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The Feminist Novel of Androgynous Fantasy

1977; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 2; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3346348

1536-0334

Ellen Morgan,

Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

Man by Joanna Russ and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin. But the feminist novels of the past decade have, for the most part, been realistic ones. Alix Kates Shulman's Memoirs Of An Ex-Prom Queen, Marge Piercy's Small Changes, Erica Jong's Fear of Flying and How To Save Your Own Life, are about real people in the real world. Feminist writers seem disposed, not surprisingly, to explore the actual conflicts within women and between women and society that are taking place as patriarchal traditions undergo rejection. Yet at the heart of the feminist impulse is a fierce hunger for images of authentic female selfhood--images which might illuminate what a liberated female person would be like. And the social reality in which the realistic novel is grounded is still sufficiently patriarchal to make a realistic novel about a truly liberated woman very nearly a contradiction in terms. Fantasy remains the primary vehicle for the depiction of women who successfully breach the barriers of sexual caste in order to achieve authenticity. So fantasies are an important kind of feminist literature. Some feminist novels of fantasy--both recent and not so recent-are not the type of utopian works one might expect; that is, they are not works which rearrange or transform society as a way of showing how more equitable treatment for women may be fostered. Rather, they are novels which challenge the concept of woman as a different kind of psyche than man. The idea that human personality is determined to a significant extent by gender, and is naturally and inherently either feminine or masculine, is today the rationale for the sexual caste system. Thus, the androgynous fantasy has an obvious subversive potential.