How They Do Things with Words: Language, Power, Gender, and the Priestly Wizards of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea Books

She had fled the Powers of the desert tombs, and then she had left the Powers of learning and skill offered her by her guardian, Ogion. She had turned her back on all that, gone to the other side, the other room, where the women lived, to be one of them.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu

"Now that I know that even in Fairyland there is no escape from politics, I look back and see that I was writing by the rules," writes Ursula K. Le Guin in her Oxford lecture "Earthsea Revisioned." Inherited "rules" shaped the imaginary world of the first three of Le Guin's Earthsea books: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore. In Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea, published nearly twenty-five years after the original trilogy, Le Guin negotiates not only the genre traditions she inherited from Western culture but also the internal logical and metaphysical structure she inherited from her own first three Earthsea books.¹ In this essay we identify the most important of Le Guin's cultural inheritances and investigate the ways in which she (after coming to regard them as ideologically and politically unacceptable) adapts them in the final book. We conclude that, contrary to Perry Nodelman's assertion that Le Guin is attempting to "blot out" the past novels and "reinvent history" in Tehanu (179-81), the author is undertaking a feminist intervention into her secondary world that works well within the tradition of extrapolation-within-constraints that characterizes science fiction. Le Guin's Tenar may say that she has "turned her back on all that"—the masculinist powers of the wizards of Earthsea—but in Tehanu Le Guin has in fact found ways to assert the power and importance of women without overturning the logical structure of the secondary world she has created. And, following both that existing logical structure and her own predilection for belief in a feminist "Mother Tongue," Le Guin, like her priestly wizards in Earthsea, has accomplished her transformation by examining and changing the ways people do things with words.

Wizards: Medieval Christian Priests

The most significant cultural inheritance Le Guin imports into Earthsea is the one that seems perhaps the most unlikely for a self-proclaimed Taoist who also has called herself a "congenital non-Christian" (Language 55) and who sees her hero as being "outside the whole European heroic tradition" (Revisioned 8).² Le Guin notes that she "followed the intense conservatism of traditional fantasy in giving Earthsea a rigid social hierarchy of kings, lords, merchants, peasants" (Revisioned 8). It is in this pseudomedieval matrix that the mages of Earthsea assume the social and cultural roles and powers of medieval Christian priests, celibate males, trained in a textualized lore managed in a central location, holders of specific ranks in a centrally managed hierarchy, and (often) wanderers who depend on the charity of local people. Most significant, wizards and priests alike are able to perform speech-acts by which they can change not only social reality but the physical world as well.³ Using words, a wizard can transform a pebble into a diamond or a person into a bird; using words, a priest can transform bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.⁴ Wizards and priests have powers beyond those of ordinary people that allow them, in the words of J. L. Austin, "to do things with words."

In Earthsea, as Le Guin notes, "the fundamental power, magic, belongs to men; only to men; only to men who have no sexual contact with women" (Revisioned 9).⁵ As Aunt Moss explains in Tehanu, accepting and binding oneself to celibacy is absolutely necessary if a wizard is to exercise power (Tehanu 107-8).⁶ In the Middle Ages, priests were required to be celibate, not only by canon law but also as an "implied" part of their consecration and hence as a basic prerequisite of the power of celebrating the sacraments...