by Joanna Russ
The Female Man
Joanna Russ
Review
Four women living in parallel worlds, each with a different gender landscape. When they begin to travel to each other’s worlds each woman’s preconceptions on gender and what it means to be a woman are challenged.
Acclaimed as one of the essential works of science fiction and an influence on William Gibson, THE FEMALE MAN takes a look at gender roles in society and remains a work of great power.
About the Author
Nebula and Hugo Award winner Joanna Russ is the author of The Adventures of Alyx, Extra(Ordinary) People, and To Write Like a Woman, among many other books.
‘Her finest novel.’
Washington Post
‘An explosion of witty and savage writing.’
New Statesman
‘A writer of energetic clarity. The power of her writing is always complexly vivid… Ms Russ is a major writer.’
New York Times Book Review
Joanna Russ
THE FEMALE MAN
Science Fiction Masterworks Volume 83
This book is dedicated to Anne, to Mary and to the other one and three-quarters billions of us.
INTRODUCTION
SF writers have been fascinated by the ‘many worlds’ or ‘multiverse’ concept since it first emerged as a marginally respectable scientific idea—usually credited to a graduate student, Hugh Everett III, 1957. Parallel universes allow for time travel without offences against causality. Parallel universes allow SF writers to play dress-up, and still claim they are not writing fantasy. And that’s not all they can do:
Sometimes you bend down to tie your shoe, and then you either tie your shoe or you don’t. Every choice begets at least two worlds of possibility. It’s possible, too, that there is no such thing as one clear line or strand of probability, and that we live on a sort of twisted braid, blurring from one to the other without even knowing it, as long as we keep within the limits of a set of variations. Thus the paradox of time travel ceases to exist, for the Past one visits is never one’s own Past, but always somebody else’s; or rather, one’s visit to the Past instantly creates another Present (one in which the visit has already happened)…
Arguably, every trivial decision we make creates a different self, with a different present and a different past. But not all decisions are trivial. In The Female Man (1975) Joanna Russ—already adept at mixing a keen appreciation of genre with a sharp grasp of the social politics of her times—combines a ‘many worlds’ science fiction plot with the phenomenon known in radical politics as raised consciousness. When it dawns on you that some classes and races are exploited; or that prejudice and corruption are rife in your society, all your memories change colour. All your hopes for the future vanish and are replaced: it’s as if you’re a new person, in a strange yet familiar new world. Three women, one from the far future, two from variants of the USA in 1969, meet in what seems a freak accident, a brief fusion of the ‘braided possibilities’. Janet, from far-off Utopian Whileaway; Jeannine, from a 1969 where the Great Depression never ended (and economic growth never generated Women’s Liberation); and ‘Joanna’, who is Joanna Russ herself, are independent characters in the plot. They are also the same person, the modern Everywoman, USA, at different stages of her life. Partly this story is a dizzying SF mind game; partly it’s a timeless road-map of the feminist route to self-realization. Partly it’s a very funny book about sexual mores in the New York of the ‘swinging sixties’—and by no means all of the barbed humour is directed against the men.
Despite Jeannine’s trapped and lack-lustre femininity; despite Joanna’s outbursts of grief and rage, as she struggles to escape from domestic helplessness by ‘becoming a Man’—and then struggles to ‘become a Woman’, because she hates pretending to be one of the boys—it seems (for a while) as if nobody’s going to get hurt. Janet, the down-to-earth police officer from the future, energizes and nourishes both Jeannine and Joanna; though she’s by no means morally irreproachable. She gets into fights at parties (Whileawayans have a swashbuckling penchant for violence); she falls in love—to Jeannine’s utter horror—with a delicious teenage girl, the ‘cinnamon and apples’ sweetheart of small-town America. The Utopian strand that weaves through the narrative is magically evocative, often unsettling; and rich in ideas for a future desired by as many male as female SF readers: where high tech, instead of paving the planet, brilliantly supports a ‘Green’ and vibrant social economy.
Then the fourth variant makes herself known—the shadow-self, the dark side. Jael Reasoner is an assassin, from a future where the battle of the sexes has created two armed camps, each set on destroying the other, and devastating the planet in the attempt. Manland constructs its own women, from weakling men. Jael, to satisfy her old-fashioned sexual appetites, keeps a pretty, mindless pet. She is the one, she reveals, who brought them together: the fusion of the braids was no accident. She offers Joanna and Jeannine a choice, and brings Janet a horrifying revelation. How will the ‘Js’ respond? Can wonderful Janet choose not to exist? Which of the two ‘former’ selves, Jeannine, the original doormat, or Joanna the angry feminist, will refuse the path of violence?
