The regime that appeared in The Left Hand of Darkness is the reflections and extension. In fact, the regimes that appeared in The Left Hand of Darkness are the reflections and extensions of the regimes that we know in the text. They are Orgoreyn, a warbled public society, Gethen, a lawless feudal society, and Ekumen, a loosely allied alliance. Because the text takes place in winter Star, Ursula is more concerned with the latter two social systems and has made a series of descriptions of them.
Ursula's depiction of Orgoreyn is obviously influenced by the anti-Utopia ideas and reflections on totalitarian regimes in books like ours and 1984, creating a Soviet society, even create one with a secret police system like the Ministry of Love, Sarf. Sarf oversees the entire social movements, controls the propaganda of the country. For a traitor, he will be sent to a volunteer farm or brainwashed, or secret execution. In this social system, the person doesn’t have private property and the name is no longer important. Instead, the certificates can let people work in an area that is similar to People’s Communes( the place that people can live together).
With practice, the depiction of Orgoreyn has a great relationship with one thing that America was antagonistic to the Soviet Union. The Left Hand of Darkness was written in 1969. And a year later, The Gulag Archipelago also published in the west. This is the closest age about two camps, the internal propaganda of two camps makes people have a strong ideology, Ursula also cannot avoid it. What’s more, she is a democrat, when writing The Left Hand of Darkness, she unconsciously put the prejudice against the people's democratic dictatorship and the Soviet Union into text. After artistic treatment, it is presented as the Orgoreyn symbiotic area.
As Orgoreyn’s political enemies, Gethen is a laissez-faire society. It is not obvious in the text, but if we put aside the complicated court battle of two main characters, we found that actually Gethen's struggle is limited in the court, and the struggle has never spread beyond the capital. According to most people’s attitudes towards exiles, we can know they don’t care about the king how to defines the person, they still can accept the exiles with no barriers. It is also mentioned in the text, more people belong to the Lord of the region rather than the king. Another extreme example is the mad king of Gethen, however the kingdom doesn’t develop in a bad direction during his rule. It also confirms the tradition of the Gethen from another side. Just like Orgoreyn can be a prejudice of the red regime, in Ursula’s opinion, Gethen is a shadow of western society. It is not a good society, but at least it’s more human than Orgoreyn.
The last to mention is Ekumen. it’s not only the ideal society of Ursula's vision but also the other shadow of the West. Besides, it is the ideal one. The description of Ekumen is a little. However, as for the loose alliance based on fair trade, Kinley Ai had mentioned it in a conversation with Estefan:
And then he (Ester Lavender) deliberately added: However, if a man is not disgusted with a bad government, he is a fool.at the same, if there is really good in the world government, it must be a great pleasure to work for it.
We reached a consensus on this point. “I know about the happiness.” I (Kinley Ai) said.
Ekumen is a political entity that is similar to the federal government. If the planetary system that has people live in is settled into a state, then Ekumen is composed of more than eighty states joint regime. Like the federal government, including a consistent constitution outline, each state has the right to carry out the local law that doesn’t contravene. The constitution Outlines. Ekumen in Ursula's description, however, the government management of subordinates is very loose, it has something with the wide regional and the extensive distribution of the entire political. More important, Ursula believes that in the advanced stages of human development, it is not necessary to have a tight organization of regime. in the context of the shared core values. And the outward form of the regime turned violent towards outright non-violence. In the text, the approval of Ursula gives Ekumen the most, but because Ekumen’s idealization makes it difficult to develop the story that Ursula cannot focus on.
By comparing Ursula with other contemporary fiction, we can see the imprint left by the same era on different people. By comparing The Left Hand of Darkness with the works of the preceding and subsequent eras, we can see the bias and inheritance of western literary tradition and ideology.
