A Utopian Trace in Charles Dickens' Hard Times: A Utopian Studies Conference Paper

      Charles Dickens’ Hard Times is not traditionally read within a utopian framework. The scholarship on the novel tends to focus on the generic conventions of realism and representations of the working class. The only reference to utopia in the scholarship comes from Leona Toker, who reads the novel as a critique of utopia, placing utilitarianism into the camp of utopia. I want to pose a counter-reading that places its focus on a series of liminal moments in the text. The novel continually gestures towards the fantastic, whether in the form of imagery on carpeting or the pulp literature consumed by the working classes. These traces of the fantastic are a threat to the advocates of utilitarianism, who attempt to suppress them from the school room and daily life. These attempts are shown in a comic light, revealing a narrow-minded literalism on the part of school teachers, but these liminal forms of art and literature also gesture towards the possibility of a world that operates on a different logic than the ‘hard facts’ of the factory town. I read these moments in the text as a utopian trace in the text, gesturing towards the forms of cooperation between working people that life in the industrial town depends on even as the dominant structures of the town attempt to suppress it. The traces of the fantastic take the form of a series of novum in the Blochian sense disrupting the daily life of the instrumental life of the factory town with a range of fantastic alternatives.

      It would be a mistake to see the utopian impulse as a central feature. Instead, the novel provides a sharp critique of the narrow instrumental reason of utilitarianism through a contrast of the many foibles of the middle-class citizens of the city of Coketown, contrasting them with the quiet dignity of the working-class victims of the industrial city and the carnival performers who try to avoid that life. The narrative follows the utilitarian Mr. Gradgrind as he moves from the reform school of the beginning of the novel to the upper reaches of parliament by the end of the novel. At the same time, it maps the effects of his education reform by showing the foundering of his children as they attempt to create lives for themselves without any real moral or ethical compass. It mirrors those problems by following the life of factory hand, Stephen Blackpool, who is unable to escape from his unfortunate marriage to his alcoholic wife, who shows no interest in either her husband or escaping from her condition, to marry his love, the devoted Rachel. In each case, the ‘muddle’ of family relations stands in for the ‘muddle’ of social relations that define Coketown as a whole.

       Leona Toker’s essay “Hard Times and a critique of Utopia: A Typological Study” attempts to frame this discussion as precisely a critique of utopianism by framing the reform work of Thomas Gradgrind as a kind of utopian schema of improvement. Within this context, Thomas Gradgrind is presented as a principled reformer, one that allows his schema of improvement to blind him to the complexity of human existence. Because of that, his utopian schema becomes a dystopian reality for those who must live within it. Toker then places the book within a long tradition of anti-utopian literature that present the utopian and dystopian as two sides of the same coin, looking particularly at the work of Adolous Huxley and George Orwell. Utilitarianism in this context stands in for any program built on a set of abstract principles that are placed in effect within a society. However, while the text emphasizes Gradrind’s obsession with calculation and abstraction, there is little sense of Gradgrind as an individual who has any real interest in the improvement of the society that he lives within. Instead, Gradgrind’s work is continually focused on improving the efficiency of the system as it exists. Rather than showing an obsession for creating a new set of abstractions designed to create a better world, Thomas Gradgrind accepts the world as it is and refuses to imagine any possibility of it working differently. Gradgrind is certainly engaged in a project of the kind of reductionism that defines what James C Scott would identify as a high modernist impulse, but that impulse isn’t directed towards social transformation which is at the heart of the utopian project.

