[In the following essay, Franko reexamines the feminist themes and narrative techniques of The Beginning Placein light of Le Guin's later more explicit feminist stance.]

The concept [of] “attentive love” … designates a cognitive capacity—attention—and a virtue love.… Attention lets difference emerge without searching for comforting commonalities, dwells upon the other, and lets otherness be. Acts of attention strengthen a love that does not clutch at or cling to the beloved but lets her grow. To love a child without seizing or using him, to see the child’s reality with the patient loving eye of attention—such loving and attention might well describe the separation of mother and child from the mother’s point of view

—Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking

“Why can’t they say [what they mean]—It isn’t fair [said Irena]. For all I know they’re just sending you out as a—I don’t know. A scapegoat. A—” But she could not think of the word she wanted, that meant something given up as an offering.

“They’re stuck,” [Hugh] said. “They can’t do what they have to do.”

—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Beginning Place

“To be powerful,” comments Sara Ruddick in her study of maternal thinking, “is to have the individual strength or the collective resources to pursue one’s pleasure and projects” （37）. By this definition mothers are too often powerless to pursue their pleasures and projects—burdened as so many are by poverty and violence, burdened as virtually all are with our “culture’s contempt for [the work of] mothers” （37）. Ruddick thus situates her analysis of the “acts of attention” fundamental to maternal thought and practice in a real world where mothers get “stuck” （Le Guin, BP 127） and, lacking the individual strength to overcome the dearth of collective resources, are unable to do what they want to do, or what they need to do.

This “stuckness” describes the dilemma of mothers in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Beginning Place （1980）—an ambitious novel of two worlds, two fictional modes, and two young people that was much admired in reviews and in a few critical essays. These responses also typically present the novel, for all of its beauty, as posing a puzzle, one that remains enigmatic despite illuminating readings of Beginning Place as a commentary both on the proper uses of fantasy （Attebery） and on the struggles of adolescents with psychic and physical incest （McLean; Spivack）.¹ I suggest that if we revisit the rich foregrounds and backgrounds of meaning in Beginning Place in light of the increasingly feminist turn that Le Guin’s writing has taken in the past fifteen to twenty years, we will better appreciate and understand the “multiplexity” （McLean’s apt term） of this narrative and of the developing feminist ethos of its author. The Beginning Place may not be as explicitly feminist as, for example, Always Coming Home （1985） or Tehanu （1990）: yet in its haunting, gnomic way it anticipates their thorough critiques of “patriarchy” and their feminist reshaping of narrative.

Although it details the experiences of adolescents “on their way to becoming responsible human beings,” this young-adult novel is more concerned than critics have noticed with the “reality of the mother’s experience” （Le Guin, “Fisherwoman’s Daughter” 229）. Certainly The Beginning Place depicts the dangers and difficulties experienced by adolescents when their mothers cannot separate from them via the attentive love that allows differentiation to be a new stage in relationship.² Yet Le Guin depicts these problems as tragic for the mother and for the society as well as for the child. Furthermore—and this is the enabling conceit of my reading—Le Guin fashions a narrative where the storyteller has the power to do for her young protagonists what their mothers cannot. I thus read The Beginning Place as a special kind of speech act: at once the storyteller’s act of attentive love for the “other” and her affirmation of the key role such maternal praxis plays in the development of the child/emerging adult. The storyteller acts with attention toward her protagonists Irena Pannis and Hugh Rogers—young adults who need to recognize and value their own subjectivity, their own desires and goals, so that they can “unstick” themselves from a sad, dangerous stasis and risk “the reaching out to the dissimilar Other which is the beginning of mature love” （Attebery 241）.

Of course this authorial power to act attentively lies （as Le Guin might pun） in fiction—in this case, especially in the manipulation of point of view and genre. A third- person recorder （an avatar of Ruddick’s attentive maternal thinker whom I call the storyteller） conveys the outer/inner reality of Hugh and Irena, who emerge as the “You” and “I” of a quest for a social-psychic beginning place.³ In the first eight chapters, the angle of vision alternates between Hugh （chapters I, 3, etc.） and Irena （chapters 2,4, etc.）. This alternation proves crucial in two ways. Readers first meet Hugh through Hugh’s reality and Irena through Irena’s perspective—thus the storyteller’s respect for the realness of her protagonists’ subjective experience. Once Hugh and Irena have met, readers meet each of them again through the eyes of a subject viewing a stranger-other: we see Hugh through Irena’s eyes and vice versa. Despite the antagonism that characterizes the early stage of their friendship. Irena and Hugh observe one another with an increasingly attentive eye. The “quirky individuality” （McLean 141） that readers have enjoyed thus results from successive acts of attention: the storyteller for each of her protagonists, her two protagonists for each other.⁴ After Hugh and Irena become allies, friends, and lovers, there is a final permutation of point of view. In the three sections of the ninth and last chapter we get Hugh’s angle, then Irena’s, and then a final section （mostly dialogue） where neither angle is dominant—a quiet yet powerful culmination of the storyteller’s enactment of inter- subjectivity through narrated angles of vision.

