Your post is a good read.

Firstly, the two principal examples being discussed above as evidence of Kurt’s patriarchy-enabling are Sirens of Titan (1959) and Welcome to the Monkeyhouse (written before 1960, anthologized much later). As an already rabid Vonnegut fanatic (I was halfway through huffing his then-published works when I read it), Welcome to the Monkeyhouse made me profoundly uncomfortable, and I flatter myself to think that it was for some of the same reasons as those given above. On the other hand, I’ll say that as a teenaged male, I was going to read Sirens of Titan just based on the cover, so ‘guilty’.

That said, these are some of his earliest works (Player Piano [1952] is also ripe for criticism). Vonnegut was fighting his way into the business by writing what was essentially pulp fiction (or maybe one step up from that). If you look at some of his peers who followed the same path (science-fiction-writer-becomes-all-respectable-like), this early work comes off as pretty typical (much less fucktarded than a lot of contemporary stuff, really).

While I’m thinking mainly of male authors here, I can’t also but compare him to my other favourite 20th century American novelist, Ursula K. LeGuin. While she never indulged in anything as offensive as the ‘deflowering’ scene in WTMH, nevertheless her Hainish novels (published 1966-1967, seven years after Sirens came out) do have their fair share of stock patriarchal female characters, including the self-sacrificing wife (two of them, actually) in Rocannon’s World, and the faithless concubine in City of Illusions.

I would argue that Vonnegut’s and LeGuin’s positions at this point in their respective careers were similar in two significant ways: 1) they were in thrall to their audience (entrenchedly-patriarchal male magazine/science-fiction editors); and 2) they had internalized their tropes like good little boys and girls, and just couldn’t help it.

So to get to the point, I’m with Violet Socks on this one. It’s been a long time since I last read Vonnegut’s novels, and I know I’m probably doing some selective editing, but even so I am sure the comments sell him far short. Yes, there is ample grist for the patriarchy-blaming mill in 50’s Vonnegut, but I don’t think one should use his early work as a pretext to invalidate his life or contributions. Vonnegut evolved, and he’s a big reason that I ended up being the Twisty-fearing creature what I am.

I only wish I had total off-the-cuff recall of his less famous works, so that I could better come to his defense, but I’m going to give it a try anyway.

From what I recall, Jailbird is the closest Vonnegut ever gets to doing what he says he never would do (in the Paris Review interview), which is to write a love story. Plot (or a bit of it anyway): the protagonist is male; he is accosted on the street by a homeless woman; she turns out to be someone from his past. It is revealed that she is half-mad — she is in fact immensely rich, and lives with an entirely justified fear that someone will cut off her hands. She and the protagonist keep each other company in the aftermath of their respective lives; he earns her trust in a limited way.

Again from what I remember, female characters drive the story (which is about economic inequality), and the homeless woman represents the conscience of the work. It’s been fifteen years at least since I read this book, but the scene that sticks in my mind concerns the blistering reaction of the protagonist’s date when he (a well-off young man) tips a waiter at a posh establishment $50 — this being at the height of the Great Depression.

Returning to the Paris Review interview (published in 1977; Jailbird was published in 1979), and specifically Anuna’s comments.

INTERVIEWER: Let’s talk about the women in your books.
VONNEGUT: There aren’t any. No real women, no love.”

Based partly on this quote, Anuna concludes that Vonnegut’s attitude is one of dismissal — briefly, that women in fiction can only serve as love interests. I respectfully submit that this is a misreading.

In the interview, Vonnegut goes on to say this:

“It’s a mechanical problem. So much of what happens in storytelling is mechanical, has to do with the technical problems of how to make a story work. Cowboy stories and policeman stories end in shoot-outs, for example, because shoot-outs are the most reliable mechanisms for making such stories end. There is nothing like death to say what is always such an artificial thing to say: The end. I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that’s the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers.”

Now, as I read this (keeping in mind that the novels he was about to write [Jailbird] and had recently finished [Slapstick (1976), about which more below] have important and atypical female characters), Vonnegut doesn’t have a problem with women, but rather with women as they typically function in mainstream fiction — that is as tools. He is saying that a woman in a romance novel is like a shoot-out in a cowboy novel, not because that’s what women are like, but because that’s how powerful the trope is.

I won’t speculate about what Vonnegut would have said if pressed along these lines in 1977. Personally, I feel that Jailbird is indeed a love story, just not a hankies-on-platforms love story.

Slapstick is also a love story, not because there’s a romance in it, but because it’s about love. This is what the female protagonist says about saying ‘I love you’. She says it’s like putting a gun to someone’s head, and asking them to say ‘I love you’ back.

Maybe I’m wrong, but speaking about love as a manifestation of violence, ownership and coercion doesn’t seem out of place in the comments section of I Blame the Patriarchy.

One last thing. I don’t know why he says there are no “real” women in his books. It might just be that he thinks readers think ‘real’ women are the ones that ‘real’ men fall in love with. In Slaughterhouse-Five he makes it clear that he’s not going to write about ‘real’ men. As he explains in the book, the subtitle “Children’s Crusade” fulfills the promise he made to the wife of a friend, who didn’t want more children going off to war, and who didn’t want Vonnegut writing another book that they’d turn into a movie starring ‘real’ men like John Wayne or Dana Andrews.

It might also be that he knew his limitations. He was an all-but-legally divorced male old fart writer, with his Pall Malls, and his breath that smelled like mustard gas and roses, who was interested in science and society. What would he know about writing a romance? What would he know about real women?

Please forgive for saying so, but I know I feel that way posting here…

Kurt would be — and was, at times — the first to say that he didn’t understand women. His mother, an early suicide, was the defining woman in his life until well after World War II and his experiences in Dresden, and he spent self-acknowledged years overcoming an innate and very real fear of women. As well, there wasn’t the depth of feminist thought in the 1940s and 1950s that there is today. No one was blaming the patriarchy then.

Except that he was. I won’t argue that his characters are scions of feminism. Indeed, his women are as advertised in this thread, second-fiddle to the men. But all of his characters are weak; he had said as much himself. Vonnegut isn’t about the characters, which are all just props, really, whether man or woman, human or alien. His writing is about the ideas.

And those ideas — the senselessness of war, the truth of humanism, the need for kindness in a world of cruelty — those ideas are at the heart of what feminism (radical, advanced, or otherwise) is about. Patriarchy is the greatest granfalloon of them all, and so it seems to me that discarding Vonnegut as an inspiration for feminism because his female characters are marginally more of set-pieces than his male characters is to miss the point of Vonnegut, and perhaps a bit of feminism, entirely.

Poot-tee-weet?

But Vonnegut evolved. He paid attention to the women’s movement, he analyzed his own fear of women, and tried to move into a more enlightened place. By the time of Galapagos and Bluebeard (mid-8os) he was explicitly trying to express what he understood as a pro-woman point of view.

In his last years he always used gender-neutral language in his speeches and interviews. He made a point of saying women’s liberation was an excellent thing and about damn time.

He tried.

Thank you for this. I never knew too much about him, although I had a vague impression of coolness. The fact that he tried, and eventually got it, is more important to me than that he made some mistakes.