The House of Surrender

Group Work: Feminist Literature

● 03.05.2023: session
● 10.05.23: mini essay

IDEAS: Study Session

TO DO NOW (LUISE):
● prepare text give it to the class for reading before hand → page numbers
○ send to Ryan to distribute to course
● ask Ryan to bring paper and colors

START: 10 -15 minutes 10:15-10:30

● present: summary of the story prepared by: Shivani

● present: Laurie Penny prepared by: Shivani

○ Laurie Penny (they/them or she/her)
○ British journalist and writer
○ studied English at Wadham College, Oxford
○ has written articles for publications including The Guardian, The New York Times
and many more
○ topics: politics, popular culture, feminism

● prepared by: Sofia

● what were your first impressions when reading? Any questions? any Surprises?

TEXT GROUP WORK: 30 minutes 10:30-11:00 introduced by Luise

● 4 groups
● what is liberal and feminist in each part of the story?
○ 4 parts of the text
■ (1) “Not far from here and many …..with them across the great river”
● prepared by: Luise
■ (2) “The murderer in room thirteen…. two bolts drawing back”
● prepared by: Kaspar
Mit der Google Docs He
■ (3) report: App bearbeiten
came to us in the last week of May…..Thereafter-”
● prepared
Nehmen Sie Veränderungen vor,by:
hinterlassen Sie
Kommentare■und (4) geben
visit: “He
Siedoes
Dateiennotfür
seem like a savage….Or, I thought,”
andere
● prepared
frei, damit Sie gleichzeitig by: Shivani
mit anderen daran
arbeiten können.
○ → note down aspects of liberal feminism you have detected in your part of the
short story → write each on one round paper piece
Neincolored
○ different danke paper→
App herunterladen
where is it not liberal feminist? → how would a
liberal feminist version be different?
BREAK: 10 minutes 11:00-11:10

DISCUSSION: 11:10-11:30 mediated by Kaspar

● summary of group work
● focus on aspects on liberal feminism: what parts of the story are similar and different
to liberal feminism

CREATIVE GROUPWORK: 11:30-11:50 introduced by Luise

● rewriting parts to make it more “liberal feminist”
● draw/… you ideal liberal feminist utopia

● get into the roles of convinced liberal feminist. how would the transition to an “ideal”
society take place? connect it to the story. how could liberal feminist transform society
from “Schmidt’s time” (Sanctuary’s past/our present?) to Sanctuary’s present/our
future?write an action plan
○ could this grave of a change even be possible through liberal feminism?

● interpretation of the end: hierarchies are prone to break out again? Schmidt has
inflicted harm on the society of sanctuary by bringing this thoughts/values/ideas/… to
the place

END 11:50-12:00
● short conclusion of main finding

TOPICS: Liberal Feminism

● LIBERALISM:

○ a political philosophy that emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries alongside the
advent of modernity and the rise of capitalism

○ encourages the development of freedoms, particularly in the political and

economic spheres

○ key notions of liberalism include individual freedom, democracy, equal

opportunities, and equal rights

● LIBERAL FEMINISM:

○ born in Western countries from the contact of educated women with liberal
ideas

○ wants to apply the philosophy of liberalism to gender equality: the oppression

of women lies in lack of political and civil rights; can, therefore, be countered by
reforms aiming at establishing equal opportunities for both women and men

○ Women's 'liberation': achieved by putting an end to discriminatory practices,

and by pushing for equal rights
 and by pushing for equal rights

● CRITICISM:
○ is a reformist (not revolutionary) feminism, which does not question the
system but believes in its capacity to reform (changing individual mindsets, not
in the need to overthrow the system as a whole)

TEXT: The House of Surrender

Rape Culture In a remote future violent criminals go to a sanctuary by free choice. But a
new arriving stranger brings trouble. A science fiction story by Laurie Penny

Source: https://www.freitag.de/autoren/laurie-penny/the-house-of-surrender

Not far from here and many lifetimes' journey away, there is a place called Sanctuary where
they grow almonds and avocados and the weather is a perpetual late Spring. The town and its
hundred thousand happy folk are watered by a wide, grey, treacherous river, and in that river is
an island where no trees grow, and on that island is a house unlike any other.

It has had many names, but the people of Sanctuary have forgotten them. They call it the
House of Surrender.

To get to the House of Surrender, you must cross the grey river, although there are few boat
captains brave enough to make the crossing, not for all the gold and silver in your purse. The
river is full of hidden currents and sudden whirlpools that appear to suck down unseasoned
swimmers and sailors to an icy grave in the grimy water. And besides, nobody has used
money in Sanctuary for a century and more.

