In Ammonite Nicola Griffith describes human women as aliens in a new world. However there is a virus that is killing off a percentage of the women and all of the men who try to inhabit there. I found the virus to be most intriguing. The idea that these women can meditate back and view their whole history is shocking, and that it enables them to basically be able to control their bodies in amazing ways including inducing pregnancy. It’s a very intriguing idea.

The Gate to Women’s Country reminded me of Slave and the Free in the way that it is set after present time, yet the people are living as though they had not experienced the technological age. It’s a very intriguing idea that these future people have lost most of the technology and medical science and yet still have books etc. from this previous period. While I did not particularly enjoy The Slave and the Free I did like this novel. I couldn’t put it down. It was a complex plot with romance and mystery along with the speculative fiction. The idea’s presented were those we have been looking at all semester, male and female relationships, sex, and nature vs. nurture.

I think it’s pretty clear that Tepper is stating nature is much more important than nurture. She has the women create a society in order to weed out the weak characteristics in humanity through breeding. The women have children with only the ‘Servitors’ who have been chosen as they are “highly competent, calm, judicious..highly respected” (288),martially skilled, and many have a form of clairvoyance or telepathy. They also chose to sterilize certain women with ‘undesirable’ characteristics. This ruse set up the idea of the ‘warriors’ and carnival. Eventually all the boys would choose to come back through the gate and selection would be perfected.

The warriors saw women as sentimental, and attempted to use them through manipulating the one natural characteristic that they could not change, their mothering, nuturing instinct. They needed it for the survival of the species, yet the men used it to manipulate them, such as with Chernon and Stavia. They saw women as important for one reason only, to bear them sons: “In bearing a son for a warrior, a woman earns her life”(143).

Tepper also looks at domestic violence through the people who live to the South which seem very much like stereo-typical polygamists, minus the whole killing female children thing which I still don’t understand besides it creating a lack of females leading to the capture of Stavia. She basically was commenting on the ridiculousness of what we now call ‘domestic violence’ saying “It has a funny sound, like a wild animal only partly tamed”(292). And I feel that that’s what she is saying about humnanity. It is a wild animal only partly tamed, and through this novel she is attempting to tame humanity through selection.

The male society is interesting as it functions with two parent families, only both parents are men, and do not necessarily have sex. However, most do. I found the idea of social credits in order to have children a neat idea. In this society being a parent was a privilege, and you had to earn the right to bear a child. Those who do not behave or follow the law lose credits and are farther away from having children. In theory this is a great plan. In today’s society there are plenty of people who have children and do not treat them properly for reasons like drugs, poverty etc. However, in reality this theory would raise many ethical problems, such as who draws the line between what is correct behavior and criminal behavior, and should the government be allowed to regulate procreation? This brings me to the laws governing child-birth in China, where anyone bearing more than one child must pay extra taxes (I think). As Earth becomes more and more populated, and people live longer and longer the governments will be forced to make rules about procreation.

Another topic portrayed in the novel was obviously homosexuality. Lois Mcmaster Bujold represents the homosexual in the space station, and it seems much the same as it would likely have been in the 80’s. People call the planet Athos “The Planet of Fags”. They are discriminated against. However, in this novel, Ethan also discriminated against women. On Athos women are seen as evil, and most never even see a picture of a woman. There is an interesting quote on page 34:

“Women. Uterine replicators with legs, as it were. He was not sure if they were supposed to be the inciters to sin or sin was inherent in them, like juice in an orange, or sin was caught from them like a virus. He should have paid more attention during his boyhood religious instruction, not that the subject had ever been anything but mysteriously talked about”

This quote describes how in Athos, women are taboo, and seen as evil, yet no one is really clear as to why they are bad. When bearing children the doctors remove the female producing X chromosome so that the child doesn’t turn out female. They genetically alter themselves to have no women present, which is a bit different than our other books. It was also funny when Ethan finds out what a hermaphrodite is and wonders whether they would be allowed on Athos because of their male parts or not allowed because of their female parts.  In all this was an interesting, and different read compared to the other novels in the course.

Atwood goes on to portray Offred’s previous life as her thoughts as she makes her way around her life in Gilead. The reader’s get snippets of life in both past and future in a tantalizing way. What makes this novel so extraordinary is that it seems so plausible. If you think about it, Offred is a first generation of this new republic, yet the daughters of these women will not remember the past and society could change dramatically in a very short period of time. Think of how quickly Germany was able to change during Hitler’s rule, people felt that he was doing good things and he was able to make dramatic changes in his own country in a few short years. Atwood drives this idea home by showing that it’s not the whole world that has changed, only those women living in Gilead. She does this by having the Japanese tourists women dressed in regular ‘western’ style clothes who ask the women (through a translator who is assumed to be an Eye) if they are happy. What I thought was interesting is that she calls the women’s high heeled shoes ‘delicate instruments of torture’(35), which I thought was pulling into the way that neither past nor future society was perfect. They call the past  Freedom to and the Future Freedom From.

