An interesting essay on Virginia Woolfs idea of androgyny Re-evaluating Woolfs Androgynous Mind Elizabeth Wright University of St Andrews Woolf

introduced her theory of the androgynous mind[1] in A Room of Ones Own (1929) and the concept has caused contention among critics ever since. Often worried by the word and its binary baggage, critics have either loved or hated Woolfs ideal state for a creative mind which alternates between male/masculine and female/feminine. Lovers of the theory, including Carolyn Heilbrun and Nancy Topping Bazin, read androgyny as a balance and union between opposites (the evanescent masculine and the eternal feminine[2]) which gives a satisfying pattern to life. However, others have read Woolfs vision of androgyny as variously: an escape from the body (Elaine Showalter and Lisa Rado), an avoidance of key feminist issues (Elaine Showalter), a sexist myth in disguise perpetuating the phallogocentrism it seeks to deconstruct (Daniel Harris, Barabara Charlesworth Gelpi), a vision of self-destructive narcissism (Julia Kristeva, Francette Pacteau) or merely as an insipid form of homogeneity that lacks zest and energy.[3] However, Woolf distilled a purer essence from the concept than contemporary critics tend to do. Androgyny, for Virginia Woolf, was a theory that aimed to offer men and women the chance to write without consciousness of their sex the result of which would ideally result in uninhibited creativity. Whether she succeeded in this aim will be the study of the following essay. The foundations of Woolfs androgyny and Bloomsburys sexual liberalism can be found in nineteenth and early twentieth century science. Figures such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, Otto Weininger, and Sigmund Freud all put forward to some degree or other the theory of a third sex in which masculine and feminine characteristics (drawn of course along the lines of biological essentialist binary thought) came together in a single body.[4] Havelock Ellis wrote that each sex is latently hermaphrodite[5], while Dr Anduin, as quoted by Freud, asserts that there are masculine and feminine elements in every human being (cf. Hirschfeld, 1899); but one set of these according to the sex of the person in question is incomparably more strongly developed than the other, so far as heterosexual individuals are concerned [6]. This theory was developed further by Carl Jung whose concept of the anima, (the female within the male) and animus, (the male within the female), was interpreted as the healthy balance for the human psyche. The scientific recognition of the ability for men and women to contain the characteristics of each other, not only bodily as hermaphrodites, but mentally, (whether homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual), was a step forward even though this concept reinforced patriarchal binaries. The application of this thinking to androgyny begs the question of whether we [can] move beyond androgyny as a mere merging of gender roles in a polarisation of traditional oppositions (passive/active, emotional/rational)?[7] For these men of science the correct preponderance of one set of characteristics over the other led to heterosexuality while the incorrect preponderence led to homosexuality. To be an invert (Freuds term for homosexual), whether absolute or amphigenic (Freuds version of homo- and bi-sexual), was still to be degenerate in the eyes of the majority; and yet, it was generally believed to be a factor in creativity and there were concerted efforts at the time to demonstrate that a large number of great artists, musicians and writers were inverts including the Romantics, Michael Angelo and Shakespeare.[8] Some psychologists such as Edward Carpenter even envisaged Uranians as the advance guard of that great movement which will one day transform the common life by substituting the bond of personal affection and compassion for the monetary, legal and other external ties which now control and confine society.[9] Barbara Fassler points out that Ellis and Carpenter were read by members of the Bloomsbury group and most within that circle shared the common belief that to be artistic one must have the unique combination of masculine and feminine elements found in hermaphrodites and homosexuals.[10] This view of the positive creative element in the sexual aberrations was taken up by the sexually liberal milieu of Bloomsbury and clearly influenced Woolfs concept of the androgynous mind.[11] In A Room of Ones Own Woolf seems to be reiterating her scientist cousins: I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the mans brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the womans brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating.[12] For modern thinkers the definition of androgyny has proven to be more of a problem than for the scientists of Victorian patriarchy. Despite its problematic origins which have led such critics as Mary Daly to pronounce it as a semantic abomination, androgyny was for Woolf and many feminist critics, a way of liberating women from the negative forces placed by patriarchy on their sex. Carolyn Heilbrun, who started her critique in Towards a Recognition of Androgyny with its

roots in the Greek andros (male) and gune (female), stated that the term did not mean hermaphrodite, nor bisexual or homosexual it meant, for Woolf, to be fully human.[13] As a consequence, instead of referring to androgynous individuals, we [should] call them simply fully human men and women thus ridding ourselves of connections with sex and gender and the conceptual baggage attendant on them.[14] The function of androgyny would ideally be to provide a third term that neutralises the gendered way in which the subject is constructed.[15] One of the oddities of the concept of androgyny, and one which was arguably a part of Woolfs thinking, was its assignation to sex. Androgyny all too often escapes out of the grasp of critics and settles back down into the sexual polarisation it is designed to avoid. Thus we find ourselves mired once again in theories of binary opposition through male and female centred androgyny. Beginning with the latter which places the emphasis on women as the embodiment of androgyny, we can read the concept as either liberation for women,[16] as a bisexuality to which women are closer than men[17] or the result of the split that continually takes place in female consciousness due to womens position in society.[18] Pinkney suggests that Woolf saw women as having a closer connection with androgyny, because the woman inherits no tradition, she is an outsider and her mind is already divided into halves similar (though not exactly akin) to the androgynous ideal. Woolf writes, the woman is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness when from being the natural inheritor of that civilisation, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical.[19] In this view Pinkney is backed up by Hlne Cixous who writes, in a certain way woman is bisexual man having trained to aim for glorious phallic monosexuality.[20] In other words, the precepts of phallogocentrism keep man homogenous, leaving women, as outsid[er] alien and critical, to develop heterogeneously. Jane Marcus clearly states her view that Woolf has leant on the heterogeneity of the female in her theorising, calling women a collective sublime while men, who are trained to aim for glorious phallic monosexuality, are trapped in an egotistical sublime.[21] Marcus writes, While the poet is still for [Woolf] the legislator of morality, his authority is derived not from an individual talent but from the expression of collective consciousness. The egotistical sublime of the patriarchy, she argues, has been replaced by a democratic feminist collective sublime.[22] Elizabeth Abel claims that the weighting of androgyny toward the maternal is in fact implicit throughout Woolfs discussion of androgyny in A Room of Ones Own[23] while Ellen Carol Jones argues that Orlando is more woman than man because woman is defined by the absence of a stable position. In this sense, Orlando is woman precisely because she changes sex.[24] Reading along these lines one would come to the conclusion that Woolf, by centring it in the female, offers a stilted version of androgyny which does not achieve the unconsciousness of sex that creates great literature. However, despite giving space to the development of a specifically female style of writing, Woolf does not forget that the mind must contain elements of both sexes in order to be truly productive. After all, she states, It is fatal to be a man or a woman pure and simple; one must be a woman-manly or a man-womanly.[25] And that to think, as [she] had been thinking of one sex as distinct from the other is an effort. It interferes with the unity of the mind.[26] Recent Woolf scholarship has stretched the female centred version of androgyny by exploring the lesbian subtext of Woolfs concept of the term and thus jettisoning the male altogether. An interesting exploration of the subject is made by Jane Marcus in her essay Sapphistry: Narration as Lesbian Seduction in A Room of Ones Own. In this essay Marcus argues that Woolf has seduced us into sisterhood by asking her female audience to collude in the exclusion of men from the lecture.[27] Marcus sets her discussion of Woolfs paper, given in a lecture at Girton and Newnham, in the context of Woolfs sapphisim, the publication of Orlando and the trail of Radclyffe Halls lesbian novel then on trial for indecency. As a consequence, Marcus argues, the literary women gathered in the room to discuss women and writing are, at least symbolically lesbians, and the Law is the enemy.[28] Instead of an androgyny in which both sexes play an equal part, Marcus suggests that Woolfs feeling for sexual difference privileges the female and continues When [Woolf] says the book has somehow to be adapted to the body, she means the female body.[29] Marcus therefore suggests, to some extent, that Woolfs androgyny is not only biased towards the female, its conceptual space is essentially lesbian. In opposition to the female-centred type of androgyny which, although positive, is still not really the balance and unity that Woolf craves, we have the male centred form. A number of critics have argued that androgyny is a conceptual red herring for Woolf because it offers a design for the mind which subsumes the female into the male. Thus, the androgyny which appears as liberation actually achieves the opposite result. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg asserts that the New Women of the 1920s saw androgyny as a concept which offered the chance to see themselves as social and sexual hermaphrodites, as an intermediate sex that existed between and thus outside of the biological social order.[30] However, as Jones points out this strategy failed because its rhetoric entailed only the inversion of dominant metaphors rather than their deconstruction.[31] Androgyny could only have served these women if they had first rid themselves of the binary schools of thought on which the dominant metaphors were based. For Fayad androgyny is the epitome of patriarchal domination, the fusion of the female other within the male subject. Fayad argues that it is a characteristic of the patriarchal need for assimilation and sameness.[32] As a consequence of this need for phallic unity the splitting off of consciousness which seemed to place

women closer to androgyny than men has conversely be read by Luce Irigaray as a means to keep women as a negative other: Do women remain divided and assigned to their lot so that men can remain one [un(s)]? she asks: Are women the site of an irreparable wound torn between the yes and the no: the wound of all the I want I dont want, I love I hate, I take I reject which lie below, covered by the Good, the True and the Beautiful men? When you assert that Man is and remains, as man and assuming that he exists as man who would not be woman as well, - one (LemioneLuccioni, 1976, p.9: 1987, p.3), the knowledge does not divide him (ibid.) arent you making women a support for what you call the splitting of the subject?[33] The power of patriarchy is such that even in androgyny its force, these critics suggest, would cause the woman to either sacrifice her personality or remain as a negative other existing within the male. Androgyny can therefore be read as a patriarchal construct which has earned the tile of sexist myth in disguise.[34] In her deconstructive reading of androgyny Gelpi enlists the help of history tracing the concepts long heritage of patriarchal service and implying that its meaning is so deeply inscribed by patriarchy that its re-appropriation to the post-structuralist cause is more problematic than one might think. Gelpi argues, Gnostics, alchemists, cabbalists of the remote past, as well as social visionaries from the Renaissance to the present, found in androgyny a male ideal of wholeness that, by subsuming the feminine, obviated the need for interaction with actual women.[35] Thus androgyny, as Irigaray, Harris, Fayad and Gelpi would agree, can offer the chance to avoid confrontation with the female and its attendant femininity and all of the negative otherness that she embodies. In its ultimate negative incarnation male centred androgyny is read as self-destructive male narcissism. The psycholinguistic critic Julia Kristeva, argues that, The androgyne does not love, he admires himself in another androgyne and sees only himself, rounded, faultless, otherless. Coalescing in himself, he cannot even coalesce: he is fascinated with his own image.[36] Narcissim as its mythic origins tell us is self-destructive and therefore cannot create or self-fertilise as Woolf would desire it. Certainly, Woolf would never have employed the term had she suspected it to be read as so antithetical to her cause. Although critics have suggested Woolfs vision of androgyny to be female centred, the concept as a whole to be secretly in the service of patriarchy and therefore counter-productive to her cause, it is important to establish what Woolf aimed to do with the theory rather than what the word means to others. Ultimately, the term implied, in her usage, the forgetfulness of sex. A way of thinking that would enable women and by implication men to write as themselves, still in a sexed body, but without the attendant prejudices and discriminations that are connected to the body by society. To write without consciousness of sex is to see the piece of work for itself not as its author. When reading the angry writing of men about women, Woolf finds herself thinking not of what he was saying, but of himself.[37] The result of this sex conscious anger is to make the reader aware of who is writing not what is written and this consciousness therefore undermines the argument. To be successful the mind must possess an ignorance of sex, Woolf writes in A Room of Ones Own, the mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent, like Shakespeares mind, Coleridges poetry and her sisters painting.[38] In the Foreword to Vanessa Bells 1930 exhibition catalogue Woolf writes: One says, Anyhow Mrs Bell is a woman; and then half way round the room one says, But she may be a man.[39] Woolf is arguing here that sex should enter the mind and, through the medium of its androgynous thinking patterns, re-emerge incandescent and unconscious of itself on the other side. For Woolf, the enemy of androgynous thinking was summed up in the Victorian age which forced writers into a consciousness of their sex and led to the production of abortive works deformed by sexual self-awareness. Thus we find Orlandos hand gripped by the spirit of the age and forced to dash off insipid floral verse: The pen began to curve and caracole with the smoothest possible fluency. Her page was written in the neatest sloping Italian hand with the most insipid verse she had ever read in her life.[40] In order to avoid this abortive sexualisation of language Woolf proposes that poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father.[41] Just as the Victorian period ruined poetry by feminising verse, Woolf sees the rise of fascism, the ultimate motherless machismo in Europe, as the death of poetry: The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in the museum of some country town.[42] Fascism as the antithesis of androgynous thought leads directly to the deformation and death of language. As a consequence of the rise of fascism, Pinkney notices that the positive image of the couple getting into the taxi at the end of The Years is an ideal of androgyny [which] seems further than ever away in her subsequent pre-war novel Between the Acts.[43] Shaking off current and ancient patriarchy is the only way to ensure that the mind and therefore language and literature are androgynously free.

Woolf leaves the reader in no doubt that the androgynous mind is the creative ideal, but what marks a text as the production of an androgynous mind? How do women avoid writing as women constructed by patriarchy, or avoid writing like men in the service of patriarchy? How do men prevent themselves from writing angrily about women and pompously or egotistically about themselves? In A Room of Ones Own Woolf demonstrates the turgidity of the male sentence: The sentence that was current at the beginning of the nineteenth century ran something like this perhaps: The grandeur of their works was an argument with them, not to stop short, but to proceed. They could have no higher excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their art and endless generations of truth and beauty. Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success. That is a mans sentence; behind it one can see Johnson, Gibbon and the rest.[44] She goes on to reinforce her point through the imaginary character of the poetry critic Mr B. whose sentence, due to his purely masculine mind, falls plump to the ground dead.[45] The presence of the male ego in literature which lies like a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter I over their work, is also a sign of a mind which is singlesexed and therefore uncreative.[46] But to think only as a woman is no better. In Orlando, as we have seen, writing as a women involves sentimentality and floral imagery, however, adopting a patriarchal style does not provide the answer. Woolf argues that many female novelists have fallen prey to the mans sentence: Charlotte Bront, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description.[47] However, Austen managed to form her own sentence and therefore, Woolf argues, succeeded where the Bronts and Eliot did not. However, despite this ability on the part of Austen her style is still too feminine for Woolf to list her among the great androgynous minds. To write androgynously ignoring the persistent voice of patriarchy is the only way to save the literature of both sexes from stasis, corruption or deformity. For Pinkney, Woolfs writing is a working demonstration of her thinking, an androgynous alternation, an impossible dialectic which aims to be integrated at the moment of maximum dispersal.[48] In other words, Woolfs writing matches the ebb and flow of the human mind, it moves like the rhythm of the waves or the pulsation of Kristevas semiotic chora. Pinkney states that this dangerous, impossible dialectic is the existential reality of androgyny. The rhythm of the sea as a metaphor of the semiotic chora its patterns and pulses of one/two, in/out, rise/fall cuts across the syntax of sentences and plot throughout the text, yet without dissolving them completely.[49] This androgynous rhythm in her writing is most evident in sections of Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse and The Waves in which Woolf uses free indirect discourse. Nancy Topping Bazin actually draws a diagram of the pattern of Mrs Dalloway which forms the image of waves alternating between different minds and different locations.[50] The constant flow of the text is a characteristic of the androgynous mind and one which Woolf demonstrates in her own writing as well as in the writing of others such as Shakespeare and the Romantics. The strength of language and form as a means of realising Woolfs androgynous vision lies in the fact that masculine and feminine can be exchanged, or travestied, because words can be.[51] Language can alter its meaning and as sex and gender are arguably realised through language they too can be changed and exchanged. Jones argues that gender is a symbolic construct, not an essence that has meaning outside or beyond discursive structures, and is as heterogeneous (and as empty) as writing itself.[52] Therefore, language offers the ideal medium through which to challenge, deconstruct and then reconstruct gender into a more positive androgynous creative form. It is important to remember that for Woolf androgyny did not mean, as some modern critics would prefer it to mean, sexless writing. Preserving the differences between the sexes is an important part of the creative process and Woolf does not seem to be advocating the death of that. Rather that the differences should be played out within the mind of the individual not between two individuals who are sexed as male and female. This is where Nancy Topping Bazins book falls down in its attempt to see characters as a realisation of Woolfs androgynous vision. Mr and Mrs Ramsay, for example, do not make an androgynous whole simply because they are the embodiment of patriarchal binary thought and are conveniently married. Topping Bazin goes on to suggest that by linking disparate notions such as depression and mania, personal and impersonal, life and death, Woolf creates a sense of homogenous androgynous unity. But Woolf does not merely want to effect a resolution of opposites. As Pinkney points out, Orlando lives alternation not resolution[53] and Woolf herself asks, if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with only one? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is.[54] Difference is to be celebrated, but should exist within the individual androgynous self-fertilising mind. As an example of this, Woolf describes the effect of reading Coleridge, when one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life.[55] The androgynous mind is united, but heterogeneous and creatively self-perpetuating. Woolf highlights this point by asking: What does one mean by the unity of the mind? for clearly the mind has so great a power of

