The Woman's View
Jan. 3rd, 2011 02:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselApr 2010
Lavinia - Ursula Le Guin - Gollancz, 2009
* * * * *
At the risk of displaying the very habit of categorisational thinking that certain of its adherents decry, I would like to make an observation about feminism (hey, we all have a gender so it's a game that everyone can play). Its various forms fall into two main schools of thought that closely mirror the left-right split in politics. One - espoused in liberal, socialist and post-modernist feminism - argues that gender roles in society are socially constructed. Men and women can perform the same roles and there should not be artificial barriers of law or social expectation preventing, say, a woman from being a bishop or a man from raising a child. Another view, which I think is what radical feminists are saying, is that women are naturally different from men and that the issue is that social institutions and cultural practices - especially those of science and technology - do not adequately reflect (and in fact actively work to suppress) women's ways of working and thinking. The difference between the two lies in the recommended solutions to the practical problem of the under-representation of women. The former favours a technocratic approach where equality of law or class eventually leads to social parity, while the latter implies that no amount of gender-neutral law-making or socialist revolution will fix the issue and instead we must learn to live with and mitigate as best we can the inevitable conflicts between male and female ways of looking at the world.
Ursula Le Guin has investigated both these types of feminism in her writing, but in her middle- and late-period work she seems to me to incline towards the "naturally different" view. Certainly one or two of her books are off-putting for male readers - Always Coming Home, with its recipes and less than subtle fables of male brutality (oy! I'm a man but I'm not brutal, so stop lumping me in with men who are!), is one that I am unlikely to read again. But another theme that runs through Le Guin's writing is the Taoist balancing of opposites, and in Lavinia she finds a way to infuse the strongly masculinised world of Virgil's Aeneid with feminine values and concerns without denigrating the former. The result is a triumph, and a book that I shall definitely come back to.
The main reason it works is because Lavinia's character in the original virtually demands a female response. She is a token love interest with no dialogue and no role in the action other than as a casus belli for the war between the Trojans and the Latins. By contrast, in Le Guin's world, women of the royal household are high priestesses of the earth religion and have a vital role in their society, though different from that of the men.
But Le Guin's chief ingenious innovation is to have Lavinia meet the shade of the dying Virgil early on in the book. So she knows that she is a construct in someone's fiction and cannot die. Virgil expresses regret for getting her all wrong, although it is much too late to make amends. He also reprises the whole story of the Aeneid, possibly at excessive length, but Le Guin's interpretations of his artistic decisions - such as "you can't have two love stories in the same book" to explain why Lavinia's character is so underdeveloped - are interesting. Lavinia's knowledge of her true nature folds back into the story, explaining why she refuses to marry a prince of her own people (a decision made for her by her father in the original).
The men of the story are of course martial, but most are sympathetically drawn with the exception of Turnus, Lavinia's intended husband, who is an obvious oaf. Aeneas in particular seems somewhat idealised, a military man who longs for peace and fights only because he has to. Interestingly, the other obvious villain of the piece is Lavinia's mother Amata, who sides with Turnus against her husband's wishes. Whilst you can clearly see the feminist agenda here - like Eliot, Le Guin is clearly aware that attitudes amongst both genders contribute to the suppression of women - Amata's motivations are clearly explained and so do not seem forced.
The other outstanding feature of this novel comes from Le Guin's background in SF, which is a strong sense of place. There are copious maps showing all the major locations of the story, carefully pieced together from Virgil's descriptions and modern Italian locations. The result is utterly convincing, as is the strong sense of daily life and the careful attention to economic details such as the goods traded between the different tribes. Despite being set in Virgil's mythical dreamscape, this is a very real world. At least until the ending, which is moving, beautiful and absolutely right.
As you may have guessed, I incline more to the social than the radical end of feminism. There are far many more things that men and women share than that separate them - our bodies, basic needs and values are ninety percent the same, and to emphasise the ten percent that are not seems perverse. Nonetheless Le Guin makes a convincing case for the separation of roles here. Well, almost - there is the odd contradiction that a book that is fundamentally about giving Lavinia agency in the story of the Aeneid is driven by her passive acceptance of her role as a character in a man's story. But I think Le Guin's point is that ultimately all academic theories must be subsumed by life and by love, in this case for a great poet. And I for one wouldn't disagree with that.