This is an interesting concept, as our modern day society does have perils for women that men do not face, and most do not even think of. Atwood shows this on page 30 when she states “I never ran at night; only in the daytime, only beside well-frequented roads”. She then goes on to list how women were told not to stop for people who were broken down, always check police id before allowing them to enter your home, if a man whistles at you than keep going don’t look, etc. Women deal with these things on a day to day basis. The fact that 1 in 3 women is raped in our society is a shocking fact, and women are now taught to be careful, don’t go out at night alone etc, whereas a man can go where he wants at whatever time of day without the same type of fear. Atwood states “Now we walk along the same street… and no man shouts obscenities at us, speaks to us, touches us. No one whistles”(31). This society claims to be protecting women from this fear. However, it’s odd that in this new society there is still prostitution etc. that shows no matter what society is like sex is a commodity, even in this extreme right wing republic.

On wikipedia it says that this book is a reaction to contemporary feminism. “By working against pornography, feminists in the early 1980s opened themselves up to criticism that they favoured censorship. Anti-pornography feminist activists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon made alliances with the religious right, despite the warnings of sex-positive feminists. Atwood warns that the consequences of such an alliance may end up empowering feminists’ worst enemies. She also suggests, through descriptions of the narrator’s feminist mother burning books, that contemporary feminism was becoming overly rigid and adopting the same tactics of the religious right.” I thought that this was an interesting idea that I am going to ponder.

In general, I feel that much of the literature in this course is portraying how things can change dramatically in a short period of time, such as nuclear war, though science, or through politics. It’s weird to think about how short a period of time has past since women have been considered ‘equal’ (which isn’t totally accurate) in western society.

To start, the cover of this book was a bit deceiving. It’s just a really odd cover with the woman floating in a nighty. Anyways, besides the cover the book was compelling and frightening. The more books I read concerning futuristic societies the more concerned I am about the marginalization of women now and in the future. This novel (and previous novel from our course) have made me think in a more divisive way, because men and women are different, and it shows how in the course of history women have been subjugated for so long that it’s almost foolish to believe that it couldn’t change back just as easily or that men and/or government couldn’t just take back whatever power women held. Many of the authors in this course have discussed this topic but I think this novel really struck me right between the eyes with a possible future.

 
This novel has continued with the future as it might possibly be, it does not lose all technology like The Slave and the Free. Things are pretty similar to what people would assume of the future, flying cars, aliens communicating with earth, better medical attention etc. However in this future women have been forced back into an extremely submissive position, one in which they have no power and are ruled by the men. The government called the 20^th century “an aberration in cultural science that led briefly to such bizarre phenomenon as women practicing medicine, sitting as judges—even as a Supreme Court Justice, incomprehensible as that seems to us today– and filling male roles throughout society, can be rather easily explained. Men are by nature kind and considerate, and a woman’s eagerness to play at being a physician or a Congressman or a scientist can be both amusing and endearing; we can understand, looking back upon the period, how it must have seemed to 20^th C. men that there could be no harm in humoring the ladies”(72).

 
Elgin begins each chapter with some glimpse of the period using advertisements from the period (like that of the trained wife), government briefings, definitions of women’s areas like gynecology, and then she also adds poignant feminist writings from the 20^th century. These are interesting insights into both the future she is depicting and the past which they have moved away from. By portraying history in this way, Elgin really brings reality to her story, and I think it’s the most well done portrayal of this that we have seen so far. Using these fictional briefings and random essays etc. Elgin’s work seems realistic and logical.
Really, this novel made me contemplate a future in which women could be put back into the submissive role, and simply put, it is a terrifying possibility. However, this novel did not look at the rest of the world, instead focusing on North America.

p.s. The whole disposable babies and ‘volunteering’ your children (without their mother’s permission) was fairly disturbing, especially that they couldn’t even describe what happened to the babies. Oh yeah and drugging babies with LSD to try and make them able to speak some alien language. Creepy and possible.

The first book was basically male centered, and allows the reader a brief understanding of the Holdfast, and how women and men function in it. I think that it took me longer to read the first hundred pages or so than it did the 300 or so pages that were left. It was just not pushing me to read it. The male characters were intriguing, but I just couldn’t empathize with them.

