Approach to the Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin

¶ … Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula Le Guin. Specifically, it will look at the book with a critical feminist approach. The Gethenian society seems perfect at first, but the lack of warmth in this cold world is a sad statement about relationships, and the lack of them.

THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS

Ursula Le Guin's book, "The Left Hand of Darkness" won the Nebula and Hugo awards for science fiction, and many critics have praised the prose and sensuality of the book, which tells the tale of the planet Winter, and the Gethenians who populate the planet. The Gethenians are androgynous, and their sex lives are discussed quite frankly in the book. When they go into "kemmer," they can choose their sex and become sexually active, and during the rest of the month, they look human, rather than male or female. "Normal individuals have no predisposition to either sexual role in kemmer; they do not know whether they will be the male or female, and have no choice in the matter" (Le Guin 91). Ultimately, the society is run by sex because of their kemmer cycles. Business shuts down during kemmer, and anyone can engage with anyone else, there is no social of racial rank. "Room is made for sex, plenty of room; but a room, as it were, apart. The society of Gethen in its daily functioning and in its continuity, is without sex" (Le Guin 93). While the society is fascinating in many ways, from a feminist point-of-view, there is no feminism here, for there is no recognition of male or female except during sex, and after that, there are no sexes, unless a woman is pregnant. As one critic of the novel noted,

The story makes us aware of the impersonal interactions that go with our hotter climate, but, lest we judge too hastily, we discover that the passions of Winter have generated a tragedy that is averted only through the intervention of a cooler, blander society. The story's structural ambiguity is reinforced by a moral one, and both push the reader toward a more complex understanding of the events (Attebery 164).

At first, Winter might seem like the perfect society, for there is no division of the sexes, there is only partnership and teamwork. "Consider: There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter" (Le Guin 94). In our society, gender is used as a measure of who you are, and what you do. Even Estraven and Genly discuss the nuances of being a woman, "Even where women participate equally with men in the society, they still after all do all the child-bearing, and so most of the child-rearing...." (Le Guin 234). Women still do that on Winter, too, while the rest of the society returns to their sexless state, so there is still some separation of the sexes.

What would society be like if we did not relate to each other as men and women, but only as beings? Much of the way we see ourselves and others is dependent on our sex. Men are supposed to be strong wage earners who protect their wives and children. Women are supposed to be nurturing lovers who care about their family and how they appear to others. In Winter, the residents do not have to concern themselves with stereotypes and images; they can simply be whoever they are. Le Guin writes of how our world should be, and how she pictures a world without sexual stereotypes and dominance. As one critic notes about Le Guin's writing:

Sexuality should have nothing to do with issues of power or wealth, or one individual's advantage over another, and that violence has no place in the feminist concept of sexuality. It is natural for friends to love one another and to include sexuality within the larger boundaries of their caring and communication, and this phenomenon should hold true for all planets and times (Spector 207).

In fact, Le Guin herself said she wrote the novel completely as a result of her feminist thinking. "I was and am a fiction writer. The way I did my thinking was to write a novel. That novel, 'The Left Hand of Darkness,' is the record of my consciousness, the process of my thinking" (Palumbo 221). Many have called the book the opposite of feminist thought, because much of the Gethenian society still seems to be "male" dominated, even if the sexless creatures do not appear entirely male or female. However, Le Guin herself said the real story was not about feminism. "The fact is that the real subject of the book is not feminism or sex or gender or anything of the sort; as far as I can see it is a book about betrayal and fidelity. That is why one of its two dominant sets of symbols is an extended metaphor of winter, of ice, snow, cold: the winter journey (Palumbo 222).