Feminist Utopian Novels of the 1970s: Joanna Russ and Dorothy Bryant (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY OUTSTANDING DISSERTATIONS edited by William E.Cain Wellesley College

A Routledge Series

OTHER BOOKS IN THIS SERIES: THE SELF WIRED Technology and Subjectivity in Contemporary Narrative Lisa Yaszek THE SPACE AND PLACE OF MODERNISM The Little Magazine in New York Adam McKible THE FIGURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS William James, Henry James, and Edith Wharton Jill M.Kress WORD OF MOUTH Food and Fiction after Freud Susanne Skubal THE WASTE FIX Seizures of the Sacred from Upton Sinclair to The Sopranos William G.Little WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN? Family and Sectionalism in the Virginia Novels of Kennedy, Caruthers, and Tucker, 1830-1845 John L.Hare POETIC GESTURE Myth, Wallace Stevens, and the Motions of Poetic Language Kristine S.Santilli BORDER MODERNISM Intercultural Readings in American Literary Modernism Christopher Schedler THE MERCHANT OF MODERNISM The Economic Jew in Anglo-American Literature, 1864-1939 Gary Martin Levine THE MAKING OF THE VICTORIAN NOVELIST Anxieties and Authorship in the Mass Market Bradley Deane

iii

OUT OF TOUCH Skin Tropes and Identities in Woolf, Ellison, Pynchon, and Acker Maureen F.Curtin WRITING THE CITY Urban Visions and Literary Modernism Desmond Harding FIGURES OF FINANCE CAPITALISM Writing, Class, and Capital in the Age of Dickens Borislav Knezevic BALANCING THE BOOKS Faulkner, Morrison, and the Economies of Slavery Erik Dussere BEYOND THE SOUND BARRIER The Jazz Controversy in Twentieth-Century American Fiction Kristen K.Henson SEGREGATED MISCEGENATION On the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the U.S. and Latin American Literary Traditions Carlos Hiraldo DEATH, MEN, AND MODERNISM Trauma and Narrative in British Fiction from Hardy to Woolf Ariela Freedman THE SELF IN THE CELL Gender and Genre in Woolf, Forster, Sinclair, and Lawrence James J.Miracky SATIRE AND THE POSTCOLONIAL NOVEL V.S.Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie John Clement Ball THROUGH THE NEGATIVE The Photographic Image and the Written Word in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Megan Williams

FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS OF THE 1970s Joanna Russ & Dorothy Bryant

Tatiana Teslenko

ROUTLEDGE NEW YORK & LONDON

Published in 2003 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE www.routledge.co.uk Copyright © 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Excerpts from The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You copyright © 1971 by D.M.Bryant. Co published by Random House, Inc. and Moon Books. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. Excerpts from The Female Man by Joanna Russ copyright © 1975 by Joanna Russ. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Teslenko, Tatiana. Feminist utopian novels of the 1970s : Joanna Russ & Dorothy Bryant / by Tatiana Teslenko. p.cm.—(Literary criticism and cultural theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-96787-2 (acid-free paper) 1. Russ, Joanna, 1937—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Feminism and literature—United States —History—20th century. 3. Women and literature—United States—History—20th century. 4. American fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 5. American fiction— 20th century—History and criticism. 6. Bryant, Dorothy, 1930—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Feminist fiction, American—History and criticism. 8. Utopias in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PS3568 .U763Z88 2003 813′ .5409372—dc21 2003004915

ISBN 0-203-48434-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-57911-9 (Adobe eReader Format)

To the memory of my mother who taught me to dream

Contents

List of Tables

ix

Preface

x

Acknowledgments

Chapter One:

Chapter Two:

Chapter Three:

Chapter Four:

xii

Introduction

1

Rhetoric of Identification

7

New Rhetoric of Genre

11

Utopia as Rhetorical Subject

17

Utopia and Utopianism

23

Utopia and Ideology

24

Utopia as Literary Genre

26

Utopianism and Feminism

35

Scrapping False Dichotomies

36

Genre Transformation

61

Dorothy Bryant: Saving the Human Race

84

The Real World

86

Utopian Chronotope

89

Utopian People

98

Dream-time: Fluid Meaning and Rigid Word

110

The Law of Light

116

Joanna Russ: New Meaning for Old Concepts

124

Calculated Ambiguity

125

Janet the Savior

134

Jeannine: Cognitive Starvation

139

viii

Conclusion:

Jael: Terror of Terrorism

141

Joanna: Usurp the Denied

145

Identification Revisited

151

Utopian Genre as Feminist Strategy

159

Notes

170

Glossary

176

Bibliography

178

Index

186

List of Tables

Table 1. Table 2.

Index of Utopian Terms Feminists Propositions of the 1970s

30 49

Preface

This book identifies a need for a utopian genre that can provide the feminist community with a conceptual space to articulate the politics of change, to validate the personal as political, and to express feminists’ self-defense in their retaliating symbolic violence against patriarchy. Feminist utopias of the 1970s expose patriarchal social order and offer such a new conceptual space: they envision a different time/place that allows for ideological change. It is quite a challenge to portray a vision of the future that can generate change in the present. First, feminist utopias must avoid fixing the act of social dreaming by creating blueprints of utopian worlds because doing so removes the transformative potential of the imagined future. Second, feminist utopias must describe a better world for women while working with the very tools of patriarchy in the form of language. Consequently, they need to disrupt the genresetting “rules” of mainstream utopia through the use of ambiguity, multiplicity, and openness. I approach this genre as a feminist researcher, an East-European woman raised in a traditionally patriarchal ethnic community that was going through a deconstruction of its own: the dismantling of patriarchy in favor of communist “democracy” with its tacit sexism and false promises of equal opportunities for men and women. In Soviet society (1917–1991), gender stereotypes were cast in stone, sexism was tacit, and women’s roles as mothers and educators were openly celebrated. Heterosexual monogamy was the norm, and attempts to reenvision established gender roles could be regarded as non-conformity to the Moral Code of the Builders of Communism, and, therefore, would constitute an ideological crime. Western psychoanalysis was severely criticized as dangerous and misleading “bourgeois” theorizing. Due to the limitations on translation and dissemination of books in the Soviet Union in the years of the Cold War, I was only able to read American feminist utopias in 1994. When I first read them, I could not identify with the female positioning described in them because the socio-political situation in the Soviet Union of the 1970s was quite different. The writings of Soviet women of the time undermined the inflated optimism of socialism but did not attempt to re-invent the existing construction of gender roles. It took me several years of living and studying in North America to

xi

understand the bitter revelations of the female positioning disclosed in the American feminist utopias of the 1970s. My readings of Dorothy Bryant’s The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man are informed by Burke’s rhetoric of identification, Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope, and feminist theories of gender and subjectivity. Discussing feminist utopia as a set of strategies for re-inventing a patriarchal genre, I am guided by new-rhetorical theories that view language as situated social action and genres as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” (Miller 159). Being active social processes, “dynamic rather than static” (Devitt 580), genres respond to and regenerate their context of situation. Evolving due to changes of larger discursive systems, they continue to exist only if the strategies they embody “work.” Feminist utopia is not a “natural” or ideologically innocent transgression of patriarchal genres, but a set of strategies both contingent on the rhetorical situation and implicated in the politics of feminist discourse community. Feminist utopia describes “the good place which is no place”; but as a genre, it is grounded in place and time: it reflects the feminist attempts to change their inferior positioning in the socio-historic context of the 1970s.

Acknowledgments

A complete list of people that helped me throughout this project would be much longer than the book itself because it would include feminist scholars from the Ukraine, Canada, and the United States, who did the hard work of utopian dreaming together with me. I would like to acknowledge the help of my past and present colleagues and students from Simon Fraser University (Canada), Kharkiv National University (Ukraine), Old Dominion University (USA), and the Centre for Research in Women’s Studies and Gender Relations at the University of British Columbia (Canada), who helped me shape my trajectory as a researcher and teacher. I am especially grateful to the following people: • Dr. Richard Coe at Simon Fraser University, Canada, for introducing me into the disciplinary community and for tactful and continuous guidance throughout the project; • Dr. David Stouck, Simon Fraser University, and Dr. Janet Giltrow, University of British Columbia, for most valuable advice and incessant support; • Dr. Carolyn Rhodes, Dr. Janet Bing, and Dr. Anita Freedman, Old Dominion University, for encouraging me to start the study; • my family: for inspiring me and for putting up with me throughout the project.

Introduction

Humanity has long dreamt about a better future, and the imagined better world, utopia, has been associated in the human mind with dreaming, desire, hope, and progress. Oscar Wilde puts it best when he articulates the connection between progress and the realization of utopias: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias” (Wilde 27). But what is Utopia and how can it be achieved? Sir Thomas More’s Utopia1 gave a name to numerous earlier, as well as later, efforts to picture ideal societies. As Lewis Mumford comments in The Story of Utopias (1), Sir Thomas More was a punster in an age when it was not always wise to speak too plainly, and when the keenest minds delighted in playing tricks with language. He coined a term in which the root, topos, means “place”; the prefix can be read as eu which means “good,” or as ou which means “no” or “not.” More was aware of the multiple implications of his term; and, lest anyone else should miss them, he elaborated his linguistic paradox in a quatrain included in his Latin text (More 1995, 1) which, unfortunately, is omitted from English translations of his Utopia. As Mumford (1–2) reports, Thomas More explained in his verse that utopia might refer either to the Greek eutopia, which means “the good place,” or to outopia, which means “no place.” Thus, utopia implies an evaluation, as well as suggests the unattainable.2 Lyman Tower Sargent (1994) remarks that, though all fiction describes a “no place,” utopian fiction generally describes a good or bad “no place.” The meaning of More’s ambiguous term has been debated ever since. Used in diverse contexts, it started various spins of meanings, such as the derogatory in colloquial “utopic” and taxonomic in academic “utopian.” Since Thomas More, many commentators attempted to define utopia; however, until the present, this phenomenon has resisted static definitions. Meanwhile, our understanding of utopia has been systematically problematized (Sargent 1994). While some scholars restrict utopia to a literary genre, others use this term for a variety of manifestations reflecting utopianism as social dreaming (Sargent’s definition) or a certain viewpoint, a philosophical approach to perceiving and representing the world.

2 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

Over the past two decades, most commentators have arrived at the conclusion that the term “utopia” resists definition because of the plurality of phenomena involved in the concept. For example, the Marxian philosopher Ernst Bloch (66) believes that utopia is not necessarily a literary genre or even a written work of any kind; he lists literature, architecture and music among important vehicles of utopia. What binds these diverse phenomena together is their representation of dreams of a better life. They all venture beyond the present reality and reach forward to a transformed future, embodying both the act of wishing and what is wished for. Ruth Levitas in The Concept of Utopia (1990) conceives utopia as the expression of a desire for different (and better) ways of being. With its emphasis on human desire (151), her definition of utopia responds to that of a broader phenomenon— utopianism. While Levitas is not directly concerned with literary utopias, her definition reinforces the argument that utopian literature should be treated as a subset of a broader phenomenon. Another important debate developed around the mainstream meanings of utopia as a blueprint and utopia as perfection. It is still argued whether utopia should or should not describe “perfect” societies. For Andreas Voigt (1906), utopias were “idealistic pictures of other worlds” (1). Joyce Oramel Hertzler (1923) identified perfection as a “distinctive characteristic” of Thomas More’s Utopia, saying that “More depicted a perfect, and perhaps unrealizable, society, located in nowhere, purged of the shortcomings, the wastes, and the confusion of our own time and living in perfect adjustment, full of happiness and contentment” (2). Perfection, then, is perceived as beneficial for human beings and as essential for utopia; indeed, as Kenneth Burke points out, “there is a principle of perfection implicit in the nature of symbol systems; and in keeping with his nature as symbol-using animal, man is moved by this principle” (Language 17). Burke even includes perfection in his definition of humans when he defines humans as “bodies that learn language” who are “goaded by the spirit of hierarchy/ acquiring the foreknowledge of death/ and rotten with perfection” (16). Employing the Aristotelian concept of the “entelechy” Burke explains that “each being aims at the perfection natural to its kind (or, etymologically, is marked by a ‘possession of a telos within’)” (Language 17). I find it notable that the Burkean definition of human beings lists the knowledge of death and the rot of perfection side by side, in so far as some utopian scholars now argue that perfection symbolizes death: “the death of movement, death of progress and process, development and change; the death, in other words, of politics” (Sargisson 1996). Here is the paradox, then: progress is fueled by striving for perfection, and this motivates our utopian dreams. But, once perfection is achieved, it is dead: to strive for perfection, then, is to strive toward death. Indeed, as Marie Louise Berneri (1971) in her Journey through Utopia (first published posthumously in 1950) points out, utopias have often been plans of societies functioning mechanically, dead structures conceived by economists, politicians and moralists; according to her, such an exclusionary focus

INTRODUCTION

3

undermined utopia’s potential to reflect what Berneri calls “the living dreams of poets” (3–4). In this book, I am most concerned with one particular convention of the “dead” structures promoted by patriarchal utopias: they envisioned alternative societies that surmount all the prejudices of the status quo with the notable exception of sexism. Most mainstream utopias failed to make one important imaginative leap—they failed to expose the sexist discrimination within the patriarchal status quo and to envision true gender equality. Since Thomas More, patriarchal utopias have set, in Anne Freadman’s terms, “the rules of play” for the utopian genre, as well as “the rules for playing,” thus reflecting societal ceremonials that blended patriarchal regulations and morals (see Freadman 1994). In its striving for perfection, patriarchal utopia portrayed sexist discrimination as natural, “perfect” and eternal. As M. Keith Booker (1994) points out, a significant lack of genuine attention to gender issues in mainstream utopia suggests that gender prejudice is far more difficult to overcome than other social conventions. Booker explains this resistance by the fact that sexism is one of the most ingrained and invisible characteristics of Western socio-political reasoning. Thus, as I will show in my discussion of feminist discourse, feminist writers realized that, in terms of gender representation, the patriarchal utopian genre got stagnant: it became excessively regulated and exclusionary. Hence, feminist writers could not use the utopian genre without reinventing it. They needed to recreate utopia as a“constellation of strategies” (Schryer 1998) for envisioning the new nonsexist social order. Within the American “counterculture” of the 1970s, an antihegemonic political alliance emerged, with a new “counterdiscourse” aimed at overthrowing capitalist authoritative codes. As Moylan (1986) reports, “The opposition to contemporary capitalism and the hierarchical state is no longer to be found limited to that of a single vanguard party or, at the other pole, an expression of pure negation and terror” (27). He maintains that, since the late 1960s, the new political opposition occurred on three levels: economic, political, and ideological. It was made up of several autonomous movements that he identifies as “an historical anti-hegemonic bloc” with a shared task of “smashing through the established totality towards emancipation” (27). The new counterdiscourse reflected divergent political views, eclecticism and heterogeneity instead of emphasis on homogeneity, conformity and uniformity in the dominant discourse of the previous decades. The period of the late 1960s— early 1970s is described as a turbulent time that, according to Moylan, “significantly awakened subversive utopianism” (10). Moylan maintains that this subversive utopianism negates the contradictions of the dominant social system “by forging visions of what is not yet realized either in theory or practice. In generating such figures of hope, utopia contributes to the open space of opposition” (1–2). The revival of social activism in the 1970s followed the deep conflicts of the 1960s that Moylan describes as “rooted in an affluence that

4 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

hinted at the end of scarcity and in an experience of the repression and exploitation of nature and humanity needed to achieve such affluence” (10): As much as those uprisings, coded around the year 1968 but springing from the oppositions of the 1950s and the late 1940s, might have been defeated by state suppression or contained by ideological reduction to individual narcissism, hip-capitalism, or even ‘Clean for Gene [McCarthy]’ reformism, their spirit survived in a continuing activism that marked a return to the human agenda of the categories of cooperation, equality, mutual aid, liberation, ecological wisdom, and peaceful and creative living. This revived longing for the not yet realized potential of the human community was expressed in many ways in the emerging oppositional culture of the late 1960s and the 1970s. (10) During the political upheavals of the 1970s, suspicion of government and rejection of universal truths became the norm. In the period following the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the student uprisings of the 1968s, and the anti-Vietnam war protests, the foundations of the patriarchal establishment were under constant attack from an oppositional bloc that comprised the civil rights movement, feminism, radical ecologism, and racial and ethnic liberation movements. The aim of this alliance was to open up “oppositional spaces in the social fabric from which further subversion of the system can be launched” (Moylan 28). Moylan names this bloc “a new historic bloc of opposition to Western(izing) culture and capitalism” and further describes the new vision of justice and democracy that was gradually shaping up in the counterdiscourse: “In the 1960s, that vision of justice and economic democracy as well as minimal government, individual and group freedom, decentralist ideals, and localist claims has been expressed in documents such as the Port Huron Statement, the founding manifesto of the Students for Democratic Society, and Martin Luther King’s “‘I Have a Dream’ Speech” (199). This, then, is the socio-historic context when feminist utopias of the 1970s emerged. Moylan directly ties feminist utopia to the oppositional bloc: “The critical utopia is part of the political practice and vision shared by a variety of autonomous oppositional movements that reject the domination of the emerging system of transnational corporations and post-industrial production and ideological structures” (11). Feminist authors were positioned in the center of this vibrant socio-political space, actively participating in the new feminist discourse that was joining speakers and hearers, writers and readers within an oppositional communicative domain. They adopted a certain frame of mind and began acting on accordance with this orientation. Bazerman (2002) makes an important observation when he discusses “the interplay between the existing social worlds writers recognize and orient toward, and the individualized presences and contributions each writer makes through participation in the shared discursive space of genres.” He argues that “going to the place is only the

INTRODUCTION

5

first step, for once you are there you need access and encouragement to engage with particular people in particular roles, use particular resources, and take part in particular experiences and activities” (14). When authors start writing in those genres they “take on the feelings, hopes, uncertainties, and anxieties about becoming a visible presence in that world and participating in the available activities” (14). In other words, they develop and become committed to the identity they are carving out within that domain. As it is now widely acknowledged, feminism3 is one of the most far-reaching movements of the twentieth century that influenced every area of social, political and cultural life worldwide. One of its most important characteristics is that it combines theory with practice: being a set of ideologies, feminism is also a movement that retains a commitment to change sexism ingrained in capitalist patriarchy. Moreover, there are at least two aspects to feminist rhetorical action: first, feminist discourse influences feminist social action; and second, feminist rhetoric itself is one of these actions. As I will attempt to show in my readings of feminist utopian novels, the changes feminist rhetoric has set in motion may be as much defensive as accommodating because the patriarchal institutions and structures are striving to protect their cherished areas of privilege and superiority. One of these changes is caused by feminist interventions into the traditionally patriarchal areas of language and meaning. In their interventions, feminist writers employ the potentialities of the utopian genre: utopian thinking creates a new conceptual space for conceptualizing the past, present and future. According to feminist critics, this new imagining, in order to be really different, needs to transgress the patriarchal ways of thinking, conceptualizing and theorizing. It is for this reason that many commentators stress the paradigmatic nature of the transformative effect of utopian thought: if utopian thought can change the shape and scope of our consciousness, then what used to be the unthinkable can be thought of, desired, and articulated. In the absence of blueprints, the future is open-ended. Therefore, it is likely that feminists employ the utopian genre as a recognizable, socially standard, transhistorical form to facilitate their social dreaming. I refer here to Burke’s rhetorically grounded and pragmatically oriented conception of form. In Counter-Statement, Burke claims that certain literary and artistic forms are to some extent transhistorical, universal in nature; and, as genre theorists inform us, they are socially standard. Burke says that there exist universal formal patterns which serve to distinguish our experiences [such as “the accelerated motion of a falling body, the cycle of a storm, the procedure of the sexual act, the ripening of crops” (Counter-Statement 45)]. Therefore, part of the artist’s task is to use these patterns. Burke reasons that because form is the “adequate satisfying of an appetite,” the artist must construct a “symbol” which serves the function of “arousing the human potentiality for being moved by the crescendo” (Counter-Statement 45) of human desires. And since, for Burke, “the symbol is the verbal parallel to a pattern of experience” (152), he asserts that the artist producing the symbolic artifact must begin “with his moods to be

6 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

individuated into the subject-matter, and his feelings for technical form to be individuated by the arrangement of the subject-matter” (52). I would also suggest that utopia might be such a transhistorical artistic form, whereas feminist utopia is one of its historical and social manifestations, further individuated in the work of utopian writers. According to Burke,” art is eternal in so far as it deals with the constants of humanity.… But art is also historical— “a particular mode of adjustment to a particular cluster of conditions” (Counter-Statement 107). What Burke means by “conditions” are dominant societal attitudes reflected in the socio-historical context; he also mentions the “practical attitude” that “alters our way of living” (107). For Burke, writers who are intent on affecting social change will need to construct symbols which identify with certain residual, contemporary, and emergent social attitudes that have currency in society. And, as I intend to show, this is what feminist utopian writers do. Burke’s idea of the “practical attitude” is, in fact, somewhat analogous to Kenneth Bruffee’s adaptation of Richard Rorty’s division of “normal” and “abnormal” discourse: dominant “normal” discourse comprises “the standards and expectations members of discourse communities share since the prevalence of a community’s discourse is partly established and maintained through a process of labeling individuals as being either insiders or outsiders, as having or lacking the values, knowledge and skills required to belong to a community” (Behr 15–16). Burke also points out that people often identify with the discourses of discourse communities in unconscious ways. Moreover, those who are excluded from becoming members of a certain discourse community will often exhibit nonstandard, deviant, “abnormal” discourse. From the point of view of epistemology, “abnormal discourse is at best an accident, something not to be explained but rather to be eliminated as quickly as possible by either socializing or excluding the ignorant person” (Cooper 208). However, from the point of view of hermeneutics, “abnormal discourse is an important object of study, for though abnormal discourse produces nonsense, it also produces intellectual revolution” (Cooper 208). From the perspective of patriarchal hegemony, then, feminist discourse is abnormal and nonstandard; but for the feminist discourse community it is transformative and revolutionary. This function is also related to Burke’s idea of practical and aesthetic attitudes as identifications which challenge and attempt to overthrow the authoritative codes that are often inscribed into the dominant discourses. Being an “abnormal” revolutionary discourse, feminism repeatedly identifies the oppressed situation, attempts to turn the dominant patriarchal discourse inside out, and tries to develop a recurring, characteristic way of writing. It creates new conceptual spaces for the metaphoric transformation of patriarchal discourse. As I will show in my discussion of feminist rhetoric of the 1970s, language serves as a crucial tool for expressing feminist ideology. I assume that, in their opposition to patriarchal discourse, feminist writ ers turn to utopia because for them utopian thinking is a vehicle to promote feminist ideology and to demonstrate the continual exploration of the possible new ways for semiotic

INTRODUCTION

7

representation. Without utopian thinking, says Drucilla Cornell, “feminism is inevitably ensnared in the system of gender identity that devalues the feminine” (168–169). Therefore, denying the traditional usage of utopia within the “normal” discourse “in the sense of the establishment of a blueprint of an ideal society,” feminism readily employs the utopian potential for “abnormality,” revolutionary criticism, and metaphoric transformation of patriarchal gender and genre canons: “the necessary utopian moment in feminism lies precisely in our opening up the possible through metaphoric transformation” (Cornell 171). As I intend to demonstrate in my discussion of feminist interpretations of psychoanalysis, feminist narratives offer new options for the female subject; to use Julia Kristeva’s words, they reveal “a certain knowledge and sometimes the truth itself about an otherwise repressed, nocturnal, secret and unconscious universe” (Kristeva Women and Power 456). I will attempt to prove, then, that the symbolic action of feminist discourse is the expression of the repressed truth about the women’s inferior subject-positioning in patriarchy. The feminist utopian tradition gained considerable energy with the secondwave feminist movement of the late 1960s—early 1980s, the time of rebellion and change that helped to bring to life Berneri’s “living dreams of poets” (3–4). This period witnessed a major ideological revolution that caused numerous political, social, and cultural changes. One of these changes was an explosion of feminist narratives that exposed the inferior positioning of women in patriarchy and met their demand for envisioning a better social order. Indeed, during this period feminist writers produced works that reenergized many literary genres. In particular, in their interventions into the utopian genre, feminists were moving toward an open-endedness that sought to overcome the tendency toward monological stagnation4 that, as they argued, had long haunted patriarchal utopia. RHETORIC OF IDENTIFICATION I will now attempt to define the feminist interventions in terms of Burke’s rhetoric of identification. Burke’s theory is premised on how art can foster the justification and, ultimately, the maintenance of whole social orders. Burke says that discursive practices are instrumental in generating certain worldviews, as well as influencing individuals who hold these views. This theory, thus, explains how individuals are constituted culturally. While I.A. Richards believes that rhetoric “should be the study of misunderstanding and its remedies” (3), Burke comments that rhetoric “is the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols” (Rhetoric 43). As Richard Coe observes, Burke’s concept of rhetoric is grounded in his definition of humans as “beings who continually define and redefine [themselves] through the symbolic processes of language, discourse, rhetoric, culture” (“Editor’s Preface” xi). Burke, therefore, directs our attention beyond a classical understanding of the power of language to persuade and towards the ability of language to enact. Coe

8 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

explains that “the crucial relation of attitude to act (and, as synonyms such as standing, position, and posture suggest, [attitudes] … crucial relation to substance)” is an idea that “underlies the reframing of rhetoric that leads both Richards and Burke to the New Rhetoric” (“Burke’s Act” 3). Coe also notes the way in which “Burke emphasizes that the phrase ‘inducing cooperation’ presumes that cooperation must be induced” (“Defining” 48). For Burke, then, cooperation arises from the ways in which individuals come to identify with a particular social perspective by dividing themselves from other perspectives and forming social groups. Rhetoric thus becomes primarily the process whereby a community comes to share a symbolic discourse—or whereby a communally shared discourse creates consubstantiality, subliminally persuades individuals to identify with the community, even to sacrifice their lives for their country and flag (and what it stands for). Or to refuse to listen to, understand, or publish nonstandard discourse. (Coe “Defining” 49) Burke suggests that, whereas the key term of the “old” rhetoric was “persuasion” with its stress on deliberate design, the key term for the “new” rhetoric should be “identification” which can include a “partially unconscious factor of appeal” (“Old and New” 204). His key concept is consubstantiality. He states that in being identified with B, A is ‘substantially one’ with a person other than himself. Yet at the same time he remains unique, an individual locus of motives. Thus he is both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with another. (Rhetoric 21) Consubstantiality, Burke argues, etymologically refers to the term “substance,” which points towards a person’s or a group’s social context. Describing the function of the term “substance” in western philosophy, Burke contends that the term “in the old philosophies was [construed as] an act; and a way of life is an acting-together; and in acting together men have common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes that make them consubstantial” (Rhetoric 21). In other words, Burke explains that when people are consubstantial they stand on a common ground; this is how discourse communities form themselves. That is, through “acting together” people divide themselves from others and, in doing so, often unconsciously identify with a given set of discursive practices which bind them together within a discourse community. This phenomenon has significant ideological implications because, when being part of a discourse community, people can induce other people to divide themselves from their worldviews and adopt the view of their community. As Burke stresses, people often form allegiances with others through transcending identifications which oppose the worldviews that they may hold. And it is precisely for this reason that Burke

INTRODUCTION

9

defines rhetoric as a “partisan” weapon through which individuals and groups are “at odds” with each other (Rhetoric 22). According to Burke, Identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division. Identification is compensatory to division. If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity…. Put identification and division ambiguously together, so that you cannoxt know for certain where one ends and the other begins, and you have the characteristic invitation to rhetoric (Rhetoric 22, 25) He further speculates that to identify with a particular group or perspective is contingent upon human motivations that may only be signified “in terms of verbal action, and which ultimately serve the purpose of unifying us to see things in terms of some thing rather than its other counterpart” (Grammar 49). It follows that, for Burke, language dialectically shapes our perceptions; that is, people subscribe to certain social perspectives by transcending the claims of competing social orientations.5 Burke, therefore, asserts that our identifications only become meaningful to others when they are explained through our ideology. For him, “an ideology is an aggregate of beliefs sufficiently at odds with one another to justify opposite kinds of conduct” (Counter-Statement 163). And since identification is “a kind of transcendence,” it can serve to eliminate disharmony, thereby enabling people to subscribe to certain worldviews: “with such identification there is a partially dream-like, idealistic motive, somewhat compensatory to real differences or divisions, which the rhetoric of identification would transcend” (203).6 By arguing that acts of reading, speaking, and writing motivate our attitudes in certain ways, Burke shows that our critical discourses, which are allegedly designed to challenge the symbols of those who control our society, can function in ways that are ideological. Terminologies, as Burke explains, act as “terministic screens” through which people (or worldlings) view their world, directing their attention to some aspect of a situation rather than others (Language 44). Thus, for Burke, language is “both social and socializing”; human beings are “bodies that learn language / thereby becoming worldlings.” Burke notes that our species7 is the one “endowed by mutation” with the ability to use a language that “can comment on itself,” a “‘second-level’ dimension (the possibility of words-about-words, symbolsabout-symbols) that makes possible the development of human personality as we know it” (Language 29). Burke labels this capacity “logological,” defining logology as “words about words” (Rhetoric of Religion 1). Addressing the relation between psychology and logology, Burke comments on the relation between “God” and his concept of “god-terms.”8 God-terms are unitary terms that enable people to transcend purely secular domains of perception. Since god-terms serve to “entitle” our experiences, they can perform the ideological function of motivating our actions. Just as language frames

10 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

provide us with order in interaction, so too the terminologies we develop create frames of acceptance and rejection of authority. The critical discourse on feminist utopias shows that numerous disciplines that are concerned with this genre— philosophy, utopian studies, feminist theory, literary criticism, psychology, sociology—all impose their own terministic screens on it, creating terms and indices that, according to Burke, are a “reflection” of their respective disciplinary attitudes—and a “deflection” of others (Burke Language 45). This action of disciplinary attitudes can be interpreted through Janet Giltrow’s concept of metagenre. Giltrow provisionally describes meta-genres as “atmospheres of wordings and activities, demonstrated precedents or sequestered expectations— atmospheres surrounding genres” emphasizing that, “[l]ike genres themselves, metagenres are indexed to their context of use: every activity—or discipline— having its own relation to and life in language, and meta-genres representing or advancing these relations, positioning genres in relation to other activities” (Meta-Genre 1–22). Because meta-generic assumptions brought forth in the critical discourse on feminist utopias position this genre in relation to other feminist activities, I assume that I need to explore both the social action of feminist utopia and that of its critical discourse. Following Burke’s understanding of language as strategic9 “symbolic action” (Language 44), I will argue that both utopianism and feminism are symbolic discourses that represent theory and practice, strategy and action. My other assumption is that in their interventions into patriarchal utopia, feminists use language strategically for 1) identifying feminist goals; 2) developing consubstantiality within the feminist discourse community; 3) challenging patriarchal terms, hence, patriarchal attitudes. In Burkean terms, they create the framework of acceptance for feminist rhetoric and the framework of rejection for the “normal” patriarchal rhetoric. This assumption directs my attention to language use in feminist utopian genre and in the meta-genre. Working within the “abnormal” revolutionary discourse, feminist genres re/ construct feminist rhetorical situations; in this way, they invoke feminist changes in the existing patriarchal reality. These changes need to be interpreted: and, because genres are cultural artifacts, I will attempt to explain their functioning by their relation to other artifacts (such as language and gender). I am also informed by Bakhtin’s suggestion to initially identify genres as “typical forms of utterances” (Bakhtin 63), as relatively stable types that reflect recognizable and recurring episodes in the life of a community. As I will show in my readings of the feminist utopian novels, these episodes are described as gendered because they represent the gendered activities of the members of a community, and therefore genres reflect and reproduce gender roles typical of life in the community. Members of the discourse community recognize these types as generic. In our case, members of the feminist community would recognize utopian texts as marked by I’écriture feminine or strategic writing practice (in Hélène Cixous’s terminology) that violates the patriarchal utopian genre in a

INTRODUCTION

11

feminist way. So far, the newrhetorical genre reasoning is hospitable to feminist theory, but it also raises some questions: • if speakers are used by genres as vehicles for the reproduction of the social order, then how feasible is the project of constructing an independent woman’s style (or mode of writing) with its own system of genres? • in what respect is such a style feminist? • how does it embrace and revalue the “feminine” in language? Carol Pearson in “Coming Home: Four Feminist Utopias and Patriarchal Experience” (written in the wake of the explosion of feminist utopias of the 1970s and first published in 1981) provides a useful interpretation of the social action of feminist utopias. Pearson defines this action on the basis of content and function: “Feminist utopian fiction implicitly or explicitly criticizes patriarchy while it emphasizes society’s habit of restricting and alienating women” (“Coming Home” 63). She argues that feminist utopias “assume that patriarchy is unnatural and that it fails to create environments conducive to the maximization of female—or male—potential. Upon discovering a sexually egalitarian society, the narrators have a sense of coming home to a nurturing, liberating environment”(63). Pearson here defines the critical function of utopia, at the same time assigning a constructive role for it. The nature of this construction is one of rediscovery. Feminist utopias, then, facilitate this rediscovery because this genre functions as an important arena for artistic and social critique. This action makes feminist utopia a perfect genre to embody the new feminist strategies of writing and reading which Teresa de Lauretis10 called “forms of cultural resistance”: Not only can they work to turn dominant discourses inside out (and show that it can be done)…they also challenge theory in its own terms, the terms of a semiotic space constructed in language, its power based on social validation and well-established modes of enunciation and address. (Quoted in Godard 53) Therefore, the new-rhetorical framework enables me to hypothesize that feminist utopias of the 1970s emerged and functioned as a set of strategies to provide an alternative to patriarchy and articulate the politics of feminist opposition and change. NEW RHETORIC OF GENRE New-rhetorical theories hold a social view of writing, claiming that a discourse community’s discourse is regulated through its discursive genres. Advancing Burke’s dramatistic account of discourse, Carolyn Miller argues that “a rhetorically sound definition of genre must be centered not on the substance or

12 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

form of discourse but on the action it is used to accomplish” (151). By defining genres as modes of “social action,” Miller offers a pragmatic and epistemological account of discourse. That is, she argues that genres shape particular kinds of knowledge, thus producing particular kinds of responses. Charles Bazerman, following Miller, asserts that “a genre is a social construct that regularizes communication, interaction, and relations” (62). Genres are dynamic in that they serve to affect a discourse community’s discursive expectations. Martin Behr suggests that genres “legitimize modes of social action because they function to conventionalize methods of both academic and nonacademic inquiry; they are therefore instrumental in constituting ideological beliefs among the members of discourse communities who generate them” (3). One of the ways in which new-rhetorical theories treat genre is by describing it as strategy. This reasoning reflects the new conception of language as constitutive rather than descriptive; genre has now become the focal notion for understanding language in its social, functional and pragmatic aspects. While traditional theories of genre focused primarily on discursive form, the new theories explain the discursive structures of a genre functionally, not merely as a socially standard form, but as a socially standard rhetorical strategy for addressing a type of situation and attempting to evoke a desired type of response (Coe and Freedman 1997). Defining genre as a “typified rhetorical action” (Miller 24), genre theorists have articulated the need to consider not only the forms of genres, but also their contexts, functions, and their ability to reflect and shape tacit social values which Raymond Williams (1976) calls “common sense.” In this way, genre becomes a meaning-making event that facilitates specific social action. George Herbert Mead makes an important connection between meaning and action when he says that “meaning occurs in relationships among organisms and objects, not in them nor in minds. Meaning occurs among phases of the social act” (cited by Thayer 205). In his application of Mead’s pragmatism, Burke reasons that [a]ction as here conceived does not involve rationality, or even ‘consciousness of action,’ but is equated with the internal motivations of an organism which, confronting reality from its own special point of view or biological interests, encounters ‘resistance’ in the external world. And this external resistance to its internal principle of action defines the organism’s action. (Grammar 237) Burke is here saying that people’s actions are both constituted and constrained by their material and social environments. This argument suggests that the material and social environment of the 1970s influences feminist reinvention of rhetorical genres as forms of political and cultural resistance. The feminist community offers various strategies for social action that encompasses new situations. I assume that feminist utopia acts as one such strategy, naming the ingredients of

INTRODUCTION

13

the patriarchal socio-symbolic order in a way that demonstrates the feminist attitude to them, and creating a conceptual space for rearranging, remolding, or reinventing these ingredients. My exploration of feminist utopias as generic strategy incorporates the newrhetorical focus on the actions of genre users. Being dynamic entities that both shape and are shaped by their users, genres are socially standard strategies, embodied in typical forms of discourse, which have evolved for responding to recurrent types of situations: “these strategies size up the situations, name their structure and outstanding ingredients, and name them in a way that contains an attitude towards them” (Burke Philosophy 1). They continue to exist only if the strategies they embody “work,” and, therefore, they evolve and are adapted to suit particular purposes in particular contexts. Aviva Freedman reminds us of the emphasis that Bakhtin places on the “freedom” and “plasticity” available to the users of genres (“Locating Genre Studies” 10). Coe describes generic structures as “pre-pared ways of responding…[which] embody our social memory of standard strategies for responding to types of situations we encounter repeatedly” (History and Principles of Rhetoric 183). This perspective reminds of Giddens’s idea that “[h]uman social activities…are recursive. That is to say, they are not brought into being by social actors but continually recreated by them via the very means whereby they express themselves as actors. In and through their activities agents reproduce the conditions that make these activities possible” (2). Carolyn Miller’s proposal that genres be defined by “the action they accomplish,” as well as her emphasis on the heuristic and/or tyrannical nature of genres as sites of dissent reflects Burke’s attention to “situation and motive” (Miller 24). Thus, Miller suggests that genres help genre users better understand what ends they may wish to achieve through such use (40). Recent contributions to genre studies that I am employing here include Anne Freadman’s widely cited metaphor of “game-playing” for describing the action of genres, with its implications of sociality and turn-taking. Freadman (2002) also speaks about the “ramified, intertextual memory” of generic “uptake” (“Uptake” 41) and proposes to treat genre as a verb (action) and not as a noun (state). Taking up on Freadman’s proposal, Catherine Schryer (2002) describes genres as “regulated improvisational strategies that agents enact to promote certain forms of gnoseological order.” She proposes to examine genres as trajectory entities or “structured structures that structure our management of time/ space” (95). Schryer interprets genres as actions or verbs: “As discourse formation or constellations of strategies, genres provide us with the flexible guidelines or access to strategies that we need to function together in the constant social construction of reality” (95). New-rhetorical theories of genre, then, developed in response to ideological exigencies articulated by Alan Luke in Genre and the New Rhetoric when he called for “some system of analysis that enables normative judgments of genres and texts, that foregrounds whose interests they serve, how they construct and position their writers and readers, and who has access to them” (ix). Schryer

14 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

(2002) observes that a more critical turn is needed to probe at questions of ideology and power so that all genre researchers can explicitly acknowledge the political dimensions of genres; she sees genres as “stabilized-for-now or stabilized-enough sites of social and ideological action” (94–95). As Burke explains, ideological actions are those “framed and propounded for an ulterior purpose” (Rhetoric 88). Burke refines this notion by characterizing ideology as “but a kind of rhetoric (since the ideas are so related that they have in them, either explicitly or implicitly, inducements to some social and political choices rather than others)” (88). Echoing Bourdieu (1991), Schryer (2002) further infers that genres are forms of “symbolic power” and could be forms of “symbolic violence” if they create time/spaces that work against their producers’ and receivers’ best interests (76). Schryer argues that “Some genres that control will function at all levels as discursive sets of practices that construct space/times against some of their participant’s best interests” (95); they, therefore, “will more often consist of authorized speakers/voices that create constricted spaces and futures for their readers” (95). Similarly, Nadeane Trowse in “The Exclusionary Potential of Genre: Margery Kempe’s Transgressive Search for a Deniable Pulpit” (2002) articulates the power of prohibition inherent in genres, suggesting that genreuse and genre-comprehension create opportunities for both positive and negative social effects and benefits, and concluding that genres can have “exclusionary, even punitive potential.” Invoking Freadman’s metaphor, Trowse observes that “if genres are like games, genres must, like games, have rules in order to function. And rules may disempower, may restrict or prohibit certain actions of players, may even specify what kinds of players can or cannot play” (341–342). Like other aspects of discourse, genres are neither value-free nor neutral, and often imply hierarchical social relationships. They also create and operate in a specific time/space or have a specific chronotope. Mikhail Bakhtin coins his term “chronotope” by combining two Greek roots: chronos which means time and topos meaning place. It literally means “time space” and is applied by Bakhtin to “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (“Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” 85). Michael Holquist (1990) reports that Bakhtin first found out about chronotope in 1925 from a lecture on the chronotope in mathematical biology; his theory of the artistic chronotope was developed in 1937–1938 as part of his notes towards historical poetics and illustrated by the example of generic heterogeneity in the novel. In his essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (234), Bakhtin introduces this term into literary studies in a metaphorical sense. As Holquist suggests, Bakhtin could have borrowed this idea from mathematics where it was introduced as part of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to express the inseparability of space and time (treating time as the fourth dimension of space). For Bakhtin, spatial and temporal indicators in the artistic chronotope are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole: “Time, as it were, thickens,

INTRODUCTION

15

takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (“Forms of Time” 84). These indicators characterize the artistic chronotope. As Holquist points out, here Bakhtin follows the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who defines space and time as indispensable forms of any cognition, but Bakhtin takes up the Kantian evaluation treating these forms not as “transcending” but as forms of the most immediate reality. Bakhtin attempts to show what role time and space play in the process of concrete artistic cognition that he calls “artistic individualization” in the genre of the novel. Beginning with elementary perceptions and representations (85), Bakhtin moves toward establishing the relative typological stability of novelistic chronotopes. Developing Bakhtin’s idea of chronotope, Schryer (2002) suggests that all genres function as discourse formations projecting potential views of the world and differing possibilities for human agency. She indicates that genres are “local and in a constant state of construction; they are dynamic; they are structured structures that structure; they are strategy-produced and driven and produce strategy” (95). To describe this process of producing strategy, Schryer develops a metaphor of a constellation: Constellation like, [genres] function as strange attractors, creating patterns of connected content, form, and style. They create gnoseological systems— systems where common sense visions of time/space and the possibility of human action exist. Consequently they are profoundly ideological. They create ideologies. (95) Schryer concludes that “[a]t the level of individual agents, we are genred all the time. We are socialized through genres and acquire our linguistic capital through our exposure to various genres” (95). But, as she points out, it is not only linguistic capital that we gain through genres: we acquire gnoseological and ideological capital as well. Consequently, I assume that it can be instrumental for my study to understand genre as a nexus of time/ space/ideology. This means that, in order to analyze the action of utopia as a strategy for re/creating feminist ideology, I need to focus on its chronotope. Bakhtin asserts that chronotope has “an intrinsic generic significance” (Bakhtin’s emphasis, 85). Genres express space/time relations that reflect current social beliefs regarding the placement and action of human individuals in space and time (Schryer 75). Hence, it is important to study genre (and text) in context. Aviva Freedman argues that genres are context-dependent and their features cannot be isolated and taught explicitly (“Locating Genre Studies” 1–20). M.A.K.Halliday (1986) introduces an important distinction between texts and their contexts when he argues that social context cannot be collapsed into a text— rather they are separate yet related entities. For Halliday, context is the whole environment surrounding the text; it precedes the text that emerges from it.11 The term “context” is traditionally used in linguistics to refer to the verbal

16 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

surroundings of an utterance. In rhetoric, anthropology, and genre research this concept was importantly expanded by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1923). Malinowski described the “context of situation” (which is not specifically verbal) and the “context of culture” as the frames for understanding language in use. Malinowski defines “context of situation” as “the situation in which words are uttered” (306), that is, what an observer needs to know about the immediate situation in order to understand a particular instance of language in use, so he obviously includes much more than just words in this term. His “context of culture” includes “the general conditions under which a language is spoken” (306), or those “geographical, social and economic conditions” that must be referenced in any discussion of “the meaning of a word” (309); i.e., what an observer needs to know about the broader culture in order to understand the meaning of language in use. Coe represents both these contexts as framing the rhetorical situation of an utterance (“Eco-Engineering”). For Burke, context is crucial; in fact, his study of rhetoric provides the critical heuristic to describe a contextual theory of discourse. Burke points out that, unlike formalist literary theory, rhetoric studies an utterance and its context simultaneously. Context, then, is extremely important in the analysis of a genre because it can show how discourse is persuasive, how it “can motivate people to subscribe to certain attitudes and to respond with certain actions or behavior, often on the basis of group identification” (Rhetoric 67). Burke’s dramatism accounts for the ways in which “words are aspects of a much wider communicative context… [since it] considers both their nature as words in themselves and the nature they get from the nonverbal scenes that support their acts” (Grammar 482). Burke’s perspective points towards the context into which discourse is disseminated, as well as towards the social effects such discourse may have. Like Burke, Bakhtin argues that “form (and this includes thematic and stylistic construction) always has ideological commitments” and thus “every genre has its own value-laden orientation” (670–671). For Halliday (1986) a genre is known by the meanings associated with it; in fact, genre is a short form of the phrase “genre-specific semantic potential.” One of the purposes of genre research, then, should be to study the “chronotopic unconscious” or the set of unspoken assumptions about space and time that are so fundamental that “they lie even deeper (and therefore may ultimately be more determining) than the prejudices imposed by ideology” (Holquist 142). Examining the chronotope of feminist utopias, I am guided by Janet Giltrow’s discussion of genre’s dependence on the background knowledge of a community of users (“Genre and the Pragmatic Concept” 174–5), which in this case includes the knowledge of both patriarchal utopian genre and the feminist rhetoric of the 1970s. I will argue that feminist utopia as a genre, then, has a certain trajectory, a specific potential for producing worldviews and representing human agency for the feminist community. Consequently, when feminists address the issue of gender and power, they need to explore the new utopian genre’s relationship to time and space, not just in terms of its portrayal of the present, its alternative, or

INTRODUCTION

17

the future, but, most importantly, in terms of its attempt to control time/space. In particular, feminists explore the possibilities for human action that exist within the utopian chronotope. Because in each generic chronotope differing sets of values are attached to human agency, feminist genres have the potential to provide a conceptual space for foregrounding feminist issues. I further assume that agents (protagonists, authors—and, by implication—readers) in utopian chronotopes have more access to meaningful action (in the future or in the alternative world) than in other chronotopes. Following this line of reasoning, I am interested in the context of situation, context of culture, and social action of feminist utopia as the site of gendered opposition and resistance to patriarchy. UTOPIA AS RHETORICAL SUBJECT My book, therefore, proposes a pragmatic, situated approach to feminist utopia as a cultural, political, and rhetorical subject and employs newrhetorical principles to explore the relationship between utopian forms of feminist discourse and the system of contexts (including those of culture and of situation) in which feminist utopias emerged and functioned in USAmerican culture of the 1970s. My study has three major aims: descriptive, methodological, and theoretical. First, I intend to describe both the context in which feminist utopia emerged, the critical discourse on it, and the genre itself, outlining distinctive external features (such as audience, purpose, occasion, and function) that show how this genre is embedded in the context of culture of the 1970s United States. I find previous formulaic attempts to define feminist utopia problematic because they invoke inappropriate closures. The performative acts of these approaches are essentially and eternally exclusive ones (Sargisson 36); they are incomplete and inadequate because they restrict discussions unnecessarily, and because they can have the insidious functions of disciplinary or cultural imperialism. The second aim is methodological: I will try to develop a working model of a comprehensive, detailed approach to the study of feminist utopianism, focusing on its generic features of transcendence, social criticism, and metaphoric transformation. There is a consensus among the critics that the expression of utopian thought has always been transgressive of disciplinary boundaries. Indeed, Ernst Bloch identified utopia in terms of transcendence. Furthermore, utopian thought always represents a critical engagement with political issues and debates of its time. As I will show, attempts to capture utopia within the bounds of one discipline or one ideology inevitably result in both inadequate readings of utopian texts and inadequate conceptualizations of utopianism itself. Most theories discussed in the thesis prove that one-dimensional analyses simply no longer work. My study advocates a multidimensional and interdisciplinary approach. It incorporates complementary aspects borrowed from new-rhetorical theories of genre, utopian studies, feminist theory, and discourse analysis, while at the same time insisting that any framework that emerges from this integration

18 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

must remain flexible. I assume, then, that only a nonformalized new-rhetorical approach can do justice to the complexity and diversity of feminist utopias. This assumption implies that no single existing theory or analytic model is adequate to define it. Instead, such theories and models can be consulted, either to extract relevant ideas and analytic ways of reading that can contribute to a better description, and/or provide a larger perspective. Thus, my approach is essentially flexible, allowing the researcher to be open about those inevitable methodological decisions that involve an interpretation of the data before the analysis ever begins. In particular, the new-rhetorical approach will allow me to observe the following: 1. What happens when the action of a patriarchal genre is inadequate for a new task? 2. What strategic changes occur when feminists adopt the utopian genre? 3. What is the shared symbolic action of feminist utopias? I will also identify internal features of substance, thus establishing those areas in which genre standardizes its narratives. Various aspects of text and context are integrated into an explanation of the symbolic social action of the genre. Addressing the assertions that feminist utopia transgresses the patriarchal utopian chronotope and creates a new conceptual space from which to reapproach the world in a nondualistic way, I will examine the ways in which the chronotope of feminist utopia offers possibilities for disrupting patriarchal certainty and truth and exploring openness and multiplicity. In particular, I will examine the following aspects of its symbolic action: • • • • • •

its transgression of social codes and truth-conditional notions of reality; its disruption of dominant genre canons; its changing of patriarchal tropes; its experimentation with the narrative form; the verbal action of feminist utopian narratives; discursive means by which it is achieved.

Thirdly, I will examine feminist utopia as an example of genre transformation triggered by a changed situation. Here, I intend to clarify what happens when the action of a patriarchal genre is inadequate for a new task and examine those strategic changes that occur when feminists adopt the utopian genre. Applying the new-rhetorical approach, I am treating feminist utopia as the site of gendered opposition and resistance to patriarchy that explores new possibilities for human agency. Treating the antecedent genre as a transhistorical form, feminism overcomes its patriarchal limitations and revives it through feminist individuation. The new utopian genre is contextspecific, contemporaneous with the second-wave feminist movement and made possible by it. It rejects utopian blueprints because those blueprints maintain hierarchies of social and cultural

INTRODUCTION

19

patriarchy. It displays a dialogic and intertextual relationship with feminist rhetoric of the 1970s, articulating the feminist message and vocalizing the concerns of the feminist discourse community. Because it is made possible by the discourse community, it treats audience as consubstantial and designs a specific narrator-reader interaction. The feminist genre emerges in response to the negative representation of women in the patriarchal genre (as invisible, objectified, nonimportant, or nonexistent), and is, therefore, critical of the patriarchal social order. It provokes social transformation by offering possibilities for individual and social change. Suggesting divergent options for the way out, feminist utopias promote the feminist message that biology is not (necessarily) destiny; not, at least, in social and political terms. My primary foci include the application of the principles of the new rhetoric of genre toward the study of a feminist genre and its interventions into the patriarchal genres. My secondary foci are derived from the primary foci; in particular, they involve rhetorical analyses of several feminist utopias. I will start with a survey and assessment of existing approaches to utopian theory and move towards examining feminist utopian discourse, its relation to the politics of resistance, and its strategic symbolic action. Thematically, my analysis will include the discussion of feminist utopian subversions of the concepts of power, subjectivity, gender, sexuality, womanhood. I will further move to the analysis of discursive means that allow for the utopian transgression. I will later explore the estranged form of feminist utopian narratives and inquire why feminist utopianism is not marked with closure. This theoretical discussion will be grounded in close readings of two feminist utopias: Dorothy Bryant’s The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You (1971) and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1974). This study intersects several areas of knowledge: genre studies, utopian studies, feminist theory. Its implications stem from its attempts to outline feminist interventions into patriarchal utopian genres and to establish utopia’s contributions to feminist goals. More importantly, while applying an interdisciplinary approach to the genre of feminist utopia, I also aim to reexamine, clarify and add to the recent propositions of new-rhetorical theories of genre. Chapter one, “Utopia and Utopianism,” explores the terministic screen of utopian studies. It discusses the utopian impulse, the interaction of utopia and ideology, and utopia as a literary genre. Starting with Thomas More’s interpretation of the term utopia, the discussion moves through systematic attempts to problematize its meaning towards a broader understanding of utopian impulse and a definition of utopianism as a form of social dreaming. It rests on the assumptions developed in the seminal work of Ernst Bloch (1986). The future, argues Bloch, constitutes a realm of possibility—real possibility, rather than merely formal possibility. Although not all real possibilities will, in fact, be realized, these possible futures must be seen as a part of reality.

20 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

Bloch further argues that utopia reaches toward the future and anticipates it; in so doing, it helps to affect the future. Human agency plays a central role in choosing which possible future may become actual: “the hinge in human history is its producer” (Bloch 1:249). In its concern with the definition of utopia and its relationship to perfection, the discussion in the chapter takes up the ideas of prominent commentators in the area of utopian studies. In chapter two, “Utopianism and Feminism,” I discuss major feminist propositions put forth in the 1970s. I touch upon psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Helene Cixous. I also examine the issues of sexism in patriarchal utopia that promoted the need to develop a special mode of writing—a parole feministe (Gershuny 189) to articulate the new understanding of gender, subjectivity and sexuality. Helene Cixous (1986) formulated this need in France and, in the Unites States, Audre Lorde12 articulated it in her call to action: “one can’t break the master’s house with the master’s tools.” When patriarchal meanings became suspect, there was a need to conceptualize and articulate new meanings. Deconstructing dichotomy and dualism, introducing plurality, open-endedness and evolution, feminist critics offered the necessary tools for producing new meanings; one of them was fiction theory that originated in the Canadian feminist discourse community. Feminist utopia is one of the genres reclaimed and reinvented in this meaningreconstructing process. At the end of the chapter, I discuss critical discourse on feminist utopia in terms of its meta-genre, or the ideological and methodological atmospheres around feminist utopia that influenced the genre’s selection of certain ideas and relationships. From the content-based definitions developed by Joanna Russ, Sally Gearhart and others, I move to function-based analyses of Carol Pearson and Tom Moylan, and then to the more recent approaches developed by Lucy Sargisson and other commentators. Here, I identify feminist utopia as a genre and advocate the need to apply new-rhetorical theories to its analysis. Chapter three, “Dorothy Bryant: Saving the Human Race,” describes Bryant’s novel The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You (originally published in 1971 as The Comforter). Here, I discuss Bryant’s interventions into the patri archal genre, her transformation of the folkloric and idyllic chronotopes, and her understanding of language and its socio-symbolic action. I start my analysis with Bryant’s utopia for a number of reasons. For one thing, it is more readily identifiable as spiritual and environmentally minded than feminist. The circumstance that intrigues me here is that even now radical feminists have a problem identifying her narrative as a feminist utopia because it does not portray a strong female protagonist, objects to rage or self-defense, and downplays the issues of political activism and separatism. I argue that the novel’s feminist message and its symbolic action are more elaborate rather than blatantly radical. The first section, “The Real World,” introduces the male protagonist of The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You. After killing his girlfriend and getting into a car

INTRODUCTION

21

accident, this misogynist winds up in Ata, an island where people live in an egalitarian fashion and dedicate themselves to discovering the truth through their dreams. In this chapter, I argue that Bryant continuously and deliberately evokes a sense of dreamtime that can be read through the conditional mode. Her utopian vision vocalizes the realm of the Symbolic by merging dream with reality on a number of levels: those of language, communication, mythology, culture, which are discussed in the following sections of the chapter. The Atan culture is not an inscribed text, it defies writing or other graphic representation because they “freeze” and reify language and culture. Neither is there any permanence in the complex and shifting mythology of Ata. Considered in such a way, the dreamtime of the conditional mode is not a mere escapism, but rather, it has a transformative function, motivating the protagonist to undergo a metamorphosis which can be read as a paradigm shift in his sexist consciousness. Chapter four, “Joanna Russ: New Meaning for Old Concepts,” discusses Joanna Russ’s novel The Female Man (written in 1969 and published in 1975). The novel’s influence and popularity makes it significant as an instance of the feminist utopian genre that creates new meanings by deconstructing old meanings through manipulation of the audience’s perception of the patriarchal social order. An important figure in feminist utopian fiction,13 Russ is notable both for the strong feminist message and stylistic innovations of her narrative. This simultaneously hilarious and angry novel employs the traditional utopian premise of voyages to alternative worlds. However, Russ introduces an interesting new development: her four agents/protagonists share identical genes, but, due to the differences in the socio-political context of their respective situations, they have developed four very different subjectivities. Jeannine, who lives in an economically depressed United States, is the most oppressed and underprivileged patriarchal woman. Joanna comes from a world familiar to the novel’s readers—America of the 1970s, with the second-wave feminism on the move. Having more choices than Jeannine, Joanna is still expected to function as a man-identified woman. She longs to express her true subjectivity: her attempt to become a Female Man is most pronounced in the novel. The utopian visitor Janet represents the ideal person who grew up with no gender-based constraints on her life and thus developed her human potential to the full. She hails from the utopian Whileaway, a world in which all the men were killed off centuries ago in a plague (or, in a different version of the story, in a war). Joanna wistfully calls Janet a woman “whom we don’t believe in and whom we deride but who is in secret our savior from utter despair” (Russ Female Man 212–213). Jael, the fourth protagonist, brings the other agents together in her world, a near future in which men and women wage a permanent cold war. Jael’s experience of being a woman is much like Joanna’s, but her response to patriarchy is terror and violence. The chapter discusses the novel through the lens of fiction theory. Here, I focus on calculated ambiguity, reconstructions of female subjectivity, and the interaction of multiple agents with the same genetic make-up.

