factory worker in Orgoreyn, as a daring rescuer of Genly Ai from prison, and as an adventurer crossing the Gobrin Ice in a death-defying journey, Estraven evokes the masculine ideal. He's a modern-day action figure, a latter-day James Bond, an early-twentieth-century Hemingway code hero. He's never seen with a child or tidying up a hearth. And if this isn't enough, the protagonist, Genly Ai, is another "he."

Although it seems "she" would be as ineffective as "he," in fact, "she" would better describe the creature that appears to have sprung whole from Le Guin's fertile imagination. According to Le Guin, the androgyne of Gethen has a 26-to 28-day cycle, paralleling a woman's cycle. Kemmer, or estrus, begins on the twenty-first day, and the sexual role of male or female is determined by hormonal dominance in one partner, which determines the opposite role in the other partner. Still, an androgyne has an equal chance of becoming a mother or a father. Nevertheless, when the androgyne becomes a mother, that role is extended by pregnancy and lactation; therefore, an androgyne spends more time as a female than a male. Also, the mother's line of descent prevails. Finally, Estraven sounds close enough to the female hormone estrogen to subliminally suggest his feminine side. But even if "she" presents a better case than "he," neither pronoun describes the androgyne.

The pronoun "it" is used for inanimate objects or animate ones whose sex is not known or apparent. "It" would certainly be appropriate for an androgyne, especially the ones in The Left Hand of Darkness where sex is an issue for only one-fifth of their lives. Considering that sleep takes up one third of a human life, one fifth seems a short time. Yet the implication of "it" denotes a lack of personhood and suggests the androgynes are relegated to the position of beasts. "They," on the other hand, a non-specific sex pronoun, could well describe this group, but not in the singular. Le Guin explains in her essay, "Is Gender Necessary? Redux," that until the sixteenth century "they" was the singular and is still used that way colloquially. However, this choice would have been more confusing than illuminating.

Nevertheless, Estraven's uniqueness should be able to shine through. His personality and character do, but any references to sexual characteristics are supplied by Ai, whose "eye" is clouded by bias. This leads to another pronoun, the point of view pronoun in this novel, "I." Aside from the chapters supplying cultural information, most of the novel is narrated in the first person and most of the time that first person is Ai. He approaches Estraven as a man approaches a man, and whenever Estraven acts in what Ai considers a stereotypically feminine way, Ai criticizes him. This perspective characterizes Ai quite well: a man defensive of his knowledge based on human sexuality; prejudiced against the unknown but, nevertheless, knowable androgyne; and unperceptive in general, partially due to the Karhide custom of shifgrethor or face saving. Possibly, too, since an androgyne also means an effeminate man, Ai's perspective is justified, although this doesn't speak well for Terra (Earth). Estraven doesn't clarify matters when he becomes narrator, but then he has no need to explain himself.

Perhaps the most disappointing section of the novel occurs when Estraven enters Kemmer (as a female naturally). Both Ai and Estraven in their separate accounts merely mention they chose not to have a sexual relationship. Their use of the past tense means Kemmer is over and the chance has passed. Ai further says he had a revelation of Estraven as a complete person after seeing "him" as a female. But this doesn't explain Estraven. Somehow, the core issue of single versus dual sexuality is missing. If Kemmer is as intense as it's been described, and these two beings love each other as friends and respect each other for their similar goals, and trust each other with their lives, wouldn't the temptation to consummate their feelings be seen as the most passionate struggle of their lives? Or has Estraven's brother Arek intervened as he had in mindspeak? But then, if Estraven so closely identifies the voice of Ai with Arek, wouldn't his passion be doubled? On the other hand, maybe Ai has an extremely low sex drive. Never does he long for a woman nor explain his own sexual needs. The first woman he sees walking off the spaceship seems strange to him. But speculation aside, the real reason a more explicit scene seems necessary is that Ai tells the reader he understands Estraven through his androgyny, but that is all the reader is told. The reader is shown nothing. Despite the clever argument that this scene is left to the reader's imagination, so that the complaining reader risks being called unimaginative, wouldn't it be better if the author presented it? The author—who's made up the alien elements and who's drawn such an important conclusion from them? If this scene had been fleshed out, Ai would never again use "he" for Estraven. On the other hand, Estraven's femininity, felt by a man who's never known anything but his own masculinity, might have been so unforgettably intense that "she" would have been the perfect description of Ai's evolving understanding of androgyny. Another possibility is Ai inventing a pronoun because of his experience. "He" remains an impediment and any new ideas Le Guin might have found by facing the scene are lost forever. The scene is left out, and the reader is left on the right hand of light.

