Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1999 12:38:10 +1200 From: Jenny Rankine Subject: [*FSFFU-LIT*] Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Hi all, Since it's August 2 where I am (Aotearoa New Zealand, first to see the sunrise and the new millenium, yadayada), I decided to leap in. I enjoy Octavia Butler's earlier work more than her later writing, and I ate this book in a single sitting which had me up till 4am a few nights ago. I also followed it with Patternmaster. I really enjoy the way she tackles the situation of a woman with less power in confrontation with a man with the power of life and death over her (I know I've said this before). She has written several portrayals of strong women seeking to be autonomous and independent in situations where they were constrained, both by the structures around them and a particular male. The only way at the beginning of WS in which the female protagonist can influence Doro is to make him care for her. This is always a dicey strategy, but sometimes the only option. The heroine has to sexually service a man who has threatened her or has power over her life - I call this rape because it is coerced, since it is her only option. I see these scenarios in Butler's books as metaphors for women's position in heterosexual relationships, and for all women's position at some point in non-sexual situations with more powerful men. The way I see it, Doro rapes the heroine many times - in only a few periods in the book does she actively want him for a lover in an uncoerced way. Later in the book she runs away, surviving for another century, and influences Doro by being the only person who he values who does not die. This is when she is able to negotiate her strongest agreement with him. I don't think Butler ever falls into the trap of portraying women as innately more peaceful or less warlike. I found all her characters well-drawn. One test for this is whether I imagine them reacting to different situations and developments from the book's story after I've finished reading it. Enough for a first comment. Have to go and do some work. Jenny R ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1999 10:20:54 -0700 From: Lindy Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Jenny Rankine wrote: > I enjoy Octavia Butler's earlier work more than her later writing Just curious... which later novels did you enjoy less? > I really enjoy the way she tackles the situation of a woman with less power > in confrontation with a man with the power of life and death over her. snip. This is one of the many aspects I like about Butler's novels and short stories. She is highly imaginative, a great storyteller, and explores the inequity of power in relationships of all kinds. snip. > I see these scenarios in Butler's books as metaphors for women's position in > heterosexual relationships, and for all women's position at some point in > non-sexual situations with more powerful men. That seems to be so. I also see these scenarios as depicting the relationships between those enslaved and those who "own" or otherwise have power over them. Doro has control over "his" people. They must have children as he desires, and it is often from this group that he chooses those he consumes and inhabits their bodies. He may leave them alone for years, but they know him when he returns. > The only way at the beginning of WS in which the female protagonist can > influence Doro is to make him care for her. This is always a dicey > strategy, but sometimes the only option. Horrible, isn't it? Butler's characters are survivors. I've forgotten the name of this character, despite her importance is most of the series. > Later in the book she runs away, surviving for another century, and > influences Doro by being the only person who he values who does not die. > This is when she is able to negotiate her strongest agreement with him. If you've read Walker's _The Color Purple_, where near the end, the aging Mister__ and Celie sit together on the porch congenially. . . Butler's situation reminds me of this. Two enemies or combatants, one having disempowered or enslaved the other, finding some comfort together because of shared experience. Friendly enemies, or some such definition. It's very complex. I keep wanting to call the female protagonist "Edna." . . . anyway, she and Doro are unique in that each is the only person from one another's past, shared experiences, and shared memories. She is less lonely than Doro, though, because she has a personal connection to her family. Doro seems to me to be a perpetual adolescent in many ways. For the most part, I disliked him intensely. At times, I felt somewhat sorry for him. The experience of becoming immortal during childhood, and having consumed both parents before he realized what he was doing, then living forever like a vampire of souls, and then coming upon people with abilities he valued. . .I can imagine no other way for him to be. That's part of the genius of Butler's plots and characterization, I think. _Wild Seed_ is a great read. It deals with complex and intense and often horrendous situations which hurt as I read, but it is one I'd read again (unlike _Mission Child_). I'm not certain why I can read and enjoy Butler's work despite the uncomfortable, ambiguous situations of the characters. Personal quirk, perhaps. Take care all, Lindy ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 14:22:46 0100 From: Petra Mayerhofer Subject: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Summer time. Everybody (?) is on the beach, not sitting in front of the PC writing emails ... This was the fifth book by Butler I've read (after the Xenogenesis trilogy and _Kindred_) and it's the one I'm most uncomfortable with. It's a good book, but I did not quite enjoy it. At the moment I am not motivated to read the other Patternmaster books. I was surprisingly disturbed by the second part of the book, which made me wonder. Of course, it is the hardest time for Anyanwu, she is a slave, degraded and raped (I agree that's the only correct term for it) by Doro directly and indirectly. But, that's not the first book I've read in which rape and violence occurs. I wonder why I react more strongly to it in this instance than e.g. to when Lore prostitutes herself in _Slow River_. It might be because it reminds me of one of the often used Romance plots: independent, strong woman is tamed by dominant man who abuses her and in the end she likes it/is resigned to it. And I hate that storyline. It might also be because there is the potential for love between Anyanwu and Doro and then Doro throws it away and uses her like cattle (I'm ever the romantic, I know). On 2 Aug 99, Jenny Rankine wrote: > I see these scenarios in Butler's books as metaphors for women's > position in heterosexual relationships, and for all women's position > at some point in non-sexual situations with more powerful men. I completely agree. On 2 Aug 99, Lindy wrote: > Butler's characters are survivors. !!!! The point is not to preserve one's pride, but to survive. And to transform, if possible, the experience to something meaningful. I think for example of the episode in which Doro forces Anyanwu to sleep with Thomas because he wants to punish her. Instead of only feeling humiliated she starts to see it as a task for her as a healer. Only to have Doro hit back in the end by killing Thomas and sleeping with her while 'wearing' his body. I could hardly read this scene, I found it so horrible. Is this episode only a defeat for Anyanwu? IMO it depends on what is seen as important: only the final result or the process as a whole. In any case, it's hard to imagine that anybody forgives something like that, even after 150 years. One thing I am wondering about is how Doro is adored by 'his' people, especially the women, and how they are ready to die for him (most of them, the others die sooner, we never get 'closer' to one of the runaways). Several times it is stated that he protects his people in exchange but they seem to be destroyed and got lost rather regularly. And why is it so very important for Doro to breed people with telepathic or other capabilities? Simply to have better 'food' for himself? I couldn't find any online reviews of _Wild Seed_, probably because it's been published such a long time ago. There are several Butler interviews on the net, but only in one _Wild Seed_ is more than only mentioned. That's in Steven Piziks' interview of Octavia Butler from 1997, published in Marion Zimmer Bradley's FANTASY Magazine 37 http://www.mzbfm.com/butler.htm Quote: 'SP: Why did you write the Patternist books backward? PATTERNMASTER takes place last, but your wrote it first, and WILD SEED, which takes place first, was written last. OB: I wrote it that way because that was the way it occurred to me. I had this idea of the Patternists in the distant future and their particular society and their enemies and all that. After a while, I wanted to know more about how they came to be who they were, so I had to invent a past for them. When I created Emma Daniels, who is Anyanwu, I really wanted to do a past for her, but I was a little afraid to. Once I had done that, I had also wanted to do a past for Doro, take him back to his origins, but I've never done that. Norman Mailer came out with a book about a transmigrating Egyptian, and I just figured I didn't really want to follow that. Doro was me giving myself a chance to play God in a whole new way. Think of it - here is this character who cannot die. I mean, even the vampires in vampire stories can die. In fact, they work very hard at not dying. Doro could not die and had no choice but to kill, and the people that he most enjoyed being with were the ones he had to regard as food. SP: I want to get a science fiction and fantasy course started at the high school where I teach, and I want to use WILD SEED in the class. OB: One of the things I'm sure you'll end up saying to your students at some point, if you already haven't, is that what you bring to a story is at least as important as what the author brought to it, and interpretation is inevitable. SP: You also did a lot of research into Ibo mythology for WILD SEED. OB: Ibo life, really. Oddly enough, I've done more since, just looking around Yoruban mythology just because I do want to write about Yoruban mythology. I want to make use of it. Everyone makes use of Greek mythology, so I've been fooling around with Yoruban. There's a good reason why my character in Parable of the Sower is named Lauren Oya Olamina. Oya is a rather tempestuous goddess.' _Wild Seed_ was short-listed for the Tiptree Retrospective Award http://www.tiptree.org/retro/short.html Debbie Notkin, one of the jurors, wrote about it: 'Octavia Butler explores continuously _not only_ the boundaries of gender, but of alienness wherever she may find it. In Wild Seed, which may still be her best book to date, she paints the joint canvasses of the horrors of ante- bellum slavery and the mysteries of immortality with the stories of Doro and Anyanwu-an immortal man and an immortal shapechanger with the heart and soul of a woman. Doro starts the book believing that he is a match for anything-but Anyanwu's task is to show him that she is his equal and more.' A very good interview with Octavia Butler is that by Mike McGonigal from 1998 for Indexmagazine http://www.indexmagazine.com/indexm/indexed/butler.htm There is an article by J. Douglas Allen Taylor from 1996 published in Metro (Jan. 4-10). Title: 'Novelist and short- story writer Octavia Butler defies categories' that discusses mostly the collection _Bloodchild_ http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/01.04.96/books- 9601.html Octavia Butler doesn't have a homepage but there are several Butler tribute pages: The Unofficial Octavia Butler Homepage by Laura Quilter http://www.wenet.net/~lquilter/femsf/authors/butler.html lists Butler's works, literary criticism on Octavia Butler, and interviews with Octavia Butler. Furthermore Laura comments Butler's work on the main author's page: http://www.wenet.net/~lquilter/femsf/authorsa.html#butler Octavia Butler Page at the website 'Voices from the Gap - Women Writers of Color' http://voices.cla.umn.edu/authors/OctaviaButler.html with a biography and a selected bibliography. Octavia Estelle Butler: An Unofficial Web Page by Sela Fenske http://www.towanda.com/sela/octavia.htm