The people of this town take what they need and give what they can and answer to no ruler but
the common good. So there is no law to compel any sailor to take you to the island in the river
where no trees grow. If one of them takes pity, you may pay your passage with a promise, a
gift or a secret, although those who travel to the House of Surrender have too many of those
and precious few worth sharing.

Pull yourself up to the jetty and climb the steps cut into the cliffs. Walk half a mile over the
rocks and you'll find the House. Its walls are thick stone. Whether that's to protect those inside
from the outside world or whether it might be the other way round is a question nobody here
cares to answer.

The heavy doors are not locked. Walk the halls. Nobody's going to stop you.

Here you will find the worst and weirdest of men and women, strange and dangerous creatures
who cannot live among their fellow humans – or else their fellow humans will not have them.
This one is a rapist. That one poisoned her husband and infants in a fit of madness after the
twins were born. This one beat his wife until the teeth flew from her head. That one cheated his
neighbours of all their harvest until the children sickened and starved.

Had they stayed in the Sanctuary, these people would have had to face their neighbours'
justice. Instead, they come to the House of Surrender, where nobody will harm them, and they
can reflect on their transgressions in all the safety stone walls can offer, which is less than
you'd think, as most of them bring the terror with them across the grey river.
In my two score years as warden of this place, I have known them all – the wicked and the
warped, the tortured and the repentant and those too far beyond the sphere of decency to
contemplate redemption.

But none were as strange as Robert Schmidt.

He arrived one cold June morning, courtesy of a boatswain who had been too shocked at his
appearance and obvious distress to consider turning him down when he begged passage. The
coins he offered her, which he also tried to press upon me, were as strange as he was –
different shapes and shades of corrosive metal, all emblazoned with the faces of stern men,
great buildings and motifs of war and conquest that were chilling to look at, though I did not
look away. I took one as a gift, a silver that he said was called a quarter, although its shape
was perfectly round.

He was a thin, frayed string of a man, this Schmidt, his skin pale as boiled fish, so much so
that anyone who saw him knew that he had come from far away. That was all we knew at first,
as he would not speak to us beyond demanding to be released, and no records could be found
of his birth or previous life – only the report we had received from the assembly of the village
that sent him here.

We took him to room fourteen, where he yelled for three hours. First he yelled to be released.
Then he yelled, in his strange foreign accent, for his mother. Then he just yelled.

I could hear the screaming from down the corridor as I went over the morning's reports. I
gritted my teeth at the dumb-beast noise and decided to do something about it.

The corridors of the main asylum were light and airy, even on a cold winter morning with the
sun floundering in an ash-grey sky. Below the wide wooden walkways, some of the other
wardens were setting out bowls and spoons in the communal area, ready for breakfast.

The murderer in room thirteen put his head up to the grill of his cell as I passed.

“Can you ask him to stop?” he whispered.

“I'll try,” I promised. “Do you want music?”

The murderer, who had strangled his own brother in a rage twenty years ago, nodded hard –
yes, he did want music.

I fingered my tablet. A few seconds later a gentle, rhythmic tune started spooling from the
speaker in the corner of his cell. He smiled and closed his eyes, and started to rock gently
back and forth on his sleeping pallet. I took a deep breath in front of the door to room fourteen.
Then I pounded on the grill.

“That's enough,” I yelled. “You're upsetting your blockmates. If you don't control yourself, there
will be consequences.”

The screaming stopped. Two blissful seconds of quiet, heavy breathing.

“Let me the fuck out of here,” Schmidt said. “You people have no idea the mistake you're
making.”

“I'm sure there's been no mistake,” I said. “But if you've got an issue to raise, why don't you
“I'm sure there's been no mistake,” I said. “But if you've got an issue to raise, why don't you
talk to me or one of the other wardens about it, instead of screaming?”

I heard a shuffling noise as Schmidt dragged himself up to the speaking-hatch. Then his face
appeared.

I stepped back, alarm fisting up through my guts. I had forgotten quite how strange-looking the
Schmidt truly was, with his wild beard and ice-blue eyes.

“I don’t know why I'm being kept here,” he said, in his languid, long-ago accent. “But when
someone works out who I am, you're going to be in a world of trouble. So I suggest you open
this door right now, if you value your job.”

“I can't open the door,” I said.

“On whose authority am I kept here?”

I was truly confused. Where had this man come from, to ask such a thing?