22 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

In the conclusion, “Utopian Genre as Feminist Strategy,” I discuss the findings and implications of this project, focusing on the chronotope of feminist utopia. Here, I analyze the feminist genre in terms of its interaction with other genres, its remetaphorization, and transformation of the patriarchal concepts man and woman. When describing the new feminist utopianism, recent commentaries (Barr 1993, Moylan 1990, Sargisson 1996) point out that it forces “the field of political theory onto the new ground: utopian thought journeys into uncharted and unfamiliar territory, and creates spaces in which visions of the good can be imagined” (Sargisson 5). Following feminist appeals to appropriate “new power, language, and meaning” (Kristeva “Women and Power” 449) and to write “the true texts of women—female-sexed texts” (Cixous “The Laugh of the Medusa” 335), feminist utopia moves beyond the “status quo” of patriarchal utopia “which discusses the existing oppressive situation and the suffering of a female protagonist, but provides no explicit solution other than to live in the system as it is, to go mad, or to die” (Hacker 68). Developing the potential of fiction theory to confront and resist the patriarchal genre’s “rules of play,” to expose the arbitrariness of binary oppositions and disrupt mainstream conceptions of narrative and reality, feminist utopia creates open-ended possibilities for imagining change. In the mind of the reader, feminist utopia projects a multitude of ideas about the ways in which we can make the present world better for everyone, and not for women only.

CHAPTER ONE Utopia and Utopianism

Our reality is essentially unfinished, and utopian dreaming is important precisely because it describes a possible future (or a range of possible futures) located within real life. Both ideology and utopia are consigned to a symbolic realm of ideas which is outside this reality and can be contrasted with it. In this chapter, I will discuss Ernst Bloch’s and Karl Mannheim’s insights on the relationship of utopia and ideology. A diachronic look at the efforts to define utopia reveals some interesting dialectics: in order to demonstrate one or more utopian traditions, scholars have to define utopia, but that definition itself emerges from existing traditions. As Lyman Tower Sargent argues in “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited” (1994), the basic utopia, eutopia, dystopia lexicon must be complicated to express the range of materials that authors have recently created, though his criterion in all cases is the existence of at least one work that fits into a single category. In particular, he challenges anti-utopia and dystopia, two commonly used terms: “Anti-utopia is in common use as a substitute for dystopia, but as such it is often inaccurate, and it is useful to have a term to describe those works that use the utopian form to attack either utopias in general or a specific utopia” (“Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited” 30–37)). At the same time, he concludes, recognizing changes in the utopian traditions, we need to realize that those traditions still exist. The task of defining utopia is problematic due to the evolution of utopian traditions, that is, in turn, caused by real-life social developments. There is now a consensus in the critical discourse that the traditional utopian emphasis on perfection is outdated; most commentators argue that adhering to this characteristic of utopia easily leads to misrepresentation of the continuous evolution and dynamic nature of utopianism as a “living dream of poets.” I find that this patriarchal approach to utopia cannot be applied to the analysis of feminist utopia because it is incomplete in two important ways: a) it fails to capture the richness and diversity of utopian thought; b) it creates a view of utopia which sees it as closing debate, ending progress, and providing ideal conditions for stagnation and decay. Needing to redefine utopia, I will explore Lyman Tower Sargent’s seminal index of utopias, grounding my approach in it. I will further examine the concept

24 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

of the utopian chronotope, the futility of blueprints, and the emphasis on ideology in utopian fiction. UTOPIA AND IDEOLOGY Without the Utopias of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who traced the lines of the first city…. Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future. (Anatole France, cited in Mumford 22) The above comment of Anatole France implies that the common-sense meaning of the term utopia is twofold: first, it refers to the ultimate human dream of perfection in an imaginary land; second, it is directly connected to progress because it outlines rational efforts to remake human nature, environment and institutions, and to enrich the possibilities of communal life. Since the time when More spun on eutopia or “good place,” commentators have added dystopia or “bad place” and anti-utopia or “not a good place.” Therefore, the imaginary utopian place must be recognizably good or bad for the readers. To enrich and challenge the common-sense understanding of utopia, researchers have done a lot of spinning around these three terms, one of the latest additions being as unusual as uchronia or “not when” (Sargent “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited” 1–2). Moreover, we should also remember that utopias evolve diachronically: most sixteenth-century eutopias would horrify today’s readership even though the authors’ intentions were progressive for that time. On the other hand, most twentiethcentury eutopias would be considered dystopias by sixteenth-century readers; many of them would likely be burnt as “the works of the devil.” In her influential book “The Concept of Utopia” (1990) and in her recent paper “Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete Utopia” (1997), Ruth Levitas provides an account of a more recent and complete discussion of utopianism while providing extensive comments on the past definitions and the current situation in utopian scholarship. She starts with the seminal work of Ernst Bloch which has been widely incorporated into utopian studies as a justification and celebration of utopianism. Bloch’s work fulfilled the need to defend utopia against those who regard it as trivial or dangerous (Levitas “Educated Hope” 65). In his encyclopedic study, The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch richly details the presence of a utopian impulse which he understands as “the human capacity to fantasize beyond our experience and the ability to rearrange the world around us” (Bloch 1:3). It is fundamental to Bloch’s argument that reality does not consist only of what is, but includes what is becoming or might become. The material world is essentially unfinished and in a state of process—a process

UTOPIA AND UTOPIANISM

25

whose direction and outcome are not predetermined. Levitas agrees that the utopian impulse is a crucially important human activity which is conditioned by “the unfinished-ness of the material world” (66). It is true, then, that utopia is the expression of hope, but that hope is to be understood “not…only as emotion… but more essentially as a directing act of a cognitive kind” (Bloch 1:12). Bloch makes an important distinction between abstract and concrete utopia. This distinction is fundamental to the relationship between utopia and any political orientation involving a commitment to social transformation (Levitas “Educated Hope” 65). Without this distinction, utopians can only visualize alternative worlds; the point of political activism, however, is to create one. For Bloch, then, abstract utopia is fantastic and compensatory: yes, it is wishful thinking, but the wish is not accompanied by the will to change anything. Concrete utopia embodies what Bloch identifies as an essential utopian function, that of simultaneously anticipating and affecting the future. While abstract utopia may express desire, only concrete utopia carries hope (Levitas “Educated Hope” 67). Concrete utopia, understood both as content and function, is within the real, but relates to what Bloch describes as Front, or Novum, that part of reality which is coming into being on the horizon of the real. This particular location (within, but on the edge of the real) means that utopia is transcendent; yet, it is “transcendent without transcendence” (Bloch 1:146). Sheila Delany (1983) divides utopia into two categories: the programmatic and the ideological. The former stresses a comprehensive social critique and serious social planning; it attempts to demonstrate what should change and what might realistically replace present arrangements; and it also tends to propose social reforms that give scope to human variability. According to Delany, the ideological utopia tends to minimize social criticism or confine it to a few key areas of social concern, to simplify both social criticism and social planning in accordance with a specific, schematic ideology, and to offer a static social structure that emphasizes uniformity rather than variety (157–160). In this study, I will follow the distinction proposed by Bloch, treating feminist utopias as concrete utopias that carry hope and simultaneously anticipate and affect the future. Bloch’s distinction between abstract and concrete utopia can be clarified by comparing it to Karl Mannheim’s understanding of ideology and utopia (one of the chapters in which Bloch discusses the issue is entitled “The Encounter of the Utopian Function with Ideology”). Mannheim views both ideology and utopia as categories of ideas incongruous with reality. However, utopias are oriented to the future and represent those ideas that transform reality in their own image, whereas ideologies are oriented to the past and serve to legitimate the status quo. Consequently, not all forms of wishful thinking are categorized as utopias. Mannheim agrees that “wishful thinking has always figured in human affairs” (184). For Mannheim, those forms of wishful thinking which do not serve to affect the future are not utopias at all. For Bloch, they are utopias, but largely comprise abstract utopias.

26 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

Both Bloch and Mannheim point out that their distinctions are analytical and their categories are ideal types: concrete utopia contains abstract elements, ideology may contain utopian elements, and utopia may contain elements of ideology. Whereas concrete utopia, like Mannheim’s utopia, is anticipatory, transformative and linked to the future, abstract utopia (while compensatory) is not necessarily linked to the past in the sense of sustaining its social forms (although it does draw upon memory rather than imagination in the construction of its images). Mannheim’s ideology is anti-utopian in function; Bloch’s abstract utopia is not. Another fundamental difference is in the relationship between utopia and reality. Mannheim sees reality as given, and, moreover, regards the question of what is real as unproblematic. Both ideology and utopia are consigned to a symbolic realm of ideas that lies outside of this reality and can be contrasted with it. For Bloch, reality is essentially unfinished, and concrete utopia is important precisely because it describes a possible future (or a range of possible futures) located within the real. It is not only subjectively anticipated in utopian thinking (as a product of the “not yet conscious”), but treats objective reality as the “not yet become” or as the real-possible future, whether or not in any particular case it becomes actual reality. Whereas Mannheim can only retrospectively define ideas as utopian, since they qualify only if they succeed in realizing themselves, Bloch’s open future dispenses with the criterion of success in distinguishing between abstract and concrete utopia. Mannheim fears utopia as irrational and potentially revolutionary while Bloch welcomes the “red dream” and the revolution. UTOPIA AS LITERARY GENRE As a literary genre, utopia is not only a subset of utopianism, but has a “composite” structure: it resembles a novel yet usually lacks developed plot and character; it resembles a political tract yet generally lacks the close argumentation or the explicit agitational point. In his prefatory note to A Modern Utopia (1905), H.G.Wells was “vacillating over the scheme of this book” and asking himself whether his utopia was “an argumentative essay, a discussion novel or a ‘hard narrative.’” Wells concludes that utopia is “a sort of shot-silk texture between philosophical discussion on the one hand and imaginative narrative on the other” or “a hybrid of the two” (Delany 157). An important generic characteristic of utopia is its chronotope—an imaginary location in time and space related to a representation of a certain set of values of the utopian community. In his essay “Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel” (1981), Bakhtin observes that every genre has “a certain chronotope which expresses space/time relations that reflect certain social beliefs regarding the placement and actions of human individuals in this particular space and time” (Bakhtin “Forms of Time” 233). Bakhtin understands chronotope as a formally constitutive category of literature; he ventures to say that “it is precisely the

UTOPIA AND UTOPIANISM

27

chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions, for in literature the primary category of the chronotope is time” (85). The chronotope as a formally constitutive category determines to a significant degree the image of the individual in literature. From this, Bakhtin infers that the image of the individual (protagonist) is always intrinsically chronotopic. Projecting Bakhtin’s concept on the utopian genre, we can define the utopian chronotope as a means for uncovering social contradictions that employs a certain way of expressing time’s fullness: the way of utopian inversion. Utopian thinking locates such categories as purpose, ideal, justice, perfection, the harmonious condition of the individual and society in the utopian space and time. Discussing the concept of the Golden Age, Bakhtin points out that “this particular ‘trans-positioning,’ this ‘inversion’ of time is typical of mythological and artistic modes of thought in various areas of human development; it is also characterized by a special concept of time” (Bakhtin’s emphasis, 147). In utopia, the world of the future (or the alternative present) is not homogeneous with the real-life present and the past, it is somewhat empty and fragmented, with just enough detail to support its ideological plane. The primary characteristic of the utopian chronotope is its ambiguity or the conditional mode of the narration: utopia is often presented as a dream, a vision, an illusion. Kenneth Burke suggests that in order to understand how reality is apprehended “what we want is not terms that avoid ambiguity, but terms that clearly reveal the strategic spots at which ambiguities necessarily arise” (Burke’s emphasis, Grammar xviii). Therefore, ambiguity becomes a resource for multiple utopian visions in alternative worlds that are governed by laws different from the real-world laws. Tzvetan Todorov defines the particular kind of ambiguity in utopia as “problematic in terms of its existence”: The ambiguity is sustained to the very end of the adventure: reality or dream? Truth or illusion?… The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination—and laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality—but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us. (Footnote 24, quoted in Delany 160–161) The next essential characteristic is the prominence of the ideological difference: utopia describes an imaginary “community” or “society” with a distinctively differing ideology; in this way, ideology is rendered (more or less) discursively visible. This makes utopia social and ideological in nature: the term generally refers to works which describe an imaginary society in some detail. Some centuries stressed certain aspects of societal life and neglected others, and some authors are concerned with certain parts of society more than others. But, as researchers point out, it must be a society—a condition in which humans (or utopian people) express themselves in a variety of ways. For example, Darko Suvin defines utopia as:

28 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

the verbal construction of a particular quasi-human community where socio-political institutions, norms and individual relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle than in the author’s community, this construction being based on estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis. (132) Lyman Tower Sargent argues that Darko Suvin misses an important point found in J. Max Patrick, who says “a Utopia should describe in a variety of aspects and with some consistency an imaginary state or society” (293). On the other hand, Suvin’s definition is important in emphasizing that most utopias are based on “an alternative historical hypothesis” or, in other words, an explanation of how the better society came into being. Utopias are often criticized for simply describing the society without indicating how that society was or could be achieved. While many utopias skip such explanations altogether, they are, as Suvin notes, frequently there. A traditional characteristic of utopia that is currently being debated is whether it should strive to provide a blueprint for a perfect society. Many classic utopias are characterized as finite or static, or representing/ desiring perfection. These are the fundamental characteristics of any encyclopedia or dictionary definition,1 and, as such, they form the pivotal terms of the standard view of utopia. Some authors insist that the utopian society must be perfect and therefore unrealizable. One goes so far as to say that “Utopia is a place where everybody lives happily ever after,” which obviously does not include dystopias and critical utopias. People do not “live happily ever after” even in More’s Utopia. As Sargent (1975) demonstrated, perfection has never been a characteristic of utopian fiction, but the misuse of the word perfect persists (Cf. Sargent, “A Note”). Sargent defines the broad, general phenomenon of utopianism as social dreaming: “the dreams and nightmares that concern the ways in which groups of people arrange their lives and which usually envision a radically different society than the one in which the dreamers live. But not all are radical, for some people at any time dream of something basically familiar” (Sargent “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited” 3). Sargent further maintains that utopianism has been expressed in three different forms, each with many variants—utopian literature, which includes two fundamental traditions (which he calls body utopias or utopias of sensual gratification, and city utopias or utopias of human contrivance); communitarianism; and utopian social theory. He makes an important point when he argues that it is essential for commentators to keep these forms distinct and not deny the existence of any of the three. In his more recent work, Lyman Tower Sargent further elaborates the term “utopia” as an umbrella term to update his basic definitions. He discusses the dialectics of the efforts to define utopia and acknowledge its traditions: in order to demonstrate that there is one or more utopian traditions, we have to define utopia, but that definition emerges from the existing traditions. Sargent reflects briefly on the nature of definitions, arguing against the very possibility of

UTOPIA AND UTOPIANISM

29

defining since the act of defining depends on where we stand and who we are. At the same time, says Sargent, we constantly make distinctions and must do so to have any sort of control over the flow of information and knowledge that passes through us each day. These distinctions are the root of definition. It is necessary to be able to say that something is utopia or not-utopia, intentional community or not-intentional community. At the same time, it is necessary to recognize that definitions are intellectual constructs that attempt to provide a useful tool to deal with the bulk of a phenomenon. Definitions are rarely or ever useful at the extremes, and the boundaries established by definitions are both moveable and porous or permeable. However, for certain purposes (e.g., bibliography) boundaries are necessary (Sargent “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited” 1–2). Sargent points out that we are discussing living traditions which are always in process, only fixable at a moment in time and place. Their evolution further problematizes the task of defining utopia. According to Sargent, therefore, utopia is the general umbrella-term that can be further subdivided into positive utopias (or eutopias) and negative utopias (dystopias and anti-utopias). There is a lot of similarity in Sargent’s definition of dystopia and anti-utopia. His only distinction is that anti-utopia is concerned with criticism of the contemporary society, while dystopia portrays a society that is considerably worse that the reader’s, with the negative tendencies of the contemporary society taken to their logical end. Sargent’s comprehensive index of utopian terms is now widely used in the critical discourse (it is presented in table 1 below). Analyzing Sargent’s index, Nan Bowman Albinski (1988) points out that eutopia represents a “good” place and involves a common belief in the malleability of human nature. She finds that eutopia is often set in the future but always directly connected to the imperfect present. Dystopia evinces a shared belief in the flexibility of human nature but shows it being manipulated for the worse, often in the name of eutopia. Dystopia may be, but is not necessarily, antiutopian. An explicitly anti-utopian work is focused on satire, but utopian satire is not always directed against utopia as such. The anti-utopia is, according to Albinski, unique in its approach towards human nature, which is presented as fixed and immutable. Albinski’s analysis is in terms of content and form, and she manages to avoid problems of overgeneralization by keeping the focus of her work context-specific. With regard to form she finds that the British and American eutopias of the 1960s and 1970s show declining realism and a shift towards allegory and ambiguity, while clear-cut images are the property of the modern dystopia. Why did the feminists turn to the utopian and not to the dystopian genre? Evidently, in the 1960s-1970s there was a certain amount of optimism within the feminist discourse community that could be better expressed in social dreaming, and not social criticism. Booker argues that, due to its critical potential, dystopian fiction would seem to be a more natural genre for feminist writers, despite the fact that their works have more typically been associated with utopian fiction. He points out that mainstream dystopia focuses on sexuality and gender

30 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

Table 1. Index of Utopian Terms

(Source: Lyman Tower Sargent, “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” 9).

relations only as elements of the central conflict between individual desire and societal expectations. For example, in Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s The Brave New World, and Orwell’s 1984, the governments of dystopian societies focus on sexuality only because it is crucial for their efforts at social control (Booker 337). This focus stems from a phallocentric perception that sexuality is a potential locus of powerful subversive energies. On the other hand, despite a consistent focus on sexuality, most patriarchal dystopias do not attempt to challenge conventional gender roles. Raffaella Baccollini suggests that we should reconsider dystopia in the same way that we have been forced to reconsider eutopia as a result of femi nist criticism. Discussing patriarchal genres, she notes that “genres are cultural

UTOPIA AND UTOPIANISM

31

constructions; implied in the notion of genre and of boundaries lies a binary opposition between what is “normal” and what is “deviant”—a notion that feminist criticism has attempted to deconstruct since this difference consigns feminine practice to inferiority” (quoted in Sargent “Utopia: The Problem of Definition” 139). She argues that feminist writers have used various strategies to undermine the dominance of patriarchal genre. Female protagonists are a central strategy but so are the frequent use of irony, detachment, and humor. As Baccolini points out: “Laughing at the collapse of the Western world and its heritage can also be seen as a sign of a lack of nostalgia for the ‘golden past’ of patriarchy” (139). More recently, commentators (Levitas 1990, Sargisson 1996) have repeatedly rejected content-based definitions of utopia as “evaluative and normative, specifying what the good society would be, rather than reflecting on how it may be differently perceived” (Levitas The Concept of Utopia 4). Instead of relying upon function, form or content, Levitas proposes that utopia be considered in broad terms as the expression of the desire for a better way of life. However, her definition is inefficient because it is too broad and may be applied to many other genres. Sargisson (1996) supports the idea that the nature of the desire expressed in feminist utopias is of some defining value in distinguishing the feminist from the mainstream utopia: “Whereas utopianism per se cannot be defined with regards to function, form or content alone, these aspects do play a role in identifying specifically feminist utopias” (20). Importantly, Sargisson also finds that “analyses in these terms produce warped visions of feminism” (34). She concludes that the content-based approach to utopianism is unsatisfactory because it leads to misrepresentative (hence unnecessarily exclusive) ideas about the content of utopian thought. Not all utopias are the same, and so this approach simply does not work in a definitional sense. It can, perhaps, be employed to enable separation of one “type” of utopian thought (such as feminist) from others. Obvious flaws in this approach lie in the tendency to (mis)represent (and hence erect) exclusive understandings of feminism (Sargisson 37). I agree with Sargisson that previous formulaic attempts to define feminist utopia are problematic because they invoke inappropriate closures. The performative acts of these approaches are essentially and eternally exclusive ones (Sargisson 36); they are incomplete and inadequate because they restrict discussions unnecessarily, and because they can have the insidious functions of disciplinary or cultural imperialism. Therefore, definitions merely in terms of content cannot be universally applied and are inadequate. Normative definitions may enable us to distinguish feminist utopia from other types, but not to define utopianism or feminism. Tom Moylan in Demand the Impossible (1986) proposes an interesting approach to utopianism. His book is of considerable value for utopian studies. Though his position is not without problems, Moylan is right in viewing utopian thought as representative not only of the unfinished-ness of the world, but as

32 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

“rooted in the unfulfilled needs and wants of specific classes, groups, and individuals in their unique historical contexts” (Moylan 1). Therefore, Moylan broadens the narrow understanding of utopia by including not only content and form, but function, the last one being the element to which he pays the most attention. The function of utopia is to provide the opposition to what Moylan terms “the affirmative culture”: “Utopia negates the contradictions of a social system by forging visions of what is not yet realized either in theory or practice. In generating such figures of hope, utopia contributes to the open space of opposition” (1–2). Moylan’s position here is consubstantial with the argument about the dominant “normal” discourse and the “abnormal” revolutionary discourse of the counterculture that I discussed in the Introduction. The influences of Bloch and, to a lesser extent, Mannheim upon Moylan’s thinking are apparent, yet the central hypothesis of his book Demand the Impossible is distinct from that of any other utopian scholar. Moylan, wishing to see the apparent uniformity and universality of twentiethcentury capitalism shaken, delights in the new multiplicity of what he names the “critical utopias” of the 1970s. For Moylan, utopia is critical in two senses:” ‘Critical’ in the Enlightenment sense of critique—that is expressions of oppositional thought, unveiling, debunking, of both the genre itself and the historical situation, as well as ‘critical’ in the nuclear sense of the critical mass required to make the necessary explosive reaction” (Moylan 10). It is ironic that, while highlighting multiplicity in feminist utopia, Moylan promotes dichotomy in his own theory; as Lyman Tower Sargent (1994) points out, this dichotomy is a distinctive flaw of his approach. In order to critique contemporary society, critical utopia must, according to Moylan, destroy, transform and revive the utopian tradition, which, in its present/ past state, is/was inadequate to the task of provoking social transformation. A fixed, finite and universal utopia of perfection cannot, says Moylan, adequately critique a fixed, finite and universal capitalist system. His own approach is premised on the argument that only an understanding of utopia that destroys old perceptions of the genre can transform them into something new and thus revive utopianism. Only this new utopianism can adequately reflect the concerns, needs and wants of contemporary oppositional forces. Critical utopia does not blueprint; in fact, social change in process is privileged in the alternative societies it presents. In this way, the term “critical utopia” describes that growing category of utopias that present a good place with problems that reflect critically on the utopian genre itself, retaining both difference and imperfection. Moylan’s theory not only conceptualizes utopia, but also (and importantly) approaches utopianism from a fresh angle. Moylan writes: A central concern in the critical utopia is the awareness of the limitations of the utopian tradition, so that these texts reject utopia as a blueprint while preserving it as a dream. Furthermore, the novels dwell on the conflict between the original world and the utopian society opposed to it so

UTOPIA AND UTOPIANISM

33

that the process of social change is more directly articulated. Finally, the novels focus on the continuing presence of difference and imperfection within the utopian society itself and thus render more recognizable and dynamic alternatives. (10–11) Critical utopia clearly fits the works Tom Moylan was discussing when he invented the term in Demand the Impossible (1986). Moylan explains that critical opposition means opposing the existing space of opposition; its function is not to provide an alternative but to deny that existing options are the only ones. Opposition thus understood is a bigger concept than the either/or position; it is comprised of multiple critiques of a(n) (omni)present structure of exploitation, hierarchy and alienation. This leaves Moylan’s concept in a position of considerable strength with regard to the transgressive feminist utopianism (55). However, Lyman Tower Sargent (1994) challenges Moylan’s approach because he is not convinced that critical utopias are now as important as they were when Moylan initially characterized them. Therefore, as Sargent points out, Moylan’s position is historically contingent. He further questions Moylan’s theory by asking if a “critical dystopia” is plausible at all or whether it is simply an oxymoron because all dystopias are “critical” in Moylan’s sense. As Sargent suggests, “critical utopias” in Moylan’s definition are still being written, and we need to think more seriously about the possibility of a “critical dystopia” and keep the concept even though it needs to be rethought, especially if “critical” implies this particular kind of genre awareness. There is, then, a normative prescription in Moylan’s approach to utopia which is problematic and can cause dissent. As Giltrow (2002) remarks, “whereas comings and goings of prescriptions can leave a political record of ideas about writing, so can proscriptions leave a lively record of the not-said” (200). However, his work is important because he is one of those scholars who explain why the main body of contemporary utopian fiction looks so different from what is often assumed to be the standard utopian text (or the utopia of perfection): “There can be no Utopia, but there can be utopian expressions that constantly shatter the present achievements and compromises of society and point to that which is not yet experienced in the human project of fulfillment and creation” (Moylan 28). Utopian thought not only points to the not-yet-become, but opens receptivity to new and radically different, “other” ways of being and thinking. The ultimate function of utopianism is, for Moylan, the development of an open consciousness of the present: “It can only offer itself as an activity which opens human imagination beyond present limits” (40). Most theories discussed above prove that one-dimensional analyses are inadequate because attempts to capture utopia within the bounds of one discipline or one ideology simply no longer work. Such approaches are exclusive because dogmatic generalizations are limiting the activity of the critical discourse. Only a nonformalized new-rhetorical approach can do justice to the complexity and diversity of feminist utopia. Whereas no single existing theory is

34 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

adequate to define it, individual theories can be consulted to provide a larger perspective and to extract analytic ways of reading that can contribute to a better understanding of the genre. At this point, I would like to support the notion of the dual utopian/ dystopian action (Booker 343) or the double (utopian and dystopian) center of gravity in feminist utopias which contain both “the negative and positive poles of exposure and advocacy, the contrary (though complementary) impulses of destruction and construction, or social criticism and social planning” (Delany 158). In the next chapter, I will attempt to prove that, whereas feminist writers adopt the utopian genre in terms of its social dreaming and criticism of the existing social order, they drastically change its chronotope while attempting to represent the new feminist system of values. Feminist authors consider utopia especially empowering for their exploration of an alternative socio-symbolic order because utopia is more creative than critical in as much as it provides for “[an] idea to become flesh, abstraction to become concrete, imaginative extrapolation to become aesthetic reality” (Annas 145). The very success of the feminist intervention in the patriarchal utopian genre becomes possible because of a strong feminist desire for social dreaming. The new utopian genre has a dialogic and intertextual relationship with the feminist rhetoric of the 1970s, articulating its revolutionary message and vocalizing the concerns of the feminist discourse community of the time.

CHAPTER TWO Utopianism and Feminism

Feminism has foregrounded issues of gender difference and male dominance in society; it has prompted a concern with putting women ‘on the map’ and a critical reappraisal of pre- and non-feminist research. (Coates 1–2) Despite its frequent lip service to gender equality, patriarchal utopia traditionally described a utopian society with conventional gender stereotypes in place because patriarchal utopian writers did not attempt to go beyond the phallocratic paradigm. In this chapter, I will start by taking a closer look at the gender prejudice ingrained in patriarchal utopian discourse. I will argue that this gender bias is central for the balance of power relations within the patriarchal social order. In the first section, “Scrapping False Dichotomies,” I will show that the feminist discourse differs significantly from the patriarchal discourse because it does not come from the dominating socio-symbolic order, from the hegemony. The feminist discourse reveals the limits of patriarchal tolerance in authorizing feminist social action and calls for a radical revision of the patriarchal paradigm. It also provides the becoming female subject with a possibility for scrapping old dichotomies and constructing new meanings. I will further examine the propositions foregrounded by second-wave feminists, arguing that the emerging feminist consubstantiality constituted a major social development of the period between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. The new feminist community provided feminist writers with an audience that possessed “a shared body of experience and values” (Snitow 161), an audience with a collective memory. In the next section entitled “Genre Transformation,” I will discuss feminist utopia as a cultural, political, and rhetorical subject, as a genre embedded in a system of contexts that allowed for its emergence and evolution. I will argue that feminist utopia presents an example of genre transformation triggered by a changed rhetorical situation. When the action of a patriarchal genre becomes inadequate for a new task, feminists adopt the utopian genre and introduce strategic changes to articulate their socio-cultural reconstructions of subjectivity, femininity, desire, and difference. My analysis, therefore, will aim to outline feminist interventions into the patriarchal utopian genre and to establish utopia’s

36 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

contributions to feminist goals. It is true that feminist utopias borrow from the patriarchal utopia its generic potential “to posit an alternative world that allows for a radical shift in the narrative: options other than capitulation and defeat are made possible” (Moylan 61). However, the social action of the new genre goes beyond that because feminists need to challenge and transgress such patriarchal dichotomies as language and meaning, fiction and theory, action and passivity, form and substance, mind and body, reason and emotion. Therefore, feminism transforms the old genre by opening up new possibilities for human agency. In this way, feminist utopia becomes a site of gendered opposition and resistance to patriarchy. SCRAPPING FALSE DICHOTOMIES I’d like to start with a disclaimer: feminist critics are certainly not original in denying dichotomy. Burke, for example, views binary oppositions as “static, synchronic, ahistorical, antithetical to process” (Coe, “Burke’s Act”). As Richard Coe points out, when Burke “creates such a dichotomy, he heuristically seeks a third term to transform the dichotomy into a transcendent dialectic, “to watch for modes of catharsis or of transcendence that may offer a symbolic solution” (“Burke’s Act” and “Burke’s Words” 165–66). According to Burke, meaning is contextual; it can only be articulated through a system of beliefs and attitudes which functions to ground a meaning; that is, through the extrinsic “substance” that supports a meaning. Burke maintains that our social discourses are contextually based, and they become meaningful to us through extrinsic factors (that is, through the ways in which language functions to both unify and divide us). As Coe suggests, “rhetorical structures…are the social memory of standard responses to particular types of rhetorical situations” (Apology 19). This social, collective memory represents the conventionalization of discursive practices operating within discourse communities: a discourse community’s social memory serves to “invite” a discourse of a certain “type.” Burke points out that form implies a strategy of response, an “attitude”; therefore, as Coe argues, “form is cultural not neutral” (20). Coe thus reinforces Burke’s idea that literary forms have an a priori existence: “insofar as a form is socially shared, adopting the form involves adopting, at least to some extent, the community’s attitude, abiding by its expectations” (Coe Apology 19). Through binary oppositions, patriarchal expectations have normalized and stereotyped gender behavior into hierarchies of acceptability, associating the highest or most desirable attributes with masculinity. Thus, within the feminist discourse community, a new socially shared discourse was shaping up, with old patriarchal dichotomies being its first target. Many commentators now agree that Thomas More’s seminal text set the stage for maintaining the patriarchal status quo in the utopian world (Delany 158, Booker 337). Since then, patriarchal utopias have always established binary oppositions not only in the present world, but also in the future or “other” world

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

37

as well. Their blueprints of future societies remained closed, maintaining hierarchies of social and cultural patriarchy and prohibiting any challenges to gender roles (Sargisson 202). Working within phallocratic constraints, patriarchal utopian authors were conspicuous in their tendency to include only a minimal amount of social criticism in their work, or to limit it to only a few areas of concern. They created future worlds that were in agreement with a preconceived ideological focus that privileges conformity instead of diversity. Therefore, Sheila Delany places Thomas More in a group of utopian writers whom she labels as “ideological” (158). She argues that, in contrast to his belief that social and economic inequality is the source of the ills of contemporary society, More’s Raphael Hythloday described an ideal utopian society where equality was emphasized even to the point of suppressing individual liberty and imposing a potentially oppressive conformity. However, despite the demand for complete social homogeneity, More’s Utopia envisioned a strongly patriarchal society: its principal political unit was the family household ruled by the patriarch. Upon marriage women transferred to the household of their husband’s family, while men remained members of their own family for life. Within the household, the patriarchal hierarchy was cast in stone: “Wives are subject to their husbands, children to their parents, and generally the younger to their elders” (More 41). More’s insistence on female subservience in his otherwise “equal” society reveals his conformity to the existing patriarchal paradigm. At that time, male supremacy was such an obvious and apparently natural idea that it might have never occurred to Thomas More to include gender inequality among the other social hierarchies leveled in his society. Booker makes a strong case arguing that More’s inability to imagine a society with genuine gender equality “stands as a reminder of the profound embeddedness of gender prejudice in Western society” (338). Indeed, female subservience, incessant domestic labor, and total dependence on male members of the family was still the norm in the American household in the 1970s. In 1976, Phyllis Chesler and Emily Jane Goodman exposed the inevitable round-theclock unpaid domestic labor in their parody of a job advertisement for a wife: Help Wanted Requirements: Intelligence, good health, energy, patience, sociability Skills: at least 12 different occupations Hours: 99.6 p/week Salary: None Holidays: None (will be required to remain on stand-by 24 hours a day, 7 days a week) Opportunities for advancement: None (limited transferability of skills acquired on the job)

38 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

Job security: None (trend is towards more layoffs, particularly as employee approaches middle age. Severance pay will depend upon the discretion of the employer). Fringe benefits: Food, clothing and shelter generally provided, but any additional bonuses will depend on the financial standing and good nature of employer. No health, medical or accidental insurance; no social security or pension plan. (Quoted in Russ, What Are We Fighting For? 171–172) Women writers of the nineteenth century were well aware of the profound sexism of patriarchal utopia, responding to it with a counterdiscourse that went beyond the patriarchal paradigm. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Mary E. Bradley authored late nineteenth-century utopias with feminist affinities, and the early twentiethcentury work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) (Moving the Mountain, Herland, and With Her in Ourland) announced the beginning of a full-blown feminist utopian tradition. These “first-wave” feminists concerned themselves with analyzing such patriarchal institutions as family, motherhood, chastity, prostitution, birth control, and the double standards or morality. Though they did focus on the connection between the male sexuality and the subjugation of women, for the most part they did not explore the female sexuality in their analyses of woman’s social condition, except when it affected other institutions, such as motherhood (Shulman 22). Since then, feminist reasoning has revealed that scholarly comments on gender difference always reflected the ideas of their time. The feminist rhetorical situation underwent a dramatic change in the period of 1930s-1960s. By the 1960s, the first-wave feminism of the beginning of the century had long been in eclipse. Far from being viewed as political, gender relations and sexuality were considered mostly within a biological, psychological, personal, or religious perspective. The second-wave feminists argued that, historically, in the first half of the twentieth century patriarchal discourse attempted to justify a preconceived concept of female inferiority: while equality presupposes a standard to which one is equal, the implied standard has always been men. Feminists criticized Sigmund Freud and the other Great (white male) Thinkers for their accounts of “human experience” which habitually excluded or misinterpreted the experiences of women and other underprivileged and marginalized groups. When Alix Kates Shulman in “Sex and Power: Sexual Bases of Radical Feminism” (1980) identifies what triggered second-wave feminism, she mentions Simone de Beauvoir’s famous book, The Second Sex, which was published in France in 1949. De Beauvoir’s influential book reopened the subject of sex and power to feminist analysis. Her account of the cultural construction of woman as Other laid the foundations for much of secondwave feminist reasoning. According to de Beauvoir, one is not born, but rather becomes a woman; feminine is a societal construct that is intermediate between male and eunuch. Simone de Beauvoir argues that the category of the Other is

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

39

fundamental in the formation of all human subjectivity, since our sense of Self can be produced only in opposition to something which is not-self (Thornham 34). But men have claimed the category of Self or Subject for themselves, and relegated woman to the status of the eternal Other. The category “woman” has thus no substance, being merely a projection of male fantasies and fears. In the USA, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) heralded a second round of organized feminism. Calling for a drastic reshaping of the cultural image of femininity that will help women to reach maturity, identity, and completeness of self, Friedan became a key contributor to the emphasis on consciousness-raising with second-wave feminism (Thornham 35). A larger feminist context came about when the radical wing of second-wave feminism made subjectivity and sexuality a central part in the feminist accounts of patriarchy. Their publications identified patriarchy as malesupremacist culture. Ironically, even within the radical ranks of the New Left, women were subordinated and marginalized. This subordination angered second-wave feminists, “those mostly young women of the New Left whose discontent1 with their subordination by male radicals led them in the late sixties to form the women’s liberation movement (WLM to the FBI)” (Shulman 22–23). The new movement was based on the new consubstantiality2 that made feminist discourse both ideological and subject to ideology. As Shulman reports, in 1970 came Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectics of Sex, and the first of the large publishers’ anthologies of articles and pamphlets that had been circulated earlier in women’s liberation movement’s journals: Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood Is Powerful, Leslie Tanner’s Voices from Women’s Liberation, Sookie Stambler’s Women’s Liberation: A Blueprint for the Future, and, in 1971, Vivian Gornick andB. K. Moran’s Woman in Sexist Society. Their books were expressive of what Tom Moylan identifies as “the non-dogmatic, multitendency, feminist, ecological and libertarian oppositional consensus that developed in the United States in the 1970s” (60). Tom Moylan argues (201) that this consensus reflected the triple alliance of feminism, ecologism, and libertarian socialism because the multiplex libertarian discourse could not emerge within one paradigm. However, much as he wants to represent this development as a cooperative alliance, it can be argued that the socio-historic situation in the 1970s was not that simple because, according to the writings of prominent feminists of the time, sexism was prevalent in the New Left as well. Sara Evans provides a valuable account of the emergence of radical feminism from the civil rights movement and the New Left in Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (1979). She documents sexual insults and exploitation of women within the New Left and the persistent refusal of the male radicals to take the complaints of women seriously. Marge Piercy, who later became an outstanding utopian writer, provides in her 1970s essay “The Grand Coulie Dam” a first-hand account of the sexual resentments of New Left Women (Morgan 1970). As participants within various left-wing movements, women found, in Juliet Mitchell’s words, “the

40 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

attitude of the oppressor within the minds of the oppressed” (quoted in Thornham 30). In a speech given at the Free University in New York City in February 1968, Anne Koedt confirms that “movement women found themselves playing secondary roles on every level—be it in terms of leadership, or simply in terms of being listened to As these problems began being discussed, it became clear that what had at first been assumed to be a personal problem was in fact a social and political one.… And the deeper we analyzed the problem and realized that all women suffer from this kind of oppression, the more we realized that the problem was not just confined to movement women” (quoted in Thornham 30). Despite the media version of “the great sexual revolution of the 1960s,” and far from being freed by it, the young, dedicated women in the New Left expressed the feeling of being victimized by it. As Alix Kates Shulman points out, They complained that they were expected not only to type the speeches, stuff the envelopes, and prepare the food and coffee for the radical men they worked with, but to sleep with them besides, without making any demands in return. Their own feelings, their needs for affection, recognition, consideration, or commitment, did not count. If they did not comply, they were often made to feel like unattractive, unhip prudes who could really be replaced. Sexual favors were often the price of political favor. Naturally, these women resented being used sexually, as they resented performing political labors without appreciation, and resented being relegated to doing what they called movement’s ‘shitwork’—all by so-called radicals whose proclaimed purpose in life was to end oppression. And these women saw an intimate connection between the way men treated them in their organizations and the way they treated them sexually; they were two sides of a single demeaning attitude toward women—one that would not take them seriously. (23) The writings of second-wave feminists document their response to the socalled “sexual liberation.” Shulman, who was an active participant of these events, reports that in 1967 a handful of feminists began organizing for women’s liberation and analyzing every aspect of the relations between the sexes, including the sexual: Not that the subject of women’s sexuality was ignored before then. Sex had long been a ‘hot,’ salable subject. Men were studying it in laboratories, in books, in bedrooms, in offices; after several repressive decades, changes called the ‘sexual revolution’ and ‘sexual liberation’ were being widely discussed and promoted all through the sixties; skirts were up, prudery was down. (21) Shulman describes how in 1969 a coalition of feminist groups staged a sitin at the Ladies Home Journal office until they were granted twenty pages in which to

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

41

present feminist ideas to a vast female audience (27). Late in 1969, the first Congress to Unite Women was held in New York, attended by more than 500 women. That same year Barbara Seaman’s The Doctor’s Case against the Pill was published. Shulman goes on to detail a complete history of the publication of second-wave feminist books of the 1970s—one might speculate that, for the feminists in the 1980s, when her account was published, this publishing record was a significant landmark in itself. In this way, they were attempting to historicize the development of their movement. Radical feminist reasoning in the 1970s is both unique and motivated by the socio-political context. Applying the tools of analysis and organization that women learned in the civil rights movement and the New Left to their own situation, and drawing on the works of de Beauvoir, Friedan, Millett, and others, feminists developed a counterdiscourse that helped them understand the power relations between the sexes. Their discontent served as a basis for consubstantiality and identification, and as a catalyst for articulating the politics of resistance. Their social action was aimed at achieving the “ultimate revolution” that Shulamith Firestone envisions in her book, The Dialectics of Sex (1970), when she urges the women “to create a paradise on earth anew.” Her “ultimate revolution” (238–240) rests on several important demands: • freeing women from biological tyranny and willingness to advocate extrauterine reproduction; • diffusing childbearing and child-rearing to society as a whole; • rejection of the nuclear family; • economic independence and self-determination of all people; • liberation of children; • total integration of women and children into larger society; • free creative work for all people who want it; • sexual freedom and love. Firestone’s vision of a feminist Utopia is one in which reproductive technology will have removed the tyranny of sexual division based on biology. With such a removal will come the collapse of social structures that have supported this sexual division—the family, romance, marriage, and motherhood. As Tom Moylan (1986) observes, the Utopia outlined by Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex is in many ways a direct reply to the dystopia of Huxley’s The Brave New World, and elements of her vision can be found in many feminist utopian novels, including those of Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, and Samuel Delany (200). I am particularly interested how feminist discourse mirrors Simone de Beauvoir’s famous argument in Second Sex that man has constructed woman as “the Other,” as the one who is not himself. Being the more powerful gender group, men conveniently impose patriarchal “scenes and contexts” on the masculine/feminine opposition. All the negative characteristics of humanity (as men perceive them) are projected into women. Therefore, according to this

42 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

argument, in the existing socio-symbolic order, women are “naturally” perceived as “deviant,” peripheral, or invisible. Radical feminists attempted to deconstruct the total cultural context in which patriarchal oppositions were operating. They had to overcome the symbolic violence of the patriarchal discourse, including the misrepresentation of “woman” that was presented at best as a pale imitation of “man,” if not actually the feared castrating “other.” Feminist discourse aimed to counteract the negative representation of women in patriarchal discourse. Initially, feminist critics looked most unfavorably at patriarchal psychoanalysis. With the renewal of campaigns for women’s rights in the late 1960s, vigorous feminist discussions of Freud’s writings refuted his arguments and especially his theory of penis envy. In the 1970s, however, the controversy changed direction with the gradual appearance of books and essays explaining how Freud’s writings could be interpreted in ways critically advantageous for feminism. Feminist engagement with psychoanalytic thought has made a significant contribution to the larger debate about subjectivity and difference that preoccupied many feminist theorists from the 1970s through the 1990s. Sigmund Freud first published his account of sexuality in 1905; however, in the 1960s, Freud’s psychoanalytical theory was still an unquestionable part of the patriarchal discourse. Freud’s explorations of sexuality are important for my study because they influenced the socio-political context in which feminist utopias of the 1970s emerged. As I will attempt to show, significant changes in the context were always represented in the feminist utopian novels; therefore, it is illuminating to see how feminist utopias reacted to Freud’s reasoning. In this respect, I find both Freud’s and the feminist reasoning on sexuality profoundly ideological. I am guided here by Burke’s idea that critical discourse is always ideological. According to Burke, criticism itself is an ideological enterprise that serves the interests of an influential group of theorists because the “substance” of human discourse is contextually determined: language becomes meaningful to us through extrinsic factors which exist outside of critical and literary texts. Burke says that a person’s orientation (which works through ideology) is, in effect, a vocabulary that provides a framework for interpreting the world. According to Burke, an orientation is “a bundle of judgments as to how things were, how they are, and how they might be” (Permanence 14). He maintains that our ideologies/ orientations are perspectives that guide our experiences because “our minds, as linguistic products, are composed of concepts which select certain relationships as meaningful” (14). Bristow (1997) provides a useful summary of Freud’s psychoanalytic investigations: “1) sexual life begins during infancy; 2) the “sexual” and the “genital” have separate meanings, since the “sexual” encompasses many behaviors that are not “genital” in character; and 3) sexual pleasure involves the development of erogenous zones, ones that may or may not lead to reproduction” (62–63). To understand the complex identifications through which the infant must pass in the formation of sexuality, Freud theorized two interdependent structures: the Oedipus complex and the castration complex. Suggestive yet

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

43

schematic, these complexes provide the main foundations to Freud’s explorations of sexuality. However, Freud draws a line between male and female experiences when he prescribes two different paths in which the boy and the girl should develop heterosexuality. Even though the boy must pass along a tormented route through what Freud frequently terms the “positive” Oedipus complex towards “normal” heterosexuality, the girl has to travel a much more winding path towards the same destination. Indeed, in Freud’s theory, the girl is in for a rough ride. Her initial conflict is caused by the imbalance between the masculine and feminine, active and passive, aspects of her psyche. As Bristow (1997) observes, Freud’s explanations of the development of the girl’s castration and Oedipus complexes are problematic because, when Freud attempts to explain how a girl reacts to the threat of castration, he acknowledges that the absence of penis marks not the end, but the beginning of her Oedipus complex: A little girl behaves differently. She makes her judgement and her decision in a flash. She has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it. Here what has been named the masculinity complex branches off. It may put great difficulties in the way of the regular development toward femininity, if it cannot be got over soon enough. The hope of some day obtaining the penis in spite of everything and so of becoming a man may persist to an incredibly late stage and may become a motive for strange and otherwise unaccountable actions Thus a girl may refuse to accept the fear of being castrated, may harden herself in the conviction that she does possess a penis, and may subsequently be compelled to behave as though she were a man After a woman has become aware of the wound to her narcissism, she develops, like a scar, a sense of inferiority. When she has passed beyond her first attempt at explaining her lack of a penis as being a punishment personal to herself and has realized that this sexual character is a universal one, she begins to share the contempt felt by men for a sex which is the lesser in so important a respect, and, at least in holding that opinion, insists on being like a man. (Freud 19:253) Though the Oedipus complex is now in place between the girl and her father, none of her conflicts have been resolved for certain. As Freud remarks in “Femininity” (1933), girls can remain in the Oedipus complex “for an indeterminate length of time; they demolish it late and, even so, incompletely.” Recognizing the controversial implications of this assertion, Freud acknowledges how “feminists are not pleased when we point out to them the effects of this factor upon the average feminine character” (Freud 22:129). And he was right: feminist critics were far from being pleased with his construction of femininity. Joanna Russ in her utopian novel The Female Man (1969) describes several such “average feminine” characters, as well as the varying degrees of sexism in the patriarchal background against which the stories of her protagonists unfold.

44 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

Her novel can be read as an instance of the feminist genre that is reactive to its socio-historic situation, particularly to patriarchal theorizing of women’s inferiority complex based on Freud’s theory. For example, in a short section of the novel, Russ introduces anonymous disembodied societal voices that instruct the reader how “normal” American girls should behave. Then, in a sudden twist of the narrative, Russ portrays an “abnormal” adolescent girl, Laura Rose Wilding of Anytown, USA, who “can’t ever be happy or lead a normal life” because she is “a victim of penis envy” (65). Laur’s mother blames herself for her daughter’s “deformity”: “My mother worked as a librarian when I was little and that’s not feminine. She thinks it’s deformed me” (65). Laur is now daydreaming; and, in her dreams, she is Genghis Khan—that is, trying on a power-hungry, violent, neurotic male identification. According to Freud, we can say that Laura is demonstrating her masculinity complex. Importantly, it is not the penis that Laur craves, but the male social status and power. Laur’s predicament can be read as Russ’s attempt to portray the confusion caused by Freud’s psychoanalytical theory that permeated the patriarchal discourse of the time. Russ here ridicules Freud’s explanations of the girl’s conflict that is caused by the imbalance between the masculine and feminine, active and passive, aspects of her psyche. In fact, as Russ demonstrates, Laur’s inferiority complex is caused by continuous harassment exercised by anonymous members of patriarchal society. For example, in section VI, quite suddenly for the reader, Laur’s dreams are shattered by a sexist and offensive monologue in an unnamed narrative voice. This disembodied voice utters a sexist “common-sense” message that later on keeps replaying in Laur’s mind: “Everyone knows that much as women want to be scientists and engineers, they want foremost to be womanly companions to men (what?) and caretakers of childhood; everyone knows that a large part of a woman’s identity inheres in the style of her attractiveness” (Russ The Female Man 60). Being constantly judged and misjudged, Laur is dreaming about “mermaids, fish, sea-plants, wandering fronds.” She is simultaneously dreaming of being Genghis Khan because the coveted identification with “some pretty girls” that Russ calls “those strange social artifacts half dissolved in nature and mystery” is unattainable for her. Her dreams are soon shattered by another intrusive disembodied voice; this voice takes up the idea of attractiveness and equates it with being “the real thing,” i.e., pushing Laur towards sexual permissiveness and oppressive conformity to demeaning societal stereotypes: “A beautiful chick who swims naked and whose breasts float on the water like flowers, a chick in a raintight shirt who says she balls with her friends but doesn’t get uptight about it, that’s the real thing” (60). It follows that Laur can read Engels and dream about becoming Genghis Khan as much as she likes; she is doomed to be identified primarily as a “social artifact,” i.e., as a playmate or a “ballsy chick.” In this way, her inferiority complex is both caused and reenforced through societal indoctrination.

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

45

Russ’s novel was first published in 1969, approximately at the same time when Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) appeared, with its extended polemic against Freud’s theory of penis envy. Millet’s book is considered a landmark study for the 1970s because it provides a rigorous analysis of phallocratic discourse. Millett’s book popularized both the phrase “sexual politics” and the broadening of the term “patriarchy” beyond its original definition as the rule of the older male within a traditional family, to mean the institutionalized oppression of all women by all men (Thornham 36). According to Millett, patriarchy is a political institution, and sex is a status category with political implications. Millett examines the development of sexist thinking from the Victorian epoch to the sexual revolution of the 1960s as represented in the writings of D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) and Henry Miller (1891–1980). Freud’s work is discussed in Millett’s central chapter, “The Counterrevolution, 1930– 1960.” To Millett, these three counterrevolutionary decades are significant because they marked the backlash of the patriarchal discourse against the advanced sexual views of the late nineteenth century pioneered by Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde. Millet exposes the “habitual masculine bias of Freud’s own terms and diction” and refutes Freud’s castration complex on the basis that he makes no distinction between “fact” and “fantasy” (182–3): “It is interesting that Freud should imagine the young female’s fears center about castration rather than rape—a phenomenon which girls are in fact, and with reason, in dread of, since it happens to them and castration does not” (184). Millett blames Freud for collapsing culture into nature and the social into the biological: Freud had spurned an excellent opportunity to open the door to hundreds of enlightening studies on the effect of male-supremacist culture on the ego development of the young female, preferring instead to sanctify her oppression in terms of the inevitable law of ‘biology.’ The theory of penis envy has so effectively obfuscated understanding that all psychology has done since has not yet unraveled this matter of social causation. If, as seems unlikely, penis envy can mean anything at all, it is productive only within the total cultural context of sex. And here it would seem that girls are fully cognizant of male supremacy long before they see their brother’s penis… Confronted with so much concrete evidence of the male’s superior status, sensing on all sides the deprecation in which they are held, girls envy not the penis, but only what the penis gives one social pretensions to. (Millett 187) For a number of years, Millett’s reasoning exerted influence over the Women’s Liberation Movement. Her writings, together with the books of Simone de Beauvoir, Adrienne Rich, Shulamith Firestone, and Bettie Friedan were instrumental in changing the socio-historic context. Their books were so influential for the Women’s Liberation Movement and to society at large that

46 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

Russ makes her narrator Joanna ask her “little daughter-book” to pay homage to their shrines as the founders of New Feminism: “Go, little book, …bob a curtsey at the shrines of Friedan, Millet, Greer, Firestone, and all the rest” (Russ The Female Man 213–214). It is important to note that the patriarchal discourse of the time chose either to ignore these writings or to discredit them as “[s]hill… vituperative…no concern for the future of society…maunderings of antiquated feminism…selfish femlib” and label each new writer as “another of the screaming sisterhood” or one of “those who cuddled up to ball-breaker Kate” (Russ The Female Man 140–141). One of patriarchal paradoxes revealed by Russ in her novel is that in such violent acts as sexual abuse or rape, society views the woman “not only [as] the victim of the act but in some strange way its perpetrator; somehow she attracted the lightning that struck her out of a clear sky.” Russ’s character Jael, an elevenyear-old child, describes over-hearing adult neighbors blaming another seventeen-year-old girl for being raped. Jael’s story is interesting to me because it demonstrates two important things: first, it shows patriarchal patterns of initiation of young females into appropriate acceptable modes of behavior through small talk and gossip. Second, it discloses a patriarchal paradox of blaming not the rapist, but the victim for the crime of “secret inadequacy” of being female, of the “wretched guiltiness” of being young and vulnerable: “I do not mean the man who did it, I mean the woman to whom it was done A diabolical chance—which was not chance—had revealed her to all of us as she truly was, in her secret inadequacy, in that wretched guiltiness which she had kept hidden for seventeen years but which now finally manifested itself in front of everybody. Her secret guilt was this: She was Cunt. She had ‘lost’ something” (193). Russ’s sarcasm is evident when she explains that the crime of the raped girl is no crime at all—it is the inappropriate behavior of being out late at night and in the wrong part of town: “Her skirt was too short and that provoked him. She liked having her eye blacked and her head banged against the sidewalk” (193). At the young age of eleven, Jael is already indoctrinated that the woman is always at fault because she has something to lose while the man has something to gain. Societal voices reprimand the rapist for being a “prick,” “but being Prick is not a bad thing,” says Russ, “In fact, he had ‘gotten away with’ something (possibly what she had ‘lost')” (193). To disclose the symbolic violence of patriarchal discourse, Russ portrays the anticipated negative critical reviews of her book. Again, she employs the same narrative strategy: showcasing anonymous societal voices that spill out hostile messages of the mainstream media. While still engaged in writing the book, Joanna is playing out this response in her head as if tuning in to various radio stations. She is bombarded by hostile criticism indicating that she “burned her bra” and therefore “needs a good lay,” that her book is “shapeless,” “twisted” and “neurotic” because it reflects “women’s limited experi ence” (140). She keeps on listening to these messages to find out that her book is just “another shrill polemic” that displays “feminine lack of objectivity” and, therefore, is “a

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

47

brilliant but basically confused study of feminine hysteria.” She is severely criticized for her “denial of the profound sexual polarity,” “all too womanly refusal to face facts” and “pseudomasculine brusqueness.” I find it notable that the critics blame Joanna for nonconformity to acceptable patriarchal standards; “they” (patriarchal men and compliant women) would have listened to her “if only she had spoken like a lady” (Russ 140–141). Russ’s narrative strategy is important because it demonstrates the dialogic nature of feminist utopia and its potential for accommodating both fiction and theory within the narrative. Russ is incorporating in her novel a cacophony of anonymous societal voices that attempt to ward off her reasoning as “ephemeral trash” and “missiles of the sex war,” However, in spite of the anticipated hostile response, Joanna sends her “little daughter-book” out in the world, hoping that it will eventually grow old and die, i.e., become obsolete after it initiates the desired socio-historic change that would erase patriarchy: “Rejoice, little book! For on that day, we will be free” (213). In the stifling patriarchal atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s, secondwave feminists devised a new strategy for political representation—they started consciousness-raising groups that undermined the patriarchal constructions of gender roles and sexuality. The process of consciousnessraising can be described as “the move to transform what is experienced as personal into analysis in political terms, with the accompanying recognition that ‘the personal is political,’ that male power is exercised and reinforced through ‘personal’ institutions such as marriage, child-rearing and sexual practices” (Thornham 30). Radical feminists from the Women’s Liberation Movement were working towards a female revolution in consciousness via the process of consciousnessraising. They argued that male sexuality had been openly discussed for decades, whereas women’s sexuality was never viewed squarely in its political dimension as an aspect of power relations between the sexes. This most intimate aspect of gender relations was not open to political analysis until the feminists boldly declared that “the personal is political.” One of the feminist critics who wrote on sexuality was Kathie Sarachild, a founding member of the women’s organization “The Redstockings” and an advocate of the consciousness-raising practice. In her essay, “A Program for Feminist Consciousness Raising,” she repeatedly emphasized the importance of connecting personal testimony with the testimony of other women, now and in the past, and with political organizing. Her essay was published in 1970 in the anthology Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Lib, Major Writings of the Radical Feminists and was widely disseminated as one of the first feminist attempts to refute the deformed patriarchal accounts of sexuality. Shulman reports that as soon as consciousness-raising groups were organized, many women without prior political experience began joining them to voice their resentment: “Many complained bitterly that their men never took responsibility for birth control, for children, for the progress of their relationships. The stories poured out. In those days, few of the women had had the opportunity to talk

48 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

honestly about sex with anyone; it had been a taboo subject in the fifties and was still suspect in the sixties. Certainly, women had not felt free to talk about the intimate physical details. For not only were sexual topics embarrassing, but sexual problems had long been taken as signs of personal failings or illness and as such were shameful, and talk about sexual secrets was considered a betrayal of your man and thus dangerous” (23). Shulman remembers the excitement generated when the women in her group in 1967 first admitted to each other that they had been faking orgasm—and for various reasons (24). Once the truth was out, they tried to analyze why they had felt the need to fake. Instead of feeling guilty about it, they saw faking as a response to pressures that had been placed on the women by men. Their discussions were liberating and exhilarating; however, the idea was not simply to improve their sex lives or to find some personal solution to their problems; the purpose of their discussions was to identify the common social roots of their resentment: “The women wanted nothing less than to understand the social basis for their discontents, including the sexual, and then do something to change it—for everyone” (24). As a result, those early consciousness-raising meetings “felt like life-transforming discussions because our object was justice for all women” (25). Thus, consciousness-raising was not therapy, and more than simply factgathering sessions. Rather, in sync with Audre Lorde saying that a slave cannot break the master’s house with the master’s tools, consciousness-raising was conceived as a new political tool. As Shulman explains, this strategy was modeled on the Chinese practice called Speaking Bitterness: “If women were truly to understand their situation in patriarchy, they had to base their analysis on information they could trust, information that was not suspect, and for this they had to gather it themselves” (24). Women had to challenge all previous patriarchal generalizations, substituting them with new knowledge based on their own experience and feelings. Carole Hanisch—in “The Personal Is Political” (1970)—discusses the differences between therapy and consciousness-raising sessions. Since all the discussed topics were interconnected, women felt that they could start their analysis of women’s lives by looking closely at any aspect: sex, class, work, marriage, motherhood, sex roles, housework, health, education, images, or language. Understanding that all these aspects were riddled with sexism, they hoped that the WLM would change them all by bridging the gender gap and empowering the female subject. And indeed, the WLM called for a radical revision of the phallocentric understanding of power, gender, language, work, parenting, and marriage. Table 2 summarizes the movement’s major propositions. Some feminist writers are skeptical about their new freedom to be explicit about sexuality. They want to know how female sexuality will develop if men are unstable, elusive or destructive. For example, Adrienne Rich in “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980) examines societal forces which wrench women’s emotional and erotic energies away from them and other women, and from women-identified values. As Rich observes:

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

Table 2. Feminists Propositions of the 1970s

49

50 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

Table 2. Feminists Propositions of the 1970s (continued)

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

51

If women are the earliest sources of emotional caring and physical nurture for both female and male children, it would seem logical, from a feminist perspective at least, to pose the following questions: whether the search for love and tenderness in both sexes does not originally lead toward women; why in fact women would ever redirect that search; why species-survival, the means of impregnation, and emotional/erotic relationships should ever have become so rigidly identified with each other; and why such violent strictures should be found necessary to enforce women’s total emotional, erotic loyalty and subservience to men. (Rich 68) Rich further discusses Kathleen Gough’s essay “The Origin of Family” (1975) that explores the concept of male power as men’s entitlement to the following actions (see Rich 69–70): deny women sexuality or to force it upon them; command or exploit their labor and to control their produce; control or rob them of their children; confine them physically and prevent their movement; use them as objects in male transactions; cramp their creativeness; withhold from them large areas of society’s knowledge and cultural attainments. Rich elaborates on each of Gough’s categories, identifying some of the methods by which male power is manifested. Rich argues that women are confronted not with a simple maintenance of inequality and property possession, but with a pervasive cluster of forces, ranging from physical brutality to control of consciousness which suggests, as she insists, that an enormous potential counterforce has to be restrained. Some of the forms by which male power manifests itself are more easily recognizable as enforcing heterosexuality on women than are others. Yet, as Rich comments, each one “adds to the cluster of forces within which women have been convinced that marriage, and sexual orientation towards men, are inevitable, even if unsatisfying and oppressive components of their lives” (Rich 71). Rich concludes that these situations occur precisely because women are deprived of choice and, therefore, they cannot “undo the power men everywhere wield over women, power which has become a model for every other form of exploitation and illegitimate control.” According to Rich, women have no real choice because they are trapped within a “maze of false dichotomies”: We have been stalled in a maze of false dichotomies which prevents our apprehending the institution as a whole: ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ marriages; ‘marriage for love’ versus arranged marriage; ‘liberated’ sex versus prostitution; heterosexual intercourse versus rape; Liebeschmerz versus humiliation and dependency. Within the institution exist, of course, qualitative differences of experience; but the absence of choice remains the great unacknowledged reality, and in the absence of choice, women will remain dependent upon the chance or luck of particular relationships and will have no collective power to determine the meaning of sexuality in their lives. (Rich 91) Rich calls for a revision of the institution of heterosexuality itself, as well as for the restoration of the history of the female resistance “which has never fully understood itself because it has been so fragmented, miscalled, erased” (91).

