The Color of Battleships: Racial Identity in The Lathe of Heaven
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven confronts the “problem” of racial identity and the implications of, what Toni Morrison terms, the “deliberateness of the construction, the conscious necessity for establishing difference” (Morrison 39). Le Guin uses two methods of exploration. First she intentionally racializes her characters, calling into question the role of racial appearance on perceived identity. Le Guin offers focused descriptions of George Orr from the perspective of both Dr. Haber and Heather Lelache. Haber describes George Orr as having “Light hair and eyes, a short, slight, fair man, slightly undernourished, good health, twenty-eight to thirty-two. Unaggressive, placid, milquetoast, repressed, conventional” (Le Guin 7). Heather Lelache, the “Black Widow” (42), finds him “A born victim. Hair like a little girl’s, brown and fine, little blond beard soft white skin like a fish’s belly; meek, mild, stuttering” (42). In both instances, Le Guin marries the physical/racial with the psychological/emotional. This marriage leaves the reader to ask: how much does race have to do with who we are and how we are perceived? How much does race have to do with identity?
To answer this question, Le Guin proposes a universe that “undoes” this racial construction. Dr. Haber suggests that there should be “no more color problems. No more questions of race” (129). Consequently, human beings become gray, “the color of battleships” (130). With memories of both worlds, Orr struggles to integrate his ideas of a racial identity with a non-racial world. He notes, “That’s why she [Heather]’s not there… She could not have been born gray. Her color, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixed nature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the gray people’s world. She had not been born” (130). Orr feels that race is essential to Heather’s identity or his perception of her identity. Resigned to this new world without Heather, George encounters the arrest of a short man for the crime of cancer. Instead of racial persecution, disease is “other.” By doing so, Le Guin emphasizes the metaphorical implications of race as a “way of referring to and disguising forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay and economic division far more threatening to the body politic then biological ‘race’ ever was” (Morrison 63). To demonstrate this point, disease and race become interchangeable. Just as one can produce a racial identity, so can one produce one based on a particular illness or good health. These identities are not inherently evil; rather, suffering comes from the appropriation and misuse of these identities to create difference.
Le Guin depicts racial identity as something that gives human beings shade and dimension. To further emphasize this point, Orr compares the racialized Heather to the gray one: “His wife had been a gray person, a far gentler person than this one… This Heather carried a big black handbag with a brass snap, and probably a half pint of brandy inside; she came on hard. He wife had been unaggressive and, though courageous, timid in manner. This was not his wife, but a fiercer woman, vivid and difficult” (182). Like Morrison, Le Guin finds race as an asset rather than a detriment. Racial diversity allows for a “deeper, richer, more complex life than the sanitized one commonly presented to us” (Morrison 66).
Works Cited
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Lathe of Heaven. New York: Scribner, 1971.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark. New York: Random House, 1992.