Final Response: Deerskin by Robin McKinley

I have found this independent study to be very thought provoking and interesting despite the fact that speculative fiction is a genre that I read a lot of. Looking at it from the perspective of women authors and how they use the genre to rethink, reimagine, subvert gender and other social issues has been an enlightening experience. I read some works and authors I had not even heard of before (Russ, Butler, & Carter) and likely wouldn’t have come across outside of formulating this class. It is interesting to come around full circle to Robin McKinley’s book Deerskin as a final response as McKinley frames the writing as a very traditional fairy tale. While at a cursary glance one would think it is as far removed from Carter’s style, in fact, there are ways that they are very similar in how they subvert the genre of myth and fairy tale to comment on the treatment of women and change the outcomes. Carter was quite interested in taking the fairy tale back to the complicated, often bloody and uncomfortable, original storylines (for example, in a book of short stories called The Bloody Chamber). Deerskin does the same and goes back to the tale of Charles Perrault’s “Donkeyskin”

Princess Lissar has issues with identity, a very common thread through all these books by women authors as across the 20th century women struggle to find another way to be that doesn’t set themselves up as marginalized. In this tale, the Princesses identity is completely subsumed by her mother and Lissar’s beauty becomes simply a mirror in which people can look and see not her–but who they want to see to the point of her father raping her and then beating nearly to death her for not being who he really wants, his dead wife. There is a tower room, but no gallant prince to come and save her in this story–she has to save herself. While she is given some help in the form of a refuge, the gift of time to heal, and a deerskin that makes her unrecognizable–in the end she has to find healing on her own. She does eventually heal and even find love and companionship, but she recognizes that she is forever changed by the encounter and tells the man she loves: “I am hurt…in ways you cannot see, and that I cannot explain, even to myself, but only know that they are there, and a part of me, as much as my hands and eyes and breath are part of me” (306). McKinley is careful to to wrap the tragic story in a “happily ever after” but in the knowledge that our experiences change us and healing does not always erase the hurt that human beings are capable of inflicting on each other. But there is hope there, as well, that people are also capable of treating each other with respect.

Many people pay too much attention to the fact that there are uncomfortable topics such as rape and incest in this book, the scenes are a small, although very uncomfortable, portion of the book that are important–rape happens, incest happens, and there isn’t always a white knight, and sometimes what a person needs most is the time and the space to heal and find a way to reconstruct their identity–all worthy topics done with terrible gentleness and remind me of two things, a song by Ingrid Michaelson called Breakable, and a line from Carter’s Nights at the Circus: “The mould in which the human form is cast is exceedingly fragile” (61).

 

Final Book List

I’m in the process of wrapping my research/seminar paper and my final reading response, the book list I started with got modified a bit and I ended up reading an extra book I believe, but the final tally is:

Orlando by Virginia Woolf
The Female Man by Joanna Russ
Kindred by Octavia Butler
Fledgling by Octavia Butler
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
Deerskin by Robin McKinley

 

Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter

I started to write a response but then I ended up working it until it became the introduction for my paper. I found this book to be incredibly powerful and can imagine it is one of those books that you pick up every so often and re-read and find whole layers that weren’t found on the previous reading.
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The formation of identity and structuring of gender are issues that have concerned women across time. When looking at the literary dialogue in terms of women authors using the genre of speculative fiction to comment on social constructs, especially in terms of identity formation, the conversation starts with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. She effectively argues that the male Romantic notion of the “I” as an internalized, personal quest for the true self is not a legitimate model for identity formation and is a failed construct (as seen in the character of Victor Frankenstein). In its place, she constructs a female Romantic model of identity formation that is relational to the world around individuals encompassing family and society as a whole. One hundred and sixty-six years later Angela Carter would continue the conversation about what it meant to be a woman constructed as a monstrous other and marginalized in her novel Nights at the Circus, with some powerful differences. The main female character, Fevvers, a woman born with wings, understanding how identity is formed takes control over as much of the formation as is possible, and manages to show identity as not a single static structure but a fluid, mutable construct. The main male character, Walser, while at first seemingly set in his identity, finds not only his world but who he inherently is turned upside down when he decides to run away and join the circus in an effort to debunk Fevvers as a fraud. The issue of identity formation is much more developed and complex in Nights at the Circus, but in it one can see the threads of Mary Shelley’s argument taken and expanded on. Set in 1899, the characters are the products of the 19th century and while Shelley looked forward to to the Victorian period with serious reservations, the main characters of Nights at the Circus look forward to the 20th century with some degree of hope that gender and identity issues might change for the better.
[[This became my introduction for my paper]]

