Native Tongue (53 page)

Native Tongue
must be viewed within the history not only of feminist thought but also of the science fiction genre. Science fiction is often traced back to Mary Shelley’s 1818
Frankenstein, Or, a Modern Prometheus
. Read variously as a political tract, a philosophical critique of Romantic individualism, and a birth myth, this brilliant novel presents a solitary scientist who constructs a human being in his laboratory out of a mixture of human and animal parts. The experiment goes awry, and the monster—alien and unnamed—escapes only to wreak havoc on its human creator, other human beings, and itself. Shelley’s interrogation of the limits of humanity and the role of technology in human life forms the basis of much of science fiction today. Even our fascination with outer space and aliens reflects the genre’s special concern with questions of identity and technology. Despite its origins in the mind of a young woman, science fiction as it developed—from H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and C.S. Lewis in Europe to Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and more recently William Gibson in the United States—has been a genre dominated by white men as authors and readers. As science fiction gained popularity in the United States during the early part of the century through pulp novels and pulp magazines, the stories of exploration and high technology resonated with American expansionist ideals and the concomitant stress on technological innovation. Yet as far back as the teens in the United States, Charlotte Perkins Gilman articulated a strong feminist critique of such expansionist ideologies in
Herland
, while in Great Britain in the 1920s Charlotte Haldane grappled with the implications of eugenics and compulsory motherhood in her dystopian
Man’s World
. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that women made the strongest impact on science fiction, using it as an important medium to think through some of the claims and conflicts of feminism. Naomi Mitchison, Marge Piercy, Ursula LeGuin, and Joanna Russ all used the generic conventions of science fiction, often with modification, to examine and interrogate the actual, and possible,
gender relations of modern life. And it was only when men and women of color, like Samuel Delaney and Octavia Butler, began to play an increasingly important role in forging a resistant science fiction that the genre gave a far-reaching and serious critique to the racializing agenda of science.

In its exploration of the constitutive properties of language, Elgin’s novel harks back to Mary Shelley’s emphasis (in
chapter 12
of
Frankenstein
) on the role of language in forming the creature’s sense of self and world. Like the women in
Native Tongue
, the monster must learn an alien language; like them, the ability to name opens up a whole world:

I found that these people possessed a method of communicating their experiences and feelings to one another by articulate sounds. . . . This was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to become acquainted with it. But I was baffled in every attempt I made for this purpose. Their pronunciation was quick, and the words they uttered, not having any apparent connection with visible objects, I was unable to discover any clue by which I could unravel the mystery of their reference. By great application, however . . . I discovered the names that were given to some of the most familiar objects of discourse. . . . I cannot describe the delight I felt when I learned the ideas appropriated to each of these sounds and was able to pronounce them. (Shelley 107)

If Elgin’s novel continues the tradition of Mary Shelley’s feminist analysis of the constructive aspects of language, it also evokes other recent works of science fiction: Neal Stephenson’s examination of the way language functions as a virus in his widely read and critically acclaimed
Snowcrash
, and Greg Bear’s exploration of DNA as a language technology for species adaptation to global change in
Darwin’s Radio
.

Thus this reprinting of Elgin’s novel marks a significant new moment in science fiction, for it signals a convergence of the genre’s three major strands: the original (though frequently unacknowledged) strand of feminist cultural critique running from
Frankenstein
through to
Herland
; the tradition of technoscientific experimentation of science fiction’s male-dominated high modernist period (from Wells through Clarke and Asimov); and the postmodern strand of science fiction linking an examination of social technologies (language, race, gender) with a new focus on biotechnological interventions. Finally, in her attention to aging and to interspecies communication, her invention of the Barren House and the Interface,
Elgin draws attention to two contemporary issues which are increasingly the focus not only of science fiction but of fiction of all genres: the receding limits of human life and the vanishing boundaries between species. As contemporary biomedicine’s assault on the limits of the probable encodes as mundane what only months ago was coded as revolutionary, these issues increasingly function to break down the distinction between science and other forms of culture, between science fiction and other sorts of fiction.

