Well, howdy! Do I ever have a link for you! It is entitled “The Fantasy of Girl World: Lady Nerds and Utopias,” and it will lead you to an essay by me, about just such a topic!
There is one line in the end of it which reads, “and it’s easy to point out the flaws of the books themselves, political or otherwise.” Which is true! And yet, simply stating it thus does not allow me to engage in my favorite hobby, which is complaining about flaws. So, I have for you a series of footnotes, which will hopefully increase your appreciation of the piece itself, and also allow us all to complain at length in comment sections. (Well: this comment section, please; other comment sections should contain comments reading “wow! Sady’s neat! She saved my kitten from a tree once, and then she knitted me a scarf so attractive I instantly found several very attractive potential sex partners!”) It goes like this:
1. I have serious problems with both Andrea Dworkin and Mary Daly. Such serious problems, in fact, that they have their own pages on this site.
2. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was racist. I know, right? Who would have thought it from a white woman in 1915???? It’s subtle in Herland, but it’s there — it’s specified that all the ladies are white and that they’re very creepily proud of their “race,” but all-white alien lands and planets are not uncommon in the early 20th century imagination, and the white American guys are also referred to as being a different “race” and an “alien race,” so it’s easy to miss. It’s far more tempting to get caught up in the other shocking stuff, such as the fact that the one crime the Herland women are genuinely disgusted by is abortion, and the fact that the women who enjoyed and wanted sex were prevented from breeding. The rest of it seems very much like the racism you’d get in other books of that time period. But in later books, which I haven’t read in full and so can’t give detailed comment on, shit apparently gets REAL(ly racist). Ellador, the ambassador from Herland, discovers that not everyone in the entire world is white, and she apparently gives a lecture on why racism against black people is wrong but also worries about racial purity, aloud, thus starting the proud white lady feminist tradition of complaining about (a) racism and (b) the existence of other races. Feminist scholars have actually had to point this stuff out in response to people embracing the book as a socialist-feminist-separatist political vision. They’ve also pointed out that these were contemporary, mainstream, even liberal views at the time of publication. One of the notable things about these books is that feminist visions of utopia tend to mirror the problems with feminism. In the first wave, one of the most major problems with feminism was that it was For White Ladies.
3. Marion Zimmer Bradley is the most complicated person I’ve ever written two paragraphs about. The Mists of Avalon, as I pointed out, represents Christianity as a violent, colonizing, misogynist, jerkass-inhabited religion of No Good, whilst saying things about religious tolerance. It’s influenced by Merlin Stone’s When God Was a Woman, and Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance (which was in turn influenced by Zsusanna Budapest, who formed the separatist Dianic tradition of Wicca and was Starhawk’s teacher) so these views can perhaps be attributed to those sources as much as anything else. Bradley nevertheless became a traditional Christian later in life, when she started going to an Episcopal church, with much pagan involvement in the middle of her life and around the time of Avalon’s publication, when she was forming a center for nontraditional religion and “rejecting” Christian beliefs. Also: Marion Zimmer Bradley wrote not one, but several books re-interpreting myths to focus on principal female characters, about “free Amazons” roving the countryside, and about the main characters pausing every so often to declaim that beating and raping and not respecting woman power is wrong. She also ran an anthology which especially courted female writers and was considered one of the best ways for feminist sci-fi to get out there. She characterized one of her plots as “strong woman overcomes an anti-feminist culture,” which was actually A LOT of her plots, said that The Mists of Avalon was written specifically in response to “anti-feminist” elements within the church and culture, published articles with titles like “A Feminist Creation Myth,” and then, when feminists criticized her, said she wasn’t feminist. She was also one of the people who invented nerds dressing up like knights and shit. No. Really.
4. And then there’s the issue of her husband. Depositions from the case against her are posted online, by a family member of a victim — they name victims, which is why I’m not linking to them here — and honestly, in my opinion which reflects in no way on anyone else’s, HOLY HELL. You can look them up. Go ahead. I will be back to hold you while you cry later.
5. One of the things that’s really important in this life, and in any form of political engagement, is to be aware that no-one is actually “one of ours.” Which is to say: The instinct you have to protect someone who seems to side with you, and to gloss over their crimes, is a bad one. Just because someone agrees with you on Wednesday, that doesn’t mean that they’re not going to say something abhorrent on Thursday or that they didn’t do something terrible on Monday that you just don’t know about yet. I actually find it really fascinating that the women who wrote these hugely influential Utopian or lady-powered fictions were in fact so super-duper-ultra-flawed; it says something, about how powerful your unease in this world has to be in order for you to want to create your own world, and about how assuming that you have the ability to define “perfection” or “the ideal” almost certainly means that you’re far from perfect or ideal, or at the very least will make your distance from it that much clearer. For someone like me, who apparently gets a lot out of pointing at Feminisms Of Generations Past and yelling “a-HA,” looking at Utopias is a good way to do it. Then again, just pointing out the obvious weirdnesses has taken almost as many words as were in the piece itself! So, you know. There is that.
