Subject: File: "FEMINISTSF-LIT LOG0204E" ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2002 08:49:35 -0400 Reply-To: friendly STRICTLY ON TOPIC discussion of Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Sender: friendly STRICTLY ON TOPIC discussion of Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia From: Dave Belden Subject: Reopening The Dispossessed Comments: To: friendly STRICTLY ON TOPIC discussion of Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia In-Reply-To: <20020428200759.NVUI23644.priv-edtnes16-hme0.telusplanet.net@[161.184.46.243]> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I have been trying to get the time in a busy month to write about the Dispossessed. This was a seminal novel for me personally: one of a very few that made me throw all other career options out the window and try to make it as a writer. I was almost afraid to reread it: in case it wasn't as good for me now as it was then, or maybe in case I had not kept faith with it - I don't know what. When I read the novel first in 1976 I was more or less, at least in my dreams, living on Anarres. I had for 25 of my 27 years lived in first religious and then feminist/left communes, had been working for some years in collectives, considered myself more an anarchist than a socialist, was living in voluntary poverty. A lot of Anarres rang true to me: that it was highly idealistic, but calcifying as people sought security in the familiar and in groupthink. LeGuin understands that human nature endures, that we still seek for power and status even when we have leveled the playing field so drastically. She also understands the horror that people raised in a severely puritanical and idealistic milieu feel when they first go out to meet the enemy, the morally lax, the greedy capitalists... and the surprise when they discover that there are great souls among them, and also mostly just more human nature, not that different in some ways. I liked that the Anarres anarchists are still dependent on the wealthier society - that rang true. She captured a great deal of the complexity involved in being an anarchist, even while taking the anarchist world so much further than we had been able to create it in the 60s/70s. There was an article written by an American woman that was much quoted in the circles I was in, then, called 'The Tyranny of Structurelessness.' The argument was that if you try to create a world without formal structure, informal structures arise that are worse, because semi-invisible, without structures for democratic control. Anarres is actually managed by an informal structure that is extremely hard for Shevek to see. LeGuin seemed very wise about all this. The book is both an inspiration and a warning for anarchists. I was moved by reading the novel again. If anything I caught more of the nuances. The power of Shevek's search for truth was more of an inspiration to me this time. That he searches for truth in physics, which is so much more of a hard-edged field (in spite of its weirdnesses) than religion, politics or literature, was interesting to me: as a metaphor for truth... what could be more true than a weird theory that ends in creating an ansible, a real way of actually obliterating distance? Nothing postmodern here, in the sense of all truths being relative, and equally true. Either the ansible works or it doesn't. This establishes an old-fashioned (and possibly future) notion of truth at the center of the novel. As he follows his sense of truth, he is comes to question the way his own society is failing in its mission, and to reach out to the other society and to discover truth-seekers and good people in it. Truth in that sense turns out to be wider than even the most idealistic political doctrine. Reading the book again I was struck by how plausible she makes it all sound, how real it seems, how believable the people. I thought once again what a great story teller and creator of worlds she is. I am just full of admiration. I love her sense of language, no false notes, every page a pleasure to read. I guess I turn out to be a lifelong fan. All this in spite of the fact that I no longer call myself an anarchist. I don't think human nature is advanced enough to create an anarchist society. It's not a bad vision, but for a very distant future, something we can move gradually towards but never expect to reach. I am more aware now how intractable human nature is, and how dangerous it can be to try to enact overly idealistic social systems. You might not get Anarres - you might get Stalin or Mao. I am more aware of the good that has been created in capitalist societies, often as a result of the campaigns of socialists and feminists. Better to deal with the devils we know, in ways we know, than try to create angels: that's my view now. A classic progression from idealism to a more cautious wisdom. Rereading the Dispossessed I think LeGuin was there all along, in some ways, and in other ways was letting her idealism rip. This is a