{"id":167860,"date":"2024-06-21T09:56:44","date_gmt":"2024-06-21T13:56:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=167860"},"modified":"2024-06-27T17:55:09","modified_gmt":"2024-06-27T21:55:09","slug":"on-joanna-russ","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/06\/21\/on-joanna-russ\/","title":{"rendered":"On Joanna Russ"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

THOR, Pink Kiss<\/em><\/a>, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Bury Your Gays: the latest tongue-in-cheek name for authors\u2019 tendency to end queer relationships by killing somebody off, or having someone revert to heterosexuality, or introducing something that abruptly ends a queer storyline. The message: queer love is doomed, fated for tragedy. The trope has existed for decades, and although there are plenty of books and movies and television shows now that aren\u2019t<\/span> guilty of it, Bury Your Gays is by no means a thing of the past. In 2016, the death of <\/span>The 100 <\/span><\/i>character Lexa reintroduced Bury Your Gays to a whole new generation and reminded seasoned viewers\u2014who could recall the infamous death of the character Tara Maclay on <\/span>Buffy the Vampire Slayer<\/span><\/i>\u2014that the trope was alive and well. More recently, <\/span>Killing Eve<\/span><\/i>\u2019s series finale reminded viewers yet again.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Joanna Russ (1937\u20132011), who wrote genre-bending feminist fiction throughout the seventies and whose <\/span>The Female Man <\/span><\/i>(1975)<\/span> catapulted her to fame at the height of the women\u2019s movement, agonized over Bury Your Gays. In 1973, Russ was writing <\/span>On Strike Against God <\/span><\/i>(1980), an explicitly lesbian campus novel about feminist self-discovery and coming out. But her head was, in her words, \u201cfull of heterosexual channeling.\u201d She felt constrained\u2014enraged, often\u2014by the limited possibilities for how to write queer life, but she struggled to imagine otherwise. <\/span>\u201cHow can you write about what really hasn\u2019t happened?\u201d Russ appealed to her friend, the poet Marilyn Hacker, as she pondered the relationship between life and literature for people whose identities, desires, and ambitions were erased and denounced by mainstream culture<\/span>. <\/span>Everywhere Russ turned, women (and especially queer women) were doomed: \u201cIt was always (1) failure (2) the love affair which settles everything,\u201d in life and literature alike<\/span>. Russ\u2019s was a quest to examine, deconstruct, and reconstruct the elements of storytelling so that readers with deviant lives and desires might find themselves\u2014their dreams and plights, lusts and fears\u2014plausibly and artfully borne out in fiction<\/span>, and it was a quest she undertook in dialogue with Hacker over the course of many years.<\/span><\/p>\n

The letters<\/a> published today on the <\/span>Paris Review<\/span><\/i>\u2019s website offer a window into Russ and Hacker\u2019s shared, decade-long attempt to wrest language\u2014prose fiction in Russ\u2019s case, poetry in Hacker\u2019s\u2014from the grips of patriarchal convention and to remake it in the service of underwritten lives. This window reveals Russ\u2019s frustration at its most potent: <\/span>On Strike Against God <\/span><\/i>was her first foray as a seasoned author into a genre\u2014realism, or literary fiction\u2014she had enthusiastically abandoned years before. As an adolescent reader of \u201cGreat Literature\u201d in the repressive fifties, Russ had become \u201cconvinced that [she] had no real experiences of life.\u201d Great Literature\u2014not to mention her educators, psychologists, and friends\u2019 parents\u2014told her that, despite the evidence of her eyes and ears, her inner life, and the experiences that shaped it, \u201cweren\u2019t real.\u201d And so she turned to science fiction, <\/span>which concerned itself with the creation and navigation of new worlds, within which gender roles could be either peripheral or malleable or both. She embraced speculative fiction as a \u201cvehicle for social change,\u201d a tool for escaping the \u201cprofound mental darkness\u201d that engulfed her youth. <\/span>On Strike Against God <\/span><\/i>marks Russ\u2019s return to the real world as a subject for fiction, and the real world\u2019s bigotries were there to greet her upon arrival\u2014in life, in fiction, and in her own head.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Russ\u2019s struggles upon returning to \u201crealistic\u201d fiction were not, of course, simple failures of imagination, just as Bury Your Gays isn\u2019t simply a<\/span> failure of individual creativity, nor is it (necessarily) evidence of an individual creator\u2019s homophobic intent. \u201cAuthors do not make their plots up out of thin air,\u201d Russ explains in \u201cWhat Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can\u2019t Write\u201d (1972). They work with familiar, well-worn attitudes, beliefs, expectations, events, and character types\u2014Russ calls them \u201cplot-patterns\u201d\u2014that are already available to them, modeled for them by extant works of art. Like all \u201cplot-patterns,\u201d Bury Your Gays dramatizes what mainstream culture \u201cwould like to be true\u201d and, indeed, what it took pains to enforce <\/span>as <\/span><\/i>true, especially in the early twentieth century. The Motion Picture Production Code\u2014\u201cthe Hays Code\u201d\u2014instated by the Motion Picture Association of America in 1930 and enforced until 1968, threatened all depictions of \u201cperverted\u201d sex acts with censorship\u2014unless, that is, these perverted acts, people, and relationships were shown to suffer consequences. This meant that, to depict gay life and love without fear of censorship, creators had to punish their characters with death, madness, or heterosexuality. The result? Hundreds of works of narrative art\u2014lesbian pulps, gay films\u2014with devastating endings. The message, for decades: homosexuals were bound for lives of loneliness.