Sadler's Lectures

Ursula K Leguin, Tehanu - Therru's Abuse, Fear, And Healing - 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 character Therru, a terribly abused child who was beaten, starved, and raped by her parents and their gang. She is thrown into a fire and left for dead, but survives and is adopted by Tenar, who raises her and tries to help her heal.

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Duration:: 22m
Broadcast on:: 07 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. One of the main characters of Ursula K. Leguine's fourth Earthsea novel, Tohannu, is named Theru. And she's named that by Tenar, one of the other main characters who takes her in as a damaged, abused child. And this happens in the very first chapter of the work. We find that Lark comes and says, "Gohah, it's a very bad thing. "It's a very bad thing. "Can you come?" And what is the bad thing, a burned child? Gohah is, of course, the use name of Tenar, the character from Toom's of Antoine. And what do we find here? Well, there is a story that's told by Lark. They've been camped in the river meadows all the month. A man passed himself off as a tinker, but he's a thief and a woman with him. Another man, younger, hanging around with them most of the time. Not working any of them, filching and begging and living off the woman. Boys from Down River were bringing them farm stuff to get at her. You know how it is now and gangs on the road coming by farms. If I were you, I'd lock my door. So this one, the younger fellow, comes into the village and I was out in the front of the house and he says, "The child's not well." I'd barely seen a child with them. A little ferret of a thing slipped out of sight so quick I wasn't sure it was there at all. So I said, "Not well, a fever." And the fellow says, "She hurt herself, lighting the fire." And then before I'd got myself ready to go with him, he'd made off, gone. And when I went down there by the river, the other pair was gone too, cleared out. All their traps and trash gone too. There was just their campfire and smoldering and just buy it partly in it on the ground. They hadn't even put a blanket over her. She'd been pushed into the fire while it was burning. Lark said she swallowed and brushed at the sticking seeds on her hot face. I'd say maybe she fell, but if she'd been awake, she'd have tried to save herself. They beat her and thought they'd killed her, I guess, and wanted to hide what they'd done to her. So they, and then Goha asks, "Will she live?" And Lark said, "She might, she might well live." And Lark says, "I don't know why it came to you. Ivy's there, there's nothing to be done." And Goha says, "I could go to Volmouth or beach, a sorcerer who could possibly do something." And she says, "Nothing he could do. It's beyond, beyond help. I got her warm Ivy, the local witch, has given her a potion and a sleeping charm. I carried her home. She must be six or seven, but she didn't weigh what a two-year-old would. She never really waked, but she makes a kind of gasping. I don't know if there's anything you can do, but I wanted you." And then Tenar Goha says, "I want to come." And all the other children have been sent outside. The village witch had smeared an ointment of witch hazel and heel all on the lesser burns, but did not touch the right side of the face and head in the right hand, which had been charred to the bone. She'd drawn the rune peer above the bed and left it at that. And Lark says, "You learned healing up on the mountain, didn't you?" And Tenar says, "Even Ojian couldn't heal this." So what do they do? They stay with the child and see whether it's going to live. Goha says, "I served the powers of the earth, and I left them, I will not let them have you." And the chapter ends by saying, "The child stared at her or at nothing, trying to breathe, and trying again to breathe, and trying again to breathe." It's that close to death. And what we find out later from Tenar, when she's summarizing what had happened, is that the abuse was pretty horrific. She tells the young king on the ship that the man that she confronts was one of the people who crippled the child. He and her parents, they raped her and beat her and burned her. These things happen, my lord, these things happen to children, and he keeps following her to get at her. So horrific abuse, the sort of thing that unfortunately, in our world and also in the world of Earthsea, does happen so often to children. She's starved, malnourished. We have that remark about, should have weighed a lot more. She's raped by who knows, the father, the same man that come to visit her mother. Beaten, beaten not just in the sense of punish, but they tried to kill her with beating her, and then pushed into a fire. And you can call these people misguided or traumatized themselves, but Le Guine has no problem calling them evil, and it's very clear that they are evil. Tenar takes Theru and gives her a name. Theru is a kargish name as her own child, and Theru grows up with what appear to be some significant challenges and deficits. She doesn't speak for a long time. Takes her a while to learn how