      Katherine Kearn’s “A Tropology of Realism in Hard Times” might be a better place to begin an examination of the utopian impulse within the work of the novel. Her text argues that Thomas Gradgrind’s demand for a world based on facts and his desire to suppress a web of activities placed under the term ‘Fancy.’ For Kearns, Fancy then stands in for sexual pleasure and a constellation of other activities tied to the pleasure of the text, a continual excess of language that spills over and challenges the narrow logic of realism. For her, it represents ‘an opposition between the Hard Times consistently brings the reader to share in the deconstruction of its stated "realism," whose utilitarian surface yields throughout to those alternative and ineffable truths produced by the artist's "mute Hands," which do not tell but only feel and make’ (Kearn 859). The text continually exceeds the conventions of realism linked to the instrumental reason of capital, delving into the terrain of unconscious desire, which is ‘felt but not told’ through its figurative languge. Even though, Kearns’ analysis is framed within the trajectory of a deconstructive approach to the text, the analysis is not unreconcilable with Bloch’s theory of the utopian trace. The critique of utilitarianism opens an abundance of small possibilities, traces of the possibility of another world, another logic, and created by drives that are exogenous to the logic of the system that they live under.

      The utopian trace is initially gestured towards through the interaction between the daughter of a circus performer, Sissy Jupe and her future guardian, Mr. Gradgrind at the school that Mr. Gradgrind had organized to enact his utilitarian principles.

      ‘Girl number twenty,’ said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength of knowledge.
       Sissy blushed, and stood up
      ‘So you would carpet your room—or your husband’s room, if you were a grown woman, and had a husband—with representations of flowers, would you?’ said the gentleman. ‘Why would you?’
       ‘If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers,’ returned the girl
       ‘And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over them with heavy boots?’
       ‘It wouldn’t hurt them, sir. They wouldn’t crush and wither, if you please, sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy—’
       ‘Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn’t fancy,’ cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point. ‘That’s it! You are never to fancy.’
       ‘You are not, Cecilia Jupe,’ Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, ‘to do anything of that kind.’
       ‘Fact, fact, fact!’ said the gentleman. And ‘Fact, fact, fact!’ repeated Thomas Gradgrind.
       ‘You are to be in all things regulated and governed,’ said the gentleman, ‘by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. You don’t walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets. You don’t find that foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery. You never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls. You must use,’ said the gentleman, ‘for all these purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration. This is the new discovery. This is fact. This is taste.’ (Dickens 13-14)

       At its most immediate level, the passage is a critique of the utilitarian classroom and its desire to reduce the complexity of human life into a table of facts and figures. The classroom is immediately marked as a disciplinary space, a space that both demands obedience from its subjects and transforms the complexity of life to a series of rote answers. Earlier in the novel, the space is referred to as dictatorial. Within Dickens’ own sentimental economy, the utilitarian reform school takes the form of a bully that destroys, rather than builds the subjectivity of the children who enter its classrooms. The disciplinary lesson takes the form of a rather one-sided debate over how one should decorate one’s home. The two instructors fail to bully young Cissy Jupe into rejecting the representation of flowers as an acceptable decoration for one’s living room carpet for the simple fact that actual flowers would not be found on a living room floor. It’s hard not to see Dickens’ satirical tendencies within this exercise of reductio ad absurdium. Articles of daily life are suddenly presented as threats to the very fabric of reality as a virtual form of madness that could turn the world upside down.

       At the same time, the passage introduces a significant opposition that defines the rest of the novel. The reductivist world of facts is place in opposition to the world of ‘fancy’, a world that must be destroyed. The world of ‘fancy’ disrupts the world of facts by contradicting them. It points to a world where ‘foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery’ and random quadrupeds roam the walls of suburban living rooms. ‘Fancy’ within this context points obliquely to a world where the facts of utilitarian life are contravened, and the possibility of another life is pointed to. This opposition is only intensified when the book turns to the education of the children of Mr. Gradgrind and the term fancy which creates the conditions for another world is then connected to the world of the fantastic, whether in the form of folk or fairy tales or in the figures of a variety of monsters. The narrow and reductionist nature of their education, one that focused on the world as it exist and requires the exclusion of monsters who disrupt the inevitability of Coketown.

       The question of fancy is then picked up several pages later in one of the many authorial interjections in the novel, framing its qualities in relationship to the working life of the many hands who produce the abundant wealth of the community.