great novel, big enough to incorporate different interpretations. Dave Dave Belden web page: www.davidbelden.com > -----Original Message----- > From: friendly STRICTLY ON TOPIC discussion of Feminist SF/Fantasy and > Utopia [mailto:FEMINISTSF-LIT@UIC.EDU]On Behalf Of Angela Barclay > Sent: Sunday, April 28, 2002 9:19 AM > To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@UIC.EDU > Subject: [*FSF-L*] upcoming discussions > > > Our upcoming book discussions are: > > Suzette Haden Elgin's _Native Tongue_ (May 6 - June 2) > > Marge Piercy's _Woman on the Edge of Time_ (June 3 - June 30) > > > > In the week that remains before the _Native Tongue_ discussion > begins don't > hesitate to regenerate the discussion of _The Dispossessed_. Are > there any > listmembers who have written papers on _The Dispossessed_ or > other works of > Le Guin they'd be willing to share with us? > ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2002 23:11:30 -0500 Reply-To: friendly STRICTLY ON TOPIC discussion of Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Sender: friendly STRICTLY ON TOPIC discussion of Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia From: "Janice E. Dawley" Subject: BDG: The Dispossessed After many delays, I have at last finished re-reading *The Dispossessed*. What an amazing book! I remembered its strength, the acuteness of its vision, but I had forgotten how beautifully structured and musically resonant it is. Not in a dazzling, showy way, but in complete service to the story and its concepts. Odo is quoted as saying "true voyage is return", and Shevek's General Temporal Theory says, "You *can* go home again [...], so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been." That is exactly how Shevek's story is structured, a spiral voyage that returns him to a changed Anarres, a revitalized world. How workable is that world, really? I don't know. One of the great unanswered questions of the novel is how Anarres could come to be, complete with a new language and a million citizens willing and able to speak it. Apart from a few historical notes about Odo, we don't get much background on the revolution and the early years of the colonization. But I found that this wasn't that important to me, because the contemporary society was described with such detail and subtlety that I completely believed in it, warts and all. Less convincing, actually, was the depiction of A-Io on Urras. Perhaps because so many of the events and customs there could be taken straight from our own newspaper headlines, Le Guin seems to have taken less care and invested less emotion there. There is not the same need to make it feel real because it is already depressingly familiar. Most readers see the novel as a compare and contrast exercise between a capitalist nation-state (A-Io on Urras) and a theoretical utopian alternative (Anarres). The differences between them are highlighted again and again. Urras is fertile and rich, but stratified and secretive; Anarres is comparatively barren and harsh, while also being much more open and egalitarian. But Le Guin takes care to show that the two planets are not independent of one another. Each needs and reacts against the other in a complex economic and ideological system. Near the end of the book, the Terran ambassador Keng says to Shevek: Perhaps Anarres is the key to Urras... The revolutionists in Nio, they come from that same tradition. They weren't just striking for better wages or protesting the draft. They are not only socialists, they are anarchists; they were striking against power. You see, the size of the demonstration, the intensity of popular feeling, and the government's panic reaction, all seemed very hard to understand. Why so much commotion? The government here is not despotic. The rich are very rich indeed, but the poor are not so very poor. They are neither enslaved nor starving. Why aren't they satisfied with bread and speeches? Why are they supersensitive? Now I begin to see why. (p. 275, Avon edition) This strikes me as similar to Shevek's idea that there is "a woman in every table top" on Urras -- that by the persistent denial of certain ideas, you only end up thrusting them into the subculture or the subconscious, from whence they will spring again when the time is right. The influence of Jung and Taoist thought is obvious here, as in much of Le Guin's work. In fact, the first description of the wall (one of the book's most pervasive visual images) in chapter 1 can also be seen as one half of a yin-yang symbol written on the face of Anarres. The worlds interpenetrate one another; each is a part of the whole Cetian system. The system is not balanced or unchanging, though -- far from it. Each nation on Urras is depicted as a political powder-keg (Benbili blows about half-way through the book), and Shevek's Syndicate of Initiative does quite a job of stirring up Anarres. To me, this is the central theme of *The Dispossessed*: all human society is process, and it is the responsibility of