SOURCE: “Unlearning Patriarchy: Ursula Le Guin's Feminist Consciousness in The Tombs of Atuan and Tehanu,” in Extrapolation, Vol. 36, No. 3, Fall, 1995, pp. 244-58.

The Writer at her work:
I see her walking
on a path through a pathless forest,
or a maze, a labyrinth.
As she walks she spins,
and the fine thread falls behind her
following her way,
telling
where she is going,
where she has gone.
Telling the story.
The line, the thread of voice,
the sentences saying the way.

This stanza from Ursula K. Le Guin’s poem “The Writer on, and at, Her Work” aptly describes Le Guin’s approach to writing. Not only is she a skillful writer who carefully spins and weaves the details of her stories, creating new worlds between the weft and warp of her paper and pen, but she also leaves a path for the reader to follow that traces where she has been in her life and suggests where she is going. Her changing views and deepening social and feminist consciousness are clearly reflected in both her fiction and nonfiction writings. Le Guin has been strongly influenced by both the changing social climate in the United States today and by the growing body of criticism on her work. In the introduction to her latest book of essays, Dancing at the Edge of the World, she says, “I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind” （vii）. Yet, her changes of mind—particularly her growing feminist perspective—are clearly reflected in both her fiction and nonfiction. This becomes particularly evident in a comparison of The Tombs of Atuan and its companion novel, written over a decade later, Tehanu.

In Feminism and Science Fiction, Sarah Lefanu has pointed out that “there is a simple anomaly, or contradiction, at the heart of Le Guin’s work. It features very few women; these are restricted either by biology or by stereotype … this is not unusual in science fiction; what is odd is that despite it, Ursula Le Guin should have such a feminist following” （132）. This contradiction is perhaps best explained by the fact that Le Guin’s work has not remained static. As the American feminist movement has grown and changed, so has Le Guin’s writing. Some critics, when considering her early writings—novels primarily produced in the 1960s—have complained that they represent little more than traditional, male-oriented science fiction written by a woman. But what most of them fail to acknowledge is the fact that although those novels may now be considered to “portray the preservation of the status quo” （Manlove 287） or to be too filled with male heroes who “act as dead weight at the centre of the novels” （Lefanu 137）, they were written nearly two decades ago, and they reflect the author’s early feminist leanings rather than the more developed feminism of her later novels. As Lefanu points out, most science fiction up until the 1970s reflected “what could be called masculine concerns, based around the central theme of space exploration and the development of technology: masculine concerns because access to these areas was effectively denied to women in the real world” （3）.

Even in the 1960s and 1970s, however, Le Guin’s novels did not fit into a basic science fiction mold. Unlike most of her male contemporaries, who emphasized science, technology, adventure, and space exploration, she generally reflected a more feminist approach to writing by focusing on characters, inner journeys, and human nature. She also has frequently explored themes of liminality, marginalization, and displacement. Her characters are often misfits, caught in between two worlds. Even the genres in which she most frequently chooses to write—science fiction, fantasy, and children’s books—are on the fringes of acceptability, often ignored or not taken seriously by many critics. She explains her attraction to these genres, stating, “I chose to work in such despised, marginal genres as science fiction, fantasy, young adult, precisely because they were excluded from critical, academic, canonical supervision, leaving the artist free” （Dancing 234）.

