The Judas Rose (65 page)

            
“Jo-Bethany, have you lived in a house with a man recently? Just one man?”

                   
“Yes. My brother-in-law. The man who sent me here.”

                   
“Well, did you enjoy it?”

                   
She found herself looking straight into the other woman's eyes, and those eyes were dancing with amusement, as if Dorcas knew all about what it had been like to live with Ham Klander.

                   
“Oh . . .” she had said weakly. “No. No, not very much.”

                   
“Then would you please try to imagine what it would be like
to live in a house with dozens of men? With fifty men, or more?”

                   
The expression on her face must have been eloquent; and what she had said had been the perfect thing to say. She had heard her mother say it so many times. She had said, “A hill is to climb. A man is to pick up after.” Talking to herself, really. And all of the other women had begun to laugh, laughing till there were tears in her eyes; laughing for her, not at her. (118–19)

The implicit assumption that relations with men provide no sexual or social benefits—since the violence integral to masculinity will inevitably express itself—means that women must work to connect with other women: the implication is that, in their world, women need to connect precisely because there are currently no healthy connections between women and men. But starting with connections between women can help enable the reeducation away from violence that will prevent the cataclysm that Elgin implies is impending, because it enables women to resist the violence men perpetuate as the galactic structure responds to the rising New World Order. (The resonances of Elgin's vision here seem as uncannily prescient as her portrait of a relatively peaceful womankind seems nostalgic.)

Through the complicated sets of relations it presents—Terran and Alien, Linguist and non-Linguist, male and female—
The Judas Rose
both articulates and critiques the New World Order that was beginning to develop when Elgin was writing the novel. It also speaks to our
new
New World Order, in which a patriotic nationalism claiming to support feminist emancipation is activated in the name of a transnational global culture whose economic order is indifferent, at best, to the well-being of women. From the Terran perspective from which the novel takes place, geopolitics is dominated by a race to the colonies between the U.S. and the Soviets. In reality, however, members of the inner circle of the Earth's governments understand that this “race” is in fact a manufactured one, tightly controlled by the Alien Consortium. The U.S. populace, on the other hand, in a continuation of the manifest destiny in which their political imaginary is rooted, believes that the endless expansion to new colonies is both a blessing and their rightful due. Although this race/expansion is understood religiously (Heykus Joshua Clete), evolutionarily (Aliens), and politically (Macabee Dow), the novel makes it clear that this only perpetuates and further solidifies the grossly unequal and violent status quo presented in the trilogy from the start. As Nazareth remarks, “Earth has been able to molder along undisturbed in its comfortable rut. Pressures that would have meant inevitable change before the colonization of space are siphoned off now—we just export them to the stars” (64).

Within the U.S. government of the twenty-third century, the New World Order is understood as a power struggle between the government and the Linguists, framed as the ability to control trade agreements with the Aliens. The Lines are described as “‘control[ling] the fate of entire planets, and of whole alliances of planets'” (255). This is the thrust both of Macabee Dow's plan to Interface his son [“‘The game, gentlemen, is
power;
there are no other games worth playing'” (104)] and the Roman Catholic Church's plan to convert the women who speak Láadan to proper Catholic worship [“‘We wish to win those women—and through them, their men—and in the fullness of time, the Lines and all their power'” (183)]. Yet if the Terran battle is framed in terms of male or patriarchal power, by the novel's epilogue we learn that this violent race to power is futile: the Aliens control both the power and the alliances, and they understand the crucial problem facing Earth to be the human tendency toward violence. Even Alien intervention in Terran affairs—which, we learn, has taken place because humans were in danger of exterminating themselves—has failed to change the situation. The only alternative to extermination, as the Aliens perceive it, is to trust that the women will eventually change the world with Láadan. Thus the distance between the sexes poses a significant problem not only for female-male relations, but also for the future of the human species: it acts as an impediment to the only remaining solution to human violence, the possibility that women can influence men to renounce violence. As Nazareth explains,

            
Meanwhile, Láadan would spread; the tiny wild vine wreaths, unnoticed by anyone, would go up on wall after wall. It would continue to keep the women of the Lines, and all the women who knew it beyond, immune to the state of violence that the men struggled with so incessantly; it would continue to provide the women with the patience necessary to bring the men
out
of those endless loops of violence always begetting more violence. The day would come when they would have a war, and all of the men would look at each other and laugh and just go home (355).

Despite Nazareth's optimistic vision, it is unclear that Láadan can spread fast enough to accomplish this immense transformation in human behavior. And in the novel's closing chapter, a paper prepared by XJH
_i
for the Council of the Consortium articulates the desperate choice facing those who wish to improve the Terran situation: Should women be allowed to continue their Láadan project, or should Aliens intervene, eradicating the world in “swift mercy”(363)? Whether the strategic embedding process central to the women's resistance—emblematically represented in the wild vine wreaths that
head every chapter—will succeed or fail when the context has expanded from Terran to galactic-scale politics is the urgent question with which readers will turn to Elgin's final volume in the Native Tongue trilogy,
Earthsong.

                          
Susan M. Squier, Pennsylvania State University

                          
Julie Vedder, West Virginia University

                          
May 2002

NOTES

1
. Please see the afterword to
Native Tongue
, “Encoding a Woman's Language,” for discussions of how these themes can be explored through linguistic theory and feminist science fiction.

2
. Suzette Haden Elgin, personal communication, 20 January 2002.

3
. That any attempt to describe what it is like to be without language must itself be rendered in language is of course one of the ironies of Selena's situation.

4
. Suzette Haden Elgin, personal communication, 20 January 2002.

WORKS CITED

Elgin, Suzette Haden. “A Feminist Is a What?”
Women and Language
18.2 (1995): 46.

———. “Láadan.”
http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/Láadan.html
(2000).

———.
The Language Imperative
. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books, 2000.

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