister Alyonushka and Brother Ivanus,” thirsty orphans alone in the forest remain loyal and rescue one another from transformation, drowning, and a Witch (Russian Crafts). In traditional stories the earth may be formed from the murder of the first brother and sister, the moon and the sun or vise versa may be sister and brother, the ocean and his sister may give birth to rivers as offspring, and a brother may impregnate, eat, or flog an unchaste sister, win his sister’s suitor test, or kill the sister’s husband. Incest, often involuntary, in these tales occurs world-wide, and, as stated in Mara and Dann, such marriage between brother and sister was practiced among the royalty or higher nobility in Egypt, Persia, Peru, Siam, Ceylon, Wales, Burma, Hawaii, Uganda, among Greek deities, and is recorded in Genesis. Incest between brothers and sisters was more commonly forbidden because it could cause tragedy, such as drought or being forbidden to enter Paradise, or children might be insects, or, as Mara suggests in Mara and Dann, be malformed or look like sinister doubles (Leach and Fried 16566). Sometimes, as in “Kora and His Sister,” their blood and even the smoke from their burned bodies refuses to mix, indicating that never again should a brother and sister marry (Folklore of the Santal Parganas, no. 50). Despite pressure from their kin, orphaned Mara and Dann refuse to form a doomed dynasty based on intermarriage of their extended family, and Mara warns Dann about the genetic punishments for incest that she learned about at the museum. Still, Dann seems never to adjust to losing 2

In the Lithuanian tale, “A Brother Wants to Marry His Sister,” when all her relatives conspire to make her marry her younger brother, the beautiful sister asks the earth to open and swallow her. She marries the lord of the underground instead of her brother (Incest in European Folktales).

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what he believes is his “true bride” and mourns Mara throughout most of The Story. Lessing also explores incest in The Golden Notebook and The Grandmothers. In addition to folklore narrative patterns and character types, Lessing also uses mythological motifs, including a relative’s treachery, kindness and unkindness, the false bride (Kira), magic in hair (Leta), escape from an ogre (Kulik), quest for a savior (Dann), and escape from a deluge as examples of many possible world calamities (Leach and Fried 478; Aarne 152-53; Thompson I). (See also Wilson (71-74). As in “Hansel and Gretel,” Mara, the Gretel figure in Mara and Dann, learns to be independent and saves her brother. In the fairy tale, the siblings are left in the forest when everyone is starving and their parents cannot take care of them anymore. Although they attempt to mark their paths with pebbles and then crumbs, after the witch traps them in her Gingerbread House and Gretel both pushes the witch into her oven and releases Hansel from the shed, they are initially unable to find their way. Mara and Dann’s journey is much longer and more arduous than that of Hansel and Gretel. In the fairy tale, the crumbs have been eaten by birds, and they must rely on a white duck to cross the water. The tale ends happily when the children see their father’s house and recognize that the bad mother is gone just as the witch is. As in Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, the characters’ continuous hunger for food in “Hansel and Gretel” (Hunt 86-94) and Mara and Dann represents a Gingerbread House that traps the characters through their need and greed. Mara and Dann are orphaned when they must leave their home to escape an apparent revolution among the Mahondi tribe, and they are unable to return home to Rustum. They must battle ogres, drought, floods, marshes, wars, lizards, water stingers, ice, spiders, and other creatures. They lose their names, cultures, and families as they are taken to the Rock People and the old woman, Daima, and later go on walking and taking such often broken contrivances as sky skimmers, carrying chairs, cart birds, carriages, coaches, and boats throughout the Mara book. Through the journeys, however, they do meet other Mahondis and many other races, learn about both slave and royal past, and learn about the glorious wisdom and inventions of the past civilizations. Unlike some fairy tales and Brian Aldiss’s interpretation of this book, however, there is no happy ending. While the main characters meet many people on their journey, the text continuously calls attention to “the brother and sister,” and Dann’s failures as a brother. Unlike “Hansel and Gretel,” where the siblings are loyal to one another, in Mara and Dann Dann essentially sells Gretel to the witch, in the case of the novel going so far as to sell his sister to a madam. Although Mara forgives him and even trusts him with some more of her

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gold, there can be no resolution to their incestuous rivalry and no end to their postcolonial journey. 3 The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog more completely deconstructs the happy ending both novels self-consciously discuss and any expectation that there can be a stable home, identity, ethnicity, nation, or planet in this cautionary tale resembling oral narrative (Tiger 23). Even when Mara goes “north of north” and forms a communal family on the farm with Shabis, Kira, Dann, Daulis, Leta, and Donna, Mara admits that, early in the morning, she always thinks how far she and her brother will go that day (407). Dann continually asks why he and Mara can’t be together, and Mara admits that she loves Dann more than Shabis. She rejects the utopian fabrics and inventions of the past that depict the impossibility of utopia. The end of every story is still war. As in Atwood’s trilogy, Mara discovers the importance of witnessing the apocalypse and telling its story. Story-telling occurs throughout Mara and Dann, and the name of a key character, Griot, meaning story-teller, underlines the importance of storytelling in both Mara and Dann and The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog. Daima’s stories, which sometimes seem made-up, often begin with “what did you (or I) see” and sometimes tell of the ruined city with walls depicting warfare. Often stories give the history of Rock City and Ifric and answer “why.” Dann tells stories of his travels without Mara, where he has seen strange conveyances made by people much more advanced than Mahondis. There are stories about the week of love among the people attempting breeding in Hadran, and Shabis has an ancient book of tales made from treebark that Mara uses for lessons. Mara tells women of the brothel stories of civilizations that could make indestructible clothing, houses, and other things and how everything is a stage, “one way of being changes into another” (322). Daulis tells of machines that covered large distances quickly while Mara thinks of tales of flying dragons and talking birds. Many of the stories, such as those about drowned cities, use magic realism. As a “princess prostitute” who has aborted a child (327), she also parodies fairy tales. At the Centre, Felissa and Felix tell about the kin’s incest during a warm period between the two ice ages. Viewing history and ruling as swings of climate, their attempt to force Mara and Dann to be “stud. . .and brood animal” is unsuccessful (375). Ultimately, many of the stories are about gender and sexism, which often accompany racism, empire, and hierarchy. Women are often seen as the property of men, and for protection Mara wears a leather disc to prove 3

See the red-blanketed army that longs for postcolonial identity in The Story.

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Storytelling in Lessing’s Mara and Dann and Other Texts

that she is married to Daulis (339). In the Alb settlement, single women are considered whores, and Mara feels unfree as long as a man could make her pregnant. Mara and Dann’s stories together also warn us of greed, imperialism, war, global warming, and generally mismanaging our planet.

Atwood Women are objects of exchange in both Lessing and Atwood texts. Cannibalism, folktales, and storytelling also occur in the two Atwood books. In the case of Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, the body, “having ditched its old traveling companions, the mind and the soul” (85), was like a giant slug eating its way relentlessly through all the other bioforms on the planet, grinding up life on earth and shitting it out the backside in the form of pieces of manufactured and soon-to-be-obsolete plastic junk. (Atwood 243).

Oryx and Crake is a blind Frankenstein and “Fitcher’s Bird” or “Bluebeard” story. Both Jimmy and Crake are blind about the corrupt technological society in which they are involved, and are also Bluebeards, married to death (Wilson 35-51). In the sequel, The Year of the Flood, Atwood uses various kinds of folklore to convey her social criticism, culminating in warnings of approaching apocalypse for the world outside of the novels. Drawing upon sometimes parodied folk tales, folk songs, oral histories, legends, fairy tales, myths, and the Bible, most significantly the Genesis tale, The Year of the Flood is about a flood, this time waterless, destroying the earth. As the female characters tell their own stories, however, the reader may infer that, as in Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor and most flood stories, rebirth follows apocalypse. Both Lessing and Atwood use folk stories to contextualize their novels in a timeless perspective. Human beings behave as they always have, selfishly and heroically, greedily and generously, foolishly and wisely. References to tales such as “Hansel and Gretel,” The Odyssey, Frankenstein, “Bluebeard” 4 and flood stories from the Bible and other stories give believable, somewhat realistic characters an archetypal quality and the books an aura of magical realism, which fuses magic with realism. Atwood refers to Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood as speculative fiction, and Lessing calls her Canopean series and presumably Mara and Dann and The Story of Colonel Dann, and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and 4

Odysseus and Circe are referenced in The Story, and Frankenstein, “Fitcher’s Bird” or “Bluebeard” in Oryx and Crake. See Wilson 75, Chapter 2.

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the Snow Dog space fiction. As indicated in the Introduction, others would say that all dystopias are science fiction, fantasy, or fabulation and that these texts are ustopias with utopias as well as dystopias buried within. Because the four texts are satiric, they all imply the perils of dystopias as well as how society could be—humane, peaceful, balanced, and respectful of nature and knowledge.

Works Cited Aldiss, Brian. www.lexisnexis.com.souce.unco.edu/Inacuia2api/deliver. Aarne, Antti, and Stith Thompson. The Types of the Folktale. A Classification and Bibliography. Trans. and enlarged Stith Thompson, 2nd rev. Folklore Fellows Communications 184 Ed. Walter Anderson et al. Helsinki Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1961. Atwood, Margaret. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. NY: Nan A. Talese Doubleday, 2011. —. Oryx and Crake. NY: Nan Talese Doubleday, 2003. —. The Year of the Flood. NY: Nan Talese Doubleday, 2009. Crater, Theresa. “Temporal Temptations in Lessing’s Mara and Dann: Arriving at the Present Moment.” DLS 23.2 (Winter 2004): 17-24. Dorson, Richard M. Folktales Told Around the World. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975. Knapp, Mona. Review of Mara and Dann, World Literature Today. 74.2 (Spring 2000): 366. Hunt, Margaret and James Stern, trans, The Complete Grimms’ Fairy Tales. NY: Pantheon, 1972. Incest in European Folktales. http://www.pitt.edu-dash/incest.html. Leach, Maria and Jerome Fried. Asst ed. Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary and Folklore, Mythology, and Legend. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984. Lessing, Doris. Mara and Dann. NY: HarperFlamingo,1999. —. The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog. London: HarperCollins, 2005. Russian Crafts.com/tales. Thompson The Folktale. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London. U of California P, 1977. Tiger, Virginia. “’Our Chroniclers Tell Us’: Lessing’s Sequels to Mara and Dann.” Doris Lessing Studies. 25.2 (Winter 2006):23-25. Wilson, Sharon Rose. Myths and Fairy Tales in Contemporary Women’s Fiction: From Atwood to Morrison. NY: Palgrave, 2008.

THE EXEGESIS OF DORIS LESSING’S THE CLEFT: RETHINKING BEING AND TIME BOOTHEINA MAJOUL AOUADI

"Astrology and Literature have the same task, the 'delayed' confirmation of the real" (Barthes 116)

Doris Lessing is a "writer for all seasons." She tackles in her works different themes and advocates a cornucopia of literary genres. Her book The Cleft (2007)—"the word refers both to the rocky outcrop where they live and to their own genitalia" (Bedell)—defies categorization; it bears an alchemical vision to gender dichotomy. It is a "plot less, characterless and timeless novel" (Bedell) that challenges the preconceived social conventions and subverts "the order of things" while defying, in her narrator's words, "the crabby faded documents we call histories" (99). The Nobel laureate imagines in her book a group of women she calls the Clefts who—in the beginning of the novel—live in an all-female universe; they are self-fertilised by the wind, wave or moon. The book's narrator, a Roman historian, explains how such creatures came into being: And, of course, the babies being born. They were just born, that's all, no one did anything to make them. I think we thought the moon made them, or a big fish, but it is hard to remember what we thought, it was such a dream. How we thought, it was such a dream. How we thought has never been part of our story, only what happened (11).

The historian tries thus to re-construct this dream-like universe and deconstruct it in an attempt to understand the past and provide a historical document deciphering the relics of a pre-historic society; nevertheless he also alludes to the fact that both the history and the story of these creatures are similar to a deluding fantasy. The historian describes the Clefts as savages with "slow old minds" (120); he asserts, "We do not know what the Clefts looked like" (118); but it is reported that they were criminally mutilating male babies then

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throwing them to eagles to devour. This parthenogentic utopian universe transmogrifies when the Squirts or the Monsters, a group of males, penetrate it. In fact, the Clefts "were prosperous, easy-living, comfortable communities" (136) that changed with the new way of being that came to be imposed on them by nature. The novel creates new worlds out of an imagined past; it establishes through historical records a new genre, and provides through a critical examination of a pre-historic society a new vision to gender roles. The Cleft is thus a narrative of defamiliarisation that attempts to re-examine the history of genesis and reformulate the universal laws of ethical perceptions. It narrates a utopian universe loaded with the secrets of the past, compelling readers to question it, cogitate about Being and Time, and engage in what the novel’s narrator calls "the process of listening, while the history is spoken aloud" (136). Cloë Houston in an article entitled “No Place and New Worlds" claims, "When they are found, utopian countries are strange and unknown; entering a utopia always involves a process of discovery, a process which by its very nature challenges the status and the knowledge of the reader." Lessing's The Cleft thus falls into this category of narratives that confuse readers with strange creatures in an out of common universe, in order to make them meditate on the multi-layered facets of Time and Being. The novel might also be read as a "dystopian fable of maleness and femaleness" (Bedell), a strategic amalgam between creation myth, history and fabulation aiming at escaping societal structures in an attempt to deconstruct and fathom them. It in fact recalls an improbable pre-historic past and projects a bleak vision about both the present and the future of human species. Nonetheless, it paves the way for re-examining the world with a critical eye. And it is through providing whether a perfect or rather a deformed version of the real, that Lessing, amongst other writers of utopian/dystopian narratives, historicises and criticises through fabulation. The Cleft opens with the title of Robert Braves' Man does, Woman is. Lessing quotes Braves and adopts his words to tease her readers and intrigue them about the implications and the perspectives of her plotless book. The poet's title could suggest that the novel might contain feminist claims, whereas in fact both the poem's title and the novel's story bear broader perspectives. Be that as it may, the writer does not impede herself from playfully provoking her male and female readers by intruding suggestive statements in her text such as: "The Clefts for the time believed that the boys were defective, mentally: they did not have memories. This idea developed to 'they are born normal but then later they don't seem to think of anything but their squirts'" (156), but also: "It was generally

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The Exegesis of Doris Lessing’s The Cleft

agreed in the end that the men were, if not mad, then deficient in understanding" (162). Such claims are at the surface level the Roman historian's recalling of historical facts the way he deduced them; they seem to be his own interpretation of past relics expressed through present ideologies and thoughts. In fact, these statements rather entail Lessing's satiric portrayal of gender stereotypes expressed through her narrator to intentionally taunt her readers. The writer attempts to compel both men and women to face their own imperfections and become aware of the narrow sphere of thoughts into which they imprison themselves. Lessing has her own utopian dreams about the gender issue; she explains in an interview: Of course, I am for women's equality. Of course, I consider women inherently equal to men. However, I would never maintain that men and women are alike. They simply are not. Physically, psychologically, and intellectually, they are not—which is not to say that women must be more stupid than men. They have other gifts. No two people in the world are perfectly alike; how can men and women be alike? What I wish is that women should be independent, neither the slaves of men nor Amazons. (qtd in Ingersoll 103)

Gender stereotypes are according to the writer part of what she calls "prisons we choose to live inside" (Prisons). In other words, Lessing points at social constructs that lock up both men and women and compel them to cohabitate within their narrow ideological sphere, as she puts it: Nearly all the pressures from outside are in terms of group beliefs, group needs, national needs, patriotism and the demands of local loyalties, such as to your city and local groups of all kinds. But more subtle and more demanding—more dangerous—are the pressures from inside, which demand that you should conform, and it is these that are the hardest to watch and to control (Prisons We Choose to Live Inside 55).

Lessing goes back in time and uses legendary-like creatures to invoke and criticise the gender gap. She follows the line of the Sufi tales, which quite often advocate didacticism through fabulation. What the writer tries to highlight through The Cleft is the like-mindedness of what she calls "group minds" (Prisons We Choose to Live Inside 47), as she also alludes to the unchanging nature of human beings. The book is thus a historical report of ever-present traces of the past. It also entails an eternal Truth about the gender dichotomy. In Lessing’s novel, history recalls the past only to criticise the present and think about the future.

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These documents called history are according to the Roman historian, "Compiled from ancient verbal records, written down many ages after their collection" (29). The British writer thus wants to underline through her narrator's words that it is impossible to read the past without bearing present ideologies or what the Roman historian calls "our lexicons of feelings" (250) in mind. She thus draws a fine line blurring the boundaries between the past and the present, since the past is eternally confined to the linguistic tools of the present. The Roman historian emphasises "These, our ancestors, our so distant forebears, never spoke, as far as we can tell from their records" (228) and he asserts "There is a great deal it seems we do not know" (259). He further explains the process of exorcising the past as follows: We Romans have measured, charted, taken possession of time, so that it would be impossible for us to say, 'And then it came to pass'... for we would have the year, the month, the day off pat, we are a defining people, but then all we know of events is what was said of them by the appointed Memories, the repeaters, we spoke to those who spoke again, again, what had been agreed long ago should be remembered (101).

In her book Metafiction, Patricia Waugh explains that "the metafictionalist is highly conscious of a basic dilemma: if he or she sets out to 'represent' the world, he or she realizes fairly soon that the world, as such, cannot be 'represented'. In literary fiction it is, in fact, possible only to 'represent' the discourses of that world" (3). The Cleft is in fact about past records "whose version of events is going to be committed to memory" (136), as claims the Roman historian, then recalled back and reinterpreted with present "discourses". The story goes through the process of recollecting records and interpreting them the way they are perceived, as Paul Ricoeur puts it: In this way, the phenomenology of memory begins deliberately with an analysis turned toward the object of memory, the memory that one has before the mind; it then passes through the stage of the search for a given memory, the stage of anamnesis, of recollection; we then finally move from memory as it is given and exercised to reflective memory, to memory of oneself (xvi).

Doris Lessing proves to be a ‘metafictionalist’ aware of the impenetrability of the past and the impossibility of producing a faithful copy of the unknown, but she shows throughout her narrator's claims that it is not her intention to reproduce history. The Roman historian narrates, "We Romans like to behave as if we know everything. Pliny, my old

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The Exegesis of Doris Lessing’s The Cleft

friend, was in pursuit of knowledge—and died for his efforts" (259). In fact, “The utopia insists upon the existence of secrecy, of unknown waters and lands, and asserts that the reader is not in full possession of knowledge of the world" (Houston). The writer aims thus at producing, through her text, an intentional "faithful resemblance" (Ricoeur 11) to the past; she defamiliarises her readers with a utopian imaginary universe in order to familiarise them with the preconceived ideas they have about the present, the past and the recorded history. In a paper entitled Female Perspectives in the Dystopian Novel, Desmet asserts, "This factual reporting leads to the confrontation of an established set of norms with a possible new set of norms, which is known in literary theory as ‘the attitude of estrangement’. It implies that although the reader or viewer recognises the subject, at the same time it seems unfamiliar to him or her." Lessing adopts thus "the attitude of estrangement"; she revisits the myth of creation in order to cogitate with her readers on the history of Being into this world. Nevertheless, Lessing's book was "inspired by a scientific article in which it was asserted that the basic and primal human stock was probably female" (Bedell). This all-female society fertilised by the wind, she imagines, recalls back the myth of matriarchal prehistory advocated by the Swiss anthropologist and sociologist Johan Jakob Bachofen (1815-1887) in his book Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World, in which he asserts that matriarchy is the source of human society. Lessing's sexless utopian society of the Clefts also draws on the Romans' old speculation, dating of 100 AD, that mares can be fertilized by the wind. The Nobel laureate gathered these mythological elements and concocted an uncategorised story about the origin of creation. She even reinforced the enigma in her metafictional work by inventing the character of a Roman historian, as enigmatic as are the Clefts and the Monsters, attempting to decipher the traces of a Palaeolithic age, while he is unable to deal with his own reality. The man studies and interprets past relics, unaware that his present reality is not within his grasp. The utopian narrative is thus being critical about how much people are interested in examining memory while forgetting their present reality. Doris Lessing's mythical story of The Cleft seems at first glance to be merely a feminist utopia, claiming that women are at the origin of creation, whereas by delving deeper into the structure of this plotless novel, the reader might notice the impossibility to classify it within the limited repertoire of a specific literary genre. The novel is a feminist utopia that defies the preconceived social and religious norms, a critical utopian narrative defamiliarising with odd mythical implications aiming at

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investigating different layers of being and time, a dystopian fable that intentionally projects horrifying realities and a speculative fictional work with alchemical and philosophical concerns about existential Truths. In fact, "utopia, dystopia and science fiction are all characterised by the presentation of otherness and therefore they show a certain discontinuity from 'realism' ” (Williams 196). Hence, the unrealistic universe of The Cleft bears no connection with the present reality; though at the end of the book, the Clefts and the Monsters started having "human" feelings, troubles and societal interactions. Doris Lessing is convinced that writing utopian/dystopian fiction is one way of criticising society, depicting its imperfections and unveiling its vices. She thinks that: People who are continually examining and observing become critics of what they examine and observe. Look at all those utopias written through the centuries. More's Utopia, Campanella's City of the Sun, Morris's News from Nowhere, Butler's Erewhom (which is "nowhere" backwards), all the many different blueprints for possible futures produced by science and space fiction writers who, I think, are in the same tradition. These of course are all criticisms of current societies, for you can't write a utopia in a vacuum. (Prisons We Choose to Live Inside 7)

So, writing utopia is according to Lessing a major and compulsory critical task of the writer. For thus she ventures into the genre—amongst other genres—to produce a text that might be at the same time imagining the past, reproducing the present and predicting the future, while "simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary standards" (Gilbert and Gubar 73). Her all-female world defies males' narrative standards and ideologies. In fact, unlike the old utopias of Plato and Thomas More, which create perfect unchanging worlds, Lessing's story is not static; and though her novel is plotless, it is not closed. Furthermore, the group of females she imagined are not confined to the past utopian model. Nonetheless, the utopian imagined community of the Clefts, at the beginning of the story, portrays an ideal world without a masculine presence. "The Old Shes" (10) are fertilised by the wind and living in "a kind of dream, a sleep" (11); their perfect world is disturbed by males, who suddenly penetrated into their utopia and tarnished it with mundane realities. The Squirts or Monsters introduced them to dystopian thoughts and feelings and aroused their awareness of Being and Time. Through this novel Lessing re-invents the myth of creation to portray the controversial issue of gender divides, and convey timeless Truths. The Cleft is an 'ou-topia,' an ideal imaginary world set in an isolated space, non-identified place, that the historian in the novel describes as: "all

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The Exegesis of Doris Lessing’s The Cleft

together on a big flat rock, their place" (67); and he asserts his incapacity to grasp the whole truth of its existence: "No, I cannot say how it started. That isn't in our story" (10). The setting seems like a 'Eu-topia', a good place, "a lovely valley" (139), where a group of females, "they probably were sea creatures" (118), are living together without any kind of feeling and with a totally absent notion of temporality, since "they lived in an eternal present" (31). Foucault describes the odd utopian spaces as: "these places which are absolutely other with respect to all the arrangements that they reflect and of which they speak might be described as heterotopias". The novel itself is what the critic calls a "heterotopia of time,” in the sense that it confronts the present with the past and amalgamates history, mythology and imagination; as Foucault puts it "The heterotopia has the power of juxtaposing in a single real place different spaces and locations that are incompatible with each other." But the Clefts were too brutal to fit the utopian world they lived in, "they are clumsy and rough" (28); and the historian excuses their savage nature explaining that "Shock after shock was felt by this community of dreaming creatures and it was their helpless panic that created their cruelty" (33). Nevertheless, Bedell in an article entitled “Women and children first” argues that "this is a novel that appears to have no political allegiance, beyond a statement that women came first. She suggests that the capacity for cruelty and self-defence has as much potential to take hold of women as it does men." The writer thus created a fictional utopian female society with a dystopian imperfect image, as the novel's historian explains: As I have said, the history I am relating is based on ancient documents, which are based on even earlier oral records. Some of the reported events are abrasive and may upset certain people. I tried out selected bits of the chronicle on my sister Marcella and she was shocked. She would not believe that decent females would be unkind to dear little baby boys (7).

It is in fact impossible to imagine the existence of cruelty in an allfemale world, and it seems awkward to believe that women could mutilate their own babies just because they are boys; but the Cleft's story is so skilfully imagined that it seems as real as history itself. The (his) story's narrator, the Roman historian insists on these females' savagery, and thus harshly argues: "People wishing to avoid offence to their sensibilities may start the story on p.29" (7). In fact in this book, Lessing goes beyond the boundaries of the traditional utopias and writes a novel that “contains both utopian and dystopian elements,” and provides a “critical or open-ended dystopia” (Baccolini 13). And while the Clefts' cruelty might be shocking,

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mutilating and killing babies is a dystopian fact. This sexist phenomenon is recorded in past, present and even future history. In the past, Arabs in the pre-Islamic societies buried baby girls alive because giving birth to a female was a shameful curse then. In the postmodern era, choosing the sex of the baby to come is also a controversial issue; there are still some criminal practises hanging over the sex of the newborn babies. Lessing crosses the line and delicately delves into the forbidden realm of gender wars without proclaiming it. The novel turns creation myth into a dystopian fable to deconstruct and fathom past and present human history. Throughout narration, the novelist attempts to reformulate the universal laws of ethical perceptions while asserting "there is a part in this tale that has to remain dark" (34) and hidden within the impenetrable caverns of the (his) story she narrates. The utopian universe of the Clefts is tarnished by dystopian elements that aim to satirize utopian thinking and to shed light on the anti-utopian reality of Man's existence, since "the dystopian novel partly emerged as a critique of utopian constructions which often turned a blind eye to the depressing reality of the world" (Desmet 4). The Cleft is thus a utopian fable denouncing dystopian realities. It is, in the Roman historian's words: "a tale expressing some kind of deep psychological truth" (142); it does not focus on gender divides as much as it emphasises both the Clefts and the Monsters—as representatives of gender dichotomy—"hungry for touch and tenderness" (76). It also alludes to their need to understand the importance of living together to preserve the continuation of their human species as the historian puts it in the novel: "Both sides were learning fast from the other, particularly as the more they learned, the more they knew how much there was for them to know" (74). They have to be aware of their imperfections and limitations in order to live in harmony and raise their progenitors. This message is hidden within the relics of the past to reach the historians who search for truth in the midst of history's archive, of "our ancestors, whose thoughts still live in us" (77), and confirming the unchanging nature of human beings and their need to socialise in order to exist. The novel also sheds light on the way history is perceived and facts are conceived through the claims of the Roman historian: Yes, I know, you keep saying, but what you don't understand is that what I say now can't be true because I am telling you how I see it all now, but it was all different then. Even words I use are new, I don't know where they came from, sometimes it seems that most of the words in our mouths are this new talk. I say I, and again I, I do this and think that, but then we wouldn't say I, it was we. We thought we. I say think but did we think?

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The Exegesis of Doris Lessing’s The Cleft Perhaps a new kind of thinking began like everything else when the Monsters started being born. I am sorry, you keep saying the truth, you want the truth, and that is how we saw you, all of you, at first. Monsters. The deformed ones, the freaks, the cripples. When was then? I don't know. Then was a very long time ago, that's all I know (7-8).

The story of the Clefts living at first in a utopian all-female world is drawn on historical relics deciphered by a Roman historian, who attempts to narrate the past with tools of the present, and at the same time raises doubt on his own conclusions. He even criticises the language of the present he uses to narrate the past. His cogitation questions the discrepancy between past history and the way a story is told in the present. As he puts it: "these whispers from the past, the immense past, voices that repeat what has been said by other voices, we have to interpret by what we know, what we have experienced - and our questions disappear as they were stones dropped into a very deep well" (170-171). He asserts that his story is drawn from history and at the same time defies the readers saying, "well, I may say thousands of years and no one will contradict me" (84). And the readers are aware that "it is impossible to describe an objective world because the observer always changes the observed" (Waugh 3). Furthermore, the Historian in the novel emphasises that "We all know that in the telling and retelling of an event, or series of events, there will be as many accounts as there are tellers" (136). The pre-historic Clefts represent a monstrous truth for present history readers, and they are unaware of their deformity and have their own ways of living their epoch. In other words: "Generations come and go. Individuals flare into visibility, then fade. There is rape and murder, a devastating wind and an expedition, but time sweeps on and the survivors stumble forward. Novels are nothing if not a testament to the significance of individual experience" (Bedell). The Cleft, as "a testament" of a particular time and particular species, puts into question the whole notion of Utopia and speculates about the dichotomy of past/present truths. According to Ruth Levitas, utopias are characterised by two functions "compensation (or retreat or escapism) and critique" (14), which are elaborately achieved in Lessing's book. In fact, the writer highlights, subverts and criticises the dystopian truths depicted through historical documents in the sense that the past, which is preserved by historical traces, mirrors the present past reality we try to hide. In this context, the theorist Derrida asserts, "the presence-absence of the trace… carries in itself the problems of the letter and the spirit, the body and the soul…" (71). Hence these past traces represent and preserve both the history and the spirit of the past, which are hardly penetrable. In the novel, the Roman

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historian asserts: "Shameful history preserved on ancient shards is by no means the only dangerous information kept locked up" (24); he intends thus that historians do not only preserve relics of the past, they also keep part of their interpretations secret, and only unveil half of the past Truth to the present readers of history. Nonetheless, the critic Linda Hutcheon thinks that "we only have access to the past today through its traces – its documents, the testimony of witnesses, and other archival materials" (55). These traces of dystopian truths contained within the caverns of history are the mere embodiment of our very human origin; and in the novel the Roman historian asserts: All this locking up and smoothing over and the suppression of the truth took place when it was agreed all hostilities were over and we were One one Race, or People. With so much unhappy history in our memories, and much of it preserved in the Official Memories, it was agreed – this formulation always signals the smoothing over of disagreement - that as much of the inflammatory material as could be got together must be put in a safe place, and made inaccessible to anyone but the trusted custodians. (24-25)

The collected evidences claimed by the Roman historian are everpresent tangible traces of a past that cannot be denied. They inform about ancestors, recall back inherited inhuman features still inherent in human nature till the present; the Roma historian confirms "you cannot destroy what is preserved in people's minds" (26), as these serve "to resolve the enigma of the presence of the absent, an enigma common to imagination and memory (Ricoeur 8). The critic Jacques Derrida emphasises furthermore the eternal presence of the past through its traces; he explains: "If the trace refers to an absolute past, it is because it obliges us to think a past that can no longer be understood in the form of a modified presence, as a present past. Since past has always signified present-past, the absolute past that is retained in the trace no longer rigorously merits the name ‘past’" (66). Occurring changes through time modify the past and transmogrify our own perception of a present past that historians try to interpret and preserve the way it fits their present. As Lessing's narrator puts it in the novel: "Ages ago, these primitive people, our ancestors, whose thoughts still live in us - we have their thoughts once spoken, now written - ages and ages ago they did this and they did that but never knew why. So we like to think now" (77). This attempt of deciphering past traces is thus what Ricoeur describes as "the moment of knowledge and the moment of the acquisition of the imprint" (9).

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The Exegesis of Doris Lessing’s The Cleft

Nevertheless, "The most common structure for utopian playfulness is one that takes familiar practices and institutions and de-familiarizes them" (Abott). Lessing forces readers to rethink the way they consider history and demystifies the mystery of genesis through a narrative of defamiliarisation. In fact she provides a dystopian version of history and subverts the imagined portrayal of an all-female world. The monstrous clefts' quasi-utopian universe was tarnished by the penetration of the dystopian species called Squirts. For this all-female world, boys represented "defective infants" and were "put out on the Killing Rock" as "food for the eagles" (35). But "soon there was a community of young males, we do not know how many" (40). This presence bothered their utopia and changed their lives and feelings. Lessing here "conveys a powerful belief in the impermanence of any situation in which human beings find themselves and the paradoxically unchanging nature of human relations" (Bedell). This new cohabitation imposes a different way of living. In fact, the historian explains "Without males, or Monsters, no need ever to think that they were Clefts; without the opposite, no need to claim what they were. When the first baby Monster was born, Male and Female was born too, because before that were simply, the people" (78). Both the clefts and the squirts started discovering "feelings," which were "unthinkable, these new thoughts" (87), and then their world started being tarnished with dystopian realities. They were free from feelings and became enchained within them: "Ideas, emotions, words, thoughts, that have been inhabiting the minds of us, the human race, quite comfortably and at least without strain, were presenting themselves now to these young Clefts, and they were restless and disturbed, sitting there at the mouth of their cave" (86). Lessing's novel is a speculative fiction that reinvents the history of genesis and reformulates the universal laws of ethical perceptions. The text intrigues the readers and compels them to question being and time. Heberle in an article entitled "An Inquiry into the Purposes of Speculative Fiction-Fantasy and Truth," underlines that: Speculative fiction (ultrafiction) imagines scenarios that transcend normal reality, but such works always reflect the real world and encourage readers to consider psychic, philosophical, and metaphysical truths or assumptions that we normally pass over without reflection. Such fiction remains forever ambiguous in its meaning and capable of endless and multiple interpretation (142).

The book brings forth truthful elements and insights about the reality of modern Man, who tends to see past creatures as savages and naive

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ignorant primitives. This utopian world dissolving within the discovery of a new way of living loses its very essence as soon as the Clefts and the Squirts transmogrify into social being. Lessing confirms that "civilization is by its very nature antagonistic to certain basic human impulses and therefore fundamentally a source not of happiness, but of unhappiness" (Booker 9-10). The novel is an odyssey into history and pre-history; it goes back to a Palaeolithic era. ̶The nearly people who inhabit the Cleft are seen at a remove, but are, in any case, impossible to understand. They are simply too far away from us; they have no concept of individuality, or love" (Bedell). These creatures are described in the novel as having "the slow tranquil gaze of eyes that had never been troubled by thought" (43). They embody the gloomy nature of the past/history. The writer strategically amalgamates imagination, creation myth and history; in fact, "For Lessing, myths are particularly useful because they can communicate beyond words" (Wilson). In his book Imaginary Homelands, Rushdie asserts that: "Any mythological tale can bear a thousand and one interpretations, because the peoples who have lived with and used the story have, over time, poured all those meanings into it. This wealth of meaning is the secret of the power of any myth" (48). Lessing's imagined utopia, like all utopian narratives, "insists upon the existence of secrecy, of unknown waters and lands, and asserts that the reader is not in full possession of knowledge of the world" (Houston). Her fable subverts the boundaries of Time and Space and gender divides, and bridges the gap between the past and the present of human existence. Through the character of the Roman historian investigating the traces of ancestors, the writer juxtaposes two worlds: the past and the present. The implications of her text join Aristotle's view about history and time passing by: Time, past, present, and future, forms a continuous whole. Space, likewise, is a continuous quantity; for the parts of a solid occupy a certain space, and these have a common boundary; it follows that the parts of space also, which are occupied by the parts of the solid, have the same common boundary as the parts of the solid. Thus, not only time, but space also, is a continuous quantity, for its parts have a common boundary" (14).

In fact, this imagined community of Clefts and Monsters or Squirts transmogrified through time into a society similar to the contemporary one in terms of laws, feelings, and nature; and became invaded by new ideas and ideologies. They were living in a utopian world where "Mirrors had not been invented or even thought of. People knew how others looked, but

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not much had been made of a large nose, or eyes too close" (99). Foucault thinks about these imagined spaces: These are arrangements which have no real space. Arrangements which have a general relationship of direct or inverse analogy with the real space of society. They represent society itself brought to perfection, or its reverse, and in any case utopias are spaces that are by their very essence fundamentally unreal.

As soon as the Clefts and Squirts started living together and procreating, dystopian elements and facts such as "restlessness and curiosity" (103) penetrated their utopian universe and "they were all distraught with fear and with knowledge of their helplessness" (139). The writer emphasises the horror of delving into a newness of being, and transmogrifies these strong and savage pre-historic creatures into helpless beings lost within an unknown strange universe they discovered within themselves; as the historian puts it "Ideas, emotions, words, thoughts, that have been inhabiting the minds of us, the human race, quite comfortably and at least without strain, were presenting themselves now to these young Clefts, and they were restless and disturbed, sitting there at the mouth of their cave" (86). Lessing defamiliarises with the creation of a strange savage all-female world, and then brings the readers back to reality by changing the very nature of her characters and making them regain normality. She provides critical insights to her plotless novel and forces the reader to look at the past from a different corner, to rethink the present by going back in time and to cogitate about human existence on earth. In fact, "the recovery of the past and the negotiation of memory and future worlds can be reconciled through the productions of new possibilities, new understandings of the past" (Archer-Lean). Through the Clefts and the Monsters, the writer intentionally intends to "test human possibilities, to conserve human demands for happiness and playfully anticipate what in reality has not been produced but what dreams and religious or profane wish-images of humans are full of" (Bloch). She tries to revive an imagined past, and projects an image with a "faithful resemblance" (Ricoeur 11) to the past, for the sake of the present living creatures and imposes on readers a re-examination of the present through uncertain past relics. Lessing here confirms Barthes' claim that "the writer is the prey of an inner god who speaks at all times" (20). Lessing's The Cleft is also a philosophical novel that deals with a cornucopia of worldly concerns. It questions being and time and cogitates about gender dichotomy and human lives in general. It denounces

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historical lies and paves the way to psychological truths. It fathoms the past, satirises the present and prophesises about the future. Rather than escapist, the novel is confronting an uncertain past to depict the unchanging nature of human nature no matter the time or the space. It shades light on the predestination of men and women to live together and emphasises the importance of difference that allows the richness of the experience of cohabitating and forging a self-identification process through the other. For thus in this novel "Time, past, present, and future, forms a continuous whole" (Aristotle 14). Lessing goes back in time and provides a utopian image of women in the past: the Clefts are portrayed first as strong savage women deciding the sex of their babies, exterminating baby boys and fertilised by the wind. They seemed to be of superior specie. Even when they started cohabiting with the Monsters, they continued being described as more responsible, more mature than the Squirts. The Roman historian in Lessing's novel argues: "I have always found it entertaining that females are worshipped as goddesses, while in ordinary life they are kept secondary and thought inferior" (27). The utopian universe of the Clefts and the Squirts provides an ideal society model in terms of gender equality. Gloria Steinem discussed the myth of all-female worlds and established a critical analogy between past myths and present realities claiming: Once upon a time, the many cultures of this world were all part of the gynocratic age. Paternity had not yet been discovered, and it was thought that women bore fruit like trees—when they were ripe. childbirth was mysterious. It was vital. And it was envied. Women were worshipped because of it, were considered superior because of it.... Men were on the periphery—an interchangeable body of workers for, and worshippers of, the female center, the principle of life. The discovery of paternity, of sexual cause and childbirth effect, was as cataclysmic for society as, say, the discovery of fire or the shattering of the atom. Gradually, the idea of male ownership of children took hold.... Gynocracy also suffered from the periodic invasions of nomadic tribes.... The conflict between the hunters and the growers was really the conflict between male-dominated and female-dominated cultures.... women gradually lost their freedom, mystery, and superior position. For five thousand years or more, the gynocratic age had flowered in peace and productivity. Slowly, in varying stages and in different parts of the world, the social order was painfully reversed. Women became the underclass, marked by their visible differences. (qtd in Eller)

The novel also unveils and predicts a dystopian truth that might disturb the nature of procreation: female-only conception is possible now. Page

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Rockwell in an article entitled "Self-fertilizing females to take over the world" claims that "the field of literature offers numerous scenarios featuring female-only societies, from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland to Doris Lessing’s The Cleft, many of which have troublingly eugenicist overtones." It sheds light on the literary experiments of such all-female worlds but also emphasises the real side of it, asserting that: Science is considering taking the concept of single motherhood a step further. Professor Karim Nayernia at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in the U.K. is taking stem cells from harvested human bone marrow and turning them into sperm cells. (Last year, Nayernia had similar success creating artificial sperm from embryonic stem cells in mice.) So far, Nayernia and Co. have only created sperm cells using cells taken from men, but they may be able to create sperm using cells from women’s bone marrow, a finding that “brings the prospect of female-only conception a step closer,” the Independent reports. We’re not living the dream just yet: The researchers are still working out some pesky questions like whether the process is possible, whether it’s safe and whether it’s ethical. And even if it all worked out, there’d be some limitations; lacking the Y chromosome, self-fertilizing women would only be able to have daughters.

Lessing's fiction proves to be visionary. Her deformed world also warns us about the danger of deviating from nature's laws. Self-fertilised women procreating only baby girls, is a scary phenomenon that might transmogrify being's norms. Such ideas as crazy as they seem to be when read in works of fiction are nowadays as real as sciences. The postmodern world puts Man face to face with his craziest imagined myths. Nevertheless, Lessing underlines two dystopian existential truths that do not change through time nor dissolve within history, which are: the impenetrability of the past highlighted through the Roman historian's claim "a part in this tale has to remain dark" (34), and the ephemerality of existence as this latter asserts "How few we are, how easily we die" (157). It is thus one of the main features of Utopian/Dystopian narratives to hide a secret message behind the narration, and to "always underline the reader’s inferiority when it comes to understanding the world and the way in which it is laid out" (Houston). Lessing explains in an interview: "my novels are fantasies, or utopias in the truest, most precise sense of the term, rather less related to Orwell and Huxley than to Thomas More and Plato. They are fables, spun out of what is happening today" (qtd in Ingersoll 107). It is thus through writing utopian narratives, amongst other literary genres, that she projects and historicises her "certitudes and dogmas" (Prisons 21). She is more than convinced about the fact that: "Novels should be on the same shelf with

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anthropology...Writers comment on the human condition, talk about it continually. It is our subject. Literature is one of the most useful ways we have of achieving this “other eye,” this detached manner of seeing ourselves; history is another" (Prisons 8).

Works Cited Abbott, Philip. "Utopians at Play". Society for Utopian Studies. 15.1 (2004): Print Gale Group. Archer-Lean, Clare. "Revisiting Literary Utopias and Dystopias: Some New Genres." Social Alternative Second Quarter. 28.3 (2009): Print. Aristotle. "Categories." The Complete Aristotle. Trans. E. M. Edghill. South Australia: The University of Adelaide Library, 2007. Print. Baccolini, Raffaella. “Gender and Genre in the Feminist Critical Dystopias of Katherine Burdekin, Margaret Atwood, and Octavia Butler.” Future Females, the Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism. Ed.Marleen S. Barr. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. 13- 34. Print. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. London: Vintage Books, 2009. Print. Bedell, Geraldine. “Women and Children First”. The Observer, Sunday January 7, 2007. Print. Bloch, Ernst. The Utopian Function of Art and Literature. Trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenberg. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1988. Print. Booker, Keith M. The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature. London : Greenwood Press, 1994. Print. Derrida, Jaques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatari Charkovortsky Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1974. Print. Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias". Ed. Leach, Neil. Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. Routledge, 1997. 330-336. Print. Gilbert, Sandra M and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 1979. Print. Heberle, Mark A. "An Inquiry into the Purposes of Speculative FictionFantasy and Truth". Marvels & Tales, 19. 1. Wayne State University Press. 2005. Print. Houston, Cloë. “No Place and New Worlds: The Early Modern Utopia and the Concept of the Global Community”, Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal no. 1, Spring 2006, ISSN1646-4729. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.

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Ingersoll, Earl.G. Doris Lessing: Conversations. US: The Ontario Review Press, 1994.Print. Lessing, Doris. The CleftǤ‘†‘ǣHarper Perennial, 2007. Print. —. Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. New York: Harper Pernnial, 1987. Print. Levitas, Ruth. The Concept of Utopia. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1990. Print. —. and Lucy Sargisson. "Utopia in Dark Times: Optimism/Pessimism and Utopia/Dystopia." Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination. Ed. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan. New York: Routledge, 2003. 13-28. Print. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History and Forgetting. US: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. Print. Rockwell, Page. "Self-fertilizing females to take over the world". Salon. US: Salon Media Group, 2007. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta Books, 1992. Print Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London and NewYork: Routledge, 1984. Print Welser, Tracie A. Fantastic Visions: On the Necessity of Feminist Utopian Narrative. Graduate School Theses and Dissertations. Paper 910. Department of Women’s Studies College of Arts and Sciences. US: University of South Florida, 2005. Williams, Raymond. "Utopia and science fiction." Problems in Materialism and Culture. London: New Left, 1980. 196-212. Wilson, Sharon. “The Cosmic Egg in Lessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor.” Doris Lessing Studies 23.1 (Winter 2003): 13-17.

  

II OTHER AMERICAN AND ENGLISH FICTION

THE HAND THAT CRADLES THE ROCK: NATURE, GENDER AND SUBALTERNATIVES IN THE WORKS OF CAROL EMSHWILLER AND URSULA LE GUIN1 RICHARD HARDACK

“The women are speaking. Those who were identified as having nothing to say, as sweet silence or monkey-chatterers, those who were identified with Nature, which listens, as against Man, who speaks—these people are speaking. They speak for themselves and for the other people: the animals, the trees, the rivers, the rocks.” Ursula Le Guin, “Woman/Wilderness,” Dancing at the Edge of the World (162)

From Genesis to Joyce, women have been represented as being closer to nature than culture, and hence quintessentially Other, and Carol Emshwiller and Ursula Le Guin, writers of fantasy, science fiction, and social criticism, transform this purported proximity into a heuristic homology. Embracing and dramatizing an imputed feminine animality, Emshwiller, a short story writer and novelist who has taught creative writing at New York University, and Le Guin, who, in addition to being a prolific fiction writer, essayist and writer of screenplays, has also taught creative writing, use a variety of thought experiments to reassess and realign notions of gender and humanity. Often similar in focusing their narratives through the perspective of those once silent or entirely beyond the parameters of language, Emshwiller and Le Guin try to circumvent what they perceive as the inherent limitations of normative discourses. In Emshwiller’s Carmen Dog, the protagonist is a woman who begins life as an animal, and who learns that becoming human is a relative endeavor. In the stories in Emshwiller’s The Start of the End of it All, the longing for love that determines self-definition is cathected onto the changing shapes 1

A version of this article was presented to the Women’s Utopian and Dystopian Fiction section panel, MLA, Seattle, January, 2012. My thanks to Sharon Wilson, and to Tyler Bradway, Nathan Fuhr and Katherine V. Snyder.

