The Female Man and A Christmas Carol
Dedicated to John Clute, with some regret that I have never really got on with Dickens.
In 2026 I published Considering The Female Man with Luna Press Publishing. The book is quite short, 37,000 words, and although I am very happy with the book and its contents, because it is quite specifically about the rhetoric and language of The Female Man, I continue to return to the novel with new filters, and each time see something different. I am fairly sure that this will be the first of a number of essays on Joanna Russ’s Mistresspiece.
As I explain below, this paper is the result of a talk I was writing for Iridescence (Eastercon 2026) although it is not that talk. The talk I gave at Eastercon was shambolic because of the moment of realisation I had had two days earlier. I gave the talk again at Swancon in Perth, Australia in June, and by that point my ideas were firming up. Then I gave the talk for the third and final time at Metropolcon in Berlin in July. The paper below is very close to that talk.
I want to thank Nick Hubble (Foundation: the International Review of Science Fiction, UK), Alexandra Pierce of Speculative Insight (AU) and Van Ikin (Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature), who have all agreed to co-publish and thus widen the readership for this short paper.
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The week before Eastercon 2026 I sat down to write a conclusion to the talk on Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975) that I was planning to give, and I wrote this line:
Joanna is being visited by three ghosts and may be one herself.
The act of writing the line, which I had not thought through in any other way than as a summary of what I had written about Russ and existentialism, stopped me in my tracks.
Russ liked ghost stories, she liked them a lot. She wrote a number of them herself including my favourites, ‘Mr. Wilde’s Second Chance’ and ‘The Little Dirty Girl’ (in The Hidden Side of the Moon,1982). In To Write Like a Woman(1995) she has an essay on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) as a ghost story, and I think there are elements of that novel in the Ghost (capital G) who crawls through Joanna’s face at one point, or in Jeannine, trapped in a bed sit.
The Female Man is a ghost story.
Specifically, The Female Man is a story of a woman (Joanna), trapped in a space and moment by her own choices and compromises, who is visited by three ghosts: Jeannine a ghost of a present where contemporary changes haven’t happened, and thus a ghost of a ‘past’; Janet a ghost of her own present but also a possible and desirable future, and Jael, a ghost of a possible future-to-be-avoided
The Female Man is a version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843). What follows is a short think piece, of what I think is going on.
The Female Man as A Christmas Carol
Organised in five ‘staves’ (the five lines of a bar of music) each chapter of A Christmas Carol is meant to be representative of a verse in a carol and the whole was meant to be read aloud and is far and away the most staged of Dickens’ stories. I have been struck, over and over again, by how much The Female Man is a performance—how well it reads aloud and how it could be staged. The concept of stave also leads to the idea of the harmonious progression to a climax, and a coming together, and although the story of The Female Man ends in the cafe Schrafft’s (known for being a safe place for women to eat), the actual conclusion is a bringing together of the argument of the book and (possibly) the integration of the characters (or ghosts).
In the first stave of A Christmas Carol, Dickens introduces us first to (the deceased) Marley, and then to Scrooge, and to the life Scrooge has constructed. We see Scrooge interact with the charitable gentleman and with his clerk. When he arrives home, the door knocker appears as Marley’s face, and glows with a dismal light; then, as he sits and then prowls and sits again, a bell rings, and Marley’s ghost appears. Marley outlines what Scrooge is to expect and then leaves him. Scrooge ‘followed to the window; desperate in his curiosity’ and observes the air ‘filled with phantoms, wandering hitherto and thither in restless haste and moaning as they went’, every one of them in chains.
In the second stave of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge wakes to the dark and wonders whether he has slept a whole day and a night. He goes back to bed, and then his curtains are drawn aside, by a creature, ‘being now a thing with one arm, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now without a body; of which dissolving parts no outline would be visible in the dense gloom’. The ghost invites him to ‘rise and walk with me’ and takes him in to the past, to observe, first the boy left at school, then to the moment his sister welcomes him home, then to Fezziwig’s employ, and thence on to the scene in which the girl he loves rejects him for his increasing hardness. Finally he sees the life he might have had, his girl married to another and with a thriving family, a hint at an alternative history.
Stave three is the ghost of Christmas Present, cheery of demeanour and very much present. This ghost will take Scrooge out into the world to see the happy shoppers, to the celebration at the Cratchitts, to see miners celebrating and thence to a lighthouse, on to the house of his nephew, but finally to confront, hidden in the garments of the now aging ghost, the children who represent Want and Ignorance. The key exchange is when Scrooge asks if they belong to the ghost: ‘“They are Man’s” said the Spirit…’
Stave four is the final spirit, the warning spirit. This spirit takes Scrooge to see first the locale of his own death, to experience how little he mattered to anyone (except in the most negative ways, as a source of easy loot, as the holder of mortgages ruthlessly enforced), the death of Bob Cratchitt’s youngest son, and his own neglected grave, but is given reassurance that this is only what may come to pass.
Finally, we have stave five, in which Scrooge is enlightened, and filled with the energy of joy and epiphany, rushes into the street, purchases a goose which he sends on to Bob Cratchitt, surprises his nephew by arriving and taking a full part in the festivities, and the following morning growls at his clerk before announcing a pay rise. The ending of the book is a summary of what will pass into the future.
Now let us think about The Female Man. The Female Man is organised in nine parts, not five, and it is notoriously uneven in the way that it is structured, with the bulk of the story in parts one and four, and subsequent sections carrying vignettes and scenes (see Considering the Female Man, Luna Publishing Press, 2026 for a detailed analysis). But if we compare this with A Christmas Carol, then the structure of The Female Man makes more sense. As with each stave of A Christmas Carol, it is proposition, followed by example. In A Christmas Carol, the proposition at the beginning of each stave is less direct, but it is still the same structure: Scrooge knows that he is to be visited by three ghosts, and by the second and third ghost he knows what to expect, he will be shown incidents from his life which will lead him to a new argument.
In my reading of The Female Man as a version of A Christmas Carol, we begin with Joanna. Like Scrooge, Joanna is technically alive. But also like Scrooge she is hiding away from herself, her own life, and from the world. In modern parlance, both Joanna and Scrooge ‘mask’ out of insecurity and fear. They live as ghosts in their own lives. At times both Scrooge and Joanna are haunting their own past, looking back at their childhoods, at the moments that cramped them into the tiny emotional and psychological space they now occupy.
Joanna, at times, is also a ghost, but when she is a ghost she is all ghosts in one. As Scrooge is a future-ghost of his own past, present and future, Joanna is a ghost of all the women she might have been: the even more repressed Jeannine, the distorted and bitter Jael, and the full person Janet.
Joanna is both the haunted and the haunting, the ghost of her own past present and future, and like Scrooge at times she haunts others: Scrooge haunts the Fezziwig brothers’ party, Joanna haunts the celebrations and occupations of the people on Whileaway. She does, however, have control over the narrative which Scrooge does not have, and I think this is deliberate. Scrooge has striven for control: it’s what he lacked as a child, but as a middle class man it is achievable, and to reform he must relinquish that control. Joanna has had control stripped from her, with each step in her life. Agency has been illusory, seemingly granted for conformity but somehow forever out of grasp. Her ghosts are about the consequences of having less or more agency, and how to use it. This, I think, is why Joanna the ghost-narrator is not quite the Narrator with a capital N. The narrator needs to be slippery, to be slightly ungraspable, because a Narrator has narrative autonomy (even though it may be unreliable) and Joanna does not.
The Ghost of Christmas Past is vague, faint, and ragged. Jeannine wanders as a ghost through her own world, Joanna’s world, and her own life, and represents a past that didn’t disappear. Jeannine’s is the world without the intervention of the Second World War sending women into the workforce, without the fight backs started by the Civil Rights movement and anti-Vietnam War movements, each of which contributed to the development of Women’s Liberation. Her presence is always a reminder, a holding back, and it continually demands submission to constraints past, present and future. Jeannine is the most Gothic, her droopy clothes patched and torn, ragged and projecting a longing for something better.
Jeannine appears as a ghost in the cocktail lounge where Joanna is watching Janet interviewed on TV: ‘I don’t belong here’ (1/VII), she says, and she doesn’t, she is wearing fashions thirty years out of date, she is anxious, she doesn’t like places like this, she doesn’t like feeling present. Jeannine dawdles in the morning (I/X), she stands on the sidelines at the Chinese New Festival (2/X), she lives in her head and imagines what people might say to her and how she might respond (2/IX) while frozen with fear of engagement. Jeannine cannot inhabit herself peacefully; on a subway with Joanna, Jeannine is restless, ‘always twisting around to look at something, forever fiddling with her clothes, suddenly deciding she just has to see out of the window, I’ll die if I don’t.’ (5/I). Jeannine shops for someone who is a different Jeannine, a Jeannine who would wear red fishnet hose (5/IV). Jeannine spends her time with her mother and her brother in Part Six, trying very much to be yet another a Jeannine, one who pleases, one who lives in the interstices of her mother’s and brother’s lives, who ‘is going to put on her Mommy’s shoes’ (6/VI), even though her Mommy hates wearing them too; and who falls in love with an actor (6VII) because the actor is unreal; a ghostly love by a ghost, for a ghost.
Because Jeannine cannot inhabit herself, she is continually engaged in daydreams, some cinematic and idyllic, but others anxious. In 5/VII she engages in a game of What If with Janet in which she assumes the worst in a narrative which begins with imagining losing one’s way, and concludes with her speculating on the worst possible approach to first contact. Janet punctures this Gothic melancholy with her customary practicality. Janet is a creature of what is, Jeannine a creature of what may be or may have been.
Jeannine is, like the Ghost of Christmas Past, immaterial/ethereal. ‘Stupid and inactive. Pathetic. Cognitive starvation. Jeannine loves to become entangled with the souls of the furniture in my apartment, softly drawing herself in to fit inside them…’ (5/VIII) Faced with the physical and material nature of Janet’s relationship with Laura, ‘Jeannine flattens like a film of oil; she vanishes dimly into a cupboard, putting her fingers in her ears.’
My nomination for the Ghost of Christmas Present is Janet (although she might also be a ghost of a possible future). Janet is as material as they come. She is hearty, straightforward, and rooted in herself and her culture. She knows who she is in a way none of the other characters do (although Jael narrates herself well). Janet’s presence is solid and present, taking up space the way the Ghost of Christmas Present takes up space.
The Female Man opens with Janet’s memoir, presumably dictated to the debriefer, which is a series of paratactic statements mostly but not entirely about herself. Janet situates herself at the end: ‘I love my family… I love my wife… I’ve fought four duels. I’ve killed four times.’ Bam, bam, bam. It is grounded in the way Joanna’s memories are not. The future Janet offers is grounded in a different kind of childhood produced by a different kind of society. It isn’t merely that Scrooge has been ill treated by his family or that Joanna has been ill treated by her parents, it’s that the entire society needs to change how it rears its children in order that Joanna-Scrooge emerge whole.
Janet is hearty, is fully present, in the way the Ghost of Christmas Present is. Janet is confidently different. When challenged over the absence of males, her response to the question ‘Surely you expect men from our society to visit Whileaway?’ with the one-word counter question ‘why?’ is not so much a push back as a wall of nothing, an othering of the very question. Although Janet deigns to consider the question, it’s as a historian or analyst, on her ground, not the questioner’s. Her present is absolute, it is what it is. There is no side to Janet: there has been no threat, no constraint, no crippling social mores that have forced her to take refuge in nuance and subtlety. Janet is a celebration of all that women could be in the absence of men (and perhaps also, of any kind of societally constructed gender). Janet, like the Ghost of Christmas Present, takes up space.
Although both Janet and Jael are from a future, Janet is always presented to a much greater extent as from an alternate present. It is Jael that works in this reading as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come or, as the sf world might term it, the Ghost of If This Goes On. In Jael’s future, men may have tried to suppress women, but many women have refused to besuppressed: the result is a bitter war in which both sides are distorted, the men’s side into an ultra masculinity that we now recognise in the manosphere, which seeks to curate femininity while loathing femaleness (I won’t go into the issue of transphobia here, I tackle it in Considering The Female Man by Joanna Russ). The Jael sections are, I think, in conversation with the ideas in (if not the actual novel) Suzy McKee Charnas’s Walk to the End of the World, published the year before The Female Man. In this book men have ‘suppressed’ women (in ways similar to Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night [1937]), and they are an angry denial of the passivity we see in these books (less so in its sequels). Jael as future ghost is not the Dickensian ghost of regret but of resistance, not of ‘you can stop this coming’ but of ‘this is how you should and will react to what is coming.’ Jael is a prophesying ghost, her chosen moniker (she is named for a prophetess in the Bible) thoroughly appropriate.
Joanna is being visited by three ghosts and may be one herself.
I am genuinely not sure how well this works. This being Joanna Russ, one of the cleverest authors in our field, there was never going to be an easy mapping. But every time I have read out that line to someone, they have had the same reaction I did.
How did we not see it?
Farah Mendlesohn won a Hugo with Edward James in 2005 for The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature. They are the author of Diana Wynne Jones: The Fantastic Tradition and Children's Literature, Rhetorics of Fantasy, with Edward James, A Short History of Fantasy, The Inter-galactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children's and Teens' Science Fiction, with Michael M. Levy Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction, which won the World Fantasy Award and the Mythopeic Award in 2017. The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein was published in 2019, and Creating Memory: Historical Fiction and the English Civil Wars in 2020. Considering The Female Man by Joanna Russ, or, As the Bear Swore … was released by Luna Press Publishing in 2026 at Iridesence. Farah is also a convention runner, and has led on Worldcon programmes, accessibility desks and the 2014 exhibit hall.