One of the things Delany warns us of, by indirection, in his preface, is that all the monsters in his book will be male. If his view of the world, particularly in the relation of men and women that the preface presents, is correct, then it follows (I am assuming this is his logic) there simply is no room for female monsters in fiction. It seems he has decided this in the same way that a generation of American writers in the thirties and forties decided that there was no longer room in fiction for the black monster—such a mainstay of both American and European light fiction for the previous seventy-five years (and whose avatars can still be seen in films like Griffith’s Birth of a Nation). It is not, I think Delany would concur, that there are no female monsters in life. It is rather that there are no female monsters as usually presented in literature; and that the famous ones, such as Kesey’s Big Nurse, or Arthur Kopit’s Mom (from Oh, Dad, Poor Dad) are a trivializing political lie. I gather, from book and preface, that Delany feels the presentation of any female monstrousness without a firm, fictional appeal to the sociological, economic, and psychological indignities women are forced to endure (as a political class) on every front from men, is, at this point in history, merely a politically egregious cliché. I suspect he feels, further, that since the monstrousness with which men treat women, in all walks, so outweighs those times when women are brutalized into behaving monstrously in return, that to harp on a particular monstrousness from a women before the monstrousness of men is fully explored and revealed for what it is, is to render the fiction, at this particular moment, somewhat irrelevant.

This is a liberal (not a revolutionary) position; it is a sympathetic one; but it is one whose flaws have been shown before. And it is ultimately what opens Hogg to the charge of Feminist-Uncle-Tomism—that, indeed, Delany invites toward his preface’s close.

All the women in Hogg are martyrs, saints, or heroes. We have seen that Delany is concerned with the political statement the book makes. But I cannot help thinking what a different, and possibly more effective, statement it would have made if it had been, say, Maria, rather than Harkner, whose horrendous and outraged slaughterings we were forced to listen to in report after report. On multiple readings, I find myself questioning whether Delany’s making the crippled girl the only young woman with any rebelliousness in the face of direct fire is a bit of the same, unconscious, political maneuvering he decries so in the preface.

Delany talks about the failure of women to encounter in fiction. There are only two such encounters in Hogg:

In one all that is exchanged is an inarticulate roar.