Dragons in the Earthsea series

I've been reading a lot of Ursula Le Guin lately. I had never read the Earthsea trilogy, but a friend of mine loaned me the first trilogy, which was fascinating because it was so well-written, and so unthinkingly misogynistic. Amazing that le Guin, of all people, could so unconsciously internalize the values of her oppressors - I know, she was very young when she wrote those ones. But this is the writer of The Left Hand of Darkness, for crying out loud, the first novel I ever read that made me think seriously about social construction of gender. (I think I was around 12), and that things don't have to be the way they are; that they're built that way. So it's a warning to us all that we all do the same, internalize those values, try as we may to avoid it; and that we must keep on trying to extricate ourselves. Constant vigilance our watchword, etc.

So then my friend loaned me "Tehanu", also fascinating and well-written but fascinating particularly because you get to watch le Guin begin to write her way out of the misogynistic hole she had originally dug for herself in that series. So the culture she describes is misogynistic but the narrator is conscious of that; the narrator describes, and Ged and Tenar question, as far as they're able, the sexist and woman-hating assumptions on which their whole culture is based. But it's a tribute to le Guin that Ged and Tenar are not and do not become potted 21st century apologists for feminism, because raised in the culture they have been, they can't become so. It takes more than one generation to make a revolutionary, and there are ideas Ged and Tenar simply aren't equipped to have.

I was particularly interested in Ged's objection to the idea that men and women are the same. He lives in a culture where only men can be "real wizards". Women are excluded from the training that would make them wizards, and are then told that they're inferior and that's why they can't become wizards; they are prohibited from ever learning the True Language in which magic can be done. Women with magical talents are "witches", village-witches, hedge-witches, and generally looked down upon; women's magic is evil magic, though useful if weak (they do a range of fertility spells, love charms, healing of minor illnesses, the sort of thing that wizards don't stoop to).

But Ged, in Tehanu, can't accept the idea that "men are nothing more than women who can't have children", and women are nothing more than men who can. There has to be more than that, he thinks. He's an essentialist.

But in his world, it pays to be an essentialist, because the roots of magic are rooted in who and what you are. And men's magic, he has been taught, is different, because men are different. If he gives up that certainty, he has to give up magic.

Tenar thinks differently; she thinks the root of all things, all magic, is single, so magic in men and magic in women must ultimately be the same. But both of them respect the idea that the magic must not be lost. (And the whole book is written in the context of a world in which the magic nearly was lost, by people trying to have everlasting life, so they know what a world without magic looks like.)

But this debate showed me why it is we are so loathe to give up the idea of essential male-female distinctions ourselves. Because we are afraid that we will lose something essential. We very much want magic - power; souls; individual people as more than social and biological constructs - to exist, and we do not want to lose the vessel that contains that possibility. Essentialism seems to make it possible. If we are all the same, if there are no distinctions but acculturated ones, if it's all words and clothes and makeup and no real difference whatever, then is there anything real at all? Perhaps nothing, including magic, ever really existed. And essentialism is the very breath of patriarchy; without essentialism, patriarchy could not exist.

So we're afraid to let go of the patriarchy, because it has always promised us that this magic exists, and more, that it owns the magic. However damaging patriarchy is, we are afraid to let go of it, for fear of losing everything that seems to be implicated in the structure.

Which brings me to the dragons.

In "Tehanu", an 8 or 9 year old girl, Therru, who lives with a group of gipsies who include her parents and a couple of other men including an uncle, is routinely maltreated, starved, beaten, forced to work past her strength to serve the others, and is finally sexually abused (one doesn't know for how long that went on), beaten unconscious and pushed into a fire by men (including her father) trying to hide their crimes. She breathes the flame, which damages her throat and voice forever; one side of her face is badly scarred and she loses one eye. But Tenar, a middle aged farm wife with an interesting past, saves her life and adopts her. We later discover that Therru is in fact both human and dragon, and her parent is the oldest dragon of all, Kalessan. When she matures she will take her dragon form and join her kind in the West.

In "Tales from Earthsea" there is a young woman, Irian. She hates her name, though it appears to be her true name (albeit not all of her true name); because her father's estate is called "Iria", and "Irian" obviously means "of Iria". But she hates her father, with whom she lives alone; her mother died in childbirth for her. Her father is a soggily drunken abusive bad tempered lout, and three instances in the story make it clear that he not only beats her when he's drunk but also subjects her to slobbering repulsive "prying" caresses. In other words she is also sexually abused. She grows up to be sexually numb, uninterested in sexual behaviour of any kind. There's only once, when meditating, that she accesses her true nature and feels herself full of fire. But this is ambiguous. Because it turns out that she also is a dragon; that anger, sexual desire and fire are in her as in Therru inextricably linked (well, we don't know about desire, in Therru).

Now dragons are the most powerful, beautiful, dangerous and inscrutable creatures in Earthsea. So what is the connection between being incestuously raped and otherwise abused in childhood, and discovering your true dragon nature? I think it's important here to note that le Guin does not claim that childhood sexual abuse makes you a dragon; both these young women always were dragons. Only neither they nor anyone else knew it.

I think, though I'm still working on it, that for le Guin, these are women who have had cause to realise that the patriarchy offers them nothing at all. The protections and promises that patriarchy claims to offer women, for which women give up autonomy, power and respect and in exchange for which women agree to live subordinate lives as inferiors, sacrificing even their anger at all they have had to lose, turn out not to be a guaranteed deal. There is in fact no contract. Women give up everything, in return for which perhaps the patriarchy will protect them, if it feels like it. But if the patriarchy does not protect them, they have no recourse.

Except it turns out that's not true. It's only the women who are forced by the circumstances of their childhoods to realise that there is no point giving up power, because protection is not guaranteed in return - even their own fathers turn out to be predators - who realise their own essential dragon natures. It turns out that far from being powerless, magicless, cast out unprotected into a world with no meaning whatever, women who reject patriarchy become the most powerful, beautiful, dangerous and magical creatures of all. Le Guin is arguing that for those who reject patriarchy, the world is infinitely more magical than before. We lose nothing, and have everything to gain.

I have one more book to read in the series though. I'll be interested to see where she takes this.