Gender and Information Technology
In the simultaneously global and galactic context of The Judas Rose, language is presented as a potent technology for human communication, but one that can, paradoxically, be either enhanced or inhibited by information technology. This is nowhere so clearly represented as in the character of Selena Opal Hame. In Native Tongue, the infant Selena is fed a combination of hallucinogens before she is Interfaced with Beta-2, a non-humanoid whose worldview was so “alien” to the human mind that it had killed previous infants Interfaced with it. The hallucinogens did their work, in a sense: when Selena was Interfaced her tolerance for alternative realities was sufficiently great that she survived, while the Alien died. Yet one could argue that Selena’s “survival” was minimal and carried with it an incalculable toll: she exits the Interface having not acquired a non-humanoid language, and, tragically, stripped of her own native tongue. The impact is devastating, forcing her to live in a non-linguistic world:
I know that when their mouths move and noises come it is because they are sharing what is inside their heads. They can show each other, or they can do it when no other person is there. . . .
I don’t know what in me is the broken part. My ears work; my eyes work; my head works. My fingers are not broken; I can cut and sew and dig and stir and cook. All the doings. I can go where other persons go, I know it is not my legs. My mouth opens like their mouths, but it does not make any noise . . . perhaps it is my mouth that is the broken part. (202; 204)3
Selena’s poignant linguistic dislocation and alienation emerges fully when the women of the Lines introduce her to a form of information technology: a small box with buttons on it that she can manipulate like a computerized voice synthesizer. Working with it, she is able for the first time to make complex, stable, layered sounds, which she learns to associate with objects and actions. In short, she learns to use language. For Selena, that breakthrough moment of communication seems elemental, miraculous: “When the magic came, it was like what the lightning does to the sky in the hot time! It was a great crashing and a tearing inside my head, and a great light flashing through me! I understood, oh I understood.” (205)
While Selena struggles with a linguistic deficiency that is remedied by information technology, the woman known as the “Judas Rose” demonstrates a linguistic control and power that information technology is used to undermine, if only temporarily. Miriam Rose is a child of the Lines, raised from birth in the convent and placed at age thirteen in the Order of Saint Gertrude of the Lambs, where she grows up as Sister Miriam, part of Nazareth’s scheme to extend Láadan beyond the Barren Houses of the Lines. Protected within the convent by sympathetic Sister Carapace and taught linguistics and Lines-quality bodyparl (though never defined by Elgin in the texts, context seems to suggest bodyparl is the use of gesture, movement, expression, tone of voice, and intonation to communicate nonverbally) by her mother in secret meetings, Miriam Rose grows up trained as a secret ally and weapon of the developing rebellion. Her notable linguistic mastery gives her access even to the Order’s centers of power; soon, she is working intimately with the Abbot of Saint Gertrude’s, Father Dorien. Although he prides himself on his ability to control the perceptions of others, even he finds himself under Sister Miriam’s spell because of her tremendous linguistic ability:
It was the woman’s magnificent voice. A voice that Father Dorien was confident had been given to her by God, specifically to enable her to serve his purposes in this project. As he had anticipated, she had only had to speak one sentence to put an end to their objections. He had heard that voice many hundreds of times, because he was her confessor, but it never ceased to be something he marveled over. It was not just a voice, it was a musical instrument, and she was a virtuoso in its use. (178–79)
