Women’s Agency in the Dune Universe

: Tracing Women’s Liberation through

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Kennedy
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Women’s Agency in
the Dune Universe
Tracing Women’s Liberation
through Science Fiction
Kara Kennedy
Women’s Agency in the Dune Universe
 Kara Kennedy

Women’s Agency in
the Dune Universe
Tracing Women’s Liberation through Science
Fiction
Kara Kennedy
Auckland, New Zealand

ISBN 978-3-030-89204-3    ISBN 978-3-030-89205-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89205-0

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To my teachers Ms. H and the two Dr. B’s for introducing me to
women’s studies
 Preface

They’d been there the whole time, neglected, misjudged, disregarded.

The extraordinary women of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood in Frank
Herbert’s Dune series deserved more. This book is a step toward giving
them the scholarly focus their characters ought to have.
The premise of this book originated when I chose to study Dune for my
undergraduate honor’s project. It was more than a little risky choosing to
analyze my favorite book, lest I ruin my enjoyment of it, but I wanted to
look at something different from the traditional literary texts of my degree
program. I also wanted to find a topic that could combine my fields of
study—English literature and women’s studies. Thus, I decided to focus
on the character of Lady Jessica. During the course of the project, I stum-
bled across a significant gap in the scholarship: little had been written
about the women of Dune. And the criticism that did exist was quite dis-
missive, resulting in an incomplete picture of the female characters in this
best-selling work of science fiction. Jessica alone was an admirable, three-­
dimensional character worthy of study, not to mention the all-female
organization she belonged to, the Bene Gesserit. Truly, how many male
heroes have their mother with them every step of the way? For the project,
I chose to examine the representation of Jessica as a strong woman who
went beyond stereotypes despite being in a male-dominated culture. I
used the concept of agency (the means through which someone exerts
power or achieves their goals) because it was flexible enough to fit the
roles and types of influence Jessica had. My argument covered three
aspects of her agency in Dune—maternal, military, and religious—as well
as the term ‘witch,’ used in the book a few times to label her. At the final

vii
viii PREFACE

presentation of the project, I played a film clip from Monty Python and the
Holy Grail that makes a mockery of the idea of a woman being a witch.
Although this term did appear in Dune, I concluded, this did not mean
that the characterization of women was stereotypical.
When I moved on to my master’s thesis, I expanded my analysis of
women’s agency in Dune to include the agency of the Bene Gesserit as an
organization, as well as characters such as Reverend Mother Gaius Helen
Mohiam, Lady Margot Fenring, Princess Irulan, and Chani. This allowed
a more expansive view of women’s activities, revealing additional evidence
that the characterization of women was more complex than critics implied.
Yet there was only enough space to examine the first book. I still wanted
my research to encompass the original six-book series, especially since the
final two books are dominated by female characters and include another
all-female faction to rival the Bene Gesserit. Thus, I embarked on a PhD
that would enable me to take my analysis of women’s agency across the
whole series, from Lady Jessica to Mother Superior Darwi Odrade. Since
a doctoral dissertation required more theorical backing, I chose a blend of
feminist and historical approaches that allowed the series to be situated in
its cultural moment while being analyzed within an agency framework. I
focused on embodied agency, specifically, because it aligned with both
second-wave feminist demands for bodily autonomy and the characteriza-
tion of the Bene Gesserit. In addition, I included criticism of the trajectory
of science fiction scholarship that has overlooked this series as a notewor-
thy part of both New Wave and feminist science fiction.
This book therefore builds on my doctoral research, in which I was sup-
ported by a scholarship from the New Zealand Federation of Graduate
Women. My thanks go to my advisors and supervisors along the way who
have provided valuable feedback and insight. Thanks also go to friends and
family and my long-suffering partner who have conversed with me about
elements in the Dune series and provided a springboard for working out
lines of argument. Fortunately, throughout such focused study, I have
only grown to appreciate the Dune series more, so my original choice was
a risk well worth taking.

Auckland, New Zealand Kara Kennedy

 Contents

1 Introduction: The Sidelining of the Women of Dune  1

Introduction   1
Why the Women of Dune?   4
Contemporaneous Concepts of Second-Wave Feminism   7
The Incomplete Narrative of New Wave and Feminist Science
Fiction  16
Embodied Agency  21

2 Mind-Body Synergy 27
Theories of the Mind and Body  28
Alternatives in Eastern Philosophies  34
The Foundation of Bene Gesserit Skills  43
Anticipation of Feminist Science Fiction  58
The Matter of Prescience  60
Contrast with Mentats  62
Conclusion  67

3 Reproduction and Motherhood 69

Feminist Theories on Reproduction  70
The Bene Gesserit Breeding Program  75
Reproduction as Oppressive or Transformative  83
Alternative Means of Reproduction in Feminist Science Fiction  90
Contrast with the Bene Tleilaxu  92
Conclusion 101

ix
x Contents

4 Voices103
Feminist Resistance to Limitations on Women’s Voices 104
The Voice and Women 109
Silencing of the Bene Gesserit 119
Women’s Truthsaying Ability 121
Women’s Roles as Advisors 125
The Use of Epigraphs 129
Female Voices in Feminist Science Fiction 132
Conclusion 134

5 Education and Memory137

Shifting Conceptions of Education and History 138
Bene Gesserit Education 144
Parallels with the Jesuit Order 147
Limitations on Women’s Autonomy 152
Women’s Access to Other Memory 156
Female Communities in Feminist Science Fiction 168
Solidarity and Forging Bonds of Sisterhood 169
Conclusion 175

6 Sexuality177
Changing Conceptions of Sexuality 178
The Bene Gesserit as Case Study for Treatment of Sexuality 186
Ways That the Bene Gesserit Secure Agency 187
Contrast Between Honored Matre ‘Whores’ and Bene Gesserit
‘Witches’ 198
The Depiction of Homosexuality as Abnormal 208
Visions of Sexuality in Feminist Science Fiction 210
Reflection of Changes in the Treatment of Sexuality in the New
Wave 212
Conclusion 213

7 Conclusion215

Index 221
 Abbreviations

CHA Chapterhouse: Dune

CHI Children of Dune
DM Dune Messiah
GE God Emperor of Dune
HD Heretics of Dune

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Sidelining of the Women

of Dune

Introduction
Frank Herbert’s Dune is one of the foundational texts in science fiction,
having enjoyed decades of popularity after an initial struggle to find a pub-
lisher willing to take on such a long and multi-layered work. First serial-
ized as “Dune World” and “The Prophet of Dune” in the science fiction
magazine Analog in 1963–1965, Dune was published as a novel in 1965
and was followed by five sequels: Dune Messiah (1969), Children of Dune
(1976), God Emperor of Dune (1981), Heretics of Dune (1984), and
Chapterhouse: Dune (1985), with events spanning around 5000 years
within the Dune universe. The first novel holds the status of being the
best-selling science fiction book of all time and is frequently taught in sci-
ence fiction courses.
Yet in spite of Dune’s popularity and the series’ publication during the
height of second-wave feminism in the U.S., critical attention to female
characters in the series has severely lagged behind that devoted to female
characters in other science fiction, particularly in the category of feminist
science fiction, in which Herbert’s series has never been placed. This
appears strange considering that the series contains such a prominent all-­
female organization, the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood, whose members have
an array of impressive skills and abilities. In fact, in his study of the author,
Frank Herbert (1988), William F. Touponce calls attention to this neglect,
noting that “whether or not the Dune series is ultimately feminist in the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
K. Kennedy, Women’s Agency in the Dune Universe,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89205-0_1
2 K. KENNEDY

images and voices of women it projects is an open question” (109).

Therefore, this book seeks to redress this situation by answering the ques-
tion ‘Is the series feminist?’ as well as additional follow-up questions: If so,
what kinds of bodily agency and control do the female characters display,
how do these link with feminist thought, and how do the characters com-
pare to those in other twentieth-century science fiction?
I focus on the women of the Bene Gesserit because they are the most
prominent female characters throughout the series, making them ideal
objects of analysis whose characterization can also be compared across the
six novels. The characterization of individual women of the Sisterhood
and the larger organization creates some of the rich complexities and key
tensions in the narrative, including the tension between individual and
collective agency and the tension between human agency and biological
determinism, which also offers a perspective on the role of sexual differ-
ences between female and male bodies. In light of the series’ focus on the
capabilities of humans rather than computer technologies and second-­
wave feminist demands for women to have control over their own bodies,
I use the overarching framework of embodied agency in particular to
explore these tensions and analyze Herbert’s representation of the Bene
Gesserit, as well as map the intersections between the series, second-wave
feminism, and feminist science fiction texts. I am primarily concerned with
the six novels, contextual and critical material published in the U.S. in the
same time period, and the American science fiction tradition in which the
series sits. The fact that the series materialized during a period of transfor-
mative social and cultural movements in the U.S. makes it a particularly
unique case study in American science fiction in which to examine the
representation of women.
In essence, my study looks further back than the 1970s—considered to
be the pinnacle of second-wave feminism as well feminist science fiction—
to find what redeeming feminist features Herbert has in his writing, how
these features link with second-wave feminist thought, and how they com-
pare to aspects in the works of key feminist science fiction writers like
Joanna Russ and Ursula K. Le Guin. My main contention is that the Dune
series is feminist but not wholly liberatory in its representation of the
women of the Bene Gesserit due to the development of a high degree of
female embodied agency but also complexities regarding this agency. I
argue that the series offers a representation of women that is
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE SIDELINING OF THE WOMEN OF DUNE 3

three-­dimensional and much more complex than the stereotypical females

in other science fiction, and that the series at times even goes so far as to
position women’s embodied agency as superior to masculine-associated
technology. It also underscores the complexity of notions of essentialism
(the idea that women and men are naturally a certain way) as well as dem-
onstrating how women can strategically leverage essentialist notions at
times to accomplish larger political goals. In order to examine agency
within this framework, I have chosen to rely on essentialist assumptions in
order to analyze the female characters in the texts within their historical
context as well as the context of second-wave feminism, which was itself
grappling with how to theorize women in terms of women’s liberation.
Ultimately, my analysis shows that although the series’ depiction of an all-­
female order may not be as overtly liberatory in terms of women’s roles or
sexual equality as the depictions of women in other feminist science fic-
tion, the series nonetheless presents a rich and complex speculation on the
ways in which women may exert agency that anticipates and parallels simi-
lar issues in second-wave feminism.
Although a biographical approach is outside of the scope of this study,
it is worth noting that Herbert’s relationships with the women in his life
were likely a large factor in his decision to create and characterize the Bene
Gesserit as he did. Herbert’s mother and her ten sisters shared in his
upbringing, and his aunts’ insistence that he be taught by Jesuits points to
them being the model for the Sisterhood (O’Reilly 89; B. Herbert 21).
Another influential woman in Herbert’s life was his second spouse, Beverly.
She helped support his writing in a financial sense and by assisting with
plot and characterization, “particularly the motivational aspects of female
characters” (O’Reilly 17, B. Herbert 170). Herbert’s son, Brian Herbert,
has specifically linked his father’s intentions with the historical context:
“Aware of a simmering women’s liberation movement in the early 1960s
and the desires of women in religious service for more recognition, Dad
decided to postulate a ‘sisterhood’ in control of an entire religious system.
He thought readers would accept the premise of women with occult pow-
ers of memory, since females have traditionally been said to have ‘women’s
intuition’” (B. Herbert 187). The above insights indicate that the connec-
tions between the women in his life and the characterization of the Bene
Gesserit are also worth further exploration.
4 K. KENNEDY

Why the Women of Dune?