 

Fledgling

I picked up Fledgling after Reading Kindred and Parable of the Sower and I was struck by an interesting thought in regards to Butler’s main female characters. They all are relatively, and to varying degrees, strong women who find their strengths hampered by the situation and people surrounding them and they all deal with it in different ways. In Kindred, Dana is a strong woman in the 1970s and yet when she is continually pulled back into the slave South, her strength is continually weakened and constrained by the her need to keep Rufus alive. She is vulnerable because she is not an island unto herself but connected and responsible in complicated ways to Rufus, to her husband, and to Alice. In Parable of the Sower, Lauren is smart, creative, and determined to not simply exist in a crumbling world but act. She resists the mind numbing ease of just following along and takes the difficult road of defining what she believes and how that belief asks her to act–and yet while she knows what she needs to do and puts many things into place–when it comes time to act she is held back and hampered by her loyalty to family and friends and her hyperempathy issue that literally make her vulnerable to the pain of others.
In Fledgling Butler creates her strongest character of all three, Shori is a vampire, physically strong, mentally intelligent and quick, she even has the advantage over others of her own kind in that she has been genetically altered to not be completely incapacitated by sunlight. Yet she to is made vulnerable by her need for her symbionts (humans she bonds to and relies on for sustenance) and their need for her love and protection. In this world, Butler has created a very literal representation of a social structure in which people have a very real and physical connection and responsibility for each other that both makes them stronger and more vulnerable.
In Kindred Dana is made vulnerable by her need to keep Rufus alive and is also alive by the same token. In Parable Lauren is strengthened by the belief of others and made vulnerable in trying to keep them all together and alive. In Fledgling the bond between Shori and her symbionts very clearly goes both ways. Butler seems to be making a long range arch across novels dealing with connectivity of individuals and society and the ways in which the individual never exists in a vacuum but always in relation to those around her.

 

Kindred by Octavia Butler

What I found the most interesting about Kindred by Octavia Butler was the paradoxical situation that Butler places her character in. Dana, in her own time and place, is a strong, independent black woman married to a white man in a time when it is not socially acceptable–by either white or black society and she doesn’t care. Thrown back in time to save a white child (Rufus) in the antebellum South who turns out to be her ancestor and a slave owner son is confusing for her to say the least. Each time she is thrown backwards in time he is a little older, but still in need of saving and she gets stuck back in time for longer periods of time. The problem becomes that in order to save him (and hence to save herself in the future) and in order to stay alive in a time when being a woman is problematic and being a black woman is untenable–she is forced to become in some ways complicit with the society that is perpetuating slavery.

Butler takes on the very touchy subject of what it meant to be a “house slave” versus a “field slave” and the hierarchy that existed even with the slaves, she doesn’t shy away from what it meant to be a slave and have to in many ways be complicit with the brutality that happened to other slaves in order to survive yourself. She doesn’t excuse these actions, but she holds them out for possible understanding of how you might find yourself struggling to survive at the cost of others dignity and even safety. Dana has a realization even about Rufus’ father:

His father wasn’t the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves. He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper. (134)

Even Dana finds herself having to make monstrous decisions, for example to talk a free black woman (her ancestor) who has been forced into slavery, beaten nearly to death into going quietly to submit to what is essentially a quiet rape–she struggles with the complications surrounding the act, that the woman could go quietly or she could be beaten again and raped in a brutal manner or run and be taken by dogs again and beaten and raped. Regardless, Dana gains something in being complicit with Rufus, her survival both immediate and in the future and possibly being reunited with her husband.

The power in Butler’s work is that she exposes the complications surrounding all the horrific situations that humanity both perpetuates and is subjected to and the incredible will to survive and the incredible ability to endure that some people are able to pull out of themselves.

 

Update, coming down the home stretch

Where I’m at: After reading Octavia Butler’s Kindred, I was interested in her as a writer I hadn’t heard of or read anything by her previously. So I thought, I’ll throw another of her books into the mix and read Fledgling. Curiosity piqued even more, I read Parable of the Sower and I find her female main characters to be fascinating in the way that they appear to be strong women but each hampered or made vulnerable in ways that impact their ability to function as strong, independent women and how they each work that out. This has become the theme I’ll focus my final paper on (proposal for that to come next week). Still, sitting down to map out the rest of the semester I found I had added two books in at the expense of time–so I decided to pull He, She, and It by Marge Piercy. My reasoning is that I have read it multiple times (it is one of my all time favorite books) while I have never read Nights at the Circus. Also, while there are certainly gender issues in the book, there are more human issues that gender issues and between it and Deerskin, I felt Deerskin fit into the arch of the reading list much better. By pulling that book I’ve essentially just added one extra and that is manageable.

