Planet of
Exile is Ursula K. Le Guin’s second novel in what became the Hainish
Cycle. It’s a relatively short novel,
only spanning 100 pages in my edition.
The story
takes place on a planet whose rotation around its sun is equivalent to 60 earth
years, so seasons last about 15 years a piece.
It is the end of autumn, the beginning of winter, when the story begins,
and the whole narrative covers about three (Earth?) weeks. There are three groups of people at the heart
of the story. The Tevarans are a nomadic
people, native to the planet, who exist in the technological equivalence of our
Iron Age. The Alterrans are a
dark-skinned people who live in a city by the sea. They are the descendants of a group from the
League of All Worlds who came to the planet to enlist the inhabitants in the
upcoming battle. An unknown trouble
struck, and their ship left them there.
That was 10 Years ago by this planet’s calendar, 600 years by our
own. The Alterrans have a code that
prevents them from using technology beyond the capabilities of the planet’s
natural-born people. Finally, the Gaal
are a group of Northerners who come south every winter. This Year, they have amassed as one great
people and are essentially building an empire as they head south.
The
Alterrans and Tevarans have something of an uneasy alliance, which becomes more
strained when the Rolery, daughter of the Tevarans’ leader, becomes the lover
of Jakob Agat, the Alterrans’ leader.
The Tevarans and Alterrans have intermixed in the past, but something
within them are incompatible, in the sense that no children can be born from
the union. Miscarriages or death of the
mother are the most common result. The
lovers are discovered just after Tevarans have agreed to team up to fight
against the Gaal, and the discovery dissolves the alliance leaving each people
to fight for themselves. The second half
of the novel covers that invasion.
Okay, if you
haven’t read the novel, you probably want to stop here, because I’m going to
get all spoilery and analytical about what I think is happening in this novel.
So what’s
with all the patriarchal bullshit in this story? Wold’s people are all about the gender
division, and even though Rolery notes that the women of Landin (the city of
the Alterrans) have fewer restrictions on their behavior, it is clear that when
the war comes, the women play just as much a secondary role as the
Tevarans. While there was a serious lack
of female characters in Rocanon’s World, the division of gender roles
and the diminished social status of women were not drums that were beaten in
the novel, certainly not like in Planet of Exile. So what’s the deal? Was Le Guin just feeling especially
patriarchal while writing the novel?
I don’t
think so. I think gender, and the division
of the genders, is thematically on-point in the novel.
In many
ways, the novel is all about divisions between people, both the social
divisions and the physical barriers. The
Alterrans and Tevarans have not only different ways of life, but they are
physically separated as well. When
Rolerly enters the city of Landin in the first chapter, she makes her way
through the various barriers of the city—the outer wall, the inner square, the
long causeway. In fact, that last one is
a barrier that is too much for her. She
goes around it onto the sands and out to the Stack, it’s own little fortress
divided from Landin itself and the rest of the world by the unpredictable
tides. There rolery is called in from
the sand by Jakob. His mindspeech breaks
the barriers of her own mind, and then she in turn breaks the barriers of the
Stack. And that’s the beginning of their
love, though neither knows it.
Le Guin
summons up all kinds of images of division and focuses on the forceful breaking
down of those divisions, such as the siege of the Winter City and of course the
multi-chapter siege of Landin. Similarly,
she has clear opposites that have to be redefined in the face of new
threats. First the Alterrans and
Tevarans are placed in opposition, then they are united against the invading
Gaal. The Gaal are successful because
they overcame their own internal divisions so that separate tribes joined together
to become one force.
Even the
snowstorm is a dividing force, isolating groups and individuals from each
other, a barrier put in place by nature itself.
Mindspeech too is about barriers and divisions. Jakob tells Rolery that the skill of
mindspeech is to keep the brains natural barriers from flying up at the first
intrusion. Mindspeech is about
successfully opening yourself up to another human. In this world Le Guin has created, no
surprise that so few have mastered the art form; they are all so busy blocking themselves
off with names and titles and scientific specifications.
In the end,
the story itself is about the Alterrans finally becoming a part of the
ecosystem, as opposed to self-enforced aliens in exile. There is hope that they have adapted to the
planet, which on the one hand lets them suffer infections (another broken
barrier!), but on the other lets them potentially conceive children with the
Tevarans. Jakob’s big speech in the
final chapter to the Tevarans in Landin is to say that the city is open to
them, that they are free to leave and equally free to stay forevermore. Those barriers and differences are dropped
entirely.
It’s in this
entire context that the gender division that seems so ridiculously stringent
exists. We may not see Rolery or Alla
pick up arms and fight side by side with the men, but everything in the story
tells us that difference is not only meaningless, but ultimately harmful. Even though the novel changes perspectives
from chapter to chapter, it is in Rolery’s chapters that we find horrible
sentence like “but she was only a woman, and so she wept” (I can’t find the
exact passage now, but it is within the final three chapters). The final divide, gender, is the only divide
that goes unexamined by these characters.
It’s possible that it is unexamined by Le Guin herself, but something
compelled her to be especially explicit about that divide, something I haven’t
yet seen in her other writings. If she
has any hangup about that bridging that divide, I think it is because she sees
the divide as necessary and bridged in other ways, by which I mean that man and
woman come together in the act of sex, and their union creates a child, that third
thing that is separate from them, just as the Alterrans and Tevarans will come
together to create an all-new people over time.
