Women, Science and Fiction Revisited [2 ed.] 3031251709, 9783031251702

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

Women, Science and Fiction Revisited Second Edition

Debra Benita Shaw

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine Series Editors

Sharon Ruston Department of English and Creative Writing Lancaster University Lancaster, UK Alice Jenkins School of Critical Studies University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK Jessica Howell Department of English Texas A&M University College Station, TX, USA

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and emerging topics as well as established ones. Editorial board: Andrew M. Beresford, Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University, UK Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Stony Brook University, USA Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA Peter Middleton, Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Professor of English and Theatre Studies, University of Oxford, UK Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK Susan Squier, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Pennsylvania State University, USA Martin Willis, Professor of English, University of Westminster, UK Karen A. Winstead, Professor of English, The Ohio State University, USA

Debra Benita Shaw

Women, Science and Fiction Revisited 2nd ed. 2023

Debra Benita Shaw Department of Architecture and Visual Arts University of East London London, UK

ISSN 2634-6435     ISSN 2634-6443 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ISBN 978-3-031-25170-2    ISBN 978-3-031-25171-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25171-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: marc zakian / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my students at the University of East London who, over the years, have helped to sustain my enthusiasm for all things weird and out of this world. My most effusive thanks go to fellow sf fan and critical friend Professor Stephen Maddison for his appreciative reading of the manuscript and his insightful suggestions which helped enormously in the final edit.

v

Contents

1 Introduction: The Nearly Silent Listener  1 2 Herland: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Literature of the Beehive 13 3 Swastika Night: Katharine Burdekin and the Psychology of Scapegoating 41 4 ‘No Woman Born’: C. L. Moore’s Dancing Cyborg 67 5 The Left Hand of Darkness: Ursula Le Guin and the Haploid Heart 91 6 The Handmaid’s Tale: Margaret Atwood and the Politics of Choice113 7 The Power: Naomi Alderman and Archaeologies of Gender135 8 The City We Became: N. K. Jemisin and Posthuman Urbanism155 Index177

vii

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Nearly Silent Listener

I have been announcing myself as a feminist for some forty years but I still remain uneasy about what the term implies, how my interlocuters receive it and what it means for them. Feminism has no straightforward interpretation. As these things are periodised, we are now in a ‘fourth wave’: a resurgence of gender politics which has in common with other ‘waves’ a demand for rights, a claim for autonomy and a denouncing of masculine behaviour through which males achieve status by claiming possession of women. All this has happened before and will (to quote Battlestar Galactica) happen again (Larson 2004–2009). Or will it? I have been struck by the violence of the debates between the feminist old guard, who came to consciousness in the 1970s and 80s, and their granddaughters in the new generation as well as between a cadre of cis-­ gendered activists and the trans-women whom they denounce. The question of who or what is a ‘woman’ and who is authorised to speak for and to women seems to be overwhelming the more important work of challenging the patriarchal social structures which, fundamentally, have defined these terms in the first place. During these debates I have been engaged in revising my first book for republication. This is a book about science fiction (sf), the women who write it and have written it and how they imagine gender in some future time, other place or re-imagined past. Not all would explicitly claim to be

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. B. Shaw, Women, Science and Fiction Revisited, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25171-9_1

1

2 

D. B. SHAW

feminists. Some used male pseudonyms to gain publication in a very masculine-dominated publishing fraternity. Most were, and are, fascinated by how science writes the world and how it might be written differently, from another perspective or with a different kind of knowledge. All, of course, are beneficiaries of what, in the original version of this book, I called the Frankenstein Inheritance—the legacy of Mary Shelley who dared to experiment with a body given form by other than heterosexual desire. Re-reading the book that started as my doctoral thesis at the end of the twentieth century and that was published at the turn of the millennium, what strikes me is that, in some sense, all the stories and novels that I subjected to analysis are, in one way or another, describing the world that we now live in. This is not to claim that sf is prophetic or that these women are clairvoyant. What it does suggest is that the concerns of these texts remain acutely relevant, as is demonstrated by the fact that novels from the early twentieth century are still in print and too that I discuss here have been adapted for radio and TV. Also, as sf critics well know, the genre, even in its most utopian form, is never really about the future but about opening gaps in time and space through which we might peer back at our own time and view it as if we were visiting an alien planet. The big question of sf is ‘what if?’, a question that is always addressed by employing scientific knowledge as what Ursula Le Guin calls a ‘heuristic device’ (Le Guin 1979, p. 163). So these writers ask: what if there were no men? Or no gender? Or if sexuality were fluid? What if advanced prosthetics could furnish a brain with a new body? What if a robot could be designed to be a much better lover than any human male? They have even asked: what if there were no women (or none that we would recognise as such)? What if race were no longer a source of conflict in the world? And what if women were to develop a form of defence against masculine power that meant that they could no longer be raped? My point here is that all these questions are germane to contemporary concerns, but all the texts to which they refer were written across a span of roughly one hundred years. There are no ‘waves’ in feminist- or gender-­ oriented science fiction, just a constant rehearsal of the questions that have obsessed people who identify as human females for centuries, looked at through the perspective of what might become possible, given a set of contingent circumstances. My original intention, when I published the first version of this book, was to make explicit the scientific subtext of the works I had selected for analysis. My aim was to demonstrate that women given the opportunity to

1  INTRODUCTION: THE NEARLY SILENT LISTENER 

3

imagine new worlds based on known scientific ideas could be read as responding to their own marginalised position by challenging the tired gender stereotypes of the traditional genre. I gave myself the freedom to ignore the intentions of the author in favour of a reading that located the text within the cultural preoccupations of the time of writing. I wanted to explore science fiction as an enabling form; as a genre that, in requiring subtextual reference to specific ideas, provided the opportunity to challenge the way that gender is assumed in the practice and application of science. I followed Brian Aldiss (1988) in accepting that Shelley probably inaugurated the genre but I also wanted to establish Frankenstein as the first sf novel concerned with the effects of scientific innovation specifically on the lives of women. In her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Shelley described how she was motivated to write the novel. In the summer of 1816, she and Shelley ‘visited Switzerland, and became the neighbours of Lord Byron’ (Shelley 1969, p.  6). Also present was Byron’s secretary, Polidari. The weather being particularly bad, they spent much of their time reading ghost stories and agreed that each would attempt a story of their own. Mary was lost for ideas until a particular night when a discussion between Byron and Shelley fired her imagination: Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent, listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were discussed and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any possibility of its ever being discovered and communicated. They talked of the experiments of Dr [Erasmus] Darwin … who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things; perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together and endued with vital warmth.

Shelley then goes on to describe how, once in bed, she ‘did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the normal bounds of reverie’ (pp. 8–9). What struck me here was Mary’s silence; the fact that she took no substantial part in the discussions on the fateful night but that she

4 

D. B. SHAW

nevertheless contributed and in such a way that she, although she obviously did not know it at the time, founded a literary genre. I was also struck by the fact that she seems to almost want to relinquish responsibility for the tale. She claims that it is a gift of her imagination, rather than a product of conscious thought, as if she could not possibly be responsible for such an audacious proposition. This, for me, exemplified the position of women in relation to the subject matter of science fiction. When I published the first edition of this book, it was still possible to argue for a distinction between sf and fantasy where sf could claim to be a literature of scientific realism. Fantasy, on the other hand, was understood to be more akin to myth and more invested in inventing worlds than in extrapolating new futures for this one. However, as my final chapter for this edition illustrates, this now seems like a naïve point of view in that it not only assumes a shared reality which the extrapolation exposes or explores but privileges a literary technique founded in the methods and claims of Western science. Nevertheless, the fact remains that, for much of the historical period that I have been examining, women in the West have continued to occupy Shelley’s position of the ‘nearly silent listener’ in debates about the social effects of new technologies and the political implications of new descriptions of the physical world. The result has been some extraordinary fiction that, like Frankenstein, has not only stood the test of time but has become increasingly relevant as new technologies and ideas have impacted how we understand the world. While I agree that the division between sf and fantasy is limiting in the sense that it tends to privilege a particular story told about Western science and its effects in the world, what remains crucial is to appreciate the very different stories that have emerged from the position of the nearly silent listener and their relevance as documents of feminist thought applied to science and technology. Similarly, although what counts as ‘science’ in any given historical period needs to be interrogated, what remains relevant is that these are examples of imaginary worlds developed from the unique point of view of those with a great deal at stake in the future but who have largely been excluded from the debate. So, although Herland (Chap. 1) offers some difficult propositions about the future of eugenics, it is nevertheless an extraordinary document in terms of the way in which it utilises the theory of evolution to question the gender binary. And, given that we are now living in a period of global precarity in which a particular form of insecure masculinity threatens national security on all levels, Swastika Night (Chap. 2) should, I think, be required reading. Because these two chapters are

1  INTRODUCTION: THE NEARLY SILENT LISTENER 

5

only slightly shortened versions of the originals, I have included addenda at the end of each to contextualise them within contemporary debates. For similar reasons, I have largely re-written my chapter on C L Moore’s ‘No Woman Born’ (Chap. 3) to further emphasise the way in which it appears to anticipate much later arguments about gender as a culturally conditioned performance rather than an innate attribute of bodies. Equally remarkable is the way in which it extends the debate to question the relationship between what it means to be human and the technological interfaces through which we experience the world. Although Moore ends her story by casting doubt on whether Deirdre will be able to continue to maintain relationships with her human friends, this seems to me to be an unnecessary coda, perhaps added as a sop to the pulp readership that she was writing for. The most enjoyable part of the story is Deirdre’s performance where she explores the aesthetics of cyborg ontology through a dance that goes beyond the range of human movement. What Moore seems to be suggesting is that it is not only the performance of gender but also the performance of human that limits what we can imagine both in the realm of art and in the realm of politics. These first three chapters are the only ones that have survived from the first edition. I have made the decision to omit four of the original chapters, largely because the novels and short stories that they discuss are out of print and also to make room for some important texts that were either not yet published when I wrote the first edition or that I ignored at the time because they were already well covered in the critical literature. The most notable of these is, of course, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (Chap. 4). I was motivated to include it in this edition largely because of the 2015 BBC Radio adaptation which sent me back to the novel with a new perspective. I had always read LHD as an extrapolation from the methods of anthropology, as a reflection on the masculine bias of the so-called human sciences. What the radio adaptation made clear is that it is equally a novel about communication and about the media through which meaning is translated. It is also, of course, about extreme weather and thus, under current conditions of global heating, asks us urgently to examine how climate governs social structures. This chapter also enabled me to re-introduce some of my discussion of James Tiptree Jr’s ‘Your Haploid Heart’ from the first edition. Both Tiptree and Le Guin were children of anthropologists, and there are some interesting similarities in the way that they approach extrapolation. For both, the question of human ontology and its relationship with gender categories is paramount.

6 

D. B. SHAW

Similarly, I was motivated to include an analysis of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (Chap. 5) following the extraordinary MGM/Hulu TV adaptation that premiered in 2017 and is in receipt of, currently, fifteen Emmy awards. What particularly interested me was the way in which the narrative easily translated to a contemporary setting, as if Atwood had anticipated the world of social media and the way in which it has exposed the violence at the heart of gender relations. The handmaid’s costume, a symbol of both restriction and high visibility, has been a gift to women in movement against increasingly draconian restrictions in the US, particularly as related to abortion and the right to choose. The power of the novel then is in the meaning that it has lent to a simple red cloak and white bonnet. It stands alongside Swastika Night as one of the most uncompromising feminist dystopias. It not only proposes that, under the right political conditions, women who congratulate themselves on their autonomy and freedom could find themselves stripped of citizenship and enslaved but, again like Swastika Night, it emphasises the potential for women ourselves to collude with an oppressive regime. This is also emphasised in Naomi Alderman’s The Power (Chap. 6), a title which alludes both to the genetic mutation which gifts women a weapon to protect themselves against assault and to the political changes this enables and through which certain women become dangerously powerful. The Power is very much a novel for a post-truth world, directly referencing the form of digital communication as consequential in the dissemination of damaging popular mythologies and demonstrating the ease with which new power makes use of old discourses. Like LHD, The Power is framed by a report from a future world in which we are disappointed to find that old power imbalances still pertain but, this time, the genders have simply swapped positions. Alongside this, the text performs a skilful critique of bias in the scientific method, introducing ‘ancient’ artefacts (some of which are consumer products from our current time), the uses of which are surmised on the basis of gendered historical assumptions. There are similarities here with Herland in that Alderman has fun at the expense of her future scientists, gravely pronouncing that an iPad has something to do with serving food in the same way that Gilman obviously enjoyed confronting her explorers with women who had no concept of romantic love. In both cases, the world of the text functions to interrogate scientific realism, but whereas this allows Gilman to expose her Herlanders as utopian ‘new’ women, Alderman employs the technique to expose how ideology structures power relations beyond the gender divide. As women

1  INTRODUCTION: THE NEARLY SILENT LISTENER 

7

have gained the advantage in physical power so, the text illustrates, they have gained the power also to determine what stands as truth. Both THT and The Power feature reflexive voices speaking to us from far futures in which the time of the narrative has become ancient history. Notably, in both cases, the future world is a thinly veiled version of the time of the novel’s production. These voices have a dual function. They both allow for an exposition of the critique that the text performs and for a reflection on historicity, particularly as it relates to sf. As Sherryl Vint points out, ‘[t]he rhetorical conflation of technological innovation with progress writ large emerged alongside genre sf’ (Vint 2021, p. 33). The result is that it has generally been read as future history concerned with the social effects of innovation. But postmodernity has put an end to confidence in the future trajectory of history, essentially also closing off the future as the space which authors could imaginatively occupy in order to gain perspective for a critical evaluation of their own time. Nearly all the major theorists of postmodernity at some point turn to sf to emphasise the way that, in David Harvey’s words, ‘the future has come to be discounted into the present’. Harvey suggests this is marked by a ‘collapse of the cultural distinctions between … “science” and “regular” fiction’ (Harvey 1990, p. 281); Fredric Jameson suggests, similarly, that ‘science fiction … turns into mere “realism” and an outright representation of the present’ (Jameson 1991, p.  286). And, for Jean Baudrillard, writing for Science Fiction Studies in 1991, the conquest of space marked a turning point at which ‘the era of hyperreality ha[d] begun’. What he calls the ‘pantographic exuberance which made up the charm of SF [is] now’, as he says, ‘no longer possible’ (Baudrillard 1991, p. 311). Aside from the fact that we now live in the future that sf predicted and it is proving less than utopian, popular culture is now so thoroughly saturated with sf imagery that our world is largely experienced through representations drawn from the way the future was imagined in the past. ‘Daily life’, according to Vint, ‘can … at times seem like visions from the pulp sf of the 1920s and 1930s’ (Vint 2021, p.  1), and sf writer Kim Stanley Robinson, in an article for Nature, offers that ‘[w]e are now living in a science fiction novel that we are all writing together’ (Robinson 2017, p. 330). As Vint suggests, one of the functions of sf has been supposedly to ‘prepare us for the future’ (Vint 2021, p.  53) but, in contemporary culture, ‘advertisers embrace sf imagery to make their products seem to usher in the world promised by technophilic stories’ (p.  13). In other words, the genre’s speculative orientation and its association with the

8 

D. B. SHAW

promise of modernity has been hijacked to prepare us for the future of consumer capitalism. Vint also points to the fact that sf has become important for securing research funding for new products (p.  47) and that it has increasingly influenced design. This is particularly evident in the devices that we now use in everyday life which seem to have first appeared in early series of Star Trek. If you are designing, for instance, a personal communication device, it would seem sensible to mimic a model that Star Trek has already made highly desirable (the flip phone). Similarly, if you want to design a device that captures valuable data and, to that end, encourages people to communicate with it frequently (smart speakers), it makes sense to produce and market something that has already captured consumers’ imaginations and that feeds the desire for the kind of future that Star Trek offered.1 We don’t yet have flying cars but we do have replicators (3D printers) and, as computer games become more sophisticated and incorporate VR, we are on the way to a full-blown version of TNG’s holodeck. The sf of the early to mid-twentieth century, from which most of these devices are derived, was characterised by what Patricia Monk has called ‘the androcentric mystique … a literary mystique characterised by gadgetry, adventure and androcentric thinking’ (Monk 1980, p.  16). The inheritance of this is gender bias built into the technologies that we now rely on to manage our home, work and social lives. This is alluded to in the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale which incongruously features a laptop computer that, it is suggested can, in the world it depicts, now only be used by certain privileged men (see Chap. 5). And, in both The Power (Chap. 6) and The City We Became (Chap. 7), contemporary communications devices are the channels through which particular forms of insidious evils make their way into the world. Furthermore, as Liz W.  Faber discovered in her analysis of the computer’s voice, acousmatic computers in the early twenty-first century have been almost exclusively gendered female, largely because computers in sf have been represented as ‘both houses and wives/mothers—literal housewives’ (Faber 2020, p.  142). As she notes, films like Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) in which the central character falls in love with a female voiced computer are not science fiction because they are created for ‘an audience that [already] has access to voice-interactive software’ but they nevertheless ‘use the same narrative and conceptual techniques as previous SF texts by situating acousmatic computers into preexisting gender and narrative contexts’ (p. 166). So, we could say that, in general, what we might call

1  INTRODUCTION: THE NEARLY SILENT LISTENER 

9

gadget-oriented sf can no longer be read through extrapolation. What we are left with is a form of fiction that, like Her, might be called critical realism but which nevertheless fails to question the persistence of the androcentric mystique. Similarly, sf criticism has, somewhat belatedly, recognised the tacit acceptance of Western imperialism which is a structural property of the majority of sf texts. As Gerry Canavan puts it, ‘the imperial-turn critics of SF excavate the racist and colonialist assumptions about difference that are not only evident in early entries in the genre but continue to structure creative production in the genre to this day’ (Canavan 2017, p. 5). It may indeed be no accident then that a culture which seems to be attempting to live in the future imaginary of sf is one in which social media has provided space for expressions of both racism and misogyny that would not have been out of place in Swastika Night. As Jonathan Crary has argued ‘the internet complex … disperses the disempowered into a cafeteria of separate identities, sects and interests and is especially effective at solidifying reactionary group formations’ (Crary 2022, p.  11). As I suggest in Chap. 6, this is the subtext for The Power which is, ultimately, an argument for the impossibility of social change in a world that provides for the endless circulation of simulated models of power in a claustrophobic space which prohibits the imagination of an outside from which change might come. It is, in effect, an sf novel which employs extrapolation to model the end of the genre. My claim then is that the time of sf is over. What I mean by this is not only that the concept of linear time on which it has traditionally depended is now thoroughly compromised but that the criteria that distinguished the genre and which governed the mode in which extrapolation functioned are now no longer sustainable. The long debates over what is and what is not science fiction now seem to belong to the time of colonialist assumptions and to be part of the taxonomic ordering of the world which structured scientific imperialism. The City We Became, as my final chapter suggests, comes under the description of the Black Fantastic but it also falls under the conventions of the New Weird and Urban Fantasy. What it is not is science fiction and it is also not feminist science fiction. Although it features women as independent central characters, it fantasises the tension between the everyday and the extraordinary as also a tension between a world in which gender makes sense and one in which a form of posthuman becoming makes nonsense of the categories through which we traditionally police both gender and race. And it demands that we understand

10 

D. B. SHAW

the parameters of genre as established under the same divisive epistemology that has governed the boundaries of the human under the terms of modern science. I would suggest, in fact, that all the texts that I examine here ultimately offer a similar challenge. All in presenting gender as problematic also question how we define what counts as human in the context of imagined worlds where scientific epistemology is also questioned. Although most evince a feminist politics, what they ultimately expose is the way that categories of knowledge both structure and are structured by the artificial divisions through which social worlds are organised. Although I do not claim to offer here an overview of all sf written by women during the century from 1918 to 2022, what I do offer is a selective history which demonstrates the political value of imagining other worlds from within the margins of this one and which charts a gradual change from the confident extrapolation of Herland to the emergence of a new hybrid genre more suited to interrogating the fractured world of the twenty-first century. Along the way, I suggest ways of reading that emphasise the way in which they challenge conventions of both genre and gender. The time of sf might be over but its critical function, particularly in the way that it is able to expose the lingering effects of the androcentric mystique and offer alternatives that are not caught in repetitions of tired binaries, is as vital as ever.

Note 1. In a famous scene from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1987), set in the late 1980s, Scottie (James Doohan), who is used to simply talking to computers, tries to wake what looks like an early Apple Mac by addressing it verbally. When he gets no response, Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) hands him the mouse which he, again, tries to use as a verbal communication device. The scene is hilarious but is also prophetic. Now, of course, I can ask my computer to, for instance, play my favourite music, without even being in the same room.

References Aldiss, Brian with David Wingrove. 1988. Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction. London: Grafton. Baudrillard, Jean. 1991. Trans. Arthur B. Evans, Simulacra and Science Fiction. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 18.

1  INTRODUCTION: THE NEARLY SILENT LISTENER 

11

Canavan, Gerry. 2017, March 29. Science Fiction. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (online). https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/ 9780190201098.013.136 Crary, Jonathan. 2022. Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Postcapitalist World. London and New York: Verso. Faber, Liz W. 2020. The Computer’s Voice: From Star Trek to Siri. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London and New York: Verso. Jonze, Spike (dir.). 2013. Her. Annapurna Pictures, Stage 6 Films. Larson, Glen A. 2004–2009. Battlestar Galactica (TV Series), BSkyB, David Eick Productions, NBC Universal Television. Le Guin, Ursula. 1979. The Language of the Night. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Monk, Patricia. 1980. Frankenstein’s Daughters: The Problem of the Feminine Image in Science Fiction. In Other Worlds, ed. J.J. Teunissen. Canada: Mosaic. Robinson, Kim Stanley. 2017, December. 3D glasses on reality. Nature 552. Shelley, Mary W. 1969 [1818]. Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus. Oxford University Press. Vint, Sherryl. 2021. Science Fiction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

CHAPTER 2

Herland: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Literature of the Beehive

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was perhaps best known in her own time for Women and Economics, published originally in 1898, which anticipated much later critiques of patriarchal economics and the assumption that domestic labour should be excluded from calculations of wealth creation. She wrote at a time when the ideas of Darwin were giving rise to much discussion—‘feeding an extraordinary range of disciplines beyond its own biological field’ (Beer 1983, p. 17). Gilman, as both a socialist and a feminist, was committed to the belief that evolutionary theory indicated the need for social evolution to be planned in accordance with ideals that would ensure ‘improvement’ for the human race. What she saw as the prime directive in establishing a more evolutionarily viable society (and she believed the current state of the society in which she lived to be indicative of a morbid degeneration of the species) was the role of the mother in educating her children, a role that she believed the women of her time were poorly adapted to fulfil. Gilman was supremely aware of the masculine bias of fiction and was concerned that women, ‘new to the field, and following masculine canons because all the canons were masculine’ (Gilman 1911, p.  105), should grasp the opportunity presented by a burgeoning women’s movement to stake a claim for a literature of their own which would reflect the new freedoms that she saw as offered by a rapidly changing social environment. Against the ‘preferred subject matter of fiction … the Story of Adventure, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. B. Shaw, Women, Science and Fiction Revisited, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25171-9_2

13

14 

D. B. SHAW

and the Love Story’ which ‘do not touch on human processes, social processes … but on the special field of predatory excitement so long the sole province of men’ (pp. 97 & 98), she proposed a new literature that would give a ‘true picture of woman’s life’ (p. 105)—the life that she believed women would evolve, once released from their economic dependence on men. Herland is her attempt to write the new literature; to show how the conventions of the Story of Adventure and the Love Story must necessarily be subverted by the introduction of themes which derive their emotional impact from motherhood as the determining influence on the future, rather than from the emotions of what she called ‘an assistant in the preliminary stages’. This chapter will explore the ‘literature of the beehive’ (p. 101), Gilman’s attempt to popularise these ideas and present an alternative to what she called ‘the Adventures of Him in Pursuit of Her … [which] stops when he gets her. Story after story, age after age, over and over, this ceaseless repetition of the Preliminaries’ (p. 99). Herland was first serialised in Gilman’s own fortnightly magazine The Forerunner, which she published between 1909 and 1916, writing every word herself, including the advertisements, as a direct response to the reluctance of the publishing paternity to accept her more radical work. In her own words: Social philosophy, however ingeniously presented, does not command wide popular interest. … If one wants to express important truths, needed yet unpopular, the market is necessarily limited. As all my principal topics were in direct contravention of established views, beliefs and emotions, it is a wonder that so many editors took so much of my work for so long. (Gilman 1935, pp. 303–4)

Herland, like all sf writing, is a product of its time, conditioned by prevailing trends in both scientific and social development, and should, I think, be read as such. The narrative begins with three male explorers discovering clues to the existence of Herland on an expedition to explore and document the surrounding country. In a spirit of adventure, they return to the scene in the hope of realising their dream of a country full of willing virgins who would welcome their ‘civilising’ influence. The reality, of course, is quite different and as Bartkowski comments, ‘Herland maintains its humour through the constant and repeated exposure of the men’s preconceptions about what a world of women would or could be’ (Bartkowski 1989, p. 28).

2  HERLAND: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN AND THE LITERATURE… 

15

The three explorers are representative of three specific male attitudes. Terry O.  Nicholson is described as ‘a man’s man’ (Gilman 1979, p.  9) who believed there to be only two types of women, ‘those he wanted and those he didn’t’ (p.  21), Jeff Margrave is a romantic who ‘idealize[s] women, and [is] always looking for a chance to “protect” or “serve” them’ (p. 89), while Vandyck Jennings, the central protagonist and narrator, was more than likely intended to represent the sociologist Lester Frank Ward, for whom, as Mary A. Hill writes, Gilman held ‘a lifelong hero-­worshipping respect’ (Hill 1980, p. 265). Gilman’s social philosophy needs to be understood as a reaction to, and a consequence of, the paradoxes that Darwinism presented to nineteenth-­ century intellectuals as it was absorbed into ever more varied disciplines. For instance, the essentially theistic view that evolution was merely the playing out of a pre-designed course initiated by a divine creator could answer the question of how a benevolent God could allow suffering by pointing to the fact that the laws of nature had been designed to weed out the ‘unfit’ so that the divine purpose would be seen to unfold along the lines of Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’. Nevertheless, evolutionary theory, which proved the earth to be much older than could be calculated from the story of Genesis and which denied the separate creation of species, could not be reconciled with a fundamentalist reading of the Bible. Similarly, the planned evolution debate promoted ‘negative eugenics’, on the one hand, and co-operative effort to raise all members of a society to the level of ‘the fit’, on the other.1 Brian Easlea reports that Darwin himself vacillated between denying the value of social support for the weaker members of a society and an exhortation that all members of a society should feel compassion and sympathy towards ‘the unfit’ (Easlea 1981, pp. 154–5). Indeed, the American John Fiske believed altruism to be ‘the guiding feature of human evolution’ (Bowler 1984, p.  215), whereas William Graham Sumner’s philosophy was summed up in his own words as ‘root, hog, or die’ (p. 271). But in all these arguments, the fundamental question remains that, if natural selection favours only the fittest, then by what criteria do we determine fitness? Early thinkers influenced by Darwinism were easily able to offer the tenets of evolutionary theory as a justification for capitalism. Accordingly, ‘the survival of the fittest’ was interpreted to legitimate the laissez-faire economy. Natural selection supposedly favoured the ‘captains of industry’ with power naturally accruing to moneyed families who instructed their children correctly in the management and

16 

D. B. SHAW

maintenance of wealth—progress being commensurate with economic prudence and privileging those who engaged all their energies in the competitive process. In the words of Sumner, a leading proponent of this system of thought, ‘millionaires are a product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirements of certain work to be done’ (Hofstadter 1959, p. 58). It was assumed that natural selection necessarily tended towards progress, despite the fact that, as Bowler points out, ‘in a truly Darwinian universe there was no guarantee of progress’ (Bowler 1984, p.  209). Evidence for progress was offered in the distinction between the less technologically advanced and socially sophisticated races and the socalled civilised and superior white, industrialised races. Bowler reports that it was ‘even suggested that women represented a stage of growth lower than that of men’ (p.  286). Darwinism thus also provided the foundation for feminist arguments and it is a version of evolutionary theory that provides the subtext for Herland.

Male Efflorescence Gilman is an inheritor of the system of thought instigated by the publication, in 1792 of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, which ‘argued for reason as the basis for women’s equal part in society and politics’ (Rowbotham 1992, p. 23), although, like Wollstonecraft, Gilman is ‘inclined to be complacent about the inherent progress and superiority of Western civilisation’ (p. 24), the collectivity which she advocates and the socialist utopianism upon which Herland is based were recurrent themes in the feminism of the period, and a number of thinkers believed domestic reform to be a necessary step in the move towards a more egalitarian society. Gilman’s radicalism echoes that of other social reformers like Marie Stevens Howland who ‘became convinced that not only should housekeeping be cooperative but that children should be brought up communally’ (p.  89). Nevertheless, she was primarily a eugenicist who believed in these changes as a way of influencing the course of evolution. When Gilman published Women and Economics, with its strong bias towards planned evolution in freeing women from ‘pitiful dependence’ (Gilman 1966, p. 19), Lester Frank Ward, whose gynaeococentric theory of evolution she called ‘the most important single percept in the history of thought’ (Gilman 1924, p. 57) had yet to publish Pure Sociology (1903) in which the theory was fully expounded, and his first book, Dynamic Sociology (1883), was as yet largely ignored. Ward ‘was the first and most

2  HERLAND: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN AND THE LITERATURE… 

17

formidable of a number of thinkers who attacked the unitary assumptions of social Darwinism and natural-law laissez-faire individualism … he replaced an older passive determinism with a positive body of social theory adaptable to the uses of reform’ (Hofstadter 1959, p. 76). His response to the theory of evolution was to argue that human evolution should be brought under conscious control. Like most post-Darwinist social scientists, Ward makes use of analogies from the animal kingdom to give a biological basis to his social theory, and it is this that informs his arguments for a gynaeococentric basis for evolution. Gilman’s own work is largely an extension of this theory, relevant as it is to the status of women.2 According to Ward, sexual reproduction is the next evolutionary stage to parthenogenesis, which ‘is not usually classed as another step in the series but rather as a backward step from a more advanced form’ (Ward 1903, p. 306). ‘The female’, he writes, ‘is the fertile sex, and whatever is fertile is looked upon as female…. It therefore does no violence to language or to science to say that life begins with the female organism and is carried on a long distance by means of females alone. In all the different forms of æsexual reproduction, from fission to parthenogenesis, the female may in this sense be said to exist alone and perform all the functions of life including reproduction. In a word, life begins as female’. (p. 313)

Ward saw the development of sexual reproduction as necessary to facilitate adaptation of the species to a changing environment, but the male, in its first evolution as a separate organism, was merely a fertilising agent and had no life function other than this. However, the female, having the power of selection, would choose to benefit her offspring, favouring the largest and strongest of the available males with the result that the male evolved proportionately in strength and size. Or, as Gilman herself depicts the scenario, early males were ‘very tiny, transient, and inferior devices at first, but gradually developed into fuller and fuller equality with the female’ (Gilman 1966, p. 130). The result, according to Ward, was what he called ‘male efflorescence’: The time came in the development of the race when brute force began to give way to sagacity, and the first use to which this growing power was put was that of circumventing rivals for female favour. Brain grew with effort, and like the other organs that are so strangely developed through this cause,

18 

D. B. SHAW

it began to be more especially characteristic of the sex. The weaker sex admired success then as now, and the bright-witted became the successful ones, while the dull witted failed to transmit the dullness. There was a survival of the cunning. (Ward 1913–18, Vol. 4, p. 134)

So the human female is the victim of an evolutionary irony. She has been displaced in her ‘natural’ function as selector of the most suitable mate to benefit her offspring in the race for survival, simply by selecting too well. Ward and Gilman seem almost to compete in their condemnation of the male. What for Gilman was an ‘inferior device’, for Ward was ‘a mere afterthought of nature’ (Ward 1903, p.  314) and bees and spiders are frequently brought into the argument to ‘prove’ the natural position of the male to be one of inferiority. The ‘tiny male’ of the common spider, who ‘tremblingly achieves his one brief purpose and is then eaten up by his mate’ (Gilman 1966, p. 130) is Gilman’s example of a well-adapted sexual relationship, and both she and Ward were delighted to find parthenogenesis among certain varieties of plant lice3 although Gilman points out that ‘when conditions grow hard, males are developed, and the dual method of reproduction is introduced’ (p. 131). As Mary A. Hill points out, Ward provided the ‘kind of intellectual ammunition’ that ‘many suffragists thought they needed’ (Hill 1980, pp. 269–70) and what may seem to the modern reader like an argument for reducing the male to a kind of ambulant germ-cell or disposing of him entirely after a ‘short period of functional use’ (Gilman 1966, p. 131) was, for Gilman and her contemporaries, authoritative scientific support for metaphorically, rather than literally, cutting him down to size. It is central to Gilman’s argument that women have become slaves to their secondary sexual characteristics, ‘those modifications of structure and function which subserve the uses of reproduction ultimately, but are not directly essential’ (p. 32). In other words, the physical characteristics which women have developed, in the course of evolution, to sexually attract the male of the species, have taken precedence over other faculties due to the fact that the female must ensure, by her sexual attractiveness, that the male will also be inclined to feed and clothe her. This is what Gilman calls the ‘sexuo-economic relation’ (p. 94), the condition of marriage in her time which dictated that the female develop only those ‘faculties required to secure and obtain a hold on [the male]’ (p. 62) so that she becomes little more than a decorative domestic servant, performing only

2  HERLAND: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN AND THE LITERATURE… 

19

those duties necessary for her husband’s comfort and thus being ignorant of the ‘knowledge of the world’ (p. 189). She has thus developed, not as the best kind of mother, but merely as the best kind of mate for the male— ‘over sexed’ (p. 141), economically dependent and a threat to the continued development of the species. ‘The female’, she writes, ‘segregated to the uses of sex alone naturally deteriorates in racial development, and naturally transmits that deterioration to her offspring’ (p. 183). Therefore, in order to assist evolution effectively, woman must be freed from the ‘artificial position’ (p. 317) in which she merely competes for male attention and is excluded from co-operative effort as the man is excluded by ‘the increasing weight of economic cares. … [C]hildren come to be looked upon as a burden’, she suggests, ‘and are dreaded instead of desired by the hardworked father’ (p. 169). Although it seems that both Ward and Gilman are arguing for a parthenogenetic world, neither would dispute that evolution has, of necessity, provided for dual parentage, and at one point Gilman stresses that the ‘sexuo-economic relation’ was necessary to raise and broaden, to deepen and sweeten, to make more feminine, and so more human, the male of the human race. If the female had remained in full personal freedom and activity, she would have remained superior to him, and both would have remained stationary. Since the female had not the tendency to vary which distinguishes the male, it was essential that the expansive forces of masculine energy be combined with the preservative and constructive forces of feminine energy’. (p. 132)

So what does Gilman think went wrong? Her argument rests on the proposition that evolutionary adaptation can have negative as well as positive possibilities. We should not assume that evolution is, in itself, a guarantee of survival but should be aware that we have evolved the faculty of reason precisely for the purpose of assessing our chances for survival and directing our social evolution accordingly. But she also believed the growth of ‘the “women’s movement” and the “labor movement”’ (p. 138) in her own time to be indicative of ‘a sharp personal consciousness of the evils of a situation hitherto little felt’ (p. 139). Nevertheless, she was despairing of the greater mass of women who did not recognise their duty to ‘develope [sic] a newer, better form of sex-relation and of economic relation therewith, and so grasp the fruits of all previous civilizations, and grow on to the beautiful results of higher ones’ (p.  142). ‘This is the woman’s

20 

D. B. SHAW

century’, she writes, ‘the first chance for the mother of the world to rise to her full place, her transcendent power to remake humanity, to rebuild the suffering world—and the world waits while she powders her nose’ (Gilman 1935, p. 331). Both genders then are handicapped by the ‘sexuo-economic relation’ (Gilman 1966, p. 94) and its attendant specialisation of function. Female passivity inheres in a social order which privileges the male as the active sex only because of his biological adaptation, through natural selection, to the tasks that he has appropriated as ‘masculine’, following the demands of ‘male efflorescence’. The effect has been to reduce the demands of motherhood to an inferior position.

The Literature of the Beehive In Women and Economics, Gilman explores the paradox inherent in the attitude that women should necessarily be dependent for the sake of their progenitive role. ‘In spite of her supposed segregation to maternal duties’, she writes, ‘the human female, the world over, works at extra-marital duties for hours enough to provide her with an independent living, and then is denied independence on the grounds that motherhood prevents her working!’ (Gilman 1966, p. 21). Hence, in compiling the literature of the beehive, Gilman was committed to revealing the absurdity of a social order that could support such a paradox while also demonstrating the value, in terms of evolutionary development, of motherhood released from the restrictions of the sexuoeconomic relation. Herland offers the proposition that, without the presence of men to hinder their development, women will evolve a social structure that privileges the needs of children—a form of co-operative motherhood where the needs of the community become those of the individual and ‘conscious improvement’ (Gilman 1979, p. 78) is the driving force behind their development. But, unlike more recent feminist utopias, Herland does not propose life without men as the ideal for women but instead makes the argument that men who allow themselves to be directed by reason will themselves see the value of a society organised around motherhood, as will women who allow themselves to think beyond the terms of the romantic ideal. So Herland provides a scenario which allows Gilman, as Frances Bartkowski puts it, ‘a great deal of space in which to play’; to invent a society that ridicules the ‘man-made world’ while offering a formula for change.

2  HERLAND: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN AND THE LITERATURE… 

21

Bartkowski believes that Gilman’s choice of a male narrator ‘is one which might make male readers of The Forerunner more comfortable by giving them the privileged place of observer or storyteller’ (Bartkowski 1989, p. 28) but, while this may be true, a female narrator would not have allowed her to demonstrate that men also have the potential to evolve. As Dale Spender points out, she refused to describe herself as a feminist (a term which she interpreted as representing the ‘other’ side of masculinist values), preferring instead to claim ‘humanity for herself’ (Spender 1983, p. 516) and believed in ‘the full social combination of individuals in collective industry’ which would lead to ‘a union between man and woman such as the world has long dreamed of in vain’ (Gilman 1966, p. 145). I believe it is essential to Gilman’s purpose that we recognise Herland as a frozen moment in a potential evolutionary history, a moment in which, as the female regains the power of selection, the ‘man’s man’ and the ‘romantic’ become redundant. For Gilman, Jennings represents the future when ‘men and women, eternally drawn together by the deepest force in nature, will be able at last to meet on a plane of pure and perfect love’ (p.  300). For this reason, it is Jennings and his Herland ‘wife’, Ellador, who are selected to spread the message to the wider world and who continue their adventures in a sequel (With Her In Ourland). Nicholson is banished, having attempted to rape his ‘wife’, Alima, and Margrave is similarly ‘written out’ by being left behind in Herland. So, while the later essentialist utopias propose parthenogenesis as a device to demonstrate the liberation of women from all male influence and to depict the future of cultural development in female terms alone,4 in Herland it allows Gilman to rewrite evolutionary history, as both she and Ward saw it, to eliminate the ‘mistake’ of male efflorescence. The arrival of the three men finds Herland quietly prosperous, well organised and abundantly fruitful, with the women ‘tall, strong, healthy and beautiful’ (Gilman 1979, pp.  77–8). The explorers discover that Herland was originally populated by both sexes, but a series of wars had greatly reduced the male population. When a volcanic eruption effectively blocked the pass from the mountains and the remaining men had died, the women had found themselves alone. They had then developed a co-­ operative social structure that, following the first ‘miracle’ (p. 56) birth, was devoted to what Terry Nicholson’s Herland teacher, Moadine, calls ‘Human Motherhood—in full working use’ (p. 66). Gilman saw motherhood as primarily educative in function. ‘A right motherhood’, she writes, ‘should be able to fulfill this great function

22 

D. B. SHAW

perfectly’ (Gilman 1966, p. 188). ‘Right motherhood’ is what she later terms ‘wider maternity’ (p. 289) which she contrasts to ‘the feverish personality of the isolated one-baby household’ (p.  288). Children reared communally, she believed, ‘would unconsciously absorb the knowledge that “we” were humanity, that “we” were creatures to be … fed … watched … laid to sleep … kissed and cuddled’, fostering an immediate identification of the individual with the wider community and giving the mother ‘certain free hours as a human being, as a member of a civilized community, as an economic producer, as a growing, self-realizing individual’ (pp. 289–90). Gilman’s argument, then, is primarily against the patriarchal family, which, while enslaving women, breeds an ‘inordinate self-interest’ (p. 277) in the next generation, thus creating women who live vicariously through their husbands and children and men who demand domestic service from their wives, who are thus cut off from the means to fulfil themselves both as women and as mothers. According to Gilman, ‘[t]he human mother does less for her young, both absolutely and proportionately, than any kind of mother on earth. She does not obtain food for them, nor covering, nor shelter, nor protection, nor defense. She does not educate them beyond the personal habits required in the family circle and in her limited range of social life. The necessary knowledge of the world, so indispensable to every human being, she cannot give, because she does not possess it’ (p. 189). The women of Herland have thus developed a religion based on maternal epistemology. Gilman believed that, ‘[t]o the death-based religion the main question is, “What is going to happen to me after I am dead?”—a posthumous egotism. … To the birth-based religion the main question is, “What must be done for the child who is born?”—an immediate altruism. … The first is something to be believed. The second is something to be done’ (Gilman 1924, pp. 46–7). The first parthenogenetic mother of Herland had thus inaugurated ‘the Temple of Maaia—their Goddess of Motherhood’ (Gilman 1979, p. 56). As Jennings explains ‘[t]he religion they had to begin with was much like that of old Greece—a number of gods and goddesses; but they lost all interest in deities of war and plunder, and gradually centered on their Mother Goddess altogether’ (p. 59). The women thus have no understanding either of Christianity or of the family, or of the economic principles of capitalism, allowing the narrative to present numerous ironies as the men attempt to instruct them as to the value of their ‘civilisation’. The question of surnames raises some confusion,

2  HERLAND: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN AND THE LITERATURE… 

23

with the women puzzled as to why they should need to ‘sign’ their children (p. 76), and they are rather less than honoured by the men’s desire to bestow their surnames on the Herland women that they ‘marry’, a custom that Alima pronounces to be merely ‘unpleasant’ (p. 118). While being forced to account for the apparent inadequacies of their system, the men are brought to question their own role, with the result that, as the narrative develops, Nicholson’s defensive and therefore resistant stance is brought into increasingly sharp contrast with Jennings’ developing sympathy and admiration. The third man of the party, Jeff Margrave, described as having ‘a poetic imagination’ (p. 25) (and actually the most annoying character in the novel), displays a subjective reverence for the women which again is contrasted with Jennings’ considered, objective viewpoint, mediated by his ‘scientific imagination’, which, he flatters himself, is ‘the highest sort’ (p. 26). The first chapter, ‘A Not Unnatural Enterprise’, reveals their disparate personalities as they consider a country of only women. Even Jennings’ ‘scientific imagination’ can see no further than the survival of a ‘primeval’ matriarchy, while Jeff, ‘a tender soul’, imagines ‘roses and babies and canaries and tidies, and all that sort of thing’ and Nicholson, ‘in his secret heart, had visions of a sort of sublimated summer resort—just Girls and Girls and Girls’ (p.  7). All three imagine a form of conquest to be the outcome of the ‘enterprise’, and so the easy acceptance of their arrival and the casual use of chloroform to restrain them puts them at an immediate psychological disadvantage. Margrave is prompted to comment, ‘It’s as if our being men were a minor incident’ (p. 30). The Herland women, secure in their own autonomy, present a psychological challenge to the three men and, through them, to the reader. The challenge is threefold. Assumptions regarding the role and character of women are held up to question and ridicule, the accepted structure of family life is questioned with regard to its effectiveness for the continued growth of society, and the concept of love between the sexes is brought into conflict, as an ideal, against the absorbing passion of the Herland women for co-operative motherhood. Furthermore, the growing divisions between the men can be read as a conflict between potential narratives: narratives that present, on the one hand, distinct responses to evolutionary theory and, on the other, the attempt to write a masculine ending against a conclusion which would deny that such an ending is inevitable.

24 

D. B. SHAW

Newbolt Man Meets His Match Writing in Play Up and Play the Game: The Heroes of Popular Fiction, Patrick Howarth discusses a figure who ‘[c]ast in the role of hero … dominated a large area of English literature, which may be loosely described as popular fiction, for about a century’ (Howarth 1973, p. 14). Howarth’s title is telling, in that the adventure stories that he describes appear to derive their narrative from the game of cricket, the hero being the ultimate sportsman and notions of ‘fair play’ informing the outcome of the adventure. The title is, in fact, from a poem by Sir Henry Newbolt, a poet of dubious talent but extraordinary popularity who wrote at the turn of the century and whom Howarth believes to be the blueprint for what he terms ‘Newbolt Man’, the archetypal hero whose childhood he discovers in Tom Brown’s School Days, and whose growth he traces through adolescence in the stories of Henry Rider Haggard and his contemporaries to adulthood as Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond.5 Newbolt Man was bold, brave and not particularly bright: ‘[h]is philistinism served to widen a largely unnecessary gulf between athlete and aesthete, manliness and art, and so impoverish life. His attitude to women was a curious compound of fear and self-distrust, causing him at one moment to elevate women on to a rather chilling pedestal, at the next to regard them as a kind of permanent second eleven, one or two of whom might in an emergency be allowed to field as substitutes’ (p. 175). The evidence for Terry Nicholson as a parody of Newbolt Man is persuasive. ‘Fear and self-distrust’ are obvious in his treatment of the Herlanders, and his apparent inability to relinquish values that he believes incontestable is tantamount to Newbolt Man’s insistence on bringing the values of the cricket field to a variety of diverse situations in which he is commonly shown to triumph. The world of Newbolt Man is fraught with adventure and physically challenging situations, but, immured within the rules of ‘the game’, he is able to create a narrative in which he is indestructible. It is a narrative of Christian values, white imperialism and male, upper middle class supremacy in which a mystery must always be solved by the hero. It is just such a narrative that Terry Nicholson tries desperately to create. Indeed, in the opening chapter, all the elements for ‘a ripping adventure yarn’ are present—secrecy, a mystery to be solved and three potential heroes with the social status and material means to deliver them safely into the plot.