What’s left: Reading responses for Kindred & Fledgling (coming tomorrow), a research paper proposal (coming next Tuesday), reading Nights at the Circus and Deerskin with reading responses for each (spaced out over the rest of the semester), and a final seminar paper.

 

Parable of the Sower

This book was very interesting for a number of reasons, there are the more obvious ones, the fact that it is an apocalypse style novel–the end of the world has come and now what–how do we remain human when the rest of the world goes insane. The author takes great pains to not make the world insane because aliens have landed, or bad magic has flooded the earth, or any great nuclear war–it is more the frightening end to global warming issues (though more subtly), growing class differences, drug issues, splintering families taken to their furthest end. In an interview at the back of the book Butler writes that she wanted to write an autobiography of a person who in their future after their death might be thought of as a god. A simple, ordinary person who steps outside of the stream and dares to reimagine another way–another way to be, another way to believe, another way to live. She chooses Lauren, the daughter of a preacher who starts her own religion, a religion that Butler said didn’t always have to be right–but had to be reasonable.
Lauren is born with a “defect” called hyperempathy that appears to happen to children of mothers who have drug issues. Lauren feels people’s pain, literally and just as if it is her own, as a child she would even bleed if another was bleeding, though that effect seems to wear off with age. This hyperempathy makes Lauren very vulnerable in a world where people are starving and being either beaten down or doing the beating down–how do you hit someone upside the head with a 2×4 when you end up knocked out yourself? What is interesting is that this doesn’t maker her completely non-violent, but forces her to be an excellent shot. If she is forced to shoot a gun, she needs to shoot very well and shoot to kill otherwise the person’s pain will cripple her. Still, her “defect” begs the question of the reader, how would we change our actions if we had to feel the physical/emotional rebound of every choice we made?
In terms of gender issues, Butler uses a woman and gives her the power to define god, to create a belief and a religion. Butler seems to lean towards female characters who are strong, but often crippled in some way, vulnerable in a way that hampers their innate strength of will. This particular character is vulnerable due to her age, her being of a weaker (physically) gender without a father or a husband, and hampered by her hyper-empathy. Despite this, or perhaps because of these things, she becomes a woman of action. She not only wants to survive, she actively pursues it before anyone else will take extra steps–she gathers knowledge, packs an emergency bag, accepts that at some point she will have to run so arms herself the best she can. She doesn’t passively believe but actively questions and then acts on the questions in forming a completely new belief system and then further acts on that by gathering a following and creating a community. In many ways, of the three Butler books I’ve finished reading, Lauren’s character most uses her vulnerabilities to galvanize her into action rather than passivity.

 

The Female Man–conclusion

It is difficult for me to sum up my experience in reading The Female Man by Joanna Russ because I think it would take a few readings to really get at the layers and nuances of the book. I cannot say that I enjoyed reading this book as I’m really not all that sure it is meant to be enjoyed. I think it is meant to be challenging, difficult, fragmented, confounding, powerful, even irritating all at once–and in this it succeeds. It is difficult to follow the almost stream of consciousness style, with four female characters all “I” moving in and out as main characters with sometimes little clues when switching from one to another.

1. Jeannine is a librarian in a version of the world that is stuck in the depression who thinks her only way into happiness is through a man and ultimately through marriage.
2. Joanna is a woman in the 1970s, probably considered pretty much the “present time” of when the novel was written. She is the typical early feminist female character and she uses the term “female man” to describe herself–hence the title of the book. She is an interesting character as she doesn’t seem so much to find a way of being a strong woman so much as she becomes a man in a woman’s body. In some ways I find her one of the sadder characters because she is fighting so hard to become something better than “just a woman” and she ends up being “just a man.”
3. Janet comes from earth in the future at a time when all men have been killed (either by a plague or wiped out by women, depending on whose story one believes) and lives in a quasi-utopian world–albeit with hard work. She seems the most comfortably confident, the least angry, the most alive in her own skin. Yet it isn’t that she has found a way to be a woman fully in a world with men–that comfortability of being female only comes with the complete absence of men. This, also, is sad in that the author does not seem to really envision a utopia, or rather, a future when women can be equals with men. Her vision of utopia seems to accept that the two genders cannot live together in peace.
4. Jael is a soldier and she lives in a world where men and women are at war and she brings all the characters together as different sides of the same coin. She is the most radical and militant and her whole aim is whole scale war on men in all the different dimensions.