Critics have not remarked on this crafting of point of view, focusing their comments on the novel’s striking juxtaposition of realism and fantasy. Attebery and McLean explain their ambivalent responses to this hybridity in reference to Le Guin’s manipulation of the fantasy mode, arguing that fantasy proves powerful for depicting relations between conscious and unconscious, but a bit lacking in other ways—too cryptic in its symbolism or not wholly satisfying in its rendering either of the secondary fantasy world （Attebery 242） or of the characters’ development （McLean 140-41）. Yet the hybridity becomes newly intelligible and satisfying when we consider how its mongrel landscape serve a storyteller who, although primarily concerned with her young protagonists, is also sympathetic toward their mothers.

The “borderlands” of my title is implicated in the cultural construction of adolescence as liminal “place,” but it refers specifically to a dialogue of contrasting geographics of being/becoming in Beginning Place. On the one hand, borderlands are a literal and psychic suburbia that trap the protagonists and their mothers into a twisted love based on an economy of silence and fear. Yet borderlands also emerge as places of meetings, of creative （re）crossings: such is the borderland of “intersubjective reality, where subject meets subject” （Benjamin 98）, and such is the discursive “space” of Le Guin’s novel. Her storyteller employs a satirical realism that stresses how children and their parents are constructed by socioeconomic and patriarchal-Oedipal relations—relations that tend to be of the buy-and-sell, subject-appropriating-of-object variety. Yet she also exploits the resources of fantasy to validate the agency and the “willingness to love” （129） of her protagonists.⁵ The resulting hybrid text functions for the emerging selves of Hugh and Irena as a “holding space”—a space for play, for creation, and for affirming one’s own desires while discovering the subjectivity of other selves—a space made safe, risky, and thus free by the paradoxes of attentive love.⁶

The “real world” is portrayed in Beginning Place as North American suburbia: clock-time- measured island of plastic and concrete, habitat of troubled children and their troubled mothers, women socioeconomically and/or emotionally dependent on men who are gone, dead, or problematically present. This world is juxtaposed with a fantasy realm of slow time, sweet running water, twilit silent forests, a homey mountaintown （harboring contradictions in its family values）, and, as in suburbia, a desired, absent city. Irena Pannis and Hugh Rogers （of the “real world”） want to move to the city but are stuck in suburbia, in a powerless “parenting” that is also a delayed childhood. They feel compelled to help their mothers while knowing they can’t; meanwhile, each feels homeless, parentless, and thus powerless to move on with their lives. “She [Irena] had no home … there was no room … anywhere that was hers” （91）. “I was born without parents,” thinks Hugh bitterly at a particularly low point, “I haven’t got anything and I’m not anything” （107）.

In moments of great need each stumbles on a “gate” from suburbia into the twilit forest where they will eventually meet. Irena finds it several years before the novel opens, running in fear from violence against women （her girlfriend raped, herself nearly raped, and her mother beaten up by Irena’s stepfather）. She learns the language of the twilight world, regards it as her “ain [own] country” （110）, and at first resents and fears Hugh’s presence there. Hugh finds the gate in the opening chapter when he too is running from fear—fear of stasis, of self-alienation, and of the dishonesty of his relations with his mother, who is a bad mother, a castrating bitch （i.e., this is the misogynist type she resembles）. Yet the narrator who conveys Hugh’s reality also contextualizes the awfulness of his mother, who thus emerges pitiable as well as reprehensible—a flawed human unable to transcend a flawed environment.