2  HERLAND: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN AND THE LITERATURE… 

25

Nicholson differs from Newbolt Man in that, for him, women are the prizes in the game rather than merely peripheral players, but there is nevertheless a sense in which he attempts to adhere to the Newbolt Man scenario by requiring them to play by the rules. This is illustrated by the scene in which, announcing that he has come ‘prepared’, he produces ‘a necklace of big varicolored stones’ which he intends to use as ‘bait’ (Gilman 1979, p. 16) but remains undeterred when his quarry refuses to be ‘caught’, confidently announcing that ‘They expected it. Women like to be run after’. This then is ‘fair play’ as far as he is concerned. It is not the reticence of the women that has him at a disadvantage but the nonappearance of the opposing team. When, after they have given up chasing the women through the forest, he observes, with obvious delight, ‘The men of this country must be good sprinters!’ (p. 17) he is clearly anticipating the appearance of worthy opponents. It is when the worthy opponents turn out to be women that his confidence begins to suffer. When his companions show signs of being won over, having learned the history of Herland, Nicholson attempts to engage their complicity in opposition by invoking the safe stereotypes that have structured the men’s experiences in their home culture: ‘[i]t’s likely women—just a pack of women—would have hung together like that! We all know women can’t organize—that they scrap like anything—are frightfully jealous’ (p. 58). When his stated goal of becoming ‘king of Ladyland’ (p. 10) is thwarted, his frustration manifests itself as anger and he is openly abusive, declaring, ‘They aren’t human’ and ‘The whole thing’s deuced unnatural’ (p. 80). His anger provides the motivational drive to reassert his ‘superiority’ in a manner unacceptable to the Herlanders although, as Jennings points out, ‘in our country he would have been held quite “within his rights”’, as Alima’s ‘husband’. For a contemporary reader, it is unsurprising that Nicholson emerges as a rapist, given that he represents precisely the kind of entitled straight masculinity identified by, for instance, Laura Bates in Men Who Hate Women (2020). However, in light of Gilman’s project to expose the limitations of the popular literature of her time, the evidence for Nicholson as Newbolt Man in the wrong adventure is persuasive. As Jennings comments, ‘here he was all out of drawing’ (p. 74). While it is quite possible that Gilman was familiar with the Newbolt Man style of hero, it is also true that he only functions adequately in the context of British upper class culture. Gilman was an American, writing for an American audience where, traditionally, the frontier provided the necessary challenge for a hero to prove himself. So, if Terry Nicholson can be

26 

D. B. SHAW

read as Newbolt Man, urgently trying to forge his identity through a narrative that refuses to adhere to ‘the rules’, then the ‘Not Unnatural Enterprise’ is a similar archetype identified by, among others, Nina Baym as a myth associated specifically with American literature. In essence, Nicholson is Newbolt Man liberated from the mores of British culture and let loose in ‘the wilderness’. The wilderness represents the pioneering spirit which fosters individuality. ‘[T]he essential quality of America’, writes Baym, ‘comes to reside in its unsettled wilderness and the opportunities that such a wilderness offers to the individual as the medium on which he may inscribe, unhindered, his own destiny and his own nature’ (Baym 1986, p. 71). Discussing ‘the entramelling society’ and ‘the promising landscape’, Baym finds them to be a constant source of tension in American literature, while both being ‘depicted in unmistakably feminine terms’ (p. 72): the encroaching, constricting, destroying society is represented with particular urgency in the figure of one or more women. There are several possible reasons why this might be so. It would seem to be a fact of life that we all—women and men alike—experience social conventions and responsibilities and obligations first in the persons of women, since women are entrusted by society with the task of rearing young children. Not until he reaches mid-­ adolescence does the male connect up with other males whose primary task is socialization; but at about this time—if he is heterosexual—his lovers and spouses become the agents of a permanent socialization and domestication. Thus, although women are not the source of social power, they are experienced as such. And although not all women are engaged in socializing the young, the young do not encounter women who are not. So from the point of view of the young man, the only kind of women who exist are entrappers and domesticators. (p. 73)

The opposition that Baym proposes between female society and male individuality is revealing for a criticism of Herland which posits the discovery of a wholly female co-operative society as the achievement of the quest. In The Adventures of Newbolt Man women either do not appear at all, appear as prizes for the ‘victor’ or exist ‘between the lines’ as necessary but dispensable (in terms of narrative) vessels of genealogy. Similarly, in the American stories of escape into the wilderness, ‘the role of entrapper and impediment in the melodrama of beset manhood is reserved for women’. In both cases, women are merely marginal to the text or represented as obstructions. The quest for self-definition involves an escape from

2  HERLAND: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN AND THE LITERATURE… 

27

‘entramelling history’ into a new history that the hero may write for himself. Whether, within the narrative, women represent a threat or a promise, they as individuals do not write history. They are important only insofar as they represent what the hero must either escape, conquer or win in order that the writing of history may proceed. Baym, following Annette Kolodny, suggests that ‘the hero, fleeing a society that has been imagined as feminine, then imposes on nature some ideas of women which, no longer subject to the correcting influence of real-life experience, become more and more fantastic. The fantasies are infantile, concerned with power, mastery, and total gratification’ (p. 75). The ‘mythic landscape’ of Herland as the subject of such fantasies is suggested by Jennings when he explains, ‘There was something attractive to a bunch of unattached young men in finding an undiscovered country of a strictly Amazonian nature’ (Gilman 1979, p. 5) and the tabula rasa promise of the ‘feminine’ wilderness is perhaps echoed in Nicholson’s assertion that ‘[t]hey would fight among themselves. Women always do. We mustn’t look to find any sort of order or organization’ (p. 8). That the intention is to impose ‘order and organization’ where they expect to find none is obvious as is the desire for mastery and the expectation of submission, all of which combined would satisfy the need for Newbolt Man’s predictable narrative while also allowing for the pioneering spirit to triumph. It is also worth pointing out that Nicholson’s attempted rape of Alima, in the context of nineteenth-century social imperialism and the attendant imperative to subordinate women for the sake of maintaining colonial power, would have been not only acceptable but also unremarkable. Nevertheless, Nicholson’s fantasy narrative is thwarted so that Vandyck Jennings, with his ‘rational’ approach and more constrained sexuality can emerge as an alternative ‘hero’.

Romance and the Scientific Imagination Brian Easlea believes that ‘[i]f Gilman had been able to write the story in the 1970s she surely could have safely included lesbian loving between the sisters of Herland without compromising the affection and solidarity felt between all the sisters, and made the presence of the three male explorers—who constantly thought about returning to “penetrat[e] those vast forests and civilizing—or exterminating—the dangerous savages”—as unambiguously unwelcome as it was menacing’ (Easlea 1981, p. 270). But this, I think, is to miss the point. Lesbian love could only have been

28 

D. B. SHAW

included as part of the phase of transition that Herland represents rather than as a political statement (as is the case with the later utopias).6 For Gilman, it was necessary that the far more important issue of effective motherhood and planned evolution should not be eclipsed by attention to what she would have considered to be superfluous details. So, as Jennings reports, the Herlanders ‘hadn’t the faintest idea of love—sex-love that is’ (Gilman 1979, p. 88). Instead, the men present them with the possibility of ‘making the Great Change … of reverting to their earlier bi-sexual order of nature’ (pp. 88 & 89). What Gilman wants to stress is that the evolution of the male is not a ‘mistake’ but a successful adaptation, nurtured through its early stages by the sexuoeconomic relation but now in need of a new direction in order to be a continuing success. The men are welcome in Herland because it is for just such an intervention that the women have been preparing. This, as I have indicated, requires a new form of love story—a narrative which derives tension not from the vicissitudes of a patriarchal economy with woman as the spoils of victory but rather from the endeavours of a unified social organism striving for mutual benefit. But, in demonstrating how the literature of the beehive might be shaped, Gilman needed to acknowledge accepted narrative forms and, indeed, needed to subvert them in order to demonstrate the value of her thesis in fictional form. Her awareness of this need is aptly summed up by Jennings, who, in discussing the drama of Herland, comments that it was ‘to our taste—rather flat. You see, they lacked the sex motive and, with it, jealousy. They had no interplay of warring nations, no aristocracy and its ambitions, no wealth and poverty opposition’ (p. 99). Without these oppositions, there is no place for the traditional characters of fiction, still less for the style of narrative which produces popular heroes or romantic heroines. The emotive force which characterises the traditional love story is abrogated by the lack of overt sexual polarity as well as by the criteria which determine the basis for sexual selection. The Herlanders are ‘strikingly deficient in … “femininity”’ (p. 59), ‘all [wear] short hair’, run ‘like marathon winners’ (p. 30), are ‘not provocative’, (p. 128) and ‘their only perception of the value of a male creature as such [is] for Fatherhood’ (p. 124). Equally, selection on the basis of individual choice with standards dictated by social position is replaced by considerations as to how the race may benefit and is a matter for community decision. The sisterhood takes the place of the individual so that the men’s relationships with the individual women are presented as insignificant in comparison to the wider

2  HERLAND: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN AND THE LITERATURE… 

29

issue of ‘bi-sexual’ generation, which concerns the whole society. Hence, the emotional emphasis and the true ‘love story’ of Herland is based on an examination of the values accruing from collective effort and public ‘service’. This, and the absence of cultural artefacts associated with courtship, places the men at a disadvantage from which Jennings is forced to re-evaluate his views on the status of women and the status of the men as potential suitors: You see, if a man loves a girl who is in the first place young and inexperienced; who in the second place is educated with a background of caveman tradition, a middle-ground of poetry and romance, and a foreground of unspoken hope and interest all centering upon the one Event; and who has, furthermore, absolutely no other hope or interest worthy of the name— why, it is a comparatively easy matter to sweep her off her feet with a dashing attack. Terry was a past master in this process. He tried it here, and Alima was so affronted, so repelled, that it was weeks before he got near enough to try again.

Gilman’s oblique references to sexuality are at times, for a modern reader, difficult to decipher, but it becomes clear that she intends her readers to understand that Alima does not find the idea of sex itself to be repellent but is rather affronted by Nicholson’s assumption that she is ready to succumb whenever he demands. Jennings and Ellador talk ‘it all out together’ so that they have ‘an easier experience’ during ‘the real miracle time’ (p. 93). Again here Gilman’s strategically vague references to sexual intercourse make for a rather confused reading. While a modern reader may initially construe the ‘miracle time’ to be Jennings’ initiation into a sexual relationship with a woman who knows what she wants and insists that her sexual needs are satisfied, later revelations make it clear that the ‘miracle’ is Jennings’ ability to accept what Ellador most definitely does not want. As Frances Bartkowski notes, ‘Gilman’s late Victorian sexual ethics are apparent in all her writings’ (Bartkowski 1989, p. 31) so it is with difficulty that we appreciate her insistence on sex as an activity to be restricted to reproduction and Ellador’s surprise that ‘when people marry, they go right on doing this in season and out of season, with no thought of children at all’ (Gilman 1979, p. 127). But while she ‘has not come to grips with speaking of sexual pleasure’ (Bartkowski 1989, p. 31), Gilman makes clear her belief, as she states it in His Religion and Hers, that ‘[i]n normal motherhood, sex use will be

30 

D. B. SHAW

measured by its service to the young, not its enjoyment by the individual’ (Gilman 1924, p.  208). Sexual pleasure, then, is deferred in favour of work and ‘social service’ as the Herland women ‘voluntarily defer’ motherhood by deflecting the ‘deep inner demand for a child’ into ‘the most active work, physical and mental’ (Gilman 1979, p. 70) on such occasions as the potential overpopulation of the country demands it.7 Here, sublimation of instinctual drives is, for the Herlanders, a positive indication of the use of reason in directing social evolution. This is not repression in the Freudian sense8 but a conscious postponement of individual desires for the greater good of the community. However, despite the difficult (and, frankly, comical) discourse on sexual relationships, what is clearly established is that it is the women who exercise control and the men who submit (Nicholson, of course, is denied the relationship altogether) and Jennings finds that ‘an apparently imperative demand had disappeared without my noticing it’ (Gilman 1979, p. 128). In Bartkowski’s view, ‘Gilman replaces religion with sacred motherhood and eliminates sexuality’ (Bartkowski 1989, p. 32) but I think it is more accurate to say that she eliminates sexuality as a constant factor in male/female relationships, replacing sexual desire and its association with creativity, with desire directed towards co-operative effort in ‘service to the young’. Hence, the Herlanders’ ‘drama … dance, music, religion and education were all very close together’ (Gilman 1979, p.  99) and all prompted by allegiance to an ideal of motherhood, replacing ‘the sweet intense joy of married lovers’ as the ‘higher stimulus to all creative work’ (p. 127). It is thus Gilman’s intention to demonstrate the untapped creative potential that she believed would accompany the evolution of human beings from sex-driven individuality to propagation-driven co-operation. Nevertheless, Gilman must retain the sex drive in order to bring her three pairs of lovers together, and it is here that she encounters some difficulty. While the women of Herland display none of the overt sex-distinctions of their American sisters, Jennings is moved to speculate as to their capacity for sex attraction. ‘Two thousand years’ disuse had left very little of the instinct’, he suggests, ‘also we must remember that those who had at times manifested it as atavistic exceptions were often, by that very fact, denied motherhood. Yet while the mother process remains, the inherent ground for sex-distinction remains also; and who shall say what long-forgotten feeling, vague and nameless, was stirred in some of these mother hearts by our arrival?’ (p. 92).

2  HERLAND: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN AND THE LITERATURE… 

31

The arrival of the men thus effectively produces an evolutionary regression which is difficult to justify in the terms that Gilman proposes. What she is apparently proposing is that the reawakening of sexual desire in the women emulates the seasonal mating habits of species unaffected by the sexuoeconomic relation—a selective atavism operating to exclude the women’s more recent ‘harem-bred’ (p. 56) racial memories. This suggestion of atavism becomes highly problematic in the context of a narrative that is concerned to present what Gilman called ‘the attitude of the full-­ grown woman, who faces the demands of love with the high standards of conscious motherhood’ (Gilman 1911, p. 107). As Beer writes, the ‘quality of latency in the experience of physical growth makes it a possible metaphor for all invisible process[es] …. The particular organisation implied by evolutionary theory and determinism borrows the idea of irreversible onward sequence from the experience of growth. It can’t run backwards, though it may include equally convergence and branching. Nor can it stay still. Recrudescence is also not a concept easily assimilable to evolutionary ideas’ (Beer 1983, pp. 107 & 108). Similarly, to the nineteenth-century mind, atavism spoke clearly of degeneration and as Beer documents the attendant assumptions: The idea of development harboured a paternalistic assumption once it was transferred exclusively to human beings, since it was presumed that the observer was at the summit of development, looking back over a past struggling to reach the present high moment. The European was taken as the type of achieved developmental pre-eminence, and other races studied were seen as further back on the chart of growth. The image of growth was again misplaced from the single life cycle, so that whole races were seen as being part of ‘the childhood of man’, to be protected, led and corrected like children. (p. 119)

There is nothing to suggest that Gilman resisted these assumptions. The Herland women have developed their ‘anthropology’ partly on the basis of ‘the knowledge of the savagery of the occupants of those dim forests below’ (Gilman 1979, p. 64) with whom, as Jennings reports later, ‘they had no contact’, making for a high level of assumption in the use of the word ‘savage’. And, during a conversation in which Terry is at pains to point out the virtue of decoration in a woman’s dress, he makes a distinction between ‘men’ and ‘Indians … Savages, you know’ (p. 94) who, it is clearly implied, are to be considered as demonstrably inferior by the fact

32 

D. B. SHAW

that they, unlike ‘civilised’ men (but like their women), find it necessary to wear feathers. So if the Herlanders are ‘full-grown’, the three women singled out to become lovers to the three men are, by implication, less highly developed than their sisters. This, in the context of Jennings’ remark that ‘atavistic exceptions’ were ‘denied motherhood’ (p. 92), makes for an awkward fit between the Herlanders’ project of ‘race improvement’ and the romantic narrative which brings the three couples together. If the arrival of the three men has caused three of the women to respond with atavistic desires, then the advantage gained by curtailing the reproduction of such traits must surely be threatened. There is thus a conflict which is not easily resolved between Gilman’s attempt to write the literature of the beehive and her need to re-introduce heterosexual love in order to project her evolutionary narrative beyond the time and place of Herland. The introduction of a recrudescent theme does damage to the project of demonstrating the Herlanders’ achievements in terms of growth towards a ‘higher’ form of civilisation. We are left to wonder whether the ‘full-­ grown’ woman should have need of the male at all and, indeed, if the literature of the beehive can be written in a heterosexual world. It would seem then that the scientific imagination is not easily reconciled with romance, and I would suggest that Gilman’s problem lies primarily in the absence of social conditions that lend tension to the traditional love story. According to A. O. J. Cockshut, love ‘as traditionally conceived by poets, is private, intimate, intense, even ecstatic’ (Cockshut 1977, p. 9) but, in the novel, private feelings are necessarily brought into conflict with the public sphere. The novelist ‘writes of love in terms of time and society’ (p.  10). In other words, the ‘intense moments’ of private love must be presented in the context of their relation to ‘religion, to duty, to society or to work, money, recreation and friendship’ (p. 9), and tension is produced primarily by the interaction between the demands of (private) love and the equally insistent demands of convention in the public world of cultural norms. But the Herlanders live primarily within the public sphere, and Gilman’s concern was to show the smooth integration of personal love with the Herlanders’ social duties, rather than to show the two in conflict. Jennings explains that they had ‘not the faintest idea of that solitude à deux we are so fond of’ (Gilman 1979, p. 125) and Somel tells him, ‘this new wonderful love between you. The whole country is interested’ (p. 104). Thus heterosexual love in terms of the Herland society takes on the character of a general election. The ‘limitations of a wholly personal life’ being

2  HERLAND: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN AND THE LITERATURE… 

33

‘inconceivable’ (p. 97) to the Herlanders therefore make for an absence of tension, and because tensions and satisfactions normally associated with the love story are missing, so too is the necessary involvement of the reader. The three relationships seem, at least, improbable, and Celis’ pregnancy remarkably so. Nevertheless, at least one traditional character of romantic fiction is brought in to emphasise the lack of equality in the traditional ritual. Most obviously this is Terry Nicholson, as the unsuitable suitor, who must be rejected in favour of a more appropriate match, but the excessively chivalric Jeff Margrave, in terms of nineteenth-century morals a more ‘suitable’ replacement, is here upstaged by the ‘new man’, Vandyck Jennings, whom Somel describes as ‘more like People … more like us’. By contrasting the two, Gilman is able to present her ideal of androgyny. Margrave is progressively ‘feminised’ as the novel proceeds in that in his ‘exalted gallantry’ (p.  89) he displays a passivity which is brought into increasing contrast with Jennings’ developing conscious appreciation of the Herlanders’ achievements. For Jennings, Nicholson is ‘a stray male in an ant-hill’, while Margrave is ‘a stray man among angels’ (p. 123)—a relevant metaphor in an age when the ideal woman was an ‘Angel in the House, contentedly submissive to men, but strong in her inner purity and religiosity, queen in her own realm of the Home’ (Showalter 1977, p. 14). In the sphere of the home, she was the keeper of men’s morals, the earthly representative of Christian ideals and the social representative of her husband’s status. A ‘fallen’ woman relinquished her angelic status and became unmarriageable. As Jennings reports, Margrave ‘accepted the angel theory, swallowed it whole’ (Gilman 1979, p.  123) the implication being that, lacking Jennings’ rational curiosity, he is happy to accept the apparent perfection of Herland as the natural result of a land inhabited by angels, rather than the achievement of social planning. If Herland is read as a frozen moment in evolutionary history which is concerned to offer a paradigm for the future, then Margrave’s remaining happily in this ‘eternised’ moment, rather than, like Jennings, proceeding beyond the narrative, marks him, like Nicholson, as redundant in terms of the continuing evolutionary narrative. However, this is to reckon without Celis’ pregnancy, which marks him also as a seed of change within Herland itself. But this, of course, serves to highlight the fact that Ellador and Jennings must forego procreation in order to pursue their mission, confirming Gilman’s dictum that postponement of desire is, ultimately, to the greater good of humanity. There is also a sense in which the environment

34 

D. B. SHAW

of Herland can be equated with the home, a place of security for mothers and children which also, in Gilman’s view, sheltered woman from taking up responsibilities in the world which would prepare her to be a better educator for her children. Margrave, an inadequate educator, remains ‘at home’, confirming further the impression of femininity. While, as I have already described, Nicholson’s response to the restrictions on sexual activity is to attempt to use force and Jennings, while initially impatient, is subdued by the use of reasoned argument, Margrave takes ‘his medicine like a—I cannot say “like a man”, but more as if he wasn’t one … there was always this angel streak in him’ (pp. 123 & 124). The angel metaphor, applied to Margrave himself, together with the aspersions cast on his masculinity amount finally to an ironic suggestion that the romantic hero, in his passive acceptance and, indeed, adoration of the excessively feminine woman, effectively feminises himself and is thus an inadequate partner to (and perhaps an inadequate lover of) the burgeoning new womanhood. This, of course, makes Celis’ pregnancy doubly questionable (and a forced conclusion), but it is undoubtedly the case that, having sent Ellador with Jennings to an uncertain future in the ‘strange, unknown lands’ (p. 144), Gilman had need to ensure that the next stage of evolution be seen to begin in the ‘nursery’ (p. 94) of Herland. So Jennings is Gilman’s new hero. Neither intensely masculine nor feminised by a poetic imagination which limits his vision, he thus promotes scientific objectivity as the source for a revision in human consciousness. But Gilman’s difficulty was in presenting the literature of the beehive as a viable alternative to the ‘Adventures of Him in Pursuit of Her’ while adhering closely enough to the rules of popular fiction to attract her readership, and the question remains as to whether she fully achieved her aim. Herland is a ‘not yet’ world where a better future is glimpsed but held in check by forces which militate against the full realisation of utopia. The Herlanders have need of the drones to complete their beehive world but are disappointed to find them largely inadequate. As Jennings and Ellador prepare to leave, they are told, ‘we are unwilling to expose our country to free communication with the rest of the world—as yet … it may be done later—but not yet’ (p. 145). And it is made clear that the rest of the world is not ready for Herland, rather than the reverse. So it is perhaps inaccurate to say that Herland is the literature of the beehive. Rather the novel, like Herland itself, marks a point of evolutionary transition. If Jennings finds the drama of Herland to be ‘flat’ it is because he, like the world for which Gilman was writing, has not yet developed the necessary aesthetic

2  HERLAND: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN AND THE LITERATURE… 

35

sensibilities to fully appreciate the literature of the beehive. For Gilman, that time had yet to come, as it would when the novelist who ‘is forced to chronicle the distinctive features of his time’ (Gilman 1966, p. 151) writes as a participant in utopia, rather than, like Jennings, as an observer.

Addendum It is now over a century since the first publication of Herland and although it is anachronistic in its coy references to sexuality and assumptions of racial hierarchy in other ways, it is more relevant to contemporary debates than it was when I first encountered it in the late 1970s. Certainly, its engagement with planned evolution presents difficulties in a world that has experienced the excesses of Nazi Germany. On the other hand, and for the same reason, we need to re-examine how we understand what evolution means and its relationship to concepts like ‘progress’ and ‘development’. Although Ward and Gilman’s assessment of ‘male efflorescence’ and its effects remains somewhat fanciful, the implication that overdeveloped heterosexual masculinity is a threat to the survival of the species still resonates in feminist argument, as does the claim that the survival of the corresponding feminine subject provides the necessary conditions for its perpetuation.9 Gilman’s re-visioning of sexuality may have stopped short of imagining same-sex relationships but, nevertheless, she does address the de-­ sexualisation of women’s bodies as a necessary political move for feminists committed to radical change in gender relations. This seems singularly apposite at a time when, alongside a re-vivified feminist politics, there has been a corresponding resurgence of what has been termed ‘toxic’ masculinity.10 Indeed, the type represented by Terry Nicholson—the male that harbours unshakeable assumptions about the nature of women and is prepared to rape to ‘prove’ them is not only prevalent in contemporary culture but is offered as a learned performance which can be purchased as a solution to a perceived failure to attract ‘high-quality’ women. In Rachel O’Neill’s research into the seduction industry, she discovered a group of men willing to pay substantial sums to attend seminars and ‘boot camps’ (O’Neill 2018, p.  160) run by PUAs (Pick Up Artists) apparently well versed in feminine psychology, as well as male grooming and masculine self-presentation. There is a suggestion throughout that the women approached by these men are often coerced into sex and, although O’Neill doesn’t use the word, the spectre of rape haunts the often

36 

D. B. SHAW

tragi-comic scenarios that she witnesses. Steeped in the discourse of evolutionary psychology which justifies men’s predatory behaviour in terms of evolutionary imperatives, what O’Neill calls the ‘seduction community’ (p. 123) essentially thrives on masculine insecurity and entitlement, driven by the logic of commodification. As O’Neill points out ‘evolutionary narratives have much in common with neoliberal rationalities, as both promote a logic of individualism centred on profit maximisation’ (p. 127). In the case of commodified seduction, the investment of considerable sums of money in ‘training’ to appropriate women for sex heightens the sense of entitlement such that the response to perceived failure is often expressed as the kind of outrage that, Gilman suggests, prompts Terry Nicholson to attempt rape (p. 142). This same affective matrix of fear, pride and disdain is, in fact, what motivates the Nazi males in Swastika Night which I will discuss in the next chapter. It is also what has recently driven self-defined ‘incels’ (involuntary celibates) like Elliot Rodger and Jake Davison to murder women by whom they feel rejected (and also kill themselves).11 Under these circumstances, the alternative evolutionary narrative that Gilman offers bears further consideration, not least as a counter to the discourse which promotes an unachievable performance of masculinity at the expense of women’s lives.

Notes 1. First put forward by Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, who believed that the ‘worst elements of the poorer classes, those presumed to have subnormal mentalities, would have to be physically prevented from passing on their infirmities’, that is, prevented from having children (Bowler 1984, pp. 212–13). 2. Gilman dedicated her book, Man Made World: or, Our Androcentric Culture (1911) to Ward. The dedication reads as follows: ‘This book is dedicated with reverent love and gratitude to Lester F. Ward sociologist and humanitarian, one of the world’s great men; a creative thinker to whose wide knowledge and power of vision we are indebted for a new grasp of the nature and processes of society, and to whom all women are especially bound in honour and gratitude for his gynaeococentric theory of life, than which nothing more important to humanity has been advanced since the theory of evolution, and nothing more important to women has ever been given to the world’. 3. For a discussion of the plausibility of parthenogenesis in humans, see de Carli and Pereira (2017).

2  HERLAND: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN AND THE LITERATURE… 

37

4. See, for example, Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground (1985) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1979). 5. Richard Usborne, who has made a study of Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond, finds him to have had ‘a strong interest’ in pretty girls’. No entanglements. But he … knew enough … to look … at their feet to see if they were thoroughbreds’ (Usborne 1983, p. 153). 6. Gilman herself had at least three close female friends during her lifetime, with two of whom she actually set up home. However, as Mary A.  Hill points out, ‘Close and intimate friendships between women were common in the nineteenth century, as were hugging, kissing, commiserating, communing, unashamedly sleeping together in one another’s beds. Whether such relationships were sexual is often impossible to know’ (Hill 1980, p. 82). 7. The Herland process of selective breeding gives primacy to parcenary considerations. As Somel explains to Jennings: ‘If the girl showing the bad qualities had still the power to appreciate social duty, we appealed to her, by that, to renounce motherhood. Some of the few worst types were, fortunately, unable to reproduce. But if the fault was in a disproportionate egotism—then the girl was sure she had the right to have children, even that hers would be better than others’. ‘I can see that’, I said. ‘And then she would be likely to rear them in the same spirit.’ ‘That we never allowed’, answered Somel quietly (Gilman 1979, p. 82). It would seem that Gilman had need to reconcile her interpretation of socialism with her commitment to democracy which, as she says, ‘means, requires, is, individual liberty’ (Gilman 1966, p. 145). 8. Gilman had little sympathy with psychoanalytic theory and refused to be ‘psyched’ by the ‘mind-meddlers’ when Freudian psychoanalysis came to New York (see Gilman 1935, p. 314). 9. See, for example, Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender (2010), Angela Saini’s Inferior (2017) and Sarah Banet-Weiser’s Empowered: Popular Feminism & Popular Misogyny (2018). 10. See Gilchrist (2017). 11. See Kelly et al. (2021).

References Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2018. Empowered: Popular Feminism & Popular Misogyny. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Bartkowski, Frances. 1989. Feminist Utopias. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Bates, Laura. 2020. Men Who Hate Women. London, New York, Sydney, Toronto, New Delhi: Simon & Schuster.

38 

D. B. SHAW

Baym, Nina. 1986. Melodramas of Beset Manhood. In The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter. London: Virago. Beer, Gillian. 1983. Darwin’s Plots. London: Routledge. Bowler, Peter J. 1984. Evolution: The History of an Idea. Berkeley, LA and London: University of California Press. de Carli, Gabriel Jose, and Tiago Campos Pereira. 2017. On Human Parthenogenesis. Medical Hypotheses, Vol. 106, September. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.mehy.2017.07.008. Cockshut, A.O.J. 1977. Man and Woman: A Study of Love and The Novel, 1740–1940. London: Collins. Easlea, Brian. 1981. Science and Sexual Oppression. London: George Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Fine, Cordelia. 2010. Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences. London: Icon Books. Gearhart, Sally Miller. 1985. The Wanderground. London: Women’s Press. Gilchrist, Tracy E. 2017. What Is Toxic Masculinity? Advocate, December 11. https://www.advocate.com/women/2017/12/11/what-­toxic-­masculinity. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. 1911. Man Made World: Or, Our Androcentric Culture. London: T. Fisher Unwin. ———. 1924. His Religion and Hers. London: T. F. Unwin. ———. 1935. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography. New York: D. Appleton Century. ———. 1966 [1898]. Women and Economics. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1979 [1914]. Herland. London: Women’s Press. Hill, Mary A. 1980. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist 1860–1896. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hofstadter, Richard. 1959. Social Darwinism in American Thought. New  York: George Braziller. Howarth, Patrick. 1973. Play Up and Play The Game. London: Eyre Methuen. Kelly, Megan, Alex DiBranco, and Julia R. DeCook. 2021. Misogynist Incels and Male Supremacism. New America, February 18. https://www.newamerica. org/political-­reform/reports/misogynist-­incels-­and-­male-­supremacism/. O’Neill, Rachel. 2018. Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy. Cambridge, UK and Medford, MA: Polity Press. Piercy, Marge. 1979. Woman on the Edge of Time. London: Women’s Press. Rowbotham, Sheila. 1992. Women in Movement: Feminism and Social Action. New York and London: Routledge. Saini, Angela. 2017. Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong … and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story. London: 4th Estate. Showalter, Elaine. 1977. A Literature of Their Own. Princeton University Press.

2  HERLAND: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN AND THE LITERATURE… 

39

Spender, Dale. 1983. Women of Ideas (and What Men Have Done to Them). London: Ark Paperback. Usborne, Richard. 1983 [1953]. Clubland Heroes. London: Hutchinson. Ward, Lester Frank. 1903. Pure Sociology. New York: Macmillan. ———. 1913–18. Glimpses of The Cosmos. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

CHAPTER 3

Swastika Night: Katharine Burdekin and the Psychology of Scapegoating

In July 1940, the Left Book Club monthly selection was, unusually, a novel. Swastika Night, by a reclusive but respected writer called Murray Constantine, was originally published by Victor Gollancz in 1937, but was reissued in July 1940 as a Left Book Club1 selection, fulfilling the need ‘in these difficult summer months’ (cover of Left News, July 1940) for a psychological analysis of fascism which could reveal potential weaknesses in the Nazi psyche. Nearly fifty years later, Swastika Night was republished by Lawrence and Wishart at the instigation of an American researcher, Daphne Patai, who had discovered that Constantine, whose first novel Proud Man (1934) had also been published by Gollancz, was, in fact, Katharine Burdekin writing under a pseudonym. Both Swastika Night and Proud Man are important for their thoroughgoing analysis of the psychological construction of gender identity, more than two decades before Lacanian psychoanalysis and the burgeoning second wave of feminism prepared the way for an understanding of gender ideology and sexual politics. Burdekin’s theorisation of fascism as a logical extension of the ‘debasement’ of women within the male psyche finds echoes today in the writings of such theorists as Klaus Theweleit2 but was, at the time, a thoroughly radical proposal. Of Burdekin herself, little is known.3 She died in 1963, having published ten novels between 1922 and 1940. Although there is no existing

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. B. Shaw, Women, Science and Fiction Revisited, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25171-9_3

41

42 

D. B. SHAW

biographical material which would support the theory that she was deliberately using psychoanalytical material in developing the plots of her novels, the way in which the characters are developed, and their behaviour explored, argues for a reading which recognises psychoanalytic theory as an insistent subtext. The time-travelling narrator of Proud Man, ‘a single-­ sexed fully conscious being’ (Burdekin 1934, p.  22), observes the gendered society of Burdekin’s own time and offers an objective analysis of the psychological basis of gender stereotyping which resonates suggestively with the theories of post-Freudian feminist psychoanalyst Karen Horney as well as suggesting that Burdekin may have been familiar with object-relations theory as formulated in the writings of Melanie Klein.4 Swastika Night develops these proposals by imagining a world after 700  years of Nazi domination in which Hitler has been elevated to the status of a god5 and women have been reduced to the status of breeding animals. In the ruling Nazis, gender insecurity has developed into a full-­ blown psychosis which renders them infantile and prone to suicide. Hope is offered in the form of a dissident Englishman who, by reading a forbidden text, is able to analyse the inherent weakness of Nazi rule and to understand the importance of the status of women to the possibility of a non-violent revolution. Burdekin introduces her readers to a world in which their own present is part of the distant past: a time, according to Nazi doctrine, of savagery and darkness, from which Europe and Africa have been delivered by the ‘civilising’ Germans. Asia, Australia and the Americas are similarly held by the Japanese and the two empires are trapped in a cold war of long duration. At the heart of the German Empire is a decaying culture, based on the Hitler religion, which has systematically destroyed all evidence of pre-Hitler civilisation. In the future world of Swastika Night, the book which leads the Englishman, Alfred, to knowledge of the world before the dominance of the German Empire has for seven centuries been secretly preserved by succeeding generations of one family of the privileged order of the Knights. Although the Knight, von Hess, who is the keeper of the book in the time of the narrative is, like his forebears, secretly opposed to German rule, his privileged position prevents him from fully understanding the significance of the ‘Reduction of Women’ (Burdekin 1985, p. 70), a systematic debasing of all things female instigated by the conquering Nazis. But Alfred, in

3  SWASTIKA NIGHT: KATHARINE BURDEKIN AND THE PSYCHOLOGY… 

43

his marginalised position as a member of a ‘subject race’, is able to bring his own experience of oppression to bear in reading the document. Alfred and the Knight, the last surviving member of the family von Hess, are brought together by circumstance, but von Hess is moved to give the book into Alfred’s care when he recognises a sympathetic strength of character in the Englishman, unknown among the common Nazis. He also gives Alfred a photograph of Hitler, rescued from destruction by the same ancestor who had compiled the book, showing him to be ‘a little soft fat smiling thing’ (p. 100) rather than the seven foot God with ‘the holy German physique’ (p. 67) into which he has been mythologised. But the full significance of the photograph is that it shows him in the company of a woman ‘as lovely as a boy, with a boy’s hair and a boy’s noble carriage, and a boy’s direct and fearless gaze’ (p.  68). Sexual relationships with young boys is an accepted feature of Nazi life but for a woman to be sexually desirable, other than as a bearer of sons for Germany, has become unthinkable. Women of ‘the Blood’ live in cages where they are allowed the bare minimum necessary for subsistence, are kept shaven headed and in clothes designed to accentuate their ‘ill-balance[d]’ (p. 12) bodies, their sole purpose being to submit constantly to rape and to bear male children who are removed from them at eighteen months to be indoctrinated amongst men. The girls remain in the ‘Women’s Quarters’ (p.  8) ultimately to suffer the same fate as their mothers. Alfred, who has never had to think ‘unsexually and objectively about women’, now realises that he ‘must think about women. How does one do that? Do they think about themselves?’ (p. 98). Unlike the narrator of Proud Man, who directly experiences the Great Britain of the 1930s as their past,6 Alfred’s perspective is limited by the flawed nature of the history that has been given into his keeping. Although the book recounts the destruction of all other historical records and charts the beginning of the process which has perpetuated the idea of Hitler as a god and the German people as superior to all other races, it is, itself, a mixture of fact and conjecture. Alfred’s insights are derived from analysing the history against his own experience and that of his Nazi friend, Hermann, whose life is controlled by the teachings of the ‘Hitler Bible’ and who, when brought to face the truth about the past, suffers a breakdown.

44 

D. B. SHAW

Thinking About Women Burdekin was writing at a time when the feminist movement was overshadowed by the world political situation. In the UK, the suffrage fight had been won and the fall in the birth rate among the middle classes since World War I was attributed to the higher participation of women in the labour market. The widely held belief that the quality of the race could be measured by the proportion of the population holding high socio-­ economic status led to exhortations that middle-class women should reject ‘masculine occupations’ in favour of ‘making their homes more interesting and more racially valuable’ (Lewis 1980, p. 216).7 In the new Nazi Germany women’s role was simply to reproduce. The ‘racially fit’ were offered financial incentives to marry and produce children with the provision that the woman did not work outside the home (Koonz 1987, p. 149), and ‘Himmler applied Hitler’s obsession with race in his exhortation to SS men to father as many children as possible without marrying’ (p. 398): ‘Women performed only one function, breeding the children who would be raised by the Reich as the soldiers and mothers of the next generation’ (p.  399). Nor were women unenthusiastic about their newly prescribed role. Conservative women who considered that the role of the mother had been undermined by the emancipation of the 1920s found not only state support for their grievances but an opportunity to glorify their role in the name of National Socialism. Hitler’s aim was to recruit the existing structures of the Christian church to enforce allegiance to the fascist state, and in this women were to play an important role. He saw, in the existing proliferation of Protestant women’s organisations, a resource to be used for the ideological indoctrination of both women and children. According to Richard Grunberger, Since the Weimar Republic had been even less effective among women than among men in inculcating a linked sense of personal autonomy and public commitment, the collective feminine psyche remained apolitical and littered with a residue of dynastic loyalty and unfocused religiosity, dormant impulses which Hitler activated to a pitch of unprecedented intensity.

Whether or not Grunberger is correct in his analysis of the causes, the effects were extraordinary, as witnessed by the phenomenon of Kontaktsucht or ‘contact-craving’—a form of ‘mass hysteria’ in which, on public occasions, ‘the female section of the crowd often exhibited … an

3  SWASTIKA NIGHT: KATHARINE BURDEKIN AND THE PSYCHOLOGY… 

45

uncontrollable urge to touch [Hitler] physically’ (Grunberger 1974, p. 339). So women, who in Swastika Night have been reduced to the status of breeding animals and, like animals, are kept caged and ill-fed, had in Hitler’s Germany already begun to relinquish any autonomy they might have gained under the Weimar Republic and were inscribing for themselves a role that would cage them within the home and remove their influence entirely from public life. In her introduction to Mothers in the Fatherland (1987) Claudia Koonz observes that despite ‘the publication of fifty thousand books and monographs about Hitler’s Germany … half the Germans who made dictatorship, war and genocide possible have largely escaped observation’, adding that the women of Nazi Germany have remained ‘unclaimed by feminists and unnoticed by men’ (Koonz 1987, p. 3). As Barbara Ehrenreich writes in her foreword to Klaus Theweleit’s study of the writings of German ‘soldier males’ between the wars, Male Fantasies (1987), ‘the point of understanding fascism is not only “because it might return again”, but because it is already implicit in the daily relationships of men and women’ (Ehrenreich 1987, p. xv). In a similar vein, Grunberger’s (1974) analysis of anti-feminism in Nazi Germany as ‘a non-lethal variant of anti-­Semitism’ reflects a psychohistorical perspective influenced by a decade of feminist thought. He writes: ‘Just as the latter fused divergent resentments into a single hate syndrome, anti-feminism provided men with the opportunity for abreacting a whole complex of feelings: paterfamilias authoritarianism, anti-permissiveness, Philistine outrage at sophistication, white-collar workers’ job insecurity, virility fears and just plain misogyny’ (Grunberger 1974, p. 322). So, fifty years earlier, and at a time when the full horrors of Nazism remained to be realised, Burdekin provided as a subtext for her novel what Ehrenreich, Theweleit and Grunberger could only analyse with the benefit of hindsight. She recognised the importance of understanding the link between misogyny and fascism and clearly saw, in the social conditions that pertained in Nazi Germany at the time that she was writing, the potential for the complete degradation of women that she depicts in Swastika Night. Her work can be seen to be singularly important in anticipating much later discussions of war and totalitarianism which see them as part of the debate about the oppression of women, rather than as separate political issues. In Swastika Night Hitlerdom is literally ‘the worship of a man who had no mother’ (Burdekin 1985, p. 11). The creed teaches that Hitler ‘was

46 

D. B. SHAW

not begotten, not born of a woman, but Exploded … From the Head of His Father … God the Thunderer’ (pp.  5 and 6, emphasis in original).8 Consequently, in the world of the German Empire it is unseemly for a man to be able to point to a woman and say, ‘There is my mother’(Burdekin 1985, p.  10). Nevertheless, the language which denies the relationship fails to eradicate it from consciousness because of the Nazis’ need to visit the Women’s Quarters to fulfil their duty of procreation as well as the fact that their ‘defilement’ in literally having mothers is preached to them at every religious service. This, and the fact that the Nazi unconscious must retain the residue of the first eighteen months of life, ensures that, while Hitlerdom teaches vociferous denial of the value of the female role, constant confrontation with that denial produces unbearable psychic conflict. The crucial aspect of von Hess’ book is its reference to another book, long destroyed, in which a fanatical Knight called von Wied, sensitive to the stirrings of panic among the conquering Germans and feeding on their ‘insensate pride’, ‘lunatic vanity’ and a fear which ‘gradually grew into a kind of hysteria … the fear of Memory … proved that Hitler was God … [and] that women were not part of the human race at all …. Von Wied’s theory was that the rejection right of women was an insult to Manhood [and] that family life was an insult to Manhood’ (pp. 79 & 80). And so ‘the whole pattern of women’s lives was to be changed and made to fit in with the new German Manhood, the first civilized manhood of the world’ (pp. 81–2). Some of von Wied’s book has been ‘incorporated in the Hitler Bible’, but, ironically, because it ‘proves a man is God’ and ‘advocates the destruction of records of other civilizations’, it is, paradoxically, itself a record of that which it advocates must be eradicated. As von Hess points out, ‘There was plenty of Memory in von Wied’s book’ (p. 80). Burdekin’s diagnosis of the psychopathology of fascism proceeds from the idea that the psychological development of the individual is mirrored in the development of culture and, in the context of the pre-war years, the text encodes an implicit warning against complacency in merely demonising fascism as something peculiar to the German mentality. As Alfred discovers in Swastika Night, the British also once had an empire, a fact about which he is prevented from rejoicing by the realisation that the urge to colonise must, again, be understood in terms of the ‘lunatic vanity’ which can accrue from masculine gender insecurity. This, he discovers, is not only a factor in the cultural stasis of the Nazis but is a threat to the survival of the entire species.

3  SWASTIKA NIGHT: KATHARINE BURDEKIN AND THE PSYCHOLOGY… 

47

Early in the narrative, during the women’s service in the Hitler church, von Hess mistakenly exhorts the women to ‘bear strong daughters’ (Burdekin 1985, p. 13). This mistake is significant in that it reveals the source of the disintegration of Hitler society. As von Hess knows, male births have become disproportionate to the point where the increasing lack of females spells death to the race, but this the women must never know: ‘if the women once realised all this, what could stop them developing a small thin thread of self-respect? If a woman could rejoice publicly in the birth of a girl, Hitlerdom would start to crumble’ (p. 14). So although the ostensible function of women within Hitler society is to breed sons and remind the men that they are superior but ‘tainted’ and must therefore strive for the virtues of ‘pride … courage … violence … brutality … bloodshed … ruthlessness … and all other soldierly and heroic virtues’ (p. 6) lest they themselves fall prey to loathsome female qualities, they in fact are the key to the survival of the Empire, both in a physical sense and in the sense of maintaining the ‘idea’ that Alfred is determined to destroy. Women are largely absent from the narrative, except as abstract subjects of discussion, reinforcing the sense in which they are ever present as a symbol of the repression out of which the Nazi psyche is constructed. The narrative refers to this sense of presence in absence during an exchange in which Alfred questions Hermann as to his failure to provide sons for Germany. Aware of his friend’s agitation, Alfred closes the conversation by dismissing women as ‘neither here nor there’ but Hermann, ‘misunderstanding the English idiom’, replies, ‘They’re too much there’ (p.  23), revealing his own preoccupation with what should be a subject unworthy of a Nazi’s attention. Theweleit finds this same ‘presence in absence’ in the writings of the Freikorpsmen, the ‘First Soldiers of the Third Reich’.9 ‘Relationships with women are dissolved’, he writes, ‘and transformed into new male attitudes, into political stances, revelations of the true path, etc. As the woman fades out of sight, the contours of the male sharpen; that is the way in which the fascist mode of writing often proceeds’ (Theweleit 1987, p. 22). In Swastika Night, it is precisely this transforming of relationships that has been effected by von Wied’s book. While the Freikorpsmen’s wives and sweethearts ‘evaporate as the story progresses’ (p.  35), having fulfilled their roles as catalysts in the hardening of male resolve (violated possessions giving cause for just revenge or angels to be compared to the castrating whores of the enemy), so the women of the German Empire are reduced to elevate the male and finally dissolved in the destruction of

48 

D. B. SHAW

Memory, becoming ‘neither here nor there’ but always, for the men who must breed sons for Germany, ‘too much there’. Hermann, in common with other Nazis, suffers from a ‘deep repugnance, which amount[s] to a fear of women’ (p. 33)—a fear which is, of course, unconscious but which, as the text reveals, keeps the Nazis in a state of infantile dependency. In the writings of the Freikorpsmen women are present as objects of fantasy, allowing Theweleit to analyse the texts from a feminist/psychoanalytical point of view. In Swastika Night it is the absence of women that marks the text as a document which itself explicitly argues for a recognition of their presence as repressed aspects of the psyche of what Burdekin refers to as ‘the killing male’ (Burdekin 1934, p. 22).10 Theweleit’s soldier males are analysed by the writings that they have left behind from a perspective which is, literally, in their future and encompasses the history of the world from the end of World War II to the late 1980s, as well as the effect of the women’s movement on psychoanalysis in the decades since its rebirth in the 1960s. Swastika Night is a text which incorporates its own analysis, actively promoting a method of psychoanalytic enquiry to uncover the roots of the fascist mentality and the corruption which is the inherent weakness of the fascist ideal by imagining the future (meanwhile uncannily predicting the Holocaust. In Swastika Night, the Germans have ‘after a time killed all the Jews off’ (Burdekin 1985, p. 72)). The text therefore offers a diagnosis of the psychology of the fascist identity, an identity dependent upon the belief that women are inherently inferior. The novel charts the dissolution of fascism, not through a political opposition which takes up arms against the conquerors, but through the final resolution of a psychological paradox which it inherently harbours. The process which relegates the scapegoat lends power to what is relegated by the demands of the need for the process itself to be continually repressed within the psyche. In Swastika Night the lack of female births offers a biological metaphor for the way in which this power insinuates itself into consciousness. The Knights, at least, must now, like Alfred, begin to ‘think about women’.

