Questing Feminism: Narrative Tensions and Magical Women in Modern Fantasy

Works of Epic Fantasy often have the reputation of being formulaic, conservative works that simply replicate the same tired story lines and characters over and over. This assumption prevents Epic Fantasy works from achieving wide critical acceptance resulting in an under-analyzed and under-appreciated genre of literature. While some early works do follow the same narrative path as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Epic Fantasy has long challenged and reworked these narratives and character tropes. That many works of Epic Fantasy choose replicate the patriarchal structures found in our world is disappointing, but it is not an inherent feature of the genre. Other possibilities exist. This study uses the figure of the magical woman—a character found throughout Fantasy literature—to investigate the ways in which works of Epic Fantasy challenge, modify, or discard patriarchal narratives that work to contain powerful magical women characters. In order to investigate the ways in which works of Epic Fantasy are reworking patriarchal narratives and challenging generic conventions, this study first looks to the genre of Epic Fantasy itself, tracing its inauguration as a widely recognizable, marketable genre through the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. In order to investigate new and compelling imaginings of the magical woman, this study analyzes a number of types and approaches to Epic Fantasy including: Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, Lois McMaster Bujold’s Paladin of Souls, and N.K. Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy. This study finds that the magical woman, while often powerful in her own right through her access to magic, is often constrained by narrative and generic expectations. It is only when these structures are modified, or discarded, that powerful magical women characters are not subsumed beneath patriarchal narratives.


Introduction
Magical Women in Fantasy "Never put your faith in a Prince. When you require a miracle, trust in a Witch" (Valente 2006: 134).
"Reading fantasy is what the cool kids do once again" (Smith 2015) Fantasy recalls our desire for wonder, for epic narratives, for imagining alternatives and looking at the world anew through a confrontation with human concerns on a grander scale. Fantasy also offers a chance to imagine a world almost without limits, where authors can experiment with different social, gender, and political relationships. The secondary worlds of Fantasy can have magic, and dragons, and wizards, but Fantasy is not so divorced from the mundane world that it does not engage with issues that exist in the "real world." This study looks to Epic Fantasy to explore and comment on myriad issues, in particular patriarchal narratives that are enacted through the character of the magical woman. This character, and the ways in which her narrative unfolds within Fantasy works, highlights how patriarchal narratives influence not only the genre as a whole but also specific character types.
The magical woman, whether she is witch, sorceress, mage, shapeshifter, shaman, oracle, or seer, is an archetype seen throughout literatures, but appears with regularity in Fantasy. And as Fantasy works present newly imagined magical women characters, by challenging or deconstructing traditional tropes and proposing alternatives, they are often at odds with generic expectations and thus demand new narrative approaches. If these new approaches are not enacted, the tension that arises between the figure of the magical woman and narrative expectations is resolved at the expense of the magical woman: she is contained within a patriarchal narrative, despite her power. This study makes clear the ways in which works of Epic Fantasy participate in a feminist tradition of re-appropriating and reimagining often conservative genres.
When I began this study, I expected to find that when the magical woman was able to access power through magic, this would be the deciding factor in whether or not her character was somehow diminished within the narrative. While I found that this is, in a sense, true-magical women's access to power through magic would become an important tool for them to challenge patriarchal expectations-the narrative structure of the work played a larger role in her development. When authors modified, played with, or discarded more traditional Fantasy narrative structures, only then could the magical woman fully step out from behind a male hero. Whether this modification is through multiple focalized narrators and egalitarian world-building, a reimagining of the specifics of the hero's narrative, or an approach to Fantasy that foregrounds the experience of marginalized peoples, it is when these changes are made that magical women are freed from earlier constraints. This is why, though my interest lies in the figure of the magical woman, this study is also largely concerned with narrative structures, character tropes, and generic expectations. I pay close attention to the ways in which these narrative and generic expectations are reimagined by authors, both subtly and strikingly, and the ways in which these structural changes affect the character and agency of the magical woman.
Without confronting and modifying, and sometimes rejecting, these structures, fully realized feminist works of Fantasy are not possible.
This study relies on a number of theoretical works and approaches. I bring together feminist studies of the female hero, narrative theories on focalization, postcolonial studies, and existing studies on Fantasy, casting a large net in order to fully explore the myriad ways authors are reimagining the magical woman and her place within the Fantasy text. I also look outside of accepted scholarly texts and theories. If familiarity, dedication, and volume of reading can make one an expert, then Fantasy fans are some of the most passionate experts that exist. Many fans of Fantasy read voraciously within the genre, and become extensively involved with different workslooking at the absolute thoroughness of fan wiki sites should be enough to convince anyone of the expertise and dedication of Fantasy fans. And, while Fantasy might have been largely ignored by the academy, it has not been ignored by the fans. Blogs, fan sites, and even Reddit offer numerous insightful, detailed, and yes, scholarly examinations of Fantasy. Fantasy authors also tend to be more involved in the Fantasy community than other authors of different genres. Many give extensive interviews, post articles and think-pieces on their own websites, and write for Fantasy magazines and periodicals. Thus, when appropriate, I utilize these resources in my own work.

Helen Young argues in Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of
Whiteness that "Fantasy has a reputation for being a Eurocentric genre, that is, one which is by, for, and about White people" (2016: 1). And while Fantasy might have a tendency to foreground the quests of male heroes and protagonists, Fantasy also offers an array of characters and narratives that challenge preconceived notions of the genre as being inhospitable to anyone non-white or non-male. 1 Through these characters (even in those narratives that do focus on male stories), the genre does participate in complex commentary on a range of social issues. The archetype of the magical woman is ubiquitous in Fantasy, and her position-as a woman but also as a user of great power-demonstrates the potential of the genre for challenging the status quo and upending patriarchal narratives while also foregrounding those trappings of these same narratives with which the genre must still contend. Given her access to power, the magical woman always has the opportunity to challenge patriarchal narratives given her access to power, but only certain characters inhabit narratives in which they do.
Within Fantasy worlds magic may play any number of roles and be governed by any number of rules. Often it is innate, with magic-users being born with the ability to somehow access the magic of the world. Other times it can be learned. Sometimes magic lives in true names, in runes or symbols or spells said just the right way. Other times it is a force of will. What magic always is, regardless of how one accesses it or what effects it has on the world, is a way to harness power. 2 Magic gives one an ability to act upon the world. In a society in which power is taken away from women, the magical woman is a direct threat to patriarchal control. Many Fantasy texts, both 1 Helen Young argues in Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness that "Fantasy has a reputation for being a Eurocentric genre, that is, one which is by, for, and about White people" (2016: 1). 2 Lori M. Campbell notes that "As most fantasists and scholars agree, magic equals power" (2010: 11). Jane Mobley also writes that "Perhaps magic is best described in terms of power: magic is an elemental creative power capable of actualizing itself in form," and "Magic is an effective power which can be brought to bear on everything we know, even what is usually considered the realm of ordinary nature. It is a condition of life, and it works on or through persons and things, manifesting itself in results which can only be ascribed to its working. As a power, it is impersonal, but it is often connected with some person who controls of embodies it." (1974: 25; 27).
6 notably the ways in which feminist scholars have interrogated Science Fiction works.
Feminist authors have often had to rework genres in order to tell different stories and genre fiction offers feminist authors unique challenges but also unique opportunities.
Because genre fiction relies on specific conventions-as we will see in Chapter 1, much of these conventions for the genre of Fantasy were established by Tolkienoften these "textual conventions and strategies by which the texts construct their meaning subverted the attempt to tell a different story. Or, to put it another way, they defined the extent to which a different story could be told" (Cranny-Francis 1993: 94).
Feminist authors had to work within these genres, "writing texts which were like what people had read before, but different enough to be able to construct a different voice" (Cranny-Francis 1993: 98). Science Fiction was one of the first genres to undergo this feminist reconstruction, using its non-realism to imagine different societies, different gendered relations, and different possibilities.
Feminist Science Fiction is now a fairly recognized and critically interrogated phenomenon, as are feminist re-workings of the detective novel and horror story.
However, not much critical attention has been paid to the potential feminist power of Fantasy texts. As a genre, Fantasy traditionally adheres to clearly patriarchal narratives, and unlike Science Fiction did not experience a clear and sustained feminist challenge to the genre. As I have argued, Fantasy's departure from consensus reality offers nearly unlimited alternatives, and magic specifically offers a way to circumvent conventional power relations and a variety of authors have begun to make use of this opportunity to present multi-faceted and original female characters and worlds that do not adhere to patriarchal norms.
In order to achieve successful feminist works of Science Fiction, many authors found that female characters could not simply be inserted into slots previously occupied by male characters. They often required a reworking of the narrative or of underlying assumptions of how Science Fiction worlds functioned. We see a similar struggle in Fantasy, but one that is complicated by the use of magic. Magic offers female characters a way to access power that is outside of societal structures, because, while magic may be regulated in different ways, by different schools, or different organizations within the novels, it is not created by society, but exists outside of it.
This tension results in characters that are at once powerful in their own right, but constrained by the narratives into which they are written, either diminished in some way or packaged into tired tropes and stereotypes.
With a subject as diverse and massive as the genre of Fantasy, choices must be made. In order to offer a more in-depth analysis of the magical women found throughout Epic Fantasy, a representative rather than survey approach was taken. Each work I include demonstrates a unique approach to magical women through a particular narrative structure, and thus begins to tease out the ways in which the genre has and is still evolving concerning its representation of female characters. Because Fantasy is a popular genre, I was also acutely aware that if I were to make any claims concerning the genre of Fantasy as a whole, I could not, in author Steven Erikson's words, focus only on the branches. Erikson accuses scholars of being mired in the assumption that writers of Epic Fantasy, which serves as the trunk of the Fantasy tree, are "merely imitative or belligerent wanderers in the wasteland of Tolkien's legacy" (2012: 4). He goes on to say that Epic Fantasy has moved on, but critics have failed to notice. And while I agree with Erikson's assertion that Fantasy is not a genre filled with authors endlessly trapped under the influence of Tolkien, he still remains a massively influential figure within the genre and so, he garners a decent amount of attention in this study.
In selecting the works I examine, while keeping Erikson's words in mind, I look to those series and novels which first and foremost have something interesting to say about the narrative position of magical women. I also selected a variety of "types" of Epic Fantasy: so-called Tolkien copycats, gritty Epic Fantasy that rejects a sanitized approach to world-building and doesn't shy away from mud, blood, guts, sex, and death, a work of Epic Fantasy that foregrounds the quest, and a work that pushes the definition of Epic Fantasy and engages with clear socio-political critiques. 5 As a popular genre, I also did not limit my selection to works that are critically acclaimed, but have included works that are simply massively popular (though often works are both).
Studies of Fantasy have not yet found a consistent or established place within critical literary studies. This does not mean that there are not studies of fantasy. But as a genre, Fantasy remains remarkably unexplored. The first chapter will examine some reasons for this lack of scholarly attention. This chapter will also provide an overview of both fantasy criticism and Fantasy as a genre. After giving a brief history of the genre and Fantasy criticism, this chapter will also further explore the ways in which a feminist reading of Fantasy yields important results.
