CUSTODIAL HEROES, MORAL SOLDIERS, AND WILLING SACRIFICES:
HEROIC MASCULINITY IN MODERN EPIC FANTASY
A Thesis
Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Master of Arts
in English
University of Regina
By Sean David McKenzie
Regina, Saskatchewan
October, 2009
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FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES AND RESEARCH
SUPERVISORY AND EXAMINING COMMITTEE
Sean David McKenzie, candidate for the degree of Master of Arts in English, has presented a thesis titled, Custodial Heroes, Moral Soldiers, and Willing Sacrifices: Heroic Masculinity in Modern Epic Fantasy, in an oral examination held on October 16, 2009. The following committee members have found the thesis acceptable in form and content, and that the candidate demonstrated satisfactory knowledge of the subject material.
External Examiner: "Dr. Brian Attebery, Idaho State University
Supervisor: Dr. Susan Johnston, Department of English
Committee Member: Dr. Noel Chevalier, Luther College
Committee Member: "Dr. Lynn Wells, Department of English
Chair of Defense: Dr. Alison Hayford, Department of Sociology and Social Studies
*Participated via video conference **Not present at defense Abstract
In this thesis I will argue that modern epic fantasy, fantasy which follows Tolkien's generic conventions and examines the human condition, uses its suspension of disbelief to consider important issues of masculine identity, particularly custodial masculinity. My definition of custodial masculinity is from Jamie Paris, who defines it as
male identities predicated on taking responsibility for ensuring the human
flourishing of another person. Such masculinity perceives others, not as means to
its own ends, but as ends-in-themselves, whose flourishing helps to ensure the
higher-order goods of the community. Custodial masculinity, then, is a
communitarian notion, which may even call for a knowing sacrifice of the self in
order to ensure these larger goods, (ii)
I compare this conception of masculinity to those proposed by theorists such as Michael
Kimmel, Larry May, and R.W. Connell, noting particularly how this concept undermines their arguments for a hegemonic, destructive masculinity.
Each of the three chapters of my thesis will explore a different facet of custodial masculinity, expanding upon Paris' definition, and specifically focusing on how modern epic fantasy authors provide models for custodial conduct and moral masculinity. In my first chapter, I will discuss masculine morality in The Sword of Truth series by Terry
Goodkind, and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliver series by Stephen R.
Donaldson, particularly concentrating on the role of the soldier, and the idea of moral redemption. In my second chapter, I will discuss the concept of fatherhood in fantasy, using the same primary sources, but focusing on the physical and emotional absence of
i fathers, and the power dynamic between father and child. My third chapter will consider the role of the surrogate and the sacrifice in J.K Rowling's Harry Potter series and Guy
Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry, examining the relationship between custodial care and
sacrifice, and considering how the question of motive and intent relates to both. Thus, my thesis will begin with considering what it means to be a custodial man, examine how that masculine identity is passed on, and discuss the resolution and ramifications of
choosing to become a custodial male.
ii Acknowledgements
This thesis would not have been possible without my supervisor, Dr. Susan Johnston, who offered endless discussion, argument, encouragement and support. I am additionally thankful for my committee members, Dr. Noel Chevalier and Dr. Lynn Wells, who supported me despite the magnitude of my project and its extensive reading list.
I would also like to thank the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research at the University of Regina and the Social Sciences and Humanities Counsel for their gracious funding.
Finally, thank you to my family, who may not have completely understood why I chose this path, but love me regardless.
iii Dedication
To my loving wife, Christina, who has patiently listened to my ranting, tolerated my vehement arguments with books, and supported me through my bleakest and brightest hours. Post-Defense Acknoledgement
A special thank you to Dr. Brian Attebery, who took the time out of his busy schedule to serve as the external examiner for my thesis defense.
v List of Abbreviations
Donaldson, Stephen. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever—The Chronicles
-Lord Foul's Bane—LFB
-The Illearth War—IW
-The Power that Preserves—PtP
Goodkind, Terry. The Sword of Truth
- Wizard's First Rule- WFR
-Stone of Tears—SoT
-Blood of the Fold—BotF
-Temple of the Winds—TotW
-Soul of the Fire—SotF
-Faith of the Fallen—FotF
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter.
-Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone—Philosopher's
-Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets—Chamber
-Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban—Prisoner
-Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire—Goblet
-Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix—Order
-Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince—Half-Blood
-Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—Deathly Hallows
vi Table of Contents
ABSTRACT
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
DEDICATION
POST-DEFENSE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE: Masculine Morality: The Role of the Soldier and the Redeemed in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever and The Sword of Truth
CHAPTER TWO: On Sons, Fathers, and Surrogates in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever and The Sword of Truth
CHAPTER THREE: Custodialism and Sacrifice: Caregivers, Teachers, and Saviours in Harry Potter and The Fionavar Tapestry
CONCLUSION AND REFLECTION
WORKS CITED
APPENDIX A Introduction
Though the "sword and sorcery" movement actually began with Robert Howard's series of Conan (1932)1 stories, it was not until Tolkien's Lord of Rings (1954-5) that the fantasy genre began to find acceptance as literary art,2 and the imprint that Tolkien left upon the genre is unmistakable: fantasy novels are filled with knowledgeable wizards, estranged and ostracized heroes, and vulnerable characters that reenact and complicate
Frodo's necessary moral choice between good and evil. These conventions often provoke critics to suggest an ironic lack of imagination in the fantasy genre, and indeed there are many formulaic fantasy authors that seek only to retell Tolkien's tale ad nauseum without significant engagement with the genre and the literary values behind it.
However, there is significant evidence, both textual and critical, that supports epic fantasy's ever-evolving ingenuity, and its status as a literary art form; writers such as
Stephen R. Donaldson, Guy Gavriel Kay, Terry Goodkind, and J.K. Rowling have all created brilliant fantasy worlds entirely worthy of academic critique. I will examine how the genre fits into literature and addresses contemporary issues through these authors by focusing upon the most heavily foregrounded and important element in fantasy: the hero.
Because the vast majority of fantasy heroes are male, any constructive examination of heroism implicitly requires consideration of the masculinity behind that heroism as well.
By studying the hero in the works of Tolkien, and some of the better fantasy authors that
' Howard actually began his barbarian stories in 1929, writing about a character named King Kull, but this character was usurped by Conan, when the first stories about the Cimmerian appeared in Weird Tales in 1932 ("Robert E. Howard"). 2 This is certainly not to say that the entire fantasy genre made the leap; there are far more pure escapist adventure stories than there are literary ones, and many of those who try to write in modern epic fantasy completely ignore the literary requirements of the genre in favour of blind generic adhesion. I will outline my criteria for differentiating both types of'pulp' fantasy from literary fantasy further on. followed him, I intend to discern the common masculine elements which tie the unique male heroes of fantasy together, and explain what kind of masculinity modern epic fantasy proposes, and why. In doing so, I will show that modern epic fantasy is not only conscious of masculine roles, but often actively reconfigures them to present a masculinity rooted in ideals of fairness, care for others, and self-sacrifice.
Though critical works on modern epic fantasy are few, what does exist can be
split into two distinct movements. The first appeared in the mid-1970s, some ten years
after Lord of the Rings was first published in the U.S.A. These pioneers had three primary goals: to create a workable definition of fantasy literature, to identify its lineage,
and to defend its study in an academic setting. C.N. Manlove's Modern Fantasy (1975)
and The Impulse of Fantasy Literature (1983) are particularly concerned with the first two goals, defining and situating modern epic fantasy as a descendant of classical epics
such as The Aeneid (-29-19 BCE), and of western European mythology and fairy tales.
Though Modern Fantasy also studies five fantasy works, including Tolkien's Lord of the
Rings, it is the theoretical work and generic situating that makes this work remarkable;
except, perhaps, for Tolkien's own "On Fairy Stories" (1947), Manlove's work is the first
example of generic critique of modern fantasy. W.R. Irwin builds upon Modern Fantasy
in his work The Game of the Impossible (1976), working to clarify the boundaries
between fantasy and the fantastic, and situating fantasy's origins in the historical need for
cultural "play" in a healthy society, and how fantasy has functioned through a variety of
genres, including utopianism, parody, and supernatural stories. He ends by evaluating
fantasy in both culture and academia, creating a foundation upon which later theorists
2 such as Ann Swifen would build for their defenses of modern fantasy, and the explorations of fantasy aesthetics that follow them.3
The second movement began in the mid-1980s and continues to the present;4 though some authors, such as Brian Attebery and Lucie Armitt, continued the generic examination and defense of fantasy, they, and many others, such as Michael Moorcock,
Roger Schlobin, Katherine Hume, and Charlotte Spivack, also moved away from a focus on defining and defending fantasy, toward engaging it academically, pointing out its strengths and flaws, while associating it with other disciplines and theories such as psychology and feminism.5 This wave also included a number of studies on specific fantasy texts, though they are still particularly sparse when compared to studies of other literary movements. By far the most common are criticisms of Tolkien's work, including those of Manlove, Eaglestone and in particular, Katharyn Crabbe, who offers a multi- pronged approach to Tolkien in her work J.R.R. Tolkien (1988), taking into account biographical elements, mythological roots and quest narratives. W.A. Senior provides a similarly extensive approach in Stephen R. Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant:
Variations on the Fantasy Tradition (1995), exploring a variety of issues, and including transcripts of two interviews with the author himself. Though there is little academic work on either Kay or Goodkind, Kay's inclusion of both biblical and Arthurian elements presents a critical starting point, and Goodkind has offered his opinion of masculinity and the fantasy genre in a personal letter dated March 18th, 2008. The recent Harry Potter
3 This handful of first-wave critics is by no means an exhaustive list. Writers such as John Aquino, and Eric Rabkin, and Amaryll Chanady would all be part of a larger discussion of first-wave criticism. 4 Arguably, the criticism from 1995-present may in fact form a third wave, consisting primarily of direct critical analysis of fantasy texts, and largely abandoning the need for defense of the genre. 5 This included a number of ways to examine fantasy outside of genre theory; Hume's focus on mimesis, and Attebery's suggestion that fantasy simultaneously exists as a genre, a mode, and as part of a larger generic "fuzzy set" of the fantastic are particularly notable. 3 craze has also inspired a number of critical texts, most notably Giselle Anatol's Reading
Harry Potter: Critical Essays (2003), and Cynthia Hallett's Scholarly Studies in Harry
Potter (2005), which offer a variety of critical readings on Rowling's series, from the points of view of childhood development, literary context, and morality, including discussions of ethnicity, gender, and economic status in the novels.
While the second wave has included some consideration for gender in fantastic works, much of this study has been only tangentially related to fantasy, instead focusing on other genres, such as science fiction. Brian Attebery's Decoding Gender in Science
Fiction (2002), for instance, seeks to explain how gender functions specifically in SF, though he makes a number of observations relevant to both genres. He suggests that, like fantasy, SF allows authors to explore different social issues, particularly gender, and thus alter the signifying system of cultural markers upon which readers rely to shape their consciousness. Attebery specifically targets the view of gender as binary, suggesting that
"SF authors are more than willing to disrupt the binary gender code with such concepts as a literal third sex, a society without sexual division, gender as a matter of individual choices, involuntary metamorphosis from one sex to another, gender as prosthesis, and all manner of unorthodox manifestations of sexual desire" (9). As with fantasy worlds,
"readers are asked to accept these features as literal truths about the imaginary universe of fiction, but at the same time they are invited to map the new fictional(dis)orde r onto the world of experience" (9). Where fantasy and SF differ are in the specific ways they challenge this gender binary and hierarchy; while SF approaches the difficulty quite directly through the lens of science, playing with alternative evolutionary models and sexual alternatives in an attempt to "match up fictional elements with images and ideas
4 from science in such a way that each component, the fiction and the science, represents and illuminates the other" (17), fantasy explores the gender divide from within the individual, extrapolating the internal struggle for gender roles into the world around the hero.
Unfortunately, gender examinations in fantasy are much more difficult to find, and almost all of them explore lines of reasoning based entirely on feminist discourse, ignoring masculinity, except to attack and condemn it as misogynistic, as in Ruthann
Mayes-Elma's Females and Harry Potter: Not All that Empowering (2006). Little has been said, however, about the heroes as men, and no attempt has been made to chart the path and progress of the modern male fantasy hero from his roots through to present day.
This critical omission is particularly disturbing given the compelling nature of the genre, deriving from its ability to cause a complete suspension of disbelief, which C.N. Manlove argues "can produce an imprint on our imaginations deep enough to give it a measure of truth or reality" (MF 2) and allow the author to explore issues that either cannot be addressed in any other way, or are difficult to articulate without allegory and metaphor.
This is not to say that fantasy novels fulfill purely allegorical functions, but rather that the terrain of a secondary, magically-based world allows authors to explore the human condition through situations that serve to focus and magnify key elements in the author's paradigm. Stephen R. Donaldson alludes to this in "Epic Fantasy in the Modern World"
(1986), suggesting that "fantasy is a form of fiction in which the internal crises or conflicts or processes of the characters are dramatized as if they were external individuals or events...The internal struggle to deal with those needs/problems/exigencies is played out as an external struggle in the action of the story" (3-4). This is a distinctly different
5 paradigm from the one used in realist fiction, in which "the characters are expressions of their world;" rather, "in fantasy the world is an expressions [sic] of the characters" (4).
Michael Moorcock agrees, suggesting, in Wizardry and Wild Romance (1987), that as the hero of the novel "range [s] the terrain of his own psyche, encountering, as other characters, various aspects of himself," he can also "lead us to a greater self understanding" (16). As the writers and heroes of modern, epic, fantasy literature are predominantly male,6 the hero's adventure is often primarily concerned with the formation of masculine identity; their heroic quests are extrapolations of the internal struggle to define themselves as men, exploring abstract concepts of emotion and power, fatherhood, care, nurturing, and sacrifice, through concrete situations within carefully constructed, closed systems, and ultimately displaying ever-evolving models of masculinity.
While these models shift over time, most modern fantasy depicts gender as neither uniquely essentialist nor strictly constructivist, but rather a combination of the two. This is, I suspect, a result of the inadequacies of both gender models. Essentialism, such as that depicted in Robert Bly's Iron John (1990), claims that gender, and particularly manliness,7 resides not in "the feminine realm, nor in the macho/John Wayne realm, but in the magnetic field of the deep masculine" (8). He likens the inner core of the masculine to a dirty, aggressive brute, caged by society, with the only key in the
6 Of course, not all fantasy is written by males; there have been a number of notable female authors, such as Elizabeth Moon, Mary Stewart, Sara Douglass, Leigh Eddings (writing with her husband David), and J.K. Rowling. 7 Manliness, rather than masculinity, is used quite consciously here. The key difference between the two terms is in their usage. While "masculinity" is a descriptive term, "manliness" tends to be used prescriptively, describing how men should be, rather than how men are. This accounts for Bly's argument that, despite the fact that most men fail to discover the violent and uncontrolled "inner Hairy man," his rediscovery should be the goal for all men. 6 possession of a woman. Bly admits that this is "some advance over keeping the Hairy
o •
Man in a cellar, where many elements in every culture want him to be" (7), but argues that "eventually a man needs to throw off all indoctrination and begin to discover for himself what the father is and what masculinity is" (25). This presents the primary flaw in Bly's argument: the impossibility of "throwing off' all indoctrination, and the related
assumption that an authentic, essential masculinity exists that completely supersedes
culture and socialization and prescribes what men will be.9 Gender constructivists, such as R.W. Connell in his work Masculinities (2005), oppose the Essentialist claim,
suggesting that identity is made up of "layers of emotion [that] coexist and contradict
each other" (10), and are constructed through social interaction. This allows for a multiplicity of masculinities, which differ as a result of culture, sexual orientation, and personal experience.
Though the constructivist model allows for a variety of masculinities, Connell also posits the existence of a culturally-constructed, dominant masculinity, not unlike
Bly's conception of manliness, which he calls "hegemonic masculinity." Connell defines this term as the "gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men" (77). Yet this definition ignores the self-destructive dimension of hegemonic masculinity; while it serves as an overarching benchmark against which men can be measured, "not many men actually meet the normative
8 Bly specifically points to the industrial community and the Christian church as key contributors to the suppression of true masculinity (6). 91 suggest that this is an obvious flaw because it would require that all men, regardless of culture, history, or social participation, be inherently the same, something that is patently ridiculous and untrue; though men share similarities with one another, different cultures prize different attributes and personal values which directly influence how men behave. 7 standards" (79), instead occupying the fringes, and subordinated by the hegemonic masculine. The key differences between Bly's conception of the alpha masculinity of the
Hairy Man and Connell's hegemonic masculinity lie in morality and the capacity for change: unlike Bly, who sees the Hairy Man as a gender touchstone to be freed and embraced, Connell sees hegemonic masculinity as a tool of oppression, constantly changing to present the most apt tool for the subjugation of women and alternative masculine roles.
The difficulty inherent in both essentialist and constructivist views is their tendency to conflate social and moral conscience with the masculine gender role, regardless of whether they believe it springs forth in full battle garb from the hearts of men or is built from never-ending layers of personal interaction. This leads to two further problems: the conflation of masculinity and patriarchy, and the assumption of an immorality surrounding key attributes of men, to which even champions of "natural" manliness, such as Bly, ascribe.10 The former problem arises, for the most part, from constructivist texts such as those by Michael Kimmel. Jamie Paris argues that, according to Kimmel,
the project of masculinity studies ought to be men writing about men as men to
divest men of their power and to make men aware of their privileges as men. In
this way, the task of the masculinity studies critic is to make men aware that they
10 Though Bly would not argue that these assertive, often violent, characteristics of men are immoral, the fact that he ascribes them to a the Hairy Man figure, and notes that society has locked him away suggests that Bly is aware that these attributes are seen as negative or immoral by society; what is important is that he never questions their existence, but simply argues that the they must be freed to benefit the individual, regardless of how detrimental it may be to society. are suffering from false consciousness, and that their only real goal should be to
bring about an androgynous society. (8)
Paris is not far from the truth. Not only does Kimmel frequently fail to distinguish between masculinity and patriarchy, but he also completely ignores any potential beneficial aspects of patriarchal relationships," positioning masculinity, historical and contemporaneous, as a horrific fiction of the male imagination that has led only to suffering, and should be completely abandoned, just as he believes that patriarchy is entirely evil and should be overthrown.12 Despite his critique of hegemonic masculinity, this is a particularly frightening possibility for Connell, who suggests that
to argue for degendering is to revisit an old feminist debate over equality and
difference. It was successfully argued in the late 1970s that a degendering
strategy of equality undermined women rather than affirming them, because it
demanded they become like men; equality meant sameness, and women's culture
would be lost. A strategy based from the start on a critique of masculinity does
not face exactly this difficulty, but it faces a related one. Abolishing hegemonic
masculinity risks abolishing, along with violence and hatred, the positive culture
produced around hegemonic masculinity. This includes hero stories from the
Ramayana and the Iliad.. .participatory pleasures such as neighbourhood baseball;
abstract beauty in fields such as pure mathematics; ethics of sacrifice on behalf of
" By beneficial or benign aspects of patriarchy, I mean the results of "fair" hierarchies, in which the ruler attempts to better the situation of those who serve him, viewing them as valuable in and of themselves, rather than means to an end. I will explore this relationship in significantly more detail in chapter 3. 121 am certainly not claiming that overarching, unchecked patriarchy is a good thing, merely that just male rule is not impossible, as Kimmel seems to believe. 9 others. That is a heritage worth having, for girls and women as well as boys and
men. (Masculinities 233)
Kimmel vehemently disagrees with the suggestion that masculinity may have any intrinsic value, particularly for women, suggesting that contemporary masculinity is nothing more than a myth, and that "American men have been searching for their lost manhood since the middle of the 19th century" (History of Men 37), when they began to define manhood as "the repudiation of the feminine, the resistance to the mother's, and later the wife's efforts to domesticate men" (21). The result is a movement of what
Kimmel refers to as "masculinism," that is, the "effort to restore manly vigor and revirilize American men by promoting separate homosocial preserves where men can be men without female interference" (21). Kimmel goes so far as to suggest that these efforts "involve the symbolic appropriation of women's reproductive power by developing distinctively masculine forms of ritual initiation and nurture—initiations that displaced maternal care with manly validation" (21), situating male nurturing and homosocialism13 within a decidedly negative realm, and assigning the attributes of patriarchy, or what Connell refers to as the "hegemonic" masculine, to the entirety of men. Though this assertion seems to be directly at odds with Kimmel's belief that "to acknowledge these differences [age, ethnicity, class, geographic location] among men, we must speak of masculinities," his statement, "at the same time, though, all American
13 By homosocialism, I am not referring to Eve Sedgwick's conception of male relationships that blur companionship and homosexuality (as in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire), but rather to heterosexual fraternal bonding, which is absolutely necessary for the formation of masculine identity within a constructivist framework; without spending time learning from, and exploring masculinity with, other men, it is impossible to establish a solid, autonomous gender role. These experiences need not be tribal reconnections with an inner "primal nature" like those suggested by Bly; it is the company of men that is valuable, and the exploration of both public and private spaces for homosocial gathering allows for a more well-rounded and competent gender role to evolve. 10 men must also contend with a singular vision of masculinity, a particular definition that is held up as the model against which we all measure ourselves" (Manhood in America 4), denotes not merely a belief in the hegemonic masculine as Connell defines it, but also in men's complicity with and active support of this role. As a result, even though "Kimmel seeks to articulate a means to socially just ends.. .he cannot motivate those means because he discusses male power in absence of male duty" (Paris 10).
Larry May takes Kimmel's arguments one step further in Masculinity and
Morality (1998), arguing that men behave badly because of social indulgence, and that the male character thus created is an immoral one. He suggests that society excuses violence and rape on the basis of biology, citing what he calls the "testosterone excuse," which claims that the violent actions of men are the result of uncontrollable hormonal urges. While May is correct in dismissing the excuse as ridiculous, his assertion that, because of societal indulgence, which "boys will turn out to be rapists is often as much a matter of luck as a matter of choice" (83) is no less preposterous, and similarly insulting; he believes that because rape and other violent crimes are "made more likely by the collective actions, or inactions, of men in a particular society," all men are actively
"participat[ing] in a crime against humanity for which they are collectively responsible"
(95). It would seem that for May, though it is unbelievable that all men should be flawed biologically, all men are nevertheless flawed, and the only reasonable option remaining to them is "to reconfigure the meaning of masculinity, so that men can feel good about being masculine without the negative repercussions of traditional patterns of aggressive masculine behavior" (23).
11 May's use of the word "aggressive" is emblematic of the difficulty masculinity theory, both essentialist and constructivist, has in dealing with morality. While there is little doubt that many men, past and present, have committed violent crimes, including crimes of "aggression" such as rape and murder, the assumption that masculinity is necessarily "aggressive" is unjustified. The Oxford English Dictionary defines aggression as "an unprovoked attack; the first attack in a quarrel; an assault, an inroad," with those exhibiting aggression to possess a "hostile or destructive tendency or behaviour, held to arise from repressed feelings of inferiority, frustration or guilt." While it is true that males are typically more active, often more assertive, competitive, and even disruptive than females, the term "aggressive" implies an unwarranted, overtly negative morality inherent in men. It is clear that May himself intends this implication in his arguments, but his evidence for it is often unsound. His examination of the sport of boxing, in which he uses Mike Tyson as an example of how "misbehavior, especially sexual misbehavior of males toward females, is something which is publicly condemned but which many men condone" (82), is a perfect example of May's non-sequitur approach. He first applauds an article by Joyce Carol Oates14 for its analysis of boxers as
"living conduit[s] for the inchoate, demonic will of the crowd: the expression of their collective desire, which is to pound another human being into absolute submission" (81-
2), before attacking it for its suggestion that Tyson is "an outlaw or even a sociopath.. .very different from other males in our society" (82), suggesting that while
Tyson may not be precisely typical, neither is he particularly deviant, and that the larger community of men must accept responsibility for his actions, because he exists as a
14 Citation courtesy of May: Oates, Joyce Carol. "Rape and the Boxing Ring." Newsweek, 24 February 1992, 60. standard member of the group. May and Oates fundamentally misunderstand boxing, in the same way they misunderstand masculinity; boxing is based not on the desire for destruction, but the desire for competition and respect,15 though deviants like Tyson may use the violent aspects of the system to justify their sadism. Similarly, masculinity cannot be summarily dismissed as aggressive, though the patriarchal system that it inhabits may encourage an assertiveness and competitiveness that sometimes fosters, and even requires, violence.
Modern epic fantasy displays a masculinity markedly different from both essentialism and constructivism, one which recognizes assertiveness and differentiates it from naked aggression. It accepts the existence of certain fundamental aspects of masculinity, based in large part on assertiveness, but suggests that this potential for violence and competition can be socially-conscious, though this requires that it be shaped through social interaction between the heroes and those around them. In fantasy terms, the hero is like a lump of metal entering a blacksmith's forge at the story's onset, which must be shaped by the forces around it. Though the final product depends in large part on the hammering of the smith(s), whose skill or ineptitude may make a masterpiece or a failure, not every metal is suitable for the making of weapons, nor for the making of pots.
I will examine the hero, both his initial form and the growth he undergoes through interaction with those around him, in five key examples of modern epic fantasy:
Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (1954-5), Stephen R. Donaldson's Chronicles of the Thomas
15 F.X. Toole adamantly reinforces this idea in his short story collection Rope Burns, using each of his short stories to illustrate how boxing fosters both self respect, and mutual respect. Real world evidence of this is continually provided through the mutual respect the majority of boxers, and even mixed martial arts fighters, display after a bout, often hugging and offering words of encouragement and admiration for their opponent, despite the sensationalist, aggressive attitudes often shown pre-fight. 13 Covenant the Unbeliever (1977),16 Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry (1984-86),
Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series (1994-2007), and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series (1997-2007). All of my choices conform to my definition of modern epic fantasy literature: they are epic, both in length, as a part of a series, and in content;17 the main body of action occurs in a secondary world and requires a necessary suspension of disbelief;18 magic is central to the events of the text;19 and they are all written, with the obvious exception of Tolkien's own work, after Lord of the Rings was first published in
North America.20
The primary texts provide a chronological map between Tolkien's work and present day, allowing me to look at the evolution of fantasy as a genre, and the evolution of masculinity within it, as the genre responded to changing gender roles in western society during the advent and propagation of second-wave feminist discourse, and the
161 am specifically concerning myself with what Donaldson entitles the First Chronicles, comprised of the first three novels that involve Thomas Covenant; though I will take the Second Chronicles, the second set of three novels, into account, they focus primarily on developing the character of Linden Avery, and are thus less directly concerned with the formation of Covenant's masculine identity. 171 will refer to epic content the same way Stephen R. Donaldson does: "an epic is 'epic' because it deals explicitly with the largest and most important questions of humankind: what is the meaning of life? why are we here? who is God and what is She doing? what is the religious and/or moral order of the universe?...the 'epic' was the highest form of literature and was expected to say the highest things ("Epic Fantasy" 10). 18 This is not to say that the entire stoiy must take place within a secondary world, nor that the secondary world cannot exist within what is ostensibly our own; the Harry Potter series depicts both of these, having the action take place in small amounts within "muggle" London, and situating the realm of magic and wizards within, but separate from, the natural world. The main body of action in the story still takes place in the secondary world of wizards, which includes Hogsmeade, Hogwarts, and the Ministry of Magic, but the boundaries are deliberately overlapping and accessible. 19 The centrality of magic to the text is what primarily differentiates fantasy from the fantastic, which may include supernatural elements, but either chooses not to make those elements central points upon which the story functions (as in the Gothic), or attempts to explain them logically through a medium such as scientific terms (as in Science Fiction). Instead, fantasy makes magic absolutely essential to both plot and character development, using it as the central premise upon which the created world functions. 20 I have deliberately avoided entering into a prolonged discussion of what precisely constitutes fantasy, as others have laid the groundwork for a basic definition of the fantasy genre. C.N. Manlove's Modern
Fantasya takes this discussion up at length, carefully differentiating the fantasy genre from similar genres, and positing such possible definitions as: "a fiction evoking wonder and containing a substantial and irreducible element of supernatural or impossible worlds, beings or objects with which the mortal characters of the story or the readers become on at least partly familiar terms" (1). 14 response of masculinity theory to this discourse. Though gaps exist in this chronological timeline, particularly between Tolkien and Donaldson, this is due in large part to the dissemination of Tolkien's ideas over the course of the 1960s, and the evolution of a distinct epic branch of fantasy within the larger realm of "sword and sorcery."
