Returning to the distinction between la parole originaire (authentic [Word, speech, idiolect]) and la parole secondaire (empirical), [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty says that the former, in relation to the later, is silence . . . . Language is of itself oblique and autonomous, it expresses as much by what is between words as by the words themselves. To understand the parole originaire, which gropes around an intention to make meaning, we must consider other expressions which might have taken its place and the threads of silence intertwined with the words themselves.-Philip E. Lewis (27, 26) ¹

Ursula K. Le Guin's Tehanu is an important short novel and one with relatively few "incidents" (in the traditional, masculinist sense), so I'll summarize the story in some detail, in part chronologically and then mostly as events occur in the plot-and I'll supply, on occasion, some commentary.

The story of Tehanu starts at the beginning, the very beginning of Earthsea, when Segoy (who is the dragon Kalessin) called the land of Éa up from the sea, and, as the wind blows over the land, it produces dragons, including a dragon-person named Tehanu, who became long afterwards (to most human eyes) a little girl who would receive the use-name Therru; although, mythically considered-like Coyote-she is still Tehanu: "She has been Tehanu since the beginning," we learn at the end of the novel, "Always she has been Tehanu" (224; ch. 14). Then there's a very long hiatus and the story picks up in the time of the Earthsea trilogy, when Ogion of Gont visits the Woman of Kemay (who is a woman, specifically a fisherwoman, and dragon) and is sung a song telling how, ". . . in the beginning, dragon and human were all one. They were all one people, one race, winged, and speaking the True Language." ² The unity breaks down: ". . . the dragons, always fewer and wilder, scattered by their endless, mindless greed and anger, in the far islands of the Western Reach; and the human folk, always more numerous in their rich towns and cities, filling up the inner Isles and all the south and east." Some humans preserved the True Language of the Making and became wizards. "But also, the song said, there were those among us who know they were once dragons, and among the dragons there are some who know their kinship with us. And these say that when the one people were becoming two, some of them, still both human and dragon, still winged, went not east but west" and continued west until they got "to the other side of the world," where "they live in peace, great winged beings both wild and wise, with human mind and dragon heart" (11-12; ch. 2 ". . . Falcon's Nest").

If in Tehanu we see Earthsea Revisioned, as Le Guin presents the book in a pamphlet by that title; if we are to see in Tehanu part of Le Guin's attempt to find "a story for" her "dear young hero," then "It will not be the old story" ("My Hero" [1994]) but something new, with a new kind of hero. If we want a formula for the new hero-one to replace the ancient fortitudo et sapientia (strength and wisdom for male heroes)-"wild and wise, with human mind and dragon heart" is a good place to begin.³

Some time after the meeting between Ogion and the dragon/woman, Ogion's former apprentice Ged brings to Gont and Ogion the Lady Tenar, as he promised her at the end of The Tombs of Atuan. We will later learn that Tenar had fallen in love with Ged (189-90, ch. 12; 214, ch. 13 [ER 15]).⁴ Ogion is father and teacher to Tenar into her adulthood and offers to teach her all he knows. She learns Old Speech easily, but she declines his offer and-parallel to Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea-Tenar leaves Ogion to seek her own way: "Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan or foreign ward of the Mage of Gont, she was set apart, set above.⁵ Men had given her power, men had shared their power with her. Women looked at her from outside, sometimes rivalrous, often with a trace of ridicule. She had felt herself the one left outside, shut out. She had fled from the Powers of the desert tombs, and then she had left the powers of learning and skill offered her by her guardian, Ogion." Le Guin's Narrator sums up that Tenar, "had turned her back on all that, gone to the other side, the other room, where the women lived, to be one of them" (30; "Kalessin," ch. 4). As Yehedarhed Havzhiva (a man) will do in "A Woman's Liberation," Tenar chooses to "live on the woman's side" (FWF 207). Stating the matter in her own voice, Le Guin says that Tenar "quit grad school" and, in what may or may not be a sacrifice, Tenar "went off to be a nobody, a wife and mother" (ER 17).

Tenar does not seem to have been in love with him, but she marries Flint, a prosperous farmer, thereby entering the larger world and taking up women's power, "the authority allotted her by the arrangements of mankind" (30). Tenar, or Goha, as she is called, bears a healthy, nice daughter, Apple, and later a sickly son. The son, Spark, grows up to neither love nor trust his mother enough to tell her his true name: an "endlessly active boy," "driven," with "no patience with animals, plants, people," silent except to use words "for his needs only" (46; "Bettering," ch. 5). Apple marries well and happily. Spark, so radically and significantly different from Ogion, is able to make sufficient contact with Ogion to tell him (not his parents) that he wants to go to sea, and he does: eventually becoming second mate on a Gontish ship, probably running stolen goods (207; "The Master," ch. 13). After Lebannen starts to bring law and order to Earthsea, Spark loses his ships and heads home, arriving three years after Flint's death (204; ch. 13).

However badly Spark finally turns out, though-he is far from Daoist stillness and connectedness-Goha's marriage to Flint is fairly happy, and Goha has some status. Among the women, she is

I.e., she is accepted; she runs into some minor bigotry and prurient interest under female and male gaze respectively, until she approaches middle age or older, and she becomes as Alice Sheldon's title has it, one of "The Women Men Don't See" (1973) or one of the "Middle-Aged Women" among the Ndif in Le Guin's "Pathways of Desire" (1979)-a potential Crone.⁶

When Flint dies, twenty years into his marriage with Tenar, Tenar becomes the holder, but not the owner of Oak Farm. Earthsea society is thoroughly patriarchal, and Tenar's tenure on Flint's property "was contingent on there being no male heir or claimant" (191; ch. 12 "Winter"), and there is, Spark. Then an important addition to the cast arrives on Gont: Aspen, the new wizard to the Lord of Re Albi. He is a follower of Cob of Farthest Shore in the search for immortality, and has discovered his own, rather vampiric, way to eternal life. For some three years before the start of Tehanu, Aspen has kept the old lord alive, by leaching the life from the old lord's grandson and heir (118-19; "Finding Words," ch. 9). ⁷

About the time Ged and Arren start on their quest in The Farthest Shore (72; ch. 6 "Worsening"), when things are going quite ill all over Earthsea, "a very bad thing" happens among a band of tramps: Shag, Handy, the coupled pair of Hake and Senini, and Hake and Senini's daughter (?), who appears to be a girl of about six or seven.⁸ The mother, Senini, has been regularly abused, but now the daughter is beaten, raped, and thrown into a fire to die. For whatever reasons, Handy gets help for the girl, and a woman named Lark gets aid from the village witch Ivy and from the widow Goha. Goha takes the little girl for her own, saying in Kargish, "I served them and left them. . . . I will not let them have you" (5; see ER 19 f.) For readers familiar with the trilogy, "them" here refers to the Nameless Ones, the primordial powers of darkness (ch. 1 "A Bad Thing"). Tenar gives the girl the name Therru, a Kargish word for "burning, the flaming of fire" (21; ch. 3 "Ogion"). Later we learn that the attempted murder of Therru-whatever other part he played in it-meets with the approval of the wizard Aspen (218; "The Master," ch. 13).

A year passes. Ged and Arren/Lebannen, ending The Farthest Shore, defeat the Wizard Cob. Arren "kills" the already dead Cob. Ged closes the door between the worlds: "It was," this way to immortality, "a way that led nowhere" (FS 183; ch. 12 "Dry Land").⁹ In performing the great and good deed of closing the door between the life and death and restoring human mortality, Ged spills out all of his wizardly power, loses his art (FS 193; "The Stone of Pain," ch. 13), loses the light on his "yew staff and in his face" (185; ch. 12), and leaves the staff itself "half-buried in the sand on Selidor" 193; ch. 13).¹⁰ As Irena helps Hugh across the worlds in The Beginning Place (1980), Arren takes Ged over the mountains of Pain back to life and the island of Selidor. From there, the androgynous and mysterious dragon Kalessin-the Eldest-takes Arend and Ged to Roke, where Ged kneels to Arren, the future King Lebannen, and then remounts Kalessin and flies toward Gont (FS 194-97; ch. 12).

Simultaneously, the dying Ogion asks Goha/Tenar to come to him at his home near Re Albi (6; ". . . Falcon's Nest," ch. 2). Tenar brings Therru, and, just before they arrive at Ogion's, they are accosted by four men, whom Tenar bluffs her way past, getting so angry at them she turns red, which Therru describes as "Like fire" (16; ch. 2). The one in the "leather cap and jerkin" has to be Handy and the two others must include Hake and/or Shag.¹¹

Even near death, Ogion is very interested in Therru. He asks her name and its meaning: "He knew the True Language of the Making, but he had never learned any Kargish at all" (20; ch. 3), not even as tutor and foster father to Tenar, a speaker of Kargish. Ogion prophesies of Therru, "That one-they will fear her" and tells Tenar, "Teach her . . . . Teach her all!-Not Roke. They are afraid!"¹² He asks Tenar, "Why did I let you go? Why did you go? To bring her here-too late?" and Ogion repeats his injunction, "Teach her!" (21; ch. 3).

Ogion goes out to die "between the roots" of a young beech tree, symbolically returning to the roots of life-and gets four more lines. When Tenar is looking after Therru while helping Ogion die, he comments, "Never one thing, for you," to which Tenar replies, "No. Always at least two things, and usually more" (22; "Ogion," ch. 3).¹³ Looking west, he whispers, uncertain, "The dragon-". Finally, he will tell Tenar his true name, but just before that, "'Over,' he whispered with exultation. 'All changed!-Changed, Tenar! Wait-wait here for-"; he doesn't finish the sentence (23).¹⁴

Tenar waits. Aunty Moss, the village witch, arrives for "the homing" of Ogion-now Aihal; and a couple of wizardly vultures (figuratively speaking) arrive to try to get the body for the honor of burying it in Gont Port or at, significantly, Re Albi. When she can get their serious attention, Tenar tells Aspen, one of the two wizards, Ogion's true name, and that he wanted to be and will be buried where he is; and she returns to the body Aunty Moss's little charm-bundle, flicked away by Aspen (24-26; "Ogion," ch. 3). Waiting, Tenar gets solitude and time to think, including thoughts about magic and men's power and women's; she and Therru plant a peach pit in a "tiny grave"; Aunty Moss teaches Therru cat's cradle, and Tenar makes friends with Aunty Moss (29-34; "Kalessin," ch. 4). And then something both quiet and very spectacular happens: Kalessin arrives, has a brief eye-to-eye talk with Tenar (men may not look dragons in the eye, but Tenar is a woman), and drops off Ged (37-40; ch. 4).¹⁵ Aunty Moss says that Sparrowhawk (Ged's use-name) cannot be Sparrowhawk, not if Sparrowhawk is Archmage of Earthsea: the man before her is without magic powers (42; ch. 4). For readers who remember the end of Farthest Shore, the answer is simple: Ged is now merely Ged, and no mage; for readers new to the series-and for Tenar-there is a nice riddle here: When is a man you know well not that man at all? (44; ch. 4).

Ged is in bad shape. Therru looks at the four white scars marking half Ged's face and asks "Was he burned?" Tenar knows Ged was wounded by "One of the kinship of the Nameless Ones," but she also knows what "burned" means to Therru and tells her Ged was "burned" (48; "Bettering," ch. 5). Moss helps, without much enthusiasm, to heal Ged, and she and Tenar talk about power and men, about eunuchs and Tenar's life at the Tombs of Atuan, about the use-value of children (49). Ged, awaking, says Tenar's true name, and she kisses him, and thinks how she'd never kissed him before and how she had never kissed Ogion nor Ogion her, how Ogion (like her people at Atuan) had never touched her (56; ch. 5).