The Guardian "the fantasy writer upending the 'racist and sexist status quo'" (Berlatsky).
Jemisin herself notes that she expressly works against the conservative tendencies that often mark the Fantasy genre. She says: "As a black woman . . . I have no particular interest in maintaining the status quo" (2015) and, as Berlatsky notes, her novels do anything but, representing what he calls a slow but definite change in SF and Fantasy.
Berlatsky closes his article with this telling quote from Jemisin: "I don't really understand why so many fantasy writers choose to focus on worlds that just seem strangely denuded. But to them I guess it doesn't seem strange. And I guess that's their privilege. It isn't mine" (2015). The Inheritance Trilogy offers not only a unique take on the magical woman, but an exciting look at where contemporary secondary world Fantasy is heading. The Inheritance Trilogy is not a quest narrative. Nor does it present a struggle between good and evil in the typical sense. The Broken Kingdoms, follows a poor, blind woman who has the gift of magic. Jemisin writes an Epic Fantasy novel that focuses on a simple, personal story that feels relatable, but is still infused with the magic and world-building that makes secondary world Fantasy unique. Jemison is able to utilize the defining features of secondary world Fantasyher narrative takes place in a wholly different world and is reliant on magic-but reworks many of Fantasy's more conservative narrative tendencies.
Fantasy in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy as "Any fantasy tale written to a large scale which deals with the founding or definitive and lasting defence of a LAND may fairly be called an EF [Epic Fantasy]" (1997: 319). As examples, they give "the SECONDARY-WORLD tales central to the development of fantasy over the past 100 years" (1997: 319). Tolkien is obviously included in their list of authors. 6 The term continues to be used throughout Fantasy fandom and amongst Fantasy authors. While definitions vary, Epic Fantasy is generally agreed to take place in a secondary-world (that is, an entirely created world that is not, and has never been, Earth), contains significant magical elements, where the protagonist(s) must overcome some significant hurdle, and the stakes must be exceptionally high (usually the fate of the "world"). The journey to "save the world" has typically been presented through the Quest, though it does not necessarily have to take this narrative form. High Fantasy is likely the term most commonly interchanged with Epic Fantasy. I prefer the term Epic Fantasy for a number of reasons: most of the authors I interrogate in this study identify their works as in the Epic Fantasy tradition; it remains the designator used by most fan sites; and it maintains a clear relationship with the core of Fantasy texts.
Throughout this study I will also sometimes refer to works as "traditional Epic Fantasy." While I recognize the amorphous quality of calling something "traditional" or "more traditional," within Fantasy there is a generally accepted set of works that, while not direct copies of Tolkien, follow a well-worn narrative, structural, and character development path. This does not necessarily mean that these works are bad, 6 Unfortunately, they also write that "the term has been increasingly used to describe HEROIC FANTASIES that extend over several volumes, and has thus lost its usefulness" (1997: 319).
reputation as a conservative genre because "for a long time a huge amount of it has been" (qtd in Newsinger 2000). He notes that if one looks at stereotypical Epic or High Fantasy they tend to be based on feudalism lite: the idea, for example, that if there's a problem with the ruler of the kingdom it's because he a bad king, as opposed to a king. . . . Strong men protect curvaceous women. Superheroic protagonists stamp their will on history like characters in Nietzschean wet dreams, but at the same time things are determined by fate rather than social agency" (qtd in Newsinger 2000).
And this observation is not completely inaccurate, as most early works of Epic Fantasy, and Fantasy in general, tend to follow this structure that began with Tolkien but solidified in the 70s and 80s. 8 Any study of the history of Fantasy must inevitably include J.R.R. Tolkien. An exhaustive examination of Tolkien's life and works is outside the scope of this study-and can be found in a number of other works, notably Tom Shippey's J.R.R.
are few and far between. In the past decade the number of books featuring female leads has grown tremendously. 8 Farah Mendlesohn notes that immediately following Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Fantasy could be separated into two types: the stylists, like Peter S. Beagle, Poul Anderson, and David Lindsay; and the adventure writers like William S. Burroughs, Sprague De Camp, and Robert E. Howard, that followed more closely the sword and sorcery approach. She marks 1977 as the moment when a third type emerged epitomized by Brooks' Shannara series and Stephen Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: the romance writer. She notes that from Brooks and Donaldson forward the reverie-a kind of internal monologue that the reader is privy to, but does not actually function as fragmented internal dialogue, but rather as a kind of self-contemplation-prophecy that forces the hero to demonstrate his fitness through some kind of display, and action that carries emotional weight push the genre in a clear direction (2008: 38-42).
Shippey also writes that "Tolkien did not invent heroic fantasy, but he showed what could be done with it; he established a genre whose durability we cannot estimate" (2000: xix). Carter Lin admits that although he finds numerous flaws with The Lord of the Rings, the work is "surely one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of fantasy" (1973: 119). Emily Auger writes "J.R.R. Tolkien reinvented the medieval 'romance,' complete with archetypal characters, quest theme, and interlace narrative structure, when he wrote The Lord of the Rings and, in doing so, he became a principal founder of the modern literary genre of fantasy and inspiration to a wide range of fantasy art" (2008: 70). Brian Attebery calls it the "mental template" for Fantasy fiction (1992: 14). Stefan Ekman writes that "although fantasy works had been written for one or even two centuries previously, depending on how one chooses to define the genre, the publication of Tolkien's novel marked the beginning of seeing fantasy as a genre, and its influence has shaped modern fantasy and reader expectations alike" (2013: 9) and because it is so well known, The Lord of the Rings acts as a useful touchstone.

The Lord of the Rings and the Shape of a Narrative
In this study I am arguing that the character of the magical woman found in works of Epic Fantasy presents an opportunity to articulate the genre's potential for social change. Most of the works in this study challenge and reimagine the narrative structures that have influenced the genre for decades and therefore challenge patriarchal expectations and limitations. In making this argument, I rely heavily on the ways in which authors respond to and depart from generic expectations. In order to better understand these different conventions I examine, The Lord of the Rings serves as a useful template for the ways in which Fantasy narratives have traditionally unfolded and the myriad influences that shaped the genre. Before continuing with my own argument it is necessary to briefly map out the specific ways Fantasy has traditionally approached narrative structures and the specific literary influences that are still found within the genre.
One of the most recognizable narrative forms Tolkien deploys in The Lord of the Rings is that of the quest. Frodo must leave the Shire, and overcome a number of obstacles (with the help of various friends and guides, of course), in order to fulfill a specific goal-the destruction of the one ring. As Joseph Campbell points out in The Hero with a Thousand Faces: The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation-initiationreturn: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth. A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man (1949: 30, emphasis in original). 9 Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is, at its heart, a quest narrative, the form that would come to dominate Epic Fantasy. It fits nearly perfectly the basic structure of the quest laid out by Campbell: Frodo leaves the safety of the Shire, a place of rolling farmland, ventures into the world outside where he encounters magical beings and supernatural forces, recruits friends and allies, faces trials and danger, battles a great evil, and restores the land.
In addition to the quest, Tolkien employs the medieval romance and the fairytale. 10 George H. Thomson writes that "The Lord of the Rings is . . . the first attempt since the Renaissance to write a fully developed traditional romance" (1967: 44). The story itself is, according to Thomson, an "anatomy of romance themes or myths" (1967: 45). In addition to utilizing the archetypal characters and quest theme of the medieval romance, Tolkien also uses a similar interlace narrative. 11 This interlace, or tapestry, narrative "is a series of interwoven stories each of which is picked up or dropped as occasion and suspense require" (Thomson 1967: 48). Emily Auger, quoting Eugéne Vinaver's The Rise of Romance, argues that the interlace of the 10 While not particularly pertinent to this discussion, Tolkien also borrows from the Victorian travel narrative. Martin Simonson notes that the Shire is "an idealized reconstruction of a rural England prior to the Great War" (2006: 81), the journey out of the shire and in the beginning of the quest to destroy the Ring is filled with "irreverent joking," and "the travelling as such is more like a walking holiday in the countryside than a dangerous expedition" (Simonson 2006: 82). Simonson argues that the characters of Bilbo, Gandalf, Frodo, and Sam "confirm the possibility of high adventure and the inclusion of dark, fantastic elements in a narrative that starts off in a nineteenth-century blend of bourgeois fairy tale and humorous and rural novels" (2006: 85 emphasis in original). Simonson also notes that moving from the relative safety of the Shire as rural England to the greater, much darker, and more dangerous, world beyond presents certain narrative obstacles. 11 The medieval romance is also evident in the general setting and technologies of the work. People travel by horse, there are kings and regents, armies of cavalry, archers, and foot soldiers, armor, sword-fighting, castles and manors.
cyclical romance "can only be understood in terms of the simultaneous pursuit of multiple themes that 'alternate like threads in a woven fabric, one theme interrupting another and again another, and yet all remaining constantly present in the author's and reader's mind ' (76-77)" (2008: 73). Thus, while Frodo's journey to destroy the Ring is the central quest, Tolkien spends significant time and attention on the war with Sauron, Aragorn's struggle with his destiny as the returning King of Gondor, Merry and Pippin's time with the Ents, etc. The main story of the Ring "involves many other stories, all more or less independent yet linked at many points and occurring more or less simultaneously" (West 81 qtd. in Auger 2008: 74). 12 This interlace narrative will become a staple of Fantasy, found in the multiple point-of-view narratives that many works contain.
Tolkien also liberally borrows from the fairy-tale, and, more specifically, the Märchen or folk-tale. Linda Dégh describes the structure of the folk-tale as such: The Märchen tells about an ordinary human being's encounter with the suprahuman world and his becoming endowed with qualities that enable him to perform supernatural acts. The Märchen is, in fact, an adventure story with a single hero. . . . The hero's (or heroine's) career starts, as everyone else's, in the dull and miserable world of reality. Then, all of a sudden, the supernatural world involves him and challenges the mortal, who undertakes his long voyage 12 Auger also identifies another level of stylistic interlace in the frequent storytelling that occurs in the text, particularly when Aragorn tells the story of Beren and Lúthien (their tale is told in great detail in The Silmarillion, published posthumously in 1977) to the resting Hobbits in The Fellowship of the Ring. This telling weaves together three different threads that are present in the current text of The Lord of the Rings: a journey to Rivendell, the love of a man for an elf, and the eventual path of Aragorn and Arwen's love (2008: 75).
to happiness. He enters the magic forest, guided by supernatural helpers, and defeats evil powers beyond the boundaries of man's universe. Crossing several borders of the Beyond, performing impossible tasks, the hero is slandered, tortured, trapped, betrayed. He suffers death by extreme cruelty but is always brought to life again. Suffering turns him into a real hero: as often as he is devoured, cut up, swallowed, or turned into a beast, so does he become stronger and handsomer and more worthy of the prize he seeks. His ascent from rags to riches ends with the beautiful heroine's hand, & kingdom, and marriage. The final act of the Märchen brings the hero back to the human world; he metes out justice, punishes the evil, rewards the good (1972: 63).
Of course, as Sullivan notes, few tales follow this structure exactly, but with minor modifications, or metaphoric readings, many stories fit this structure. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings both fit in general (1996: 307).
Tolkien also borrows from the narrative approach of the realist novel. This is seen in his prose style as well as his approach to world-building. Initially, the affinity between The Lord of the Rings and the realist novel seems incompatible given the core tenets of the realist novel, namely a desire to achieve a "correspondence between the literary work and the reality which it imitates" (Watt 1957: 11). Part of portraying the world as it is is an attention to particular individuals in a particularized time and place, and abandoning a reliance on disguises and coincidences for a more causal connection of events operating through time (1957: 9-22). All of this is to be relayed through simple, easy, and natural prose. Watt summarizes this as follows: implicit in the novel form is "the premise, or primary convention, that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience" (1957: 32). And while Fantasy novels do not represent the world as it is, not only can they give a "full and authentic" report of human experience, they also have the freedom to depart from it, offering experiences not constrained by patriarchal ideas.
Tolkien makes the world of The Lord of the Rings as "real" as possible. Each book begins with a map of Middle Earth that does more than simply provide a reference for readers; it insists this world is unified, it has terrains that are navigable and, more than that, that have been recorded. Tolkien goes on to describe his landscapes in painstaking detail, attributing to them a history that indicates this setting is not simply some ephemeral world that someone has entered for adventure, but that this land has meaning, substance, and a function beyond the actual story the reader is currently experiencing. The aim is expressly to treat the fantasy world as if it were fact: "The less 'invented' the world of a fantasy seems, the more true and free of control it will also appear" (1975: 169). Integrating the stylistic approaches of the realist novel, particularly in regards to characterization, helps Tolkien to create more fully realized characters that, while still basic types, are also substantially more complex than the characters found in earlier literary fantasy These features-the hero's quest, the interlace narrative, and approaches to world-building and characterization-are all elements that will continue to appear in this study. This is because each of these aspects of the genre of Fantasy influence the ways in which the object of this study, the magical woman, is presented within the narrative. The hero's quest is traditionally a male endeavor and thus, the narrative shape this quest takes is geared towards male experiences of and in the world. In order for a female hero to successfully complete her quest, the facets of the hero's quest must be reexamined, modified, and in some cases, discarded. The interlace narrative encourages not only in-depth development of secondary characters, but also their subordination to the primary (male) hero's narrative. This allows authors to create powerful, strong, interesting magical women characters, while still subsuming them within a patriarchal narrative that upholds the male protagonist. World-building can either support and encourage the creation of independent, fully realized magical women by structuring the very foundations of the world as one that has gender parity, or it can do the opposite by creating worlds that repeat and uphold patriarchal gender relations.

Fantasy after Tolkien: The Repetition of Form
Tolkien's influence is seen most clearly in the successful early works John Clute and John Grant's summary of the first novel brings these similarities into stark relief: A young Hobbit-like UGLY DUCKLING is told by a Gandalf-like WIZARD that he is a HIDDEN MONARCH, last of the Shannara line; and must now undertake and arduous QUEST, with suitable COMPANIONS, for the eponymous SWORD. The MAGIC sword had been crafted centuries earlier by an associate of the current DARK LORD, a REVENANT who threatens to effect a terming THINNING of the world" (1997: 142-43).
What the annotations also reveal is the influence of Ballantine's editor, Lester Del Rey, who was specifically seeking a marketable Fantasy series after Tolkien. 14 And it worked. With the publication of The Sword of Shannara, Brooks was the first Fantasy 14 Part of this success, as Perschon notes, is that Shannara is in many ways easier than Lord of the Rings. He writes that "Brooks was not an Oxford scholar steeped in Beowulf and the Eddas. He was a law student looking to become a best-selling writer" (2012).
author to make the New York Times bestseller list (Clute and Grant 1997: 142) and demonstrated that Tolkien's approach was a repeatable, viable, and profitable formula.
This basic narrative structure is seen throughout early Fantasy, and would only serve to reinforce the perception that all the stories presented within the genre are essentially the same. David Eddings' Belgariad (1982-85) 15 The Riddlemaster trilogy will be revisited in chapter four as a possible example of a duomyth as the second book shifts to Raederle's quest to find Morgon during which she comes into her own powers. However, it is Morgon who eventually defeats the Earth Masters, learns he is the High One's rightful heir, takes his place as ruler, and is the eponymous Riddlemaster of the series. 16 While he acknowledges the response to Tolkien offered by Terry Brooks and Stephen Donaldson, Michael Livingston dubs Robert Jordan "America's Tolkien" defeat the Dark One. After Shannara, it is perhaps the most faithful representation of the Tolkien inspired format: a young boy who grew up in the country discovers he is part of a prophecy and must journey to faraway lands, complete a number of quests, until he battles The Dark Lord (1990Lord ( -2013. It is also the focus of the following chapter of this study. Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth started with Wizard's First Rule published in 1994 after a bidding war where the book "sold at auction for more than six times the record price ever paid for a first fantasy novel" (Flewelling 1995). It would go on to become "one of the most successful debut fantasy novels in the history of trade publishing" (Flewelling 1995 19 I'd like to offer an illustrative anecdote of how these two assumptions play out. In the Fall of 2017 I attended a general literature conference to present a paper that examined the historical devaluation of the Fantasy genre juxtaposed against the relative critical acceptance of Science Fiction. The paper was meant to be a general rumination on the generic attributes and various early theoretical works that established an academic prejudice against Fantasy literature. As often happens at a general literature conference when one is presenting on Fantasy, my panel was an eclectic mix of papers that didn't quite go together. Two of my fellow panelists, both trained Classicists, were presenting part of a collaborative work that focused on philology and Nietzsche's concept of slow reading. They were interested in the argument that, in a world that encourages one to "hurry-skurry" and emphasizes the drive to "get it done" (even more so now than when Nietzsche was writing in 1886), the art of philology is indispensable as it "teaches how to read well, that is, slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes" (2007: 9). Thus, philology is "an art which must carry out slow, fine work" (2007: 8). They posited their discipline, studies of classical Latin and Greek literature, was uniquely well suited to accomplish these goals. During the question and answer session, I was asked by another Classicist whether or not it was possible to "slow read" Fantasy, because his experience with Science Fiction was that none of those authors could write-there was no complexity to their words, no sentences of phrases or word choices that would require a philological examination. aware of (and even read some) popular fiction, but they "are not supposed to spill serious ink on the matter" (2007: 10). This leads to an assumption that genre fiction is not necessarily a worthy object of academic study.
When the division between literary fiction and genre fiction begins to indicate that genre fiction is bad, or empty, or devoid of artistic merit (and conversely that somehow all literary fiction is of value) this division does harm to a whole wealth of literature that is ignored before it is even given a chance. This distinction can even bias readers against genre fiction, causing them to perceive it as less emotionally somehow not 'generic' (Lennard 2007: 10). Anne Cranny-Francis makes a similar point when she writes that "all fiction (and all non-fiction) is generic, but some of it works to disguise its conventionality" (1993: 93). Literary realism naturalized conventions "so that they seemed obvious or inevitable to readers, and so became effectively invisible" (1993: 93). Literary fiction also utilizes generic conventions, they are just not as obvious and so presented as natural. 22 Lennard also argues that there are also class judgments at work in judgments of literary merit: "leisured 'literature' being the nobility, and hasty generic scurries through the market-place the proletariat or petit bourgeoisie" (2007: 10-11). It was this question Chris Gavaler and Dan Johnson set out to answer. They wanted to measure "how identifying a text as science fiction makes readers automatically assume it is less worthwhile, in a literary sense, and thus devote less effort to reading it" (Flood 2017). Gavaler and Johnson gave groups two identical texts, apart from "setting-creating" words. So, instead of a character entering a room, 23 David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano argue that literary fiction "forces the reader to engage in ToM [Theory of Mind] processes" (2013: 377), but that other forms of fiction do not necessarily achieve this. They also call upon Roland Barthes' distinction between readerly texts-texts that, like most popular genre fiction, are meant to entertain passive readers-and writerly texts-texts that engage their readers creatively as writers-and Mikhail Bakhtin's theory that literary fiction is polyphonic, and requires readers to contribute their own voices (2013: 377). In other words, literature forces readers to fill in gaps and search for meaning. Popular fiction, on the other hand, "tends to portray the world and characters as internally consistent and predictable" (2013: 378). To test this hypothesis, they first compared the effects of reading literary fiction and non-fiction, then literary fiction and popular fiction. Their conclusions were that reading literary fiction improved performance on affective ToM tasks, while reading non-fiction and popular fiction did not. they would enter a galley. Instead of door, there was an airlock. Gavaler and Johnson surmised that this should have no effect on their ability to relate to the characters, or to infer what they were feeling. What they found was that converting the world to a science fictional one "reduced perceptions of literary quality" (Flood 2017). They conclude that the science fiction setting "triggered poorer overall reading" and "appears to predispose readers to a less effortful and comprehending mode of reading .
. . regardless of the actual intrinsic difficulty of the text" (Flood 2017). Gavaler specifically addresses Kidd and Castano's study as a major incentive for conducting his own. He was not only annoyed that their category divisions weren't accurate, but that they didn't account for pre-existing generic bias. When a text is identified as genre fiction, the reader assumes it is simpler and thus invests less effort into understanding it. This then lowers their score on comprehension tests, though readers still report that the story required less effort to understand. It becomes a self-fulfilling bias (Flood 2017). He concludes: "So when readers who are biased against SF read the word 'airlock', their negative assumptions kick in -'Oh, it's that kind of story'-and they begin reading poorly. So, no, SF doesn't really make you stupid. It's more that if you're stupid enough to be biased against SF you will read SF stupidly" (Flood 2017 There are a number of ways to answer the charge that Fantasy has no social or political aspirations. First, the one that seems to garner the least amount of 25 Suvin would go on to write that "Though fantastic fiction has a long pedigree in most European countries and the United States, for the first half of this century in the United States it 'flourished only as a parasite on its more popular cousin, science fiction'  We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. We should meet the centaur and the dragon, and the perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs, and horses--and wolves. This recovery fairy-stories help us to make (1965: 57).
John H. Timmerman similarly writes that "Fantasy is essentially rejuvenative. It permits us a certain distance from pragmatic affairs and offers us a far clearer insight into them" (1983: 1). Erikson also pushes back specifically against charges of escapism: "I never said my series was escapist, in any sense, and at no time do I recall feeling any "escape" while writing it. The themes never went away" (qtd. in Orullian 2012). Thus, Fantasy is not about escaping, but standing apart for a time and then returning with a renewed sense of direction and purpose. This is why stories of heroes and quests appear throughout history and remain popular even now.