Individually, each of my selected texts provides its own unique contribution to the discussion of modern epic fantasy, as each author struggles to stretch the boundaries of the genre, both contributing to the generic structure and subverting it, in precisely the way Derrida suggests a healthy genre should function: "with the inevitable dividing of the trait that marks membership, the boundary of the set comes to form.. .an internal pocket larger than the whole; and the outcome of this division and of the abounding remains as singular as it is limitless" ("Law of Genre" 59). Derrida is stating that the very aspect with which people choose to define a genre will become a connection larger than the genre itself, thereby simultaneously existing within the genre, and subverting it, existing as both a singular anomaly of genre, and the typification of it. Stephen R.
Donaldson's The Chronicles is an excellent example of Derrida's concept; though
Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings laid the groundwork for a hero capable of evil by depicting the temptation of the One Ring on Frodo, Donaldson completely distorts and reworks the definition of the fantasy hero by making Thomas Covenant a physical and moral leper, bitter, disenchanted, and unwilling to shoulder responsibility. Covenant's condition, his resulting unwillingness to participate in the secondary world reality he is thrust into, and the way in which Donaldson links Covenant's summoning to the secondary world in each novel to his falling unconscious in the primary world,
15 deliberately calls the existence of the secondary world into question.21 Guy Gavriel
Kay's Fionavar Tapestry differs from Donaldson's series in that the characters accept the existence of the secondary reality around them with little difficulty, but the text very much continues the examination of the hero, positing the possibility of heroes undertaking noble acts, such as sacrifice, for selfish reasons, and exploring the relationship between mythology and Arthurian legend in the fantasy genre. Terry
Goodkind's Sword of Truth series focuses much less on the relationship between fantasy and mythology,22 instead invoking the relationship between high and low fantasy by positioning its hero as both a sword-wielding, passion-driven, barbarian figure, and a thoughtful, intelligent man capable of moral philosophy, and constantly questioning his emotions, actions, and the nature of mankind, which draws the series deep into epic territory. The high fantasy designation is reinforced by a system of gender equality within the novel,23 and a conscious consideration of opposing figures of immorality, and the ways in which their flaws cripple their humanity. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series is centered upon many of the same conventions that Goodkind's series follows; it uses an
21 This appears to run contrary to Tolkien's comment in "On Fairy Stories;" in defining fantasy (fairy stories) he states that he "would also exclude, or rule out of order, any story that uses the machinery of Dream, the dreaming of actual human sleep, to explain the apparent occurrence of its marvels," claiming that fantasy through dream would be "like a good picture in a disfiguring frame" (17). This is perfect example of Derrida's claim, as Donaldson carefully skirts the boundaries between fantasy and phantasy by having his hero enter the world via unconsciousness. Ultimately, this is merely a stretching of the boundaries, however, rather than a breaking, as neither Covenant nor the reader is ultimately expected to believe that the Land only exists in dreamtime, and thus the dreamstate cannot be used to explain what has happened in the fantasy. 22 Goodkind's series moves away from Christology as well as Mythology, a move uncharacteristic of modern epic fantasy. This is due in large part to Goodkind's own libertarian social, economic, and political views, as well as his diminutive opinion of the fantasy genre as a whole. Ironically, however, his Sword of Truth series still departs from these views, as Richard fails to follow the libertarian model which Goodkind creates in FotF (which actually corresponds better to the actions of Darken Rahl), in favour of a sacrificial model which requires him to continually put the needs of others above his own. The adoption of this model undermines Goodkind's political intentions and firmly entrenches the series in the genre of modern epic fantasy. 23 The majority of low fantasy tends not to reconfigure or reconsider stereotypical gender roles, but to reinforce them through close adherence to their rules. orphaned hero, who is faced with the adult need to decide his moral path, and must undergo tests that teach him not only about himself, but about social conscience and responsibility. Rowling's work is notable, however, not only because of its rapid acceptance into popular and academic culture, but also because it is one of the few female-authored fantasy series to explore the creation of masculine identity. In addition, it is also the only fantasy series that I have chosen that depicts the childhood or adolescence of the hero, as the other authors in my study begin their stories after their hero has achieved physical adulthood.24
My critical analyses of these fantasy texts are primarily concerned with custodial masculinity. Jamie Paris, crediting Marcel Decoste for the term itself, defines custodial masculinity as being exemplified by "relationships where men take on the responsibility for ensuring the human flourishing of another person when they enter into a community," noting that "these men are not generally fathers, who have biological and legal responsibilities towards the child, but men who, of their own free will, decide to take these boys under their wing" (3). While Paris' definition is a reasonable one, it fails to take into consideration the etymology of the word; the word "custodial" derives from the
Latin "custodia," meaning "watch, guard, care," and is closely related to "custos," meaning "keeper; guardian; protector" (Oxford Latin Minidictionary 72). My initial chapter focuses on the role of guardian and protector, particularly in the works of
Donaldson and Goodkind, and paying particular attention to the relationship between emotion, power, and morality. I briefly reflect on the connection between fantasy and
241 differentiate between physical and moral adulthood of the hero in chapter one of my thesis, in which 1 argue that while the fantasy hero has often reached physical maturity before the beginning of his adventure, he is merely on the cusp of emotional/mental/moral adulthood, which he cannot assume until his adventures teach him the correct pathways to that adulthood. morality and consider the masculine alternative to Kimmel and May that I have
established. I then use the novels of Donaldson and Goodkind to illustrate how this
alternative model functions within the fantasy genre, noting both the way in which the masculine role develops through personal interaction, and the way it can affect others.
My second chapter considers the other side of Paris' definition of custodial masculinity, focusing specifically on the relationships between fantasy fathers and their progeny. I note fantasy's connection to the Greek mythology and the epic, using both to help illuminate the paradigm in which fantasy approaches fatherhood. I then begin an
exploration of how fatherhood and paternalism function in fantasy, beginning with The
Lord of the Rings, and moving into the Sword of Truth series and The Chronicles. In particular, I explore the generically typical way in which Richard interacts with his father, the evil wizard Darken Rahl, contrasting it with the unique relationship Donaldson depicts between Covenant and his daughter-by-rape, Elena.
The third and final chapter explores the way in which the fantasy hero transcends the typical "sword and sorcery" barbarian role he is often accused of occupying, embracing precisely the model of custodial masculinity set out by Paris, acting as surrogate father, nurturer, and guide for others, often to the point of self-sacrifice of either life or freedom for those under his protection. This requires significant consideration of not only Paris' idea of custodial masculinity, but also the idea of "just hierarchies." A fair, or just, hierarchy is one in which each member of the hierarchy is
"treated as ends-in-themselves, and not as means to an end" (Paris 15-16). Though
25 This, of course, arises directly from Howard's stories, and the escapist nature of those stories, as well as the extreme simplicity of the barbarian character, driven by greed, lust, and the need for adventure, caused much of the academic disdain for the entire fantasy genre to which the first wave of fantasy theorists were responding. 18 power and control may differ, this does not mean that the hierarchy need be unfair; Paris uses the hierarchy of the family to illustrate this, noting that while the parents ultimately hold the power, if that power is used for the benefit of the child as well as the parent, rather than using it to oppress the child, that hierarchy is fair. The same concept can be applied to other power relationships26, including those between ruler and subject.
Richard Rahl in Goodkind's Sword of Truth series becomes the emperor of the D'Haran
Empire, but his choice to rule on the basis of personal freedom and responsibility makes the ruler/subject hierarchy a just one. I examine how the combination of custodialism and just hierarchies functions in fantasy, particularly noting the connection between modern epic fantasy and the Christological. Using Tolkien, and then Rowling's Harry
Potter series and Kay's Fionavar Tapestry, I will begin by examining concepts of surrogacy and parental care, before expanding to consider custodial roles that function outside of parental conventions, leaders and rulers as custodians, and finallymasculin e sacrifice, particularly that which occurs outside of battle 27 Of particular interest to me is the way in which sacrifice can function as an extension of custodialism, performing the same basic function, but costing the giver life or freedom, rather than merely time and effort. Determining if a sacrifice is custodial requires an examination of the motives behind masculine sacrifice, as these motives determine whether or not the sacrifice is, in fact, selflessly custodial, or merely a means to an end of personal suffering.
26 It is important to note that just hierarchies, by definition, can only apply to relationships of power; this makes examining relationships that should not be power oriented, such as gender relationships, difficult, as gender itself should dictate no specific power, and thus any power relationships focused on gender are typically unjust. While a number of fantasies, including the Sword of Truth series, carefully examine the relationship between men and women, and the power dynamic between them, a full reading of this must remain a promissory note. 27 This is not to say that sacrifice in battle is less important than other kinds of sacrifice; personal sacrifice for others is always important. However, because I will be examining the motives behind sacrifice, and the premeditation of it, partially contrasted with reactionary sacrifice, the distinction becomes relevant. In examining the custodial and sacrificial aspects of fantasy masculinity, I hope to uncover not only how modern epic fantasy resolves the seemingly disparate fantasy figures of the sword-wielding barbarian, the thoughtful, emotional father figure, and the intellectual, moral wizard, but precisely how this new moral masculine identity develops and functions within the closed worlds of fantasy. Fantasy is a particularly pertinent choice for the study of developing and evolving masculinity, as so much of it focuses upon the heroic bildungsroman of a young male hero; it is, most often, a genre written for and read by men,28 and thus its concern for male identity is paramount, though often underlying, and through its heroes, the genre expresses the difficulties surrounding male identity, and the possible resolutions to those problems.
28 Though female authorship and readership of fantasy is ever increasing, bolstered by the rise of the fantastic romance, such as Stephanie Meyers Twilight series, and even straight fantasy texts such as Rowling's Harry Potter, fantasy remains a male-dominated genre. Though readership is nearly impossible to calculate, Susan Linville points out that, as of 2001, female writers made up only about 25% of sci-fi and fantasy short fiction authors; while this neither specifically addresses novel length fantasy fiction, nor female readership, such a large percentage difference between the sexes suggests that fantasy is still dominated by men. Chapter One
Masculine Morality: The Role of the Soldier and the Redeemed in The Chronicles of
Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever and The Sword of Truth
French and German fairy tales and their progeny are, of all fantastic genres, most overtly concerned with issues of morality, particularly as they involve heroes, villains, and the breaking of prohibitions.1 Tales such as "Bluebeard" explore the dangers involved in curiosity, and a lack of trust in relationships; "Little Red Riding Hood" relates the danger posed by strangers; "Beauty and the Beast" teaches that not everything can be judged by appearance. All of these stories, regardless of their strangeness, seek to teach the reader, as J.R.R. Tolkien suggests in "On Fairy Stories"; speaking of a story called The Frog King, in which a princess promises to marry a frog if he performs a task for her, Tolkien suggests that "the point of the story lies not in thinking frogs possible mates, but in the necessity of keeping promises (even those with intolerable consequences) that, together with observing prohibitions, runs through all Fairyland.
This is one of the notes of the horns of Elfland, and not a dim note" (61).
Tolkien's allusion to "Elfland" draws a direct connection between fairy tale and its most magnificent offspring: modern epic fantasy. Brian Attebery suggests that this familial relationship is the result of "mixed parentage—fairy tale on the mother's side, and realistic fiction on the father's," and that it is through this joining that fantasy derives its "unique ability to investigate the.. .process of constructing a self' (Strategies 86); this
1 Arguably, all literature engages with morality at some level; it is the fantastic's ability to completely resolve these issues, or follow them to their logical conclusion, no matter how disturbing or bizarre, that is unique. 21 mixing may well be the reason for fantasy's apparent lack of many traditional fairy tale motifs, though closer inspection of the genre reveals that the motifs are merely abstracted rather than absent. The intended audience of each genre further complicates the motifs; while fairy tales are constructed as a form of children's literature,2 and meant to be didactic, fantasy is typically written for adolescent and adult readers, capable of making finer distinctions and therefore less likely to need overt and obvious themes and tropes to follow the moral path of a story. While the line between good and evil remains a bold and obvious one, the moral questions that fantasy engages are often far more complicated than those found in fairytales, and the roles of hero and villain much less rigidly defined.
Though fairy tale and fantasy use different methods to examine and attempt explanations of life and moral truisms, "the lack of realism" found in both "lies in the form, not in the meaning or application" (Senior 9). Both attempt to "depict Life in Truth as opposed to
Life Actual" (Senior 12), using fantasy settings to shape and define their moral dilemmas because they are the most efficient and useful arenas for the exploration of morality. This allows authors to strip away unnecessary political and social realities and situate their commentaries within an infinite variety of socio-political environments, all of which bring with them the freedom from expected social and physical rules.3
The freedom with which modern epic fantasy writers are able to write allows them to engage directly in the exploration of the fine line between assertiveness and aggression in masculinity through their heroes in order to refute a misandrist notion of
2 I'm speaking here of modern fairy tales (post-eighteenth century), as different and distinct from much older forms which may have been targeted toward an adult audience, as well as children. 3 Science fiction and other genres that exist at the periphery of fantasy share this freedom, but choose to anchor themselves more firmly in consensus reality by providing a means of connection or explanation for the fantasy elements. Pure fantasy dismisses this need, and experiences the most freedom as a result. 22 masculinity as purely negative. Terry Goodkind states in a personal letter that those who, like Kimmel and May, attack masculinity and promote androgyny, do so because "it is self-worth that gives rise to masculinity" and "if you can destroy self-worth you destroy individuality and not just the value of men, but the nobility of mankind itself. To do this they belittle the accomplishments of men as individuals and their value to mankind"
("Goodkind to McKenzie" 2). Rejecting the condemnation of masculinity, works such as
Stephen R. Donaldson's Chronicles of the Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever and Terry
Goodkind's Sword of Truth series depict heroes that are infinitely complicated and ever- changing models of masculinity, constantly engaging with forces and characters around them; they embrace their own power and emotions, including those often thought negative and associated with aggression, while grappling with issues of social and moral conscience. Modern epic fantasy uses the suspension of disbelief and the freedom of fantastic realms to posit "what if' scenarios of masculinity that can ignore or even oppose social and political gender expectations and propose masculinities that embrace emotion, power, and duty simultaneously, serving and fulfilling social morality without losing or condemning masculine identity.
Modern epic fantasy has had an intrinsic link with issues of masculine power and emotion since its inception. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings emblematized the struggle masculine identity was facing as a result of evolving female gender identities at the end of the 19th Century, and the World Wars; perhaps as a direct result of the new, less female-dominant role men were expected to assume, the horrors Tolkien himself saw in service to his country, and the way in which evolving machines of war began to end human life on a catastrophic scale, Tolkien's hero is not an unstoppable masculine force, but a small, frightened, and yet enduring hobbit named Frodo. Tied inescapably to domesticity and the natural world through a hobbits' love for plants and the closed, private sphere of the Shire, Frodo is an unlikely hero, but it is his custodial, domestic nature that allows him to resist the temptations of power and carry the One Ring; he is devoid of the "alpha masculine" attributes found in low fantasy heroes like Conan,4 instead possessing a distinctly counter-hegemonic, intensely internal, and naturalized masculinity,5 without external power and influence, and yet strangely adamantine and resistant to external corruption. It is these traits that enable Frodo to succeed where others would have failed and carry the Ring to Mount Doom, though he still ultimately fails to carry his quest to conclusion and destroy the Ring on his own. These masculine traits arise directly from Frodo's position as a child; though his adventure begins a few years after his formal coming of age, it signals the beginning of his moral development; in accepting responsibility for the Ring and leaving the Shire, Frodo steps into the larger world, and begins to encounter moral dilemmas. As a result of this new-found adolescence, Frodo is essentially powerless in the face of the destructive forces around him, and only through the assistance of the "Fellowship of the Ring" is he able to undertake the quest for the Ring's destruction.
Like the convention of the youngest son in fairy tale, who receives no inheritance and must instead rely on only his own inherent abilities to make his way, Frodo is surrounded by men who possess powers much greater than his own, and yet can neither
4 Conan is a perfect example of one version of what Connell deems the hegemonic male; he is incredibly strong physically, violent, aggressive, and intensely virile. 5 In using the term "naturalized," I am consciously applying both an organic meaning, suggesting a deliberate attempt on the part of the author to somehow make their hero a part of nature and the land itself, and an ideological one, denoting the attempt to make the masculine role of the hero seem both believable and acceptable. take his place in the quest, nor lighten his burden: Gandalf, Legolas, and Gimli are remnants of the time of magic and wonder, before the gritty, realistic, and warlike time of ores and men; Aragorn is a fallen man, a descendent of the once great house of Isildur, marred by the mistakes of his forebearers, and the ignored responsibility of his kingship; only Sam, a fraternal6 rather than paternal figure, and equally diminutive in stature, may accompany Frodo, signifying the importance of fraternal bonds in a world of brutality and danger, particularly in light of the relative powerlessness of individual men. Though
Frodo must move from moral adolescence to adulthood, making his own decisions and living by their consequences, thankfully he does not have to do so completely autonomously; men may still have friends, even when they have moved out of their fathers' shadows and into larger realms.
Though modern epic fantasy is intrinsically linked to Tolkien's work, the way in which it deals with masculine power and emotion has changed. Stephen R. Donaldson's
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, a series of three novels, Lord Foul's
Bane, The Illearth War, and The Power that Preserves, continues the redemption of the fallen man that Tolkien promises both through Aragorn's return to kingship and Frodo's resurrection after he "falls" in Mount Doom, but depicts masculine power not as necessarily domestic or counter-hegemonic, but as a raw potential, a wild and unstoppable power that can only be accessed via complete acceptance of self. Like
Tolkien's model, however, Donaldson's model of masculinity also insists on the need for
6 It is important that Sam accompanies Frodo to Mordor rather than either Merry or Pippin, the other two hobbits who are a part of the Fellowship. Sam is not only a fraternal figure, but a distinctly subservient one, particularly after the difficulties of the journey begin to wear on Frodo. This leaves Frodo free to choose his own path without outside interference, but insures that he has the fraternal backing he needs to succeed in his quest. Tolkien himself notes this subservience in terms of rank, recalling: '"My "Sam Gamgee"...is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war'" (Pearce 40); if Sam is the private, Frodo is surely his lieutenant. 25 fraternal bonds, and a related care and devotion to others, in order for the model to be moral and functional. To explore these necessities, Donaldson depicts a character devoid
of both: Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever.
Thomas Covenant is a leper, physically and quite often, morally. This leads to the
destruction of his comfortable life in the real world: his wife leaves him, taking their son,
and his community ostracizes him, fearing any and all contact, viewing him much as he
views himself: "Beware! Outcast unclean/" (LFB 1). At the same time, Covenant must
learn to cope with the realities of his disease; leprosy, or Hansen's disease, requires the
constant monitoring of extremities in order to ensure that any injuries, however small, are
found and cleaned before infection can set in.7 His unexpected introduction into the
Land, a world that knows little sickness, presents Covenant with a distinct choice: he can
either give in to the seductive power of the Land, relinquishing his hold on physical
reality and thus risking possible injury, or he can deny the Land's reality entirely, treating
it as a dream, or a nightmare, and risk the possibility that his refusal to defend it against
Lord Foul,8 could result in its destruction. Thus Covenant becomes "the unbeliever," a
hero torn between responsibility and denial, emotionally tied to those around him, but
continually denying the bonds in order to avoid anyone depending upon him, or making
him accountable for his actions.
The seductive power of the Land is directly tied to the health of its inhabitants,
and its ability to spread that health to others. Though Covenant enters the Land a leper,
7 For lepers, infection can potentially cause gangrene and require amputation. The need for vigilance arises directly from the deadening of the nerves in the extremities, which exponentially increase the possibility of unknown injury, permanent damage, and disfigurement. 8 Lord Foul, also called "Despite," "Despair," "The Gray Slayer," and "The Despiser," is the Land's basic equivalent to both the Christian concept of Satan, and Tolkien's figure of Sauron. 26 powerless, ostracized, and impotent,9 "the reaction of those in the Land stands in stark contrast to Covenant's alienation in his world. He is not shunned because no one can see his illness; even the concept confuses them" (Senior 78). Instead, he finds himself interpellated into a role completely opposite to the one he occupies in the real world; he is seen as the rebirth of a national hero, Berek Half-Hand, who saved the Land in the past, and is expected to return and do so again. As a result, Covenant is valued not only as a man, but almost as a god, worthy of awe, a stark contrast to the fear and disgust to which he has become accustomed. This prompts a physical and emotional reawakening, a stirring of his lost humanity and need to connect that has been long denied. Lena, the young girl who welcomes him to the Land, becomes the primary target of this reawakening: "he pulled his gaze back into focus on the girl's face. For the first time, he noticed that she was pretty. Even her awe, the way she hung on his words, was pretty.
And she had no fear of lepers" (LFB 44). The hurtloam10 Lena provides revives
Covenant's dead nerves, much to his astonishment: "an odd tingling started in his palms, as if the hurtloam were venturing past his cuts into his nerves, trying to reawaken them.
A similar tingling danced across the arches of his feet. He stared at the glittering mud with a kind of awe in his eyes" (54). Covenant's cuts and scrapes are healed when the hurtloam is brushed away, and shortly after, he discovers the greater miracle: his leprosy has vanished, taking with it his numbness and impotence. This restoration is double- edged, however, as the curing of Covenant's afflictions results in an onrushing of human desires that have been ignored for years; Covenant is overwhelmed physically and
9 Because of nerve damage, leprosy often results in impotency, as is the case with Covenant. 10 Hurtloam is a rare mud in the Land with the ability to heal both external and internal wounds, including both physical, and on occasion, mental damages. 27 emotionally, and lashes out at Lena, whom he sees as the source of his rebirth and the
Land's seductive power. He assaults her, emotionally and physically, beating, raping,
and impregnating her (90-92).11
Covenant's attack on Lena sparks a moral and ethical dilemma that encompasses
The Chronicles, invoking both Kimmel's concept of a "rape culture," and May's notion
of the "Testosterone Excuse." In Gender of Desire (2005), Kimmel explores the mindset
of rape, suggesting that rapists act "not from a feeling of power, but from a feeling of powerlessness. In [the rapist's] mind, rape is not the initiation of aggression against a woman, but a form of revenge, a retaliation" for the 'aggressive' way in which women's beauty "invades men's thoughts, elicits feelings of desire and longing against their will,
mak[ing] men feel helpless, powerless and vulnerable" (190). The result is "a potent
mix—powerlessness and entitlement, impotence and a right to feel in control" (190).
This seems to describe precisely the forces acting on Covenant; he not only regains his
virility unexpectedly, he is also subject to "the unconscious offer in [Lena's] eyes [which] burned more disturbingly than ever" (LFB 71). To Covenant, Lena is goading him with her sexuality and her awe for him, challenging him, as Kimmel would say, to "reclaim the power that he believes is rightfully his" (Kimmel Gender 196). Covenant envies
Lena and the happy, prosperous life she plans with her intended husband Triock, and he
is galled by her insistence about the Land's reality and the intolerable dilemma this poses.
He tears away her clothes "with grim triumph in his eyes, as though he had just exposed
some foul plot," and in raping her, experiences a "climax [that] flooded him as if he had
11 This assault on Lena provides an interesting antithesis to Covenant's healing; Covenant destroys in Lena the very things which he has been given by the Land: physical health and a sense of emotional belonging. fallen into a Mithil12 of molten fury" (91) rather than desire. The rape of Lena is not an act of desire, but an assertion of power by an otherwise powerless man.
Perhaps just as disturbing as Covenant's violation of Lena is the way in which both she, and others in the Land, react to it. Despite the atrocity that she has just suffered, Lena does not take refuge with her supportive and nurturing family, but instead deliberately hides herself until Covenant and her mother Atiaran, who is to be his guide, have already left for the Lord's Keep to warn of Lord Foul's return. Though Atiaran believes Lena to have spent the night with a friend, Covenant knows differently, and realizes that Lena's choice results from the way she sees him as "a Berek-figure, a bearer of messages to the Lords. She did not want his purpose to be waylaid by the retribution of the Stonedown.13 This was her contribution to the defense of the Land from Lord Foul the Gray Slayer" (95). This willingness to endure personal hardship rather than compromise Covenant's mission extends beyond Lena herself; though Triock, Lena's betrothed, follows Covenant and Atiaran, intent on vengeance, Atiaran forbids it, recognizing and honouring her daughter's sacrifice for the Land as a "brave deed, worthy of praise and pride" (111), and demanding that Triock forgo his vengeance, stating "this matter is beyond me. Triock, remember your Oath" (112).
While it is tempting to see Atiaran and Lena's actions or inactions in May and
Kimmel's terms, as the product of a culture that allows, and even fosters, rape and other crimes of aggression, the Oath of Peace and the Oath of Land Service provide an alternate explanation. Thousands of years before Covenant arrives in the Land, High
12 The Mithil is the massive river just outside of Lena's home, near where the rape takes place. 13 Stonedowners are one of the two major human societies in the Land; they, like Tolkien's dwarves, devote themselves to stone and earth, while the Woodhelvinnin, like Tolkien's elves, live in and devote themselves to trees. Lord Kevin, later called "Landwaster," desecrated the Land, destroying established knowledge and scourging life from a large part of it in a last, desperate attempt to stop
Lord Foul; however, he not only failed to destroy Foul, but unwittingly carried out his will, though by sending away the Bloodguard and giants, preserving some of his most important lore behind carefully constructed seals, and encouraging the people of the Land to flee into the mountains, Kevin managed to avoid a complete obliteration of culture.
The people who returned after the desecration, and saw the suffering Kevin's despair caused, attempted to learn from his mistakes, undertaking an Oath of Land Service, putting the greater good of the Land above their own, and promising '"we will not redesecrate the Land, though the effort of self-mastery wither us on the vine of our lives.
Nor will we rest until the shadow of our former folly is lifted from the Land's heart, and the darkness is whelmed in growth and life" (233). In order to insure that this oath is carried out, the Land's inhabitants also undertake the Oath of Peace, which states:
Do not hurt where holding is enough;
do not wound where hurting is enough;
do not maim where wounding is enough;
and kill not where maiming is enough;
the greatest warrior is one who does not need to kill. (280).
Taken together, these oaths not only require the Land's inhabitants, including Atiaran and
Lena herself, to allow Covenant to avoid external punishment for his crimes, but also to actively support his quest; the Oath of Land Service's emphasis on self-mastery in service to the Land requires that punishment be withheld until such time as he no longer plays a pivotal role in the salvation of the Land. The Oath of Peace frames how those
30 less directly involved in Covenant's crimes react to what he has done, and helps those who become most familiar with Covenant understand that his own self-recrimination far exceeds any external punishment they may impose, and that such additional punishment would be both unnecessary and cruel.
Covenant's deep and genuine remorse, and the self-disgust with which he views himself as an "unconscionable bastard" suggests that Donaldson is not only critical of a
"rape culture," but also moving toward a view of masculinity as powerful, but neutral, with the potential to be wielded in either moral or amoral ways. Characters such as the
Lord Mhoram or the giant Saltheart Foamfollower are able to see Covenant in terms of what Seyla Benhabib calls the "concrete other," which "requires us to view each and every rational being as an individual with a concrete history, identity and affective- emotional constitution," and deal with them from within a moral framework built upon
"love, care and sympathy and solidarity" (159). As a result, Mhoram and Foamfollower are able to see past Covenant's crime, as well as his fafade of aloofness, and realize that
"not all crimes are committed by evil people...sometimes a good man does ill because of the pain in his soul" (IW196). Though they still see his crime as abominable, they recognize his self-recrimination, and that "the blade of [his] Unbelief cuts both ways"
(196); Mhoram realizes that the self-loathing and abjection that Covenant inflicts upon himself as a result of his crime, and his unwillingness to accept the Land as real or make meaningful emotional contact with its people is significant punishment in and of itself.
