[In the following essay, Attebery discusses Ingelow's fantasy novel Mopsa the Fairy and its emphasis on the coming-of-age of its title character as a forerunner to the rite of passage novels by modern fantasy writers such as Ursula Le Guin and Patricia Wrightson.]

An orphaned young man discovers a destiny, true love, and his identity. A wizard tests his powers and learns his own limits. An amiable young hobbit grows into a heroic and somber figure. A youth wakes up in a room transformed into woodland and undergoes a series of tests and adventures that lead him to self-knowledge. One of the most prevalent patterning motifs in fantasy literature is coming of age. From the earliest traditional fairy tales to the most recent fantasy novels, protagonists have moved from the end of childhood to adulthood as the story unfolds. The magical adventures are tied together and the story given shape by the hero's gradual assumption of his proper powers and his place in society.

Each of the protagonists referred to above—Taran Wanderer, Ged, Frodo, and Anodos—is male. This is not a surprising revelation; the majority of the central figures in fiction is male, reflecting cultural biases and the prevalence of men in the ranks of writers. But the creator of one of those characters is a woman.

Ursula Le Guin chose Ged as the hero of A Wizard of Earthsea, and not until The Tombs of Atuan, the second book of her Earthsea Trilogy, did she explore directly the coming of age of a young woman. The experience of that character, Arha, is significantly different from that of Ged, whom we may take as typical of the male hero. Beginning in obscurity, he attracts attention for his native gifts in sorcery, undergoes an apprenticeship under a (male) master who gives him a new name, attends a school for wizards (all male), disobeys an injunction, wanders the world looking for a cure for the evil he has unleashed, is tempted by a (female) witch, bests a dragon in a test of wits, and finally overcomes the evil. Ambitious, proud, and impulsive, he must learn the limits of his powers. His only real adversary is himself, and his chief accomplishment is self-mastery. For Arha, the problem is unleashing rather than mastering herself, as we will see later.

A large percentage of contemporary fantasy fiction is being written by women. Marion Zimmer Bradley, L. M. Boston, Angela Carter, Joy Chant, Vera Chapman, C. J. Cherryh, Susan Cooper, Jane Louise Curry, Carole Nelson Douglas, Diane Duane, Phyllis Eisenstein, Suzette Haden Elgin, Jane Gaskell, Virginia Hamilton, Dahlov Ipcar, Diana Wynne Jones, Nancy Kress, Katherine Kurtz, Sanders Anne Laubenthal, Tanith Lee, Ursula Le Guin, Madeleine L'Engle, R. A. MacAvoy, Patricia McKillip, Robin McKinley, Ruth Nichols, Andre Norton, Mary Norton, Elizabeth Scarborough, Mary Stewart, Evangeline Walton, Nancy Willard, Patricia Wrightson, and Jane Yolen have all contributed to the fantasy boom of the past twenty years. They have found its conventions, derived from fairy tale, romance, supernatural legend, and myth, appropriate vehicles for conveying the ideas and experiences they found significant enough to work into narrative form. What, then, have these writers and the women who explored the mode of fantasy before them had to say about the coming of age of women?

Coming of age is one instance of what anthropologists call rites of passage or rites of initiation. All such rites mark the passage of an individual from one state to another: from one tribe to another, from the laity to the priesthood, from life to death, or, in this case, from childhood to adulthood and full participation in society. Arnold Van Gennep, whose 1908 study of Les rites de passage remains a standard, treats these rites as essentially concerned with changes of status in males: “Transitions from group to group and from one social situation to the next are looked on as implicit in the very fact of existence, so that a man's life comes to be made up of a succession of stages with similar ends and beginnings: birth, social puberty, marriage, fatherhood, advancement to a higher class occupational specialization, and death” (3).

This one-sided emphasis on “a man's life,” ignoring a woman's, may reflect Van Gennep's own bias or that of the cultures he is examining; in either case, his study primarily documents male activities from birth to grave, discussing women only in conjunction with pregnancy, childbirth, and marriage, and the last with respect to the man's acquisition of a wife. Mircea Eliade, in his Rites and Symbols of Initiation, has more to say about female initiation, but he points out that such rituals typically lack the element of spiritual revelation present in the puberty rites of boys, being more concerned with marking the onset of menstruation and other such physical changes (47).