But the thrust of Suvin's distaste for Fantasy seems to stem from the idea that Fantasy somehow allows its readers to opt out of social responsibility, that it does not inspire or require them to think about how they can move from their experience as a reader of Fantasy to confronting "real world" issues. Of course, Fantasy, like any popular genre, reflects the society in which it was written. Helen Young notes that because most early successful authors were white men, the genre formed certain habits of whiteness that shape the narratives themselves. So like all popular culture Fantasy is a representation of the socio-political context in which it was written. But Fantasy can do more than just reflect society, it can also offer socio-political commentary. In fact, the features of the genre make it an excellent site for this kind of work. Even Attebery, who approaches fantasy as modern myth-making, highlights its social and historical embeddedness, writing that "the most powerful and provocative fantasies recontextualize myths, placing them back into history and reminding us of their social and political power" (2014: 4). Fantasy as a genre is well-suited to this kind of work. Thus, Fantasy does not allow us to "escape ourselves or our situation: fantasy has an inevitable role as a commentary on, or counterpart to, reality and realism" (Hunt and Lenz 2001: 8). Fantasy offers authors a way to explore socio-political issues without the constraints and burden of remaining true to an accurate account of the world as it is. Fiction encourages readers to imagine differently, but Fantasy's departure from consensus reality offers even more vectors of exploration. Thus, if an author wishes to explore issues of colonialism or conquest, or gender, or revolution, setting their story within a world not our own gives them the unique freedom to do so. Fantasy can offer a space within which to confront these issues, and to imagine differently.
Take even the most stereotypical plot from Fantasy: the young boy who grows to challenge a great evil. One certainly can read this in a way that highlights its conservative elements-the hero is typically a white male, there is often some aspect of conquest that is seen as natural or pre-ordained, there are often racist elements concerning those who are seen as "evil," etc.-and these aspects should not be ignored or glossed over, but even here there are explorations of what inspires those who are weaker to believe they can stand up to, and maybe even defeat, a force that is seen as overwhelmingly powerful. Along the way they will meet those who find it easier to simply be complicit in something they know to be morally wrong in order to make profit or because it is the easiest way out. The reader encounters systems of oppression-the evil ruler does not maintain rule alone-as there are those who actively attach themselves to whoever they believe is going to win. There is great sacrifice (rarely does every member of the party make it to the end), and characters must figure out how to keep going in the face of great sorrow. And as Fantasy has evolved as a genre, those aspects that make this narrative problematic are challenged, reworked, and sometimes discarded: works begin to explore and comment on the colonial aspects often embedded in these quest narratives, like in N. As Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz note, most studies of fantasy begin (as most academic studies do) with an attempt to define the object of study, "marking out academic or conceptual territory" (2001: 9). In the case of fantasy, they note that this can turn into "a fairly defensive exercise" (9). This is due to the fact that "fantasy" can take on so many different meanings. It is surely possible, they note, to claim that all fiction is fantasy "because fiction narrates and makes sense of things in a way that is unavailable in reality" or, in a more commonly encountered move, "one could reasonably include the category of fantasy any fanciful tale, from myths to religious parables, from the folk tale to the absurd, from nursery rhymes to nonsense" (2001: 9).
Of course, defining one's object of study is also good academic practice, so even Hunt Manlove foregrounds its relationship to our world and beliefs, calling it "another order of reality from that in which we exist and form our notions of possibility " (1975: 3) and "a fiction involving the supernatural or impossible" (1999: 3); Brian Attebery takes a self-referential approach, writing that fantasy is anything that violates "what the author clearly believes to be natural law" (1980: 2); Le Guin highlights the ways in which fantasy helps us to understand existence, defining it as "a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence" and goes on to offer a number of descriptive terms, writing that fantasy "is not anti-rational, but para-rational; not realistic, but surrealistic, superrealistic; a heightening of reality" (1992: 79) (2001: 9). To their fairly comprehensive list I would add: Tzvetan Todorov marks the fantastic as when "In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know .
. . there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world" (1973: 25); Farah Mendlesohn attempts to side-step a definition, but at some point must identify what rhetorical move that she can identify as "fantasy" entering the text, writing that it is "dependent on the dialectic between author and reader for the construction of a sense of wonder, that it is a fiction of consensual construction of belief" (2008: xiii); and Rosemary Jackson locates the fantastic as existing "Between the marvellous and the mimetic, borrowing the extravagance of the one and the ordinariness of the other, the fantastic belongs to neither and is without their 27 Rabkin is more specifically concerned with establishing the fantastic as the opposite of narrative reality. He writes that the fantastic occurs "when the ground rules of a narrative are forced to make a 180 reversal, when prevailing perspectives are directly contradicted" (1976: 12).
assumptions of confidence or presentations of authoritative 'truths '" (1981: 35). It subverts unitary vision, introduces confusion and alternative, and is meant as an opposition to the "realist" novel's support of bourgeois vision (1981: 35). 28 The studies listed above include vastly different texts and further confusion arises through a conflation of genres, with studies also seeing little difference between Fantasy and the fantastic-Hunt and Lenz's assertion that "fantasy" is relative is evident nowhere more than when one attempts to find a definition for fantasy and then determine which texts fall within that definition.
Part of the confusion in defining fantasy lies in the conflation of the fantastic and what one generally thinks of when one hears the term "fantasy literature." A.P.
Canavan notes that 'Fantasy,' as a term, is used in three major ways: the mode, the genre, and the formula. This simple statement reveals a problem that has plagued fantasy scholarship almost from its very inception: when we as academics discuss fantasy, we are almost always arguing at cross purposes, not because we have never defined the limits of fantasy nor because our desire for taxonomy has obscured the discussion but because we use the term fantasy to mean multiple things (2012: 1).
He goes on to note that a number of theorists use "the term 'fantasy' interchangeably with 'fantastic' to refer to the supergenre or mode of 'the fantastic,' the grand overarching category of nonrealist or nonmimetic literature" (2012: 1-6). While this isn't by default an issue-studying different manifestations of the fantastic in literature allows critics to place their work in context and make connections between different traditions-"fantasy is not the same as the fantastic" (Canavan 2012: 6 From there she reaches the definition that "Fantasy is any departure from consensus reality" and this departure does not have to be noticed by the characters, only the reader (1984: 21; 23). In order to examine fantasy "we must abandon the assumption that mimesis . . . is the only real part of literature" (1984: 21). 29 Hume goes on to examine different ways fantasy might operate within any variety of texts as escape, adventure, horror and ghosts, augmented worlds, mythic dimensions, didactic approaches, etc. These approaches may appear in any fantastic genre. Hume's clear distinction of fantasy as mode also goes a long way to alleviating the concern of C.W.
Sullivan III who points out that while many trace the history of fantasy back to Beowulf or The Faerie Queene this confuses the nature of fantasy. He writes that "the contemporary fantasy writer's borrowing of material from medieval and ancient literatures for his modern texts automatically makes those older narratives no more fantasies than it makes them modern" (1992: 99). He goes on to argue that "fantasy 29 Hume notes that a number of factors-particularly the classical theory of Plato and Aristotle, and early Christian literary theory-led to the valuation of mimesis over fantasy (1984: 5-7). literature . . . is a product of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and should be approached as such" (1992: 100). His point is well taken, but if one considers fantasy as mode, then looking back to ancient epics, Medieval literature, epic Romances, the Gothic, etc. becomes much less fraught if one's focus is on the ways in which fantasy appears narratively in the text. These texts are not "Fantasy" in the generic sense, because "fantasy requires some concept of realism before it can exist" (Hunt and Lenz 2001: 15) and is a 20 th century genre, but they certainly employ fantasy as mode and have a traceable influence on Fantasy as genre. 30 In this study, I refer to these works as literary fantasy, acknowledging that, while they are not accepted as works of Fantasy (the modern genre), they do make use of fantasy as narrative strategy and a number of their features are found within the genre of Fantasy. 31 I attempt to make the distinction easily distinguishable by speaking of fantasy as mode and Fantasy as genre, marking the difference through capitalization. I have chosen this approach in order to more clearly call attention to works of literary fantasy that, while not Fantasy, do exist within the same tradition, if at a distance. 30 Canavan suggests abandoning the use of the term fantasy to describe mode at all. He argues "Fantasy is not the overarching mode. Fantasy is not the term to use for the discussion of the mode, the supergenre, the all-encompassing category. Fantasy is a genre within the fantastic. . . . Fantasy is a distinct tradition, a distinct genre, a distinct entity with all the complexity, paradoxes, exceptions, and formulas that every other genre exhibits" (2012: 6). I largely agree with him-it would be infinitely more simple if the term fantasy was reserved for the genre of Fantasy alone, while the term the fantastic was deployed to speak more broadly of a supergenre or category of texts that in different ways depart from consensus reality. Unfortunately, established scholarship has already deployed these terms in a variety of ways. 31 Tom Shippey terms all literature that utilizes fantasy as "the fantastic" and further claims that viewed this way "The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic" and that "even authors deeply committed to the realist novel have often found themselves unable to resist the gravitational pull of the fantastic as a literary mode" (2000: vii, viii).  33 Additionally, the "fuzzy set" Mendlesohn refers to as an accepted definition of fantasy is generally understood to apply to fantasy genres, not fantasy as mode. Thus, as Brian Attebery notes, even a fuzzy set needs a few texts to stand near the center. Fuzzy sets, he writes, are "categories defined not by a clear boundary or any defining characteristic but by resemblance to a single core example or group of examples" (2014: 33). He continues, noting that "fuzzy sets involve not only resemblances but also degrees of membership. Instead of asking whether or not a story is science fiction (SF), one can say it is mostly SF, or marginally SF, or like SF in some respects. Allowing for partial membership in genre categories helps explain how genres can hybridize" (2014: 33). This is not so much a definition of the narrative effects of fantasy, but of Fantasy as genre. Mendlesohn's own study is essentially approaching fantasy as mode-she is interested in the rhetorical effects of fantasy within a narrative, so the ways in which fantasy interrupts or shapes a story-but is not terribly concerned with generic distinction. Thus, for her, it does not matter what genre a work is traditionally considered as belonging to, but rather the narrative function of fantasy within it. She uses these functions to establish a new criteria for organizing fantasy texts, one that is often at odds with accepted generic divisions. There is also a danger in simply declaring the pursuit to define fantasy as over, which recalls debates concerning terminology addressed earlier in this chapter.
Canavan again notes that: We have debated aspects of fantasy. We have debated key texts within fantasy.
We have debated approaches to the fantastic. We have agreed on a consensus of critical frameworks that can be applied to the fantastic as well as to fantasy.
But we have never had a debate about fantasy. The very shape, size and core of the genre remain areas that need meaningful and concerted debate, deconstruction, and discussion (2012: 6). 34 Mendlesohn notes that most quest fantasies fit better within the designation portal fantasy, as the main character often goes from a mundane life that has very little to do with the fantastic (even if they know of its existence, it is distant and unknown) to "direct contact with the fantastic, through which she transitions, to the point of negotiation with the world via the personal manipulation of the fantastic realm" (2008: xx). "Egwene died": The Magical Woman as Donor/Helper ". . . to accept something from somebody is to accept some part of his spiritual essence, of his soul" (Mauss 1990: 12).
The impulse to venture out into unfamiliar lands, battling monsters and dragons, winning fame and possibly love, and defeating a great evil-that is, becoming a hero-is something that is found in our earliest literature and has never quite left our collective consciousness. From Beowulf and Rama to Achilles and Gautama Buddha, and from the Redcrosse Knight and Kama to King Arthur and Sir Gawain, literary fantasy has tended to portray this journey as one undertaken by a young man who is thrown into adventure and becomes greater than he once was. And this trend has continued. Literary fantasy, myth, folk-tales, epics, romances, and medieval literature would all influence the genre of Fantasy and, while Fantasy would become its own unique, independent genre in the mid-20 th C, these influences are still clearly seen from characterization, to plot, to narrative style. Unfortunately, this also meant an emphasis on the hero's journey as a fundamentally male narrative. This does not mean that women do not feature prominently in Fantasy; they are present in a number of ways. However, these women rarely feature as the novel's protagonist or hero, rather, they are given a number of supportive roles within the narrative that allow them to assist, or motivate, the male hero. Sometimes these female characters are girls, who disguise themselves as boys, in order to have adventures and at some point may join the hero's troupe or perform an important task that aids in the hero's journey. 36 Or they are evil or broken and either betray someone or are in need of saving from their tortured path, offering the hero a chance to redeem a fallen woman. 37 The limitations placed on female characters of Fantasy has become a somewhat tired refrain of (female) readers: critics and fans consistently lament the tendency to rely on repeated tropes. Gabrielle Taub writes that "There's something to be said about the fact that women, even in fantasy novels, are given the same tired, overused roles -and that 'something' is: this is getting ridiculous" (2015). Emily Russel compiled a list of "The Four Women-in-Fantasy Tropes I'm Bored With" that includes Princess Hellion, The Tortured Waif, The Innocent Rogue, and The Woman Warrior. 38 Faith M. Boughan focuses on the specific issue of "Your Heroine is too Beautiful" and writes that "While it's true that females have a greater role in fantasy novels these days than in previous decades, I think we still have a long way to go before the character of the "strong woman" becomes more than a man in sexy woman's clothing (or, in other cases, a sex object with a "masculine" attitude)"  (2015). Thus, many female characters' backstory, while complex, still allows her to fit conveniently within a patriarchal narrative, e.g. the Tortured Waif has been through tough times, but she is not removed from the possibility of romantic/sexual interest.
characters" will generate a number of fan compiled lists-readers of Fantasy have recognized their own desires to read works with stronger female characters and seek to help others wade through less progressive offerings to find these works.
One common way women are integrated in modern Fantasy is as users of magic. As witches, sorceresses, and elves, magical women exist throughout Fantasy.
And yet, even these popular figures rarely feature as the protagonist of the story. For the purpose of this chapter, I am most interested in the role that is often reserved for magical women in particular-that of the helper or donor. Like the Spider Woman of Navajo lore, or the helpful crone or fairy godmother of European fairy-tale, many of the magical women found in Fantasy are what Joseph Campbell terms "supernatural aid," a character that exists to assist the hero in some important way (1949: 70-71).
When the magical woman is cast as donor/helper, the Fantasy narrative must contend with two often opposing forces: the power that magic affords female characters and the proscription to make her secondary to the male hero. By examining this character in particular and the tensions she creates within the narrative, the fissures in the patriarchal scaffolding of Fantasy are made clear. examples from popular series. These magical women occupy periphery positions in goods, but are rather "religious, juridical, and moral" and involve both family and society (1990: 3). The gift, Mauss argues, is not simply a physical item, but is something that is "part and parcel of his nature and substance, because to accept something from somebody is to accept some part of his spiritual essence, of his soul" (1990: 12). This is often seen in the magical gift given by the donor-they are often imbued with the donor's own magic-and that of the helper, who so often gives the hero physical and emotional support. This obligation to give and to receive forms bonds of alliance and commonality (1990: 13). Once someone receives a gift, they are in a "position of inferiority so long as he is not freed from his pledge-wager" (1990: 62). 40 In Derrida's conception of the gift, giving and receiving functions as a kind of circle-what is given always returns in the form of the reciprocal gift-that precludes the gift as such. In other words, the recognition of gift as gift annuls the possibility of the gift (1992: 14). 40 We reach an aporia: if the gift is recognized as a gift, then it ceases to be a gift as it enters into a reciprocal economy of exchange, but if the gift is not recognized, then it also not a gift. The question then arises, is anything ever given, if the act of giving is a circle? Is it possible to get outside of this circle to a place outside the economy of exchange, or the "ritual circle of the debt" (1992: 23-24)? To accomplish this, a gift must be secret, from an unknown donor, and unnamed. 41 In a work that features relatively little magic, it is telling that Martin makes his most clearly magical figure a woman who also serves as a helper, devoting her magical abilities to the service of Stannis Baratheon. the narrative, assisting or interacting with the hero in ways that reinforce the primacy of the male hero's journey while relegating them to largely supporting roles. While many of these characters are interesting, captivating, and fan favorites, their relative power, gained through their use of magic, is nevertheless mediated and integrated in a male narrative, containing their potential. This paradigm of magical woman as donor/helper, found throughout fantasy literature, was codified in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. It would become so paradigmatic, that it becomes difficult for subsequent works of Fantasy to completely break free of its influence, even when they expressly attempt to do so.
In order to demonstrate the ways in which Egwene from Jordan's A Wheel of Time fulfills the need for a strong, complex magical woman, but ultimately reinscribes her into a narrative structure that privileges the male quest, I will first give an overview of the magical woman as helper/donor in literary fantasy in order to establish the long history of magical woman as donor/helper in fantasy literature. From ancient epic, to Renaissance poetry, to folk-tale, one finds the figure of the magical woman whose main purpose in the narrative is to assist the hero on his journey through either action or a bestowing of (magical) gifts. While Fantasy is, of course, a genre distinct from the literary fantasy tradition, this establishes a narrative function that is a readymade and recognizable slot into which magical women handily fit. This demonstrates that the narrative compulsion to subsume the narratives of magical women under the hero's quest through the function of donor/helper is difficult to overcome, even by those who create complex and captivating magical women characters.

Literary Fantasy and the Magical Helper
Because literary fantasy so clearly influences Fantasy, the roles established for magical women throughout literary fantasy offer a clear history of the ways in which authors have imagined magical women and establishes narrative precedent for what to do with these characters. This history reveals that the magical woman as donor/helper is a popular role, though its realization necessarily differs from work to work. What it also reveals is that by casting a magical woman as donor/helper, her power is effectively contained within the narrative of the male hero's story. If her primary narrative function is to help or assist the actual hero, she cannot be a hero in her own right. Interestingly, when magical women have outlived their usefulness as donor/helper, yet are still clearly powerful, they are often re-cast into another popular role for magical women, that of the evil sorceress. What this brief history demonstrates is that narrative positions that are subordinate to the hero's are often used to contain magical women, who by virtue of their magic possess great power.
The magical woman who gives tokens to the hero or helps him along on his quest abound in Classical literature. 42 The abundance of goddesses, demi-goddesses, magical beasts and items, and the popularity of hero-journey literature makes this 42 For the purpose of this study, I will treat these figures as they appear in their most popular mythic forms (See Morford and Lenardon 1999). However, it should be noted that the specifics of these stories are not consistent and are treated differently depending upon which ancient text, or images, one consults. For more on the various incarnations of Ariadne, see Webster 1966; for an analysis of the various studies of Heracles, see Philips 1978. unsurprising. Jason and the Argonauts offers a clear example of the hero's journeytheir quest is to retrieve a golden fleece from a dragon-and prominently features one of the most iconic magical woman, Medea, as donor. Medea's fate in subsequent tales also highlights the ways in which the magical woman and her power must somehow be contained through her casting and narrative function-Medea would transform from donor/helper, to evil witch. Medea first appears in the tale of Jason and the Argonauts. Jason, in an attempt to reclaim his family's throne, is sent on a quest to obtain the golden fleece. While on his journey, Medea, a priestess of Hecate who is a witch skilled in magic, falls in love with Jason and gifts him a magic ointment that will protect him against fire or iron for the length of one day. He uses this ointment to make it past fire-breathing bulls and the armed men who spring from the dragon's teeth. She also gives him the knowledge that he will need to throw a stone in the middle of the men so that they will fight each other to the death. Still, he is only able to take the fleece with further help from Medea: he uses the herbs she provides to drug the serpent. 43 Jason, victorious in his quest "took her who had made possible his success, a second prize" (Morford 1999: 472)-Medea is at once recognized as being integral, even responsible, for Jason's success while also being relegated to his prize.
Of course, Medea's eventual fate is well known as she embraces another role reserved for magical women, the evil witch who breaks taboos, once her usefulness as donor/helper is outlived. Several other magical women in Classical literature also function clearly as donors: Theseus receives aid in vanquishing the Minotaur from 43 Euripides gives Medea a much larger role, making her, and not Jason, the dragonslayer (Morford and Lenardon 1999: 471). While the fairy-godmother who assists the young girl in ultimately securing a prince/husband is a popular character, magical women often act as donor/helpers to male heroes as well. While many of these are written primarily for children, the fairytale is undeniably an influential genre within fantasy literature. In George MacDonald's The Princess and Curdie, a young miner is given a test, tokens, and a task by a mysterious woman who appears in the moonlight. After passing the trial given to him by the woman, Curdie is given his mission, but only after he is asked to put his hands in the fire, which he does without complaint. This grants him the ability to "know at once the hand of a man who is growing into a beast" (1888: 73)-that is, Curdie is now able to perceive both hidden good and hidden evil. The woman gives Curdie the first part of his mission: to head north to court. The woman sends him a companion, Lina, a creature who has very long legs like an elephant, a thick tail, and a head between a polar bear and snake who, while terrifying, becomes extremely loyal to Curdie (1888: 76). After a series of adventures, Curdie and Lina find Princess Irene and the King, and discover that the king is being poisoned. There is a duplicitous doctor and Lord Chancellor, a battle, victory, a promise of marriage between Curdie and Princess Irene, and the bestowing of an eventual kingship.
As these examples demonstrate, the narrative strategy of placing the magical woman in an accessory role is one that is used by a number of different genres throughout the history of literary fantasy. In the 20 th century, Tolkien would draw on many of these genres and traditions when writing what would become an integral touchstone for the genre of Fantasy, The Lord of the Rings. In making use of these narrative structures and character tropes, Tolkien also largely inscribes magical women to these secondary roles as donors or helpers, whose main purpose within the narrative is to assist the hero on the primary quest, regardless of their own power. 45 This narrative strategy simultaneously privileges male quests while containing those women within the narrative that might challenge male characters in regard to power and autonomy. Beyond that, it redirects their power to the hero for his own gains. The tendency of literary fantasy to ascribe magical women narrative functions that put them at the disposal of the hero, and the various structural and stylistic traditions Tolkien borrows from, complement each other. The interlace narrative, the heroicquest, the medieval romance and the fairy-tale all privilege the central narrative of the male hero, making it narratively convenient to cast magical women in these donor/helper roles.

