From Water Margins to Borderlands: Boundaries and the Fantastic in Fantasy, Native American, and Asian American Literatures

From Water Margins to Borderlands: Boundaries and the Fantastic in Fantasy, Native American, and Asian American Literatures A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota By Jennifer L. Miller In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation Advisor: Dr. David Treuer December 2009 © Jennifer L. Miller 2009 Acknowledgements The completion of this dissertation would not have been possible without the help and support of many people. In particular, I would like to thank the following people for their unfailing advice, support, and love: Dr. David Treuer, my advisor, for giving my project a home and for your enthusiasm for my idea. My committee members, Dr. Josephine Lee, Dr. Jack Zipes, and Dr. Qadri Ismail, for their comments, critiques, and advice. I appreciate your willingness to work with a project that exists in between categories, and for pushing your own boundaries to embrace it. The Asian American Studies dissertation writing group, headed by Dr. Josephine Lee. Thank you for including my project in your group. Your support, comments, and advice were extremely helpful, and being part of this group helped provide the impetus for seeing my project through to completion. Kathleen Howard and Lindsay Craig, for your work with me on the Fantasy Matters conference in November of 2007. Thank you for helping me organize a wonderful conference, and for being wonderful friends who helped me figure out my dissertation, academia, and life in general. My parents, Mark Ilten and the late Donna (Sieck) Ilten, for providing me with an incredible literary foundation. I would not be here today if it hadn’t been for those many nights spent reading Asimov, Jacques, Adams, Lewis, Tolkien, Nesbit, and countless other fantasy and science fiction authors. You shared your love of literature with me, and in doing so, showed me your love for me. My brothers, Nathan and Philip Ilten, who both contributed many great suggestions for reading material and whose enthusiasm for my project is reassuring and uplifting. The many other family and friends who provided support throughout my years both as an undergraduate and a graduate student, especially Karen Ilten, Carla Ilten, Barb and Bill Miller, Aaron Miller and Amanda Hakemian, and Sam and Angela Miller. In particular, I would like to thank my husband, Adam Miller, whose patience, interest, encouragement, and love saw me through this project from beginning to end. You believed I could do this even when I did not, and for your faith and love, I am eternally grateful. And finally, to my daughter Zoe Miller, thank you for providing my life with perspective. By simply existing, you’ve pushed my own boundaries past the walls of the library and the screen of my laptop, and my life is so much richer for it. i To my mother, whose tears at the end of Watership Down are now my own And to Adam and Zoe, with all my love ii Abstract This dissertation examines the tropes of boundaries and the fantastic in Asian American, Native American, and fantasy literature, in works by authors ranging from Sherman Alexie and Stephen King to Maxine Hong Kingston and J.K. Rowling. Because both race and the fantastic engage the theme of boundaries, by focusing on the elements of the fantastic in these works of contemporary literature, the theme of race can be brought to the fore as well. The fantastic proves to be particularly valuable in challenging the binary relationship between Self and Other, suggesting new ways to think about the process of identity formation. Furthermore, because of the hesitation and uncertainty inherent in the trope of the fantastic, this same uncertainty is transferred to the discussion of race in these texts, highlighting the way in which many authors simultaneously embrace and reject stereotypical racial fantasies. Additionally, examining the limitations of the fantastic provides another challenge to expected portrayals of race and difference in the way it blurs the line between reader and text and compels the reader to become a more active participant in discussions of race. In this way, reading these works through the lens of the fantastic moves questions of race in popular texts to the center of the discussion, forcing readers to acknowledge the complex, ambiguous, and often contradictory ways in which race is portrayed in contemporary works of fantasy, Asian American, and Native American fiction. iii Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction: Water Margins, Borderlands, and the Fantastic 1 Chapter 2: Theorizing the In-Between: Power, Borderlands, and the Fantastic 21 Chapter 3: Fantastic Walls, Roads, and Doors: Physical Manifestations of Interstitial Spaces 56 Chapter 4: Characters on the Borders: Negotiating the Boundary between Self and Other 111 