Through Hugh’s experience as checker in Sam’s Thrift-E-Mart and as pedestrian, suburbia emerges as a site for buying/selling objects, guarding borders, and disguising truths. At work the people Hugh serves become “hands giving money, taking money”—as does Hugh himself （1）. After each day of handling “things for sale and the money that bought them,” Hugh feels empty “because his hands never held anything else, and yet kept none of it” （2）. Hugh walks home through a landscape of barriers, like the so-called freeway, a most effective barrier for walkers, and of lies—street and neighborhood names falsely promising “heights,” “valleys,” and “oaks.” Twenty years old, with ambitions to move to the city and go to library school, Hugh instead moves with his mother from one suburban wasteland to another. His father left them years ago, and the son has tried with consistent feelings of inadequacy to take his father’s place without becoming his father, the male who runs away. He also lives in a climate of fear. Hugh’s mother is controlled by fear—fear of inner cities, of solitude, of any change that she does not control. Currently, Mrs. Rogers （who lacks a first name） has a “good” job with a loan company （thus like Hugh a cog in the machinery of buying/selling） and has even made a woman friend who shares her interest in the occult. She sometimes spends evenings with her new friend （a daring break in her routine）, but she can’t stand to come home to an empty apartment, so Hugh arranges to be there. Mrs. Rogers does not thank him for putting his life on hold to suit her: thanks would require acknowledgment of her fear and of her son’s separate reality. She and Hugh never talk about the fear that structures their lives. And far from “dwelling” appreciatively on Hugh’s “otherness” and “letting [it] be” （Ruddick 122）, his mother broadcasts her dislike of his masculine difference from herself. He’s too tall and heavy, takes up too much room in their cramped, expensive apartment: he makes too much noise eating, perhaps even breathing （103-04）.

Mrs. Rogers is clearly a bad mother, as all previous readings of Beginning Place point out. Yet Le Guin’s storyteller gives us glimpses of a woman who exceeds the stereotype （of Bad Mother） and whose anger is directed partly, and part consciously, at herself. When Hugh starts to separate from her and their unhappy stasis, she responds by refusing to speak to him and by staying out later at night with her one friend: “She came in at ten-thirty, looking thin, grim, a little disheveled in her cotton print dress.” When Hugh tries to talk about their taboo subjects, addressing her as “Mother,” with “some authority of passion in his voice,” she devastates him by replying. “There’s no use you calling me that” （106）. Her statement, made, we’re told, in “a clear, dry tone” （suggesting lucidity and irony as well as heartlessness） is not only an act of cruelty toward Hugh but also an indictment of herself, of her powerlessness, and her only way to effect the needed separation from her son. She can’t separate from Hugh with loving attentiveness so she does so cruelly. Her diction ironically underlines the poverty of her outlook—there’s “no use” in a mothering coopted by use-value and bordered by suburbia’s fear and lies.

Irena seems more independent than Hugh: she owns a car, drives it to her job in the city, and doesn’t live at home, but shares an apartment. Yet although she wants to get a place of her own in the city, like Hugh, she stays in suburbia, convinced that her mother needs her close by. Like Hugh, Irena has grown up fatherless; and, as it is for Hugh, this experience is linked to the social-personal powerlessness of mothers. Nick Pannis died of leukemia about eighteen years ago, leaving his young widow with two children, Irena, and a younger brother. Mary Hanson, Irena’s mother, is now thirty-nine years old, has had four more children and three miscarriages, and is married to the progenitor—a big good-looking man （Irena’s stepfather, Victor Hanson） who sometimes sells illegal drugs, sometimes gets drunk and hits Mary, who remains loyal to him. This loyalty stems not from the emotional and sexual fulfillment that was the “central glory” of Mary and Nick Pannis’s marriage （75） but rather, apparently, from a patriarchal-capitalist ideology—wives belong to their husbands, children to their parents. Yet, unlike Hugh and Mrs. Rogers, Irena and Mary have a loving relationship: the mother recognizes her daughter’s “otherness” by nicknaming her Irena, which becomes the name her daughter associates with her own self, in contrast to the legal name of Irene （71, 85, 140）. Further, the daughter is able to help her mother in some significant ways: she persuades Mary to use the birth- control pills that her second husband forbids （71）. Despite their mutual love. Irena and Mary’s relations are, like Hugh’s and his mother’s, ruled by silence and fear: “tenderness … replac[es] honesty between them” （74）. Irena knows that Mary’s loyalty to husband and children is the glue that holds her life together: she doesn’t want to name the contradictions in this loyalty （73）. Thus Irena hasn’t told Mary （or anyone） that Victor tried to rape her when Irena still lived with them. Similarly, Mary doesn’t really want to involve her daughter in her troubles, so she doesn’t call Irena when Victor gets drunk and potentially violent. Instead, she urges Irena to move to the city and thus nearly admits, herself, the contradictions of her outlook: this “dump” of suburbia is “right” for her, the mother, but not for her daughter （75）. Irena has decided never to risk intimacy with men—because of the violence against women she has experienced and witnessed—but also because she is afraid of becoming her mother, this loving, sexual woman whose shared “central glory” ended at age twenty-two （when Nick Pannis died） and who now carries out the duties of wife and mother “without desire.” “I am the daughter of a ghost,” thinks Irena—not of her dead father but of the living mother she is fearfully, lovingly contemplating （74）.

