Technological and Gender Progress in Ray Bradbury’s Postwar Speculative Fiction
Lisa Michelle Paper
University of Florida
April 2016
Paper 1
Technological and Gender Progress in Ray Bradbury’s Postwar Speculative Fiction
“I often use the metaphor of Perseus and the head of Medusa when I speak of science fiction. Instead of looking into the face of truth, you look over your shoulder into the bronze surface of a reflecting shield. Then you reach back with your sword and cut off the head of
Medusa. Science fiction pretends to look into the future but it’s really looking at a reflection of what is already in front of us” (Weller). These were the words of the American author Ray
Bradbury in an interview from The Paris Review recorded in the 1970s. Bradbury’s insights brilliantly illuminate the art of exploring through science and speculative fiction larger issues in society.1
Science fiction has been described as the “literature of cognitive estrangement” by scholar and critic Darko Suvin. Suvin goes on to argue that science fiction is a genre “whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment” (Suvin). Cognitive estrangement is thus the ability, as Bradbury puts it, to “attack the recent past” and reveal “the present” by pretending you’re “writing about the future” (“About”). Bradbury used cognitive estrangement as a tool to address many larger social
1 For the purpose of this thesis and the specific works analyzed, Ray Bradbury’s postwar fiction is both speculative and science fiction. Speculative fiction is any fiction that speculates on the result of changing an elemental part of our world, such as changes in history, laws, or technology. Speculative fiction is widely regarded as a more modern literary classification. Science fiction can be a subgenre of speculative fiction. Science fiction is a more limited category, but would have been the common classification of Bradbury’s stories at the dates of publication. For this reason, I consider Bradbury’s works to fit into both categories. However, I find speculative fiction to be a more accurate, comprehensive, and modern way of generally defining his writing. In addition to the speculative science fiction examined in this paper, Bradbury wrote a great deal of speculative fantasy and horror stories throughout his writing career. In light of this I consider Bradbury a speculative writer. For a comprehensive look at the differences between speculative and science fiction, see Annie Neugebauer’s article “What Is Speculative Fiction?” (Neugebauer). Paper 2 issues plaguing postwar America in his own writing, including, notably, issues of gender in the face of a rapidly developing, techsavvy nation.
Bradbury’s portrayals of human and gender relations in his own work encapsulate many of America’s challenges in the aftermath of World War II. His use of the fantastic makes the exploration of these issues entertaining, interesting, and even humorous. Often set in faroff fantastic places, such as distant planets filled with violence and foreboding atmospheres, many of his depictions of human life are oddly familiar to his readers. Moreover, no matter how alien, they present domestic situations strikingly similar to those of suburban life in the 1950s: alien housewives busily doing chores, automaton families cheerily going about their daytime duties,
2,3,4 and husbands travelling to work by rocketship. In this way, these households become representative of American domesticity in general. Joe Patrouch further argues in his essay,
“Symbolic Settings in Science Fiction: H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison,” that the settings for The Martian Chronicles, scientifically inaccurate even according to the knowledge of the era in which it was written, are really figures for the “rural, small town Midwest of
Bradbury’s childhood” (41).
2 See “February 1999: Ylla” pp. 2, 3, 6, 7, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, and “August 1999: The Earth Men” pp. 2224 in The Martian Chronicles for excellent examples of alien housewives doing domestic chores in Bradbury’s works. Listed chores include cooking, cleaning, gardening, and appliance operation for household duties. While domestic duties and housewives appear in many of Bradbury’s stories, these particular examples involve Martian housewives and beautifully encapsulate some of the issues discussed in this paper. Each of these stories are examined in more detail in sections two and three. 3 See “The Rocket Man” in The Martian Chronicles, pp. 97111. 4 There are a number of automaton families in Bradbury’s works, including the story “April 2026: The Long Years” in The Martian Chronicles, where Mr. Hathaway builds a robot family to keep him company and replace the loss of his wife and children during his solitary years as one of the last men on Mars. As a team of explorers return to the planet and are invited to his home, they begin to realize in horror and shock that none of his family members have aged and that they are actually robots. See pp. 207220. Paper 3
One difference between these fictional and realistic domestic settings is the presence of
5 strong tensions between genders, often culminating in terrifying and even fatal spousal violence.
Or is this, really, a difference? If Bradbury means to “reflect” the present in his estranging science fictional landscapes, then the presence of domestic violence and gender tensions may indeed not be so farfetched a depiction after all.
In my thesis, I will explore the cultural contexts of gender relations in the postWorld
War II period, with a main focus on the years 19451959, through Bradbury’s fictional depictions of galactic suburbia and domestic gender tensions. I do so in order to think further about how and why Bradbury introduces reflections of gender tensions and violence into his outwardly happyseeming fictional domestic homes. In the course of my study, I examine stories from his two collections, The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles, published originally in 1945 and 1948.
In a time of rapidly changing technologies, emerging social institutions, and increasingly mutable gender roles and power dynamics, science fiction offered an opportune vehicle through which to explore utopian future technologies and new frontiers, while simultaneously reflecting back current dystopian gender relations. Bradbury used cognitive estrangement to demonstrate the insufficient nature of traditional gender roles in his own time, and the dangers of technological evolution outpacing change in gender relations. These issues were prominent in the wake of World War II, at a time when male and female anxieties about their gender roles were,
5 For a particularly violent example of spousal violence and the destruction of the family unit, see Bradbury’s “The October Game”. In this horror story, the husband’s increasing emotional abuse of his wife culminates in the murdering of their daughter and then handing the pieces to the wife in the basement during a Halloween party as part of a ‘game’: an example of unchecked abuse once more leading to disastrous consequences. See “November 2005: The Off Season” for another particularly good example of spousal control and the culmination in greater consequences − a murdering of a fleet of native Martians − in The Martian Chronicles if interested in gender tensions in Bradbury’s works as well. There are many other examples, but these are each exemplary ones. Paper 4 in the U.S. at least, at an alltime high. In my first section, I explore postwar gender anxieties in a historical, cultural, and literary context. In the latter half of this section, I specifically focus on postwar gender portrayals in science fiction. I incorporate Bradbury’s own views on gender as expressed in several interviews on the subject. I next examine Bradbury’s portrayals of postwar gender relations through science fiction. In this second section, I focus on the stories
“Marionettes, Inc.,” “Ylla: February 1999,” and “The Rocket Man.” Gender tension, power struggles, and violence in domestic marriages are prominent themes in these stories. In section three, I analyze the theme of angry and monstrous housewives in Bradbury’s works. The two examples I use to illustrate these concepts are “The Concrete Mixer” and “The Earth Men.” In my final section, I look at a unique example of a functional relationship in Bradbury’s story “The
Last Night of the World.” I posit that the couple is depicted in this light due to the shared housework and the modernized gender roles highlighted in the story. I conclude this thesis with a closer look at Bradbury’s own relationship with his wife and family. I also underscore the overall relevancy of this topic when it comes to understanding the gender relations of the postwar and present periods.
Exploring PostWorld War II Gender Anxieties through Science Fiction
During the Great Depression, a movement known as “New Deal” feminism emerged in the U.S., when immigrant women flocked in great numbers to the workforce in order to contribute to family incomes (Halberstam 588). World War II further changed how women were viewed in the workforce, as practically overnight, industrial jobs which had generally been viewed as “masculine,” such as the operation of heavy machinery, became a “patriotic Paper 5 necessity,” and women were welcomed to the forefronts of the American workforce (Halberstam
588).