After four days, Ged is finally coherent enough to wonder about Ogion and say "This is Ogion's house." Tenar responds "Aihal's house," speaking Ogion's true name, thereby letting Ged know that Ogion is dead, having died as she later tells him, ten days past. Ged regains his strength but not his health (58; "Bettering," ch. 5) and helps around the house; unlike Flint (and like Ogion and sailors and [some] other bachelors), he was willing to do "Women's work" (60). Tenar thinks about her past: "the power of the dark places" that "had run through her, used her, left her empty, untouched" and the power Ogion had offered her that she refused, choosing instead the powers of a wife and mother. But she was no longer a wife, and her children were grown; and now, like Ged, she had "nothing in her, no power, for anybody to recognize." But there is another "but": "But a dragon had spoken to her." Tenar remembers asking Ged at Atuan "What is a dragonlord?" and his responding, as she recalls it, "A man dragons will talk to" (Tehanu 62 [exact quotation: "One whom the dragons will speak with" (TA 85; "The Great Treasure," ch. 7)]). Tenar recognizes that whatever else she is or is not, she is most definitely "a woman dragons would talk to" (Tehanu 62). Ged tells Tenar about Lebannen as King of Earthsea. Tenar has a memory/vision of Havnor as "the beautiful city" and sees moving out "From that bright center . . . order going outward like the perfect rings on water, like the straightness of a paved street or a ship sailing before the wind: a going the way it should go, a bringing to peace" (see ER 14).¹⁶ "'Is that it, then,' she asked, kneeling, watching him-'the joy coming into the light?'" that Ogion saw (64). Ged does not attempt an answer, and the perfection of those circles of order, the straightness of the order should give Le Guin's readers pause. Therru interrupts the visions and philosophizing and a sentimental moment to announce that Sippy, the energetic goat, has (again) gotten away. Ged looks at Therru "as if he did not see her hideous scars, as if he scarcely saw her at all: a child who had lost a goat, who needed to find a goat. It was the goat he saw." For good and for ill, Ged's here is a male gaze, classifying and looking for work for the gazer. Therru looks carefully at Ged-it is unusual for her to look at people, especially male people-and Tenar wonders "Was a hero being born?", necessarily in the mind of Therru (65-66; "Bettering," ch. 5).

Ged heals slowly, and Tenar ponders his male "indifference . . . towards the exigencies that ruled a woman: that someone must be not far from a sleeping child, that one's freedom meant another's unfreedom, unless some ever-changing moving balance were reached, like . . . walking" (68-69; "Worsening," ch. 6).¹⁷ Immediately following, we learn just how deaf Tenar has been to what Aunty Moss has been telling her and how blind she has been to Ged's loss of power (71-72). Finally seeing, she and Ged talk seriously-if necessarily metaphorically-about Ged's former power and his loss: "I went into the dry land when I was young," Ged says, "and I met it there"-his Shadow-"I became it, I married my death. It gave me life. Water, the water of life. I was a fountain, a spring, flowing, giving.¹⁸ But the springs don't run, there" in the dry land of death. "All I had in the end was one cup of water, and I had to pour it out on the sand . . . ."¹⁹ Tenar is hardly feeling more upbeat. Both of them have done what they have done against Cob and for Therru "because it was all you could do" (72; "Worsening," ch. 6), but Tenar does feel better when she holds Therru and "set her mind on the light of her [Therru's?] dreaming, the gulf of bright air, the name of the dragon, the name of the star, Heart of the Swan, the Arrow, Tehanu" (75; ch. 6).

A ship arrives from Havnor, with men seeking Ged to have him crown Lebannen. Ged will not deal with these men (82; "Mice," ch. 7), and Moss finds Ged's unwillingness totally understandable (88); but it bothers Tenar, who wonders what it might be like to have never feared anyone-or any human-as a powerful man like Ged had never needed to fear (85). Tenar tries to apply to Ged's case her own experience of power as the One Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan and then to become (in good anarchist, Daoist, feminist fashion) "only Tenar, only herself"-therefore weak. Still, Tenar is honest enough to recognize that she was not only herself: she had become soon enough a respectable married woman with a respectable family, but she had lost all that, in the normal course of things, "becoming old and a widow, powerless." So Tenar does have some relevant experience to help her sympathize with Ged, except that she cannot "understood his shame, his agony of humiliation, Perhaps only a man could feel so. A woman got used to shame." That, "Or maybe Aunty Moss was right, and when the meat was out" of a man-loss of power, position-"the shell was empty" (86). Tenar tells Ged her experience as Ogion's pupil. Old Speech, for her, "was like learning the language I spoke before I was born. But the rest . . . that was all dead to me. Somebody else's language," as if she tried to dress up as a warrior. The clothes wouldn't make her a hero, just uncomfortable (ER 18). So she gave up any dreams she might have had of power, and Ogion went along. Still, it was another matter indeed when Ogion met Therru (87; "Mice," ch. 7).

When Ged is away, the searchers for him visit Tenar at Ogion's house and indicate that they intend to stay in the neighborhood, with the lord of Re Albi. Therru is upset by the visitors, not looking at Tenar and making Tenar hold her "like a block of wood" (93; ch. 7)-not the Archetypal Child here or the Daoists' "uncarved block" (a symbol of unlimited potential) but a scared little girl, tensing up in fear. Tenar knows she must act; or, anyway, she does act: reluctantly (and perhaps anachronistically), she tears a strip of paper from one of Ogion's lore books and sends a note to Ged that will send him to her home at Oak Farm.²⁰ Therru, who usually tries to avoid people, takes the note to Ged, going confidently out the door, "flying like a bird, a dragon, a child, free" (94; "Mice," ch. 7).

Tenar spends a good deal of time with Aunty Moss, discussing philosophy and Ged, life's goal, and sex. Tenar takes the strong position for herself that "living is having your work to do, and being able to do it. . . ." So she knows "in part" what's going on with Ged, but doesn't understand it. Aunty Moss has her own theory: "It's a queer thing for an old man to be a boy of fifteen . . . ." In Tehanu, we're not in a heroic fantasy and only on the edge of a fantasy world, and Aunty Moss is going to back-fill and answer a question we've probably never asked about wizards and Heroes, "The Question of Sex" (see Christie 94-95). Moss's answer is that Ged did without sex, that wizards generally or universally do without sex (ER 11, 15). The sorcerer of Vemish in A Wizard of Earthsea has a daughter (152; ch. 9), and Ged's wizardly friend Vetch certainly enjoys a domestic, if apparently celibate, life on Iffish (WE 158; ch. 9), but that proves little: there could be some married wizards and still Aunty Moss's rule could hold that "You don't get without you give as much," and with wizards the cost of power is virginity or celibacy or continence, or, at least, never using one's power to satisfy one's own sexual lust (98; "Hawks," ch, 8). In her own voice, Le Guin sets the cost of wizardly power at virginity: sacrifice of "sexual contact with women"; in the Earthsea stories as in many hero tales, masculinist "Strength lies in abstinence-the avoidance of women and the replacement of sexuality by non-sexual male bonding. The establishment of manhood in heroic terms involves the absolute devaluation of women. The woman's touch, in any sense, threatens that heroic masculinity" (ER 9, 11). ²¹

Perpetual virginity was not a price Aunty Moss paid, and Tenar asks her, "Is it different, then, for men and for women?" in the magical arts. Moss answers with the rhetorical question, "What isn't, dearie?", and Tenar answers in earnest, "it seems to me we make up most of the differences, and then complain about 'em." The issue of difference is not resolved, and the discussion moves on (100-01; ch. 8).

Tenar prepares to take Therru to the village to buy cloth, with her preparations including washing, drying, and brushing her own hair. Therru watches the sparks from the static electricity from the hair brushing-as Ged had seen Tenar shine in the darkness of the Labyrinth at Atuan (86; ch. 7)-and Therru says, fearfully or, more likely, exultantly, "The fire flying out . . . . All over the sky!" (101). Tenar then has a vision of Ged's meeting on his way "one of the men who had stood waiting for her and Therru on that road" to Ogion's, the "youngish man with a leather cap," Handy, "the one who had stared hard at Therru"-with an unspecified version of the male gaze (103; "Hawk," ch. 8). Looking out from her vision, Tenar sees Handy in front of her and, quite spontaneously, follows him until he sees that he did not follow Ged's path to Oak Farm but instead went uphill "to the domain of the Lord of Re Albi" (104).

Tenar and Therru then go to get cloth at the house of Fan, a weaver Tenar knew from her time with Ogion.²² They all examine and admire the object that gives Fan his use-name: a large fan, with dragons on one side and humans on the other. Held up to the light, one sees "the two sides, the two paintings, made one by the light . . . so that the clouds and peaks [of the dragon side] were towers of the [human] city, and the men and women were winged, and the dragons looked with human eyes" (105; "Hawks," ch, 8). This image of both double vision and integration is important: all people should be heroes (kings, gods), combining human and dragon, wisdom and wildness and the unowned, dispossessed freedom of both (ER 21-24). Human people should be at home in towering cities and towering wilderness, and human-made cities should be appropriate for such dual people to call home.

Tenar returns to her home and finds Therru missing. For whatever psychological reasons, Tenar's guilt trip on Therru's disappearance includes a stop at her knowledge "that a wrong that cannot be repaired," such as that done to Therru, "must be transcended" (108; ch, 8). In terms of the structure and theme of the story, the stop at the thought of an irreparable wrong is well placed: relating Therru, malicious injury, transcendence, and dragons. In Le Guin's analysis of Tehanu, transcending an irreparable wrong involves dragons. If a harm cannot be healed or undone, "there must be a way to go on from there. . . . It involves a leap. It involves flying." But not some easy, merely spiritual transcendence. The fire of the dragon's wrath-"the wildness of the spirit and of the earth, uprising, against misrule"-flashes out to meet and consume and meld with "the fire of human rage, the cruel anger of the weak, which wreaks itself on the weaker in the endless circle of human violence." On the cultural level, the dragon is "subversion, revolution, change," most specifically changes that go beyond the old order where men are allowed and encouraged "to own and dominate women," and, complementarily, "women were taught to collude with them." Most specifically, the dragon "rejects gender." Kalessin is neither male nor female, and Le Guin sees Therru as "ungendered by the rape that destroys her 'virtue' and the mutilation that destroys her beauty." In a culture of oppression, the deepest foundation "is gendering, which names the male normal, dominant, active, and the female other, subject, passive. To begin to imagine freedom, the myths of gender, like the myths of race, have to be exploded and discarded" (ER 23-24)-a feminist defense of a kind of androgyny (and not one all feminists would accept).²³ To transcend the wrong done to Therru, Earthsea's human people will need to get beyond the culture that makes such wrongs possible, and likely.

Therru had been hiding from Handy, which infuriates Tenar; but she holds in her rage and promises Therru that Handy will not touch her ever again (109; ch, 8). She advises Therru not to fear Handy: "He feeds on your fear. We will starve him" and gets angry enough to appear "a red dragon" to Therru, with "a shining of fire all about [her] head" in the view of Moss (110-11; ch. 8).²⁴ Tenar tells Moss about the man's showing up, and Moss, rigid as "a block," wonders why the father would show up. Tenar notes it might be to claim Therru since "She's his property," but she doesn't think the man she saw was Therru's father (112; ch. 8).

Tenar encounters Aspen again, the wizard of the Lord of Re Albi, who offers Tenar a job helping with the haying, quite appropriate for Flint's widow Goha, but a grievous insult to "the woman to whom Ogion dying had spoken his true name"-and a warning (114; "Finding Words," ch. 9). Aspen goes beyond an oblique insult, calling Tenar a witch-which Tenar wouldn't mind-a witch followed by a "foul imp": "The man did well who tried to destroy that creature, but the job should be completed." Aspen thinks Tenar "defied" him at Ogion's burial and forbids her to even be on his lord's, and his, domain. Aspen asks if Tenar has understood him, and she answers that she has never understood men like Aspen (115). Aspen is about to lay a curse on her when he is interrupted by courtiers, one of whom kneels to Tenar as Tenar of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe. Tenar does not know if Aspen "had known or had just now learned that she was Tenar of the ring. It did not matter. He could not hate her more. To be a woman was her fault. . . . He had looked at what had been done to Therru, and approved (116). Tenar is grateful to the courtiers; still, they walk off with Aspen, talking "comfortably" (117), which leads Tenar to think about the rumors of magic promising immortality to the Lord of Re Albi, and of the villagers' philosophy of "Let be": "The doings of the powerful were not to be judged by the powerless. And there was the dim, blind loyalty, the rootedness in place"-a very negative rootedness here-"the old man was their lord, Lord of Re Albi, nobody else's business what he did." Even Moss felt that way, finding immortality magic "Risky," likely to go awry, but she does not call it wicked (119).

Tenar recalls Ogion's instructions to her to teach Therru all and feels momentarily uneasy that so far she has taught only cooking and spinning. She asks herself only mostly rhetorically, "Is wisdom all words?" and tries teaching Therru "the true names of things" starting with "stone."²⁵ That doesn't feel right, though, so Tenar starts teaching yet again with stories (120-21; "Finding Words," ch. 9).

