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pheloniusfriarI am digging through boxes upon boxes upon boxes looking for where I put my stupid birth certificate (which I need for some paperwork). I had taken it out of my wallet in 2019 because I was traveling overseas and figured that carrying my passport and birth certificate was probably a security risk (doing so domestically was as well, probably more so), and I put it somewhere safe. It's in the house, but it might as well be on Ceres. As I dig through boxes, I am uncovering some essays that I wrote but never posted.
The second one was written for a 4th year Women's and Gender Studies class (which was actually an English course... so... much... reading...) called "Women Travel Writers" with Dr. Roseann O'Reilly Runte. This was an amazing class done in a proper interactive seminar style. My classmates were all top knotch, and the discussions were always challenging and engaging. In addition, given her rank and position, Dr. Runte brought in some pretty amazing guests to the class. For instance, we got to talk to Charlotte Gray, the author of “Sisters in the Wilderness, The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill” (fyi, I was studying Parr Traill for a gallery exhibit I was co-curating). There was an archives specialist who presented work done by Emily Carr. We had an amazing informal chat with Dr. Sharon Johnston (the then "wife of the Governor General") who was all forms of kick-ass and talked about her grandmother who was the inspiration for her novel "Matrons and Madams". And, I got to meet Roberta freakin' Bondar and hear the story of how she got to be an astronaut and then went on to become a professional nature photographer! Anyway, it was a great course, and the essay I had to write was on, gasp, women travel writers. Because one of the books we read in class, Jan Morris' "Last Letters from Hav", was fictional (but written like traditional travel literature), I felt I had permission to similarly use fictional travel writing, and chose this book. I will always remember Elisabeth Vonarburg fondly for attempting to teach me some Simon and Garfunkel songs on guitar one night in the Con Suite at a convention in Montreal. This is an exceptionally good book as well that I have read more than once. I further bring in Ursula K. LeGuin's foundational book The Dispossessed.
Elisabeth Vonarburg’s Pragmatic Utopia: “In The Mothers’ Land”
As long as there are social issues, there will be room and a need for utopian discourses along with, of course, resonant dystopian visions. Both literary genres explore the possible in order to encourage contemplation of the actual – whether through careful consideration by the reader, or by attempting to elicit a visceral response to the depictions they provide. But rather than just telling a story, “writers of utopian and dystopian fiction call for social and political action: in utopias, by describing a world in which we want to live, and in dystopias, by warning us of the consequences of current social and political trends” (Little). With our species’ new-found ability to destroy itself and potentially most life on Earth (or at least permanently cripple our collective ability to thrive), examinations of potentiality have assumed critical importance; and in our current age of postmodernist feminism, the literary and conceptual tools we can bring to bear on these questions offer a sophistication that is also unparalleled in history. To explore some key central contemporary themes and styles, I will examine categories of modern feminist utopian and dystopian stories, then focus on Quebec writer Élisabeth Vonarburg’s novel In The Mothers’ Land (originally Chronique du Pays des Mères, and later published as The Maerlande Chronicles), and discuss American Ursula K. LeGuin’s novel The Dispossessed.
“The concept of utopia is an ancient one, and the utopian literary tradition is at least as old as Plato’s Republic” (Little), and what can be called feminist utopian literature in English exists as far back as at least the 17th century – for instance, Margaret Cavendish’s Description of a New World Called the Blazing World (1666) and Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interests (1692). The tradition of examining what sorts of societies would result from women taking dominant and/or leadership roles in English and other languages goes back even earlier (Wu) if one considers “prefeminist” writings such as The Book of the City of Ladies (Le Livre de la Cité des Dames) by Christine de Pisan (1405), or even works by men such as Spencer’s Faerie Queen (1596) and Sanbao’s Expedition to the Western Ocean by Luo Maodeng (1597). While these older works are not precisely utopian stories, they do contain elements that at least acknowledge that women are capable of wielding power and forming cohesive societies without the need for their agency to be provided exclusively by or for men. Modern Western feminist utopian fiction goes much further and “takes a stand against the present [...] the suppression of women and the hypocrisy that surrounds all female-male relationships”, and critiques societies that “preach freedom and equality and practice coercion, hierarchy and patriarchy” (Sargent). Many modern feminist writers also explicitly examine what the results could be of our current environmental trajectories as a means of shedding light on the very real threats to survival we all face. These writers often treat environmental and biological disaster as a given and ongoing event in the story’s past, and point out the underlying sociopolitical – often patriarchal and capitalist – structures that they see leading inexorably to such terrible consequences.
In the book Feminist Philosophy and Science Fiction, Utopias and Dystopias, editor Judith Little has compiled a selection of feminist short stories on the subject. Even before reading any of the stories, Little does a grand service with the book’s table of contents by setting forth categories for the various works included. The book is divided into two major parts: “Human Nature and Reality”, and “Dystopias and Utopias”. In the first part, there are five sub-categories: “What Does It Mean to Be Human?”, “What Are Women and Men Really Like?”, “How Significant Is the Reproductive Difference?”, “The Concepts of ‘Woman’ and ‘Nature’”, and “Why Is Language Important?”. Immediately, we can see that the first part of the book tackles a range of topics that have been deeply explored in feminist theoretical works such as Haraway’s exploration of cyborg (Haraway); discussions of gender essentialism – e.g. (Gilligan), who has been accused of essentialism with her writing on the ethics of care, versus the likes of Mary Wollstonecraft who argues, as long ago as 1792, that gender is a socially constructed phenomenon (Wollstonecraft); Shulamith Firestone’s utopian vision of the elimination of gendered biological roles through technological advances (Firestone); Sherry Ortner’s anthropological analysis “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” on how this dichotomy is used as justification of the subordination of women (Ortner); and we need look no further than the works of Foucault on the power of language – see, for example (Butler) and (Irigaray) – and the writings of Cixous on feminism and language (Cixous, Gagnon, and Leclerc).
