Book Review: Tales from Earthsea

[osprey_archer]

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tales of Earthsea is a collection of novellas and short stories that form a bridge between Tehanu and The Other Wind. It is also, like Tehanu, is an argument with the refrain repeated in A Wizard of Earthsea: “Weak as women’s magic, wicked as women’s magic.”

Now this refrain is well worth arguing with: it was one of the reasons I quit Earthsea and indeed all of Le Guin in a huff when I was about eleven. But I felt that Tales of Earthsea retconned the established Earthsea worldbuilding just a bit too hard to feel real, while also doubling down on my least favorite element in Tehanu, which on the whole I thought grappled with the inequality baked into the Earthsea premise far more successfully.



The first story, “The Finder,” is about the establishment of the school of wizardry on Roke Island. In A Wizard of Earthsea, Roke has a strong medieval Oxford vibe as an all-male college staffed by celibates; in “The Finder,” however, we are informed that at the beginning, Roke was founded by and accepted both male and female students (and later stories tell us that later on the first archmage barred male students).

I can see why Le Guin wanted to give Roke this egalitarian beginning, and I will spot her the fact that it’s possible that Roke could have begun as a coed institution and then everyone forgot about it. Shades of the Disney animation studio, where the female animators hired in the 1970s believed they were the first female animators at Disney, even though female animators made up 40% of the staff in the 1940s!

But at the same time I just didn’t buy it. There are no hints in the earlier books, and there’s no proper explanation how the switch from a co-ed to an all-male institution occurred, and it also just felt too convenient to make Roke an institution founded on pure and egalitarian principles, rather than an institution founded with genuine good intentions and also stunning blind spots that is, perhaps, ready to begin to change.

This change begins in “Dragonfly,” when a girl called Dragonfly attempts to disguise herself as a boy to study on Roke. She is instantly caught (wizards, after all), hangs out for a while in the Imminent Grove while the masters argue whether or not to admit her, then turns into a dragon, defeats her main opponent (who is, conveniently, already dead, but has summoned himself back to life), and flies away to find her dragon kin.

Again, I get this as wish fulfillment: haven’t we all had a moment when we would like to defeat some obstructive fuddy-duddy with our magical dragon powers! But at the same time I found it disappointing in the same way I found it disappointing, at the end of Tehanu, when Therru turned out to be a dragon child. In both cases I wanted the character to be enough as she was, and to have them both be dragon-humans, more than human, undercuts the egalitarianism of the message. As both books specifically aim to create a more egalitarian Earthsea, that’s a real problem.

Comments

[sovay]

Here is Le Guin's afterword to Tehanu, from a later edition than I own:

"Between the last chapter of The Tombs of Atuan and the first chapter of Tehanu, twenty-five years or so pass, time enough for the girl Tenar to become a widow with grown children.

"Between the last chapter of The Farthest Shore and the fourth chapter of Tehanu, a day or two passes, time enough for the dragon Kalessin to carry Ged from Roke to Gont.

"Between finishing The Farthest Shore and beginning Tehanu, eighteen years of my life passed, time enough for me to learn how to write this book.

"I never thought of Earthsea as a trilogy, but for a long time I saw it as a three-legged chair.

"I knew Tenar's story needed to be told, and that she and Ged had to be brought together. So right after finishing the third book, I began the fourth one. But—though I knew Tenar had not stayed with Ogion but had gone off and married a farmer and lived an ordinary, unmagical life—I didn't know why. The story got stuck. I couldn't go on. It took years of living my own ordinary life, and a great deal of learning how to think about such things, mostly from other women, before I could understand why Tenar did what she did and who she was at the end of it. Then at last I could write Tehanu.

"When it came out, some reviewers and readers were disappointed. It wasn't like the first three books. It wasn't what they expected. Nobody had made a fuss when I reversed the racist tradition of white heroes and black villains; but now I was messing around with gender. And sex.

"Heroic fantasies, even in 1990 and even if they included women heroes, were (and mostly still are) based on institutions, hierarchies, and values constructed by men. True to the tradition, the characters in the first and third books of Earthsea were almost exclusively male, and in Tombs Tenar shares the stage with Ged. But Tehanu is all about women and children to start with. Ogion appears only to die, and when Ged arrives he seems a broken man, so weak he takes refuge with a common witch and then goes off to herd goats, leaving Tenar alone to deal with incomprehension and malevolence. Where's the guy with the shining staff? Who's going to do the big magic? A little girl? Oh, come on. That's not a hero tale!

"I didn't want it to be. By the time I wrote this book I needed to look at heroics from outside and underneath, from the point of view of the people who are not included. The ones who can't do magic. The ones who don't have shining staffs or swords. Women, kids, the poor, the old, the powerless. Unheroes, ordinary people—my people. I didn't want to change Earthsea, but I needed to see what Earthsea looked like to us.

"Some readers who identified with Ged as a male power figure thought I'd betrayed and degraded him in some sort of feminist spasm of revenge. So far as I know, I had no spasms and didn't betray Ged. Quite the opposite, I think. In Tehanu he can become, finally, fully a man. He is no longer the servant of his power.

"But where did the power go? Is the magic, in fact, dying out of Earthsea, as it seemed was happening in the third book?

"I don't think that’s the case, but certainly there's a great change taking place in the world, only just beginning to be visible, and not yet comprehensible. Ogion sees it as he dies. Tenar has intuitions of it, from the story of the Woman of Kemay, from the painted fan in the old weaver's house, from her dreams, from what she knows and doesn't know about her adopted daughter, Therru.