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But of course, readers like Russ, coming of age in the fifties, sixties, and beyond, weren\u2019t privy to the material bases of these devastating plots; the reality of the Hays Code lurked behind the scenes, regulating what it was possible to imagine, limiting queer viewers\u2019 hopes and dreams for their lives. There were exceptions, of course. Patricia Highsmith\u2019s <\/span>The Price of Salt<\/span><\/i>, published in 1952 and adapted into <\/span>Carol <\/span><\/i>in 2015, was a beacon in the dark. The novel doesn\u2019t end in tragedy, so unusual for its time that it was rumored to be \u201cthe first gay book with a happy ending.\u201d In her 1991 afterword to the novel, Highsmith recalls the gay novel conventions of the late forties and early fifties. \u201cThe homosexual novel then had to have a tragic ending,\u201d she writes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the main characters, if not both, \u2026 had to see the error of his\/her ways, the wretchedness ahead, had to conform in order to\u2014what? Get the book published? \u2026 It was as if youth had to be warned against being attracted to the same sex, as youth now is warned against drugs.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And so readers grew up, became writers, and recycled the trope, entrenching it, increasing its potency, even if they didn\u2019t want to. A teenage Russ in the early fifties didn\u2019t know anything about the Hays Code\u2014she knew only that she couldn\u2019t imagine a future for two women in love. When, in grade school, Russ wrote a story about two lesbians, she followed her imagination\u2014but her imagination couldn\u2019t conjure a happy future for her characters. In fact, it couldn\u2019t conjure any future whatsoever. \u201cI couldn\u2019t imagine anything else for the two of them to do,\u201d she explains, and so she ended the story with suicide.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A seasoned writer by 1973, Russ had identified the problem\u2014the seeming necessity of \u201cfailure\u201d\u00a0 or the heterosexual \u201clove affair that settles everything\u201d\u2014but she struggled to solve it. Before she settled on <\/span>On Strike Against God<\/span><\/i>\u2019s final, published ending, which she characterized as \u201can appeal to the future,\u201d she cycled through frustrating alternatives, drawn ceaselessly back to the old, dire clich\u00e9s. \u201cThe pressure of the endings I didn\u2019t write\u2014the suicide, the reconciliation, the forgetting of feminist issues\u2014kept trying to push me off my seat as I wrote,\u201d she confessed to Hacker. She wouldn\u2019t kill off her lesbian protagonists like she did so many decades before\u2014that much she knew\u2014and she wouldn\u2019t concede to heterosexuality, but what was there to do instead? \u201cWe interpret our own experience in terms of [literature\u2019s] myths,\u201d Russ wrote, reflecting on these difficulties. \u201cMake something unspeakable and you make it unthinkable.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Straining for alternatives, Russ even tried murder on for size: she\u2019d end <\/span>On Strike Against God<\/span><\/i> not with suicide but by having her protagonist kill \u201cyou,\u201d the novel\u2019s presumed-male reader, the object of Russ and her characters\u2019 ire. Hacker, thankfully, objected to these earlier, unpublished endings. Murder, she pointed out\u2014and killing men, especially\u2014wasn\u2019t an improvement on \u201cfailure\u201d or the panacean love affair. <\/span>In her letter to Russ, Hacker noted that these earlier endings capitulated to the same tropes Russ was trying to avoid. \u201cWhy are [the last pages] addressed to <\/span>men<\/span><\/i>[?]\u201d Hacker asked. \u201cI wanted this one to be for us, women.\u201d \u201cI can see,\u201d she continued, \u201cthat the book must end on a note of challenge \u2026 but there is still the implication that The Man is still so important that even <\/span>this <\/span><\/i>book, even in defiance, in hatred, in challenge, is addressed to <\/span>him<\/span><\/i>, that the person you see reading it is not a woman or a girl thinking here is something at last, but a <\/span>man <\/span><\/i>being Affronted.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On Strike Against God <\/span><\/i>was Russ\u2019s attempt to speak the unspeakable and think the unthinkable, and she couldn\u2019t do it alone. <\/span>At Hacker\u2019s urging, Russ decided instead on an ending that <\/span>said, instead, \u201cthis is the beginning,\u201d in which she addressed her readers directly, rallied and appealed to them, urged them to read, write, and live into reality that hopeful future that \u201creally [hadn\u2019t] happened\u201d yet\u2014urged them to do, in short, what Hacker and Russ were struggling to do themselves, in conversation with one another. If past and present models weren\u2019t up to snuff\u2014if neither \u201cGreat Literature\u201d nor lesbian pulps were adequate for depicting, in fiction, queer life and desire\u2014Russ would enlist her readers in \u201can appeal to the future,\u201d positioning her novel as a jumping-off point for an as-of-yet unthought and unspoken world of possibility\u2014as, in her words, \u201ca kind of prayer.\u201d Any meaningful, future-oriented appeal for change, in life or in literature, must involve other people, Russ concluded, and she told her readers so.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Alec Pollak is a writer, academic, and organizer. She is the winner of the 2023 Hazel Rowley Prize and the 2018 Ursula Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship for her work on a biography of Joanna Russ. Her writing appears in <\/em>The Los Angeles Review of Books, <\/em>The Yale Review, and various academic publications. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of literatures in English at Cornell University.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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