That night, Tenar has trouble sleeping and finds herself in a rapidly despairing internal monolog, ending in "Only fire can cleanse me. Only fire can eat me, eat me away like-" and she sits up and cries out a curse-turning formula in Arha's Kargish and then gets up and yells out at her attacker, "You come too late, Aspen. I was eaten long ago." Tenar may have the satisfaction of turning the curse and singeing Aspen, but returning to Ogion's house the next day she and Therru are followed by two little boys, boys who throw stones at them, which may foreshadow her returning home to find herself caught in a spell laid there for her, a spell that leaves her "confused, slow, unable to decide" (123; ch. 9) and, as becomes increasingly clear as the plot unfolds, unable to speak of the source of her immediate problems. The source is of course Aspen's evil, but what is the source of that evil in Aspen? Two malicious little boys throwing stones at Therru and Tenar may give us as good a hint as we will get: some people may start out no damn good at a young age, and especially if they're male gendered people, they may be allowed by their cultures to get worse. Or "the cruel anger of the weak" may have been turned upon those boys, and they redirect and misdirect their own rage against the still weaker. The text is silent on their motives, and a range of possibilities will legitimately fill that silence, if we want it filled. Tenar thinks "in her own language, I cannot think in Hardic. I must not." She can think, slowly, in Kargish. "It was as if she had to ask the girl Arha, who she had been long ago, to come out of the darkness and think for her. To help her. As she had helped last night, turning the wizard's curse back on him. Arha had not known a great deal of what Tenar and Goha knew, but she had known how to curse, and how to live in the dark, and" like Falk in the Falk-Ramarren combination in City of Illusions, Arha knew "how to be silent," and, like all the wise in Le Guin's worlds, she knows wu wei, the wisdom of acting only when one must (123; ch. 9): going with the Dao.

Tenar/Arha leaves Ogion's house, following an "animal sense" and taking with her only Ogion's lore books and Therru. Hardic starts to come back to her, and some words of the Old Speech, and the name "Kalessin" helps clear her mind as she sees below her, at sea "a beautiful ship under full sail" (125), and, although a stranger to cities or even towns, she heads toward Gont Port and ends up at that ship.²⁶ There Handy tries to get Therru and manages to touch Therru's arm. Tenar speaks to a sailor she initially thinks is Spark, asking to come aboard: in effect begging sanctuary for Therru. It is a ship with an all-male crew, which is somewhat disturbing to Tenar, and the sailor is not her son, but, Tehanu being a well-made novel, and coincidences being significant for folk of power like Tenar, the ship is the king's ship Dolphin with Lebannen aboard, the young man she thought to be Spark. Tenar introduces herself to King Lebannen, who is "about to bow or even kneel to her" when she catches his hands and says "Not to me . . . nor I to you!" putting her one up in protocol on Ged, who has knelt to Lebannen at the end of The Farthest Shore. Tenar tells Lebannen of being cursed and of encountering Handy and about what was done to Therru, and Lebannen offers to take her and Therru home, making the offer "with delight in being able to offer it, to do it" (a male thing, perhaps: showing affection through service, but also traditional knightly service to a lady, or a king giving royal succor to one who has herself aided him). More immediately, with Tenar's permission, Lebannen takes up Therru and puts her to bed (130-32; "The Dolphin," ch. 10).

Tenar tries to cheer up Therru and is surprised to see her arm marked, as if branded, where Handy "had only touched her" (133-35; "The Dolphin," ch. 10). Tenar seems to respond to the marked arm as a kind of symbol or omen: she'd promised Therru Handy "would never touch her again. The promise had been broken. Her word meant nothing. What word meant anything, against deaf violence?" A while later Lebannen touches Therru very lightly (136), and the mark at least begins with that touch to go away, totally disappearing in a short time (187; "Winter," ch. 12).²⁷ Tenar is introduced to the Master Windkey of Roke and thinks of how polite they all are, "Ladies and Lords and Masters, all bows and compliments" and wonders "at how men ordered their world into this dance of masks, and how easily a woman might learn to dance it" (138; "The Dolphin," ch, 10). Juxtaposed with this thought, a toothless sailor gives Therru a toy: a beautiful little carving of a dolphin. Then comes a conversation among Tenar, Lebannen, and the Master Windkey of Roke, a wizardly political weatherman who tries to "know the way the wind blows." The conversation starts with Lebannen's telling Tenar of his desire for Ged to crown him and Tenar's observation that Lebannen had "learned pain" and would relearn it "again and again, all his life, and forget none of it." And then the thought by Tenar, "And therefore he," Lebannen, "would not, like Handy, do the easy thing to do"-with no explanation of what "the easy thing" might refer to, and the "And therefore" sentence marked by no transition but set off in a paragraph by itself. Note, though, that Lebannen learns from his suffering and that the lessons he learns are good ones. In Tehanu, not everyone learns from suffering, not all of suffering's lessons push those who learn toward the good. Perhaps the easy thing for a man under patriarchy is to go along with his culture-not the Way-and try to push around those weaker than he.

The rest of the conversation is important to the meaning of Tehanu: it is a long response to Tenar's question to the Master Windkey of whether Ged is still Archmage. It is a delicate question, and Lebannen must press Windkey to answer. Ged isn't Archmage, of course, but neither is anyone else. The Council of the Wise meets, with Lebannen making the ninth member, but the best they can do is a vision of the Patterner that results in his crying out (in his native Kargish), "A woman on Gont." An experienced teacher, but a dense, sexist, and condescending one, Windkey tells his story of the meeting of the Wise and asks Tenar if she knows "of any woman on this isle who might be the one we seek-sister or mother to a man of power, or even his teacher; for there are witches very wise in their way" (142-43; ch. 10). Tenar is upset with Windkey, but he does not feel she can confront him: "His deafness," starting with deafness to his own condescension, "silenced her. She could not even tell him he was deaf"-so she changes the subject to there being no archmage in Earthsea now, but a king.²⁸ And she raises the possibility that Cob could "have such power because things were already altering," that a "great change has been taking place," a change correlating with the change from an archmage to a king. Windkey responds with the non sequitur, "Don't be afraid, my lady . . . . Roke, and the Art Magic, will endure." Tenar reacts strongly, if cryptically: "'Tell Kalessin that,' she said, suddenly unable to endure the utter unconsciousness of his disrespect," a disrespect stemming, Tenar infers, from his having "never listened to a woman since his mother sang him his last cradle song." Windkey makes "an earnest effort to amend his offense. 'I'm sorry, my lady,' he said, 'I spoke as to an ordinary woman.'" Tenar almost laughs. "She said only, indifferently, 'My fears are ordinary fears.' It was no use; he could not hear her." However deaf Windkey is, Lebannen listens carefully here (144-45), and Tenar soon says to him directly, in private, her thought that perhaps "there is, or will be, or may be, a woman, and that they seek-that they need-her." Lebannen listens "He was not deaf. But he frowned, intent, as if trying to understand a foreign language" (146; ch. 10). And then Lebannen goes over to a language he is learning quickly: When Tenar asks him if men from Roke will come for Ged, he says, "I will forbid" (147).

Tenar and Therru leave the Dolphin at Valmouth, and visit with Tenar's daughter Apple (Apple's "young merchant husband" is absent or silent and invisible). Tenar tells Apple about Aspen, although she cannot remember his name in Hardic, or talk seriously of Re Albi at all, and Tenar makes clear to Apple and reiterates for us her interpretation of Aspen's antipathy for her-and for putting upon Tenar the spell we see working on her: "For being a woman, mostly" (149-53; "Home," ch. 11).

Tenar arrives home at Oak Farm to find Ged sent to work herding goats in the high pastures, and she sets to her own work putting her farm aright, and finishing the dress for Therru she makes from the cloth she got from Fan. Therru tries it on, and (paralleling Ged's showing Arha herself-i.e. Tenar-in a beautiful gown [TA 88; ch. 7]) Tenar tells Therru "You are beautiful. . . . 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 Therru, and beautiful" (155; "Home," ch. 11).

The fall equinox arrives in Earthsea, and, far away in Havnor, Lebannen is crowned. Tenar mentally rebukes Ged for not going to Havnor to crown Lebannen (although she also did not attend the coronation). Tenar doesn't dwell on such high-flown matters but, instead, resolves to make a new friend. Her getting to know the witch Moss at Re Albi piques her interest in Ivy, the local witch, and Tenar works at overcoming Ivy's dislike of her (156). Tenar's interest in Ivy is increased by the local sorcerer, Beech. Like Aspen, Beech has a tree name; unlike Aspen, Beech comes across as more mature and far better rooted on Gont. Totally unlike Aspen, Beech is a good, kind, relatively "innocent" and "sensitive" man (and a devout admirer of Ogion). As a man socialized in Earthsea culture, however, he too hastily and too easily interprets Ogion's injunction concerning Therru, "Teach her all . . . Not Roke" as meaning "that the learning of Roke-the High Arts-wouldn't be suitable for a girl . . . . Let alone one so handicapped"-to which he adds some other male-chauvinist and condescending remarks. As a sensitive man, though, and a sorcerer of power, he can-dimly-sense in Therru "the gift," and he can suggest that Therru be sent to Ivy to learn healing: "Healing befits a woman. It comes natural to her" (157-59; "Home," ch. 11). Indeed, Beech here gives advice that Moss might give, or might be given by any modern feminist of the feminism that sees women as essentially more rooted in nature than men, hence essentially more nurturing-or in any event just more nurturing. On a second reading of Tehanu, knowing Therru as girl/woman/dragon, this advice seems simultaneously wise and ludicrous, especially ludicrous in its condescension.

Tenar promises she will consider Beech's suggestion, and she does so. With good reason. Lebannen is moving with speed and efficiency to establish the King's Peace; still, though, Therru lives in fear, and that fear can both draw harm to itself and lead Therru to do harm (158-60). Also, "most people," either in Earthsea or most people, period, believe "that you are what happens to you. The rich and strong must have virtue; one to whom evil has been done must be bad, and may rightly be punished" (161).²⁹ So it is highly important to find Therru a relatively safe place in Earthsea society, and it will be difficult to do so. So Tenar sets up a "chance" encounter with Ivy. With an innocence stemming, I think, from her absolute blindness to power, Tenar asks Ivy if Therru has any "gift" for magic art-"any power in her." Ivy answers promptly and contemptuously that "Of course!" Therru has power, but refuses to take her on as an apprentice, for the sound reason that she fears Therru. Ivy asks Tenar "What is she?" and gets in answer "A child. An ill-used child!" Ivy responds "That's not all she is," and a very angry Tenar jumps to the unfair conclusion that Ivy rejects Therru because Therru has been raped. Ivy didn't mean that:

Tenar leaves Ivy, angry at being left alone with the problem of Therru, especially angry at being left alone by Ged. In an internal dialog, Goha tells Tenar that Tenar is being unfair to Ged, that Ged had been fair to her "Or tried to" be fair (164). Still in a mildly bad mood, she arrives home to find winter coming on and tells Therru that winter is the time to learn the great stories and songs. This leads to a brief discussion of whether or not Therru, with her burned lungs and throat, can sing-she can if "The mind sings"-and then a brief comment by Tenar how Therru is strong and how ". . . strength that is ignorant is dangerous." Therru responds with "Like the ones who wouldn't learn . . . . The wild ones. . . . The ones that stayed in the west," and Tenar realizes Therru is thinking of the dragons in the song of the Woman of Kemay (165; "Home," ch. 11). Therru starts learning the great stories with the Creation of Éa (not The Deed of the Young King, the other choice Tenar offers her), and "By her bedtime Therru knew how Segoy had raised the first of the islands from the depths of time. . . . the first stanza of the song of the Making" (166).

And then the farmhouse is attacked by Hake, Shag, and Handy.

The attack is narrated, and with no turning away from gory details, but it takes up only three pages of the novel (166-69). Tenar does what she can as long as she can to keep out the men and then takes up her butcher knife in a "kitchen that was all red light in her eyes" and challenges them to enter. But it is Ged who comes in, armed with a pitchfork (169-70). Ged had come across three men and had feared them. He follows them unobserved: "One of them kept talking. About the child," about how he "was going to get her back. Punish her"-and get back at Tenar. It was Hake doing the talking: if not Therru's biological father, at least a man who believes Therru is his. He had talked about "teaching-teaching lessons"; and he is the man Ged stabbed with the pitchfork (171-72; "Home," ch. 11), which stops the attack. Ged assures Tenar that she did what she could. "What you did was right. Timed right" (moving with the Great Wheel), and Tenar tells Ged, "You did the right thing" (175). Ged wishes he could bring himself to finish off the wounded Hake, but even after Tenar's "Do it," he can't, and neither can she (176). So Ged will take Hake to Ivy in the morning (apparently, without his magic, Ged is useless as a healer). Meanwhile, Tenar and Ged have tea, and the attack sequence ends somewhat cryptically, especially for readers who do not catch the allusion to Tenar and Ged's escape in The Tombs of Atuan (and for any who've failed to note the fire motif and fail to see here the D. H. Lawrencian fire/darkness/color imagery):

Therru had slept through the attack and Ged has cleaned up his mess and taken Hake to Ivy, but Therru finds linen soaking, obviously blood-stained linen. Tenar startles herself somewhat by answering Therru's "What happened?" with a lie about her period coming on early. Responding to the lie, Therru comes to look to Tenar "as if her face were not human at all" but (some other) "animal"; so Tenar becomes convinced that even as she has now lied to Therru, Therru will disobey her (178-79; "Winter," ch. 12). How Therru knows (apparently) that Tenar lies about the menstrual blood is hinted at but unexplained: a significant gap to be left or filled in by readers.