So Hugh and Irena are both stuck in suburbia, in the realm of disenfranchised mothers, and in adolescence—unable to get to the desired “city,” which represents the place where they can be sexual, loving adults. Critics have tended to focus on a gendered complementarity in Hugh’s and Irena’s “stuckness”; as Spivack puts it, their journey toward the “treasure of their own sexual nature” （123） has been “deeply troubled by their unhappy experiences with their parents of the opposite sex” （119）—Hugh with his mother, Irena with her step-father. McLean names their dilemma more starkly the threat of incest （133）. Without wishing to downplay either the threats of rape for Irena or of psychological emasculation for Hugh, I am arguing that Irena and Hugh’s stuckness is also, and importantly, a variation of what Adrienne Rich calls （after the poet Lynn Sukenick） “matrophobia.” Rich defines “matrophobia” as “the fear not of one’s mother or of motherhood but of becoming one’s mother”—a fear stemming from socioeconomic and psychological facts of our culture: “The mother stands for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr” （Rich 237, 238）. Irena and Hugh try to help their mothers cope with victimization and/or unfreedom, while fearfully seeing themselves victimized and enthralled like their mothers—Irena by violence against women, Hugh （in trying not to be the man who abandons his mother） by isolation and immobility. Thus in the real world of Beginning Place, an adolescent’s love for her—or his—mother is inseparable from matrophobia, and this fear of becoming one’s mother blocks progress toward becoming one’s “ain” self.

The twilight world provides a landscape, a set of characters, and a quest that together symbolize Irena’s and Hugh’s （un）conscious fears and needs. “The refuge found for them by their unconscious minds”—Attebery’s apt use of a passive construction in his naming of the fantasy realm （238） implies its basic but little-analyzed feature. The twilight world is both coextensive with and more and other than the collective and individual unconscious of its “real world” visitors. Its status in the narrative is unresolvedly ambiguous and irreducibly multiple—its existence at once for Irena and Hugh and for itself. This flexible integrity makes the twilight world a borderland where Irena and Hugh can grow out of matrophobia and related ills. To see this, we have to look at Irena and Hugh’s relation to the landscape, a relationship that predates encounters with other humans there.

The twilight world is more real than suburbia in at least one way: it is “the country” （6）, with cool air, tall trees, delicious running water, and loose dirt growing a heterogeneity of pungent life. This rich materiality allows Irena and Hugh a fortunate “regression” to the pleasurable responsiveness of infancy a responsiveness to the world that includes delight in one’s body. The twilight world is where Irena and Hugh enjoy being embodied, an important ground for enjoying their sexuality. Irena has delighted in the movement of her body here for years in “the endless dance” （29）, part of a ritual with which she inaugurates each visit. Hugh’s senses have wakened more recently. When he first stumbles into the twilight world, he is as encased as the products he sells—those items whose “shells” both litter and resemble the “crushed white rocks” lining the “patches” of dirt in suburbia’s housing developments （2）. Hugh’s first sniff of the twilight world, however, reminds him that “the olfactory part of [his] brain … [is] alive and immense” （6）. As he returns for hikes and swims, he enjoys the strength of a body he before only tolerated as a necessary encumbrance.

Irena’s and Hugh’s physical joy in the twilight world is qualitatively different from simplistic praise of the “natural,” including “natural” sexuality. The character linked implicitly to Nature is Victor, Irena’s stepfather, who believes that birth-control pills harmfully “bloc[k]” the male’s “fertile material up in the glands” （73）. He loves his body: “Victor was a big, well-made, handsome man, much concerned with his body and its functions and appearance, a central reality of which the rest of the world and other people were mere reflections without substance: the self-concern of the athlete or the invalid, though he was neither, being healthy and inactive” （71）. For Victor, the only real, embodied subject is himself: he is a caricature of adulthood as autonomy. Victor’s solipsistic self-love lends itself to casual brutality toward others he doesn’t quite believe in: in contrast, in the twilight world, Irena and Hugh enjoy their bodies in relation to an “other” of materiality that, far from being a “mere reflectio[n] without substance,” is a reality both address as “You.” When we first see Irena enter the twilight world, she “kisse[s] the dirt, pressing her face against it like a suckling baby”: this and her subsequent actions contrast significantly with her step-father’s “self-concern”: “She stood up and reached up at full stretch toward the sky, then went to the water’s edge, knelt, washed her face and hands and arms noisily, drank, answered the water’s loud, continual singing. ‘So you are, so I am, so.’ She sat down crosslegged … shut her eyes to contain her joy.… This was the place where she was herself, her own” （29-30）. Irena’s addressing （“answering”） the water as “you” is as crucial to her joy in being her “own” self as is her getting nourishment, “like a suckling baby,” from kissing the dirt. In a comparable passage, Hugh addresses water-earth-rocks-trees as “you”; his declaration of communion with this other—“I am you” （55）—fuses the two gestures in Irena’s scene: the childlike reliance on the other with the mature recognition of the other’s subjectivity.⁷

