by Tim van Gardingen
The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences, in every page: the men so good for nothing and hardly any women at all - it is very tiresome. – Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
Stand on Waterloo Bridge in London, and power surrounds you. To the west is Westminster, the centre of British government – a few small square miles which over history has exerted tremendous influence across the world. To the east towers ‘The City’, one of the world’s mightiest financial centres – a place of such influence it has its own rules and even its own police force independent of the rest of London.
I stood on Waterloo Bridge, thinking of witches, farmhands and dragons. The world looks different with a novel on the mind, and my mind was pondering whether society had power all wrong. In the established, male-oriented sense, few cities in the world parade their power like London. New York outdoes London as a financial centre and DC dwarfs London’s political clout, but how many places on earth display both worlds at the mere turn of a head? Yet this is power as established by men, by male tradition. It is not the whole picture.
Ursula le Guin, author of the Earthsea novels, saw power past the male tradition. It was the isles of Earthsea, of Gont and Havnor, I considered as I stared over to the houses of parliament across the Thames. Earthsea is, of course, just as subject to a male power tradition as our world is, but le Guin exposed the shortfalls of this view through her fantasy world and celebrated the potential for sources of power outside the traditional male conceptualisation. Instead of in institutions, and military and financial might, she saw power in the everyday: in community, in love, and in service to others. As Tehanu, the fourth Earthsea novel suggests, it may even only be through these pillars that the fragile forces of male power can be mended when they snap.
More to power than men
In the modern world it would be false to claim power is solely in the hands of men. Ursula von de Leyen heads the European Commission. During the Obama administration, Angela Merkel was one of the President’s greatest allies. There is a place at the table of power for women, even while they remain far too underrepresented.
Yet the concept of power that is recognised in society was formed when that power was open only to men. The voice of women was unheard and in medieval Europe was outright subjugated to create that concept of power. Used formally, the word ‘power’ refers to influence in the historically male-dominated realms of politics, money, war, and religion. Yet culturally we talk of power in a much wider sense. Culturally we recognise the powers of love and friendship, powers which exert positive forces on our daily lives.
Those concepts which culturally could be named ‘power’ but formally never are, are subjugated to a position of lesser importance. Tehanu celebrates these ‘everyday’ cultural powers which so often fall within traditional women’s roles. These are forces for connection and of personal meaning, constructive rather than destructive. They deserve the label of power because they are powerful, and because they quietly prop up the formalised structures of power.
Fragility and emptiness of traditional power
The strength and value of the women in Tehanu are clearest with the failings of Earthsea’s male power structures laid bare from the very start. Your writer is after all male and writes not only in allyship with women, in hope of a fairer society for all, but also partially to face his own failings and learn to be better – as is the power of writing.
Earthsea looks very different away from the eyes of Ged, archmage and protagonist for most of Ursula le Guin’s classic Earthsea fantasy series. It is a world led by the counsel of wise men, a kingdom awaiting a king to bring peace and order. The first three novels can be reduced to how one lone man brought together the missing pieces leading to the return of a king to Earthsea. Ged first faces himself, then reclaims an artefact essential to restoring order, and finally takes the heir to the throne on a quest that leads to his crowning. Both Tenar, the protagonist of Tehanu, and the future king Lebannen, accompany him at stages of this journey, but only ever in a supporting role. Ultimately it is Ged’s power in magic, knowledge, and status, which guides him.
Magic is the core manifestation of power in Earthsea, and its high form is treated as a man’s art. “Women’s magic” is seen as lowly and valueless, the role of witches to perform “lowly jobs of finding and mending (…) (that) people would not bother (a) mage with” (p. 10). The abstractions of magical and political power are how Earthsea’s (male) wizards understand the world. The wizard Beech sees the solution to society’s woes purely in its grand structure – find an heir to the throne and all will be well (p. 410). He has no direct connection with this manifestation of power, joined only by the imagined community of kingdom.
In Tehanu, Ged is stripped of the form of power he lorded over before. He is no longer a wizard and no longer archmage, stripped of both magical power and standing in society. He lost that power to save Earthsea in the previous novel, adding salt to the already gaping wound. There is no space in Ged’s mind for what he has achieved, or what he is as a human being. It does not matter to him that he has returned to friends. It does not matter to him that he has come home. Without power and status, his existence falters and this once proud character becomes empty.
Moss, the witch neighbour of Tehanu’s protagonist Tenar, recognises the superficiality male power lends to men. A man of power and of magic is “a nut in its shell” (p. 431), absorbed in himself, closed off from the world. If their power disappears then they become nothing but the shell. This is the fate Ged faces early in Tehanu, to forever be a shell of a human.
The towers of our world are not so different. Think for a second of how closely the powerful defend their reputation. To be defamed is to lose everything if you live at the top of society. Looking to the Shard, the glass stalagmite where hives of financiers scuttle about their business, I linger at the thought that this skyscraper is built in the image of their occupiers – strong, certainly. But so very fragile too.
Is this not perhaps the cost of power? Is it doomed to consume and become the sole identity of those who carry it? Are those who lose power destined to become shells, just like Ged?
A (re)balance of power
Le Guin turns away from the male-focused perspective of the first three Earthsea novels - a world of magic, kings and power – and in Tehanu turns to women, children, and everyday life. Le Guin shows that male power need not be so fragile. Instead, we see that the male conceptualisation of power misses forms of power traditionally attributed to women, ignored by a patriarchal society that fails to value ‘women’s work’. A different form of power exists there, one that rebalances male power and empowers all.
A woman of male power
This time Tenar is the protagonist, Ged becoming a secondary character. She appears first in the second Earthsea novel, The Tombs of Atuan. In Atuan she is known as Arha, a priestess in service to the nameless ones. She then too was once in a position of power, as society would see power. She had rank, authority, and title.
Arha’s power is, however, as the form that society recognises, a male-created power. It is of the empty, fragile kind that Moss lambasts in Tehanu. Arha is the lady of an empty kingdom, one literally without light. She lives in a space of female servants and eunuch guards, of which all are servants to the nameless ones, malignant deities wholly irreverent of their worshipers. Arha leads the worship of a force which owes her nothing and cares nothing for her. Arha’s experience of empty power is thus twofold. On one level her power is undermined from below, with her leadership all but ceremonial. On another, her role of appeasing a deity oblivious of her worship is fruitless – her power is truly empty.
Arha is a young woman, but her position of power embodies a male power structure. It is purely built on status. Her title, ‘the eaten one’, highlights explicitly that she has given everything and received nothing in return. She loses what is most precious in Earthsea – her true name. As an older woman, Arha – now known as Tenar – sees the face of power as posturing, without substance. On meeting Lebannen, the soon-to-be-crowned king, “because she was not a girl now, she was not awed, but only wondered at how men ordered their world into this dance of masks” (p. 498).
Rediscovering power in the everyday
To see the ‘dance of masks’ which governs kings and mages, Tenar must leave those power structures and pursue a ‘normal life’. She trades male power for the subservient roles of caregiver and farmer and does so entirely out of choice. Ogion had effectively begun training her in magic “As if [she] weren’t a girl, as if [she had] been his apprentice” (p. 431), but after the emptiness of her existence as Arha,“[she] wanted a man, [she]wanted children, [and she] wanted [her] life” (p. 430). These domestic concerns are where she empowers Ged and Therru, her adopted daughter and victim of extreme abuse. As Ged is a former representation of male power and Therru emerges (as we will see later) as an even greater power, Tenar’s chosen caregiving role enables and balances the traditional sense of power.
The roles of caregiving and community building are not subservient out of unimportance. To think fully about why would require thousands more words and a shift to a purely academic style, but I can share a thought: Men have resolved to keep their power for centuries. With few justifiable reasons for denying women power, traditional roles of women were systematically devalued, othered or labelled crimes. The clearest example of this is the witch hunt, which subjugated women’s roles, removed them from the economy (and financial power) and killed any who defied subservience. Caregiving is not less significant than political or economic pursuits – it has been created as such, in an act of male power preservation.
Tenar looks down on witchcraft: “Village witches, though they might know many spells and charms (…) were never trained in the high arts or the principles of magery. (…) Wizardry was a man’s work, a man’s skill; magic was made by men” (p. 419). Yet both the witches of Earthsea and the historical witch excel in domestic concerns – in healing and in helping with day-to-day life. If Tenar had been a woman during the witch hunt in our world, she may well have been branded one. The strength she brings to those she cares for may not be recognised as witchcraft or magic by herself, but it is akin to it and is undisputably a power.
These facets of female power are less fragile than male power structures. “I have roots!” proclaims Moss in a half-mystic trance, when Tenar asks her how men’s and women’s power differ. Even as a cryptic answer, there is a strong hint here as to why everyday power does not suffer the fragility of male power - she and her fellow witches have a power built through social connection, through roots. Male power is comparably rootless, built off the self and through competition. The great political theories of our world claim this is human nature, even as anthropology so often suggests community to be what led to the rise of humankind.