“On nobody's authority,” I said. “Nobody has the authority to keep you here against your will.
You chose to come here, for your own safety and others'.”

“Then why am I locked in?”

“You aren't locked in. I can't open the door because it locks from the inside. If you want to get
out, you'll have to unlock it yourself.”

“You're lying.”

“There's a bolt underneath the door, and another one up top. They're a little stiff sometimes,
but I promise you, you're free to leave. I must warn you, though,” I said, a little louder, “that if
you try to harm me or anyone else in this building, I'm going to have to use my shock-stick on
you, and I don't want to do that.”

Silence. Then the slow, resentful thunk-thunk of two bolts drawing back.

“Can I come in?” I said.

Silence.

“My name is Gorman Rayne,” I said. “I'd like to come in and talk to you, but I need to know
you're not going to attack me, because I don't want to have to hurt you. It has been a pleasant
morning so far, and I don't want to end it with your vital fluids on my shoes.”

“Come in if you want.”

I came in, and sucked in a breath through my teeth.

The man in room fourteen had overturned all his furniture, and thrown his food tray across the
room. There were dabs of blood on the walls where he'd been pounding. He sat curled like a
question-mark in one bare corner.

“Is there any way I can help?” I asked.

“I need you to tell them,” he said, “that I haven't done anything wrong.”
“I need you to tell them,” he said, “that I haven't done anything wrong.”

“If there's been a misunderstanding, I'm sure you can explain yourself.” I said. “But there's
rarely misunderstanding in cases like yours.”

What reason, after all, would the girl have had to lie? I could see that Schmidt was going to be
difficult to reach.

“Do you even know who I am?”

“Only what you’ve told us, and what you told the people of the village you came from. Your
name is Robert Schmidt. You say you are a scientist. But there are no records of where you
practised, or where you were born.”

“I'm from here,” Schmidt said. “I'm from here, three hundred and thirty years ago.”

I took a deep breath.

“So how did you come to be here now?” I asked.

“In a time-machine. I AM a scientist. Well, a researcher. It's one of the first multi-century
journeys my lab has made, and I need to be allowed back to the place I came through.”

“Why?”

“So I can tell them it worked.”

I asked a junior warden to keep a subtle eye on Schmidt for the next few days to check that he
wasn't hurting himself. Inside, I was cursing my own foolishness. I had clearly made a mistake
in my initial diagnosis. I had assumed that Schmidt was merely uneducated and lacking in
empathy.

He appeared instead to be quite mad.

I wanted to help him, this young man. I wanted to know the ghosts that haunted him so that
together we might banish them and find him some measure of peace. I am old, and in forty
years I have tended so many lost creatures on this abstemious rock, and most I have been
able to stretch out a hand to, though not all come here hoping for peace.

My place is not to judge them, but to help them, to protect them, whatever harm they have
done in the lives they left behind. This is my work – has been the work of my life, since I came
here on my own rickety midnight boat so long ago – to reach the unreachable with soft words
and offer them a bridge back to the world.

I felt certain that however Schmidt had transgressed, however mangled his mind by suffering I
could not guess at, I could help him.

Perhaps I was arrogant. I see that now. But there was more.

What I did not, could not admit to myself, was that Schmidt frightened me. And the most
frightening prospect was the idea – remote, but impossible not to consider when you looked at
that strange white face, heard that odd, high voice – that he might be telling the truth.

***
***

The next day I returned to speak to Schmidt. I brought fresh rolls and coffee, and we took
breakfast together. He had restored order to his room during the night, and perhaps it was in
repentance for his previous rudeness that he answered almost immediately when I asked if he
was feeling better.

“I'm not crazy,” he said, “you must see that.”

“It's not my place to pass judgement on how you see the world,” I said, which was quite true.
“I'm merely anxious that you cause no further harm to yourself or any other citizen.”

“I'm not like the lunatics in here,” he said. “I didn't even hurt that girl. It was a
misunderstanding.”

“They say that you violated her autonomy,” I said. “They sent a report.”

“It wasn't like that,” he said. He was looking away from me, and eviscerating his roll with his
hands. “Besides, it seemed so primitive here, I assumed – I don't know what I assumed.” He
started in on a second roll. “I suppose I was excited to be in a new place.”

That night I re-read the report that had arrived with Schmidt, on the solar tablet I reserve for
official communications. It was long enough that the village assembly had clearly thought it
important to inform the house of the full facts.

