Native Tongue
Page 38
The prodigious control the linguists maintain over the deployment and interpretation of language extends to the power male linguists wield over the female linguists. When Nazareth’s love for Jordan Shannontry is exposed, leading to her familial humiliation, the worst pain comes from her inability to express the experience: “And there were no words, not in any language, that she could use to explain to them what it was that had been done to her, that would make them stop and say that it was an awful thing that had been done to her” (201–02). Elgin contrasts this despair with the relief felt by the women of Barren House when they can finally use the “right words” of Láadan (267). Along with its constitutive and manipulative powers, language also has the power to produce emotional comfort through consensual validation. Thus English expresses the experiences of the men and especially the linguist men relatively well and completely, creating in them a sense of justification and self-righteousness. For the linguist women, on the other hand, the available language fails to match their set of experiences, and they feel a host of negative emotions.
Despite their appreciation for the power of language and their grip on well-known linguistic principles, linguist men are unable to evade the constitutive power of gender relations. Thus the linguist men fail to apply this information to their own families. The constitutive link between language, gender relations, and reality is expressed in the women’s search for a believable suspect for the attempted poisoning of Nazareth. Precisely because religious and reproductive rebel Belle-Anne is already assumed to be insane, she can act as decoy and confess to Nazareth’s attempted murder, thus distracting the men of the Lines from the subversive activities taking place in the Barren House. Belle-Anne’s tale of heavenly mandate and the hordes of he-angels does not fit the reality set of her immediate acquaintances and it is dismissed as the ravings of a madwoman; ironically it is precisely because she has already been disbelieved that she is now believed.
The linguist men are aware that the women are constructing a women’s language. Their assumption that women have inferior linguistic skills blinds them to the women’s true strategy: the women’s decoy work on the false project of Langlish, an elaborate and unworkable female tongue, screens their real work on Láadan. Viewing the Langlish Encoding Project as harmless and time-consuming, the linguist men are trapped by their assumption of female inferiority, encapsulated in their convenient repetition of the fact that language skills are not correlated with intelligence (15–16). Only after Láadan is spoken and taught to the little girls does anyone recognize the power of the project. Even then, despite all of the evidence presented at the family celebration to all the men of the Lines, only Thomas recognizes the “‘danger’” and “‘corruption’” present (281) in what appears to the others as “charming” and “endearing” (276).
In certain ways, Láadan is deceptively simple. Encodings are “‘the making of a name for a chunk of the world that so far as we know has never been chosen for naming before in any human language, and that has not just suddenly been made or found or dumped upon your culture. We mean naming a chunk that has been around a long time but has never before impressed anyone as sufficiently important to deserve its own name’” (22). When the women create Láadan, then, they are not simply creating new words. They are, in fact, reordering what is significant and not significant, perceived and not perceived.
Láadan, the true women’s language, is both the culmination of and the evidence for the idea that language can change reality. While Láadan is still a secret, the men describe the women as constantly frowning, complaining, weeping, nagging, pouting, sulking, bitching, and arguing (289). Further, they frequently accuse women of talking endlessly about things no one would find important, and even then of never getting to the point (264). Verbal exchanges between male and female linguists are contentious and combative. Once Láadan is in place, however, women are happy, effective, self-sufficient. This reordering has profound effects on the world of the linguist men as well as the women. After Láadan has been in general circulation for about seven years, the men notice a change in the behavior of the women. Adam reports to Thomas, “‘Women, they tell me, do not nag anymore. Do not whine. Do not complain. Do not demand things. Do not make idiot objections to everything a man proposes. Do not argue. Do not get sick—can you believe that, Thomas? No more headaches, no more monthlies, no more hysterics . . . or if there still are such things, at least they are never mentioned’” (275). But what appears to be a good change, a benign change, from the initial point of view of the men, is revealed as something both larger and more disturbing.
When the men of all of the Lines get together to discuss the “problem” of cooperative, cheerful women, the stakes of their behavior become clear: “‘It used to be,’ [Dano Mbal] said, ‘that when a man had done something in which he could take legitimate pride, he could go home and talk to his wife and his daughters about it, and that pride would grow—it would be a reason to do even more, and do it even better’” (290). In his mind, Adam continues the corollary:
It used to be that a man could do something he was ashamed of, too, and then go home and talk to his women about it and be able to count on them to nag him and harangue him and carry on hysterically at him until he felt he’d paid in full for what he’d done. And then a man could count on the women to go right on past that point with their nonsense until he actually felt that he’d been justified in what he’d done. That had been important, too—and it never happened anymore. Never. No matter what you did, it would be met in just the same way. With respectful courtesy. With a total absence of complaint. (290)
The new language, with its new set of values and perspectives on reality, thus changes the way the men and women of the Lines relate to one another. In effect, the women are no longer playing the linguistic games that support a binarized and hierarchized version of gender. The male response to the new world created by Láadan is, ironically, to do just what the women have desired: to move all of the women into their own residence. A shift in language has thus produced, albeit slowly, a real, measurable, and enjoyable change in their daily lives.
Of course, language is not entirely all-encompassing; knowledge can exist outside of language, which is precisely the urgency to produce new Encodings. We can see this in the book through Nazareth’s unexplainable sense that the women’s elaborate contingency plans are missing the point (271), the idea that even babies make (unpronounceable) statements about experience (141), and the experience of the LSD tubies, who are silent because for them, perception of reality is not linguistic (167). But the success of Láadan in emancipating women from oppression materializes the ways in which language can, quite literally, alter reality.
Elgin’s second main concern in this novel is gender relations, and more specifically, the balance of power between the sexes. The world of Native Tongue takes place in a period of dramatic feminist setback. March 11, 1991, sees the landmark passage of the Twenty-fourth Amendment (repealing the Nineteenth Amendment that granted universal female suffrage) and the Twenty-fifth Amendment (affirming women’s universal secondary and protected status) (7–8). Women’s subordinate status is so ingrained and unquestioned that Aaron Adiness, as a young boy, believed his grandfather was a liar because he said women were once “allowed” to vote, be members of Congress, and sit on the Supreme Court (17). While the injustices of a male-ruled world are made clear, Elgin also demonstrates the complexity of effort and institution required to maintain such an unequal and dehumanizing system. The male assumption of female inferiority rests on three main tenets: that women are biologically inferior, that there is a natural hierarchy of the sexes, and that a woman’s value derives from her basic reproductive usefulness. Women are variously described as more primitive than men (151) and as “rather sophisticated child[ren] suffering from delusions of grandeur” (110). Both statements presume not only that women and men have different biological complexities, but that a more complex organism is more intelligent and more w
orthy of rights; such claims were frequently used in nineteenth century science to justify racism, and have been widely criticized since. Evidence to the contrary in the novel, such as Nazareth’s incredible linguistic ability, is explained away with the oft-repeated fact that “language acquisition skills are not directly correlated with intelligence” (279).
The idea of biological hierarchy grounds the society’s gender relations, which mandate female subservience and male protection rather than equality. When Rachel and Thomas fight about Nazareth’s prospective marriage to Aaron Adiness, Thomas is driven to rage by what he sees as Rachel “forget[ting] her place” (151). More than twenty years later, as the men discuss Nazareth’s cancer and the appropriate medical response to it, Thomas remarks, “‘We do feel—and, I might add, we are obligated to feel—more than just a ceremonial regard for the women in question’” (10). Even something as presumably female-oriented as gynecology is reinterpreted to focus on men: “‘Let me tell you what gynecology is. What it really is. Gentlemen, it is health care for your fellow man—whose women you are maintaining in that state of wellness that allows the men to pursue their lives as they were intended to pursue them. As this country desperately needs them to pursue them’” (225).
Women are valued to the degree that they serve the needs of men. Thus, Thomas values his daughter Nazareth for her linguistic skills and her genetic heritage, since both bring great benefit to the men of the Lines (147). When she is poisoned, he is persuaded to seek medical care not because she is in pain, but because she has a crucial role to play in the following day’s important labor treaty negotiations. As he puts it, “‘I am not concerned personally about this illness of Nazareth’s. . . . She gets excellent medical care. Whatever this is, I’m sure you’ve blown it up completely out of proportion. But I am concerned—very concerned—about the negotiations at the ILO’” (107). Nazareth is not a special case. The women are valuable for their languages, which bring money and prestige to the household, as well as for their reproductive abilities, which bring more money and prestige to the Lines through the production of linguistically skilled children. When a woman can no longer breed, she is removed to Barren House, the cruelly named woman-only space apart from the main house. Although once in the Barren House women are free (by definition) from the burden of reproduction, women there are still expected to translate. When they are too old or sick or frail to serve as official translators, they act as informal partners for the little girls to practice their many languages (206–07). Those activities seen as useless from the male perspective, such as tending to others (219) or working on Langlish (216), must be done in spare moments that don’t interfere with the primary tasks of teaching languages and running the household. Women’s subordination means that men rule the household unquestioningly. They take credit for the creation of children (11), they choose the spacing of their children (146), and they have free license to abuse their wives verbally, if not physically (175). Men outside the Lines can even choose their wives from and send their daughters to an array of sophisticated wife-training schools. As Nazareth muses bitterly upon accepting her marriage to Aaron, “Every woman was a prisoner for life; it was not some burden that she bore uniquely” (159).
