I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass27
The “instruments / that once held to a course”: in some of Rich’s poems from earlier volumes, notably “A Marriage in the ’Sixties” and “Like This Together,” she had celebrated her husband as a “Dear fellow-particle” with whom she was twinned.28 Now what had been has been hopelessly lost, not only the self that “he” was but the self that “she” had. Thus, in the last stanza of “Diving into the Wreck” the explorer who ventured into the oceanic depths of the past must be not only spiritually and sexually but even grammatically revised and reborn, as s/he confronts the endless factuality of the wreck. Strikingly, a confusion of pronouns at the poem’s conclusion suggests an infusion of the barely speakable new into the old, as the reader, too, is drawn into the action: “We are, I am, you are . . . the one who find our way / back to this scene / carrying . . . a book of myths / in which / our names do not appear” (italics ours).29 Standard English grammar does not suffice for the articulation of this thought: Rich drowns it as she struggles to find new ways of saying and new ways of being so original that “the book of myths” has never before recorded the existence of such a utopian being.
“We are the one.” We are one. Only one. What is left of the couple is the one who survives, carrying within her not just the story of ruin but a hope of rebirth. Diving into the Wreck does not conclude with Rich’s turn toward a new kind of love. Her relocation of herself on what she was to call “the lesbian continuum” happened slowly, once she had begun to define heterosexuality as not just a pervasive but a “compulsory” institution. But the book closes with a few poems that celebrate her progress into the personal, poetical, and political change for which she had longed. Most notably, the wistful poetic epistle to her dead husband, “From a Survivor,” offers a clear-eyed look at the broken marriage (“The pact that we made was the ordinary pact / of men & women in those days”), mourns his willful suicide (“you are wastefully dead”), and describes the arc of change that was to define the decade whose spokeswoman she became. The “leap / we talked / too late of making”—divorce? personal reinvention?—is what “I live now / not as a leap / but a succession of brief, amazing movements // each one making possible the next.”30
Those amazing movements included the composition of a number of groundbreaking essays, a book-length research project into the “experience and institution” of motherhood, and the intensely erotic “Twenty-One Love Poems,” which reimagine the traditional sonnet sequence as a female-authored paean to lesbian love. Rich’s prose works in this period included incisive analyses of Jane Eyre and of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, but the most influential of them were “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” and “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.”
In “When We Dead Awaken,” she extolled the consciousness-raising that marked the decade (“The sleepwalkers are coming awake, and for the first time this awakening has a collective reality”), then affirmed that “Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.”31 These sentences summarized the feminist rethinking of literary culture that was to become a vital mode of critical thinking; “When We Dead Awaken” is a founding text of women’s studies as well as of feminist criticism. Equally central, the essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality” critiqued the cultural “ideology which demands heterosexuality” (italics hers) as she sought to excavate the reality of a “lesbian continuum” in which “women’s choice of women as passionate comrades, life partners, co-workers, lovers, community” would be a social and erotic possibility.32
In her own poetic oeuvre, the arguments of these prose works inform “Twenty-One Love Poems,” the sequence at the heart of The Dream of a Common Language (1978). These thirteen- to twenty-line poems aren’t really sonnets, but on the page they look very much like sonnets, and like traditional, male-authored sequences they trace the arc of a love affair—in this case, between two women: as Holladay tells us, Rich and her psychiatrist Lilly Engler (who had also been Susan Sontag’s lover). According to Rich’s friend Robin Morgan, Engler was hardly a wild erotic goddess. On the contrary, she was “a classic sort of middle-European, slightly older than middle-aged, zaftig, sweet-looking, dumpy woman.”33 But in Rich’s bold sequence, she becomes an idealized female other with the aura of a Venus.
Like many of Rich’s poems in this period, these quasi-sonnets are set in New York City, with its tenements, playgrounds, and elevators, where, as the speaker says,
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,
dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,
our animal passion rooted in the city.34
And, like most of Rich’s work in this era, the poems are as politically committed as they are emotionally energized. Loving each other, the two women still have to “stare into the absence / of men who would not, women who could not, speak / to our life.” Yet despite the sense that she and her lover have to confront a cultural “absence,” Rich’s testimonial sonnets are infused with an almost exalted desire: “I want to travel with you to every sacred mountain. . . . I want to reach for your hand as we scale the path, / to feel your arteries glowing in my clasp,” she declares in poem XI; and in the next poem she affirms that “in any chronicle of the world we share / it could be written with new meaning / we were two lovers of one gender / we were two women of one generation.”35
One generation. Placed as it is at the end of a central poem, the word “generation” takes on special force, implying not just a station in time but a renewal, rebirth, regeneration. And the explicitly erotic unnumbered poem titled “The Floating Poem,” meant to be read at any point in the sequence, dramatizes the generative sexual awakening that drives the poet toward metamorphosis. “Whatever happens with us, your body / will haunt mine,” she promises as she praises her beloved in a series of blazons—using the technique that (male) Renaissance writers deployed to list the beauties of a woman’s body: “your traveled, generous thighs,” “the live, insatiate dance of your nipples,” “your strong tongue and slender fingers.” Now she includes a reversal that equally celebrates the body of the speaker/lover, “reaching where I had been waiting years for you / in my rose-wet cave”36 (italics ours)—not only the moist vagina of the desirous speaker but also the originary female home where the poet had been waiting through decades of “compulsory heterosexuality” for a moment when the lesbian within her could “[begin] to stretch her limbs.”37
“Twenty-One Love Poems” concludes with an affirmation of choice in which, again, the poet transports herself back into the past, where she models for her readers the will to change. Imagining herself among the “blue and foreign stones / of the great round rippled by stone implements” that is and is not the archaic site of Stonehenge, she argues that this isn’t just Stonehenge:
. . . but the mind
casting back to where her solitude,
shared, could be chosen without loneliness,
not easily nor without pains to stake out
the circle, the heavy shadows, the great light.
