Re Sean's question:
Perhaps he wasn't, but consider that this was the early sixties. Were
verymany 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.
But there were people writing in the 60s eg Delany (quite apart from any women
writers of the time) who were aware of gender issues. So things were stirring
in the zeitgeist, even if one doesn't necessarily expect 90s PC attitudes.
A thing I find somewhat spooky in Herbert's work is his verging-on-obsession
with occult female conspiracies doing their best to run history (this occurs
in a non-Dune novel/set of link stories as well--The GodMakers I think)--the
point at which I finally gave up on Dune (God Emperor I think) was the one in
which not only the Bene Gesserit but another group into tantric-style sex
aimed at enslaving/brainwashing powerful males--Holy Matres?--figures.
Returning to this after reading Suzette's comment (her novels have given me
much enjoyment ever since I read 'For the Sake of Grace' in an anthology and
went out looking for anything else by her): I think there's a problem
sometimes with the way men depict women as 'really' and often somehow
secretly, powerful (Dr Johnson: Nature has given women so much power that the
law in its wisdom gives them very little--this may not be an exact quote).
It's the sort of power without responsibility or restraints which J S Mill
suggested was characteristic of people who had power but not of a kind that
was recognised and overt, which can then be taken to imply that power in
women's hands is necessarily dark and dangerous.
Saying women are powerful in these surreptitious ways is a way of keeping them
out of other legitimated and respected kinds of power.
On the idea that women really ran everything, I read something recently
(cultural studies) pointing out that this was often a theme of 1950s
sitcoms--the competent wife deviously helping out her dumb husband (eg the one
where the wife was a witch). So perhaps Herbert was picking up on this
zeitgeisty theme.
Lesley
Lesley_Hall@classic.msn.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:48 PDT