Ged returns, with the Oak Farm tenant Clearbrook and they fill in Tenar (and us readers) on the news. Hake is alive, but Hake, Handy, and Shag had beaten to death Therru's mother, or, anyway, the human woman who had initially raised Therru: Tehanu is silent on the biological aspects of producing a human/dragon child. Handy and Shag are being held prisoner in a wine cellar and will be tried in "the King's Courts of Law" and sentenced to death by hanging or "set to slave labor" (179-82; "Winter," ch. 12). We learn later that they have been sentenced to the galleys, news which Tenar and Therru greet with silence (203; "The Master," ch. 13).³¹ Ged feels the men must be punished; Tenar feels more ambivalent: "'Punished.' That's what he [Hake] said. Punish the child. She's bad. She must be punished"-or so Tenar presents Hake's motive for hurting Therru. "Punish me, for taking her for being-" Tenar doesn't finish this sentence, but it seems safe to fill the gap with "for being a woman." What Tenar does continue with is "It should not have happened.-I wish you'd killed him!"³² Ged says he tried, and Tenar agrees, and sees a little later "in his eye the faintest, irrepressible gleam of triumph" (182).

When recounting the attack on the house to Lark, Tenar is upset that without Ged's intervention she would have trapped herself and Therru in the house. Lark responds with a rhetorical question that is both obvious and appropriate in context, and adds a philosophical remark: "What could you do but lock the doors? But it's like we're all our lives locking the doors. It's the house we live in." The "we" is not specified, but the conversation turns to the dead woman, who turned out to have been four-five months pregnant. "Trapped," Tenar says, and Lark responds with "Fear" and the questions, "What are we so afraid of? Why do we let 'em tell us we're afraid? What is it they're afraid of? . . . What are they afraid of us for?" Again, we have to fill in the referents for the pronouns: "women" and "men"-women are afraid, and men fear women (although the plot of Tehanu might also justify "weak" and "strong" or "householders" and "tramps"). Here the names of all the tramps are given: Handy, Shag, Hake, and Senini, with Therru supplying the correct form of the woman's name (184; ch. 12).

Lark asks Tenar if she will keep Ged on, and Tenar answers, "If he likes." The decision comes shortly, when Ged comes in and then Therru. Tenar almost latches the door behind them and then unlatches it. She will not imprison herself behind walls, not even the walls of her own house. Then Therru tells Ged she knows the opening of the Creation of Éa and says it (since she cannot sing it) for him:

And (we're told) Therru recites the Creation on to the end with the rise from the foam of the first island. Therru looks at Ged, her face (like his) "scarred and whole," also (possibly unlike Ged's) "seeing and blind" and "fiery"-and she tells him about King Lebannen and his ship, about being sick from Handy's touch, and cured by the touch of the king. "Some day I want to fly to where he lives," Therru says (187; ch. 12). Tenar and Ged discuss Therru and how she is big enough now that she obeys Tenar "only because she wants to," which Ged thinks (in another good anarchist thought) "the only justification for obedience." Tenar is concerned by the "wildness" in Therru, and concerned that Ivy fears Therru. "But you're not afraid of her," she says to Ged. "Nor she of you. You and Lebannen are the only men she's let touch her" (188). Having Therru's approval of Ged, Tenar asks him to stay on, at least for the Winter, and gets to the key question: "'Well,' she said, 'which bed shall I sleep in, Ged? The child's or yours?"

Ged responds, "Mine, if you will" and asks her to be patient with him. Tenar's response is elliptic, unanswered by Ged, and highly significant: "I have been patient with you for twenty-five years"-i.e., for about as long as she has known him. Later she will tell him, and us, "I have loved you since I first saw you" (214; "The Master," ch. 13). Ged, in the earlier scene, says nothing (stupefied?), and Tenar only looks at Ged and begins to laugh: "Come-come on, my dear-Better late than never! . . .  Nothing is wasted, nothing is ever wasted. You taught me that" (189; ch. 12). They embrace and end up "that night on the hearthstone, and there she taught Ged the mystery that the wisest man could not teach him." This is Ged's sexual initiation, a traditional rite of passage, and Tenar jokes about it: "Now you're a man indeed . . . . Stuck another man full of holes, first, and lain with a woman, second. That's the proper order, I suppose."³⁴ Tenar takes the joke back, asking Ged not to fear her and telling him "You were a man when I first saw you! It's not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself" (190; "Winter," ch. 12).

After Tenar tells the farm tenants about her relationship with Ged "promptly and bluntly," she and Ged discuss what I've suggested we might call the «negative capability» of mages: the "emptiness" power can fill, the "potentiality" for magery. Ged says that he was taught on Roke "that true magery lies in doing only what you must do," but Tenar's "emptiness" theory "would go farther. Not to do, but to be done to ...." Tenar does not think that's quite it either. "It's more like what true doing rises from. Didn't you come and save my life-didn't you run a fork into Hake? That was 'doing,' all right, doing what you must do ...." Tenar says that as Arha she was taught "that to be powerful she must sacrifice. Sacrifice herself and others. A bargain: give, and so get. And I cannot say that that's untrue. But my soul can't live in that narrow place-this for that, tooth for tooth, death for life{sic}" (193-94; ch. 12).³⁵ Tenar wants the possibility of a freedom beyond bargains, "Beyond payment, retribution, redemption"-beyond Heroic (or Christian) sacrifice, beyond the Law of Retribution-she wants what Ged calls "The doorway between them." That night Tenar dreams of the doorway in the Creation of Éa, which she wants to open, "but there was a word or a key, something she had forgotten, a word, a key, a name" she needs to open it (194).³⁶

Ged and Tenar discuss the true speech of dragons and Ged's theory that "the dragon and the speech of the dragon are one," and Tenar gives him, free gift for a free gift, her story of the Woman of Kemay, all leading to a discussion of the Patterner's line "A woman on Gont." Ged explicitly denies one obvious possibility for the meaning of the Patterner's phrase: that the next archmage is currently a woman living on Gont Island.

Tenar brings up queens, but Ged calls a queen "only a she-king," given power by men. So Tenar asks directly, "What is a woman's power, then? * * * When has a woman power because she's a woman? With her children, I suppose. For a while ..."-or over her children to use a formulation Tenar does not. Tenar first learned of the distribution of power in her confrontation with Kossil. Tenar "had the honor," but Kossil "had the power, from the God-king, the man," and then Tenar asks Lark's question, "Why are men afraid of women?" Ged implicitly accepts that men are afraid of women and answers, "If your strength is only the other's weakness, you live in fear" (197-98; "Winter," ch. 12).

The next question is why women "seem to fear their own strength, to be afraid of themselves?", a question Ged answers, in a therapeutic, teacherly, Talmudic, philosophical, or wizardly manner, with another question: "Are they ever taught to trust themselves?" Tenar's attention wanders to Therru stacking wood and wishes that "power were trust," bringing an end to hierarchy: "all these arrangements-one above the other-kings and masters and mages and owners- It all seems so unnecessary. Real power, real freedom," would better lie "in trust, not force." Ged responds with "As children trust their parents," which may or may not include whatever trust Therru had for Hake and Senini; the text is silent on this point. Speaking more generally, Ged says "As things are . . . even trust corrupts" and cites the trust of the mages of Roke in each other and what they do and in the goodness of their purity and power (198; "Winter," ch. 12).

Leading back to the riddle with the answer "A woman on Gont" and Ogion's "All changed." If the change is political, perhaps it is the renewed kingship, but Tenar wonders "if Lebannen's kingship is only a beginning. A doorway ... And he the doorkeeper. Not to pass through"-to whatever; the thought ends without specifying a destination. And then the conversation takes an intriguing and, for me, an initially surprising turn: an echo of Ogion's advice to the young Ged to "turn and return to his beginning" (WE 128; ch. 7), becomes a hint of the Kargish belief in individual reincarnation or even the Christian idea of dying to the world and being reborn. Ged talks of how he has "died and been reborn, both in the dry land and here under the sun, more than once"-somewhat literally in embracing his Shadow in Wizard and going to the Dry Land in Shore, perhaps figuratively in the marriage with Tenar. Ged quotes and paraphrases what he calls here "the Making" to the effect "that we have all returned and return forever to the source, and that the source is ceaseless. Only in dying, life ....": an idea similar to Ogion's assumptions in advising Ged for the turning point of Wizard to "turn and return" to Ged's beginnings.³⁷ Le Guin as critic comments on this dialog that "Tenar is whole, but not single. She is not pure. The sacrificial image of dying to be reborn is not appropriate to her. Just the opposite. She has borne, she has given birth to, her children and her new selves. She is not reborn, but rebearing . . . . actively, in the maternal mode" (ER 18; see DEW 5). I will take this to imply that Ged, too, dies and is reborn insofar as he learns "goat wisdom" and that of sages, and «rebears» new versions of himself: finally, ego becoming Self and Brahman or dissolving into the Dao or Shiva/Shakti-the destroying/creating godhead-reforming and coming into renewed being.³⁸

The conversation moves without pause from metaphysics to Ged's personal psychology, so perhaps the dying/rebirth reference means mostly that humans change, figuratively dying to childhood to become adults, etc. In any event, Ged tells how, on the mountain, the last few weeks, among the goats, he came to ask, rhetorically, why he grieves: "What man am I mourning? Ged the archmage? Why is Hawk the goatherd sick with grief and shame for him?" Tenar tells him he has done nothing to be ashamed of, but Ged asserts he has done shamefully, that all male greatness "is founded on shame, made out of it." Tenar declines to argue the point, and she and Ged agree that he is starting out in life again, at about where Moss put him, a boy of fifteen (199-200). Then, with Ged thinking of his literal youth as "An emptiness ... A freedom" (in both Daoist and Existentialist fashion). Tenar asks, "Who is Therru, Ged?" And he responds after only a very long pause. "So made-what freedom is there for her?" And Tenar asks in turn (in what could be a interrogation of J-P Sartre by Simone de Beauvoir), "We are our freedom, then?" Ged thinks so. Tenar replies

If Therru learns to dance, Ged and Tenar agree, "They will fear her" (201; ch. 12).

Winter passes, an ending and a beginning (201), and royal officials arrive, including wizards, who, Ged thinks, are looking for "abuses of the art." Tenar wants to suggest that a good place to look would be "the manor house of Re Albi!", but she cannot get the words out, and she must move on to other thoughts. In terms of the novel's magico-politics, she has been silenced by the spell (203). Among the newcomers, Spark returns to take his inheritance and show that he has grown into a young male chauvinist boar, who will not give his own mother straight or full answers, which Tenar hears as, first, Flint's half-answers to her questions during the twenty years of their marriage, and, second, lies (205, 207; "The Master," ch. 13). Tenar sees herself as a failure with her son since he is less than a man, jealous of Ged, dishonest, envious. Ged responds, "Frightened, I think . . . not wicked" and adds, "And it is his farm" (207).³⁹ We are not given enough information to judge for sure whether Spark is more frightened or wicked, but in terms of Tehanu we can be quite sure Spark has taken the crucial test, and flunked: he has judged and condemned Therru. Tenar quotes him as asking about Therru, "What did she do, to look like that?" (208). The last we see of him, Spark makes one friendly gesture: he teaches Ged a useful sailor's knot (212; ch. 13).

News comes from Re Albi that old Moss is sick, and Tenar, Therru, and Ged leave Tenar's-now Spark's-farm, with Tenar taking only some personal possession and three Havnorian ivory pieces (of seven money pieces Flint saved). Spark offers her all the money, but she leaves him the four pieces as her gift to Spark's bride when he marries; the farm she freely gives him with the line "You're the master" (211; "The Master," ch. 13).

And then there is another action sequence, the climax of the book: significantly, a sequence that runs only eight pages and is very straightforward, without rhetorical flourishes or elaborations.

