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- Title
Rescuing the Female Child: The Fiction of Joanna Russ.
- Authors
Spencer, Kathleen L.
- Abstract
Whereas, in a patriarchal culture, stories about a boy's maturation process typically emphasize separation from parental figures, stories about a girl's maturation tend to focus on her sexual initiation: his story is about individuation, hers about a new sort of intimacy and a merging of identity with her mate. But because feminists define female maturity in different terms, they need a different kind of story. In the fiction of Joanna Russ we find such a story: in the repeated narrative pattern Russ herself calls ‘the rescue of the female child.’ What the child is rescued from is patriarchy. In Russ's fiction, the rescuer is always a middle-aged woman (35–45 years old): the child is either about 12 (i.e., on the edge of puberty) or, more commonly, about 17 (on the edge of sexual awakening). There are five stages of this rescue, increasing in complexity: (1) the physical removal of the child from a life-threatening situation in a patriarchal culture; (2) the rescue of the child from the psychological crippling of a culture which devalues her as female; (3) the rescue from ‘compulsory heterosexuality’; (4) the rescue of the self, as the older woman in some kind of time-loop goes back to help her younger self rebel against or survive patriarchal restrictions; and (5) the rescue of the mother, accompanied by some significant gesture of reconciliation with the woman who had earlier been seen only as the teacher and enforcer of patriarchy's limits. All of these stages seem to be important parts of the feminist awakening, and most can be more easily imagined and more fully represented in the mode of SF than in realistic fiction. My conclusion connects this pattern with the developmental theories of Carol Gilligan and Nancy Chodorow as a way to further illuminate its significance for feminist scholars and readers.
- Subjects
RUSS, Joanna; FEMINIST science fiction; ADVENTURE stories; MATURATION (Psychology); EMOTION regulation; HETEROSEXUALITY
- Publication
Science Fiction Studies, 1990, Vol 17, Issue 2, p167
- ISSN
0091-7729
- Publication type
Literary Criticism