I think Le Guin radically reinterpreted her own work in the two followups to the trilogy.
Spoilers, obviously.
The original trilogy has interesting gender roles. One one hand it's very rigid in its ideas of gender, as you'd expect from someone into Taoism. On the other, those roles were far from one-dimensional. I'd say that it presents an unconventional, but surprisingly positive view of the masculine gender role in the wizards of Roke, and a grim but original and compelling view of death. Both men and women can be cruel, but even at their worst you don't necessarily lose sympathy for them.
In Tehanu, that's all rolled back. There the men are evil, and the women are victims, period. And Ged kills a guy (which he didn't in the first three books) and gets to have sex right after, pretty explicitly as a reward - that was a bit of a "what the hell, author?" moment. And the grim afterlife is apparently the fault of those patriarchal wizards. It seems Le Guin was embarrassed at her earlier work that it wasn't feminist enough, or that it wasn't feminist in the right way. And maybe it wasn't Taoist enough either (I for one could never understand how she could combine those two).
She's still a great storyteller, of course, so it's certainly possible to appreciate those books, just know that they're written 20 years later when the author had a completely different view of many things.
Tehanu is my favorite in the series; I'm sorry you feel that way!
> And Ged kills a guy (which he didn't in the first three books) and gets to have sex right after, pretty explicitly as a reward - that was a bit of a "what the hell, author?" moment.
Two people with a long-standing attraction having sex after a life-or-death experience seems completely natural to me. Your framing of them having sex BECAUSE Ged killed a man is a misrepresentation of what happens in the book.
I don't recognise your description of Tehanu at all. But that she recognised that the first three books were written at a time when she herself was still stuck in a mindset of fantasy being written a certain way is not controversial - she herself spoke about that. They challenged fantasy tropes in many ways, and were radical in her insistence of not focusing on white people, but they did not challenge gender roles.
The later books did that. But I do see them as presenting the men as evil, and the women as victims, "period", not unless you identify the idea of privilege and power as inherently marking all of those affected by it irrespective of how they engage with it.
But I think they did! The wizards of Roke were not stereotypically masculine. They had a focus on "Being" over "Doing". They weren't into rescuing princesses. (The one "princess" Ged arguably rescued, Arha, he did so by convincing her to rescue herself. And that wasn't why he was there in the first place.) They had a basically pacifist, non-interventionist way of living.
> not unless you identify the idea of privilege and power
The first two really evil men we met in Tehanu were ragged gypsies, nobodies. (Apropos that, Le Guin might have to had make some new revisions in another 20 years, I doubt portraying wanderers like that would pass without comment today). They were anything but privileged.
I liked the portrayal of the wizards of Roke in the first books. I don't think I'd ever seen men as men presented so sympathetically in any fantasy book before. Although they certainly were capable of embodying many traditionally male faults (what the first book is about, basically), they weren't defined by what they did. They were allowed to be. Which is, as I'm sure you know, slightly at odds with Taoism and with western traditional gender roles for that matter, where it's women who are something and masculinity is performed, won by doing.
Which is why it felt like such a betrayal when Ged did a thing, killing a guy threatening a woman, and immediately became a "real man" instead of a celibate weirdo.
> But I think they did! The wizards of Roke were not stereotypically masculine.
That's not challenging anything for fantasy, and it's an obtuse answer when the point is that her books were - and she herself has acknowledged this - written from the point of view of a tradition that focuses on the men.
In that respect Roke is an archetypical example of adhering to the gender roles: A school of wizardy entirely run by men who don't even have female partners.
> The first two really evil men we met in Tehanu were ragged gypsies, nobodies. (Apropos that, Le Guin might have to had make some new revisions in another 20 years, I doubt portraying wanderers like that would pass without comment today). They were anything but privileged.
Yes, in Thehanu. And in the first three books the wizards were all men, and the leaders were all men, and as you yourself has pointed out, while Arha/Tenar did not need to be "rescued" directly, she still needed a man to show her the path out. The women are respectively not present or helpless.
> I liked the portrayal of the wizards of Roke in the first books
Nobody has argued you shouldn't or can't. But Le Guin made the point very clearly that she had failed to tell stories from the point of view of women, and so she did that too. That doesn't erase the earlier portrayals.
> Which is why it felt like such a betrayal when Ged did a thing, killing a guy threatening a woman, and immediately became a "real man" instead of a celibate weirdo.
I don't see that as a betrayal at all. Ged had changed. People changed. The world around him has changed. And he had always been different in any case. That he was allowed to evolved through the story, and had a whole life in the stories is part of what makes them not follow the stereotypical fantasy arc.
I had certainly not read anything like it. Remember how old those books are - the fantasy of that age was closer to Moorcock, Leiber etc. Where in that sort of literature can you find gentle, hands-off wizards (hell, men of any sort) who live a largely contemplative life? And written well enough that it seems really appealing?
> That doesn't erase the earlier portrayals.
Well it doesn't exactly erase them, but it reinterprets them drastically. Also, even though Le Guin later didn't consider it good enough, the Tombs of Atuan were written from a woman's perspective. A woman who's frankly a bit hard to recognize in the book Tehanu. Isn't a bit odd that the former high priestess of the Nameless Ones, of a visibly different race (who the islanders are understandably afraid of) settles down in a domestic life, and coincidentally develops concerns about domesticity similar to modern women at that time? You'd think she'd have much worse concerns than that her son doesn't help with housework!
I feel like Le Guin devalued her own story in the first three books, failed to recognize that through its basic empathy it did tell good and thoughtful stories with a gender dimension that challenges you to think.
In the author's own words (excerpted from the Introduction to The Books of Earthsea, Complete Illustrated Edition, 2018):
...
I have written so often of how and why it took me so long to write the six books of Earthsea that the story has become like the book you have to read to your four-year-old every night for weeks—You really want to hear it again? Oh well, okay, here goes!
I wrote the first three books in five years: ’68, ’70, ’72. I was on a roll. None of them was closely plotted or planned before writing; in each of them much of the story came to me as I followed what I wrote where it inevitably led. I started confidently on the fourth book. The central character was Tenar again, of course, to balance it out. I knew she hadn't stayed and studied wizardry with Ogion, but had married a farmer and had children, and that the story was going to bring her and Ged back together. But by the middle of the first chapter, I realized that I didn't know who she was—now. I didn't know why she’d done what she’d done or what she had to do. I didn't know her story, or Ged’s. I couldn’t plot or plan it. I couldn’t write it. It took me eighteen years to learn how.
I was forty-two in 1972; in 1990, I was sixty. During those years, the way of understanding society that we’re obliged to call feminism (despite the glaring absence of its opposite term masculism) had grown and flourished. At the same time an increasing sense of something missing in my own writing, which I could not identify, had begun to paralyze my storytelling ability. Without the feminist writers and thinkers of the 1970s and ’80s, I don’t know if I ever could have identified this absence as the absence of women at the center.
Why was I, a woman, writing almost entirely about what men did?
Why because I was a reader who read, loved, and learned from the books my culture provided me; and they were almost entirely about what men did. The women in them were seen in relation to men, essentially having no existence unrelated to male existence. I knew what men did, in books, and how one wrote about them. But when it came to what women did, or how to write about it, all I had to call on was my own experiences—uncertified, unapproved by the great Consensus of Criticism, lacking the imprimatur of the Canon of Literature, piping up solo against the universally dominant and almost unison chorus of the voices of men talking about men.
Oh, well, now, was that true? Hadn't I read Jane Austen? Emily Brontë? Charlotte Brontë? Elizabeth Gaskell? George Eliott? Virginia Woolf? Other, long-silenced voices of women writing about both women and men were being brought back into print, into life. And my contemporary women writers were showing me the way. It was high time I learned to write of and from my own body, my own gender, in my own voice.
The central character of The Tombs of Atuan is female, the point of view is hers. But Tenar is just coming out of adolescence, not yet fully a woman. I had had no problem in 1970 writing out of my own experience of what it is to be a girl-child, an adolescent girl.
What I couldn't do then, and hadn’t yet done in 1990, was write a fully mature woman at the center of a novel.
Strangely enough, it took a child to show me the way into the fourth book of Earthsea. A girl-child, born in poverty, abused, maimed, abandoned, Therru led me back to Tenar, so that I could see the woman she had become. And through Tenar I could see Earthsea, unchanged, the same Earthsea as eighteen years earlier—but seeming almost a different world, for the viewpoint was no longer from a position of power or among men of power. Tenar was seeing it all from below, through the eyes of the marginal, the voiceless, the powerless.
The essay “Earthsea Revisioned,” reprinted in this edition, discusses that change in viewpoint. When Tehanu came out, a good many critics and readers saw it as mere gender politics and resented it as a betrayal of the romantic tradition of heroism. As I tried to say in the essay, not to change viewpoint would, for me, have been the betrayal. By including women fully in my story, I gained a larger understanding of what heroism is and found a true and longed-for way back into my Earthsea—now a very much greater, stranger, more mysterious place than it had ever appeared before.
Though Tehanu is named for the child character, neither it nor the two books after it are books “for children” or definable as “young adult.” I had abandoned any attempt to suit my vision of Earthsea to a publisher’s category or a critic’s prejudice. The notion that fantasy is only for the immature rises from an obstinate misunderstanding of both maturity and the imagination. So, as my protagonists grew older, I trusted my younger readers to follow them or not, as and when they chose. In the PR-driven world of publishing, that constituted a real risk, and I am very grateful to the editors who took that risk with me.
I assume that is referring to the concept of yin/yang dualities which is part of Taoism (as well as Confucianism) -- dark/light, moon/sun, and yes, female/male
Yeah. But that is a metaphor. Extrapolating that to mean Taoism has a 'black/white' view of gender and using it in the Christian Gender war, as an example of agreement with another religion, is a BIG stretch.
I certainly don't see any sign of it in the Tao Te Ching or Chuang-Tzu. But there's a lot of history to the religion, and a lot of blending with Confucian and Buddhist teachings, too.
Spoilers, obviously.
The original trilogy has interesting gender roles. One one hand it's very rigid in its ideas of gender, as you'd expect from someone into Taoism. On the other, those roles were far from one-dimensional. I'd say that it presents an unconventional, but surprisingly positive view of the masculine gender role in the wizards of Roke, and a grim but original and compelling view of death. Both men and women can be cruel, but even at their worst you don't necessarily lose sympathy for them.
In Tehanu, that's all rolled back. There the men are evil, and the women are victims, period. And Ged kills a guy (which he didn't in the first three books) and gets to have sex right after, pretty explicitly as a reward - that was a bit of a "what the hell, author?" moment. And the grim afterlife is apparently the fault of those patriarchal wizards. It seems Le Guin was embarrassed at her earlier work that it wasn't feminist enough, or that it wasn't feminist in the right way. And maybe it wasn't Taoist enough either (I for one could never understand how she could combine those two).
She's still a great storyteller, of course, so it's certainly possible to appreciate those books, just know that they're written 20 years later when the author had a completely different view of many things.