Reconsiderations of the Separatist Paradigm in Recent Feminist Science Fiction

Pamela Sargent’s The Shore of Women (1986), Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean (1986), and Sheri Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country (1988) may be read as interlocutors in a dialogue with the feminist utopias of the 1970s. In terms of its setting and plot, Sargent’s The Shore of Women portrays a matriarchal society which dominates and exploits men as a failed utopia; and in its appeal for a reconciliation of the sexes it seems to have accommodated both homophobia and heterosexism through the narrative of a conversion to heterosexuality. The Gate to Women’s Country shifts the utopian focus away from the contours of the alternative community to the mechanism for achieving the better society—one based on changing “human nature” and the male predisposition to violence, a problem for which Sargent had no solution. A Door into Ocean, finally, argues forcibly that there are limits to what can or must be done to protect a utopia, rejecting the strategies enunciated in the 1970s by a whole range of utopias which acknowledged the necessity of violence to bring about a new society. In contrast to the utopias of the 1970s, these three novels do not focus on the evocations of alternative societies, but rather blend representations of alternative patterns of life with more rhetorical and figurative evocations of a transformed world. In the manner of the critical utopia, these three novels propose correctives to what their authors saw as some of the excesses of the 1970s utopias. Yet at time these works seem to go too far in their implied critiques of the ’70s utopias. The references here to liminality—door, gate, shore—seem to stand not only for a vision of a world on the verge of being born, but as a retreat, the doorway through which the authors are backing away from the utopian hopes and dreams of the ’70s—a gesture which to some extent repudiates the earlier utopian energies. (PF)

Aesthetics · Art · Sociology · History · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction