Native Tongue

Afterword

Encoding a Woman’s Language

Native Tongue (1984) inaugurates Suzette Haden Elgin’s powerful trilogy about the invention of a female language. As the first volume of this trilogy, Native Tongue introduces us to the patriarchal culture of a future Earth, where a small number of linguistically skilled women are banding together to fight their second-class status by secretly creating a women’s language. The sequel, The Judas Rose (1987), follows the story of that language, Láadan, as it evolves from the private creation of a very few women to a shared language that subversively links women worldwide, and then as it is discovered by the patriarchal church and state it was created to oppose. The concluding book in the trilogy, Earthsong (1994), turns from the question of a gender-based language to the broader question of alternate and gender-linked forms of nourishment, as women try to spread the news of another way of feeding the world, aurally rather than orally.

Central to this trilogy, as to most of the science fiction of Suzette Haden Elgin, are two interrelated convictions: “The first hypothesis is that language is our best and most powerful resource for bringing about social change; the second is that science fiction is our best and most powerful resource for trying out social changes before we make them, to find out what their consequences might be” (Elgin, “Linguistics”). Elgin’s definition of feminism can be gleaned from the type of social change she is most interested in making: the eradication of patriarchy and its replacement with “a society and culture that can be sustained without violence” (Elgin, “Feminist” 46). The belief that “patriarchy requires violence in the same way that human beings require oxygen” links the Native Tongue trilogy to Elgin’s bestselling non fiction book, The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense: both are concerned with feminist linguistic interventions, the production and/or teaching of “gentle” linguistic strategies to counter, and thus change, verbal violence (Elgin, “Feminist” 46).

Fifteen years after it was first published, and despite a number of years out of print, Native Tongue retains a cult following and remains an important contribution to the canon of feminist science fiction as well as to feminist debates about the significance of language. Its importance is far more than academic, although it also serves as a historical document highlighting the particular concerns of feminism in the early 1980s. With all of the changes feminism has wrought in American society, Native Tongue and its sequels remain exciting for the sense of expanded social possibilities they embody.

The themes of the Native Tongue books have been woven throughout Suzette Haden Elgin’s life and work. She received her Ph.D. in linguistics, with a focus on the Navajo language, from the University of California at San Diego in 1973, at the age of thirty-seven. Earlier degrees were in French, English, and music, all of which came into play in her later teaching. Elgin taught at San Diego State University until she retired in 1980, at which time she began the Ozark Center for Language Studies near Huntsville, Arkansas. She is the founder and president of LOVINGKINDNESS, a nonprofit organization that investigates religious language and its effect on individuals, as well as the editor and publisher of Linguistics and Science Fiction, a bimonthly newsletter interested in language issues in genre fiction. She writes prolifically in a variety of forms, including fiction, poetry, and essays, and she now draws prolifically as well. Her best-known work, however, is the popular series of books that begins with The Gentle Art of Verbal Self- Defense, which teaches readers how to identify and defuse verbally violent or combative situations[1].

Elgin’s most basic tenet is that language is power: “If speaking a language were like brain surgery, learned only after many long years of difficult study and practiced only by a handful of remarkable individuals at great expense, we would view it with similar respect and awe. But because almost every human being knows and uses one or more languages, we have let that miracle be trivialized into ‘only talk’” (Elgin, Language Imperative 239). Overlooked because it is so inherent, language may in fact be “our only real high technology” (Elgin, “Washing Utopian” 45). It is certainly our most prominent social technology, the primary way human beings manipulate the material world (De Lauretis 3). Yet our very familiarity with language leads to its undervaluation. How can something as everyday as talk shape reality?

Elgin subscribes to a widely discussed but highly controversial theory that in linguistics is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis[2]. This hypothesis claims that languages “structure and constrain human perceptions of reality in significant and interesting ways” (Elgin, Language Imperative xvi). Based on a study of American Indian languages, this hypothesis proposed that languages vary dramatically and in ways not easily anticipated, and that such variations encode dramatically different understandings of reality, so that people speaking different languages actually see the world in widely divergent ways (Bothamley 473). How we perceive the world depends upon our linguistic structures in both the words we choose and the larger metaphors they encode. These structures, for example, powerfully affect our understandings of gender. Assumptions about gender roles are everywhere encoded in our language, particularly in our habit of binary thinking, through which the paired terms male/female become associated with other pairs: active/passive, strong/weak, right/left, and so on. The work of feminist anthropologist Emily Martin provides an excellent example of this idea. In “The Egg and the Sperm,” Martin examines the metaphors used by gynecology and obstetrics textbooks to describe female reproductive processes. Dominant social assumptions about gender roles, she discovers, color the books’ scientific descriptions of conception: the egg is represented as waiting passively for the sperm to compete for the privilege of entering it. Linguistic structures for representing gender lead researchers to focus on characteristics that accord with their conceptual presuppositions. Thus, a passive egg/active sperm model prevails over another model, which might involve a “sticky” egg capturing sperm (1–18).