       Is it possible, I wonder, that there was any analogy between the case of the Coketown population and the case of the little Gradgrinds? Surely, none of us in our sober senses and acquainted with figures, are to be told at this time of day, that one of the foremost elements in the existence of the Coketown working-people had been for scores of years, deliberately set at nought? That there was any Fancy in them demanding to be brought into healthy existence instead of struggling on in convulsions? That exactly in the ratio as they worked long and monotonously, the craving grew within them for some physical relief—some relaxation, encouraging good humour and good spirits, and giving them a vent—some recognized holiday, though it were but for an honest dance to a stirring band of music—some occasional light pie in which even M’Choakumchild had no finger—which craving must and would be satisfied aright, or must and would inevitably go wrong, until the laws of the Creation were repealed? (Dickens 30)

       Fancy within this context takes on another shape, one of simple relief and relaxation. It becomes an escape from the ordinary monotony of daily life, an escape from toil and monotony of factory life. The drive towards also powerfully reflects the fact that the life of utilitarian reason, while producing so much for the middle classes has produced ‘nought’ for the masses of workers who have produced that wealth. Fancy not only represents a form of escape, but a demand as well. It represents an attempt to create a meaningful life within a life that is primarily defined by rote repetition. That meaningful life is then constructed out of the detritus of industrial production, forms of popular music, what would in the future become pulp literature, and dives and dancehalls of the city. It would be easy to reduce these pleasures to simply a precursor to the forms of mass entertainment that would define the era of Fordist production, and to an extent, this material does presage that moment, but it also represents a powerful demand, a demand for a world that focuses on use rather than exchange and the desire for a life that is meaningful for its participants. These two points continually exceed the commodity forms associated with them.

       The novel then interweaves this critique throughout the novel, returning to it in its interstices, frequent authorial interjections, and pronouncements that differentiate the novel from most of his work for many critics. The novel pairs the search for pleasure with the search for a meaningful life. The search for pulp literature doubles with the search for genuine meaning at the library, a preoccupation that continually flummoxes the Thomas Gradrinds and Josiah Bounderby’s of the world. At the same time, Dickens respect for the demands of the hands, the working people of the imagined Coketown does not extend to political organization. If the ascendant bourgeoisie are rebuked through the paired figures of Josiah Bounderby and Thomas Gradrind, the novel equally rebukes the attempts on the part of radical workers to organize through the figure of Slackbridge, who mirrors the bombastic rhetoric of Josiah Bounderby as a sort of debased copy of the first figure. The novel is committed to the dignity of the hands but rejects collective political action as the product of demagoguery that matches or even exceeds the demagoguery of the factory owners such as Josiah Bounderby. The novel oscillates between the quiet commitment of the hands to a collective dignity and mutual aid and a political discourse that only manipulates them.

       Even as Dickens repeatedly rejects the self-organization of the hands as a meaningful solution to the muddle that is identified by Stephen Blackpool, the text refuses to resolve the contradiction through traditional devices of reconciliation such as marriage. The narrative ends with the betterment of two of the characters, but it also ends in the mutual death of Josiah Bounderby and his laborer, Stephen Blackpool without resolution. The satirical tone of the rest of the novel takes on a rather different tone with the death of Mrs. Gradgrind, the long-ignored wife and mother of the Gradgrind family, a lightly comical character up until this point. Mrs. Gradgrind’s final speech immediately expresses a submerged critique of the philosophy of her husband. She asks for pen and paper to write to him, to tell him that there is something that has been left out of his system of knowledge. She notes, “‘But there is something—not an Ology at all—that your father has missed, or forgotten, Louisa. I don’t know what it is. I have often sat with Sissy near me, and thought about it. I shall never get its name now. But your father may” (Dickens 194). The speech returns to the earlier opposition in the novel, between the naïve ethical system of Sissy and the systematic knowledge of Thomas Gradgrind. Returning to that opposition, Mrs. Gradgrind affirms that Sissy’s beliefs contains something in excess of what is contained in Thomas Gradgrind’s narrow worlds of facts, but she can’t put a name to it. At the same time, she recognizes that the organized knowledge might be able to provide that name.

