Sadler's Lectures

Ursula K Leguin, Tehanu - Women & Men, Magic & Power - Sadler's Lectures

This lecture discusses the science fiction and fantasy author, Ursula K. Leguin's novel, Tehanu, the fourth of six Earthsea books

It focuses specifically on the relations between men and women, the understandings of gender, and the dimensions of power as key themes in Leguin's text, expressed, argued, and mulled over by characters in the novel.

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Duration:: 23m
Broadcast on:: 15 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

(upbeat music) Welcome to the Sadler Lectures Podcast. Responding to popular demand, I'm converting my philosophy videos into sound files you can listen to anywhere you can take an MP3. If you like what you hear and want to support my work, go to patreon.com/sadler. I hope you enjoy this lecture. In Ursula K. LeGreens' fourth Earthsea novel to Hanu, one of the key themes that runs throughout the entire work, is the interconnection between the relations between men and women within their society and in their relationships and power. Power understood both in terms of, you know, the very broad sense of power, being able to make people do things to compel, to arrange things according to one's wishes. And in terms of magic, since this is Earthsea, and magic plays an incredibly important role within, the, you could say, economy and social structure and the plot of all the things that are going on in Earthsea. And this theme is explored in large part through the things that Tenar, the main character, says to other people, has people say to her or in her interior reflections, as in, for example, the case of Handy, one of the abusers of her adopted child, Therum, where she reflects on how, you know, Handy is doing this thing and doesn't he realize this? So there's a lot of discourse about power. And I want to begin sort of towards the end when she and Ged are talking about these matters together, a passage that we'll come back to. And she says, you seemed in your power as free as man can be, but at what cost? What made you free? And I was made molded like clay by the will of the women serving the old powers or serving the men who made all services and ways and places I no longer know which. Then I went free with you for a moment and with Ojian, but it was not my freedom. Only it gave me choice and I chose. I chose to mold myself like clay to the use of a farm and a farmer and our children. I made myself a vessel. I know its shape, but not the clay. Life danced me, I know the dances. I don't know who the dancer is. And so this is a very important teaching here. There's always a contingency in the freedom and the power that we have, but we also do have some measure of choice and responsibility. And neither of them are entire, they come together. Now, Tenar is an unusual person. She's not an ordinary woman. And so if we begin with one of her first ruminations about this, Tenar was somebody who had power. She was, as she says, set apart and power was shared or given with her. She says, when Tenar had first lived in Rialbi 25 years ago, Moas had not been an old witch, but a young one, she ducked and bowed and grinned at the young lady, the white lady. Ogion's ward and student never speaking to her, but with the utmost respect. Tenar had felt that respect to be false, a mask for envy and dislike and distrust. They were all too familiar to her from women over whom she had been placed in a position of superiority. So when she has power herself, whether in this novel or back in the tombs of Atuan, these women see themselves as common and her as uncommon, as privileged. Priestess of the tombs of Atuan or a foreign ward of the Mage of Gaunt, she was set apart, set above. Power is about these vertical relations. Then she says, men had given her power. Men had shared their power with her. Women looked at her from outside, sometimes rivalries, often with a trace of ridicule. She had felt herself, the one left outside, shut out. She'd fled from the powers of the desert tombs. Then she'd left the powers of learning and skill offered her by her guardian, Ogion. She turned her back on that. So for a while, she enjoys power, but in terms of respect, it's not really her power. It's a borrowed power. And what does power do? Does it get her what she actually wants? No, it sets her apart and sets her at odds with others. So she leaves behind that power. And there's a couple different descriptions of that in passages running throughout this text, several different reminiscences of it. But here's one of the key things. She turned her back on it, gone to the other side, the other room where the women lived to be one of them. A wife, a farmer's wife, a mother, a householder. Undertaking, here again, the key term, the power that a woman was born to, the authority allotted her by the arrangements of mankind, the arrangements of mankind, social arrangements, the ways in which we often take the culture, the customs as being natural. Later on, for example, her son's spark returned from his ship after the crew has been broken up, refuses to put his dishes even into a tub or the sink. That's women's work, right? These are social arrangements and Tenar goes into that. At the same time, she still remains rather unusual and not just because of her, her white skin, but because she in effect becomes a dragon lord. So when she engages with the dragon kalescing, she thinks to herself, well, I'm not supposed to have this kind of power, but I'm also somebody that a dragon came to and talked