every individual to understand their place and power in that process, to face the walls and know them, to unbuild them where possible, even knowing that the unbuilding cannot be permanent, that it will have to be done again. It's interesting that the book implies that, if you *aren't* confronting walls and experiencing pain, there's something wrong, either with society or with you. Life is very hard on Anarres, and the descriptions of the famine years are sad and disturbing. But the luxury of Shevek's life at Ieu Eun is even more disturbing, because it is based on the hidden (at least from Shevek) poverty of others. It is fundamentally dishonest. So is the behavior of any number of people on both planets who hypocritically spout ideals while acting in opposition to them. They are taking the easy, dishonest way out. At the end of chapter 2, Shevek says, "[Brotherhood] begins in shared pain." Logically, then, without pain, there is no brotherhood. This fits right in with Le Guin's other extended exploration of an ambiguously utopian society in *Always Coming Home*, with its self- limiting, genetically damaged population, but it runs counter to many people's ideas of the perfect society. She's perverse that way, eh? Petra asked how people engaged with the story, as an exploration of character or an exploration of societies. For me the book is incredibly rich in both. Anarres feels more real to me than many communities on Earth -- even some I've lived in! Urras was less satisfying to me, as I said, but in a way that made sense because Shevek was only there for a year or so and was carefully prevented from seeing much of the planet. And the people... I didn't remember it being so, but upon rereading I've decided this is Le Guin's most character-driven novel. Shevek alone is an extraordinary creation, not so much because he is an extraordinary individual (though he is that), but because we see so many sides of him, the bad with the good. He is a full human being. Then there are all the other memorable characters: Takver (whom I appreciated much more this time around), Bedap, Chifoilisk, Pae, even minor characters like Desar the hoarder, and Bunub, the neighbor with a persecution complex who coveted Shevek and Takver's room. I felt again and again, "I've met people like this. These are real people." This sense of reality reminded me strongly of Le Guin's stories of Orsinia, a fictional Eastern European country that is the subject of *Orsinian Tales* and the novel *Malafrena*. Both books are out of print, but they're well worth tracking down if you are interested in other works by Le Guin that play in the same heart-rending minor key as *The Dispossessed*. And I did find it heart-rending. I don't even know how many times tears slipped from my eyes while reading it. Am I just getting old? I don't know, and I don't care. This is good stuff. Petra also asked, "What are the feminist aspects of the novel?" Well, foremost is the fact that work on Anarres appears to be completely gender neutral. All jobs are equally likely to be held by men or women. And the sexes are not differentiated by clothing or grooming. (Vea asks in chapter 7 how often Anarresti women shave. Shevek's answer is: they don't.) Some of Shevek's earliest intellectual influences, Mitis and Gvarab, are older women, and of course the spiritual founder of Anarres, Odo, is a woman. Marriage, an institution that many radical feminists have objected to, doesn't exist on Anarres, and primary care giving is as likely to be provided by men like Shevek's father as it is by women like Takver or a communal creche. Anarres is truly egalitarian for women. And homosexuals like Bedap are not disapproved of or even seen as unusual. I loved the ease with which Le Guin introduced Shevek's sexual liaison with Bedap, and the fact that it was not a big deal to either of them when it ended. That still seems pretty revolutionary to me. I was bothered, however, by the scene Rachel mentioned, in which Shevek nearly rapes Vea. I too couldn't understand how he would be excited by her resistance, unless Le Guin was positing a primal male response to women who seem to be "asking for it" (Shevek sees Vea as provocative from the beginning). Takver does mention that there are "body profiteers" on Anarres, but since there is no example of one in the text, Shevek's behavior with Vea comes across as bizarre and horrifying, even given that he is drunk. And there is no follow-up to it, so we are left with the impression that her side of the story doesn't matter. Dated is a charitable way of putting it, I suppose. I was also bothered by the characterization of Shevek's mother, Rulag. I had forgotten that she reappears at the end of the book as a firm opponent of the Syndicate of Initiative. There is just no way for me to separate this revelation of her repressive politics from her earlier cold approach as a mother; the one seems to be an outgrowth of the other. It comes across as an indictment of the unnatural career woman who lets her child suffer. Grr. Overall, I think Le Guin was trying to depict complete sexual equality without erasing sex differences altogether... and she botched it now and then. But she mostly got it right. And the book is so well crafted, so intelligent and so resonant otherwise that I still see it as a masterpiece. I could go on and on about the metaphors and patterns in the novel, but I won't. Maybe I'll write an essay one day. Thanks to Petra and all the voters who prompted me to read this book again. It was marvelous. ----- Janice E. Dawley.....Burlington, VT http://homepages.together.net/~jdawley/ Listening to: Television -- Television "...the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other." Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 10:18:06 -0400 Reply-To: friendly STRICTLY ON TOPIC discussion of Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Sender: friendly STRICTLY ON TOPIC discussion of Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia From: Rose Reith Subject: Re: Reopening The Dispossessed Comments: To: friendly STRICTLY ON TOPIC discussion of Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" I'm glad Dave wrote his perceptions of the book. I too have been trying to find the time and an inspiration as to what to say about the Dispossessed, since I finally finished reading it about a week ago. This is only the first time I have read it. It was amazing. It was interesting. Despite it being rather dryly written, I had no trouble finishing it, but as you can see I'm just having great difficulty coming up with anything intelligent to say about it. The way LeGuin makes Annares so real is remarkable. I liked her technique of alternating chapters that eventually led to a feeling of having come full circle. I was really concerned that Shevek would never again fit in with his family and friends on Annares after having broken that taboo and gone to Urras. I didn't find his embarrassing attempt to have sex with that stupid woman, Vea, who certainly behaved like a courtesan, all that unbeleiveable - or was it that people thought he wanted to rape her? - as did some of the other readers who wrote in earlier. I guess I believed that she thought she knew what she was doing, according to the standards of her own society, and his only real fault was not understanding those same standards. She was not really coming on to him the way he perceived it, for her it was just part of the game she was using him in to appear to be such a sophisticated hostess, holding the most enviable soiree. If he had been Urrasti he would have realized that, much of her allure would have been diffused, and he surely would have found a way to score one off her in return. Because he is naive, and believes people are motivated by truer emotions, he thinks she is actually attracted to him for himself, not as a trophy specimen from another world. Anyway, all in all I agree with Dave that LeGuin is truly remarkable in the way she characterizes her novel. It is all very believeable, very moving, and very thought provoking. But for a first time reader, who has not really had any thought or it is also Rose >I have been trying to get the time in a busy month to write about the >Dispossessed. This was a seminal novel for me personally: one of a very few >that made me throw all other career options out the window and try to make >it as a writer. > >I was almost afraid to reread it: in case it wasn't as good for me now as it >was then, or maybe in case I had not kept faith with it - I don't know what. > >When I read the novel first in 1976 I was more or less, at least in my >dreams, living on Anarres. I had for 25 of my 27 years lived in first >religious and then feminist/left communes, had been working for some years >in collectives, considered myself more an anarchist than a socialist, was >living in voluntary poverty. A lot of Anarres rang true to me: that it was >highly idealistic, but calcifying as people sought security in the familiar >and in groupthink. LeGuin understands that human nature endures, that we >still seek for power and status even when we have leveled the playing field >so drastically. She also understands the horror that people raised in a >severely puritanical and idealistic milieu feel when they first go out to >meet the enemy, the morally lax, the greedy capitalists... and the surprise >when they discover that there are great souls among them, and also mostly >just more human nature, not that different in some ways. I liked that the >Anarres anarchists are still dependent on the wealthier society - that rang >true. She captured a great deal of the complexity involved in being an >anarchist, even while taking the anarchist world so much further than we had >been able to create it in the 60s/70s. There was an article written by an >American woman that was much quoted in the circles I was in, then, called >'The Tyranny of Structurelessness.' The argument was that if you try to >create a world without formal