We see the juxtaposition of caregiving and ‘rootless’ power in the wizards visiting Ogion after his death. They come out of obligation and tradition. Attacks on their status matter more than the passing of a man who mattered to a community. “[Tenar] looked down at her friend, a corpse ready for the ground, lost and still. [The wizards] stood over him, alive and full of power, offering no friendship, only contempt, rivalry, anger” (p. 415). The wizards knew Ogion in name and of his standing. Tenar knew Ogion as a person and as a friend, valuing his being over his magical power. Even after Ogion’s death, there is a bond between him and Tenar, a completeness that the wizards cannot have in their state of rivalry.
A rebalancing
This is no argument for women and men to take their traditionally allocated roles – quite the opposite. I see an alternative where purpose and meaning are found for all in the systematically under (or not at all) valued realm of ‘women’s work’. Here I mean roles traditionally filled by women, not work that should only be done by women. In a fairer world, the differentiation would no longer exist, but in history and cultural remnants, gendered roles influence power.
Le Guin seems to support this view, writing in her afterword to Tehanu: “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. (…) Quite the opposite, I think. In Tehanu he can become, finally, fully, a man. He is no longer the servant of his power.” (p. 550)
It takes Ged time to overcome the grief of losing power as he knew it, but there is a fulfilment in his emerging role he could never have as archmage. Ged does not overcome his lost power through facing himself, as he did in the past. Tenar rebuilds a warmth in Ged through her undervalued power. As he herds goats and teaches songs to Therru, he is connected to others in a way that the disconnectedness of male power did not allow. Now he supports housekeeping and looking after a child, he has come closer to ‘women’s power’ and becomes more whole. Women and men need not take up traditionally assigned roles. There is another, fairer way for gender to exist.
A girl of dragon’s power
Tehanu is not only about Tenar and Ged. Therru, the burned child, is equally if not more important. Le Guin goes as far as to call her “the key to the book” (p. 550). She describes Therru as “powerless” and a girl who “can’t be healed” but on some level, she is the most powerful character in the novel. She may be in a frail state for most of the story, wronged, scarred, and victimised. Yet she also has the power of a dragon inside her. Her kinship with dragons is hinted at throughout the whole story, but only in the last chapter does she reveal she is half-dragon through speaking with the dragon Kalessin as an equal. She is scarred because she is a girl of power. The men who attack her and attempt to murder her do so because they are afraid of that power and spiteful of it in a girl. They hate her as a threat to their power, whatever little of it they have.
It is only the power of Tenar’s care which heals Therru, a power which transcends magic. The wizard Beech says of Tenar’s healing: “If I or any sorcerer or witch, or I daresay wizard had kept her, and used all the power of healing of the Art Magic for her (…) she wouldn’t be better off. Maybe not as well off as she is” (p. 502). The power of the caregiver trumps the power of magic, and only through that care is Therru able to realise her connection to dragons.
Even after being welcomed by Kalessin to join the dragons in the final pages of the novel, Therru chooses Tenar and Ged, her caregivers. Then, in one of the most poignant moments of the book, she turns immediately to care for the near-mortally ill Moss. One moment the kin of dragons, and without a blink to the significance of that power, to more important matters - the care of a friend. So is not only the power of ‘women’s work’, but also the power of a dragon.
Earthsea to the real world
The views from Waterloo Bridge rank among the inspiring sights of London. Yet the sense of emptiness of the power surrounding you there, the ‘nut in its shell’ that Moss saw in male power, is not just found floating above the Thames. It is in every corner of the city. What would Tenar make of London? Would Therru and Ged have been able to heal in this city of fragile powers?
Perhaps if they saw that women’s power quietly resonates here too. This very same bridge was built mainly by women as part of the war effort in the 1940s. At a point where male power had forced much of the world into a bloodbath, women rebuilt as destruction continued around them. The power of women runs alongside the power of men, contributing far beyond what the history books recognise.
Tehanu reveals power in all its forms and points out that what society perceives as true power is built on sand. The bedrock of power is the elements which have been systematically undervalued, along with the women who nurtured it. The high-power structures are gradually changing in our world, but what of its roots? When a power is undervalued and ignored, it is rendered invisible, but it does not disappear. Nurturing these invisible female facets of power is a way to balance and empower society as a whole.
Fantasy always has its roots in the real world. Earthsea is no different, and we can learn as much from fantastical worlds as reality, if not more. As unlikely as it may seem, next time I cross Waterloo Bridge, I’ll be thinking of Earthsea.
*Ursula Le Guin. The Books of Earthsea. London, Gollancz, 2018.
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Tim van Gardingen is a writer with a direction problem. Over the past decade he has dabbled in everything from scribbling angsty poetry to covering energy markets. Now based in London, Tim spent most of his 20s in Asia becoming an avid polyglot and absorbing experiences which continue to inspire his work today. He likes best to work at the intersection of politics, art and culture.
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