by Sherry Ginn
This all suggests that the influence of home is as authoritative as it is inevitable, and both are true. Our desire to leave home, then, reflects our desire to alter our relationship to this influence. This notion is at the heart of all great questing narratives, from the fourteenth-century British alliterative romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Peter Jackson’s film trilogy of The Lord of the Rings. Merten writes, “In literature and myth, home is the point of departure for heroes,” and he is correct in this (19). Psychologists argue that such action is the beginning of the process of individuation, that one must leave home in order to complete the identity work that has already begun there. This is not done, however, because identity requires mobility as part of its construction; rather, one must leave home because “home” is almost always lacking, in some capacity or another, a vital component of a singular identity construct. It is this lack that ultimately drives the social imperative to leave home, if only for a brief time.
Thus it seems that we leave home because home cannot fulfill us. Yet we almost always desire a return. At the end of their respective narratives, Gawain and the hobbits return home, to King Arthur’s court and to the Shire, respectively; this is not the end of their narrative, just as it is not the end of their lives or their identity formation, but it does mark the end of the quest. Thus the desire to leave home, to quest, is actually reflective of a desire to transform home or, perhaps, more accurately, to transform the self in relation to the homeplace. Reynolds writes that, traditionally, “homeplaces offer shelter and respite” (153). Merten agrees: “Home is ideally a place of security and privacy—a place where one can be ‘oneself,’ feel protected, and accepted” (20). Being “oneself” is key here, reflective of identity formation. One has to leave home to become oneself, or to find one’s self; and then, ideally, return to the safety of the homeplace in order to fully present the final construction of the self’s identity.
Linda McDowell tells us, “All identities are a fluid amalgam of memories of places and origins, constructed by and through fragments and nuances, journeys and rests, of movements between” (215). Connecting identity to place—to homeplaces as well as to movement through spaces—suggests the importance of place in the construction of the self. Yet the familiar notion of home as sanctuary is not a collective experience. As Mona Domosh and Joni Seager write, “Recent studies suggest that even the most taken-for-granted meaning of home as a sanctuary and place of privacy is far from universal” (34). Merten tell us that home is a “microcosm of the larger society,” and dominant society, like home, has its problems (20). Indeed, upon returning from their quests, altered by their journey, both Gawain and Frodo Baggins find their altered selves unable to reconnect to their homes, to their former selves, and even to their current identities. Gawain is disaffected by his quest; he views himself as a failure, even when no other, including the Green Knight, does so. The celebrations over his return appear mocking; his transformation has left him without a home anywhere in the world. The same is true for Frodo. Having experienced most fully the configurative identity of the ring, he can no longer inhabit the places that are—were—most familiar to him, bear to be around the people most knowable to him, and, most tellingly, inhabit the world as his self, the self he now views himself to be. Thus, as Domosh and Seager observe, “again we can see just how complex and multivalent are the meanings of home—as the site of privacy and freedom of expression, but also as a site of oppression” (34).
Like Gawain and Lord of the Rings, Farscape begins with a quest. Astronaut John Crichton is launching his one-man craft, Farscape 1, in order to substantiate his theory regarding starship acceleration and atmospheric friction. Perhaps more significantly, though, the experiment—if successful—will allow him to stop dwelling (with an emphasis here on “dwell”) within the shadow of his renowned father, also an astronaut, a concept that the premiere episode of Farscape demonstrates quite overtly:
JACK CRICHTON: Son, you got rattlers in your stomach?
CRICHTON: Ahh, I’ve been up on the shuttle before, Dad. Twice.
JACK: Didn’t matter how many times I went up. Every time—rattlers. First EVA, first time I walked on the moon...
CRICHTON: I’m not going EVA, Dad. I’m not walking on the moon. I’m just running a little experiment.
JACK: Yeah, an experiment to prove your own theory. Have you any idea how proud that makes me? That’s something I never did. I mean, the guys in the button down collars, they got to use their brains. The only thing I ever got to use was—
CRICHTON: [mocking, as if speaking for his father] Guts! And the seat of my flight suit.
JACK: Son, I can’t help being who I am—or was.
CRICHTON: It’s not who you are, Dad. I love who you are. It’s being son of who you are [“Premiere”].