concentrating at any point at any moment that it seems to have no single state of being. It can separate itself from the people in the street Or it can think with other people spontaneously.[56] The power of the androgynous mind lies in its ability to alternate simultaneously between a million different subject positions preserving heterogeneity at the same time as giving the impression of unity. In the final chapter of Orlando we see this premise in practice as Orlando ties to call her many selves into one key or captain self. However, Woolfs heterogeneous version of androgyny has its ideological pitfalls. The multiplication of gender and self within the individual leads, Moi would argue, back to biological determinism: the belief that if we can just turn sex into a more multiple or diverse category than it has been so far, then social norms will be relaxed. This is nothing but biological determinism with a liberal face.[57] Woolf, on the other hand, argues that multiplication of the self and the celebration of difference within the self leads to creativity and liberation from sexual prejudice in literature. To think androgynously offers not liberal biological determinism, but freedom to think creatively, with heterogeneity and difference playing a key role in this creative process. Yet another attack on Woolfs concept of the androgynous mind has emanated from the theory of narcissism. Kristeva has stated her vision of androgyny as destructive male-centred self-obsession, but other critics have argued that even in perfect sexual balance, The fantasy of the androgyne is exorbitant It is a logical impossibility, outside systems of signification and their necessary foundation in difference. The androgyne transgresses the very existence of difference. Thus Pacteau sees androgynous fantasy as a narcissistic caress in which the subject annihilates itself.[58] For Kristeva and Pacteau androgyny is not the solution to Woolfs problem because its love of self inscribed in its seemingly homogenous unity does not make for glorious difference or internalised heterogeneity, but for a narcissism which cannot create and can only selfdestruct. However, androgyny in Woolfs usage did not imply homogeneity or nihilistic self-love. Woolf enjoyed difference and promoted androgyny as a way to express the self not as a self-obsession in which the subject looks back at itself until it expires. Reading androgyny as a form of narcissism would uphold the presence of the ego in literature which is something that Woolf very clearly wishes to dispose of. Rado translates this self-destructive element detected by Jones, Pacteau and Kristeva in androgyny, not as narcissism or love of the self, but rather as fear of the body and argues that its success as an idea is predicated on the repression of [Woolfs] own female identity, her own female body.[59] Elaine Showalter would agree and calls androgyny a myth that helped her evade confrontation with her own painful femaleness and enabled her to cloak and repress her anger and ambition.[60] For Rado and Showalter the body is something that Woolf fears and androgyny offers the chance to get rid of it, but by getting rid of it, Showalter argues, she is reduced to the sphere of the exile and the eunuch.[61] Rado uses the comparison between the characters Orlando and Rhoda to illustrate how androgyny, without a strong sense of the body, actually causes insanity and death: Rhoda like Orlando becomes so alienated from her physical self that she can only be made aware of it by slamming herself against a door or a tree. By suggesting that this self-alienation is the source of Rhodas (and Orlandos) madness and suicide, Woolf exposes their androgyny as a kind of female castration, a forced lack, a requisite sublimation that precipitates a terrifying void of sexless absence.[62] Androgyny, to these critics, is an untenable position because it denies the importance of the body, of sexual desires of any material markings of sexual difference.[63] However, Woolf does not suggest that the body should be suppressed, rather that being a woman or a man is still an important factor just not the only factor and not the conscious factor. Woolf keeps an awareness of the body in her writing, otherwise why advocate the development of the womens sentence and state that Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father?[64] Yet at the same time Woolf reminds the reader and writer not to judge or create the work on that basis alone. Ultimately, it is an unconsciousness of sex, not a void of sexless absence that Woolf calls for. In A Room of Ones Own, Woolf holds the author, Mary Carmichael, in high esteem for her writing because she has mastered the first great lesson: she wrote as a woman, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages [are] full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself.[65] Notice that there is still a sexual quality in Marys work which suggests that the body is not to be thrown away. Perhaps Woolf would have created less critical contention if she had written in A Room of Ones Own, rather than in a letter to Ethyl Smyth: I believe unconsciousness, and complete anonymity to be the only conditions in which I can write. Not to be aware of oneself.[66] By getting rid of the troublesome word, androgyny, Woolf would not have to content with critics

arguing that it underscores and reifies the binary it is attempting to transcend.[67] Despite all of the drawbacks associated with the word androgyny and the many negative interpretations of Woolfs use of the term, Woolfs concept of the androgynous mind should not be read negatively or as counter-productive to her cause. Woolfs intention by introducing the concept was to promote a positive creative force that gets rid of gender stereotype, prejudice and discrimination in literature. It is not symbolic of a fear of the body, colourless homogeneity, self-dissolution or narcissistic death. That it is a concept based on feminine and masculine and all of the traits connected to them by patriarchal binary thought should not prevent the reader from seeing the concept as offering the possibility of creative transcendence. For Woolf, as for Cynthia Secor, androgyny is the capacity of a single person of either sex to embody the full range of human character traits, despite cultural attempts to render some exclusively feminine and some exclusively masculine.[68] The ability to access this full range of character traits and subject positions so that we read and write as fully human men and women is the ideal that Woolf is chasing.

WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME by Marge Piercy (A later essay by Marge Piercy) Utopian Feminist Visions Marge Piercy Isaac Asimov says, that all science fiction or speculative fiction is answering or dealing with the questions of what if, if only and if this continues. Basically, most of Woman on the Edge of Time is an if only book. The genre of the utopian novel, which Woman on the Edge of Time mostly is, is an old genre, which goes back to Plato's Republic. Most of the utopian novels were written by men and they are frequently very rational societies, in which everything is tremendously planned out, plotted out, often very hierarchical, usually with the social group from which the author comes being on top of the pyramid, and everybody else neatly arranged below it. For the past, perhaps hundred, or hundred and ten years, women have been writing utopian novels. Except for, perhaps, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, which was a bit hierarchical, but not like the ones we have been talking about, and has no sex in it, most utopian novels that women have written are very different. They tend to much looser, more anarchical societies. They tend to be very concerned that the daily work of society should be as prestigious as the jobs that are now loaded with rewards. In other words, that helping to raise children, helping to heal the sick, helping to give birth, helping to die peacefully and gently, helping to socialize people, helping to negotiate between people, should be as prestigious as, in our society, taking money away from people is, or manipulating the stock market, or all the other things that our society seems to reward so highly: taking over companies and driving them out of business, that sort of thing. Basically, women's utopias are very concerned with overcoming loneliness, because what is utopia? Utopia is what you don't have. It is the fantasies about what you lack and you feel you lack in society. So if you create a utopia in which everyone is concerned with raising of children, everyone shares the burden of doing the necessary and almost invisible work of the society, then you know that it was probably created by somebody who lives in a society in which women are penned up alone in little houses or flats with their children, going quietly crazy, feeling the whole burden on them. Whatever they are doing, it is wrong. Whatever they do, in fifteen years, some counselor will say to them, It is your fault. In most feminist utopias, such as Woman on the Edge of Time, basically sex is never coerced. It is usually not a society in which people live in the couples we live in now. Serial monogamy does not exist, I think, in any of the utopias created by women. People often live together in larger kinship or social groups, in which they can deal with the loneliness and the lack of communication, of community, that so many women experience. In some, sex is romanticized; in others it is much more promiscuous, much easier, but it almost always crosses the boundaries of what our society considers appropriate heterosexual activity. Feminist utopias are also concerned with safety. In one of Joanna Russ's novels, The Female Man, she says, that in her future society, a naked woman could walk around the equator, carrying a very large emerald and no one would ever bother her or show much interest. Usually, there is pretty much classlessness. Usually, the problems of having enough have been dealt with. Nobody seems to be terribly interested in being filthy rich, but there is also no poverty. Things are pretty well spread around. That is characteristic of all utopias that women have created. In the seventies, there was a great bursting forth of feminist utopias. In recent years, with women so much under attack and fighting to maintain the gains that we have fought for, there has been less energy for creating utopias. Now when I came to

He, She and It, that is not an if only novel, it is not a utopian novel, it is more if this continues. It is a novel in which many of the things happening now have reached fruition: in which the ozone layer has gone, so you can't go outside unprotected, in which much of the rice baskets and bread baskets of the world have been either inundated by the rising oceans or turned to deserts, in which there have been terrible disasters, in which the great international corporations are the primary form of control and government. The election of officials is a kind of sport and gambling. All real decisions are made by the multinational corporations. There are really no nation states left. There are large corporations, in which the higher executives and middle management and techies live in domes and protected environments, and most of the population lives in what they call the Glop, a megalopolis, which in the United States stretches from Boston to what is now Atlanta. It is densely populated, extremely polluted, basically lives on recycled garbage. There are some free towns in areas at the border of the corporations, and part of He, She and It takes place in such a free town called Tikva. Tikva is an anarchistic town, a green space in the middle of a manmade desert. Like most places that women imagine, it is very loose: Everything is argued out; everything is discussed; everything is open in how decisions are made. There are many plants. My protagonist Shira comes from a matriarchal family. She was raised by her grandmother. She believes her mother to be a sort of fussy middle-age bureaucrat and, in the course of the novel, she discovers that her mother was actually a datapirate and now is a woman dedicated to stealing information from the large multinational corporations and liberating it into the Glop; taking information and making it free and making it available, which is a very dangerous proposition, for which she could be killed at any moment. In Woman on the Edge of Time, my time traveler is not a white man. It is a Chicana woman who has had a hard life, but she is what they call a catcher: a woman with an unusually open and receptive mind. And she is the person who visits the future, often as an escape from an agonizing present. When Connie first goes into the future she is extremely disappointed. Her image of the future is extremely mechanized, and when she arrives in a place in the future, which actually is a town in Massachusetts, it is a village. At first glance, it really looks to her very primitive. They are all peasants, goats and chickens running around and so forth. As she gets to know the place more, the more tedious work is all mechanized. The manufacturing is mechanized, but the agriculture is not. The agriculture and the care-taking is all completely unmechanized. I am not a writer who is afraid of machinery per se, afraid of technology at all. I figure I wouldn't be alive without technology. Woman on the Edge of Time was an attempt to make concrete many of the ideas I liked best in the social movements of the time it emerged: the women's movement, the new left, Native American movement, etc.; and, to make vivid and real those ideas, to make them flesh. Woman on the Edge of Time has a structure where all the people in the frame of the novel, in the present, have counterparts in the future. The counterparts are quite different from them, because I tried to imagine what people who did not grow up in a sexist, racist, competitive imperialist society would be like. How would these personalities be different? So that is the sort of game plan behind the mirroring of the characters in the present and the future of the novel. Basically people in Woman on the Edge of Time choose their mtier. There is a lot of necessary work that everyone shares. Just about everyone shares in child raising, as one of these three co-mothers, but it is not mandatory. The scut work is mandatory. Everybody has to do some of the physical labor, everybody has to do the things that hold the society together, everyone takes part in government by lot. Basically, I have always thought that choosing by lot was not a bad way to run things, but I have never been able to persuade other people of that. When I sat on a couple of boards that gave art grants, I said, The fairest way to do it, to eliminate our own prejudices, is, read everything, drop out the bottom half, and then do it by lot. That way the same people would not always get the grants because it feels safe. Government is for sale generally. If you have enough money, you can buy yourself a governorship or senatorship or whatever. You just simply overload the media. There in Mattapoisett, the government is chosen by lot and everybody serves for a year, when they are called upon. There are a lot of things that people choose to do and other things are chosen by lot. The different roles in the society are being passed around, some by people choosing them, some by everyone having to contribute to them, and other things by lot. Fairness is very important for me and I thought that was a fair way to run a place. I was very struck a few years before I wrote Woman on the Edge of Time by a book about the Pawnee Indians, called The Lost World, written by an anthropologist, who interviewed all the remaining members after they had been uprooted. And, one of the things I learned from that book was that while they were what we would call primitive technologically, socially they were far more sophisticated than we are. They had ways of dealing with social problems that were far more sophisticated. For instance, let's say you feel lonely and neglected, as people so frequently do. Well, you would have a dream that it was time for you to do a certain ceremony, and you would say, it is time for me to do this ceremony, I have dreamt it, it must be so. Then for three days you should be the most important person in the entire village. Similarly the women who did the agriculture, when they came back from planting the fields, covered with mud, cold; it was spring; it was hard work; all the older men in the village would have to get up on top of the houses and sing for them, and greet them when they came back. Similarly, if somebody stole something from me, I would have to give him another present, because he would only steal, if he felt that he didn't have enough, and so you should be made to feel that you have enough. So they were sophisticated in social ways. Their constant aim was to keep resocializing people to be good to each other, to maintain social cohesion and

cooperation. That struck me as an extremely sophisticated society in that sense, and I was very impressed by that and thought a lot about that before I wrote Woman on the Edge of Time. In both the novels, there is a great deal of emphasis on the education of children, on children being raised together, educated together by the community, by shared responsibility for the children. I think this is pretty common in women's utopian novels, even those like He, She and It, that isn't at all utopian but has a pleasant enough sub-society within it. Basically there is a lot of freedom given to children, freedom to learn, freedom to experience things. I see the difference between my own childhood, in which I was able to run loose a great deal, and now, where children are shepherded from one activity to another, usually by their mother, occasionally by their father. Children go from soccer practice to language skills, to the tutor, the singing group to god knows what, it goes on and on. I live in a village and here children still have far more freedom then they have in the suburbs, where it seems they have no freedom at all. I don't think it was bad for me to run wild as a child. Certainly I got into danger, but I also learned to get out of it. It is a very circumscribed and imagination-starved life that most children lead now. Their imaginations are programmed by the media, so that they have very little space in which to explore, except on the net, that is part of why they go on the World Wide Web so much. That is the one place in which they seem to have any autonomy and ability to explore. In both of these books, I have been concerned with the education and socialization of children. In He, She and It, it is mostly the community where I am concerned with it, not the very hierarchical education that occurs in the multinational corporations. In Woman on the Edge of Time, there is a lot more about the education process. The children spend very little time in formal learning or taking tests. They spend a lot of time with adults. In Woman on the Edge of Time, all children have three mothers who may be of any sex. Those three are equally responsible for them until the age of twelve or thirteen, when the child decides he or she is ready to become youth. And when they do, they undergo an initiation process, and their comothers are not allowed to even speak to them for three months. They have instead other elders who answer questions, give advice, but who don't have the authority over them or the kind of intimacy that their co-mothers had. It's a liberation process that attempts to short circuit the agony of adolescence as we experience in this society, in which all children quite hate their parents and, at some point, want to murder their parents out of frustration and fury. The reason why people write speculative fiction, in part, is because if you cannot imagine anything else, all you can ask for is more of the same, more McDonalds, more and bigger SUVs, more and bigger highways, more and bigger malls that's all you can ask for because that is all you can imagine, more of the same, bigger. Part of the reason why people write speculative fiction is to suggest that there may be alternatives. The imagination is a very powerful liberating tool. If you cannot imagine something different, you cannot work towards it. On feminist critical utopia which combines the qualities of both utopia and dystopia 1. Feminist Utopia as a Genre: (source Booker 337-) 1. "Centrally concerned with the clash between individual desire and societal demand, Dystopian fiction often focuses on sexuality and relations between the genders as elements of this conflict." (e.g. We, The Brave New World, 1984.) (337) 2. Despite giving frequent lip service to equality of genders, literary dystopias (and utopias, for that matter) have typically been places where men are men and women are women, and in relatively conventional way. (337) 3. "critical utopia": Feminist writers [e.g. Piercy, Ursula K Le Guin, Samuel Delany, and Joanna Russ] "produced works that re-energized the utopian genre as a whole and moving toward an open-endedness that sought to overcome the tendency toward monological stagnation that had long haunted conceptualizations of utopia. Tom Moylan argues that such writers attempted to create in their works what he calls 'critical utopia,' retaining an "awareness of the limitations of the utopian tradition, so that these texts reject utopia as blueprint while preserving it as dream" (10). Such uotpias are able to function effectively as critique of status quo, while maintaining a self-critical awareness that prevents them from descending into empty utopian cliche." (338-39) 2. Women's position in the relations of Production and Reproduction: Production and Reproduction: "Piercy not only opens wide the definition of modes of reproduction, she examines it economically, socially and biologically as well as politically. " motherhood and family; birthing 103/104; co-mothers, no genetic bonds with the child. "Where Gilman's future family is one of overmothers, landmothers, mothers and daughters, Piercy's family is an extended one in which notions of motherliness replaced motherhood" (Bartkowski 72) "'Parenting, not pair-bonding, is the basis of these families. And 'coupling' refers to a sexuality no longer tied to reprodution."

WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME: OBSERVATIONS by Miriam Rosenthal Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy, published in 1976, gives us vivid multiple pictures of lives lived in that present time and of possible futures, 150 years hence. It is a rich book that can be interpreted on many different levels. Throughout her narrative, Ms. Piercy shows us: the life of a poor Chicano single parent, struggling to provide some sort of a life for herself and her child; the plight of poor women in a society that doesn't really care, and the plight of economically disadvantaged women and men captured in the cruel web of the mental health [sic] system. We experience the struggle of a person helpless to extricate herself from the consequences of a diagnosis routinely applied to patients on admission to psychiatric institutions. As a contrast to those dour pictures, we are also given a vivid picture of a future society that provides hope for humanity and serves as the only positive refuge for our protagonist. Who would want to be Consuelo Ramos, the woman on the edge of time? The only reason one might be willing to be her would be in order to have the grand discovery adventure of being transported, "caught," in time travel to a more loving and felicitous future time. At least, that is our initial view of the future. This future is a time in which humans have overcome some of the damage to the environment and society wreaked by our time. One would certainly not wish to participate in Connie's life in her present, or to have lived through her immediate past. Her present is a life of oppression, degradation, and an almost mindless inconsideration for any rights she might have to live her life in a humane manner. After her lover dies of hepatitis, she engages in an effort to blot out the pain by indulging in a drunken binge which culminates in child abuse. Writhing in remorse and guilt, she is incarcerated in a mental hospital, is diagnosed a schizophrenic, a psychiatric catch-all diagnosis, and her career as a mental patient begins. That diagnosis, for "the system," becomes her identity and her entry card into a world of bleak horror. Relatives, not wanting to deal with her, collude with "the system" to continue to victimize her, all in the name of protecting her from herself and others from her actual and potential misdeeds. Was she mad or was it her world that was mad? She was a woman on her own at a time when mothers were supposed to be best off with men to provide for them. She was poor. She was a woman on the edge: the periphery, the ultimate "other," the bottom edge of society, the edge of sanity. Most of the men in her history had used her and then disposed of her or disappeared. Her one successful pregnancy was the fruit of rape. Her fertility was taken from her by male residents at a hospital who used her as practice for hysterectomies. The only men who had treated her well were her first husband who was murdered by the police in the streets and the blind pickpocket, Claude, who ended up dying of hepatitis as part of a prison experiment. As far as Connie was concerned, the same system that had victimized her had also been responsible for extinguishing the lives of the only protectors she'd had. It was the male-dominated, patriarchal, Anglo world that seemed to cause her distress. Her femaleness and her browness seemed to her to be a major causal factor for her problems, rather than her own specific behaviors. Page: 2 Where did the world of the future, the world of Luciente and Bee and Jackrabbit come from? Did Connie's madness invent and then transport her to this other time or was there something special, an extra-sensitivity that made it possible for her to make the journeys back and forth over 150 years to a time that was more generous than her own. Connie's presence on the edge made it easier for Luciente, the person from the future, to contact her and for her to jump over into the other time. How could a person with Connie's lack of education and imagination have invented such a future? If that future was a hallucination, does that make it any less hopeful? If she would have invented it, wouldn't that be evidence of her superior mental state? Even saying that, there are still instances in the story when some people from the future bear resemblance to people from Connie's past or present life. This keeps us guessing. Is Luciente really a Connie of the future? We have no pat answer to this question and this gives a tension that points to Piercy's skill as a storyteller. What is this future like? In Mouth-of -Mattapoisett, Luciente's place of habitation, people live very simply in what we would consider a sustainable manner. Every element of their lifestyle is crafted with care. From the moment a child is brought into being to the moment of death, all is covered by community practices and ritual and yet, there is also a great deal of room for independence and the exercise of free spirit. Nothing is predetermined. Initially, we are led to believe that Mattapoisett is a typical type of community of the future. It is about the size of a village, Connie is told that big cities were deemed unworkable. It is bucolic, vegetables are grown and cows graze. Our first view even provides clothes drying in the sun. In many ways it reminds Connie of the

Mexican villages of her childhood. For the most part, the use of fossil fuels is a thing of the past. Solar energy is primarily used. Each community tries to be "ownfed," i.e., self-sustaining. Each adult has a space of per own. The pronouns his and her are no longer used -- per, for person, is the correct term. Language, as we might expect, has evolved. Some of it, such as the word, "fasure," no doubt has its derivation from the expression "for sure" popular in the '70s. Fellow community dwellers are referred to as mems. even cats and other animals are conversational, persons communicate with them by sign language. People live in close contact with their environment. By this time, reproduction of the human species is carefully controlled and a child is born only when someone in the community dies. People are not encouraged to live expanded numbers of years and most don't. While Connie is around, we experience the death of two people, one old respected woman who has reached the end of her days, and one young beloved man who is killed in defense of his community. The survivors mourn their loved ones and cherish their memories, but are also joyful to welcome new members into the community. There is a diverse mix of racial types, rather than a blending into uniformity. There are still blacks and whites, not merely light brown people. The parenting arrangement is not of our convention. Three mothers are chosen from men and women who have volunteered to mother. There is no mention of fathers. All mothers breastfeed and bond very closely with the child. Reproduction and parenting, as we know it, is obsolete. Since mothering is a matter of choice, all mothers are eager and joyful in their task. This doesn't mean that children are perfectly behaved and are like little obedient robots. To the contrary, it seems that children are often headstrong and eager to fly from their comfortable nests long before a child of our time would. There is a feeling that children belong to the community, not to the mothers. Following a Page: 3 week on their own in the wild, their official independence ritual that takes place when they are about 12, children often do not stay or settle in the communities of their raising, but move around. Youth is a time for freedom and experimentation, settling down comes in later years. The social life of a person is also very different than in Connie's world. Men and women couple without great regard for the gender of their partner. They refer to each other as "sweetfriend." And most have multiple sweefriends, although they have a "core." We are treated to evidences of jealousies that exist when one sweet partner may have a special relationship with another to the exclusion, or perceived exclusion, of a third. What we learn from this is that even though human social practices may change, there are basic human emotions that still exist. In the future, they are not swept under the rug, rituals are developed to resolved problems that may emerge. How is madness perceived in the future world? Luciente says, "Our madhouses are places where people retreat when they want to go down into themselves -- to collapse, carry on, see visions, hear voices of prophecy, bang on the walls, relive infancy -- getting in touch with the buried self and the inner mind. We all lose parts of ourselves. We all make choices that go bad....... How can another person decide that it is time for me to disintegrate, to reintegrate myself?" (p.60) So, madness is seen as a normal part of life, not as something that makes a person wrong. This world sounds so idyllic, where is the need for defense, and against whom? If most communities are like Mattapoisett, then how or why would someone be killed? We never find out exactly who the enemy is, but we suspect it is that other world, the world of the "multies;" New York, a world that is as carefully contrived and just the opposite of Mattapoisett. If we think of Mattapoisett as a tranformational scenario, New York is the scenario of continued growth (on its way to collapse), although a dark and cancerous growth. We see this world once Connie is operated on as part of a special experiment to try to control her "violent tendencies" and has machines and electrodes planted in her brain. Her guide to this world is a "fem," a woman-like creature, physically altered to accentuate her sexual characteristics, named Gildina. She is the apparent willing captive of a man named Cash who keeps her for sex. She lives in one room, with a holographic set for entertainment, a picture screen that substitutes for a window, and is under constant surveillance by a big brother-like organization. The "richies" are in control. Gildina and her ilk do not expect to survive their middle age when they are sent off to the "Geri" and then "ashed." Organ transplants and other gene modifications enable richies to live to more than 200. One does not go outside, the air is too bad. Richies do not live "on the surface," they live on space platforms. Poor people, "duds," are walking organ banks. They are born coughing and pass on to Geri coughing. Connie says that talking to Gildina is like talking to her niece, Dolly, on speed, or like talking to a poodle. Dolly is also a woman who is captive in prostitution by and for cash. If any world is a product of Connie's mind, it would seem to be the New York of this future. The story does not end on a hopeful note. Connie cannot be saved by the future and she also cannot seem to save her friends in the future. War is waged all out on all fronts: present and future. One of the messages we

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might take form the book is that the seeds of the future are in the present, but when you start to modify the biosystem (or any system), as Luciente and her mems say, "In biosystems, all factors are not knowable." One never knows what the outcome will be from one small change. Monkeying around with Connie's brain ends up creating death for some of those doctors and a long-term incarceration for Connie. Treating Connie as a violent person creates a person who can only use violence as a way of combating her treatment. Perhaps the electrodes accidentally stimulated her violent tendencies. Her choices seem to be capitulation/resignation or warfare/affirmation of herself as a living being. Being allowed to live on her own terms does not seem to be an option for her. She did not create the war, she is placed in the perceived position of fighting or dying. Page: 4 What meaning do we find in the story of Consuelo Ramos, the Woman on the Edge of Time? What special meaning might there be in this tale, especially for futurists? As stated earlier, when a person is thought of as an object and dehumanized, it is possible to do all sorts of inhumane things to them. One can even treat them as laboratory animals, as if we treat laboratory animals in anything other than an inhumane fashion. One of the things we can get from this book is that we must redefine our treatments for those we classify as mentally ill, or poor, or maladjusted to our society. There ought to be other options besides institutionalization or total neglect. It means that coming up with more positive ways to deal with people with problems takes time and attention and money and most importantly, creativity, patience, generosity, and a willingness to persist despite failures. We have learned that throwing money at problems doesn't work; we have also learned that starving the problem doesn't make it go away either. One of the things a futurist might contribute to a discussion about our dysfunctional society is a new picture of the future and a vision of what it might look like if it was fixed. It was written about Alvin Toffler in Wired , "successful futurists make their fortune by interpreting the present in a new way -- a way that makes more sense and seems more conventional the further into the future one goes." Piercy uses her book as an opportunity to take a look at the underclass, as well as the structure of our society, and make a new picture of it. What meaning might futurists get out of Connie's story? Any and everyone is a potential futurist, it is the type of thinking a person does that is more important than their title. They may be reminded that there are any number of possible futures "out there." The seeds of all those futures are here in the present. That even in what seems to be a utopia, a good place, there comes the threat of the dystopia. Is that what we want? Do we have any idea of what we want? Is there a way to create positive futures without those seeds of destruction? Can we get the cooperation of those parties who's participation is necessary to move things along? How would one obtain that cooperation? Is everything a matter of self-interest? If so, doesn't that make every situation a zero-sum game? Is there a way of creating win-win situations? Perhaps the question should be is there a way of getting people to move away from the desire to get theirs' first? How do we empower a sense of community amongst all these disparate entities? This seems as if it would be an unlikely and certainly an unpopular question in an age celebrating the "free market," competition, and all the "me-firsting" this entails. One important step could be the development of clear and powerful scenarios that could be inspirational and embraced, not only by those in a position to make things happen, but also by most other citizens. Another step might have to do with participatory democracy -- create ways to reach out beyond "decision makers" to enable most citizens to become decision makers. Or, perhaps there are other ways to create a change in direction yet to be developed. No matter which scenarios are chosen, or which methods of economic/social development are followed, it is imperative that someone, whether it be futurists or policy makers, or whatever, be brave enough to outline the possible consequences of the actions taken. The surprises we seem to be dumbfounded by, such as the growth and spread of international organized crime in the countries of the former Soviet Union, might be mitigatable by some foresight and a willingness to take preventative action. To tie this back to our book, when we look at the seemingly dystopic future of the "multi's" and New York City, we see a society that rollerbladed into being by allowing scientific advances and social disadvantages to follow their trend lines. Our utopian future of Mattapoisett is a purposeful creation designed to repair the physical and social environment wrecked by our time. Both futures are possible. Do we want to choose or are we content to wait and see what happens? Are we powerless or powerful? Are we reactors or initiators? Is there something in the middle? Ultimately, I don't know the answers to those questions, but I feel we are always searching for that middle ground, as well as being depressed or elated over our responses to the two ends of that continuum. Can we choose, or are the structural forces of our modern/post-modern/ante-post-modern worlds too much for us?

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Social relations and scientific culture in Connies world (the present, but not quite real, i.e. not like USA in the 1970s) Gender and familial relations in the past and present "families" "His" violence: Connie's husbands: Martin; Eddie 43-44; Geraldo pp. 12; G and the other men 14-15; Professor Silvester p. 50 --> the anger of the weak Luis: many wives 48; Luis wants to be like Anglo 363; Claud 26-27; 109; 112-13; submission to childbirth: Connie's mother: p. 45; Teresa 47-48<-> Connie p. 46; mother-daughter: o Connie nevered been "mothered enough"; p. 47 o Angelina: p. 61 o Dolly: o a vicious circle for women in the lower classes p. 280 women's roles in biological reproduction --Connie--her mother dies the year she gets her first abortion; o hysterectomy -- her mother and Connie ("they had taken out her womb at Metropolitan when she had come in bleeding after that abortion and the beating from Eddie. Unnecessarily they had done a complete hysterectomy because the residents wanted practice" (38). o experiment: Inez (cannot tell the difference between a doctor and a scientist) 274; Like my sister Inez, she lives in New Mexico. . . she has seven kids. After the sixth, she went to the clinic for the pill... See, she thought she went to a doctor. But he had his scientist cap on and he was experimenting. She thought it was good she got the pill free. But they gave her a sugar pill instead. So, she got heavy again with the seventh child. It was born with something wrong ... Now they have all that worry and money troubles. They're supposed to give him pills and send him to a special school, but it costs. All because Inez thought she had a doctor, but she got a scientist. ( 268-269) What should or can the social workers do? Social system of surveillance: A. Education p. 107 - 108 // regulation like a mental institution B. police and social workers: pigeon-holing--restricting(p. 17) , condemning and imprisoning caseworker: Mrs. Polcari p. 40; social worker Ms Fergusson: 25-26 ("human-to-cockcroach look") B. The medical field and the mental hospital: (psychotropic medications, electric shock therapy, and brain surgery) experiment on humans: Claud's experience in the jail 27; Skip's experience of having electrode attached to his penis (to test his sexual responses) p. 167 lack of privacy or freedom 1) *the hospital is like school, where the authorities dominate (e.g. language training; lack of freedom in action); 2) having to stand in line for medicine, to get permission to make a phone call, 3) no privacy pp. 165 - 66 (cross-examined by the nurse) Connie's experience: o the first and the second time 59-60; --feel guilty and self-hatred. o control with psychrotopic medicine: Thorazine, "hypo" o control through communication (examination): "they trapped you into saying something and then they'd bring out their interpretations that made your life over... into a pattern of disease" (18-19). o control with judgment: doctor not listening, only judging with their pre-concepts 19-21; any sign interpreted as that of sickness. o control with spatial division and regulating action: pp. 17; 25 (sit and sit and sit); Ward L-6 (violent ward) 80; seclusion ward; "the real hospital" 88; a former schoolteacher's response 91 (re-classification); Ward G-2: 94-95 o control by promotion or punishment 83 o dehumanizing: "your sign is cuckoo" 29; tin mirror 89, like the other mirrors in society o be obedient. 194 the consequences of electrode on pp. 204, 201, Alice 260; on Skip 254; 263-64, 270; Connie --feeling raped 179; Tina 341; Sybil 342 Their ways of persuading Connie 269 Inez's experience of "scientist" 274

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Social organisation of the future androgynous world at Matapoisett The future (2137) --community + individualism, no hierarchy, no institutions I. Mouth-of -Mattapoisett 1) language: -- about human identities: "ownfed," person, per, intersee --> "Person must not do what person cannot do." 101 -- about family: comother, sweet friends, mem, core, -- ceremonies: kidbinding, naming, 115; Thanksmaking 174 -- name: only one word for a name (no family name), can change names. (e.g. Rose of Ithaca, Luciente and Bee and Jackrabbit ) pp. 76; choosing different names (different from Connie's sense of her names) 121-22; -- others (frequently nouns used as verbs): worming (struggle p.101), bottom, fasure, kenner, red, compost, Yif, suck patience (57), "Craze me"; trance, body one's feelings; -- suck patience 213 2) pluralism, individualism + communication: sender/catcher: p. 42; being in contact 52; Identity -- individualism 101; 136; -- naming e.g. p. 121; Innocente p. 114 -- free self-expression of "I want" p. 123 -- personalities: each with different traits, e.g. Jackrabbit with artistic tendencies; weaknesses (Jackrabbit's 124; Dawn's shyness, Luciente's jealousy 176) -- dialogic communication (negotiation) as mothering worming 207 -- in order to discover and eliminate the sources of hostility between individuals. Connie: "Don't you people have nothing to worry about besides personal stuff?" One of the community members then points out the connection between individual and national warfare: Response: [W]e believe many actions fail because of inner tensions. To get revenge against someone an individual thinks wronged per, individuals have offered up nations to conquest. Note: Sara Ruddick on mothers and peace: "Out of their faiture as well as successes, mothers develop a conception of relatinships that undermines the paranoid conception of individuality that fuel conquest. . .They not only modify aggression in the interest of connection but develop connections that limit aggression before it arises. The self who desires other selves to persist in their own lively being is a self at least capable of respecting the lives and life-connections of quite different others." (254) 3) Community Culture and Ecological Concerns Sexual and family arrangement: family with individual private spaces; comothers and sweetfriends 74; man breastfeeding 134; love and sex: love more than one per 133; "person never stales on anybody" 148 (e.g. Erzulia and Bee)flirting in public 123; allowing children to experiment sex 138-39 the brooder 101 - severs the connection between genes and racial culture "Decisions were made forty years back to breed a high proportion of darker-skinned people and to mix the genes well through the population. At the same time, we decided to hold on to separate cultural identities. But we broke the bond between genes and culture, broke it forever. We want there to be no chance of racism again. But we don't want the melting pot where everybody ends up with thin gruel. We want diversity, for strangeness breeds richness." (96) examples: the ceremony of naming; children-- naming ritual and then they go away ("They body our sense of good." 117) Shaper vs. Mixer pp. 226 Culture and Arts --pluralism 178, affirming different cultures -- preservation of racial cultures 100 ( hunting); 102; 103;104-06; Zuli follows voodoo; Sappho an Indian believer; 150;

