Dune: Women

Female characters and women more generally in Dune

Jude: Having talked about the role of women—or lack thereof—in Lord of the Rings last time, we’re back to consider the same subject for Dune.

Thomas: Let the mansplaining…continue.

Jude: So right at the outset, I think we can say that women figure prominently in this story in a way they simply don’t in Lord of the Rings. I certainly haven’t done a major survey of science fiction circa 1965 but I strongly suspect Dune was way ahead of its time in this respect.

Thomas: As I’m sure we’ll get to soon, Frank Herbert appears to be just as much of a gender essentialist as we assume J.R.R. Tolkien was. The soldiers in Dune are all men, for example. But this is fundamentally a book about political intrigue and Herbert is wise enough to realize that throughout history and certainly in the medieval contexts that very loosely inspired the book’s politics, women played important roles even if they weren’t Dukes or Barons.

Jude: I don’t know, Dune is a story of adventure and revenge. It would be easy to write it like Treasure Island and basically have only male characters.

Thomas: I’m just saying that Lord of the Rings is at some level a book about going on a really long camping trip. It’s been a long time since I read Treasure Island but I recall a lot of sailing being involved. Today we think of these as pretty much unisex activities, but in Tolkien and Herbert’s time, I’d argue going on long, adventurous journeys was something one did with the boys. Whereas with Dune, despite its name, nearly all of its important scenes take place inside. The book frequently skips over action in its haste to reach the next meeting.

Jude: When Jessica and Paul first join Stilgar’s band in the desert, I’m not exactly sure what the Fremen were doing out there so far from Sietch Tabr, but it was a long camping trip and the band has both men and women. Everyone’s armed, too.

Thomas: Yeah, I’m not sure Herbert really thought that through. Would a society where high-status women like Chani are armed and trooping around in mixed company also be a society where killing someone in a duel results in being awarded his wife?

Jude: I think a more important observation here is that whatever the details of individuals on the ground, Dune is very concerned with big political factions and there is a distinctive organization that is entirely run by women, the Bene Gesserit.

Thomas: I guess we can call that representation. There are a half-dozen factions or so ranging from the Emperor, the nobles, the Spacing Guild, and some groups like the Bene Tleilax that don’t really figure until the sequels. All the other factions appear male-dominated. Men being in charge is the default and the Bene Gesserit are the exception.

Jude: I wasn’t saying this is something someone would write in 2024, just that the author is thinking about women more than Tolkien and a lot of their contemporaries. The Bene Gesserit isn’t a sewing circle, it’s a hugely important institution that appears to serve a similar role to the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. Historically, nobles were often more concerned with fighting each other and doing awful things to peasants, and it was the Church that was at least somewhat more attentive to what we would call “human rights” and tried to restrain the nobility with ideas like the Peace of God.

Religion is deemphasized in Dune and the Bene Gesserit seem like a secular institution, but their efforts across thousands of years to produce the Kwisatz Haderach is a long-term project to benefit humanity that often operates at the expense of short-term benefits to local nobility. And although eugenics no longer seem progressive to us today, I’d argue that the Bene Gesserit are in many ways the most sympathetic faction.

Thomas: It’s funny you compare them to the Catholic Church. Characters who don’t like the Bene Gesserit call them witches, and although that’s supposed to be a slur, one can’t help but notice Herbert has drawn from a bunch of misogynist stereotypes: women with unholy powers, conspiring with each other in secret groups to work against the interests of the men of their society and even their husbands, twisting sex and procreation for their own ends, standing in the shadows behind theoretically powerful men and acting as puppeteer. These are fears men have had about women for all of human history.

Jude: But don’t you think the text approves of this behavior? Sure, they are schemers, but everyone in Dune is scheming. The Bene Gesserit are smart, capable, and maybe most importantly, they are cool. They have what would otherwise be called magic powers, but they don’t get them by sleeping with the devil, they get them through scientific study and rigorous mental disciplines. Science fiction authors and readers of this era thought “psi” powers might really be something it was possible to cultivate, but somehow in most other words it is men who happen to cultivate them. 

Thomas: The Bene Gesserit are cool, but everything in Dune is cool. If anything, they are overpowered. They seem like the most competent faction in the book, and Jessica and Paul’s Bene Gesserit martial arts make them better fighters than the Fremen even though the Fremen are supposed to be the universe’s best fighters. But despite all these advantages, they never exercise power directly. They have to influence the world through the role of wives, like Jessica, and servants, like the Reverend Mother’s work for the Emperor as a “truth-sayer”. Gurney Halleck and Thufir Hawaii suspect and eventually believe that Jessica could betray Leto to the Harkonnens, but the thought she would just take over the Atreides to rule in her own stead, or on behalf of the Bene Gesserit, never occurs to them. It’s apparently unthinkable that women could hold power themselves.