I. Ghosts, Sisters, and China in Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses 117 II. Interstitial identity and the bildungsroman form in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony 135 III. Harry Potter, Race, and Identity 157 Chapter 5: “If I Could Turn Back Time”: The Limitations and Moral Necessity of the Fantastic 181 Conclusion: Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior 215 Works Cited and Consulted 235 Appendix A: A Brief History of Fantasy Literature 255 iv But to Sam the evening deepened to darkness as he stood at the Haven; and as he looked at the grey sea he saw only a shadow on the waters that was soon lost in the West. There still he stood far into the night, hearing only the sigh and murmur of the waves on the shores of Middle-earth, and the sound of them sank deep into his heart.—from The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien Cold hit her, and the relentless current, but she stood where she was, still feeling the warmth of Life on her back. This was the very interface between the two realms, where she would normally plunge ahead. This time, she planted her feet against the current, and used her continuing slight contact with Life as an anchor to hold her own against the waters of Death. —from Sabriel by Garth Nix Chapter 1: Introduction: Water Margins, Borderlands, and the Fantastic Bordering Middle-earth to the West is the High Sea. This ocean not only marks the borders of Middle-earth, but it also delineates the end of the age. At the end of The Return of the King , the fellowship of the ring truly ends on the shores of the ocean, right before Gandalf and Frodo sail with the elves into the West. Gandalf says, “Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle- earth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil” (Tolkien Return 384). The sea is not only a physical boundary around Middle-earth, but it also carries a symbolic value, for by crossing it, Gandalf and the elves demonstrate that their time in Middle-earth is over and now is the time of humans. As Gandalf tells Aragorn, “The Third Age was my age. I was the Enemy of Sauron; and my work is finished. I shall go soon. The burden must lie now upon you and your kindred” (Tolkien 308). The 1 water around Middle-earth sets both the physical and symbolic limits around Tolkien’s narrative. Boundaries of water around fantasy worlds are not unique to The Lord of the Rings trilogy. C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia , Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Fionavar Tapestry , Kate Elliott’s Spirit Gate , Brian Jacques’ Mossflower , Garth Nix’s Sabriel, and Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind , to name a few, all contain maps where at least one edge of the fantasy world is bordered by a seemingly endless ocean. Even popular fantasy video games, such as World of Warcraft , often create fictional worlds completely surrounded by water. John Clute gives a name to these boundaries of water in his and John Grant’s Encyclopedia of Fantasy , calling them “water margins.” He defines this term as a term taken from the tv series The Water Margin , where it describes the unmapped and ultimately unmappable regions which surround a central empire, a vast polder whose rules attempt to stave off, by the use of magic and treachery, various revolutionary incursions from the heroes who inhabit the unknown regions. Water Margins surround a central land or reality, and fade indefinitely into the distance, beyond the edges of any map. Fantasies set in secondary worlds are commonly supplied with maps whose edges are not borderlands but water margins. (Clute and Grant 997) As Clute’s definition of the term makes clear, water margins set the land they surround apart, limiting the reality of the world to the lands contained within the boundaries of the map. As the examples above show, these boundaries often have a symbolic value as well, setting apart a world that is more innocent or a world of childhood. These philosophical or ideological boundaries reinforce the physical boundaries that exist on the maps, and vice versa, so that their mutual existence creates a boundary that is seemingly impermeable. 2 This definition of the term water margin as an impermeable boundary can serve as a way of thinking about not only a geographical aspect of certain fantasy novels, but also about fantasy literature as a whole. Like the worlds of Narnia and Middle-earth that are set apart from any other continents or worlds, fantasy literature as a whole is often set apart from the rest of literature. Perhaps because of its historical ties to fairy tales and children’s stories, as well as the way in which it is categorized as “genre fiction,” fantasy literature is often considered escapist and not read in connection with other more literary texts.

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