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of women’s bodies and personas, and the shifting roles of animals who share, or are even transposed onto, their lives. In Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, Le Guin paces the reader through a series of stories about animals and aliens whose characters and languages have been belied or misinterpreted by men.2 Both writers characterize non-verbal art forms as closer to nature and animals, and as therefore less subject to universal or male-dominated readings and appropriations. As a result, their writings start with the premise of a feminine wildness embedded within Western culture, but end with an ambiguous glimpse of what it would mean to transcend all hierarchic oppositions between female and male and between nature and culture. Such a form of what Russian Formalists termed ostranenie, of making the familiar alien, is an endemic trope of science fiction: as Rebecca BellMetereau argues, for example, women are the real aliens in the film Alien (210). At the 2011 American Comparative Literature Association conference in Vancouver, Han Saucy gave a keynote speech that asked the audience to imagine an alien comparative literature, but I think Le Guin and Emshwiller began that task some years ago; they developed an alternative history of the silent and/or voiceless that tries to imagine plants and birds and rocks and things as protagonists. Le Guin proposes that “one of the essential functions of science fiction . . . [is to stage] reversals of a habitual way of thinking . . .” (“Is Gender Necessary? Redux” Dancing 9). Such “cognitive estrangement,” as Scott Maisano calls it—following Viktor Shklovsky, Darko Suvin, Tzvetan Todorov, and Carl Freedman— can make the familiar the Other, and by so doing remind us of the mutable status of, but also of the interconnections among, such designations. Emshwiller approaches her fiction in consonant terms: “The nicest thing that was ever said about my science fiction writing was by Jim Gunn. He wrote that my science fiction stories “Estranged the everyday.” That’s what I like best about science fiction. You can make the everyday seem strange. You can see ordinary things with new eyes. Sometimes alien’s eyes.” As Emshwiller elaborates, “I see that “estranging the everyday” is often why I work on a story in the first place. Also I think it’s science fiction’s best reason for being” (“Guest” 12). For Emshwiller and Le Guin, the aliens already among us are the animals, and the gendered Others. A key difference that sets Emshwiller and Le Guin apart from many science fiction writers is that they approach the Other with empathy, but without attempting to “domesticate” it, she or he; doing so is the corollary 2

I confine myself primarily to these texts partly for reasons of space, but also because of their consonance in subject matter, publication date and approach to alterity.

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of estrangement, and makes the alien familiar, or at least related. Le Guin especially believes that all forms of identity contain their opposites, and that nothing exists without its counterpart, doppelganger or Other. In a variety of contexts, Le Guin notes that she values the “exploration of the archetypal Other, the alien,” as a sensibility beyond our ken; yet she also situates her own characters, and others that she admires, as part of a spectrum of relatable subjectivities: “Shevek, Ms. Brown, the Other, a soul, a human soul . . . .” (“Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction,” “Science Fiction and Ms. Brown,” Language 71, 103). As relevant as animal studies, then, in approaching some of Emshwiller’s and Le Guin’s work are questions of commensurability and translation; both writers at times advance a humanist proviso that all forms of communication and values are ultimately translatable, but also acknowledge that some aspects of alterity, even or especially the alterity within us, must always remain inaccessible. A question that remains, however, is what relationship Le Guin and Emshwiller posit between the alien and the animal—are they all Others with whom we cannot communicate, and hence at the limit and border of representation itself? Or are they merely a “we” we haven’t met yet? What if they represent a form of hegemony in their own discourses? Emshwiller and Le Guin often explore issues of gender by representing once unvoiced nature. Their “anthropological” fictions are full of animal women, human animals, and some less defined beings who may or may not be singing, talking, pausing, or avidly ignoring us. Emshwiller focuses not just on women, but on the non-male, the beastly, the non-normative, the liminal, the disempowered. “A great deal of doubt has been cast on the status of women as human beings all through the ages, but now in particular,” Emshwiller writes in Carmen Dog (73); often taking cultural suppositions to their illogical extremes, she frequently casts women as actual animals. As Le Guin writes in “A Left Handed Commencement Address,” “we’re already foreigners. Women as women are largely excluded from, alien to, the self-declared male norms of this society, where human beings are called Man. . .” (Dancing 116). If men are categorized as normatively human in a variety of spheres—psychological, political, and economic—women are designated as not altogether human.3 As Donna 3

Failure to recognize unfamiliar patterns of cultural expression can lead anthropologists, visitors and readers to label other societies as inhuman because they are non-human. When Tamara, in Le Guin’s “The Pathways of Desire,” remarks, “The Ndif are culturally subhuman; they don’t exist fully as human beings,” Bob retorts regarding their use of a “naïve” form of English, with what I take to be an implicit pun, “the only rational explanation is that these people—the

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Harawy summarizes along similar lines, “The discursive tie among the colonized, the enslaved, the noncitizen, and the animal—all reduced to type, all others to rational man, and all essential to his bright constitution—is at the heart of racism and, lethally, flourishes in the entrails of humanism” (“Encounters” 99). How do women then situate themselves to the animals with whom they are identified? One can defy, deify or complicate this distinguishing otherness, and Emshwiller and Le Guin, rather than seek inclusion in a male defined “humanity,” highlight the possibilities of identification with the animal. More so than Le Guin’s, Emshwiller’s version of the “natural” can be sentimentalized and partial, yet it suggests that since nature is always interpreted through culture, more variability should be allowed in defining “natural” and culturally constructed gendered behavior. One senses that Emshwiller in her early works was largely responding to social constructs of gender, tearing them down and inverting them, and then initiated the process of formulating an alternative that begins less as a response and more from original desire. Such a project poses some initial epistemological quandaries, particularly with regard to representation and communication. As Cat Yampbell suggests of the genre in “When Science Blurs the Boundaries: The Commodification of the Animal in Young Adult Science Fiction,” science fiction writers frequently erase or transgress fixed boundaries between human and other animal life (207-08). In “Science Fiction’s Renegade Becomings,” Carol McGuirk further observes that “Science-fictional machines and aliens, however greatly they may differ in motivation from human characters, are seldom portrayed as significantly other in their modes of communication,” while animals must remain beyond the realm of language, and it is this apparent limitation that Emshwiller and Le Guin translate into an ontological whole society—are a plant” (The Compass Rose 198). Ironically, given her family background, one could say that Le Guin, as Grace Dillon remarks in consonant terms of Gerald Vizenor, “adopts a “literary” as opposed to “ethnographic” method” (73); that is, metaphor is paramount in both literary and purportedly “primitive” perspectives, and one suspects that Emshwiller and Le Guin would advocate a scientific epistemology that more directly acknowledges the importance of the literary non-literal. In “Woman/Wilderness,” Le Guin treats the animal/plant world as a metaphor for the world of women and vice versa: nature stands for the Muted group, the silent group within culture that is not spoken, whose experience is not considered to be part of human experience, that is, the women. . . . that experience is the wilderness or the wildness that is utterly other—that is, in fact, to Man, unnatural. That is what civilization has left out, what culture excludes, what the Dominants call animal, bestial, primitive . . . what has not been spoken . . . . (163)

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advantage (281).4 As Sherryl Vint notes, McGuirk uses Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “becoming-animal” in relation to redefining gender: “becomings-animal in sf are uniquely difficult for writers to portray, as animals do not use language, whereas sf’s aliens and robots speak in ways analogous to human language” (“The Animals”185). Emshwiller’s animal protagonists do sometimes speak, if haltingly. In Carmen Dog, women turn into animals—e.g. snapping turtles—while female animals “evolve” into people. The tale’s protagonist, Pooch, is caught between her training and instincts and the new world to which she aspires. As the chains of being are reforged, and the domestic animal/ domestic servant comes to face the perpetual threat of domestic violence, Pooch’s dog collar is clearly overlaid with a wedding band. In a series of episodic adventures, Pooch leaves her master, encounters an ultrarationalist, sadistic doctor and a lascivious “operateur,” finds a community of sister animals, and makes her way in the big city. Carmen Dog is primarily a chronicle of Pooch’s simultaneous complicity with and rejection of her role as chattel, loving servant, and adoptive mother. For the most part, Pooch is an unwitting protagonist: the narrator frequently tells us what Pooch doesn’t yet realize or fails to comprehend, and apologizes for the fact that much of Pooch’s personality is the result of generations of social conditioning/breeding. But this places the character at such a remove from the author, and probably from most readers, that Pooch can become haplessly cloying. (Marian Scholtmeijer observes that “in narrative, as in life, it is difficult to escape the paradigm of victimization when it comes to animals,” but proposes that one way women writers address this issue is to posit “kinship between victimized women and victimized animals” (235); Emshwiller is more effective in this context in exploring the sociological, psychological and historical discourses that led to such a kinship). Because she is not sufficiently alienated from her surroundings, Pooch is usually not animal enough to make her observations seem more than a source of dramatic irony, though Emshwiller highlights some of Pooch’s fundamental averageness as itself not only heroic, but the necessary precondition for reevaluating gender roles. Emshwiller begins Carmen Dog with an epigram telling us “there is more matter”—more mother, in effect—“in the universe than we at first thought” (1). Emshwiller’s universe is always expanding, in constant redshift; as she emphasizes in her epilogue, it is “recreating itself every fraction of a second, even as you and I” (147). What is particularly being 4

Citing Carey Wolfe, Sherryl Vint observes that truly to communicate with an animal Other requires acknowledging a consciousness that is beyond our own (Animal 68).

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recreated in these “Outlandish Changes,” as Emshwiller calls them, is the shape of gender, matter itself having been typically associated with women and reproduction (1). (As the doctor rationalizes by quoting repeatedly from Marcus Aurelius, “Matter in the universe is supple and compliant, and the reason which controls it has no motive for ill-doing” (10)). Like Le Guin, Emshwiller sees the speculative recreation of the world as the optimal way to initiate realistic critiques of society. Still, Emshwiller at times reinscribes equally gender-based myths, for example of an earth goddess. From their opposing camps, Rosemary and the Doctor respectively advance the ontologically coterminous suppositions that “the earth [is] the mother of us all,” and that “the earth is unquestionably female” or in feminine confluence with the moon (82, 23). Such proposals are endemic to the domain of science fiction, where archetypes often provide the basis for identity and for the reevaluation of self in relation to society; but if these archetypes are assumed to be unequivocally “natural”—god or nature-given—we wind up where we started, within a structure of essential gender identities. While lambasting the scientific community’s attempt to create an “Academy of Motherhood,” Emshwiller maintains Pooch as an avatar of traditional nurturance who cannot overcome a reified maternal instinct. Emshwiller does deflate some of the images—for example, of beast and snake—through which women are universalized, but she doesn’t as thoroughly question the “positive” myths of gender that are also predicated on the tethering of women to reproduction and to a plethora of constricting gender dichotomies. Emshwiller does at times valorize women’s position as is, rather than strictly criticize the conditions that created such a position; as a result, the feminine is surprisingly essentialized in Carmen Dog. The innate characteristics of animals and natural processes are taken as harmonious, if somewhat fluid, guides for behavior. This form of essentializing can be egregious when it becomes sentimental, as it threatens to when the novel suggests the necessarily uneducated Pooch must be blessed with natural artistic talent: “She is obviously quite an artist, though, as she tells them, she has had little artistic training” (30). Later, “Pooch finds that, distracted and frightened as she is, and though not good with colors, she has a bit of artistic talent beside being musical” (81). Rather than more comprehensively redefine art—for example as not needing to be universal and permanent, or as arising from social conditions that correlate with different forms of training—Emshwiller makes it unnecessary for Pooch to be trained, which borders on lauding whatever women do simply because women are doing it. Emshwiller never quite develops new models of aesthetic performance or achievement as part of a feminist ethic that would reformulate modes of

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being; again quoting Marcus Aurelius, the animal-experimenting doctor wants to know, “How comes it that souls of no proficiency or learning are able to confound the adept and the sage?” (37). (It is unfair to expect fiction writers to insert overt aesthetic credos in their work, but Emshwiller does raise such concerns in ways that would allow readers to expect some intimations in that context). Obviously the learning of the animals in the book is excluded from the dominant discourse, and could be valued on its own terms; but Emshwiller suggests that it is sophistication, education, and training that corrupt natural virtue. Emshwiller argues that while we need to discard romantic illusions, we should also confine ourselves to the wisdom of animals and children; too much knowledge alienates us from our instincts, which are situated, a priori, as reliable ethical barometers. These are neither revolutionary nor consistent directives, and in order to be a more unequivocally successful book, Carmen Dog would have to live up to its premises with more challenging conclusions. It is hard to object to the notions of female community and sisterhood advanced in Carmen Dog, though they can seem unrealistic and contrived. How much is female “gentleness” and passivity, as expressed in the novel, a form of disempowerment, an acceptance of attributed subservience, and how much a form of potential revolt? Why must the Rosemarys be abominable, and effectively masked, in order to be aggressive and powerful? Despite her objection to women’s putatively internalized dependencies, Emshwiller sometimes reinscribes the burdens of vulnerability into women’s characters in a prescriptive rather than descriptive manner. Animals, children, and women are categorized, as Emshwiller writes in “Pelt,” from The Start of the End of it All, as “wanting to be right and noticed and loved,” as therefore at the mercy of the master/parent who will make them feel these things (159); in Carmen Dog, the literal master is always potential parent, husband, and lover. Despite her ironic portrayal of stereotypes of dependency, Emshwiller seems to accept the needs of the dependent as natural caregivers whose proclivities society has somehow perverted, and some of their limitations as too deep-rooted to be eradicated. Yet Pooch’s version of nature in Carmen Dog is just as constructed as her notion of self-sacrifice and subservience. Even in satirical form, Emshwiller winds up with unconvincingly utopian solutions to the persistent problems she has raised: Perhaps the more animal we are . . . that is, Pooch thinks, that I should keep my basic nature even while becoming (or, rather hoping to become) an intellectual. . . . If I could retain strong links to my animal past. Never forget what I am and where I come from. (60)

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One of course can imagine a Žižekian dismissal of such “new agey” notions of nature, natural identity, and the essentialized opposition of nature to culture. From a Lacanian perspective, such attempts to return to some lost primordial wisdom, or to align oneself with the harmony of nature, retroactively fabricate a past that never existed, and represent a quintessential mystification always already coopted by what it alleges to oppose.5 One would not want to quibble with the call to be more humane, and to accept our connection to the animal world, as, in oxymoronic effect, our universal ethnicity: “Maybe it’s animalness that will make the world right again. . . . Perhaps being human needs some diluting” (130). Yet there is an inherent danger in referring to anything as a god-given or nature-given norm. The argument from nature or god can also, and probably more easily, be used to promulgate the notion that women are foremost meant to be mothers. To argue that women begin life as, and must remain, nurturers presents a contextually desirable conclusion that relies on a set of unsustainable and potentially noxious, decontextualized presumptions. Fortunately, in most of her work, Emshwiller begins with the assumption that a domestic animal is a contradiction in terms; and she proceeds to stage the consequences of our complex need to see people as liberated from the confines of human society, while seeing animals as reflections of that society. Her novel has a pointedly ambiguous conclusion: as Pooch is emphatically told by Rosemary—the doctor’s wife, unexpected ally, and, finally, unexpected alien of the piece—“especially not win, or lose all” (144; see also 112). In many ways, ambiguities are the dialogical, expressive counterparts to Emshwiller’s and Le Guin’s silences—answers voiced, but never as definitive end points. In terms of such ambiguities, Emshwiller and Le Guin both consider Borges to be the exemplary writer of speculative fictions. Emshwiller’s “The Circular Library of Stones,” in The Start, is an homage to and corrective of several of Borges’s stories in Labyrinths; in it, an old woman seeks to read the world without mediation, to the chagrin of her daughters, who want to institutionalize her. An old woman’s pantheistic desire to decipher the world as text, to read stones, forms a complement to that of Le Guin’s young protagonist in “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight?” (Myra here acts as the conduit to a world to which we have denied ourselves access, and which we no longer imagine). And Emshwiller’s stones, like her conclusions, “speak their ambiguities for themselves,” without suffering the indignity of having a univocal meaning imposed on them (41). This is a key image in a lineage of transcendental 5

See, e.g., Žižek, The Ticklish Subject 61, and The Indivisible Remainder 27.

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American writing that seeks not blood, but voice from a stone—what Le Guin might term stone-telling. Rosaleen Love playfully suggests that Le Guin “created the science of therolinguistics, or the study of the language of animals,” but I would stress that for Le Guin this science of non-human languages must be kept metaphorical (231). When Love imagines she might read a “gaseous text,” or empathetic coral (choral?) bodies, she locates a critical trope of American nature writing, transcendental pantheism and radically egalitarian cosmology, whose lineage spans from Morton of Merrymount to Annie Dillard (233-34). Like Dillard, who hopes to teach stones to talk, Le Guin imagines “sentient plants,” and, like Thomas Pynchon, implements the hylozoic or pansychic conjecture that consciousness has no borders.6 Le 6

Regarding the pantheistic ascription of subjectivity to the animal and plant world, see my “‘A Woman Need Not Be Sincere: Annie Dillard and the Gender Politics of American Transcendentalism,” and “Consciousness Without Borders: Narratology in Against The Day and The Works of Thomas Pynchon.” Here, I briefly provide some historical context for the development of American hylozoism. In his 1872 essay “Transcendentalism,” Cyrus Bartol asks whether “the soul [is] reared on primitive rock? or is no rock primitive, but the deposit of spirit, therefore in its lowest form alive, and ever rising into organism . . . ” (120). As the Emersonian Babbalanja declaims in Melville’s Mardi, “I live while consciousness is not mine, while to all appearances I am a clod. And may not this same state of being, though but alternate with me, be continually that of many dumb, passive objects we so carelessly regard?. . . Think you there is no sensation in being a rock?” (458) According to John Fiske, in his 1885 address to the Concord School of Philosophy, all matter is imbued with an impersonal animation, and consciousness cannot be confined to organic life: “[T]he universe as a whole is thrilling in every fibre with Life,—not, indeed, life in the usual restricted sense, but life in a general sense. The distinction, once deemed absolute, between the living and the not-living is converted into a relative distinction. . .” (149-51). That “relative” distinction is recuperated in much of Le Guin’s short fiction; in “Vaster Than Empires,” for example, Osden realizes that a world might have “sentience without senses. . . . Nothing comprehensible to an animal mind” (Buffalo Gals 142). This trajectory of imbuing rocks and stones and more than senseless things with subjectivity reaches one culmination in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which closes with the invocation of a “face in ev’ry mountainside,/And a Soul in ev’ry stone”— (760). Pynchon’s unexpected bearing on Le Guin and the gendering of the transcendental project is evident, for example, in the following passage from Gravity’s Rainbow: Felipe’s particular rock embodies also an intellectual system, for he believes in a form of mineral consciousness not too much different from plants and animals, except for the time scale. . . . Felipe has come to see, as those who are not Sentient Rocksters seldom do, that history as it’s been laid on the world is only . . . an outward and visible fraction. That we must

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Guin gestures to her own pantheism when she proposes that “the myth of civilization” is “embodied in the monotheisms which assign soul to man alone. And so it is this myth which all talking-animal stories mock, or simply subvert” (“Introduction,” Buffalo 10). Le Guin frequently imagines what it would mean to have a non-human subjectivity, as well as narrators beyond cognizable or “animated” taxonomy; but she does not posit that we could achieve “transparency” with or fully interpret such beings. Perhaps less radical in their alterity, Emshwiller’s stones are embedded within a more delimited correlation of gender and narrativity: “It is fitting that stones should be open to question, as my stones are. I like letting them speak their ambiguities” (“Circular Library” 40). As Le Guin similarly writes in “The Basalt,” in her section of “Three Rock Poems,” “You can pick up a word and hold it,/Opaque,/Untranslated” (64). (Le Guin offers stone poems, vegetable poems, bird and beast poems, and cat poems in Buffalo Gals; stones and cats get their own niches in Le Guin and Emshwiller). Appropriately, the messages these stones convey are anything but set in stone; rather, they are fluid, mutable, evolving. These ambiguous inscriptions redefine the significance of art, any canonical measures of universality and permanence, and institutional emphases on individual authorship, translatability, and authority. Along those lines, for Le Guin purely political solutions are too narrow, literal and inadequate, and her utopian vision is explicitly anti-“realist” in some sense, though she begins by redefining what’s essential to reality. Accepting difference as the very guarantor of meaning, Le Guin assumes any propositions of also look to the silence around us, to the passage of the next rock we notice—to its aeons of history under the long and female persistence of water and air. . . . (612-13) Silence is still gendered, but it is no longer inexpressive. In Teaching A Stone a Talk, Annie Dillard raises some of the same issues as Emshwiller and Le Guin, situating civilized man as insensate and deaf to the voices he once heard: Nature’s silence is its one remark. . . . We as a people have moved from pantheism to pan-atheism. . . . Did the wind use to cry, and the hill shout forth praise? Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of earth, and living things say very little to very few. . . . What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to . . . raise a peep out of anything that isn’t us. . . . Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, or until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it. (70–72) Unlike Le Guin and Emshwiller, however, Dillard adopts an elaborate form of male camouflage in her approach to American transcendentalism: see my “‘A Woman Need Not Be Sincere.”

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universal standards or solutions are misprisions, and should instead accommodate the ambiguous, aesthetic, and indeterminate. For Le Guin, the real is itself magical, so science fiction might be a more inherently realistic genre than naturalism. Here again, rocks emblematize this alternative way of seeing and being. As Le Guin’s narrator in “The Author of the Acacia Seeds” concludes, “We do not know. All we can guess is that the putative Art of the Plant is entirely different from the Art of the Animal. . . . And [then] . . . may there not come that even bolder adventurer—the first geolinguist, who . . . will read beneath it the still less communicative, still more passive, wholly atemporal, cold, volcanic poetry of the rocks. . .” (Buffalo 210). As Sherryl Vint emphasizes, Le Guin never conflates species and their modes of communication into a single form of alterity (even as she does dramatize the way men sometimes situate all Others schematically (Animal 74)). Annie Dillard too wishes to restore this sense of an animated and vocal, transcendental nature to contemporary literature, but situates the gnosis of otherness as a mystical and creative, rather than primarily empirical, endeavor: “What geomancy reads what the wind-blown sand writes on the desert rock?”(Pilgrim 68) Josephine Donovan remarks that the women writers she addresses “conceive of “reality” or physical nature as animated by a spiritual presence” (163). In other words, every Other— no matter how different—from the alien to a seemingly senseless stone is imbued with some form of consciousness or spirit, and that supposition, as Donovan elaborates, means that every signified, and not just signifier, retains a “living presence,” even when absent (163). The point then, however, might not be to voice the subaltern, but reevaluate the significance of the silence, and consider some silence not as a form of repression, but another way of being, and another indication that not all things should be named, parsed or reduced to univocal meanings. Acknowledging what one does not know is a political act for Le Guin; and as she writes in “Is Gender Necessary? Redux,” Is [The Left Hand of Darkness] a Utopia? It seems to me that it is quite clearly not; it poses no practicable alternative to contemporary society, since it is based on an imaginary, radical change in human anatomy. All it tries to do is open up an alternative viewpoint, to widen the imagination, without making any very definite suggestions. . . . (16)

The definite and definitional have often operated to the detriment of women and animals, so Le Guin often approaches these categories with bemused suspicion. Le Guin and Emshwiller share a willingness to let stones or a feminine

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nature remain unvoiced or ambiguous in human terms—to let Moby Dick’s silence console rather than enrage us—along with a determination to find new discourses to provide partial access to, or at least to acknowledge, these other forms of knowledge and communication. Le Guin’s and Emshwiller’s silences in nature become those of the dispossessed and the regendered; for both authors, “the stone is [still] at the center” (Le Guin, “Mount St. Helens/Omphalos,” Buffalo 65). Each writer constructs non-verbal societies in their written stories by emulating and further extrapolating the motifs of oral narratives and animal folktales. Their versions of utopias are predicated on the presence not just of suppressed human voices, but the communications of animals, plants and even purely “silent” beings that have never been allowed to convey meaning in the dystopian worlds of human (male) fiction. For Emshwiller and Le Guin, stones also serve as indices of a nature we are not equipped to perceive, or as even more liminal versions of animals. Emshwiller’s narrator “heard the thump of stone tablets being placed upon the shore, and I knew they were full of women’s thoughts . . . women’s writings . . . women’s good ideas. Even old women’s good ideas” (“Circular Library,” 45). Emshwiller’s narrator finds the mother of the library of stones, “Fecund and wise. Big breasted and a scholar. . . . Clearly, she not only had babies and nursed them, but she read all the books” (41). As with Pooch, however, one should note that Emshwiller again advises us to be both “animals” and intellectuals, which I would argue are incommensurate terms, and that to attempt to harmonize them represents an endeavor to domesticate otherness itself. The Other of course might be precisely heterogeneous and contradictory, other not just for/to us, but itself. The historian of unvoiced literature then seeks not only Shakespeare’s sister, but that sister’s animals and stones, the unwritten histories of nature as well as society: otherwise one might “toss away a stone like my important librarian and not see what it really was” (42). Many of the characters in Emshwiller’s and Le Guin’s stories are themselves tossed away or wayward, dispossessed of home, like Le Guin’s young girl Myra, or Emshwiller’s old woman who decides to cease talking “human”: “Why, I’ve almost stopped talking altogether, wanting, now, other kinds of meaning” (40). In her introduction to Buffalo Gals, Le Guin writes, “In literature as in real life, women, children and animals are the obscure matter upon which Civilization erects itself, Phallologically. That they are Other is (vide Lacan et al) the foundation of language, the Father Tongue” (9). (By contrast, Le Guin adds that “Literature takes shape and life in the body, in the womb of the mother tongue: always: and the fathers of Culture get

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anxious about paternity. They start talking about legitimacy. They steal the baby” (“Bryn Mawr Commencement Address,” Dancing 153)). This passage regarding the Other tongue is critical for Le Guin, as it triangulates, via Emerson, Fanon, and Lacan, the idea that animals represent the return of a silent repressed, and are the true subaltern/atives. To restore speech to those upon whose silence language is predicated, Le Guin gives voice to “the dumb: the others,” to wild, wild women and the deceptively slow talkers among the rocks and stones (9). But as George Steiner wrote over a decade before Le Guin, though with a more narrowly linguistics focus, “a science fiction writer or computer could devise a new tongue, [but] one could affirm in advance that it would fall within the set limits of human expressive potentiality” (92, 96).7 One might say the same of some identifications with cyborgs or animals, but Le Guin especially tries to keep critical aspects of the alien indecipherable. Other kinds of meaning require other kinds of voices and silences, and hence other kinds of life. In Le Guin’s “The Direction of the Road,” the tree that bends to the path creates the illusion of motion by dipping and diving, enlarging and shrinking, as we apparently approach and recede; in this parable about progress, the oak has “done [its] share in supporting the human creatures’ illusion that they are going somewhere” (Buffalo 105). Le Guin again employs a specific ontological trope, the concept of species relativism, to advance a notion of an encompassing but non-monological community, one that manifests difference through connection. As the oak says, “If the human creatures will not understand Relativity, very well; but they must understand Relatedness” (107). Relativity, or difference, is never antithetical to Relatedness, or connection, in Le Guin’s and Emshwiller’s writings; the two are mutually defining. And it is no accident that in Le Guin’s work the lessons of relativity and relatedness are taught by trees, ants, stones, cats and coyotes. As Coyote effectively quips to Myra in “Buffalo Gals,” they are each a pigment of the other’s imagination: ‘Resemblance is in the eye. . . . So, to me you’re basically greyish yellow and run on four legs. . . . To Hawk, you’re an egg, or maybe getting pinefeathers. See? It just depends on how you look at things. There are two kinds of people.’ ‘Humans and Animals?’ 7

Steiner’s comment is also apropos of the Emersonian desire to find a way for the universe to speak to itself. Žižek concludes that dumb “Nature has an ineradicable tendency to ‘speak itself out.’ It is caught in the search for a Speaker whose Word would posit it as such; this Speaker, however, can only be an entity which is itself not natural, not part of Nature, but nature’s Other” (Indivisible 47).

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‘No. The kind of people who say, “There are two kinds of people,” and the kind of people who don’t.’ Coyote cracked up. . . . The child didn’t get it and waited. (35-36)

(As Le Guin embellishes in a more serious vein in “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” “to a forest, we might appear as forest fires. . . . The rootless would be alien, terrible” (143)). This is still a polarized world, divided between the first peoples, the animals, the children, the original inhabitants, and those who make webs, and the new people, the adults, who make fences; in reductive terms, it is a world that has decayed from a feminine nature to a masculine order.8 Notably, however, Le Guin never suggests we should live in a world with only one kind of people. Sandra Lindow observes, via Roz Kaveny, that “Le Guin’s dragons are liminal beings living on the threshold of several different states” (34); in other words, Le Guin’s animals and Others generally cannot be reduced to taxonomic behaviors, genres, genders or ontologies; instead of being defined through binaries, they are defined through mixtures. One of Le Guin’s favorite writing exercises, often employed by science fiction writers, is to change one aspect of reality, social norms, or the laws of nature and reconstruct the resulting world. Throughout Buffalo Gals, Le Guin asks what the world would be like outside human time-frames, beyond human sensory references, to a rock, a collective immobile consciousness, or even a vegetable. From this premise, Le Guin explores what an animal art might entail. To Le Guin, animals become lost tribes; believing in the convergence of difference and creativity, Le Guin comes to regard animals as the avant garde. Le Guin intimates that nature is not simply a muse, but a neglected source and medium of creativity; as evident in the tree semaphore in “Vaster Than Empires,” or in the language of the unrecognized alien in “Mazes,” the animal/Other performs a dance of communication that becomes art, regarding which humans are simply illiterate. In “The Author of the Acacia Seeds,” one of the few narratives equally concerned with hermeneutics and penguins, one animal language is deciphered through another: “Indeed it seemed strange that a script written entirely in wings, neck, and air, should prove the key to the poetry of short-necked, flipper-winged water-writers” (204). In a Borgesian context, Le Guin is rewriting literary criticism through the language of the Other. Le Guin produces a “kinetic” literature of dance, 8

When Donna Haraway proposes that “only the pose of disinterested objectivity makes “concrete objectivity” impossible,” she gives too much credence to the possibility of a transcendent discourse that elides perspective (Primate 13). Coyote might say that without such skewed perspectives, we’d have no perspective at all.

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animal and even plant speech, as in “The Author,” in which she envisions a utopian refashioning of language through the liberated speech of silenced minorities: not just women, but all the categories unseen or passed over in a male domain are given voice, as well as new forms and discourses. Like Emshwiller’s stones, the “speech” of penguins, the ants’ acacia seeds, and the other examples of animal communication in Le Guin’s stories are ambiguous and performative, not subject to literal transcription. Here, Le Guin again validates what was impugned as ephemeral, and insufficiently male, rational, consistent, definitive and authoritative under the ethos of what was once defined as canonical art. Instead, Le Guin asks us to reconsider the neither nor that rejects fixed binaries. As Le Guin’s Little Bear Woman reflects in “The Woman Without Answers,”—whose title adumbrates the ambiguities Pooch embraces—“you aren’t the hero but only the monster, the animalhead, the dumb one who doesn’t have the answers” (Dancing 129). (In “Is Gender Necessary? Redux,” Le Guin stresses that her stories pose “questions, not answers; process, not stasis” (9)). The dumb one is often the anti-hero in Le Guin’s work. Or as the narrator of Emshwiller’s “The Start of the End of it All” opines, it would be “better, in fact, to have been some dumb animal” (10). For both writers, the once imposed silence of nature’s subalterns can be reclaimed as a strategic advantage, and a form of epistemological imperative. One should note, however, that both Emshwiller and Le Guin sometimes valorize indeterminacy not as a desirable, culturally mediated trait, but as the logos of an essentialized nature. At the end of Carmen Dog, for example, Pooch decides she must be “Neither Conqueror, nor Conquered,” and accept “Neither Victory nor Defeat” (147). While we should retain some distance between Emshwiller and Pooch here, the text does validate such sentiments by attributing them to what Pooch considers the “Wisdom of the wild things” (144). (Such indiscriminate and sentimental validation of all aspects of nature can resemble the new age glorification of all aspects of paganism or the primitive). Even if its source is sometimes essentialized, however, such wisdom is never unequivocal or ossified. Christopher Powici, for example, situates Le Guin’s Coyote as an agent of “reorientation,” and notes Coyote’s “desire can’t be fixed” (191). I would add that Coyote, though hardly silent, represents not just another critical aspect of ambiguity, but of an indeterminacy that is central to Le Guin’s definition of and approach to the Other. Coyote is in this sense the dialogical speaker of a mixture of positions and perspectives previously marginalized. While some critics will find such a refusal to engage with “hard facts” disingenuous or frustrating, Le Guin’s acceptance of the indefinite also

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reflects a resistance to closure, which affords a more nuanced understanding of complex reality, and richer aesthetic and political responses to it. Where Emshwiller provides a glimpse of animal art in Pooch’s version of the opera Carmen, Le Guin pursues a full-fledged anatomy of creation. For Le Guin, “no verbal rendering can approach” the languages, the arts, of the non-human, which utilize neither speech nor writing, but motion or even immobility (“Author,” 205). And writing cannot reproduce “the allimportant multiplicity of the original text,” which cannot be reduced to anything less than the entirety of its original flux (205); the full range of silences of “kinetic literatures”; or the atemporal “passive” expression of plants and rocks (207). The world is an oyster to Le Guin, one whose quiet language we might someday almost learn to read. The world as text, a familiar romantic trope, is in Le Guin’s writing transformed into a different kind of narratological and aesthetic assumption; as a translation of nature, art is affective and experiential, and cannot be reduced to univocal meanings. Unlike Emshwiller’s medical doctors, Le Guin’s anthropologists attempt to approach rather than contain the Other, and act as ambassadors from, stand-ins for, the writer and reader; therolinguists and geolinguists, they seek to make contact with, not subjugate, the Other, though we might still encounter a form of hierarchy in the act of interpretation itself. The reassessment of myth and the reconstruction of genre are central components of Le Guin’s and Emshwiller’s work. A precursor of Emshwiller’s more ominous “Yukon” in Verging on the Pertinent, Le Guin’s “The Wife’s Story” redresses the conflicts of gender through the conventions of horror. In this tale of reversal, the husband, who has undergone a transformation from wolf to human, is reluctantly but decisively hounded out of nature and away from the family by the womanpack. In both cases it is the wife’s story being told, with Emshwiller finding in “nature” a gloss of social patterns, and Le Guin offering a commentary on the interplay of instinctive and social allegiances. As Le Guin cautions in her introductions to the tale, this is not a story about werewolves (Buffalo 69). Behind many of Le Guin’s and Emshwiller’s stories lies a woman’s desire to escape, or perhaps rather to enhance her estrangement, from a family through an alliance with nature. In Buffalo Gals, Le Guin focuses on horses, coyotes, lions, children, and the marginal to redefine the self and escape the confines of a putatively universal, male adult model of existence. In “The White Donkey,” the mythical creature and the world beyond the town are lost to the girl once her family betroths her without her consent. The inclusion of such animal figures usually indicates that a myth or story is being retold

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from a new perspective, particularly from the point of view repressed in the standard tellings. “May’s Lion” is a twice-told tale, which is returned to the woman and the lion through the re-telling; in many of Le Guin’s stories, there is a parallel narrative, if not parallel world, unfolding beneath any apparently definitive version. (“May’s Lion” is especially interesting as an originary tale for Always Coming Home, Le Guin’s novel of a people who “might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California” (xi); as in that novel, the stories in Buffalo Gals are often concerned with matrilineage, mothers and grandmothers, and women’s houses). In the 1990s, Le Guin became more interested in oral cultures and animal legends, and “Buffalo Gals” the story transfigures formal elements from captivity narratives, and also incorporates the structural and thematic concerns of Western Native American coyote trickster tales. (Le Guin consults, for example, the collection of coyote stories in Coyote Was Going There: Indian Literature of The Oregon Country, compiled by Jarold Ramsey. Thinking explicitly of coyote, Emshwiller notes that she changed the word trickster to “great God Clown,” in her story of the same title (Datlow, 449)). The importance of the trickster animal figure again suggests that Le Guin’s and Emshwiller’s “utopian” sensibilities are not literal, but (un)cagey—they reflect the animal’s saturnine and sometimes carnivalesque response to the human illusion and hubris of pure teleology. (Le Guin straightforwardly proffers, “I don’t think we’re ever going to get to utopia again by going forward, but only roundabout or sideways” (“A Non-Euclidean View of California,” Dancing 98)). In a useful discussion of “the human othering of animals,” Tonia Payne proposes that Le Guin uses the animal fable “to explore how we construct the other,” but rarely “suggest[s] any cure for the problem of othering” (177, 169). Claire Curtis also concludes that Le Guin’s skepticism helps neutralize the dangerous self-rationalizing tendencies of utopian thinking (266). As Le Guin remarks of The Dispossessed, “the book does not have a happy ending. It has an open ending” (“Response” 308). As more self-contained thought experiments, Le Guin’s stories sometimes present less of an ambiguous utopia than “The Dispossessed,” and veer away from the anti-utopian sentiments of The Lathe of Heaven, but they rarely resolve. As part of that resistance to resolution, Emshwiller and Le Guin sometimes refuse to name or use conventional names for things, but either unname or suspend naming altogether. To Le Guin, the names of animals connote cosmological assumptions as well as personal dispositions. In Le Guin’s “She Unnames Them,” Eve lets the animals “slid[e] into anonymity,” discarding what Adam had somewhat ineptly imposed upon

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them as well as her (233). As often occurs in Le Guin’s stories, the animals debate among themselves what is being done to them; Le Guin’s animals are usually meta-fictional, in a paradoxically unself-conscious way. (In A Wizard of Earthsea, Ged is taught that to glean the true name of a rock is to be able to change that rock; to know “deep-structure” taxonomy, the system of classification and naming, represents the greatest form of awareness and power). Similarly, in Emshwiller’s “Yukon,” the protagonist, once she is living in the bear cave, finds “By then it’s not a question of naming. She can’t even remember what names are for” (6). Instead of a new language, she is left with the speech of her own child. Like the laws of nature that break down in Le Guin’s “Schrodinger’s Cat,” the “laws” of Adam’s naming are broken by Eve in “She Unnames Them”: “[The animals] seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier” (235). In other words, Le Guin and Emshwiller don’t simply assign new, more desirable names to animals, but often question the need for and process of naming itself. Now that the barriers are down, between girl and coyote, linguist and subject, self and Other, buffalo ballet and animal dance, Eve and animal, “the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food” (235). In their litany of transpersonal or collective beings—from Theodore Sturgeon’s more than human characters and Robert Heinlein’s Valentine Michael Smith to Myra the buffalo gal—science fiction writers often assert this radical correspondence with the world: “So where [Myra’s] fingers ended and the dirt began she did not know . . . she was the earth’s life” (“Buffalo Gals,” 51). (Once Myra enters Coyote’s world, she experiences progressively less recoil from dirt, smells, a pine pitch eye, Coyote’s turd children, or any projected liminal aspect of herself). Once again, the woman or girl departs from the world of family and custom to live with the unnamed animals (and in Le Guin’s revision, Adam is a little too dense, or maybe a little too sparse, to figure out what is transpiring, being preoccupied primarily with dinner). Le Guin’s characters repeatedly undo Adam’s naming process—sometimes restoring lost names from other languages—and willfully identify with a non-sentimentalized and sometimes un-named nature. Eve’s last Yeatsian perception is of the “motionless dancers,” giving the reader another glimpse of what the natural world would look like if we could but perceive. Here, animals help make the world not just strange, but anew. Le Guin suspends “her stories in Buffalo Gals” between two poems, Denise Levertov’s “Come into Animal Presence”—into the world beyond humans, beyond linear thought—and Rilke’s “Eighth Elegy” from The Duino Elegies. The inclusion of this second poem evokes an exigent

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animal presence in modernism, for example in Joyce’s panthers, Lawrence’s bestiary, and Fauvism. Not a question of simple primitivism, such an association of the wild with the aesthetics of modernism suggests an almost ritual invocation of animals as the guides to other modes of consciousness. As Rilke writes in Le Guin’s translation, the child, the animal, becomes the mirror image of the person: “We control it. It breaks down/We re-control it, and break down ourselves” (“The Eighth Elegy” 232). Le Guin suggests that in order to break down barriers and old selves, we must seek animal presence we can never, and should never, fully possess. It is in this context that Rosemary’s advice in Carmen Dog makes its best sense, in the manner of fairy tales and animal stories: do not possess all, or you will lose all. In “Vaster Than Empires,” Le Guin concludes, “He had learned the love of the Other, and thereby had been given his whole self.—But this is not the vocabulary of reason” (154). In “Buffalo Gals,” the collection’s most recent story, Le Guin still outflanks the vocabulary of reason; but as she comes to voice her endings even less schematically, Le Guin imbues them with greater insight and impact. Donna Haraway warns in The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness that it is potentially dangerous to both parties to treat animals as if they were human (33-39). In that regard, Le Guin’s approach to animals is not anthropomorphic, but, as Kasi Jackson emphasizes, empathetic, even as her creatures always retain their difference (214, 224). (As Marian Scholtmeijer reminds us, anthropocentrism (and anthropomorphism) are not “natural,” but often reflect an ideology of dominance and victimization (232-33)). I would add that Le Guin sometimes situates the Other as an aspect of the self, sometimes repressed, lost, or unfamiliar—for example, as the irrational or the unconscious—but in doing so also decenters that self. Derrida concludes that, especially from a Lacanian perspective, the paradox of the animal is that it represents the unconscious, yet cannot possess one itself (123). Animal characters, however, particularly in the guise of tricksters, also often seem to embody what Derrida refers to as “the deception of speech,” part of the final move from imaginary to symbolic orders to which animals would otherwise have no access (130-33). Here, one might need to differentiate between the metaphoric/symbolic representation of animals and the realistic representation of how humans treat animals, though such a distinction would sometimes be ontologically and epistemologically difficult to maintain. (Perhaps the more germane question here would be, what is the difference between animal tricksters and other kinds of tricksters?) Another related danger is that if we deny subjectivity to

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animals, it becomes easy to deny that they can suffer. To situate the concept of suffering as a purely human interpolation helps justify any form of cruelty toward and abuse of animals (though the process becomes circular: there might be nothing wrong with such abuse if you accept the premises). Naively anthropomorphizing animals and treating them as wholly beyond comprehension equally denies their independent status. In this sense, the categorical Other is not in some reductive way a relatable facet of a unified self, but an analogue for parts of the self we can never fully assimilate or know, as well as a wholly separate agency we might not ever be able to understand, interact with, or integrate to our expectations. Pursuing what she terms the risk of an “intersecting gaze,” Donna Haraway hopes, after but beyond Derrida, to “reject [ ] the facile and basically imperialist, if generally well-intentioned, move of claiming to see from the point of view of the other, [and] correctly criticize two kinds of representations: one set from those who observed real animals and wrote about them, but never met their gaze; and the other set who engaged animals only as literary and mythological figures” (“Encounters,” 103). To achieve “positive knowledge,” Haraway effectively proposes that we must move beyond the constraints of both disciplines and genres, and combine fiction, philosophy and the work and fieldwork of geneticists, ethnologists and animal behavioral scientists. Through no fault or limitation of their writing, however, such options are largely beyond the scope of Le Guin’s and Emshwiller’s fiction, and Haraway’s proposal, though perhaps unrepresentative of her usually more syncretic views, suggests a possible limitation of her approach to epistemology. From Le Guin’s and Emshwiller’s perspective, based on both their fiction and essays, the mythological and metaphorical can be as “truthful” as the literal or synthetic. Prescriptively to argue that a primarily literary engagement with animals is inherently inadequate is not only to make an unwarranted generalization, but to distort the insights that can be conveyed through the non-literal. Haraway does, however, more typically insist that one must also read science as a narrative, that “scientific practice is above all a story-telling practice,” and that no single discursive method is sufficient or “objective” (Primate 4). In addressing Le Guin’s books of beings, Rochelle Warren defines the human itself in terms of storytelling (87). Warren proposes that in Le Guin’s work, “the irrational, the subjective, the small, and the personal—what is yin—is to be valued along with the rational, the objective, the big, and the public, or what is yang” (92-3), and that Le Guin uses myth to value the subjective as well as the objective (93 n1). By extension, to portray animals unrealistically or fantastically in

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fiction is a necessary complement to working for their better treatment in political and sociological contexts. Finally, it is as much through my impetus as Emshwiller’s and Le Guin’s that various formulations of “Others” have been grouped under the same heading in this article; but when the alien in “Mazes” concludes “it will not understand the dance I dance in dying,” his/her speech suggests that in Le Guin’s work the marginal, though almost always distinguished as subjects and species, are sometimes rendered schematically interchangeable, conflated with the tribal Other, the theriomorphic Other, and the gender Other, whose languages have all been misapprehended (76). As these categories are transformed in both Le Guin’s and Emshwiller’s work, one can no longer always tell the observer from the observed, or the Other from the same; that is, the self is accepted as having within it a non-self. These positions are, of course, all relative. In the end, Le Guin and Emshwiller refuse to delineate fixed borders where the animal ends and the human begins. The utopian question remains whether to bolster the categories of the Other, or merge them so that divisions or projections from the self are eroded. In the meantime, as Le Guin writes in her introduction to Buffalo Gals, “Civilized Man has gone deaf. He can’t hear the wolf calling him brother” (9). (As Emerson had asserted in “The Method of Nature,” perhaps from the opposite side of the fence, “Nature is a mute, and man, her articulate, speaking brother” (1, 218)). In “Woman/Wilderness,” Le Guin begins by emphasizing that the gap between civilization and the Other in part stems from a lack of selfrecognition: “Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is Other—” (161). Emshwiller and Le Guin both question and identify with this attribution of Otherness, sometimes denying the degree of difference, and other times modifying its negative association. Waiting for people and civilized men to restore the voice of nature, so that nature can return to its “true silence,” Emshwiller’s and Le Guin’s dogs, cats, coyotes, and stones yelp, howl, and whisper that all things are related.

Works Cited Adams, Carol J. and Josephine Donovan. Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Print. Bartol, Cyrus. “Transcendentalism.” Radical Problems. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872. 61–97. Reprinted in Critical Essays on American Transcendentalism. Ed. Philip Gura and Joel Myerson. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. 108–27. Print.

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Bell-Metereau, Rebecca. “Woman: The Other Alien in Alien.” Woman Worldwalkers. Ed. J.B. Weedman. Lubbock: Texas Tech P, 1985. 924. Print. Curtis, Claire P. “Ambiguous Choices: Skepticism as a Grounding for Utopia.” The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Ed. Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. 265-82. Print. Datlow, Ellen and Terri Windling, eds. The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales. New York: Firebird, 2007. Print. Derrida, Jacques. “And Say the Animal Responded?” Trans. David Wills. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Ed. Cary Wolfe. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2003. 121-46. Print. Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Print. —. Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters. New York: Harper and Row, 1982. Print. Dillon, Grace L. “Totemic Human-animal Relationships in Recent SF.” Extrapolation 49.1 (2008): 70-96. Print. Donovan, Josephine. “Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Reading the Orange.” Hypatia 11.2 (Spring 1996): 161-84. Print. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Vols. 1– 12. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–4. Print. Emshwiller, Carol. Carmen Dog. Northampton: Small Beer P, 2004. Print. —. “Guest of Honor Speech, WisCon 2003.” Extrapolation 45.1 (2004): 9-14. Print. —. The Start of the End of it All. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991. Print. —. Verging on the Pertinent. Minneapolis: Coffee House P, 1989. Print. Fiske, John. The Idea of God as Affected by Modern Knowledge. Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1885. Print. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm P, 2003. Print. —. Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge, 1989. Print. —. “Encounters with Companion Species: Entangling Dogs, Baboons, Philosophers, and Biologists.” Configurations 14.1-2 (Winter 2006): 97-116. Print. Hardack, Richard. “‘A Woman Need Not Be Sincere’: Annie Dillard’s Fictional Autobiographies and the Gender Politics of American Transcendentalism.” Arizona Quarterly 64:3 (Autumn 2008): 75-108. Print.

