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Beginnings and Becomings
“If you knew time as well as I do,” said the Hatter, “you wouldn‟t talk about it. It‟s him.”
(Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland) It can be argued that fantasy and science fiction share many features but perhaps the most salient is their ability to make the invisible visible; these genres often seem to encourage readers to confront elements of their psyches and societies that may otherwise remain unseen and unchallenged. Thus, when Carroll‟s Mad Hatter, in a moment of characteristically lucid „lunacy‟, describes time as a man the reader should consider the significance of the statement with care. Given that time is arguably the matrix within which all being occurs one wonders what the impact would be on women if this all-encompassing force were a „him‟, and perhaps a „him‟ that promotes a patriarchal ideology. Because time is invisible, feminists who would like to explore it may turn to the genres of fantasy and science fiction in order to do so. After all, not only does this fictional space enable them to question philosophical and scientific hypotheses previously limited by male-dominated perspectives, it is also in this arena, in which the invisible is made visible, that they may confront an otherwise unassailable opponent. A very brief look at the history of the Western exploration of this „invisible assailant‟, time, reveals that this particularly complex and slippery concept has been treated almost solely by great male thinkers. In looking at time, one moves through the work of Parmenides (520-430 BCE), Plato (428-347 BCE) and Aristotle (384-322 BCE) to Augustine (354-430 CE) and the male thinkers that dominated more modern times, such as Newton (1642-1727), Locke (1632-1704), Leibniz (1646-1716), Kant (1724-1804), Hegel (1770-1831) and Nietzsche (1844-1900). Nowhere is there any record of a contribution by female thinkers or a consideration of how time (and the domination of time by men) may affect women. The dominance of male thinkers continues into the twentieth century with philosophers and scientists like Einstein (1879-1955), Husserl (1859-1938), Heidegger (1889-1976) and so on. Although these men contributed invaluable insights to humanity‟s understanding of time, their perspectives reflect only one side of the human experience. In this thesis I focus on the feminist struggle with time and the insights that previously silent women voiced during the Second Wave; my argument is that their exploration of time and the female experience of time may provide a valuable and provocative counterpoint to the previously male-dominated Western exploration of time. Because the modern feminist engagement with time emerges during the struggle for women‟s liberation that surfaced in the 1960s and 1970s, their exploration of time is grounded in the political, empirical and embodied experiences of women, unlike the hypotheses generated by male philosophers and scientists, most of whom describe time in fairly esoteric terms. In this period (which has since become known as the Second Wave), time came under scrutiny and, like many other supposedly „natural‟ and „neutral‟ phenomena, was identified as one of the mechanisms used by a „hegemonic patriarchy‟ to keep „universal woman‟ in her place (Mitchell, 1984; Johles-Forman and Sowton, 1989; Davies, 1990; Braidotti, 1994). As I suggested earlier, prior to the feminist investigation of time during this period, there was little consideration of the effect this phenomenon might have on women because, as sociologist Karen Davies observes: „Examining the social construction of time is deemed irrelevant (…). [T]ime is taken for granted, it is assumed that we all know what time is and that we share a common definition. Time is genderless. It exists as objective fact‟ (Davies, 1990:15). In opposition to this view feminists of the Second Wave argue that time is not, in fact, genderless but very much gendered and therefore imbued with a patriarchal ideology that disempowers women (Collard, 1988; Ffeuffer-Kahn, 1989; O‟Brian, 1989; Jardine, 1985; Donovan, 2001; Murphy, 2001). The foundation of this argument is that the dominance of patriarchal culture in the West has led to the division of phenomena such as time into a set of binary oppositions, the one half gendered masculine and the other half feminine (de Beauvoir, 1953; Cixous, 1975 reprinted in Marks and de Courtivron, 1981: 96). Linear time, which dominates Western temporal consciousness, is gendered masculine because it is equated with the ordered, public, male- dominated realms of reason, commerce and science. Second Wave feminists suggest that the historical relegation of women to a private domain that is characterised as domestic, irrational cyclical and essentially un/re-productive denies women a place in the linear time of male history and production. The „private‟ activities, emotions and experiences of women are not only conflated with this feminine cyclical time but are thus also comfortably dismissed as irrelevant to the project of public human endeavour, effectively silencing women until the feminist projects of the twentieth century (Merchant, 1980; Deeds-Ermath, 1989; Davies, 1990; Orr, 2006). While there is no unified Second Wave feminist position on what appears to be the dismissal of women from linear time, various Second Wave feminisms argue that linear time is complicit with oppressive patriarchal ideologies and propose counter-strategies that might enable women to defy this misogyny. What I argue in this thesis is that the Second Wave feminist investigation and challenge of masculine time is not limited to the arenas of political activism or emerging feminist theory, but that some of the most ground-breaking insights may be found in selected novels written at the time, notably in what was then the newly emerging genre of feminist speculative fiction. I thus read the novels discussed in chapters two and three of this thesis as contributing to the Second Wave debate on time.
Table of Contents :
- Introduction: Beginnings and Becomings
- Chapter One: A Chronology of Her Own
- Chapter Two: Rebirthing the Dispossessed Children of Time: the Second Wave SF of Butler, Piercy and Russ
- Chapter Three: Fantastic Cosmogynesis: the Second Wave Fantasy of Le Guin, Lee and Tepper
- Conclusion: Resetting the Clockocracy
- Bibiography