Galadriel and the Giving of Gifts
In  (1967: 50). This narrative structure and use of archetypal characters clearly demonstrates the ways in which Tolkien borrows from various types of Romance, but it also inscribes the female characters to the same kinds of secondary 46 Sullivan reminds those critics who negatively comment on the structural similarities in the plots between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that Tolkien's plot structure is the plot structure of the Märchen, legend, and epic and that "Folk-lore and mythology scholarship has repeatedly shown that traditional stories share traditional characteristics, and Tolkien wanted to tell a traditional story" (1996: 307). What they believe is a negative is in fact a purposeful re-imagining of these traditional plots.
roles. 47 As Ian Watt notes in The Rise of the Novel, romance has less to do with the love story between the hero and the damsel, and more to do with "the adventures which the knight achieved for his lady" (1957: 136). Therefore, the male quests occupy the spaces of central concern. This is clearly seen in the examples drawn from literary fantasy previously discussed-if the magical woman was not a donor/helper, then she was evil, and sometimes, she is both in order to elevate the male hero's journey. What is clear is that this character type perseveres as does the relegation of magical women to secondary roles. 48 While magic appears in various forms throughout The Lord of the Rings, it always in some way intersects with the male heroes and their journeys: Gandalf goes 47 Much work has been done to "rescue" Tolkien from charges of misogyny for his lack of strong female characters in his works. Jack M. Downs argues that while both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings see the male characters performing a bulk of the action, if one examines Tolkien's entire mythos one finds not only more women characters, but ones that are not assigned to merely secondary roles. In order to demonstrate this, Downs examines the story of Lúthien from The Silmarillion and Eowyn from The Lord of the Rings. Downs successfully demonstrates that each woman participates in their own hero's journey, often subverting gendered expectations. Where Downs' argument loses its force is his necessary acknowledgment that both characters are reintegrated into traditional gender roles once their quests end-both women willingly give up their heroic persona in favor of marriage. Downs generously forgives the casual reader for assuming women do not feature strongly in Middle-earth if they have not read anything past the main texts of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Downs ultimately speculates that women were largely left out because that mirrored Tolkien's experience on the front in World War I and the death of his school-friends in the war where women were absent on the frontlines. Downs argues both that women do exist in Tolkien's work, and also that if they don't it's because women weren't on the frontlines of WWI. Ross Smith notes that while most of the leading figures in Tolkien's works are male, this has not proved an obstacle to attracting a female readership, as the Lord of the Rings Research Project shows fans to be fairly divided between men and women (2006: 46). 48 The magical woman as evil witch or sorceress in modern Fantasy also merits critical analysis. How is this figure re-inscribed in modern Fantasy narratives? How does this character evolve from her functions in literary fantasy to modern Fantasy? on a number of quests, Sting helps Frodo, and later Sam, out of many dangerous situations, and the phial of light helps Sam defeat Shelob. The most powerful magical woman in The Lord of the Rings, the elf-queen Galadriel, also uses her power to aid the male heroes. But she is not only a magical woman, she is perhaps the most powerful magical figure aside from Sauron in the entire series (while her power does not allow her to defeat him, it does allow her to withstand him). And yet, all of her magic is redirected through the male characters, while she is relegated to a largely passive role in which she acts as Propp's donor. And she fulfills the role nearly perfectly: she provides the heroes with magical gifts that allow them to complete their journey, and she also performs a series of tests. 49 49 Scholarship on Galadriel is perhaps less abundant than that on other aspects of The Lord of the Rings. Romuald Ian Lakowski notes that Galadriel is "one of the best known and best loved characters" (despite only playing an important role in Book II: 6-8 and the end of Book VI), but little has actually been written about her (2007: 91). Part of the reason for this Lakowksi identifies is that the Galadriel of The Lord of the Rings is quite different from the Galadriel that is elaborated on in later writings like The Silmarillion, The Unfinished Tales, and Tolkien's late letters. Tolkien seems to have continually re-imagined Galadriel's past. The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia traces her evolution from a Faerie Queene type figure in The Lord of the Rings to a kind of Virgin Mary figure in later renditions. According to his 1971 letters, Tolkien largely agreed with this interpretation, writing "I think it is true that I owe much of this character to Christian and Catholic teaching and imagination about Mary, but actually Galadriel was a penitent: in her youth a leader in the rebellion against the Valar (the angelic guardians). At the end of the First Age she proudly refused forgiveness or permission to return. She was pardoned because of her resistance to the final and overwhelming temptation to take the Ring for herself" (Letters 407 qtd in Drout 2007: 228). Both Lakowski and Drout point to Galadriel as a counterargument to the claim that Tolkien does not write strong women, yet both rely on largely unfinished works and letters written after The Lord of the Rings to make this claim. Each also relies on the isolated aspects of her character and less on the narrative function she plays within the main work (she plays a much more active role in the tales of the First Age, though here she also goes from prideful rebel who is subject the Ban of the Valar for taking part in Fëanor's rebellion, to not playing a role in the rebellion and leaving for Middle Earth with the permission of the Valar). Charles Nelson comes closest to recognizing Galadriel as donor, casting her as a guide character, noting that "Of all the things Frodo first meets Galadriel in the Galadhrim elf city in the forests of Lórien, where the hobbits, Aragorn, and Legolas will eventually meet Gimli and Boromir to form the Fellowship. Galadriel is first described as sitting "side by side" with Lord Celeborn and after rising, Tolkien notes that they both were very tall, "the Lady no less tall than the Lord" (1954: 345). In addressing Frodo, Galadriel tells him that Gandalf was wise to send them to Lórien for "the Lord of the Galadhrim is accounted the wisest of the Elves of Middle-earth, and a giver of gifts beyond the power of kings" (1954: 347). And yet, though she tells them the gifts are from the Lord and Lady, it is Galadriel who gives them the most powerful, and ultimately essential, gifts and from her words it becomes apparent that these gifts come more from her than Celeborn. These gifts tend to be magical in nature. Aragorn receives a sheath to fit his sword and any sword drawn from this sheath cannot be stained or broken. Galadriel tells him that "it was left in my care to be given to you" (1954: 365); Elessar, the Elfstone of the house of Elendil, is also given to Aragorn. Galadriel makes clear that it is an heirloom Galadriel passed to her daughter, and she to hers (1954: 366); Boromir, Merry, and Pippen all get belts of precious metals; Legolas is given a bow; Sam is given earth from Galadriel's own garden, which she has blessed so that anything planted in a sprinkling of it will grow; to Gimli she gives three of her hairs; and which Galadriel does for the Fellowship, perhaps the most important is her giving of gifts at their parting-for in many ways, these tokens allow the individual members of the quest to proceed in doing their duties and bring their varied missions to successful conclusions" (2002: 53). Sarah Workman works to reinterpret The Lord of the Rings as an elegy that positions women as the central mourners. This "text as elegy" would reposition Galadriel as a hero whose power is that of memory and commemoration and Arwen's decision to renounce her immortality and marry Aragorn as a "heroic decision [that] privileges the gendered-female work of mourning above her own life" (2014: 83-84; 88).
finally, to Frodo a crystal phial filled with the light of Earendil's star held in the waters of Galadriel's fountain (1954: 366). A sheath placed in her keeping, an heirloom she passed down to her daughter and granddaughter, earth from her garden, locks of her hair, and a phial filled with water from her fountain-it seems that including Lord Celeborn as a giver of these gifts was largely a formality. 50 Indeed, the only gifts given personally by Celeborn are boats.
Galadriel also tests Frodo (and Sam), ensuring they are worthy of her gifts.

After many days and nights in Lothlórien, Galadriel brings Frodo and Sam to the
Mirror of Galadriel. And so begins the first test. The Mirror, if left free to work, will show "things that were, and things that are, and things that yet may be" (1954: 352-53). Sam looks first, and sees a number of injustices happening in the Shire, namely people cutting down trees they shouldn't, and this causes in Sam a desperate urge to return home. Galadriel reminds him of his vow not to go back without Frodo, and Sam, breaking down into tears, agrees to stay and complete his journey. Reluctantly, Frodo looks into the water next. He sees a series of images that he understands to "be parts of a great history in which he had become involved" (1954: 354). The last image he sees is the Eye of Sauron. She advises both Sam and Frodo, preparing them for their journey. It is Galadriel who offers wise council, not Celeborn.
While Galadriel's role in the narrative is largely passive, as a giver of gifts to aid in the central journey, she is clearly an objectively powerful character within the text, rivaling Sauron and commanding Gandalf's respect. As already noted, she holds an equal social and political position as Lord Celeborn, and she alone seems able to Already the tensions between a narrative structure that focuses on the male hero's journey and a powerful magical woman are evident. Galadriel may use her magic, but only in service to the true heroes of the tale as a donor, though her power is clearly evident. Tolkien largely succeeds in smoothing out these tensions by relegating Galadriel to a mostly unseen role and mediates her power by linking her clearly with Lord Celeborn-the reader hears tales of her power and catches small glimpses of her magical ability, but as a character we do not get to know her in any real sense.
Whenever her magic is actually implemented, it is done so through one of the main, 51 While Downs and I agree on this characterization of Galadriel in the The Lord of the Rings, we differ in our conclusions that supplementary texts somehow address Tolkien's lack of strong female characters in The Lord of the Rings.
male characters utilizing the gift she has given them. She does not get her own interlace narrative, but is folded into the main narrative in the span of a few pages. 52 Works after Tolkien would do just that, building on the interlace narrative structure, expanding their narrative through multiple point of view characters and letting the reader get to know the magical women as more fully fleshed out characters.
While the number of side/complementary journeys increase, and as series also increase in length from the trilogy to multi-volume works, the core narrative consisting of a hero's journey remains the same, and the subordination of these side narratives to eventually re-intersect with the main quest is still the predominant approach. However, with the expansion of points of view characters, and the explosion of volumes of books in a series, these interlace narratives became more and more complex, and their protagonists, while still subsumed under the main hero, became infinitely more individualized. In this way, it seems almost inevitable that some of these interlace narratives would be centered around women characters. And yet, despite introducing a magical woman with a complex characterization and motivation, the narrative structure itself cannot allow her to fully assume agency and must subsume her under the male hero's journey. This is clearly seen in Robert Jordan's fourteen volume series The Wheel of Time.

The Wheel of Time and the Tensions of Narrative
It is certainly clear that She concludes that Jordan creates a world that readers are able to treat as a real time and place, "a world vastly complex and nuanced" (2003:76) that also forces them to confront their own world with a new perspective.
already decided, and the ultimate clash is inevitable. This is echoed in the refrain that is repeated throughout the work: The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. . . . There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning (1990: 1, emphasis in original).
Jordan is explicitly acknowledging what Attebery also notes-the pattern is not new, but each story is different and unique, and that makes all the difference. He also echoes Tolkien's own view, that the fairy-story is one of legend, one that is "very ancient indeed" (Tolkien 1965: 20).
