Since for that day we had also read “No Woman Born,” by C.L. Moore, one of the few women publishing regularly in the 40s-50s era sf magazines, a story about a woman whose brain is installed in a metal body, I had made some flippant comment at the beginning of class about it being “gender day.” The student reporting on “TCE” referred back to that comment in the course of his disparaging comments about possible feminist readings.
No doubt I will be lambasted in the student evaluation forms for being “too feministic.” This is (most of) the follow-up email I sent to the class:
Our discussion of “The Cold Equations” brought up a number of important points about the process of literary interpretation. That the story is about the laws of nature as immutable seems fairly clear. The point is explicitly and repeatedly made in the text: we read of “law not of men’s choosing” (293) “physical law” (303, twice), “the laws of nature” (305, twice), “laws that knew neither hatred nor compassion” (306) “a law that . . . was incapable of sympathy” (307) “forces that killed with neither hatred nor malice” (313), and so on. Any reading that did not acknowledge that this is the central thesis of the story would be seriously flawed by missing something that isexplicitly stated, and clearly central to the narrative.
On the other hand, any reading that stopped with this point would be awfully thin (or superficial, depending on which direction you like to take your spatial metaphors). That the stowaway is a girl—-both female and young (and pretty)-- is also repeatedly stressed in the story. Pilot Barton’s discovery that “It was a girl” gets its own paragraph (295). She wears “perfume” (295) and “lipstick” (299), and is skilled in the traditionally feminine arts of cooking, sewing, and “nursing” (297). “Pretty girls” (303) are not jettisoned on earth, but Marilyn is subject to a “law that recognized neither innocence nor youth nor beauty” (307)—so we know by inference that she has all three of those useless qualities. Not only is her gender important, but so too is her youth. She’s compared to a “pup” (295) anddescribed as a “kid” (298) and a “child” (300), and, more pathetically, a “lonely little child” (307) and “small and limp like a little rag doll”(299)—a comparison marked by its association with both youth and femininity (since, stereotypically, it’s girls who play with dolls).
These characteristics are presented as significant to the pilot’s emotional response to the situation, and (since the pilot is the character through whom the narrative is focalized, the central consciousness through whose perceptions the narrative proceeds), therefore central to the emotional or rhetorical effect of the story for the reader. We’re told that “had the stowaway been a man,” it would all have been over in a few minutes (295), and that the pilot will “fear” the “nights” when the girl “would come in his dreams to die again” (307).
From this point the possibilities for interpretation get more interesting, because more complex. One could take the observations about the gender and youth of the stowaway as part of an explanation of how the story works to set up its argument—that is, for instance, by playing on readers’ (conventional) expectations that girls are most deserving of protection.
A further twist might be to engage in what’s sometimes called a“hermeneutics of suspicion,” which critic and theorist Jonathan Culler describes as seeking “to expose the unexamined assumptions on which a text may rely” and valuing a text for the ways “it helps us to rethink issuesof moment today” (Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction,Oxford: Oxford U P, 1997, 68).
One version of this would be the argument that the frontier is representedas masculine territory. We read of “men scattered wide across the frontier” (293); the laws of the space frontier are “hard and relentless”(296). While one might suggest that the “men of the frontier” (306, twice) are “men” in the generic sense of “humans,” there is no evidence that there are women on the frontier (the exploration parties on Woden are evidently all male).
Although presumably there are males on earth and the colonies, who might be as ignorant of frontier life as Marilyn is, that wouldn’t necessarily contradict the reading of the frontier as masculine, since cultural conventions often suggest some men are more masculine than others—one might think of the western genre’s opposition between the gunslinger and the citified dandy, or, for those of you who’ve read Regeneration in World Views, perhaps the hostility felt by Sassoon for the elderly civilian gents he encounters. It may be notable that the only male earth resident specifically mentioned in the story is Marilyn and Gerry’s father, a shopkeeper presumably well past the age of the “men of the frontier.” It might also be relevant that Woden is the Norse god of war.
Another possible move would be that of considering the legal or regulatory context in which the story places the physical laws it highlights. That is, for instance, one might raise the question of why it isn’t standard procedure for the EDS pilot to look in the closet before taking off. The relevant “issue of moment today” in that framework would be the conceptual slippage whereby contingent effects appear to be inevitable, and the ways such slippage can justify a status quo (in the story, perhaps the masculinity and political order of the frontier—since stowaways both ignorant and outlaw will be jettisoned).
Anyway, my point here isn’t that any of these interpretations is the Right One, but that stronger interpretations will take account of more textual details, and provide explanations that go beyond the obvious. Culler suggests that, often, part of the process of interpretation is what he calls “playing the ‘about’ game: ‘so, what is this work really about?’” He notes that
This question is not prompted by the obscurity of a text; it is even more appropriate for simple texts than for wickedly complex ones. In this game the answer must meet certain conditions: it cannot be obvious, for instance, it must be speculative. To say ‘Hamlet is about a prince in Denmark’ is to refuse to play the game. But ‘Hamlet is about the breakdown of the Elizabethan world order,’ or ‘Hamlet is about men’s fear of feminine sexuality,’ or ‘Hamlet is about the unreliability of signs’ count as possible answers. (Literary Theory, 64)