The second part of Little’s anthology is divided into three sub-categories: “Dystopias: The Worst Of All Possible Worlds”, which is further subdivided into the sections “The Possible Present” and “Far In The Future”; the sub-category “Seperatist Utopias: Worlds of Difference”, which is further divided into “Why Separate?” and “All-Female Societies and Planets”; and the sub-category “Androgynous Utopias: Worlds of Equality” (Little). On dystopias, I would make the argument that almost all feminist writing (fiction and non-fiction alike) about our present day is dystopic in some form as it examines patriarchy and institutionalized discrimination’s role in our relationships with gender. But another way to examine this power dynamic is to imagine, using intentionally dystopian fiction, how things could quickly turn very badly against women in a very short period of time today, for example Alice Sheldon’s (aka James Tiptree, Jr.) horrifying story “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled Of Light!” (Sheldon) presents an almost hyper-realistic and violent portrayal of “the world as it is, not just a possible one” (Little). Many other stories posit that should things continue as they are now, the far future will be much worse than the dystopia we live in today – Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale comes to mind as an excellent example (Atwood). It is also only natural then to ask what would happen if women were the sole gender running society (or at least the part of it that they lived in)? Certainly there is a long history of radical feminist treatise on active separatism by women (Frye), and the tradition of writing stories about female-dominant places and societies goes back hundreds of years as was discussed above (Wu), and remains a staple of both utopian and dystopian writing (Little). While some, like (Firestone) and (Haraway), have suggested extreme technological measures to destroy biological difference between men and women while leaving their bodies intact, the path of androgyny (or gynoandry) provides a path that is both more radical if approached in an essentialist manner, and less radical if seen in a social constructivist, queer theory, light. In this overall category, Ursula K. LeGuin’s classic utopian speculative fiction novel The Left Hand of Darkness is one of the definitive works in this area (LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness).
Vonarburg’s novel In The Mother’s Land (Vonarburg) is situated in a post-apocalyptic world where the radical disruption of the climate and the poisoning of the environment with toxins and biological agents has left the Earth’s ecosystem, and the humans living in it, in a precarious state. The book starts in the west Garderie of the city-state Bethely, where a young mosta (child), Lisbeï, is being raised in the cloistered environment of the “middle floors” of a huge snail-shell shaped building in a walled enclosure along with others in a narrow age band (between toddler and age 7). The “three inner coils” of the upper floors of the Garderie are the nurseries, and the largest floor at the bottom is where the older children go until they are 14 – each group is isolated from the others to ensure that only age-appropriate behaviour and care is required and experienced. Only after reaching the age of 14 are children allowed to become part of the world that exists outside the Garderie. We learn that children in the nursery are provided for by wet nurses, and that the caretakers on the middle floor engage the children in preschool type activities where they can play and learn basic social skills, but are not really required to engage in instensive academics. We do not know what happens on the lower floor as we follow Lisbeï through her several years on the middle floor in the first part of the book. There is an idyllic sheen over these first few pages, but without providing a reason we soon learn from her, “You got sick. You went to the infirmary. Sometimes you came back. More often you didn’t. ‘She’s gone to Elli,’ the gardianas used to say – probably somewhere above the ceiling (but higher than the nurseries), because most of the gardianas raised their eyes when they said this”.
Another piece of critical information we learn from Lisbeï is the existence of strange creatures living amongst them in the Garderie: boys. “On the second level there’d been the boys, the three-headed entity known as Rubio-Turri-Garrec. (Actually there’d been two others, although they very soon went to Elli, and Lisbeï could barely remember them.) But the boys were different from one another. For one thing they weren’t the same age: only Rubio and Turri had come downstairs with Lisbeï and her group to join the big mostas. That was when their differences began to show. Readheaded Rubio was the bold one: ‘Me, I ...’ he’d say, and the gardianas called him ‘youyou’ until he stopped”. In that short segment, a tremendous amount of information is conveyed: that there are very few boys, that they often didn’t survive for long, and that seemingly essentialist male gendered personality traits spontaneously emerged that the women gardianas took great exception to and tried to quash. Lisbeï learns that there is a fundamental difference between her and the boys, “Everyone knew they were called ‘boys,’ and that you said ‘he’ instead of ‘she’ when talking about one of them, because they were little mostas who had somehow gone wrong, what with that little pipe sticking out”. The essentialist behaviour and this society’s intention to minimize its impact and cast it as unacceptable, is further clarified by Lisbeï, “But the boys were mistakes – that was obvious, and so no one had ever bothered to find out for sure by asking a gardiana. After all, you couldn’t play rough games with boys. The way gardianas all sprang into action the first few times this happened made it abundantly clear: it was even worse than fighting among girls”. A final hint at the way things were is provided when Lisbeï recalls her confusion at wondering why “Elli made mostas who weren’t good for anything?” and the time one of the boys asked “why aren’t there many boys?” only to be told by a gardiana that “it’s a punishment sent by Elli”. It seems that very few boys are born, and very few of those that are survive. When the girls asked why there are boys at all, they are told “there are always some” by the gardiana they asked, so the small number of boys relative to girls seems at least to be stable.
