Marion Zimmer Bradley said that her interest in telling women's side of the story in her books was not feminism, but an attempt to "hear more about the human realities" behind a well-known story.
However, her writing changed focus in the 1970s, when the rest of the world became aware of feminism, and it is this writing in particular that has inspired many science fiction and fantasy authors and fans who are avowedly "feminist."
Did Bradley change the world of SF by writing the feminist tracts she'd always wanted to create, or did she follow the market and write what she thought would sell?
I don't think she set out to transform the world, but she was certainly no follower. She had always held the views that show up in her so-called feminist novels, making them more explicit over time.
The very first
Darkover novel, Planet Savers, includes a Free Amazon as one of its secondary characters. Bradley wanted to write a novel about the Free Amazons for years, but it wasn't until The Shattered Chain in 1976 that her publisher was willing to try a novel with a female protagonist. Even then, the fact that the SF audience (or at least the vocal portion of it) was still mostly male kept him from being too enthusiastic.
The book sold just fine.
Freedom knows no gender
When she finished The Shattered Chain, Bradley discovered that instead of the straightforward adventure story she had intended to write, the book "wasn't really about the Free Amazons at all; it was about freedom in general."
Indeed, the book's major theme is the consequences of the choices the characters make, including the choice to be free. It's a theme that crops up in much of Bradley's writing -- as critic Susan Schwartz has commented, "for every woman who 'ups and leaves' her responsibilities, there remain burdens that other people must shoulder."
This hardly sounds like feminist polemic, and some might even call it an argument against "women's liberation." However, Bradley, who hated the romances and astrology articles she wrote to feed her young children,
knew plenty about the responsibilities and the loss of freedom that women experience when they have families.
She couldn't imagine why anyone thought the Free Amazons lived in a feminist paradise -- after all, they were on patriarchal Darkover. Moreover, radical feminists raged against The Shattered Chain because the heroine dared to fall in love with a man in the last chapter of the book.
Bradley didn't see fantasy as a way of fighting battles to prove women's worth. The essence of her so-called feminism is that she always wrote about the world the way she thought it really was.
"Any attempt to put politics into fiction should be treated with the utmost contempt -- not to mention the editor's ultimate weapon, the rejection slip," she said. "On the other hand, if you write with conviction and honesty, your views will be clear enough."
Bradley's views were always clear in her writing, where she allowed female characters to do whatever they had to do. She felt that "anything is women's (or, for that matter, men's) work if they are strong enough for it and want to do it. I sometimes thank heaven that I was not made to climb utility poles, but if women want to, why they shouldn't is a mystery to me."
Remembering Darkover's Queen
About Darkover
About The Mists of Avalon
Humble beginnings
Cultivating the future
Bibliography
advertisement
