Ryan Mori
January 26, 2015
UCOR 1430

Reflection 3

I enjoyed reading both "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" by Ursula K. LeGuin, and “Unearthing Herstory: An Introduction” by Annette Kolodnyza. I would first like to reflect and analyze LeGuin’s thought provoking essay. After discussing her other essay on mountains and her view on feminism, I was not surprise when this essay included another extended metaphor that had to relate to how media presents male and female in todays society. LeGuin starts off by describing the gender dynamics of early humans. It was believed that before, humans were hunters rather than gatherers, however, media has constantly pushed that weapons were the first invention of ‘man’. LeGuin further reveals how this assumption has de humanized women and affected our culture so much so that the general refer human as man. For the longest time, this has been presented as the norm, men had always been superior to women due to this invention; but LeGuin finds this adopted myth to be not true, “If it is a human thing to do to put something you want […] into a bag […] and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it […] and then next day you probably do much the same again, if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all” (152). Since humans could have been hunters (men) or gatherers (female), and since both are equally important pieces of culture, this allows LeGuin to view men and women as humans rather than being male dominant. Like LeGuin, Kolodnyza also focuses on a specific topic of feminine culture; nature. As seen in previous readings, a lot of authors such as Therou and Emerson describe nature in great detail. When reading their description, it is almost mythical to us. Kolodnyza describes how today, we have grown so apart from nature, that we experience and interact with it differently than those before us where culture, technology, and social structure was still minimal. We have lost our source of innocence that allows us to see the side of nature through the eyes of these naturalist authors.