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This weekend I read City of Illusions, one of Ursula K Le Guin's early Hainish novels.
Here's my review:
And I was just thinking about female writers who are extremely good writers, but could not or did not write women with any real agency or interiority.
Obviously this made me think of Rosemary Sutcliff, and how deeply and tenderly she explores male characters and their relationships to each other...and how women are only ever ciphers in her work.
I've never been able to decide which explanation is worse: that she was incapable of believing that women (besides her) had any real depth or whether she thought they could, but she was just completely uninterested in it.
The difference between Le Guin and Sutcliff is that Le Guin grew. She saw where she was weak or had failed and she worked hard to become better. I admire that tremendously.
(Btw, I've heard she and Joanna Russ were correspondents, which makes so much sense, and I would commit murder to be able to read the letters between them.)
What's striking about Le Guin's internalized misogyny is that she was so smart and also she lived in the 20th century. Female writers of the past had written wonderful and nuanced female characters, so it was clearly possible. Le Guin's mother was an interesting, thoughtful, intelligent woman with a talent for writing. So why did Le Guin have such a hard time discovering(?) that it was possible to write interesting female characters? I speculate that it had something to do with the world of anthropology that she grew up in because of her father, but there were significant female anthropologists during Le Guin's formative years and surely she came into contact with them? I just don't know.
I guess we all just have major blind spots and the question is whether we are open to having those pointed out to us and working to learn to see.
Here's my review:
This is the strongest of the 3 early Hainish books but goodness gracious, young Le Guin couldn’t write a woman to save her life, could she?
That’s horrifying for what it says about the culture she grew up in but heartening because it reminds us that we can grow: this is the same woman who, decades later, was able to write Tehanu. May we all be so lucky as to become better versions of ourselves.
And I was just thinking about female writers who are extremely good writers, but could not or did not write women with any real agency or interiority.
Obviously this made me think of Rosemary Sutcliff, and how deeply and tenderly she explores male characters and their relationships to each other...and how women are only ever ciphers in her work.
I've never been able to decide which explanation is worse: that she was incapable of believing that women (besides her) had any real depth or whether she thought they could, but she was just completely uninterested in it.
The difference between Le Guin and Sutcliff is that Le Guin grew. She saw where she was weak or had failed and she worked hard to become better. I admire that tremendously.
(Btw, I've heard she and Joanna Russ were correspondents, which makes so much sense, and I would commit murder to be able to read the letters between them.)
What's striking about Le Guin's internalized misogyny is that she was so smart and also she lived in the 20th century. Female writers of the past had written wonderful and nuanced female characters, so it was clearly possible. Le Guin's mother was an interesting, thoughtful, intelligent woman with a talent for writing. So why did Le Guin have such a hard time discovering(?) that it was possible to write interesting female characters? I speculate that it had something to do with the world of anthropology that she grew up in because of her father, but there were significant female anthropologists during Le Guin's formative years and surely she came into contact with them? I just don't know.
I guess we all just have major blind spots and the question is whether we are open to having those pointed out to us and working to learn to see.
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And, not sure if this is IM or not, but around the time Sutcliff was growing up, I don't think the move to put women back into history in different roles had anywhere near as much influence as it does today. Of her few books with female protagonists, Lady Fairfax in The Rider of the White Horse spends a lot of her time suffering patiently and waiting. I haven't read The Armourer's House, but a review on Goodreads comments on its lack of plot and the Wikipedia summary backs that up.
Sutcliff in interviews strikes me as the kind of person who, had she been born some decades later, might have been setting records as a mountain climber or piloting an apache. Still's Disease certainly didn't stop her from being active and productive, but if she hadn't been so strong, it could have been easy to be condemned to a life of passivity, of objecthood.
To write historical adventure books about people going to hazardous places and getting into dangerous situations may have been rather a pleasant escape from a sometimes trying everyday life, and that would to Sutcliff perhaps have meant writing primarily about men. Of the women famous for going against gender stereotypes that Sutcliff would likely have been familiar with, there's Joan of Arc (burned at the stake), Mary Read (died in prison), Ann Bonny (pregnant in prison; disappeared from the historical record), Gwenllian ferch Gruffudd (beheaded), Boadicea (poisoned herself). Not necessarily easy models for the kind of book that lets the protagonist survive and have a happily ever after.
That said, one of the odd things about Rider of the White Horse is that, from what I remember twenty plus years after reading it, the book stops before the thing that Lady Fairfax is actually famous for happens. i.e. crying out that her husband 'had more wit than to be here!' at the trial of Charles I.
Le Guin was born nine years after Sutcliff. (I've just looked that up and it blew my mind a little at there wasn't a bigger age gap – I'd mentally positioned them much further apart). Anyway, not hugely different in age, but certainly their background separated them. Military families aren't known for their radicalism and free-thinking, and the attachment of Sutcliff to Kipling would certainly have been nourished in that environment; I think it may have strengthened and limited her. In contrast, Le Guin was born into an academic family, so was in a sense primed to ask awkward questions of herself of others.
Sorry, rambling reply that I hadn't especially intended to write. Putting off coding homework can do strange things to a person.
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(I've just looked that up and it blew my mind a little at there wasn't a bigger age gap – I'd mentally positioned them much further apart).
Right?!?
