Other types of manipulation are even more insidious. Nazareth discovers how kindness can function like manipulation when Jordan Shannontry begins to act as her backup in negotiations with the Jeelods. He pays her attention and compliments that culminate in presenting her with a yellow rose. When she tells him she loves him, however, he tells her father, and she becomes a victim of abuse and ridicule from both her father and her husband (193–97). The manipulation of religious feeling, as well as emotional feeling, is touted as another way to control women (130). As Nazareth remarks, “There was no end to the inventiveness of men when their goal was to prove their mastery” (176). The tactics used are multiple, and they are interesting not only for their variety, but for their very existence. By demonstrating the need to constantly reinforce mastery, Elgin demonstrates the instability of the dynamic, and it is this inherent instability that creates the possibility of change and thus of successful rebellion.
Indeed, Native Tongue begins with a preface that sounds a note of hope. Written in an even more distant future by a woman who holds the title of executive editor, the (fictional) preface explains that the novel is being published by a coalition of institutions, including the Historical Society of Earth, WOMANTALK, and the Láadan Group (6). This strategy of retrospective annotation implies that the experiment that was Láadan really did change the world, demonstrating the contingency of any system of oppression.
Elgin’s novel explores other familiar feminist issues, such as the inability of resources to keep up with modern global—and in this case, intergalactic—capitalism, the gendered structure of government, the malleable nature of power, the gendered relationality of labor, and the distinction between the artificial and the natural. But it is the book’s two main themes of constitutive language and linguistically enforced gender relations that reflect Suzette Haden Elgin’s primary contribution to feminist thought.
Native Tongue was originally published in 1984 by DAW Books, a respected science fiction imprint. Contemporary reviews were positive to mixed. While conservative journals faulted the book for what was seen as lack of characterization or social logic (Publishers Weekly) and boring didacticism used to rationalize her language experiment (Booklist), more progressive and feminist outlets praised the book for its significant themes. Fantasy Review noted that “Elgin is on strongest ground when she writes of male/female relations, the work of the linguists, and the feminists’ struggle to hide the development of their own language from the men. Though structurally flawed, her novel is well-written, its people are strong characters, and its themes are well worth considering” (Taormina). Carolyn Heilbrun, writing in the Women’s Review of Books, praised as “exciting” Elgin’s understanding “that until women find the words and syntax for what they need to say, they will never say it, nor will the world hear it.” The Voice Literary Supplement praised her for “hav[ing] insight into cultural survival, colonialism, pidginization as well as into anger other than her own” (Cohen). These reviews all appear to agree with Elgin that oppression and language can be linked, and that language can also be a tool of revolution.
Native Tongue is frequently compared to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, another feminist, dystopian science fiction novel. The novels have similar settings: near-future versions of the United States where women have been stripped of their rights and are under the legal and often physical control of men. But where The Handmaid’s Tale was praised for the spooky possibility of its imagined future, the scenario in Native Tongue has, according to Elgin herself, been dismissed as “improbable” and something that “could never happen in the United States” (“Women’s Language” 176). The Handmaid’s Tale was a bestseller and has been considered a classic since its 1986 publication, while Native Tongue went out of print in 1996 and maintained only a small, though enthusiastic, following among readers and scholars.
The context of the early 1980s, when Elgin was writing Native Tongue, is important in understanding both the social concerns that motivate the text and its intellectual position. Feminism in the late 1970s and early 1980s, especially academic feminism, was concerned with several sets of questions. Central among these was the question of whether gender is essential or constructed. If gender is essential, biological, and material, then the differences between men and women are set in nature. If gender is constructed, then it has nothing (or little) to do with our bodies and everything to do with social expectations and socialization. This debate had practical consequences, because an answer, even a contingent, personal answer, helped to point one towards an appropriate strategy of revolution. If gender is essential, then feminists should work for equal valuation of the inherent qualities of both men and women. If gender is constructed through socialization, then we should emphasize different relations and social practices that would challenge gender roles. This larger question carries other issues along with it. If gender isn’t essential, as most feminists seemed to conclude, then on what can we base collective action? Is separation an effective political strategy? How would—or should—sexuality change along with gender roles?
A second major concern of 1970s and 1980s feminism, as previously noted, lay with the power of language to structure and express, and thus make possible, different perceptions. Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray all advocated variations on the idea that language as we know it encodes masculinist perceptions and values, in effect rendering women silent. They advocated the adoption of a women’s language that is non-linear, sensual, and true to women’s experience in patriarchal culture. As noted, Elgin’s novel endorses the view of language as constructivist. In its very structure, Native Tongue highlights the power of language to construct reality. In its juxtaposition of various points of view, and its alternation between narrative and historical documents concerning the oppression of women in its various forms, the novel necessarily “engage[s] active reader involvement in the de/construction of textual meaning” (Rosinsky 107). By choosing such a structure, Elgin not only avoids burdening her narrative with history, but also enacts the very constitutive power of language she demonstrates.