Her understanding of the power of language, both voiced and read, enables Miriam Rose to subvert the attempts of the Roman Catholic Church to reinscribe Láadan into the patriarchal hegemony. Only the deathbed confession of Sister Maria, the nun who had for more than forty years worked as a “kind of double agent” among the Roman Catholic clergy, alerts them to the existence of Láadan, the deeper layer hidden by the rebels beneath the clunky Langlish (335). As the person in charge of the seemingly impossible project to strip the Láadan Bible of any feminist influences—generated by the priests’ demand for materials that would “draw women to the church, but that would be free of feminist contamination” or heterodox suggestion of a female deity—Sister Miriam Rose has final say on the form of the translated passages (337). This proves crucial, enabling her to subvert any attempts to render the translation in beautiful or moving language. As another nun laments, “Who would have suspected that Father Dorien’s precious Sister Miriam Rose would have a terrible tin ear? It was shocking, the way she would take a properly defeminized section, with a lovely ring to it when you read it aloud, and fool around with it until it went clanking and stumbling over the tongue, completely ruined” (243). By changing the language to make it “clank and stumble,” Sister Miriam Rose effectively prevents the “new” Láadan Bible from being a tool to convert even more women to the hierarchical, patriarchal religions. Father Dorien remarks on this effect when he muses, “It wasn’t surprising that they kindled no religious fire in women; women were theologically illiterate, and they had to be attracted to the Lord by the rhythm and power of words and music well assembled. He had tried reading some of those recent bits aloud, and it had been like reading a comphone directory” (306). Such is her skill that almost no one even suspects deliberate intent on her part, even if they notice the discrepancies between her vocal and apparent written ability. Only Sister Gloria John glimpses part of the plan, when she mutters to the other nuns, “‘Perhaps she does it on purpose,’. . . after one especially unpleasant sequence produced by Miriam’s tinkering had been entered into storage as a final version. . . . . ‘Because . . . the longer she can keep us at this, the longer she can avoid doing any real work herself. And when the Fathers read the garbage she has produced, they’ll make her throw it all out and start over again from the beginning’” (243–44).
Sister Miriam Rose’s power over influential men extends even to Heykus Joshua Clete, architect of planetary expansion and perhaps the most powerful religious man on the planet. When he meets her at a friend’s deathbed, toward the end of the novel, he is surprised to find that he feels blessed “by a woman. A Catholic, and a woman” (329). Yet that initial frightening moment of trust seems dangerously seductive to Clete—emasculating, even infantilizing—and he turns to information technology to combat it. He counters the force of her presence with all of the technological skill at his command:
To ease the weight of his helplessness, he looked Sister Miriam up in the databanks. She was there, with her Federal Identification number and her blood type, her height and eye color and allergies; because she was a nun—born at the convent . . . and illegitimate, parents unknown—she had no possessions and no record of any earnings. No titles, no distinctions. . . . A thoroughly unremarkable life. (329–30)
Yet if the databanks reassure Clete that Sister Miriam Rose is a nobody, the authority of that information extends only as far as the imagination interpreting the data. As the novel unfolds, the reader learns that she is far from the “thoroughly unremarkable” nun with “parents unknown” that the data entry summarizes. Indeed, the core significance of the novel emerges in the gap between the life documented in the databanks and the full account of the activities of the Judas Rose.
In the contrasting tales of Selena Opal Hame and Sister Miriam Rose, Elgin demonstrates that information technology, like other technologies, is not inherently gendered; whether its uses are emancipatory or repressive depends on who is wielding it, how skillfully, and to what ends. Though the databases are a form of information technology that enhances the power of the Terran government over women, both within and outside the families of the Lines, the ‘thologies—another kind of information technology prov
iding a National Public Radio–like narrative news programming—empowers Nazareth Chornyak Adiness, the leader of resistant women of the Lines, by giving her “a kind of grasp of events over the past hundred years. She felt a little less ignorant now, and that was the point” (82). Elgin demonstrates that the very form information technology takes—the extent to which we even recognize it as information technology—can also sometimes be gendered. To the databanks of the government, and the helpful ‘thologies of Nazareth, we can add another form of information technology: the recipes of the women of the Lines, each replete with coded information accessible only to those who know how to access it, and stored in a recipe collection kept, “to the men’s great amusement, on file cards” (73).
