The Two of Them

By Joanna Russ and Sarah Le Fanu

A time-traveling heroine vows to rescue a subjugated girl from a fundamentalist society by any means necessary in this “extraordinary novel” (Marge Piercy).
 
Rebelling against her repressive 1950s upbringing in a sexist America, Irene Waskiewicz flees in search of liberation and adventure as a time-and-space-traveling agent of the Trans-Temporal Authority. Her partner is Ernst Neumann—a mentor, father figure, friend, and lover.
 
When the two are assigned to a repressive fundamentalist colony, they meet a twelve-year-old poet whose spirit is being crushed by the harsh restrictions of the society in which she lives. But Irene’s attempt to rescue Zubeydeh doesn’t go as planned—especially when Ernst proves unexpectedly resistant. To follow through on her commitment to the girl, Irene must undertake a drastic course of action—no matter the cost . . .
 
In this fierce and moving speculative science fiction novel of female solidarity, Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author Joanna Russ “digs deep into her anger and comes up with a rich and lively tale” (Ms. Magazine).
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: May 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781504050951

Joanna Russ

Joanna Russ (1937–2011) was a radical feminist writer and academic who became one of the seminal figures of science fiction during the 1960s and ’70s, when women began to make major inroads into what had long been a bastion of male authorship. Her best-known novel, The Female Man, is a powerful mix of humor and anger told from the alternating points of view of four women—genetically identical, but coming from different worlds and vastly different societies. Russ wrote five other novels—including the children’s book Kittatinny—and is renowned for her literary criticism and essays. Her short stories appeared in leading science fiction and fantasy magazines and have been widely anthologized as well as collected into four volumes. She received the Nebula Award for her short story “When It Changed” and a Hugo Award for the novella “Souls.” Russ received a master of fine arts degree from the Yale School of Drama and was a 1974 National Endowment for the Humanities fellow. She was a lecturer at Cornell and other universities and a professor of English at the University of Washington, where she taught from 1984 to 1994. Her scholarly work includes How to Suppress Women’s Writing and To Write Like a Woman, among others. Her papers are collected at the University of Oregon.

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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF JOANNA RUSS

As hard and mean and fine as Flannery O’Connor … I wish that everyone would read Joanna Russ’s books. —Dorothy Allison

Joanna Russ offers a gallery of some of the most interesting female protagonists in current fiction, women who are rarely victims and sometimes even victors, but always engaged sharply and perceptively with their fate. —Marge Piercy

Joanna Russ is one of the pioneers and luminaries of women’s science fiction. —Ms. Magazine

Russ is a master crafter. —The Washington Post Book World

The Female Man

A stunning book, a work to be read with great respect. It’s also screamingly funny. —Elizabeth A. Lynn

A work of frightening power, but it is also a work of great fictional subtlety. … It should appeal to all intelligent people who look for exciting ideation, crackling dialogue, provocative fictional games-playing in their reading. —Toronto Star

We Who Are About To …

An important science fiction novel. —The New York Times Book Review

If this were a film it could be one of Peckinpah’s, violent, self-indulgent, obsessively contemptuous of humanity, nihilistic and fascinating. —Publishers Weekly

Picnic on Paradise

The depth, humanity and craft of this novel are as rich as the situation is stark. —Samuel R. Delany

Splendid! —Theodore Sturgeon

The Two of Them

"Beyond questions of genre or gender, Joanna Russ is one of the best prose writers working in the English language today. The Two of Them is informed throughout by her intelligence, wit and imagination … by her vision of the pertinence and necessity of speculative fiction to feminists." —Marilyn Hacker

Fine science fiction, a challenging sexual polemic, and a wittily, economically constructed novel. —Kirkus Reviews

And Chaos Died

"Many novels have dealt speculatively with psi-phenomena, describing the effects on people and society. Ms. Russ has taken it on herself to put the reader through the experience. She is wholly successful … spectacular." —Samuel R. Delany

A work of awesome originality. —Robert Silverberg

The Two of Them

Joanna Russ

This book is dedicated to Suzette Hayden Elgin, who has generously allowed me to use the characters and setting of her short story, For the Sake of Grace, as a springboard to a very different story of my own.

