October 13th, 2007
by
Yonmei
I was re-reading “Ministering Angels” by C.S.Lewis (first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science-Fiction, January 1958, posthumously collected in The Dark Tower by Walter Hooper).
The basic plot of “Ministering Angels” is dreadfully simple, and dreadfully cruel: the supply ship for an all-male mission to Mars brings, along with the expected supplies, two women: a committee on Earth has decided that men living and working so far from Earth ought not to be expected to be celibate (or, which Lewis hints at) be sexual with each other: women should be provided. Two women form part of the supply cargo: someone described as “a crank who believes in the new ethicality” and “Its hair was very short, its nose very long, its mouth very prim, its chin sharp, and its manner authoritative. Its voice revealed it as, scientifically speaking, a woman” and the other described as “infinitely female and perhaps in her seventies”.
One of the men, discussing the women later with another man, says “What kind of woman – without force – is going to come and live in this ghastly place – on rations – and play doxy to half a dozen men she’s never seen?”
And I thought, reading that one line, “A woman who is desperate to get to Mars, and knows that registering as a doxy is the only way she’ll be allowed to go – no matter how well-qualified she is for the Mars expedition otherwise, in this 1958 vision of the future, she’d be disqualified by gender.”
I finished reading the story. I was still playing with my rewrite – the two women had both longed to go to Mars, were both technically qualified, had both been denied because the authority that sent the group had decided women were “too distracting” and that the expedition must therefore be men-only – when it occurred to me:
That’s the basic plot of “With Delicate Mad Hands” by James Tiptree Jr, (first published in Out of the Everywhere, and Other Extraordinary Visions, 1981 – five years after Tiptree’s gender was made public). I see that story summarised frequently as a “first contact” story, but whenever I read it, the first part of the novella strikes me more strongly – how CP got to go into space, how she got to become a pilot, how she got to escape: she was considered so unattractive, so ugly, that she would be used as human waste container, without any jealousy or sexual tension on the part of the men of the crew.
Now I want to know if Tiptree knew the Lewis story (The Dark Tower was first published in 1977).
===
Update: Thene expands on this on Aaru Tuesday: 1958, which you should go read. (The “Frank Miller Test” in particular is inspired.)
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Yonmei at
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Filed under Books & Literature, Women in Space, female characters, feminism | Comments (14)
I suspect it’s very very likely that she had. She was reading Lewis in 1975 — she wrote, in her last contribution to the Khatru symposium: “I’ve been reading a mess of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Wm. Morris, and T.H. White.” And she’d been a voracious reader of SF magazines since she was very young, so it’s possible she read the story before it was reprinted, too.
Ooh, interesting.
Thanks for that – I’ve never read the Khatru symposium.
Her contributions to it are reprinted in Meet Me At Infinity, but it’s also possible to get a copy of the whole symposium via the Tiptree Award Council.
I was thinking of that short story recently. I tend to think of it on most occasions where prostitution – especially organised prostitution – is used as a plot device in sci fi and fantasy (and videogames). It’s often like the message is ‘Girls, you can come into space with us, so long as you’re here to keep our cocks warm.’ The tragic thing is, I first read that short story when I was about 14 or so, and at the time, I didn’t notice anything wrong with it, and thought it was just ‘funny’ and ‘risqué’.
I was thinking of that short story recently.
Which one – Lewis’s or Tiptree’s?
Lewis’s, sorry. I read it in a short story collection an awful long time ago.
[...] Feminist SF – The Blog! – Ministering angels with delicate mad hands This one is books rather than visual media, but starts to explore just what type of female character is allowed to get sent into space [...]
Thene, I just wondered. Yes, I think I had a similar reaction when i first read Lewis’s story – there were so many assumptions in it that I took for granted.
In my head I am now contemplating a deliberate revisioning of Lewis’s story in which the two women who went to Mars are both deliberately concealing that they are scientists to give themselves additional freedom to explore/study Mars – no one will pay attention to anything they do if everything they do is considered unimportant.
(I picked it up and ran – feel free to tl:dr).
I’d be interesting to see that revisioning, but part of me is asking ‘did that work for Rosalind Franklin, or Emilie du Chatelet?’ But then, something having been tried and failed irl is never a reason not to drag it into sci-fi…
Brilliant entry, Thene. You should totally add the Frank Miller test to the FSF Wiki!
Thene: I’d be interesting to see that revisioning, but part of me is asking ‘did that work for Rosalind Franklin, or Emilie du Chatelet?’
I wasn’t aware that either of them were sex workers.
A friend gave me a whole bunch of CS Lewis last year, and I was seriously revolted by the assumptions. My friend was mortified, I think, and I was sorry that I was left out of so much that is the ground of the fannish history – but reading CS Lewis as a grown up woman in the oughts without picking up on the sexism is just impossible.
I had read all of C.S.Lewis that I’m ever going to read before I was 20 – and all his fiction, I think, before I was 15.
I read all of the Narnia novels more than once before I knew it was a Christian allegory, and without it occurring to me that there was anything wrong with Lewis’s treatment of the female characters involved (I liked Jill and Lucy, and never much liked Susan).
It was The Dark Tower collection (bought when I was 23, read a few years earlier in the library) that really capped it for me – “The Shoddy Lands” is horrible. But my discomfort grew with each of the science-fiction novels – Out of the Silent Planet isn’t so bad, Voyage to Venus has a fantastic beginning until the Temptation of Eve part of the story begins, but That Hideous Strength is horrible in all sorts of ways.
Though I never scribbled all over the pages of C.S.Lewis’s novels the way I did with a lot of the Robert Heinleins I owned then. Still, I don’t think I would be able to read them now from scratch either.
Sxsm? Gt vr yrslf. Th Shddy Lnds is DD N. S r th thrs y mntnd. FL.