What’s Good for the Goose is Good for the Gander
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leisurely sensuous enjoyment that characterizes Piercy’s
world. (Deery 100)
As idealistically appealing as sensuality is, it is rapidly leaving contemporary
American society which every day moves more towards an attitude that the
natural world is dangerous and unsanitary. Against the destroyed natural world
of the ‘"raw” and the overprocessed lifestyle of the Yakamura-Stichen enclave,
Tikva is very appealing, but its appeal is in its romantic, regressive tendencies
and its idealization of the natural world. Gibson’s settings are the more
progressive and revolutionary.
Piercy’s characters’ psychologies and their gender roles are also parts
of the novel that tend towards the traditional. At the novel’s outset, the custody
battle, which Shira loses, conveys a mother’s horror at losing her child to its
father due to divorce. To exacerbate this. Josh is portrayed as a bad, neglectful
father who turns the care of Ari over to a nanny. He, She and It is valorized for
its lack of horror at technological social changes, but it is hidebound when it
comes to domestic scenarios. The other parenting situation in the novel is
equally as conservative. Despite being built as an adult, Yod is essentially the
child in this novel who must be raised and socialized by his creators and sibling.
Predictably, Avram is the distant, domineering father who demands total control
over his biological son and has literally destroyed his previous cyborg sons
because they have failed to live up to his expectations and desires much in the
same way he has psychologically rejected his organic son, Gadi, because he is
too artistic and mercurial. Malkah, as Yod’s mother, sought to make her son
inquisitive, able to learn, able to be socialized, loyal to people, and desirous of
forming personal bonds. Finally, Shira is hired by Avram to socialize Yod—a
beauty to tame the beast.
The resolution of He, She and It also reinforces traditional gender roles
and has gone unnoted by the critics. Yod’s suicide in defense of Tikva is
brimming with masculinity’s standard sacrifice: to die so that others may live. In
effect, this turns him into a classical, tragic hero and is the ultimate way in
which Piercy’s text is fundamentally regressive. Yod has two of the key aspects
of the tragic protagonist. First, he is fatally flawed due to his non-human status
and is ultimately rejected because of it. Second, his death brings catharsis to his
audience, which cannot help but to have fallen in love with him throughout the
course of the novel. His death brings down his enemies and frees his people. He
is Samson bringing down the temple upon the Philistines. He is Hector fighting
outmatched against Achilles at the gates of Troy. Shira is the bereaved widow
who must find a way to carry on in the absence of her fallen hero. There is
nothing wrong with this ending. It is emotionally satisfying for its tragedy.
However, those critics who want to say that Piercy is hacking Gibson or is
otherwise pushing some envelope are off base. Piercy is hacking Homer. She is
hacking Shelley by not allowing the monster to live. The truly revolutionary
ending would have been for Yod to live and for the novel to have finished with
an open ending, much in the same way Atwood’s science fiction does. Even