“He came to us in the last week of May,” it ran. “He appeared at the door of a farmstead, badly
bleeding and disoriented. The people of the house, after they had tended his wounds, brought
him to the town square, where he explained that he was a traveller from another time. We
have heard news of such things happening, but we would not have given them credit were it
not for the strangeness of his behaviour.

Schmidt was from the start rude and unsocial, which was put down at first to his evident
foreignness. He insisted on being brought to the head of our community, and it took some time
to explain to him that no such position exists. He thinks in an extremely hierarchical manner,
and though he claims to be a scientist he cannot seem to credit the evidence of his own
senses. For this reason many of our young people remain convinced he was playing a
practical joke on us.

Schmidt spent a great deal of time in the tavern and also in the library as his strength returned,
taking notes on parchment, which he used freely from the central stocks, apparently unaware
of its great expense. He was from the start dismissive and unsocial towards the female and
non-binary among us, seeming unable to hold true conversation with them. One of our young
men offered to have intercourse with him, at which point he became angry and violent. The
young man was injured, and Schmidt had to be restrained.

One young woman in our research team took an interest in Schmidt's work, gifting him freely
with her time and attention to help further his studies. She reported to us that she woke to find
a drunken Schmidt attempting to have intercourse with her. She communicated clearly that she
did not want to be part of intercourse with him, but he did not appear to understand. In his
culture, a signal of interest by a woman permits the man to use her body to relieve himself of
his need at any time thereafter, and this is what Schmidt proceeded to do, using his strength to
force her submission. Thereafter-”

I clicked the tablet shut. I had read enough. Schmidt had clearly fooled this rural assembly into
I clicked the tablet shut. I had read enough. Schmidt had clearly fooled this rural assembly into
accepting his wild story of time-travel to avoid taking responsibility for his own empathetic
defects. He would not fool me. I would reach him, even if he was determined not to be
reached.

***

It was autumn and high harvest; the time when everyone with the strength and skill to farm
lends themselves to the almond groves.

A fresh breeze trembled from the plantations and I long to be among them, to drink hot cider
and taste roasted almonds at the the evening celebrations after the gathering-in – but I have
not joined the harvest since I came here to work at the House of Surrender.

No one could compel me to stay away, just as no one could force the people of the town to
bring in the fruit before it rots on the trees. There is an awkwardness, though, among those
who know my duties. Sanctuary is not a large community, and after a while everyone's
business is the subject of common gossip.

Instead, I walked about the grounds with Schmidt, sometimes talking, more often in silence.

We had come to an agreement: for the time being, he would stop demanding to be released
and complaining that he did not belong here, and in return I would behave as if I believed his
time-travel story. In truth, I was not sure whether he believed it himself. Still, I allowed him to
question me as if he were truly from a long-ago world with laws and customs alien to our own.

“Why do you do this?” he asked me once. “Why do you work here, if you don't have to work at
all?”

“Most people work if they can,” I said. “We do the work we feel we're best suited to.”

“There can't be a lot of applications for this place,” said Schmidt.

“Not too many,” I admitted. “It takes a certain mindset. Most people worry about being around
antisocial, violent individuals all day.”

“Don’t you?”

I closed my eyes. Looked down at my broad, blunt hands – so much like my father's, though I
have kept myself from using them to hurt another human being.

“Of course,” I said. “But even more, I believe that those who can't live with others need a place
to go. Rehabilitation, if it's possible. Asylum, if it isn't.”

“What about justice?”

“What about it?”

“For the real monsters here. Not like me. The murderers. Their victims, and their families.
Won't they want to see them punished?”

“Perhaps. But would that bring their loved ones back?”

“That's not the point.”

“Then what is the point?”

“Sometimes the families will demand amends. Sometimes, when the inmates return to their
communities, they work the lands of those they have wronged. Or find some other way to
prove themselves reformed.”

“And if they don't?”

“Then they lead very lonely lives. Or they come back here.”

“And you think that's acceptable.”

“Most people think being shut out of the community is punishment enough. Otherwise we're no
better than-”

“Than me?”

I held his eyes. “Than the world you're from, yes.” Schmidt was certainly from another world, if
only in spirit.

“You think you're better than me.”

“No,” I said. “I think you can be better than you are.”

“What if I don't want to be?”

***

Visitors, especially official ones, are an unusual event on the island. So when a science-history
councillor from Sanctuary itself arrived by barge, along with not one but two assistants, I knew
the matter was of utmost importance.

“I'm here about Schmidt,” said the councillor, whose name was Sophia. She wore well-cut
overalls and could not have been more than thirty-five, but she wore her hair in the half-shaved
style traditionally adopted by those who have already rotated through the senior levels of the
science councils and have the authority of learning.