Woman Envy and the Fascist Identity Psychoanalysis is, as Michel Foucault has pointed out, ‘in theoretical and practical opposition to fascism’ in that it regards ‘with suspicion … the irrevocably proliferating aspects which might be contained in [the] power mechanisms aimed at controlling and administering the everyday life of

3  SWASTIKA NIGHT: KATHARINE BURDEKIN AND THE PSYCHOLOGY… 

49

sexuality’. In other words, because fascism exerts its control through what Foucault terms ‘the deployment of sexuality’ (Foucault 1981, p. 150) in the service of normalisation, the demythologising of sexuality presents a danger to acceptance of the ideology. In Swastika Night, sexuality is deployed to ensure that the Nazis are reminded that they are at the mercy of their defiled, human bodies, whose desires can only be regulated by allegiance to Hitler’s creed. The myth of Hitler’s ‘exploded’ birth and complete lack of contact with women provides an unattainable ideal which is both mysterious and superhuman. As Theweleit explains it: That prohibition, the law that bodies cannot know themselves, has been used to recreate susceptibility to repression ever since people first began ruling other people … In societies ruled by a single person, the despot was the only one who could (theoretically) use his body in any way he pleased— except in a human way, since no other was like him. (Theweleit 1987, p. 414)

Psychoanalysis attempts to remove sexuality from the level of the body politic and return it to the individual as a form of knowledge in which bodies will indeed ‘know themselves’ and thus is antagonistic to the project of fascism which can only maintain a hierarchical ordering of society by perpetuating the myth of the hegemonic body. It was the preoccupation with heredity and descent that informed the psychic position of the middle classes of the early nineteenth century which, Foucault believes, brought sexuality into the forefront of the political sphere. Where previously the ruling aristocracy had preserved their position by asserting ‘the special character of its body … in the form of blood’ (Foucault, 1981, p. 124, emphasis in original), so the discourse of social class produced a shift in emphasis from a mysterious, ascendant form of ‘blood’ to a medicalised idea of sexuality which, while creating categories of deviance, also allowed for health to be measured in terms of the potential for reproductive success. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, ‘the thematics of blood was sometimes called on to lend its entire historical weight toward revitalising the type of political power that was exercised through the devices of sexuality’, and it was at this point that ‘[r]acism [in its modern form] took shape’: a long series of interventions at the level of the body, conduct, health and everyday life, received their colour and their justification from the mythical concern with protecting the purity of the blood and ensuring the triumph of the race …. Nazism was doubtless the most cunning and the

50 

D. B. SHAW

most naive … combination of the fantasies of blood and the paroxysms of a disciplinary power. A eugenic ordering of society, with all that implied in the way of extension and intensification of micro-powers, in the guise of an unrestricted state control … was accompanied by the oneiric exaltation of a superior blood. (Foucault 1981, pp. 149–50) However, although the language used to describe sexuality and its effects demonstrated a concern with anatamo-physiological processes and the potential for malfunction or ‘unhealthy’ behaviour in the individual, Foucault detects a concomitant ‘elaboration of [the] idea that there exists something other … something else and something more, with intrinsic properties and laws of its own: ‘sex’: Thus, in the process of hysterization of women, ‘sex’ was defined in three ways: as that which belongs in common to men and women; as that which belongs par excellence to men, and hence is lacking in women; but at the same time, as that which by itself constitutes women’s body, ordering it wholly in terms of the functions of reproduction and keeping it in constant agitation through the effects of that very function. (pp. 152–3)

The caging of the women in Swastika Night represents, symbolically, this ordering of female sexuality in terms of reproduction alone, but equally it implies a response to the fear that the mechanisms deployed to order sexuality in the service of what Foucault calls ‘the symbolics of blood’ (p. 148) will fail and a repressed power in (specifically female) sexuality itself will rise up to destroy the fragile hegemony of the ‘master’ race. While trying to convince Hermann of the fragility of the German idea, Alfred gives an analysis of the Nazi character in terms which suggest that Burdekin herself understood this: ‘as long as Blood is a Mystery none of you will ever be men. You hide behind the Blood because you don’t really like yourselves, and you don’t like yourselves because you can’t be men. If even some of you were men the rest would like themselves better. But it’s a circle. If there’s going to be Blood there’ll be no men’ (Burdekin 1985, p. 28). The Nazis have a responsibility to procreate in the service of the Blood which, so long as it is a ‘Mystery’, is theirs alone and that which ‘proves’ their ascendancy. But the act of procreation in itself reminds them that they are ‘defiled’ and must purge themselves by recourse to ‘soldierly virtues’. Their self-image is thus inextricably linked to the Blood and their self-esteem based solely on proving themselves worthy to be its

3  SWASTIKA NIGHT: KATHARINE BURDEKIN AND THE PSYCHOLOGY… 

51

carriers—something which they can never achieve because what is given as their ‘defilement’ ensures that they are constantly at the prey of emotions anathema to full soldierly ‘virtue’. The meaning of Alfred’s analysis can thus be found in tracing the development of the Nazi personality as constrained by what, to borrow from Foucault, can be called ‘the Hitlerite politics of sex’ (Foucault 1981, p. 150). It is worth considering here the work of Melanie Klein whose essays on infantile development were published between 1921 and 1945 and collectively form a body of work which shows how a fixated personality can develop when anxieties connected to the mother have no potential for relief or transformation. Reading Swastika Night with reference to Klein brings into sharp focus the influence of the first eighteen months of a Nazi boy’s life, before he is removed from the Women’s Quarters. For Klein, the unconscious constitutes a battleground where the infant’s inadequate concepts of ‘self’ and ‘other’ are continually defined and redefined in terms of hated and loved objects. Briefly, then, part of the mother (the breast) is perceived as both a good and a bad object, both giving and denying satisfaction, but because the infant ego is as yet unformed (and Klein does presuppose a rudimentary ego), the child ‘introjects’ into itself the good object which it also partly projects as feelings of love while, at the same time, introjecting a bad, persecutory object which is projected as hatred and destruction. In phantasy, the child is omnipotent in destruction, inflicting actual harm, and later, when the mother is identified as a separate being, feelings of guilt demand that the child make reparation for the supposed injury. When the mother is perceived as a separate and independent being, ‘libidinal fixation to the breast develops into feelings towards her as a person. Thus feelings both of a destructive and of a loving nature are experienced towards one and the same object and this gives rise to deep and disturbing conflicts in the child’s mind’ (Klein 1975, p. 285). This gives rise to what Klein terms the depressive position where ‘the ego comes to a realisation of its love for a good object, a whole object and in addition a real object, together with an overwhelming feeling of guilt towards it’. Before reparation can effectively alleviate the anxiety of loss, the infant must experience itself as capable of restoring through love what its hatred has apparently destroyed: As the ego becomes more fully organised, the internalised imagos [phantastic representations of objects] will approximate more closely to reality and the ego will identify itself more fully with ‘good’ objects. The dread of per-

52 

D. B. SHAW

secution, which was at first felt on the ego’s account, now relates to the good object as well and from now on preservation of the good object is regarded as synonymous with the survival of the ego. (p. 264)

What is particularly interesting for an evaluation of the denial which informs the psychic position of the Nazis is the defensive position of the ego when reparative drives first come into play. The infant’s fear of experiencing feelings of loss and guilt for its own destructive impulses leads to a denial of its experience, that is, to a denial of psychic reality. The ‘manic defences’ come into play in order that the valued object may no longer be valued and therefore its loss will not be experienced as guilt and depression. Furthermore, the ego must defend itself against dependence. Hence, feelings of control, triumph and contempt are directed against the object. Burdekin’s Nazis represent the adult personality, fixated at this stage of development. What Klein terms the ‘hypomanic’ personality is characterised by feelings of omnipotence, ‘by which he defends himself against his fear of losing the one irreplaceable object, his mother’ and an inclination to ‘exaggerated valuations: over-admiration (idealisation) or contempt (devaluation) … [C]ontempt … is also based to some extent on denial. He must deny his impulse to make extensive and detailed reparation because he has to deny the cause for the reparation; namely, the injury to the object and his consequent sorrow and guilt’ (p. 352). The dread of persecution from the object insufficiently repaired is thus added to the sense of unrelieved guilt. In normal development, the fear of persecution is diminished by a gradual balancing out of the need to receive love and the need to make reparation which results in the ability to give and receive love in later life. However, where possibilities for even partial reparation are dramatically reduced, the manic stage characterises all subsequent relationships. What von Hess’ book refers to as ‘insensate pride’ and ‘lunatic vanity’ among the conquering German males can be seen to correspond to the feelings of omnipotence which characterise the hypomanic personality, finding its fullest expression in the character of von Wied, whom von Hess refers to as ‘a complete nervous hysteric’ (Burdekin 1985, p.  79). The Nazis have been happy to accept his ideas, rather than dismissing him as a lunatic, primarily ‘because of the part about the women’. Von Hess explains:

3  SWASTIKA NIGHT: KATHARINE BURDEKIN AND THE PSYCHOLOGY… 

53

von Wied’s theories about women were wildly popular with a large section of the men. You see, the lunatic vanity of the Germans was concentrated really in the males among them. The women hadn’t beaten the world and made the Empire. They had only borne the children …. And these proud soldiers, the great-grandsons of the men who really made the Empire, were beginning to feel very strongly that it was beneath the dignity of a German man to have to risk rejection by a mere woman, to have to allow women to wound him in his most sensitive part, his vanity. (pp.  80–81, emphasis in original)

Embedded in this analysis is the suggestion that, in Kleinian terms, the vanity of the Nazi males covers a protracted sense of guilt which has no potential for relief in reparation. The Reduction of Women, while removing their right to reject the sexual advances of men, also ensures that they are unworthy of love. As von Hess points out, ‘Men cannot love female animals’ (p. 71), and so the Nazis are able to deny the impulse to reparation while they nevertheless remain slaves to unrelieved guilt. As von Hess admits to Alfred, there is an increasing incidence of suicide among young Nazis which, it is suggested, may be due to a loss of faith. This in itself would indicate that, once belief in the doctrine of superiority founders, the precarious psychic controls which keep repressed impulses at bay are lost, allowing guilt to overwhelm the desire to live.

Wounded Masculinity It is also worth here considering the work of the neo-Freudian Karen Horney whose essay ‘The Dread of Woman’ (1932) begins by asking whether ‘one of the principal roots of the whole masculine impulse to creative work’ might not be ‘the never-ending conflict between the man’s longing for the woman and his dread of her’ (Horney 1973, p.  135). Horney perceives the male as experiencing constant anxiety with regard to penetration—an anxiety which he must strenuously deny lest his self-­ respect be impaired. She argues with Freud in his assumption that the vagina remains undiscovered, for both sexes, in the early stages of development and suggests, instead, that ‘the boy, urged on by his impulses to penetrate, pictures in fantasy a complementary female organ’ (p.  140). However, he ‘instinctively judges that his penis is much too small for his mother’s genital and reacts with the dread of his own inadequacy, of being rejected and derided’. Thus the child invests his mother with the power to

54 

D. B. SHAW

wound, both through frustration of his libidinous desires, ‘the thrusting back of his libido upon itself’, and ‘through the wounding of his masculine self-regard’ (p. 142). Horney sees puberty as the time when the boy must not only free himself from incestuous attachment to his mother but must also ‘master his dread of the whole female sex’ (p. 141). However, this mastery remains incomplete and Horney perceives ‘that the anxiety connected with his self-respect leaves more or less distinct traces in every man and gives his general attitude towards women a particular stamp’ (p. 143). This ‘general attitude’ appears to be what informs the writings of Theweleit’s Freikorpsmen. Women initially provide the context for their writings, threading the plot with the impulse to action but later they disappear or are re-introduced to represent the decadence of the enemy in the form of the castrating whore who deserves only death. Theweleit writes: It’s as if two male compulsions were tearing at the woman with equal strength. One is trying to push them away, to keep them at arm’s length (defense); the other wants to penetrate them, to have them very near. Both compulsions seem to find satisfaction in the act of killing, where the man pushes the woman far away (takes her life), and gets very close to her (penetrates her with a bullet, stab would, club etc.). (Theweleit 1987, p. 196)

Horney suggests that fear of women is sublimated by the adoption of two opposing attitudes: ‘[t]he attitude of love and adoration signifies: “There is no need for me to dread a being so wonderful, so beautiful, nay, so saintly.” That of disparagement implies: “It would be too ridiculous to dread a creature who, if you take her all round, is such a poor thing”’ (Horney 1973, p. 136). It is, of course, not surprising that the Nazis have been pleased to adopt universally the latter attitude because, as Burdekin points out through the narrator of Proud Man, ‘contempt … is more soothing to the self-esteem’ (Burdekin 1934, p.  29). But it is Alfred’s response to the birth of his daughter which enforces Burdekin’s claim that fascism is the extreme form of a common pattern of relationships between men and women. Towards the end of Swastika Night, when Alfred returns to England, his colleagues offer him condolences for the fact that his current woman, Ethel, has recently given birth, but the baby is only a girl. Impelled by curiosity and his conviction that the future of the human race must now depend on a revision in attitudes towards the status of women, he visits his

3  SWASTIKA NIGHT: KATHARINE BURDEKIN AND THE PSYCHOLOGY… 

55

daughter in the Women’s Quarters, breaking protocol by demanding to see her in the formal words used only to apply to sons. His feelings towards Edith are immediately possessive: ‘he felt [she] was entirely his, no one else should touch her’ (Burdekin 1985, p. 163). Had he complete control over her, he could ‘make a new kind of human being, one there’s never been before’ (p. 161). But Edith needs to be fed, and he becomes furious with Ethel ‘for being able to do something for the baby he could not do himself’ (p. 163). So Alfred is forced into a position where unconscious envy of women is brought to the surface. According to Horney, men’s ‘feeling of playing a relatively small part in the creation of living beings’ leads to ‘envy of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood, as well as of the breasts and of the act of suckling’ and she asks, ‘Is not the tremendous strength in men of the impulse to creative work in every field precisely due to their feeling of playing a relatively small part in the creation of living beings, which constantly impels them to an overcompensation in achievement?’ (Horney 1973, pp. 60–61). But Burdekin suggests that the impulse to violence can also be traced to this source. Alfred becomes so agitated that he threatens to beat Ethel if she does not take care of ‘his’ daughter. Horney considers it ‘remarkable … that so little recognition and attention are paid to the fact of men’s secret dread of women’ and ‘almost more remarkable that women themselves have so long been able to overlook it’ (p. 136). Burdekin offers us a means of recognising this dread by showing it acted out in extreme circumstances. Alfred’s response to Edith is important in demonstrating, on a domestic level, the impulses that have moulded the fascist state. He responds violently to the realisation that he alone cannot ‘make a new kind of human being’ because the nature of woman is such that, even in a reduced state, she performs an important function that, to him, will always be a mystery and that he can never wrest from her control. However, Alfred, through his own experience of doubt, is able consciously to evaluate the conditions that have provided for women to acquiesce in their own reduction. The old Knight, von Hess, believes that ‘[w]omen are nothing, except an incarnate desire to please men’, a theory that he supports by reading from his ancestor’s book, which reports that ‘[o]nce [women] were convinced that men really wanted them to be animals and ugly and completely submissive … they threw themselves into the new pattern with a conscious enthusiasm that knew no bounds’. But Alfred is convinced that there is ‘something wrong somewhere’ (Burdekin 1985, p. 82). Finding a correlation between his own position as a member of a subject race and the description in von Hess’ book of the position of

56 

D. B. SHAW

women before von Wied’s prescriptions for their reduction, he concludes that ‘women always live according to an imposed pattern, because they are not women at all, and never have been. They are not themselves … They see another form of life, undoubtedly different from their own … and they say “that form is better than our form”. And for that reason men have always unconsciously despised them, while consciously urging them to accept their inferiority’ (p. 107, emphasis in original). Alfred’s explanation thus locates the reasons for women’s inferior status in the male unconscious and later he expresses the belief that the ‘human values of this world are masculine. There are no feminine values because there are no women’ (p. 108). No women, that is, whose identity has not been formed by compliance with male demands. Ironically, von Hess also blames men for women’s position, but for him it is ‘a mistake in their leadership’: ‘If men want [women] to have an appearance of perfect freedom, even an appearance of masculine power, they will develop a simulacrum of those things. But what men cannot do, never have been able to do, is to stop this blind submission and cause the women to ignore them and disobey them’ (p. 70, emphasis in original). So, while von Hess believes that women are innately masochistic, Alfred is arguing for their status to be assessed on the basis of what men have never allowed them: ‘sexual invulnerability and … pride in their sex, which’, as he says, ‘is the humblest boy’s birthright’ (p. 108). It is possible, in fact, to read the conversation between Alfred and von Hess as a reproduction of the arguments for and against innate female masochism which turn on interpretations of Freud’s theory of penis envy. In ‘The Problem of Feminine Masochism’ (1933), for instance, Horney argues with Freud’s assertion that ‘masochism is … truly feminine’ (Freud 1973, p. 149). Freud believed that the instinctual life of little girls leads them to blame their mothers when they discover that they are ‘castrated’ and to turn to their father in the hope of receiving a penis from him. As this hope can never be realised, it is later sublimated into the wish for a baby. However, female ego development is weakened by this only partial resolution of the Oedipus complex. The girl child has, by this stage, rejected her mother but cannot fully identify with her father, as can the boy. She is thus left with a desire for, as Juliet Mitchell explains it, ‘passive intercourse with an aggressive father (or his replacements) and childbirth [which] … suggests pleasure-in-pain’ (Mitchell 1990, p.  115). Horney argues that the assumption of a constitutional basis for masochistic drives in women is formulated on the basis of ‘unwarranted generalisations from

3  SWASTIKA NIGHT: KATHARINE BURDEKIN AND THE PSYCHOLOGY… 

57

limited data’ (Horney 1973, p. 222). She sees that ‘[o]nly one justification could be adduced for such generalisations, namely, Freud’s hypothesis that there is no fundamental difference between pathologic and “normal phenomena”’ (p. 223), and warns that psychoanalysis is in danger of making spectacularly untenable assumptions if it does not take into account the role of social conditioning in feminine psychology.11 Further, she asserts that ‘[b]eyond admitting the possibility of a certain preparedness in women for a masochistic conception of their role, every additional assertion as to the relation of their constitution to masochism is hypothetical’ (Horney 1973, p. 232). Burdekin herself, through the narrator of Proud Man, gives an account of penis envy as socially rather than psychogenetically based, which accords closely with the theory that Horney develops in ‘The Problem of Feminine Masochism’: The young subhuman females were made to feel of no account, even before they were well out of their cradles, and before they were aware of possessing any sexual organs at all. Their reproductive organ was internal, and their mammary glands undeveloped. Yet their small brother’s phallus was visible even from babyhood, and the girl rapidly learned to associate it with all the value and all the dignity of being a boy. She felt herself despised, and not only that, but physically unfinished, lacking and inadequate. And when, as she grew older, she realised that she had sexual organs, she discovered that they were only a matter for whispering, secrecy and shame, and not even of much practical value unless she could produce with them more boys. She herself was not worth reproducing. (Burdekin 1934, p. 28) So, if von Hess’ book is taken as a metaphor for the unconscious, its contents can be read as a model for the process which, according to Horney, forms the male ego. The acceptance of von Wied’s theories about the inferior status of women can then be seen as assuaging penetration anxiety, allowing the dread of women to be sublimated: ‘He … held the theory that the beauty of women was an insult to Manhood, as giving them … an enormous and disgusting sexual power over men’ (Burdekin 1985, p. 81). Von Wied’s prescription for the destruction of Memory can therefore be read as rejection of the mother and her ‘enormous and disgusting sexual power’ in order to effect identification with the father, ‘the perfect, the untainted Man-child’ (p. 6, emphasis in original), Hitler. The effect of this on the common Nazis is demonstrated by Alfred’s friend Hermann who is Burdekin’s most complex, and perhaps most sympathetic, character.

58 

D. B. SHAW

To Die for Him In the early pages of the novel, Hermann appears to be a model Nazi. Although he is bored by the service in the Hitler church and finds a useful diversion in attempting to catch the eye of a beautiful boy in the choir, it is his long familiarity with the words of the creed and the values that they express that makes him restless. True to the doctrine of aggression, when he fantasises about the boy, he imagines winding his hands in his hair and giving ‘a good tug, pulling the boy’s head backwards. Not to hurt him much, just to make him mind’ (p. 8). This is in sharp contrast to his later fantasy about Alfred, who arouses feelings immediately in conflict with the values that Hermann has been taught to respect. He ‘would have adored to serve him, to be his slave, to set his body, his strong bones and willing hard muscles, between … Alfred and all harm—to die for him’. Hermann’s dilemma is such that not only is the love that he feels for Alfred anathema to the doctrine of aggression, but it is directed towards a member of a race for whom he should feel only contempt. Furthermore, the object of Hermann’s love is a dangerous rebel who deserves only death, but, it is suggested, it is this very ‘flaw’ in Alfred’s character that is the source of his attraction. When Alfred is near, Hermann thinks ‘almost like an individual’, but ‘with his heavy influence relaxed [he starts] to think like a Nazi’ (p. 31). Early in the narrative, Alfred makes blasphemous statements against the Hitler regime, but Hermann, whose duty is to kill anyone who utters such perfidy, having taken out his knife to stab Alfred while he sleeps, ‘could imagine it dulled with blood, his duty done, his oath fulfilled, his friend lying dead’, but he cannot ‘make his arm obey him to strike downwards into Alfred’s body’. He sits ‘in a trance of shame’ (p. 32) for his inability to kill his friend who is a member of a subject race and as such, the doctrine teaches, below him in the hierarchy. Unconsciously Hermann is attracted to Alfred’s rebellious nature because it offers a resolution to the dilemma of a personality at war with itself. If Hermann were to abandon his belief in the ideal of aggression, he would no longer be torn by emotions in conflict with his cultural values and his guilt would be relieved.12 Hermann’s conflict finds symbolic expression in the two texts, the Hitler Bible and von Hess’ book, and their conflicting versions of history. It is significant to a reading of these texts as representations of the unconscious conflicts that inform the fascist personality that Hermann is unable to read

3  SWASTIKA NIGHT: KATHARINE BURDEKIN AND THE PSYCHOLOGY… 

59

either (the common Nazis are illiterate), but their contents are fundamental to the way in which his life is structured. Hermann, finally, is allowed his wish to die for Alfred when he fights to the death to protect von Hess’ book from discovery. When he attacks Alfred’s enemies (his own Nazi compatriots), he is striking a blow for his own freedom (from the regime), as well as giving free rein to repressed desires in the only form of self-expression available to him. He also creates a diversion, allowing Alfred’s son Fred to escape with von Hess’ book, thus symbolically freeing the repository of ‘Memory’, from those that would further repress it by destroying the book and denying its existence. He dies, Alfred suspects, ‘completely happy’ for the first time in his life. But his ‘last wild fight’ (p. 191) is perhaps symbolic also of the death of the German Empire—the final destruction of the ‘idea’ which holds it together. As Nazi fights Nazi, von Hess’ book and the truth that it reveals are brought, symbolically, ‘above ground’, out of the dugout beneath Stonehenge where Alfred had hidden it and into the realm of the Christians, ‘the remnants of a pre-Hitler civilized religion’ (p. 71) (considered a safe hiding place, as the Christians have the status of ‘untouchables’) and thus back into the past from which the future dystopian world of Hitlerdom has been constructed, serving to establish once again the connection between the interior world of the reader’s own psyche and the exterior, nightmare world of Hitlerdom—only too capable of becoming a reality. In her introduction to the 1985 edition of Swastika Night, Daphne Patai details the similarities to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published seven years later. Apart from the suggestion that Orwell, ‘an inveterate borrower’ (Patai 1985, p. xii), may have been influenced by Swastika Night, Patai observes a striking difference between the two novels in that while Nineteen Eighty-Four offers a conclusion fraught with despair, Swastika Night closes with hope for the future. Orwell can ‘only, helplessly, attribute the pursuit of power to “human nature” itself’ while Burdekin ‘is able to see the preoccupation with power in the context of a gender polarisation that can degenerate into the world of Swastika Night’ (p. xiv), the corollary of which is that Orwell offers his warning against totalitarianism couched in terms which ultimately exclude the possibility of rebellion once the regime is entrenched, while Burdekin is able to envisage the regime slowly destroying itself through the very mythology which supports it.

60 

D. B. SHAW

Addendum What Burdekin achieves here is a novel about women and the ideology which prohibits their speech which demonstrates its effects simply by the device of silencing them within the narrative. Ethel says very little and the other women nothing at all but when Alfred wonders whether women ‘think about themselves’ we know, not only that of course we do but that there is another story to be told about life in the Womens’ Quarters: the despair of mothers deprived of their children at eighteen months and the torture of constant rape that Burdekin gives us no access to. The fact that we are forced to imagine the suffering of their everyday lives is a powerful technique which mobilises empathy in the service of consciousness raising—a technique that is no less effective in the second decade of the twenty-first century than it was when the book was first published. Perhaps even more so. In today’s global culture, we know of women abducted and raped in the service of a totalitarian ideology but we also know that, in the deprived conditions provided for by war and insurgency, women often pragmatically accommodate themselves to violent regimes simply to escape poverty or gain access to even a rudimentary form of education.13 At the same time, we in the developed West are experiencing a resurgence of fascist ideologies which are, broadly, the outcome of the economic and political conditions which emerged with the growth of neoliberal capitalism but which share with the Nazis of Swastika Night the conviction that achieved utopia depends on the control of women. This is most evident in the US where in 2016 Donald Trump was elected to the presidency on a wave of grass-roots support for a Republican party which traded on nostalgia for an imagined past of low immigration, ‘family’ values and economic prosperity. Having promised his supporters the repeal of pro-choice legislation, he appointed three new justices to the Supreme Court including a woman, Amy Coney Barrett, who, in June 2022, after he had been voted out of office, were instrumental in overturning Roe vs Wade, the supreme court ruling which, in 1973, secured a woman’s right to abortion. In the context of Swastika Night, what is interesting is the speculation before the event that it would be achieved by the appointment of a woman to one of the vacant positions. As Jennifer Mason Peiklo suggested acerbically, ‘They’ll even call it feminism’ (Peiklo 2018). Burdekin’s point that women will work against their own interests because ‘they have never been themselves’ seems apposite here. Put another

3  SWASTIKA NIGHT: KATHARINE BURDEKIN AND THE PSYCHOLOGY… 

61

way, she is warning us that we should be very careful what we call feminism. The women of Swastika Night have ended up caged and despised because they have been coerced into believing that the interests of a patriarchal regime are commensurate with their own. If we accept that there is a structural relationship between patriarchy and capitalism and that the peculiarity of neoliberal consumer capitalism is that it depends on the necessity to reproduce the self through the acquisition of gendered commodities, then we must also accept that what currently looks like feminism is simply paternalistic hegemony masquerading as equality. We are not yet in cages but we are imprisoned within a matrix of conformity to measurable achievement within a regime that rewards performances of gender that accord with not only a circumscribed femininity whose parameters are constantly changing but a presentation of self that signifies demonstrable support for competitive individualism. Having to constantly find a response to wounded masculine pride is what makes the women’s exhaustion and final capitulation to the regime in Swastika Night believable. Furthermore, what is equally believable is the complete demoralisation of the Nazi males and their propensity to kill themselves. Jack Urwin, who coined the term ‘toxic masculinity’ (Urwin 2016, p. 35), reports in his book Man Up: Surviving Modern Masculinity that, in 2016, suicide had been identified as ‘the leading cause of death in men aged 20–49, and in 2013, 78% of suicides in the UK were by men’ (pp.  46–47). His analysis, that gender conditioning produces a fragile masculinity which, deprived of the social conditions under which it finds its most potent expression (war and traditional working-class manual labour), is instead expressed as violence towards both others and the self, is not dissimilar to Burdekin’s. But where Burdekin is more radical is in the fact that she locates the toxicity in the civilising process itself. Or, to be more accurate, in the institutions which perpetuate extremes of gender in the service of a belief system which, itself, is produced out of the need to maintain those extremes. This, after all, is what psychoanalysis is derived from; the need to understand how children become gendered adults under civilised conditions and how the fragility of this process is exposed in self-­ defeating and often destructive behaviour. Swastika Night is possibly one of the most perceptive and nuanced novels in the dystopian mode which engages with feminist themes. Despite the fact that Alfred seems to offer some hope for the future in his aim to destroy the German idea, it is Hermann for whom women are ‘too much there’ who is the only character with a capacity for love. Alfred cannot love

62 

D. B. SHAW

Ethel or indeed Edith, who only represents for him a project through which his new found knowledge that women could be different can be explored—a project over which the spectre of eugenics, and all that it is associated with, seems to hover. Hermann’s love for Alfred, however, is not concerned with futurity but with fulfilment in the present and, in his final heroic act, the ability to overcome shame for his attachment to a person considered debased in Nazi culture. While Alfred’s project seems to partake in the same dangerous utopianism that has produced the world of Swastika Night and, fundamentally, is a planned return to the heterosexual conformity that initiated it, Hermann queers the impulse to repeat and thus the incessant reproduction of gendered norms.

Notes 1. The Left Book Club was created by Gollancz ‘to spread knowledge for the threefold aim of the preservation of peace, the defeat of fascism and the pursuit of social justice’ (reader’s letter, Left News, No. 54, December 1940). 2. See Theweleit (1987). 3. In a footnote to her essay ‘Orwell’s Despair, Burdekin’s Hope: Gender and Power in Dystopia’, Daphne Patai comments on the fact that Burdekin’s first six novels were published under her own name and suggests that the reason ‘[w]hy she [later] chose to adopt the pseudonym … is only one of the many questions regarding her life and work that still need to be explored’ (Patai 1984, p. 85). However, as Keith Williams notes, ‘she was at the cutting edge of the progressive thought of the inter-war period … [and] knew and/or corresponded with H. D., Radclyffe Hall, the Woolfs and the Russells, among others’ (Williams 1999, p. 12). See also Daphne Patai’s afterword to another Burdekin novel, The End of This Day’s Business (1989). 4. As Daphne Patai points out, Karen Horney’s ‘essays on feminine psychology were available in English in the 1920s’ (Patai 1985, p. ix). This historical coincidence (shared also with Melanie Klein) as well as the internal textual evidence from Swastika Night and Proud Man argue persuasively for her knowledge of, and interest in, these theorists, despite the fact that, as far as is known, she published nothing other than her fiction. 5. The deification of Hitler, which Burdekin imagines after 700 years of Nazi rule, reflects the role that historical analysis reveals he had perhaps imagined for himself (see Grunberger 1974, pp. 104–5). 6. At the end of the novel, the narrator concludes that they have been mistaken in their assumption that they have travelled into their own past, seeing, finally, no possibility that the ‘creatures’ that they meet could evolve

3  SWASTIKA NIGHT: KATHARINE BURDEKIN AND THE PSYCHOLOGY… 

63

to the state that their people have achieved. See Murray Constantine, Proud Man (1934). 7. Evidence for the fact that concerns over racial ‘quality’ were not confined to Nazi Germany alone is provided by the release of previously withheld documents to the Public Record Office in Kew (UK) which reveal how Winston Churchill, when Home Secretary in 1910, ‘wanted forcibly to sterilise more than 100,000 people he described as “mentally degenerate”’ (see Ponting 1992). 8. This immediately invites comparison with the Greek myth of the birth of Athene who ‘sprang, fully armed, with a mighty shout’ from the head of her father, Zeus. But, as Robert Graves points out, ‘before the arrival of Aryan invaders from the distant North and East … Ancient Europe had no gods’ (Graves 1955, p. 13) and all religious worship centred around the triple-­aspected Moon goddess, of which Athene would undoubtedly have originally been a representation. Graves quotes Jane Harrison, who describes ‘the story of Athene’s birth from Zeus’ head as ‘a desperate theological expedient to rid her of her matriarchal conditions’ and adds that it is ‘also a dogmatic insistence on wisdom as a male prerogative; hitherto the goddess alone had been wise’ (p. 46). It is possible that Burdekin intends to suggest that the mythologising of Hitler’s birth is a similar expedient and that both myths can be taken to represent assuaging of male envy of women’s procreative ability. The re-mythologising of the Moon goddess is also, of course, another example of the ‘destruction of Memory’ (Burdekin 1985, pp. 79–80). 9. As Barbara Ehrenreich explains in her Foreword to Vol. 1 of Male Fantasies, the Freikorps were ‘the volunteer armies that fought, and to a large extent, triumphed over, the revolutionary German working class in the years immediately after World War I … they managed to survive the relatively warless years between 1923 and 1933, becoming the core of Hitler’s SA and, in several cases, going on to become key functionaries in the Third Reich’. 10. It is interesting that Burdekin makes this distinction and that for her, as for Klaus Theweleit, who calls his Friekorpsmen ‘soldier males’, the distinction is made to draw attention to the fact that the culture ratifies a type of psychosis, which these males represent. 11. Freud may have had Horney in mind when he wrote: ‘For the ladies, whenever some comparison seemed to turn out unfavourable to their sex, were able to utter a suspicion that we, the male analysts, had been unable to overcome certain deeply-rooted prejudices against what was feminine, and that this was being paid for in the partiality of our researches. We, on the other hand, standing on the ground of bisexuality, had no difficulty in avoiding impoliteness. We had only to say: ‘This doesn’t apply to you.

64 

D. B. SHAW

You’re the exception; on this point you’re more masculine than feminine’’ (Freud 1973, p. 150). Later analysts have pointed out that Freud’s stressing of bisexuality implies that he also saw the feminine role to have been constructed out of prevailing social conditions, ‘masculine’ exceptions serving to prove this point (see, e.g. Mitchell 1990, p. 131). 12. In Quiet Ways, the central character, Helga, who has been brought up to ‘think like an individual’, is compared to her contemporaries who, it is suggested, in their vigorous support of the war ethic (the novel is set during World War I) are, like Hermann, hiding deep, inner conflicts. 13. See, for example, Matfess (2017).

References Burdekin, Katharine (Murray Constantine). 1934. Proud Man. London: Boriswood. ———. 1985. Swastika Night. London: Lawrence and Wishart. ———. 1989. The End of This Day’s Business. New York: Feminist Press. Ehrenreich, Barbara. 1987. Introduction to Male Fantasies, Vol. 1 (see Theweleit, Klaus). Foucault, Michel. 1981. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. Freud, Sigmund. 1973. New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. Graves, Robert. 1955. The Greek Myths. Vol. 1. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. Grunberger, Richard. 1974. A Social History of the Third Reich. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. Horney, Karen. 1973. Feminine Psychology. New  York and London: W. W. Norton & Co. Klein, Melanie. 1975. Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works, 1921–1945. New York: Dell. Koonz, Claudia. 1987. Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics. London: Methuen. Lewis, Jane. 1980. In Search of a Real Equality: Women between the Wars. In Class, Culture and Social Change: A New View of the 1930s, ed. Frank Gloversmith. Brighton: Harvester Press. Matfess, Hilary. 2017. Women and the War on Boko Haram: Wives, Weapons, Witnesses. London: Zed Books. Mitchell, Juliet. 1990. Psychoanalysis and Feminism. London and New  York: Penguin Books. Patai, Daphne. 1984. Orwell’s Despair, Burdekin’s Hope: Gender and Power in Dystopia. Women’s Studies International Forum 7 (2): 85–95.

3  SWASTIKA NIGHT: KATHARINE BURDEKIN AND THE PSYCHOLOGY… 

65

———. 1985. Introduction to Swastika Night (see Burdekin, Katharine). Peiklo, Jennifer Jason. 2018. Why I Believe President Donald Trump Will Choose a Woman to Kill Roe v. Wade (Updated). Rewire.News, June 28. https://rewirenewsgroup.com/2018/06/28/trump-­woman-­roe-­v-­wade/. Ponting, Clive. 1992. Churchill’s Plan for Race Purity. The Guardian, June 20/21. Theweleit, Klaus. 1987. Male Fantasies. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Polity Press. Urwin, Jack. 2016. Man Up: Surviving Modern Masculinity. London: Icon Books, London. Williams, Keith. 1999. Back from the Future: Katharine Burdekin and Science Fiction in the 1930s. In Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History, ed. Maroula Joannou. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

CHAPTER 4

‘No Woman Born’: C. L. Moore’s Dancing Cyborg

In 1937 sf writer John W. Campbell took over the editorship of a little known pulp magazine called Astounding Stories, later to be renamed Astounding Science Fiction, thus ushering in what is now generally regarded as the ‘golden age’ of sf. His predecessor, Hugo Gernsback, although responsible for naming the genre, made few demands on his writers, other than to insist that they incorporate a scientific theme. Campbell’s contribution was to hone and refine the genre into what Kingsley Amis calls ‘something an intelligent adult could profitably read’ (Amis 1961, p. 19), encouraging his writers to experiment with language and content and, ultimately, discarding the hacks in favour of a coterie of challenging and sophisticated writers. Nevertheless, the genre during this time reflected the prevailing preoccupation with technology—of the metal and grease kind. The predominate equation of the scientific with the technological ensured that Campbell’s demand for plausible scientific content was interpreted generally in terms of clanking machinery. Stories of its use and misuse, the pleasure of its operation and its deadly potential overwhelmed the by now receding minority of Bug Eyed Monsters (BEMs to the initiated) and Mad Scientists. However, as Lester del Rey, one of Campbell’s team, remembers: ‘Campbell was always receptive to mixing the hard science—the physical technological developments—in stories with as much social

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. B. Shaw, Women, Science and Fiction Revisited, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25171-9_4

67

68 

D. B. SHAW

science as he could get … to base a future on physical science and neglect the social developments was unrealistic’ (del Rey 1975, p. 152). The 1940s is also notable as the decade which saw the emergence of sf fandom, although early fans were less devoted to cosplay and more interested in examining their own intelligence. One ‘gigantic … survey … showed that 70 per cent of those responding claimed themselves smarter than the average man … Philadelphia fans at one time devoted most of their meetings to showing off their muscles’ (Warner 1969, p.  31). In defence of fandom, however, it should be noted that the close links that it forged between writers and readers (many well-known writers had originally been fans) accounted in no small part for maintaining the new sophistication of the writing. The fannish intelligentsia were harsh critics, demanding that the standard of the writing reflects their self-assumed status. Needless to say, few women participated independently in fandom and even fewer found their way into print.1 Catherine Lucille Moore was a notable exception whose first story, ‘Shambleau’, has prompted Brian Aldiss to comment that she had ‘a maturity few of her male contemporaries could match’ (Aldiss and Wingrove 1988, p. 322). This is perhaps revealed in the fact that where the male writers often appeared to see science as, in T. A. Shippey’s words, ‘a djinn to be stuffed back in the bottle’ (Shippey 1979, p. 98). Moore realised that not only was this not possible but that it might be possible to imagine a world in which it was not even desirable. ‘No Woman Born’ is primarily a story which raises questions about the way that technology is perceived in the context of a culture which was engaged in managing its fear of its own inventions by confusing the distinctions between human life and the machines it had created. Post-war propaganda boasted of ‘the splendid contribution made by the scientists and their devices to victory’. And with ‘the bonanza of the new consumer goods supplied by science … information about science … flooded into popular journals and radio, and onto the television screens’. But Dora Russell was among those who viewed with suspicion the machine legacy of the war. As she wrote: To defeat Hitler’s bid for hegemony had demanded desperate means and effort, but it had to be done. In the process the victorious allies acquired not only the techniques of mechanised and scientific war, but, in addition, the technical and psychological devices for instilling into the masses such emotions as were necessary to ensure appropriate behaviour and loyalty under

4  ‘NO WOMAN BORN’: C. L. MOORE’S DANCING CYBORG 

69

totalitarian control. Statesmen and the mass of the population in America, Europe and Russia, were well satisfied with their machine god. (Russell 1983, p. 209)

Nevertheless, ‘the masses’ were admitting technology into the home and the workplace with feelings of ambivalence. The ‘machine god’ promised to alleviate drudgery in the home and streamline production in the factory, but anxieties surfaced in connection with the modifications of workplace practices that the introduction of new technology would demand. If machine technology was so versatile, what would be the role of the human worker? In 1921 Czech dramatist Karel Capek had introduced the idea of ‘simplified human beings [which had] no soul and [did] nothing but work’ in his satirical play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) and, although Capek’s robots are ‘what we would [now] regard as androids or clones’ (Aldiss and Wingrove 1988, p. 221), they provided an adaptable symbol for expressing the fear that machine technology was set to usurp the human role in production. The sf writers re-created the robot as a creature of metal, and a new mythology was born. As John Griffiths writes, robots embody ‘the fear of replacement of Man [sic], and particularly the less skilled Man, by the machine. … The final extrapolation of this fear is the total replacement of the human race by such “thinking” devices’ (Griffiths 1980, p.  122). But, equally, the robot gave form to the anxiety that streamlined workplace practices in particular, and overreliance on technology in general, would erode the human capacity for individual thought and create a race of similarly robotised automatons. Nor, particularly in the US, was the fear completely unfounded. At the turn of the century Frederick W. Taylor’s system of ‘Scientific Management’, as implemented by Henry Ford, had led to the introduction of the ‘moving assembly line’ (Hales 1982, p. 180) in factories and ‘the regime of the man with the buff smock and the stopwatch’ (p. 177). Implicit in the idea of time-and-motion efficiency and the fragmenting of work into ‘smaller and smaller parcels nested deeper and deeper within formal levels of study and supervision’ (p. 180) was the suggestion that the worker was merely an automaton or a component in the larger machine that was the factory. In the 1920s the Italian Marxist and Communist leader Antonio Gramsci described the ‘new type of man suited to the new type of work and productive process … The only thing that is completely mechanised’, he wrote, ‘is the physical gesture; the memory of the trade,

70 

D. B. SHAW

reduced to simple gestures repeated at an intense rhythm, “nestles” in the muscular and nervous centres and leaves the brain free and unencumbered for other occupations’ (Gramsci 1971, pp. 286 & 309). Gramsci believed that, with the freedom to think, the worker who realised that ‘they are trying to reduce him to a trained gorilla’ would be led into a train of thought ‘that is far from conformist’ (p. 310), a prediction perhaps borne out by the need for ‘the infamously brutal Ford police force’ (Hales 1982, p. 18). However, the appliance of science to rationalising the workforce necessarily set a pace for social adaptation, as summed up in the guidebook to the 1922 Chicago World’s Fair: ‘Science finds— Industry applies—Man conforms’ (Pacey 1983, p.  25)—a pace which accelerated with the new technological developments brought about by World War II. As traditional occupations were simplified, mechanised or eroded by ever more complex and capable machinery, it was the machines themselves that became the focus for anxiety. Anthropomorphised into grotesque parodies of the human form (although, even today, very few robots are cast in the image of their creators), the robot came into its own in the pulp magazines as a symbol for the anxieties invoked by machine technology (and, as I will discuss later, the management of those anxieties, as proposed by Isaac Asimov). As Aldiss and Wingrove put it, ‘Robots can embody depersonalisation fears. This is perhaps their most obvious psychological function. They then stand for man’s anxieties about surviving the pressures of modern society’ (Aldiss and Wingrove 1988, p.  310). Lewis Mumford had perhaps underestimated the anxiety when he wrote in 1932, ‘We now realise that the machines, at their best, are lame counterfeits of living organisms’ (Mumford 1934, p. 371). But although the stories appearing in the sf magazines coded a resistance to the mechanisation of society, worship of the machine god was in general fuelled rather than tempered by the anxieties that I have discussed. The most coherent explanation for this can be found in Marshall McLuhan’s analysis of American machine culture, The Mechanical Bride, first published in 1951, in which he identifies a capitulation to machines which manifests as a form of totemism, evidenced by the rise of behaviourist psychology which ‘substituted for the vision of man as a free, if often deeply flawed, spirit a model of man as machine whose performance could only be measured in terms of his responses to external stimuli’ (McLuhan 1967, p. 33).

