Suzette Elgin - Native Tongue

The idea of biological hierarchy grounds the society’s gender relations, which mandate female subservience and male protection rather than equality. When Rachel and Thomas fight about Nazareth’s prospective marriage to Aaron Adiness, Thomas is driven to rage by what he sees as Rachel “forget[ting] her place” (151). More than twenty years later, as the men discuss Nazareth’s cancer and the appropriate medical response to it, Thomas remarks, “‘We do feel — and, I might add, we are obligated to feel — more than just a ceremonial regard for the women in question’” (10). Even something as presumably female-oriented as gynecology is reinterpreted to focus on men: “‘Let me tell you what gynecology is. What it really is. Gentlemen, it is health care for your fellow man — whose women you are maintaining in that state of wellness that allows the men to pursue their lives as they were intended to pursue them. As this country desperately needs them to pursue them’” (225).

Women are valued to the degree that they serve the needs of men. Thus, Thomas values his daughter Nazareth for her linguistic skills and her genetic heritage, since both bring great benefit to the men of the Lines (147). When she is poisoned, he is persuaded to seek medical care not because she is in pain, but because she has a crucial role to play in the following day’s important labor treaty negotiations. As he puts it, “‘I am not concerned personally about this illness of Nazareth’s… She gets excellent medical care. Whatever this is, I’m sure you’ve blown it up completely out of proportion. But I am concerned — very concerned — about the negotiations at the ILO’” (107). Nazareth is not a special case. The women are valuable for their languages, which bring money and prestige to the household, as well as for their reproductive abilities, which bring more money and prestige to the Lines through the production of linguistically skilled children. When a woman can no longer breed, she is removed to Barren House, the cruelly named woman-only space apart from the main house. Although once in the Barren House women are free (by definition) from the burden of reproduction, women there are still expected to translate. When they are too old or sick or frail to serve as official translators, they act as informal partners for the little girls to practice their many languages (206–07). Those activities seen as useless from the male perspective, such as tending to others (219) or working on Langlish (216), must be done in spare moments that don’t interfere with the primary tasks of teaching languages and running the household. Women’s subordination means that men rule the household unquestioningly. They take credit for the creation of children (11), they choose the spacing of their children (146), and they have free license to abuse their wives verbally, if not physically (175). Men outside the Lines can even choose their wives from and send their daughters to an array of sophisticated wife-training schools. As Nazareth muses bitterly upon accepting her marriage to Aaron, “Every woman was a prisoner for life; it was not some burden that she bore uniquely” (159).

Though subordinate to men, women can reframe even their most subservient behaviors to resistant ends. Thus Michaela, the ideal deferential listener, plays the role of executioner to the men whose trust she wins by flattery and manipulation. Although most of the women in the novel do not go as far as Michaela does, they are hardly resourceless victims. While they cannot fully escape their subordinated status, they do find ways to challenge their subordination. Aaron remarks, “This business of letting them have pocket money, and making exceptions for flowers and candy and romance media and bits of frippery was forever leading to unforeseen complications… astonishing how clever women were at distorting the letter of the law!” (16–17). Women thus use an exception meant to keep them contented in ways never anticipated: to exert small bits of female control and thus sabotage, without directly challenging, male rule. The practice of incremental change is another popular tactic of resistance. Making small changes over long periods of time, changes that are so small that they escape male notice, women frustrate the men while exerting their own control. Even if all they do is annoy the men, they are also putting them on notice that their control must be maintained .

The women adopt the stereotypes men hold as covers for their own subversive activities. Needlework, that quintessential female activity, is used to disguise the women’s serious strategy sessions: “‘Crochet, Natha,’ [Susannah] directed. ‘That is what we women do… ask the men and they will tell you. Any time they come here, they find us chatting and needling away. Frittering our time’” (249). Because sewing is assumed to be useless and a waste of time, everything associated with it, including conversation, is assumed to be harmless. The women of Chornyak House frequently remark that the image of frivolity and stupidity provides the best defense against the men of the household. Under these assumptions the men neither look for or see the evidence of conspiracy, of the teaching of forbidden women’s history, of the women’s medicine, contraception, and abortifacients. Some women even use the most stereotypical of male/female relations — romantic love — to manipulate, and thus resist, men. Michaela ruminates:

Thomas, now, she felt no love for, any more than she’d felt love for Ned. She had turned her attention to convincing him that he had seduced her, because she knew his power and respected it and she knew no other way to make use of it. But she felt no love for the man. Loving someone who considered you only one small notch above a cleverly trained domestic animal, and made no secret of it — that is, loving any adult male — was not possible for her. It would be a perversion, loving your masters while their boots were on your neck, and she was a woman healthy of mind. (258)

Although women are quickly disabused of their belief in romantic love, they continue to rely on it as a source of resistance, a way to remain useful and convenient to men.

Perhaps the most extreme version of female rebellion in the novel is found in Belle-Anne, who functions as an effective foil to Michaela. Belle-Anne’s specific rebellion is to refuse pregnancy at all costs, but in such a way that force won’t change anything. As the doctors observe, “‘You insert a sperm in that young lady, no matter how you go about it, and she just twitches her little butt and the sperm dies . Dead. Gone’” (127). Her ability to sabotage her own reproductivity enables her to escape both marriage and living among men. Unfortunately, it also makes her appropriate as a sacrificial lamb when Aquina botches her attempt to make Nazareth barren and thus accelerate her entrance to Barren House. Belle-Anne confesses to poisoning Nazareth in order to forestall the search that would inevitably expose all the women’s secret sources of resistance — linguistic, social, and medicinal.

Since resistance can be produced from within patriarchy, patriarchy must be continually reproduced. The eternal small battles between the men and women demonstrate that gender hierarchy and sexual enslavement must be continually maintained through a variety of tactics. The most common tactic used at Chornyak House is the simple and expedient one of keeping the women busy. Thomas advises the head of another Line, “‘Double their schedules, Andrew. Give them some stuff to translate that there hasn’t been time for. Hell, make them clean the house. Buy them fruit to make jelly out of, if your orchards and storerooms are bare. There’s got to be something you can do with them, or they will literally drive you crazy. Women out of control are a curse’” (86). This rationale also allows the women their Encoding Project (16). By assigning them amounts of work unheard of outside the Lines, the men assume the women won’t have either the time or the energy to scheme. The women, of course, counter this with traditional women’s activities that double as subversive covers, such as needlework and the ingenious recipe-code.