Not to leave the reader in the dark, Vonarburg employs a number of the narrative techniques that we have seen in the many works we have read as part of our journeys through the subject of women travel writers. In particular, she introduces segments of Lisbeï’s later journals to provide context, often jumping between different time periods, to place her experiences both then and in the future on a more complex footing – to problematize her story even as it is being told. Furthermore, she introduces correspondence between a woman traveller to Bethely, Antonë, and her lover (another woman) back home, Linta. Antonë is a scientist and is travelling the world attempting to document what she can of “the Malady” that kills so many children, so it can be better understood and possibly mitigated. From one of her letters home, we learn “The Malady rate here is 46 percent, but the survival rate has risen to 9 percent! Enormous, don’t you think?”. We also learn that this is one of the main reasons for the Garderie structure: just a little over 50% of children born survive past the age of 7, but if they live that long, then they seem to be immune to the Malady. Babies are given up by mothers to be raised in the nursery of the Garderie because so many of the babies will die that it would leave most of the population psychologically crippled; and similarly, those under the age of 7 are not educated because it was viewed as being a waste of society’s resources. Once they are 8 years old and move to the bottom level of the Garderie, they are educated and readied for integration into the larger society that exists outside the walls they have grown up in. We find out even later that stillbirths, especially for male fetuses, and horrific mutations are even more common and that any “viable” children are sent to the Garderie. There, they are given intensive care so they remain as healthy as possible in hopes that more of them will have the strength to survive the Malady, a strategy that Antonë claims is working. There are still mutations among the children in the Garderie, but the most serious of those who might survive, are sent out to the Farms on the outskirts of Bethany to be raised.
Given all of the challenges, and despite the initial warm glow of utopia in Vonarburg’s language and descriptions, the story provides a terrible and dystopic backdrop of a possible future existence if we continue to pollute and introduce biological agents into our environment. But Bethany remains a world suffuse with hope and a will to survive and thrive as best as possible under the conditions. It exists many hundreds of years after the calamity that befell our planet at the hands of men, and civilization is re-emerging under the guidance of the women who comprise the vast bulk of the population. After the fall of civilization, there was a long period called the Harems, a brutal regime of the few men that survived to adulthood using extreme violence to gather large numbers of women around themselves, and war against each other for supremacy and resources. This period was followed by the Hives, in which a small number of women deposed the Harems and ruled as warlords themselves in place of the men, killing and enslaving both men and women. In an entry in an adolescent Lisbeï’s journal, she writes: “if the women were so bad, it was really the fault of the Harem Chiefs. They’d seen the Chiefs do bad things, and they just copied them [...] It was a long, long time ago, and life was very hard, so all the people were hard as well. That’s why Hive women killed a lot – even worse – burned books!”. In the distant past of the world, we see two classic dystopias: the trope of a male-dominated post-apocalyptic world where women are deeply subservient to their violent and presumably technology-capable overlords, and the inverse of that society where women warlords engage in an equally violent suppression of society and wage war against the technologies that had held them subservient to men for so long. From Antonë’s letters, we learn that Bethany employs nothing but the most primitive of technologies and has no electricity or other complex machines, but does use some water power, and the latest Capta (the leader of Bethany) has broken with tradition and introduced methane “gasoles” for light. The fear, or outright hatred, for the technologies that brought about the collapse of the world’s ecosystem continues, if attenuated, from the days of the Hives.
Given the history of the Harems and Hives, Bethany ends up coming across as relatively utopic despite the environmental legacy it inherits. We learn it is prosperous and has been organized into something of a socialist collective where every member of the community shares in the work needed to survive and prosper. Bethany as well exists as one city state amongst many that, although they have different attitudes to how best to move forward, at least resolve their issues through the gathering of regular councils rather than through physical violence (although there is considerable evidence of social violence within and between groups). Social structures are carefully designed and instilled into the young through the Garderie structure, and motivation of action is provided by the ever-present struggle with the corrupted environment they must live in. Indeed, there is indication that evolution is catching up with the challenge put before it, and Antonë writes that “if their Archives are to be trusted, there’s a slow but steady increase both in the Malady and in the survival rate. In any case, it isn’t an infection, because it’s never contagious. And guess what? Among survivors, the rate of post-Malady infections is 0.04 percent. It seems my theory is holding its own, doesn’t it?” So, whatever adaptations were required to exist in this world have resulted in mutations that not only assist in survival against “the Malady”, the same change offers some sort of exceptional protection against bacterial and viral infections. Humans have been through hell, but are on their way back – led with a new gender and power dynamic. Despite the limitations that must be faced, a harmony has been achieved in the face of adversity, and something that many would consider to be an idyllic existence seems to have arisen on the ashes of dysfunctional and ultimately shattered societies. Where Vonarburg truly excels is that she creates a believable society: it is a utopia grounded in human imperfection and open to criticism both by the characters in the story and the reader.