4  ‘NO WOMAN BORN’: C. L. MOORE’S DANCING CYBORG 

71

Cybernetics and the Automatic Housewife The theory of behaviourism, first proposed by John B. Watson in 1919, gained currency in the late 1940s along with Dr. Norbert Wiener’s theory of cybernetics. Wiener was primarily interested in the dynamics of the human nervous system and the method of communication between the exterior senses and the muscles. Observing people who suffered from varying forms of ataxia (a breakdown in this communication resulting in a loss of control over the simple actions necessary to respond to stimulus from their immediate environment), he concluded that ‘[t]he central nervous system no longer appears as a self-contained organ, receiving inputs from the senses and discharging into the muscles. On the contrary, some of its most characteristic activities are explicable only as circular processes, emerging from the nervous system into the muscles, and re-entering the nervous system through the sense organs’ (Wiener 1948, p. 8). Wiener realised that in order for these ‘characteristic activities’ to be duplicated by machinery, a similar system of mechanical feedback would be required whereby ‘messages’ could be transmitted to influence a series of actions, the outcome of which would in turn generate further messages. For example, the action of picking up a pencil, for a machine, would require a simulation of at least two senses (sight and touch) along with an information processing mechanism which would ‘know’ at any given moment, from initiation to completion of the action, what had so far been accomplished by the moving parts. It would then have the capacity to relay this information back to the ‘senses’, which would in turn pass back information from the environment. This, in very basic terms, is what cybernetics is all about. Thus, according to Wiener ‘[c]ybernetics takes the view that the structure of the machine or of the organism is an index of the performance that may be expected from it’ (Wiener 1968, p. 53, emphasis in original). The key words in Wiener’s assertion are ‘that may be expected from it’: that is, it follows that if a machine or organism, having a specified structure, does not perform as expected, then that machine or organism must necessarily be flawed. Of course, Wiener’s confidence in his statement must hinge on the belief that structure can be read in such a way as to produce an understanding of performance. Wiener was the first to propose myoelectric control for artificial limbs, which, ‘utilising direct linkage between mechanism and nervous system, permits the amputee to manipulate his artificial limb simply by “willing” it to perform the desired action’ (Rorvik 1975, p. 102). Despite the positive

72 

D. B. SHAW

implications for the future development of prosthetics, Wiener’s proposal again raised the spectre of the human machine with the added implication that elements in the controlling mechanism deemed to be defective could be as easily replaced or repaired as the limbs themselves. Indeed, behaviourists took seriously Dr. Wiener’s maxim that structure should be considered as an index of performance and proposed the modification of human performance considered to be inappropriate by the use of behaviour-­modifying drugs and brain surgery. So although technology raised the spectre of redundancy while simultaneously producing anxieties connected with the idea of human beings reduced to cogs in a mechanical wheel, these anxieties were, paradoxically, managed by recourse to theories which offered a conception of human beings as not so very different from that which they feared. However, there is evidence to suggest that fear of technology was gender-­ biased. The war provided an unprecedented opportunity for women to enter into paid occupations, albeit under exceptional conditions, and many were drafted into factories where they gained skills in operating manufacturing machinery. This brought about a situation of ambivalence in women’s relationship to technology. While in 1946 Woman and Beauty magazine tentatively suggested to its readers that ‘in these difficult days, it is worth learning how to mend a fuse or repair the vacuum cleaner’,2 Len Chaloner, in the October 1945 issue of Electrical Age, was urging women to ‘step forward in partnership with men’ to facilitate ‘the development of power for peaceful, rather than destructive purposes and for the building of a new world’. However, with the ending of the war, armaments manufacturers seeking new areas of profit saw the potential for turning their former female employees into customers for new products. Metal and grease were to be transformed into a plethora of devices to transform women’s work from drudgery to pleasure or, as Mr. George Tomlinson, the Minister of Education in the UK in 1947 gravely put it, ‘It was [sic] now become possible to make use of the results of scientific research to ease the housewife’s burden’.3 Nevertheless, it was implicit in this that housewives they were to become again, and on both sides of the Atlantic the ad-men swung into action to ensure that women who had tasted a brief spell of economic independence during the war years would go rushing back to the home to test the delights of the new domestic technology. However, according to one estimate, despite so-called labour-saving devices flooding onto the post-war market, it would seem that by 1950 the average weekly hours

4  ‘NO WOMAN BORN’: C. L. MOORE’S DANCING CYBORG 

73

spent on housework had actually increased over the 1929 figure from 51 hours to 70 (Bereano et al. 1985, p. 168). It was doubtful then that women would ever find the time to build ‘a new world’ and hardly surprising that, when in 1952 the Electrical Association for Women conducted a survey of domestic equipment and asked ‘if there was any work in the home which could be performed electrically but for which there is no appliance available and how such an appliance should be designed’, the answer was, overwhelmingly, a robot: ‘a small all-purpose fractional horse-power motor, possibly mounted on a wheeled stand. This would serve operating tools for scrubbing floors, dusting, vacuum-cleaning carpets, polishing floors, furniture and metal goods, cleaning windows and peeling vegetables—in fact, an automatic housewife’.4 The implication here is that unlike men, who feared replacement in their traditional work or the reduction of their role to one of mindless activity by the appearance of ever more capable machines, women were demanding a machine to replace them in their traditional sphere, thus perhaps declaring housework itself to be a dehumanising activity, better suited to ‘trained gorillas’ (or robots). But the ideal robot is, after all, an uncomplaining and efficient servant, and the Electrical Association for Women’s ‘automatic housewife’ can be read as an ironic comment on the new image of woman as defined by the advertising. The ads insisted that it was a woman’s duty to be ‘glamorous, cheerful, efficient, and, so far as possible, to run the home like an automatic factory’. Relieved of ‘the housewife’s burden’ she could devote herself to loving the husband that had made it all possible (McLuhan 1967, pp. 32 & 33). For McLuhan, the mechanical bride was epitomised by the Hollywood ‘glamour girl’ who ‘accepts from the technological world the command to transform her organic structure into a machine. A love machine? It would seem so. At least she is told that the end of all the methodical processing will be love unlimited’ (p. 154). So the process that Naomi Wolf would later elaborate in The Beauty Myth (1990) began with the hard-sell directed at women, who would be the new technological consumers when the wartime armaments manufacturers turned their production processes to domestic appliances. Market researchers identified three categories of woman, ‘The True Housewife Type’, ‘The Career Woman’ and ‘The Balanced Homemaker’, of which the latter was deemed to represent ‘the market with the greatest future potential’ (Friedan 1965, p. 183). Appliance manufacturers were advised

74 

D. B. SHAW

that it would be to their advantage to ‘make more and more women aware of the desirability of belonging to this group’ (p.  184). The Balanced Homemaker was portrayed in advertising and the entertainment media as the perfect wife and mother and, perhaps more importantly, the most sexually desirable type of woman. This was the era when women were advised that no matter how well they managed the home, they would lose their husbands if they ‘let themselves go’, and a plethora of beauty aids flooded the market to ensure that the technology was available whereby they could remain ‘glamorous’. In 1988, Betty Friedan explained: ‘[i]t used to be that being a woman in the United States meant that … you encased your flesh in rigid plastic casing that made it difficult to breathe and difficult to move, but you weren’t supposed to notice that. You didn’t ask why you wore the girdle, and you weren’t supposed to notice red welts on your belly when you took it off at night’ (Wolf 1990, p. 214). This implicit robotising of the female body, with engineered ‘control’ garments and ‘scientifically’ manufactured cosmetics (pp.  118–21) through to the appliances that she was designed to manipulate, contributes to a fantasised image of women as compliant, restrained but sexually available—an image that Ira Levin elaborated in the later sf novel The Stepford Wives (1972) in which a group of suburban American men turn their independent and liberated wives into actual robots. The woman as love machine fitted exactly the requirements of a culture which ambivalently both feared and desired the ‘machine god’ that it had created. So the robot can be seen to symbolise anxieties connected to the nature of technology, the management of these anxieties by a close identification of the human with the machine and an implicit reconstruction of the female body to conform to the alternative fantasy of the robot as a compliant technological servant. The one writer credited with giving this last image a coherent form was Isaac Asimov, considered to be the supreme exponent of the fictional robot and acknowledged as having invented the word ‘robotics’. In 1941 he formulated the Three Laws of Robotics which were: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence so long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.5

4  ‘NO WOMAN BORN’: C. L. MOORE’S DANCING CYBORG 

75

These ‘have become the inescapable premise for robot stories by virtually all other sf writers’. The phenomenon was, in Griffiths’ words, ‘as if every nineteenth-century novelist had been content, without question, to accept the social judgements of Dickens as the basis of his own stories’ (Griffiths 1980, p. 127). Anxieties about the destructive potential of technology imbued the robot with an erratic nature, and a common theme of the stories depended on, as McLuhan describes it, ‘the horror of a synthetic robot running amok in revenge for its lack of a soul’ (McLuhan 1967, p.  1000). The Three Laws gave the robot a new identity as a still powerful but, nevertheless, servile creature which, if it did prove a danger, could be shown to have received faulty programming or to have been inadequately instructed. So the somewhat hackneyed monster/robot alliance gave way to the image of the robot as an innocent victim of human error. Interestingly, Asimov himself claims that he was uniquely able to construct the Three Laws because ‘he got on well with his father’. As Rorvik explains it: ‘People [sic] fear robots … for the same reason that fathers often fear their sons: because they are afraid that the sons might prove mightier than the father’ (Rorvik 1975, p. 32). So Asimov is claiming that fear of robots is a projection of Oedipal anxiety and the monster/robot a representation of the avenging son. This Oedipal analysis goes to the heart of the anxiety which the robot symbolises. Allied to the fear of the machine replacing man in the sphere of production is the deeper anxiety that his role in reproduction may also be under threat. The robotised image of women in the post-war years, while designed to ensure their compliance in consumption of the new machine goods and to desexualise the ‘Career Woman’ to keep her off the production line, may have served ultimately to deepen the anxiety that ‘the love machine’, like Frankenstein’s monster, may demand a mate that her creator is unwilling or unable to provide. Indeed, Dierdre in C. L. Moore’s ‘No Woman Born’ is a promising monster who not only escapes the control of her creator but appropriates the tools of his trade to re-make herself.

Monsters and Cyborgs in the Wor(l)ds of the Father Deirdre, originally a talented and much loved actress and dancer, has been saved from a theatre fire which had all but destroyed her, after which her untouched brain has been housed in a supple and uniquely beautiful metal

76 

D. B. SHAW

body. The story is told from the point of view of her former manager (and, we suspect, lover) John Harris who witnesses the ‘Frankenstein complex’ destroying the formerly brilliant scientist, Maltzer, who has been responsible for initiating her re-creation. Maltzer believes that he has created a monster. Unprepared for her resolve to pursue her former career and reappear on television, he is confronted, like Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s novel, with his own creation which, so he believes, has escaped his control. Deirdre claims that she could ‘play Juliet just as [she is] now, with a cast of ordinary people, and make the world accept it’ (Moore 1975, p. 279). Maltzer’s fear is that her confidence is misplaced and that, when her audience do not accept her, despair will cause her mind to withdraw, leaving nothing more than an animated machine. Deirdre’s brain has been kept conscious throughout the process of her reconstruction and it is she that has determined the principle on which the design is based. Her new body is made from a series of ‘diminishing metal bracelets fitting one inside the other’ (p. 245), and, watching her move, Harris deduces that the body beneath the chain mail ‘chlamys’ must be made of ‘the same interlocking sections as her limbs’ (p. 246). Movement is controlled by ‘[e]lectromagnetic currents flowing along from ring to ring’ (p. 247) which, as Deirdre explains to Harris, are directed by the ‘same impulses that used to go out to my muscles … It’s all a matter of the brain patterns that operated the body and now operate the machinery’ (pp. 248 & 249). Moore thus seems to have, somewhat uncannily, predicted Wiener’s proposal for the development of myoelectrically controlled prostheses. Maltzer represents the fear of technological hubris that gave rise to representations of machinery as both dangerous to human life and a threat to the human spirit. Believing himself to be condemned for unlawfully ‘bring[ing] life into the world’, he casts himself in the role of ‘the student Frankenstein’ (p. 276), who must die for his transgression. Harris, on the other hand, symbolises the need to humanise machine technology, to endow it with human qualities so that it is no longer threateningly alien. But in imagining Deirdre as the woman that she once was, he ascribes to himself the role of thwarted lover and is jealous of the ‘intimacy so like marriage’ (p. 269) that he believes Maltzer to have enjoyed with Deirdre in their time together in the laboratory. However, Deirdre herself presents a third point of view which emerges as the story progresses in radical contrast to the perceptions of the two male characters. Moore writes that, in constructing an identity for her

4  ‘NO WOMAN BORN’: C. L. MOORE’S DANCING CYBORG 

77

fictional cyborg, she asked herself ‘How would you handle it?’ (p.  367. Emphasis in original). She consequently presents us with a set of questions which challenge the way in which we receive the notion of an interface between human beings and technology while, at the same time, offering an alternative to the construction of female identity in terms of love machine or malfunctioning neurotic. Deirdre establishes for herself a new identity which offers the potential for women to realise the ‘great riches’ to be found ‘in explicitly embracing the possibilities inherent in the breakdown of clean distinctions between organism and machine’ (Haraway 1991, p. 174) that, four decades after the first publication of ‘No Woman Born’, Donna J. Haraway would offer as a new feminist identity for the postmodern age. Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ develops an argument which moves beyond the opposition between machine and organism, refusing the stance of feminists who claim a female identity that is essentially opposed to, and victimised by, technology. When the Manifesto was first published, there was a growing movement, particularly in the US, which aligned the oppression of women with environmental politics. In its most extreme form, this was expressed as a female (generative) planet opposed to a male productive force with the rape of natural resources equated with heterosexual reproduction understood as the rape of women, and a maternally derived spirituality proposed as a force to counter masculine domination.6 Haraway’s exasperation with this point of view is evident, particularly in her final statement that she would ‘rather be a cyborg than a goddess’ (p.  181). For her, the cyborg is ‘a creature in a post-gender world’ (p. 150)—a political myth through which to code resistance and a material signifier of the increasingly potent symbiosis of bodies and machines in the late capitalism of the end of the twentieth century. In the 1980s, the threat of advanced technologies which had animated post-war science fiction was becoming more acute with the advent of Reagan’s Star Wars and early developments in ubiquitous computing. While it was becoming increasingly apparent that the future of work would necessarily require skills that those trained in traditional industries were ill prepared for, new descriptions of life emerging from scientists working in new fields of biotechnology were challenging received understandings of species and what it meant to be embodied. A former scientist herself, Haraway saw very clearly how these developments must also challenge notions of race, gender and sexuality and, as a Marxist, she also understood how a new revolutionary subject was implied in the changes in social

78 

D. B. SHAW

relations that would necessarily ensue. There are echoes of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s claim that ‘this is the women’s century—her chance to remake the world’ (see Chap. 1) in Haraway’s insistence that the cyborg is ‘the self feminists must code’. Certainly she understood that emerging industries were proving the techno-dystopians of the 1940s correct in their fears that they would be replaced in their traditional roles but the replacement was not a robot (at least not yet) but micro-technologies manipulated by the nimble fingers of women trained in crafts like sewing and weaving as well as the legions of typists whose clacking industry had lent vital support to post-war commerce. Haraway sees writing to be ‘pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs’, the one tool which can challenge ‘the systems of myth and meaning structuring our imaginations’ (p. 163). Cyborg writing ‘must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked [women] as other’. The tools are ‘often stories, retold stories, versions that reverse and displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalised identities’ (p. 175). So, what Haraway would later prescribe as a tool for feminists to break through the dualisms that structure Western thought, Moore similarly utilises to construct a story that is a sophisticated exercise in exploring how bodies become gendered. Moore’s reinterpretation of the Frankenstein myth allows for the text to be read as problematising accepted notions of what it means to be human and, perhaps more specifically, of what it means to be a woman. So, like Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s novel, the scientist’s mental and physical health deteriorates as the story progresses. Maltzer’s belief that he has repeated Frankenstein’s mistake impels him to act out a drama in which he, the transgressing scientist, having failed to control his creation, will suffer and die. Towards the end of the story he attempts suicide with the clear intention of forcing the conclusion of the Frankenstein scenario. Harris remembers ‘that Frankenstein, too, had paid with his life for the unlawful creation of life’ (Moore 1975, p. 276), but what a reader familiar with Shelley’s novel will also remember is that the monster too is destroyed by Frankenstein’s death. Nevertheless, it is not Deirdre’s physical destruction that Maltzer desires but the death of her ambition. Maltzer will not ‘leave’ (p.  277) without forcing Deirdre to acknowledge that, although she has been built to perform, to do so would be to bring upon herself the scorn and derision of those who had previously

4  ‘NO WOMAN BORN’: C. L. MOORE’S DANCING CYBORG 

79

loved her. As Frankenstein’s monster, having relinquished everything to the torment of his creator, is left purposeless by the scientist’s death, so Maltzer’s design is to trap Deirdre with the bonds of his own mortality into relinquishing her purpose, the one thing she was ‘made to do’ (p. 276). So Maltzer’s identification with ‘the student Frankenstein’ provides a parallel which allows for questions to be raised as to how far Deirdre will conform to the complementary role of the monster. In Maltzer’s view, Deirdre is monstrous because she ‘hasn’t any sex. She isn’t female anymore. She doesn’t know that yet, but she’ll learn’. As Frankenstein’s monster turns to destruction when he learns that he is deformed, so Maltzer believes Deirdre’s mind will become unbalanced when she is rejected, because she has ‘lost everything that made her essentially what the public wanted’ (p.  258). Biologically, Deirdre indeed ‘hasn’t any sex’, but it is absurd to assume that Maltzer believes she is unaware that she no longer possesses a woman’s body. What he believes that Deirdre will ‘learn’ is that the source of her former appeal was purely physical; that her performance was always secondary to the paradoxical promise of the Hollywood star—a woman who is sexually available but unattainable. The metal body ensures that Deirdre is no longer sexually available and thus, Maltzer’s statement implies, no longer desirable, either as a woman or as a performer. His belief that she is deluded reinforces the sense in which he estimates her in terms of the cultural stereotype—the innocent virgin/angel, unaware of her own sexuality, who, when she becomes aware, takes on the opposing representation, the demon/whore. So Maltzer’s identification with Frankenstein carries with it a hidden metaphor. Deirdre is only monstrous in terms of stereotypical notions of femininity which reduce women to their biology. In compiling Women of the Future: the Female Main Character in Science Fiction, Betty King hesitated before including ‘No Woman Born’ because ‘Maltzer insists that Deirdre is now sexless’ and ‘[i]t is clear at the story’s conclusion that both Johnnie and Maltzer believe that she will soon be little other than a beautiful machine’ (King 1984, p. 72), but this reading gives undue privilege to the points of view of the male characters and does not take account of the source of their anxieties. Where Harris and Maltzer’s points of view coincide is in their descriptions of Deirdre in terms of powerlessness. For them she is ‘frail’, ‘fragile’, ‘vulnerable’, ‘helpless’, ‘bewildered and confused’ (Moore 1975, p.  277). So while both evince concern for her mental health, they nevertheless judge her mind on the basis of her former structure, the female body that is perceived as

80 

D. B. SHAW

imposing mental frailty and confusion. The cyborg here is sexless but, nevertheless, gendered in terms of the cultural norm. While Maltzer is ‘too close to Deirdre to see her’ and Harris is ‘too far’ (p. 253), both, in their ‘psychic blindness’ (p. 252), are unable to think of her as other than powerless. This disjuncture between their perceptions of her and Deirdre’s growing self-awareness is brought into sharp focus by the scene in which the two men watch Deirdre’s first reappearance on television. Although the performance is live, they are depicted alone in Maltzer’s office or apartment, separated from the source of their anxiety by both geographical distance and the technology which is her medium. This provides for a heightened sense of Maltzer’s distress as well as providing a metaphor for the very real separation between Deirdre’s self-image and what the men imagine her to be. Maltzer’s hand shakes so badly that he is unable to ‘turn the dial’ (p. 257), his inability to ‘tune in’ to Deirdre significant in emphasising his lack of empathy with her state of mind. The sexual element is here emphasised as well and there is a sense of combativeness in the exchanges. Watching Maltzer’s emaciated frame, Harris notes ‘almost jealously’ that ‘he seemed to be drawing nearer Deirdre in her fleshlessness with every passing week’, and Maltzer insistently attempts to impress on Harris the loss of her sense of touch: ‘She can’t feel anything with tactual delicacy any more … She’s withdrawn from all physical contacts’ (p.  259). Harris is ‘a little stunned’ by Maltzer’s claim that she ‘hasn’t any sex’. ‘[T]he thought had not occurred to him before at all, so vividly had the illusion of the old Deirdre hung about the new one’ (p. 258). The fact that neither image is adequate to encompass the reality marks a point of intersection between Moore’s revision of the Frankenstein story and the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. In Ovid’s version of the myth, Pygmalion is ‘revolted by the many faults which nature has implanted in the female sex’ (Innes 1955, p. 231) and builds his statue out of a desire to possess a woman that conforms to his ideal. He falls in love with the statue and demands of the goddess Venus that it be brought to life. However, the awakened Galatea is a true woman and, as such, must necessarily possess those ‘faults’ that Pygmalion believed he had fashioned her to avoid. The irony is that the lifeless statue was female only in structure. Galatea does not perform as Pygmalion expects because the only link between her structure and her expected performance is in his imagination. Deirdre’s humanness is similarly tested and she, like Galatea, defies the expectations of her maker. She insists, ‘I’m not a robot, with compulsions

4  ‘NO WOMAN BORN’: C. L. MOORE’S DANCING CYBORG 

81

built into me that I have to obey. I’m free-willed and independent’ (Moore 1975, pp. 278–9) and, later, she compares herself to another mythological creature, the phoenix, which ‘rises perfect and renewed from its own ashes’ (p. 286). The phoenix is its own agent of death and renewal, and the allusion to the myth implies that it has been Deirdre’s own decision to choose life and embrace the potential of a robot body. Maltzer has provided the means of her renewal, but it is she that has controlled the regeneration. Her response to Harris’ suggestion that Maltzer would have to ‘give his permission’ (p. 256) for her to resume her career is couched in terms which problematise the construction of bodies in terms of medical and legal discourse: Now look, John! That’s another idea you and Maltzer will have to get out of your minds. I don’t belong to him. In a way he’s just been my doctor through a long illness, but I’m free to discharge him whenever I choose. If there were ever any legal disagreement, I suppose he’d be entitled to quite a lot of money for the work he’s done on my new body—for the body itself, really, since it’s his own machine, in one sense. But he doesn’t own it, or me. (p. 257)

Here Deirdre succinctly expresses the way in which cyborg politics can elucidate the discourses which structure gender in terms of capitalist investment strategies. She is brought to a reflection on who ‘owns’ her body through an understanding of the forces that have shaped the possibility of her reconstruction. Deirdre offers a premonitory analysis of the ways in which, as Anne Balsamo describes it, ‘an apparatus of gender organises the power relations manifest in the various engagements between bodies and technologies’ (Balsamo 1996, p. 9). She understands herself as existing at the confluence of medical, technical, commercial and evolutionary discourse and thus estranged from, but offering a challenge to, the ‘natural’ woman so necessary to the maintenance of dichotomous identities. She symbolically recognises Haraway’s point that ‘who controls the interpretation of bodily boundaries in medical hermeneutics is a major feminist issue’ (Haraway 1991, p. 169). For Maltzer, Deirdre is incomplete, ‘an abstraction’ (Moore 1975, p. 258) and he is confident in his assertion that ‘[o]ne of the strongest stimuli to a woman of her type was the knowledge of sex competition. … All that’s gone, and it was an essential’ (p. 259). But essential to whom? Maltzer’s judgement is limited by assumptions which accord value to

82 

D. B. SHAW

women only on the basis of their ability to compete for male attention, but Deirdre can be read as having transcended such limitations. His attempt at suicide is a final attempt to regain control; to make Deirdre admit that she has ‘learned [her] inadequacy’ (p. 281). Maltzer must claim full responsibility for his ‘mistake’ so that his suicide may be vindicated and he can write the final chapter of the Frankenstein story, destroying both himself and his creation. But Deirdre has other ideas. Harris is our witness as she, moving with superhuman speed, retrieves Maltzer from his precarious perch on a high windowsill and simply carries him to the centre of the room. Where Victor Frankenstein’s ‘child’ is irrevocably linked to its father through its need for completion—its desire for a mate—and sees its salvation only in that provision, Deirdre has no desire for salvation. Instead, her project is experiment and exploration. She has thus, through a fusion with technology, transcended the opposition between the organic and the technological—an opposition which has as its telos an apocalyptic confrontation—and, in so doing, has wrested control from her ‘father’. As Haraway points out: ‘[t]he main trouble with cyborgs … is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential’ (Haraway 1991, p. 151). Deirdre defies the apocalyptic promise of the technological monster. She promises instead the possibility for transcending one crucial opposition of the modern world in order that we may make of her a symbol for transcending other, more fundamental, dualisms. So, while both Harris and Maltzer romanticise Deirdre into a frail creature, she proves the limits of their imagination by succumbing neither to sorrow nor to madness and equally dismisses their anxieties about whether she is human or machine by demonstrating the pleasure she discovers in being both. Of course what Maltzer and Harris both fail to recognise is the fact that femininity is far from ‘essential’. As Veronica Hollinger points out, ‘No Woman Born’ can be read as an argument for gender as a performance which is both culturally determined and contingent. Referring to both Joan Riviere’s ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ and Judith Butler’s arguments in Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, Hollinger suggests that Deirdre ‘is monstrous not because she has ceased to be feminine, but precisely because her performance of femininity is so—calculatedly— convincing’ (Hollinger 2002, p. 309). In fact, when I referred to her earlier as a ‘promising’ monster, I had in mind the way in which her

4  ‘NO WOMAN BORN’: C. L. MOORE’S DANCING CYBORG 

83

performance of self exposes the instability of gender and the potential of all bodies to perform otherwise. This is what Butler’s oft quoted reference to drag and cross-dressing also achieves. ‘In imitating gender’, she writes, ‘drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency’ (Butler 1990, p, 137. Emphasis in original). Furthermore, Moore’s title is taken from a poem by James Stephens which includes the lines ‘No man can ever love her; not a man … Can ever be her lover’ (Moore 1975, p. 262). This is patently clear to Maltzer who, in pointing out to Harris that she ‘hasn’t any sex’, is stating what should have, perhaps, been obvious from the start. While it is certainly the case that gender, as a term differentiating performative norms from biological description had not yet gained cultural currency at the time that Moore was writing, it is nevertheless also the case that, in the context of Stephens’ lines, Maltzer’s meaning here is unambiguous. In light of this, I have always found Maltzer’s despair somewhat comic. He is obviously in love with Deirdre and yet has seemingly forgotten to provide her with the sexual organ which would enable him to consummate the relationship. He evinces concern for Deirdre because ‘they’re going to persecute you because you are different—and helpless’ (p. 291) but elsewhere his language reverberates with renewed ambiguity. He suggests, for instance, that he understands that she must forego ‘the one thing you were made to do’ (p.  292) and asks ‘Do you know how … wrong I’ve made you?’ (p.  293). While the former statement, in the context of the narrative, refers to his insistence that she retire from public life, the latter is difficult to parse in the same terms. Taken together, they bring to the surface the sub-textual anxiety that haunts the story: that the cyborg may have no need of heterosexual coupling. Indeed, Haraway’s cyborg explicitly subverts the normative matrix through which sexed and gendered bodies are (re)produced and the assumption that reproduction is the ‘one thing that [women] are made to do’.

Cyborg Choreography Deirdre then is a posthuman prophet and Moore’s story is a potent myth for a time in which the technologies that were in their infancy when she was writing and were coming of age when Haraway published her manifesto have now matured into very real threats to societies that are still, despite changes in the constitution of the family and patterns of labour, based on productive/reproductive relations. Hence, the global retreat to

84 

D. B. SHAW

positions behind the imagined boundaries of the nation state and the return of charismatic masculinity in the persons of national leaders who preach the ideology of retrenchment to protectionism and the control of women’s bodies. The robots, in effect, have already won and what remains of the human mired, as it is, in the narrow definition bequeathed by enlightenment science, can only understand its self-expression in oppositions which were only lent legitimacy by the forms dictated by twentieth-­ century industrial capitalism. Deirdre, after all, performs gender as a technique to convince her audience that she is human. Thus, her performance situates the determination of gender within the discourses that reproduce the human as a distinct category, marked by conformity to behavioural norms and epitomised by, for the most part, white, heterosexual, masculine bodies which must keep their feminine counterpart close in order not to be undone. The fact that, unlike Frankenstein’s monster, she has no desire for a mate both thwarts the conclusion of the Frankenstein story and emphasises the sense in which she queers the expressive matrices of both gender and sexuality. She chooses to perform femininity but other performances are always lying in wait to shatter the illusion. Harris, for instance, sees her more than once as a knight in armour and when she saves Maltzer from suicide she is, for a moment, pure machine. And when she dances, significantly, it is ‘no dance a human being could have performed’ (Moore 1975, p. 283). Deirdre, in fact, invents a new school of choreography and Moore describes in some detail how she plays with her audience’s expectations, presenting herself initially as a robot which is also a work of art and, towards the end, shifting into a performance of self which is calculated to evoke her former identity—the celebrity identity which was, of course, a similarly crafted work of art. It is through the dance, in fact, that she asserts her autonomy, making clear to her audience that she is her own creation. She is received with rapturous applause which Maltzer dismisses as merely ‘excitement’ or ‘mass hysteria’, insisting that ‘[m]orbid curiosity’ will take over once the excitement has died down (p. 284). In a sense, of course, Maltzer is correct. Deirdre is a celebrity and, as such, stands as a defining figure for norms of feminine appearance and behaviour who can as easily attract scorn for transgressing such norms as for performing in accordance with what they dictate. But what Maltzer implies here is that Deirdre herself does not understand her position or is too naïve to appreciate it which corresponds with his continual insistence that she is ‘weak’ and ‘fragile’. This effectively places Deirdre, in her

4  ‘NO WOMAN BORN’: C. L. MOORE’S DANCING CYBORG 

85

reconstructed state, in the position of people living with physical disabilities who, because they rely on prosthetics to accommodate their bodies to their environments, are perceived to be inadequate to either social interaction or, in many cases, the use of reason. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has pointed out ‘disability is a broad term within which cluster ideological categories as varied as sick, deformed, crazy, ugly, old, maimed, afflicted, mad, abnormal, or debilitated—all of which disadvantage people by devaluing bodies that do not conform to cultural standards’ (Garland-Thomson 2002, p. 5). Because Maltzer views Deirdre as disabled and her prosthetic body, despite its beauty, as a handicap, he places her in the position of wheelchair users and other incipient cyborgs who in Garland-Thomson’s words are ‘deviant bodies’ who, if they are female, are stereotyped as ‘asexual, unfit to reproduce, overly dependent, unattractive’ (pp.  14 & 17). Moore’s story can thus be seen to effectively reproduce Garland-Thomson’s argument that disability and femininity are both forms of ‘unusual embodiment’ which, historically, share a catalogue of attributed characteristics and both of which are carefully policed by environmental constraints. Cyborg politics, in fact, can be usefully understood as the fruitful coupling of feminism and disability politics that Garland-Thomson calls for. As she says, ‘[r]ecognizing how the concept of disability has been used to cast the form and functioning of female bodies as non-normative can extend feminist critiques’ (p. 7). With this in mind, the conflict between Maltzer and Deirdre can be read as a fictional staging of the conflict between paternalistic medical science, the claims of people living with disabilities for recognition of their identity as a form of embodiment which is different rather than deviant and the feminist critique of what Garland-Thomson calls ‘normate’ social forms in which what (particularly female) bodies can do is understood as given and immutable. As Deirdre proves, her fusion with prosthetic technology gifts her the ability to do much more than she was previously able, recalling contemporary debates about para-athletes’ enhanced abilities and their effect on standards of competition. The Olympic Games, staged every four years since 1896, is a spectacle of human endurance and exemplary physicality which succinctly reproduces the ideology of competitive individualism and, under the terms of twenty-first century, neoliberal global culture has become a display of branded self-fashioning which sets the standard for bodies and what they are expected to achieve. Athletes with disabilities have been performing in the Parallel Olympics (Paralympics) since 1960

86 

D. B. SHAW

and it is now the case that refinements in prosthetic technologies have meant that Paralympians are outcompeting their supposed able-bodied counterparts (Yates 2016). This has prompted Leslie Schwartz and Brian Watermeyer to enquire ‘[s]urely, the place of bodily perfection and desirability we are called to reach for is not a place inhabited by disabled people. Or is it’? (Swartz and Watermeyer 2008, p. 189). Implicit in this debate is how far a body may be prosthetically changed before it is considered to have exceeded the boundaries of what is acceptable as human, a question, as Schwartz and Watermeyer point out, not asked of women who have their feet surgically altered to accommodate fashionable shoes. Nevertheless, there are similarities in that it is women who, in being deemed always already disabled, have submitted to various forms of bio-engineering for centuries. Thus Deirdre’s acceptance of her new form and willingness to experiment with its capacities makes perfect sense. If the cyborg is a myth which ‘gives us our politics’, then ‘No Woman Born’ seems to suggest, along with Haraway, that it is women who are uniquely placed to seize the possibilities that it offers. Finally, the fact that Deirdre is a dancer and that it is the language of choreography through which she communicates her new found abilities to the world reveals further connections with more contemporary understandings of the relationship between prosthetics and embodiment. Choreographer Wayne McGregor has produced a suite of dance pieces based on collaborations with cognitive and computer scientists, anthropologists and engineers. One of the results has been dance-making which utilises a Choreographic Language Agent—essentially a piece of software described by McGregor collaborators James Leach and Scott deLahunta as ‘a kind of prosthetic dancer’s brain’ (Leach and deLahunta 2017, p. 463). This eventually evolved into an ‘entity’ called ‘Becoming’ which worked with the dancers in the studio; a technological presence which enabled the evolution of new dance vocabularies utilising the ‘physical thinking’ which is the condition for much contemporary dance and particularly important to McGregor’s ongoing project to ‘perturb and disrupt the habitual processes of developing vocabulary’. Through their involvement in this process Leach and deLahunta came to a new understanding of ‘what has been termed “the body” … which begins to appear far less of an individual entity restricted to the skin, and much more as an extension of feeling, knowing, and sensing into the world with, and of, other bodies’ (emphasis in original). Becoming is an ‘other’ body which introduces a changed element into the space in which

4  ‘NO WOMAN BORN’: C. L. MOORE’S DANCING CYBORG 

87

dance-making occurs and has the effect of shifting, not only habitual practices but relationships between other entities in the space (audience, sets, music, the architecture which describes the limits of movement) into a different register of experience. Thus, contemporary dance provides a set of conditions under which we may think the posthuman and an aesthetic through which it can be realised as both affect and political project. ‘No Woman Born’, of course, pre-dates McGregor, Leach and deLahunta’s experiments by more than eighty years but there is a sense in which Deirdre the dancing cyborg anticipates McGregor’s recognition of dance as uniquely placed to interrogate how bodies are known in and through the technologies which give them their ontology. When Moore asked herself ‘how would you handle it?’ she essentially engaged in a form of physical thinking which, as McGregor himself suggests, can release us from the determined movements of a constrained biology in order to ‘misbehave beautifully’.7 Deirdre then is an icon for the misbehaving body which refuses to be constrained either by gender or prescriptions for what counts as able. At the same time she introduces a new aesthetic for the machine age which performs cyborg politics by confusing the distinctions between bodies and technology but, equally, art and science.

Notes 1. Warner notes: ‘Around 1940, it was possible to claim that there was no such thing as an independent, honest-to-goodness girl-type fan, because virtually all the females in fandom had a fannish boy friend, brother, husband, or some other masculine link’, although, by 1948, a survey revealed that ‘eleven per cent of all fandom now was feminine’ (Warner 1969, p. 26) and, in the same year, a competition in Amazing Stories, ‘to locate the best fan writing of the year’ (p. 29) was actually won by Marion Bradley, now well known for her Darkover novels (as Marion Zimmer Bradley) and her rewriting of mythology from the female point of view (The Mists of Avalon and The Firebrand). 2. ‘How to Become a Successful Wife’ in Women and Beauty Magazine 1946, p. 55. Accessed via the archives of the Women’s Library, London. 3. The Manchester Guardian, 14 May 1947. Archives of the Women’s Library, London. 4. The Manchester Guardian, 13 November 1952. Archives of the Women’s Library, London. 5. First stated in full in ‘Runaround’, Astounding Science Fiction, March 1942, reprinted in Asimov 1983, pp. 269–70.

88 

D. B. SHAW

6. Chapter 7 in the original edition of this book discussed this at length. 7. Wayne McGregor, ‘A Choreographer’s Creative Process in Real Time’, TED Talks, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPPxXeoIzRY. Accessed 16 July 2018.

References Aldiss, Brian with David Wingrove. 1988. Trillion year spree: The history of science fiction. London: Grafton. Amis, Kingsley. 1961. New maps of hell: A survey of science fiction. London: Gollancz. Balsamo, Anne. 1996. Technologies of the gendered body: Reading cyborg women. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Bereano, Philip, Christine Bose, and Erik Arnold. 1985. Kitchen technology and the liberation of women from housework. In Smothered by invention, ed. Wendy Faulkner and Erik Arnold. London: Pluto Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. London and New York: Routledge. Del Rey, Lester. 1975. The best of C. L. Moore. New York: Ballantine. Friedan, Betty. 1965. The Feminine Mystique. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2002. Integrating disability, transforming feminist theory. NWSA Journal 14 (3): 1–32, (Fall). Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from prison notebooks (1948–51). London: Lawrence & Wishart. Griffiths, John. 1980. Three tomorrows: American British and soviet science fiction. London: Macmillan. Hales, Mike. 1982. Science or society: The politics of the work of scientists. London: Pan Books. Haraway, Donna J. 1991. A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the late twentieth century (1985). In Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature, ed. D.J. Haraway. London: Free Association, Books. Hollinger, Veronica. 2002. (Re)reading queerly: Science fiction, feminism, and the defamiliarization of gender. In Reload: Rethinking women + cyberculture, ed. Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Innes, Mary M. (trans.). 1955. The metamorphoses of Ovid. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. King, Betty. 1984. Women of the future. London: Scarecrow Press. Leach, James, and Scott deLahunta. 2017. Dance ‘becoming’ knowledge. Leonardo 50: 5. https://doi.org/10.1162/LEON_a_01074. McLuhan, Marshall Herbert. 1967. The mechanical bride. London: Routledge. Moore, C.L. 1975 [1944]. No woman born. In The best of C. L. Moore, ed. L. del Rey. New York: Ballantine. Mumford, Lewis. 1934. Technics and civilization. London: Routledge.

4  ‘NO WOMAN BORN’: C. L. MOORE’S DANCING CYBORG 

89

Pacey, Arnold. 1983. The culture of technology. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell. Rorvik, David. 1975. As man becomes machine. London: Abacus Books. Russell, Dora. 1983. The religion of the machine age. London: Routledge. Shippey, T.A. 1979. The cold war in science fiction. In Science fiction: A critical guide, ed. Patrick Parrinder, 1940–1960. New York: Longman. Swartz, Leslie, and Brian Watermeyer. 2008. Cyborg anxiety: Oscar Pistorius and the boundaries of what it means to be human. Disability & Society 23 (2): 189. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687590701841232. Warner, Harry, Jr. 1969. All our yesterdays. Chicago: Advent Press, Chicago. Wiener, Norbert. 1948. Cybernetics. MIT Press. ———. 1968. The human use of human beings: Cybernetics and society. London: Sphere. Wolf, Naomi. 1990. The beauty myth. London: Vintage. Women and Beauty Magazine. 1946. A collection of careers planned for women. London: Sampson, Low, Marston & Co. Yates, Christian. 2016. Can disabled athletes outcompete able-bodied athletes?. The Guardian, September 7. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/ sep/08/can-­disabled-­athletes-­outcompete-­able-­bodied-­athletes.

CHAPTER 5

The Left Hand of Darkness: Ursula Le Guin and the Haploid Heart

It is now nearly fifty years since ‘a rather stuffy young man from Earth’ (Le Guin 1989, p. 138) sat down to use up Ursula Le Guin’s typewriter ribbon and tell the story of an impossible journey across an ice-bound planet to demonstrate that ‘being a gendered being is a very complicated business’.1 Indeed, it is attempts to address the complications of gender which motivate all the stories discussed in this volume, rather than simple appeals for equality. So, it may be that Le Guin speaks for many of the writers discussed here when she claims ‘I am a man … when I was born there actually were only men. People were men. … so that’s who I am … a Pretend-a-Him’ (Le Guin 2004, p. 1). In 2015 the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) broadcast the first audio drama adaptation of LHD from a script by Judith Adams who worked in close consultation with Le Guin.2 In her blog for the BBC ‘Writer’s Room’ website, Adams tells us that she had been trying to dramatise Le Guin for twenty years but had always been told ‘no’. Then, she suddenly found herself commissioned to write not only LHD but also part of Le Guin’s equally well-known Earthsea trilogy (Adams 2015). The reasons are not given but it is possible to speculate that the contemporary resurgence of feminist consciousness alongside a growing awareness of gender categories as open to contestation and able to be disassociated from biological sex may have provided the conditions under which the dramatisation, of LHD at least, could make sense. At the same time, as © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. B. Shaw, Women, Science and Fiction Revisited, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25171-9_5

91

92 

D. B. SHAW

I will continue to argue, there is a sense in which Le Guin’s imagination of a frozen world where the climate is the primary organising factor in social relations is newly relevant as we are forced to contemplate reorganising our own world to accommodate a changing climate. The Left Hand of Darkness is, like Swastika Night (see Chap. 2), a novel without women. As in Swastika Night they make brief appearances. One, Lang Heo Hew, appears only in the final pages and represents, like Edith in Swastika Night, the change to come; the beginning of the planet Gethen’s incorporation into the Ekumen—a universe-wide coalition of inhabited worlds. Another, similarly outside the timeframe of the narrative, is the Investigator who has prepared the briefing documents which the ‘stuffy young man’, Genly Ai, makes use of in attempting to navigate the alien culture of Gethen. And, in the journey across the ice, when Ai must face both the unforgiving climate of Gethen and his own prejudices and presuppositions, he is briefly confronted with a Gethenian native in ‘kemmer’ (Le Guin 2017, p. 36) when his own perpetual maleness forces his ambisexual companion to present as a female. Kemmer is the oestrus phase of the Gethenian sexual cycle when, for five to seven days out of a period roughly equivalent to an Earth month, they are sexually active and have the potential to present as either male or female. The remainder of the time they are, essentially, neuter and have no interest in sexual activity. This and the necessities of dealing with a planet in perpetual winter where snow and ice present continual hazards determine both Gethenian social structures and their politics. The Left Hand of Darkness is part of Le Guin’s Hainish cycle of novels that are connected by an imagined history in which all inhabited worlds have been originally seeded by the planet Hain and all lifeforms are thus morphologically consistent but with adaptations depending on the environment in which they have developed (or, in some cases, genetic manipulation, a point to which I will return). The conceit is that this history has been lost and is now being pieced together by ‘Investigators’ (p. 20) who make clandestine visits to newly discovered worlds, preparing the ground for the ‘envoys’ (p.  8) who will make first contact. Gethen, unusually, seems to have been an experiment which, by the time of Ai’s arrival, has proved successful enough that there are two significant and flourishing nations, Karhide and Orgoreyn, both of which have developed robust infrastructures and sophisticated technologies. Significantly, war is not a concept that the Gethenians understand. Conflict is generally managed by a complicated system of social etiquette referred to as ‘shifgrethor’, the

5  THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS: URSULA LE GUIN… 

93

‘all-­important principle of social authority’ (p. 13. Emphasis in original) on Gethen. When this breaks down, violence may occur but in the form of local skirmishes, rather than organised combat. However, ‘[d]uring the time span of the novel … One of the two large nations of the planet is becoming a genuine nation-state, complete with patriotism and bureaucracy’ (Le Guin 1989, p. 140). Early feminist analysis of The Left Hand of Darkness tends to be critical of Le Guin’s attempts to write an androgynous culture because her unconsidered use of the masculine pronoun for the Gethenians makes it difficult for an English language reader to imagine them as anything but slightly unusual males.3 Le Guin herself, in a later revision of ‘Is Gender Necessary’, the essay in which she discusses her thinking behind the novel, admitted that she hadn’t realised how ‘the pronouns I used shaped, directed, controlled my own thinking’ (Le Guin 1989, p.  145). However, there is a sense in which the jarring nature of Ai’s insistence on referring to his Gethenian interlocutors as ‘he’ can be read as a counterpart to his rather dismissive, somewhat confused and condescending response to the Gethenian’s androgyny which tends to take the form of comparisons with ‘Terran’ women. So, he accuses them of ‘effeminate intrigue’ (Le Guin 2017, p.  8) and the Karhidian king of laughing ‘shrilly, like an angry woman’ (p.  31). The superintendent of the ‘island’ where he lives in Karhide he thinks of as his ‘landlady, for he had fat buttocks that wagged as he walked, and a soft fat face, and a prying, spying, ignoble, kindly nature’ (p. 48), he compares the quarrelsome behaviour of the Gethenians to that of ‘animals … or women’ (p. 49) and finds in Estraven’s refusal to consider love for one’s country in the abstract ‘something feminine … a submissiveness to the given, which rather displeased me’ (p. 213). In fact, Ai’s general stuffiness and analloyed prejudice, at least in the early parts of the novel, serves to emphasise that what he is offering to the Gethenians—membership of a coalition of planets seemingly dominated by beings such as himself—may not be strictly to their advantage. This is where the ‘ansible’ device that Ai offers as a technology which will secure communications with the Ekumen if Gethen accepts membership becomes demonstrably significant. It represents not only the inevitable changes in Gethenian culture which will result from trade and the exchange of ideas with other Hainish worlds but an alien technology which, in itself, structures the form that those communications will take. Although it only features in the novel as one of Ai’s possessions that he is denied access to for much of the narrative, it has gained in significance since its first publication

94 

D. B. SHAW

because it inevitably invites comparisons with the growth of the Internet and its global effects. That one of these effects has been a concerted questioning of gender essentialism and the development of global forums in which fluid gender identities have taken shape invites a new appraisal of LHD as it is read under contemporary conditions. Indeed, Emily Ruth Mace, in a recent blogpost discussing the novel for the Los Angeles Review of Books, finds it necessary to tell her readers that ‘Le Guin’s novel … emerged before our more contemporary untangling of the relationship between physical or biological sex and gender identity. … [T]he human society from which Le Guin drew protagonist Genly was largely bifurcated into male and female, with effectively no consideration of trans or biologically intersexed individuals, or presumed need for things like nongendered pronouns’ (Mace 2018). Similarly, in a November 2017 issue of ada: a journal of gender new media and technology dedicated to Le Guin’s work, Tuesday Smillie calls Le Guin’s deconstruction of gender ‘awkward’ and ‘dated’ (Smillie 2017) but in the same issue Aren Aizura points out that ‘in contemporary times queer and trans culture is defying some of the heteronormative structures that maintain the [gendered] division of labor just as Gethen does’ (Aizura 2017). Gethen’s vicious climate would seem to also suggest that the planet is in a state of advanced environmental degradation4 which would make it a strong contender for a version of Earth in the not too distant future where gender binaries may have finally collapsed but only under conditions which indicate that humans, in their bi-sexual form, may not have much longer to survive as a species. However, I would suggest here that a more cautious approach, taking into account Le Guin’s knowledge of anthropology and the wider socio-political structures of both Gethen and the Ekumen, may yield a more significant analysis for contemporary readers. Le Guin herself, in her Introduction to LHD, states categorically that ‘[s]cience fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive’ and continues Yes … the people in [LHD] are androgynous, but that doesn’t mean that I’m predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weather, we already are. (Le Guin 2017, p. xiv & xvi)

5  THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS: URSULA LE GUIN… 

95

This, I think, is an important statement and one that reveals much about the influence of Le Guin’s background as the daughter of an anthropologist and a writer (Alfred and Theodora Kroeber) who had been exposed to cultures other than her own from a young age (Le Guin 2004, pp. 28–30). Indeed, although gender is often questioned in her fiction, it is categorical assumptions of racial difference that are more often interrogated.5 In fact, although most critical analyses of LHD concentrate on the effects of the Gethenians gender fluidity, what has not been accorded sufficient significance is how this intersects with the fact that they are all, like Genly Ai, dark-skinned. The fact that the reader must necessarily infer this from passing references and brief descriptions from characters’ point of view rather than from the words of an omniscient narrator means that they are likely to get more than half way through the book before they realise that, just as there are no women in LHD, there are, equally, no white people. Skin colour then is, for Genly Ai and the other protagonists of LHD, at most incidental. Probably the most startling reference is when the King of Karhide, fearful of the changes that Ai represents, demands ‘[a]re they all black as you?’ (Le Guin 2017, p. 35) while interrogating him about the worlds of the Ekumen. The Karhiders are described as having faces like ‘brown, round pebbles’ (p. 4) and Ai remarks that he has no trouble posing as a native because although he is ‘blacker and taller than most’, he is ‘not beyond the range of normal variation’ (p.  56). Other than this, there is little reference to race or skin colour and because Ai is a distinctly unreliable narrator, at least in the matter of the politics of Gethen, when he judges the Gethenians as ‘effeminate’ it does not have the effect of triggering notions of primitivism but does suggest that the Ekumen that Ai represents is not as benign as it appears.