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confirming the past e.g. J's art work 180-81; *other examples of holi(visionary artwork) pp. 180, 265 Environmentalist/Ecological views of Nature -- use either solar energy or gas from decomposed waste --communication with animals 98-99; animals Tilla 98 -- decompost or re-cycle things p. 55; -- use spinners to make fences. Another possible future is that of Gildina, the robot-woman or ultrafeminine cyborg who only fulfils a sexual function The World of Gildina -- clues: "We are only one possible future," Luciente 177 chap 15: marriage as contract 290; life expectancy 291; use of drugs 292; levels 292; HG; no window, no view 294-95; SC (sharpened control); monitored by the Securicenter; multi;

THE FEMALE MAN by Joanna Russ The "Straight Mind" in Russs The Female Man Susan Ayres For years I have been saying Let me in, Love me, Approve me, Define me, Regulate me, Validate me, Support me. Now I say Move over. (7.2:140) In The Female Man Joanna Russ contrasts our present-day heterosexual society with two revolutionary alternatives: a utopian world of women and a dystopian world of women warring with men. The Female Man, both science fiction and utopian novel, operates as what Monique Wittig in The Straight Mind (hereafter, SM) calls a literary "war machine" (69). The goal of such a war machine is "to pulverize the old forms and formal conventions. It is always produced in hostile territory" (SM 69). Russs war machine confronts hostile territorythe heterosexual institutions that regulate genderin tones that are variously hilarious, furious, and parodic. Her purpose in The Female Man is to trick the reader into recognizing the problem of "contrarieties": "You cant unite woman and human any more than you can unite matter and antimatter" (138, 151). In deploying this literary war machine, Russ critiquesin a manner similar to Wittigs The Straight Mind and her utopian novel Les Gurillres (1969) heterosexual institutions that regulate gender, showing how two representatives from a world similar to ours respond to those institutions. She also shows two alternative worlds that further undermine, but do not offer solutions to the ways in which heterosexual institutions regulate gender. Ultimately, Russs war machine succeeds by reappropriating language, as illustrated by one characters change into the female man. The Female Man takes place in four worlds inhabited by four Js, very different women who share the same genotype: Jeannine Dadier (who lives in 1969 in an America that never recovered from the Great Depression), Joanna (who also lives in 1969, but in an America like ours, and who merges at times with Joanna Russ, the author), Janet Evason (who lives in the allfemale utopian future of Whileaway), and Alice Reasoner, christened Jael (who lives in the dystopian future where Womanlanders are at war with Manlanders). These worlds constitute "worlds of possibility," but are not linearly related, so neither Whileaway nor Jaels world is "our future" (1.6:6-7, 8.5:160-61). The novel presents multiple configurations of a visitor-guide utopia: Janet, a visitor to America, is guided by Joanna and Jeannine, who are in turn visitors to Whileaway, guided by Janet. Joanna, Jeannine, and Janet are visitors to Manland and Womanland, guided by Jael. Jael also visits America and is guided by Jeannine. The novel constantly shifts among these worlds and voices, sometimes to such an extent that it is impossible to identify the speaking "I." For instance, when Janet moves in with an American familythe Wildings of Anytownand has a lesbian affair with the Wildings daughter, Laura Rose, an "I" follows her (4.2:58). Based on textual clues, it is impossible to determine who this "I" is. Similarly, near the end of the novel the following sentence illustrates this confusion: "I said goodbye and went off with Laura, I, Janet; I also watched them go, I, Joanna; moreover I went off to show Jael the city, I Jeannine, I Jael, I myself" (9.7:212). As the entire novel implies, the question of identity is intertwined with the question of gender. This is depicted, for example, in the following description of the statue of a god on Whileaway: "Persons who look at the statue longer than I did have reported that one cannot pin It down at all, that She is a constantly changing contradiction, that She becomes in turn gentle, terrifying, hateful, loving, stupid (dead) and finally indescribable" (5.16:103).

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These narrative shifts not only displace the reader, but on another level they raise the question of the identity of the subjective self. Identity, like the statue on Whileaway, "is a constantly changing contradiction." In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler discusses the relation between gender and identity and argues: "It would be wrong to think that the discussion of identity ought to proceed prior to a discussion of gender identity for the simple reason that persons only become intelligible through becoming gendered in conformity with recognizable standards of gender intelligibility" (16). Although gender and identity are ineluctably intertwined in The Female Man, this paper sets aside questions of identity in order to focus on how the "standards of gender intelligibility" in "our world" are contrasted with and undermined by Russs two alternative worlds and how language is deployed as the ultimate weapon to destroy "standards of gender intelligibility." The worlds Jeannine and Joanna inhabit are ruled by standards which Wittig, a materialist feminist, associates with what she calls "the straight mind." Wittig asserts that the straight mind "cannot conceive of a culture, a society where heterosexuality would not order not only all human relationships but also its very production of concepts and all the processes which escape consciousness, as well" (SM 28). For Wittig, there is one category of sex femaleand this "category of sex is the product of a heterosexual society which imposes on women the rigid obligation of the reproduction of the species"; it also "turns half of the population into sexual beings.... Wherever they are, whatever they do...they are seen (and made) sexually available to men, and they, breasts, buttocks, costume, must be visible" (SM 6-7). Wittigs position is that there is no gender and no sex; rather, the straight mind discursively produces these categories (see Butler 112-13, 115-16). The category of sex, Wittig says, "does not concern being but relationships.... there is no such thing as being-woman or being-man. Man and woman are political concepts of opposition" (SM 29). This is another way of saying that "there are not two genders. There is only one: the feminine, the masculine not being a gender. For the masculine is not the masculine but the general" (SM 60). Butler, who agrees with Wittigs analysis of the straight mind, criticizes Wittig because she "presumes the subject, the person, to have a presocial and pregendered integrity" and because she "neglect[s] the critical dimension of the unconscious which, as a site of repressed sexuality, reemerges within the discourse of the subject as the very impossibility of its coherence" (29, 28). The category of sex and the straight mind which Wittig analyzes in her essays are found in the worlds of Jeannine and Joanna, which is unsurprising because their worlds are very similar to ours. For example, this monologue by Joanna illustrates some of the consequences of the straight mind: "Do you enjoy playing with other peoples childrenfor ten minutes? Good! This reveals that you have Maternal Instinct and you will be forever wretched if you do not instantly have a baby of your own.... Are you lonely? Good! This shows that you have Feminine Incompleteness; get married and do all your husbands personal services, buck him up when hes low, teach him about sex (if he wants you to), praise his technique (if he doesnt), have a family if he wants a family.... "Do you like mens bodies? Good! This is beginning to be almost as good as getting married. This means that you have True Womanliness, which is fine unless you want to do it with him on the bottom and you on the top.... (7.5:151-52) Joannas monologue echoes an earlier chapter, "The Great Happiness Contest," a series of dramatic vignettes which includes the following: FIRST WOMAN: Im perfectly happy. I love my husband and we have two darling children. I certainly dont need any change in my lot. SECOND WOMAN: Im even happier than you are. My husband does the dishes every Wednesday and we have three darling children, each nicer than the last. Im tremendously happy. THIRD WOMAN: Neither of you is as happy as I am.... Im happiest in fulfilling my responsibilities to him and the children. We have four children. FOURTH WOMAN: We have six children.... I have a part-time job as a clerk in Bloomingdales...but I really feel like Im expressing myself best when I make a custard or a meringue or decorate the basement. ME: You miserable nits, I have a Nobel Peace Prize, fourteen published novels, six lovers, a town house, a box at the Metropolitan Opera, I fly a plane, I fix my own car, and I can do eighteen push-ups before breakfast, that is, if youre interested in numbers. ALL THE WOMEN: Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill. (6.5:116-17)1 Joanna says that the straight mind is the "doctrine of Nobodys Fault...the doctrine that Women Can Love Better Than Men so we ought to be saints... the doctrine of Its A Personal Problem." All these doctrines are implicit in a heterosexual culture, just as in a heterosexual culture women are to men as slaves are to mastersas Joanna satirically taunts: "Selah, selah, there is only one True Prophet and its You, dont kill me, massa, Ise jes ignerant" (7.5:152).2 Russ also depicts consequences of the straight mind in courtship or flirting, other occasions for men to dominate women. For instance, when Jeannine goes on a blind date, the third-person narrator states: "His contribution is Make me feel good; her contribution is Make me exist" (6.6:120). Likewise, when Joanna takes Janet to a party where Janet meets a man, Joanna says: "When I got back they had reached the stage of Discussing His Work" (3.2:39). That heterosexual institutions define sex roles for courtship can also be seen when Janet and the host of the party get into a fight. The host and Joanna furiously

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scramble through their copies of the little blue and pink books given out in high school entitled, WHAT TO DO IN EVERY SITUATION (3.2:45-48). These books satirize the heterosexual institutions regulating gender. For instance, in the little pink book under "Brutality," Joanna reads: "Mans bad temper is the womans fault. It is also the womans responsibility to patch things up afterwards" (3.2:47). Women in The Female Man are objectified as sex objects. For instance, Joanna says, "After we had finished making love, he turned to the wall and said, Woman, youre lovely. Youre sensuous. You should wear long hair and lots of eye make-up and tight clothing. Now what does that have to do with anything?" (7.5:150). Joanna also notes how people stare at her legs on the subway as if she were a cheerleader (5.1:83). The straight mind excludes females from the universal (male), a point made by the Non Sum that Laura and Jael repeat as a mantra. Laura "Says over and over to herself Non Sum, Non Sum, which means either I dont exist or Im not that, according to how you feel it..." (5.3:59). Jael explodes, "It is I, who you will not admit exists.... I, I, I. Repeat it like magic. That is not me. I am not that.... NON SUM, NON SUM, NON SUM!" (8.10:195).3 Because of Non Sum, men oppress and invalidate women, as illustrated in "The Great Happiness Contest" and in the satiric chapter composed of fragments reviewing The Female Man: "Shrill . . . vituperative . . . ...needs a good lay . . . ...no characterization, no plot . . . ...a womans book . . . ...feminine lack of objectivity . . . ...the usual boring obligatory references to Lesbianism..... ...sharp and funny but without real weight or anything beyond a topical.... (7.3:140-41).4 Joanna reverses Non Sum by becoming a man, a female man. She cryptically hints at this several times (1.5:5, 2.2:19-20) before she explains it: "Ill tell you how I turned into a man. First I had to turn into a woman" (7.1: 133). As Simone de Beauvoir says in the The Second Sex, "One is not born, but becomes a woman" (249). Before Joanna can become a man, she has to become a woman through societal enculturation: I had a five-year-old self who said: Daddy wont love you. I had a ten-year-old self who said: the boys wont play with you. I had a fifteen-year-old self who said: nobody will marry you. I had a twenty-year-old self who said: you cant be fulfilled without a child. (7.1:135) She elaborates: At eleven I passed an eighth-grader, a boy, who muttered between his teeth, Shake it but dont break it. The career of the sexless sex object had begun. I had, at seventeen, an awful conversation with my mother and father in which they told me how fine it was to be a girlthe pretty clothes...and how I did not have to climb Everest, but could listen to the radio and eat bon-bons while my Prince was out doing it.... There is the vanity training, the obedience training, the self-effacement training, the deference training, the dependency training, the passivity training, the rivalry training, the stupidity training, the placation training. (7.5:151)5 Joanna thus successfully becomes a woman but cannot "put this together with my human life, my intellectual life, my solitude, my transcendence, my brains, and my fearful, fearful ambition" (ibid.). In describing how she became a woman she self-consciously parodies "feminine writing," the fluid and ludic style of writing from the body practiced by Hlne Cixous and others to show the desire to return the the preconscious state of union with the mother.6 Joanna rejects feminine writing because it is another (false) mark of gender: "my diction is becoming feminine, thus revealing my true nature...I have no structure...my thoughts seep out shapelessly like menstrual fluid, it is all very female and deep and full of essences, it is very primitive and full of ands, and it is called run-on sentences" (7.1:137).7 Joanna explains that she becomes a man as a consequence of "the knowledge you suffer when youre an outsider.... the perception of all experience through two sets of eyes, two systems of value, two habits of expectation, almost two minds" (7.2:137-38). In other words, she must constantly be aware not only of the universal male, but also of the female Other.8 Thus, she becomes a female man: "To resolve contrarieties, unite them in your own person" (138). Become your own universal. She says, "Manhood, children, is not reached by courage or short hair or insensibility.... Manhood, children, . . . is Manhood" (2.2:20). A woman reaches "manhood" by appropriating language. Joanna describes the process metaphorically: take in your bare right hand one naked, severed end of a high-tension wire. Take the other in your left hand. Stand in a puddle.... When She [God] roars down in high voltage and high amperage both, She is after your marrow-bones; you are making yourself a conduit for holy terror and the ecstasy of Hell. (7.2:138-39) Joannas change into a female man appears magical, but then, so does the appropriation of language. As Wittig points out, "One must understand that men are not born with a faculty for the universal and that women are not reduced at birth to the particular. The universal has been, and is continually, at every moment, appropriated by men" (SM 80). Gender, which reduces women to the particular, can be destroyed through language: "For each time I say I, I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality" (SM 81). As Butler points out, "This absolute grounding of the speaking I assumes god-like dimensions within Wittigs discussion" and affords "women [the ability to] speak their way out of their gender" (117).

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Like Joanna in The Female Man, women in Wittigs Les Gurillres also "speak their way out of their gender." Les Gurillres is a utopian, nonlinear novel about an anarchic society of women warring with and eventually defeating men. The women reject myths and symbols (30), are concerned with finding a new language (131), and with rewriting their history, which has been falsely invented by men (110-11). In the novel Wittig, by "universaliz[ing] the point of view of elles, illustrates how language can be used to destroy the mark of gender. The goal of this approach is not to feminize the world but to make categories of sex obsolete in language" (SM 85).9 Joanna destroys gender and becomes universal when she becomes the female man. This resolution is not the ultimate political goal Wittig has in mind, but it is a good short-term solution. Wittig believes we should "suppress men as a class, not through a genocidal, but a political struggle. Once the class men disappears, women as a class will disappear as well" (SM 3). This entails destroying "heterosexuality as a social system" because "[it] is based on the oppression of women by men and...produces the doctrine of difference between the sexes to justify this oppression" (SM 20). Wittig claims, however, that we dont need to wait until the ultimate victory; a short-term solution is to "declare...that women are human as well as men.... It is part of our fight to unmask them, to say that one out of two men is a woman, that the universal belongs to us..." (SM 56). And thisnot the ultimate suppression of men, but the short-term declaration "that women are human"is Joannas solution to the dilemma of "unit[ing] woman and human" (7.5:151). She becomes a "man" because man is the universal; man is human. She says, "If we are all Mankind [i.e., human], then it follows to my interested and righteous and rightnow [sic] very bright and beady little eyes, that I too am a Man and not at all a woman" (7.2:140). Jeannine doesnt evolve as much as Joanna. Jeannine works in New York City as a reference librarian for the WPA (1.2:2). In her world of 1969, World War II never occurred and the Great Depression and rationing linger over America. Gender roles are more strictly inscribed in Jeannines world than in ours, which accounts for her concern with her feminine appearance (she checks lines around her eyes and worries about her age, for instance) and her obsession with getting married. She is badgered by her mother who wants the answer to "the really important question, viz, is Jeannine going to have a kitchenette of her own" (6.10:127), and her brother, who tells her to marry "Anybody" (6.4:116). She has a lover, Cal, but she really doesnt like him and tries to avoid him because he will "want to Make Love" (1.10:16). She daydreams that a prince will whisk her away (6.1:109), but after a few blind dates ends up calling Cal and telling him the answer is yes to the marriage question hes been asking (6.9:129-31). What Jeannine believes is: "Somewhere is The One. The solution. Fulfillment. Fulfilled women. Filled full. My Prince. Come. Come away, Death. She stumbles into her Mommys shoes, little girl playing house" (6.7:125). After she decides to marry Cal she wonders "Do you think if I got married I would like making love better?" (7.5:150). Jeannine has the potential to be the most intelligent of the genotype of the four Js, a possibility to which Jael quips, "try to prove that to a stranger!" (161-62). However, cultural expectations cause her to unquestioningly accept her role as (heterosexual) wife. She says, "I wouldnt be a man for anything.... I like being admired. I like being a girl" (5.2:86). She is appalled when Janet and Laura Rose touch each other (7.4:143), and when she finds Janets dildo, Joanna tells her that it is "Infinitely [dangerous]": What it does to your body...is nothing compared to what it does to your mind, Jeannine. It will ruin your mind. It will explode in your brains and drive you crazy. You will never be the same again. You will be lost to respectability and decency and decorum and dependency and all sorts of other nice, normal things beginning with a D. It will kill you, Jeannine. You will be dead, dead, dead. (7.4:148) Jeannines straight mind questions even slight deviations from the heterosexual norm. For instance, Jeannine asks Joanna whether theres "something wrong" with Cal because "when he does it [makes love], you know, sometimes he cries. I never heard of a man doing that" (84), and because "He cant make up his mind, either. I never heard of a man like that" (85), and most of all, because Sometimessometimes he likes to get dressed up. He gets into the drapes like a sarong and puts on all my necklaces around his neck, and stands there with the curtain rod for a spear. He wants to be an actor, you know. But I think theres something wrong with him. Is it what they call transvestism? (5.2:85) Unlike Joanna, who becomes a female man and a lesbian10 by the end of the novel, Jeannine does not completely reject the straight mind but evolves only to the point of questioning it. She recognizes the myth of Woman and the necessity of feminist politics. She now gets up late and neglects housework; she is doing just as she pleases, which doesnt happen to coincide with the myth of Woman (9.7:209-12). Russ compares the solutions Joanna and Jeannine reach to the alternative worlds of Janet and Jael. Though these two worlds further critique and undermine the straight mind, they fail to conclusively demonstrate a final victory. Janets world of Whileaway is merely a hope and Jaels world is a parody. Janet comes from Whileaway, an all-women, anarchist society (5.7:91). The men on Whileaway were wiped out by a plague (1.8:14), thus, women are (naturally) lesbians and have children through gene splicing. They marry but are not monogamous and have sexual relations primarily outside the family (52, 53). Janets visit to America inevitably leads to reversals that undermine the straight mind.

