The truth is self-evident: Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness isn't about gender
*spams* I'm apparently too tired to comment usefully on anything, so I'm just spamming your flists with excerpts. Whoops. Anyway, interesting retrospective review of Left Hand of Darkness.
The truth is self-evident: Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness isn't about gender, by Josh Wimmer
The Left Hand of Darkness is about a lot of things. It might be a (literally cold) cold war metaphor in some ways, with the semi-anarchic monarchy of Karhide, where Genly's story starts, standing in for the U.S., and the rival communist nation of Orgoreyn, where Genly almost dies, as the U.S.S.R. It plays with history as cycle, breaking up the primary narrative with Gethenian myths that are relived by Genly and the other main character, the exiled Karhidish prime minister Estraven. And it spends a lot of time on the harmony between dichotomy and unity - yin and yang, I and Thou, individual and group. The novel's title refers to light - the opposite hand of darkness - the point being that, pervasive Judeo-Christian and other religious metaphors notwithstanding, light alone isn't good, isn't any better than darkness alone. Life deals in both.
Genly's coming-to-terms is really about overcoming that obstacle in his thinking - internalizing the understanding that life is not about any single way. Maybe paradoxically, it's also about his recognizing the power of the solitary self. He's sent alone by the Ekumen on his mission not merely because of a Prime Directive-esque philosophy that one person can't do too much harm, but also because only a self can really connect with anyone else. Any group identity is a convenient fiction - there are similarities between students at the same school, or citizens of the same country, or followers of the same religion, but nearly any time you say, "[Group X] is..." you're flattening a complex four-dimensional reality into a less accurate Mercator projection (and the more people there are in Group X, the grosser the inaccuracy becomes). The only way for Genly to get over his feelings about the Gethenians is to engage deeply with a single Gethenian, Estraven - to touch another self.
Read more.
Alternate: http://schmevil.dreamwidth.org/255251.html.
The truth is self-evident: Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness isn't about gender, by Josh Wimmer
The Left Hand of Darkness is about a lot of things. It might be a (literally cold) cold war metaphor in some ways, with the semi-anarchic monarchy of Karhide, where Genly's story starts, standing in for the U.S., and the rival communist nation of Orgoreyn, where Genly almost dies, as the U.S.S.R. It plays with history as cycle, breaking up the primary narrative with Gethenian myths that are relived by Genly and the other main character, the exiled Karhidish prime minister Estraven. And it spends a lot of time on the harmony between dichotomy and unity - yin and yang, I and Thou, individual and group. The novel's title refers to light - the opposite hand of darkness - the point being that, pervasive Judeo-Christian and other religious metaphors notwithstanding, light alone isn't good, isn't any better than darkness alone. Life deals in both.
Genly's coming-to-terms is really about overcoming that obstacle in his thinking - internalizing the understanding that life is not about any single way. Maybe paradoxically, it's also about his recognizing the power of the solitary self. He's sent alone by the Ekumen on his mission not merely because of a Prime Directive-esque philosophy that one person can't do too much harm, but also because only a self can really connect with anyone else. Any group identity is a convenient fiction - there are similarities between students at the same school, or citizens of the same country, or followers of the same religion, but nearly any time you say, "[Group X] is..." you're flattening a complex four-dimensional reality into a less accurate Mercator projection (and the more people there are in Group X, the grosser the inaccuracy becomes). The only way for Genly to get over his feelings about the Gethenians is to engage deeply with a single Gethenian, Estraven - to touch another self.
Read more.
Alternate: http://schmevil.dreamwidth.org/255251.html.