to trust even their environment. And the physical damage is incredibly extensive. So, you know, the healing that's going to take place and the scarring that's going to take place is very significant. And it comes, you could say, in three main ways that are signaled in the novel. One has to do with the physicality. Her face and hand are burned down to the bone. Her eye is gone. Her face is completely damaged. To the point where when Ged, the former archmage, comes, is brought by the dragon and is being nursed by Tenar at Ojion's house. There's a sort of kinship that the child recognizes because Ged's face is scarred, not by fire, but by the shadow in the first wizard of Earthsea novel. And she says, he's like me. Her face and her hand are, in some respects, unusable. And in other respects, she's able to do some things. Anti-mos, the witch, teaches her how to use the essentially claw that she still has of her right hand to do cat's cradle. And she adapts. But there is very serious damage done to her body. And, you know, this gets mentioned at a number of points. For example, Tenar will draw the child in with her, right? And there's questions about what could be done. There's actually a great line here. This is about midway through the novel. And Tenar is sort of questioning herself. She says, everything she, Tenar had done, was wrong. She'd been given to the dark powers as a child. She'd been eaten by them. She had suffered to be eaten. Did she think that by crossing the sea, by learning other languages, by being a man's wife, a mother of children, by merely living her life, she could ever be anything but what she was, their servant, their food, theirs to use, for their needs and games. Destroyed, she had drawn the destroyed to her, part of her own ruin, the body of her own evil. And this is a really significant line we're going to talk about a little bit later. Tenar doesn't know whether she did the right thing. But she goes on and she says, the child's hair was fine, warm, sweet smelling. She curled up in the warmth of Tenar's arms, dreaming, what wrong could she be? Wronged, wronged beyond all repair, but not wrong. There's a very important distinction there that is central to healing this sort of trauma. Wronged, but not wrong. Not going to be recognized by everybody else. And that's when we can talk about the social stigma against Thero that takes place. A little bit earlier in that section, she's talking and she'd hope that Ged could heal Thero, lay his hand on the scar and it would be whole and while the blind eye bright, the clawed hand soft, the ruined life intact. Knowing what her life must be, as said. And then we have this description, the averted faces, the signs against evil, the horror and curiosity, the sickly pity and the prying threat for harm draws harm to it. And never a man's arms, never anyone to hold her, never anyone but Tenar. So she's going to have to live with the misunderstanding of other people of what was done to her, the confusion of this being wronged for being wrong, for being evil, for being fearsome. Terrible things were done to her, which makes her terrifying to others. And there's actually an interesting discussion a little bit later on, actually several discussions where bad things are happening to people, the powerful are imposing their will on the powerless and everybody else is like, well, it's not really my business. I don't have to do anything about this. Matter of fact, maybe they had it coming to them. There's a line there where it's assumed that the rich and the powerful have some sort of virtue and that the people that have bad things done to them, maybe on some level they deserved it. So that social stigma is something that is a problem. Just as important as a matter of fact, perhaps even more important because the social stigma can be avoided by going into a place where nobody else is, is the fear and the turning inward on the part of Thero. She is filled with fear at certain points by the people who have done the evil to her, those four, her mother and father and the other two. In particular, the one who's going to show up the most is this man handy, the man with the leather cap who is just as wicked as the rest of them and is trying to get at her. And she's afraid of them, understandably so because they did horrific things to her that she is just beginning to recover from through Tenar and the others, Anti-Moss, Ged, the others that are involved with her, the animals, Thero is able to unclench, to unfold, to begin to engage with other people. But the only people that she doesn't really show fear of at first are Tenar and Lark, and then later on, others who are interacting with her. But she doesn't have a general trust of human beings, right? So I'm going to read you some of the passages that have to do with that in just a moment. There is this question, was it good for Tenar to take her in or would it have been better for Thero to die? Tenar wavers back and forth about this. And there's actually a discussion between she and Ged. Ged tells her at one point that she, in some respect, might not have done the right thing, but she had