Book Review: Dispossessed

I've had a pretty good Fall when it comes to books. Seems like I just kept tripping on mind blowing books.

So I've decided to give my review of each of them!

Starting with Ursula K Le Guin's The Dispossessed.

The premise for the novel is simple, two civilizations orbiting each other, with distinct cultures: Urras is hyper capitalist with many but unevenly distributed resources, and Anarres which was founded on Urras's moon after an anarchist rebellion two hundred years previous and has not/barely enough resources distributed equally/as needed by a computer system. These two wolds have by design, had minimal contact in the past 200 years.

The Dispossessed is the story of Shevek, an intelligently disgruntled Anarresti physicist who travels to Urras.

The story is told in non-chronological order, switching between worlds every chapter. The first two chapters are slightly disorienting in this regard, but this element is perfect because it simulates Shevek's disorientation of culture shock.

While two seemingly polar opposite societies are represented, Le Guin masterfully does not come down on the side of either and instead uses individual characters to expose the problematic elements within both societies.

The sophistication of thought and emotion in this book is sharply philosophical and is as painfully relevant now as the year it was first written (1974). The complexity of societies is portrayed seamlessly through the main character's investigation of character's motives.

I wish that I could go back in time and hand this book to my fifteen year old self. It gave me all the complexity and richness I wanted from and subsequently failed to pry out of Atlas Shrugged.

This story is an appropriately critical approach to idealized societies. Through the voice of Shevek, Le Guin managers to balance care for the individual freedoms of creation/destruction with the needs of humans as a cooperative society.

This book is absolute magic for anyone who consistently feels like an outsider because they refuse to settle for a belonging that comes at too high a cost. This book is for people who are suspicious of both luxury and austerity and know that danger lies in clinging to closely to any ideology.

I know it's premature but I would already classify this book as deeply influential for me. There was so much rich thought surrounding ownership, belonging, suffering, and oppression that I will be chewing on it for years.

The Dues Ex at the end was a little disappointing, but not at all unexpected in a book I know to be part of a series. I look forward to reading more of the Hainish Cycle (maybe this time I'll get past chapter 3 of The Left Hand of Darkness).


Next up on my review list is Whipping Girl! Stay tuned!

A Feminist Analysis of Carrie: Violent Projections of Womanhood (MEGA SPOILERS)

I watched Carrie for the first time this October.

I was alone. And I was ready to be scared.

I was not scared. If anything I was creeped out. Not by the film itself but because it's exaggeration of the violence that women face reminded me of the reality of how difficult it is to be a woman sometimes. And how strange and difficult and lonely it is to be who you are in a world where you have no (real) support and your peers are vastly more privileged and comfortable than you.

A lot of people will think upon viewing Carrie will find a sympathetic character in the gym teacher, Miss Collins, but I don't think she is a actually friend to Carrie. In fact I find her to be a faux-ally. She doesn't reach out to Carrie out of compassion. She reaches out to her to encourage and enforce the her own roll as benevolent teacher and the role of Carrie as a blossoming adolescent. Miss Collins needs Carrie to be successful socially because she see herself as being validated by doing so. She approaches carrie in a passive aggressively predatory manner, trying to make her better fit into her social group, and make her into the "girl" that she is nostalgic for. She is attracted to the an idealized version of Carrie and is not actually interested in the person that Carrie is.

In the beginning of the film when speaking to the principle about slapping Carrie in the shower Miss Collins says "In that moment I knew why those girls wear doing what they did and I just wanted to smack her."

Despite her friendly approach she is still trying to force Carrie into a role. In the infamous pigs blood scene Carrie recognizes Miss Collin's falseness and "sees" her gym teacher laughing along with everyone else. Like all of the women in this film Miss Collins feels the need to discipline ridicule or change Carrie because of her failure to live up to what she considers normal and acceptable for the role of woman.

To an excruciating and delightfully acted degree Carrie's mother projects the expectation of innocence and virginity onto Carrie. The girls at school project the expectation of teenage normality onto her. The gym teacher is complicit in this although she works her butt off to make Carrie's mandatory assimilation into her version of womanhood as comfortable and humane as possible. Kind but ultimately misguided.

Carrie is a whipping girl, a repository for every other female characters expectations of womanhood. The array of the projections she suffers are often delivered violently. In the literary sense I'd argue, that the heightened adversity she suffers from these projections is the violent crucible from which her powers to arise (much like a superhero is often motivated by tragedy/abuse).

For this reason I view Carrie as a parable about the horrific consequences of women willy-nilly projecting their impossible expectations onto other women. I love this film specifically for it's unique focus on relationships between women. Yes it is violent but the relationships between woman often are (one of the ways the patriarchy maintains itself is by pitting women against each other). And some of my all time favorite movies demonstrate this (Mean Girls).

Call it misandry if you must, but I also find it very funny that all of the men in this movie are inconsequential. Their characters basically only exist to serve the aims of the female characters seeking to undermine Carrie. It's a deliciously strange reversal of how genders are usually represented in film. The women and their twisted motivations drive this film.

Carrie is often billed as a revenge flick and honestly I think that's an oversimplification. Carrie doesn't burn down the school, flip the car, and bring her house down because she wants to get revenge on all of people who have violently projected their crap onto her. She does it because the world as she knows it is a terrible horrible place where if you don't live up to people's expectations you get ridiculed and abused.

She burns the world to the ground because she's had first hand experience after experience of just how fucked the world is. She isn't in it for revenge, this move is a murder suicide story.

In this sense it's telling that Sue, the only survivor of Carrie's rampage, never spoke directly to Carrie and felt actual remorse about the shower incident. Sue made no attempt to change or solicit anything from Carrie at all. The only person in the film who gave Carrie anything without expecting her to fill their ideal role of womanhood was the person allowed to survive. Although she is left haunted by what she witnessed, as are all of us who live in a world were women are pitted against one another for not living up to skewed and violently enforced ideals of womanhood.