THE READING RHEUM: UPROOTED

Back in September of last year I experimented somewhat with "viewing the mode of the combative through the lens of sex rather than violence." My specific conclusions in that essay are only tangentially related to my reading of the 2015 Nebula-winning fantasy-novel UPROOTED.

There have been, as I've frequently mentioned on my FEMMES FORMIDABLES blog, hundreds if not thousands of fictional characters who conform to what I called, in LOVE OVER WAR "the fighting woman archetype." I've occasionally seen ultra-feminist ideologues complain that this archetype isn't true to the spirit of actual femininity, that it reduces the female characters to "men with boobs" or some such nonsense. Clearly, I for one don't think it's a problem to show fictional women assuming confrontational roles, like the superhero's function of fighting evil in all its forms, as opposed to some pie-in-the-sky conception of a femaleness that is ideologically opposed to confrontation.

That said, I think it's conceivable that one might be able to create a combative heroine who's oriented more on accomodation than on confrontation, going by the terms discussed in the LOVE OVER WAR series. However, such an "accomodation heroine" would have to be more than some warmed-over tripe with no theme smarter than "girls are sugar and spice and everything nice."

In UPROOTED, author Naomi Novik takes a trope seen in many archaic folktales-- that of the maiden forced to serve a strange or evil master-- and gives it several modern twists, not least being that of giving the maiden, one Agnieszka, her own individual, quirky personality. But Novik doesn't approach this challenge in the narrow, ideological manner seen in, say, Jemisin's BROKEN EARTH TRILOGY, which hardly lets a page pass without ranting against evil white males. In Novik's world, Agnieszka and her "master," the mysterious sorcerer Sarkan, evolve a fractious but ultimately emotionally rich relationship. But although it would be fair to deem Sarkan to be the "co-star" of the story, his male way of using magic-- that of constant confrontation with the book's "villain," an evil forest known as "the Wood"-- is shown to be inferior to Agnieszka's feminine sense of reaching an accomodation that heals and dispels evil rather than dominating it.

I won't go into the specifics of the plot, except to say that Novik's small fantasy-world-- loosely based on Polish folklore-- is under constant threat by the Wood, and that Novik brings that menace to a boil right at the time when the humble village-maiden Agnieszka is made aware that she, like Sarkan, was born with a wizard's power, making it incumbent on her to accept the Campbellian "call of heroic destiny." Again, unlike many feminist ideologues, Novik is actually extremely good with working out methods by which wizards might battle menaces like magical arrows and giant mantises. I'm not damning Novik with faint praise when I say that she's among the best female authors in terms of depicting invigorating combative scenarios, right alongside Rumiko Takahashi and C.L. Moore. And, as far as I'm concerned, she may even be their superior in terms of crafting battles that have a specifically feminine touch to them.