FOREWORD Sarah LeFanu

In an online appraisal of Joanna Russ’s What Arc We Fighting For?: Sex, Race, Class and the Future of Feminism someone describing herself as ‘a feminist of the 90s’ talks about her frustration at the lack of contemporary writings about the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, and how excited she was to read Russ’s book. It was exactly that sense of excitement that readers felt in the 1970s when we knew Russ primarily as a science fiction writer who was doing extraordinary things with the genre, and when every novel and short story she published illuminated some aspect of women’s experience. Russ hasn’t published a novel since On Strike Against God in 1982, and since then has focussed her energies on non-fiction, with four books on politics, literature and writing.¹ The most recent of those is What Are We Fighting For?, which, as she explains in the introduction, took over ten years to write. For a new generation of readers and students Joanna Russ is now primarily a non-fiction writer. This is why a reissue of her fiction is so important. Will a reader coming for the first time to The Two of Them and Russ’s other novels feel the same kind of excitement that the ‘feminist of the 90s’ felt about What Are We Fighting For? I think the answer is yes, not just because the questions raised by her novels and stories are no closer to being answered now than they were then, but also because of the glorious eclecticism and the narrative innovations of her fiction writing, which seem as bold and exciting and unusual now as they did then.

The Two of Them, the sixth of Russ’s seven novels, came out in 1978, at the end of a ten year period in which she produced not just five novels but a huge number of short stories which were published in a variety of journals and magazines, and which were later gathered in The Adventures of Alyx, The Zanzibar Cat, Extraordinary People and The Hidden Side of the Moon. Those ten years were the years of emerging feminist politics in the United States, Britain and Europe and you can see in Russ’s novels and stories a series of dialogues—interrogative, engaged and sometimes enraged with a world being turned inside out by the women’s liberation movement.

Russ published her first story in 1959,² but it was her creation of Alyx that was a turning point in her career. The first Alyx stories were published, in Orbit 2, in 1967. She describes the change thus: ‘Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.’ Alyx, small and gray-eyed, ‘neat, level-browed and governessy’, is clever, quick-witted, tough and brave, and as well as being a first-class assassin in her own right, is also a prototype for later bold and clever women on other worlds and in other times, such as Jael in The Female Man (published in 1975 but written some six years earlier) and TransTemp agent Irene Waskiewicz in The Two of Them.

Slowly at first in the sixties and then with increasing momentum, all those questions that had been asked by women decades or centuries before, questions asked by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the 1880s, or the British suffragettes in the early 1900s, but that had been written out of history or suppressed in other ways, were being asked again. Why shouldn’t women have equal rights with men? Why shouldn’t they be paid the same rate if they did the same job? How come they never got the top jobs? Who said that women’s place was in the home? Was it really part of women’s essential nature to care for babies? To look after the man? ‘You start by sinking into his arms,’ went one slogan of the early seventies, ‘you end up with your arms in his sink.’ Rallying cries from other revolutionary movements were adapted: ‘Women unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!’

Women got together and talked to each other and read articles and wrote pamphlets and discovered that their personal experiences weren’t private to them alone. For many young middle-class women in the fifties and sixties their only role model was a mother who had sacrificed her own opportunities for motherhood and wifedom, and who then experienced her dissatisfaction not only as something personal and individual but also, more cripplingly, as something that was her own fault. This is the world inhabited by Irene’s mother Rose in The Two of Them, the world of quiet tears and depressions, the world thrown open to women’s hungry gaze by Betty Friedan in her groundbreaking book The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963. Like many clever girls of that era Joanna Russ looked at her own mother and was disturbed by what she saw. In 1975 she wrote: ‘If my mother hadn’t been a Squashed Woman who was guilty at being intelligent, guilty at having gone to graduate school (she always explained effusively how much she hated it—she, who knew the Oxford Book of English Verse by heart), guilty at having a job (the most conventional one for a woman, an elementary school teacher), guilty at being competent at anything—she once told me that men’s egos had to be built up by women, and clearly a woman like herself was a dreadful threat simply by existing—well, if all this hadn’t happened, would I have vowed at age 16 never to be like my mother? (All my friends did the same.)’³ In order never to be like her mother, Irene Waskiewicz demands of Ernst Neumann that he ‘collect’ her and recruit her into the TransTemp agency, thereby taking the radical step of literally removing herself from her mother’s world.