Instead, these characters provide what Covenant desperately needs if he is to learn to accept himself and use his power to save the Land and himself, rather than give in to despair and fail in his quest: human contact, care, and guidance. The need for care and guidance arises directly from the source of Covenant's power. Though Covenant possesses the ring, a conduit for the wild magic of white gold, it is also an intrinsic part of his character; Covenant is the white gold, in the sense that the untamed power, capable of destroying or saving the Land, directly represents Covenant's masculinity.
High Lord Mhoram had told him, You [sic] are the white gold. It was not a thing
to be commanded, employed well or ill as skill or awkwardness allowed. Now
that it was awake, it was a part of him, an expression of himself. He did not need
to focus it, aim it; bone and blood, it arose from his passion. (PtP 461)
This power is equally capable of embodying Covenant's dominance and destruction, which "stabbed" into Lena's loins "with a wild, white fire that broke her silence, made her scream" (LFB 91) as it is the salvation of the Land, springing forth from Covenant's core.
The wild magic of Covenant's masculinity is merely potential, it is not naturally aggressive or immoral, though it may be used in those ways, nor is it intrinsically beneficial or moral; it is inert, neither a weapon, nor a shield until the bearer chooses its shape and action; it can be accepted or denied as the bearer sees fit; it can only provide the power, it does not determine the means of its use. This equal potential for both light and darkness in masculinity, and the demand for guidance and control that it implies, fascinates writers of fantasy.14 For Covenant, this not only means accepting his potential
14 Donaldson discusses this point in relation to Frodo. He suggests that "the importance of Sauron, personified evil, resides in the fact that he is an expression of Frodo. Seduced by power, Frodo spends the novel in the process of becoming Sauron—and that is only possible because part of him was Sauron to begin with" ("Epic Fantasy" 6). The same struggle can easily be identified in the majority of modern epic fantasy: Darian, from Kay's Fionavar Tapestry struggles to decide whether he will embrace his potential 32 power, but also accepting the help of others to shape and use this power morally. Though
his leprosy cuts him off from this help in the primary world, in the Land, he is able to
move beyond the categorical ostracization, both external and self-imposed, that he has
suffered and begin to connect with those around him, learning from their example, and
assembling a meaningful masculine identity.
The masculine role models that Covenant acquires in the Land each contribute a
necessary element to his emerging masculinity, though individually each character or
group signifies only a part of a complete, functional masculine identity. The Bloodguard,
particularly Bannor, who personally undertakes the duty of Covenant's protection,
represent the masculine potential for violence on behalf of others, the vigilant, custodial
protection that grows from devotion to another. "When we came to the Land," Bannor
tells Covenant, "we saw wonders—Giants, Ranyhyn, Revelstone—Lords of such power
that they declined to wage war with us lest we be destroyed. In answer to our challenge,
they gave to [us] gifts so precious... we swore the Vow [of service to the Lords]. We
could not equal that generosity in any other way" (LFB 252-3). Through pure service,
and a bonded oath, 500 members of the "Haruchai," a tribe of mountain dwellers, became
the Bloodguard: "together we called upon the Earthpower to witness our commitment.
Now we do not return home until we have been slain" (252). Their service to the Lords
can only be ended if they are killed, or fall under the veil of "Corruption," which the
Bloodguard conflate into one danger: "life or death—the Vow or Corruption" (253). This
strength, the ability to ignore even time, is also the distinct problem with the
for evil, inherited from his father, or actively oppose him; Harry Potter grapples with the similarities that exist between himself and the evil Lord Voldemort; and Richard, from Goodkind's Sword of Truth series must constantly struggle against elements of despair that threaten to overwhelm him and turn him against his cause for truth and freedom. Bloodguard's masculine role; as Covenant puts it, they "live forever because [their] pure, sinless service is utterly and indomitably unballasted by any weight or dross of mere human weakness" (253), but their entire role balances precariously on a vision of perfection which requires the denial of their very humanity. While the Bloodguard ultimately show Covenant the extent to which service of others can help shape and define masculine identity, as well as a protective and moral way in which the masculine potential for violence15 can function, this model is largely unrealistic; the austere disconnection with those around them, and the precarious perch of pure service upon which the Bloodguard balance their identity, ultimately defeat them. When the purity of their bond to the Lords is thrown into question,16 the Bloodguard find themselves lost;
••17 their austerity has removed them from simple human contact and emotional connection, and their sole remaining purpose has been stripped from them. Their sense of identity evaporates, leaving only the shell and appearance of men, broken by self-recrimination.
The Lords build on the Bloodguard's role of service, expanding it beyond simple, selfless abandonment of private life and identity in order to serve another, into a model which guides others, rather than serving them. Through the Oath of Land Service, the
15 In "masculine potential for violence," I am working with the Oxford English Dictionary definition of violence, which reads: "the exercise of physical force so as to inflict injury on, or cause damage to, persons or property." Though the action may be destructive, this in no ways suggests a moral structure, which I consider separate from the action itself. A mother bear, for example, can be extremely violent in defending her cubs, but cannot be deemed immoral for doing so; the Bloodguard function much the same. 16 This results both from the fall of High Lord Elena in The Illearth War, and from the corruption of three Bloodguard by Lord Foul using the Illearth Stone, which the Bloodguard believe befouls the service of them all by contaminating their collective purity. 17 Emotional disconnection and austerity are two traits that Covenant shares at the deepest level with the Bloodguard. Elena realizes this, consciously or not, when she sculpts a bust of Covenant, and Covenant himself recognizes the resemblance by assuming the bust is not of him, but of Bannor. (IW 435). Others are able to see this in the statue as well, though they attribute it to the fact that "both ur-Lord Covenant the Unbeliever and Bannor of the Bloodguard require absolute answers to their own lives" (PtP 35); it is not merely the need for absolute answers that give Bannor and Covenant the same, grim visage, but the denial of everything else that accompanies this answer. Lords find a moral and ethical outlet for their power, much as the Bloodguard find an outlet for their martial skills in service to the Lords. However, while the Bloodguard's power derives from purity and austerity, the Lords connect with others as teachers and political leaders, seeking to expand their knowledge in order to better serve the Land and
18 its people. While on the surface, this identity seems to unite masculine power and duty, the difficulty of this role lies in the distinct insecurity the Lords, particularly Lord
Mhoram, feel. They live in the shadow of High Lord Kevin Land waster, lacking his knowledge and thus feeling themselves insufficient to the task of protecting the Land, yet fearing to apply what knowledge they do possess, lest they repeat Kevin's mistakes.
Thus, though they come to represent a power greater than the Bloodguard, they are crippled by an unwillingness to use it that the Bloodguard could never understand, just as the Lords could never fathom relinquishing emotional connection in order to attain purity of service, as they see power and emotion as fundamentally linked.
In the giant, Saltheart Foamfollower, Donaldson depicts a link between passion and masculine power, though he details the dangers of this mating of emotion and masculinity to both the wielder and those around him, if it is not controlled by a social conscience. This is certainly not to say that all of Foamfollower's passions are potentially destructive; he embodies very strong conceptions of love and joy, particularly in terms of his songs, stories, and infectious laughter. Not until Foamfollower first faces
18 Masculine power and duty is somewhat of a misnomer, as there are in fact female Lords (including Covenant's own daughter Elena in The Illearth War), with power equal to any male Lord, including Mhoram. While this presents a particularly equality-based society worthy of academic consideration, it is unfortunately beyond the scope of this particular work, as Covenant's greatest influences in the land are male, and it is from them that he learns to develop his own masculine role. Lord Foul's army of ur-viles,19 do the much more deeply disturbing and disturbed aspects of his masculine identity and power manifest themselves; enraged by the atrocities committed upon the innocent men, women, and children of Soaring Woodhelvin,
Foamfollower is infused with a rage that goes far beyond simple custodial care for others, and steps into the realm of passionate hatred and wanton destruction. Having not only turned the ur-viles and Cavewights back, but pursued them into the forest in the hope of slaughtering the survivors, Foamfollower returns "like a massacre metaphored in flesh— an icon of slaughter. He [is] everywhere smeared in blood," with "shreds of Cavewight flesh still [clinging] to his fingers" (LFB 333-4). Bathed in blood, Foamfollower comes to represent not merely a masculine protector for the Land, but an agent of vengeance and hate. He is in many ways a fallen man, unable to resist giving in to his desires, and falling into a berserker rage when opposing his enemies. This becomes a great source of pain for the giant, particularly given the gentle nature of his fellow Seareach giants; they so abhor violence that they simply accept their destruction when one of their own children is possessed by a vengeful possessing spirit caked a "raver," leaving
Foamfollower as the sole remaining giant. Senior suggests that their defeatism is
"because they perceive in themselves the capacity for execration that Foul incarnates, the heart of darkness in all men" (79), but he is only partially correct; this capacity for violence is not necessarily an abomination, or heart of darkness, but merely a potential for it. The giants believe themselves unable to retain moral control over their strength and capacity for destruction should they turn to violent means to protect themselves.
19 The armies of the Despiser are typically made up of two major contingents: Cavewights and ur-viles. While the Cavewights are largely unintelligent ground troops, valuable mostly for their strength and numbers, the ur-viles are significantly more intelligent, and possess magical lore that serves as the antithesis of the Lords' power. This same battle is fought internally in Foamfollower, who must temper his potential for violence with precise control and morality, and he fights a continual battle with himself for control over his emotions and the terrible actions they often prompt.
Foamfollower's passion, despite its potential for destruction, is perhaps the most important model that Covenant must adopt in order to stand against Lord Foul, though the examples of the Bloodguard and the Lords teach him how to avoid Foamfollower's mistake of letting his passions overcome his reason and commitment to others. When
Covenant first enters the Land, he is ignorant, impotent, and emotionally sterile.
Foamfollower, the Lords, and the Bloodguard each provide him with a flawed, but necessary model for his own masculinity. From the Bloodguard, Covenant learns both the necessity of duty, and the danger of unwavering single-mindedness; from the Lords, he learns the value of emotional connection with others, and the importance of a moral and social conscience, as well as the dangers of insecurity and hesitation; from
Foamfollower, he learns the importance of passion, and the potential danger of it.
Ultimately, Covenant must combine all of these beneficial traits while avoiding their pitfalls in order to successfully oppose Lord Foul; he must learn to embrace service to the
Land by relinquishing his absolute rejection of its existence and embracing service to
* 20 others so that he is not merely an observer, but an active, equal participant; he must learn to connect and even depend on those around him, trusting their service and loyalty so that his emotional disability can be healed and he can once again learn empathy and 20 This also requires Covenant to deliberately forgive himself for his past sins, including that which he visited upon Lena. While this in no way relieves him of responsibility for his actions, it is a necessary step for Covenant to make if he is to once again function as an active, responsible member of society. He realizes this shortly before his final confrontation with Foul: "I've got to give up these impossible ideas of trying to make restitution for what I've done. I've got to give up guilt and duty, or whatever it is I'm calling responsibility these days. I've got to give up trying to make myself innocent again" (PtP 306). In order to move forward, he must stop struggling with his past and focus on his future. 37 love; and he must embrace emotion and passion, carefully tempering them with responsibility and conscience so that he has the tools to face Foul directly, and the wisdom to succeed where others have failed.
Covenant's preparation to confront Lord Foul shows the synthesis of masculine identities that has taken place. After experiencing Foamfollower's willing sacrifice, in which he carries Covenant through a river of magma so that he may reach Foul's lair and confront him, Covenant realizes that he must complete his task just
as Bannor and Foamfollower would have done it—dispassionately and
passionately, fighting and refusing to fight, both at once—because he had learned
one more reason why he would have to seek out the Despiser. Surrounded in his
mind by all his victims, he found that there was only one good answer still open
to him.
That answer was a victory over Despite.
Only by defeating Lord Foul could he give meaning to all the lives which
had been spent in his name, and at the same time preserve himself, the
irremediable fact of who he was.
Thomas Covenant: Unbeliever. Leper. (PtP 430)
The paradoxes Covenant identifies here help him see how the different male roles around him can be re-formed and integrated in a stronger whole. The return of Saltheart
Foamfollower, who arises from the fiery river21 with "the former extremity of his
21 This is not quite as fantastical, or deus ex machina as it may seem; Donaldson establishes a giantish invulnerability to fire quite early on in Lord Foul's Bane. Though giants still feel the painful effects of fire, they are not harmed by it, and instead use the pain as a sort of mental and emotional purification ceremony called a caamora. While Foamfollower is the first to attempt immersion in magma, it would seem the giantish resistance to fire holds true for molten rock as well. gaze.. .replaced by something haler, something serene" reinforces this; the giant's eyes
22 glow "with laughter out of their cavernous sockets.. .Somehow in Hotash Slay,
Foamfollower had carried his most terrible passions through to their apocalypse" (436).
Just as Foamfollower has achieved a form of personal redemption, so too can Covenant, though Covenant pays for his redemption not through the physical agony which
Foamfollower undergoes, but in mental and emotional suffering at the hands of Foul.
The Despiser tempts Covenant with possible release from his suffering, with the promise of health, "seductively sweet—a surcease from pain" (456), and the threat of illness, "unmarrowed, flawed by rot, stressed by tendons whose nerves had died" (457), but is unable to break his spirit.23 When Foul shows him images of the Land and the people that Covenant has come to care for, rife with leprosy, Covenant responds with neither despair nor uncaring; "fury exalted Covenant—fury as hot as magma.. .he began to struggle for freedom like a newborn man fightinghi s way out of an old skin" (459).
Gone is the bitter, selfish, outcast who arrived in the Land wishing for an end to his pain, and angrily rejecting emotional connection with those around him, while abjecting himself; gone is the Covenant whose self-imposed disempowerment caused him to violate and ultimately destroy an innocent; in his place stands a man in control of himself, a man who can take responsibility for his actions, willing to use his power to protect those around him. The white gold, Covenant's masculine identity, burns within him, and he uses it to strip away Lord Foul's facade, leaving only "molded limbs, as pure as alabaster...an old, grand, leonine head, magisterially crowned and bearded with flowing white hair—an enrobed dignified trunk, broad and solid with strength" (464). 22 Hotash Slay is the proper name for the underground river of magma flowing beneath Foul's domain. 23 This is obviously a reference to the temptations of Christ. The Unbeliever's newly constructed social and moral masculine identity is most powerfully tested in the final, unmasked confrontation between Covenant and Foul;
'"despite such as mine is the only true fruit of experience and insight,'" Foul tells him.
"You will learn contempt for your fellow beings...You will learn that it is easier
to control them than to forbear—easier and better. You will not do otherwise. You
will become a shadow of what I am—you will be a despiser without the courage
to despise. Continue, groveler. Destroy my work if you must—slay me if you
can—but make an end! I am weary of your shallow misperception." (464).
With the ghosts of dead Lords including Kevin Landwaster and Covenant's own daughter, Elena,24 demanding that he carry out Foul's destruction, Covenant must ultimately face not only Foul's corrupting influence, but a chorus of the most powerful men and women ever to walk the Land, demanding Covenant give in to his hatred and destroy his enemy. This final test requires Covenant to prove that he has not only accepted his own emotions and potential for passionate action, but also that he can apply logic and morality to control them. Rather than give in to the demands of the Lords,
Covenant feels their "vehemence [wash] away his fury, his power for battle.. .In a voice thick with grief, he answer[s] the Lords, 'I can't kill him. He always survives when you try to kill him...Despite is like that'" (465). Instead, Covenant relies on the passions he knows to be moral and uplifting, rather than hateful and selfish: "'Foamfollower!'
Involuntary tears blurred his sight. 'I want you to laugh. Take joy in it. Bring some joy
24 Because of a difference in the speed time elapses in the Land versus its speed in reality, Covenant meets his own daughter, the result of his rape, who has grown up and become High Lord of the Land. She will be discussed in significantly more detail in Chapter Two. 40 into this bloody hole. Laugh!'" (466). Covenant's choice, and Foamfollower's laughter, ultimately proves not only to defeat Foul, but to save the souls of the Lords as well:
As Foamfollower fought to laugh, his muscles loosened. The constriction of his
throat and chest relaxed, allowing a pure wind of humor to blow the ashes of rage
and pain from his lungs.. .The Lords responded.. .They began to unclench their
hate.. .Lord Foul cringed at the sound. He strove to sustain his defiance, but could
not. With a cry of mingled pain and fury, he covered his face and began to
change. The years melted off his frame. His hair darkened, beard grew stiffer;
with astonishing speed, he was becoming younger. And at the same time he lost
solidity, stature.. .Then he disappeared altogether. As they laughed, the Lords
also faded. With the Despiser vanquished, they went back to their natural
graves—ghosts who had at last gained something other than torment. (467)
Donaldson's focus on the passion in Covenant derives directly from his view of how modern epic fantasy functions. In "Epic Fantasy in the Modern World," he suggests that the "modern American mainstream novel seems dedicated to expressing Jean-Paul
Sartre's definition of what it means to be human: Man is a futile passion" 25 (7), where what makes passions futile is the "void" of "the nightmare world, alienation and nausea, the quest for identity, and the comic doomsday vision" (8). By contrast, he argues, " the approach of modern fantasy is to externalize, to personify, to embody the void in order to confront it directly...[It] posit[s] fictional situations which allow [it] to define answers, allow [it] to say that, 'Man is an effective passion'" (8). This, of course, requires some
251 am not suggesting here that the type of passion in Donaldson's novels is necessarily equivalent to passion as Sartre defines it, but that the two arise from the same type of emotional needs. 41 consideration of how Sartre himself means "man is a futile26 passion;" Sartre's concern, particularly in Being and Nothingness (1956), is with the conflict between what he calls the "in-itself," which all things possess, and the "for-itself," which is unique to humans as cognitive beings. Sartre explains the in-itself as the unconscious state of being which simply is, as a tree or a chair simply is, without need for consciousness. This requires nothing of the object but to exist and follow its own role in nature. The "for-itself' is the conscious portion of the mind, and thus exists only in cognitive beings, because only such beings can actively change the roles that they play. The for-itself strives to discover and inhabit the one role which best fits its nature, the in-itself, but is foiled by the fact that cognitive beings choose their own roles; though one may take on the role of a waiter,
Sartre suggests, one does not become a waiter in an existential sense. Thus, because human beings have no active control over what they are (the in-itself), they are merely taking on roles, not constructing existence. The only way in which it is possible to actually define existence is through ultimate, god-like power, which humans cannot possess. Therefore, humans struggle vainly to do the impossible, because they have no power beyond their own choices; man is thus a futile passion. As Donaldson rightly suggests, fantasy has the ability to circumvent this existential problem in two distinct ways: by deliberately allowing its characters to overstep the bounds of reality and actively change their circumstances and freedoms, or, if the fantasy work follows the
26 This particular word has also been translated into English as "useless," by some translators of Being and Nothingness. . 42 Christological traditions of the genre,27 to nullify the issue through the institution of
• * 28 faith or God, constructing what Derrida calls a transcendental signifier.
In practice, most epic fantasy both allows its characters to step beyond human power and assume full control over all aspects of life, and institutes a transcendental signifier. For Donaldson, who believes that people "have postulated gods of various kinds to account for that dimension of our experience which seems to transcend the tables and chairs of ordinary reality," and that "good fantasy deals with [this] almost explicitly in a thematic way" (Rich 24), this is particularly easy to do. By instituting a strong thematic core of faith into his novels, Donaldson effectively removes the need for resolution between the in-itself and the for-itself; for if a God or gods control human essence, the basis of the in-itself, then all that is required of the for-itself is faith that divine providence will choose correctly, and the willingness to fully accept that decision.
For Covenant,29 this acceptance is identity-based; Covenant must accept himself as a leper, and yet still a man, and a human being with emotional requirements and moral expectations. When Covenant returns to the real world, this acceptance is a resolution of the in-itself and the for-itself, in that Covenant accepts his role, and himself, as set out by a higher power. For the few writers of atheist modern epic fantasy, such as Goodkind,
27 Whether intentionally or not, the majority of modern fantasy authors tend to include Christology and issues of faith in their novels due to an adherence to the generic conventions set out by such writers as Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, who wrote very specifically with issues of faith in mind. 28 In simplest terms, Derrida's transcendental signifier is the one object/being which cannot be deconstructed or altered by man, and therefore functions as a touchstone for the understanding of the world, the ultimate reference which makes meaning possible. 29 Covenant's name itself reflects this acceptance. Scott Hahn states "covenant was an ancient family's way of extending the duties and privileges of kinship to another individual" and notes that this signified not merely a treaty, but a familial relationship of "mutual support and protection" (First Comes Love 20-21). Covenant must submit to the will of "the Creator" and accept that he was brought to the Land as a saviour. The name "Thomas" is equally symbolic, relating to the biblical apostle of the same name who is unable to believe in Christ's resurrection until Christ appears and shows him the wounds of his torture and crucifixion. this question is somewhat more difficult, and often requires a strong transcendental signifier to stand in for God or faith, which allows for an engagement with existential thought without falling prey to self-defeating paradoxes.30
According to Goodkind's Sword of Truth series, there can be only one transcendental signifier: freedom. Goodkind struggles simultaneously against the ideas of pre-destination and the hopeless despair Donaldson sees in Being and Nothingness, instead following a path not unlike Sartre's later work, "Existentialism is a Humanism,"
(1956)31 ultimately positing that only a goal of freedom for self and others is sufficient in the creation of identity. In order to achieve this goal, Goodkind constructs his protagonist, a simple woodsman turned wizard and emperor named Richard Cypher (later
Richard Rahl), with a masculine identity based solely around the ideas of personal freedom and the protection of life, liberating him emotionally, and forcing him to embrace each and every power he finds within himself. This necessitates a masculinity primarily focused on accumulated action, meaning that Richard's masculine identity is not simply developed internally, though subject to external forces, but is in fact developed and revealed externally through an accumulated understanding of Richard's actions on the part of the reader and Richard's fellow characters. This is a distinctly different process from that which Donaldson details; while Covenant's masculinity lies
30 While Goodkind avoids using God, per se, Richard must ultimately undergo an apotheosis in order to defeat his foes and their ideology; in the final novel of the series, Richard uses the boxes of Orden to split the universe in two, allowing him to reserve one reality for those that wish to live in peace and freedom, while condemning the other reality to live with the results of its corrupt choices in a world devoid of magic and promise. 31 This, of course, requires some explanation. Though Sartre does not precisely contradict Being and Nothingness in "Existentialism as a Humanism," it does seem as though he is suggesting a secondary possible goal or "passion" for humankind in the quest for freedom; in a way, Sartre is suggesting that it is not necessarily important that humans can never fully resolve the in-itself and the for-itself, but rather that it is the journey and constant struggle for that freedom that is all-important. within him, existing as a raging potential, waiting to be set free, and dependent on its master to determine its mode of expression, Richard only achieves a masculine identity through action, echoing Sartre's suggestion that "man will only attain existence when he is what he purposes to be. Not, however, what he may wish to be. For what we usually understand by wishing or willing is a conscious decision taken—much more often than not—after we have made ourselves what we are" ("Existentialism" 291). This is precisely why those surrounding Richard are often baffled by his actions until he explains them;
Richard is merely acting in ways which unconsciously express his beliefs, and constantly constructing his identity, both masculine and moral, rather than imitating an existing model. This is distinctly different from Judith Butler's notion of Performative Gender; while Butler claims that "gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous," and that "the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief'
("Performative" 520), Goodkind is supposing a gender identity based upon internally continuous actions, flowing directly from a system of values. The result is a gender identity that is significantly more "genuine" than Butler's performativism would suggest; rather than self-deception, gender is an extension of the self, and inseparable from morals, values, and personal beliefs. While it is altered and reconsidered as a result of outside influence and factors, Goodkind implies through Richard that the core will remain the same, provided that the system of values remains intact.
The creation of a layered masculine identity necessitates some level of recursive writing; in order for Richard's actions to be interpreted correctly, and integrated into a larger sense of his identity, they must be repeated and emphasized. In order to do this,
Goodkind constructed his Sword of Truth series in a gradually expanding exploration of his characters and the theme of freedom, beginning with intensely personal events in
Richard's life that illuminate certain characteristics and ideas, and slowly widening his scope to see how these issues function in larger and larger spheres of action. The result is a closed environment which grows as Richard does, rapidly expanding as the series progresses, so that his sphere of action eventually encompasses the entire fictional world, and providing almost unlimited physical and philosophical space for Richard to act, and thereby construct and define his moral masculinity. Thus, Richard grows up in the closed realm of Westland, before journeying to the larger realms of the Midlands and D'Hara, which together with Westland make up the "New World," in Wizard's First Rule; in
Stone of Tears Richard travels to the other side of ancient wizarding barriers and into the
fringes of the "Old World;"32 in Blood of the Fold, his expanding realms begin to grow
less physical, and more philosophical, as Richard explores the realm of power as ruler of the newly formed D'Haran Empire, which requires the submission and allegiance of the entire New World in order to present a united front against the Imperial Order; Temple of the Winds continues this philosophical exploration, taking Richard into the realm of the dead, and more importantly, into the greater realm of magic, and the ethical questions that accompany its use; Soul of the Fire explores a microcosmic, post-colonial struggle which in many ways mirrors and complements the struggle between the D'Haran Empire
32 The world of the Sword of Truth series is split into two major parts: the Old World, and the New World. The New World, comprised of Westland, the Midlands, and D'Hara was separated from the Old in much the same way as each district of the New World was separated by the Boundaries, and for much the same reason. Richard is forced to destroy the Towers of Perdition, which have formed the barrier between the worlds for thousands of years, when he returns to the Midlands at the conclusion of SoT. 46 and the Imperial Order, exploring corruption, misinformation, and self-delusion, while testing the lessons Richard has learned about magic and leadership in Blood of the Fold and Temple of the Winds', and Faith of the Fallen takes Richard into the heart of the Old
World, and the homeland of the Imperial Order, where he must help others from within the chaotic world of the Order's madness. The decisions which Richard makes in response to this expanding physical, political, and philosophical terrain ultimately construct his moral masculine identity. For the first and second novels, the primary physical and philosophical problem that Richard faces is the question of personal freedom. This struggle takes two forms. First, Richard must escape seemingly predestined roles to define himself as a man, overcoming both socially enforced blocks on his actions, and stepping out from behind the shadow of his birth father, the evil wizard Darken Rahl. Second, he must escape both from unwilling bondage, at the hands of Rahl's torturers, and from his willing bondage to the Sisters of the Light, who take him into the Old World in order to teach him to control his emerging magic. In the process,
Richard comes to terms with the emotional aspects of his personality, differentiating between moral and immoral uses of both love and anger, which Goodkind sees as in themselves morally neutral.33 Richard must also accept that while a present situation may resemble a past one,34 each situation must be dealt with in terms of what it is, and not what he may fear it is, or wish it would be. This establishes Richard in a realm firmly
33 The issue of accepting anger as an equally important and morally-neutral emotion is integral to the idea of masculine morality, but because of the necessary connection between fatherhood and the passage of masculine identity and power to Richard's emotional development, I will leave a more complete discussion of the subject until Chapter 2. 34 In particular, Richard initially sees his bondage to the Sisters of the Light as identical to his forced bondage to the Mord Sith, Darken Rahl's elite torturers. Because both groups of women use magical collars to control, and give pain, to their wearers, Richard makes the moral connection in his own mind between the two groups of women, and the two situations, despite the very different goals and values that motivate each group. 47 controlled by rationality rather than passion; though passion may provide the motive for action, it must never dictate the means.