Gender and Biomedical Technology
The Judas Rose reveals that, like information technology, biomedical technology too has both dominant and subversive forms, uses that can be liberating or repressive. The medicalization of female resistance to male power is one such repressive use of biotechnology that the novel illustrates. Rebellious women are understood to be insane, and dealt with not through the legal but the medical system. Chapter six reveals this gendered use of biotechnology for social control when Heykus Clete receives Coast Guard Captain Frege’s report that a group of women were discovered to have landed on an asteroid, murdered their male companions, and begun the work of establishing a women’s settlement using only “antique hand tools and survival packs.” Clete commends Captain Frege for making sure that the women have been carried “suitably tranquilized” to “the nearest institutional facility” by their Coast Guard captors, there to be administered with reversible procedures that would “clean out” their minds. But he reproaches Frege for calling the women “bitches” and viewing them as guilty of the murders they committed: “They are not responsible. . . . No woman becomes sick like that overnight. Where were their men all this time, while their minds were rotting away? Frege . . . could your wife, or your sister, or your mother, or any other woman in your care, reach a state of deterioration in which she would be capable of ending your life, without you ever noticing that she needed medical attention?” (90). Kekyus, who prides himself on knowing “everything there was to know about normal women,” admits to himself that he is “baffled” by women who refuse the protective care offered them by the state. As he recalls asking such a subversive woman almost a decade earlier: “On earth, and on every colony of Earth, to the limit of our resources, . . . women are cherished. Treated tenderly. Indulged in every way. Looked after, deferred to, sheltered. . . . Why do you turn to this perversion? What more do you want?” (91). Yet Hekyus is certain that there is only one appropriate response to such behavior: “Such females should be given expert help immediately, at the first signs of their illness, not allowed to wander around in public with their pathetic condition on view to all the world” (93).
Biomedical technology, like information technology, is portrayed as variable and gender-specific in The Judas Rose: used by the U.S. government to put down female resistance but also by the Linguist women to subvert male dominance. In fact, Elgin portrays biomedical technology as a continuum, from the “healthies” of conventional high-tech medicine to the hands-on nursing practices and herbal remedies of the Linguist women. In the tale of Jo-Bethany Schrafft, who is sent by her brother-in-law to work as a nurse for the Linguists, we see the contrast between these two modes of biomedicine. Initially appalled by the primitive medical conditions in the Barren House, the Linguist facility for postmenopausal women, Jo-Bethany is even more surprised when she learns that this absence of high-tech medical care is voluntary. She had assumed that the absence of “healthies,” servomechanisms that provide nursing and pharmaceutical care to the ill, reflects the age of the Barren House occupants and the relative poverty of the Linguists. In short, she assumes that faced with a need to provide health care that will be both costly and will yield no obvious social benefit (since the elderly linguist women are past reproductive age and unable to work any longer in the Interfaces) the Linguists have simply dumped their old women in the Barren House to die. But she is soon set right in her thinking:
The [L]inguists didn’t use healthies, they told her. . . because they were convinced that the touch of human hands, the nonverbal communication of live hands doing the tending, was absolutely essential to the care of the sick. . . . Only when there was no human being available to tend a patient, or when the only human being available would have been unkind or uncaring, did they consider healthies appropriate, and within the Lines those situations did not exist. They might have been wrong in their belief that the mechanical nursing was bad for the patient—certainly the physicians who had taught Jo’s class at nursing school would have considered that not only scientifically incorrect but superstitious, and the evidence for the medical position was overwhelming. But the women of Chornyak Barren House were not without healthies because they were old, or because they were not loved. (117–18)
Yet if the Linguist women refuse the tools of high-tech medicine, their response is fueled not by abstract principle, but by what seems the most effective strategy for each situation. They reject the “normal” reliance on healthies in favor of more medically effective hands-on nursing, yet they also couple an extensive use of natural healing potions with a computerized tracking system for supply and applications: “the database on herbal medicine in the computers at Chornyak Barren House was awe-inspiring, and the women who put the potions together knew exactly what they were doing” (113). Moreover, if the Terran governments rely on biomedicine to maintain a galaxy-wide control over women, the Linguist women use biomedicine to extend their subversive networks fighting that massive system of control. This strategic work explains an event that greatly puzzles Father Dorien: the note from Sister Miriam Rose “saying only that she considered her usefulness in her present post at an end and humbly requested transfer to a nursing position in one of the large public hospitals in Washington. . . . Why [Father Dorien asks himself] would she want to trade [a] sweet sinecure for a hospital nursing post?” (303). Sister Miriam Rose wants to move into nursing because she understands that it offers the greatest access to the widest population, enabling the fastest diffusion of Láadan. As Jonathan Chornyak “explains” the women’s plan to Nazareth:
“There you were with your silly ‘woman’s language,’ all verbed up and no place to go. No way to get it out beyond the Lines. And then you remembered nurses—the only women who come and go freely between the Lines and the public, the only women who have the opportunity to talk to all sorts and kinds of people, and—coincidentally—women who had access to the hospital chapels. All you had to do was seduce the resident nurses from each of the Lines into your cozy little Thursday night meetings in the Womanhouses. and convince them that your Langlish twaddle was romantic and exotic and terribly terribly mysterious and exciting, and they would take it straight out into the world for you.” (348)
Clearly, Chornyak fails to understand the plan in its entirety, since he is unaware of the existence of Láadan. However, he has grasped the women’s central strategy: the nesting circles of relations between women embodied in the symbol of the women’s resistance, the wild vine wreaths.
