-
The Left Hand of Darkness
Which I assume is the book @ltc was talking about. It's not a good treatment of gender. A world full of people who have no gender most of the time, but both the protagonist and the author consistently refer to the characters in male terms when they're in active, important roles and female when not. Genly calls the overweight, gossipy, nosey person who rents him a room his landlady, but the country is ruled by a king.
did a bit of accidental misogyny
Internalised misogyny is a constant thing in most of her books, which remind me a lot of Mary Renault, who did the same thing. In the first Earthsea book there are almost no female characters and all but one of them are evil or weak and let Ged down or betray him. They're even more absent from the third. Same pattern in The Dispossessed: an anarchist utopia where the very language they speak is designed to make the articulation of bigotry difficult, but almost no involvement of women in the plot and one of them is the protagonist's mother who... is malevolent and spiteful and spends her whole time attacking her son's work and mission. Have to wonder what kind of a relationship the author had with her own mother.
Le Guin was criticised for this all through her writing career, conceded herself that it was an issue and the belated fourth Earthsea book was explicitly written to address it. Surprised any of this is news to you both.
itsbruce-
I need to read up on it more, that had all totally passed me by to be honest!
-
That's all fair, I know she'd returned to Earthsea deliberately, but the last time I re-read it was straight through with the new additions and short stories, which I think did a decent job of re-framing the earlier ones. Maybe I was just being too generous as interpreting the obvious misogyny as belonging to the characters rather than the author.
I'd agree that LHOD has some, uh, gender stereotyping language, but I don't really feel it outweighs the more deliberate treatment of gender roles in the rest of it. Maybe I need to read it again!
The Dispossessed I think is actually worse, in that the discussion of gender roles and how characters actually behave is more at odds.
ltc
useless
Likewise. It's hard to believe the author of The Left Hand of Darkness did a bit of accidental misogyny, rather than choosing to comment on misogyny in the culture she was describing.
Speaking of which, she also wrote some excellent sci-fi, not least that one I just mentioned.