Though subordinate to men, women can reframe even their most subservient behaviors to resistant ends. Thus Michaela, the ideal deferential listener, plays the role of executioner to the men whose trust she wins by flattery and manipulation. Although most of the women in the novel do not go as far as Michaela does, they are hardly resourceless victims. While they cannot fully escape their subordinated status, they do find ways to challenge their subordination. Aaron remarks, “This business of letting them have pocket money, and making exceptions for flowers and candy and romance media and bits of frippery was forever leading to unforeseen complications . . . astonishing how clever women were at distorting the letter of the law!” (16–17). Women thus use an exception meant to keep them contented in ways never anticipated: to exert small bits of female control and thus sabotage, without directly challenging, male rule. The practice of incremental change is another popular tactic of resistance. Making small changes over long periods of time, changes that are so small that they escape male notice, women frustrate the men while exerting their own control. Even if all they do is annoy the men, they are also putting them on notice that their control must be maintained.
The women adopt the stereotypes men hold as covers for their own subversive activities. Needlework, that quintessential female activity, is used to disguise the women’s serious strategy sessions: “‘Crochet, Natha,’ [Susannah] directed. ‘That is what we women do . . . ask the men and they will tell you. Any time they come here, they find us chatting and needling away. Frittering our time’” (249). Because sewing is assumed to be useless and a waste of time, everything associated with it, including conversation, is assumed to be harmless. The women of Chornyak House frequently remark that the image of frivolity and stupidity provides the best defense against the men of the household. Under these assumptions the men neither look for or see the evidence of conspiracy, of the teaching of forbidden women’s history, of the women’s medicine, contraception, and abortifacients. Some women even use the most stereotypical of male/female relations—romantic love—to manipulate, and thus resist, men. Michaela ruminates:
Thomas, now, she felt no love for, any more than she’d felt love for Ned. She had turned her attention to convincing him that he had seduced her, because she knew his power and respected it and she knew no other way to make use of it. But she felt no love for the man. Loving someone who considered you only one small notch above a cleverly trained domestic animal, and made no secret of it—that is, loving any adult male—was not possible for her. It would be a perversion, loving your masters while their boots were on your neck, and she was a woman healthy of mind. (258)
Although women are quickly disabused of their belief in romantic love, they continue to rely on it as a source of resistance, a way to remain useful and convenient to men.
Perhaps the most extreme version of female rebellion in the novel is found in Belle-Anne, who functions as an effective foil to Michaela. Belle-Anne’s specific rebellion is to refuse pregnancy at all costs, but in such a way that force won’t change anything. As the doctors observe, “‘You insert a sperm in that young lady, no matter how you go about it, and she just twitches her little butt and the sperm dies. Dead. Gone’” (127). Her ability to sabotage her own reproductivity enables her to escape both marriage and living among men. Unfortunately, it also makes her appropriate as a sacrificial lamb when Aquina botches her attempt to make Nazareth barren and thus accelerate her entrance to Barren House. Belle-Anne confesses to poisoning Nazareth in order to forestall the search that would inevitably expose all the women’s secret sources of resistance—linguistic, social, and medicinal.
Since resistance can be produced from within patriarchy, patriarchy must be continually reproduced. The eternal small battles between the men and women demonstrate that gender hierarchy and sexual enslavement must be continually maintained through a variety of tactics. The most common tactic used at Chornyak House is the simple and expedient one of keeping the women busy. Thomas advises the head of another Line, “‘Double their schedules, Andrew. Give them some stuff to translate that there hasn’t been time for. Hell, make them clean the house. Buy them fruit to make jelly out of, if your orchards and storerooms are bare. There’s got to be something you can do with them, or they will literally drive you crazy. Women out of control are a curse’” (86). This rationale also allows the women their Encoding Project (16). By assigning them amounts of work unheard of outside the Lines, the men assume the women won’t have either the time or the energy to scheme. The women, of course, counter this with traditional women’s activities that double as subversive covers, such as needlework and the ingenious recipe-code.
Another primary tactic for controlling women is the manipulation of information. The men manipulate history in
order to eradicate a precedent of female autonomy by reinterpreting through the contemporary trope of male indulgence: “‘Men are by nature kind and considerate, and a charming woman’s eagerness to play at being a physician or a Congressman or a scientist can be both amusing and endearing; we can understand, looking back upon the period, how it must have seemed to 20th century men that there could be no harm in humoring the ladies’” (72). This form of manipulation seeks to control aspirations. Another kind of linguistic manipulation seeks to grant women the illusion of control and input while strictly circumscribing the options they can exercise. During one argument, Thomas says “‘Rachel, . . . it doesn’t make the slightest difference whether you approve or not. It would be pleasant if you did approve, of course. I make every effort to consider your personal wishes with regard to my children whenever I can. But when you refuse to be reasonable you leave me no choice but to ignore you’” (148). Women’s supposed autonomy is thus predicated on their fundamental agreement with men.