(urth) what??

David Stockhoff dstockhoff at verizon.net
Tue Mar 8 18:39:01 PST 2011


I've seen published academic articles "proving" Milton was a royalist.

And of course there are those who believe Wolfe is a right-winger, when 
he is plainly just an American Catholic of his times. Such people used 
to be considered "liberal," at least in the old sense of the word---no 
different from anyone else.

It was Catholics who threw fake blood on ICBM silos in the 1970s. Now 
they picket clinics. But Wolfe is no extremist, just a farm boy and an 
ex-Marine.

About the only charge he could be found guilty of that I can see is his 
scarcity of female protagonists/narrators. But it's not that weird in 
Wolfe's generation---he's a bit older than my own father, fer 
chrissakes, who was in Korea a few years after hostilities there ended. 
And he's an SF fanboy. Until a few decades ago, female writers typically 
used male pseudonyms when wrote male narrators. Male writers rarely 
wrote female narrators directly.

When Cordwainer Smith (under a different but male name) wrote a novel 
with a female narrator in the 1940s, this was considered "experimental." 
Even now, not many writers, male or female, successfully cross the 
gender divide. Margaret Atwood is one who does it with almost chilling 
precision.

On 3/8/2011 7:39 PM, Jane Delawney wrote:
> Sorry can't remember as of this moment if I'm supposed to be 
> top-posting, bottom-posting or interlining, these mailing lists get 
> confusing they all have different rules and I don't have much time.
>
> Hard to believe that there are still peeps out there who will admit in 
> public that they have mistaken the writer's depiction of his/her 
> characters/world for that writer's own personal view on whatever subject.
>
> It's fiction. GW has created worlds with certain societal norms; given 
> the world we see in BOTNS it's not at all surprising to me that women 
> get something of a raw deal in that world. It's kind of a might is 
> right, chivalry duhhhh? what's that? universe. Despite this GW gives 
> us strong, independent female characters who are obviously up against 
> it in their world but who survive and pursue their goals none the 
> less: Agia of course; and Dorcas, a real tough cookie who despite 
> looking like a teenage girl and despite her internal disarray none the 
> less makes her way back from Thrax to Nessus unmolested in time (we 
> are led to assume) to be reunited with her son. Actually a happy 
> ending, if an obliquely signalled one.
>
> (I'd love to have more information about what happened to Cyriaca, who 
> attempted to do much the same thing, but we'll never know).
>
> Oh I could go on, but I do think that the idea that GW is a dyed in 
> the wool mysogynist is very, very silly.
>
> jd
>
> On 08/03/11 22:39, Daniel Petersen wrote:
>> On a wholly different note, have you all read the latest Silk for Calde blog
>> post on Wolfe?  A really well reasoned article on this issue of misogyny in
>> Wolfe:
>>
>> http://silk4calde.blogspot.com/2011/03/king-rat-and-abuse-of-women-in-gene.html
>>
>> <http://silk4calde.blogspot.com/2011/03/king-rat-and-abuse-of-women-in-gene.html>
>> DOJP
>>
>>    
>>
>>
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