Postmodern literature challenges traditional narratives regarding the divisions we make in matters such as gender, race, and language. All three stories considered here are set in strange lands, one the site of a plane crash visited by aliens, one a timeless and harsh world of civil war, the third, er, Edenic. In all three worlds, women are able to escape gender oppression. James Tiptree, Jr., "The Women Men Don't See
Don Fenton The narrator of this story is Don Fenton, who speaks in a confident male voice and is dismissive of the two women he meets whom he calls a “double female blur.“ They are not attractive enough for him to notice, and they do not seek any attention from him. This comes to bother him. The women constantly disappoint his expectations: When the weather turns rough aboard the plane, “I look back with a vague notion of reassuring the women. They are calmly intent on what can be seen of Yucatán.” They are equally calm and practical as the plane goes down, and quick to congratulate the captain on his crash landing: "’Oh, yes! It was beautiful.’ The women are shaky, but no hysteria.” Marooned with them and their Mayan pilot Captain Estéban in an uninhabitable swamp in Bahia Espiritu Santo, Don proves incapable of going beyond his maleness and seeing the two women as people , making incorrect guesses based on his stereotypes. “I have Mrs. Parsons figured now; Mother Hen protecting only chick from male predators.“ He can't see the situation as it is and can only interpret it by imposing well-worn cliches. He longs to assert his traditional dual male role as both huntsman and predator: “Out of sheer reflex my arm goes around my companion's shoulder — but Mrs. Parsons isn't there; she's up on her knees peering at the burnt-over plain around us.” Then when he spends the night in proximity with her, his male urges take over. She is adept at evading him: “Mrs. Ruth Parsons has judged things to a nicety. If I were twenty years younger, she wouldn't be here. [....] Mrs. Parsons knows her little shorts are safe. " His tough guy attitude toward sexual conquest is belied by his acknowledgment that he cannot perform sexually. Instead he satisfies himself with prurient meditations on Ruth Parson's "firmly filled little shorts, so close" and "Captain's Estéban's copper buttocks pumping into Althea's creamy upturned bottom." Ruth and Althea As he and Ruth are temporarily stranded together on their search for water, he learns that Ruth and Althea Parsons are decidedly unconventional, women who do not need men. Ruth gave birth to her child without the father knowing and says she in turn "grew up quite happily under the same circumstances." Althea seems willing to continue the tradition. Their way of life is threatening to Don. Casting about for reassurances, he accuses her of hating men or of suffering from the trauma of rejection: but Miss Parsons tells him: “’Oh, there wasn't any trauma, Don, and I don't hate men. That would be as silly as —- as hating the weather.’ She glances wryly at the blowing rain.” Her independence is not enough. As free as she is, she still lives in a world controlled by men: "Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world.“ She tells him further that "[w]hat women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine.” Not able to qualify in Don’s world as a human being, she compares herself and her kind to small secretive animals: "Think of us as opossums, Don. Did you know there are opossums living all over? Even in New York City." The women men don’t see live out of their sight, hidden even in the middle of their greatest cities.
The Aliens A standard image from the Science Fiction genre now intrudes on the situation – the extraterrestrial alien, used often by sf writers to symbolize the monster in us all. Here the alien is simply, as in much Science Fiction written by women, the Other. After she sees the bright light, hears the metallic twitters and the little voice saying "Eh-ep," Ruth’s behavior changes. She is nervous, waiting. This leads Don –- and perhaps even the reader -- to indulge in all sorts of fantasies: She is a government agent or a courier for a guerrilla organization. Neither of these things is true. Like Lara in “The History,” Ruth is tired of "All the endless wars [....]All the huge authoritarian organizations for doing unreal things. Men live to struggle against each other; we're just part of the battlefield. It'll never change unless you change the whole world. I dream sometimes of—of going away—-" Don realizes later that in the incident of the bright light, Ruth found a device lost by the aliens and made her plans to escape. When the aliens return in search of their machine, Don sees that they are not the guerillas of his imagination. They aren’t human, and Ruth did not plan this meeting: “I look where their faces should be and see black hollow dishes with vertical stripes. The stripes move slowly....And Ruth—Jesus, of course—Ruth is terrified too; she's edging along the bank away from them, gaping at the monsters in the skiff, who are obviously nobody's friends.”
Even when the aliens have returned them to their downed plane, he cannot abandon trying to play his authoritarian warrior role: “The alien device is twinkling or phosphorescing slightly. I lean over to look, whispering, ‘Give that to me, I'll pass it to Estéban.’" Believing a different ethic, Ruth refuses to play his game because "[i]t's theirs, they need it!.[....]They haven't hurt us. I'm sure they could.[....] I think they're gentle." In this story, it is Don, the aging macho tough guy, who is the would-be combination of huntsman and wolf. But he cannot win his objectives either in love or war: he fails to bed Ruth, his attempt to shoot the alien misfires. Hopelessly stuck with his male ego, he doesn’t know anything else to do but shoot. Captain Estéban, from the older and perhaps wiser Mayan culture, on the other hand, probably did better, as attested to by the moved hammock – but he is not the wolf either. If he succeeded in bedding Althea, it was with her willing cooperation for her own purposes.
