We will be meeting on Minerva Island at 11am PDT on Sunday, July 20. I have added a discussion group on this site, for those who would like to continue the discussion after we finish.

We will conduct meetings in text chat, unless all members of the group agree otherwise. The format of the reading group is up to the members, but I have provided some reading questions below, and a video from You Tube that makes a thought-provoking contrast to the novel.

Suzette Haydin Elgin has her own page about Native Tongue, here. I have borrowed questions 6, 7. 12, and 16 to start us out, and added a couple of my own.


1. Do you think this novel paints an impossible portrait of gender relations? In other words, do you think the males are painted as monsters?

2. The females in this novel live very restricted lives. How do they cope with this? How do they make their lives more bearable?

3. In the novel, women past childbearing age are sent to live apart from the rest of the community. Is this a punishment?

4. It has been suggested that the tubies (infants conceived in test tubes and nurtured until birth in artificial wombs of some kind) would be exactly like human beings born from human wombs -- except that they would not have souls. What is your opinion about that idea? Do we have enough information about human souls to discuss the question in any rational way? Is it a scientific question or a religious question, or both?

5. What is your opinion about the possibility that women in America could be declared legally minors, as happens in the book? Could that happen? Is it an impossibility? (Consider the situation of women in Afghanistan today; it hasn’t been so long ago that those women were doctors and lawyers and professors.) Could it happen without any need to use force? Would the fact that there are women in the U.S. armed forces make it more difficult? Have you seen anything in the news recently that’s relevant to this question (for example, reports of research claiming that women’s brains are significantly different from men’s)?

6. What do you think is the primary message of Native Tongue?

QUESTIONS ON LANGUAGE

First, watch this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc


7. Susan Squier and Julie Vedder (in the afterword to the new Feminist Press edition of the book) identify three plot strands, which they describe on page 310 as follows: "The primary story follows the development of the woman-language Láadan by the women of the Linguist Lines... A parallel story line traces the U.S. government’s secret attempts to break the linguistic monopoly of the Lines by successfully learning...a non-humanoid alien language. A third narrative strand follows Michaela, a non-linguist, as she attempts to avenge her infant, who was killed in a state experiment to break the language monopoly; instead she finds surprising commonality with the linguist women." Do you agree that the story of the development of Láadan is the "primary" story? If not, which one do you feel is primary? Are there any other major plot strands in the novel besides the three in the quotation?


8. In the novel, the known universe is filled with many different languages, requiring translators and interpreters in order to get anything done. Would it be better to have just one universal language that could be used by everyone, regardless of what their native language might be? If so, how do you suppose the decision would be made as to which language should become the universal one? Would it be better to choose some existing natural language, some existing "artificial" language, or to construct a brand new artificial language for the purpose? How would people learn the universal language? What problems would arise if not everyone using the universal language were human or humanoid? Could there still be just one language, or would there have to be two or more?