Lavinia - Ursula Le Guin - Gollancz, 2009
* * * * *
At the risk of displaying the very habit of categorisational thinking that certain of its adherents decry, I would like to make an observation about feminism (hey, we all have a gender so it's a game that everyone can play). Its various forms fall into two main schools of thought that closely mirror the left-right split in politics. One - espoused in liberal, socialist and post-modernist feminism - argues that gender roles in society are socially constructed. Men and women can perform the same roles and there should not be artificial barriers of law or social expectation preventing, say, a woman from being a bishop or a man from raising a child. Another view, which I think is what radical feminists are saying, is that women are naturally different from men and that the issue is that social institutions and cultural practices - especially those of science and technology - do not adequately reflect (and in fact actively work to suppress) women's ways of working and thinking. The difference between the two lies in the recommended solutions to the practical problem of the under-representation of women. The former favours a technocratic approach where equality of law or class eventually leads to social parity, while the latter implies that no amount of gender-neutral law-making or socialist revolution will fix the issue and instead we must learn to live with and mitigate as best we can the inevitable conflicts between male and female ways of looking at the world.
Ursula Le Guin has investigated both these types of feminism in her writing, but in her middle- and late-period work she seems to me to incline towards the "naturally different" view. Certainly one or two of her books are off-putting for male readers - Always Coming Home, with its recipes and less than subtle fables of male brutality (oy! I'm a man but I'm not brutal, so stop lumping me in with men who are!), is one that I am unlikely to read again. But another theme that runs through Le Guin's writing is the Taoist balancing of opposites, and in Lavinia she finds a way to infuse the strongly masculinised world of Virgil's Aeneid with feminine values and concerns without denigrating the former. The result is a triumph, and a book that I shall definitely come back to.
The main reason it works is because Lavinia's character in the original virtually demands a female response. She is a token love interest with no dialogue and no role in the action other than as a casus belli for the war between the Trojans and the Latins. By contrast, in Le Guin's world, women of the royal household are high priestesses of the earth religion and have a vital role in their society, though different from that of the men.
But Le Guin's chief ingenious innovation is to have Lavinia meet the shade of the dying Virgil early on in the book. So she knows that she is a construct in someone's fiction and cannot die. Virgil expresses regret for getting her all wrong, although it is much too late to make amends. He also reprises the whole story of the Aeneid, possibly at excessive length, but Le Guin's interpretations of his artistic decisions - such as "you can't have two love stories in the same book" to explain why Lavinia's character is so underdeveloped - are interesting. Lavinia's knowledge of her true nature folds back into the story, explaining why she refuses to marry a prince of her own people (a decision made for her by her father in the original).
The men of the story are of course martial, but most are sympathetically drawn with the exception of Turnus, Lavinia's intended husband, who is an obvious oaf. Aeneas in particular seems somewhat idealised, a military man who longs for peace and fights only because he has to. Interestingly, the other obvious villain of the piece is Lavinia's mother Amata, who sides with Turnus against her husband's wishes. Whilst you can clearly see the feminist agenda here - like Eliot, Le Guin is clearly aware that attitudes amongst both genders contribute to the suppression of women - Amata's motivations are clearly explained and so do not seem forced.
The other outstanding feature of this novel comes from Le Guin's background in SF, which is a strong sense of place. There are copious maps showing all the major locations of the story, carefully pieced together from Virgil's descriptions and modern Italian locations. The result is utterly convincing, as is the strong sense of daily life and the careful attention to economic details such as the goods traded between the different tribes. Despite being set in Virgil's mythical dreamscape, this is a very real world. At least until the ending, which is moving, beautiful and absolutely right.
As you may have guessed, I incline more to the social than the radical end of feminism. There are far many more things that men and women share than that separate them - our bodies, basic needs and values are ninety percent the same, and to emphasise the ten percent that are not seems perverse. Nonetheless Le Guin makes a convincing case for the separation of roles here. Well, almost - there is the odd contradiction that a book that is fundamentally about giving Lavinia agency in the story of the Aeneid is driven by her passive acceptance of her role as a character in a man's story. But I think Le Guin's point is that ultimately all academic theories must be subsumed by life and by love, in this case for a great poet. And I for one wouldn't disagree with that.