52 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

Rich observes that this analysis will need “a courageous grasp of the politics and economics, as well as cultural propaganda, of heterosexuality” (91). By examining the socio-political, economic, and cultural basis of heterosexuality, feminist criticism has uncovered “the politics of difference”: sex, like race, is an area of social relations where dominance has invariably been justified by difference. In focusing on “difference,” feminists were increasingly questioning not only how one thought about the difference between women and men, but also how one considered the many differences—including those of sexuality, age, class, and ethnicity—that at times came between women seeking liberation from patriarchal oppression. At this time, feminist criticism also actively disputed Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of the phallus, one of his most controversial theoretic devices designed to explain how the subject becomes sexed. Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) describes the infant’s entry into culture as occurring through its identification with its own mirror-image and consequent sense of possessing an independent identity. The second important rite of passage is the infant’s entry into the Symbolic Order via the acquisition of language. The Symbolic Order, according to Lacan, is patriarchal, and it constructs meaning through sets of binary oppositions in which the “male” term is privileged (man/woman, activity/ passivity, mind/nature, etc.). He describes patriarchal signification as the Law of the Father, with the Phallus being the privileged signifier. It is opposed to the realm of the Imaginary, the world of the first mother-child relationship in which the infant acquired a sense of self as a separate being through seeing its reflection (Thornham 41). For the child in Lacan’s account, the Phallus is an imaginary object in possession of the father; while it seems to represent masculine power, it in fact represents absence or lack. Lacan observes that the Phallus should be understood as a cultural construction that attributes symbolic power to the biological penis. Men, by definition, have a penis, but this does not mean that they possess the Phallus. Only through another’s desire does the man feel that he has the Phallus (Ramsey 175). However, in Lacanian theory, no one actually has the Phallus. Lacan’s The Signification of the Phallus (1958) emphasizes that the phallus “is the signifier intended to designate as a whole the effects of the signified, in that the signifier conditions them by its presence as a signifier” (Lacan Ecrits 285). Whereas Lacan’s explanations sound perplex ing and enigmatic, he does attempt to illuminate the connection between the “latency,” the “turgidity” and the “vital flow” of his “veiled signifier”: The phallus is the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire. It can be said that this signifier is chosen because it is the most tangible element in the realm of sexual copulation, and also the most symbolic in the literal (typographical) sense of the term, since it is equivalent there to the (logical) copula. It might be said that, by virtue of its turgidity, it is the image of the vital flow as it is transmitted in generation. All these propositions merely conceal the fact

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

53

that it can play its role only when veiled, that is to say, as itself a sign of the latency which any signifiable is struck, when it is raised to the function of the signifier. (Lacan Ecrits 287–8) As feminist critics point out, due to his evasive imagery, Lacan’s reasoning remains obscure. In particular, it is not clear why Lacan reserves the position of the privileged signifier for the phallus; in what way logos is joined with the advent of desire; why the phallus is equated with the copula; how turgidity represents the flow; and why the phallus can only function as a signifier when veiled. In the feminist critical discourse, Lacan’s phallocentrism has been the subject of a highly contentious debate. By the 1980s, Lacan’s difficult and demanding texts were widely circulating in English. They prompted significant questions for feminists seeking theoretical tools that would illuminate the psychic and social formation of femininity within a patriarchal culture. As Bristow (98–99) reports, the following counterarguments were characteristic for the feminist criticism of phallocratic psychoanalysis: 1. Psychoanalysis fails to address the historical specificity of the structures and narratives it explores, by seeking to pass off its findings as timeless and universal. 2. Psychoanalysis conspires with the phallic authority it strives to analyze, by refusing to propose models that could or would remove the penis or phallus from its omnipotent place. 3. Psychoanalysis is preposterously based on an epistemological impossibility, by professing to interpret what it cannot by definition understand, since the unconscious is not immediately accessible to knowledge. 4. Psychoanalysis lays far too much emphasis on the conservative nature of sexual identification, by presuming that eroticism can only be understood by returning it to foundational events that occurred extremely early in childhood, and which supposedly determine all succeeding relations. 5. Psychoanalysis purports, but does not manage, to resist biological assumptions, by reducing its critique of sexuality to questions of anatomy. Julia Kristeva is the theorist who has become most notable for modifying the phallocentric paradigms of psychoanalysis to feminist ends. Her training as a linguist and semiotician was instrumental in helping her to redefine the Lacanian distinction between the Imaginary and the Symbolic. From the outset of her career, Kristeva has been preoccupied with subjectivity and signification; in particular, with the processes that bring the “inchoate human subject” into the domain of language. She elaborates three orders—the semiotic, the thetic, and the symbolic—to explain the intricate stages in the development of the subject when it comes to represent itself to itself after being disassociated from the maternal entity. Kristeva’s works were published in France in the 1970s, and by

54 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

mid-1970s, were available in English. Through translation, Kristeva’s work became widely known because it theorized the same patriarchal discourse that nourished feminist utopias of the 1970s, especially Monique Wittig’s Les Guerielleres (1971). Since her research concentrates on the channeling of the drives, Kristeva takes a great effort to elaborate the critical discourse on sexuality. Kristeva details her three orders in Revolution in Poetic Language (1984), first published in France in 1974. There she explains how the semiotic relates to its Greek etymology, where the word means “distinctive mark, trace, index, precursory sign, proof, engraved or written sign, imprint, trace, figuration” (Kristeva Revolution in Poetic Language 25). Since the word implies “distinctiveness,” it helps to identify “a precise modality in the signifying process”; that is, the process that sustains the subject. Like Freud and Lacan, Kristeva examines infant’s multiple drives and the familial and societal constraints that manipulate, direct, and shape them when the body encounters its environment. She develops her concept of chora, a presymbolic stage in which the infant and the mother are one: Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such and, in the course of his development, they are arranged according to the various constraints imposed on this body— always already in the semiotic process—by family and social structures. In this way the drives, which are ‘energy’ charges as well as ‘psychical’ marks, articulate what we call a chora: a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated. (Kristeva Revolution in Poetic Language, 25) According to Kristeva, the chora denotes “an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movement and their ephemeral stases.” The chora represents the prelinguistic moment where the child remains unable to differentiate itself from the maternal body. However, its movement and ephemeral stasis allow for growth and organization. Not yet related to the signifying chain, the chora is a presymbolic realm that provides the dual rhythms of freedom and constraint from which a relation to signification will gradually emerge. As Bristow (1997) remarks, Kristeva here moves away from Freud and Lacan when she points out that this stage involves not random polymorphous perversity, but a space in which perceptions and sensations are taking on some semblance of organization. I see Kristeva’s work as consubstantial and parallel to the development of feminist discourse in the 1970s and early 1980s; therefore, I find her concept of “chora” instrumental for my analysis of the prelinguistic stage in the metamorphosis of the subject in Dorothy Bryant’s The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You. As I intend to show in the next chapter, Bryant’s utopian society on Ata designates a specific place (hol-ka) for the individual agent to be able to experience this essential transformation.

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

55

Kristeva explains that the second rupture is marked by the thetic: “a break in the signifying process, establishing the identification of the subject and its object as preconditions of propositionality” (Kristeva Revolution in Poetic Language 43). “All enunciation,” Kristeva adds, “is thetic.” So the creation of a word or sentence is based on “propositionality”: that is, a proposing of meaning. Placed on the “threshold of language,” the thetic is where symbolization can begin. As Bristow (1997) observes, the thetic stage combines both the Lacanian mirror stage and Freud’s established model of castration. It marks the moment where subjectivity necessarily emerges through imaginary misrecognition and through a relation to the primary but veiled signifier: the phallus. The third and final order is called the symbolic (as many commentators have observed, it bears some resemblance to the field of signification to which Lacan gave the same name). Kristeva carefully outlines how and why the symbolic eventually must intervene: “Dependence on the mother is severed, and transformed into a symbolic relation to an other; the constitution of the Other is indispensable for communication with an other” (48). Similarly, Judith Butler in Bodies That Matter (1993) elaborates on the symbolic when she defines it as “the normative dimension of the constitution of the sexed subject within language. It consists in a series of demands, taboos, sanctions, injunctions, prohibitions, impossible idealizations, and threats—performative speech acts, as it were, that wield the power to produce the field of culturally viable sexual subjects: performative acts, in other words, with the power to produce or materialize subjectivating effects” (Bodies That Matter 106). For Kristeva, even in the symbolic order, the subject never quite deserts the semiotic. Art enacts the “semiotization of the symbolic,” and in doing so “represents the flow of jouissance into language” (79). However, it is important to remember Kristeva’s warning that entry into the symbolic marks “the first social censorship” because the subject, as it propels its image of itself into the world, meets with symbolic castration (48). Kristeva’s later work, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), makes it clear that her concern with the semiotic chora means that sexual desire refers as much to the maternal body as it does to the phallic signifier that constitutes the subject’s lack. What she calls the “abject” marks “our earliest attempts to release the hold of the maternal entity even before ex isting outside of her.” This “abject-ing,” argues Kristeva, constitutes a “violent, clumsy breaking away” that carries the “risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling” (Powers of Horror 13). To be sure, this focus on the significance of the “maternal entity” to the “inchoate human subject” provides a counterweight to the phallocentrism of Freud’s and Lacan’s paradigms that was often entertained in many feminist utopias. Michele Roberts in her feminist utopia The Ark of Mrs. Noah (1987) illustrates Kristeva’s idea when she says that the purpose of the maternal entity is to be abandoned because the infant has to leave and become not-mother. The novel, with its images of water and the womb, with its focus on the body, with its recurrent references to feeding, and its

56 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

proximity to pain and love, can be read as an exploration of the complex relationships between the infant and the maternal body. Though the Ark is described as a benevolent maternal entity where creation takes place, the subject’s purpose is “to leave it,” and, therefore, pain and tears are imminent. It is important to note that the mother nourishes her child with words, thus making an important connection between the body and the semiotic: Creation starts here in the Ark. Love actively shapes the work. My mother nourishes me with words, words of such power and richness that I grow, dance, leap. But the purpose of the Ark is to leave it. The purpose of the womb is to be born from it. So when I’m forced to go from her, when I lose her, I can call after her, cry her name. I become myself, which means nother; with blood and tears I become the not-mother. (Roberts 274) Like Kristeva, Helene Cixous also engages in discussing the relationship of women to power, language and meaning, and liberating the feminine jouissance. She indicates the release of the symbolic into the semiotic when she asserts that the woman “has never ceased to hear what-comes-beforelanguage reverberating” (“Sorties” 88). Cixous’s “Sorties” (1985 [1975]) focuses on dismantling the masculinist logic of the “same”: a rigid system of reasoning that Cixous memorably names “the Empire of the Selfsame.” In Cixous’s view, the masculinist imperialism of the “Selfsame” violently enacts an ongoing “story of phallocentrism.” As I intend to show, most feminist utopias can be read as counterstories to the dominant phallocentric narrative that, according to Cixous, “keeps the movement toward the other staged in a patriarchal production, under Man’s law” (79). Faced with the glorification of the triumphal “Selfsame,” Cixous longs to liberate women’s jouissance. Such feminine jouissance, she claims, belongs to an “instinctual economy” that “cannot be identified by a man or referred to the masculine economy” (82). It still needs to be examined, though, what kind of alternative the liberated feminine jouissance poses to the binary logic of gender upheld by the phallocratic patriarchy. In this respect, the sexual logic celebrated by Cixous’s écriture feminine may be somewhat more traditional than it appears. “Let masculine sexuality gravitate around the penis, engender ing the centralized body…under the party dictatorship,” declares Cixous. “Woman,” she argues, “does not perform on herself this regionalization that profits the couple head-sex,” she adds. Cixous urges the woman to write her own self, her desires, her body, for herself and other women. Her appeal to “bring women to writing” (“The Laugh of the Medusa” 334) articulates the need to create a common discourse that can facilitate the identification of women into a feminist community. Like Burke in his rhetoric of identification, Cixous takes it for granted that language is indispensable in uniting people, implying that the feminist reinvention of a style is quite possible and necessary. For Cixous, when women begin to write in all their diversity and complexity, “beauty will no longer be forbidden” (335). She believes that, once women have taken language,

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

57

discovered its symbolic potential, and reinvented it for themselves, then they can write “the true texts of women— female-sexed texts.” Therefore, as both Cixous and Kristeva argue, any transformation of female subjectivity must start with a decisive change of the woman’s relationship to the socio-symbolic contract, based upon the appropriation of power and new signifying practices: sexual difference—which is at once biological, physiological, and relative to reproduction—is translated by and translates a difference in the relationship of subjects to the symbolic contract which is the social contract: a difference, then, in the relationship to power, language, and meaning. (Kristeva Women and Power, 449) Many feminist theorists agree that women need to develop a new language and meaning that will enable their counterdiscourse. For example, in the 1980s the rhetoric of “silencing,” “alienation,” and “appropriation” permeates the writing of radical feminists (Daly 1978, Kramarae 1981, Rich 1978, Spender 1980). Arguing that even the naming of the world was done from the men’s point of view, they claim that the entire language system is phallocentric and misogynist, since it belongs to men and is controlled by them only. Man-made language is a form of Orwellian thought-control because men define the limits of language and make women see things their way. Jennifer Coates (1986) formulates the androcentric rule to explain the patriarchal practice of alienation: “Men will be seen to behave linguistically in a way that fits a writer’s view of what is desirable or admirable; women, on the other hand, will be blamed for any linguistic state or development which is regarded by the writer as negative or reprehensible” (15). Coates here indicates that in patriarchal discourse women are perceived as inferior and aberrant and, are therefore, relegated to a negative semantic space. Feminist utopias of Dorothy Bryant and Joanna Russ expose this androcentric rule when they portray patriarchal tactics of rendering women nonexistent, unimportant, or literally invisible. As one of Russ’s protagonists comments, “My friend Kate says that most of the women are out into female-banks when they grow up and that’s why you don’t see them, but I can’t believe her” (The Female Man 204). In Bryant’s utopia, the patriarchal world is a nightmare; patriarchal success is phony; patriarchal values are rejected. Bryant’s character Connie screams: “But I exist!” Yet, the Man does not believe her, treats her as a phantom of his nightmare, and kills her. In Russ’s novel, her protagonist Joanna asks the secret service agents that search her car when they are looking for the interplanetary visitor: “Who are you looking for? There is nobody here. Only me,” thus equating herself with nobody. In the workplace, Joanna needs to act as if she is neuter, otherwise the men harass her as if she were wearing a sandwich board saying: “Look! I have tits!”(134). Jeannine, another of Russ’s four protagonists, feels selfless (that is, devoid of her own self) and therefore wants to blend in with the furniture. Russ pays a lot of attention to the woman’s attempts

58 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

to come to terms with the patriarchal identification; she maintains that in patriarchy, any woman starts “learning to despise one’s self” (219). Russ’s character is learning to despise herself because patriarchy has habitually abjected the woman as the Other, defining her by her difference. This inferiority complex is generalized as every woman’s experience because, once again, Russ does not inform the reader which of her four protagonists is speaking. Radical feminists further warn that the inauthenticity of language may undermine women’s capacity to transform both themselves and the existing socio-symbolic order. They assume that only through a different language can women construct a different reality. While Mary Daly (1978), Adrienne Rich (1980), and Dale Spender (1980) disclose the inauthenticity, alienation, and misrepresentation of women’s experiences in the patriarchal discourse, they acknowledge that a woman can only find some whole, authentic female self (the inner Eye/“I”) through a process of personal and political transformation that involves the denial or transformation of the patriarchal discourse. Language is among the most important sources of women’s alienation, but it is also potentially a resource of their transformation. Language “breaks” women; however, when repossessed, it can also remake them. Thus, the new revolutionary discourse can enable women to overcome and change the patriarchal social order. Feminist discourse calls for the exorcism of the patriarchal language seeing this exorcism as the necessary step for the development of new consubstantiality. Women can only redefine themselves after the exorcism is complete. The reasoning of radical feminists is based on the widely discussed but highly controversial Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This hypothesis combines two principles: linguistic determinism (language determines the way we think) and linguistic relativity (distinctions encoded in one language are not found in any other language). Whorf’s argument is that people dissect nature along lines laid down by their native languages. It follows, then, that languages structure and constrain human perceptions in important ways. The world is presented to people in a kaleidoscope of impressions that, according to Whorf, have to be analysed by the linguistic systems of the mind. He main tains that people cut natural phenomena up, categorize them, organize them into concepts, and in this process, ascribe significance to their experiences according to hierarchies and agreements that are codified through language. This linguistic agreement is implicit and tacit, but its terms are absolutely obligatory: people cannot communicate without subscribing to the organization and clarification of data which this agreement decrees (Crystal 15). The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis proposes that languages vary dramatically and in ways not easily anticipated, and that such variations encode dramatically different understandings of reality. Therefore, people speaking different languages actually see the world in widely divergent ways. Linguistic relativity (or the weaker version of the hypothesis) is widely recognized in linguistics, specifically, in psycholinguistics. Language may not determine the way we think, but it does influence the way we perceive and

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

59

remember, and it affects the ease with which we perform mental tasks. For example, people can recall ideas and concepts more easily if they correspond to words and phrases readily available for them in their language. Similarly, Burke argues that the vocabularies of communities are constituted arbitrarily, and that our conception of “reality” is influenced through the ways in which language is culturally determined. However, according to Burke, we need to keep in mind that there is a reality outside of language. Moreover, this reality is not covered by the framework of our interpretation: “We discern situational patterns by means of the particular vocabulary of the cultural group into which we are born…these relationships are not realities, they are interpretations of reality—hence different frameworks of interpretation will lead to different conclusions as to what reality is” (Burke Permanence 35). How we perceive the world depends upon our linguistic structures in both our choice of words and our selection of our metaphors and metaphor systems, with their limitations and consequences. These structures powerfully affect our understanding of gender: “Assumptions about gender roles are everywhere encoded in our language, particularly in our habit of binary thinking, through which the paired terms male/female become associated with other pairs: active/passive, strong/weak, right/left, and so on” (Squier and Vedder 307). It follows that men habitually fail to recognize women’s feelings and perceptions that do not have any linguistic representation; therefore, they declare these perceptions nonexistent. More radically still, Dale Spender in Man Made Language (1980) denies the existence of reality outside its linguistic representation. She advocates linguistic determinism (the stronger version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) in her reasoning of the importance of language; according to her, the language women use affects what they perceive as real. Thus, constructing a new female “self” first requires some “exorcism” of masculinist language and, secondly, a means of expression to reveal and unravel feminist consciousness. According to Spender, only then can women attempt to change the patriarchal reality around them. Suzette Haden Elgin, a feminist writer, takes up the “weaker” version, or the theory of linguistic relativity, in her novel Native Tongue (1984). She subscribes to the idea that human language structures and constrains our perception of reality. Because patriarchal language is man-made, it cannot provide the means for representing the reality of women’s lives. Therefore, Elgin’s novel portrays a bloodless revolution in which the women of the Linguist lines attempt to change reality by secretly constructing a “women’s language,” Láadan. This language is developed by women only and dispersed through the community of women. In the Appendix to the novel, Elgin provides several examples from her First Dictionary and Grammar of Láadan (304): doóledosh: pain or loss which comes as a relief by virtue of ending the anticipation of its coming… lowitheláad: to feel, as if directly, another’s pain/grief/surprise/joy/ anger…

60 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

raduth: to non-use, to deliberately deprive someone of any useful function in the world, as in enforced retirement or when a human being is kept as a plaything or pet… rarilh: to deliberately refrain from recording; for example, the failure throughout history to record the accomplishments of women... rashida: non-game, a cruel ‘playing’ that is a game only for the dominant ‘players’ with the power to force others to participate... sháadehul: growth through transcendence; either of a person, a nonhuman, or a thing (for example, an organization, or a city, or a sect)... wonewith: to be socially dyslexic; uncomprehending of the social signals of others… zhaláad: the act of relinquishing a cherished/comforting/familiar illusion or frame of perception. (Elgin 302–3-4) Elgin’s main premise is that language is power, or, as she attempts to demonstrate, it is our best and most powerful resource for bringing about social change. She writes the novel as a “thought experiment” to prove that changing our language will change our world. She firmly believes that the language we use to describe and operate in the world affects the way we understand the world, our place in it, and our interactions with one another: I wrote the novel as a thought experiment with the express goal of testing four interrelated hypotheses: (1) that the weak form of the linguistic relativity hypothesis is true [that is, that human languages structure human perceptions in significant ways]; (2) that Goedel’s Theorem applies to language, so that there are changes you could not introduce into a language without destroying it and languages you could not introduce into a culture without destroying it; (3) that change in language brings about social change, rather than the contrary; and (4) that if women were offered a women’s language one of two things would happen—they would welcome and nurture it, or it would at minimum motivate them to replace it with a better women’s language of their own construction. (Quoted in Squier and Vedder 308) In Native Tongue, women look forward to the time when, instead of being an artificial creation, Láadan will become a natural tongue for all the other women on Earth. They believe that it will empower the women to liberate themselves. However, the Linguist women run into a problem when they attempt to work out a valid plan of action. The answer is a Whorfian paradox: the entire problem is based on the women’s assessment of what would happen within the old, preLáadan reality; but Láadan creates a new reality in which all previous calculations are void. Moreover, Láadan changes the women’s reality, but it does not affect men’s reality because the men do not know this language and, therefore, do not use it. The Linguist women end up with a “native tongue,” but

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

61

they do not end up with power to change the patriarchal reality. Therefore, the narrative is open-ended because the women’s “ultimate revolution” is only partially successful. Elgin admits that the experiment did not produce the desired outcome because Laadan failed to be taken up in any meaningful way.3 However, as Squier and Vedder observe, the questions Elgin raises concerning gender, language and power continue to resonate (308). Taken together, the explorations of gender, subjectivity and sexuality in the writings of feminist theorists dramatize the contradictions that emerge when they seek to free women from the strictures imposed by capitalist patriarchy. Their work forms part of a wide-range theoretical discourse on subjectivity and sexuality. Providing the critique of patriarchal strictures, feminist critics force attention on the economic foundations of the patriarchal social order that inform differing masculine and feminine subjectivity. Most of them agree that no radical improvement of feminine subjectivity is possible without a feminist revolution that will start with an exorcism of the manmade language. I would suggest that in the 1970s, the social action of feminist criticism was itself a liberating experience because it attempted to overcome the constraints of patriarchal discourse and to create a positive semantic space for the woman. The discourse of second-wave feminists offered a vision of the woman as having a self that can be liberated from the strictures of male dominance. GENRE TRANSFORMATION “Utopias, though not blueprints, can be harbingers.” (Kessler 1984) In this section, I will attempt to explore the complex relationship of the new feminist genre with the antecedent patriarchal genre. According to Burke, formal discursive structures often have a priori existence since they must identify with an audience’s desire and expectations. To use Anne Freadman’s notion of uptake, I would like to suggest that feminism finds in utopia a “pre-pared way of responding” that embodied the “ramified, intertextual memory” of generic “uptake” in the new, changed rhetorical situation that allowed for subversive social dreaming. This memory is an important aspect of the feminist genre; in fact, as Freadman (2002) argues, every genre depends on its “memory” that she defines as “the adaptation of remembered contents to changed contexts” (41). Examining the relationship between utopian forms of feminist discourse and the system of contexts (including that of US culture in the 1970s), I will argue that the rhetorical situation of the time encourages heterogeneity, nonconformity and subversive utopianism in as much as it provides for feminist optimism and desire for social change that, in its turn, “invites” utopian discourse of a particular type. I will further show how the transformed genre fills the feminists’ need for a new conceptual space that was previously denied by the patriarchal genre. Within the new-rhetorical perspective, I will describe this genre, outlining both its internal

62 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

and external features. The internal features of substance establish those areas in which genre standardizes its narratives. As I will show, they are most prominent in the chronotope of the new genre, its choice of protagonists, incorporation of fiction and theory in the narrative, open-endedness, and distinctive similarity of topics. External features, such as targeted audience, purpose, occasion, and function, show how this genre is embedded in the rhetorical context of the 1970s. I will also look at the critical discourse on feminist utopia which I will analyze in terms of meta-genre, or the ideological and methodological atmospheres around feminist utopia that influenced the genre’s selection of certain ideas and relationships. How, then, can feminist writers represent women’s experiences, “express a reality that has been mute” (Cixous 335; Brossard Picture Theory 13) within the constraints of patriarchal language “tailored to the needs of a society where the Phallus is significant” (Scott 1)? As I will argue, feminist utopia attempts to “write the body,” thus becoming I’écriture feminine, a distinctively feminist mode of creating and communicating new meanings in the narrative. Looking closely at the social action of the genre, I will attempt to identify the ways in which it authorizes and contains women’s personal experiences or, to use Mary Daly’s term, their gyn/ecological memory. This collective memory, as I will argue, encompasses such shared experiences as the construction of femininity, sexuality, pregnancy, birthing, and nurturing. Many commentators point out that feminist authors want to return both a language and a meaning to the body. They attempt to return to it the idealized, mythic quality that the body had in ancient times, and simultaneously return a reality, a materiality, to language and to meaning. Of particular interest to me, then, are the ways in which the new feminist meaning is constructed in these narratives. As critics have observed, feminist utopias attempt to deny hierarchy, linearity, and dichotomy. They make a special effort to transgress the limitations of patriarchal language and to open new conceptual spaces for exploration in emancipatory projects. When attempting to “write the female body,” feminist writers are looking at sexuality as one element in a larger drama of the woman’s life with its experiences of pregnancy, mothering, breast-feeding, caretaking, and nurturing. As Ann Barr Snitow (1980) puts it, they write the narratives that express “the female article of wisdom”: The novels that try to extend the boundaries of sexuality are expressing what until now has been primarily a female article of wisdom: the body is an animal that needs to be fed, to be held, also to be loved; one can never forget about it, pretend it is not there. Women, whose vocation it has been to be attuned to the slightest physical change in themselves (pregnancy), in their families (illness), in their infants (the need for constant nurturance), are quite naturally the sex to suggest that the varied joys of living in the body could and should be explored and extended. (Snitow 171)

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

63

H.Lee Gershuny (1984) observes that, while working on the patriarchal script, feminist utopianism affects linguistic theory. Her analysis focuses on utopian work on language. Gershuny (1984) argues that feminists have attempted the linguistic transformation of womanhood which she locates at the center of their attempts to create paradigm shifts in consciousness: In criticizing patriarchal institutions, feminist writers have generated a parole feministe both to transform and transcend patriarchal paradigms. To perceive herself as a subject in present or future worlds first requires what Mary Daly calls an ‘exorcism’ of masculinist language and, secondly, a means of expression that reveals and unravels feminist consciousness. Starting from different perspectives, feminist writers are developing that language in forms as varied as philosophical treatises and utopian literature. The result is that feminist models, myths, and methods not only reflect a unified sensibility, but an integration of three phases of feminist consciousness: analysis and criticism, transformation, and transcendence. (189) Gershuny insists that the feminist writers discard “masculinist maps that polarize female and male into hierarchies” and attempt “to blend reason and feeling into a unified sensibility” (192). She further identifies a common pattern in feminist utopias that includes three phases: criticism, transformation and transcendence. Each phase has a particular function: phase one is concerned with analysis and criticism of the present; phase two with transformation, manifested, for example, in the creation of alternative worlds; and the third phase is focused on transcendence of what she calls androcentric forms of expression, an example being that of dualistic thought (189–203). Transcendence, then, may offer a symbolic solution to the situation: as Burke advises us, to transform a dichotomy into a transcendent dialectic, we need “to watch for modes of catharsis or of transcendence that may offer a symbolic solution” (Coe “Burke’s Act” and “Burke’s Words” 165–66). Seen in this way, the utopian transcendence facilitates the creation of an imaginative and conceptual space between the real and utopian worlds, the writer and the reader, the reader and the text. This space can generate the revolutionary power of social change to be further enacted in the “real” world of the present. Lucy Sargisson (1996) examines Gershuny’s concept of transcendence and incorporates it in her idea of the feminist utopian transgression. Sargisson observes that willful transgression of generic or conceptual boundaries is an effect and a function of utopian thinking per se. Sargisson reminds us that feminist theory is particularly cautious of the term “transcendence” because in the patriarchal discourse it has traditionally been associated with the valuing of mind over body (59). Sargisson prefers the term “transgression” arguing that the transgression of boundaries by the feminist utopian text affects our perception of the world. This transgression renders patriarchal dichotomies redundant and

64 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

opens the previously masculine world of the mind and theory to the body and emotion. Sargisson argues that, within patriarchy, oppositional conceptualization functions as a vehicle of oppression, domination and hierarchy. For this reason, it should constitute the primary target of feminist criticism. Likewise, Marge Piercy in her novel Woman on the Edge of Time (1979) demonstrates that transgression of our acceptance of the present-day reality can provoke truly open-ended attitudes towards both the world of the present and the world of the future. Piercy’s protagonist, Connie Ramos, a Chicana woman in her mid-thirties, lives in New York of the 1970s and is labeled insane and committed to a mental institution. But the truth is that Connie is overwhelmingly sane and tuned in to the future. She is able to communicate with the year 2137 in which two totally different ways of life are competing: utopian and dystopian. The utopian society is communal, nonsexist, environmentally pure, and open to ritual, whereas the dystopian society is totalitarian, exploitative, and rigidly technological. Piercy’s utopian Mattapoissett consists of many family-communities where everyone is an acquaintance and a relative of everyone else. The government does not exist or hardly exists, although a council is sometimes called to deal with work assignments (thus, administration is seen as the main role of the government in the utopian society). Everyday social and biological activities are open to both sexes and are devoid of gender bias; in this way, men and women are portrayed as people of the same social standing. They are both the same and different; in this way, binarity is somewhat transgressed, but not entirely surpassed. Mattapoissett is still, however, a society of difference that Piercy attempts to transgress linguistically by replacing the pronouns “he” and “she” by the universally applicable “per” (obviously derived from “person”). However, this linguistic intrusion does not eliminate the gender difference: the utopian people are still men and women, distinct from each other as such in physical terms. Woman on the Edge of Time is an important book, inspiring and thoughtprovoking. Many other feminist utopias have taken up its topics: physical freedom to travel safely and without money, access to education and jobs, communal parenting, sexual permissiveness. The point of permissiveness is not to break taboos, but to separate sexuality from questions of ownership, reproduction, and social structure. Monogamy, for example, is not an issue since family structure is a matter of parenting or economics, unrelated to the availability of partners. In terms of describing the reproductive changes, Piercy’s novel is most inventive, portraying bisexuality as the norm. While being the norm, bisexuality is not perceived as a separate category, and thus it remains implicit—it is never named per se. Piercy describes exogenic birth, triads of parents of both sexes caring for children, and all three parents nursing infants. Exclusive homosexuality (also not named) is an unremarkable idiosyncrasy. Thus, mothering is diffused into the life of the community whereas sexuality is liberated to become a personal area of both play and profound feeling.

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

65

Piercy skillfully interweaves the themes of unethical technological progress and medical paternalism towards marginalized groups, such as all women, all people of color, and especially poor women of color. In Connie’s struggle to keep the institution’s doctors from forcing her into a brain control operation, Piercy portrays the gradual process of transformation inspired by Connie’s interactions with the utopian people. Connie is motivated by her experiences in Mattapoissett to challenge the patriarchal constraints to which she is subject in her own world. This action becomes possible due to Piercy’s central premise of open-endedness and multiplicity: neither the future, nor the present is fixed; however, the future can be changed through radical social action in the present. Importantly, neither the eutopian world, nor the dystopian world in the novel is distanced temporally from Connie’s own world, the world of the present. Thus, both the eutopia of Mattapoissett and the dystopia can happen as a result of social developments that Connie initiates in her own world. Piercy’s novel is a notable example of a feminist transformation of the patriarchal genre. It proves that feminism treats the antecedent genre as a transhistorical form, overcomes its patriarchal limitations and revives it through feminist individuation. One important change is that feminist utopia describes better worlds, but these utopian worlds are not perfect because feminism rejects utopian blueprints that maintain petrified hierarchies of social and cultural patriarchy. Tom Moylan (1986) identifies this novel as a critical utopia arguing that Piercy “is aware of the limitations of the genre itself: its tendency to reduce alternative visions to closed and boring perfect systems that negate the utopian impulse that generated them” (151). While Lyman Tower Sargent (1994) argues that this characterization of the utopian tradition is wrong, he agrees with Moylan that Woman on the Edge of Time is clearly a critical utopia in that the tension between the contemporary United States and the alternative future worlds is central to the novel. However, Sargent is suspicious of the use of violence as a legitimate vehicle for promoting social change. Piercy’s protagonist resorts to murder as a method of struggle against patriarchy; as Sargent comments, one can wonder if murder as the mechanism of social change really fits Moylan’s notion of an “articulated process” of opposition. Another remarkable opportunity for the utopian transgression of boundaries is presented by a narrative strategy that incorporates both fiction and theory. In the 1980s, this strategy was theorized as fiction theory, a feminist mode of writing that, as I will argue, operates in many feminist utopias. Feminist utopian writers face a dilemma, however, when they engage in feminist constructive theory because their attempts to destabilize binaries that privilege representations of men could simply reverse the hierarchy and attribute a superior status to women. This pitfall is often avoided by utopias that both challenge the reality of the present world and deny the ideal of linear, historical progress. An important example is Les Guerilleres (1971), where Monique Wittig portrays a society of women that constantly work to deny order through knowledge or history. The women burn the Feminaries books because they contain fixed accounts of history, and focus

66 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

instead on change and flux, represented by the register, which is constantly updated and rewritten. Using a disjointed narrative without a central narrator, Wittig in Les Guerilleres attempts to negate dualistic constructions of femininity in contrast to notions of masculinity while she portrays a society that is constantly changing both in the present and in the future. Nicole Brossard, a Canadian author, first used the term “fiction théorique” to name texts that Hélène Cixous would identify as marked by I’écriture feminine. Cixous, in Laugh of the Medusa (1981) describes l’écri-ture feminine as “feminine writing,” the mother-tongue, the female voice, or a discourse that takes us back to the presymbolic imaginary. In L’Amèr: ou, le Chapître Effrité (1977), Brossard first uses the term “fiction” in a negative way to imply that fictions are constructs in which women are made into objects; these constructs are created by patriarchal men and compliant women. Brossard here consciously fuses incongruous terms in her concept of fiction théorique. She describes a text that can operate as both fiction and theory, “with theory working its way through syntax, language and even narrative of a female as subject, and fiction in which theory is woven into the texture of the creation, eliminating or trying to, distinctions between genres, between prose, essay, poetry, between fiction and theory” (35). Brossard explains that this mode of writing manifests the women’s desire to understand patriarchal reality not for its own sake, but “for its tragic consequences in the lives of women, in the life of the spirit” (35). According to her, fiction theory draws attention to the female body and also attempts to create and theorize new strategies of writing and reading that will allow the female body “to speak its reality,” i.e. to bring it to the page. Importantly, I would like to add that this mode of writing is indispensable for creating feminist consubstantiality because it allows women to render in words their original allencompassing memory (working with Mary Daly’s term “gyn/ecology,” Brossard coins her own phrase “the gyn/ecological memory”): The female body will speak its reality, its images, the censure it has been subjected to, its body filled to bursting. Women are arriving in the public squares of literature and text. They are full of memories: anecdotal, mythic, real, and fictional. But above all women are filled with an original allencompassing memory, a gyn/ecological memory. Rendered in words, its reality brought to the page, it becomes fiction theory. (Brossard Picture Theory 35). By using Burke’s dramatistic method of analysis, I will try to explain fiction theory both in terms of its motives and in terms of its social action. I find that fiction theory can be best interpreted by using Burke’s “perspective by incongruity” presented in his Permanence and Change (1935). This perspective describes the way a world view can be dialectically evoked through the fusing of incongruous terms. According to Burke, revolutionary change occurs when an existing frame or perspective is superseded by a competing, and hence

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

67

incongruous, social orientation. Therefore, it follows that theorising fiction and fictionalizing theory enables the feminist writers to transcend patriarchal assumptions about writing. Daphne Marlatt, a well-known Canadian feminist author, discusses the deconstruction of the old world view and the creation of the new perspective implied by the Burkean term: “theory deconstructs sections of patriarchal society while fiction, always conscious of itself as fiction, offers a new angle on the ‘real’” (Marlatt in Godard, et al. 58). This new angle, she argues, is manifested in a number of genres of poetry and prose. Again, I would like to turn here to the recent propositions of the new-rhetorical genre theories. According to them, generic strategies respond to the rhetorical situation, naming its ingredients in a way that contains an attitude toward them. Therefore, to understand and explain a genre marked by fiction theory, we should restore to consciousness the situation to which it corresponds, and the specific attitude that it embodies. In short, we must focus on the ends this genre is structured to meet. In this respect, I assume that both I’écriture feminine as a strategic mode of writing and fiction theory as its essential manifestation can be construed as feminist strategies for reinventing the utopian genre. Barbara Godard is a Canadian critic who discusses fiction theory as a critical mode. She focuses on the potential of the new mode of writing to disrupt oppositions and to explode stale patriarchal genres. Godard maintains that “[w] omen’s writing disturbs our usual understanding of the terms fiction and theory which assign value to discourses. Detached from their ordinary contexts, established meanings become suspect. By inciting the readers to rethink their presence within that ‘social reality,’ women writers effect a disturbance in those constructions that work at keeping us all in our ‘proper places’” (Godard, et al. 54). Godard says that fiction theory focuses on the self-conscious use of language and the self-reflexive nature of the narrative, as well as the “complex nature of feminist interaction with the text which explodes categories and genres” (54). Godard’s focus on interaction brings to mind the principle of newrhetorical genre theory to describe genres as intertextual and to explain them interactively. Anne Freadman, a well-known genre theorist, in “Anyone for Tennis?” (1994), develops the metaphor of “game-playing” with its implication of sociality and turn-taking. This metaphor is now widely used for describing the action of genres because it directs our attention to the ability of genres to facilitate engagement with a social process (45). New-rhetorical theories point out that discursive genres serve to regularize communication and social relations. They allow us to consider genre as a meaning-making event and foreground an interactive conception of form and content. Such a pragmatically, rather than semantically, orientated conception of genre contributes toward an understanding of how discourse works—that is, how language serves to motivate social actions. In much the same way that Burke shows how formal linguistic entities are “individuated” through social contexts, Carolyn Miller argues that the existing generic models provide writers with

68 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

solutions to recurring rhetorical problems. Drawing on Lloyd Bitzer’s definition of “rhetorical situation as a ‘complex of persons, events, objects, and relations’ presenting an ‘exigence’ that can be allayed through the mediation of discourse” (152), Miller asserts that typified actions mirror commonly perceived interpretations of events. She further maintains that what does recur “is not a material situation (a real, objective, factual event) but our construal of a type” (157), which is how “recurring situations seem to ‘invite’ discourse of a particular type” (162). Kathy Mezei, a Canadian feminist scholar, suggests that the disruption of distinctions between genres in fiction theory provides a way to expose the arbitrariness of man-made traditions (Godard, et al. 53). I find this comment important because it explains what feminist fiction does. To use Cixous’s phrase, we can say that, as a mode of writing, it uses language to “blow up the law” of the Selfsame (Cixous “The Laugh of the Medusa” 343), that is, to disrupt the patriarchal order that assigns value to traditional discourse. Thus, feminist narratives become purposive, functional and motivated, and can be defined by what they do, and not only by their formal properties. I think that it is appropriate to analyze feminist utopia in terms of fiction theory because feminist utopia makes such a determined attempt to debunk the patriarchal utopian genre and to explode both patriarchal subjectivity and patriarchal reality. To explain how this analysis can work, I’d like to look briefly at the work of two utopian authors: Michele Roberts and Dorothy Bryant. Roberts’s utopian novel The Book of Mrs. Noah (1987) offers a new angle on the patriarchal reality. It is open-ended and self-conscious in terms of attention to the texture of the narrative. It also attempts to “write the female body” and its “gyn/ecological memory.” This book does not provide any blueprint or present itself as an overtly political piece and, therefore, it would not “fit” into conservative definitions of utopia. Keeping in mind Carol Kessler’s suggestion that utopias, though not blueprints, can be harbingers (2) and Lucy Sargisson observation that instead of blueprints, feminist utopias are better read as metaphors (59), I would argue that the imagery in Roberts’s novel is distinctively feminist. It develops a system of metaphors based upon the idea of creation and metamorphosis, as well as the images of watec, the flow, and the womb. While Roberts presents a fictional world that is very different from our own, its female characters are recognizably contemporary. This narrative attempts to inscribe female experiences and to explore alternative images of subjectivity; it is also marked by multiplicity in terms of narrative form. The book does not appear to form a single narrative; instead, it focuses on the texture and the materiality of language. It is fragmented into short and apparently unconnected stories told by the characters in the Ark. A fundamental area of the Ark is the library, representing a catalogue of women’s lives: “The Ark’s bookstack, extending over many decks, contains all the varied clashing aspects of women’s imagination expressed in books” (Roberts 1987, 20). Roberts’s intense discussion of the writing materials demonstrates her attention to texture

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

69

and her attempts to weave theory into the texture of creation. Describing the books in the library, Roberts explains that “writing materials on offer include knotted strings, circular seals, blackboards and chalk, wampum belts, message tallies, tablets of clay and ivory and wood, oracle bones, slabs of gold and silver and wax, shards of pottery, strips of cloth and papyrus and paper, sticks of bamboo, palm leaves, bits of birch bark, leather scrolls, rolls of parchment, copper plates, pen and ink, palettes and paintbrushes, sticks and dust-trays, printing presses, typewriters, tape-recorders, word processors, etc” (Roberts 20). This diversity of writing materials is representative of the all-encompassing gyn/ecological memory that contains the women’s cultural histories and personal experiences. Lucy Sargisson (1996) notes that the words “text” and “textile” are linked etymologically by the Latin “text” meaning “woven” (Sargisson 155); all the items described by Roberts are writing materials. Their diverse forms generate texts of a certain tactility that are perceptible by touch; Roberts mentions that they are indexed on “soft thick pages: rag paper, lovely to touch” (21). I’d like to remind my readers that both Cixous and Irigaray mention tactility, affinity and openness to the body as stylistic markers of I’écriture feminine. Thus, I would argue that Roberts employs these stylistic markers when she weaves the metaphors of creation and metamorphosis into her own “web of dream images.” Roberts’s character Mrs. Noah, on one of her exploratory trips to the shore, enters a city that is above ground level but underwater; this city can be interpreted as a symbol of a womb. She then passes through a room of metamorphoses, where chaos reigns and all rules are transgressed in a orgiastic and sensually described scene. In the middle of these descriptions, Roberts inserts an unexpected passage on writing and the construction of meaning, imposing a grid as a symbol of organization on the chaos of the narrative: A narrative is simply a grid placed on chaos so that it can be read in descending lines from left to right, if that’s what you want to do. Some writers prefer simply to record, rather than to interpret, the interlocking rooms and staircases and galleries of this place, this web of dream images that shift and turn like the radiant bits of glass in a kaleidoscope. Others like the Gaffer, make a clear design, slot incident onto a discernible thread. (Roberts 67–8) I would like to suggest that Roberts’s novel is illustrative of fiction theory because it is more than fiction; it is also a piece of creative theory. Roberts uses fiction as a vehicle for an exploration of feminist theory. The stories of Roberts’s characters form a fragmented “whole” that explores gender roles in patriarchal society. This “whole” is not complete because Roberts’s narrative is intentionally open-ended. Dorothy Bryant is another feminist author who is particularly attentive to the female experiences of birth and nurturing. Bryant’s Garden of Eros explores the

70 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

physical changes in the female body when she enters the stream of consciousness of a blind woman having her baby alone on the floor of an isolated cabin in the woods. Her husband is on her mind during the first few hours of contractions, though he is absent from the scene. The woman tenderly remembers their courtship, their first lovemaking, but sex here is treated symbolically, as an act of intimate sharing and self-esteem. As time goes on, the pains come faster and harder, and the woman begins to get angry at her husband. However, she forgets him altogether when her anger is overshadowed by the necessity that calls forth an unexpected strength in her. The woman gathers together all the things she will need for the birth, such as a piece of string to tie the cord, some water, and a blanket. The baby is born well before the husband returns. In this way, the man becomes a shadow beside the baby, beside the strength of the mother. We can see how, in this instance of genre, the woman protagonist is empowered while the man is relegated to a negative semantic space, thus reversing the sociosymbolic contract. In this narrative, the female body is both a subject and a fiction because the woman’s experiences are woven into the texture of creation. The woman’s rhythmic movements toward giving birth push the novel forward towards birth that is portrayed as an overwhelming physical event before which all other procreative acts pale. To use Brossard’s metaphor, in this narrative the woman’s body, “filled to bursting,” spills out its new reality onto the page. In The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You (1971), Dorothy Bryant chooses a male protagonist to experience and to articulate the utopian transcendence of boundaries between the public and the private spheres of life. She portrays the gradual transformation of a patriarchal man on a utopian island. Through a set of traumatic experiences, the Man learns that on the island there are no distinctions between private and public life. To him, this comes as a paradox because, in his understanding, everyday life that he observes on Ata should be an exclusively personal and private life. The Man, therefore, thinks that by its very nature there can be nothing public about it: in the Man’s world such everyday events as waking up, meditation, eating, copulation, giving birth are intimate affairs of isolated people that could not occur in the eyes of the world. However, on Ata these events take place in the open, in the public eye. This public nature of private life creates a place for the contemplative observer, for the protagonist’s “I” who is in a position to judge, evaluate and meditate upon this life. Gradually, the Man becomes an indispensable and obligatory participant in the collective events. For example, together with everybody else in the community, he spiritually assists a girl in giving birth. This mental effort of bonding and sharing is a disturbing experience for him because in his “real” world, giving birth is treated as a private event. Conversely, on Ata everybody is summoned to the ritual tent to offer their spiritual strength to the woman during her hard work. The Man sees three boys assisting the young woman in labor; as he finds out, these three boys are considered to be the fathers of the baby. To his surprise, it turns out that the young woman “lay with all three”; therefore, one of the boys must be the biological father, but it is not clear which one, and this circumstance does not

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

71

seem to matter within the utopian collective. What matters is that all the Atans spiritually support the girl in labor. First, each person stepping into the ritual tent embraces and kisses the girl, and then sits down in silent concentration, moaning and groaning together with her. Thus, the whole community is offering emotional support to the young woman. This therapeutic support both relaxes the woman and marks her labor as an important public event, shared by the whole community. The patriarchal Man is deeply troubled by this experience, but he is also rewarded by the instant recognition from the members of the utopian collective. This is how the Man describes it: “I had never seen a birth. I felt sick and ashamed of my weak stomach, but when we heard the cry of the baby, Salvatore turned to me and said, “Fine, my kin, you did your part well” (Bryant 150). Later, all the Atans help to clean up the blood and make a fresh place for the woman and the baby to lie near the communal fire pit. For Bryant’s audience in the 1970s, this description of birth in a more natural position, constantly attended by one’s relatives, was a welcome change. This description is also important for the feminist utopian genre because it illustrates several feminist propositions: that childbirth is a natural phenomenon and that women should be able to give birth at home, without drugs, using such traditions as giving birth in a squatting position. Birth is presented as a natural event and not as a sickness; therefore, staying near the warm fire for too long and this avoiding communal work is condemned as indulgence. Upon giving birth, the Atan girl would stay in the ritual tent for three days only, constantly attended by the fathers of the child. Then she would take her baby and walk back to her own tent (150). Later on in the novel Bryant tells us about this custom again when she describes how the Man’s wife Augustine returns to work only three days after giving birth to their daughter: “On the third day Augustine bounced up in a very businesslike way, as if we had indulged ourselves long enough, and I followed her back to the ka, carrying the baby” (155). Thus, in Bryant’s narrative, birth and child-minding are diffused to the whole collective, nuclear family is modified, and women and children are totally integrated within the larger community. Another important strategy employed by Bryant is her choice of male protagonist to relate to the readers his experiences of life within the utopian society. I would argue that Bryant designs a specific narrator-reader interaction and treats her audience as consubstantial, particularly at the end of the novel when she makes her protagonist directly address the readers. In these examples, we can see how this genre transgresses the patriarchal utopian chronotope and creates a new conceptual space from which to reapproach the world in a nondualistic way. It offers new possibilities for disrupting patriarchal certainty and truth and exploring openness and multiplicity. An important aspect of the social action of feminist utopian narratives is their criticism of the present-day patriarchy and sexism. Moylan (1986) identifies these texts as critically utopian (198) arguing that they have played their part in the politics of the anti-hegemonic bloc of the 1970s. I would add that, while

72 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

feminist utopias do not commit to resistance in the same way, they voice many issues that were crucial to second-wave feminists; in this way, feminist utopia is made possible by its discourse community. It is worth noting here that feminist utopias were written at the same time when other important narratives of postmodernism emerged. These subversive narratives promoted open-endedness, multiplicity, and resistance to closure. Whereas critics have noted the absence of discussion of sexual difference together with the fact that few women have engaged in the postmodern debate (Gamble 299), feminist authors employed strategies developed by postmodernist writers. Feminists welcomed the opportunity to rewrite the patriarchal script that was presented by postmodernism which, according to Jean-Francois Lyotard, rejected all universal theories and ideas (Gamble 299). Feminist utopian writers shared the postmodernism’s project to disrupt traditional boundaries between elite and popular culture, theory and practice, art and life, and the dominant and the marginal. In her analysis of the literary postmodern, Feminine Fictions (1989), Patricia Waugh argues that postmodernist writings by women maintain an adherence to the principle of the historically situated subject, thus rejecting the doctrine of “impersonal ity” which characterized the work of many male postmodern novelists. Feminist utopias reflect the recognition of the personal as political, as well as the open critique of patriarchal master discourse. These openended and selfreflexive narratives liberate the utopian discourse from its petrified systematizing that has restricted utopian desire in patriarchy. Feminist utopian novels have added to the ways in which the women perceived their dissatisfaction with the present. They also contribute to the wider utopian dialogue of speculation about the emancipatory society and share in the reassessment of feminist activism going on since the 1960s. According to Moylan (56), a key theme in feminist criticism is the maintenance of diversity and difference. Discussing “women’s renaissance in science fiction,” Jeanne Gomoll in her 1986 “Open Letter to Joanna Russ” refers to the empowering action of feminist utopia that counteracts the symbolic violence of patriarchal utopia and science fiction: It was not one or two or a mere scattering of women, after all, who participated in women’s renaissance in science fiction. It was a great BUNCH of women: too many to discourage or ignore individually, too good to pretend to be flukes. In fact, their work was so pervasive, so obvious, so influential, and they won so many of the major awards, that their [work] demands to be considered centrally as one looks back on the late 70s and early 80s Ah ha, I thought, how could they ever suppress all THAT?! (Quoted in Russ What Are We Fighting For? 429) The rhetorical situation underwent a dramatic change in the 1980s. At that time, patriarchy attempted to reverse the major achievements of secondwave feminism;

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

73

as a result, the initially negative critical response of mainstream criticism grew into a powerful backlash. As Joanna Russ mentions in her 1998 book, “[w]hen you can't bury something completely, declare it boring, selfish, and a fad” (What Are We Fighting For? 429). Suppressing “all that” mini-boom of feminist utopias came in an elaborate way: it was achieved not through criticizing the decade’s feminism directly, but by criticizing it in code, i.e. by attacking something that seemed unrelated to it. As Jeanne Gomoll explains: For the last couple [of] years I’ve begun to suspect that the phrase “the middecade” is really... [an] attack upon changes made by the women’s movement.… But the ironic judgment of the men who found themselves cared for less well than their fathers had been, is that women who are not selfless must be selfish.… As time goes on, the two statements—# 1: that SF was boring—or faddish—in the ’70s and #2: that women’s writing and issues are boring—appear to be two separate statements and new readers are lulled into ignorance. (Quoted in Russ 1998, 429–430) It is important to note that patriarchal criticism attacked feminism as a whole, thus burying its diversity. However, since its onset in the 1970s, feminist utopianism has never been a homogeneous body of thought; no more than feminism itself. More importantly, feminist utopianism, while firmly rooted in the present in its various critiques, is not representative of feminism in general. Nan Bowman Albinski (1988) raises similar points regarding the differences amongst feminist utopias. Albinski has undertaken a comprehensive historical analysis of American and British feminist utopian literature. She finds some striking differences between these works: the American tradition is concerned with a “belief in social rather than political change, internal rather than external influences, and in religious and moral rather than secular evolution” (Albinski 5). Differences in narrative content can be found within women’s utopian theory and fiction because differences exist within and between the various ideological manifestations of feminism. The move observed by Albinski towards a certain fragmentation and dislocation is illustrative of this. As she rightly observes, black and white feminisms are not yet comfortable with one another, and the consequent tension between the pull of integration on the one hand, and separation on the other, is an important theme of her work. I would like to turn now to the interplay of genre and its meta-genre as represented in the critical discourse on feminist utopia. The concept of metagenre was recently developed by Janet Giltrow, a well-known Canadian genre theorist. Giltrow (2002) recommends us “to hear talk about genres” as “a complex indication of social context” (187) suggesting that meta-genre is a useful concept for discriminating among rhetorical situations because it can help clarify a number of their aspects (199). She describes meta-genres as “atmospheres of wordings and activities, demonstrated precedents or sequestered expectations— atmospheres surrounding genres” that have semiotic ties to their context of use

74 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

(195). She suggests that the concept of meta-genre can facilitate our understanding of the kind and quantity of information a context transmits to its writers and readers (199). Meta-genres “comprise not only syntactic, substantive and pragmatic regularities but also regularities in the way readers and writers translate their tacit know-how into discursive knowledge” (190). The concept of meta-genre easily lends itself for critical analysis; in my case, for exploring the ideology and sociopolitics of the feminist discourse community of the 1970s. As Giltrow suggests, even “[the] history of a meta-genre itself—its timing in the schedule of the genre’s career, its changes over time—could be read to discriminate amongst rhetorical situations” (199). I am most interested in those changes that can identify the kairos, chronotope, and significant disturbances in the genre’s evolution and career, as well as instances of dissent or acclamation in meta-genre. I would like to explore the situations in which feminist writers compose in the utopian genre and instances of contest and domination where discourse is a site for interested interpretations. I will also be looking for functional collusion of understandings and noting those unspoken nego tiations amongst conflicting interests that are represented in the meta-genre. Though critical discourse and meta-genre are not the same concepts, they intersect: critical discourse includes hermeneutic, biographical, historicist, and other subgenres; meta-genre, among other sub-genres, includes rubrics, handouts, guidelines (Giltrow personal communication 05/31/2000). I will suggest that subgenres of critical discourse make meta-generic assumptions about what kind of narrative should be identified as a feminist utopia, and what kind of social action a feminist utopian narrative should accomplish. I will start my analysis of the meta-genre with Joanna Russ’s influential essay Recent Feminist Utopias (1981) that discusses eleven books published between 1971 and 1978. These are the narratives that are now referred to as “women’s renaissance in science fiction” (Jeanne Gomoll) and “the miniboom of feminist utopias” (Joanna Russ). Historically, Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères is the earliest; its English translation was published by Viking in 1971. Though Wittig’s book is actually not a North American utopia, Russ identifies it as a catalyst for some of the later US-American utopias (“Recent Feminist Utopias” 133–134). Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed was published in 1974 and Russ’s The Female Man in 1975. Several books appeared in 1976: Samuel Delany’s Triton, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Shattered Chain, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Sally Gearhart’s The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women, Catherine Madsden’s Commodore Bork and the Compost, and two stories by Alice Sheldon, “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!” under the pseudonym of Raccoona Sheldon and “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” under the pseudonym of James Tiptree, Jr. Most of these novels present alternative futures that suggest multiple possibilities, some utopian, some decidedly dystopian. The last novel that Russ includes in her list of feminist utopias, Suzy McKee Charnas’s Motherlines, was published in 1978.

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

75

Many commentators now agree that the 1980s were dominated by the ReaganBush conservative politics and tarnished by the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment. In this changed context, feminist writers found it more and more difficult to see better times ahead. The late 1970s is the period in which Suzy McKee Charnas, for example, sets up her utopian Motherlines with Walk to the End of the World, an earlier dystopian fiction. Indeed, feminist visions of the future tended to show a dark turn in the 1980s. This turn has been attributed to political reverses that dumped the feminist optimism of the 1970s: “More recent fictions no longer give us images of a radically different future, in which the values and ideals of feminism have been extended to much of the planet, but rather offer depressing images of a brutal reestablishment of capitalist patriarchy” (Fitting 142). By the mid1980s, Margaret Atwood produces The Handmaid’s Tale, a feminist text that is almost purely dystopian. Russ’s essay, “Recent Feminist Utopias,” was first published in 1981, i.e., a decade after the first of these books appeared. At this time, Russ was already an established feminist writer with a developed network of fans; therefore, her attempts to theorize the new genre were coming from a position of authority and were influencing the further evolution of the genre. Russ’s essay is of particular interest to me because, among other things, it helps to distinguish between the rhetorical situations of the 1970s and the 1980s. It is obvious that Russ’s status in the 1980s had distinct meta-generic consequences because her analysis of the socio-political and rhetorical situation of the 1970s influences not only the metageneric assumptions of other feminist utopian critics, but feminist ideology at large. In this way, Russ was establishing the “rules for playing” in the metagenre. Struggling within the limitations of the patriarchal definition of utopia as a blueprint of a perfect society, Russ points out that defining the novels under discussion as utopian might be problematic within the limited framework of the patriarchal definition. Simultaneously, Russ argues for explicitness of their feminist orientation. Russ starts her essay with a disclaimer: “although ‘utopia’ may be a misnomer for some of these works, many of which present not perfect societies but only ones better than the authors’ own, ‘feminist’ is not” because these narratives portray societies that are conceived by their authors as better in explicitly feminist terms and for explicitly feminist reasons (134). Moreover, these utopias “use similar tropes and similar terms in their presentation of feminist concerns and the feminist analyses that are central to these concerns” (134). It is notable that Russ carefully selects for discussion only those utopias that fall within her own definition of “feminist.” Obviously, similarity of topics is an important criterion for her selection, thus allowing her to exclude novels that do not meet this criterion. I find it quite notable because this is where meta-genre is displaying its exclusionary potential. Nadeane Trowse in “The Exclusionary Potential of Genre: Margery Kempe’s Transgressive Search for a Deniable Pulpit” (2002) invokes Freadman’s metaphor of gameplaying introduced in

76 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

Anyone for Tennis? (1994). She reminds us that genres are like games; for this reason, like games, genres must have rules in order to function. And rules may disempower; as Trowse points out, they may “restrict or prohibit certain actions of players, may even specify what kinds of players can or cannot play” (341–342). Developing this idea, I would like to suggest that meta-genres, obviously, also have this ability to disempower. For example, while commenting on the similarity of feminist utopias, Russ fails to include Dorothy Bryant’s The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You (1971) in her list, thus tacitly undermining this book’s identification as feminist. To an extent, it can be explained by Bryant’s lack of a strong female protagonist and her distinctive ecological and spiritual emphasis. According to Russ, feminist utopias are remarkable not only for their explicit feminist orientation, but also for their intertextuality and connectivity; as Russ points out, “They not only ask the same questions and point to the same abuses; they provide similar answers and remedies” (136). It follows that Bryant’s novel might have been excluded because Bryant fails to imitate other feminist utopias and does not take up these topics. I think that this is where meta genre demonstrates its ideological essence: definitions established in terms of content would attempt to identify politically grouped “types” of utopia. The use of a politically defining adjective such as “feminist” to describe a certain type of utopianism (eutopia, dystopia and utopian satire) does have some advantages. It makes for a definition that is descriptive while allowing flexibility to the genre itself. However, it also has limitations which outweigh its advantages, for if the characteristics of this form of utopianism are taken to be representative of the genre as a whole, familiar problems of exclusion will arise once more. Again, we can see traces of dissent within the metagenre. Russ further confirms that feminist utopia emerged in response to the negative representation of women in patriarchal science fiction and utopia. She reminds us that in the 1960s American science fiction was written for and read primarily by the young male audience. Until the 1970s, American science fiction ignored the woman’s estate and the problems of social structure. Even such “honorable exceptions” as Theodore Sturgeon and Damon Knight, says Russ, could only “indicate their stress at a state of affairs in which women were perceived as inferior and men were encouraged in machismo” because “earlier feminism had been buried and the new feminism of the late 1960s had yet to occur” (135). For example, Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X “presents no political analysis of sex class, and its solution— literal unisex—places the blame for oppressive social conditions on the biologically innate temperament of the sexes” (135). Russ emphatically rejects this solution because it assigns blame to biology or to both sexes equally. Judging by its attitude toward sex roles, Russ divides patriarchal science fiction into three categories: “the status quo (which will be carried into the future without change), role reversals (seen as evil), and fiction in which women (usually few) are shown as equals alongside men” (135), in a side-kick role, as in Westerns. Russ emphasizes, however, that “the crucial questions about the rest of society (e.g., personal relations and who’s doing the work women

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

77

usually do) are not answered” (135) by the patriarchal genre. I think that the patriarchal genre was not able to even pose these crucial questions, let alone answer them because that action was not part of its desired outcome. In her influential essay “Anyone for Tennis?” (1994), Ann Freadman maintains that a genre is governed by a ceremonial (or, to use Lyotard’s term, by a “jurisdiction”); she defines it as “a ritualized sequence in a formalized space and time, enacted by fit persons to effect a specific outcome” (Freadman “Uptake,” 44). She further argues that “when uptake crosses the boundary between ceremonials, and a fortiori between jurisdictions, it mediates between genres” (44). If the utopian genre situates the utterance and its speaker as the defining rhetorical act, then it is clear too that second-wave feminists could not be considered as the “fit persons” and were not able to effect an outcome specified by the patriarchal genre; therefore, they had to violate its “rules for playing” on order to produce their own outcome. While the function of their utterance was indeed defiance of rules, hence a threat to society and a challenge to patriarchy, let us not forget that the feminist meaning they constructed was context-specific. Feminist interventions articulated their rejection of the patriarchal signifying place/time and their creation of a new signifying space for representing feminist values. The rhetorical impotence of the over-regulated patriarchal genre urged feminist writers to “demand the impossible” and ultimately empowered them for conceptual transgression. The inadequacy of the patriarchal genre was overcome by the emergence of a new genre that compensated for the desire and expectations of the feminist discourse community. This feminist genre challenged sexist restrictions on gender representation in both current and utopian reality. Russ argues that feminist utopias of the 1970s are not only embodiments of apparently “universal” human values, but they are also reactive; that is, they supply in fiction what their authors believe women lack in the real world (144). Consequently, these utopias are concerned with “the grossest and simplest forms of injustice and violence against women”; for example, they discuss rape and the unavailability of noncoercive and nonexploitative sex. Another issue that they are preoccupied with is the escape from urban landscapes that women do not own and do not enjoy because they are not safe or happy in them. According to Russ, feminist utopias portray women that are busy saving their children from solitary imprisonment, madness, rape and beatings, or being chained for life (146). These narratives challenge essentialist values of female roles, sexuality and constructions of gender. For example, Angela Carter’s novel, The Passion of New Eve, transgresses notions of gender and its construction by having male characters changed to female through medical experiment; in contrast, characters initially thought to be female are revealed as male. In Carter’s representation, gender is fragmented and chaotic; similarly, as I will show further, it is portrayed as fragmented and nomadic in Russ’s novel The Female Man. A chaotic and fragmented representation of gender was not possible in the patriarchal genre that favored essentialist definitions. As Russ reports, a

78 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

particularly misogynist subgenre evolved within patriarchal science fiction: the role-reversal (or battle-of-the-sexes) novel that described “all-female or femaledominated worlds (of which there are none among feminist utopias) that are returned to normalcy by male visitors from our own society or male renegades from the world of the story” (143). By some method reminiscent of a phallic display (flashing, kiss, rape), the “normal” men overthrew “abnormal” gynocracy, which was portrayed as both repressive and inefficient. These novels presented the phallic display (including rape) as desired by the woman. Russ identifies these novels as nonerotic, presenting sex as a matter of power and not pleasure. They are also strikingly violent in their celebration of male power that guarantees the man’s victory over his enemies. At the same time, Russ points to a fundamental difference in the representation of sex and violence when she observes that feminist utopias are relatively nonviolent: The battle-of-the-sexes novels envision what is essentially (despite sciencefiction trappings) a one-to-one confrontation between one man and one woman, in which the man’s sexual power guarantees his victory, while feminist utopias, if they present a conflict at all, see it as a public, impersonal struggle. One might expect the public war to be more violent than personal conflict; thus the relative gentleness of the feminist books is all the more surprising. (Recent Feminist Utopias 144) Distinguishing feminist utopias as relatively gentle, Russ mentions, however, that they are labeled by patriarchal critics as violent; moreover, their “violence” is perceived as “abnormal” and deviant precisely because it is directed by women against men. Here, we can see traces of unspoken negotiations4 in the meta-genre when patriarchal criticism naturalizes highly contingent practices of representation of sex and violence in mainstream science fiction. The negative patriarchal response to feminist utopias suggests that the feminist genre was socially active enough to generate the negotiation of conflicting interests. Russ reports that a male reviewer in Mother Jones described her novel The Female Man as “a scream of anger” and “a bitter fantasy of reversed sexual oppression,” quoting at length from the episodes when women use violence against men. However, as Russ mentions, there are only four such episodes in her novel: “a woman at a party practices judo on a man who is behaving violently towards her and (by accident) hurts him; a woman kills a man during a Cold War between the sexes after provocation, lasting (she says) twenty years; a woman kills another woman as part of her duty as a police officer; a woman, in anger and terror, shuts a door on a man’s thumb (this last incident is briefly mentioned and not shown)” (144). Nonetheless, the male reviewer quoted at length from the second and fourth incidents (the only two quotations from the novel he used), entirely disregarding the other two and ignoring the relatively peaceful utopian society on Whileaway. Russ’s account of this instance of critical

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

79

disparity provides evidence of dissent between the feminist discourse and the mainstream critical response. Importantly, Russ analyses the kairos of genre emergence: she identifies the “mini-boom” of feminist utopias in the 1970s as a phenomenon not only contemporaneous with the second-wave feminist movement but made possible by it (135). Russ discerns the social exigency and acknowledges the feminist discourse community when she concludes that “in these recent feminist utopias we certainly have part of the growing body of women’s culture, at least available in some quantity to readers who need and can use it” (146). Likewise, Carol Pearson, another influential feminist critic of the time, argues that feminist utopias form “a remarkably coherent group made possible by the feminist movement” (“Coming Home” 63). In this way, she seems to stress that feminist counterdiscourse is united by similarity (or, to use Burke’s phrase, by consubstantiality). I would like to point out that here genre becomes a meaningmaking event that achieves specific social purposes. I would argue that feminist utopias of the 1970s are “female-sexed texts” that members of the feminist discourse community are able to recognize. They bear distinctive stylistic markers of what Cixous described as I’écriture feminine. I would also like to remind my readers about M.A.K. Halliday’s insight on how a text functions (though Halliday did not specifically refer to feminist utopia when making this observation). According to Halliday (1986), a text “functions as the realization of semiotic orders ‘above’ the language” because it “does not merely reflect the reality beyond it; it participates in the reality-making and reality-changing processes” (339). For these reasons, I would argue that feminist utopias of the 1970s are bridging an important conceptual gap when they promote the personal as political, assign symbolic power to women, and relegate men to a negative semantic space, thus reversing the socio-symbolic contract. To account for the similarity of the books she discusses, Russ introduces the notion of their “parallel evolution” (133). Russ considers this parallel evolution a significant feature of feminist utopias. I would like to explain Russ’s notion in terms of Anne Freadman’s observation that she makes while discussing strategic and tactical dimensions of symbolic interchange. Freadman reminds us that “a genre does not inhere in its more or less standardized morphology, but in the dynamics of what Carolyn Miller calls ‘social action’; that is what it gets people to do with one another, and what they do with it” (Miller 1984, quoted in Freadman 2002, 40). This intentional similarity can be construed as part of the genre’s social action. Russ maintains that in the 1970s, science fiction is still a relatively small field; therefore, authors included in her list have likely read one another (with the possible exception of Monique Wittig); nonetheless, she finds it significant what exactly feminist authors chose to imitate. Within the newrhetorical framework, I would like to make two observations on how genre responds to its context of situation. First, new-rhetorical theories of genre highlight the intertextuality and dialogism of discourse. As Burke suggests, our social discourses are connected

80 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

rather than autonomous; this relates to Bakhtin’s insight that all utterances are dialogic and, therefore, intertextual. Second, I think that the explicit consensual solidarity of the meta-genre reveals the functional collusion of understanding. According to Giltrow (2002), such consensus signifies “a deep socialization and isomorphism of practice and identity” (Giltrow 199). In the patriarchal rhetorical situation, feminist writers have to overcome the symbolic violence of the patriarchal genre, including its misrepresentation of woman and its ingrained sexism. Identifying themes and concerns specific to feminist utopias of the 1970s, Russ points out the noticeable absence of traditional patriarchal values, such as “material success, scientific triumph, immortality, being admired for one’s exceptional qualities, success in competition, inherited status” (Recent Feminist Utopias 146). In contract, as she points out, feminist utopia is “explicit about economics and politics, sexually permissive, demystifying about biology, emphatic about the necessity for female bonding, concerned with chil dren” (“Amor Vincit Foeminam,” 15). It is also “non-urban, classless, communal, relatively peaceful while allowing room for female rage and female self-defense, and serious about the emotional and physical consequences of violence” (15). Russ’s definition points towards a generic utopian difference from mainstream fiction: utopia allows the writer and the reader to move beyond constraints of everyday reality. More recently, commentators have suggested that feminist utopianism goes even further beyond the strictures of patriarchal fiction: it differs from patriarchal utopia because it transgresses the standard view of utopia as perfection due to its desire to escape closure (Sargisson 1996, 3). By the 1990s, a consensus develops in the meta-genre that the expression of utopian thought has always been transgressive of disciplinary boundaries. Indeed, Ernst Bloch identified utopia in terms of transcendence. It is now widely accepted that utopian thought always represents a critical engagement with political issues and debates of its time. As Sargisson (1996) observes, recurrent themes and constructions in feminist utopias fall into three broad areas of transgression: reconsideration of stereotypes of gender, sex and the nuclear family; disruption of assumptions about time being linear or sequential, and truth and reality being stable; transcendence of patriarchal genre and narrative conventions. In all three areas, feminist utopias use multiplicity as a method to reject dualistic, hierarchical thought and to re-present reality. For my purposes, the third area is most important. Sargisson (59) extracts from socialist and feminist approaches a view of utopianism as having oppositional and transformative dynamic functions. Utopianism challenges the simplistic dualistic opposition and replaces it with a multi-sourced and multidirectional conception, which needs to create new paradigms. Utopianism has a speculative function which is located in part in its conventions of critique, estrangement and imaginative writing. “Utopias, though not blueprints, can be harbingers,” says Carol Kessler (2). Tom Moylan argues that feminist writers attempt to create in their works what he calls “critical

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

81

utopias,” retaining an “awareness of the limitation of the utopian tradition, so that these texts reject utopia as blueprint while preserving it as dream” (10). Such utopias are able to function effectively as critiques of the status quo, while maintaining a self-critical awareness that prevents them from descending into empty utopian cliché. In order to critique contemporary society, critical utopia must, according to Moylan, destroy, transform and revive the utopian tradition, which, in its present/past state, is/was inadequate to the task of provoking social transformation. A fixed, finite and universal utopia of perfection cannot, says Moylan, adequately critique a fixed, finite and universal capitalist system. Only an understanding of utopia that destroys old perceptions of the genre can transform them into something new and thus revive utopianism. This new utopianism can adequately reflect the concerns, needs and wants of contemporary oppositional forces. Critical utopia does not blueprint: social change in process is privileged even in the alternative societies it presents. In this way, the key term “critical utopia” describes that growing category of utopias that present a good place with problems that reflect critically on the utopian genre itself: both difference and imperfection are retained. Moylan’s theory not only conceptualizes utopia, but also (and importantly) approaches utopianism from a fresh angle. Utopian thought not only points to the not-yetbecome but opens receptivity to new and radically different/other ways of being and thinking. The ultimate function of utopianism is, for Moylan, the development of an open consciousness of the present: “It can only offer itself as an activity which opens human imagination beyond present limits” (40). Lucy Sargisson suggests that, instead of blueprints, feminist utopias are better read as metaphors. This position reminds of Burke’s insight that metaphors identify the ethical with the aesthetic, that they can be used to construct a “corrective literature” which will motivate its audience toward an alternative social orientation; in this case, toward the accommodation of the needs of the female subject. This brief analysis of the meta-genre demonstrates that feminist commentary on utopianism is often cast in term of its narrative content (Gearhart 1984, Pearson 1981, Russ 1995). The surprising thematic similarity of feminist utopias makes it easy to assume that this specific narrative content distinguishes feminist utopias from the patriarchal genre. However, while it is certainly true that the content of feminist utopias is what marks them as specifically feminist, this content alone is inadequate with regard to definition. Sally Miller Gearhart’s definition is a good example of this inadequacy: A feminist utopian novel is one which a) contrasts the present with an envisioned idealized society (separated from the present by time or space), b) offers a comprehensive critique of present values/conditions, c) sees men or male institutions as a major cause of present social ills, and d) presents women not only as at least the equals of men but also as the sole arbiters of their reproductive function. (Gearhart 296)

82 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

Lucy Sargisson (1996) argues that Gearhart’s definition is insufficient and exclusionary on several accounts. The first concerns utopian content and is fairly straightforward: implicit in Gearhart’s point of (a) is the assumption that the feminist utopian novel is representative of eutopia, while other elements of the field, such as dystopia, are being disregarded (31). Lyman Tower Sargent (1994), on the other hand, insists that the field of utopianism contains eutopia, dystopia and utopian satire. Moreover, there is no room in Gearhart’s definition for the open-ended utopia. In this reading, therefore, Gearhart’s understanding of utopia is over-restrictive: it downplays such important aspects of the social action of feminist utopias as the envisioning of a future society that is better in a feminist sense, portraying it in its development, or exploring strategies for social change. It also reduces the women’s activity to their reproductive function, or, at least, gives this function a primary defining status. Therefore, Gearhart’s definition of the feminist utopian genre invokes unnecessary closure—a twofold closure that restricts utopianism to conventional understandings, and restricts feminism to Gearhart’s limited conception. Keeping in mind Carolyn Miller’s idea that “a rhetorically sound definition of genre must be centered not on the substance or form of discourse but on the action it is used to accomplish” (151), I would like to suggest that the major symbolic action of feminist utopia is its participation in contemporary remetaphorization and the generation of a feminist mythology. This action provides for the “fusion” of form and substance implied by Miller’s definition of genre as “a complex of formal and substantive features that create a particular effect in a given situation” (153). Miller goes on to argue that substance and form interrelate hierarchically, claiming that form on one level signifies substance on another level. And it is “through this hierarchical combination of form and substance that symbolic structures take on pragmatic force and become interpretable actions” (Miller 160). The interpretable actions that feminist utopia performs are numerous and diverse. It questions the adequacy of patriarchal language to describe reality, and especially feminist reality. By employing ambiguity, fluidity and multiplicity, feminist utopia deconstructs binary oppositions of male/female, mind/body, spirit/matter, and utopia/dystopia. It portrays the personal as political while describing the situations that empower the individual woman for growth and transformation. It treats violence with a seriousness that is central to the feminist rhetoric of the time. It is explicit about economics and politics as the driving force of capitalism and a key tool in oppressing women and maintaining the status quo. It also portrays unprecedented workplace opportunities unattainable for most women in the 1970s and describes societies that are not prescriptively heterosexual. Suggesting divergent options for the way out, feminist utopias promote the feminist message that biology is not (necessarily) destiny—not, at least, in social and political terms. As a genre, feminist utopia has several ideological functions. The narrowness of the patriarchal utopia urges feminist writers to “demand the impossible” and

UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM

83

ultimately empowers them for conceptual transgression. The feminist genre emerges in response to the negative representation of women in the patriarchal genre (as invisible, objectified, nonimportant, or nonexistent), and is, therefore, critical of the patriarchal social order. It provokes social transformation by offering possibilities for individual and social change. The social action of feminist utopia is the rejection of the strictures of patriarchal language, of male dominance, of narrative form, and the creation of a positive semantic space for the woman. In particular, disruption of dominant genre canons occurs through transgression of social codes and truth-conditional notions of time and reality and through deconstruction of patriarchal tropes. Feminist utopian transgression of the notions of time, reality, and sequential order can be read through Luce Irigaray’s “conditional mode,” interpreted by Rosi Braidotti as a way to address becoming a woman rather than being a woman (415). The idea of becoming is a powerful notion that subverts time and reality because a subject that is becoming is constantly changing and cannot be fixed or defined in the same way as a static “being.” In the next chapter, I will show how becoming, or the conditional mode, implies an eternal present that is evoked in the dreamtime of Dorothy Bryant’s The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You. The novel’s male protagonist undergoes a paradigm shift in consciousness regarding what constitutes reality. I will also discuss Carol Pearson’s conception of time as paradoxical, coexistent (past, present and future) and outside of our control (“Of Time and Space” 261). These concepts will enable me to view feminist utopia as work that disrupts certainty and truth, playing with time and space, openness and diversity.

CHAPTER THREE Dorothy Bryant Saving the Human Race

When Dorothy Bryant’s novel, The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, appeared in 1971, the response of the feminist community was a critique and a radical departure from her position. The novel’s identification as a feminist text was seen as problematic on the grounds that “Bryant’s feminism is subsumed in her holistic ecologism: the emancipation of women is not a central theme of this text” (Sargisson 153). Indeed, in her utopia Bryant goes beyond the problems of living in the world without disturbing its ecological balance into presenting its characters as feeling a strong emotional connection to nature. This utopia did not fit easily within the orientation and meta-generic assumptions of feminist scholars, possibly, due to their perfectionist tendency. As Burke comments, to the extent that a terminology contains various implications, there is “a corresponding ‘perfectionist’ tendency” for people to carry out these implications (Language 19). Because Bryant’s utopia favors tolerance, humility, forgiveness (even of rape and murder), Bryant’s opponents might have been induced to carry out the implications embodied in their rigid definitions of the genre and failed to recognize the extent to which her book was consubstantial with their ideology. For example, my Women’s Studies students in the fall of 1999 had a problem identifying her book as feminist because it does not have a strong female protagonist; its feminist message is overshadowed by ecological and humanistic concerns; it does not express female anger and rage, nor does it suggest radical action against patriarchy. I would argue that, though Bryant’s novel is more traditionally utopian (it is written in a dreamlike mode, presenting utopia as a dream, which is consubstantial with the more traditional understanding of utopianism as social dreaming), its feminist orientation functions on a deeper level. Examining Bryant’s articulation of the feminist message, I will take a look at strategic changes that occur when Bryant adopts the utopian genre. I am treating Bryant’s novel as an instance of the feminist utopian genre that provides a site for gendered opposition and resistance to patriarchy and explores new possibilities for human agency by means of: • Questioning the adequacy of patriarchal language to describe reality, and especially feminist reality (thus challenging the patriarchal divides

DOROTHY BRYANT

• •

• •

85

of conscious/subconscious, knowable/ unknowable, truth/illusion, writing/ dreaming). Exploring the ways in which binary oppositions male/female, nature/culture, spirit/matter, primitive/advanced, health/disease, can be transgressed. Portraying the personal as political (by examining the oppositions of self/ collective, private/public spheres) and describing the situations that empower a person for growth and transformation. Treating violence with a seriousness that is central to the feminist rhetoric of the time. Describing a two-sexed society that is not prescriptively heterosexual, and by promoting feminist reasoning on the issues of sexuality, love, control over one’s fertility, child-bearing, birth, parenting.

Discussing the chronotope of Bryant’s novel, I will explore its relationship to the antecedent genre(s), its dialogism and intertextuality, arguing that Bryant’s novel does not only intervene into the utopian genre, but it also revives basic folkloric and idyllic matrices in literature. In doing this, I will employ Bakhtin’s theory of the folkloric and the idyllic chronotopes outlined in “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (206–236). Bryant explores several possibilities of traditional plots: the first is the traditional utopian premise of a voyage to utopia and return to the real world. This cycle reflects a sense of utopian fulfillment as expressed in Le Guin’s maxim “true departure is return,” in this case return to the roots of precapitalist, classless society. (Le Guin in The Dispossessed suggests that there is always a sense in which you are returning as you depart, and that your return indicates the fulfillment of the journey for which the departure was a beginning. Her slogan “true departure is return” is illustrated by the circular imagery and the cyclic form of The Dispossessed and by the story of the protagonist.) The next is the traditional cyclic “framing” device: the first and last chapters occur in the real world, and they frame the portrayal of the utopian world. I will argue that this particular cyclic movement of the text demonstrates both Bryant’s revival of folkloristic traditions and her feminist interventions into them. Bryant creates one more cyclic “frame” when she directly addresses the readers in the epigraph: “and the Comforter…shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance” (Bryant ii) and in the very end of the novel, portraying her protagonist as the Comforter who invites the readers to start their utopian journey “tonight, when you close your eyes” (220), thus constructing the readers as participating in the action of the novel. In contrast, in her description of the protagonist’s transformation in the utopian world, Bryant treats the audience as eavesdroppers. This double framing device is not unusual either, and Bryant’s epigraph justifies this cyclic framing in its mystical implication that the Comforter will tell the readers what they have always known. This device shapes the narrator-reader interaction, helping Bryant’s protagonist treat the audience as consubstantial and directly address the readers in focal narrative moments.

86 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

Discussing the book’s relationship with the antecedent patriarchal genre, I will argue that it treats utopia as a transhistorical form and revives it through feminist individuation. It displays dialogic and intertextual relationships with other literary genres, plots and motifs. Bryant’s utopia manifests its dialogism when it takes up the motifs and plots of the detective story, Christian fables, the pastoral, the agricultural idyll, the journal, the confession. The narrator/protagonist is a thoroughly dislikable man who, during the story, causes the deaths of two people and twice rapes one of his healers. In another cyclic motion, the novel starts with murder and finishes with the trial of the protagonist. Bryant borrows on myth and fable when describing the metamorphosis of the protagonist in the utopian world and his willful sacrifice. She also makes an important move when she expands the possibilities of patriarchal genres. For example, as Bakhtin argues, the mythic unity of the world of folklore rules out any representation of individual change and self-realization. To move towards this, the narrative must move away from the world of folklore to a genre whose chronotope allows for individual transformation. The world of Ata, then, combines both the chronotopes of the idyll and the novel by means of representing the private origin and public representation and use of dreams. Bryant’s innovation is that her utopian chronotope combines two other chronotopes that seemed to be quite opposite for Bakhtin: Bryant creates a possibility for the existence of an individual observer in the collectivist utopian time, and for his subsequent individual transformation within this collectivist chronotope. THE REAL WORLD The novel starts with a sudden jump, in an unmediated narrative voice. The unnamed “I” of a male, white, individualistic narrator proudly presents himself as the embodiment of commonsense capitalist morality and extreme consumerism. This narrator/protagonist, a self-made rich man, remains unnamed throughout the novel, though Bryant finds most unusual names for her utopian women and men (Aya, Tam, Chil-sing, Sbgai, or a little girl named Herbert). Bryant does not find a name for her patriarchal protagonist, and I find it notable that neither does Russ in The Female Man: Russ’s male characters have no names either. This anonymity suggests that the emphasized nameless-ness of male characters might constitute a feminist utopian genre’s attempt to relegate the man to a negative space; such a reversal would help feminist writers to problematize gender constructions within the “normal” patriarchal discourse. In my reading of the novel, I will call Bryant’s protagonist the Man. In the metamorphosis of her white, male, intellectual protagonist, Bryant offers her stimulating yet problematic answer to the readers. By choosing a male protagonist and narrator while using a female utopian character to promote her eco-humanitarian ideals and articulate her strategy for initiating social change, Bryant goes beyond radical definitions of feminist utopia. Even if

DOROTHY BRYANT

87

Bryant’s novel is not a radical feminist utopia, it sends a strong feminist message by envisioning the realization of feminist values of the 70s: nurturing, bonding, sharing, and spirituality. At that time, it might have been especially revealing to have these values reflected through a masculine consciousness. The Man’s “real world” is a patriarchal society where human relationships are based on the capitalist ideologies of competitiveness, consumerism and individualism, and the patriarchal values of ownership, rigid gender stereotypes, heterosexual monogamy, nuclear family and exclusive parenting. Bryant’s utopia challenges all these ideologies. In the patriarchal discourse [which Cixous calls “the on-going story of phallocentrism” in the “empire of the Selfsame” (Cixous “Sorties” 79)], individual success at the expense of others is highly valued. Therefore, Bryant makes a particular effort to show the futility and irrelevance of patriarchal values, thus exemplifying the critical function of the feminist utopian genre. The Man describes his “successful” pre-Atan life in terms of having material possessions, power, prestige, and capital. The protagonist enjoys living on what he calls an “orgasmic plane of success”: he has a strong appetite for “talent, appreciation, fame, drugs and drink and sex and fame and things ... plenty of things” (Bryant 25). Within the “normal” patriarchal ideology, this way of life is accepted and celebrated. However, within the utopian perspective, Bryant creates a framework of rejection for the patriarchal order by portraying the “real world” as a nightmare-generating disaster. Bryant’s utopian character describes it as a place where “all the people are like starving beasts, catching a glimpse from time to time of the great feast that lies before them, but kept from it by an invisible wall of fear and pride and superstition, crying, clawing at one another, despairing, and, by their acts, creating nightmares so that they learn to despise and fear that which would save them” (Bryant 139). The Man’s method of getting money and women, who “fall into his bed like cut grass,” is highly unethical and immoral. It is not surprising that all his coveted “orgasms of life” prove to be false: “But almost before you’ve finished saying it, you’re on your way down, the thrill is waning, the orgasm is over and you can’t reach it quite that way again” (25). When the Man twice rapes a woman in the utopian world, he demonstrates that his disdainful treatment of her and his own rape-related empowerment is the “norm” that he has acquired in his “real world.” Bryant further proves that the ideology of individual success at the expense of others promotes isolation and profound loneliness. Not surprisingly, while surfing on the “orgasmic wave” of success, the Man understands that his success is “phony”; he feels lonely and suffers from frequent nightmares. These nightmares become the only “real” thing in his life. He cannot develop a human connection even with his girlfriend Connie, who he sees as a stereotypical woman “out of one of his books,” with “long legs, small waist, full breasts that hung loose, half covered by tossed blonde hair” (1). Connie’s stereotypical looks are phony: “the pubic hair tells the true color of her bleached hair: mouse brown, blotchy skin with smeared make-up” (1). Despite Connie’s claims that she exists,

88 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

that she is not his invention, in the Man’s world she can only be treated as a dispensable sex object and not quite a human being; therefore, neither communication, nor understanding or love are possible. When the Man gets violent, he kills Connie without hesitation and remorse, thus transforming her into a “wet doll,” a commodity that he has consumed and can now discard at his will. Bryant demonstrates the patriarchal relegation of the woman to a negative semantic space by having the Man kill his girlfriend because he is not sure that she actually exists and that she is not part of his nightmares. However, his victim becomes one of the phantoms of his nightmares that throughout the novel are contrasted to the utopian “good dreams.” Panicking, the Man escapes and gets into a car accident. The cinematic description of the slow movement of his car that floats through the air, then rolls and rolls (5) and finally crashes, marks an important focal point in the narrative when the “real-world” time slows down and eventually stops entirely. He realizes that his death will be a plunge into permanent nightmare, and this is what frightens him most. However, when the Man awakens after the crash, instead of a nightmare he finds himself in a utopian paradise which he does not recognize as such, at least not until much later in the novel. The paradox is further intensified when the utopian people explain to the Man that he is one of the “lost” Atans, and utopia was indeed his destination. He could not have reached Ata if he did not want to get there: “It is a very hard thing,” said Salvatore, “a very great thing, to come from the outside. That is why we were so grateful that you came, because we saw you as part of the fulfillment of our purpose” (81). The purpose of Ata is “to survive, to persist in the dream until the lost Atans return[ed], not in ships or planes, but one by one through their dreams; to hold on until man could begin again to fulfill hisdestiny” (146). Throughout the novel, Bryant keeps reminding the readers of the existing threat of the “real world”: its planes, helicopters and ships keep approaching Ata. The people of Ata cannot afford to have the island discovered because their way of life will perish, and that will result in the collapse of the “real world.” Therefore, by using their collective telepathic power, they make their island temporarily “disappear” and thus evade invasion. The Man witnesses this phenomenon when a plane is approaching Ata: “then suddenly the whole village disappeared. I blinked and it came back. As I focused and unfocused my eyes upon the village it alternately melted into scrubby ground and reappeared in its spiral design, like a shifting optical illusion game or an expert work of camouflage” (39). This collective telepathic action exhausts all the people—in a similar situation, the Man sees them “lying all about, as if shot down in the midst of their work, in the fields, on the paths” (79). A moment later, they are in motion again, engaged in doing their everyday jobs. Later in the novel, Chil-sing explains this phenomenon to the Man: “A helicopter…came out from a ship. It was looking for someone lost at sea. It saw Ata. It came down close. It was going to land here… And so Ata disappeared— sank into the sea. Disappeared—like in a dream… The people, together, made it

DOROTHY BRYANT

89

so. Ata melted into the sea like…a mirage” (79). Another utopian character, Tam the Frenchman, explains to the Man why the utopian people keep Ata invisible: “Ata is the only hope. It alone stands apart from the way of life you and I left” (82). UTOPIAN CHRONOTOPE Examining Bryant’s novel, I am interested in the ways in which feminist utopia reflects current social beliefs and explores possibilities for human action in the “real” and in the utopian worlds. I find Bakhtin’s theory of chronotope instrumental for my analysis. Bakhtin’s term “chronotope” literally means “timespace” and stands for “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (“Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” 85). Bakhtin asserts that chronotope has “an intrinsic generic significance” (Bakhtin’s emphasis, 85); in his discussion of the reworking of the idyllic chronotope in the Rousseauan novel (230), Bakhtin also implies that some genres can employ chronotopes that are pertinent to other genres. According to Schryer (2002), genres express space/time relations that reflect current social beliefs regarding the placement and action of human individuals in space and time. I assume that feminist utopia, in its exploration of alternative ways to create new meaning and in its borrowings from other genres, can combine several chronotopes; in this case, borrowing from the patriarchal utopian novel and from the idyll. This assumption allows me to regard Bryant’s two chronotopes (that of the “real world” and that of the utopian world) as a separate nexus of time/space/ideology. Carol Pearson, a feminist utopian scholar, sees the strength of feminist utopianism in the interconnection of its political theory and its representation of time/space relations. In “Of Time and Space: Theories of Social Change in Contemporary Feminist Science Fiction” (1984), Pearson identifies three principles drawn from this new theory: 1. Time is linear; and it is relative. To the degree that people live only in linear time, they are locked into a world governed by laws of causality, dualism, linearity, and struggle. But they also have available to them a reality based upon relativity. In this dimension, time and space are not separate, but the time/space continuum is curved. It then becomes possible to understand that people can change not only the future but the past. This theory focuses on concepts like paradox, synchronicity, responsibility, commitment, and transformation. (Pearson 260–1) As I intend to show, Bryant’s utopian world, Ata, is based upon such an understanding of relativity because it accommodates a possibility for transformation. Pearson’s reference to time/space curves is connected, in my

90 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

opinion, to the understanding of time and space in quantum mechanics.1 From its principles, Pearson draws her second and third principles: 2. Although past, present and future co-exist and are equally real, the only point of action in which anything can be changed is in the present. Paradoxically, widespread social change results from the solitary actions of individuals who step outside linear time into the ‘eternal now.’ Yet, at the same time, no individual can move into the new world alone. No one is fully there, until all people are. (261) I find this insight quite important because it can be applied to the feminist genre itself: feminist utopia is part of nonstandard discourse that is perceived by patriarchy as “abnormal.” Yet, it is revolutionary for the feminist community because it provides a space to promote social change on feminist terms. Such a change can be envisioned and initiated through the feminist discourse, but it will not be successful until the whole society goes through it. From this, the third principle follows: 3. The move into a new, utopian future occurs when people take responsibility for their own lives and relinquish all illusions that they control anything—others, the flow of history, or the effects of their own actions. (“Of Time and Space” 261) In Bryant’s novel, as soon as the utopian time begins, the real-world time stands still for the protagonist, although space expands. This new space, however, is abstract and fragmented, marked by difference, and has a specific socio-cultural and ideological connection to the utopian collective. Bryant’s ideal of the unity and harmony of all humanity as the best way forward (or as the best defense against the evils of the “real world”) is realized on Ata, a utopian island in the center of the world where a preurban, pretechnological classless society develops. The isolation of the island provides for the necessary separation of this community (to avoid being consumed by the “real world”). For the protagonist, it provides a solution to his individual search for fulfillment. But it also acts as a limitation, not only separating, but enclosing the community within the geographic seclusion. The dynamic of the plot rests on the contrast of the two chronotopes: that of the outside world and that of Ata, thus exploring the outside/inside binary opposition. The utopian Ata exists in parallel with the Man’s own real life. However, the Man’s transformation is conditional; it can only happen in the utopian world and depends on his actions there. On the contrary, change is not possible for an Atan person unless it is prescribed by the common dream. I will argue that in her utopia, Bryant employs the trans-historical folkloric matrix that was described by Bakhtin in his analysis of the folkloric bases of the Rabelaisian chronotope (“Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” 206–224). Bakhtin traces back the basic forms of the productive and generative

DOROTHY BRYANT

91

time of folklore to a pre-class, agricultural stage in the development of human society because “[t]he preceding stages were poorly suited to the development of a differential feeling for time, and for its reflection in ceremonies and in linguistic images” (206). As he argues, a sharply differentiated feeling for time could arise only on a collective, work-oriented agricultural base. I intend to prove that Bryant’s utopian time is cooperative and communal, differentiated only in the events of collective life. Atan society is classless, lacking any kind of council or government; classlessness here is an assumption so absolute that it never even gets discussed. The interior time of an individual life is not important, and the individual Atan lives completely on the surface, within a collective whole. On Ata, both labor and the consuming of products are collective; the Atan moral and cultural systems are based on a collective social consciousness. Bakhtin identifies seven features of the folkloric chronotope that I will use for my discussion of Bryant’s novel. He describes folkloric time/space as 1) collectivist, 2) measured by labor events, 3) as the time of productive growth, 4) aimed towards the future, 5) profoundly concrete and spatial, 6) unified in an unmediated way, and 7) marked with cyclicity (206–210). According to Bakhtin, the folkloric time is collective because it is differentiated and measured only by the events of collective life; everything that exists in this time exists solely for the collective. In her description of the Atan collective, Bryant demonstrates how the feminist genre can use the possibilities from precapitalist societies for envisioning a nonsexist social order that invokes the feminist values of sharing, nurture, tolerance, patience, and understanding. The Man initially identifies Ata as likely either an Indian reservation or a rural commune (Bryant 12). This is an important move for the novel because it provides the necessary socio-historic orientation and allows for the Man’s initial division from the community. Bakhtin further describes folkloric time as “the time of labor, measured by labor events; everyday life and consumption are not isolated from the labor and production process. “It is the time of productive growth; the time of growth, blossoming, fruit-bearing, ripening, fruitful increase, issue” (“Forms of Time” 207). On Ata, as the Man notices, “There was constant work to do. But if everyone helped there was never too much to do. There was always time for the hol-kas or for a long walk around the island to gather wild grass for the weaving. And the yield was always enough” (Bryant 158–159). Bakhtin insists that this time is maximally tensed toward the future because all labor processes are aimed forward. He observes that “there is as yet no precise differentiation of time into a present, a past and a future (which presumes an essential individuality as a point of departure)” (“Forms of Time” 207). Similarly, the Man reports that, “There were times for doing certain things: times for planting, for dreaming, for eating, for telling dreams. There were times, but no time: “Time doesn’t exist here,” I told Augustine. “There is only now,” she

92 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

agreed. “It is because nothing changes.” “Change comes, but very slow and very suddenly,” she said” (Bryant 173). Bakhtin adds that this time is spatial and concrete: “It is not separated from the earth or from nature. It, as well as the entire life of the human being, is all on the surface…. Human life and nature are perceived in the same categories. The seasons of the year, ages, nights and days (and their subcategories), copulation (marriage), pregnancy, ripening, old age and death: all these categorical images serve equally well to plot the course of an individual life and the life of nature (in its agricultural aspect). All these images are profoundly chronotopic” (“Forms of Time” 208). Likewise, on Ata, death is neither perishing or the end of life, and nor is it sacrifice. For the Atans, “[d]eath is only release into dreams; it can only be bad if one’s dreams are bad” (Bryant 138). And birth is a shared experience in which everybody in the community helps out: “Giving birth is a very hard thing. We all try to help…. We try to take some of the pain on ourselves, to share it. We try to give some of our strength for the hard work. We try to make the girl feel happy that, once she has done this, she need no longer carry the burden of the child alone. Then she will labor in joy. At the least, we give the warmth of our bodies surrounding her” (149). Therefore, as Bakhtin explains, this time is unified in an unmediated way. Bakhtin makes an important distinction here when he says: “However, this imminent unity becomes apparent only in the light of later perceptions of time in literature (and in ideology in general) when the time of personal, everyday family occasions had already been individualized and separated from the time of the collective historical life of the social whole, at a time when there emerged one scale for measuring the events of personal life and another for measuring the events of history (these were experienced on various levels). Although in the abstract time remained unified, when it was appropriated for the making of plots it bifurcated”(208). Time is measured by labor events and governed by rituals.2 Bakhtin says that in a folklore matrix, an individual is never lonely because he is always in the collective, and each moment of his life “will avail itself to being made public” (Bakhtin “Forms of Time” 123). To use Bakhtin’s term, the exteriority of an individual Atan exists not in the empty place: on this island, to be exterior means to be for others, for the collective, for one’s own people. Therefore, the unity of a person’s externalized wholeness is of a public nature. All major events (birth, christening, wedding, food, work, sleep, sacrifice) happen in the open space and within the organic human collective. Private life on Ata adopts the most varied means for making itself public, one of these means being the dream-sharing ritual: to remember and share their dreams, every morning each one of the twelve people in the Atan “sleeping wheel” tells their dream to their neighbor. The dream-sharing ritual takes place at the first graying of dawn, when the Atans wake up, hang their grassy blankets on the wooden supports of the tent, and greet each other with the ritualistic “nagdeo.” It reminds the Man of praying and a conversation, at the same time.

DOROTHY BRYANT

93

Bakhtin’s final characteristic of the folkloric time is its cyclicity, which he identifies as a negative feature, “one that limits the force and ideological productivity of this time. The mark of cyclicity, and consequently of cyclical repetitiveness, is imprinted on all events occurring in this type of time. Time’s forward impulse is limited by the cycle. For this reason even growth does not achieve an authentic ‘becoming’” (“Forms of Time” 209–210). Similarly, on Ata life is marked by a certain rhythm and follows an agricultural cycle: “everything went on as usual. Grain and legumes were being harvested and root vegetables planted. Food was prepared for storage on the steps of the la-ka; a few steps were already full. The days were shorter, and the air crisper. Every evening the usual procession to the la-ka took place” (Bryant 77). The Man gets accustomed to this cycle and treats it as the “natural” order of things: “Seasons passed, but I no longer kept track of the number of cycles through which we lived. Time was one; there was only now” (Bryant 203). Yet, while living in the “now,” the Atans are concerned with the future. All their collective labor concerns itself with the future, all labor processes are aimed forward, and all are following the cyclic pattern. Bryant makes her patriarchal narrator acknowledge the superiority of the Atan ecologically sound, pretechnological agricultural practices: “It was only much later that I came to any realization of the intricate pattern of cultivation. Plants which needed a great deal of sun formed umbrellas over those that needed shade. Certain plants attracted bugs antagonistic to those attracted by the nearest other plants. Seemingly irregular swirls of planting patterns repeated themselves, year after year, possibly following lines of underground channels of water. Plants flourished where dreams directed they be planted. The people were right. They operated with knowledge far deeper than I could ever reach—I who could not even dream” (158). To complete the natural cycle, the kin of Ata recycle everything, including the bones of their dead which become agricultural tools: “At the next funeral I learned that bodies were taken to a high cliff over the sea where they were picked clean by large birds within a couple of days. Then the skull was buried and the rest of the bones taken back to the village and thrown into the pile of tools, used until broken and the chips buried in the fields” (159). However, the Man, who might once have been shocked by this, later validates this practice as in no way disrespectful of the dead: “How could there be disrespect toward those who, these people believed, had simply been wholly liberated into their dreams, freed from the bones that now dug the soil?” (159). Bakhtin further moves toward discussing the idyllic model for restoring the ancient complex and for restoring folkloric time (“Forms of Time” 224–236). He mentions several kinds of idylls, distinguishing the following “pure types: the love idyll (whose basic form is the pastoral); the idyll with a focus on agricultural labor; the idyll dealing with craft-work; and the family idyll” (224). He also mentions mixed types of idylls, in which one or another aspect predominates (love, labor or family). All the types of idylls have several

94 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

common features determined by “their general relationship to the immanent unity of folkloric time” (225). As Bakhtin observes, This finds expression predominantly in the special relationship that time has to space in the idyll: an organic fastening-down, a grafting of life and its events to a place, to a familiar territory with all its nooks and crannies, its familiar mountains, valleys, fields, rivers and forests, and one’s own home. Idyllic life and its events are inseparable from this concrete, spatial corner of the world where the fathers and grandfathers lived and where one’s children and their children will live. This little spatial world is limited and sufficient unto itself, not linked in any intrinsic way with other places, with the rest of the world. But in this little spatially limited world a sequence of generations is localized that is potentially without limit. The unity of the life of generations (in general, the life of men) in an idyll is in most instances primarily defined by the unity of place, by the age-old rooting of the life of generations to a single place, from which this life, in general, in all its events, is inseparable This unity of place in the life of generations weakens and renders less distinct all the temporal boundaries between individual lives and between various phases of one and the same life. The unity of place brings together and even fuses the cradle and the grave (the same little corner, the same earth), and brings together as well childhood and old age (the same grove, stream, the same lime trees, the same house), the life of the various generations who had also lived in the same place, under the same conditions, and who had seen the same things. This blurring of all temporal boundaries made possible by a unity of place also contributes in an essential way to the creation of the cyclic rhythmicalness of time so characteristic of the idyll. (225) Bakhtin mentions that the family idyll in its pure form is not common, “but in conjunction with the agricultural idyll it is of enormous significance”: “This form comes closest to achieving folkloric time; here the ancient matrices are revealed most fully and with the greatest possible actuality” (226). This form of the idyll draws upon not the conventional pastoral life (which, as Bakhtin explains, “exists nowhere in such a form”), but “on the real life of the agricultural laborer under conditions of feudal or postfeudal society” (226). Right from the beginning, the Man perceives the Atan community as “abnormal,” nonstandard, anti-capitalist, and, as we will see, nonpatriarchal. This commune is extremely ecology-minded. In this world with no industry, no pollution, no waste or environmental hazard, everything is built of wood, leaves, grass. I will argue that here Bryant uses the idyllic chronotope as a transhistoric form that she individuates to describe her spiritualecological utopia. The utopian time is ideal for expressing Atan ideology; it is the communal time of the human collective living in the presence of the uniting dream. Atan ideology is collectivist and oriented towards the future of the community.

DOROTHY BRYANT

95

Discussing the ways in which idyllic chronotope is reworked in the novel, Bakhtin turns to the Rousseauan novel. According to Bakhtin, reworking proceeds in two directions: “first, the basic elements of the ancient complex— nature, love, the family and childbearing, death—are isolated and undergo sublimation at a higher philosophical level, where they are treated more or less as forms of the great, eternal, wise force of earthly life. Second, these elements provide material for constituting an isolated individual consciousness, and from the point of view of such a consciousness these elements act as forces that can heal, purify or reassure it, forces that solicit its surrender, its submission, requiring that it fuse with them” (“Forms of Time” 230). Folkloric time and the ancient matrices are perceived here as stages in the development of society and consciousness from a point of view that is contemporary to the writer, a point of view in which such time and such matrices become the lost ideal of human life. The contact with the lost ideal is reestablished at a new stage of development; the novelty, therefore, is that “the interior aspect of life is retained, and, in the majority of cases, individuality is preserved as well (although it is transformed)” (230). The major change in the narrative is that whereas in the idyll, as a rule, there were no heroes alien to the idyllic world, in novels of the Rousseauan type, the protagonists are the author’s contemporaries, people who had already succeeded in isolating individual lifesequences, people with an interior perspective: “They heal themselves through contact with nature and the life of simple people, learning from them the wisdom to deal with life and death; or they go outside the boundaries of culture altogether, in an attempt to utterly immerse themselves in the wholeness of the primitive collective” (231). Therefore, as Bakhtin shows, “the Rousseauan line of development, by sublimating in philosophical terms the ancient sense of the whole, makes of it an ideal for the future and sees in it above all the basis, a norm, for criticizing the current state of society. In the majority of cases this critique is two pronged: it is directed against feudal hierarchy, against inequality and absolutism, against the false arbitrariness of society (conventionality); but it is directed as well against the anarchy of greed and against the isolated, egotistic bourgeois individuum” (231). In the novel, the transformation of the patriarchal Man is not possible in the real world, but it is possible on Ata, in the eternal “now,” in the unity of utopian time/space. The real-world time begins again when the protagonist returns to his own nightmarish place, California, where only a few weeks have passed since the Man disappeared, though the Man had lived on Ata for about fifteen years. In an ironic twist of the plot, he now wishes that the real world was just a dream, and he could wake up on Ata again: “A good look in the mirror showed that I was thirty years old, no older. The dates on the papers, the statements of my lawyer, showed that no more than a few weeks had passed. I wished with all my soul that this were a dream, and I waited and waited to wake up. But I did not. Had all the events of the past time happened? Did Ata exist? The answer was obvious: Ata

96 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

existed, but only in the drug-laden and injured brain of an admittedly imaginative and desperate man” (Bryant 214). The Man’s transformation is irrelevant for the real world; therefore, the Man starts doubting the existence of Ata. Gradually, the Man understands why he was taken to Ata and chosen to come back: to use his celebrity status and to tell the world about Ata: “It was to fulfill Augustine’s dream by shining this feeble light on the people of Ata I was chosen because my career, my life, my trial and my execution will attract a larger audience than might come to read the book of a better man or woman” (219). Though the Man’s transformation happens elsewhere, its results are important for the real world. This outside world, therefore, is the only point of action where the future can be changed; and it was to understand this that the Man had to step outside the linearity of his time into the dream, into the utopian “now.” He now needs to demonstrate his commitment to and responsibility for his transformation. Bryant, thus, reinforces the idea that transformation is only possible for the patriarchal Man in the utopian time/space; before that, as an eternally lonely and isolated capitalist individual, he could not undergo a metamorphosis (which is only possible in the collectivity of utopian time/space) and willfully choose sacrifice that also provided him with a possibility for action: to return to the real world and write a book that we are reading, thus promoting the utopian ideals and initiating social change. The Man’s first experience in the utopian world is relief and relaxation felt through sensory perception: helpless and wounded, he finds himself in “absolute blackness and stillness” (6), in muteness and invisibility. For a long time, he seems to hang between two dark places, the nightmare of his deathsleep and this waking up to blackness and shadows (that might be read as Bryant’s description of birth or rebirth). He feels being touched, listened to, even smelled. But he also feels safe, cared for, and relieved: “Something touched my cheek. It was cool and wet and smelled like a leaf. A cool drop fell on my lips. I licked them. It was water. I let my eyes open again, and the drops of cool water fell into my mouth. I opened my eyes again, but saw only blackness. I could sense that someone knelt over me dropping water into my mouth from something that smelled green, like grass or leaf” (7). The necessity to perceive the whole world in the mute and blind mode helps the Man to concentrate on his inner life; this necessity also revitalizes him and facilitates his transformation. Through silent meditation and silent dreams, the Man engages in a conversation with himself; this experience purges him for perceiving the utopian world: “I was wide awake. I knew I had come through something. I’ve been close to death, but I was going to live now…. I wondered where I was” (9). As the Man finds out later, he is recuperating in a hol-ka—the utopian place where the individuals can hide and meditate whenever a crisis occurs in their lives. “Hol-ka” is Bryant’s icon of interiority. Here, though, in the utterly collectivist and public life where every aspect of existence can be seen or heard,

DOROTHY BRYANT

97

Ata provides a space for mute and invisible internal life. The holka is such a ritual place reserved entirely for invisible or mute journey back to one’s roots: as Augustine explains to the Man later, “The hol-ka is to help us when we have gone very far from nagdeo, or when we are afraid we might. There we go naked back into our mother. And we come out reborn and begin again” (70). In this way, hol-ka becomes a symbol of the womb. However, it looks like a strange kind of womb to the Man: cold, dry, dark, and unfeeling, where, as Bryant tells us, during his first session the Man feels detached and claustrophobic. The Man describes it as a completely dark “hole in the ground, covered with a rock and clay roof” (Bryant 57), with enough height to kneel but not to stand: The Man crawls inward in the dark, slipping downward into the depths of the mound, seeing and hearing nothing. He fears that he might suffocate, that he is buried alive, entombed (96). Nonetheless, an important process takes place in the hol-ka: the Man’s transformation starts there. Like every other Atan, the Man can now undergo a ritual purging of his mentality and perceptions, thus returning to an infant’s state which can be compared to what Kristeva implies by developing her concept of “chora” or “presymbolic realm”: hol-ka can be perceived as the utopian space in which, after the ritual purging, perceptions and sensations are taking on some semblance of organization. According to Kristeva, this space represents the prelinguistic moment where the child remains unable to differentiate itself from the maternal body: “[n]ot yet related to the signifying chain, the chora is a presymbolic realm that provides the dual rhythms of freedom and constraint from which a relation to signification will gradually emerge” (Kristeva Revolution in Poetic Language 24–25). Here, the subject’s multiple drives are manipulated and directed by its encounters with both its body and its environment. Bryant here portrays the Man as drifting through various stages of fear until he sweats his fears out and becomes empty inside because the terror literally “oozes out” (96). After this first session in the hol-ka, the Man’s nightmares are gone—he has “sweated them out” and is free to “dream of childish trivia” instead (105). While the Man thinks that not much has happened to him in the holka, this is because what happens is unknowable to him: he goes through a process of purification that is similar to what Kristeva describes as the processes that an infant undergoes in the chora: “Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such and, in the course of his development, they are arranged according to the various constraints imposed on this body—always already in the semiotic process—by family and social structures” (Kristeva Revolution in Poetic Language 25). The Man is now free to dream childish dreams and, like a child, absorb the values that the utopian social order will impose on him.