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—. “Consciousness Without Borders: Narratology in Against The Day and The Works of Thomas Pynchon.” Criticism 52.1 (Winter 2010): 91128. Print. Jackson, Kasi. “Feminism, Animals, and Science in Le Guin’s Animal Stories.” Paradoxa 21 (2008): 206-231. Print. Le Guin, Ursula. Always Coming Home. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. Print. —. Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences. New York: Penguin, 1990. Print. —. The Compass Rose. New York: Bantam, 1983. Print. —. Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove P, 1989. Print. —. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Ed. Susan Wood. New York: Berkeley Books, 1982. Print. —. “A Response, by Ansible, from Tau Ceti.” In The New Utopian Politics, 305-08. Lindow, Sandra J. “Becoming Dragon: the Transcendence of the Damaged Child in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin.” Extrapolation 44.1 (2003): 32-44. Print. Love, Rosaleen. “Ursula K. Le Guin and Therolinguistics.” Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 4.10 (1998): 231-36. Print. Maisano, Scott. “Reading Underwater; or, Fantasies of Fluency from Shakespeare to Mieville and Emshwiller.” Extrapolation 45.1 (2004): 76-88. Print. McGuirk, Carol. “Science Fiction’s Renegade Becomings.” Science Fiction Studies 35.2 (2008): 281-307. Print. Melville, Herman. Mardi. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1970. Print. Payne, Tonia. “Dark Brothers and Shadow Souls: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Animal Fables.’” What Are the Animals to Us? Approaches from Science, Religion, Folklore, Literature, and Art. Ed. Dave Aftandilian, Marion Copeland, and David Scofield Wilson. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2007. 169-179. Print. Powici, Christopher Pollock. “‘Who Are the Bander-log?’: The Child and the Animal in Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli Stories and Ursula Le Guin’s Buffalo Gals Won’t You Come Out Tonight?” Figuring Animals: Essays on Animal Images in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Popular Culture. Ed. Mary Sanders Pollock and Catherine Rainwater. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 177-94. Print. Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Penguin, 1995. Print.

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Scholtmeijer, Marian. “The Power of Otherness: Animals in Women’s Fiction.” In Animals and Women, ed. Adams and Donovan, 231-62. Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. London: Oxford UP, 1975. Print. Vint, Sherryl. Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2010. Print. —. “‘The Animals in That Country’: Science Fiction and Animal Studies.” Science Fiction Studies 35.2 (2008): 177-88. Print. Warren, Rochelle G. “Choosing to be Human: American Romantic/ Pragmatic Rhetoric in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Teaching Novel, Gifts.” Extrapolation 48.1 (2007): 84-95. Print. Yampbell, Cat. “When Science Blurs the Boundaries: The Commodification of the Animal in Young Adult Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 35.2 (July 2008): 207-22. Print. Žižek, Slavoj. The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters. London: Verso, 2007. Print. —. The Ticklish Subject. London: Verso, 2000. Print

FAY WELDON’S THE CLONING OF JOANNA MAY AS A FEMINIST DYSTOPIAN BURLESQUE ZEYNEP Z. ATAYURT

Viewed as a “subgenre of literary utopianism” (Cavalcanti 48), the term dystopia denotes a counter-utopian or anti-utopian world that has been overshadowed by multi-faceted forms of terror, exploitation and oppression exercised on nature and living organisms, a dark landscape in which individuals are often controlled and repressed by violence, fear or threats. In line with this, dystopia as a literary work embodies, as in Anne Cranny-Francis’s words, “the textual representation of a society apparently worse than the writer’s/reader’s own” (qtd. in Cavalcanti 48). As the writers of dystopias construct an oppressive and repressive social, political and cultural climate, their narratives are often intended as a warning against “the consequences of current social and political trends” (Little 14). Certainly, the consequences of scientific trends, particularly the effects of the exploitation of science, often form a key element in the conceptualization of the term dystopia. The representation of the notion of the use/misuse of science in the literary imagination, arguably since the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, has inspired many discussions within the frame of various personal and social parameters – the personal aspect of it could be explained in relation to human being’s existential anxiety, fear of mortality, desire to acquire an all-powerful status, whilst the social aspect often bears a utilitarian tendency, with a perverted desire to render an improved version of society. The genre saw a boom in the 1970s, coinciding with the increasing scientific interest in cloning in the wake of Dr. Karl Illmensee’s scientific venture on nuclear transfer and his attempt to clone a mouse. Thus, it is not surprising that many sci-fi novels from 1970s onwards dealing with the use, misuse and abuse of science novels such as Cloning (1972) by David Shear, Joshua, Son of None (1973) by Nancy Freedman, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976) by Kate Wilhelm, Boys from Brazil (1976) by Ira Levin, The Clone Rebellion (1980) by Evelyn Lief - have engaged with the theme of human cloning

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and reproduction, exploring in imagined spaces and plots the possible benefits and harms of this phenomenon. Written in 1989, the British author Fay Weldon’s novel The Cloning of Joanna May is, as in Nerlich et al’s words, “a post-Chernobyl [dystopian] story about genetic experiments” (Web.), coming out in a period when the scientific explorations in the field of genetics and gene cloning methods have become a significant area of research in the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear explosion. The novel explores the notion of cloning from the perspective of its eponymous heroine, sixty-year-old and childless divorcee Joanna May who finds out that, when married, her ex-husband cloned four women from her eggs. When the book was first published, human cloning was still a far-fetched idea (the first successful cloning of a mammal taking place in 1996), and in the context of the time Weldon’s novel could be seen as a highly futuristic, dystopian and perhaps prophetic narrative. In The Seeds of Time (1994) Jameson explains how “he should like to disjoin the pair of Utopia/dystopia” (55), stating that “the Utopia text is mostly non-narrative and somehow without a subject-position” which “describe[s] a kind of mechanism or even a kind of machine” disregarding “the kinds of human relations that might be found in a Utopian condition” (56), whereas “dystopia is generally a narrative that happens to a specific subject or character” (56). Viewed as a possible example of dystopian fiction, Weldon’s work may not fall easily into what has been categorized as the “first wave” of dystopian novels (produced during both World Wars, and the Cold War) with their portrayals of a powerful, totalitarian state. Rather, the work could be regarded as belonging to the “second wave” of dystopian fiction (produced after the Cold War), where the emphasis has moved from a certain fear of state politics or political terror to a more individual fear, focusing on anxiety over disease, genetics, terrorist attacks, economic failure etc. Thus, Weldon’s novel engages with the anxiety over the female body, and critiques the loss of control over the body within the frame of genetic engineering and reproductive technologies. In Ira Levin’s 1972 novel The Stepford Wives we see the author taking a critical interest in eugenics that runs parallel to Weldon’s with his literary envisioning of the creation of a “super-race” of women. However, unlike Weldon, Levin has used not clones but submissive and docile robots, and arguably created a fantasy of “the angel in the house.” Weldon, in her novel offers a feminist parody of the fantasy represented in Levin’s novel, burlesquing Levin’s controversial construction of a male fantasy, and directly referencing the book by choosing Levin’s protagonist’s name – Joanna – for her own heroine. In The Stepford Wives, we find wife

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robots who are almost identical to each other both physically and in their psychological make-up where they are programmed to respond and perform in the same manner. In Weldon’s novel, however, despite the physical similarity of Joanna’s clones, each clone has a distinct personality, harboring different outlooks on their private and public appearances. What unites them is their desire to overturn patriarchal hegemony and its execution of medical and scientific power through feminist means. Thus, Joanna and her clones praise sisterhood and refuse to be, as in Irigaray’s words, mere “products used and exchanged by men” (84). Within the framework of the critical enunciations of dystopian fiction inspired by Jameson’s views alongside feminist literary criticism, this chapter aims to explore a possible link between second wave of dystopian fiction and Second Wave Feminism in The Cloning of Joanna May. In so doing, this essay engages with the ways in which Weldon’s work offers a feminist dystopian burlesque of reproductive technologies, critiques Levin’s construction of a misogynistic male fantasy, and thus serves as a feminist salvo against the political and social mechanisms regulating women’s lives.

The Cloning of Joanna May as a Feminist Dystopia Weldon may not be considered a vigorous writer of science fiction specifically, thus her works have been underrated for their “prescriptive” plots with romantic appeal – a tendency which has often led her novels to be labeled as “chick-lit” and as “malicious feminist comic strips.”1 Yet, in her novel The Cloning of Joanna May she blends romance with science fiction, and creates a highly stimulating narrative that is both futuristic and sarcastic with its engagement with the notion of human cloning, and the ways in which this phenomenon might generate negative consequences when conducted for sheer personal satisfaction rather than serving the common interests of humanity. In her essay entitled “Of Birth and Fiction” (1990), Weldon states as follows: “In The Cloning of Joanna May I take birth away from women, and hand it over to men: as they are of course busy doing for themselves in the real world.” (206). In her essay Weldon writes about her visit to a professor of Egyptology who was, at the time of her visit, working on cloning a mummy, but stopped research because of “public pressure” (206). Weldon feels ambivalent about the idea of cloning, and seems to take issue with it saying: “Children get born without 1

See Michiko Kakutani’s review of The Cloning of Joanna May (“Books of the Times; In Fay Weldon’s New Novel, The Devil Is Man”), The New York Times, 16 March 1990.

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license: is it the unalienable right of the individual to reproduce not quite himself, but half himself, no matter what his or her nature, temperament, or circumstances, or just something we’d rather not think about?” (206) Thus, through her novel Weldon scrutinizes the problematics of human cloning as she speculates on the issues above. In fact Weldon’s meeting with the Egyptologist seems to have been inspirational for her novel – we find in her narrative an Egyptologist (interestingly Joanna’s illicit lover), as well as a scientist who is engaged in cloning a child from the cells of an Egyptian mummy. With her critical interest in the notion of cloning, Weldon’s novel thus initially prompts an ethical reading of the idea of human cloning with respect to the right to protect one’s genetic identity, and links this ethical concern to a feminist concern. That is to say, whilst the novel critiques the notion of cloning as a threat upon identity, it also envisions an apocalyptic world in which this threat manifests itself in the form of the controlling and manipulation of women’s reproductive ability by men. Yet, Weldon’s protagonist rises above this oppressive background, and her narrative offers a feminist counter-narrative to the patriarchal male agenda that seeks to regulate women’s bodies. The novel opens in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster when England along with the rest of Europe finds itself in a panic regarding radioactive fallout, as Weldon’s heroine puts it, “the invisible enemy, the silent murderer […] flying through the air and causing death and decay wherever it fell” (27). Weldon’s choice of setting for her novel is significant, as with this setting posing a threat on nature and humanity, the issues that the novel raises tend to overlap - the destructive power of science, abuse of science as a form of control etc. As Robyn Alexander argues, the Chernobyl disaster “metaphorically signals a (temporary) breakdown of patriarchal science’s control over the natural world” (Web.); thus, the novel, through this setting symbolically relates patriarchal science’s control over the natural world to its control over women’s bodies. In the novel, Carl May, the ex-husband of Joanna, who is the head of the British nuclear power industry, is a manipulative scientist driven by his desire to be, as in his own words, “the master of mortality” (141). Constructing Carl as an excessively ambitious scientist, who strives to achieve his goals no matter what the cost, and here, at the cost of others’ lives, Weldon offers a dystopian account of the scientist with domineering and oppressive motives. In a non-linear narrative alternating between the first and third-person’s points of view, the novel offers an in-depth portrayal of each character. The book opens with the disintegration of Joanna’s marriage at the age of

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sixty due to Joanna’s “infidelity” (15), and with Joanna in her luxurious, abundant house recalling her past, and her marriage to Carl. Carl has been scarred with a traumatic childhood - he was “battered and abused” (24) by his stepfather and chained around the neck and kept in a dog’s kennel. It is out of pity for him that Joanna marries him, as she says with more than a hint of female altruism, “to make the past up to him” (35). In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire has pointed out that “the ‘fear of freedom’ which afflicts the oppressed may equally well lead [the oppressed] to desire the role of oppressor or bind them to the role of oppressed” (46). Carl’s case arguably exemplifies Freire’s hypothesis, in that the underlying rationale behind his inability to free himself from his past can be attributed to his tendency to align himself more with his former oppressor – in this case his stepfather. Although Joanna believes that “it is perfectly possible to rise above circumstances, however dire those circumstances may have been” (25), Carl seems to be trapped in his past, being preoccupied with the notion of reconstructing his past, and in the process of creating himself anew, he becomes a sadistic overambitious scientist. He marries Joanna because he “needed a wife to look after him” (34), and he did not want children. When Joanna, at the age of thirty, thinks that she is pregnant, Carl wants her to have an abortion. The doctor informs him that Joanna is in fact not pregnant - her swollen belly and morning sickness, merely being the psychosomatic symptoms of “a hysterical pregnancy” (43), a condition which the doctor simplistically suggests could be cured either by “affection” or “a mock abortion” (44). On finding out that Joanna shows symptoms of pregnancy, Carl feels betrayed saying, “I took that phantom pregnancy of hers badly” (44), and further explaining, “an imagined one seemed to me worse than the real thing; let her conscious mind be loyal and loving, in her unconscious, in the depths of her being, Joanna May betrayed me, went against me” (44). Carl’s irrational ascription of Joanna’s “hysterical pregnancy” to her unconscious rebellion against him leads him to want to take revenge on Joanna, and furthermore he sees in this episode an opportunity to inflict a unique form of punishment on Joanna – a punishment which begins with the unauthorized removal of one of her eggs under the pretense of an abortion in the clinical environment of a hospital with the intention to clone Joanna for selfish and malevolent aims. To this end, Carl asks Dr. Holly, the head of the abortion clinic, to perform the mock abortion, in the process of which Joanna’s egg is removed, as Carl explains: While she was opened up we took a nice ripe egg; whisked it down to the lab: shook it up and irritated it in amniotic fluid till the nucleus split, and split again, and then there were four. Holly thought we could have got it to

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eight, but I said no. Growth begins so quickly: there wasn’t time. A truly vigorous egg, that one. We kept the embryos in culture for four whole weeks, had four nice healthy waiting wombs at hand and on tap, for implantation. All four took like a dream: there they grew until they popped into the world, alive and kicking well. Four nice assorted ladies, desperate for babies, got four pretty little girls: little Joanna clones. Not cloning in the modern sense, but parthenogenesis plus implantation, and a good time had by all. We kept it quiet. So quiet one of the mothers didn’t even know we had done it. What passive creatures women are: they just lie there, trusting, and let the medical profession do what it wants. (45-46). … She was thirty. She was growing little hairlines round her eyes: so I gave time itself a kick in the teeth. It seemed a pity to let it all go to waste, when you could save it so easily. (46) … When she woke up she was cured. My lovely wife, slim and fresh and all for me again. (44)

The extract points to various repressive views fostered by Carl with regard to medicine, gender and physicality. Carl is a manipulative man of science, and the motives underneath his desire to clone Joanna are purely self-interested: by cloning Joanna he would have preserved Joanna’s youth, for Carl is a man who is preoccupied with looks, and therein his wife should be in conformity with the idealized image of femininity. Viewed from another perspective with Carl’s misogynistic description of women as passive receptors of science, and with this dystopian portrayal of medical science in terms of, as Rose Quiello says, “the profession’s abuse of women” (85), Weldon embarks on a feminist dystopia, engaging critically with the ways in which reproductive technologies could take an unethical turn, and become yet another area of oppression for women. Feminist dystopia is “an intrinsically critical genre” (Cavalcanti 48), and as Judith Little describes, “critiques a particular political or moral theory by depicting a future in which the theory grounds the systemic oppression of one sex by the other” (16). Unlike familiar dystopias which “tell the story of an imminent disaster – ecology, overpopulation, plague, drought, the stray comet or nuclear accident – waiting to come to pass in our own near future, which is fast-forwarded in the time of the novel” (Jameson, The Seeds of Time 55), feminist dystopias tell the story of a disaster whose consequences imminently inflict gender-bias and oppression, and “imaginatively mirror actual abominable treatment of women in the past and present” (Little 16). However, different from dystopias, feminist dystopian fictions usually end on a pessimistic note where women fight against this terrifying account of the future, and “find their individual and

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collective voices” (Lewis 7), highlighting “the courage and beauty of those who break silences” (Lewis 11). Weldon’s text could be considered a feminist dystopia with her portrayal of her powerful women not conforming to be the repressive maneuvers of patriarchal science. Weldon’s novel does not necessarily portray a phantasmagorical future - her book is set in the late 80’s - yet her novel has futuristic overtones as the book deals with human cloning, an idea which is still far-fetched at the time of the novel’s publication, but rapidly becoming more feasible with the advances in science and biotechnology. To put this into perspective, the first successful cloning of a mammal took place in 1996 with the now famous cloning of “Dolly” the sheep, and more controversially in 2008 Dr. Samuel H. Wood in partnership with Andrew French announced that they had cloned human cells. This latter cloning was done in the context of medical research, but the subject remains highly controversial prompting heated ethical and religious debate with each advance in this technological field. In the novel, Weldon explores the notion of human cloning as a feminist as well as an ethical issue within the framework of the concerns over the female identity. In her essay “Of Birth and Fiction,” Weldon initially envisages the cloning of human beings from a positive perspective viewing it as a useful phenomenon, a fantasy that would reduce the haste and pressures of modern life, as she says: “I’d like to be cloned: while one of me was out talking, the other one could be at home writing” (208), yet in her book she turns that “simple thought” into a highly “complex” issue relating it to the idea of having multiple selves in terms of social and psychological notions of identity. The complexity of this issue is voiced by Joanna half-way through the novel when she finds out that she has been cloned, a confrontation which leads her to harbor conflicting thoughts about her identity. First, she sees it as a threat against her singularity – throughout the novel there is an emphasis on her identity with the use of “I, Joanna May” - but later her fear is replaced by a sense of power, as she says: I, Joanna May, beautiful and intelligent in my prime, now past it, am a woman plus repetitions, taken at my prime. Carl’s fault, Carl’s doing. I am horrified, I am terrified, I don’t know what to do with myself at all, whatever myself means now. I don’t want to meet myself, I’m sure. I would look at myself with critical eyes, confound myself. I would see what I don’t want to see, myself when young. I would see not immortality, but the inevitability of age and death. (157-58) … I, Joanna May! See how easily it comes to me to turn from “I” to “she” – joining my lot with other women, universalizing an experience, as if the better to justify myself. As if I, a woman who never gave birth but has four

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daughters, an only child with four sisters, could ever be quite like anyone else. Perhaps what Dr. Holly took away from me at the Bulstrode Clinic was not so much identity, as my universality. He made me particular, different from other women: he turned me into someone of scientific interest. (264) … I felt what it was to be Carl, and want to change the world: I felt the power of it. But most of all, I wanted to see what I would be, born into a newer, more understanding world: one which allowed women choice, freedom and success. (265)

Here, although Joanna feels that she has been turned into an object of scientific interest, Weldon gradually renders her heroine a certain sense of power facilitated by not a loss of individuality but rather by a reinscription of her identity onto her clones, a situation which arguably reinforces her singularity as well as universality. Her clones – Jane, Julie, Gina and Alice – are different socially, yet similar biologically as they all have the same genetic makeup: Jane is a journalist, she is reluctant to marry and give up her independence; Julie is unhappily married, and she cheats on her husband with the vet; Gina is a housewife, she is married to a brute, and she has three children; Alice is a model and she is single. It is interesting to note that Weldon adds a mystical dimension to her narrative by the use of Tarot cards in that each one of Joanna’s clones embodies the attributes that the four queen cards of the Tarot – Queen of Wands, Queen of Pentacles, Queen of Swords and Queen of Cups – are assumed to represent.2 Jane is represented by the Queen of Wands reflecting her strength and love of freedom, Julie by the Queen of Pentacles for her generosity, Gina by the Queen of Swords for her patience and compromising nature, and Alice by the Queen of Cups for her coquettishness and preoccupation with her appearance. It might be argued that Weldon with this mystical dimension to her characters seems to offer an appropriation of spirituality as an alternative to patriarchal science. Thus, Joanna creates a stimulating synergy with her clones, saying: When I acknowledged my sisters, my twins, my clones, my children, when I stood out against Carl May, I found myself: pop! I was out. He thought he would diminish me: he couldn’t. […] Joanna May was now Alice, Julie, Gina, Jane as well. Absurd but wonderful! (324)

2

See The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination by Robert Place, and A Description of the Cards of the Tarot by Aleister Crowley for the implications of the four queen cards of Tarot.

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The acknowledgement of her clones, thus, provides Joanna, as in Quiello’s words, with “an emotional network in which her power is quadrupled rather than divided” (90). This feeling of togetherness and sisterhood ultimately prompts Joanna to outwit Carl’s antagonistic motives, and shatter his misogynistic agenda of re-creating Joanna in different hybrid forms - with “a monkey’s head” or “a bitch legs” (143). From Carl’s point of view after the explosion of Chernobyl, “all things impossible are possible” (143), and following this, with an air of great confidence he says: “I want to amuse myself. I can make a thousand thousand of you if I choose” (142), further stating, “I can entertain myself by making whatever I feel like” (143). Yet, Weldon’s Joanna is not intimidated by Carl’s façade of omnipotence, for she is assured that despite Carl’s cruel intention to crush her sense of identity, he ends up strengthening it, as she says: Multiply me and multiply my soul: divide me, split me; you just make more of me, not less. I will look out from more and different windows. […] You might end up doing more good than harm, in spite of yourself, if only by mistake. (143)

Here, Weldon seems to take the view that Joanna’s clones render her a stronger perception of self, “boost[ing] her ego” (Marcus 410). In his essay “Ethics of Human Cloning”, Amit Marcus brings a different reading of Weldon’s text within the frame of bioethics, and argues that “the evil intention of cloning someone irrespective of his will may incidentally have positive implications for the one cloned” (410). Although Marcus’ view is relevant to Weldon’s text, it is my intention here to focus on the text’s feminist dystopian aspects, and to argue that the novel does not tend to highlight specifically the idea that cloning might generate positive implications but rather critiques the medical atrocities exercised by patriarchal science as represented by Carl and Dr. Holly in the novel. Both Carl and Dr. Holly tend to use medical and scientific power destructively, in particular Carl exploits science for personal gain. For instance, the motives for cloning Joanna serve his personal interest to satisfy his need to be loved since he initially thinks that the clones would love him as much as Joanna, as the narrator states: “He had done it to multiply her love for him, Joanna May’s love for Carl May, multiply it fourfold: to make up for what he’d never had: Carl May, the bitch’s son” (316). It is significant to note that Carl’s ego-centric aspirations are not only prevalent in his private life - he is self-interested in the public as much as in the private. Being the head of the British nuclear power stations at a time of collective fear and panic over radiation emission because of the Chernobyl

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explosion, “his business interests” and “the future of the nuclear power industry” (151) could be at stake. Hence, he distorts the truth, and taking an unsympathetic and condescending attitude, he underestimates and even ridicules the public’s anxiety. On a TV program, He said he doubted very much the story of 2000 dead and large areas laid waste and desolate, never to grow a blade of grass again. He deplored the scare stories in the media that death was raining down from skies all over the world. He drank a glass of milk front of camera, and said there was more to fear from cholesterol than radioactivity. (151-52) … The unthinking and uninformed always fear an unseen enemy. From reds under the bed to radiation in the head, the public gets the wrong end of the stick, is ignorant and hysterical and impossible. (153)

By constructing Carl as an indifferent and egoistic man both in the public and private, Weldon intensifies the novel’s feminist overtones, and portrays Joanna and her clones as powerful, feisty and unyielding women who rise above this dystopian background. As the novel progresses, Carl becomes determined to kill Gina and Jane, and keep Alice and Julie to replace his young girlfriend Bethany, and Joanna and the clones act together to protect themselves. At the end of the novel Carl dies, yet his death is not brought about by Joanna and her clones, but rather by his own very means since in order to prove to the public that “low-level waste was no threat to anyone” (340) he jumps into the contaminated cooling pond of the nuclear power plant, and he dies. But, shortly before his death, towards the end of the novel, with an unexpected turn the roles are reversed, and Carl asks for a second chance, and Joanna and her clones, having power and dominion over Carl, grant him his wish. The novel ends with Carl remade as a clone, and his clone - “little Carl” (347) – being looked after by the aging Joanna with care and affection. It could be argued that despite the dystopian issues regarding the destructive use of scientific power, the novel ends on a positive and highly empowered note as Joanna now has the full control over Carl as he grows up. Joanna’s final words at the end of the novel - “I do love him. Never stopped” (351) - might be interpreted as troubling in terms of a reinstatement of female altruism since throughout the novel Carl has been depicted as a manipulative and hostile man with unlovable persona. Yet, this ending does not disturb the novel’s feminist take on the exploitation of women’s bodies by science, as Weldon, arguably, tends to emphasize the humane feelings against one-dimensional, profit-seeking policies exercised against women, and highlights that Joanna and her clones are not “Stepford wives”

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- she and her clones retaining their individuality despite their uncannily similar physicality.

From Clones to Robots In The Cloning of Joanna May Weldon writes from a feminist point of view, and through her protagonist Joanna and her clones speaks back to the misogynistic practice of science and medicine, arguably offering a feminist response to Ira Levin’s 1972 dystopian fiction The Stepford Wives. Although there is a time span of almost seventeen years between the publication of these novels, both novels engage with the idea of the patriarchal regulation of women’s bodies by c(o)lonising or robotizing them. As previously stated, both works feature protagonists who have the same name, but in comparison to Weldon’s resourceful and feisty protagonist who at the end of the novel rises above the exploitations inflicted on her, Levin’s Joanna, despite beginning the novel as a committed feminist in support of the Women’s Liberation movement, in the course of the narrative loses her fight against patriarchal techno-science, ending the novel as a submissive housewife with her “socially acceptable” behavior and appearance. Portraying a problem-free idealized fictional upper-class suburban town - which is depicted as the anti-thesis of the “filthy, crowded, crime-ridden” (8) city - Levin thus introduces a dream-like setting with the orderly assemblage of its helpful and friendly residents. Yet, this arguably utopian image of a town is overshadowed by a dystopian vision of the exploitation of science whilst offering a satirical engagement with men’s fear of the Women’s Liberation movement as well as idealized images of femininity. As Elyce Rae Helford argues, the Stepford wives are “perfect examples of physically beautiful, passive, fetishized objects of the male gaze” (149). Viewed in line with Helford’s argument, it is interesting to note how Joanna is initially in the position of being the observer, yet later is transformed into the object of the gaze. As a semi-professional photographer Joanna is equipped with a perceptive appreciation of her environment, and an ability to focus on the particulars. At the beginning of the novel she is portrayed as a woman highly observant of her neighbors who seem strikingly similar both in terms of their appearance and their tendency to spend most of their time doing housework, and this leads her to be suspicious of the activities undertaken at the “Men’s Association” (12). Joanna, in her conversation with Carol, one of the Stepford wives, asks her the following questions to gauge her reaction to this exclusively male organization; “Doesn’t it bother you that the central organization, the only organization that does

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anything significant as far as community projects are concerned, is off limits to women? Doesn’t that seem a little archaic to you?” (23) (Joanna has to supply Carol with the meaning of the word “archaic” on seeing her unable to understand it, an early indication that Stepford wives have a limited vocabulary with cliché responses.) Carol replies “Ted’s better equipped for that sort of thing than I am […] and men need a place where they can relax and have a drink or two” (23), and in response to Joanna’s suggestion that women should also have a similar place to relax, Carol is dismissive, saying she does not have time “for a get-together” (24). Joanna soon realizes that most of the wives in Stepford do not seem to have leisure time, and they have no willingness to spend time outside of their homes, “to meet with other women and talk about their shared experiences” (25). She gradually comes to view these women in a different light as she starts to believe in the possibility that they have undergone a transformation of some kind, one that poses a threat to the liberation and empowerment of women. However, in the course of the novel, as Joanna herself is transformed into a Stepford wife, she loses this highly tuned perceptive faculty, and instead is reconstructed as the idealized subject of the male gaze. The notion of the gaze is also highlighted in Weldon’s text as we see Weldon’s Joanna repeatedly punning on the words “I” and “eye”, for instance her speculation on the significance of the eye, as she says: The human eye, if you regard it without emotion, is a glob of light-sensitive jelly attached by strings of nerves and muscles to the convoluted tissue mass of the brain, in itself a fine ferment of electrical discharges. But it works, it works. The “you”, the “me”, the “I” – behold, it sees! (27) … What the contemporary eye gets to see on a good day is Mickey Mouse. (28)

Weldon’s Joanna, prior to her confrontation with the fact that she has been cloned, had a positive outlook on life, willing to see what pleased her, and content to be fooled by the images presented to her, that is to say not directing her gaze critically. However, as the novel progresses she sheds this attitude by saying: “I, Joanna May. No longer ‘Eye’. Acting, not observing. Doing, not looking” (134). It might be argued that Weldon’s Joanna transforms into an individual who is alert to her social landscape gaining a critical insight into the agenda of patriarchal science and in line with the novel’s theme of female empowerment, refusing to be the object of the male gaze. Levin’s Joanna, on the other hand, describes an opposite trajectory, starting off with a critical standpoint, but by the end of the novel re-created as a passively accepting robotic wife. Following the

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transformation, she seems as perfectly content with her subservient position as her Stepford sisters, as she says: “Housework’s enough for me. I used to feel I had to have other interests, but I’m more at ease with myself now. I’m much happier too, and so is my family. That’s what counts, isn’t it?” (137) Joanna’s attitude indicates the commodification of her body, in that she becomes not “the owner of this commodity but instead the laborer who must provide the goods to those who will benefit directly from her services” (Varsam 216), in this case her husband. Further, Joanna’s accepting and unquestioning robotic mode is in fact in accordance with Isaac Asimov’s famous “Rules of Robotics.” In his short story “Runaround” (1942), Asimov propounds his three laws of robotics: One, a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Two, a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Three, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. (37)

Stepford wives are designed in such a way that they are in conformity with these rules, serving their creators in a benign and subservient manner. Levin is thought to have been inspired by the notion of technological human simulacra by “a trip to Disney theme park” (Maio 115). In fact, the novel overtly alludes to Disneyland as one of the members of the Men’s Association “worked on robots at Disneyland” (131). The reference to Disneyland and the robotic versions of the real is reminiscent of the notion of simulacra as discussed by Baudrillard in his essay “The Precession of Simulacra” (1983), where he notes the blurring of the difference between reality and simulation, and based on his reading of Disneyland, Baudrillard has emphasized the shift from the production of “things” to the production of “copies.” The fake other represented by Disneyland, as Jameson points out in his Archaeologies of the Future (2005), is the “artificial reproduction of inherited cultural images” (215). Interestingly, both Weldon’s and Levin’s works thus take issue with the consumerist tendency prevalent in their societies with regard to the objectification of women’s bodies. In Cloning of Joanna May, Weldon critiques the production of organic copies of the original, and in his Stepford Wives, Levin takes a similar critical view in his portrayal of the robotic wives who “simulate happiness, fulfillment and self-realization through domesticity” (Johnston and Sears 84-85). Whilst the tone of Weldon’s work despite the dystopian setting is empowering, Levin’s work is pessimistic, leaving no hope for the survival of the real in its battle against the simulacra.

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The enforcement of modern technological processes onto women’s bodies is an idea which engages with and leads to the “supremely dematerialised and ironically disembodied” (Orbach 108) forms. Particularly, in Levin’s work the reconstruction of the women via new technology, thus, affiliates them with the image of the “cyborg” representing the body as a site manipulated by technoscience. The concept of the cyborg represents, as Haraway has stated in Simians, Cyborgs and Women (1991), “an apocalyptic telos of the West’s resistance to seductions to organic wholeness” (150-151). As Haraway further argues, the cyborg, which could be defined as a half-organic, half-technological figure, functions as a paradigm for “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities” (154). The boundaries that the cyborg trespasses can be attributed to those between nature and culture, and thus Haraway gestures at the potential liberatory aspect of the cyborg imagery for women, serving as a means of “building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships” (181). In Weldon’s and Levin’s works the image arguably represents this double-edged position respectively: although The Cloning of Joanna May employs the notion of the cyborg not in the same sense as it has been done by Levin - the clones of Joanna are organic despite technoscientific interference to their existence – the novel emphasizes how this category could be rendered a liberatory aspect, whereas Levin’s novel reinforces the idea of a technological recreation of the female body into the image of a perfect femininity, which is suggestive of a dystopian vision of “technologically perfect, hyper-real version of women” (Johnston and Sears 89). To conclude, both novels offer conflicting visions of technoscience in the literary imagination. Levin’s work portrays a dystopian future for women where women function as the products of “male fantasies of consumption, control and mastery” (Johnston and Sears 84). Weldon’s work, on the other hand, dealing with the tyranny of patriarchal science and the destructive use of science from a feminist point of view, turns this dystopian narrative into a feminist dystopia. In so doing, Weldon’s text blends the concerns of Second Wave Feminism (those regarding body and female embodiment in particular) with the key issues of the “second wave” dystopian fiction where the personal anxieties override social fears. Thus, this mixture, arguably, paves the way for a feminist dystopian burlesque which mocks and challenges, as in the case of The Cloning of Joanna May, the objectification of women through a satirical engagement with the dystopian implications of technoscientific methods of reproduction and reconstruction.

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Works Cited Asimov, Isaac. “Runaround.” I, Robot. New York: Bantam Dell, 1950. 2545. Alexander, Robyn. “The Cloning of Joanna May: Reproductive Technologies, Motherhood, Identity.” Michigan Feminist Studies 13 (1998-1999).4161. Web. 26 April 2012

Cavalcanti, Ildney. “The Writing of Utopia and the Feminist Critical Dystopia.” Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination. Ed. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. 47-67. Crowley, Aleister. A Description of the Cards of the Tarot. San Diego: The Book Tree, 2007. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York, London: Continuum International, 1970. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, 1991. Helford, Elyce Rae. “The Stepford Wives and the Gaze.” Feminist Media Studies 6. 2 (2006): 145-55. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Jameson, Fredrick. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. —. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London and New York: Verso, 2007. Johnston, Jessica, and Cornelia Sears. “The Stepford Wives and the Technoscientific Imaginary.” Extrapolation 52. 1 (2011): 76-93. Kakutani, Michiko. “Books of the Times; In Fay Weldon’s New Novel, The Devil Is Man.” The New York Times. 16 March 1990. Web. 15 June 2008. Levin, Ira. The Stepford Wives. London: Constable & Robinson, 1972. Lewis, Arthur O. “Breaking Silences in Feminist Dystopias.” Utopian Studies III. Ed. Michael S. Cummings and Nicholas D. Smith. Maryland, London: University Press of America, 1991. 7-11. Little, Judith A. Feminist Philosophy and Science Fiction: Utopias and Dystopias. New York: Prometheus Books, 2007. Maio, Kathi. “The Town Hollywood Couldn’t Forget.” Fantasy and Science Fiction (2004). 115-20.

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Marcus, Amit. “The Ethics of Human Cloning in Narrative Fiction.” Comparative Literature Studies 49: 3 (2012). 405-33. Nerlich, B., D. D. Clarke, and R. Dingwall. “Fiction, Fantasies, and Fears: The Literary Foundations of the Cloning Debate.” Journal of Literary Semantics 30 (2001). 37-52. Web. [15 March 2012] http://www.metaphorik.de/aufsaetze/nerlich-fictions.htm Orbach, Susie. Bodies. London: Profile Books, 2009. Place, Robert. The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2005. Quiello, Rose. “Going to Extremes: The Foreign Legion of Women in Fay Weldon’s The Cloning of Joanna May.” Fay Weldon’s Wicked Fictions. Ed. Regina Barreca. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1994. 83-92. Varsam, Maria. “Concrete Dystopia.” Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination. Ed. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. 203-24. Weldon, Fay. The Cloning of Joanna May. Glasgow: William Collins Sons & Co, 1989. —. “Of Birth and Fiction.” Fay Weldon’s Wicked Fictions. Ed. Regina Barreca. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1994. 198-208.

POWER, SURVEILLANCE AND REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY IN P.D. JAMES’ THE CHILDREN OF MEN SOO DARCY

We are outraged and demoralized less by the impending end of our species, less even by our inability to prevent it, than by our failure to discover the cause. Western science and Western medicine haven’t prepared us for the magnitude and humiliation of this ultimate failure (The Children of Men 5).

This extract from P.D. James’ 1992 novel The Children of Men sets the scene for the following analysis, not only engaging with the themes of human reproduction and the body of science and technology associated with it, but also evoking the more subtle relationships at play in the novel between power and knowledge. This chapter considers the dystopian theme of dictatorial rule, and the attempted subversion of that rule, through the interplay of power, surveillance and reproductive technology in the narrative. I focus on James’ novel in particular because of its reflection on contemporary debates surrounding reproduction and control of the body, using the narrative to draw attention to dystopian themes that engage with wider discourses of power and control. James’ novel has been paid relatively little critical attention compared to the film it inspired – Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) – due in part, perhaps, to the film’s explicit engagement with political aspects related to race and immigration 1 which is quite different from the distinctly white, middle class, middle England setting of the novel. Similarly, the novel has received far less attention than one which shares as its central premise the themes of infertility and control of the body, Margaret Atwood’s The 1

See, for examples of critical analyses of the film’s themes, Chaudhary, Z. “Humanity Adrift: Race, Materiality, and Allegory in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men” in Camera Obscura 24.3 (2009): 73-109 and Trimble, Sarah. “Maternal Back/grounds in Children of Men: Notes towards an Arendtian Biopolitics” in Science Fiction Film and Television 4.2 (2011). 249-270.

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Handmaid’s Tale (1985), perhaps because James’ male narrator and somewhat peripheral pregnant character offer fewer explicit opportunities to explore these themes. Nevertheless, I contend that The Children of Men offers a rich narrative which reflects upon the body of critical work that emerged in the 1970s and 80s as feminist theorists and cultural critics rushed to analyse the implications of rapid technological advances in reproductive medicine, particularly as these techniques became drawn into mainstream practices aimed at pregnant women. By situating the text within a history of feminist utopian and dystopian writing that engages with concerns about reproductive technology; I will show how such writing offers a dystopian vision of power and control through the construction of the pregnant body as one continually under the threat of surveillance and discipline. The central premise of The Children of Men – Omega is the year in which the last baby is born, signalling the end of the human race – is intimately bound up in power relations between members of the government, the scientific community and the population of England. However, this relationship exists as a subtle undercurrent because the cause of this global catastrophe is not man-made, and thus is not a political act in itself. Indeed, the cause of the global infertility is never fully explained but is suggested to be something other-worldly; though the novel’s narrator, Dr Theo Faron, muses on the potential contributing factors of over-population, birth control and postponement of pregnancy, in fact the abrupt and complete end to fertility takes on a sinister character resonant of the supernatural. Theo recalls that, when even the frozen sperm stored in laboratories was found to be impotent, the discovery “was a peculiar horror casting over Omega the pall of superstitious awe, of witchcraft, of divine intervention. The old gods reappeared, terrible in their power” (9). As a result Xan Lyppiatt, the Warden of England who had been elected to power, has remained in charge through an attractive policy of providing the ageing population with the means to live out its days in comfort, resulting in voter apathy. By establishing that the cause of the world’s infertility is not directly attributable to human actions, the novel allows Xan’s regime to initially appear benign – doing the best it can in difficult circumstances that were not deliberately created. It is the appearance of Julian, a pregnant woman surrounded by a small group of revolutionaries known as the Five Fishes, that draws attention to the despotic nature of the Warden’s rule and threatens to disturb the apparently calm acceptance of infertility that has fallen over the population. In this essay I argue that, through this pregnant character, political power in The Children of Men is shown to reside in the dormant threat of

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surveillance and technological intervention associated with pregnancy and reproduction, and it is this relationship between power and the body that constitutes the dystopian nature of James’ England. Rather than overtly depicting reproductive technology as an oppressive or dangerous force in the hands of a totalitarian regime, a theme that features in dystopian literature and film from director Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) to Gattaca (Dir. Andrew Niccol, 1997) and The Matrix (Dir. Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999), in James’ infertile population the medical and scientific community has been unsuccessful in utilising technology to restore fertility or to reproduce through artificial means. Reproductive technology is described primarily in terms of its obsolescence and inadequacy; compulsory testing of the population’s fertility does continue but, we learn, has recently lapsed due to its repeated and consistent failure to identify any fertile men or women. Theo’s observation that the population has been “outraged,” “demoralized,” and humiliated by “our failure to discover the cause” (5) of the infertility illustrates the sense of ownership and control over the body that has been invested in Western science and medicine by the remaining populace of England in The Children of Men. Furthermore, these words imply anger at the failure of science to exert and demonstrate such control, indicating that there exists a sense of entitlement to knowledge – and the power wielded by the possession of that knowledge – that has been undermined by the inability of Western science and medicine to solve the problem.

Reproductive Dystopia When attempting to situate the novel within a body of related work it should first of all be noted that there is no single satisfactory definition of “dystopia” as a literary genre or collection of typical themes; the notion of dystopia is shifting and dependent upon the viewpoint of the observer. In “Dystopia and histories,” Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan trace the history of dystopian literature from what they call the “classical, or canonical, form of dystopia” (2, original emphasis), such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Huxley’s Brave New World, to more diffuse forms that “shared the cultural ambience of the dystopian imagination” (2) as well as dystopian tendencies in popular science fiction. A common thread running throughout many of these forms, diverse though they may be, is that of totalitarian regimes and/or the overt or insidious loss of individual freedom. Within the broad genre of speculative, utopian and dystopian fiction we can further identify a strand of literature that specifically addresses modes and forms of reproduction. Throughout

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the 1970s, for instance, there can be found numerous examples of novels that explore feminist utopian visions of gender equality or neutrality and challenge sex-specific reproductive roles, foregrounding a resistance to the dystopian vista of lost autonomy. Examples include Suzy McKee Charnas’s Motherlines (1978) and the community of Mattapoisett in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). Theorists have noted that there is a strong link between this sub-genre of feminist utopian fiction dealing with reproduction and cultural responses to the rapid rise of reproductive technology and its widespread application in Western obstetric medicine (Donawerth 14, Barr 173). We can therefore consider The Children of Men as part of a body of literature in which reproduction is a central theme, and draw comparisons with the varied feminist responses to reproductive technology. It is from this perspective that I ground my analysis of the novel as depicting a reproductive dystopia. Responses to the Western investment in reproductive technology from critics that can be broadly categorised as feminist, particularly throughout the 1970s and 80s, range from the rejection of technology to a call to embrace and appropriate it for the benefit of women. The former group advocates suspicion or an outright refusal of intervention in pregnancy and childbirth, attributing the growth of routine surveillance and treatment of pregnant women to an oppressive patriarchal medical institution. The work of Mary Daly and Gena Corea, among others, is particularly comprehensive on this point.2 Those in the latter group – notably Shulamith Firestone – urge women to embrace technologies that hold the potential to remove the “burden” of childbirth and child rearing from women alone. Firestone’s call in The Dialectic of Sex (1970) for “the freeing of women from the tyranny of reproduction by every means possible” (221) can be found in several utopian novels of the 1970s and 1980s, perhaps most clearly in Piercy’s Mattapoisett in Woman on the Edge of Time. By the 1980s and into the 1990s a dystopian focus had become more common in women’s writing; this trend can be seen in the sub-genre of reproductive fiction, including James’ novel and The Handmaid’s Tale. In her essay “A Necessary Alliance: Women and the Environment in Recent Utopian Fiction” (2002) Susan Stratton traces this shift from feminist utopian writing to feminist dystopias to the perception in 1980s America that women were finally making progress towards equality, followed by the disappointment of the subsequent anti-feminist reaction.3 Stratton observes 2

Gena Corea. The Mother Machine. London: The Women’s Press, 1988. Print. Also Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology. London: The Women’s Press, 1979. Print. 3 Stratton cites Susan Faludi’s Backlash (1991) as a timely record and analysis of this phenomenon.