Aspen, apparently with an audience, magically binds Tenar and Ged, forcing Tenar into humiliating postures and calling her "Bitch" (215, 218; ch. 13). Aspen is looking for Therru but is happy to have captured Ged, "The Lord Archmage Sparrowhawk":

Ged answers "No," and adds, in the manner of his response to the Terrenon (WE 118; ch. 7), an aphorism: here, "In dying is life." Aspen dismisses the quotation, and dismisses Ged as "schoolmaster!" Like Cob, he takes seriously only power, and he will show Ged and Tenar (and, if he can catch her, Therru) his power. Aspen keeps the old Lord of Re Albi alive, and continues the work of Cob.

Tenar and Ged are imprisoned, with Tenar much humiliated: muzzled, by magic, words taken from her. And Aspen will seek out Therru, whom he sees as Tenar's "whelp . . . that I planned to finish punishing, since it was left half-burned" (218).

For the conclusion of the novel and its last chapter, the point of view switches initially to Therru.⁴⁰ Therru sees Aspen "as a forked and writhing darkness" and knows-just knows-that his true name is Erisen.⁴¹ She sees Tenar and Ged as her mother and father, and sees them bound "with a thong through her tongue and a thong through his heart." Aspen takes Tenar and Ged behind "a stone door. She could not enter there" but needed to fly, "but she could not fly; she was not one of the winged ones." So she moves to the edge of the cliff, looking carefully with her physical eye to make sure she doesn't fall. "She looked into the west with the other eye, and called with the other voice the name she had heard in her mother's dream"-i.e. Kalessin.

Therru runs to town, passing the place where she planted the peach tree; it's not there: the peach tree will not be a life-symbol for Therru, rising from a "tiny grave" into life (wrong author for rebirth as resurrection). Then she goes directly to the house of Aunty Moss, who has been cursed by Aspen and is dying: as a lure for Tenar. Moss asks Therru to say Moss's true name, which she does; but Therru will not fulfill Moss's more basic request, "Set me free, dearie!" by letting her die (220-21; "Tehanu," ch, 14). Freedom for Le Guin does not include dying, so long as there is hope for life within the natural order.

Then the point of view goes back to Tenar as she and Ged are led to the cliff's edge, where Ged will be forced to push Tenar off the ledge and then jump himself (221, 222); but, in good villain fashion, Aspen must first mock his victims. So, before the murders we get Aspen's "But first, maybe she wants to say something. She has so much to say. Women always do. Isn't there anything you'd like to say to us, Lady Tenar?" She cannot speak, but can and does point to the sky. Aspen says "Albatross," and Tenar-like the young Duny rendered speechless by his aunt's magic-laughs aloud (WE 4; ch. 1). "In the gulfs of light, from the doorway of the sky, the dragon flew . . . . Tenar spoke then." She yells out "Kalessin!" and pulls Ged behind a rock "as the roar of fire went over them, the rattle of mail and the hiss of wind in upraised wings, the clash of the talons like scytheblades on the rock."{sic} And that long phrase is it for the resolution of the physical action of the novel: Kalessin has done the dragon thing, and we can be sure Aspen and his co-conspirators are dead (222). The "wildness of the spirit and of the earth," symbolized in Kalessin, rises up "against misrule," symbolized by Kalessin sending fire against Aspen et al. (ER 24).⁴²

In a conversation among Ged, Tenar, Therru, and Kalessin, Ged thanks Kalessin, by the title "Eldest." Therru addresses the dragon as "Segoy," and the dragon calls her "Tehanu." Kalessin, it turns out, has long sought Tehanu, and she has the choice of going with Kalessin or staying with "these." Tehanu will stay with Tenar and Ged and humans generally, and Segoy pronounces "It is well. Thou hast work to do here." Kalessin promises to come back for Tehanu "in time," but, for now, says to Ged and Tenar, "I give you my child, as you will give me yours"-Tehanu in both cases-to which Tenar replies, "In time" (223). Kalessin flies off, and Tenar and Tehanu look at the meager remains of Aspen and crew. Tehanu says "They are bone people," and Ged responds to the line-because said in Old Speech?-with, "Her native tongue . . . . Her mother tongue." And Tenar and Ged comment on Therru's true name of Tehanu, given "by the giver of names," so "She has been Tehanu since the beginning. Always, she has been Tehanu" (224)-and then Tehanu urges them on to visit the sick Aunty Moss.

For the denouement, Moss begins to recover, and it is clear that the old Lord of Re Albi will die and "The grandson might live, if the house is made clean ...." Ged asks the question Lark asked at the beginning of the novel: "Why do we do what we do?" (3, ch. 1; 225, ch. 14). Tenar and Tehanu resolve to plant more peaches. Tenar realizes she left Ogion's lore books "On the mantel at Oak Farm-for Spark," who "can't read a word of them." That is no big matter, though. Tenar likes Ogion's house and ends the novel saying: "I think we can live there" (226; ch. 14).

"To be whole is to be part; true journey is return" as Odo's tombstone says (TD 68; ch. 3), and like many another Le Guinian hero-from Tenar and Ged tentatively at the end of The Tombs of Atuan and (in the true Gontish version) Farthest Shore to Luz in Eye of the Heron to Stone Telling in Always Coming Home-Tenar and Ged return with Tehanu to a place both old and new, and a true home.

*

DISCUSSION:

As mentioned above, the critical consensus on Tehanu, including Le Guin, sees it as Le Guin's revising and re-visioning of Earthsea, filling gaps (Christie) and reinvigorating the more feminist aspects of Tombs of Atuan, or turning into fiction the feminist insights of "Is Gender Necessary? Redux" (Littlefield 249-51)-or doing penance or practicing "affirmative action" (ER 12). And again, I am part of this consensus. Still, I wish to stress the Janus-face of Tehanu, its looking backward and fitting in to Le Guin's canon as of 1990, as well as looking forward to other feminist works. This is decorous for a novel with so much stress on doorways and liminality-the space between-with so much stress on faces scarred on one side: the face of Sparrowhawk/Ged, the face of Therru/Tehanu. Especially when we recognize Le Guin's long-standing custom of debating with herself, Tehanu completes some patterns left unbalanced in the Earthsea trilogy.⁴³ In the trilogy, the score was two to one for books narrated from a male point of view and books dealing with transcendence-as projects-more than immanence; Tehanu evens the score and then some: being mostly Tenar's book and ending with minimal closure with our interest in an androgynous dragon and a person both dragon and little girl.

I want to look now at two familiar themes. The first is immanence vs. transcendence. The second is the filling of gaps, but with my own twist. Mike Christie discusses how Tehanu backfills available gaps in the world of the earlier trilogy, with sex being one gap and the lives of women and children and peasants and nonHeroic sorts generally being a more important other gap (Christie 94-95). I wish to look at the gaps within Tehanu and different ways different readers can fill those gaps. I think my discussion will make clear that Tehanu was intended as a feminist novel and should be read as a feminist novel but is figuratively in the doorway on the path to a fully feminist novel-part of the continuing cultural inventing of the feminist novel-insofar as the reader must supply some feminist filling into those gaps. To stress the point, I will, provocatively (and, I hope, usefully), occasionally fill in gaps with some masculinist filling, for a "resistant" reading. I also do some resistant readings to remind my own readers that resistance is possible and far from futile. Propagandizing children is usually immoral, but a book is a pretty noncoercive thing in the hands of a grownup, for the grownup. Authors and audiences collaborate to establish meaning, and if one starts feeling uncomfortable with or hostile toward a meaning, one should identify the meaning and decline to collaborate; one can recognize and even respect the author's (apparent) intention, but resist. In Earthsea Revisioned, Le Guin uses one of my favorite images when she says she could not continue her hero story of Earthsea until "as a woman and artist" she had "wrestled with the angels of the feminist consciousness" (11). In the traditions I come out of, "The profoundest relationship" one can have "with the cosmos" (TD 12; ch. 1) is imaged as a wrestling match (Genesis 32.24-30). If Jacob can wrestle with God and Le Guin can wrestle with feminist angels, readers can wrestle, as a point of respect, with Le Guin's work generally, and more specifically with a text as rewarding as Tehanu.

IMMANENCE:

Immanence in Tehanu is very much in the sense of Simone de Beauvoir, but with values reversed.

Again, in The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir uses "immanence" and "transcendence" as central terms for her analysis, not of anything metaphysical but of women's situation(s) in the late 1940s and proposals for women's liberation, and finds that the "domestic labors that fell to [woman's] lot . . . imprisoned her in repetition and immanence"-a bad thing. A heterosexual human couple may be "the original Mitsein" (friendly society) (35), but still, women generally are most trapped in immanence in reproduction and marriage.⁴⁴ As Arha, the One Priestess at Atuan, Tenar was caught in immanence without marriage, and part of Le Guin's point in Tombs (as in "Darkness Box" [1963]) is that some people with jobs that put them high in hierarchies may find themselves trapped worse than the most conventional Hausfrau. Penthe is a reliable, if juvenile and prejudiced, guide to Atuan; she gives a nicely vulgar, radically nonDaoist view: "It's always the same here. Nothing happens." Arha replies, "All that happens everywhere begins here," referring I assume, to Atuan's depths and hub-like stillness (TA 17; ch. 2). Penthe would prefer someplace else-any place else: "I'd rather marry a pigherd and live in a ditch. I'd rather anything than stay buried alive here all my born days with a mess of women in a perishing old desert where nobody ever comes!" (40; ch. 4 [see Littlefield 248]). So readers should see Arha's becoming Tenar and escaping from Atuan as a Good Thing. If anything is bad about that escape-Tenar's rescuing Ged and being rescued by Ged-it is that that escape is justified in large part because a community of women has been presented so negatively. However, this is a community of women working for two organized religions, a community ultimately under the authority of the men who made themselves high priests and, eventually, Godkings of the Kargad Lands (TA 24 and passim). So the area of the Tombs at Atuan offers the same challenge for feminists as the double vision (minimally) required for a fair look at the medieval convent as an institution: women's space indeed, yet with captive women, on the one hand; on the other, like a medieval or Renaissance ghetto: both a prison and a fortress (see ER 12).

But Le Guin has had immanence both good and bad throughout the Earthsea trilogy, and usually good. Transcendent action-Heroism-as Ged emphasizes, has been a temptation for Ged, a temptation he needed to resist. And Ged learned the lesson. At the end of Ged's public life, in the second to the last speech in Farthest Shore, the Doorkeeper says "He has done with doing. He goes home." The last speech in Farthest Shore comes from the Gontish version of whether or not Ged crowns Lebannen. Again, on Gont they say that Lebannen forbids seeking out Ged, saying "He rules a greater kingdom than I do"-i.e., in going alone in forest and mountains, communing with nature, (re)joining nature, and coming to know and rule himself (FS 196-97). In Tehanu, it is pretty strictly the marriage version of immanence that gets privileged. Like the young Ged, young Tenar gets offered the education-though not the life-of a mage. And, as we've seen, like Ged she leaves Ogion-but very much unlike Ged she rejects a life of masculine power and doing. As Rosemarie Arbur pointed out in 1978, Tenar reaches Ged's "goal in life-that of being rather than doing-about two decades before he does" (Proceedings 151). Old Speech is a mother tongue for Tenar, but the rest of magery is a foreign language, the wrong sort of clothes: if an old word may be allowed-inauthentic for her.

The possible "immanence," or tender trap, of marriage versus a career was a major question in the 1940s when Beauvoir wrote. It was a major question for my mother in the 1950s and 1960s. It was a major question for Le Guin in her life and in the essay "The Fisherwoman's Daughter" (1988)-and a major question for the women responding to the analysis of "The Fisherwoman's Daughter" as it appeared in Le Guin's newspaper feature, "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Writes the Book." Do "real women" go out there and get a job and whip male butt at men's games, or do they stay home in the old "domestic sphere"? Or do they stay home and write books and take care to do more than "one thing" (see Tehanu 22, ch. 3; 203, ch. 13). Or some other choice, not yet defined for women or men? That the debate goes on is clear from a bit of commentary from late 1995 on those classics of American television, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Murphy Brown, and Roseanne.

Writing in the Arts and Leisure section of The New York Times, Betsy Sharkey quotes and paraphrases Regina Barreca on valorized domesticity and maternity as part of the backlash against feminism:

In Tehanu, as in "Fisherwoman's Daughter" Le Guin's position is clear. Those who wish may accept what power men are willing to share (or perhaps whatever power that women in the late twentieth century can seize), but she will value also, and valorize, "the other room, where the women live"-a domestic life (30; ch. 4). Regina Barreca may think Roseanne et al. have sold out; Le Guin seems to feel otherwise, and many feminists in the 1990s will accept such a position (see "Fisherwoman" 233-35).