"Therru is the key to the book. It wasn't till I saw her that I could begin to write it. But what I saw took me aback. Therru isn't ordinary at all. Her life has been ruined at the start. She is not just powerless, but crippled, deformed, and terrorized. She cannot be healed. The cruel wrong done her came with the breakdown of the society of Earthsea, which the new king may be able to repair; but for Therru, what reparation?

"'What cannot be mended must be transcended.'

"Maybe the change coming into Earthsea has something to do with no longer identifying freedom with power, with separating being free from being in control. There is a kind of refusal to serve power that isn't a revolt or a rebellion, but a revolution in the sense of reversing meanings, of changing how things are understood. Anyone who has been able to break from the grip of a controlling, crippling belief or bigotry or enforced ignorance knows the sense of coming out into the light and air, of release, being set free to fly, to transcend.

"In both The Tombs of Atuan and Tehanu, books in which women are central to the story, there’s a kind of anger which I don’t think is in A Wizard or The Farthest Shore. It's the anger of the underdog, fury against social injustice, the vengeful rage women have too often been made to feel. I'd finally learned to acknowledge such anger in myself and to try to express it without injustice. So Ged the Archmage could be grandly serene as he paralyzed pirates with a wave of his staff, but Ged the goatherd in blind fury uses a pitchfork on his enemy. And so Aspen, the wizard of Re Albi, is detestable in a way even Cob is not, because Aspen flaunts all the behaviors that cause such anger—fear and loathing of women, the arrogance of the powerful, and the sick human lust to dominate that leads to endless cruelty.

"It's not surprising that Tehanu was labeled 'feminist.' But the word is used so variously that it's worse than useless. If you see feminism as vindictive prejudice against men, the label lets you dismiss the book unread; if you see feminism as a belief in superior properties unique to women and expect the book to confirm that belief, you'll find it equivocal.

"The conversation between Tenar and the witch Moss in the fifth chapter is a case in point. Is it 'feminist'? Moss is pretty contemptuous of men in general, having been treated by them with contempt all her life. That's all right, and I find her discussion of men's power and women’' power harsh, incomplete, but interesting. Then she goes off into an incantatory praise of mysterious female knowledge: 'Who knows where a woman begins or ends? . . . I have roots, I have roots deeper than this island. . . . I go back into the dark!' And she ends with a rhetorical question—'Who'll ask the dark its name?'

"'I will,' Tenar says. 'I lived long enough in the dark.'

"I've often seen Moss's rhapsody quoted with approval. Tenar's fierce answer almost always goes unquoted, unnoticed. Yet it refuses Moss's self-admiring mysticism. And all Tenar's life is in it.

"Tenar is three people. As young Arha she lived a cruel, rigid, mindless life of ritual obedience in a community of women worshiping the Dark Powers, the Nameless Ones. She broke free from this prison and came away with Ged, who could give her back her true name and show her the power of knowing the names of things. Then she took a second, more obscure step to freedom, by refusing to stay with the kind teacher, Ogion, whose wisdom was not quite what she needed. She'd had enough of the celibate, sexless life in Atuan. Thinking the best way to learn where a woman begins and ends was to live a woman's life as fully as she knew how, and take all the chances a woman takes, she went off to get married, to live as Goha, the farmer's wife, to bear children and bring them up.

"Now, older, and having made herself responsible for a damaged and vulnerable child, she knows she is ready, not for vague, innate mystical insights, but for the wisdom she needs and has earned. Beyond the obscure worship of dark earth-powers, and beyond the common sense of daily life, she wants understanding. Living the mystery of daily life, she longs for the clear light of thought. Tenar has a fine, strong mind. The two people best able to see and respect that in her were Ged and Ogion. Ogion is gone; Ged has come back to her.

"But Ged, too, is in desperate need of a new wisdom. He has lost so much: his fame and high standing, the gift that shaped his life since he was a boy, the use of all he learned on Roke. How is he to live as an ordinary man? Now all his magic's gone, used up, given away, can he even respect himself? Was he (as Moss slyly asked) ever anything but his power—is there anything left of him when it's gone but an empty shell?

"Tenar may know the answer to that question, but for Ged to be able to answer it himself, as he must, he has to find out what he gave up to become a man of power. Which might be defined as everything but that power. Or which might be seen as a different kind of learning. The kind of learning ordinary people get from talking in the kitchen on winter evenings . . .

"Or is it beyond learning—is it the kind of magic that men lost, but the dragons kept?"

I have arguments with how Le Guin constructed her world to see it differently, and disagreements with some of what she did once she saw it, but she wrote Tehanu because of things that were changing in her, not in her readers.

[asakiyume]

Thank you for sharing that.

[sovay]

Thank you for sharing that.

You're welcome. I just had to track it down!

[kore]

That reminded me of how she revised "Is Gender Necessary" something like two or three times, and IIRC finally published it so all the deletions and additions were side-by-side, and I think she rewrote some of the writing advice in Steering the Craft to be more inclusive, too, and revised other essays. Dancing at the Edge of the World (1989) really shows her working through a lot of her earlier thinking to be more feminist, more radical, less....I don't want to say "less academic" because she got into feminist theory, but she really looked at her own internal metaphors and systems of thought, which I found impressive because she could have literally just rested on her laurels and kept on doing the same thing.

Plus I do think she left the stories alone, apart from including a rewritten scene at the back of Left Hand of Darkness and maybe a few other changes. (I always think of the Annals of the Western Shore books as a kind of reply to Earthsea, too.) That impressed me too.