98 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

UTOPIAN PEOPLE Getting out of the hol-ka, the Man meets the first utopian people: Chil-sing, an oriental-looking boy with golden hair, and Augustine, a muscular, strong and slim black woman with sharp and pointed Nordic features, blue eyes and coarse brown hair in a long braid. Their unusual racial make-up is an interesting move for feminist utopia because it challenges the patriarchal values and reinforces the ideology of the feminist discourse: racial make-up is perceived as irrelevant because racial diversity does not affect consubstantiality of the utopian people on Ata. Here the feminist utopian genre demonstrates its openness and tolerance to ideological innovations. It is notable that, describing the utopian person, Bryant combines the traditional feminist images of circle and light with a Christian symbol of a halo: “I looked into the face of a boy, a broad fair face with the slight down of a blonde beard. His hair was thin and long, curling down his shoulders. His face was broad, with high cheek bones, and his eyes were wide and slanted with an oriental fold. He was leaning over me, shielding my face from the sun, so that the sun shone behind his head, lighting up his hair like a halo” (10). Circular imagery proliferates in the descriptions of the Atan tents shaped like domes (11), their round hol-kas, and the ritual sleeping wheel in which the Man is included. This inclusion proves to the Man that he is treated as part of the Atan community. The images of the wheel and circle are further reinforced by the circular structure of the novel and the cyclicity of life in the Atan agricultural community. They are also supported by the spiral imagery in the description of the utopian village: “[T]he path curved. It seemed to curve always to the left. We were walking in a circle, a continuously narrowing circle. Along the path were other tents like the one I’d been in. And I could see our destination, in the center of the narrowing circles marked by the low stone walls” (28). Bryant gives the readers another description of the village with its twelve round la-kas and twenty round hol-kas. The image of the circle envelops all individuals within the utopian community and emphasizes a holistic approach to life; it avoids pyramidal hierarchy and promotes the utopian message that “true departure is return.” But (though Bryant does not show this other than by portraying the Man as trapped on the island) the circle can also be limiting, final, enclosing the individual within the collective, restricting individual freedom, and promoting the need to prescribe conformity. Thus, Bryant’s usage of circular imagery can be read as an implicit attempt to problematize her utopian paradise. Her novel, then, can be identified as a critical utopia in Moylan’s sense due to its implicit criticism of the limitations of the utopian tradition. Slowly recuperating, the Man has a lot of time for anthropological and ethnographic observations: he notices the Atans’ faraway, concentrated look, the austere and ascetic way of their life, their comfortable and harmonious closeness to each other: “They all dressed alike and all walked alike: silent, erect and

DOROTHY BRYANT

99

somehow tensed, as if listening to something The younger ones ran and skipped, but even they seemed occasionally to be skipping in time to music only they could hear” (18). At first everybody looks alike, then the Man is able to see some startling combinations of physical traits. Yet, he is unable to identify the ethnicity of these people, and he soon observes that ethnicity is irrelevant here as racial differences cause no obvious discrimination. One of the possible interpretations of the irrelevance of race is an implicit critique of capitalist patriarchy whose discriminatory practice reinforces racism alongside with sexism.3 Such a critique was quite functional in the sociopolitics of the 1970s and was part of the feminist discourse. In Bryant’s utopia, division is not based on race, gender or class; in fact, division is hardly an issue at all because it seems that identification for the Atans does not imply division from any other group. The Atans treat all humanity as their kin; thus, the feminist values of cooperation, tolerance and acceptance of diversity are promoted. Neither is the Man sure of the gender of the Atans, since every Atan wears their hair long and is clothed in the same shapeless, knee-length tunic. He soon finds that only beards and body contours can be treated as definitive signs of their biological sex: “Up to the age of sexual maturity the children were naked and long-haired, they looked sexless or all rather like little girls because of their long hair. The old people looked alike in their own way” (19). More importantly, he observes a total lack of gender roles in work and parenting: the women obviously nurse the infants; but the men care for them as much as the women do. He is not even able to distinguish the Atans by names, because few of these people have a name before they are thirty, when “a name comes to them in their dreams” or they “hear” the name of someone in the real-world “who feels close” (176) and wants to reach the utopian Ata. Later, the Man witnesses several christenings on Ata which are rituals performed in recognition of persons who have dreamed a name: “He told the dream in the laka that night, then was formally introduced to all the people. As he walked among them, they each pronounced his name and touched his forehead” (176). The Man, however, remains unnamed throughout the novel—and this is important for this instance of the genre because his name does not matter; what matters is his initial patriarchal identification and his subsequent transformation into a utopian person. Living in complete harmony with nature and with themselves, the Atans are very healthy people. The Man is amazed at “the magnificent health of the people”: “I rarely saw anyone ill. The people believed that ill health was donagdeo—acts which would disturb or decrease their ability to dream, and resulted from accompanying states of imbalance. That was why they immediately went to a hol-ka, at the first sign of such imbalance. A session in the hol-ka generally averted illness” (134). They have pet animals, but it is the animal who chooses a person as a pet. Therefore, in an interesting twist, the animals are not perceived as pets (even if the narrator so calls them), but the people are.

100 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

The kin of Ata drink rainwater out of seashells and grow plants, herbs and fruit. They treat animals as their kin, therefore, their diet is strictly vegetarian. As the Man comments, “I need hardly add that I knew better than to suggest that we eat birds or animals, or even fish. They would have reacted the same way as if I had told them we should eat the children. When animals died, their bones and skins were taken (only after the birds have picked them clean) and used for many things. But no one would have thought of killing any of them” (159). Thus, the Atans consume only the produce of their own labor; the Man notices fruits and leaves lying around among shells and water pots perched on the low stone walls, but he never sees any adults eating. He assumes (correctly) that they must eat somewhere else and that the surplus food is left there for children and anyone else who could not wait until the sundown for a communal meal. The association of food and children is characteristic for the agricultural idyll; the folkloric matrix is revived through the portrayal of growth and the renewing of life. Food sharing on Ata becomes a ritual that promotes kinship; all generations and age-groups come together for the sundown meals in the la-ka. People feed each other; thus, food becomes a gift, like an ornament. “Ornaments, like food, were to be given to others,” observes the Man after he sees that no one decorates himself or herself, but “people sometimes put a flower or a woven necklace on someone else, then stand back to enjoy the effect” (51). During the food-sharing ritual, the emphasis is not on nourishing oneself, but rather feeding each other from earthen pots, putting bits of food in the mouths of others. No one feeds themselves from the pots, except one or two of the small children (31). The food-sharing ritual is very significant in the social life on Ata. As Chil-sing explains to the Man, this ritual is based on a myth about the waking-dreamer, i.e. a very strong dreamer, “[o]ne who lives in the dream all the time, asleep or awake. One who goes Home without dying” (104): Once, long ago, when Ata was very young and the twelve times twelve people had not yet dug and built the great la-ka, but sat to tell dreams beneath the branches of the great Life Tree, a strong dreamer, a wakingdreamer, was born among them. He had been born as a baby, torn out of the body, long before, but then he was born again as a wakingdreamer. And all this happened in the midst of famine, when the harvest of summer was gone, and the root crop of fall had been dug up, and still the winter fast was long to go before the first new grass would come to feed the people And the waking-dreamer sat beneath the Life Tree and the people all came before him, and they said, ‘We have only these twelve pots of grain left and these twelve baskets of fruit. Some will eat and some will starve. Tell us who shall live and who shall die before those of us who are strong take all, and the people of Ata are reduced to strong bodies with bad dreams.’ And the waking-dreamer said, ‘You feed all the people.’ But the people protested and said, ‘We have not enough for all people.’

DOROTHY BRYANT

101

‘You have not enough for yourselves,’ said the waking-dreamer. ‘If you feed yourselves you will starve, but each feed another, and all will be filled, for kin are nourished by what they feed to others.’ And so twelve people picked twelve pots and began to feed others from the pots. And twelve more picked up twelve baskets of fruit and began to feed all the twelve times twelve people from the baskets. And when they were through, and all were fed, all having been fed from the hands of others, the pots and the baskets were still full and so were the people. (103) In response, the Man narrates to Chil-sing the Christian fable of loaves and fishes. However, much to the Man’s surprise, Chil-sing finds the Christian fable a corrupted version of the utopian dream: “the point of the dream is lost. The waking-dreamer of your story is just a trickster who can make many fishes from a few. It is not his act, but the act of the people in feeding one another that multiplies the food. Such a story becomes donagdeo when it is corrupted. Perhaps if your people had not put it down into markings, they could have improved it, dreaming it over until it got better, instead of being stuck in such a meaningless story,” concludes Chil-sing (104). In this example, Bryant’s manipulation of biblical motifs is quite significant: she attempts to create consubstantiality with her audience by mentioning the well-known Christian fable. However, what she suggests is that genuine consubstantiality should be based upon sharing not only material things and activities (food, dwellings, utensils, work, leisure, parenting, rituals), but also through common ideology expressed in the Atan dreams that promote sharing, understanding, and tolerance. Christian motifs are further supported with the Man’s preaching to the children, the Man’s “return” to the ritual la-ka like a “prodigal son” asking for forgiveness after he murders Tam, and his willful choice to go back to the real world and, in this way, to accept sacrifice. Christian motifs are also evident in the Atan emphasis on the number “twelve”: there are twelve people in the sleeping wheel, and the population of the village is limited by the “twelve by twelve” number of the dream (148). In this way, Bryant demonstrates the interaction of feminist utopia with patriarchal discourse. The implication for the feminist genre, I think, is the possibility of transcending the rigidity of patriarchal discourse by transforming Christian imagery and fables to reflect the feminist message. It can also be useful in the feminist utopian genre to have a male protagonist notice, describe and theorize utopian social practices because such a strategy provides for a smoother introduction of feminist values of sharing, connection, collaboration, nurture, valuing social bonding over biological bonds, and communal parenting. Portrayal of such practices through the eyes of a male protagonist, I would assume, provides for their legitimacy and accessibility for the readership of the 1970s. The Man gets his first lesson in collectivism during the welcoming ritual when he is taught how to get nourished by feeding others. He is encouraged to walk

102 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

around the ritual tent and put morsels of food into people’s mouths. When he does as he is asked to, people laugh and clasp their hands in delight (32). In this spiritual and agricultural idyll, the Man initially experiences profound boredom. He is being taught and taken care of like a child, but he has not yet developed any relationships with the utopian people. He had never spent so much time alone. He is still devising plans of escape; it never occurs to him that he can stay in this commune for a long time. However, when he tries to escape, he realizes he is trapped on an island (37). Some time later, he asks Chil-sing about the geographic location of Ata, but the only answer he gets is that Ata is the center of the world. It takes him time to understand that the world in question is not his, not the outside world that is divided into parts, continents, countries. Ata is the center of a unified utopian world, situated in a unity of time and space marked with features that make Ata very different from the Man’s real world. The Man soon discovers a paradox: the Atans believe that he ended up on their utopian island on his own will. Augustine saw him in a dream three times, and waited for him to come, but she did not bring him to the island because no one has the power to bring another person there. It is next to impossible for anyone to get to Ata unless one is a strong dreamer. Though the Man denies it, according to Augustine, he had to want to get to Ata with his whole soul; therefore, he is considered by the Atans to be a strong dreamer (73). Not believing her, the Man devises plans to escape, persuading the Atan children to help him and luring them with the benefits of civilization: “You are being held prisoners of superstition. Follow me and I will save you” (76). The Atans let the Man persuade their children, occasionally watching him from a distance. Nobody seems to be paying any attention to them, and the Man does not understand why: “For, of course, I was lying. It was easy to talk about bringing the blessings of so-called civilization to Ata. Ata would probably gain a jet-strip, a gambling casino and a set of slums from which these people could go out each day to serve the tourists. It could even become another navy base. If the people were not so ignorant, I thought, nor so reluctant to argue, they could easily have made my little speech sound ridiculous” (75). Instead, what happens to the Man is that his old nightmares start haunting him again, and they seem to affect the children in his gang: “The children slept fitfully, often starting and moaning. I slept little, if at all. The old nightmares had come back with redoubled terror and when they were not there, I was killing Connie, endlessly, in slow motion. I suspected someone of poisoning the food left for us and began eating fruit I picked myself. But the nightmares continued, bursting on me every time I closed my eyes. I began to feel that the island was a trap where I would go mad and die” (78). The Man notices that the Atans have some jewels that they display during their rituals. For example, during the fire dance, he sees the children passing on rubies from hand to hand (48), and later on he sees a huge pearl: “I looked up to see the child’s mouth open wide with joy—and between her teeth I saw a pearl

DOROTHY BRYANT

103

as big as an egg. Then, some quick sleight of hand, and it was gone” (49). The Man can only see jewels during ritual dances and dream-telling rituals: “I had been listening with my eyes closed, concentrating on the words. I opened my eyes. Salvatore stood in front of the fire. The spokes of gold crown radiated from his head with almost blinding glow. Then a quick motion, and the crown was gone” (65). The Man suspects that these people are hiding their treasure in the la-ka (thus, the motif of the treasure island becomes one more of Bryant’s manipulations of traditional patriarchal motifs that make her utopia dialogic). Asking Chil-sing about the treasure, the Man gets no definite answer: “Is your treasure kept in the laka?” “Treasure?” “The riches of your people. The precious ornaments used in the dances.” “Oh, yes.” He frowned as if uncertain. “Our treasure is kept in the la-ka.” He pushed back his golden curls and looked apologetic. “But please... I would please like to stop talking now” (61). The Man decides that the Atans are hiding their treasure from him; he, therefore, needs to find it before he escapes from the island: “I decided that these people were a mixture of subtlety and stupidity. They obviously knew the value of the precious gems I had glimpsed, and they prized them, but only as a decoration to their stories and rituals, not as means for their material condition” (49). The Man spends nights searching the la-ka, where he thinks the treasure is hidden between rituals (78), but he can find nothing. Then the Atan elders come to offer him a deal—they can get him off the island in the spring, after the winter fast. But the Man wants to rob them of their jewels before any deal can be made: “Turn them over. Now. To show good faith. Then I’ll wait till spring and I won’t cause any more trouble” (83). The Atans listen to him in great surprise: “They all turned and looked at me. Even the children’s mouths hung open. “Tell me,” said the squeaky-voiced old creature. “Tell me, you saw these things during the telling of the stories in the la-ka?” (83). When the Man describes the jewels he saw, Tam, the old Atan translating for him, smiles in reply. And, suspecting that Tam is laughing at him, the Man gets angry and kills Tam as he had previously killed Connie: “I only meant to scare him. I was furious, but I felt quite in control of myself because I thought I had won. I simply reached out to give him a backhanded slap across the face, to frighten him, to show them all that I meant business…. At a bare touch of my hand he lost his balance. He fell head down in a heap, across three steps. His head struck the lowest step. The smile was still on his face. We didn’t have to touch him to see he was dead” (84). Thus, the Man becomes twice murderer. Judging the utopian people by himself, he assumes that their patience, tolerance and gentleness are only coverups for “pent-up rage which would be now unleashed upon the murderer” (85). He anticipates that they will search the island, find him and kill him. Hiding for three days in the hills, he is visited by the spirit of the dead Atan who offers him forgiveness by saying: “We never mourn for those who go Home, my kin” (88). Like a prodigal son, the Man goes back to the village where everybody is waiting for him in the ritual place. Expecting to be killed, he asks to be forgiven: “I killed the old one. Before that I killed a woman. But these murders are the least of my

104 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

crimes. I have never done anything good. I am an empty man. Not a real person. I gave away what was real in me long ago. I sold it. For nothing. I am nothing. I am not fit to live” (89). This episode exemplifies the identity crisis of the patriarchal Man—he cannot go on living like that, in guilt and isolation. This, then, is the time when the patriarchal Man understands the futility of his life and is asking for death. Instead of a knife, he feels Chil-sing’s cool hand on his neck: the boy is helping him up. The community forgives him, and the Man starts crying, thus undergoing a ceremony of purification and forgiveness: “Tears streamed from my eyes. I hadn’t cried since I was a small boy. Now the tears poured, silently, steadily in streams down my cheeks…. The people got up from their seats on the steps. One by one, they came up to me, touched my tears, and moved their hands across my body, washing me with my own tears…. Some of them were crying too” (90). Through this purification, the Man continues his transformation into a utopian person. Later on, when he starts understanding what is happening on Ata, Augustine explains to him that the Atans treasure is not materialistic—it is spiritual. It exists, but everybody sees it in the form that is adequate for his/her mentality. Trapped within his patriarchal mentality, the Man saw the Atans’ spiritual treasures in the form of gems. In reality, it is something very different, and for the most part, unknowable unless one becomes consubstantial with the Atans and starts living in the presence of their dreams. The Atan people explain to him that these treasures can look like jewels—if this is how he defines treasure: “When we watch the dance, when we listen to the dreams, we are in the presence of what is most real and most precious. But we cannot see it or touch it, and so, perhaps it appears to each of us in the forms of that which we treasure” (112). In this way, Bryant makes the patriarchal Man understand that material treasures are useless, that spiritual treasures are most real and most precious, but to see them, he needs to complete his transformation and acquire the values of the utopian world. Towards the end of the novel, after his transformation is complete, the Man can see the treasures for what they really are—acts of true kindness and love: “I began to see acts of true kindness and love which shone like the jewels I had first seen in the la-ka” (196). In contrast to many other feminist utopias that describe one-sexed societies, Bryant’s utopian society is two-sexed. However, the role of gender difference is downplayed: no new gender stereotypes exist on the island, and old patriarchal gender stereotypes simply do not apply. The gender gap is bridged within the kin as an extended family; not a real-world nuclear family, but rather an un-owned, nonheaded, nonpatriarchal family based on kinship. With monogamy being a matter of choice, marriage as it exists in patriarchy has no legal status on Ata, and their coupling is not a matter of parenting or economical needs. This society is sexually permissive for the experimenting young people; however, mature adults choose to be serially monogamous, and the very old ones are portrayed as sexless, belonging to the whole community, being treated in some ways like children again (174).

DOROTHY BRYANT

105

Bryant makes particular efforts to portray a nonsexist society. Sexual activity is nonexploitative and unfettered from puberty on. For example, the Man notices that the naked children engage in sex play the way the animals do, “touching and sniffing at one another, ignored by the adults” (51). This play is often homosexual, and the Man decides that there are no restrictions on sex, and both heterosexual and homosexual preferences are recognized. No penalty or taboo applies to any sexual practice—except rape, which is regarded as an act of violence, not sex, but still inflicts no penalty other than having bad dreams (this crime, therefore, is punished within the realm of the collective subconscious). He later sees a young couple having sex in the orchards, and he is shocked when he realizes that “on their way back they spotted me, realized I’d been watching them, but gave no sign of embarrassment” (52); moreover, they gave him “a smile of enticement.” However, while Bryant’s utopia expresses a feminist value system, there are gaps that betray her privileging the nuclear, monogamous family and heterosexual superiority. At the beginning of the novel the protagonist is familyless, wandering through a competitive world among hostile people. The novel’s movement takes the protagonist out of the capitalist world of random “success” into the small utopian world of kinship, where nothing is accidental, where authentically human relationships are reestablished: love, childbearing, childrearing, a peaceful old age, shared meals in the la-ka. I find that this base of kinship is not much different from that of patriarchal family: there are no gender roles on Ata, but the Atan behaviors follow the traditional patriarchal prescriptions for the feminine roles that involve selfsacrifice, subservience, humility, tolerance, acceptance, and nurturing. I assume that Bryant challenges sexist representations of gender roles, but does not transcend them. At first, the Man remains foreign to the utopian world; later he heals himself through contact with nature and the life of Atans, learning from them the wisdom to deal with life and death, redefining happiness and purpose in life. Thus, to remember Bakhtin’s phrase, Bryant creates a protagonist that resembles Rousseau’s characters “who go outside of boundaries of culture altogether” (Bakhtin 231) in an attempt to utterly immerse themselves in the wholeness of the idyllic collective. Moreover, Bryant exhibits two instances of traditional, male-identified, heterosexual, monogamous nuclear family bias that undercuts her assertions of personal freedom. Such gaps reflect a distance between Bryant’s intention and her socially situated rhetoric. Bryant valorizes the love idyll of the Man and Augustine, as well as the longterm monogamous relationship of Salvatore and Aya, who stay together year after year, without pledges or promises, without compulsion. A relationship of this sort is neither required nor even hoped for, but a couple who remain together for many years is felt to be a great asset to the collective (174). Such a couple is thought to have combined into something greater than the sum of their two parts. They often (but not exclusively) dream together, and their dreams are considered to be very strong. In general, such a couple comes very gradually to be viewed with

106 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

the delight that most societies reserve for small babies—as a precious gift (174). And sometimes a ceremony honoring their relationship is held: a wedding. Bryant valorizes monogamy by portraying the wedding of Salvatore and Aya and by making the protagonist hope for his own wedding with Augustine. When the Atans want to commend the couple for the closeness of their relationship, they make a connection between the two and the whole community: “Having four arms instead of two, they can include more people in their embrace.” (174). The love idyll of the Man and Augustine starts almost against Augustine’s will: at first she rejects his courtship, remaining polite but indifferent; after he forces her, she hides from him in the hol-ka, until she can be serene and neutral again (62). However, later on she is instructed through her dreams to become his partner, and she leads him to a grassy bank with trees and simply says: “I am to be woman to you” (107). She does not say that she loves him, as if her emotions have nothing to do with her mission prescribed by the dream. The Man feels that their love-making is like “a ritual to cancel out the rape, a purified reenactment” (107). However, Augustine is not his woman, she is a woman to him, and this matters in the utopian world because, as she explains, “No one belongs to anyone else” (110). This is an unusual relationship for the Man, and he is afraid of Augustine’s “total and open acceptance” of him: “She was not an adversary, nor was she simply a body to be aroused by prescribed techniques to prescribed responses… And I was afraid” (110). While monogamy as a choice made by two people is not essentially patriarchal, patriarchy does reinforce monogamy through a system of laws and practices. The Man tries to build their relationship the way he was taught to see fit, suggesting that Augustine and he should have a separate ka, as a married couple. Promising Augustine: “I will be man to you,” he wants to build a ka for the two of them, apart from the others, “as man and wife should live, I told her. But she seemed horrified at the idea that the two of us should leave the ka to live alone” (111). The Man explains to her that he wants them to be alone so that they could make love anytime they wanted, but she says that they can make love anytime they want as things are, except the night that is reserved for sleeping: “Before long, we will not want to make love so much. Then if we lived alone, we should have nothing but each other. Two is the number for making love. Two is a very strong number; for other things it is too strong” (111). The Man tries to reduce the warm and glowing Augustine to be the patriarchal figure of the “good woman” behind the “great man”: in the novel, she comforts and cures his wounds, fulfills his sexual desires, bears their child, cares for them through the winter fasts, and keeps her body warm for her man whenever he pleases. However, though Augustine remains always affectionate to him, she also works for her kin, for the whole collective, and later for the whole human race, becoming a spiritual leader. In their relationship, Augustine makes the Man a very happy and fulfilled individual, in this way contributing to his transformation. Bryant shows that their deep intimacy transgresses sex because the Man feels fulfilled and accomplishes more, even when Augustine refuses his

DOROTHY BRYANT

107

sexual advances: “now Augustine refused me from time to time, when she was menstruating or when she felt fertile. In some ways, these times were better than our lovemaking days. We lay together in a deep rest that seemed no different from the rest that came after orgasm, and I began to notice that on those days I accomplished a great deal of writing in the afternoon” (172). When Augustine is pregnant, he chooses to be celibate, counting off the time before they could make love again. Seeing this, she says to him: “Many girls are warm and eager after the fast. They will not refuse you” (147). Startled, the Man asks if she would be jealous if he made love to another girl. Her answer is a paradox: “That depends on where you are in your dreams. I can’t know. Only you can find out. If sex for you is still simple, as it is for the children, for the goat,” than it has nothing to do with her, and she does not care (148). Despite this, the Man remains faithful to Augustine, and this comes as a great surprise to him: “It was the first time I had ever denied myself sex for any reason” (152). He gradually understands that he loves Augustine with a kind of love that transcends “simple” sex, “love that shares pain.” When Augustine gives birth to their daughter, the Man has one of the most profound experiences on Ata. Describing the birth as both a private and a shared event (all the people of the village come to the la-ka to support her, though no one had been sent to get them), Bryant compares Augustine’s contractions to the heaving of the earth in an earthquake, developing monumental imagery and returning tactility to language; to use Cixous’s phrase, she is really “writing the body” and representing women’s shared “gyn/ecological memory” (Brossard Picture Theory 35): “I looked at her face, expecting to see it contorted with the effort, but her face was still serene, gleaming in the glow of the fire on which her narrowed eyes fixed in deep concentration” (154). The Man and Augustine do not get to enjoy their parenting for long: except when Augustine is nursing the baby, she seldom touches it because the others take turns caring for the infant: “The baby never cried. At first restless grunts of hunger, someone heard and brought her to Augustine to nurse. At any other stirrings, she was held and rocked. Her first sound was a coo of pleasure at recognizing Chil-sing’s face as he bent over her”(155). Bryant emphasizes time and again the diffusion of parenting to society as a whole group. The Man confesses: “She was truly, from the beginning, not our baby. She belonged to everyone” (155). Indeed, Atan children, after they are born, belong to the whole collective. Every Atan takes great care not to thwart children, raising them in the spirit of nagdeo. As Salvatore explains to the Man, “our numbers remain the same and not many children are born” (151) because no woman wants to go through pregnancy and birth once she knows what it is. However, when outsiders from the real world come, they often conceive children, and this is a healthy factor that varies the physical and ethnic type of the Atans. Atan ideology prescribes that children cannot be disciplined even if they try out dangerous things, including drugs (194–195); children “must try everything, have everything—too many would destroy our way of life faster than any invasion from outside” (152).

108 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

Therefore, too many children are “donagdeo,” both for an individual woman’s health and for the survival of the collective, not only because any increase in population will disrupt the fragile ecological balance and lead to starvation, but for ideological reasons which are much more important than starvation: in the Atan world, children are perceived as “bundles of appetites,” as egotists that come “straight out of the dream, yet they are the farthest from it“because their humanity is still raw. Children must be carefully taught how to give up their egotistical desires of their own free will. However, this instruction cannot be done by force because to force is “donagdeo” (152). What is implied here, then, is that denial of worldly desires and passive spirituality is desirable. Carefully preserving the ecological balance as part of preserving nagdeo, the spiritual balance, the utopian world of Ata is then limited not only to a well-defined place and time, but also to a well-defined narrow circle of kin, and to a well-prescribed ideology of asceticism and endurance. Ata, then, is problematic as a feminist utopian society because it favors prescribed conformity that stifles diversity and activism and reinforces humility and tolerance. The Man comes to understand Ata through his experiences there, and through his discussions with the Atans, in particular, Salvatore and Augustine. In fact, Augustine’s function in the novel is not only to show the Man the way to live, but to show the way out for the whole human race. In the novel, Augustine is compared to a flower because she is always accompanied by a butterfly. She manifests inspiration, drawing every living thing towards her glowing spiritual light: “There was always a circle of children and animals around her, drawn to her as were the constant attendant butterflies whose size and colors increased as the days grew warmer” (156). Gradually, Augustine develops into a miraculous healer and spiritual leader of her people: “In addition to directing more and more of the planting, Augustine was beginning to do healing. Instead of going to a holka when feeling out of sorts, or after an accident, people went to Augustine, who touched them briefly, almost apologetically, as if she were embarrassed. I saw one child whose foot had been cut by a bone tool. A few minutes after Augustine touched her, the wound was closed and there was hardly a mark to show where it had been “(179–180). All her activities are shown not as hard work, but as “acts of grace”: “And nothing she did seemed to be work. Everything was a dance. Whether she walked or wove, fed people from the pots or dug in the ground, all her movements were such acts of grace that I often stopped whatever I was doing just to watch her. I was not the only one. There were always people around her, as if she gave out a glow in which kin would warm themselves” (173). The Man realizes that his life is complete, and that he cannot imagine his life without Augustine (175). He now defines happiness as monogamy, absorption in work and a simple lifestyle. The Man feels extremely happy and hopes for a wedding with Augustine. However, Augustine, in tears, asks him not to hope for a wedding, because she anticipates that she will need to be sent to the outside world, thus providing the

DOROTHY BRYANT

109

protagonist with an example and showing him the way out. She symbolizes the glowing light of hope; in fact, she develops a special gift—at the next ceremony of lights, she sets the branches of the Life Tree ablaze by simply touching them (180). At the spring ritual, she voluntarily steps into the sacrificial fire and gets sent into the real world. Through her sacrifice, Augustine shows the Man the next step in his transformation. Her sacrifice is portrayed as a great loss to her people and as an event of monumental proportions that shuts down everything in the universe—the wind, the fire, the birds, the insects (184). After Augustine is sent into the outside world, the Atans mourn her and pray for her all night. Bryant again introduces Christian motifs here because the Atans obviously consider Augustine a saint and a martyr. To the Man, it sounds “like a funeral for a person who’d gone to hell,” which shows that the concepts of hell and divinity are not foreign in the utopian world. Some time later, the Man has a clear and vivid dream about himself wandering in the London Underground. Lost at unknown stations, he aimlessly gets on and off trains which rush him “to places but not to a destination.” Then he goes up an escalator, and there, under the sign WAY OUT, he sees Augustine in the uniform of the ticket-taker. She smiles at him and holds out her hand to help him out (189). In this way, through the dream and through keeping the utopian rhythm, the Man and Augustine reunite. For seven years, the Man keeps seeing vivid dreams of Augustine every night, following her ordeal in the real world “as she circled the world on her knees, scrubbing floors of the powerful, succoring the oppressed” (193). This spiritual connection with Augustine marks another important stage in his transformation because Augustine shows him the solution, she becomes the WAY OUT: “at that point, my whole life had made a complete shift, a greater change than had been made by my coming to Ata. For a long time my life had centered around Augustine and the writing. Now that she was gone, Augustine was even more the center, as the WAY OUT” (192). Once, in his dream, the Man attempts to interact with Augustine when he sees her standing behind a cafeteria counter taking orders for food. However, she interrupts him very firmly, saying that he cannot order there, he must accept what is offered (194). In this episode, Bryant again promotes acceptance, humility and patience as utopian ideals. After watching the real-world people, following Augustine for over a year, the Man starts feeling pity and love for them. And at that point the breakthrough in his telepathic powers comes: he learns how through his dreams to get Augustine out of the real world, bring her back to Ata, and keep her with him for some time. This goes on for seven years: at night when he sleeps, he watches Augustine in all her activities in the outside world, and she sees him there and acknowledges him. During the day, she stays by him for as long as he holds the Atan rhythm, and he bends all his efforts toward prolonging these times. He begins writing a story of her ordeal in the real world where she becomes a spiritual leader from whom a lot of people draw strength: “she worked hard at

110 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

menial tasks and kept little for herself. What she had, she gave where it was needed. She sang in poor front churches and brought great comfort to miserable people, but her songs were also in the form of protests against injustice, and many marched to her songs. I was always beside her, hoping to help with whatever strength I could give her, but feeling always that it was I who drew strength from her” (198). In these years, the Man and Augustine learn to be together in almost every instant, and rise to “love which shares pain”(198). At the end of the seventh year, while in the real world, she is shot in what the Man describes as “a senseless riot,” stepping in front a young man who was raising a rock to throw at the police (199). The Man and the Atans go in a procession toward the cliff where the dead are left, and they believe that, with the first rays of light, she is freed from her ordeal and allowed to go Home. Thus, the utopian woman becomes the spiritual leader, saint and martyr who sets an example for the man, teaching him how to transgress sex, jealousy, possessiveness, selfishness, and move towards the realization of his utopian purpose in explicitly feminine ways: through humility, tolerance, acceptance, and persuasion. The Man and Augustine transgress folkloric harmony, idyllic unity and personal fulfillment for the utopian purpose to initiate social change that is aimed to save the outside world. The way out is shown by the woman who thus symbolizes “nagdeo” or the goodness of the utopian dream. The man keeps his utopian rhythm until his summons come (204) to fulfill his purpose: “I dreamed by night and sometimes by day. I kept my rhythm, thankful for each day that I was able not to fall too short of nagdeo, especially considering the kind of man I am. I felt Augustine everywhere now, yet not as I did before, but her essence, like traces of her in the air, in the people, the animals, something that was and was not Augustine, but was becoming something greater than Augustine, something purer, now that she was released” (203). By the end of the novel, the Man finally understands the reason for his journey to utopia: “I know now why I was taken to Ata and why kept there and why chosen to come back. It was to fulfill Augustine’s dream by shining this feeble light on the people of Ata. What I don’t understand is why it should be me. Perhaps I was chosen because my career, my life, my trial and my execution will attract a larger audience than might come to read the book of a better man or woman” (218–219). However, his action is made suspect by the conditional mode of the narration when, at the end of the novel, returning to his own “reality,” the protagonist is not sure whether he ever really left it. Consequently, the chronotope of Bryant’s novel accommodates calculated ambiguity, manipulating the readers’ understanding of reality and illusion. DREAM-TIME: FLUID MEANING AND RIGID WORD “Dreams are the fire in us” (Marge Piercy)

DOROTHY BRYANT

111

One of the concerns of feminist rhetoric reflected in the novel is the discussion of patriarchal discourse that negates the woman. Like many other feminist writers (Kristeva, Cixous, Daly, Spender, Rich), Bryant is concerned with what brings the subject into the domain of language—and whether language is necessary at all. We might say that she pays attention to what Kristeva would describe as the prelinguistic (symbolic and thetic) stages4 in the development of the human being. Bryant uses an interesting strategy to transcend the problem of using patriarchal language to describe feminist values. Her Atan “people of the Light” are almost completely divorced from spoken and written language, except for ceremonial purposes. On Ata, as she portrays it, identification is based on shared societal habits and an ideology that is almost nonverbal and revealed through dreaming, ritual, myth and dance. In fact, there is an ideological endorsement of the nonverbal as superior to verbal communication, particularly in the fact that it is the Man who is the portrayed as the writer of this piece. Following Burke’s observation that social life is predominantly “cultural,” it is important to note that the Atan culture is of cooperative nature. Burke also comments that “work-patterns and ethical patterns are integrally related,” but under capitalism “this basic integration between work-patterns and ethical patterns is constantly in jeopardy, and even frequently impossible” because of “capitalism’s emphasis upon the competitive aspects of work against the cooperative aspects of work” (“The Nature of Art Under Capitalism” 676). Bryant’s utopia describes the Man’s capitalist world as individualistic and competitive, whereas the utopian society is based on cooperation and sharing. The Atans live for their community and for each other, like one social organism. In this way, Bryant expands the feminist message about the need for female bonding to include all of humanity. Bryant demonstrates how the feminist genre can use the possibilities of precapitalist societies to envision a nonsexist social order that invokes the feminist values of sharing, nurture, tolerance, patience, and understanding. The Atan discourse is constructed through the social mechanism of interweaving language and dream. There is a lot of free indirect discourse in the novel as opposed to direct speech and dialogue. The Atans do not talk much, and, whereas their speech is minimal, their dance and song are the preferred modes of communication. Participation (and thus conformity to utopian expectations) is important. Later, the Man learns to participate in the dances, “since the kin of Ata placed great importance on everyone learning and participating in the dances”(113). He asks Augustine to explain the meaning of the dance, and she cannot do it because, for her, words are false and inadequate to describe movements: “Of course, the movements have meanings behind them. If we were sure of the meanings, we would not need the dance. There is a great danger in trying to interpret the dance in words. Words get between us and the dance and the meaning behind the dance—just one more thing between us and the meaning. One must dance the dance and go through it to the meaning” (118). As Burke asserts, in preindustrial societies, ritual dance serves to foster, on the one hand, a

112 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

degree of competitive behavior, while on the other hand it functions to induce cooperation: The ethical values of work are in its application of the competitive equipment of cooperative ends…. It has been suggested that the primitive group dance is so highly satisfying ‘ethically’ because it is a faithful replica of this same cooperative fusion. It permits a gratifying amount of muscular and mental self-assertion to the individual as regards his own particular contribution to the entire performance, while at the same time it flatly involves him in a group activity, a process of giving and receiving. (“Nature” 676) Not only is Burke here acknowledging that competitive behavior is not restricted exclusively to capitalist social formations, but he is also proposing that there exist universal forms of human experience grounded in biology. His account of ritual dance appears to suggest that competitive and cooperative behavior means that people transcend the cultural divisions which function to inhibit cooperation. Here Burke further applies his rhetoric of identification showing how art can foster the justification of the social order. Art has significant ideological traits since it “tends to promote a state of acceptance”: It carries the social patterns into their corresponding “imaginative patterns,” hence tends to substantiate or corroborate these patterns. The aesthetic act here maintains precisely the kind of thinking and feeling and behaving that reinforces the communal productive and distributive act. (“Nature” 677) Accordingly, dance is portrayed as a ritual that promotes conformity and collective action. Speech on Ata is described as fluid and minimal; a few words suffice, with meaning varying according to context (this might be read as Bryant’s implementation of what Dale Spender describes as the “exorcism” of the patriarchal language). The Atans do not communicate much in words: “They seemed to avoid speaking as much as possible, using gestures when they needed to tell someone something” (47). Judging from their language, the Man initially concludes that they are “a race of mental retardants” (47) because he cannot understand how anything can be communicated with a language of such poverty. (47). Indeed, the Atan language is limited in vocabulary but syntactically complex: the word “ka,” for instance, refers to a dwelling or a hut, and to all its contents and parts; a single noun “kin” refers to all humans, becoming plural or singular according to context: “One pronoun referred to all human beings. People called to one another by this word when not using someone’s name, or they referred to one or more people by it. It was both singular and plural and it meant kinship. The way most people use the word ‘brother’ but because ‘brother’ implies gender and singularity, it is quite wrong. The closest word I can think of

DOROTHY BRYANT

113

to approximate the meaning of this pronoun is ‘kin.’ We were all called kin” (51). Collectivism is reflected in the language also because the language has no sense of the singular: “The language lacked all sense of the singular, the individual. But what shocked me, next to the lack of a sense of time, was inconsistency of gender. Everything animate and inanimate was either masculine or feminine, nothing was neuter—except human beings” (50). The Man adds that he never encounters anything like this in any other language. Here, Bryant demonstrates the inadequacy of patriarchal language to express utopian subjectivity, as well as irrelevance of concepts of gender and singularity/plurality. The Atan verbs lack tenses: “literally, as they spoke, there was no sense of past or future, only of now, the present moment” (Bryant 50). This is similar to what Bakhtin describes as folkloric chronotope with “no precise differentiation of time into a present, a past and a future (which presumes an essential individuality as a point of departure).” Indeed, Bryant attempts to create such a chronotope on Ata: the Atan language lacks tenses because time is trapped in the eternal “now”; it does not move other than in dreamtime. Instead, there is a powerfully and sharply differentiated meaning for different times reserved for daily routines, ceremonies and rituals: for planting, for dreaming, for eating, for telling dreams—there are times, but there is no time and no visible change. Because time does not exist, change, then, cannot happen—it is brought from the realm of the subconscious. Bakhtin argues that a folkloric conception of time arises only in collective, work-oriented agricultural base: “at its heart is a taking apart and putting together of social everyday time, the time for holidays and ceremonies connected with the agricultural labor cycle, with the seasons of the year, the periods of the day, the stages in the growth of plants” (“Forms of Time” 206–210). This time is characterized by a general striving ahead (in dream and in action) towards change, towards the fulfillment of the utopian dream. For the kin of Ata, “reality consisted of dreams and their waking life was an illusion” (66); this makes their dreams particularly important as visions of reality through which their perception of life is expressed. Dreamtime is sunk deeply in the individual and collective subconscious, implanted on it and ripening on it. When the Man tells the Atans that their dreams are not real, they are “hallucinations, mental enactments of desires” (66), they do not understand him. The crucial thing for Atans is not the self-sufficiency of their limited spatial world, but its telepathic link to the rest of the world. Their goal in life is to find a path of dreaming higher dreams that let them communicate with the real-world people; this goal is more self-sacrificial and spiritual than ecological. Searching for the path and trying to stay on it is absorbing and vital for the person who tries it. This is a particularly interesting development for the feminist genre: whereas utopia is generally viewed as social dreaming, Bryant’s feminist utopia idealizes living the dream and dreaming higher (more humanistic) dreams. Dreams, therefore, become life regulators in utopia; the kin choose to live in a certain rhythm which, in turn, serves as one of universally accepted dream regulator:

114 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

freedom to move around, a simple diet, abundant physical labor, few distractions, the company of people with shared values, solitude when desired. Dreaming prescribes a certain lifestyle, a rhythm, a meditative approach of patience and openness that facilitates the individual change in the mentality of the male protagonist. For many years, the Man collects the dreams that he hears on Ata because he thinks that the dreams (and not the rhythm) are key to everything. Since there is no paper on Ata, he inscribes the dreams on animal hides and stones. As the scope of his work grows, he categorizes dreams into taxonomies, thus trying to impose patriarchal order on the shared dreaming of the Atans: the historical chronicles, the Sabbath dreams, the winter tales. Gradually, the scope of his work grows, as do the categories that now encompass “history, customs, ceremonies, allegories, fairy tales, songs, health practices, agricultural methods, bodily disciplines, etc.” (177–179). He then becomes increasingly frustrated as he realizes that his attempts to impose order do not work: each story varies with the teller. There is, he comes to recognize, no permanence in “the complex and shifting mythology of Ata” (164). He has another revelation: intrigued by the similarity of Atan dreams to the mythology, folklore and literature of the real world, the Man decides to spend the rest of his life trying to “reconcile” all these versions (200). The implication for feminist genre reasoning, then, is quite significant: while the Man looks for order in terms of hierarchy, permanence and stability, all his regulatory efforts are futile because Bryant’s utopian dreamtime is fluid and changeable. According to Burke, all human action is performative; the human performance has a way of affecting the situation. We can speculate that the Man’s action of writing down the dreams affects the situation in an unpredictable way: paradoxically, the dreams remain unknown, unrepresentable, resisting fixation. Despite patriarchal attempts at writing or other graphic representations of dreams, the utopian culture remains something other than an inscribed text. At this point, his Atan friend Salvatore tells him a new dream with an important message: to grasp the reality beyond the dream, one needs much more than a passive act of reading and writing. One needs to act, to keep the rhythm—to live in the presence of the dream. Salvatore’s dream articulates the elevation of speech above writing and dreaming over speaking: In my dream the people of Ata began to make markings. They were very pleased, believing that all the great dreams of Ata would be captured and preserved, and none would be lost But then disputes arose as to which were the best versions of the dreams, and as to whether the mark gave the correct meaning. Many more marks were invented, and many worked on carving alternate stories. Kin split over which story was correct There was no time to carve all the stories; choices would have to be made. But even more serious was the effect that writing had upon the words of the story. It froze them. People began to mistake the word for the unknown behind it. Instead of expressing the unknown, the carved word became a thing between the

DOROTHY BRYANT

115

people and the unknown which it should symbolize. All was donagdeo. The people ceased to dream high dreams. And so, one by one, they stopped the writing and the reading. They went back to the old way of telling the dreams in spoken words that rose like smoke and disappeared into the air to intermingle there, where there was room for an infinite number of dreams, which could change and grow and become closer to reality. (201–2) To function as life regulators, the dreams have to remain fluid, changeable and resisting inscription. These dreams are individual; however, they influence the whole collective through sharing and rituals. When a person dreams the same dream three times, it is considered important enough to be told to all the Atans in the la-ka. And then all the people obey what this dream tells them (as a collective) to do. Through this procedure, the utopian collective maintains its social order. While the Man refines his content-based taxonomy of dreams, Salvatore again warns him that simply to dream (and even keep the rhythm) is not enough: a person must obey their dreams. The Atan dreams exist on different levels: simple bodily dreams and deeper dreams. Bodily dreams warn the Atans about some inner strain or beginning of disease. Every Atan tries to live in such a way as not to make these warnings necessary. They find and keep a certain biological rhythm. Deeper dreams come only after the simple bodily dreams go; they may be very direct and sometimes veiled, but they tell the people deeper things about themselves. And lastly, after deeper dreams are fulfilled, they go away, and the more important dreams come to the Atans and teach them how to communicate telepathically with the outside world. In these telepathic dreams, they can be touched more directly. These dreams tell them that words and gestures are not necessary because they are crude and indirect (191). Therefore, on Ata, obeying the rhythm and perceiving (listening and seeing) are far more important than speaking and writing. This valorization of perceiving over expressing is most interesting: on the one hand, Bryant attempts to question the patriarchal dogma that language is indeed necessary as a tool for understanding; on the other, the idea of using language as a means of expression is represented as “patriarchal” in this instance of the genre (and several others, e.g. Suzette Haden Elgin’s “Native Tongue”). The only person who needs language is the patriarchal Man. For him, writing is the venue for liberation and the finding of his voice, in part because for him writing is still about stability and order. Through writing, he is able to document his own consciousness-raising experience for the world to read. In contrast, the Atans need no words to communicate and live in harmony with everything around them, in an understanding that transcends the language barrier: they create stories without writing, and their traditions of orality help them keep these stories alive. With time, the Man realizes that his hallowed skill or talent of writing is really an untruth, only a partial translation of reality; and in rising

116 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

above writing and its inadequacies, he learns to communicate in the Atan way, i.e., on a more intense telepathic level. THE LAW OF LIGHT According to Burke, social order is understood by its members through symbols, myths, rituals and images in which society reflexively perceives itself. Consequently, Burke’s perspective of symbolic action allows for societies to be formed around collective symbols. Shared dreams, myths, and archetypes act out and perpetuate the commands of the collective. What unites society, says Burke, is common experience, and that requires symbolic similarity, common meanings; therefore, one can describe and analyze society as a symbolic order. On Ata, the central symbols and images of light and darkness, cycle and circle, dream and word construct the meaning of situations for which the actions of the kin are strategies. Being dreamers rather than talkers, the kin of Ata are still human beings; and, in as much as they use language, they are “inventors of the negative” and are “goaded by the spirit of hierarchy,” as Burke writes in his definition of human beings. The negative is the concept that Burke uses to describe the symbolic processes through which people make sense of their world. According to Burke, we are “moralized by the negative” that has a “hortatory” function, what he calls the “thou shalt not”.5 Here, Burke is urging us to consider how language is an instrument of transcendence in as much as it defines our nature as human beings, affects our behavior and motivates our actions. Without an order there is no disorder, and, as any other society, Ata is engaged in drama through the linguistic device of nagdeo and donagdeo, “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not” that articulate the division, create authority and dictate the acceptance or rejection of morals expressed in dreams. So, while they deny negativity on one level (nothing is explicitly prohibited; rather, certain actions are not recommended), the Atans are still trapped in the primeval positive/ negative dichotomy. By examining the dreams of Ata, the Man is inquiring into the concepts and ideas used to produce understanding in this collective. Atan rituals, myths and symbols do more than reflect the experience of their collective life; they create it. It is worth remembering here that Burke views myths as stories that function as “the basic psychological tool for working together”; he says that myths can serve to promote the continuation or transcendence of a given “reality” because they “deal with a second order of reality” (cited in Behr 22). Burke therefore argues that the communal relationships by which a group is bound are arbitrary, they are also “myths,” but they “nonetheless serve a real function because they symbolically orient our perception beyond our immediate material environments and, in doing so, affect real human actions in the world” (Behr 22). On Ata, as the Man reports, “every act had become ritualized to serve the dramas of their dream life, which in turn dictated their waking life” (67). Therefore, myths here

DOROTHY BRYANT

117

affect real human actions in the Atan world; dreams are enacted in rituals that, through the mechanism of prescribed conformity, govern the actions of the Atans. The communal consciousness of Atans as conveyed through their myths, language and ritualization, is quite unique. Importantly, in the Atan language, the term for word is the same as the term for false or lie. This utopian language contains few abstractions except nagdeo and donagdeo; there are words for good or bad, honor or duty, and other lofty concepts, but all of these are seldom used. Notably, there is no word for happiness. The Man comes to realize that nagdeo encompasses all that is positive, and donagdeo, all that is negative: this is the concept by means of which the Atans are “moralized.” These two terms are never applied to persons, only to acts. Persons are just kin, neutral, neuter, unmodified. Nagdeo is “a greeting, a prayer, a benediction,” roughly meaning “good dreams,” or “valuable dreams” or “enlightening dreams.” To call something donagdeo is to say that it is “not productive of good, valuable, or enlightening dreams, dreams that showed the way back—to the sun” (67). On Ata, there is no written moral code: each person finds for oneself what is donagdeo. However, certain actions are prescribed as not recommended through shared dreams: forcing anyone to do or not to do something is not good. Eating too much or not eating enough, or talking too much (98) is not recommended. To work too hard is also donagdeo: a bit of work, however, makes one’s body ready for good dreams. The Man perceives this principle as a societal regulation of the ordering and distribution of work without compulsion (99). An Atan should not exhaust himself in compulsive work for fear of being restricted to dreaming only of “trees falling on his aching back.” But more importantly, no one would want to exist entirely on the labor of others, lest he or she dream “mean” dreams (68). Anger, violence, coercion is donagdeo. Even when the Man is raping Augustine, the Atans do not stop him because “to stop or force him would be donagdeo” (54); they just watch him with a grave expression and, in this way, make him profoundly ashamed: “Nobody moved, nobody said anything Suddenly I felt sick. Something I had not felt for so long I hardly knew what it was—a wave of shame—passed through me. I felt it only as anger, sickening anger. I stood up. As soon as I did, the people fell back and started to walk back to the fields” (54). His victim Augustine does not blame him either; instead she goes straight to the ritual place of refuge—hol-ka—and stays there until she forgives him. But the Man is not regulated by the Atan moral code: once forgiven, he rapes her again and, this time, he makes her pregnant. Yet, he is not punished even for his second crime (he is only reprimanded with donagdeo). Yet, he feels that he is the one being humiliated. The Man finds that donagdeo expresses “reactionary and primitive taboos” (68), telling the people that they are imprisoned by their superstitions (70). If there is hierarchy or social order, there is also the rejection of order and the consequent guilt. Burke suggests that the “sacrificial principle…[is] intrinsic to the idea of Order.”6 Here, then, is Burke’s foundation of society: drama is based

118 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

on conflict; conflict implies hierarchy; hierarchy causes guilt; guilt leads to redemption, and redemption produces victimage. Rejection means the need to expiate the resulting guilt. Burke writes that rituals, dramatic enactments, provide us with visible symbols in which hierarchy is built up and in which rejection is atoned for; this means that the scapegoat, the victim, is essential to the order of society. Given the sociohistoric exigence of the 1970s, the sacrificial principle is essential for Bryant’s novel; the Christian drama is enacted again and again: first the utopian woman is sacrificed, then the Man willingly goes through transformation and accepts sacrifice. The Atan creation myth is of paramount importance in the novel because it speaks about the division from the Sun and the need to go back to it. It reveals the connectedness of light and darkness, sign and its meaning, nature and humans, part and whole, dream and reality. It also discloses the ultimate goal of the Atan people—to overcome the gravity of guilt, to go to the sun, and to become the light again. This myth is told, performed and enacted several times in the narrative. Each time, it evolves, transcending fixed meanings and overcoming the rigidity of reification: But the day came when a piece of the sun fell to the ocean. It fell and floated on the ocean. It separated itself into earth and water and plants and animals. It was no longer sun, but each of its parts was a part of the sun and a sign of the sun. And all its parts, earth and water and plants and animals, were content in their division, content in their expression of the sun, striving and being, as a sign of the sun but never true sun, lost to the form of the true sun…. Until the single multiple signs formed the human part. And the human part of the sun was not content. The human part suffered because within it was the knowledge of the fall from the sun and the yearning to return. It knew and it did not know. It suffered and yearned. It suffered and yearned for what it did not know. And out of its suffering and yearning grew the cry of the people, yearning to know the way back to the sun. And the sun took pity on the people, and when they fell asleep, the sun shone through the sleep and lit up the world of sleep and showed them the way. In silent light of sleep the people saw that as there was a law of gravity there was also a law of light and that the law of light was stronger than the law of gravity. And the people obeyed the light of sleep, and they kept the light within them, and stood in the light of sleep both waking and sleeping until the light surrounded them and filled them. And they became the light. And as the sun shone on them, they shone back, and were lifted as light and shot as rays of light. And gravity was overcome and the people of light returned to the sun where they shine and flame eternally. (64–65) Myths are not only told and retold on Ata; they are also enacted. Augustine’s and the Man’s sacrifice is part of such a myth, intensified by the imagery of light. When the Man becomes consubstantial with the community, the purpose of Ata

DOROTHY BRYANT

119

is revealed to him: without Ata, the human race “would have destroyed itself. The complete disconnection from the dream, total donagdeo, is destruction. When that possibility is imminent, someone is called, some kin of Ata, someone very strong. This kin is sent back, is sacrificed, is sent to live among those on the edge of destruction. The human race is like a suicide, perched on the edge of a cliff, wavering, teetering. When she is about to fall over the edge, one of us goes out and, using all the strength he has, makes a wind that blows against the falling, keeps humanity wavering on the brink” (Bryant 140). The Man asks: why bother, why not let the human race jump? Salvatore explains to him that all people are kin, both in the utopian world and in the real world: “though we have lost them, we must draw them all back again if any of us is to go to…to what we are for. One cannot go alone; it must be all or none, you see” (140). For this reason, every Atan, especially a leader, a “strong dreamer,” lives in constant anticipation of the time when s/he will be “called” to save the human race. Bakhtin identifies another characteristic of ritual when he describes it as a cultic activity by which society differentiates itself from undifferentiated production (Bakhtin 212). According to Bakhtin, the elements of the eternal matrix, such as food, drink, death, enter into ritual, acquire a magic significance in the ritualistic context. Ritual and everyday life are highly interwoven with each other, but there is already an interior boundary between them: bread in a ritual is no longer the actual ordinary bread that one eats every day. Indeed, the Atan herb and grain stew becomes their ritualistic nourishment. As Bakhtin points out, the isolated object becomes a substitute for the whole. This is the source of the substitutive function of the victim and the basis for sacrificiality in the novel: when the Man chooses to be sent into the real world, he is thus willfully sacrificing himself. At the same time, in this willful sacrifice, he acts as a substitute for the real world itself in the Atan ritual of pushing the world away from suicide. Bryant’s treatment of myth is frequently metaphorical: if myth has (historically) embodied patriarchal values and aspirations, re/deconstructed myth perhaps can embody or at least inscribe different values of connectedness, sharing, bonding, collectivism. By suggesting alternative truths, realities and values through metaphor and myth, by stimulating questions and perhaps discordance in the mind of the reader, Bryant, I suggest, attempts to challenge patriarchy and create feminist mythology. In this way, her changing of patriarchal tropes functions similarly to Russ’s disjointed narrative technique that I discuss in the next chapter. Tradition is denaturalized, symbolic order upturned, and new spaces for/of exploration opened: “The ‘as if’ of the imagination is implicated in the very act of ‘seeing’ the real” (Cornell 1991, 168). The moral development of the protagonist in Bryant’s novel requires selfsacrifice. After living on Ata for close to fifteen years, the Man understands its “greatest miracle”: the Atans are “no different from any other people in the world, subject to the same faults, desires and temptations, but living each day in

120 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

battle against them” (204). Portraying this constant battle is an important action of the novel. Through the sacrifice of Augustine and the resulting catharsis, the Man comes to realize that he needs to transform and start battling his patriarchal self. Seven years later, at the spring ceremony, he steps into the flames of the ritual fire to be sent back to the world. When he is sent back to the world, he feels that he is “sent from heaven to hell” in an act of utopian redemption. He breaks from the utopian collective and becomes an individual hero again: aided by others, visited by his daughter, but acting alone. Through his self-sacrifice, he is enabled to fulfill Augustine’s dream and to cast a light on the people of Ata through writing the book we are reading. His sacrifice becomes his nagdeo, his act of gratitude to the people of Ata who, as he now believes, are “the sustainers, the sufferers who tried to counterbalance what was done by men like me” (204). As he now understands, the Atans “gave all their strength to the most strict, self-imposed, unarticulated discipline, resigned to maintaining this balance, and the balance of the whole insane world, until it would, of its own choice and from its own realization of necessity, come back to Ata” (204). In the very last development of the plot, the Man “finds the utopian rhythm” again. It is interesting that, to describe utopian fulfillment, Bryant uses the same metaphor of “orgasmic waves” that she used at the beginning of the novel. As soon as the Man pleads guilty to the charge of murder, he gets instant gratification when he sees “indescribably warm, glowing light… everywhere”: “I breathed it into me and it poured out of me, sweeping through me like a million orgasms. I was full and whole. I was part of light and of all the other things that shone in and with the light. All were one. And whole” (218). In conclusion, I find that the controversy around the novel could stem from the fact that, in making her protagonist a male, a father and husband, a writer and leader of the young, articulate and well-liked in the utopian society, Bryant draws on the traditional qualities of the male hero in Western culture. And yet, her male hero does not get his social position in Ata by his patriarchal virtues, but only by rejecting them and adopting values associated with feminism. It is also important that each step in the Man’s metamorphosis is superseded by his sexual encounters with the utopian woman. In this pattern of sexual potency and moral transformation, Bryant reveals a deeper valorization of the “creative potency” of the male, aided by a female partner who is a stimulus and catalyst for the solitary transformation of the male. His willed transformation is considered as necessary to achieve utopia and universal harmony. This formulation has something in common with the phallocratic capitalist status quo which places the male, heterosexual hero at the center of its culture. Bryant’s Ata, then, implies such a patriarchal mentality because it reinforces Christian virtues of humility, tolerance, selfsacrifice, conformity, acceptance (that are also inscribed by patriarchy as traditionally feminine virtues), and provides little opportunity for activism, change, plurality, diversity and open-endedness.