However following the War, the return of thousands of men from the battle front, coupled with a rise in affluence of many American families, made it unnecessary for there to be two workers in each household. As a result, women were fired by the hundreds of thousands from the auto and aircraft industries in the first postwar months. Female secondary education and career opportunities were severely limited, and the migration of families to the suburbs meant that many women were now physically isolated from the workplace by greater distances than ever before. Furthermore, a sudden boom in home appliances such as washers, dryers, freezers, and blenders, accompanied by a rise in femaletargeted advertisements and a drastic increase in media depictions of the “perfect” housewife, led to new pressures to stay in the home and accept a rigid gender role for many women (Halberstam 585588).
Pulitzerprize winning journalist David Halberstam argues in his history of the 1950s that the “career woman” subsequently was often portrayed in ladies’ magazines as a “brittle” and lonely figure, and many women knew that even if they did manage to find a career outside of the home, working women almost always accepted lower titles, status, pay, and growth opportunities than their male counterparts. In the face of this, many collegeeducated women, as well as women who had become accustomed to working, were now forced back into the home. These former working women felt unfulfilled, isolated in the suburbs, and frustrated by their own fears and doubts − and these emotions were rarely articulated (Halberstam 590592).
James Gilbert points out in his book, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s, that according to statistics released by the Bureau of the Census in 1950, women Paper 6 outnumbered men for the first time in American history, effectively ending the male majority and marking another turning point for gender relations (215, 217). This imbalance in ratio, coupled with rising consumerism, suburbanization, and some men’s difficulties adjusting to civilian life, seemed to many to have produced an overall more passive society. For these critics, this shift represented a gradual “feminization” of America and the forming of a “culture of domesticity” (Gilbert 217). Women were often perceived as being at the forefront of such shifts
(Gilbert 217).
Though many see the postwar era as one of sexual and gender conservatism, there were in fact widespread undercurrents of the sexual revolution of the sixties already developing. The era was the launch pad of sixties second wave feminism. Among the factors contributing to these gender role changes were the revitalization of the topic of birth control, and from there, a dialogue among American women on having a greater say in reproduction and more control over
6 their own bodies. Halberstam notes that “the revolution in birth control had begun in 1950,”
6 Margaret Sanger was a wellknown American women’s rights activist who pushed for over forty years for women’s reproductive health, education, hygiene, birth control, and rights, and would help to fund and push for the invention of the birth control pill and Planned Parenthood. Sanger repeatedly linked birth control to women being in charge of their own bodies. In her newspaper publication The Woman Rebel, started in 1914, she wrote that women should “speak and act in defiance of convention” (Halberstam 285). Halberstam notes that the newspaper primarily “contain[ed] articles on birth control,” and that Sanger spent most of her time in the library studying the subject (Halberstam 284285). By 1950, she’d successfully rallied enough supporters that they generally outnumbered opponents of birth control, and it was about this time that she rekindled a friendship with Katharine McCormick, who contributed large amounts of money to the cause and introduced Dr. Pincus to the scene (287293). Pincus was already doing research with hormones, and was extremely concerned about the idea of human overpopulation, especially in the wake of the postwar baby boomwhen Mrs. Sanger came along, he jumped at the opportunity and, aware already of research connecting ovulation and the hormone progesterone, assembled a team of researchers led by his friend Dr. Chang (291293). From there, birth control development progressed rapidly. The first tests on rabbit ovulation began on April 25th, 1951 (293). By 1953, attitudes regarding Planned Parenthood and contraceptives were rapidly changing, and Dr. John Rock joined the study and successfully administered synthetic progesterone to a group of women in 1954, delaying ovulation (600602). The research team began to refer to the contraceptive as the “the Pill” (600602). The pill was approved by the FDA in 1957, “Envoid” (a retail name for the contraceptive) was FDA approved in 1960, and by 1963 over 2.3 million women − and counting − were taking oral contraceptives (605). For more on birth control, its development, contributors, and effects on American suburbia and women’s liberation, see The Fifties by David Halberstam, pages 28688, 292, 598605. Paper 7 when famous women’s rights activist Margaret Sanger forged, with the help of Katherine
McCormick, a business venture to fund contraceptive research. Together, the two women, with the aid of Dr. Gregory Goodwin Pincus, launched the birthcontrol pill, and by 1963 over two million American women were on the pill (Halberstam 282, 288, 605).
In the course of the development of birth control, Sanger and others were simultaneously working to make the controversial topic of birth control less socially taboo. They met with resounding success: unlike their more sexually conservative parents, the new generation of 1950s women are more open to embracing reproductive rights. Halberstam points out that Sanger found her supporters in a “new urban young middle class” in 1950s suburbia, one “independent of the ways of their parents and increasingly sympathetic to social and scientific advances” (287). Once a fringe activist primarily backed by radicals and frequently arrested throughout most of her career, by the early 1950s Sanger enjoyed a new audience of supporters, including collegeeducated “society wives” from “old families” and “good homes” (Halberstam 285). The late forties and early fifties thus marked a turning point in gender issues and women’s reproductive rights.
In addition to the development of birth control, several other precursors of the 1960s sexual revolution were well underway by the postwar forties and early fifties. One of these developments lay in a change in the way sexuality was discussed and represented, particularly in literature and popular culture. For instance, A Streetcar Named Desire opened in December of 1947, a play well known for its grappling with sexual themes and demand for the rethinking of
American male sexuality (Halberstam 270). Halberstam comments that the popularization and
Hollywood production of Streetcar reflected a “changing America and changing sensibilities...a Paper 8 more tolerant social order, where words and images once banned were now permitted. Ten years earlier America might not have been ready for Williams’s plays” (270). The play subsequently would influence prominent researchers and artists interested in exploring American sexuality, including professor and American sexuality researcher Alfred Kinsey, who would form a friendship with Tennessee Williams after finding that the subject of the play was related to his
7 studies.
Later to appear were several prominent writings on the plight of the 1950s American housewife. In an era filled with numerous advertisements for household appliances and magazine pictures of perfect housewives, many women began to crack under the tremendous pressure of the ascribed gender identity. One of the most prominent of those who began to suffer under these pressures was Betty Friedan (Halberstam 595). In 1957, Friedan, bored and unfulfilled in her role as a suburban housewife and mother, conducted a series of interviews with women from her
Smith college graduate class of 1942 on their feelings about their roles as homemakers
(Halberstam 595). The results stunned her, while also confirming her sense of alienation: there were confessions of “doubt, frustration, anxiety...resentment. The women felt unfulfilled and isolated with their children; they often viewed their husbands as visitors from a far more exciting world” (Halberstam 595). Her surprise at finding she was not unique in her dissatisfaction would
7 Alfred Kinsey was a prominent American researcher who focused on the wide disparities between how Americans perceived their sexual behaviors and what those behaviors were in reality. His works, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and the more controversial Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), were the result of data gathered from interviewing various students and married couples. He found that he connected with Williams’s Streetcar after seeing it for the first time on Broadway in 1950, and wrote to Williams himself on the similarities between the play’s subject matter and his research, noting, “As you may know we are making an extensive study of the erotic element in the arts. This covers painting, music, writing, the stage...One of the plays we have studied in some detail is your Streetcar...we should get together” (273). Kinsey’s contributions, though controversial, opened up a dialogue on sexuality in academia and marked yet another turning point towards open discourse on American sexuality and gender roles. Paper 9 inspire her to write The Feminine Mystique, a work deeply associated with American feminism and the sexual revolution of the 1960s (Halberstam 5957).
