Where No Man has Gone Before

Essays on Women and Science Fiction

Lucie Armitt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136322082
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

How do women writers use science fiction to challenge assumptions about the genre and its representations of women?

To what extent is the increasing number of women writing science fiction reformulating the expectations of readers and critics?

What has been the effect of this phenomenon upon the academic establishment and the publishing industry?

These are just some of the questions addressed by this collection of original essays by women writers, readers and critics of the genre. But the undoubted existence of a recent surge of women's interest in science fiction is by no means the full story. From Mary Shelley onwards, women writers have played a central role in the shaping and reshaping of this genre, irrespective of its undeniably patriarchal image. Through a combination of essays on the work of writers such as Doris Lessing and Ursula Le Guin, with others on still-neglected writers such as Katherine Burdekin and C. L. Moore and a wealth of contemporaries including Suzette Elgin, Gwyneth Jones, Maureen Duffy and Josephine Saxton, this anthology takes a step towards redressing the balance.

Perhaps, above all, what this collection demonstrates is that science fiction remains as particularly well-suited to the exploration of woman as 'alien' or 'other' in our culture today, as it was with the publication of Frankenstein in 1818.

Part I

Writing Through the Century: Individual Authors

Chapter 1

The loss of the feminine principle in Charlotte Haldane’s Man’s World and Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night

Elizabeth Russell

The title of this anthology, Where No Man Has Gone Before, in no way describes the dystopian societies depicted by Charlotte Haldane and Katherine Burdekin, for their fictional worlds are men’s worlds, ruled by men for men. The women in these worlds have been reduced to their biological function and it is this alone that gives them a social identity. In both novels the women are minor characters and comply with the dominant ideology. They are depicted by silence rather than sound and only exist in so far as they internalise male desire and imagine themselves as men imagine them to be. The women of Haldane’s world have been elevated to a pure and intensely ‘feminine’ level; those of Burdekin’s world have been devalued into ‘unwomen’. At opposite poles, neither the former nor the latter have the possibility of asserting themselves, of becoming fully developed human beings. In this essay, I shall attempt to decipher their silence in order to make clear the political message that both Haldane and Burdekin – by adopting the voice of Cassandra – try to put over.

Charlotte Haldane’s Man’s World, first published in 1926, depicts a futuristic scientific socialist state which covers North America, Australasia and Europe. Her husband, the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, had written an essay, Daedalus: or Science and the Future, only three years before, in which he suggests that the responsibilities of the future should be left in the hands of a scientific elite. Haldane’s essay was answered with scepticism in 1924 by Bertrand Russell’s Icarus or the Future of Science. Both essays constitute different views of the possibility of science to promote human happiness. For Russell, Daedalus represents the rational scientist whose prime aim is to aid humanity, which he does by taking a middle road, whereas his son, Icarus, represents the irresponsible scientist who does not heed the warnings of others and refuses to be guided. Rash and imprudent, Icarus becomes over-confident of his own abilities and allows his passions to take precedence over his reason. The middle road, the road indicated by Daedalus, represents the perfect balance between head and heart, or – as Nietzsche put it – between the Apollonian and Dionysian.

In the early twentieth century there appeared a great number of scientific utopias which pointed out that the perfect society of the future would be one inhabited by rational thinkers who, like Daedalus, would take the middle road and be aware of the consequences of each act. Daedalus and science was the road civilisation had to follow if it was to avoid self-destruction. The scientific dystopia, on the other hand, was the civilisation of Icarus, the irresponsible scientist who does not take into account the consequences which his scientific experiments may have upon humanity. The conflict between head and heart, reason and emotion, have long been the focus of many a philosophical discussion. Christa Wolf, in her essay Conditions of a Narrative, refers to the warning issued by Leonardo da Vinci which runs: ‘Knowledge which has not passed through the senses can produce none but destructive truth’ and follows his line of thought by adding:

There could truly be a new renaissance of consciousness if this insight were to bear fruit again, after the long dangerous experiment with abstract rationality, which resulted in thinking that everything is a means to an end. What speaks against this possibility? The fact that the senses of many people – through no ‘fault’ of their own – have dried up, and that they are justifiably afraid to reactivate them.¹

