The ambiguous brotherhood in Ursula K. Le Guin's narratives.

Abstract

Ursula K. Le Guin's novels are about transcending personal boundaries to make the essential connection with another, and she shows us this attempt to form a brotherhood in two of her most famous narratives, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. Le Guin challenges the definitions of brotherhood and solidarity by posing the question whether social and sexual androgynies create the perfect conditions to create this brotherhood. I look into these narratives to see if masculinist individuals are able to look beyond the biological and inherent differences to transcend one’s personal boundaries and prejudices to create solidarity with those he regards as aliens. How do we define humanity when we only have bits and pieces of similarities between the different races and sexes, and is it possible to form a genuine and sincere bond for the communal progress for the different races? Le Guin implores us to look within ourselves, because we are not so different from her androgynous characters too: we also display, unconsciously, some forms of androgyny, and that we should not be so quick to dismiss her androgynous characters so quickly, and we are to look within ourselves to see that there is no exclusive definition of ‘human’ within the universes that she has created.