Customer Reviews

The Moon's Wife: A Hystery

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I bought this book in an airport during my jetsetting late girlhood, after having read Radix, Mindarc, and The Last Legends of Earth, Attanasio's cosmic masterpieces that the word epic is too small to describe. So this book was surprising; it's more like a Marion Zimmer Bradley, secretary-wish-fulfillment, Harlequin kind of thing. Normal woman's life transformed, fated love, blah blah. But it contained enough Attanasio tropes to keep me interested: the imperceivable distinction between vision and madness, the erasure of the boundaries between magic and biochemistry; and I'm a chick, I have your regular Prince Charming fantasies, so I liked it okay.

But there was something naggingly odd about the book, so I reread it, and reread it again, and although I couldn't quite believe it, I found that I was reading it as an allegory about feminism and the position of woman in a technologically advanced society. Put very baldly, the crisis of the book concerns a choice which the protaganist must make between a group of characters who can be read to represent irrationality, religion, belief in instinct, and another group representing science and reason. The disasterous choice which she makes is the same choice that popular feminism has made - not the feminism of the academy, but the woman-centered life of regular ladies who get up and go to work everyday.

Now I tend to overanalyze, but what makes me think that Attanasio is indeed playing this kind of game is that the novel makes very explicit the economic subtext of the Harlequin. That is, the entrance of the man into a Harlequin protaganist's life means that she can stop working. The dreary life from which she is liberated is the world in which she is subordinated to an office routine. The grayness and dreariness of office work - work in general - is here treated as no other genre author except Tanith Lee does. The entrance of mystery and magic is directly linked to the release from the protaganist's job. Tanith Lee is, of course, also playing with the conventions of the Harlequin.

Even if Attanasio didn't mean all this, by trusting the tale I found myself a work by a man that says something profoundly novel about how ordinary women encounter feminism.