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that “it is clear that feminist utopian writing has grown markedly thinner since its heyday in the 1970s. The feminist utopias portrayed then […] capture the optimism of the ‘60s – that feminist awareness would eventually overcome the obstacles that had kept women down” (28). Stratton goes on to comment that The Handmaid’s Tale is Atwood’s response to the anti-feminist backlash (29), clearly linking women’s fiction to contemporary political debate. Marge Piercy makes a similar observation in a 2003 interview for the installation Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies: “In the seventies, there was a great bursting forth of feminist utopias. In recent years, with women so much under attack and fighting to maintain the gains that we have fought for, there has been less energy for creating utopias.” Furthermore, during the period in which medical intervention was becoming increasingly mainstream and routine, feminist critics such as Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, Anne Balsamo and Iris Marion Young were paying close attention to the effect of this surveillance and intervention on women and their bodies. James’ novel, then, can be situated within a body of work that represents a renewal of interest in dystopian themes in the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly that which engages with contemporary concerns about reproduction, engaging with shifting cultural attitudes towards the emerging reproductive technologies and modes of control and surveillance of the pregnant body. James herself is quoted as saying that the novel “was [inspired by] the review of a scientific book drawing attention to a dramatic drop in the sperm count of Western men” (1995), clearly demonstrating the close link between women’s writing and cultural concerns about fertility and reproduction. When considering the novel’s dystopian themes of power and surveillance in the light of cultural discourses on technology and reproduction, it is useful to understand the nature of the environment in which the novel’s protagonists are situated. It is first worth noting that James’ vision of England is set in 2021 and that the year Omega – in which the last baby in the world was born – occurs in 1995, only three years after the novel was published. Though speculative in terms of its scope, the setting is unmistakeably England almost to the extent of being a caricature: the countryside is green and rolling; the people are polite and uncomplaining; and the weather is recognisably changeable. There are no “other worlds” here, no alien life forms, no post-apocalyptic terrain and no (overtly) totalitarian government regimes. The novel represents what Jane Donawerth describes as a society “significantly worse than the society of the reader, but uncomfortably close to it” (30). Yet aside from the obvious fact of sudden and inexplicable infertility, on the surface England in the year

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2021 appears a relatively pleasant place to be. In a society where the absence of a young generation has long since been accepted, or at least tolerated, by most citizens, the emphasis of the allegedly “egalitarian” (The Children of Men 8) dictatorship that now governs England is on creating a crime- and stress-free environment in which the dying population can live out its final days in comfort. With the exception of the unruly Omega generation, there is little need for law enforcement in the uncrowded cities because the population’s appetite for civil and criminal unrest has disappeared. Many of the common characteristics of dystopian literature are absent here: there is no overpopulation and thus no overcrowding (a central theme in novels including Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! and Naomi Mitchison’s Solution Three); postapocalyptic pollution is not a concern (see, for instance, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road); and food, wine and recreational activities are plentiful and freely available (the withholding of luxuries can be found in The Handmaid’s Tale and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy). Instead, the novel’s bleak concept is based on two possible outcomes: first, that the human race faces extinction and that the last generation to be born will face a lonely future as those around them gradually die out. The second possibility, the one which is realised, is that this lost fertility might be restored – at least to some degree. If we read the novel within the framework of cultural responses to reproductive technology, as outlined above, then the possibility that fertility will be “rediscovered” offers up the prospect of renewed and vigorous interest in physical examinations and testing, reducing the generation that is still of a child-bearing age to the status of reproductive bodies. These two oppositional possibilities bring into focus a concern that pervades the narrative: whose responsibility is it – if, indeed, there is a responsibility – to repopulate the human race; and should this responsibility outweigh the agency and autonomy of the individual? It is within these questions that the obvious absence of technology in the novel becomes important; the fervent testing and research conducted after year Omega was fruitless, but its spectre remains as a latent threat. It should be reiterated that the narrative does not foreground technology and science; in a 1995 interview, James herself stated that “I don’t think of it as science fiction, as some have claimed.” Rather, it is the potential for the world’s impotent and ‘humiliated’ medical profession to turn its attentions on Julian, threatening to subject her to unwanted intervention, that brings to the fore the notion of technology without it being an explicit feature of the novel. Theo observes: “Western science has been our god […] the spare heart, the new lung, the antibiotic,

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the moving wheels and the moving pictures” (5-6), demonstrating a recognisable level of scientific development in this speculative England that positions it very much within the realm of our existing scientific capabilities. This depiction of recognisable contemporary medical practices in the narrative, coupled with the novel’s contextualisation as part of a body of literary work engaging with cultural concerns about reproduction in the late twentieth century, mean that even though reproductive technology itself occupies a peripheral space in the narrative it can be read as a potential threat to the individual’s agency, and Julian is the conduit for its reappearance. We join the narrative at a time when Xan Lyppiatt’s rule has transformed almost imperceptibly; Rolf notes that “[t]he Warden was elected when he first took power, but that was fifteen years ago. He hasn’t called an election since. He claims to rule by the people’s will, but what he is is a despot and a tyrant” (67). The question of fertility and reproduction, then, becomes intimately bound up in a dormant political power that is simply waiting for an opportunity to exert its control over both the medico-scientific institution and the population of England. It is because Julian fears becoming the focus of this currently dormant technology, and the power bound up in it, that parallels can be drawn with feminist responses to Western obstetric medicine and reproductive technologies where these practices are shown to constitute systems of surveillance and management of pregnant women and their behaviour. These critical responses, and their thematic echoes in The Children of Men, are explored in the following section.

Reproduction and Power Relations Julian would be tenderly lifted away to that public hospital bed, to the medical technology of childbirth which had not been used for twenty-five years. Xan himself would preside and would give the news to an incredulous world. There would be no simple shepherds at this cradle (The Children of Men 228).

Reproduction occupies a complex space in cultural theory, being bound up in myriad and varied discourses such as those addressing the body, gender, sex, sexuality, work and family. The Five Fishes group in The Children of Men, encompassing a midwife, the father of Julian’s baby and Julian’s husband, along with the presence of Theo who is asked by Julian to reason with his cousin, Xan, offers a diverse platform from which to analyse the reproductive discourses that surround Julian. On the discovery that she is pregnant, the group has assembled to resist Xan’s

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government and, indeed, Julian’s husband Rolf is keen to leverage his position as the baby’s father to gain political power before discovering that Luke, a priest, is in fact the father. Julian’s pregnancy holds the potential to catalyse power and privilege for several members of the group; Miriam, the midwife who has been drafted in to the Five Fishes to care for Julian, is accused by Theo: You know she ought to be in hospital. Or are you thinking of yourself? […] Your own glory? It would be quite a thing, wouldn’t it? Midwife to the first of a new race, if that is what this child is destined to be. You don’t want to share the glory; you’re afraid you might not be allowed even a share (179).

Yet Miriam does not seek to exploit the pregnancy for her own gain; she does not appear to equate her role as midwife with the potential to appropriate political power. Her character brings to the narrative a range of dichotomous nuances that foreground the tensions implicit in the power relations surrounding Julian: tensions between the natural and the cultural, private and public, woman and man. Miriam represents an approach to midwifery that has at its core an understanding of the female body as a lived and experiential body. This is expressed in her certainty that Julian is pregnant because “the baby quickened” (171), quickening being a somewhat archaic term for early foetal movement that, with routine ultrasound scanning at around twelve weeks, is no longer relied upon to confirm a woman’s pregnancy. Her insistence that Julian be allowed to decide how and where to give birth, especially when this involves a rejection of medical intervention and positions the birth firmly in the private rather than the public environment, situates Miriam within a history of midwifery that privileges women’s understanding of their own bodies. The birth eventually takes place in an open barn in a wooded area that Theo remembers from his childhood summers with Xan. Miriam can be read as an oppositional force to Theo both literally, through her resistance to external intervention in Julian’s pregnancy, and figuratively through an opposition between the natural, essential body that can be understood in terms of an innate physicality and the medicalised body that is constructed through discourses of medical knowledge. This opposition has a basis in historical approaches to pregnancy management; Clare Hanson notes that historically the nature/culture dichotomy has, with one or two notable exceptions, “tended to split the medical profession along gendered lines, with midwives defending the line of least intervention (nature) and man-midwives/obstetricians advocating intervention (culture)” (10). At several points in The Children of Men this alignment

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between gender and Julian’s treatment is expressed; Theo believes that, during the early stages of labour, Julian and Miriam “shared an intense preoccupation from which he was excluded” (245). Noting Theo’s inability to empathise with Julian’s experience of labour, “it seemed to him that midwife and patient were one woman and that he, too, was part of the pain and the labouring, not really needed but graciously accepted, and yet excluded from the heart of the mystery” (262). It should be noted that Miriam and Julian are described as “midwife and patient”: in the “quiet confidence with which […] she exercised her ancient art” (261) it is clear that Miriam’s role requires her to demonstrate skill, knowledge and experience, particularly when Julian has had no experience of pregnancy and childbirth among her own friends and peer group. Nevertheless, Miriam’s intervention is minimal – this contrasts with the image Theo conjures of the hospital environment comprising “the acolytes, the gowned nurses and midwives, the anaesthetists, and beyond them but dominant, the television cameras with their crews” (259). The term “acolytes” is provocative here: Theo marvels at the quiet, autonomous skill of Miriam whilst likening midwives in the hospital setting to assistants or followers, the term “acolyte” being descriptive of those who perform duties in religious ceremonies. The implication here is that midwives in the hospital environment would operate under the direction of the “distinguished obstetricians summoned from retirement” (259), establishing a hierarchy of power and a privileging of obstetric knowledge over the practice of midwifery. It is this operational hierarchy of power and knowledge that the private delivery of Julian’s baby avoids, without obstetric intervention and in the literally “natural” environment of an ancient wood rather than under the scrutiny of doctors and cameras. Much contemporary theory that engages with discourses of reproductive surveillance has built on the Foucauldian notion of the “medical gaze” (Birth of the Clinic 9), locating the body as the object of medical knowledge. In his account of the birth of the medical clinic, a site of both the teaching and practice of clinical medicine, Michel Foucault emphasises the productive rather than oppressive aspects of power and medical knowledge. According to Foucault, the power that exists within the medical profession is a dispersed, relational power and is not a conscious desire on the part of the medical profession to exert dominance over the patient. However, he also asserts that where power relations exist there is always the possibility for resistance; certainly, though the medical gaze might afford the patient an objective understanding of her body that could be beneficial, any such benefits are gained by the patient conforming to modified forms of behaviour. Julian’s refusal to be treated in hospital is a

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combined resistance to medical intervention and Xan’s power; for her, they are one and the same thing. Rolf, refusing Theo’s argument that Julian should be in hospital because of the risk of complications, says “she’ll be in greater danger from complications, physical or mental, if she’s forced into hospital. She’s terrified of the Warden, she thinks he’s evil” (191). Thus the scope of the clinician’s gaze is widened to include the influence of political power, and it is the threat of this relational web of control over Julian that leads her to resist intervention. Medicalisation theory builds on Foucault’s notion of the medical gaze and argues that processes and behaviours have increasingly become viewed as medical conditions to be diagnosed, monitored and/or treated. As a result, it can be argued that there are power hierarchies inherent in this relationship between the viewer and the object of the gaze and that constructing the body as the sum of its parts reduces the lived, or experienced, body to a medicalised body.4 In relation to the reproductive capacity of the female body, there is a further argument that the medicalisation of pregnancy has resulted in a specific power relation between practitioners and patients of obstetric and gynaecological medicine that renders pregnancy a condition or defect that needs to be observed, regulated and treated (Barker 1982, Cahill 2001). The body under the clinician’s gaze becomes an object of the clinician’s knowledge, exerting a potentially repressive power over the patient who is, in turn, constructed as a patient because of this gaze. In Julian’s case, she and the Five Fishes see the repressive power of knowledge and surveillance at the fore, and her refusal to submit to it positions her as a site of resistance to the power relations that surround her. Foucault’s theories of power describe a dispersed web of relationships through which power is distributed, rather than held solely within a central, class-based or patriarchal hierarchy. Knowledge of the body, and the power relations that exist around this knowledge, are therefore linked to the exercise of political control and discipline as it is dispersed through myriad outlets in the everyday lives of individuals. Xan’s political power appears to operate at both the centralised and dispersed levels; noting that there are no women at the Warden’s court, Theo muses “whether this was to avoid even the hint of sexual scandal or whether the loyalty Xan demanded was essentially 4

It should be noted here that, in fact, Foucault’s theory does not recognise the existence of an essential body; rather, he contends that the body is constituted by the discourses that surround it. Medicalisation theory departs from Foucault’s work in this respect, but the central notion of the body as affected by the influence of external knowledge, and power relations between the patient and the doctor, remains.

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masculine: hierarchical, unquestioning, unemotional” (99). It is through disparate systems of control that Xan is able to coerce the population into acquiescence whilst maintaining the illusion that his policies are in the best interests of the people. Foucault describes the systematic discipline of the docile body as “anatomo-politics of the human body”; the body is treated as “a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities […] the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility” (History of Sexuality 139). Under Xan’s regime, the body is disciplined through a series of systems and controls that echo Foucault’s description of a drive towards both increased usefulness – through, it is hoped, the discovery of a fertile human – and docility that allows the population to be ruled without disorder. These systems include: regular and compulsory fertility testing; gradual movement of dispersed communities to the cities where they can be more easily supplied and controlled; harsh punishment of crime through the permanent confinement of the body on the Man Penal Colony; and a host of fines and controls around death, culminating in allegedly voluntary suicide – the Quietus – which is revealed to be anything but voluntary. How, then, can we see these sites of power and resistance operating in relation to Julian? James’ England is characterised by a failure of medical science to control, or to ‘fix,’ the sudden and inexplicable infertility of the human race that occurred in year Omega; in turn, the governing bodies of each country are left impotent in their inability to compel the finding of a solution. No amount of money or resource has been successful in identifying either a cause or a cure, and an air of calm acceptance has largely fallen on the population of England. The compulsory fertility testing that had been in place since year Omega has lapsed in many areas as acceptance of universal infertility becomes the norm. In James’ world, subdued within a largely self-regulating society, science, law and politics have atrophied, not radicalised. Theo, the novel’s narrator, recalls: “The world didn’t give up hope until the generation born in 1995 reached sexual maturity. But when the testing was complete and not one of them could produce fertile sperm, we knew that this was indeed the end of Homo sapiens” (9). Crucially, not only has the biological body failed on a catastrophic scale but the ability of science to correct the problem has also failed. All hope and faith in technology and in the ability of government to control research and development has been lost; as a result, public interest in the political and scientific environments has reached a state of apathy. In this context Julian’s pregnancy – if made public – would render her a curiosity and a wonder, vulnerable and marginalised. Her refusal to give birth in hospital is not simply a rejection of medical intervention but is a rejection of state interference in a pregnancy that would undoubtedly

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captivate the attention of the world. Obstetric medicine comes to symbolise, and act as a conduit for, Xan Lyppiatt’s political control as dictator. The threat of experimentation, surveillance and confinement – as Julian is sure to suffer if her fertility becomes known – emanates from both the inevitable renewed interest of the medical profession in reproduction and the desire of the state controllers to be the first to possess the knowledge of the “secret” of repopulation. Theo initially tries to convince the revolutionary Five Fishes group that Julian is risking her own life and that of her baby by refusing to give birth under the care of professional – albeit out of practice – obstetricians. Theo’s insistence that Julian should give birth in hospital not only displays his own desire that the group give itself up but also expresses the implicit view that a pregnant woman is irresponsible if she chooses not to give birth in the hospital environment. Theo comments, “You must think first of your baby. Suppose there are complications, a haemorrhage? … Speak to her, Miriam, you’re the professional. You know she ought to be in hospital” (179). This attitude endorses the view that, should Julian suffer complications while giving birth, any resulting injury to or death of the baby will be her fault.5 It also undermines the right of Julian to express her autonomy above any rights afforded to her unborn baby; although it is never made clear in the novel whether or not a pregnant woman’s legal rights would supercede those of the foetus during the unprecedented period of mass infertility, Theo’s attitude demonstrates how the perception of a broader social imperative to reproduce can challenge the autonomy of the pregnant woman whether or not there is any legal or medical basis for doing so. It is simply assumed that, as the only pregnant woman in the world, Julian should want what is ‘best’ for the baby, for her own body in its capacity as a fertile reproductive vessel, and for the future of mankind. Clearly, though, these three objectives create a conflict and it is the threat of technological invasion of her body and the baby’s – during the birth and afterwards, as Xan’s scientists would attempt to harness Julian’s reproductive capacity – that seems to loom largest over Julian’s decision to flee from the Warden’s control.

5

This is a sentiment that continues to be expressed frequently in sociomedical discourse related to pregnancy and birth; see the recent editorial in The Lancet entitled “Home birth – Proceed with caution,” which stated, “Women have the right to choose how and where to give birth, but they do not have the right to put their baby at risk ... Hospital delivery should be the preferred method of delivery for high-risk pregnancies, even though it is not without risks.” (303). The Lancet 376:9738. 31 July 2010.

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Surveillance of the pregnant body has implications for both the woman and the embryo. Theo voices his concern that Julian might not be carrying a healthy embryo when he points out to Rolf that “[t]here’s one thing you apparently haven’t considered. It [the power that Rolf can claim as the father of the baby] will depend on what she gives birth to, won’t it? The child will have to be normal and healthy. Suppose she’s carrying a monster?” (193) The implications of surveillance are therefore twofold: for the mother, it serves to enter her into a system of diagnoses and treatments, rendering pregnancy a condition that requires medical intervention; for the unborn foetus, it questions whether or not the pregnancy should be carried to term and the live baby delivered at all – the foetus is classified within a set of constructed parameters defining what is and is not “normal.” In the case of Julian’s baby, the question of whether or not it is “normal” is further bound up in its potential as a site of political power: if it is deemed unfit to kick-start a new, healthy, normal population then it becomes worthless in terms of political currency, regardless of how miraculous its conception appears to be. Ultimately, it is revealed that Luke is in fact the father of the baby, not Julian’s husband, Rolf. Luke’s fertility remained below the radar because he “was exempt from testing. He had mild epilepsy as a child. Like Julian, Luke was a reject” (217). Julian’s misshapen hand and Luke’s childhood epilepsy rendered them both unfit to breed the new population; neither had been thought suitable to undergo fertility testing as they would not have been selected to bear a child in any case. Because Julian has evaded the fertility testing programme, her pregnancy has not been identified and monitored in the usual way and Theo’s assumption is that the baby will develop abnormally; Julian’s refusal to submit to bodily surveillance means that her ability to produce a healthy baby is thrown into doubt. She has not entered into the system of scrutiny that is in place to determine whether or not a woman’s body is performing as it should, and her baby developing as it should. The belief implicit in Theo’s question is that a baby born to genetically “imperfect” parents is undesirable, not fit to pass on its own imperfect genes, and is therefore of less value to the stricken society: Rolf will not achieve the power he seeks if the baby turns out to be an unviable breeder. Does the fact that it will be the only baby in existence make it more desirable under the circumstances? Perhaps; such a conclusion is never reached in the novel. What is clear, though, is that Xan’s regime has put in place selective surveillance arising from the classification of subjects into desirable and undesirable breeders on the basis of eugenic principles; having been exempt from the system, Julian has no intention of willingly entering into it. Indeed, it is only through

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marginalisation as an imperfect human, and thus one unfit to breed, that Julian has avoided detection of her pregnancy and been able to so far remain outside of state surveillance.

Marginalisation and Vulnerability And for the first time Theo understood and accepted Julian’s desire to give birth in secret. This forest refuge, inadequate as it was, was surely better than the alternative. He pictured again that alternative, the high sterile bed, the banks of machines to meet every possible medical emergency, the distinguished obstetricians summoned from retirement, masked and gowned (The Children of Men 259).

As we have seen, Julian occupies a paradoxical state of being pregnant, an exceptional condition under the circumstances, yet classified as unfit to breed; this situates her pregnancy within political discourses drawing in issues concerning disability, heredity and eugenics. She has, up until the point of her pregnancy, remained outside of the disciplining systems of medical testing and surveillance, but now Julian’s physical imperfections are not the only reason for marginalisation. Feminist critics have argued that pregnancy itself marginalises the subject for several reasons, both in terms of its physical appearance, which is theorised as rupturing the boundaries of public and private, and because of the medical technology that allows us to see the growing foetus which thus becomes the subject of our attentions. Firstly, theorists have argued that pregnant women retreat into private spaces because of the physical and emotional changes that manifest during pregnancy – changes to a female body that, as theorised by critics such as Elizabeth Grosz, are already perceived as unreliable and uncontrollable. Grosz observes that “the female body has been constructed […] as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid” (203). Robyn Longhurst, building on both Grosz’s notion of women’s corporeality “inscribed as a mode of seepage” (203) and Julia Kristeva’s work on abjection,6 observed that pregnant women “increasingly withdrew from public space and public activities the more their pregnancy was in evidence and this withdrawal was, at least in part, tied to a notion of pregnant women’s bodies as dreadful, abject, and as posing a threat to a rational public order” (81). Theo despises his own “unsought and unwelcome” reaction at likening Julian’s squatting pregnant body to the appearance of a “defecating animal” (The Children of Men 225). The pregnant body, Longhurst notes, invokes 6

See Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An essay on abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

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feelings of fear and disgust exposing, as it does, the fragile border between self and other; the threat of the ‘seeping’ body transcending the borders of private and public, of self and other, reflects back onto the pregnant subject who may increasingly remove herself from public situations. Indeed, Julian is forced to withdraw from public spaces precisely because her body’s unpredictability is seen to pose a threat to her personal safety and the safety of those around her: Theo notes that “[i]f the labour was a false alarm or was protracted, they might yet fall into Xan’s hands before the baby was born” (245). Just as we can argue that Julian is marginalised because her pregnancy makes her publicly visible, the work of Rosalind Pollack Petchesky brings to our attention a converse cause of marginalisation for the pregnant woman: rather than her being visible, Petchesky argues that a cultural preoccupation with the foetus renders the pregnant woman invisible. She demonstrates through her analysis of in utero foetal images that the foetus is foregrounded “as primary and autonomous, the woman as absent or peripheral” (175). Though the pregnant body itself may be viewed as unstable or, indeed, as provoking disgust within the context of the rational public order, the foetus contained therein is of great interest to the observer to the extent that the woman herself becomes of secondary importance. Both Anne Balsamo and Iris Marion Young7 have commented on the power of the external or objective gaze to assign subjectivity to the unborn foetus, often to the exclusion of the pregnant woman who is “divested of ownership of her body, as if to reassert in some primitive way her functional service to the species – she ceases to be an individual […] and becomes a biological spectacle” (Balsamo, 80). For Julian, within the context of a society in which she is apparently the only pregnant woman, we see that her sense of personal safety is compromised by the knowledge that a population with a renewed desperation to reproduce will claim ownership over, and pay scant regard to the privacy or integrity of, her fertile body. It is this sense of looming danger, of threatened disorder bubbling under the apparent calm of an apathetic and docile population, that lends itself to the novel’s dystopian themes. The sense of suppressed disturbance is heightened by the self-regulating society in which behaviours considered to be in danger of destabilising the social order are eliminated; even relatively petty criminals are sent, without further recourse to justice, to the Man Penal Colony whilst the remaining citizens of England continue 7 See Iris Marion Young. “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation.” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 9.1 (February 1984). 45-62.

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to enjoy the illusory freedoms of a crime-free society. It is within the apparent stability of this compliant population that women who would have reached child-bearing age during the year Omega are observed by Theo to be “notoriously unstable” (41), as disturbing the social order and thus to be avoided. Their erratic behaviour, typified by the scene in which a porcelain doll being pushed in a pram by a “quasi-mother” is dashed against a wall by another woman (40), highlights the relationship between the socially constructed concept of “the pregnant woman” – irrational, emotional and unreliable – and the subsequent construction of pregnant women as requiring treatment. Theo comments, “It used, after all, to be a common delusion. In the first years after Omega women all over the world believed themselves to be pregnant, displayed the symptoms of pregnancy, walked proud-bellied […] had even gone into spurious labour, groaning and straining and bringing forth nothing but wind and anguish” (171). The construction of the pregnant woman as irrational and unstable – Clare Hanson describes the historical disease category of the “insanity of pregnancy” (60) that is particularly apt here – allows a host of negative behaviours to be projected onto the woman, creating a pregnant personality that is culturally constructed as being in need of protection from its own weakness. Hanson notes that the division between female midwives, who have traditionally advocated little intervention in pregnancy, and manmidwives and obstetricians, who tend to advocate intervention (10), brings with it further implications for the treatment of pregnant women that are based in the resultant “nature-culture opposition” (11). Hanson argues that “the construction of the pregnant woman as ‘natural’ serves to align her with the bodily and undermine her status as rational subject and social agent” (12). The pregnant woman is therefore established as either the object of privileged knowledge under the medical gaze, and thus requiring ongoing surveillance and treatment, or aligned with notions of nature (which, in this context, is contrasted with ‘culture’ to which man is assigned (11)) and thus incapable of making rational decisions. There is a further argument that pregnant women in medical literature have in the past been depicted as vulnerable and child-like, thus requiring protection and treatment (Oakley 1981). Parallels can be drawn between such a depiction of women in medical literature and the characterisation of Julian in The Children of Men, demonstrating how this construction of the pregnant woman as vulnerable sets up the expectation that she should willingly enter into a system of medical surveillance and intervention during pregnancy. Indeed, there are many examples of medical literature and case law that position women as selfish and taking unnecessary risks if they refuse medical treatment and surveillance during pregnancy, a theme

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that is fully explored in the novel through Julian’s refusal to hand herself over to the authorities. In The Harm Paradox (2007), Nicolette Priaulx articulates the expectation placed on pregnant women to behave in ways that are deemed acceptable for women in the “condition” of pregnancy: The pregnant woman’s body is no longer her own; it labours now for another – she is not one person ‘but two – mother and foetus – and society may expect, even demand, that her freedom is curtailed in the interests of the foetus’ (Morris and Nott: 54-5). Under an ideology whereby ‘the foetus is something to be protected from its mother’ (Diduck, ‘Legislating Ideologies of Motherhood’, 2 Social and Legal Studies, 461-485. 471), the rational and sane mother must willingly accept treatment by medical professionals; however, ‘no normal mother-to-be’ would persist with a course that would cause serious harm to her foetus (15).

Priaulx’s comments here, coupled with her references to the work of Alison Diduck, demonstrate the double-bind created for pregnant women. There is an assumption, articulated by the assertion above that the foetus must be “protected from its mother,” that the pregnant woman on her own cannot be trusted to behave in the manner that will best serve the interests of the foetus: she must be guided in this endeavour by medical professionals. At the same time, there is a nod here to the cultural construct of the “rational and sane mother” who would never wish harm on her unborn baby; this is the mother who must willingly submit to surveillance and, if necessary, medical intervention in her pregnancy for the health of the foetus. A useful analysis of the language associated with this paradoxical construction of the mother who is both dangerous to, and protective of, her unborn baby is Ann Oakley’s essay “Normal Motherhood: An Exercise in Self Control?” (1981). Oakley identifies themes in advice literature that describe “normal” motherhood including the observation that “normal mothers, or mothers to be, are people especially in need of medical care and protection; they are essentially childish, but at the same time fundamentally altruistic” (80, my emphasis). Oakley’s choice of language is interesting here, in that the tendency to be childish is set up as oppositional to the quality of altruism; “childish, but at the same time fundamentally altruistic” suggests that the two would not usually be expressed together, that a childlike temperament is perhaps inherently selfish rather than altruistic, yet an expectant mother is perceived to exist in both states simultaneously. An alternative interpretation is that a person requiring protection, therefore displaying the physical and emotional vulnerability of a child, would usually be incapable of making autonomous altruistic decisions. In either case, I would argue that it is the perception

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(or, as Oakley is demonstrating, the literary depiction) of expectant mothers as requiring medical care and protection that confers on them this childlike vulnerability, and it is the converse expectation that pregnant women are selflessly giving of their own corporeality for the furthering of the race that confers on them the quality of altruism. In Julian’s case, obstetric surveillance and intervention is literally bound up with control over her body, therefore to be perceived as childlike and vulnerable is to risk oppression on several levels regardless of whether or not she is actually vulnerable. Throughout much of The Children of Men, Theo describes Julian in terms that situate her fully within the category of a woman who is childlike, weak and unable to give birth to her baby without medical intervention. This perception of Julian is in contrast to Theo’s observations about her when they first met and, indeed, the way in which Julian is described after she has given birth. She seemed to him, at their initial meeting, a strong and intelligent woman having “dark and luscious” hair with “strong, straight brows” (45) and being an “articulate confident debater” (46). Theo is taken aback to find, upon meeting Julian subsequent to their first academic encounter, that she has an “almost adolescent gaucherie” (46); this observation begins to establish Julian as an emotionally or intellectually unreliable figure, one who eventually becomes “distressed, uncertain, plaintive as a worried child” (224). As an extension of her vulnerability, she is referred to as a child on several occasions: “Julian, wrapped in her cloak, stood calmly and silently, like a docile child taken on a picnic and waiting for some minor mishap to be remedied by the adults” (195). The assumption that Julian is putting her baby at risk by refusing to reveal her pregnancy to the authorities requires that she must show she is capable of giving birth – she is assumed to be incapable of safely delivering her baby until she proves otherwise – and establishes her pregnant body as one not to be trusted, as likely to fail to perform. Julian is positioned as vulnerable and, by extension, unreliable: she believes that she will be able to give birth but parturition is, so far, an untested function of her own body. Within the context of a community in which everybody has failed to reproduce, and in which women have been established as increasingly emotionally unstable, Theo’s narrative viewpoint is constructed as one from which this is – arguably – a reasonable conclusion to reach. As a result, it is left to Julian to refute and resist the assumption that she will deliver herself into the hands of clinicians and, by extension, the control of Xan.

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Power and Ownership Once he gets possession of the child his power will be immensely increased, not just in Britain, all over the world (The Children of Men 192).

I have so far argued that the Warden’s political control is revealed to be invested in a dormant arsenal of medical and scientific equipment, and that the construction of Julian as unstable, vulnerable and in need of medical treatment means that she is expected to submit to medical surveillance in order to ensure the safe delivery of her baby for the benefit of the wider population. Through the insistence of Theo that she seek “professional” help, and through Julian’s refusal to submit to this surveillance and intervention, the threat of political control exercised over the body becomes apparent. Now the question of ownership is brought to the fore: to whom does Julian’s body, and the baby, belong? Furthermore, can – and should – Julian protect either herself or her child from the lifetime of testing and experimentation that she anticipates? Corporeal “ownership” is itself a contentious issue; Western philosophy situates the debate firmly within the context of the Cartesian mind/body duality whereby the mind is understood to rationally control the potential and actual functions of the corpus. This separation of mind and body poses numerous problems for the pregnant woman, not least because it sets up the framework in which the fleshly body can be viewed as merely a container or vessel in which to carry a foetus. It also establishes the body as a thing to be controlled, and the question of who should control the pregnant body becomes one to be objectively determined. Theo exclaims, “This birth is the concern of the whole world, not just England. The child belongs to mankind,” to which Luke responds, “The child belongs to God” (179). Thus Julian’s pregnant body, and the baby it contains, are bound up in discourses of ownership that draw upon a web of power relations incorporating the conflicting facets of government, religion and the autonomy of the individual. The notion of corporeal ownership, in this context, becomes central to the social and political implications of Julian’s pregnancy. Recalling the period in which the occurrence of mass infertility was first discovered, Theo comments that “[i]n the late 1990s the bureaucracy of espionage flourished as it hadn’t since the end of the Cold War … in particular we watched Japan, half fearing that this technically brilliant people might already be on the way to finding an answer” (7). The quest to find a cure for global infertility was not a unified effort; rather, as Theo recalls it, the explosion in covert scientific research was akin to that seen during the US–Soviet space race as nations “watched each other suspiciously,

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obsessively, feeding on rumour and speculation” (7). Indeed, he concedes that “Man is too addicted to this intoxicating mixture of adolescent buccaneering and adult perfidy to relinquish [spying] entirely” (7). This language equates fertility with something to be won, to be conquered, and to demonstrate the dominance of one nation over another in its technological capability. In particular, it equates the search for a cure with boys’ games – spying and buccaneering – and, subsequently, with a male-dominated technological age. Here, again, we can see the insidious nature of power being dispersed through diverse systems of observation and control that transcend notions of public and private. The birth of a child was never, under these conditions, going to be a private act: a child born of a scientific victory would be parented vicariously by every researcher and politician who had a hand in its creation. Although Julian is carrying a child that was conceived without medical intervention, the threat of appropriation of both her body and her baby is ever-present. That nature has triumphed where technology was impotent does not make the ownership of Julian and her baby any less desirable for Xan; indeed, it will allow him to claim full control over a body that does not also “belong” to a team of research scientists. After he shoots and kills Xan in the name of protecting Julian, it is Theo who ultimately appropriates the baby by exercising the power afforded to him by his relationship to Xan and to Julian as her companion. Despite the fact that Theo is not the biological father of the child, his behaviour can be examined using the model of ownership discussed by Gena Corea in The Mother Machine (1985). Corea compares a woman’s physical experience of maternity, through the changes to her body and the resultant labour and birth, with an “abstract idea” of paternity that results from the nine month gap between the moment of conception and the birth of the baby that a man must claim as his own. Corea asserts that “[m]an’s sperm is alienated (that is, separated) from him in the sex act and this alienation negates him as a parent” (287). According to Corea, this nullity is unbearable and thus “to neutralize his separation from his seed and from genetic continuity, man had to … appropriate the child. Defying the uncertainty of paternity, he works in cooperation with other men to assert a proprietorial right to a child … His assertion of a right to the child must be supported by ideologies of male supremacy and by a host of social structures” (288). Detached from the baby in a biological sense, Theo uses these social structures to claim it as his own: The primitive act, at which he was both participant and spectator, isolated them in a limbo of time in which nothing mattered, nothing was real except the mother and her child’s dark painful journey from the secret life of the

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Theo’s desire to be the father of the child here emerges out of a sense of detached awe for the intense labouring of the birth. What unfolds is an illustration of Corea’s argument that man’s parental nullity through detachment from the conception–gestation–parturition process results in a desire to appropriate the child through proprietary means. In this instance, Theo is literally removed from the process because he could not possibly be the father of the baby; the baby’s biological father is dead, as is its assumed father by marriage. Yet Theo appropriates the child on two levels: through familial ties, by assuming some kind of relationship with Julian – although this is not an overtly sexual relationship at this point, there is reference to love; and on a political level, Theo assumes the power of Warden of England, a role he had never before coveted. He thereby positions himself as the guardian of the child on both a private and a public level, donning the Coronation ring – “the wedding ring of England” (272) – as “a gesture to assert authority and assure protection” (277). The ring can also be seen symbolically as an assertion of spousal rights over Julian – as Warden, Theo does not need to marry Julian in order to assume control over her. There is a strong suggestion that, despite his apparent good intentions and sympathetic feelings towards Julian, Theo is himself becoming ‘intoxicated’ by the power of the ring; he admits that “it begins again, with jealousy, with treachery, with violence, with murder, with this ring on my finger” (277). By the time Xan and Theo are face-to-face, fighting to determine who will take ownership of the baby, Xan can be said to represent a physical manifestation of the ruling apparatus and its ideologies. Theo, then, literally engages in a battle against the state yet the death of Xan leaves a gap in the system; one that simply needs another man to step into the role. The cross placed by Theo on the baby’s forehead is a religious performance in which Theo has not previously indulged, being interested historically but distanced emotionally from what he calls the “true” religions, which are now largely defunct. The ritual therefore tells us something about his assumption of power: he is assuming a role, a position of religious/moral power rooted in and stemming from his new political position, rather than because of any personal religious beliefs. The parallel and contrast with Luke, the child’s biological father, become apparent: Luke was a religious man whose political power lay only in his reproductive capacity but which was never exercised; Theo’s paternity is reclaimed through the appropriation of a Christian theology which is afforded to him, in turn, by the

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appropriation of political power. The idea that Theo may be seduced by power is indeed established earlier in the text, when he expresses feelings of enjoyment at stealing the elderly couple’s car: “…I enjoyed the excitement, the power, the knowledge that I could do it. It wasn’t all horrible. It was for them, but not for me” (251). The final paragraph of the novel, which sees Theo christen the baby in his own name and that of its dead biological father, thus sees him assume a trio of rights over the baby: paternal, religious and political.

Conclusion Ultimately, then, the bleak dystopian future envisaged for England is not one of a slowly dying population, but one of a generation trapped under the spotlight of medical research in which the hopes of the population are invested. The programme of fertility testing is not voluntary; with a renewed motivation to seek out fertile individuals, the body is appropriated by technology. Furthermore, the individual becomes bound up in an inescapable web of power relations, culturally constructed assumptions about pregnancy and systems of control and surveillance that are made effective by these collective assumptions; who would, under these circumstances, refuse to comply? Xan says, “If it’s a boy and he’s fertile, he’ll be the father of the new race […] our female Omegas will only be thirty-eight. We can breed from them, from other selected women. We may be able to breed again from the woman herself” (273). I contend that it is this notion of a collective will that is exerted on the individual to behave in a particular way – that the body will be willingly submitted to whatever regime is thought necessary to rebuild the population – that constitutes a feminist reproductive dystopia in The Children of Men. Julian’s attempt to escape from this source of power over her body is a conscious choice that brings with it risk and danger, even death, and the consequences are both the result of her own decision and, paradoxically, beyond her control. Her autonomy is tempered by a host of conflicting expectations about how a pregnant woman should behave, and the external interventions to which she should be exposed: “[W]hat other option had she but to trust? She could no more control her life than she could control or stop the physical forces which even now were stretching and racking her body” (260). The narrative’s clear engagement with contemporary concerns about increasingly invasive – and routine – forms of surveillance and treatment of the pregnant woman allows us to read the novel as a speculative dystopia that is uncomfortably recognisable.

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Works Cited Baccolini, Raffaella and Tom Moylan. “Dystopia and Histories” in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination. Eds. Baccolini, R. and Moylan, T. New York: Routledge, 2003. 1-12. Print. Balsamo, Anne. “Public Pregnancies and Cultural Narratives of Surveillance.” Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. London: Duke University Press, 1996. 80-115. Print. Barker, K.K. “A Ship Upon a Stormy Sea: The Medicalization of Pregnancy.” Social Science & Medicine 47:8 (1982). 1067-1076. Print. Barr, M.S. “Blurred Generic Conventions: Pregnancy and Power in Feminist Science Fiction.” Reproductive and Genetic Engineering 1:2 (1988). 167–174. Cahill, Heather. “Male Appropriation and Medicalization of Childbirth: An Historical Analysis.” Journal of Advanced Nursing 33:3 (2001). 334-342. Corea, Gena. The Mother Machine. London: The Women’s Press, 1988. Print. Donawerth, J. “Genre Blending and the Critical Dystopia.” Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, eds. Baccolini, R. and Moylan, T. (2003), New York: Routledge. 29-46. Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. London: The Women’s Press, 1970. Print. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock Publications, 1973. Print. —. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Print. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994. Print. Hanson, Clare. A Cultural History of Pregnancy: Pregnancy, Medicine and Culture, 1750-2000. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Print. James, P.D. “P.D. James – The Art of Fiction No.141.” By Shusha Guppy. Paris Review 135 (Summer 1995).52-75. Print. —. The Children of Men. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. Print. Longhurst, Robyn. “Breaking Corporeal Boundaries: Pregnant Bodies in Public Spaces.” Contested Bodies. Eds. R Holliday and J Hassard. London: Routledge, 2001. 81-94. Print. Oakley, Ann. “Normal Motherhood: An Exercise in Self Control?” Controlling Women: The Normal and the Deviant. Eds. Bridget Hutter and Gillian Williams. London: Croom Helm, 1981. Print.

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Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack. “Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction.” Feminist Studies 13.2 (Summer 1987). 263-292. Print. Priaulx, Nicolette. The Harm Paradox: Tort Law and the Unwanted Child in an Era of Choice. Oxon: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007. Print. Ressler, O. “Marge Piercy Utopian Feminist Visions.” Transcription of a video recorded on Cape Cod, U.S.A., 24 mins, for the installation Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies (2003). Stratton, Susan. “A Necessary Alliance: Women and the Environment in Recent Utopian Fiction.” Feminist Utopias: Re-Visioning our Futures. Eds. Eichler, Margrit, June Larkin and Sheila Neysmith. Ontario: Inanna Publications, 2002. 27-36. Print.

INCLUSION AND EXCLUSION IN SOME FEMINIST UTOPIAN FICTIONS KAREN F. STEIN

“By definition, utopia hinges on [contradiction and] paradox: it is a vision of a better world, but one that does not exist” (Stein, “Utopianism” 409).1 Utopian fictions (like their counterparts in society, intentional communities) seek to create places of harmony and well-being. Peter Ruppert asserts Utopias set out to challenge existing social values, to undermine existing norms, to transform existing social beliefs. They engage us in a dialogue between social fact and utopian dream. What initiates this dialogue is the recognition of contradictions and disparities: the non-coincidence between social reality and utopian possibility, the incongruity between “what is” and “what might be” or “what ought to be,” the discrepancy between history and utopia (5).

According to Robert C. Elliott “Utopia necessarily wears a Janus-face. The portrayal of an ideal commonwealth has a double function: it establishes a standard, a goal; and by virtue of its existence alone it casts a critical light on society as presently constituted” (22). Both the idea of utopia and the fictions that portray it are replete with paradoxes. Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), the text that coined the term for this fictional genre, builds upon the contradictions inherent in its very name which may mean both eutopia (the good place) and outopia (no place). And, of course, one person’s good place may be another’s dystopia (bad place). Gary Saul Morson writes that utopias set up oppositions of “fact and fiction, wakefulness and dream, sane and insane, history and poetry, practical and visionary” (quoted in Lewes 74). To these 1 Darko Suvin offers a definition: utopia is the verbal construction of particular quasi-– human community where sociopolitical institutions, norms, and individual relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle than in the author’s community, this construction being based on estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis (132).

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oppositions, Darby Lewes notes that women’s utopias add the contrast between public and private (Lewes 74). Elliott points out that the literary genre of utopia is closely related to satire: Satire and utopia are not really separable, the one a critique of the real world in the name of something better, the other a hopeful construction of the world that might be. The hope feeds the criticism, the criticism the hope. Writers of utopia have always known this: the one unanswerable argument for the utopian vision is a hard satirical look at the way things are today (24).

Elliott explains that the idea of utopia grew out of the Saturnalia, ancient Roman festivals that symbolized a return to the mythic Golden Age “the time when all men were equal and the good things of life were held in common” (10). These festivals overturned the usual order for “the theme of the Saturnalia is reversal – reversal of values, social roles, of social norms” (11). Thus, from its beginnings, the utopia enacts paradoxes and reversals of the status quo and of the expected standards of behavior. Lincoln Allison defines what he terms “the utopian paradox”: “if you want to effect a radical improvement in institutions you cannot do so without first improving people, but nor can you improve people without first transforming institutions. An important rider adds that therefore it is often the case that attempting improvement will make things worse.” Another paradox of utopia is that it is typically also a “uchronia,” a place outside of time. It may resist history, or, in fact, any form of change. In Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1998) the founding fathers of the all-black town of Ruby seek to build a safe community where women are usefully occupied in home-making and protected from attack. Yet over time the community stagnates. New ideas are discouraged, the comfortable and secure homes become entrapping, and many of the women and the young people grow restless and disaffected. Patricia Best, the community’s selfappointed chronicler, discovers that the lighter-skinned residents face a subtle discrimination, and their story is expunged from the annual pageant celebrating Ruby’s founding. The nearby Convent where a group of abused and homeless women finds comradeship and healing together becomes an enticing lure for many of Ruby’s citizens who come to buy the hot peppers grown in its garden, and to find companionship, herbal cures, or illicit sexual encounters. To the leading men of the town the Convent’s free-wheeling women represent a threat of change and disorder. Soon a group of men from Ruby attack it; however, the Convent women appear to find their own (supernatural) forms of paradise at the book’s conclusion.

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Morrison’s novel points to another aspect of utopias, the importance of place and of boundaries. Ruppert notes .

ever since More described his island Utopia, boundaries, walls, trenches, moats, and a variety of other spatial and temporal barriers have been indispensable features on subsequent maps of utopia. The function of these barriers is, of course, to protect what is inside from outside influence and contamination (27).

Thus, outsiders cannot enter, but the insiders are insular and isolated. These boundaries like almost everything else about utopia, [are] twofold: seen from the inside, they function to keep disorder and chaos out; seen from the outside, they function to keep docile and unknowing inhabitants within and can be read as an unambiguous sign of utopia’s desire to escape the uncertainties and contingencies of time and history (Ruppert 27).

Morrison explains that she wrote Paradise to explore “why Paradise necessitates exclusion” (Reames 21). She continues: “the isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia. . . . But, in addition to that, it’s based on the notion of exclusivity. All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in” (Reames 21). This exclusion/ inclusion is another of the many paradoxes of utopia. Who gets to stay in utopia and who is left out or exiled? The list of the excluded is long. In the first utopia, the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve are exiled for disobedience to a rule the importance of which they probably don’t fully understand. Plato’s Republic banishes poets from his ideal society, because they threaten the hegemony of the rulers. Poetry “encourages habits of thought and feeling contrary to those the Republic deems desirable,” and thus subverts the order of the Republic (Philmus 64). The parable-like short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. LeGuin illustrates the exclusionary nature of utopia. The narrative postulates a seemingly perfect society that is predicated on the exclusion of one unfortunate scapegoat, a child who must suffer severe deprivation and maltreatment in order for the utopia to thrive. The residents are aware of the child’s misery, and, in response to its degradation, some of them leave. A recent novel, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) carries exclusion to an extreme. The trickster-scientist Crake proposes to create a worldwide utopia whose inhabitants are an improvement over the present world’s imperfect people. To that end he recombines genes to engineer a

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race of humanoids who lack many of the traits and emotions he perceives as dangerous flaws of humanity such as jealousy, greed, possessiveness, and symbol-making. He explains that these negative traits of the “primate brain” are rendering earth uninhabitable because they lead to wars, overpopulation, and overuse of natural resources. He hopes that because his “Paradice models” lack these problematic features they will be content to live in unchanging harmony with the earth and its creatures (and each other). However, in order to eliminate the “primate brain,” Crake produces and disseminates a lethal hemorrhagic virus that obliterates almost all people. Thus, his intended global utopia has no room for humans on planet earth. A somewhat less drastic exclusion is the removal of men from samesex utopias by women writers. Dana R. Shugar lists twenty-five such fictions written in English between 1881 and 1988, thirteen of them written or re-issued during a time of feminist activism, from 1975 to 1980. An outlier, Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall, was written in 1762 and reissued in 1986. (Shugar 210). This paper will examine exclusion and inclusion in five feminist utopian fictions popular in the U.S. in the late 1970s and 1980s: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (published serially in the journal The Forerunner in 1915 and first printed in book form in 1979), Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women (1979), Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Suzy McKee Charnas’s Motherlines (1978), and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). These books appeared (or, in Gilman’s case reappeared) and gained a wide readership in tandem with the second wave of feminism, a time of social critique and political activism. Utopian fictions frequently arise at such moments in response to what is perceived as their opposites, dystopian political conditions. Therefore, I shall read these novels in conjunction with the then-current feminist critiques of American society. Issues that are particularly salient in these works include relationships among women, family, motherhood, reproduction and childcare, and (implicitly or explicitly) the problems with male-female relationships. For North American feminists during both the first wave of the women’s rights movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the second wave of activism from the mid-1960s through the 1990s, the dystopian political conditions against which they wrote were the patriarchal organization of society and women’s second–class status. As Thomas Moylan explains the critical utopian text can be a valuable part of the opposition to the prevailing system: the text is not important for its practical blueprints of actual alternative society, but rather as it provides pre-conceptual images

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Inclusion and Exclusion in Some Feminist Utopian Fictions that are generated out of opposition to what is. The unresolved problems in the text, the tensions and absences in the text, become an important part of the oppositional ideology (Moylan 163).

Of course, the absence of men in these fictions is part of that feminist oppositional ideology, the critique of a patriarchal system that distorted heterosexual relationships and oppressed both women and men. Because men are absent, child-bearing and child-rearing must assume new forms as authors invent new social structures that will replace the patriarchal nuclear family and new forms of behavior that will allow women to develop to their full potential.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) Gilman lived during a time of “great intellectual speculation and creativity in American thought” (Lane 10). She edited a journal, The Forerunner, wrote and lectured prolifically on the economic and political status of women during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the period (then called the woman’s rights movement) now known as the first wave of the feminist movement, when women were seeking the rights to own property, to vote, and to be their own persons rather than the property of their husbands. Gilman wrote three utopian/dystopian narratives which exemplify in fiction the feminist (or, as she termed it, humanist) / socialist theories expressed in her non-fictional works, chiefly Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution and The Home: Its Work and Influence. The subtitle of Women and Economics points to Gilman’s argument that women’s economic dependence on men exaggerates the differences between the sexes, causing women to become more conventionally “feminine” and men to stress their “masculine” traits. The Home describes many of the issues that Adrienne Rich will later take up in her discussion of motherhood. According to Gilman, because women take on a variety of household jobs (cooking, sewing, cleaning, nursing, childcare, and so forth) without special training, they are exhausted, and their energies are fragmented. In the privacy of their homes women carry out alone functions that are better done on a larger scale by trained specialists. To solve this problem she advocates housing built with private small apartments, communal kitchens and dining rooms, and childcare centers. In these places specialists who are gifted in certain skills and trained for their professional roles will perform more efficiently many of the duties now undertaken by the overburdened housewives. Summarizing the tenets put

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forward in The Home, Ann J. Lane terms it a “witty and wicked book” (264). Each of Gilman’s fictional utopias / dystopias consists largely of dialog between a visitor and a resident of utopia. Each has a male narrator for dramatic and satirical reasons [and to] . . . expose contemporary myths and errors as her narrators express the values and views of patriarchy and are proven wrong by their utopian experiences and acquaintances. . . .The male narrators’ mistaken notions are popped like so many balloons by the superior wisdom of utopia (Doskow 27).