Such scenes where they experience the twilight world as both for them and for itself have several ramifications. As though the storyteller is granting them a lost birthright. Irena and Hugh recapitulate an early stage of development: the recognizing of an other （a parent or other caregiver） as a self while being so recognized by that other. Having felt like failed caregivers of their mothers and like children without parents or homes, each here relates to a “maternal” you （the twilight world, the “ain” country） who doesn’t need them but who welcomes them, relishing both their existence and its own. Thus Irena’s answer to the water “So you are, so I am.” Their pleasure in their bodies, and their future relations with “nature” and with other humans, rest on this ground of mutual recognition, of subject-to-subject relationship. And this orientation is not a beginning place for them alone. Irena and Hugh arguably extend their acts of attention into cultural practices—I’m referring to how both enact their recognition that the water of the twilight land is a “You” and thus “holy” by making a ritual of their first drink, each visit （108-09）. The I You （or I Thou） relationship Irena and Hugh assume with the twilight world thus implies a cultural ethos better than Victor’s solipsism and suburbia’s insularity.⁸ But this is also a beginning place in the sense that Irena and Hugh have to “move on” through their overdetermined quest. Their relation to water and dirt is submerged, but not forgotten—the ritual first drink renewing an implied promise between them and any world.

When Hugh and Irena engage its human inhabitants, the tangible, sniffable reality of the twilight world recedes. Foregrounded are its “artificial” qualities. It is silent here except for the rushing water—no birds and no sun or stars—this twilight is unreal because it isn’t a threshold between daylight and darkness—or so Hugh sees it （63）, his impressions reflecting his need for a “real” threshold while suggesting that the stasis of suburbia is made visible as this world’s stuck twilight.

Human society on this quiet, half-lit stage in some ways merits Attebery’s description—“insubstantial, conventionalized fairy tale world” （241）. Tembreabrezi, or Mountaintown, has become Irena’s second home and is the only town we see, although others punctuate forest and grazing lands, and in the north lies a great city. Their society vaguely feudal and idyllic, people, until recently, have been content and productive. Mountaintown society also resembles fairy tales and medieval romance in the “tasks” that there engross Hugh and Irena: pursuing both monsters and idealized erotic love. Mountaintown is facing extinction—people paralyzed by a fear that fixes them at home, unable to travel and practice the trade vital to their economy. Hugh, and less directly Irena, are called upon as the outsiders who can find and destroy the fear. Meanwhile Hugh has fallen in love with Allia, the daughter of one patriarch （Lord Horn）, and Irena is suffering disillusionment in her longstanding love for another, younger patriarch—Dou Sark, the “Master” of Mountaintown.

The narrative space where Irena and Hugh accept a quest they scarcely understand, kill a monster, and find truer love with each other is a borderland of prosaic realism, stylized fairy tale, murky myth,⁹ and surreal nightmare. This borderland is not only the place where Irena and Hugh meet their individual （Jungian） “shadows,” nor does it only mirror, poignantly and satirically, their real-world dilemmas. Rather, these functions are embedded in a larger, “twilit” context that features cultural shadows and sociohistoric monsters. The border between this background and the foreground of Irena’s and Hugh’s quest is fluid. Nonetheless—and because the reader’s information is more or less limited to Hugh’s and Irena’s perceptions—this embedding context constitutes an excess of half told satiric and utopian meaning. The storyteller is doing for her protagonists what no mother could: creating a scenario where their modestly contemporary and personal “strength and need” （170） can circumvent the habitual configurations （“archetypes”） of a very old and hostile unconscious of patriarchy.

Mothers do not figure as main characters in Mountaintown, but the fear and silence that form the currency of Irena’s and Hugh’s relations with their mothers in suburbia are replayed in the “economic” crisis of this feudal society. Instead of two powerless, stuck, middle-aged women, there are two middle-aged men, unmarried and of ambiguous authority, who, unequally mired in fear and tradition, disagree about the right way to involve Hugh and Irena in their community’s need. The proposed quest is murky with multiple motives and a lack of communication between generations literalized in the language barrier: Hugh knows but a handful of words, while Irena’s considerable knowledge still only allows her to make tentative translations of crucial conversations between Master Sark and herself and between Sark and Lord Horn. Thus emerges, sketchily, a history of sacrificing children （usually females, apparently） to an unnamed menace—a history marked by such gothic artifacts as iron rings that bind the “bait” （149） and family portraits that reveal the “withered” right hands of “scowling” patriarchs who made “the bargain” and paid “the price” with “what they love” （119-20）.