Anthropologies of Gender As Edward Said has famously argued, the discourse of Orientalism has condemned the colonised peoples of Africa and Asia as both effeminate and childlike (Said 1978, p.  48) so that darker skin colours have been equated, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with underdevelopment and irrationality. So, for instance, an early twentieth-century writer like Charlotte Perkins Gilman could use the word ‘savages’ uncritically to conjure images of peoples both dark-skinned and supposedly uncivilised (see Chap. 1). Indeed, the Star Trek franchise which was in its third season when Le Guin first published LHD and also imagines a federation

96 

D. B. SHAW

of planets, too often itself made use of these assumptions, a point to which I will return later. Le Guin’s singular achievement in LHD is to bypass these assumptions by implying a future race of humans who are not differentiated by skin colour but where other differentiations cause distrust (although stopping short of outright hostility) while, at the same time, signalling both Ai’s unreliability as a narrator and that he is not immune to prejudice. In the context of the narrative Ai is designated the status of ‘envoy’ but what he tends to represent is the position of the lone anthropologist observing an alien culture who is only brought to full understanding when he participates completely in the social life of his hosts. This is hardly surprising given Le Guin’s background. In her nonfiction collection The Wave in the Mind she tells of learning from her father’s First Nation friends and suggests that, in pondering cultural difference, she was ‘perhaps composting the soil from which the cultural relativism of my fictions would grow’ (Le Guin 2004, p. 15). Thus anthropology, its investigative methods and its forms of documentation provide both a subtext to LHD and the knowledge which Genly Ai both employs and eventually questions in his quest to bring the planet into the Ekumen. It is, arguably, the one scientific discipline which, in studying human cultures, has been best placed to question assumptions of universality and thus what it means to be human in the first place although, originating in the developed West, it has, in the past, been too complacent in its assumption that certain non-­ variables would emerge to distinguish what amounts to the essence of humanity.6 Le Guin, in fact, in both her background and her awareness of cultural difference has much in common with James Tiptree Jr, a fellow science fiction writer who, in the same year that saw the first publication of LHD, published a short story, ‘Your Haploid Heart’, although very different in style and setting works with similar themes; a federation of planets, a team of scientists evaluating an outlying planet for membership and an unusual (at least in terms of the existing federal membership) mode of reproduction and sexual physiology. Tip (as ‘he’ was known by the sf community) was actually a woman called Alice Sheldon, an experimental psychologist who had worked as an intelligence agent during World War II.  Alice, therefore, had no need to invent a biography for Tip because she had been engaged in perfectly acceptable ‘masculine’ occupations. They merely declined to be photographed or appear at award ceremonies, claiming a need for privacy, and were thus able to obscure their sex for eight very

5  THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS: URSULA LE GUIN… 

97

productive years, during which they won both the Hugo and Nebula awards (Siegel 1985, p. 7 & 10) for science fiction writing. Rumours, of course, abounded. The celebrated sf author Robert Silverberg referred to the suggestion that Tip was female as ‘absurd … for there is to me’, he wrote, ‘something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing’ (Silverberg 1975, p. xii). Like Le Guin, Tip’s mother was a writer, Mary Hastings Bradley, and their father was the naturalist Herbert Bradley. Writing about herself in the third person, Alice remembers: ‘This future writer was plunged into half a world of alien environments all before she was old enough to be allowed to enter an American movie house … she was exposed to dozens of cultures and sub-cultures whose values, taboos, imperatives, religions, languages and mores conflicted with each other as well as with her parents’ (Gearhart and Ross 1983, pp. 443–4). Donna J. Haraway refers to Tip as ‘a man and a mother, the female author who could not be read as a woman’ (Haraway 1992, p. 377), a description that could equally apply to Estraven in LHD who is not only a ‘man and a mother’ but a writer who inscribes their presence as co-author of Ai’s story but who, equally, cannot be read as either gender. After Tip was outed, Le Guin wrote an introduction to their Star Songs of an Old Primate in which she applauded their duplicity. ‘[S]he did fool us’, she says, ‘and the fact is important, because it makes a point which no amount of argument could have made. Not only does it imperil all theories concerning the woman as writer and the writer as woman, but it might make us question some of our assumptions concerning the existence of the writer, per se’ (Le Guin 1978, p. xi). Here she echoes Roland Barthes’ argument in ‘The Death of the Author’ (Barthes 1977, pp. 142–8) where he poses the question of authority in terms of how certain texts offer up multiple meanings, depending on when and by whom they are read and under what conditions. That an author, by virtue of their gender, social position, sexuality, nationality or other distinguishing characteristic, can impose any particular reading on a text thus becomes a fiction in itself. Silverberg certainly illustrates the point when he attempts to impose a gender-based meaning on Tip themselves, writing from, and concerned to maintain, his own position as a straight cis-male author in a patriarchal culture. It is the ontology of the author then that is in doubt and Tip along with Murray Constantine (see Chap. 2) and many others who have obscured their gender in order to be published in the first place exist to

98 

D. B. SHAW

substantiate Le Guin’s claim that, under certain conditions, we can be nothing other than androgynous. Both Tip and Le Guin understood extrapolation as a form of scientific method. What Le Guin describes as ‘a heuristic device, a thought experiment’ (Le Guin 1979, p. 163), Tip refers to as ‘dangl[ing] plot-strings in the saturated solution until they start coming up with plot-crystals on them’ (Siegel 1985, p. 9). And both were avowed feminists whose politics were developed through a distinctive understanding of cultural difference in the context of colonialism. For this reason, I think, both writers understood how oppression operates through the intersection of race and gender and, more particularly, how science has operated to justify it.7 Le Guin, in a critique of Naturalist, E.  O. Wilson’s autobiography, warns that ‘Opinions and assumptions, when presented by a distinguished scientist, are likely to be mistaken for scientific observations—for fact’ (Le Guin 2004, p.  152) and she accuses the well-known sociobiologist of being ‘anthropologically naïve’ (p.  159). ‘Anthropologists’, she writes, ‘have excellent justification for avoiding the term human nature, for which no agreed definition exists, and which all too easily, even when intended as descriptive, is applied prescriptively’ (p. 153. Emphasis in original). She is particularly critical of his unqualified use of the phrase ‘division of labor between the sexes’. ‘No anthropologist’, she points out, ‘or person with an anthropopolitical conscience, knowing how differently work is gendered in different societies, could accept these implications’ (p.  154). Similarly Tip, writing for the now famous Khatru Symposium, suggested (before Joanna Russ asked ‘him’ to leave for daring to offer ‘his’ opinion on the undervaluing of motherhood) that genders should be understood as patterns that ‘may or may not be present singly or together in a given individual at a given time’ (Tiptree in Smith (ed.) 1975, p. 21) and another of their stories, ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’ (1975), is, essentially, a fictional critique of sociobiology which also makes the point that uncritically accepting human nature as powered by the selfish gene means also accepting the dominance of the male pattern which can only lead to extinction. I offer the similarities between Tip and Le Guin here to emphasise how the techniques that they employ in crafting their writing, drawing on the methods and orientations of anthropological research, enables them to produce fiction which criticises gender determinism while being neither utopian nor dystopian. They are participant observers, as it were, in their invented worlds, asking what the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead,

5  THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS: URSULA LE GUIN… 

99

who was a media personality in the 1960s and 70s, called ‘open-ended exploratory questions’. Such an approach ‘clears away our whole weight of cultural preconceptions about men and women’ (Mead 1962, p.  49). Mead sees one of the tasks of the anthropological writer as being ‘to break down our culture-bound expectation that some aspect of learned behavior is inevitably always as it is in our society’ (p. 51), a description that could equally apply to Tip and Le Guin’s approach to writing sf. Tip, of course, is theirself also an irresistible reference for Le Guin’s Gethenians—a person whose gender is fluid but who assumes a specific gender, and all the cultural baggage it entails, under the pressure of social circumstances. Thus both writers challenge the androcentric mystique of traditional sf while, at the same time, posing questions about the function of the writer, and in particular the writer’s gender, in the way that texts are interpreted, both in science and in fiction.

Myths of Difference The practice of cultural anthropology and the kinds of knowledge that it produces are thus what structure both the form and content of LHD. Accordingly, LHD sketches both a history and a cosmology for its nations through the myths and stories that sustain their self-­understanding. Chapter 17, for instance, is an Orgota creation myth that recounts both the emergence of the settled family unit from the originary anarchy of the band which, being resolved through violence, brings death into the world at the same time as it heralds the creation of new life. Like many similar myths familiar to Earth-based ethnographers, it structures a relationship between the individual and cosmic time and encodes an understanding of difference and complementarity. Thus, the world is formed out of sun and ice and the first beings are nurtured by the milk that flows when the sun melts the ice. Edondurath, the first mother, brings snow into the world which freezes the bodies of the band brothers that they have killed. With these, Edondurath builds a ‘house of bodies’ into which the first children, and founders of the nations of Gethen, are born. The father, ‘the other … his name is not known’ (Le Guin 2017, p. 239). What is important here then is that the name of the father has no significance for Gethenian cultures, both literally in that they have no patriarchal marriage or patronymic system of genealogy and symbolically in that their language does not encode a systemic privileging of terms based on binaries separated by Lacan’s ‘primary signifier’ (Minsky 1998, p. 71),

100 

D. B. SHAW

the phallus. Or, put another way, because there is no sustained sexual dimorphism, their language does not reflect a hierarchy of terms divided by gender and thus it is possible to conjecture that they find it difficult to grasp the concept of ‘otherness’, the idea of ‘Not-I’ which, for us, informs concepts of individuality. But, as Jewell Parker Rhodes has pointed out, androgyny as a conceit is problematic because it is a concept that occurs in both Eastern and Western cosmogonies which ‘posit that at creation, there was the androgyne—a primoridial unity of sexually undifferentiated entities’ (Parker Rhodes 1983, p. 110). In these myths, the entry into the social order is signalled by a separation into masculine and feminine archetypes which must search each other out in a quest for completeness. ‘As a result’, she writes, ‘romantics throughout history have accepted the androgyny myth as justification for heterosexual unions’ (p.  111). Nevertheless, the problem here is not so much that Le Guin fails in her delineation of cultures that are not derived from social structures based around the gender binary but that language which, if Lacan is correct, absolutely depends on it to ensure meaning, cannot ever adequately convey the radical difference of Gethenian sexual physiology. They will always, when read by language users for whom meaning is constructed on the basis of difference, fall into the position of otherness. Indeed, as several commentators have noted, Genly Ai’s family name, recalling both the first-person pronoun, the ‘I’ which denotes the abstract individual and thus connotes the self, and the ‘eye’ which observes, has the effect of securing the Gethenians in the opposing position of ‘other’, ‘Not-I’, and the objects which confirm Genly’s subjectivity. For Jamil Khader, Ai represents not only the ‘archetypal ego’ but also ‘the allegorical Every Traveler, who is obviously constructed along the traditional image of the traveler—white, male, and European, for whom traveling bespeaks the privileges of class and missionism (a sense of mission)’ (Khader 2005, p. 115).8 But, again, I read this as a textual device which refers the reader constantly to the self as a construct founded in imperialist history and reiterated through language. The privileges of race, class and gender are writ large in the person of the coloniser and the travel writer, authorised to speak for the other in the native encounter. What Ai (I) must discover is that he is constitutionally unable to speak for the Gethenians or even, perhaps, to speak to them. Throughout, the communication that he desires is either delayed, impossible or fraught with misunderstanding. His interview with the King of Karhide goes badly and results in him leaving the country and travelling

5  THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS: URSULA LE GUIN… 

101

to Orgoreyn where he believes he is welcomed but finds himself imprisoned. It is here where he discovers that his complete misunderstanding of shifgrethor has led him to mistrust and betray Estraven, the ex-Prime Minster of Karhide and his only friend. Estraven rescues him from the ‘Voluntary Farm’ (Le Guin 2017, p.  175) where he has been detained and, together, they make the perilous journey across the Gobrin Ice to return to Karhide where Ai will summon the star ship that is in orbit around Gethen and, finally, persuade Argaven that Karhide should lead negotiations for Gethen to join the Ekumen. In fact, it is suggested, they have no choice. The journey across the ice is, for Ai, a journey into a more complete understanding, both of Gethen and its cultures and of Estraven, whom he comes to love. It is also one of the most vivid evocations of an alien environment in science fiction, made more so by its similarity to the frozen regions of our own Earth. At one point, after battling blizzards, extreme cold and a constantly changing terrain of impacted snow and dangerous cravasses that force them to double back and change direction, they experience a sudden change in the weather. All brightness was gone, leaving nothing. We stepped out of the tent onto nothing. Sledge and tent were there, Estraven stood beside me, but neither he nor I cast any shadow. There was dull light all around, everywhere. When we walked on the crisp snow no shadow showed the footprint. We left no track. Sledge, tent, himself, myself: nothing else at all. No sun, no sky, no horizon, no world. A whitish-gray void, in which we appeared to hang. The illusion was so complete that I had trouble keeping my balance … Every footfall was a surprise, a drop or a jolt. No shadows. An even, white, soundless sphere: we moved along inside a huge frosted-glass ball, and nothing was outside it’. (pp. 261 & 265)

This is the place ‘inside the blizzard’ (p. 261) characterised by visual distortion and a form of hallucination that paralyses Ai. It is foreshadowed in a much earlier chapter that recounts a ‘North Karhidish “hearth-tale…” of two brothers who defy the Gethenian form of the incest taboo by vowing “kemmering for life”’ (p. 21) following the birth of their child. The condemnation that they suffer drives one to suicide and the other, Ennoch, is banished and, leaving, lays a curse on the Hearth. Ennoch walks across the ice and enters the place inside the blizzard where they meet a ghost who has the form of their dead brother but ‘there was no longer any life

102 

D. B. SHAW

in his belly, and his voice sounded like the creaking of ice’ (p. 24). The ghost tries to detain Ennoch so that they may keep their vow, seizing them by the left hand. Ennoch escapes but loses their hand to frostbite. The warning that is encoded here is largely against suicide, a more heinous crime on Gethen than murder, as well as a reinforcement of the taboo against full brothers vowing kemmering. But it is also a morality tale which warns of the consequences of transgression, not for the individual transgressor but for those that they love and who depend on them. Ennoch must survive to learn of the harm that he has done in laying a curse on his Hearth and to recognise that he has played a part in his brother’s death. The story, finally, is a clue to the ethical and political foundations of Gethen which the reader (and Ai) only understands in retrospect. Ennoch suffers because they have failed to understand their responsibility to the Hearth; that the crimes of the individual are a curse on the whole. When Ai questions Estraven about the principles of Handdara, the Karhidish religion, he quotes ‘Tormer’s Lay … Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way’. Ennoch’s loss of their left hand thus symbolises the loss of light, representing both a failure of understanding and the severing of necessary dualities—the individual/hearth, hearth/nation, nation/planet (and, by implication, male/female). When Ennoch curses their Hearth, they leave behind their name and disavow their allegiance; when they reclaim their name they, symbolically, reclaim their responsibility and the Hearth is healed. The place inside the blizzard then is both a real climatic phenomenon on Gethen and a symbol for what Estraven calls ‘the likenesses, the links, the whole of which living things are a part’ (p.  233. Emphasis in original), and there is, in the Gethenian belief system ‘nothing outside it’. Lacking fathers, they have no paternalistic religion and thus no appeal to an ‘outside’ on the basis of which law is established. It is through shifgrethor alone then that their social structures are maintained (Le Guin 1989, p. 162). Thus when Estraven dies recklessly skiing across the border into Karhide in full view of armed guards (they are considered an outlaw), they have not committed suicide but have sacrificed themself for what they believe to be the greater good; the unity of Karhide and Orgoreyn and the incorporation of the planet into the Ekumen. The sadness (and irony) of LHD is that the Gethenians’ belief in the unification of opposites in the completion of a whole may, in the end, prove fatal to them. As Wendy Gay Pearson suggests ‘Although the

5  THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS: URSULA LE GUIN… 

103

Ekumen is not remotely as predatory as the colonialists of human history, the Gethenians cannot escape having their world view permanently changed’ (Pearson 2007, p. 190). And the fact that Orgoreyn is on the way to becoming a nation-state suggests that the Karhiders are committing themselves to a future in which the previously unknown horrors of war will, very likely, destroy them. Furthermore, as Lisbeth Gant-Britton points out, Ai is happy to admit that one of the motives of the Ekumen is ‘[m]aterial profit’ (Le Guin 2017, p. 34) which she suggests reveals ‘a callous, potentially malevolent underside’ (Gant-Britton 1997, p. 450), not least because the dates given for Ai’s encounters on Gethen, despite ostensibly representing an alien calendar, ‘resonate with the period of Christopher Columbus’s so-called “discovery” of the New World on Earth’, and she continues ‘we cannot be completely sure that Genly is not just an uninformed tool of the Ekumen’ (p. 40). However, if this is the case, it is his naivete that has placed him in a position from which he has been forced to experience the reality of Gethen and its unforgiving climate while also, for the first time, facing the reality of Gethenian sexuality. In this scenario, it is Ai’s world view, I would suggest, that is permanently changed. What he learns from the place inside the blizzard is the true meaning of the myth of Ennoch and his own responsibility for Estravan’s death.

Establishing the Human Norm The year that LHD was first published also saw the culmination of the original series of Star Trek (TOS) which similarly attempted to represent a Galactic Federation of planets. Although Gene Roddenberry was not attempting to write feminist literature or explore a world without gender, TOS does attempt to interrogate, albeit in a limited way, gender and race stereotypes. It is famous for featuring the first interracial kiss on US TV and its equally famous ‘Prime Directive’ mandating non-interference in the development of planets deemed ‘underdeveloped’ does, despite the judgemental assumptions that it implies, demonstrate a desire to challenge the arrogance of American manifest destiny. Nevertheless the premise that a supposedly benign Federation of planets explores the galaxy because ‘it is there’ (Booker 2008, p. 207) cannot, as M. Keith Booker argues, escape comparisons with colonialism; with the ‘taming of the American frontier, with its associated legacy of racism and genocide’ (p. 196). Further, the Federation does not seem averse to waiving the Prime Directive, at least in

104 

D. B. SHAW

part, when planets are encountered which are undoubtedly developing but in the ‘wrong’ direction (p.  204). TOS then, despite being ground breaking for a TV series broadcast in the late 1960s, seemed to struggle with the paternalism implied by a galactic federation that appears to believe that the answer to the problems of the universe is to persuade wayward planets to conform to what Tip, in ‘Your Haploid Heart’, calls ‘human norm’ (Tiptree 1969, p.  14). Nor, it initially appears, can LHD escape similar problems. However, there is a difference in that TOS deliberately imagines (and dresses its actors up as) an array of species with diverse evolutionary trajectories. But as Genly Ai tells the Karhidish King in LHD, ‘[a]ll the worlds of men were settled, eons ago, from one world, Hain’ (Le Guin 2017, p. 35). Gethenian sexual physiology, however, is unique among the known worlds, leading the first Ekumenical Investigator to suggest that they were ‘an experiment, the planting of one Hainish Normal group on a world with its own proto-hominid autochthones … It is possible that the experimenters wished to see whether human beings lacking continuous sexual potentiality would remain intelligent and capable of culture’ (pp.  89 & 95). ‘Human genetic manipulation’, she points out, ‘was certainly practiced by the Colonizers’ (p. 89) not, on the evidence here, to ensure survival in hostile environments or to prolong life but on a whim or to prove a theory. Tip, interestingly, ends ‘Your Haploid Heart’ with a similar suggestion. Their two-man delegation from the ‘Galactic Federation’ (Tiptree 1969, p. 11) are both scientists. Having become emotionally involved with the Flenni, a species endangered by the ruling Esthaans’ desperate need to be accepted as human, they contrive to have them evacuated by appealing to the vanity of two old and very rich scientists who are betting large sums of money on which of their theories of evolution will be proved. Both writers then are concerned to make a point about the relationship between scientific practice and cultural change, the effects of unacknowledged bias in the scientific method and, perhaps more specifically, the ethics of ethnographic investigation. In ‘Your Haploid Heart’, the Esthaans have obscured their symbiotic relationship with the Flenni in response to an earlier visit by a Federation scientist who has implanted the suggestion that their method of reproduction may disqualify them from human status. In LHD, the Gethenians must not only learn that they are likely the product of a genetic experiment but must face the fact that Ai’s visit will precipitate change whether they welcome it or not. In fact, there is a strong

5  THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS: URSULA LE GUIN… 

105

suggestion that their unique sexuality which is also potentially the reason that they have never gone to war and is certainly the reason why they have no gendered division of labour, ‘no unconsenting sex, no rape’ (Le Guin 2017, p. 94) will be brought to an end. Ai expects that ‘it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainishnorm one-sexed human beings’ (pp. 247–8). He and Estraven do not test the theory, despite the growing attraction between them but because Le Guin does not entertain the possibility of homosexual relationships on Gethen, the conclusion must be that the ‘permanent kemmer’ (p. 36) of ‘Hainish Normal’ (p. 89) one-sexed sexuality would force any Gethenian with whom they had a relationship into presenting, while in kemmer, as only the opposite sex. Consequently, by the end of the novel, the potential remains for the introduction of gender division with all its hierarchical and oppressive structures. LHD is, fundamentally, a novel about communication. When asked by an official in Orgoreyn to describe the Ekumen, Ai responds that ‘[t]he motives of communication and cooperation are of its essence’ (p. 136). This makes the ansible singularly important9 as a technology which will secure communications between Gethen and the rest of the eighty-three worlds of the Ekumen but it is confiscated fairly early in the narrative and the one time Ai uses it (as a demonstration for the King of Karhide) is comic in its bathos. The King asks (obviously with Estraven in mind whom he believes has betrayed him) ‘what makes a man a traitor?’, There was a pause, a long pause. Somebody seventy-two light-years away was no doubt feverishly punching demands on the language computer for Karhidish, if not on a philosophy-storage computer. At last the bright letters burned up out of the screen, hung awhile, and faded slowly away: “To King Argaven of Karhide on Gethen, greetings. I do not know what makes a man a traitor. No man considers himself a traitor: this makes it hard to find out. Respectfully, Spimolle G. F., for the Stabiles, in Saire on Hain, 93/1491/45. (Le Guin 2017, p. 38)

This is not only unconvincing but, one suspects, impugns the King’s shifgrethor in that it implies they have asked a ridiculous question. The King theirself compares the response to ‘an answer I might get from any Foreteller’ (p. 39). As is subsequently established, Foretelling is a practice of the Handdarata, the Gethenian religious caste which explicitly demonstrates ‘the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong

106 

D. B. SHAW

question’ (p. 70). Ai, in attempting to sell the Ekumen to the King on the basis of access to knowledge, thus stumbles on the hurdle of his own ignorance or, at least, his lack of preparation for his mission. At this point, he appears to have no knowledge of the Handdara religion or the role of questioning in its practice. This lends further credence to Gant-Britton’s suggestion that Ai is an ‘uninformed tool of the Ekumen’. What Estravan obviously understands, and what Ai must learn, is that, as Tip makes explicit in ‘Your Haploid Heart’, the mere introduction of an alien presence brings with it a form of knowledge that must inevitably precipitate change. Ai himself, of course, is also changed by the encounter but not before he has experienced both intense deprivation and a form of spiritual awakening precipitated by exposure to Gethen’s unforgiving climate and extraordinary terrain. There is, in fact, a similar journey in ‘Your Haploid Heart’ when one of the scientists ‘escapes’ from the university and is forced to leave behind his assumptions about Esthaan biology. It seems that both Tip and Le Guin were concerned to make use of the trope of planetary exploration to examine how scientific discourse has constructed particular ideas about the universality of something called ‘human nature’ and its expression in biological conformity. Roland Barthes had already pointed out the bias inherent in any project, emerging out of the Western sciences, purporting to demonstrate the homogeneity of human ‘types’ (Barthes 2000, pp. 11–13) and neither Tip nor Le Guin could have been unaware of the debates between ethnographers about their role as scientists and its effects in the field, including the pitfalls of adopting a dual identity in order to effect a more complete immersion into the ethnic group being studied [10].10 However, what both texts, and LHD in particular, achieve is to use this knowledge as a foundation to interrogate the gender-biased assumptions that ethnographers bring to the field. During the journey across the ice, for instance, Ai, presumably well trained in observing gender relations in alien cultures, is stumped when Estraven asks him ‘how does the other sex of your race differ from yours?’ (Le Guin 2017, p.  233). After several attempts to explain, he simply admits, in a response very similar to Alfred in Swastika Night when he is forced to ‘think about women’ (see Chap. 2), ‘I can’t tell you what women are like. I never thought about it much in the abstract …. In a sense, women are more alien to me than you are’ (p. 234). Initially, he seems somewhat unperturbed about being thought of by the Gethenians as ‘a highly imaginative monster’ (p.  13), ‘a sexual freak’ (p.  32), and a

5  THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS: URSULA LE GUIN… 

107

‘pervert’ (p. 190) because he is ‘always in kemmer’ (p. 232), presumably because his briefing has prepared him for just such a response. However, by the end, when the star ship finally lands and Ai is reunited with his Ekumenian colleagues ‘they all looked strange to me … They were like a troupe of great, strange animals, of two different species; great apes with intelligent eyes, all of them in rut, in kemmer’ (p. 296). Thus, not only women but the men of the Ekumen have become alien. Or, put another way, what has become alien for Ai is the gender binary itself as it is corporeally represented. This then is perhaps where LHD can be read as utopian. By this I do not mean to suggest only that, despite the consequences for the future of Gethen, Ai represents the beginnings of change in the Ekumen itself, although this is certainly implied. Considered in a wider context, his response here can be held to represent also the political effects of defamiliarisation and thus to refer to the power of sf itself to effect change; to offer a manifesto which may lead to action in the present. Perhaps of more importance though is the sense in which Ai’s experience exposes both gender and sexuality as conditional. As Judith Butler has pointed out, the regulatory mechanisms (both social and constitutional) which ensure the reproduction of gender also ensure that bodies perform according to a range of behaviours through which they maintain their gendered specificity. But, as she points out in Undoing Gender (2004), ‘To the extent that gender norms are reproduced, they are invoked and cited by bodily practices that also have the capacity to alter norms in the course of their citation’ (Butler 2004, p. 52). [T]he norm only persists as a norm to the extent that it is acted out in social practice and reidealized and reinstituted in and through the daily social rituals of bodily life. The norm has no independent ontological status, yet it cannot be easily reduced to its instantiations; it is itself (re)produced through its embodiment, through the acts that strive to approximate it, through the idealizations reproduced in and by those acts. (p. 48)

The implication is that Ai, in his journey across the ice with Estraven, has incorporated the social practices of the other to the extent that he can no longer understand himself as a raced and gendered subject under the norms of his home culture. By the end, he occupies a radically indeterminate subject position which may point the way to a more fluid conception of gender, even for those of us in permanent kemmer. He approximates

108 

D. B. SHAW

Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic subject, arising out of the experience of embodiment as process and as a series of fluid interactions between inside/outside, self/world, body/culture; the body as ‘a threshold of transformations … an affective field in interaction with others’ (Braidotti 2011, p. 25).

The Place Inside the Blizzard In Adams’ radio adaptation, Estraven is played by a woman (Lesley Sharp), Genly Ai by a man (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) and other Gethenians are a mix of male and female voices. However, as the drama progresses, the distinctions in tone, pitch and timbre become unimportant and the Gethenians are experienced as the androgynes that Le Guin intended them to be. This is largely, I think, because Adams changed very little of the original dialogue which, although written in English and necessarily stymied by the much discussed generic pronoun as well as the oppositions, founded in the binomials of gender, by which it takes meaning from what it is not, nevertheless manages to convey a vocabulary which is not inflected by gender. In the novel, Ai survives the cold and miserable journey to his imprisonment in ‘Pulefen Commensality Third Voluntary Farm and Resettlement Agency’ (Le Guin 2017, p. 175) in Orgoreyn by repeating, as a mantra, the upwards of a hundred Gethenian words for snow. In Adams’ dramatisation, she employs this as a device throughout his long imprisonment so that the listener is constantly reminded of the lexical specificity of the language and its origins in the almost invariable climate of the planet that the Ekumen calls ‘Winter’ (p. 2) [11].11 Listened to in the second decade of the twenty-first century when climate change is impacting communities globally and forcing changes in lifestyle and how we conceive of bodily integrity in the face of dramatically changing environmental conditions, Adams’ adaptation gifts us a new reading of LHD which prompts questions about the relationship between survival and cultural change. Considering that climate change denial has emerged as a corollary of the intensely patriarchal politics of the new far-right, invested in impugning the authority of science in the service of maintaining damaging hierarchies, LHD now seems to offer a timely warning that our entrenched norms of gender and sexuality provide for conditions under which humans, as we currently understand ourselves, have no future. In short, it forces consideration of the link between how we organise socially on the basis of

5  THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS: URSULA LE GUIN… 

109

gender division and climate change survival, emphasising that the ‘strange animals of two different species’ that Ai is so surprised to encounter are doomed if their performance of difference continues to govern their politics. As Le Guin herself said in an interview with Louisa Mellor in 2015 ‘My books have been banned simply because they are imaginative— science-­fiction, fantasy, what have you. The imagination is considered dangerous and of course, it is. These people are right. The imagination is truly the enemy of bigotry and dogma’ (Mellor 2015). What LHD offers to twenty-first-century readers is a way to imagine a world in which gender is not important. What I mean here is that it is important on a textual level because ‘Hainish Normal’ readers are required to adjust their expectations of what governs social relationships. But what Adams’ audio version emphasises is that, at the level of narrative, the primary concern, and the condition that defines Ai’s experience, is the climate and the difficult choices that it presents. Any distinction between masculine and feminine voices becomes unimportant. What we may learn from LHD then is perhaps that any future for the planet we currently inhabit can only be imagined when we appreciate that, like the Gethenians, we already inhabit the place inside the blizzard and that, like Genly Ai, we will only understand our collective responsibility when we lose what we love. I would suggest, in fact, that we should no longer consider LHD as an example of genre fiction which seeks to interrogate the gender binary but as, itself, a new form of mythology that requires us to understand our changed priorities under the terms of a rapidly changing climate.

Notes 1. ‘Ursula Le Guin at 85’, BBC Radio 4. Accessed 24 July 2018. https:// www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pkmyg. 2. See Le Guin (2015). 3. See Russ (1972). 4. See ‘The Arctic is sending us signals of impending climate chaos’, New Scientist, 14 March 2018. 5. Writing in 1975, Le Guin accused sf writers (and American sf writers in particular) of simply reproducing British imperialism in their fictions. In what she called ‘baboon patriarchy’, women, social and racial ‘others’ function only to elevate the heroic white man. See Le guin (1975, pp. 208–10). 6. The well-known twentieth-century anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss believed that the construction of myths was a universal which would be found in all human cultures and which could be analysed to reveal an

110 

D. B. SHAW

­nderlying common humanity (Lévi-Strauss 1983). Famously, he was u challenged by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida who accused him of imposing a pre-determined structure, drawn from Western philosophy, on myths found in diverse cultures and thereby imposing on them a meaning which makes sense only under restricted linguistic conditions (Derrida 1978, pp. 351–70). 7. In ‘Your Haploid Heart’ Tip makes this clear by imagining a race who are both oppressed and disavowed because they remind the dominant race, who depend on them for reproduction, that they will, by that fact alone, never be accepted as fully human and admitted to the planetary federation. 8. Ai’s race tends to complicate this reading but what is relevant here is that, in his role as envoy, he takes the position of the privileged traveller/ missionary. 9. Invented in an earlier Le Guin novel, Rocannon’s World (1966). 10. See Pels (1999). 11. It is highly likely that Le Guin derived this from the widely accepted (at the time) idea that Eskimo languages contain many more words for snow than, for example, English. This has since been revealed as, if not exactly a hoax, at least a misrepresentation. See Kaplan (2003).

References Adams, Judith. 2015. Adapting Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Earthsea’ and ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ for Radio. BBC Writer’s Room, April 14. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ blogs/writersroom/entries/a8a7b23c-­a12e-­463c-­be7e-­a741fc9967d0. Aizura, Aren. 2017. Communizing Care in Left Hand Of Darkness. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No. 12. https://doi. org/10.13016/M2RB6W385. Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text, Trans. S. Heath. London: Fontana. ———. 2000. The Great Family of Man. In Posthumanism, ed. Neil Badmington. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK & New York: Palgrave. Booker, M. Keith. 2008. The Politics of Star Trek. In The Essential Science Fiction Television Reader, ed. J.P. Telotte. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Braidotti, Rosi. 2011. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in contemporary feminist theory. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. London and New York: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. In Writing and Difference. London and New York: Routledge. Gant-Britton, Lisbeth. 1997. Exploring Color Coding at the Beginning and End of the Twentieth Century in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In Into Darkness Peering: Race and

5  THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS: URSULA LE GUIN… 

111

Color in the Fantastic, ed. Elisabeth Anne Leonard. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press. Gearhart, Nancy S., and Jean W.  Ross. 1983. Alice Hastings Sheldon (James Tiptree Jr.). In Contemporary Authors, Vol. 108, ed. Hal May. Detroit, MI: Gale Research Company. Haraway, Donna J. 1992. Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science. London and New York: Verso. Kaplan, Lawrence. 2003. Inuit Snow Terms: How Many and What Does It Mean? In Building Capacity in Arctic Societies: Dynamics and shifting perspectives. Proceedings from the 2nd IPSSAS Seminar. Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada: May 26– June 6, 2003, ed. François Trudel. Montreal: CIÉRA  – Faculté des sciences sociales Université Laval. Khader, Jamil. 2005. Race Matters: People of Color, Ideology, and the Politics of Erasure and Reversal in Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 16 (2): 110–127. Le Guin, Ursula. 1975. American sf and the Other. Science Fiction Studies 2 (3): 201–300. ———. 1978. Introduction. In Star Songs of an Old Primate, ed. James Tiptree Jr. Baltimore: Del Rey. ———. 1979. The Language of the Night. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. ———. 1989. Is Gender Necessary (1969): Redux (1988). In The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. London: The Women’s Press. ———. 2004. The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination. Boston: Shambhala. ———. 2015. The Left Hand of Darkness (Audio). Adapted by Judith Adams. BBC Radio 4. ———. 2017 [1969]. The Left Hand of Darkness. London: Gollancz. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1983. The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques, Volume 1, Trans. John and Doreen Weightman. University of Chicago Press. Mace, Emily Ruth. 2018. The Left Hand of Darkness in Light of #MeToo. Blog// Los Angeles Review of Books, May 14. https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/ essays/left-­hand-­darkness-­light-­metoo/. Mead, Margaret. 1962. Male and Female. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. Mellor, Louisa. 2015. Ursula Le Guin Interview: Sci-fi and Fantasy Snobbery, Adaptations & Trouble-Making. Den of Geek, April 7. http://www.denofgeek. c o m / b o o k s -­c o m i c s / u r s u l a -­l e -­g u i n / 3 4 8 2 9 / u r s u l a -­l e -­g u i n -­ interview-­sci-­fi-­and-­fantasy-­snobbery-­adaptations-­trouble-­making. Minsky, Rosalind. 1998. Psychoanalysis and Culture: Contemporary States of Mind. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Pearson, Wendy Gay. 2007. Postcolonialism/s, Gender/s, Sexuality/ies and the Legacy of The Left Hand of Darkness: Gwyneth Jones’s Aleutians Talk Back. In Yearbook of English Studies: Science Fiction, ed. David Seed and John Batchelor,

112 

D. B. SHAW

vol. 37.2. Leeds, UK: Maney Publishing for the Modern Humanities Research Association. Pels, Peter. 1999. Professions of Duplexity: A Prehistory of Ethical Codes in Anthropology. Current Anthropology 40 (2). www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ 200001. Rhodes, Parker, and Jewell. 1983. Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness: Androgyny and the Feminist Utopia. In Women and Utopia: Critical Interpretations, ed. Marleen Barr and Nicholas D.  Smith. Lanham, MD and London: University Press of America. Russ, Joanna. 1972. The Image of Women in Science Fiction. In Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Koppelman Cornillon. Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge. Siegel, Mark. 1985. James Tiptree Jr, Starmont Readers Guide 22. Washington, DC: Starmont House. Silverberg, Robert. 1975. Who Is Tiptree, What Is He? In Warm Worlds and Otherwise, ed. James Tiptree Jr. New York: Ballantine. Smillie, Tuesday. 2017. Radical Imagination and the Left Hand of Darkness. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No. 12. https://doi. org/10.13016/M2W37KX2H. Smith, Jeffrey D., ed. 1975. Khatru 3 and 4. Baltimore: Phantasmicon Press, Baltimore. Tiptree Jr, James. 1969. Your Haploid Heart. In Analog: Science Fiction Science Fact, ed. John W.  Campbell, Vol. 84, No. 1, September. (Also (Revised) in Tiptree Jr, James. 1978). ——— (Alice Hastings Sheldon). 1975. The Women Men Don’t See (1973). In Warm Worlds and Otherwise. New York: Ballantine. ———. 1978. A Momentary Taste of Being (1975). In Star Songs of An Old Primate. Del Rey.

CHAPTER 6

The Handmaid’s Tale: Margaret Atwood and the Politics of Choice

Margaret Atwood’s satirical dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale, was first published in 1985 and has become probably her best known novel. Set in a thinly disguised near-future US where extensive environmental pollution has caused the birth rate to plummet, it is a scathing indictment of Christian fundamentalism, feminist apathy and women’s potential to collude in their own oppression. It has been adapted for film with a screenplay by Harold Pinter (1990),1 has also been produced as an opera (2000)2 and more recently (2017) has been the subject of a major TV series whose iconography has been adopted by a new wave of feminism.3 The Handmaid’s Tale has been compared to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Atwood herself has acknowledged the influence of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). However, in the current context, the most striking parallels are with Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (see Chap. 2). Atwood’s Handmaids are metaphorically, rather than literally, caged but their freedom to inhabit space, to speak or to determine their own lives is nevertheless severely curtailed. They, like Burdekin’s Nazi breeders, are reduced to the status of brood mares, must submit to a regime of systematised rape, are not allowed to read or write and their babies, as in Swastika Night, are removed from them as soon as possible after birth. Similarly, they are indoctrinated via forms of religious service, as well as ceremonies in which their hatred and frustration are channelled into violence against their own © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. B. Shaw, Women, Science and Fiction Revisited, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25171-9_6

113

114 

D. B. SHAW

kind. The Ceremony, however, is a bizarre monthly ritual during which they are raped by whichever ruling Commander currently has ownership of them while being restrained by his wife. As the narrator describes it ‘[h]er legs are apart, I lie between them, my head on her stomach … she holds my hands …. This is supposed to signify that we are one flesh … What it really means is that she is in control’ (Atwood 2017, p. 104). In this way, the regime ensures that the wives, who are all believed to be sterile, are involved in the conception of the children which will eventually be passed into their care. The ceremony is justified by a fundamentalist reading of Genesis (30:1–3).4 Consequently, it is blasphemy to suggest that men bear any responsibility for either the lack of births or the recurrent mutations and Handmaids that fail in their duty to breed successfully become slave labour for nuclear waste sites in the ‘Colonies’ (Atwood 2017, p.  171) where their life expectancy is severely curtailed. As in Swastika Night then ritual degradation, religious indoctrination and enforced ignorance, as well as threats, are employed to ensure that women function only to preserve a myth of masculinity in which patriarchal power is ordained and the supposed failings of women are the only contributory factor in the decline of a civilisation. However, the Handmaid’s Tale differs from Swastika Night in that the latter imagines an entrenched regime in which women have become almost a different species and thus cannot be given a voice in the narrative because they no longer have access to language through which they could make sense of their own predicament. In The Handmaid’s Tale, by contrast, the totalitarian regime is in its infancy, its strictures are still in need of constant reinforcement and the narrator, a Handmaid herself, remembers her life when it was very different. In the time of the narrative, she is Offred, her name designating her status as the property of a Commander called Fred. The Handmaids then are stripped of their former identities by the simple expedient of re-naming, marking their passage from self-determining independence to slavery and determination only in relation to both their ownership by a man and their ability to procreate. The parallels to modern marriage here are irresistible and thus the naming itself sets up a critique of the kind of institutionalised dependency that marriage represents read through the dystopian conditions of the novel. What this achieves is similar to Alfred’s reading of von Weid’s book in Swastika Night. The reader is not allowed to comfortably distance herself from the world of the

6  THE HANDMAID’S TALE: MARGARET ATWOOD AND THE POLITICS… 

115

narrative because she is faced with her own complicity as an actor in the history that has provided for it. In THT, Offred has been married and, although the narrative gives no clue as to whether she took her husband’s name (her former first name is only hinted at), there is a strong suggestion that her failure to recognise her former compliance with gender conformity, despite her independent life as a working mother, has contributed to the conditions in which she, and many other women, have found themselves. With this in mind, it is possible to claim THT as a radical feminist novel and to suggest a reading in which it sets up an argument in opposition to both patriarchal fundamentalism and the feminisms of the 1980s and 1990s which were founded in a gender essentialism derived from conflating the oppression of women with the depletion of natural resources by industrial capitalism and the resulting environmental destruction.

The Making of the Unwoman Indeed, Donna J. Haraway’s ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’, which I discussed in Chap. 3, was first published in the same year as THT and was written as an exasperated reply to the burgeoning ‘ecofeminist’ movement which supported a feminist identity based on the modern scientific definition of woman as primarily a life-bearer and thus, like planet Earth, a natural resource. Associated with writers like Mary Daly, Susan Griffin (1984), Carolyn Merchant (1983), Karen Warren (1994), Starhawk (1999), Val Plumwood (1993) and Ynestra King (1983), among many others, generally speaking ecofeminism begins with the premise, as articulated by King, that ‘[t]he hatred of women and the hatred of nature are intimately connected and mutually reinforcing’ (King 1983, p. 118). Most of these writers supported a politics of feminist separatism, with women forming collectives to found utopian enclaves beyond the reach of patriarchy.5 At its most extreme, ecofeminism associated all technology with patriarchal culture and proposed a return to a form of women’s culture based on pre-patriarchal mythology. ‘[W]omen’s spirituality’, claims Hazel Henderson, ‘affirms and celebrates human embeddedness in Nature and confirms it by researching the early matri-focal cultures and humanity’s first great universal religion: that of the Great Mother Goddess’ (Henderson 1983, p. 207). Hence, when Haraway wrote ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’ (Haraway 1991, p. 181), she was referencing these ideas and critiquing both the way that they implied a universal women’s experience and their apparent capitulation to patriarchal norms. The cyborg is a

116 

D. B. SHAW

figure in Mary Daly’s argument against what she calls ‘phallocratic technology’ (Daly 1979, p. 70) which she equates with the hubris of Victor Frankenstein and his desire for what amounts to a birth engendered by a lone male. So when Haraway appropriated the same figure to stand for the real conditions of women’s labour and embodiment in the early days of digital culture, she was tacitly pointing out the indulgent ideology of ecofeminism and its association with middle-class privilege. In THT, a similar argument is staged through Offred’s recollections of her mother, an anti-porn feminist and her friend Moira whose politics in the ‘time before’ were clearly aligned with feminist separatism. She had, Offred remembers, like the political lesbians6 of that era ‘decided to prefer women’ (Atwood 2017, p. 180) and Offred remembers telling her that if she ‘thought she could create Utopia by shutting herself up in a women-­ only enclave she was sadly mistaken’ (p.  181). In the Rachel and Leah Center where the handmaids are ‘re-educated’ Offred sees her mother ‘as young as she must have been once before I was born’ (p.  129) in an ‘Unwoman documentary’ (p. 128) (actually a film about the Take Back the Night marches of the 1970s), shown to instruct them in the futility of resistance (‘unwomen’ in Gilead are banished to the ‘colonies’ where they labour to dispose of toxic waste). Offred remembers ‘I didn’t want to live my life on her terms’ (p. 132) but she later reflects that ‘[n]o 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’. ‘I wish she were here’, she says, ‘so that I could tell her I finally know this’ (p. 190). As has been noted by several critics, Offred is far from a feminist heroine. In comparison to the fiery Moira, who makes an appearance in the present day of the novel as a prostitute in the Commanders’ illicit brothel, or her fellow handmaid Ofglen who is obviously engaged in subversive activity, she does little that is not expected of her by the regime and, throughout, seems to be finding ways to resign herself to her role. However, I would argue that this is precisely because, on a textual level, her function is to survive to tell her tale, something that her mother clearly cannot do. Related to this is her function as a bridge between the past and the future. We are never told the details of her escape from Gilead but the fact that she has committed her voice to tape suggests not only that she was able to but that she understands the importance of leaving a record as instruction for the future. This is again one of the many ironies conjured by the text of THT. Offred, in all her apparent weakness and capitulation to the regime is the, perhaps unwitting, catalyst for potential change,

6  THE HANDMAID’S TALE: MARGARET ATWOOD AND THE POLITICS… 

117

whereas Moira, the separatist feminist who was faithful to her ideals, has ‘only three or four good years’ before her ‘snatch wears out’ and she is sent ‘to the boneyard’ (p. 261). A further irony is that, although Christian religious dogma is the foundation for the Gileadean constitution, it is justified through an appeal to the same notions of biological destiny which structured the ideology of ecofeminism. Indeed, in the final chapter, which is in the form of a lecture at a meeting of a far future ‘International Historical Association’, a professor of ‘Gileadean Studies’ (p.  311) suggests that, in Gileadean culture, ‘[t]here are echoes … of the fertility rites of early Earth-goddess cults’ (p. 320). And, in one of their secret meetings the commander tells Offred, We’ve given them more than we’ve taken away. … Think of the trouble they had before. Don’t you remember the singles bars, the indignity of high-­ school blind dates? The meat market? Don’t you remember the terrible gap between the ones who could get a man easily and the ones who couldn’t? Some of them were desperate, they starved themselves thin or pumped their breasts full of silicone, had their noses cut off. … This way they’re protected, they can fulfil their biological destinies in peace. With full support and encouragement.

