The "Masculine Mystique" Revisioned in The Earthsea Quartet

Published as one of the articles in The Presence of the Past in Children's Literature (Greenwood Press, 2003)

Yoshida, Junko

　　　　Ursula K. Le Guin published The Earthsea Quartet which includes A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1972), The Farthest Shore (1973), and Tehanu (1990) during the turbulent years of changing conceptions of gender in the United States of America. Le Guin honestly admits in her essay, Earthsea Revisioned (1993), that she "lived under the spell" of the myth of masculinity, like most other Americans, when she wrote the first three books of Earthsea (17). The myth is based on a narrow image of white middle-class heterosexual males, and expects men to conform to it. I will therefore place The Earthsea Quartet in a social and cultural context, reading them as novels about changing conceptions of masculinity in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.

　　　　In A Wizard of Earthsea Ged, an apprentice wizard, conjures up a shadow in order to prove himself. Because the shadow is nameless and therefore out of his control, his whole existence is threatened. Hunted by the shadow he travels around the world. After the critical failure in dealing with the shadow, Ged learns from his mentor, Mage Ogion, that he has to pursue it instead of fleeing from it. Then he finally confronts the shadow and integrates it into himself by calling it "Ged," thereby becoming whole himself.

　　　　The shadow can be gendered, because Ged's attitude toward it is closely connected with his masculine identity. The shadow represents the dark side of his conventional masculinity that has features of being power-hungry, always "in harness" (suppressing human feelings), disturbing the balance of nature (exploiting nature), and excluding the feminine from his gender construct (using and exploiting femininity).

　　　　Ged's first contact with the shadow comes after he becomes an apprentice of Ogion, his initiator into manhood. In other words, the shadow appears after the shift of his role model from his harsh and violent father to the silent and mild father figure who respects the balance of nature and is reluctant to use power. Ged's confused and irritated feelings toward Ogion's passivity are described as follows: ". . . when it rained Ogion would not even say the spell . . . [but he] let the rain fall where it would. He found a thick fir-tree and lay down beneath it. . . Ged wondered what was the good of having power if you were too wise to use it . . ." (26-27).

　　　　Around the same period, Ged is challenged by the daughter of the Lord of Re Albi to summon a spirit of the dead. Out of "a desire to please her, to win her admiration" (28) and to "prove himself for her" (30) he eventually conjures up a shadow, which is actually "the foreboding of the shadow, or the shadow of a shadow" (120). According to the sociologist Arlene Skolnick, it was already haunting American society in the 1950s as a "masculinity crisis." Skolnick says, "the ideology of the strong male was at odds with the ideology of togetherness" (71), and "social critics feared that women were powerful and growing more so, and that men were weak and becoming ever more effeminate and emasculated" (111).

Like the protagonist, Jim, in the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause who mocks at and rebels against his "weak" father, Ged sneers at Ogion's typically feminine and ineffectual attitude while challenging the most difficult art of magic, and chooses to go to Roke, the hierarchical top of the wizardry. Like many teenage boys in the 1950s Ged is beginning to feel a nameless fear caused by the "masculinity crisis." It is metaphorical that the ship that carries Ged to his ambition is named "Shadow" (33) and that when he enters the School of Roke, the shadow stealthily follows him through the gate (40).

　　　　The real shadow is released when Ged competes with Jasper, a similarly power-hungry apprentice wizard at school. He challenges Ged to perform "the height of the Summoner's art and the mage's power" (57): to summon up a spirit from the dead. Ged, again out of his arrogant desire to prove himself, calls up a spirit of Elfarran, the legendary beautiful lady. Perry Nodelman, in his interpretation of this scene, uses Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's analysis of "male homosocial desire" (1) and maintains that Ged and Jasper "develop their bonds and establish their hierarchies of power with each other" through the exchange of the woman ("Reinventing the Past" 191). However, I would rather focus femininity in discourses of manhood than homosocial men's bonding, as Le Guin writes:

In the realm of male power, there is no interdependence of men with women. Manhood . . . is obtained and validated by the man's independence of women. . . . Women in that world are non-people, dehumanized by a beautiful, worshipful spell - a spell which may be seen, from the other side, as a curse. (Earthsea Revisioned 16)

　　　　The sociologist Anthony Rotundo maintains that the concept of conventional masculinity is defined by the idea of a "separate sphere" and has been accepted as the norm by American society. This sphere excludes any attributes that are thought to be feminine, such as the nurturing, caring, intimate, passive and emotional.*1 Therefore, women as a full embodiment of the feminine are useful in "the male traffic" in the sense that men are exempted from taking the feminine elements into their manhood. This scene paradoxically exemplifies omission of femininity from conventional masculine construct. Ironically, Elfarran helps Ged disclose the dark side of conventional manhood, which costs him a high price. He is physically and psychologically wounded.

　　　　The year of the publication of A Wizard of Earthsea, 1968, was an eventful year. In February U.S. troops dispatched to Vietnam became the largest in number, despite the rising anti-war movements throughout the country. In April Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, setting off widespread riots in urban areas. In September a group of feminists demonstrated against the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, attracting much attention from the mass media. In this social and cultural climate Ged releases the shadow and tracks it down in his shipwrecked boat with water seeping in everywhere, continually casting a weakening spell upon the boat to keep it from sinking (134-37).

This desperate quest reflects the social and cultural situation around 1968 when America's masculine authority and justice came into question. In addition, his Odyssey reminds us of that of Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye who roams around New York psychologically weakened and wounded after he becomes disillusioned with "phony" masculinity.*2 Ged, who has confronted the cultural anxiety that has no name, is a successor to Holden. In the closing pages when Ged approaches the shadow, it starts to transform from one image into another including his father and Jasper. They all represent conventional manhood. Thus, Ged successfully overcomes the masculine identity crisis by integrating conventional masculinity into his consciousness. He does not escape into the world of innocence as Holden does. He does not see "phony" masculinity in others but in himself.

The Tombs of Atuan (1972), from the perspective of Ged's masculinity, deals with his fear of the feminine. Though Ged once felt threatened by and escaped from the female power, "the Old Powers of earth" that locked the Stone of Terrenon in the first book, he enters the Tombs of Atuan, a female world, which is governed by the same biding-spell. Trapped in the womb-like maze under the tombs, the magelight of his staff, his masculine symbol, becomes feeble.

Here he encounters Arha/Tenar, priestess, who has been sacrificed for this power, and he meekly accepts Tenar's food and water, female nurturing. As Le Guin admits, the focus of this novel is on a girl's coming of age (The Language of the Night 55), but in the background it narrates how Ged, after overcoming his fear of femininity, establishes an egalitarian relationship with her and plays the role of a midwife/witness in the rebirth of the female adolescent. It is symbolically represented in the reunification of the broken ring of Erreth-Akbe and Tenar's exodus from the world of the dead with Ged.

Skolnick says that several studies recognize a dramatic turning point in sex role beliefs in the early 1970s, when the traditional concept of the female role was replaced by a more egalitarian attitude ( Embattled Paradise 105). In other words, many women rejected the gender-based division of labor and the role of the Earth Mother, i.e., the externalized and institutionalized feminine nature.

　　　　It is not surprising then that many men who had excluded feminine nature from their construction of masculinity started to develop various men's movements in order to reconstruct their masculinity. The First National Conference on the Masculine Mystique and the first Men and Masculinity conference were held respectively in 1974 and 1975. In the following years, there was a rush of publications on masculinity including Herb Goldberg's The Hazards of Being Male (1976), a national best seller, which proclaimed: "Earth Mother is dead and now macho can die as well. The man can come alive as a full person" (20).