I choose to be a figure in that light,
half-blotted by darkness, something moving
across that space, the color of stone
greeting the moon, yet more than stone:
a woman. I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle.38
Whereas “Diving into the Wreck” concluded with a confusion of pronouns, “Twenty-One Love Poems” ends with a powerful gesture of self-definition: the speaker names herself as a woman by choice, and a w
oman who has chosen to walk in a certain place, and to situate herself in the center of a circle at the beginning of time. By now she has moved far away from the streets of Manhattan where she trysted with her lover. Now, in the solitude of a self-made self she has become a strange new creature—a woman almost as hard to imagine as a figure from science fiction or fantasy.
DYSTOPIAS AND UTOPIAS
Like Rich’s speculative poetry, much of the female-authored science fiction of the decade similarly set dystopias against utopias. The writers of these texts were working in a tradition that had significant antecedents in feminist thought. For, as we studied our own literary history, we discovered lost texts that brood on these twin themes of dystopia and utopia. Some of us in the seventies began exploring the works of the turn-of-the-century feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. We began to teach her story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), a first-person narrative that delineated a dystopian world in which a young mother is separated from her child and imprisoned in an attic room where she can neither read nor write and goes mad attempting to decipher menacing figures in the yellow (ancient? musty?) wallpaper. The text’s utopian twin, which we also now began to study, was Gilman’s novel Herland (1915), an account of an egalitarian, all-female society into which three male explorers have stumbled.39
Both these works prefigured the speculative fiction to which many feminists turned in the sixties and increasingly in the seventies. If the great awakening of the decade could be understood as a heightened consciousness that the system of gender in which we had all been living was not the way things had to be but was a kind of dystopia, by contrast the revised and revisionary system for which feminism labored was a utopia. And in the writings of Rich’s contemporaries who turned to fantasy and science fiction, a revulsion against patriarchal dystopia is as crucial as an aspiration for a feminist—perhaps matriarchal—utopia. Unlike “realist” novelists, feminist sci-fi writers dramatize both the oppressions and the aspirations of women by setting them on fantastic planets or in grimly dystopic geographies.
Three major authors of works in these genres—Alice Bradley Sheldon, Joanna Russ, and Ursula K. Le Guin—became textual and political companions. Though all three were compelling writers, Alice Sheldon was the most fascinating of these figures. Throughout the seventies, she wrote as James Tiptree, Jr., and was thought for nearly a decade to be a male author and was critiqued as such. Le Guin, Russ, and everyone else in the lively, disputatious science fiction community knew Tiptree’s work, but most feminist readers didn’t, probably because of the cover of “Tiptree’s” male pseudonym. Yet Sheldon/Tiptree set dystopias against utopias in a series of short stories with significant feminist implications. And perhaps because of her (literary) male impersonation, her feminist writing was received with special applause.
ALICE SHELDON/JAMES TIPTREE, JR.
The “real” Alice B. Sheldon was the beautiful wife of a CIA official. Born in Chicago in 1915, she had been a wealthy debutante with lesbian longings, but later became a successful graphic artist, married and divorced a wealthy playboy, joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps during the war, married her second husband in Paris, and then joined the CIA when he did. She earned a Ph.D. in psychology in 1967, around the time she began writing science fiction. Seeking a pseudonym, she turned toward a jar of British marmalade in her local supermarket and exclaimed “James Tiptree,” to which her husband jokingly appended “Junior.” 40 But—no joke—Tiptree was to become her other self, and “he” was to bring her extraordinary success. As a “man,” did she seem to some to be a “better” feminist—a male feminist?