Crichton’s conversation with his father runs the gamut of quest-growth emotions. Crichton feels condescended to by his father (“Son, you got rattlers in your stomach?”) and belittles himself in remonstrance in an attempt to disconnect himself, and his identity, from that of his father (“I’m not going EVA, Dad. I’m not walking on the moon. I’m just running a little experiment.”). Jack Crichton’s non-apology (“Son, I can’t help being who I am”) demonstrates a typical paternal reaction to a son’s demonstration of individuation, a manifestation that Crichton at first expresses forcefully (“Guts! And the seat of my flight suit”) and then reiterates more earnestly (“It’s not who you are, Dad. I love who you are. It’s being son of who you are”). Thus, in leaving home—indeed, in leaving Earth—John Crichton also wishes to leave behind his own previous self, the self he views as too interconnected with the father-self to ever fully achieve individuation and the full realization of the actual self. Like Gawain, he seeks to better himself, to “improve” what he views as his perceived lack of individuated identity-standing and formation, through glorious deeds and rites of honor. In escaping the Earth’s atmosphere, Crichton is really escaping “the familiar haven of the home. Familiarity is a characteristic of the past. The home provides an image of the past” (Tuan 128). Hoping to leave behind his past as well as his past self, Crichton blasts off, on a quest for truth, for honor, for glory—and for a new identity.
Crichton’s journey goes quickly wrong when he is drawn into a wormhole and into the waiting maw of Moya. The quest has changed—no longer does he seek glory or vindication; rather, he seeks a way home. When one is lost, seeking home is usually the best way to find it, even if the “home” one ultimately finds is not the place where the journey started, or the home the quester believes s/he is initially looking for, as Crichton and the entire ragtag crew of Moya soon learn. Quests often have an unnerving way of delivering their journeyers to the homes they are meant to inhabit, those that best fit their newly configured identities, whether they like it or not. Indeed, the shared quarters of Moya do more than simply unite the crew in individual quests for individual homes. Almost from the onset, place begins to shape the identities and lives of those who inhabit it, as Sherry Ginn notes: “Although Moya’s crew is bound together by their desire to escape the Peacekeepers and return home, they grow into a ‘family’ (for lack of a better word) over the course of the first season” (83). Lavigne agrees: “The characters on Moya begin as separate entities, but have evolved into a cohesive family unit by the end of the first season” (58). The domesticity of the disparate group is hardly a surprise; indeed, one of the most familiar cultural constructs of the home is that it is assembled upon familial bonds. Apartments, dormitories, barracks—these are where single people or collective units reside. Those bonds that connect home and hearth may vary from dwelling to dwelling and culture to culture, but the ties that bind us to our homes tend to be familial in nature.
If Moya is a family home, then what kind of home is she? She is, first and foremost, mobile. As Domosh and Seager note, “It is not easy to move through space. The ability of people to move around—to overcome the ‘friction of di
stance,’ as geographers say—varies wildly” (110). They add: “Getting from one place to another takes time, money, confidence, and often machinery of some kind—and it can also take sheer endurance and will” (110). Degrees of mobility are generally connected to socioeconomic status:
Mobility is greatest at the extreme ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. The mobility of the destitute is a hardship-induced rootlessness: the homeless, refugees, people on the margins of job markets, and people pushed into migration out of need or crisis are all clustered at this end of the mobility curve. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the highflyers (literally and metaphorically). In contemporary societies, increasing wealth is attended by increasing mobility, and, reciprocally, increasing mobility increases privilege [Domosh and Seager 110].
The refugees of Farscape are clearly not “highflyers,” at least not in the socioeconomic sense of the term. It is interesting to note that, for the most part, they all once were enfranchised members of their societies: Aeryn Sun was a Peacekeeper; John Crichton the son of fame and privilege; Zhaan a high-ranking priest; D’Argo a soldier in a warrior caste system; and Dominar Rygel XVI was, of course, a monarch, the very pinnacle of social and economic enfranchisement. It is likewise noteworthy that their disenfranchisement largely occurs before they land on Moya: Dominar Rygel was deposed, Zhaan was considered an anarchist by her people, Crichton rejects his paternal identity-construct, etc.1 Most telling, perhaps, is the notion that Aeryn Sun, from dwelling within space inhabited by “Others” for too long a period of time, has been declared “irreversibly contaminated” by her kith and kin; indeed, in many ways, all the inhabitants of Moya are likewise “contaminated,” their identities tainted by experience, by flight, and by their own desire to return to the transformed homeplace, wherever and whatever it may represent (“Premiere”).
