Vonarburg's Vision

[bibliogramma]

Elisabeth Vonarburg, translations by Jane Brierley:
The Silent City
The Maerlande Chronicles

I first read Elisabeth Vonarburg’s The Maerlande Chronicles (published in the US as In the Mother's Land) some years ago. It captured my imagination in a way that no other feminist exploration of a female-dominated society has. It remains my favourite example of the subgenre, more so than other, better-known feminist revisionings of society, be they utopian, dystopian, or somewhere in between.

It’s hard for me to put my finger on just why this book is so meaningful to me in the midst of such powerful works as Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, Suzy McKee Charnas’s Holdfast Chronicles, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, or Sheri Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country, to name but a few.

Part of it is the mystery, I think - the fact that Vonarburg lets us look at her future society from the inside out and leaves her vision incomplete and unfinished. Vonarburg’s Maerlande is a commonwealth of matriarchal societies at a pivotal point in their history. We know some of what has gone before, but only through the eyes of the characters - we do not know, nor will we ever learn, the uninterpreted truths. We know that changes are coming, from the discovery of new evidence about the past, from explorations planned for the future, from plans old and new only referred to and never described explicitly, but we do not know what those changes will be or how they will affect Maerlande and its people. There are characters whose functions in this change are only partially seen and understood. Vonarburg gives us an image of a future that is as open to speculation, interpretation, and conjecture as any real society is, and furthermore, one in which not only gender roles but gender itself may be less fixed and certain than we, and the women of Maerlande, believe.

Some time after my first reading of The Maerlande Chronicles, I discovered a library copy of The Silent City, which is set in the same universe as a time some centuries before. While the events of The Silent City – set during a period of worldwide social disintegration out of which the commonwealth of Maerlande will some day evolve – illuminated some of the questions, the uncertainties, the mysteries, there was still much that I didn’t have a clear interpretation of.

For some time, I thought this might be due to the fact that I read them in the “wrong” order, so this fall, after finally acquiring my own copy of The Silent City, I decided to read both volumes in order, only to find that the tantalising lack of definitive determination of objective fact remains.

The Silent City is set at the end of technological Civilisation; a plague has swept around the world, disproportionately killing men, and most of humanity is sinking into various forms of barbarism, most of which are violent and patriarchal. At the same time, the last remnants of "civilised" humanity have withdrawn into underground fortresses, from which they send out, from time to time, cyborg observers to watch the disintegration happening around them. The novel tells the story of one of the last inhabitants of the last functioning city, whose genetic experiments may ultimately bring about an unfathomable change in human existence.

The Maerlande Chronicles takes up the story several centuries later. Humanity is recovering from the devastation of the past, although some variation of the old plague remains a threat to all children and men are still in the minority. A commonwealth of matriarchal societies has come into existence, each one somewhat different in the ways it deals with issues of gender, reproduction and leadership, among other aspects of life, but all drawing much of their culture from a key religious event involving a female saviour figure and her apostles. We see the events of the novel from a number of perspectives, one of which may be informed by at least some, if not all, of the information and experience of the key protagonists of the earlier book, but the crucial mysteries of the past – the reality behind the religion of Maerlande – and the future – what will be the ultimate effect on humanity of the combination of the plague and the genetic modifications that are part of the first novel's plot – remain unanswered.

And there is something both comforting and compelling in that uncertainty, because it is so very real.