In the emerging women’s liberation movement women were discovering what they had in common, and beginning to articulate their sense of themselves as a group or class that was systematically oppressed by another group or class. Sexual politics, in other words, was a form of class politics. Sexual politics are what inform Joanna Russ’s science fictional worlds, from the parallel universes of The Female Man to the planet of We Who Are About To … which is so many light years from home that there is no hope in hell or heaven of rescue, and to the tunnelled-out rock of Ka’abah in The Two of Them.

Parallel worlds and distant planets: well, you don’t get those in the canon as it’s taught in the academies, or you didn’t then, in the late sixties and seventies. In her reading and her writing, Joanna Russ had already been exploring the wonderful freedoms of genre writing, not just of science fiction and fantasy, but also of ghost stories and horror stories. She recognised how those marginalised forms allow things that there’s no room for in the canon of realist prose. ‘High culture is still dominated by realism—the dominant mode of fiction in the West for roughly the last two centuries,’ she wrote, ‘but surely the paraliterary genres exist to receive and express what can’t easily be contained by realism.’⁴

Ghost stories and horror stories give shape to readers’ real-life ontological anxieties. As Russ says, ‘They validate perceptions that need validating, especially in adolescence—ie, under the bland, forced optimism of American life terrible forces are at work, things are not what they seem, and if you feel lonely, persecuted, a misfit, and in terror, you aren’t crazy. You’re right.’⁵ Ghost and horror stories, science fiction and fantasy, far from being escapist, uncover and express the truth of what is.

Joanna Russ was already playing with the possibilities of genre fiction in the early days of the women’s liberation movement and she recognised, along with other writers, such as Ursula Le Guin, James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon) and Suzy McKee Charnas, who were also working outside the well-lit mainstream in the shadowland of science fiction and fantasy, what great opportunities this kind of fiction offered. Science fiction, Russ has always maintained, changes the reality we live in in order to analyze it.

Looking back at her early essays when they were gathered together in To Write Like a Woman, Russ reflected on the continuity that she could see: ‘If any theme runs through all my work, it is what Adrienne Rich once called re-vision, ie, the re-perceiving of experience, not because our experience is complex or subtle or hard to understand (though it is sometimes all three) but because so much of what’s presented to us as the real world or the way it is is so obviously untrue that a great deal of social energy must be mobilized to hide that gross and ghastly fact. As a theatre critic (whose name I’m afraid I’ve forgotten) once put it, There’s less there than meets the eye. Hence, my love for science fiction, which analyzes reality by changing it.’⁶ The tradition of realist fiction with its omniscient third person narrators and its reliance on a construct of narrative unity does not lend itself to the other worlds and other possibilities of science fiction.

Russ looks back to nineteenth-and twentieth-century ghosts and gothic fictions to nourish her own work. Vampires, ghosts, talking animals and lowlife adventuresses stalk, scamper and swashbuckle their way across the pages of her stories. And she looks to other genre writers.

The Two of Them is dedicated to the science fiction writer and linguist Suzette Haden Elgin, ‘who has generously allowed me,’ writes Russ, ‘to use the characters and setting of her short story, ‘For the Sake of Grace,’ as a springboard to a very different story of my own.’

The setting: a recently-invented, quasi-Islamic society, inside the rock of a barren planet, where men rule and women live in purdah, barred from all public office save that of Poet. Not even one woman in a generation passes the Poetry examinations; the price, for women, for trying and failing, is lifelong solitary incarceration. The characters: a clever, charming, rebellious twelve-year-old girl, called Zubeydeh in The Two of Them, who wants to be a poet; her aunt (in Elgin’s story the Grace of the title; Dunya in The Two of Them) who once upon a time also aspired to be a poet.