Do women come of age? In Van Gennep's view perhaps not, for he considers women and children to form a single social group. Boys require a drastic break from this group to that of adult men; girls merely work their way through it. The further implication is that women never do become fully adult, that they are like those salamanders that stay underwater all their lives, able to reproduce but otherwise still in the gill-bearing immature stage. Carolyn Heilbrun suggests that women, even in our own culture, pay a psychological penalty for having no coming-of-age ritual:

All societies, from the earliest and most primitive to today's, have ceremoniously taken the boy from the female domain and urged his identity as a male, as a responsible unfeminine individual, upon him. The girl undergoes no such ceremony, but she pays for serenity of passage with a lack of selfhood and of the will to autonomy that only the struggle for identity can confer.

(104)

Suppose, then, a woman wishes to establish such a ritual, at least a private one for herself. She can do what people have done for millennia with their desires and frustrations: tell a story about it. (This is not the only thing women can or should pursue, but it is the only course of action relevant to this article.) What sort of story might it be?

Looking at the models available to the prospective storyteller, we see that the traditional mainstream novel has little to offer. Youthful women in novels are generally confined to two fates. They marry or die. Either fate ends the heroine's development. This limitation, however, applies only to stories of young women: there is a large class of fiction that “shows women developing later in life, after conventional expectations of marriage and motherhood have been fulfilled and found insufficient” (Abel et al. 7).

Rachel Brownstein points out that the marriage plot, if well handled, can be used to show “how very odd it is to choose another so as to choose a self” (xvii). The heroine's selection of a proper husband may be overlaid with wit and social commentary, as in Pride and Prejudice, or laden with ethical implication, as in Middlemarch. Nonetheless, the marriage plot does not show how a woman can become a self, independent of her choice of mate. It is still the story of Cinderella, waiting for the fulfillment that comes only with the right man.

Cinderella, along with her sisters Snow White and the Sleeping Beauty, has given fairy tales the reputation of being for women indoctrinations in passivity. However, as Heilbrun points out, fairy tales are such splendid enactments of the maturation process it is a pity to abandon them to boys. She suggests that girls and women cross gender lines in their identifications, recognizing “that she is not confined to the role of the princess; that the hero, who wakens Sleeping Beauty with a kiss, is that part of herself that awakens conventional girlhood to the possibility of life and action” (150). This is a sensible suggestion, and, as she points out, one that works as well for male readers who would like occasionally to identify with someone other than the prince. Heilbrun seems unaware, though, of the many traditional tales in which a courageous, independent heroine wins her own way, reaching adulthood in the process. In Joseph Jacobs's collection of English Folk and Fairy Tales, for instance, the following tales have young female protagonists: “Tom Tit Tot,” “Nix Nought Nothing,” “Cap o' Rushes,” “Mollie Whuppie,” “Mr. Fox,” “Earl Mar's Daughter,” “The Fish and the Ring,” “Kate Crackernuts,” “The Well of the World's End,” and “The Three Heads of the Well.” The heroines of these tales outwit devils, kill giants, work for a living, unmask false suitors, and rescue siblings. The princess in “The Three Heads of the Well” does not wait around to be rescued from an evil stepmother; instead, “the young princess having lost her father's love, grew weary of the Court, and one day, meeting with her father in the garden, she begged him, with tears in her eyes, to let her go and seek her fortune …” (232-33).

From such models writers could build satisfying fantasies of female coming of age, if not for the weight of other literary traditions and of cultural mores. Jean Ingelow's Mopsa the Fairy, first published in 1869, reveals in its plot and symbolism some of the tensions between cultural expectations for women in the Victorian era and the aspirations of a woman writer. Many of these narrative and symbolic patterns continue to appear in fantasies by women a century later.

Ingelow's story is told from the point of view of Jack, an ordinary little boy who happens one day to find a nest of fairies in a hollow tree. The four tiny fairies inside begin as infants but mature very quickly, all except for Mopsa, the one Jack kisses. She remains a child, but grows to human stature and is the only one to remain with Jack as he travels to fairyland. Jack passes through various strange realms, does a few good deeds, and meets a fairy queen. Throughout the story, Jack remains very much as he began, a polite and adventurous child. Mopsa, however, changes a great deal.