Joanna Russ was the most controversial of the outstanding US female writers of the seventies, science fiction’s feminist decade. In her sharp and witty action-fantasy stories (collected in The Adventures of Alyx, 1976); in the arresting strangeness of And Chaos Died (1970); and in a trio of significant novels (The Female Man, 1975, We Who Are About To, 1977, The Two of Them, 1978), she proved the scope of her genre talent. But she was made painfully aware of her position as a dazzling, unacceptable outsider. Her work, increasingly, became an interrogation of science fiction, and a clinical study of the predicament of its female readers and writers. Yet in a genre where ‘fandom’ had made the barrier between writers and readers uniquely porous, long before the internet, it was Russ who spoke most clearly for a generation and a community of women (‘Feminist SF’ itself was, arguably, a fan invention)—escapologists, god-game builders, dreamers and daredevils—who believed they had as much right as the boys to play with SF’s toys, and to imagine their own, female, independent futures.
‘Whileaway’, the wild frontier Utopia at the centre of the The Female Man, made its first appearance in the Nebula award-winning short story ‘When It Changed’ (Again Dangerous Visions, ed Harlan Ellison, 1972). Russ described this high-tech, hardworking, under-populated society—on a colonized planet where only the women survived a long-ago plague, and where the arrival of male ‘rescuers’ is a catastrophe—as her response to Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. The hermaphrodites of Gethen intrigued the SF public, but a pregnant king did not address Russ’ hunger for a world where female human beings could be the measure of humanity. In the same afterword she noted that ‘the premise of the story needs either a book or silence’. In 1975, Whileaway returned: no longer a fragment of an impossible dream, but an ingeniously crafted, strictly even-handed, forensic examination of gender, Utopia and the divided self.
Gwyneth Jones
If Jack succeeds in forgetting something, this is of little use if Jill continues to remind him of it. He must induce her not to do so. The safest way would be not just to make her keep quiet about it, but to induce her to forget it also.
Jack may act upon Jill in many ways. He may make her feel guilty for keeping on “bringing it up.” He may invalidate her experience. This can be done more or less radically. He can indicate merely that it is unimportant or trivial, whereas it is important and significant to her. Going further, he can shift the modality of her experience from memory to imagination: “It’s all in your imagination.” Further still, he can invalidate the content: “It never happened that way.�
� Finally, he can invalidate not only the significance, modality, and content, but her very capacity to remember at all, and make her feel guilty for doing so into the bargain.
This is not unusual. People are doing such things to each other all the time. In order for such transpersonal invalidation to work, however, it is advisable to overlay it with a thick patina of mystification. For instance, by denying that this is what one is doing, and further invalidating any perception that it is being done by ascriptions such as “How can you think such a thing?” “You must be paranoid.” And so on.
R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience, Penguin Books, Ltd., London, 1967, pp. 31-32.
PART ONE
I
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 North Continent above the forty-eighth parallel, using only a rifle. I made a travois for the head and paws, then abandoned the head, and finally got home with one paw, proof enough (I thought). 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, that is S & P (Safety and Peace), a position I have held now for six years. My Stanford-Binet corrected score (in your terms) is 187, my wife’s 205 and my daughter’s 193. Yuki goes through the ceiling on the verbal test. I’ve supervised the digging of fire trails, delivered babies, fixed machinery, and milked more moo-cows than I wish I knew existed. But Yuki is crazy about ice-cream. 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.
II
Jeannine Dadier (DADE-yer) worked as a librarian in New York City three days a week for the W.P.A. She worked at the Tompkins Square Branch in the Young Adult section. She wondered sometimes if it was so lucky that Herr Shicklgruber had died in 1936 (the library had books about this). On the third Monday in March of 1969 she saw the first headlines about Janet Evason but paid no attention to them; she spent the day stamping Out books for the Young Adults and checking the lines around her eyes in her pocket mirror (I’m only twenty-nine!). Twice she had had to tuck her skirt above her knees and climb the ladder to the higher-up books; once she had to move the ladder over Mrs. Allison and the new gentleman assistant, who were standing below soberly discussing the possibility of war with Japan. There was an article in The Saturday Evening Post .
“I don’t believe it,” said Jeannine Nancy Dadier softly. Mrs. Allison was a Negro. 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.
“I don’t believe it,” repeated Jeannine Dadier, not knowing what they were talking about. “You’d better believe it!” said Mrs. Allison sharply. Jeannine balanced on one foot. (Nice girls don’t do that.) She climbed down the ladder with her books and put them on the reserve table. Mrs. Allison didn’t like W.P.A. girls. Jeannine saw the headlines again, on Mrs. Allison’s newspaper.
WOMAN APPEARS FROM NOWHERE ON BROADWAY, POLICEMAN VANISHES
“I don’t—” (I have my cat, I have my room, I have my hot plate and my window and the ailanthus tree).