Native Tongue must be viewed within the history not only of feminist thought but also of the science fiction genre. Science fiction is often traced back to Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein, Or, a Modern Prometheus. Read variously as a political tract, a philosophical critique of Romantic individualism, and a birth myth, this brilliant novel presents a solitary scientist who constructs a human being in his laboratory out of a mixture of human and animal parts. The experiment goes awry, and the monster—alien and unnamed—escapes only to wreak havoc on its human creator, other human beings, and itself. Shelley’s interrogation of the limits of humanity and the role of technology in human life forms the basis of much of science fiction today. Even our fascination with outer space and aliens reflects the genre’s special concern with questions of identity and technology. Despite its origins in the mind of a young woman, science fiction as it developed—from H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and C.S. Lewis in Europe to Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and more recently William Gibson in the United States—has been a genre dominated by white men as authors and readers. As science fiction gained popularity in the United States during the early part of the century through pulp novels and pulp magazines, the stories of exploration and high technology resonated with American expansionist ideals and the concomitant stress on technological innovation. Yet as far back as the teens in the United States, Charlotte Perkins Gilman articulated a strong feminist critique of such expansionist ideologies in Herland, while in Great Britain in the 1920s Charlotte Haldane grappled with the implications of eugenics and compulsory motherhood in her dystopian Man’s World. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that women made the strongest impact on science fiction, using it as an important medium to think through some of the claims and conflicts of feminism. Naomi Mitchison, Marge Piercy, Ursula LeGuin, and Joanna Russ all used the generic conventions of science fiction, often with modification, to examine
and interrogate the actual, and possible, gender relations of modern life. And it was only when men and women of color, like Samuel Delaney and Octavia Butler, began to play an increasingly important role in forging a resistant science fiction that the genre gave a far-reaching and serious critique to the racializing agenda of science.
In its exploration of the constitutive properties of language, Elgin’s novel harks back to Mary Shelley’s emphasis (in chapter 12 of Frankenstein) on the role of language in forming the creature’s sense of self and world. Like the women in Native Tongue, the monster must learn an alien language; like them, the ability to name opens up a whole world:
I found that these people possessed a method of communicating their experiences and feelings to one another by articulate sounds. . . . This was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to become acquainted with it. But I was baffled in every attempt I made for this purpose. Their pronunciation was quick, and the words they uttered, not having any apparent connection with visible objects, I was unable to discover any clue by which I could unravel the mystery of their reference. By great application, however . . . I discovered the names that were given to some of the most familiar objects of discourse. . . . I cannot describe the delight I felt when I learned the ideas appropriated to each of these sounds and was able to pronounce them. (Shelley 107)
If Elgin’s novel continues the tradition of Mary Shelley’s feminist analysis of the constructive aspects of language, it also evokes other recent works of science fiction: Neal Stephenson’s examination of the way language functions as a virus in his widely read and critically acclaimed Snowcrash, and Greg Bear’s exploration of DNA as a language technology for species adaptation to global change in Darwin’s Radio.
Thus this reprinting of Elgin’s novel marks a significant new moment in science fiction, for it signals a convergence of the genre’s three major strands: the original (though frequently unacknowledged) strand of feminist cultural critique running from Frankenstein through to Herland; the tradition of technoscientific experimentation of science fiction’s male-dominated high modernist period (from Wells through Clarke and Asimov); and the postmodern strand of science fiction linking an examination of social technologies (language, race, gender) with a new focus on biotechnological interventions. Finally, in her attention to aging and to interspecies communication, her invention of the Barren House and the Interface, Elgin draws attention to two contemporary issues which are increasingly the focus not only of science fiction but of fiction of all genres: the receding limits of human life and the vanishing boundaries between species. As contemporary biomedicine’s assault on the limits of the probable encodes as mundane what only months ago was coded as revolutionary, these issues increasingly function to break down the distinction between science and other forms of culture, between science fiction and other sorts of fiction.
