Three Observations and a Dialogue by Sylvia Kelso

Author:Sylvia Kelso [Kelso, Sylvia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book View Cafe

4. “Codedly Feminine”

Like the wall in Apprentice, Miles is more than he originally seems. When I first began analyzing the Bujold books, Miles’s physical fragility, his height, his inability to use physical strength and violence, quickly recalled Robin Roberts’ concept of the codedly feminine: a process where “an author …explores a singularly feminine dilemma using a male character as stand-in, or cover”(16). I was charmed to find Bujold herself calling Miles a “female in disguise,” and “socially disadvantaged” by his physique, “just as women in patriarchal society are made to feel deformed” (Lake, 8). In this light, the wall in Apprentice instantly assumed an extra significance; like the wall in The Dispossessed, it also symbolized gender bars. I recalled, too, Le Guin writing of her “private delight” in one of her most famous characters, the Getheni Estraven from The Left Hand of Darkness, “not a man, but a manwoman,” who usurped male roles (“Redux,” 15). Estraven, however, is ambiguously gendered, not codedly feminine. But Miles’s exploits read very easily as women’s solutions to the problems of a masculinist world, including military space opera. Repeatedly, from Apprentice on, Miles appears as physically weaker, more fragile than his opponents; and he prevails by intelligence as well as audacity, by manipulation and psychic judo as well as forward momentum. In a further judo turn, female readers accustomed to taking on male identification find themselves identifying with a man who really is one of them.

The codedly feminine in Bujold’s work does not stop with Miles. I once proposed (“Letterspace,” Letter 3) that Miles and Mark are Take One and Take Two of the concept: like Estraven, Miles achieves all the masculine things that women would like to do. He wins by wits and keeps charity, lacks muscle and still manages to manipulate, leads on battlefields and can salvage lost causes by charisma alone. In the early books he is manic, intellectually brilliant, yet keeps compassion and sensitivity, for example in the way he always feels for his dead. But for all his accompanying problems, Miles is the daylight version of the codedly feminine.

Mark is the night-time version: the codedly feminine that women do not like to face. To start with his body, he is forced into an unnatural shape, but not by accident, and he suffers that eternal women’s problem of weight. In Mirror Dance he exhibits the normally female eating disorder, bulimia,[2] and in the throes of his refusal to play Miles, he uses it as a weapon of defense. It has been argued that many anorexics actually control their bodies to thwart social demand. Nor does Mark ever make a success of charisma, leadership, and field command. In fact, in finding himself he renounces all traffic with the military. Moreover, Mark suffers for most of Mirror Dance from self-hate, hideously low self-esteem, and masochism, all proverbial women’s psychic problems.

Beyond this, Mirror Dance gives Mark a clear case of Multiple Personality Disorder, another classic women’s problem, and again, it operates in his favor.

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