In an interview conducted by Marilyn Mehaffy and AnaLouise Keating, Octavia Butler was prompted to discuss the importance of bodily inscription in writing, to which she responds that the body is "all we really know we have... all we really know we have is meat." (Mehaffy and Keating, 59) Butler's concern with saving the "flesh" through writing is a persistent theme in his novel, The Parable of the Sower, which follows the protagonist Lauren Olamina, as she leads a community of individuals along the Pacific coast as he writes and teaches a religion based on the acceptance of change and difference as God. Lauren writes Earthseed: The Books of the Living, through short philosophical passages dispersed throughout the novel; "I wrote, enriching my journal notes," (Butler , 216) tells Laura, as her writing embraces both the female mind and body. Earthseed, the fictional religion introduced by Butler, encapsulates a discourse that is innately feminine; this concept of "embodiment" and the epistolary style used by Butler are simultaneously compatible with Helene Cixous's manifesto for female writing, "The Laughter of the Medusa", an exhortation to a "feminine way" of writing. The narrative incarnations of Butler's fiction support a spiritual claim to the "flesh" as the primary and significant site of knowledge and communication, both personal, as Lauren's journals suggest, and collective, as its doctrinal function of socially bringing its followers together is materials that narrate, Butler recognizes the exploitative narrative uses what she calls "body knowledge," which does not necessarily or literally involve renouncing flesh but, rather, reinventing and reassembling it within an ethic of survival . Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made “Why” essay. Shouldn't violent video games be banned'? Get the original essay The Parable of the Sower is in essence an analogy drawn between the cultivation of Earthseed, which Lauren meticulously applies to her experience, and the grand narratives of Christianity and capitalism, which are rigorously applied to ours. Each is a way of giving shape and meaning to existence in the same way that narrative itself tends towards a similar "fictitious" ordering of experience. Butler positions herself in this analogy through the act of “writing herself” into the literary economy of science fiction and making space for the undervalued female voice in that economy. Butler thus alludes to a conceivable reality but at the same time contests the validity of the forms we use to give it shape. Helene Cixous aimed to literalize figures of femininity in the theory of écriture and explore the consequences of that lateralization. He did not simply privilege the “female” half of an existing binary opposition between “male” and “female”; like other theorists of écriture, he questioned the very adequacy of logic to define the complexity of cultural realities. Her essay opens didacticly, as she instructs women writers to write to the text: Woman must write herself: she must write about women and lead women to writing, from which they have been driven away with the same violence as from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal objective. The woman must insert herself into the text - as into the world and history - with her own movement. (Cixous, 1942) The act of a woman “writing” herself is applicable in both a fictional and an authorial sense; while Butler uses her novel as a platform for female agency and empowerment, Lauren, in a metafictional sense, designates her own writing asplatform for his religious teaching. He recounts one of his doctrinal passages: “We are the Seed of the Earth. We are flesh: self-aware, seeking, problem-solving flesh... We are earthly life maturing, earthly life preparing to move away from the parent world. ” (Butler, 151) Lauren titles her creed as “EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING,” which accentuates the corporeality associated with the Earthseed teachings. The passage encapsulates the “essence” of Earthseed; the pronoun “we” represents the community aspect of a re-inscription of the body in religious doctrine. When read together with Cixous's proposal, similarities emerge: firstly, Butler and Cixous are intrinsically interested in community and collective thought, secondly. , both consider the oppressive context in which they are writing. Cixous recognizes the dominant patriarchal force that has plagued her literary space, as it has been “violently distanced from the body” while Lauren constitutes Earthseed as a deviation from the “parent world” that it has devastated its own community. The concept of écriture describes everything about writing that can neither be subsumed into an idea nor made to correspond exactly to empirical reality. It encompasses the “textuality” of all speech, and Helene Cixous can be credited with being responsible for women's inherently unique speech. Cixous does not privilege the “feminine” half of an existing binary opposition between “male” and “female”; just like his contemporary writing theorists, he questions the adequacy of said opposition to label the complexity of cultural realities. Cixous mitigates this opposition in the following passage: I argue unequivocally that there is marked writing: that until now, much more extensively and repressively than one could ever suspect or admit, writing has been managed by a libidinal and cultural logic. —hence political economy, typically masculine…(Cixous, 1945)It becomes evident that an inconsistency lies at the heart of Cixous's work: his insistence on the two incompatible logics within feminine ecriture. First, Cixous claims that female écriture is characterized by the explicitly female body parts that have been repressed by traditional discourse and must be expressed by the writer. However, it also promotes the use of feminine writing for both men and women. Perhaps it is more appropriate to interpret Cixous's "body" as that of any transgressive or desiring individual; it is plausible that his interpretation of the body itself was repressed. The “body” may not even be a physical body, but rather figurative bodies that possess power or cannot possess power. Traditionally, power, authority and law have assumed the male body; but, since no real body is depicted, both men and women would have access to commentary about the body. Writing as if the female body could be affirmed, Cixous's feminine ecritura frees it from invisibility and, at the same time, does not make it a new model for the universal human being. The new opposition is not between male and female, but between a logic of the One and a logic of heterogeneity and multiplicity. Considering Cixous's contemplation of “unity” and “multiplicity,” Lauren's Earthseed can be analyzed through this dichotomy. Regarding community, Lauren writes Earthseed's narrative as follows: “Civilization is to groups as intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve continuous adaptation of the group. "(Butler, 101) Earthseed depends on the need for collective support; community participation, as in most doctrines,it is necessary for the maintenance and survival of the discipline. Lauren, by inscribing corporeality