14 Comments
i’m swooning over this and its parent thread on the awl. and it goes perfectly with the piece garland did with the rejectionist on female characters.
You should really check out some of Mary Renault’s novels, especially The King Must Die and The Bull From the Sea, based on the Theseus myths. It’s not a feminist utopia, but sort of the end of one: Renault (like Bradley?) followed some archaeological theories, respected at the time but crackpot in retrospect, about a prehistoric, Crete-centered, female dominated culture which was replaced by patriarchy; Theseus is basically a major early patriarch, smashing female-dominated, goddess-worshiping societies in favor of male, “rational,” rule.
And Renault is definitely a problematic figure like the ones you describe. She was incredibly progressive in her views on homosexuality — she was an open lesbian when that was a very unpopular thing to be, and her novels are full of sympathetically described gay (usually male) relationships. But there’s a weird bit of anti-woman sentiment in her work (some of which, to be sure, can be written off as just the perspective of her ancient male narrators and main characters) — and, less excusably, she was apparently a very late defender of South African apartheid. So, a major case of your rule #5.
Hmm. I had heard about Renault’s support for apartheid from someone knowledgeable, but Wikipedia says she protested against it. So take that with a grain or two of salt.
Cool! I read this right after reading about Christine de Pizan, who in the 1300s wrote “City of Women,” which could be sort of a utopia too. But since she used the stories of real actual women and the whole thing related back to misogyny in specific literature I guess it didn’t serve the same escapist purpose. I’ve never read it, though (I can’t stand epic poetry).
I really enjoyed both these essays.
Great essays, Sady.
I actually find it really fascinating that the women who wrote these hugely influential Utopian or lady-powered fictions were in fact so super-duper-ultra-flawed; it says something, about how powerful your unease in this world has to be in order for you to want to create your own world, and about how assuming that you have the ability to define “perfection” or “the ideal” almost certainly means that you’re far from perfect or ideal, or at the very least will make your distance from it that much clearer.
I fucking love this especially. I think you could extend that line of thinking to slipstream and magical realism too. I think* that a powerful unease with the world compels a lot of writers, including those who write in more realist styles. One may want to create and escape (sci-fi, fantasy, magical realism, etc), while another may want to investigate and expose (realism, dirty realism, modernism, etc).
*of course I don’t know, but I do write fiction that’s usually of the dirty realist variety. That unease you mention is some part of what compels me.
Joana Russ, James Tiptree, where are they? I’d like to hear your take on modern separatist utopias that are well written and stuff.
My first thought is: Dude, I want one of those scarves.
In the realm of dudes writing separatist women Utopias, see Tennyson’s poem “The Princess“, which is sort of proto-feminist. (It ends with the women giving up their utopia so they can pair off with men, of course.)
The story was reworked into the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta “Princess Ida”, and made considerably less feminist along the way.
Hopefully the fact that it’s male-authored doesn’t make it off topic, but I think it’s interesting as a slightly earlier example of a female utopia than the ones you discussed.
What about Woman on the Edge of Time? Can I still have Woman on the Edge of Time? Please don’t take Marge Piercy away from me!
wow! Sady’s neat! She saved my kitten from a tree once, and then she knitted me a scarf so attractive I instantly found several very attractive potential sex partners!
wait… wrong comment thread?
Pisan’s The City of Women is prose, not epic poetry.
I’d never read that essay on Andrea Dworkin until now. In spite of the fact that Andrea Dworkin gave at least one of my favorite speeches related to feminism, like, ever, it is still thought-provoking (and entertaining) to read such beatdowns.
Also: Sady is write about intriguing literary history! We is learn about wacky feminist scifi from early 1900s! Awesome!
Wow, I loved mists of avalon. I followed your links, and it’s clear, she is indeed both responsible for creating the SCA, AND also a child molester, and married to a child molester as well.
That sucks.
Feminism is complicated! Maybe even more complicated in our country than in other countries. Unlike, say, Afghanistan, we’re not all united in this idea that “yes, we deserve education” and “No, we are not sluts if we get divorced.” It’s kind of more cut and dried there.
Here, we’ve got people saying “Well, pornography is bad” and “Feminism is whitey guilt” and “Maybe porn is okay” and “Feminism can be for everyone, wait, how do we include everyone?”
Thanks for bringing up these complexities.
Your columns rule.
Mazarine
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