meta: gender, sex, and magic in Prydain
Sep. 13th, 2011 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseSo I have been doing all this reparative/critical work with Prydain. For a while now - and I swear I will finish and post some of it soon. It's interesting turf in terms of sex/gender: on the one hand, so dated in terms of narrative focus, with the male protag getting all the real development and the female protag being just a little Too Perfect - or just being airheaded. But on the other, Lloyd Alexander was always someone who really tried to write inclusively & to have Strong Female Characters, and I know that I found more for myself in Prydain than I did most other places, as a kid.
Prydain does a really good job, imo, separating sex from gender. Gender tends not to matter; sex does. Representation remains as issue - why are there no women in this universe?! but for all that, it does some interesting things with fairly feminist sex/gender politics. Lemme 'splain.
Gender first: there's very little gender policing in Prydain, especially considering that it's 60s kidlit fantasy. Eilonwy fights, yells, steals swords from barrows, wears boys' clothes, sics wolves on outlaws - and everyone pretty much takes that in stride. Certainly the narrative does! Dallben has a tendency to get harrumphy and sexist, which, eeeeeh. And every now and again Taran tries to make a Deal about Eilonwy being a girl, but he pretty inevitably gets slapped down hard for it. Taran being mildly sexist is part and parcel of Taran's whole deal, connected to his insecurity, his arrogance, and his occasional testosterone poisoning - and the narrative exists to cure those things. There's no textual assumption made that Eilonwy will enjoy pretty things more, or be more nurturing, or more patient, or better with her hands, because she's a girl. In fact, Taran's the nice polite one - she'll just snap your head off.
Taran is a wonderfully ungendered character; although there's still some typically 60s rhetoric about him becoming a man, that pretty much means that he's learned to be kind, compassionate, nonviolent, able to compromise, skilled in handicrafts, open to guidance and lessons from all comers, patient, grateful, and sweet. He learns war, as well - but so does Eilonwy.
What Prydain does have in spades is narrative emphasis on sex: not on social behaviors that are learned and performed, but on biological difference. This happens largely in the books' system of magic, which breaks down in a pretty old-European way as male/female, darkside/lightside, with Don, Llyr, Achren, and Annuvin representing each. Women's magic is different from men's magic; one of the ways you can tell Arawn is a baddie is that he repeatedly steals women's magics for his own, making him either a misogynist (yay!) or a transsexual (oh dear, that is problematic. Um, let's stick with misogyny=bad?).
This system of magic actually does provide a handwavy explanation for the lack of women in the universe - because the powers of Light Womanhood are either stolen or borked. The House of Llyr, I think, screwed itself some generations back when it turned from love to more political power. Llyr-magic runs on unselfish love - the bauble, combined with that remark of Achren's that Eilonwy's powers will ripen as she comes to sexual maturity. It's not just sex-magic, because the unselfish part has to be there as well. When Angharad of Llyr left everything to follow her true love, she was actually, I think, acting in accordance with the nature of her power. Regat was wrong to try to marry her off for political gain - and so the whole potency tumbles down.
And meanwhile - because of? or the other way around? - Arawn is stealing Achren's kingdom and the Triple Goddess' cauldron. Achren also has some hetero sex magic going on - she's like the Queen of Noncon. All that stuff with Gwydion in The Book of Three - and the fact that she's the first adult to really acknowledge what's going on between Taran and Eilonwy, in that really creepy scene in Llyr where she essentially offers to sell Eilonwy's sexual love to Taran in exchange for information.
So all the male/female stuff is out of whack. And what follows is a profound barrenness. A surprising number of characters in Prydain are childless: Math, Gwydion, Coll, Smoit. And there are also a lot of dead or lost children: Aeddan's child, and Craddoc's, and Adaon, and Ellidyr, and Rhun. The House of Don doesn't seem to be able to beget a blood-heir, and so instead Gwydion pins his hopes on Taran, built not born to be king hereafter. And there's a parallel problem of barren earth, all those places that are fallow or fruitless, the sense that the soil doesn't bear as it used to. The sexual coupling that balances the Prydain magical system isn't happening as it ought, and so reproduction is messed up, and there aren't any women, and the crops keep failing.
It's a profoundly heterocentric system, because it relies so heavily on marriage as the symbolic union of divine male and divine female. Same as the gender essentialism/biological determinism problems you get in a lot of New Age stuff. But it's interesting that the heterosexism is so separate from gender policing.
Prydain does a really good job, imo, separating sex from gender. Gender tends not to matter; sex does. Representation remains as issue - why are there no women in this universe?! but for all that, it does some interesting things with fairly feminist sex/gender politics. Lemme 'splain.
Gender first: there's very little gender policing in Prydain, especially considering that it's 60s kidlit fantasy. Eilonwy fights, yells, steals swords from barrows, wears boys' clothes, sics wolves on outlaws - and everyone pretty much takes that in stride. Certainly the narrative does! Dallben has a tendency to get harrumphy and sexist, which, eeeeeh. And every now and again Taran tries to make a Deal about Eilonwy being a girl, but he pretty inevitably gets slapped down hard for it. Taran being mildly sexist is part and parcel of Taran's whole deal, connected to his insecurity, his arrogance, and his occasional testosterone poisoning - and the narrative exists to cure those things. There's no textual assumption made that Eilonwy will enjoy pretty things more, or be more nurturing, or more patient, or better with her hands, because she's a girl. In fact, Taran's the nice polite one - she'll just snap your head off.
