Sunday, October 24, 2004
I've just finished reading The Female Man by Joanna Russ. I didn't much care for it. The spirit of Virginia Woolf looms large and, yes, I say that having only read A Room of One's Own, Mrs Dalloway and Orlando and not cared for any of them.
The Female Man is about a third Virginia Woolf rewriting Stranger in a Strange Land and two-thirds Russ writing A Room of One's Own. But while I like the slipping between fact and fiction, between the story and Russ's own thoughts, too often in this it ends up a muddled mess. It's disorganised, chaotic, ideas mashed together like a car crash. Parts of what little story there is are inexplicable unless you read the back cover. With that in mind...
The Female Man is a suspenseful, surprising and darkly witty chronicle of what happens when Jeannine, Janet, Joanna and Jael - four alternative selves from drastically different realities - meet. Joanna's world is like our own, Jeannine's world is even poorer & grungier, a place where neither World War II nor its resulting developments of technology have happened.
Now I didn't get this at all. And while the story starts with Janet coming back to our time from the future and Joanna picked at random as chaperone it's not made clear where Jeannine comes from or what it's like, except that Jeannine feels unhappy and suffocated by it, unable to tell whether marriage is escape or grave. Suddenly she's living with Joanna, disgusted when Janet has a relationship with a teenage girl.
Janet - the explorer - comes from 'Whileaway' where men have died off, leaving a world without the 'poisonous binary' of gender. Finally we meet Jael, warrior and assassin, who takes the other three to where the final war between men and women is being waged.
Now, it is made clear that Jael (unhelpfully more often referred to as 'Alice Reasoner') has brought them to her world (but not Janet back to the past, that was her own doing) in the last quarter of the book. But why only these three? She has a deal she wants to make with them, but why just them? Why not a multitude of alternatives of them? Possibly because the fictional part of the story is slight.
The Female Man, Joanna Russ' innovative science fiction novel, caused a furore when first published in the 1970s - it has a power that has stayed fresh, witty and WEIRD. A welcome new edition of a book that now looks as good as it reads.
Yes, well...
It's not even clear in Jael's world that men and women ARE at war but while all of the men in the book are stereotypical straw men who appear only fleetingly, thoughtless jailers of the female sex, the only distinguishing feature about the men of Jael's world is that the brush strokes are even broader, the charicatures are simpler. I'm not offended, look at Asimov's women to see the men were just as guilty AND getting published more often too. I suppose it could be argued to be Swiftian satire, four Gullivers adrift in a world of Yahoos. But is a call to metaphorical arms against an imaginary adversary counter-productive?
There is a funny scene when Jael is having sex with her (literally) brainless boy-toy. The other three J's walk in on her and Janet, who spends the book trying to understand these strange 'men' creatures while Joanna can't understand why she doesn't feel the lack of having no man in her life, exclaims "Is that all?" to Joanna. And while her future of Whileaway seems to be presented by Russ as a desireable utopian future she is at least honest enough to have Jael point out that it would almost certainly be built on the bones of a situation like on her world.
Russ finishes her book with the hope that one day her 'little book' will be redundant and so discarded. Unfortunately I would say that we've already reached that date less than thirty years later, though not for the reasons that Russ set out.
The Female Man is about a third Virginia Woolf rewriting Stranger in a Strange Land and two-thirds Russ writing A Room of One's Own. But while I like the slipping between fact and fiction, between the story and Russ's own thoughts, too often in this it ends up a muddled mess. It's disorganised, chaotic, ideas mashed together like a car crash. Parts of what little story there is are inexplicable unless you read the back cover. With that in mind...
The Female Man is a suspenseful, surprising and darkly witty chronicle of what happens when Jeannine, Janet, Joanna and Jael - four alternative selves from drastically different realities - meet. Joanna's world is like our own, Jeannine's world is even poorer & grungier, a place where neither World War II nor its resulting developments of technology have happened.
Now I didn't get this at all. And while the story starts with Janet coming back to our time from the future and Joanna picked at random as chaperone it's not made clear where Jeannine comes from or what it's like, except that Jeannine feels unhappy and suffocated by it, unable to tell whether marriage is escape or grave. Suddenly she's living with Joanna, disgusted when Janet has a relationship with a teenage girl.
Janet - the explorer - comes from 'Whileaway' where men have died off, leaving a world without the 'poisonous binary' of gender. Finally we meet Jael, warrior and assassin, who takes the other three to where the final war between men and women is being waged.
Now, it is made clear that Jael (unhelpfully more often referred to as 'Alice Reasoner') has brought them to her world (but not Janet back to the past, that was her own doing) in the last quarter of the book. But why only these three? She has a deal she wants to make with them, but why just them? Why not a multitude of alternatives of them? Possibly because the fictional part of the story is slight.
The Female Man, Joanna Russ' innovative science fiction novel, caused a furore when first published in the 1970s - it has a power that has stayed fresh, witty and WEIRD. A welcome new edition of a book that now looks as good as it reads.
Yes, well...
It's not even clear in Jael's world that men and women ARE at war but while all of the men in the book are stereotypical straw men who appear only fleetingly, thoughtless jailers of the female sex, the only distinguishing feature about the men of Jael's world is that the brush strokes are even broader, the charicatures are simpler. I'm not offended, look at Asimov's women to see the men were just as guilty AND getting published more often too. I suppose it could be argued to be Swiftian satire, four Gullivers adrift in a world of Yahoos. But is a call to metaphorical arms against an imaginary adversary counter-productive?
There is a funny scene when Jael is having sex with her (literally) brainless boy-toy. The other three J's walk in on her and Janet, who spends the book trying to understand these strange 'men' creatures while Joanna can't understand why she doesn't feel the lack of having no man in her life, exclaims "Is that all?" to Joanna. And while her future of Whileaway seems to be presented by Russ as a desireable utopian future she is at least honest enough to have Jael point out that it would almost certainly be built on the bones of a situation like on her world.
Russ finishes her book with the hope that one day her 'little book' will be redundant and so discarded. Unfortunately I would say that we've already reached that date less than thirty years later, though not for the reasons that Russ set out.