It will be useful to provide a brief summary of key points in the six novels
and the Bene Gesserit’s role in them, with the caveat that they are rich,
complex, and lengthy books despite the sometimes seemingly simple nar-
rative arcs. The Dune series is set in a universe with a medieval-like feudal
structure that has developed in response to the Butlerian Jihad, a human
revolt in the distant past against thinking machines that saw them banned,
thereby forcing humans to develop their own capabilities. Dune features
the story of the family of House Atreides—Duke Leto, Lady Jessica (a
member of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood), and their son, Paul—as they
move to the planet Dune, the only location of sandworms and the prized
spice known as melange, where their enemies, House Harkonnen, have
laid a trap for them. The sandworm life cycle is integral to the creation of
the spice, which is an addictive substance highly valued for its geriatric
properties and ability to expand the psyche. Leto is killed and Jessica and
Paul escape into the desert, where she uses her Bene Gesserit skills to find
safe passage among the locals known as the Fremen, whose tribal culture
has been prepared by previous Bene Gesserit women of the Missionaria
Protectiva to accept a Bene Gesserit woman and her child as fulfillments of
a prophecy. While pregnant with her daughter, Alia, Jessica undergoes the
Water of Life ceremony to become a Reverend Mother, altering both her
and Alia’s psyches. Because he is part of the Bene Gesserit’s breeding pro-
gram and his mother trained him in the Bene Gesserit Way, Paul is also
able to ingest the Water of Life and alter his psyche, although he gains
access to prescient visions as well. He eventually overthrows the Baron and
the highest authority in the Imperium, the Emperor, agreeing to an
unconsummated marriage with the royal daughter Princess Irulan to
solidify his ascension to the imperial throne.
Dune Messiah details the downfall of Paul after the wars in his name
resulted in the deaths of billions across the universe and his enemies plot
to deny him an heir and end his reign. One of the enemies is a new group,
the Bene Tleilaxu, who create gholas, which are resurrections of deceased
individuals developed from skin scrapings that the Tleilaxu can train to
behave in certain ways at a subconscious level. Two Bene Gesserit women,
Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam and Irulan, are also part of the
plot. However, after Chani dies in childbirth and Paul goes blind and
resists the Tleilaxu’s temptation of resurrecting a ghola of Chani, Irulan
gives up her plotting to help raise Paul’s twin children, Ghanima and Leto
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE SIDELINING OF THE WOMEN OF DUNE 5

II, for whom Alia is regent. Children of Dune follows the maturation of
the twins, who must avoid plots against them by outsiders as well as their
Aunt Alia, who has become possessed by the memory of her grandfather,
Baron Harkonnen. Jessica returns to ensure that the twins are not similarly
possessed, Leto starts down the Golden Path that will see him turn into a
sandworm, and Ghanima agrees to a relationship with another royal heir
in order to continue the Atreides line into the future.
God Emperor of Dune takes place around 3500 years after the events of
Dune and is largely concentrated on Leto’s philosophical musings, after he
has become the God Emperor. The Bene Gesserit have survived, but Leto
has taken over management of the breeding program in order to develop
humans who will be free from the trappings of prescience. Eventually he
allows a young woman of the Atreides line named Siona along with one of
the Idaho gholas to rebel against him and cause his death, and this explains
how the Bene Gesserit are able to resume their influential place in the
universe in the last two books. Set around 1500 years after Leto’s death,
Heretics of Dune details how people who had gone out into what is known
as the Scattering have fled back to the known universe and begun causing
trouble for groups like the Bene Gesserit and Tleilaxu. Many of those who
return call themselves Honored Matres, who are women using advanced
sexual techniques to enslave men and gain control over whole planets.
They see the Bene Gesserit as rivals to be eliminated, as do the Tleilaxu,
but the Bene Gesserit have gained more abilities over the centuries: they
can share memories with other members on demand and can sexually
imprint men in order to gain their loyalty, in a way similar to that of the
Honored Matres. The two female groups battle and have their final con-
frontation in Chapterhouse: Dune. The Bene Gesserit leader, Reverend
Mother Darwi Odrade, concludes that the two groups must merge in
order to curb the wildness of the Honored Matres and preserve the
Sisterhood, and when she dies, the former Honored Matre Murbella
becomes the new leader, having undergone Bene Gesserit training.
The question is: why have the women of such a popular, best-selling
series remained so critically neglected? In general, critics have largely
focused on aspects of the obvious themes—the messiah figure, religion,
ecology and the environment, politics, and psychology—to the neglect of
issues of gender, postcolonialism and the Other, and posthumanism.
Furthermore, critics often focus solely on the first novel as the most popu-
lar and self-contained one. However, its sequels take place in the same
universe and continue Herbert’s exploration of significant themes. They
6 K. KENNEDY

also provide the opportunity to see how changing social mores and politi-
cal concerns may have influenced Herbert as a writer, since he wrote the
novels over a span of several decades. The narrow and limited body of
criticism has meant that there is much material left unexamined, and the
later novels especially have very little criticism on them at all.
There are three book-length studies of Herbert and his works that vary
significantly in their coverage and focus, but none of them contains a sus-
tained analysis of female characters or gender issues in the Dune series.
The few who have explicitly addressed women and gender in Dune have
done so in a cursory way. For example, Jack Hand’s “The Traditionalism
of Women’s Roles in Frank Herbert’s Dune” (1985) is a short article that
presents a scathing yet shallow critique of female characters in the first
novel. Miriam Youngerman Miller’s “Women of Dune: Frank Herbert as
Social Reactionary” (1985) is more willing to consider the positive aspects
of Herbert’s portrayal of female characters yet draws a similar conclusion
about traditional female roles subordinating women. M. Miller is one of
the few critics to explicitly acknowledge the cultural context in which
Herbert was writing, namely second-wave feminism, and consider how it
might have impacted his characterization of women. But her apparent
belief that equality between the sexes is required for the series to have
redemptive feminist qualities results in her discounting the first four novels
as having too traditional a view of women. The limitations of her analysis
likely stem from the fact that her chapter is part of a book of conference
proceedings. But both Hand’s and M. Miller’s articles are cited by other
critics, showing that they have likely biased later critics against a more
thorough and nuanced analysis of women’s roles.
In an effort to understand why female characters in the Dune series
have received relatively little criticism, C. N. Manlove’s argument regard-
ing concealment offers one convincing explanation. He finds that “the
motif of concealment is central to Dune and its manner”—it “is of the
essence, and is bound up with waiting over long periods of time” (Manlove
81). This motif can explain why female characters have been so underrated
and underestimated: because Herbert deliberately conceals their motives
and political maneuverings just as he does with many other aspects of the
story in order to construct multi-layered novels that offer the reader more
than just an entertaining story. Indeed, Herbert spent six years of research
on world religions, desert environments, and sciences like psychology and
ecology before putting together the story in the first novel (HD v,
B. Herbert 141, 164); yet much of this information is layered into the
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE SIDELINING OF THE WOMEN OF DUNE 7

Dune universe such that the reader may not realize how much effort went
into the world-building. As Manlove elaborates, “the readers have to work
very hard as in all Herbert’s fiction to make the links, which are often hid-
den in the narrative or understandable only with considerable effort”
(Manlove 89). In this way, the series requires an active reader to under-
stand the depth of the complexities just as Russ’s The Female Man requires
an active reader to grasp such a “disjunctive” novel (Bartkowski 50). In
only looking at the surface level of the series—where women often operate
in roles as concubines, wives, mothers, and advisors—critics miss expres-
sions of agency that are more concealed.

Contemporaneous Concepts
of Second-Wave Feminism

In order to redress the oversight in the lack of feminist criticism, and in

light of the rich historical context, I deemed it most suitable to undertake
an approach that takes into consideration contemporaneous issues and the
social climate in which Herbert was writing and publishing. Therefore, I
engage with select concepts in second-wave feminist thought and works in
the U.S. and look at trends in the American science fiction genre, namely
the New Wave movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the rise of female-­
authored texts that infused New Wave concerns with those of the feminist
movement, in order to see how the Dune series may address feminist con-
cerns and bring them to life through a group of fictional women, without
necessarily proving that there was a direct relationship. This method was
successfully implemented in Jeanne Cortiel’s study of Joanna Russ,
Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ, Feminism, Science Fiction (1999), and
enables a rich exploration of intersections and connections between fiction
and the real world (Cortiel Demand 11). In this way, I can both answer
Touponce’s question about whether the Dune series is feminist and chal-
lenge the existing critical discourse of mid-twentieth-century science fic-
tion that has relegated one of its most successful authors to the sidelines.
As Cortiel acknowledges, there is a “fundamental indeterminacy that
governs more recent feminist thinking” that must be partially suspended
to examine such texts within the context of second-wave feminism (Cortiel
Demand 16). This study acknowledges there have been some significant
shifts in feminist theories since the 1960s–1980s. It also recognizes that
use of the wave metaphor can tend to emphasize differences and conflicts
8 K. KENNEDY

between generations of feminists, obscuring the many overlapping con-

cerns between movements, as Nancy A. Hewitt highlights in the introduc-
tion to No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism (2010).
In general, third- and fourth-wave feminism have paid more attention to
overlapping and intersecting types of oppression and multicultural per-
spectives (Tong “Feminist Thought” 33). They are more open to con-
cepts about choice, empowerment, and sexual differences, and less
concerned with seeming contradictions in their feminist viewpoints. There
have been challenges to prior feminist frameworks and a further destabili-
zation of sex, gender, and sexuality. Technologies such as the internet have
become an important tool through which women “claim feminist agency
for themselves and each other” (Garrison 380). Yet the fragmentation of
the feminist movement and the concurrent rise of individualism can make
it challenging to articulate what a feminist position might look like and
how many might subscribe to it. But the concept of women’s right to self-­
determination and control of their bodies arguably remains relevant in the
feminist struggle for change. Thus, as explained in more detail below, I
believe that embodied agency offers a useful tool in feminist theory for
analyzing the representation of women in literature.
Second-wave feminism in the U.S. was a heterogeneous movement
with various branches and ideologies, but there are several key ideas popu-
larized by radical feminism in particular that are pertinent to my explora-
tion of women’s agency. Building on a long tradition of women who
advocated for women’s rights, including early feminist and British author
Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and
American suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony,
second-wave feminists offered their own interpretations and reformula-
tions regarding how to address women’s oppression. According to
Rosemary Tong’s overview of feminism, feminist theoretical approaches
can be classified into the broad categories of liberal, Marxist, radical, psy-
choanalytic, socialist, existentialist, or postmodern (Tong, Feminist
Thought 1). To illustrate: whereas liberal feminists generally advocated for
equality of the sexes and believed that new laws would help eliminate
inequality, and Marxist feminists believed that a socialist revolution would
benefit both workers and women, radical feminists theorized that wom-
en’s oppression was based on their sex—that their bodies were sexually
different and considered inferior to men—and that they needed to funda-
mentally change society in order to achieve liberation. They were more
concerned with women’s rights over their bodies than equal pay in a
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE SIDELINING OF THE WOMEN OF DUNE 9

capitalist system that they saw to be based around men’s needs and desires.
Although a range of feminist ideas had an impact on the shaping of femi-
nism in the second wave, it was radical feminism that was arguably respon-
sible for the popularity of the women’s liberation movement. This was
largely due to media coverage of radical feminist demonstrations, as
detailed by Alice Echols in her comprehensive study of radical feminism,
Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967–1975 (1989).
Indeed, it was the New York Radical Women’s 1968 protest of the Miss
America pageant that “put the women’s liberation movement on the map”
due to “extensive press coverage” (Echols 96, 93). In radical feminist
Ellen Willis’s reflections on the era, she argues, “It was radical feminism
that put women’s liberation on the map, that got sexual politics recog-
nized as a public issue, that created the vocabulary (‘consciousness-­raising,’
‘the personal is political,’ ‘sisterhood is powerful,’ etc.) with which the
second wave of feminism entered popular culture,” and confirmation of
her statements can be found threaded throughout Echols’s study (Willis
92). Through their rhetoric, radical feminists introduced concepts regard-
ing women’s agency and bodies that would become standard feminist fare.
According to Echols, radical feminism was central to the transformation of
women’s situation in the world in terms of improving women’s self-­
determination (Echols 285–286). In light of the significance of radical
feminism and the parallels between its theories and the characterization of
the Bene Gesserit as possessing myriad bodily abilities, this book is con-
cerned primarily with radical feminist theories. As Tong observes, “more
than liberal and Marxist feminists, radical feminists have directed attention
to the ways in which men attempt to control women’s bodies” and “have
explicitly articulated the ways in which men have constructed female sexu-
ality to serve not women’s but men’s needs, wants, and interests” (Tong,
Feminist Thought 72). The fact that radical feminist theories were circulat-
ing during the time of Herbert’s writing offers a unique and fruitful
opportunity for the Dune series to be read alongside contemporaneous
feminist debates and have connections traced between them.
Yet despite being influential, radical feminism had a relatively short
period of popularity before being superseded by cultural feminism in the
1970s, and it is important to note that this splintering was due in part to
internal struggles within the feminist movement that illustrate the poten-
tial consequences when there are significant tensions between individuals
and groups. As Echols explains, the two movements differed in key
respects: whereas radical feminists sought to change society to make
10 K. KENNEDY

gender irrelevant, cultural feminists sought to celebrate femaleness in

order to reverse the devaluation of stereotypically feminine characteristics
in society. In radical feminists’ efforts to eliminate inequality within their
movement, and through their reluctance to explore women’s differences,
they created tensions between individual women and the larger collective.
Cultural feminists’ notion of sisterhood based around women’s female
nature may have represented a more attractive way to unite women despite
their differences. Nonetheless, in Echols’s analysis, ultimately the “strug-
gle for liberation became a question of individual will and determination,
rather than collective struggle” and thus lost the notion of women’s
agency as a way of effecting change in society (Echols 279). What the
ascendancy of cultural feminism illustrates is not only the difficulty in the-
orizing sexual difference, but that there must be a balance between the
consideration given to individual members of a group and the consider-
ation given to the larger group and the goals it is trying to achieve that
require members’ commitment.
For information about the concerns and theories of the second wave,
this book relies on several key texts that were precursors to the movement,
primary sources that were published during the heart of the movement,
and secondary sources that analyze feminist ideas and trends with some
distance from the events themselves. The precursor texts are Simone de
Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (trans. 1953) and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine
Mystique (1963). Primary sources include essays in editor Robin Morgan’s
anthology of radical feminist texts, Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970), and edi-
tors Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone’s collection, Radical
Feminism (1973), and stand-alone texts like Shulamith Firestone’s The
Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) and Adrienne
Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976).
Secondary sources include Sara Evans’s books on the women’s liberation
movement—Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil
Rights Movements and the New Left (1979) and Born for Liberty: A History
of Women in America (1989); the aforementioned book by Echols; and
Jane Gerhard’s book on feminism and sexuality, Desiring Revolution:
Second-Wave Feminism and the Rewriting of American Sexual Thought,
1920 to 1982 (2001). Together these texts present a multi-faceted picture
of the currents of second-wave feminism that nonetheless shows that
women were united about one thing: they wanted change.
Arguably the most crucial overarching idea of second-wave feminism—
and one that is key to an analysis of the Dune series—is that women should
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE SIDELINING OF THE WOMEN OF DUNE 11

have the right to control their own bodies. Beauvoir’s theory that “One is
not born, but rather becomes, a woman” challenged the idea that women
came to be the way they were, namely normatively feminine, because of
biology, which enabled her to argue that the weakness and inferiority asso-
ciated with the female body were actually a result of socialization that
needed to be changed to liberate women (Beauvoir 281). Once translated
into English, her book The Second Sex quickly became a pivotal text within
American feminist thought, with most feminist writers acknowledging a
debt to her (Spender Women 512). Beauvoir’s main argument is that
women have been categorized as Other by men, limited to the physicality
of the body while men are free to transcend the body and be considered
autonomous individuals capable of higher orders of thinking. She blames
women’s socialization and conditioning for restricting them to roles as
wives and mothers. However, she insists that things can change, for
“Woman is the victim of no mysterious fatality; the peculiarities that iden-
tify her as specifically a woman get their importance from the significance
placed upon them. They can be surmounted, in the future, when they are
regarded in new perspectives” (Beauvoir 763). It is societal pressures,
then, that are responsible for giving weight to sexual differences in her
view, and these are malleable. Although Beauvoir has been criticized for
seeming to treat the body with abhorrence, notably by feminist scholar
Toril Moi in Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman
(1994), her recognition that it is socialization not biology that causes it to
be a hindrance for women offers an important feminist perspective on the
female body, as well as pointing to a possible way out of women’s dilemma.
Indeed, her theory about women’s socialization “came to be absolutely
crucial to feminist thinking” (Hughes and Witz 48) and “launched a
whole generation of feminist scholars, intent on dispelling the doctrine of
‘natural’ difference and showing that differences between the sexes were
socially rather than biologically constructed” (Davis 8). Friedan’s The
Feminine Mystique, credited with helping initiate the second wave of femi-
nism, has a narrower focus: the “problem that has no name—which is
simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full
human capabilities” (Friedan 364, Bowden and Mummery 13). Although
Friedan is referring mainly to middle-class American housewives, her
underlying message that women should be free to make their own deci-
sions about their futures is more broadly feminist and concerned with
female agency.
12 K. KENNEDY

Later feminists were more focused on the issue of the reproductive

body and women’s right to choose whether to become mothers. Firestone,
who co-founded several radical feminist groups in the 1960s, rejected
reproduction as an activity that any woman should partake in and was
heavily criticized for her belief that artificial reproduction offered a viable
solution to liberate women from the limitations of the female body. In The
Dialectic of Sex, she detailed the subjection of women to the pain and
trauma of childbirth and the unequal allocation of childcare responsibili-
ties, then posited that an equal society was possible if women no longer
had to bear the brunt of pregnancy and men shared responsibility for rais-
ing children. In contrast to Firestone, Rich—herself a mother of three
who came to identify more with cultural feminism than radical feminism—
embraced the sexual difference that allows women to become pregnant
and give birth and argued that this was something for feminists to cele-
brate, not give away. She theorized that motherhood provides a valuable
perspective on the debate about whether the differences between female
and male bodies should be erased or acknowledged as positive, and she
suggested that motherhood should be reclaimed by women.
A related issue in second-wave feminism was sexuality and women’s
right to define it on their own terms outside of a male-dominated or pro-
creative framework. Radical feminists confronted Freudian theories on
female sexuality and began to consider what sexual pleasure for the female
body might entail. Some believed that women must create an “exclusively
female sexuality through celibacy, autoeroticism, or lesbianism,” while
others thought that women should be able to experiment sexually how-
ever they chose (Tong, Feminist Thought 5). Cultural feminists, mean-
while, defined male and female sexuality as opposed. Former radical
feminist Robin Morgan maintained that men were interested in sex but
women were interested in relationships, writing that men promoted “gen-
ital sexuality, objectification, promiscuity, emotional noninvolvement, and
coarse invulnerability” but women pursued “love, sensuality, humor, ten-
derness, commitment” (Morgan qtd. in Echols 256). This theory gave
women less room to maneuver in terms of sexuality since it appeared to be
preprogrammed for them, but it nonetheless allowed women a reason to
refrain from participating in relationships with men if they chose. Although
all feminists did not agree on what they believed the female body should
do once freed of its conditioning, if this were possible, they knew they
wanted women to have the choice to decide.
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE SIDELINING OF THE WOMEN OF DUNE 13

The concept of women in control over their bodies is important to an

analysis of the Dune series because it forms the backbone of the philoso-
phy of the Bene Gesserit, whose members train their bodies extensively in
order to establish precise control over nearly all of their functions. The
basis for their skills in prana-bindu, or muscle and nerve control, will be
analyzed in Chap. 2, which looks at the mind-body synergy they cultivate
and the mental and physical feats they can perform because they are not
bound by the dualistic thinking that Beauvoir critiques. The representa-
tion of reproduction and motherhood is examined in Chap. 3 using
Firestone’s and Rich’s theories, as is the way that the series showcases the
potential consequences of technological interference in reproduction. The
complexities of sexuality are taken up in Chap. 6, in which the focus is on
the later novels where there is a marked shift toward more open discussion
of female sexuality and a clear refutation of the idea that women are natu-
rally more nurturing and loving in their sexual relationships through the
characterization of the Honored Matres.
Two other relevant issues in second-wave feminism are women’s right
to speak and their right to recover the history of their foremothers. For
women, the right to speak meant having the right to not only express
themselves without being silenced, but also be listened to and trusted
rather than dismissed. The technique known as consciousness-raising that
became popular in the second wave was one method of gaining this plat-
form. Consciousness-raising involved groups of women across the
U.S. meeting in their own communities to share the details of their lives
where, by breaking the silence around notions of womanhood and taboo
topics such as sex, they realized that they were not alone in suffering from
sexism and being dissatisfied with the current state of affairs for women.
Consciousness-raising was important to radical feminists in particular
because, as the group New York Radical Women believed, “part of women
claiming their authority lay in the larger process of, first, overturning male
experts and oppressive socialization and, second, speaking their own truth
about their experience” (Gerhard Desiring 101). Before women could
claim an authoritative position, then, they had to set aside men’s perspec-
tives and trust in the value of their own. Although feminist texts may not
explicitly state their authors’ desire for an end to the silencing which
women had been subjected to, it runs as a current throughout the second
wave. For example, Morgan in her introduction to Sisterhood Is Powerful
clearly thinks of the publication as a statement in itself: “This book is an
action. It was conceived, written, edited, copy-edited, proofread, designed,
14 K. KENNEDY

and illustrated by women” (Morgan “Introduction” xiii). It is not just

women’s voices being expressed through the texts that matter to Morgan
but the fact that it was women who were instrumental in having those
voices published. The recovery of the voices and ideas of feminists from
the past was also an important concern. Both the collections Radical
Women and Sisterhood Is Powerful open with articles about American
women’s history in an effort to contextualize the emergence of the con-
temporaneous feminist movement, and these articles serve to both frame
the collections of radical feminist texts and underscore the need for wom-
en’s history. In fact, higher education did respond to a growing demand
for courses about women spurred on by the feminist movement, and
women’s topics were increasingly taken up by researchers (Evans
Born 300).
Women’s demand that the voices of themselves and their foremothers
be heard is particularly significant to an analysis of the Dune series because
of the Bene Gesserit’s abilities in the Voice and Other Memory, which play
a key role in their characterization. Chapter 4 examines the extent to
which the female voice is authoritative, influential, and truthful as seen in
the Bene Gesserit’s skills with the Voice and in their roles as advisors and
Truthsayers. Chapter 5 looks at the Bene Gesserit’s system of education
for girls and how it prepares them to use their bodies for political goals
and to undergo an initiation wherein they gain access to the lives and
memories of their female ancestors through Other Memory.
Two second-wave slogans that are pertinent as background informa-
tion are ‘the personal is political’ and ‘sisterhood is powerful.’ The idea
that ‘the personal is political’ for second-wave feminists meant that what
may seem like a personal issue, such as workplace discrimination or a lack
of affordable childcare, is in fact political because it reflects women’s dis-
empowerment in patriarchal society and requires some kind of interven-
tion to address it. Consciousness-raising was a clear example of this
personalized approach to politics (Evans Personal 214). It saw personal
issues as all potentially open to collective action and solutions (Evans Born
290). The idea was not without its flaws, however, because for some it
encouraged self-transformation in one’s lifestyle that did not translate into
collective political action (Echols 17–18). Nevertheless, for others it
prompted them to “embrace an asceticism that sacrificed personal needs
and desires to political imperatives” (Echols 17). Having a broad defini-
tion of what is political allows for a wide range of people and activities to
be deemed politically relevant and important for feminist
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE SIDELINING OF THE WOMEN OF DUNE 15

analysis—including female bodies, concepts of femininity, education, and

language—of which this book takes advantage. Acknowledging that the
personal can be political is well-suited to an analysis of the Bene Gesserit,
since it is revealed to be a political organization in the opening of the first
book that clearly sees a link between the capabilities of the individual bod-
ies of its members and the accomplishment of its political goals. In addi-
tion, the idea that a woman can put the needs of a movement ahead of her
own—and that some may even consider this action to be essential to being
a feminist—recognizes a more complex version of motivation and under-
standing of agency than many of the critics of the Bene Gesserit do when
they evaluate members’ loyalty.
The idea that ‘sisterhood is powerful’ arose from the new bonds formed
among women during consciousness-raising (Evans Born 289). The inten-
sity and power of these bonds between women “prompted them to name
themselves a sisterhood, a familial metaphor for an emerging social and
political identity” (Evans Born 289). Women saw themselves as fighting
for common goals and needing to show solidarity toward one another
(Bowden and Mummery 144). However, as described above, fractures
formed over disagreements and differences between women, and for many
their loyalty to radical feminism was replaced by a belief that women
should bond on the basis of a supposed essential femaleness that they
could cultivate individually. Yet the belief that women’s experiences, at
least, were in some way universal and that there was strength in bonding
together as women helped underpin the movement as a whole (Bowden
and Mummery 144). In the Dune series, the concept of sisterhood is
immediately set up in the second sentence—“This every sister of the Bene
Gesserit knows”—though the Bene Gesserit are only referred to as the
Sisterhood once in the appendix (Dune 3, 506). The term becomes used
more frequently in the remainder of the novels as a synonym for the Bene
Gesserit, which emphasizes their connections with one another. With
Dune being published in the magazines in 1963–1965, before the second-­
wave movement, it is likely that Herbert was drawing upon older forms of
sisterhood to characterize the Bene Gesserit such as Catholic nuns, both
of whom wear black robes and use the terminology of sisters. Nonetheless,
there exists a noteworthy parallel, discussed further in Chap. 5, between
the Bene Gesserit and real-life women during the second wave who used
the concept of solidarity to achieve their political goals yet also faced ten-
sions between the interests of individuals and the collective.
16 K. KENNEDY

The Incomplete Narrative of New Wave and Feminist

Science Fiction
In addition to examining the Dune series in relation to the context and
theories of second-wave feminism, this book situates it in the genre of sci-
ence fiction literature where so far Herbert is not considered to have made
a contribution to the development of feminist themes. Although Herbert
is included in histories of science fiction and sometimes in criticism of the
New Wave period specifically, it is never because of his treatment of female
characters. With thousands of stories published in magazines, novellas,
and novels across a period of rapid technological and cultural change,
twentieth-century science fiction is difficult to classify in precise catego-
ries; nonetheless, as the genre gained more critical attention in the 1970s
and 1980s, critics made attempts to frame its history through their classi-
fications of stories and themes and began using the term ‘New Wave’ to
identify the period of change in genre texts that began in the 1960s.
According to Peter Nicholls in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the
term New Wave was borrowed from film criticism where it was used to
refer to experimental French cinema (Nicholls “New Wave”). In science
fiction it refers to a “kind of imagistic, highly metaphoric story, inclined
more toward psychology and the soft sciences than to hard sf”; hard sf
generally referring to fiction reliant on sciences like physics, mathematics,
and space flight, and soft sf to fiction reliant on the so-called soft sciences
or social sciences including anthropology, ecology, and psychology
(Nicholls “New Wave,” “Hard SF,” “Soft Sciences”). In other words,
‘hard’ science fiction is considered “distinct from ‘soft’ SF, which deals
with social issues,” because it is based on real-world scientific principles
and more concerned with the incorporation of technology (Seed Science
50). Nicholls notes that New Wave science fiction often shares qualities of
the 1960s counterculture such as an interest in drugs, Eastern religions,
and sex, and “a pessimism about the future that ran strongly counter to
genre sf’s traditional optimism” (Nicholls “New Wave”). Adam Roberts
describes it as “a loose affiliation of writers from the 1960s and 1970s
who, one way or another, reacted against the conventions of traditional SF
to produce avant-garde, radical or fractured science fictions” (A. Roberts
History 230–231). The New Wave is closely associated with the British
science fiction magazine New Worlds, which in 1964 gained a young edi-
tor named Michael Moorcock who sought to transform what was consid-
ered to be science fiction (Merrick “Fiction” 103; Aldiss and Wingrove
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE SIDELINING OF THE WOMEN OF DUNE 17