Jude: Maybe this is a way in which the historical sources are leaking into the fiction in ways that no longer make sense. Herbert is modeling his space feudalism culture after real feudalism, a time when women influenced dukes and emperors as wives and servants but didn’t rule directly. And he didn’t reexamine that piece of it after powering up the Bene Gesserit with their space opera martial arts and psi powers.

Thomas: Is that really true historically? It might have been rare but it wasn’t unthinkable for a woman to rule in her own name, like Queen Elizabeth. And failing that, they could rule as regent for a son too young to take the throne. I think this is less about sloppy worldbuilding and more about Herbert’s belief that women are fundamentally different from men. Today our culture argues about this mostly in respect to sports, but in Herbert’s day much more significant differences were considered plausible.

Jude: Yes, though it’s important to note these hypothesized differences weren’t always ways of saying women were inferior. Early feminists thought that women were literally kinder and gentler and thus if women were in charge of countries, there would be no wars or oppression. I suppose this is one way in which Dune has become quite dated: Herbert builds this antique gender essentialism directly into the metaphysics of the story. The Bene Gesserit's savior, the Kwisatz Haderach, has to be male because there’s a place in every woman’s mind where she can’t go…but a man can?

Thomas: Herbert tries to make it sound mystical but these days it sounds almost unhinged:

There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it’s almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed…These things are so ancient within us…that they’re ground into each separate cell of our bodies…It’s as easy to be overwhelmed by giving as by taking.

Each separate cell? What does he think happens when a woman gets a man’s kidney transplanted? Or vice versa?

Jude: Maybe that was after—

Thomas: No, I looked it up, the first kidney transplant was in 1954. But I think that quote, alas, shows that the Kwisatz Haderach having to be male is a matter of perhaps unconscious sexism on the part of the author. It doesn’t make sense based on the book’s own metaphysics. Okay, men and women are super different, fine. So why can’t a woman take on a bit of maleness and become the Kwisatz Haderach that way? Why does it have to be a man doing the reverse? If it were at all possible to have a female Kwisatz Haderach, the Bene Gesserit would definitely prefer that option.

Jude: Maybe the Bene Gesserit have internalized the patriarchy. Or maybe they could make a female Kwisatz Haderach, but society wouldn’t accept that person as Emperor, so they need a man.

Thomas: The way that quote is written strongly suggests transsexuality to us today, or at least that the Kwisatz Haderach is a nonbinary person, but obviously Paul’s masculinity is never challenged or complicated in any way.

Jude: As odd and perhaps inconsistent as it is, at least Herbert is engaging with this. It’s also worth noting that he ends the book on a conversation between Jessica and Chani about…well, partly about Paul, so I guess it’s not passing the Bechdel test, but it really centers their experience in a surprising way: “History will call us wives.” That’s the last line of the book!

Thomas: I guess Dune fans will consider this blasphemy, but sorry, this is just a bad way to end the book. It’s great that Herbert is paying attention to Jessica and Chani’s lived experience, and had he wanted to make it a major theme of the story, he could have. But it’s not even the most important thing going on with these characters, much less the overall story, so what is it doing being given such emphasis? Imagine how much harder this line would have hit had it been about the jihad. “History will call us righteous.” Not only would that put an exclamation point on the book’s central preoccupation, it would tie in to the Princess Irulan chapter headings. Damn right history will call us righteous, we’re going to be writing the history! Instead, the person we see writing the history in this book is the person who is probably least sympathetic to Jessica and especially Chani.

Jude: Let the record show that I, at least, am not arrogant enough to think I can improve on Frank Herbert’s masterpiece. I think that last conversation reminds us of the personal costs to politics and alludes to the distinction between truth and history.

Thomas: But it actually asserts that history will be more correct than contemporary understanding! This, from a book that assumes this period will be documented via propaganda!

Jude: Speaking of propaganda, since we talked about three of the most notable female characters from Lord of the Rings, let’s look at the three major female characters from Dune. And I think we should start with Princess Irulan.

Thomas: The one who is in, like, one scene?

Jude: Functionally, she’s the Arwen of this story. She’s a distant and seemingly unattainable princess who the hero gets the marry at the end because of his great victory. We get to know Arwen—slightly—from an appendix, but Irulan gets quoted ahead of each chapter, so she has a strong presence throughout the story.