All of these developments show that while the 1950s is often remembered as a time of placid sexual values and stagnant gender roles, it was in fact a complex time when both men and women were beginning to explore the possibilities of new gender roles and identities in the wake of enormous cultural and technological changes.
Gilbert argues that these questions over changing gender roles continue to plague the mainstream, and outlines the history of cycles of large masculine movements, including the reemergence of male evasion literature in the 1990s. Gilbert astutely observes: “Many of the experiences that worried the generation of the 1950s persist today, although they are not now generally conflated with the post war and mass culture revolutions...Many of the contradictions of the 1950s exist...and more” (Gilbert 221222). For instance, Gilbert finds that the often conflicting images of masculinity that challenged white, middleclass suburban males in the
1950s persist today, and have been expanded upon in literature and the media. These representations range from male stereotypes of a “smackdown” wrestler who embodies at once a
“bully,” “coward,” and “tyrant,” to the “illmannered husbands and sons” on television comedy series who almost seem to “equate vulgarity with masculinity” (222). Such paradoxical presentations of manhood reveal an ongoing cultural dialogue regarding just how men in a technocultural and suburban landscape ought to behave and express their own identities.
Ultimately, such efforts to recover a concept of ailing and threatened masculinity invariably influenced and were influenced by changing conceptions of female gender identity. Indeed, Paper 10
Gilbert argues that male identity is relational in nature and “defined in terms by its apparent opposite, such as femininity” (15).
Concerns over such large social changes and the emergence of new social institutions were inevitably played out in various platforms, and one of these was fiction. There were many literary responses to this widely perceived ‘feminization’ of American culture, including what
Gilbert notes as a genre of “disturbing literature” focused on the “imperiled masculinity” of the day (Gilbert 217). Critic Leslie Fielder notably found in some of America’s well known maleauthored works a theme of “male evasion and companionship,” apparently resulting from a
8 desire to flee from women and live among men (Gilbert 216). There were also many fictional male characters in the popular entertainment industry offering solutions to the crisis of masculine identity in a newly domesticated American society. These range from failed experiments at being a new suburban father in the figure of Ozzie Nelson, to examinations of masculinity in Tennessee Williams's famous works such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Gilbert 219220). Whether authors embraced or rebelled against perceived threats to American manhood in this period,
8 Bradbury himself explored this theme of “male evasion” literature in his own works. Ultimately, Bradbury’s exploration of these issues led him to the conclusion that such an approach is doomed to failure, as it often ends in the obliteration of the human race. Its impracticality is played out in stories such as “December 2005: The Silent Towns,” a story in The Martian Chronicles which explores the relationship between the last man and woman on Mars. Finding the woman (Genevieve Selsor) boring, “plump,” and clingy, the man (Walter Gripp) runs away from her, leaving the human race to wither on the planet (203206). The results of such a course of action are revisited in “April 2026: The Long Years” when, on a mission to return to the planet, Captain Wilder and a team of explorers found Mars to be a “tomb planet” (207.) Indeed, Wilder finds only two people left: an old man from his original expedition named Hathaway, his family of robotic automatons constructed to ward off loneliness (his original family members long since deceased,) and Mr. Walter Gripp himself. The Captain remarks: “We’ve circled Mars twice. Found only one man, name of Walter Gripp, about ten thousand miles from here...Mars is pretty well dead, not even a Martian alive” (211). Gripp’s decision obliterates the last hope of repopulating Mars and annihilates the possibility of continuing human colonists on the planet. The next humans on Earth appear in “October 2026: The MillionYear Picnic,” and they are only there to vacation − Earth at this point in The Martian Chronicles having been pretty much destroyed by war (229). Bradbury’s collection ends with the idea that the tourists are the real “Martians,” and the attempt to colonize Mars ends in complete failure (241). Bradbury’s humorous portrayal of Gripp’s running from Selsor suggests that the author was satirizing the idea of male evasion literature. Paper 11 evolving gender relations were a popular and complex topic being examined at multiple literary levels and across various genres.
While diverse literary forms and genres serve to express the undercurrent of gender tensions in the postwar era, science fiction proved ideal for doing so, especially for women authors who otherwise might not have been able to write about such issues. Lisa Yaszek investigates the presentation of women in relationship to American society in post1945 science fiction in her book Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction. Much as Gilbert explores the changing roles for men in literature in an increasingly domestic postwar nation,
Yaszek focuses on the perspectives, challenges, and changes women faced as these are reflected in some of the science fiction of this period. After World War II, nearly three hundred published women science fiction writers challenged the feminine mystique and began to envision a new place for women in an emerging reality (Yaszek 2).
Prominent science fiction editor and author Judith Merril advocated science fiction as a favorable safe space for writers to explore these concerns: “Science fiction provided authors with ideal allegorical narrative spaces in which to critically assess the “‘here and now’” in an era of typical “‘social conservatism’” and “‘paranoia’” (Yaszek 3). Yaszek discusses the dire prospects facing women authors during this time who attempted to discuss gender roles in other formats, relating several stories about women being rejected for writing about anything other than issues which, in the words of Friedan, could be “sold through their emotions as wives and mothers”
(Yaszek 3).
Many female science fiction authors in the early 1950s, such as Helen Reid Chase, used such a platform to focus on women in “the hightech world of tomorrow,” and celebrated the Paper 12 possibility that “women in the home − much like men in the laboratory and on the assembly line
− might contribute to a new technocultural world order” (Yaszek 2). In these ways, women science fiction authors used the medium to envision a place for domestic females in the coming technological revolution and future American society, at a time when their voices were not usually heard and their roles seemed to be neglected in popular literature.
Yaszek also presents the critiques such writing faced by later feminist scholars and science fiction authors. The body of works produced during this period are set in what some call
“galactic suburbia,” a term invented by feminist critic and writer Joanna Russ to “make sense of the large body of SF stories set in hightech, far futures where gender relations look suspiciously like those of ‘presentday, white, middle class suburbia’” (Yaszek 34). Russ goes on to argue that such stories are marked by heroines saving the day by doing something as domestic as
“mending [their] slip” (Yaszek 4). Much of the domestic fiction in Bradbury’s world also embodies this sentiment, projecting seemingly conservative gender roles into future and galactic settings. Yaszek notes Russ’s view of ‘galactic suburbia’ recognized that these stories placed a “feminine face” on the future while failing to show how “new sciences and technologies might produce new sex and gender relations” (Yaszek 4). This distinction was important in that it went on to allow Russ to define an emerging body of new feminist science fiction (Yaszek 4).
Science fictional narratives dealing with gender did evolve to focus less on the domestic and come to more openly embrace female empowerment. Justine Larbalestier, in her work The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction, examines these presentations of masculinity and femininity in the emerging field of science fiction and the ways in which presentations within the Paper 13
9 genre of women and gender relations evolved over time. Many of the early science fictional texts from 19261973 contained antifeminist images, such as male invaders taking over helpless allfemale planets (Larbalestier 2). Such stories are key to my discussion in that the existence of such literature reveals the immense amount of general anxiety, concern, and tension between the sexes during this period.
