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Article Excerpt
While many writers in the canon of mainstream U.S. literature consider social activism and literary aestheticism to be mutually exclusive, progressive era author and feminist Zona Gale saw them as mutually constructive. In her essay "The Novel and the Spirit," first published in the October 1922 issue of Yale Review and reprinted in her 1928 collection Portage, Wisconsin, and other Essays, she outlined her hope for the future of American literature: "It is a great moment in any art when the artist transfers his attention from the extension of his method to the extension of his material" (135). Contrary to prevailing views, she did not believe that literary works were artistically damaged or aesthetically compromised by engaging societal concerns. Instead, as Deborah Williams has written, "ignoring social issues, in Gale's formulation, becomes detrimental to the making of art" (Not 49).
Given Gale's views on writing, it is surprising that neither past nor present critics have connected her with either speculative fiction or feminist fabulation. In keeping with the cultural aim of literary speculation, she believed that writers ought not to distance themselves from social, political or economic events, but should embrace them. In her mind, novelists, poets and playwrights had not just a right but rather a duty to examine current societal practices, critique them and offer better alternatives. Likewise, echoing the goal of feminist fabulation, Gale was interested in undermining patriarchal practices and empowering women. In both her essays and speeches and her numerous novels and poems, she was one of the leading voices for feminism during the early twentieth century.
This essay demonstrates the productive dialogue that is generated by bringing together the seemingly disparate fields of early-twentieth century women's domestic literature and late-twentieth century sf deployments of speculative fiction. In the pages that follow, I seek to correct the previous omission of Gale from these common sf modes by highlighting the connection that one of her most popular books has with each of them. First published in 1908, Gale's short story collection Friendship Village forms a powerful instance of her union of activism and art. In the sequential narratives "Nobody Sick, Nobody Poor" and "Covers for Seven" within Friendship Village, an unmarried woman, Calliope Marsh, organizes a surprise Thanksgiving dinner for the single women in her neighborhood. Commonly viewed as simply a cliched act of charity, the event has more profound implications: it can be read as a radical effort to re-envision the status of old maids, widows and spinsters in the text's fictional world and, by extension, early twentieth century America. Through Calliope's organizing efforts, the single women in Friendship Village not only find meaning in and for their lives, but they do so in a radically new way. The Thanksgiving dinner shows the narrative's unmarried women that they need not adhere to any of the negative stereotypes about single women, from the image of the selfless maiden aunt to the equally disparaging portrait of the lonely, isolated eccentric. Instead, these women can band together to create their own self-contained community and, hence, their own meaningful existence. In brief, they can live independent from the harmful historical roles established for their position. Gale, however, was not simply interested in re-imagining an isolated literary stereotype. Employing the longstanding trait of sf in general and works written in the speculative mode in particular, her portrait of old maids, widows and spinsters in "Nobody Sick, Nobody Poor" and "Covers for Seven" re-imagines U.S. society itself.
Together with "putting a new spin on spinsters," Friendship Village puts a new spin on the genres of speculative fiction and feminist fabulation. Traditionally, these literary modes have been seen as confined to the imaginative writings of science fiction. As Robert Scholes, Graham Dunstan Martin and Natalie Rosinsky have written, speculative fiction seeks to invent the world anew by separating itself from earthly reality and focusing on fictive locales, from futuristic settlements with advanced technology to ancient cultures and their long-lost wisdom. While speculative fiction often draws parallels between this unfamiliar invented world and our own factual one, it nonetheless, as Robert Scholes has asserted, "offers us a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know" (47). Feminist fabulation shares this basic purpose, but, as Marleen Barr has written, it simultaneously "exposes, subverts, and rewrites a patriarchal myth" (xii). In works like Joanne Russ's The Female Man (1970) and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), writers forgo simply pointing out structural flaws or intellectual shortcomings in our society. On the contrary, in keeping with the central aim of feminist fabulation, they focus on weaknesses that are rooted in sexism, gender inequality, and misogyny.
Gale's stories "Nobody Sick, Nobody Poor" and "Covers for Seven" illustrate that the definitional boundaries and imaginative scope of these literary modes can be broadened to include texts that are not predicated on the fictive peoples or imaginary cultures of sf. Her narratives reveal that texts written in the naturalistic style can also become sites for speculative alternatives to the "real" and the "now." Challenging readers with a new and different vision of our society and the place that single women can occupy in it, Gale's texts form an important but overlooked locus for both speculative fiction and feminist fabulation. "Nobody Sick, Nobody Poor" and "Covers for Seven" demonstrate the possibility of presenting readers with a radical new vision for our world without ever leaving it. Instead of retreating to the proverbial galaxy "far, far away" with which sf is popularly--if myopically--associated, her work illustrates the speculative potential of scenes and situations on our own planet and, more pointedly, in our own communities.
While science fiction is a broad genre that encompasses a wide array of narrative styles and subject matters, one element has remained historically constant: its interest in speculation. Sf is generally concerned with constructing alternative societal structures and then asking the foundational question, "What if?" As Robert A. Heinlein famously asserted: "a handy short definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present." (91).
While the creation of different socio-political systems and especially the implementation of new scientific technologies are common fodder for the speculative elements of sf works, so too are traditional gender roles. At least since the publication of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)--and arguably even long before that in works like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915) or Mary E. Bradley Lane's Mizora: A Prophecy (which was first published serially from 1880 to 1881 and released in book form in 1890)--sf narratives have called stereotypical Western constructions of masculinity and femininity as contrasting and mutually exclusive entities into question, proposing alternative formulations in their place. In fact, for some writers like Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Jr., Doris Lessing and Le Guin, the examination of these issues form a central preoccupation of their work. Narratives like Russ's The Female Man (1975) or Tiptree's seminal short story "The Women that Men Don't See" (1973) spotlight Western notions about male and female gender roles, only to challenge, interrogate and upend them. One of the four protagonists of Russ's The Female Man, for example, lives in a matriarchal world in which all of the men have been exterminated via a gender-specific epidemic and women now rule. Akin to other all-female utopias, this scenario allows Russ to critique common assumptions about women and authority, technology and leadership. Meanwhile, in the now infamous finale to Tiptree's signature tale "The Women Men Don't See," the...
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