      Mrs. Gradgrind then makes a final attempt to put down this knowledge in the form of a letter. The effort fails, but the language describing that failure is highly evocative. The passage reads, “It matters little what figures of wonderful no-meaning she began to trace upon her wrappers. The hand soon stopped in the midst of them; the light that had always been feeble and dim behind the weak transparency, went out; and even Mrs. Gradgrind, emerged from the shadow in which man walketh and disquieteth himself in vain, took upon her the dread solemnity of the sages and patriarchs” (Dickens 194). The message takes the form of a trace of ‘figures of wonderful no-meaning’ that take a form that ‘matters little.’ That trace in turn gestures towards a set of possibilities that were always ‘feeble and dim behind the weak transparency.’ But nonetheless, they constitute a trace of a possibility of another life, one that must be gestured towards, even as it. That sentimentalized trace mirrors the death of Stephen Blackpool who similarly gestures towards other possibilities even as those possibilities are not grounded in the conventional notion of marriage and reproductive futurity. They constitute a refusal of closure or reconciliation even as that refusal is grounded in the figure of the muddle rather than any political formation.

       That trace is in a sense a product of the tension between the novel’s desire to recognize the inner life of the working people of England in the novel, to ‘give them a little more play’ to draw on the language of the novel and the phobic response to worker self-organization. However, rather than reading this tension as a failure of the novel, the tension produces a rich sense of symptoms in the series of authorial intrusions and side comments identified by Katherine Kearn. That tension is not resolved and unlike so many industrial novels, there is no effort to suture together the class division through the act of marriage. That lack of resolution also refuses to accept the illusion that the social problems of the novel are somehow resolvable within the confines of the society as it existed. Fancy or Fantasy become a sort of gesture towards a different world, even as it draws from the detritus of the old. Its ineffable nature exposes the limits of that vision even as it gestures towards a novum that cannot be reincorporated into the existing system.

Message, Politics, and Form: Debates in Science Fiction

            This essay was published on my most recent failed blog project, and I thought I would reprint it here with some minor revisions.  I thought it was one of the better things I wrote for the project, but it didn't get a lot of attention, so I thought I would see if it got more attention over here.  The essay opens with the now close to defunct debate over the Hugo Awards, but it uses the controversy to explore the nature of science fiction through a discussion of the concept of message fiction.  Rather than simply taking a side on the debate, the essay both rejects the concept of messages a good way to understand science fiction and argues that politics are inherent to the genre at a formal level.  It does so by drawing from the critical work of Samuel Delany and Darko Suvin, and their understanding of the genre.  In any case, here is the essay....

            In the past few months, I have been fairly faithfully following the controversies surrounding the Hugo Awards, which was created by the expansion of what is called the Sad Puppies slate, along with the creation of a mirroring, Rabid Puppies slate.  Rather than getting into the details of that fairly baroque debate, I thought I would focus on one small rhetorical feature of the conversation.  Throughout the debate, the puppies have focused on condemning something called ‘message fiction’, which they define as the imposition of the political on the form of science fiction.  In response, the critics of the puppies tend to make two arguments, either noting the ‘messages’ or political aspects of the puppies texts, or arguing that all texts have a message, or political dimensions to them.  Not surprisingly, my views are far closer to the critics of the puppies, but they make a common mistake, collapsing the broader implications of the political into the narrower framework of message, which doesn’t necessarily operate within political terms.  I plan on showing the distinction between message and politics, and then use the literary criticism of Samuel Delany to examine how the political dimension of science fiction is better understood as a formal dimension of the genre.