Once in the realm of the fairy queen, she matures very rapidly. She grows to Jack's height, begins to understand things that are mysteries to Jack, and initiates a sisterly rivalry with the queen. Because there cannot be two queens in one fairyland, the queen conveys a message from Fate (the queen's mother) that Mopsa is to go rule a land where the fairies are condemned to the shapes of deer. Mopsa rebels, because she has heard that those fairies keep their queen imprisoned in a tower, and she and Jack flee. Finally they come, by accident, to the country of the deer, and Mopsa realizes that they want her not as a prisoner but as their deliverer. She acquiesces, and she and Jack undo the spell. The deer regain their fairy form, and the young prince, in honor of their rescuers, becomes Jack's exact double. Mopsa stays on to rule in her country and perhaps eventually to marry the fairy Jack. The original Jack goes home to his family.

What does all this say about a woman's coming of age? First, Ingelow uses a male protagonist to initiate her plot. Alice in Wonderland notwithstanding, adventures were for boys. For the first half of the book, our interest is primarily with Jack. Second, Mopsa does not become queen because of her royal birth or her innate qualities but because Jack has kissed her: the older queen explains that “the love of a mortal works changes indeed. It is not often that we win anything so precious” (280). It is almost impossible not to read “man” for “mortal.” The woman begins as something alien, a smaller imitation of a human, and only through love comes to humanity.

Third, the relationship between woman and girl is one of nurturing only until the girl grows close to womanhood and then it changes to rivalry. “I don't love the Queen,” says Mopsa; “She slapped my arm as she went by, and it hurts” (294). That slap is very interesting. The red mark it leaves proves that Mopsa is indeed on her way to becoming a queen, for ordinary fairies have no red blood. The incident strongly suggests the slap often given to girls at their first menstrual cycle. In both cases, the message is that maturation for girls is accompanied by shame and the hostility of older women, though the women who do the slapping say they are simply following tradition.

Fourth, Mopsa has no reliable mentor to aid her in her struggle for independence. The fairy queen is more frightening than helpful, even when giving advice: “when everyone had finished, the Queen leaned her arm on the edge of the boat and, turning her lovely face towards Mopsa, said: ‘I want to whisper to you, sister.’ ‘Oh!’ said Mopsa. ‘I wish I was in Jack's waistcoat pocket again; but I'm so big now.’ And she took hold of the two sides of his velvet jacket, and hid her face between them” (304). The old apple-woman, a mortal kept by the queen as a companion, sets Mopsa on the wrong path entirely by passing on a false rumor about the deer-shaped fairies. Only when Mopsa has essentially reached her maturity does she find a wise female friend.

Fifth, whatever women need to know, they know without having to learn it. Furthermore, their knowledge is intuitive and beyond logic: “Mopsa, however, was like other fairies in this respect—that she knew all about Old Mother Fate, but not about causes and reasons” (328). But when women try to tell what they know—first the queen and then Mopsa tell prophesying stories—everyone falls asleep.

Sixth, maturity for a woman involves acceptance of fate. Mopsa must reign where she is fated to reign, and any amount of wandering will only take her there in the end.

Laid out thus, the points Ingelow is making sound profoundly anti-feminist. That is not exactly the effect of the story, however. It may be read as saying that society does indeed place blocks in the path of a young woman who aspires to individuality, but that the determined heroine may overcome them. Mopsa, who begins as an ordinary young fairy, orphaned or abandoned, ends up as a queen, wiser and more humane than the fairy queen whose land she flees.

The story may begin with Jack, but Mopsa and her fate are far more interesting. Jack seems to serve primarily as an avenue into the realm of the fairy tale, a conventional fairy tale hero with a conventional name. Because more people seem to be aware of male-oriented tales than of the “Mollie Whuppie” sort of fairy tale, perhaps Ingelow thought the form required someone like Jack. Hers is not the only fantasy by a woman to begin from a male point of view. As mentioned earlier, Ursula Le Guin wrote one book about a male wizard before looking at the coming of age process from a female viewpoint. Patricia Wrightson's The Ice Is Coming and Patricia McKillip's The Riddle Master of Hed also have male heroes, with female counterparts not appearing until the sequels.