The Earthsea trilogy—A Wizard of Earthsea （1968）, The Tombs of Atuan （1971）, and The Farthest Shore （1972）—has been particularly criticized among her early works for not being feminist enough. Lefanu says, “In the Earthsea trilogy women feature first as witches and enchantresses who are either wicked or ignorant—or like Elfarran [a princess from legends] dead.… Or they are absent: not a girl to be seen amongst the hundred or more boys and young men of the wizards’ school” （132）. Cummins states that “Earthsea is a hierarchically structured world … only men can advance to positions of power. When writing in the Earthsea world, Le Guin was not questioning some of her culturally-shaped assumptions about the structure of relationships and the roles of women and men” （155）. Clearly, Earthsea is a prime example of what Le Guin herself calls the “perfect baboon patriarchy” of science fiction “with rich, ambitious, aggressive males at the top, then a great gap, and then at the bottom the poor, the uneducated, the faceless masses, and all the women” （Language 99）. All characters with any real authority or power in Earthsea are men. Two of the three novels do not even have a single significant female character. Women are rarely seen, almost never speak, and none but the most traditional of roles are prescribed for them. In an essay written in 1978 Le Guin retrospectively comments on and agrees with this criticism of her early work: “At the time （1963-4）, I could say with a perfectly clear conscience, indeed with self-congratulation, that I simply didn’t care whether my characters were male or female, so long as they were human. Why on earth should a woman have to write about only women? I was unselfconscious, without a sense of obligation: therefore self-confident, unexperimental, contentedly conventional. … I didn’t care whether my protagonist was male or female: well, that carefulness is culpably careless. The men take over” （Language 140-41）. Her reasons for this conventionality, however, are easily understood. As one of the few female writers of science fiction, there were few feminist models or precursors for her to draw on. As she points out later in the same essay, “It’s ever so much easier to write about men doing things, because most books about people doing things are about men … as Virginia Woolf pointed out, English prose is unsuited to the description of feminine being and doing, unless one to some extent remakes it from scratch. It is hard to break from tradition; hard to invent; hard to remake one’s mother tongue” （Language 141）. Interestingly enough, however, remaking the “mother tongue”—breaking from tradition and reinventing genre—is what Le Guin seems to have been gradually, steadily, doing for the last three decades.

In the creation of Earthsea, Le Guin admittedly did little experimentation with the social order. Although the world she created was vibrant, alive, and unique in many ways, with its own history, traditions, and laws, it essentially mirrored the social structure of the world in which she was raised. Le Guin’s early failure to criticize patriarchal social structure was certainly not unique among science fiction writers. Until recently this genre was seen mainly as a vehicle for intriguing characters and plot-driven novels rather than for social criticism. Lefanu points out that “science fiction has been notably silent on the concomitant subject of social development, particularly as regards the personal and political relationships between women and men” （3）, and Amis suggests that although science fiction writers seem to be willing to experiment with nearly all other elements of human experience, male/female relationships always remain the same and “science fiction writers are evidently satisfied with the sexual status quo” （quoted in Lefanu 4）. Le Guin, however, despite the conventionality in some of her works, was one of the first writers really willing to explore and experiment with gender and social roles. The Left Hand of Darkness, which depicts an androgynous society, was published in 1969 and is one of the hallmark novels of this kind of experimentation.

Additionally, despite all of their conventionality in the area of social structure, the Earthsea novels reflect a radical departure from the traditional science fiction/fantasy novel in the areas of character, theme, and plot. Although the patriarchal social structure of that world is highly familiar and traditional, the characters are not. In a genre dominated by macho-man heroes and Flash Gordon look-alikes, the main characters of Earthsea are clearly misfits. Ged, Arren, and Tenar （Earthsea’s main characters） are not cut-out, comic-book heroes. They are thoughtful, reflective, and often fallible. Although, like most science fiction works, each novel tells the story of an actual, physical journey or quest, the real focus of the story is on the character’s inner journey, something few science fiction writers have wanted to deal with.

Le Guin’s interest in Jungian theory is clearly reflected in these novels as each character undergoes an inner quest to confront the shadow, “the dark side of his soul, the unadmitted, the inadmissible,” the monster within （Le Guin, Language 60）. Bassnett claims that although Le Guin “has been criticized for the marginal role of women overall … the question of sex roles is not her main consideration here … her principal concern is to look at the way in which the individual of whatever sex faces the darkness and desolation within” （56）. While her peers were busy creating violent, action-oriented heroes, Le Guin’s characters, male as well as female, avoid violence at all cost, seek to maintain balance and equilibrium in their world, and prefer thought to action. They work hard to form and maintain close friendships, and they live simply with little or no material wealth. Clearly they do not espouse or support the traditional values of patriarchy such as domination, control, and conformity.

Although academic writers frequently discuss and criticize A Wizard of Earthsea and The Farthest Shore, The Tombs of Atuan, even though it received the Newbery Award, is almost completely ignored. It seems striking to me that no full treatment of this novel exists while the other two are discussed repeatedly. Significantly enough, this may be because The Tombs of Atuan features a female protagonist. Is it consequently considered to be less important and less worthy of comment by those writing on Le Guin’s work? Barrow points out that even most feminists have tended to “overlook The Tombs of Atuan [despite] its story of a woman’s coming of age” （20）.