The Wizard's Third Rule, "passion rules reason" {BotF 484), or more specifically, that passion can rule reason, but it must not be allowed to, is explored in Blood of the
Fold, which foregrounds the struggle for morality and "right action" that Richard encounters as both ruler of the D'Haran Empire, which he unwittingly inherits after slaying his father35 and a conqueror of the Midlands, a role he reluctantly takes on in order to successfully oppose the Imperial Order. This concern for right action, coupled with his role as ruler, forces Richard to examine issues of rationality through the lens of military action; considerations of the role of the soldier, the meaning of duty, and the ethics of war recur throughout the series. In conquering the Midlands, Richard contradicts, at least superficially, his commitment to personal freedom; in order to oppose the Imperial Order, Richard must impose his rule on others. While his rule seems both moral and humane, allowing the lands that freely agree to join him to carry on largely undisturbed, except for the relinquishment of their sovereignty, and a required donation,
"if not with service under arms, then at minimum with a tax to support [the] troops," which he claims is necessary not only for the success of the campaign, but so that "all, no matter their means, [will] have an investment in their freedom, and will pay their part"
(BotF 145), it exposes him to significant criticism, as his benevolent intent is much less apparent than his assertive actions. He is compared both to his father, who lusted for greater power and sought to conquer the lands around him, and to the Imperial Order, for
35 Richard is completely unaware that Darken Rahl is his father, and kills him only to stop him from harming the people he cares about, not in search of power. 48 forcing others to either join or suffer the consequences of disrupted trade and a removal of the Midlands' former military protection. Richard rebuts these claims, stating
"I do not lust to rule. I take up the sword only because I have the ability to help
oppose oppression.. .1 ask that you not judge me by who my father was, but by
what I do. I do not slaughter innocent, defenceless people. The Imperial Order
does. Until I violate the trust of honest people, I have the right to be granted
honest judgement.
"I cannot stand by and watch evil men triumph; I will fight with
everything I have, including magic. If you side with these murderers, you will
find no mercy under my sword." (140-1)
Despite his passion for personal freedom, Richard realizes that it must sometimes be put aside for the freedom and benefit of all, particularly on the part of soldiers, who
• • 36 may give up their freedom, and often their lives, in order to protect the body politic.
Goodkind attempts to rectify this paradox by deliberately differentiating between the soldier and brute; while brutes, such as those that follow the Imperial Order, primarily seek their own gains through rape and pillage, the soldier freely chooses to stand as a guardian and professional warrior for his sovereign and fellow countrymen in order to protect the greater good. This is a difficult distinction, and one that cannot rely entirely upon profession and skill; though Darken Rahl's D'Haran army was a group of highly professional soldiers, they were used in such a way that they became little more than
36 This is, of course, a simplification of a complex relationship, as soldiers (excepting in times of conscription) freely choose their vocation, and for their own reasons. 49 brutes, though highly effective ones.37 What they must become under Richard's rule is
guardians, rather than simply soldiers, something even the commander of Richard's
forces, General Reibisch, is sceptical of: '"the Master Rahl always thinks he knows best,
and always wants to rule the world. You are your father's son. War is war. Reasons make
no difference to us; we fight because we are told to, same as those on the other side.
Reasons mean little to a man swinging his sword, trying to keep his head'" (158).
Richard vehemently disagrees, primarily because of his own experience as bearer of the
10 Sword of Truth, and the first war wizard in thousands of years:
"I know it sounds a paradox, but don't you see? If we behave with honor, then all
those lands with integrity, who want peace and freedom, will join us. When they
see we fight to stop the fighting, and not simply to conquer and dominate, or for
plunder, they will be on our side, and the forces of peace will be invincible.
"For now, the aggressor makes the rules, and our only choice is to fight or
submit." (159-60)
Richard champions a masculinity that posits violence as a necessary component of life,
one that must be directed and controlled, and is expressed in terms of guardianship rather than conquest. Because of this, a leader must seek peace, but be ready to protect that
peace, assertively, and often violently, as his failure will not only condemn him, but
everyone he guards. He is subject to what Sartre calls "anguish,"39 a state that arises
"when a man commits himself to anything, fully realizing that he is not only choosing 37 The high ranking officers of the Imperial Order form the antithesis of the D'Haran soldiers, as they truly believe that the atrocities they commit are for the greater good, though their actions are those of brutes. 38 The Sword of Truth is magical weapon carried only by the Seeker of Truth, empowered by the Seeker's quest for truth and freedom for all. It uses the Seeker's righteous anger to fuel its power, and causes great emotional and physical pain to its bearer when used to kill, particularly if the Seeker is unsure or acting deliberately irresponsible. 39 Sartre argues that everyone suffers from anguish, but this is particularly obvious for a leader. what he will be, but is thereby at the same time a legislator deciding for the whole of mankind" ("Existenstialism" 292). Though this comes with a "sense of complete and profund [sic] responsibility," (292), "it does not prevent their acting, on the contrary it is the very condition of their action, for the action presupposes that there is a plurality of possibilities, and in choosing one of these, they realize that it has value only because it is chosen" (294). It is this anguish that Richard feels in turning to the path of violence, either on a personal level, or on a larger military scale; he must temper his personal desire for freedom, and the desire for his people to live in world without violence, with the necessity to preserve that peace through soldier/guardians. Richard argues that the
"world has balance to it. Just as we all, especially soldiers, can aid the Keeper in
bringing death, we all can also be a part of the Creator's work of creating life. We
know, better than most, perhaps, that soldiers are charged with protecting peace
and life itself. The balance to that is that we sometimes must take life to stay an
enemy who would do greater harm. For this, we are remembered, not for the lives
we try to preserve." (TotW319)40
Richard's position as a war wizard, one who controls both additive and subtractive forms of magic41 and has a distinctive gift for battle magic, further reinforces
40 This is echoed in Richard's request that the Mord Sith continue to carry their weapons in the service of peace. Though Richard himself has been subject to the horrors that these professional torturers and bodyguards both experience themselves, and force upon their enemies, he realizes the need for their ruthless capabilities: '"forgive me, all of you, but I must ask you to keep them for now.' He handed back their Agiel. 'When this is over, when we are free of the threat, then we can all give up the phantoms that haunt us, but for now we must fight for those who count on us. Our weapons, terrible as they are, allow us to continue the struggle.. .Until then, we must be strong. We must be the wind of death'" (BotF 344). 41 The magic in Goodkind's world is split into two forms, the additive, which can augment or create, and the subtractive, which can diminish or remove things from existence. This separation of magic is quite common in fantasy (e.g. Order/Chaos magic in L.E. Modesitt Jr.'s work, Saidin/Saidar in Robert Jordan's work) and is often used to emphasize the moral neutrality of power, despite preconceptions. In Goodkind's novels, though subtractive power originates in the realm of the dead, it exists as a necessajy counterbalance rather than evil, just as death is a necessary counter to life; without one, the other could not function. 51 the idea of a necessary balance between life and death, and the necessity for assertive action. Though these concepts are expressed in a variety of ways, including the way in which Richard's appetite for meat diminishes in response to the harm he inflicts and the lives he takes, the most powerful expression of his duality and assertiveness lies in the symbology of war wizards. When Richard first goes to the First Wizard's42 Enclave in
Temple of the Winds, he immediately recognizes the symbols drawn upon its door as the same ones which are drawn on the war wizard's uniform he found in the keep and now wears. Though no other wizard alive could understand these symbols, Richard interprets them immediately upon tracing their shapes with his fingers; the twin triangles represent the movements of the "dance with death," the war wizard's art of battle;43 the starburst admonishes the wizard to "look everywhere at once, see nothing to the exclusion of all else.. .never settling, even when cutting" (544); most important of the symbols is the one not pictured, the one which they add up to, called the primary edict, symbolized by the ruby pendant that accompanies the war wizard's uniform: cut.
"Cut from the void, not from bewilderment. Cut the enemy as quickly and directly
as possible. Cut with certainty. Cut decisively, resolutely. Cut into his strength.
Flow through the gaps in his guard. Cut him. Cut him down utterly. Don't allow
him a breath. Crush him. Cut him without mercy to the depths of his spirit.
It is the balance to life: death. It is the dance with death.
42 First wizard is a position given to only the most powerful and learned wizards. It requires a massive depth of knowledge, a great deal of power, and demonstrated empathy and compassion. Zedd, Richard's maternal grandfather is the only First Wizard left. 43 The dance with death is first introduced in Stone of Tears, when Richard is taken into the Old World. He finds himself facing thirty blade-masters, tribal warriors with no equal in skill, and must open himself to the skill and experience of all the past Seekers, transmitted via the Sword of Truth. This provides him unprecedented and impossible skill and training, which he uses to defeat the overwhelming force. The dance transcends physical combat however, also applying to any engagement with an enemy, and the economical, tactical employment of force in order to be victorious against much larger foes. 52 It is the law a war wizard lives by, or he dies." (TotW 572)
Though the primary edict seems to conflict with Richard's deeply held values of life and freedom, nothing could be further from the truth; in the primary edict lies the necessary balance of life and death, the cost of freedom and the obligation to protect it. Hesitation in carrying out this ruthless defence of liberty results in the loss of that liberty, and with it, as Goodkind himself suggests, "the nobility of mankind" ("Goodkind to McKenzie"
2).
The ultimate test of Goodkind's moral masculinity comes in the sixth novel of the series, Faith of the Fallen. Richard is captured by Nicci, a Sister of the Dark44 who uses a spell to force Richard to comply with her wishes, or have his beloved wife Kahlan45 die.
Nicci is particularly interesting, in that even though she has completely absorbed the doctrine of the Imperial Order, she feels that something is inherently missing, and that
Richard possesses the key to that missing link. She forces Richard to accompany her into the Old World, to the heart of the Imperial Order, a city named Altur'Rang. There, she believes, Richard will see the wonder of the Order's ways, and be swayed, confirming
Nicci's own beliefs, and eliminating the possibility of something better for her. What
Richard sees, however, is far from wondrous; the Imperial Order has claimed its society is founded on freedom, but upholds slavery, and banishes ideas of beauty and personal freedom by deeming humanity unworthy, driven by exclusively selfish urges, and only fit to exist in the Creator's shadow. This is best reflected in the art of the Old World; as
44 Sisters of the Dark are Sisters of the Light who have turned to the dark powers of the Keeper. They gain subtractive magic through couplings with demons, and are able to augment their own gifts as sorceresses with the gifts of wizards they have killed. 45 Kahlan is a character who simultaneously represents the nobility of mankind, as does Richard, as well as the ultimate perfection of femininity; she is empowered, the equal of any man, a wielder of immense power in her own right, though the power is distinctly different from a wizard's. She would be a perfect subject for a later gender study. 53 Nicci and Richard stand surveying a "grand scene of a group of men, some gouging out their eyes after having seen the perfect Light of the Creator," while other "men at the base of the statue, who'd not blinded themselves, were being mauled by underworld beasts," she tells him
"it's a portrayal of the unworthy nature of mankind. It shows men who have just
witnessed His perfect Light, and in so doing have thus been able to see the
hopeless nature of man's depravity. That they would cut out their own eyes shows
how perfect the Creator is that they could no longer bear to look upon themselves.
"These men.. .are heroes for showing us that we must not arrogantly
endeavour to rise above our corrupt essence.. .This work teaches us that only the
society as a whole can be worthwhile. Those at the bottom, here, who failed to
join in with their fellow man and blind themselves, are suffering their grim eternal
fate at the Keeper's hands." (FotF 504)
To Richard, the statue represents only death, both literal and spiritual. Though he believes that often personal freedom may be temporarily set aside in order to more effectively bring freedom for all, the idea that the core of the human soul is not beauty, but ugliness, refutes any claim to freedom as an ultimate goal, as it suggests enslavement to one's own degrading nature; while a person may choose to give up their freedom for the betterment of others, as Richard does, the Order's doctrine enslaves every man and woman from the moment they are born, while holding up the delusion of a better life to come after death.46
46 There is an unavoidable, implicit comparison here between Goodkind's work and the teachings of Christianity, particularly the ideas of heaven and original sin, though Goodkind is choosing to display the very limits of possible corruption of these beliefs. This is worth noting, however, as the majority of Though Nicci assumes that immersing Richard in the doctrine of the Imperial
Order will make him see his errors, the result is quite the opposite; he wholeheartedly rejects the system in place, identifying its problems, and finding solutions for them. He
leads by example, working tirelessly to improve both his own situation, and that of the
world in which he lives. He inspires others, such as the misfits Kamill and Nabbi, who
initially threaten Richard, to take pride in their surroundings and work to create beauty that mirrors their potential for beauty within. This theme culminates in Richard carving a
statue for the Order that is meant as a centre-piece for the newly-built palace; rather than
carving a degenerate, horrifying scene depicting man's depravity and corruption,
Richard's statue embodies his own ultimate values: life and beauty. The statue, like the
virtues it represents, comes with the necessary price of violence, as Richard must attack
his block of marble, swinging his "steel club with the fury of battle," and making his
"chisel hand st[i]ng with the ringing blows," but as with the struggle for freedom, "as
violent as the attack [is], it [is] controlled" (672), harnessed ferocity used to an ethical
end. The result is a work of art that stands as "a devastating indictment of all [the
ugliness] around it," making "the evil of the wall carvings" cry out "at their own
dishonesty in the face of incorruptible beauty and truth" (726). He crafts knowing that the unveiling of such a creation will almost certainly mean a painful death at the hands of the Order, but willingly sacrificing his own future to empower others to escape from the
wretched lives to which they have condemned themselves.
Sartre suggests that existing as a hero or a coward, rising above oppression, such
as that brought by the Imperial Order, or succumbing to it, is a choice. He states that "the
modern fantasy is distinctly Christian in nature, while Goodkind works in a much more existential and secular framework. 55 coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic.. .There is always a possibility for the coward to give up cowardice and for the hero to stop being a hero.
What counts is the total commitment, and it is not by a particular case or particular action that [one is] committed altogether" ("Existentialism" 302) but rather that a person is "the sum, the organization, the set of relations that constitute these undertakings" (301). What
Richard does in unveiling the statue is to inspire others to put aside their cowardice in the face of adversity, and instead commit themselves to the same ruthless, assertive action that has served him as leader and war wizard, and become their own heroes by embracing life and freedom. Seeing Richard's creation, a statue of a woman and man "in a state of harmonious balance," showing "awareness, rationality, and purpose.. .a manifestation of human power, ability, intent" {FotF 726), the people of Altur'Rang, including Nicci herself, are stunned and uplifted:
when she saw the statue, she saw at last the truth she had always refused to see,
suddenly and clearly standing before her.. .She understood, now, why life had
seemed so empty, so pointless: she herself had rendered it so in refusing to
think.. .Her life was hers to live by right. She belonged to no one. (734-5).
Though the high priest of the Order forces Richard to destroy the carving in front of the people as a lesson, the message, both the one implicit in the carving itself, and the very explicit words carved into the statue's base, "your life is yours alone. Rise up and live it"
(740),47 cannot be undone; the people of Altur'Rang rebel, accepting the need for
47 This recalls Sartre's words: "life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the value of it is nothing else but the sense that you choose" ("Existentialism" 309). 56 violence against their oppressors as never before48 because they see the true value of what they are fighting for.
In carving the statue, Richard fulfills one of the most important, and yet most problematic responsibilities of moral masculinity: providing a model for others to follow.
In many ways, this is precisely the goal of hegemonic masculinity, though as Connell points out (and is inherent in the term itself), its model suppresses expressions of gender that do not fit its ideal. This is due directly to elements of caricature, both in how hegemonic masculinity is recognized, portrayed, and enacted by men themselves, and in how it is depicted by theorists, as both groups focus upon antagonistic elements of violence, lust, and control over others, while deliberately deemphasizing the more beneficial side of masculinity: guardianship, protectiveness, and moral leadership. In
Richard, as in Covenant, the balance between these two opposing sets of characteristics is restored; Richard embraces his capacity for violence, emotion, and control by tempering it with moral responsibility and his belief in freedom for himself and others, while
Covenant learns from the masculine roles around him how he may redeem himself from both his own mistakes, and the dehumanization he has suffered as a result of his leprosy.
Though Donaldson and Goodkind construct distinctly different worlds in which their heroes may achieve moral masculinity, allowing Covenant to build his identity in a primarily internal way, and Richard to construct his masculinity in the public sphere in order to provide a model for the emerging gender identities of those around him, both heroes explore the possibility of an exemplary masculine identity that can embrace power
48 Though the people of Altur' Rang have tried to rebel before, including one attempt which they wanted Richard himself to lead, they were unable to ruthlessly pursue that goal, and were cut down as a result of their hesitation (FotF 605). 57 and emotion without sacrificing duty and morality. Just as Richard shows the people of
Altur'Rang, and ultimately the peoples of both the Old and New Worlds, how a masculine identity can be constructed almost entirely around the values of freedom, beauty, and wonder, and the willingness to fight for those values, Covenant shows how even the most repugnant anti-hero and fallen man can be reclaimed if he chooses to learn from those around him, and channel his almost limitless masculine potential toward moral and ethical ends. Both men must realize that while their battles can never be undertaken alone, ultimately their actions, and identities, are theirs to choose, though the results will affect not only them, but everyone around them; by upholding a masculine ideal that prizes both assertive protectionism, and a willingness to do violence when necessary, while at the same time embracing freedom, fairness, laughter, caring, and an acceptance of self, they teach others to do the same. They accept responsibility not for the choices others may make, but for the example they project to those others, as leaders, fathers, and, ultimately, saviours.
58 Chapter Two
On Sons, Fathers, and Surrogates in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever
and The Sword o f Truth
J.R.R. Tolkien states in "On Fairy-Stories" that "fairy stories1 as a whole have three faces: the Mystical towards the Supernatural; the Magical towards Nature; and the
Mirror of scorn and pity towards Man. The essential face of Faerie is the middle one, the
Magical. But the degree in which the others appear (if at all) is variable, and may be decided by the individual story-teller" (28). Tolkien provides a lineage for fantasy, rooted in myths "of the greater elemental changes and processes of nature," which are localized through "epic heroic, legend, saga," and often pared down into "folk-tales,
Marchen, fairy-stories—nursery tales" (25), which not only explains the fundamental core of fantasy, a magically-based restructuring of the writer's world, but also the common connections between fantasy and fairy tale, moral allegory, and particularly, classical mythology. W. A. Senior echoes this sentiment in Stephen R. Donaldson's
Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, in which he argues that because myths "create methods of assigning meaning, value and belief systems and encompassing human truths," and
"all fantasies depend on central belief systems," the "kinship between fantasy and myth is explicated by their common goals and interlocking content" (98).
Perhaps the most obvious area in which myth and fantasy align is in their ability to depict abstract concepts and relationships through fantastic stories, particularly
1 Tolkien is using "fairy stories" here to refer to fantasy works such as his own The Hobbit, for which there was not yet an established generic name. relations between sons and fathers, men and gods;2 the very foundations of western mythology are built upon stories of power struggles between impossibly mighty fathers, and their willful, growing sons, who are often feared for their own youthful virility and power. The story of Zeus and Cronos illustrates this point, pitting the mighty Cronos, father of the gods, against the one son whom he failed to devour at birth. Zeus overthrows his father, just as Cronos himself overthrew his father Uranus, illustrating the passage of male power from one generation to the next (Powell, 82).3 This struggle recurs in heroic myth as well, such as in the tale of Oedipus, in which a king, warned by an oracle that his son will kill him and take his kingdom, abandons the infant to die.
Oedipus is raised by the king and queen of a neighboring kingdom, but returns to Thebes as a man and unknowingly kills his own father and marries his mother, taking control of the Theban kingdom (458).4 Both tales illustrate the same point: masculine power and identity must be passed on to the next generation, and denying this natural passage is not only foolish, but inherently dangerous.
Greek and Roman epics, such as Homer's The Odyssey(~800 B.C.) and Virgil's
The Aeneid, offer an alternative to this history of violent usurpation, depicting a willing and graceful passage of masculine power from one generation to the next, and based on
2 Myth also examines other relationships, such as the husband/wife relationship between Zeus and Hera, basic male/female dynamics, and even mother/son relationships, like Hera/Hephaestos, but the overarching motif behind western mythology seems to be the power relationship between father and son, be it Uranus and Cronos, Cronos and Zeus, or Odin and Thor. 3 Uranus had imprisoned his children deep within the earth (Gaea)'s womb, causing Gaea to help Cronos castrate and seize power from his father. The plan backfires; Cronos only releases his fellow titans, not his other, more monstrous kin. He then perpetuates the cycle by consuming the children he fathers on his sister, Rhea, until she tricks him into swallowing a stone in place of the baby Zeus. Zeus is raised by surrogate parents, and returns home where he tricks his father into drinking a potion that makes him vomit up Zeus' siblings, who, together with Zeus, enslave the Titans and seize power for themselves. 4 While Oedipus' father is punished in death for the crime of abandoning his son, so too is Oedipus punished by the furies for the murder of his father, just as Cronos is punished both for imprisoning the Titans, and for the crimes against his father and monstrous kin, who are employed by Zeus and his siblings to help overthrow the Titans during the Titanomachy. initiation, knowledge, and empowerment. Interestingly, both epics depict this passing in two parts: at the beginning of the hero's great adventure, and again shortly before its conclusion. In The Aeneid, Aeneas takes charge of Troy's survivors as the city is burnt by the Greeks, aided and guided by his elderly father. This, however, is shown only in flashback, as the father dies before Aeneas and his people come to the land of Carthage, where the tale begins. Without his father's guidance, Aeneas is at a loss, and must, through significant trial and error, learn who he is and what he must do, on his own.
Fortunately, Aeneas is able to seek additional guidance from his father when he is unable to fulfill his destiny and found a new Troy; he journeys to the underworld, where his father continues his education, teaching him both what he must do, and how actions influence identity and the soul's condition in the underworld (VI.956-1210).
The Odyssey functions much like The Aeneid, in that Odysseus' father, Laertes, raises his son to be a cunning and capable warrior king, but is absent during his son's great adventure following the fall of Troy. Like Aeneas, Odysseus must make his own mistakes, learn from them, and struggle to prove his worth as a man and fulfill his destiny before returning home. Though he eventually manages to do so without the aid of his father, Odysseus must enlist both Laertes and his own son, Telemakhos, to help repel the suitors who have invaded his home and besieged his wife, as well as the angry families that attack after the suitors have been slain (XXIV.548-594). Though Laertes plays only a minor role in the second of the two skirmishes, he does not begrudge his progeny for seizing the glory of the day, declaring "Ah, what a day for me, dear gods!/to see my son and grandson vie in courage!" (XXIV.571-2). By taking an active role alongside his father in repelling the suitors and their families, Telemakhos also takes the mantle of masculine power upon himself; though he was unable to assert himself and expel the suitors on his own, the return of his father and the chance to fight alongside him provides an initiation to manhood for him, and gives him access to his own masculine power.
Thousands of years have elapsed between the time of classical mythology and the advent of modern fantasy, but the strong focus on fatherhood remains the same; fantasy depicts both vicious power struggles like those of Cronos and Oedipus, and the proud father, amazed by the glory of his child. Though fantasy uses these same motifs, it has twisted the mythical view of fatherhood to better suit the present reality of fatherhood; fathers in fantasy, tyrants like those found in Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series, nurturers like those found in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, and even enigmas like
Thomas Covenant in Stephen R. Donaldson's Chronicles of the Unbeliever, are almost entirely absent from the lives of their children, as the authors use their fantasy worlds and the reader's suspension of disbelief to seek resolution for what David Popenoe identifies as a very real want of fatherly, masculine role models in contemporary society. Fantasy authors offer possibilities of change and evolution, emblematized by sons who no longer seek to merely overthrow their fathers' kingdoms, but to establish a more just order in their place.
Modern fantasy is not merely aware of the changes to fatherhood and family, it is deeply concerned with them; its volumes are littered with young men struggling to find their own identity, and having to do so without the aid of their fathers. The timing is critical, however, as fantasy most often glosses over or ignores the actual childhood of the hero, concentrating instead of the development of his identity as he takes up the
62 mantle of moral adulthood.5 As I have shown, this timing can easily be traced back to
The Lord of the Rings; Frodo, the story's protagonist, has only just come of age at thirty- three6 when his adopted father Bilbo leaves the Shire, and though his great adventure begins at the adult age of fifty, Frodo's complete inexperience with the world outside of the Shire, coupled with the unnatural youth imparted by the One Ring, emphasizes his position as a youth, rather than a man. When he leaves the Shire with the One Ring, he must begin to make decisions that will impact the greater world around him, rather than the relatively closed world of the Shire.
As has become common in fantasy, Tolkien's hero is also an orphan, having been adopted by Bilbo after the death of his parents when he was twelve years old ("Frodo
Baggins"), and has only the support of a string of surrogate fathers and brotherly figures to help direct his search for identity. Tolkien's choice of an orphan for a hero, and
Frodo's continual loss and gain of father figures is unsurprising, given Tolkien's own history. Katharyn Crabbe notes that Tolkien was himself an orphan; like Frodo, he lost his parents at a young age, as his father Arthur died when he was only four years old, and his mother died when he was twelve (.J.R.R. Tolkien 4-7). As a result, he and his brother found themselves in the capable guardianship of Father Francis Morgan, their parish priest, who was responsible for Tolkien's intellectual and spiritual education. He was
5 Though this point could be argued using such exceptions as J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, which does begin quite early in Harry's life, during what many would still consider his childhood. However, his position as sole survivor of a killing curse that destroyed his family, as well as continual battles against the forces of evil signal the fact that Harry is actually deep in the process of becoming a man, fighting his own battles, and being forced to make moral decisions regarding self-sacrifice and custodial care of those around him. This situation of adventure on the cusp of moral adulthood is echoed by authors such as George R.R. Martin, David Eddings, L.E. Moddisit Jr., and Robert Jordan, as shown in Chapter One. 6 As Hobbits do not age in the same way as men, and tend to live longer lives, the 33rd birthday is considered as the coming of age. almost certainly responsible for the strong Catholic undertones in The Lord of the Rings, as well as the strong focus on surrogacy that Tolkien's novels possess.7
Tolkien, and many other modern fantasists, explored the relationships between men, positing solutions for the problematic absence of fathers. For Tolkien, this meant the replacement of the father figure with a series of surrogate fathers and fraternal relationships, though even these were somewhat problematized. Frodo's father-figures tend to disappear: Bilbo, when Frodo first comes of age, leaves the role to Gandalf, who in turn fails to meet the hobbits at Bree; Strider (Aragorn) takes over in Gandalf s place, but Frodo must leave him to be rushed to Rivendell when he is injured by a Ring-Wraith;
Gandalf reappears at Rivendell, but soon falls in Moria; Aragorn takes over again, but
Frodo must leave him when he realizes the effect the Ring is having on Boromir, and potentially the others of the group. He is left with only a fraternal companion, Sam, to help him finish his quest. Even that relationship comes into question, however, as the
Ring makes Frodo increasingly paranoid and distrusting of those around him; only Sam's stalwart love and friendship keep Frodo from being completely alone when he must enter the heart of Sauron's power in Mount Doom.
Though Tolkien does not propose Sauron as a father figure for Frodo, there exists an undeniable connection between the two that is somewhat paternal. Stephen R.
Donaldson notes in his essay "Epic Fantasy in the Modern World," that "seduced by power, Frodo spends the novel in the process of becoming Sauron—and that is only possible because part of him was Sauron to begin with" (6), suggesting that the evil
7 Arguably, the surrogacy in the novels may also be tied to the cultural mourning that Britain underwent after the World Wars, and the loss of so many men, as Tolkien himself served, and lost all but one of his best friends by the time he was 21 (Crabbe 15). which permeates Sauron is at least seeded in Frodo, and that a passage of power between the two, not unlike the typical father/son passage of power in fantasy, may be taking place. Tolkien himself commented on the passage of power through Sauron's Ring, stating:
If I were to 'philosophize' this myth, or at least the Ring of Sauron, I should say it
was a mythical way of representing the truth that potency (or perhaps rather
potentiality) if it is to be exercised, and produce results, has to be externalized and
so as it were passes, to a greater or less degree, out of one's direct control. A man
who wishes to exert 'power' must have subjects, who are not himself. But then
he depends on them. (Carpenter 279)
Because Sauron invests the Ring with his power so that he might carry it and control others,8 he is vulnerable to the possibility that another may take the Ring and usurp his power. Though Frodo is not literally the son of Sauron, the Ring engenders both the desire for power that would involve the usurpation of Sauron's paternal might, in a way particularly reminiscent of the violent passage of power from father to son in western mythology, and also the weight of responsibility for destroying that source of power, overthrowing the patriarch, and establishing a new order in its place.