The whole society just seemed to be set up in a systematic and rational way so as to work on the weaknesses and faults of the younger men and women to sustain the older male society. This reminded me of regular society in some ways, more in a poverty/wealth situation, where the poor are abused and make less money in order to raise the wealthy up and allow them more wealth.

Also, even after class today I am confused about the terms used to describe the men and women, and what these terms mean. There are the men, divided into roles of Father and Son, Old and Young, and then there are mentioned the “unmen”, which I still do not understand. On the other side of the gender we have Fems and Women. I thought it was telling that the author used the name of ‘Fems’, meaning feminine women, to describe the submissive and abused women, while she used the term ‘women’ to describe the Riding women. And then I started wondering why she would use the term women to describe the women who have nothing to do with men, when she could have given them another name. I thought maybe she named the women living in Holdfast ‘fems’ because the men did not want to feel that the women were the same by calling them a variation of men.

While reading the second novel I found myself believing that all the men had died in the fights at Holdfast, which I now know they didn’t. I just didn’t feel that I could empathize with these characters, and felt like an outsider looking in throughout the two novels. When compared to other books such as Herland, and The Disappearance, the women in the Holdfast Chronicles were more realistic as they had faults, were jealous, and fought, but I didn’t feel the connection with the characters that would draw me in.

These novels portray many interesting views and aspects of society and human nature, yet it was almost as though there were too many ideas stuffed in it for me to read in one sitting and understand and be able to ponder the meanings. I’m sure these novels would become more interesting if you had time to stop when something struck your interest and pursue the thought. However, I did not have that luxury. The ideas of relationships between women, food supply/cannabalism, and sexual habits were all intriguing aspects of the novels, but they are complex issues and the author allows them to remain complex, not presenting any clear solution to problems within society.

We discussed in class today the idea of cannabalism, and how all of the characters are involved in eating people/horses they mate with. It was as though she was pointing out the animal within every person as they will do anything to survive. It’s also intersting how each society accepts and make things okay for humans to do, such as fems eating fems, in order to live and survive.  Even though these fems eat other fems, it doesn’t make them more accepting of other people doing what they have to do to survive, such as the Rider women. Alldera and the fems see the Rider Women as disgusting because they have sex with the horses in order to repopulate, while the Rider women see the Fems as disgusting as they eat other fems.

I found this story was a lot different than the others we have read so far because of it’s technical parts dealing with the suits and the wars etc. which I found really interesting, but like Dr. Jones said in class, I really didn’t know what was plausible as things we already have and what was made up stuff. However it was all neat to read about, and I kept wondering what parts of this story were actually more accepted today than they were in 1974 when the story was written. Such as equal amounts of women in the army, homosexuality, and even technology. The technology part is really strange to think about because Haldeman was writing this in a time before computers and cell phones were the norm. I’ll get back to this point. I read this book in the first week of classes so feel free to correct anything I get wrong. What I remember most were the sleeping arrangements in the Army, the state of Earth on their first visit home and the way homosexuality becomes the norm.

First of all I thought it was interesting not only how there were equal amounts of women in the army (something not even close to the truth even today) but that they were on a scheduled sexual rotation. In a weird way I feel like this makes sense. None of these people had wives/husbands and this novel points out that this would create comradely, lessen jealousy, and fulfill these peoples sexual and comfort needs. My boyfriend is in the army, and sex between female and male soldiers can really cause a lot of problems between people, leading to charges being raised against men etc. This enforced sleeping arrangement would make these problems a moot point for the most part, although I’m sure some people would still get jealous and have favorites. However, his views on women were what I would expect for a man in the 70′s, and I can’t recall a certain part of the story that makes me feel this way, but it’s a lingering feeling. Okay I just remembered the part that bothered me, it was when the group of soldiers gets to a place where there were only a few women living with a bunch of men, and the women of their group had to sleep with all the men or something like that. Either way it just didn’t feel right, as it wasn’t to enforce camaraderie (which is the only reason to make them sleep together) but to simply satisfy the men.

The way earth was on the main characters first visit home seemed to me to be pretty close to what reality possibly could be in 20 or 30 years (I’m not pessimistic, just realistic). From needing bodyguards to not being able to find work and living in tiny apartments. I just got chills reading this section about ration wars and over-population. It just felt too close to what is really possible. I’m going to skip over the scary stuff and talk about sex instead.