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For instance, when Janet is interviewed on television, the M.C. presumptuously asks how Whileaway will react to the reappearance of men. Janet cannot imagine "why" men should reappear. She keeps asking "why," until the M.C. finally tells her, "One sex is half a species" (1.7:9-10). Janet does not comprehend this, of course, because on Whileaway one sex is the whole species. This is the reversal of universality: on Whileaway females are the universal. When Janet lands on Jeannines world, she asks, "Where the dickens are all the women?" (1.7:8). Similarly, although Whileawayan children are given the last name of their mother plus "son" (Janets last name is Evason), Janet tells us "Evason is not son but daughter. This is your translation" (1.15:18). Another reversal is that of heterosexuality. On Whileaway women are lesbians and bear children, so they have no reproductive need for men and no concept of heterosexuality. Because of this, when the three other Js watch Jael have sex with her male robot, Davy, Janet exclaims, "Good Lord? Is that all?" (8.14:198). Although one critic suggests Janets exclamation shows that "sex between a person and a dehumanized object is notand should not be regarded as being highly significant" (Spector 201), this interpretation ignores the obvious parallel to the possible dehumanization of women in heterosexual sex between "real men" and "real women." Moreover, Janets exclamation can be interpreted from the lesbian perspective that, compared to lesbian sex, "is that [heterosexual sex] all [there is to it]?" Is it over so quickly? Is it so lacking in sensuality? And so on. The lesbian reversal on Whileaway carries over to Joannas world. For instance, before Laura sleeps with Janet, Laura carries the straight mind to its (il)logical conclusion: Ive never slept with a girl. I couldnt. I wouldnt want to. Thats abnormal and Im not, although you cant be normal unless you do what you want and you cant be normal unless you love men. To do what I wanted would be normal, unless what I wanted was abnormal, in which case it would be abnormal to please myself and normal to do what I didnt want to do, which isnt normal. (4.11:68) After Janet sleeps with Laura, Laura becomes a lesbian. From this perspective, we can read Lauras Non Sum ("I dont exist or Im not that" [4.3:58]) as a reversal. Not only can it mean "As a female I dont exist because Im not the universal (male)," but also it can mean "As a lesbian I dont exist in the categories of sex." As Wittig argues, "Lesbian is the only concept...which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically" (SM 20). Joanna, who at first rejects Janets advances and the possibility of lesbianism, saying "Thats different...I couldnt" (3.1:31), eventually escapes the categories of sex by becoming a lesbian (9.6:209). Although Whileaways all-women (lesbian) society undermines gender relations in heterosexual society, it also raises the problem of separatism. In "Recent Feminist Utopias" (1981), in which Russ discusses feminist science fiction including The Female Man, Russ comments: "I believe the separatism is primary, and...the authors are not subtle in their reasons for creating separatist utopias: if men are kept out of these societies, it is because men are dangerous. They also hog the good things of this world" (77). The purpose of utopias, she further remarks, is to "supply in fiction what their authors believe society...and/or women, lack in the here-and-now. The positive values stressed in the stories can reveal to us what, in the authors eyes, is wrong with our own society" (81). Although Russs comments expressly support separatism, Wittig does not agree that lesbian societies are solely separatist when they are part of a larger, more revolutionary purpose: "To destroy woman does not mean that we aim, short of physical destruction, to destroy lesbianism simultaneously with the categories of sex, because lesbianism provides for the moment the only social form in which we can live freely" (SM 20).11 Wittig creates a separatist society in Les Gurillres, in which the warrior-women brutally defeat the men, but accept those men who wish to "join them in their struggle" (141, 142); in The Lesbian Body, Wittig describes a (devouring) lesbian relationship, which Butler calls a "textual...overthrow of the category of sex through a destruction and fragmentation of the sexed body" (114). Despite these separatist novels, Wittig believes an all-lesbian society is not the way to destroy "heterosexuality as a social system"; rather, a lesbian society "pragmatically reveals that the division from men of which women have been the object is a political one and shows that we have been ideologically rebuilt into a natural group" (SM 9).12 And while the all-woman/lesbian society of Whileaway is the utopia in The Female Man, it cannot evade the problem of origin. How do we get there? The men of Whileaway were wiped out by a plague that attacked only men (1.8:12).13 This is obviously not a realistic way to destroy the heterosexual institutions that regulate gender. Moreover, as Butler points out, a "utopian notion of a sexuality freed from heterosexual constructs...fail[s] to acknowledge the ways in which power relations continue to construct sexuality for women even within the terms of a liberated heterosexuality or lesbianism" (29). Despite these problems, Whileaway nonetheless critiques and undermines the straight mind, a point Jean Pfaelzer makes when she says that a utopia "deconstructs our assumptions about social inevitability through representations that provoke a cognitive dissonance between the present as lived and the potentialities hidden within it. Utopias tempt us as an evocation of political desire" (199). As Russ admits at the end of the novel, "Janet [is one] whom we dont believe in and whom we deride but who is in secret our savior from utter despair" (9.7:212-13). Whileaway, like any other utopia, represents our hope.

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Jaels world, on the other hand, represents our fear. Hers is a dystopian world in which men live in Manland, separated from women in Womanland. For forty years a war has been waged between the "Haves" and "Have-nots," the men and women (8.6:164-65). Manlanders have more technology, but they have no women so they buy babies from the Womanlanders (8.7:167). On Manland there are real-men, the changed (men surgically changed into "women"), and the half-changed ("who keep their genitalia but who grow slim, grow languid, grow emotional and feminine, all this the effect of spirit only" [ibid.]). Womanland has no men, but does have male robots, such as Jaels Davy, "The most beautiful man in the world" (8.9:185). Jael herself is part robot (a cyborg) with surgical claws and steel teeth hidden under plates that look like human teeth (8.7:181-82). Both Manland and Womanland are heterosexual. For instance in Manland: "All the real-men like the changed; some real-men like the half-changed; none of the real-men like real-men, for that would be abnormal" (8.7:167). Thus, unlike Whileaway, Jaels world reinscribes the straight mind and in Wittigs terms, it is an unsuccessful revolution against heterosexual institutions because it merely "substitute[s] women for men (the Other for the One)" (SM 54-55). For instance, after Jael kills Boss-man for relentlessly trying to seduce her ("You want me. It doesnt matter what you say. Youre a woman, arent you? This is the crown of your life. This is what God made you for.... You want to be mastered" [8.8:181]), Jael thinks: Still hurt, still able to be hurt by them! Amazing. Youd think my skin would get thicker, but it doesnt. Were all of us still flat on our backs. The boots on our neck while we slowly, ever so slowly, gather the power and the money and the resources into our own hands. While they play war games. (8.8:183) Jael, like her Biblical namesake who kills the commander of the Canaanite army (Judges 4), is an assassin (8.9:187). The night after she kills Boss-man she has a "didactic nightmare" of guilt: "It was the guilt of sheer existence," of being a "Cunt." "I was very lucid in my nightmare. I knew it was not wrong to be a girl because Mommy said so; cunts were all right if they were neutralized, one by one, by being hooked on to a man....." Jael dreams, "I murdered because I was guilty"; "For every drop of blood shed there is restitution made.... See? Its me!... Are you catching on? it is I, who you will not admit exists" (8.10:192-96). Like Joanna, Jaels emphasis on "I" is an attempt to appropriate (linguistically) the universal. Other than this one appropriation, however, Jael does not succeed as does Joanna in becoming the female man. Clearly, Womanland is a dystopia. Unlike Whileaway, it hopelessly fails to revolutionize heterosexual institutions because it merely reinscribes them. Thus, Jaels world shows the danger of "substitut[ing] women for men" (SM 55). But it is also a parody of those heterosexual institutions, and as a parody it reveals the shakiness of those very institutions. For instance, part of Jaels job is to impersonate Manlanders, as she does when she acts as a Manlander diplomat in "a primitive patriarchy on an alternate Earth" (188). Here, Jael is disguised as "Prince of Faery." One of the native women falls in love with her, she commits medieval acts of knighthood, and when she finally reveals "the marks of Eve" to her "most loyal feudal retainer," he says, "If the women of Faery are like this, just think what the MEN must be!" (8.9:189-91). Another parody occurs when Jael takes Joanna, Jeannine, and Janet into Manland for business (to make a baby deal with Boss-man). Their first stop in Manland is at "The Knife," a "recreation center" that is more like a tavern (8.7:167-172). Here they meet their business contact, Anna, a half-changed (170). He wears "a pink chiffon gown, with gloves up to his shoulder, a monument of irrelevancy on high heels, a pretty girl with too much of the right curves and a bobbing, springing, pink feather boa.... His green eyes shrewdly narrowed. This one has intelligence. Or is it only the weight of his false lashes?" (171). Jael hypothesizes that "There must be a secret feminine underground that teaches them how to behave.... He wets his lips again, the indescribable silliness of that insane mechanism, practiced anywhere and everywhere" (171, 173). Anna thinks the four Js are "real men": "Anna bats his eyes at us and wets his lips, taking the women inside the suits to be real-men, taking me to be a real-man (what else can I be if Im not a changed?)" (173). Later, at Boss-mans, his wife, Natalie, a changed, "clicked in with a tray of drinksscarlet skin-tights, no underwear, transparent high-heeled sandals like Cinderellasshe gave us a homey, cute smile...and stilted out" (173). The women who dress like men and the men who dress like women are parodies of "an original or primary gender identity," as Butler argues: As much as drag creates a unified picture of "woman"...it also reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence. In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itselfas well as its contingency. (135) Anna and Natalies feminine dress and coy behavior and Jaels posturing as Prince of Faery parody male and female gender roles, thus suggesting how gender roles are indeterminate and contingent. This parody of a parody is mirrored in the sex specifications the Womanlanders give the Manlanders for their sex change operations. No "real woman" exists behind the fantastic specifications. As Jael tells the other three Js, "[Manlanders have] been separated from real women so long that they dont know what to make of us; I doubt if even the sex surgeons know what a real woman looks like. The specifications we send them every year grow wilder and wilder and there isnt a murmur of protest" (8.7:169). Jaels world, which merely substitutes "Other" for "One," is not a viable solution to the heterosexual institutions that oppress women. Jaels world undermines heterosexual institutions through parody, just as Whileaways lesbian society undermines heterosexual institutions by demonstrating the false nature of the categories of sex. But even the utopian Whileaway is not the

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final victory for women. The Female Man ultimately relies on the power of language to reappropriate the universal and thus fulfills Wittigs criteria for a successful war machine: "It is the attempted universalization of the point of view that turns or does not turn a literary work into a war machine" (SM 75). Even though Russ says, "I like Jael the best of all.... who says die if you must but loop your own intestines around the neck of your strangling enemy" (9.7:212), Joanna is the hero of the novel and Joannas change into the female man shows that for all women, change into the female man is possible through language. As Wittig says, "to eradicate [the lexical symbol for gender] would not only modify language at the lexical level but would upset the structure itself and its functioning" (SM 89). Through language women can kill the myth of woman and abolish the class of women (and the class of men). Like Jael, women can yell "I, I, I. Repeat it like magic" (8.10:195), and in this way attempt to universalize their point of view. The Female Man suggests that women can "speak their way out of their gender" (Butler 117). Although the conclusion of this battle is not clear-cut, the novel provides strategy and hope. Appropriately, Russ ends with an envoi: "Go little book...." and "Do not get glum when you are no longer understood.... Rejoice, little book! For on that day, we will be free" (9.7:214). NOTES 1. In other vignettes in this chapter, the characters are men and women who debate the effects of the straight mind on women. The debate usually ends when the man negates the womans point of view"This argument is becoming degraded and ridiculous" (118)thus illustrating R.D. Laings vignette in The Politics of Experience showing how men invalidate womens experience, which Russ uses as the epigraph of The Female Man. 2. Wittig states: "The perenniality of the sexes and the perenniality of slaves and masters proceed from the same belief, and, as there are no slaves without masters, there are no women without men" (SM 2). Like Joanna, the women in Les Gurillres say that men are the "domineering oppressors, the same masters who have said that negroes and women do not have a heart spleen liver in the same place as their own" (102). 3. Both of these passages allude to Martin Luthers crying out "Non Sum" in the choir. Intertextually, Russs non sum relates to Wittigs essay entitled "Homo Sum," a title which she ironically takes from Terences statement "Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto" ("Man am I; nothing human is alien to me"). In both cases, Russs and Wittigs female perspective "playfully exposes" that the words "human" and "man" have been appropriated by the dominant group (Wittig 54, Spender 151-57). 4. Russ has previously written about how men invalidate and silence womens works in How to Suppress Womens Writing, and Spender writes about the same thing in chapter seven of Man Made Language. Wittig makes the point about lesbian works in her essay "The Point of View: Universal or Particular?" (SM 62-63, 65). 5. This is similar to the things Laura Roses mother tells her and what she experiences (4.9:65-68). 6. For a discussion of feminine writing, see Todd (53). 7. Wittig also criticizes feminine writing because it "merg[es] a practice with a myth, the myth of Woman" (SM 59). 8. One aspect of this, as Spender explains, is that because "the registers for discourse are male decreed and controlled, women who wish to express themselves must translate their experience into the male code" (81). 9. Wittig uses the plural feminine pronoun elles to replace the general (male) plural pronoun ils. Unfortunately, the English translation of elles in Les Gurillres is "the women," which Wittig laments because "when elles is turned into the women the process of universalization is destroyed" (SM 86). (For a brief discussion of Wittigs strategic use of j/e in The Lesbian Body, see Butler 120.) 10. I dont believe the two are necessarily linked, even in Wittigs thinking. This issue is addressed below in the discussion about Whileaway. 11. Both Butler and Fuss criticize Wittigs concept of lesbianism as essentializing. Butler notes that, in effect, Wittig sees the lesbian as "a third gender" (113); Fuss points out that Wittig "tend[s] to homogenize lesbians into a single harmonious group and to erase the real material and ideological differences between lesbians" and is reluctant to destroy the category of lesbian (43). 12. As Butler argues, the point of The Lesbian Body "is not to call attention to the presence of rights of women or lesbians as individuals, but to counter the globalizing heterosexist episteme by a reverse discourse of equal reach and power" (120). 13. The Whileawayan history of the plague is contradicted by Jael, who tells Janet, "Whileaways plague is a big lie"; "I, I, I, I am the plague.... I and the war I fought built your world for you" (9.7:211). Jaels version of historywomen warring against menis discussed below. WORKS CITED Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. NY: Routledge, 1990. De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. 1953. NY: Bantam, n.d. Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking. NY: Routledge, 1989. Pfaelzer, Jean. "Response: What Happened to History?" Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative. Ed. Libby Falk Jones and Sarah Webster Goodwin. Knoxville: U Tennessee P, 1990. 191-200. Russ, Joanna. The Female Man. 1975. Boston: Beacon, n.d.