Gilman’s first utopian narrative, Moving the Mountain (1911), describes a socialist utopia of both women and men that developed over a thirty-year period almost without a struggle when “women woke up” to the issues and to their own power to initiate social change. Once awake, they set in place in the U.S. the institutions that re-shape civil society and become models for other countries to follow. Like many utopian fictions, the novel is thinly plotted. The narrative unfolds as John Robertson recounts conversations with his family about the changes that have transformed the country during the thirty years while he was lost in Tibet. His sister, Nellie Robertson, a college president, is married but (unusual in that time period) keeps her birth name. In line with Gilman’s thesis in Women and Economics that economic dependence leads women to overemphasize their femininity, John, the unreconstructed traditional man, expects more typically feminine behavior from his sister. He is surprised to observe that Nellie’s independence allows her to be “brisk, firm assured . . . somehow like – almost a man. . . . Not mannish; but she takes things so easily—as if she owned them” (42). John’s skepticism about the social transformations provides the book’s slight dramatic tension as he hears about the new arrangements for childcare and the solutions to poverty and crime. When he learns that women convinced men to give up such traditionally masculine practices as smoking, heavy drinking, and hunting he asks Nellie if “you women are trying to make men over to suit yourselves?” (93). She replies “Yes. Why not? Didn’t you make women to suit yourselves for several thousand years?” (93). John insists that there must be some men who resist these changes. And, yes, there have been. These are the people who are excluded from the new society. Nellie explains “we dealt very thoroughly with them. . . . Hopeless degenerates were promptly and mercifully removed. . . . Perverts were incapacitated for parentage and placed where they could do no harm. . . . Many proved curable, and were cured” (98). These few euphemistic sentences are all Nellie reveals about the fate of these undesirables. How did the utopia deal with the

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“degenerates” and “perverts?” We later learn from another informant: “We killed many hopeless degenerates, insane, idiots and real perverts, after trying our best powers of cure” (136). This, of course, raises a serious ethical issue we will encounter repeatedly in utopias: who is excluded and why? What happens to those who do not conform to the standards and behavioral expectations of the utopian society? How do women living in a single-sex society get rid of the men? Violence and war are surprisingly frequent in the utopias discussed here, although they are usually the background context and not central to the plot.2 Gilman removed men entirely from her second utopia, Herland, the most novel-like of the three narratives. Perhaps she realized that this would allow her to show new possibilities for women in a way that she could not in Moving the Mountain where Nellie Robertson, the college president, is never shown at work, but appears only as one of her brother’s informants. Nevertheless, the story of Herland unfolds through the perspective of a male visitor (in contrast to the four novels by the other writers whose focalizing characters are women). Thus, the story becomes one of contrasting gendered expectations as the men from the U.S. engage with the women of a secluded single-sex utopia. Three male explorersthe narrator Vandyck (Van) and his friends Jeff and Terryset the plot in motion by arriving at the isolated country now occupied entirely by women. Marveling at the beautifully appointed countryside, the well-maintained forests, and the conveniently laid out towns, the explorers are certain that there must be men to accomplish such results, but they are wrong. Here again, the independent women confound the three explorers’ expectations of “femininity.” The Herlanders have short hair, and are dressed 2 Single sex utopias frequently explain their origins as reactions to male violence, either against women or among themselves. In Houston, Houston, Do You Read by James Tiptree, Jr. (a pseudonym of Alice Sheldon) the women of the future reluctantly kill the three remaining twentieth-century men, because "we simply have no facilities for people with your emotional problems," i.e. masculine traits such as violence and sexual aggressiveness (147). Their assumption appears to be that these negative traits are genetically inherent, not amenable to change through education or socialization in the future women-based society. Sometimes, as in The Female Man, there are actually battles between the sexes. However, the violence is usually external to the main action, and, as Joanna Russ explains, its "emotional consequences" are explored, and it is never "presented as adventure or sport" as is frequently the case in science fiction or crime fiction (Russ Recent 76).

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comfortably in simple clothing that permits them to move freely, in sharp contrast to the crinolined, corseted American and British women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact, the first women our explorers meet are foresters, climbing trees, and evading capture by the intruders. The women of Herland react to the explorers differently than the men are used to: “They don’t seem to notice our being men . . . . They treat us . . . just as they do one another. It’s as if our being men was a minor incident” (174). When the men give the women jewelry the recipients place the trinkets in museums. The Herlanders are quite interested in motherhood, and in the possibilities of adding new genetic material to their society, but they appear to have no interest in personal experiences of sexuality, either among themselves or with the men. By virtue of their superb educational system the women here are athletic, self-confident, intelligent, even-tempered, wise, and independent. They greatly value sisterhood and public service. After subduing the male intruders the women keep them under guard while they educate them about Herland and learn from the men about the world beyond Herland, which they imagine must be even more wonderful due to the presence of two sexes. This allows Gilman much opportunity for satire, as the men reveal the real situation in their country, the U.S. According to the history of Herland, the men met a violent end 2000 years before the novel begins. It appears that the men themselves incited the violence. Most of the men were away fighting in a war when a volcanic eruption caused a landslide that sealed off access to their hilltop country. As for those men who had remained at home, slaves “rose in revolt, killed their remaining masters even to the youngest boy . . . intending to take possession of the country with the remaining young women and girls” (194). To save themselves the young women “slew their brutal conquerors” (194). None of the boys born to pregnant women after this tragedy survived. The loss of men seemed to doom them to extinction. In order to assure the continuation of their societies, separatist utopias must imagine unique methods of single-sex reproduction. Eventually one of the Herland women miraculously gave birth parthenogenetically to five girls in succession and all the women of Herland are her direct descendants. As the explorers discuss parthenogenesis their instructors ask them to explain what “virgin” means, as in “virgin birth.” Zava asks if the term applies also to the male who has not mated (187). (Other words the Herlanders do not understand include competition and poverty.) Reproduction is triggered by a young woman’s mystically intense longing to bear a child. But they have wisely

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decided to limit population growth so as not to exhaust their country’s resources. Thus women are restricted to one child each, except that certain particularly excellent mothers are permitted a second child. Motherhood is a prominent value, spoken of with reverence and awe by the Herlanders. The children are nurtured and cared for by those who are specially skilled and trained to do so. But Gilman does not show us any of the young children or their living and schooling arrangements so it remains unclear whether they live with other children in dormitories, with their mothers in apartments, or in some other type of dwelling. Similarly we see little to demonstrate how the superb education actually occurs. It must be difficult to tell the genetically identical women apart from each other, especially since they are all so healthy, athletic, and selfconfident. Yet, despite their genetic likeness the explorers find more variation than seems possible. The Herlanders attribute this variation partly to “careful education, which followed each slight tendency to differ, and partly to the law of mutation” (212). As in Gilman’s treatise Home, women specialize in what they are best fitted and trained for. We meet foresters and teachers, but never see the other workers, the cooks, engineers, gardeners, automobile technicians, plant and animal breeders, carpenters, dress-makers, weavers, and so on. When Terry argues that women can’t work together without quarreling, Jeff “dragged in the hymenoptera,” using the analogy to prove that, like ants and bees, women are “natural co-operators” (204). Critic Graham J. Murphy also drags in the hymenoptera, arguing that Herland and other single-sex societies are like hives or anthills. He argues that the men who visit are made to serve as drones for purposes of reproduction. One person’s utopia is another’s dystopia. Of the three explorers Van and Jeff are the most receptive and accepting of Herland and its women. Although Van leaves at the end of this novel, he returns with his Herland wife, Ellador, at the end of the sequel, With Her in Ourland. Jeff is sentimental and romantic, and he also marries a Herlander whom he “worships” (250). Terry, on the other hand, is more macho and expects more subservience from women. His relationship with Alima, his wife, is stormier. Terry chafes at the restrictions on cohabitation placed on them, and attempts to rape Alima. In consequence he is exiled. Always wise and rational, the women of Herland are unwilling to admit men without further investigation of the social organizations men have produced in the world outside of their isolated single-sex homeland. Van leaves with his wife Ellador to escort the exiled Terry home, and to travel through “Manland” to show Ellador the world beyond the boundaries of her utopian enclave.

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Gilman called herself a humanist rather than a feminist. Her aim in Herland was to depict a society where women could flourish and attain their potential as fully developed humans rather than as limited beings constrained by their dependence on men and their relegation to the burdensome obligations of the private home. This desire to explore the possible range of women’s potential as humans remains a driving impulse beyond single-sex utopias. But what are Gilman’s views of men and masculinity? Although Terry represents one type of traditional, macho male, Gilman contrasts him with two gentler, more respectful men. Van explains that Terry appears normal as “a man among men,” but looks quite different as “a man among women” in Herland. Gilman’s theories explain that patriarchal social arrangements have trained Terry (like all men in patriarchal societies) to over- accentuate his masculine traits. Although in the sequel, With Her in Ourland, Ellador lays out a devastating critique of patriarchal institutions, she does not paint men in general as hostile or brutal, only as misguided, ignorant, even stupid. She hopes that the women of Herland will be able to teach them and thereby transform the world beyond their utopia. This portrayal of men contrasts with the men depicted in the other single-sex utopian fictions under consideration here. With Her in Ourland reverses the “visitor to utopia” genre by having the utopian Ellador from Herland visit “Ourland.” In a kind of Socratic dialog Ellador very rationally, kindly, and with flashes of humor demonstrates the deficiencies of the patriarchal world. She analyzes religion, economics, immigration, the values and practice of democracy, and families. She explains how the patriarchal family is not “a pattern of all that is good and lovely [but instead a] . . . primitive social group, interfering with the development of later groups” (330). Noting that people wish to “preserve the sanctity of marriage” she asks “have they tried benzoate?” (341). She declares that there is “much mischief [because of] . . . too much father. . . . The dominance of him! . . . The egoism of him!” (334). She tells Van that “human misery is a jokebecause you don’t have to have it!” (330). When it comes to her analysis of economics, she points to the “bloodsuckers! . . . oil-suckers and coal-suckers . . . this splendid young country is crawling with them” (335-36). And the women, compelled to be “home-bound” and dependent on men, are forced to become “mensuckers” (336). She concludes “I would die childless rather than to bear a child in this world of yours” (381). So they return to Herland, where in time “a son was born to us” (387). What could his life as a lone male child in a country of women be like? Unfortunately Gilman did not write a sequel to answer this question.

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Many of the issues Gilman addresses in her fiction and non-fiction remain problematic today. In the decade of second-wave feminism considered here scholars develop theories to analyze similar issues, activists carry out political campaigns to address them, and novelists formulate critiques in dystopias and single-sex utopias.

Second-wave Feminism Second-wave feminism arose in conjunction with the Civil Rights Movement as women perceived themselves to be locked into subservient domestic roles and excluded from career opportunities and from policymaking positions. As depicted powerfully in the film The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter the women who had previously been recruited to work in defense industries during World War II were now urged to remain at home to raise children and nurture their families. The tensions of the ensuing Cold War period spawned a mood of conservatism. It was a time when women faced limited life choices, and a version of “the cult of true womanhood” that extolled the value of domesticity held sway (see Cott and Welter). “The Good Wife’s Guide” purportedly an article in a magazine called Housekeeping Monthly from 13 May 1955which circulated widely on the internet sums up exaggeratedly the expectations for wifely behavior. The article advises the woman who aspires to be a good wife to cook, clean, manage the children and the household, “never complain,” and “remember he is the master of the house.” While the article is almost certainly written much later as a parody, it does indicate the prevailing domestic ideology and the separate roles for women and men. Similar publications such as Helen Andelin’s Fascinating Womanhood (1963) exhorted women to remain at home and yield to their husbands--for of course the men’s jobs were more important than women’s housekeeping (Snopes.com). Women’s primary role was intended to be the home-maker, the nurturer, and the provider of childcare. In response to the constraints women experienced, Betty Friedan conducted interviews with many women suffering from what she termed “the problem that has no name,” and analyzed a growing malaise among them in her book The Feminine Mystique (1963). The book pointed out women’s dissatisfaction with their limited roles and inferior social and economic status. For the feminists of the second wave, equality, workplace parity, sexuality, and reproductive rights are key foci. Motherhood and its discontents are also important aspects of the second wave feminist agenda. Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1977) speaks of the problems

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women face when they are the only parent responsible for the care of the home and the children. Dorothy Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (1976) argues from psychoanalytic theories of child development that misogyny, aggressiveness, and other human failings arise from the fact that only women are the primary caretakers of young children. She urges men to become more nurturing and to participate in rearing their children. More radically, Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex (1971) points to child-bearing and childcare as the source of women’s second-class status, and urges the separation of sexuality and reproduction. Firestone wrote: Just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself . . . so the end goal of feminist revolution must be . . . not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally (Firestone quoted in Fox).

At this time women’s organizations such as NOW (National Organization of Women) began to advocate for affordable and reliable day care for children so that women could work outside the home. To redress the gendered imbalances and to alleviate the constraints under which women suffered, utopian fictions of this time often dismantle the nuclear patriarchal family and imagine worlds without men.

Suzy McKee Charnas, Walk to the End of the World (1974) and Motherlines (1978) Motherlines depicts a group of nomadic Plains women who live in a harsh environment. They disrupt the stereotypes of femininity as they tame and ride horses, form allies and enemies, raid each other’s camps to steal horses, love and hate each other, fight, fuss, and feud. Charnas’s previous book, Walk to the End of the World introduces the Holdfast society from which the women have escaped. The Holdfast is strictly hierarchical: older men dominate the younger; food and other resources are scarce. Holdfast men are brutal and macho. They enslave women to perform the difficult labor of the society and to breed children. The children are kept in “kit pits” where only the toughest survive until they are old enough to be trained by men for their lives of hard work and subservience. Charnas introduced a woman, Alldera, into the novel when she thought: “there has got to be a woman in here someplace or things are going to look awfully lopsided” (Charnas “A Woman Appeared” 103).

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While she wrote more of the novel Charnas began to read feminist theoristsespecially Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1971), and Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970)and to participate in consciousness-raising groups. As Charnas tuned in to feminist ideas she reshaped her novel. Alldera’s story began to emerge and the plot changed. “The book ended up being about sexism carried to a logical extreme, and it suggests . . . the inherent destructiveness of any society in which one portion of the population enslaves and dehumanizes another” (“A Woman Appeared” 104). Charnas explains that excluding males from her next book gave her room to create women characters with the full range of human behaviors, rather than the restricted roles assigned to women in patriarchal societies: With the spectrum of human behavior in my story no longer split into male roles (everything active, intelligent, brave and muscular) and female roles (everything passive, intuitive, shrinking and soft), my emerging women had natural access to the entire range of human behavior. They acted new roles appropriate to social relationships among a society of equals, which allowed them to behave simply as human beings tenderly, aggressively, nurturingly, intellectually, intuitively, whatever suited a given individual in a given situation (A Woman Appeared 106 – 107).

Alldera survives her life as a slave in the patriarchal Holdfast society and escapes to find two groups of women, the free fems and the Riding Women, who have likewise escaped. The fems worry that they will not be able to have offspring and try to make themselves fertile through herbal douches. The Riding Women have been genetically engineered by male experimenters so that they can have children through the addition of a special fluid. Now that they have left the world of men, they obtain the required fluid by matingusually successfullywith the male horses they raise (much to the horror of the fems, who call the Riding Women mares). These women have the full complement of genetic material, so their children are genetically identical to them and do not contain horse genes. Thus, the “motherlines” are the generations of children born of the original mothers. They welcome Alldera, who is pregnant through rape by a Holdfast man, because she can add a new, genetically different, line. They place her in a semi-conscious state and nurse her while she is in a half-sleep. A group of co-mothers lactate and raise her infant daughter until she is ready to enter the “childpack,” and they believe that after being suitably trained she will be able to mate with the horses as they do.

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Child-rearing in this group is markedly different from the careful nurturance given the girls of the other utopias discussed here. The children in the childpack generally run wild. When the girls start to menstruate they are ousted from the pack and take their place among the women who clean them and educate them in the ways of their tribe. The two groups of free women each feel superior to the other. The fems hope to return to the Holdfast, overcome the men and free any remaining women. The Riding Women have prevented the fems from carrying out their plan because they realize that the fems have few martial skills and because they do not want men to know about their existence outside the Holdfast. But Alldera acts as an intermediary who helps the two groups to intermingle and grow to respect each other. The fems learn to ride horses and become more skilled in the martial games the Riding Women play. Thus, in her next novel, The Furies (1994) the fems sneak off and, aided by freed female slaves and a few Riding Women who have tracked them, defeat the Holdfast men.

Sally Miller Gearhart, The Wanderground (1979) This book, a series of linked short stories with various protagonists, recounts the tales of the hill women who escape a brutal heterosexual society and live in enclaves outside of the cities. The men are so dangerous and brutally oppressive that nature herself comes to the rescue; the men become impotent and all machines stop working outside of the cities. Here again the women reproduce parthenogenetically through a kind of mystical ecstasy, as in Herland. Children are instructed in skills such as mindmelding (connecting telepathically with other women and with animals) and wind riding (flying). The “remember rooms” contain virtual representations of women’s lives in the cities before they escaped. There are two groups of men who remain in the cities: the majority of brutal, macho, patriarchal men, and a small group of “gentles,” men who repudiate heterosexuality and brutality and who cooperate secretly with the hill women. Nevertheless, many of the hill women remain distrustful of the gentles, and believe that “men and women cannot yet, may not ever, love one another without violence; they are no longer of the same species” (115). Peter Fitting argues that “the absence of men [in single-sex utopias] functions not as a call for a world without men, but as a metaphor for the elimination of male [patriarchal] values” (“For Men Only” 102). Thus he claims that stories lacking positive male characters carry that message more forcefully. He believes that male readers may identify with the

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“gentles” in Gearhart’s book, and fail to appreciate the necessity of reading “beyond gender” (104).

Joanna Russ The Female Man (1975) Russ’s novel utilizes time travel as it relates the interactions among four women who represent possible alternate selves; they are genetically identical but shaped differently by their cultures. Jeannine, a librarian living in a version of the 1960s when the Depression continues and World War II never happened, struggles with the demands of femininity and feels pressured to marry. Joanna is the self in the novel’s present who travels backward and forward in time, and becomes the female man. Two visitors arrive from two different time periods of the future Whileaway. Janet Evason’s Whileaway is a peaceful single-sex agrarian society that uses highly advanced technology for difficult work. Jael is an assassin who comes from an earlier and bleaker future in Whileaway. The women express their sexuality in different forms. Jeannine engages in heterosexual sex, but without much pleasure. Women of Janet’s time have many lovers, and reproduce by means of merging ova. Their sexual taboos proscribe inter-generational sex. In Jael’s time men and women are separated into different societies. In one scene Jael engages in graphically described love-making with Davy (who may be a lobotomized young man or an android) who performs sexual and household services for her. Janet explains that a plague wiped out men in Whileaway. Jael takes credit for the “plague” and explains that in fact women killed the men in a 40-year struggle, a war between the segregated societies of Manland and Womanland, thus making Janet’s peaceful country possible. Jael seeks the help of the other three in setting up bases to prepare for her war. Janet refuses; the other two accept. Meanwhile, Joanna becomes the eponymous “female man:” To resolve countrarieties, unite them in your own person. . . . Well, I turned into a man. . . . If we are all Mankind, it follows that I too am a Man and not at all a Woman, for honestly now, whoever heard of Java Woman and existential Woman and the values of Western Woman? (138 – 140).

Let’s review some of the issues raised by single sex societies. Does eliminating men from these communities suggest that men and women cannot coexist successfully, as the women in Wanderground fear? Is it ethical to exclude men when feminists are asking for equality and advocating for their wider inclusion in the public sphere? Does eliminating

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men simply reverse roles, making men the shunned “other” and thus change one undesirable situation for another? Does the need to imagine new forms of single-sex reproduction push these utopias into the genre of science fiction and thereby render them less valued as literature, less believable, or less possible to achieve? Must utopian visions always be exclusionary? In contrast to these single-sex fictions Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time works to be inclusive, admitting men, but changing them in the process.

Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) One of the ironies of single-sex societies is that feministswho argued for their inclusion in the rights, privileges and responsibilities of society would find it necessary to exclude men from their utopias in order to achieve the freedom they sought. Of the group of feminist utopian fictions discussed in this paper only Gilman’s Moving the Mountain and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), admit men to the utopian community. But in both of these utopias it is necessary “to make men over” as more sensitive and nurturing people so that they fit into the communal society. This novel also (like The Female Man) features time travel as Consuela (Connie) Ramos, a Chicana woman living in New York City, travels to two vastly different possible futures, the utopian communal Mattapoisett and a hostile future world. Connie’s life reveals the hardships of a poor woman of color in a patriarchal classist society. Her successive husbands and lovers have died from disease, been imprisoned, or been victims of random street killing. She ekes out a living from menial jobs and welfare. Her young daughter is taken from her by social workers. When she strikes her niece’s abusive pimp he has her committed to a mental hospital where she becomes a subject of an experiment to control inmates’ emotions and behavior through brain implants. Luciente, a native of the utopian future Mattapoisett, makes contact with Connie in an urgent attempt to enlist her in the fight to insure that her future will take place.3 Because Luciente is “well muscled for a woman,” Connie assumes she is a “dyke.” Indeed, Luciente is bisexual, as are many of the inhabitants of her utopian world. “Luciente spoke, she moved with that air of brisk 3 .

Some readers argue that Connie’s time-travels are really hallucinations. I accept the novel’s version that time-travel occurs. I suspect readers would be more amenable to the idea of time-travel if Connie were not institutionalized

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unselfconscious authority Connie associated with men. Luciente sat down, taking up more space than women ever did. She squatted, she sprawled, she strolled, never thinking about how her body was displayed” (61). Mattapoisett is an inclusionary society, but it does maintain the death penalty for repeat killers, as the citizens do not want to have to squander resources on policing and imprisoning people. Their society is peaceful, and Mattapoisett encourages its members to solve conflicts through mediation. Yet they are involved in a war with hostile enemies, and they know that another type of future may preclude their existence. When Connie enters an alternative future by mistake at one point, we realize how dangerous it may be. The world she visits is governed by corporations who police their subjects by mind control, drugs, and machine-like androids. Ordinary women are surgically enhanced to accentuate their sexuality, and contracted as sexual servants to higher ranking men. The “richies” live on space platforms and replace any ailing body parts with organs and parts harvested from the rank and file people living on the polluted earth below. In contrast, the citizens of Mattapoisett have spent considerable effort in their inclusionary project of encouraging diversity, preventing sexism, ageism, classism, and racism, and allowing men to participate. Peter Fitting (like Lincoln Allison) argues the imagining of an alternative future must address the question of how to collectively create the consciousness and identities of men and women for that society and not simply the larger social and economic structures, which would make such people possible (“Mothers” 170).

The people of this future have worked to create such consciousness. Jackrabbit explains to Connie: “we tried to learn from cultures that deal well with handling conflict, promoting cooperation, coming-of-age, growing a sense of community, getting sick, aging, going mad, dying” (119). As in The Wanderground and Herland young people are trained in meditation, and forms of mind control. They strive to be inclusive of older people and of ethnic and racial diversity. Each of the local communities chooses an ethnic flavor. Mattapoisett derives its culture from Wampanoag native Americans; a nearby village has an Ashkenazi Jewish “flavor,” another is Harlem – Black. They “mix the genes well through the population. . . . But we broke the bond between genes and culture. . . . We want there to be no chance of racism again. But we don’t want the melting pot. . . . We want diversity, for strangeness breeds richness” (96 – 97). Their educational system strives to imbue all community members with values of caring and nurturance. The elderly are seen as the best educators

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for young people, and the aged are treated with reverence and respect. The novel presents many scenes from daily life, children working with adults as they learn and work together, festivals and feasts, and rituals surrounding death and dying. Connie wonders why they are still faced with problems of sickness and death. Luciente explains: “Some problems you solve only if you stop being human, become metal, plastic, robot computer,” rather like the people in the dystopic future Connie visits (118, italics in original). Most striking is their system of reproduction and childcare. They have broken the nuclear family as well. Groups of three people (including at least one man and one woman) who are not in intimate relationships with each other (“sweet friends”) request to become co-mothers and to raise a child together. Men who wish to become parents take hormones that allow them to lactate, the computer selects a genetic code for the new infant, and babies are grown in a “brooder.” Women have given up the privilege of birthing children, in order to share power equally. It was part of women’s long revolution. When we were breaking all the old hierarchies. Finally, there was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth. Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we’d never be equal. And males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers. Every child has three. To break the nuclear bonding (98).

Piercy’s divorce of sex and child-bearing here echoes the ideas of Shulamith Firestone. In the utopian future Ms. Firestone envisioned, reproduction would be utterly divorced from sex: conception would be accomplished through artificial insemination, with gestation taking place outside the body in an artificial womb. While some critics found her proposals visionary, others deemed them quixotic at best (Fox, “New York Times”).

The language of Piercy’s utopia has been re-shaped to remove sexism. There are no male or female pronouns; the single personal pronoun is “person,” as in “person must not do what person cannot do.” Luciente’s child Dawn does not know the meaning of the word “daughter” (93). Luciente’s communal society sounds rather like an Israeli kibbutz, a form of social organization that is on the wane. Connie is increasingly frightened of the potential for loss of her identity through the hospital’s experiments. In the face of such likely harm, she is empowered by her visits to Mattapoisett. Taking dramatic and

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daring action to save herself and her fellow institutionalized inmates from the mind control experiments and to help make the utopian future more likely, she poisons the doctors who would render her passive and docile.

Conclusion Joanna Russ notes the ways that these utopian fictions are critiques of the society in which they were written: The stories’ classlessness obviously comments on the insecurity, competitiveness, and poverty of a class society. Their relative peacefulness and lack of national war goes hand-in-hand with the acceptance of some violence – specifically that necessary for self-defense and the expression of anger, both of which are rare luxuries for women today. The utopias’ sexual permissiveness and joyfulness is a poignant comment on the conditions of sexuality for women: unfriendly, coercive, simply absent, or at best reactive rather than initiating. . . . The emphasis on freedom in work in the public world reflects the restrictions that bar women from vast areas of work and experience (“Recent” 82).

Most of the issues treated in these utopian fictions—social, economic and political equality, reproductive rights and practices, sexual identities, violence, environmentalism and environmental justiceʊremain problematic. However, as feminism evolves, its theories have become more complex, taking into consideration issues of globalization, ecology, environmentalism, sexual preference and sexual mores, and others. Whereas feminism of the 1970s and 1980s often viewed “woman” and “man” as unitary categories, today there is greater concern for the subject positions of individual women and men as they are informed by class, race, age, education, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and gender identity. The impulse to write utopias seems to be correlated with a time of activism and optimism, seemingly lacking in the present climate of cynicism. If a feminist were to write contemporary utopian fiction, what might it look like? I look forward to reading more of these stories.

Works Cited Allison, Lincoln. “How Utopian is Utopia?” http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001033.php Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. NY: Anchor Books, 2004. Print Charnas, Suzy McKee. The Furies. NY: Tor, 1994. Print. —. Motherlines. NY: Berkeley, 1978.Print.

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ʊ. Walk to the End of the World. NY: Ballantine, 1974. Print. —. “A Woman Appeared.” Future Females: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Marleen S. Barr. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1981, 103-8. Print. Dinnerstein, Dorothy. The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise. NY: Harper and Row, 1976. Print. Elliott, Robert C. The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre. Chicago: U Chicago Press, 1970. Print. Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex. NY: Quill, 1970. Print. Fitting, Peter. “For Men Only: A Guide to Reading Single-Sex Worlds.” Women’s Studies 14 (1987): 101-117. Print. —. “So We All Became Mothers”: New Roles For Men In Recent Utopian Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 12.2 (1985): 156-183. Literary Reference Center. Web. 14 Aug. 2012. Fox, Margalit. “Shulamith Firestone, Feminist Writer, Dies at 67.” The New York Times, 30 August, 2012. Web. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. NY: Dell, 1974. Print. Gearhart, Sally Miller. The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1979. Print. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Utopian Novels: Moving the Mountain, Herland, and With Her in Ourland. Ed. Minna Doskow. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999. Print. —. The Home: Its Work and Influence. NY: McClure, Phillips & Co, 1903; rpt NY: Source Book Press, 1970. Print. —. Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co, 1898. Rpt NY: Harper & Row, 1966, and Source Book Press, 1970. Print. Lane, Ann J. To Herland and Beyond: the Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia, 1990. Print. Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” 1973. Rpt Gioia, Dana and R. S. Gwynn, eds. The Art of the Short Story. NY: Pearson Longman, 2006, 531-535. Print. Lewes, Darby. Dream Revisionaries: Gender and Genre in Women’s Utopian Vision, 1870-1920. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1995. Print. Morgan, Robin. Sisterhood is Powerful. NY: Vintage, 1970. Print. Morrison, Toni. Paradise. NY: Knopf, 1998. Print.

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Morson, Gary Saul. The Boundaries of Utopia. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981.Print. Moylan, Tom. “The Locus Of Hope: Utopia Versus Ideology.” Science Fiction Studies 9.2 (1982): 159-166. Literary Reference Center. Web. 14 Aug. 2012. Murphy, Graham J. “Considering Her Ways: In(ter)secting Matriarchal Utopias.” Science Fiction Studies. 35.2 (Jul 2008): 266-280. Print. Philmus, Robert M. “The Language of Utopia.” Studies in the Literary Imagination. 6.2 (Fall 73): 61-78. Print. Piercy, Marge. Woman on the Edge of Time. NY: Knopf, 1976. Print. Reames, Kelly Lynch. Toni Morrison’s Paradise: A Reader’s Guide. Continuum, 2001. Print. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Institution and Experience. NY: W. W. Norton, 1976. Print. Ruppert, Peter. Reader in a Strange Land: The Activity of Reading Literary Utopias. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1986. Print. Russ, Joanna. “Recent Feminist Utopias.” Future Females: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Marleen S. Barr. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1981, 71-85. Print. —. The Female Man. 1975. Reprint NY: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1990. Print. Shugar, Dana R. Separatism and Women’s Community. Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Print. Snopes.com (Barbara and David P. Mikkelson) “How to be a Good Wife” Web (accessed 21 August 2012). Stein, Karen F. “Utopianism.” Encyclopedia of Feminist Literary Theory. Ed. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace. NY: Garland Publishing, 1997, 40910. Print. Suvin, Darko. “Defining the Literary Genre of Utopia: Some Historical Semantics, Some Genology, a Proposal, and a Plea.” Studies in the Literary Imagination. 6.2 (Fall 73) 121-45. Print. The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter. Dir. Connie Field. Clarity Productions, 1980. (video Direct Cinema, 1987). Tiptree, James, Jr. [Alice Sheldon]. Houston, Houston, Do You Read? 1976. Rpt. Science Fiction Collection 1996. Print. Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood.” American Quarterly, 18. 2, Part 1 (Summer, 1966), 151-174. Print.

GENDERED TRAVEL AND QUIESCENCE IN TONI MORRISON’S PARADISE KRISTIN M. DISTEL

Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1998) consistently broaches the themes of utopias and dystopias, artfully demonstrating the volatile and often violent relationship that arises between them. Morrison’s novel examines the explosive conflict that arises between the small town of Ruby, Oklahoma (a failed attempt at utopia) and a nearby household of women (a modern utopia called “the Convent”). When Ruby, “the one all-black town worth all the pain” (5), slowly realizes that their attempts at creating a utopia have been unsuccessful, the residents are desperate to blame something— or someone—outside of their own town; with no option other than selfincrimination, they blame the Convent women for the loose morals slowly invading Ruby. Numerous plot points and seeming coincidences reveal that travel between utopias and dystopias is perilous. Indeed, it is often associated with death, particularly in the forms of the babies born in the Convent, travelers innocuously passing through, the Convent women themselves, and ultimately the town as a whole. My argument consists of multiple sections, each examining the Convent as an unlikely utopia, Ruby as a dystopia, and the points at which these two locales merge. I will also examine the ways in which dystopian prejudice, shame, and overly simplistic religious beliefs beget violence and destruction, culminating in an examination of the women’s ontological liminality.

The Convent Women and an Unlikely Utopia In separate journeys, five disparate women make their way to a dilapidated convent seventeen miles outside of the all-black town of Ruby, Oklahoma. The women, Connie, Mavis, Grace, Seneca, and Pallas, live together in “the Convent.” It is important to note, however, that the building was never actually a convent; interestingly, an embezzler built the structure as his personal mansion. His theft was soon discovered, and the

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state converted the home to a Catholic school for what they termed “native girls.” The fact that the building is called a convent but never actually served as such is indicative of Morrison’s message throughout. The novel comments on appearance versus reality, especially in terms of religious dogma. Characters who claim to be deeply religious are often hypocritical, rage-filled, and violent. Characters (like the Convent women) who either have no religious affiliation or abandoned it some time ago are often welcoming, loving, and compassionate. Their kindness, not any purported self-righteousness or theocratic code of behavior, makes the Convent a utopia. Morrison, both in this instance and several others, seems to argue against a simpleminded acceptance of aphoristic Christianity. Religious façades—whether that of a person (like the men who attacked the Convent women) or a structure (like the Convent)—are often illusory. All five women are attempting to escape something or someone— trauma that has left them shattered. Connie is the “leader” of the Convent. She was rescued at the age of nine from the filthy streets of Brazil after having been sexually abused. Her rescuer—a sister from Christ the King School for Native Girls—took Connie back to Oklahoma (to the Convent), where Connie remained for life. Demand for the school dwindled, and it eventually closed. After the school’s closing, the Convent became an unlikely (and unintentional) home for wayward, frightened women. Other than Connie, Mavis Albright is the first to arrive to the Convent; significantly, it was not her destination, as she was originally fleeing to California, on the run from an abusive husband and her three living children who—she was convinced—were trying to kill her as punishment for the deaths of Mavis’s young twins. They suffocated in her husband’s car, which Mavis had taken without his knowledge. In leaving her family, Mavis stole her husband’s car—the one she had previously “borrowed” and in which her infant twins had died. It is the only source of transportation for the Convent women. It is also one of the novel’s many indications that travel from one’s utopia is discouraged. Using the car— travelling—is necessarily illicit because Mavis fears detection; there is a warrant for her arrest on suspicion of larceny and the children’s deaths. If the women leave the Convent, they are in danger. However, as readers learn in the opening chapter, they eventually find that staying poses an even greater danger. Nevertheless, they will not (and perhaps cannot) leave. The women are largely lost and aimless—until they realize the Convent is their home. This is especially true of the final woman to come to the Convent; Pallas (who is later called Divine) faced similar familial betrayal, as Pallas encountered her mother being intimate with her own fiancé.

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Horrified, Pallas hurriedly attempts to drive away from her mother’s home; in the process, she is pursued by a gang of young men who are intent on raping her. She crashes her vehicle and seeks shelter in the murky waters of a lake. Morrison is somewhat ambiguous as to whether the young men succeed in their plan. Pallas never explains what happened to her, and the truth about her encounter is never clear. Billie Delia Cato, a kindhearted outcast from Ruby, stumbles upon Pallas and brings her to the Convent for care and help. (As one who has been ostracized from Ruby, Billie Delia understands the utopian nature of the Convent.) Like all the women who live there, Pallas arrives at the Convent without intending to stay. Her father, who begs her to come home, is a wealthy businessman who provides a lavish, extravagant lifestyle for Pallas; when considering her character, it is important to remember that she is just sixteen years old. For a short time, she happily goes home to her father and to her comfortable life. Nevertheless, Pallas soon flees her father’s home, traveling from California to Oklahoma to return to the Convent. She abandons her palatial home and posh life with her father for the ramshackle conditions of the Convent and the company of four near-strangers. Materialistic thinking (or perhaps basic logic) would indicate that she has left a utopia for a dystopia; her experience indicates otherwise, though. After her ordeal at her mother’s home, it is only at the Convent that she feels safe, welcome, and at peace. The quiescence the women feel at the Convent and the complete acceptance they find is especially remarkable when one recalls the opening lines of the novel, wherein Morrison reveals that one Caucasian lives amongst the four black women: “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time” (3). To preserve the sanctity of otherness, she never explicitly discloses which woman is white. A close analysis of dialogue reveals that Morrison may be referring to Pallas in the novel’s opening line. This is implied particularly in the conversation between Lone and Dovey regarding Connie’s whispered words after having been shot. Connie is telling Divine (i.e. Pallas) that Divine’s baby is safe. As I will address in a later section, I argue that Divine, having been shot, is also restored through Connie’s powers of resurrection. If Divine is “the white girl” and the other Convent women are still alive at the time Connie is shot, it is logical that Connie would reassure Divine that the baby is protected (“He’s divine he’s sleeping Divine,” Connie says [291]).1 With the exception of the novel’s opening lines, a reader almost forgets that a “white girl” lives amongst the Convent women. It simply does not matter, 1

Other critics, such as Justine Tally, argue that Seneca is Caucasian (Tally 85).

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which may be Morrison’s implication. In a house that consists only of African-Americans, which is seventeen miles from an all-black town, a “white girl” is the pinnacle of otherness. Nevertheless, she has found a utopian home. For reasons the women themselves perhaps do not understand, they cannot permanently leave the Convent after they arrive. There, they have no financial, moral, religious, or familial obligations. This is not the true reason they stay, though. They are no longer seeking safety or a utopia, as the outside world cannot offer anything better than what they have found in the Convent: an unequivocal acceptance of otherness. They never intended to stay when they arrived; the Convent was a stop on the way to a better place. They simply never leave. Everyone is an outsider; it is their simple and enduring truth. A force much more powerful than fear or danger holds them to the Convent, though. They cannot leave because it is only at the Convent that their profound otherness is acceptable—even welcomed. When Mavis first arrives to the Convent, Connie summarizes the reason that the Convent becomes a permanent home or temporary haven for anyone who needs a respite: “Lies not allowed in this place. In this place every true thing is okay” (38). Even Mavis’s fugitive status— dodging an arrest warrant for “grand larceny, abandonment, and suspicion of murdering her two children” (168) is acceptable, though Mavis is deeply ashamed of the warrant against her. Still, she is welcome in the Convent; whatever is true is acceptable. Because of their individual trauma and abuse from untruthful, cruel family members, the Convent women require such relativism. Throughout their lives, truth has been so malleable, so changing and inconstant, that the women seem to disbelieve the very concept of truth.

Ruby as a Failed Utopia The neighboring all-black town of Ruby finds the Convent’s rejection of absolutism horrifying and threatening; they consider the women “a new and obscene breed of female” (279) and “black Eves unredeemed by Mary” (18). In her article “Another Night, Another Story: The Frame Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Paradise and Alf Laylah Wa Laylah [The Arabian Nights],” Majda Atieh provides a useful summary of the novel’s incongruous settings. She notes, “[T]he [Convent]…like an African home, welcomes strangers. The tension between the two worlds of Paradise distinguishes this novel from earlier frame narratives. …In Paradise, tension evolves between the world of allowing and ‘disallowing.’ …Thus the Convent and Ruby become the symbols of two opposing moralities in

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the novel” (“Another” 120). While Atieh’s descriptions are certainly accurate, it is important to note that simple dichotomies are not at work in Paradise. The Convent is not utopian because of the absence of men, and men (even in Ruby) are not necessarily set in opposition to women. Michiko Kakutani's New York Times review (“Paradise: Worthy Women, Unredeemable Men”) argues that the novel “mechanically pits men against women,” an assessment that rather ignores several characters' temperaments and behavior. Indeed, Grace is often an unlikeable character, as are several women of Ruby; Dee Dee (Pallas’s mother) and Jean (Seneca’s mother) particularly prohibit a reading of women as seraphic, innocent victims. Further, some men in Paradise are compassionate and loving, such as Reverend Misner. Kakutani's criticism also seems to overlook the complex development of specific characters; Deacon Morgan, for example, transforms from an adulterous, arrogant man to a humble penitent. The novel’s conflicts are far more complex than a “male versus female” reading would allow.2 Ruby values homogeny above all; they require “unadulterated and unadulteried 8-rock blood” (217), and they cast off anyone who fails to meet their standards of “purity.” Of course, the Convent does not value this concept at all. It is, perhaps, the starkest difference between them. This, along with the town’s extreme narcissism, is particularly evident in the town’s nativity play; it depicts the seven “holy” families of Ruby, not the single holy family of Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus. (There were originally nine families, but the townspeople eliminated from the play those who married light-skinned African-Americans or those who committed adultery —both actions that compromised the elitist, exclusive nature of Ruby.) In considering Ruby’s drastic efforts to create a utopia, Reverend Misner reflects: Born out of an old hatred, one that began when one kind of black man scorned another kind and that kind took the hatred to another level, their selfishness had trashed two hundred years of suffering and triumph in a moment of such pomposity and error and callousness it froze the mind. Unbridled by Scripture, deafened by the roar of its own history, Ruby, it seemed to him, was an unnecessary failure. (306)

Reverend Misner is one of the few people to realize that the town has produced a dystopian, homogenous catastrophe. Ruby has created a people 2

My reading opposes that of Geoffrey Bent, whose article in the Southern Review states, “Virtue and vice seem to have been rigorously sorted along the convenient divide of gender; all the women are good, all the men bad” (148).

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so convinced of their own superiority that they refuse to accept any responsibility for the crises that plague them. As the men who attack the Convent mull over their justifications for murder, they reflect on the problems occurring in their town: Outrages that had been accumulating all along took shape as evidence. A mother was knocked down the stairs by her cold-eyed daughter. Four damaged infants were born in one family. Daughters refused to get out of bed. Brides disappeared on their honeymoons. Two brothers shot each other on New Year’s Day. Trips to Demby for VD shots common. …The one thing that connected all these catastrophes was in the Convent. And in the Convent were those women. (11)

In contrast to Connie’s truism, “every true thing” is far from “okay” (38) in Ruby; that which is true, that which accepts or allows the flawed humanness of its people must necessarily be the fault of an outsider. Even cursory familiarity with the town, however, indicates that Ruby’s preoccupation with homogeny initiates these problems.

The Origins of Dystopia—Historical Prejudice and Shame The townspeople founded Ruby, Oklahoma, because no other town would accept them; even other all-black towns rejected them as settlers, considering the future founders of Ruby to be too poor and more disturbingly, too dark-skinned (195). The unwanted wanderers termed this refusal “the Disallowing” (189), and it is rejection that ultimately leads nine men from Ruby to raid the Convent and shoot each of the five women living there. They considered the women a collective representation of the greatest threats facing their town: loose morals, promiscuity, witchcraft, disdain for religion, and above all, otherness (the sole “crime” of which the women were truly guilty). If the women encroached upon Ruby, the town could fail; the people of Ruby simply would not allow that. It would be another Disallowing, another indication of failure. Their town is their greatest source of pride, and to leave it would betray weakness. Ruby was founded after the downfall of another all-black town, Haven, which the previous generation had established. After World War II, the founders of Haven (the fathers and grandfathers of Ruby’s current townspeople) decided that the encroachment of twentieth-century values was too dangerous. They had to move further west; they needed a new, pure town; hence, they continued to travel to try to escape from what they themselves embodied—a distrust of and hatred for otherness. Haven

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collapsed. Ruby could not. Soane Morgan, the wife of a Ruby patriarch, remarks to Connie, “He [Deacon] can’t fail at what he is doing. None of us can. We are making something” (240). The people of Ruby refused to leave; they could not allow failure, and otherness was failure. Thus, in their opinion, the women of the Convent had to be forced out—murdered. Shame is, perhaps, one of the most powerful forces driving the men of Ruby. In examining the novel, it is shocking to note the consistent references to individuals and relatives being driven apart by shame of themselves or others. Here, it is worthwhile to examine the causes of shame and how feelings of embarrassment culminated in the creation of a dystopia and, ultimately, the attack on the Convent women. The town of Ruby was both founded and named as a result of shame. A young woman named Ruby (a daughter of the new town’s founder) became gravely ill; distrustful both of whites and of modern medicine, her family reluctantly took her to a hospital. Ruby died before she could receive treatment—the hospital staff had been trying to contact a veterinarian who might treat Ruby (a black woman), as no white doctor would help her (113). After Ruby’s passing, they gave the town her name; they resolved to create a place in which what happened to her would never happen to another one of their settlers. More importantly, Ruby’s brothers felt that after her death, God had wronged them and thus had an obligation to them. Morrison writes, “Ruby was buried, without benefit of a mortuary, in a pretty spot on Steward’s ranch, and it was then that the bargain was struck. A prayer in the form of a deal, no less, with God, no less, which He seemed to honor until 1969, when Easter and Scout were shipped home. After that they understood the terms and conditions of the deal much better” (113). Readers eventually come to understand that the people of Ruby cannot die; they are immortal as long as they live in Ruby. (Death is possible anywhere outside of the town’s limits—including at the Convent. Naturally, this is another reason for the townspeople’s fear of the Convent and the women living there.) If the people of Ruby leave, if they abandon the town that is their calling and their protection, they can die (as did Easter and Scout Morgan when they left Ruby to fight in Vietnam). In this sense, the town certainly does bear markings of a utopia; however, the privilege of immortality, too, is lost, which I will examine near the end of my analysis. The people of the town will not leave what they (wrongly) deem to be a utopia because they fear two things: rejection and death. The failure of the town, leaving Ruby, would mean both. This would force the people of Ruby to acknowledge that their attempts at creating a utopia have crumbled. In contrast, the women of the Convent cannot travel because there, they are happily quiescent; the Convent is the only place

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that welcomes the otherness they embody, and they simply have no reason to leave. K.D. Morgan and Menus Jury, both male citizens of Ruby, each experienced shame within the Convent. For two years, K.D. maintained an illicit relationship with Gigi, much to the horror of his uncles; when K.D. became abusive toward Gigi, the Convent women defended her, beating K.D. and chasing him off their property. This would be shameful for anyone, but especially for a Morgan man, one who has been raised to believe that he is naturally superior. Humiliation—especially at the hands of women (women who did not meet the town’s standards of racial “purity,” no less)—was enough to infuriate K.D.; it certainly facilitated his participation in the Convent attack. Menus, too, spent time at the Convent after serving in Vietnam and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Instead of being grateful toward the women who took him in, cared for him, gave him a home, he is ashamed that anyone—especially “sinful” women—saw him in that state. In considering Menus’s reasons for attacking the women, it is worthwhile to consider the character of Lone. Like Connie, she was found as a child—alone—and rescued. Though Lone becomes something of an adopted child to Ruby, they never truly accept her. As an outsider, she bears an awareness of the town that native citizens do not. In considering Menus, Lone notes: Spending those weeks out there drying out, you’d think he’d be grateful. Those women must have witnessed some things, seen some things he didn’t want ranging around in anybody’s mind in case they fell out of their mouths. … Getting rid of some unattached women who had wiped up after him, washed his drawers, removed his vomit, listened to his curses as well as his sobs might convince him for a while that he was truly a man unpolluted by his mother’s weakness, worthy of his father’s patience…. (277-78)

The passage illustrates again the secrets and shame that have ruined Ruby and caused it to become a dystopia. A utopia cannot exist based on the exclusion of every negative or shameful thing; conversely (and perhaps counterintuitively), it must accept that which is disgraceful and painful; it must allow and embrace flaws. Attempts to create a utopia based on prejudicial grounds or to protect oneself from shame will inevitably fail, as Ruby does. As citizens of Ruby, K.D. and Menus cannot accept imperfections within themselves, and they cannot tolerate the presence (even the life) of those who know of those imperfections. To them, murder is more acceptable than is shame; indeed, this allows readers to see the very entrenched, ingrained nature of their exclusionist, ignominious upbringing.