At the center of this novel is Tenar, a young, fourteen- or fifteen-year-old priestess whose life has been dedicated to the service of ancient, nameless, frightening gods. She has been raised in the middle of a desert, among a number of ancient tombs and temples built to honor and shelter these gods. A small number of women, chosen specially to serve the gods, live in isolation amid these tombs. Although this novel deals primarily with the importance of character—focusing on Tenar’s inner journey to find her true identity and her outer journey to escape the tombs and the labyrinth in which she lives—Le Guin also is clearly criticizing the patriarchal world in which Tenar lives. Despite the fact that the priestesses in this novel are in positions of power, they have been put in these roles by men to serve male interests and worship male godkings. While they may have some power over each other, none of them seems to have any real power outside of their isolated temples. Their lives are joyless and difficult, filled with empty ritual and endless monotony. Charlotte Spivack points out that the life Tenar leads among these priestesses “has no opportunity for either personal choice or voluntary actions. Her development as a conscious individual is totally stultified” （33）. In fact at one point Penthe, a young priestess, says to Tenar, “I’d rather marry a pigherd and live in a ditch. I’d rather anything than stay buried alive in this place with a mess of women in a perishing old desert where no one ever comes” （40）. Although they are isolated from men, they are still carefully and thoroughly controlled by them. When Tenar turns away from the gods she serves and flees from the tombs, she is also rebelling against the patriarchal structure that has imprisoned her all her life.

Some critics have disapprovingly claimed that Tenar essentially must be rescued from her fate by the arrival of the wizard Ged, who saves her （Lefanu 132）. Yet this is a fairly simplistic interpretation of the events of the novel. Although it is clear that Ged serves as a catalyst for Tenar’s escape, he is not solely responsible for it. When they meet in the underground tombs it is she who is in control, not he. When a fifteen-year-old girl single-handedly manages to outwit, entrap, and control the most powerful wizard in the land, it should be obvious that she is not a simpering, helpless female needing some knight in shining armor to rescue her. In fact, her strength is in many ways equal to or even greater than Ged’s. He says to her, “I was dying of thirst when you gave me water, yet it was not the water alone that saved me. It was the strength of the hands that gave it” （106）. In addition, it is not just Ged’s magic that holds back the power of the ancient, nameless gods of the tombs, it is also Tenar’s presence. It is clear that he attributes most of the success of his mission to her. He tells her that he will describe her to the people in Havnor by saying, “In the place of darkness I found the light, her spirit. By her an old evil was brought to nothing. By her I was brought out of the grave. By her the broken was made whole, and where there was hatred there will be peace” （145）.

Finally, when she decides to leave the tombs and flee with Ged, she takes a risk like no other character in the trilogy. She tells Ged, “If I leave the service of the Dark Ones they will kill me. If I leave this place I will die.” He replies that in order “to be reborn, one must die” （114）. And although she believes that she may well die, she gives up everything she knows, every shred of power and prestige she has, and risks it on the unknown. As Cummins points out, “whereas Ged and Arren [in the other two novels] mature so as to assume socially-approved roles, she has had to rebel against the society which nurtured her” （156）. Consequently, her rebellion and independence are much more difficult and come at a greater price than that of the other main characters in Earthsea. In addition, as Slusser observes, although Tenar is “faced with the same ordeal that Ged faced in A Wizard of Earthsea—the coming of age. She has no Ogion to guide her, and no school of wizardry to teach her. Her world is one that has sunk into ignorance and perversion. The proper balance of light and darkness, death and life has been upset” （40）. Yet, she must take action against this evil with no training or background to help her.