WILD VINE WREATHS: WOMEN’S EMBEDDED CIRCLES OF RESISTANCE
In the image of the wild vine wreaths, The Judas Rose offers a structural alternative to the “endless loops of violence” that are the central problematic of Elgin’s novel. While the resistant force of the wild vine wreaths is generated by women, it must extend beyond them if it is to succeed, and while the looping pattern of violence is generated and perpetuated by men, the diverse stories of such women as Selena Opal Hame, Jo-Bethany Schrafft, Nazareth Chornyak, and even of Benia, the young mother isolated as the only woman colonist on Polytrix, demonstrate how violence reaches beyond the male community into the lives of women and children. Elgin’s use of multiple embedding strategies, imaged in the wild vine wreaths, articulates her understanding that feminist anti
violence work must proceed with an indirection, a circularity, and a capacity for diversion if it is to last long enough to have an effect. As Elgin explains:
The women of the Linguist Lines hide their revolutionary mechanism—the woman-language Láadan—inside the silly fake woman-language Langlish. They hide their revolutionary messages inside their exchange of recipes; they hide their revolutionary communication inside their needlework circles and their caretaking of the elderly; they hide their dissemination of the real woman-language inside Thursday night religious services, which are in turn hidden inside hospital chapel ministries. They hide the real (womanist/feminist) translation of the King James Bible into Láadan inside the grotesquely-bad translation commissioned by the Roman Catholic Church and directed by the “mole” who is the Judas Rose—Sister Miriam Rose (herself physically hidden inside the R[oman] C[atholic] C[hurch] by the women of the Lines).4
Symbol of the intertwined circles of female resistance, the wild vine wreaths articulate another theme central not just to The Judas Rose but to contemporary society: the possibility that women can unite despite obstacles of race, religion, class, ethnicity, even galactic location. While even a decade ago this vision might have seemed too old-fashioned in its feminism to teach, from the perspective of the new millennium the trilogy has both a thematic and a historical interest. The very premise of Láadan itself, the notion of a women’s language, is based on the idea, familiar to cultural feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, that women have a connection with other women that transcends differences of context and situation, a connection that can transcend other relationships. This principle is most evident among the women of the Lines, who already do have Láadan to connect them together. While the thirteen Households of the Lines span national and cultural boundaries (though most of the Households are in the United States), race is never mentioned. This omission—so striking to contemporary readers—both situates the trilogy in its own historical time by illustrating the unity among women argued in feminist thought just several decades earlier and serves as a vivid illustration of the theoretical and political lacunae that feminisms of the most recent two decades have critiqued. The women of the Lines demonstrate the kinds of connections that women can forge: through Láadan, through the recipe codes, and most importantly through the Barren Houses. The practices of speaking together, sharing recipes together, even living in old age in gender-segregated units, have a political effectiveness for the Linguist women that recalls theories of a unified women’s culture in the era of cultural feminism. Significantly, Elgin’s vision of this women’s culture develops during the course of the trilogy. After the first book, women who are not barren live in Womanhouses; a barren woman could still live in one of the Womanhouses instead of a Barren House if that was her preference. Girl children move to the Womanhouse as soon as they begin to menstruate. Implicitly, then, they are united by their experience and essence as women, not by their new status as cast-offs of patriarchal culture.
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