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Rising Tensions between Utopia and Dystopia Here, it is useful to examine the character of Sweetie Fleetwood. Readers of Paradise will recall that Sweetie, a resident of Ruby, is the mother of four “damaged” children (11). The town blames the children’s poor health on Lone, the midwife and lifelong outsider who delivered Sweetie’s babies. This, again, is an indication of the town’s constant inclination to blame an outside person or force for the problems Ruby faces. (Simple logic indicates that the town’s insistence on racial “purity,” resulting in inbreeding, is the reason for the children’s developmental disabilities.3) In speaking about Paradise during an interview with A.J. Verdelle, Morrison commented, “In that little town, you could imagine everybody was married to one another, and they had children by each other, and they go back so long” (qtd. in Verdelle). I contend that the Fleetwood house is a microcosm of Ruby itself. Sweetie excludes herself from others, just as Ruby is exclusionary. She has not left her house (actually the house of her parents-in-law) in six years because of the constant care her sick children require. Moreover, even people within the town rarely enter the Fleetwood home; it is possible that their generally superstitious nature leads them to believe that the house or household is cursed in some way. The final chapter reveals that one of Sweetie’s daughters, Save-Marie, has died (an occurrence I will examine near the end of my argument); upon the child’s passing, people of Ruby know that others will die, that their supposed “deal” with God has been nullified. A tragedy that has begun in the Fleetwood home (sickness ultimately leading to a death in Ruby) will soon spread to the town at large. In the novel’s final chapter, just as Save-Marie is being buried, Morrison writes, “Thus the tense discussion of a formal cemetery was not only because of Sweetie’s wishes and the expectation of more funerals, but out of a sense that, for complicated reasons, the reaper was no longer barred entry from Ruby” (295-6). The Fleetwood tragedy will soon become the crisis of the entire town. I speculate that the town would attribute the death of Sweetie’s daughter not only to simple illness or even a broken “deal” but also to the supposedly deviant behavior of Sweetie herself. On the morning that she finally, shockingly left home and wandered in the direction of the Convent, she defied the code of exclusivity by which Ruby lives. Offers to help Sweetie care for the children had come in long ago, but only when— 3

Justine Tally rightly points out that Jeff Fleetwood’s “exposure to Agent Orange” during his war experience is another likely cause for the Fleetwood children’s illnesses (Paradise Reconsidered 27).

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or perhaps because—she maintained her subservient role within someone else’s home. The offers waned, but when she actually needs help, that is, on her manic walk out of town, Deacon refuses not only because he must open the bank on time (114) but also because she is rebelling against the understood place of women in Ruby. Once Sweetie becomes an “other” by abandoning her assigned role in the household, she is unworthy of help. Morrison writes, “The woman Deek was watching seemed to be leaving Cross Peter Street and heading toward Sergeant’s Feed and Seed. But she did not stop there. Instead she was moving resolutely north, where Deek knew there was nothing for seventeen miles” (114). Sweetie’s flight from her home, responsibilities, and children is exponentially more shameful when Deacon surmises that Sweetie is walking toward the Convent. It is her direction and her rebelliousness, not a desire to open his bank punctually, that prompts his decision to drive past Sweetie. In this way, Sweetie substantially increases the animosity Ruby has toward the Convent. Sweetie suffers a mental collapse, just as some of the Convent women did before their arrival at their utopia. On the morning she flees, Sweetie realizes that her home—again, a microcosm of Ruby— is a dystopia, that it will destroy her. She also comes to understand that Mable, her mother-in-law, emblematizes the dystopic people of Ruby; though she seems to have good intentions, Mable stifles Sweetie in the same way that Ruby suppresses and demands conformity of its citizens. Morrison writes: When dawn broke and Mable came into the dim room with a cup of coffee, Sweetie stood to take it. She knew Mable had already run her bathwater and folded a towel and fresh nightgown over the chair in the bedroom. And she knew she would offer to do her hair—braid it, wash it, roll it, or just scratch her scalp. The coffee would be wonderful, dark and loaded with sugar. But she also knew that if she drank it this one time and went to bed in morning sun this one time she would never wake up, and who would watch her babies then? (125)

It is important to note that Sweetie keeps watch over her children throughout the night, staying awake until dawn. In this way, her life bears a similarity to the Convent women’s lives before their arrival. Mavis flees her children during the night. Pallas’s (likely) rape and hiding in the swamp occurs at night. Sweetie’s nights are harrowing as she keeps watch and listens for breathing, a similarity she shares with Seneca who, at the age of five, was abandoned by her mother/sister: “Meantime the nights were terrible,” Morrison writes of Seneca’s experience (127). It is particularly noteworthy that the chapter in which Sweetie’s account

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appears is named Seneca, thus drawing a clear parallel between the two women’s experiences and juxtaposing them as abandoner (Sweetie) and abandoned (Seneca). Significantly, though the women do not know each other, it is Seneca who sees Sweetie on her walk out of town and ultimately helps her. (Sweetie is coatless and walking over seventeen miles in the snow. Dazed, she does not acknowledge the few passersby who offer to help her.) Neither woman had ever been to the Convent—Seneca was an undiscovered stowaway in a pickup truck passing through the vicinity of the Convent; as a resident of Ruby, Sweetie had always associated the Convent with sin. Knowing that this poor, cold, speechless woman needed help, Seneca turns Sweetie around and walks with her to the Convent. Though Sweetie does not speak, Morrison reveals that Sweetie thinks of Seneca as “sin shape” (129). Here, though, is the definitive moment in which Sweetie bridges the dystopian town and the utopian Convent; upon Seneca and Sweetie nearing the Convent, Morrison writes, “Of her own accord, Sweetie slogged up the driveway. But she let the demon do the rest” (129). Though she still sees an outsider (such as Seneca) as an embodiment of sin, she nevertheless approaches the Convent of her own free will. Sweetie’s reaction upon entering the Convent, though, solidifies Ruby’s fate—she cannot accept otherness, even when those “others” are compassionate, helpful, and concerned. The Convent women do their best to take care of the clearly ill woman, but the sense of superiority and exclusion that Ruby has instilled in Sweetie precludes her from accepting their help. When Sweetie refuses to see the Convent as a utopia, Morrison implies that the town, too, will forever have a distorted view of the Convent and of the very concept of utopias and perfection. Though Sweetie did not resist entering the Convent (and indeed even walked to the Convent’s door), she later claims that the women took and kept her against her will. Mavis kindly gave Sweetie food, medicine, and a ride back to Ruby. In turn, when Sweetie’s husband Jeff asks her why she fled, she incriminates the Convent women: “They made me, snatched me” (130). Through Sweetie, there was an opportunity to establish peace between Ruby and the Convent. If she had been forthright about the reasons she left her home and about the kindness with which the women treated her, the people of Ruby may have been less inclined to see the Convent as a den of sin and witchcraft. Instead, Sweetie’s lie solidifies and intensifies the town’s animosity toward the Convent women, ensuring that their hatred would have a violent end.

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Religion, Utopia, and Dystopia As with many notable tragedies, the men of Ruby justify their attack on the basis of religion. As previously mentioned, they view the Convent women as the very incarnation of sin and worldly otherness. It is true that the women do not subscribe to a particular religious tradition, even acting indifferently (and sometimes irreverently) toward the religious relics in the Convent. For example, Grace dislikes her puritanical name and insists on being called “Gigi” instead. Of course, this could certainly be another indication of Morrison’s implications regarding Christianity, which I briefly discussed earlier.4 Grace is traveling in Oklahoma (and eventually arrives in the town of Ruby) because of a lie told by her boyfriend, Mike Rood; he promised to meet her at an unusual landmark he had told her about, but it does not exist. This boyfriend, too, demonstrates Morrison’s disdain for Christian simplicities; of course, “rood” is another name for the cross. Here, Morrison is reiterating her assertion that utopias are not necessarily religious, just as dystopias do not necessarily oppose the concept of God; indeed, dystopias may adhere to a religion to a fault, as Ruby does. Herein lies what I believe to be the novel’s ultimate purpose—to demonstrate that simplistic, dualistic absolutism is inevitably harmful. It is the base element of dystopian life. It leads people, such as the residents of Ruby, to justify prejudice and harm. Reverend Misner’s description of Ruby is particularly applicable here. He defines the town as “This hardwon heaven defined only by the absence of the unsaved, the unworthy and the strange” (306). This clearly hearkens back to the Reverend’s definition of Ruby as “an unnecessary failure” (306). A utopia cannot thrive when its sole reason for existence is to exclude others. This very way of thinking causes their “hard-won heaven” to become a dystopia. In an interview with Anna Mulrine (U.S. News and World Report), Morrison asks why “paradise necessitates exclusion” (qtd. in Mulrine). Her comments confirm that the exclusive nature of Ruby is the cause for the town’s downfall. They exclude others based on religious affiliation, familial ties, occupation, and especially skin color. Ruby only values those whom Patricia Best, the town’s historian, has termed “8-rocks,” a designation that refers to “a deep deep level in the coal mines. Blue-black people, tall and graceful, whose clear, wide eyes gave no sign of what they really felt about those who weren’t 8-rock like them” (193). Ruby harshly discriminates against 4

For discussion of Morrison and Christian subjects that is more thorough than I can provide in this space, I would refer readers to Shirley Stave’s Toni Morrison and the Bible: Contested Intertexualities.

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Roger Best, Patricia Best, and Billie Delia Cato (Patricia’s daughter) because Roger married a light-skinned African-American. (The Best family is excluded from the town’s aforementioned nativity play, a true demonstration of the town’s narcissism and exclusionary beliefs.) Morrison seems to imply that a person or community cannot rely solely on one form of support for survival. Discrimination against outsiders and against their own townspeople led to Ruby’s dystopian state. In turning back to the Convent, Morrison also reiterates the need for inclusiveness through the character of Connie and her utopia. Earlier in the novel, Connie initially refused her gift of healing and resurrection (called “stepping in” [245]). Having been raised from the age of nine in a Catholic school by harsh Catholic sisters, she believes throughout her life that “practicing” is witchcraft. That she is taught to step in (that is, to resurrect) by another outsider, Lone, is significant. Lone sees Ruby as a dystopia, and she observes an isolation and separateness similar to her own in Connie; more importantly, she also sees in Connie the gift to heal. Connie sees stepping in as the loss of her soul; she even says she is “damned” after beginning to “practice” (248). Lone considers stepping in a way to honor God, warning Connie not to “separate God from his elements” (244). When Connie resists, she implies that healing others is a form of witchcraft: “My faith is all I need” (244), Connie maintains. Lone responds, “Sometimes folks need more” (244), thus demonstrating her knowledge that simplistic theology and banal ideas about truth lead to harm. Morrison, too, is critical of the simplistic nature of Christianity and those who think as Connie does. Despite the townspeople’s efforts to force the women out of the area and away from the seeming utopia of Ruby, the women do not leave. Thus, the men of Ruby decide they must kill the women because it is the only way to preserve their sense of absolute truth and morality; in their collective opinion, the murders are entirely justified (though the men have varying personal reasons for wanting to exact revenge on the women, as discussed previously). When the town’s coroner (whose services have been heretofore unnecessary) arrives to collect the women’s bodies, there are none to be found. The women, who have each been shot, are gone. Along this theme, the novel opens with an epigraph that I believe explains the novel’s greatest complexities; it contains the novel’s truth about utopias, dystopias, the chasm between them, and the fate of those who harm citizens of a utopia. The epigraph ends with the phrase, “And they will live / and they will not die again.” Readers widely recognize that the book’s first chapter begins with the story’s climax; it certainly opens in a startling way: “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take

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their time” (3). The first scene that readers encounter is a murderous raid upon the home of five peaceful, quiescent women. It is an assault on the very concept of otherness. The first chapter eerily describes the men, weapons in hand, scouring the Convent for their victims; Morrison’s visceral language leaves no doubt as to the brutality of the scene. However, if readers neglect the epigraph, then many of the novel’s most important events—including the first chapter—will make little sense. The epigraph is a poem dedicated to Isis in praise of divine female power; it is critical of simplistic Christian dualities of good and evil. The poem, discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945, praises Isis, who resurrected Osiris after he had been murdered. I argue that this serves as an explanation of the novel’s dense final chapter.

An Alternative Religion to Christian Dualisms It is my assertion that Connie, the Convent’s “leader,” is the novel’s version of Isis. Isis was the protector of the dead; it was her responsibility to ensure the safety (and the continued life) of the deceased. Connie had this exact purpose; her abilities were not limited to the Convent, as is she is able to resurrect Scout Morgan after a car accident. (This same young man later dies in Vietnam. In Ruby, he cannot die permanently; once he leaves city limits, God’s apparent hand of protection, secured in the aforementioned “deal,” is gone.) As she comes upon the accident scene, Connie “steps in,” as she calls it, finding “the pinpoint of light” (245) through which she could resurrect him. It is conceivable that Connie does the same when the first Convent woman, “the white girl” (3), is shot. Connie possibly finds the pinpoint of light to resurrect the woman, but she does not seem to know whether she was successful in bringing her back to life because she has to abandon the woman’s nearly lifeless body when further gunfire explodes in the next room. The men of Ruby are continuing their assault, shooting at the three remaining Convent women as they try to escape outside. Instead of facing the men or even trying to disarm them, to stop them somehow, Connie lifts her head, looks to the sun, “as though distracted by something high above the heads of the men,” and utters her final words: “‘You’re back,’ she says, and smiles” (289). It is my assertion that “the white girl,” who has been shot, has returned, brought back to life by Morrison’s version of Isis. It is true that readers do not actually see Connie resurrecting the girl; however, a great deal of action occurs in the novel that readers do not witness, and blatant exposition would disregard the book’s narrative style.

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Immediately after Connie sees the girl’s resurrected form, Steward Morgan—one of the town’s leaders—shoots Connie in her forehead. One would assume that this would immediately end Connie’s life, and upon a cursory reading, it seems that Connie does in fact die. The novel never truly proves or definitively states that Connie dies, though. Two possibilities arise: first, it is possible that Connie dies and is able to “step in” to her own “pinpoint of light” and resurrect herself. Second, perhaps she miraculously survived. Lone and Dovey’s conversation certainly implies that Connie is deceased, but Morrison artfully sidesteps a definitive answer regarding Connie’s condition (291). Morrison describes a “third [eye], wet and lidless” (291) in Connie’s forehead, but perhaps this wound is also the pinpoint of light through which Connie can restore her own life. If she can resurrect others, it is possible that she can do the same for herself. If Morrison is critical of Christianity, then Connie’s act of resurrecting herself is quite revealing. The book of Saint Mark reveals that Christ’s detractors taunted him, telling him, “Save thyself, and come down from the cross.” Obviously, Christ refused to do so. Connie, however, did not refuse. I argue that she lives, as do the other Convent women. Here, it is worthwhile to examine Morrison’s use of a telling stylistic feature: there is an irregular area of whitespace within the final chapter. Before the whitespace, Morrison provides the thoughts of Billie Delia, who grew up in Ruby but experienced discrimination for being a lightskinned African-American. She was one of the very few townspeople to admire and trust the Convent women. Morrison writes: Billie Delia was perhaps the only one in town who was not puzzled by where the women were or concerned about how they disappeared. She had another question: When will they return? When will they reappear, with blazing eyes, war paint and huge hands to rip up and stomp down this prison calling itself a town? … She hoped with all her heart that the women were out there…brass-metaling their nails, filing their incisors— but out there. Which is to say she hoped for a miracle.” (308)

After this internal monologue (and after the aforementioned whitespace), the setting shifts to scenes of the Convent women—alive (at least seemingly)—interacting with members of their families. That is, after the murders occur, they meet with family members who abused and discarded them in life.5 The novel’s great question is why the women appear to be 5

Johnny R. Griffith’s 2011 article “In the End is the Beginning: Toni Morrison's Post-Modern, Post-Ethical Vision of Paradise” provides a useful examination of the way in which the readers’ confusion mirrors that of the citizens.

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alive after the murders at the Convent. Megan Sweeney’s 2004 article, “Racial House, Big House, Home: Contemporary Abolitionism in Toni Morrison's Paradise,” supports my assertion. Sweeney writes, “[A]lthough the men of Ruby eventually sacrifice the residents of the Convent, Paradise concludes with the possibility that the Convent women continue to dwell, unvanquished, in some alternative earthly realm” (47). Are readers encountering the women in some sort of afterlife? Are they simply spirits or apparitions? Justine Tally’s Paradise Reconsidered presents an intriguing argument for the women as revenants, rather than physically resurrected forms (83). Majda R. Atieh argues that the women become “whirling dervishes,” a transformation that begins when the women dance in the rain (“Revelation”). However, if my assertion is accurate—that Connie is a representation of Isis—then the Convent women are truly alive at the end of the novel. It is possible that Connie has resurrected them. The revivified women, who did not intend to harm anyone while they were alive, now have a purpose. Morrison’s original title for the novel was War, a decision her editor overrode (Mulrine).6 Perhaps War would have been a more fitting title, though, as I believe it is exactly what the women wage after they are murdered and resurrected. Though it is unwritten, the implication exists. Restored by Connie’s ability to step in (to raise the dead), it seems that the women return to Ruby—to quell absolutism and a fear of otherness so strong that it overrode morality and decency. In short, I believe the women seek revenge against the people of Ruby, as Billie Delia suspects; it is possible that this action takes places as a novelistic aside, that it implicitly occurs in the area of the previously mentioned whitespace (308). When the men murdered the Convent women, they effectively broke their “deal” with God. Indeed, the utopian power of immortality seems to have shifted from Ruby to the Convent; people in Ruby can now die, and the women are, by all appearances and against all logic, alive. Tellingly, the final chapter begins with a funeral in Ruby; as mentioned previously, one of Sweetie Fleetwood’s children has died. Morrison writes, “It was a brand-new problem; the subject of burial sites hadn’t come up in Ruby for twenty years, and there was astonishment as well as sadness when the task became necessary” (295). Because of the baseless, murderous malice of the men who raided the Convent, the deal with God was voided. Death 6 Mulrine quotes Morrison as saying, “I wanted to open with somebody's finger on the trigger, to close when it was pulled, and to have the whole novel exist in that moment of the decision to kill or not.” Mulrine explains, “Knopf [Morrison’s editor] feared the title War might turn off Morrison fans.” Morrison explains, “I'm still not convinced they were right.”

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was free to enter Ruby, and it may have done so through the resurrected forms of the five Convent women. As previously stated, in the final pages of the novel, the women visit those who harmed them in the past. Mavis visits her daughter, Sally; when Sally hugs her mother, Mavis gasps in pain: her side is wounded (315). Gigi, clad in military fatigues, visits her father, a death row inmate; as she walks away from him, he realizes she is armed with a gun (310). Seneca faces her mother, whom she had long believed to be her sister, who abandoned her as a child. Denying her mother/sister and largely ignoring her, Seneca’s hands are streaming with blood (316). Pallas returns to her mother’s house, refusing to speak and bearing a large sword in its sheath (311). The night before the raid on the Convent, the women shaved their heads; this action could have several logical meanings. It might be a physical manifestation of their desire for equality—some of the women had mentioned how much they admired Pallas’s hair; shaving it off would neutralize their differences. The action might also refer to a simple desire for a new beginning, a representation of their rebirth. More intriguing, though, is the possibility that the women have shaved their heads in preparation for war; they are armed and ready to engage in combat, to seek revenge. When Gigi’s father sees her fatigues, he asks, “‘You in the army? Gigi smiled. ‘Sort of’” (310). While the aforementioned injuries may be resultant of the attack on the Convent, it is also possible that in the novel’s closing pages, the women have done battle—they are wounded (as they have always been), but they have won. In referring back to the concept of Connie as Isis, it is important to note that the worship of Isis ended with the uprising of Christianity. The very lives of the Convent women may have ended (even if temporarily) because of Ruby’s distorted Christian ideology. Overall, perhaps this is the novel’s didactic point. A religion that works so hard to exclude others— even to the point of death—is not a religion at all. It is not edifying or exhorting. It is not utopian truth. It is murderous and can only lead to harm. Interpreting Connie as Isis reveals Morrison’s criticism of exclusionary religious thinking. The tiny town of Ruby has three churches, which are opposed to one another. The town’s streets are named after the gospels. Here, it is interesting to hearken back to the example of Sweetie Fleetwood’s flight from her home and children. In searching for a haven— a utopia—she must walk in the presence of these churches and through these streets to get to a haven; one cannot find utopia when entrenched in religion that does not allow a secular paradise. Morrison revisits this incident near the end of the book, when Deacon, who deeply regrets his involvement in the murders, walks to Reverend Misner’s house to seek counsel and forgiveness. It is noteworthy that

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Deacon is barefoot and thus vulnerable, just as Sweetie walked to the Convent without a coat. When Deacon fully acknowledges his culpability, he begins to defy the town’s concept of normative behavior; this includes altering his method of travel—he begins to walk instead of drive. Morrison writes, “It had been at least a decade since the soles of his shoes, let alone his bare feet, had touched that much concrete” (300). This changed behavior and newfound contrition serve to negate some of the volatility between Deacon and those he has judged so harshly. To some, this would suggest a hopeful outcome for the town of Ruby. Indeed, Sarah Appleton Aguiar’s article “‘Passing On’ Death: Stealing Life in Toni Morrison’s Paradise” has a more optimistic view of the novel’s end, stating, “The novel concludes with visions of redeemable Ruby” (518). While some members of Ruby are repentant after the attack, Appleton Aguiar’s interpretation seems to overlook characters such as Steward Morgan, whom Morrison describes as “insolent and unapologetic” (299). Steward’s status as a town leader (and the person who shot Connie) makes his lack of remorse especially problematic for Ruby as a whole. Indeed, Morrison ominously refers to Steward as “the stronger man,” an assessment that seems to negate the extent to which an absolved Deacon could change Ruby’s fate.

Conclusion The great debate surrounding the novel is a question of truth and ontology: are the women truly alive at the end of the novel? Have they been resurrected, or are these simply imagined presences, revenants (Tally 83), or something else? Do the women exist solely in a liminal space? I argue that the answer to these questions lies in the novel’s epigraph, the poem “Thunder, Perfect Mind”: For many are the pleasant forms which exist in numerous sins, And incontinencies, And disgraceful passions And fleeting pleasures, Which men embrace until they become sober And go up to their resting place. And they will find me there, And they will live, And they will not die again. [Emphasis added]

They are alive, it seems. Morrison’s deliberate and telling choice of epigraph reveals that the women live. As mentioned previously, the novel

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is widely known for revealing the story’s climax in the opening paragraphs of the first chapter. I argue that the novel’s end actually appears before the first chapter begins—that is, in the epigraph. Morrison has artfully revealed the women’s fate—that they are alive—before readers are even aware that the women have been shot. The epigraph and the novel’s final page combine to answer questions of the novel’s truth. On the final page, Morrison describes an otherworldly utopia that is in some ways a perfected version of the Convent itself. When Connie, who eventually accepted and used her supernatural ability to help and heal people, began providing a form of therapy to the women, she described to them a land of impossible beauty: She told them of a place where white sidewalks met the sea and fish the color of plums swam alongside children. She spoke of fruit that tasted the way sapphires look and boys using rubies for dice. Of scented cathedrals made of gold where gods and goddesses sat in the pews with the congregation. Of carnations tall as trees. Dwarfs with diamonds for teeth. Snakes aroused by poetry and bells. Then she told them of a woman named Piedade, who sang but never said a word. (263-64)

All are welcome here; all are accepted and equal. The imagery of “gods and goddesses” is especially remarkable, as it demonstrates the inclusiveness and egalitarianism that mark true utopias. In a 1998 New York Times article, interviewer Dinita Smith questioned Morrison about the novel’s conclusion. Morrison responded, “The whole point is to get paradise off its pedestal, as a place for anyone…” (qtd. in Smith). This description applies to the Convent itself as readily as it applies to the novel’s triumphant final page. It is significant that Connie’s description of a perfect place encapsulates the novel’s previously discussed theological stance regarding utopias and dystopias. Moreover, Connie’s depiction is similar to that of the final page, wherein Morrison reveals the women’s location after the encounters with their respective families: In ocean hush a woman black as firewood is singing. Next to her is a younger woman whose head rests on the singing woman’s lap. Ruined fingers troll the tea brown hair. All the colors of seashells—wheat, roses, pearl—fuse in the younger woman’s face. Her emerald eyes adore the black face framed in cerulean blue. Around them on the beach, sea trash gleams. Discarded bottle caps sparkle near a broken sandal. A small dead radio plays the quiet surf. There is nothing to beat this solace which is what Piedade’s song is about. (318)

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Outside the confines of the novel, Piedade is also the name of a forgotten, legendarily beautiful village in Brazil; readers will remember that Connie was rescued from Brazil. However, it seems that Piedade—the village—is the women’s permanent utopia at the end of the novel. Moreover, they have been imbued (perhaps through Piedade herself) with immortality—the very gift that Ruby was certain it had, until the men violated their sacred agreement. While living at the Convent, the women were not merely hiding from dystopias—they were working. Their work was to help and restore the broken people who found themselves, for whatever reason, seeking shelter at the Convent. This work has followed them into this new phase in their lives—into their second life, that is. Melanie R. Anderson’s article “‘What would be on the other side?’: Spectrality and Spirit Work in Toni Morrison’s Paradise” also takes up this issue: “The Convent women have achieved a similar state of being in that they are free to move wherever they are needed for healing” (316). The women are no longer in need—they are able to meet others’ needs for love and acceptance. Morrison writes on the novel’s final page, “Another ship, perhaps, but different, heading to port, crew and passengers, lost and saved, atremble, for they have been disconsolate for some time. Now they will rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in paradise” (318). The woman with the “tea brown hair” is certainly Connie, as the description perfectly characterizes her. Moreover, Morrison implicitly places the other women alongside Connie and Piedade. Shortly before the novel’s close, Morrison describes Grace swimming in a lovely, secluded locale, where “she looked toward the lake where her companion was just coming ashore” (311). The imagery of water and renewal implies that by the novel’s end, all the women are together in “paradise” (318). There, the women are part of a larger community in their new utopia—one that does not “necessitate exclusion” (Mulrine). It is welcoming and loving, an unqualified paradise where all are welcome—just as all were welcome at the Convent. The novel’s end—its truth—is in its very beginning.

Works Cited Agular, Sarah Appleton. “‘Passing On’ Death: Stealing Life in Toni Morrison’s Paradise.” African American Review 38.3 (2004): 513-9. Print. Anderson, Melanie R. “‘What Would Be on the Other Side?’: Spectrality and Spirit Work in Toni Morrison’s Paradise.” African American Review 42.2 (2008): 307-21. Print.

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Atieh, Majda R. “Another Night, Another Story: The Frame Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Paradise and Alf Laylah Wa Laylah [The Arabian Nights].” Contemporary African American Fiction: New Critical Essays. Ed. Dana A. Williams. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2009. 119-35. Print. —. "The Revelation of the Veiled in Toni Morrison's Paradise: The Whirling Dervishes in the Harem of the Convent." Melus 36.2 (2011): 89-107. Print. Bent, Geoffrey. "Less Than Divine: Toni Morrison's Paradise." Southern Review 35.1 (1999): 145-9. Web. 13 Sept. 2012. Griffith, Johnny R. “In The End Is The Beginning: Toni Morrison's PostModern, Post-Ethical Vision Of Paradise.” Christianity & Literature 60.4 (2011): 581-610. Print. Kakutani, Michiko. “‘Paradise’: Worthy Women, Unredeemable Men.” Rev. of Paradise, by Toni Morrison. The New York Times 6 Jan 1998. Web. 12 Jan. 2013. Morrison, Toni. Paradise. New York: Plume, 1997. Print. Mulrine, Anna. “This Side of ‘Paradise’.” U.S. News & World Report 124.2 (1998): 71. Web. 12 Sept. 2012. Smith, Dinita. "Toni Morrison's Mix of Tragedy, Domesticity And Folklore." New York Times 08 Jan. 1998: 1. Web. 12 Sept. 2012. Stave, Shirley A., ed. Toni Morrison and the Bible: Contested Intertexualities. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2006. Print. Sweeney, Megan. “Racial House, Big House, Home: Contemporary Abolitionism in Toni Morrison's Paradise.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 4.2 (2004): 40-67. Print. Tally, Justine. Paradise Reconsidered: Toni Morrison’s (Hi)stories and Truths. Forecast 3. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction P, 1999. Print. Verdelle, A.J. "Paradise Found." Essence (Essence) 28.10 (1998): 78. Web. 12 Sept. 2012.

III MARGARET ATWOOD

BREAKING THE CIRCLE OF DYSTOPIA: ATWOOD’S THE HANDMAID’S TALE ADELINA CATALDO

By questioning the generic conventions of genre, feminist science fiction writers have contributed to the extension of the utopian, and above all, the dystopian text. In particular, as Raffaella Baccolini points out (Baccolini 2000), they have contributed to the creation of a new genre, the “critical dystopia,” which includes both utopian and dystopian elements. The expression recalls Tom Moylan’s “critical utopia” (Moylan 1986), in which one of the main novelties consists in breaking the boundaries, and thus transforming the closed pattern of “integration-rebellion-integration” (Manferlotti 43), into an open one, with an ambiguous ending that refuses any form of closure. The “open-ended dystopia,” as Baccolini defines it (Baccolini 2000), is the form of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which represents an attempt to break the boundaries represented by the suffocating circle of her dystopian society, and, together with it, the circle of imprisonment represented by patriarchal politics, which she obviously questions and radically opposes. The image of circles breaking, of the desperate attempt of the protagonist to find some form of escape, was certainly not a novelty for Atwood. In The Circle Game, her major book of poetry, that won her the Governor General’s Award for 1966, and in particular, in the poem that gives the title to the book, there is the same imagery of rooms, mirrors and enclosures, and thus a series of circle games within which the speaker struggles in order to escape. In the first part, this essay aims at pointing out Atwood’s use of the dystopian text as a means for escape, a rebellion against the sense of closure imposed by the novel, and, as a consequence, the refusal of any definite truth or meaning, which is also reflected in the incompleteness or fragmentation of her narrating character. The second part, instead, focuses on Atwood’s use of the circle/closure imagery in the dystopian text, also with reference to her poetry. As Dorothy Jones points out, The Handmaid’s Tale continually demonstrates how enclosed systems, with their restraints of human freedom and imagination, are essentially life-denying, but the dystopia itself, and,

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indeed, the literary form of the novel, are also closed systems” (Jones 41). The novel thus represents a closed system from which Atwood wants to escape, and, in fact, “The use the author makes of genres, and the device of doubling and intertextuality, challenges notions of unity, singularity and order, displaying a predilection for multiplicity” (Rao 3), also in relation to character. Although the difficulty of reaching truth by linguistic and literary means is a typical modernist assumption, Atwood infuses the typical mimetic conventions with self-reflexivity, as postmodernist fiction does, in order to reproduce the multiplicity of reality (Rao XXI). Further, according to Mary Jacobus, “The revisitation of literary genres has […] been a privileged form of writing by women writers, as it signifies a challenge to the literary structures that women writers necessarily inherited.” (Jacobus 16). Atwood thus challenges male literary structures, although fully aware of the importance of the conventions which form the contract between author and reader, and as she once commented in an interview: You have to understand what the [literary] form is doing, how it works, before you say, “Now we’re going to make it different, we’re going to do this thing which is unusual, we’re going to turn it upside down, we’re going to move it so it includes something which isn’t supposed to be there, we’re going to surprise the reader. (Ingersoll 193)

According to Baccolini: “Genres are cultural constructions; implied in the notion of genre and of boundaries lies a binary opposition between what is ‘normal’ and what is ‘deviant’ (Baccolini 1992, 139), which is exactly what feminist theorists try to deconstruct, in order to escape the state of inferiority to which the opposition has traditionally confined women, and thus their literary production.” Deconstructing genres thus becomes a way of deconstructing certain values on which the patriarchal order is based. So, as Baccolini points out, Atwood subverts the traditional dystopia, inhabited by silent and passive women who often embody the most negative values of that society, and creates for her protagonist “an alternative world to the one which is usually possible for women in negative utopias” (137). Another disrupting feature consists in the fact that the feminine subject is presented as plural, since, as Luce Irigaray states, multiplicity begins at the very level of women’s anatomy: “Women do not have one sex organ. They have at least two […]. Their sexuality […] is plural/multiple.” (Irigaray 27). Therefore, although dystopias are already subversive for themselves, Atwood manages to appropriate this genre in a way that is significantly new. First of all, Offred, the rebellious protagonist, is a

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woman, different from those in other “classical” dystopias, such as Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. Secondly, the narrating voice belongs to the protagonist herself, which makes her more than just an anonymous character, although the reader never learns her real name. Her narrative is rich in psychological analysis, which is lacking in the dystopian novels just mentioned, and, according to Coral Ann Howells, it is this narrative strategy which allows Atwood to reclaim a feminine space of personal emotions and individual identity (Howells 164). Atwood intentionally blends different genres into the dystopian skeleton, such as the fairy tale – as is clearly detectable even in the title – the history, the autobiography, the realistic narrative and even the epistolary novel, although Offred never writes, since writing is forbidden in Gilead. In fact she tells her story to a tape-recorder, and through that, to a generalized “you,” in whose existence she needs to believe: “A story is like a letter. Dear You, I’ll say. Just you, without a name. Attaching a name attaches you to the world of fact, which is riskier, more hazardous: who knows what the chances are out there, of survival, yours?” (Atwood 150). Moreover, Offred’s story is presented as a series of registrations which have been found and subsequently assembled by a group of male historians, and, in particular, by Prof. Peixoto, who appears as the narrating voice in the final section of the “Historical Notes,” and is particularly intent upon the task of devaluing what in the end is just a woman’s tale. The strategy of the framed narration seems to give the novel an appearance of fact, a historical fact looked back upon from a distant moment in the future; this, despite the uncertainty that surrounds Offred’s mode of narration, which, as she keeps reminding us, is just a “reconstruction.” In fact, It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many. (144)

The time of the events that are described is located in the future, although that future is not so far from the reality of the ideal reader, due to the typical dystopian device of extrapolation that the author exploits for her critical purposes. The future thus represents a privileged observing point to look at present events, creating an estranging effect, which allows a detached consideration of present society and, therefore, of the gender politics of the author’s present and past times, without excluding the possibility of change. Indeed, as Tom Moylan points out, “Many dystopias

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are self-consciously warnings,” but warnings also imply that “choice and therefore hope are still possible” (Moylan 2000, 136). The Handmaid’s Tale focuses on the possible consequences of neoconservative religious and political trends of the 1880s in the United States. Atwood presents the reader with a critical analysis of North American feminism, from the Women’s Liberation Movement of her mother’s generation to the Christian fundamentalism of the 1980s, represented here by the Commander and even better by the overzealous Aunts. The dystopian society of Gilead even serves as a parody for some of the main ideas belonging to second wave feminism, such as the essentialist definitions of femininity, the anti-rape and anti-porn movements. It likewise represents a sort of denunciation of the dangers inherent in the conservative attitude concerning gender politics during Atwood’s own time. Moreover, what is pointed out as particularly dangerous is women’s indifference and lack of commitment: Is that how we lived then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now. We lived as usual. By ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously […]. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. […]. We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories. (Atwood 66-67)

As other dystopian protagonists, Offred finds herself “trapped inside a space and a narrative where she is denied any possibility of agency,” but, “under such threat of erasure she fights for her psychological and emotional survival as she tells her story” (Howells 164). In fact, “within such constraints she needs to tell stories if only to herself, as a way of escape from the time trap of the present” (166). Offred manages to survive by escaping the present and slipping back into the past, although time itself represents a trap: What I need is perspective. […] Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. […] Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.

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Breaking the Circle of Dystopia: Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale But that’s where I am now, there’s no escaping it. Time’s a trap, I’m caught in it. I must forget about my secret name and all ways back. (Atwood 153)

In many ways, Offred is like the flowers in Serena Joy’s garden, which are always “bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamour to be heard, though silently” (161). As Madeleine Davies observes, “All of Atwood’s female tellers of their own stories are emerging from a lifetime of enforced or self-imposed silence […] and this in part accounts for the repeated images and metaphors connected with muteness, secrecy, and tonguelessness […].” (Davies 63). Her narrative is a way to create alternative realities, as when she tells stories differently from how things actually happened, a way to escape the enclosures represented by objective narration. Atwood, through her protagonist, refuses the idea of a definite truth or meaning: “The things I believe can’t all be true, though one of them must be. But I believe in all of them […]” (Atwood 116). Further, “If it’s only a story, it becomes less frightening” (154). So that her telling “stories” makes her feel as if what she is telling were an invention, and she might convince herself that reality stands somewhere else: I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off. (49)

Telling a story for Offred is like talking to someone and thus coming out of the labyrinth of her own mind, escaping the circle of her consciousness: “But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else” (49). Moreover, Offred’s narrative represents a way to re-appropriate her own body: “I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing.” (83). On the other hand, it also gives her a chance to transcend that body which “determines [her] so completely” (73). In fact, pollution, in particular radioactivity, has greatly reduced fertility and thus birth rates. A great number of children are born deformed and do not survive, or are sent somewhere out of sight. For these reasons childbearing has assumed a sort of sacred value, though it also paradoxically justifies women’s oppression and degrading to mere body: “We are twolegged wombs, that’s all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices” (146).

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Nonetheless, as Eleonora Rao reminds us, “Motherhood in this novel retains both the oppressive aspects of a ‘patriarchal institution,’ as well as the pleasurable facets of the experience” (Rao 19). In her past life, Offred was a loving mother, and now that her little daughter has been taken away, she cannot help thinking of her, trying to recapture images, smells and sounds of the time when they were together. The handmaid no longer has a name, apart from the one that states who she belongs to“Of-Fred.” After a period of psychological training, handmaids are in fact assigned to Commanders for reproductive purposes, on the basis of biblical precedents. They are not allowed to read or write, walk down the streets alone or go any farther than the limits imposed upon them, and they cannot cultivate any relationships. They are under constant surveillance and have to dress in red gowns that cover their whole body. Even their faces must be partly concealed, by means of the white wings that frame it, limiting their visual field. Their whole existence revolves around the monthly “ceremony,” during which the Commander and his infertile wife try to conceive an heir for themselves, by disposing of the handmaid’s body as a sort of surrogate mother. If a handmaid fails to produce a baby after being assigned to three different Commanders, she is sent to the Colonies, together with the Unwomen, where they clean up toxic waste, until they die. Handmaids are therefore reduced to pure bodies or “vessels,” and thus denied any kind of personal identity. In fact Offred’s identity has been “shattered,” exactly like the glass that Cora breaks upon entering her room, and at the end of the novel, she “is revealed to be merely a disembodied voice” (Rao 44), as fragmented as her narration: “I’m sorry there is so much pain in this story. I’m sorry it’s in fragments, like a body caught in a crossfire or pulled apart by force” (Atwood 279). Indeed, according to Rao, the connection between self/text/body is also indicated by the fact that the story itself is described in anthropomorphic terms (83): “But I keep on with this…limping and mutilated story” (Atwood 279). Offred tries to “compose” herself through her narration, while the reader must “compose” his/her own reading of the story. As Madonne Miner points out, the way Offred composes words during the scrabble games with the Commander suggests how we might try to read the novel itself: […] when composing words, Offred must restrict herself to letters she draws from those spread out on the desktop; similarly, we are to compose our readings of The Handmaid's Tale relying upon what is "in" the text. But finally, just as Offred and the Commander "bend the rules" to allow for a more free-wheeling creativity, so too we may find that "taking up extra

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The connections that Offred repeatedly finds, and then denies, between different words, meanings and things, forces the reader to consider further connections, and thus take a chance for different readings (Miner 152-53). Likewise, Offred often stops to reflect on the various meanings of words, such as when she considers the meaning of the word “chair”: I sit in the chair and think about the word chair. It can also mean the leader of a meeting. It can also mean a mode of execution. It is the first syllable in charity. It is the French word for flesh. None of these facts has any connection with the others. These are the kind of litanies I use, to compose myself. (Atwood 120)

According to Miner, this passage, along with the one describing the blood-red smile associated to tulips, suggests “that the signifying system cannot be arrested, cannot be contained” (153). The connections are also of course between past and present meanings, so that the Commander leads the word games in the sense that he is the one actually entitled to decide how to use and compose words just as Luke was the “word authority” (154), as Miner observes, in Offred’s past marriage. Offred repeatedly tells about Luke’s knowledge and interest in words, as when she remembers his explanation of the word “Mayday”: "It's French, he said. From m'aidez” (Atwood 54). Miner has pointed out many parallels between Luke and the Commander, as for example the hotel room to which the Commander takes Offred, which is the same one she used to meet Luke at. Besides, Miner suggests that: “Luke is the one who introduces the topic of difference, as if intent upon sustaining it” (Miner 156). Although Nick is quite different from the other two male characters, there are clues of some connections, as is suggested by the reference to the mushroom-colored carpeting. Each of the “affairs” reflects the other in one way or another, as through a series of mirrors, which once again lead back to Atwood’s predilection towards multiplicity. Through such multiplicity, which presents itself at every level, she also challenges the notion of the homogeneous ego, and this “yields in Atwood’s fictional world a specifically gendered vision wherein woman is more inclined than man to assume a multiplicity of roles and positions” (Rao 45). Offred is continually trying to “compose” her story, and along with the “reconstruction” of her tale, she is trying to gather the fragments in order to put her own self back together: “I compose myself. My self is a thing I

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must now compose, as one composes a speech” (Atwood 76). But, as Eleonora Rao points out, “the self is shown to be unable to produce a faithful narrative of itself and identity becomes an ‘elusive’ construct” (7980). The fact that both narrative and self are presented as incomplete is the outcome for Atwood’s resistance to closure. She manages to break the circle of dystopia by reserving some space for hope. Although the reader does not know whether the ending of the story coincides with the end of Offred’s life, or with a new beginning, the “historical notes” make it clear that she must have survived sometime after her escape, just as Atwood’s ancestor, Mary Webster, had survived after her hanging. “Hope,” in fact, is not totally absent from Offred’s narration, although it is just a word still written only on the gravestones in the cemetery and on one of the two missing cushions which Serena Joy must have stowed somewhere, but has not thrown away. * Offred’s hope is to survive, “keep on living, in any form” (298), but also to escape, to step outside the circle that encloses her, and to reappropriate her own life. Thus every little thing that seems to set a crack in the dystopian circle represents to her some reason for hope, such as the cigarettes Serena Joy possessed: “The cigarettes must have come from the black market, I thought, and this gave me hope” (24). The whole tale is scattered with images of enclosures, such as the room, the walls, the barbed wire, the rope that “segregates.” Likewise there are many examples of mirrors that together with the circle imagery contribute to create a sense of entrapment, which can be found also in Atwood’s early poem, “The Circle Game”: Being with you here, in this room is like groping through a mirror whose glass has melted to the consistency of gelatin (2: 1-6)

In this same poem, besides the circle and the mirror, we find “trenches” (3:27), and also “[…] a lake enclosed island/with no bridges” (3: 32-33). This kind of imagery, in the poem, as in the novel, is curiously

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linked to man’s use of words, to what Atwood refers to as “word-plays,” used to keep her at a distance: Returning to the room: I notice how all your wordplays, calculated ploys of the body, the witticisms of touch, are now attempts to keep me at a certain distance and (at length) avoid admitting I am here (4: 1-10)

Even in The Handmaid’s Tale, words stand with power, that is they serve to create and justify male dominion and female oppression. Such ideas recall Lacan’s symbolic order, also called “The Law of the Father,” which generates meanings and therefore power. As Pam Morris points out: Both Freud and Lacan insist on gender as social construction, not as inborn destiny […] However [Lacan’s] theories seem to release women from biology only to lock them into another form of determinism. Instead of women’s lack of a penis making their inferior status inevitable, Lacan theorizes a symbolic order that enacts an equally irresistible subordination of women. The process of constructing a social identity is the process whereby language positions us into our expected place within the Law of the Father. (Morris 107)

Only when Offred re-appropriates language through her narrative and enters the word-game of scrabble with the Commander can she feel she has some power and has thus, in a way, broken the circle. The power of words is also symbolized by the pen, which recalls Lacan’s idea of the phallus as signifier: “The pen between my fingers is sensuous, alive almost, I can feel its power, the power of the words it contains” (Atwood 196). Reference to Freud is also marked by Atwood’s clever use of the pun “Pen-is envy” (196). The pen, significantly presented as an instrument for tracing boundaries, also appears in “The Circle Game,” in which we read: And I remember that You said In childhood you were A tracer of maps (not making but) moving

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A pen or a forefinger Over the courses of the rivers, the different colours that mark the rise of mountains; a memorizer of names (to hold these places in their proper places) So now you trace me Like a country’s boundary Or a strange new wrinkle in Your own wellknown skin And I am fixed, stuck Down on the outspread map Of this room, of your mind’s continent (4: 19-38)