It is in the construction, if not the context, of Vonarburg’s utopian vision that we find parallels with LeGuin’s worlds in The Dispossessed (LeGuin, The Dispossessed). One of the main differences between the two is the past societies that are critiqued for having the social ills that lead to the destruction of Earth in Vonarburg’s novel, are still operating on the planet Urras in LeGuin’s work (that have nations on it that are allegories for the Cold War United States and Soviet Union, including their proxy war in Southeast Asia). The supposed anarcho-syndicalist seggregated planet Anarres, a barely habitable former mining colony moon of Urras, is like the future Earth where Bethany is situated. The past provides Vonarburg with the tools she needs to argue against our current civilization, and Urras is used by LeGuin for the same end. Where Vonarburg’s characters inherit the imperfect world they live in simply because of time elapsed, Anarres is populated by members of a socially-motivated rebellion against the oppressive patriarchal regimes of Urras who are given Anarres to live on if they end their uprising... provided they continue to mine the world for the benefit of Urras and send annual shipments (tithes?) of valuable ore to their homeworld (to be divided amonst the factions on Urras). As an aside, in The Dispossessed, we learn that the planet Terra (the Earth) is nearly exactly Vonarburg’s vision of what the Earth will become if we do not change in time:
Bethany and Anarres can both be considered imperfect feminist utopias both in how they arose and in how they conduct themselves. In both places, as the stories progress, it becomes clear that social tensions and rigid ideology are hindering the revolutions that they purport to be living. In particular, hierarchies have been formed, privileges have been quietly conferred and then defended by social structures and pressures, and egalitarianism is fracturing – partly through necessity of survival, but also because of humans’ supposed natural tendency to seek the comfort of familiarity of role and clarity of position within society. In In The Mother’s Land, Lisbeï grows up to be the Capta (captain/leader) of Bethany and travels the world to understand it and the changes it is going through, and those still required. In The Dispossessed, the exceptionally talented scientist Shevek runs up against the limitations of Anarres’ society trying to pursue their ideas and ultimately travels to Urras to do so. Both novels become travel stories, learning the strengths and weaknesses of the societies the protagonists grew up in, and developing a more nuanced appreciation of societies outside their own (or of their past). Even the travel stories we have read of women past invariably contained examinations of their own culture and those they enter or pass through on their travels – these works of fictional travel and exploration are similar in both the form and function of the stories they tell.
Where utopian and dystopian stories have a long and venerable history, they have been criticized for being prescriptive and unrealistic. Modern entries into that genre, such as the works examined here, have managed to escape from the limitations and lack of subtlety that characterized so many earlier works. Strong use of allegory and postmodern feminist writing techniques (early postmodernism for The Dispossessed and late postmodernism for In The Mother’s Land) make these works fully critical analyses of society and social structures. These authors are not afraid to problematize their utopias – they do not fear the imperfection of their visions. On the contrary, “what differentiated these new utopias was their attempt to evade the traditional criticisms of the old utopias [...]: that they were static, boring, and unattainable. After all, utopias are not required, by definition, to be perfect. There seemed no reason to believe that all of humanity's problems could be solved through improved social organization; but it seemed possible that some of them might be” (Brians). The novel The Dispossessed was ultimately subtitled “An Ambiguous Utopia” in later editions and built on (and revolutionized) the traditions of American science fiction, tropes of individual exceptionality, and of the travelogue. LeGuin also claims that she was inspired by the anarchist writings of Murray Bookchin (Davis and Stillman), in particular Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Bookchin), in her portrayal of Anarres. Vonarburg is obviously influenced by the same American literatures (including, presumably, LeGuin), but could also draw from the traditions of French experimental and utopian fiction – for example, Hélène Sixous, Madeleine Gagnon, Nicole Brossard, and Jeanne Hyvrard (Santoro). With the tools of ambivalence and ambiguity at their disposal, both authors were able to create believable societies where better ways could be imagined, but could remain solidly grounded in the humanity of their visions. As readers, it is easier to travel along with a writer, and weigh the merits of their interpretations and stories, if the suspension of disbelief we must employ to follow them does not become the dominant tool that we need. In that regard both The Dispossessed and In The Mother’s Land succeed in a way every bit as engaging as the long tradition of non-fiction works by women travel writers.
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. 1st Anchor Books ed. New York: Anchor Books, 1998. Print.
Bookchin, Murray. Post-Scarcity Anarchism. Berkeley [Calif.]: Ramparts Press, 1971. Print.
Brians, Paul. “Course Notes for Science Fiction (English 333) – Ursula LeGuin: The Dispossessed.” Apr. 2003. Web.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. Routledge Classics.
Cixous, Hélène, Madeleine Gagnon, and Annie Leclerc. La Venue À L’écriture. Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1977. Print. Série Féminin Futur.
Davis, Laurence, and Peter G. Stillman, eds. The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Lanham, Md: Lexington Books, 2005. Print.
Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Print.
Frye, Marilyn. “Some Reflections on Separatism and Power.” Feminist Theory: A Reader. Ed. Wendy K Kolmar and Frances Bartkowski. Third. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2010. 275–281. Print.
Gilligan, Carol. “Images of Relationship from In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development.” Feminist Theory: A Reader. Ed. Wendy K Kolmar and Frances Bartkowski. Third. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2010. 312–319. Print.
Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Feminist Theory: A Reader. Ed. Wendy K Kolmar and Frances Bartkowski. Third. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2010. 336–346. Print.
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1985. Print.
LeGuin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed. New York, NY: Avon Books, 1975. Print. Hainish Cycle.
---. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York, NY: Ace Books, 1969. Print.
Little, Judith A., ed. Feminist Philosophy and Science Fiction: Utopias and Dystopias. Amherst, N.Y: Prometheus Books, 2007. Print.
Ortner, Sherry B. “Is Female to Male as Nurture Is to Culture?” Feminist Theory: A Reader. Ed. Wendy K Kolmar and Frances Bartkowski. Third. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2010. 201–210. Print.