According to the Sapir-Whorf line of thinking, language structures our perceptions not only through word choice, but through metaphors and metaphor systems, with benefits, limitations, and concrete consequences. For example, as Elgin points out in The Language Imperative, the language we use to talk about menopause influences how we experience it. The description of menopause as “a natural event” will produce one set of effects; with this model, a woman going through menopause is likely to interpret any negative experiences as annoyances (minor or major) rather than medicalizing them. However, if menopause is described as “a medical condition characterized by a lack of estrogen,” the menopausal woman is more likely to interpret her experiences in terms of pathology, leading to medical intervention as well as increased concern on the part of the woman, her family, and her friends. This linguistic shift has an effect on the woman’s material reality (75–80). It is important to point out that there is no way out of this dilemma produced by the linguistic construction of reality. Because the language we use has developed alongside human history, we are inevitably embroiled in these issues. While no form of speech is inherently better than another, the effects of different speech acts are often very different, and Elgin encourages us to judge speech on that basis. Summarized briefly, Elgin’s linguistic position has powerful feminist implications: The language we use to describe and operate in the world affects the way we understand the world, our place in it, and our interactions with one another. Changing our language changes our world.

This idea is not unique to Elgin, nor to linguistics. Other feminist thinkers have also addressed the ways that language shapes our perceptions. French feminist philosophers Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray have both considered how language reinforces existing gender relations. Cixous argues that the subordinate position of women has its foundation in the Western habit of thinking in dual, hierarchized oppositions. Holding that the logical and linear structures of modern Western languages reproduce the values and prejudices of patriarchy, Luce Irigaray further claims that women need our own language if we are to free ourselves from domination. This idea that language matters in the day-to-day existence of humans thus brings together a variety of different disciplines and links different feminist projects. This idea is also not unique to feminist theory; it has been addressed by such philosophers as Ferdinand Saussure, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.

It also has far-reaching social and political implications. Elgin wrote what she has called the “thought experiment” of the Native Tongue books in order to test four hypotheses:

Elgin admits that the experiment did not produce the desired outcome: the fourth hypothesis was proven false when her constructed women’s language, Láadan, failed to be taken up in any meaningful way. But the broader questions she raises, concerning gender, language, and power, continue to resonate.

Should we be surprised to find these urgent feminist concerns addressed in a work of science fiction? That has been the initial response of some feminists. For example, when Carolyn Heilbrun reviewed Native Tongue in 1987 for the Women’s Review of Books, she described herself as “a non-reader of science fiction” (17). Despite her self-confessed “resistance to SF (not that I dislike it, but that I can never figure out what’s going on),” Heilbrun gave Native Tongue a glowing review: “There isn’t a phony or romantic moment here,” she observed, “and the story is absolutely compelling” (17). It is worth asking why science fiction has been anathema to many feminists, and worth offering a quick list of the reasons science fiction deserves a feminist audience. Feminist distaste for science fiction must be more than simply a response to its relatively low status as “genre fiction,” since other forms of genre fiction, from the detective novel to the romance, have their staunch feminist adherents. Responding to the historic linkages between science and its traditional values — especially masculinist objective rationality — feminist readers and critics have challenged science as a method of inquiry about the world. They have tended to avoid scientific issues, themes, plots, and images, focusing instead on the crucial projects of reclaiming forgotten women writers, questioning the gendered nature of the literary canon, and imagining alternative forms for literary expression (Squier 132–158).

“Toys for boys”: all too often, this phrase has seemed to accurately sum up the science fiction genre. But precisely because science and science fiction have seemed the rightful terrain of men at their most macho, feminists should give the genre their renewed attention, revitalizing its form and its content. The issue is, as Elgin has taught us, linguistic at its core. Until we abolish the culturally enforced hierarchical relations between science and the humanities that maintain literature as an insignificant, invisible, and feminized part of our culture in relation to significant, visible, masculinized science, we haven’t made the large-scale linguistic transformation that Elgin herself calls for. We are still representing the world by gendered binary pairs (male/female; science/literature), and ceding to males the science half of the two-culture divide. Science, in short, is as open to feminist redefinition as any of the other words in our lexicon. Rather than abandoning it, we simply need to encode it anew and reclaim it as one of our native tongues.