While Elgin’s story focusses on the twelve-year-old girl and her success against the odds, Russ takes us on a bleaker journey.⁷ Within The Two of Them is a science fictional version of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ghost story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. Poor mad Dunya creeps slowly round and round the wall, like the woman in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. Irene, rescuing Zubeydeh, leaves Dunya behind and is later haunted by her, by ‘the memory of another voice, the voice of Dunyazad, Shahrazad’s sister, that mad, dead, haunted woman who could not tell stories, who could not save herself.’ It is also, of course, a horror story. Dunya is lonely, persecuted, a misfit, and in terror. Is she crazy? Or was she right?

The novel is also about the Two of Them: the two TransTemp agents Irene Waskiewicz and Ernst Neumann. ‘Here they are’, the novel begins, presenting them to the reader like the first shot in a film: ‘They’re entirely in black, with belted tabards over something like long underwear that make them look like the cards in Alice, though nobody here has heard about that…’

The Two of Them is also a love story. But it is not a romantic comedy, ‘where Ernst would marry Irene in the end.’ The opening scene sets up the differences between them (and between them and the fake holy culture of Ka’abah—this is a novel about differences): their differences in appearance—one dark and one fair, one angular and one stocky, one beaky-nosed and one flat-faced, one old and one young—foreshadow other differences. It is the subtle and sinuous interplay of the differences, melded into what each believes is equality, between the two of them that has formed the very basis of their love for each other. At first their gender difference is treated as comedy. In this woman-hating culture Irene is automatically assumed to be a man, and when they tell their host that one of them is in fact a woman, his response is represented as an amateur theatricality, an overacting to the point of caricature: ‘… he looks between his fingers. It’s true, it’s true! Those great maenads who grow enormous, eat horseflesh, have no breasts, and wear men’s clothes. Where are your children? he shrieks accusingly, throwing his beard up over his eyes.’ But gender difference is no comedy in this novel. For all Ernst’s and Irene’s sophistication and subtlety they have not until now recognised the sexual political nature of their relationship.

This opening scene in the cave of Ala-ed-deen suggests to the reader some of the questions that underpin the narrative: questions about the social construction of history and culture, questions about ideas of authenticity, of naturalness and a natural order, and of the shifting roles in society played by individuals. On this other world and in this other universe we see reflected questions about our world and our cultures and our ways of living.

A ghost story, a horror story, and a love story: it is also a quest story, or a story of self-discovery. Irene ‘collects’ Zubyedeh. She rescues her, or she kidnaps her. It depends on interpretation. The journey back from Ka’abah to the TransTemp Centre is a rite of passage for Irene as she comes to recognise that the risible flummery of Ka’abah with its artifice and theatricality covering a hidden core of punishment and cruelty has its counterpart outside the rock of the planet. She begins to see Ka’abah as a microcosm of the rest of the universe. And perhaps there is no escape, in which case her ‘collecting’ of Zubeydeh, and by extension any other girl, is pointless. But she learns from Zubeydeh, whom she tries to reinvent as Zooby in shorts and t-shirts, about her own repressed desires.

Mother/daughter pairs occur frequently in Joanna Russ’s fiction. Here in The Two of Them there are three generations of women: Zubeydeh the girl-child, Irene, and Irene’s mother Rose, the original ‘friend’ of Ernst. When Irene is faced with Zubeydeh’s sense of loss at being taken from her mother, she is moved to reevaluate her own feelings about the mother she left behind. The shifting roles of mothers and daughters, and older selves with younger girl-selves, are powerfully explored in stories such as ‘The Autobiography of my Mother’ and ‘The Little Dirty Girl’, and in Kittatinny: A Tale of Magic, Russ’s novel for young adults, published the same year as The Two of Them. In Kittatinny the young girl Kit’s encounters with fable and fairytale (which include a