Santoro, Miléna. Mothers of Invention: Feminist Authors and Experimental Fiction in France and Quebec. Montréal ; Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002. Print.
Sargent, Lyman Tower. “A New Acarchism: Social and Political Ideas in Some Recent Feminist Eutopias.” Women and Utopia: Critical Interpretations. Ed. Marleen S. Barr and Nicholas D. Smith. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983. 3–33. Print.
Sheldon, Alice B. “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled Of Light!” Feminist Philosophy and Science Fiction: Utopias and Dystopias. Ed. Judith A. Little. Amherst, N.Y: Prometheus Books, 2007. 247–263. Print.
Vonarburg, Élisabeth. In The Mothers’ Land. Trans. Jane Brierley. Toronto: Bantam Spectra, 1992. Print.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 2nd ed. Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications, 1996. Print. Dover Thrift Editions.
Wu, Qingyun. Female Rule in Chinese and English Literary Utopias. 1st ed. Syracuse, N.Y: Syracuse University Press, 1995. Print. Utopianism and Communitarianism.
The second one was written for a 4th year Women's and Gender Studies class (which was actually an English course... so... much... reading...) called "Women Travel Writers" with Dr. Roseann O'Reilly Runte. This was an amazing class done in a proper interactive seminar style. My classmates were all top knotch, and the discussions were always challenging and engaging. In addition, given her rank and position, Dr. Runte brought in some pretty amazing guests to the class. For instance, we got to talk to Charlotte Gray, the author of “Sisters in the Wilderness, The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill” (fyi, I was studying Parr Traill for a gallery exhibit I was co-curating). There was an archives specialist who presented work done by Emily Carr. We had an amazing informal chat with Dr. Sharon Johnston (the then "wife of the Governor General") who was all forms of kick-ass and talked about her grandmother who was the inspiration for her novel "Matrons and Madams". And, I got to meet Roberta freakin' Bondar and hear the story of how she got to be an astronaut and then went on to become a professional nature photographer! Anyway, it was a great course, and the essay I had to write was on, gasp, women travel writers. Because one of the books we read in class, Jan Morris' "Last Letters from Hav", was fictional (but written like traditional travel literature), I felt I had permission to similarly use fictional travel writing, and chose this book. I will always remember Elisabeth Vonarburg fondly for attempting to teach me some Simon and Garfunkel songs on guitar one night in the Con Suite at a convention in Montreal. This is an exceptionally good book as well that I have read more than once. I further bring in Ursula K. LeGuin's foundational book The Dispossessed.
As long as there are social issues, there will be room and a need for utopian discourses along with, of course, resonant dystopian visions. Both literary genres explore the possible in order to encourage contemplation of the actual – whether through careful consideration by the reader, or by attempting to elicit a visceral response to the depictions they provide. But rather than just telling a story, “writers of utopian and dystopian fiction call for social and political action: in utopias, by describing a world in which we want to live, and in dystopias, by warning us of the consequences of current social and political trends” (Little). With our species’ new-found ability to destroy itself and potentially most life on Earth (or at least permanently cripple our collective ability to thrive), examinations of potentiality have assumed critical importance; and in our current age of postmodernist feminism, the literary and conceptual tools we can bring to bear on these questions offer a sophistication that is also unparalleled in history. To explore some key central contemporary themes and styles, I will examine categories of modern feminist utopian and dystopian stories, then focus on Quebec writer Élisabeth Vonarburg’s novel In The Mothers’ Land (originally Chronique du Pays des Mères, and later published as The Maerlande Chronicles), and discuss American Ursula K. LeGuin’s novel The Dispossessed.
“The concept of utopia is an ancient one, and the utopian literary tradition is at least as old as Plato’s Republic” (Little), and what can be called feminist utopian literature in English exists as far back as at least the 17th century – for instance, Margaret Cavendish’s Description of a New World Called the Blazing World (1666) and Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interests (1692). The tradition of examining what sorts of societies would result from women taking dominant and/or leadership roles in English and other languages goes back even earlier (Wu) if one considers “prefeminist” writings such as The Book of the City of Ladies (Le Livre de la Cité des Dames) by Christine de Pisan (1405), or even works by men such as Spencer’s Faerie Queen (1596) and Sanbao’s Expedition to the Western Ocean by Luo Maodeng (1597). While these older works are not precisely utopian stories, they do contain elements that at least acknowledge that women are capable of wielding power and forming cohesive societies without the need for their agency to be provided exclusively by or for men. Modern Western feminist utopian fiction goes much further and “takes a stand against the present [...] the suppression of women and the hypocrisy that surrounds all female-male relationships”, and critiques societies that “preach freedom and equality and practice coercion, hierarchy and patriarchy” (Sargent). Many modern feminist writers also explicitly examine what the results could be of our current environmental trajectories as a means of shedding light on the very real threats to survival we all face. These writers often treat environmental and biological disaster as a given and ongoing event in the story’s past, and point out the underlying sociopolitical – often patriarchal and capitalist – structures that they see leading inexorably to such terrible consequences.