Nevertheless, Yaszek makes a strong case that ‘galactic suburbia’ stories are vital to our understanding of the seemingly conservative gender relations of the time, as they provide a framework for understanding the views of the authors regarding these relations (Yaszek 4).
Science fiction allowed people to explore their feelings about an emerging “technocultural world,” and helped them ultimately to find “new understandings and representations of sex and gender” (Yaszek 4).
For the purposes of my thesis, ‘galactic suburbia’ is a useful term in that it encapsulates the phenomenon I am analyzing in Bradbury’s science fiction. While Yaszek is seeking to understand women’s galactic suburban fiction, I would posit that the term is equally useful in describing the similar phenomena we find in some male science fiction writing, including the writings of Bradbury. Many of his short stories and novels present gender roles and relations which at once seem eerily familiar, despite being set in distant galaxies in the far flung future.
Like the women writers who contributed to postWorld War II galactic suburban fiction,
Bradbury isn’t actually just mirroring the gender relations of his day − he uses science fiction to
9 Larbalestier coins her term ‘the battle of the sexes in science fiction’ from Joanna Russ, in her article “Amor Vincit Foeminam: The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction,” which examines science fictional texts that present a: “‘sex war’ between men and women and which posit as a solution to the conflict that women accept their position as subordinate to men’” (Larbalestier 1). Russ argued for a reclaiming of science fiction by and for women in her article. Paper 14 comment on the challenges of allowing technological change to outpace the evolution of human nature and the development of more functional gender roles.
The idea of technological evolution surpassing our society’s ability to change human nature and update traditional gender roles is explored in Andrea Krafft’s essay, “Appliance
Reliance: Domestic Technologies and the Depersonalization of Housework in Postwar American
Speculative Fiction.” Krafft notes that following the war, advancements in household technology served to “dramatically alter” the lives of women in suburban America (69). Increased prosperity and homeownership, combined with advertising portraying “perfect” housewives and the gradual mechanization of the home, often created more pressures and, ironically, more work for housewives (Krafft 6970). With new household technologies and pressures came a massive wave of female discontent, as women moved from doing weekly chores as a family unit to
“continually operating appliances in a neverending cycle of household maintenance” (Krafft
71). The industrialization of the home brought about anxieties to women in the late forties and fifties, with domestic technology marking a “loss of agency” and “a turn away from the independent” figure of the “‘New Woman’ of the 1930s” (Krafft 75). Undoubtedly, such a loss of agency added to the strain on gender relations in the domestic sphere. Given these changes,
Krafft finds that it is “not surprising that writers of fantasy and science fiction...regardless of their gender identities,” wrote about “how postwar household technologies altered domestic relationships” (Krafft 71). Krafft demonstrates that technologies “threate[n] to displace and even replace the female subject” in such literature (Krafft 71).
I would like to build on Krafft’s argument by suggesting that these challenges were not restricted to household technologies, but extended to human technology in general. Bradbury Paper 15 used everything from automatons in the home to rockets to examine and critically assess the domestic gender relations of the postwar era. In stories such as “Marionettes, Inc.,” technology usurps the men in the homes as well. Krafft points out that Bradbury himself explicitly recognized the rapid pace of societal and technological revolution in America. He told an interviewer in the 1970s that “the mainstream hasn’t been paying attention to all the changes in our culture during the last fifty years. The major ideas of our time—developments in medicine, the importance of space exploration to advance our species—have been neglected” (Weller).
Bradbury saw these changes as an untapped field for literary exploration, and used science fiction as a medium through which he could invent and predict what he termed the “possible”
(Weller).
In an interview in the 1970s, Bradbury admitted to a fantasy of sitting on a passing train conversing with some of his favorite authors as a source of writing inspiration (Weller). One of these imagined conversations was with George Bernard Shaw, a man whom Bradbury felt had delved into the “fiction of ideas,” and one with whom Bradbury imagined to have one day sat up
“late into the night...saying, Well, if this is true about women in 1900, what is it going to be in the year 2050?” (Weller). This is interesting, as it is an explicit acknowledgement on Bradbury’s part that gender roles and female identity are changeable and fluid over time. This makes his examinations of the roles of women in his future fictional worlds yet another area of potential and exciting fictional possibility.
On occasion, Bradbury professed his own ideas on gender relations, including the sentiment that men and women were “two different races,” men having no inherent center to themselves “beyond procreating” (“About”). He further suggests, “Women, however, are born Paper 16 with a center. They can create the universe, mother it, teach it, nurture it. Men read science fiction to build the future. Women don't need to read it. They are the future” (“About”).
Bradbury uses the term “race” here as a means of highlighting the divide between male and female roles in postwar society. Where there are differences in worldviews between two “races”
− especially in a science fiction story − there tend to be tensions and clashes, and in this regard,
Bradbury’s fictional universe is no exception.
This fact is borne out in this quote from Bradbury’s dark fantastic 1962 novel Something Wicked This Way Comes: Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh
that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need
not mention it. Why speak of time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments,
as they pass, into warmth and action? How men envy and often hate these warm clocks,
these wives, who know they will live forever. So what do we do? We men turn terribly
mean, because we can’t hold to the world or ourselves or anything. We are blind to
continuity, all breaks down, falls, melts, stops, rots, or runs away. So, since we cannot
shape Time, where does that leave men? Sleepless. Staring. (Bradbury, Something 5859).
Here, Bradbury sets up an even more ominous difference between genders, speaking of “envy” and “often hate” for wives that sets the stage for domestic violence. This makes clear that
Bradbury is part of the conversation on the “battle[s] of the sexes” in midtwentieth century science fiction writings which Russ, Yaszek, Larbalestier, Krafft, and others effectively map. Paper 17
Bradbury explores galactic suburbia, changing gender roles, gender tensions, male evasion, and intimate partner violence throughout his work. Bradbury investigates these themes through many of his short stories, including those collected together in The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, the volumes which I will be focusing on in the remainder of my thesis. The stories set in Bradbury’s own galactic suburbia, “Marionettes, Inc.,” “Ylla: February 1999,” and “The Rocket Man,” directly address themes of 1950s gender tensions and domestic violence.
Gender Tensions: Galactic Suburbia and the Dangers of Power Struggles in “Traditional”
Domestic Marriages
In this section, I will examine Bradbury’s depictions of the power dynamics in traditional domestic marriages. Wherever there is an attempt to exert control in any form over a domestic partner, the majority of such Bradbury stories often end in violence and death. The rigid gender roles in these homes are out of sync with the futuristic technological settings, culminating in micro aggressions between the sexes that eventually result in disaster.
In Bradbury’s story “Marionettes, Inc.” two men named Braling and Smith are trapped in traditional domestic marriages which they view as boring and limiting. In an effort to escape his controlling wife, Braling illegally authorizes the creation of an automaton marionette to replace himself in order to trick her so that he may go out drinking and board a rocket without her noticing. Upon hearing of his plan, Smith, who complains of his wife’s domestic attentiveness −
“married to a woman who overdoes it...when you’ve been married ten years, you don’t expect a woman to sit on your lap for two hours every evening, call you at work twelve times a day and Paper 18 talk baby talk” − begins to consider his own escape marionette (The Illustrated 235). While this may seem trifling in nature, Bradbury isn’t interested in merely crafting a domestic fantasy.