Thomas: Yeah, what a strong character. None of these quotes from her relate to herself. And it’s debatable whether she makes any choices of her own. She meekly does what her father wants. Or maybe what the Bene Gesserit want? I’m not even sure, that’s how little there is to work with here.

Jude: I didn’t mean she was strong, just that a strong impression is left on the reader. Whereas I suspect many people finish reading Lord of the Rings (and perhaps even watching the movies) without having a clear idea of who Arwen is.

And although she doesn’t actually play a large role in the story, Herbert uses Irulan to subvert the trope of the trophy princess. Yes, Paul marries her when he wins, but he doesn’t want this trophy and wishes he could avoid it. For some reason Herbert liked this idea so much he used it twice in the same book, first with Jamis’ wife Harrah and then with Irulan, and in each of these situations he makes sure to take note of what the women involved think and feel about it.

Thomas: I’ll give him credit for paying attention to them at all—not a given in 1965—but unfortunately I think he’s much more interested in Paul than he is in any of the women. He’s just using two different female characters to try to make his male hero look better. Paul, like nearly all Dune readers, is monogamous and stays loyal to Chani despite these various temptations.

Jude: In our second Dune article you were keen to emphasis that Chani herself is basically a princess.

Thomas: I was, yes, but the text doesn’t. She’s Paul’s age and they meet cute out in the desert, so it’s a love that feels natural and pure compared to Paul’s essentially arranged marriages to Harrah and Irulan.

Jude: I think Herbert wants to dramatize the tension between one’s role in society and the chaotic attachments of interpersonal love. Paul/Chani and Leto/Jessica are both love matches and it’s mildly tragic that neither can become a marriage. Western culture has a strong individualist streak so this is a common theme, but instead of railing against these strictures, Herbert portrays people as being not trapped per se but able to maneuver within their social framework and find ways to express themselves in it.

Thomas: The men express themselves, maybe, but it doesn’t seem like any of the women are happy with these arrangements.

Jude: Irulan gets to express herself plenty in her books. And we are told she likes books.

Thomas: Usually when a book describes a character as bookish the reader—probably quite “bookish” themselves after all—is supposed to consider this a compliment even if the other characters don’t. But in Herbert’s swaggering universe of knife-fighting men and sorceress women, Irulan is an annoying geek and we’re supposed to root for Paul and Chani to stuff her into a locker.

Jude: She’s the daughter of Paul’s ultimate enemy, so naturally she’s positioned as a villain. The book actually ends right as her story is getting interesting, I admit, but this does get explored more in Dune: Messiah.

Thomas: We’re not covering the sequels, but that could have been much more interesting. Instead, she continues being a villain, conveniently becomes remorseful when she’s finally caught after years of bad behavior, and then becomes a governess. It’s a very lame way to resolve a really interesting setup.

Jude: You’re right, we’re trying to avoid discussing the sequels, so let’s move on to the second woman of the three, Chani.

Thomas: She is also the Arwen of this story. In this case I don’t think more is better.

Jude: She’s not a trophy! Their relationship starts halfway through the book.

Thomas: She’s the “good job impressing the Fremen” trophy instead of the “you won the book” trophy, but otherwise I think it’s the way to describe what happens. Like the princes and princesses at the end of fairy tales, they fall in love instantly and conveniently moments after meeting. There’s very little evolution to their relationship, nor is there much of a sense that Chani is bringing much with her to this combination. Paul just takes her by the arm and that’s that.

Jude: Backing up, maybe I’m grading on a curve but I think the book deserves some credit here. She is literally Paul’s dream girl but when they meet, she turns out to be a tough Fremen woman. I’d also argue that even though technically she is kind of a princess, the book portrays her as a girl-next-door sort of love interest rather an an ideal woman.

Thomas: Sorry, I don’t think you get many feminism points for using tropes like “girl-next-door”. Even the name of that idea centers the man.

Jude: How about this, then: whereas Tolkien feels it necessary to have various other characters validate that Arwen is extremely hot, implicitly assigning her worth through her appearance, I don’t think anyone ever comments on Chani’s looks.

Thomas: She’s repeatedly described as “elfin”. For all we know, Herbert literally had Arwen in mind when he was writing this.

Jude: But does “elfin” even mean someone is attractive? I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone use this word in real life.

Thomas: I doubt many people have strong associations with it now, but I suspect that, to Herbert, it strongly suggested “smoking hot”.

Jude: Let’s look at the dictionary.

(with reference to a person) small and delicate, typically with an attractively mischievous or strange charm.