In these four characters we have women defined as either complacent with being inferior in a man’s world, living as a man in a man’s world, living devoid of men entirely, or wiping men off the face of the planet. In a book thick with the issue of identity and how women come at or find some sort of identity outside of what men “allot” them, there really isn’t a fully developed or realized female character that finds her identity in and of herself that isn’t reactionary (and therefore still reflective of) the male gender. One wonders if the author simply couldn’t envision this as a possibility.

 

The Female Man

One of my favorite books for a long time was Dostoevsky’s The Idiot–it literally gave me a headache to read, but I thought it was fabulous. The Female Man by Joanna Russ is similar in the sense that it gives me a bit of a headache to read because there are 4 main characters as well as several “echo” characters who may or may not be in some relation to the 4 main characters and yet the entire book is written from the first person perspective of “I” with no indicators when one “I” is changing to another “I”. As I said in the previous introduction post, it also has somewhat of a feel of Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time but without the same cohesive plot. I have this vague feeling that I really like the book, and yet, I’m really not all that clear what is going on from section to section and keep waiting for it to pull together, like Milan Kundera’s string of snapshots that all pull together at some point and you sigh out loud and think, “aha!” So far, that has not happened. I think I should have planned to read the scholarship in the first week instead of the second and might have had some insight, so I look foward to doing some digging this week.

Despite this overwhelming sense of being quite lost, there are many striking things about the book. One of my favorite techniques the author uses is to have the narrator rolling on in a very casual, list taking, plain speaking format and then all of a sudden a burst of poetic prose slides under the radar and catches the reader off guard. This style starts right away on page 2 after just blandly going on about Jannine’s job, stamping books, climving ladders, overhearing conversations Jeannine whispers, “I don’t believe it,” and notes: “Mrs. Allison was a Negro.” After this completely random fact, without benefit of a paragraph change or shift in perspective:

It was an unusually warm, hazy day with a little green showing in the park: imaginary green, perhaps, as if the world had taken an odd turning and were bowling down Spring in a dim bye-street somewhere, clouds of imagination around the trees. (2)

Then instantly back to the library, the overheard conversation, and a reiteration that she didn’t believe the possiblity of war with Japan. It a was startling interuption to the pacing of the novel and Russ does this again and again.

Not surprising in a book about what it means to be female, whether without men or in conflict with men or in uneasy relationship with men, the theme of motherhood winds its way through the book through the various perspectives of the “I’s”. To the women of Whileaway (our world, thousands of years in the future after all men are wiped out by a plague and all inhabitents are female) motherhood is a five year vacation framed on either side by a great deal of hard work. To the women of the books “present” time, approximately early 1960s, finding a husband and becoming a mother is the all important goal and prize. The issue of motherhood, the book seems to suggest, is inexorably tied into the issue of the female self.

While it has been very jarring to read this style of book in conjunction with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, I found it telling that in a 1975 book dealing with feminist issues the major question that comes again and again seems to be, “What is it that you want…tell me what you want (122-123). Subsequently, in a book written in 1848 in which the narrator bursts into an argument for the desires and freedoms of women being just the same as men, she should ask the same exact question, “What do I want” (152)–and neither Jeannine and Jane feel they can truly get what they want and both modify the desire to match their reality more closely to a desire that has the possiblity of being met.

 

Moving on…

I’m leaving Orlando and moving on to Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, this is going to be interesting I can tell already from the first few chapters. It reminds me of Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. Susan Ayres, in her article “The ‘Straight Mind’ in Russ’s The Female Man,” describes it:

In The Female Man Joanna Russ contrasts our present-day heterosexual society with two revolutionary alternatives: a utopian world of women and a dystopian world of wome warring with men. The Female Man, both science fiction and utopian novel, operates as what Monique Wittig in The Straight Mind calls a literary “war machine” (SM 69). The goal of such a war machine is “to pulverize the old forms and formal concentions. It is always produced in hostile terriotory” (SM 69). Russ’s war machine confronts hostile territory–the heterosexual institutions that regulate gender–in tones that are variously hilarioius, fucious, and parodic. Her purpose in The Female Man is to trick the reader into recognizing the problem of “contrarieties”: “You cannot unite woman and human any more than you can unite matter and antimatter” (138, 151). (Ayres 22)

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Ayres, S. “The” Straight Mind” in Russ’s the Female Man.” SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES 22 (1995): 22-22. JSTOR. Web. 21 Jan. 2009.