The philosophy expressed by Smith in this story is applicable to Bradbury’s fictional marriages in general: “‘Love will fly if held too lightly, love will die if held too tightly’” (The Illustrated 238). Upon discovering a missing ten thousand dollars from his joint bank account, Smith confronts his wife Nettie, believing she has spent it on “More hats, more clothes, more perfume” (The Illustrated 241). However, to his horror, he learns that she has spent it on a robot so that she is no more than a ticking marionette herself. His earlier belief that his wife loves him so much that “she can’t bear” to lose him for “an hour” suddenly appears a fantasy (The Illustrated 238). This is not the response of a wife happy in her role, and Smith is horrified as the “loneliness and the terror” and “fever and disillusionment” of the situation engulfs him (The Illustrated 241). The second neglected housewife, whom we later learn hasn’t been kissed in years, has been living with the Braling marionette while her husband is out with Smith. Braling’s fate is even worse than his counterpart. Becoming attached to his wife, “Braling Two” ends up usurping the real Braling, the robot declaring as he seizes the man’s wrists that he shall: “put [him] in the box, lock it, and lose the key. Then...buy another Rio ticket for [his] wife” (The Illustrated 243). This effectively kills Braling. Thus, what began as a seemingly domestic tale of men trapped in suburban life and traditional marriages ends in a horror story of robot spouses and obsolete human husbands. The technology in Bradbury’s constructed world usurps housewives and husbands alike as they fail to evolve with the times, try to control each other, and attempt to manipulate their partners. Paper 19
This pattern of danger in the home and strained gender relations persists throughout
Bradbury’s science fiction, and it is little surprise that Bradbury chose the setting of the home to comment on marriage as a social institution. Christian Ylagan notes, “Since its earliest days, science fiction has always been a vehicle where notions of home and homecoming were portrayed and problematized” (30). Ylagan further points out that the concept of “home” can be a broadly conceived topic in science fiction narratives, ranging from the fourwalled household we most often see in Bradbury’s works to entire “villages,” “homelands,” and even “home planets”
(30).
Indeed, Bradbury demonstrates how problems within the home can impact an entire society through the potential ripple effects of such power struggles as they rise from micro to macro levels. A prime example of this last point is to be found in his story “Ylla: February
1999.” In this tale, domestic violence eventually spreads outside of the house, impacting the entire history of the planet Mars. Bradbury indicates in this story that while gender tensions can culminate in terror within the home, such tensions can also easily spread out on a macrocosmic scale, and are therefore dangerous to the health of our entire society. “Ylla” is also one of the best examples in his science fiction of Bradbury’s direct address of 1950s gender tensions and intimate partner violence. In “Ylla,” originally published in 1945 as the second vignette in The Martian Chronicles, gender tensions between man and wife run rampant as a result of the husband’s dangerous possessiveness and abuse of his wife.
Robin Reid notes that the couple’s life is first “disrupted” with the appearance of Ylla’s telepathic dreams of astronaut Nathaniel York, as “Her husband, Yll, reacts with jealousy to her enthrallment” (29). Ylagan adds that the partnership is a “strange Martian caricature of a middle Paper 20 class human couple,” and that Yll’s jealousy is the cause of a “wrath,” which he eventually unleashes in the killing of the visiting astronaut (Ylagan 3637).
I wish to build upon Reid and Ylagan’s notions of “jealousy” and “wrath” and focus on the behaviors Yll exhibits preceding York’s murder. These represent stages of domestic abuse, as
Yll moves from harboring an unexpressed anger towards his wife to using verbal, physical, and emotional abuse against her, violence which ultimately explodes in the Martian society.
Bradbury’s deliberate portrayal of an abusive relationship offers a detailed commentary on the ripple effect of domestic violence on society as a whole. York’s early demise significantly delays and deters the colonization of Mars by Earthlings.
“Ylla” opens in a conventional domestic fashion, set in a house of “crystal pillars” on faraway Mars by an “empty sea,” where bored housewife Ylla goes about her household chores, every day dutifully plucking and “eating the golden fruits that grew from crystal walls, or cleaning the house with handfuls of magnetic dust” (The Martian 2). The theme of empty repetition is immediately established by Bradbury, as we are told that Ylla and her husband Yll have lived “by the dead sea for twenty years” just as their ancestors “had lived in the same house...for ten centuries” (The Martian 2). In addition to the sense of deadening tradition ruling the home, Bradbury also hints at Ylla’s lack of identity: her name appears to be derived from her husband, a name, moreover, which looks suspiciously like “ill.” Immediately then, readers are left with a sense of the archaic nature of gender roles in this household, one where tradition permeates the very space they inhabit and dictates the names they call each other. Lisa Yaszek similarly argues that homes in fiction can be more than just Paper 21
“material places” where women enact identities; they are also “psychic spaces where women learn to inhabit specific sex and gender roles” (The Martian 77). Ten centuries of gender traditions in an isolated desert home is enough to frustrate even a happy couple, but Ylla’s life is plagued by far greater concerns. Her husband’s love affair in the city, his lack of warmth, and his erratic behavior towards her are gradually revealed as she struggles to fill her empty days and conform to her domestic role. This depiction of domestic isolation and frustration reflects the experience of many postwar suburban housewives, as we saw earlier highlighted by feminists such as Friedan, and the tensions between the couple mirror the gender anxiety in the period discussed by Gilbert. In this way, Bradbury constructs an allegory linking this alien couple and a typical postwar suburban couple.
Yll’s controlling behavior slowly escalates as the tale unfolds. Ylla is forced by her husband to attend “an entertainment” with him despite her repeated pleas to stay home, as her husband becomes increasingly jealous of her telepathic dreams of the Earth astronaut, Nathaniel
York (The Martian 7). As he can’t distract her from her dreams, her husband intimidates and frightens her with increasing possessiveness. For example, when Ylla wakes the morning after the entertainment, Bradbury writes, “She opened her eyes. Her husband stood over her. He looked as if he had stood there for hours, watching. She did not know why, but she could not look him in the face” (The Martian 9). Yll’s subsequent manipulations − including making his wife stay at home all day and not allowing her to go outside to receive a visitor named Dr. Nlle − contribute to her emotional trauma (The Martian 213). Intimidation then builds to physical threats and violence, with her husband bending
“stiffly over her,” “seizing her wrist,” flinging “her hand away stiffly,” giving her a “rough pat,” Paper 22 and finally, shooting the astronaut (The Martian 1115). This last act causes her body to “jerk...with it” and she begins “screaming and screaming,” as she runs “violently through the house and once more [throws] wide the door” (The Martian 1115). Of special interest here is Bradbury’s use of language: the repetition of “stiffly” and “rigid” in these passages recalls the earlier description of traditional roles in their home that have been ongoing for one thousand years. Bradbury’s gradual escalation of violence contributes to the slow dramatization of gender tension in the short story, and by the time of York’s murder, the ripple effect of intimate partner violence culminates in dire straits.