Virginia Woolf's fantasy Orlando is structured in a way that helps explain the frequent use of this device. Woolf's hero, Orlando, is male for the first half on the book, and then inexplicably changes to female. The result is that the readers are unable thereafter to view the female Orlando in the way they are accustomed to viewing female characters. We are already used to seeing Orlando travel, fight, create, fall in love, fall out of love, and so on; it is no use suddenly to start expecting him/her to become passive, mysterious, and secondary. The heroes of Le Guin's, Wrightson's, and McKillip's fantasies are male because we have come to expect the heroes of the sort of book they are in to be male. However, like Orlando, Le Guin's Ged and the others are androgynous enough that their creators can, through them, express general ideas about youth and its trials and discoveries. Then, once the fantasy world is established, the writer may choose to explore the special experience of women in it.

Andre Norton, whose Witch World series waited until its third volume for a full-fledged female hero, explains why audience expectations dictate that the unexamined choice of protagonist, even for a woman writer, be male:

But to write a full book from the feminine point of view was a departure. I found it fascinating to write, but the reception was oddly mixed. In the years now since [Year of the Unicorn] was published I have had many letters from women readers who accepted Gillian with open arms, and I have had masculine readers who hotly resented her.

(“On Writing Fantasy” 161).

Only when the coming of age includes sexuality does it become absolutely necessary to split the androgynous hero into male and female. Le Guin, speaking of the second book in the Earthsea Trilogy, associates femininity with the sort of physical changes that were mostly left out of A Wizard of Earthsea:

The subject of The Tombs of Atuan is, if I had to put it in one word, sex. There's a lot a symbolism in the book, most of which I did not, of course, analyze consciously while writing; the symbols can all be read as sexual. More exactly you could call it a feminine coming of age. Birth, rebirth, destruction, freedom are the themes.

(Language 55)

For the same reasons, Ingelow begins with Jack and moves to Mopsa when things get interesting. But why must it be Jack's kiss that calls Mopsa to her fate? That pattern, too, recurs in the work of more recent fantasists. In The Tombs of Atuan, the protagonist Arha is raised as priestess of the Nameless Ones, dark, inhuman forces worshipped by her society. Her education is designed to suppress or destroy her individual personality and make her an empty vehicle for the gods she serves. When the wizard Ged arrives, he restores her humanity and individuality by giving her back the name she was born with, Tenar. That is the beginning of her rebellion and maturation. Again the male character initiates a transformation in the female, from alien to human.

The process is most explicit in Patricia Wrightson's The Dark Bright Water. In that book, the hero from The Ice Is Coming, a young aborigine named Wirrun, meets many of the creatures from his people's folklore, among them the Yunggamurra. This is a sort of fresh-water siren, a beautiful woman-shaped singer that lures men to their deaths. The Yunggamurra is not evil; her main interest is not killing men but playing in the water with her sisters. The siren song is a game she plays. After she drowns Wirrun's friend Ularra, Wirrun finds out the other rule of the game: he catches her in the smoke of a grassfire, and she is transformed from silvery water spirit to golden mortal woman: trapped, tamed, humanized.

The motif is traditional: swan-maiden, seal-maiden, and the like caught to be human brides. But Wrightson's perspective on the story gives it a different significance. The transformed Yunggamurra, now named Murra, loves Wirrun, but she regrets her lost life: “to flow with the water and ride it; to be one strand among weeds, one voice in the singing. To rise to the sun or sink from the wind as the others do. To be no one but to be many, and to play” (216). She has given up a wild, anonymous freedom for a name and a lover.

It is an exchange Murra makes against her will, but she is willing to abide by it. However, she warns Wirrun that he must keep her away from water, where her sisters might find her: “They will call and call and I will hear and hear; and one day they will find me in water. They will catch Murra more surely than ever you caught Yunggamurra. They will take me back to the rivers and the games and I will be Yunggamurra again. You should keep me always from the water” (220).