Read as a work in this new, hybrid genre for which we do not yet have a name—this genre that does not differentiate science from other kinds of culture, but instead performs a detailed analysis of the networks between them—Native Tongue seems both powerfully prescient and strikingly dated (or, to put it more positively, of historical interest). The novel is prescient in its attention to the experiences of aging and menopausal women, who were given short shrift in feminist theory until the late 1990s. In its invention of Barren House, Native Tongue provides wonderful meditations on the different consciousness of aging, the pains and pleasures of growing—and being—old.4 Looking to the present and future, the novel also nudges us to realize that we are living and working through precisely the kind of linguistic shift, or re-encoding, that Suzette Haden Elgin explored in Native Tongue. The increased emphasis on nonsexist language and the integration of feminist challenges to simple or deterministic ideas of gender or biology have changed the workplace environment, helped to make space for nontraditional families, and catalyzed a civil rights movements for lesbians and gay men and for disabled persons. As the biomedical revolution reshapes the entire human lifespan, with interventions ranging from assisted reproduction to hormone replacement therapy, our language is also registering the cultural shift in our definitions of the human. Thus our lexicon now includes the terms biological mother, surrogate mother, genetic mother, and postmenopausal mother, in addition to the older terms adoptive mother, unwed mother, and natural mother. Along with assisted reproduction, fetal surgery, cloning, and interspecies organ transplantation are changing the human narrative so dramatically that what seemed like science fiction in 1984 now seems to us in the new millennium as increasingly unremarkable fact. Test tube fertilization and cloning, which Elgin depicts in the novel, seem now not wildly futuristic but, in other contexts, realities, as well as moral dilemmas. In addition, the novel’s portrait of intergalactic capitalism anticipates the actual trend in the 1990s—with the decline of Communism and the rise of multinational corporations and the Internet—toward global capitalism.
At the same time, the novel serves us well as historical record of the dystopian visions central to a particular stage of feminism, for the life of linguist women mirrors in its stringencies the harshest social critiques of second stage feminism: patriarchal domination, sex as an instrument of control, women subject to the whims of their male masters and categorized solely by their sexual and reproductive capacities. Yet Native Tongue reflects the partial vision of its era, too, particularly in its insistence on seeing men and women as unified groups necessarily opposed to one another in thought, action, and desire. Contemporary readers may well wish for another project that would encode a newer language, one that complicates the idea of a “native tongue” by challenging its basis in a fixed and gendered identity.
While Elgin’s novelistic vision of the future was dystopic, the strategies of language she and her characters employed provide new avenues of critique and change. Just as the novel both reveals language to be based on gendered assumptions and provides new ways to think about both language and reality, we can explore the ways language helps encode other power hierarchies, including those of race, class, sexual orientation, and even the human over other species. In doing so, we can employ new linguistic strategies to challenge these power structures and encode a reality more equitable for all.
Susan Squier
Julie Vedder
Pennsylvania State University
June 2000
NOTES
1. Elgin’s nonfictions series has grown quite extensive. In addition to the original Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, it includes The Last Word on the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense (1987), The Gentle Art of Written Self-Defense: Letters in Response to Triple-F Situations (1993), Genderspeak: Men, Women, and the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense (1993), and The Gentle Art of Communicating With Kids (1996), among others.
2. While linguists have, for the most part, discarded this theory in favor of the school of thought pioneered by Noam Chomsky—which contends that the capacity for language is wired into our brains by evolution, rather than developed as a result of our environment—the idea survives in many other disciplines. All the same, there is some confusion about the actual meaning of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The “strong” version, which Elgin claims no one has ever advocated, says that our language determines our perception of reality (Language Imperative 52). It is this version that is often discredited. The “weak” version, to which Elgin subscribes, also known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis, says only that our language structures and constrains our perception of reality. For a discussion of all these competing theories, see Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, especially pages 55–82.
3. Gödel’s theorem argues that within any fixed system, there are truths that exist, but are not provable within the system (Hofstadter 101). In other words, no system is complete, and in any attempt to include new things, the system necessarily changes. In the case of Native Tongue, the fixed system is a masculine, violent, hierarchical culture and language. Elgin’s experiment was to see what would ha
ppen if she tried to “prove” the truth of a women’s language. For a detailed discussion of Gödel’s theorem, see Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach.
4. This theme appears in Earthsong: Native Tongue III, which has as its central character a linguist woman who communicates with the spirit of one of the oldest old who has just died—a linguist woman who helped to create Láadan.
WORKS CITED
Bothamley, Jennifer. Dictionary of Theories. London, Detroit: Gale Research International, 1993.
Cohen, Debra Rae. Rev. of Native Tongue. Voice Literary Supplement October 1984: 18.
De Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Elgin, Suzette Haden. “A Feminist Is a What?” Women and Language 18.2 (1995): 46.
———. The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense. 1980. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1985.
———. “Laadan, the Constructed Language in Native Tongue.” Suzette Haden Elgin’s Website (www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/Laadan.html) Online. March 2000.
———. The Language Imperative. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 2000.
———. “Linguistics and Science Fiction.” Suzette Haden Elgin’s Website (www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/SHE_info.html) Online. March 2000.
———. “Washing Utopian Dishes; Scrubbing Utopian Floors.” Women and Language 17.1 (1994): 43–47.
———. “Women’s Language and Near Future Science Fiction: A Reply.” Women’s Studies 14 (1987): 175–181.
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