Gender tension drives the violence throughout. Yll’s very murder weapon, a gun of stinging “bees,” serves as a metaphor for the sexual tensions in the story, with this phallic symbol finally marking the end of York’s life (The Martian 16). Moreover, when Ylla tells her husband that in her dream the astronaut called her beautiful, he first laughs, telling her to keep her “Silly, feminine dreams” to herself, before screaming “Tell me! ...You can’t keep secrets from me!” all with a face “dark and rigid as he stood over her” (Bradbury, The Martian 10). In addition to physical and verbal abuse, Yll also discounts Ylla’s feelings and insults her intelligence as both a female and an autonomous being, before telling her at the close of the story that she’ll “be all right tomorrow” (The Martian 17). Ylla’s world is one marked with all the 10 classic indicators of an abusive and controlling domestic situation. In this case, with a husband
10 According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Human Resources, domestic violence is “abusive or violent behavior between two people who are married or living together...the abuse can be physical...or psychological…” (U.S.) Aspects to abuse can include domination (abuser making the decisions,) economic control (denying job freedom,) emotional manipulation (such as using jealousy, frustration, etc. to justify behavior,) sexual and physical abuse, intimidation, or control (isolating partner, name calling, etc.) (U.S.) Paper 23 capable of murder, she relents and agrees with him that it will in fact be “all right tomorrow” as she sobs and trembles (The Martian 17). Yll’s solution to Ylla’s distractedness is to encourage her to throw herself into her domestic role, telling her that ““If [she] worked harder [she] wouldn’t have these silly dreams”
(The Martian 4). Ylla’s labor is a figure for the perceived ease of housework made possible by the technology of the postwar era. She cooks their food in boiling lava, a technology reminiscent of microwaves; she tosses some cleaning dust down much as one might place a Roomba on the floor and empty it later; she wipes down glasses with ease and picks fruits ready to be gathered every day as if in a grocery store bin (The Martian 2, 6, 1314, 1617). At the same time, however, there doesn’t appear to be a time in which Ylla is truly at leisure. This is in marked distinction to her husband, who never lifts a finger in the home other than to read his book on war. In this way, Bradbury comments critically on the inequities in the home in gender roles. Through traditional housework and the subservient role Ylla learns to play, she experiences helplessness, suffering, and the inability to prevent murder. There appears to be no positive result from these domestic gender roles, and yet their lives continue according to tradition, moving forward to an equally dysfunctional tomorrow.
Overall, “Ylla” serves as one of Bradbury’s chief examples of the insufficiency of traditional gender roles in postwar America. Bradbury demonstrates the disaster in embracing archaic roles, specifically by highlighting the loneliness, frustration, and pathos of Ylla. He also shows how outdated gender ideologies harm both sexes, as readers watch Yll increasingly scramble to assert dominance. The entire story seems all too familiar to readers as a story of Paper 24 domestic violence in the postwar American suburban home. In order to speak about issues that were, and still are, often hushed or hidden, Bradbury sets his tale in galactic suburbia.
If couples who occupy traditional gender roles in marriage experience such trauma when side by side every day, what occurs when they are apart? Can traditional roles be as damaging when the partners are separated; or does the freedom when apart allow them to avert the problems evident elsewhere in Bradbury’s galactic suburban science fiction? This is the issue
Bradbury explores in his short story, “The Rocket Man.” The story focuses on a husband who travels through space for three months at a time, leaving behind on Earth a loving wife and son.
The husband is thus the equivalent of a travelling businessmen or military man. Such a situation would be highly relevant to many wartime and postwar suburban American families.
In “The Rocket Man,” readers are struck once again by the degree of loneliness in the household. Housewife and mother Lilly pines for her travelling husband, continuously concocting plans to keep him at home. For instance, Lilly asks her son not to mow the lawn or do other traditionally ‘male’ household chores, including “repairing the electric breakfastmaker” and “the mechanical book maker,” so that her husband will be forced to do them when he returns
(The Illustrated 103104). The presence of advanced home appliances and technology once more marks the story as futuristic, and juxtaposes the futuristic setting with the persistence of traditional gender roles. As her husband spends his few days off “hammering and tinkering” around the house, his wife stands “smiling over him, happy” (Bradbury, The Illustrated 104). Traditional female household duties are also used in the story as a means of control. Take for instance this scene presented from the perspective of the son at the family dinner table, where his mother has just prepared a Thanksgiving feast in the middle of August: “Mom looked across Paper 25 her table which she had set like a wonderful silver trap, a miraculous gravy pit into which, like a struggling beast of the past caught in a tar pool, her husband might at last be caught and held, gazing out through a jail of wishbones, safe forever. Her eyes sparkled” (The Illustrated 107). As with Yll and Ylla, possessiveness permeates the couple’s dynamic. This exertion of will affects negatively both spouses, as Lilly’s obsession leaves her husband feeling “helpless” and anxious
(The Illustrated 104). Feeling equally unfulfilled at home and in space, the man forces his son to promise him that he’ll never become a rocket man, telling him, “when you’re out there you want to be here, and when you’re here you want to be out there. Don’t start that. Don’t let it get hold of you” (The Illustrated 106). Remarking that his wife treats him “as if [he] weren’t [there]as if [he] were invisible,” and that he’s “not there for her,” the man is repeatedly driven back to the stars as a way of escaping his unhappy domestic life (The Illustrated 104). This is akin to Ylla, who looked to the stars and the arrival of Nathaniel York as a source of comfort and escape from her awful domestic situation.
Ultimately, his trips into space result in his death, as his ship falls into the sun and burns up (The Illustrated 111). The symbol of the sun − a source of dangerous power and also that which makes life possible − and its connection to the figure of the wife and mother cannot be overlooked. Nor should we fail to note Bradbury’s naming of the wife to be Lilly, as the idea of
11 the lily often represents death in flower symbolism.
11 In a 2002 sociological study examining gendered metaphors, it was found that both the sun and flowers are commonly associated with women and motherhood (Hegstrom 226). Additionally, women and nature are often associated together in literature and among the study’s participants (Hegstrom 219). Phillip L. Thomas notes in his examination of death and color symbolism in Latin literature “Red and White: A Roman Color Symbol” that flowers in literature which are red and whitecommonly lilies and poppiesare often associated with death (314). Specifically, Thomas mentions that lilies were found in Virgil’s underworld, in Ovin’s Tarquin story, and were Paper 26
While Lilly’s manipulations within the domestic sphere leave her husband feeling guilty and divided, the constant wandering of the man in the dangerous realms of space slowly drives the wife to depression and desperate delusion. Her desire for her husband leads to repeated crying, insomnia as she waits up for her husband’s arrival, and a fear of her husband even looking at the stars. This leads her to call him back to the home as the sun goes down in the garden “like she called” her child in from the street at night (The Illustrated 101). Conversely, her coping mechanism while her husband is away is to tell herself that he is already “dead,” resulting in a dehumanization of her husband and transforming him into a
“pleasant little memory or a dream” (The Illustrated 110). This results in her feeling that her husband “isn’t there” even when he is home (The Illustrated 110). This delusion results in her neither crying nor grieving when her husband does actually die.
However, she does repress her pain by hiding from sunlight. The avoidance of the sun alters the family’s routine and negatively affects the life of her son, who tells us,
So for a long time after my father died my mother slept through the days and wouldn’t
go out. We had breakfast at midnight and lunch at three in the morning, and dinner at the
cold dim hour of 6 A.M. We went to all night shows and went to bed at sunrise. And, for a long while, the only days we ever went out to walk were the days when it was raining
and there was no sun. (The Illustrated 111) In this way, Bradbury explores the damaging effects of traditional gender roles even when couples are separated. The “male” spheres of domestic work, which the wife insists her husband perform, become a way to exert her control over him, and also negatively affect the entire
placed on the gnat’s tomb in Culex, among others (314). Lilies thus have a long history of death symbolism in Western literature. Paper 27 household when they are neglected while he is away. The rigid female household routine is also used as a way to ‘trap’ her husband and convince him to stay; yet, this strategy is ineffective and only succeeds in driving him further away. The menial tasks fail to make the home interesting to the husband, especially when compared to the excitement of the rocket, and the wife’s habit of dehumanizing her husband results in his feeling absent from the home even while he is there.
