M.G. Lord has a great piece in today’s NY Times on “Heinlein’s Female Troubles.” She really manages, as so few critics do, to hit the core elements of his complexity. Heinlein was in some ways, for his time, a terrifically progressive, even feminist, writer and thinker. But at the same time, his competent, intelligent, female characters (even the Empress of 20 Universes) enjoy being treated as naughty children by stronger, more competent, men.
Heinlein’s body of work as a whole, throughout his career and including the juveniles and the flimsy, solipsistic mishmash in which he so often indulged at the end, give some psychological insight into a complex man, a complex American, from a complex time in American culture and history. The celebration of competence and masculine and ability…the nostalgic longing for small-town life…the idealization of mothers, daughters, and sisters (to the point of complicated and literally or figuratively incestuous scenarios)…the firm libertarianism and the sexual libertinism…it all adds up to a complicated novelist–and thus a damn good one, even at his worst.
It’s rare (and valuable) to see such an intelligent and accurate analysis of Heinlein (or any SF author of his era) in the NY Times. Nice work, Ms. Lord!
Thanks for pointing me to this, Joe; I never would have caught it otherwise.
Ah, I remember Heinlein from my late elementary school days. I really enjoyed his young adult fiction, but I never really noticed the feminist aspect of it. Then again, by that time (1974-75), at least in the environment I was in, there was no doubt that we girls could go on to become engineers, scientists, etc. The reality turned out of course to be a little more complex, but people paid lip-service at least to the notion of equality.
When I was older I read his other stuff, but it didn’t do much for me. I kinda liked Stranger in a Strange Land but then, Lazarus Long – I found all that group sex stuff more yucky than liberating, the way it was portrayed. Not that I have anything against group sex, mind you, it was the lasciviousness of it, as M.G. Lord says, that was the turn-off.