The government encourages homosexuality in this novel to a large degree. I felt that Haldeman was neutral on the subject of homosexuality but I could be wrong. In theory it seems probable that the government would encourage people to sleep with the same sex as it makes contraceptive obsolete, yet I can’t believe that it would help the problem of overpopulation as people would still want to have babies, whether they were gay or not. I think it is humorous that Haldeman points out that in this future society heterosexual people are looked at as oddities and are socially ostracized, as even now 30 years later homosexuality is still not fully accepted.

All in all I thought that this was an interesting book, however I do not like what I remember of the end except it was all tied up and happy, which I’m not really a fan of. I like endings to be more open-ended,depressing or morbid but thats just me. It was a good read.

P.s.I googled the author Joe Haldeman (as I do all our authors) and found a blog/information site that he writes. Here’s the link!

http://home.earthlink.net/~haldeman/faq.html

            So I just finished this week’s reading “Houston Houston, Do you Read?”, and it was really interesting. Again we are dealing with a female utopian society, and the three men, although in this one there is the more relaxed, they call him nerdy, he is a scientist, and one is very religious and one is the alpha male type. Like Herland the scientist is able to understand things more easily. However, in this story all the men die and the story is more of a mystery. You don’t know what is really happening as it is told through the male perspective from their space shuttle.

            What is really interesting is how this story shows it’s feminist intentions at the end which I thought I was reading to much into until discovering that James Tiptree jr.  is a pen name for a female writer. Then I believed my own interpretation of the story which is that Tiptree uses this all female society to make a point about feminist issues. However it is not fully evident until the end (to me anyways) that this is the point. She draws conclusions about these women who take care of their own needs and make clone babies to being entirely self-sufficient, without conflict or war. It is like a utopia. And drawing contrast to Herland, these women kill the men (in a humane way) because they are too emotional and from history they have learned from it that men are the cause of all of these problems such as war etc. They do not need the men or want them for reproductive purposes. They simply get what they can out of them for information and then puts them down. However, none of these men is shown in a great light.

            There is the scientist who is narrating, and he feels like a nerd, wishes he could be more of an ‘Alpha Male’ type. Then there is the second in command who thinks that all women should be his sexual slaves, and then there is the religious man in charge who believes that the Bible says men should rule women. The narrator is constantly talking about the way these women never stop chattering, like hens, etc. So the women decide they are too much of a threat to their new peaceful clone society and put them to sleep after drugging them to get information.

            I thought it was an interesting concept that the scientist stands up for the man portrayed as a sex fiend, who talks about having all the women serving him on their knees etc., by saying “Everybody has aggressive fantasies. They didn’t act on them… Until you poisoned them” (215).

            In all I though this was a different kind of narrative, and found it really intriguing to read.

The first quotation I wanted to look at was this from page 100:

“If you are so foolhardy as to ask a Whileawayan child to ‘be a good girl’ and do something for you:

“What does running other people’s errands have to do with being a good girl?

Why can’t you run your own errands?

Are you crippled?”

This is something that still plays a part in society today. This quote really leads into the thinking that gender roles are constructed, women do not naturally want to play the role of the ‘good girl’ and be helpful and put themselves out their way for other people. It is something that is taught to you through childhood, like being told to be a ‘good girl’ and do this or that. I was taught that way and I feel it makes you want to be helpful even at your own expense.

The next quote is found on page 109, this is a section in which Jeannine is speaking and she is discussing marriage and love:

“If only (she thinks) he’ll come and show me to myself. I’ve been waiting for you so long. How much longer must I wait?”

So my first reaction to these lines were a flashback to the line from the show Sex and the City when one of the women is sitting in a restaurant upset saying something like “I’ve been dating since I was 13, Where is he?… My hair hurts”. While this idea that women must get married is not necessarily still the norm, women who choose to remain unmarried, or unattached to a man, earns them the name of slut or whore. But men, such as George Clooney for one (not that I dislike him but just for example) he goes through women like Kleenex and is called a bachelor. Hmm… sounds fair to me…..

Also this novel explores the idea that women are looking to find themselves through a man, that a man will make them a whole person, and that that is the only way to complete their lives.

The next quotation was taken from  a section where it’s a conversation between a man and a women. She is taking the feminist outlook and he is expressing his patriarchal views:

He: But darling, why be irrational? It doesn’t matter that you can’t make money because I can make money. And after I’ve made it, I give it to you, because I love you. So you don’t have to make money. Aren’t you glad?

She: NO. Why can’t you stay home and take care of the baby? … Why should I be glad because I can’t earn a living?

He ( with dignity): This argument is becoming degraded and ridiculous. I will leave you alone until loneliness, dependence, and a consciousness that I am very much displeased once again turn you into the sweet girl I married. There is no use in arguing with a woman.