The scientific study of alien species, a classic science fiction focus on the future, and a feminist preoccupation with the science of linguistics connect science fiction and feminism in the three interrelated narratives that compose Native Tongue. The primary story follows the development of the woman-language Láadan by the women of the Linguist Lines, especially the protagonist, Nazareth Chornyak Adiness. A parallel story line traces the U.S. government’s secret attempts to break the linguistic monopoly of the Lines by successfully learning, or “Interfacing” with, a non-humanoid alien language. A third narrative strand follows Michaela, a non-linguist, as she attempts to avenge her infant, who was killed in a state experiment to break the language monopoly; instead she finds surprising commonality with the linguist women. While these three narratives do not always connect smoothly, taken together they explore the constructive power of language, the origin of gendered oppression, and the material and social commonalities between women.

Elgin explores the nature, power, and significance of language through the distinction between humanoid and non-humanoid languages, and the different worldview each constructs. Any language is a limited set of perceptions and expressions; the rough similarity of humanoid languages, and thus the rough correspondence of their worldviews, is what allows them to be Interfaced. Dramatically different worldviews separate humanoid and non-humanoid languages, and thus the realities they construct, which explains the dangers of Interfacing humanoid and non-humanoid languages. The government technicians, in an effort to work through the problem of non-humanoid languages, articulate the relationship of language to reality:

Elgin puts it this way in the epigraph to chapter 13: ‘“For any language, there are perceptions which it cannot express because they would result in its indirect self-destruction”’ (145). Thomas Chornyak describes the failure to Interface with non-humanoids as an intrinsic limitation: “It was distressing, but it was not ridiculous. No human being could hold his breath for thirty minutes; that was a natural barrier, and one learned not to fling oneself at it. No human being, so far as he knew, could share the worldview of a non-humanoid. It was not ridiculous” (66). The Government Work technicians articulate the intrinsic limitations more specifically as ‘“human beings are hardwired to expect certain kinds of perceptions”’ (140). Language, then, is both biological, in that our biological brains can form certain kinds of perceptions, and cultural, in that every language and culture uses a smaller set of perceptions and expressions from the larger set of hardwired possibilities.

This imbrication of the physical and the social is demonstrated most forcefully when the technicians pursue the experimental Interfacing between human infants and non-humanoid aliens despite warnings of disaster from the linguists. The leader of the group, Showard, finally concludes, “‘There’s something about the way the non-humanoid aliens perceive things, something about the “reality” they make out of stimuli, so impossible that it freaks out the babies and destroys their central nervous systems permanently’” (141). One infant, in an attempt to Interface with Beta-2, the resident non-humanoid alien, had convulsed so violently that it “literally turned itself inside out” (48). That the problem is not simply one of human linguistic and cognitive limitations is demonstrated by the subsequent experiment, in which the technicians try to alter consciousness and thus worldview by feeding the infants hallucinogens (186). This time, when they get the dosage “right” and Interface the infant, it is the alien being, Beta-2, that goes mad and dies, showering sparks throughout the Interface (188). The infants who survive the experiment cannot, so far as other people can tell, communicate in any way comprehensible to humans, although they appear normal and healthy.

The constitution of reality through language is more than simply a psychological effect in Native Tongue. As the Interfacing experiments reveal, language has the power to fundamentally reorder the material world, producing vibrant life or violent death. Moreover, language is constitutive in a number of other ways. A large part of the popular prejudice against linguists stems from their ability to manipulate verbal and non-verbal language. John Smith, a government liaison to the linguists, “knew that there was absolutely nothing an ordinary citizen could do if a linguist decided to structure an encounter in such a way that that citizen would look like a perfect ass” (63). And he knows this is also true of the linguist women: “Oh, they observed all the forms, those women; they said all the right words. But they had a way of somehow leading the conversation around so that words came out of your mouth that you’d never heard yourself say before and would have taken an oath you couldn’t be made to say” (63). Examples of this linguistic power dynamic abound, both between linguists and citizens (“Thomas tilted his head a fraction, and Jones felt deeply inferior for no reason that he could understand” [63]) and between male and female linguists. For example, Rachel is unable to countermand her training as a linguist and resort to tears (“Women of the Lines learned early not to give in to tears… because tears destroyed negotiations” [149]) and she thus fails in her attempt to dissuade Thomas from marrying Nazareth to a powerful linguist she hates. In fact, a frequent refrain in the book is “you can’t lie to a linguist.”

The prodigious control the linguists maintain over the deployment and interpretation of language extends to the power male linguists wield over the female linguists. When Nazareth’s love for Jordan Shannontry is exposed, leading to her familial humiliation, the worst pain comes from her inability to express the experience: “And there were no words, not in any language, that she could use to explain to them what it was that had been done to her, that would make them stop and say that it was an awful thing that had been done to her” (201–02). Elgin contrasts this despair with the relief felt by the women of Barren House when they can finally use the “right words” of Láadan (267). Along with its constitutive and manipulative powers, language also has the power to produce emotional comfort through consensual validation. Thus English expresses the experiences of the men and especially the linguist men relatively well and completely, creating in them a sense of justification and self-righteousness. For the linguist women, on the other hand, the available language fails to match their set of experiences, and they feel a host of negative emotions.

Despite their appreciation for the power of language and their grip on well-known linguistic principles, linguist men are unable to evade the constitutive power of gender relations. Thus the linguist men fail to apply this information to their own families. The constitutive link between language, gender relations, and reality is expressed in the women’s search for a believable suspect for the attempted poisoning of Nazareth. Precisely because religious and reproductive rebel Belle-Anne is already assumed to be insane, she can act as decoy and confess to Nazareth’s attempted murder, thus distracting the men of the Lines from the subversive activities taking place in the Barren House. Belle-Anne’s tale of heavenly mandate and the hordes of he-angels does not fit the reality set of her immediate acquaintances and it is dismissed as the ravings of a madwoman; ironically it is precisely because she has already been disbelieved that she is now believed.

The linguist men are aware that the women are constructing a women’s language. Their assumption that women have inferior linguistic skills blinds them to the women’s true strategy: the women’s decoy work on the false project of Langlish, an elaborate and unworkable female tongue, screens their real work on Láadan. Viewing the Langlish Encoding Project as harmless and time-consuming, the linguist men are trapped by their assumption of female inferiority, encapsulated in their convenient repetition of the fact that language skills are not correlated with intelligence (15–16). Only after Láadan is spoken and taught to the little girls does anyone recognize the power of the project. Even then, despite all of the evidence presented at the family celebration to all the men of the Lines, only Thomas recognizes the “‘danger’” and “‘corruption’” present (281) in what appears to the others as “charming” and “endearing” (276).

In certain ways, Láadan is deceptively simple. Encodings are “‘the making of a name for a chunk of the world that so far as we know has never been chosen for naming before in any human language, and that has not just suddenly been made or found or dumped upon your culture. We mean naming a chunk that has been around a long time but has never before impressed anyone as sufficiently important to deserve its own name’” (22). When the women create Láadan, then, they are not simply creating new words. They are, in fact, reordering what is significant and not significant, perceived and not perceived.

Láadan, the true women’s language, is both the culmination of and the evidence for the idea that language can change reality. While Láadan is still a secret, the men describe the women as constantly frowning, complaining, weeping, nagging, pouting, sulking, bitching, and arguing (289). Further, they frequently accuse women of talking endlessly about things no one would find important, and even then of never getting to the point (264). Verbal exchanges between male and female linguists are contentious and combative. Once Láadan is in place, however, women are happy, effective, self-sufficient. This reordering has profound effects on the world of the linguist men as well as the women. After Láadan has been in general circulation for about seven years, the men notice a change in the behavior of the women. Adam reports to Thomas, “‘Women, they tell me, do not nag anymore. Do not whine. Do not complain. Do not demand things. Do not make idiot objections to everything a man proposes. Do not argue. Do not get sick — can you believe that, Thomas? No more headaches, no more monthlies, no more hysterics… or if there still are such things, at least they are never mentioned’” (275). But what appears to be a good change, a benign change, from the initial point of view of the men, is revealed as something both larger and more disturbing.

When the men of all of the Lines get together to discuss the “problem” of cooperative, cheerful women, the stakes of their behavior become clear: “‘It used to be,’ [Dano Mbal] said, ‘that when a man had done something in which he could take legitimate pride, he could go home and talk to his wife and his daughters about it, and that pride would grow — it would be a reason to do even more, and do it even better’” (290). In his mind, Adam continues the corollary:

The new language, with its new set of values and perspectives on reality, thus changes the way the men and women of the Lines relate to one another. In effect, the women are no longer playing the linguistic games that support a binarized and hierarchized version of gender. The male response to the new world created by Láadan is, ironically, to do just what the women have desired: to move all of the women into their own residence. A shift in language has thus produced, albeit slowly, a real, measurable, and enjoyable change in their daily lives.

Of course, language is not entirely all-encompassing; knowledge can exist outside of language, which is precisely the urgency to produce new Encodings. We can see this in the book through Nazareth’s unexplainable sense that the women’s elaborate contingency plans are missing the point (271), the idea that even babies make (unpronounceable) statements about experience (141), and the experience of the LSD tubies, who are silent because for them, perception of reality is not linguistic (167). But the success of Láadan in emancipating women from oppression materializes the ways in which language can, quite literally, alter reality.

Elgin’s second main concern in this novel is gender relations, and more specifically, the balance of power between the sexes. The world of Native Tongue takes place in a period of dramatic feminist setback. March 11, 1991, sees the landmark passage of the Twenty-fourth Amendment (repealing the Nineteenth Amendment that granted universal female suffrage) and the Twenty-fifth Amendment (affirming women’s universal secondary and protected status) (7–8). Women’s subordinate status is so ingrained and unquestioned that Aaron Adiness, as a young boy, believed his grandfather was a liar because he said women were once “allowed” to vote, be members of Congress, and sit on the Supreme Court (17). While the injustices of a male-ruled world are made clear, Elgin also demonstrates the complexity of effort and institution required to maintain such an unequal and dehumanizing system. The male assumption of female inferiority rests on three main tenets: that women are biologically inferior, that there is a natural hierarchy of the sexes, and that a woman’s value derives from her basic reproductive usefulness. Women are variously described as more primitive than men (151) and as “rather sophisticated child[ren] suffering from delusions of grandeur” (110). Both statements presume not only that women and men have different biological complexities, but that a more complex organism is more intelligent and more worthy of rights; such claims were frequently used in nineteenth century science to justify racism, and have been widely criticized since. Evidence to the contrary in the novel, such as Nazareth’s incredible linguistic ability, is explained away with the oft-repeated fact that “language acquisition skills are not directly correlated with intelligence” (279).

The idea of biological hierarchy grounds the society’s gender relations, which mandate female subservience and male protection rather than equality. When Rachel and Thomas fight about Nazareth’s prospective marriage to Aaron Adiness, Thomas is driven to rage by what he sees as Rachel “forget[ting] her place” (151). More than twenty years later, as the men discuss Nazareth’s cancer and the appropriate medical response to it, Thomas remarks, “‘We do feel — and, I might add, we are obligated to feel — more than just a ceremonial regard for the women in question’” (10). Even something as presumably female-oriented as gynecology is reinterpreted to focus on men: “‘Let me tell you what gynecology is. What it really is. Gentlemen, it is health care for your fellow man — whose women you are maintaining in that state of wellness that allows the men to pursue their lives as they were intended to pursue them. As this country desperately needs them to pursue them’” (225).

Women are valued to the degree that they serve the needs of men. Thus, Thomas values his daughter Nazareth for her linguistic skills and her genetic heritage, since both bring great benefit to the men of the Lines (147). When she is poisoned, he is persuaded to seek medical care not because she is in pain, but because she has a crucial role to play in the following day’s important labor treaty negotiations. As he puts it, “‘I am not concerned personally about this illness of Nazareth’s… She gets excellent medical care. Whatever this is, I’m sure you’ve blown it up completely out of proportion. But I am concerned — very concerned — about the negotiations at the ILO’” (107). Nazareth is not a special case. The women are valuable for their languages, which bring money and prestige to the household, as well as for their reproductive abilities, which bring more money and prestige to the Lines through the production of linguistically skilled children. When a woman can no longer breed, she is removed to Barren House, the cruelly named woman-only space apart from the main house. Although once in the Barren House women are free (by definition) from the burden of reproduction, women there are still expected to translate. When they are too old or sick or frail to serve as official translators, they act as informal partners for the little girls to practice their many languages (206–07). Those activities seen as useless from the male perspective, such as tending to others (219) or working on Langlish (216), must be done in spare moments that don’t interfere with the primary tasks of teaching languages and running the household. Women’s subordination means that men rule the household unquestioningly. They take credit for the creation of children (11), they choose the spacing of their children (146), and they have free license to abuse their wives verbally, if not physically (175). Men outside the Lines can even choose their wives from and send their daughters to an array of sophisticated wife-training schools. As Nazareth muses bitterly upon accepting her marriage to Aaron, “Every woman was a prisoner for life; it was not some burden that she bore uniquely” (159).

Though subordinate to men, women can reframe even their most subservient behaviors to resistant ends. Thus Michaela, the ideal deferential listener, plays the role of executioner to the men whose trust she wins by flattery and manipulation. Although most of the women in the novel do not go as far as Michaela does, they are hardly resourceless victims. While they cannot fully escape their subordinated status, they do find ways to challenge their subordination. Aaron remarks, “This business of letting them have pocket money, and making exceptions for flowers and candy and romance media and bits of frippery was forever leading to unforeseen complications… astonishing how clever women were at distorting the letter of the law!” (16–17). Women thus use an exception meant to keep them contented in ways never anticipated: to exert small bits of female control and thus sabotage, without directly challenging, male rule. The practice of incremental change is another popular tactic of resistance. Making small changes over long periods of time, changes that are so small that they escape male notice, women frustrate the men while exerting their own control. Even if all they do is annoy the men, they are also putting them on notice that their control must be maintained.

