Yet if the Linguist women, who live together, cook together, and talk together in a community that excludes men, find that their connection to each other flourishes, women outside the Lines have no such connections, even between women who are friends and whose backgrounds and lives are otherwise similar. At a dinner party, for instance, Cassie’s husband suggests that the point of marital academies is to teach a female form of violence, one based on polite humiliation (259). The lack of a unified women’s community provides opportunities for men to turn women against each other, generating verbal and social violence as another form of the generalized violence that keeps patriarchy in place. Cassie herself expresses disconnection when she thinks about losing her best friend to the colonies: “Cassie will be sorry to lose Brune, but maybe Doby will be kinder to her when they get out to the colonies; she hopes so. She doesn’t like always having to feel sorry for Brune; it distracts her, and it makes her feel uneasy and insecure” (263). The women of the Lines pity other women for their alienation from women: “It did change your perspective about your own problems, remembering how much worse it was for most women . . . with no other woman to comfort her or help her or advise her. And the women of her family as ignorant as she was, even if they happened to be close by when she was miserable, by some accident” (298).
Connections between Linguist and non-Linguist women demonstrate both the possibility of alliance across differences and the difficulties of escaping context. When Jo-Bethany Schrafft first comes to Chornyak House, she is suspicious of the women, stunned by the accommodations, and horrified by the lack of bedside healthies (117). Although it takes the combined efforts of many women to settle her concerns, once the initial misunderstanding is gone, she does feel a connection. In The Judas Rose, Elgin implies that women are disconnected by the work of two major patriarchal instruments: the compartmentalization of women’s lives in separate, male-headed households and the social structures that train women to be adversarial. As befitting its era, the novel suggests that if these factors could be overcome, if women could both regularly connect and learn to overcome their social training, women would have “natural” bonds together. Connection is possible, Elgin suggests in The Judas Rose, through women’s invitation and women’s effort. As the woman of the Lines at the dinner party says, “You’re missing all the fun. My dears, won’t you come play, too?” (270). Elgin’s vision of this natural link between women depends on an essentialized vision of gender that to a contemporary reader has great historical interest precisely because of its distance from our current attention to gender as a category of performance rather than essence. In the Native Tongue trilogy, Linguist women are understood to have a special connection to things empathetic, earthly and spiritual, while men are conceptualized as aggressors; sexual intercourse between women and men of the Lines is portrayed overall as an unfulfilling and boring interaction offering little to the woman, and to the man only the assurance of his control of women. And though Elgin suggests that women can unite with effort, bonds with men are portrayed as inherently problematic. When Jo-Bethany Schrafft accuses the men of the Lines of being sexist for creating Womanhouses, the women respond:
“Jo-Bethany, have you lived in a house with a man recently? Just one man?”
“Yes. My brother-in-law. The man who sent me here.”
“Well, did you enjoy it?”
She found herself looking straight into the other woman’s eyes, and those eyes were dancing with amusement, as if Dorcas knew all about what it had been like to live with Ham Klander.
“Oh . . .” she had said weakly. “No. No, not very much.”
“Then would you please try to imagine what it would be like to live in a house with dozens of men? With fifty men, or more?”
The expression on her face must have been eloquent; and what she had said had been the perfect thing to say. She had heard her mother say it so many times. She had said, “A hill is to climb. A man is to pick up after.” Talking to herself, really. And all of the other women had begun to laugh, laughing till there were tears in her eyes; laughing for her, not at her. (118–19)
The implicit assumption that relations with men provide no sexual or social benefits—since the violence integral to masculinity will inevitably express itself—means that women must work to connect with other women: the implication is that, in their world, women need to connect precisely because there are currently no healthy connections between women and men. But starting with connections between women can help enable the reeducation away from violence that will prevent the cataclysm that Elgin implies is impending, because it enables women to resist the violence men perpetuate as the galactic structure responds to the rising New World Order. (The resonances of Elgin’s vision here seem as uncannily prescient as her portrait of a relatively peaceful womankind seems nostalgic.)