structure, informal structures arise that are >worse, because semi-invisible, without structures for democratic control. >Anarres is actually managed by an informal structure that is extremely hard >for Shevek to see. LeGuin seemed very wise about all this. The book is both >an inspiration and a warning for anarchists. > >I was moved by reading the novel again. If anything I caught more of the >nuances. The power of Shevek's search for truth was more of an inspiration >to me this time. That he searches for truth in physics, which is so much >more of a hard-edged field (in spite of its weirdnesses) than religion, >politics or literature, was interesting to me: as a metaphor for truth... >what could be more true than a weird theory that ends in creating an >ansible, a real way of actually obliterating distance? Nothing postmodern >here, in the sense of all truths being relative, and equally true. Either >the ansible works or it doesn't. This establishes an old-fashioned (and >possibly future) notion of truth at the center of the novel. As he follows >his sense of truth, he is comes to question the way his own society is >failing in its mission, and to reach out to the other society and to >discover truth-seekers and good people in it. Truth in that sense turns out >to be wider than even the most idealistic political doctrine. > >Reading the book again I was struck by how plausible she makes it all sound, >how real it seems, how believable the people. I thought once again what a >great story teller and creator of worlds she is. I am just full of >admiration. I love her sense of language, no false notes, every page a >pleasure to read. I guess I turn out to be a lifelong fan. > >All this in spite of the fact that I no longer call myself an anarchist. I >don't think human nature is advanced enough to create an anarchist society. >It's not a bad vision, but for a very distant future, something we can move >gradually towards but never expect to reach. I am more aware now how >intractable human nature is, and how dangerous it can be to try to enact >overly idealistic social systems. You might not get Anarres - you might get >Stalin or Mao. I am more aware of the good that has been created in >capitalist societies, often as a result of the campaigns of socialists and >feminists. Better to deal with the devils we know, in ways we know, than try >to create angels: that's my view now. A classic progression from idealism to >a more cautious wisdom. Rereading the Dispossessed I think LeGuin was there >all along, in some ways, and in other ways was letting her idealism rip. >This is a great novel, big enough to incorporate different interpretations. > >Dave > >Dave Belden >web page: www.davidbelden.com > > > > >> -----Original Message----- >> From: friendly STRICTLY ON TOPIC discussion of Feminist SF/Fantasy and >> Utopia [mailto:FEMINISTSF-LIT@UIC.EDU]On Behalf Of Angela Barclay >> Sent: Sunday, April 28, 2002 9:19 AM >> To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@UIC.EDU >> Subject: [*FSF-L*] upcoming discussions >> >> >> Our upcoming book discussions are: >> >> Suzette Haden Elgin's _Native Tongue_ (May 6 - June 2) >> >> Marge Piercy's _Woman on the Edge of Time_ (June 3 - June 30) >> >> >> >> In the week that remains before the _Native Tongue_ discussion >> begins don't >> hesitate to regenerate the discussion of _The Dispossessed_. Are >> there any >> listmembers who have written papers on _The Dispossessed_ or >> other works of >> Le Guin they'd be willing to share with us? >> -- 'As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.' Virginia Woolf ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 10:58:54 -0400 Reply-To: friendly STRICTLY ON TOPIC discussion of Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Sender: friendly STRICTLY ON TOPIC discussion of Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia From: Dave Belden Subject: Re: BDG: The Dispossessed Comments: To: friendly STRICTLY ON TOPIC discussion of Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Janice, thank you for this post. I learned a lot from it, thought it full of insight. I liked your emphasis on the interdependence of the two societies, and your view that: > To me, this is the central theme of *The > Dispossessed*: all human society is process, and it is the responsibility > of every individual to understand their place and power in that > process, to face the walls and know them, to unbuild them where possible, > even knowing that the unbuilding cannot be permanent, that it will have to > be done again. This in itself is a major argument against the notion of utopia. Societies can be improved, even greatly, but the struggle is constant and never ending: we never arrive. I would say it's only when we feel 'at home' in this constant journeying, when we see the journey itself as home, that we can be comfortable in this world. We even have to learn to feel at home with the idea that there is value in contradictory ideas - not that everything is equally