Rootlessness, then, not only marks the crew of Moya but is also what unites them; without essential roots elsewhere, they put down roots in the first ideal locale that comes along: Moya. Homeplace, then, is as much a need as it is an instinct, as important as air and food for survival. Moya’s mobility is reflective of this transferable and impermanent sense of home. Tuan suggests, “Permanence is an important element in the idea of place,” but the experiences of the Farscape crew suggest otherwise (140). Indeed, by the second episode Crichton has already adapted the lexicon of the rest of his crew, a linguistic manifestation of his assimilation into his new home. Like the others, he quickly sets down roots into Moya’s biomechanoid flesh. Thus individual quiddities become one group of exiles, one group of refugees, one group of collected identities, traveling through space in the gullet of the being they now label home.
In addition to being mobile, Moya is also spacebound.2 Unlike the crew of an airship, which never wholly loses contact with earth, or the crew of a yacht, whose decks are wide open to the sun and air, or even the crew of a submarine, which must surface from time to time, the crew who utilizes a spaceship as a homeplace experiences total confinement and disconnectedness from actual terra firma. Vivian Sobchack writes, “The emotions generated by the narrative and the visual imagery in regard to being ... in a spaceship are those of confinement, of discomfort, of dependence” (112). This is further compounded by the fact that Moya is contested space. Lavigne observes, “Nor is Moya an entirely peaceable space: the home itself is often subject to violence and gun battles, invaded by alien forces, or, in one notable case, gutted and burned” (58). These battles may be intrafamilial amongst those dwelling within the homeplace, external threats to the family, or even instigated by Moya herself, as Battis notes: “Moya is not a passive being” (63). Contested space is a source of continual anxiety. The constant threat of exile, of being forced again into rootlessness, reflects a threat to both the practiced/ing and established identity. If identity is so connected to home—regardless of whatever gradation of identity one is experiencing—then threat of removal from the home likewise threatens identity. Examples of this disconnectiveness resound throughout society. Refugees forced from their lands may settle elsewhere, but they bewail the loss of the homeland; families threatened with foreclosure lament the stability of the familial unit without a homeplace to call their own; gay and lesbian children exorcised from their homes, individuals whose identities are already in flux, face terrible circumstances related not only to physical survival but psychic survival as well. By placing roots located in the nexus of a conflict zone—indeed, by being both the cause and locus of said contest—the crew of Moya, and Moya herself, have devolved the home into a constant state of anxious instability. Tickamyer writes, “The meaning of space becomes more problematic and more sharply etched in struggles for control of both physical and metaphysical space” (812). In the struggles on and over Moya, the desperate labor of the crew to preserve their roots reflects their desire to maintain both home- and self-identities. In this case, the greater the cause to fight, the harder the crew and Moya struggle to prevail. In this place of double anxiety—caused by outer space and endless conflict—the need and desire to put down roots becomes even stronger, as the need for a semblance of stability to overcome the disquiet of their circumstances continues to intensify.
Moya—who gives birth during the first season of the show—is also maternal space. Indeed, the connectedness between maternal space and outer space—both realms unfathomable to man—has long been noted by critics. Sobchack notes that beings who dwell within spaceships “emerge from repressed representation of human biology and its process ... the infantile intimations of original being and not-being” (112). Battis puts it more plainly when he notes, “Being on board a starship, then, is very much like being in utero, entirely dependent upon a life support system beyond your control, vulnerable to invasion and intervention from all manner of sources. This human anxiety often gets projected onto alien pregnancies, especially those involving human/alien miscegenation” (44). He continues: “Alien pregnancy is a common trope ... within [science fiction], and it generally does not end well. In some way, the very conditions of confinement within a starship, of being surrounded on all sides by terrifying black space, resemble amniotic preconsciousness and the fetal ‘experience’” (44). Both Sobchack and Battis perceive the inhabitants of spacecraft—those who call outer spaces homeplaces—as helpless as fetal children. This suggests that, even without the threat of violent contest, such homeplaces are a nexus of anxiety. Furthermore, in placing the cynosure of experience with the crew and the developing child, Sobchack and Battis emphasize the result of the pregnant act, the offspring, over the mother—emphasizing, indeed, those who inhabit the space versus the space in which they reside.