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Cal outside in the street; he was walking bouncily and his hat was tipped forward; he was going to have some silly thing or other to say about being a reporter, little blond hatchet face and serious blue eyes; “I’ll make it some day, baby.” Jeannine slipped into the stacks, hiding behind Mrs. Allison’s P.M.-Post : Woman Appears from Nowhere on Broadway, Policeman Vanishes. She daydreamed about buying fruit at the free market, though her hands always sweat so when she bought things outside the government store and she couldn’t bargain. She would get cat food and feed Mr. Frosty the first thing she got to her room; he ate out of an old china saucer. Jeannine imagined Mr. Frosty rubbing against her legs, his tail waving. Mr. Frosty was marked black-and-white all over. With her eyes closed, Jeannine saw him jump up on the mantelpiece and walk among her things: her sea shells and miniatures. “No, no, no!” she said. The cat jumped off, knocking over one of her Japanese dolls. After dinner Jeannine took him out; then she washed the dishes and tried to mend some of her old clothing. She’d go over the ration books. When it got dark she’d turn on the radio for the evening program or she’d read, maybe call up from the drugstore and find out about the boarding house in New Jersey. She might call her brother. She would certainly plant the orange seeds and water them. She thought of Mr. Frosty stalking a bath-robe tail among the miniature orange trees; he’d look like a tiger. If she could get empty cans at the government store.
“Hey, baby?” It was a horrid shock. It was Cal.
“No,” said Jeannine hastily. “I haven’t got time.”
“Baby?” He was pulling her arm. Come for a cup of coffee. But she couldn’t. She had to learn Greek (the book was in the reserve desk). There was too much to do. He was frowning and pleading. She could feel the pillow under her back already, and Mr. Frosty stalking around them, looking at her with his strange blue eyes, walking widdershins around the lovers. He was part Siamese; Cal called him The Blotchy Skinny Cat. Cal always wanted to do experiments with him, dropping him from the back of a chair, putting things in his way, hiding from him. Mr. Frosty just spat at him now.
“Later,” said Jeannine desperately. Cal leaned over her and whispered into her ear; it made her want to cry. He rocked back and forth on his heels. Then he said, “I’ll wait.” He sat on Jeannine’s stack chair, picking up the newspaper, and added:
“The vanishing woman. That’s you.” She closed her eyes and daydreamed about Mr. Frosty curled up on the mantel, peacefully asleep, all felinity in one circle. Such a spoiled cat.
“Baby?” said Cal.
“Oh, all right,” said Jeannine hopelessly, “all right.”
I’ll watch the ailanthus tree.
III
Janet Evason appeared on Broadway at two o’clock in the afternoon in her underwear. She didn’t lose her head. Though the nerves try to keep going in the previous track, she went into evasive position the second after she arrived (good for her) with her fair, dirty hair flying and her khaki shorts and shirt stained with sweat. When a policeman tried to take her arm, she threatened him with le savate, but he vanished. She seemed to regard the crowds around her with a special horror. The policeman reappeared in the same spot an hour later with no memory of the interval, but Janet Evason had returned to her sleeping bag in the New Forest only a few moments after her arrival. A few words of Pan-Russian and she was gone. The last of them waked her bedmate in the New Forest.
“Go to sleep,” said the anonymous friend-for-the-night, a nose, a brow, and a coil of dark hair in the dappled moonlight.
“But who has been mucking about with my head!” said Janet Evason.
IV
When Janet Evason returned to the New Forest and the experimenters at the Pole Station were laughing their heads off (for it was not a dream) I sat in a cocktail party in mid-Manhattan. I had just changed into a man, me, Joanna. I mean
a female man, of course; my body and soul were exactly the same.
So there’s me also.
V
The first man to set foot on Whileaway appeared in a field of turnips on North Continent. He was wearing a blue suit like a hiker’s and a blue cap. The farm people had been notified. One, seeing the blip on the tractor’s infrared scan, came to get him; the man in blue saw a flying machine with no wings but a skirt of dust and air. The county’s repair shed for farm machinery was nearby that week, so the tractor-driver led him there; he was not saying anything intelligible. He saw a translucent dome, the surface undulating slightly. There was an exhaust fan set in one side. Within the dome was a wilderness of machines: dead, on their sides, some turned inside out, their guts spilling on to the grass. From an extended framework under the roof swung hands as big as three men. One of these picked up a car and dropped it. The sides of the car fell off. Littler hands sprang up from the grass.
“Hey, hey!” said the tractor-driver, knocking on a solid piece set into the wall. “It fell, it passed out!”
“Send it back,” said an operator, climbing out from under the induction helmet at the far end of the shed. Four others came and stood around the man in the blue suit.
“Is he of steady mind?” said one.
“We don’t know.”
“Is he ill?”
“Hypnotize him and send him back.”
The man in blue—if he had seen them—would have found them very odd: smooth-faced, smooth-skinned, too small and too plump, their coveralls heavy in the seat. They wore coveralls because you couldn’t always fix things with the mechanical hands; sometimes you had to use your own. One was old and had white hair; one was very young; one wore the long hair sometimes affected by the youth of Whileaway, “to while away the time.” Six pairs of steady curious eyes studied the man in the blue suit.