            The concept of message fiction is probably most easily understandable by referring to its earlier antecedents, notably morality tales, fables, and folk tales.  These stories are explicitly constructed to pass on a lesson, which can often be expressed in sentence or two.  These lessons might express an abstract concept such as the golden rule, or may express the far more concrete danger of wandering alone, away from home, in the dead of winter.  There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this form of literary construction, and, indeed, it is a far older form of literary creation, and deeply contributes to all forms of literature.  However, the authors were far less concerned with literary form and quality, which was in service of the lesson. Not surprisingly, the structure of this traditional approach is most easily found in pedagogical literature produced for either children or adolescents.  We might reference Sesame Street, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, or the Canadian television series, Degrassi Junior High, as examples of this sort of ‘message fiction,’ along with a great deal of religious fiction.  It’s significant to note that we are far away from the narrative structures of science fiction, when we discuss is sort of literature, and that while this form of pedagogical fiction has political implications, it rarely is intended to act as a political intervention.  However, another subsection of ‘message fiction’, which might be called polemical fiction, interventions into the events of the day, can be constructed with explicitly political purposes in mind, and utilize science fictional narrative structures.

           However, the politics of science fiction and other dominant literary forms takes a distinctively different approach than the messages discussed above.  That politics can be found in the explicit and implicit background assumptions of the writer that are embedded in the narrative form of the story.  They are produced in the effort to create a sense of ‘reality’ that constitutes the background of the story, and the norms and expectations of the characters interact within social institutions.  Indeed, even within the polemical fiction discussed above, the story is judged far more on its ability to engage an audience on these formal questions.  Perhaps, this argument is better explained through a concrete example.  A recent debate has opened up around conservative John C. Wright’s nostalgic invocation of the literary trope of the ‘princess in distress,’ which he marks as part of the origins of the genre, before the accursed introduction of political messages.  A critic argued that this trope itself constituted a message, a political dimension to the text.  At a larger and more substantial level, I’m largely in agreement with this critic.  The ability to imagine women as only in need of rescue has a disturbing and deeply hierarchical implication to it.  But, it isn’t a message.  Instead, it’s a narrative convention, created to engage with a set of audience expectations to produce a sense of enjoyment.  Its political implications are embedded in a set of common assumptions about the role of women in a society and about what it means to be feminine. 

  

          All fiction, whether escapist or engaged, fantastic or realistic, focused on a past or a future, engages in this unmistakably political process through their construction of a world that is both recognized and enjoyed by an audience.  In his effort to define the genre of science fiction in his essay, “About 5,750 Words”, author and critic, Samuel R. Delany understands this process through the concept of ‘subjunctivity,’ which he draws from an engagement with the linguistic theorist, Ferdinand Saussure.  Delany notes, “Subjunctivity is the tension on the thread of meaning that runs between (to borrow Saussure’s term for ‘word’:) sound-image and sound-image.”  (Delany 10)  To break that fairly opaque statement open, Delany is noting that narrative is constructed by a string of words being joined together to produce a narrative.  The subjunctivity of a piece is defined by the relationship of that narrative to its relationship to the world of the author.  Reportage is defined the “blanket indicative tension… this happened,” while  naturalistic fiction is defined by “could have happened,” fantasy is defined by “could not have happened”, and  science fiction is defined by “have not happened.” (Delany 10-11)  Within this series of generic descriptions, Delany shifts from the narrative conventions of ‘reportage’, which must correspond with the facts of the empirical world, to a variety of fictional narrative structures, which produce worlds that critically engage with that world through a variety of rules sets, which define what can and not occur within that world.

            In every case, the author has to make a series of critical interventions about what the world is, and how will their fictional world engage with those expectations.  Science fiction attempts to largely imagine what might be called ‘potential worlds’, worlds that could exist, but do not, whether in the form of a future to come, an alternative present, or a past that never occurred.  In each case, we break away from the ideological horizons of the present to imagine a different, and even alien society that could exist.  At the same time, the author has to produce that alternative with a meaningful engagement with the available natural and social sciences, history, and critical theory.  The ‘have not happened’ has to be plausible within the knowledge of its time, and it has to show that plausibility through its narrative structures.  It therefore has to engage with the question of politics, amongst other questions.  Delany stresses these demands on the genre in his lengthy critical investigation of Ursula Leguin’s Utopian novel, The Dispossessed,

Mundane fiction can get by with a clear and accurate portrayal of behavior that occurs merely because it occurs.  Science fiction can not.  In an alien culture—both Anarres and Urras are alien cultures—we are obliged to speculate on the reason behind any given behavior; and this speculation, whether implicit or explicit, must leave its signs in the text.  The scenes and paragraphs are signs of limitations on the social egalitarianism of Anarres; they are not sighs for the causes of those limitations.