Still, many a great novel has minor flaws. The weak integration of androgyny to the plot doesn't weaken Le Guin's creative concept of androgyny; the pronoun choice doesn't take away from Le Guin's great courage in writing a feminist-rooted novel for her overwhelmingly male audience; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has one line devoted to the famous professor bringing his creature to life—a scene that dominates every movie on the subject—and her book has been in publication for more than one hundred years. Besides, Ursula Le Guin's masterpiece has lifted the standard in the world of science fiction and left all of literature the chill of a wintry planet, the warmth of a beautifully evolved but tragic friendship, and the taunt of an androgyne's tantalizing sex life.

Source: Chloe Bolan, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1999.
Bolan is an English instructor, playwright, essayist and fiction writer, who has published science fiction.

Much of the impact of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) results from the fact that the novel is an exploration of the concept of the dichotomous/androgynous one on three time levels: future, present, and past. First and most obviously, it is future directed, presenting a possible androgynous world on the planet Winter. Second, it is rooted in the present. As Le Guin affirms in her introduction to the Ace edition, the purpose of her science fiction is descriptive, not predictive: "I'm merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of the day ... we already are [androgynous]." Third, The Left Hand of Darkness is directed to the past. In her exploration of androgyny, Le Guin examines a subject whose origins are buried deep in our mythic past....

The very origins of the word, lying in our past, in ancient Greece suggest a beginning definition. Androgyny is a combination of andro meaning male and gyn meaning female. It suggests by its form a blending in which human characteristics of males and females are not rigidly assigned. One might simply assert then that the androgyne is the dichotomous one, incorporating male and female psychological duality in one physical entity. There are, though, more complex ideas currently associated with the word. Androgyny is an affirmation that humanity should reject all forms of sexual polarization, emerge from the prison of gender into a world in which individual behavior can and is freely chosen....

In practical terms, then, the theory of androgyny affirms that we should develop a mature sexuality in which an open system of all possible behavior is accepted, the temperament of the individual and the surrounding circumstances being the determining factors, rather than gender....

The preceding interpretation of androgyny in the present is certainly part of what concerns Le Guin. However, her presentation of the androgynous beings in The Left Hand of Darkness also encompasses the original archetypes. These archetypes express the underlying human conviction that man had once experienced a unity that is now denied by the basic division into male and female. Any review of the creation myths reveals an astounding number of androgynous situations.... Some of the more obvious examples are briefly referred to here. Consider that the Bible includes two versions of creation. In Genesis I, it is an androgynous God who creates both man and woman in his image. In the second version in Genesis, it is the hermaphroditic Adam who produces Eve from his side....

Similarly, this concept of the paradoxical, split yet unified, male and female principle is found in Chinese mythology. This traditional belief is embodied in the I Ching or Book of Changes dated sometime between 2000 to 1300 B.C. Here the supreme ultimate generates the primary forms, the Yin and the Yang. All nature then consists of a perpetual interplay between this primordial pair. They are Yang and Yin, heat and cold, fire and water, active and passive, masculine and feminine....

According to the perceptions of many writers, we are, indeed, male and female. This recognition of androgyny as our ideal is buried in our mythology, in our literature, in our subconscious, and in our cells. Ursula Le Guin draws upon this past tradition of the mythic and literary androgyne and her recognition of the androgynous behavior in our present society when she writes her future-based novel, The Left Hand of Darkness.

Le Guin is aware how difficult her readers will find acceptance of the androgynous principle. To make explicit the need for such a non-Western interpretation of experience, she first establishes the movement from duality to unity on all levels of Genly Ai's experience, then depicts his increasing sensitivity to the peripheral ambiguities of truth that contradict the central facts.

We begin with duality into unity in terms of imagery, setting, characters, action, and philosophy. Traditionally, the right side has been associated with light representing knowledge, rationality, and the male principle; the left with darkness, ignorance, and the female principle. In The Left Hand of Darkness the initial description of the setting immediately establishes this light/dark, left/right polarity. The novel opens with "Rain clouds over dark towers ... a dark storm-beaten city." Yet there is one vein of slowly winding gold. This is the parade. Genly, the protagonist, sees these as contrasts, separate facets of the scene. They are, though, part of one unified vision of the world of Winter.