“Thank you for coming all this way,” I said, pouring coffee for us both.

“Not at all. Robert Schmidt is of great interest to the science council. I'd been hoping meaning
to make a personal visit. Is he settling in well?”

“We had some problems at first,” I said. “He claims that he is no foreigner, but is in fact from
here, many centuries ago. He does not seem delusional, merely troubled.”

“It's perfectly true,” said the councillor. “It's been happening more and more, these people
arriving from the first era of time-jump technology. Back when there were no guidelines.”

I felt a bubble of excitement expanding beneath my ribcage, and buried my face in my coffee
mug to contain it.

“Schmidt is the first from his time to appear on the West Coast, however,” said Sophia. “We
were dismayed to learn that he had been obliged to Surrender,” Sophia continued. “Dismayed,
were dismayed to learn that he had been obliged to Surrender,” Sophia continued. “Dismayed,
but not surprised. The time from which he comes- well. There was a great deal of savagery.”

“He does not seem like a savage man,” I said. “After he learned that he was free to leave, I've
found him courteous, if a little strange.”

“Have you begun his therapy?”

“Yes,” I said “He's very receptive, although still in deep denial of why he had to come here.”

“That's to be expected,” said Sophia. “The moral codes of his culture were very different from
ours.“ She pursed her lips over her coffee cup. As a young man I might have desired her
greatly, a woman of such wit and elegance. I reprimanded myself for thinking such coarse
thoughts about someone who was, however briefly, my superior.

“A decadent society,” she went on, her bright black eyes holding my own. “A violent,
authoritarian world of class, racial and sex hierarchies. A culture that drove itself to destruction
in pursuit of profit for the very few. We can't just understand it through the lens of our own
society.”

I nodded. Now I had been given permission to believe Schmidt, it all made sense.

“That, in fact, is the substance of our visit,” said Sophia. “Schmidt could help us a great deal in
understanding the culture and technology of his time. But for his safety we feel – the council
feels – that it would be better for all concerned if Schmidt were to remain here, in the House of
Surrender, on a permanent basis.”

“Are you saying that Schmidt is in danger?”

“I'm saying that Schmidt is dangerous. And there are people who would, if it came to it, judge
him too dangerous to live as part of this society.”

“Because of what he did?”

“Because of what he is,” said Sophia. “Through no fault of his own, he happens to come from
the most frightening place imaginable.”

“What place is that?”

“The past.”

I was silent.

“You must ensure,” she said, “That Schmidt does not come to any harm. Break the news to
him gently.”

“Can he not be returned to his time?” I asked.

“Impossible,” said Sophia. “We cannot return a time-traveller to a culture without any sense of
the common good. His leaders set their future on fire before the first leap engine was even in
use. Who's to say he wouldn't do the same?

“He needs to be kept somewhere out of the way, or who knows what he'll do. Or what might be
done to him.”
Or, I thought, what he might do to himself.

***

When I told Schmidt that he would not be allowed to return to his own time, he said nothing.
He did not rage or argue as I would have expected. Instead, he locked his door, and did not
emerge for three days.

Eventually, I had the guards break down the door. There was blood everywhere. He had tried
to open his wrists with a broken spoon, and failed.

He could not bring himself to end his life, not alone.

“I understand now,” he kept saying. That was all he said. Poor soul. There could never be
peace for him here.

I wrote to the science-history council, but received no reply.

So, I have made my decision.

Tonight I will go to room fourteen and bring Schmidt his supper in person. We will eat together,
and talk together, and in the course of our conversation I will mention, casually the small cove,
hidden between the rocks on the north side of the bare island, where I keep my own boat.

The boat that took me here forty years ago, when I came to this place to surrender, after I
woke in the night to find my hands, the thick blunt hands I had from my father, closing around
my lover's neck.

I had planned to return one day, when I could be sure that I was old and frail enough to be of
no more danger to anyone I cherished. Now I know that I will never leave this place.

Schmidt, though, will choose what he will choose.

Perhaps he will go down to the cove and take the boat out on the grey river and cast out on its
treacherous waters, all alone, towards the land.

And perhaps the currents will not pull him down. And perhaps the people of Sanctuary will
spare him. Or perhaps they will give him what he could not give himself.

Not forgiveness. Redemption.

They will know, of course, and they will want to come for me. But what can they do?

I will take my bunch of keys and find a door to lock behind me.

There are always more rooms in the House of Surrender.