            Nothing prevents an SF writer from writing a story about an intelligent species in which adolescent male bonding behavior is imprinted on the genes.  (The species might biologically and genetically bear a resemblance to birds, who exhibit much complex behavior that may well be genetically controlled.)  Similarly, nothing prevents the SF writer from writing about an intelligent species in which such behavior is completely the product of intrasocial forces.  Indeed, the writer if she chooses can write about a species in which the reason switches back and forth according to the changes in the moon.

            What we must remember, however, is that once mundane fiction has accomplished its portrait of behavior at some historical moment, from the here and now to the distant past, if we ask of it: “But what do you think the surrounding cause are?” mundane fiction can answer, without fear that it is shirking its job, “Frankly, I don’t know.  It’s not my concern.” But because science fiction is not constrained to answer such a question “correctly,” within its generic precincts, the “I don’t know. It’s not my concern” of mundane fiction not only becomes self-righteous and pompous, it signifies a violation of the form itself.   Science fiction may ultimately end with an “I don’t know” about any given point, but only after a good deal of speculation, either implicit or explicit, has left its signs in the text. (Delany 128-129) 

            Delany opens his engagement with the genre by contrasting its narrative horizons with that of ‘mundane’ or what he may have earlier called ‘naturalistic fiction.’  The latter can simply represent the world ‘as it is.’  It need not explain why a social phenomenon exists; it merely has to exist to be represented.  However, science fiction has to live up to a much higher standard, due to its speculative nature.  Delany goes on to show how open ended this process can be, allowing for the imagination of radically different worlds, with structures of gender and sexuality that have radically different biological and social explanation.  However, the author produces the rules for the universe of the novel, and therefore must be able to show either the natural or social rules for such a world, in either an ‘implicit or explicit’ manner.  Anarres fails, Delany argues, not because it represent inequality, but because it fails to offer an explanation for that inequality.  It naturalizes the social expectations of the present, and therefore fails in its obligations as a science fiction novel.  In effect, the science fiction novel demands a sort of political engagement with why its social structures work the way they do, even if that explanation imagines an alternative biological structure.  To draw on the work of Darko Suvin, science fiction "does not ask about The Man or The World, but which man?: in what kind of world?: and why such a man in such a kind of world?" (Suvin, "Estrangement and Cognition", 2.1)

            It should be noted that the political engagement that Samuel Delany demands has no partisan markers.  It doesn’t demand that the author be a radical or a conservative, commit to the views of a particular party, or even understand the social structures of the present in the same way.  It simply demands that the world that is represented has some sort of explanation of how its culture came to operate in the way it does in the book, either in an implicit or explicit fashion.   It’s why radical critics are more than happy to recognize that novels such as Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, Keith Roberts’s Pavane, and Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun series are great science fiction novels.  They produce richly imagined worlds, with complex social and political structures that are formal political engagement with the present through those author’s conservative political framework.  They ask substantial political questions that are worth following in the narrative form, even if you profoundly disagree with the answers.  To use the language of Darko Suvin, science fiction is a literature of cognitive estrangement, which means it’s a literature of critique, in its richest and most open ended sense.

