Assignment #3: In-Betweenness: Good or Bad?

This was part of our take-home final. Given her theme of interstitiality, she finally asked us to decide whether being in between "is a position of freedom, a means for individuals to determine their own attitudes and actions with less pressure to conform, or whether it implies being nothing, being without a definition, and having none of the privileges of belonging to a group."  I thought that most of her reading selections were unfairly biased towards the negative conclusion, but as I personally felt that in-betweenness offered a freedom that few of our characters seemed to take advantage of, I went for the more positive side.

I don't know what grade I received on this.

Interstitial positions are by their nature tenuous; most people find that they cannot live comfortably while trapped in between two opposing forces, even if they don't realize exactly what is happening. Inevitably the conflict between the two forces becomes so great that they cannot ignore it, and they must struggle to somehow regain their balance when all the values they've relied upon in their lives begin to fail them. For some people, this realization is crushing; others, however, use their interstitial positions to discover their true values. Forced to somehow resolve the conflicts arising from their interstitiality, characters from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and The Left Hand of Darkness eventually learn more about themselves and their world; although their interstitial experience may be painful at times, in the end it is positive.

In Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette is trapped between her religious community and her individuality, which includes not just her sexuality but also her growing philosophical differences. Jeanette has been raised in the church community since infancy, steeped in the evangelical doctrines espoused by her mother, who raises her as "a missionary child" (10) bound to serve the Lord. Her public school headmistress even notes with concern that she seems "'rather pre-occupied...with God'" (41). Jeanette feels as though her church is a place where things are "clear and warm and...happy" (41); all of her friends are members of the church and everything in her life revolves around its activities. Jeanette grows up feeling safe and loved within this community and believes that "the church [is her] family" (37).

However, as Jeanette grows older, she begins to question the teachings of her denomination and the opinions of her mother. First she begins to have "theological disagreement[s]" (60) with the pastors' messages. At another point, she discovers that her mother has been concealing things from her, changing everything from history to theology to the endings of novels like Jane Eyre to suit her purposes. Still, Jeanette feels safe within her community; even while involved in a sexual relationship with Melanie, a girl she converts to the church, Jeanette doesn't clearly understand that her behavior will not be considered acceptable. She believes that "'Melanie is a gift from the Lord'" (104). Finally, however, Jeanette and Melanie are caught and confronted about being "'full of demons'" (104). Melanie repents immediately, but Jeanette refuses to accept that she cannot love both Melanie and God. Ostracized from the church, Jeanette tries to hold on to everything that is important to her--her church and her sexuality/individuality--by claiming to repent without really believing it. Jeanette is accepted back into the church, but she now realizes that she's living a lie. She's forced to conceal her true self from people she once cared about because they would reject her were they to discover it; "betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it" (112), she concludes. When Jeanette is found to be involved with a woman a second time, she decides she can no longer keep up the charade and severs all ties to the organization she once felt so happy in. She leaves the church, is thrown out of the house when her mother announces that she's not "'havin' any demons here'" (136), and eventually moves away to the big city where she can live as she likes.

Although Jeanette's interstitial position causes her a great deal of pain, it eventually leads her to understand herself better as she compares how she really feels to how she's told she's supposed to feel. She does miss the security of the life she left behind; she misses "the company of someone utterly loyal...God who was [her] friend" (170). Still, her struggle helps Jeanette to realize who her true friends are--Elsie, who tries to defend and protect even when extremely ill, but not the people who should have been the closest to her, like her mother and Melanie. Melanie, who continues working for the church, denies her sexuality by getting married and insisting to Jeanette that "those sorts of feelings [are] dead" (171). Jeanette knows she doesn't want to end up like that, "serene to the point of bovine...almost vegetable" (171), repressing her true nature because someone else said it was evil. Jeanette's in-between position helps her to break away from the views of her particular religious community and live in a way that better reflects her personal values.

In Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly is caught between his own notions of gender and dualism and the beliefs of the androgynous Gethenian culture. The Gethenians, who have no gender most of the time and are equally likely to be male or female during their reproductive cycles, do not have any stereotypes about gender as Genly's society does. Genly is used to a world where everything is divided into male/female, "strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive" (94), where people make assumptions about others' aptitudes and behaviors based on their perceived gender. Genly is at first unable to wrap his mind around the concept of androgyny; he continually divides people's behaviors up by gender, "forcing [them] into those categories so irrelevant to [their] nature and so essential to [his] own" (12). This method never works, though, because no one he meets is either all feminine or all masculine. This concept is more difficult for him to grasp than either of the main languages, and it seriously hampers his ability to accomplish his mission, to convince Gethen to join the Ekumen.

Genly's path to greater understanding is slow and painful. He continues to mistrust the "effeminate deviousness" (14) of Therem Harth, the one person on the planet who genuinely wants him to succeed; the display of both "masculine" and "feminine" traits in the same person is just too disorienting. When he refuses to listen to Therem's advice, Genly ends up falling victim to Gethenian political maneuvers. He is imprisoned in a "Voluntary Farm" (175) in Orgoreyn where he is kept cold and hungry and pumped full of drugs which make him so sick he can't get out of bed. When he is finally rescued by Therem, the two of them must spend more than eighty days trekking across the frozen northern wasteland of the planet, trying to cross the border without being discovered. It is only in this space, which is literally interstitial, between the countries of Orgoreyn and Karhide, that Genly finally begins to understand Therem and himself. Genly realizes that Therem is "the only one who had entirely accepted [him] as a human being" (248), not an alien specimen; up until now, however, Genly had "refused him his own reality" (248), that of being "a woman as well as a man" (248). It is their differences, not their similarities, that bind them in friendship, like the two complementary sides of the yin-yang symbol Genly draws for Therem. Although all of Genly's problems are not resolved, he has overcome the largest obstacle of his interstitial position and can now try to "see the people of the planet through their own eyes" (11).

Interstitiality can lead to pain and confusion for those caught between concepts that appear to be incompatible, especially when the conflict is between one's personal feelings and the beliefs of society. Interstitial people can feel isolated from, and even betrayed by, those around them, but instead of wallowing in their troubles, some of them are able to change their ways of thinking in order to find a position they can live with. Jeanette of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Genly of The Left Hand of Darkness both have their perceptions about the world challenged, but they both take the opportunity to discover new things about themselves and those around them. In this way, their interstitial positions have benefitted them.