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- Title
Animals, Empathy, and Care in Naomi Mitchison's "Memoirs of a Spacewoman."
- Authors
Miller, Gavin
- Abstract
Naomi Mitchison's "Memoirs of a Spacewoman" (1962) represents the adventures of Mary, a female explorer who uses her highly developed capacity for empathy to communicate with animals. Mary's attentive sympathy plays a vital role in the ethical relations which she maintains with both Terran and extra-terrestrial animal life. Her animal encounters also foreground the embodiment of her own rationality, and particularly the potential for an ethic of care derived from mammalian biology. This ethic is to some extent repressed by Mary's society, particularly within the space-exploring sub-culture to which she belongs. Although Mitchison's novel is forward-looking in its representation of a caring, sympathetic ethic that extends (potentially) to all life, it is complicit with myths of gender essentialism: empathy and care are limited specifically to the female in Memoirs.
- Subjects
CRITICISM; MEMOIRS of a Spacewoman (Book); MITCHISON, Naomi, 1897-1999; SCIENCE fiction; HUMAN-animal communication; STUDY &; teaching of empathy; SOCIAL constructionism; FEMINIST theory
- Publication
Science Fiction Studies, 2008, Vol 35, Issue 2, p251
- ISSN
0091-7729
- Publication type
Literary Criticism