Despite not having experienced the same personal loss that affected Tolkien, many modern fantasy authors similarly position their heroes as orphans guided by surrogates and fraternal relationships, putting them in similar situations requiring the confrontation of ugly realities within themselves, building on "Tolkien's realization that
8 This actually takes place in The Silmarillion (1977); Sauron creates the other Rings of power to give to Dwarves, Elves, and Men, before forging the "Master Ring," which gives him knowledge of, and control over, the bearers of the other Rings. 65 darkness can come from even the most innocent, simplest, cutest characters" (Donaldson
"Modern World" 6). The difference, however, lies in the way post-Tolkien fantasy authors often force their heroes into a direct confrontation with their fathers, or memories of them,9 and resolve their identity issues through eventual acceptance of their lineage, and an active desire to be better men. Though fantasy tends to play out this confrontation on a physical level, often through either magic or swordsmanship, the real battle is internal; the heroes must face the reality of the flawed men that sired them, and choose whether or not they will perpetuate those flaws, or address the contradictions in themselves, and grow into better men as a result.
Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series, particularly the first two novels,
Wizard's First Rule, and Stone of Tears, provides a fairly characteristic example of an orphaned son's journey toward his confrontation with his birth father, pitting Richard
Cypher against Darken Rahl, the evil wizard who raped his mother and left her for dead.
As is typical in the fantasy tradition, Richard begins his adventure in Wizard's First Rule unaware of his true genealogy, believing himself to be the son of a humble trader, and happily accepting a similarly humble profession as a woodsman and guide, an occupation which naturalizes his character and provides a pragmatic view of life that will benefit him throughout the series.10 Beginning his story shortly after the murder of Richard's adopted
91 am referring to novels such as the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, in which Harry moves slowly from hero-worship of both his father, James, and his surrogate fathers, Sirius and Dumbledore, into an understanding of their values and flaws as men; Harry finds that none of the men he worships is, in fact, pristinely good, but instead human and flawed, capable of the same minor cruelties, lapses in judgment, and mistakes that all people may make. It is, in part, his ability to understand and resolve these conflicting images that allow his own masculinity to develop, and his personal identity to form. 10 This motif should be familiar to most fantasy fans; Rand from Robert Jordan's Wheel ofTime(\990- Present) series begins life as a farmer, as does Garion (later Belgarion) from David Eddings Belgariad (1982-4), and even Luke Skywalker from the Star Wars (1977-2005) series. Even Frodo Baggins, as a hobbit, is intensely tied to the land around him by hobbits' love for plants and gardening. The father George Cypher, Goodkind deliberately highlights Richard's position as both an orphan, and an emotional youth:
Grief and depression overwhelmed him, and even though he still had his brother,
he felt abandoned. That he was grown into manhood offered him no sanctuary
from the forlorn feeling of being orphaned and alone in the world, a feeling he
had known before, when his mother died while he was still young. Even though
his father had often been away, sometimes for weeks, Richard had always known
he was somewhere, and would be back. Now he would never be back. (3)
Richard's metamorphosis into manhood begins with his initial encounter with
Kahlan and the assassins hunting her. Defending her forces him out of his child-like state, where answers to his questions are ends in themselves, such as discovering who killed his father, into the realm of action, where he takes on an active role in meting out justice and protecting the vulnerable. Though Goodkind reveals, through flashback, that
Richard has already undergone a ritual of initiation with his father in memorizing an important book of magic called the Book of Counted Shadows, his role remains passive:
"he held his father's trust in his arms, held the trust of everyone in his arms, and he felt the weight of the burden.. .In that moment, he was no longer a child" (87). He is merely expected to retain the knowledge in the book to pass on to another. Not until he saves
Kahlan from the men hunting her, and is subsequently named Seeker, does he begin to take on an active role as an adult, and confront both the emotional maelstrom within himself and his obligation to actively promote justice. We witness this change when he naturalization of the hero is meant to signify their moral potential and "rightness," which contrasts the wrongness found in their fathers/opposites. Though all the heroes have the potential for evil, they have an equally strong motivating force for good, signaled through their connection to nature, that helps to shape those around them, and themselves. 67 learns of Darken Rahl's grisly methods of divination," and realizes that Darken Rahl is in fact responsible for his stepfather's death:
In his mind he added the shadowed figure of Darken Rahl, hands dripping
crimson blood, standing over his father's body, holding the red, glinting blade...
The picture was complete now. He had his answers. He knew how it had been.
How his father had died. Until now that was all he had ever sought—answers. In
his whole life, he had never gone beyond that simple quest.
In one white-hot instant that changed. (120)
Richard's change forces him to confront not only his own need for vengeance, and the bitter anger behind it, but also his responsibility to ensure that others do not share his father's fate. Darken Rahl seeks to unite the boxes of Orden, powerful magical objects, which together contain unlimited powers of life and death. However, only one box may be opened, and each leads to a different outcome: one box gives the opener power over every living thing, one removes the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead, plunging every living thing into darkness, and the third box pulls the opener into the land of the dead, the same fate that awaits any who put the boxes "into play," as Rahl has, and fails to open one within a year. Darken must not only possess all three boxes, he must also find the Book of Counted Shadows, which contains instructions on how to determine which box is which. This gives Richard three distinct options: he could simply deny responsibility and go into hiding, forcing Darken Rahl to choose a box at random, and hoping that he will choose wrongly; he could also actively pursue his
" Darken Rahl employs anthropomancy, the art of divining answers from "the inspection of human entrails" (120). Though Richard had previously learned that George Cypher had been disemboweled, he was unaware up until this point why, and by whom. revenge and attempt to kill Darken before he can claim the final box; or he can accept responsibility for all the living, and use his knowledge of the Book of Counted Shadows to actively oppose Rahl, without giving in to his desire for personal vengeance. In choosing the third path, Richard not only becomes a heroic figure, but dooms himself to undergo the necessary tests to become a hero. His journey toward the eventual confrontation with his father forces Richard to endure enslavement and torture under the direction of Rahl, to struggle with complex issues of morality involving the nature of love, hatred, and necessity, and to seek a way to circumvent the impossibility of an intimate relationship with Kahlan,12 all of which hones his sense of morality and justice tempered with forgiveness, acceptance, and responsibility, and enables him to face
Darken Rahl and his tools.
Markedly, Richard's tests force him to begin seeing life outside of singularities, and decide how best to navigate between the choices before him. This begins when
Zedd, Richard's maternal grandfather (though Richard is unaware of it) and a powerful wizard in his own right, first tells his grandson about the power of Orden, disagreeing with Richard's assumption that the boxes of Orden must be evil:
"Like all power, it simply exists. It's the user who determines what use it will be
put to. The magic of Orden can just as easily be used to help crops grow, to heal
the sick, to end conflict.. .It is up to the mind of man to put it to use. I think we
all know which use Darken Rahl would choose." (112)
12 Kahlan's power as a "confessor" is her ability to augment the smallest spark of love within a person, shaping and encouraging it until it becomes an all-encompassing devotion to her. This act destroys the personality of the touched, leaving them with only their love for her. Richard and Kahlan are unable to be together because rather than having to consciously act to use her power, she merely has to lower her defenses, allowing it to take place; any moment of intense relaxation or loss of restraint, such as lovemaking, would inadvertently cause her to release her power into whoever she is touching, obliterating their personal identity (WFR 520). This lesson is reinforced by Richard's first experience drawing the Sword of Truth, which he feels as a "frightening and at the same time seductive sensation that border[s] on violation" (109), demanding that he put aside the fear of anger that his step-father instilled in him after his mother's death;13 just as the boxes of Orden can be used for either good or evil, Richard must accept that anger itself is not inherently evil, but rather a source of power like his magic.14 Richard's power is thus the counterpart of Kahlan's; while he uses righteous anger to amplify his power, and emotionally justify the horrors of killing, Kahlan's power is based on the augmentation of love, something Richard initially dismisses as unworthy of either respect or fear. After Kahlan explains how one touched with the power is "forevermore.. .devoted to the one who touches [them], to the exclusion of all else. What [they] wanted, what [they] were, who [they] were, no longer means anything" (509), Richard must concede that, in its own way, love is equal in power to anger, to be used for good or ill. Their relationship is mirrored in Richard's relationship with Denna, the Mord-Sith who captures and tortures him for Darken Rahl.
Richard's time with the Mord Sith, Denna, is significantly more than simple torture or enslavement, but rather a direct and vicious assault on both his physical senses and his sense of identity. The true growth Richard undergoes is not a direct result of this attack, however; it is in his ability to forgive and even love the person who has caused him so much pain. Despite the horrors Denna inflicts upon Richard, he can see her
13 Richard's mother died in a house fire when an angry customer attacked George Cypher, inadvertently knocking an oil lamp off a table (36). This made Richard fear the potential dangers of letting himself get angry. 14 The morality of anger and aggression is taken up in significantly more detail in Chapter One of my thesis. 70 actions are determined by her own horrific enslavement and training as a Mord-Sith,15
and forgive the poor, innocent girl behind the monster. Though Richard must still kill
Denna in order to escape, he does so without anger or hatred, mercifully releasing Denna
from the life she has been forced to lead (719).
Richard's ability to see the dual forces of love and anger, forgiveness and hatred not only distinguishes him from his birth father, Darken Rahl, but ultimately allows him to defeat the much more powerful wizard. Despite their similarities, the "raptor's gaze,"
intensity of emotion, and unwavering conviction, Darken is separated from Richard by his own inability to function outside of singularities. Though he occasionally mimics
concern for others, as with the young boy meant guide him to the underworld,16 or even
his apparent concern for his father's tomb,17 Darken never achieves the very real
custodial care shown by his son toward friends, strangers, and even captors. Darken's
lack of genuine empathy derives from his complete inability to understand the power of
love. Echoing Richard's initial negating reaction toward love as power, but failing to
reconsider and reinvent his understanding, Darken dismisses love as powerless,
particularly in the face of his own lust for domination, and self-confidence in his own
power. This makes it possible for Richard to use his own ignorance against him, tricking
15 The training for a Mord-Sith involves taking the most empathetic, caring girls, and torturing them endlessly, with physical, emotional, and sexual abuse in order to break their spirit. They must then watch their mothers being tortured to death in a similar way to break their empathy, and finally torture their own fathers to death to eliminate their fear of hurting another, and prove they are capable to committing such horrors on any they may be ordered to discipline (697). 16 Travel to the underworld requires a guide, if the traveler is to return unharmed. The requirements dictate that the guide be untainted, unafraid, and utterly devoted to the traveler. These requirements prompt Rahl to display his only moment of custodialism in the novel, as he feeds and cares for the boy prior to sacrificing him. His intention to sacrifice the boy for his own ends, and the continual falsehoods he feeds the boy, belie his selfish intent, warping the scene into a distinct mockery of custodial care (328-36). 17 Darken Rahl customarily has servants who allow petals from the roses in his father's tomb to fall put to death for disrespect. Though this might indicate merely a twisted reverence for his father, his askance "why do they mock me with their carelessness?" (261), implies that his concern is entirely for respect and honour for himself, rather than for his father. 71 him with the wizard's first rule: "people are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true" (560).
Darken Rahl wants to believe that Kahlan's exertion of her power upon his son has rendered Richard completely biddable, and incapable of lying when he gives precise instructions on the use of the boxes of Orden, but Richard's ability to understand and accept the power of love has allowed him to unlock the secret of Kahlan's power: those already devoted to a confessor, and willing to sacrifice anything for her, are unaffected by her magic. He tricks Darken into opening the wrong box by omitting a key passage from the Book of Counted Shadows, and Darken Rahl is pulled into the underworld (804-5).
Richard unwittingly becomes the new Lord Rahl, and is given the opportunity to rule the
D'Haran18 people and attempt to establish a new order based on equality and fairness.
The remaining books in the Sword of Truth series serve to expand and examine the confrontation between Richard and Darken Rahl beyond the mythic trope of filial power struggles, and into a more general, ideologically-based contest for rule of the living world. Richard's sense of duality is continually tried, his moral decisions become ever more complex, and his battle against the opposing view ever more important. Stone of Tears, Goodkind's sequel to Wizard's First Rule, replays many of the same events seen in the first novel: a danger is presented; Richard is captured and collared; Richard learns from his imprisonment, growing morally, intellectually, and emotionally; Richard escapes from imprisonment; and Richard confronts his father, now a part of the
18 D'Hara is name of the country ruled by the Rahl family for untold generations. The most recent rulers, Panis and Darken Rahl, both lusted for conquest, leading to the erection of the boundaries between D'Hara, the Midlands, and Westland as told of in Debt of Bones (1998), and a renewed attempt to conquer the Midlands after the boundaries fall. underworld,19 to decide the fate of the world. While this repetition might initially be dismissed as formulaic, Goodkind employs these repetitions to offer moral alternatives.
His second capture, for example, challenges his simplistic, binaristic view of good and evil by presenting people as fundamentally mixed. It also forces him to accept his own mixed nature and confront both his features and his flaws. Most importantly, Richard learns that intention and outcome are separable: a benevolent intention does not justify a bad result, and an action may be seen as malevolent, but have good results. This is the heart of the Wizard's Second Rule: "the greatest harm can result from the best
intentions.. .Sometimes doing what seems right is wrong, and can cause harm. The only counter to it is knowledge, wisdom, forethought, and understanding the First Rule" (886).
The second rule helps Richard understand why Kahlan sends him away, just as he sends away Gratch,20 the young gar he cares for after he is forced to kill its mother. Not only
does this realization reignite his need to return to the Midlands as soon as possible, it also
supplies him with the means to defeat his father; when he returns to D'Hara, Richard realizes that, despite his own emotional need to condemn his father to an eternity in the
blackest depths of underworld, he must accept responsibility for his own part in the tearing of veil between the underworld and the world of the living, and return to confront
19 This provides an interesting contrast to Aeneas' reuniting with his father in book VI of The Aeneid, as both heroes learn about the state of the soul and the underworld, though Darken Rahl provides the information to Richard out of spite and an attempt at deliberate misdirection, rather than fatherly guidance. 20 Kahlan forces Richard to accept the collar offered by the Sisters of the Light, despite his fear of being collared after his Mord-Sith capture in WFR (SoT260-3). Though she does this to save his life, as his newly-discovered magic is causing potentially lethal headaches, she must lie to him, insisting that she no longer wants him near her, and demanding that he prove his love by submitting to the Sisters. Richard faces a similar situation when he must banish Gratch to save him from being killed by the Sisters as a monster. The similarity causes Richard to realize Kahlan's benevolent intention, and begin to understand the distinct separation between action and intent. 21 Gars are intelligent, but fearsome beasts from D'Hara, originally created by wizards during the Great War. Though gars are almost universally feared, Richard is unwilling to slaughter the defenseless baby gar after he is forced to kill its mother in self defense, and instead cares for him. Gratch turns into a loving, and dependable companion, fiercely dedicated to Richard's wellbeing as a result. 73 his father's spirit, an act which prevents the complete destruction of the veil and keeps the underworld from completely consuming the world of the living:
He had brought this on himself. That he had not done it intentionally made no
difference. Life was not fair, it simply existed. If you accidentally stepped on a
poisonous snake, you got bitten. Intentions were irrelevant.
"I have caused my own grief," Richard whispered. "I must suffer the
consequences of my own actions." (951)
Richard places the Stone of Tears around his own neck, placing the greater good above
his own desires; allowing his father's spirit to remain in the world of the living would
allow him to save Kahlan's life,22 and placing the Stone of Tears around Darken's neck
would banish him eternally to the deepest level of the underworld and subject him to
eternal torment. However, using the Stone of Tears selfishly will result in the same
unhappy end as leaving Darken in the world of the living: the veil will be torn, and
eternal night will fall (So T 888). Richard must instead bear the stone himself, choosing to
repair the damage to the veil and seal the breach between worlds, while knowing that it
23
will damn Kahlan and condemn him to an empty, unhappy life.
The second defeat of Darken removes all opposition to Richard's kingship over
D'Hara, a succession that signifies not only his personal identity shift from the
woodsman, Richard Cypher, to the absolute monarch, Lord Rahl, but also a larger
cultural shift, due to the difference of values between Richard and Darken Rahl.
22 Richard has learned that Kahlan is the subject of a prophecy which requires her death, and only has time to either stop Darken from tearing the veil or save her. Darken offers him the chance to accomplish both, at the cost of the living world. 23 This, of course, does not actually happen, as Zedd makes it appear as though Kahlan is dead, without actually killing her. Richard's attempt to inculcate a new culture of justice and equality in place of Darken's murderous tyranny recalls Raymond Williams' notion in Marxism in Literature (1977) that at any given time, culture is made up of three distinct, yet intertwined social powers: the residual, the dominant, and the emergent. The hegemonic norm, the dominant, seeks to suppress alternatives to its hegemony:
We have certainly still to speak of the 'dominant' and the effective', and in these
senses of the hegemonic. But we find that we have also to speak, and indeed with
further differentiation of each, of the 'residual' and the 'emergent', which in any
real process, and at any moment in the process, are significant both in themselves
and in what they reveal of the characteristics of the dominant. (121-2)
For Williams, then, the dominant may hold hegemonic power, but power is, at least in part, derived by its association with the residual, or the previous hegemonic dominant, and the emergent "meanings and values, [the] new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship [which] are continually being created" (123).
The idea of the residual, which Williams suggests "has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present" (122), is particularly useful in reference to the relationship between Darken and Richard; though the values of father and son are almost completely at odds, Richard's identity, both personal and cultural, is formed in part by his Rahl heritage. Though Richard seeks to effect immediate change in D'Haran culture, he cannot escape some of the conventions formed under the rule of his forebearers: despite his best intentions, Richard is unable to disband the Mord Sith by granting them freedom, as they choose to become his personal bodyguards; the devotion24 continues, though Richard's previous repugnance for it evaporates when he realizes that it is not part of Darken's vanity, but a residual element from a benevolent Rahl leader thousands of years in the past, which conveys magical protection to devotees; and Richard himself must continue his family's tradition of militaristic expansion, though he does so with defensive motives rather than imperialist ones. Though these continuations seem residual from Darken's reign, and often at odds with the world which Richard intends to create, they are inescapable necessities for the preservation of everything he cares for, and the success of his peaceful goals; Richard must learn to accept that peace often requires war.
The remaining nine novels build on the lessons Richard learns in Wizard's First
Rule and Stone of Tears, as he must apply them in order to assume military command of the entire New World and oppose the Imperial Order, a group first encountered and opposed by Kahlan in Stone of Tears. The Order's goal is nothing less than the subjugation of both the New and the Old worlds, using ideological doctrine that prizes submission; though they claim to idealize custodial and economic caring for those less fortunate, they provide this support through forced donations that cripple the entire Old
World economy, and make it impossible for law-abiding citizens to prosper. They explain this failed prosperity and the mass poverty and starvation that it creates among the lower classes both by citing the "greater good," and by upholding what they see to be the key attributes of humankind: immorality, corruptibility, and ignobility. Richard is
24 Devotion here refers not only to a personal devotion to the Lord Rahl, but also to the practice of devotion; twice each day the entire D'Haran palace gathers to chant "Master Rahl guide us. Master Rahl teach us. Master Rahl, protect us. In your light we thrive. In your mercy we are sheltered. In your wisdom we are humbled. We live only to serve. Our lives are yours" (WFR 677-8). The devotion was created by an ancestor of Richard's who sought to prevent Dreamwalkers, a magically-altered person who could infiltrate and control people's minds, from possessing his people. The D'Haran bond, and the devotion from which it draws its power, provides this magical protection. able to see through the deception by recognizing that most people are breaking the primary rules of wizardry, believing lies because they fear they might be true, and hiding behind claims of benevolence while actively creating chaos and disorder.
Though Stephen R. Donaldson's The Chronicles explores a similar moral conundrum to that found in The Sword of Truth series, Donaldson completely subverts the standard father/son struggle motif by situating Covenant in a father/daughter power relationship with Elena, the child Lena conceived when Covenant raped her.
Though Covenant's second summoning to the Land, at the beginning of The Illearth War, comes only days after his return from his previous adventure to the real world, forty years have passed in the Land, and his summoner, High Lord Elena, is, unbeknownst to
Covenant, his daughter. Though Elena's summoning is ostensibly for the benefit of the land, in the hope that Covenant and his magical white-gold ring will help to destroy Lord
Foul the Despiser,25 the circumstances around his summoning serve to foreshadow the relationship Elena seeks with her father. When Covenant is pulled into the Land, he is on the telephone with his estranged wife for the first time in months, though he is unable to bring himself to speak. Before he can manage a word, he falls, hitting his head on the coffee table, and falling unconscious.26 Upon being summoned, Covenant demands to be sent back, screaming: "to Joan, do you understand? I was talking to Joan. She called me.
After all this time. When I needed—needed. You have no right...She was my wifeV (IW
25 Covenant struggles against Foul throughout the three novels with little success, as Foul grows ever stronger. He is named for the darkest emotions, Despite and Despair, which the Lords of the land fear above all else. 26 Throughout the series, Covenant's summoning to the Land is continually paired with a lapse in consciousness in the real world, calling attention to, and fueling Covenant's rejection of reality. Neither Covenant nor the reader can every be entirely sure that the Land exists, and must therefore question the events that take place there, and consider them both as possible experiences, and dreams, serving both literal and allegorical functions. 30). Though Mhoram wishes he could comply, claiming that "if the choice were mine, I would return you at once to your world.. .the Land has no need of service which is not
glad and free," Elena is unrepentant: "I cannot undo your summoning. Had I the power,
still the Land's need would deny me" (32). Her contradiction of Mhoram's assertion that
service to the Land must be given willingly, if not with a measure of altruism, is evidence
of Elena's own selfish reasons to keep Covenant near her; regardless of whether his presence results in the saving or the destruction of the Land, she aches to know who her
father is, and even live out a version of the Electra complex, in which she wrests
Covenant away from his wife Joan, in order to have him for herself,27 though she fails to
do more than hint at this to Covenant until the two begin the search for the Power of
Command.
The Power of Command is considered the pinnacle of High Lord Kevin
Landwaster's lore. Land waster was High Lord, much like Elena, but thousands of years
in the Land's history, who was faced with the possibility of Lord Foul taking over. In
order to defeat Foul, he enacted the Ritual of Desecration, a spell which essentially
destroyed all learning, putting both Lord Foul, and the people of the Land back into the
dark ages. Before doing so, he placed his learning (Lore) behind protections, meant to be
overcome sequentially to unlock the power. The Power of Command, Kevin's greatest
Lore, is undeniably god-like, and recalls the power attributed to Titans, including Cronos;
it is the call of Earthpower itself, forcing any and all things to obey any askance within their power. It can cause mountains to fall, seas to swallow the land, and even the dead
27 This is complicated not only by the fact that Elena is the daughter of rape, but specifically by the fact that Joan is not Elena's actual mother, and thus the relationship does not precisely fit the Electra complex, in which the daughter wishes to eliminate her actual mother because she sexually desires her father. 78 to rise, though it cannot directly compel either the Creator or Lord Foul, who sit outside the arch of time (IW 489-90). By placing the knowledge behind his seven barriers,
Landwaster echoes Cronos and his desire to deny power to his offspring, though he does so not merely out of jealous spite, but also out of the belief that knowledge is a necessary precursor to power.
The quest for the Power of Command reveals the extent of Donaldson's reversal of the father/child power hierarchy. When viewed in terms of mythological father/child power structure, the initial roles of the characters, Elena as High Lord and Covenant as an outsider, suggest a pure reversal of the hierarchy, placing Covenant as the child and Elena as the more powerful parent, which is reinforced by Covenant's position as a moral adolescent; this is complicated however, by Covenant's status as the wielder of all- powerful white gold, both "hero and fool,/potent, helpless—" and potentially capable of
"sav[ing] or damn[ing] the Earth" (LFB 70), paradoxes which suggest a potential for ultimate power coupled with a child-like inability to use it. Covenant's incapability stems, as I have shown, directly from his unwillingness to accept responsibility for the events that happen within the land, further cementing his status as a child. He even actively seeks to preserve this role, intending to use Elena's power, and affection for him, to entrap her, forcing her to take on the responsibility he has chosen to shirk:
He might be able to induce her to take his place, assume his position at the onus
of Lord Foul's machinations. He might be able to lead her extravagant passion to
replace his white gold at the crux of the Land's doom. If he could get her to
undertake the bitter responsibility which had been so ineluctably aimed at him, he
79 would be free. That would remove his head from the chopping block of this
delusion. (/IT 437-8)
Covenant's entrapment of his daughter into the responsible role of parent comes very close to being realized; the assumption of the Power of Command firmly places Elena in a seat of power unquestionably above that which Covenant occupies, giving her unlimited power, and because of her oath of the Land Service, unlimited responsibility.
She is, however, as much a flawed vessel for power as is Covenant; she also chooses to pass the responsibility to another, resurrecting dead High-Lord Kevin Landwaster and ordering him to confront Lord Foul in her stead. In doing so, Elena errs in a way reminiscent of Richard's breaking the Wizard's Second Rule in the Sword of Truth series, breaking the barrier confining the dead in their realm, damning both herself and
Landwaster to the spiritual possession of Lord Foul, and nearly fulfilling Covenant's plan to have her "replace his white gold at the crux of the Land's doom" (437).
Elena's lust for the Power of Command forces Covenant to accept both Elena's obvious flaws, and his responsibility for them. When father and daughter stand in the presence of EarthBlood, the source of the Power of Command, Covenant begins to sense
a wrongness which "crept insidiously across the whelming odor like an oblique defiance which seemed to succeed in spite of the immense force which it opposed, undercut, betrayed" (490). Though he is initially unable to pinpoint its source, the foulness grows:
"it appalled him. Despite the dizziness which unanchored his mind, he located the source
of the nameless reek of wrong. The ill was in Elena, in the High Lord herself' (492).
Covenant identifies the source of the wrong in Elena as his own sins returned, claiming that they result from the unholy bargain with which he coerced the Ranyhyn, great horses • 28 of the plains, to visit her mother once a year in atonement for his own sin of rape.
Though Elena deeply values her experiences with the Ranyhyn, Covenant sees them as inherently flawed by his own motives in sending them to her, claiming: "I was trying to give her [Lena] something, make it up to her somehow. But that doesn't work. When you've hurt someone that badly, you can't go around giving them gifts. That's arrogant and cruel" (407). Covenant claims that Elena's vision, her driving need to seize power, and her encompassing belief that she is destined to succeed flows directly from his own flawed motives and unethical bargain, poisoning her existence; his attempt to atone and to replace his presence in Lena and Elena's life backfires, sowing the seeds of madness, which remove them from reality, convince them of their uniqueness and, ultimately, prevent them from achieving their desires. David Popenoe suggests that the lack of a father will cause a child to lose one or the other "contradictory human desires: for communion, or the feeling of being included, connected, and related, and for agency, which entails individuality and independence." He claims that the loss of either can result in "a denuded and impaired humanity, an incomplete realization of the human potential"
(40). For Elena, this effectively turns her into a monster, actively seeking power wherever she may grasp it, and utterly convinced of her own potential and destiny to wield it, despite her very human flaws.
