The Judas Rose (64 page)

The Judas Rose
reveals that, like information technology, biomedical technology too has both dominant and subversive forms, uses that can be liberating or repressive. The medicalization of female resistance to male power is one such repressive use of biotechnology that the novel illustrates. Rebellious women are understood to be insane, and dealt with not through the legal but the medical system.
Chapter six
reveals this gendered use of biotechnology for social control when Heykus Clete receives Coast Guard Captain Frege's report that a group of women were discovered to have landed on an asteroid, murdered their male companions, and begun the work of establishing a women's settlement using only “antique hand tools and survival packs.” Clete commends Captain Frege for making sure that the women have been carried “suitably tranquilized” to “the nearest institutional facility” by their Coast Guard captors, there to be administered with reversible procedures that would “clean out” their minds. But he reproaches Frege for calling the women “bitches” and viewing them as guilty of the murders they committed: “They are not responsible. . . . No woman becomes sick like that overnight. Where were their men all this time, while their minds were rotting away? Frege . . . could your wife, or your sister, or your mother, or any other woman in your care, reach a state of deterioration in which she would be capable of ending your life, without you ever noticing that she needed medical attention?” (90). Kekyus, who prides himself on knowing “everything there was to know about normal women,” admits to himself that he is “baffled” by women who refuse the protective care offered them by the state. As he recalls asking such a subversive woman almost
a decade earlier: “On earth, and on every colony of Earth, to the limit of our resources, . . . women are cherished. Treated tenderly. Indulged in every way. Looked after, deferred to, sheltered. . . .
Why
do you turn to this perversion? What more do you want?” (91). Yet Hekyus is certain that there is only one appropriate response to such behavior: “Such females should be given expert help immediately, at the first signs of their illness, not allowed to wander around in public with their pathetic condition on view to all the world” (93).

Biomedical technology, like information technology, is portrayed as variable and gender-specific in
The Judas Rose:
used by the U.S. government to put down female resistance but also by the Linguist women to subvert male dominance. In fact, Elgin portrays biomedical technology as a continuum, from the “healthies” of conventional high-tech medicine to the hands-on nursing practices and herbal remedies of the Linguist women. In the tale of Jo-Bethany Schrafft, who is sent by her brother-in-law to work as a nurse for the Linguists, we see the contrast between these two modes of biomedicine. Initially appalled by the primitive medical conditions in the Barren House, the Linguist facility for postmenopausal women, Jo-Bethany is even more surprised when she learns that this absence of high-tech medical care is
voluntary
. She had assumed that the absence of “healthies,” servomechanisms that provide nursing and pharmaceutical care to the ill, reflects the age of the Barren House occupants and the relative poverty of the Linguists. In short, she assumes that faced with a need to provide health care that will be both costly and will yield no obvious social benefit (since the elderly linguist women are past reproductive age and unable to work any longer in the Interfaces) the Linguists have simply dumped their old women in the Barren House to die. But she is soon set right in her thinking:

            
The [L]inguists didn't use healthies, they told her. . . because they were convinced that the touch of human hands, the nonverbal communication of live hands doing the tending, was absolutely essential to the care of the sick. . . . Only when there was no human being available to tend a patient, or when the only human being available would have been unkind or uncaring, did they consider healthies appropriate, and within the Lines those situations did not exist. They might have been wrong in their belief that the mechanical nursing was bad for the patient—certainly the physicians who had taught Jo's class at nursing school would have considered that not only scientifically incorrect but superstitious, and the evidence for the medical position was overwhelming. But the women of Chornyak Barren House were not without healthies because they were old, or because they were not loved. (117–18)

Yet if the Linguist women refuse the tools of high-tech medicine, their response is fueled not by abstract principle, but by what seems the most effective strategy for each situation. They reject the “normal” reliance on healthies in favor of more medically effective hands-on nursing, yet they also couple an extensive use of natural healing potions with a computerized tracking system for supply and applications: “the database on herbal medicine in the computers at Chornyak Barren House was awe-inspiring, and the women who put the potions together knew exactly what they were doing” (113). Moreover, if the Terran governments rely on biomedicine to maintain a galaxy-wide control over women, the Linguist women use biomedicine to extend their subversive networks fighting that massive system of control. This strategic work explains an event that greatly puzzles Father Dorien: the note from Sister Miriam Rose “saying only that she considered her usefulness in her present post at an end and humbly requested transfer to a nursing position in one of the large public hospitals in Washington. . . . Why [Father Dorien asks himself] would she want to trade [a] sweet sinecure for a hospital nursing post?” (303). Sister Miriam Rose wants to move into nursing because she understands that it offers the greatest access to the widest population, enabling the fastest diffusion of Láadan. As Jonathan Chornyak “explains” the women's plan to Nazareth:

            
“There you were with your silly ‘woman's language,' all verbed up and no place to go. No way to get it out beyond the Lines. And then you remembered nurses—the only women who come and go freely between the Lines and the public, the only women who have the opportunity to talk to all sorts and kinds of people, and—coincidentally—women who had access to the hospital chapels. All you had to do was seduce the resident nurses from each of the Lines into your cozy little Thursday night meetings in the Womanhouses. and convince them that your Langlish twaddle was romantic and exotic and terribly terribly mysterious and exciting, and they would take it straight out into the world for you.” (348)

Clearly, Chornyak fails to understand the plan in its entirety, since he is unaware of the existence of Láadan. However, he has grasped the women's central strategy: the nesting circles of relations between women embodied in the symbol of the women's resistance, the wild vine wreaths.

