Study Guide to The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin
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Study Guide to The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin

Intelligent Education

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Study Guide to The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin

Intelligent Education

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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, a book that pioneered the feminist science fiction movement. As a science-fiction, fantasy novel of the mid to late 1900s, The Left Hand of Darkness explores androgyny, tragedy, and love. Moreover, Le Guin’s writing shows that in fantasy, journeys into outer space are often metaphors for journeys inward. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Le Guin’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including
essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

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Year
2020
ISBN
9781645425212
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INTRODUCTION TO URSULA LE GUIN
 
THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS: ITS PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE FICTION
Male dominance
The first science fiction novel, it is largely agreed, was written by a woman, Mary Shelley, the daughter of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the wife of the English romantic poet Shelley. She wrote Frankenstein in 1818 when she was only nineteen. However, the field has since been dominated by male writers who have made the domain of science fiction almost exclusively male. Indeed, in his book Billion Year Spree - The True History of Science Fiction, Brian Aldiss describes the genre as an “all-male escapist power fantasy” and calls its writers “Philistine-male-chauvinist pigs” who work in the “Ghetto of Retarded Boyhood.”
IMMATURE HEROES
The heroes that these male writers created were generally immature men seeking to remain forever young and powerful, playing with imaginative and powerful toys, hoping to escape from girls or women, mothers or wives, as well as to avoid the responsibilities of a demanding reality, enclosing themselves in their exclusive men’s club.
FEMALE HEROINE FOLLOWERS
Needless to say, all these heroes were virile males served by their followers, the female characters. With all their invention and often daring imagination, these writers failed to explore alternative roles for women in a future society. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, the lions in the genre, had hardly any place for women in their fantasies. Other writers who did employ female characters pictured the relationships between the heroes and their women largely along the same lines as did the existing society: women as assistants to men, women in the role of entertaining dolls. A classic example is the story “Helen O’Loy” by Lester del Rey (1938) which features a man who builds a robot programmed to be a perfect wife. These writers, naturally, aimed their stories mainly at male readers, mostly young boys who often stopped reading science fiction novels once they grew up.
NO WOMEN WRITERS
In her fine introduction to Women of Wonder, Pamela Sargent, herself a prolific science-fiction writer, calls traditional science fiction “an escapist literature for men and boys.” She claims that women have traditionally been discouraged from entering scientific and technological fields, based on two assumptions: first, that women lack the aptitude, and second, that they are essentially intuitive rather than rational, and are “hostile to any kind of intellectual exploration.”
Few women dared to invade the field and even when they did, they imitated their male colleagues. Catherine Moore, for example, wrote from the male point of view, “a necessity,” Pamela Sargent explains, “for anyone who wished to publish in the pulp magazines which had dominated American SF since the 1920s.”
CHANGE
A change began to take place after World War II, when some women science-fiction writers joined the field. However, they too, like their male colleagues, usually presented housewife heroines, passive, naive, ignorant child-raisers, who solve problems not through their intelligence and daring but through ineptitude or accident.
Only in the 1960s, a decade that gave birth to much questioning of conventions as well as to many social revolutions (including feminism), women science-fiction writers began to question the very nature of science fiction, and as a result, took it in a completely new direction: software replaced hardware, human relationships replaced technology, social science took the place of the physical sciences. Substance and emotional content introduced depth and meaning into what had often been flat, boy scouts’ literature.
WOMEN WRITERS
In 1973 Brian Aldiss said that much of the best writing in science fiction of that time was done by women who brought the genre closer to mainstream fiction. Although there was still much “Sword-and-Sorcery” writing in the market, the best of science fiction is more reality-oriented, reflected in better and more careful writing, better characterization, and more diversity of subjects.
Although much of today’s science-fiction writing is still male-oriented power fantasies, serious writers such as Ursula Le Guin or Joanna Russ have turned the best of science fiction into writing worthy of serious consideration and literary criticism. Pamela Sargent, in her introduction to Women of Wonder, presents an intriguing quote by Harlan Ellison: “... women are writing many of the things male SF writers thought could never be written, they are opening up whole new areas to us ...”
RISE IN POPULARITY
Darko Suvin, a Canadian critic, surveying contemporary science fiction, maintains that science fiction has risen in popularity in the leading industrial nations, especially among college graduates and the general population interested in alternative ways of thinking. This increase is attributed to the fact that from the early 1970s on, an increasing number of courses in science-fiction literature have been offered in universities worldwide.
BACKGROUND OF THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS
In the light of this history, Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness, first published in 1969, presents a real change. Human relationships take center stage; everything else is subordinate to the development of a profound and meaningful relationship between two human beings. The great achievement of The Left Hand of Darkness is the creation not of a new technology or of science-fiction gadgets but rather of a new society of truly equal human beings. It is her depth of thought, emotional involvement, strong moral values, and philosophical thinking that place Le Guin among the very top contemporary science-fiction writers.