Another short essay on The Female Man

The novel opens with the introduction of three different women from three substantially different versions of the Earth, two substantially different versions of the present and a utopian vision of the future. In the final section of the text, we are introduced to a fourth woman from a distinctively different future, one far more dystopian in nature, who has brought the other three women together to help her defeat the patriarchal community of men who have declared an almost genocidal war on the women of their world. She also reveals that each of the four women of the text, the ‘four J’s’, Jeannine, Janet, Jael, and Joanna, are genetically the same world, revealing the deeply constructed nature of what Gayle Rubin called the ‘sex/gender system’, or what Teresa de Lauretis wants to understand as a gender system, removing the naturalistic remnants of the category of ‘sex.’[1] Each of these women is in fact the same woman shaped by radically different social environments. The intersection of these worlds allows for a comparative analysis of the political, social, and economic systems of those worlds, along with their modes of sexuality, kinship, and child-raising. Jeannine comes from an Earth that has never left the depression ear because World War II was never fought. Joanna is a stand in for the author and comes from that world, while Janet comes from an alternate future earth in which the men of the society died in a plague. The last character, Jael, comes from an alternate earth where the men and women of the society are in a long-term war against each other, a war produced by a similar catastrophe to the one that occurred in Whileaway, albeit with radically different results. Each of these characters represents an alternative vision of a single subject and at the same time, an alternative vision of the world at large.

We enter into Joanna Russ’ novel, The Female Man through the conjuncture that is through the disruptive process of the intersection of four different temporalities, and four different world systems. In effect, the narrative cannot be simply reduced to the ethnographic exploration of four worlds through their representatives. The narrative opens with Janet’s introduction into the world of Joanna, the world that most represents the present of the text. From there, the text introduces three of four of the characters is introduced, and the novel begins to introduce each of the worlds. The next sections of the text oscillate between Janet’s exploration of the world of Joanna, and descriptions of the utopian space of Whileaway. Through those engagements the text begins a satiric critique of the present world through Janet’s continual refusal to live up to the norms of that world, and the failures of that world to enforce those norms. From there, the narrative shifts to focus on the world of Jeannine, a repressed world in which the depression continues unabated, and the possibilities for women are even more limited. In each case, the world of Whileaway creates a deliberate contrast with the limited possibilities of the worlds of Joanna and Jeannine, allowing for the reader to recognize the contingent nature of each of the worlds. The final section moves into the dystopian world of Jael or Alice Reasoner, which is defined by warfare between men and women, with each side searching to annihilate the other. At the same time, the limitations of Janet are revealed. After exploring the world, Jael reveals why she has brought the women together, to support her attempt to destroy the Manlanders. Janet refuses this proposal, Jeannine accepts it, and the narrative never reveals the choice of Joanna. With these decisions, the narrative ends with each of the characters returning to their original worlds.

The text also tracks the various transformations of each of the characters through their engagement with each other, the ability of women to profoundly change each other’s worlds through the act of collective engagement and exchange, through the substantial act of consciousness-raising. Jeannine probably transforms the most, moving from a deep investment in the restricted horizons for women in her world to contribute to the war on Jael’s planet. Joanna’s transformations, while not drastic, are similarly significant, moving from an ambivalent embrace of the women’s movement to a full commitment to the radical feminist perspective, along with a sense of health and well being gained through the rejection of the conventions and expectations of femininity, of the rejection of the restricted role of supportive reproductive labor for men. Furthermore, the narrative of each character’s process of consciousness raising produces an incredible surplus of text, as she figuratively regurgitates those very restrictive discursive structures of femininity, from the institutional structures of psychoanalysis to the informal expectations of everyday common sense. These moments of seeming free association constitute the surplus to the narrative of the text, the excess that escapes the conventions of the narrative. The transformations of the two women from the future are harder to measure, less linked to the linear project of feminist transformation, but they, nonetheless, exist. Through her involvement in the world of Joanna, Janet breaks one of the most significant taboos of the world of Whileaway, the taboo of involving oneself in a sexual relationship with one that is significantly older or younger than oneself, with her relationship with Laura Rose. She also has to confront the possibility that the foundational narratives of Whileaway might be a myth, a cover up for the profound act of genocide that Jael is planning for her world. Jael is the exception, the catalyst who brings the other three together, who change each of the rest, while remaining unchanged herself.




[1] See Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1987), Chapter One.