The wider universe is depicted in terms of light and dark. The mad Argaven, King of Karhide, mentions that the stars are bright and blinding, providing a traditional account of the universe. Continuing the description, he expands it, insisting on the surrounding void, the terror and the darkness that counterpoint the rational light of the interplanetary alliance of the Ekumen that Genly symbolizes. The glacier, the heart of Winter, is so bright on the Gobrin Ice it almost blinds Genly and his travelling companion, Estraven, the proscribed first minister of Karhide. Yet it is dark and terrible when they are caught between Drumner and Dremegale, the volcanos, spewing out black smoke and ash.

The action in the novel is often described in terms of dualities. At Arikostor Fastness, Genly specifically mentions the thin strips of light that creep across the circle. They are the counterpoints of the slats of dimness. The weaver, Faxe, a man, is seen as a woman dressed in light in the center of darkness. The foretellers are a part of a bright spider web, light against dark.

Toward the conclusion of his journey, both Genly and the reader perceive the merging pattern of dualities on these levels of setting and action. Light and dark, left and right, and, by implication, male and female become whole. Estraven quotes Tormer's Lay to Genly:

Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.

Genly and Estraven yearn for the dark of the shadow when they are in the antarctic void of the white darkness. Without shadow, without dark, there is a surfeit of light. They cannot see ahead to avoid the threatening changes in the terrain. In total understanding, Genly draws for Estraven the Yang and the Yin, the light and the dark. "Both and one," he says; "A shadow on snow." Both are necessary. Ultimately, Genly recognizes their crossing of the ice is both success and failure: union with the Ekumen, death for Estraven. Both are necessary.

But light and dark, left and right are not the only polarities that are unified as preparatory patterns for the central sexual unification. There is political duality in the opposed states of Orgoreyn and Karhide. Karhide has a slow steady pace of change. In many ways it is disunited. While it speaks to the people's sense of humanity, fostering a sense of strong individualism and family loyalty based on the conception of the hearths, like many democracies it harbors within it the possibility of the rise of fascism and a susceptibility to demagogues.

Orgoreyn is more socialist. Burdened down by the rivalries of its Commensalities, the extensiveness of its bureaucracies, the pettiness of its inspectors, it nonetheless is ordered and unified. It conveys a sense of progress. Still, it terrifies Genly with its failure to respect the rights of the individual. These political polarities exist not only between the two states but also within each, since the individual systems are at the same time both rational and irrational.

Genly, disgusted with this ambiguity, embraces Karhide, then rejects it; accepts Orgota, then flees from it. He seeks a consistent rational pattern. There is none. This is precisely Le Guin's thesis. Ambiguous duality must exist if unification is to occur.

This state of political polarity is unified by the agency of the Ekumen. Not a kingdom but a coordinator, it serves as a clearinghouse for trade and knowledge for the eighty-three nations within its scope. Mystical in nature, the Ekumen works slowly, seeking consensus. Estraven immediately recognizes that the Ekumen is a greater weaver than the Handdara. It has woven all aliens into one fabric that reflects both the unity and diversity of the civilized world.

This pattern of unifying dualities is clearly related to the central concern of androgyny. Without an awareness of the possibility of unifying oppo-sites on the imaginative, physical, and political levels, we would not be as willing to alter the present sexual dichotomy we experience. According to Ursula Le Guin, at times we already perceive the androgynous possibilities within us. She suggests we are, nonetheless, unable to explore fully this unified duality. One reason for this limitation is the restrictive way the western mind interprets human experience. (A similarview is promulgated by Taoism and Zen.) This linear approach, characterizing western thought, focuses on scientifically provable facts. As a result it is narrow and exclusive. It fails to incorporate our peripheral senses which, through intuition and mystical awareness, also contribute to knowledge [according to Alan W. Watts in his The Way of Zen]. Through the action in The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin suggests that by utilizing this peripheral vision we, like Genly, can learn to accept life with all its ambiguities, its paradoxes, its flow, its unknowable qualities, with all its androgyny.

At the beginning of The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly is limited by the western mode of thought. As a scientist observing a subject, there is a tacit assumption of superiority on his part. He admits early in the first chapter that he judges the Gethenians as aliens. His detached manner leads him mistakenly to assert that the rivalry between Tibe, the traitorous cousin of the King, and Estraven is irrelevant to his cause. He dislikes Estraven because he is obscure, not an easy subject for scientific research. Notably, Genly's poor judgment of Winter's cultures results from his desire to gather the facts and proceed to logical conclusions. He is skeptical of anything that cannot be labeled and categorized.