Together she and Ged form a mutual bond of trust that allows them to escape from the tombs and to rejoin the ancient ring of Erreth-Akbe, and in so doing she is reborn as an independent, free woman. Margaret Esmonde claims that at the end, Tenar’s “journey through the labyrinth of her own mind, filled with darkness and guilt, has ended in freedom and light. Maturation as a woman is complete; now she, too, is whole and free” （27）. The price that she must pay for this freedom is very high, however. She tells Ged, “All I know is of no use now” （Atuan 132）. Later, on their journey back to Ged’s homeland, she becomes filled with dread as she realizes that “All that lay ahead of her was unknown. She knew nothing but the desert and the Tombs. What good was that? She knew the turnings of a ruined maze, she knew the dances danced before a fallen altar. She knew nothing of forests, or cities, or the hearts of men” （135）. Unlike Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea, who can go on to become a mage, or Arren in The Farthest Shore, who becomes a king, there is no future, no acceptable role, for Tenar. Cummins explains Tenar’s dilemma claiming that she “cannot immediately go back and become a peasant wife and mother, nor does she have the credentials to be a princess; she cannot become a wizard or a king.… Le Guin has created a strong woman and then was unable to imagine an appropriate place for her in the hierarchical, male world” （156）.

Tenar instinctively seems to know this and asks Ged to leave her on a deserted island, alone, far away from the world that has no place for her. He refuses, trying first to cajole her into living in the big city of Havnor by saying, “They’ll welcome you in Havnor as a princess … they’ll love you the more because you are so young. And because you are beautiful. You’ll have a hundred dresses like the one I showed you” （131）. These words have little effect on Tenar; she is not a traditional woman who has learned to be bought and sold for dresses, beauty, and male admiration. In the end Ged realizes this and instead he takes her to Gont, where she can live alone, in isolation, with his former teacher Ogion. He tells her, “it is true that you have no place there [in Havnor]. You are too young and too wise” （145）. In reality it seems that Cummins is right—there is no place in “Earthsea for the self-defined woman” （157）. While writing in the midst of the feminist revolution that was taking place in the 1960s, Ursula Le Guin was able to create a female character that ran counter to nearly every feminine role model that her genre had produced up until that time. Her consciousness had been raised enough to allow her to create Tenar but not enough to imagine a future for this woman who does not neatly fit into any of the roles that patriarchy has allowed for females. Le Guin has stated that aside from the traditional wife/mother roles allowed to women, the only other “alternative offered by the patriarchal mythology is that of the Failed Woman—old maid, the barren woman, the castrating bitch, the frigid wife, the lezzie, the libber, the Unfeminine” （Dancing 156）. Clearly Tenar is none of these things; consequently, her future in a world that only acknowledges these roles for women is uncertain. As Kate Chopin did with The Awakening, Le Guin has created an independent woman who awakens to a world that has no place for her, and although Le Guin at least does not literally kill Tenar—as Chopin seems forced to do with her heroine—she does figuratively kill her off. She is left, isolated on Gont, far away from the center of life and action in Earthsea. Significantly, she does not appear even once in the third novel of the trilogy. It will take almost twenty years for Le Guin to be able to reexamine and reimagine Earthsea in a way that will allow her to find a place for Tenar.

In an essay written in 1988, “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter,” Le Guin tries to explain why the position of women in her early novels is so problematic: “Until the mid-seventies I wrote my fiction about heroic adventure, high-tech futures, men in the halls of power, men—men were the central characters, the women were peripheral, secondary. Why don’t you write about women? my mother asked me. I don’t know how, I said. A stupid answer, but an honest one. I did not know how to write about women—very few of us did—because I thought that what men had written about women was the truth, the true way to write about women. And I couldn’t” （Dancing 234）. At the time there were very few models of women writing about women for her to follow, and she had not yet come to actively question the depiction of women in the fiction written by most men. In the twenty-five years that have passed since the publication of the first Earthsea novel, however, our society has changed radically—a change that is clearly reflected in Le Guin’s writings. As Cummins points out, “Reading her fiction world by world allows us to follow a journey in which Le Guin has periodically come home to give birth to a new sense of herself as a writer and as a woman.… Earthsea was a safe haven for the woman who could not yet question the traditional, hierarchical, male world of fantasy literature” （164）. Le Guin herself acknowledges this, stating that, in the 1960s, “I considered myself a feminist; I didn’t see how you could be a thinking woman and not be a feminist; but I had never taken a step beyond the ground gained for us by Emmeline Pankhurst and Virginia Woolf” （Dancing 7-8）. But now, nearly two decades after the last novel in the Earthsea trilogy was published, Le Guin has returned to the world that she created in the 1960s and has written a fourth Earthsea novel that addresses many of the feminist criticisms and complaints directed at the earlier novels. Feminism, she says, “has enlarged its ground and strengthened its theory and practice immensely and enduringly, in these past twenty years” （Dancing 8）, and Le Guin’s increasing understanding and acceptance of this theory is strongly reflected in Tehanu, the final Earthsea novel.