　　　　The third book, The Farthest Shore, was published in 1973 when the Vietnam War ended and there were widespread rumors of the Watergate scandal. In this novel masculinity really starts to change. Cob, a self-claimed Lord of the dead and the living, inflicts a "wound" on Earthsea that has caused the decline of power. The story unfolds along the dangerous voyage of Ged, the Archmage, and Arren, the young prince, to the Dry Land. Ged faces up to Cob, another shadow of Ged, there and consumes all his magic power in healing the wound. In the meantime Arren, guiding Ged, comes back across the Dry River and is thus initiated into manhood. The central theme in this novel is alteration of generation between Ged and Arren, or Arren's coming of age.

　　　　In reading this novel from the perspective of masculine development, one keyword "sword," a masculine symbol, is worth noting. We learn in the opening pages that Arren's name means "Sword." He possesses a hereditary sword which has never been wielded except for justice, but he usually wears a knife. Later we learn that this seventeen-year-old "girlish lad" cannot use even this knife effectively to protect Ged and himself in a crisis. When he finally gets a chance to wield the sword, he destroys the wraith of Cob only in vain (466).

Arren's development of masculinity is at odds with the traditional and magnificent sword. Read in the social and cultural context of America in the late 1960s, this is reminiscent of the awkward and strained relationship between the youth and America's masculine authority which is typically seen in the counter-culture and radicalism.

　　　　However, Ged does not mind this and rather admires Arren's innocence while encouraging him to learn passivity. Ged says, "You are my guide. In your innocence and courage, in your unwisdom and your loyalty, you are my guide. . . It is your fear I follow" (411). Arren, reflecting his anxiety and fear, suffers recurring nightmares and hears a voice that invites him throughout his journey. Ged says to Arren:

　　"You stand on the borders of possibility, in the shadowland, in the realm of dream,
　　 and you hear the voice saying Come. As I did one. But I am old. I have made my
　　choices, I have done what I must do. I stand in daylight facing my own death. And
　　 I know that there is only one power worth having. And that is power, not to take,
　　but to accept." (424)

　　　　 In order to heal the wound Ged needs Arren as his guide to the Dry Land. In the early 1970s, according to the historian Peter N. Carroll, America was suffering a "raw, painful, unhealing wound" (20) or "a gaping crack in the American identity" (20) inflicted by the "dishonesty of the Vietnam War" and the Watergate scandal (159). Carroll further maintains that, during the 70s, millions of Americans came to share the hopeful vision that the youth were trying to remake America in their own image (21). If we genderize the wound, the youth, and America as masculinity, we can say that the new manhood embodied in Arren is a guide and hope to heal America's wounded masculinity.

　　　　As they enter the Dry Land, Arren takes his sword while Ged lifts up his staff to cast a light in the darkness. However, what is significant here is that it is Ged's staff that takes the responsibility to heal the wound, not Arren's sword. When the job is done, "there [is] no more light on Ged's yew-staff" (467). As Arren's awkwardness with wielding his father's sword shows, the new manhood in the early 70s was not approved by the general public.

Probably, it found its unstable home only in hippies' masculinity. In other words, the concept of new manhood had just entered an "adolescent" phase, and, in order to be recognized as mature, needed to "grow up" through numerous discussions and various men's movements. In this sense Arren's new manhood anticipates the "new man" which stimulated an active discourse on ideal images of new masculinities in the late 70s and the early 80s.

In Tehanu (1990), though the female issues are foregrounded, the novel is concerned with how to revitalize the life of Ged whose power is totally consumed. Ged already anticipated this in The Farthest Shore: "It is time to be done with power. To drop the old toys, . . .It is time that I went home. I would see Tenar. . . .And maybe there I would learn at last what no act, or power can teach me, what I have never learned" (441).

