Losing LeGuin
A few weeks ago, in my conversation with English Department faculty Jeannette Lee-Parikh and Samantha Simpson, we discussed the power of reading, especially reading that helps promote and develop empathy in students. As a teacher of English for pretty much my whole adult life I have been on a continual search, a search for books written by women on topics that appeal to a range of student ages and to all gender identities. Teaching ninth graders in a previous school I came across The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K. LeGuin. It’s a slim volume, not especially complex, but a book with a strong female hero, Luz. Usually considered one of LeGuin’s minor novels, it covers the themes she wrote about for much of her life: the social construction of gender, pacifism, different societies (usually alien against earth) in conflict fueled by clashing values. These themes are developed in The Left Hand of Darkness (a former CSW summer read in the days of Alorie Parkhill, who loved LeGuin too) and The Dispossessed. LeGuin’s work is mostly science fantasy and she creates societies that mirror ours in insightful ways.
A few weeks ago, in my conversation with English Department faculty Jeannette Lee-Parikh and Samantha Simpson, we discussed the power of reading, especially reading that helps promote and develop empathy in students. As a teacher of English for pretty much my whole adult life I have been on a continual search, a search for books written by women on topics that appeal to a range of student ages and to all gender identities. Teaching ninth graders in a previous school I came across The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K. LeGuin. It’s a slim volume, not especially complex, but a book with a strong female hero, Luz. Usually considered one of LeGuin’s minor novels, it covers the themes she wrote about for much of her life: the social construction of gender, pacifism, different societies (usually alien against earth) in conflict fueled by clashing values. These themes are developed in The Left Hand of Darkness (a former CSW summer read in the days of Alorie Parkhill, who loved LeGuin too) and The Dispossessed. LeGuin’s work is mostly science fantasy and she creates societies that mirror ours in insightful ways.
When LeGuin died last week in her late eighties, the world lost a powerful, brilliant writer. In an essay in her collection “The Wave in the Mind,” [see here for some excerptshttps://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/17/ursula-k-le-guin-gender/] LeGuin writes about “being a man.” Born in 1929, she always felt that she missed the opportunity to fully live according to the contemporary model of womanhood, so as a writer she needed to see herself as a man. It’s a riot of an essay well worth reading. Two excerpts encapsulate her thinking:
When LeGuin died last week in her late eighties, the world lost a powerful, brilliant writer. In an essay in her collection “The Wave in the Mind,” [see here for some excerptshttps://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/17/ursula-k-le-guin-gender/] LeGuin writes about “being a man.” Born in 1929, she always felt that she missed the opportunity to fully live according to the contemporary model of womanhood, so as a writer she needed to see herself as a man. It’s a riot of an essay well worth reading. Two excerpts encapsulate her thinking:
“I am a man. Now you may think I’ve made some kind of silly mistake about gender, or maybe that I’m trying to fool you, because my first name ends in a, and I own three bras, and I’ve been pregnant five times, and other things like that that you might have noticed, little details. But details don’t matter… I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the inventors just didn’t know how to sell the product. Their distribution techniques were rudimentary and their market research was nil, and so of course the concept just didn’t get off the ground.”
“I don’t have a gun and I don’t have even one wife and my sentences tend to go on and on and on, with all this syntax in them. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after ‘semicolons,’ and another one after ‘now.’”
You perhaps get her point. How difficult it remained for her, even for a winner of countless awards and someone who had gained international recognition, LeGuin felt that she fit the model of a man more readily than that of a woman.
Her writings have influenced countless readers. I urge you to delve into her work. Her Earthsea trilogy is a great place to start. From Tales From Earthsea: “The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the act of goodness with the act of doing things well.” And with that enticement… I will leave you to ponder and to explore this incredible writer.
The Cambridge School of Weston is a progressive high school for day and boarding students in grades 9–12 and PG. CSW's mission is to provide a progressive education that emphasizes deep learning, meaningful relationships, and a dynamic program that inspires students to discover who they are and what their contribution is to their school, their community and the world.