Read as metaphor, Murra's transformation is from child to woman. Children are wild and free. They are anonymous insofar as adults fail to distinguish among them, and their identities are not fixed but fluid, responding to everything around them. A girl child looking at her mother sees someone bounded by convention and tied to the needs of husband and children. Girl and woman might as well be different species. If the mother was once a girl, she must have been trapped and transformed. The magic spell that will do the same to her, hears the girl, is called love.

That is one possible meaning for all these stories of witch, fairy, or animal turned into woman. In many of the traditional tales, the woman is mistreated and goes back to her old life. The man has caught her, but he does not have her soul. In a patriarchal society, that is as free as a woman can be. She accepts the bargain, lives a circumscribed life, bears her children, and becomes an adult according to her culture's dictates, but she retains an escape clause.

In Wrightson's book, Wirrun admirably refuses to play the game. He refuses to keep Murra locked up away from water; she is now human and must stay with him or go by her own choice. He has not sought a subservient wife but an equal companion. Much of the third volume of the trilogy concerns Murra's coming to terms with a relationship not covered by the magical game.

Jean Ingelow's fantasy does not take up such adult dilemmas, but Jack's kiss of Mopsa carries some of the same implications. Jack himself is unaware of the effect of his attentions, since men are not caught in the same way women are. By the end of the book, Mopsa has outgrown Jack (though Ingelow describes her as looking only ten years old she has more growing to do). She has moved on to a new realm of knowledge and responsibility. Her last act in the story is to give Jack back his kiss and send him on his way home. She has accepted womanhood, but she does not tie herself to the one who triggered her transformation.

Mopsa had no older woman to guide her to maturity. The image of older woman as threatening rival rather than as mentor is familiar to us from “Hansel and Gretel” and “Snow White.” This image may derive from the fact that mother and daughter must compete for favors from a dominant male. It also reflects the daughter's awareness that the mother is “in on it”—she is one of the forces pushing the girl into the constricting mold of female adulthood. In The Tombs of Atuan, Le Guin shows older women in the latter role. The priestess Kossil is as fearsome as any fairy-tale step-mother; she is ambitious, cruel, and hypocritical, and she resents the young priestess of the Nameless Ones, her only peer. Arha must reach adulthood literally over Kossil's dead body, when the latter is trapped in the caverns of the Nameless Ones.

Raederle, the heroine of Patricia McKillip's Heir of Sea and Fire, has both positive and negative role models among older women. The old pig-woman, who is really the wizard Nun in disguise (McKillip's wizards can be female), gives her friendship and instruction in the magical arts. On the other hand, the shapechanger Eriel attacks Raederle's lover Morgon and taunts Raederle with the idea that she will eventually become as ruthless as herself. Both older women are magicians, and both are kin to Raederle. Nun represents the mother Raederle would like to be; Eriel is the mother she dreads becoming. Raederle's own mother is dead, and so the story of her coming of age is also the story of her search for an acceptable maternal model, just as many male fantasy heroes are looking for fathers. In addition, Raederle's shapechanger heritage echoes the common fantasy treatment of women as alien creatures until tamed by love.

Raederle's problem is learning to accept and control the powers she was born with, whereas her male counterpart Morgon must learn his powers step by step. This distinction between acquired and inborn ability or knowledge marks many fantasies by and about women. As mentioned earlier, Mopsa begins to know things spontaneously when she reaches a certain level of maturity, and this knowledge is of a sort that cannot be explained to Jack. The fantasies are here echoing a common perception of women as intuitive, men as logical.

Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, examining this idea in a cultural context, suggests two explanations. Women's knowledge is perceived as illogical and unsystematic, she suggests, because cultures do not develop complex categories for women's activities as they do for men's: “It is because men enter the world of articulated social relations that they appear to us as intellectual, rational, or instrumental; and the fact that women are excluded from that world makes them seem to think and behave in another mode” (30). Women appear to acquire their knowledge spontaneously because they have been learning it by imitation since infancy, whereas “a man's experience lacks this continuity; he may be wrenched from the domestic sphere in which he spent his earliest years, by means of rituals or initiations that teach him to distrust or despise the world of his mother, to seek his manhood outside the home” (28).