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_____. How to Suppress Womens Writing. Austin: U Texas P, 1983. _____. "Recent Feminist Utopias." Future Females: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Marleen S. Barr. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green SU Popular Press, 1981. 71-85. Spector, Judith. "The Functions of Sexuality in the Science Fiction of Russ, Piercy, and Le Guin." Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature. Ed. Donald Palumbo. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986. 196-207. Spender, Dale. Man Made Language. 2nd ed. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. Todd, Janet. Feminist Literary Theory. NY: Routledge, 1988. Wittig, Monique. The Lesbian Body. Trans. David Le Vay. Boston: Beacon, 1986. _____. Les Gurillres. 1969. Trans. David Le Vay. NY: Viking, 1971. _____. The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon, 1992. Some of the ways in which Joanna Russ appropriates the symbolic language of patriarchal culture to project androgyny as a natural condition of womens existence: 1. By directly addressing the woman reader as a fictional and genderless you (occasionally slipping into an us when referring to the shared experiences of women) and engaging her in a playful unravelling of the patterns of behaviour and experience that cut across the gender divide. Masculine and feminine role playing are determined by social conventions. And it will not help the reader to bring a trained feminist perspective (with preconceived notions of gender disparity and how to overcome it) for making sense of the text (e.g. by reading between the lines.) [A woman does not behave differently from a man in a crowd public behaviour in civil society is not gender-specific. Mass culture defines individuals as interchangeable, regardless of their gender. The standard of social normativity, by legal definition, is man. (e.g. man includes woman)] As I have said before, I (not the one above, please) had an experience on the seventh of February last, nineteen-sixty-nine. I turned into a man. I had been a man before, but only briefly and in a crowd. You would not have noticed anything, had you been there. [The glory of Manhood cannot be explained by the cultural myths about manhood or by the performative aspects of masculine behaviour. It is an irreducible experience of gender superiority that is assumed to be the image of an essential Self.] Manhood, children, is not reached by courage or short hair or insensibility or by being (as I was) in Chicago's only skyscraper hotel while the snow rages outside. I sat in a Los Angeles cocktail party with the bad baroque furniture all around, having turned into a man. I saw myself between the dirty-white scrolls of the mirror and the results were indubitable: I was a man. But what then is manhood? Manhood, children is Manhood [But every woman learns to internalise the ideology of conforming to a feminine behaviour pattern in the private sphere of patriarchal culture. Gendered socialisation for woman is a denial of her autonomous selfhood; a womans identity is defined only in relation to man. Russ pre-empts the response of the reader who might consider this a lecture towards feminist indoctrination and be suspicious of the authors intention. The solution is not to inculcate less feminine interests in women.] This is the lecture. If you don't like it, you can skip to the next chapter. Before Janet arrived on this planet I was moody, ill-at-ease, unhappy, and hard to be with. I didn't relish my breakfast. I spent my whole day combing my hair and putting on make-up. Other girls practiced with the shot-put and compared archery scores, but Iindifferent to javelin and crossbow, positively repelled by horticulture and ice hockeyall I did was dress for The Man smile for The Man talk wittily to The Man sympathize with The Man flatter The Man understand The Man

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defer to The Man entertain The Man keep The Man live for The Man. [A lesbian relationship is not the means of achieving androgynous sensitivity. At best, only a woman who has learned to live on both sides of the divide can give another woman the sense of self-worth that is missing in a heterosexual relationship.] Then a new interest entered my life. After I called up Janet, out of nothing, or she called up me (don't read between the lines; there's nothing there) I began to gain weight, my appetite improved, friends commented on my renewed zest for life, and a nagging scoliosis of the ankle that had tortured me for years simply vanished overnight. I don't even remember the last time I had to go to the aquarium and stifle my sobs by watching the sharks. I rode in closed limousines with Janet to television appearances much like the one you already saw in the last chapter; I answered her questions; I bought her a pocket dictionary; I took her to the zoo; I pointed out New York's skyline at night as if I owned it. 2. By introducing hilarious situational conflicts in encounters between men and women. Not only do they expose the stereotypical expectations of men from women, but they are also shown as arising from miscommunications due to gendered differences in the interpretation of signs (i.e. beyond the literal sense of the word or the gesture). A woman (or a man) is always a being from another world to the opposite sex, or someone who speaks a foreign language, and this is brought out best in a situation where the woman is really an alien to the codes of patriarchal socialisation. Notice that the first person narrator shows her typical feminine response to the unpleasantness of the following situation by adopting a stance of passivity, whereas Janet is blissfully unaware of the expected feminine decorum, and thus more free to act in unconventional ways. But all the time the narrator is dead scared that Janet may overstep her limits, and when Janet does react with violent disapproval she seems to have missed the point entirely. The play on literal meanings is carried out at two levels of everyday language and the language of academic discourse: 1) She dumped him is not simply a rejection; the unwanted suitor is literally overthrown. (Isnt polite dumping a better option than this? the author seems to ask the men who consider dumping offensive because it is an affront to their ego); 2) When he calls Janet a cancerous castrator she understands that he wants her to die of cancer and shrugs off the curse with a laugh. The cultural significance of this abuse is too learned and specialized for her to take offence. She showed him all her teeth. He saw a smile. "You're beautiful, honey." "Thank you. I go now." (good for her) "Nah!" and he took us by the wrist "Nah, you're notgoing." "Let me go," said Janet. Say it loud. Somebody will come to rescue you. Can't 1 rescue myself? No. Why not? All this time he was nuzzling her ear and I was showing my distaste by shrinking terrified into a corner, one eye on the party. Everyone seemed amused. "Give us a good-bye kiss," said the host, who might have been attractive under other circumstances, a giant marine, so to speak. I pushed him away. "What'sa matter, you some kinda prude?" he said and enfolding us in his powerful arms, et ceterawell, not so very powerful as all that, but I want to give you the feeling of the scene. If you scream, people say you're melodramatic; if you submit, you're masochistic; if you call names, you're a bitch. Hit him and he'll kill you. The best thing is to suffer mutely and yearn for a rescuer, but suppose the rescuer doesn't come? "Let go,-," said Janet (some Russian word I didn't catch). "Ha ha, make me," said the host, squeezing her wrist and puckering up his lips; "Make me, make me," and he swung his hips from side to side suggestively. No, no, keep on being ladylike/ "Is this human courting?" shouted Janet. "Is this friendship? Is this politeness?" She had an

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extraordinarily loud voice. He laughed and shook her wrist. "Savages!" she shouted. A hush had fallen on the party. The host leafed dexterously through his little book of rejoinders but did not come up with anything. Then he looked up "savage" only to find it marked with an affirmative: "Masculine, brute, virile, powerful, good." So he smiled broadly. He put the book away. "Right on, sister," he said. So she dumped him. It happened in a blur of speed and there he was on the carpet. He was flipping furiously through the pages of the book; what else is there to do in such circumstances? (It was a little limp-leatherexcuse mevolume bound in blue, which I think they give out in high schools. On the cover was written in gold WHAT TO DO IN EVERY SITUATION.) "Bitch!" (flip flip flip) "Prude!" (flip flip) "Ball-breaker!" (flip flip flip flip) "Goddamn cancerous castrator!" (flip) "Thinks hers is gold!" (flip flip) "You didn't have to do that!" Was ist? said Janet in German. He gave her to understand that she was going to die of cancer of the womb. She laughed. He gave her to understand further that she was taking unfair advantage of his good manners. She roared. He pursued the subject and told her that if he were not a gentleman he would ram her stinking, shitty teeth up her stinking shitty ass. She shrugged. He told her she was so ball-breaking, shitty, stone, scum-bag, mother-fucking, plug-ugly that no normal male could keep up an erection within half a mile of her. She looked puzzled. ("Joanna, these are insults, yes?") He got up. I think he was recovering his cool. He did not seem nearly so drunk as he had been. He shrugged his sports jacket back into position and brushed himself off. He said she had acted like a virgin, not knowing what to do when a guy made a pass, just like a Goddamned scared little baby virgin. Most of us would have been content to leave it at that, eh, ladies? Janet slapped him. [The unwomanly ways of the women who live on Whileaway seem quite natural in that androgynous culture when Janet takes over the I-narration, but the authorial narrators judgement that follows is coloured by a feminine (i.e. gendered by the long standing patriarchal symbolic associations of femininity with peace) disgust.] Why make pretensions to fight (she said) when you can't fight? Why make pretensions to anything? I am trained, of course; that's my job, and it makes me the very devil angry when someone calls me names, but why call names? All this uneasy aggression. True, there is a little bit of hair-pulling on Whileaway, yes, and more than that, there is the temperamental thing, sometimes you can't stand another person. But the cure for that is distance. I've been foolish in the past, I admit. In middle-age one begins to settle down; Vittoria says I'm comic with my tohu-bohu when Yuki comes home with a hair out of place. I hope not. There is this thing with the child you've borne yourself, your body-child. There is also the feeling to be extra-proper in front of the children, yet hardly anybody bothers. Who has the time? And since I've become S & P I have a different outlook on all this: a job's a job and has to be done, but I don't like doing it for nothing, to raise the hand to someone. For sport, yes, okay, for hatred no. Separate them. I ought to add there was a fourth duel in which nobody got killed; my opponent developed a lung infection, then a spinal infectionyou understand, we weren't near civilization thenand the convalescence was such a long, nasty business. I took care of her. Nerve tissue's hard to regrow. She was paralyzed for a while, you know. Gave me a very salutary scare. So I don't fight with weapons now, except on my job, of course. Am I sorry I hurt him? Not me! IV Whileawayans are not nearly as peaceful as they sound.

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[The language of misogyny speaks in both words and gestures. Also a comment on how men perceive the ineffectual rage of second wave feminism, which has already been branded by men as a demand for sexual liberation. As the male speaker ironically observes, burning bras is no way to attain liberation, and feminists who try to liberate themselves that way cannot possibly be desirable women. So they defeat the very cause of womens (sexual) liberation for which they appear to be fighting] Burned any bras lately har har twinkle twinkle A pretty girl like you doesn't need to be liberated twinkle har Don't listen to those hysterical bitches twinkle twinkle twinkle I never take a woman's advice about two things: love and automobiles twinkle twinkle har May I kiss your little hand twinkle twinkle twinkle. Har. Twinkle. 3. Juxtaposing the language of academic feminism with the language of popular culture. In both cases Russ parodies the styles specific to each speech community (the logical discursive style of the former and the melodramatic dialogic style of the latter) to show that everywhere sexism is the same story. Men decide the terms and conditions of the game and women can either play along or quit, without ever unsettling the position of men as perpetual winners. "Man" is a rhetorical convenience for "human." "Man" includes "woman." Thus: 1. The Eternal Feminine leads us ever upward and on. (Guess who "us" is) 2. The last man on earth will spend the last hour before the holocaust searching for his wife and child. (Review of The Second Sex by the first sex) 3. We all have the impulse, at times, to get rid of our wives. (Irving Howe, introduction to Hardy, talking about my wife) 4. Great scientists choose their problems as they choose their wives. (A.H. Maslow, who should know better) 5. Man is a hunter who wishes to compete for the best kill and the best female, (everybody) OR The game is a dominance game called I Must Impress This Woman. Failure makes the active player play harder. Wear a hunched back or a withered arm; you will then experience the invisibility of the passive player. I'm never impressedno woman ever isit's just a cue that you like me and I'm supposed to like that. If you really like me, maybe I can get you to stop. Stop; I want to talk to you! Stop; I want to see you! Stop; I'm dying and disappearing! SHE: Isn't it just a game? HE: Yes, of course. SHE: And if you play the game, it means you like me, doesn't it? HE: Of course. SHE: Then if it's just 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)

4.

Suggesting that the domination of male gender characteristics is patriarchal culture is based on anthropomorphism (i.e. imagining God as a self projection of man) and that the gendered identity of woman can be founded not on a lack, but on a confident acceptance of her own duality and contradictions as constitutive of a more androgynous selfhood, if God is imagined as Woman. There is an unpolished, white, marble statue of God on Rabbit Island, all alone in a field of weeds and snow. She is seated, naked to the waist, an outsized female figure as awful as Zeus, her dead eyes staring

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into nothing. At first She is majestic; then I notice that Her cheekbones are too broad, Her eyes set at different levels, that Her whole figure is a jumble of badly-matching planes, a mass of inhuman contradictions. There is a distinct resemblance to Dunyasha Bernadetteson, known as The Playful Philosopher (A.C. 344426), though God is older than Bernadetteson and it's possible that Dunyasha's genetic surgeon modelled her after God instead of the other way round. Persons who look at the statue longer than I did have reported that one cannot pin It down at all, that She is a constantly changing contradiction, that She becomes in turn gentle, terrifying, hateful, loving, "stupid" (or "dead") and finally indescribable. Persons who look at Her longer than that have been known to vanish right off the face of the Earth I live between worlds. Half the time I like doing housework, I care a lot about how I look, I warm up to men and flirt beautifully (I mean I really admire them, though I'd die before I took the initiative; that's men's business), I don't press my point in conversations, and I enjoy cooking. I like to do things for other people, especially male people. I sleep well, wake up on the dot, and don't dream. There's only one thing wrong with me: I'm frigid. In my other incarnation I live out such a plethora of conflict that you wouldn't think I'd survive, would you, but I do; I wake up enraged, go to sleep in numbed despair, face what I know perfectly well is condescension and abstract contempt, get into quarrels, shout, fret about people I don't even know, live as if I were the only woman in the world trying to buck it all, work like a pig, strew my whole apartment with notes, articles, manuscripts, books, get frowsty, don't care, become stridently contentious, sometimes laugh and weep within five minutes together out of pure frustration. It takes me two hours to get to sleep and an hour to wake up. I dream at my desk. I dream all over the place. I'm very badly dressed. But O how I relish my victuals! And O how I fuck. 5. Shifting innocuously to patriarchal modes of representing women with distinct sexual characteristics (such as, saying one thing and meaning another). This enables Russ to deploy the double perspective of an androgynous writer/narrator overtly patriarchal and sexist in its assumptions, but implicitly subversive of that stance to signify the loss of voice and identity that a woman undergoes within a repressive gender system. I found Jeannine on the clubhouse porch that evening, looking at the moon. She had run away from her family. "They only want what's good for you," I said. She made a face. "They love you," I said. A low, strangled sound. She was prodding the porch-rail with her hand. "I think you ought to go and rejoin them, Jeannine," I said. "Your mother's a wonderful woman who has never raised her voice in anger all the time you've known her. And she brought all of you up and got you all through high school, even though she had to work. Your brother's a firm, steady man who makes a good living for his wife and children, and Eileen wants nothing more in the world than her husband and her little boy and girl. You ought to appreciate them more, Jeannine." "I know," said Jeannine softly and precisely. Or perhaps she said Oh no. "Jeannine, you'll never get a good job," I said. "There aren't any now. And if there were, they'd never give them to a woman, let alone a grown-up baby like you. Do you think you could hold down a really good job, even if you could get one? They're all boring anyway, hard and boring. 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." "Don't care," said she. Or was it Not fair? "Marry someone who can take care of you," I went on, for her own good. "It's all right to do that; you're a girl. Find somebody like Bud who has a good job, somebody you can respect; marry him. There's no other life for a woman, Jeannine; do you want never to have children? Never to have a husband? Never to have a

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house of your own?" (Brief flash of waxed floor, wife in organdie apron, smiling possessively, husband with roses. That's hers, not mine.) "Not Cal." Ah, hell. "Now, really, what are you waiting for?" (I was getting impatient.) "Here's Eileen married, and here's your mother with two children, and all your old school friends, and enough couples here around the lake to fill it up if they all jumped into it at once; do you think you're any different? Fancy Jeannine! Refined Jeannine! What do you think you're waiting for?" "For a man," said Jeannine. For a plan. My impression that somebody else had been echoing her was confirmed by a brief cough behind me after these words. But it turned out to be Mr. Dadier, come out to fetch his sister. He took her by the arm and pulled her toward the door. "Come on, Jeannie. We're going to introduce you to someone."

5.