true, but that the ideas you choose and make your 'home' are not all there is. I feel LeGuin is saying all of this. The constant intellectual challenges posed to Shevek and his circle are a great deal of what makes the book appealing to me, and as appealing today as 25 years ago, even though I no longer think Anarres as practicable a goal as I did then. I also liked your statement that > Anarres feels more real to me than many communities on > Earth -- even some I've lived in! I felt similarly, and to my great surprise, felt it more now than when I first read the novel. How do you explain this - what do you think she is doing that makes this stand out from so many less successful descriptions of imagined societies (or even of actual societies)? I fail in analytical ability at this point and start muttering things like 'great novelist', but I would like to understand better, if anyone can go further here. You mentioned a number of things, of course - the full characterization of individuals, the ironical interdependence of enemies - i.e. a level of complexity that reflects reality. I like the descriptions also of the spare physical bleakness of Anarres, so severely idealistic and northern/protestant (in terms from our times), so far from the more Hispanic, warmer, relaxed, life-celebratory 'utopias' of Piercy's 'Woman on the Edge of Time' or Starhawk's 'The Fifth Sacred Thing'. Even so, I feel there is much I don't understand about her achievement here. On the 'rape' scene. I think I agree with the post by Rose Reith, just received. I have been puzzling over this. Did LeGuin assume men had some primeval urge that got triggered by Vea's sexual trickery, or did she just describe a lonely man who thought he was being offered sex and misread the signals because he came from somewhere else? I am more comfortable with the latter interpretation, and with the idea that he had got somewhat unhinged by the frustrations of life on Urras, one of which was the sexual tease gambit he had not known before. Yes, he then behaves badly, but the man isn't a saint, and he probably feels anger towards Vea, for her underhand Urrasi way of operating, as well as lust. How easily we can get confused and act against our own best principles when put in a world where nothing is as it seems. That interpretation works for me. But I agree with Janice about Rulag. Dave ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 20:34:21 EDT Reply-To: friendly STRICTLY ON TOPIC discussion of Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Sender: friendly STRICTLY ON TOPIC discussion of Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia From: Joy Martin Subject: Re: BDG: The Dispossessed Comments: To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@uic.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I've been thinking about the drunken sexual scene with Vea off and on since my last post about it (way back earlier this month), but haven't had the time really to write. Despite it's 'dated' sense, it's a crucial scene, really pivotal in the novel, because it's after that scene that Shevek changes his course on Urras and begins to refocus on the reasons he had come there. Shevek realizes after that evening the extent to which he has been lead astray, or dallied without making progress, both in his theoretical work and in his political work. In Chapter 9, when he realizes 'they own him' and when he talks with his servant, Efor, about the differences in their societies ("No body ever out of work there"...'no' "And nobody hungry?" "Nobody goes hungry while another eats" "Ah"..."It is not all milk and honey on Anarres, Efor". "I don't doubt it, sir ...All the same there's none of them there!" "Them?" "You know Mr. Shevek..the owners"), Shevek finds his bearings and discovers not only the solution to his theoretical quandary, but to his political one. Even before that, at the party, while he is drunk, Shevek takes the plunge into his first moment of eloquent total honesty with his hosts, in that wonderful speech where he says about Anarres "it is not wonderful. It is an ugly world...Life is dull and hard work. You can't always have what you want, or even what you need*, because there isn't enough. You Urrasti have enough...You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful, here. Only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful , nothing but the faces. The other faces, the men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels,. there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit. Because our men and women are free - possessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes - the wall, the wall!" It's immediately after this beautiful speech that Vea takes him away to the bedroom and he almost - not quite- forces himself on her. [*shades of the Rolling Stones!:>) And then there's the other 60s reference, maybe, to 'free is just another word for nothing left to lose'. Even though these references seem pretty humorous when I point