At 15:01:42 Wed, 24 Sep 1997, Janice Dawley wrote:
>Not that I am decrying Dune -- in its paranoid way, I
>found it interesting and entertaining. I even liked the second book, though
>I never read any further than that. I was not offended by the portraits of
>women I found there, but it also seemed that Herbert was not very aware of
>gender issues.
At 05:15 PM 9/24/97 -0500, Sean Johnston wrote:
>Perhaps he wasn't, but consider that this was the early sixties. Were very
>many people like Frank Herbert very aware of gender issues as we define
>the term ('aware') today? I think that, were he writing today, you'd be
right,
>but to apply a nineties sensibility (I'm assuming yours is a nineties
>sensibility) to a thing written in the sixties, and probably from a sixties
>sensibility, isn't fair to the person who wrote in the sixties.
Come now. I believe I was very fair. The United States at the time Herbert
wrote Dune had had a long history of feminism of which he was probably
aware. I'm not particularly upset that he did not infuse his work with
feminism, but neither am I going to turn a blind eye on the grounds that he
was kept ignorant by society. There were science fiction authors writing at
the time who WERE conscious of gender issues. Samuel Delany's Babel-17 was
published one year after Dune. The main character of that novel is a woman
named Rydra Wong, a spaceship captain with an extraordinary gift for
languages. A smart, strong, competent character -- even a role model.
-- Janice
-----
Janice E. Dawley.....Burlington, VT
http://homepages.together.net/~jdawley/jedhome.htm
Listening to: Radiohead, OK Computer; Tricky, Pre-Millennium Tension
"...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
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