WILD VINE WREATHS: WOMEN'S EMBEDDED CIRCLES OF RESISTANCE

In the image of the wild vine wreaths,
The Judas Rose
offers a structural alternative to the “endless loops of violence” that are the central problematic of Elgin's novel. While the resistant force of the wild vine wreaths is generated by women, it
must
extend beyond them if it is to succeed, and while the looping pattern of violence is generated and perpetuated by men, the diverse stories of such women as Selena Opal Hame, Jo-Bethany Schrafft, Nazareth Chornyak, and even of Benia, the young mother isolated as the only woman colonist on Polytrix, demonstrate how violence reaches beyond the male community into the lives of women and children. Elgin's use of multiple embedding strategies, imaged in the wild vine wreaths, articulates her understanding that feminist antiviolence work must proceed with an indirection, a circularity, and a capacity for diversion if it is to last long enough to have an effect. As Elgin explains:

            
The women of the Linguist Lines hide their revolutionary mechanism—the woman-language Láadan—inside the silly fake woman-language Langlish. They hide their revolutionary messages inside their exchange of recipes; they hide their revolutionary communication inside their needlework circles and their caretaking of the elderly; they hide their dissemination of the real woman-language inside Thursday night religious services, which are in turn hidden inside hospital chapel ministries. They hide the real (womanist/feminist) translation of the King James Bible into Láadan inside the grotesquely-bad translation commissioned by the Roman Catholic Church and directed by the “mole” who is the Judas Rose—Sister Miriam Rose (herself physically hidden inside the R[oman] C[atholic] C[hurch] by the women of the Lines).
⁴

Symbol of the intertwined circles of female resistance, the wild vine wreaths articulate another theme central not just to
The Judas Rose
but to contemporary society: the possibility that women can unite despite obstacles of race, religion, class, ethnicity, even galactic location. While even a decade ago this vision might have seemed too old-fashioned in its feminism to teach, from the perspective of the new millennium the trilogy has both a thematic and a historical interest. The very premise of Láadan itself, the notion of a women's language, is based on the idea, familiar to cultural feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, that women have a connection with other women that transcends differences of context and situation, a connection that
can transcend other relationships. This principle is most evident among the women of the Lines, who already do have Láadan to connect them together. While the thirteen Households of the Lines span national and cultural boundaries (though most of the Households are in the United States), race is never mentioned. This omission—so striking to contemporary readers—both situates the trilogy in its own historical time by illustrating the unity among women argued in feminist thought just several decades earlier and serves as a vivid illustration of the theoretical and political lacunae that feminisms of the most recent two decades have critiqued. The women of the Lines demonstrate the kinds of connections that women can forge: through Láadan, through the recipe codes, and most importantly through the Barren Houses. The practices of speaking together, sharing recipes together, even living in old age in gender-segregated units, have a political effectiveness for the Linguist women that recalls theories of a unified women's culture in the era of cultural feminism. Significantly, Elgin's vision of this women's culture develops during the course of the trilogy. After the first book, women who are not barren live in Womanhouses; a barren woman could still live in one of the Womanhouses instead of a Barren House if that was her preference. Girl children move to the Womanhouse as soon as they begin to menstruate. Implicitly, then, they are united by their experience and essence as women, not by their new status as
cast-offs
of patriarchal culture.

Yet if the Linguist women, who live together, cook together, and talk together in a community that excludes men, find that their connection to each other flourishes, women outside the Lines have no such connections, even between women who are friends and whose backgrounds and lives are otherwise similar. At a dinner party, for instance, Cassie's husband suggests that the point of marital academies is to teach a female form of violence, one based on polite humiliation (259). The lack of a unified women's community provides opportunities for men to turn women against each other, generating verbal and social violence as another form of the generalized violence that keeps patriarchy in place. Cassie herself expresses disconnection when she thinks about losing her best friend to the colonies: “Cassie will be sorry to lose Brune, but maybe Doby will be kinder to her when they get out to the colonies; she hopes so. She doesn't like always having to feel sorry for Brune; it distracts her, and it makes her feel uneasy and insecure” (263). The women of the Lines pity other women for their alienation from women: “It did change your perspective about your own problems, remembering how much worse it was for most women . . . with no other woman to comfort her or help her or advise her. And the women of her family as
ignorant as she was, even if they happened to be close by when she was miserable, by some accident” (298).

Connections between Linguist and non-Linguist women demonstrate both the possibility of alliance across differences and the difficulties of escaping context. When Jo-Bethany Schrafft first comes to Chornyak House, she is suspicious of the women, stunned by the accommodations, and horrified by the lack of bedside healthies (117). Although it takes the combined efforts of many women to settle her concerns, once the initial misunderstanding is gone, she does feel a connection. In
The Judas Rose
, Elgin implies that women are disconnected by the work of two major patriarchal instruments: the compartmentalization of women's lives in separate, male-headed households and the social structures that train women to be adversarial. As befitting its era, the novel suggests that if these factors could be overcome, if women could both regularly connect and learn to overcome their social training, women would have “natural” bonds together. Connection is possible, Elgin suggests in
The Judas Rose
, through women's invitation and women's effort. As the woman of the Lines at the dinner party says, “You're missing all the fun. My dears, won't you come play, too?” (270). Elgin's vision of this natural link between women depends on an essentialized vision of gender that to a contemporary reader has great historical interest precisely because of its distance from our current attention to gender as a category of performance rather than essence. In the Native Tongue trilogy, Linguist women are understood to have a special connection to things empathetic, earthly and spiritual, while men are conceptualized as aggressors; sexual intercourse between women and men of the Lines is portrayed overall as an unfulfilling and boring interaction offering little to the woman, and to the man only the assurance of his control of women. And though Elgin suggests that women can unite with effort, bonds with men are portrayed as inherently problematic. When Jo-Bethany Schrafft accuses the men of the Lines of being sexist for creating Womanhouses, the women respond: