SOURCE: “The Power of Women in Ursula K. Le Guin's Tehanu,” in Extrapolation, Vol. 38, No. 2, Summer, 1997, pp. 110-18.

[In the following essay, McLean examines Le Guin's shifting portrayal of female empowerment in Tehanu,focusing on the tension between compassion, acceptance, and justified anger over patriarchal abuses.]

In Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea, published in 1990, Ursula K. Le Guin returned to the fantasy world of Earthsea that she had created in the first three books of the children’s series published between 1968 and 1972. In the years after the first three books were written, her evolving feminism made her uncomfortable with the “unquestioned patriarchal system where only men are wizards, only men have power” that she had unconsciously created in Earthsea （“Ursula K. Le Guin” 5）. In Tehanu, she attempts to change the whole system by exposing the dark side of patriarchy—including misogyny, rape, child abuse, and a system that devalues the work and concerns of women, children, and powerless men—and by postulating an alternative “woman’s power” that will eventually lead Earthsea to a new balance and harmony.

The first three books of the Earthsea series are coming-of-age stories with adolescent protagonists. In the first, A Wizard of Earthsea, the teenage protagonist Ged has to learn to use magic and to accept and control his own dark side. In the second book, The Tombs of Atuan, a slightly older Ged helps a teenage girl, Tenar, escape from her role as a priestess of dark powers. In the third book, The Farthest Shore, a teenage boy, Arren, comes of age while helping Ged to fight the threat of Cob, a rival magician who is draining Earthsea of life and magic by holding out the illusory lure of immortality. The theme of the third book is the necessity of accepting death as a part of life, and Ged is able to save his world only by sacrificing his own powers of magic, thus undergoing a symbolic death.

Tehanu does not include an adolescent coming of age. Instead, it follows a different fictional model, concerned with “women developing later in life, after conventional expectations of marriage and motherhood have been fulfilled and found insufficient” （Abel et al. 7）. The book focuses not only on a middle-aged Tenar’s search for an identity outside of her familial roles, but also on Ged’s need to find a new identity once he has lost the power that gave meaning to his life. There is a third main character, the eight-year-old girl Therru, who is adopted by Tenar after being raped, beaten, and thrown into a fire by her father. Whether she can recover from that experience, and what her life will offer if she does, is the third central question that Tehanu addresses. Through these three characters Le Guin implies that profound “changes of life” can happen not just at adolescence but at any time. As in her essay on menopause, “The Space Crone” （Dancing 3-6）, Le Guin suggests that what looks like a loss—of youth, of power, of beauty—can also be an opportunity for growth.

In Tehanu, Le Guin’s indictment of patriarchy is thorough and effective. The death of patriarchy begins with the death of fathers, both literal and metaphoric. At the beginning of the book, Tenar’s husband, Flint, the father of her two grown children, has died, setting her free from his patriarchal control and from her identity as “wife.” At the same time, Ged’s loss of his role as Archmage leaves the entire society of Earthsea without a central controlling figure. Arren’s succession as King of All the Isles provides a source of social order, but he is too young to be a father figure, and his control is less complete than that of an Archmage. The other wizards search in vain for a new Archmage, rejecting the Master Patterner’s statement that the pattern of the future centers on “A woman on Gont” （157）.

Soon after the story begins, Tenar is summoned to the death of her adoptive father Ogion, who has also functioned as Ged’s adoptive father. Of all the fathers portrayed in the series, he is portrayed most favorably. Ogion is a wise old man—in Jungian terms, an image of the Self, which acts as a guide—but in Tehanu Le Guin distances herself from the Jungian theory that she had earlier found congenial. In an essay called “Earthsea Revisioned,” she observes that Jung’s archetypes “are mindforms of the Western European psyche as perceived by a man” （5-6）. On the road that Tenar is traveling, no man—no matter how wise—can be her guide. Even a wise old woman, like the witch Moss, can only give her some useful hints. She must find the way herself, and so must Ged—not as children being led, but as adults, side by side.