The women adopt the stereotypes men hold as covers for their own subversive activities. Needlework, that quintessential female activity, is used to disguise the women’s serious strategy sessions: “‘Crochet, Natha,’ [Susannah] directed. ‘That is what we women do… ask the men and they will tell you. Any time they come here, they find us chatting and needling away. Frittering our time’” (249). Because sewing is assumed to be useless and a waste of time, everything associated with it, including conversation, is assumed to be harmless. The women of Chornyak House frequently remark that the image of frivolity and stupidity provides the best defense against the men of the household. Under these assumptions the men neither look for or see the evidence of conspiracy, of the teaching of forbidden women’s history, of the women’s medicine, contraception, and abortifacients. Some women even use the most stereotypical of male/female relations — romantic love — to manipulate, and thus resist, men. Michaela ruminates:

Although women are quickly disabused of their belief in romantic love, they continue to rely on it as a source of resistance, a way to remain useful and convenient to men.

Perhaps the most extreme version of female rebellion in the novel is found in Belle-Anne, who functions as an effective foil to Michaela. Belle-Anne’s specific rebellion is to refuse pregnancy at all costs, but in such a way that force won’t change anything. As the doctors observe, “‘You insert a sperm in that young lady, no matter how you go about it, and she just twitches her little butt and the sperm dies. Dead. Gone’” (127). Her ability to sabotage her own reproductivity enables her to escape both marriage and living among men. Unfortunately, it also makes her appropriate as a sacrificial lamb when Aquina botches her attempt to make Nazareth barren and thus accelerate her entrance to Barren House. Belle-Anne confesses to poisoning Nazareth in order to forestall the search that would inevitably expose all the women’s secret sources of resistance — linguistic, social, and medicinal.

Since resistance can be produced from within patriarchy, patriarchy must be continually reproduced. The eternal small battles between the men and women demonstrate that gender hierarchy and sexual enslavement must be continually maintained through a variety of tactics. The most common tactic used at Chornyak House is the simple and expedient one of keeping the women busy. Thomas advises the head of another Line, “‘Double their schedules, Andrew. Give them some stuff to translate that there hasn’t been time for. Hell, make them clean the house. Buy them fruit to make jelly out of, if your orchards and storerooms are bare. There’s got to be something you can do with them, or they will literally drive you crazy. Women out of control are a curse’” (86). This rationale also allows the women their Encoding Project (16). By assigning them amounts of work unheard of outside the Lines, the men assume the women won’t have either the time or the energy to scheme. The women, of course, counter this with traditional women’s activities that double as subversive covers, such as needlework and the ingenious recipe-code.

Another primary tactic for controlling women is the manipulation of information. The men manipulate history in order to eradicate a precedent of female autonomy by reinterpreting through the contemporary trope of male indulgence: “‘Men are by nature kind and considerate, and a charming woman’s eagerness to play at being a physician or a Congressman or a scientist can be both amusing and endearing; we can understand, looking back upon the period, how it must have seemed to 20th century men that there could be no harm in humoring the ladies’” (72). This form of manipulation seeks to control aspirations. Another kind of linguistic manipulation seeks to grant women the illusion of control and input while strictly circumscribing the options they can exercise. During one argument, Thomas says “‘Rachel,… it doesn’t make the slightest difference whether you approve or not. It would be pleasant if you did approve, of course. I make every effort to consider your personal wishes with regard to my children whenever I can. But when you refuse to be reasonable you leave me no choice but to ignore you’” (148). Women’s supposed autonomy is thus predicated on their fundamental agreement with men.

Other types of manipulation are even more insidious. Nazareth discovers how kindness can function like manipulation when Jordan Shannontry begins to act as her backup in negotiations with the Jeelods. He pays her attention and compliments that culminate in presenting her with a yellow rose. When she tells him she loves him, however, he tells her father, and she becomes a victim of abuse and ridicule from both her father and her husband (193–97). The manipulation of religious feeling, as well as emotional feeling, is touted as another way to control women (130). As Nazareth remarks, “There was no end to the inventiveness of men when their goal was to prove their mastery” (176). The tactics used are multiple, and they are interesting not only for their variety, but for their very existence. By demonstrating the need to constantly reinforce mastery, Elgin demonstrates the instability of the dynamic, and it is this inherent instability that creates the possibility of change and thus of successful rebellion.

Indeed, Native Tongue begins with a preface that sounds a note of hope. Written in an even more distant future by a woman who holds the title of executive editor, the (fictional) preface explains that the novel is being published by a coalition of institutions, including the Historical Society of Earth, WOMANTALK, and the Láadan Group (6). This strategy of retrospective annotation implies that the experiment that was Láadan really did change the world, demonstrating the contingency of any system of oppression.

Elgin’s novel explores other familiar feminist issues, such as the inability of resources to keep up with modern global — and in this case, intergalactic — capitalism, the gendered structure of government, the malleable nature of power, the gendered relationality of labor, and the distinction between the artificial and the natural. But it is the book’s two main themes of constitutive language and linguistically enforced gender relations that reflect Suzette Haden Elgin’s primary contribution to feminist thought.