Needless to say, these women are not confined. It is Don who ends the story getting drunk inside a bar while Althea and Ruth explore the universe. Remembering Ruth’s words, Don can only judge her as deranged: “We survive by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine....I'm used to aliens [...] She'd meant every word. Insane. How could a woman choose to live among unknown monsters, to say good-bye to her home, her world?” He doesn’t realize that he and his kind are the monsters and that she and her daughter are happy to leave such a world; at the end to him they are even less than human: “two of our opossums are missing.”
Isabelle Allende, “Two
Words” Unlike the number of unnamed women characters we have encountered, Belisa Crepusculario has named herself (“Belisa” is an anagram of “Isabel”; a crepuscular animal is one that is active at twilight or dawn – like the puma). Belisa has endured great tribulation, she is tough: on her journey away from death and destruction, she has “no strength to waste in acts of compassion.” She faces life without fear. She embodies another theme that arises whenever women’s history is discussed, the importance of literacy and language. Semanticists tell us that words are symbols, arbitrary constructs first formulated to symbolize the things of the material world. The word is a symbol of the thing; it is not the thing itself, but human beings tend to forget that fact. There are many times when we react to the word as if it were the thing, and not only in our fear of a threat or anger over an obscene insult. Many rituals depend on this reaction; certain words become powerful if people give them power: Catholics believe the priest’s words spoken over the bread and wine change them into the body and blood of Christ. Believers in magic are said to have died from knowing that there are spells cast against them – not because of the spell’s efficacy but because of their belief in the power of the words. The belief in words as in themselves powerful is an ancient one. Words here are not the symbols of things, they are themselves things. Belisa’s family is “so poor they did not even have names to give their children.” Belisa is attracted to words because they “make their way in the world without a master,” as she has. Magic realism, as its name implies, blends elements of realistic fiction and fantasy. Certainly, no one in our real world could make a living selling words, not the literal way Belisa does it. For these words are her own creations: she has thrown away her dictionary “because it was not her intention to defraud her customers with packaged words.”
Words are truly magic in this story. Some of the words she sells are similar to spells, like the “secret word to drive away melancholy” or the two secret words she gives the Colonel. She uses her words to fend off El Mulato, whose machismo represents the dark side of masculinity, contrasting with the more gentle demeanor of the Colonel, who, weary of his career as a bandit, has a voice “as soft and well modulated as a professor’s”. In this story, words virtually end sexism, subdue an evil violent man, and bring love and rightfully gained power to a good man. Literacy here conquers male violence and rage, and joins with the enlightened leadership of a gentle man subdued by his overwhelming attraction to a strong and slightly feral woman.
El Mulato brings Belisa once again to the Colonel because he is obsessed by the two words she has given him: "'I brought this witch here so you can give her back her words, Colonel,’ El Mulato said, pointing the barrel of his rifle at the woman's head. ‘And then she can give you back your manhood.’"
El Mulato sees
violence and manhood as synonymous. Belisa has truly enchanted the Colonel, not
as a sorceress but in the way of sexual attraction: “The Colonel and Belisa
Crepusculario stared at each other, measuring one another from a distance. The
men knew then that their leader would never undo the witchcraft of those
accursed words, because the whole world could see the voracious-puma eyes
soften as the woman walked to him and took his hand in hers." Ursula K. LeGuin , "She Unnames Them"  In the Judeo-Christian bible we read that God gives Adam dominion over all living things: "So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name" (Genesis 2:19). In doing so, Adam, with God's permission, has erected a verbal barrier between animal and human, one that endures to this day. In LeGuin's alternate Eden myth, Eve makes things right restoring a unity lost when human beings developed language and used it to subdue the so-called mute beasts. Science has told us fairly recently that we are closer to animals than we think. And that animals have emotions and abilities to communicate among themselves and with us that we have overlooked in our (read "male") pride. This feeling of superiority allowed men of the past to enslave women and anyone else deemed inferior. If you don't recognize commonality between your self and the Other, then the Other is fair game. By erasing the boundaries that names have erected between human and animal, Eve reestablishes a primal harmony with nature. But Adam has named more than the animals. When Eve was created from Adam's rib, God allowed Adam to give Eve her name (Genesis 3:20). Here, Eve takes the next logical step and returns her own name to Adam. She has "reclaimed language". Then she leaves the garden. Alone. The mother of the many nameless women that we have read about this semester. This Week We start our last novel, Coyote by Linda Barnes. Detective fiction has long been a male-dominated genre, like science fiction. But within the last twenty years a number of women have ventured into the area, creating believable strong female detectives. One such is Carlotta Carlyle. We will see how much the world has changed. And hasn't. Though Carlotta is able to live outside of the traditional female stereotype and shows us how far women have progressed, her world is far from a paradise for women. |