Taran is a wonderfully ungendered character; although there's still some typically 60s rhetoric about him becoming a man, that pretty much means that he's learned to be kind, compassionate, nonviolent, able to compromise, skilled in handicrafts, open to guidance and lessons from all comers, patient, grateful, and sweet. He learns war, as well - but so does Eilonwy.
What Prydain does have in spades is narrative emphasis on sex: not on social behaviors that are learned and performed, but on biological difference. This happens largely in the books' system of magic, which breaks down in a pretty old-European way as male/female, darkside/lightside, with Don, Llyr, Achren, and Annuvin representing each. Women's magic is different from men's magic; one of the ways you can tell Arawn is a baddie is that he repeatedly steals women's magics for his own, making him either a misogynist (yay!) or a transsexual (oh dear, that is problematic. Um, let's stick with misogyny=bad?).
This system of magic actually does provide a handwavy explanation for the lack of women in the universe - because the powers of Light Womanhood are either stolen or borked. The House of Llyr, I think, screwed itself some generations back when it turned from love to more political power. Llyr-magic runs on unselfish love - the bauble, combined with that remark of Achren's that Eilonwy's powers will ripen as she comes to sexual maturity. It's not just sex-magic, because the unselfish part has to be there as well. When Angharad of Llyr left everything to follow her true love, she was actually, I think, acting in accordance with the nature of her power. Regat was wrong to try to marry her off for political gain - and so the whole potency tumbles down.
And meanwhile - because of? or the other way around? - Arawn is stealing Achren's kingdom and the Triple Goddess' cauldron. Achren also has some hetero sex magic going on - she's like the Queen of Noncon. All that stuff with Gwydion in The Book of Three - and the fact that she's the first adult to really acknowledge what's going on between Taran and Eilonwy, in that really creepy scene in Llyr where she essentially offers to sell Eilonwy's sexual love to Taran in exchange for information.
So all the male/female stuff is out of whack. And what follows is a profound barrenness. A surprising number of characters in Prydain are childless: Math, Gwydion, Coll, Smoit. And there are also a lot of dead or lost children: Aeddan's child, and Craddoc's, and Adaon, and Ellidyr, and Rhun. The House of Don doesn't seem to be able to beget a blood-heir, and so instead Gwydion pins his hopes on Taran, built not born to be king hereafter. And there's a parallel problem of barren earth, all those places that are fallow or fruitless, the sense that the soil doesn't bear as it used to. The sexual coupling that balances the Prydain magical system isn't happening as it ought, and so reproduction is messed up, and there aren't any women, and the crops keep failing.
It's a profoundly heterocentric system, because it relies so heavily on marriage as the symbolic union of divine male and divine female. Same as the gender essentialism/biological determinism problems you get in a lot of New Age stuff. But it's interesting that the heterosexism is so separate from gender policing.
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Date: 2011-09-13 10:55 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2011-09-14 01:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-14 10:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-14 01:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-14 10:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-14 04:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-14 10:47 pm (UTC)My basic problem with Alexander's Prydain which I loved as a kid
Date: 2011-09-14 06:40 am (UTC)This system of magic actually does provide a handwavy explanation for the lack of women in the universe -
Apart from the fact that Lloyd Alexander's Prydain is based on the Mabinogion which is absolutely littered with women who play a lot more and more complex roles than those which Alexander gives them; it's not so much that you go "Well, 60s kidlit obviously would never stand for Gwydion the rapist (let alone the bestial incestuous mpreg rape-atonement sub-plot)" but it's that Alexander took a country's national myth cycle, buggered it and pretty much exised the women.
Which obviously I didn't notice when I read it the first time round, but which bugs me now (for example, does Alexander when he's referring to "the Children of Don" mention that Don=Danu who is an incredibly powerful Goddess?)
Re: My basic problem with Alexander's Prydain which I loved as a kid
Date: 2011-09-14 10:51 pm (UTC)Alexander's definitely a tokenist - one exceptional Strong Girl Character, and then a horde of men. Getting a Bechdel pass out of Prydain fanfic is not an easy thing to do. But the lure of his exceptionals has always been very strong for me.
(Interestingly, the magical lightsides in Prydain have opposite-sex divine descents: the enchantresses named after the male sea-god Llyr, the male heroes after the earth-goddess Danu. Make of it what you will.)
Re: My basic problem with Alexander's Prydain which I loved as a kid
Date: 2011-09-15 06:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-15 12:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-15 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-16 12:26 am (UTC)Who wouldn't want to go on about Prydain all day long?
no subject
Date: 2011-09-16 02:21 am (UTC)Prydain is funny, because it's from this like interim period in kidlit/ya/fantasy publishing - too new to be classic a la CS Lewis, but not sexy/edgy enough to attract any of the attention that YA gets. It's somehow out of joint with theoretical time.