While Rand is our hero, for the purposes of this study I am not terribly concerned with his story. As far as hero journeys go, it is fairly typical: he leaves his rural town with a group of friends, encounters enemies, learns to control his power, or groups, to belong to. 56 The Aes Sedai serve as councilors to kings and queens, they broker peace treaties, and they travel the land to discover histories and knowledge. Tar Valon is a powerful city, and the Aes Sedai are a powerful organization. And it is 55 The One Power is, in a sense, made up of air, earth, fire, water, and spirit, which manifest as different weaves. A user of this power learns how to manipulate these weaves, creating different patterns that cause different things to happen. While women who can channel are found and trained, men who can channel saidin are found and stilled-that is, their ability to access the power is cut off. This is because saidin was tainted by the Dark One at the last breaking of the world, so men who channel tend to go insane (Rand cleanses saidin in Winter's Heart). As men also tend to be stronger in the One Power than women, men who can channel are feared and thought uncontrollably dangerous. 56 These are denoted by color and each has a different focus that suits different personality types. For example, sisters of the Green Ajah tend to have a skill in battle and strategy, while sisters of the Brown Ajah tend to be more academic and spend their time reading and studying. Some women are more powerful and can channel more of the power than others, while others are more adept at making complex weaves.
filled with, and run by, magical women. 57  Moraine are also important female characters but are not as consistently influential as the others already mentioned. Three of these characters are also clearly types: Elayne 57 Aes Sedai are not the only ones who can channel. Unbeknownst to them, many of the Wise Ones of the Aiel can also use saidar. As desert people who live in the Threefold land, or Aiel Waste, they have little contact with other nations, until the Last Battle begins to approach and alliances are made. Much like the Aes Sedai, girls who can channel are found and trained by other Wise Ones and serve their tribes as healers and councilors. Additionally, the Windfinders of the Sea Folk, a people who live primarily on board ships, are usually strong in air and water, the two weaves necessary to control the weather and ocean. While they occasionally send young girls weak in the power to the White Tower to prevent any suspicions, the strongest channelers are kept and become Windfinders. The Sea Folk Windfinders are also accomplished in weaves the White Tower is unaware even exist. 58  is a refined and politically savvy Princess then Queen; Aviendha is an exotic warrior; and Min is a rebellious tomboy. All three are, naturally, very beautiful. And, all three of these characters become Rand's lovers. Looked at one way, the mere fact that Jordan includes so many magical women characters, who are all different in some way, from different nations and with distinct personalities, is a testament to the progress made within the genre concerning the inclusion of female characters since The Lord of the Rings and the influence of an expanded number of interlace narratives and a larger volume of works in a given series. 60 However, Elayne, Aviendha, and Min-no matter how compelling their own narratives-have their story arcs clearly subordinated to Rand's. So much so that all three of them become his lovers, and while this may at first seem a cosmopolitan endorsement of polyamorous relationships, their quartet is clearly posited in terms of satisfying the multiple facets of Rand's personality. 61 While he is able to explore himself through his romantic relationships with these three different types of women, they remain monogamous to 60 Attril also commends Jordan for his portrayal of so many believable female characters (though she acknowledges they are not free from stereotypes) and notes that "he is one of the first male writers of serious heroic 'epic fantasy' to provide female characters with such numerous strong, leading roles" (2003: 39). 61 Propp writes that any element of the folktale may be negated twice, so that it may repeat a total of three times. This "trebling" may occur "among individual details . . . among individual functions (pursuit-rescue), groups of functions, and entire moves" (1968: 74). Rand's accumulation of three lovers to fulfill his multi-faceted personality is also an example of the rule of three: the idea that things that come in threes are more satisfying to the reader or listener. Often seen in fairytales (three little pigs, Goldilocks meets three bears, three Billy Goats Gruff) it also appears in popular slogans ("Stop, Drop, and Roll," "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité," "Stop, Collaborate, and Listen"). The rule of three, or the instinct to treble something, crosses genres and purposes-it seems universally pleasing and effective for memorization and the transfer of maximum knowledge through minimum length. There are also, naturally, echoes of the trinity.
him and do not experience the same type of experimentation or freedom. What their relationships with Rand do achieve is a guarantee that their narratives remain subordinated to his personal development and ultimate hero's journey. While they do not gift Rand physical objects, they donate not only their magical abilities, but also their emotional support and their bodies to his character development and emotional growth. It is through his sexual and romantic relationships with these women that Rand both finds the most psychological stability, connections to various groups of people, and maturation and initiation into manhood. Despite their characterization as a shrewd and just Queen, a capable and tough Wise Woman, and a rule-breaking, confident tomboy, their containment within Rand's narrative culminates as the last scene these women appear in shows them standing together, staring into a crowd where Rand is concealed. Rand notes that "All three women at the pyre had turned from it to look at him" (2013: 907). Their gazes, their futures, their attention is centered solely on Rand. As his lovers, one the mother of his twin children, they have effectively been contained, their power directed forever towards Rand. This is not the case for the one magical woman who occupies a crucial role in the narrative as a whole.

Egwene and the Possibility of Resistance
Rand's narrative role as hero effectively subordinates the stories of most of the magical women characters, regardless of their power-they are either his lovers, assist him in some way, or are his enemies. Despite the fact that Jordan and Sanderson have done a truly remarkable job at incorporating an array of interesting, multi-faceted, and influential female characters, there is never any question that all these narratives will converge on Rand's. But there is one character, a magical woman, who for a majority of the series appears to resist this subordination. Egwene al'Vere is not the hero, but she is also not clearly portrayed as a donor or helper, nor is she his lover or his enemy.
While making Egwene a magical woman who is not romantically linked to Rand seems to satisfy the need for magical women to move beyond the donor or periphery of the narrative, the gains made by this character are severely undermined due to the primacy of the hero's journey and the narrative compulsion to subordinate the stories of magical women. 62 The Wheel of Time, despite its expanded cast of magical women, and the fact that these women are strong and fully actualized characters, still cannot fully move out from under the narrative structure that would contain these women in some way, even if that containment comes in the last few pages Egwene is in many ways linked to the quest motif-she is a young woman living in a rural town, who is called to adventure, leaves with a group of friends, faces trials that she overcomes on the way to mastering her own power and sense of self, and encounters and defeats evil. If it was not so obvious that Rand was the chosen hero from the beginning of the first book, the hero's quest might be reimagined as Egwene's. And unlike Rand, Egwene has always thought about leaving the Two Rivers. Part of the draw of becoming a Wisdom (a kind of village healer) in another town is the ability to travel and the promise of adventure, even if it is small. She tells 62 There are other magical women who come in and out of the narrative who also retain some autonomy throughout the series, but none feature in a primary role. Cadsuane Sedai is an example of this. While she does help Rand and acts as a mentor, she constantly has her own schemes running. She is also older, thereby automatically removing her as a romantic interest. Unfortunately, she doesn't receive much page space and remains a largely unexplored character.
Rand "Maybe I want to see some of the places I hear about in the stories. Have you ever thought of that?" Rand dismisses her desire for a larger life than what the Two Rivers promises her by responding "Of course I have. I daydream sometimes, but I know the difference between daydreams and what's real. " (1990: 37). Even before the adventure begins, Egwene is looking to experience more of the world, to not settle for what is expected, and to challenge herself to achieve her goals.
Indeed, Egwene is at times narratively in the position of hero, who overcomes trials, is betrayed, overcomes this, solidifies her power and fulfills her potential. These trials also serve to further strengthen her separation from Rand's central narrative.
While all the main characters face trials in some form-Aviendha's training to become a Wise One is physically and emotionally difficult, Elayne returns to Caemlyn, the capitol city of Andor, after her mother's death and must out-maneuver others' claims to the Lion Throne, Perrin must learn to control his wolf-sense and rescue Faile from the Aiel, and Mat must keep Tuon safe and command the Band of the Red Hand-only Egwene seems to face trials that involve a comparative level of physical and psychological suffering and political maneuvering as Rand. She is clearly the most tested magical woman within the series. She unites a broken White Tower, trains Aes Sedai to fight in the last battle, and is made prisoner by the Seanchan, 63 an experience that forces her to endure both physical and mental torture, but also makes 63 In The Great Hunt, she is collared by the Seanchan, a civilization located west across the Aryth Ocean that believes women who can channel are dangerous and must be "collared." The collar is put around the neck of a woman who can channel, called a damane. The collar is connected to a leash that connects to a bracelet worn by a sul'dam. The damane is a slave and the sul'dam control her. The sul'dam control when and how the damane channels. An uncollared woman who can channel is called a marath'damane and is considered an abomination by the Seanchan.
her strong and resilient. 64 Egwene is never spared physical or emotional pain but manages to persevere.
Egwene's main trials begin with her nomination to the Amrilyn Seat. Elected by an oppositional group of Aes Sedai who no longer recognized the validity of the current Amrylin, Egwene must not only unite the rebel Aes Sedai, but reclaim the White Tower. This trial occupies the bulk of Egwene's narrative from The Lord of Chaos (Book 6) until the final battle. In addition to establishing her legitimacy amongst the rebel Aes Sedai, rebuking attempts from older sisters to use her as a pawn, and organizing a resistance movement against the White Tower, Egwene is also betrayed and taken captive. Returned to the White Tower, she is demoted back to novice and expected to observe all of the customs of honorifics that a novice would afford a full sister. Egwene refuses. This earns her several visits to the Mistress of Novices where she suffers physical punishments. 65 Egwene uses these beatings to master her reaction to pain. This is not only a physical trial, but a psychological one as 64 Egwene soon learns that whatever pain the sul'dam feels, the damane feels twice as powerfully-this makes hurting or killing your sul'dam in order to escape impossible (Hunt 1990: 566). The sul'dam may also inflict great pain on the damane through the leash. Despite this physical torture, the psychological torture is much worse. Damane are treated as pets, less than human, and have their old identities and names stripped from them in order to compel obedience (Hunt 1990: 567;601;647-48). 65 In her first visit, she refuses to renounce the title of Amyrlin and gets a mark in the punishments book. The Mistress of Novices says she will "give [her] the night to think about it rather than putting [Egwene] over [her] knee now" (2005: 90). Egwene responds by saying "Do you think you can make me deny who I am with a spanking?" (2005: 90). Egwene is told "There are spankings and spankings" (2005: 90). Egwene is beaten so frequently that she begins to need Healing each day so that the beatings may continue. The Mistress of Novices explains the reason they bother healing her at all: "Else you'll soon be too bruised to spank without bringing blood. But don't think this means I am going easy on you. If you require Healing three times a day, I'll just spank all the harder to make up. If need be, I'll go to the strap or with switch" (2005: 552).
well. Egwene can be "forgiven" and accepted back into the White Tower if she simply renounces the title of Amyrlin and stops treating full sisters as equals. If she accepts her position as novice and acts as she is expected to, her betrayal will be forgotten. But she knows she cannot, both because she genuinely believes that her position is legitimate, and because she knows that "Acquiescence would be as sharp a blow to the rebellion as her execution. Maybe sharper" (2005: 90). Her dedication to a cause she believes is just and to the people whom she feels responsible for will not allow her to accept an easy way out, even if it means daily beatings and psychological attacks by other sisters who repeatedly treat her as lesser than she is. Egwene has fully accepted and embraced her new position and the power it affords her and refuses to relinquish these.