with. So are there women dragon lords? Does this open up a door a possibility? And we see throughout the novel, if there's anybody who is unusual, except for of course, Thero, because of her trauma and injury, and then what happens with her at the end, it is Tenar, right? She does come from this background. She asks Gad later on about the possibility of women mages and even a woman arc mage as we're going to come to later. So we've got Tenar as a character who has experienced power, who is on the high side of things, at least to a certain extent, there's still power exercised over her, who is on the low side of things. For example, when the two wizards at Ogion's death basically ignore her, even though she is the one who was his ward and knows the dispositions, the one wizard is very resentful of her, he's very misogynistic, Aspen, the Wizard of Ray Albie. We also encounter Moss. Moss is a village witch, and Moss is a woman of power. In fact, she recognizes that Gad no longer has his power because of the power that she has, which she likens to being like a seeing person who can tell whether other people have eyes or are blind or have only one eye or three eyes. And Moss is going to give Tenar metaphors of the power that men and women have, both in life and in relation to their magic, and she's putting forth a kind of essentialism. Women are one kind of thing, men are another kind of thing. It's interesting, she's very fascinated by the gilded men, the eunuchs of Atuan, when Tenar tells her about that, she won't let that conversation go because they're kind of in between, right? Here's the things that Moss will say. A man's in his skin, see like a nut in its shell. It's hard and strong, that shell, and it's all full of him, full of grand man, meat, man, self, and that's all, that's all there is. It's all him and nothing inside. And then Tenar says, what if that man's a wizard? Well, then it's all his power inside, his powers himself, see? That's how it is with him and that's all. When his power goes, he's gone, empty, nothing. And then she says, what about a woman? Here's where we have one of the most famous speeches from this novel. Oh, a woman's a different thing entirely. Who knows where a woman begins and ends? Listen, mistress, I have roots. I have roots deeper than this island, deeper than the sea, older than the raising of the lands. I go back into the dark. I go back into the dark before the moon I was. 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. So this is one way of looking at things instead of men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Basically, men are an identity. They are what they are and are contained within themselves. Women are what they are, but their roots go down into the depths. Well, that doesn't say whether this is all women or whether it's just women of power, but that is the metaphor that she's going to use. She also is going to say another thing about this that men are, especially wizards, are like great pine trees, right? They stand up, but they can be destroyed easily by the wind. Whereas, of course, women are much more like brambles, blackberries, again, the metaphor of roots. Their roots are in some respects, if not deeper, at least appropriate to them. When a great wind comes, they won't be tumbled down. And so that's a key thing. And their magic works like that as well. Women's magic, you know, in the world that they live in, there is the high magic and that's only for men. You know, they go to rock and they study there. Everybody has been told that there have never been any women mages or anything like that. Part of the backstory that turns out to be false as we find out in the fifth and sixth books, but this is the sort of reigning ideology that witches are undisciplined. Men, their magic can actually be disciplined. There's also an interesting interconnection between men, their magic, and celibacy that Moss is going to bring up as well. And this is precisely because she's talking about Ged and she says that Ged is essentially like a 15-year-old boy. Why? Because he entered into his majorhood around that time and had to give something up. And here Moss says something really interesting. They witch themselves. Some will tell you they make a trade-off like a marriage turned backward with vows and all. A marriage turned backward. Isn't that an interesting way to think of it? So they get their power. But that to me has got a wrong sound to it like a dealing with the old powers more than what a true witch deals with. And the old mage, that's Ogin, he told me they did know such things. But I've known some women witches do it and come to know great harm by it. And Tenor says, "The ones who brought me up "did that promising virginity." And then Moss goes on and says, "That's the power of this you don't think. "You can't, nor do they once they've set their spell. "How could they, given their power? "It wouldn't do. "You don't get without you give as much. "That's true for all, surely." So they know that the witch men, the men of power, they know that better than any. But then you know it's an uneasy thing for a man, not to be a man, no matter if he can call the sundown from the sky. So they put it right out of mind with their spells of binding. And truly so. Because otherwise they would be using their spells to satisfy their bodies' lust. And Tenor says, "They set themselves apart." And she says, "I, a wizard, has to do that." And then she said, "But you don't. "Me, I'm only an old witch woman, dearie." And she says, "When you had a man, Moss, "did you have to give