DOROTHY BRYANT

121

Bryant’s ideal is harmony for all humanity on the basis of humility, tolerance, conformity. Bryant’s critique is directed against capitalist patriarchy, against its inequality and sexism, but it is also directed against the chaos of consumerism, materialism, greed, and against the isolated, egotistic capitalist individual. Bryant’s utopia, thus, exemplifies several generic functions, in particular the critical and the transgressive ones. Through conceptual transgression, Bryant intervenes in the patriarchal utopian genre, overcoming its narrowness and tendency towards provision of blueprints. Emerging in response to the negative representation of women in the patriarchal genre (as invisible, nonimportant, or nonexistent), Bryant’s utopia challenges patriarchal values and provokes social transformation by exemplifying utopianism of process that offers possibilities for individual change. Offering her anticapitalist option for the way out of the patriarchal situation, Bryant’s book promotes idealism versus materialism, spirituality versus consumerism, reinforcing the feminist message that neither biology nor social order are destiny; not, at least, in social and political terms. Bryant’s utopia displays a move away from certainty and “truth” towards a more open-ended and less acquisitive understanding of ourselves and our relations to others. Utopian ideals demand space and time for their full realization, and Bryant’s Ata embodies a definite system of feminist ideals. For example, Bryant’s Augustine legitimizes traditional feminine “passivity” and tolerance (which are only such from the linear perspective, but, as Bryant suggests, can function as important strategies within the feminist utopian discourse). Bryant’s portrayal of the utopian woman also • provides a critique of the low status of women’s work in the present and the subsequent revaluing of traditionally “feminine” occupations such as teaching and healing; • challenges assumptions about an innate female nature and counters them by the emphasis on women’s strengths; • portrays violence as male and thus antithetical to a feminist vision. Bryant’s description of Ata accomplishes the following important functions: it • • • •

challenges the public/private divide by patterning society after the family; gives precedence to respect for individuals over issues of race and class; describes social order achieved by persuasion rather than by force; romanticizes the human relationship with nature.

We can see that Bryant’s position is consubstantial with many other utopias of the 1970s.7 As Carol Pearson puts it, these feminist utopias form “surprisingly numerous areas of consensus among such seemingly divergent works” (63). These utopias differ from patriarchal narratives because they discard stereotypical themes and devices, such as striving for perfection, providing

122 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

blueprints, and validating the patriarchal gender roles; rather, they employ such traditional feminine forms of self-revelation as the diary and the confession. Bryant portrays a new relationship to one’s own self, to one’s particular “I”— with no witnesses, without any concessions to the voice of a “third person,” an observer. I will argue that relating his own “self” makes the protagonist’s transformation much more believable. Here, to use Bakhtin’s description of the protagonist’s metamorphosis in a novel, the representing consciousness “seeks support and more authoritative rereading of its own self, without mediation, in the sphere of ideas and philosophy” (Bakhtin “Forms of Time” 145); and his own self is revealed to the Man within the utopian chronotope which encompasses dreamtime or the conditional mode. By contrasting the Atan chronotope to that of the real world, Bryant’s novel depicts a constant struggle between the alienation of the real-world depersonalized self and human bonding and sharing built onto an abstractly humanistic foundation of the utopian world. In the utopian chronotope, the Atans privilege their dream life over their waking one, which they consider to be illusory. The dreamtime of the condi tional mode is not mere escapism; rather it has a transformative function. The protagonist’s metamorphosis is only possible in the utopian chronotope which enables the protagonist to change his own perceptions and hence his actions in his own reality. A famous writer, almost of cult standing, he could, as his lawyer insists, successfully plead not guilty to the charge of murder that he faces when he returns from the utopian world. Instead he pleads guilty and chooses a death sentence. He has, to paraphrase Margaret Whitford, undergone a paradigm shift in consciousness that has led him to a willful sacrifice. To use Bakhtin’s phrase, his metamorphosis “serves as the basis for portraying the whole of an individual’s life in their more important moments of crisis: for showing how an individual becomes other than what he was” (Bakhtin’s emphasis, Bakhtin 115). In this way, Bryant is able to provide sharply differing portrayals of the same man at various stages in the course of his life: she describes the man’s crisis, transformation, and rebirth. The Man gets sent back to his world because, as it was observed, in their own chronotope agents have more access to meaningful action than in other chronotopes. The Man’s action is, then, writing the book we are reading. He feels that he was sent back in space and in time for this particular purpose to tell the story of Ata. In his final monologue, the Man, twice rapist and twice murderer, is transformed into the Comforter promised to us by the epigraph of the novel: after his metamorphosis, he is able to bring all eternal utopian values to our remembrance. The utopian side of the novel relies on the real-life possibilities of human development—possibilities not in the sense of a program for immediate practical action, but in the sense of the eternal demands of the human nature. The transformed Man now offers to the audience the feminist blessing for the action motivated by the novel:

DOROTHY BRYANT

123

It is finished and tomorrow I go Home. Perhaps you picked up this book because of the sensation surrounding my trial…if you continued to read, it was because in this hasty and incomplete account, I told you something that at some level of your being, you already know. Something you know as an echo, as a glimpse of a dream or as a fragile hope you are ashamed to voice. Do not judge these words by the man who writes them. Listen not to my dreams, but to the echo they evoke in you, and obey that echo. And think that if I, a murderer whose murders were the least of his crimes, a man like me could find himself in Ata and could re-learn the dream, and further, could glimpse for a moment the reality behind the dream…then how much easier it might be for you. You have only to want It, to believe it, and tonight, when you close your eyes, you can begin your journey. The kin of Ata are waiting for you. Nagdeo. (220) Here, the reader is promoted from the role of the eavesdropper to that of the participant who is encouraged and blessed for participating in the symbolic action of the novel. The feminist transformation of the patriarchal Man is complete and the feminist motivation for individual activism in search of the utopian Home is finally articulated. Bryant’s novel definitely plays its part in the antihegemonic context as an attempt to digest the intense socio-political experiences of the 1970s. Bryant considers the important question of the individual’s relation to society, the power of dreams, and the use of this power. She also attempts an examination of a peaceful, decentralized utopian society whose politics and philosophy are monitored by the collective subconscious revealed through their dreams. Bryant challenges many patriarchal divides: those between private/public spheres of life, interiority/exteriority, dreaming/writing, action/passivity. In its reliance on the conditional mode and open-endedness, the novel hints at the higher reality which can be grasped through dreaming higher dreams. Bryant’s utopia works toward the classical utopian aspirations of Western philosophy which Moylan identifies as reconciliation in the potential harmony for all (93). As a revival and transformation of utopian writing, it contributes to the wider feminist utopian dialogue about the emancipatory society.

CHAPTER FOUR Joanna Russ New Meaning for Old Concepts

Joanna Russ, Nebula, Hugo, and Tiptree award-winner,1 wrote her utopian novel The Female Man in 1969.2 Russ’s novel was highly important for the development of the feminist utopian genre because of her utopian vision, activist solutions and radical narrative interventions. Taking up feminist issues pioneered by theorists in the 1960s and 1970s (Betty Friedan, Shulamith Firestone, Germaine Greer, Kate Millett, and Simone de Beauvoir),3 The Female Man exemplifies the intertextual and dialogic nature of the feminist utopian genre. The book is socio-historically contingent and implicated in the politics of the second-wave feminist movement with which it is contemporaneous. Problematizing patriarchal values, Russ discloses the linguistic sexism of patriarchal discourse by portraying a heteroglossia of societal voices and employing an array of rhetorical devices. In fact, Russ makes the negative patriarchal response to feminism one of her central themes. When Janet Evason, Russ’s utopian visitor, meets New Yorkers at a party, she is right away exposed to patriarchal denial of feminism: “A Manufacturer of Cars From Leeds (genteelly): I hear so much about the New Feminism here in America. Surely it’s not necessary, is it?” (The Female Man 37). On many occasions in the novel, Russ uses irony and sarcasm to disclose patriarchal treatment of women who constitute “the great, cheap labor force that you can zip in when you’re at war and zip out again afterwards” (137). Russ’s revelations provide a socio-historic explanation for the rage and anger of radical feminists, thus facilitating her emphasis on separatism as feminist strategy. Russ’s novel, therefore, had a profound impact on the emerging feminist community as an example of a consciousness-raising narrative (feminist science fiction and utopian fans still include it in the “must read” list). Russ reinforces the idea that gender is a social construct, that patriarchy is not going to change by itself, and that individuals can succeed only when they gain access to power, even if it is done by force. I will start my analysis with discussing The Female Man’s relationship to the antecedent genre, its disruption of patriarchal narrative codes, its dialogism and interaction with both patriarchal and feminist discourses, Russ’s insistence on ambiguity, fluidity and multiplicity of identification illustrated by her

JOANNA RUSS

125

protagonists. Using the new-rhetorical analysis, I will explore several conceptual issues: • the initiation of young girls into patriarchal sex roles; • the subversion of the key concepts “manhood” and “womanhood”; • the attempt to eradicate the difference and to resolve contrarieties between the key concepts within Russ’s “female man.” CALCULATED AMBIGUITY The form of Russ’s novel is the first refreshing experience for the reader because Russ develops what I would call “calculated ambiguity” and makes an elaborate attempt to disrupt the narrative codes of patriarchal fiction. As Burke reminds us, “form in literature is an arousal and fulfillment of desire. A work has form in so far as one part of it leads the reader to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence” (Counter-Statement 124). Form, thus, evolves out of an artist’s ability to identify with an audience’s expectations. I would further argue that Russ manipulates her readers’ expectations of the utopian genre: she intervenes in the patriarchal genre with narrative innovations that can be best described in terms of fiction theory, a feminist mode of writing later theorized in the Canadian feminist discourse community. Daphne Marlatt, a feminist theorist and writer, thus describes fiction theory (the punctuation in the citation below is original): fiction theory: a corrective lens which helps us see through the fiction we’ve been conditioned to take for the real, fictions which have not only constructed woman’s ‘place’ in patriarchal society but have constructed the very ‘nature’ of woman (always that which has been). fiction theory deconstructs these fictions while fiction theory, conscious of itself as fiction, offers a new angle on the ‘real,’ one that looks from inside out rather than outside in (the difference between woman as subject and woman as object). this is not to say that fiction theory is busy constructing a new ideology, a new ‘line’—indeed (in-action) suspicious of correct lines, of claims to a preemptive real, it enters a field where the ‘seer’ not only writes it like she sees it but says where she is seeing from…this is where vision in that other sense enters in, that which is also and could be. fictions that focus on our becoming (real). grounded in an analysis of the actual (theory). (Marlatt in Godard, et al. 64) Russ develops the utopian genre’s possibilities to accommodate fiction and theory within the narrative, seeing parts as parts, and not as a seamless whole. Joanna, one of Russ’s protagonists, describes writing the book we are reading, as well as seeing herself writing it; she, therefore, sees the narrative from the inside.

126 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

This reflexive strategy helps Joanna understand why writing causes so much pain to her: she is writing it from her inferior positioning in the social order. Although utopian scholar Tom Moylan does not use the term fiction theory in his analysis of The Female Man, his use of ideas of Yves Lomax and the “politics of montage” parallels Marlatt’s description of fiction theory. Moylan develops Lomax’s assertion that the purpose of montage is not to make many parts fit into some kind of seamless and complete whole in which the individual parts are lost, but to continue to see the parts as parts, as a multiplicity that reveals our negotiations of difference (Moylan 82). Another feminist critic, Barbara Godard, argues that feminist narratives mediate difference in their representation of women by using a multiplicity of narrative forms that play with language and critique patriarchal social discourse. Godard argues that “[w] omen’s writing disturbs our usual understanding of the terms fiction and theory which assign value to discourses. Detached from their ordinary contexts, established meanings become suspect. By inciting the reader to rethink her/his presence within that “social reality,” women writers effect a disturbance in those constructions that work at keeping us all in our “proper places” (61). Godard’s definition of fiction theory closely matches Russ’s utopia: [A] narrative, usually self-mirroring, which exposes, defamiliarizes and/or subverts the fiction and gender codes determining the re-presentation of women in literature and in this way contributes to feminist theory. This narrative works upon the codes of language (syntax, grammar, gendercoded diction, etc.), of the self (construction of the subject, self/ other, drives, etc.), of fiction (characterization, subject, matter, plots, closure, etc.), of social discourse (male/female relations, historical formations, hierarchies, hegemonies), in such a way as to provide a critique and/or subvert the dominant tradition that within a patriarchal society has resulted in a deformed representation of women. All the while it focuses on what language is saying and interweaves the story. It defies categories and explodes genre. (Godard 60) Though Godard’s claim that fiction theory explodes genre sounds quite radical, she here refers to the patriarchal genres that indeed stifle the feminist desire to represent women’s experiences in the patriarchal status quo and to envision a new social order. When seen in this perspective, her definition is not contrary to how genre theory justifies the feminist interventions into the patriarchal genres. Moylan identifies the montage elements in The Female Man that fiction theory would recognize as playing with narrative and language codes. This montage effect is first established by the division of the novel into nine parts which are further divided into segments of varying length and form. Sometimes a segment is a long and subjective consideration of a significant event in the life of one of the agents in the novel. Such is Part Four, XVI, in which Janet remembers falling in love with Vittoria (Russ The Female Man 75–9). At other times a segment is

JOANNA RUSS

127

only one sentence long, like Part Four, VII, which makes a simple yet piercing comment on the hegemony of male-dominated political decision-making: “[t] here are more whooping cranes in the United States of America than there are women in Congress” (6). Different narrative strategies can even be combined in one segment; such as Part Five, IX, which includes a description, a dialogue set out as parts in a play, and a numbered list (93). This disjointed narrative technique is a notable development for the feminist utopian genre because these segments and, on a slightly different plane, numerous shifts from the first to the third-person narration disrupt and defamiliarize patriarchal traditions of fiction and narrative. Another technique is the absence of titles in most sections of Russ’s novel because it intensifies ambiguity. Each section is written from the point of view of the author, one of the protagonists, or some unacknowledged narrative voices. In its explorations of alternative worlds and different female identifications, the novel is an extended dialogue of four protagonists—Janet, Jeannine, Joanna, and Jael. One more way in which the codes of fiction are reworked in The Female Man is its refusal to adhere to a conventional utopian plot by multiplying and problematizing it. Russ’s narrative can be seen as an instance of the feminist genre that does not permit the antecedent utopian genre to become a rhetorical constraint, particularly in its chronotope. Traditionally, utopia portrays one voyage to (and a return from) a perfect society that is presented as a blueprint for the development of the author’s contemporary society. Such, for example, is Bryant’s utopia discussed in the previous chapter. Conversely, Russ’s chronotope is based on the tactics of disrupting time/space linearity. Sequence and chronology are continuously questioned in the protagonists’ visits to the worlds: Joanna’s of the present, Jeannine’s dystopian past, Janet’s utopia, Jael’s dystopia. The reader must constantly work to understand not only who is speaking in any given episode, but from/in which world this person is. This kind of disruption brings into question whether there are four separate agents, or whether each of them exemplifies a different aspect of the same female self. Ambiguity is further complicated because some episodes represent the “stream of consciousness” of one more female character, adolescent Laur, who is also on her way towards becoming the female man. The subjectivity of the female man, then, becomes a montage, a multiplicity. Plot, characters, chronology, place and point of view shift and circle so that they can never be fully grasped or pinned down. Moylan observes that, by not privileging one type of action, Russ’s utopia develops possibilities for diverse and multiple actions: “[n]ever does the assemblage of this…montage freeze into privileging one type of one action” (Moylan 85). Refusal of closure allows the text to work upon the codes of language, of self, and of fiction (Godard et al. 10). A further element of fiction theory in The Female Man is its self-mirroring or self-reflexive construction: Jeannine’s dystopian past is a reflection of our own, and Jael’s dystopia is mirroring Janet’s utopia. Though each of the four Js attempts to challenge gender stereotypes, the real potential for change resides in

128 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

Joanna’s writing the book we are reading, in the fiction that provokes radical action. The fragmented form of the novel represents feminist resistance to the constraints of the patriarchal genre. The book accommodates the expansive possibilities of the patriarchal genre to depict a better society together with the potentiality of fiction theory to indicate a way towards the utopian destination which resists the customary closure of authoritarian utopian systems. The twisted braid of the narrative disturbs traditional expectations of form and challenges the reader to re-envision the present and the future. Its calculated ambiguity is based upon three distinct strategies: • intentionally misleading usage of the first person pronoun “I”; • intertextuality demonstrated by borrowings from other literary genres (the novel, science fiction, drama, and the pastoral); • plurality of unmediated narrative voices. I am interested in Russ’s stylistic projects because, following Russ, many other feminist utopian writers have explored the narrative possibilities that she foregrounded. Russ deliberately starts her narration with “I,” and this grammatical fiction puzzles the reader who does not know which of the protagonists is speaking, or even what subject is talking—a woman, a man, or a female man. Indeed, as Butler writes, (problematizing Descartes “Cognito, ergo sum”), “there is no ‘I’ prior to its assumption of sex, and no assumption that is not at once an impossible yet necessary identification” (Bodies That Matter 99). Russ uses the grammar that challenges this identification precisely because she wants to avoid the explicit assumption of sex and/or mislead the reader. The reader is indeed confused, partly because Russ is unable to define clearly what differentiates her female men from their previous female identifications. The following example illustrates Russ’s calculated ambiguity. Janet Evason, the utopian visitor, starts the novel with a monologue, in an unmediated utopian voice, without the typical narrative frame of a voyage to utopia or the mediation of a guide to show the nonutopian characters around. PART ONE 1 I was born on a farm on Whileaway. When I was five I was sent to a school on South Continent (like everybody else) and when I turned twelve I rejoined my family. My mother’s name was Eva, my other mother’s name Alicia; I am Janet Evason (Russ Female Man 1). The first section of part two contains a monologue of another unnamed utopian character; the reader will not know her name until Part Eight where this

JOANNA RUSS

129

mystification is finally disclosed. Moreover, the second section of Part Two introduces one more unacknowledged narrator who identifies herself with the pronoun “I,” simultaneously declaring that she is not the “I” of the above section. This narrator articulates the central question of the book: “Who am I? I know who I am, but what’s my brand name?” (19). In other words, how can a person identify herself if she rejects the patriarchal brand name “woman”? It is notable that Russ asserts that her character has indeed turned into a man, but does not define Manhood, which remains desirable but indefinable. Russ’s hybrid, fragmented text “operates through excess: it isolates, exaggerates, reconnects, plays with certain features or components of the personality under varying conditions” (McClenahan 114). Within the fragmented narrative, the four characters are drawn into closer contact with each other and deeper explorations of their own selves, their respective worlds, and their choices of action. Moreover, they live their lives and go through their transformations while being observed, lectured to, and gossiped about by a multitude of patriarchal societal voices. For Russ, such a form resists simple closure and consistency, yet allows a strong statement about the present-day situation in the world. This hybrid form offers an unusual perspective on alternative strategies and tactics of the oppositional politics of change, thus contributing to the ideological function of feminist utopia. Russ creates an oxymoron for her title: a female man is a contradiction in terms which can be interpreted through Burke’s perspective by incongruity. Here, ambiguity is important because, as Russ further shows, though “man” should include “woman,” it really does not: being a gender-specific term, “man” in patriarchal discourse excludes “woman.” Russ makes this obvious when she uses other gender-specific terms (such as “feminine,” “female” or “wife”) as antonyms to “man.” By developing ambiguity, Russ disrupts the traditional meanings of the key concepts “man” and “woman” and makes them suspect. According to Burke, planned incongruity involves the deliberate fusion of incongruous terminology; it has both a disruptive as well as an enlightening effect, and it can therefore work as a “corrective framework” through which one affects a new social stability. Ambiguity, then, “is a resource that makes transformation possible” (Coe “The History and Principles of Rhetoric” 1–15).4 In our case, ambiguity is used to describe the transformation of a woman into a female man. The title is also incongruous for another reason: it talks about one female man, while the novel describes at least four such transformations. In fact, throughout the novel, Russ bombards the reader with examples of ambiguity and selfcontradiction; she even celebrates it in describing the man’s statue on Whileaway: “An ancient statue outside the fuel-alcohol distillery at Ciudad Sierra: a man seated on a stone, his knees spread, both hands spread against the pit of his stomach, a look of blind distress, face blurred by time. Some wag has carved on the base sideways eight that means infinity and added a straight line down from the middle; this is both the Whileaway schematic of the male genital and the mathematical symbol for self-contradiction” (Russ 100). Thus, the man

130 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

on Whileaway is placed near an alcohol distillery, he is in permanent distress, and is a monument to self-contradiction. Burke suggests that literary and artistic forms are to some extent transhistorical and universal in nature; and, therefore, part of the artist’s task is to convey the universal patterns of experience. Russ employs a “universal” utopian narrative premise that has been widely used before her. Her premise is based on the traditional utopian ploy of alternative temporal probabilities and/or different worlds.5 In this way, to use Burke’s phrase, she is able to satisfy her readers’ appetite for utopian genre expectations. For our purposes, it is enough to define an alternative world as not a place, but a possible way our world might be, or might have been. It follows, then, that there can be an infinite number of possible worlds. As it has been observed, one of utopia’s generic features is to construct “alternative universes in which variations of history exist in pasts, futures, and presents that are those of the protagonist, or reader” (Moylan 61). Developing a metaphor of a twisted braid of multiple alterations (which can be read as symbolizing a set of trajectories/strategies), Russ introduces her narrative’s central premise: always looking for an alternative, she presents her narrative not as one strand of possibility, but as a “twisted braid” within a set of variations (7). Russ uses the utopian extrapolative premise to set the chronotope for several feminist alternatives to the patriarchal, phallocratic world of the United States in 1969. Serving as the basis for the narration, this premise indicates Russ’s rejection of single-minded, linear, authoritarian visions of the present-day reality. Indeed, it marks her resistance to the existing totalitarian sociosymbolic order, facilitating the open, disjointed, fragmented form of her narrative. Russ’s chronotope (as portrayed by the twisted braid of alternative times and spaces) rejects linearity and promotes unrestrained instantaneous time/space movement. However, time appears to stay still on Whileaway and in Womanland while the four Js visit these societies; the protagonists can only feel the passage of time in Joanna’s real world. It is here, in the real world, then, that the movement of time offers the possibility for societal change in the future. Joanna’s real world, thus, contains a potential for her revolutionary transformation into the female man through enacting anger and violence against patriarchy. Russ consciously challenges and rises above preexisting and indoctrinated patriarchal narrative strategies. The result is that words and concepts are not divided; they are not, in other words, made discrete by grammatical interruptions. Connections between concepts, overlaps and dissonances, can thus be perceived. This is a different way of writing that is transformative of the language in which it is couched, and of our reception of it. It is reminiscent of Cixous’s concept of I’écriture feminine.6 Russ develops a confrontation of established and new meanings. Through her disclosure of patterns of linguistic sexism Russ compels the readers to consider whether these four characters can ever be adequately described by one-sided terms that beg questions of a political nature: why must women as sexual beings be determined as not-men, as “chics,” “bitches” or “whores,” i.e., in negative ways? In this way, Russ attempts to reconsider the

JOANNA RUSS

131

supposed neutrality of patriar chal discourse. It is particularly obvious in the scene at the party when a patriarchal man is getting confused while attempting to encourage the utopian visitor Janet with “You’re a real balsy chick. I mean you’re a woman … I mean you’re a fine person” (The Female Man 39). Another man is quite willing to discuss feminism, but he reminds Janet of the “obvious” and “natural” things: “What you’ve got to remember…is that most women are liberated right now. They like what they’re doing. They do it because they like it.” But, as this man claims, “You can’t challenge men in their own fields” (43), such as power, work, money, physical strength. According to him, “Unequal pay is a disgrace. But you’ve got to remember, Janet, that women have certain physical limitations” that supposedly explain why they are victimized: “you have to take into account that there are more than two thousand rapes in the New York City alone in every particular year. I’m not saying of course that that’s a good thing, but you have to take it into account. Men are physically stronger than women, you know” (44). Thus, the Man justifies male aggression and violence against women as “natural.” Later, the host of the party makes a pass at Janet who is not amused by his manifestation of human courting and finds it “savage.” But the host is not discouraged by her remark because in his patriarchal lexicon, “savage” is marked as affirmative: “Masculine, brute, virile, powerful, good” (45). Smiling broadly, the man says: “Right on, sister,” when Janet suddenly dumps him. And the patriarchal man is not prepared for this situation. He has no experience in dealing with it—Russ metaphorically describes him going through a patriarchal advice book, “flipping furiously through the pages of the book; what else is there to do in such circumstances? (It was a little limpleather—excuse me—volume 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 flip) “Ball-breaker!” (flip flip flip) “Goddam cancerous castrator!” (46). When Janet finally understands that these are insults, she breaks his arm. This is totally beyond his expectations because, in the Man’s blue book, the girl’s response to insults should be tears and not violence: “Girl backs down—cries— manhood vindicated. Under ‘Real Fight With Girl’ was written Don’t hurt (except whores)” (47). Joanna finds instructions for coping with brutality in her own pink book (which embodies society’s double standards for acceptable male and female behavior): “Man’s bad temper is the woman’s fault. It is also the woman’s responsibility to patch things up afterwards” (47). Seeing Joanna’s predicament, Janet advises her to throw both books away—and this is how Joanna’s liberation starts. In a short poem in Section V Russ describes women’s suffering from the (alleged) inferiority complex, depression, and identity crisis in patriarchy: “Learning to / despise / one’s / self” (219). Russ’s protagonist is learning to despise herself because patriarchy has habitually relegated the woman to the negative semantic space and abjected her as the Other, defining her by her difference. This inferiority complex is generalized as every woman’s experi ence

132 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

because, once again, the reader is not told which of the four protagonists is speaking. The verbal mystification becomes even stronger when this poem is interrupted by other unnamed societal voices harassing the woman: “Burned any bras lately har twinkle twinkle A pretty girl like you doesn’t need to be liberated twinkle har Don’t listen to those hysterical bitches” (49). Even by comparing this passage to the previous and the next, the readers cannot decipher whether one or many narrative voices are speaking here: it certainly sounds like a whole sexist crowd. The readers can decipher this mystification, however, if they consider this passage within the context of the novel, or even within the whole context of the rhetorical situation in which the novel appeared, and within the socio-political context of US culture. Russ here demonstrates patterns of linguistic sexism that permeate patriarchal discourse. She also depicts the women’s reaction to this sociohistoric situation: patriarchy renders women invisible or unimportant. When the secret service agents are looking for Janet, Joanna tells them: “Who are you looking for? There is nobody here. Only me” (21). She feels that she is nobody; likewise, Jeannine usually sees herself as unfit to live and readily communicates with mannequins rather than people. The novel reflects the sexist background against which the multiple stories of the four Js unfold, thus suggesting that feminist utopia as a genre is reactive to its socio-historic situation, particularly to patriarchal theorizing of women’s inferior positioning based on Freud’s psychoanalysis. A short section vocalizing anonymous societal voices follows a part introducing Laura Rose Wilding of Anytown, USA, an adolescent girl who “can’t ever be happy or lead a normal life” because she is “a victim of penis-envy” (65). Laur’s mother blames herself for her daughter’s “deformity”: “My mother worked as a librarian when I was little and that’s not feminine. She thinks it’s deformed me” (65). Laur is daydreaming that she is Genghis Khan—that is, trying on a male identification. According to Freud, Laura is demonstrating her masculinity complex. Laur’s predicament can be read as Russ’s attempt to portray the confusion caused by Freud’s psychoanalytical theory that permeated the patriarchal discourse of the time. As discussed in chapter two, Freud argues that the absence of a penis causes the girl’s sense of inferiority.7 Russ here, therefore, reacts to Freud’s theory that the girl’s conflict is caused by the imbalance between the masculine and feminine, active and passive, aspects to her psyche. Russ, however, shows that Laur’s conflict is caused and reenforced by continuous harassment exercised by anonymous members of patriarchal society. For example, quite suddenly for the reader, Laur’s dreams are broken by a sexist and offensive passage in an unnamed narrative voice: V …Everyone knows that much as women want to be scientists and engineers, they want foremost to be womanly companions to men (what?)

JOANNA RUSS

133

and caretakers of childhood; everyone knows that a large part of a woman’s identity inheres in the style of her attractiveness. Laur is daydreaming. She looks straight before her, blushes, smiles, and doesn’t see a thing. After the party she’ll march stiff-legged out of the room and up to her bedroom; sitting tailor-fashion on her bed, she’ll read Engels on the family and make in the margin her neat, concise, perfectly written notes She’s surrounded by mermaids, fish, sea-plants, wandering fronds. Drifting on the affective currents of the room are those strange social artifacts half dissolved in nature and mystery: some pretty girls. Laur is daydreaming that she’s Genghis Khan. VI A beautiful chick who swims naked and whose breasts float on the water like flowers, a chick in a rain-tight shirt who says she balls with her friends but doesn’t get uptight about it, that’s the real thing. (60) Laur can read Engels and dream about becoming Genghis Khan as much as she likes; the patriarchal voices will still view her as a sex object. Similarly, teenage Joanna dreams of being Humphrey Bogart, James Bond, or Superman, but she is constantly told that these dreams are not all right for women (205). Because the sexist voices are unacknowledged, the reader is left to speculate who Laur’s or Joanna’s anonymous opponents might be: misogynist neighbors or peers. The anonymity of the sexist voices in the novel makes them impersonal, and therefore more generic, typical for the patriarchal context. Russ keeps shifting authorial voices from the author’s point of view to an intentionally impersonal one which emulates encyclopedic entries about the underrepresentation of women in American political life. This narrative strategy is important for the feminist genre because it allows the feminist writer to portray a panorama of US culture in a confined space of the novel. Later in the novel Russ portrays the result of continuous societal harassment when she describes how a woman turns from self-hate to man-hating: “I am a sick woman, a madwoman, a ball-breaker, a man-eater; I don’t consume men gracefully with my fire-like red hair and my poisoned kiss; I crack their joints with these filthy ghouls’ claws O, of all diseases selfhate is the worst and I don’t mean for the one who suffers it!” (Russ 135) Thus, due to the symbolic violence of patriarchal discourse, through selfhate, rage and anger, the woman reverses the socio-symbolic contract and resorts to symbolic violence against men. The utopian visitor Janet travels ten centuries backward in time to our Earth. She arrives from the utopian planet Whileaway, a world in which all the men were killed centuries ago in a plague (or, in a different version of the story, a war). Janet represents the ideal woman who grew up with no genderbiased constraints on her life and, therefore, was able to develop her human potential in

134 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

full. The panorama of life on Whileaway is only part of the novel, for much of the action occurs in alternative worlds. The reader learns about them through the experiences of Joanna, Jeannine, and Jael, the other three protagonists, each having the same genotype and thus representing the power of societal and cultural construction of identity. The utopian Janet first meets Jeannine, who is from an alternative reality of the United States in 1969. In her world, Depression never ended, World War II never occurred, and women are more openly repressed than in the existing world. The third protagonist, Joanna, functions as the main narrator of the novel, though it is doubtful that the fictional Joanna can be easily identified with Russ herself. Both “real-life” Joanna and dystopian Jeannine represent women trying to accommodate to patriarchal worlds which are contrasted to the utopian Whileaway and the struggling Womanland. Joanna lives in the “real-life” New York in 1969 with its contradictory, and usually false, promises of liberation to the individual female in the phallocratic society. Joanna’s world is less dystopian than Jeannine’s, but not to a great extent. Joanna wistfully calls the utopian Janet a woman “whom we don’t believe in and whom we deride but who is in secret our savior from utter despair” (Russ 213). “Our only savior” (87) Janet is portrayed as a redeemer; this comes through in her manipulation of the pronouns he/she while singing a religious hymn (in this particular instance of the feminist utopian genre, it is important that God in the novel is portrayed as a female). Janet’s effect on Jeannine is generally overwhelming, because Jeannine had never imagined the possibility of a free and self-motivated woman, much less a whole planet full of them. Around Janet and in Whileaway, Jeannine typically wants to fade away into the woodwork and return to the secure slavery of her own time. Yet, she is curious enough to stay and absorb the mentality of the utopian “female man.” Janet’s effect on Joanna is more immediate, for Joanna is already partially aware of the need to be transformed: as a female subject, she is trying to find a new identification in a patriarchal society that reduces her to a sex object. These three characters meet a fourth, Jael, from a dystopian future between our time and Whileaway’s. Jael is from a world in which, referring to both gender and power, the “haves and have-nots,” the men of Manland and the women of Womanland, have engaged in a tiring and never-ending life-and-death struggle. Jael’s experience of being a woman is much like Joanna’s, but her response to patriarchy is violence, aggression, and terrorism. The braided narratives of the four protagonists invite the reader to accept responsibility for current choices that could lead toward one or another alternative. JANET THE SAVIOR In her opening monologue, Janet immediately asserts the existence of a onesexed utopian society which has successfully functioned without men8 for a thousand

JOANNA RUSS

135

years [as she explains, for her men are “a particularly foreign species” (33)]. On Whileaway, women are free and fulfilled individuals rather than victimized subjects produced by the socio-historic situation in the USA of the 60s (partly because, though motherhood is portrayed as a gratifying experience, children leave their mothers much earlier, at age five). The core of their social structure is families of thirty to thirty-five persons; children have a free run of the planet past puberty, and “the kinship web is worldwide.” It is interesting that utopian societies both on Ata and on Whileaway employ the concept of extended families for childcare; both of them are also classless, nonurban, communal, and ecologically sensitive. Whileaway, however, is an industrially developed society with a planned economy. Its citizens have access to free creative work and personal fulfillment. This is how Janet describes her new subjectivity—that of the female man of the future: I was born on a farm on Whileaway. When I was five I was sent to a school on South Continent (like everybody else) and when I turned twelve I rejoined my family. My mother’s name was Eva, my other mother’s name Alicia; I am Janet Evason. When I was thirteen I stalked and killed a wolf, alone, on the North Continent above the forty-eighth parallel, using only a rifle…. I’ve worked in the mines, on the radio network, on a milk farm, a vegetable farm, and for six weeks as a librarian after I broke my leg. At thirty I bore Yuriko Janetson; when she was taken away to a school five years later (and I never saw a child protest so much) I decided to take time off and see if I could find my family’s old home—for they had moved away after I had married and relocated near Mine City in South Continent. The place was unrecognizable, however; our rural areas are always changing. I could find nothing but the tripods of the computer beacons everywhere, some strange crops in the fields that I had never seen before, and a band of wandering children. They were heading North to visit the polar station and offered to lend me a sleeping bag for the night; but I declined and stayed with the resident family; in the morning I started home. Since then I have been Safety Officer for the county…. I’ve supervised the digging of fire trails, delivered babies, fixed machinery, and milked more moo-cows than I wish I knew existed I love my daughter…. I love my family (there are nineteen of us). I love my wife (Vittoria). I’ve fought four duels. I’ve killed four times. (Russ Female Man 1–2) Here, then, is the exciting potential for the American women of the 1970s: free access to jobs, technology, career choices, communal living, a network of friends and family, free and safe travel. But all of this can only happen once the “North Continent Wolf” is killed, once male power is broken, and women are free to establish their own society. It is meaningful that the sacrificial slaughtering of all men in the war has been translated in the communal memory into a more

136 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

appropriate myth of a plague that killed all males on Whileaway. Whileaway is now a relatively peaceful society: though the Whileawayans still kill each other in duels over incompatibility in temperament, the officially sanctioned mythology enabled the women to get rid of their guilt for massive violence against men. It also allowed them to assume a new identification and turn into “female men” without any remorse. However, Russ does not make it clear whether Whileawayans identify themselves as women, and what this concept means for them. It is not easy for the reader to define them as men or women either, because these gendered concepts are no longer relevant: woman on Whileaway has no other. This is an interesting development for the feminist utopian genre because it shows that sexual identity is not a basis for difference or discrimination; it means little in the utopian context where the very notion of identity is challenged. Another generic feature is the criticism of patriarchal language: due to linguistic difficulties, the new sexual identity cannot even be expressed by means of patriarchal language: though their last names end with “son” (Evason, Janetson), this flexion is presented as the fault of conventional patriarchal translation. Janet comments to Joanna that, “Evason is not ‘son’ but ‘daughter.’ This is your translation” (18). In the society of Whileaway, the hegemonic recodification of the woman is completed. To use Kristeva’s phrase, this society seems to function as utopia’s floodgate which she describes as “the only refuge for fulfillment” (“Women and Power” 453). However, Whileaway is not convincing as the place of the final “fulfillment,” in the sense of harmonious society celebrating the feminine values of tolerance, spirituality, sharing, self-sacrifice, bonding, because here sexual difference has been disintegrated by force. Whileawayans eliminated their male counterparts, in the meantime appropriating traditionally “male” values of anger, arrogance, dominance, hunger for power. It follows that this unique circumstance should allow for developing the singularity of the individual woman; however, this does not happen in the novel: individuation for Whileawayans is blurred rather than fully developed. Yet, Whileaway displays a panorama of utopia as liberated zone: an ideal society which is post-industrial, socialist, ecologically sound, and libertarian (Moylan 65–67). This world is under-populated, which is the key to its emphasis on ecology: farms, moo-cows, fields, ecological house-keeping are important in this world: “Whileaway doesn’t have any true cities. And of course, the tail of culture is several centuries behind the head. Whileaway is so pastoral that at times one wonders whether the ultimate sophistication may not take us all back to a kind of pre-Paleolithic dawn age, a garden without any artifacts except for what we would call miracles” (14). The selfsufficient utopian world does not waste itself in stagnation: another key term here is work. The only people who do not work are mothers. Motherhood on Whileaway is celebrated as a vacation, as one of the few periods when the woman has no other work for five years than raising her child. Janet bore her daughter at thirty, and she describes motherhood as “a hiatus at just the right time”: “It’s a vacation. Almost five years. The baby rooms

JOANNA RUSS

137

are full of people reading, painting, singing, as much as they can, to the children, with the children, over the children… There has been no leisure at all before and there will be so very little after—anything I do, I mean, I really do—I must ground thoroughly in those five years. One works with feverish haste At sixty I will get a sedentary job and have some time for myself again” (14–15). Childhood is a very important period in the life of the person, as well as the drastic separation from the mother at age five. This period is recognized as forming the basics for identification as a Whileawayan: “Whileawayan psychology locates the basis of Whileawayan character in the early indulgence, pleasure, and flowering which is drastically curtailed by the separation from the mothers” (52). All citizens enjoy individual autonomy within their worldwide web9 of kin. This community supports its members and maintains a risk-free environment, which is a sharp contrast to the USA in 1969: There’s no being out too late in Whileaway, or up too early, or in the wrong part of town, or unescorted. You cannot fall out of the kinship web and become sexual prey for strangers, for there is no prey and there are no strangers—the web is world-wide. In all of Whileaway there is no one who can keep you from going where you please (though you may risk your life, if that sort of thing appeals to you), no one who will follow you and try to embarrass you by whispering obscenities in your ear, no one who will attempt to rape you, no one who will warn you of the dangers of the street, no one who will stand on street corners, hot-eyed and vicious, jingling loose change in his pants pocket, bitterly bitterly sure that you are a cheap floozy, hot and wild, who likes it, who can’t say no, who’s making a mint off it, who inspires him with nothing but disgust, and who wants to drive him crazy. On Whileaway eleven year-old children strip and live naked in the wilderness above the forty-seventh parallel, where they meditate, stark naked or covered with leaves, sans pubic hair, subsisting on the roots and berries so kindly planted by their elders… While here, where we live—! (Russ Female Man 81) Paradoxically, Janet becomes Whileaway’s first emissary across time boundaries, because she is “stupid”—they could spare Janet since, with an IQ of 187 and the routine job of Safety Officer, she was less bright than the others and could be released from a job that required little work in utopia. Notably, Russ includes several socio-historic indications for the reader. Whileaway is a nowhere-land, but the novel is consubstantial with the sociohistorical context of the 1970s: first, Whileawayans meditate, reflecting the spiritual practices of the 1970s; second, the IQ is the sole measurement for a person’s intellect (which is an anachronism for feminism in the 1990s that includes other aspects of intelligence and ways of

138 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

knowledge-making not measurable by IQ). Third, marijuana is a widespread and legal drug on Whileaway. In this way, Russ acknowledges the 1970s valorization of smoking marijuana: Janet remembers “the orderly fields on Whileaway, the centuries-old mutations and hybridizations of cannabis sativa, the little garden plots of marijuana tended (for all I know) by seven-year-olds” (36). Stupid as Janet might be in the standards of Whileaway, she provides a sharp contrast to the two New York women in the alternative 1969: Jeannine, passive and repressed, and Joanna, awakening but still questioning. Janet’s “female man” subject-position is alien to the Earth women expectations because it situates itself outside the linear time of their identifications. As it was developed and operates “without equal in the opposite sex,” it remains “exploded, plural, fluid, in a certain way nonidentical” for them (Kristeva “Women and Power” 448). Therefore, Jeannine and Joanna initially identify Janet as a woman, and this paradox indicates discrepancies between their mentalities and hers. Russ’s utopian society has other contradictions, and ambiguity is quite welcome on Whileaway. Even their statue of God (who is, of course, female) is the tribute to contradictions because it is constantly changing: “She is a constantly changing contradiction, in that She becomes in turn gentle, terrifying, hateful, loving, ‘stupid’ (or ‘dead’) and finally indescribable.” (103). Citizens of Whileaway celebrate their jouissance—the joy of living a happy and fulfilled life—by playing musical instruments and dancing (102). They celebrate such occasions as the full moon, the winter and summer solstice, the autumn and vernal equinox, the flowering of plants, copulation, birth, marriages, sport, divorces, great ideas, anything at all, nothing at all, and even death (103). Taboos on Whileaway include “sexual relations with anyone considerably older or younger than oneself, waste, ignorance, offending others without intending to” (53). In this respect, Russ’s utopia exemplifies the ways in which this genre pursues feminist goals with explicitly feminist means. Here, then, women’s jouissance is liberated, and Cixous’s description of an empowered woman could be read as a portrayal of Whileawayans: Her libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide: her writing can also go on, without ever inscribing or distinguishing contours, daring these dizzying passages in other, fleeting, and passionate dwellings within him, within the hims and hers whom she inhabits just long enough to watch them, as close as possible to the unconscious from the moment they arise; to love them, as close as possible to instinctual drives, and then, further, all filled with these brief identifying hugs and kisses, she goes on and on infinitely. (Cixous “Sorties” 88) Another period which provides a striking contrast to women’s experiences in patriarchy is old age on Whileaway: old age is a time for creative work, freedom and leisure. Older women have learned “to join with calculating machines”; i.e., they have responsible jobs that require computer experience: “old brains use one

JOANNA RUSS

139

part in fifty to run a city (with check-ups made by two sulky youngsters) while the other forty-nine parts riot in a freedom they haven’t had since adolescence” (53). Seniors, then, are free to “spend their days mapping, drawing, thinking, writing, collating, composing.” In this creative work, they manifest celebratory qualities of feminist strength. At the end of the novel, Janet becomes a legendary figure, the women’s only hope, both “everywoman” and secret savior “who appears Heavenhigh in our dreams with a mountain under each arm and the ocean in her pocket, Janet who comes from the place where the labia of sky and horizon kiss each other so that Whileawayans call it The Door and know that all legendary things come therefrom. Radiant as the day, the Might-be of our dreams, living as she does in a blessedness none of us will ever know, she is nonetheless Everywoman” (213). JEANNINE: COGNITIVE STARVATION Jeannine comes from an alternative world whose history after the 1930s took a different turn. There was no Second World War, no Nazism, no concentration camps, no nuclear bombs; this world is in permanent depression. The postwar period of global US economic and military dominance, the cold war, the postcolonial development never happened. Women did not enter the labor force en masse. Since no pill was introduced in the 1960s, the women were not “drafted” as the “soldiers” of the sexual revolution. The Depression is worldwide. Describing Jeannine’s situation in her patriarchal world, Russ’s utopia manifests several important aspects of its generic social action: it criticizes patriarchy and develops socio-historic orientation for the readers (such as the abortive putsch, Chian Kai-shek, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) that allows them to recognize their own situation. It also speculates about “what might have happened.” The chronotope in Jeannine’s “lucky” world is different from that of Joanna’s real world: time here does not move, the world is stagnant in its permanent depression, and there is no possibility for social change. Women here are destined to remain on the margins, invisible, mute, constrained within stereotypical roles of possession—child or mother, sexual object. Consequently, though Jeannine dreams of having “a beautiful body and personality to burn” (17), patriarchy renders her “relieved of personality,” passive and weak, and most commonly associating with “souls” of furniture and mannequins: “Stupid and inactive. Pathetic. Cognitive starvation. Jeannine loves to become entangled with the souls of the furniture in my apartment, softly drawing herself in to fit inside them, pulling one long limb after another into the cramped positions of my tables and chairs. The dryad of my living room” (93). Later in the novel, when the “passive” and “weak” Jeannine meets the guerilla fighter Jael, she is most directly affected. A childish, dependent, frightened woman of 29, Jeannine has cherished romantic love so thoroughly that she feels that only by meeting a tall, dark, handsome, domineering myth can she ever be

140 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

rescued from her worthlessness and the boredom of her baresubsistence job. The Hollywood-style fantasies of romance and marriage are her sole escape. Jeannine internalizes the conflict of maintaining one’s own authenticity and the guilt of not fitting the established mold. In her situation, patriarchy is totally oppressive: marriage and motherhood are the only choices for girls while boys are expected to have careers and adventurous lives. Women’s value is based solely on one’s desirability; marriage and children are the only options; in fact, Jeannine does not really exist until she is married: “There is some barrier between Jeannine and real life which can be removed only by a man or by marriage; somehow Jeannine is not in touch with what everybody knows to be real life” (120). Man’s contribution to a relationship, then, is “Make me feel good; her contribution is Make me exist” (120). Jeannine talks about the pressures to get married; though she wants “something else,” she is “not fit to live” (121) without marriage because, as Russ explains marriage is the only acceptable outcome. Jeannine is in a crux: she is haunted by the thoughts of marriage and the impossibility of marrying her suitor Cal: “I ought to get married. (But not to Cal!)” (108). Her family and friends are pressuring her as well: when her brother sees her, the first thing he asks about is her wedding plans: “Jeannie… It’s nice to see you. When did you get in? When are you going to get married?” (113). When Jeannine jokingly asks her brother who she should marry, his answer is quite serious: “anybody” (116). Her family members are relieved when at last she announces her wedding plans: “We’re getting married—marvelous!—and my mother is very pleased because I am twentynine” (150). The only person who is not pleased is Jeannine herself: “I have everything and yet I am not happy. Sometimes I want to die” (150). Jeannine, thus, demonstrates her on-going conflict with social pressure to conform to traditional female traits of passivity, tolerance, dependence, propriety, admiration and support of men, and her betrayal of herself when she behaves in these inauthentic ways. Presumably, Russ demonstrates here that it is not possible for a patriarchal woman to own her sexuality and initiate free nonexploitative sex. For example, Janet shocks the “real life” people in her expression of her sexual desire and also in her sexual preferences. Social taboos for women to express their anger or sexuality are reflected in Joanna’s shock when she sees Janet throw a man on the floor at the cocktail party, or when Jeannine and Joanna see Jael killing a Manlander. Obviously, while male violence is acceptable, there is no room for female violence (even in self-defense) in patriarchal worlds. Women are so openly oppressed in these worlds that there remains no other option than either to die or to initiate change. Thus, Jeannine’s intolerable enslavement facilitates Russ’s articulation of feminist rage and the need to appropriate power by force. Pathetic in her passivity, Jeannine is frightened by the possibilities suggested by Janet and, while briefly visiting in her own time, tries to escape her selffulfillment by capitulating and marrying Cal, thus pleasing her family and burying herself. We see her in the novel refusing to be a man (86) and “softly but

JOANNA RUSS

141

very determinedly” trying to bolt her door against the change initiated by Janet: “She wanted to get back to the freedom of Fifth Avenue, where there were so many gaps—so much For Rent, so much cheaper, so much older, than I remembered” (87). However, influenced by Jael, Jeannine is rendered “selfpossessed” and “quietly stubborn” (165) by a sudden awareness that she, too, can kill a man and thus appropriate power (even through violence). Her resistance to change is finally broken not by utopian fulfillment, but by the dystopian chance to destroy the male society that has so totally constrained her. In this case, Russ’s novel demonstrates the dual utopian/dystopian action (Booker 343) or the double (utopian and dystopian) center of gravity of the feminist utopian genre which contains both “the negative and positive poles of exposure and advocacy, the contrary (though complementary) impulses of destruction and construction, or social criticism and social planning” (Delany 158). When Jael kills the Manlander, Joanna is ashamed, Janet weeps, and Jeannine is calm in the revelation of the power of women. She has seen a way toward acquiring her new subjectivity and decides to join Jael’s movement. At the final dinner Jeannine, former slave in a peripheral “undeveloped” society, is the one who wholeheartedly joins in Jael’s plan to extend the war into other time zones: “You can bring in all the soldiers you want. You can take the whole place over: I wish you would” (211). Thus, she accomplishes the first stage in the transformation into a female man—she catches the germs of anger, violence and aggression and welcomes the terrorist armies which will inevitably destroy her world. At the end of the novel, Jeannine goes window-shopping because she wants to say good-bye to her patriarchal self and to welcome the politics of change and opposition. JAEL: TERROR OF TERRORISM Important as utopia is for Jeannine and Joanna, Russ shows that the move from oppression to freedom cannot be taken without the mediation of the anger and the violence, both metaphoric and political, of revolutionary change. This skepticism about the programmatic efficacy of utopian reasoning and the foregrounding of radical change are important moves for the feminist utopian genre because this is where feminist discourse shows its revolutionary potential. The necessary assertiveness and anger are supplied by the fourth J. Jael, or Alice Reasoner, which is her cover name in her job as an employee of the Bureau of Comparative Ethnology, is “the woman without a brand name,” that is, without female subjectivity. More accurately, she represents a different type of a “female man,” a terrorist and secret agent. Jael comes from an all-woman society that is in constant war with the all-man society. It is notable that Russ examines war as a basis for identification because, as Burke suggests, war can be “a unifying enterprise”:

142 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

War does promote a highly cooperative spirit. War is cultural. The sharing of a common danger, the emphasis upon sacrifice, risk, companionship, the strong sense of being in a unifying enterprise—all these qualities are highly moral, and in so far as the conditions of capitalistic peace tend to inhibit such expressions, it is possible that the thought of war comes as a ‘purgation,’ a ‘cleansing by fire.’ (Burke “The Nature of Art under Capitalism” 677) Russ’s guerilla fighter Jael is from a utopian society unified by war; and, importantly, she is the one who brings the other three protagonists into contact with each other. On assignment as one of the leaders of Womanland, Jael sought her “alter egos” in alternative worlds to recruit them into the movement. Jael tells the other three about herself at her estate in Vermont hills, with its computerized house, ecologically balanced beauty, and live-in male android, the “sex-object” Davy who is the “most beautiful man in the world.” She describes her gradual move from the underground sentimental Arcadian communes to the revolutionary violence of a guerilla fighter, now privileged to spend short periods of rest in her own palace and gardens. Rather than finding refuge in a pastoral escape that might satisfy herself, she realized that such an escape was still a capitulation to the power structure. Therefore, she made a commitment to fight for the complete defeat of male power: “it took me years to throw off the last of my Pussy-fetters, to stop being (however brutalized) vestigially Pussy-catified. But at last I did and now I am the rosy, wholesome, single-minded assassin you see before you today” (187). In Jael’s world, femininity, tolerance, decency, passivity, dependency have derogatory meanings, while creativity is limited to technological gimmicks facilitating murder and rape. Womanland provides an answer to radical feminist speculations about what happens when women refuse male power and create a parallel society [the one that Kristeva describes as “a counterpower which then takes on aspects ranging from a club of ideas to a group of terrorist commandos” (“Women and Power” 452)]. This answer is the appropriation of power in order to exercise violence against men. Womanland is indeed a countersociety; it might serve as an example of a social structure whose very logic, as Kristeva would say, “necessarily generates, by its very structure, its essence as a simulacrum of the combated society or of power” (Kristeva “Women and Power” 454). In this countersociety, everything is done in the name of the Woman, an ideological concept that helps to mobilize individual women for the struggle against Manland, but is dysfunctional when applied to individual persons. Feminist theory (and Kristeva’s work in particular) has since warned us that this ideology can become “an unbelievable force for subversion in the modern world.” Kristeva observes that the woman “does not exist with a capital ‘W,’ possessor of some mythical unity—supreme power, on which is based the terror of power and terrorism as the desire for power” (455).

JOANNA RUSS

143

Any social order is sacrificial, but sacrifice orders violence, “tames it,” while refusal of the social order uncovers the risk that the unchained power will explode and lead to absolute arbitrariness. Womanland illustrates this arbitrariness; it both proves and argues with Kristeva’s warning that the female identification with power and the constitution of a fetishist counterpower are structurally related to the problem of terrorism.10 By portraying Jael, then, Russ demonstrates that feminist utopia treats violence as a viable option, with a seriousness that is central to the feminist rhetoric of the 1970s. The counterinvestment is evident in the anger, violence, and the military resistance required to strike back and destroy the coercive power of the current order which are represented in the terrorist Jael. But Russ does not let the reader judge Jael too harshly: Jael suffers from a profound guilt syndrome. However, this guilt is not caused by the murder and violence she commits, for she herself is a victim of an earlier crime: In my sleep I had a dream and this dream was a dream of guilt. It was not human guilt but the kind of helpless, hopeless despair that would be felt by a small wooden box or geometrical cube if such objects had consciousness; it was a guilt of sheer existence. It was the secret guilt of disease, of failure, of ugliness (much more worse than murder) it was the attribute of my being like the greenness of the grass. It was in me. It was on me. If it had been the result of anything I had done, I would have been less guilty. In my dream I was eleven years old. (Russ Female Man 193) Jael later explains why she feels so guilty: an old-fashioned girl, she was brought up to believe that a woman (though being a victim) is to blame for all of “those shadowy feminine disasters, like pregnancy, like disease, like weakness” that happen to her. Even in such violent acts as abuse or rape, the woman is considered “not only the victim of the act but in some strange way its perpetrator; somehow she attracted the lightning that struck her out of a clear sky.” The “secret guilt” of the raped victim is that she “was Cunt” and she “had lost something” (193). Jael’s story reveals patriarchal patterns of initiation of young females: through small talk and gossip into appropriate accepted modes of behavior. Never blaming the rapist, societal voices blame the victim instead: “being Prick is not a bad thing. In fact, he had ‘gotten away with’ something (possibly what she had ‘lost’)” (193). Though the young girl claims that she understands the situation, in fact, she does not, for she still wonders why the victim is guilty, and can only associate this guilt with the mysterious Original Sin that can be atoned for through developing an association with a man: “cunts were all right if they were neutralized, one by one, by being hooked to a man, but this orthodox arrangement only partly redeems them and every biological possessor of one knows in her bones that radical inferiority which is only another name for Original Sin” (194).

144 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

The grown-up Jael does not conform to patriarchal sex-roles: she articulates a passionate division from patriarchal identification: she is not like that, NON SUM, not a victimized object: “I, I, I. Repeat it like magic. That is not me. I am not that. Luther crying out in the choir like one possessed: NON SUM, NON SUM, NON SUM!” (Russ 195). Why, then, does she kill? Talking directly to the “idiot reader,” Jael rushes to explain that murder is her way out: Now here the idiot reader is likely to hit upon a fascinating speculation (maybe a little too late), that my guilt is blood-guilt for having killed so many men. I suppose there is nothing to be done about this. Anybody who believes I feel guilty for the murders I did is a Damned Fool in the full Biblical sense of those two words; you might as well kill yourself right now and save me the trouble, especially if you’re male. I am not guilty because I murdered. I murdered because I was guilty. Murder is my way out. (195) Her driving force, then, is revenge on all men for all the victimized women. Like any other countersociety, Jael’s Womanland is based on abjecting the man as the scapegoat, “on the expulsion of an excluded element, a scapegoat charged with the evil of which the community duly constituted can then purge itself” (Kristeva “Women and Power” 453). Thus, male violence and aggression are replaced by female terrorism. The man now becomes the excluded element, the sacrificial scapegoat: “For every drop of blood shed there is restitution to be made; with every truthful reflection in the eyes of a dying man I get back a little of my soul; with every gasp of horrified comprehension I come a little more into the light. See? It’s me!” (Russ Female Man 195). The eventual slaughtering of all men is regarded as a necessary purge which will finally exonerate this community and make the utopian Whileaway possible. Here Russ portrays feminist ideology which becomes a kind of inverted sexism when this logic of locating the guilty one in the other sex is followed to its conclusion. Jael demonstrates her tactical violence when she takes the three women along on an assassination mission to Manland. There, with her steel teeth and retractable claws, urged by her voluntary hysterical strength, she kills the male official by raking open his neck, chin, and back. This is yet another sacrificial scapegoat murdered in the war that will continue “until the beautiful, bloody moment that we fire these stranglers, these murderers, these unnatural and atavistic nature’s bastards, off the face of the earth” (173). At her home, Jael demonstrates her sexual power when the other protagonists watch her make love to her male humanoid sex-object. Later, the pragmatic and straightforward Jael tells the three Js that she wants to build bases in their worlds: “We want places to recuperate and places to hide an army; we want places to store our machines. Above all, we want places to move from—bases that the other side doesn’t know about” (200).

