The Female Man: synopsis and analysis

Female Man

Russ, Joanna. The Female Man. New York: Beacon Press, 1986.

The Female Man by Joanna Russ uses the techniques of science fiction to illuminate truths and to ask questions about the relationships of men and women in contemporary life. The book chronicles the lives of four different women, in four different parallel universes. The first world, Joanna's world, gives the book its title because the narrator openly states that a woman such as herself must sacrifice her femininity to be effective in a masculine world. Joanna is happiest when she feels most masculine, because she feels powerful and validated as an intelligent being. At a cocktail party she gleefully says to herself" "I had just changed into a man, me, Joanna, I mean a female man, of course; my body and soul were exactly the same. So there's me also. The first man to set foot on the earth" (Russ 5). Even though she is a woman on the outside, she feels like a man on the inside, and this is explicitly stated in her narrative voice.

This divided nature of feminine identity, of body and mind, is reflected in the divided nature of reality in the book. Joanna lives in the contemporary world of the author but the librarian Jeannine also lives on our Earth in a poor parallel universe, where the Great Depression never ended, a kind of negative parallel world where the question of when she is going to get married is on everyone's mind, from her prospective suitors to her mother's: " Jeannine,' he says. 'It's nice to see you.' 'When did you get in?' 'When are you going to get married?'" (Russ 113). Society never moved on socially, and women were forced to turn to men and marriage for economic security. The complete opposite of Jeannine, apparently, the women Janet lives in an entirely female-dominated society called Whileaway where women reproduce through artificial means, and till the land. Finally, the reader is introduced to a woman named Jael who lives in a world where men and women are eternally polarized in a fight for survival.

These different women exemplify the different ways that women in real history have dealt with the differences between the sexes and female oppression, in terms of political conflicts and their internal psychology. Jael's world is a kind of obvious 'battle of the sexes,' where men and women despise one another. Men do not even wish to have sex with women, and have sex with young boys, young men who are made to look like women, another way in which the title is invoked in the book. This suggests that hyper-feminine identity is a construction that can be created with plastic surgery, just like reproduction does not necessarily make one a woman -- after all, the women of Janet's society reproduce without physical men. In contrast to the use of technology in Whileaway, in Jael's world women are Amazons who trade children as one of their 'resources' to a hostile, male enemy. Jael exemplifies the fantasy of living without men, a much more hostile fantasy, a dystopia rather than an apparent utopia like Whileaway.

Janet's fantasy world has no men at all, and essentially does away with the problem of men and the differences between the sexes, just like Jael deals with the problem through fighting men. Joanna stands poised between these two extremes, half-liberated, but still desiring a relationship with men, even though she feels that to enjoy the pleasures of being a woman is impossible while still working for a living and commanding respect from men. She admires Janet, but the limits of Janet's world are manifest when Joanna takes Janet to a mixed party and Janet reacts violently because she does not know how to behave when propositioned by a man. Joanna wants to find a middle ground, and while she and the other contemporary women praise the ideals of Whileaway, Janet in fact believes that Whileaway's single-minded attitude and lifestyle is incomplete. It is just as incomplete, in its own way, as the more traditional lifestyle of Jeannine, who is pressured to start a family and to fulfill a traditional feminine role. She fears being a 'female man' without a 'real man.' Thus the novel is just as unsparing in the way that it shows the limits of a female-dominant perspective that simply reverses the dominant paradigm of male dominance. For example, when Jael suspects a male still believes in the inequality of women, she kills him, and hopes that all of the main characters, whom she sees as 'the same' as herself, all part of the same woman yet existing in different universes will adhere to her own society's goals to create all-female worlds. Jael does only live in a society that is absent of men, like Janet, but she is openly hostile towards males.

One of the most striking aspects of the complexity of the novel is evident at the end, when Jael tries to mobilize the women to do away with all of the males in their respective worlds. Janet refuses. Then Jael reveals that, rather than a natural plague, an effective similar campaign to the one proposed by Jael is the reason that there are no males in Whileaway. Jael is triumphant, but Janet's regret about this fact explain a comment she made earlier in the novel, that she no longer fits into the all-female Whileaway. It also explains regrets she experiences having to kill 'on assignment,' which the housewife Laura, frustrated in her role and excited by her association with Janet, gleefully celebrates (Russ 145).

The novel underlines the fact that Janet's dislike engage in violence is not because of sexual frustration because Janet enjoys sexual relationship with women, including the married Earth woman Laura, as well as having a wife of Whileaway. Instead, Janet's dissatisfaction with Jael's proposition comes from her ability to question the value of using violence and adopting 'male' norms. From personal experience, Janet knows this does not bring happiness. Because she still exists in a polarized society, Joanna can recall wanting to 'be' (and not just have a crush on) Humphrey Bogart and Douglas Fairbanks, and to be loud, ambitious, and powerful. This illustrates that ironically, living in an all-female and undivided society might be why Janet is the most disdainful of violence of all four women at the end of the novel. Only Janet has any inkling of what a world without gendered divisions might resemble, in contrast to the other women. Even the traditional Jeannie, who does not feel complete without a man at the beginning of the book, goes on to endorse Jael's campaign because of her own frustrations with her societal role.