with links and resources, including an essay by Sela Fenske on Octavia Butler, done as part of her Women and Their Literature class in 1997. And another short Butler page http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/butler/butler_octavia_bio.html The first chapter of _Wild Seed_ is online by Warner Books http://www.twbookmark.com/books/89/0446606723/chapter_excerpt312.html A (very) short note by Octavia Butler on a Butler infopage by Warner Books http://www.twbookmark.com/authors/85/184/index.html Petra Petra Mayerhofer mailto:mayerhofer@usf.uni-kassel.de -- BDG website http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Comet/1304/ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 13:07:23 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU >This was the fifth book by Butler I've read (after the >Xenogenesis trilogy and _Kindred_) and it's the one I'm >most uncomfortable with. It's a good book, but I did not quite >enjoy it. At the moment I am not motivated to read the other >Patternmaster books. > >I was surprisingly disturbed by the second part of the book, >which made me wonder. Of course, it is the hardest time >for Anyanwu, she is a slave, degraded and raped Petra, I have to admit that I was put off reading more of Butler's work for years because of this book; I found it horrible to read, for all the reasons you raise -- even though I recognize (or think I do!) that the raped-victim-comes-to-acceptance-of-the-male-abuser plot as coming not from the modern romance novel's putrid version of it, but descending from the realities of social situations of ultimate inequality in history, such as American southern slave-society (I avoid the sex-specific pronoun for the victim because there's an example with a male rape victim in M.J. Engh's ARSLAN, where I found it just as loathsome a story). And I am in a very peculiar position with regard to all this because the same pattern surfaces in various forms in some of my own work. Actually I think it's very hard to avoid it, *in some level of dilution*, in any feminist work that takes a serious look at the ways in which exploited classes of people learn to deal with the exploiting class(es) that cannot be dislodged. It's part of women's history -- when we fought too hard they killed us, and when we "accepted" too much we became collaborators in passing oppression on to our daughters -- so it's pretty hard *not* to address it one way or another. I think most books that take up the situation of the sexes in this respect include examples of members of the victim class finding strength and sometimes solidarity in sheer survival, and some workable peace in acceptance of an unwinable situation as that which you just have to find the strength to endure, or die. Maybe Butler's way of narrowing the focus to this very personal, long- running nexus between Doro and his breeding-slaves and then relentlessly bearing down on it as the core of the book is just too painful for some readers, myself included. I guess we all find our "pain threshold" for ourselves with work like this. I have to admit that I took up the PARABLE books, recently, with some trepidation because of this; but they are much more "open" in the sense of offering at least the hope of more freedom for characters laboring under the kind of desperate conditions she puts them in, and I enjoyed them more than I had expected to. Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 5 Aug 1999 18:13:01 +0200 From: Lassnig Subject: [*FSFFU-LIT*] Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU I'm glad the discussion on Wild Seed hasn't become a victim of summer vacations and that the ball is finally set rolling! I found Wild Seed a very well-crafted book, its narration technique is incredibly good and it's certainly a good read. But I also felt uneasy with the motifs Butler raises, such as Petra discussed (thank you, Petra, for all the delightful links you gave us!). As I see it, Butler wanted to show that slavery / oppression / patriarchy is such a pervasive and inescapable mechanism that even strong-minded women like Anyanwu fall prey to it and have to give in to it in some way or another. All she could do really is comply and not risk the life of her children or perish. It's certainly not a radical design Butler develops here, but I think it's a dystopian, pessimistic and therefore realistic picture. I was very uncomfortable with Doro's breeding plan, even more so as the concept of difference (creating superiority in some sort of way - telepathy, telekinesis, shape-shifting, all survival skills really!) emerges as one of the pillars in Butler's fiction. I see this most highlighted in the Parable books, which I actually didn't enjoy very much (I didn't like Lauren and the way the Earthseed belief is promoted; and even if these are supposed to be seen critically, I miss a relativizing distance from them). Racial, cultural and any other sort of difference as a valuable contribution to society, tolerated and appreciated - this concept is probably a general principle of liberal fsf, no? But what Butler seems to do (I might be misreading her badly, though) is project a vision where difference may enable their "carriers" to dominate in one way or the other. Or is Butler warning us of precisely this? I'm sorry if my observations are rather confusing but I find most of Butler's stories just as wonderful and fascinating as I find them ambiguous some time. Especially in Wild Seed I couldn't decide whether it is critical of Anyanwu or not (in the end). Petra wrote: >And why is it so very important for Doro to breed people with >telepathic or other capabilities? Simply to have better 'food' for >himself? This touches on exactly what I meant above. It's this idea of breeding a different people to create survivors or dominators (I really haven't figured this out!) Greetings, Ines ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Aug 1999 08:45:06 +1200 From: Jenny Rankine Subject: [*FSFFU-LIT*] Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU I Lassnig says of Anyanwu -- > All she could do really is comply and not risk the life of her > children or perish. It's certainly not a radical design Butler develops > here, but I think it's a dystopian, pessimistic and therefore realistic > picture. All one person on their own can do in that kind of circumstance is resist as much as they can without being killed, which means complying most of the time. If Anyanwu had five other allies with the same abilities among Doro's breeding "stock", then she could have organised a resistance movement. Butler seems to me in her early books to be interested in exploring the experience of the lone woman in a situation of slavery or coercion, not how radical movements are built by *groups* of people in that situation. That is what makes some of her novels so bleak. One person on their own can do very little. I was surprised by Lassnig's perception that Butler may have been critical of Anyanwu in Wild Seed. I found the book to be completely sympathetic to her, and very critical of Doro's character and actions. I interpreted the book as a strong warning about the dangers of eugenics (which is what Doro was doing), and of any deliberate biologically-based system of dominance. I was concerned, however, in the Imago trilogy that she seemed to support her aliens' analysis of humans as genetically/biologically programmed for male dominance and the building of destructive hierarchies. Jenny R ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1999 15:31:35 -0700 From: Jessie Stickgold-Sarah Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU This is a book I'm very glad to read "in company", so to speak, because it made me intensely uncomfortable. I think that a great deal of SF leads us to the belief that a solution will always be found--like the mystery novel, which I think is an intensely idealistic form of literature, in which evil is punished and good is triumphant. (Of course, in much of the best work there is always ambiguity. Unsettling but closer to reality.) I had trouble with Wild Seed because it failed to find a true solution, only an uneasy compromise. I really wasn't satisfied with it; it made my head hurt. I appreciated the comment that: > It's part of women's history -- when we fought too hard they killed us, and > when we "accepted" too much we became collaborators in passing oppression > on to our daughters It's such a fine line to walk. On the one hand, we may say (as Anyanwu does at one point) that to submit enough to survive is worse than death. On the other hand, in so many of these situations it's a real triumph just to stay alive through all the horrors that may be inflicted. Where do you draw the line? Perhaps sometimes you can't know until it's too late. And people say science fiction is escapist! Are the later books less grim? What's the "correct" order to read them in? (That is, I suppose, the order in which they will make most sense, since I gather they're written in backwards order.) jessie ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1999 19:18:22 EDT From: Phoebe Wray Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU I admire Butler's work -- the clarity and lean-ness of her prose, the steady structuring of the book. Wild Seed was uncomfortable for me, too, as several have expressed, but I couldn't put it down. I wanted her to give me a hope, a relief, and then felt guilty for wanting that. It seemed to me an elaborate metaphor for the whole American Slave experience. Perhaps, as Anyanwu, most African-Americans feel they are collaborating in their own oppression. Not just now, but the whole history of it. Is that stretching this book too far? And not just African-Americans, but all of us collaborating, patching over, coping, unable to stop the evils put in motion long ago, and unsure how to proceed. I could stretch this further and say it resonates with the entire Western World domination that destroys as it insinuates itself into cultures everywhere. How far away from breeding for telepathy etc is inserting consumerism into a Third World culture. People who need clean water don't need Coca-Cola or Marlboros. Doro then becomes the symbol of the *make-'em-buy at any cost* trader. I especially liked the layers of *loving.* Some characters bonded, however briefly, and found something like normalcy, even though they knew that was not possible with Doro still able to arrive and annihilate their beings and their souls. I liked the fact these moments of *loving* were unsentimental. They were real, but doomed. Who or what is Doro? Non-human, alien, trapped in his own need to exist. To expand my metaphor above -- Doro = the conundrum. It would seem the only way to get out of his mad design is to kill him. Butler is suggesting that is not easy, or someone -- probably most especially Anyanwu -- would have done so. Somehow his existence is seen as necessary. But is it? Maybe not. By the end, when Anyanwu has her own establishment, she could be the new pioneer. Seemed to me the ending left some room for that. Tantalizing thoughts and problems posed her. best wishes, phoebe Phoebe Wray zozie@aol.