298). Indeed, “the fundamental element was the belief that sf could and
should be taken seriously as literature,” which involved writers making “a
deliberate attempt to elevate the literary and stylistic quality of SF”
(Nicholls “New Wave”; A. Roberts History 231). There is some critical
debate as to the suitability of the label New Wave, as Helen Merrick
acknowledges in her chapter “Fiction, 1964–1979” in The Routledge
Companion to Science Fiction. However, she argues that regardless of how
much of a break with previous science fiction one believes there was, this
period did see a broadening of themes, with stories more “radical in style
and content, often explicit in terms of language and sexual references, and
more concerned with ‘inner’ than outer space” (Merrick “Fiction” 103).
Although these definitions, especially those of Nicholls, would appear
to place Dune squarely within the New Wave, in critical histories and over-
views of the science fiction genre, the Dune series is accorded a mention
for its popularity, its world-building, or its messianic theme rather than its
many other themes or the complexities of its characterization, including
that related to women. Brian W. Aldiss in Billion Year Spree: The History of
Science Fiction (1973) presents Herbert as significant primarily for his
world-building skills, devoting over a page to a block quote from Dune to
this effect (Aldiss 275–276). Even in the updated version of the text,
Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (1986), co-authored with
David Wingrove, the authors keep the quote and add more about world-­
building (Aldiss and Wingrove 315–316). In their discussion of the later
novels, they do recognize that there is a focus on the women of the Bene
Gesserit and Honored Matres but make no comment on the gendered
nature of these groups nor hint at a connection to New Wave concerns,
even while acknowledging that Herbert’s work shows “growth, change, a
continued interest in new things” (Aldiss and Wingrove 396). Merrick in
her chapter noted above only states that Dune won both prized science
fiction awards—the Hugo and Nebula—and does not discuss Herbert in
sections about the impact of the women’s movement on science fiction.
A. Roberts in his chapter “The Impact of New Wave Science Fiction
1960s–1970s” in The History of Science Fiction (2006) focuses on Dune’s
messianic theme, as does Damien Broderick in his chapter “New Wave and
Backwash: 1960-1980” in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction
(2003). Broderick is one of the few critics to more explicitly recognize
Herbert’s writing as potentially part of the New Wave, seen in his observa-
tion that Herbert set up his hero to fail and thus demonstrated that “his
secret instinct resonated with the writers of the emerging New Wave if not
18 K. KENNEDY

with older sf fans” (Broderick 52). Even so, the question of Herbert’s
position as a writer who engages with the concerns of the New Wave—
particularly higher literary quality and inclusion of the social sciences, both
directly related to his representation of women—has not been sufficiently
addressed by existing criticism.
By examining the complexities of the representation of women in the
Dune series, I seek to show that the series makes a significant step toward
the maturation of the genre at which New Wave writers aimed. I look at
how the attention to characterization results in three-dimensional female
characters who have a high degree of agency that affords them the ability
to play a large role in the narrative, thus illustrating a clear move away
from the use of sexist stereotypes for which the genre was heavily criticized
by feminists, detailed below, and toward a higher quality of character
development. Female characters also are an important means through
which the series showcases a concern with the social science of psychology,
and aspects such as Other Memory focus attention on the ‘inner’ space
that Merrick discusses rather than outer space and the technology needed
to navigate it. Although the series may not seem to be very radical in con-
tent, the depiction of women possessed with self-determination and pre-
cise control of their bodies in fact gives women some of the very rights for
which radical feminists were struggling. This book reveals that what the
series contributes to the genre as part of the New Wave is further move-
ment toward the goal of higher literary quality through rich character
development, especially as seen through female characters.
Not only has the series been neglected in criticism of the New Wave, it
has also been overlooked in criticism of feminist science fiction, which is
partially explained by a critical narrative that focuses on female-authored
texts of the 1970s that were influenced by ideas and theories emerging out
of the feminist movement. Merrick devotes a chapter in The Secret Feminist
Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms (2009) to her anal-
ysis of the development of feminist criticism of science fiction, criticism
that is especially important because, as she argues, it plays a large role in
constructing what counts as feminist science fiction (Merrick Secret 103).
Merrick opens the chapter with a quote from science fiction writer Connie
Willis that was published in 1992, wherein Willis discusses how she keeps
hearing that there were no women in science fiction before the 1960s and
1970s or that the few who were there had to either use pseudonyms or
had to write domestic stories about babies, but that she knows that
“[t]here’s only one problem with this version of women in SF—it’s not
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE SIDELINING OF THE WOMEN OF DUNE 19

true” (Willis qtd. in Merrick Secret 103). Merrick agrees that this narrative
is too neat and obscures older female authors and older stories, and one of
her goals is to problematize it by examining material outside of feminist
criticism found in academic publications. This narrative is also problematic
in that it obscures male authors and stories, resulting in the stories of an
author like Herbert never being considered as a potential source of repre-
sentations of women that might be considered feminist.
One of the reasons for the focus on female-authored texts is straightfor-
ward: science fiction authors and critics like Joanna Russ and Ursula K. Le
Guin did not believe that the genre and its mostly male authors were living
up to the potential to challenge traditional gender norms and speculate on
new gender roles. In Russ’s essay “The Image of Women in Science
Fiction” (1972), she castigates science fiction writers for envisioning “the
relations between the sexes as those of present-day, white, middle-class
suburbia,” or relying on the cultural stereotype that “masculinity equals
power and femininity equals powerlessness” when their fiction shows that
active or ambitious women are evil, women are weak, and women’s pow-
ers are passive and involuntary (Russ “Image” 81, 83). In Le Guin’s essay
“American SF and the Other” (1975), she criticizes the portrayal of
women as “squeaking dolls subject to instant rape by monsters—or old-­
maid scientists desexed by hypertrophy of the intellectual organs—or, at
best, loyal little wives or mistresses of accomplished heroes” (Le Guin
“American” 83).
Indeed, when female writers including Russ and Le Guin began pub-
lishing stories that were more experimental specifically with regard to gen-
der, they captured the attention of feminist critics who positioned these
works as constituting feminist science fiction, which entailed a turning
away from the analysis of male-authored texts and their representation of
women. As is evident in Jane Donawerth’s overview of “Feminisms” and
Gwyneth Jones’s overview of “Feminist SF” in The Routledge Companion
to Science Fiction, texts considered by current feminist science fiction crit-
ics to be part of the “feminist years (roughly, the 1970s)” are almost all
authored by women (Jones 485). These include Le Guin’s The Left Hand
of Darkness (1969), Suzy McKee Charnas’s Walk to the End of the World
(1974), Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the
Edge of Time (1976), Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground (1979),
and James Tiptree Jr.’s (later revealed to be Alice Sheldon) short stories
such as “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (1976).
20 K. KENNEDY

The concept of feminist science fiction itself, then, is problematic. First,

as Merrick notes, it has been significantly shaped by a handful of academic
critiques and an almost exclusive focus on female-authored texts.
Moreover, it implies there is a “unified body or field of study,” which critic
Veronica Hollinger argues cannot exist due to the category having
expanded beyond any such unity (Hollinger cited in Calvin). Yet, there is
still value in using the term as long as it is clear that it does not refer to one
monolithic view of feminism. In Ritch Calvin’s discussion of the term in
his book Feminist Science Fiction and Feminist Epistemology (2016), he
states that feminist science fiction exists and is ideologically diverse, but
that one commonality is that texts try to highlight, challenge, or change
structures regarding sex, gender, sexuality, and other attributes used to
discriminate against certain people (Calvin 21). I believe that the ongoing
use of the term, in addition to its connection with science fiction texts in
the 1970s, makes it applicable to my study of other texts that fit a more
expanded definition of the concept.
Looking at the above works, there is not necessarily an identifiable fea-
ture of female characters that makes these texts worthy of inclusion in the
category of feminist science fiction. Some draw on radical feminist theories
while others on cultural feminist theories, and they include a range of
speculation about all-women societies, alternative forms of reproduction,
and special abilities. Rather, it appears that critics consider them to be
feminist due to their attention to the problematic nature of male-­
dominated societies and women’s place in those societies and, in most
cases, their depiction of capable, agential women who are far from the
stereotypes or negative depictions that critics had found in other science
fiction. These stories share a critique of aspects of male-dominated societ-
ies such as restrictive gender roles and, with the exception of The Left
Hand of Darkness, a portrayal of female characters who are agents in their
own right that resist oppression and exercise their abilities in a variety of
ways. It appears that the obviousness of the stories’ critiques regarding
gender roles is one of the primary reasons they are considered feminist
science fiction, for there are other stories that include agential female char-
acters but have seemingly never been considered for inclusion in this
category.
Compared to the detailed and nuanced treatment that female charac-
ters developed by some female writers have received, the way in which the
female characters of the Bene Gesserit have been ignored or dismissed is
noticeably out of step in science fiction criticism. It is true that the series
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE SIDELINING OF THE WOMEN OF DUNE 21

contains no overt criticism of male-dominated societies, nor does it dis-

count the role that sexual difference can play in women’s lives. However,
this should not discount the possibility of female agency and a nuanced
and non-stereotypical representation of women. The idea that a woman
can bear children and put the needs of a movement ahead of her own—
and that some may even consider this action to be essential to being a
feminist—recognizes a more complex understanding of agency than many
critics have when evaluating the Bene Gesserit. Although a comprehensive
comparison between the feminist science fiction texts listed above and the
Dune series is beyond the scope of my study, there are several similarities
in the concerns that they address that are important to highlight, includ-
ing concerns related to mental and physical prowess, reproductive choice,
memory, and sisterhood. Therefore, in each chapter I discuss these simi-
larities in order to position the series and its depiction of female agency
alongside some of the most critically significant and oft-cited feminist sci-
ence fiction narratives of the 1970s. Given the gaps outlined above, I seek
to show that male-authored texts can contain feminist representations of
women, and that the series does make a significant step toward the matu-
ration of the genre at which New Wave writers aimed through a clear
move away from the use of sexist stereotypes and toward a higher quality
of characterization, resulting in agential, three-dimensional female
characters.

Embodied Agency
In light of the significance of radical feminism and the parallels between its
theories and the characterization of the Bene Gesserit as possessing myriad
bodily abilities, this book utilizes a framework of embodied agency with
which to analyze the representation of these women. I define embodied
agency as the capacity for self-determination and control over one’s body
and the ability to actively influence the outcomes of events, both of which
are mediated by their existence within a particular context, in this case by
women’s membership in the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood. In this view, the
female body becomes not an obstacle to women’s ability to be agents but
a means for them to be active rather than passive. This definition is human-
istic in nature, meaning that it rests on the theory of humanism, which is
the idea that what makes human beings human is that they have the capac-
ity to be self-determining agents of change. In this way, it sits in opposi-
tion to postmodern theories—which are more likely to minimize the
22 K. KENNEDY

impact of human agency in their insistence that socialization and condi-

tioning are in fact responsible for much of what appears to be human
choice—yet still leaves room for an understanding of agency as complex,
with possible tensions between individual and collective action. It is also
conducive to an analysis that maintains fidelity to the historical moment in
which Herbert was writing and the humanistic assumptions present in the
series, in a similar way to Cortiel’s approach discussed above. In addition,
the issue of sexual difference is important to consider because it is entan-
gled with notions of female embodied agency and at times can limit what
women are able to do, either due to physical limitations or perceptions of
limitations. It is also linked with the notion of biological determinism,
“the view that certain biological features determine either the totality of
one’s being (personality, appearance, likes and dislikes) or certain signifi-
cant features of a person” (McHugh 12). A biological determinist view is
inclined to see differences between women and men as being caused by
uncontrollable factors such as genetics rather than societal norms. The
continued persistence of the belief that women are a certain way and men
are another shows that it is important to look not only at embodied agency,
but also at the tensions between such agency and sexual difference and
biological determinism that are likely to impact it and the representation
of women in the series.
The book is structured to trace the avenues in which the Bene Gesserit
secure embodied agency through five aspects: mind-body synergy, repro-
duction and motherhood, voices, education and memory, and sexuality. In
each of the following chapters, I analyze key features of the characteriza-
tion of the Bene Gesserit, examine contrasts between their faction and
other major groups, and draw comparisons with female characters in femi-
nist science fiction, all within the historical and theoretical context of
second-­wave feminism. Because the Bene Gesserit’s agency stems from
their prana-bindu training, the mind-body synergy that they cultivate
through this training is the subject of Chap. 2. Subsequent chapters mir-
ror the development of the Bene Gesserit’s skills and their presence in the
novels, with the model being Jessica, who is the most prominent Bene
Gesserit woman in the first novel and showcases her abilities in the greatest
detail. Although she is not wholly representative of the Bene Gesserit, her
characterization plays a significant role in establishing the capabilities of
the Sisterhood for the reader, making her a valuable example in many
cases. It is important to note that, overall, the concept of agency is fraught
and complex in the Dune universe due to the setting of a strongly feudal
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE SIDELINING OF THE WOMEN OF DUNE 23