Supporting the tradition of sacrifice is the “Master,” saturnine Dou Sark, who argues that the survival of Mountaintown depends on it, scorning critics of either sex as foolish old women （118）. Meanwhile Sark seems both excited and angered by the bargain’s sado-masochism, associates the bargain’s reestablishment with a higher status “mastery” for himself （the family portraits hang on his walls） and is ready to serve up Irena and/or Hugh as dinner for a monster （119, 92, 126）. Lord Horn’s position is as laconic as Sark’s but more complex. His opposition to Sark seems to be that the bargain is a “delusory option” （Hugh’s phrase for the choices available to him in suburbia [103]）, a nonchoice that produces what it supposedly alleviates: a rule of fear that in turn demands more sacrifice. Although Horn does not buy this option, he and everyone in Mountaintown have been sold to it （124）. Yet, if Lord Horn cannot end the cycle, he seems to try to subvert it. While Sark angles to make Hugh and Irena useful victims. Lord Horn asks for help from these outsiders whom he apparently associates with intersubjectivity rather than mastery, mentioning to Irena that the visitors from her world come as “One and other, other and one” （87）. In his respect and compassion for the young questers Lord Horn shows himself to be a canny “maternal thinker.” He gives Hugh his sword but focuses on Irena （who speaks his language and currently needs more encouragement）, addressing her as “daughter,” praising her courage, and comforting her with the suggestion that “There is more than one road to the City” （123）, an aphorism repeated as the last line of the novel.

When Irena and Hugh leave Mountaintown to seek the monster （or dragon, its more distinguished posthumous name）, they are poised between Lord Horn’s trust in their cooperative agency and Master Sark’s hopes for their destruction. Although they haven’t understood the dispute of the patriarchs, they are drawn to the “delusory options” offered by Mountaintown’s tradition of sacrifice. If Sark, from the perspective of sacrificer, sees the bargain as a necessarily bloody social contract that moreover promises him mastery over life, death, and otherness, Irena and Hugh, from the perspective of potential sacrifice, half-consciously see the bargain as a solution to their conflicting fears and desires, especially their love for their mothers, their matrophobia, and their desires and fears to live their own lives.

Irena and Hugh are tempted to think that self-fulfillment comes through self- sacrifice—a notion that informs （for example） ideologies of motherhood, of childhood, and of the idealized erotic love into which Irena and Hugh recently have been initiated. Critics have not commented on how Irena’s and Hugh’s mostly fantasy relations with their beloveds resemble their relations with their mothers—chiefly in the rule （or “price”） of loving in silence and in the desire to be of service to the beloved/the mother （see, e.g., 74, 82, 90, 92, 102）. The quest that could make them food for the dragon arguably symbolizes for Irena and Hugh the merging of their matrophobic love for their mothers with their erotic love for Sark and Allia. What they must resist is the delusion that the role of victim offers a transcendent experience: a fulfillment both sexual and self-affirming with a freedom from matrophobia and its attendant guilt, since by assuming the mother’s place of “victim … martyr” （Rich 238） they would have no “room” for fear or regret.

Fortunately, by keeping each other company on the quest, they are able to choose the pleasures and responsibilities of life and of subject-to-subject relationship over the attractions of an “erotic” or noble death. Irena has already become disillusioned with her submissive, intense, yet nonintimate attachment to Sark. Strengthened by Lord Horn’s encouragement, she is able to urge Hugh from his gentle determination to self-destruct. Together they track the monster to its womb tomb cave and vanquish it—Irena throwing rocks to lure it out, Hugh stabbing it with the sword, Irena pushing its heavy corpse off Hugh （who has a few broken ribs） and subsequently leading him back to the gate, guided by the water. Thus they save Mountaintown, which now may be free to invent new negotiations between children and adults, fear and desire, conscious and unconscious. Their deed also frees their sexuality, enabling them to risk intimacy. They make love a decent distance from the monster’s carcass. Once back in their commonplace reality. Hugh and Irena friends, lovers, “married,” as Hugh puts it （177, 183）—are finally on their way to the city, to an apartment over a garage.

