Friday 7 October 2011

John Wyndham, 'Consider Her Ways'

I stumbled across a reference to this 1956 SF oddity in the most unlikely place: the 'Lesbiana' book list of The Ladder, the newsletter/journal of the first American lesbian organisation, the Daughters of Bilitis. In the brief review in the February 1958 issue of The Ladder, 'Consider Her Ways' is described as 'one of the most delightful stories of feminine superiority ever written' and a 'feminist story', featuring 'a happy, well-integrated group of Lesbians'.

I can only imagine that the reviewer hadn't actually read the story, which hardly warrants such praise, and which I would describe as definitively anti-feminist. (It also features zero lesbian characters, so what was the reviewer thinking of?) Wyndham's novella is one of three included in a collection published by Ballantine in 1957, under the heading Sometime, Never. The other two novellas are 'Envoy Extraordinary' by William Golding, and 'Boy in Darkness' by Mervyn Peake. The Golding piece is an odd, intermittently comical tale, featuring Romans; the Peake story appears to be an outtake from his Gormenghast series; neither is what I would call 'science fiction', although both are being marketed as such here.

And so to the Wyndham. I have a soft spot for Wyndham, having loved both The Chrysalids  and The Day of the Triffids, but I have always found his gender politics to be problematic and 'Consider Her Ways' almost killed my affection for his very English, amusingly parochial, class-bound fantasies of apocalypse and futurity. The female narrator wakes up in an unfamiliar place and time, apparently having been transported into another, quite alien body. She finds herself as one among many 'Mothers', large, indolent women who are waited on hand and foot by some rather sinister Lilliputians and whose only function is to breed; the wider society consists only of women, but it is no feminist utopia. The Mothers are categorised as 'Class One' or 'Class Two' Mothers, depending on the 'grade' of babies they produce, and the society is rigidly hierarchical and regulated so that 'Mothers' serve only that reproductive function and the protagonist's expression of a desire to read is met by consternation and alarm. When she starts asking questions about 'the two human sexes' and attempts to escape her confinement, she is warned that she will be arrested for 'Reactionism'.

Ultimately, her experience of time travel is explained as a case of 'projected perception', brought on by some kind of South American hallucinogenic drug that she has been prescribed in her own time, and an elderly historian tells her the history of their society, in which all the men became sick and died in the course of one year. The dialogue between the historian and Jane (the protagonist) is used by Wyndham to offer a notably anti-feminist argument: whilst the historian offers a rather cartoonish 'feminist' reading of the mid-twentieth century ("there was probably, in the aggregate, more disappointment, disillusion, and dissatisfaction amongst women than there had ever been before..."), Jane interjects to dispute this view of her own time ("it wasn't like that. [...] It didn't feel a bit like the way you put it. I was in it. I know.") It is, asserts Jane, "the most curiously unrecognizable account of my world that I have ever heard - it's like something copied, but with all the proportions wrong." The historian, in turn, simply tells her that her response is due to her "conditioning" (a familiar 'false consciousness' argument).

The story ends with Jane taking a drug that will return her to her own time, and attempting to alter the course of history to ensure that the future world she has witnessed cannot possibly come about. It's certainly fascinating to read this story in conjunction with bona fide feminist utopias but its interest lies mainly in the way it provides a kind of counter-narrative to these, using a futuristic story as a way of warning against the perceived 'dangers' of feminism - and thereby exemplifying the peculiarly masculine anxieties of the postwar period.

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