The Female Man

[sawyl]

I recently finished Joanna Russ's The Female Man, which I don't think I've read since I was at university. It's a dazzling piece of second wave feminist fiction that takes some of the tropes of SF — time travel, parallel worlds, utopian futures — and braids them together into a critique of modern society that seems just as relevant now as it was when it was written 40 years ago. (As an aside, I wonder whether there was any overlap between The Female Man and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, another great feminist classic that also features time travel, utopian futures, and refuses to provide any easy answers to the questions it raises).

The story involves a series of tableaux from the lives of four linked women (Janet Evason, Jeannine Dadier, Joanna and, towards the end, Alice Jael Reasoner). Janet, a time-travelling visitor from Whileaway (a green, utopian Earth populated only by women), enjoys herself in 20th century America, becoming a celebrity and behaving boisterously (she breaks a groper's arm at a party) and generally enjoying breaking the local taboos. Joanna (who, in occasional interventions, reminds us that she's the true author of the book) chaperons Janet (or, more precisely, tries and often fails to keep Janet out of trouble) and adds thoughtful, frustrated, scathing comments on the unequal state of women in society:

18 year old male college freshman (laying down the law at a party):	If Marlow had lived, he would have written very much better plays than Shakespeare's.
Me, a 35 year old professor of english (dazed with boredom):	Gee, how clever you are to know about things that never happened.
The Freshman (bewildered):	Huh?

OR

18 year-old girl at a party:	Men don't understand machinery. The gizmo goes on the whatsit and the rataplan makes contact with the fourchette in at least seventy percent of all cases.
35 year-old male professor of engineering (awed):	Gee.

(Something wrong here, I think)

Joanna also finds herself caught up in the live of Jeannine an uncertain (but clever — the cleverest of the bunch, according to Jael) librarian living in a world where WWII never happened and where women are expected to do nothing more than marry and have children. After trying to satisfy her mother, after trying to decide what to do about her (deadbeat) journalistic boyfriend, Jeannine finds herself swept up with the other two J's, abandoning early mornings and domestic drudge work in favour of something more progressive (but not so progressive that she isn't horrified by Janet's girlfriend).

The final sinister twist in the plot comes courtesy of Jael, an elite assassin from a future Earth were men and women live completely separate (and largely antagonistic) lives. Having come up with a plan to use the parallel worlds to further the fight against Manland on her own Earth, Jael has gathered together the three J's as representatives of their own worlds (and also, as parallel instances of her her own personality), in order to ask them to commit to the action.

The Female Man is a sharply brilliant novel that works on several levels. The cleverly interwoven stores of the three (later four) J's worlds particularly well. Sometimes it is (deliberately) unclear which character is narrating or relating a particular section and what their agenda might be and whether we can trust what they tell us. The characters are well drawn and differentiated, in a way that allows each to make a point about 20th century society: where Joanna sees, and is angry with, the hypocrisies and inequalities of her time from the inside, Janet (with her different cultural values) describes them from the outside in a way that emphasizes their complete absurdity; whereas Jael, ruthless murderer (although she professes never to have killed a woman), is the member of the group Joanna most admires and wants to be.

The writing is a constant delight and Russ delights in playing tag with the reader, switching first person narrators in a non-obvious way, including sections of dialogue to prove a point or to underscore a theme, occasionally dropping into a stream of consciousness (as in the last chapter, where she bids farewell to the characters and imagines the fate of her little book, wondering how it might be received by future readers). It is also (often), especially in the earlier sections, ferociously, satirically, cuttingly funny and a pure joy to read.

A modern masterpiece. And with good reason.