The bad fathers in Tehanu all display a selfishness and self-centeredness that is thematically linked to Cob’s attempt to achieve personal immortality at the expense of destroying the balance of life for everyone else. Therru’s father—with a man called Handy—beats Therru, rapes her, burns her, and abandons her. He also beats and eventually murders Therru’s pregnant mother, and he tries to break into Tenar’s house to rape her. He is wounded by Ged in that attempt, then handed over to the authorities to be hanged. Another evil father is the old Lord of Re Albi, who hires the wizard Aspen to prolong his own life by feeding it on the life of his grandson. Aspen himself, as a celibate wizard, is not a father, but he is a profound misogynist, who considers himself to be superior to all women, children, and powerless men. He attempts to destroy Tenar, Ged, and Therru but is himself destroyed by the dragon called by Therru. Once Aspen is dead, the old Lord of Re Albi will die too.

Most of the other male characters of Tehanu are neither evil nor wholly good, but many of them—such as Tenar’s son Spark—have been corrupted by a society that gives them “unearned power” （Le Guin, “Earthsea Revisioned” 14）. When the teenage Spark takes over the farm that Tenar had been running while he was away at sea, he treats her, Ged, and Therru with insufferable high- handedness. He contrasts unfavorably with the young king Lebannen （formerly called Arren）, who knows how to use his power and how to listen to others because “He has been through the fire” （Tehanu 145）. Tellingly, when Tenar first sees Lebannen, she mistakes him for her son, and when she first sees Spark after his return, she mistakes him for a neighbor’s child. Lebannen is a child of Tenar’s spirit in a way that Spark is not.¹

Some readers have objected that the strengthening of Tenar’s character in Tehanu seems to take place at the cost of the weakening of Ged’s.² Le Guin has replied that Ged’s apparent weakness is part of her attempt to redefine strength as something “that doesn’t involve contests and conquests and bossing people around” （“Earthsea Revisioned” 18）. Ged himself is devastated at first by the loss of his power because, like the other mages, he assumes that the power he has lost is the only kind of power, and that power is the key to his own worth. He slowly relearns the truth of his own earlier statement to Arren, in The Farthest Shore, that “there is only one power that is real and worth the having. And that is the power, not to take, but to accept” （138）. This is the kind of power that women are more likely to have. The witch Moss, trying to define the difference between male and female power, tells Tenar: “A man gives out, dearie. A woman takes in” （Tehanu 109）. But women’s power is not passive. On the contrary, this power reflects the lesson that Ged first learned about magic, “that true magery lies in doing only what you must do” （216）. Tenar, like most women, is constantly doing what must be done, often several things at once and all of them seemingly minor, such as feeding, clothing, and cleaning. Her commitment to the dailiness of life is her inner strength, and it is this strength that Ged must rediscover.

Le Guin takes pains in Tehanu to correct the negative view of women of power expressed in her earlier Earthsea books in the phrases “Weak as woman’s magic” and “Wicked as woman’s magic” （A Wizard of Earthsea 5）. However, the exact nature of women’s power is only sketchily defined in Tehanu. It seems to have its roots in the body, in sexuality and nurturance, and it is consistent with Carol Gilligan’s observation that whereas men define themselves primarily in terms of separation and individuality, women’s identity “is defined in a context of relationship and judged by a standard of responsibility and care” （160-61）. This “woman’s power” is revealed mainly in two characters, Tenar and Therru.

Tenar embodies the power of caring. Her name may derive from the French verb tenir or the Italian tenere, both of which come from the Latin tenere, “to have, to hold, to keep” （Le Guin did graduate work in French and Italian）. In The Tombs of Atuan Tenar holds on to her humanity, against all efforts to deprive her of it, by caring for Ged （in both senses of the word）, and in Tehanu she holds on to the people she loves and her own self- respect against even harsher opposition. Her Gontish name, Goha, means “a white spider.” Spiders make a thing of beauty, their web, that is also a home and a means of living. The spider is thus an appropriate symbol of women as artists and homemakers, people who make connections. Le Guin used the same symbol in her earlier story “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight,” where the spider known as Grandmother （a figure borrowed from Native American mythology） weaves a web that ties all of nature together （Buffalo Gals 50-51）.