Which is far from saying that Tehanu celebrates domesticity or patriarchal marriage. It does not.

Most strongly attacked is rootless heterosexual promiscuity, alluded to in terms of roaring girls (as the Elizabethans said) joining the gangs on the roads and often returning home "within the year, sullen, bruised, and pregnant" (14; ". . . Falcon's Nest," ch. 2). The family relationships among the sturdy beggars (to use another high-caste Elizabethan term) is seen only in the highly dysfunctional family that abuses and almost kills Therru. Unlike the welfare mothers Le Guin celebrates as "the superwoman of today" in "The Fisherwoman's Daughter," these roaring girls have made a serious mistake. In Tehanu Le Guin comes down against rootless gangs-men figuratively as well as literally homeless-as much as she shows negatively the wondering tribes in Planet of Exile (1966) or City of Illusions (1967), or the settled but still rootless Shing in City of Illusions or the Condor People in Always Coming Home (1985). These gang members will inflict on others "the cruel anger of the weak, which wreaks itself on the weaker in the endless circle of human violence" (ER 23): the men rape and nearly kill Therru and do kill Senini, her mother; and they in turn will be enslaved (181-82; ch. 12).

Arrangements more traditionally valued than tramp groups also come off poorly. Flint dies before the start of the novel, and Tenar rarely thinks of him (and people Tenar meets do not reminisce about him); so we only get glimpses of the marriage. Still, those are not very positive views: Flint not giving Goha straight answers for twenty years, Flint keeping their few money-pieces in his money box, Flint refusing to do "women's work" ("The Master," ch. 13). Probably our best indication of what Flint was like-aside from the widespread indifference to his death-is Spark, who'd "been struck off Flint" (46; "Bettering," ch. 5)-i.e., a chip off the old rock, with a face like Flint's "but still narrower, harder" (204; ch. 13). Faces in Le Guin's work are important as gauges to character, as are names, and the word-play with Flint and Spark is clear. Spark is a flinty failure as a human being, and we may infer his father was not much better.

What we see with Tenar and Ged is not a good traditional marriage but a good Le Guinian marriage in old age, when Tenar and Ged "partner." And we see that on "the other side," in "the other room, where the women lived," there could be a strong community of women: Tenar and Moss and even (eventually) Ivy, Tenar and Lark and Apple. Among women of men-allowed power, like Arha and Kossil, there may be little love or cooperation; among women with only the power of women, Tehanu implies, there may be cooperation, solidarity, Mitsein. Contrasted with this being together-but with no philosophical to-do about relationship with nature or Being (or the Dao)-is the intellectual Aspen trying for personal transcendence. On one side: the women and the Tenar-Ged relationship; on the other side: Aspen with his intellectual, macho-Heroic, Dr.-Haberish quest for the ultimate transcendence for the eternal Individual, eternal life. There is no contest. Tehanu reinforces immanence, but almost entirely in Simone de Beauvoir's secular sense. Marriage and society and a family of equals obeying willingly is affirmed; striving individuals on power trips-definitely including domestic power trips-are condemned.

*

SILENCES:

Before The newest criticism called all in doubt / And plain-speaking critics were quite put out, there was still some speaking of "gaps" and "silences" in literature: based on a standard defense of the "naughty bits" in satire, or on Erich Auerbach's essay "Odysseus' Scar" (1946), and/or on Søren Kierkegaard's great exercise filling in the gaps in the Akidah-The Binding of Isaac Story (Gen. 22)-in Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric (1843). My own background is Auerbach and Kierkegaard but also the film and novel versions of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and my mother's complaint against people who failed to understand quickly: people who declined to make logical leaps, who needed things spelled out. Part of my mother's complaint may have been itself based on different conventions in story-telling. Following Auerbach, and throwing in a little Matthew Arnold, one might call these different sets of conventions the Hellenic and the Hebraic. As Auerbach points out, Homer in The Odyssey insists on filling in as much as possible. The teller of The Binding of Isaac story insists on giving only the high points. Much more recently, Arthur C. Clarke's novel, 2001 can be read as a "Hellenic" filling in of gaps in Stanley Kubrick's much more "Hebraic," high-points-only film, 2001. The idea of gap-filling, in a more contemporary form, has Tehanu filling in gaps in the Earthsea trilogy as a central method of revising and re-visioning this world through the nonHeroic and antiHeroic "eyes of those that fantasy has traditionally had little time for-ordinary, middle-aged, unbeautiful, unsexy, practical women; wives or widows, with children or without" (Christie 94).

Here, I wish to turn to the silences and gaps in Tehanu itself, and how we readers go about filling them.

If Joanna Russ et al. have taught us to ask, "Where are the women," I'll ask of Tehanu, Where are the people of faith in forms appropriate to a very ancient world? If Odo is right, religion is "one of the categories: the Fourth Mode. Few people learn to practice all the Modes. But the Modes are built of the natural capacities of the mind," definitely including the "religious capacity" (TD 12; ch. 1). And, of course, Le Guin's Kesh in Always Coming Home are a highly spiritual people, and, generally, spiritual matters are important in several of the more recent stories collected in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (1994) and Four Ways to Forgiveness, plus "Coming of Age in Karhide" (1995). At least outside of the Kargad Lands, Earthsea does without gods, and that is well. There are observances of the turns of the year in the trilogy-and Ogion and later Ged and other people of inner power are in touch with the Balance-but in Tehanu the closest we come to spirituality is Aunty Moss's presenting its possibility for women. "A man's in his skin," including the young wizards we see, but women have deep roots. Ogion dies at the roots of a tree and the council of the wise meet in the Immanent Grove with deep-rooted trees (22-23, 142), but it is with Moss that we get the dialog on roots: Moss is sure she is rooted, and gets her power not from sacrifice or social forms but from her roots (51-53; "Bettering," ch. 5).⁴⁵ Aunty Moss raises some good points, but she is "as essentialist as Allen Bloom" (ER 16), and she may represent a feminism admirable in its day but now inappropriate.⁴⁶ If that is the case, what will Tenar and Ged do to expand their connectedness beyond the family-find rootedness in their world? In their daily lives, of course: living on the land and keeping goats-and in the good, Daoist philosophy Ged learned on Roke and elsewhere (e.g., 200; ch. 12). Also, probably in their relationship with Tehanu, but Tehanu's dragon-nature associates her with fire and air, not with water and earth and roots, and one must make a leap of faith to expect a human daughter to lead necessarily to deeper connections for her parents. (The stereotypical American nuclear family is not hope-inspiring for connectedness.) The dragon will include symbolic and mythical immanence only for readers who bring to Tehanu some knowledge of "St. George's earthy worm" (ER 21), and of the World-Serpent surrounding Ocean. Beyond that readers must see that "These are dragons of a new world, America, and the visionary forms of an old woman's mind," a "guide into a mystery," and "emptiness" (ER 22) that readers can fill as we wish. Tehanu is the girl-gendered dragon-child of Segoy, the demiurge, so she can hold a lot of symbolic meanings. And Tenar and Ged (on the hearthstones again?), move toward a feminist re-visioning of the Perennial Philosophy in their discussion of emptiness, potentiality, true magery, power, sacrifice, and a freedom "beyond all the bargains and the balance"-moving beyond the "balance" celebrated in the trilogy toward what Ged glimpses as "The doorway between them" (192-95; "Winter," ch. 12). But with Ogion dead, we could use some spiritual people beyond Moss to help us understand how the religious mode works in Tehanu, or a more explicit imbuing of everyday farm and pastoral life as life in the world.⁴⁷

If we now are to learn about sex in Earthsea, we might ask about the varieties of sexual experience. There are, apparently, no gay wizards, no lesbian witches. As far as we can see, everyone in Earthsea is heterosexual or doing without among the respectable people, and at least heterosexual among the homeless tramps. A witch like Moss will take her pleasure where she can, but she limits herself to men. The book certainly does not present the idea as either insult or brag that "Feminism is the theory, lesbianism, the practice."⁴⁸ Among the Kesh, a man might be woman-living man, like the wergern among the Yurok and (with other names) generally among the Indians of California and "probably by all the tribes . . . north of Mexico" (Kroeber, Handbook 46; ch. 1)-but not among the peoples we learn about in Earthsea.

I do not think such silences should bother readers. And I for one was glad to see Le Guin showing some unheroic single people as happy: Ivy, Moss, miscellaneous bachelors who do "women's work" without thinking about it. As critics from Sir Philip Sidney to MAD Magazine have pointed out, we expect art to give us better than a slice of life, so all art is selective and highly selected: ordered, arranged, and, in some sense, made more interesting than life. And if women got included in Tehanu, others will be left out: not just believers or gays or lesbians, but others we might expect to be in a book such as this. For a major example: an anarchist. As Le Guin says in Earthsea Revisioned, "Old Moss is no revolutionary" (16), and Tenar, though a wonderfully complex character, is not either. In Tehanu, Earthsea gets itself a king, and Tenar finds him a nice boy, and a capable one: which we know he is (see ER 14), and Tenar approves. But another very loud silence in Tehanu is what we should make of kingship generally and more specifically what, if anything, King Lebannen should do about (or, Daoist fashion, set a good example on) the social problems giving rise to "tramps." "Sturdy beggars" and today's homeless in reader-world history, have been produced by economic dislocation, public stinginess, and/or oppression. If we accept the openness of the ending of Tehanu, we also may assert our right to speculate. Ogion's final joy invites us to optimism about the future of Earthsea, but that optimism is much too extreme in Craig and Diana Barrow's statement that "Therru-Tehanu becomes the female archmage of Roke at novel's end" (41; n. 1), which would balance the new royal power. Le Guin recognizes and honors people who are kingly, whose "lordship is the outward sign or symbol of inward greatness" ("Elfland," LoN [1979]: 87). But from Always Coming Home, Tombs of Atuan, and what I know of history, I would infer serious problems with kingship as an institution. Even a nice boy learning to forbid and command and establish law 'n' order may soon oppress his people⁴⁹ . And if not Lebannen, then one of his successors. Kingship may be a phase through which Earthsea must pass, but if we foresee Therru eventually becoming archmage we should also foresee her facing a patriarchy and hierarchy reinvigorated by a King. So readers foreseeing a happy new world order under Good King Lebannen and Archmage Therru might do well to consider the possibility that Kings are good for punishing rapists and other scoundrels, but they are kings by right of hierarchy, and the logic of their situations means they will enforce the patriarchal groundrock of hierarchy: men over women.⁵⁰ Moreover, Tenar is right to have problems with the whole concept of punishment-she is a good Odonian anarchist in questioning guilt, punishment, deserving (TD 266, 288; ch. 10)-and we should be careful about wishing to Earthsea anything more than a brief phase under a king.

In my summary of Tehanu, I have at least implied a number of gaps in the narrative: places where readers have to supply something out of our own lives and experience. Here I will deal with some I find most important.

A big one for me relates to my feeling that "This book," like City of Illusions, "has villain trouble." In her introduction to CI (1978), Le Guin had said, "Real villains are rare; and they never, I believe, occur in flocks. . . ." (LoN [1979]: 146; "Introd. to CI"). In case you are way ahead of me-men generally are not the villains in Tehanu (there are good men as well as bad in it [ER 14]), but I think one needs to bring to Tehanu a strong suspicion of the motives of men generally to make the novel work. "Why do we do what we do?" (3, 225) is indeed an explicit and twice-repeated question in Tehanu, and in some ways this book is an investigation of the mystery of good and evil behavior in the manner of Shakespeare's Othello, King Lear, or Macbeth. Except that Tehanu puts the question, «Why do men do what men do?» and why do women-who instigate no evil in Tehanu-allow it?