up your power?" And the witch says, "Not a bit of it." So she says, "But you said you don't get unless you give. "Is it different then for men and for women? "What isn't dearie? "I don't know." And now here's where Tenor says something really interesting. "It seems to me we make up most of the differences "and then complain about them. "I don't see why the art magic, "why power should be different for a man and a woman witch, "unless the power itself is different or the art." So this is a very important sort of figuring of things. Why is magic, if a person has power, why does it vary according to gender? Is it that the art is only learnable by men? Is it that the power itself is different in men and women? And Moss says something, and she's very confident about this. Tenor doesn't quite buy it. A man gives out dearie a woman takes in. And here's where they turn to talking about reputation. Reputation is being a kind of power. So Moss says, "Arse is only a little power next to theirs, "but it goes down deep, it's all roots." That was the thing about the blackberry bramble. And then she says, "It's probably good that get left "because people in the town might begin to talk." And Tenor says, "What do you mean to talk?" And she says, "Well, you're a respectable woman, dearie. "And reputation is a woman's wealth." And now Tenor says, "Her wealth, her wealth, "her treasure, her hoard, her value. "Like the dragons who found caves, "who build fortresses for their treasure, "for their hoard to be safe, "to sleep on their treasure, to be their treasure, "take in, take in, and never give out." Going back to this, a woman takes in, a man gives out. And then Moss says, "Well, you'll know the value "of a good reputation when you've lost it." It isn't everything, but it's hard to fill the place of. And then, you know, Tenor turns it on and says, "Well, would you give up your power to be reputable?" And Moss says, "Well, I wouldn't, "because the power is really all I know, "but you, you, Tenor, you need to think about that." So notice that Moss is not given the sole place of interpretation of this, this problematic. When we come to Ged, we note that his power has been poured out as he tells us like a cup. He had to use his power to close the breach between the living and the dead, the dry land and the world of Earthsea. And in doing so, he poured out everything that he had. And now, he is humiliated, he feels shame, he feels fear, because people want him to be who and what he was, the archmage, he flees from the king's men, the king who he saved the world with. He doesn't want to see him. Later on, Ged will come back, and there's a very interesting discussion that's taking place between him and Tenor. She says, "How did you know to follow these guys?" Who he ends up, you know, stabbing one of them with a pitchfork, saving Tenor and Therro from Therro's former abusers. How did you know to find them? And he's kind of meditated on this. And she says, "It's the kind of thing that happens to a wizard." And he says, "And others, maybe my dear, you're not trying to reinstate me." No, no, not at all. If you were a wizard, would you be here? And then she says, "But what I want to know is this. Is there something besides what you call power that comes before it, maybe? Or something that power is just one way of using. Like this, OG and said if you once that before you'd had any learning or training as a wizard at all, you were a mage. Mage born, he said. So I imagined that to have power, one must first have room for the power. An emptiness to fill. And the greater the emptiness, the more power can fill it. But if the power was never got or was taken away or was given away, still that would be there." He says, "The emptiness." Emptiness is one word for it, maybe not the right word. And then Ged says, "Potentiality? What is able to be, to become?" And then Tenor says, "I think you were on that row just there, just then, because of that, because of it is what happens to you. You didn't make it happen. You didn't cause it. It wasn't because of your power. It happened to you because of your emptiness." After a while, he said, "That isn't far from what I was taught as a boy on rope, that true, major lies in doing only what you must do. But this would go further, not to do, but to be done to." All right, so Ged is now reversing a polarity, you can say here. And then she says, "I don't think that's quite it. It's more like what true doing rises from. Didn't you come and save my life? Didn't you run a fork and to hate that was doing all right? Doing what you must do." And then Ged says, "Is this a wisdom taught you when you were a priestess of the tombs?" And she says, "No, no, I didn't get it from there. Arha was taught that to be powerful. She must sacrifice, sacrifice herself in others, a bargain. Give and get." And I cannot say that's untrue, but my soul can't live in that narrow place. There is a freedom beyond that, beyond payment, retribution, redemption, beyond all the bargains and balances, there is freedom. And so there's this very complicated thing that's going on in this discussion. Arha at one time, Tenar is telling about what power was like when she was a priestess and why she had to leave that behind. Ged is coming to gropingly realize that he isn't totally without anything, but what he has is an emptiness or potentiality that is still aligning him with things. We're gonna come back to that in a moment. Let's talk about Handy and other evil people and the power that they have. Handy is one of the people who has horribly abused the