And later, ‘[a]ll we’ve done is return things to Nature’s norm’ (p. 232). Thus, the regime presents itself as a benign force, battling the false consciousness of ‘man-made women’ in the service of protecting their ‘genuine’ selves. And the text again echoes Swastika Night when the Commander continues ‘they got no respect as mothers. No wonder they were giving up on the whole business’ (p. 231). Hence the text extrapolates the appropriation of separatist consciousness and ecofeminist mythology by a patriarchal regime happy to collude with the idea that the future of the planet and the future of women are inherently linked. Indeed, this idea is reinforced by the ‘Aunts’ (p. 14), the elderly women who Tara Johnson has suggested are a considerable power in Gilead (Johnson 2004). As Aunt Lydia tells the handmaids, ‘Unwomen were always wasting time. … Mind you, some of their ideas were sound enough. … We would have to condone some of their ideas, even today. … But they were Godless, and that can make all the difference, don’t you agree?’ (Atwood 2017, pp. 128–9). So while the handmaid’s own histories are erased so that they can be re-­ born into their slave identities, the history of feminist politics is re-read as an aberration on the journey towards a new truth.

118 

D. B. SHAW

Under His Eye It is the Aunts then who are the true zealots of THT. Armed with cattle-­ prods, they are both physically violent and emotionally manipulative. Although Offred suffers at the hands of both the Commander and his impatient wife Serena Joy, it is Aunt Lydia who is her nemesis; the voice of Gileadean reason that intrudes on her thoughts and the torturer who officiates at the violent spectacles of ‘Salvagings’ and ‘Particicutions’ where disobedience is punished by death and mutilation. As in all totalitarian regimes, the spectacle of state-sanctioned violence is both a warning against transgression and a confirmation of power and the Aunts, it is suggested, are not only the enforcers but the architects of its rituals. As Johnson points out, Atwood herself suggested that she based the Aunts on imperialist strategies through which colonised peoples are controlled by specially trained cadres of their own kind (Johnson 2004, p. 69) and they appear to control not only the Handmaids but also the Wives and, to a certain extent, the Commanders. Offred is surprised to find an Aunt quietly directing proceedings at Jezebel’s, the Commanders’ ‘secret’ brothel where she is taken by Fred, disguised as a prostitute, in a spirit of erotic transgression, and it is Aunts who conduct the rituals of both birth and death. In fact, both Fred and Serena Joy are shown to break what appear to be their own rules. It is Serena Joy who initiates Offred’s affair with the chauffeur, Nick, knowing that he presents the best chance for the Handmaid to become pregnant and Fred not only takes Offred to Jezebel’s but initiates a series of meetings in which they, incongruously, play Scrabble, a discussion of which I will return to later. Highly significant here is the fact that, as Johnson makes clear, it is only the Aunts of all the female groups in THT who are allowed to read and write, suggesting that their primary function is control of knowledge. The prohibition against access to knowledge which questions the regime except for a small cadre of the elite is, of course, consistent with both the history of totalitarian regimes and dystopian fiction. Forbidden and secret texts, of various kinds, feature in most of the best known works of the genre and are foundational to the plots of both Nineteen Eighty-­ Four and Swastika Night. THT, like Nineteen Eighty-Four, foregrounds the revision of history through the control of language with exchanges between the Handmaids themselves, as well as between strata of the hierarchy, strictly controlled. So, greetings are expressed in biblical language referring to growth and reproduction; for instance, ‘Blessed be the fruit’

6  THE HANDMAID’S TALE: MARGARET ATWOOD AND THE POLITICS… 

119

and ‘May the Lord open’ (Atwood, 2017, p. 29). As Atwood herself tells us in her 2017 introduction, ‘[t]he regime uses biblical symbols, as any authoritarian regime taking over America doubtless would’. And she continues acerbically, ‘they wouldn’t be Communists or Muslims’ (p. xiii). One of the most telling greetings is ‘Under His Eye’, used as a farewell, a device which reminds the Handmaids that they are under constant surveillance, that the power of omnipresence is masculine and that they will not fare well if they do not pass scrutiny. The phrase is used early in the narrative when Offred and Ofglen part following their shopping expedition (an approved form of exercise for Handmaids) with the only explanation that it is ‘[t]he right farewell’ (p. 54). It is important here, however, because it not only informs the reader that surveillance is significant to the text but implicates her (and I am assuming a female reader here) as a subject who is likewise surveilled. What has been formalised in the language is not only the hegemony of a theocratic regime under the terms of which god is understood as all-seeing, and the sense in which this power is appropriated by the regime itself, but also what Laura Mulvey has famously referred to as the ‘male gaze’; the way in which women are styled (particularly in cinema) for what she called ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ (Mulvey 1989, p. 19). Further, the Handmaids are reminded that they are to be looked at but that they themselves cannot look by the ‘wings’ (Atwood 2017, p. 18) which obscure their peripheral vision when they are outside the home, the vivid red of their uniform—‘red’, says Atwood in her introduction, ‘is easier to see if you happen to be fleeing’ (p. xiii)—and the ‘[f]our digits and an eye, a passport in reverse’ (p. 75) tattoed on their ankles. But the semiotics of Gilead, of course, dictate that what appears evident must be contradicted. So, Aunt Lydia tells the Handmaids, in a statement that traduces Mulvey’s meaning, ‘[t]o be seen—to be seen—is to be … penetrated. What you must be, girls, is impenetrable’ (p. 39). Conversely, the Aunts themselves are powerful enough to enjoy the freedom of invisibility, something that Moira discovers when she steals Aunt Elizabeth’s uniform (the Aunts wear khaki), assumes her characteristic facial expression and deportment and walks calmly through several checkpoints (pp. 256–7).7 Moira is re-captured and it is following this that she is re-deployed to Jezebel’s on the way to the ‘boneyard’ of the colonies, but it is an important scene in that it does expose a potential weakness of the regime and also allows Moira to communicate to Offred the existence of the ‘Underground Femaleroad’ (p. 258) when they meet in the women’s toilet at Jezebel’s. Offred’s journey to Jezebel’s, in fact, involves a similar act

120 

D. B. SHAW

of subterfuge. The Commander dresses her in an outfit which Offred surmises has been salvaged from the time before Gilead and obtained on the black market with ‘cups for the breasts, covered in purple sequins … [and] feathers around the thigh holes’ (p. 242). He then smuggles her through the checkpoints covered in one of Serena Joy’s blue (the colour for Wives) cloaks. Although the episode at Jezebel’s serves primarily to emphasise the cynicism of the regime and the duplicity of both the Aunts and the Commanders, both Offred’s journey to the club and Moira’s account of her journey across Gilead are examples of resistance founded in the simple act of being out of place. The changes of costume, along with the appropriation of the necessary pass cards, allow movement into and through prohibited spaces and the performance of alter-subjectivities which, even if performed, as in Offred’s case, resignedly if not reluctantly, bring unexpected changes of perspective and access to new knowledge. I will return later to a discussion of women’s dress and its relation to visibility within the securitised state but, for now, it is sufficient to note (again, perhaps, ironically) that it is the fragility of heterosexual masculinity which has permitted Jezebel’s to exist and for the encounter between Offred and Moira to take place. The Commander himself explains the necessity for Jezebel’s in the language of Sociobiology: ‘Nature’, he says, ‘demands variety, for men … it’s part of the procreational strategy. … Women know that instinctively’ (p. 249). But Offred understands that ‘he is showing off. … He is demonstrating, to me, his mastery of the world’. He is also, of course, showing off to the other men at Jezebel’s, parading his ability to smuggle ‘his’ Handmaid into a forbidden space and parading her body as his exclusive possession (p.  248). Later, she infers that he ‘wants to be complimented’ (p. 250). Jezebel’s then performs a parody of gender conformity, exposing the constructedness of roles conceived of as ‘natural’ in scientific discourse which, in the oblique reference to Sociobiology, positions the ‘truth’ of scientific dogma alongside the ‘truth’ of religious dogma as twin expressions of a biopolitics in which women’s bodies are the prize for the correct performance of heteronormative masculinity and women who correctly perform their feminine role gain access to privileges only through the generosity of their male counterpart.

6  THE HANDMAID’S TALE: MARGARET ATWOOD AND THE POLITICS… 

121

Men Explain Things Johnson believes that ‘[t]he Commanders’ behavior is more suggestive of freedom for women than the Aunts’ behavior’ (Johnson 2004, p. 74) and goes so far as to suggest that ‘[t]he Commander allows Offred rights that the Gileadan regime and the Aunts deny her’, citing their games of Scrabble as occasions when he is happy to help her (p. 75). But his apparent generosity here is entirely consistent with his role as the patriarch who bestows gifts; who mediates between the woman and the world and who has it within his power to provide her with what she is not permitted in exchange for access to her body. Note that the excursion to Jezebel’s only takes place after several evenings spent playing Scrabble and after Offred has become relaxed enough to cheat at Scrabble, invent words and giggle with him (Atwood 2017, p. 220). The gift of Scrabble, in the context of the prohibition against her reading and writing is, of course, highly symbolic. He allows her, in effect, the gift of language; of words that take their meaning from a world outside of Gilead and which are part of a semiotic system which does not refer directly to biblical texts. Some of his other gifts are women’s magazines which evoke memories of the time before and which Offred, deprived of any reading material at all, is avid to read. But these are a calculated gift; traditional instruction manuals for aspiring wives, girlfriends and mistresses, imparting the knowledge of femininity and its expression in consumerism. Scrabble, then, is a form of courtship, taking the traditional form of a man propositioning a woman through the promise of wealth or social status or, in this case, access to forbidden texts. As the Commander explains, referring to the time before: ‘The main problem was with the men. There was nothing for them anymore. … I’m not talking about sex …. That was part of it, the sex was too easy. Anyone could just buy it. There was nothing to work for, nothing to fight for. … Men were turning off on sex, even. They were turning off on marriage’ (p. 221). In other words, they were experiencing the same problems as Terry Nicholson in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s (1979) Herland (see Chap. 1); they could no longer play the game of courtship because the ‘opposing team’ were no longer invested in the contest. Gilead has solved the problem by depriving women of their jobs, their money and, perhaps more importantly, the possibility of access to knowledge. THT then engages with the problem identified by Rebecca Solnit in Men Explain Things to Me (2014), in which she tells the story of

122 

D. B. SHAW

encountering an influential man who has to be told three times that the book he is recommending she read, if she wants to really understand a subject, had, in fact, been written by her. When he finally understands ‘as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen’ (Solnit 2014, p. 3). This is a scenario familiar to most women, particularly those who are academics. But what is important here is the connection that Solnit makes with the silencing of women who are not believed when they pronounce a truth of their own lives, particularly truths connected to domestic and psychological violence, because knowledge, in any form, is still tacitly understood to be the province of men. For some, it is the gift that they believe women should receive with gratitude. Indeed, many of Offred’s memories of her husband, Luke, are connected with his explanations about language and the meaning of words. ‘Fraternize’, he has told her, ‘means to behave like a brother’ but ‘there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister’ (Atwood 2017, p.  21). ‘He liked knowing about such details’ Offred tells us, ‘I used to tease him about being pedantic’. But, for the reader, this is evidence of Offred’s sometimes infuriating naivete and is consistent with other hints that Luke is neither dead nor escaped (as Offred likes to imagine) but has, in fact, colluded with the regime. Clearly what Luke intends to explain is that the sisterhood that many feminists wished for and worked towards is impossible. Similarly, the Commander’s sociobiological explanation for the ‘problem … with the men’ encodes the suggestion that he believes, like the Knight in Swastika Night, that ‘women are nothing but a desire to please men’ (Burdekin 1985, p. 82) and that the men have made a ‘mistake in their leadership’ (p. 70). Indeed, in the contextualising document that forms the final chapter of the novel, which I will return to in more detail later, one of the founders of Gilead is reported to have said “Our big mistake was teaching them to read. We won’t do that again” (Atwood 2017, p. 320). Equally, the Commander’s appeal to sociobiology projects a fantasy of blame in which the waste of the planet by war and capitalist excess, and the resulting decline in viable births, is tacitly connected to the implied excessive nature of female sexuality. There is also a further rebuke here to those who think that Offred is not a sufficiently daring feminist heroine. As Solnit has now famously said ‘[m]en explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they are talking about’ (Solnit 2014, p. 4), but the confidence which accompanies the explanation, in every case, sows enough doubt in women’s minds for them to question their own knowledge. Offred, given no

6  THE HANDMAID’S TALE: MARGARET ATWOOD AND THE POLITICS… 

123

resources for independent research, is dependent entirely on the Commander for any form of knowledge that is not Gileadean dogma. In his study, she reads Raymond Chandler and Dickens: ‘quickly, voraciously, almost skimming, trying to get as much into my head as possible before the next starvation’ (Atwood 2017, p. 194). When the Commander lends her a pen to write a phrase she has asked the meaning of, she can ‘feel its power, the power of the words it contains’ (p. 196). What she writes is Nolite te bastardes carborundorum (p.  62),8 words that she has found scratched into the corner of her cupboard in the Commander’s house which she has fantasised is a message from a former Handmaid, the previous occupant of the room, and which she suspects is Latin. What she discovers is that it is a schoolboy joke, invented Latin for ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down’ (p. 197). ‘Have I risked this’, she asks herself, ‘made a grab at knowledge, for a mere joke?’ (p. 196). But the knowledge that she gains is not in the translation of the phrase but in the discovery that her predecessor had scratched into the surface of the cupboard something that she could only have learned through a similar encounter with the Commander. She also learns that her predecessor hanged herself. Thus, again, she merely receives knowledge that reveals her own naivete, both in thinking that she might have some power over the Commander and in fantasising a world outside Gilead (or even outside the Commander’s house) to which she might escape. THT, like Winston Smith’s diary in Nineteen Eighty-Four, is itself a forbidden text and one whose afterlife is suggested in the ‘historical notes’ which follow the final chapter. As David Ketterer has noted, this makes THT unusual in the tradition of dystopian fiction in that it does not leave open the question of whether history will heed its warnings but provides a historical context that is internal to the text. The paper given by ‘Professor James Darcy Pieixoto’ at ‘the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies … University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195’ (p. 311), suggests that Offred did escape Gilead because Pieixoto makes clear that what we have just read was transcribed from a series of tapes unearthed within the borders of what had been Gilead but in a place known as ‘a prominent way-­ station on. … “The Underground Femaleroad”’ (p. 313). This chapter, it seems to me, is Atwood’s final irony. As Ketterer points out ‘Pieixoto's prissy academic jokes and the laughter they elicit from his audience provide evidence that sexist attitudes still persist’ (Ketterer 1989, p.  214). Aside from this, it is a man explaining things to an audience which, if not all women, certainly contains some women, including the chair of the

124 

D. B. SHAW

symposium, ‘Professor Maryann Crescent Moon’ (Atwood 2017, p.  311) whom he refers to, in the first sentences of his speech, in language that is both slyly condescending and sexually inflected. ‘I am sure’, he begins, ‘we all enjoyed our charming Arctic Char last night at dinner, and now we are enjoying an equally charming Arctic Chair. I use the word “enjoy” in two distinct senses, precluding, of course, the obsolete third (Laughter)’ (p. 312). In light of the knowledge that Prof. Pieixoto was, in fact, the editor of the tapes, we are forced to review what we have read as the words of a woman, at a particular time in history, translated by a man in a future that seems to have returned, at least in terms of gender ideology, to a culture not so very different to that from which Gilead emerged. For Ketterer, who refers to THT as a ‘contextual dystopia’, this represents a cyclical view of history and an argument against the linearity implied by the idea of progress. However, while I would agree that it is a contextual dystopia, I would suggest that the context is given in the fact that it is a woman’s story transcribed by a man and one furthermore who urges caution about ‘passing moral judgement upon the Gileadeans’ (p.  314) instructs his audience that ‘[o]ur job is not to censure but to understand’ (p. 315) and seems to get carried away with admiration for the two ‘Freds’ that he has identified as the original architects of the Gileadean regime. Frederick Waterford, the ‘Fred’ who he suspects is the Commander referred to in the tapes, he describes as ‘a man of considerable ingenuity’. At the same time, he berates Offred for not having ‘the instincts of a reporter or a spy’ (p. 322) and accuses her of ‘malicious invention’ (p. 321). Thus, the contextual device here is important, not only because it locates Gilead in a wider history but because it impugns the truth of any history which must always be filtered through the ideology of the culture in which it is reconstructed. Professor Pieixoto, a man explaining things to us, casts doubt on the veracity of what we have just read or, at least, our interpretation of it.

Adaptation and Popular Feminism The TV production company MGM/Hulu’s adaptation of THT premiered in April 2017, just three months after the media mogul Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the US. Trump, in common with other ‘alt-right’ leaders like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro was actively misogynist and presided over the roll back of hard won feminist reforms, most notably the right to abortion. Writing for the New York Times in

6  THE HANDMAID’S TALE: MARGARET ATWOOD AND THE POLITICS… 

125

March of the same year, Atwood responded to the question of whether THT could be thought of as prophetic by suggesting that ‘it’s an anti-­ prediction: If this future can be described in detail, maybe it won’t happen’, adding that nevertheless ‘such wishful thinking cannot be depended on either’. However, the power of extrapolation is precisely in the fact that it does not attempt to predict the future but is more interested in the historical conditions from which possible futures may emerge. As Atwood tells us ‘One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened in what James Joyce called the “nightmare” of history, nor any technology not already available’ (Atwood 2017). The power of the TV series, I would suggest, is that it keeps to the same rule and thus, consequently, is able to evoke a world that is not comfortably removed from contemporary conditions but reproduces them as the entirely plausible starting point from which the dystopian conditions of Gilead will evolve. So, for instance, in a flashback scene in Episode 3, a perfectly ordinary morning for June (Offred, Elizabeth Moss) and her friend Moira (Samira Wiley) is marred by an experience of sexism in a local coffee shop. This follows the refusal of their bank cards when they attempt to pay for the morning coffee which, we are given to understand, is a habitual end to their daily exercise. What the visual medium allows is for an aspect of daily routine, recognisable to many in the global cultures of twenty-first-­century capitalism, to be represented and for the casual sexism of the barista (Dan Beirne) to be understood as part of the same quotidian experience. What is evoked here is an equation between the casual use of technology, everyday sexism and the routines of body conditioning which are an accepted part of the gendered cultures of Western capitalism. This sets the scene for further state-mandated incursions on the women’s freedom. The scene then is pivotal in that it encodes the simple extrapolation, first introduced in the book, whereby the data which indicates the gendering of bank accounts is employed to simply cancel access to all those designated female. The absence of the female barista that June and Moira remark on and the change in conditions which grants her male replacement licence to employ misogynist language are not incidental but are thus seen as entirely consonant with the employment of familiar technology in the service of totalitarianism. Furthermore, I would suggest that, in the era of streaming video, the scene also (and certainly with hindsight) inaugurates a reflection (continued throughout the series) on the

126 

D. B. SHAW

multi-platform nature of visual media and their effects on gendered concepts of embodiment. In other words, in the context of the relationship between digital media and neoliberal subjectivity, the morning run and its association with self-­ discipline and the mandated fitness regimes of the commodified Western self takes on new significance when it is presented as part of the soon-to-­ be-curtailed everyday reality of women who are subsequently enslaved by the simple expedient of removing their access to money. The ubiquity of mobile phones in the second decade of the twenty-first century, their link to social media and the body shaming which is already a common experience among women, alongside the fact that TV series like THT are streamed, re-visualised and discussed via the same technology thus enable the scene to be read as extending the book’s warning about the dangers of surveillance technologies to the new media of the twenty-first century which provides the platform for both the viewing of streaming video and the body shaming and trolling which feeds contemporary insecurities. It is also the platform for what Sarah Banet-Weiser calls ‘popular feminism’ and ‘popular misogyny’ (Banet-Weiser 2018, p. 2). Both operate, as she suggests, within an ‘economy of visibility’, a component of the larger ‘attention’ economy in which the stakes are measured in numbers of followers on social media (p. 10) and both depend on an escalation of outrage coupled with confessional and supposedly therapeutic ‘sharing’ through which individuals maintain their visibility. Although, as Banet-Weiser points out, popular feminism is to be welcomed in that it provides a discourse through which the injuries of masculine domination can be articulated it, at the same time, like the ‘Girl Power’ of the 1990s, is almost entirely focused on individual ‘empowerment’. Thus aside from the fact that what empowerment seems to primarily refer to is achieving the confidence to compete in a market economy, it sells a version of feminism that remains firmly within the structures of neoliberal gendered self-branding. Thus, popular feminism is predicated on its ability not only to engineer a market for feminist-inspired consumer goods but also to create a newly acceptable “feminist” subjectivity that is hyperfeminine and heterosexual, often white, and, most importantly, invested in the desire to become a corporatized, consumable (popular) body. (p. 88)

6  THE HANDMAID’S TALE: MARGARET ATWOOD AND THE POLITICS… 

127

Ironically, the cultivation of ‘confidence’ which is given as the primary goal of popular feminism is also the driving mantra of popular misogyny. Whereas young women are exhorted to ‘love’ their bodies and to develop attitudes commensurate with a successful presentation of self in the workplace, young men ‘claim to be losing both economic and sexual confidence precisely because of these newly confident women’ (p. 93). Thus supposedly there is a ‘crisis’ of masculinity9 which has prompted the growth of a lucrative industry promising heterosexual men ‘that by purchasing its wares and enlisting its services they will find whatever it is they are looking for - choice with women, status among men’ (O’Neill 2018, p. 151). And, as Rachel O’Neill discovered, this ‘seduction’ industry markets a narrow and conformist ideal of masculinity which not only reconfirms and reproduces racist and classist hierarchies among men but also ranks women according to standards of appearance so that achievement in the seduction stakes is predicated on ideals of feminine beauty ‘conceived as a marker of masculine status’ and ‘valued above all else’ (p. 155). The corollary of this is that rejection, real or perceived, particularly by women who are not regarded as particularly high status, leads to the kinds of sexual shaming, rape threats and general harassment typical of popular misogyny. The viciousness of popular misogyny is acted out during the coffee shop scene in THT when the barista, emboldened by June and Moira’s inability to pay for their coffee, calls them ‘fucking sluts’ and tells them to ‘get the fuck out of here’. What is notable here is that he uses the language of popular misogyny as it is expressed online which is generally prohibited IRL by the conventions of neoliberal service culture. When Moira responds by asking for the barista’s name, contemporary viewers would understand her response as legitimised by the culture of ratings and the ability to report ‘poor service’ that valorises individuals under the terms of neoliberal employment. What this scene implicitly enacts then is the link between social media, surveillance culture and neoliberal capitalism in which the performance of gender, and its policing, forms the structural nexus which determines conventions of normality. The misogyny previously held in check IRL by conventions associated with employment and dating culture and only expressed online where a certain amount of anonymity is guaranteed is, in the world visualised for the streamed version of THT, given full licence once women’s economic independence and their right to refuse men’s sexual advances is removed. The scene thus emphasises how the taken-for-granted protection of economic independence is of a piece with

128 

D. B. SHAW

the equally taken-for-granted protections afforded by social media; protections which can be threatened by practices like ‘doxing’, ‘the release of personal information about a woman, such as her phone number, address or other confidential information’ (Banet-Weiser 2018, p. 83). In this context, the scene in Episode 5, where the Commander (Joseph Fiennes) first allows Offred access to illicit reading material takes on a similar significance. In the book, his gift is a Vogue (Atwood 2017, p. 165). For the streaming version, it is something called ‘Beautify’, the title an imperative and a tacit reminder that the purpose of such publications was to sell femininity in the form of fashion and cosmetics. The viewer reads, awkwardly, over Offred’s shoulder, only glimpsing the models which, as she says ‘all look insane, like zoo animals, unaware they’re about to go extinct’. She reads an article, ‘Ten Ways to Tell How He Feels About You’, exemplifying a type of journalism through which heterosexual femininity has long been reproduced as both a product and a producer of the male gaze. The scene is further contextualised by the one following: a flashback in which June recalls her first meeting with her husband, Luke (O-T Fagbenle). Before he appears, she and Moira are shown joking as they swipe through Tinder on their phones, rating potential dates with cries of ‘No!’ and ‘Euuww!’ and we are reminded that what is also about to ‘go extinct’ is women’s right, as in Swastika Night, to choose and reject. Thus what is equally emphasised here is the continuity between the world of women’s magazines and the world of Tinder; the relationship between industries catering to the desire to ‘beautify’, the economy of visibility and the performance of gendered sexuality. What flashback scenes like this also serve to emphasise is that Gilead appears to be a determinedly non digital culture. However, elsewhere it is suggested that only men are able to use digital devices because, of course, it is only men who are allowed to read. In one notable scene in Episode 4, Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski) enters the Commander’s study while he is preparing for a meeting with a delegation of officials from Mexico. The appearance of a laptop on his desk is not only strange but also notable for the way in which it suddenly draws attention to the absence of such mundane (to the viewer) devices in Gilead. The experience is one of temporal dislocation, as if a technology of the future has slipped into Gilead which, as has already been established, is a staged and reconstructed version of an imagined past. This is emphasised by Cinematographer Colin Watkinson and Director Reed Morano’s chosen colour palette for Gilead, derived from the work of seventeenth-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer

6  THE HANDMAID’S TALE: MARGARET ATWOOD AND THE POLITICS… 

129

and the twenty-first-century Ukrainian fine art photographer Oleg Oprisco as well as the shallow focus and ‘formal, symmetrical compositions with characters isolated in the frame’ (Marcks 2017, p.  88) providing for an atmosphere of restraint, stasis and claustrophobia. In opposition, the flashback scenes have ‘have ‘a hand-held cinéma-­ vérité look’ (p. 86) which has the effect of, as in the book, emphasising the reader/viewer’s own complicity in acquiescing to the world from which Gilead was able to evolve, a world in which electronic devices (including, of course, the camcorder and other ‘hand-held’ recording devices) are the sine qua non of surveillance culture. The appearance of the laptop in the restricted world of Gilead thus has a similar effect to Atwood’s ‘historical notes’ in that it emphasises a continuity between past, present and future, a continuity which is only experienced as such by men of the Commander’s status. It is also a reminder that the tale that we are witnessing is told from the point of view of someone whose access to knowledge is severely curtailed and whose witnessing, like ours, can be subject to Prof. Pieixoto’s charge of unreliability. Gilead, we are given to understand, has other tales to tell of which we are permitted only a glimpse. It is up to us, perhaps, to reconstruct them and to question the role of everyday technologies in perpetuating the gender violence of the present. I have concentrated here only on Season 1 of the MGM/Hulu adaptation because although, as I write, four Seasons have completed, it is only Season 1 that is relatively faithful to the events of the book. In this way, I have been able to expose another form of temporal continuity—that between different ‘waves’ of feminism and their cultural effects. Atwood’s careful extrapolation from only what was known in the 1980s enabled her to present a future world in which Sociobiology and ecofeminism have joined forces to naturalise and normalise the disenfranchisement of elite women and the enslavement of others. The 2017 adaptation to streaming video remains faithful to Atwood’s technique and, in doing so, enables an understanding of twenty-first-century everyday digital technologies as deadly weapons in the transition to gender dictatorship. As I have pointed out, both popular feminism and popular misogyny rely on these devices, and the media that they support, to perpetuate gender ideas which rely on similar assumptions about what is ‘natural’ to the expression of gender and sexuality. Thus the streaming of THT in this same media environment makes a potentially powerful statement about the relationship between media technologies, the production of gender as an effect of economies of visibility and the dissemination of ideas. Equally, it serves to confirm my

130 

D. B. SHAW

claim that the time of sf is over. THT, like LHD, can no longer be read as sf because the siting of contemporary communication devices in the visual text of the TV series marks it as allegory, rather than extrapolation or speculation—a reading reinforced by Atwood’s self injunction to not invent anything that had not already happened. However, a significant omission from the TV series is the fact that Gilead is an overwhelmingly white dystopia. In Atwood’s novel, a passing reference to the ‘[r]esettlement of the Children of Ham’ (Atwood 2017, p. 930) suggests not only extrapolation from the racism of many fundamentalist Christian groups but that ‘resettlement’ is simply a euphemism for genocide. Atwood herself has said that the situation of her handmaids is modelled on American slavery and, indeed, the fact that it is the reproduction of the white race with which Gilead is primarily concerned suggests a further subtext in which the rhetoric of right-wing Christian authoritarianism encodes an adherence to the principles of Social Darwinism (see Chap. 1, this volume). Nevertheless, as Nora Berlatsky in an article for The Verge has pointed out ‘[a]ppropriating the experiences of women of color to create a hell for white women raises uncomfortable questions’ (Berlatsky 2017), something of which TV series showrunner Bruce Miller was certainly aware and Berlatsky cautiously welcomes his decision to employ a more diverse cast. So, when June is captured trying to escape and her daughter, Hannah (Jordana Blake), who is mixed race, is wrenched away from her ‘the reference to enslaved black children being sold is more powerful, and more honest, because Hannah is black herself’. And when June’s friend Moira who is both black and a lesbian ‘is forced into prostitution by the Gilead regime, it illustrates how slaves were raped, then hypersexualized, as if they were to blame for the violence done to them’. Nevertheless, as Heather Hendershot points out ‘[i]t is impossible to believe that a fundamentalist Christian theocratic regime in which a wealthy elite enslaves fertile women, and where gays and lesbians are executed as “gender traitors,” is also a world in which racism simply no longer exists’ (Hendershot 2018, p. 21). It is easy to understand, however, the dilemma that faced Miller in adapting the novel for the twenty-first century. As he says ‘[w]hat’s the difference between making a TV show about racists and making a racist TV show where you don’t hire any actors of color?’ (Dockterman 2017). What this dilemma and the inclusion of black actors in itself helps to illuminate, I would suggest, is the constant presence of racial difference as a factor in all forms of oppression. If the idea of whiteness is produced solely

6  THE HANDMAID’S TALE: MARGARET ATWOOD AND THE POLITICS… 

131

on the basis of its distinction from blackness then the mere presence of black actors is a reminder that, in a class hierarchy, even white women kept as slaves are able to claim a privileged position through the mythology of exceptionalism. Again, this emphasises the importance of Atwood’s fealty to historically verifiable events. If a regime like Gilead looked to history for its models, then it would find a template not only for slavery but for enforced surrogacy in the use of black women’s bodies to breed further slaves which were automatically the property of their owners as well as objects of exchange in a capitalist economy. The historical precedent for Gilead then is in the material conditions of slaves in the ante-bellum American South and thus black actors on screen function, like the ‘historical notes’ in the book and the brief appearance of a communicative device from the twenty-first century in the time-shifted environs of Gilead, to suture past, present and future. Again, this has the effect of disallowing a viewing in which Gilead is experienced as merely an aberration or a fantasy. As Hendershot points out, ‘TV’s allegorical turn has been fairly recent’ (Hendershot 2018, p. 19), having to wait until streaming video allowed for the kinds of complex world building that allegory demands. I would add here that it is, ironically, the economy of visibility that enhances the allegorical reading of the TV version of THT because the presence of black actors also raises questions of representation, specifically of black bodies and how the imperative to ‘beautify’ itself refers to whiteness as a privileged standard for female appearing. Shortly after the election of Donald Trump to US President in 2016, women marched in protest carrying signs that said ‘Make Margaret Atwood fiction again’ (Dockterman 2017) and the Handmaids’ characteristic red cloak and vision-obscuring white bonnet have become iconic in recent feminist protests across the world. The costume is ingenious for the way that it renders the wearer both visible and invisible. In the MGM/ Hulu series, all the ceremonies featuring the be-cloaked and hooded handmaids en masse and in formation are shot from overhead so that they appear as indistinguishable white dots in a sea of red. This serves to emphasise both their lack of individuality and the regimentation of their lives. But it is also a reminder that the bonnet obscures the facial features and, together with the cloak, renders the women who wear it unrecognisable. In the context of protests against the rolling back of abortion rights and the election of right-wing demagogues, the costume, again ironically, protects against capture by CCTV and other surveillance devices. In the current historical moment then it is a powerful statement against both

132 

D. B. SHAW

institutionalised misogyny and the surveillance state. Of course, in Gilead, total surveillance means that there are no protections and the bright red of the cloaks means that fleeing handmaids can be easily spotted. As Atwood herself has said ‘[w]hat the costume is really asking viewers is: do we want to live in a slave state?’ (Beaumont and Holpuch 2018/2019). Over and above this, what The Handmaid’s Tale also asks us to consider is our own responsibility for the perpetuation of ideas which have historically divided women and our consumption of the culture which gives them visible form.

Notes 1. See Schlöndorff (1990). 2. See Bentley (2005). 3. See Miller (2017). 4. And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister, and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die. And Jacob’s anger was kindled against Rachel; and he said, Am I in God’s stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb? And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her. 5. These were often presented in fictional form. See Chap. 7 in the original edition of this book. 6. Political lesbianism was a conscious choice to reject heterosexuality as a protest against the patriarchy. See, for example, Johnston (1973) and Johnson (1981). 7. See Johnson (2004, p. 74). 8. When I was at school, we knew this phrase as ‘Nil Illegitimo Carborundorum’. I went to an English Secondary Modern in the 1960s where they certainly didn’t teach Latin (they could barely manage English) but the phrase was well known and it didn’t take too much of a stretch of my imagination to recognise it in the form that Atwood uses. When I first read THT, Offred not knowing the meaning made her come across as particularly stupid. I have wondered since if this was Atwood’s intention or whether she was simply using it to illustrate the differences in male and female education in the US in the ‘time before’. Indeed, Offred’s certainty that her predecessor must have learned the phrase during similar encounters with the Commander because she was ‘never a schoolboy’ (p. 197) would seem to confirm this. 9. See also Chap. 2, this volume.

6  THE HANDMAID’S TALE: MARGARET ATWOOD AND THE POLITICS… 

133

References Atwood, Margaret. 2017 [1985]. The Handmaid’s Tale. London: Vintage. ———. 2017. Margaret Atwood on What ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Means in the Age of Trump. The New  York Times, March 10. https://www.nytimes. com/2017/03/10/books/review/margaret-­atwood-­handmaids-­tale-­age-­of-­ trump.html. Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2018. Empowered: Popular Feminism & Popular Misogyny. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Beaumont, Peter, and Amanda Holpuch. 2018. How The Handmaid’s Tale dressed protests across the world. The Guardian, 3 Aug (Last modified on Mon 4 Mar 2019). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/03/how-­the-­ handmaids-­tale-­dressed-­protests-­across-­the-­world. Bentley, Paul. 2005. A handmaid’s diary: The story of how Margaret Atwood’s novel the handmaid’s tale became an opera. Wilhelm Hansen. Berlatsky, Nora. 2017. Both versions of The Handmaid’s Tale have a problem with racial erasur. The Verge, June 15. https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/15/ 15808530/handmaids-­t ale-­h ulu-­m argaret-­a twood-­b lack-history-­r acial-­ erasure. Burdekin, Katharine. 1985. Swastika Night. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Daly, Mary. 1979. Gyn/ecology: The metaetheics of radical feminism. London: Women’s Press. Dockterman, Eliana. 2017. The Handmaid’s Tale Showrunner on Why he made some major changes from the book. Time, 25 April. https://time.com/ 4754200/the-­handmaids-­tale-­showrunner-­changes-­from-­book/. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. 1979 [1914]. Herland. London: Women’s Press. Griffin, Susan. 1984. Woman & nature: The roaring inside her. London: Women’s Press. Haraway, Donna J. 1991. A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the late twentieth century (1985). In Haraway (ed.) Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature. London: Free Association, Books. Hendershot, Heather. 2018. The Handmaid’s Tale as Ustopian Allegory: “Stars and stripes forever, baby”. Film Quarterly, 72 (1), Fall. Henderson, Hazel. 1983. The warp and the weft: The coming synthesis of ecophilosophy and eco-feminism. In Reclaim the earth, ed. L. Caldecott and S. Leland. London: Women’s Press. Huxley, Aldous. 1950 [1932]. Brave new world. London: Chatto and Windus. Johnson, Jill. 1981. Love your enemy? The debate between heterosexual feminism and political Lesbianism. London: OnlyWomen Press. Johnson, Tara J. 2004. The aunts as an analysis of feminine power in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Nebula, 1.2, September.

134 

D. B. SHAW

Johnston, Jill. 1973. Lesbian nation: The Feminist solution. New  York: Simon & Schuster. Ketterer, David. 1989. Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”: A Contextual Dystopia (“La servante écarlate” de Margaret Atwood: une dystopie contextuelle). Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2, July. King, Ynestra. 1983. Towards an ecological feminism and a feminist ecology, In Machina Ex Dea: Feminist perspectives on technology, ed. Joan Rothschild. New York, Oxford, Toronto, Sydney, Paris, Frankfurt: Pergamon Press. Marcks, Ian. 2017. Rules of engagement. American Cinematographer, June. Merchant, Carolyn. 1983. The death of nature: Women, ecology & the scientific revolution. San Francisco: Harper Collins. Miller, Bruce. 2017. The handmaid’s tale, season 1. MGM Television/MGM-UA Television, Hulu. Mulvey, Laura. 1989. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. In Visual & other pleasures. London & New York: Palgrave. O’Neill, Rachel. 2018. Seduction: Men, masculinity and mediated intimacy. Cambridge, UK & Medford, MA: Polity Press. Orwell, George. 1948. Nineteen eighty-four. London: Secker & Warburg. Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the mastery of nature. London & New York: Routledge. Schlöndorff, Victor (dir.). 1990. The handmaid’s tale. Bioskop Film, Cinecom Entertainment Group. Cinétudes Films, Daniel Wilson Productions, Master Partners, Odyssey. Solnit, Rebecca. 2014. Men explain things to me and other essays. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Starhawk. 1999. The spiral dance: A rebirth of the ancient religion of the great goddess. San Francisco: Harper Collins. Warren, Karen J. 1994. Ecological feminism. London & New York: Routledge. Zamyatin, Yevgeny. 1972 [1924]. We. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books.

CHAPTER 7

The Power: Naomi Alderman and Archaeologies of Gender

In 1785 the French experimental physicist Joseph-Aignan Sigaud de la Fond was experimenting with the newly discovered action of electricity in the human body. He connected a chain of people with linked hands to a source of stored electricity (a Leyden jar), expecting, as in previous experiments, that all sixty people in the chain would experience a shock when the circuit was completed. However, he was bewildered to find that, on this occasion, the flow of electricity from hand to hand was terminated at the sixth man in the chain. This man, of course, was standing in a puddle but, at the time, the conducting properties of water were unknown and the hypothesis was advanced that the fault was in the body of the person where the charge had terminated and that he must therefore, as Frances Ashcroft puts it, ‘not [be] in full possession of Nature’s attributes’ (Ashcroft 2013, p. 35). Or, in other words, he must be a eunuch. History doesn’t record whether any women were tested to prove the hypothesis but, this being eighteenth-century France, castrati were available to be electrocuted in the service of science and were found to transmit the spark as readily as any fully endowed male. The suggestion that lack of gonads, and thus the ability to create life, may correlate to a lack of ability to conduct electricity seems at least vaguely plausible; as Ashcroft demonstrates, previous experiments did seem to prove ‘that animal electricity was a real phenomenon’ (p. 25). Nevertheless, the inference is that

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. B. Shaw, Women, Science and Fiction Revisited, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25171-9_7

135

136 

D. B. SHAW

the fault must be located in the body, rather than in the environment: that an inability to harness, at whatever rudimentary level, the elements of life must point to a defective masculinity. It is this anxiety that animates Naomi Alderman’s The Power (2016) which extrapolates from the simple premise that women in the twenty-first century develop a new bodily organ (called a ‘skein’ (Alderman 2017, p. 20)) which gifts them the ability to administer significant electric shocks using only their hands. It begins among younger women who discover that they can trigger the dormant skeins of older women and some, like Allie, who found a new religion based on the worship of a mother goddess, learn to fine tune their abilities to the point where they can exercise control over others without their knowledge. In the opening chapter, Roxy, the daughter of a south London gangster is in the throes of being sexually assaulted by one of her father’s rivals when she ‘feels the thing like pins and needles along her arms … some instinct tells her a new thing … She twists something quite deep inside her chest, as if she’d always known how to do it’ (p. 9. Emphasis in original). ‘Roxy’, we are told, ‘is fourteen. She is one of the youngest, and one of the first’ (p. 11). The story is told through four intersecting points of view: Roxy, Allie (who becomes Mother Eve), Margot, a politician in a typically corrupt US administration, and Tunde, a Nigerian photo journalist who experiences the effects of the power during a sexual encounter but tells nobody because ‘If he said what happened, they would think he was crazy, or weak, or lying. He thinks of the way she laughed at him’. At one point he entertains the idea that, echoing Sigaud de la Fond, it was ‘not her at all but some lustful malfunction of his own body’ (p. 15). Tunde, in fact, emerges as a more sympathetic and complex character than these initial responses would suggest and is central to the narrative as both the recorder of events and the catalyst for potential change, a discussion of which I will return to later. Other masculine characters are more one dimensional. Darrell, Roxy’s brother, nearly kills her by removing her skein and transplanting it to his own body, Awadi-Atif, the king of Saudi Arabia builds an army provisioned with sophisticated tasers in a kind of direct rebuke to women’s newly found power and a blogger called UrbanDox broadcasts conspiracy theories and misinformation in the service of male supremacy. However, the text does not simply oppose a weaponised femininity to an increasingly embattled masculinity. Instead, Alderman employs the trope of gender reversal to question the techniques of archaeology and to delineate the recounting of a flawed history in which the time of the

7  THE POWER: NAOMI ALDERMAN AND ARCHAEOLOGIES OF GENDER 

137

novel’s production is between five hundred and two thousand years in the past. Letters between an author and his editor (called, tellingly, Naomi) open and close the text and, significantly, detail a process of appropriation by which a male authored text is claimed as her own by a female editor. ‘Neil’, she writes, referring to his frustration that all his writing is only assessed as ‘men’s literature’, ‘I know this might be very distasteful to you, but have you considered publishing this book under a woman’s name?’ (p. 339). The irony here would not be lost on feminist readers, well aware of the obfuscations of gender that have historically seen women’s writing either claimed by men or published only under invented masculine pseudonyms; not least in the genre of science fiction. However, in The Power it also functions as a device to destabilise meaning and to question the veracity of what is given as a historical record in the context of a novel that also questions scientific authority. Most significant here are Marsh Davies’ illustrations which depict artefacts ‘discovered’ by future archaeologists accompanied by authoritative statements regarding their provenance or speculating as to their cultural significance. Two of these, as Alderman tells us in an afterword, ‘are based on actual archaeological finds from the ancient city of Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley’: We don’t know much about the culture of Mohenjo-Daro—there are some findings that suggest that they may have been fairly egalitarian in some interesting ways. But despite the lack of context, the archaeologists who unearthed them called the soapstone head illustrated on page 214 ‘Priest King’, while they named the bronze female figure on page 213 ‘Dancing Girl’. They’re still called by those names. Sometimes I think the whole of this book could be communicated with just this set of facts and illustrations. (p. 341)

So, what Alderman wants to communicate is that all history is flawed because its interpretation is founded in gender-biased assumptions and read through the lens of masculine supremacy. It is this flawed epistemology, the novel suggests, which not only naturalises practices of gendered social reproduction by establishing them as timeless and eternal but provides a discourse through which all forms of domination are rationalised. In The Power, the new matriarchal religion established by Allie, reborn as Mother Eve, and Bessapara, a matriarchate ‘on the borders of Moldova’ (p.  98) presided over by Tatiana Moskalev whose abusive husband had died suddenly of a ‘heart attack’ (p. 97) are seen to be both founded in

138 

D. B. SHAW

murder, oppression and manipulation. The text thus performs an interrogation of the nature of power while also challenging the assumption that cruelty and violence are exclusive to masculinity.