This gradual shift in Le Guin’s sense of herself as a writer and as a woman can be traced throughout nearly all of her writings. A look at the two versions of her essay “Is Gender Necessary?” is particularly revealing. The first version, written in 1976, reflects a growing feminist awareness and some views that would have been considered radical at the time; however, she still makes some claims that would set most modern feminists’ teeth on edge. For example, at one point in her discussion of The Left Hand of Darkness she stated, “I call Genthenians ‘he’ because I utterly refuse to mangle English by inventing a pronoun for ‘he/she.’ ‘He’ is the generic pronoun, damn it, in English.… But I do not consider this really very important” （Language 168）. Eleven years later in her revised version of this essay, she strongly criticizes her own earlier statements, claiming, “I still dislike invented pronouns, but I now dislike them less than the so-called generic pronouns he/him/his, which does in fact exclude women from discourse.… If I had realized how the pronouns I used shaped, directed, controlled my own thinking, I might have been ‘cleverer’” （Dancing 15）.

In many ways Tehanu seems to be the fictional version of this essay, depicting in prose some of the same changes and issues. Barrow claims that, “In many respects the realism of Tehanu deconstructs the first three volumes of Earthsea, since Le Guin now must feel that she had overemphasized male power through romance and magic” （42）. Tehanu is clearly a departure from the other three Earthsea novels. Le Guin cannot now go back and reconstruct the world she created nearly three decades ago; however, what she has chosen to do instead is write a mature response to it that truly reflects women’s experience in that world and offers some harsh criticism of it. As a young girl Tenar was so isolated that her ability to observe, reflect on, and criticize the social structures in place in her world was minimal. As a middle-aged woman, her eyes have been opened, and she finds herself repeatedly questioning and condemning the laws, traditions, and policies that have caused women to be second-class citizens in Earthsea. Le Guin has criticized our society saying, “almost all the rules, laws, codes, and commandments we have—all our ethics—were made by men … women had no voice, no vote. We let the men make all the choices” （Dancing 19）. This same criticism can be stated of Tenar’s world. Now both Tenar and Le Guin are over twenty years older; with that experience comes a deeper and more political understanding of their lives. Le Guin explains this, saying, “Feminist ideology … has forced me and every thinking woman of this generation to know ourselves better: to separate, often very painfully, what we really think and believe from all the easy ‘truths’ and ‘facts’ we were （subliminally） taught about being male, being female.… All too often we have found that we had no opinion or belief of our own, but had simply incorporated the dogmas of our society; and so we must discover, invent, make our own truths, our values, ourselves” （Language 142）.

Many critics have observed that the main theme and focus of the Earthsea novels is one of balance, of maintaining an equilibrium. In each novel there is an imbalance in the world that must be righted. Remington points out that, at the end of the trilogy, “the circle of life is made complete as the dark forces of death are recognized as the necessary and natural balancing forces to which those of light and life are the left hand” （285）, while Manlove states that “balance is at the heart of the fantastic world of Earthsea” （287）. In the first three novels, however, Le Guin focuses solely on the importance of balancing concepts or ideas such as good and evil, action and inaction, or life and death. The fundamental imbalances of power and gender are never addressed. Consequently, in Tehanu we see that things are not as in balance in Earthsea as we were led to believe they were at the end of The Farthest Shore. Ged and Arren may have righted one imbalance in their world by shutting the opened door between life and death, but that is not the only imbalance in their society. According to the wizards and mages, once the ring of Erreth-Akbe was reunited and a king sat on the throne in Havnor, all would be right again in Earthsea—an era of peace and prosperity should now be upon them. It is made clear right away in the beginning of Tehanu, however, that this is not the case.