The speaker here feels entrapped in the man’s game of tracing and naming, in order to hold everything in its proper place and assimilating the Other, turning it into a mirrored image of man himself, an image of difference which serves to define his masculinity. According to Kathleen Wheeler: “throughout her explorations of language and discourse, [Atwood] suggests that language is available either to entrap us or to liberate us, whether men or women” (268). Moreover, “She has shown that deception is inherent in language, that figures are fundamental to it and are not merely ornaments, and then has insisted that language is available as either a release and a transformative power or as a trap and a force of subjugation” (268). The only male character in the novel that does not “have the word” is Nick, who significantly becomes Offred’s escape from the dystopian circle, first at the psychological level, since Offred falls in love and thus finds in him someone that can make her feel human and alive, despite her state of subjugation, and then by concretely organizing her escape. Love is the real subversive force present in the novel, since it is exactly what the regime has tried to destroy. That is why, when the Commander asks for Offred’s opinion about what the regime has overlooked, her answer is simply “Love” (Atwood 231). As has already been anticipated, in Atwood’s novel, images of circles serve to entrap the protagonist within the limits imposed by patriarchal and dystopian society, but the circles also have other connotations. In fact, circles represent the sun, and thus male power, but they also stand for the maternal principal. Moreover, the circle represents the female, as opposed

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to vertical male. An example of Atwood’s use of such symbolism is present already in the very first page, which gives the reader an introductory description of the Center where handmaids are trained for their future task: “We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there” (Atwood 13). Circles invade the whole narration, even at the level of its structure, as in the cyclic presentation of time, with the alternation of night and day, as can be observed in the section titles in which “night” is alternated with the other sections describing daytime events. Offred prefers the night, since she says that: “The night is mine, my own time, to do as I will [..]” (47). So that when she lies in bed and is left alone with her thoughts and memories, she slips out of the circle and is again in control of her mind and may pretend she can just “step sideways out of [her] own time” (47). Time, with its cyclic repetition of day and night, of the seasons coming and going, increases Offred’s sense of entrapment, as if things proceed inevitably along a circular line that she feels unable to break. But Offred’s time is mostly marked by another cycle, which is in relation to the lunar one, and is that of her own menstrual calendar, around which her whole existence now turns: I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black. Pinpoints of light swell, sparkle, burst and shrivel within it, countless as stars. Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. It transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time. (84)

Even in “The Circle Game”, cyclic time, the return of the seasons and thus repetition are part of the suffocating game from which the speaker wants to break free: Summer again; In the mirrors of this room The children wheel, singing The same song; (7: 1-4)

Moreover: You make them Turn and turn, according to The closed rules of your games,

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But there is no joy in it And as we lie Arm in arm, neither Joined nor separate (your observations change me To a spineless woman in a cage of bones, obsolete fort Pulled inside out), Our lips moving Almost in time to their singing, (7:21-33)

And in the end: I want to break These bones, your prisoning rhythms (winter, summer) all the glass cases, erase all maps, crack the protecting eggshell of your turning singing children: I want the circle broken. (7:50-60)

The children, turning mechanically and with no joy, remind the reader of Offred’s position in the dystopian “game”, in which patriarchal rules keep her in a childish condition in which, at times, she even feels like a doll, as when she loses her job and senses something has changed in her relationship to Luke: “I felt shrunken, so that when he put his arms around me, gathering me up, I was small as a doll” (Atwood 191). Other important images of “The Circle Game” that recur in The Handmaid’s Tale are those of mirrors and glass: There remains a mirror, on the hall wall. If I turn my head so that the white wings framing my face direct my vision towards it, I can see it as I go down the stairs, round, convex, a pier-glass, like the eye of a fish, and myself in it like a distorted shadow, a parody of something, some fairytale figure in a red cloak […]. A Sister, dipped in blood. (19)

The mirror, which is round, reflects her oppressed condition, which has erased her identity, turning her into a shadow or some fairytale figure, a sort of Little Red Riding Hood, in a red cloak representing the blood of menstruation, and thus defining her in biological terms. The mirror is, moreover, linked to moon symbolism because of its reflecting and passive

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characteristics; in fact it receives images as the moon receives the light of the sun. It also stands for the multiplicity of the soul or can be seen as a mythic door towards freedom (Cirlot 211). Of course, all these connotations may be found in Atwood’s use of the mirror symbolism. Apart from mirrors, Offred’s narrative presents other circular and oval figures, linked to female fertility, but which also contribute to create a sense of closure and suffocation. Inside these circles, Offred is always searching for a crack, or a hole that might present a chance for escape, so that each tiny rebellion becomes a “peephole” through which something else can be envisioned: In returning my pass, the one with the peach-colored moustache bends his head to try to get a look at my face. I raise my head a little, to help him, and he sees my eyes and I see his, and he blushes. […] I think of placing my hand on it, this exposed face. He is the one who turns away. It’s an event, a small defiance of rule, so small as to be undetectable, but such moments are the rewards I hold out for myself, like the candy I hoarded, as a child, at the back of a drawer. Such moments are possibilities, tiny peepholes. (31)

Even the short conversations with her friend Moira, at the Red Centre, occur through “a small hole in the woodwork” (83), that the Aunts had not noticed, and when she thinks of what might have happened to Luke, she prays that: “at least one hole is neatly, quickly and finally through the skull, through the place where all the pictures were, so that there would have been only one flash, of darkness or pain” (114), and he would be free. Offred’s predecessor in the Commander’s household has likewise found her escape through death, by hanging herself on the chandelier that has been removed from Offred’s room, and what is left in its place is a blank space, a hole: “Above, on the white ceiling, a relief ornament in the shape of a wreath, and in the centre of it a blank space, plastered over, like the place in a face where the eye has been taken out” (17). When Offred lies in bed and looks at the wreath on the ceiling, she feels free to travel with her mind though space and time, another way to subtract herself from the regime’s design to confine her to her bodily being: “Today it makes me think of a hat, […] hats like an idea of paradise […]. In a minute the wreath will start to color and I will begin seeing things” (138). The wreath is circular and is also associated by Offred with the cyclic time which entraps her, and that is represented by the round face of the clock:

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I sit in my chair, the wreath on the ceiling floating above my head, like a frozen halo, a zero. A hole in space where a star exploded. A ring, on water, where a stone’s been thrown. All things white and circular. I wait for the day to unroll, for the earth to turn, according to the round face of the implacable clock. The geometrical days, which go around and around, smoothly and oiled. (210)

Besides the wreath, Offred’s tale also presents various images of flowers; she is particularly attracted by Serena Joy’s Garden, which, like her room, appears to be enclosed by walls and is also the place where Nature is subdued and ordered. The garden therefore stands for Offred’s repressed sexual desires, as is evident in all the flower imagery throughout the text, celebrating beauty and fertility. But Offred still believes in love, so the garden is for her the space of romantic fantasy and physical sensation, which are again an escape from her real circumstances. And when she comments on her story, she says: “I’ve tried to put some of the good things in as well. Flowers, for instance” (279). Nick is the character who embodies Offred’s romantic fantasy and that becomes her rescuer through love. He thus seems to belong more to romance than to realism, as the rough sketching of his character also suggests. Thanks to Nick, Offred has created a tiny space for herself in which life, even in Gilead, may be endurable: “Being here with him is safety, it’s a cave, where we huddle together while the storm goes on outside” (281). Instead, when Offred starts her affair with the Commander, she knows it is not love, but she feels that at least she now has something to do, something to think about, as with the “pig balls” she remembers being used for pigs who were fattened in pens (79). The Commander wants to see Offred alone in his room but, to her surprise, he asks no more than to play some scrabble. During their talks, he comments upon the present state of things, as if trying to justify what he and others have done, by looking back on the problems with women’s condition in the past: “Money was the only measure of worth, for everyone, they got no respect as mothers. […] This way they’re protected, they can fulfill their biological destinies in peace.” (231). As Offred herself remembers, women in the past were not protected: I remember the rules, rules that were never spelled out but that every woman knew: don’t open your door to a stranger, even if he says he is the police. […] Don’t stop on the road to help a motorist pretending to be in trouble. […] If anyone whistles, don’t turn to look. Don’t go into a Laundromat, by yourself, at night. (34)

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The Commander’s words thus recall Aunt Lydia’s discourse back at the centre: “There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t Underrate it” (34). Further, both the Commander and Aunt Lydia’s words can be seen as an exemplification for Offred’s satirical thought, while looking at the circle of plaster flowers on the ceiling: “Draw a circle, step into it, it will protect you.” (223). The reader, sympathetic with the narrator, has in fact already learned the price that must be paid for such a “protected” state. Offred is not the only rebellious character in the novel, but there are other courageous female figures that serve as a background. For instance, Ofglen is a member of the Underground movement, against the regime, and she is also, in a way, Offred’s double: “I watch her. She’s like my own reflection, in a mirror” (54). When Ofglen reveals herself thanks to the secret password “Mayday,” Offred thinks: “[…] I can’t believe it; hope is rising in me, like sap in a tree. Blood in a wound. We have made an opening” (178). Even the Commander’s wife is in a way Offred’s double: “I see the two of us, a blue shape, a red shape, in the brief glass eye of the mirror as we descend. Myself, my obverse.” (271). Serena Joy is likewise a victim of the patriarchal ideology that she herself had helped to consolidate. She is certainly unhappy with her life, and although she tries to fix Offred up with Nick, thus breaking the rules, she does not actually rebel against the system which has silenced her as well: Her speeches were about the sanctity of the home, about how women should stay home.” […] She doesn’t make speeches any more. She has become speechless. She stays in her home, but it doesn’t seem to agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word. (55-56)

An interesting rebel, and a comically heroic figure is Offred’s mother, who was an activist in the Women’s Liberation Movement and who has now disappeared, turned into an Unwoman by the regime. When deprived of the freedom her mother had fought for, Offred starts to admire her courage and also clings to her memory in the attempt to keep her alive. Finally, there is Moira, whom Offred believes to be a real heroine, a source of hope. She never becomes a handmaid, since she escapes from the Red Center and becomes, for the women still there, a kind of secret idol: “[…] Moira was our fantasy. We hugged her to us, she was with us in secret, a giggle; she was lava beneath the crust of daily life. In the light of

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Moira, the Aunts were less fearsome and more absurd. Their power had a flaw to it.” (143). Offred admires Moira, and when, in the end, she finds her, resigned and working as a prostitute at Jezebels, she feels she has lost someone to look up to, something to believe in: Have they really done it to her then, taken away something – what? – that used to be so central to her? But how can I expect her to go on, with my idea of her courage, live it through, act it out, when I myself do not? I don’t want her to be like me. Give in, go along, save her skin. That is what it comes down to. I want gallantry from her, swashbuckling, heroism, single-handed combat. Something I lack. (261)

Another female rebel, absent though present in Offred’s narration, is her predecessor at the Commander’s house, who is also another of her doubles: “Behind me I feel her presence, my ancestress, my double, turning in mid-air under the chandelier […]. How could I have believed I was alone in here? There were always two of us.” (305). The former handmaid had succeeded in leaving an inscription with a message for whoever would come after her. The sentence, which Offred feels as a link between her and the previous handmaid, is written in mock-Latin, and the Commander translates it as: “Don’t let the bastards grind you down” (197). Offred picks up the sentence, which appears as an appropriate response to the totalitarian regime, and cherishes it as a motto for her resistance against Gilead. In Offred’s narrative, all these characters therefore serve, in different ways, to highlight some of the main flaws in the totalitarian state, and contribute in striking a blow against it, even though a very light one. As Baccolini has pointed out, “Offred is not heroic; rather she lacks courage, tends to compromise, and is full of unsolved contradictions and selfish fears,” but her reflections are significant, since they “constitute a site of resistance and struggle against the obliteration of individuality the regime enforces.” (Baccolini 2000, 22). * To summarize, through her clever use of the dystopian novel, of which she subverts some of the main conventions, Atwood aims at transcending the notion of boundaries, obviously linked to the concept of genre, which also represents a typical feminist practice. But in The Handmaid’s Tale, the ideas of crossing limits, escaping enclosures and blurring divisions, in order to deconstruct the binary opposition man/woman, or normal/deviant,

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which lies at the basis of patriarchy, turn out to be strongly enhanced by Atwood’s skillful use of the circle/enclosure symbolism. Further, the use of such symbols in her 1985 novel does not represent a novelty in her production, since, as has been pointed out, the same images are already quite similarly employed in one of her best early poems, “The Circle Game,” and likewise help to create a striking effect which gives relevance to the suffocating feeling of oppression that traditionally pertains to female experience.

Works Cited Atwood, M. The Handmaid’s Tale, London, Virago Press, 1987. —. “The Circle Game”, The Circle Game, Toronto, Anansi, 1978. Baccolini, R., “Breaking the Boundaries: Gender, Genre, and Dystopia”, N. Minerva (ed.), Per una definizione dell’utopia. Metodologie e discipline a confronto, Ravenna, Longo, 1992, 137-46. —. “Gender and Genre in the Feminist Critical Dystopias of Katharine Burdekin, Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler,” M. S. Barr (ed.), Future Females, The Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism., Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, 13-34. Cirlot, J. E. A Dictionary of Symbols, New York, the Philosophical Library, 1971. Davies, M. “M. Atwood’s Female Bodies”, C.A. Howells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to M. Atwood, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006, 58-71. Howells, C. A. “Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions: The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake”, C. A. Howells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to M. Atwood, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006, 161-75. Ingersoll, E. G., ed. Margaret Atwood: Conversations. Princeton, N.J.: Ontario Review Press, 1990. Irigaray, L. This Sex Which is Not One. New York: Cornell, University Press, 1985. Jacobus, M. “The Difference of View.” M. Jacobus (ed.), Women Writing and Writing about Women. London: Croom Helm, 1979, 10-21. Jones, D. “Not Much Balm in Gilead.” Commonwealth 11.2 (Spring, 1989): 31-43. Manferlotti, S. Anti-utopia. Huxley, Orwell, Burgess. Palermo: Sellerio, 1984.

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Miner, M. “"Trust Me": Reading the Romance Plot in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.” Twentieth Century Literature 37.2 (Summer, 1991): 148-68. Morris, P. Literature and Feminism. Oxford UK & Cambridge USA,: Blackwell, 1993. Moylan, T. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and Utopian Imagination.,New York & London Methuen, 1986. —. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia, Boulder CO: Westview Press, 2000. Rao, E. Strategies for Identity. The Fiction of Margaret Atwood, New York: Peter Long, 1993. Wheeler, K., ed.. A Critical Guide to Twentieth-Century Women Novelists, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.

LAYERS OF TIME: MARGARET ATWOOD’S HANDLING OF TIME IN THE HANDMAID’S TALE CHARLOTTE TEMPLIN

Margaret Atwood writes in a variety of forms, including what is often called “speculative fiction” (which includes science fiction as well as utopian and dystopian fiction).1 Such works are usually ostensibly about the future—or are they? In the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin insists that writers do not make predictions. That might be the business of futurologists and clairvoyants, but not novelists, whose function is to invent stories—or “lie” as Le Guin says. And what of Atwood’s speculative fiction? Atwood certainly wants to tell a good tale, but she also turns an eagle eye on some cultural problems, specifically the persistent masculinist bias (even patriarchal control) in North American society and, by extension, North American or Western culture. 2Her innovative handling of time serves her purpose of critiquing the power relations of gender in patriarchal culture through time. For some critics, Atwood’s novel fails as a dystopian fiction because, in the words of Gorman Beauchamp, “there is insufficient “legitimate plausibility to her future,” and therefore no “real force” in her warnings (14). Beauchamp has been joined by some other reviewers and critics in wondering how we can fear a future that has so little grounding in current conditions (as they assert). Beauchamp questions whether there can be any probability in the idea of a take-over by the religious right, whether there is actually revolutionary zeal in Gileadean leaders, whether it is plausible to make the “patriarchy responsible for handmaidenry” (19). 1

Atwood’s novel is sometimes described as science fiction in reviews and articles. See Ketterer’s argument that Mary McCarthy’s unfavorable review arises from a mistaken belief that the work is a dystopia rather than science fiction. 2 See the article by Sandra Tomc for a reading of the novel that focuses on Canadian-US relations and on Atwood’s view of American society as the heir of Puritan extremists.

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However, we should not assume that Atwood aims to predict the future or indeed whether the creation of a legitimately plausible future is an aim of dystopian fiction. Yes, dystopian fictions point to current trends, and suggest serious threats to our well-being. The purpose is to make the reader examine the society we have created and to get to work on drastic alterations—or to allow the reader to gain the self-recognition that is the first step toward change. For Fredric Jameson and others the focus of dystopia (and speculative fiction) is on the idea of estrangement or defamiliarization: the goal is to “defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present” (244). We take our present for granted and accept its normality and inevitability. As Jameson explains, “elaborate strategies of indirection are therefore necessary if we are somehow to break through our monadic insulation and to ‘experience,’ for some first and real time this ‘present,’ which is (after all) all we have” (244). Such a strategy can make possible a transformed viewpoint and the unleashing of new energy, as our present is turned into the “past of something yet to come” (245). Andrew Milner agrees that the question suggested by Jameson is the correct one--not “Did the dystopian novelist get the future right?” but rather “Did the work sufficiently shock its own present as to force a meditation on the impossible?” (117). In Atwood’s “thought-experiment,” setting the action in a future time helps to achieve the goal of “defamiliarization.” But Atwood also reaches back to past generations in the telling of her tale, and she also includes an epilogue that takes place in the distant future. The one thing constant across the centuries is patriarchal control. Atwood implicitly suggests that we are in some way ignoring the continuing problem of the subordination and denigration of women Dystopias and other speculative fictions usually ostensibly adopt a linear concept of time. Atwood’s tale represents a departure from that formula. My paper explores Atwood’s handling of time, offering a reading of the novel as employing a technique I call “layers of time,” similar to Atwood’s description of time in Cat’s Eye. This approach suits Atwood’s feminist purpose suggesting that masculinist bias and patriarchal control have been with us for centuries and show little sign of disappearing. To drive home her critique, Atwood projects an extreme form of control of women into the not-so-distant future, with handmaids stripped of all autonomy and all women strictly regulated. In Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood describes time as “not a line but a dimension” (2), as having a solidity that permits one to look back through it, as through a series of layers. In that novel Atwood foregrounds a preoccupation with time, superimposing past on present and evoking past

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layers of time so effectively that at least one reviewer found justification for the novel in the mere archeology of a past time--in the recreation of forgotten “songs, phrases, tastes, sights and attitudes” of the forties and fifties (Fender 27). Atwood faces the challenge of all writers of dystopias, in the words of Andrew Milner: “how to represent naturalistically plausible danger sufficiently terrible to be threatening but insufficiently so as to be demoralizing” (116). The extreme deprivations and restrictions of Offred’s world shocked readers, but Atwood insisted that she found historical precedents for all the elements of Gilead.3 At the same time, Atwood has often been at pains to contradict the charge that she is a pessimist. She points out that her characters tend to be alive at the end of the novels. She saw a message of hope in Orwell’s 1984, asserting that the existence of the “Appendix on New Speak” must be an implicit statement that the horrors of Oceania have passed away (“Orwell”). Atwood’s handling of time in The Handmaid’s Tale may be an even more challenging undertaking than her task in Cat’s Eye as she telescopes the past and present of Offred, a child of the next generation, together with that of the reader, circa 1985, and by this means shocks us into the recognition that though we may pride ourselves on our progressive society, sexism and control of women have not gone away. In fundamental ways we seem stuck in past practices, and the horrors of Gilead are meant to induce the defamiliarization that may produce the shock that can bring about that “new relation to our own present.” Atwood underlines the seriousness of the situation by projecting, in the “Historical Notes,” a distant future society that seems characterized by the same pervasive sexism. Atwood’s subversion of time is one of the ways the novel attempts to startle, to disrupt, and subvert naturalized views of truth, finality and authority in order to challenge the power of patriarchal culture. Atwood’s approach involves postmodern techniques. Feminist writers have historically employed techniques of realism, seen as appropriate for a political stance that points to material conditions and seeks social change. It has sometimes been suggested that activism and postmodernism are antithetical, but Magali Cornier Michael and others have argued persuasively that postmodernism, defined as a realization of the constructed nature of all truths and all reality, can be utilized to open a space for progressive change. Michael demonstrates that while Atwood and others continue to rely on realist conventions, at the same time they use postmodern techniques to challenge those conventions: 3

See the article by Marilyn Elias.

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By juxtaposing realist and postmodern strategies, these writers offer a representation of the world that is familiar and thus both accessible and plausible to the reader while simultaneously disrupting the conventions of realism by foregrounding their contradictions and links to a Western metaphysic implicated in material oppression. (8)

Atwood has engaged in experimental narrative devices for her earliest days. (Linda Hutcheon refers to postmodern techniques as early as The Edible Woman.) Certainly the later novels contain elements that are selfconsciously experimental and that expose a craft characterized by the selfreflexivity that Hutcheon describes as fundamental to the postmodern. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood employs both the fracturing of time and the destruction of temporal boundaries implied by the inclusion of an epilogue that takes place centuries later yet delineates a society whose values mirror those of the late twentieth century. It could be said of The Handmaid’s Tale that never was a book about the future more firmly rooted in the past, but I think it is more pertinent to say Offred’s narrative suggests that past and present are not separable discourses. The permeability of the boundaries of time is an important theme in the novel. There are three temporal locations in the novel: Offred’s present as a Handmaid in Gilead, Offred’s memories of her personal past, and the distant future setting of the epilogue. In addition, the narrative reaches back into the past before Offred’s time, in the form of her knowledge of history and awareness of cultural continuity. However, far from representing a linear arrangement, these locations take the form of a palimpsest, a concept Offred herself invokes in her description of the former gymnasium that is the Rachael and Leah Center for Reeducation of Handmaids. That past, or as Offred frequently describes it, “the time before,” is also, importantly, the present of the contemporary reader. This pastpresent is evoked on the first page of the novel, as Offred muses about scenes that might have been witnessed in the dormitory of the center, formerly a high school gymnasium: . . . I thought I could smell, faintly like an after image, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls, felt-skirted as I knew from pictures, later in miniskirts, then pants, then in one earring, spiky green-streaked hair. (3)

This passage epitomizes a sleight of hand that Atwood deftly enacts throughout the novel. She needs to conflate our world and Offred’s. Offred is not the contemporary of the reader, circa 1985, but rather a child of our generation. Thus Offred’s “memories” of this particular scene are

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partly gained from photos, and the history of fashion that she gives reaches back several generations—hence the effect of palimpsest. The telling phrase “as I knew from pictures” reveals that Offred has no personal knowledge of the earliest forms of costume described—seemingly going all the way back to the fifties in the reference to felt skirts. Atwood (born in 1939) has incorporated her memories and the memories of her contemporaries as well as those born later in the century—has, in fact, conflated the memories of Offred and the reader. Since Atwood has chosen to present the novel in the first person, and our world is distinctly past for Offred, Atwood sometimes has to go to some lengths to get us in the picture, so to speak. There are a number of examples similar to the gymnasium passage quoted above, in which Atwood deftly merges past and present—or our world and Offred’s—as Offred evokes our world through references to events from the past that she has heard of, or seen pictures of, or has become aware of through reruns on TV. To achieve her purposes in the novel Atwood undertakes a telescoping of time that disrupts the notion of linear time and strains at the conventions of realism. As Offred looks back through layers of time, she reaches back as far as the late 1940’s (through photos and tales from her mother), and in that way her world becomes solidly connected to our own. The end result of Atwood’s fracturing of linear time is the establishment of the interrelatedness of past, present, and future, highlighting the pervasiveness of patriarchal control and the internalization of masculinist values in women. The narrative lays bare women’s collusion in their marginalization and oppression. The novel suggests that cultural attitudes are reproduced and that little real change can be indentified in the condition of women over generations—even centuries—because male control is so much a part of our cultural beliefs. Through postmodern devices, Atwood’s text, to use Offred’s words, has the effect of “[subverting] the perceived respectable order of things” (100). Offred is referring to her desire to undermine the repressive hypocritical order of Gilead, but, on another level, the phrase applies to Atwood’s attempts to subvert the binary metaphysic that underlies the sexist values developed through centuries of male control. Atwood has to do two things in setting the novel. One is to put the action far enough forward so as to create a futuristic world that is startling and strange--one capable of shocking us into seeing our own world more clearly. At the same time she must also make Offred’s past seem to be our past—and our present—so we identify with her. The effect is that we come to see that while change takes place on one level; on another level time is indivisible within a male-dominated culture that reaches back into the past and still exists in the 2195 of the epilogue.

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In her handling of time Atwood must successfully surmount any sense of disjuncture between a familiar world of Tupperware and Ms. magazine (both evoked in the novel) and a futuristic world in which technological change has moved on relentlessly and, more importantly, in which a social revolution has destroyed life as we know it. The masterful effect of strangeness in familiarity, or familiarity in strangeness, is achieved through the handling of time. There is realism in Atwood’s presentation of the material culture of the 1970s and 1980s, but Atwood also employs other effects to sidestep the canons of realism and create a psychic world not bound to realistic conventions of time. Atwood is careful to avoid giving information that would make for easy dating of the action in Offred’s narrative. Offred tends to refer to events in the past as having happened “years before.” The judgment of the novel’s many readers that the novel is a success would suggest that Atwood has succeeded in covering over the seams stitching the present to an imagined future. One telling point is the difficulty the novel’s readers have had in attempting to establish the time of the action. Reviewers offered various conjectures, ranging from John Updike’s “best estimate” that the events occurred “just before the year 2000” (118) to P. Cousins’ assertion that the novel is set “in the U.S. nearly a century from now” (1384). In between are various other suggestions, including Alan Cheuse’s “only a few generations from now” (4D); Grace Ingoldby’s “in the twentyfirst century” (31) and Judith Fitzgerald’s “circa 1990” (30). The uncertainly of the novel’s readers about the date of the setting is the more understandable in view of the fact that Offred herself makes statements that have the effect of bringing about a blurring of time and that any dating of events in the novel is dependent on interpolations gained from close reading. One could say that Atwood is being coy about the actual date of Offred’s narrative, but this coyness is a strategy that relates to the deepest levels of meaning of the novel. The reference to the fact that priests gave up wearing cassocks “years ago, when the sect wars first began” (57) makes it seem that the Gileadean regime may have been in power longer than it has. Offred’s choice of words is slightly odd for a new regime, in its first generation, having been in existence for a fairly limited amount of time, as we know from the fact that Offred is beginning her third two-year posting as a handmaid. But Offred’s sense of time may be affected by the rapid changes she has seen and the trauma she has endured. The most forthright dating of the narrative occurs in the “Historical Notes” set in 2195. A Professor Pieixoto is identified as the author of a “well—known” study entitled “Iran and Gilead: Two Late-Twentieth-

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Century Monotheocracies, as Seen Through Diaries.” Thus, it would seem that Atwood is imagining something that might happen to a child born about the time the novel was written in the early eighties, or even Atwood’s daughter, who was born in 1976. When, however, we do a close reading of Offred’s narrative itself and extrapolate a date for the action from the meager historical allusions the narrative contains, we find hints that seem to point to a later dating of events. One such example is the Take-Back-the–Night marches. These marches began in 1978 (Lederer 15) and continued while Atwood was writing the novel. Offred sees her mother in a film of a march, and describes her as young, “younger than I remember her, as young as she must have been, once before I was born,” and also comments that “her face was very young” (153). We know that Offred is 33 and that she was born when her mother was 37. If Offred’s mother had been, say, 25, in 1978, Offred would have been born in 1990 and would be describing, in the present of the novel, events which took place in 2023. We are talking about approximate dates, but if we assume that Offred’s mother was in her twenties at the time of the marches, the present of the tale would be later, by about twenty years, than the turn of the century. There is no way of getting the numbers to work to support the idea of a twentieth-century setting. One other passage gives some hints toward dating the action. In Chapter 24, Offred remembers seeing, at age “seven or eight,” a documentary about World War II “made years before” (188). Along with archival film clips, the documentary features a series of interviews made at a later date with people still living, including a mistress of a man who had run one of the death camps. The interview is said to have taken place “forty or fifty years later” than the events spoken of in the interview (the life the speaker shared with the man at the time of WWII). Thus the interview would most likely have been done between 1985 and 1995. We cannot say exactly when Offred saw the interview because her dating of the viewing is vague (a realistic touch given that she is talking about childhood memories), but she would have to have seen it some years after 1985. If it had been made in 1985 when she was, say four years old (and she saw it three years later), we could place the action of the Tale in 2024, given her age of 33. Offred may also be referring to this documentary in Chapter 12 when she mentions a film (I thought of The Sorrow and the Pity) she saw many years in the past showing women having their heads shaved in public (seemingly a reference to head-shaving done to French women who had consorted with German soldiers), but in that case she is extremely vague about dates: “Where did I see that film, about women, kneeling in the

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town square, hands holding them, their hair falling in clumps? What had they done? It must have been a long time ago because I can’t remember” (85). By telescoping of time Atwood has joined past, present and future. We note a density of allusions that ground the narrative in our present, and at the same time we are shown Offred existing in a futuristic nightmarish world. There is a density of references to North American life, many of which strongly suggest a time contemporary to the composition of the novel. Offred mentions plastic grocery bags as being phased out (replaced by more ecologically preferable paper), Agent Orange, date rape (the “trendy subject” of a character’s term paper), Tupperware, women’s magazines (Ms. and Vogue, illegally provided for Offred by her Commander), smilebutton faces, Playboy Bunny costumes, women’s networking, old movies (with Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, and Katherine Hepburn) Weight Watchers, granola, vats of ice cream in pastel colors and jimmies to put on it, the fashion of wearing one earring. Atwood’s evocation of the past is reminiscent of a similar archeology of manners in Cat’s Eye. The allusion to date rape, for example, as a trendy term paper topic, seem to come directly from a moment contemporary to the novel’s composition—and of course suggests male control through violence as an enduring fact. Through her references to past time, Offred reaches forward and pulls forward the seventies and eighties. She notes in Chapter 19 that schools were closed down in the eighties for lack of children, and both Offred and the Commander more than once casually refer to magazines from those years though Offred’s personal memories of the seventies could only be those of a very small child, at best. Grafted onto this familiar world is a world that is startlingly strange: the Gileadean society that Offred has been thrust into, of course, but also the world that had immediately preceded it. The reader becomes engrossed in a strange and fascinating world of the future, including new social roles for women (all with special costumes) and new social conventions. There are technological advances, predictable in our day, but with shock value nonetheless when we see how completely even a small “advance” can alter the lives of women. A centralized credit system, the “Compudoc,” makes it possible to deprive all those of the female gender of their money. Also startling are some social developments (just prior to Gilead). “Pornonmarts” and “Feels on Wheels” suggest a coarsening of the culture that may be just around the corner. Other developments are meant to be shocking: the epidemic of defective babies, the loss of the fisheries, rapid destruction of the environment. A good science fiction writer, Atwood projects contemporary tendencies into a future form, showing us a future

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that is horrifying as we see these developments in place is a world temporarily so little removed from our own. In some details developments in Gilead seem to have advanced almost too rapidly for credibility. It is vital to the plot that electronic transfer of funds should have replaced paper money, but paper money seems to be a long way in the past (too long for creation of a realistic timeline) based on Offred’s comments about her mother keeping some paper money in a scrapbook. The extreme problems with fertility seem appropriate for a more distant time than the turn of the century, as does the statistic that one baby in four is too defective to support life (Chapter 19). My pointing to such details is not a criticism of the novel, however, but further evidence of the telescoping of time—the bringing together of present and future. In several interviews, Atwood has spoken of an anxiety that her work would be considered too shocking and, in defense of her projections, she produced a clipping file that shows horrors like those she describes in the novel already on record (Elias). Her use of layers of time has the effect of compressing time, to the end of persuading the reader that her projections of the future are all too plausible while suggesting the pervasiveness of patriarchal control across time. Atwood implicates the reader’s generation in the responsibility for the society she describes. Clearly The Handmaid’s Tale has a feminist theme and mounts a strong critique of the profound male-centeredness in the culture and its naturalization among both men and women.4 At the same time, it is true that the novel suggests disapproval of the form of twentieth-century feminism called “cultural” feminism, a feminism that elevates a “women’s culture,” emphasizes the differences between male and female nature, and sees women as more in tune with natural and spiritual realms, more innately nurturing and less aggressive than men. (Some reviewers, such as Barbara Ehrenreich, praised Atwood for her critique of cultural feminism in the portrayal of Offred’s mother and the movement she is associated with.) Atwood finds any form of ideological hard line problematical. 5 The feminism of Offred’s mother is based on a kind of binarism that Atwood sees as a source of the problem. At the same time Atwood may be suggesting that Offred’s mother’s criticisms of the male-centered social order stemmed from the right 4

Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson says that Atwood’s goal is to “denaturalize the seemingly natural” (24). 5 As Barbara Hill Rigney says, “Atwood does not exonerate a radical feminist movement that she holds responsible for the original book burnings . . . . A ‘woman’s culture’ can be dangerous, Atwood indicates, as any other rigidly enforced system based on ideology” (144).

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impulses, and in hindsight Offred seems to have more respect for them. As a handmaid she sees more clearly the flaws of her past thinking and seems to regret her passiveness. In fact, her acceptance of gender inequality in the past serves as another means of bringing past and present together. Atwood subverts linear time in suggesting that the subordination of women in Gilead is different only in degree from the time before. Like George Orwell in 1984 Atwood included an epilogue. Atwood’s “Historical Notes” and Orwell’s “Appendix on New Speak” are framing devices indicating that the dystopian societies did not endure. If Orwell’s appendix was written by someone from a society that came after the dystopian present of the novel, his epilogue may be more hopeful than Atwood’s “Notes.” Yes, Gilead is just a historical episode, but Atwood presents a more troubling hint about the future. The symposium on Gileadean Studies is held in Denay, Nunavit. Atwood’s pun—“deny none of it”—underlines the fact that sexism is a dominant force in the distant future. The culture based on masculinist views has spread to the far corners of the earth (the far north) and has permeated what used to be native culture, as we see in the reference to Professor Maryann Crescent Moon. In the “Notes” we see a male-centered culture firmly in place, only dimly masked by a superficial progressivism. The speakers at the symposium expose their own sexism by condescending and sexist jokes. They distort Offred’s narrative to foreground the activities of male actors, and, in their emphasis on technical matters and public policy, they reveal themselves capable of only a surface understanding of Gilead. According to convention, the function of the epilogue is to provide closure, but Atwood uses the epilogue in a new way. The epilogue exposes the enduring nature of sexism, but it should be emphasized that the epilogue is merely a striking example of a technique used throughout the novel. The epilogue shows us the future to enable us to see the present, while Offred’s narrative brings together past, present, and future to dramatize the persistence of the sexist bias that has been fundamental to centuries of philosophical thought and that threatens the well-being of all humans. In Cat’s Eye Atwood speaks of time as having “shapes, something you can see, like a series of transparencies, one laid on top of another” (3). In The Handmaid’s Tale we see such layered transparencies--Offred’s present, her past, her mother’s time (or, in other words, our present time), and a time we can only imagine--all existing at once. It is through her structuring of time that Atwood brings home to us the cautionary nature of her tale.

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Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. Cat’s Eye. New York: Bantam, 1989. —. “George Orwell: Some Personal Connections.” Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing 1970-2005. London: Virago, 2005. 333-40. —. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Ballantine, 1987. Beauchamp, Gorman. “The Politics of The Handmaid’s Tale. Midwest Quarterly (Autumn 2009) 51.1: 11-25. Cheuse, Alan. “Margaret Atwood Stumbles on Science Fiction.”Rev. of The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. USA Today 7 Feb. 1986: 4D. Cousins, P. Rev. of The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. Choice May 1986: 1384. Ehrenreich, Barbara. “Feminism’s Phantoms.” Rev. of The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. New Republic 17 Mar. 1986: 33-35. Elias, Marilyn. “Author’s Version of Church and State as One.” Los Angeles Times 9 May 1986: 8-9. Fender, Stephen. “Eyeful of Feminism.” Rev. of Cat’s Eye, by Margaret Atwood. Guardian [Manchester and London] 27. Jan. 1989: 27. Fitzgerald, Judith. “A Necessary Allegory.” Rev. of The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. Canadian Forum Oct. 1985: 30-31. Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English Fiction. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1988. Ingoldby. Grace. “Lives of Quiet Despair.” Rev. of The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. New Statesman 23 Mar. 1986: 31. Jameson, Fredric. “Progress or Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science-Fiction Studies 9.2 (1982): 239-52. Ketterer, David. Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992. Le Guin, Ursula K. “Introduction.” The Left Hand of Darkness 1969: 1-6. —. “Introduction.” The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: ACE Books, 2000. xiii-xix Lederer, Laura. “Introduction.” Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography. Ed. Laura Lederer. New York: Morrow, 1980: 15-20. Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl. The Cambridge Introduction to Margaret Atwood. New York: Cambridge, 2010. Michael, Magali Cornier. Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse:Post World War Fiction. Albany: State UP of New York, 1996. Milner, Andrew. “Archaeologies of the Future: Jameson’s Utopia or Orwell’s Dystopia?” Historical Materialism (2009) 17.4: 101-119.

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O’Brien, Tom. Rev. of The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. Commonweal 25 April 1986: 251-53. Rigney, Barbara Hill. “Dystopia.” Rev. of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Canadian Literature 111 (Winter 1986): 143-44. Tomc, Sandra. “’The Missionary Position’”: Feminism and Nationalism in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Canadian Literature FallWinter 1983: 75-87. Updike, John. Expeditions to Gilead and Seagard.” Rev. of The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood and The Good Apprentice, by Iris Murdoch. New Yorker 12 May 1986: 118-23.



SCREEN MEMORIES: MATERNAL AFTER-IMAGES IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S DYSTOPIAN NOVELS KATHERINE V. SNYDER

“A movie about the past is not the same as the past,” reflects the protagonist of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale, acknowledging the inevitable discrepancy between representation and history, and between fantasy and reality. But what constitutes the past is itself a fraught issue for Atwood’s post-apocalyptic protagonists. Just as Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale suffers from a disturbed relationship to what she calls “the time before,” an unrecoverable yet also inescapably determinative earlier era in her life and history, so too do the postapocalyptic protagonists of Atwood’s 2003 Oryx and Crake and 2009 The Year of the Flood. The memories of these traumatized protagonists, like the post-apocalyptic narratives that render their stories, are conspicuously marked by gaps and repetitions. These disturbances of knowledge and of time itself signal the vexed relation of their individual pasts to their present lives, and of their fictional present lives to our future as envisioned by Atwood. Given the disturbances of memory that characterize the subjectivities of Atwood’s traumatized, post-apocalyptic protagonists, it is worth observing that these speculative narratives are replete with images of mediated memory: films, photos, audio-recordings, television broadcasts, and, in her more recent books, the Internet. The prevalence of such images in these novels suggests both the inescapability of the past in an age of mechanical reproduction, as well as the inevitability of that past’s technological mediation. In this essay, I will examine a particular type, or example, of mediated memory that appears in these post-apocalyptic novels: the return of the protagonist’s mother onscreen. Such images have a predictably complex status in and for the narratives in which they appear: they join the protagonist’s pasts to their present and our future, or



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perhaps they reveal the temporal distance separating past from present, and present from future; they also link these protagonists’ private lives to the public sphere, and link their familial histories to the political and environmental catastrophes that seem to have hastened an apocalyptic end of history; and they cross these temporal and spatial or conceptual divides, or reveal their permeability, by establishing and breaking boundaries that have long been associated with spectatorship and visuality. My interest in these particular filmic images of mediated memory is spurred, in part, by Shuli Barzilai’s analysis of “phototexts” (verbal representations of photographs) and “phototextuality” in Atwood’s poetry and in her 2000 novel, The Blind Assassin. The duality of such images as articulated by Marianne Hirsch—“the photograph’s capacity to signal absence and loss and, at the same time, to make present, rebuild, reconnect, bring back to life” (quoted in Barzilai 105)—is particularly vivid in the filmic images of mothers that appear in Atwood’s speculative fictions. And Barzilai’s description of the phototext as an act of protest—“And yet photographs and their transposition into language also constitute an act of resistance against death, against effacement and forgetting” (105)—has particular resonance for the images of abject and yet still resisting mothers that appear onscreen in both of these novels. Indeed, The Handmaid’s Tale with its attention to the subjection of women in a dystopian totalitarian theocracy, and Oryx and Crake with its focus on the dystopian potential of genetic engineering, as well as The Year of the Flood, Atwood’s 2009 “simultanequel” to Oryx and Crake and the second volume in a projected trilogy, might all be said to foreground the politics of sexual reproduction and the role of maternity in the making and unmaking of futurity. In what follows, I will argue that these uncanny filmic returns, or maternal afterimages, serve in their respective narratives as windows onto their postapocalyptic protagonists’ individual pasts but, as such, they also represent points of departure for re-envisioning our collective future.1

 1

In Powers of Horror, Kristeva explicitly links the ideas of “the abject” and “abjection” to the maternal body as a source of horror or disgust, as occupying a liminal position in relation to language or the symbolic order. It is no coincidence, I would argue, that the figures who particularly embody abjection for the protagonists of Atwood’s post-apocalyptic fictions are specifically mother figures, and especially mother figures whose status as technologically mediated or screened spectacles, at once projected and veiled, causes them to occupy the uncanny position of the “undead” or the “living dead.” But I would contend that it is not simply the mother’s physical body in the context of psychological individuation within the symbolic order that accounts for the abject status of the maternal in these novels. Rather, or additionally, it is the cultural, political, economic, and/or



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The Handmaid’s Tale The protagonist of The Handmaid’s Tale glimpses her mother onscreen for the first time when she and the other Handmaids at the Red Center are shown what Aunt Lydia contemptuously calls an “Unwoman documentary” (118). This footage of a 1970s feminist protest march is screened for the Handmaids, along with samples of violent pornography and snuff films from the same era, as part of their re-education prior to being assigned to their posts as reproductive surrogates. The filmed spectacle of this joyful crowd of young feminists, united in political solidarity—“smiling, laughing, they all move forward, and now they’re raising their fists in the air” (The Handmaid’s Tale 120)—is presented as a cautionary tale to the Handmaids, but it nonetheless stands in the text as a melancholic emblem of a lost past. This past is not envisioned in the novel as a utopian golden age, as some early critics of the novels mistakenly asserted, but rather as an era whose imperfections were offset by such public goods as permissible dissent, the freedom of speech and assembly, the right to advocate for what one believes is right and to protest what one believes is wrong. 2 Significantly, Offred recognizes onscreen a mother who is “younger than I remember her, as young as she must have been once before I was once born . . . I’ve forgotten my mother was once as pretty and as earnest as that” (The Handmaid’s Tale 119). This technologically mediated image of her mother is fundamentally uncanny: Offred is haunted here by a past that she herself has never truly known, by the ghost of a mother who returns but also, in a sense, arrives for the first time. The onscreen image of the familiar but unknown mother, moreover, embodies both the intersection of Offred’s past and the present, (or Atwood’s present and her imagined future), and the intersection of Offred’s private life and the public sphere, of her familial and the nation’s political history.

 technological relegation of these mother figures to something comparable to Agamben’s notion of “bare life” that fundamentally constitutes their abjection: mater sacra as a subtype, or archetype, of homo sacer. I would note, finally, that my emphasis on these mothers as abject-yet-still-resisting might be considered oxymoronic, since the play of identification and disidentification in abjection means that the abject is never absolute or without protest: “And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master. Without a sign (for him), it beseeches a discharge, a convulsion, a crying out” (Kristeva 2). 2 See Neuman’s critique of John Updike’s New Yorker review and Malak’s critique of Lorna Sage’s Times Literary Supplement review. Both critics challenge the reviewers’ notion that Atwood is celebrating a utopian present in The Handmaid’s Tale.



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The repurposing of the historical archive in this scene suggests, moreover, the extent to which meaning is mediated by individual and historical context. The movie is screened for its literally captive audience to teach them a lesson that inverts the feminist documentary’s original educational and inspirational purpose. This end is accomplished, in part, by reinforcing its viewers’ paranoia and uncertainty. While the original sound track is muted and the superimposed titles and names covered up by a censor’s black crayon, the signs carried by the feminist marchers shown in the film remain legible, in violation of the Gileadean prohibition against female literacy: The camera pans up and we see the writing, in paint, on what must have been a bedsheet: TAKE BACK THE NIGHT. This hasn’t been blacked out, even though we aren’t supposed to be reading. The women around me breathe in, there’s a stirring in the room, like wind over grass. Is this an oversight, have we gotten away with something? Or is this a thing we’re intended to see, to remind us of the old days of no safety? (The Handmaid’s Tale 119)

An oversight, or a deliberate message? Stolen utopian words from the past, or words subsumed by the dystopian message of the present? A similar ambiguity surrounds Offred’s recognition of her mother in the film: is it a mere coincidence that her mother appears in this film, or is it a planned part of her re-education? Is what Offred sees here in excess of what is intended, or does she see precisely what she is meant to see? What and whose ends are being served, yet also possibly subverted, by the shock of recognition afforded by the onscreen image of the mother? Offred’s mother appears again onscreen later in the novel, although her daughter does not witness this second appearance firsthand. Rather, the sighting is reported by her best friend, Moira, when they are reunited in the women’s room at “Jezebel’s,” the Commanders’ sex club. Moira tells her, “I saw your mother,” then describes how she spotted Offred’s mother in newsreel footage of elderly women at work in the colonies, disposing of the human casualties of warfare and cleaning up toxic waste. Here, as in the scene at the Red Center, Offred’s mother’s appearance on film is part of a propaganda effort, in this case to enlist Moira’s consent to a precarious life of prostitution at the heart of the regime, a choice she makes over an even barer life in the colonies. By contrast with her own experience in being shown the film, Moira reports this maternal sighting neither to enlist Offred’s consent to her own subjection nor to galvanize her to rebel. It is simply a gift to a friend, itself a dissident act in an



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authoritarian society that depends upon the strict control of information and the disruption of personal bonds. While the gift reveals the enduring bond between these friends, Moira nonetheless sharply corrects Offred’s conditioned sentimental response, “Thank God,” to the news that her mother has been seen alive: “She might as well be [dead], said Moira. You should wish it for her” (The Handmaid’s Tale 252). Given the dystopian nightmare of environmental poisoning and slow starvation, wishing for her mother’s death might well be considered an act of merciful kindness and daughterly devotion rather than one of filial betrayal or aggression. Moira’s bleak clarity about the mother’s state of abjection in the Colonies must be taken in context of her own hopelessness as a prostitute at Jezebel’s, and the impact of that despair upon her friend: “She is frightening me now, because what I hear in her voice is indifference, a lack of volition. Have they really done it to her then, taken away something—what?—that used to be so central to her?” (The Handmaid’s Tale 249). That unnamed but central “something” is what links Moira to her mother in Offred’s memory, and what has made them both crucial figures of emotional investment for her. While Moira’s brand of sex-positive lesbianism differs in significant ways from the antipornography activism of earlier feminists such as Offred’s mother, these two charismatic female characters ultimately resemble each other more than not, particularly with respect to the powerful, if ambivalent, feelings they inspire in the novel’s protagonist. Both Moira and Offred’s mother serve as Offred’s ego ideals, a role that Offred herself now recognizes. She accurately assesses the role that Moira continues to play in her psychic life: “I don’t want her to be like me. Give in, go along, save her skin. That is what it comes down to. I want gallantry from her, swashbuckling, heroism, single-handed combat. Something I lack” (The Handmaid’s Tale 249). She is similarly clearsighted about her enduring wishful confidence in her mother’s powers: “Surely her cockiness, her optimism and energy, her pizzazz, will get her out of this. She will think of something. . . But I know this isn’t true. It is just passing the buck, as children do, to mothers” (The Handmaid’s Tale 253). While Offred recognizes her own idealized, romantic fantasy of the maternal other, she nonetheless minimizes the significance of this investment, or, perhaps more to the point, she fails to internalize this ideal fully enough, remaining in a state of emotional dependence, a helpmeet or handmaiden to the (m)other. Just as her romantic relationships with men— with Luke, the Commander, and Nick—are self-destructively framed by the generic and emotional constraints of fairy tale romance and Hollywood



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movies, so too are her romantic investments in her significant other women.3 Offred acknowledges how the movies mystify imaginary pasts, for example, when she highlights the fictionalized, and fictionalizing, aspect of her first sexual encounter with Nick the chauffeur: “We’re quoting from late movies, from the time before. And the movies then were from a time before that: this sort of talk dates back to an era well before our own. Not even my mother talked like that, not when I knew her. Possibly nobody ever talked like that in real life, it was all a fabrication from the beginning” (The Handmaid’s Tale 262). This endless regress of mediated invention applies, as well, to her own mystifications in retelling this encounter and her personal history more generally: “It didn’t happen that way either. I’m not sure how it happened; not exactly. All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is only approximate” (The Handmaid’s Tale 262). She suggests here that the experience of love is itself a form of memory, a reconstruction or approximation of an originary feeling or relationship, an endless affective regress that indicates the impossibility, or the irretrievability, of first love. “A movie about the past is not the same as the past,” she reminds herself at one point, but the past, or its memory, or the love itself, is inevitably mediated, the subject of approximating fictionalization. Yet, at the same time, her reflections on her own past suggest the importance of such “good enough” approximations. Remembering her mother lingering over her own baby pictures in their family albums, she reflects that “No mother is ever, completely, a child’s idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn’t do badly by one another, we did as well as most. . . . I wish she were here, so I could tell her I finally know this” (The Handmaid’s Tale 181). Offred’s retrospective appreciation for her imperfect but “good enough” relationship with her own imperfect but “good enough” mother is particularly poignant in the context of the loss of her own daughter, a key traumatic loss that is at once the emblem and the nadir of her post-apocalyptic abjection. Losing her mother and losing her daughter stand as mirror images in the text, which together undermine our attempts to identify a moment or object of originary loss, comparable to the narrative’s undermining of our attempts to locate an originary moment or object of love.