Although women in fantasies are represented as possessing this intuitive understanding, to rely entirely on such knowledge would leave them reproducing the lives of their mothers. Some additional knowledge is required if the cycle is to be broken, and, because men have always had to break away from the maternal world, the heroines of fantasy borrow knowledge from them. Already knowing of continuity, duty, and the submersion of the self, they must learn of individuality and rebellion; hence Ged gives to the priestess Arha (translated as “the eaten one”) her birth name of Tenar. Hence Wirrun givens to the Yunggamurra, who has no identity from her race, the individual name of Murra.

Armed with a double knowledge, these heroines can grow into mature, independent women and sometimes into magic-workers and queens. They are free to choose their roles, although they may have been fated to those roles all along, as Mopsa was fated to rule over her realm. If she had merely acquiesced to her fate and gone meekly to the land of the fairies who had been turned into deer, they would never have been freed from their enchantment. The spell required that “they were to remain in the disguise of deer till a queen of alien birth should come to them against her will” (328). Mopsa's rebellion made her the queen they needed.

In a few very recent works, women characters come of age in ways different from that mapped out in Mopsa the Fairy. No male characters are required to initiate the plots of Diana Wynne Jones's The Spellcoats, Virginia Hamilton's Justice and Her Brothers, and Suzette Haden Elgin's Ozark Trilogy. Nor are their women characters portrayed as something other than human to begin with, though they may grow into something greater than human.

Responsible of Brightwater, the heroine of Elgin's Ozark Trilogy, is on center stage from the beginning. She needs no man to teach her independence. Fourteen years old at the beginning of the series, she possesses an adolescent self-assurance not always short of arrogance. She has her magical powers well in hand and is fully supplied with female mentors in the persons of the Grannys [sic] who run households on the planet Ozark. Ozark society is organized in a fashion derived from its earthly namesake: men and women inhabit largely separate spheres, with the men handling politics, feuds, food raising, and major magical spells, and the women being concerned with household maintenance, child rearing, the preservation of knowledge, and small bits of “Granny Magic.” What the men do not know is that there is always one woman, always named Responsible, who is the “meta-magician” of Ozark. She can do anything the male Magicians of Rank can do and more. She is the channel through which magical powers reach the magicians. The Grannys know all this, but they have been content for generations let the men think they run things: the attitude is that male egos are too frail to handle too much truth.

Here is how one Granny explains the difference between the sexes:

“If,” she said, “a man does something properly, that's an accident. That's the first thing. As for the sorry messes they make in the ordinary way of things, that's to be expected, and not to be held against them—they can't help it. That's the second thing. And the third thing—and this is to be well-remembered—is that no man must ever know the first two things. …”

“And a woman?” one of the little girls had asked timidly. “How about a woman?”

The Granny had gripped her cane till her knuckles gleamed like pearls. “There is nothing,” she said in a terrible voice like ice grinding together, “more despicable than a woman who cannot Cope!”

(Jubilee 259)

Within this separate but unequal system, a woman can reach a state of considerable maturity and even power, so Elgin can write about Responsible of Brightwater without relying on a male hero to set the story into motion or to act as a catalyst in her maturation. The quest that takes up the first book and sets the seal of her adulthood is her own idea. No man names her, either; that is a task for Grannys and one of the most important aspects of their magic. However, coming of age also includes coming to terms with sexuality, either outright or in symbolic guise.

One man on Ozark is a suitable match for Responsible: Lewis Motley Wommack the 33rd is handsome, charismatic, and as unorthodox as she. They meet and are attracted to one another, but her independence irks him. There is no room in the world view he has been taught for such a strong woman. They seduce one another, with different motivations, and along with sexual conjunction comes close psychic communion. For her, the experience is pleasurable:

Sure enough, it had been a kind of peace, a kind of wondrous rest, being with someone whose mind she could share as easily as she shared ordinary speech with everybody else. Like moving around in a place of columns and soft wind and—She brought herself up short. If there'd been words for what it was like, it wouldn't have been what it was. …

(Jubilee 367)

Wommack, however, does not like this invasion of his mind. Too proud simply to ask Responsible to get out, he calls in the Magicians of Rank to end it. They put Responsible into a magical sleep (Prince Charming in reverse), with disastrous results. Responsible is able to handle anything having to do with magic, but no satisfactory solution to love is available in a culture that treats men and women as separate species. Lewis Motley Wommack places Responsible and the planet into great peril that cannot be averted by any effort of the male Magicians. Instead, the problem is solved by two other young women, Responsible's sister Troublesome and the saintly Silverweb of McDaniels.