After coming back from the Dry Land, Ged is carried to Ogion's house on a dragon's back where he meets middle-aged and widowed Tenar and her adopted daughter, Therru, who had been abused by her father. Tenar nurses Ged as well as Therru, who later identifies herself as a daughter of dragon-people and also the future Archmage at Roke. Therru is the key in this book as Le Guin writes in her essay, "Raped, beaten, pushed into the fire, disfigured, one hand crippled, one eye blinded, this child is innocence in a different sense of the word. This is helplessness personified: disinheritance, a child dehumanized, made Other" (Earthsea Revisioned 19). Because Therru is a female, child, and dragon (nature) which the men's world has marginalized and exploited, she is the "Other" on all three points. The encounter with Therru is vital for Ged because he has believed, "Both men and magery are built on one rock: power belongs to men" (664), and now he has to face up to the ugly reality male power has created.

　　　　At first Ged's attitude toward Therru is an indifferent one, even though he displays no overt aversion. Ged says, "I don't know . . . why you took her, knowing that she cannot be healed. Knowing what her life must be. . . . we must live on into the new age with the spoils of our victory over evil. You with your burned child, and I with nothing at all" (547). Unable to find any correlation between the burned child and himself, Ged regresses to his childhood by retreating to the mountain in Gont where he used to tend goats as a boy. It is not until he comes down the mountain that Ged marries Tenar after fighting burglars with a farmer's fork, not with a wizard's staff. Then Ged accepts Tenar as his wife and Therru as his adopted daughter. In this way Ged learns what Roke cannot teach him: by nurturing and loving others he can reconcile with the typically feminine aspects buried in himself such as the nurturing, intimate, and emotional, and thereby can heal his wound.

　　　　Turning our attention to American society in the 1980s, as evidenced by the Reagan presidency, there was an emergence of a new conservatism, and a backlash against the radicalism. Rabinowits and Cochran maintain, "masculinity that defined the male psyche as a simplistic, achievement-oriented black box" returned in the 1980s (xvi). Some youths who found no appropriate masculine model were in need of protecting themselves from the possible confusion, and came to identify with a narrow and rigid masculinity. The machismo portrayed in Sylvester Stallone's films during this period exemplifies this trend. Therefore, it is not by accident that a "spiritual perspective" segment of the men's movement became active during the same period, and many of their writings appeared in "new-age" publications. Its activities were mostly grounded on Carl Jung's theory that men's psychological wounds could be healed by searching the archetypes buried in their unconscious and recovering their psycho-spiritual health.

　　　　John Rowan's The Horned God is one of the politicized and feminist contributions to the debate, and offers insight into Ged's trajectory of psychological healing. Rowan admits that many men have repressed or excluded their feminine elements from themselves. The rejection of the feminine, he maintains, worsens the wounds men receive when the reality of their masculinity is debunked. Rowan claims that men can heal their wounds by reconnecting with the feminine buried in their unconscious.*3

　　　　We should note that Ged appears in the first book as a dark-skinned hero. Le Guin's attitude toward the hero's manhood in this heroic fantasy has been a subversive one from the beginning of the series. Le Guin writes, "I was making him an Outsider, an Other, like a woman" (Earthsea Revisioned 8). Therefore, it is natural that she should further decentralize the hero's masculinity. If we think Ged and Arren are actually one man in the discourse of manhood, then we can say that Arren who once was a premature "new man" in The Farthest Shore has matured into Ged in Tehanu. Seen from a pro-feminist man's viewpoint, Le Guin seems to follow social trends rather than lead them, taking four volumes and 25 years.

Notes
1. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Columbia UP, 1985), pp. 22-25, 253-54, 264-65.
2. J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (Boston: Little Brown, 1951, rept. 1991). pp.40-52. Note that Holden's flight from Pencey came after his fight with Stradlater, who represents stereotypically conventional type of masculinity and can conform to the norm of masculinity at prepschool during that time.
3. John Rowan, The Horned God: Feminism and Men as Wounded and Healing (New York: Routledge, 1987), p.1.

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