The man’s absences cause him to neglect the emotional needs of both his wife and son, to feel unfulfilled at home and work alike, and eventually result in demise. The son views all of this with sad sagacity, and in the end his father’s recommendation that he never become a ‘rocket man’ seems like Bradbury’s own voice coming through the page.
In these stories and throughout his fiction, Bradbury shows how traditional early twentieth century gender roles are unsustainable in an evolving society. As housework becomes depersonalized and technology outstrips established gender roles, power struggles emerge, and marriages and domestic environments fall apart. The stories culminate in heartbreak and often death. Both sexes, households, and even entire planets suffer. All of these patterns point toward the need for changes in social and gender roles to accompany technological advances.
Angry and Monstrous Housewives in Galactic Suburbia
“They’ll fry you, bleach you, change you! Crack you, flake you away until you’re nothing but a husband, a working man, the one with the money who pays so they can come sit in there devouring their evil chocolates! Do you think you could control them?” (The Illustrated 221). These are the words of Martian invader Ettil Vrye, a character from Bradbury’s “The
Concrete Mixer” whose resistance to war and Earthlings in general leaves him terrified of Paper 28
American housewives. Bradbury uses Ettil’s viewpoint to estrange readers from American suburbia, in order to expose them to the negative effects of traditional gender roles.
The figure of the angry housewife “monster” dominate many Bradbury stories. In the case of Ettil, exposure to American culture − both dangerous housewives and predatory businessmen − eventually drives him to insanity and death. Another prime example of the dangerous angry housewife figure is seen in Mrs. Ttt, a Martian housewife in Bradbury’s
Martian Chronicles vignette “August 1999: The Earthmen.” Mrs. Ttt’s impatience with visitors and isolating housework causes her to dislike the visiting American astronauts. Mrs. Ttt and other aliens pass the visitors off from home to home, until the humans are confined in an insane asylum, lose their minds, and eventually perish (The Illustrated 2039). Each story involves the housewife as a source of insanity and death. In “The Concrete Mixer,” Bradbury critiques beauty parlors and products as giving women revolting artificial qualities that make them into monsters. Ettil subsequently becomes horrified by the vanity, lust, and consumerism he sees in American society. Ettil views these values as dangerous and threatening:
The odors of perfume were fanned out on the summer air by the whirling vents of the
grottoes where the women hid like undersea creatures, under electric cones, their hair
curled into wild whorls and peaks, their eyes shrewd and glassy, animal and sly, their
mouths painted a neon red. Fans were whirring, the perfumed wind issuing upon the
stillness, moving among green trees, creeping among the amazed Martians.
“For God’s sake!” screamed Ettil … “They’ll get us! Those horrid things in there ...Those
evil undersea things, those women in their cool little caverns of artificial rock! ...They’ll Paper 29
rush out on us, hurling chocolate boxes and copies of Klieg Love and Holly Pickture, shrieking with their red greasy mouths! Inundate us with their banality, destroy our
sensibilities! Look at them, being electrocuted by devices, their voices like hums and
chants...Do you dare go in there?” (The Illustrated 220221) Bradbury turns the American housewife into a “sea creature” with a “red greasy mouth” that shrieks and throws chocolate. She reads the kind of ladies’ magazines typical of the era which instructed women to be wives and mothers. She presents the danger of inundating us with her
“banality.” Unlike popular fifties advertisements, which glorified beauty parlor glamour, this passage critiques the artificiality of the “perfect” housewife figure.
Bradbury uses cognitive estrangement to present a horror story of the 1950s housewife as monster and weapon. Indeed, originally destined for war, Ettil writes in a letter to his wife Tylla that the vapid American housewife has seduced and imperiled the Martians: “To think in my naiveté I imagined that the Earthmen would have to counterattack with guns and bombs...No...
There are blond robots with pink rubber bodies, real, but somehow unreal, alive but somehow automatic in all responses, living in caves all their lives ... Nothing of us will survive. We will be killed not by the gun but by the gladhand” (The Illustrated 225). Bradbury’s depiction of the weaponized dumbeddown housewife illustrates the clear dangers of the almost robotic figure perpetuated by the typical advertising of the era. The reference to the wives as “automatic,”
“rubber,” and “unreal” speaks to the objectification of the human female Ettil witnesses.
Furthermore, the reference to the beauty parlor as the “cave” calls to mind both the stunted evolutionary process of the caveman, and Plato’s allegory of the cave. Plato’s allegory of the cave concerns society’s unwillingness to be enlightened (Plato). In this instance, Bradbury’s cave Paper 30 represents society’s refusal to recognize how detrimental Hollywood beauty standards are to women and American culture. Not surprisingly, the story is set in California, the epicenter of
“glamour” propaganda (The Illustrated 216217). Bradbury quite consciously depicts the postwar housewife as an evil weapon, and one which could destroy the American family unit and society as a whole. Indeed, it is this ‘artificial’ society which leads to Ettil’s insanity and ultimate demise (Bradbury, The Illustrated 233). Bradbury again portrays the housewife as a dangerous agent in his story, “The Earth
Men,” where Martian housewife Mrs. Ttt’s absorption in her domestic labors leaves her no time to welcome visiting American astronauts. The first Martian to meet the team, the second expedition to Mars after Nathaniel York, Mrs. Ttt slams the door on the men, annoyed that they have interrupted her chores (The Illustrated 2122). Rather than welcome the aliens, she can only scream: “All over my clean floor! ... Mud! Get out! If you come in my house, wash your boots first” (Bradbury, The Illustrated 22). She shifts from mere annoyance to outright hostility, declaring, “If you’ve made my crystal buns fall in the oven...I’ll hit you with a piece of wood!”
(The Illustrated 22). Bradbury gives her qualities of the monstrous, describing her in this way: “She peered into a little hot oven. She came back, red, steamyfaced. Her eyes were sharp yellow, her skin was soft brown, she was thin and quick as an insect. Her voice was metallic and sharp” (The Illustrated 22). Her verbal assault on the men and her degradation of their importance produces a physical reaction in them: “The man swore luridly, as if she’d hit his hand with a hammer” (The Illustrated 22). Their disappointment only increases, as the men first hear the “sound of quarrelling upstairs,” and then, over an hour later, they find her watering some flowers and Paper 31 recalling that she’d “forgot something” (The Illustrated 23). When she passes them on to Mr. Aaa, the men, heartbroken, look at her as if “at an empty Christmas tree” (The Illustrated 24). The significance of the figure of the angry housewife stressed out by her domestic role cannot be overlooked. Household duties take precedent over even such a monumental development as a visit from aliens, and the arrival causes domestic tension to erupt between husband and wife. Mrs. Ttt’s behavior is an omen of the developments to follow as the men are passed along until they are interred in an insane asylum, where they go crazy and die (The Illustrated 2439). Mrs. Ttt’s role as a perverse housewife figure, who doesn’t welcome the travelers to her hearth, aids in their untimely demise.