to do it. That there wasn't any other path forward for her that it's like Ged and dealing with his own challenge imposed by the shadow. And Tenar is unsure whether she did the right thing. As time goes on, that worry goes away as she can see Thero developing. And I suppose you can say there's actually a point where this is driven home to her, how much value Thero has when we're dealing with handy in the rest of the evil band that are trying to get at her. The first time is at Ogion's house and she sees this guy handy going off to Ray Albee. And then she goes up to the house and she can't find the child. And she's worried, you know, where is Thero? She went to Ogion's house in a short way pasted up the forest path calling. As she came back through the meadow, the Kestrel was hunting in the same spot where Ged had watched it hunt. And she goes on and she says she must search around the house, the spring house, the milking shed more carefully. This was her fault. She'd caused it to happen by thinking of making Thero into a weaver, shutting her away in the dark to work to be respectable. She knew a wrong that cannot be repaired, must be transcended. When she knew the child had been given her and she failed in her charge, failed in her trust, lost her, lost the one great gift. She went into the house, having searched every corner of the other buildings, looked into the alcove and around the other bed, she poured herself water for her mouth was dry as sand. Behind the door, the three sticks of wood, Ogion's staff and the walking sticks moved in the shadows and one of them said here, the child was crouched in that dark corner drawn into her own body so that she seemed no bigger than a little dog, had bent down to the shoulder, arms and legs pulled tight in the one eye shut. Little bird, little sparrow, little flame, what is wrong? What happened, what have they done to you now? Then Tenner says, how could you frighten me so? How could you hide from me? Oh, I was so angry. She wept and her tears fell on the child's face. Oh, Thero, Thero, Thero, don't hide away from me. A shudder went through the knotted limbs and slowly they loosened. Thero moved and all at once clung to Tenner, pushing her face into the hollow between Tenner's breast and shoulder, clinging tighter till she was clutching desperately. She did not weep, she never wept. Her tears had been burned out of her maybe, she had none, but she made a long, moaning, sobbing sound. Tell me, the woman murmured and the child answered in her faint horse whisper, he came here. Tenner's first thought was of ged and then she realized who came here, a man. A man in a leather cap, Thero nodded once. We saw him on the road. So she asked, do you know him, Thero? Thero says, yes. From when you lived in the camp by the river, one nod. He came here, she said, and all the fears she felt turned as she spoke into anger, a rage that burned in her the length of her body, like a rod of fire. And then Tenner makes a promise to her. He will never touch you, Thero. Understand me and believe me. He will never touch you again. He'll never see you again unless I'm with you. And then he must deal with me. Do you understand my dear, my precious, my beautiful? You need not fear him, you must not fear him. He wants you to fear him. He feeds on your fear. We will starve him, Thero. We'll starve him till he eats himself. Till he chokes gnawing on the bones of his own hands. Ah, don't listen to me now. I'm only angry, angry. And so there's a little bit more. The idea of the man's coming to the house, being in the house, coming to look at his handiwork, maybe thinking of improving upon it. That idea when it recurred to Tenner came, less is a thought than as a queasy fit, a need to vomit. But the nausea burned itself out against the anger. So this is a very important exchange here. There's a lot going on. This notion that the man is going to come and finish what he started or improve upon his work. The abuser wants to continue abusing. In this case, the vulnerable child who he's already imposed so much upon. He wants her fear. And Tenner is both angry as a result and nauseated and wants to drive that fear away as well. And this is really the proper response to that sort of evil. The next time is in the port of Gaunt. And this time, Tenner is actually under a spell from the evil sorcerer of Ray Albie Aspen and taking Tenner down to the harbor and handy is pursuing them. As a matter of fact, Handy even tries to take Theru from her and it's only the people on the boat who end up saving them. Handy says, "You don't have to run away. I don't mean you any harm. I don't want to hurt you. You don't understand. I was the one who got help for her, wasn't I? I was really sorry what happened. I want to help you with her. He put out his hand as if drawn irresistibly to touch Theru. Tenner could not move. She'd promise Theru. He would never touch her again. She saw the hand touch the child's bare flinching arm. What do you want with her? Said another voice, another sailor had taken the place of the bald one, a young man. Tenner thought he was her son. Handy was quick to speak as