There are many things profoundly wrong and out of balance in Earthsea. The book opens with death, the rape of a child, a mutilation, and widespread fear. A new king may be ruling, but all is not well. He has trouble keeping control over the pirates that roam the open seas, and most importantly we discover that there is no archmage in Roke. No wizard has been found to fill the void that Ged left when he lost his powers. Although the wizards are told in a prophecy that they must look for a woman, they rigidly refuse to accept this message. Their fear and mistrust of women is so deeply ingrained that they can only interpret this prophecy to mean that some woman will help them to find the needed male mage. Windkey, a master at Roke says, “Evidently this woman is to guide us, show us the way to our archmage” （157）. Yet when Tenar suggests that this prophecy might mean something else, that it might be suggesting the need for a more profound and fundamental kind of social change, he ignores her. She realizes then that he could not truly hear her. “How could he who had never listened to a woman since his mother sang him his last cradle song?” （160）.

Tenar’s growing independence and self-awareness cause her to recognize this profound imbalance in the wizards, and she refuses to share with them the knowledge she has regarding the prophecy. The wizards cut themselves off from all that is female. Although they constantly espouse balance and moderation, their own lives do not embody this. They live unnatural lives shut away in their male-only world. They do not marry or father children; they understand politics and magic but nothing to do with the simple day-to-day workings of life. The wizards’ inability to acknowledge or respect anything feminine is repeatedly shown in Tehanu. When Ogion, Tenar’s adopted father, dies, two wizards show up and arrogantly argue over which of them gets to have his body for burial. They refuse to believe that Tenar would know his last request until she proves it by telling them Ogion’s true name. Even then one of them says to her, “Take care, woman, how you speak to men of power” （28）. It is firmly ingrained in the minds of the wizards that, while women might be witches or petty village healers, they cannot deal in true magic or real power. “No woman was so trained. Wizardry was a man’s work, a man’s skill; magic was made by men. There had never been a woman mage” （36）. Ogion, who lives apart from Roke and does not accept their ways, is different. He recognizes the power in the child Therru and on his deathbed says, “Teach her Tenar. Teach her all!—Not Roke. They are afraid” （23）. Tenar does not understand this cryptic message, but by the end of the novel its meaning becomes clear. Therru, a female child, holds more power in her than any living male mage. Ogion knew this, but he also realized that she would not be accepted at Roke. The men there would fear her and be too threatened by her.

Many critics have noted that each of the Earthsea novels involves dual journeys, both a physical and an inner quest are accomplished in each. Tehanu is no different; however, its focus on the inner journey is even more profound than that of the other three novels, and in many ways it represents a kind of feminist consciousness raising for the two main characters. Although both Tenar and Ged come to radical new understandings of themselves and the world in which they live, Ged’s change is perhaps the more difficult of the two because he has farther to go in his process of self-education than Tenar does. In an interesting move, Le Guin essentially reverses their roles from the ones they played in The Tombs of Atuan. In the process of shutting the door between life and death at the end of The Farthest Shore, Ged lost all his powers and abilities as a wizard. Like Tenar in The Tombs of Atuan, everything he knows has been taken from him, and he must learn to adapt to a whole new life. He must confront his own powerlessness. To a certain extent he has been symbolically feminized. He lacks his rod, his mage’s staff, which was left broken on Selidor, and is left powerless, impotent. Significantly, it is Tenar who teaches him to regain his sense of self and manhood by returning him to the life he led as a child and forcing him to look at his own remaining inner shadows. He must learn to accept his weakness and vulnerability. It is Tenar who teaches Ged to become a man rather than just a wizard. She restores to him a different kind of potency—both physically, as she teaches him about sexual union, and emotionally, as she teaches him to learn to find happiness and fulfillment outside of wizardry and in connections with other people instead. As Tenar had to be reborn in the earlier novel, Ged must now be reborn in Tehanu.

In “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter” Le Guin criticizes many women writers, including herself: “It seems to me a pity that so many women including myself have accepted [a] denial of their own experience … writing as if their sexuality were limited to copulation, as if they knew nothing about pregnancy, birth, nursing, mothering, puberty, menstruation, menopause, except what men are willing to hear, nothing except what men are willing to hear about housework, childwork, lifework, war, peace, living and dying as experienced in the female body” （Dancing 228）. She strongly addresses these concerns in Tehanu. An important theme of this book deals with the importance of female experience and knowledge. As Barrow puts it, “The series begins with the wizardry of men and the power of mages but ends with the wisdom of women” （37）. The doors of male privilege and power were opened to young Tenar when Ogion agreed to take her in as an apprentice, to teach her the spells, ways, and language of wizards. Although she has power and could have become a wizard, she realized that that path is not for her. Instead she left Ogion, married a farmer, and raised children. She was seeking something that Ogion could not give her. After Ogion’s death she realizes that he had never “kissed her, or she him. He had called her daughter, and had loved her, but had not touched her; and she, brought up as a solitary, untouched priestess, a holy thing, had not sought touch, or had not known she sought it” （61）. He had been gentle and kind to her, but he had always kept a distance from her. She needed more than that kind of love and more than the empty words of the wizards’ cold magic.