Archaeology and Fictions of Gender The Power can be characterised, first and foremost, as an archaeological fiction in that it is the objects illustrated by Davies that locate it in a temporal and cultural context. In the letter from ‘Neil’1 to ‘Naomi’ which prefaces the narrative, ‘he’ refers to it as ‘[a] sort of “novelization” of what archaeologists agree is the most plausible narrative’ designed to appeal to the ‘general reader’ who, he suggests, is uninterested in ‘the technicalities of dating finds and strata composition’ (Alderman 2017, p. ix). What follows is announced as ‘a historical novel’ (p. 1), set in what we later discover is the ‘Cataclysm Era’ which the text counts down towards but only hints are given as to its meaning. What does become apparent is that the cataclysmic event has left only scattered remains of a technologically sophisticated culture, including artefacts decorated with a ‘Bitten Fruit motif’ that, we are told, ‘are found across the Cataclysm Era world and their use is much debated’ (p. 213). Alderman has a great deal of fun constructing a future archaeology confounded by the possible uses of an iPad. The suggestions that these objects were ‘used for serving food’ and that the Apple logo was ‘a religious symbol’ are reasonable assumptions given that corporate logos, outside of the culture which validates them, are, essentially, meaningless. At the same time, these attributions are significant in that they promote a reading in which the text performs a critique of archaeological epistemology and the cultural biases which inform it. As feminist archaeologists have pointed out, popular culture in our own time has done a great deal to perpetuate the image of the archaeologist as a particular masculine type with fieldwork given as the terrain on which he is able to prove his gendered credentials and professional prowess. As Stephanie Moser suggests, through fieldwork, the disciplinary culture of archaeology expresses a gender regime that valorizes everything connected with the active (and actively) heterosexual male, or perhaps more specifically, everything connected with a certain type of masculinity. Given the centrality of fieldwork to the disciplinary identity and culture of archaeology, this means that the professional identity of archaeology as a whole is associated with traditional masculine values and modes of behavior. (Moser 2007, p. 253)

7  THE POWER: NAOMI ALDERMAN AND ARCHAEOLOGIES OF GENDER 

139

The cultural archetype of the hero archaeologist is perpetuated in, for instance, the Indiana Jones movies,2 but he is established in the muscular fieldwork of the nineteenth century which sought to employ the methodology of investigative fieldwork to consolidate colonial power. Furthermore, the androcentric bias of archaeological methodology and epistemology was not challenged until relatively late in the twentieth century (Conkey and Spector 1984, pp. 1–38). Alderman’s use of archaeology, however, is not only to expose it as a particularly gender-biased scientific practice but to draw parallels between the gendered assumptions brought to analyses of ancient artefacts and similar assumptions which still plague the publishing world, despite feminist critiques of gender bias in literary publishing going back to, at least, Virginia Woolf (1929). So, in the initial exchange of letters (or emails) between ‘Neil’ who writes from an organisation called ‘The Men Writers Association’ and ‘Noami’, she can’t wait to read the book because, as she says, ‘I think I’d rather enjoy this ‘world run by men’ you’ve been talking about. Surely a kinder, more caring and—dare I say it?—more sexy world than the one we live in’ (Alderman 2017, p. x). This not only alerts a reader familiar with the gender bias of language to the fact that she is entering a narrative universe in which the bias is reversed but immediately positions ‘Neil Adam Armon’ the writer of the ‘historical novel’ that we are about to read as unreliable. As his cautious explanation of what Naomi is about to read tells us it is ‘[a] sort of “novelization” of what archaeologists agree is the most plausible explanation’ (p. ix). Thus, Alderman suggests that what is ‘plausible’ in archaeology is only so given that assumptions about gender remain unquestioned while, at the same time, raising the question of the assumptions that editors also bring to their work—a particularly pertinent question given that science fiction editors have been, until very recently, notoriously biased when confronted with a female author. The final pages of the novel return to the written communications between Neil and Naomi with an apparently more cautious Naomi questioning the premises of the story. While she allows that, in places, it is historically accurate, she is concerned that the claims of a prior civilisation in which men were soldiers organised into armies is a fantasy based on wishful thinking. ‘We were taught in school’, she writes, ‘about women making men fight for entertainment—I think a lot of your readers will still have that in mind when you have those scenes where men are soldiers in India or Arabia. Or those feisty men trying to provoke a war!’ (p. 332).

140 

D. B. SHAW

The ‘feisty men’ are the followers of Awadi-Atif who arms his men with ‘rubber suits’ and ‘battery packs’ to fight what he believes to be a holy war (p. 189). But what is significant here is Naomi’s unquestioned allegiance to a specific ideology of gender in which masculinity is expressed as passively constructed by female desire and the men’s attempts at rebellion are understood as not only hopeless but staged for women’s pleasure. This serves to emphasise the arbitrary nature of gender signification while, at the same time, drawing attention to the cultural techniques through which a gender hierarchy is maintained and, in particular, to the way that scientific authority lends veracity to historical discourses. Indeed, in a paper published as late as 2019 Karen Dempsey states at the outset that ‘[i]n archaeology, the story of the past is largely told through the experiences of men … this situation persists more than 30 years after the first feminist critiques of archaeology’ (Dempsey 2019, p. 772). To put this into perspective, in her review of Oxford handbooks of archaeology from 2014 to 2017, she finds that ‘there are twice as many male authors as female authors. In the section on “Power and display” all five chapters are by men’ while women only feature as the majority in sections on child rearing and death (p. 774). And she concludes ‘a particular gendered ideology is implicit throughout many archaeological texts—that of the lives and practices of white, able-bodied heterosexual men’ (p. 775), even (or perhaps particularly), as she points out, when the subject of the study is women. It is worth noting here also the role of archaeology in colonialism and the persistence with which the culture of colonised peoples has been ‘proved’ to be either slower to develop than that of the coloniser or completely static (Trigger 1984, pp.  355–370). Given this, the history of archaeology in the developed West can be understood as an instrument of considerable power which is not only ideologically biased but fundamentally flawed. In this sense, Alderman’s employment of archaeological tropes and her ironic reflection on the meaning attached to contemporary artefacts fifteen hundred years or so into our imagined future serves the double function of reflecting on how both literary texts and scientific documents contribute to the maintenance of power regimes. Therefore The Power is not only concerned with the development of physical power and its cultural and social effects but the power of discourse, given authority through written texts, in the perpetuation of ideas that maintain oppressive political and social regimes.

7  THE POWER: NAOMI ALDERMAN AND ARCHAEOLOGIES OF GENDER 

141

The illustrations in The Power then have several functions. They question claims of scientific veracity in the archaeological literature by appearing as narrative devices in what is clearly a fictional text while, at the same time, presenting us with recognisable artefacts from our own time and culture which are rendered unrecognisable by supposed scientific analysis based on an alien ideology. However, they are also integral to the narrative, both confirming and informing the ‘story’ that is being presented for ‘Naomi’s’ approval. Significant here is the ‘[m]ass grave of male skeletons’ with ‘marked skulls … typical of the period’ (Alderman 2017, p.  162. Emphasis in original), an illustration which immediately follows the introduction of ‘Glitter’, the drug that is ‘designed to enhance the experience’ (p. 156. Emphasis in original) both of the power and its sexual effects. The skull markings are the typical Lichtenberg figure (p. 17) that results from electrical injury, the branching shape that marks the use of the power and has here been incised in the bone post-mortem, suggesting that they were used for target practice. The fact that the skeletons’ hands have been removed pre-mortem hints sinisterly at a deliberate cruelty meted out to those males who, in the novel, have ‘a chromosomal irregularity’ causing them to, like women, develop a skein (p.  153). This particular artefact thus points to a structure of power, well known to twenty-first-century readers, in which an authoritarian regime maintains control through violence. Later, depictions of a ‘serving boy’ statue, thought to be a ‘sex worker’ (p.  114) and ‘[r]ock art’ depicting a ‘‘‘curbing” procedure’ in which ‘nerve endings in the penis are burned out’ and after which ‘it is impossible for a man to achieve an erection without skein stimulation by a woman’ (p. 248. Emphasis in original) testify to an escalating pattern of cruelty and sexual violence as the novel counts down towards the unspecified ‘cataclysm’ that marks the era. In the time of the narrative, female babies are being born with active skeins and teenage girls, like Allie and Roxy, are discovering their power with puberty. What they also discover is that they can trigger the dormant skeins of older women. Margot Cleary is a municipal Mayor in an unspecified state in the US with ambitions to run for governor. Her power is triggered by her daughter, Jocelyn, but she keeps it secret, judging that her chances of being voted into office would be destroyed by what is being referred to as ‘a mutation, a terrible deformity’ (p. 21). While ‘[t]elevision pundits are saying: “Lock them up, maximum security”’ (p. 22), Margot proposes to ‘set up safe spaces for the girls to practise their power together’ (p. 88). The incumbent state governor Daniel Dandon, however, who has

142 

D. B. SHAW

already told her ‘You should shoot those girls. Just shoot them. In the head. Bam. End of story’ (p. 85. Emphasis in original) now switches tactic and condemns her for proposing to ‘use public money to train basically terrorist operatives to use their weapons more effectively’ (p. 90. Emphasis in original). In the context of post 9/11 culture in the US, Dandon is here mobilising the discourse of terrorism to justify misogyny by appealing to sensitivities about tax dollars employed in the name of equality. He is also, of course, implicitly referring to the discourse of gun control and debates about ‘domestic’ terrorism in order to cast girls and women in the role of dissidents who must be controlled. The British, more concerned with the discourse of ‘correct’ femininity and sexual continence, are teaching girls, as Roxy tells Allie, ‘Breathing exercises! No kidding, bleeding breathing. Bleeding “keep it under control, don’t use it, don’t do anything, keep yourself nice and keep your arms crossed”’ (p. 102). However, the plate that follows the chapter in which these exchanges occur, picturing ‘a device for training in the use of the electrostatic power’ which is ‘[a]pproximately fifteen hundred years old’ the size of which indicates it ‘was meant for thirteen- to fifteen-year-old girls’ (p. 121. Emphasis in original) effectively foreshadows Cleary’s triumph but, significantly, it is a barbed victory. The ‘safe’ spaces later evolve into training camps for armies of mercenaries for hire to the highest bidder. The Power is not the first science fiction novel written by a woman to employ a reversal of gender roles to question whether gender oppression is an effect of power rather than a trait of masculinity per se. Danish writer Gerd Brantenberg’s Egalia’s Daughters: A Satire of the Sexes, first published in 1987, humorously charts the struggle of men to win recognition in a full-blown matriarchy in which typical mid-twentieth-century gender roles are reversed and male ambition is simply laughed at. However, what is significant about The Power is the way in which it employs the techniques of fiction to question the way that historical records are constructed. Alongside the analysis of fictional artefacts from a ‘lost’ civilisation, Alderman presents Tunde’s narrative framed within the context of contemporary broadcast and social media which, motivated by clicks and viewing figures, escalates the growing animosities and unfounded prejudices. Indeed, Tunde himself is a journalist for whom ‘[t]his thing feels like his personal miracle, a thing to overturn the world’ (p. 60) and the world is indeed overturned by not perhaps in the way that he hopes.

7  THE POWER: NAOMI ALDERMAN AND ARCHAEOLOGIES OF GENDER 

143

Overturning the World In his discussion of Neil Postman’s well-known 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death in the context of social media, Jason Hannan (2018) suggests that the ‘post-truth’ politics of the early twenty-first century can be understood as a direct result of the culture of news as entertainment that Postman first identified (Hannan 2018, pp. 117–251). For Postman, following Marshall McLuhan (1964) and other theorists who understood the form of media technologies as both determined by and determining of affective zeitgeists, television, and television news in particular, had, by the mid-twentieth century, produced a flattening of affect which rendered the distinction between politics and game shows or soap operas somewhat moot. Hannan is particularly interested in what Postman calls the ‘Now … this’ phenomenon ‘the magical words that newscasters routinely recite to signal a break for commercials’ in which ‘the transition from one topic to the next has the effect of trivialising all topics’ (Postman 1985, p. 4). ‘The phrase’, according to Postman, ‘is a means of acknowledging the fact that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has no order or meaning and is not to be taken seriously’ (p. 115). So, in The Power, Kristen, Tom and Matt, news anchors for an unspecified TV station, report on the developing situation with characteristic levity. Experts are interviewed and their knowledge trivialised, they report on a bombing by a men’s rights group and show video of a pregnant woman crushed to death by falling masonry when she is unable to control her own power and, when Cleary’s daughter, Jocelyn, loses control and kills a man, they interview her and spin it into a heroic act. Later, Kristen, who is now lead anchor with Matt as her compliant assistant, fronts a segment reporting on ‘extremist websites’ which ask ‘how many men do we really need?’. In every case, the end of the segment is marked by ‘and now the weather on the ones’ (Alderman 2017, pp. 20, 63, 89, 278). Thus, the overturning of the world is reported by what Postman calls ‘a cast of talking hair-­ do’s’ (Postman 1985 p. 117) with ‘a fixed and ingratiating enthusiasm’ (p. 120) where ‘the weatherman as comic relief’ (p. 123) renders the news ‘largely banal’ (p. 121). For Hannan, ‘The internalisation of a “Now … this” worldview is the beginning of what we today, extrapolating from Postman’s analysis, call a post-truth world’ (Hannan 2018, p. 217), and it is this that is clearly evidenced through Alderman’s narrative. The gradual reversal of the gender hierarchy which is charted through both the reports and relative positions

144 

D. B. SHAW

of the news anchors in the viewing schedule takes place in an atmosphere of total distraction. Alderman devotes a chapter to an archived extract from a ‘nominally libertarian’ website expounding theories as to the identity of ‘Mother Eve’ interspersed with far-right paranoia blaming, variously, ‘[t]he Israeli government’, ‘Jewish organized crime’ (Alderman 2017, p. 140), ‘our government in the USA’ (p. 142. Emphasis in original), ‘the House of Saud’ (p. 143) and, particularly relevant in the post-­ Covid world, a poster called The Lord Is Watching tells us: ‘The government has been causing this change for years through carefully measured doses of hormones called VACCINATIONS. VAC as in VACUOUS, SIN as in our sinful souls, NATION as in the once great people who have been destroyed by this’ (p. 144). Other posts on the site are misogynistic diatribes expressing what Laura Bates calls ‘manosphere ideology’ (Bates 2020, p. 182). For instance, a poster calling themselves ‘Beningitis’ spins a tale about ‘a girl … maybe thirteen, fourteen years old’ trying to ‘convert’ his nine-year-old son in a shopping mall (Alderman 2017, p.  145). This elicits a series of violent responses which would not be out of place on the message boards and websites that Bates discusses in Men Who Hate Women (2020) and which she characterises as a form of terrorism (Bates 2020, pp.  191 & 255). However, as the narrative evolves and the women take control, their dominance is seen to be shaped by similar discourses and their expression in physical violence. Bessapara evolves into a dictatorship where ‘the police [are] going door-to-door asking about any man who [is] not properly certified and with an approved guardian’ (Alderman 2017, p. 265) gangs of women shock and rape men (p. 281) and, as the bodies pile up, ‘They know that no one cares what happens here. No one is here to protect these people, and no one is concerned for them. … They do it because they can’ (p.  283). In this way, the text makes clear that what The Power is concerned with is the intersections of power in all its forms; that power does not only corrupt but that historically powerful discourses provide models for how it might be employed and that, therefore, the way that it is employed makes use of existing paradigms of violence and oppression. More importantly, a correspondence is set up between the mediated reality of twenty-first-century culture and the perpetuation of these paradigms. Thus in The Power the world is not so much overturned as restructured to accommodate a new normal which is made sense of through already existing discourses of gender and sexuality and the appropriation of subject positions made available by literary and media representations. When Margot makes a strategic visit to the new President of Bessapara, she finds

7  THE POWER: NAOMI ALDERMAN AND ARCHAEOLOGIES OF GENDER 

145

her ‘sitting on an actual throne … A huge gold thing, with lions’ heads on the arms’. She is wearing ‘an enormous white fur coat with a gold dress underneath’ with ‘a ring on each finger and two on each thumb’. ‘It’s like’, Margot muses, ‘she learned what a President ought to look like from watching too many mafia movies’ (pp. 219–220). And the tribe of blind women that capture Tunde and cage him perform rituals which draw heavily on the revisionist anthropology which informed the essentialist feminisms of the 1980s. As Roxy tells him, ‘They’ve got some thing about blokes; they round up boys and let them be king for a few weeks and then stick antlers on their heads and kill them at new moon. Or full moon. Or one of those moons. Obsessed by the fucking moon’ (p. 273). The intertextual reference here is to literature like Mary Daly’s Gyn/ Ecology (1979) which resurrected pre-patriarchal ‘Triple Goddess’ mythology in the service of an anti-Christian feminist separatist politics centred on the rejection of ‘masculine’ technology and language. The ritual described in The Power, however, owes more to Robert Graves’ Seven Days in New Crete, first published in 1949, a novel in which a time travelling poet encounters a matriarchal society and attends a play in which the king, crowned with antlers, is ritually killed by ‘wild women’ and replaced with a younger successor. Graves, better known for his poetic two-volume retelling of The Greek Myths, first published in 1955, and The White Goddess (1948), was convinced that ancient Western and Middle Eastern mythologies all refer to a triple-aspected mother goddess who was supplanted by the patriarchal Judeo-Christian god. This provided the impetus for Daly and others like Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor (1987) to present patriarchy as an aberration and argue for a return to the ‘natural’ order of matriarchy as a means to reconnect with the lifeforce of the planet and heal the wounds of androcentric capitalist imperialism. As I pointed out in Chap. 5, these ideas have been subject to criticism on the basis of their Eurocentric orientation and universalising of female experience. However, by introducing them here, Alderman reinforces the association that the text sets up between scientific epistemology, literary fiction and media cultures. The blind women that capture Tunde are performing a subjectivity that is pre-given in a literature informed, like ‘Neil’s’ archaeological fiction, by readings of objects from a distant and mythologised past. Furthermore, The Power sets up a further dialogue with twentieth-century matriarchal feminism in the figure of Mother Eve, a young girl with a prodigious version of the power who hears a voice telling her ‘[t]here is a need for a prophet in the land’.

146 

D. B. SHAW

The Power and the Prophet Mother Eve is Allie who, on discovering her power, kills her sexually abusive foster father and takes refuge in a convent among other girls that have been forced to leave their homes. The abbess, however, believes that ‘[t]he Devil walks abroad and tests the innocent and the guilty, giving powers to the damned’ (Alderman 2017, p. 45) and Allie knows that she is no longer safe. Her response, prompted by the voice which encourages her to question biblical orthodoxy, is to stage a series of ‘miracles’, using her particular ability to control the power in others to heal a girl with epilepsy and ‘baptize’ others: ‘each of the girls in the circle suddenly feels their knees buckle under them … They all fall to their knees in the water … They all know for a moment that they will die here under the water, they cannot breathe and then … they are lifted up and reborn’ (p.  79). Later she preaches that ‘[i]t is the Mother not the Son who is the emissary of Heaven. We are to call God “Mother”’ (p. 80). ‘The girls pass the news … God has returned, and her message is for us, only us’ (p. 81). However, this is 1980s ecofeminist spirituality re-emerging into a post-truth world where social media confounds the distinction between fact and fabulation and between cognition and sophism. There is a sense in which the text suggests that Allie understands the affective power of new media and knowingly exploits it. The voice that exhorts her to take on the role of prophet to ‘try it on for size’ (p. 46) is the voice of her dead mother, victim of domestic violence, which alternates between portentous biblical language and the contemporary vernacular. ‘I heard a voice saying, “Go to the seashore at dawn”’, Allie tells the girls in the convent. ‘Well played girl’, says the voice, ‘you say what you need to say’ (p. 78). Later, Allie meets Roxy Monke whose power is even more prodigious than her own and who she determines to be the ‘soldier’ that the voice has promised her: ‘She’s British. This is unexpected. Still, the Almighty works in mysterious ways’ (pp. 100–101). Roxy, in fact, is not only British but a Jewish atheist whose values are drawn entirely from the pragmatic outlaw culture of the London drug gangs. Roxy’s family is responsible for the manufacture of ‘Glitter’ (p. 156): ‘A snort of the full thing—pure Glitter— and Roxy could send a blast halfway across the valley’. At the same time, the ‘new churches’ provide a convenient and willing production line,

7  THE POWER: NAOMI ALDERMAN AND ARCHAEOLOGIES OF GENDER 

147

‘[w]omen who think they’re doing the work of the Almighty, bringing power to Her children’ (p. 160). What they are doing, in fact, is making the Monke family extraordinarily rich: ‘They’re printing money. And money can turn into anything’ (p. 161). Money, of course, can ‘turn into anything’ because the structures which have maintained the capitalist world order including the black economy which ensures that it remains effective are infinitely fungible. The Monke’s switch smoothly from shipping cocaine to shipping glitter and, in Bessapara, President Tatiana Moskalev negotiates with Margot Cleary to deploy the girls she has been training in the US ‘NorthStar’ camps in a ‘holy’ war against Saudi Arabia. ‘I think it will be good news for the world’ says Tatiana, ‘Securing the supply of energy, helping the government through a difficult period of transition’. And Margot understands exactly what is being proposed. Deploying NorthStar combatants as a private army will enhance their value: ‘It’s worth a lot of money. Even more if they win the war with the North and seize the Saudi assets’ (p. 222). In exchange, Margot simply has to turn a blind eye to torture (p. 223). ‘The power to hurt’, she muses, ‘is a kind of wealth’ (p. 71). The title of The Power, then, is ambiguous, referring to the new found physical abilities of the women but also to the sense in which, in enacting a reversal of gendered hierarchies under contemporary cultural conditions, the text insists that a feminism which does not understand how power relations are structured by capital and maintained through powerful discourses fails also to understand how hegemonies of gender are perpetuated. And, in a further rebuke to feminist essentialism, women becoming physically dominant is shown to result in a mere adjustment of norms. The world has emerged from the cataclysm with dominance hierarchies simply reversed, rather than overturned, and money continues to turn into anything. As Mark Fisher writes in Capitalist Realism (2015) ‘capitalism is very much like the Thing in John Carpenter’s film of the same name: a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact’ (Fisher 2009, p. 6). So what The Power makes clear is that capitalist realism and biopolitics are interdependent—that the social and cultural norms which support the power structures of the neoliberal world order can equally ‘turn into anything’.

148 

D. B. SHAW

What There Is As Michel Foucault has famously argued, power structures are dependent on myths of normality, perpetuated through discourse and ‘technologies of the self … which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves’ (Foucault 1988, p. 18). Foucault argues that individuals constitute themselves as subjects through differentiation, primarily according to norms of sexual functioning and through ‘confession’. As he says, ‘Unlike other interdictions, sexual interdictions are constantly connected with the obligation to tell the truth about oneself’ (Foucault 1981, p. 16). Hence, the ‘truth’ of sexuality, understood as a biological given, is established on the basis of sanctions against what are considered perverse forms of desire which, as Foucault demonstrates, have, in different historical periods, been treated either as spiritual, legal or medical ‘problems’ to be confided and treated. Thus, early in The Power, when Margot Cleary is interviewed by Tom, one of the news anchors, about her plan to set up ‘safe spaces for the girls to practice their power together’, his response, that ‘we should be trying to cure it’ (Alderman 2017, p. 88), appeals to a discourse already established in connection with the politics of sexuality. This is further emphasised in the text by anomalies, like Jocelyn and Ryan, who, from the start, understand themselves as ‘deviant’ and ‘abnormal’. Jocelyn has an unstable version of the power which she is unable to control and Ryan has the supposed chromosomal abnormality that expresses in males as the weak version. UrbanDox, The Power’s ubiquitously reliable hate blogger is, ironically, Jocelyn’s guide to the existence of men with functioning skeins and other ‘[w]eird people … in whom the thing hadn’t taken right, one way or the other’ (p. 153) and she seeks Ryan out through a dating website. Jocelyn’s attraction to Ryan is sexual because ‘[t]he single dependable human desire is very adaptable; what there is, in humans, is sexy. This, now, is what there is’ (p. 154). It is suggested, in fact, that ‘what there is’ may be latent in some men and may be woken up by ‘the techniques that are already being used in the training camps to strengthen the power in weaker women’ but ‘most men aren’t trying any more, if they ever did. They don’t want to be associated with this. With weirdness. With chromosomal irregularity’ (p. 153). Instead, Awadi-Atif, the exiled king of Saudi Arabia, wages ‘holy war’ (p. 189) against the women of Bessapara to show

7  THE POWER: NAOMI ALDERMAN AND ARCHAEOLOGIES OF GENDER 

149

that ‘this change is merely a minor deviation from the norm, that the right way will reassert itself’ (p. 190), and Margot, her political career in the balance, separates her daughter from Ryan by convincing her that he is an extremist. ‘If we could find someone to help you’, she tells her, ‘well, you’d just be able to like normal boys’. ‘What there is’, then, is adaptable, not only to the expression of sexual desire but to the workings of power in all its forms which is shown to require only determinations of difference to effectively police submission. There is little difference here between the ludicrous posturing of Awadi-Atif and Margot, who claims that she is merely being a ‘good mother’ (p. 192). Both are caught in a power structure which demands normalisation of gender and sexuality as a pre-­ condition of control and both recognise it is in their own best interests to maintain both myths of power and myths of gender. Thus what Alderman demonstrates is that the emergence of what is ‘deviant’, ‘abnormal’ and ‘weird’ is dependent on the incorporation of medical discourses into power relations which find cultural expression through the signification of otherness. But another meaning for ‘what there is’ is given in the way that, in The Power, although the reader is free to infer queer sexualities, at least among the separatist women, the narrative suggests that heterosexuality remains the norm. Alderman tells us that Jocelyn ‘quite likes girls. She quite likes boys who are a bit like girls’ (p.  154), but this is the only reference to queer desire in a text that, in dealing with biopolitics, as I have pointed out, necessarily references Foucault’s ground-breaking analysis of the role of sexuality, and homosexuality in particular, in power relations. However, I read Alderman’s intention here as emphasising the adaptability of human desire in order to equally emphasise how hegemony is maintained through binary oppositions. In other words, Jocelyn’s relationship is queer under the terms of the new biopolitics because the skein has replaced the phallus as the universal signifier. Because ‘this now, is what there is’, it governs the policing of desire as well as the policing of gender from which it is, of course, inseparable. In the new world ushered in by the ‘day of the girls’ (p. 98), there is no suggestion that love between two persons with skeins is prohibited but bodies with both a penis and a skein are the newly abject others which prove the norm. Roxy’s brother, who is killed by the women in his Glitter factory when they discover that he has stolen Roxy’s skein, would seem to confirm this. Whatever his motives, he stands for the position of dissident bodies who are always in danger in that they challenge the

150 

D. B. SHAW

hegemonic ordering of biological difference so necessary to authoritarian regimes. Finally, only one character, Tunde, emerges with any integrity. He is betrayed by his former lover, Nina, who publishes his manuscript about the ‘Great Change’ as her own work and fakes his obituary so that he is presumed dead. He is rescued from the ‘forest cult’ (p. 277) by Roxy who has faked her own death ‘[t]ill I can work out how to get back what’s mine’ (p. 276). Tunde realises that, ironically, the only person he can trust to publish his evidence for the atrocities he has witnessed is UrbanDox, and Roxy’s revenge is thwarted by the death of her brother. And it takes the death of her daughter for Margot Cleary, who is now a senator, to realise that there is only one way to stop the violence: ‘She sees it all in that instant, the shape of the tree of power. Root to tip, branching and re-­ branching. Of course, the old tree still stands. There is only one way, and that is to blast it entirely to pieces’ (p. 323). This, it is suggested, is what precipitates the cataclysm that marks the historical loss of knowledge that ‘Neil’ is attempting to reconstruct. It is worth emphasising here that The Power is, as I have pointed out, a self-referential text which raises questions about the veracity of authorship. Tunde, who is ‘handsome as hell’ (p. 219), is the sympathetic invention of a ‘male’ author who, himself, is a thinly disguised avatar for Alderman herself and Roxy is, like Alderman, both British and Jewish. In a further irony, Nina’s appropriation of Tunde’s manuscript foreshadows ‘Naomi’s’ manoeuvres to claim ‘Neil’s’ manuscript as her own, suggesting that, in writing the novel, he has anticipated her duplicity (which has, of course, succeeded). In this way, the text performs a complication of gender which effectively raises questions about gendered interpretations of authorship. But perhaps more significant is the fact that both Roxy and Tunde have to symbolically ‘die’ in order to find a way to live, however briefly. I read this as a reference to Roland Barthes who begins his famous essay The Death of the Author by reflecting on the identity of a voice in Balzac’s ‘Sarrasine’ which, he concludes, is impossible to distinguish as that of an identifiable character and could as easily be the author or a character posing as his surrogate. ‘It will always be impossible to know’, he continues, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap

7  THE POWER: NAOMI ALDERMAN AND ARCHAEOLOGIES OF GENDER 

151

where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes. (Barthes 1977, p. 142)

The author, for Barthes, is an invention of modernity and of ‘capitalist ideology, which has accorded the greatest importance to the author’s “person”’ (p.  143). The author, concludes Barthes, has to be ‘buried’ (p. 146) for the text to live; meaning is not accorded to the text by the author but is made and re-made by multiple readers, across time and cultures. Thus, in The Power there is a correspondence between the text’s engagement with the assumed truths of literary authorship and the critique of scientific authority that it performs in its engagement with archaeology. Hence, an equation is made between our reading of fiction and our interpretation of historical artefacts. Indeed, archaeologists in the 1980s, influenced by the arguments of poststructuralists like Barthes, began to understand the meaning of objects as, like fiction, ‘produced in the reading and by the reader’ (Stig Sørensen 2000, p. 77). It is this idea, I would argue, that provides a subtext for Alderman’s novel, structuring an argument for an informed feminism, aware of the way that truths about gender have been historically constructed. The Power appears to argue, in fact, for an understanding of how scientific epistemology and the knowledge that it makes possible can authorise ideologically determined versions of the past which can have real and unforeseen effects in the present. As ‘Neil’ writes to ‘Naomi’, ‘The way we think about our past informs what we think is possible today’ (Alderman 2017, p. 335). What Alderman’s text demands then is that we understand our politics as conditioned by existing forms of knowledge and in dialogue with both the past and an always uncertain and unpredictable future. I would mark The Power as a text which structures an argument for attending to the way that institutional ideologies determine how gender is both understood and performed. Simply put, it offers a reversal of gender roles, not only as a satirical comment on stereotypical representations of femininity and masculinity but as a means of questioning the founding myths which connect the ability to dominate through physical oppression with the structure of hierarchies and the policing of difference. In ‘Neil’s’ final correspondence with Naomi, he writes ‘What is a man? What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it’s hollow. Look under the shells: it’s not there’ (p.  338). While many readers of the novel would readily agree with this, the achievement of The Power is in fictionalising the impossibility of a world where this knowledge can be instrumental in social

152 

D. B. SHAW

change so long as subject positions, which anybody can occupy, are structured by the ideology of late capitalism. Equally, The Power is an emphatic demonstration of my claim that the time of science fiction is over. Although it clearly works with extrapolation, if not from the work of Sigaud de la Fond, then certainly from the problematics of archaeology, it also clearly denies the possibility of progressive change authorised by scientific epistemology. In presenting a simple reversal of gender roles in the context of contemporary mediated culture and suggesting a future in which little has changed, despite an event that has destroyed the world, Alderman offers a scathing indictment of utopianism, particularly as it affects feminist politics, and a clear demonstration of how the mode in which knowledge circulates perpetuates power regimes.

Notes 1. ‘His’ full name is Neil Adam Armon, an anagram of Naomi Alderman. 2. Fictional professor of archaeology, first appearing in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), created by George Lucas and directed by Stephen Spielberg.

References Alderman, Naomi. 2017. The power. UK: Penguin Random House. Ashcroft, Frances. 2013. The spark of life: Electricity in the human body. Penguin. Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, music, text. Trans. S. Heath. London: Fontana. Bates, Laura. 2020. Men who hate women. London, New York, Sydney, New Delhi, Toronto: Simon & Schuster. Brantenberg, Gerd. 1987. The daughters of Egalia. London: Pluto Press. Conkey, Margaret W., and Janet D. Spector. 1984. Archaeology and the study of gender. In Advances in archaeological method and theory, ed. Michael B. Schiffer, vol. 7, 1–38. New York: Academic. Daly, Mary. 1979. Gyn/ecology: The metaetheics of radical feminism. London: Women’s Press. Dempsey, Karen. 2019. Gender and medieval archaeology: Storming the castle. Antiquity 93 (369), June. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2019.13. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? London: Zero Books. Foucault, Michel. 1981. The history of sexuality: An introduction. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. ———. 1988. Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock Publications.

7  THE POWER: NAOMI ALDERMAN AND ARCHAEOLOGIES OF GENDER 

153

Graves, Robert. 1948. The white goddess, a historical grammar of poetic myth. London: Faber & Faber. ———. 2012 [1949]. Seven days in New Crete. Penguin Modern Classics. ———. 2017 [1955]. The Greek myths: The complete and definitive edition. Penguin. Hannan, Jason. 2018. Trolling ourselves to death? Social media and post-truth politics. European Journal of Communication, April. McLuhan, Marshall Herbert. 1964. Understanding media: The extensions of man. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Moser, Stephanie. 2007. On disciplinary culture: Archaeology as fieldwork and its gendered associations. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 14 (3): 235–263. Postman, Neil. 1985. Amusing ourselves to death. Methuen. Sjöö, Monica, and Barbara Mor. 1987. The great cosmic mother: Rediscovering the religion of the earth. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Stig Sørensen, Marie Louise. 2000. Gender archaeology. Polity Press. Trigger, Bruce G. 1984. Alternative archaeologies: Nationalist, colonialist, imperialist. Man, New Series, Vol. 19, No. 3, September. Woolf, Virginia. 2002 [1929]. A room of one’s own. Project Gutenberg. http:// gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200791h.html.

CHAPTER 8

The City We Became: N. K. Jemisin and Posthuman Urbanism

At an unspecified date in the twenty-first century, New York is being born. Midwifed by São Paulo and defended by avatars who embody its five constitutive boroughs, it is having a difficult birth. Weakened by attacks by an as yet unknown monster, the baby is unconscious. ‘There have been’, Paulo tells us, ‘postpartum complications’ (Jemisin 2020, p. 21). In the limbo thus created, the avatars of the boroughs seek each other out, stalked by a Lovecraftian horror that thrives on bigotry, racism and bad art. The City We Became is the first in Jemisin’s Great Cities trilogy. As I write, the second is due later in the year. Coincidentally but appropriately published during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is an eerie prognostication of the way in which the virus insidiously affected the life of major cities. Like the primary avatar of New York, the world’s urban centres were suspended between life and death while their inhabitants fought an unseen enemy which had the most destructive effects in areas already devastated by poverty and precarity. At the same time, the pandemic exposed much that had previously been obscured by the relentless pace of city living. In most affected countries, citizens were ordered to stay home and reduce social contacts. This had the effect of not only exposing the high levels of homelessness in global cities but also the high levels of domestic violence which escalated alarmingly during the pandemic.1 At the same time, while most office-based jobs could be adapted for online working, low-paid service workers were either forced to continue working under difficult and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. B. Shaw, Women, Science and Fiction Revisited, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25171-9_8

155

156 

D. B. SHAW

dangerous conditions or were made effectively redundant. A paper published in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, highlighted the danger to workers disposing of medical waste and the fact that on one day (24 February 2020) the city of Wuhan in China, where the virus was first detected, produced four times the amount of medical waste that its only dedicated facility could incinerate in one day. The authors also pointed out that population density in the poorer neighbourhoods of New York made limiting the spread of the virus extremely difficult (Saadat et al. 2020). While the precarity of urban life for many became startlingly obvious, the virus also had the effect of precipitating what Michele Acuto calls a ‘forced experiment … testing long-term solutions within a crisis’. Acuto notes the growth of mutual aid networks (London), emergency housing of rough sleepers (Manchester) and COVID testing and text alerts being made available to all inhabitants of New York and Philadelphia, whatever their visa status. Sydney instituted a multi-lingual public health information system, many cities ‘declared a moratorium on residential evictions’ and Ljubljana organised a home-food-delivery system for children of at-­ risk families and the elderly (Acuto 2020). In other words, the kinds of changes that many urban activists had been agitating for in the name of addressing the structural inequalities of urban living were implemented by city governments, albeit in most cases briefly, to deal with the substantial threat to public health that the virus posed. What we glimpsed, in the strange temporal lacuna created by the virus, was the possibility of a different world. This was a world of community cohesion where, in the UK, neighbours clapped together to celebrate the extraordinary achievements of the beleaguered National Health Service whose stressed and underpaid workers performed heroically in the face of impossible conditions. It was a world in which the idea of ‘home’ was redefined as a workspace, a school and, in some cases, a prison. It was also a world in which the city was transformed. In the early Summer of 2020 when the city was in lockdown I cycled daily round an eerily silent London. The only people I encountered were fellow cyclists and the occasional jogger. We acknowledged each other with nods and small gestures. Our body language conveyed a mutual understanding that we were part of an unprecedented experience. In that moment, as we breathed the newly purified air, we knew something we were, as yet, unable to grasp. Amid the horror of the mounting death tolls, we glimpsed

8  THE CITY WE BECAME: N. K. JEMISIN AND POSTHUMAN URBANISM 

157

the potential for something different; as if a major global city had paused to take a deep breath and found itself, suddenly, with the ability to consider its options. It is this sense of as yet unrealised potential which permeates The City We Became. The title is ambiguous, referring both to the fact of its central characters literally becoming avatars of New York and to the re-birth of New York as a process of becoming other in which all its citizens are implicated. Jemisin weaves a world in which at least two versions of New York exist (and many others potentially exist). ‘Weird New York’ is ‘the other place’ where the avatars experience themselves as cityscapes; as living embodiments of ‘skyscraperness’ (Jemisin 2020, p.  129) and where Bronca, the avatar of the Bronx, can make the city dance and lift the river from its bed (p. 164). In the other place, the avatars are powerful but they are incomplete. Brooklyn, The Bronx, Manhattan and Queens have found each other but Staten Island is missing. Without her, they cannot rouse the primary avatar from his stupor. At the same time, they are vulnerable to the Enemy, a mysterious Woman in White who is the embodiment of ‘wrongness’ (p. 40). Bronca first encounters her in the bathroom of the arts centre where she works and names her ‘Stall Woman’ (p. 120) because she seems to be inhabiting one of the toilet stalls but ‘[i]t occurs to Bronca that she cannot see any hint of Stall Woman through the cracks around the door’ (p. 121). However, she can hear her and what she hears is ‘a Lauren Bacall voice’ quoting lines from W.  B. Yeats’ Second Coming. ‘“‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed’!”’ (p.  119), she intones ominously and, Bronca realises, threateningly. For Aisling, the reluctant avatar of Staten Island, the woman takes a different form, ‘blond-white hair in a pixie cut’ and stylish white clothes (p. 91). But her head swivels ‘as if [her] neck muscles are motors or pulleys or something else mechanical’ (p.  96) and her laugh has ‘an edge that reminds Aislyn of the mean girls back in high school’ (p. 100). Nevertheless Aislyn, whose abusive and racist father has convinced her that she is never safe outside the boundaries of Staten Island, trusts the woman who wants to ‘save’ her from the primary avatar that she describes as a ‘monster’ (p. 101). The Woman in White is a manifestation of an alternate reality that fears the birth of the city. It sends its tentacled minions to invade where it senses weakness, menacing the avatars of the boroughs and threatening to destroy the primary before he can wake from his stupor.

158 

D. B. SHAW

Urban Fantastic The City We Became then can best be described as urban fantasy. Aside from the fact that the text makes passing references to the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, it is not primarily concerned with scientific ideas, nor does it conform to the literary structure of extrapolation. Its conceptual framework is more readily understood as emerging from an engagement with what, in the early twentieth century, Christopher Caudwell called ‘the crisis of physics’ which forced scientists to ‘discuss concepts … which had hitherto been excluded from science as philosophical questions’, rather than any accepted scientific ‘truth’ (Caudwell 2017, p.  20). The crisis was precipitated both by the findings of quantum mechanics, famously dismissed by Einstein as ‘spooky action at a distance’, and the effects of the new physics in the social sphere. The implications of a non-mechanistic universe, Caudwell argued, were a threat to bourgeois society because they threatened ‘the cleavage of subject and object which results from the special conditions of bourgeois economy’ (p.  57). Capitalism absolutely requires an objective and manipulable reality, thus ‘[I]deology in bourgeois society becomes distorted to a mere symbol or code-word for reality’ (p.  65). This is the reality that is demonstrably threatened by a science in which ‘the [quantum] particle becomes a localization of probability waves’ (p.  188). Although these arguments are familiar as fundamental to much of post-structuralist philosophy, I have introduced Caudwell here because his emphasis on the relationship between social structures and scientific ideas in the early days of the new physics (his book was first published in 1939) helps to expose the ideas which have produced the distinction between sf and fantasy literature. As Adam Roberts has pointed out, Darko Suvin’s well-known and generally accepted (at least until recently) 1972 definition of sf as requiring the presence of both ‘estrangement’ and ‘cognition’ includes the instruction that the premises of the story ‘must be possible, by which he means it must reflect the constraints of science’ (Roberts 2000, p. 8). By contrast then, fantasy worlds are impossible or at least are uninterested in scientific realism and what it implies for the limits of the imagination. Writing in 1981, Rosemary Jackson labelled fantasy The Literature of Subversion. ‘[U]nlike science fiction’, she writes, ‘it has little interest in ideas. Instead, it moves into, or opens up, a space without/outside cultural order’. The spaces of fantasy are what lurk ‘behind the visible, behind the image, introducing dark areas from which anything can emerge’ (Jackson 1981, p. 43).

8  THE CITY WE BECAME: N. K. JEMISIN AND POSTHUMAN URBANISM 

159

Although, as my chapters so far have demonstrated, sf can and does subvert cultural order and, as Mark Bould points out, ‘has long been allied with Marxist, feminist and queer theory, and increasingly with critical race studies’ (Bould 2009, p. 2), it is only recently that a shift has occurred in which its separation from fantasy literature has been questioned. This was explicitly argued for the first time by author of the ‘The Weird’ (VanderMeer and VanderMeer, 2011), China Miéville. In essays published in 2009 and 2011, he echoed Caudwell in making the case for understanding extrapolation as based on ‘capitalist modernity’s ideologically projected self justification’; in short ‘capitalist science’s bullshit about itself’ (Miéville 2009, p. 239). What Miéville’s critique and, indeed, his fiction makes clear is that imagining ‘dark areas from which anything can emerge’ provides for a significant challenge to the bullshit which establishes the boundaries of scientific modernity. Indeed, and as Jackson claims, this has perhaps always been the challenge of fantasy and also the reason for the hegemony of extrapolative sf. Fantasy was the populist other, closer to myth and fable and somehow less serious in its disregard for extrapolation. Miéville’s argument is that both sf and fantasy are ‘articulations of alterity’ and it is their ‘unreality function’ (p. 244. Emphasis in original) which we should see as important, rather than how closely the text extrapolates from any commonly accepted description of reality. Furthermore, as I have suggested elsewhere,2 Miéville helps to distinguish a particular genre of contemporary urban fantasy in which the city itself and the forms of subjectivation to which it gives rise are interrogated. This, I would argue, is what animates the text of The City We Became. The profiles of the central characters are constructed out of the sociology of the boroughs that they represent. They are racially diverse, of different ages, genders and sexual orientations but all refer to the city as what ultimately defines them. Manny is young, good-looking and mixed race; ‘[g]eneric all-American boy (non-white version)’ (Jemisin 2020, p. 31). He has come to New York to start a new life and a job is waiting for him but ‘somewhere in the tunnel to Penn Station’ (p. 23), he forgets his own name. In fact, he realises that he knows nothing about himself other than that his new name is Manhattan. He is saved from his first encounter with ‘The Enemy’ (p. 158) by Brooklyn who thirty years ago was a celebrated DJ but who now is a mother working for the city council (p. 81). They encounter Queens for the first time ‘in the other world’ (p. 85) where they sense that she is in danger. As they find each other, they grow in strength but they are too late to help Bronca who faces down the Woman in White

160 

D. B. SHAW

alone. She is the first to realise that ‘[t]hey need each other, working together, to amplify the power and reduce resistance and do other stuff for which there are no words’. And they ‘need the primary avatar to focus all of it’ (p. 297). What they also need is Staten Island but its avatar, Aislyn Houlihan, despite feeling the pull of their desire is unable to take the ferry to seek them out. ‘If she gets on this boat’, she asks herself, ‘will she come back wrong?’ (p. 90. Emphasis in original). What makes her vulnerable to the Woman in White is her uncertainty about who she is and her devotion to her abusive father whose racism and misogyny infect her thoughts and amplify her fear. ‘“You’re a good girl, Aislyn”’, he tells her, ‘“and the city isn’t a place for good people. What have I always told you?”’ (p. 94). Aislyn is the only white-skinned avatar but is nevertheless Irish and thus equally representative of a minority ethnicity. She describes her mother, Kendra, as ‘Black Irish’ (p. 267), a description applied to Irish people with jet black hair, blue or green eyes and white skin. The racial heritage of Black Irish peoples is largely unknown but according to the Irish Central newsletter, ‘the term “Black Irish” has emerged in recent times as a virtual badge of honor among some descendants of immigrants’ to Ireland.3 Indeed, when Aislyn observes that ‘Black Irish holds the years well’ (p. 266) in reference to Kendra’s youthful appearance, there is a sense that she is repeating something that her father has told her and that she has accepted as truth, in the same way that she has accepted that what he calls ‘“[t]hese people”’, referring to ‘“immigrants”’ (p. 92. Emphasis in original) are a danger that she must avoid. However, in the context of US history, the term ‘Black Irish’ is also a reminder that Celtic Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century were deemed to be ‘degraded “hybrid” whites. … indexed through their presumed kinship with Africans’ (Strings 2020, p. 674), thus enabling Ango-Saxon whites to claim superior status. Thus what Jemisin achieves here is to draw attention to the way that racial divisions are historically naturalised. In this way, the text both problematises the idea of racial distinction and emphasises the hypocrisy of white supremacy. There is a sense, throughout, that the birth of New York heralds the emergence of racial hybridity as a defining characteristic of the city; the point at which the racial mix is too integrated for the old divisions to be sustained. This is why the primary avatar is a ‘slender young dark-skinned Black man’ (Jemisin 2020, p. 230), Brooklyn is ‘a middle-toned Black woman’ (p. 73) and Bronca is ‘a big brown-skinned Indian with a dyke cut’ (p.  159). Queens is Padmini Prakash, a young South Asian graduate student who

8  THE CITY WE BECAME: N. K. JEMISIN AND POSTHUMAN URBANISM 

161

works on Wall Street, and Manny ‘could be anything’ (p.  290). The Enemy, in contrast, is a monstrous whiteness; an insidious infection that is visible to the avatars as a flare of tendrils ‘dozens of them, anemoneic and enormous’ (p.  41) or appendages, very like antennae (p.  62) that are briefly visible jutting from the bodies of infected citizens. Aislyn sees something ‘like a fern frond, or a very long petal from an exotic flower … so white it looks translucent’ (p. 106) attached to the door of the ferry station during her first encounter with the Woman in White. Elsewhere the Enemy manifests as something close to marine life, such as in Mrs. Yu’s pool where it is ‘grayish white … mottled and …. scarred, because it is skin and not plastic or earth’ (p.  177). It gains in strength where it encounters the standardised global brands that mark the urban terrain with ubiquitous storefronts. When Bronca, Broolkyn and Queens drive frantically across the city in a final attempt to contact Staten Island, branches of Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts grow white tendrils like the fur of ‘some kind of animal’ (p. 381) and ‘actively chase … [them] down the street’ (p. 383). The avatars can see the Enemy because they are attuned to the parallel city where their proprioception encompasses whole neighbourhoods and the Enemy is equally ‘here, but also in that other place where the sky is wild and people are a never-thought’ (p. 38). It is the people who have no inkling of the other place, who have no perception of the possibility of other worlds, who are the most easily recruited to the Enemy’s designs. Cops, in particular, are ‘harbingers of the enemy’ (p.  15). And, on FDR drive, Manny experiences the way in which it is attracted by the speed of newer, faster cars which are marked by infestations of white tendrils. ‘Most are growing from the wheels … as if the cars have rolled over something noxious that’s allowed a kind of metaphysically opportunistic infection at the site of the damage’ (p. 40). The Enemy then, is a parasite, representing both ‘predatory capitalism’ (p. 37) and whiteness ‘as a “parasitic” condition, an ideology that survives by creating a menacing racial other upon which it can assert sovereignty’ (Eshun 2022, p. 24). And, like a parasite, it adapts to provide itself with the most favourable conditions for propagation. The tendrils are its most ubiquitous form but, aside from the horror that infects Mrs. Yu’s pool, it also appears as something ‘untinted white and ghostly’ in Brooklyn’s backyard, which resolves into ‘something like a three-foot-wide spider’ with ‘only four legs’: ‘[a]n eldritch daddy longlegs, brought to you by the letter X’ (Jemisin 2020, p.  218). When it appears as the Woman in White, her form is changeable and often uncanny.