Covenant's love for Elena, and his fear of her corruption, provokes him to begin taking responsibility for his actions, causing his eventual metamorphosis into a suitable
28 In an attempt to atone for Lena's rape, Covenant used fear of white gold to force the Ranyhyn to visit Lena once every year. After Elena was born she began to take part in these yearly visits as well, though she was carried off one year by the Ranyhyn into the mountains, where she experienced things previously unseen by any in the land. Though the people of the Land prize knowledge, it would seem that what Elena learns there is not fit for humans, and becomes a corrupting force. 81 father figure and saviour for the Land. He admits his manipulation of others, "twisting them to suit purposes they haven't chosen," even his own daughter, telling her: "it never even occurred to me that I might be able to use you until.. .1 began to understand what you're capable of. I loved you before that. I love you now. I'm just an unconscionable bastard, and I used you, that's all. Now I regret it" (494). His admission is tantamount to a willingness to shoulder the burden of being the Land's only hope, taking responsibility for its survival or slaughter, something he has been unwilling to do up until this point.
The beginning of the final novel in the trilogy, The Power that Preserves, shows how much Covenant has truly changed; he puts aside the hysteria that overtakes him after his return from the Land at the conclusion of The Illearth War, ignores the danger to his own health, and saves a little girl from a rattlesnake bite, despite the fact that a recent wound in his mouth means sucking the poison from her wound will introduce it into his own body. This scene is echoed at the novel's conclusion, when Covenant, having defeated Lord Foul, seeks to destroy the tools with which the Despiser has waged war on the Land. Confronting the Illearth Stone, a magical object that gives Foul the ability to warp natural laws and create monsters, Covenant accepts responsibility for the Land's survival, willingly sacrificing his own life:
he knelt beside the Stone and put his arms around it like a man embracing
immolation. New blood from his poisoned lip ran down his chin, dripped into the
green and was vaporized.. .Like a lifeless and indomitable heart of fury, the
Illearth Stone pulsed in Covenant's arms, laboring in mindless, automatic reflex
to destroy him rather than be destroyed. And he hugged it to his breast like a
chosen fate. He could not slay the Corruption, but he could at least try to break this corruptive tool.. .Covenant embraced the Stone, gave himself to its fire, and
strove with the last tatters of his will to tear it asunder. (PtP 468-9)
Covenant's sacrifice is part revelation and part apotheosis; he is restored to human status in the real world by his rediscovered ability to feel and care for others and himself, despite his disease, and his willing immolation, partnered with his release of white-gold's power in destroying the Illearth Stone, raises him to god-like status within the Land. He fulfills his interpellated role as Berek HalfHand returned, becoming a legendary savior of the Land in his own right.
Covenant's transcendence is the final piece of the Christological motif that runs throughout Donaldson's trilogy, echoing Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and at the same time constructing its own complex hierarchy of fatherhood within Covenant himself. Like Frodo, Covenant undergoes the temptations of Christ: power, as provided by his white-gold wedding ring; satiation through the sensual recovery from leprosy that the land provides; and release from suffering, depicted in the omnipresent threat of
Covenant's suicide, particularly in his insistence on shaving while holding the razor in his half-hand. These temptations are particularly complex in Donaldson's work; while Frodo gives in to the temptation of the Ring, before finally rejecting its seductions and choosing friendship over power, Covenant must simultaneously reject the temptation of satiation the Land offers while at the same time learning to accept the Land as real, in an internal, spiritual sense, if not a concrete external reality. Like Thomas of the New Testament,
Covenant questions the comforting reality presented to him, but must eventually realize
83 that it is faith in the truth that is important;29 Covenant changes and grows as a man because he believes that the Land is real, not because of the Land's literal existence.
Covenant's willing self-sacrifice to destroy the Ill-Earth Stone and his spiritual resurrection in the real world, like Frodo's return from Mount Doom, is similarly symbolic of Christ's martyrdom and return from the dead; more interesting, however, is the resemblance between Covenant and Christ implied by this resurrection. Like Christ, who exists both as the son of God and the incarnation of Him, Covenant comes to simultaneously occupy the role of both father and son,30 though the hierarchy that
Covenant must overcome between these two positions more closely echoes the power dynamic between father and son in classical mythology. In taking responsibility for his own actions and for the wellbeing of the Land, denying his previous moral ambivalence, and learning to release and accept his emotions, Covenant confronts and topples the hierarchy within himself, replacing the tyrant father with the fairer hierarchy of the son, and mirroring Richard's usurpation of Darken Rahl in the Sword of Truth series.
Both Richard and Covenant must struggle to complete the final leg of their journey as men: having overthrown the dominant power, they themselves become custodians31 of power. For Covenant, who returns to what Donaldson ostensibly qualifies as the "real" world, this transformation is situated internally, and in the realm of potential; in freeing his emotions and accepting himself, Covenant has once again
29 Thomas the Apostle questions the resurrection of Jesus, citing the need to see the wounds of suffering on the body of the resurrected Lord before he can believe the impossible (John 20:25). The resurrected Christ presents himself to Thomas, admonishing: "because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed; blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed" (John 20:29). 30 Arguably, the power which Covenant draws upon through the white gold is analogous to the Holy Spirit, which would mean that Covenant represents the entire Holy Trinity. 31 I will be providing a much more detailed explanation of both custodial power and custodial masculinity in chapter three of my thesis, where 1 will also explore the idea of fair hierarchies as alternatives to selfish ones. 84 regained the power over his own life, and the joy that accompanies it: "he was not a leper—not just a leper.. .He had a heart which could still pump blood, bones which could still bear his weight; he had himself...He smiled because he was alive" (480). Covenant's heroic rescue of the young girl at the beginning of The Power that Preserves prompts a similar, though minor, rebirth within the community: his heroic status blocks the community's attempt to have his land rezoned in order to force him to move, and he gains limited acceptance as a result of his selfless act. Though the changes may seem small, Covenant has triumphed, reasserting his identity as a moral, responsible man, and not merely a powerless outcast.
Richard's sole existence in a world which is, at least in part, created as an extension of his own internal struggles, requires that his journey toward masculine identity and custodial power is played out both on a personal level, and a cultural one; he accepts his lineage, accepts himself, and accepts his potential, but he must also accept his responsibility as a bearer of power. In unseating his father, and becoming the Master of
D'Hara, Richard must accept his responsibility to instill a new moral order in place of
Darken Rahl's tyranny, and protect that order from those who would attempt to overthrow it. While this may involve the ruling of others, and the establishment of a hierarchy, Richard's personal values instill the responsibility in him to insure that all hierarchies of power that he imposes are fair, and that his position at the patriarchal helm is custodial, rather than selfish. Like Covenant, Richard must seize his potential as a complete person, using that self-acceptance to provide a cultural touchstone which may inspire others to critique unfair hierarchies and overthrow them in turn.
85 Chapter Three
Custodialism and Sacrifice: Caregivers, Teachers, and Saviours in Harry Potter and
The Fionavar Tapestry
Ideas of fair hierarchies, custodial care, and self-sacrifice unite the concepts of masculine morality and fatherhood in modern epic fantasy, though these concepts derive not only from fairy tale, mythology, and epic, but also from the Christian Bible. Fantasy shares a number of traits with Christianity: both work simultaneously in a literal and a metaphorical, analogous, or parabolic fashion; both function on the basis of belief, though fantasy only requires that belief to be durational, lasting only as long as the work; and both typically detail the battle between good and evil, primarily as it exists within humanity itself, or as a projection of personal struggle with temptation. Most important, however, is their shared Christology: it enables authors to examine not only a moral masculinity tested by temptation, as is Jesus in the desert, or the relationship between the
Father and His Son, but also to explore how men can work to create just hierarchies with those around him, and serve as caregiver and teacher, nurturer, ruler, and even messiah.
The relationship between fantasy and Christology is complex, and depends upon fantasy's ability to disconnect from consensus reality and create a space dependent upon a necessary suspension of disbelief, thereby allowing it to engage with difficult and complicated ideas.1 By bringing readers into a world that requires them to accept and
1 While the suspension of disbelief is common to all genres of fiction, fantasy requires the greatest removal from consensus reality, positing not only an alternate reality, but an alternate reality jarringly different from our own, and grounded in rules of magic that simply cannot be applied to our own world. The payoff for this risky investment, which chances the reader rejecting the story altogether, is the ability to engage with difficult ideas which are made easier to accept by the reader's implicit acceptance of the world itself. In believe alternate rules, the ground is laid for a reconsideration of what the reader sees as
"Truth." Joseph Pearce notes that this is precisely the way Tolkien felt about fantasy, particularly the mythical: "For most modern critics a myth is merely another word for a lie or a falsehood, something which is intrinsically not true. For Tolkien, myth had virtually the opposite meaning. It was the only way that certain transcendent truths could be expressed in intelligible form" (Man & Myth XIII). Tolkien, a devout Catholic, applied his belief in the transcendent truth of myth to the articles of his own faith:
The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all
the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic,
beautiful and moving: 'mythical' in their perfect, self-contained significance; and
t 2 among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe.
("On Fairy Stories" 65)
Tolkien's belief that the Gospels are inherently fantastic shaped The Lord of the Rings, creating what Tolkien admitted to be "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision" (Carpenter 172). Though he
"dislike[d] Allegory—the conscious and intentional allegory," Tolkien nonetheless believed that "any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language" (Carpenter 145). Furthermore, Tolkien suggested that "the more 'life' a story has the more readily will it be susceptible of allegorical interpretations: while the better a deliberate allegory is made the more nearly will it be acceptable just as a story" (145); more philosophical terms, I am suggesting that fantasy departs from the "correspondence" or actual material facts of our world, and instead uses "coherence," or the solidity and realness of a consensus fantasy reality in order to reach "transcendence" or "Truth." 2 Tolkien defines eucatastrophe as "a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur" ("On Fairy Stories" 62), "the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears... because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth" (Carpenter 100). He believed that the most important and powerful eucatastrophes were the Birth and Resurrection of Christ. 87 this view is almost certainly the reason that Tolkien's greatest work of fiction is inextricably linked with religious allegory, despite the fact that Tolkien managed to keep explicit religion from his novels, and instead examined details of Christology through his characters.
Tolkien's exploration of the figure of Christ in The Lord of the Rings has two distinct facets: surrogacy and sacrifice. The surrogate father is an important and longstanding tradition in fantasy,3 arising directly from the absence or abjection of the natural father, as discussed in Chapter Two. There are obvious, plot-related reasons for this absence, aside from the societal reflection noted previously: a hero cannot properly undertake an adventure with his parents in tow; he must be free to decide his own course and develop his identity without the problematic protectiveness that would accompany
"his parents' presence. The parental role, however, and particularly the pedagogical and nurturing functions, cannot be ignored in terms of the hero's mental and emotional
development. The surrogate resolves this question by educating the hero and
accompanying him at least partway through his great adventure, though leaving him
alone to undertake important decisions. For Tolkien, this meant creating the aged wizard
Gandalf, who is a wise and capable teacher. In Gandalf, Frodo finds a mentor and a
leader, a model who holds immense power in his own right, and who wields that power justly. Frodo learns from his example, but, as with any hero, he is ultimately forced to
make choices, and bear the burden of power on his own.
3 Interestingly, Attebery notes the same thing at work in SF: "In SF by men, one recent trend has been the dismantling of traditional father figures and their replacement by various groupings of mentors who may be male, female, or other" (Decoding Gender 8). Notably in fantasy, it is almost always a male mentor, though the hero often seeks advice from females, as Richard does with Kahlan in the Sword of Truth series. Though other men serve as temporary surrogate figures4 for Frodo, particularly during Gandalf s absences,5 they tend to serve fraternally, rather than paternally. Primary among these figures is Aragorn, also called Strider, who takes the hobbits from Bree to
Rivendell, and leads the Fellowship of the Ring after Gandalf s fall; his role as a surrogate is somewhat unsuccessful, however, as he fails to ensure that the young hobbits take proper precautions and respect the gravity of their situation while journeying from
Bree, a negligence which results in the discovery of the hobbits by the Ringwraiths and in
Frodo's grave injury and consequent near-consumption by Sauron's corruptive power.
This apparent failure is reinforced by his inability to keep the "family" of the Fellowship together. His laxity in identifying the changes the Ring provokes in Boromir results in
Frodo's fleeing the Fellowship and undertaking the Ring's destruction with only Sam at his side. Boromir is killed by ores; the hobbits Merry and Pippin are captured; and
Aragorn is left leading only a third of the original fellowship: Legolas, Gimli, and himself.6
Aragorn's failure as a surrogate is not permanent, however; it results from his unwillingness to assume his responsibility as heir to the throne of Gondor, and topple the unjust hierarchy that has sprung up in his absence.7 The willingness to accept his duty
4 Arguably, this includes Bilbo, who serves as Frodo's surrogate father through the majority of his childhood. However, he disappears before Frodo's departure from the Shire, and only briefly reappears at Rivendell before the greater adventure begins 5 Gandalf is waylaid twice by the powers of evil; he fails to meet the hobbits in Bree because the master of his wizarding order, Saruman, has been subverted by Sauron and seeks Gandalf s allegiance or death, and though he meets them once again in Rivendell, his fight with the demonic balrog in the mines of Moria takes him away from Frodo's side once again. 6 The Fellowship of the Ring left Rivendell with nine members: Gandalf, Aragorn, Boromir of Gondor, Gimli the dwarf, Legolas the elf, and the four Shire hobbits: Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin. 7 This is somewhat more notable in Peter Jackson's film adaptation of LOTR, in which Aragorn heavily doubts his own worth and ability to assume his heritage. Though much more sure of himself in the novels, there is a distinct and implicit question surrounding the fact that Aragorn has chosen not to take the throne and mobilize Gondor against Sauron. and actively oppose Mordor signifies Aragorn's move toward responsibility and a just hierarchy, and enables him to be more successful as a caregiver, not just to Frodo, but to
Gondor. Though he may have failed at being the surrogate, he does not fail at being the father; his acceptance of his obligations and responsibilities as King of Gondor, and father to his people, allows him to harness the power of the Dead Men of Dunharrow, bringing them to the war of Minas Tirith. Aragorn is also responsible for rallying the forces of men against the much larger armies of Sauron in order to divert the Dark Lord's attention and buy Frodo and Sam time to reach Mount Doom and destroy the Ring, something only an accepted king of Gondor could have done. In doing so, he accepts the possibility that he and his army will be killed, deeming their sacrifice justified if it results in the success of Frodo's mission.
Aragorn's descent into the Paths of the Dead is one of the three major custodial sacrifices8 which shape The Lord of the Rings, with the other two being Gandalf s sacrifice for the Fellowship of the Ring in the Mines of Moria, and Frodo's sacrifice at his quest's conclusion. Peter Kreeft suggests that this is a direct result of Tolkien's splitting of the Christ figure into "the Old Testament threefold Messianic symbolism of prophet (Gandalf), priest (Frodo), and king (Aragorn)," which "correspond to the three distinctively human powers of the soul, as discovered by nearly every psychologist from
Plato to Freud: head, heart, and hands" (222).9 This separation allows Tolkien to consider three different dimensions of sacrifice. For Aragorn, the sacrifice is
81 say "major sacrifices" because there are also sacrifices among the minor characters, each of which emphasizes the theme of dying for another: Boromir, for instance, repents for his coveting of the Ring, and dies trying to save Merry and Pippin from capture, and Theoden dies honourably, having thrown off the influence of Saruman and led the men of Rohan to the aid of Gondor. 9 Kreeft also suggests that this split is reflected in mind, emotion, and will, those these terms seem slightly less credible; in particular, the suggestion that Frodo is lacking in will seems dubious, as no other could have made it as close to Mount Doom carrying the ring as did he. metaphorical; he must seek the Paths of the Dead, entering as Strider the Ranger from the
North, and daring the embrace of death, before emerging as Aragorn, heir to Isildur and the throne of Gondor. The sacrifice of Gandalf the Grey is entirely literal, as Tolkien himself pointed out: "Gandalf really 'died', and was changed: for that seems to me the only real cheating, to represent anything that can be called 'death' as making no difference. 'I am G. the White, who has returned from death'" (Carpenter 201). He stands against an evil beast called a Balrog, barring its way while the rest of the Fellowship escapes, and is dragged to his death as a result. His fall is not permanent, however, as he is brought back, resurrected. Though Tolkien saw Gandalf as something more than a mortal, his sacrifice is no less pure for his greater power, and so he "sacrifice[s] himself,
[is] accepted, and enhanced, and returned" (202) as Gandalf the White.
Frodo's sacrifice is neither as literal as Gandalf s, nor as metaphorical as
Aragorn's, but is by far the most perilous, particularly in Christian terms; Frodo endangers not only his life in taking the Ring to Mordor, but his soul as well. Over the course of a journey which both Joseph Pearce and Peter Kreeft liken to Christ's Way of the Cross, Tolkien examines not merely the physical difficulty of the sacrifice, but the emotional requirements of it. Pearce suggests that "all of a sudden one sees that it was not so much the weight of the Cross that caused Christ to stumble, but the weight of evil, symbolized by Tolkien as the Eye of Sauron" (112). While I would argue that the weight of evil is somewhat more directly emphasized in the Ring itself, which becomes a heavier and heavier burden as Frodo approaches Mount Doom, Pearce's note on Tolkien's exploration of the figure of Christ is nonetheless astute; Tolkien is able to use Frodo to better explain what Christ endured during his sacrifice. Tolkien not only uses Frodo's quest to illuminate Christ's burden, he also uses the sacrifice of Christ reflexively to give context to Frodo's apparent failure at Mount Doom.
While in a completely literal sense, Frodo is unsuccessful in his quest, and it is, in fact,
Gollum who bears the Ring into the fire, Frodo's inability to bear the weight of the Ring and the Eye without faltering is not a moral failure. Tolkien notes this in a letter to
Eileen Elgar:
I do not think that Frodo's was a moral failure. At the last moment the pressure of
the Ring would reach its maximum—impossible, I should have said, for any one
to resist, certainly after long possession, months of increasing torment, and when
starved and exhausted.. .Moral failure can only be asserted, I think, when a man's
effort or endurance falls short of his limits, and the blame decreases as that limit
is closer approached.. .1 do not myself see that the breaking of his mind and will
under demonic pressure after torment was any more a moral failure than the
breaking of his body would have been—say, by being strangled by Gollum, or
crushed by a falling rock. (Carpenter 326-7)
The ultimate proof of Frodo's success lies in his worthiness and reception of divine grace—of eucatastrophe. He is rescued, not once, but twice from hopeless situations: first, he escapes both She lob's sting and capture by ores; and second, after the Ring has been destroyed, and he and Sam stand in the center of the destruction awaiting death, they are rescued by Eagles, descending like angels from above. These rescues stand in stark contrast to the demises of the story's true moral failures: Gollum, who falls into the
92 crevice of Mount Doom unrepentant; Denethor, Steward of Gondor, who burns himself alive in despair; and Saruman, who is slain by his own tool, Grima Wormtongue.10
Frodo's worthiness is established in the novels through what Richard Purtill calls
"the traditional 'feminine' virtues, such as compassion, concern for people and relationships, supportiveness, rather than 'masculine' traits, such as aggressiveness, desire to win, refusal to be dependent" (88). He cites Frodo's unfailing forgiveness and compassion for Gollum, despite his obvious flaws, the way he generally avoids violence of any kind, including the cleanup of the Shire that must take place after the Hobbits return home, and the care and support he shows for those Hobbits, particularly Sam and
Bilbo. What is important, however, is not the gendering of these attributes, as Purtill himself later admits, but their relationship to Christ: "for Christians, Christ himself is the supreme model, and Christ was the man who laid down his life for others" (96). Like
Christ, "Frodo undertook his quest out of love—to save the world he knew from disaster at his own expense, if he could; and also in complete humility, acknowledging that he was wholly inadequate to the task" (Carpenter 326). Despite the likelihood of failure and death, Frodo still follows the custodial path, choosing to sacrifice himself for those he cares about.
Many modern fantasy authors continue to use the Christological, custodial and
sacrificial framework Tolkien set out, creating heroes who embody the same virtues that
Frodo, Gandalf, and Aragorn represent; these models are almost always altered, however,
often significantly, to better integrate the passion, humility, and sacrifice of the messiah with a more modern understanding of masculine identity, and a consideration for the
10 Richard Purtill discusses this in significantly more detail in J.R.R. Tolkien: Myth, Morality and Religion (1984). 93 motives behind sacrifice that arise when the hero is not as directly representative of the divine, but rather a believable, flawed, mortal man. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series and Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry are excellent examples of this reconfiguration; though Rowling and Kay use surrogate father figures, custodial men intent on educating and caring for their heroes through just hierarchies and sacrifice, these relationships and events are often problematized or mirrored in negative examples of the same apparent behaviour type. Modern fantasy worlds thus function not only on the axis between good and evil, but also on the contrast between just and unjust hierarchies, real and false surrogacy, and both selfish and genuine sacrifice.
Harry Potter's need for surrogacy is perhaps the most compelling in modern epic fantasy. Like most fantasy heroes, Harry is an orphan, but Rowling's choice to begin his story not at the cusp of adulthood, as do Tolkien, Donaldson, Kay, and Goodkind, but at the onset of adolescence, makes it necessary for Harry to have surrogates around him as literal parent figures, and not just advisors and teachers. Ostensibly, this should not present a problem; after Harry's parents are killed protecting him from the evil Lord
Voldemort, in the first of many powerful custodial sacrifices,11 he is placed into the care of his maternal aunt, Petunia, and her husband Vernon Dursley. This situation not only provides him with parents, but even a sibling named Dudley, completing what should be a happy, nuclear family. The reality, however, is somewhat darker, and bears a distinct resemblance to the tale of Cinderella; Harry becomes little more than a domestic servant
" I will not be examining this sacrifice at length, as it actually lies outside of the main storyline, despite the fact that Harry is allowed to view it at one point in Deathly Hallows. It is notable, however, because the lingering protection Harry's mother's sacrifice gives to Harry allows him to survive Voldemort's attacks, both as a child, and an adolescent. It also plays an important part at the end of the series, when Voldemort has used Harry's blood to resurrect himself, and thus carries a tiny bit of that residual sacrifice, preventing him from destroying his nemesis. It is also a notable sacrifice because it is the only major sacrifice of the series undertaken by a woman. for the Dursleys, cleaning, cooking, and living in a tiny cupboard beneath the stairs, where he can easily be ignored.
The Dursleys serve as the first negative example in Rowling's almost continuous comparisons between just and unjust hierarchies, and false and genuine custodialism.
Despite being Harry's surrogate parents, and literal aunt, uncle, and cousin, all three members of the family treat Harry as unjustly as they can without violating their original agreement to take him in and raise him. He is forbidden contact with anyone outside the family lest his "deviant" wizardry manifest, and the Dursleys themselves view him as a bother before his powers develop, and as a freak afterwards. They make it clear that he exists only by their sufferance, and that the few luxuries he enjoys, like the freedom to move about the house and eat with the rest of the family could disappear at any time:
"'I'm warning you now, boy—any funny business, anything at all—and you'll be in that cupboard from now until Christmas'" (Philosopher's 23). So begins a series of instances between Harry and the Dursleys, in which Harry is continually threatened with expulsion from the house, or confinement within it; in fact, the implicit threat that Harry is being kept only because the Dursleys are somehow coerced is made clear in The Order of the
Phoenix, when, just as Vernon Dursley prepares to expel Harry from the house forever, a letter arrives addressed to Petunia, stating only '"remember my last, Petunia,'" after which Harry's aunt can only quaver '"the boy—the boy will have to stay, Vernon'" (41).
The troubled conception of surrogacy introduced through the Dursleys is repeated throughout the series, most notably through the characters of Sirius Black and Alastor
95 "Mad-Eye" Moody.12 For Black, this false surrogacy is not vindictive, but rather wish- fulfilling; having lost his best friend, Harry's father James, and had his own youth stolen from him by the false imprisonment he suffers, Sirius sees Harry as James reborn, treating him more as a brother than as his rightful godson:
"He's not James, Sirius!"
"I'm perfectly clear who he is, thanks, Molly," said Sirius coldly.
"I'm not sure you are!" said Mrs. Weasley. "Sometimes the way you talk
about him, it's as though you think you've got your best friend back!" (Order 84)
The false surrogacy Harry experiences at the hands of the false Alastor Moody is much more sinister than the simple wish-fulfillment of Black; the imposter, Barty Crouch Jr., quite deliberately plants himself as a friend and mentor to Harry, feeding him information
13 that, though it helps Harry complete the difficult tasks of the Tri-wizard Tournament, and even win the competition, ultimately leads to the death of a fellow participant and
Voldemort's return to the flesh.14 The return itself is a dark inversion of both Christ's resurrection and Harry's, employing the bones, flesh, and blood of others in a parasitic fashion in order to create a new vessel for Voldemort's spirit to inhabit. When Harry returns from the Dark Lord's resurrection, bringing with him the body of Cedric Diggory, the false Moody drags Harry from Dumbledore's side and illuminates his role in the events leading up to Voldemort's return: 12 This is somewhat of a misnomer; it is not Moody who is the anti-surrogate, but rather Barty Crouch Jr., who, through magical means, assumes Moody's identity in order to take up the defense against the dark arts teaching position at Hogwarts and get closer to Harry. 13 An ancient competition between the three primary wizarding schools of Europe. 14 Harry's sense of fair play causes him to insist that Cedric Diggory grab hold of the winner's trophy at the same time and thereby share first place in the competition. Unbeknownst to either boy, the cup is a portkey, a magical object used to teleport people, and the two boys find themselves in a graveyard. There, Voldemort's servant Peter Pettigrew, also known as Wormtail, kills Diggory and uses Harry's blood, to magically reconstitute Voldemort's body and give him new life. "Who put your name in the Goblet of Fire,15 under the name of a different school?
I did. Who frightened off every person I thought might try to hurt you or prevent
you winning the Tournament? I did. Who nudged Hagrid into showing you the
dragons? I did. Who helped you see the only way you could beat the dragon? I
did." (Goblet 587)
Moody/Crouch Jr. makes it clear that his motivation was not Harry's health, happiness, and wellbeing, but his own twisted ambitions:
"The Dark Lord didn't manage to kill you, Potter, and he so wanted to,"
whispered Moody. "Imagine how he will reward me, when he finds I have done it
for him. I gave you to him—the thing he needed above all to regenerate—and
then I killed you for him. I will be honoured beyond all other Death Eaters."
(588-9)
The trials Harry must endure at the hands of false surrogates stands in stark contrast to the genuine affection and belonging he finds at the Hogwarts School for
Witchcraft and Wizardry. This is due, at least in part, to the schoolboy genre in which
Rowling is writing; in The Heirs of Tom Brown: The English School Story (1982), Isabel
Quigley suggests that "the solidness and permanence of school then made it seem an unmoving centre in a shifting world, common ground in a literal as well as a metaphorical sense. It took on a sort of familial, even ancestral importance, with mystical overtones" (6). In the world of Harry Potter, this family tie is embodied in the school houses, which are characterized by the original founders of the school: Rowena
Ravenclaw, who prized intelligence and wit, Helga Hufflepuff who prized hard work and
15 The Goblet of Fire is a magical object which chooses who will participate in each tri-wizard tournament. loyalty, Godric Gryffindor, who prized bravery and chivalry, and Salazar Slytherin, who prized ambition and cunning. It is in Gryffindor house that Harry finds his place of belonging. While Chantel Lavoie emphasizes the competitive nature of school houses, stating that "to know that one's house is the best is to believe that the others are inferior,"
(37), this exclusionary view notes only the external side of the house relationship; being in Gryffindor house gives Harry the lineage and connection he craves, even making him an heir to its founder, which is accentuated by his ability to pull Gryffindor's own sword from the sorting hat when he finds himself in peril at the end of Chamber of Secrets.16
Harry's closest friends, Ron and Hermione, not only strengthen Harry's connection to his house, as they are in it as well, but represent a family within the larger family of Gryffindor, and a completion of Harry's own character. As Kreeft points out, this is in part due to the splitting of the three human powers of the soul into heart, hands, and mind; Harry, like his stag patronus,17 represents bravery, nobility, and strength of heart, but requires two others to complete him: Hermione, the brilliant, and often bossy • 18 * mind of the group, balances Harry's often rash and poorly-considered plans; and Ron is
Harry's stalwart, unwavering companion, earthy and loyal like his patronus, the dog.