JOANNA RUSS

145

Jael, thus, personifies the fighting force of change and becomes the catalyst of action to reach the utopian possibility. The paradox is that, seized by the same rage with which the dominant order originally victimized her, this female terrorist resembles nothing else but a cynical Big Brother with a big technological club. Unlike Janet who offers a vision of a better place but no clear way to get there, Jael suggests violence as the only way to resist the present domination and open the path toward utopia, but no satisfactory vision of a more peaceful society. Ironically, Joanna perceives Jael as “a clown with a broken heart,” seeing in her “death’s-head grimace” only a nervous tic, that has “intensified with time into sheer bad-angelry, luminous with hate”: “I think… that I like Jael best of all us, that I would like to be Jael, twisted as she is on the rack of her own hard logic, triumphant in her extremity, the hateful hero with a broken heart, which is like being a clown with a broken heart” (212). JOANNA: USURP THE DENIED Joanna, the “real-life” character, appears in the novel as an oppressed woman who vocalizes feminist ideology and gradually evolves into a threat to patriarchy. However, when she was five, she was a happy little girl because she thought that the world was a matriarchy and women had all the power. Growing up, Joanna understands that matriarchy can only be her fantasy, and she starts yearning for power and fulfillment. She does not want “to be a’feminine’ version or a diluted version or a special version, or a subsidiary version or an ancillary version, or an adapted version” (206) of the male heroes she admires. She wants to be like these heroes: as a teenager, she wants societal approval. She needs somebody to tell her “it was O.K. to be Humphrey Bogart (smart and rudeness), O.K. to be James Bond (arrogance), O.K. to be Superman (power), O.K. to be Douglas Fairbanks (swashbuckling), to tell me that self-love was all right, to tell me I could love God and Art and Myself better than anything on earth and still have orgasms” (205). But societal approval does not come because these virtues are reserved for men only; instead, Joanna is told she is a woman, and should therefore be “timid, incapable, dependent, nurturing, passive, intuitive, emotional, unintelligent, obedient, and beautiful” (Russ 205). Throughout the novel, Joanna displays differing layers of complexity. Caught between Janet’s self-realization which occurred in Whileaway and Jeannine’s self-suppression which occurred in the dark ages of prewar, Depression America, Joanna has achieved a certain amount of freedom but is still constantly reminded that she is a “sexless sex object” (151) whose main role in life is to serve the Man. At the beginning of the novel Joanna is “moody, ill-at-ease, unhappy, and hard to be with” because all that patriarchy instructed her to do is “dress for The Man, smile for The Man, talk wittily to The Man, sympathize with The Man, flatter The Man, understand The Man, defer to The Man, entertain The Man, keep The Man, live for The Man” (29). The reader sees her as a self-hating heterosexual woman: “I love my body dearly and yet I would copulate with a

146 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

rhinoceros if I could become not-a-woman” (151). This hatred is caused by her inferior status and constant societal brainwashing that motherhood, subservience, dependency, respectability are desirable and “natural,” whereas independence, freedom of choice, career, skills, fitness, even wealth are not essential for a woman to be happy. Russ accentuates the painful phases of change that Joanna goes through in order to attain the same entitlement to power as men. In the workplace, Joanna initially acts as if she were neuter. That was necessary for being identified as “One Of The Boys,” for being included as part of her male-dominated professional community. Behaving in the neuter mode ensured that she is not identified by her difference; otherwise she felt like she was wearing a sandwich board that said: “Look! I have tits!”: 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 physique— all 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 is 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 fulltime housekeeper and my reputation and the respect of my colleagues, when I had grown strong, tall, and beautiful, when my IQ 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. (133–134) Describing her transformation into a woman with a man’s mind, Joanna still judges its success by societal approval: unless everybody says so, her transformation is not complete. Then a new interest enters her life when she meets the utopian Janet (29). Janet shows Joanna the possibilities of anger and violence against men, lesbian love

JOANNA RUSS

147

and desire, as well as the vision of an entire society of lesbians. Influenced by Janet, Joanna transforms into an emerging Lesbian, but she is still “dissatisfied with things” and, as she explains, “it is not because I am a Lesbian. It’s because I am a tall, blonde, blue-eyed Lesbian” Implied in this description is that she still looks like a stereotypical object of male desire; in fact, she still loves men’s bodies but hates men’s minds (209). Finally, we see her turning into a man. In observing Janet toss the host of a cocktail party across the floor and later initiate the teenage Laura Rose Wilding into lesbian lovemaking, Joanna is motivated to change, especially when she sees the contrasting enslavement of Jeannine. She sees in Janet’s violence and desire (and in her sisterhood and self-confidence) a role model that inspires her. She decides to throw off her old identity, rejecting “the brand name” that reduces her to a sexual commodity, and become a “female man”: “What I learned late in life, under my rain of lava, under my kill-or-cure, unhappily, slowly, stubbornly, barely, and in really dreadful pain, was that there is one and only one way to possess that in which we are defective, therefore that which we need, therefore that which we want. Become it” (139). Joanna’s decision and subsequent transformation are described as highly symbolic performative acts.11 Russ actually portrays her female man acquiring a new sex through a speech act that initiates a new signifying practice: “if you let yourself through yourself and into yourself and out of yourself, turn yourself inside out, give yourself the kiss of reconciliation, marry yourself, love yourself —/ Well, I turned into a man” (Russ The Female Man 139). But what is the product of this transformation? This new subject is violent, egocentric, rebellious, yearning to be powerful, but still obsessed with the feeling of guilt. I would suggest that these features are quite recognizable: they are patriarchal virtues reserved for men. To become a “female man,” Joanna needs to acquire a new attitude to violence, desire, and love. Much like other radical feminist fiction, Russ’s novel reveals the hegemony of patriarchal ideology, particularly in suppressing female identities, seeing men as both degenerate and irremediable. Ironically, while passionately rejecting male subjectivity as oppressive, and placing men in the position of the disgusting “other,” thus reversing the existing socio-symbolic contract, Russ usurps the oppressor’s subjectivity for her “female man.” From the infinity of multiple and contestatory utopian identifications, she chooses a transformation of female subjectivity which denies nurturing, enriching, constructive, maternal traits and welcomes hatred, violence, dominance, and arrogance.12 This seems to be Russ’s alternative for the present-day oppressed female subjects: to resolve their desire by the assumption of male places and practices. In this respect, Russ’s new subject, the female man, becomes associated with everything for which feminism has so ostensibly criticized men. This process of becoming a man starts at the beginning of the novel and continues in Part Seven, entirely devoted to Joanna’s transformation. Claiming that she is “the female man” of the title [“I have just turned into a man, me, Joanna. I mean a female man” (5)], Joanna explains that people should now call

148 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

her a man and treat accordingly: “I think I am a Man; I think you had better call me a Man; I think you will write about me as Man from now on and speak of me as Man and employ me as a Man, and recognize childrearing as a Man’s business;… I am a man. (And you are a woman.) That’s the whole secret…. Listen to the female man. If you don’t, by God and all the Saints, I’ll break your neck” (140). This passage is crucial for the novel and important for the genre itself because this is where the female man finally emerges; and the first act of this becomingsubject is violence. Through language, Russ attempts to construct a new semiotic place for her new subject, obviously playing with the ambiguity arising from the meaning of Man as Homo Sapiens and man as male: her Mankind is simultaneously humanity and the male population of the planet. Compared to the homophobic violence which the totally denied Jeannine chooses, the activism adopted by Joanna requires more time to develop and is of a more complex variety, for Joanna lives in the “developed” metropolis of postwar affluent society. Whereas for Jeannine the process of “becoming a female man” is facilitated by the utopian Janet, it is different for Joanna. For her, the decisive step from awareness to action is only possible after she returns from Jael’s world, impressed by the power of direct violence. Thus, Jael becomes the catalyst that moves Joanna from awareness to action. The male virtues Joanna acquires are arrogance and violence, but they are useless unless directed against an “other,” a powerless, oppressed subject, be it man or woman [and this is where the (con)fusion of the key concepts is completed, because the subjectivity of the victim no longer matters]. In Part Nine, Joanna accomplishes her transformation into a female man with her own micro-structural violence: she shuts the door on a man’s thumb (203). Two sections later, she commits “the crime of creating one’s own Reality” by making love to Laura: “I can’t describe to you how reality itself tore wide open at that moment” (208). Finally, acting on the anger and desire that she observed in Janet and Jael and then found in herself, Joanna is initiated into the movement and sets off on her own path of resistance: she writes the novel we are reading. Her book is “written in blood and tears” because it is a passionate denial of female inferior positioning in patriarchy, but it is also full of hope and anticipation of a better future. Joanna says, “This book is written in blood. Is it written entirely in blood? No, some of it is written in tears. Are the blood and tears all mine? Yes, they have been in the past. But the future is a different matter” (95). In her act of writing the very text in which she appears, Joanna is totally “liberated,” and her maternality turns into her creativity, evident in her affectionate attitude to the “little book” she is writing. It is notable that, while still engaged in writing, Joanna anticipates the mainstream negative response to her narrative. This response is important because it demonstrates the dialogic nature of feminist utopia and its potential for accommodating both fiction and theory. Russ discloses symbolic violence of patriarchal discourse when she describes negative critical reviews of her book. Again, she is portraying a heteroglossia of

JOANNA RUSS

149

anonymous societal voices that attempt to ward off her reasoning as “missiles of the sex war” with nothing more than a flat denial: We would gladly have listened to her (they said) if only she had spoken like a lady. But they are liars and the truth is not in them. Shrill…vituperative…no concern for the future of society… maunderings of antiquated feminism…selfish femlib…needs a good lay… this shapeless book…of course a calm and objective discussion is beyond …twisted, neurotic…some truth buried in a largely hysterical…of very limited interest, I should…another tract for the trash-can…burned her bra and thought that…no characterization, no plot…really important issues are neglected while…hermetically sealed…women’s limited experience… another of the screaming sisterhood…a not very appealing aggressiveness… could have been done with wit if the author had… deflowering the pretentious male…a man would have given his right arm to…highly girlish…a woman’s book…another shrill polemic which the…a mere male like myself can hardly…a brilliant but basically confused study of feminine hysteria which…feminine lack of objectivity …this pretense at a novel…trying to shock…the tired tricks of the antinovelists…how often must a poor critic have to…the usual boring obligatory references to Lesbianism…denial of the profound sexual polarity which…an all too womanly refusal to face facts…pseudo-masculine brusqueness…the ladies’-magazine level…trivial topics like housework and the predictable screams of…those who cuddled up to ball-breaker Kate will… unfortunately sexless in its outlook…drivel…a warped clinical protest against…violently waspish attack…formidable self-pity which erodes any chance of…formless…the inability to accept the female role which The predictable fury at anatomy displaced to…without the grace and compassion which we have the right to expect…anatomy is destiny… destiny is anatomy…sharp and funny but without real weight or anything beyond a topical…just plain bad…we “dear ladies,” whom Russ would do away with, unfortunately just do not feel…ephemeral trash, missiles of the sex war…a female lack of experience which…. Q. E. D. Quod erat demonstrandum. It has been proved. (Russ 140–141) At the end of the novel, Joanna imagines her “little daughter-book” (213) going out into the world to be read. Joanna herself is exhausted; she says: “I’m a God’s typewriter and the ribbon is typed out” (213). Though she cannot bring about a decisive social change that will set women free, her book can describe all her problems of attempting such an action and reveal the ways in which patriarchal construction of female subjectivity can be transgressed. The imaginative gap is bound through this awareness of the book as fiction and theory that provokes social action. This final monologue demonstrates a number of important developments for the feminist utopian genre. First, Russ advocates the creative action of

150 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

writing as a viable way out of oppression. Writing a female-sexed text is thus portrayed as an important contribution to feminist movement. Russ’s monologue is dialogic in as much as she remembers the names of prominent feminist theorists: Friedan, Greer, Firestone, Millett. In the context of their rhetoric, feminist action also means consciousness raising and organization of women with common goals of eradication and challenging oppression. Writing gives voice to experience, documents oppression and change, and communicates women’s experiences to the readers. It can be argued, then, that for Joanna the writing of the book is the birthing of herself. But the emancipated Joanna also does some unexpected things: she asks her daughter-book to tell her former husband that she still loves him. She instructs the book to “behave herself” and not to be too aggressive in provoking social change. Joanna hopes that her book will have a life in the world, grow old and die—become obsolete. This is, then, the anticipated finale—the book can only grow obsolete after it affects the sociohistoric change, and patriarchy is eliminated. On that day, “we will be free”: Go, little book, trot through Texas and Vermont and Alaska and Maryland and Washington and Florida and Canada and England and France; bob a curtsey at the shrines of Friedan, Millet, Greer, Firestone, and all the rest; behave yourself in people’s living rooms, neither looking ostentatious on the coffee table nor failing to persuade due to the dullness of your style; knock at the Christmas garland on my husband’s door in New York City and tell him that I loved him truly and love him still (despite what anybody may think); and take your place bravely on the book racks of bus terminals and drugstores. Do not scream when you are ignored, for that will alarm people, and do not fume when you are heisted by persons who will not pay, rather rejoice that you have become so popular. Live merrily, little daughterbook, even if I can’t and we can’t; recite yourself to all who would listen; stay hopeful and wise. Wash your face and take your place without a fuss in the Library of Congress, for all books end up there eventually, both little and big. Do not complain when at last you become quaint and old-fashioned, when you grow as outworn as the crinolines of a generation ago and are classed with Spicy Western Stories, Elsie Dinsmore, and The Son of the Sheik; do not mutter angrily to yourself when young persons read you to hrooch and hrch and guffaw, wondering what the dickens you were all about. Do not get glum when you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. Do not reach up from readers’ laps and punch the readers’ noses. Rejoice, little book! For on that day, we will be free. (213–214)

JOANNA RUSS

151

The Female Man promotes not Whileaway as its ideal utopian society, but the utopian idea that one day this book will no longer be understood because the struggles for recognition that its protagonists wage will no longer be necessary: the world will have changed enough for gender inequality and stereotypes to be considered fictional. IDENTIFICATION REVISITED “Who am I? I know who I am, but what’s my brand name?” (Russ Female Man 19). This question keeps turning up in Russ’s novel as her four protagonists seek recodification for the disempowered patriarchal woman.13 They want to divide themselves from the patriarchal identification because it is permeated with bitterness and pain; as Russ keeps reminding us, all that patriarchy taught the four Js is how to despise themselves. According to Burke, “Identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division. Identification is compensatory to division Put identification and division ambiguously together, so that you cannot know for certain where one ends and the other begins, and you have the characteristic invitation to rhetoric” (Rhetoric 22, 25). Russ’s new identification for the woman is problematic because, while the dis-identification with patriarchy is definitely present, there is too little commonality to unite the four Js other than by this division from patriarchy. As Butler (Bodies That Matter 1993) reminds us, certain identifications and affiliations are made precisely in order to institute a disidentification with a position that seems too saturated with injury or aggression. How, then, can the old identification be transgressed? According to feminist theorists, recodification can only occur when women appropriate power and new signifying practices.14 Russ’s utopia, then, reflects the early feminist attempts to identify with power and develop signifying practices previously denied for the female subject. In particular, Russ explores contrasting conceptions of power: power over and power to, the first of which is acquisitive and grounded in appropriation (in this case, of masculine virtues), while the latter is to do with internal empowerment (individually or by society). While these two conceptions of power are not necessarily mutually exclusive, in the utopian worlds (Whileaway and Womanland) they are separately construed. Frances Bartowski observes that this distinction between the two types of power is generic for feminist utopia: The feminist utopian novel is a place where theories of power can be addressed through the construction of narratives that test and stretch the boundaries of power in its operational details. Writing from the margins and coming into speech in full knowledge of the abuses power over, feminists have tended to imagine instead about power to, they have needed and chosen to take up the materiality of language, in order to install a self as subject, knowing that the self has also been subjected. (Bartowski 5)

152 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

In Russ’s dystopian Womanland, the gender conflict is translated into a direct power struggle, a war which started forty years ago and will be fought until the death of the last man on the planet. In contrast to this ever-lasting war, on the utopian Whileaway the issue of difference is rechanneled: power here is used to promote the singularity of each woman. This development illustrates a more recent feminist current which, as Kristeva explains, intends “to channel this demand for difference into each and every element of the female whole, and finally, to bring out the singularity of each woman, and beyond this, her multiplicities, her plural languages” (Kristeva “Women and Power” 458). But even on Whileaway, the homologation of society is accompanied by assimilation of the woman into the masculine modes of action; therefore, masculine virtues are valorized. Bartowski also directs our attention to the power of language in shaping the subject. It is worth reminding here that, as Burke argues, identification with a particular group or perspective is contingent upon human motivations that may only be signified “in terms of verbal action, and which ultimately serve the purpose of unifying us to see things in terms of some thing rather than its other counterpart” (Grammar 49). According to Burke, therefore, human experience is an ongoing drama of life in which human actions result from the ways in which people respond to language. Joanna’s painful attempts to respond to her patriarchal identification through language reveal the inauthenticity of patriarchal language: Being told I was a woman. At sixteen, giving up. In college, educated women (I found out) were frigid; active women (I knew) were neurotic; women (we all knew) were timid, incapable, dependent, nurturing, passive, intuitive, emotional, unintelligent, obedient, and beautiful. You can always get dressed up and go to a party. Woman is the gateway to another world; Woman is the earth-mother; Woman is the eternal siren; Woman is purity; Woman is carnality; Woman has intuition; Woman is the life-force; Woman is selfless love. ‘I am the gateway to another world,’ (said I, looking in the mirror) ‘I am the earth-mother; I am the eternal siren; I am purity,’ (Jeez, new pimples) ‘I am carnality; I have intuition; I am the life-force; I am selfless love.’ (Somehow it sounds different in the first person, doesn’t it?) Honey (said the mirror, scandalized) Are you out of your fuckin’ mind? I AM HONEY I AM RASPBERRY JAM I AM A VERY GOOD LAY I AM A GOOD DATE I AM A GOOD WIFE I AM GOING CRAZY (205)

JOANNA RUSS

153

Lofty generalizations about the Woman as “earth-mother” fall apart and sound false when Joanna “tries them on” in front of the mirror. They can only be used in the generic sense (here, in the third-person plural). However, these generalizations make no sense when individualized (used in the firstperson singular). Conversely, demeaning and denigrating patriarchal identifications can easily apply to an individual woman, but they make Joanna “crazy.” Totally confused and nauseated, she keeps on looking for the key word in the patriarchal identifications (which she describes as “vomit”) until she is ordered to stop acting like a man. Again, the anonymous voice in this remark symbolizes the constant patriarchal harassment that renders women self-less and soul-less. Russ describes this brutal censorship as “constant male refractoriness of our surroundings” that tears the women’s souls out of their bodies “with such shock that there isn’t even any blood” (206). While questioning patriarchal identifications for the woman, Russ is exposing the constraints of patriarchal language that, as Witting comments, “is worked upon from within by these strategic concepts” of manhood and womanhood (Wittig “The Straight Mind” 409). Russ is trying to overcome patriarchal “patterns of linguistic sexism” such as domination and privileging of masculinity15. However, Russ does not find any other signifier for her new subject than a female man. Her title is ambiguous because, as she describes, her female man is a man with a woman’s body and a woman’s soul, so his only male features are those associated with the mind, i.e., ego, mentality, ideology, signifying practices, and the like. She might be better off with a neologism (neologisms and occasional lexical coinages are generic for science fiction and utopia), but she chooses to be ironic rather than inventive. “Manhood” remains unidentified in the novel, while “femininity” is associated with feebleness and incapacity. Russ’s Jeannine is “fleeing from the unspeakableness of her own wishes—for what happens when you find out that you want something that doesn’t exist?” (125). She is trapped within the limitations of patriarchal language when she thinks about her experiences on Whileaway: “Why does she keep having these dreams about Whileaway? While-away. While. A. Way. To While away the time. That means it’s just a pastime” (108). Likewise, when the adolescent Laura, the girl who wanted to be Genghis Khan, tries to find out who she really is, she is trapped within the rigidity of patriarchal discourse: “When Laura tried to find out who she was, they told her she was ‘different’ and that’s a hell of a description on which to base your life; it comes down to either ‘not-me’ or ‘Convenient-for me‘and what is one supposed to do with that? What am I to do? (she says) What am I to feel? Is ‘supposed’ like ‘spoused’? Is ‘different’ like ‘deteriorate’? How can I eat or sleep? How can I go to the moon?” (208). Butler in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993) explains that “[i]dentification is a phantasmic trajectory and resolution of desire; an assumption of place; a territorializing of an object which enables identity through the temporary resolution of desire, but which remains desire, if only in its repudiated form” (99). I would like to add that the four Js strive to acquire a

154 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

new identification that wards off patriarchal desire and acts as a vehicle for emancipated desire. In her patriarchal surroundings, Jeannine always wants to be somebody else, and Joanna is a woman with a man’s mind who wants to be a female man. Butler warns that “there is no subject who decides on its gender” (100). She speculates that if such a “willful and instrumental subject” could actually decide on its gender, it could, therefore, “wake up in the morning, peruse the closet or some more open space for the gender of choice, take that gender for the day, and then restore the garment to its place at night” (Butler x). She concludes that such a subject, “one who decides on its gender, is clearly not its gender from the start and fails to realize that its existence is already decided by gender” (x). Therefore, Russ’s attempts to create a subject who can decide on its (already preexisting) gender would appear futile because gender is not an artifice to be taken on or off at will. On the contrary, according to Butler, “gender is part of what decides the subject” (x). Russ’s predicament may, therefore, be predestined by her own gender (for her as the authoress, gender is not an effect of choice), as well as by the impossible task to portray a genderless subject. According to Burke, a whole range of signifying practices exists prior to the subject, and rhetoric often functions as a system of unconscious identifications which serve to constitute the subject. Burke argues that language and human motivation are not autonomous entities but, rather, are inseparable and intrinsically related. Thus, I suggest that the “female man” identification functions as a site for ambivalent prohibition and production of desire. Butler reminds us that, “[i]f to assume a sex is in some sense an “identification,” then it seems that identification is a site at which prohibition and deflection are instantly negotiated. To identify with a sex is to stand in some relation to an imaginary threat, imaginary and forceful, forceful precisely because it is imaginary” (Bodies That Matter 100). Russ’s protagonists do have a choice to keep their identification as women, but they choose a hegemonic identification of a man. Since gender is constructed through relations of power and specifically, through normative constraints that not only produce, but also regulate various subjects, then, to identify with a man, even partially, does not necessarily mean to oppose a female desire, but to redirect it. I would like to make two observations here: 1) utopia presents a possibility for a subject to decide on its gender (cf. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness), 2) the readers are going to “read” (or guess) the gender of the subject anyway. However, Russ’s choice of her god-term female man does not make her reader’s job easy: in the novel, the “female man” identification remains somewhat inarticulate and confusing. Russ does not even explain whether her god-term “female man” represents a gendered subject at all. As Burke asserts, god-terms can “unify” people towards a certain view of social order and can often work to obscure or “mystify” the rhetorical motives that, in effect, have served to constitute the terms themselves; the term female man reflects Russ’s calculated ambiguity. Moreover, in the novel, Russ’s female man is multiply identified.

JOANNA RUSS

155

This identification is fluid and at times obscure, because for this book female man is not a rigid designator: it does not pick up the same referent in the utopian worlds. Instead, as a nonrigid designator, it describes each of the four protagonists in their respective worlds. It is even more mystifying when we remember that, as feminist theorists argue, the new identification for the woman is not based on the “other,” but on the difference of “desire”: while developing and operating “without equal in the opposite sex,” it remains “exploded, plural, fluid, in a certain way nonidentical” (Kristeva “Women and Power” 448). Thus, developing feminist traditions that challenge the patriarchal Law of Identity, Kristeva maintains that female subjectivity is nomadic, unnameable, resisting definitions that are limited within biological, social constructionist, or cultural interpretations. This definition reminds of how Russ describes the statue of the female God on Whileaway: “She is a constantly changing contradiction She becomes in turn gentle, terrifying, hateful, loving, “stupid” (or “dead”) and finally indescribable” (The Female Man 103). All four Js share the same genotype, but not the same genealogy; therefore, they develop different identities. Identity, says feminist theorist Rose Braidotti (and her position contrasts with Kristeva’s), “is a play of multiple, fractured aspects of the self; it is relational, in that it requires a bond to the ‘other’; it is retrospective, in that it is fixed through memories and recollections, in a genealogical process” (Braidotti 418). Russ’s four protagonists display the potentialities of the same female “self” in different socio-historic contexts, avoiding the false universality of the subject. Each woman’s sociohistoric situation is unique, and each J demonstrates a strong relationship with her own history and genealogy. Russ, thus, portrays how ideology and discourse work to order the four Js perceptions and motivate their actions in different ways. Her protagonists’ identifications only become meaningful when explained through their ideologies. According to Burke, “Ideology is like spirit taking up its abode in the body: it makes that body hop around in certain ways; and that same body would have hopped around in different ways had a different ideology happened to inhabit it” (Language 6). Russ’s protagonists have a similar bodily image; however, they develop strikingly different identities because the ideologies taking abode in these bodies are drastically different. While the dystopian Jeannine is characterized by narcissism, fear, passivity, and dependence, the utopian Janet is associated with strength, intelligence, imagination, and adaptability. Jeannine and Joanna have a similar condition of sisterhood in oppression and exclusion, but their oppressive situations are obviously not the same. The third J, the superterrorist and guerrilla fighter Jael, is obsessed with fierce independence, cunning, power, and anger. Joanna, the fourth character, is the primary narrator in the novel, who isolates each of these potential persons within herself. She asserts her active presence in shaping the text and in pushing the conflict to excess by developing the other Js’ worlds in her narration and carefully monitoring the way

156 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

they respond to their encounter. Exploring the possibilities inherent in their common genotype, Russ probes the way towards uniting the contrarieties between the patriarchal god-terms, thus resolving their conflict and eliminating the difference: as she advises, “to resolve contrarieties, unite them in your own person” (Russ 138). However, Russ shows that this attempt cannot be successful. As she comments, “You can’t unite woman and human any more than you can unite matter and antimatter; they are designed not to be stable together and they make just as big an explosion in the head of the unfortunate girl who believes in both” (151). While the four Js confront each other and move towards the identification with the “female man,” Russ articulates the ideological question common to critical utopias. This question concerns the strategies for overturning the patriarchal order and moving towards an emancipated society. All four Js are driven to feminism which “liberates in women…also their desire for freedom, lightness, justice, and self-accomplishment” (Braidotti 418–9). Within this feminist orientation, Russ’s strategy is separatism which for her is the only way to ensure success for the women’s movement. Separatism asserts a revolution of women alone, for a revolution of men cannot be trusted to succeed. Russ’s book provides several separatist trajectories to the assumption of the new place, describing the dystopia of Jael’s Womanland and the lesbian utopia of Whileaway. Portraying her utopian society, Russ attempts to transgress sexual difference through advocating lesbianism. This strategy to ensure recodification of the woman into a dominant subject is not new, it has been envisioned before. For example, Monique Wittig emphasized the change in perspective when she proclaimed: “For us—lesbians and gay men—there is no such thing as beingwoman or being-man. ‘Man’ and ‘woman’ are political concepts of opposition” (“The Straight Mind” 408–9): What is woman? Panic, general alarm for an active defense. Frankly, it is a problem that the lesbians do not have because of a change in perspective, and it would be incorrect to say that lesbians associate, make love, live with women, for ‘woman’ has meaning only in heterosexual economic systems. Lesbians are not women. (Wittig “Straight Mind” 410) As Wittig here argues, lesbians refuse being identified as women, but they are neither men, and this lack of meaningful identification, probably, constitutes Russ’s motivation for creating her term female man. To overcome the symbolic violence of patriarchal discourse, Russ articulates a strategy of collective and nonhierarchical effort rather than leaving the process of social change to enlightened individuals. Women must work together in all their diversity and disagreement, for alone woman will not break through the bonds of the present system. In this sense, the novel exemplifies Russ’s definition of utopia16 as it promotes women’s bonding. However, at the same time, Russ’s utopia challenges her own definition: far from being peaceful, the book is

JOANNA RUSS

157

dense with female rage and female selfdefense, and, at a certain level of reading, seriously suggesting violence as the only alternative to the oppressed female subject. Russ also promotes the feminist message that the personal is political, or rather, that feminist politics are more concerned with women’s personal experiences in patriarchy. In the example below, Russ again portrays her argument with anonymous patriarchal voices: “You ought to be interested in politics…. No squabble between the Republican League and the Democrat League will ever change your life. Concealing your anxiety over the phone when He calls; that’s your politics. Still you ought to be interested in politics. Why aren’t you? Because of feminine incapacity” (203). Even the passive and weak Jeannine gets interested in the feminist politics at the end of the novel: she says “goodbye” to patriarchal Politics and “hello” to the new politics (209) Within this separatist and nonhierarchical collective strategy, Russ’s tactics of change begin with the process of consciousness-raising as each woman becomes aware of her own oppression, that of other women, and the possibilities of change which lie in the common action. Such awareness does not automatically happen (due to the symbolic coercion of the dominant discourse); therefore, both Janet and Jael engage in the process of political organizing of the other two Js. However, their tactics are diverse. The education, socialization, and service required to continue the new social alternative are represented in the utopian Janet, especially in her care for Laura, but also in her life and work in Whileaway. Jael promotes a different set of tactics, reminiscent of “the more radical feminist currents which, refusing homologation to any role of identification with existing power no matter what the power may be, make of the second sex a countersociety” (Kristeva “Women and Power” 453). There is, yet, a similarity between the two organizers in their appropriation of patriarchal virtues of arrogance, violence, and dominance for their “female man” identification. While the overall strategy necessitates separatism from men to avoid any chance of compromise, the need for the women’s united action remains unfulfilled. Despite their common strategy, the protagonists pursue differing tactics. Paradoxically, they do not achieve collective action (though Jael suggests it), because their consubstantiality is lacking crucial aspects, such as commonality of discourse and ideology. Therefore, other than in their unifying resistance to patriarchy, the four protagonists do not engage in cooperation. While, as Burke observes, cooperation arises from the ways in which individuals come to identify with a particular social perspective by dividing themselves from other perspectives and forming social groups, these ways for the four Js are distinctly different. As Burke stresses, people often form allegiances with others through transcending identifications that oppose the world views that they may hold; and this is what happens in this instance of genre. Russ’s rhetoric is well articulated: her novel became an important site for social critique, thus promoting feminist strategies of cultural resistance. Teresa de Lauretis describes the social action of such “forms of cultural resistance” in

158 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

the following way: “Not only can they work to turn dominant discourses inside out (and show that it can be done)…they also challenge theory in its own terms, the terms of a semiotic space constructed in language, its power based on social validation and well-established modes of enunciation and address” (quoted in Godard 53). Examining the US socio-historic context of the 1970s as a multiplex and contradictory assemblage of closures for the woman, The Female Man also portrayed the gradual process of identification of all the four women. As they seek out and are found by the others, their interdependent individual and collective development continues until the final dinner, ironically on Thanksgiving Day, after which they go off on their own revolutionary ways in their transformed identities. Since identification is “a kind of transcendence,” it could, as Burke argues, serve to eliminate disharmony, thereby enabling people to subscribe to certain worldviews: “with such identification there is a partially dreamlike, idealistic motive, somewhat compensatory to real differences or divisions, which the rhetoric of identification would transcend” (203). However, disharmony is not eliminated in Russ’s utopia, and its constructive role remains unfulfilled as the novel does not facilitate any rediscovery. Russ does not attempt to portray a more humanitarian, egalitarian society; therefore neither the protagonists nor the readers “have a sense of coming home to a nurturing, liberating environment” (Pearson “Coming Home” 63). Their separate paths lead the four Js to the denial of their own female identification, to partial appropriation of male subjectivity, to anarchy, and to the eventual transgression of the patriarchal oppositions of biological/social, female/male, and personal/ political. Multiplicity and open-endedness enable Russ to foreground the idea of “becoming” rather than portraying the closed and fixed act of “being.” By forcing the readers to engage with the narrative where notions of gender and reality are deconstructed, the binary opposition of fiction/reality is transgressed. Utopia in The Female Man is not somewhere but something; a revolutionary activity, an imaginative space that both condemns patriarchy and encourages feminist social action that will lead to change in the future.

CONCLUSION Utopian Genre as Feminist Strategy

Now, in the twenty-first century, feminist utopia of the 1970s is far from being terra incognita, but it is still an uncertain territory that allows for diverse readings. Feminist utopian discourse is not the sole property of the feminist discourse community; feminist utopias go into the world (as both Bryant and Russ ask their books to do) revealing a plurality of identifications that transcend patriarchal gender constructions. I found patriarchal approaches to utopianism incomplete because they contribute to the common-sense understanding of utopia as a perfect society. Utopian thought is far more interesting and complex than is allowed by the standard view of utopia as a genre that represents a perfect society and offers a blueprint for change of numerous patriarchal codes with the notable exception of sexism (Booker 337–338). Traditional approaches are inappropriate because they produce closed representations of utopianism. Most researchers now reject perfection as a characteristic of utopia on the basis of the following two arguments: first, very few utopias present societies that the author believes to be perfect. Perfection is rather an exception than the norm. Second, it is argued that a perfect society can only be achieved by force; thus, utopianism can potentiality promote totalitarianism and advocate force and violence. However, without the term “perfect” in the definitions of utopia, part of the logic of this argumeht would disappear. Feminist utopian meta-genre is open-ended—and, at times, problematic. Quite often, its rhetoric stems from traditional middle-class (though often radical and separatist) feminist positions that narrow its scope by excluding (or failing to represent) positions of other groups. I found most critical commentary of the 1970s and early 1980s one-dimensional and unable to satisfactorily define feminist utopia as a genre precisely because it often defines consubstantiality on very rigid grounds. As Burke reminds us, criticism is an ideological enterprise: acts of reading and writing are ideological because they serve “the interests of a powerful group of literary intellectuals” (Behr 47). Feminist utopian discourse is, then, profoundly ideological: in the 1970s, the vast majority of feminist utopias themselves and their critiques were the product of white Western feminism. This movement’s selfconsciousness regarding its historical racism and cultural imperialism was reflected in its ambivalent attitude towards class and race.1

160 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

Feminist utopian meta-genre might have been revolutionary in the 1970s, but it suggests a different reading in the 1990s. For example, any utopia that was not radically feminist was excluded from analysis, as it happened with Bryant’s The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You. However, utopian thought has always been transgressive of boundaries. Indeed, Ernst Bloch identified utopia in terms of transcendence. Utopianism has always been critically involved with political debates of its time. It follows that attempts to capture feminist utopia within the bounds of one discipline or one ideology inevitably result in both inadequate readings of utopian texts and incomplete conceptualizations of utopianism itself. Most theories presented here provide evidence that one-dimensional analyses simply no longer work, thus gesturing towards a multidimensional approach. Such an approach was envisioned in the 1990s, in the writings of Tom Moylan (1986), Lucy Sargisson (1996) and other utopian scholars who viewed feminist utopias as rooted in the unfulfilled needs and wants of women, which patriarchy marginalized as the “second sex.” Within the framework of this approach, the critical function of utopia is to provide the opposition to what Moylan (1986) calls “the affirmative culture.” Moylan argues that feminist writers attempt to create “critical utopias,” retaining an “awareness of the limitation of the utopian tradition, so that these texts reject utopia as blueprint while preserving it as dream” (10). Critical utopias function effectively as critiques of the status quo, while maintaining a selfcritical awareness that prevents them from descending into an empty utopian cliché. In the 1970s and 1980s, the mainstream critical discourse made persistent attempts to identify feminist utopia in terms of a “deviant” genre; however, this identification was not acceptable for the feminist discourse community because this difference implied that the feminist genre was inferior. Rafaella Baccollini reminds us that “genres are cultural constructions; implied in the notion of genre and of boundaries lies a binary opposition between what is “normal” and what is “deviant”—a notion that feminist criticism has attempted to deconstruct since this difference consigns feminine practice to inferiority” (quoted in Sargent “Utopia: The Problem of Definition” 139). She point towards the signs of “a lack of nostalgia for the ‘golden past’ of patriarchy” that were prominent in the feminist genre. H. Lee Gershuny (1984) locates the linguistic transformation of womanhood at the center of feminist attempts to create paradigm shifts in consciousness. While describing three important ideological functions of feminist utopia (criticism, transformation and transcendence), Gershuny singles out criticism as its most prominent function. Lucy Sargisson (1996) extracts from socialist and feminist approaches a view of utopianism as having an oppositional and a speculative function which is located in part in its conventions of critique, estrangement, and imaginative writing. She suggests that, instead of blueprints, feminist utopias are better read as metaphors (59). Feminist utopian imagery plays a key role in expressing the general sensibility of their social dreams, with their central motif of smashing the boundaries that divide and isolate. Sargisson

CONCLUSION

161

also argues that patriarchal discourse as a vehicle of oppression, domination and hierarchy should constitute the primary target of feminist criticism (185). I would like to add that, by developing their criticism of patriarchal institutions and by promoting the personal as political, feminist utopias empower women to counteract the symbolic violence of patriarchal discourse. Rather than being constrained by radical feminist ideology only, I have attempted to discuss feminist utopia within a more embracing framework that incorporates a broad range of humanistic attitudes. I advocate a pragmatic, situated approach to this genre as a cultural, political, and rhetorical phenomenon. According to Burke, rhetoric should become the new method of critical inquiry because it deals with how language and ideology are intrinsically connected. Burke effectively articulates how an ideology is a function of signifying practices. His conception of ideology as a form of rhetoric, thus, reveals how an ideology can function as a system of identifications that serve to constitute the subject. Similarly, Schryer (2002) foregrounds this connection when she argues that genres create ideologies because they function as discourse formations projecting potential views of the world and differing possibilities of human agency. Being “local and in a constant state of construction,” genres are “dynamic; they are structured structures that structure; they are strategyproduced and driven and produce strategy” (95). By employing new-rhetorical theories of genre, I was able to explore the connections of ideology and genre and to outline diverse tactics offered by feminist utopias for the transformation of the female subject. Appearing in the socio-historic context of the 1970s, feminist utopias were prepared by the writings of feminist theorists whose analysis of women’s situation showed that all aspects of women’s lives were riddled with sexism: sex, work, marriage, motherhood, housework, health, education, and language. Feminist publications cast a new light on the sociopolitical situation in the United States of the 1970s. The rejection of the highly technological, centralized patriarchy was deepened in the theory and practice of feminism and radical ecologism, as well as in racial and ethnic liberation movements. All these developments produced “the contours of counterculture” (Bookchin 115–116) that formed the underpinnings of major libertarian movements, among them the women’s liberation movement. The ideology of this movement was aimed at changing the situation for the female subject and bridging the gender gap. It also created a feminist discourse community that provided women writers with an audience eager to promote the changes. Therefore, the “mini-explosion” of feminist utopias in the 1970s is a phenomenon not only contemporaneous with the secondwave feminist movement but made possible by it. Russ (1981) discerns this social exigency when she concludes that “in these recent feminist utopias we certainly have part of the growing body of women’s culture, at least available in some quantity to readers who need and can use it” (146). Carol Pearson (1981) expresses a similar opinion when she observes that feminist

162 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

utopias form “a remarkably coherent group made possible by the feminist movement” (63). Feminism finds in utopia a “pre-pared way of responding” that embodies, to use Ann Freadman’s phrase, the “ramified, intertextual memory” of generic “uptake” (Freadman 1994, 9). This genre possesses what Carolyn Miller (1994) calls “the heuristic nature of a site of dissent” (24) which, in this case, is gendered opposition and resistance to patriarchy. It also explores new options for human agency; in particular, for the female subject. It treats the antecedent patriarchal genre as a transhistorical form, overcoming its patriarchal limitations and reviving it through feminist individuation. The Kin of Ata Are Waiting For You is a more traditionally utopian narrative; the visitor travels to utopia, lives in it, describes the utopian society, and returns to his world with the purpose of transforming it. Bryant’s novel borrows from other patriarchal genres: the idyll, Rousseauan novel, Christian fable, myth, and the detective story. Conversely, The Female Man reverses the traditional narrative premise of journey to utopia by making the utopian visitor travel to our world; the reader is forced to plunge into utopia from page one. Russ describes several such journeys, forcing the readers to wonder which world they are in and which protagonist is talking. Both narratives reject utopian blueprints as closed and maintaining hierarchies of social and cultural patriarchy, but preserve utopia as a dream. Utopian Ata is such a dream, and the distinction between reality and dream in Bryant’s novel is diffused: what matters is to obey one’s dreams. Russ’s utopia is not Whileaway but writing the book that is instructed to go into the world and change it. The ultimate revolution will be complete when the book becomes obsolete: that means that “we will all be free” at that moment. Being made possible by the feminist movement of the 1970s, feminist utopia reflects the concerns of the feminist discourse community. Its sociosymbolic action is simultaneously empowering and restrictive in as much as it accommodates both revolutionary unity and separatism. According to Russ, feminist utopias are remarkable not only for their explicit feminism but for the similar forms the feminism takes: “They not only ask the same questions and point to the same abuses; they provide similar answers and remedies” (136). The major ideological function of feminist utopias is to articulate the anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal libertarian message. The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You does so by portraying the continuous caring of the utopian people for the real world and by vocalizing the common dream. Both Bryant and Russ establish a particular relationship with the audience, treating the readers as consubstantial and often directly addressing them. Bryant’s narrator directly addresses the readers at the end, teaching them how to go on a personal journey towards the realization of utopia through dreaming higher dreams. Russ’s protagonist, by talking to the “little-daughter book,” indirectly addresses the reader at the end, explaining the way towards the realization of utopia through consciousnessraising action.

CONCLUSION

163

The new feminist utopian genre has become a meaning-making event that achieved specific social purposes of providing the becoming female subject with a possibility for a counter discourse by revealing the limits of patriarchal tolerance and by authorizing feminist social action. This genre differs significantly from the patriarchal genre because its counterdiscourse does not come from the dominant social order, from the hegemony. Another important difference is in its social action: feminist utopia authorizes and contains women’s personal experiences, fulfilling the need to discuss feminist issues that was thwarted by the restrictions of the patriarchal utopian genre. The feminist utopian genre has a specific potential for producing worldviews. For example, Bryant’s novel combines the folkloric unity of time/space with the novel’s potential for portraying the transformation and growth of the protagonist from utter egotism to self-sacrifice. The conditional time or the dream mode on Ata accommodates ambiguity: at the end, the Man is wondering whether Ata is a reality or a dream. While for the Man space extends from the “real world” California to the utopian island, for the Atans space is encompassed and enveloped within the island. The Atans have a limited potential for individual growth, but they do not really need to grow because their life paths and actions are revealed to them in their dreams. All they need is to obey and enact the dreams. Only the patriarchal Man can undergo a transformation from utter division, individualism and isolation to collectivism, identification with the whole human race, and self-sacrifice. Russ’s novel portrays the idealistic unity of time/space on Whileaway, but no such unity exists in the real world where, therefore, there is a potential for change. Indeed, the transformation into the female man occurs in the real world. Russ’s chronotope is presented in her metaphor of a twisted braid of alternative times/spaces that rejects linearity and facilitates unrestrained multi-directional time/space travel. Time does not move on Whileaway, Womanland and in Jeannine’s world; the protagonists feel the passage of time only in Joanna’s real world. Space is both localized and parallel; space travel to alternative worlds is instantaneous, though not accounted for in the traditions of science fiction. Russ’s utopia is not somewhere, but something—a revolutionary action of the book. Joanna’s real world contains a potential for her revolutionary transformation into the female man through enacting anger and exercising violence against men; but real societal change will occur only as the result of the action of the book. As Russ maintains, the book will grow obsolete when all women are free. An important feature of the feminist utopian chronotope is that it disrupts certainty and truth and plays with openness and multiplicity. Both novels employ the technique of calculated ambiguity: the reader is not told whether Ata is a dream or a reality. But this does not matter: the Man chooses the truth and reality of Ata over life in the real world even if Ata is a dream. Thus, Bryant denies the importance of fixed binary oppositions in the present world and promotes the fluidity and multiplicity of “living in the presence of the dream.”

164 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

The calculated ambiguity in Russ’s novel is more developed: the readers are not told whether the four protagonists represent fragments of the same self, or they are different, self-contained selves. We never know whether the female man is a gendered subject at all. The idea of becoming a subject is a powerful notion that subverts time and reality because a subject that is becoming is constantly changing and cannot be fixed or defined in the same way as a static “being.” Feminist utopia, thus, disrupts certainty and truth, playing with openness and multiplicity of “becoming.” For example, dreams on Ata resist fixation; they are fluid, indescribable, and changeable. While the utopian ideal remains the same (we are all kin), the strategies of how to stop the human race from wavering on the brink of suicide differ depending on the individual who is chosen to be sacrificed. Both novels are “neither wholly pessimistic nor wholly optimistic. They are entirely open-ended and this is where their radicalism lies” (Woolmark 99). Deconstructive textual practices, tactics of remetaphorization, transgression of social codes, as well as of the notions of truth and reality, allow feminist utopian writers to embody open-ended textual and conceptual strategies in portraying the future. As a genre, feminist utopia is purposive and functional. Joanna Russ calls it “reactive”: it reflects what women lack in today’s patriarchal world. Therefore, feminist utopia does not embody “universal” human values, but reacts to sexism and discrimination in contemporary society. It provides its users with what Bakhtin calls “freedom” and “plasticity” (Freedman “Locating Genre Studies” 10) for open-ended, dialogic, intertextual communication. The rhetorical inefficiency of the over-regulated patriarchal genre is overcome because the feminist genre fulfils the desires and expectations of the feminist discourse community. It is free of patriarchal restrictions on gender representation in both current and utopian reality. Feminist utopias are also critical of the patriarchal genre because patriarchal utopias have a reductive tendency to perfection that negates the utopian impulse that generated them. Feminist utopia emerged in response to the negative representation of women in patriarchal utopia. The blueprints of future societies that patriarchal utopia constructs remained closed, maintaining hierarchies of social and cultural patriarchy and prohibiting any reimagined constructions of womanhood or challenges to gender roles. In this misogynist context, the transgressive social action of feminist utopias (to imagine a woman as having a self that can be liberated from the strictures of male dominance, of narrative form, as well as of the real world) was itself a liberating experience. It forced women to consider the inadequacy of patriarchal language for representing feminist values. Both Bryant and Russ see patriarchal constructions as unnatural and not essential in the alternative worlds. Both narratives are critically utopian (Moylan 198); they have played their part in the anti-hegemonic politics of the 1970s. They have added to the ways in which the women perceived the dissatisfaction with the present. “Woman” in patriarchal discourse was an absence, at best a

CONCLUSION

165

pale imitation of “man,” if not actually the feared castrating “other.” Conversely, in Bryant’s utopia, the patriarchal world is a nightmare; patriarchal success is phony; patriarchal values are unacceptable. The Man treats his girlfriend not only as a disposable and replaceable object, but as a phantom of his nightmare. Though she screams that she exists, the Man pays no attention to her screams and kills her when she persists (Bryant 1–2). In Russ’s narrative, Joanna asks the secret service agents: “Who are you looking for? There is nobody here. Only me,” thus equating herself with nobody. In the workplace, Joanna learns to act as if she is neuter, otherwise the men harass her as if she were wearing a sandwich board saying: “Look! I have tits!” (Russ 134). Whereas in Joanna’s world allimportant positions are occupied by males, in Janet’s (and in Jael’s) world women are qualified for and have access to all the jobs. Both utopias promote utopianism of process, initiating it on two levels: 1) they provoke social transformation; 2) they offer possibilities for individual change. The novels portray becoming a subject rather than being a subject. Joanna’s transformation into the female man has only just begun; in the end, she admits to still loving her husband and asks her little daughter-book to behave in socially acceptable ways. Bryant and Russ describe utopian societies that promote sharing, cooperation, caring, nurturing, collectivism. In this way, they prove that the feminist utopian genre is dialogic and evolving in as much as it takes up similar topics in similar ways. However, The Female Man articulates the rage and anger of radical feminists of the 1970s, promoting separatism as a strategy because men are not to be trusted. Russ’s narrative advocates the appropriation of power by force. Masculine virtues (dominance, arrogance, smartness, rudeness, competitiveness) are valorized because the new subject, the female man, appropriates them. Anger, rage and violence are offered as realistic ways to empower women, whereas consciousness raising is shown as a way to reach assertiveness. Both novels include socio-historical orientations for the readers that help them to position the utopian world in relation to the real world: Bryant’s Man thinks that Ata is an Indian reservation or a rural commune, in this way reflecting ecological and environmental trends of the 1970s. Russ mentions such socio-historic orientations as the Depression, World War II, the Chinese New Year, etc. Russ’s novel attempts to transgress patterns of linguistic sexism and eliminate gender difference by portraying Whileaway, the chemical-surgical castrati in Manland [“everyone should have his own abortion” (178)], and Joanna’s microstructural violence towards men. In this way, it responds to the narrowness of patriarchal utopia that urges feminist writers to “demand the denied.” Both utopias reflect the recognition of the personal as political, as well as an open critique of the “normal” patriarchal discourse. They demystify biology, treating it as not destiny; not, at least, in social and political terms. Bryant offers possibilities for transformation not only for the woman, but for the man as well. Russ portrays the woman as having a self and thus liberates her from the strictures of male dominance. Her central question is “Who am I? I know who I

166 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

am, but what is my brand name?” Russ passionately and desperately rejects the patriarchal identification of woman; her Jael screams: “NON SUM! Not me!” However, the identification of Russ’s female man remains nomadic and mystifying, partly because it is not related to an “other.” Both novels are explicit about economics and politics as the driving force of capitalism and a key tool in oppressing women and maintaining the status quo. They are sexually permissive and not prescriptively heterosexual, classless and communal to the core. They treat violence with a seriousness that is central to the feminist rhetoric of the time. They also contribute to the wider utopian dialogue of speculation about the emancipatory society and share in the reassessment of activism going on since the 1960s. Largely through the conscious manipulation of language—both in word choice and in language structure—Russ and Bryant are able to construct their novels as female-sexed texts. Through privileging free indirect discourse, circular reasoning rather than analytic logic, and open-ended story lines, these novels approach the feminist values. At the same time, they demonstrate the inadequacy of the patriarchal language by either exposing it, deconstructing it (The Female Man), or transcending it altogether by showing that is cannot adequately represent the utopian dreams (The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You). As one of their narrative strategies, Russ and Bryant employ fiction theory, or self-conscious and overtly transgressive writing that aims, amongst other things, to disrupt the symbolic order of representation. For Russ and Bryant, this is not change for change’s sake but rather a representation of the desire for a dynamic and open attitude towards apparent certainties.2 Fiction theory, therefore, reveals the ways in which constructions of binary oppositions, of male/female, masculine/feminine, or utopia/dystopia, are deconstructed through ambiguity, fluidity and multiplicity. While focusing on what language is saying, Russ debunks deformed representations of women in patriarchy. In particular, Russ employs the disjointed narrative tactics of fiction theory: her narrative is constructed as self-mirroring, selfreflexive; it defamiliarizes and/or subverts the fiction and gender codes, in this way contributing to feminist theory. Russ’s narrative is a montage of disjointed parts and not a seamless whole (this tactic reveals her negotiations of difference). All the four worlds remain fixed and resist change, but change is possible in the action of the “little daughter-book.” Therefore, this book becomes fiction that implies action. Bryant pursues feminist goals (cooperation, sharing, nurturing) with explicitly feminine means (tolerance, humility, passivity, self-sacrifice, patience, acceptance), thus employing traditional narrative techniques and traditional patriarchal understanding of femininity. Russ uses language to highlight that meaning is not neutral but is inseparably connected to the social construct from which it is created. Bryant approaches feminist values by animating them in her utopian world, while patriarchal “wisdom” and “reason” are typified in the visitor. By refusing to connect Ata with anything as (allegedly) incomplete, biased and fragmented as the written

CONCLUSION

167

and spoken word (that connection is reserved for Earth), Bryant demonstrates the absurdity of capitalist values while quietly but undeniably showing the benefits of feminist values. Thus, Bryant attempts to bypass the question of language altogether, treating is as a patriarchal construct that reifies the fluid meaning of the ever changing dreams and is therefore unnecessary in the utopian world. While both novels are responding to similar situations, they suggest different strategies for intervening into the patriarchal genre. Russ clearly attempts to tear the patriarchal genre apart (although such “breaks” are not peculiarly feminist). Her use of experimentation in form is in itself a rebellion. Bryant resists traditions conceptually more than she does stylistically. Russ takes her statement one step further and elevates her argument by rebelling against the very genre she is writing in. These strategies reveal different degrees of complexity and the relative amount of resistance described. The higher textual complexity of The Female Man reflects Russ’s deeper examination of her context and her consequent multi-level rebellion. The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You addresses women’s inferior positioning only on the metaphoric, symbolic, and conceptual levels and does not explore, nor does it rebel, on the linguistic level. Russ and Bryant envision very different utopian societies. The consubstantiality of women in Russ’s utopian world is based upon division from men because men are viewed as irremediable and, therefore, unnecessary. While portraying the woman as a devalorized and misrepresented entity and asserting the specificity of female experiences, Russ attempts to elaborate alternative identifications for the female subject. However, this attempt is not successful: ironically, instead of developing different forms, all four protagonists symbolize different stages of the same process: usurping the male subjectivity and turning into a man. Russ’s novel clearly favors separatism and (symbolic) violence against men. Russ’s utopian Whileaway is a contrary political vision, a peaceful but nonetheless striking revolution against patriarchy. Her guerilla fighter Jael shows that women’s rage can be the catalyst for change because radical actions force a confrontation with the oppressor. The expression of anger frees the woman and moves her out of a victimized position into an empowered position. Though female anger frightens people, this emotion cannot be ignored. Whereas Russ criticizes the masculine authority, power, dominance, arrogance, at the same time she endorses them by making them desirable qualities for her female man. Rage empowers women for counteracting symbolic violence against patriarchy. Thus, Russ valorizes anger and rage, rudeness, arrogance, violence (including murder) and portrays objectification of men as sex toys. Male dominance and power, thus, are partially appropriated, and violence is portrayed as a realistic way for women to change the existing situation. The two novels offer divergent options for the way out: while Russ suggests terrorism, action, and separatism, Bryant promotes humility, patience, acceptance, and harmony. Bryant, therefore, insists on consubstantiality with the whole human race, envisioning a world where violence is not necessary and culturally not acceptable; where men and women exist together without definite

168 FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS

gender roles; where sexuality is permitted to be expressed but not indulged in. Her character Augustine shows that tolerance and forgiveness can also be appropriate actions when the force that the woman is tolerating is rigid, unmovable, and unlikely to change with violence and pressure. When Augustine does not react to the Man’s oppressive behavior and simply lets him be without judgment, she thus empowers him to feel the guilt of his oppressiveness and move into a more supportive, equality-based treatment of her and the utopian world. Bryant compares the flawed and diseased Earth to the fragrant, harmonious, rhythmical Ata as a total opposite to the dominant social order that has led to chaos on Earth. This comes through in symbolic contrasts: health and disease, nightmare and dream, violence and tolerance. The contrary political voice is clear because Bryant portrays Ata as a new social structure, simultaneously insisting that patriarchal language is inappropriate to describe reality, and especially feminist reality. While the Man is able to describe the real world, exposing it as completely flawed, the world of Ata defies verbal and written description: even when the Man tries to write down the myths, he cannot contain them. In the end, Ata is revealed more through dreams, myths, and rituals, as well as by the way in which the Atans relate to their surroundings and to one another. While The Female Man reflects attempts to avoid further compromise and to build strength, The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You takes up the attitude of détente, of cooperation of previously contending forces to transcend hostility, suffering, and injustice. These diverse and, in many senses, divergent works form part of the “abnormal” counterdiscourse of the 1970s. They contribute to Moylan’s “critical mass” of a “new historic bloc of opposition.” With the qualifier that the opposition is not along the lines of a cohesive dialectic, I would argue that feminist opposition to the man/woman and mind/body divides is indeed of this “critical” nature. It envisions an imaginative space between the real and utopian worlds, the writer and the reader, the reader and text. This space contains and generates revolutionary power for the feminist dreaming of social change that can be enacted in the here and now. Feminist transformation of utopia demonstrates their strategies for encompassing new situations. The narrowness and rhetorical impotence of patriarchal utopia empowers feminist writers for conceptual transgression, for defiance of patriarchal rules. Feminist interventions foreground their avoidance of the patriarchal signifying practices and their creation of a new signifying space for representing feminist values. The feminist meaning they construct is chronotopic, and, consequently, profoundly ideological and socio-historically contingent. Feminist critics maintain that genre can be theorized and invented to assert la difference feminine as the context of the feminist situation. They further suggest that multiple recurrent situations spell out an objective need for its specific symbolic action in a particular community of speakers. It follows that feminist

CONCLUSION

169

genres escape the curse of further producing gendered situations because they constantly work on the patriarchal order, rearrange it, and ultimately change it. Feminist utopias are open-ended narratives that aim to disrupt binary oppositions, striving instead towards the uninhibited exploration of multiple alternatives for the patriarchal social order. They examine utopian ideals and dystopian denials, promoting strategies of synchronic unity and diachronic movement toward a better world. They also counsel humility and harmony, as well as militancy and suffering, as the necessary elements of social change. They discuss alternative types of female subjectivity through the possibilities of language, thus contributing towards the creation of a strategic feminist way of writing. Feminist utopian dreaming, which is not fixed but fluid, never realized or complete, but always revolutionary, fills the gap between what exists and what could be. It does so by creating in the mind of the readers a multitude of ideas about how to build the utterly needed cooperative framework that can serve society at large, and how to make the present world better for everyone.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. More’s two-part moral document was composed in Latin in 1515 under the title Libellus vere Aureus nec minus salutaris quam festivus de optimo reipublicae statu deque nova Insula Utopia (A Pamphlet truly Golden no less beneficial than enjoyable concerning the republic’s best state and concerning the new Island Utopia). It was published in 1516 and translated into English in 1551 by Ralphe Robynson (Snodgrass 529). 2. More’s Raphael Hythloday has a “telling name” that means “spinner of idle tales.” 3. On many levels, as Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi have argued, the “feminist revolution” of the 1970s has failed, and since the late 1970s there has been an antifeminist backlash in the media that works so as to revoke the gains that the feminist movement has won for women (Gamble 193). 4. I will argue that, as Burke proposes in defining his principle of “individuation,” although art takes the form of prior structures, the specific individuations of a form of experience will change significantly with changes occurring within the social contexts and ethical systems out of which they arise. Thus, for Burke, the individual forms which serve to convey our experiences are not stagnant, but are dynamic and flexible; they can be moulded and remoulded to accommodate changes taking place within social situations. 5. Like Roman Jakobson writing about the metalinguistic (“Linguistics and Poetics” 355–77), like Fredric Jameson commenting on the metacritical (“Metacommentary” 9–18), Burke studies the way language folds onto itself. 6. Burke therefore views human experience as an on-going drama of life in which human actions result from the ways in which people respond to language; from this assumption he develops his dramatistic approach. 7. Burke acknowledges that “whereas many other animals seem sensitive in a rudimentary way to the motivating force of symbols, they seem to lack the ‘secondlevel’ aspect of symbolicity that is characteristically human, the ‘reflective’ capacity to develop highly complex symbol systems about symbol systems, the pattern of which is indicated in Aristotle’s definition of God as ‘thought of thought,’ or in Hegel’s dialectics of ‘self-conscious'” (Language 24). 8. “An idea of God need not be derived from the child’s relation to its father and/or mother, but is also implicit in the logic of language, which naturally makes for culmination in some word of maximum generalization that serves as over-all title of titles (and this is what we mean technically by a ‘god-term')” (“Symbol” 224).