the abusers always are. They've always got a line ready, right? She's got, she took my kid, my niece, it's mine. She wished it, she ran off with it, see? And Tenner is having a hard time even speaking. She says, "Let me come aboard, please." The young man held out his hand. She took it. He brought her across the gangway and onto the deck of the ship. "Wait here," he said to Handy, and to her come with me. She sank into a heap on the deck of the ship from Hovnor, dropping the heavy sack, but clinging to the child. Don't let him take her, oh, don't let him have her. Not again, not again, not again. And this is where the story comes out. Turns out the young man is actually the king. And the king is going to set things straight, either himself or through his intermediaries later in the book. She tells him what they did to Theru. And the king says, "I'm sorry I let the man go, "but he can be found again." And they talk about it again. And then while they're on the boat, Theru is terrified. And it takes a lot to get her to relax. She won't even talk to people. One of the sailors carves a beautiful bone or ivory dolphin for her. Tenar says, "It can live in your grass bag "with the others, the bone people." At that, Theru came to life enough to fetch out her grass bag and put the dolphin in it. But tenar had to go thank the humble giver. Theru would not look at him or speak. And here's where there's some interior monologue on the part of tenar about what's been done. It's so easy, she thought with rage. It's so easy for Handy to take the sunlight from her, take the ship and the king and her childhood from her. And it's so hard to give them back. A year I've spent trying to give them back to her. And with one touch, he takes them and throws them away. And what good does it do to him? What's his prize? Is his power? Is power that an emptiness? And so this is a really key line. What is it that these people, the abusers, are actually going to get? What are they after? It's worthless to them what they end up getting and it does so much damage to the traumatized child. Then there's a third time where the three men come to Goa or Tenar's farm and try to break in to take the child. Fortunately, Ged has come along with them, although not accompanying them and stabs one of them with a pitchfork and the other's scatter. Eventually they'll all be hung by the king's justices. And this is one more time in which the abusers are trying to get at Theru and to harm her, to damage her again. There's so much going on here. What is it that they want? They want to possess, they want to destroy, they want to, as Tenar remarked earlier, to improve upon their handiwork. And it's all for nothing. It won't give them any satisfaction. Healing, as we find out in this story, is not something that in so many novels and television shows and films is this, you know, one thing happens and then everything falls into place. Good will, hunting, being told. It's not your fault, right? Real healing isn't like that. Real healing is a cumulative process. One step forward, one step back. It can be undone by people coming in from the outside to re-traumatize the child. And it requires not only patience, but effort and working through not knowing whether you're actually doing the right thing. There is this great line here that I'll end with in this where Tenar is making a dress, a red dress for Theru, a red dress with a white apron for fancy wearing an orangey brown one for every day. Now then you look beautiful as the Tenar in her seamstress's pride when Theru first tried it on. Theru turned her face away. You are beautiful, Tenar said in a different tone. Listen to me, Theru, come here. You have scars, ugly scars because an ugly evil thing was done to you. People see the scars, but they see you too and you aren't the scars. You aren't ugly, you aren't evil. You are Theru and beautiful. You are Theru who can work and walk and run and dance beautifully in a red dress. The child listened, the soft, unhurt side of her face as expressionless as the rigid scar mask side. She looked down at Tenar's hands and presently touched them with her small fingers. It's a beautiful dress, she said, in her faint horse voice. When Tenar was alone, folding up the scraps of red material, tears came stinging into her eyes. She felt rebuked. She had done right to make the dress and she'd spoken the truth to the child. But it was not enough, the right and the truth. There was a gap, a void, a gulf on beyond the right and the truth, love. Her love for Theru and Theru's for her made a bridge across that gap. A bridge of spider web, but love did not fill it or close it, nothing did that. And the child knew it better than she. What a great way of summarizing what can be done to help healing in those who are traumatized, but also a recognition that these values, truth, rightness, love, don't actually face, don't erase what has happened. There's that earlier line about, instead of simply filling things in, transcending them. That is where it happens most explicitly in this story. 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. [ Music ] [MUSIC PLAYING]