society in which aspects such as authority, hierarchy, and prophecy deter-

mine much of an individual’s behaviors, as do education and socialization.
This results in significant restrictions on characters’ agency at times,
whether they are male or female, which must be taken into consideration
with any analysis of agency in the series.
In Chap. 2, before analyzing the Bene Gesserit’s mind-body synergy
and prana-bindu training, I first set up the basis for a feminist understand-
ing of women as beings situated in bodies by examining the philosophical
differences between Beauvoir’s and René Descartes’s approaches to dual-
ism and the body. I also highlight some of the influences on the series
from Eastern religions like Taoism and Hinduism and Eastern-influenced
Jungian psychology. I then analyze several of the key skills of the Bene
Gesserit, such as their abilities in hand-to-hand combat and their survival
of the spice agony, and how these may have anticipated some of the com-
munities of women in feminist science fiction novels. There is also a com-
parison with the abilities of male characters, including prescience and
Mentat logic, and what the series suggests about their limitations.
In Chap. 3, I move into full engagement with second-wave feminist
contexts and theories, using Shulamith Firestone’s and Adrienne Rich’s
theories about reproduction and motherhood to analyze the agency of
Bene Gesserit mothers like Jessica and Janet Roxbrough-Teg. I examine
how the series gives women the tools to actively control their bodies,
although it presents a vision of reproduction that is less speculative than
some of the alternatives in feminist science fiction. Rather than limiting a
discussion of agency to the maternal body alone, I also look at how the
Bene Gesserit breeding program and individual women’s mothering serve
to make reproduction a considerable political tool, and how the Bene
Tleilaxu enable the series to address the potential consequences of techno-
logical interference in reproduction.
I take a broader view of embodied agency in Chap. 4 by examining the
extent to which the female voice is authoritative, influential, and truthful
as seen in the Bene Gesserit’s skills with the Voice and in their roles as
advisors and Truthsayers. I briefly explore the basis of these skills in the
pseudo-scientific field of general semantics in order to demonstrate that
the techniques are extrapolations of existing communication methods,
showing that it is neither sexual difference nor magic that enables women
to become masters in these areas. I examine women’s voices more broadly
by analyzing women’s advisory roles and the narrative structure itself,
which features frequent epigraphs authored by Bene Gesserit women such
24 K. KENNEDY

as Irulan. Comparisons with the number of vocal and agential female char-
acters in feminist science fiction indicate that the series anticipates and
parallels the trend of having a multitude of female speakers in the genre.
I continue to examine women’s voices and influence in Chap. 5, but
more specifically in their role in the early education of Bene Gesserit
women and in the historical memories that comprise Other Memory. I
analyze the significance of this education in that it cultivates women’s
agential potential by socializing them to become highly skilled women, yet
also represents an acquiescence to the desire for them to be prepared for
traditional roles as concubines and wives. I compare the Sisterhood to the
Jesuits and see the degree to which the female body is prepared to become
a political instrument and tensions are created between individual and col-
lective agency. In my analysis of Other Memory, I look at connections
with second-wave conceptions of sisterhood and the recovery of women’s
‘herstory,’ and how these compare with the expressions of solidarity that
appear in feminist science fiction narratives.
Finally, the complexities of sexuality are taken up in Chap. 6, in which
the focus is on the later novels where there is a marked shift toward more
open discussion of female sexuality and a clear refutation of the idea that
women are naturally more nurturing and loving in their sexual relation-
ships through the characterization of the Honored Matres. I analyze how
on the one hand, the Bene Gesserit are represented as sexually active, self-­
determining, and free from male oppression. However, the Honored
Matres possess similar characteristics and yet are demonized as characters,
and thus their presence serves to problematize both radical and cultural
feminist theories about sexual agency for women. In my comparison of
these two groups, I discuss the language used to describe them—‘witch’
and ‘whore’—and the significance of the connotations of these terms in
relation to stereotypes. In addition, I examine the treatment of biological
determinism and homosexuality and how this limits the revolutionary
potential of the series, especially when compared with portrayals of female
sexual agency in other science fiction texts.
Regardless of the reasons, no extended analysis of female characters in
the Dune series has previously been undertaken, leaving a woefully incom-
plete picture of aspects of female agency and how they might relate to
cultural shifts occurring in both U.S. society and the science fiction genre
over the course of the series’ publication. After three decades, it is time to
address Touponce’s suggestion that Herbert’s female characters may in
fact be “an innovative twist on the feminist ideal of Sisterhood” and answer
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE SIDELINING OF THE WOMEN OF DUNE 25

his question about whether the series is feminist in its representation of

women. Thus, this book provides an in-depth study of the Bene Gesserit
and examines how their characterization links with feminist thought and
invites comparisons with established feminist science fiction. By focusing
on embodied agency in particular, the book aims to show how the series
can be feminist in its representation of women, even if it is not wholly
liberatory in terms of women’s roles or sexual equality. The concept of
women in control over their bodies in fact forms the backbone of the phi-
losophy of the Bene Gesserit, and so the following chapter sets the foun-
dation for an analysis of embodied agency by exploring the mind-body
synthesis that the Bene Gesserit cultivate and the many extraordinary skills
that it affords them.
 CHAPTER 2

Mind-Body Synergy

Dualistic thinking that separates the mind and the body, privileging the
former, has pervaded Western philosophy for centuries. It has also featured
in science fiction narratives, some of which place faith in technological
advancement as the way toward liberating the mind from the physical trap-
ping of the body, which is viewed as a weakness or limitation. In the Dune
series, however, the focus is on the human, not technology, and the series
shows that when the mind and body work together and complement one
another, the body becomes an essential part of humans and key to their
ability to not only survive but thrive after the banning of computers in the
Butlerian Jihad. It soon becomes apparent that the mind-body synergy
that would be most useful in this type of environment has been achieved
and perfected by the women of the Bene Gesserit, and that their skills,
such as those in hand-to-hand combat, are more advanced than those of
other characters, such as the Emperor’s famously skilled soldiers. Their
skill set even appears to increase across the series, such as when a Bene
Gesserit woman discusses adjusting her blood flow and circadian rhythm
to adapt to changing planetary conditions, which serves as a reminder that
the body can be a help rather than a hindrance. With critical attention
focused on prescient abilities, which are linked to male characters like Paul,
though, the extraordinary number of abilities both mental and physical
that the Bene Gesserit possess has remained largely unexamined.
In this chapter, I set the foundation for an analysis of embodied agency
in the Dune series by examining the development of the Bene Gesserit’s

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 27

Switzerland AG 2021
K. Kennedy, Women’s Agency in the Dune Universe,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89205-0_2
28 K. KENNEDY

mind-body synergy and physical and mental feats. This involves showing
how a more holistic understanding of the human as situated in the body
serves to dismiss the idea that the female body limits women’s agential
capacity. I argue that the description of their feats helps to characterize
them as capable and skilled women with a high degree of embodied
agency, and that the balance they maintain between the mind and the
body is positioned as superior to the preference for logic of the Mentats,
although male characters’ use of prescience can serve to undermine the
representation of women as agential. I thus introduce the tensions over
sexual difference that I will explore throughout the remainder of the
book—tensions that reinforce the series’ speculation that sometimes men
and women have different abilities, and that women do not have to be
equal to men in every respect to be agential and may even benefit from
leveraging essentialist notions, as some do in the feminist science fiction
narratives with which I compare the series.

Theories of the Mind and Body

In the following section I discuss René Descartes’s and Simone de
Beauvoir’s perspectives on the body in order to establish the framework I
will use to analyze the mind-body synergy that appears in the Dune series.
One of the main obstacles to overcome in an understanding of embodied
agency for women is the type of Cartesian dualistic thinking wherein the
mind and body are considered to be separate, and the body is regarded as
a limitation, a weak vessel that entraps the mind. This thinking was pro-
mulgated by philosophers as far back as Aristotle, but it was Descartes in
the seventeenth century who popularized the concept of a separation
between mind and body, believing that the body was an obstacle to having
an objective outlook on the world. In his Meditations on First Philosophy
(1641), he describes his attempt to shut out bodily sensations in pursuit of
purer thinking: “I shall now close my eyes, I shall stop my ears, I shall call
away all my senses, […] I shall esteem them as vain and false; and thus […]
I shall try little by little to reach a better knowledge of and a more familiar
acquaintanceship with myself” (Descartes 79). His famous dictum that “I
think, therefore I am” reflects his belief that the mind is what constitutes
being. According to feminist theorist Susan Bordo in The Flight to
Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (1987), Descartes views
the body as a type of prison that is the main source of humans’ inability to
achieve clear, untainted perception (Bordo Flight 89). She argues that he
 2 MIND-BODY SYNERGY 29

believes it is possible for the mind to be liberated from the body and its
distractions, and although he was not the first philosopher to view the
body in negative terms, he was the one responsible for defining the body
and mind as mutually exclusive (Bordo Flight 93). From this, she con-
cludes, he develops his idea of objectivity, where he could transcend the
body and “relate with absolute neutrality to the objects he surveys, unfet-
tered by the perspectival nature of embodied vision” (Bordo Flight 95).
However, according to John Cottingham in Cartesian Reflections: Essays
on Descartes’s Philosophy (2008), Descartes’s theories on the mind and
body are more complex than scholars like Bordo suggest, being that
Descartes is “a greatly misunderstood thinker” (Cottingham v). He
asserts, “It is of course true that the perspective adopted in Descartes’s
most famous work, the Meditations, is that of the solitary thinker, cut off
from all contact with the outside world, and immersed in his own reflec-
tions,” but in many other instances Descartes “approaches things from the
outside, and asks how various kinds of observable phenomena (in humans
and in animals) can be explained” after being apprehended by sensory
awareness (Cottingham 19–21). Although Descartes’s theories regarding
sensory awareness are the subject of continued scholarly debate, as dis-
cussed by Joseph W. Hwang in “Descartes and the Aristotelian Framework
of Sensory Perception” (2011), it is undeniable in Descartes’s work that
the body plays at least some role since he maintains that “the process by
which sensory ideas are obtained is partially a mechanical one,” such as
when light stimulates the eye and the nervous system sends a signal to the
brain which results in the “perception of an idea in the mind” (Hwang
125). Descartes also theorizes a “distinction between simply reacting to
stimuli in a patterned way [as animals do], and being able to respond in a
thoughtful and rational manner to all the contingencies of life—some-
thing only genuine humans can do” (Cottingham 21). This suggests that
he views the mind-body relationship in humans as unique, wherein the
mind is master over the body and its instincts which makes humans ratio-
nal. Yet he does not see this unique relationship freeing humans from an
“essentially embodied nature” and a need to rely on their sensory percep-
tions to understand their environment (Cottingham 18). But what is sig-
nificant about Descartes remains the legacy of Cartesian dualism, that is,
the separation of the mind and body such that the mind is considered
superior, and how this mind/body dualism has had the effect of categoriz-
ing other things into pairs, such as male/female and rational/irrational.
30 K. KENNEDY

The relevance of dualistic thinking for feminist thought is that it not

only sets up an artificial mind-body split, but it tends to privilege things
associated with the mind—such as rationality and men—and denigrate
things associated with the body—such as emotions and women (Bowden
and Mummery 48). Thus, due to women’s supposed closeness to the
body and its natural rhythms of menstruation and childbearing, women
have historically been deemed less able than men to achieve higher levels
of thinking and rationality, even to the point they are associated more with
animals reacting on instinct than humans who supposedly act rationally.
Even when men are associated with the body, such as in physical combat
as warriors, the implication is that they have a greater ability to rationally
control the body than women do. The tendency for women to be consid-
ered unequal or inferior in this type of dualistic thought is apparent; how-
ever, according to feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz, the dominance of
dualistic philosophy in Western society has meant that even twentieth-­
century feminists are the heirs of Cartesianism in that they are susceptible
to regarding the body as an object, a tool, or a medium and thus them-
selves reinforce a problematic dualism (Grosz 8–10). She argues that femi-
nist theory must move beyond such limiting views of bodies in order to
escape the trap of dualism, lest it continue to “participat[e] in the social
devaluing of the body that goes hand in hand with the oppression of
women” (Grosz 10). Hence, recognizing the female body as a potential
vehicle for agency requires a move away from Cartesian dualistic thinking
that treats the body as a limitation and toward recognition that the mind-­
body separation is an artificial assumption that has contributed to prob-
lematic stereotypes about women’s capabilities.
As a philosopher in the Western tradition, Simone de Beauvoir in The
Second Sex relies on some dualistic notions regarding the female body and
its constraints, but her insistence that women are beings situated in bodies
who have the capability of being active and independent offers a valuable
theoretical lens through which to analyze the embodied agency of women
in fiction. I choose Beauvoir as the first feminist theorist with which to
engage in this book for several reasons. She was a key influence on second-­
wave feminists and their understanding of the body. Her critique of dual-
istic thinking and her analysis of sexual difference laid the groundwork for
how feminists thought about women and their situatedness in the body,
and she continues to be the subject of feminist scholarship seeking to
understand how to reconcile the idea of equality with that of differences
between women and men. Thus, I find that engaging with her theories in
 2 MIND-BODY SYNERGY 31

