EN 2215 S/F I Joanna Russ Lecture

Lecture Summary

Joanna Russ, The Female Man, 1975, rpt. London: The Women’s Press, 1985.

The novel invokes possible worlds theory in order to postulate four variants on a female type: Jael Reasoner, Janest Evason, Joanna, and Jeannie Dadier. Joanna belongs to a realist present, Jeannie to an altered past, Janet to an imagined future, and Jael to a world in which the other three can be brought together to reconstitute feminine identity in a new way.

The sf element is the manner in which we are invited to participate in the speculative fantasy of how, on an imaginary future earth, these four females impact one another’s life.

The four female variants are each given a narrative line which intersects the other lines, so that each mode of life, with all its assumptions, beliefs, values, habits and customs is exposed to comparison with the others.

As a narrative, the novel is structured as a series of short sections rather than a single sequence. It prioritizes discourse over plot, discursive ideas over narrative action. Conversations and events are meant to represent the and patterns of thought and action that constitute alternative female modes of existence.

The novel is not interested in the conventional notion of character. It show how individual identity is a product of a complex interaction between heredity and environment, in which the cultural and ideological components of our environment shape our belief-systems, and create gender roles and typologies through which we negotiate our relation with our selves and with the other gender.

Male and female stereotypes are described and satirized in a manner that is both comic and bitter.

The novel invokes possible worlds theory in order to postulate four variants on a female type: Jael Reasoner, Janest Evason, Joanna, and Jeannine Dadier. Joanna belongs to a realist present, Jeannie to an altered past, Janet to an imagined future, and Jael to a world in which the other three can be brought together to reconstitute feminine identity in a new way.

… it’s possible, too, that there is no such thing as one clear line or strand of probability, and that we live on a sort of twisted braid, blurring from one to the other without ever knowing it. (7)

Oh, I made that woman up; you can believe it! (30)

Jennine is Everywoman. I, though I am a bit quirky, I too am Everywoman. .. Jael is Everywoman…. I Jeannine, I Jael, I myself. (212)

THE SF Elements:

Whileway: The earth 10 centuries in the future, 9 of them without men (all killed by a plague). Geography: 2 continents, North & South. Pastoral planet, no cities.

History:

(PC Preceding Catastrophe)

(AC After Catastrophe)

300PC-180AC Golden Age

17PC The Plague

03AC End of the Plague

239AC Matter-antimatter reactors

Genetic surgery

240AC Colonization of Mars, Asteriods, etc.

500AC Complex clan organization

700AC Jovian mining

900AC Induction helmet

913AC Probability mechanics

The sf element: we are invited to participate in the speculative fantasy of how, on an imaginary future earth, these four females impact one another’s life.

You will meet me later. (19)

The four female variants are each given a narrative line which intersects the other lines, so that each mode of life, with all its assumptions, beliefs, values, habits and customs is exposed to comparison with the others.

Why did they send me? Because they can spare me. (22)

I am from another time, from the future… (23)

… how did I get stuck with Jeannine? And how did Janet get into that world and not mine? ….

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh Jeannine was saying miserably under her breath. I don’t want to be here. They forced me. I want to go home. (88)

Janet, Jeannine, and Joanna arrived in the middle of a field…. Vittoria and Janet embraced and stood very still… (89)

Jeannine wakes from a dream of Whileaway. (105)

As a narrative, the novel is structured as a series of short sections rather than a single sequence. It prioritizes discourse over plot, discursive ideas over narrative action, polyphony of women’s voices over an authorial monologue. Conversations and events are meant to represent the patterns of thought and action that constitute alternative female modes of existence.

Janet Evason appeared on Broadway at two o’clock in the afternoon in her underwear. (4)

Janet picked up Jeannine at the Chinese New Festival. (26)

The novel is not interested in the conventional notion of character. It show how individual identity is a product of a complex interaction between heredity and environment, in which the cultural and ideological components of our environment shape our belief-systems, and create gender roles and typologies through which we negotiate our relation with our selves and with the other gender.

This book is written in blood.

Is it written entirely in blood?

No, some of it is written in tears. (95)

Male and female stereotypes are described and satirized in a manner whose comedy and satire, humour and bitterness both arise from a utopian frame of mind.

BEAUTY: HAIR

How do women of Whileaway do their hair?

JE: They hack it off with clam shells. (11)

Women’s underclothes:

(… “Oh, my goodness,” she says—and finally, completely stupefied, wraps one of them around her head.) (33)

MANHOOD

Manhood … is not reached by courage or short hair or insensibility… (20)

Patriarchal Stereotypes of the Woman

If you scream, you’re melodramatic; if you submit, you’re masochistic; if you call names, you’re a bitch. Hit him & he’ll kill you. The best thing is to suffer mutely and yearn for a rescuer… (45)

Man’s bad temper is the woman’s fault. It is also her woman’s responsibility to patch things up afterwards. (47)

A pretty girl like you doesn’t need to be liberated… Don’t listen to those hysterical bitches … I never take a woman’s advice about two things: love and automobiles… (49)

Men make the decisions and women make the dinners. (67)

His contribution is Make me feel good; her contribution is Make me exist. (120)

Men succeed. Women get married.