In her research on women’s development Nancy Chodorow has found that “in any given society, feminine personality comes to define itself in relation and connection to other people more than masculine personality does” （43-44）. Tenar is a perfect example. Although she loves Ogion, she cannot stay cut off from the rest of the world, in isolation with him. She says, “I left him. What did I want with his books? What good were they to me? I wanted to live, I wanted a man, I wanted my children, I wanted my life” （56）. And later when Ged asks her how she could have given up the power and knowledge of being a mage, she asks him. “What should I have done with my power, and the knowledge Ogion tried to teach me?” （94）. She again realizes that there is no real place for a woman of power in her world, and she goes on to tell him, “I used to think, I could be dressed up as a warrior, with a lance and a sword and a plume and all, but it wouldn’t fit, would it? What would I do with a sword? Would it make me a hero? I’d be myself in clothes that didn’t fit.… So I took it all off and put on my own clothes” （95）. She has been enmeshed all her life in male ways and men’s knowledge, and she realizes that she needs to know something about being a woman. Ostriker has stated that “if the woman artist has been trained to believe that the activities of motherhood are trivial, tangential to the main issues of life, irrelevant to the great themes of literature, she should untrain herself. The training is misogynist, it protects and perpetuates systems of thought and feeling which prefer violence and death to love and birth and it is a lie” （quoted in Dancing 228）. This applies equally to the women of power in Tehanu, which Tenar clearly realizes. She understands the need to become more deeply connected to her own inner power as a woman.

Moss, the village witch, speaks to Tenar about the difference between male and female power. She tells her that a man’s power comes only from within himself. “His power’s himself, see. That’s how it is with him. And that’s all. When his power goes, he’s gone. Empty” （56）. A woman’s knowledge, however, is deeper and more connected to things outside her own body. Tenar is told that “a woman’s power [is] deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon” （57）. In Tehanu women seem to be continually linked to dragons, the oldest, most powerful, and strongest creatures on earth. Both Tenar and Therru （her adopted child） are repeatedly described in dragon terminology and linked to fire, burning, and strength. In the end of the novel it is clear that Therru is in fact descended from the dragons, and from that comes much of her strength. Tenar, however, also is connected to this ancient power. The language of dragons comes easily to her in a way that all the spells and wizards’ words did not. When the dragon Kalessin arrives to bring Ged to her, she does not run from it in fear; instead she is intrigued by it, and although “she had been told that men must not look into a dragon’s eyes, that was nothing to her” （41）. She stares directly into its eyes—something none of the wizards have ever been able to do—recognizing a kinship with this ancient creature whose power is embedded in the very formation of the earth.

As a mature woman Tenar learns the importance of connectedness and that not all significant knowledge is found in books. Modern feminists like Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule have discussed the importance of women’s ways of knowing and understanding. They point out that often women value connectedness and an understanding that comes from the “conviction that the most trustworthy knowledge comes from personal experience rather than the pronouncements of authorities” （112-13）. Like them, Tenar clearly questions authority-based knowledge. When Ged, overwhelmed with self-pity at the loss of his book-based wizard’s knowledge and power, refuses to consider that there may be other things of importance for him to know, she tells him in frustration, “It’s time you learned that you didn’t learn everything on Roke [the island that houses the wizards’ school]” （113）. Later she asks, “Is wisdom all words?” （133）. And finally, when she and Ged spend their first night together, we learn that “She taught Ged the mystery that the wisest man could not teach him” （211）. Interestingly enough, Arbur notes that Tenar is “a character who complements Ged and, in an important sense, reaches his life’s goal—that of being rather than doing—about two decades before he does” （151）. It is she who finally helps him reach this goal himself without the aid of magic or books. Le Guin states, “In our society women have lived and have been despised for living the whole side of life that includes and takes responsibility for helplessness, weakness, and illness, for the irrational and the irreparable, for all that is passive, uncontrolled, animal, unclean” （Dancing 117）. Yet it is Tenar’s connectedness to this less-sanitized side of life that has taught her compassion. She is willing to take in the burned and mutilated child Therru when no man will have her in his house. Barrow points out that “Therru is reclaimed to life by the constant care of Tenar and develops a female magic through her suffering at the hands of men and through the daily love of women” （41）. Tenar has learned to see beyond appearances and into the deeper heart of things. Ultimately it is this compassion for Therru that saves both her life and Ged’s.