an analysis of the depiction of the mind and body of female characters is

not only historically relevant, but theoretically valuable in that it enables
an exploration of ideas circulating in the mid-twentieth century that con-
tinue to find resonance in more recent feminist thought.
Indeed, third- and fourth-wave feminism’s interest in how gender
becomes embodied has resulted in further attention to the relationship
between the mental and the physical. Meanwhile, scientific inquiries into
the human brain and behavior have provided more insight into human
development and challenged the idea that there is such a thing as a ‘female
mind’ that is inferior to a ‘male mind,’ which Cordelia Fine discusses in
Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create
Difference (2010). Having more multicultural and non-Western voices
participating in the formulation of feminist theories also allows for a
decentering of Western viewpoints and traditions that tend to reinforce a
mind-body split. As Nancy Bauer indicates in Simone de Beauvoir,
Philosophy, and Feminism (2001), seeing Beauvoir’s work as a call for a
new conception of philosophy that includes women indicates its signifi-
cance as a foundation for third-wave feminists and beyond to build on in
their search for new frameworks about gender, the mind, and the body
(Bauer 23–24).
In her introduction to The Second Sex, Beauvoir acknowledges the type
of Cartesian thinking where a man “thinks of his body as a direct and nor-
mal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objec-
tively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance, a prison,
weighed down by everything peculiar to it” (Beauvoir xxxix). She then
proceeds to argue that men have used this perception to construct their
belief that humanity is male, thus setting themselves up as the Subject and
defining women in relation to themselves as the object, or Other. This
duality reinforces the binary behind the Cartesian mind-body split, so that
characteristics associated with women such as femininity, irrationality, and
passivity are consigned to the supposedly inferior side of the body, mean-
ing that women seem to be unable to have an active existence like men
have. However, Beauvoir’s main argument is that even though women are
subject to biological functions like menstruation that may ‘limit’ them at
times, it is men who have “created artificial distinctions between mascu-
line and feminine functions, and thus kept woman in a false, passive role”
(Leighton 34). Beauvoir believes that women are socialized to be passive
rather than born that way, and this allows her to see hope for change.
Indeed, she calls for women to reject the definition of themselves as
32 K. KENNEDY

passive, irrational beings and instead embrace an active, independent

existence.
However, due in part to the language Beauvoir uses about the female
body, critics have expressed concern that she actually reinforces the prob-
lematic idea that the body is an obstacle for women. Genevieve Lloyd in
The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy (1984)
understands Beauvoir’s remarks about female biology to make the female
body appear as an obstacle that reinforces a “stark dualism” between what
a woman wants to do and what she can do because of her confinement to
her body (Lloyd 99). Toril Moi writes of Beauvoir’s “visceral disgust for
the female sexual organs” as being “disparaging to women” and notes that
many feminist intellectuals have denounced Beauvoir “for hating the
female body […] [and] not being positive enough in her representation of
women” (Moi Simone 200). These criticisms understand Beauvoir to be
reinforcing dualistic notions wherein the body is shown to be something
holding women back. There are certainly passages in The Second Sex that
portray the female body in unflattering terms, including one where
Beauvoir calls it “a burden: worn away in service to the species, bleeding
each month, proliferating passively […]; it is no certain source of pleasure
and it creates lacerating pains; it contains menaces” (Beauvoir 651). Her
language is distinctly negative and depicts the female body as uncontrol-
lable and painful. In these instances, Beauvoir appears to accept the dual-
ism that relegates women and their bodies to a lower status.
Yet there are other ways of reading her work that bring to light the
importance of the body to her theory and thus are valuable in a discussion
of embodied agency. Fredrika Scarth in The Other Within: Ethics, Politics,
and the Body in Simone de Beauvoir (2004) finds that Beauvoir was not
reproducing dualisms but critiquing the Western philosophical tradition.
She analyzes Beauvoir’s portrayal of the body as being “more nuanced
than many of her feminist critics would grant” due to the presence of an
ethical demand within Beauvoir’s work that calls for humans to under-
stand themselves as embodied and relational individuals rather than seeing
the body negatively (Scarth 164). Similarly, in Karen Vintges’s defense of
Beauvoir in “Simone de Beauvoir: A Feminist Thinker for the Twenty-first
Century” (2006), she argues that the interpretation that Beauvoir wanted
women to aspire to rationality by leaving the body behind is an incorrect
view of her work. Instead, Vintges believes that “Beauvoir’s appeal to
women in The Second Sex to grasp their chances at developing into a self
cannot be considered a plea for women to become pure Cartesian, rational
 2 MIND-BODY SYNERGY 33

selves” because Beauvoir wanted both women and men to become sensi-
tive selves that were situated in the body (Vintges 218). Such interpreta-
tions of Beauvoir’s ideas are helpful in that they illustrate that embodiment
is important to Beauvoir, in spite of her ambivalent attitude toward the
experience of reproductive cycles (Moi What 66). When she writes that
woman “endeavors to combine life and transcendence, which is to say that
she rejects Cartesianism, with its formal logic, and all related doctrines,”
she suggests that women want more than an existence on one side of a
mind/body divide (Beauvoir 652). In this way, Beauvoir’s theory opens
room for women as embodied beings to strive for an active and indepen-
dent existence, or in other words, to have the capacity for autonomy and
the taking of an active role in shaping history that constitutes embod-
ied agency.
In addition, Beauvoir’s recognition that female and male bodies are dif-
ferent but that this biological difference does not have to be eliminated for
women to be liberated presents a feminist perspective on the concept of
sexual difference with which this book will engage. As Sara Heinämaa
argues in Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference (2003), part of the
core of Beauvoir’s argument is “that women’s and men’s experiences of
their own bodies are partly different” but that there are also similarities,
leaving space for new ways of understanding the human experience that
validate women’s experiences of embodiment (Heinämaa 133). In the
conclusion of The Second Sex, Beauvoir clearly states that

there will always be certain differences between man and woman […]. This
means that her relations to her own body, to that of the male, to the child,
will never be identical with those the male bears to his own body, to that of
the female, and to the child; those who make much of ‘equality in differ-
ence’ could not with good grace refuse to grant me the possible existence of
differences in equality. (Beauvoir 766)

In realizing the existence of differences in how women and men relate to

their own bodies as well as the bodies of others, Beauvoir does not con-
cede that women are somehow lesser beings than men but instead recog-
nizes that women’s liberation will come from not being defined solely in
relation to men. For her, independence does not necessitate the removal
of all differences but the cultivation of a mutual respect. Thus, Beauvoir
understands sexual difference as a reality that can coexist with women’s
liberation. I find this a necessary perspective to consider when examining
34 K. KENNEDY

the Dune series because it does depict differences between women’s and
men’s abilities, as in the matter of prescience discussed in this chapter, but
the absence of complete equality should not preclude a recognition of
women’s agency and liberation from restrictive ideas about the female body.

Alternatives in Eastern Philosophies

In my understanding of Beauvoir’s conception of women as beings whose
situatedness in the body is part of what makes them human, rather than
something to be overcome, I see a more holistic understanding of the
human that is important for my analysis of the mental and physical feats of
the Bene Gesserit. This holistic understanding entails the mind and body
working together and reinforcing each other such that they are both nec-
essary for a person to function, and thus the body becomes an integral part
of the expression of agency. Before closely examining the Bene Gesserit’s
skills, though, I will discuss some of the influences of Eastern philosophies
in the series since these also envision a more holistic, interdependent rela-
tionship between mind, body, and spirit than the Western Cartesian tradi-
tion. I find that these influences are necessary to consider when examining
the representation of the Bene Gesserit not because they offer a feminist
perspective like Beauvoir’s or eschew dualities, but because they offer an
alternative to Western modes of thought that denigrate the body and
instead emphasize the concept of balance. In showing the foundations for
the Bene Gesserit’s training as being an amalgamation of elements from
Eastern religions like Taoism and Hinduism, and Eastern-influenced
Jungian psychology, I demonstrate that such influences help enable the
series’ refutation of some aspects of dualistic thought patterns that regard
the body and women as inferior or passive, which then opens space for
female characters to appear agential in their balancing of mental and physi-
cal abilities.
First, I must acknowledge that I have only attended to the aspects of
Eastern philosophies that I see appearing in the series and relating to a
discussion of embodied agency. For the purpose of this book, I define
Eastern philosophies as primarily those which were impacting the culture
in the U.S. in the mid-twentieth century, though Herbert conducted his
own research into Eastern disciplines and, according to Timothy O’Reilly,
should be credited with having written predictive science fiction since
“Oriental religion had not yet become widely popular in the West” at the
time of Dune’s publication (O’Reilly 61). Herbert was also influenced by
 2 MIND-BODY SYNERGY 35

other non-Western worldviews, such as those of Coast Salish and Quileute

Native Americans that he was familiar with through various friendships,
but I focus on the linkage with Eastern traditions since they are more pro-
nounced in the characterization of the Bene Gesserit (B. Herbert). In
Eastern Spirituality in America (1987), Robert S. Ellwood argues that
religious traditions such as Hinduism and Taoism played a large role in
making up “the Eastern spiritual presence in America” (Ellwood 34). Of
the Taoist influence, he asserts that “[t]his great mystical and aesthetic
tradition of China has had a real impact on American Eastern spiritual
consciousness at least since the sixties” and that “East Asian exercises and
martial arts, from Tai chi chuan to Aikido, profoundly shaped by Taoism,
have grown rapidly in popularity” (Ellwood 41). In Virtual Orientalism:
Asian Religions and American Popular Culture (2011), Jane Naomi
Iwamura asserts that Hindu traditions became popular in large part due to
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his Spiritual Regeneration Movement, which
taught youth how to practice Transcendental Meditation and gained
widespread interest in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s—especially after
Yogi became the Beatles’ personal guru (Iwamura 63). Given this cultural
environment, it is not surprising that some of these ideas would make their
way into the literature of the time, and Herbert was not the only science
fiction writer to draw on Eastern philosophical traditions in his work. In
Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (1986), Brian W. Aldiss
and David Wingrove note that it was common for science fiction narra-
tives in the mid-twentieth century to have elements of “strange religions,”
although this terminology assumes a Western audience unfamiliar with
religious traditions other than the Judeo-Christian one (Aldiss and
Wingrove 315). Peter Nicholls defines the New Wave science fiction nar-
ratives of the 1960s and 1970s in part through their interest in “oriental
religions” (Nicholls “New Wave”). Yet although critics have acknowl-
edged the Taoist elements in the work of writers such as Ursula K. Le
Guin and Philip K. Dick, there has been little examination of the appro-
priation of Eastern religious and philosophical traditions by other writers,
including Herbert, or the degree to which this may be problematically
Orientalist in nature. Betsy Huang is one of the few critics to explore how
Dick and Le Guin engaged in cultural appropriation and altered the source
ideas to fit their fictions. In “Premodern Orientalist Science Fictions”
(2008) she argues that they are guilty of using a “Westernized brand of
Dao” in order to advance their critique of reality and progress in the West
through their fiction (Huang 25). In finding parallels between Le Guin’s
36 K. KENNEDY

“esteem for the chief Daoist tenets of restraint and inaction,” which
Huang critiques, and Herbert’s esteem for Taoist principles shown
through the Bene Gesserit, I see that Herbert’s series is also problematic
in the way it borrows from Eastern tenets in a dehistoricized manner and
that there remains a need for the type of detailed critique that Huang
offers in order to further investigate the use of Eastern philosophies by
science fiction authors, though this is outside of the scope of this study
(Huang 29). Instead, I look at these influences to see how the series, like
Le Guin’s works, is able to draw on Taoist philosophy to show the limita-
tions of Western thought patterns and thus legitimize the type of embod-
ied agency that female characters have.
The parallels in the texts between the philosophical and religious sys-
tem of Taoism and the Bene Gesserit Way allow the body to take on an
important function from which women who subscribe to this way of
thinking can benefit. The name Bene Gesserit Way makes clear there is a
link with Taoism, which revolves around the Tao, or Way. From Lao-tsu’s
Tao-te-ching (The Book of the Way and Its Power) (circa fourth to third
centuries BC) derives the concept of the Tao, an “all-embracing matrix of
the patterns by which things happen in the world” (Keown). Attaining
knowledge of the Tao leads to an understanding of the interconnectedness
of all things, longevity, and even supernatural powers; however, one must
first find a balance between the opposing cosmic energies of yin and yang
(Keown). This understanding is existential, not intellectual, and found
through emulation of nature’s rhythms rather than language and thought
(Keown). Taoism attends to the “connection between the body and the
Tao” because practicing the Tao means observing it with the body, which
does not align with Descartes’s belief that the mind can be independent of
the body (Guangbao 177, 179). There is also an expectation of a “strict
regimen of practice” in Taoism (Guangbao 184).
Though not dwelt on in the series, it is implied that following the Bene
Gesserit Way requires a great deal of rigorous practice of both mind and
body. The reader can envision a demanding training schedule first enforced
by teachers (discussed further in Chap. 5) and later carried on as part of a
self-paced maintenance. Alia gives some idea of what this entails in Dune
Messiah in her training chamber filled with “the gross and subtle instru-
ments which toned a Bene Gesserit adept into ultimate physical and men-
tal awareness /preparedness” (DM 113). Among these “mnemonic
amplifiers, digit mills from lx to strengthen and sensitize fingers and toes,
odor synthesizers, tactility sensitizers, temperature gradient fields, pattern
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He leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head and smiled.
“What is it?” asked Bonnie May anxiously.
“I’m afraid I couldn’t explain to you. I was just thinking about—about
certain forms of reconstruction.”
 CHAPTER XVI
MRS. THORNBURG REVEALS A SECRET

Baron shook his head slowly. He had been thinking about that
advertisement in the Times which Thornburg had answered without
any result.
“Strange,” he mused. “I won’t believe but that somebody is looking
for her—somewhere. Children like that are not dropped down and
deserted like superfluous kittens or puppies. There’s something
wrong somewhere.”
Then he remembered that Mrs. Thornburg wished to see him; that,
according to Thornburg, she had “mentioned Bonnie May.”
Possibly she knew something. At any rate, Baron felt that he ought
to call on her. It was just after the dinner-hour—of the day on which
Mrs. Baron had announced her policy of reconstruction—and the
evening was flinging a challenge to all mankind to get out of doors
and enjoy the spring air.
He took up his stick and hat and left the house.

