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Helen America
Jun. 18th, 2005 03:26 pmI am rereading Cordwainer Smith.
It all started with the program design for Continuum (in July, in Melbourne, and with an amazing array of wondrous people to meet).
When the Cordwainer Smith panel was short of people I raised my hand to be in the audience. I may be in the audience, I may be on the panel - whatever happens I am *there*. With bells and whistles on. Even if it means missing Neil Gaiman. Not many authors compel me to such sacrifices.
The net result of all this is that I am re-reading stories I haven't read since my late teens. I have changed since then, and I have learned a little history since then: I am reading with new eyes.
My big surprise of yesterday was the early part of his tale about Helen America.
Smith repeats over and over again the word "feminist" as if it means something we should be familiar with. It doesn't. Helen's mother was one. And what her mother was bears a lot more relationship to the various alternate lifestyles of the 1960s than it does to feminism.
Words change. Society changes.
And Smith's definition of a face without experience was identical to his description of a woman's face, which says something about his notion of feminism and his perception of women.
He was amazing, but still a product of place and time.
Helen America herself was the first woman to qualify for a sailor when she was still young enough to be a sailor. This was in a society where people lived 160 years. We all create fiction based on our own society and our own experience of it. For the 1940s, his statement of Helen America fitted. More recently though, women's access to education has changed. All it took for Smith's comment on Helen America to be true was for Smith not to use his own system as a basis, rather than constructing a new one and for him to accept that women's faces do not reflect life experience as much as men's - that most women learn more slowly.
It feels strange to be re-reading a favourite author and finding that the feminist in me and the writer in me find Cordwainer Smith a bit unsettling on this one character, while the historian in me is thankful for his oversight. He was superbly visionary and wrote the most amazing stuff - and at the same time he was so much a product of his time that his assumptions are a weft in the fabric of his work.
I still have three and a half volumes to read before Continuum: I plan to enjoy every word.
It all started with the program design for Continuum (in July, in Melbourne, and with an amazing array of wondrous people to meet).
When the Cordwainer Smith panel was short of people I raised my hand to be in the audience. I may be in the audience, I may be on the panel - whatever happens I am *there*. With bells and whistles on. Even if it means missing Neil Gaiman. Not many authors compel me to such sacrifices.
The net result of all this is that I am re-reading stories I haven't read since my late teens. I have changed since then, and I have learned a little history since then: I am reading with new eyes.
My big surprise of yesterday was the early part of his tale about Helen America.
Smith repeats over and over again the word "feminist" as if it means something we should be familiar with. It doesn't. Helen's mother was one. And what her mother was bears a lot more relationship to the various alternate lifestyles of the 1960s than it does to feminism.
Words change. Society changes.
And Smith's definition of a face without experience was identical to his description of a woman's face, which says something about his notion of feminism and his perception of women.
He was amazing, but still a product of place and time.
Helen America herself was the first woman to qualify for a sailor when she was still young enough to be a sailor. This was in a society where people lived 160 years. We all create fiction based on our own society and our own experience of it. For the 1940s, his statement of Helen America fitted. More recently though, women's access to education has changed. All it took for Smith's comment on Helen America to be true was for Smith not to use his own system as a basis, rather than constructing a new one and for him to accept that women's faces do not reflect life experience as much as men's - that most women learn more slowly.
It feels strange to be re-reading a favourite author and finding that the feminist in me and the writer in me find Cordwainer Smith a bit unsettling on this one character, while the historian in me is thankful for his oversight. He was superbly visionary and wrote the most amazing stuff - and at the same time he was so much a product of his time that his assumptions are a weft in the fabric of his work.
I still have three and a half volumes to read before Continuum: I plan to enjoy every word.