Charlotte Haldane’s Man’s World is a discussion of the conflict of head/heart, of rational and abstract thinking/emotion and feeling. It is also the conflict between science and religion. In this, Man’s World offers little that is original from the other scientific utopias or dystopias of its time² but, read from a feminist perspective, it is clear that Man’s World is essentially an analysis of gender distinctions and a warning of what the effect on society would be ‘if the human race could determine in advance the sex of its children’.³ As the title of her novel suggests, the future for women in a man’s world is grim. Women have little or no say in matters of state. Science has solved almost all the problems afflicting humanity but it has not yet been able to control or manipulate instinct. The female population of the scientific state is kept down to a minimum. All girls entering adolescence choose to become either ‘vocational mothers’ or – if they show no mothering instinct – they are sterilised by the state and doomed to be neuters. Living in a male supremacist society, the women in Man’s World enjoy the privileges which their status as mothers or neuters allows them, as long as they stay within the limits prescribed to them by the state. The existence of both mothers and neuters, however, is at risk when it is revealed that plans are already under way which, if successful, would reduce the population of mothers (and possibly neuters) down to one woman, who would be solely responsible for the continuation of the race, like ‘a sort of human termite queen’ (MW :77).

All members of the scientific state are classified according to a rigid hierarchy. The women are mothers or neuters (entertainers, artists, writers or administrators). The men are grouped according to their abilities. The Brain of the state is constituted by the scientists; the Patrol comprises its administrative and executive officers and the Body of the state comprises the ‘masses’. There is no room for those who cannot conform to the ruling norms as is the case of the two individualists, Christopher and Morgana, who must be sacrificed (they commit suicide).

In an analysis of the gender distinctions inherent in Man’s World I shall take Hélène Cixous’ table of binary oppositions as a starting point and then discuss C. S. Jung’s process of individuation and its application to the novel.⁴

Cixous⁵ offers the following table of binary oppositions in her analysis of phallocentrism and shows how women have been allotted the category of ‘not man’, of absence of word, law and meaning in a hierarchy in which man is and woman is not:-

Activity	/	Passivity
Sun	/	Moon
Culture	/	Nature
Day	/	Night
Father	/	Mother
Head	/	Heart
Intelligible	/	Sensitive
Logos	/	Pathos

The norms on the left are, according to patriarchal tradition, to be listed under male = positive = master whereas those on the right would bear the reading female = negative = mastered. In order for the one side to acquire meaning it necessarily has to destroy the other. Thus, as activity equals victory in patriarchal thought, it follows that the male is the winner and the female the loser.

Both the mothers (to an exaggerated degree) and the neuters (to a lesser degree) ‘fit’ the norms described as ‘feminine’ in Cixous’ patriarchal binary table; likewise, the male members of the scientific state fit the description the table presents as ‘masculine’. Not only does this equation of femininity leave no space for the development of woman’s self or a change in the status quo, it also denies men the possibility of achieving wholeness by withholding from them the feminine principle.

The only person who receives any characterisation in the novel is Christopher. Christopher is a seeker of a religion, an individualist in a society of stereotyped people, in search of his self. He is also an artist. He is a musician who takes his inspiration from nature: he learns from the song of the bird, the moaning of the wind, the humming of insects and the murmuring of the stream. As an artist he is tolerated by the scientific state, but Christopher has a defect: he is emotional rather than rational, he possesses a ‘mystical understanding of the ways of women’ (MW :105) is described as having ‘a streak of femininity’ (MW :104) and as being ‘intermediate sexually’ (MW :322) and ‘submasculine’ (MW :322). People in the scientific state insist that he has not grown up yet and that he needs special assistance to ‘think like a man’ (MW :265). Christopher cannot and will not think like a man. Furthermore, he seldom thinks, as he himself stresses: he feels.

Applied to the Jungian theory of individuation, which is the quest for self, Christopher’s journey seems doomed right from the beginning. Jung believed that a fully developed individual personality must transcend gender; it must not be endowed by either excessive masculinity or excessive femininity. It is true, as Annis Pratt points out,⁶ that Jung’s definition of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are rigid and almost stereotypical, but it is also true that the same gender stereotyping is present in Man’s World and I believe that this is what classifies Haldane’s novel as a dystopia.⁷ To achieve wholeness, each person has to come to terms with, and incorporate, characteristics of the opposite sex into her or his personality. This means that a man would have to listen to what Jung calls the ‘inner voices’ of his ‘anima’ which is feminine and a woman would listen to the ‘inner voices’ of her ‘animus’ which is masculine. The feminine anima or soul is represented by the moon and is erotic and mysterious, sentimental and irrational. The masculine animus is represented by the creativity of the sun and by the logical and spiritual. To become whole, the individual has to become reconciled with those aspects of his or her personality which have not been taken into account. No one can become whole by repressing the ‘inner voices’ in the unconscious.

In the individuation process a man might become ‘possessed’ by the anima and this will cause him to behave in a manner stereotypically expected of women, such as openly expressing emotions like moodiness, sulking, lamenting and tearfulness, whereas a woman who is possessed by her animus will become shrill and opinionated. (The blatant sexism in Jung’s theory has recently been discussed in depth by Demaris S. Wehr.)⁸ At the beginning of his individuation process, Christopher suffers from neurosis: from a split between his conscious and his unconscious. He cannot relate to the other people in the scientific state, people whom he sees as ‘100 per cent man and 100 per cent woman’ (MW :298), and this, together with the fact that there is no free will, causes the neurosis. By free will he means, not the right to choose between good and evil since both concepts have been dispensed with in this futuristic society, but the right to choose one’s own destiny, the right to self-government which is true anarchism. At the same time, he has not been able to enter a dialogue with the ‘inner voices’ of his unconscious; he is not aware that the basic reason for this split is that the ‘problem’ is not only an external one (incompatibility with the community and the state) but also one which is internal; and to solve this he has to assimilate his homosexual soul.

One outcome of this neurosis is that Christopher projects onto his much loved sister, Nicolette, what are actually his own characteristics. He imagines she is like him, is a rebel at heart, shares his desire for the mystical and transcends her gender. It is only when Nicolette falls in love with the 100 per cent manly geneticist, and becomes pregnant by him, that she shakes off her homosexuality and slips into the hierarchy as a 100 per cent mother. This ironically helps Christopher is his quest for self. By projecting less onto his sister he enlarges his own personality. He accepts the ‘inner voices’ of his anima which encourage him to be more emotional, more feminine. But as his individuation process reaches its completion it becomes clear that Christopher’s alienation from the society he was born into offers no way out except death. With this knowledge, he climbs into his small plane, the Makara⁹ (which is always referred to as ‘she’) and flies higher and higher into the sky in a suicidal flight which seems more like another beginning than an end. Christopher as a ‘whole’ person would be characterised as follows:

Activity	!	– –
	!	Moon
	!	Nature
	!	Night
	!	Emotions
	!	Sensitive
	!	Pathos

A ‘feminine’ mind within a masculine body has no possibility of survival in a society which insists on polarising gender differences. As Christopher sails higher up into the clouds he ponders:

That word sex (words were like stepping-stones in the pools of thought to-night) – that had to be thrown overboard too, before Christopher could soar freely towards his destination. It was another feeble monosyllable, a euphemism, masking emotions which had been institutionalized by man. You might turn away from it, withdraw, deny, deny, deny – it was useless, down there. Neutrality was not negation. On that ground you were either one of the army of propagatives, or an enemy whom they would ultimately extirpate. Moses and Luther between them had seen to that. Their modern successors did not preach; practice was more efficient. It was not the homosexual body they dreaded, but the hom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I. Writing Through the Century: Individual Authors
• PART II. Aliens and Others: A Contemporary Perspective
• PART III. Readers and Writers: SF as Genre Fiction
• Bibliography
• Index