Through Ron, Harry also connects to the rest of exceptionally large Weasley clan, who accept Harry as one of their own, and serve as a powerful antithesis to the Dursleys; while Harry's relatives privilege cleanliness, elitism, and a narrowly conceived normalcy, 16 This not only enables Harry to conquer a basilisk and thus defeat Voldemort once again, but also to dispel any worry he has about his lineage, as the entire novel revolves around the worry that Harry may be the heir to Slytherin, and thus in the wrong house altogether. By pulling the sword from the hat, Harry reaffirms his own identity, and his belonging in Gryffindor house. 17 A patronus is a magical animal brought forth by a wizard or witch for protection; each animal is a representation of the person's spirit and personality, like a totem. 18 Despite Hermione's encyclopedic knowledge, her patronus is not an owl, but an otter; this is somewhat fitting, however, as Hermione's strength is not just her vast repository of knowledge, which the owl often symbolizes, but the curiousity and the adeptness with which she solves problems. 98 the Weasleys are accepting, their house is a cluttered, homey retreat, and they accept and encourage individuality in their children. Though this encouragement finds some obvious boundaries, such as Mrs. Weasley's disapproval of her eldest son Bill's earring and ponytail (Goblet 59), or her continual frustration with the gags and pranks perpetrated by the twins, Fred and George, both parents allow their children to develop their own unique personalities and use their authority only when misbehaviour threatens the safety of the family or the individual.
Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts, fosters and encourages individuality in a similar way to the Weasleys, championing fair play and equality amongst his students,19 and treating them with both respect and fairness. Karen Manners
Smith suggests that these virtues in the headmaster stem from the school story genre
Rowling adopts, suggesting that "like Hughes's Arnold,20 J.K. Rowling's Albus
Dumbledore is wiser, more powerful, and more influential than any mortal could possibly be," though she notes that Dumbledore is somehow "humanized by his comic sensibility and the rather fey eccentricity he sometime [sic] exhibits" (78). However, Dumbledore's quirkiness evidences how highly he prizes individuality, and thus why he allows his students, and particularly Harry, to come to their own conclusions, experience their own adventures, and choose their own paths. Though this occasionally (in fact, once per novel, for the first few) results in Harry's moving outside of Dumbledore's protective
19 It could be argued that the apparent favouritism Dumbledore shows Harry (and perhaps Ron and Hermione) implies a lack of equality between all Hogwarts students; this is untrue. Dumbledore quite carefully avoids choosing paths for any and all of his students, instead providing comfort, care, and protection for them where necessary, and education for those who seek it. This is made particularly obvious in the way Dumbledore attempts to protect and reform Draco Malfoy in Half-Blood Prince, remaining unwilling to give up on the boy despite his apparent treachery. 20 Thomas Hughes is often credited with writing the first true schoolboy novel, Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), in which Hughes inserted the character of Dr. Arnold, his own school headmaster, of whom he was quite fond. 99 sphere, it contributes directly to the construction of Harry's identity and morality, forcing him to enter moral adulthood, despite his young age, and confront and answer ethical questions that will define his moral masculinity.21 Only after Harry has made his choices does Dumbledore appear and offer him aid in understanding them: "in Dumbledore's words we hear Harry Potter's life lessons about courage, compassion, and integrity"
(Manners Smith 78-9).
In the later novels of the series, Dumbledore's integrity comes under attack, and
Harry must come to grips with the realization that his mentor is not the symbol of pure moral guidance that he once believed. Harry learns that Dumbledore once, in his youth, championed precisely the anti-muggle sentiments against which he is now fighting, and worked alongside the evil wizard Grindelwald, establishing the dogma that later shaped
Grindelwald's reign of terror. Rather than destroying his conception of Dumbledore entirely, however, knowledge of the misdeeds forces Harry to abandon the black and white morality with which he has viewed the world, and gives him the ability to accept what he later learns of Snape's22 courage, and even of the sad, lonely child at
Voldemort's core.
Harry is not without his own faults and mistakes, and he makes a number of disastrous ones, which might have been avoided had he remained under his surrogate caregivers' watchful eyes. These errors vary greatly in their severity and consequence;
21 This is identical to the way that Gandalf disappears before Frodo must decide to leave the fellowship and set out for Mordor on his own. 22 Snape is the potions teacher at Hogwarts, and in many ways possesses a classic villain profile: greasy, pale-faced, black-clad, and ill-tempered. This, and Snape's intense dislike for Harry (which grows largely from a childhood hatred for Harry's father), leads Harry to continually accuse Snape of treachery and deceit, despite the potions master's stalwart loyalty to Dumbledore. 23 The revelation of Dumbledore's missteps also humanizes him to a certain degree; like Lancelot, he is both the best knight, and the one with a stained conscience, reflecting a distinctly human ability for failure and wrongdoing. 100 smaller infractions, such as Harry's unfounded presumption of Snape's guilt and treachery in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, in which Harry believes that
Snape is attempting to betray Dumbledore and steal the stone, often give Harry the opportunity to prove himself as a hero, while the more severe mistakes result in the endangerment of Harry and his friends, and even the death of his godfather, Sirius Black.
Black is of particular interest in terms of surrogacy and custodialism because of the way in which Rowling reverses standard character markers, both Black's personal moral characteristics, which can denote him as hero or villain, and the way these characteristics appear to both the reader and the rest of Rowling's fictional world, both of which problematize Black's personal morality and the surrogate relationship he has with
Harry. Veronica Schanoes suggests that Black's character markers are most obvious when he is considered alongside Severus Snape, as both characters "complicate a black and white moral schema" (135); while Snape shows the reader that a person of questionable characters may become a hero, "Black forces [the reader] to acknowledge the potential for violence and ruthlessness that can exist in a good person," giving the two characters "more in common than either would like to admit" (135). Both men, for example, are initially depicted as villains. For Snape, this villainy arises largely because of his appearance and intense personal dislike for Harry, which grows directly from a past rivalry with Harry's father, James; first described as having "greasy black hair, a hooked nose and sallow skin" (Philosopher's 94), and "swooping around like an overgrown bat" (209), Snape fits the profile of a standard fairy tale villain. His intense dislike for Harry, which remains largely unexplained for the first half of the series, sends a further narrative cue to the reader, for if Harry is the hero, and Snape dislikes him, then Snape must be a villain. This is similar to the way in which Rowling chooses to introduce Black; because neither Harry nor the greater wizarding world knows the truth surrounding his incarceration,24 they all believe that Black has escaped from the wizard prison, Azkaban, in order to kill Harry, and thus finish the job Voldemort started when he killed Harry's parents and attempted to kill Harry himself. This villainous persona is reinforced by Black's appearance: "a mass of filthy, matted hair hung to his elbows. If eyes hadn't been shining out of the deep, dark sockets, he might have been a corpse.. .His yellow teeth were bared in a grin. It was Sirius Black" (Prisoner 248).
Though Harry discovers Black's innocence and accepts him as his godfather, and thus his legal surrogate parent, the relationship that develops between them is less paternal than fraternal, a substitute for what Sirius lost when James died, and it is more often Harry who plays the part of the older brother, reining in or protecting his sibling.
This begins at the very moment in which Harry discovers the truth about Sirius' innocence, when he must stop his godfather and Lupin25 from murdering the real villain,
Pettigrew: "'NO!' Harry yelled. He ran forwards, placing himself in front of Pettigrew, facing the wands. 'You can't kill him.. .1 don't reckon my dad would've wanted his best friends to become killers'" (Prisoner 275). Harry's wish to protect Sirius ultimately leads to Black's demise; despite both Dumbledore and Snape's warnings that the
24 Sirius is arrested for the murder of Peter Pettigrew, and a crowd of non-magical (muggle) bystanders shortly after Harry's parents are murdered by Voldemort. It is generally accepted that Sirius led Voldemort to the Potters, when in fact it was Pettigrew that did so before faking his own death at Black's hands and going into hiding. 25 Lupin was the fourth member of a small group of friends at Hogwarts, which included James Potter, Black, and Pettigrew; he returns to Hogwarts as Harry's defense against the dark arts teacher in Prisoner of Azkaban, and realizes Black's innocence slightly before Harry himself. 102 connection26 between Harry and Voldemort may allow the Dark Lord access to Harry's mind, Harry rashly follows a vision he has of Sirius being tortured and rushes to his aid, only to find he has been duped into putting both himself and his friends in peril. Though the arrival of Sirius and four other members of the anti-Voldemort Order of the Phoenix,
27 seems to promise an escape from his mistake, Voldemort's Death-Eaters are skilled duellers, and the Order does not triumph unscathed; a number of them suffer minor injuries, and Sirius is killed.
Sirius Black's death is one of two moments in the Harry Potter series that depicts distinctly troubled and complicated images of sacrifice, which both articulate the differences between custodial and sacrificial masculinity, and examine issues of motive within sacrifice. Though Sirius comes to Harry's rescue and dies as a result, his sacrifice is neither chosen, nor intended, nor are his custodial intentions completely pure. Rowling depicts Black as an energetic, impulsive man, held back from the struggle by his position as a fugitive, and unwillingly confined to the headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix by
Dumbledore himself (Order 79). Black's affinity for excitement and adventure further complicate his frustration at being confined to the point where he actively envies Harry, despite the dangers his godson may face: "Personally, I'd have welcomed a Dementor attack. A deadly struggle for my soul would have broken the monotony nicely. You think you've had it bad, at least you've been able to get out and about, stretch your legs, get into a few fights ... I've been stuck inside for a month." (79)
26 Voldemort's failed attempt to kill Harry as an infant not only causes the Dark Lord's downfall, but also establishes a mental link between the two of them that neither are completely aware of until Order of the Phoenix, but which Voldemort is able to manipulate through his own magical powers. 27 The Death-Eaters are Voldemort's closest circle of servants, entrusted with the most difficult of tasks when the Dark Lord is unable or unwilling to complete the task himself. 103 This reckless wish for excitement convolutes Black's intentions when he comes to
Harry's rescue; rather than appearing simply to save his surrogate son, Sirius willingly embraces battle with the Death-Eaters, taking needless chances and revelling in the
• 28 potential danger of the moment. This excitement and inability to act in a serious, adult fashion not only undermines the custodial reasons behind Sirius' rescue attempt, it inadvertently causes his own death:
Harry saw Sirius duck Bellatrix's jet of red light: he was laughing at her.
"Come on, you can do better than that!" he yelled, his voice echoing
around the cavernous room.
The second jet of light hit him squarely on the chest.
The laughter had not quite died from his face, but his eyes widened in shock.
(Order 710)
The troublesome questions of intention that Black's death raises are echoed in the
sacrifice of his counterpart, Severus Snape. Despite Harry's doubt of Snape, which turns
to a bitter, seemingly justified hatred after Snape murders Dumbledore at the end of
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Snape is neither a traitor to the Order's cause,
nor committed to Harry's destruction; the truth is the opposite, though Harry does not
discover this until after he watches Snape die at Voldemort's hand, and enters the
memories which Snape leaves him.29 From these memories, Harry learns that Snape was
in fact carrying out Dumbledore's final orders, protecting both Harry and the causes of
life and freedom that he champions by acting as a double agent and spying on Voldemort
28 This suggests that Rowling intended the name to have not only celestial, but also ironic, connotations. 29 In Rowling's world, memories exist in a liquid form that can be contained and revisited. Snape's final act is to carefully extract his own memories and give them to Harry. 104 from within the ranks of the Death Eaters. Though this leads directly to an ironically justified30 death at Voldemort's hands, which could easily be read as a willing sacrifice on Harry's behalf, Snape's captured memories depict much more selfish motives, and even outside coercion of his care and sacrifice for Harry; deeply in love with Lily Potter,
Snape is shattered by her murder at Voldemort's hands, and Dumbledore is able to coerce
31 • him into becoming Harry's protector, telling him '"if you loved Lily Evans, if you truly loved her, than your way forward is clear... You know how and why she died. Make sure it was not in vain. Help me protect Lily's son'" (Deathly Hallows 544). Though Snape initially rejects the idea, he eventually gives in for his love of Lily and agrees, requiring only that Dumbledore never speak of it to another soul:
"very well. But never—never tell, Dumbledore! This must be between us! Swear
it! I cannot bear ... especially Potter's son ... I want your word!"
"My word, Severus, that I will never reveal the best of you?" Dumbledore
sighed, looking down into Snape's ferocious, anguished face. 'If you insist"
(545). 32
It is atonement for his crimes, crimes which contributed to the death of his only love, rather than selfless care for Harry and the Order's ideals, that motivate Snape to undertake the dangers and hardships of the double agent, supplying the Order with information that may help destroy the Dark Lord and thus preserve Harry's life. This is not to impugn Snape's actions, by which he may be measured as one of the most heroic 30 Ironically justified in the sense that while Voldemort kills Snape despite his belief that he is an ally, the Dark Lord would have executed Snape immediately, and with some justification, had he known that he was a spy for Dumbledore. 31 Evans was Lily's maiden name; Snape knew and loved Lily long before she met and married James Potter. 32 It was, in fact, Snape who overheard and reported the prophecy which Voldemort interpreted to mean that Harry would be his nemesis, thus inadvertently causing the deaths of both Lily and James Potter. 105 figures in the series, suffering not only physical death, but the scorn and hatred of his misunderstanding peers, and the necessity of killing Dumbledore, the man who helped him begin reclaiming his soul. My goal here is not to argue that Snape is not a hero, in his own way, but rather that the specific motives behind his custodial and sacrificial care of Harry are problematic in their selfish and unwilling nature.
Snape's memories reveal not only the motives behind his own sacrifice, but also the stark contrast between Snape's death at Voldemort's hands, and the willing sacrifice of Albus Dumbledore. Though the reader is initially led to believe that Dumbledore's end was much like those of Sirius Black and Severus Snape, dying unexpectedly at the hands of an enemy while protecting Harry's life, the memories reveal not only
Dumbledore's foreknowledge of his own death, but also his role in orchestrating it.
Harry's own memories of the night Dumbledore died show only the events themselves;
Harry and his headmaster arrive back at Hogwarts after having been out searching for one of Voldemort's Horcruxes,33 only to find the school under attack. Before they are able to join in the fight, they are accosted by Harry's school nemesis, Draco Malfoy. Paralyzed by Dumbledore's spell and invisible, Harry must watch as his beloved headmaster attempts to convince Draco to return to the side of good; Draco finds himself paralyzed emotionally in a way reminiscent of Harry's physical paralysis, and it is Snape, arriving late to the scene, that casts the fatal spell on Dumbledore, seemingly despite Albus' final plea: '"Severus ... please ..."' (.Half-Blood 556). Snape's memories, however, make it clear that Snape kills Dumbledore not despite his last plea, but in fact because of it;
33 A Horcrux is an object that has been infused with a piece of a wizard's soul, and can only be filled when the soul is fractured by killing another human being. Doing so allows the wizard to live on after his mortal body has been killed, potentially enabling him, as does Voldemort, to return to the flesh again at a later time. 106 aware of Voldemort's plan to have Draco kill him, months before the actual event,
Dumbledore asks that Severus kill him, to save the boy both the emotional trauma of the event, and the retribution of Voldemort should he fail:
"Ultimately, of course, there is only one thing to be done if we are to save him
from Lord Voldemort's wrath."
Snape raised his eyebrows and his tone was sardonic as he asked, "Are
you intending to let him kill you?"
"Certainly not. You must kill me." (Deathly Hallows 548)
Dumbledore's motives are not completely selfless; he is aware that Voldemort's plan to have him killed will very likely succeed at some point, and he wishes that death be a quick and honorable one: '"You alone know whether it will harm your soul to help an old man avoid pain and humiliation,'" Dumbledore tells Snape, '"I confess I should prefer a quick, painless exit to the protracted and messy affair it will be if, for instance,
Greyback is involved—I hear Voldemort has recruited him? Or dear Bellatrix, who likes to play with her food before she eats it'" (548). Snape's unique role as a double agent allows him to advance himself in the ranks of the Death Eaters, while at the same time providing a humane and honourable death for a man he has grown to care for and respect.
Dumbledore's sacrifice is further complicated by an exceptionally strong curse that means he has less than a year to live (546), but neither his impending mortality, nor his wish for a painless death undermines his selfless motives behind it; Dumbledore orchestrates his death not only to enable Harry to succeed against Voldemort, but also to save Draco Malfoy's soul, despite the fact that Draco is actively plotting against his life.
107 Casey Cothran suggests that Rowling's work "struggles to articulate and define the nature of a positive masculinity," that is "honourable, humble, open-minded, [and] non-violent," despite a "masculine tradition that drives him to assert his authority in selfish and violent ways" (131-2); this is not entirely true. Harry is presented with a myriad of possible masculine values, in his father, Sirius, Voldemort, and Dumbledore, rather than a solidified and singular tradition; it is up to him to choose from this array of masculine values in constructing his own identity, and to actively subdue those parts of his own personality that contradict these values. These choices figure prominently throughout the series, and are often accompanied by revelations about the men Harry idolizes: in the well of Snape's memories, which Harry inadvertently taps while learning to fend off mental attacks in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry must confront the fact that his father was, in fact, a bully at times; in the same novel, he watches Sirius die because he cannot take battle seriously; and in Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows, Harry must face the truth of Dumbledore's questionable morality during his adolescence, which was little different from Voldemort's own philosophies, despite the headmaster's active opposition to the Dark Lord in his adult life.
The summation of Harry's masculine exploration, and the moment in which he must choose his own identity, comes at the series' conclusion; with Voldemort and his army of Death Eaters poised to strike, and his friends facing a battle they cannot win,
Harry must choose between giving in to Voldemort's demand for his personal surrender, knowing that it can only end in his own death, and allowing his friends to continue a mortal battle they have little hope of winning. Harry turns to those that have proceeded
108 him into the arms of death for comfort, using the "Resurrection Stone"34 to bring their shades back, though he realizes that "he [is] not really fetching them: they [are] fetching him" (Deathly Hallows 560). In choosing to sacrifice himself for his friends, Harry turns away from the aggressive and somewhat selfish roles of his godfather Sirius Black, and his begrudging protector, Severus Snape, toward the composed, willingly sacrificial role set out by Albus Dumbledore; like Dumbledore, Harry is aware of his impending end and chooses it for the greater good it will do, despite the personal cost of life which accompanies it.
The costs and benefits of Harry's sacrifice are not only Christological, but also filtered through Arthurian elements. Like the pure and devoted Galahad, Harry can succeed where Dumbledore, the Lancelot figure of tarnished purity but unquestionable ability, has failed; while Dumbledore was fit to die in the name of the cause, he was not fit to return from that sacrifice—he could only glimpse the grail, not possess it. It is this closeness to perfection that allows Dumbledore to meet Harry in the afterlife and advise him, elucidating the blood tie between Harry and Voldemort and Harry's choice to return from the dead. Only Harry may return from his sacrifice, as did Christ, to extend protection over those he loves. In doing so, Harry departs from the type of sacrifice made by his mother. While Harry's mother died to protect him, and did so successfully, with her task completed there could be no reason for her to return. Harry, on the other hand, does not defeat the Dark Lord through his sacrifice—he merely allows for the possibility of Voldemort's defeat in the future, and must return in order to finish the task. In doing so, he also departs from a strict mirroring of Christ; notably, Harry is not sinless, nor is he
34 One of the three Deathly Hallows, the Resurrection Stone effectively brings the ghosts of people back; the other two Hallows are the undefeatable Elder Wand, and an infallible invisibility cloak. 109 above vengeance, though his struggles have helped him shape his moral identity and synthesize both self-sacrifice and justified violence.
It is the capacity for assertive action and violent protectiveness, as previously noted in Goodkind's character Richard Rahl, that allow Harry to face Voldemort and triumph over him, though his choice of weapon is less overtly violent, and thus significantly more fitting given the much closer and obvious Christology of the Harry
Potter series; while Richard chooses to an offensive weapon in the Sword of Truth, Harry
Potter faces Voldemort and uses a significantly more defensive measure: expelliarmus, a spell intended only to disarm his opponent. Though Chantel Levoie notes that
"Voldemort's wand is put to destructive use, such as with the Cruciatus and Avada
Kedavra (torture and killing) curses; Harry's wand is used for preservation and recuperation when he employs Expelliarmus" (42), this does not mean that Harry is incapable of destruction and violence, only that he does not actively seek it, instead allowing the actions of others to dictate their fate; for Voldemort, this means that his own curses are revisited upon him: "Voldemort was dead, killed by his own rebounding curse, and Harry stood with two wands in his hand, staring down at his enemy's shell" (Deathly
Hallows 596).
With Voldemort gone, life in magical Britain can return to normal, though Harry remains changed, his identity firmly defined by his sacrifice, and the men who have cared for him and helped shape his masculinity. As a result, he no longer sees the world in terms of polar opposites and absolutes, as he, and even his father, once did, but as a list of choices to be made that will determine the future and its moral slant. When his youngest son, preparing to leave for Hogwarts, nervously asks "what if I'm in Slytherin?" (606).
110 Harry does not dismiss the house and those in it, as he once would have. Instead he insists that it is neither the labels put upon people, nor their innate abilities, but their choices, that define who they are:
"Albus Severus," Harry said quietly.. ."you were named for two headmasters of
Hogwarts. One of them was a Slytherin and he was probably the bravest man I
ever knew."
"But just say—"
"—then Slytherin house will have gained an excellent student, won't it? It
doesn't matter to us, Al." (607)
Though this last chapter suggests that Harry Potter returns quite easily to normal life after his sacrifice and resurrection, the idea of returning from sacrifice is much more problematic in Guy Gavriel Kay's trilogy, The Fionavar Tapestry. Kay portrays sacrifice that deviates significantly from both the Christian tradition and contemporary fantasy:
Christ's return after his death is never meant to be permanent, nor a return to normal life—he is no longer of the realm of men; Tolkien takes this Christian concept of sacrifice and adapts it very little, noting that Frodo no longer belongs in the realm of
Middle Earth after his sacrifice, and must therefore accompany the elves to the Summer
Land. However, much of the fantasy that Tolkien inspired, such as Rowling's series or the works of David Eddings, often seeks happier endings, allowing its heroes to reintegrate into human society after their sacrifices, and return to the status quo, rather than becoming outcasts. Kay's characters often walk the middle ground between these two possibilities; some are able to return from their sacrifice, or be fulfilled through it and
"return" in less than literal ways, but they are no longer a part of the human world in
111 Fionavar, though they must still live within it. This allows Kay to fully explore both the motives behind sacrifice, and the consequences of it, as well as the complicated relationship that arises between custodialism and sacrifice: while custodial acts always require a grain of sacrifice, even if this sacrifice is merely time and effort, sacrifice can be sought without custodial intentions, even if it yields custodial results. It is important to realize that characters may choose to sacrifice themselves based on purely selfish motives, even if that sacrifice saves others.
Custodialism in The Fionavar Tapestry, though it includes the expected, yet complicated, fraternal, paternal, and pedagogical relationships between men, also introduces custodial kinships unique to fantasy and the fantastic, such as mage/source, legend/believer, and savior/saved, intertwining with and expanding on known relationships to explain the complexity involved in each. This connectivity is perhaps most obvious in the mage/source relationship between Loren Silvercloak, mage to the kingdom of Brennin,35 and Matt Soren, the source of his magic and the estranged king of the dwarves. While the two men generally operate in fraternal space, there is a specific intimacy between them that supersedes brotherly affection and care. Described as "not a thing to be done lightly," the binding of a mage to his source is the fusing of body and mind; whatsoever the mage should want accomplished, the source must provide the energy for; "the mage can do no more than his source can sustain, and this bond is for life. Whatever a mage does, someone else pays the price" {The Summer Tree 72).
Though a fraternal character might be willing to commit to such a bond, the mage/source relationship also requires a distinct submission to the will of the mage, and the
35 Brennin is merely one of the kingdoms in Fionavar. It's closest neighbour to the south is Cathal, and it is bordered to the north by the plains of a nomadic people called the Dalrei. 112 willingness to abandon even personal moral values. Matt illustrates this in the story of
Nilsom and Aideen, in which the immensely powerful mage, Nilsom, waged an unjust war upon the heart of Brennin, using magic as his primary method of destruction. This
went unchecked until his source and greatest love, Aideen, confronted him, refused to
carry out his will any longer, and killed herself. Though Aideen's choice of death over
moral delinquency implies personal choice and autonomy for the source within the relationship, Matt dispels this notion, noting how the mage/source bond restricts the
moral agency of the source through the expectations of their peers:
"Nilsom's is a name whose memory we curse by ritual...so too," said the Dwarf
softly, "is the name of Aideen."
"What?"
Matt's gaze was unwavering. "She betrayed her mage," he said. "In the
laws of our Order, there is no crime so deep. None. No matter what the cause."
(130)
The bond between mage and source is so strong that violating it brings with it eternal
condemnation—even for one of the greatest heroes in the history of Brennin—
highlighting the unavoidable sacrificial aspects of the custodial relationship; in a very real
way, the source is not only asked to submit to the will of their mage, but to give up their
own life in that mage's service. For Matt, this meant walking away from his position as
King of Dwarves, though that choice was largely made before he became Loren's source.
With that choice, however, comes a never-ending pain:
113 "when the King is bound to Crystal Lake,"36 Matt was explaining softly, "he is
forever bound. There is no breaking it. He may leave but he is not free. The lake
is in him like another heartbeat and it never stops calling. I lie down at night
fighting this and rise up in the morning fighting it, and it is with me through the
day and the evening and will be until I die. This is my burden, and it is mine
alone, and I would have you know, else I would not have spoken before you, that
it was freely chosen and is not regretted." (320)
The relationship between legend and believer in The Fionavar Tapestry carries with it the same assumption of responsibility and relinquishment of personal choice as
that of mage/source, but reexamines the ideas of motive chosen versus forced bonding.
The heroes of legends who are called and compelled to enter the land of Fionavar,
Arthur, and with him Lancelot, and Guinevere, do not do so by their own choice, but as
penance for their past sins. This is not to say they are unwilling to take up the fight for
the world. Arthur accepts that his fate is a "cycle of war and expiation under many
names, and in many worlds, that redress be made" (Wandering Fire 34), with the
knowledge that he is condemned to die before the end and return again to perform his
part in a never-ending recreation of the fall of Camelot. Guinevere, after the original
shock of realizing who she is,37 follows her path willingly out of love for the only two
men that ever mattered for her. Finally, Lancelot, perhaps the most miserable of the
three, caught between loving his King, and loving his liege's wife, exists only to test
36 Crystal Lake is both a place, and the way in which Dwarves choose their King. Any Dwarf who wishes to be crowned must spend a night of the full moon beside the lake's shore, and offer it a crystal carving. If the Dwarf survives the night without going insane, and the crystal is accepted, that Dwarf becomes King. 37 Unlike Arthur, who is summoned to join the fight in Fionavar, or Lancelot, whom Arthur awakens to help save Matt from certain death, despite knowing what that awakening means, Guinevere finds that she has been reincarnated through Jennifer, one of the five University of Toronto students who is brought to Fionavar at the beginning of the trilogy. 114 himself and carry out the will of his Lord and Lady, faithfully and unquestioningly. All three accept their fates, condemned to endless repetition of deepest love tainted with ultimate misery, constantly living out the frustration and heart-ache of their love triangle, knowing each time they are called forth from the land of legends that history will repeat itself and their punishments will continue.
