As complex and problematic as the novel was in its subtle shifts in time and narratives, I found the novel to be the most dynamic and interesting yet. While all of the naratives in Russ’s novel are rife with feminist rhetoric (even Jeaninne ultimately rejects the patriarchal assumptions of her self-worth, i.e. marriage and children), each woman is unique; none fold to the male ontological notion that all women are "essentially" feminine. They don’t possess the same characteristics, preferences, interests, and capabilites and none of the women want what the men in the novel think they want: child-rearing and a husband.
As Haraway articulates, as does Russ in multiple scenes throughout The Female Man, women (feminist cyborgs and the like) do not live cookie-cutter lives according to essentialist theories that prescribe to women what they should be because it is ‘their nature.’ This point is reminiscent of The Intuitionist/ Bell Hooks discussion in which I asserted that while Whitehead’s protagonist is a black woman who encounters other black ‘folk’ in the novel, Whitehead’s black characters are tremendously varied, none of whom lend to an essentialist ontology. Whether these characters conform to traditional archetypes of black experience (cliche’s according to some) or not, none are "essentially" the same. Similarly, Russ’s ‘female men,’ though they are all genetic analogues, are all very different people. Each is a product of her (what Bourdieu calls) habitus. We are told that their respective universes are alternatives to one another, and by extension parallels since each produces the four ‘analoguos’ women, but each world is a radically different environment from the next, which yields strikingly different subjects. According to John Fiske, "Culture is not concieved of as the asthetic ideals of form and beauty found in great art, or in more humanist terms as the voice of "the human spirit" that transcends boundaries of time and nation to speak of "a hypothetical universal man (the gender is deliberate- women play little or no role in this conception of culture)." Russ implies through her variant women that there is no universal experience of women. All lead unique, individuated lives within her respective ideological constructs (male in Joanna’s and Jeaninne’s realities). ‘Essentially,’ typical female experience is one of subordination according Haraway, but the plethora of possible female identites are limitless. Women must unite with other women consciously (Haraway) since women are so diverse. Women’s groups are not ‘natural,’ but they are conscious constructs. Russ’s female protagonists, such as Jael, the assassin, "The Reasoner," lives by her own constructed, conscious "hatred" of anything male. Janet, ‘the savior,’ is another utopian possibility of female identity not yet known in the world of the reader since we still live in a gendered society.
Russ also implies that Janet’s world is the utopian reality in which women become the historians (Janet explicitly revels in her telling of Whileawayan history since the plague), the scientists, the dominant keepers of civilization, but this female uplift is only possible if gender is no longer a fissure in the human race. Haraway suggests that "imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis" may also create "a world without end." I don’t agree. Men and women are men and women. Whether gender is a social construct or a ‘natural’ phenomenon or combination of socialization and biology, I like being a woman and understood as being such. Thanks.
"The cyborg incarnation" of Janet is not bound to the history of men, which according to the anti-feminist characters in Russ’s novel, such as the men, is "a very bad mistake." As ‘the sharp glasses man’ at the party on page 43 tells Janet, "You can’t challenge men in their own fields." This of course signifies all fields in Joanna’s world, a world in which she has literally become ‘a female man’ because she has pursued a line of work in a ‘man’s field’ as a writer and, God forbid, a thinker. "If we are all Mankind, it follows to my interested and righteous and rightnow very bright and beady eyes, that I too am a Man and not at all a Woman."
I found the end of the novel to be problematic at the point at which Jael claims responsibility for Janet’s world, the genderless utopian future that neither Joanna nor Jeaninne will ever be a part of. How is it that Jael’s war and its objective, the ultimate demolition of the male species, can yield Janet’s world if the two women of different realities from two different times, Jael of the relative past and Janet of the ‘undetectable’ future, have crossed paths? According to an earlier passage in the novel on page seven, the narrative voice (perhaps Joanna, perhaps the author, perhaps a muddling of the two) informs the reader "the paradox of time travel ceases to exist, for the Past one visits is never one’s own Past but always somebody else’s; or rather, one’s visit to the Past instantly creates another Present…and what you visit is the Past belonging to that Present- an entirely different matter from your own Past." So, since Janet visited Joanna’s world, one alternative past, but a past that isn’t hers, and Jael’s world, another version of the past that also isn’t Janet’s, then neither Past is Janet’s. Jael tells Janet that the plague is a false record of history generated by the women in power after the war in Jael’s universe in which all men on earth were wiped out. However, though perhaps what Jael tells Janet was true prior to Janet’s time travel, Janet has existed or entered Jael’s reality, and therefore, everything from that point on changes retroactively. So, either the plague really did happen in Janet’s past prior to time travelling/ universe hopping or it was a lie. Either Janet’s entry into Jael’s universe instantly created another present in Janet’s world (one that is not Janet’s), in which the plague was a socially generated fabrication, or it wiped out Whileaway altogether, for if Jael’s war is the cause of a genderless reality, not the historical the plague of Janet’s actual present, then Janet’s Whileaway and its history no longer exist. Perhaps Janet can never return to Whileaway because it no longer exists. By visiting the Pasts that are not the pasts of her present, or visiting pasts that could have been her Past before the plague and therefore, retroactively changed everything, her former present reality might not exist in exactly the way it was before she started universe hopping, in which case, Whileaway is not Whileaway and never really was.
I’m still very confused about this, as evident in my rambling. I’m sure there are numerous combinations of realities and mutant worlds, and other possible impossibilities that Russ attempts to unfurl. I’d like to know more about them.