In her later writings and speeches Le Guin has been particularly critical of the use of language to perpetuate second-class status for women. She states, “This is a man’s world so it talks a man’s language. The words are all words of power” （Dancing 115）. She describes the language used and taught in schools as “the language of power—social power; I shall call it the father tongue … it doesn’t speak itself. It only lectures” （Dancing 147）. Both Le Guin and other feminists （Dale Spender, Mary Daly, Cheris Kramarae, and many others） have described at length how language has been used to control and subordinate women. This is a realization that Tenar also comes to in Tehanu. Le Guin has said that “the essential gesture of the father tongue is not reasoning but distancing—making a gap, a space between the subject or self and the object or other” （Dancing 148）. This seems to be very true of the wizards’ use of language. Speaking the wizards’ language—the father tongue—is nearly impossible for Tenar. She says, “The lore, the runes of power, the spells, the rules, the raising of forces—that was all dead to me. Somebody else’s language” （Tehanu 95）. Countering this kind of language is the mother tongue, “language not as mere communication but as relation, relationship. It connects. It goes two ways, many ways, an exchange, a network. Its power is not in dividing but in binding, not in distancing but in uniting” （Dancing 149）. The parallel to this in the Earthsea novels can be seen in the old language, the ancient language of making that the dragons speak. Although the wizards have appropriated some words and phrases from this language to shape their spells, they do not speak it easily or fluently. However, Tenar finds that it comes easily to her “like learning the language I spoke before I was born” （Tehanu 95）. This language of creation—essentially of life—comes more readily to her, a woman, than it does to most men who struggle to learn a few words of it. The ancient “mother tongue” of her world comes naturally to her, but when she must force it into a language of control and domination she cannot. The rules of the “father tongue” are too foreign to her.

In a 1986 commencement address to the young women at Bryn Mawr, Le Guin said, “I hope you don’t try to take your strength from men, or from a man. Secondhand experience breaks down.… I hope you’ll take and make your own soul; that you’ll feel your life for yourself pain by pain and joy by joy” （Dancing 158）. This struck me as advice that Tenar might well have given to a similar group of young women in her own world. She has learned to rely on herself and her own knowledge and experience. She turned away from a solely male understanding of the world and tried to forge her own new ideas about power and balance in her world. The end of Tehanu suggests that a change is coming over Earthsea; the fundamental social imbalances that had so long been ignored will be addressed by a greater understanding and need for the power of women.

Le Guin has brought an ever-growing and deepening feminist consciousness to her writings, something we can see reflected in the lives of her characters and the intricacy of her plots and themes. In a description of herself she has said, “I am trying to unlearn these lessons … [the] lessons I was taught by my society, particularly lessons concerning the minds, work, works, and being of women. I am a slow unlearner. But I love my unteachers—the feminist thinkers and writers and talkers and poets and artists and singers and critics and friends from Wollstonecraft and Woolf through the furies and glories of the seventies and eighties” （Dancing 151）. The growing acceptance and importance of feminist thought in society today, as well as the gradual development of feminism over the last three decades, are clearly mirrored in her work as we watch her unlearning through the years.

Works Cited

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Barrow, Craig, and Diana Barrow. “Le Guin’s Earthsea: Voyages in Consciousness.” Extrapolation 32 （Summer 1991）: 20-44.

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Belenky, Mary Field, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule. Women’s Ways of Knowing. New York: Basic Books, 1986.

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———. “The Writer on, and at, Her Work.” The Writer on her Work. Ed. Janet Sternburg. New York: Norton, 1991.

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