He found Mrs. Thornburg sadly changed since he had seen her last.
She was unmistakably very ill, though the only symptoms revealed to
Baron’s inexpert eye were a pathetic thinness and pallor and a
profound lassitude.
She was alone, Thornburg having just gone out.
“It was good of you to come,” she said when Baron entered. She
spoke as if she had been expecting him. And without circumlocution
she continued: “I wanted to talk to you about the little girl. You
haven’t let anybody have her, have you?”
“No,” replied Baron. Then he added lightly: “I think we’ve changed
our minds about letting her go. It seems likely now that we’ll keep her
with us indefinitely.”
He was glad that her glance rested upon her thin, clasped hands. He
could note the effect of his statement with a steady scrutiny which
need cause him no compunction.
To his surprise she seemed quite pleased. “It makes me glad to
know that she is to be with nice people,” she said, lifting to him now
a softly grateful glance. She explained: “You see, I’m sure I’m too ill
to have her now, even if....” Her lips trembled and her eyes filled.
“But you’ll be better,” said Baron, reading her thought. Clearly she
had despaired of ever being any better. “When you’re able to have
her, she’ll be so happy to visit you. I mean Bonnie May. She’s a
wonderfully sociable little creature. If she were invited to come to see
you she would be delighted. Attentions like that—such as you would
pay to grown people—have a wonderful effect upon her.”
“Yes.... And of course some day she will be coming here to stay.”
“You mean—” Baron was surprised that his suggestion had been
received with a dully uttered, enigmatic remark, rather than gratitude
or eagerness.
“You don’t know what I mean by that?” There was regret in her tone,
reluctance in her glance—as if she knew he was not dealing
honestly and frankly by her.
“No, truly, I don’t.”
“Ah, well.... But I wanted to tell you why I was so eager to have her
when you called before. You see, I wanted to—to atone....”
She sat listlessly, lost in troubled memories, and Baron waited.
“Mr. Thornburg came to me one time, in the one moment of his
greatest need, and asked me to help him. And I failed him.”
She leaned back and closed her eyes for a moment, and Baron
thought how out of harmony she was: the ailing woman whose whole
being was in a minor key, amid surroundings which suggested only
sturdiness and well-being.
“He was always generous toward me, and patient. He was always
giving, giving, and never asking. I think I got used to that and just
took it for granted. And then one day he came home, excited, as
happy as a child ... and asked me.... It was such a little thing ... and I
refused.
“You know, he had been married when I first met him. An actress. It
didn’t last long. She got tired of the life and wanted to go back to the
stage. I think she appealed to his generosity. It would have been
easy to do that. At any rate, he allowed her to go away and take their
little girl. I can’t understand how he brought himself to let the little
daughter go, too. I have an idea he was so troubled because she
wanted to go that he didn’t realize how much the child meant to him,
or would come to mean. She was only a year old then. I never
blamed him for that episode in his life. I just concluded that the
woman was worthless. And when I married him we didn’t speak of
his other marriage—nothing in connection with it. It was just as if it
hadn’t happened. Then, after a year, or about a year, he—he made
the one request of me. The mother had offered to give him the little
girl. He wanted to bring her to me, to have her in our home.
“And that made me jealous and unhappy. I can’t explain ... or defend
myself. I could scarcely answer him when he spoke about it. And
when I didn’t answer he looked at me, and after a little a strange
expression came into his eyes. He was chilled and bewildered. He
had been so happy. He couldn’t understand. He just gave it up, and
the next day he was trying to pretend that nothing had come
between us; that I hadn’t been ungracious and cruel.
“You see, I was thinking of her child, and he was thinking of his own.
Mine was the woman’s—the narrow—point of view, and his was the
father’s. Maybe you can understand a little of what I felt. I couldn’t
have the child here in the house, while its own mother.... It would
have been like giving her a place in our home—the woman, I mean.
You can’t really separate people by putting their bodies in different
places. You see what I mean?”
“Yes,” assented Baron, “I think I see quite clearly.”
“And I was sure she was a bad woman. And I felt that if her child
were in the house, her—her real self would be here, too. Her
influence, I mean. Bodies are not everything. Sometimes they’re
even the least things of all. I was afraid that other woman’s very
presence would be here among us on the most sacred occasions: at
bedtime, to see if her child were covered up, and in the early hours
of Christmas morning, jealously looking to see what we’d given her,
and jealous of us, because we were fond of her. She would be a real
influence in the house. It couldn’t be helped.”
“But a bad woman.... Surely a bad woman would forget,” suggested
Baron.
“Well, not our kind of a woman, anyway. How could she have
deserted a man who was good to her? And how could she consent
to give up her child afterward? It might be right for her to leave her
husband; but for a mother to give up a little daughter.... No, I couldn’t
think of having here in our home a link to bind us with a woman like
that—a life out in the unknown, on the streets that are strange to us,
that are strange to all faithful, happy people.
“And then when it was too late I began to see his side of it. He was
the father just as much as she was the mother. She was his child as
much as hers—more, if he loved her more. And I began to realize
what it must be to a father to have his little daughter away from him,
perhaps not loved and provided for, possibly facing an evil future.
Oh, the night that thought came to me! And always he was so kind to
me, and patient. He did not speak of his daughter again. And I
waited.... I knew he would speak again some day, and I wanted to
grow strong enough to say to him honestly: ‘Ah, do bring her, and
she shall have love here, here in her own home’....”
She lifted her hands to her cheeks and closed her eyes. It was as if
she must shut out some of the impressions which crowded into her
mind.
Baron waited until a measure of calm came upon her. “And—he
never did?”
She opened her eyes and regarded him inquiringly.
“I mean, he never spoke of her again?”
She regarded him with a smouldering look in her eyes. Then she
leaned forward, her hands gripping the arms of her chair. “I honestly
believe you don’t know!” she whispered.
And in an instant she had taken from a little box on the table near
which she sat an envelope. She drew from it a single sheet and
passed it to Baron.
He turned a little, so that the light from the table fell upon it and read:
“Do be good to the little girl your husband has brought to you. You
ought to be, because he is her father.”
There was no name. Baron handed the sheet back to her. He was
thinking hard. “Who could have written it?” he asked.
“Of course you realize that I don’t know,” she replied. “Do you mean
to ask me what I think?”
“Well, what do you think?”
“I think her mother wrote it. I think she must have lost track of the
child, and concluded that Mr. Thornburg had taken her. I think she
must have known of my—my jealousy on that other occasion. I think
she wrote this note hoping that I would refuse to have the child in the
house if I knew who she was. It seems plain that she wants her
now.”
Baron was examining the date of the postmark on the envelope. She
saw that furrows were gathering on his forehead.
She explained: “It came some time ago. I had it with me here when
you called that first time.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Baron. “And you knew, then——”
“Yes, I knew then.”
“But you haven’t.... Mr. Thornburg....”
“I didn’t show him this. He doesn’t know. Surely you can understand.
He has acted a lie, in trying to get the little girl into the house without
telling me about her. And I can’t blame him for that, after what
happened that other time. But I can’t bear to let him know that—that I
know.”
“But don’t you see, if Bonnie May is really his daughter, and if he
weren’t afraid to tell you so, he could bring her here without any
further hinderance!”
“No, he couldn’t. Not if the mother wants her.”
Baron arose. “After all, it’s largely guesswork—conclusions reached
in the dark,” he said. “You’ve received an anonymous note. That’s all
the foundation you have for what you’ve told me. And people who
write anonymous letters....”
He reflected dubiously, and then he came to a decision.
“I’ve reason to believe,” he said, “that there is good ground for you to
reject what’s in that note.”
She leaned forward, observing him intently.
Baron was remembering the actress who had called on Thornburg;
the woman who, almost certainly, was she who had taken the child
into Thornburg’s theatre. He was recalling his question to the
manager, and the latter’s vehement, prompt response.
“You mean,” questioned Mrs. Thornburg, “that you don’t think Bonnie
May is really ... that you don’t believe it was her mother who wrote
this note?”
“It’s difficult to be quite sure of anything,” said Baron, “but I would
stake a great deal on that one thing being true—that it wasn’t Bonnie
May’s mother who wrote that anonymous note.”
 CHAPTER XVII
“A KIND OF DUEL”

That night in his attic room Baron arrived, by perfectly logical

reasoning, at two conclusions, each of which was precisely the
opposite of the other.
The first of these conclusions was that he had a perfect right to
shape Bonnie May’s future according to his own inclination. The
second was that he had no right at all to do such a thing.
He arrived at the first conclusion in this manner:
He had made an honest effort to locate any person or persons
having a legal and just claim on the child, and he had failed. If the
Thornburgs had any claim upon her, it was not his fault that they had
bungled their affairs until they were unwilling to make their claim
public.
Therefore he had a right to have and to hold Bonnie May, and to
regard her, if not as his own, at least as a permanent member of the
household.
His second and contrary opinion began to shape itself when he
recalled the picture of Mrs. Thornburg, helpless and despairing,
greatly desiring the presence of the child in her own home in order
that she might complete a great moral victory over herself.
A man couldn’t oppose his claims and advantages to a need like
that!
Besides—it was borne in upon Baron more and more strongly—
there was a very serious question as to the child’s best interests.
She was an actress, born and bred, and some day she would surely
hear the call of the theatre. Not in the near future certainly. Baron
couldn’t bear to associate children and the stage. But in a few
years....
And if she were ever to return to the profession which was her
birthright, it was Thornburg she would need, and not the Barons.
Moreover, Thornburg was a wealthy man, and childless. He was now
ready to take the child into his home as his own. There could be only
one outcome to such an arrangement—an outcome wholly in Bonnie
May’s favor.
Therefore, his—Baron’s—right to keep the child was of the shakiest
possible nature.
And having reached these two conclusions, dwelling now upon the
one and now upon the other, Baron extinguished his light and went
to bed.

In the morning at about seven o’clock, while he was standing before

the glass with a military hair-brush in his hand, his problem was
solved for him in a flash. He stood with the brush suspended in air. A
light leaped into his eyes.
“How simple!” he exclaimed. “The very way out of it. The only way.”

At three o’clock that afternoon he entered Thornburg’s private office,

after having taken the precaution of ascertaining (1st) that Thornburg
had returned from luncheon in a fairly good humor, and (2d) that the
manager was alone.
“You know I had a little talk with Mrs. Thornburg about Bonnie May
last night,” he began, when Thornburg had thrust a chair toward him.
He was assuming his most casual manner, primarily because it
suited his present purpose, and also because he had not failed to
note that Thornburg’s face had darkened slightly at sight of him.
“Yes, I know.” The manager glanced at his desk as if he were a very
busy man.
“I felt the least bit—up a tree, as the fellow said, after I had talked to
her,” continued Baron. “You know I want to—to be decent about
things.”
“Of course,” agreed the manager, giving part of his attention to the
papers which were strewn about his desk. “And I suppose the child
is a good deal of a burden——”
He glanced up, and Baron wondered why a man shouldn’t be able to
keep the light of triumph out of his eyes when he really tried to.
“Not at all!” he interrupted blandly.
“——or that you are sure she will be, when the novelty of having her
about wears off.” He squared about sharply, with the air of a man
who means to do something handsome. “I’m still ready to take her, if
you decide that you’d like to give her up. Of course, I don’t know how
soon I might change my mind. In case Mrs. Thornburg loses interest,
I’d be through with the case, naturally.”
He turned to his desk again and examined a letter which came
uppermost, frowning and pursing his lips as if he were giving it deep
consideration.
Baron did not wholly succeed in repressing a smile. “All wrong,” he
said amiably. “The Greeks must have borne gifts to you before now,
Thornburg. No, I’m not tired of her. I’m not likely to be, either. Why,
she’s like a tonic. Sense? You wouldn’t believe it. She’s forever
surprising you by taking some familiar old idea and making you really
see it for the first time. She can stay at our house until the roof falls
in, if she only will—though of course I don’t hope she’d be willing to.
But don’t think there’s any question of our getting tired of her. She’s
not that kind. I might add, neither are we.”
Much to his amazement Thornburg sprang to his feet excitedly.
“I don’t know what you’re getting at!” he exclaimed. “If you’ve got
anything to say, why not say it and be done with it?”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at!” he exclaimed. “If
you’ve got anything to say, why not say it and be done
 with it?”
Baron arose, too. He thought he was justified in feeling offended. “I
think,” he said quietly, “I haven’t got anything to say, after all.” He
managed to keep his voice and eyes under control. These
proclaimed no unfriendliness. But his lips had become somewhat
rigid.
“But you did have,” retorted Thornburg. He sat down again and
produced a handkerchief with which he wiped his face and neck
nervously. “Come, don’t pay any attention to my bad manners. You
know I’ve got a thousand things to worry me.”
“Yes, I know. I’m really trying to help—or I had the thought of helping.
You—you make it a bit difficult.”
“There was something about the little girl,” said Thornburg.
“Yes. As to her—status. Chapter I—the inquiry for her, and our little
flurry—seems to be completed.”
“They probably didn’t care about her very much.”
“Well—possibly. At any rate, we seem to have come to a full stop for
the time being. And I’ve been thinking about the future. I ought to tell
you that after my talk with Mrs. Thornburg, the case didn’t seem
quite so simple as it had seemed.”
Thornburg, clasping his knee in his hands, was bending upon the
floor a gaze darkened by labored thought.
“I’ve begun to feel a kind of moral responsibility. At first I thought only
of my own point of view. My family’s, I mean. Our interests and
pleasures. But you see there’s also something to be said from the
standpoint of our—our guest. I wouldn’t want to lessen her chances
of future happiness. I wouldn’t want to have my way altogether and
then find out after a while that it had been the wrong way. I never
realized before how much the people of the stage are born and not
made. That’s the gist of the matter. There will come a time when
nothing in the world is going to keep Bonnie May off the stage.
That’s my conviction now.”
“They say children do inherit—” interposed Thornburg.
“The question of her future stumps you a bit. It’s not as if she were
like any other little girl I ever heard of. It’s like this: I’d like to have a
skylark in a cage, if it would sing for me. But I’d never be able to
forget that its right place was in the sky. You see what I mean. I don’t
want to be wholly responsible for keeping Bonnie May—out of the
sky.”
“Well?”
“My ideas aren’t exactly definite. But I want her to be free. I want her
to have a part in working things out the way she wants them.”
“That’s good sense. Turn her over to me, then.”
“That’s not the idea at all. I think up to a certain point it may be good
for her to experience the—the gentle tyrannies which are part of her
life with us. On the other hand, if she becomes identified with you (I
don’t know just what other word to use), and you get to be fond of
her, why then in a material sense.... Oh, I don’t like the tone of that at
all. But you’ll get the idea, and take it for granted that what I’m trying
to get at is that I don’t want to stand in Bonnie May’s light.”
Baron tried to join the manager in the latter’s impatient laugh. “You’ll
have to excuse my denseness,” said Thornburg. “I get your meaning
as easy as I can see into a pocket. The way it sounds to me is that
you’re sure you want to keep her, and that you’re just as sure that
you don’t want to keep her.”
“That’s nearly it,” admitted Baron, flushing slightly. “Suppose I say
that I want to keep her a part of the time, and that I’d like you to keep
her the other part. Suppose I offer to share her with you: to
encourage her to visit Mrs. Thornburg a day at a time—days at a
time—a week at a time. Suppose we take her on a kind of
partnership basis. No unfair influence; no special inducements.
Suppose I make it plain to her that you and Mrs. Thornburg are her
real friends, and that you will be glad to have her come as often as
she likes, and stay as long as she likes.”
Thornburg’s eyes were beginning to brighten.
“Would you,” added Baron, “do the same thing by us? I mean, would
you encourage her to come to us when she felt like it, and see that
she had the chance to go as freely as she came?”
Thornburg’s flushed face was all good-nature now. The little barriers
which he had kept between his visitor and himself fell away
completely.
“A kind of duel between us,” he elaborated, “to see which of us has
the best attractions to offer?”
“Well—yes, you might put it that way, I suppose. That’s a theatrical
phrase, I believe. Perhaps it wouldn’t have occurred to me. At any
rate, the plan I’ve outlined would give her a chance to do a little
deciding on her own account. It would give her a chance to give her
affections to those who win them. It would place some of the
responsibility for her future on her own shoulders. And whatever
conclusions she came to I’d be willing to bank on.”
“That,” declared Thornburg with enthusiasm, “is what I call the
proposition of a first-class sport.” He extended his hand to Baron.
“You stick to your part of the bargain and I’ll play fair to the letter.”
He would have shown Baron out of the office, then. He had a taste
for suitable climaxes, too. But Baron lingered, chiefly because he
didn’t like the prospect of an almost mischievous conflict which the
manager seemed to welcome and to anticipate.
“She can be loyal to us all,” he said, “if she’s encouraged in being.”
At the sound of his own words he fell to thinking.
No, she wouldn’t need to be encouraged. She would be loyal without
that. There was nothing to fear on that score at all.
He looked up rather whimsically. “Well, I’ll tell her,” he said.
“You’ll tell her——”
“That she has been invited to visit Mr. and Mrs. Thornburg, and
make herself quite at home.”
 CHAPTER XVIII
MRS. BARON TAKES UP THE GAUNTLET

Having decided upon what he conceived to be an admirable plan of

action, Baron was unwilling to believe that he ought to be in any
hurry to execute his plan.
For the time being Bonnie May was getting along very well indeed. In
fact, Baron made a point of looking into this matter with a good deal
of thoroughness, from a somewhat new angle, and he was greatly
pleased by what he discovered.
Little by little the child had become habituated to the home
atmosphere. This, of course, was due largely to the fact that the
other members of the family had become habituated to having her
about. They no longer felt constrained to utter pleasant nothings, or
to hold their tongues, because of her presence. When they forgot her
“strangeness,” she ceased to be strange.
She obediently and even intelligently attended when Mrs. Baron
gave her her lesson on the piano.
“Though I think,” she confided to Baron on one occasion, “I could get
hold of the high places without going through all the funny business
she seems to regard so highly.”
Baron spoke in defense of the “funny business,” and presently she
agreed with him.
The guest’s wardrobe had been made gloriously complete, and in
this relationship another pleasant development was to be noted.
Bonnie May had been painfully accustomed to the use of trunks.
Now she made the acquaintance of bureau drawers, and her delight
was unbounded. She spent hours in arranging her things. She won
Flora’s genuine applause by her skill and taste in this matter.
Flora bought her a hat.
She looked at it in a queerly detached manner for an instant. “Oh, a
hat,” she commented. She might have been repeating a word
spoken by a travel-lecturer, describing some interesting place which
did not seem to concern her. It appeared that she never had owned
a hat.
She put it on before the glass. “Oh!” she cried. She thrust impulsive
arms about Flora’s neck and hugged her.
Flora enjoyed that experience so much that she bought another hat
which she described as “unmade.” Ribbons of gay colors, and white
lace, and little silk flowers of various hues, came with it, and the child
was given these materials to experiment with as she pleased. Flora
gave advice, and was ready with assistance.
Again the result was interesting. Bonnie May experienced a joy
which was rapt, almost tremulous in quality. A desert-bred bird,
coming upon an oasis, might have regarded its surroundings with the
same incredulous rapture.
Baron’s room became hers permanently, and here she developed a
keen delight in “housekeeping.” Here also she received Mrs. Baron
and Flora as guests, and amazed them by her performance of the
part of hostess.
“I call it nonsense,” declared Mrs. Baron to Flora, after the two had
paid a formal call. But her face was flushed with happiness and her
voice was unwontedly soft.
“Not nonsense,” responded Flora; “it’s just happiness.”
She spent whole afternoons with Mrs. Shepard in the kitchen and
dining-room. She learned how to bake little cakes.
It became her duty—by her own request—to set the table, and upon
this task she expended the most earnest thought.
Baron commented upon this on one occasion. “Ah, you’re not an
artist, after all. You’re a Gretchen,” he said.
“But everything about the table is so pretty and nice,” she
responded. “It’s as elegant as a table in a play, and ever so much
more sensible. You know something always happens when you sit
down to a table on the stage. A servant comes in and says: ‘Beg
pardon, mum, but there’s a gentleman—he says he’s your uncle
from Green Bay’—and then everybody gets up in a hurry, because
the uncle is supposed to believe his niece has a lot of children he’s
been helping to support, when she hasn’t got any at all. Or
something like that.”
In brief, there were a hundred accumulating evidences to prove that
Bonnie May in the Baron household was the right individual in the
right place.
It is true that Mrs. Baron did not forget how Thornburg had called on
a certain night to take the child away, and how she had given him to
understand—she supposed—that she would expect him back on the
same errand some other time. And Baron could not free his mind of
the fact that he had voluntarily entered into a compact by which his
guest must sooner or later be lost to the household at least a part of
the time.
But these were matters which were not discussed in the family.
A week passed—two weeks, and Baron hadn’t seen Thornburg or
communicated with him. One day in June the thermometer shot up in
real midsummer fashion, and the audiences in most of the theatres
were such that all the shrewd managers became listless and absent-
minded. The “regular season” was over.
Thornburg closed his theatre and turned his attention to a summer
resort where there was an opportunity to launch an al fresco
entertainment scheme. “Everybody was leaving town.” There
remained only the uncounted thousands for whom some lighter form
of entertainment must be provided.
The flight of time, the inevitable march of events, brought to Baron a
realization of the fact that there was a promise he must keep. And so
one day, during an hour in the attic, he spoke to Bonnie May.
She didn’t seem to pay any attention at all to his preliminary words. It
slowly dawned upon her that what Baron was saying concerned her
in a special way.
“... people you will be interested in, I am sure,” Baron was saying.
“Thornburg, the name is.” He glanced at her; but the name had
made no impression. “Mrs. Thornburg is not very strong, and a
cheerful visit ought to be just the thing to help her. Mr. Thornburg is a
theatrical man. Why, it was his theatre I met you in. They have a
beautiful home.”
“Oh, that makes me think,” was all the reply he received. “What
became of the man who had a play?”
“Eh—a play?”
“You remember—when I first came. He had the first act and read it to
you in the library, and I had to go to bed.”
“Oh—Baggot. He’s probably forgotten all about it by this time. Or
writing another that he’ll never finish.”
She shook her head, unconvinced. “He was so enthusiastic,” she
objected.
So for the time being there was an end to the discussion of her visit
to the Thornburgs.

Another week passed, and then Baron had an extraordinarily busy

day.
In the forenoon came a letter from one of the dramatic editors for
whom Baron had done special work occasionally.
“They are launching some sort of a dramatic stock enterprise out at
Fairyland to-night,” the letter ran, “and I’m hoping you can do it for
me. Thornburg is managing it. I don’t hope it will be much as a
dramatic proposition, but you might be able to get some readable
impressions. Please let me know.”
A later mail brought a communication from Thornburg.
The sight of the manager’s signature brought Baron up with a jerk—
but he was reassured by the first few lines. Thornburg wasn’t
charging him with bad faith. Instead, he was enclosing an order for
an unlimited number of seats for the Fairyland opening.
“I understand,” ran a pencilled line by way of postscript and
explanation, “that you are to represent the Times to-night.”
Also there was a letter from Baggot. Baggot’s play had reached a
stage where it needed Baron’s inspection. The budding playwright
asked no questions. He merely declared his intention of calling that
night.
Baron went up into the attic to look at the morning paper. He wanted
to know what they were doing out at Fairyland, and who was doing it.
And while he noted one impressive name after another, he was
arrested by an altogether amazing sound down in his mother’s
sitting-room. Mrs. Baron had been giving Bonnie May her music
lesson, and now, the lesson done, she was singing for her pupil.
The thin old voice faltered on some of the notes, but the words came
clear enough:
“... She’s all the world to me,
And for bonnie Annie Laurie....”
Baron smiled and shook his head.
“What was it,” he mused, “about a plan of reconstruction?”
Then he went down-stairs to telephone his acceptance to the man
on the Times.
Baggot he completely forgot.

When Baron entered the dining-room at dinner-time that evening

Flora looked at him with mild surprise.
“All dressed up and nowhere to go,” said she.
“But there is somewhere to go. I’m going to write up the Fairyland
opening. Would you like to go with me?”
“No, thank you.”
It was clearly understood that Baron’s question had been put in a
spirit of jest. It was understood that Flora and her kind did not go to
the Fairylands—and their kind.
But Bonnie May failed to grasp the situation.
“What’s Fairyland?” she inquired.
“A large enclosure occupied entirely by mad people, and with a
theatre in one corner.”
She ignored the reference to mad people. “Oh! a theatre. What are
they playing?”
“A piece called ‘The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,’” said Baron.
She sat up, swiftly erect, and clasped her hands. “How fine!” was her
comment. “Do you think you could take me?”
“I should say not!” Baron responded without thinking. His unthinking
refusal was a result of the habitual Baron attitude. But as he
regarded her thoughtfully, and noted the puzzled inquiry in her
glance, he couldn’t quite understand why he had been so emphatic,
so confident of being right. “It’s not a play a little girl would care for,”
he added, now on the defensive.
She smiled indulgently. “The idea! I mean, anybody would be
interested in it.”
“What’s it about?” challenged Baron.
“A lady who died because they were unkind to her—even the people
who loved her. It’s about a lot of snobs and a—a human being.” She
spoke with feeling. She sensed the fact that again she was being
required to stand alone.
Baron frowned. “How in the world did you find out anything about a
play like that?”