 3

On Atwood’s use of the romance genre in The Handmaid’s Tale, see Miner and Morrison. On Atwood’s use of fairytale motifs, see Wilson and Osborne.



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This mirroring effect is concretized through the appearance in Offred’s narrative of two photographic images of her daughter. Her narrated memory of the first of these photos highlights her hope, or wish, that she will be remembered by her daughter: “I lie … beside an open drawer that does not exist, and think about a girl who did not die when she was five; who still does exist, I hope, though not for me. Do I exist for her? Am I a picture somewhere, in the dark at the back of her mind?” (The Handmaid’s Tale 64). The memory of the second photo, taken three years later and shown to her by Serena Joy as a bribe, is overshadowed by her anguished reflection on her inevitable erasure from her daughter’s life and memory: “Time has not stood still. It was washed over me, washed me away . . . I have been obliterated for her. I am only a shadow now, far back behind the glib shiny surface of this photograph. A shadow of a shadow, as dead mothers become. You can see it in her eyes: I am not there” (The Handmaid’s Tale 228). These photos of the mother’s daughter in the text function not so much as historical witness, but as measures of the fragility of memory. Offred’s maternal after-images then, serve a variety of functions in The Handmaid’s Tale. For one, they open windows onto the past and serve as bridges across geographical distance in Offred’s narrative, their disturbance of temporal and spatial coherence evoking the disturbances in linearity that characterize her fragmented narration and recollection more generally. As well, these technologically mediated memories of her mother concretize what is, in this post-traumatic and post-apocalyptic narrative, the larger paradox of a past that is both unrecoverable and yet inescapable. They also stand as “ocular proof,” as witness to a past that cannot be denied any more than the compulsoriness of the present regime, yet their contextual re-framing indicates how history itself can be revised. Atwood’s use of filmic images in her narrative—not just in these maternal after-images, but throughout the text—is a significant part of her novel’s engagement with the workings and implications of individual and collective memory. Offred’s struggle to make whole a life story and a cultural history that lie “in fragments” (The Handmaid’s Tale 267) is part of a more general reflection on the importance and the difficulty of remembering the past in order to shape the present and the future. Finally, the screen memories of Offred’s mother have both political and personal significance in Offred’s narrative. In fact, I would argue that these emblematic images of the feminist mother rampant and subdued together encapsulate the very connection between the political and the personal that is at stake in the novel more generally. The woman onscreen is literally Offred’s mother, but she is also a symbolic figure of feminist



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history and politics, an emblematic foremother. These documentary films profess to show history as it happened or is currently happening, but their meaning is further shaped by the historical and political contexts in which they are screened, and especially by the shock of recognition when their viewers recognize a face onscreen as someone they know or even as a member of their family. When historical documentaries suddenly become “home movies,” the apparent collision between the personal and the political reveals that this connection has been present all along.

Oryx and Crake Almost 20 years after the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake goes back to the future, albeit to a somewhat later and even more dire future than what Atwood envisioned in her earlier dystopian novel. Once again, Atwood intertwines the political and the personal, the global and the individual, by foregrounding the temporal disturbances wrought upon a post-apocalyptic survivor of a dystopian world. If Atwood’s “choice of a female narrator [in The Handmaid’s Tale] deliberately turns the traditionally masculine genre of dystopia upside down” (Howells 164), her choice of male protagonist in Oryx and Crake, admittedly anomalous within an novelistic oeuvre that almost exclusively features female protagonists, nonetheless also challenges the private/public divide, not least by emphasizing the enduring power of mothers, and of parents more generally, in the psychic lives of their children, and the inextricability of these domestic influences upon the fate of humanity.4 It is striking, then, that Snowman, like his post-apocalyptic protagonist predecessor in The Handmaid’s Tale, is haunted by maternal after-images, including but not limited to the experience of seeing the spectacle of his lost mother onscreen. Perhaps even more striking, however, is the similarity between the earliest memories of these two novels’ protagonists. While the young woman that Offred recognizes in the feminist documentary is her mother from “the time before,” both before the Gileadean regime and before her daughter’s birth, Offred’s earliest actual memory of her mother represented in the narrative features a different act of protest. Offred recalls attending a

 4

In her PMLA essay (2004), Atwood debated the characterization of The Handmaid’s Tale as a “feminist dystopia,” and also disputes the notion that Oryx and Crake is a dystopia at all. More recently, in In Other Worlds, she has described both of these novels as examples of “ustopian fiction,” a coinage that combines “utopian” and “dystopian.”



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bonfire with her mother, a scene which she experiences as a betrayal— “she said we were going to feed the ducks. . . But there were some women burning books, that’s what she was really there for. To see her friends; she’d lied to me”—and also as fascinating: “the fire drew me back” (The Handmaid’s Tale 38). A cognate to Offred’s earliest memory can be found in the earliest represented memory of Oryx and Crake’s Jimmy, as Snowman is known in his own “time before,” a memory of attending a bonfire with his genetic engineer father in which the carcasses of infected lab animals, collateral damage of an act of industrial sabotage, are being incinerated. Both of these earliest memories are, significantly, remembered in adulthood from the perspective of a child who could not at the time grasp their full significance: Jimmy thinks the burning animals are suffering pain and looking at him reproachfully “because he’d done nothing to rescue them” (Oryx and Crake 18); Offred thinks that the naked, bound woman hanging from a chain pictured in a pornographic magazine is adventurously “swinging, like Tarzan from a vine, on the TV” (The Handmaid’s Tale 38). Both children are fascinated by what they see, but both sense, however dimly, that their looking is somehow wrong, a guilty pleasure, perhaps even pleasurable because guilty. While the book burning is a political spectacle whereas the animal incineration is a sanitary measure, I would argue that both bonfire memories nonetheless serve similar narrative functions in their respective texts. These remembered scenes dramatize the play between what should or should not be seen—“Don’t let her see it” (The Handmaid’s Tale 39) snaps Offred’s mother at the woman who hands the child the magazine to throw on the fire—or what can or can’t be known: “How many times do I have to tell you?” Jimmy’s mother reproaches his father after the bonfire, “He’s too young” (Oryx and Crake 20). The paradoxically obscuring and enduring spectacle thus makes the bonfire into the shared primal scene of these protagonists’ dystopian childhoods.5 The bonfire also serves, I would note, as a key primal scene for dystopian literature itself, encompassing such loci classici as Nineteen Eighty-Four’s “memory hole” and the central conceit of Fahrenheit 451, which was inspired, Bradbury claimed, by the Nazi book-burnings of 1933.6 Glimpses of forbidden knowledge, and the contradictory emotional

 5

For an account of the classic psychoanalytic concept of primal scene, and the expanded version that underwrites my reading here, see Lukacher. See also Snyder for an extended discussion of the role of vicarious witness and compulsory return in this novel. 6 For a compelling account of the erasure of recorded memory in Orwell’s and Atwood’s dystopian novels, see Finigan.



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responses that these viewings inevitably elicit, recur throughout Oryx and Crake, defining both the protagonist’s subjectivity and the reader’s own experience of the narrative. Such mixed responses are at issue, for instance, in the novel’s extended representation of Jimmy’s adolescent virtual amusements, most of which involve sexual and/or violent spectacle.7 As teenagers, Jimmy and Crake first encounter their shared love interest, Oryx, on “HottTotts, a global sex-trotting site” (Oryx and Crake 89). Together, they witness her performance of oral sex, along with two other young girls, upon an adult male customer: Oryx paused in her activities. She smiled a hard little smile that made her appear much older, and wiped the whipped cream from her mouth. Then she looked over her shoulder and right into the eyes of the viewer—right into Jimmy’s eyes, into the secret person inside him. I see you, that look said. I see you watching. I know you. I know what you want. (Oryx and Crake 90-91)

Crake freezes this frame, downloads it, then prints the image of Oryx’s searing returned gaze, and gives Jimmy a copy. Their pornographic spectatorship is here mirrored and inverted, potentially rendering them objects, Oryx’s returned gaze standing as both an invitation and challenge, as both sexual seduction and ethical confrontation. Her look simultaneously compounds the boys’ desire to look, or their inability to look away, but also draws their viewing into question. This screen-captured image stands in the novel as yet another primal scene: as an originary moment of first encounter, yet one whose technological mediation and hall-of-mirrors play of self-consciousness paradoxically complicates any simple sense of singular origins. In fact, the “moment when Oryx looked” (Oryx and Crake 91) might also, or alternately, be understood as a kind of screen memory in the way that it recalls, or overlays, Jimmy’s “first complete memory,” his childhood fantasy of the returned gaze of the burning animals, reproachfully watching him taking pleasure in the spectacle of their suffering while doing nothing to prevent it. While the onscreen image of Oryx’s returned gaze shares an affective charge with Jimmy’s even earlier memory of the bonfire, it recalls even more vividly another constitutive, traumatic memory of his adolescence. After his mother’s disappearance, Jimmy is repeatedly interrogated by the CorpSeCorps security force, a periodic ordeal that includes, at least on one

 7

On the role of media and gaming in Oryx and Crake, see Bouson (2004) and Dunning, as well as Cooke, 116.



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occasion, his enforced viewing of a video clip in which his mother, bound and blindfolded, is executed by spraygun. He recognizes her just before the clip’s horrifying climax: [T]he Corpsmen had the sound turned down because they wanted Jimmy to concentrate on the visuals, but it must have been an order because now the guards were taking off the blindfold. Pan to close-up: the woman was looking right at him, right out of the frame: a blue-eyed look, direct, defiant, patient, wounded. But no tears. Then the sound came suddenly up. Goodbye. Remember Killer. I love you. Don’t let me down. No question, it was his mother. (Oryx and Crake 258)

The interrogators want to know just who this “killer” is, a line of questioning that underlines the pathos and absurdity of the moment. “Killer,” Jimmy explains while “weeping with laughter” (Oryx and Crake 259), was his childhood pet, a genetically spliced “rakunk” (raccoon/ skunk) that his mother had liberated along with the company secrets she stole when she fled the OrganInc Compound, leaving behind her husband and child. While Jimmy easily deciphers his mother’s authenticating mention of “Killer,” he is less certain about her injunction, wondering “[W]hat did she mean about letting her down?” (Oryx and Crake 259). It would be futile, of course, since Jimmy is being polygraphed by his interrogators, for him to deny the shock of recognizing his mother on screen. Yet he experiences his enforced cooperation as doing just what his mother has warned against: “There, he’d done it. Another betrayal. He couldn’t help himself” (Oryx and Crake 259). Later, he worries that his confirmation of his mother’s identity could put her in danger, should it turn out that the video of the execution had been faked, should his mother prove to be still at large: “If so, what had he given away?” (Oryx and Crake 259). That his mother could still be alive is not inconceivable, given the novel’s emphasis on the technology of simulation and the culture of cover-ups, but his wishful fantasy is nonetheless telling. His fantasy that she still lives is inseparable from a complex, even self-contradictory, sense of betrayal, a sense both that he has betrayed her and that she has betrayed him. He cannot wish for her to be alive, moreover, without the fear that he has or will let her down, that he has given away or will give away secrets that might be essential to her survival. In Jimmy’s anguished consciousness, wishing his mother alive means being always in danger of causing her death. Yet, as the addressee of this videotaped farewell, he can only feel, once again,



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abandoned by the absent mother who has, once again, left him behind.8 If the video clip reveals that a sense of maternal betrayal is inevitable for Jimmy, it nonetheless also challenges this foregone conclusion, both with respect to his own interpersonal relations and the fate of the human species. In this shared moment of abjection, Jimmy’s mother nonetheless seizes back a shred of agency for both of them, delivering a coded message to her son from beyond the grave, a message both from the crypt (posthumous) and encrypted (coded). If she cannot escape her death sentence, she can attempt to cheat death, or at least to cheat her executioners, by seizing control over her mediated image to deliver this message of inspiration and connection, of a shared obligation to futurity. The returned gaze of the mother in the film clip, like that of Oryx in the pornographic video, is “direct, defiant, patient, wounded.”9 Like Jimmy’s technologically mediated first encounter with Oryx, his last glimpse of his mother onscreen confounds any simple opposition of gazing subject and gazed-upon object, victim of and witness to violence, pornographic or disciplinary subjection and ethical agency. The filmic return of Jimmy’s abjected yet still protesting mother from beyond the grave is just one example among many in the text of the losses and traumatic repetitions that structure this novel’s doubled time scheme. The post-apocalyptic strand of the narrative is structured around Snowman’s physical return to the Paradice Dome, ground zero for the creation of both the pandemic virus and the post-human Crakers who have been genetically engineered to replace the destroyed human race. Returning to Paradice, which now houses the moldering, intertwined corpses of Oryx and Crake, means confronting the horrifying scene of the Promethean and Oedipal crimes that he had a hand, however forced, in making. Snowman regains a modicum of agency through this return to the scene of the crime, a shift that is reflected not only in his somewhat more unified mental state but

 8

The stilled filmic image of his mother returning the camera’s gaze in the moment of her death repeats an earlier scene of filial spectatorship, loss, and fear of betrayal, when Jimmy spots his mother in news footage of violent protests over genetically modified coffee. As he does earlier with the image of Oryx’s returned gaze in the pornographic video, Crake “freeze[s] the frame” (181) and offers it to Jimmy, who fears that his positive identification of her onscreen may somehow expose his mother to further danger. 9 Barzilai (2004) observes that Jimmy’s mother’s injunction, “Don’t let me down,” is echoed by the promise extracted from him by Oryx later in the narrative—“I want you to take care of the Crakers [ . . . ] Say you’ll do it, don’t let me down” (322)—as well as somewhat less exactly by Crake’s parting appeal: “I’m counting on you” (329).



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also in the somewhat more unified structure of the narrative after this point. I emphasize that Atwood’s narrative, like Snowman himself, is only “somewhat more” singular because the question of what Snowman will do once he encounters other human survivors on the beach at the end of the novel remains an open one: will he lash out murderously or will he attempt to establish relations? Will he protect the Crakers, his post-human children by proxy, or will he sacrifice them in favor of his earlier human allegiances? Will the human race end here, or will this point stand as a new beginning?

Après le Déluge: The Year of the Flood and Beyond Some of the questions left open at the end of Oryx and Crake are answered when Atwood revisits this final scene in The Year of the Flood, but Flood ultimately opens new questions of its own about the fate of its characters and of humanity, questions that may or may not be answered by the “MaddAddam” trilogy’s final volume, slated to be published in fall 2013. While Flood returns to the post-apocalyptic landscape of Oryx and Crake, this novel’s exploration of the physical and psychic travails of postcatastrophe female survival equally constitutes a return to the dystopian world of The Handmaid’s Tale. Whereas Oryx and Crake portrays global cataclysm from the top-down vantage of a relatively privileged male protagonist, Flood follows The Handmaid’s Tale in viewing dystopia from the bottom up, from a subjugated but still resistant female perspective. Actually, Flood doubles or mirrors this perspective by featuring a crossgenerational pair of female protagonists, characters who may represent two different generations of feminists, somewhat reminiscent of Offred’s mother and her friend Moira. In the ultimate alliance of the crone-like Toby and the feather-clad exotic dancer Ren, Atwood envisions the potential of feminist coalitions across the generations.10 The allegiance of Toby and Ren at the end of the novel, when they team up to rescue the abject Amanda from the Painballer rapists, is figured in Atwood’s narrative as a heroic victory but also, significantly, as a mother-and-child reunion. At first, Toby is only concerned to defend herself from infection by this “bird woman,” this “festering hotspot,” but she soon recognizes that “[b]eneath all the dirt and mangled glitz, it’s only little Ren” (Flood 354). Even after she begins nursing Ren back to health,

 10

Bouson (2011) similarly reads the novel as portraying a “generational divide between feminists and postfeminists” (14), and as ultimately “emphasiz[ing] the feminist ideal of female solidarity” (22).



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spoon-feeding her liquids and cleaning her soiled bedding, Toby briefly contemplates poisoning her charge, putting Ren out of her misery and also reserving their rapidly dwindling food for herself. But she quickly changes her mind, reflecting “You’ve known this girl since she was a child, she’s come to you for help, she has every right to trust you” (Flood 357). As Ren improves, Toby’s sense of maternal investment expands: “Her homicidal impulse of the night before is gone…Now she’d like to cure her, cherish her, for isn’t it miraculous that Ren is here…Just to have a second person on the premises—even a feeble person, even a sick person who sleeps most of the time—just this makes the Spa seem like a cozy domestic dwelling rather than a haunted house. . . . I’ve been the ghost, thinks Toby” (Flood 360). This image of maternal domesticity, albeit a gothicized domesticity in which the ghost returns to life through the affective experience of mothering, suggests that the post-apocalyptic renewal of humanity will depend as much upon humane caretaking as upon human or even posthuman reproduction. Flood concludes with Toby offering a decidedly maternal blessing over a meal shared around a camp fire by the next generation, now expanded to include the traumatized, feverish and possibly dying, Amanda and Jimmy/Snowman as well as the vicious but temporarily subdued Painballers. Toby may not be able to repair the mental and physical ravages that assail her charges, but the imminent arrival of the posthuman Children of Crake, singing, portends the possibility of a cure. Rather than concluding my own discussion with this open ending, rich as it is with possibility, I want to turn back to an earlier, bleaker image from Flood that imperfectly recalls, or repeats with a difference, the mediated maternal after-images that appear in Atwood’s earlier dystopian novels. This resonating image appears in the narrative immediately after Ren encounters her childhood friend and rival, Bernice, at college: Years later—when I was already working at Scales and Tails—I saw onscreen that Bernice had been spraygunned in a raid on a Gardeners safe house. That was after the Gardeners had been outlawed. Though being outlawed wouldn’t have stopped Bernice; she was a person with the courage of her convictions. I had to admire her for that—for the convictions, and also for the courage—because I never really felt I had either one. There was a close-up of her dead face, looking more gentle and peaceful than I’d ever see her look in life. Maybe that was the real Bernice, I thought, kind and innocent. Maybe she was truly like that inside, and all the fighting we used to do and all her sharp and unpleasant edges—that was her way of struggling to get out of the hard skin she’d grown all over herself like a beetle shell. But no matter how she hit out and raged, she’d



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Ren here commemorates what may have been best in Bernice, but in doing so she retrospectively conjures up a more pleasant Bernice, a Bernice who is “gentle and peaceful,” “kind and innocent,” creating a sentimental fiction that belies all evidence to the contrary. The truth that Ren can’t quite bring herself to admit is that the real Bernice, a Bernice who would almost surely have gloried obnoxiously in her own martyrdom, is more attractive dead than alive. That sad truth is what ultimately brings Ren to tears. Ren’s attempt to rewrite the past as a sentimental fantasy allows her to mourn the loss of an unsympathetic contemporary, to feel pity for a character whose dourness and dogmatic adherence to principle seems incompatible with pleasure or warmth or love. Ren’s imaginary reconstruction of a gentler, kinder Bernice needs to be taken in context of the guilt that she continues to feel for having betrayed Bernice in their childhood. When they re-encounter each other at college, Ren attempts to make things right by apologizing to Bernice for the part she had inadvertently played in the violent death of Bernice’s stepfather at the hands of the CorpSeCorps, the result of a petty bit of gossip, a revelation about his adulterous misconduct that spiraled out of control. Bernice at first claims not to remember Ren’s earlier violation of their friendship, and then downgrades its significance, claiming that she was the one, not Ren, who blew the whistle on her stepfather, a revisionary history that makes her the heroine, and not just the victim, of the story. The multiple layerings of return and revision in this admittedly minor episode, beginning with Ren’s and Bernice’s different constructions of what “really” happened in their childhood and ending with Ren’s sentimentalized account of Bernice’s dead face onscreen, indicate the inevitable fictionalization of the past, a key thematic in Atwood’s oeuvre as a whole. Recalling the revisiting of girlhood friendships and bullying resentments in Cat’s Eye and of sisterly loyalty and rivalry in The Blind Assassin, Atwood’s use of screen memories here as in those earlier novels suggests the irrecoverable and yet inescapable nature of the past. There are obvious differences between the onscreen return of Bernice in death and the screen memories of maternal abjection, resistance, and return in Oryx and Crake and The Handmaid’s Tale discussed earlier, differences that may well begin with the fact Bernice is not the mother of either one of the novel’s protagonists, and continue with the fact that Bernice who appears on screen is already dead rather than facing imminent death or “death in life.” But there are obvious parallels as well. For example, Ren’s admiration here for Bernice’s “courage” and



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“conviction” as an activist, an admiration tempered by a sense of her own lack, recalls Offred’s admiration for and resentment of her mother and her friend, Moira. As well, Bernice’s unpleasant self-righteousness equally recalls the unbearably smug demeanor of Aunt Lydia, with Ren’s antipathy to Bernice’s bossy brand of “extreme fanatic ultra-green” (Flood 287) recalling Moira’s rebelliousness and Offred’s lesser shade of rebellion in the face of fundamentalist rigidity and constraint. Perhaps most vividly, Ren’s fictionalizing response to the mediated return of Bernice recalls the enduring ambivalence of Jimmy and Offred in the face of their activist and abject mothers’ mediated returns from beyond the grave. The parallels between Bernice’s technologically mediated posthumous cameo and those of Offred’s and Jimmy’s abjected mothers add another layer to the multiple, overlapping convergences that give shape and meaning to The Year of the Flood, to the as yet unfinished “MaddAddam” trilogy, and to the body of Atwood’s dystopian novelistic oeuvre as whole. The Year of the Flood takes its form from the parallel and ultimately intersecting narratives of its pair of female protagonists, a doubled structure that is further multiplied by its interweaving of Toby’s and Ren’s stories with the Gardeners’ hymns and Adam One’s sermons. In this way, Atwood braids a multi-stranded narrative that is simultaneously singular and collective, telling the stories of individual characters, of a utopian community in a dystopian world, and of the collective fate of humankind. The temporal and spatial convergences of this multi-stranded narrative extend beyond the bounds of this volume, joining the story of its paired heroines to that of Oryx and Crake’s Snowman and, presumably, to the as yet untold story of the protagonist(s) of the forthcoming concluding volume of the trilogy. This unfinished post-apocalyptic trilogy thereby offers its readers an outlook that is both speculative yet also truly openended. Atwood directs our readerly gaze, along with that of her fictional characters, toward the past of our feminist foremothers while gesturing toward a future potentially replete with dystopian horror but also towards one that holds utopian promise, a future that she encourages us to envision for ourselves.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. Print. Atwood, Margaret. The Blind Assassin. New York: Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday, 2000. Print. —. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. New York: Nan A.



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Talese/Doubleday, 2011. Print. —. The Handmaid's Tale. New York: Anchor Books, 1985. Print. —. “The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake ‘In Context’.” PMLA 119.3 (2004): 513-517. Print. —. Oryx and Crake: A Novel. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2003. Print. —. The Year of the Flood: A Novel. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2009. Print. Barzilai, Shuli. “ ‘If You Look Long Enough”: Photography, Memory, and Mourning in The Blind Assassin." Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake. Eds. J. Brooks Bouson and Sarah Graham. New York, NY: Continuum, 2010. 103-123. —. “ ‘Tell My Story’: Remembrance and Revenge in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.” Critique 50.2 (2008): 87-110. Web. 26 December 2012. Bouson, J. Brooks. “ ‘It’s Game Over Forever’: Atwood’s Satiric Vision of a Bioengineered Posthuman Future in Oryx and Crake.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 39.3 (2004): 139-56. Web. 26 December 2012. —. “ ‘We’re Using Up the Earth. It’s Almost Gone’: A Return to the PostApocalyptic Future in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 46.9 (2011): 9-26. Web. 26 December 2012. Cooke, Grayson. “Technics and the Human at Zero-Hour: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Studies in Canadian Literature, 31.2 (2006): 105-25. Web. 26 December 2012. Dunning, Stephen. “Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake: The Terror of the Therapeutic.” Canadian Literature, 186 (2005): 86-101. Web. 26 December 2012. Finigan, Theo. “‘Into the Memory Hole’: Totalitarianism and Mal d’Archive in Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid’s Tale.” Science Fiction Studies, 38.3 (2011): 435-459. Web. 26 December 2012. Howells, Coral Ann. “Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions: The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake.” The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Ed. Coral Ann Howells. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 161-175. Print. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. L. S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Print. Lukacher, Ned. Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986. Print. Malak, Amin. “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid Tale and the Dystopian



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Tradition.” Canadian Literature, 112 (Spring 1987): 9-16. Web. 26 December 2012. Miner, Madonne. “ ‘Trust Me’: Reading the Romance Plot in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Twentieth Century Literature, 37.2 (1991): 148-168. Web. 26 December 2012. Morrison, Sarah R. “Mothering Desire: The Romance Plot in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Susan Fromberg Schaeffer’s The Madness of a Seduced Woman.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 19.2 (2000): 315-336. Web. 26 December 2012. Neuman, Shirley. “ ‘Just a Backlash’: Margaret Atwood, Feminism, and The Handmaid’s Tale.” University of Toronto Quarterly, 75.3 (2006): 857-868. Web. 26 December 2012. Osborne, Carol. “Mythmaking in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Once Upon a Time: Myth, Fairy Tales and Legends in Margaret Atwood’s Writing. Ed. Sarah A. Appleton. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008. 25-46. Print. Snyder, Katherine. “‘Time to go’: The Post-apocalyptic and the Posttraumatic in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Studies in the Novel, 43.4 (2011): 470-489. Print. Wilson, Sharon Rose. Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Print.



CONTRIBUTORS

Bootheina Majoul Aouadi is a PhD student at the Faculty of Letters, Arts and Humanities of Manouba, Tunisia. She is also teaching English (EFL/ESP) at a Tunisian University (ISSEP). Zeynep Z. Atayurt received her BA and MA degrees in English from the University of Ankara in Turkey. In 2002 she was awarded a scholarship by the Turkish government for postgraduate study abroad. She earned a second MA degree in Twentieth Century Literature in 2003 at the University of Leeds where she went on to do a PhD in English literature, finishing in 2008. Having returned to Turkey, she is currently working as an assistant professor at the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Ankara. She has written various reviews and essays on contemporary Anglophone literatures and cultures, with a specific focus on the representations of gender and embodiment. She is the author of Excess and Embodiment in Contemporary Women’s Writing (2011), and is a member of the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association. Adelina Cataldo is a PhD student, University of Calabria, in English Literature and a high school teacher of English as a Foreign Language in Cosenza, Italy. Soo Darcy is working on a PhD in English literature at Northumbria University. Her thesis is concerned with the relationship between reproduction, technology and law in late twentieth century women’s speculative and science fiction. Kristin Distel is a graduate student in the Ashland University Master of Fine Arts program. She also teaches composition at Terra State in Fremont, Ohio. In addition to the study of Toni Morrison and other women writers, she is interested in the work of Mary Astell; Kristin is currently researching modernist revisions of early modern ideologies. On this topic, she has recently presented papers at The University of Oxford, The University of Manchester, the South Central Society for EighteenthCentury Studies, and several other conferences.

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Richard Hardack, Independent Scholar, has taught at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges and at the University of California–Berkeley, at which he received his doctorate in English and J.D. He has published widely in American Studies and African American Studies. His first book, “Not Altogether Human”: Pantheism and the Dark Nature of the American Renaissance, was published in 2012 by the University of Massachusetts Press, and he is completing his second manuscript, “Coming Between Africa and America: Transcendentalism and the Transcendence of Race, from Emerson to Morrison.” Sun-Hwa Park is Assistant Professor, Konkuk University, South Korea . She worked as a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of East Anglia in 2004 and at the University of Greenwich in 2005. Her research is primarily focused on Doris Lessing, Jungian psychology, narrative theory and cultural studies. She has published widely on Doris Lessing’s novels and modern English writers, such as A. S. Byatt. Katherine V. Snyder is Associate Professor of English in the UC Berkeley English Department. Her current book project investigates the uses of the literary past in post-9/11 fiction, with particular attention to post-9/11 novels that obliquely but emphatically rewrite earlier canonical works of literature. Her publications on Atwood include “‘Time to go’: The Post-apocalyptic and the Post-traumatic in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake,” Studies in the Novel 43.3 (2011); “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” a review of The Year of the Flood, Women’s Review of Books 27.2 (2010); and a review of MaddAddam, forthcoming in fall 2013 at publicbooks.org. Karen Stein is professor of English and Women’s Studies at University of Rhode Island and author of: Reading, Learning, Teaching Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood Revisited, and Rachel Carson. Charlotte Templin, Emerita Professor of English at the University of Indianapolis, has authored Feminism and the Politics of Literary Reputation: The Example of Erica Jong (Lawrence: The UP of Kansas, 1995) and edited Conversations with Erica Jong (Jackson: The UP of Mississippi, 2002). Her recent articles include “Americans Read Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing: Literary Criticism and Cultural Differences” in Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, Vol.3 (Summer) 2011 http://receptionstudy.org/Templin.pdf; and “Discourses in Dialogue: The Reception of Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen” in

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New Directions in American Reception Study, ed. Philip Goldstein and James Machor, Oxford, 2008: 195-2008.

FURTHER READING BOOKS ON WOMEN’S UTOPIC AND DYSTOPIC (SCIENCE) FICTION.

Brian Attebery. Decoding Gender in Science Fiction. Routeledge, 2002. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, ed. Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination. Routeledge, 2003. Essays about feminist and women’s utopic and dystopic science fiction. Frances Bartkowski. Feminist Utopias. University of Nebraska, 1989. Jennifer Burwell, Notes on Nowhere: Feminism, Utopian Logic, and Social Transformation. University of Minnesota, 1997. Gergory Claeys. ed. The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, Cambridge, 2010. There are sections on feminism and definitions/ history of “dystopia” and “utopia” terminology. Chris Ferns. Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature. Liverpool, 1999. Mary Flanagan, ed. Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture MIT, 2002. Carl Freedman. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Wesleyan. 2000. Barbara Goodwin. The Philosophy of Utopia. Routeledge,2001. Sarah W. Goodwin and Libby F. Jones, ed. Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative. University of Tennessee, 1990. Carol Farley Kessler. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Towards Utopia With Selected Writings. Syracuse University, 1995. Justine Larbalestier. The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction. Wesleyan, 2002. —. ed. Daughters of the Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century. Wesleyan, 2006. Judith A. Little, ed. Feminist Philosophy and Science Fiction: Utopia and Dystopias, Prometheus, 2007. It is notes of different feminist philosophies combined with Science Fiction examples in the form of an anthology.

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Further Reading

Helen Merrick. The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms. Aqueduct, 2009. Tom Moylan. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. NY and London: Methuen, 1986. —. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia.. Boulder: Westview, 2000. Patrick Parrinder, ed. Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia. Duke, 2001. Joanna Russ. To Write like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction. Indiana University, 1995. Lucy Sargisson. Contemporary Feminist Utopianism. Routeledge, 1996. A philosophical/critical examination of feminism, utopian ideology, postmodernism, and how they intersect. Tatiana Teslenko. Feminist Utopian Novels of the 1970s: Joanna Russ and Dorothy Bryant. NY: Routledge, 2003.

INDEX

1984, 178, 185 A Aarne and Thompson, 26 Aarne Tale Type, 427A 26 Abjection, 189, 190, 193, 199, 200, 202-03 Absolutism, 138, 146, 150 “A Left Handed Commencement Address,” Dancing at the Edge, 50 “A Non-Euclidean View of California,” Dancing at the Edge of the World, 66, 52 “A Response, by Ansible, from Tau Ceti,” 66 Aldis, Brian, 28 Alice in Wonderland, 9, 13 Always Coming Home, 66 Animals, becoming animal, 50-54, 57, passim Anti-utopian, 72 Apocalypse, Apocalyptic, 23 25, 29 Archive, 37 Aristotle, 41, 43, Atwood, Margaret, 25, 90-95, 188205, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 184, 185, 186 Aurelius, Marcus, 55-6 Authority, 22 A Wizard of Earthsea, 67 B Bacall, Lauren, 183 Baccolini, Raffaella, 92, 157, 158, 173. Bachofen, Johan Jakob, 34 Balsamo, Anne, 94, 104 Bartol, Cyrus, 58 n6

Baudrillard, 84 Beauchamp, Gorman, 176 Bell-Metereau, Rebecca, 51 Birth of the Clinic, 98 Braves, Robert, 31 Body, 90, 92, 94, 96-104, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111,162, 163, 166. Bogart, Humphrey, 183 Borges, José Louis, 57, 64 Bradbury, Ray, 196 Brother and sister, 25 Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, 51, 66 “Bryn Mawr Commencement Address,” Dancing at the Edge of the World, 62 “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight?” Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, 57, 63, 67 C Carmen Dog, 50, 52, 54-7, 64-5, 68 Cat’s Eye, 177, 178, 185, 202 Charnas, Suzy McKee, 93 Cheuse, Alan, 181 Childbirth, 91, 97, 98, 100-103, 107-110 Christianity, 146-9, 151, Circle Game, The, 157, 165-169, 174 Clones, 73, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85 Collins, Suzanne, 95 Confession, 18-19, 22 Control, 90, 91, 92, 94, 96, 99-101, 107-111 Corea, Gena, 93, 109, 110 Counter-utopian, 72 Cousins, P., 181

210 Coyote(s), 63-7, passim; see also tricksters Crater, Theresa, 26 Cuarón, Alfonso, 90 Curtis, Claire P., 66 Cyborg, 85 D Daima 28 Daly, Mary, 93 Davies, Madeleine, 162 Defamiliarisation, 31, 177 Deleuze, Giles, 54 Derrida, Jacques, 68-9 Deus ex machine, 20 Dick, Philip K., 95 Diduck, Alison, 106 Dillard, Annie, 58, 59 n8, 60 Dissolving wall 9, 13-14, 20 Distance 12, 14 Donawerth, Jane, 93, 94 Donovan, Josephine, 60 Doris Lessing, 7-8, 18 Dorson Double/doubles, 172, 173 dystopia(n) 31, 34-40, 42-44 Dystopia, 10, 90-95, 104, 111, 135137, 147-147, 153-154, 188199, 191-192, 195-196, 200201, 203, 176(n1), 177, 178, Dystopias/dystopian: 157, 158, 159, 160, 165, 167, 169, 173; Critical dystopia, p. 157. Dystopian fiction, 176, 177 Dystopian, feminist dystopian, 72, 73, 77, 78, 85 Dystopic, dystopias, 23, 25 E Ehrenreich, Barbara, 184 Elias, Marilyn, 178(n3) Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 58 n6, 70 Emshwiller, Carol, passim Escapism 20

Index F Fable, 31, 35, 37, 41, 44 Fabulation, 31, 32, Fairy Tales, 25 Fantasy, 30, 31, 40, 188, 192, 198, 202 Fanthom, 31, 37, 43 Father, 96, 102, 109, 110, 111 Feminism, 161, 190-02, 194-05, 200, 203 Feminist, 31, 34, 91, 93, 96, 111 Fender, Stephen, 178 Fertility, 91, 92, 94-96, 100, 102, 109, 111 Film, 188-91, 195, 199 Firestone, Shulamith, 93 Fiske, John, 58 n6 Fitzgerald, Judith, 181 Focalization 12 Focalizer, 10, 14 Foetus, 101-104, 106, 108 Foucault, 98, 99 Frankenstein, 30 Freud, Sigmund, 166. G Gattaca, 92 Gender/gendered, 30-32, 35, 37, 4143, 160, 161, 164, 166, Genesis, 27, 31, 40 Genre, 8-9, 19 Grace Dillon, 53 n3 Grimms, the “Fitcher’s Bird,” 30 “Hansel and Gretl,” 27-28 Griot, 29 Grosz, Elizabeth, 103 Guattari, Félix, 54 Guest of Honor Speech, WisCon 2003, 51 H Hanson, Clare, 97, 105 Haraway, 85 Haraway, Donna, 51-2, 63 n9, 68-9 Hardack, Richard, 58, n6

Women’s Utopian and Dystopian Fiction Harrison, Harry, 95 Heinlein, Robert, 67 Hepburn, Katherine, 183 Herland, 44 Heterotopia, 36 History of Sexuality, 100 History, 30-34, 36-41, 44, 45 Homogeny, 139-40 Howells, Coral Ann, 160. Human cloning, 72, 73, 74,75,78 Hutcheon Linda, 179 Huxley, 44 Huxley, Aldous, 92, 160 I Identity, 160, 163, 165, 165, 169. Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie, 41 Imaginary, 34, 35 Immortality: 141, 150, 154 In Other Worlds: Science Fiction and the Human Imagination, 23, 25 Incest, 27 Infertility, 90, 91, 94, 100, 101, 108 Ingoldby, Grace, 181 “Introduction,” Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, 59, 62, 70 Irigaray, Luce, 159 “Is Gender Necessary? Redux,” Dancing at the Edge of the World, 51, 60-1, 64 J Jackson, Kasi, 68 Jacobus, Mary, 159. Jameson, Fredric, 73, 74, 77, 84, 177 Jones, Dorothy, 158-59 Joyce, James, 68 K Ketterer, David, 176(n1) Knapp, Mona 23, 25

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Knowledge, 90, 92, 97-99, 101, 104, 105, 111 L Lacan, Jacques, 166 Lawrence, D.H., 68 Le Guin, Ursula, 176 Le Guin, Ursula, passim Leach and Fried, 27 Lederer, Laura, 182 Lessing, Doris, 25, 30-45 Levertov, Denise, 68 Levin, Ira, 92 Lindow, Sandra, 63 Love, Rosaleen, 58 M Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl, 184(n3) MaddAddam, 200 Magical realism, 31 Maisano, Scott, 51 Mara and Dann, 23, 25 Marginalisation, 100, 103, 104 Martha Quest, 26 Mary Turner, 26 Matrix, The 92 McCarthy, Cormac 95 McCarthy, Mary, 176(n1) McGuirk, Carol, 53 Medical gaze, 98, 99, 105 Medicalisation, 97, 99 Medicine, 90-93, 96, 98, 99, 101, 104 Melville, Herman, 58 n6, 61 Memoirs of a Survivor, 26 Memory, 12, 18, 22, 33, 34, 39, 42, 188-189, 192-197 Metafiction, 33, 34 Metamorphosis, 20 Michael, Magali Cornier, 178 Midwife, 96-98, 105 Midwives, 97, 98, 105 Milner, Andrew, 177 Modernism, 68 More, Thomas, 35, 44 Morton of Merrymount, 58

212 Motherhood, 188-203 Motifs, 27 Moylan, Tom, 92, 158, 160-164 Multiplicity, 159, 164, 170. Myth, 31, 34-37, 41, 43, 44 Myths, 25 N Narrator, 9-22 Nature, 91, 92, 94, 97, 105, 109 O Oakley, Ann, 105, 106 Orwell, George, 44, 92, 160, 178, 185, 196 Oryx and Crake, 25, 188-89, 195200, 202-03 Other, the (alterity), 50-52, 61-2, 646, 68-70, passim Otherness, 137-8, 140-2, 145, 148, 150 Ownership, 92, 104, 108, 109, 110 P Palaeolithic age, 34 Pantheism, 57-9, 58 n6, passim Patriarchal culture, 176, 176(n1) Patriarchal science, 75, 78, 79, 80, 83, 85 Patriarchy, 18; patriarchal, pp. 158, 159, 163, 167, 169, 174. Payne, Tonia, 66 “Pelt,” The Start of the End of it All, 56 Persephone, 21 Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack, 94, 104 Photography, 188-89, 194, 204 Piercy, Marge, 93 Plato, 35, 44 Pornography, 190, 192, 196-97, 199 Post-apocalyptic, 188-89, 193-95, 199-201, 203 Postcolonial, 29 Postmodern, 37, 44 Postmodern techniques, 178

Index Power, 90, 96, 108 Powici, Christopher, 64 Pregnancy, 91, 93, 94, 96, 97, 101108, 111 Pre-Islamic societies, 37 Priaulx, Nicolette, 106 Primal Scene, 196-97 Puritan extremists, 176(n2) Pynchon, Thomas, 58 n6 Q Quiescence: 137, 141, 148 R Ramsey, Jarold, 66 Rao, Eleonora, 163, 165. Reconstruction, 14 Relativism, 138 Relics, 30, 32, 34, 37-39, 42 Reproduction, 90, 92-94, 96, 101 Reproductive technology, 73, 84, 85, 90-96, 100, 103, 109, 111 Resurrection, 137, 147-52 Rhodesia 26 Rigney, Barbara Hill, 184(n5) Rilke, Rainer Maria, 68 Robotic, 73, 74, 84 Robots, 58, 79-80, 88-89, 90, 92, 135 S Saucy, Han, 51 Scholtmeijer, Marian, 54, 68 “Schrodinger’s Cat,” Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, 67 Science fiction, 21, 158, 176 “Science Fiction and Ms. Brown,” The Language of The Night, 51 Science, 90, 92, 95, 100 Screen Memory, 188, 194, 197, 202 Screen, 188-91, 194-95, 197-99, 201-02 “She Unnames Them,” Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, 67-8

Women’s Utopian and Dystopian Fiction Self-recovery, 21 Sentimentality, 192, 202 Silence, 57, 59 n8, 61, passim Simulacra, 84 Space fiction, 31 Spectatorship, 189-90, 195-97, 199 Speculative fiction, 25, 31, 176, 177 Steinem, Gloria, 43 Steiner, George, 6. Stereotypes, 32 Stones, 57-9, 61-2, 64, passim Stratton, Susan, 93 Sturgeon, Theodore, 67 Sufi tales, 32 Sufi, 26 Surveillance, 90, 102 T Technology,5, 9, 29, 84, 91, 94, 95, 96-100, 102, 104, 106-108, 110, 112-16 Technoscience, 85 Tell the story, 26 The Blind Assassin, 202 The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 12 “The Circular Library of Stones,” The Start of the End of it All, 57, 59, 61-2 The Cleft, 30-45 The Cloning of Joanna May, 72, 73, 74 The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith Firestone, 91, 116, 129, 213-7, 130 The Dispossessed, 66 The Edible Woman, 179 The Four-Gated City 10 The Golden Notebook 28 The Grandmothers 28 The Grass is Singing 26 The Handmaid’s Tale, 178, 179, 182, 184, 185, 188-196, 200, 202

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The Harm Paradox, Vicolette Priaulx, 104, 111 The implied author 13-14, 22 The Lathe of Heaven, 66 The Left Hand of Darkness, 176 The Memoirs of a Survivor, 8-13, 18-22 The Mother Machine, 109, 110 The Story of Colonel Dann, and Mara’s Daughter, Griot, and the Snow Dog, 8, 9, 22, 25, 27 The Sorrow and the Pity, 182 “The Pathways of Desire,” The Compass Rose, 52, 59 n7 The Start of the End of it All, 50 The Stepford Wives, 72, 73, 82 “The Wife’s Story,” Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, 65 “The Woman Without Answers,” Dancing at the Edge of the World, 64 The Year of the Flood, 25, 188-189, 200-203 “The Author of the Acacia Seeds,” Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, 60, 63-5 “The Direction of the Road,” 62 “The Eighth Elegy,” Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, 68 “Three Rock Poems,” Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, 59 Tickling game, 17 Tomalin, Claire, 26 Tomc, Sandra, 176(n2) Trace(s), 32, 34, 38, 39, 41 Transcendentalism, see pantheism Trauma 18, 21, 188, 190-94, 197, 199, 201, 203 Tricksters, 66, 68-9; see also coyotes U Under My Skin , 9, 18 Updike, John, 181 “Ustopia,” 195 (note 4)

214 Utopia 21, 31-38, 40-44, 91-94, 72, 82,190-91, 203 Utopias, Utopia(n), 25, 3156, 60-1, 64, 66, 70, passim 158, 159; critical utopia, p. 158. V “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow,” Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, 63, 68 Vint, Sherryl, 54, 60 Vizenor, Gerald, 53 n3 Voice 12, 14, 16, 19, 22 “Yukon,” Verging on the Pertinent, 65, 67,19, 133 W Warnock, Jeanie, 18, 20, 22 Warren, Rochelle, 70

Index Weldon, Fay, 73, 78-79, 80-81, 8384, 85-93 Wells, 1 Wheeler, Kathleen, 167 Wilson, Sharon, 25, 26, 28,29, 3035, 47, 52. 4, 197 Wolfe, Carey, 54, n 474,75,78 “Woman/Wilderness,” Dancing at the Edge of the World, 50, 53, 70 Women as objects of exchange, 30 Woman on the Edge of Time, 97, 115, 133, 138 Y Yampbell, Cat, 53 Young, Iris Marion, 94, 104 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 57 n5, 62 n8, 218