But what did they kill? Seemingly anybody and everything feared or afraid. The creature has a big, heavy, white body—like both Hugh and Victor although twice their size; it is blind and virtually faceless: it gobbles; its trail smells male to Hugh, like semen （151）, while Irena views its dead body as female, with “a woman’s arms” and two pairs of “breasts, pointed like a sow’s teats” （156）. Yet in addition to its postpubescent traits, the creature is also “wrinkled,” and it howls and sobs with hunger, need, pain—like a baby. Certainly it represents aspects of Hugh, Irena, and the adults in their lives （both worlds） （see, e.g., Spivack 121）; certainly it shows fears about sexuality （see McLean 136-37）. Moreover, since it suggests father, mother, and baby, the creature arguably is both a collectively unconscious shadow of the patriarchal family and the persistent bogey of a world that does little to help children grow into adults who like living and who embrace response-ability: “Two people are always sort of responsible for each other”—Hugh’s remark that aptly names his and Irena’s actions on the quest （149）.

Anything as greedy, needy, and out of control as the monster must be hidden? worshiped? killed? acknowledged? In its blindness, the monster is bound to be Oedipal but as such is also importantly and “desolate[ly]” self-enclosed （145）—lonely and dangerous—“groping” （155） for a connection it can’t make because it lacks awareness of an other, of a “you” in relation to an “I” Further, in its terrifying combination of power and neediness, the monster is the disguised or silenced aspects of Irena’s and Hugh’s erotic dreams of Sark and Allia: it is what Master Sark and his forebears of the grim paintings clamp down under their rigid control and yet worship in their “bargains”: finally, it is a fitting emblem of the mother in patriarchy, who is both powerful parent and second class citizen, “dragon thing” （156） and sacrificed daughter. “All of us are her children,” says Master Sark of the long-ago-devoured daughter of his grandfather （124）. Irena extends this insight, referring to herself and/or Hugh as “dragonkiller[s]” and “child[ren] of the dragon” （160, 175）. Irena and Hugh have “killed” their matrophobia and the related delusory option of self-sacrifice and thus are able to separate from their mothers while remaining related to them. Yet the dead female dragon that Irena has seen and touched remains ambiguous, suggesting pessimistically that from the point of view of the child/emerging adult within patriarchy, the best available option may be to re-scapegoat the mother.

The spring must rise beneath the floor of the [dragon thing’s] cave [Irena surmised].

In her 1988 essay, “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter,” Le Guin muses on how her 1985 novel Always Coming Home emerged from a “rash attempt to imagine … a world … where the Hero and the Warrior are a stage adolescents go through on their way to becoming responsible human beings, [and] where the parent-child relationship is not forever viewed through the child’s eyes but includes the reality of the mother’s experience” （229）. The world of Always Coming Home includes a utopian society where women and mothers are as powerful as men and fathers and where being powerful—“hav[ing] the individual strength or the collective resources to pursue one’s pleasure and projects” （Ruddick 37）—does not necessitate mastery over others whose subjectivity is denied. I have been arguing, in effect, that The Beginning Place prefigures the utopian Always Coming Home by its sympathetic inclusion in a coming-of-age story of “the reality of the mother’s experience” and by its feminist critique of the familial-social ideologies of patriarchy—a critique that targets the unconscious of patriarchy.

Readers of Beginning Place seem to assume that its twilight world presents an ahistoric and universal （while at the same time Freudian/Jungian） unconscious, but three aspects of Le Guin’s hybrid text suggest otherwise. First, the borderland of fantasy and realist discourse that makes up the twilight world suggests that the unconscious plots and players that Irena and Hugh there meet are always-constructed if venerable “fictions”—powerfully linked to needs/desires but still made—or narrated. So perhaps archetypes do not resemble divine acts of special creation but rather are only more permanent variations of psychic narratives, evolving and mutating in relation to social, conscious reality. Secondly, the parodic aspect of the hybridity in which, for example, Master Sark and his grandfathers seem thinly, weirdly conventionalized suggests that Le Guin is satirizing the collective unconscious of patriarchy, making a critical fable of its history of secrets and sacrifices and proposing that its symbolic configurations, while still capable of fostering misery, are wearing out, no longer adequate for humanity’s communal narrations. Thirdly, the hybrid twilight realm harbors a utopian element that exceeds the status quo of the patriarchal unconscious. This excess emerges not only in Hugh’s and Irena’s I-Thou relation to each other and to the materiality of the twilight world, but also in elliptical accounts of “the City,” which include cryptic references to a positive feminine power.

I conclude, then, with speculations on what is perhaps the most enigmatic passage of an often enigmatic novel. The following exchange occurs just before Lord Horn and Master Sark have their dispute, when Horn gnomically is cheering up Irena.¹⁰

“Lord Horn … I wish I had gone to the city…”

“There is more than one road to the City,” he said.

“Were you ever there?” …

“.… I am called lord, because I have been there.…”

“Did you see the King?”

