Week Twelve: Diverse Position Science Fiction

For this week I read the short story I Live With You by Carol Emshwiller. I feel like this novel represents someone who resents a majoritarian culture or is at least turned off by it. The story is through the perspective of an individual who I’m suspecting is a hermit who goes about living in different peoples homes. She describes herself as someone who is never seen and she spots girl at the bookstore and immediately labels her as someone just like herself (the hermit). I’ll address the hermit as hermit and the girl as the “host” because the hermit follows her home and decides to live with her. The way the hermit describes the host is quiet, paranoid, antisocial, and with no aspiration for life. The hermit lives unseen and the host has money they she never spends, has a job packaging ice cream into boxes, watches the same shows, wears muted colors, eats TV dinners, and never does any talking to others and spends most of her time day dreaming. The host checks outside her door in the morning before leaving so she won’t have to carry any conversations. The ghost decides to push her outside of her anti-majoritarian ways and starts stealing clothes so she’ll have to dress more vibrantly and the hermit eventually finds a male and convinces him to come see the host. An awkward interaction goes on in between the three and the man ends up leaving running with his pants around his ankles. The hermit realizes that since she’s shown her face the host will not rest until the hermit has left or rotted away so the hermit leaves.

To someone that thrives on human interaction and being a part of majoritarian culture at least in the aspect of companionship this whole story is a bit disturbing to me. That there are people like this out there and the concept of someone like the hermit has always been terrifying to me. We fear what we don’t understand and how someone could be like the hermit or the host just blows my mind.