More on The Left Hand of Darkness

I’ve kept thinking about The Left Hand of Darkness since I’ve finished reading it yesterday, especially about the gender aspects. What I didn’t express well enough in my review was how little the idea of a naturally sexless people actually mattered for the story. The core of the story is the relationship between Genly Ai and Estraven and while the latter is supposed to be sexless, it could just as well have been a story about two men bonding together in the face of common danger. As I said yesterday as well, using gendered male pronouns for the Gethenians was a mistake as it reinforces the idea that the characters we meet are all male, if occasionally effeminate. It wouldn’t take that much rewriting to make the gender aspects disappear altogether.

What I kept comparing The Left Hand of Darkness is Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite, which takes place on a planet where through some handwave only female creatures are able to live. Both are at heart planetary romances, stories whose main purpose is to lead the protagonist (usually, as here, an outsider) on an exotic tour of the planet in question, the better to showcase the cultures and landscapes it contains. The planetary romance is a science fiction subgenre of long standing, a logical translation of the exploration or adventure stories set in Darkest Africa and the jungles of South America, only set on Mars or Venus. What Griffith does in Ammonite is telling this very familiar sort of story, but with women in every role you’d normally find male characters and she does so without fuss. Its very matter of factness helps underscore how often the opposite is the case, how many stories there are with only male roles, or with just the occasional token female love interest or professional victim.

Coming back to Darkness, I feel that LeGuin failed where Griffith succeeded. Griffith had women in roles that in formula fiction are automatically filled by male characters and did so matter of factly. LeGuin has supposedly sexless characters doing the same, has the narration (Genly) discuss this sexlessness a lot, but shows characters that still read male, behaving little different from how they would in a standard adventure story. There are no female-presenting characters doing the stuff male characters do normally.

A related problem I have with the gender relations in Darkness, the more I think of it, has to do with the infodumps LeGuin gives about how the whole sexual cycle of the Genthenians works. It’s a common pattern in nature of course, an animal that’s without sex drive for most of the year, only getting in heat at certain times, the twist she added being the idea of being able to “chose” becoming male or female gendered. The problem I had with it was that, despite LeGuin’s comparisons between the unity of the Genthenian gender and the “bisexuality” of the rest of humanity, it was actually still too binairy for me. In kemmer people become either male or female, pairing of with either a female or a male partner, but male-male, or female-female partnerships aren’t mentioned, if I remember correctly: no homosexuality. Kemmer and kemmering are presented as deterministic a process as the rutting rituals of lower animals. Real humans (or even some known animal species) don’t work that way, why would the Gentenians?

I won’t say too much about the idea that rape in such a system is impossible, as LeGuin says somewhere, because that’s so selfevidently silly that it’s not worth going in to.

I do want to say that this criticism does not make The Left Hand of Darkness a bad book, rather than a good novel with flaws. Just the fact that I can engage it on this level is a good thing; too many novels just skid along the surface of your engagement leaving only quickly fading ripples.