Thomas: There you go. Hot, but exotically hot. Doubly problematic.

Jude: My original point is that no one makes any remarks about this, so you have to admit that it’s much less emphasized than in Lord of the Rings, which already was pretty light on the male gaze.

Thomas: Okay, but Chani is nevertheless emblematic of what people used to complain about when they talked about a lack of “strong female characters”. Sure, she is a tough desert woman who can probably fight a little bit, so the text respects her more than, say, Irulan. But as we just said, she instantly falls in love with Paul and afterward she doesn’t do anything or even feel like a real character. Arwen at least chooses Aragorn over her family and friends. It’s only a single choice and it’s relegated to an appendix, but it’s at least a big, conflicted decision that she gets to make! Chani just has kids and mostly stays off screen.

Jude: At least she isn’t “put into a refrigerator” at the end to motivate Paul.

Thomas: No, but she’s had a daughter by that point so the book still uses a female character for that, even Alia’s hostage situation is a bit odd and doesn’t seem to impact Paul’s choices much.

Jude: Alia literally liberates herself. What could be more feminist than that?

Thomas: I know you’re kidding, but I will give credit where it’s due: “St. Alia of the Knife” is an extremely cool name. But it’s fortunate we’re not covering the sequels, because her character gets the rawest of raw deals. Dune is kind of ambiguous but seems to lean toward Alia being persecuted for being too smart—a sure way to make a character sympathetic to SF readers—and that the Fremen women and Bene Gesserit who object to her existence seem like they are being needlessly superstitious. Then, in the sequels, it’s like: oops, sorry Alia, the conventional wisdom was, in fact, totally right. You are an abomination who is better off dead than alive! Sure wish you had been strangled at birth so you wouldn’t cause problems for other people!

Jude: She’s trapped by destiny, but so is Paul. In fact, you could argue that Paul doesn’t have any more agency than Chani, Alia, or Irulan.

Thomas: You could, but come on, philosophy aside, it’s obvious that he has more apparent agency than any of them. And Alia is on a whole other level: the sequels would have us believe her entire existence is massively negative in value. The text’s objective statements about her are pretty much the worst things someone suffering from major depression might think—mistakenly!—about themselves.

Jude: If you’re going to start dropping hot takes about the sequels, are you going to move on and tell us what you think about the Fish Speakers? What about the Honored Matres?

Thomas: No, because any readers who love the later sequels probably understand them better than I do, and no one else will have any idea what we’re talking about. Let’s get back on topic. Where were we?

Jude: We talked about Irulan and Chani, but we’ve been saving the most important female character for last. Jessica plays a huge role in the story. In a book with a lot of head-hopping, she’s probably the second most common perspective we see besides Paul’s. She’s a wife and a mother, but she has her own desires, dreams, and abilities distinct from her husband and son. And whereas most male heroes leave behind their parents after chapter one, Jessica is part of the story throughout. It sounds odd to say about someone with, when you stop to think about it, over-the-top magic powers, but she is also probably the most realistic character in the novel because she has a lot of understandable but conflicting goals that she must try to navigate.

Thomas: That’s all true, and you also have to once again underline the fact that this was all quite exceptional for a 1965 science fiction novel, so that’s very much to Frank Herbert’s credit.

Jude: Great! Glad we agree.

Thomas: …but it’s a shame she doesn’t get to do anything. That keeps her from getting Strong Female Character status.

Jude: I don’t think that’s fair. She wins the trust of the Fremen housekeeper Mapes, her intervention is crucial to saving Paul and herself in the desert, and then she insinuates herself into the Fremen’s female religious institutions to help with Paul’s project.

Thomas: Yeah, she helps Paul, sure. No feminist points for that, sorry.

Jude: It’s what she wants to do!

Thomas: The text puts her in a position where everything she does is helping a man. First Leto, then Paul. Of course she benefits indirectly from their success, but she doesn’t get to do anything that is purely for her. She doesn’t even seem to want anything for herself, since her conflicted feelings are mostly about whether the family as a whole should try to escape, initially “with the family atomics” and then later she and Paul sneaking offworld.

Jude: Only a cartoon feminism would criticize a woman for valuing her family. You could say everything Paul does is for the Atreides honor too!

Thomas: People can make up their minds about whether they think it’s a big deal or not, I’m just noting it. I think it’s more of a shame that she is put in a position where things just happen to her while she frets: Paul is tested, establishing the palace on Arrakis, being taken into the desert by the Harkonnen, watching Paul become a religious leader: for all her intelligence and ability, she spends the entire novel being anxious and strictly reactive. Paul gets to make all the choices.

