BOOKS
BY
URSUL A
K.
LE
GU IN
NOVELS
Always Coming Home
The Eye of the Heron
The Beginning Place
Malafrena
Very Far Away from Anywhere Else
The Word for World Is Forest
The Dispossessed
The Lathe of Heaven
The FarthestShore
The Tombs of Atuan
A Wizard of Earthsea
The Left Hand of Darkness
City of Illusions
Planetof Exile
Rocannon'sWorld
SHORT STORIES
Buffalo Gals and Other Animal presences
The CompassRose
Orsinian Tales
The Wind's Twelve Quarters
DANCING
AT THE
fn/-f
LIJUT,
OF THE
VORLD
THOUCHTSON VORDS VOMEN PLACES
FOR CHILDREN
Catwings
Solomon Leviathan's 93lst Trip Around the World
A Visit from Dr. Katz
LeeseWebster
[Jrsula K. Le Gurn
POETRY AND CRITICISM
Wild
Oats and Fireweed
Hard Words
The Language of the Night
From Elfland to Poughkeepsie
Wild Angels
\b
T
GROVE
PRESS
New York
Copyright O 1989 by Ursula K. Le Guin
CONTENTS
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,or
transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical,electronic,
photocopying, iecording or otherwise, without prior permission
of the publisher.
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
The name Grove Pressand the colophon printed on the title page and the oumide
of this book are trademarks registered in the u.S. patent and riademark office
and in other countrres.
vll
TALKS AND ESSAYS
ry76 The SpaceCrone e o
Is Gender Necessary?
Redux tr 9
Published by Grove Press
a division of Wheatland Corporation
841 Broadway
New York, N.y. 10003
rg78 "Moral and Ethical Implicationsof Family
Planning" o e
rg?g It Wasa Dark and Stormy Night I
Working on "The Lathe" tr
Library of CongressCataloging-in-publication Data
Le Guin, Ursula K., 1929Dancing at the edge of the world: thoughts on words, women, places/
by Ursula K. Le Guin.
cm.
P.
rsBN 0-8021-l105-x
I. Tide.
PS3562.E42D36 1988
814'.54-dc 19
88-11266
CIP
rg8o SomeThoughts on Narrative !
rg8r
World-Making n
Hunger +
PlacesNames -+
r98z The Princess O I
A Non-Euclidean View of California as a
Cold Placeto Be !
Facing
It -+ o
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Designed by lrving perkins Associates
Manufactured in the United Statesof America
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
First Edition 1989
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rg83 ReciprocityofProse and Poetry !
A Left-Handed CommencementAddress 90
Along the Platte -+
Lo4
rg84 Whose Lathe? I o
The Woman Without Answers !
The SecondReport of the Shipwrecked
Foreigner to the Kadanh of Derb o
123
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rg85 Room 9, Car L4Zo -)
Theodora D
ScienceFiction and the Future tr o
The Only Good Author? n
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130
Y
r60
URSUL A
K.
L E GUIN
women speak truly they speak subversively-they can't help it: if
you're underneath, if you're kept down, you break out, you subvert.
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our
truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountatns.
That's what I want-to hear you erupting. You young Mount St.
Helenses who don't know the power in you-I want to hear you. I
want to Iisten to you talking to each other and to us all: whether
you're writing an article or a poem or a letter or teaching a classor
talking with friends or reading a novel or making a speech or
proposing a law or giving ajudgment or singing the baby to sleep or
discussing the fate of nations, I want to hear you. Speak with a
woman's tongue. Come out and tell us what time of night it is! Don't
let us sink back into silence. If we don't tell our truth, who will?
Who'll speak for my children, and yours?
So I end with the end of a poem by Linda Hogan of the Chickasaw people, called "The Women Speaking."5
Daughters, the women are speaking.
They arrive
over the wise distances
on perfect feet.
Daughters, I love you.
Notes
l. Sojourner Tr uth, in TheN ortonAnthnlog of LiteraturebyWomen,ed. Sandra M.
Gilbert and SusanGubar (New York: W W Norron & Co., 198b),pp. 255-56.
2. Joy Harjo, "The Blanket Around Her," in That'sWhat SheSaid: Contemporary
Poetrl and Fietion byNatiueArnericanWomen,ed. Rayna Green (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1984),p. 127.
3. Denise Levertov, "Stepping Westward," in NortonAnthalogl,p. 1951.
4. Wendy Rose, "The Parts of a Poet," in That'sWhat SheSaid,,p.204.
5. Linda Hogan, "The Women Speaking,"in ibid., p. 172.
VOMAN /WILDERNF,SS
( r 986)
In.June of 1985, Gary Snyderinaited m,eto come talk to his class in
Wilderness at the [Jniaersity of Calzfornia at Dads. I told, him I uould
say a little about uoman and wild,ernessand read somepoetry, mostly
fro- rry book AlwaysComing Home. What follows is what I said before
getti.ng into the read,ing. Highly tend,entiou, it was meant to, and did,
f r ouohe lia eh discussion.
Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Masteq all the rest is Otheroutside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I
exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what
matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women and the wilderness, to be used as I see fit.