162 

D. B. SHAW

In the back of Aislyn’s car she appears fleetingly as ‘a long, thick tongue of featureless white substance’ (p. 332) which quickly resolves into ‘the visual opposite of everything Aislyn has been taught to fear’. Although Aislyn now has proof that the Woman’s true form could actually ‘be anyone or anything’, nevertheless she thinks ‘Well, she looks all right’ (p.  333). Consequently, it is in Staten Island, the New York borough that voted twice for Donald Trump, where the Enemy is able to most securely establish itself and where Aislyn encounters it both as the Woman in White and as ‘white towerlike things’ which the Woman describes as ‘adapters’ (pp. 335 & 336). However, it is Bronca that demands to know what the Enemy is. ‘My name is R’lyeh’ is the reply, ‘[c]an you say it?’ (p. 391).

The Call of Lovecraft It is not difficult to see why Jemisin would appropriate H. P. Lovecraft’s literary expression of his abject fear of racial difference as a suitable monster to menace her mixed-race protagonists. In ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (1928) in which the city of R’lyeh makes its first appearance, it is persons of mixed race who are most susceptible to the ‘call’, as are artists and anyone, it seems, who dares to imagine a world not strictly ordered according to rational principles. R’lyeh has a problem with Euclidean geometry. Lovecraft describes it as ‘loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours’ (Lovecraft 2012, p. 48). The geometry is ‘all wrong’ (p. 38), is ‘nothing of this or of any sane planet’ (p. 47) and, in a passage that suggests that non-Euclidean geometry can be actively dangerous, a sailor is swallowed by ‘an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse’ (p. 50). And so, in The City We Became, the Woman in White brings with her things that ‘shouldn’t be there’ and fragments of an alien geometry. In the gallery at the Bronx Art Center, a crack appears revealing a different coloured ceiling that ‘is much farther away than it should be’ (Jemisin 2020, p.  252) and, when the Woman appears in the back of Aislyn’s car, she loses sight of the road in her rearview mirror which is replaced by an ‘empty shadowed room’ (p. 337). However, while Lovecraft menaces his readers with portents of a coming apocalypse with origins beyond the borders of the US and from under the sea, Jemisin stages the coming of Cthulhu in the heart of New York City in the twenty-first century, as if the monster has lain in wait for

8  THE CITY WE BECAME: N. K. JEMISIN AND POSTHUMAN URBANISM 

163

history to furnish it with the optimal conditions. There are hints that it utilises the facility of digital networks, but it is having difficulty adapting. Its presence is often heralded by a sound described as ‘da dump’ (p. 257. Emphasis in original), ‘a low, gulping, almost musical double reverberation’, familiar as the sound of device disconnection in the days of Windows 10. Similarly, during her conversation with Bronca, Stall Woman’s voice briefly sounds ‘[l]ike the stutter of an audio file that’s corrupted or otherwise incompatible with whatever system it’s trying to run on’ (p. 123) and she describes the white tendrils to Aislyn as like ‘camera[s] … or … microphone[s]’ (p. 107). At the same time, the Enemy is often accompanied by the smell of its origins, ‘Trimethylamine oxide … The scent of the deep, cold, crushing ocean depths’ (p. 44. Emphasis in original) and Manny compares its manifestation in the form of a mass of white tendrils to ‘some haunting, bioluminiscent deep-sea organism dragged to the surface’ (p. 46). This then is a Lovecraftian horror repurposed to stand for the way that networked global capital attempts to make over the city in its own image. What is ‘dragged to the surface’ in The City We Became is the entwined histories of capital and colonialism and their expression in contemporary contexts. The Woman in White’s plan is to ‘bring [R’lyeh] into this world and use it to begin erasing this universe and all of its antecedents and offshoots’ (p.  406) and her strategy is land appropriation and culture war fought on the terrain of conceptual art. In the guise of the ‘Better New York Foundation’, the Enemy forces a compulsory purchase of two houses owned by Brooklyn’s family (p. 226). Later, the Woman in White representing the same foundation makes Bronca an offer of ‘[t]wenty-three million dollars’ of unrestricted funds, enough to keep the struggling Bronx Art Center ‘running at peak for years’ (p.  237) in exchange for exhibiting three paintings by a group that call themselves the ‘Alt Artistes’ (p. 153). Bronca refuses because she has seen the work: ‘It’s racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, homophobic, probably some other shit she isn’t catching at first glance. But it’s also terrible’ (p. 141). However there is one painting that is ‘the real deal’. This is a street scene ‘or the suggestion of one’: Chinatown. It’s a night scene, and a rainy one; there’s a sheen of colors like wet road pavement. The figures are barely more than ink-swirls, faceless and indistinct, but … Bronca frowns. There’s something about them. They are dirty, these figures—clad in drab non-fashion, with sleeves rolled up to show

164 

D. B. SHAW

blackened hands and shoes smeared with grime and aprons stained with blood and less identifiable body fluids. They loom, these creatures, for whom the word people is a laughable misnomer. And as a haze in the air suggests the smell of wet garbage tangled with evening mist, Bronca can almost hear their chatter. (p. 145)

The painting is called ‘Dangerous Mental Machines’ and is a direct reference to one of Lovecraft’s letters, written to Frank Belknap Long in 1926. Referring to Chinatown, he wrote: ‘There is here a grave and mighty problem beside which the negro problem is a jest—for in this case we have to deal not with childlike half-gorillas, but with yellow, soulless enemies whose repulsive carcasses house dangerous mental machines warped culturelessly in the single direction of material gain at any cost’ (Clark 2014). Unlike the other paintings, which Bronca dismisses as ‘caricatures of art—the kind of thing that people who hate fine art think constitutes the bleeding edge of the field’ (Jemisin 2020, p. 145), this one is seductive; a gateway to a universe in which Lovecraft’s hateful visions are made manifest. Bronca identifies it as ‘an attack’ (p. 147); an attempt to destroy what New York is becoming through the imposition of a different conceptual reality. The Bronx Art Center houses work by an unknown graffiti artist, photographed and collected by Bronca, that ‘is the work of another of her people. Another of her, part of New York’ (p. 229). The artist is, she discovers later, the missing avatar of the city, the young man who embodies New York in its entirety, and one of the paintings is a clue to where he can be found. It is these works that are a threat to the Enemy and what it needs to replace or destroy. Bronca confronts the Woman in White in the other place and she retreats, but the Enemy has already joined the culture wars on the side of the Alt-Right, using social media to promote the Alt Artistes as ‘victims of a conspiracy by uppity women “of color” and questionable sexuality to promote their own indisputably inferior art over the work of skilled, deserving artists who just happen to be cis-het white men’ (p.  245). As Veneza, Bronca’s associate (who later turns out to be the avatar of New Jersey) puts it: ‘“Skippy the tentacle monster sends her little bigot fuckbois to harass you on the internet? Like, is that how Lovecraftian horror works now…?”’ (p. 262). The implicit association between ‘Lovecraftian horror’ and the contemporary culture wars here is instructive. Lovecraft’s stories are, if nothing else, an exercise in abjection. As César Guarde Paz has pointed out, his

8  THE CITY WE BECAME: N. K. JEMISIN AND POSTHUMAN URBANISM 

165

fear of miscegenation ‘understood as a process of tempering and eventually eradicating the purity of the white race’ (Guarde Paz 2012, p. 21) is a constant subtext to his fiction and seems to be connected with his equally abject fear of modernity. Despite this, as Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock point out in their introduction to The Age of Lovecraft ‘against all odds, Howard Phillips Lovecraft has become a twenty-first-­ century star’ (Sederholm and Weinstock 2016, p. 1), partly because what is referred to as the ‘Chthulu Mythos’ (p.  10) offers a rich symbolic resource for New Materialist philosophies, a discussion of which I will return to later. Equally, and for similar reasons, Lovecraft has been both adopted and adapted by New Weird writers (including Miéville) a genre which, as I have already suggested, is useful for framing the parameters of Jemisin’s invented worlds. However, at the same time, the Mythos offers a myriad of monsters which can be, and have been, appropriated to stand for the real or imagined enemies of adherents of the Alt-Right. Greg Fish, in an article for Rantt Media, suggests that, ‘[i]f anything, the Cthulhu Mythos is with us today precisely because Lovecraft was a bigot’s bigot’. ‘[A]s far as the right is concerned’, he continues, they’re engaged in a life or death battle with existential threats, ones they may no longer see as entirely human anymore, but as monsters hiding under a cloak of humanity’ (Fish 2020). At the same time, the Alt-Right has been particularly skilful at harnessing the largely unregulated power of the Internet and social media to promote racist ideologies. ‘The rise of the alt-right’, according to Jessie Daniels, ‘is both a continuation of a centuries old dimension of racism in the U.S. and part of an emerging media ecosystem powered by algorithms’ (Daniels 2018, p. 62). ‘[I]t is fair to say’, she continues, ‘that White supremacists are succeeding at using media and technology to take their message mainstream’. This, then, is precisely how Lovecraftian horror works now. Jemisin’s protagonists are menaced by a Lovecraftian monstrosity from a parallel universe that manifests (albeit imperfectly) by hacking the digital ecosphere. In true Lovecraftian fashion, it manipulates those most susceptible to its call into performing the rites that enable it to cross into the world of accepted reality. As Daniels points out, the Alt-Right disseminates racism through social media via memes that push the ‘Overton Window’; a strategy that ‘shift[s] the range of the acceptable ideas to discuss’ (p. 64). So, the Alt Artistes’ YouTube video ‘is almost a masterwork of insinuation … The messaging is all there, carefully divorced from specific conclusions or

166 

D. B. SHAW

calls to action, And judging by the comments, their audience is eating the whole thing up’ (Jemisin 2020, pp. 244 & 245). The power that the enemy gains from this is prodigious but the Woman in White makes the mistake of confronting Bronca on her home ground. The Alt Artistes have broken into the Art Center and prepared to set fire to the unknown artist’s work, while the Woman in White has attempted to, again, replace it with a mural inspired by Lovecraftian themes and now, apparently, digitally generated. But she has underestimated Bronca who, in the other place, ‘stands expansive’: She has legs bolted to a million foundations, and arms of a hundred million joints of rebar. The flesh that fills the gaps is the soil where a thousand generations of Bronca’s mothers grew and thrived, which has been invaded and poisoned and built over again and again—but it survives still. Survives strong … So Bronca touches a steel clad toe to the ground, lightly as any dancer. It lands with the pounding force of ten thousand block parties, boom cars, and drum circles’—and sends forth a wave of energy that obliterates everything in its path. Everything that’s not of New York, that is. (p. 259)

Thus, although Lovecraftian mythology strengthens the Enemy and enables its manifestations, the implication here is that there are other stories; other constructed realities which can be appropriated as weapons against it. So, Bronca confronts the Woman in White drawing on the history of her Lenape ancestry allied with the force of Bronx street culture. Similarly, when Manny first encounters the Enemy, it is at the site of the Shorakkopoch rock, the monument to the place where the leader of the Canarsee reputedly sold Manhattan to the Dutch. Realising that ‘the rock is meaningful’ (p. 69), he and his roommate fight their way through a forest of white tendrils by throwing money and credit cards. Elsewhere, Manny is aided by an old-fashioned yellow New York taxi, ‘like a cab out of an old movie: smooth and bulbous and huge, with a black-and-white checkered strip along its near flank’ (p. 35) and, in the battle to save the primary, he channels King Kong, ‘[a]nd as black fur and shimmering city-­ power sheaths Manny’s limbs’, he thinks, ‘I’m really going to have to watch some better movies about New York’ (p. 409). These then are ‘construct[s]’; mythologies drawn from written history and popular culture which the avatars are able to ‘weaponize in a crisis’ (p. 354). Jemisin thus gives a new meaning to the idea of culture wars,

8  THE CITY WE BECAME: N. K. JEMISIN AND POSTHUMAN URBANISM 

167

appropriating the concept to stand for the power of stories to construct the meaning of place, as well as for the mutually defining relationship between different bodies and the objects with which they share the world. Of crucial significance here is the Bronx Art Center itself. It is a problem for the Enemy and a site of resistance because of what it represents; a community space where Bronca has given a home to ‘keyholders … artists in residence [who] are literal manifestations of the term’ … kids kicked out by their families for being queer or neuroatypical or saying no, adults priced out of rooms of one’s own’ (p.  152). Thus, like the other constructs that the avatars draw on to channel the power of the city, it represents an idea that can be adapted as a resistant counter-force. It is also, of course, the space where the power of the primary avatar’s art is concentrated; where the Enemy must attempt to replace it, rather than merely destroy it.

Degenerate Art Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) was an exhibition mounted by the Nazis in Munich in 1937, featuring work by artists that are now well known like Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian, among many others. An exhibition of the ‘new’ German art, approved by Hitler, was mounted in a building nearby with the idea that visitors would view both and accede to the superiority of the Nazi aesthetic. To help them, the ‘degenerate’ art was ‘displayed in a mad jumble’ and ‘furnished with inciting titles, explanations or filthy jokes’ (Grunberger 1974, p.  536). For the Nazis, art that challenged the classical tradition and evoked a disordered universe was an abomination and what is interesting about Entartete Kunst is that they found it sufficiently threatening to mount a public campaign to discredit it. They dealt with the problem of German Expressionism by either dismissing it as ‘Jewish’ art or claiming that it was the product of Jewish patronage. As Neil Levi has pointed out, they were motivated less by aesthetic considerations and more by the imperative to ‘exclude Jews from German culture without exception’ (Levi 1998, p. 48). A chillingly similar Kulturkampf was mounted by the American New Right in the early 1990s via an attack on the National Endowment for the Arts and its funding of the explicitly queer photography of Robert Mapplethorpe. John Frohnmayer, chairman of the NEA between 1989 and 1992, drew explicit parallels with Entartete Kunst, referring to a 1991

168 

D. B. SHAW

recreation of the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition as ‘disquieting because the techniques of its creators were clearly parallel to those of the NEA’s critics’ (Fischer and Madureira 1994, p.  38). Equally, in a paper published in 1994, Barbara Fischer and Luís Madureira pointed to significant correspondences between the language used by the Nazis to assert the degeneracy of modernist art and ‘[t]he link between the New Right’s aesthetics and its attacks on the politics of identity’ (p. 55). This was a culture war, as they pointed out, central to the New Right’s ‘struggle for hegemony in the United States’ (p. 40). Fischer and Madureira’s point is not only that the American New Right had ostensibly appropriated Nazi tactics by attacking contemporary art but that, in doing so, they had successfully shifted the Overton window. ‘The cultural hegemony which the New Right has so successfully created for itself’, they state, ‘has survived the “art wars” intact’. And they conclude, chillingly: ‘Its site remains open and available for future investment’ (p.  56). Unsurprisingly then, when President Trump took office in 2016, entirely defunding the NEA was a major item in his budget proposal and the Mapplethorpe controversy was again referred to alongside Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, another shibboleth of the New Right in the 1980s (Andrews 2017). Equally unsurprising is the fact that Lovecraft too was hostile to modernist visual art but understood, similarly, how it could be ‘repurposed as a resource for invoking the outside’ (Fisher 2016, p. 23). So, in The City We Became, the twenty-three million dollars that the Woman in White’s ‘Better New York’ foundation offers to the Bronx Art Center to display the work of the Alt Artistes is not so much a bribe as an investment in its continued existence as a resource for perpetuating the discourse of the art wars; for ‘invoking the outside’ as an abject other which is constantly available to trigger the outrage on which the Enemy thrives and which fuels its existence. When the tactic fails, the Enemy simply engulfs the entire building, raising an eighty-feet high tower of white tendrils ‘which solidify together into a single mass’ (Jemisin 2020, p. 369).

Parasitic Urbanism As Edward Soja observed in Postmetropolis, published at the turn of the twenty-first century, although capitalism creates ‘a specific urban geography’ designed to ‘facilitate the accumulation process’ (Soja 2000, p. 99) the inflexibility of urban space in the face of rapid change has traditionally posed significant problems for urbanists concerned with adapting the city

8  THE CITY WE BECAME: N. K. JEMISIN AND POSTHUMAN URBANISM 

169

to changing market conditions. The solution, identified by Keller Easterling, fourteen years later, was what she called ‘the zone’ which ‘[w]hile banishing many of the circumstantial frictions of ubanity … transforms itself into a model for the metropolis that welcomes every conceivable residential, business or cultural program’ (Easterling 2014, p.  42). The result is that buildings are ‘reproducible products set within similar urban arrangements … repeatable phenomena engineered around logistics and the bottom line’ (pp. 12–13). This then is a distinctive feature of what Andy Merrifield calls ‘parasitic urbanism’ in which ‘[w]orld cities are giant arenas where the most rabid activity is the activity of rapidly extorting land rent, of making land pay anyway it can’ (Merrifield 2014, p.111). It is clear to see then that in The City We Became, the Woman in White and the Better New York Foundation are quintessentially characteristic of parasitic urbanism. As Bronca notes, ‘[t]hey’re destroying everything that makes New  York what it is, replacing it with generic bullshit’ (Jemisin 2020, p.  357). This is why they can control the generic storefronts of global capitalism. It is also why the cars on FDR drive that are most infested with the white tendrils are not only newer but are more likely to be digitally connected. It is digitalisation, in fact, that has made parasitic urbanism possible, producing what Easterling calls ‘[i]nfrastructure space, with the power and currency of software … an operating system for shaping the city’ (Easterling 2014, p. 13). Nevertheless, as I have indicated there are signs that R’lyeh is struggling to materialise in New York. At the Bronx Art Center, the Woman in White appears with ‘the kind of angular, high-boned face that Bronca has only ever seen before on high-fashion models’ but ‘[t]his one is even more modelly than most, however—in a way that pushes her past beautiful and into uncanny valley territory’ (Jemisin 2020, p. 253). Later, ‘her mouth opens very wide … showing all her teeth’ (p. 254). In Staten Island she looks different again, seeming to forget to provide herself with some hair when she materialises in the back of Aislyn’s car (p. 331). The impression is that she is structuring herself out of available pixellated images; imperfectly manifesting through channels somewhat inimicable to her form. In Aislyn’s car she seems to struggle, also, with gravity and when Bronca first meets her ‘she … wavers, sort of. There is a heat haze flicker, a channel change interstitial instant’ and her shadow seems to contract ‘for one fleeting glimpse—as if it were much, much bigger a moment before’ (p. 238). Elsewhere, she describes her ‘adapters’ as ‘guide lines’ that ‘[e]ncourage preexisting inclinations’ (p. 331) which she leaves in places where the conditions are right. The implication is that this is the operating system

170 

D. B. SHAW

through which the Enemy will shape the city; through which it is already attempting to craft it to its own design but that, as yet, it is encountering some obstacles. The city of R’lyeh, then, is an allegory for parasitic urbanism; a Lovecraftian horror from a universe outside of time, which is given purchase in New York through a developing culture of intolerance and division, enabled by the encroach of infrastructure space. As James Kneale has pointed out, Lovecraft’s fiction, and his writing style in particular, lends itself to the contemporary world in that it is concerned with creating what he calls ‘weird geographies’; slices of space and time that are incommensurate with everyday reality but which are nevertheless there and which generally involve ‘mediating technologies’ (Kneale 2016, p. 46). This applies to the various artefacts, ancient tomes and physical anomalies which litter his fiction as well as the technologies of modernity that he also renders uncanny and ‘haunted’. But, as Kneale also points out, it can apply equally to ‘the ancient, uneven, and shifting flows of people, things, and ideas popularly known as “globalization”’ (p. 52); the driver and facilitator of infrastructure space. In 2012, Graham Harman, the contemporary philosopher most closely associated with what is generally known as ‘speculative realism’ published a book on Lovecraft which reintroduced him to the world of philosophy, if not literary criticism. Harman’s argument was that Lovecraft’s particular style ‘generates a gap between reality and its accessibility to us’ (Harman 2012, p. 28). This is important, according to Harman, because, if he were able to describe the horrors that he envisioned, in all their gory detail, they would still be very much of this world, at least as it is described in language. Lovecraft’s particular skill, Harman argues, is to allude to something whose properties exist in a world that exceeds the parameters of what is knowable or that can be articulated in familiar terms. What Harman believed Lovecraft was aware of was that ‘[r]eality itself is weird because reality itself is incommensurable with any attempt to represent or measure it’ (p. 51). Jemisin, however, appears to take issue with the tenets of speculative realism or atleast with Harman’s reading of Lovecraft. Chapter 7, for instance, introduces Padmini Prakash, avatar of Queens and maths prodigy, while she is musing on a Tumblr debate about just how threatening R’lyeh’s non-Euclidean geometry could possibly be and which had concluded that ‘Lovecraft was probably just scared of math’ (Jemisin 2020, p. 172). Aislyn, however, is happy to take The Horror at Red Hook literally

8  THE CITY WE BECAME: N. K. JEMISIN AND POSTHUMAN URBANISM 

171

because it sounds ‘pretty accurate to how her father describes Brooklyn’ (p. 341). As Kneale points out, Lovecraft’s narrators are generally ‘gullible rationalists’ (Kneale 2016, p.  50) but, aside from Aislyn, Jemisin’s are anything but. When the other avatars encounter challenges to their dominant reality, they react with outrage or frustration, rather than fear. Bronca’s response to Stall Woman’s threats, for instance, is simply ‘“Eat a bag of dicks”’ (Jemisin 2020, p. 125) and Brooklyn fights the X-monsters with sheer anger: ‘This is her floor. Her house, her family, her city, and oh how dare these fucking things invade it—’ (p. 223). In other words, Jemisin is making the point that Lovecraftian horrors are only such for those who, like Aislyn and Lovecraft’s narrators, cling to the myth of a human-centred, rational world; one which establishes itself on the basis of its difference from the outside and can therefore also be threatened by it. Jemisin’s other avatars as, variously, gender non-­ conforming, racially and sexually marginalised survivors are both comfortable inhabitants of both worlds and, it is implied, veterans of battles against monsters far worse than anything Lovecraft could dream up. They are thus positioned as antagonists to more traditional heroes of sf and fantasy who, like Lovecraft’s narrators, function to clarify the distinction between the familiar world of the reader and the fantastic world of the text. Jemisin’s protagonists are monsters themselves and as such are avatars, also, for the possibilities of marginalised and hybridised identities and, indeed, for their necessity as active agents in any meaningful urban future. As I have suggested elsewhere (Shaw 2018), while urban subjects take their meaning from the flows that structure the maps of urban life urban bodies are realised at the level of the street, in negotiations with the architecture of the everyday and in dialogue with urban institutions and the way that they construct the past, present and, crucially, the future. What I call posthuman urbanism describes an urban politics attuned to monstrosity; to the power of what is produced at the margins of urban social structures and in what I call dark space. This describes the architectural anomalies which gentrification attempts to hide, the failed experiments of neoliberal capitalism which survive long enough to attract forms of parasitical life, the alter-geographies of urban space that emerge from the wanderings of vagabonds and the practices of artists who sculpt the city according to ideas drawn from urban myth. Dark space is potential; space that is overlooked or abandoned or in some way able to exist in a different rhythm to the highly surveilled conformity of the late capitalist city. In The City We Became, dark space is exemplified by the Bronx Art Center which

172 

D. B. SHAW

provides housing for bodies that have slipped the net of social regulation while providing space for creative play. As the text makes clear, it exists in a form of managed precarity, on the margins of the legal structures that constrain charitable foundations and it is also, of course, where Bronca collects the work of the primary avatar who is painting the city so that it can breathe (pp. 4–5). Equally, it is in the dark space of the abandoned City Hall subway station that the primary avatar lies sleeping and it is here that the avatars, led by Manhattan and aided by Jersey City, fight the Enemy to join their strength to his. R’lyeh is forced to retreat but not before she has secured her hold on Staten Island which ‘sits in a deep well of gloom’ (p. 433). While, in previous chapters, I have suggested that the texts that I have examined can no longer be read as sf, The City We Became is part of a genre that I believe marks the end of science fiction as we have known it. Certainly the hopeful extrapolation of the early twentieth century now seems particularly naïve and I think the rise of the new weird marks the point at which the limitations of genre fiction are being both recognised and challenged. What Jemisin’s writing exemplifies is a productive hybrid which brings together urban realism and fantasy to explore the possibilities of what a recent exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London called the ‘Black Fantastic’ (Eshun 2022). As the introduction to the catalogue suggests, this includes works of speculative fiction ‘that draw from history and myth to conjure new visions of African diasporic culture and identity’, that are ‘non mimetic in form’, that challenge dominant Western notions of what constitutes reality and that: Begin … from an understanding of race as a socially constructed fiction rather than a scientific truth, albeit one that maintains a determining sway over popular perceptions of the world. It also operates with a scepticism about Western narratives of progress and modernity, predicated as they are on the historical subjugation of people of colour. (Eshun 2022, p. 10)

This is an apt description, not only of Jemisin’s style and orientation, but also of the way in which her characters take for granted, not only a world in which different realities can be inhabited simultaneously but one in which the fight for the city is collectively their fight. Bronca, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Veneza, as the text makes clear, do not particularly like each other but they recognise their joint investment in the future of the city as a space where new ontological freedoms are possible; where

8  THE CITY WE BECAME: N. K. JEMISIN AND POSTHUMAN URBANISM 

173

a new urban subject is emerging, less invested in racial origins and more attuned to the myths that construct what I have called elsewhere ‘the symbolic geography of imagineered urbanism’ (Shaw 2018, p.  183). This includes the stories of Bronca’s Lenape origins, the backbeat that allows Brooklyn to turn ‘the memory of an entire catalog of musical history’ (Jemisin 2020, p.  222) into a weapon, the equations describing fluid mechanics that allow Padmini to control the plumbing of Mrs. Yu’s swimming pool (pp.  178–9) and the popular culture constructs that Manny employs against the enemy because they are all he knows of New York. Manny ‘came to New York because he no longer wanted to be what he was’ (p. 206) but does not yet know what he will be. This kind of radical openness, the text seems to suggest, is what will stand against the forces that require sameness and conformity in order to control what the city will become. The betrayal of Staten Island is, in contrast, founded in fear of change which is, ultimately, a fear of difference. It is this, Jemisin makes very clear, which threatens the future of New York. Finally, the slim, homeless queer young black man who is the avatar of the united city appears to be deliberately written to evoke the New York graffiti artists of the 1980s. The most well known is probably Jean-Michel Basquiat but Jemisin’s nameless character who ‘will embody a city of millions’ (p. 9) more closely suggests Rammellzee who ‘was described more often as alien than human’ (Gotthardt 2018). According to Hua Hsu, he ‘believed that his time in the train yards and the tunnels of New York gave him a vision for how to destroy and rebuild our world’ (Hsu 2018). Rammellzee described his personal philosophy as ‘Gothic Futurism’, in which ‘the alphabet revolts against being institutionalized, locked into the system that is magnetized to our fridge doors’ (Tompkins 2012), also described by Hsu as a ‘mashup of quantum physics and “slanguage,” [which] made sense as an outsider’s survival strategy’. Hsu suggests that the work of Rammellzee and his fellow graffiti artists was what inspired the sociologists Kelling and Wilson (1982) to write the essay that would inspire the ‘broken windows’ policy in the 1990s which criminalised street art in the name of ‘preserving the appearance of calm, orderly neighborhoods [in order to] foster peace and civility’ (Hsu 2018). When the policy began to make life too difficult for graffiti, Rammellzee responded by walking the streets in elaborate costumes that he called ‘Garbage Gods’. Ultimately, like the unnamed avatar of New York in The City We Became, who Paolo describes as ‘the catalyst, whether of strength or destruction’ (Jemisin 2020, p. 6), his art was brought into the gallery. It is art that, like

174 

D. B. SHAW

Jemisin’s fiction, and in accordance with the Black fantastic ‘finds productive tension in the to and fro between the everyday and the extraordinary’ (Eshun 2022, pp. 11 & 12). It is the catalyst, I would suggest, that produces change in the everyday for those who are attuned to the dark space of the city and the possibilities it harbours for becoming extraordinary.

Notes 1. See Shaw (2021). 2. See Shaw (2013, pp. 778–791). 3. See Irish Central, 18 March 2022. https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/ history/who-­were-­the-­black-­irish.

References Acuto, Michele. 2020. COVID-19: Lessons for an urban(izing) world. One Earth, 16 April. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2020.04.004. Andrews, Travis M. 2017. Behind the right’s loathing of the NEA: Two ‘despicable’ exhibits almost 30 years ago. Washington Post, 20 March. https://www. w a s h i n g t o n p o s t . c o m / n e w s / m o r n i n g -­m i x / w p / 2 0 1 7 / 0 3 / 2 0 / behind-­t he-­l oathing-­o f-­t he-­n ational-­e ndowment-­f or-­t he-­a rts-­a -­p air-­o f-­ despicable-­exhibits-­almost-­30-­years-­ago/ Bould, Mark. 2009. Introduction: Rough guide to a lonely planet, from nemo to neo. In Red planets: Marxism & Science Fiction, ed. Mark Bould and China Miéville. London: Pluto Press. Caudwell, Christopher. 2017. The crisis in physics. London & New York: Verso. Clark, Phenderson Djeli. 2014. The ‘N’ word through the ages: The madness of HP Lovecraft. Media Diversified, 24 May. https://mediadiversified. org/2014/05/24/the-­n -­w ord-­t hrough-­t he-­a ges-­t he-­m adness-­o f-­ hp-­lovecraft/ Daniels, Jessie. 2018. The algorithmic rise of the “alt right”. Contexts 17 (1). https://doi.org/10.1177/1536504218766547 Easterling, Keller. 2014. Extrastatecraft: The power of infrastructure space. London & New York: Verso. Eshun, Ekow. 2022. In the Black Fantastic. London: Thames and Hudson. Fischer, Barbara, and Luis Madureira. 1994. ‘The barbarism of representation’: The Nazi critique of modern art and the American new Right’s kulturkampf. Patterns of Prejudice 28 (3 & 4): 37–56. Fish, Greg. 2020. Right-wing conspiracy theories are stranger than 20th-century fiction. RanttMedia, 21 May. https://rantt.com/right-­wing-­conspiracy­theories-­hp-­lovecraft

8  THE CITY WE BECAME: N. K. JEMISIN AND POSTHUMAN URBANISM 

175

Fisher, Mark. 2016. The weird and the eerie. London: Repeater. Gotthardt, Alexxa. 2018. How 1980s cult artist Rammellzee mesmerized everyone from Basquiat to the Beastie Boys. Artsy, 26 April. https://www.artsy.net/ ar ticle/ar tsy-­e ditorial-­1 980s-­c ult-­a r tist-­r ammellzee-­m esmerized­basquiat-­beastie-­boys. Grunberger, Richard. 1974. A social history of the third Reich. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. Guarde Paz, César. 2012. Race and war in the Lovecraft mythos. Lovecraft Annual, No. 6. Harman, Graham. 2012. Weird realism: Lovecraft & Philosophy. Winchester, UK & Washington, USA: Zero Books. Hsu, Hua. 2018. The spectacular personal mythology of Rammellzee. The New Yorker, 28 May. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/28/ the-­spectacular-­personal-­mythology-­of-­rammellzee Jackson, Rosemary. 1981. Fantasy: The literature of subversion. London and New York: Methuen. Jemisin, N.K. 2020. The city we became. London: Orbit. Kelling, George L., and James Q. Wilson. 1982. Broken windows: The police and Neighbourhood safety. The Atlantic. March. Kneale, James. 2016. “Ghoulish dialogues”: H. P. Lovecraft’s weird geographies. In The age of Lovecraft, ed. C.H. Sederholm & J.A. Weinstock. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press. Levi, Neil. 1998. “Judge for yourselves!”—The “degenerate art” exhibition as political spectacle. October, Vol. 85, Summer. Lovecraft, H.P. 2012. The call of Cthulhu and other mythos Tales. Santa Fe & San Diego: IDW Publishing. Merrifield, Andy. 2014. The new urban question. London: Pluto Press. Miéville, China. 2009. Cognition as ideology: A dialectic of SF theory. In Red planets: Marxism & Science Fiction, ed. M.  Bould and C.  Miéville. London: Pluto Press. ———. 2011. Afterweird: The efficacy of a worm-eaten dictionary. In The weird: A compendium of strange and dark stories, ed. J. VanderMeer and A. VanderMeer. London: Corvus. Roberts, Adam. 2000. Science fiction. London & New York: Routledge. Saadat, Saeida, Deepak Rawtani, and Chaudhery Mustansar Hussain. 2020. Environmental perspective of COVID-19. Science of The Total Environment, Volume 728, 1 August. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.138870. Sederholm, Carl H., and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. 2016. Introduction: Lovecraft rising. In The age of lovecraft, ed. C.H.  Sederholm and J.A.  Weinstock. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press.

176 

D. B. SHAW

Shaw, Debra Benita. 2013. Strange zones: Science fiction, fantasy and the posthuman city. In City: Analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 17 (6), December, pp. 778–791. ———. 2018. Posthuman urbanism: Mapping bodies in Contemporary City space. London & New York: Rowman & Littlefield International. ———. 2021. Leaving home: Safer spaces beyond the neoliberal family. In After lockdown: Opening up: Psychosocial transformation in the wake of Covid-19, ed. Darren Ellis and Angie Voela. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Soja, Edward W. 2000. Postmetropolis: Critical studies of cities and regions. Malden, MA, Oxford, Melbourne, Berlin: Blackwell. Strings, Sabrina. 2020. Women (re)making whiteness: The sexual exclusion of the fat “black” Irish. Ethnic and Racial Studies 43: 4. https://doi.org/10.108 0/01419870.2019.1609057. Tompkins, Dave. 2012. Period piece: Rammellzee and the end. The Paris Review, 18 April. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/04/18/period-­piece­rammellzee-­and-­the-­end/. VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer, eds. 2011. The weird: A compendium of strange and dark stories. London: Corvus.

Index1

A Abjection, 164 Abortion, 124, 131 Alt-Right, 124, 164, 165 America, 119 American New Right, 167 Amusing Ourselves to Death, 143 Androcentric bias, 139 Androcentric mystique, 99 Androgyny, 93, 100 Ansible, 93, 105 Anthropologist, 95, 96, 98, 109n6 Anthropology, 94, 96, 99 Anti-Semitic, 163 Anti-Semitism, 45 Anxiety, 51, 53, 57, 69, 70, 75, 80, 83, 136 Archaeological fiction, 138, 145 Archaeologist, 138, 139 Archaeology, 136, 138–140, 151, 152, 152n2

Art, 155, 163, 164, 167, 168, 173 Astounding Science Fiction, 67 Atavism, 31 Ataxia, 71 Aunts, 117–121 Author, 137, 139, 150, 151 Avatars, 155, 157, 161, 166, 171, 172 B The Beauty Myth, 73 Behaviourism, 71 Bio-engineering, 86 Biopolitics, 147, 149 Blood, 43, 49, 50, 58 Bourgeois society, 158 Brave New World, 113 Breeding animals, 42, 45 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 91 Brothel, 116, 118

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. B. Shaw, Women, Science and Fiction Revisited, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25171-9

177

178 

INDEX

C Capitalism, 15, 22, 60, 61, 77, 82, 84, 158 Capitalist, 122, 131, 145, 147, 151 Choreography, 84, 86 Christians, 59 City, 155–157, 159–164, 166–173 The City We Became, 8, 9, 155–174 Climate, 92, 94, 103, 106, 108, 109, 109n4 Colonialism, 98, 103, 140, 163 Communication, 100, 105 Community, 20, 22, 28, 30, 36 Consumerism, 121 Contempt, 52, 54, 58 Covid-19, 155 Critical race studies, 159 Cthulhu Mythos, 165 Cybernetics, 71 Cyborg, 5, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 86, 87 D Dance, 84, 86, 87 Darwin, 13, 15, 36n1 Darwinism, 15, 17 Deformity, 141 Dickens, 123 Digital, 163, 165 Disabilities, 85 Discourse, 137, 140, 142, 148 Dystopian, 98, 114, 118, 123, 125 E Ecofeminist, 115, 117 Ekumen, 92–96, 101–103, 105–108 Electrical, 141 Electrical Age, 72 Electricity, 135 Enemy, 157, 159, 161, 163, 164, 166–168, 170, 172

Entartete Kunst, 167 Epistemology, 137–139, 145, 151, 152 Essentialism, 115 Euclidean geometry, 162, 170 Eugenics, 15, 62 Evolution, 104 Evolutionary theory, 13, 15, 23, 31 Extrapolation, 125, 129, 130 F Family, 42, 43, 46, 60, 83 Fandom, 68, 87n1 Fantasy, 4, 9, 109, 122, 131, 139, 158, 159, 171, 172 Far-right, 108 Fascist, 44, 47–53, 55, 58, 60 Fascist state, 44, 55 Father, 75–83, 96, 97, 99 Femininity, 121, 128, 136, 142, 151 Feminism, 1, 41, 45, 60, 61, 113, 126, 127, 129 Feminist, 42, 44, 45, 48, 61, 113, 115–117, 122, 124, 126, 131, 159 Foretelling, 105 Frankenstein, 2–4, 75, 76, 78–80, 82, 84, 116 Freikorpsmen, 47, 48, 54 Freud, Sigmund, 53, 56, 63n11 Fundamentalism, 113, 115 Future, 113, 116, 117, 124, 125, 128, 129, 131, 168, 171, 172 G Gender, 41, 42, 46, 59, 61, 72, 77, 81–84, 87, 91, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100, 103, 105–109, 115, 120, 124, 127, 129, 130, 136–140, 142–144, 147, 149–151, 171

 INDEX 

179

Genocide, 130 German Empire, 42, 46, 47, 59 Gethenians, 92, 93, 95, 99, 100, 102, 104, 106, 108, 109 Gilead, 116, 117, 119–125, 128–132 Gileadean, 117, 118, 123, 124 Glitter, 141, 146, 149 Global capital, 163 Gothic Futurism, 173 Graffiti, 164, 173 Guilt, 51–53, 58

J Jewish, 144, 146, 150, 167 Jezebel’s, 118–121

H Handmaids, 113, 114, 118, 119, 131 The Handmaid’s Tale, 6, 8, 113–132 Herland, 4, 6, 10, 13–36, 37n7, 121 Hero, see Newbolt Man History, 43, 48, 58, 115, 117, 118, 123–125, 131, 136, 137, 140 Hitler, Adolf, 42–47, 49, 57–59, 62n5, 63n8, 63n9, 167 Hitler Bible, 43, 46, 58 Homelessness, 155 Housewife, 72, 73 Human, 68–72, 74–78, 82, 84–86, 94, 96, 98, 103, 104, 106, 109n6, 110n7 Hypocrisy, 160

L Language, 114, 118–122, 124, 125, 127, 139, 145, 146 Latin, 123, 132n8 The Left Hand of Darkness, 5, 91–109 Lovecraft, 162–168, 170, 171 Lovecraftian, 155, 163–166, 170, 171

I Ideology, 6, 41, 49, 60, 140, 141, 144, 151, 152 Imperialism, 9 Incels, 36 Indiana Jones, 139 Infrastructure space, 169 iPad, 138 Irish, 160, 174n3 ‘Is Gender Necessary,’ 93

K Kemmer, 92, 102, 105, 107 Kemmering, 101, 102 Ketterer, David, 123 Khatru Symposium, 98 Knowledge, 118, 120–122, 124, 129, 136, 143, 150, 151

M Male efflorescence, 17, 20, 21, 35 Male gaze, 119, 128 Marriage, 18, 76, 88n5, 99, 114, 121 Marxist, 159 Masculinity, 136, 138, 140, 142, 151 Masochism, 56 Matriarchal, 137, 145 Matriarchy, 142, 145 McGregor, Wayne, 86, 88n7 Media, 143–146 Memory, 46, 48, 57, 59, 63n8 Men Explain Things to Me, 121 Men Who Hate Women, 144 Misinformation, 136 Misogynist, 124, 125 Misogynistic, 144 Misogyny, 45, 126, 127, 129, 132, 160

180 

INDEX

Modernity, 159, 165, 170, 172 A Momentary Taste of Being, 98 Monster, 75, 76, 78, 79, 82, 84, 106, 155, 157, 162, 164, 165, 171 Mother, 44, 45, 51–53, 56, 57, 115, 116, 136, 137, 144–146, 149, 159, 160 Motherhood, 14, 20, 21, 23, 28–32, 37n7, 98 Mutation, 141 Myth, 159, 171, 172 Mythology, 109, 115, 117, 131 N Nazis, 42, 43, 46, 48–50, 52–54, 57, 59, 60, 113, 167, 168 Neoliberal, 126, 127 Newbolt Man, 24–27 New Materialist philosophies, 165 New York, 155–157, 159, 160, 162–164, 166, 168–170, 173 Nineteen Eighty-Four, 59, 113, 118, 123 No Woman Born, 5, 67–87 O Oedipal, 75 Oedipus complex, 56 Organic, 73, 82 Orientalism, 95 Overton window, 168 P Parasite, 161 Parasitic urbanism, 169, 170 Parthenogenesis, 17, 18, 21, 36n3 Patriarchal, 61 Patriarchal family, 22 Patriarchal power, 114 Patriarchy, 115, 132n6

Performance, 70–72, 79, 80, 82, 84 Personality, 51, 52, 58 Phoenix, 81 Physics, 158, 173 Place inside the blizzard, 101–103, 109 Posthuman, 9, 83, 87 Posthuman urbanism, 171 Post-truth, 6, 143, 146 Power, 136, 138–150, 152, 160, 165–167, 169, 171 The Power, 6–9, 135–152 Primary signifier, 99 Procreation, 33 Pronouns, 93, 94 Prostheses, 76 Prosthetics, 72, 85, 86 Proud Man, 41–43, 54, 57, 62n4, 63n6 Psychoanalysis, 41, 48, 57, 61 Pygmalion, 80 Q Quantum mechanics, 158 Queer, 149, 159, 167, 173 R Race, 13, 17–19, 28, 32, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49, 50, 54, 55, 58, 69, 77, 95, 96, 98, 100, 103, 106, 110n7, 110n8, 130, 159, 162, 165, 172 Racial difference, 95 Racism, 155, 160, 165 Racist, 127, 130 Rape, 21, 27, 35, 43, 60, 77, 105, 113, 127, 144 Reality, 157–159, 164, 165, 170–172 Reduction of Women, 42, 53 Reparation, 51–53 Repression, 47, 49

 INDEX 

R’lyeh, 162, 163, 172 Robot, 69, 70, 73–75, 78, 80, 84 Romance, 29, 32 S Science, 1–4, 7–9, 94, 96, 98, 99, 101, 108 Science fiction, 1–4, 7–9, 94, 96, 101, 137, 139, 142, 152, 158, 172 Scientific authority, 137, 140, 151 Scrabble, 118, 121 Semiotics, 119 Sexism, 125 Sexuality, 27, 29, 30, 35, 49, 50, 77, 79, 84, 97, 103, 105, 107, 108, 144, 148, 149, 164 Sexuoeconomic relation, 20, 31 Shifgrethor, 92, 101, 102, 105 Skein, 136, 141, 149 Slavery, 114, 130, 131 Social Darwinism, 130 Social evolution, 13, 19, 30 Social media, 126, 127, 142, 143, 146, 164, 165 Social relations, 92 Social structures, 92, 100, 102 Sociobiology, 120, 122, 129 Speculative realism, 170 Star Songs of an Old Primate, 97 Star Trek, 8, 95, 103 The Stepford Wives, 74 Suicide, 42, 53, 61, 78, 82, 84, 101, 102 Surveillance, 119, 126, 127, 129, 131 Swastika Night, 4, 6, 9, 41–62, 62n4, 92, 106, 113, 114, 117, 118, 122, 128 T Technology, 4, 67–70, 72, 74–78, 80, 82, 85, 87, 93, 94, 105, 115, 125, 126, 128

Television news, 143 Terrorism, 142, 144 Three Laws of Robotics, 74 Torture, 147 Totalitarian, 114, 118 Totalitarianism, 45, 59, 125 Trump, Donald, 60, 124, 131, 162 U Unconscious, 46, 48, 51, 55–58 Unwomen, 116 Urban, 155, 156, 158, 159, 161, 168, 171–173 UrbanDox, 136, 148, 150 Utopia, 34, 116 Utopian, 98, 107 Utopianism, 16, 152 V Vindication of the Rights of Women, 16 Visibility, 120, 126, 128, 129, 131 W We, 113 The Weird, 159 Woman and Beauty, 72 Woman in White, 157, 159, 161–164, 166, 168, 169 Y Your Haploid Heart, 5, 96, 104, 106, 110n7 Z The zone, 169

181