Race and gender in Earthsea

Note while you are reading A Wizard of Earthsea Le Guin’s depiction of race and gender. Is there anything surprising in this? Why?

Gender stereotypes in A wizard of Earthsea are obvious. The wizard school at Roke takes boys only. All the great mages are men. Female mages are either weak magicians such as the witch who first taught Ged, or they are wicked witches like the beguiler of Osskil. As described in Chapter 1, there are two sayings on Gont, “weak as women’s magic,” and ‘wicked as women’s magic”. Other women appear as handmaidens, such as the Lady of O, who was consort to her Lord, or Vetch’s sister Yarrow, who cooked for Vetch and Ged and gazed at Ged admiringly.

This stereotyping is surprising in a supposedly feminist author like Le Guin, one who would go on to write the Left hand of darkness and The dispossessed, both of which treat men and woman as different but equal, much as a more modern author might do. Le Guin became aware of sexual stereotypes and corrected them to some extent in her later novels in the Earthsea series.

What is more surprising is Le Guin’s depiction of race. It is surprising because the author was not aware of it. Le Guin reacted in dismay when the film version of Wizard depicted all the characters as white. she wanted them to be dark or reddish coloured, the way she described them. But skin colour and physical characteristics are superficial determinants of cultural origin. In all its descriptions of the landscape, architecture, customs, clothing and mythology, Earthsea depicts a Eurocentric world. As Eurocentric as Middle Earth, Hogwarts or Westeros, and the makers of the film were correct to interpret it in this way.

So for example, the people of Gont and the larger islands are pastoralists, their clothes are made of leather, their houses, castles and towers are of stone, and their ships are rowed with oars, or sailed like a modern single mast boat with a swinging boom (see the description in Chapter 3). Vetch eats chicken and throws the bones away, like a modern KFC-eating teenager (Chapter 4). The mythological elements are also Western. The dragon is a Western, not a Chinese type, with wings, scales and a treasure hoard like Smaug; magic is learned from books, and spells and ancient lore are recorded in Scandinavian-style runes.

So how could this be done differently if Le Gin wanted to escape from a Eurocentric world? By maybe drawing on the mythology of other cultures. Perhaps some Japanese-style homes made of wood and paper, with rush matting, especially on places like the Ninety Islands where stone is scarce. The wizards and other holy men (because it is mostly men) could maybe be vegetarian, like the monks in the Chinese legend Journey to the West, or the Buddhist priests in Japan, or indeed the ents and high elves in Middle Earth. Clothing may be made from straw like in Japan or feathers as in the Maori cloaks, and perhaps oral traditions may be held more highly than written in some places. Maybe magic could be summoned by energetic tribal dances like in some African cultures.

Earthsea is an archipelago, and its culture would be shaped by its geography. So Le Guin could have taken elements from another archipelago culture; one that built myth and legend around long sea journeys. I am referring to the cultures of Hawai’i, the Polynesian Islands and our own Maori. Perhaps some wizards took to the sea in waka, not Roman or Viking-style rowing galleys, and there were legendary wizard navigators who could find their way to distant lands by subtle reading of currents, wind and wrack, that lesser folk could never master.

Having said this, I thoroughly enjoyed the writing style, plot and characterisation of Earthsea, and especially loved the world that Le Guin created, as I enjoy the world of Narnia, Middle Earth and Westeros. But all these worlds are European, and it is folly to pretend that this can be altered by simply changing skin colour.

Post-script: After watching 'Princess Mononoke' based on fantasy myths from another culture, I can see another example of getting away from Eurocentric fantasy literature.