In defence of SILVER...

[Tabouli]

Uh, if anyone is actually planning to read "The Silver Metal Lover", be warned that there are a *lot* of spoilers in this message...

Rita:
> I *hate* it because it is exactly teen-age
girl wish fulfillment fantasy: As soon as she stops taking the hormones,
she eats as much as she wants and is beautifully slender. As soon as she
stops the hair dye, her hair is perfectly behaved smooth platinum
blonde. As soon as her lover suggests that she sing, she has a beautiful
and emotionally touching sweet singing voice

What's wrong with a little teenage girl wish-fulfilment?  Sure, so I first read the book at 14, which is probably exactly the right age to appreciate it, but still.  I thought that the central theme of the story was "people as constructed creatures", and right from the start Tanith illustrates that Jane is the product of her late-middle-aged, egocentric mother Demeta's wish fulfilment (more on the demonised mother later).  If anything, the book is more of slur on the professional superwoman.  This is my take on the story:

Demeta is beautiful, rich, successful, famous, brilliantly intelligent, and rich enough to pump herself full of anti-ageing hormones, and decides at 59 that a perfect child will be the ideal accessory to set off her perfect and glamourous life.  She then carefully selects the eugenically approved perfect sperm, has herself inseminated, and pays to have the child removed from her body with minimal pain and disfigurement.  She then proceeds to tailor her child to her requirements, making sure the child knows that her mother is the centre of the universe and fount of all knowledge.  As the child grows up, however, a terrible thing happens.  The child grows up beautiful and intelligent and talented, just like her mother and eugenically approved father.  A RIVAL!  And one a generation younger than her, to boot!  Demeta can't have this, so she immediately organises a system of pills and injections to keep the child plumper and mousier than her, and puts her down every time she looks like gaining the self-confidence to see that her mother is a flawed human being too.

Which doesn't contradict anything Rita says above, it just puts it in what I see as the context.  Because yes, as soon as she runs away from her mother's luxury life with a person who is actually *physically* constructed to be the perfect man, not just indoctrinated and dosed into being the perfect, submissive, not-too-threatening child, all the measures Demeta has taken wear off.  Isn't it perfectly plausible (if fantasy fulfilling) that Jane should have inherited the sweet voice, platinum hair and slim figure of her mother?  Much more plausible than a million teen movies where no-one seems to notice that the geeky girl is actually a supermodel wearing ill-fitting fake glasses, or all those weight loss ads which magically transform people into size 10 movie stars in six easy weeks without sacrificing any of the foods they love.  There *are* a few bits I now cringe at a bit (the orgasm scene for one), but I find the transformation rather clever.

> AND he loves her absolutely, but for no particular reason: not for her looks,
talents, intelligence, sense of humor, courage, merely because her heart is pure.

The particular reason is that unlike all the other people who hired him as a toy and shut him overnight in robot storage, she loves him as if he is a real person, and she needs him and sacrifices her entire luxury rich-girl life for starvation in the slums to be with him.  Hey, even a vacuum cleaner would be touched by this.  A touch schmaltzy, perhaps, but hey, it's a sci-fi romance for teenage girls.

> The piece of teen-age girl wish
fulfillment fantasy that most riles me up about SILVER METAL LOVER is
something that most women I know claim not to know about. It is: that
her loathsome mother who is so cruel to her REALLY IS loathsome and
REALLY is the cause of all her problems, AND she gets to go on
world-wide radio and persuade the whole world how loathsome her mother
is. As if anyone would believe her!!<

She doesn't get to go on worldwide radio, she just writes a book and fantasises about getting her mother to bribe the City Senate into publishing it.  As for demonising her mother, sure, this is very widespread among teenage girls (I couldn't stand mine myself at 14), but that doesn't mean to say that self-indulgent, egocentric, child-as-accessory mothers don't exist out there.  I've met some.

I know one glamorous young couple who knew the Thing To Do was have a lavishly impressive wedding, buy a house in the Right Suburb, and bear a couple of children, so they did, and discovered, to their horror, that babies are so terribly inconvenient - they vomit on one's designer outfits, keep one up at night until one looks simply frightful, darling, and force one to rearrange one's feng-shui approved minimalist house so they can't put one's oriental sculptures in their mouths!  So when hubby darling got a job in the UK, they decided that they really didn't want this burden on their lifestyle, and thought they'd farm the little Osh Kosh and Weebok clad tykes off to their own parents for a few years.  How shocked they were to find that neither set of parents would have a bar of it, and told them they should develop a sense of responsibility and bond with their children!  How passe!  So after much argument, they dosed the kids up with sleeping pills (aged 8 months and 2.5 or so) to keep them quiet through the entire 24 hours of the flight, not wanting to be embarrassed by their terribly unfashionable screaming in front of the other first class passengers.

OK, so not common, but not non-existent by any means.

I can understand Rita's critique, and acknowledge a certain adolescent girl wish-fulfilment element in the book, but I still love it, and, perversely, have recognised more and more parallels with my own life that I didn't consciously see at 14.  At 14 I couldn't bear my mother, but viewed my father as the fount of all wisdom and power, of whose frequently descending judgment I lived in fear, and for whose approval I lived.  For his part, he was leaning over my cradle with "How to Raise a Brighter Child" in hand, teaching me to read from the age of 2, testing my IQ, telling people when I was 6 that I would probably "always be in academia".  Jane ran away to forge her own life with a robot after living out her mother's fantasies for only 16 years... it took me until my early 20s to realise that I was living out my father's fantasies, and until this year to finally start living my dreams instead of his.  Not that I think he's loathsome or anything.  I love him dearly, but I now do so with my eyes open to the insecurities which drove a lot of his parenting, instead of closed in prayer...

Tabouli.


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