In the book Feminist Philosophy and Science Fiction, Utopias and Dystopias, editor Judith Little has compiled a selection of feminist short stories on the subject. Even before reading any of the stories, Little does a grand service with the book’s table of contents by setting forth categories for the various works included. The book is divided into two major parts: “Human Nature and Reality”, and “Dystopias and Utopias”. In the first part, there are five sub-categories: “What Does It Mean to Be Human?”, “What Are Women and Men Really Like?”, “How Significant Is the Reproductive Difference?”, “The Concepts of ‘Woman’ and ‘Nature’”, and “Why Is Language Important?”. Immediately, we can see that the first part of the book tackles a range of topics that have been deeply explored in feminist theoretical works such as Haraway’s exploration of cyborg (Haraway); discussions of gender essentialism – e.g. (Gilligan), who has been accused of essentialism with her writing on the ethics of care, versus the likes of Mary Wollstonecraft who argues, as long ago as 1792, that gender is a socially constructed phenomenon (Wollstonecraft); Shulamith Firestone’s utopian vision of the elimination of gendered biological roles through technological advances (Firestone); Sherry Ortner’s anthropological analysis “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” on how this dichotomy is used as justification of the subordination of women (Ortner); and we need look no further than the works of Foucault on the power of language – see, for example (Butler) and (Irigaray) – and the writings of Cixous on feminism and language (Cixous, Gagnon, and Leclerc).
The second part of Little’s anthology is divided into three sub-categories: “Dystopias: The Worst Of All Possible Worlds”, which is further subdivided into the sections “The Possible Present” and “Far In The Future”; the sub-category “Seperatist Utopias: Worlds of Difference”, which is further divided into “Why Separate?” and “All-Female Societies and Planets”; and the sub-category “Androgynous Utopias: Worlds of Equality” (Little). On dystopias, I would make the argument that almost all feminist writing (fiction and non-fiction alike) about our present day is dystopic in some form as it examines patriarchy and institutionalized discrimination’s role in our relationships with gender. But another way to examine this power dynamic is to imagine, using intentionally dystopian fiction, how things could quickly turn very badly against women in a very short period of time today, for example Alice Sheldon’s (aka James Tiptree, Jr.) horrifying story “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled Of Light!” (Sheldon) presents an almost hyper-realistic and violent portrayal of “the world as it is, not just a possible one” (Little). Many other stories posit that should things continue as they are now, the far future will be much worse than the dystopia we live in today – Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale comes to mind as an excellent example (Atwood). It is also only natural then to ask what would happen if women were the sole gender running society (or at least the part of it that they lived in)? Certainly there is a long history of radical feminist treatise on active separatism by women (Frye), and the tradition of writing stories about female-dominant places and societies goes back hundreds of years as was discussed above (Wu), and remains a staple of both utopian and dystopian writing (Little). While some, like (Firestone) and (Haraway), have suggested extreme technological measures to destroy biological difference between men and women while leaving their bodies intact, the path of androgyny (or gynoandry) provides a path that is both more radical if approached in an essentialist manner, and less radical if seen in a social constructivist, queer theory, light. In this overall category, Ursula K. LeGuin’s classic utopian speculative fiction novel The Left Hand of Darkness is one of the definitive works in this area (LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness).
Vonarburg’s novel In The Mother’s Land (Vonarburg) is situated in a post-apocalyptic world where the radical disruption of the climate and the poisoning of the environment with toxins and biological agents has left the Earth’s ecosystem, and the humans living in it, in a precarious state. The book starts in the west Garderie of the city-state Bethely, where a young mosta (child), Lisbeï, is being raised in the cloistered environment of the “middle floors” of a huge snail-shell shaped building in a walled enclosure along with others in a narrow age band (between toddler and age 7). The “three inner coils” of the upper floors of the Garderie are the nurseries, and the largest floor at the bottom is where the older children go until they are 14 – each group is isolated from the others to ensure that only age-appropriate behaviour and care is required and experienced. Only after reaching the age of 14 are children allowed to become part of the world that exists outside the Garderie. We learn that children in the nursery are provided for by wet nurses, and that the caretakers on the middle floor engage the children in preschool type activities where they can play and learn basic social skills, but are not really required to engage in instensive academics. We do not know what happens on the lower floor as we follow Lisbeï through her several years on the middle floor in the first part of the book. There is an idyllic sheen over these first few pages, but without providing a reason we soon learn from her, “You got sick. You went to the infirmary. Sometimes you came back. More often you didn’t. ‘She’s gone to Elli,’ the gardianas used to say – probably somewhere above the ceiling (but higher than the nurseries), because most of the gardianas raised their eyes when they said this”.
Another piece of critical information we learn from Lisbeï is the existence of strange creatures living amongst them in the Garderie: boys. “On the second level there’d been the boys, the three-headed entity known as Rubio-Turri-Garrec. (Actually there’d been two others, although they very soon went to Elli, and Lisbeï could barely remember them.) But the boys were different from one another. For one thing they weren’t the same age: only Rubio and Turri had come downstairs with Lisbeï and her group to join the big mostas. That was when their differences began to show. Readheaded Rubio was the bold one: ‘Me, I ...’ he’d say, and the gardianas called him ‘youyou’ until he stopped”. In that short segment, a tremendous amount of information is conveyed: that there are very few boys, that they often didn’t survive for long, and that seemingly essentialist male gendered personality traits spontaneously emerged that the women gardianas took great exception to and tried to quash. Lisbeï learns that there is a fundamental difference between her and the boys, “Everyone knew they were called ‘boys,’ and that you said ‘he’ instead of ‘she’ when talking about one of them, because they were little mostas who had somehow gone wrong, what with that little pipe sticking out”. The essentialist behaviour and this society’s intention to minimize its impact and cast it as unacceptable, is further clarified by Lisbeï, “But the boys were mistakes – that was obvious, and so no one had ever bothered to find out for sure by asking a gardiana. After all, you couldn’t play rough games with boys. The way gardianas all sprang into action the first few times this happened made it abundantly clear: it was even worse than fighting among girls”. A final hint at the way things were is provided when Lisbeï recalls her confusion at wondering why “Elli made mostas who weren’t good for anything?” and the time one of the boys asked “why aren’t there many boys?” only to be told by a gardiana that “it’s a punishment sent by Elli”. It seems that very few boys are born, and very few of those that are survive. When the girls asked why there are boys at all, they are told “there are always some” by the gardiana they asked, so the small number of boys relative to girls seems at least to be stable.