Jude: Well, he is the protagonist. And Herbert explicitly tries to depict Paul “becoming a man” not just through coming of age rituals but also through his steadily diminishing reliance on his parents. That is something that really happens with children and I think it’s a more humane sort of story as a result than the typical adventure formula where the protagonist’s parents are killed or they’re an orphan in the first place.

Thomas: Those stories clear out the parental figures for a reason, though. Dramatically, it feels wrong for Jessica to just sit around the Fremen sietch in the second half of the story worrying about Paul but—as far as we can tell—unable to do much of anything. In the first half of the book, in spite of my complaints, the book really does paint her as a very smart and capable person, so it’s hard to accept that she doesn’t have more to offer Paul’s project in the later parts of the book.

Jude: Yes, that’s the cold logic of storytelling. Supposedly Obi-Wan wasn’t originally supposed to die in Star Wars, but George Lucas noticed he didn’t have anything to do in the last third of the movie, so he changed it so that he died before that point. I suppose you think that Jessica should have died during the escape to better “activate” Paul. This is why I called this “humane”. Instead of killing Jessica the moment she isn’t one hundred percent needed by the story, Herbert allows her to continue to be a lesser influence on Paul’s life, just like most parents are in real people’s lives.

Thomas: Yes, Dune is very realistic, what with the sandworms and the faster than light travel.

Jude: That stuff is just set dressing, though. Human feelings and relationships are the most important part of stories and their value comes from being relatable. That’s why far future science fiction like Dune still imagines people whose inner lives are very similar to ours. You could write an SF novel about twelve-gendered aliens who don’t experience “love” or “fear” but instead “glorp” and “juxood”. And I suppose a few brave authors have tried. But that ends up being a bloodless intellectual exercise instead of a story people want to read.

Thomas: You know, Frank Herbert doesn’t give a name to the mental region that women inexplicably can’t look into, which leads to some unfortunate dialogue, like when Paul has to shout triumphantly: “Try looking into that place where you dare not look!” Clearly it would be a better book if he was yelling, “Try looking into your juxood! You'll find me there, staring out at you!”

Jude: Okay, well, it’s also worth saying that Frank Herbert paid a lot of attention to sociology, a lot more than most authors, so perhaps he felt “realism” demanded that Jessica be present because Paul needed someone who could help him by taking over the women’s side of the society. For good or for bad, the book tends to assign men and women to different spheres, not just amongst the Fremen but in the Great Houses as well. Only by working together can Paul and Jessica lead all of the Fremen.

Thomas: That’s cool and might even be what Herbert had in mind, but I don’t know, it’s not really on the page, is it? At various points the book weakly gestures at Paul slowly taking over, but it’s not very interested in the process by which the Fremen are coopted. Except for the Jamis fight, it doesn’t even really depict it as contingent. Like everyone, the Fremen are prisoners of fate: the Bene Gesserit gave them an exploitable religion, so now they’re screwed. So the book spends nearly all of its time on Paul going through his coming of age rituals and worrying about the coming jihad.

That said, I don’t think Jessica would be needed even if the book wanted to better dramatize the Fremen takeover. If Jessica died in the escape, Chani could take on that role and get a lot more space in the narrative as a result. It would be harder for her since she’s a young woman and doesn’t have Bene Gesserit magic powers, but hey, that gives her a bigger challenge to surmount.

Jude: That would be interesting, but I think Jessica serves as an outsider’s perspective. She actually does that throughout because she’s still something of an outsider amongst the Atreides, so we see their strengths and failings through her eyes, then we see the Fremen as both strange and relatable through her in the second half. And throughout she’s an outside view of Paul, of course. Chani doesn’t know Paul before he comes to the desert, so we need Jessica to help us see how he’s being changed.

Thomas: I suppose, but, just saying, Gurney Halleck is yet another character who doesn’t have a whole lot to do once he comes back. If Jessica wasn’t in the second half, he can provide that perspective on both Paul and the Fremen.

Jude: When you start trying to rewrite a famous masterpiece, that’s a sure sign we’ve got to hurry and wrap up before you really piss off all the fans with your blasphemy.

Thomas: What’s up next?

Jude: We’ve still got to figure that out. Maybe we’ll do some recommended reading pieces for Dune and Lord of the Rings, but at some point here we also should really talk about the adaptations. People want us to do not just the “major” ones but things like the Dune miniseries and the animated Tolkien stuff. Are you excited to watch some singing orcs?

Thomas: I’m feeling massive amounts of glorp.