“…I saw the bright shadow of the King,” but the word was feminine so that it must mean the Queen or the Mother.…If I reach out my hand and touch him I will see clearly, she thought. The screen will be gone and I will stand both there and here. But in that knowledge I am destroyed.

Horn’s grey eyes said gently. Do not touch me, child.

（122-23）

The passage contains several puzzles, culminating in the indeterminable gender of the monarch and the avoided, apocalyptic shortcut to the city. The “City” and its accompanying metaphors of royalty and aristocracy （“I am called lord, because I have been there”） suggest subject to subject relations, that mutual recognition of You/Hugh and I/Irena into which Le Guin’s storyteller would like to shift unconscious energy. The Jungian sounding “bright shadow” of the King could indicate a positive unconscious aspect to patriarchy （in contrast to the bargaining of Mountaintown, etc.）: yet Irena’s subsequent realization that the word for King is feminine （and thus must mean Queen or Mother） overdetermines that reading beyond coherence. If the “bright shadow” of “Mother” lives in the City of desired intersubjective relations, any shadow of the unconscious of patriarchy has been left behind. And The Beginning Place would be another story, perhaps Always Coming Home （which doesn’t hold with big cities or royalty, however）. But these speculations push too hard at a “screen” that protects Irena’s and Hugh’s coming-of-age quest, the foreground of the twilight world, from being overwhelmed by the utopian-satiric background where the collective unconscious is narrating itself into alternative configurations.

Notes

1. Attebery, McLean, and Spivack are the only critics （that I’ve found） who treat Beginning Place in depth, and I have learned much from each of them.

2. I am here paraphrasing Nancy Chodorow: “Differentiation is not distinctness and separateness, but a particular way of being connected to others” （60）.

3. McLean apparently agrees that the sound that Hugh’s and Irena’s names make together evokes You （Hugh） and I （Irena） （138）.

4. For example, it is through Irena’s eyes that we see how Hugh’s clumsiness is part of his dignity （124）: it is only in Hugh’s （later） chapters that Irena’s name is spelled Irena rather Irene this because she has decided to share her preferred name with him （140）.

5. Attebery also emphasizes the way fantasy enables agency in Beginning Place, noting how just before Hugh discovers the twilight world, he finds himself involuntarily repeating “I can’t” but then, his “need takes him to a place where he can” （Attebery 237）.

6. I am relating Ruddick’s acts of attentive love to the notion of “holding space” from D. W. Winnicott, as discussed by Benjamin: “This space begins between mother and baby … and expands into … the transitional area … of play, creativity, and fantasy. The transitional space is suffused with the mother’s protection and one’s own freedom to create and imagine and discover” （94）.

7. If Hugh said instead, “You are me” （or, with an unlikely grammatical correctness, “You are I”）, his statement arguably would not be recognizing the integrity of the other, would in fact be a logical statement for Victor Hanson to make.

8. See Murphy for a discussion of the philosophical/political importance of trying to relate to the natural world as a speaking subject.

9. The best guide to Le Guin’s complex use of myth in Beginning Place is McLean, whose discussion of the labyrinth and the Minotaur are especially illuminating.

10. In her discussion of Lord Horn’s thematic importance, McLean makes the intriguing point that his name “recalls the gate of horn, in classical mythology, through which the god sent true dreams to mankind” （135）.

I am grateful to Alison Wheatley and Naomi Wood for their helpful responses to an earlier version of this essay.

Works Cited

Attebery, Brian. “The Beginning Place: Le Guin’s Metafantasy.” In Ursula K. Le Guin: Modern Critical Views. 1982. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.

Benjamin, Jessica. “A Desire of One’s Own: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Intersubjective Space.” In Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Ed. Teresa de Lauretis. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. 78-101.

Chodorow, Nancy. “Feminism and Difference: Gender, Relation, and Difference in Psychoanalytic Perspective.” Socialist Review 9, no. 4 （1979）.

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Beginning Place. New York, Harper, 1980.

“The Fisherwoman’s Daughter.” In Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York, Harper, 1989. 212-41.

McLean, Susan. “The Beginning Place: An Interpretation.” Extrapolation 24 （Summer 1983）: 130-42.

Murphy, Patrick D. “Prolegomenon for an Ecofeminist Dialogics.” In Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic. Ed. Dale M. Bauer and S. Jaret McKinstry. Albany: SUNY P. 1991. 39-56.

Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. 1976. New York: Bantam. 1977.

Ruddick, Sara. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. New York: Ballantine, 1989.

Spivack, Charlotte. Ursula K. Le Guin. Boston: Twayne, 1984.