Joanna Russ’ Female Man challenged my previous views of feminism and the feminist movement in the U.S. Perhaps I am fortunate to be a young woman forty years after the Women’s Rights Movement—I say this because there seems to either be a new form of female empowerment or a lack thereof among today’s American women (we’re not burning our bras and protesting so much as my mother’s generation did). Considering the novel’s ending—the literary punch in the face–and Russ’ inclusion of a savage female cyborg with claws and metal teeth, I’d say the novel aggressively argues for women’s rights as well as transgender rights. What I responded to most was the fierce parody of male and female relations within the different spaces and times experienced by the novel’s character(s)—something I’ve never experienced to such extremes, though I guess that’s parody. Or better yet, the “happy” women who compete within their traditional roles as mother/wife/servant, and who are bloodthirsty for any woman who challenges these roles (ALL THE WOMEN: Kill, kill, kill, kill). Nowadays there seems to be a reversal; working women and the generation of women who fought for women’s rights sometimes hold a certain amount of resentment towards young women who choose to stay home, manage house and family, and make a career of being a wife and/or mother.
Other parts of the novel that I am curious about are Russ’s parody of how some women depend upon “a man” for a sense of self. For example, the narrative during Jeanine’s date: “His contribution is Make me feel good; her contribution is Make me exist.” Russ’s feminism in these passages seemed to be the places where the novel was postmodern—traditional modes of gender roles were/ are not truly stable, and a woman, a transgender, and a man’s sense of self will continually shift. When Jael points out that all four J women are each other’s possibilities in other spaces and times, I was struck by the arbitrariness of circumstances and the ambiguity of self had by these women (and well, all of us). Who is saying Goodbye at the novel’s closing? All the women and someone else? Is it Joanna saying goodbye to the possibilities of her old self?
When I first read the ending, I thought that it was Janet, the central narrative voice, (I think) who was saying “Goodbye” at the end, but as I read closer, I noticed that Janet went off with Laur, that Joanna watched them go, that Jeannine went off to show Jael the city, and that Jael and I (Janet) became one, echoing the novel’s point that each woman was from a different “probability/continuim” (22). So each woman’s voice was heard. That made me think of your earlier statement about the shifting of identities and blending of selves as a postmodern feature. I am still not sure whose voice we are meant to hear at the end or if we are meant to hear them all collapsed into one female voice. The novel raises many questions about history from a feminist trajectory because we get the history of each of the four female voices, but it is Jael who reveals to them the notion of “doubleness” when she says “Doyou remember the old story of Doppelganger? This is the double you recognize instantly with whom you feel a mysterious kinship. An instant sympathy, that informs you at once that the other is really your very own self” (162).
But another question emerges from the ending: How does the “little book” figure in the novel’s ending and what does the “little book” represent? Who is talking to the book? Does the book represent a “hypertext” or a newly created self from the typed out self of Janet who wrote “herstory” from God’s typewriter, and now that she is done and the “little book” is finished, she can send it off to the world. The final command to the “little book” (rejoice and on that day we will all be free) seems to spell redemption for all women or perhaps for the four women? I don’t know. It was also significant that there was a lot of violence from the women in this novel and a repeated theme of work throughout the novel. Is Russ saying that women’s work is a subversive act of female agency?