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Aug 1999 18:55:52 +0100 From: Carol Ann Kerry-Green Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Jessie wrote: > Are the later books less grim? What's the "correct" order to read them in? > (That is, I suppose, the order in which they will make most sense, since I > gather they're written in backwards order.) To me, if anything, Mind of My Mind which follows Wild Seed is more grim. I 'enjoyed' Wild Seed more, maybe because of some of the conundrum's that people have already mentioned, it *made* me think, made me look at the way women have 'collaborated' with men over the centuries and made me question that 'collaboration'. A hard book to read, but 'pleasurable' as well, in that Anyanwu is a shape shifter and it's about telephathy, all themes that I have loved and searched out over the years. As to order, I *think* Wild Seed Mind of My Mind Clays Ark Survivor Patternmaster Though some may argue Clays Ark and Survivor aren't really of the series, but if you read them, they all fit in the sequence - I don't think I've missed anything out. Though Patternmaster is the last in the series, it was written first, and I believe Mind of My Mind was written before Wild Seed. Carol Ann Hull, UK ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 14:19:57 -0700 From: Joyce Jones Subject: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Here's another vote for this book's being a very uncomfortable read. I thought Butler did a wonderful job of describing slavery from another perspective. She didn't go into the physical abuse side that we are accustomed to. I thought the way she described the boat trip, people being stolen or sold from their home land, the inability to communicate due to differing languages opened the experience to those of us who have never consciously been slaves. She suggested the other horrors of the slave ship while not letting them be visited on these chosen slaves. That was all very skillfully done. I also liked the initial encounters between Doro and Anyanwu, the interplay of their various talents. I was fascinated at the way she made Anyanwu become a healer, living long enough and having the drive and strength to test various diseases and cures on herself. This could easily have been an enlightening book just about Anyanwu and her various adventurers. When she first became a dolphin I could feel her swimming, feel the interplay between her and the other dolphins. It was sensual, pure enjoyment of the moment, for this women who is eternal (memories of the Summer Queen). Then the got to America and it all changed. As Suzy Charnas said, Butler did a very good job describing the compromises that one must commit to in order to stay alive as a slave. I could accept all of that. I had a little difficulty understanding how Doro's people loved him so, but Butler made the business of adjustment to slavery understandable. What I couldn't understand and couldn't accept was that Anyanwu wanted Doro by the end of the book, wanted him to stay with her because he wouldn't die. He seemed to make such minor adjustments in order to win her loyalty. He stopped killing people emotionally committed to him. Not the largest sacrifice I could imagine. Again, is this just commentary on survival as a slave? The slave mistress is committed to her owner and overlooks the fact that he remains morally defective to the core? What Doro offered Isaac, Anyanwu, and a few select others was a transcendent experience in their joining with him. I could see that that would make his people judge him by different standards than they would use for a mortal man. (It kind of gave the phrase "go into the light" seem a little less uplifting, didn't it?) Maybe Butler is saying that trying to judge life by our accustomed values and ethics doesn't allow for growth. Maybe she's saying that even those of us who feel most in control of our lives must yield to larger forces. Maybe ultimately there's no way to make those forces palatable or even understandable, but we must yield nevertheless, or die despairing of our inability to control them. But did she have to make the forces male? Even taken metaphorically, not as a strong woman yielding to a stronger man but as a human yielding to the forces of nature I can't to the deepest part of myself see those forces as masculine. This book, while giving me much to think of, doesn't entice me to read more of the series. Joyce ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 20:58:08 -0500 From: Nataline Viray-Fung Subject: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Hello everyone, Newbie here, so please forgive me if I step on any toes or miss some aspect of established protocol. I liked WS very much, even though it was difficult to read at times. Most everyone has already touched on her being raped and Ines brought up the "pervasive and inescapable" quality of Doro's/patriarchy's power. What was troublesome to me was the lever which gave Doro so much of that power over Anyanwu. He offers her immortal children and threatens to kill her present children if she doesn't co-operate. Doesn't it seem that the dream of immortal children is also the dream of eternal motherhood? All Anyanwu seems to want is to be a mom and protect her children in every way possible. She says as much to Margaret. The argument here seems to be that it's an innate desire and she can't do much about it. It's the same old line we've been hearing for centuries: It's part of womens' nature to want babies and to fight desperately to protect them. Everything about Anyanwu reinforces this and it drove me crazy! Don't get me wrong, I'm _not_ trying to strip motherhood of it's value, nor am I saying that there isn't power to be found here, but every now and then I just wanted to see Anyanwu show a little more ambition! Anyanwu seems mired in some very old-fashioned ideals for having lived so long. The argument that Isaac wins her over with at the end of Covenant is the one whereby only she can save Doro's human side and stop him from senseless killing. She could be his saviour (his Angel in the House) if only she waits long enough. And at the end, that is what happens. Doro collapses at her bedside and she stays alive to comfort, bathe and put him to bed. She is in so many ways the ultimate mother figure. Maybe it was a function of the story being set from mid 17th to the 19th century. Maybe in the later books her character shifts away from trying to be supermom. Does it, Carol? Jenny? Nataline ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 11:24:31 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU >All Anyanwu >seems to want is to be a mom and protect her children in every way possible. >She says as much to Margaret. The argument here seems to be that it's an >innate desire and she can't do much about it. This has troubled me, too; it seems awfully limited to make the whole story revolve only around children, but I suppose for many women with no strong inner bent toward the exercise of some other talent or strength, that's likely to be true. Personally I prefer Joanna Russ' take on the matter in WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO, in which the women on a shipwrecked space expedition choose not to become the men's brood mares even though this means they will "die out" where they are. I mean, so what? Species die out all the time (we're killing them off at a wildfire rate right now, despite our "raised" ecological consciousness. But of course that kind of absolute position is always easier to take in the abstract than right there in the situation. Still, I would have liked to have seen more resistance on Anyanwu's -- or somebody's -- part to even *having* children under the abusive circumstances laid down by her brute of a lord and master. Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 21:58:55 +0100 From: Carol Ann Kerry-Green Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Nataline wrote: > She is in so many ways the ultimate mother figure. Maybe it was a > function of the story being set from mid 17th to the 19th century. Maybe > in the later books her character shifts away from trying to be supermom. > Does it, Carol? Jenny? Unfortunately no, Anyanwu under her European name Emma, is a very minor character in Mind of My Mind, and appears mostly content with Doro, for instance he asks her to move one of her grandchildren from the apartment next door to her which she owns so he can move one of his in (who is also a relative of hers) and she complies. I would highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it yet, to see what you think to the way Butler deals with the outcome of Doro's breeding plan. Carol Ann ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Aug 1999 10:02:22 -0700 From: Jessie Stickgold-Sarah Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU At 08:58 PM 8/8/99 -0500, Nataline Viray-Fung wrote: >What was troublesome to me was the lever which gave Doro so much of that >power over Anyanwu. He offers her immortal children and threatens to kill her >present children if she doesn't co-operate. Doesn't it seem that the dream of >immortal children is also the dream of eternal motherhood? All Anyanwu >seems to want is to be a mom and protect her children in every way possible. >She says as much to Margaret. The argument here seems to be that it's an >innate desire and she can't do much about it. and Suzy Charnas wrote: >I would have liked to have seen more resistance on Anyanwu's - or >somebody's -- part to even *having* chilren under the abusive circumstances >laid down by her brute of a lord and master. I had a slightly different read on this: that Anyanwu, like Doro, had become tired of seeing all her friends and family die out before her. I've seen other SF that explores the downsides of living forever, and I saw this book as another variant. Doro was breeding for his own gustatory pleasure, but he also wanted company. Anyanwu gathered her family and her villages around her and often returned to them in many different lives and guises. Three hundred years must have covered quite a few generations of lost friends and lovers. I do agree that it would have been nice to see a little more exploration of the morality of bearing children into such a warped future. Still, if Anyanwu had sacrificed herself rather than do so, would we now be saying that this reinforced the idea that women can die for their children but not live for themselves? It seems to me that motherhood is one of those areas which is *so* loaded with connotations that it's almost impossible to portray it neutrally. jessie ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 02:19:20 -0700 From: Joyce Jones Subject: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Are we still here? To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU I haven't had a digest for a few days. Two or three days ago I posted something about Wild Seed and it never came through on the digest. Is it possible the discussion isn't as scanty as it seems and the list is having problems. Wild Seed is a very upsetting book, but surely one worth talking about. I've been reading some of the online information about Butler, thank you Petra, and it's still very difficult to reconcile the ending of the book with the beginning. Kindred made sense to me. The main character kept forgiving and forgiving her "owner" ancestor, but eventually enough was enough. With the ending of Wild Seed having Anyanwu accept Doro as her true partner it just left a bad feeling in all our hearts, I think. I'd like to know how the Patternmaster books resolve this acquiescence to slavery, but how disappointed I would be if they didn't. As has been mentioned, a slave must do what she must do to stay alive, but Anyanwu goes beyond this acceptance to a kind of love. This was a very hard read. Joyce ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 09:59:30 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU >I do agree that it would have been nice to see a little more exploration of >the morality of bearing children into such a warped future. Still, if >Anyanwu had sacrificed herself rather than do so, would we now be saying >that this reinforced the idea that women can die for their children but not >live for themselves? > >It seems to me that motherhood is one of those areas which is *so* loaded >with connotations that it's almost impossible to portray it neutrally. > >jessie Too true -- not sure I'd recognize a "neutral" portrayal of motherhood if I saw one. What would it look like? First thing that comes to mind is the Skinner box . . . Suzy ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 09:59:36 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Are we still here? To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU >With the ending of Wild Seed having Anyanwu accept Doro as her true >partner it just left a bad feeling in all our hearts, I think. I'd like to >know how the Paternmaster books resolve this acquiescence to slavery, but >how disappointed I would be if they didn't. As has been mentioned, a slave >must do what she must do to stay alive, but Anyanwu goes beyond this >acceptance to a kind of love. This was a very hard read. > >Joyce I agree, as I think we all do, and I think -- I hope it's not inflammatory to say this -- I think that part of our problem in discussing this book re- lates to various levels of "political correctness." The idea of abused women (not just raped and enslaved outright, but bound into impossible marriages full of various degrees of emotional and physical abuse) coming