To this, Civilized Woman, in the voice of Susan Griffin, replies as
follows:
We say there is no way to see his dying as separate from her
living, or what he had done to her; or what part of her he had
used. We say if you change the course of this river you change
the shape of the whole place. And we say that what she did then
could not be separated from what she held sacred in herself,
what she had felt when he did that to her, what we hold sacred to
ourselves, what we feel we could not go on without, and we say if
this river leaves this place, nothing will grow and the mountain
will crumble away, and we say what he did to her could not be
separated from the way that he looked at her; and what he felt
was right to do to her, and what they do to us, we say,shapes how
they see us. That once the trees are cut down, the water will wash
the mountain away and the river be heavy with mud, and there
rOr
rO2
U R S U L A K . L E GU IN
will be a flood. And we saythat what he did to her he did to all of
us. And that one fact cannot be separated from another. And
had he seen more clearly, we say,he might have predicted his
own death. How if the trees grew on that hillside there would be
no flood. And you cannot divert this river. We saylook how the
water flows from this place and returns as rainfall, everything
returns, we say,and one thing follows another, there are limits,
we say,on what can be done and everything moves.We are all a
part of this motion, we say,and the wayof the river is sacred,and
this grove of trees is sacred, and we ourselves,we tell you, are
sacred.l
What is happening here is that the wilderness is answering. This
has never happened before. We who live at this time are hearing
news that has never been heard before. A new thing is happening.
Daughters, the women are speaking.
They arrive
over the wise distances
on perfect feet.
The women are speaking: so says Linda Hogan of the Chickasaw
people.2 The women are speaking. Those who were identified as
having nothing to say, as sweet silence or monkey-chatterers, those
who were identified with Nature , which listens, as against Man, who
speaks-those people are speaking. They speak for themselvesand
for the other people, the animals, the trees, the rivers, the rocks.
And what they say is: We are sacred.
Listen: they do not say,"Nature is sacred." Because they distrust
that word, Nature. Nature as not including humanity, Nature as
what is not human, that Nature is a construct made by Man, not a
real thing; just as most of what Man saysand knows about women is
mere myth and construct. Where I live as woman is to men a
wilderness. But to me it is home.
The anthropologists Shirley and Edwin Ardener, talking about
an African village culture, made a useful and interesting mental
shape. They laid down two circles largely but not completely overIapping, so that the center of the figure is the tall oval of interlap,
and on each side of it are facing crescents of non-overlap. One of the
two circles is the Dominant element of the culture, that is, Men. The
other is the Muted element of the culture, that is, Women. As Elaine
Showalter explains the figure, 'All of male consciousnessis within
the circle of the Dominant structure and thus accessibleto or struc-
W OMA N /W ILD E R N E S S
r 63
tured by language." Both the crescent that belongs to men only and
the crescent that belongs to women only, outside the shared, central,
civilized area of overlap, may be called "the wilderness." The men's
wilderness is real; it is where men can go hunting and exploring and
having all-male adventures, away from the village, the shared center, and it is accessibleto and structured by language. "In terms of
cultural anthropology, women know what the male crescent is like,
even if they have never seen it, because it becomes the subject of
Iegend. . . . But men do not know what is in the wild,"3 that is, the
no-man's-land, the crescent that belongs to the Muted group, the
silent group, the group within the culture that is not spoken,whose
experience is not considered to be part of human experience, that
is, the women.
Men live their whole lives within the Dominant area. When they
go off hunting bears, they come back with bear stories, and these
ire listened toby all, they become the history or the mythology of
that culture. So the men's "wilderness" becomes Nature, considered
as the property of Man.
But the experience of women as women, their experience unshared with men, that experience is the wilderness or the wildness
that is utterly other-that is in fact, to Man, unnatural. That is what
civilization has left out, what culture excludes, what the Dominants
found, and violent. The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our
civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of
what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share:
that wild country, the being of women'
All we can do is try to speak it, try to say it, try to saveit. Look, we
say,this land is where your mother lived and where your daughter
will live. This is your sister'scountry. You lived there as a child, boy
or girl, you lived there-have you forgotten? All children are wild'
You lived in the wild countrv. Why are you afraid of it?
164
URSUL A
K.
L E GUIN
Notes
l. Susan Griffi n, Woman and,Nartare (New York: Harper & Row, Colophon Books,
1978),
p. 186.
2. Linda Hogan,"The WomenSpeaking,"in That'sWhatSheSaid:Contem.porary
Poetryand,Fiction byNatiueAmericanWomen,ed. Rayna Green (Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress,1984),p. 172.
3. Elaine Showalter,"Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," in TheNeu Feminist
Criticistn,ed. Elaine Showalter(New York: Pantheon Books, 1985),p. 262. Seealso
Shirley Ardener, ed., PerceiaingWomen(New York: Halsted Press,1978).
BAGTHEOry
THECARRIER
OFFICTION
( r 986)
somebody else's field after agriculture was invented, much less hard
than paid workers since civilization was invented' The average prehistoiic person could make a nice living in about a fifteen-hour
work week.
Fifteen hours a week for subsistence leaves a lot of time for other
things. So much time that maybe the restless ones who didn't have a
baby"around to enliven their life, or skill in making or cooking or
singing, or very interesting thoughts to think, decided to slope off
urrJ hrrrrt mammoths. The skillful hunters then would come staggering back with a load of meat, a lot of ivory, and a story' It wasn't
the miat that made the difference. It was the story'
It is hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat
seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then
another. and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and
Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink
r b5