Why does Aspen attack Tenar? In terms of the political conspiracy he is running (216-17; "The Master," ch. 12), it is a stupid move: Lebannen probably won't find out about the disappearance of Tenar and some goatherd she has taken on, but he might. Why take the chance? Revenge against Archmage Sparrowhawk is a motive-whenever he learns the goatherd's identity-and because Aspen has this fanatical obsession about cleansing the world of "witches and monsters" (216), and demonstrating his power, especially over women, especially over a woman connected to the new King, and Ged. All right; in the Earthsea trilogy, Aspen would have been a perfectly well-motivated villain: the trilogy is heroic fantasy, and readers are not and should not be overly fastidious about motivation in heroic fantasy, especially the evil motives of villains. This is even more the case in fantasies with limited points of view: we may know the motives of "Me" and "Us" but learn little about the Others. In a high fantasy Tehanu, I would read Aspen's fanaticism as a straightforward mâshâl for racist and sexist obsessions with purity and power. But Gont in Tehanu only borders the world of high fantasy; in its use of conventions Tehanu is closer to the juxtaposition of mundane and fantasy words in The Beginning Place (1980), than to the rest of the Earthsea series. By that sort of hybrid standard, Aspen is only about as motivated as, say, the monsters in Beowulf and, more relevantly, is somewhat less realistically motivated than "the Master" of Mountain Town in the psychological-fantasy world beyond the gate in The Beginning Place.⁵¹

We accept Aspen's villainies finally, I think, because we have been prepared for them. Most immediately because they occur in ch. 13, "The Master," where we have seen that under patriarchy even a son of Tenar can turn out bad: few men-or nobody-will do well in the role of "The Master," and we know that Aspen wants power and understands power, as Cob before him, only as dominion. More important, I think, is the question of how much sheer blind misogyny and male pigheadedness we are willing to accept as plausible in Aspen, and this will depend on how much we find, or have experienced, misogyny and male pigheadedness endemic in the patriarchal world we inhabit.

A key scene for this question is the dialog among Tenar, King Lebannen, and the Master Windkey of Roke. They have the answer to the riddle, "A woman on Gont," but they need to discover the riddle. We may have a variation here of the motive of the Indwellers of the Handdara for developing Foretelling "To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question" (LHD 70; ch. 5). The search for the right question goes nowhere in this scene primarily because Tenar cannot bring herself to talk to Windkey-or even ask him to leave-because "His deafness silenced her. She could not even tell him he was deaf" (144).

Why, and why not?

Were we back on Karhide, with Estraven trying to give advice to Genly Ai, the problem would be clear enough: Ai's macho "deafness" on one side, but on the other, ensuring that Estraven will have problems cracking through that deafness, is Estraven's own Shifgrethor and diplomatic experience and the custom of Karhide making it «not done» to give direct advice.

In Earthsea, in Tehanu, Tenar does suggest to Lebannen in private "that there is, or will be, or may be, a woman, and that they seek-that they need-her." And Lebannen listens, even if it was as if he were "trying to understand a foreign language" (146; "Dolphin," ch. 10). Windkey oozes condescension for women and a generalized pomposity, but again, still, why doesn't Tenar try harder to get through to him-or politely get him to leave so she can speak then and there to Lebannen? Windkey is an intellectual, presumably with some experience handling new and strange ideas. And surely communication between women and men cannot be that much more difficult than between dragons and men, and Orm Embar tells Ged much-however obliquely-when he must communicate with Ged about Cob on Selidor (FS 153; ch. 10). The issue in the little council on the Dolphin at least seems a crucial one, and Tenar has a duty to offer good council. Tenar is multiply situated and hardly powerless: she is indeed Goha, the Gontish widow-woman, but the universe of power is lumpy, and Goha is also Tenar of the Ring, the Lady the King himself offered not only to bow to but to kneel to, a woman who will not be bowing to the King (131). Any fear Goha might have of Windkey should be more than balanced by Tenar's confidence in her status in this context, if not her general, quite high, competence. Later in Tehanu, Tenar says that ". . . women seem to fear their own strength, to be afraid of themselves" (198; ch. 12), and that is a possibility some sixty-seven pages earlier, during the council scene. Alternatively, Tenar has become mostly Goha, and speaking to Windkey as Windkey's equal (or his superior in the immediate hierarchy) is just not, for Goha, «done».

A feminist reading of my text above, ought to see me blaming the victim: «Why can't a woman, talk more like a man?» (see 50; ch. 5). That is a legitimate complaint, but I'll stick with the reading: to pass over as seamless and not question Tenar's problem with Windkey means assuming the communication problem is all with Windkey. We make that assumption, I think, only if we bring to Tehanu the assumption or the experience that «Men are/tend to be like that», in our world, or everywhere.

As with communication problems, so with other gaps in the novel, which are frequently silences by Tenar which we either assume are justified or not. Tenar loved Ged and never spoke her love. If we take the chastity spell as a clarifying subtext-what the author knows but did not make explicit in the text-Tenar could neither know nor speak her love while Ged was around; and I for one prefer a nonromantic ending in Tombs rather than Ged and Tenar's sailing off together toward marriage and life happily ever after. Still, what of later? As far as we know, Ged never visits her between the time of Tombs and Tehanu.⁵² Should Tenar have chided him for not visiting-or have sent a message via Ogion after Flint died to hint to him she was available? Such a message to the Archmage Sparrowhawk would be like discreetly propositioning the Pope, but "Who allows? Who forbids?" (FS 137; ch. 9) in the universe of Earthsea-what is to stop her if her sense of decorum and timing indicated it was time to drop the hint? I can supply a number of answers to that question myself. The point is that if we wish to judge we are not given enough information to judge whether Tenar's unspoken love is a problem with Ged or patriarchy or the nature of magic-or at least in part with Tenar. And part of one's reading of the politics of Tehanu will depend upon how one fills in or skips over that gap.

Ogion never kissed Tenar nor touched her. Did she ever ask him to? Did she touch him? If she didn't ask him to, what should we make of that lack of touch from a man who is to Tenar father, teacher, and guardian? Given Le Guin's use of "touch" generally, we should think it a bad thing that Ogion never touched her (see Remington, "A Touch"). Surely it would be terrible if Tenar and Ogion were Athsheans, where touch is "a main channel of communication" (WWF 94; ch. 5), and Ogion would be radically abnormal in not touching another person who lived with him. Such lack of touch would also be a very bad sign on our Earth during the time of Falk-Ramarren: the Shing, the great Enemy never touch "common men" or women; "they are like gods, cold and kind and wise-they hold themselves apart" (CI 154; ch. 8). But "touch" in Tehanu is at least bivalent: good when Lebannen or Tenar is doing the touching, evil when it is Handy, ambiguous when Therru touches Moss, and Moss feels the touch as a burn (220; "Tehanu," ch. 14). Indeed, touch in Le Guin has been capable of negative value since at least "Semeley's Necklace" (1964 [WTQ 16]) to Dean Festl in "The Rock That Changed Things." Festl is "a kind old Obl who had never raped Bu," the female hero, although "he had often patted her" (FIS 60); we are not to think much better of the Dean for merely patting Bu. If we are somewhat bothered by Dean Festl patting Bu or high-tech troglodytes touching Semley's golden hair, do we want the picture of Ogion kissing or even touching teenage Tenar? Frankly, I think this gap is best overleaped, since old Ogion is going to be damned by one group of readers or another whatever he does. As a teacher, though, of many years experience, I'd say, «Wise choice, old man; keep your hands off your students, period, even if you are a mage and must remain chaste (or virginal) to retain your power and would only touch.»

I'm going to say again that Tehanu is at least double-sided in genre, Janus-faced in terms of Le Guin's canon, and an internal debate (dialogic) on feminist issues. Aunty Moss can present a kind of essentialist feminism that Tenar can only partly accept, and Le Guin in 1993 rejects (ER 16), but which we may and I think should feel ambivalent about. Aunty Moss says she has "roots deeper than this island. Deeper than the sea, older than the raising of the lands. I go back into the dark"-and we should know Le Guin sympathizes: at least in her early works she generally liked roots and the dark-however much Tenar got too much of the dark (Tehanu 52; ch. 5). When Aunty Moss says, "Before the moon I was" (52; "Bettering," ch. 5), we should admire her audacity in her own context, and the greater audacity for Christian readers who know Jesus's line, as the Son, "Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8.5). And when Aunty Moss stresses the differences between men and women, and Tenar disagrees, we should accept that both have their points (100-01; ch. 8). Moss is an essentialist on men and women, believing there are some elemental, mystic differences between us; she is also a healer who would just as soon Ged died as lived (55-56; "Bettering," ch. 5) and a woman with enough against men that there is "a gleam of vengeance" when Tenar tells her about eunuchs-even though Tenar has told her, truly, that the eunuch Manan "was the nearest to a mother I had" (53-54; "Bettering," ch. 5). So Aunty Moss gets her say and Tenar gets hers, and Tehanu ends with a re-established family-a good Le Guinian marriage-and much else left open, including Tenar's cautious question, "What's wrong with men?" (51; ch. 5). That the question is very serious here, makes Tehanu a feminist novel. That it is still basically a question, is a gauge that Tehanu is going to be feminist in different degrees, according to the ways in which it is read and how that question is answered.

What is unquestionably feminist and highly interesting in Tehanu is its completion of the movement, logically more than chronologically, from The Tombs of Atuan (1970/71) and The Beginning Place (1980) to Eye of the Heron (1978) to "Stone Telling's Story" in Always Coming Home (1985): from shared billing in terms of protagonists to definitely a woman protagonist. And a woman protagonist who declines to become a female version of the masculinist Hero. People who identify strongly with Ged might also argue that Le Guin goes out of her way to reduce him from heroic stature to domesticity. But "We don't need another hero"-or we need a new kind of hero-is part of Le Guin's point, and she does well here to drive that point home. Masculinist, macho Heroes are part of the problem, and that becomes clear when you bring into a genre like heroic fantasy some mundane reality.⁵³ We lose a hero, but we gain an every-day world where a dragon might pop in now and then, and we gain the possibility for a different style than that of the Earthsea trilogy, and, to my tastes, if not a better style, a welcomed variation from the high-fantastic.⁵⁴

Tehanu is an open-ended work that I hope is not "The Last Book of Earthsea," but whether Le Guin continues the series or not-What a long, great trip it's been! Le Guin has taken us to a number of intriguing places in Earthsea: geographically, psychologically, cosmologically, philosophically, esthetically, ethically, and now (more consciously) politically. In the Earthsea Trilogy, Le Guin fulfilled some of the promise of Heroic fiction to teach new myths, new morals about the Hero and his world; in Tehanu, Le Guin has expanded the form itself to include a much smaller world geographically, and much wider world socially and thematically. If Le Guin ends the series with Tehanu, leaving open the circle, Tehanu will be and remain a book worth wrestling with: a beautiful and useful gift to the English language.

Le Guin thinks ". . . the archetypes may change" (ER 13), and Tehanu is an important step in changing the archetype of the Heroic quest and of the Dragon, opening them up to women's experience, and changing the stereotypes of those of us the Hero meets along the Heroic way.

*

At least as of my writing, though, Le Guin has written "The Last Book of Earthsea" and returned to other old universes and moved on to more mundane worlds and to different issues: among other issues, the metaphysical questions raised in "Pathways of Desire" and in Ged's guess that "the dragon and the speech of the dragon are one. One being" (196; "Winter," ch. 12). One topic coming up will be the way words make worlds. Also in the stories following Tehanu, the stories of the 1990s: serious handlings of the solitary life (possibly returning to the unhoused wildness of the Dragon), religion, menopause (with a reference to menstruation), sex in figurative flavors other than vanilla, men's studies, and a hero whose coming of age journey is in the androgynous form that is one meaning of the Dragon.⁵⁵

Tehanu: Endnotes  

1 Philip E. Lewis here alluding to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's 1945 work La Phénoménologie de la perception (The Phenomenology of Perception  [English trans. 1962]) and directly paraphrasing Merleau-Ponty's 1960 book Signes (Signs [English trans. 1964]).  Lewis notes that Merleau-Ponty here follows Ferdinand de Saussure, whose lecture notes were published in French in 1916 and in English in 1959 as A Course in General Linguistics.

2 The fisherwoman reference is repeated on 196 ("Winter," ch. 12).  See Le Guin's essay "The Fisherwoman's Daughter"; the craft of the dragon/woman of Kemay may be significant.  For primal unity, cf. Androgyne as symbol in LHD and the initial condition of things in Red Plum's creation myth in ACH, 165-68 ("Time and the City").

3 For wildness and dragons, see Le Guin, Earthsea Revisioned (ER) 21-23.  My translation of fortitudo & sapientia is correct but historically misleading: what true strength and true wisdom might be, and therefore true heroism, depends upon worldviews and is a matter of energetic contestation.  See Kaske on "Sapientia et Fortitudo" and Tolkien on "The Monsters and the Critics" in and on Beowulf.

4 Le Guin suggested that Tenar's love for Ged might have been neutralized by the chastity spell (my formulation) that comes with his being a Wizard (personal communication).

5 Note Arha as the "solitary, untouched priestess, a holy thing" (56; ch. 5).  In being set apart, Arha had been made holy or sacred, "sacredness referred to those things in society that were forbidden or set apart . . . ," as suggested of the etymology of "sacred" from Latin sacer, "set off" (Streng 123, after Émile Durkheim).