FEMINIST BOOK
In her article “Is Gender Necessary?” Le Guin herself openly discusses what inspired her to write The Left Hand of Darkness. It was, she writes, in the mid-1960s when the women’s movement began to awaken after half a century of stagnation. Although as a writer she had never been treated unfairly or patronizingly on account of her sex, Le Guin was bothered by the question that besieged many women then and even now: What is a woman? This question had motivated the French philosopher and writer, Simone de Beauvoir, to write what has been considered the bible of the women’s movement, The Second Sex (France 1949, United States 1953), the exploration of women’s situation throughout the ages. This question also inspired the American feminist Betty Friedan to write The Feminine Mystique (1963).
In “Is Gender Necessary?”, written in 1976, seven years after the publication of The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin, suprisingly, rejected the notion that hers was a “feminist” book. Although she considered herself a feminist (holding that every thinking woman is a feminist), she emphasized that “the real subject of the book is not feminism or sex or gender ... it is a book about betrayal and fidelity.” However, in 1987, eleven years later, Le Guin revised her essay, or rather added comments that attest to her own growth as a conscious feminist. In “Is Gender Necessary? Redux”, she admits to having been defensive and resentful that critics had concentrated on the gender problems “as if it were an essay, not a novel.” In her revision she writes that “there are other aspects of the novel” inextricably involved with its gender aspects.
In The Left Hand of Darkness Le Guin has aspired to reach beyond the question of “What is a woman?” to broader and deeper questions of “What is sexuality?” and “What is the meaning of gender?” Besides physiological differences, are there really any differences between men and women? Being a novelist, her explorations of these questions are the basis of The Left Hand of Darkness.
To be precise, the book does not offer ultimate answers, and readers will not find there the answer to the basic question of “What is a woman?” Actually, when the male Envoy from Earth is asked by his friend from the new planet to explain what a woman is, he embarrassedly hesitates, fails, and finally admits that he does not know what a woman is. But more important than the answers are the questions and the hypothesis that Le Guin offers, in her “thought-experiment,” as she calls the novel in her intriguing introduction. The book serves as “the record of my consciousness, the process of my thinking” in the laboratory of the mind. It offers alternative modes of thinking not about the future but about ourselves in the present.
The result? “Messy,” according to Le Guin, “dubious and uncertain.” The same experiment done by someone else, she maintains, and even by herself several years later, “would probably give quite different results” (in her revision she replaces the word “probably” by “certainly”).
However, Le Guin has been frequently criticized for making her Gethenians, although they are menwomen, too much like men. Feminists have accused her of not going far enough and for using male protagonists. In her recent essay, “The Fisherman’s Daughter” (1988), Le Guin admits that these critics were right, that until the mid-1970s “men were the central characters, the women were peripheral, secondary.” And she adds that feminism has empowered her to criticize her society, herself, and feminism itself.
All that aside, however, in the New Republic, Derek de Solla Price emphasizes that he knows of no “single book [that is] likely to raise consciousness about sexism more thoroughly and convincingly than this one.”
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INTRODUCTION TO URSULA LE GUIN
URSULA K. LE GUIN’S LIFE AND WORK: AN INTERVIEW
THE WRITER AND THE WOMAN
Ursula K. Le Guin draws a sharp line between herself as a person, woman, wife and mother and herself as a writer. An introvert, she jealously keeps her private life to herself, shielding her family and her private self from the limelight.
In her entire body of stories and novels nothing is autobiographical. Her friends and family members will not find themselves in her books as is so often the case with fiction writers. Although the integration of polarities emerges as a central theme in her writing, it seems that hers is a sharply divided world between the private and the professional.
Her answer to my request for a telephone interview came in the form of a short letter, with a don’t-call-me-I’ll-call-you provision, ardently defending her telephone number as others defend their valuables.
Is this one reason why she writes science fiction, for the distancing effect that creates the maximum remoteness between Le Guin the writer and Le Guin the woman? “Is science fiction the best way to guard her privacy? “I don’t want to write autobiographies,” she said once. “I want to distance myself from my books. That’s one of the reasons I write science fiction. I write about aliens.”
POLITICAL ACTIVIST
So I was truly surprised to hear a warm and melodious voice over the telephone. She apologized for not calling the day before as agreed. I was happy she had not called then because on the previous day I had joined other writers in a demonstration for freedom of speech concerning the Salman Rushdie affair. “Oh, that’s what we did here!” she exclaimed. (Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses had provoked Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini to order his assassination.)
Here was a glimpse of Le Guin the person, after all. It was typical of her, putting her writing aside and throwing herself into a social or political cause she believes in. In the 1960s she became involved in the peace demonstrations and campaigned for Eugene McCarthy and then George McGovern in their primaries. Her political activities in the peace movement led to a short novel, The Eye of the Heron, and to The Word for World Is Forest, and then to The Left Hand of Darkness, considered by many to be her best work.
NO-WAR SOCIETY
Her voice was pleasant and relaxed as we talked about the genesis of her book. “It all started when I began to imagine a society without war, a people that does not think in terms of war. They have murders and forays but never wars. What kind of people would they be? I thought. Obviously, they’d be different from us. But in what way? That’s how I came to the idea of an androgynous society. As one character says in the book, war is a displaced male-generalized activity, something that men do and women ...

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