into her dogma, allows the spiritual process to be applicable to any body. His narrative explains: Earthseed. I am the Earth Seed. Anyone can be. One day. I think there will be many of us. And I think we're going to have to seed ourselves further and further away from this dying place... I never thought it was anything other than real: discovery rather than invention, exploration rather than creation. (Butler, 78) Earthseed is inherently malleable, though not vulnerable to manipulation. Lauren is resistant to the patriarchy that prevails in her community, which she refers to as "a dying place". Lauren’s language is not challenging or didactic, rather, as Cixous theorizes, “Her language (women in general) does not contain, it transports; it does not hold back, it makes possible.” (Cixous 1955) These ramifications on language resonate with Cixous, as Lauren characterizes his religious discourse as a means for “discovery rather than invention, exploration rather than creation.” Earthseed followers, according to Lauren, are already implicated as both agents and objects in the spiritual hierarchy that saturates her community. Regarding the function of religion in the secular literary space, Butler, in the interview, comments on the function of Earthseed: “ Lauren uses religion as a tool. So I use that tool as something that she can use to help the people who follow her…” (Mehaffy and Keating, 62) Butler uses, to her advantage, the metafictional conventions of science fiction; Butler positions Lauren as a vehicle to deliver Earthseed material, in order to showcase his own spiritual and literary agenda. Gregory Jerome Hampton, in his publication, Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens and Vampires, examines the meaning of religious doctrine and the “body” in Butler's fiction, in which he states: Religion is a tool intended to critiquing the real world in the boundless laboratories of our imagination... Mixing science fiction with religious themes, Butler's fiction encourages readers to question the social values ​​that characterize marginalized bodies. (Hampton, 84) In the context of Lauren's religious writings, and by extension, Butler's contributions to science fiction, it is evident that the novel Lauren, both as architect and Earthseed advocate, must rhetorically advertise her doctrine in a a way that persuades her to continue thinking beyond the “world of her parents”. The epistolary style that structures Butler's novel allows the narrative to incorporate both Lauren's thought processes and doctrinal material, making them accessible only to the reader. Minor characters are supposedly not given the same insight, which causes dialogue like the one that occurs between Lauren and Harry. Harry is skeptical of Lauren's religious fabrication, but, more significantly, of her own identity: So let me read something. Let me know something about yourself that you're hiding. I feel like... like you're a lie. I don't know you. Show me something about yourself that's real. (Butler, 195) Harry, in asking to read Lauren's diary, assumes that Lauren's identity is “hiding,” or encoded in her writing. Identity, or “truth,” as Harry suggests by classifying Lauren as a “lie,” is revealed in the embodiment of writing; Cixous affirms this inscription of “truth” when he argues “by writing herself, the woman will return to the body that has been more than confiscated from her, that has been transformed into the mysterious stranger on display.” (Cixous, 1946) Butler herself, in the interview, affirms the correlation between inscription, body and perceivable identity: One's body can beknown only through language or some other means of representation. The body, in other words, is something that only language and narration can bring to life and make known to ourselves or to others. (Mehaffy and Keating, 59) Essentially, literary composition alleviates the manifestation of “strangeness, or eeriness” that outsiders, like Harry, perceive. Lauren's physical body and presence cannot be adequately or accurately understood as "real" and, as a result, identity remains obscured; narrative embodies what is “real,” and for Lauren it is essential in preserving and advancing Earthseed. The "libidinal economy" that Cixous positions in opposition to women's writing refers to the system of exchanges that has to do with sexual desire, which it is predominantly characterized as intrinsically masculine, insofar as it is active, not passive; as a result, only one wish can work at a time. This type of economy can be applied to various social systems, such as the literary economy in which Butler is writing, or the clerical economy that pervades Lauren's gated community in Los Angeles. Cixous clarifies the privileging of masculinity in such economies: Sexual opposition, which has always worked to the advantage of man to the point of reducing even writing to his laws, is only a historical-cultural limit. There exists, and will spread ever more rapidly, a fiction that produces irreducible effects of femininity. (Cixous, 1949)Lauren operates under similar circumstances before leaving for the North, as her community, especially women, experiences oppression under Richard Moss's religious movement:Richard Moss has put together his own religion, a combination of the Old Testament and historical practices of West Africa. It states that God wants men to be patriarchs, rulers and protectors of women, and fathers of as many children as possible. (Butler, 36) Moss possesses authority in the “libidinal economy” precisely because he is male; her religion depends on the concepts of “dying,” “parent world” that Lauren is naturally opposed to, and subsists in the “historical-cultural limit” of West African practices. Likewise, Lauren opposes the conventional presidency that permeates her declining society; she complains that “Donner is just a kind of human railing… like a symbol of the past to hold on to as we are pushed into the future. It's nothing. No substance.” (Butler, 56) Male influence and agency, while unethical and socially unproductive, take precedence in the political systems that structure the novel. Lauren's opposition is provoked in two ways; firstly, his religious discovery is futuristic, flexible and progressive and, secondly, because male corporeality is absent. The male body does not require representation in a patriarchal space because it is innately superior, while the female body relies on narrative embodiment for representation and tangible recognition. Earthseed initially presents a “genderless” God; rather, a God who symbolizes change, discovery, and self-reflexivity. Lauren states that "Earthseed deals with ongoing reality, not supernatural authority figures." . Conversing with traveling companions Zahra and Natividad, Lauren is baffled by the issue of a “gendered” God: Zahra and Natividad argued over whether they were talking about a male god or a female god. When I pointed out that Change had no gender and wasn't a person, they were confused, but not dismissive. (Butler, 220) Lauren views “Change” as asexual because it depends on a “body,” be it female or male, to thrive. The change is motivated by a concept that Butler introduces as “knowledge of.