Subject: (urth) Wolfe's women

From: Joel Priddy <jpriddy at saturn.vcu.edu>
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 1997 17:23:54 +0000

[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other works]

mantis say:
  >>Let's see, you wrote: "Wolfe's women do seem to have a
kind of limited repertoire: the Stand-In for Divine Love, the Sex
Object, and Agent of Destruction."  Since I don't want to put
words
in your screen, please expand a little on this by first
identifying
which one of the three types goes to each of the following:
[specific list of women deleted]
Second, please enumerate the types available to Wolfe's men, so
that
we may compare and contrast these two sets (assuming that they
aren't the same).<<

Yeesh, mantis, you mean I need to actually back up the things I
say? 

Well, let's see if I can get my muddle of thoughts straight...
Basically, Wolfe's protagonists seem to be men (I repeat that I
haven't read past the first two pages of Pandora), and women
relate to them in kind of standard ways. The man is usually on a
quest for Divine Love, and sex with women seems to be the
preferred metaphor for this search. 
  But (with the possible exception of Apheta), they are not
Divine Love, so there is often a sinister quality to the women in
their position as False Attempts At Divine Love. I refer again to
Severian stating that women love men, but must destroy them.
Also, there's Candy in _Free_Live_Free_ , who says that men come
to her BECAUSE she's physically repulsive (Candy has two of the
most common attributes of Wolfe's women: she's a whore and a
glutton. not as many gluttonous women in Wolfe's writing as
whores, but enough to have struck me as a reoccurring motif. Take
his female gods at the end of _Urth_). 
  Women, in there failure to be Divine Love, have three areas of
emphasis: (1) The Stand-in is largely benign, but still not the
final solution (say, maybe, Valeria); (2) The Sex Object is not
actively malign, but very empty, perhaps emphasizing the futility
of trying to find Divine Love through sex (Jolenta); (3) The
Agent of Destruction. Focusing the sinister, or even Infernal,
side of women's failure to be God, willfully leading the man even
further away from there goal (Agia).
  Maybe this just goes back to the protagonist being male, and
many men having a somewhat limited range of relationships with
women. And there may be similar limitation on his men, but it
hasn't struck me in quite the way it has with his women. 
  To be perfectly clear, I am not saying that Wolfe is sexist,
but his writing does seem to be from a particularly masculine
viewpoint. And I'm not faulting his writing either. William S.
Burroughs' women strike me as being all evil Mother-figures, but
he's still a writing god. And, because Wolfe is a good writer,
there are exceptions to the above: women who are just characters.
  But, it comes down to this: _Peace_ is the only Wolfe book I've
ever lent to female friends and received a positive response. And
the sticking point usually seems to be the portrayal of women.

  While I'm in this mode, I'll make another observation that I
probably won't be able to back up...
  Wolfe is a writer who can let a tremendous amount of detail
about his characters just hang for a long time. Things like: are
they aliens? Robots? If they're cyborgs, are the organics
original or the grafts? And yet he never seems to be able to
resist calling a black character capitol "B" Black over and over
again. In _Peace_ or even (I suppose) the Latro books this seems
just like a historically accurate representation of the
narrator's response, but it seems to be pretty much everywhere in
his writing. He didn't beat us over the head with the ethnicity
of the autocthons. In fact, he never seems to mention ethnicity
unless a character is "Black."
  I'm not trying to be sensitive or judgmental here, just this is
something I've observed, and am not sure why it is so.

Has anyone else noticed either of these tendencies in Wolfe's
work?

-cephalothorax-

---

From: m.driussi <m.driussi at genie.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 1997 21:13:00 +0000

Reply:  Item #2682162 from URTH at LISTS.BEST.COM@INET01#

Cephalothorax,

Well obviously I'm at a loss if you decline to answer my specific
questions (about men and women) regarding your generalizations (about
women).  So we'll just drop it.

Re: Blackness. I'm not going to say anymore than point out that your
assertion "he [Wolfe] never seems to mention ethnicity unless a
character is `Black'" conflicts with my tracking of "Celtic"
ethnicity within Wolfe's work.  Same books, different readers: The
End.

Re: William Burroughs, yes, one of his great strengths is that his
savage satire (campy/vampy/grotesque) is rigorously equal opportunity--
to the point that I'm somewhat surprised that nobody has every used his
texts as a blistering damnation of homosexuality.  Not exactly "gay
pride," that fellow Bill's books.

=mantis=

---

From: Jim Jordan <jbjordan at gnt.net>
Date: Fri, 20 Jun 1997 00:05:12 +0000

>preferred metaphor for this search. 

	I think this is often the case. A fairly clear example is There Are Doors.
My initial reading took Lara/Laura and the whole World of Woman in a very
negative way. I now think that the World of Women exists in the perceptions
of the main character, who is afraid of women, and who sees his girlfriend
in a variety of fearful and wondrous ways. Except that all this becomes
kind of real for him (just where is the border between psychology and
fantasy-reality in this novel?). Finally, he sees her as a living doll.
Thus, the World of Women and Lara/Laura are not evil, but the protagonist
is just plain scared of women (as all men are). Mama at the Italian
Restaurant (the church) tries to help him get over this fear.

>Divine Love,

	Apheta is not divine love. Wolfe told me that Severian is on the quest,
but has never found it. I'm inclined to think that the Heirogrammates may
be rather more sinister than appears at first glance -- or at least a mixed
bag. Happily, the Increate has His own designs....  (Compare "The Detective
of Dreams" for the basic scenario.)

> so there is often a sinister quality to the women in

	Well, pathetic Candy is a mess all right, but she is also on a quest for
love and freedom. With her companions she is trying to follow the yellow
brick road out of the insanity and tyranny of modern America (Oz) to the
former freedom offered by Been Free in the abandoned aeroplane in the sky
(the church). At the end of the book, she and her companions have indeed
found something....

>final solution (say, maybe, Valeria);

	Yes. Wolfe confirmed this to me.

> (2) The Sex Object is not

	I think you're right. I initially took Anne Schildler (Castleview) in a
negative light, but she's looking for the Castle (church; kingdom of God)
also. Thus, I think it is mainly a matter of Wolfe's writing primarily
about male protagonists. 

>viewpoint.

	One of the interesting things about Wolfe's fiction is that he takes the
differences between men and women seriously. His characters are often less
than universal (unlike most of literature), but rather are masculine or
feminine. I suspect this arises from his religious beliefs. It makes his
fiction rather startling in places. Severian becomes a more universal
figure only by incorporating a resurrected Thecla into himself.

>the sticking point usually seems to be the portrayal of women.

	One of my questions for Wolfe in my interview with him (and I don't think
this went into the final version) was that I could see that women could
charge him with being anti-woman. I provided illustrations: There seem to
be a lot of bad women in his books. He objected to this, and declared that
he did not intend to distribute badness unevenly. And then it became clear
that Lara and Anne Schindler are not so bad after all....
	I mention this to say that I think such perceptions are not unique.

Nutria