Vonnegut's Changing Women

Vonnegut's Changing Women

What follows is an argument to the effect that, in the novels written before 1973, Vonnegut's female characters generally are presented negatively, either as pro-authority anti-individualists or as helpless or male-manipulated victims who never "grow" in either a personal or literary sense. In addition I maintain that, in at least two of Vonnegut's later novels, certain female characters exercise individuality in their own existences and effect positively the awareness and attitudes of male characters.

From the beginning of Player Piano (1952) through Slaughterhouse Five (1969), Kurt Vonnegut describes the characters of his various worlds in terms of their victimization at the hands of a dehumanizing, or perhaps a better term might be "deindividualizing," technologically fixated, industrial/militaristic society. Time and time again in these novels the role of the individual is subsumed in the miasma that passes for "social responsibility." Like the real world in which every human being exists, Vonnegut's literary worlds feature nameless and faceless authorities (when such authorities are offered at all) who seem to be the masters in local, regional, global, and sometimes interstellar chess games. Often, as is the case in Vonnegut's 1951 "All the King's Men," these "manipulators" move their all-too-sentient pieces in what at times, for the victims, must seem to be diabolical--and what certainly are tragic--maneuvers.

In The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Slaughterhouse Five the "accidental" nature or intergalactic point of view of the authority that seems to be "in charge of things" serves to distance humans from personal responsibility for the results of such maneuvering--as such results are described in the novels. In Sirens, for example, the inappropriate and often asinine behaviors of Malachi Constant are shown to be products of the direct influence of the Tralfamadorians who for millennia have manipulated human societies simply to communicate with a mechanized messenger shipwrecked on Saturn's largest moon. The same excuse can be made for the ultimate human manipulator in the novel, Winston Niles Rumfoord, as it can for the actions and attitudes of Bee, Rumfoord's wife and the mother of Constant's son, Chrono. That the communications sent to Salo on Titan consist of such inane and, given the non-human nature of the receiver, unimportant content as, "Be patient. We haven't forgotten about you," and, "You will be on your way before you know it" (271), only makes more pathetic the fact that Tralfamadore has influenced directly the rise and fall of countless human civilizations in order to deliver such messages. In the light of the historicity of Tralfamadorian manipulations of earthling civilizations, the sufferings of the characters in Sirens in effect are trivialized. But this "trivializing" of human misery is a consistent mark of Vonnegut's satirical message. In Slaughterhouse the Tralfamadorians offer a different type of absolution for human responsibility, but their explanation still is that wars and murders and other "inhumanities"--indeed, even the ultimate destruction of the entire universe--occur because they do happen, always have happened, and will continue to happen since the moments are "structured" that way; nonetheless, such sophistry serves to release individuals from personal responsibility for either their actions or the results of those actions.

In Player Piano Vonnegut presents the reader with an industrialized anti-Utopia that is too much the product of human beings. Though neither an extra-terrestrial nor exactly a nameless and faceless "manipulator," the National Industrial Planning Board (NIPB) serves well the function of a deindividualized (and deindividualizing) controller--planning, limiting, and directing the existences of those who make up its subservient population. This novel presents essentially two types of individuals who stand apart from the mass of controlled humanity: those who aspire to maintain and rise within the society--characters like Kroner, Anita Proteus, and Lawson Shepherd--and those who desire to separate themselves from and either directly or indirectly usurp the system--Ed Finnerty, James J. Lasher, and, eventually, Paul Proteus. What is important to note, here, is that, although many of the novels from what I call Vonnegut's "early" period (novels written before 1973) present both pro-and anti-"government" characters who appear to react as individuals, those characters who strike out against the deindividualizing authority are presented in a positive light, while those who attempt to work within the system often are portrayed negatively.

Anita Proteus in Player Piano is herself a manipulator, and a very successful one. As the novel progresses we learn that she is uneducated; we learn that her origin is in the lower-class-"Reeks and Wrecks"-Homestead section of society; and we learn that she has "tricked" the rising-star, engineer-administrator Paul Proteus into marrying her by faking pregnancy and thereby forcing him into the modern form of a "shotgun" wedding. Not satisfied with this level of deception, Vonnegut further makes Anita an adulteress who literally sleeps her way into the arms of Lawson Shepherd, Paul's second-in-command at the Ilium industrial works. While her adulterous activities with Shepherd occur apparently as a means of insuring herself against the eventual collapse of Paul's misguided faith in the industrialized system that is described in the novel, the careful reader notes that there is something especially invidious in the way the author presents the relationship between Anita and Ed Finnerty, Paul's best friend and erstwhile member of the NIPB. And, knowing Anita's propensity for using her considerable arsenal of "weapons of sex" (29), the reader can conclude that the enmity Paul's wife feels for her husband's friend is more than a reflection of her disgust at Finnerty's distasteful and unhygienic habits and appearance; it may be, rather, the fury triggered by Finnerty's rejection of her attempts to sleep her way into the arms of a man whose career seems destined to eclipse her husband's. The non-conformist, indeed, hobo-like Finnerty's spurning of Anita's advances is consistent with his distaste for those very accoutrements of professional lifestyle so coveted by Anita, and his rejection of her is compatible with an accompanying detestation of those who, in order to cling to their own elite social standing, betray others--especially if the