As a child, Tenar was forced to sacrifice her identity to become Arha, the Eaten One, a high priestess of dark powers known only as the Nameless Ones. In a similar way, Therru is sacrificed to evil by her father, yet both ultimately escape with the help of others. Both characters have an inner power that seems to be connected to their ordeals. Tenar hypothesizes that the root of power is a heightened potential, a sort of emptiness that must be filled, in either a positive or a negative way （Tehanu 215-16）. Ged tells Tenar that he could see power in her from the first time he met her: “I had the power to know power, then, … And you—you shone, in that terrible place, the Labyrinth, that darkness” （94）. Ged is at first disappointed in Tenar for not “using” her power, because he does not realize what kind of power she has and how she is using it, fulfilling her potential with a wholehearted commitment to life.

Therru, whose given name means “burning” and whose true name, Tehanu, is the name of a star, has a different sort of power from Tenar’s. Early in the story, Tenar tells Therru that dragons and humans were originally one race and that some beings still exist who combine human mind with dragon heart and can appear in either form. Therru, whose future as a woman is irreversibly marred by the fire that disfigures half of her face, turns out to be one of these beings. She represents the hope of the future of Earthsea because she can integrate wisdom and power, reason and feeling, action and caring. She can do this because she is part dragon, and, for Le Guin, dragons are a symbol of nature, of wildness and freedom and anger （“Earthsea Revisioned” 22-23）. They possess an unlearned knowledge, like that of the animals in fairy tales, that makes them instinctively act “rightly” （Le Guin, Language 62-63）.

Le Guin’s concept of what her dragons represent has changed over time. In A Wizard of Earthsea the highest forms of wisdom and power seem to be reserved for men, and all of the dragons that appear in the story are male. In The Farthest Shore the dragon Orm Embar, who helps Ged to fight Cob, is also male, but Ged admits that he does not know whether the oldest dragon, Kalessin, is male or female （151）. In Tehanu the only two characters who are both dragon and human—the Woman of Kemay and Therru—are both female, and Tenar also shares some traits that link her to the dragons. She often has dreams of flying with dragons, and she is able to look dragons in the eye, a thing that no man can do. Therru says that she sees fire around Tenar’s head when Tenar is brushing her hair （111-12）, and Moss later sees fire around Tenar’s head when Tenar is angry （122）. Therru tells her, in the latter case, “You are a red dragon” （121）. Learning the Old Speech, the language of dragons, comes naturally to Tenar. She says, “That was like learning the language I spoke before I was born” （95）, but when she tries to teach it to Therru, she senses that doing so feels wrong （133）. Tenar later learns that Therru, like the other dragons, has always known the Old Speech because it is her native tongue （250）.

In her poem “To Saint George,” first published in 1982, Le Guin suggested that women and dragons share an identity as dangerously knowing and debased “others” in the male imagination:

Woman is worm.
… … …
… … She knows
the oneworm, the roundworm
unending, hollow, all, egg,
being the dragon.
Saint, better get her
before she talks.

（Wild Oats 36）

In a 1991 interview with Colin Greenland, Le Guin said, “The dragons … are or represent a different kind of power from the powers in Earthsea—marginalized, unused, something to do with women” （61）. In Tehanu the witch Moss tells Tenar that women’s power has roots that go back into the dark: “No one knows, no one knows, no one can say what I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon. Who dares ask questions of the dark?” （57）. Tenar herself spent much of her youth in the dark, in the underground labyrinth that was her legacy as a priestess of the Nameless Ones, yet she also has dreams of flying in light and fire, like a dragon. Le Guin seems to imply that in the margins, where women and dragons live, opposites unite. To have roots, paradoxically, is also to have wings.

The focus on women’s power in Tehanu may appear to exclude men from possessing the same kind of wholeness, but Le Guin has stated that the kind of freedom that her dragon-people represent “rejects gender” （“Earthsea Revisioned” 24）. Le Guin does imply that there are essential differences between male and female experience and therefore between male and female power. But when the fan that belongs to the weaver Fan is held up to the light, the paintings of dragons on one side and of humans on the other combine to reveal a scene in which “the men and women were winged, and the dragons looked with human eyes” （Tehanu 115）. The potential for wholeness is available to both sexes, even though in this case women lead the way.