What Elgin has done is reverse the traditional distinction between men, who undergo ordeals and become fully adult, and women, who do not. Responsible, Troublesome, Silverweb, and the other young women go through ordeals, both ritual and real, and are ready to meet the obligations of adulthood. The men, though, are too well protected by the Grannys and other women. They live their lives in a pleasant illusion of mastery. Unlike most earlier writers of fantasy, Elgin does not treat the society of women as something to be escaped or outgrown. Although Responsible has negative role models in her mother and in the one renegade Granny, Granny Leeward, she is generally well supported and instructed by the women she meets. Granny Leeward, and not Lewis Motley Wommack or the Magicians of Rank, is her chief adversary because she is a woman: she knows the true state of things and still chooses mischief, whereas the men are simply blundering as usual. Elgin treats men, not women, as a semi-alien race. Like the mules (an intelligent native species outwardly resembling our mules and condescending to be used as beasts of burden), men are capricious and balky. Both can be managed but not really communicated with. The mules are generally considered to have more sense.

No earlier fantasy that I know of is told so squarely from a woman's perspective. The world of Ozark incorporates the rituals, institutions, and insights that early anthropologists thought women lacked. Having shown that women do indeed come of age, Elgin next points out the necessity of adapting society to accommodate the resulting adult woman. Responsible of Brightwater deserves the company of a man who will not confuse communion with invasion or courtesy with capitulation.

The stories discussed here are not for women only. Arha, Raederle, and Responsible of Brightwater are androgynous in the same way and to the same extent that Frodo and Ged are, or, if they are not, I as a male reader have no right to talk about them. By writing about the experience of women, women writers display for our understanding truths about both men and women. In living imaginatively through the initiation rite of a fantasy heroine, a reader adds that heroine's experience to her own or his own. We need all the models we can find for such a hard-won attribute as maturity.

Works Cited

Abel, Elizabeth, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland, eds. The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development. Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press of New England, 1983.

Brownstein, Rachel M. Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels. New York: Viking, 1982.

Elgin, Suzette Haden. The Ozark Trilogy, consisting of Twelve Fair Kingdoms, The Grand Jubilee, and And Then There'll Be Fireworks. Book Club Edition. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981.

Eliade, Mircea. Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper, 1958.

Hamilton, Virginia. Justice and her Brothers. New York: Greenwillow, 1978.

Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Reinventing Womanhood. New York: Norton, 1979.

Ingelow, Jean. Mopsa the Fairy. In A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens; and Other Victorian Fairy Tales by John Ruskin, W. M. Thackeray, George MacDonald, and Jean Ingelow. Selected by U. C. Knoepflmacher. New York: Bantam, 1983.

Jacobs, Joseph. English Folk and Fairy Tales. 3rd ed. Revised. New York: Putnam's, n.d.

Jones, Diana Wynne. The Spellcoats. New York: Atheneum, 1979.

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Ed. Susan Wood. New York: Putnam's, 1979.

———. The Tombs of Atuan. New York: Atheneum, 1971.

———. A Wizard of Earthsea. Berkeley: Parnassus, 1968.

McKillip, Patricia A. Heir of Sea and Fire. New York: Ballantine, 1977.

———. The Riddle-Master of Hed. New York: Ballantine, 1976.

Norton, Andre. “On Writing Fantasy.” Fantasists on Fantasy. Ed. Robert Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski. 1971. Rpt. New York: Avon, 1984. 154-61.

———. Year of the Unicorn. New York: Ace, 1965.

Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist. “Woman, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview.” Woman, Culture, and Society. Ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1974.

Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1960.

Woolf, Virginia. Orlando; a Biography. New York: Harcourt, 1928.

Wrightson, Patricia. The Dark Bright Water. New York: Atheneum, 1979.

———. The Ice Is Coming. New York: Atheneum, 1977.