The Judas Rose (63 page)

            
1) that the weak form of the linguistic relativity hypothesis is true [that is, that human languages structure human perceptions in significant ways]; 2) that Gödel's Theorem applies to language, so that there are changes you could not introduce into a language without destroying it and languages you could not introduce into a culture without destroying it; 3) that change in language brings about social change, rather than the contrary; and 4) that if women were offered a women's language one of two things would happen—they would welcome and nurture it, or it would at minimum motivate them to replace it with a better women's language of their own construction. (“Láadan”)

Elgin admits that despite the success of the Native Tongue trilogy, her experiment did not produce the desired outcome beyond the world of literature. The fourth hypothesis was proven false when Láadan failed to be taken up in any meaningful way in society. But the broader questions of language, of gender, and of violence continue to resonate, both in fiction and beyond.

GENDER, LANGUAGE, AND VIOLENCE IN
THE JUDAS ROSE

Because the action of
The Judas Rose
so closely depends on that which happens in
Native Tongue
, it is worth reviewing the plot of the first book so that we can see how the second builds upon it. There are three primary narrative strands in
Native Tongue
, though each overlaps with the others. The first narrative follows Nazareth Chornyak Adiness, a remarkably talented linguist whose difficult life demonstrates the need for a women's language as she leads the women of the Lines into using and teaching Láadan. The second narrative chronicles the long line of failures and disasters resulting from the U.S. government's attempts to Interface a non-humanoid Alien with a human infant. The third narrative connects the government Interfacing experiments to the work of the Lines by tracing the life of Michaela Landry, mother
of an infant killed in an Interface who initially blames the Linguists for her child's death. While the conflict between Linguists and non-Linguists has led to two separate societies whose relations have been characterized by prejudice and isolation, the growth of Láadan brings women together, giving them a new, shared basis for social relations.
Native Tongue
dramatizes how changing a language can in fact change reality, as the spread of Láadan alters the very lives of the women of the Lines. No longer isolated from each other and subjected to the constant observation and supervision of their husbands and fathers, women now can work together for a society that is both fairer and less violent.

In
The Judas Rose
, the project of linguistic education for a general audience continues on both a Terran and galactic scale. Working with the unwitting assistance of both the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches, the women of the Lines find ways to send Láadan into the greater community in order to undermine the culture of violence the men have instituted. The women's project of expanding the reach of Láadan is a gentle echo of the Terran governments' project of colonizing space; while the former allows for greater communication among women, the latter reduces communication and connectivity as social deviants of all kinds are isolated each to their own designated asteroid. The Terran governments are less successful in attempts at linguistic expansion: the project of Interfacing non-humanoid Aliens with human infants (despite consistently horrific results) to extend the trade possibilities to those worlds as well as for linguistic exchange, also chronicled in
Native Tongue
, becomes less and less successful, and, ultimately, fails altogether—at least in producing the desired results. As the different projects of linguistic outreach continue (overtly and covertly), male members of the Lines are revealed to be linked to Alien objectives and monopolies, part of a coherent political power structure extending throughout the galaxy—a power structure undercut by the linguistic rebellion occurring secretly in their midst. Through these interwoven narratives and the lens of linguistics, Elgin deftly explores several issues that still have urgent relevance for us now, as the book is reissued, including the relation between gender and technology (both informational and biomedical) in the project of globalization (a project that is central to the new world order) and the possibilities for women to unite across boundaries of religion, class, nationality, race, and ethnicity.

Gender and Information Technology

In the simultaneously global and galactic context of
The Judas Rose
, language is presented as a potent technology for human communication, but one that can, paradoxically, be either enhanced or inhibited by
information technology. This is nowhere so clearly represented as in the character of Selena Opal Hame. In
Native Tongue
, the infant Selena is fed a combination of hallucinogens before she is Interfaced with Beta-2, a non-humanoid whose worldview was so “alien” to the human mind that it had killed previous infants Interfaced with it. The hallucinogens did their work, in a sense: when Selena was Interfaced her tolerance for alternative realities was sufficiently great that she survived, while the Alien died. Yet one could argue that Selena's “survival” was minimal and carried with it an incalculable toll: she exits the Interface having not acquired a non-humanoid language, and, tragically, stripped of her own native tongue. The impact is devastating, forcing her to live in a non-linguistic world:

            
I know that when their mouths move and noises come it is because they are sharing what is inside their heads. They can show each other, or they can do it when no other person is there. . . .

                   
I don't know what in me is the broken part. My ears work; my eyes work; my head works. My fingers are not broken; I can cut and sew and dig and stir and cook. All the doings. I can go where other persons go, I know it is not my legs. My mouth opens like their mouths, but it does not make any noise . . . perhaps it is my mouth that is the broken part. (202; 204)
³

Selena's poignant linguistic dislocation and alienation emerges fully when the women of the Lines introduce her to a form of information technology: a small box with buttons on it that she can manipulate like a computerized voice synthesizer. Working with it, she is able for the first time to make complex, stable, layered sounds, which she learns to associate with objects and actions. In short, she learns to use language. For Selena, that breakthrough moment of communication seems elemental, miraculous: “When the magic came, it was like what the lightning does to the sky in the hot time! It was a great crashing and a tearing inside my head, and a great light flashing through me! I understood, oh I understood.” (205)