Read as a work in this new, hybrid genre for which we do not yet have a name—this genre that does not differentiate science from other kinds of culture, but instead performs a detailed analysis of the networks between them—
Native Tongue
seems both powerfully prescient
and
strikingly dated (or, to put it more positively, of historical interest). The novel is prescient in its attention to the experiences of aging and menopausal women, who were given short shrift in feminist theory until the late 1990s. In its invention of Barren House,
Native Tongue
provides wonderful meditations on the different consciousness of aging, the pains and pleasures of growing—and being—old.
⁴
Looking to the present and future, the novel also nudges us to realize that we are living and working through precisely the kind of linguistic shift, or re-encoding, that Suzette Haden Elgin explored in
Native Tongue
. The increased emphasis on nonsexist language and the integration of feminist challenges to simple or deterministic ideas of gender or biology have changed the workplace environment, helped to make space for nontraditional families, and catalyzed a civil rights movements for lesbians and gay men and for disabled persons. As the biomedical revolution reshapes the entire human lifespan, with interventions ranging from assisted reproduction to hormone replacement therapy, our language is also registering the cultural shift in our definitions of the human. Thus our lexicon now includes the terms
biological mother, surrogate mother, genetic mother
, and
postmenopausal mother
, in addition to the older terms
adoptive mother, unwed mother
, and
natural mother
. Along with assisted reproduction, fetal surgery, cloning, and interspecies organ transplantation are changing the human narrative so dramatically that what seemed like science fiction in 1984 now seems to us in the new millennium as increasingly unremarkable fact. Test tube fertilization and cloning, which Elgin depicts in the novel, seem now not wildly futuristic but, in other contexts, realities, as well as moral dilemmas. In addition, the novel’s portrait of intergalactic capitalism anticipates the actual trend in the 1990s—with the decline of Communism and the rise of multinational corporations and the Internet—toward global capitalism.

At the same time, the novel serves us well as historical record of
the dystopian visions central to a particular stage of feminism, for the life of linguist women mirrors in its stringencies the harshest social critiques of second stage feminism: patriarchal domination, sex as an instrument of control, women subject to the whims of their male masters and categorized solely by their sexual and reproductive capacities. Yet
Native Tongue
reflects the partial vision of its era, too, particularly in its insistence on seeing men and women as unified groups necessarily opposed to one another in thought, action, and desire. Contemporary readers may well wish for another project that would encode a newer language, one that complicates the idea of a “native tongue” by challenging its basis in a fixed and gendered identity.

While Elgin’s novelistic vision of the future was dystopic, the strategies of language she and her characters employed provide new avenues of critique and change. Just as the novel both reveals language to be based on gendered assumptions and provides new ways to think about both language and reality, we can explore the ways language helps encode other power hierarchies, including those of race, class, sexual orientation, and even the human over other species. In doing so, we can employ new linguistic strategies to challenge these power structures and encode a reality more equitable for all.

Susan Squier

Julie Vedder

Pennsylvania State University

June 2000

NOTES

1
. Elgin’s nonfictions series has grown quite extensive. In addition to the original
Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense
, it includes
The Last Word on the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense
(1987),
The Gentle Art of Written Self-Defense: Letters in Response to Triple-F Situations
(1993),
Genderspeak: Men, Women, and the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense
(1993), and
The Gentle Art of Communicating With Kids
(1996), among others.

2
. While linguists have, for the most part, discarded this theory in favor of the school of thought pioneered by Noam Chomsky—which contends that the capacity for language is wired into our brains by evolution, rather than developed as a result of our environment—the idea survives in many other disciplines. All the same, there is some confusion about the actual meaning of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The “strong” version, which Elgin claims no one has ever advocated, says that our language determines our perception of reality (
Language Imperative
52). It is this version that is often discredited. The “weak” version, to which Elgin subscribes, also known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis, says only that our language structures and constrains our perception of reality. For a discussion of all these competing theories, see Steven Pinker,
The Language Instinct
, especially pages 55–82.

3
. Gödel’s theorem argues that within any fixed system, there are truths that exist, but are not provable within the system (Hofstadter 101). In other words, no system is complete, and in any attempt to include new things, the system necessarily changes. In the case of
Native Tongue
, the fixed system is a masculine, violent, hierarchical culture and language. Elgin’s experiment was to see what would happen if she tried to “prove” the truth of a women’s language. For a detailed discussion of Gödel’s theorem, see Douglas Hofstadter,
Gödel, Escher, Bach
.

4
. This theme appears in
Earthsong: Native Tongue III
, which has as its central character a linguist woman who communicates with the spirit of one of the oldest old who has just died—a linguist woman who helped to create Láadan.

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