Bradbury uses the monstrous housewife in his science fiction to caution readers against a future where antiquated gender roles persist. From the presence of the housewife as sexualized
“sea creature” set to destroy men and use them for their money to the perverted figure of homemaker causing destruction because of the stress produced by her role, Bradbury’s monsters lurk in the corners of galactic suburbia, killing men with the broom and the hair curler, in the kitchen and the beauty parlor.
Shared Housework and Modernized Gender Roles: Bradbury’s Solution to the ‘Battle of the Sexes’
Perhaps the greatest anomaly in terms of domestic gender relations in The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man is to be found in the short story “The Last Night of the World.” Nestled in one of his darkest settings yet – a telepathically agreedupon last night on
Earth − the story juxtaposes impending doom with the most peaceful, loving, and functional Paper 32 couple we have yet encountered. The story begins with the husband fixing coffee and sitting down to talk over the end of the world with his wife. They calmly agree the world is ending, sip their coffee, and contentedly watch their children playing outside. They go about their nighttime duties, lie down in sheets which are “so clean and nice,” and fall asleep with their “hands clasped” and “their heads together” to face the end of the world as one (The Illustrated 140). What is unique in this story is that unlike Bradbury’s other galactic suburban couples, there is no violence or tension present in the story. In fact, there are numerous signs of affection, love, and trust between husband and wife. For example, they sit by the fire and read their papers, before the man “kisse[s] his wife for a long time” (The Illustrated 140). They tenderly tuck their children into bed and kiss them goodnight (The Illustrated 139). The story ends with the couple holding hands and stating, “We’ve been good to each other, anyway” (The Illustrated 140). Unlike the husband in “The Rocket Man,” this husband declares that he enjoys spending time with his family: “Do you know, I won’t miss anything but you and the girls. I never liked cities or my work or anything except you three” (The Illustrated 138). The atmosphere of this suburban home is calm and loving; there is even an “easy, clean aroma of the brewed coffee in the evening air,” and the crackling of a fireplace (The Illustrated 136, 140). The very bed in which the couple sleeps is a safe haven, a “cool night bed” sheathed in “cool darkness” (The Illustrated 140). The story is set in 1969, twentyone years after the date of its debut in The Illustrated Man, and eighteen years after its publication in Esquire magazine. What explains this couple's unique functional and affectionate dynamic? Throughout the story, this couple is marked as different from many of Bradbury's other stories in their shared responsibility of housework and domestic duties. For example, already in the sixth line of the Paper 33 story, we see the husband at work in the kitchen: “He poured some coffee...they lifted it slowly and drank” (The Illustrated 1367). Throughout the rest of the story, the inclusive pronoun “they” is used when describing the couple’s tasks. This signals a mutuality in their dynamic, an equality of gender when it comes to running the household and raising their children. For example, Bradbury informs the reader, “They washed the dishes and stacked them away with special neatness;” “They sat and read the papers and talked and listened to some radio music and then sat together;” “They thought of all the other people in the world;” “They moved through the house and turned out the lights” (The Illustrated 139, 140). As we have seen in Bradbury’s other stories, the wife is the one who runs the household, does all of the chores, and prepares all of the food. This inequality is the source of stress for these figures, and it usually results in disaster. While a disaster also occurs in this story, the domestic situation is not at the root of it.
This particular story is unique in its portrayal of both partners equally contributing to the home.
The story offers a rare example of a functional couple in Bradbury's fictional universe, and the uniqueness of shared housework seems to be one of the biggest factors in the couple’s success.
The sense of peace in the home is perhaps a reflection on a life well lived. Indeed, the man in the story remarks to his wife, “‘Sometimes it frightens me, sometimes I’m not frightened at all but at peace.’ He glanced in at the girls and their yellow hair shining in the lamplight” (The Illustrated 136). The look he gives his daughters indicates he draws strength and comfort from his family and home.
The couple additionally seems to have evolved beyond the household technology, and not allowed it to engulf them. Unlike the “electric breakfast maker” of “The Rocket Man” or the boiling lava of “Ylla,” the couple’s most modern appliance is a sink and light switch: there is not Paper 34 even a dishwasher, as the couple wash and dry the dishes together by hand (The Illustrated 139). The story is unique too in that the progress in gender relations outstrips the progress of technology.
Combined together, shared housework, adequately paced gender evolution, and reduced technology seem to be the factors in the “The Last Night of the World” that provide the utopian possibility of a healthy gender dynamic in the household. Unlike many other galactic suburban stories, there’s no domestic violence or gender tension in the tale. I believe Bradbury holds this story up as a new standard to which his readers should aspire. Bradbury shows that gender progress and shared housework could be the solution to the question of how to resolve this “battle of the sexes” in speculative fiction–and in the nation’s future.
Conclusion
In his own life, Bradbury embraced changing gender roles. Progressive for his times,
Bradbury’s wife Maggie worked full time, enabling him to stay at home to write and perfect his craft (“Ray”). He regularly credited his wife and marriage as his source of inspiration and success (“Ray”). Interviewers Lisa Potts and Chad Coates later wrote, “It was Maggie who allowed Ray to develop as a writer; in the early years of their marriage, she worked fulltime while Ray stayed at home to write. One chance meeting changed American literature” (“Ray”).
Bradbury’s own belief in the importance of family in the success of the American future is quite clear. He was a family man, and he only ever dated and loved one woman, his Maggie
(“Ray”). He adored his daughters, and believed that “education,” particularly primary education and literacy among young children, was the answer to the world’s ills (“Ray”). In his own Paper 35 marriage, he listed a sense of humor and the ability to say you’re sorry as vital to marital happiness (Weller). Bradbury’s own life experiences may have influenced his depictions of gender dynamics in his fiction. Specifically, couples who avoid rigid gender roles appear the happiest and most functional.
While it is unclear whether or not Bradbury ever experienced domestic violence in his own childhood, he grew up in relative poverty in the twenties and thirties and moved frequently while his father searched for work (Weller). It is possible that during these travels, Bradbury witnessed domestic conflict. There is a sense of “uprootedness” and “dislocation” as well as
“loss” in his domestic writings (Weller). Bradbury lost his grandfather at five and a baby sister at age seven, and both losses deeply affected him, possibly accounting for a certain sadness in his fictional homes (Weller).
We have seen that in his stories set in galactic suburbia, domestic and spousal violence, power struggles, and gender tension permeate the typically safe spaces of the homes. Men threaten their wives in stories such as “Ylla,” housewives terrify visiting aliens and drive them to insanity and death in “The Earthmen” and “The Concrete Mixer,” spouses try to manipulate each other in “Marionettes, Inc.,” and desperate attempts at spousal control lead to tensions and grief in “The Rocketman” and “Ylla.” These are a few examples in Bradbury’s speculative fiction that demonstrate the destructive power of traditional gender roles in the face of advancing technology.
There are exceptions, “The Last Night of the World” being a powerful example of cooperative postwar couples who have found a way to coexist and prosper, even as separate alien
“races” in galactic suburbia. In these ways, Bradbury used cognitive estrangement to Paper 36 demonstrate the insufficient nature of traditional gender roles and the dangers of technological evolution surpassing gender progress, in his time, now, and in the future, as well as the devastating global consequences that such tensions can cause if left unchecked. Paper 37
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"About Ray Bradbury." Editorial. Playboy 1996: n. pag. Harper Collins Publishers: Ray
Bradbury. Web. 05 Jan. 2016.
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