Military families aren't known for their radicalism and free-thinking, and the attachment of Sutcliff to Kipling would certainly have been nourished in that environment; I think it may have strengthened and limited her. In contrast, Le Guin was born into an academic family, so was in a sense primed to ask awkward questions of herself of others.
Oh, absolutely.
No need to apologize! I posted precisely for conversation like this!
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True. I'm trying to think of the female characters in her books now, and yes, they mostly lack agency. None of them really get to push the plot at all.
That said, I've got a soft-spot for Cottia clinging onto her identity as a woman of the Iceni, even if beyond that she's mostly characterised by her loyalty to Marcus and fondness for Cub. According to Wikipedia a major antagonist in The Mark of the Horse Lord was a woman (the Queen of the Caldones) and I can't remember that at all.
Anyway, thanks, I enjoyed your post a lot. I keep on saying that I'll read Le Guin beyond Earthsea, and I really must.
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You're welcome! DW is the place I like to have these conversations because there are people who actually want to be part of them here!
I definitely do recommend reading as much Le Guin as possible, including her nonfiction, which is truly fantastic.
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And you're so right about UKLG! The Dispossessed/TLHOD double bill always strikes me in this way: The Dispossessed is such a mess on this point (I will really never forgive it for the handling of the sexual assault Shevet commits), and then TLHOD has this very nuanced argument about how sexism poisons Genly's mission on Gethen -- but of course, there aren't any women qua women around. And then you get to her later career, just as you say, and it's worlds apart. I feel that reading the Earthsea series is like fast-forwarding through this development of hers, from Wizard, which contains moments of really egregious sexism, to Tehanu, which reads to me like someone who has just fully grasped the full horrible weight of patriarchy and is enraged, through The Other Wind, which has its blind spots (the veil…) and paints an interesting picture of a particular segment of American feminism in the 2000s.
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YES. I need to write her to her son and beg him to release a collection...
The Dispossessed is such a mess on this point (I will really never forgive it for the handling of the sexual assault Shevet commits), and then TLHOD has this very nuanced argument about how sexism poisons Genly's mission on Gethen -- but of course, there aren't any women qua women around.
Yes. TLHOD holds up better in this regard by just...ignoring women, which does NOT say good things about where she was at that point in her life.
. I feel that reading the Earthsea series is like fast-forwarding through this development of hers, from Wizard, which contains moments of really egregious sexism, to Tehanu, which reads to me like someone who has just fully grasped the full horrible weight of patriarchy and is enraged, through The Other Wind, which has its blind spots (the veil…) and paints an interesting picture of a particular segment of American feminism in the 2000s.
YES YES YES. It's her journey in microcosm! And Tehanu has literally 60 years of pent-up rage....
I really wish she'd lived long enough to write one more Earthsea book. The Other Wind is just not the strongest story to end on...
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I think that internalised misogyny could have played a part in this lack of agency or depth. Or, even if these writers believed that women had depth or interest as characters, a big part of society didn't--so they wrote about men, which I guess makes more sense for writers who focussed on historical novels. So I don't think it's related to being smart or not--it's the world they lived in, and it was impossible to not be affected by it and its sexism. In Le Guin's case, I think that's how we got a book like "The Dispossessed", which goes light years ahead in some ways, and completely backwards in others.
Also: using male characters might be a deliberate, conscious decision, as a way to create distance, or give the writer more freedom to have her character do things "impossible" for a woman to do. I definitely agree with a commenter above and their escapism explanation! And, back to the whole society thing, criticism might have been kinder/less harsh towards a male character than a female one (I feel this still happens today!), so it makes sense that writers did this. And that distance might have even let them write about themselves more freely. I was just re-reading a historical novel by Violet Jacob, where her main character is a man--and an artist, like she was. So she gave him a gender that would let him move more freely in society, like a woman perhaps couldn't, but still kept the personality traits she wanted to show--as a writer, maybe doing what she could within the limits of society? A solution that's not ideal, but realistic? It's impossible to know for sure, but it feels deliberate. (And also, I find it delightful, because it makes me think that self-inserts have always been a thing!)
Anyway, these are just random thoughts! I really appreciated this post--it's definitely worth thinking about these things, because misogyny and sexism still affect us, and it's important to try to unpack it. Thank you for sharing!
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That reminds me of historical detective novel writer Lindsey Davis being asked if she was in love with her protagonist Falco, and she remarked something along the lines of how no one ever seemed to think he could be a self-insert, that she was writing what she wanted to be.
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Yeah, I will admit that this makes a lot more sense to me with historical novels than it does for scifi. Like you say, it's incredible how forward-thinking Le Guin was in some areas, and how backwards in others. In a genre that is all about examining how things might be different!
I was just re-reading a historical novel by Violet Jacob, where her main character is a man--and an artist, like she was. So she gave him a gender that would let him move more freely in society, like a woman perhaps couldn't, but still kept the personality traits she wanted to show--as a writer, maybe doing what she could within the limits of society? A solution that's not ideal, but realistic? It's impossible to know for sure, but it feels deliberate.
That is so interesting!
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I love her and yet. She never really grew on that front. Even on the rare occasion a female character is the supposed protagonist of a Sutcliff book, she still manages to be a cipher!
Exactly! I would absolutely love to have a conversation with her about it, though it would probably be very frustrating.
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