BlogHer - Madeleine L'Engle, Feminism, and Science Fiction - Comments

Ooh! Left Hand of

stephaniesays — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 15:21:54 -0500

Ooh! Left Hand of Darkness--I love that book!
-------------------------------------
http://vidadepalabras.blogspot.com
A Vegan Editor's Life of Words (and animals and nature and politics and family and food)

Re-Read

A Elliot — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 13:36:48 -0500

I keep meaning to re-read a Wrinkle in Time. I'm curious to see how I view it as an adult. I read Ursula K. Le Guin in college and really liked it. Sometimes I still will randomly think about what it would be like if we alternated back and forth between being so called "male" and being so called "female".
A. Elliot

Exactly.

stephaniesays — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 07:58:14 -0500

This was a book I read as a kid. Had I read it several years later, it wouldn't have had the same impact on me; other things--other books, people, experiences--would possibly have already taught me about or opened me up to the things that A Wrinkle in Time could have. Or had I just not been the kid I was, or in the family I was in, or in the particular grade and class I was in, it likely wouldn't have struck me in the same ways.

Stephanie
-------------------------------------
http://vidadepalabras.blogspot.com
A Vegan Editor's Life of Words (and animals and nature and politics and family and food)

Re-read indeed!

Suzanne Reisman — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 20:47:07 -0500

Sometimes I think the impact of a book is at least as influenced by events in my life at the time I read it as the book itself.

Suzanne, BlogHer Contributing Editor - Feminism & Gender
Campaign for Unshaved Snatch (CUSS)& Other Rants

Maybe its time for a re-read

Elana Centor — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 20:06:16 -0500

I read it. I remember liking it but I don't remember it changing my world view. Now I want to go back and re-read it to understand how I could have read such an important book and not had the same reaction that so many have had.

elana
Blogher Contributing Editor,Business&CareersFunnyBusiness

love her

super des — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 17:00:23 -0500

A Wrinkle in Time (and the sequels) still remain among my favorite books. I agree wholeheartedly with Flyswallowfly about Maddy attributing to my sci-fi-and feminisim-ness. She will be missed.

On L'Engle's far-reaching influence

stephaniesays — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 14:58:05 -0500

I--like many others, I imagine--can relate to what Zarah took from A Wrinkle in Time. I documented my reaction to L'Engle's death on my own blog yesterday, so instead of trying to rephrase what I wrote there, I'll just quote myself in part:

Reading A Wrinkle in Time provided me with one of my first experiences, if not my first experience, period, with the idea that it was OK--and maybe even wonderful--to be different, to be nonconforming, to be a Meg or a Charles Wallace, to not bounce the ball with perfect rhythm (if you're confused by that last one, read the book!). It was one of the first of anything--books, teachers, family--to open my mind to the possibility of things and places we can't see, things and places and truths we don't know exist; to show me the power of perspective; to make me aware of the silliness and superficiality of judging something or someone by appearance or assuming anything about someone's character, experiences, or capability before really knowing the person; to teach me about both the fragility and vulnerability and the strength and resilience of a person's mind.

I loved that book deeply, and the copy from my childhood still sits on my bookcase, with my full name scrawled on the inside cover in careful cursive. . . .

-------------------------------------
http://vidadepalabras.blogspot.com
A Vegan Editor's Life of Words (and animals and nature and politics and family and food)

Madeleine L'Engle, Feminism, and Science Fiction

Suzanne Reisman — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 09:51:42 -0500

Science fiction author Madeleine L’Engle died last Thursday at the age of 88. L’Engle broke down barriers when A Wrinkle in Time was published in the early 1960s, after being rejected by 26 publishers before Farrar, Straus & Giroux took a chance, according her obituary in The New York Times. Decades before JK Rowling raised the bar for positive female and feminist role models in “children’s" literature, L’Engle’s strong, realistic heroines gave girls and young women characters to admire and inspire, and introduced many to a lifelong love of science fiction. Feminist bloggers are noting how important L’Engle’s work was to them, grieving, and celebrating her contributions to science fiction, feminism, and faith.

Flyswallowfly wrote at Swallow. (“named after the great scientist Ellen Swallow Richards, the first woman to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology”):

I have always loved science fiction novels and, as a child, fell in love with Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. I quickly scoured the local library for her other novels and grew to love each of them in return. To this day I credit my passion for science and feminism to the brilliance and inner strength of her characters.

Madeleine L’Engle died September 7, 2007 in Connecticut, but her legacy will survive through the inspiration her stories have provided for past, current, and future generations of young women throughout the world.

Zarah (aka the coffeegoddess) could not agree more over at The Sumatra Woman’s Brew:

How can I forget [L’Engle]? She gave me my first taste of Science Fiction through A Wrinkle In Time, a book that my mother chose for me from the shelves of the library of the old IS Manila in Makati. It was the book's feminist's pull that made its mark on my adolescent consciousness. How I adored Meg and her many eccentricities. At thirteen, I was, if not different, the weirdest girl in class. Madeleine told me not to worry. It's alright to be weird.

In her analysis of L’Engle’s book An Acceptable Time earlier this year, Michelle at I Am a Tree noted the changes in L’Engle’s female characters as her writing progressed:

Compared to the brash and self-depreciating heroine Meg was in A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door, Polly is headstrong, determined and secure with herself. Maybe it is because Polly is older than Meg originally was, or has learned from her mother, that she is the way she is, but I also suspect it has to do with the eras in which the books were written: Many Waters, the final Time Quartet book, published in 1986, makes reference to some feminist ideals. (At one point, Sandy and Dennys talk about the “patriarchal society” in which Noah’s family lives. “Meg would call it chauvinistic,” one of the twins comments.) An Acceptable Time was published only three years later. Perhaps with the women’s movement, and the country’s changing ideas about women between the 1960s and the 1980s, L’Engle was moved to change her ideal heroine, as well.

Science fiction works well as a genre for feminists because it provides a format to explore alternate societies in which gender and sex are far less set in stone than in “real life.” According to research cited at Feminist Law Professors, women compose 52% of the printed science fiction audience. Certainly, much credit belongs to the fabulous female science fiction authors like L’Engle, Octavia Butler (who passed away last year at age 58; read a moving tribute to Butler by Gena Haskett at Out On the Stoop), and Ursula K. Le Guin. (For a longer list of important women in sci fi, including women who were in at the birth of the genre in the 1920s, check out Wikipedia.)

My thanks go out to L'Engle and others who showed us that there are many ways and paths that we can explore.

Suzanne also blogs about the alternative universe she inhabits at Campaign for Unshaved Snatch (CUSS) & Other Rants