Planet of Exile: Crossing the Divides

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.