Only by abandoning his divisive scientific approach can Genly achieve the unification of the warring philosophical and sexual elements within him. First, however, there are many ambiguities he must accept. One of these is Shifgrethor, an ambiguous conveying of information and intent. Not lying, it is a viable mode of behavior, conveying one aspect of truth. The wheel of experience, as Estraven insists, is not factually knowable. It turns independent of human control. On the Gobrin Ice, Genly must accept this ambiguity. No one can predict his success or failure on the glacier. As well, Genly eventually perceives that opposites are not exclusive, not contradictory. Estraven is both patriot and traitor. Genly is both patriot and traitor. Loyal to his mission, he brings Winter into the Ekumen; yet he betrays Estraven by permitting the landing of the starship before forcing Argaven to recall Therem's condemnation. Life is not linear as Genly first believes. Since it is process, the Geth-nian system of measuring time is not alien but rather a logical emphasis of the individual's perception as the center of meaningful experience.

Finally, Genly accepts the ambiguous flow of events that makes it an impossibility to contain truth in language. In discussing Therem's behavior with Argaven, he says, "As I spoke I did not know if what I said was true. True in part; an aspect of truth." Often it is the west that affirms that there is one truth that can be logically explicated. It is the east that perceives that truth is flowing and ebbing, inexplicably diffuse, androgynous.

Ironically, this recognition of the many facets of truth is revealed in the beginning of The Left Hand of Darkness. Here the enlightened Genly, now looking back with wisdom on his experiences on Winter, declares that truth is a matter of the imagination (eastern) but one can write a report on events (western) containing facts (western). However, those facts, since they are neither solid nor coherent, will glow or dull according to the speaker (eastern).

The unification of all these dualities, the acceptance of these ambiguities, prepares both Genly and the reader to accept the central thematic unity of the sexual hermaphroditism of the Gethenians. In his response to the aliens, Genly reveals what Le Guin assumes the reader's feelings might be to these dichotomous characters. Estraven is first described as "the person on my left." Appropriately he is involved in feminine intrigue; however, he is wearing green, gold, and silver. These are colors not usually associated with both the right (the masculine) and with the left (the feminine). By page 122 Estraven is on Genly's right, all male now, but defying the traditional symbolism of right and left, he is a dark, shadowy figure. Associated with both light and dark, with left and right in a deliberately reversed symbolic order, Estraven is also an ambiguous figure. Neither Genly Ai nor the reader can interpret such a character according to traditional concepts. This world of Winter denies the established polarities of the light and dark, left and right, male and female.

Initially, the mobile responds to this confusion on the basis of his cultural conditioning. While he is repelled by the sexual duality of the Karhiders, he can neither overtly reveal his feelings to his hosts nor covertly admit his distaste to himself. His language, his responses, though, record his uneasiness. Genly first describes Estraven in these revealing terms declaring he was "Annoyed by [his] sense of effeminate intrigue." Later he calls Estraven a strange alien. He is oblivious to the fact that Estraven is the Karhider who has most attempted to befriend him. In a patronizing manner, Genly mentions that his landlady seems male on first meeting but also has "fat buttocks that wagged as he walked and a soft fat face, and a prying, spying ignoble, kindly nature.... He was so feminine." In commenting on the lack of war on Gethen, Genly observes, "They lacked, it seemed, the capacity to mobilize. They behaved like animals, in that respect; or like women. They did not behave like men or ants." Finally, in describing Therem in their later relationship, he affirms, "There was in his attitude something feminine, a refusal of the abstract, the ideal, a submissiveness to the given which displeased me."

At the beginning of The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly divides these unified creatures into polarities. He perceives the Gethenians in single bodies responding as both male and female. This merging of the stereotyped roles and responses first shocks and then revolts him.