Certainly, the cleverly constructed “masculine” voice in which she told her tales liberated her from the constraints of a conventional “femininity” even while it enabled her to dissect the conventions of “masculinity” from the position of someone who might belong to a sort of third sex. For when she was just establishing herself as Tiptree, Sheldon proposed to her literary agent that she should write a book titled “The Human Male.” As her biographer, Julie Phillips, notes, “by talking about men from a woman’s point of view, [the book] would illustrate women’s way of looking at the world” while remedying the problem that “everything we know about the human male comes from his own mouth and is suspect.” 41 Arguably, though Sheldon managed to outline only a few chapters (“Getting It There: The Central Drama of the Male,” “Beyond Sex: Dominance, Territory, Bonding and All That,” “Things That Go Wrong with Men”), much of Tiptree’s fiction is an investigation of the questions she had planned to address in “The Human Male.”
Whether you read her shrewd “The Women Men Don’t See” as male- or female-authored, it is delightfully subversive. Set in the Yucatán, the Hemingwayesque story begins with the crash of a small plane onto a tropical sandbar. The plane’s occupants seem ordinary enough: Don Seldon, the narrator, a “gray used-up Yank dressed for serious fishing”; the Mayan Captain Estéban; and two unprepossessing women, a mother and daughter, who claim to be headed for someplace in Guatemala. At daybreak, Don and the older woman, whose first name is Ruth, go off into the swamp in search of drinking water, leaving Ruth’s daughter, Althea, to mind the wreck with the wounded Estéban. Like their luggage, the Parsons pair are “small, plain and neutral-colored,” an easy-to-overlook “double female blur.” 42 As Don and Ruth trudge through watery wilderness, Don learns that the two work for the government in Washington, DC. Just as he had supposed, he decides, both are merely cogs in the wheels of bureaucracy.
Yet after a day or so, Ruth spots a Mayan ruin and seems to be waiting for something—which turns out to be an alien spacecraft, sweeping flashes of light across the swamp. And when Don tries, “heroically,” to protect her, she makes it clear that she doesn’t at all want his protection but instead plans to escape with the aliens, together with her daughter, who may have been impregnated by the handsome Mayan Estéban.
The speech in which Ruth explains herself to Don is a classic feminist polemic, as well as a cynical prediction that the ERA would be doomed to failure.
Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like . . . smoke. . . . And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You’ll see. . . . What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine. . . . Think of us as opossums, Don. Did you know there are opossums living all over? Even in New York City.43
The final scene, in which Ruth persuades the aliens to take her and her daughter away with them (“Please take us. We don’t mind what your planet is like; we’ll learn—we’ll do anything!”) is a kind of comic cosmic imbroglio. The cartoon aliens, all white tentacles and blank faces, define themselves as “Ss-stu-dens . . . S-stu-ding . . . not—huh-arming,” while Don tries to persuade Estéban to help him keep the women from going. But in the end, he has to confront the extraordinary facts: “Two human women, one of them possibly pregnant, have departed for, I guess, the stars; and the fabric of society will never show a ripple.” 44 For all its charm, “The Women Men Don’t See” is a dark parable: from the perspective of women who live like opossums in the chinks of a patriarchal “world-machine,” anywhere in the interstellar reaches would be preferable to this dystopian human planet.
With the exception of tentacled aliens, the world-machine from which the Parsons women escape is very much a realm of now. But two of Tiptree’s most disturbing dystopias, “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” and “The Screwfly Solution,” are set in terrestrial futures, where they illuminate strikingly different gender disorders.
The first, “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” recounts the pathetic tale of one Philadelphia Burke (mostly referred to as P. Burke), a girl of 17 who suffers from the deformations of pituitary disease in a society that worships beautiful “gods” and “godlings.” 45 After P. Burke tries to kill herself, she is arrested and tur
ned into a “waldo”—in sci-fi terms, a remote manipulator of, in her case, an adorable godling named “Delphi,” who becomes the glamorous other self for which miserable Philadelphia has always yearned. Elfin, brainless Delphi becomes famous, but trouble comes when the privileged son of one of the masters of this particularly cynical world-machine falls in love with her, assuming that she too is real. The awful misunderstanding climaxes when Delphi’s lover tracks down P. Burke and tries to disentangle his girlfriend from her waldo. Inevitably, the horrid hulk flops down dead at his feet, and little Delphi expires too.
Here Tiptree took on the imperatives of what feminists used to call “looks-ism,” delineating the nightmare of P. Burke’s life by contrasting it with Delphi’s career. At the same time, the thinking portion of Delphi is ugly P. Burke, in her electronic/neurological cabinet, while the seductive aspect of P. Burke is Delphi, made-to-measure by computer geniuses into a futuristic Galatea.
It’s impossible to read this story—for which Tiptree won a Hugo Award—without feeling for the pathos of P. Burke and, too, for the mindless passivity of her “other” self. The text illuminates the power of the beauty myth even while deconstructing the experience of the supposedly “beautiful” heroine. In a sense, then, it meditates eerily on the mind-body problem from a feminist perspective. If the ugly but electronically potent P. Burke is lovely Delphi’s “mind” so that only together do they constitute one perfect “woman,” does this imply that a woman’s mind is necessarily ugly though desirous? And does it also suggest that, like Delphi, a beautiful girl is nothing more than “a warm little bundle of vegetative functions”?46
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