Not to leave the reader in the dark, Vonarburg employs a number of the narrative techniques that we have seen in the many works we have read as part of our journeys through the subject of women travel writers. In particular, she introduces segments of Lisbeï’s later journals to provide context, often jumping between different time periods, to place her experiences both then and in the future on a more complex footing – to problematize her story even as it is being told. Furthermore, she introduces correspondence between a woman traveller to Bethely, Antonë, and her lover (another woman) back home, Linta. Antonë is a scientist and is travelling the world attempting to document what she can of “the Malady” that kills so many children, so it can be better understood and possibly mitigated. From one of her letters home, we learn “The Malady rate here is 46 percent, but the survival rate has risen to 9 percent! Enormous, don’t you think?”. We also learn that this is one of the main reasons for the Garderie structure: just a little over 50% of children born survive past the age of 7, but if they live that long, then they seem to be immune to the Malady. Babies are given up by mothers to be raised in the nursery of the Garderie because so many of the babies will die that it would leave most of the population psychologically crippled; and similarly, those under the age of 7 are not educated because it was viewed as being a waste of society’s resources. Once they are 8 years old and move to the bottom level of the Garderie, they are educated and readied for integration into the larger society that exists outside the walls they have grown up in. We find out even later that stillbirths, especially for male fetuses, and horrific mutations are even more common and that any “viable” children are sent to the Garderie. There, they are given intensive care so they remain as healthy as possible in hopes that more of them will have the strength to survive the Malady, a strategy that Antonë claims is working. There are still mutations among the children in the Garderie, but the most serious of those who might survive, are sent out to the Farms on the outskirts of Bethany to be raised.
Given all of the challenges, and despite the initial warm glow of utopia in Vonarburg’s language and descriptions, the story provides a terrible and dystopic backdrop of a possible future existence if we continue to pollute and introduce biological agents into our environment. But Bethany remains a world suffuse with hope and a will to survive and thrive as best as possible under the conditions. It exists many hundreds of years after the calamity that befell our planet at the hands of men, and civilization is re-emerging under the guidance of the women who comprise the vast bulk of the population. After the fall of civilization, there was a long period called the Harems, a brutal regime of the few men that survived to adulthood using extreme violence to gather large numbers of women around themselves, and war against each other for supremacy and resources. This period was followed by the Hives, in which a small number of women deposed the Harems and ruled as warlords themselves in place of the men, killing and enslaving both men and women. In an entry in an adolescent Lisbeï’s journal, she writes: “if the women were so bad, it was really the fault of the Harem Chiefs. They’d seen the Chiefs do bad things, and they just copied them [...] It was a long, long time ago, and life was very hard, so all the people were hard as well. That’s why Hive women killed a lot – even worse – burned books!”. In the distant past of the world, we see two classic dystopias: the trope of a male-dominated post-apocalyptic world where women are deeply subservient to their violent and presumably technology-capable overlords, and the inverse of that society where women warlords engage in an equally violent suppression of society and wage war against the technologies that had held them subservient to men for so long. From Antonë’s letters, we learn that Bethany employs nothing but the most primitive of technologies and has no electricity or other complex machines, but does use some water power, and the latest Capta (the leader of Bethany) has broken with tradition and introduced methane “gasoles” for light. The fear, or outright hatred, for the technologies that brought about the collapse of the world’s ecosystem continues, if attenuated, from the days of the Hives.
Given the history of the Harems and Hives, Bethany ends up coming across as relatively utopic despite the environmental legacy it inherits. We learn it is prosperous and has been organized into something of a socialist collective where every member of the community shares in the work needed to survive and prosper. Bethany as well exists as one city state amongst many that, although they have different attitudes to how best to move forward, at least resolve their issues through the gathering of regular councils rather than through physical violence (although there is considerable evidence of social violence within and between groups). Social structures are carefully designed and instilled into the young through the Garderie structure, and motivation of action is provided by the ever-present struggle with the corrupted environment they must live in. Indeed, there is indication that evolution is catching up with the challenge put before it, and Antonë writes that “if their Archives are to be trusted, there’s a slow but steady increase both in the Malady and in the survival rate. In any case, it isn’t an infection, because it’s never contagious. And guess what? Among survivors, the rate of post-Malady infections is 0.04 percent. It seems my theory is holding its own, doesn’t it?” So, whatever adaptations were required to exist in this world have resulted in mutations that not only assist in survival against “the Malady”, the same change offers some sort of exceptional protection against bacterial and viral infections. Humans have been through hell, but are on their way back – led with a new gender and power dynamic. Despite the limitations that must be faced, a harmony has been achieved in the face of adversity, and something that many would consider to be an idyllic existence seems to have arisen on the ashes of dysfunctional and ultimately shattered societies. Where Vonarburg truly excels is that she creates a believable society: it is a utopia grounded in human imperfection and open to criticism both by the characters in the story and the reader.