to forgive and even to love their abusers has come (at long last!) to be seen not just as "too bad, but the way things are" but as unacceptable. Let's remember that only a couple of decades ago, this was the standard plot of the historical Romance novel (except that the actual marriage part came at the end, *after* the rape had turned to romance). It's to our credit as a culture that this "plot" is now seen by so many as demeaning of women and their rights to self-actualization; but that conviction, outraged by this book, drives us off and shuts us up (in fact I hear that this plot has even vanished from the Romance genre in the last decade or so). Butler reminds us starkly and relentlessly that in most of the world people still live in cultures where a woman still hasn't the right to safely object to routine abuse by her husband (and sometimes her father and uncles and brothers). Vast numbers of women are still stuck in the position of having little choice but to find ways to accept their virtual enslavement or else just curl up and die (or be killed by some damned male relative "defending the honor" of his miserable family). This is really tough to swallow in any dose, and it's *very* uncomfortable to have your nose ground into it for a whole book's length instead of for the time it takes to read an upsetting article in a magazine, say. I'm a leetle sensitive to the risk feminist writers run when they write about How Bad It Can Get and Trying To Cope When You Have No "Good" Alternatives, as I've just finished writing a bunch of characters *past* that situation (which took me thirty years). Some readers have had trouble reading WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD (though I promise you, things get *way* better with MOTHERLINES), and some of the same feelings seem to be at work here with WILD SEED. I think a number of women authors deliberately took this risk in the seventies -- we were trying to talk to each other and to readers about recognizing the depths of women's problems so that enough of us could get out of denial (and Valium) and start insisting on serious, real-world changes. WILD SEED is an even tougher case than most because of the shadow over its Black author of the heritage of the outright slavery of African-American women in this country. How do White readers get critical about dealing with slavery and abuse issues without inviting charges that they don't know, as Whites, what they're talking about (or Black critics, without risking accusation, if they articulate a controversial attitude, of betrayal)? This makes talking about this aspect of WILD SEED -- which is so central and overwhelming -- very stick and uncomfortable to talk about beyond saying, well, how *uncomfortable* we are with it. All that said, there are other elements of this book that we could productively focus on, such the shape and pacing of a book that can be seen as (compared to the standard of the genre) "plotless", and what takes the place of what we ordinarily see as SF "plot," in the context of feminist revision of what started out as (and still are for some folks) the standard SF tropes and goals (eg, STAR WARS); the writing style itself (Butler is one of the handful of SF authors who is, I believe, of working-class origins, and maybe there are ways in which that affects both style and substance of her work); comparison with other books about and enslaved gender (THE HANDMAID'S TALE comes at once to my mind); and other, better ways of looking at this novel as a told SF tale rather than a very tough slog emotionally. I think a couple of earlier posts began to do this, but then we got side-tracked by this big, central block of discomfort, and I think we owe it to the book and the author to move past that. Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 11:42:24 -0500 From: Todd Mason Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Are we still here?: Charnas To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Over the last decade, perhaps (I've heard/read this as well), but a decade ago the Bodice-busters were still offering "romantic" rape scenes that might make Robert Howard blush, as I can attest as an occasionally-bored bookseller at that time looking to see just how disturbing the cookie-cutter historicals could be. But then, most of the GOR novels, I was told by my colleagues who worked mostly second-hand stores, were purchased by women. -----Original Message----- From: SMCharnas [mailto:suzych@SOCRATES.NMIA.COM] Let's remember that only a couple of decades ago, this was the stan- dard plot of the historical Romance novel (except that the actual marriage part came at the end, *after* the rape had turned to romance). It's to our credit as a culture that this "plot" is now seen by so many as demeaning of women and their rights to self-actualization; but that convic- tion, outraged by this book, drives us off and shuts us up (in fact I hear that this plot has even vanished from the Romance genre in the last decade or so). ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 18:03:16 GMT From: Robin Reid Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] Tepper's new book To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU re: Sheri Tepper >Did you happen to hear her GOH speech at Wiscon? It was fiercely anti- >pop-growth, and I believe she was an exec. with Planned Parenthood for years >in Colorado before she moved down to Santa Fe. She is passionate on the >subject of human overbreeding and environmental degradation both on and off >the page. > >Now, this book sounds like another "tough slog" in terms of presenting a >situation of deep oppression of women, as you describe it, but you don't >speak of it that way -- what makes it easier to read and talk about than >WILD SEED, if indeed I'm right that it is (I haven't read it yet)? > >Suzy I've never been to Wiscon, but have heard about the speech, and I know she worked for Planned Parenthood before. This theme is not at all new to Tepper either (earlier works such as the Marianne trilogy had a 'sentient' planet in which all creatures were connected before humans colonized it and started trying to wreck the environment). I've read most of Butler's published work (not her latest one or two), and all of Tepper's -- interesting to compare them in light of recent discussion (BTW, I really thought your long post on Butler's work made EXCELLENT POINTS). The difference between the SINGER and WILD SEED is that by the end of Tepper's novel there's a way out, a solution presented (granted it involves changing the genetic nature of all the humans), but it's a solution. WILD SEED doesn't ever give us even that hope. I've been swamped with work, so have only been reading the WILD SEED discussion. I remember reading it years ago and being absolute dumbstruck at how BRILLIANTLY DIFFERENT than most other stuff marketed as SF that novel was. I became hooked on Butler because of WILD SEED. I admire her CRAFT incredibly--she completely pulls me into worlds that I would never experience if it were not for her writing. I'll be teaching KINDRED in a 202 class this term (Multiethnic American Literature class which I'm focusing on popular culture--will have a unit on music, film, tv (specifically ST: DS(), and we'll read KINDRED and Tony Hillerman's LISTENING WOMAN. In terms of how Butler deconstructs sf/f conventions: I can think of a number of books in which telepathy is presented as a good thing--including a number of works by female sf writers. Butler takes a different view of it--I'm thinking particularly of what happens in the other novel (MIND OF MY MIND? PATTERNMASTER) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * when Mary takes on Doro, destroys him, and brings all her kin into the Pattern--it's a multiracial/multicultural network. But what happens is that the non-telepaths are made into mindslaves. Emma (the name Annwyu? sp?) has taken speaks bitterly against the oppression created by the telepaths--comparing the way the "mutes" are treated to "niggers," but (I think I recall) she says it's even worse. The whole grouping of novels is such a powerful statement against oppression. And Butler is pretty unflinching, as far as i'm concerned, by showing that oppression is not as simple as whites oppressing blacks. Now that I think more about Tepper and Butler together--in a sense, both of them share the same depressing thought: that is, human beings have to change genetically or in some other fundamental way to grow out of oppression. Some of THE SINGER is pretty hard to read through because Tepper make the violence against women so immediate: the protagonist sees the ritual where a number of women are killed (their throats slit) and their bodies are left to bleed into the sand. The girl babies are taken back to raise for more (future) victims, and the boy babies are often left if the noble family has an heir already. (Most of victims but not all come from the same noble families whose men get the drug). But there is a decisive move made to end the whole system by the end of the novel. This whole discussion raises a question of the different approaches feminists take in their work: the need to show how BAD it is, to raise the need for action and change, is one major component in many of the books I most admire. I'm trying to think of any that show successful changes on a society-wide scale, or world wide scale, as opposed to just individual strong female protagonists.........hmmm. Robin ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 20:39:33 +0100 From: sc Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU -Original Message----- From: SMCharnas To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Date: 09 August 1999 18:25 Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Wild Seed >Personally I prefer Joanna Russ' take on the matter in WE WHO ARE >ABOUT TO, in which the women on a shipwrecked space expedition choose not >to become the men's brood mares even though this means they will "die out" >where they are >Suzy Charnas As I recall, only one woman refused to be "brood mare", but then she also refused to join in with all the other futile plans to survive when there was no chance of it. She chose to embrace her death, rather than struggle against the inevitable. Cheers SC ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 17:36:40 -0400 From: "Janice E. Dawley" Subject: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG: Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU On Thu, 12 Aug 1999 at 09:59:36 -0700, Suzy Charnas wrote: > [there are] other, better ways of looking at this novel as a told > SF tale rather than a very tough slog emotionally. I think a couple > of earlier posts began to do this, but then we got side-tracked by > this big, central block of discomfort, and I think we owe it to the > book and the author to move past that. Okay, you've inspired me. *Wild Seed* made me uncomfortable, but not entirely for the same reasons as most other people have mentioned. I'm not sure if I will be able to explain myself very well, but I will give it a try... I have read other books by Octavia Butler -- *Adulthood Rites*, *Imago*, *Kindred* -- and have reacted in much the same way to each. Her style is clear, her plotting well-done, her consciousness of power dynamics a welcome constant... yet I cannot fully engage with her work. It makes me feel itchy and constrained. The one theme I can clearly target as a cause of this feeling is, as Robin said, Butler's belief that humanity is imprisoned by its genome, that certain behaviors are linked to our biology and that there is no way around it except to breed ourselves into a new species. This belief (and Butler really does believe it to some extent, as I learned from Larry McCaffery's interview with her in *Across the Wounded Galaxies*) is one with which I am extremely uncomfortable. I disagree with it on a scientific basis, but, more fundamentally, I reject it because it robs us of any motivation toward long-term social change -- after all, you can't change Human Nature! In the Xenogenesis trilogy, the Oankali maintain that "pure-bred" humans can never be free of their destructive tendency towards hierarchy. Ironically (or not?), I felt that *Wild Seed* was about the founding of just such a hierarchy. Doro's and Anyanwu's communities of telepaths, telekinetics, shapechangers, et al are the "next step" in human evolution; one-on-one, any of them can best a normal human easily, though in their greater numbers, normal humans are a threat. And above the rank and file, there are the special children, like Isaac and Joseph. Above them -- and this is where most of the book expends its energy -- are Anyanwu and Doro, the Immortals. It is their contest for dominance that is the real center of the book. I did not see *Wild Seed* as a love story, though by the end of the book I was half-convinced that that *is* how Butler saw it; I saw it as a battle of wills. And I think it is safe to say that Anyanwu won. Intellectually I can see that the book makes a statement about the ghastly dilemmas the enslaved must face, but the book did not go into enough psychological detail for me to really feel it. Unlike, for example, *Arslan*, which I found devastating. I kept wishing that Butler had spent more time concentrating on some of her throwaway plot elements, such as Anyanwu's time with the dolphins. When I read that she had given birth to dolphin babies, I inwardly exclaimed, "She what?! I'd like to know what *that* was like!" But no dice. I find it hard to believe that Anyanwu could function for months (years?) as a dolphin and come away with her values seemingly unaffected. The way Butler describes it, it sounds more like a vacation! But clearly her emphasis lies elsewhere, and I can't fault her for that. I'm just a little disappointed. Does anyone have any insight into the Biblical overtones of the novel? It must be important that the three sections of the book are entitled "Covenant", "Lot's Children" and "Canaan", but I'm so ignorant of the Bible that I'm not seeing the connections. I *can* see that Doro is in many ways a God figure, even to the "bright light" people see when they merge with him. What does this say about Butler's opinion of Christianity? Hm. -- Janice E. Dawley ............. Burlington, VT http://homepages.together.net/~jdawley/ Listening To: The *Velvet Goldmine* Soundtrack "Reality is nothing but a collective hunch." - Lily Tomlin ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 11:42:31 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Are we still here? To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Todd Mason wrote: >a decade >ago the Bodice-busters were still offering "romantic" rape scenes that might >make Robert Howard blush, as I can attest as an occasionally-bored >bookseller at that time looking to see just how disturbing the cookie-cutter >historicals could be. But then, most of the GOR novels, I was told by my >colleagues who worked mostly second-hand stores, were purchased by women. Wow, really? That's a kind of sick-making surprise, but I guess it shouldn't be; many women read THE STORY OF O, too, and god knows the enigma of the secret and guilty persistence of pleasurable rape-fantasies among women just won't go away no matter how much "explanation" it receives. I doubt, though, that someone suffering the *reality* of rape would have the slightest inter- est in these masochistic dream-scenarios (can you imagine Anyanwu wasting a moment on one of these novels?). Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 11:42:40 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU >-Original Message----- >From: SMCharnas >To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU >Date: 09 August 1999 18:25 >Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Wild Seed > >>WE WHO ARE >>ABOUT TO, in which the women on a shipwrecked space expedition choose not >>to become the men's brood mares even though this means they will "die out" >> >>Suzy Charnas > > >As I recall, only one woman refused to be "brood mare", but then she also >refused to join in with all the other futile plans to survive when there was >no chance of it. She chose to embrace her death, rather than struggle >against the inevitable. >Cheers >SC Thanks, you're right -- I haven't reread the book in some time. Suzy ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 11:42:43 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG: Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU >Butler's belief that humanity >is imprisoned by its genome, that certain behaviors are linked to our >biology and that there is no way around it except to breed ourselves >into a new species. This belief (and Butler really does believe it to >some extent, as I learned from Larry McCaffery's interview with her in >*Across the Wounded Galaxies*) is one with which I am extremely >uncomfortable. I disagree with it on a scientific basis, but, more >fundamentally, I reject it because it robs us of any motivation toward >long-term social change -- after all, you can't change Human Nature! Until you change the human genetic map. The *really* scary question, to me, is, once you *can* change human nature via interfering with the genome technologically, what are the chances that "we" will choose to do this with the intention of making our descendants less crazy and aggressive and selfish and narrow-minded? Meantime, though, I think you're right -- the idea of genetic determinism certainly does work as an excuse to condone or at least look the other way when faced with some of our nastiest human excesses. Incidentally, why do you disagree on a scientific basis? What I've seen on the subject from a scientific point of view still vacillates wildly between total behaviorism and total genetic determinism (kind of like my own opinions . . . ). One minute they've "found the gene for homosexuality," the next it's all baloney, on and on, almost as bad as scientific studies of diet and heart disease. >Intellectually I can see that the book makes a statement about the >ghastly dilemmas the enslaved must face, but the book did not go into >enough psychological detail for me to really feel it. Unlike, for >example, *Arslan*, which I found devastating. I truly hated ARSLAN, mainly because Engh chose to concentrate on the fate of a favored boy while tossing away in the margins some truly horrific treatment of girls and women as if *that* wasn't really worth bothering with -- the one whose abuse *mattered* was this lone male. It just made me *grind my teeth!* Very effective book, though, in other ways. suzy charnas ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 23:22:29 +0200 From: Diane Severson Subject: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG - Octavia Butler To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU I just discovered an "authors statement" by Octavia Butler entitled "Devilgirl from Mars - why I write Science Fiction": http://media-in-transition.mit.edu/science_fiction/transcripts/butler_talk_index.html There is also a transcript of a talk she gave together with another author (sorry I have a memory like a sieve) at the same website: http:// media-in-transition.mit.edu/science_fiction Enjoy! Diane -- Diane Severson Moerfelder Landstr. 108 60598 Frankfurt am Main (49)(0)69/624595 (+Fax) (49)(0)69/613371 ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 23:56:34 -0700 From: Joyce Jones Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Are we still here? To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU A long quote from Suzy Charnas (with liberal snipping): "I think that part of our problem in discussing this book relates to various levels of "political correctness." The idea of abused women (not just raped and enslaved outright, but bound into impossible marriages full of various degrees of emotional and physical abuse) coming to forgive and even to love their abusers has come (at long last!) to be seen not just as "too bad, but the way things are" but as unacceptable It's to our credit as a culture that this "plot" is now seen by so many as demeaning of women and their rights to self-actualization; but that conviction, outraged by this book, drives us off and shuts us up Butler reminds us starkly and relentlessly that in most of the world people still live in cultures where a woman still hasn't the right to safely object to routine abuse by her husband (and sometimes her father and uncles and brothers). Vast numbers of women are still stuck in the position of having little choice but to find ways to accept their virtual enslavement or else just curl up and die (or be killed by some damned male relative "defending the honor" of his miserable family). This is really tough to swallow in any dose, and it's *very* uncomfortable to have your nose ground into it for a whole book's length instead of for the time it takes to read an upsetting article in a magazine, say. I think a number of women authors deliberately took this risk in the seventies -- we were trying to talk to each other and to readers about recognizing the depths of women's problems so that enough of us could get out of denial (and Valium) and start insisting on serious, real-world changes." You state this point very well, and I know part of what you write is an explanation for some of the more "uncomfortable" parts of your Holdfast series, but I see these as very different works. The problem with Wild Seed, the discomfort with the whole of the book, is not that Butler describes all the various accommodations Anyanwu must make in order to survive. That part was thoughtfully, even illuminatingly well written. The problem is that Butler does not present a regular woman faced with finding a way to live under oppression. She creates a super woman who is possibly immortal, intelligent, creative beyond the capacity of any known human. She can experience life through the perspective and being of other life forms, she can learn about disease and incapacity, and through the working of her own body, mind and spirit overcome them for herself and others. She is the ultimate healer; yet even Anyanwu with all her talent and magical ability must bow her spirit to the fist of the patriarchy. In acquiescing to her oppression she "settles" for a partnership with her rapist, the abuser of her children, the murderer of her loved ones. If even Anyanwu must settle, what hope does that leave for mere mortal woman? Yes, of course we know that sometimes survival in itself must be celebrated, and we saw that done well in Mission Child. But in Wild Seed Butler gives us a goddess and says even she is powerless in the face of masculine authority. Someone wrote of Doro's being defeated in a sequel. Unfortunately, unlike in Walk to the End of the World, as a stand alone book Wild Seed leaves the reader with no hope that Anyanwu will escape her oppression because there's no indication that she still wants to. I see the book ending with Doro somewhat changed. As Janice said, Anyanwu might have been the victor because Doro fully acknowledged how much he needed her and did agree to some changes in his behavior. She used her age old feminine wiles to make herself indispensable. But her spirit was still linked to his, she was still the lesser being. All the talent, characterization, and writing style in the world does not change the fact that a book which tells women that none of us has the hope of self determination is not only "uncomfortable" it is plainly anti-feminist. I'm rather offended at the idea that an insistence on granting women the assumption of full personhood is mere political correctness. I think it is the rock bottom of feminism. Joyce ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 15:14:46 -0700 From: Jessie Stickgold-Sarah Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG - Octavia Butler To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU This is a fascinating set of articles (in the transcript of the talk she's speaking with Samuel Delany and, I think, some MIT profs: Jenkins [undoubtedly Henry Jenkins, prof of Film Studies I think] and Burstein [who I don't know]. A great deal of the material here is about literacy--also about communication, but very much about literacy and its relevance to social change and education. I recommend it. Thanks Diane! Jessie At 11:22 PM 8/13/99 +0200, Diane Severson wrote: >I just discovered an "authors statement" by Octavia Butler entitled >"Devilgirl from Mars - why I write Science Fiction": ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 00:01:01 -0500 From: Big Yellow Woman Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] Survival (Butler) To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU SMCharnas wrote (comparing Tepper and Butler): > Well, maybe that's part of what makes Butler difficult -- that in her > stories, survival *is* triumph, the only triumph there is; I've just been writing about this and thought these quotes resonate a bit. What is survival to a feminist? To a woman? To a black woman? Are we all sucked into that hierarchy of need where survival is has to be transcended before we can achieve "culture"? I highly recommend this essay to any who are interested in these questions. A couple excerpts: "For women, survival is a fundamental issue. Until we put survival at the center of our philosophical thinking, we are constantly at risk of having our theory-creation process lose sight of how fundamental is survival, rendering our theory irrelevant to our survival.... No level of posited survival hierarchy is assured: not our individual bodily well-being, or our community well-being, or our psychological well-being, or our intellectual aesthetic well-being.... We must conceive ethics--indeed, I suspect, all of philosophy--as a part of our survival." (130) "It is an accomplishment 'just' to survive.... That we are taught to see our mere survival as a personal failing of some kind is an insidious aspect of the very social and political arrangements that endanger our survival.... [S]urvival is neither an underachievement nor an embarrassment. It is an act of political resistance (not just personal strategy) to survive, and it is another act of political resistance to refuse to see "mere" survival as failing. Both of these are important acts of political resistance." (131) Ruth Ginzberg. "Poetry is Not a Luxury." Feminist Ethics. Ed. Claudia Card. Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 1991. 126-145. Susan ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 13:29:46 -0500 From: Big Yellow Woman Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG: Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Janice E. Dawley wrote: > Does anyone have any insight into the Biblical overtones of the novel? > It must be important that the three sections of the book are entitled > "Covenant", "Lot's Children" and "Canaan", but I'm so ignorant of the > Bible that I'm not seeing the connections. I *can* see that Doro is in > many ways a God figure, even to the "bright light" people see when they > merge with him. What does this say about Butler's opinion of > Christianity? Hm. I'm pretty rusty myself, but I'll give this a shot. It seems like "covenant" evokes the Old Testament/Torah God who Doro seems to parallel. God/Yahweh has a chosen people (the Israelites) with whom he makes a covenant, essentially to protect and guide them.[I am using "he" because that is appropriate here]. This is obviously what Doro is doing in the first section--he gathers his chosen people and looks after them (although he often fails to protect them, which is interesting.) Because of God's covenant, he leads the people out of slavery in Egypt--that is the Moses story. It seems that Doro sort of saves some of his African people from slavery, only to make them slaves of his own. Could we reverse the analogy of God/Doro and assume that God only chooses his people to use them for his own pleasure and his own survival, heartlessly manipulating them for his own purposes, enforcing their love through fear and constant threats of death? Sounds like the Christian God to me! As for the second section, "Lot's Children," it's less clear who "Lot" is supposed to be--perhaps Anyanwu. In the story of Lot, he is the only righteous man in a city that God is going to destroy because of its wickedness. God sends an angel(?) to warn Lot and his family to leave before the city is destroyed and they do. They are warned not to look back and, when Lot's wife does, she is turned into a pillar of salt. Merciful God, indeed. Is this referring to Anyanwu's fleeing Wheatly when she can clearly see that Doro (God?) is going to destroy her? One thing I liked about Anyanwu was that even though she treasured her children she was able to realize that she could no longer try to protect them from Doro, but that she was able to leave without looking back. "Canaan," I think refers to the "promised land." It could be thought of as heaven or utopia. Surely it's a place where Doro can't manipulate you any more. I guess Anyanwu has a hundred years of happiness and freedom at least. I have really been wondering about what difference there is between the way Doro and Anyanwu gather their people. I wanted to tell myself that Anyanwu was completely different because her motives and means were completely different. She is a healer who gathers these people because she can help them whereas Doro gathers them to use them. But even though Anyanwu refuses to manipulate breeding and is obviously a kind "master," it seems like the results for the people are not much different. There was no question in my mind that Doro was "God," but I saw Anyanwu as God too. Aside from the fact that she could (probably) be killed, Anyanwu's powers were in many ways greater than Doro's. It seems like his only abilities were to sense his "special" people and to change bodies, remaining immortal. I was reminded of a long conversation about immortality on the other list a while back--the point that was made about how everything depends on what you would do with your immortality, i.e. would you use it do experience more and do good things and help people, or would you grow bored and cynical. It seems like Anyanwu and Doro definitely respond to their immortality differently. Doro just becomes less and less human, whereas Anyanwu continues to strengthen the family that she loves and to accept their mortality. She keeps on loving and healing, whereas Doro is reduced to his appetite and his unfeeling pragmatism. His emotion at the end of the book seemed very contrived to me and completely inconsistent with what we knew of him. That this (apparent) resurrection of his humanity was sparked by his "love"(need?) for Anyanwu and that Isaac's insistence that only she could save him turned out to be right made it all the more offensive to me. I'm sick of women saving men from their brutality. Ugh! On page 14, when Doro first finds Anyanwu, she says something like "sometimes you have to become a master to avoid being a slave." I think that statement is central to what Butler is exploring. It is also an attitude that determines my own discomfort with this book because, as true as that statement might be, I feel that our response must not be merely to learn how to be better masters (i.e. a healing master rather than a manipulating one)but to question the notion that mastery and slavery are our only choices in how we will exist and relate to others. I am writing about Ursula Le Guin's book _Four Ways to Forgiveness_ now and she examines the way former slaves perpetuate the "slave mind" after they become masters. This whole paradigm must be dismantled. Of course it's not simple, and I really appreciate Butler's understanding of the ambiguity of power--how there is much more involved than just race or gender. Yet, as others have said, I just will not accept that "the way things are" cannot be changed or that we humans are inherently built this way. Since Suzy raised the issue of political correctness, I wanted to confess that part of my uneasiness in critiquing Butler is that I feel I must give her some epistemological advantage because of her identity as a black woman who surely has a better understanding than I of the dynamics of slavery. Is that so, I wonder? Or, rather, how does a white woman say, with respect, "You know more about this than I do, but I still disagree with your conclusions?" I really want to know..... Any thoughts? Susan ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 15:03:49 -0500 From: teragram Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG: Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Susan wrote: >As for the second section, "Lot's Children," it's less clear who "Lot" >is supposed to be--perhaps Anyanwu. In the story of Lot, he is the only >righteous man in a city that God is going to destroy because of its >wickedness. God sends an angel(?) to warn Lot and his family to leave >before the city is destroyed and they do. They are warned not to look >back and, when Lot's wife does, she is turned into a pillar of salt. >Merciful God, indeed. Is this referring to Anyanwu's fleeing Wheatly >when she can clearly see that Doro (God?) is going to destroy her? One >thing I liked about Anyanwu was that even though she treasured her >children she was able to realize that she could no longer try to protect >them from Doro, but that she was able to leave without looking back. While still in Sodom, Lot offers his daughters as sacrifice to the crowd when they demand the he release the angels to them. For the record, the crowd isn't interested in the girls, virgin though they may be - they're looking for the new boys in town. Still, offering up his young daughters to a mob to do with as they will never struck me as a particularly caring nor kind gesture on the part of Lot. It's also worth noting that after having fled the city Lot's daughters then sleep with their father (to 'preserve seed of our father') resulting in two sons: "And the firstborn bare a son, and called his name Moab: the same is the father of the Moabites unto this day. And the younger, she also bare a son, and called his name Benammi: the same is the father of the children of Ammon unto this day." It's all about bloodlines. meg *************** "When you drink from the river, remember the spring." ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 17:12:59 -0400 From: Frances Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG: Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Meg wrote: > While still in Sodom, Lot offers his daughters as sacrifice to the crowd > when they demand the he release the angels to them. For the record, the > crowd isn't interested in the girls, virgin though they may be - they're > looking for the new boys in town. Still, offering up his young daughters to > a mob to do with as they will never struck me as a particularly caring nor > kind gesture on the part of Lot. I wonder if the Lord was pleased? And you'd think Lot would have realized angels could take care of themselves.... Frances ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 19:24:02 -0500 From: Big Yellow Woman Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG: Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU teragram wrote: > While still in Sodom, Lot offers his daughters as sacrifice to the crowd > when they demand the he release the angels to them. > It's also worth noting that after having fled the city Lot's daughters then > sleep with their father (to 'preserve seed of our father') resulting in two sons: > It's all about bloodlines. Oh yeah. Thanks for filling that in, Meg. For some reason I was thinking Sodom and Gomorra was a different story, but I obviously didn't unearth my Bible to check. Considering what you've said, it seems obvious that Doro is the Lot figure, sacrificing his own children out of his warped sense of values (rather than righteousness) and having no qualms about incest at all. Bloodlines indeed. I thought that the issue of taboos in the book was very interesting. I found myself trying to get objective about my own responses to Doro's breaking them. I asked myself if the taboo of incest could actually be equal in kind to the taboo of milk drinking, for example. When Nweke can feel her neighbors, brother and sister, having sex, what would have happened if the girl had not liked it? Would Doro have still assured her that there was nothing wrong? Would he still have made them have children? I think so. Do others have any responses to the way these taboos being broken felt? Is Butler saying something about taboos? Susan ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 16:09:30 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Are we still here? To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Joyce wrote (snipped for length): >The problem with Wild Seed is that Butlercreates a super woman who is possibly >immortal, intelligent, creative beyond the capacity of any known human. >yet even Anyanwu with all her talent and magical ability >must bow her spirit to the fist of the patriarchy. In acquiescing to