I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on The Left Hand of Darkness... especially the purity of the central relationship when it’s stripped of conventional romance and sexuality.
Oof... I'm probably not going to say what you want to hear then, because I hate purity as a theme, except when it's explored as a misguided ambition (think Adso in The Name of the Rose). Ursula Leguin, in my (limited) reading experience of her, is not big on writing physicality and sensuality; there's something quite... cold? in the way she handles character writing -- they're often signs, for the message and symbolism they carry, rather than people; still, I would argue the only thing unconventional about Genly and Estraven's romance is the reader's perspective. Genly forces us to follow him into his difficulty grasping Gethen's culture, and especially gender; his casual heteronormativity, his crazy-ass misogyny, and his almost animalization of Gethenians. If we trust him blindly, then the Gethenians remain strange and distant, and so the romance is difficult to notice as unfolding right before our eyes; if you read Genly from the get-go as being the dumbest idiot alive, then the romance is right there, all the time, on every page, and Estraven is the most conventional romantic hero that ever Austen'd his way through literature. His hair is long and lush; his face is beautiful; his hands are powerful and strong; his aura is magnetic, his wit leaves Genly tickled, piqued and bristling; his mind is a mystery that Genly longs to tear open like a sexy shirt. Estraven keeps an eye on Genly, both in Karhide and Mishnory: eager, Genly recognizes even his shadow, always slipping away. Genly is sent to a horrible work camp; Estraven taps into his super-strength (which Genly hears first of in the context of a gorgeous dance he is entranced by) and saves him from the farm, no sweat, all on his own, and off they go, alone, into the snow desert and deadly danger, to share only-one-tent and discover each other as naked as you can be. If that's not a classic romance plot, I don't know what is. Yes there's no conventional sexuality, but there certainly is sex there. If sex (conventionally, in literature and philosophy) is the doomed attempt to merge at last, and touch the beloved as close as you can -- if sex is the tragic, erotic, platonic thrashing to grasp (again) the state of becoming one while you are several, a breaching of boundary so intimate you can only hide it away in a space of privacy, then Estraven and Genly have sex. Have more than sex. In that private, secret tent, they reach (they breach) the point where they communicate in mind, a skill that Estraven did not know about before Genly, and doesn't manage to develop any further than Genly. Purity has nothing to do with sex or lack thereof, but if we want to use "purity" as a catch-all for what it means to remain individual, unblurred, with one's integrity still whole, then Estraven and Genly are very far from making a case for "purity": they are very much, sexually, emotionally, and culturally, making a case for the impurity and risk and messiness of grappling with alterity, actively looking for meshing, for mingling, for breaching and understanding, and coming out of it transformed -- alloyed with the other (as opposed to "polluted" with the other, which would imply that purity exists, for one, or that it is a state to strive for). Transformed and alloyed with the other, and happy to be so. Exalted to be so. Exalted to death to be so. To Genly, Estraven is the "heart of warmth", despite the cold, "the only thing alive"; and when they are alone together they "touch in the only way we can touch". The central relationship is very much about romance, and about sex, and about eroticism, and about self-discovery, and all of it has to be messy in order to be real.
