Tehanu
I’ve written about Tehanu before. In January, Rose Curtin wrote about reading the original Earthsea trilogy, particularly about The Tombs of Atuan, which starred Tenar; she also read The Left Hand of Darkness, writing that she’d “overdone it on the young adult fantasy” that month. Having then only read (of Earthsea) A Wizard of Earthsea and Tehanu, I jumped in and recommended she read the latter it being pitched at a level closer to Left Hand of Darkness than Wizard of Earthsea.
Rose read Tehanu in February. (Ironically reading it last. Ironic because my library’s copy of Tehanu has the subtitle “The Last Book of Earthsea”, which I recommended it as; but there is a collection of short stories (Tales of Earthsea) and another novel (The Other Wind) that follow it—as I learned from reading Rose’s Reading List, and almost simultaneously discovering the recentest novel on my friend Suzie’s shelves!) Rose’s comment on the book took the point of it in hand:
I already knew who Tehanu was and some of her story from reading the sequels first, but I was amazed and delighted to read a book for children in which a character says, appropriately angered, that a child has been raped because sometimes children are raped.
From its creation in Wizard, Earthsea was first, a world where certain attributes were naturalised to each sex, and second, a Platonic world, a world of essences, where a word was a thing. It was this that drove me—and perhaps Ursula Le Guin, too—to Tehanu. The philosopher that comes to mind when reading this novel is Nietzsche:
Like most people, Tiff believed that you are what happens to you. The rich and strong must have virtue; one to whom evil has been done must be bad, and may be rightly punished.
This is an anti-essentialising novel. It moves to show that the sex roles are just gender roles, and that the Art Magic is just a technology. I love it, but as noted, was uncomfortable with the ending. It seemed to me to say that sexism and cruelty were inescapable—even with a deux ex machina dream ending, Tenar must still live in a world ruled of men. But worse, it seemed to reinstate the essentialism that I thought the bulk of the novel moved away from. These are Tenar’s earlier words I took to heart:
Listen to me, Therru. Come here. You have scars, ugly scars, because an ugly, evil thing was done to you. People see the scars. But they see you, too, and you aren’t the scars. You aren’t ugly. You aren’t evil. You are Therru, and beautiful.
To have Tehanu turn out to be part dragon at the end seemed to confirm the view of others: Tehanu did contain some dangerous essential otherness that was recognised; and in the attempted destruction of that otherness, it was only revealed more. The rape and attempted murder by fire was a kind of crucible…
Or perhaps it was a quasi-feminist twist on the power fantasy of the village boy who becomes a powerful wizard. Rape and brutalisation are the necessary conditions for Tehanu to become powerful…
These were ugly (and clumsy and overstated) thoughts and I mistrusted them. I asked Rose what she made of the final chapter and we had a good discussion about it, in which she changed my mind. Here are some choice quotes:
Earthsea, despite the strong female characters we get to know, is a deeply sexist society. It turns out that there’s no good reason women couldn’t attend the academy and become wizards themselves except that tradition has changed to exclude them, not because witches are intrinsically less apt or powerful. So I see Tenar’s settling down (into both marriages, really) as a way of coming to terms with this sexism and being willing to give things up to have as much of the life she wants as she thinks she can easily get.
[…]
The little tree dies because some trees die and some children are raped and basically no parents can keep all their promises. It’s a broken world, but one way to address that is to make your own family from broken pieces and see what kind of whole that makes. It may not be a big, exciting heroic life (though it turns out of course that these characters still have world-changing roles to play) but it’s life and on their chosen terms as much as possible, and I do think that’s something.
[…]
I thought the book was about the possibility humans have to choose not to be monstrous to one another, and maybe being a dragon is sometimes a way to do that.
[…]
[Tehanu] is something the townspeople should fear, perhaps, but they fear her for the wrong reasons, like the way they feared the evil mage for being a mage without recognizing the wickedness of his powers. People tend to be willfully ignorant, to see what they want to see. All of the Earthsea books are about learning to avoid that, which I think is part of the insistence on true names.
I think there are implications that Tehanu’s rape and burning were a result of her having been recognized as “Other” in a dragony way even though the story itself is clear that just being a woman (or child of any gender?) would be reason enough for her to be battered and punished the way her mother was. Tehanu can’t be just a wounded survivor because she isn’t just that, she’s this dragon thing too and that’s a separate issue. There’s always more to us than our easy defining terms, maybe?
Yes, yes, yes and yes! I can only applaud Rose: she’s a sensitive reader, and I thank her for helping me resolve my concerns!
Since then I’ve read The Other Wind, which goes further in the anti-essentialising project, showing Earthsea as a flawed, human world, though a fantastic one (which is something I had perhaps forgotten by the end of Tehanu—why the last chapter caught me by surprise). It also takes the burden from Tehanu of being the last word on Earthsea; knowing there is more does help.
And I’ve read The Tombs of Atuan (coincidentally sitting on the bookshelf at the Rivers End holiday cottage), which was more of a short story than a novel, but was wonderful and sophisticated. I didn’t know that it was actually Arha/Tenar’s story, that Ged has a small, late and occulted role. Thanks to Rose for recommending this, and I’ll be sure to read The Farthest Shore soon.