• • 38
Though each of the three legendary figures is suffering for individual misdeeds, all three sins are different forms of breaking custodial covenants, making their return to relive those sins, while at the same time continually offering their own custodial care to 39 • • the world they inhabit, a particularly fitting punishment: Arthur broke covenant with his people when he had numerous children killed in an attempt to eradicate Mordred, child of his incest, and thus must come to the "one word that [he] needs must answer to:
Childslayer" (33); Lancelot broke both his covenant relationship as a knight to his Lord, and that of a man to his beloved friend; and Guinevere broke the covenant of marriage, carrying on an adulterous relationship with Lancelot. As a result, each of the three are compelled to return, time and again, to renew the custodial covenants they have broken, while living with the knowledge of what they have done, and, for Lancelot and
Guinevere, the excruciating understanding that they could not resist. Arthur battles valiantly and selflessly in the service of whichever world calls him, bringing with him the two people he loves most, knowing that he must always leave them, killed before the battle's end, and resolution is reached. 38 Though Lancelot and Guinevere appear in each world Arthur inhabits for the specific purpose of punishing Arthur's most grievous sin, the killing of children, they are also brought back to atone for their own sins. 39 Even disregarding the idea of childslaying, Arthur's break of covenant is a particularly severe one in fantasy; custodial care is intrinsic to the relationship between fantasy kings and their subjects, as illustrated by Richard Rahl's bond to the D'Haran people in Goodkind's work, or even the expectation that the king of Fionavar will hang on the Summer Tree should the gods require it. 115 The penance and redemption that motivate Arthur call into question the genuineness of his custodial care for the world he enters, much as Severus Snape's compulsion to atone for Lily's death complicates the custodialism he shows for Harry.
Arthur's primary motive is not the restitution of that debt, though he willingly accepts that burden and requirement, but the love for the two people who have always been most important for him; Arthur fights for release, not for himself, but for Lancelot and
Guinevere, whom he loves absolutely and without reservation. This denotes not only a custodial element to Arthur's actions, but a deeply sacrificial one; in an interesting reversal of typical fantasy self-sacrifice, it is not Arthur's life which he willingly surrenders, but his death, returning time and again in the hope that one day his most deeply beloved will not have to.
The concepts of sacrifice are unsurprisingly important to the custodial relationship of saviour/saved, a central dynamic in the trilogy. Time and again, characters willingly sacrifice themselves to save others, and it is only their personal motives that separate custodial acts of personal sacrifice from arguably selfish ones. This interplay is most obvious in the character of Paul, called Pwyll in Fionavar, whose physical sacrifice most closely echoes that of Christ.40 When the five students, Paul, Dave, Kevin, Jennifer, and
Kim, are brought into Fionavar by Loren to attend a festival, they learn of Brennin's plight: it is deep in drought, the crops are near failure, and thousands will soon starve.
The traditional solution to such a situation is the King's sacrifice and willing death, tied
40 Dena Taylor argues that Paul's sacrifice is also resonant of Norse mythology, particularly the god Odin, who hangs himself on a tree called Yggdrasil as a sacrifice to gain knowledge. Additionally, she notes that the series' other sacrifices draw upon numerous mythologies, including Egyptian and northern European ("The Double-Edged Gift" [2002]). She is correct, though these mythological connections are not exclusive to Christology, which itself borrows heavily from older mythologies; thus Odin's sacrifice is echoed in Christology not only through Christ's crucifixion, but through his spear wound as well. 116 to the "Summer Tree," in a forest called the Godswood for its tie to the god Mornir.
Ailell, the King of Brennin, is old, feeble, and does not believe that he can survive the required three nights on the tree, but neither will he suffer the idea of another taking his place, and even banishes his son Aileron for offering himself in his father's stead. Paul, however, is an enigma; he comes from a world outside of Brennin, bearing suffering beyond his years, and Ailell cannot refuse him: '"now I give you to Mornir. For three nights andforever,' the King had said. And cried'" (The Summer Tree 145). The King and his chancellor, Gorlaes, strip Paul, bind him "naked to the Summer Tree at the waning of the moon" (145), and leave him to die.
Paul's nights of remembrance and suffering on the Summer Tree tell a story of the immense pain which prompts both his sacrifice, and Ailell's acceptance of it. In nights of self-loathing and accusation, Paul must face the truth of events that surrounded the death of someone he loved: Rachel. The couple was involved in a car accident, which took place moments after Rachel confided that she had not only been both physically and emotionally unfaithful, but also that, despite their long-term relationship, she had also decided to marry the other man. The car in front of them careens out of control, and though Paul aims for the gap between it and an oncoming car, he is unable to avoid a collision; Rachel is killed on impact. Though Paul did not cause the accident, and it was almost completely out of his control, he cannot dispel the possibility that he may have hesitated in swerving to avoid the other cars, and that he may have done so purposely, vengefully, angrily. His sacrifice is prompted by this self-doubt and disgust, which causes him to believe that he deserves the painful death he undertakes:
117 So she had left him and he had killed her, and you weren't allowed to weep when
you have done that. You pay the price, so.
So he had come to Fionavar.
To the Summer Tree.
Class dismissed. Time to die. (197)
Paul does not physically die, though he is deemed Pwyll Twice-Born by the people of
Fionavar; instead the part of him that died with Rachel is reborn. The goddess Dana comes to him in his grief, showing him that "he had missed the gap, and only just, oh, only just, not because of any hesitation shaped by lack of desire, by death or murder wish, but because, in the end, he was human...he missed because of hurt, grief, shock, and rain. Because of these, he could be forgiven" (199). Rain returns to Brennin, and
"here at the end, at the last, [Paul] was weeping for Rachel Kincaid who had died" (200).
Paul's release from the Summer Tree is not the end of his sacrifice, but the beginning of it. Though his rebirth once again gives him access to the full range of his emotions, and should make it easier for him to connect with others, the effect is actually the opposite. He finds himself no longer a part of humanity, nor of the gods:
Alone on the Summer Tree he'd come into his power, and it seemed that even in
the midst of a great many people, he still came into it alone.. .He could speak with
gods and hear them but never move among them, and every such exchange drew
him farther away from everyone he knew, as if he'd needed something to do that.
Not feeling the cold of the winter, or the lash of the rain that had passed.41 Sent
41 This is meant quite literally; after returning from the Summer Tree, Paul is almost completely unaffected by the weather, distancing him even from the natural world, as he cannot feel cold or uncomfortable. 118 back by the God. He was the arrow or Mornir, and arrows flew alone. (The
Darkest Road 178)
Only Jaelle, high priestess of the goddess Dana, can understand Paul's predicament and feelings, noting how "Pwyll's seemed such a harsh, demanding power, taking so much out of him and not giving, so far as she could see, a great deal back" (24), and it is she that eventually provides his way back to humanity; both are used to the extreme constraints of power, but seek simple human contact, and are thus a perfect match for one
another. Their ability to remove themselves from their powerful trappings and come together is symbolic not only of Paul's redemption, but of the necessary union between the masculine and feminine, an idea which is emphasized by Jaelle's initial hatred of men, and the closed, female space of the cult she leads.
The joining of the sexes and the Arthurian issue of fate and predestination are also
emphasized in the savior/saved relationship of Kevin to the people of Fionavar. As
Rakoth Maugrim, the evil god of the trilogy, starts to regain the power he lost centuries
before, he is able to unleash a furious winter upon the land. The mages are unable to stop
it, and the gods unwilling to overstep their boundaries, and so for the second time in the
series, crops fail, and the very real possibility of losing the war against the darkness through attrition arises. Kevin, ostensibly the least powerful or complicated member of
the five strangers in Fionavar, without the tremendous size and strength that helps Dave
find his place with the Dalrei, the power Kim wields as a seer or Paul holds as twice-
born, and apparently lacking the deep history Jennifer possesses as Guinevere reborn,
seems an unlikely hero and solution to the crisis. His uniqueness is not absent, however;
it is merely more deeply hidden than the others'. Kevin is the ultimate sexual being,
119 utterly losing himself in the act to a point where his identity is subsumed by pure sexuality. Unlike the abilities of Dave, Kim, or Paul, Kevin's peculiarity is not a power in any way, shape, or form. Instead, it is simply his identity; just as Jennifer exists simultaneously as herself and Guinevere reborn, Kevin is both himself and the rebirth of the legendary Liadon, consort to the goddess Dana. Compelled by an inner voice, Kevin braves the unnatural winter night, trekking to Dun Maura, the home of Dana. There he offers himself willingly to the goddess and takes his rightful place as her timeless lover, knowing that consorting with the goddess always ends in Liadon's death, completing the cycle so that he may again be reborn and sacrificed once more.42 In joining with Dana,
Kevin creates life, restoring the bond between masculine and feminine, and fertilizing the land of Fionavar, though the custodial intentions of his actions are thrown into question by his very identity; as Liadon reborn, Kevin has little choice in sacrificing himself—just as Jennifer/Guinevere is doomed to love both Arthur and Lancelot, and to destroy them.
As such, Kevin is merely living out his predestined fate, not knowingly sacrificing himself with the intention of benefiting others.
The complicated sacrifices of Paul, Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and Kevin are overshadowed, but not invalidated, by the two pure sacrifices that take place almost simultaneously at the trilogy's end. The first of these sacrifices, that of Diarmuid, second son to Ailell of Brennin, is not only done to save another, but to end the continual sacrifice of the three Arthurian heroes. At the outset of the inevitable battle between the
42 The Fionavar myth of Dana and Liadon seems to be a combination of two Greek myths: Artemis and Adonis, and Demeter and Persephone. In the former, Artemis takes a human lover, named Adonis, who is killed by a wild boar, much as Kevin is "marked" by a wild boar, days before he travels to Dun Maura. The latter is an explanatory myth of the seasons, in which Persephone is stolen from her mother by Hades, the god of the underworld, and may only return for six months out of each year; the months she is in the underworld are barren and fruitless, but her return to her mother's side marks the beginning of spring. 120 armies of light and dark, Arthur is faced with a challenge from the opposing army's commander that he cannot refuse, despite the urging of those around him. Though he knows that the fight can only end in his death, and the continuance of the cursed cycle he is doomed to repeat, he insists that it must be done: '"how can we not fight him, Seer?"
Arthur responds to Kim's plea that he stay; '"how can we claim to carry our swords in the name of Light, if we are cowards when we stand before the Dark?'" (The Darkest
Road 316). The question then arises of whether it should be Arthur, who is much needed as a general for the forces of the Light, or Lancelot, who has been badly maimed in battle already, who should take up the metaphorical gauntlet. Without waiting for the question to be settled, Diarmuid denies both Arthur and Lancelot the chance to sacrifice themselves, riding out onto the battlefield and into an impossible battle, racing "toward the dance his bright soul would not deny" (318). Paul realizes that, far from being a willful expression of the young Prince's spontaneity,
it was for Arthur and Lancelot, and for Guinevere, that Diarmuid, in all the wild
anarchy of his nature, had claimed this dance as his own.
It was against the weaving of their long doom that he had defiantly
rebelled, and had channeled that rebellion into an act of his own against the Dark.
Taking Uathach43 unto himself, that Arthur and Lancelot, both, might go forward
past that day. (322)
From the outset of the duel, the conclusion is inevitable; Uathach is bigger, stronger, faster, and on a more able and untiring steed. The only choice left to Diarmuid is whether to draw out a losing battle, fully employing his own prodigious skill in the hope
43 A monstrously-sized and incredibly strong beast called an urgach, which Maugrim alters to make faster, smarter, and more vicious. 121 that his end will be quick, or to willingly embrace a painful death in order to slay his opponent. For a custodial character like Diarmuid, this choice is simple; watching a counter-blow shriek toward him, he deliberately chooses not to parry it, instead creating enough space that "Uathach's blade would not sever his body entirely," and taking a
"terrible blow on his left side, just under the heart, knowing it [is] the end." Diarmuid,
"pulling himself forward, as toward a long-sought dream of overwhelming
Light.. ,thrust[s] his own bright blade into the urgach's face and out the back of its head"
(324).
Darien, the bastard son of the rape Maugrim Rakoth, named Unraveller of the
Tapestry,44 inflicted upon Jennifer (later Guinevere), faces a sacrificial choice similar to that faced by Diamuid, but it is one that his entire life has built toward. Born an andain, son of a god and a mortal, Darien ages rapidly, and arrives at the onset of his moral adolescence far too soon. With this coming of age comes a related growth in his power, as he begins to learn how to control and employ his birthright. The result is a gruesome and disturbing one: a young boy searching for acceptance and love, equally capable of saving or damning the world. In a clear parallel to Frodo's trek to Mount Doom, Darien leaves his childhood home and journeys to find his father, assuming that he will find acceptance with his maker, and carrying with him the ability to either destroy all hope for the Light, or bring it salvation; should Darien choose to join his father, they will be unstoppable, but he is also the most capable of ending the Unraveller's reign.
44 As with many fantasists, Kay examines the interplay between fate and personal choice. Similar to the mythological Greek Moirae, three hags who measured, spun, and cut the threads of each mortal life in the cloth of reality, Kay uses the image of a weaver at a loom as the creator of fate. Maugrim, however, has no thread or place in the cloth, and is thus eternal; his unending attempt to overtake and crush fate, subverting the loom to his will, has led to his naming as Unraveller. 122 Despite the combined wills of both friends and gods, who believe that Darien should be either courted to the side of the Light or destroyed, his mother insists that
Darien should be as free as possible to make his choice, claiming that only a free and uncoerced decision is a just one. She leaves Darien in the hands of Vae and Shahar, surrogate parents who can raise the child away from the bitter hatred Jennifer holds for
Maugrim. In a situation quite similar to the one Harry Potter should have found with his aunt, uncle, and cousin, Darien also has a surrogate sibling, named Finn, who helps teach him moral values and love. This ends when Finn must follow his own thread in the
Tapestry and become a part of the Wild Hunt,45 leaving his foster brother only the memories of his moral lessons. Bereft, scared, and alone, Darien follows Paul to the
Godswood and uses its power to grow and age into an adult form, with the accompanying powers of an adult andain. He then uses his newfound power to steal a powerful relic named Lokdal, a magical dagger which has two distinct powers: it insures that one who uses it and "kills without love shall surely die," and it allows one "who dies with love" in their heart to "make of his soul a gift" (The Summer Tree 176) to another, though this comes with the terrible price of forfeiting one's immortal soul.46 Darien first attempts to give the dagger to his mother, hoping to ingratiate himself with her; he is rebuffed.
Jennifer demands to know whether it is his to freely give, facing his resultant threat to instead join his father with iron control, and explaining the rationale behind her deliberate aloofness from her son: '"There is a choice for you to make, and everything I know tells
45 The Wild Hunt arises from numerous mythologies of Western Europe, referring to a group of ethereal huntsmen that either bring death themselves or are precursors to it. In Fionavar, they represent chaos incarnate, "hunting" any and all in their path, regardless of allegiance to Light or Dark. 46 Dena Taylor notes that this duality is reflected in all of Ysanne's, the seer before Kim, magical possessions; the Circlet of Lisen will bring with it a dark path to the next wearer, and the Baelrath, or Warstone, is both a power and a burden to Kim, as it forces her to employ her power in ways she often finds distressing ("The Double-Edged Gift"). 123 me that you must make it freely and unconstrained, or it will never have been made at all.
If I bind you to me now, or even try, I strip you of what you are'" (The Darkest Road
120-1). Though this idea of unconstrained choice, which echoes the choice between
Light and Dark that almost every fantasy hero must eventually make, puts Fionavar and the entire Tapestry in jeopardy, only a choice made freely and knowingly can determine an independent identity, and deliberately coercing Darien would violate the very freedom of personal choice for which the forces of Light are battling.47
The way in which Maugrim Rakoth approaches his son's choice is emblematic of his worldview, the strong must take what they want, and Darien's response reflects the distinct flaw within this paradigm. Fearing the consequence of unmasking himself to his father without first proving his usefulness, Darien attempts to show his worthiness by presenting Rakoth with the same dagger he had used unsuccessfully to persuade his mother. His father's response is indifferent and angry: '"I have no need of gifts.
Whatever I want, from today to the end of time and beyond, I shall be able to take...You have one thing only that I desire, and I shall have it before you die: I want your name"'
(363). That which Darien would have so freely given in exchange for love and acceptance, he finds that he can no longer give, and it is the people that have loved him and sacrificed for him that help him realize this; looking at images of the ongoing battle, in which people that have fought to protect him battle for their lives, and remembering his brother Finn, who had told him that he "was to try to love everything except the
Dark," Darien realizes that "he [is] one of that besieged army, the army of Light. Freely, uncoerced, he finally numbered himself among them.. .and so there, in that moment, in
47 Jennifer's attitude toward Darien is distinctly reminiscent of Dumbledore's insistence that Harry must make his own choices, fight his own battles, and come to his own conclusions about who he must be. 124 the deepest stronghold of the Dark, Darien made his choice" (364-5). Armed with the
48 • knowledge that he, and only he, has the power to truly harm Maugrim Rakoth, "Darien
[does] the one thing, the only thing, that he [can] do to manifest the choice [he has] made... he impale[s] himself upon the dagger his father [holds]" (366). Lokdal's ability to kill the wielder when used to kill without love in the wielder's heart, cuts Maugrim's thread in the Tapestry and ensures that he dies as his worldview dictates: alone. Though
Darien also dies, away from those who have cared for him, he carries within himself a love that accompanies him into the darkness; "his very last [thought] was of his brother, tossing him among the soft banks of snow when he'd still been Dari, and Finn had still been there to love him and to teach him just enough of love to carry him home to the
Light" (367).49
Though both Darien and Diarmuid have arguably bright possible futures, as
Darien has finally come to understand who he is and learn to love, and Diarmuid is soon to be married to a woman with equally cutting wit and ferocious passion, they both willingly give up all hope of a future in order to better the situation for those around them. Diarmuid's sacrifice enables Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere to break both the cycle of their deaths and rebirths, and their continuous tale of love and betrayal,50 while
Darien's removal of Maugrim from the tapestry allows not only Fionavar, but the rest of the worlds which echo it, to finally escape the Unraveller's shadow and enter an age of relative peace, where the constant worry of a war with the Dark is no longer present.
48 Though this is hinted at throughout the final novel, it is Maugrim himself that clarifies the nature of Darien's danger to him: '"I must not have a child! Did none of them see? A child of my seed binds me into time! It puts my name in the Tapestry, and I can die/"' (365). 49 This moment is beautifully echoed when Finn dies shortly after, and his last thoughts are of his brother. 50 The three enter into a boat bound for Avalon at the story's end, uniting them as three common loves, rather than the either/or situation Guinevere had always had to resort to. 125 Though their deaths are tragic, they are meant to provide contrasts to the sacrifices of those around them, and serve as models, and legends. Like Harry, they build upon the
strong sacrifices and custodial care they have themselves witnessed and received to create
something infinitely pure and beautiful, free of coercion or selfishness, willing self-
condemnations to the darkest of roads in order to set others free to bask in the light.
The reconfigured echoes of Christology often form the most beautiful moments of
eucatastrophe51 in modern fantasy. Time and again, care and custodianship, coupled with
the willing sacrifice of self for others, is brought forward as the pinnacle of human
achievement. Though the men who choose this moral path of caregiving, rather than one
that may bring more material benefits, often meet sad ends themselves, their sacrifices
enable others to grow and flourish, becoming future custodians and models of manhood
which cannot help but inspire others to join them. The use of contrasting sacrifices,
rather than invalidating some forms of sacrifice, instead invites the reader to consider the
motives behind custodial and sacrificial action and better understand the moral schema
surrounding caregiving. The heroes of fantasy not only echo Christ, but reflect what men
should be. Despite the temptations that their heroes may face, and the trials they may
suffer, modern epic fantasy writers contend that men must rise above these hindrances
and learn the pre-eminent values of custodialism and self-sacrifice.
51 See note 2. 126 Conclusion and Reflection
Custodial care for others is not a new phenomenon, though it could be argued that caring for one's own children, let alone the children of others, has become increasingly devalued, particularly for men, in contemporary industrial, consumer-driven society.
Nonetheless, custodialism remains one of the most important abilities of masculinity, provided not only moral models of behaviour, but also a way to understand those characteristics that men biologically share and how they affect male gender roles.
Though masculinity theory has done some wonderful examinations of male roles, and providing an educated look at why men act the way that they do, critics, even the male ones, are often too quick to dismiss assertive masculine traits as negative remnants of identity which have escaped western society's evolution toward equality, or as the unnatural product of constructed attempts to resist this equalization. As a result, the custodial capacity men share to become leaders, protectors, and virtuous fathers is often jettisoned from the collective conscious, subsumed by the conflation of masculinity, as a descriptive character sketch of men, with patriarchy, the often overwhelming hegemonic male leadership and dominance; assertive traits, and a capacity for violence, equally useful for dominance or protection, are labeled unnecessarily aggressive, brutish, and monstrous, while still serving as the primary identifiers of masculine identity.
Fantasy has undergone similar synecdoches, in which the escapist elements of the texts have been taken as the only attributes of the genre, or the sword-wielding, sex- hungry, mindless barbarian is believed to be the only type of hero that fantasy has to offer; both of these stray far from the truth. While modern epic fantasy does allow, and in fact require, escapism through suspension of disbelief, it also functions as any other epic, exploring what it means to be human in an ever-changing world; escapism is merely the vehicle for socio-political examination, and is not the end in itself. By using fantasy worlds, authors are able to step outside the boundaries of the real and explore the extreme facets of identity and humanism by putting their heroes in impossibly difficult situations and seeing how they progress.1 Similarly, though the larger realm of fantasy does occasionally employ the stereotypical barbarian, epic fantasy never does so without reconsideration of the figure, and more often employs a hero who is in some way weak, and must overcome that weakness through strength of character and perseverance.
The success of the fantasy hero, often springing forth from what Tolkien identifies as the eucatastrophe, allows fantasy to provide a resolution to difficult problems in ways unavailable to realist, and particularly to secular realist, texts; it is here that the true strength of fantasy resides. Whether the resolution of the fantastic crisis comes as a result of divine providence,2 or obscure rules of magic,3 what is essential is that resolution occurs, and thus the text can suggest similar resolutions to problems of identity or social, political, or economic importance, as the foundation for fantasy is always in the real world.4
What I have attempted to do in this work is to examine how, precisely, a number of important fantasy texts address the real world concept of masculinity, and particularly
1 In this way, fantasy actually shares a remarkable similarity to literature written from a soldier's perspective; both seek to express the inexpressible, and explore the effects of extreme conditions. 2 As in The Lord of the Rings, when the eagles come to rescue Frodo and Sam after they emerge from Mount Doom. 3 As in Harry Potter, when obscure rules of wand ownership are the deciding factor in the battle of good versus evil. 4 This is a matter of necessity, as Attebery points out in Strategies of Fantasy (1992). If the reader had no basis for comparison or understanding the fantastic framework, they would be unable to understand it at all (3-4). 128 how they address issues of custodial masculinity, or masculinity which grounds itself in the protection, teaching, and beneficial leadership of others within a just hierarchy.5 In order to concentrate on specific aspects of custodialism, I have split my critique into three
chapters: my first chapter focuses specifically on the morality of masculinity, examining the heroes of Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series, and Stephen R. Donaldson's The
Chronicles, and the way in which their moral masculine identity is formed around
concepts of protection and guardianship; my second chapter revisits Goodkind and
Donaldson's texts in the light of fatherhood, comparing the relationship between Richard
Rahl and his father, Darken, in The Sword of Truth to Covenant's relationship with his daughter Lena in The Chronicles-, my third and final chapter examines how the moral and the fatherly come together in the concepts of surrogate care and masculine sacrifice,
specifically in J.K Rowling's immensely popular Harry Potter series, and Guy Gavriel
Kay's Fionavar Tapestry.
I approached this study with two goals in mind: to comment on the way masculinity theory maligns the assertive sides of men and attempts to dissolve them in favour of a more androgynous role; and to examine the literary nature of modern epic fantasy, releasing it from the tiny cupboard under the stairs, where it has been stowed by the larger body of academia. With these goals, however, come three distinct limitations, all of which are directly related to scope. Fantasy is an enormous genre, and even though only a portion of the texts fit into the modern epic subgenre, there are still far too many texts that deserve academic consideration; in choosing the texts that I examined, I had to discard a plethora of texts equally deserving of critique and consideration, in favour of
5 A power relationship in which the person(s) in which the "uses of power are justified," and those in power treat those that they have power over "as ends-in-themselves, and not as means to an end" (Paris 15-16). 129 specific texts which were both excellent in their own right, and which helped me to construct a loose chronology and overview of the genre. Additionally, the need to provide a full and worthy examination of modern epic fantasy forced me to largely ignore the literary connections between it and other genres, particularly the modernist epoch that fostered Tolkien's original epic trilogy. I have attempted to remedy this fault in a small way by beginning each chapter with a brief discussion of the particular fantasy bloodline which ties in most directly with the attributes I intend to discuss. While this is by no means a complete replacement for further inter-generic considerations, it is all that can be done within the scope of the project; there is still significant and important work to be done in order to reach a complete understanding of how fantasy functions within the larger realms of literature. Finally, though I have attempted to give a fairly clear indication of the way I am engaging with masculinity theory, there simply was not enough room to include an exhaustive overview of the subject, or even to discuss its key players at length; I particularly regret the lack of time I had to devote to the work of R.W.
Connell, and I think a later study would do well to include a more lengthy discussion of how Connell's ideas affect a masculine reading of modern epic fantasy.
In clarifying how modern epic fantasy, a genre which seems to become ever more popular, functions as literature, and addresses the critical issue of masculinity raised by its use of masculine heroes, I have created what I hope will be a foundation upon which future scholars can develop their own critiques of the genre, and addressed what I see as the primary problem with contemporary masculinity theory. In addition, I hope that this study helps to open the doors of academia to the increasingly diverse realm of literature to be found not only in modern epic fantasy, but in its mixed-media offspring like the
130 epic film and the graphic novel, and bolsters the ranks of those working within masculinity theory who would like to foreground the possibility of noble, just, and custodial masculinity, on both a descriptive and prescriptive level, showing men their potential and delineating their strengths to gender theorists and mass culture alike.
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135 Appendix A
Iemy Goodkind
March 18. 2008
Scan MeKenzic 2'» 19 St. Regina, Saskatchewan S4S2B1 Canada
Dear Sean,
1 hark joi> fo<* your kind letter. 1 was delighted to hear how much you have c-njo\ ed in> btx>ks. I doubi thai 1 could folly convey how alive and real Richard, Kahlan. and all the rest are to me. it's truly gratifying to have readers also feel that special bond with the characters. Mow that CONFESSOR is out and the scries has concluded. 1 haven't yet decided what oo\e! 1 wil! w rite next, but I have a lot of books in mind and there is nothing at ail to say that there won't be many more stories about this universe and some of the inspirational characters %ve"\e come io know and io\ e. In whatever I write, I hope to keep } ou entertained and enthralled for mam \ ear> to come. At the present time I'm deepK inv oh ed with the production of the TV series It goes on air in October 2008. The show is being done by Rxeeuttve Producer Sam Raimi and produced by Disnev ABC domestic Television. Preliminaiy art tor the show as well us the Disney announcements along with a long piece by me about the TV series can he found on my official web site, tern goodktnd.com 1 would have to strongly disagree that FAR 11 Of THE FA1J !,N has anything to do with modern literary Santasj fin the sense (hut it is part of a larger entity). That book, as we!! as the rest of my novels, are individual works that stand apart from the general movements within literature in general and fantasy in particular. In fact, the lantass orld (as a whole) hates my work because it does away w tth the tired cliches that typiealh drive fantasy. Fantasy readers tend to dislike am thing different from the stereotypical sword and sorcety stories that re\ohe around mysticism.
284-C East Lake Mead Dr, #207 Henderson NV8S>015 Temy Goodkind
I don't believe that the fantasy genre contributes anything toward the concept of masculinity. other than to feed hackneyed ideas. Topical fantasy is made up of complex {and meaningless) worlds am! magic systems populated by characters who are superficial cardboard place-holders. Fantasy does not Hpieali) have anything to
Best wishes.
^ / /}/
/if t /
284-C East take Mead Dr. #207 Henderson NV 89015