This is not surprising; in case of house fire or some other form of calamity, the first question asked is usually “Is anyone hurt?” Once the safety of the inhabitants has been ascertained, then, and only then, do concerns turn to material property. Yet, with regards to a pregnant female, this typified reaction converts the mother’s body into another form of property; rather than being noted as one singular individual identity, the pregnant form is often converted into a holder of identities rather than recognized for the personage that she/it is. Henri Lefebvre, noting the connectivity between the human body and the potentially larger material continuum, writes, “A body so conceived, as produced and as the production of space, is immediately subject to the determinants of that space ... the spatial body’s material character derives from space” (195). Thus altering the space of the body—as pregnancy will do in a woman, with her swelling belly and other physical transformations—changes the manner in which the body, and the possessor of said body, is viewed by the larger, dominant culture. Jessica Benjamin argues that women’s bodies “both form a boundary and open up into endless possibility” (94). Pregnant bodies make those boundaries and possibilities even clearer; the possibility is represented by the developing fetus within the mother, whereas the boundaries are set by the physical and societal restrictions placed upon pregnant women by dominant, u
sually patriarchal, culture. Anne Elvey, talking about Simone de Beauvoir, writes, “In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir describes the pregnant body as a site of play between enrichment and injury; immanence and transcendence; creativity and passivity” (202). Pregnancy, then, reflects a series of contradictory forces reflective of the “drama that is acted out within the woman herself” (de Beauvoir 520, italics mine). The emphasis here on within, on place, on the site of the “play” and not on the actors inherent to the drama, suggests the significance of spatial dynamics in understanding the body’s relationship to the larger world around it. Kirsten Simonsen writes, “each living body both is space and has its space” (4, italics original). Thus each body not only takes up space, but also belongs to certain places. In the case of a fetus, the developing body inhabits another body—a relationship largely parasitic in this regard—and, in turn, increases the spatial dynamics of the first body. It is body affecting body, space affecting space. Elvey suggests that the pregnant body “exemplifies a mode of being that is characterised by an ever-changing embodied relationship between self and other... The unknowable other is interconnected with the self” (206, italics original). This disputation of space onto space thus alters both spatial and self-constructed identity; or, to put it more plainly, the alteration of the physical form—and the space it inhabits—alters the identity of the individual as well.
The construct of Moya as mother has been richly explored by Battis, Lavigne, and other critics of Farscape. Lavigne, though, has expressed surprise at the familial dynamic at play on the ship: “If Moya is the mother, Pilot is the father, and both are completely subject to the whims of their children” (59). The regular construct of the family is topsy-turvy; parents are subjugated to children, whose actions determine the outcomes and courses of action to take. Still, this is perhaps less surprising than it may first seem. Tuan writes, “To the young child the parent is his primary ‘place.’ The caring adult is for him a source of nurture and a haven of stability. The adult is also the guarantor of meaning to the child, for whom the world can often seem baffling” (138). Tuan is suggesting that parents are the first space a child inhabits, even beyond the womb, because parents are the first to lay building blocks in the identity-construct of a child. A child who shyly hides behind his father’s legs or instinctively clasps his mother’s hand is not seeking connection or even the protection a parent provides; rather, he seeks the security and safety that homeplace provides. For a small child, the parent is the same as the home; without a more developed sense of spatial dynamics, the child connotes safety with those who provide it as much as where it is provided. Thus a child hiding behind a parent’s legs is the equivalent of a lion cub crouching low in tall grass, or a polar bear cub lying still against a field of white snow. Safety is a construct we first associate with space, even if that space is represented by the body of another being. The fetus finds refuge in the mother’s womb; yet so, too, do small children find refuge in a return to the metaphorical womb of parental space. It will only be later, once the child has recognized the home and, usually more specifically, the child’s particular places within the homeplace (bedroom, tree house, etc.), that the connotation of space and safety will shift from the physical form of the parent to the actual manifestation of homeplace itself.