them out, the speech is still moving.] After Shevek makes his break away from the college and the 'owners', seeking out the revolutionaries, when he finds them, the women in their group are much more egalitarian, much more reminiscent of Anarres, very unlike the women of Vea's class. "The girl Siro came up to him. Smiling, she stooped as if bowing to him, a little timorously, with decorum, and kissed him on the cheek; then she went out. The touch of her lips was cool, and he felt it on his cheek for a long time." What really got me thinking about all this was wondering about the possible parallels in some current feminist orthodoxy, and in the orthodoxy that had become a problem on Anarres. Did the scene with Vea seem dated because we have come to see any miscommunication over sex as rape or leading to rape? (And always the man's fault?) Is this a case of our own ideas getting ahead of actual changes in our society? How very interesting, for example, that what was unthinkable 30 years ago, the very idea that there is 'date rape', which seemed laughable (except to feminists), has become widely accepted, but rape itself still exists and in fact may be on the upsurge. Similarly, on Anarres, ideas had gotten ahead of actual changes in the society, and the ideas had become an orthodoxy, while hiding problems that still needed changing. When I started noodling around with these parallels, what I came up with was that, even with someone with as much integrity as Shevek, brought up in a society like Anarres, it is still possible that he could have a response to Vea that included excitement over her (apparent) struggle. It's not just a case of 'he's an imperfect but real human being', although he is definitely that, but it's also an excellent illustration of how social change and personal change occur often in various waves or crises, rather than step by step increments. Somewhere in chapter 9 Shevek talks about how he had been looking for 'certainty' -( in his theories, but the context shows us that this applies in life and politics as well)- and how that need for certainty was a mistake. Orthodoxy is just that, a substitution of certainty for honesty. Vea is a woman who makes use of what little power she has in her society,which is mostly sexual power, and who believes that any woman in any society would dress the way she dresses and act the way she acts, if 'given the chance'. Unlike the revolutionary women Shevek later meets, Vea isn't interested in changing anything. Or, if she is, she hasn't confronted this idea in herself in any conscious way. She's not a victim of Shevek, although she is a victim of the narrow gender roles of her society, not that she would ever acknowledge that. Shevek stumbles to the very edge of an abyss in this critical scene, and his subsequent remorse and equally scathing selfassessment lead him back out again. I think it's quite appropriate that LeGuin shows Shevek as reaching an existential crisis through this almost rape scene. It's the 'almost' that's telling, and it's putting it to us, challenging us, the readers, to think about what's actually going on, before, during and after this scene, rather than seeing it through the lens of any kind of orthodoxy. Which is what the whole book, in a nutshell, could be said to be about. Honesty versus orthodoxy. Change vs certainty. I had to think back about what the second wave of feminism, esp. the WLM part of that, was all about. For example,ending rape, not just improving the chances of getting a conviction against a rapist. Idealistic? You bet. But also necessary. One of the most important things going on was women 'telling the truth' about their lives. And that's easiest done by people who are willing to be rebels and be on the 'outside'. As soon as the rebels' ideas become accepted, as soon as they, to some extent, succeed, the problem arises of people taking the ideas as orthodoxy, rather than as part of a process of truth seeking and continuous change. Exactly the kind of problem as LeGuin describes on Anarres. Odo lived her whole life on Urras. She never saw Anarres, the world built from her precepts. And that world, Shevek sees, is in danger from an orthodoxy that has developed because of the very success of those precepts. Rulag, whatever else she is, is someone who is clinging very hard to orthodoxy and for me she represents that tendency in all of us, far more than any 'embittered career woman' stereotype. Part of my admiration for LeGuin is that she will give us a character who could be seen in stereotypical terms, but then shows us that she/he is not that at all, or, is much more than that. I don't think that LeGuin or Shevek (or for that matter, women's liberationists) would agree with the idea of "Better to deal with the devils we know, in ways we know, than try to create angels" . Quite the contrary. As Shevek says at the end of the last chapter, "Freedom is never very safe." and a little while later, he 'laughed, a laugh of clear, unmixed happiness.' -Joy