It is in the construction, if not the context, of Vonarburg’s utopian vision that we find parallels with LeGuin’s worlds in The Dispossessed (LeGuin, The Dispossessed). One of the main differences between the two is the past societies that are critiqued for having the social ills that lead to the destruction of Earth in Vonarburg’s novel, are still operating on the planet Urras in LeGuin’s work (that have nations on it that are allegories for the Cold War United States and Soviet Union, including their proxy war in Southeast Asia). The supposed anarcho-syndicalist seggregated planet Anarres, a barely habitable former mining colony moon of Urras, is like the future Earth where Bethany is situated. The past provides Vonarburg with the tools she needs to argue against our current civilization, and Urras is used by LeGuin for the same end. Where Vonarburg’s characters inherit the imperfect world they live in simply because of time elapsed, Anarres is populated by members of a socially-motivated rebellion against the oppressive patriarchal regimes of Urras who are given Anarres to live on if they end their uprising... provided they continue to mine the world for the benefit of Urras and send annual shipments (tithes?) of valuable ore to their homeworld (to be divided amonst the factions on Urras). As an aside, in The Dispossessed, we learn that the planet Terra (the Earth) is nearly exactly Vonarburg’s vision of what the Earth will become if we do not change in time:
“My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitable, but not as this world is. This is a living world, a harmony. Mine is a discord. You Odonians chose a desert [Anarres]; we Terrans made a desert … We survive there, as you do. People are tough! There are nearly a half billion of us now. Once there were nine billion. You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do – they never adapt either. We failed as a species, as a social species. […] We had saved what could be saved, and made a kind of life in the ruins, on Terra, in the only way it could be done: by total centralization. Total control over the use of every acre of land, every scrap of metal, every ounce of fuel. Total rationing, birth control, euthanasia, universal conscription into the labor force. The absolute regimentation of each life toward the goal of racial survival.” (LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness)Obviously, LeGuin thought it important to explore the same territory as Vonarburg as a warning to the reader about the preciousness of where we live. In LeGuin’s story though, there were other planets where humanity still lived without the calamity that befell the Earth; but in Vonarburg’s story, there was only the one planet to live on and no other options or hope. Vonarburg’s utopia, when viewed beside LeGuin’s description of her Earth’s fate, does come across as perhaps a “kinder gentler” totalitarian state with many of the same features. Perhaps that is one of the lessons that both authors are trying to explore: that there are no absolutes where societies are concerned, and that the difference between dystopian oppressions and utopian freedoms are in the approach and implementation rather than the things that civilizations must accomplish.
Bethany and Anarres can both be considered imperfect feminist utopias both in how they arose and in how they conduct themselves. In both places, as the stories progress, it becomes clear that social tensions and rigid ideology are hindering the revolutions that they purport to be living. In particular, hierarchies have been formed, privileges have been quietly conferred and then defended by social structures and pressures, and egalitarianism is fracturing – partly through necessity of survival, but also because of humans’ supposed natural tendency to seek the comfort of familiarity of role and clarity of position within society. In In The Mother’s Land, Lisbeï grows up to be the Capta (captain/leader) of Bethany and travels the world to understand it and the changes it is going through, and those still required. In The Dispossessed, the exceptionally talented scientist Shevek runs up against the limitations of Anarres’ society trying to pursue their ideas and ultimately travels to Urras to do so. Both novels become travel stories, learning the strengths and weaknesses of the societies the protagonists grew up in, and developing a more nuanced appreciation of societies outside their own (or of their past). Even the travel stories we have read of women past invariably contained examinations of their own culture and those they enter or pass through on their travels – these works of fictional travel and exploration are similar in both the form and function of the stories they tell.
Where utopian and dystopian stories have a long and venerable history, they have been criticized for being prescriptive and unrealistic. Modern entries into that genre, such as the works examined here, have managed to escape from the limitations and lack of subtlety that characterized so many earlier works. Strong use of allegory and postmodern feminist writing techniques (early postmodernism for The Dispossessed and late postmodernism for In The Mother’s Land) make these works fully critical analyses of society and social structures. These authors are not afraid to problematize their utopias – they do not fear the imperfection of their visions. On the contrary, “what differentiated these new utopias was their attempt to evade the traditional criticisms of the old utopias [...]: that they were static, boring, and unattainable. After all, utopias are not required, by definition, to be perfect. There seemed no reason to believe that all of humanity's problems could be solved through improved social organization; but it seemed possible that some of them might be” (Brians). The novel The Dispossessed was ultimately subtitled “An Ambiguous Utopia” in later editions and built on (and revolutionized) the traditions of American science fiction, tropes of individual exceptionality, and of the travelogue. LeGuin also claims that she was inspired by the anarchist writings of Murray Bookchin (Davis and Stillman), in particular Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Bookchin), in her portrayal of Anarres. Vonarburg is obviously influenced by the same American literatures (including, presumably, LeGuin), but could also draw from the traditions of French experimental and utopian fiction – for example, Hélène Sixous, Madeleine Gagnon, Nicole Brossard, and Jeanne Hyvrard (Santoro). With the tools of ambivalence and ambiguity at their disposal, both authors were able to create believable societies where better ways could be imagined, but could remain solidly grounded in the humanity of their visions. As readers, it is easier to travel along with a writer, and weigh the merits of their interpretations and stories, if the suspension of disbelief we must employ to follow them does not become the dominant tool that we need. In that regard both The Dispossessed and In The Mother’s Land succeed in a way every bit as engaging as the long tradition of non-fiction works by women travel writers.
Works Cited
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