The completion of his mission, however, brings him to full understanding of the nature of all dualities. They are extremes on a continuum, separated but nonetheless joined, unified. Duality can be unity. Genly must accept this fact and find ease in it. For him the crossing on the ice is a journey to self and universal knowledge. Genly begins by sharing supplies with Estraven; moves to encompassing him with mindspeak; concludes by totally accepting Estraven's nature and, by extension, the androgyny of his own. Toward the conclusion of their journey, Genly admits,

What I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was. Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality. He had been quite right to say that he, the only person on Gethen who trusted me, was the only Gethenian I distrusted. For he was the only one who had entirely accepted me as a human being; who had liked me personally and given me entire personal loyalty, and who therefore had demanded of me an equal degree of recognition, of acceptance. I had not been willing to give it. I had been afraid to give it. I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man.

By later drawing the symbol of the Yang and the Yin, light and dark, masculine and feminine, Genly makes visible his emotional and intellectual acceptance of Estraven: the two in the one.

Le Guin, however, does not conclude with Genly's recognition of the androgynous possibility. Her ending suggests that this state of unified duality is a preferable, superior state of existence. In the final chapter, Genly no longer relates to his own species nor they to him. He is alien to the Terran arrivals. Uneasy in his new perceptions, Genly calls the representatives of the Ekumen "a troupe of great, strange animals of two different species, great apes with intelligent eyes, all of them in rut, in kemmer...." He is happy to return to the company of the young Gethenian physician who is described in these terms: "... and his face, a young serious face, not a man's face and not a woman's, a human face, these were a relief to me, familiar, right."

In The Left Hand of Darkness Ursula Le Guin suggests we too should accept as right, as familiar, the archetypal androgyny within us. Transcending male, transcending female, we can become fully human.

Source: Barbara Brown, "The Left Hand of Darkness: Androgyny, Future, Present, Past," in Extrapolation, Vol. 31, No. 3, Fall, 1980, pp. 227-235.

Ursula K. Le Guin works in a very different manner from John Brunner. Her fiction is closer to fantasy than naturalism, but it is just as grounded in ethical concerns as Brunner's work, despite its apparent distance from present actualities. Though some would argue that her political novel, The Dispossessed (1974), is her best work, and others might favor her ecological romance, The Word for World is Forest (1972, 1976), or her young people's fantasy, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), today's critical consensus is still that her best single work is The Left Hand of Darkness (1969).

In The Left Hand of Darkness Le Guin moves far from our world in time and space, to give us a planet where life has evolved on different lines from our own. This world, which happens to be in a period of high glaciation, has evolved political institutions in two adjoining countries that resemble feudalism on the one hand, and bureaucracy on the other. But the most important difference between this world and our own is that its human inhabitants are different from us in their physical sexuality. All beings on the planet Gethen have both male and female sexual organs. In a periodic cycle like estrus in animals, Gethenians become sexually aroused—but only one set of sexual organs is activated at this time. These people are potentially hermaphroditic. Most of the time they are neuter, but then they may briefly become a man or a woman, and in that time beget a child or conceive one. Thus the same person may experience both fatherhood and motherhood at different times. There is no privileged sex, exempt from child-bearing and child-rearing. This difference has many ramifications in political and social structure, and in personal behavior—far too many to attempt a discussion of them here. But the major effect of Le Guin's imagining such a fictional world is to force us to examine how sexual stereotyping dominates actual human concepts of personality and influences all human relationships. "What," one of her characters from a "normal" planet asks, "is the first question we ask about a new-born baby?" What indeed? We all know the answer. The real question of course, is "Why?" Why must we know of any new person what their sex is before we can begin to relate to them? The answer to this involves our realization of how deeply our culture is coded along sexual lines, how much must be undone if a person is to be judged as a person—even in the eyes of the law, which has never kept its blindfold tight enough to ignore the sex of those who appear before it.

Ursula Le Guin has been attacked by radical feminists for not going far enough, for using male protagonists, as she does even in The Left Hand of Darkness, and for putting other issues, both political and environmental, ahead of feminism. In fact, it is probably wrong to think of her as a feminist. But I know of no single book likely to raise consciences about sexism more thoroughly and convincingly than this one. And that this is done gently, in a book which manages also to be a fine tale of adventure and a tender story of love and friendship, makes the achievement all the more remarkable. There are few writers in the United States who offer fiction as pleasurable and thoughtful as Ursula Le Guin's. It is time for her to be recognized beyond the special provinces of fantasy and science fiction or feminism as simply one of our best writers.

Source: Robert Scholes, "Science Fiction as Conscience: John Brunner and Ursula K. Le Guin," in The New Republic, Vol. 175, No. 17, October 30, 1976, pp. 38^0.