While Selena struggles with a linguistic deficiency that is remedied by information technology, the woman known as the “Judas Rose” demonstrates a linguistic control and power that information technology is used to undermine, if only temporarily. Miriam Rose is a child of the Lines, raised from birth in the convent and placed at age thirteen in the Order of Saint Gertrude of the Lambs, where she grows up as Sister Miriam, part of Nazareth's scheme to extend Láadan beyond the Barren Houses of the Lines. Protected within the convent by sympathetic Sister Carapace and taught linguistics and Lines-quality bodyparl (though never defined by Elgin in the texts, context seems
to suggest
bodyparl
is the use of gesture, movement, expression, tone of voice, and intonation to communicate nonverbally) by her mother in secret meetings, Miriam Rose grows up trained as a secret ally and weapon of the developing rebellion. Her notable linguistic mastery gives her access even to the Order's centers of power; soon, she is working intimately with the Abbot of Saint Gertrude's, Father Dorien. Although he prides himself on his ability to control the perceptions of others, even he finds himself under Sister Miriam's spell because of her tremendous linguistic ability:

            
It was the woman's magnificent voice. A voice that Father Dorien was confident had been given to her by God, specifically to enable her to serve his purposes in this project. As he had anticipated, she had only had to speak one sentence to put an end to their objections. He had heard that voice many hundreds of times, because he was her confessor, but it never ceased to be something he marveled over. It was not just a voice, it was a musical instrument, and she was a virtuoso in its use. (178–79)

Her understanding of the power of language, both voiced and read, enables Miriam Rose to subvert the attempts of the Roman Catholic Church to reinscribe Láadan into the patriarchal hegemony. Only the deathbed confession of Sister Maria, the nun who had for more than forty years worked as a “kind of double agent” among the Roman Catholic clergy, alerts them to the existence of Láadan, the deeper layer hidden by the rebels beneath the clunky Langlish (335). As the person in charge of the seemingly impossible project to strip the Láadan Bible of any feminist influences—generated by the priests' demand for materials that would “draw women to the church, but that would be free of feminist contamination” or heterodox suggestion of a female deity—Sister Miriam Rose has final say on the form of the translated passages (337). This proves crucial, enabling her to subvert any attempts to render the translation in beautiful or moving language. As another nun laments, “Who would have suspected that Father Dorien's precious Sister Miriam Rose would have a terrible tin ear? It was shocking, the way she would take a properly defeminized section, with a lovely ring to it when you read it aloud, and fool around with it until it went clanking and stumbling over the tongue, completely ruined” (243). By changing the language to make it “clank and stumble,” Sister Miriam Rose effectively prevents the “new” Láadan Bible from being a tool to convert even more women to the hierarchical, patriarchal religions. Father Dorien remarks on this effect when he muses, “It wasn't surprising that they kindled no religious fire in women; women were theologically
illiterate, and they had to be attracted to the Lord by the rhythm and power of words and music well assembled. He had tried reading some of those recent bits aloud, and it had been like reading a comphone directory” (306). Such is her skill that almost no one even suspects deliberate intent on her part, even if they notice the discrepancies between her vocal and apparent written ability. Only Sister Gloria John glimpses part of the plan, when she mutters to the other nuns, “‘Perhaps she does it on purpose,'. . . after one especially unpleasant sequence produced by Miriam's tinkering had been entered into storage as a final version. . . . . ‘Because . . . the longer she can keep us at this, the longer she can avoid doing any real work herself. And when the Fathers read the garbage she has produced, they'll make her throw it all out and start over again from the beginning'” (243–44).

Sister Miriam Rose's power over influential men extends even to Heykus Joshua Clete, architect of planetary expansion and perhaps the most powerful religious man on the planet. When he meets her at a friend's deathbed, toward the end of the novel, he is surprised to find that he feels blessed “by a woman. A Catholic, and a woman” (329). Yet that initial frightening moment of trust seems dangerously seductive to Clete—emasculating, even infantilizing—and he turns to information technology to combat it. He counters the force of her presence with all of the technological skill at his command:

            
To ease the weight of his helplessness, he looked Sister Miriam up in the databanks. She was there, with her Federal Identification number and her blood type, her height and eye color and allergies; because she was a nun—born at the convent . . . and illegitimate, parents unknown—she had no possessions and no record of any earnings. No titles, no distinctions. . . . A thoroughly unremarkable life. (329–30)

Yet if the databanks reassure Clete that Sister Miriam Rose is a nobody, the authority of that information extends only as far as the imagination interpreting the data. As the novel unfolds, the reader learns that she is far from the “thoroughly unremarkable” nun with “parents unknown” that the data entry summarizes. Indeed, the core significance of the novel emerges in the gap between the life documented in the databanks and the full account of the activities of the Judas Rose.

In the contrasting tales of Selena Opal Hame and Sister Miriam Rose, Elgin demonstrates that information technology, like other technologies, is not inherently gendered; whether its uses are emancipatory or repressive depends on who is wielding it, how skillfully, and to what ends. Though the databases are a form of information
technology that enhances the power of the Terran government
over
women, both within and outside the families of the Lines, the ‘thologies—another kind of information technology providing a National Public Radio–like narrative news programming—empowers Nazareth Chornyak Adiness, the leader of resistant women of the Lines, by giving her “a kind of grasp of events over the past hundred years. She felt a little less ignorant now, and that was the point” (82). Elgin demonstrates that the very form information technology takes—the extent to which we even
recognize
it as information technology—can also sometimes be gendered. To the databanks of the government, and the helpful ‘thologies of Nazareth, we can add another form of information technology: the recipes of the women of the Lines, each replete with coded information accessible only to those who know how to access it, and stored in a recipe collection kept, “to the men's great amusement, on file cards” (73).

Gender and Biomedical Technology