6 See James Tiptree, Jr. (pseud. for Alice Sheldon), "The Women Men Don't See" in Le Guin and Attebery, eds., Norton Book of Science Fiction; for Le Guin on crones, see "The Space Crone" (1976), coll. as the first essay in DEW.

7 Students of folklore will recognize in the old lord and his young wizard, the folklore character Joseph Campbell calls "Holdfast."  On the name "Aspen": the two witches in the story are Moss and Ivy; the two Gontish wizards have the tree names Aspen and Beech.  Note Moss on how women's magic is small but "all roots" like a blackberry thicket; wizardly power "is like a fir tree, maybe, great and tall and grand" and ready to blow over in a major storm.  "Nothing kills a blackberry bramble" (100; "Hawks," ch. 8).  Neither mosses nor ivies have impressive root systems, but they are ground, tree, and building huggers, water-like in their ability to get into places—and very different from majestic trees.

8 "Hake" is the name for varieties of food fish related to cod.  "Handy" might be an allusion to "hende Nicholas" in Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale."  It's a stretch for the analogy, but Handy Nicholas is associated in that story with a grab at a young woman, with over-reaching, and with a brand.  See Canterbury Tales I (A) 3271-81, 3778-3853.

9 See headnote to "The Field of Vision," WTQ 222.

10 Holly Littlefield instructively reads and misreads: Somewhat, anyway, Ged "has been symbolically feminized.  He lacks his rod, his mage's staff, which was left broken on Selidor, and is left powerless, impotent" (253).  The staff is whole, at the end of FS, but it's just a staff; Ged has no more magic—no art—to empower his staff.  The key points Littlefield gets quite well: (1) Ged lost his magic potency (sexual undertones intended), and (2) in a hierarchical and patriarchal world, strong/weak = masculine/feminine.

11 For Handy's leather cap see 109 (ch. 8), 128 (ch. 9).

12 See Le Guin's poem "His Daughter," for "They Will Fear Her" as the name of Crazy Horse's daughter (Wild Oats 48).

13 See also 203; "The Master," ch. 13).

14 For Ogion's joy, see also 28; "Kalessin," ch. 4.

15 The formulation here is "She had been told that men must not look into a dragon's eyes, but that was nothing to her" (Tehanu 37; ch. 4).  In WE the quotation is "Almost he stared into the dragon's eyes and was caught, for one cannot look into a dragon's eyes" (89; "The Dragon of Pendor," ch. 5).  In the "men's tongue," one often means men.{sic}

16 Cf. "Rale" in CI (1967) as a specific analog of flowing with the Dao: "Rale is ... the right thing to do, like learning things at school, or like a river follows its course . . . " (136; ch. 8).<

17 Cf. comments by Ong Tot Oppong on "The Question of Sex" on Gethen: no Gethenian "is quite so thoroughly 'tied down' here as women, elsewhere, are likely to be"—or "quite so free as a free male anywhere else" (93-94; ch. 7).  See also Le Guin's essay on women as artists and mothers: "Fisherwoman's Daughter" (DEW 212 f.), and, for walking, "A Man of the People" (FWF 112, 117; § 2).

18 For the flowing spring image, and doorways, see Tao te Ching ch. 6, on the undying Valley Spirit, "named the Mysterious Female," whose "Doorway . . . Is the base from which Heaven and Earth sprang" and simultaneously "within us."  We are told to "Draw upon it as you will," since this source "never runs dry" (Waley trans., p. 149); see also Tao te Ching chs. 4 and 45.

19 They go on to discuss Ged's youth, and we learn that Ged has forgotten the name of his first teacher in magic: the witch of Ten Alders (73), a name the Narrator does not give (WE 2-6, 13; ch. 1).

20 WE started out in, the Bronze Age on culturally backward Gont.  By the time of Tehanu, Gontish-folk have soap, drinking glasses, paper, and other amenities, and are not overly impressed by the sight of a large sailing ship from Havnor.  In a work like "The Tale of Old Venn" in S. R. Delany's Nevèrÿon, such changes would be remarked on, possibly at length; such changes among the "Hilfs" in Le Guin's PE or among the Athsheans in WWF or the Kesh in ACH, would be noticed by someone.  That significant technological changes go unnoticed indicates that Tehanu has an agenda different from the other works I've mentioned.

21 Cf. superstitions about sexual abstinence before battles and football games.  Note that in Sir Thomas Malory's Romance, Le Morte Darthur (The Death of Arthur, publ. William Caxton, 1485), Sir Galahad is admired for his virginity and gets to see and take communion from the Holy Grail because he is "a clean virgin," "a clean maiden"; and, right after communion, Galahad kneels and prays and his soul departs "to Jesu Christ" and goes straight to heaven.  It's Galahad's father, however, Lancelot the impure Courtly Lover of Guinevere who went on to a more impressive career in popular culture.  One  formula for the ideal hero is fortitudo & sapientia; other formulas for the hero have him good "in battle and bed," at "fighting and fucking."  Whether heterosexual fucking—recreational sex—"involves the absolute devaluation of women" is a contested issue: see Moffatt 48-49, 215-25, 229-30.

22 Cf. and contrast the Dyers of Lorbanery in FS as a useful exercise for pointing the difference between the heroic fantasy of FS and the mixed genre of Tehanu.

23 To recall part of the debate on LHD and to anticipate a point we will get to in later chapters: If the concept of gender precedes and reinforces oppression, then gender-based theories and politics may be suspect.  Feminism itself depends upon and reinforces the concept of gender.  Therefore ...?  See Fraser and Nicholson, esp. 31 f.  Without adopting the affectation that distinguishes dogmatically between "which" and "that," we should read Le Guin here to refer to the situation in a culture of repression where what is to be condemned is the gendering that "names the male normal" etc., rather than a rigorous denial of genders.

24 For Tenar and dragons, see Littlefield 255.

25 In Bright's Anglo-Saxon Reader (1891 . . . 1964), the first noun to be declined is stan, "stone" ("An Outline of Anglo-Saxon Grammar," § 20): as Le Guin says in BG, rocks are basic and "The stone is at the center" (55).

26 For clearing one's mind, cf. and contrast Orr's telling Haber to say or think Er' perrehnne before effective dreaming (LoH 161; ch. 10).  See also the Old Canon (the Tao te Ching) in CI helping Ramarren (171-72; ch. 8).

27 Cf. and contrast Macbeth (ca. 1606), where Shakespeare uses thematically the idea that scrofula, "the king's evil," could be cured by the king's touch (4.3.144).

28 Cf. and contrast this scene with the «language lesson» scene in Le Guin's "Pathways of Desire" (1971), where (male) Ramchandra carries on "The great teaching tradition of the Brahman caste" to teach (female) Tamara something she is deaf to: "People cannot hear their native language" (Compass Rose 181).  Cf. and contrast Ged's necessary, and useful deafness to the siren call of Cob in FS and the frequent, negative deafness of males in Tehanu.  Note also below, Tenar's admirable blindness to power.

29 Puritans notoriously suggested that worldly success is a sign of election, and the theory of Karma affirms that if you are suffering in this life it is because of evils you have done in this life or previous ones.  Again, the translation of Aristotle's hamartia as "tragic flaw" rather than "tragic mistake" may indicate a strong belief that people get the misery we deserve (see King Lear 5.3.171-72).

30 Cf. Myra in "Buffalo Gals, with her one original eye and one made of pine pitch (BG 22, 28-19).  See ER 21, 25.

31 Ged serves on a bad galley in WE 28 f. (ch. 2), and Arren is held on a horrific one in FS and finds the thought of slavery intolerable (59f.; ch. 4).

32 For the anarchist doctrine of prison as the epitomizing institution of the State, see TD, esp. the boys' prison game (27-32; ch. 2).  Contrast premeditated and cold-blooded imprisoning of someone with a spontaneous murder, necessary for breaking out of a kind of prison and viewed positively: Falk and Estrel escaping from the Plains tribe in CI (73 f.; ch. 4).

33 Cf. Rilke's "The Eighth Elegy" (of the Duino Elegies), BG 193: quoted in part for my headnote to my chapter on ACH.  See also Tao te Ching: doorway (ch. 6), cycle / return (chs. 16, 22, 25, 40, 52).

34 Cf. WWF: Don Davidson's (derivative) formulation is "The fact is, the only time a man is really and entirely a man is when he's just had a woman or just killed another man" (81; ch. 4).

35 Tenar paraphrases a standard form of the Lex talionis: the Law of Retaliation, or Retribution (historically limiting revenge) found e.g., in ancient (patriarchal) Babylonian, Judaic, and Roman cultures, and later in Islamic culture, and Germanic (as "man-money").  See e.g., Exodus 21.22-32. Leviticus 24.17-21.  Far more recently, note, e.g., "blood money" among the Yurok of California (A. L. Kroeber, Handbook 28, 49; ch. 2).

36 Cf. Shevek's dream of the wall in TD 26-27 (ch. 2).

37 Cf. ". . . [T]rue journey is return" part of the inscription on Odo's tombstone (TD 68; ch. 3) and the Daoist river imagery in "Another Story" in FIS.  See Tao te Ching chs. 16, 25, 40, 52.

38 For Shiva and Shakti, see Coyote chapter on Le Guin's poetry.

39 Cf. Spark and Irene's brother Michael in BP (99; ch. 4).  Contrast sons' points of view in the stories of Hugh and his mother in BP and Shevek and Rulag in TD.

40 Cf. switch of point of view at end of "Nine Lives," and note Le Guin's justification for the switch in her commentary in R. S. Wilson's Those Who Can anthology (208).

41 For "Erisen" as a name, cf. William Blake's Urizen in The Four Zoas (e.g. Night the Fourth, lines 34-40) and The Book of Urizen (1794), e.g., ch. 2.  I am not competent to discuss Blake, but I am confident a detailed examination of Le Guin's canon in the context of Blake would be highly useful.

42 Cf. Arendt on spontaneous vilence to right injustice: On Violence 63, 64.

43 On the silence of the Earthsea trilogy on "fundamental imbalances of power and gender," see Littlefield 252.

44 See e.g., in Second Sex 147, 173-5, 187; II.V.xvi: esp. 429-30, 447-48, 451-54, 456; II.V.xvii: 513, 521; 555-6, 594; II.V.xxi: esp. 598-99, 602 (see also 618-21).

45 In Behavorist terms, "skin" is the impassable barrier to the private world of human individuals (Skinner 191); for a Sartrean Existentialist, that barrier may be equally impassable.  Moss suggests that skin-as-barrier, skin as a prison, is a problem with rootless males, which, for her, is a redundancy.

46 Cleaned up and regularized, Aunty Moss's views could be restated in terms of a spiritually inflected "EcoFeminism"; and an ecofeminist approach (as I imply passim) would work quite well for much of Le Guin's work.

47 Cf. and contrast the great farm communities and religious life in "Another Story Or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea" in FIS (1994).

48 For movement by Ti-Grace Atkins in the 1970s from "feminism is a theory, lsbianism is a practice" to "feminism is the theory, lesbianism the practice,"{sic: commas} see Echols 238 and 349 n. 164.

49 See 1 Samuel 8.11-17 (noting that the Prophet Samuel, was far from disinterested: royal power threatened the power of the prophets).

50 One might also read Marian Zimmer Bradley's retelling of the rise of patriarchal Kingship in ancient Britain: The Mists of Avalon (1983).

51 Cf. and contrast the investigation of motives in John Gardner's Grendel (1971), a modernist, men's tongue exercise in combining fantasy, naturalism, and philosophy.

52 He does not visit Vetch either, his best friend from WE, or Vetch's young kinswoman, Yarrow (WE ch. 9), or Ogion; so, viewed more naturalistically than is legitimate for high fantasy, Ged may have a problem with maintaining old relationships.

53 Tina Turner sings "We Don't Need Another Hero" in the 1985 film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome: a study of gendered Heroism that can be profitably studied with Tehanu.  See also, among Le Guin's other comments on the Hero, Le Guin's poem "My Hero" (1994) in Peacocks 58, and ER 25 and passim.  For Le Guin in Tehanu moving "her fictional attention away from even such devoutly fair men" as her nonmilitaristic heroes "Ged and Shevek," see Christie 94; see also ER 17.

54 For Le Guin on style see "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" (1973), coll. LoN (1979): 83-96.  See also Christie 93-94 for a fine discussion of the conversation among Apple, Tenar, and Lark while cleaning up (Tehanu 152-53; ch. 11).

55 I used the phrase "unhoused wildness" with Le Guin's first published story in mind: the idea of "breaking down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky": "An die Musik" (1961), coll. Orsinian Tales (here 145).