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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 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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