The Female Face of Shame

1. The Other Woman: Xenophobia and Shame

23 The Other Woman Xenophobia and Shame Jocelyn Eighan In the 1950s and 1960s, when science fiction predominantly consisted of works by male writers, Judith Merril emerged onto the science fiction scene with her groundbreaking texts which challenged the genre’s pervasive focus on masculine concerns.1 While the texts written by her male contemporaries often featured women as minor characters, many of Merril’s stories distinctly centered on female characters and broached topics of motherhood, sexuality, and gender relations.2 Interestingly, notions of gender inequality permeate Merril’s plotlines; as the female characters grow increasingly isolated from their male counterparts, they become the dangerous and feared alien outsiders. What is at work, then, is an intricate interplay between fear (of the other) and shame as the male characters interact with the “alien” women. Indeed, as Andrew P. Morrison notes in The Culture of Shame, “We seem to need visible ‘monstrosities ’ to depict our own disavowed self-images. Our feelings of defectiveness and imperfection find an outlet in the real-life ‘freak,’ who becomes the receptacle for our deepest fears” (27)—a notion particularly accurate, not only when applied to shame, but also when understood within the context of xenophobia. In this chapter, I explore representations of women as shame in a selection of Judith Merril’s short stories and note the ways in which the female characters become alien “others” while scrutinized under the xenophobic male gaze. Focusing specifically on Merril’s “That Only a Mother ,” “Whoever You Are,” and “The Lady Was a Tramp,” I argue that the female or feminine characters—by virtue of their alien/foreign otherness—embody stigma and shame. Paradoxically, however, the shame represented by these “alien” women mirrors the actual stigmatized feelings of the male characters. In light of this phenomenon, I investigate the specific textual moments in which the male characters utilize guises or “veils” to protect themselves from shame—notably through shame-rage, shame-pride, and narcissism. As a literary phenomenon, the “alien” is difficult to define, and it is beyond the scope of this chapter to fully analyze the numerous renderings of the alien offered by 1 24 | Jocelyn Eighan critics and theorists; from bug-eyed monsters (BEMs) to humanoid aliens and BAMs, or beautiful alien monster-women,3 the criterion of “otherness,” however, remains universally accepted within these varied categorizations. It is precisely this sense of otherness—the stigma attached to this otherness, and its accompanying shame—that incites fear within those who deem themselves “normal.” In traditional science fiction which posits the “man as human” and the “woman as other,” the woman-as-alien motif works to solidify the masculine notion of the logical/rational versus the (feminine) emotional/irrational. As Patricia Monk notes in Alien Theory, the “woman as Other” functions as part of an androcentric encoding in which the human (understood as man) is identified “positively,” while the “alien is defined with extreme negativity (the woman/alien is monstrous—a source of contamination and destruction)” (67). In light of this argument, the female alien (symbolically attached to irrationality/emotion) is threatening in her ability to contaminate masculine “reason” with her emotion—a fundamentally stigmatic trait. The female/feminized aliens in Merril’s stories, however , are unique precisely because of their stigma and its power to unveil the more unconventional and unsettling notions of reason. As one of the leading feminist science fiction writers, Merril is celebrated for her unique thematic contributions to the genre—notably female issues of love, motherhood , pregnancy, emotion (Pohl-Weary, 2). The significance of Merril’s work rests in its ability to implement these themes in ways that challenge gender-role behavior. Merril consciously acknowledges the subversion of gender stereotypes as a major impetus for her work: “How much of what we consider ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ behavior is cultural, how much biological? One of the [science fiction] games is psycho-dramaon -paper. Set up an environment-shift or a role-switch, and see what happens” (PohlWeary , 156). In her own fiction, Merril uses the trope of the alien to confront widely held views of the irrational/emotional female other. From the hairless, sensual, “loving ” beings to the mutated, monstrous humanoid child, Merril’s aliens are remarkable in their unsettling, yet provocative representations of feminine embodiment. Henrietta, the monstrous child that appears in Merril’s “That Only a Mother” (1948), exemplifies the stigmatized alien other both in terms of gender and bodily difference . As a result of her exposure to bomb radiation while...