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The Mismeasure of I-330
- Northwestern University Press
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Sona Stephan HOisington The Mismeasure of 1-330 NUMEROUS ARTICLES have been written in the West about Yevgeny Zamyatin's anti-utopian fantasy We/ most of them based on the assumption that the male protagonist, mathematician D-503, merits the reader's attention, that what happens to him, what he thinks and feels is crucial and worthy ofinvestigation and analysis. Consequently, critical literature has tended to focus on D-503 and his "rebellion," whether directed outward against the One State or inward against his entropic self.2 Little attention has been focused on 1-330, We's female protagonist. Her role in the novel has been marginalized. All too often she has been regarded as an appendage of the male protagonist. Some critics have even viewed her as a projection of D503 's unconscious or psyche.3 Because she is female, she has also been identified with Eve, the archetypal temptress, born of Adam's rib: Attesting to the hold gender stereotypes have on us, both female and male critics have drawn this conclusion. 1-330, however, has been "mismeasured."5 She is, in fact, the central force in Zamyatin's novel.6 Her role is crucial not only on the level of plot (after all she is the leader of the revolutionary Mephi, whose goal it is, in her words, "to break down ... all walls [and] let the green wind blow free from end to end-across the earth" [157]) but, as we will see, on other levels as well. Highly unorthodox, like the work she informs,7 1-330 defies easy categorization . In this sense she is markedly different from the conventional female protagonists in the modem dystopias of George Orwell and Fritz Lang. Julia, the heroine of 1984, is clearly subordinate to the hero, Winston Smith, and vanishes from the novel just as soon as she and Winston are caught in their hideaway over Mr. Charrington's junk shop. Wealdy delineated , Julia is described primarily as a youthful body, "only a rebel from the waist downwards."8 Maria, the female protagonist of Fritz Lang's expressionist film, Metropolis (1926), is easily classified as a combination of Mary and the persecuted female. 1-330, on the other hand, transcends gender stereotypes . She takes on attributes and mythiC qualities traditionally reserved for 81 Sana Stephan Hoisington male heroes and yet retains her own identity. As distinct from the conventional heroine, she is "woman as hero,"9 a rebel par excellence and the consummate heretic. While D-503 is the central consciousness ofWe (the work consisting of forty entries, purports to be his journal), I submit that the "hero"-both in the sense ofprime mover and the character who best exemplifies the novel's governing values-is 1-330 and D-503 a "mock" hero. At first glance 1-330 would appear to be a femme fatale: that beautiful, proud, and willfully evil creature so prominent in both the visual arts and literary works at the tum of the century, who lured men to destruction by means of her overwhelming seductive charms.lO After all, doesn't 1-330 employ her sexual wiles to ensnare the narrator D-503, an obedient citizen of the One State, and bring about his downfall? (In Zamyatin's satiric fantasy, which is set 1000 years in the future, the inhabitants of the One State wear uniforms and have numbers prefixed by letters rather than names.) In the early entries ofWe, Zamyatin's portrayals ofher are highly suggestive, tinged with eroticism. Significantly, they bring to mind Russian paintings of the period. For example, the descripton of1-330 in entry 4 is reminiscent of Lev Bakst's 1902 painting Supper.ll In that entry the narrator D-503 attends a lecture and is surprised to see 1-330 appear on stage to demonstrate the absurd music ofthe ancients. He describes her as follows: "She wore the fantastic costume of the ancient epoch: a closely fitting black dress, which sharply emphasized the whiteness ofher bare shoulders and breast, with that warm shadow, stirring with her breath, between ... and the dazzling, almost angry teeth.... A smile-a bite-to us, below. Then she sat down and began to play" (17; ellipses in original). If we compare this description to Bakst's painting, which Zamyatin very likely had seen at one of the ''World of Art" exhibits while a student in Petersburg at the Polytechnic Institute, we note similarities. Dominating the picture are the sinuous lines ofthe female figure...