"Balance Is the Trick": Feminist Relationality in The Amazing Maurice and the Tiffany Aching Series

A woman whose self is split into two identical beings; intelligent rats who conceptualize their community as a larger form of rat; a clan of hundreds of wee fairy men who are born in litters, have few distinguishing physical characteristics, and reuse names frequently in the same generation; a "rat king" created by tying together the tails of eight rodents, who develops power over the thoughts and actions of other beings; an apprentice witch who has "minds within minds" that encompass the land where she was born, long-dead magicians, and a saber-toothed tiger (A Hat Full of Sky 512).¹ With these and numerous other images, Terry Pratchett's young adult Discworld novels encourage readers to contemplate the nature of selfhood. By depicting multiple identities that blur boundaries between self and other, these texts present a sustained imaginative challenge to the individualist model of mature selfhood as preeminently rational, independent of others, and unaffected by embodiment. In doing so, the novels parallel the work of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminist ethicists such as Nel Noddings, Virginia Held, and Diana Tietjens Meyers, who argue that identity emerges relationally, shaped by each person's interactions with others.

Pratchett's Discworld fiction for young people, which includes The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (2001) and the Tiffany Aching series—The Wee Free Men (2003), A Hat Full of Sky (2004), Wintersmith (2006), I Shall Wear Midnight (2010), and The Shepherd's Crown (2015)—makes up a significant portion of the prolific writer's twenty-first-century publications.² Roderick McGillis characterizes Pratchett's attitude toward writing for young people as a sense that "he is able to address larger issues in children's books" (18); I argue that a central one of these larger issues—perhaps the central issue of these books—is how their young characters negotiate the challenges and promise of a relational model of selfhood. The Amazing Maurice and the Tiffany series first acknowledge, then undermine both the illusory concept of ontological self-sufficiency that is central to modern Western philosophy, and the corollary assumption that to exist in relationship with others—and particularly to depend on others—indicates weakness, immaturity, and a degradation of the capacity to make ethical decisions. The resulting societal fear of connection, vividly described by Carol Gilligan in her work on care ethics (In a Different Voice; Joining the Resistance), creates the sense that any kind of relational selfhood will destroy individuality entirely. Mirroring this notion of relationship as engulfment, The Amazing Maurice and A Hat Full of Sky both feature as the chief antagonist a dangerous being with a hive mind. These creatures depict a destructive kind of communal identity that subsumes individual difference and continually thirsts to increase its power over others: relational identity as assimilation. Only a sense of empathy and ethical responsibility can disrupt this control and replace it with a mutually supportive, relational process of identity construction. While both The Amazing Maurice and the Tiffany books challenge the misapprehension that relationship is necessarily threatening to the self, the novel and the series depict different aspects of an associated dilemma: how those who have traditionally done the work of caring can conceive of a relational self that does more than nurture others. By highlighting the development of female selfhood within patriarchal culture, these novels not only explore a general idea of relationality, but also address the issue from a feminist perspective.

In The Amazing Maurice, one of the two main female characters embodies a caring interpersonal awareness, while the other is self-assertive but fairly oblivious to the needs of her fellow creatures. Through the differences between these characters, the novel suggests that a false opposition between relationality and autonomy may be particularly damaging for women and other groups trying to claim space for their individual stories while retaining a sense of solidarity. In contrast to the cautionary mode of The Amazing Maurice, the Tiffany series presents a delicate success, one where "balance is the trick," to quote Granny Weatherwax—in this case an...