Native Tongue was originally published in 1984 by DAW Books, a respected science fiction imprint. Contemporary reviews were positive to mixed. While conservative journals faulted the book for what was seen as lack of characterization or social logic (Publishers Weekly) and boring didacticism used to rationalize her language experiment (Booklist), more progressive and feminist outlets praised the book for its significant themes. Fantasy Review noted that “Elgin is on strongest ground when she writes of male/female relations, the work of the linguists, and the feminists’ struggle to hide the development of their own language from the men. Though structurally flawed, her novel is well-written, its people are strong characters, and its themes are well worth considering” (Taormina). Carolyn Heilbrun, writing in the Women’s Review of Books, praised as “exciting” Elgin’s understanding “that until women find the words and syntax for what they need to say, they will never say it, nor will the world hear it.” The Voice Literary Supplement praised her for “hav[ing] insight into cultural survival, colonialism, pidginization as well as into anger other than her own” (Cohen). These reviews all appear to agree with Elgin that oppression and language can be linked, and that language can also be a tool of revolution.

Native Tongue is frequently compared to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, another feminist, dystopian science fiction novel. The novels have similar settings: near-future versions of the United States where women have been stripped of their rights and are under the legal and often physical control of men. But where The Handmaid’s Tale was praised for the spooky possibility of its imagined future, the scenario in Native Tongue has, according to Elgin herself, been dismissed as “improbable” and something that “could never happen in the United States” (“Women’s Language” 176). The Handmaid’s Tale was a bestseller and has been considered a classic since its 1986 publication, while Native Tongue went out of print in 1996 and maintained only a small, though enthusiastic, following among readers and scholars.

The context of the early 1980s, when Elgin was writing Native Tongue, is important in understanding both the social concerns that motivate the text and its intellectual position. Feminism in the late 1970s and early 1980s, especially academic feminism, was concerned with several sets of questions. Central among these was the question of whether gender is essential or constructed. If gender is essential, biological, and material, then the differences between men and women are set in nature. If gender is constructed, then it has nothing (or little) to do with our bodies and everything to do with social expectations and socialization. This debate had practical consequences, because an answer, even a contingent, personal answer, helped to point one towards an appropriate strategy of revolution. If gender is essential, then feminists should work for equal valuation of the inherent qualities of both men and women. If gender is constructed through socialization, then we should emphasize different relations and social practices that would challenge gender roles. This larger question carries other issues along with it. If gender isn’t essential, as most feminists seemed to conclude, then on what can we base collective action? Is separation an effective political strategy? How would — or should — sexuality change along with gender roles?

A second major concern of 1970s and 1980s feminism, as previously noted, lay with the power of language to structure and express, and thus make possible, different perceptions. Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray all advocated variations on the idea that language as we know it encodes masculinist perceptions and values, in effect rendering women silent. They advocated the adoption of a women’s language that is non-linear, sensual, and true to women’s experience in patriarchal culture. As noted, Elgin’s novel endorses the view of language as constructivist. In its very structure, Native Tongue highlights the power of language to construct reality. In its juxtaposition of various points of view, and its alternation between narrative and historical documents concerning the oppression of women in its various forms, the novel necessarily “engage[s] active reader involvement in the de/construction of textual meaning” (Rosinsky 107). By choosing such a structure, Elgin not only avoids burdening her narrative with history, but also enacts the very constitutive power of language she demonstrates.

Native Tongue must be viewed within the history not only of feminist thought but also of the science fiction genre. Science fiction is often traced back to Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein, Or, a Modern Prometheus. Read variously as a political tract, a philosophical critique of Romantic individualism, and a birth myth, this brilliant novel presents a solitary scientist who constructs a human being in his laboratory out of a mixture of human and animal parts. The experiment goes awry, and the monster — alien and unnamed — escapes only to wreak havoc on its human creator, other human beings, and itself. Shelley’s interrogation of the limits of humanity and the role of technology in human life forms the basis of much of science fiction today. Even our fascination with outer space and aliens reflects the genre’s special concern with questions of identity and technology. Despite its origins in the mind of a young woman, science fiction as it developed — from H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and C.S. Lewis in Europe to Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and more recently William Gibson in the United States — has been a genre dominated by white men as authors and readers. As science fiction gained popularity in the United States during the early part of the century through pulp novels and pulp magazines, the stories of exploration and high technology resonated with American expansionist ideals and the concomitant stress on technological innovation. Yet as far back as the teens in the United States, Charlotte Perkins Gilman articulated a strong feminist critique of such expansionist ideologies in Herland, while in Great Britain in the 1920s Charlotte Haldane grappled with the implications of eugenics and compulsory motherhood in her dystopian Man’s World. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that women made the strongest impact on science fiction, using it as an important medium to think through some of the claims and conflicts of feminism. Naomi Mitchison, Marge Piercy, Ursula LeGuin, and Joanna Russ all used the generic conventions of science fiction, often with modification, to examine and interrogate the actual, and possible, gender relations of modern life. And it was only when men and women of color, like Samuel Delaney and Octavia Butler, began to play an increasingly important role in forging a resistant science fiction that the genre gave a far-reaching and serious critique to the racializing agenda of science.