Men fail. Women get married.

Men enter monasteries. Women get married.

Men start wars. Women get married.

Men stop them. Women get married. (126)

… to be female is to be mirror and honeypot, servant and judge, the terrible Rhadamanthus for whom he must perform but whose judgment is not human and whose services are at anyone’s command, the vagina dentata and the stuffed teddy-bear he gets if he passes the test. (134)

More female types: 140-41

Women’s Stereotypes of Themselves:

Dress for the Man, smile for, talk wittily to, sympathize with, flatter, understand, defer to, entertain, keep, live for – the Man (29)

Eglantissa (thinks only of clothes), Aphrodissa (false eyelashes), Clarissa (suicide), Lucrissa (making more money than her husband), Wailissa (ain’t-it-awful), Lamentissa (ditto), Travailissa (usually only works), Saccharissa (His Little Girl), Amicissa (the Good Sport), Ludicrissa (too plain), Amphibissa… (34)

Jeannine, who sometimes believes in astrology, in palmistry, in occult signs, who knows that certain things are fated or not fated, knows that men—in spite of everything—have no contact with or understanding of the insides of things. That’s a realm that’s denied them. Women’s magic, women’s intuition rule here, the subtle deftness forbidden to the clumsier sex. (108)…. Jeannine is not available to Jeannine. (109)

Half the time I like doing housework, I care a lot about how I look, I warm up o men and flirt beautifully… I’d die before I took the initiative… I don’t press my points in conversation… (110)

The Four Women in The Great Happiness Contest (116-17)

The Damage to Woman

…Jeannine idly pulling the heads off weeds at the side of the path with an abstract viciousness completely unconnected with anything going on in her head. (112) …. You don’t want to be a dried-up old spinster at forty but that’s what you will be if you go on like this. You’re twenty-nine. You’re getting old. You ought to marry someone who can take care of you, Jeannine. (114)

Jeannine … almost been killed by an unremitting and drastic discipline not of her own choosing … maimed almost to death by a vigilant self-suppression quite irrelevant to anything she once wanted or loved… (131)

I had a five-year old self who said: Daddy won’t love you.

10yr old self… the boys won’t play with you.

15yr old self… nobody will marry you.

20yr old self… you can’t be fulfilled without a child. (135)

I am Honey

I am a raspberry Jam

I am avery good lay

I am a good date

I am a good wife

I am going crazy (205)

Janet’s education of Laura Rose Wilding of Anytown out of her conventional femininity: 58-75

Lesbian love: 78-9

I’ll tell you why I turned into a man.

First I had to turn into a woman. (133)

I think it had something to do with the knowledge you suffer when you’re an outsider… (137)

To resolve contrarieties, unite them in your own person. (138)

… recognize child-rearing as a man’s business. (140)

Feminism and the Existential Principle

Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex (1949)

`so-called equalitarian segregation has resulted in the most extreme discrimination ... whether it is a race, a caste, a class, or a sex that is reduced to a position of inferiority, the methods of justification are the same'.

Womanhood

`One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman'.

`every female human being is not necessarily a woman, to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity'.

Patriarchy: The notion of Man is treated as if it represented `the positive and the neutral', as if man designated `human beings in general'. `Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him'. `He is the Subject, he is the Absolute - she is the Other'.

Woman in Patriarchy

1 Woman is treated as Man's Other: an inessential and dependent object.

2 Woman is defined in terms of lack and defectiveness.

3 `she is simply what man decrees ... she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being'.

Otherness

`Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought'.... `no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself' (CR 308).

`following Hegel ... the subject can be posed only in being opposed - he sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object.

What is needed

Women need to bring about a change in their condition.

Reciprocity between the sexes needs to be recognized.

Women must stop being submissive: `their dependency is not the result of a historical event or a social change - it was not something that occurred.... the nature of things is no more immutably given, once and for all, than is historical reality'.

Hélène Cixous: “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1976)

1 Women must not `confuse the biological and the cultural' .... `you can't talk about a female sexuality ... Women's imaginary is inexhaustible'. `Woman must write woman' writing `that inscribes femininity'.

2 Women must write their own poetry: `Because poetry involves gaining strength through the unconscious and because the unconscious ... is the place where the repressed manage to survive'.

3 In patriarchy women have been enjoined to give the man pleasure, and enjoined to find pleasure for themselves only in doing so. Guilt, shame, and fear therefore attend on the thought or likelihood of women finding pleasure in their own bodies and their own sexuality independent of men (as in masturbation or lesbianism). The independent pleasure of subjectivity is forced out by being taught to find pleasure only in submissive dependency. Such pleasure, when found and taken, would be subversive of the male libidinal economy and its cultural and political repression of the feminine.

4 The history of writing as the effect and support of the history of reason, is a superegoized male structure, and `woman's seizing the occasion to speak', must tap the body, its pleasures, and its unconscious.

5 `woman is bisexual' ..... a bi-sexuality based on the recognition and acceptance of `each one's location in self of the presence ... of both sexes, non-exclusion either of the difference or of one sex'.

The Damage to Woman