On Mon, 21 Apr 1997, lissa bloomer wrote:
> Mike Levy wrote:
>
> You may be right about this, Lissa. I've seen similar things said about a
> >number of female fiction writers as well, particularly Eleanor Arnason. How
> >does this connect with Le Guin's whole carrier bag theory of fiction by
> >the way?
>
>
> hmm... i suppose, back to the idea of hero's, that the hero's journey is
> usually linear: (the german "bildungsroman") young male's parents die,
> young male goes out into the world to find fatherness, finds evil, kills
> evil, (sometimes finds out evil is father)((feminist?)), becomes mr.
> goodness of the universe. Le Guin believes the hero story is not what is
> good about novels (and sci fi) --- as novels should be containers for
> collections. so, i would imagine that in order to collect, she must
> meander, rather than take the ol' straightaway. (hence, the loopyness? the
> curves and wanderings?) as well, she collects her ideas into a bag --
> taking the ideas in, holding them next to her. i'm not sure if Le Guin
> would go so far as to say that this mirrors what the french fem critics of
> the body (such as Cixous) theorize -- because woman as bag sounds pretty
> terrible. as does woman as hole, or woman as
> emptiness-that-needs-to-be-filled (like Lillian Robinson writes satirically
> about)...
>
> i guess Le Guin is writing that women collect and men kill--gatherers vs.
> hunters. (sorry.)(she is, after all, referring to anthropology). but i
> don't know if she relates this to our bodies directly... although the
> sexual implications are glaring to me.
>
> -lissa bloomer
>
You might be interested in the essay "Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea:
Rescuing the Damaged Child"which appeared in the January 1997 issue of The
New York Review of SF. It was written by Sandra Lindow (who I have the great
good fortune to be married to) and it discusses some of the connections
between Le Guin's carrier bag theory, Carol Gilligan's theories of moral
development, Le Guin's frequent use of child abuse in her fiction, and
her attitudes towards abortion.
Mike Levy
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