Inland Passage and Other Stories represents a culmination of sorts of author Jane Rule’s steady movement away from being thought of primarily as a writer of lesbian fiction into being a writer chronicling the marginalized of society and into the full mainstream of 20th century society. While lesbians are to be found in abundance and many of the characters are socially marginalized, this is a collection which also feature a sort mini-collection contained within which covers in back-to-back stories five tales recounting the happily heterosexual married nuclear family of Harry and Anna and their two kids.
It is at this point in her career that lesbianism becomes really more of a subtext than a defining thematic overview. This is the kind of book in which one finds a line like “Only once her husband said, `That friend of your, Joan, I think she’s a lesbian.’” It is a line that is representative of the long slow shift of focus on marginalized sexuality which dominates the early texts of Rule’s career toward a mainstreaming of that same sexuality which, perhaps with the benefit of a more worldly experience, can be viewed, described, interpreted, analyzed and re-inscribed more authentically through heterosexual lens. The stories within feature plenty of women talking about the experience of being women, but there are now many more men show being men. The world that is populated within the multiverse of Rule grows significantly in the stories contained within and that opening up is really quite centered on the Harry and Anna stories.
They tell the story of the most conventional couple to ever become the protagonists in Rule’s fiction and she engages their very conventionality to illustrate how what so many take for granted is, when seen through the eyes of one who has been part of marginalized group so long, quite extraordinary. Contentment comes as part of the contract with monogamous heterosexuality because society confers upon such unions its immediate approval with almost no strings attached. Just the simple act of conforming to the ancient tradition of married union brings certain leniencies which those living outside those conventions have never had access to until very, very recently.
The stories about Harry and Anna serve to reveal that most people do not appreciate the enormous head-start in life that comes with being a man and woman engaged in holy matrimony. The benefits conferred upon them are so ingrained into the system that one almost by necessity must life outside those conventions looking on as a disenfranchised outsider to see them. The unspoken message being, of course, that perhaps is precisely this lack of appreciation that stimulates the corrosive breakdown of so many marriages.