Through the complicated sets of relations it presents—Terran and Alien, Linguist and non-Linguist, male and female—The Judas Rose both articulates and critiques the New World Order that was beginning to develop when Elgin was writing the novel. It also speaks to our new New World Order, in which a patriotic nationalism claiming to support feminist emancipation is activated in the name of a transnational global culture whose economic order is indifferent, at best, to the well-being of women. From the Terran perspective from which the novel takes place, geopolitics is dominated by a race to the colonies between the U.S. and the Soviets. In reality, however, members of the inner circle of the Earth’s governments understand that this “race” is in fact a manufactured one, tightly controlled by the Alien Consortium. The U.S. populace, on the other hand, in a continuation of the manifest destiny in which their political imaginary is rooted, believes that the endless expansion to new colonies is both a blessing and their rightful due. Although this race/expansion is understood religiously (Heykus Joshua Clete), evolutionarily (Aliens), and politically (Macabee Dow), the novel makes it clear that this only perpetuates and further solidifies the grossly unequal and violent status quo presented in the trilogy from the start. As Nazareth remarks, “Earth has been able to molder along undisturbed in its comfortable rut. Pressures that would have meant inevitable change before the colonization of space are siphoned off now—we just export them to the stars” (64).
Within the U.S. government of the twenty-third century, the New World Order is understood as a power struggle between the government and the Linguists, framed as the ability to control trade agreements with the Aliens. The Lines are described as “‘control[ling] the fate of entire planets, and of whole alliances of planets’” (255). This is the thrust both of Macabee Dow’s plan to Interface his son [“‘The game, gentlemen, is power; there are no other games worth playing’” (104)] and the Roman Catholic Church’s plan to convert the women who speak Láadan to proper Catholic worship [“‘We wish to win those women—and through them, their men—and in the fullness of time, the Lines and all their power’” (183)]. Yet if the Terran battle is framed in terms of male or patriarchal power, by the novel’s epilogue we learn that this violent race to power is futile: the Aliens control both the power and the alliances, and they understand the crucial problem facing Earth to be the human tendency toward violence. Even Alien intervention in Terran affairs—which, we learn, has taken place because humans were in danger of exterminating themselves—has failed to change the situation. The only alternative to extermination, as the Aliens perceive it, is to trust that the women will eventually change the world with Láadan. Thus the distance between the sexes poses a significant problem not only for female-male relations, but also for the future of the human species: it acts as an impediment to the only remaining solution to human violence, the possibility that women can influence men to renounce violence. As Nazareth explains,
Meanwhile, Láadan would spread; the tiny wild vine wreaths, unnoticed by anyone, would go up on wall after wall. It would continue to keep the women of the Lines, and all the women who knew it beyond, immune to the state of violence that the men str
uggled with so incessantly; it would continue to provide the women with the patience necessary to bring the men out of those endless loops of violence always begetting more violence. The day would come when they would have a war, and all of the men would look at each other and laugh and just go home (355).
Despite Nazareth’s optimistic vision, it is unclear that Láadan can spread fast enough to accomplish this immense transformation in human behavior. And in the novel’s closing chapter, a paper prepared by XJHi for the Council of the Consortium articulates the desperate choice facing those who wish to improve the Terran situation: Should women be allowed to continue their Láadan project, or should Aliens intervene, eradicating the world in “swift mercy”(363)? Whether the strategic embedding process central to the women’s resistance—emblematically represented in the wild vine wreaths that head every chapter—will succeed or fail when the context has expanded from Terran to galactic-scale politics is the urgent question with which readers will turn to Elgin’s final volume in the Native Tongue trilogy, Earthsong.
Susan M. Squier, Pennsylvania State University
Julie Vedder, West Virginia University
May 2002
NOTES
1. Please see the afterword to Native Tongue, “Encoding a Woman’s Language,” for discussions of how these themes can be explored through linguistic theory and feminist science fiction.
2. Suzette Haden Elgin, personal communication, 20 January 2002.
3. That any attempt to describe what it is like to be without language must itself be rendered in language is of course one of the ironies of Selena’s situation.
4. Suzette Haden Elgin, personal communication, 20 January 2002.
WORKS CITED
Elgin, Suzette Haden. “A Feminist Is a What?” Women and Language 18.2 (1995): 46.
———. “Láadan.” http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/Láadan.html (2000).
———. The Language Imperative. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books, 2000.
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