In its exploration of the constitutive properties of language, Elgin’s novel harks back to Mary Shelley’s emphasis (in chapter 12 of Frankenstein) on the role of language in forming the creature’s sense of self and world. Like the women in Native Tongue, the monster must learn an alien language; like them, the ability to name opens up a whole world:

If Elgin’s novel continues the tradition of Mary Shelley’s feminist analysis of the constructive aspects of language, it also evokes other recent works of science fiction: Neal Stephenson’s examination of the way language functions as a virus in his widely read and critically acclaimed Snowcrash, and Greg Bear’s exploration of DNA as a language technology for species adaptation to global change in Darwin’s Radio.

Thus this reprinting of Elgin’s novel marks a significant new moment in science fiction, for it signals a convergence of the genre’s three major strands: the original (though frequently unacknowledged) strand of feminist cultural critique running from Frankenstein through to Herland; the tradition of technoscientific experimentation of science fiction’s male-dominated high modernist period (from Wells through Clarke and Asimov); and the postmodern strand of science fiction linking an examination of social technologies (language, race, gender) with a new focus on biotechnological interventions. Finally, in her attention to aging and to interspecies communication, her invention of the Barren House and the Interface, Elgin draws attention to two contemporary issues which are increasingly the focus not only of science fiction but of fiction of all genres: the receding limits of human life and the vanishing boundaries between species. As contemporary biomedicine’s assault on the limits of the probable encodes as mundane what only months ago was coded as revolutionary, these issues increasingly function to break down the distinction between science and other forms of culture, between science fiction and other sorts of fiction.

Read as a work in this new, hybrid genre for which we do not yet have a name — this genre that does not differentiate science from other kinds of culture, but instead performs a detailed analysis of the networks between them — Native Tongue seems both powerfully prescient and strikingly dated (or, to put it more positively, of historical interest). The novel is prescient in its attention to the experiences of aging and menopausal women, who were given short shrift in feminist theory until the late 1990s. In its invention of Barren House, Native Tongue provides wonderful meditations on the different consciousness of aging, the pains and pleasures of growing — and being — old[4]. Looking to the present and future, the novel also nudges us to realize that we are living and working through precisely the kind of linguistic shift, or re-encoding, that Suzette Haden Elgin explored in Native Tongue. The increased emphasis on nonsexist language and the integration of feminist challenges to simple or deterministic ideas of gender or biology have changed the workplace environment, helped to make space for nontraditional families, and catalyzed a civil rights movements for lesbians and gay men and for disabled persons. As the biomedical revolution reshapes the entire human lifespan, with interventions ranging from assisted reproduction to hormone replacement therapy, our language is also registering the cultural shift in our definitions of the human. Thus our lexicon now includes the terms biological mother, surrogate mother, genetic mother, and postmenopausal mother, in addition to the older terms adoptive mother, unwed mother, and natural mother. Along with assisted reproduction, fetal surgery, cloning, and interspecies organ transplantation are changing the human narrative so dramatically that what seemed like science fiction in 1984 now seems to us in the new millennium as increasingly unremarkable fact. Test tube fertilization and cloning, which Elgin depicts in the novel, seem now not wildly futuristic but, in other contexts, realities, as well as moral dilemmas. In addition, the novel’s portrait of intergalactic capitalism anticipates the actual trend in the 1990s — with the decline of Communism and the rise of multinational corporations and the Internet — toward global capitalism.

At the same time, the novel serves us well as historical record of the dystopian visions central to a particular stage of feminism, for the life of linguist women mirrors in its stringencies the harshest social critiques of second stage feminism: patriarchal domination, sex as an instrument of control, women subject to the whims of their male masters and categorized solely by their sexual and reproductive capacities. Yet Native Tongue reflects the partial vision of its era, too, particularly in its insistence on seeing men and women as unified groups necessarily opposed to one another in thought, action, and desire. Contemporary readers may well wish for another project that would encode a newer language, one that complicates the idea of a “native tongue” by challenging its basis in a fixed and gendered identity.

While Elgin’s novelistic vision of the future was dystopic, the strategies of language she and her characters employed provide new avenues of critique and change. Just as the novel both reveals language to be based on gendered assumptions and provides new ways to think about both language and reality, we can explore the ways language helps encode other power hierarchies, including those of race, class, sexual orientation, and even the human over other species. In doing so, we can employ new linguistic strategies to challenge these power structures and encode a reality more equitable for all.

Susan Squier

Julie Vedder

Pennsylvania State University

June 2000