her >oppression she "settles" for a partnership with her rapist, the abuser of >her children, the murderer of her loved ones. If even Anyanwu must settle, >what hope does that leave for mere mortal woman? >a book which tells women >that none of us has the hope of self determination is not only >"uncomfortable" it is plainly anti-feminist. I'm rather offended at the >idea that an insistence on granting women the assumption of full personhood >is mere political correctness. I think it is the rock bottom of feminism. Well, yes; my reference to "political correctness" was specifically tied to the subject of Whites criticizing a Black author's handling of the con- cept of *slavery,* not feminism, and of course I agree that personhood is crucial. When you put the rest of your argument as you have above, I am hard put to it to find a solid defense for WILD SEED. In fact, I'm not sure there *is* a defense, except that I think that in this book she was focusing so hard on the ramifications of absolute and immovable subordination and how people respond to it that she did not see, or chose to ignore, the specifically *feminist* aspects of Anyanwu's struggle with Doro. Having sat in on several meetings at which Black feminists charged White feminists with not having a clue about the real, "rock bottom" issues of personhood for women of color, I'm a little hesitant to assess what Butler was attempting in this book and to pass judgment on it as harshly as you do -- although I sure as hell can't dismiss your objections, either, because I felt them too; enough not to want to see your post go unanswered solely on account of the sensitivity of the questions you raise. So that's my answer, for what it's worth. Can others here who have read more of Butler's work speak about feminist themes and handling of issues, or lack thereof, in later books of hers? I read the two "Parable" Books and thought they showed a feminist bite in positing a female prophet whose "religion" is *not* one of sweetness, light, and forgiveness but of grim, practical acceptance, and who gives up family life for social leadership; so much for the patriarchal tenet that women are inherently conservative, mentally unoriginal, and incapable of leadership. But I wouldn't rule out the possibility that this version of feminist awareness, easily recognizable to a White feminist reader, was not a primary target for Butler at first. She approached her material from a different angle -- a real-world slave history -- than, say, Joanna Russ or Marge Piercy; and that an early book (am I wrong in thinking it's her second novel?) like WILD SEED was a way of writing past the issues of slavery to a place at which this majority-recognizable feminism could move to share the foreground with other power-issues, as in the "Parables". Suzy ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 22:33:15 -0400 From: "Janice E. Dawley" Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG: Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU At 11:42 AM 8/13/99 -0700, Suzy Charnas wrote: >>after all, you can't change Human Nature! > >Until you change the human genetic map. Right. >The *really* scary question, to >me, is, once you *can* change human nature via interfering with the genome >technologically, what are the chances that "we" will choose to do this >with the intention of making our descendants less crazy and aggressive and >selfish and narrow-minded? Hm. I feel what I might call a "Butlerian pessimism" about the prospect. But that is because I see any such technology as being controlled by the same elite that rules today. I'm certainly open to alternatives! >Incidentally, why do you disagree on a scientific basis? What I've seen on >the subject from a scientific point of view still vacillates wildly between >total behaviorism and total genetic determinism (kind of like my own >opinions . . . ). One minute they've "found the gene for homosexuality," >the next it's all baloney, on and on, almost as bad as scientific studies >of diet and heart disease. As far as I know, all of the studies that have claimed genetic determinism of complex behavior have proven to be full of holes. And I imagine that they will continue to be, judging by the number of false assumptions and the amount of reductionist thinking that dog them. (A good debunking of "biological theories about women and men" is *Myths of Gender* by Anne Fausto-Sterling.) A stumbling block of such studies is that it's enormously difficult to define a term such as "aggression" (or "homosexuality") in a way that will be scientifically meaningful -- let alone measure it! Personally, I think we need a lot more study of behavior itself before we can address the issue of how genetics affects it. ----- Janice E. Dawley.....Burlington, VT http://homepages.together.net/~jdawley/ Listening To: The *Velvet Goldmine* Soundtrack "...the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other." Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 08:40:59 -0700 From: Joyce Jones Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Are we still here? To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Thanks Suzy for acknowledging my arguments. I rather overstated them because my "political correctness" button is easily pushed. To me being politically correct means trying to see all the people involved in a discussion as people, so it seems like a reasonable response. I'm a little surprised at your discomfort with the way white women discount a black author's depiction of slavery. Perhaps I am very naive, but I don't see how one would know the racial origins of list members. I was discussing some of your thoughts with my sister and said, "Of course, I don't know anything about slavery first hand." Then it occurred to me that no one on the list would probably have any such first hand information. Reading Kindred brought up some of the ideas touched on in Wild Seed, mainly that a person could be reluctant to strive for her own freedom because even if she achieved it, the consequences for her loved ones could be horrific. Also, I think the casual expression of power and control of slaveowners and the degree of that expression is one most of us can't understand. However, when I think of the lives of abused women of any color, I think many of the same totality of control would be found. For the individual to know that not only is she controlled but that so will be her children on down through generations is not completely foreign to women of any hue. It's a class rather than a racial knowledge, I think. But again, perhaps I'm being naive. Joyce ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 14:09:43 EDT From: Sophia Hegner Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG: Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU In a message dated 8/17/1999 2:06:05 PM Pacific Daylight Time, hagsrus@BANET.NET writes: << Still, offering up his young daughters to > a mob to do with as they will never struck me as a particularly caring nor > kind gesture on the part of Lot. > I wonder if the Lord was pleased? >> I wonder if the Lord was pleased that Lot slept with his daughters. That just creeped me out. It's like one of the earliest recordings of child molestation, and the father justified it by saying, "You have to do this so we can preserve my seed." I wonder why he was considered so holy? because he kept it in the family rather than seeing prostitutes? Why didn't he just remarry if he wanted to preserve his seed so badly? Feeling a little shaken, sophia ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 13:45:13 -0500 From: N Clowder Subject: [*FSFFU-LIT*] *FSFFU-LIT* - Grim fiction To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU I haven't read Wild Seed in a number of years, but I have been very interested in the recent thread about "grim" fiction. Not long ago I had a conversation with a friend who had just finished the latest Kindred book and was having a hard time resurfacing after her immersion in the Butler universe. And I can remember experiencing this myself while reading the Xenogenesis books. What was hardest for me was Butler's pessimism about human nature. I have admired and identified with her protagonists, but I'm not sure that I've ever liked them - if they were "real" people, I don't think I could take being around them much, though, of course, it's very difficult to think of these people disassociated from the grueling environments in which they exist. So why do we read Butler, when we come away from her gasping for air, or clutching our stomachs? (I understand that women have both fainted and thrown up from reading Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy. It may or may not be more feminist or uplifting than Butler's work, but I don't recall that that emerges until you get to the end of the book - so why do readers hang in there through the horrific events which occur about halfway through?) I think I read Butler for the shock, or the validation (or maybe both), of recognition. She takes me back to the time in my past when I was neither feminist nor free nor empowered in any sense of the word. We have all made our humiliating compromises. These are not things we like to relive, and odds are, not things that we allowed ourselves to fully/mindfully/honestly experience at the time. I feel resonances of the person-I-was when I read Butler's characters who are neither more enlightened nor empowered nor successful nor politically correct than I was. It's icky icky icky, AND it's a relief to know both that other people like that exist and that they are not so shameful that they have to be banished from literature. And for that I am grateful to Butler - but I have to take her in small doses. There are two stages to making the world a better place. One is seeing it as it is, and the other seeing it as we want it to be. Butler is working largely in the first stage, despite the fact that she's writing "speculative fiction." If you look at it this way, the question of whether or not we can "find a solid defense" for Wild Seed seems less urgent. Granted, many of us are heart-sick of the first stage. Butler's characters, over the years, have grown more conscious of the fact that there may be a stage two. In the early books, there may be no awareness of stage two at all. (This is the emphasis on "survival" that Charnas addressed in her post.) In Xenogenesis, stage two is formulated as: we aren't going to get what we want, but what's the best we can obtain? In the Kindred series, the protagonist actually dreams and (I presume, not having yet read the second Kindred book) actualizes her vision. (Butler scholars, please correct me.) She's a difficult writer and many will not like to see the universe (human nature) through her eyes. But she's also brilliant and utterly convincing and RUTHLESSLY honest within the parameters that she sets herself. No matter how horrid her fictional situations are, I can get through them because I sense the author's integrity. She doesn't fudge, doesn't lie, doesn't pretend about human nature (as SHE sees it) - and if she can stand to do that, I can go along with her for the ride. This is something that keeps me fascinated with Charnas's work as well. Nell Clowder ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 18:52:32 GMT From: Robin Reid Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] *FSFFU-LIT* - Grim fiction To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU NELL WROTE: >In the Kindred series, the protagonist actually >dreams and (I presume, not having yet read the second Kindred book) >actualizes her vision. (Butler scholars, please correct me.) IS there a second one? I missed it! Could someone give me the title! (I'm teaching KINDRED in my 202 class this fall and need to know.) THANX. >NELL AGAIN: She's a difficult writer and many will not like to see the >universe (human nature) through her eyes. But she's also brilliant and >utterly convincing and RUTHLESSLY honest within the parameters that >she sets herself. No matter how horrid her fictional situations are, I can get >through them because I sense the author's integrity. She doesn't fudge, doesn't lie, >doesn't pretend about human nature (as SHE sees it) - and if she can stand >to do that, I can go along with her for the ride. This is something that >keeps me fascinated with Charnas's work as well. > >Nell Clowder Wonderful post overall on Butler. I completely agree with what you said, and it's probably why I keep reading Butler (although I do not reread her compulsively or at certain times). I'll also add to this: she does NOT "eroticize" these horrid situations. There are lots of books out there which deal with the same type of situation (sometimes with African American protagonists, but sometimes with women of other cultures in similar situations), and those books present the whole slave/master thing as erotic, and dwell lovingly on the rapes that ensue. If Butler does nothing else (and I say she does LOTS else), her work completely undercuts that kind of book. (I don't want to give names of the authors I have in mind because I don't want to give them any credit, but if you want them, email me offlist). Robin ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 14:27:56 -0500 From: N Clowder Subject: [*FSFFU-LIT*] *FSFFU-LIT* - Grim fiction- Correction! To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU I meant the "Parable" books where I wrote "Kindred." Oops. Nell At 06:52 PM 8/19/99 GMT, Robin Reid wrote: >IS there a second one? I missed it! Could someone give me the title! (I'm >teaching KINDRED in my 202 class this fall and need to know.) THANX. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 17:28:01 -0500 From: teragram Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG: Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU >I wonder if the Lord was pleased that Lot slept with his daughters. That just >creeped me out. It's like one of the earliest recordings of child >molestation, and the father justified it by saying, "You have to do this so >we can preserve my seed." Sorry - my fault. The story is that Lot's daughters, believing that their only family trio has survived, get their father drunk, go into his tent while he's sleeping, leave while he's still asleep, and he doesn't know anything about it. I don't think it's really that plausible, but that's the way it's written. meg *************** "When you drink from the river, remember the spring." ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 16:21:56 -0400 From: Frances Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG: Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Sophia wrote: > I wonder if the Lord was pleased that Lot slept with his daughters. That > just creeped me out. It's like one of the earliest recordings of child > molestation, and the father justified it by saying, "You have to do this so > we can preserve my seed." I wonder why he was considered so holy? because > he kept it in the family rather than seeing prostitutes? Why didn't he just > remarry if he wanted to preserve his seed so badly? As I recollect, and am quite open to correction (sorry, I don't have a bible in the office, though I always mean to bring one in to refer to during the discussions that do pop up in the best regulated environments): Lot and daughters ended up somewhere rather isolated, and in fact it was the daughters' idea to sleep with him, after getting him drunk. I suppose it was tribal as much as anything. There was an obligation on the males of a family to impregnate a brother's widow, to "raise up children to his name": the actual sin of Onan was in refusing this obligation, not in "spilling his seed upon the ground". The rest of that story is quite fascinating: I believe the widow disguised herself as a prostiture and ended up seducing her father-in-law, claiming (I think) his seal in payment so that she could prove the bloodline of her child. Frances ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 21:39:40 -0500 From: Big Yellow Woman Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG: Wild Seed: Biblical questions To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU > Or how about the story of Jephtha's daughter?....snip... this is a little > different from the sweet and benevolent story of Abraham and Isaac, > isn't it? Is it ok because Jephtha's child is a girl? Is it a warning against > making rash promises? Is it a> hint that God does, in fact, prefer human > sacrifice to goats or some such?> Help me out here, Christians. > Sheryl, who still has her trophies for verse-memorization from church > camp.... There is an excellent book for any of you who are interested in a feminist reading of these kinds of texts (I believe the Jepthah's daughter story is one of them). It's called _Texts of Terror: Literary Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives_ by Phillis Trible. There is also a book called _Slavery, Sabbath, War, and Women: Case issues in Biblical Interpretation_ by Willard M Swartley that examines how the Bible has been used to argue on both sides of the 4 issues the title refers to. Susan (who got a good seminary education and then ceased to be a Christian and, most unfortunately, still has a crucifix tattooed on her shoulder :)) ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 21:52:05 -0500 From: Big Yellow Woman Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG: Wild Seed- Taboos To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Frances wrote: > Lot and daughters ended up somewhere rather isolated, and in fact > it was the daughters' idea to sleep with him, after getting him drunk. > I suppose it was tribal as much as anything. Doro doesn't seem to need any such persuasion to have sex with his daughters, does he? Do you all think that Butler is making an argument that some taboos are there for good reasons? Isn't the fact that Anyanwu in forced into violating her cultural taboos about sex and food (the milk) and probably other things is a significant way in which she is violated? Is there a distinction for Butler or for us between taboos that are "superstitious" and those that should be honored? For example, it seems like religion is largely regarded as useless superstition at some points in the book, not only by Doro but apparently by his people in General.Of course with a master like Doro, who needs God? Susan ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 22:19:44 -0500 From: Big Yellow Woman Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG: Butler, Grim fiction To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Nell wrote: >There are two stages to making the world a better place. One is seeing >it as it is, and the other seeing it as we want it to be. Butler is >working largely in the first stage, despite the fact that she's writing >"speculative fiction." If you look at it this way, the question of >whether or not we can "find a solid defense" for Wild Seed seems less >urgent. Granted, many of us are heart-sick of the first stage. >Butler's characters, over the years, have grown more conscious of the >fact that there may be a stage two. In the early books, there may be no >awareness of stage two at all. (This is the emphasis on "survival" that >Charnas addressed in her post.) In Xenogenesis, stage two is formulated >as: we aren't going to get what we want, but what's the best we can >obtain? In the [Parable]series, the protagonist actually dreams and (I >presume, not having yet read the second Kindred book) actualizes her vision. Thank you for the great post, Nell. I keep wanting to comment about _Parable of the Talents_ but don't know if I can say what I mean without spoilers. Here's my attempt to do so: r.e. Nell's point that the Parable books may go more to the second stage, and also to Suzy's post that in those books perhaps Butler starts to write past slavery issues--I am not so sure. I actually don't think that it's necessary or even desirable to move past survival/slavery issues because I think that such a notion reflects a hierarchy of need where no one gets to have any kind of culture, including art and ethics, until survival is assured. As women our survival has never been assured but we have not been always limited to "mere" survival issues. Anyanwu makes a lot of compromises to survive, but she does a hell of a lot more than "just" survive. So the way I read the Parable books is that Butler is still very interested in survival and the kind of slavery that still happens all the time and she takes the logical consequences of that kind of slavery into the future. For example, she describes a new version of the corporation town that evolves in which people virtually enslave themselves willingly to corporations for jobs and a safe place to live--the caring corporations, naturally never allow their "employees" to ever get in a financial position to leave. The threat to survival (the way the world is) in this series is still so great that the small steps taken toward Olamina's vision of the way she wants the world to be are squelched, or at least changed drastically. Others who have read the book may disagree, but without giving away the ending I'll just say that, in my opinion, Olamina gives up her vision in favor of a truly empty escapist venture. This is more grim to me than even the compromises Anyanwu makes. Doesn't Butler have any faith at all in our power to make changes, short of a genetic shift? Is Tepper equally cynical? Or is it that they still have hope, but not optimism? I'm not exactly an optimist, but I just want someone to say "Never Give up!" Susan ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 22:25:41 -0500 From: Big Yellow Woman Subject: Re: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG; Butler To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Nell wrote: > There are two stages to making the world a better place. One is seeing it > as it is, and the other seeing it as we want it to be. Just one more thing :) Once we begin seeing the world as we want it to be, even if that vision is not perfectly clear, WE MUST TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR WORKING WITH OTHERS AND *MAKING* IT THAT WAY!!! "Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul" --Edward Abbey and I'll say no more today, Fight the power, Susan ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 09:59:48 -0700 From: Joyce Jones Subject: [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU August is almost over, hard to believe. But one last thought about hopelessness and Wild Seed. I was thinking of the movie Brazil. Even though at the end the main character is almost certainly doomed, he still has hope of rescue, so much so that it appears that he escapes--at least in spirit. Yes Tepper has some pretty outrageous methods for ending her books on an upbeat, but I wonder if she's saying that we have to have hope for change, even if the method is not one we can see in our everyday lives right now. I'm thinking of Gibbons Decline and Fall, (I loved those old ladies). I don't think she's saying that civilization is without hope unless we're rescued by anthropomorphic reptiles. Maybe she's just saying there is hope, but we have to be more creative in finding solutions. For all the creativity evidenced in Wild Seed, there was no evidence of a creative solution to patriarchal domination. Joyce ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 28 Aug 1999 14:40:52 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] [*FSFFU-LIT*] BDG Wild Seed To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Joyce wrote: >August is almost over, hard to believe. But one last thought about >hopelessness and Wild Seed. >Tepper has some pretty outrageous methods for ending her books on an >upbeat, but I wonder if she's saying that we have to have hope for change, >even if the method is not one we can see in our everyday lives right now. >Maybe she's just saying there is hope, >but we have to be more creative in finding solutions. I think she's saying there are solutions, but we have to have the sheer grit and bloody-mindedness to carry them through, "we" often being women; in other words, if you leave it to men it will not happen (judging by the historical record so far, this is not a far-fetched conclusion), and because the women generally start from a one-down position, the actions required of them are a good deal more extreme than those that men, who are one-up, could take if they chose to do so. In the abstract, pretty sensible; but in reality, Butler seems to be much closer to the truth: nobody does *anything* until we're in total crisis, and when solutions are tried, they are generally the ones chosen and ineptly imposed by masculine authorities. Suzy Charnas