He, She and It As a Comment on Feminism

Marge Piercy melds timeless feminist themes of love, loss, and equality, against the backdrop of a frightening futuristic existence, resulting in a thoroughly enjoyable read. It is 2059 and the vast environmental ruin that we presently fear has come to pass. The climate has become inhospitable to humans, and this has segmented the population into those who try to survive in violent and barely inhabitable ghettos, and those who contribute their work and their lives to large, soulless corporations. Our main character, Shira, has chosen the latter, and the book opens with her loyalties amounting to nothing, as the custody of her young son is awarded to her ex-husband with little explanation and less than a fighting chance of reversal. Shira is born of a Jewish free town called Tikva, a tenuous alternative to the above mentioned extremes, and she returns there now, to rally the love of her family and friends, and to gather her courage by reconnecting to her past. She must regain her child at all cost.

 

Up to this point in our story, the reader will have glimpsed some of the obvious inequities of the world that Shira lives in, but we experience a subtler affront to feminism in the coming chapters. Upon returning to Tikva, Shira is brought into a cadre of scientists, working to create the first viable merger of human and machine, a cyborg called Yod. Though this entity is created in the male image, the issue of what it means to be human is encapsulated by the pursuit of the feminist ideal of equality. What must one objectify in order to be considered a person, to become a voice to be counted as commensurate to all others in society? This is explored with thorough originality in He, She and It. As Yod’s consciousness grows, his architects realize the immorality of creating a being of human emotion and will, but without inherent freedoms. Malkah, Shira’s astute grandmother and collaborator, echoes prevailing feminist thought in this declaration: "Yod was a mistake…The creation of a conscious being as any kind of tool – supposed to exist only to fill our needs – is a disaster" (412). The metaphor is intensified when compared to the Irish journalist Rebecca West’s thoughts from 1913: "I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat" (www.quotationspage.com). These statements express that all people should embody legitimacy.

There is a sense of timelessness in Shira’s sorrow over having lost her son, which is echoed by a parallel tale of the struggles of the Jews of Prague in 1600. In it, the character Chava has given up her son in order to escape the stifling grasp of her deceased husband’s family. Throughout He, She and It, female characters detach from their children, either by force or through some commitment to a greater purpose. Shira’s mother, Riva, gave her only child to her own mother, Malkah, because her own world was too dangerous for a child to share. The warrior character, Nili, has left her daughter among the race of women that she belongs to, so that she may carry out her mission of connecting them to the world outside. Regardless of the reasons behind their divisions, readers will identify with the enormous sense of grief and longing that accompanies prolonged separation from one’s children.

As partially described above, He, She and It confronts the age-old problem of women having to relinquish something in order to gain something else. The notion that we are not deserving or capable of having everything available to us at once is reinforced. Shira has been a product of her marriage and her corporation, and must learn to redefine herself without them. Riva has traded loving relationships for action, committing her life fully to covert acts of cyber-rebellion, in order to level the playing field between the world’s castes. Her character functions as a modern-day Robin Hood, but to do so she must give up all emotionally supportive attachments. Chava refuses to remarry because she knows that her need for intellectual stimulation will go unmet if she does. When a suitor will not accept that she is refusing his proposal for a reason other than that she loves another, she eventually concedes. As Malkah explains, "…when Chava said there was someone else, the person she had in mind was herself. She is the person she wants at the center of her life" (370). Here the ultimate feminist ideal is embodied, not only in a tale of the future but in one of times far in the past. The concept that we must make hard choices in order to conform to society’s rigid expectations of what women should be is exposed.

As Shira’s battle begins, we instinctively root for this universal female character, because the deck is so heavily stacked against her. She is the underdog and your wish for her to flourish draws you in and compels you to follow her story. Shira encounters internal challenges in addition to outside forces against her. Early on she clearly believes that she is to blame for her misery - that she was not good enough, or wife enough, or employee enough to forge a successful life. As a woman reading her perceived downfalls, I hoped desperately that she would eventually become able to value herself. Piercy stays true to life in her ‘two steps forward, one step back’, realistically flawed characterization of our heroine, but in the end the reader is poignantly satisfied.

Shira’s initial fear of the unknown leads to a regaining of her inherent determination and an eventual empowerment to create her own place in the world. "She found in herself a swelling power…The last role that appealed to her was to be an object…valued for the appearance of a helplessness she had outgrown" (423). Though it describes a future scenario that is foreign to us, readers will relate to He, She and It. Because in this novel, as in our world, we see women struggling to find happiness within the current constraints of society, while simultaneously working to create a place where all people can be considered equal.