child Theru, who had been starved, beaten, raped, cast into a fire and he tries to get hold of her once again and the king essentially stands in the way. Now, there's an interesting reflection. We see that Theru has closed in on herself again in a lot of the progress that has been made towards opening up to the world seems to have been lost. Tenar says it's so easy for Handy to take the sunlight from her, to take the ship and the king and her childhood from her and it's so hard to give it back. A year I've spent trying to give them back to her and with one touch, he takes them and throws them away. What good does it do him? What's his prize? What's his power? Is power that an emptiness? Notice that emptiness here is being talked about in a different way, a void, a vanity, right? The power that so many of us exercise over each other through attempting to exploit, to dominate, to humiliate, to do things to another so that we can feel alive or we can feel one step up, even though we may be getting crapped on from everybody on high, on downward, power coming from the exercise of resentment. It is real power in that it has effects. It's not power that can accomplish anything for good. Finally, we talk about what a woman's power could be once again with Ged and Tenar. And there's an important discussion that's taking place where she asks them why couldn't a woman be a mage or even an archmage? Why not? Ged says a woman on God can't become archmage. No woman can be archmage. She doesn't make what she became in becoming it. The mages of Rok are men. Their power is the power of men. Their knowledge is the knowledge of men. Both manhood and majoring are built on one rock. Power belongs to men. So, you know, Ged here is enunciating sort of what has become the traditional way of looking at things. Then he says something really interesting. If women had power, what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but men who can't? This would have faced the gender difference if they both had the same capacity for power. If we had an inequality. And Ged seems to be suggesting that this would be a bad thing. Tenor then says, haven't there been queens? Weren't they women of power? And Ged says a queen's only a she king. And then he says, I mean men give her power. They let her use their power but it isn't hers, is it? It isn't because she's a woman that she's powerful but despite it. She nodded and then says, okay fine, what's a woman's power? And Ged says, I don't think we know. When has a woman power because she's a woman with her children I suppose for a while in her house maybe? So this is like the traditional view as well. Domestic duties, the woman is totally in charge of the household except of course when she isn't. And Tenor isn't satisfied with that either. And she goes on and she says, why are men afraid of women? And Ged says, now showing a bit of insight. If your strength is only the other's weakness you live in fear. And then she says yes but women seem to fear their own strength to be afraid of themselves. So we have this complex dynamic there. Men, most men are afraid of women. And because of that they want to exert power over them to control them, to make them stay in their place. Good example of this is when Tenor reflects on how her husband wouldn't answer questions with a real answer trying to use her ignorance as a way to have power over her. At the same time it's not simply that men have dominated women, women fear their own power. And here we get this very interesting discussion of trust. Ged says, are they ever taught to trust themselves? And Tenor says, trust is not what were taught. If power were trust, I like that word, if it weren't all these arrangements one above the other, kings and masters and mages and owners, it all seemed so unnecessary. Real power, real freedom would lie in trust, not force. As children trust their parents, he said. So this sounds like a breakthrough. What real power would be is real freedom, would be trust, like the trust that children have with their parents when we're not talking, of course, about an abusive relationship. And then Ged points out that even this, this ideal is not perfect. As things are, he says, even trust corrupts, the men unroke trust themselves. And one another, their power is pure. Nothing taints its purity, so they take that purity for wisdom, they cannot imagine doing wrong. This is a very important passage. She looked up at him. He had never spoken about roak thus before from holy outside of it, free of it. And then she says, maybe they need some women there to point that possibility out to them. And she goes on and says, I don't see why, if there can't be she kings, there can't be she arc mages and Ged argues with her. And she says, all right, we don't even know what a woman's power is, all right, but all the same, why can't they find an arc mage? So she's suggesting something that is actually gonna be worked out as part of the back history of Earthsea and something going forward as well in the subsequent volume. So lots of very interesting structure here in the way power is understood and how it is involved in the relations between men and women in Earthsea. Special thanks to all of my Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. You can find me on Twitter at philosopher70 on YouTube at the Gregory B. Sadler channel and on Facebook on the Gregory B. Sadler page. Once again, to support my work, go to patreon.com/sadler. Above all, keep studying these great philosophical works. (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music)