Joanna Russ, Part One of The Female Man
1. In her article "What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can’t Write," Joanna Russ suggests that one strategy for exposing the gendered nature of conventional narrative plots is to imagine reversing the gender of the protagonist, for example: "A young girl in Minnesota finds her womanhood by killing a bear," or "A young man who unwisely puts success in business before his personal fulfillment loses his masculinity and ends up as a neurotic, lonely eunuch." What are the ways in which the first section (and the other sections in which Janet speaks of her life in Whileaway) of The Female Man similarly reverses or thwarts the reader’s assumptions about gender? How is this connected to the MC’s need to clarify his statement in section VII that "there have been no men on Whileaway for at least eight centuries--I don’t mean no human beings, of course, but no men . . ." and to Janet’s sardonic correction in section XV, "Evason is not ‘son’ but ‘daughter.’ This is your translation"?
2. Section VI is devoted to the explication of a theory known among present-day physicists as the "many worlds interpretation" or the "parallel universes theory." How does this relate to the narrative structure of this chapter? Where in the plot do the "presents" of the three female protagonists intersect? Although the novel is set in 1969, there are indications that Jeannine’s 1969 is not as we knew (and know) it. What are those indications, and what do they suggest about the course of history since 1936 (when Herr Shicklgruber died) in Jeannine’s time line?
3. The three "J"s--Janet, Jeannine, and Joanna--in this first chapter of The Female Man are all identical genotypes (like clones), but they are very different women. How are Janet and Jeannine different, and what could account for those differences? From what sort of "present" might Joanna come?