(I should also thank Heather Scutter, who encouraged the awkward computer science student in her class, Formative Influences: Children’s Fantasy Narratives, where I first read A Wizard of Earthsea in ’98.)
By Rose, 4 hours, 40 minutes after the fact
Wow, David, thanks!
I think the point made here that most surprised me was the reminder of how mundane the world is in Tehanu. I think I was still so caught up in the story of Ged losing his magic and of his mentor’s childhood feats that it didn’t entirely occur to me that these weren’t actually written into the story, and so it does seem like you’re just living in a world where all the powerful magic isn’t really magic anymore and people are trying to just make the most of their circumstances.
For me, after reading all the Earthsea novels I could find in the two or three weeks preceding, it seemed totally natural in a world where balance is key that when I’m reading about powerful magic being lost (or, in the case of the bad mage, misused) a new and different power could arise. It just seemed natural to me, but it’s not; I found the part where the evil mage holds Ged and Tenar captive to be more jarring than the dragony ending that followed it, but I think that makes sense philosophically because things are supposed to be jagged and off-balance in a broken world and I accepted Tehanu’s transformation as a sort of force moving against that. Whether or not that makes good reading, though, depends on the person, because I did find your initial response a plausible take on this story but just felt I had too much context from the other books to think that was all there was.
By plok, 1 week after the fact
Personally, I stopped reading the Earthsea books at “The Farthest Shore”, and always preferred the first two. As I’ve gotten older, I find I *much* prefer The Tombs of Atuan” to “The Farthest Shore”, because I think the former is innovative: that it was a coming-of-age fantasy story for girls I always understood (and understood that it was rare because of that), but it wasn’t ’til I was…hmm, shall we say, of a certain age? Yes, it wasn’t until I was of a certain age that I realized just how *female* it all was. The forever-darkened Undertomb, the biologically-labyrinthine corridors where the Nameless Ones’ treasure is kept, and the secret, ceremonial knowledge of the “Eaten One”…wow! Once I was old enough to get this, it blew me away; it even played very interesting tricks with Ged as the mostly passive activator, the catalyzer I should perhaps say, of Tenar’s life/identity/sexuality…well, aren’t all those three things the same? Wizard of Earthsea obviously presents zero conceptual difficulties to a young boy, but Atuan did something interesting with the also-important *post*-coming of age male script, which I still appreciate. But re-reading Atuan, yeah: brilliant subversion of what had traditionally been “boy’s territory”.
“The Farthest Shore” stands up to adult re-reading somewhat less well, I think. The relationship between Ged and…oh, what’s his name…the kid, anyway…between Ged and the kid is kind of funny, like a dream a 1960’s feminist might have of what male relationships are like when women aren’t around. Today, I find this unconvincing, and a little too cute. However the story itself still does the right thing, I think; it doesn’t lose much power, and it’s still admirably complex for a kid’s book.
Not that I’m saying for one second that these aren’t great books for adults as well…!
From the discussion of anti-essentializing in the later books that you get into here, I get the feeling I should be glad not to’ve read any of them, because that weirdly Platonic Earthsea milieu is something I really loved, and I think it was innovative too: past Tolkien and Lewis, I think LeGuin was the last person working in the general F/SF zone to embrace magic as essentially *magical*, anti-logical, psychological…rather than technological, reconcilable, and explainable, if you see what I mean. Every other book like this I read at the time had me excited about finding larger contexts to place its geography, logic, etc. in, but Earthsea’s context was all on the *inside*, and I found that just as stimulating, if not more so. The essences, yeah…it’s very neatly done, so neatly that I’m not sure I want to read something that takes it apart, even a little.
It’s something I still think a lot about. I do wish there were more of it. But then, if we could go where Ursula LeGuin goes and live, we’d bloody well *be* Ursula LeGuin, now wouldn’t we?
(Geeky Dr. Strange reference there)
Okay, I thought I still had a little bit to add to all that, but as it turns out I don’t. Waiter, more beer!
By David Golding, 2 weeks, 4 days after the fact
Okay, I’ve read The Farthest Shore now. Like The Other Wind, it feels necessary to the series but a little poorly written.
I notice it does a little anti-essentialising too, emphasising the “Rules change in the Reaches” line from A Wizard of Earthsea (“Over these abysses of space and in the long extent of time, I doubt whether any word that can be spoken would bear, everywhere and forever, its weight of meaning and its power”) and offering a few words about the lying/magic paradox of the dragons (“And even when one of them would speak the truth to a man, which is seldom, he does not know how truth looks to a man.”).
And I was fascinated by the influence it must have had on the Revenge of the Sith, with Cob’s accusation that the Roke wizards sought immortality, but he found it, while Ged pleads for balance… but that’s probably just me.
I may be overstating the case for the Plato/Jung/Chinese Philosophy magic of Earthsea being shown as a technology. Everything is still very psychological, just more inclusive of some more sophisticated psychology. There’s a later feminist influence on Tehanu, and the story of the Fall gets revised in The Other Wind.
But there are plenty of other “magic is magic” writers, surely? I don’t read much fantasy, but Peter S Beagle, William Goldman, and Terry Pratchett have magic that’s more like narrative. M John Harrison’s magic is psychological and anti-narrative. None of them use it as explicable technology.