This quotation is just hilarious. While this is only a small part of the conversation it shows how Russ makes the male characters seem ridiculous and the female characters seem rational and intelligent. She then goes on and describes a perfect woman, who has like a hundred kids, cooks everything from scratch, holds an executive level job and still dresses up in a wig and “turns instanter into a Playboy dimwit” (151).

Intersting side bar: When you search “Perfect Woman” in google image search all you get is naked women. WOW, what a comment on society.

Okay one more quote page 94: 

She: If you play the game, it means you like me, doesn’t it?

He: Of course.

She: Then if it’s a game and you like me, you can stop playing. Please stop.

He: No.

She: Then I won’t play.

He: Bitch! You want to destroy me. I’ll show you.

(He plays Harder)

She: All right. I’m impressed.

He: You really are sweet and responsive after all. You’ve kept your femininity. You’re not one of those hysterical feminist bitches who wants to be a man and have a penis. You’re a woman.

She: Yes. (She kills herself)

So my boyfriend is becoming irritated with all of the quotations I am reading out loud because I find they sound sooo much funnier out loud. But I simply cannot stop myself. Russ makes the truth sound ridiculous and the more I re-read this book the more I enjoy it. But on the topic of truth, who doesn’t know at least one man who thinks like this? Many people today think feminist is a dirty word, bringing up images of women who do not shave. So my question is have we really progressed much since Russ wrote this novel in…(gimme a second here) 1975 or do women and men just pretend the things they say are jokes such as “Women shouldn’t drive cars” (a common joke I hear sometimes) but does it have some truth to it? What do men think about women’s rights today? Are they committed to equality?

P.s. While reading this imagine George Bush as the white haired man

            In the introduction to this novel Silverberg puts forward that Wylie is usually a misogynist writer and that The Disappearance is different from his usual novels as it is somewhat feminist in it’s meaning. I found that this novel was more humanist than feminist. Wylie’s novel is a social commentary on the state of affairs in 1950. It focuses on the cold war, but also on the separateness of the male and female gender roles of the period, and how this affects humanity. The men go to work, make money etc, while the women (educated or not) stay home and care for the children and husband. While he is pointing out this disparity, Wylie pushes into territory that many men and women in this period are simply children and have never grown up.

       With the disappearance, all of these issues are brought to the forefront of society. In the male world anger, violence, sexuality and war are problems. For the women the problems come from the lack of education, ability to lead, and strength. He shows different ‘types’ of women who are unable to perform in any way but the role they are accustomed to, such as Kate and the Women’s Congress. However, while he portrays this negative female gender role, his female protagonist is a highly educated linguist, and is also an organizational leader. In her area she is a leader and manages to keep things under control. She also negotiates with the Soviet Union’s Women and makes peace with them, as well as engaging some of them to stay and help with some tasks that American women are unable to do. Wylie also portrays the women in the Soviet Union as more educated and able to perform engineering and higher technical tasks. While the male world becomes worse, the female world seems to do mildly better, almost like a going back in time phenomenon, working the land and hunting, with fewer modern conveniences.

        In the male world violence erupts and gets progressively worse throughout the novel. In the female world violence is an issue, but not nearly as important as food and water problems. Wylie shows the tensions between America and the Soviet Union in many ways and they are the only other country that they communicate with. In the men’s world many cities are ruined by atomic bombs but in the female world women do not know how to use the weapons and therefore it is never a threat (although the American women do not know this until after the Soviet women come to America). Wylie talks at length about how the atomic bomb should never have been invented and how scientists are pushing into new territory and instead of thinking about how these inventions are affecting the world, they simply use technology to make their lives easier or to gain power etc. It seems that he doesn’t approve of the atomic bomb, and believes that the cold war could have been averted without it’s invention.

         Wylie also discusses sexuality in this period and how sex is typically a negative thing, with people unable to communicate. Jealousy and envy becomes problems in every marriage and cheating spouses are the norm. Wylie’s main character Bill has his own indiscretions, which he seems mildly guilty about, but when he finds out his wife has had lovers he becomes jealous and this leads to a philosophical debate with himself on sex, marriage and love and what it means to people. He ends the novel by showing that men and women are two halves of one being, and that sex is a natural expression of both love and attraction. He basically says open relationships are best, but the love between two people is more important than the physical pleasure they might find together or separately.

           Wylie shows the good and bad of both genders and their roles in society. While this novel is definitely a period piece, as it is deeply embedded with cold war anxiety and the gender roles of the period, it is still an interesting piece of work.