Not exactly sure why but I had a tendency to compare Gilman’s Herland and Russ’s The Female Man. One of the things that kind of stuck out to me was the idea that both books seemed to have characters to represent one extreme to the next. In Herland, Van represented the “average” man that was both able to accept and learn from the women of Herland, while Terry represented more the stereotypical extreme of a “man’s man” and Jeff was the weaker example of a man and believed that women were superior. From these three characters Gilman is able to create an atmosphere that allows us to see various outsider perspectives. Though The Female Man has 4 main characters that all seem to represent different points of view but in a slightly different way. Russ’s characters all use the “scripts” that are present through the entire book in different ways. Janet thinks the responses are ludicrous, Janine ignores the fact that there are any scripts, Joanne acknowledges the scripts but doesn’t really know what to do with them and Jael uses these scripts to her advantage. Both of these authors seem to find it necessary to create an outsiders perspective within the book rather than letting the reader be the only outsider, and get their own point of view. It seems as though they are trying to create these dis/utopia’s, but by having the various extremes of character views they leave it up to the reader to decide which they would like to agree with.
Like Aimee brought up there seems to also be a significance of the cat character. and both of these stories also use a cat characters to get a message across. Though these two authors used seem to use similar approaches what is the significance of them doing so to create these dis/utopias. Are these familiar patterns in all books that would fall into these categories?
I like that you compared the scripts found in Herland and The Female Man. I think authors construct this to make characters "relatable," at least to an extent. Also, I believe the scripts build the basis of which we are supposed to push our minds to explore other ways of thinking.
ReplyDeleteYeah are cats supposed to be a symbol of put-down to the female or something? I never thought a female cat image was a bad thing before this.
ReplyDeleteI believe the significance of using extremes to create dis/utopias is so the reader can see how something COULD be if they let what is already corrupt and what can be done to solve it (in the authors eyes such as women worrying about love and marriage all the time like in "The Female Man" instead of just getting married and making love sound negative) blossom into a bigger problem or a really great solution. The extremes really grasp the readers' attention to think "Wow, I don't want it to ever be like this" or "Wow, if the world was like this it would be a whole lot better", etc.
In all books extremes can be attention graspers but not all books do this in the same way even though these two women writers of speculative fiction had a similar technique.
I never looked at a female cat with that perspective/ mentality either. It is interesting that these two authors used two extremes. Would the two books not have been as effective if these two sets of characters were not extreme opposites. Does the author do this so there is little "grey area?" I wonder if the book would have been portrayed differently if the characters were not opposites. All these elements combined force me to think about how one little feature, character,plot etc. change can effective the perception of the whole book.
ReplyDeleteI forgot that both stories used cats, but now this is causing me to think more about the significance of their use of cats. I think that the authors use characters that represent all different extremes because it allows the reader to see all the different possibilities. With so many different extremes there are also so many different opinions and outlooks on the world, and these really cause the reader to think about their own personal opinions. Also, these different extremes show how one person's utopia can be another person's dystopia. For example, I think Herland could have been Jeff's utopia while it would have been Terry's idea of a dystopia. I wonder what all of our dystopias and utopias would consist of?
ReplyDelete