Therru possesses traits that link her to Ged as well as to Tenar. Like Ged, she has scars on one side of her face （his are on the left side, hers on the right side）. This divided face resembles the yin and yang symbol that is one of Le Guin’s favorite images of wholeness. The resemblance is made even more pronounced in Therru’s case by her possession of one seeing eye and one blinded eye （like the opposite-colored dots within each half of the symbol）. It is later revealed that the apparently blind eye actually sees a different reality, the essential natures of people and things.

In Ged’s case, his scars are a sign of the price he has paid for wisdom, because they were made by the shadow that he accidentally called up in an effort to show off his power, a shadow that he ultimately had to accept as the dark side of his own personality. Unlike Ged’s scars, Therru’s are not a result of a moral error and do not represent personal growth. Instead, the burning away of half of her face reveals a different reality underneath, “as if her face were not human at all, an animal, some strange horny-skinned wild creature” （Tehanu 199）. Her face is not a reflection of her own error, but of human error, of humanity’s potential for inhumanity. When others look into her face, what they see reflects what they are: the humane see a hurt human child; the morally deformed see a monster. When Ogion says of Therru “They will fear her” （23）, he is referring to the power that he sees within her, but Tenar’s answer—“They fear her now” （23）—acknowledges the human tendency to blame the victim by thinking that misfortune is always deserved or is somehow contagious.³

What Tenar and Ged are able to teach Therru is the nature of humanity and the power of love. They are able to teach her by example, because both have fully accepted their own humanity and have committed themselves to the risks and burdens that life and love entail. They teach her the useful arts of living—planting food, cooking, making clothing, and carrying on the memories of humanity by memorizing the sagas that are both art and history. By loving each other and her, they make the connection that keeps her with them when she is offered a choice between the absolute freedom of dragons and the limited freedom of humanity.

There is an inherent tension between the Taoist philosophy of acceptance that informed the first three books of the Earthsea series and the feminist anger and activism that moved Le Guin to write Tehanu. The power of women in Tehanu is a paradoxical power because it seems powerless to bring about the needed change in the sexist society of Earthsea. When Ged and Tenar stand on the edge of a cliff, about to be pushed over by the misogynistic wizard Aspen, they are saved by a dragon ex machina, not by any action of their own. At first glance, such an ending seems regressive, denying women the ability to fight back against oppression. But Le Guin explains in “Earthsea Revisioned” that Ged and Tenar cannot fight the old system with the tools of that system: “Their strength and salvation must come from outside the institutions and traditions. It must be a new thing” （19）.

Tehanu often has an angry tone that contrasts with the tone of the first three books in the series and that may account for its less enthusiastic critical and popular reception. Anger is an unsettling emotion, and female anger directed against men is disturbing not only to male readers, but also to many female readers. Several of the early reviews of Tehanu objected that the shift in tone and attitude undercut the previous Earthsea books or that the ending lacked a feeling of resolution.⁴ These are related objections: if the tension between anger and acceptance is not resolved, the book may feel unsatisfactory, incomplete. Yet it is possible that Le Guin is implying that such conflict is an aspect of living, not a problem to be resolved.⁵ She acknowledged the dangers of her approach in an interview with Colin Greenland: “Will people see this as a deconstruction of Earthsea, as an invalidation of the text of the three books? That’s obviously a risk, and for some readers it will do that. For me, it revalidates them. I took the risk of unmaking something I’d made because I wanted to ground Earthsea more securely in a larger perception. The perception is different, … the world is not changed” （61）. By challenging her readers to reevaluate their assumptions about Earthsea, she is “writing beyond the ending,” asking them to rethink their attitudes toward gender and power in their own world.⁶ This goal is related to the open-endedness of the novel. Le Guin told Colin Greenland, “I left the book open at the end, to let it fly; although grounding it in Tenar’s question: ‘Where can I live?’ … That question is answered, but that turns out not to be the final question at all. The question is where can Therru live? And that question I can’t answer. Nobody can answer” （61）. Because she does not try to impose her own vision of utopia on her readers, they are free to imagine their own.⁷

By not resolving the tension between anger and acceptance, Le Guin may be implying that both are necessary—acceptance of the limitations imposed by life itself, but anger at unnecessary suffering and abuse of power. The anger is a necessary spur to action, but it also seems to have a connection to joy. After Therru is burned, she appears to be “without anger, without joy” （Tehanu 33）. Tenar, the character who is most often described as being angry, is also the one who dreams of flying with dragons, an image of pure joy. And the dragon Kalessin’s own fiery roar could be “laughter or contempt or delight or anger” （249）. By revalidating female anger and linking women to the natural wisdom and power of dragons, Le Guin gives her female readers, in particular, a myth of their own, a metaphor of empowerment in their search for a better self-image in our own patriarchal world.