The tonal shifts in language register the unstable gender status of an androgynous being. If it is to be viewed as a wholeness that is not available to man, it must also be recognized as a constant oscillation between masculine and feminine gender identities, which does not take it any closer to the ideal of humanity than men or women can attain in a patriarchal culture based upon gender division. Ironically, it is the experience of being a woman that can make her desperately want to be a man. I'll tell you how I turned into a man. First I had to turn into a woman. For a long time I had been neuter, not a woman at all but One Of The Boys, because if you walk into a gathering of men, professionally or otherwise, you might as well be wearing a sandwich board that says: LOOK! I HAVE TITS! there is this giggling and this chuckling and this reddening and this Uriah Heep twisting and writhing and this fiddling with ties and fixing of buttons and making of allusions and quoting of courtesies and this self-conscious gallantry plus a smirky insistence on my physiqueall this dreary junk just to please me. If you get good at being One Of The Boys it goes away. Of course there's a certain disembodiment involved, but the sandwich board goes; I back-slapped and laughed at blue jokes, especially the hostile kind. Underneath you keep saying pleasantly but firmly No no no no no no. But it's necessary to my job and I like my job. I suppose they decided that my tits were not of the best kind, or not real, or that they were someone else's (my twin sister's), so they split me from the neck up; as I said, it demands a certain disembodiment. I thought that surely when I had acquired my Ph.D. and my professorship and my tennis medal and my engineer's contract and my ten thousand a year and my full-time housekeeper and my reputation and the respect of my colleagues, when I had grown strong, tall, and beautiful, when my I.Q. shot past 200, when I had genius,then I could take off my sandwich board. I left my smiles and happy laughter at home. I'm not a woman; I'm a man. I'm a man with a woman's face. I'm a woman with a man's mind. Everybody says so. In my pride of intellect I entered a bookstore; I purchased a book; I no longer had to placate The Man; by God, I think I'm going to make it. I purchased a copy of John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women; now who can object to John Stuart Mill? He's dead. But the clerk did. With familiar archness he waggled his finger at me and said "tsk tsk"; all that writhing and fussing began again, what fun it was for him to have someone automatically not above reproach, and I knew beyond the shadow of a hope that 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. This is until you're forty-five, ladies, after which you vanish into thin air like the smile of the Cheshire cat, leaving behind only a disgusting grossness and a subtle poison that automatically infects every man under twenty-one. Nothing can put you above this or below this or beyond it or outside of it, nothing, nothing, nothing at all, not your muscles or your brains, not being one of the boys or being one of the girls or writing books or writing letters or screaming or wringing your hands or cooking lettuce or being too tall or being too short or traveling or staying at home or ugliness or acne or diffidence or cowardice or perpetual shrinking and old age. In the latter cases you're only doubly damned. I went away"forever feminine," as the man saysand I cried as I drove my car, and I wept by the side of the road (because I couldn't see and I might crash into something) and I howled and wrung my hands as people do only in medieval romances, for an American woman's closed car is the only place

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in which she can be alone (if she's unmarried) and the howl of a sick she-wolf carries around the world, whereupon the world thinks it's very comical. Privacy in cars, in bathrooms, what ideas we have! If they tell me about the pretty clothes again, I'll kill myself. I had a five-year-old self who said: Daddy won't love you I had a ten-year-old self who said: the boys won't play with you . I had a fifteen-year-old self who said: nobody will marry you . I had a twenty-year-old self who said: you can't be fulfilled without a child. (A year there where I had recurrent nightmares about abdominal cancer which nobody would take out.) I'm a sick woman, a madwoman, a ball-breaker, a man-eater; I don't consume men gracefully with my firelike red hair or my poisoned kiss; I crack their joints with these filthy ghoul's claws and standing on one foot like a de-clawed cat, rake at your feeble efforts to save yourselves with my taloned hinder feet: my matted hair, my filthy skin, my big flat plaques of green bloody teeth. I don't think my body would sell anything. I don't think I would be good to look at. O of all diseases self-hate is the worst and I don't mean for the one who suffers it!

THE PASSION OF NEW EVE by Angela Carter "we must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, ... however paltry they may be; the nature of our life alone has determined their forms." "You were the living image of the entire Platonic shadow show, an illusion that could fill my emptiness with marvellous, imaginary things as long as, just as long as, the movie lasted, and then all would all vanish." Angela Carter (Passion of New Eve) Some important critical points about the novel Radical portrayals of femininity and masculinity; lurid surreal landscapes; persistent undermining of narrative perspective and causality; demythologising business. Peter Ackroyd: uneasy tone, perched somewhere between high seriousness and farce, unsettles the narrative as it leaps from one improbability to the next Blurb says she is investigating the nature of the mythology of sexuality The novel was sparked off by a visit to the USA in 1969. It was the height of the Vietnam War, with public demos and piles of garbage in New York streets. If you remember, it was the year of gay riots in Greenwich village, when they even chucked rocks; so my scenario of uprisings isnt all that far-fetched. But I wanted to make it as pleasurable as possible; I put the film stars in a real art-deco house. I loved writing that glass castle; its partly inspired by Celtic mythology, partly by the idea of a sterile fisher king. I give the hero and heroine a fabulous liebestod [love-suicide]; they deserve it, and so does the reader. Interviewed by John Haffenden in 1984, she expressed disappointment that readers had not always fully understood the books central message. She was quite clear about her authorial intentions. In TPNE the central character is a transvestite movie star, and I created this person in order to say some quite specific things about the cultural production of femininity. The promotion slogan for the film Gilda, starring Rita Hayworth, was There was never a woman like Gilda and that may have been one of the reasons why I would make this Hollywood star a transvestite, a man, because only a man could think of femininity in terms of that slogan. Quite a number of people read TPNE as a feminist tract and recoiled with suitable horror and dread, but in fact there is quite a careful and elaborate discussion of femininity as a commodity, of Hollywood producing illusions as tangible commodities yet most of that was completely bypassed. I dont mind that, because you cant dictate how a book should be read. But I spent a long time on that novel, which meant so much to me for various reasons, and obviously I was disappointed that it should be treated as just another riotous extravaganza.

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It was intended as a piece of black comedy. One reviewer, a great gay spokesperson and writer, said he found Mother such a cosy person because of all those tits! One of the snags is that I do put everything in a novel to be read ... on as many levels as you can cope with at the time. In TPNE the transvestite character Tristessa has a glass house the kind of place in which you shouldnt live if you throw stones which is an image of a certain kind of psychic vulnerability. Tristessa has set up in the house a waxworks called The Hall of the Immortals, which contains thedead martyrs of Hollywood including Jean Harlow and Judy Garland, and that was supposed to be indicating something quite specific about the nature of illusion and personality which Hollywood did and does invent. In 1983 however, she had referred to it as an anti-mythic novel, conceived as a feminist tract about the social creation of femininity, among other things. Clearly concerned with the cultural production of femininity, but not a female wish-fulfillment fantasy. To say that the narrator is a role model for a new woman is fundamentally to misread to text. The titles analogy with the passion of Christ the Messiah might suggest such a reading, but this is blasphemous, not authoritative. Carter is playing with alternative theologies of the power of virginity and the androgyny of Gods son. The hero is put through certain phases of action for the instruction of the reader... These phases correspond to the process of alchemical transformation. First nigredo, the melting of the metals, as in the chaos of New York where blackness holds a promise for the future as yet unseen; then albedo, the whitening phase in which elements separate out, as in the fragments of the American lifestyle Eve encounters; and finally rubedo, the red fire of revolution which may produce pure gold. The Czech alchemist is one pointer to such a reading; another model could be Sergei Eisensteins notion of combining alchemy with dialectical materialism, in montage. Seeks to explode the universal archetypes through which Woman is codified as the passive object of masculine desire. Recurring trope of mirroring estranges gender from the body and the image from the self, attaining its apotheosis at the moment when the male narrator Evelyn sees himself in the mirror after his transformation into the female Eve. In the viewing of an image which is both himself and a stranger Eve(lyn) experiences The wrench and the dislocation which is at the heart of womans relationship with herself in a world riddled with masculine power structures: inner self forced apart from the subject of self-presentation, an awareness of hollowness, a disbelief that this self-on-view can be taken as a full representation of the person alongside the bitter knowledge that it will be, that at evry point the woman is locked into the metaphysical insult of the masculine gaze. As a male reader Punter finds that the first person narrative of Evelyn/Eve appears to me throughout, no matter what the overt sex of the new Messiah at the time, as a masculine narrative. When Evelyn becomes Eve, my experience is of viewing a masquerade; I read Eve still through the male consciousness of what he has become...Evelyn forms a barrier, a thin film which stretches between Carter and Eve at all points; and thus I too, am forced to tread that line, to respond as a mal to the residual male in Eve. Perhaps this is a recourse against humiliation, a refusal of that childed quality of masculinity which is postulated in Eves encounter with the Mother, and also, earlier on, in his fear when he is returned to the artificial womb of Beulah. What Punter is suggesting is that Carter had not intended the novel to be read by women alone. Men and women might understand the text in different ways, but both will be drawn into a critique of gender-based determinism the notion that ones identity is inescapably dependent on ones sex since masculinity and femininity are placed under equally searching scrutiny in Carters novel. Alison Lee in Angela Carters New Eve(lyn): De-engendering Narrative says that the reader, even with the whole story in front of him or her, is in a perplexing position if she or he tries to pin down whether the narrative voice or the focalization is male or female. Eve is both the I and the not-I narrator. Determining narrative level in the section of the novel that tells Evelyns story depends entirely on whether the reader sees Eve as a man in a womans body or as a woman... Eve is extraheterodiegetic if she has indeed become a woman separate from Evelyn, but she in intrahomodiegetic if Evely is till part of Eve. Hetero- and homodiegesis are detrmined by a narrtors participation in the story either not at all, or at least in some manifestation of his self. Self here is a liminal concept of which neither Evelyn nor Eve is very sure. There are feminine qualities in Eve even before her metamorphosis and masculine qualities in Eve after it. (p. 55, 34, 77, 101, 107 and 92) There is no marked change of voice between the parts of the novel which concern Eve and Evelyn, although in both sections comments are made about womens speech being incomprehensible...Neither Tristessa nor Eelyn exists except in Eves memory. Various labyrinths appear in the novel; at the heart of each is something that seems to be a center or culmination, but is in fact a dual, if not multiple being; Leilah, Mother and Tristessa. But centers fluctuate: Leilah becomes Lilith, Mother goes mad, Tristessa is revealed o be male and female.

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In Zeros harem, when Eve is subjected to his violent coupling, she says: And more than my body, some other equally essential part of my being was being ravaged by him for, when he mounted me with his single eye blazing like the mouth of an automatic, his little body imperfectly stripped, I felt myself to be, not myself, but he; and the experience of this crucial lack of self, which always brought with it a shock of introspection, forced me to know myself as a former violator at the moment of my own violation. Gender does not determine narrative; it makes narrative identity as complex as gender identity. Fluidity of gender in both the transsexual eve and the transvestite Tristessa. The fluidity of gender identity which so disturbs the stability of the narrative voice is not an endorsement of androgyny the state in which male and female coexist in perfect balance but instead lays stress on gender as performance which is being constantly generated and (often imperfectly) sustained. The texts feminist message hinges on this sense of performativity. Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble says that gender is the repeated stylisation of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural source of being. Mother;s fondest wish, to kill time and live forever, is perhaps an effort to eliminate precisely tgose frames that regulate gender. But it is also clear that her project will fail, because although Mother, like Eve, is a technological construction, she believes in the essence of what her appearance conveys. For both Tristessa and Eve, gender is an ongoing discursive practice; for Mother it is a concrete fact What is clear about both T and E is the lack of an original gender. Butler argues that gender parody, as in transvestism, is of the very notion of an original ... so gender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin. In such fluidity of identities she sees an openness to resignification and reconceptualization; parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized or essentialist gender identities. Zero and Mother are characters who, despite their self construction as male and female incarnate, do see an essential identity. Each has eliminated, or wishes to eliminate, the other. But for Eve and Tristessa gender cannot help being performative because its liminality provides multiple possibilities. In her protagonists declaration of his/her complex history of gender identification, Carter prefigures the provocative notion of a post-transsexual identity. In the site of play, possibility and exchange, Carter introduces the gender-transgressive figure. Initially Evelyn and Tristessa embody fixed and polarized positions of gender in relation to one another. Soon, however, they experience that same dynamic across their individual bodies. Classsic relation of male gaze and female object presented in the opening scene when Evelyn views Tristessa on the screen. When he describes Leilah as a visitor in her own flesh there is a discrepancy between an inferred and elusive subjectivity which is invisible and therefore threatening to him and her body as defined by a conventionally heterosexual paradigm of desire. After his physical relationship he is disgusted by her, now turned into a wholly other, maternity, blackness and feminine. Fantasizes meeting Tristessa in the forest stark naked and tied to a tree, altered by Baroslavs story of the Gestapo murdering his wife. After transformation feels a discrepancy between outward female appearance and a sense of himself as essentially or inwardly male. Interior/exterior model of subjectivity supports identification of body with female and mind with male. In fact, he reacts to his body as if it were the body of a woman he desires: the cock in my head, still, twitched at the sight of myself. Interchange of pronouns for Tristessa flitting between he and she as they fly away in a helicopter from the shattered house. Simultaneous presence of both genders at this moment, expressed in terms of mimetic performance and ghostly resurrection. Deconstructing the myth of femininity

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Without necessarily subscribing to the psychological premises of French critics Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous or their ambitions for a female language expressive of the repressed unconscious, Carter shares their appreciation of the erotic and sense of the feminine as a cultural construct that demands deconstructing. In her own more Blakean terms she would shatter women's "mind-forg'd manacles." She has forthrightly identified her concern as "investigation of the social fictions that regulate our lives" in order to demythologize those fictions, storied or otherwise. Patriarchal myths to her are "extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree" ("Notes" 70, 71), and she has a particular distaste for the myths that ostensibly aggrandize women in order to mask cultural contempt for them. As she fulminates in The Sadeian Woman, If women allow themselves to be consoled for their culturally determined lack of access to the modes of intellectual debate by the invocation of hypothetical great goddesses, they are simply flattering themselves into submission (a technique often used on them by men). All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciling mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives women emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.(3) Carter applies just such antimythic premises in her satire on symbol formation, The Passion of New Eve, a novel reenacting the turn in her writing at the end of the sixties from social realist to interrogator and critic of patriarchal culture.(4) A complicated dystopian fantasy, The Passion is set in America during the turmoil of the sixties as blacks and women rise up in militant protest. The book's rationale is declared near the outset: "Our external symbols must always express the life within us ... since that life has generated them" and therefore "A critique of these symbols is a critique of our lives."(5) The critique exposes our refusal of androgynous natures in favor of reductive gender roles that we generate the symbols to perpetuate. The narrator is a type of Tiresias, for the New Eve, Carter's substitution for the New Adam of American myth, is a female who begins the book as the male English visitor and chauvinist Evelyn, gender trained to overvalue his virility and his right to "love them and leave them." Obviously, if femininity is a social construct, so too, as Carter acknowledges, is masculinity. The plot turns on the fact that, since adolescence, Evelyn has been enamored of the cinematic image of Tristessa de St Ange, Our Lady of the Sorrows, purportedly the world's most beautiful woman and the very emblem of female suffering. The point is obvious enough: the romantic image of suffering may be delightful as a cultural myth for men but proves appalling when, as a woman, Eve is obliged literally to experience it. Carter is fond of literalizing to make her points. Thus, even as de Beauvoir's classic formulation goes in The Second Sex, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,"(6) so Evelyn is surgically and mostly psychically refashioned as Eve after capture by an amazonian cult of desert dwellers. Collectively they are Beulah, their leader the huge and many-breasted black great goddess, Mother, a skilled plastic surgeon. Technologically advanced, antiphallocentric Beulah--its very emblem is a broken phallus--which has preempted male means to female ends, is no Blakean earthly paradise but rather Carter's parody of female science-fiction-cumfertility myth, seasoned with a dash of Freudian Oedipal myth and Lacanian power symbols. Beulah exists not only in male nightmare but also in feminist utopian fantasy, of which Carter is clearly skeptical. Beulah's zeal to eliminate all things male is wrongheaded to Carter, and its fascistic refusal of deviations is repulsive. She objects to notions of orthodoxy; if not an apostate, as a feminist she is an independent. As she remarked wryly to an interviewer even in 1985, "I get into such trouble with the sisters...because ideologically, I can be found wanting. Either I argue too much or I giggle too much."(7) Yet she does respect Beulah's teaching that one must "journey backwards to the source!" (Passion 53). Eve escapes from Beulah because Carter needs her to become prisoner of a Manson-type desert cult whose sterile leader, Zero, the macho man incarnate, hates and degrades women, in order that she may demonstrate again how socialized beings form symbols--especially false messiahs, male or female--out of the problems gendering has cursed them with. Cowardly Zero, a rapist, has power only because his seven wives, trapped by their own demeaning fantasies, have chosen to deify his sexuality as their defense from death. Afraid for her life should Zero discover she is not the usual woman, Eve works hard at her gender and Carter points the moral of the tale: "This intensive study of feminine manners, as well as my everyday work about the homestead, kept me in a state of permanent exhaustion. I was tense and preoccupied; although I was a woman, I was now also passing for a woman, but, then, many women born spend their whole lives in just such imitations" (101). Her point that gender is a meaningless, socially imposed category is made most strikingly, however, through the revelation that Tristessa is really a man, though "seduced by the notion of a woman's being, which is negativity" (137). No wonder then that she-Tristessa, incarnation of he-Tristessa's aspirations for woman, was so potent a screen image; she embodied purely an image of male desire--which, Carter reminds us, is all that movies do embody. When Zero forces Eve to dress up as a man and marry Tristessa in a grotesque wedding ceremony, "it was a double wedding--both were the bride, both the groom" (135): a consummation Carter advocates, though custom forbids. Eve's "passion" is both her suffering and her desire; that she may know both, Tristessa, before Carter kills him off, gratifies Eve with her first experiences of true, erotic love and--in an arid desert rather than the fertile garden of traditional iconography--impregnates her as neither Mother nor Zero was able to do. Eventually Eve makes a heroic journey through caves and into prehistory in search of the Mother, only to find that "Mother, having borne her, ...abandons her daughter forever" (186), because the nurturing mother is a patriarchally constructed myth