NOTES

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

171

Burke notes how “any over-all term for motivation, such as honour, loyalty, liberty, equality, fraternity, is a summing up of many motivational strands” (Rhetoric 110). Such terms function as rhetorical motives because they may appear “as absolute and unconditional to us” but are, in fact, “the title for conditions” (111). As Coe points out, Burke attributes to I.A. Richards the idea that “the symbolic act is the dancing of an attitude” (Philosophy 8) but extends Richards’ concept of attitudes as incipient, potential acts waiting for activating situations. This extension embraces both the notion that attitude can be “the first step towards an act” and the notion that “attitude can be the substitute for an act” (Grammar 236). Film theorist Teresa de Lauretis is Professor of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Drawing on structuralism, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, she focuses on the questions of identification, pleasure, and desire in film. She is also concerned with how these can be related to social and material reality. De Lauretis argues that feminism is characterized by a tension between “the critical negativity of its theory” and the “affirmative positivity of its politics” and that feminists artists seek to offer alternative narratives which will articulate their desire in terms which interrupt or reverse the usual structure of narrative (Gamble 261). Though Martin (1993) argues that readers can discover in a text all they need to know about the social context. Poet and academic Audre Lorde (1934–1992) worked as a librarian before embarking on an academic career. She published several volumes of poetry, as well as the autobiographical Cancer Journals (1980), the “biomythographical” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) and the influential collection of essays Sister Outsider (1984) (Gamble 265). Located as she was at the intersection of a number of peripheral subject positions—woman, Black, lesbian and, in the last years of her life, cancer sufferer, Lorde is concerned with the voicing of the experience of marginalization; one of her sayings has become a popular slogan: “one can’t break the master’s house with the master’s tools.” Russ is one of the James Tiptree, Jr., Award Winners. The James Tiptree, Jr. Award was established in 1991 to recognize the achievement of Alice Sheldon, an outstanding feminist SF writer. It is given to the work of science fiction, utopia, or fantasy published in one year which best explores or expands gender roles.

CHAPTER ONE: UTOPIA AND UTOPIANISM 1. “Utopia—an imaginary ideal society or political state. The term…was coined by Thomas More for his book Utopia that describes a perfect political state as he envisioned it” (Morner & Rausch 232).

CHAPTER TWO: UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM 1. It is notable that I have not been able to find any account of similar subordination in the Old Left: one would wonder whether it was not practiced or not felt—and why, but this analysis is beyond my purposes in this book.

172 NOTES

2. Through his concept of consubstantiality, Burke conveys that language performs the ideological function of making people “act together” on the basis of group identification. Burke bases his conception of the relationship between identification and consubstantiality upon the ways in which the writer has interrelated generality and detail in a form that ensures consubstantiation (i.e., a condition when both the reader and the writer remain simultaneously separate and joined together). By following the verbal actions of others, readers come to be the other, yet because they remain themselves, motivated and composed of many different and particular verbal scenes or contexts, they remain “unique, an individual locus of motives.” 3. Elgin assumes that the men’s and the women’s realities can coexist for the time being. She develops the intricate and complex dynamics of their interaction in the other two books of her trilogy, The Judas Rose (1987) and Earthsong (1994). 4. “A meta-genre which occludes or tactfully or timidly evades, or naturalizes highly contingent practices, may not be bad in itself, but, rather, a sign of unspoken negotiations amongst conflicting interests” (Giltrow 2002, 201).

CHAPTER THREE: DOROTHY BRYANT 1. Quantum mechanics shook the certainties of physical science by showing that light, previously considered to be a wave, could, under certain circumstances, behave as a particle. It was thus neither a wave nor a particle, but both or either, depending on circumstances. It transgressed the binary dilemma of either/or. 2. “The labor aspect of this idyll is of special importance (present already in Virgil’s Georgics); it is the agricultural-labor element that creates a real link and common bond between the phenomena of nature and the events of human life (as distinct from the metaphorical link in the love idyll). Moreover—and this is especially important—agricultural labor transforms all the events of everyday life, stripping them of that private petty character obtaining when man is nothing but consumer; what happens rather is that they are turned into essential life events. Thus people consume the produce of their own labor; the produce is figurally linked with the productive process, in it—in this produce—the sun, the earth and the rain are actually present (not merely in some system of metaphorical links)” (227). 3. Bryant suggests a connection between capitalism and racism when the Man asks Salvatore what good can Augustine do in the outside world “if she lives the life of a poor, obscure black woman” (188), implying that Augustine would be completely dis-empowered. 4. The thetic stage is placed on the “threshold of language”; this is where symbolization begins. In the symbolic order, a symbolic relation to an other is introduced as a basis for communication with the community. 5. “If our character is built of our responses (positive or negative) to the thoushaltnot’s of morality, and if we necessarily approach life from the standpoint of our personalities, will not all experience reflect the genius of this negativity? Laws are essentially negative; ‘mine’ equals ‘not thine’; insofar as property is not protected

NOTES

173

by the thou-shalt-not’s of either moral or civil law, it is not protected at all” (Burke Language 11). 6. “Here are the steps / In the Iron Law of History / That welds Order and Sacrifice: / Order leads to Guilt / (for who can keep commandments!) / Guilt needs Redemption / (for who would not be cleansed!) / Redemption needs Redeemer / (which is to say, a Victim!) / Order / Through Guilt / To Victimage / (hence: Cult of the Kill)” (Burke Rhetoric of Religion 4–5). 7. “A feminist utopian novel is one which a) contrasts the present with an envisioned idealized society (separated from the present by time or space), b) offers a comprehensive critique of present values/conditions, c) sees men or male institutions as a major cause of present social ills, and d) presents women not only as at least the equals of men but also as the sole arbiters of their reproductive function” (Gearhart 296).

CHAPTER FOUR: JOANNA RUSS 1. These are awards for the best book of the year in the genres of science fiction, utopia, and fantasy. For example, the James Tiptree, Jr., Award was established in 1991 to recognize the achievement of Alice Sheldon, an outstanding feminist SF writer. It is given to the work of science fiction, utopia, or fantasy published in one year which best explores or expands gender roles. 2. The Female Man was first published in 1975, and it is considered one of the first feminist utopias of the 1970s. 3. Russ mentions a review “of The Second Sex by the first sex” and asks her little book to “bob a curtsey at the shrines of Friedan, Millett, Greer, Firestone, and all the rest” (213). 4. “Hence, instead of considering it our task to ‘dispose of’ any ambiguity…, we rather consider it our task to study and clarify the resources of ambiguity” (Grammar xviii-xix, Burke’s emphasis). 5. There exists a large philosophical and critical literature on the logic and semantics of possible worlds (McCawley provides a good overview). Green mentions that the notion of the different world is by now so standard (not only among science fiction and utopian writers, but even among logicians and linguists) that references are not made to its origin (Green 40). 6. Cixous urges the woman to write her own self, her desires, her body, for herself and other women. Her appeal to “bring women to writing” articulates the need to create a common language that can connect women into a feminist community. For Cixous, when women begin to write in all their diversity and complexity, “beauty will no longer be forbidden.” Once women have taken language, discovered its symbolic potential, and re-invented it for themselves, then they can write “the true texts of women—female-sexed texts” (“Sorties” 334–335). 7. Freud says: “A little girl behaves differently. She makes her judgment and her decision in a flash. She has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it. Here what has been named the masculinity complex branches off. It may put great difficulties in the way of the regular development toward femininity, if it cannot be got over soon enough. The hope of some day obtaining the penis in spite

174 NOTES

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

of everything and so of becoming a man may persist to an incredibly late stage and may become a motive for strange and otherwise unaccountable actions Thus a girl may refuse to accept the fear of being castrated, may harden herself in the conviction that she does possess a penis, and may subsequently be compelled to behave as though she were a man After a woman has become aware of the wound to her narcissism, she develops, like a scar, a sense of inferiority. When she has passed beyond her first attempt at explaining her lack of a penis as being a punishment personal to herself and has realized that this sexual character is a universal one, she begins to share the contempt felt by men for a sex which is the lesser in so important a respect, and, at least in holding that opinion, insists on being like a man” (Freud 19:253). As Russ comments, “Plaque came to Whileaway in P.C. 17 (Preceding Catastrophe) and ended in A.C. 03, with half the population dead; it had started so slowly that no one knew about it until it was too late. It attacked males only” (12). In the novel (written in 1969) Russ actually uses the term “world-wide web” which is quite prophetic given the recent development of the Internet (1993 and on). Kristeva seems to approve of terrorism as the only means of self-defense, as the result of reversing the social order, as “the inevitable product of what we have called a denial of the socio-symbolic contract and its counterinvestment as the only means of self-defense in the struggle to safeguard an identity” (“Women and Power” 454). Butler (Bodies That Matter 1993) argues that “the symbolic is understood as the normative dimension of the constitution of the sexed subject within language. It consists of a series of demands, taboos, sanctions, injunctions, prohibitions, impossible idealizations, and threats—performative speech acts, as it were, that wield the power to produce the field of culturally viable sexual subjects: performative acts, in other words, with the power to produce or materialize subjectivating effects” (106). As Russ never defines her “female men” other than by arrogance, violence, and hunger for power, it remains obscure what positive female traits are preserved in her new subjects. It also seems that Russ neglects the losses their femininity suffers, as well as the emotional and physical consequences of their violence and anger. The patriarchal term was rejected by feminist theorists because it calls for false universality that diffuses individual differences; as Rose Braidotti says, “Woman is a general umbrella term that brings together different kinds of women, different levels of experience and different identities” (Braidotti 415). “Sexual difference—which is at once biological, physiological, and relative to reproduction—is translated by and translates into a difference in the relationship of subjects to the symbolic contract which is the social contract: a difference, then, in the relationship to power, language, and meaning” (Kristeva “Women and Power” 449). Gershuny identifies such patterns of linguistic sexism as gendered hierarchies and the privileging of masculinity (Gershuny 191). Russ defines feminist utopia as “explicit about economics and politics, sexually permissive, demystifying about biology, emphatic about the necessity for female bonding, concerned with children…non-urban, classless, communal, relatively peaceful while allowing room for female rage and female self-defense, and serious

NOTES

175

about the emotional and physical consequences of violence” (Russ “Amor Vincit Foeminam” 15).

CONCLUSION 1. Dorothy Bryant in The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You breaks this stigma by making her Augustine a black woman with Nordic features and blue eyes. 2. This desire is a characteristic of transgressive utopian thought. For example, Margaret Whitford identifies two “types” of utopianism: “static utopianism, and utopianism of process, the intention of which is to bring about (paradigm) shifts in consciousness” (Whitford 19–20).

Glossary

Chronotope—the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships reflecting certain social beliefs regarding the placement and actions of individuals. Consubstantiality—identification with a community created through ideology and communally shared discourse. Discourse—a system of linguistic representation through which power sustains itself. Discourse is contextually determined and can be perceived by members of a discourse community as “normal” or “abnormal.” Identification—a kind of transcendence, the process of establishing shared ground, thus creating consubstantiality between the rhetor and audience. Division (from other groups)—an opposing process, implicit in identification. Ideology—the means whereby, at the level of ideas, every social group produces and reproduces the conditions of its own existence. Burke defines it as “a kind of rhetoric,” or “an aggregate of beliefs sufficiently at odds with one another to identify opposite kinds of conduct.” Feminism—an oppositional ideological movement committed to changing sexist codes and expressing feminist desire. Feminist utopia—a narrative that describes a sexually egalitarian, liberating, nurturing society that maximizes the human potential. As a site of gendered opposition and resistance to patriarchy, it generates feminist ideology through social criticism, transcendence and transformation of patriarchal codes. Female-sexed texts—narratives marked by feminist artistic individuation. Genre —comprises patterns of connected content, form and style marked by a specific nexus of time, space and ideology. Identity—a fluid, amorphous and provisional state of “becoming,” an interaction of multiple, fractured aspects of the self; it is relational (requires a bond to the “other”), retrospective (fixed through memories and recollections), and formulated within language. Language—understood as socially constructed symbolic action, dialectically shaping our perception of reality (with an ideological function of making people “act together” on the basis of group identification). L’écriture feminine—strategic writing practice working in opposition to conventional linguistic structures. Meta-genre—includes (but is not limited to) critical discourse on genre that informs or ratifies a writer’s genre awareness. Like genres, meta-genres possess semiotic ties to their contexts of use and are profoundly ideological. Patriarchy—the dominant social order imposing authoritative sexist codes (such as men’s assumption of authority over women as “natural”). Rhetoric—the use of language “to induce some social and political choices rather than others” (Burke).

177

Subjectivity—the notion of self as an autonomous and self-actuating agent capable of valid self-knowledge. The subject is a function of discourse—a recipient site of meaning rather than the source, fissured and constantly “in process.” In patriarchy, female subjectivity is alienated as the female is determined socially, linguistically and biologically by patriarchy which identifies her by her difference and positions her as “the Other” within dominant discourse. Symbolic power of genre—genre’s ability to empower genre users for specific action (adapted from Bourdieu 163–171). Symbolic violence of genre—genre’s ability to create time and space that restrict certain agents from using the genre. It occurs when an agent unwillingly participates in an action that is against his or her best interests (adapted from Bourdieu 51–2). Utopia—a transhistorical artistic form portraying a nonexistent society that provides for better possibilities for human agency. This society is usually described in considerable detail and located in alternative time and space.

Bibliography

Albinski, Nan Bowman. Women’s Utopias in British and American Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988. Annas, Pamela J. “New Worlds, New Words: Androgyny in Feminist Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 15 (July 1978): 143–56. Aristotle. “Rhetoric.” The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle. New York: The Modern Library, 1984. Armitt, Lucy, ed. Where No Man Has Gone Before: Women and Science Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1991. Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1985. Baccollini, Rafaella. “Breaking the Boundaries: Gender, Genre, and Dystopia.” Minerva: 137–46. Bakhtin, Mikhail M.“Discourse in the Novel.”The Dialogic Imagination . Ed. M. Holquist. Trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 259–422. ——. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 84–258. Barr, Marlene. Feminist Fabulation: Space I Postmodern Fiction. lowa City: U of Iowa P, 1992. Barr, Marlene, ed. Future Females: A Critical Anthology. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green U Popular P, 1981. Bartowski, Frances. Feminist Utopias. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1989. Bazerman, Charles. “Genre and Identity: Citizenship in the Age of the Internet and the Age of Global Capitalism.” The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and Change. Eds. Richard Coe, Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002. 13–37. —— . Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of Experimental Article in Science. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Trans. H.M.Parshley. London: Vintage, 1974. Behr, Martin. Critical Moments in the Rhetoric of Kenneth Burke: Implications for Composition. Winnipeg: Inkshed Publications, 1996. Berneri, Marie Louise. Journey through Utopia. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. Vol. 1. Trans. Nevill Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. 3 vols. Bookchin, Murray. The Ecology of Freedom. Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982. ——. “On Remaking the American Left.” Socialist Review 73 (January-February 1984): 113–16. Booker, Keith M. “Woman on the Edge of a Genre: The Feminist Dystopias of Marge Piercy.” Science-Fiction Studies 21 (1994): 337–350. Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Ed. John B. Thompson. Trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge, MA: Polity; Basil Blackwell, 1991.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

179

Braidotti, Rosi. “Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory.” Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader. Ed. Mary Eagleton. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. 411–20. Bristow, Joseph. Sexuality. New York: Routledge, 1997. Brossard, Nicole. L’Amèr: ou, Le Chapître Effrité. Montreal: Quinze, 1977. ——. Picture Theory. Trans. Barbara Godard. New York: Roof Books, 1990. ——. The Aerial Letter. Trans. M. Wildeman. Toronto: Women’s P, 1988. ——. Mauve Desert. Trans. S.de Lotbiniere-Harwood. Toronto: Coach House P, 1990. Bryant, Dorothy. The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You. New York: Random House, 1971. Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1969. ——. Counter-Statement. Berkeley: U of California P, 1931. ——. Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: U of California P, 1966. ——.“Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of Containment.” Critical Inquiry Winter (1978): 401–16. ——. “The Nature of Art Under Capitalism.” Nation 137 (1933): 675–77. ——. “Rhetoric—Old and New.” Journal of General Education 5 (1951): 203–11. ——. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. New York: New Republic, 1935. ——. The Philosophy of the Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. (Revised abridged ed.) New York: Vintage, 1957. ——. The Rhetoric of Religion. 1961. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969. ——. “Symbol and Association.” The Hudson Review 9 (Summer 1956): 212–25. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge, 1993. ——. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Cameron, Deborah. Feminism and Linguistic Theory. London: Macmillan, 1992. ——. Verbal Hygiene. London: Routledge, 1995. Carter, Allen C. Kenneth Burke and the Scapegoat Process. Oklahoma Project For Discourse and Theory. Vol. 17. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1996. Charnas, Suzy McKee. Motherlines. New York: Berkeley, 1979. ——. “No Such Thing as Tearing Down Just a Little: Post-Holocaust Themes in Feminist SF.” Janus 6 (1980): 25–28. ——. Walk to the End of the World. London: Victor Gollancz, 1979. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Eds. R. Warhol and D. Price-Herndal. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1993. 334–349. ——. “Sorties.” The Newly Born Woman. Eds. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clement. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Coates, Jennifer. Women, Men, and Language. New York: Longman, 1986. Coe, Richard M. “An Apology for Form; or, Who Took the Form out of the Process?” College English 49 (1987): 13–28. ——. “Burke’s Act” Excerpted chapter from “Toward a Better Life; or, Why and How to Read Kenneth Burke.” Unpublished manuscript. Copyright reserved by author, 1995.

180 BIBLIOGRAPHY

——. “Burke’s Words.” Excerpted chapter from “Toward a Better Life; or, Why and How to Read Kenneth Burke.” Unpublished manuscript. Copyright reserved by author, 1995. ——. “Defining Rhetoric—and Us.” Journal of Advanced Composition 10.1 (1990): 39– 52. ——.“Eco-engineering Workplace Genres Conference of College Composition and Communication.” Nashville. 18 May. 1994. ——. “Editor’s Preface” Behr Critical Moments ix-xi. ——. “Metaphor.” Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. New York: Garland, 1996. 438–444. ——. The History and Principles of Rhetoric. Custom Courseware. Burnaby, BC: Simon Fraser U, 1998. Coe, Richard and Aviva Freedman. “Genre Theory in Composition: Australian and North American Approaches.” Theorizing Composition. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Copyright reserved by authors, 1997. Cooper, Marilyn. “Why Are We Talking about Discourse Communities: Or, Foundationalism Rears its Ugly Head Once More” Writing as Social Action. Eds. M.M.Cooper and M.Holzman. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1989. 202–220. Cornell, Drucilla. Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law. New York: Routledge, 1991. Crystal, David. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Toronto: Women’s P, 1978. Delany, Samuel. Triton. New York: Bantam, 1976. Delany, Sheila. “Ambivalence in Utopia: The American Feminist Utopias of Charlotte P.Gilman and Marge Piercy.” Writing Woman: Women Writers and Women in Literature, Medieval to Modern. New York: Schocken Books, 1983. Devitt, Amy. “Generalizing about Genre: New Conceptions of an Old Concept.” College Composition and Communication 44 (1993): 573–86. Elgin, Suzette Haden. Native Tongue. Toronto: Women’s P, 1985. Evans, Sara. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movements and the New Left. New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1979. Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex. New York: Bantam Books, 1970. Freadman, Anne. “Anyone for Tennis?” Freedman and Medway Genre 43–66. ——. “Uptake.” The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and Change. Eds. Richard Coe, Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002. 39–53. Freedman, Aviva and Peter Medway, eds. Genre and the New Rhetoric. London: Taylor and Francis, 1994. Freedman, Aviva and Peter Medway. “Locating Genre Studies: Antecedents and Prospects.” Freedman and Medway Genre 1–20. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey et al. London: Hogarth P and the Institute of PsychoAnalysis, 1953–65. 24 vols. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton, 1963. Gamble, Sarah, ed. The Icon Critical Dictionary of Feminism and Postfeminism. Cambridge: Icon Books, 1999.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

181

Gearhart, Sally Miller. The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women. Watertown, MA: Persephone P, 1979. ——. “Future Visions: Today’s Politics: Feminist Utopias in Review.” Women in Search of Utopia: Mavericks and Mythmakers. Eds. Ruby Rohrlich and Elaine Hoffman Baruch. New York: Schocken Books, 1984. 296–310. Gershuny, H.Lee. “The Linguistic Transformation of Womanhood.” Rohrlich and Hoffman Women 189–203. Giddens, Anthony. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge, Polity P, 1984. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Utopian Novels. Ed. and with an introduction by Minna Doskow. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1999. Giltrow, Janet. “Genre and the Pragmatic Concept of Background Knowledge.” Freedman and Medway Genre 155–78. Giltrow, Janet. “Meta-Genre.” The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and Change. Eds. Richard Coe, Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002. 187–205. ——. Personal communication, May 31, 2000. Godard, Barbara, Daphne Marlatt, Kathy Mezei and Gail Scott. “Theorizing Fiction Theory.” Collaboration in the Feminine: Writings on Women and Culture from Tessera. Ed. Barbara Godard. Toronto: Second Story P, 1994. 53–64. Gough, Kathleen. “The Origin of Family.” Toward an Anthropology of Women. Ed. Rayna [Rapp] Reiter. New York: Monthly Review P, 1975. 69–70. Gomoll, Jeanne. “An Open Letter to Joanna Russ.” Aurora 10 (Winter 1986–87): 7–8. Green, Georgia M. Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding. 2nd edition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996. Green, Jen and Sarah Lefanu. Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind. London: The Women’s P, 1985. Hacker, Marilyn. “Science Fiction and Feminism: The Work of Joanna Russ.” “Introduction” to Joanna Russ, The Female Man. Boston: Gregg P, 1977. 1–15. Halliday, M.A.K. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold, 1986. Halliday, M.A.K. and Hasan, R. Cohesion in English. New York: Longman, 1976. Hanisch, Carole. “The Personal Is Political.” Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Lib, Major Writings of the Radical Feminists. Ed. Shulamith Firestone. New York: NY Radical Feminists, 1970. 24–35. Hanks, William F. “Discourse Genres in a Theory of Practice.” American Ethnologist 14 (1987): 668–692. Hertzler, Joyce Oramel. The History of Utopian Thought. New York: Macmillan, 1923. Holqiust, Michael. Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World. New York: Routledge, 1990. Jakobson, Roman. “Linguistics and Poetics.” Style in Language. Ed. Thomas A. Sebeok. New York: MIT P, 1960.350–77. Jameson, Fredric. “Metacommentary.” PMLA 86 (January 1971): 9–18. Jones, Ann Rosalind. “Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of l’Ecriture Feminine.” The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Litera ture, and Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. 361–377. Kessler, Carol Farley. “Editor’s Introduction.” Daring to Dream: Utopian Stories by United States Women, 1836–1919. Ed. Carol Kessler. Boston: Pandora P, 1984. 1– 15.

182 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kramarae, Cheris. “Present Problems with the Language of the Future.” Women’s Studies. 14 (1987): 183–186. ——. Women and Men Speaking: Frameworks for Analysis. London: Newbury House, 1981. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. ——. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller with an introduction by Leon S.Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. ——. “Women and Power.” Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Eds. Robyn Warhol and Diana Price Herndl.New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1993. 442–461. ——. Language: The Unknown. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock, 1977. ——. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Ed. JacquesAlain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W.Norton, 1978. ——. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne. Eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. Trans. Jacqueline Rose. London: Macmillan, 1982. ——. The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psycho-analysis. Trans. with notes and commentary, by Anthony Wilden. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P, 1968. Le Guin, Ursula. The Dispossessed. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Lee, Alison and Cate Poynton, eds. Culture and Text: Discourse and Methodology in Social Research and Cultural Studies. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. Lessing, Doris. “The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five.” Canopus in Argos: Archives. Book Two. New York: Vintage Books, 1981. Levitas, Ruth. “Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete Utopia.” Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch. Ed. Janie Own Daniel and Tom Moylan. London, New York: Verso, 1997. 65–79. ——. The Concept of Utopia. Syracuse UP Series on Utopianism and Communitarianism. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1990. Luke, Allan. “Series Editor’s Preface.” Freedman and Medway Genre. vii-xi. Malinowski, Bronislaw. “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages.” Ogden and Richards Meaning 296–336. Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979. Martin, Jim R. “A Contextual Theory of Language.” The Powers of Literacy: A Genre Approach to Teaching Writing. Eds. Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis. London: Falmer P, 1993. 116–136. McCawley, James D. Everything That Linguists Have Always Wanted to Know about Logic but Were Afraid to Ask. 2nd edition. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. McClenahan, Catherine. “Textual Politics: The Uses of Imagination in Joanna Russ’s The Female Man” Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 70 (1982): 114–25. Miller, Carolyn R. “Genre as Social Action.” Freedman and Medway Genre 23–42. Mitchell, Juliet. “Femininity, Narrative, and Psychoanalysis.” Feminist Literary Theory: a Reader. Ed. M.Eagleton. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. 154–158. More, Thomas. Utopia. Trans. Robert M. Adams. New York: Norton, 1992. ——. Utopia: Latin Text and an English Translation. Eds. George M.Logan, Robert M.Adams, and Clarence H.Miller. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995. Morgan, Robin, ed. Sisterhood Is Powerful. New York: Random House, 1970.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

183

Morner, Kathleen, and Ralph Rausch, ed. NTC’s Dictionary of Literary Terms. Chicago: National Textbook Company, 1991. Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Methuen, 1986. ——. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000. Mumford, Lewis. The Story of Utopias. New York: Boni and Levenwright, 1922. ——. “Utopia, The City and The Machine.” In Manuel. 3–24. Ogden, C.K. and I.A.Richards. The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1923. Patrick, J. Max. “Iconoclasm, the Compliment of Utopia.” Science Fiction Studies 9 (July 1976): 157–61. Pearson, Carol. “Coming Home: Four Feminist Utopias and Patriarchal Experience.” BarrFuture Females 63–71. ——. “Of Time and Revolution: Theories of Social Change in Contemporary Feminist Science Fiction.” Rohrlich and Baruch Women 260–269. Piercy, Marge. Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. ——. He, She, It. New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1991. Ramsey, Danielle. “Feminism and Psychoanalysis.” The Icon Critical Dictionary of Feminism and Postfeminism. Ed. Sarah Gamble. Cambridge: Icon Books, 1999. 168– 178. Rich, Adrienne Cecile. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience.” Women— Sex and Sexuality. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. 62–92. ——. The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974–1977. London: Norton. 1978. ——. On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978. New York: Norton, 1979. Rohrlich, Ruby and Elaine Hoffman Baruch, eds. Women in Search of Utopia: Mavericks and Mythmakers. New York: Schocken Books, 1984. Russ, Joanna. “Amor Vincit Foeminam: The Battle of Sexes in SF.” Science Fiction Studies7 (March 1980): 2–15. ——. “Recent Feminist Utopias.” BarrFuture Females. 71–78. ——. “To Write ‘Like a Woman’: Transformations of Identity in the Work of Willa Cather.” To Write like a Woman: Essays in Feminist and Science Fiction. Indiana UP, 1995. ——. The Female Man. New York: Bantam Books, 1975. ——. What Are We Fighting For?: Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1998. Sarachild, Kate. “A Program for Feminist Consciousness Raising.” Notes from the Second Year. Ed. Robyn Morgan. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 133–145. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies. 5. 1 (1994): 1–37. ——. “Is There Only One Utopian Tradition.” Journal of the History of Ideas 43. 4 (October-December 1982): 681–89. ——. “A Note on the Other Side of Human Nature in the Utopian Novel.” Political Theory 3. 1 (February 1975):88–97. ——. “The Three Faces of Utopianism.” Minnesota Review 7. 3 (1967): 222–30. ——. “Utopia: The Problem of Definition.” Extrapolation 16. 2 (May 1975): 137–48.

184 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sargisson, Lucy. Contemporary Feminist Utopianism. New York: Routledge, 1996. ——. Utopian Bodies and the Politics of Transgression. New York: Routledge, 2000. Schaer, Roland, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent. Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. Schryer, Catherine. “Genre and Power: a Chronotopic Analysis.” The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and Change. Eds. Richard Coe, Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002.73–102. Scott, Gail. “Spaces like Stairs.” HOW(ever) VI. 4 (January 1992): 1–11. Shulman, Alix K. “Sex and Power: Sexual Bases of Radical Feminism.” Women—Sex and Sexuality. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1980. 21–35. Snitow, Ann Barr. “The Front Lines: Notes on Sex in Novels by Women, 1969–1979.” Women—Sex and Sexuality. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1980. 158–174. Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Encyclopedia of Utopian Literature. ABC-Clio Literary Companion. Santa-Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1995. Spender, Dale. Man Made Language. London: Routledge, 1980. Stimpson, Catharine R., & Ethel Spector Person. Women—Sex and Sexuality. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Suvin, Darko. “Defining the Literary Genre of Utopia: Some Historical Semantics, Some Genealogy, A Proposal and a Plea.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 6 (Fall 1973): 121–45. Talbot, Mary M. Language and Gender: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity P, 1998. Thayer, H.S. Meaning and Action: A Study of American Pragmatism. Indianapolis: BobbsMerill, 1973. Thornham, Sue. “Second Wave Feminism.” The Icon Critical Dictionary of Feminism and Postfeminism. Ed. Sarah Gamble. Cambridge: Icon Books, 1999. 29–42. Todorov, Tzvetan. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogic Principle. Trans. Vlad Godzich. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. ——. Genres in Discourse. Trans. Catherine Porter. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990. ——. Symbolism and Interpretation. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1982. ——. Introduction to Poetics. Trans. Richard Howard; [introduction by Peter Brooks.] Brighton: Harvester P, 1981. Trowse, Nadeane. “The Exclusionary Potential of Genre: Margery Kempe’s Transgressive Search for a Deniable Pulpit.” The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and Change. Eds. Richard Coe, Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002. 341–353. Voight, Andreas. Die Socialen Utopien. Leipzig: G.J. Goschen’sche Verlagshandlung, 1906. Waugh, Patricia. Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern. London, New York: Routledge, 1989. Wells, H.G. A Modern Utopia. 1905. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1967. Whitford, Margaret. “Feminism and Utopia.” Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine. New York: Routledge, 1991. Wilde, Oscar. The Soul of Man under Socialism. Boston: John W. Luce, 1910. Williams, Raymond. Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Oxford UP, 1976. ——. “Utopia and Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 5.16 (November 1978):203– 14.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

185

Wittig, Monique. Les Guérillères. (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969). English trans. David Le Vay. London: David Owen, 1971. ——. “The Straight Mind.” Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader. Ed. Mary Eagleton. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 1996. 408–11. Woolmark, Jenny. “Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind” [Review]. Foundations 35 (1985): 34–45.

Index

abjection, 54–57, 131, 143 abuse, sexual, 45, 75, 142, 151, 161. See also rape act, 7, 11, 28, 69, 100, 104, 116, 119, 142, 146–152 rhetorical, 4, 76, 112–18 sexual, 4, 45, 104 of writing, 114, 148, 149 action, 11–16, 33, 36, 89, 114, 151 social, 4, 11, 138, 149, 156–61, 162, 166–72 symbolic, 9–20, 123, 161–72 verbal, 17, 151 activism, political, 2–6, 20, 34, 44, 74, 75, 123 agent, 12–21, 54, 122, 176 Albinski, Nan Bowman, 28, 73 alienation, 32, 56, 57, 121. See also silencing ambiguity, 21–28, 82, 110, 123–32, 138, 147, 154, 162–70 androcentric rule, 56 anti-utopia, 22–30. See also utopia attitude, 12, 36–40, 63, 66, 76, 146, 160, 165 audience, 16–20, 34, 40, 61, 70–76, 81, 85, 100, 125, 175 authority, 9, 49, 75, 116 phallic, 52, 166, 176

on chronotope, 13–15, 26–27, 85, 88– 94, 105, 112–24 on genre, 79, 163 battle-of-the-sexes novels, 77–78 Bazerman, Charles, 4, 11 beauty, the concept of, 49, 56, 173 Beauvoir, Simone, de, 38, 41, 44, 123 becoming, the idea of, 4, 23, 34, 42, 83, 92, 127, 147, 157 birthing, 33, 36, 49, 60–71, 85, 91, 106, 122, 149. See also childbearing bisexuality, 49, 64. See also sexuality Bloch, Ernest, 1, 17, 19, 22–27, 31, 80, 160 blueprint, 1–6, 18, 22–27, 31–36, 60–68, 75, 80, 81, 120, 121, 127, 160–68. See also perfec-tion body, 53–56, 152, 154. See also mind maternal, 54, 69, 96 and the mind, 36, 63, 82, 167 writing the body, 56, 60–71, 106 Bodies That Matter, 54, 128, 150, 153, 174. See also Butler, Judith Booker, Keith, 2, 28, 30, 33, 36, 140, 158 Bourdieu, Pierre, 13, 176 Bristow, Joseph, 41, 42, 52, 54 Brossard, Nicole, 61–69, 106 Bryant, Dorothy, 18–20, 19, 20, 54, 57, 67–75, 83–123, 158–73 Burke, Kenneth: on action, 7, 11, 12 on ambiguity, 27, 154, 173

backlash, 44, 72, 169 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 9, 12–15, 26–27, 90–94, 112–24

186

INDEX

on capitalism, 110, 141 on consubstantiality, 7–10, 78 on discourse, 11–15, 41, 67, 79, 101 on dramatism, 15, 65, 169 on form, 4, 5, 26, 125, 130, 169 on ideology, 13, 111, 154, 158, 175 on language, 7–9, 58, 83, 116, 151, 160, 171, 172 on perfection, 1, 2 on perspective by incongruity, 65, 66, 129 on rhetoric of identification, 5–10, 56, 111, 140, 141, 150, 153, 157 on society, 117, 156–61, 173 on symbols, 110, 115, 116, 169, 171 on transcendence, 36, 62–63 Butler, Judith, 54, 128, 150, 153, 174 capitalism, 2, 4, 11, 31, 49, 82, 111, 165, 172 censorship, 13, 54, 152, 153, 174 change, 5, 18, 31, 32, 59–66, 80–86, 88– 90, 109, 138, 149, 156, 167, 168. See also social change childbearing, 49, 70, 94, 104. See also birthing chora, the concept of, 53, 54, 96, 97. See also Kristeva, Julia chronotope, 13–16, 20–27, 33, 61, 127, 138, 162, 175. See also Bakhtin, Mikhail utopian, 23–27, 71, 73, 85, 85, 88–97, 110, 112, 121, 130 Cixous, Hélène, 10, 19, 21, 55, 56, 61–68, 79, 86, 106, 110, 130, 138 Coates, Jennifer, 34, 56 Coe, Richard, 6, 7, 11, 12, 15, 36, 63, 129, 171 collective, 70, 71, 85–94, 104–21 community, 4–16, 26–28, 64, 70, 71, 143, 172, 175. See also discourse community Atan, 90–94, 103–20 of discourse, 5–19, 28–36, 71, 73, 125, 158–73, 175 feminist, 56, 59, 77–83, 89, 123, 174

187

consciousness, 4, 11, 20, 32, 49, 69, 81– 94, 116, 121, 122, 141 feminist, 58, 62, 66 consciousness-raising, 16, 39, 46, 47, 123, 149, 156–69 consubstantiality, 7, 9, 34, 41, 57, 66, 71, 78, 97, 100, 156, 158, 166, 167 content, 10, 14, 25–31, 60–81, 175. See also substance contract, socio-symbolic, 12, 33–41, 56, 57, 79, 127, 146, 174 counterdiscourse, 2–7, 38, 41, 56, 78, 162, 167. See also discourse context, 9–18, 28, 60, 61, 73, 112 of culture, 15–20, 34, 39–45, 61, 71– 72 feminist, 39, 149, 154, 168 of the 1970s, 4, 20, 39–45, 60, 71–72, 137, 157, 160, 163 of situation, 16, 34, 62, 67, 73–79, 131, 133 social, 7, 66, 73, 74, 123, 136, 166, 169 socio-political, 4, 5, 20, 31, 41–45, 154 and text, 17, 112, 119, 126, 131, 172 creation, 32, 54, 55, 62–69, 117–20 criticism, 6, 9, 41, 71, 72, 158 feminist, 30–36, 51–63, 72, 160, 160 patriarchal, 45, 72–78 social, 16, 25, 28, 30, 33, 62, 71, 80, 140 culture, 2–7, 20, 44, 51, 60, 94, 120 context of, 15, 16, 31, 39, 49, 52, 61, 131, 133, 160, 160 utopian, 110, 114, 120 Daly, Mary, 56, 57, 61, 62, 66 deconstruction, 31, 66–71, 82, 126, 127, 138, 154, 165 definition, 11–16 of feminist utopia, 5, 15, 19, 30, 31, 73, 76, 79–83, 156–73 of fiction theory, 126–30 of genre, 11–16, 67, 82, 160–67, 175 of human beings, 46, 115 of patriarchy, 44

188 INDEX

of utopia, xii–1, 16–21, 22–33, 75 Delany, Sheila, 25, 26, 33–36, 140 Delany, Samuel, 41, 74 desire, xii, 1, 25, 30–34, 52, 54, 125, 139, 141, 146–58 determinism, linguistic, 57, 58. See also Dale, Mary; Elgin, Suzette Haden; Sapir-Whorf’s hypothesis; Spender, Dale Dialectics of Sex, The, 39, 41 dialogism, of genre, 18, 33, 46, 72, 79–85, 102, 123, 123, 148, 163–70 dichotomy, 36, 58, 63, 65, 71, 82, 123. See also opposition difference, 8, 27–34, 41, 57, 63, 71, 72, 81 gender, 34, 38–49, 51, 64, 104, 125, 164 politics of, 51–57, 125, 131, 151–59 utopian, 41, 89, 126, 136, 145, 160 discourse, 7–15, 41, 67, 73–74, 82. See also counterdiscourse abnormal, 5–9, 31, 39, 89, 160 dominant, 2, 10, 34–49, 53–63, 72, 85, 100, 101, 110, 123, 129–36 feminist, 2–18, 28, 33–41, 54, 61–67, 89, 140 as social action, 4–18, 56, 126 symbolic, 7, 9, 156–65 utopian, 9, 18, 34–38, 60, 61, 97, 98, 111, 121 discourse community, 5–19, 28, 33–36, 71, 73, 125, 158–73, 175 feminist, 36, 56, 59, 77–79, 83, 89, 123, 174 dissent, 12, 161 in meta-genre, 73–78 diversity, 36, 56, 97, 98, 107, 120 of feminism, 72, 73, 156, 173 in feminist utopia, 17, 22, 33, 83 domination, 4, 63–73, 144, 152, 160 dreamtime, 20, 83, 112–23. See also Bryant, Dorothy dualism, 19, 36, 58, 66, 88 denial of, 63–66 dystopia, 22–32, 41, 64, 76, 81, 82, 127, 155, 165. See also utopia

écriture feminine, 10, 57, 61–68, 79, 130, 168, 176. See also parole feministe; writing the body Elgin, Suzette Haden, 58–60, 115, 172 essentialism, 18, 41, 44, 76, 79, 82, 111, 120, 165, 174 eutopia, xii, 22–30, 64, 76, 81. See also utopia exigence, 67, 78, 80, 160. See also genre expectations: feminist, 77, 163 of genre, 11, 61, 73, 125–33 patriarchal, 2, 30, 131, 138 social, 5, 9, 77, 111 family, 38, 91–97, 135. See also parenting nuclear, 36, 41, 44, 49–53, 104, 139, 140 utopian, 63, 64, 71, 80, 86, 104 female man, the concept of, 21, 125–44, 146–60 Female Man, The, 18, 123–61, 158–73 femininity, 34–42, 52, 61, 66, 141, 152, 171, 173. See also womanhood feminism, 4–9, 18, 30, 34–83 and backlash, 72, 73, 123 first-wave, 38, 76 radical, 39, 56–58 second-wave, 20, 27, 39–49, 61, 65, 72–76, 83, 120 feminist utopia, 19, 30, 31, 73, 76, 79–83, 156–73. See also utopia fiction, xii, 46, 61, 69, 125, 127, 131 feminist, 46, 67, 146 patriarchal, 80, 125 fiction (continued) and theory, 65–69, 125, 126, 148, 149, 157 utopian, xii, 10, 20, 22, 23, 27, 28, 30, 32, 36, 73, 74, 77 fiction theory, 5, 15, 19, 21, 65–69, 125– 31, 165

INDEX

189

Firestone, Shulamith, 39–45, 123, 149, 173 form, 4, 5, 14, 15, 28–36, 93, 125, 128. See also content; substance narrative, 11, 17, 22, 68, 82, 119, 125, 129, 162 and substance, 11, 22, 28–36, 67, 82 transhistorical, 4, 18 fragmentation, 27, 51, 69, 73, 89, 163, 166 of gender, 76, 77 of narrative, 68, 69, 128–33 Freadman, Anne, 2, 12, 13, 79. See also uptake on game-playing, 2, 12, 13, 67, 76 on uptake, 12, 61, 161 Freedman, Aviva, 11, 12, 15, 163 freedom, 4, 9, 12, 41, 53, 64, 105, 113, 138–44, 145, 155 Freud, Sigmund, 19, 38, 41, 43, 53–55, 131. See also psychoanalysis and the castration complex, 42, 44, 173 and the Oedipus complex, 41 and the theory of penis envy, 41–44, 131 Friedan, Betty, 39, 41–45, 123, 149, 173 function, 4–16, 30, 31, 52 and content, 10, 30, 31, 61 of genre, 8, 11, 13, 14, 64, 75 of utopia, 10, 20, 23–32, 63, 64, 80–86, 129, 160–66

exclusionary potential of, 13, 75–76 feminist, 9, 17–20, 43, 61, 71–86, 111– 16, 123–44 limitations of, 21, 41, 60–65 and meta-genre, 73–81 patriarchal, 2, 6, 30, 34, 60–65, 75–81, 85–85, 120–61 as social action, 11–17, 36, 78–79 as strategy, 11, 12, 14, 158–74 transformation of, 18, 34, 60–71, 75 utopian, 2–10, 28–34, 81, 82, 158–74 genre theory, 4, 4, 10–16, 60, 67, 73, 126. See also genre Gershuny, H. Lee, 19, 62, 63, 160, 174 Giltrow, Janet, 9, 16, 32, 73–79, 172 Godard, Barbara, 66, 67, 126 government, 4, 63, 90 guilt, the complex of, 45, 47, 57, 103, 117, 136, 139–50, 167, 172. See also inferiority, the complex of

Gearhart, Sally, 19, 74, 81, 82 gender, 6, 15, 18, 98, 123, 129–39, 151– 58, 163 equality, 2, 34–40, 83, 112, 121, 150, 161–72 representation of, 2, 30, 57–64, 69, 77– 86, 104, 112, 126 stereotypes, 9, 10, 30–40, 46–49, 57– 61, 127 genre, xii, 1, 9–19, 26–33 and chronotope, 14, 15, 26, 27, 85–86, 88–97 emergence and evolution of, 21, 75, 78, 79

identification, 5, 41–43, 51–57, 90, 98, 100–13, 123–46, 157–65 female, 127, 128, 142, 157 of the female man, 153–60 feminist, 56, 75, 83, 146, 153, 166 male, 43, 131 patriarchal, 99, 128, 131, 143, 150–56, 165 rhetoric of, 6–10, 56, 140, 150, 151, 157 identity, 4, 51, 79, 103, 131, 153, 154 gender, 6, 39, 43, 131–39 ideology, 8, 13–16, 39, 41, 49, 61, 76, 86, 88–92, 111, 155

Halliday, M.A.K., 15, 79 Hanish, Carole, 47 heterosexuality, 42, 49–51, 86, 104, 105, 120, 145, 155. See also sexuality prescriptive, 49, 80, 85, 165 hierarchy, 1, 32–36, 58, 61–65, 80, 82, 94, 97, 114–19, 136, 156–68 homosexuality, 49, 49, 64, 104, 146, 148, 155. See also sexuality

190 INDEX

feminist, 5, 6, 14, 73–75, 82, 83, 97, 129, 141–59 and utopia, 19, 22–27, 94, 100, 107, 110 idyll, 20, 85, 85, 88–94, 99–11, 161, 172 impulse, utopian, 19, 23, 33, 64, 92, 140, 163 individuation, 18, 64–67, 85, 136, 161, 169, 175 inferiority, the complex of, 36, 38, 42–44, 57, 131, 131, 143, 173 interiority, the concept of, 96, 97, 99, 105, 108, 117 jouissance, 54, 55, 138 Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, The, 18, 83–123, 158–73 Kristeva, Julia, 6, 19, 21, 54–56, 96, 97, 112, 136, 138–46, 151–58, 156, 173 Lacan, Jacques, 19, 51–55 language, 1–15, 20, 51–54, 62, 79, 110, 126, 160, 165 exorcism of, 57, 62 inauthenticity of, 47, 49, 57–62, 82, 83, 110–18, 136, 151, 160–72 and linguistic theory, 57–59 materiality of, 68, 106, 151 and meaning, 11, 21, 36, 41, 53–55, 58–61, 69, 77, 110–14, 126–33, 147, 166 and power, 36, 56–61, 67, 151, 157 women’s, 56, 59–61, 67 Lauretis, Teresa, de, 10, 157, 171 Levitas, Ruth, 1, 23–25, 30 Lorde, Audre, 19, 47, 171 Lyotard, Jean-François, 71, 76 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 15 Mannheim, Karl, 22–26, 31 Marlatt, Daphne, 66, 125, 126 marriage, 36, 41–49, 91, 104, 138, 139 masculinity, 36–43, 65, 131, 152, 173 Mead, George Herbert, 11 meaning, 4, 8–16, 34, 51–56, 66, 67

construction of, 69–78, 88, 110–17, 123–34, 141, 147, 162, 166 contextual, 36, 41, 60, 61, 76, 155 as suspect, 19–21, 67, 126, 129 memory, 12, 26 collective, 34, 135 of genre, 12, 60, 61, 161 gyn/ecological, 61–66, 68, 106 social, 12, 36 Mezei, Kathy, 67 meta-genre, 9, 10, 19, 61, 73–81, 158, 160, 172 Miller, Carolyn, 11–13, 66, 79, 82, 161 Millet, Kate, 39–45, 123, 149, 173 mind, 11, 36. See also body and the body, 36, 51, 63, 82, 145–50, 154, 167 monogamy, 64, 86, 104–10 motherhood, 38, 54–64, 69, 135–43, 145, 162. See also parenting More, Thomas: Utopia, xii–2, 19, 36, 36 Moylan, Tom, 2, 4, 19, 21, 30–41, 64, 65, 71, 72, 80, 81, 98, 123–33, 160, 167 multiplicity, 17, 31, 64, 68, 71, 80, 82, 123– 30, 157, 162–70 narrative, 55, 123, 125, 130 feminist, 6, 17–21, 26–36, 43–46, 55, 60–77, 81–86, 126–36, 157–73 narrator, 18, 45, 65, 71, 85–86, 92, 128– 37, 155, 161 Native Tongue, 59–60, 115 New Left, the, 39–41 open-endedness, 4, 6, 19, 21, 60–72, 81, 120, 123, 157, 158, 163–73 opposition, 2–21, 30–41, 51, 63–66, 80– 89, 129, 140, 155, 157–73 as dichotomy, 30, 38, 41, 89, 155, 157, 160 as resistance, 2–18, 31–36, 65, 140, 160–72, 175 order, 12, 18. See also contract

INDEX

socio-symbolic, 12, 18, 33, 34, 41, 51– 57, 79, 127, 130, 146 orientation: feminist, 75, 83, 90, 155 political, 15, 25, 41 sexual, 49 social, 4, 8, 41, 66, 81, 90 socio-historic, 90, 138, 164 Other, the, 38–41, 56, 57, 122–39, 146–58, 164, 165 parenting, 47–49, 64, 71, 85, 86, 98–104. See also motherhood parole feministe, 19, 62. See also écriture feminine patriarchy, 2–21, 30–39, 44–47, 55–65, 71–77, 83, 89, 98, 105, 119–35, 138–51, 157–72 Pearson, Carol, 10, 19, 78, 83, 88, 89, 121, 161 personal life, 61–70, 91, 109, 135. See also private life as political, 39–49, 79–85, 156–73 penis envy, 42–44, 131, 173. See also psychoanalysis perfection, 1–2, 19–32, 64, 80–83, 121, 158 Personal Is Political, The, 47 phallocentrism, 51–52. See also Lacan, Jacques phallus, the concept of, 51–54, 61. See also Lacan, Jacques Piercy, Marge, 39, 63–65, 74 politics: of the 1970s, 2–6, 20, 34, 44, 74, 75, 123, 131–36, 160 sexual, 18, 44, 155, 130, 126 political theory, 4, 12–17, 20–27, 38, 40– 51, 73–82, 88, 120, 126, 140, 160, 160 postmodernism, 71 power, 13–18, 54, 77, 86, 123–39, 139–49, 150–59, 157, 165 male, 49, 77, 78, 135, 167 symbolic, 7, 10, 13, 79, 139, 150, 164, 175, 176 private life, 70, 85, 85, 92, 106, 121–25, 172.

191

See also personal life psychoanalysis, 6, 41, 52, 130 feminist, 6, 10, 19–21, 52–68, 79, 86, 96–110, 130–39, 138–60, 173 patriarchal, 41–52 public life, 66–78, 85–96 rape, 44–49, 77, 83, 86, 104, 137–46. See also abuse reality, 11, 14, 22, 23, 27, 51, 58, 81, 88, 110, 126, 147 feminist, 60–67, 82–83, 167 and language, 58, 59, 79, 82, 167 patriarchal, 9, 51, 65–68, 82, 83 social construction of, 12, 13, 57, 67, 83 truth-conditional notions of, 17, 80, 88, 130 and utopia, 1–27, 33, 80 utopian, 20, 21, 60–77, 81, 113–19, 134, 147, 161–68 Recent Feminist Utopias, 74–80 resistance, 11, 31, 140, 142 cultural, 10, 12 feminist, 19, 36, 41, 51, 71, 83, 128, 130, 147, 156, 161 political, 2, 12–19, 73–82, 157, 160 revolution, 26, 41–66, 155, 161, 166, 169 sexual, 40, 41, 44, 138 Rich, Adrienne, 44, 49 rhetoric, 4–21, 34, 56, 105, 111, 150, 153– 61 feminist, 4–18, 33, 38, 56, 82, 85, 110, 142, 149, 157, 158 of genre, 15–21, 33, 36, 61–82, 123–30, 160–73 Russ, Joanna, 18–21, 41, 56, 74–85, 119– 62, 158–73 and the construction of femininity, 43– 46, 56–57 on feminist utopia, 72–80 The Female Man, 123–62 Recent Feminist Utopias, 74–80 Sapir-Whorf’s hypothesis, 57, 58. See also determinism, linguistic; Dale, Mary;

192 INDEX

Elgin, Suzette Haden; Native Tongue; Spender, Dale Sargent, Lyman Tower, xii, 22–32, 64, 65, 81, 160 Sargisson, Lucy, 1, 16–21, 30–36, 63, 68, 80–83, 160, 160 satire, utopian, 28, 30, 76, 81. See also utopia science fiction, 72–80, 88, 123, 128, 152, 162, 171 Schryer, Catherine, 2, 12–15, 88, 160 Second Sex, The, 38, 173 self, the, 38, 89, 111–36, 140–58, 163, 165, 175, 176 Selfsame, Law of, 55, 67, 86. See also Cixous, Hélène sex, 38–51, 56, 62, 69–86, 98–109, 128–47, 146–60, 160, 160 sexism, 2, 4, 19, 38–47, 71, 79, 98, 120– 35, 143, 152, 158–69 sexual revolution, 40–44, 138 sexuality, 18, 19, 30, 38–64, 85, 139, 167. See also bisexuality; homosexuality; heterosexuality Shulman, Alix, 38–47 signification, 51–59, 76 Signification of the Phallus, The, 51 silencing, 56, 57. See also alienation situation, 8, 11, 31, 85, 114, 120, 160, 166– 73 context of, 15–20, 73, 79–83, 120, 131– 42, 154 patriarchal, 7, 9, 21, 41–49 rhetorical, 12, 34–39, 61, 73–75, 82, 114, 115, 155 social action, 11–20, 34, 36, 64, 66, 79, 82, 138, 156–61 of feminist fiction, 60, 67, 149, 162 of feminist utopia, 4–10, 61, 71–82 of genre, 11–18, 34, 67, 79, 140, 162 social change, 2–7, 31, 63–73, 80–86, 88– 95, 109, 120, 138, 149, 156, 167, 168 social order, 2, 10, 56–64, 76, 97, 111–28, 142, 154. See also order

patriarchal, 18, 20, 34, 36, 49–49, 64, 67, 82, 126, 161–73 social theory, xii, 4, 19, 27–34, 61, 83, 113, 140, 157 utopian, 27–30, 33. See also utopia society, 1–6, 27–36, 43, 45, 64, 94, 115–20, 158–74, 175 egalitarian, 10, 63–64, 85, 107 utopian, 34, 36, 41, 54, 61–85, 89, 120– 25, 127–56 space, 12–16, 26–30, 76, 81–93, 101, 121, 127, 130, 162, 172, 175 semiotic, 10–17, 31, 54–63, 69–87, 95, 96, 131, 153, 157, 167, 168 Spender, Dale, 57–58 structure, 12, 14, 26, 57–60, 97, 160 rhetorical, 36, 160, 165 social, 25, 41, 64, 76, 135, 141, 167 subject, 6, 15, 65, 71, 96, 128, 151 becoming, 34, 55, 62, 83, 97, 110, 147 female, 34, 47, 65, 69, 81, 125, 134, 140, 146–58 sexed, 51–54 subjectivity, 6, 18–21, 34–41, 53–68, 112, 127, 135–44, 146, 149 substance, 7–17, 36, 39, 41, 61, 82. See also form Suvin, Darko, 27 symbolic order, 12, 33, 41, 51–56, 115, 130, 146, 174 reversal of, 57, 69, 79, 119 symbolic power, 6, 13, 51, 79, 176 symbolic violence, 6, 45, 72, 133, 148, 156, 160, 166, 167, 176 text, 15–20, 63, 68, 79, 114, 129, 171 female-sexed, 21, 56, 65–67, 127, 149 utopian, 10, 32, 63, 83, 85, 129, 155, 167 time, 12–16, 26–30, 77, 82–114, 127–42, 162, 163 tradition, utopian, 6, 31, 38, 65, 73, 80, 98, 119, 160 transformation, 21, 54, 62–64, 70, 85, 88, 95, 129 of genre, 18, 34, 60, 83

INDEX

of man, 88, 95–123, 162 metaphoric, 5, 6, 15, 21, 62, 68, 80–82 of patriarchy, 57, 95 social, 17–25, 31, 80, 164 of utopia, 123, 167, 175 of womanhood, 22, 56, 57, 62–65, 82, 85, 129, 130, 140, 146, 147, 160–70 transcendence, 8, 15, 36, 62–66, 116, 157, 175 utopian, 63, 70, 80, 160 transgression, 17, 18, 63–65, 71, 77–83, 120, 157, 163, 168 of boundaries, 17, 63, 157 Trowse, Nadeane, 13, 75 unconscious, the, 15, 52, 138, 153 uptake, the concept of, 12, 60, 61, 76, 161. See also Freadman, Anne utterance, 9, 15, 76, 77 utopia, 22–33. See also utopianism abstract and concrete, 2, 23, 26 as a blueprint, 1, 6, 22, 27–33, 68, 75, 80, 127, 158, 160 critical, 30–33, 64, 65, 71–80, 81, 98 definition of, xii–1, 19, 22–33 feminist, 5, 15, 19, 30, 31, 73, 76, 79– 83, 156–73 and ideology, 22–26 as a literary genre, 1, 19, 26–33 and reality, xii, 1, 19–27 patriarchal, 6, 9, 19, 21, 30–38, 72, 80, 82, 163–73 as social dreaming, xii, 4, 22, 27–30, 33, 61, 80, 83, 113 Utopia (More), xii–2, 19, 36, 36 utopian impulse, 19–23, 64, 92, 163 utopianism, xii–2, 9, 16–19, 22–33, 34, 60, 71 feminist, 16–19, 62, 73, 80, 88 values, 5, 11, 16, 26, 163 feminist, 33, 34, 49, 74–78, 86–98, 163– 77 patriarchal, 57, 79–86, 166 violence, 21, 49, 65, 78, 104, 117, 121, 131–52, 156–72

193

symbolic, 13, 41, 44, 72, 77, 130, 133, 156, 176 Wittig, Monique, 53, 65, 74, 79, 152, 155 womb, 55, 68, 69, 96 Woman at the Edge of Time, 63–65, 74 womanhood, 18, 38, 56, 62, 83, 125, 152, 160, 163. See also femininity Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM), 39, 47 work, 47–49, 64, 71, 90–131, 136, 138, 156, 160 writing the body, the concept of, 56, 60– 71, 106. See also écriture feminine