What Le Guin offers in the end of Tehanu are images of a window facing west and a seed to be planted. Windows and doors are important symbols in Tehanu of life as a state of transition, an idea expressed in the song of the Creation of Éa:

The making from the unmaking,
The ending from the beginning,
Who shall know surely?
What we know is the doorway between them
that we enter departing.

（Tehanu 207）

In one of her dreams, Tenar sees the doorway of the Creation of Éa as a small window facing west （216-17）, like the window of Ogion’s cottage, where Tenar finally decides that she, Ged, and Therru can live （252）. West is the direction that the sun travels and therefore the direction of the future, of possibility. It is the location where the dragons live and where, in The Farthest Shore, Ged and Arren enter the land of the dead. West has always been a direction charged with significance in Le Guin’s fiction. She herself lives on the West Coast, has used it as a setting of several of her works of fiction, and has chosen to write science fiction and fantasy, the literature of possibility. In the dream world of her novel The Beginning Place （1980）, the west also is a site of danger and potential, the location of the half-human, half-dragon monster that the protagonists must both kill and acknowledge as a part of themselves （McLean 136-38）. In Tehanu, when Tenar leaves Ogion’s cottage and returns to Middle Valley, she no longer dreams about dragons. To regain her dreams, she needs a window facing west.

After Therru is burned, the first sign that she still cares about the future is her desire to plant a peach pit, to increase “the number of peaches in the world” （Tehanu 33）. While she and Tenar are away in Middle Valley, the seedling dies, but Therru is determined to plant another. In this desire, Le Guin captures the essence of “women’s power,” in small ways affirming life in the face of death and trying to increase the number of good things in the world.

Notes

1. Craig and Diana Barrow also argue that Lebannen is a son of Ged’s and Tenar’s spirit （36）.

2. See, for instance, the reviews of Tehanu by Robert A. Collins and by Mike Christie.

3. A poem of Le Guin’s, “His Daughter,” mentions that Crazy Horse, “the visionary warrior,” named his daughter, who died as a child, They Will Fear Her （Wild Oats 48）. Therru is perhaps Le Guin’s attempt to imagine a girl who could fulfill the promise of that name.

4. For objections to the change of tone and direction, see Ann Welton, who says that Tehanu is “basically unsuccessful” because “it is not sufficiently of a piece with the trilogy to which it is attached” （16）; Mike Christie, who says that a reader “may well be surprised and disappointed by the fourth book’s sudden change of mood” （95）; Robert A. Collins, who says “the acid effect of social criticism within a mythic structure is jarring” （428）; and John Clute, who says that the book is “decidedly bad-tempered. … most of it, told deliberately in the chuntering rhythms of the disenfranchised women of Gont, has a slightly sour effect on the reader. … one resents the corrosiveness of Tehanu, for in telling this particular tale Le Guin has chosen to punish her own readers for having loved other books she herself wrote” （1409）. Tatiana Keller says that Tehanu “feels like it demands a sequel” （23）, and Heather Neill says, “Ironically, while Le Guin is satisfied with her ending, readers feel it suggests another beginning” （R9）.

5. In her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Le Guin says that “Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative … may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process” （Dancing 169）.

6. I am obliged to Nancy Huse, the respondent to an earlier version of this paper at the 1992 Midwest MLA conference in St. Louis, for suggesting this interpretation of the ending of Tehanu.

7. In her essay “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be” （Dancing 80-100）, Le Guin questions the desirability of any utopia that is static rather than organic, imposed rather than evolved.

Works Cited

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Christie, Mike. Review of Tehanu. Foundation 49 （Summer 1990）: 93-95.

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