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too. Yet Beulah's teaching that one must reach back to one's sources proves true; and having returned to her uterine origins, Eve, in a "Speleological apotheosis of Tiresias" (186), finds her self. Therefore the ending leaves the resilient Eve ready to embark from American shores, praying, in the last sentence, "Ocean, ocean, mother of mysteries bear me to the place of birth" (191). She seeks to return to England, that is, and there give birth but seeks also, says "mother of mysteries," to discover what else the unconscious waters can generate. For the New Eve, it finally becomes apparent, is not only Evelyn transformed but Carter herself: the androgynous symbol maker. The reader has experienced her metamorphosis from a writer trained in male paradigms and reveling in male fantasies to a feminist who has learned to live and respond as a female without losing her insight into maleness. The Passion of New Eve pays tribute to a significant time in Carter's own history, for the late sixties brought an end to her writing as what she designates a "male impersonator," because she had finally undertaken "my own questioning of the nature of my reality as a woman. How that social fiction of my 'femininity' was created, by means outside my control, and palmed off on me as the real thing" ("Notes" 70). Eve identifies the results of that metamorphosis into a female for Carter's fiction when Eve wonders at one point, was it not time to do away "with all the symbols"--time to "Put them away, for a while, until the times have created a fresh iconography?" (174). To create a fresh iconography became Carter's own passion. NOTES (1)"Notes from the Front Line," in On Gender and Writing, ed. Michelene Wandor (London: Pandora, 1983), 75; hereafter cited parenthetically. (2)Duncker, "Re-Imagining the Fairy Tales: Angela Carter's Bloody Chambers," Literature and History 10 (1984): 6; Clark, "Angela Carter's Desire Machine," Women's Studies 14 (1987): 147. (3)The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (New York: Pantheon, 1979), 5. (4)Carter commented on her decision to change her approach in an interview with Lorna Sage, "The Savage Sideshow: A Profile of Angela Carter," New Review, June-July 1977, 51-57. Her fourth novel, the fantasy Heroes and Villains (1969), reflects the change. (5)The Passion of New Eve (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 6; hereafter cited parenthetically. (6)The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1974), 301. (7)Amanda Smith, "PW Interviews Angela Carter," Publishers Weekly, 4 January 1985, 75. (8)Nights at the Circus (London: Chatto and Windus 1984), 7; hereafter cited parenthetically. (9)"What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can't Write," Images of Women in Fiction, ed. Susan Cornillon (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1973), 4. (10)Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 205. COPYRIGHT 1994 Review of Contemporary Fiction COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning The Passion of New Eve as a feminist tract about the social fiction of femininity In spite of all the feminine sufferings and painfully grotesque female embodiments revealed in the novel, how can The Passion of New Eve be nevertheless intended and interpreted as an anti-mythic novel[]conceived as a feminist tract (Carter 1983, 71)? The fundamental paradox of metafiction is that it has to paraphrase the representations, invoke the ideologies, repeat the very fossilized myths it aims to subvert. Accordingly, what I call corporeal metafiction is a writing that wishes to analyze the text of the body and the body of texts, and undertakes to problematize the social-discursive construction, the ideological inscription of individual feminine bodies and of collective corpuses of canonized womens literature. To accomplish this, on the one hand, it must necessarily replicate the ideologically prescribed, hierarchicallydichotomically engendered, paradoxically feminized subjectivity written on the female body by patriarchal technologies of power, and, on the other hand, it must retell a narrative according to the traditional codes of always already engendered (see Butler 1990) feminine meaning formation and text production, remaining within the frames of stereotypical representations of femininity and feminine representations. In my view, The Passion of New Eve is a par excellence example of corporeal metafiction, as its aim is to exploit the feminist tactic of speaking in quotation marks, of rehearsing mean, muting and mutilating social fictions of femininity in order to reveal them as patriarchally inevitable, yet for a woman utterly unacceptable, and in order to unveil and question the conventional incompatibility of femininity/authorship/authority/subjectivity. In her The Sadeian Woman. An Ideology of Pornography--presumably written simultaneously with and published only one year after The Passion of New Eve--Carter applies the same logic when she calls Marquis de Sade a moral pornographer whose seemingly misogynist texts are actually ideology-critical manifestos serving the cause of womens liberation by unveiling that flesh comes to us out of history (Carter 1978, 11), sadism is a cultural construct, sexual relations and gender hierarchies are determined by social contexts, and all mythic versions of femininity are consolatory nonsense, bringing in reality submissiveness and suffering. Carters suggestion that a narrative is an argument stated in fictional terms (Carter 1985, 13) is particularly valid to her fictional works immediately preceding and following her polemical philosophical piece,

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as both the picaresque of The Passion of New Eve and the rewritten fairy-tales of The Bloody Chamber aim at demystifying the ideological construction of mythical femininity.[4] Although many claim that Carters argumentation, her version of feminism based on repetition--on putting new wine in old bottles and in some cases old wine in new bottles (Carter 1983, 76)--is highly problematic, because it remains locked within the infernal traps of phallogocentric imaginations imagery, the regressive circulation of patriarchal metaphors on disabling/disabled femininity (see Dworkins and Britzolakis criticism among others), yet Carters strategy of subversion from within seems to re-emerge as a recent trend in contemporary feminist thought. When Teresa De Lauretis provides a gender-sensitive re-reading of Foucauldian technologies of power, and reveals the technologies of gender, ingendering, masculinization, desexualization (De Lauretis 1987, 1-30) as inevitable phallogocentric ideological manipulations, she calls attention to the feminist potentials of an internal re-vision, and highlights the importance of the feminine subjects recognition of misrecognition. De Lauretis, as Carter, maps out feminine roles and gendered identity as a series of other, minority dispositions, determined by sexuality, corporeality, desires and abjection, remaining forever impossible (as subjects) because of their marginal positioning in a phallocentric (his)story. This mythic Woman is excluded from the active subject position, yet the embodied difference of the othered femininity is necessary for the constitution of the empowered masculine subject. Hence the concept of feminine subject[5] becomes a paradox, since She is caught inside the system of representation, society, but always only as the outside of it. The De Lauretisian argumentation coincides with the Carterian narrative strategy: the repetition of arche-images of patriarchal visual mythology responsible for the cultural construction of femininity reveals the artificial constructedness of gender, and therefore enables women readers to inspect their internalization of images of femininity, to recognize their misrecognition as feminine subjects interpellated by phallogocentric technologies of power. De Lauretis highlights that the female subject is always positioned paradoxically, being simultaneously adressed as a-woman embodying a singular identity in its plural, heterogeneous and uncontrollable bodily reality and as Woman symbolizing the essential myth of homogeneous subjection and of ideologically constituted universal femininity. She encourages women to have a view from elsewhere, to do critical re-vision, gaining insight to their alternative, heterogeneous selves beyond the denaturalized, defamiliarized, deconstructed icons of femininity. (De Lauretis 1987, 124) In this process, the body is both in ideology, seemingly repeating the same, gendered patriarchal representations of women, and/yet beyond ideology, due to the political strategy of repetition with a difference, offering a demythologizing, ironic, critical metatext on society. Performing a subversion from within the system to be subverted so as to establish womans existence as a positive experience, staying and starting from within means the exposure of the masculine efforts to keep her outside, so the relocation of her inside as starting point institutes already a form of subversion. The violent hierarchy of binaries, the heterosexual gender asymmetry are destabilized from the inside by using the transgressive potential of womans paradoxical positioning itself, by starting out from a peripheral, antagonistic feminine subjectivity (versus feminine subjection).[6] Therefore, The Passion of New Eve shall be intended and interpreted as a feminist tract, despite/due to building the narrative on the very process of physical pain and degradation that Eve undergoes in her apprenticeship as a woman (Carter 1998, 592), since the text enhances the recognition of misrecognition of the paradoxically positioned feminine subject. Indeed, Carters grotesque suffering female bodies problematize the body discipline, a fundamental Foucauldian technology of biopower, that is, according to feminist critics, responsible for the ideological corporeal constitution of femininity via a prescriptive and painful stylization, representation and performance of the body conforming to the gender norms. Carters novel unveils how Western cultures obsessive gaze always already outlines the female body antagonistically: as object of scopophilic desire and enigmatic vessel of life and death, as sublime essence of beauty and abjectified, uncanny other against which the speaking subject can define himself, as tempting and threatening, sacred and profane, corporeality associated with a femininity that remains an unresolved paradox. New Eves passion of becoming woman reveals how Western societies interpellate the female body as simultaneously idealized and normativized, decorporealized aestheticized and pathologized abjectified, eroticized and asceticized, marked by visibility as a real simulacrum in a society of spectacle and repressed, silenced, hidden as taboo in a society of scientia sexualis (see Foucault 1978). The aim is to disclose the very process how phallogocentric technologies of power produce via the impossible expectations of the engendered body discipline grotesque female bodies. Readers are faced with the shameful scenario how the ideologically interpellated, feminized woman voluntarily carves painful marks of her gender upon her own body by internalizing icons of femininity under the constant, panoptical surveillance of the Foucauldian Eye of the Power, conforming to the expectations of the given social, cultural, historical era. The stages of New Eves passion, scenes from demystified myths, ruthlessly represent how Womans heels or toes are cut off to make her feet fit into the princes shoes, to conform to his desires, how Woman is killed into the perfect mirror image where the looking glass speaks up in a male voice to tell who in this land is the fairest of all, or how Woman is squeezed into the S size pink corset of idealized yet normative Barbie doll, or into the iron maiden of beauty myth, concomitant with the constitution of femininity in Naomi Wolfs view (Wolf 1991). The epigraph of Carters novel, In the beginning all the world was America, a line from Locke, proves to be prophetic, as the United States of America is indeed marked by the grotesque female body that appears prescriptive for the entire

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construction of Western femininity. Reality imitates fiction, contemporary United States seems to model the Carterian postapocalyptic world, as it turns into a hotbed of the female grotesque, by being home of the anatomically deformed Barbie doll, the excessively skinny anorexic or the abnormally obese fast food junkie, of steroidized female body builders with muscle dysmorphia, of plastic surgery-addicts, of hypertechnological net-surfing cyborgs, of maniacally stylized and designed, tattooed, pierced, dyed, shaved, made-up female bodies. This ever-expanding spectacular society of simulacrum hatching unrealistic, un/superhuman grotesque bodies elicits the symptoms of body image disturbance, a new form of female malady (succeeding to hysteria and depression) that nevertheless can be interpreted as a manifestation of dis-ease, and as such, a mode of radical transgression. Accordingly, there are two sides of the same coin, two potential interpretations of the terrorist corporeal distortions of femininity. Carterian and current U.S. grotesque body modifications may be read as body-controlling manipulations of technologies of biopower of the dominant patriarchal ideology influenced by the economic interests of consumer societys major business fields targeting women in the form of beauty industries (diet, fitness, cosmetics, plastic surgery, etc.) and colonizing female bodies driven to (psycho)somatic disorders (see Bordo 1993). But, on the other hand, they might also signify (dubious yet) innovative technologies of the self, (re)writing the body as a mode of feminist empowerment, creating a subversive anti-aesthetic carved onto ones very flesh. It is up the reader to decide whether these forms of female grotesque are desperate and futile attempts at the carnivalesque destabilization of the conventional social order and of traditional ways of seeing, enacted by victims of the inevitable scenario of the ideology of representation, or on the contrary, they are self-reflexive, ideology-critical subversions of woman warriors rewriting myths of American beauty and femininity via performative identities and heterogeneous, self-made selves in monstrous metatexts. As I have tried to demonstrate above, despite its dwelling in images of grotesque embodiments of suffering femininity, The Passion of New Eve certainly lends itself to a reading interpreting the text as an internally subversive feminist manifesto enabling the recognition of misrecognition via a relentless ideology-criticism. It is all the more so, considering the fact that the novel is structured as a retrospective autobiographical narrative, in which the masculine Evelyn looking at women is from the very beginnings, always already looked at by the feminized Eve looking back on him(self). No matter how misogynist, male chauvinistic the narrative and its images seem to turn, it is always easy to detect an ironic womans voice complementing the macho confessions. Examples are numerous. (The sadistic Evelyn calls himself a tender little milk-fed English lamb (9), he escapes New York like a true American hero, [his] money stored between [his] legs (37). Mothers self-created god-head is as big and as black as Marxs head in Highgate Cemetary (59), while her two tiers of divine breasts recall a patchwork quilt, bobbles on the fringe of an old-fashioned, red curtain at a French window open on a storm, and the console of a gigantic cinema organ (60,64,65). The captured Evelyn ceremoniously exclaims: Oh, the dreadful symbolism of that knife! To be castrated with a phallic symbol! (70), and is turned via the ritual surgery into a Playboy center fold (75). The lowly Zero enacts the Nietzschian bermensch amidst abject waste and his pigs. The child crusaders claim to be the scourge of God in shrill, sweet, child voices (155). Tristessa a star in space, an atomized fragmented existence, forms the uroborus, the perfect circle, the vicious circle, the dead end by having his cock stuck in his asshole (173). The masculine entity of the ocean is called a mother of mysteries(191).) Eves ventriloquist, ironic, feminist voice within Evelyns macho confessions is certainly powerful enough to make readers smile (see Ward Jouves account on her sons reading the novel). Yet, defeating every pornographic expectations from male readers (Ward Jouve 1994, 142), defamiliarizing the phallogocentric imagery and destabilizing the patriarchal narrative, still does not render, in this case, the novel fully comic, celebratory or feminist-wise satisfying. In my view, the reader can never fully forget about the actual female suffering and its direct material consequences involved in the text. Nevertheless, as I have pointed out in my introduction, despite it sado-masochistic tendencies, critics tend to praise Carters self-conscious feminist project. Lorna Sage convincingly claims that Carters story of the woman born out of a mans body reflects not only the woman-writer Carters hardships of coming out as a feminist, but also provides a more general allegory of the painful process by which the 1970s womens movement had to carve out its own identity from the unisex mould of 1960s radical politics (Sage 1994a, 35). But does The Passion of New Eves writer really succeed in leaving her male impersonator self behind, can she carve out an own feminist identity from the unisex mould, and is her feminist manifestos political project truly that selfconsciously structured and reassuringly coherent? The Passion of New Eves narrative seems to enact the principal paradox of metafiction, irony and the transgressive reinscription (see Dollimore 1991) of the internally subversive, demythologizing feminism it applies. Having it both ways, like the subversion from within the system to be subverted, here signifies an uncertainty, a vertiginous balancing in the void of nowhere without location, safety or stakesleading to painful disillusion. It could be the subject of a further analysis to examine how the text speaks up in multiple, contradictory narrative voices, in feminist, feminine, male impersonator, feminized transvestite, transsexual autobiographical, or transgender voices becoming legion to produce a fantastic cacophony of the text. However, instead of exploiting the joyous, playful, celebratory potential of polysemy and polyphony, these numerous dissonant narrative voices and internal narrative contradictions seem to tear the text apart in a chaos where the dissolution of the shattered narrative reflects semioticized the explosion of hurting feminine landscapes and the painful fragmentation-decomposition of grotesque female bodies.

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Some ways in which Carter deconstructs the gender symbolism of patriarchal culture. 1. Symbols are the projections of our lived experience; a critique of our lives should begin with a critique of the symbols which in turn determine our perception of lived experience. Our external symbols must always express the life within us...since that life has generated them. A critique of these symbols is a critique of our lives. 2. Demythologising, or the deconstruction of symbols is a revisionary exercise. The process is not essentially iconoclastic. It cannot be completed until old symbols are replaced by a fresh iconography (i.e. new meanings to be attached to the images of old symbols). But no individual or political movement (like the black movement or feminist movement) can achieve this consciously. History will give it shape. So Carter seems to be aware that the iconoclasm that she has undertaken is more irreverent than reconstructive. Was it not time to put away all the symbols? Put them away, for a while, until the times have created a fresh iconography? 3. Carter uses a technique of montage to bring together disparate myths from different cultures and different ages (e.g. Grek, Egyptian and Biblical mythology) to give an effect of condensed time and cumulative symbolism to an image. This makes the image ludicrous and divests it of the sanction and authority that it has as a symbol in any particular culture (because it is always being juxtaposed with another symbol from another culture), but also makes its signification more multilayered and polyvocal. (e.g. the description of the Mother) 4. Likewise, she creates an effect of pastiche by mimicking or parodying well known passages from male authored texts spanning the entire range of western history to dislocate an idea from its image and prevent it from being defined as a fixed archetype in Jungian terms. (Read the internet article The Alchemy of the Self in Angela Carters The Passion of New Eve to see how Carter insists on demythologizing Jung.) e.g. Leilah is described as emitting a strong animal odour (along with other references to the smell of womens parturition and excretion) as any misogynist/antifeminist male writer (like Henry Miller) might describe. But she is also represented in the image of the Mermaid, which has always inspired male romantic imagination. Leilah is in turns Dog woman, Little Mermaid and Lamia, and Eve herself is confined in Zeros harem to reverse and replay the tale of Ulysses and Circe. This technique has been described as a male impersonation by the author, but it could be more complex.

6. 7.

She also satirizes feminist theory and makes a travesty of the genre of feminist science fiction which upholds fertility myths and a utopian vision about the androgynous future of men. Psychoanalytic symbolism is used to undermine the authority f religious symbolism. Also the word Passion in the title signifies suffering, like the Passion of Christ. Whereas the second coming of Christ heralds the birth of a New (androgynous) Adam in Christian teleology, Carter makes her protagonist a New Eve. Or, Tristessa de St. Ange is a name that translates into the image of Our Lady of the Sorrows, but is a namesake of Madame de Saint-Ange who introduces the young virgin Eugenie intothe theory and practice of libertinism in de Sades Philosophie dans le boudoir. 8. Alchemical and hermetic symbolism used in a more positive, less iconoclastic way.

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