Egwene also expressly rejects the common heroine's position of the hero's lover. While Aviendha, Elayne, and Min's romantic relationship with Rand is one of the defining facets of their characters, Jordan seems to go out of his way to eschew traditional power dynamics in Egwene's romantic relationships. In The Eye of the World the reader learns that in their small town, Rand and Egwene were always expected to marry. In The Great Hunt, Rand, musing about his old life, reveals that "He had grown up thinking he would marry Egwene one day; they both had " (1990: 36). This is curious, since in The Eye of the World, when Rand says people shouldn't marry just because they are old enough, Egwene responds "Of course not. Or ever, for that matter" (1990: 37). Egwene then tells Rand that she wants to study to become a Wisdom and that "A Wisdom almost never marries" (1990: 37). While Egwene and forego a romantic relationship in order to pursue her own ambitions.
Egwene not only rejects a romantic relationship with the hero, she also eschews the traditional marriage plot. While studying at the White Tower, Egwene meets and falls in love with Gawyn Trakand, Elayne's brother; however, they spend much of the series apart, and once Egwene becomes the Amyrlin Seat, she is reluctant to pursue her relationship with Gawyn without clear expectations. This is due in large part to his inability to fully recognize her power and authority as Amyrlin. When he complains that she is acting too formally and stand-offish in their interactions, she tells him that "The Amyrlin cannot be served by those who refuse to see her authority" Elayne, Aviendha, and Min are protected by their romantic relationship to Rand-their narratives clearly work to support his, and their romantic ties place them clearly within the patriarchal system. But Egwene is not. Nearly everything she accomplishes and does is in opposition to a patriarchal ideal that is so often reinforced in Fantasy novels-her romantic relationship, her ascension to power, her fortitude, her prominence within the series, and her unwillingness to acquiesce to Rand as hero all set her apart from the other magical women in the novel. And she is powerful. Not only powerful in magic, but she is strong, resilient, smart, cunning, and compassionate. And she is the leader of the most powerful and influential group that exists, the Aes Sedai. Like Rand, Perrin, Mat, and Nynaeve she leaves a small farming town for a world of greater adventure. She learns to master saidar, makes alliances and forms bonds with others, faces intense trials and perseveres, and fights the forces of evil. This seems a great accomplishment, and leagues of improvement from magical women characters who barely function within the narrative, acting only as donors or helpers along the hero's journey. And in many ways it is-credit should be given to Jordan (and Sanderson) for creating a character as dynamic and strong as Egwene.
But, and there is of course a but, The Wheel of Time seems unable or unwilling to allow Egwene to co-exist alongside the real hero's journey at the culmination of the series. The narrative expectations of the hero's journey, that have already been established as belonging to Rand, require that his quest takes precedence and so, somehow, Egwene's narrative must be re-integrated into his own.

Killing off Women and The Death of Egwene
If interlace narratives typically support the hero's journey, and magical women in particular need to be contained within the narrative, traditional Fantasy narrative expectations say that Egwene ultimately has to be re-integrated and subsumed back under Rand's heroic quest. Because she is not romantically linked with him, and in her interactions with him as Dragon Reborn she is explicitly concerned with the fate of the White Tower independent of whether Rand succeeds or not, her narrative is circumscribed through her death, finally placing Egwene into the role of donor, though a unique one.
Utilizing a female character in this way is not new or uncommon. Killing off women in order to motivate other male characters, or to simply move the plot along, has a long history and continues to be a common trope found in film and television. While I have argued that Egwene's death is primarily a way to re-absorb a narrative that had gained too much primacy in challenging the hero's own journey, it is also ultimately what allows Rand to defeat the Dark One. In this way, her death not only neutralizes her power, it also serves as a necessary facet of the hero's journey, thereby re-integrating the interlace narrative into the main quest-her death becomes an integral part of Rand triumphing over the Dark One. Egwene thus essentially enters the designation of donor, as she gifts Rand her life and, like other helpers, is ultimately 68 "Women in Refrigerators" is a rather simple website that consists mainly of a list compiled by Simone. On the homepage, Simone explains that "This is a list I made when it occurred to me that it's not that healthy to be a female character in comics." After compiling the list, Simone contacted a number of comic writers asking for their thoughts on what this list might mean. A number of these responses are included on her website. 69 The phrase "women in refrigerators" was inspired by the issue of Green Lantern where the corpse of the titular character's girlfriend is literally left inside a refrigerator for Green Lantern to find by one of the villains of the series. The list also includes female characters who have been raped, depowered, incapacitated, brainwashed, or otherwise violently treated.
"place [d] . . . at the disposal of the hero" (Propp 1968: 45 There is more than a little irony to the fact that Egwene's death is literally caused by her acquisition of too much power. And this power comes to her through magic. At the point at which her narrative threatens to challenge the primacy of the hero's journey, or complete its own arc, the narrative is ended, and ended in such a way that the hero can reintegrate her story into his own. The singularity of her death is also striking. She is, as previously noted, the only main character to die. She is also the only main character who ventures so far outside of the narrative umbrella of the hero's journey. What is also striking, is that Egwene's death is largely unnecessary. Of course, death is often used in a meaningful way to create emotional weight through exploring a universal truth of life. And in an ultimate battle between good and evil, it makes sense that not everyone will make it, that there will be heroic sacrifice and painful loss. But killing Egwene, and killing only Egwene (out of the main characters), then using her death as the push Rand needs to complete his own journey, is too convenient, especially given her position as the one major magical woman not clearly subsumed under the hero's journey and echoes too clearly the magical woman as  Kafalenos 1997 andBremond andVerrier 1984. 72 Function is "an act of character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of action" (1968: 21). For Propp, function is the fundamental unit of the folktale, and they remain independent of who fulfills them or how they do so.
By way of conclusion, I'd like to return to an example first given in the previous chapter in more depth in order to underscore the pervasiveness of this narrative structure and the compulsion to reintegrate and re-subsume an errant magical woman's narrative, even when the authors are explicitly attempting to create a powerful female character. The character of Tauriel in Peter Jackson's film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit is a clear continuation of this trend, despite the fact that the need for strong female characters was at the forefront in the minds of not only fans and critics, but the creators as well.
Due to the striking lack of female characters in the original novel, Jackson specifically created the character of Tauriel as, according to co-screenwriter Philippa Boyens, "We could feel the weight of that gender imbalance," an imbalance only made more apparent once it was to be put on screen (Sacks 2014 Kili's body, does. As Collett notes, "All that she does must be joined with a thick line to a man, denying her agency of her own. She does not achieve the noble aim of diversifying Middle Earth" (2013). And it so easily could have been otherwise.
Simple misogyny is not a satisfactory explanation for this compulsion to subjugate the narratives of magical women to their male counterparts. This is especially true given the relative strength and autonomy of these magical women prior to their re-integration into the male hero's journey. Looking at these choices as part of a long narrative tradition of imagining the magical woman in a secondary role as "Tell me, how good is Tattersail?": Magical Women in Egalitarian (and Not-So-Egalitarian) Worlds "Since the earliest days of humanity, witches have been admired, adored, loved, feared, trusted, mistrusted, loathed, persecuted, killed, lusted after, and worshipped. Every culture around the world acknowledges the existence of witches, or at the very least recognizes some kind of witch" (Illes 2010: 7).
In the first chapter, I discussed how the narrative approach of Tolkien

Multiple Points of View: Creating Worlds and Perspectives
Telling a story from multiple points of view has a number of benefits, many of them particularly useful to a work of Fantasy, and even more useful if that work is secondary world or Epic Fantasy. This is because of the way in which varied points of view contribute to world-building. Secondary worlds are created worlds, and while they may resemble places in our world, they are not our world. Making these secondary worlds believable is one of the core tenets of secondary world-building. It was of utmost importance to Tolkien, who  we are generally referring to are multiple perspectives or focalizers. 83 Point of view 80 As Martin has also noted, characters are often hundreds or thousands of miles apart, and this makes sequential chapters difficult as often action is occurring simultaneously, just in different areas (Napolitano 2015: 40 Erikson shifts so dramatically and without warning between focalizers so that often the character whose perspective is being shown is hard to determine (sometimes they are revealed only at the end right before the narrative shifts to another character), the ability to speak of the third person narrator as well as focalizers is a useful distinction.
While I will use point of view in its commonly used sense to mean perspective, when Genette argues that a clear distinction between mood and voice has yet to be made. He believes that theorists "have failed to distinguish between 'mood and voice, that is to say, between the question who is the character whose point of view orients the narrative perspective? and the very different question who is the narrator?'" (Culler 1980: 10). The narrator does not necessarily change, but the narrative can be focalized through a character when the narrative is told from the point of view of that particular character. The question of whether this character is also the narrator speaking in first person, or a third person 83 narrator who speaks of the character, is a question of voice, not point of view. Genette further breaks this focalization into three groups: zero focalization "corresponds to what English-language criticism calls narrative with omniscient narrator and Pouillon 'vision from behind,' and which Todorov symbolizes by the formula Narrator > Character (where the narrator knows more than the character, or more exactly, says more than any of the characters knows)"; in internal focalization the "Narrator = Character (the narrator says only what a given character knows)"; finally, in external focalization the "Narrator < Character (the narrator says less than the character knows)" (1980: 188-89). Bal would further clarify the distinction between zero focalization and internal focalization as the agent that sees the story. This would be the narrator in the former, and a character in the latter. Bal eventually winds up with two distinct systems: two types of focalization (internal/character bound and external [zero and external combined]), and two types of things focalized (imperceptible things or "psychological material" and perceptible things that one can see, hear, taste, touch, smell, etc.) (Bal 2006: 18-19 The Wheel of Time also utilized multiple points of view and had a world that was fundamentally imbued with magic, but because of its indebtedness to the single hero's journey, magical women were still constrained. And, as we will see, Martin, like Erikson, will eschew the single hero's journey through multiple points of view narrative, but his particular approach to world-building seems to likewise constrain his magical woman. 85 There seems to be a general consensus among online forums, fans of fantasy, and writing workshops that multiple points of view should be limited and clearly delineated. Philip Athans cautions that there shouldn't be a new point of view every few paragraphs and suggests that hero, villain, and observer are a good trio of point of views to offer readers. The hero and villain provide two sides to the main conflict, and the observer provides context for this struggle within the invented world. Of course, the length of the work also matters, and Athans writes that "as many as a dozen different well-managed and strongly-motivated POV's in a very long novel is fine" (2011). Goldsmith argues that in most cases writers should not exceed six point of view characters and, if one feels the need for more than six, to make sure every point of view is absolutely necessary for advancing the story (2016). The character whose point of view is presented should be the one who is most emotionally impacted by the event. Fantasy novels, he still adheres to many of the conventions that make these kinds of novels "easier" to read-each chapter has only one focalized character, and each chapter is clearly titled with the character through whose perspective the reader is narratives. While it's clear opinions on multiple point-of-view narrators are varied, most agree that they should not confuse the reader, that it should be easy to determine who is speaking preferably with one point-of-view per chapter, and you should only have as many as you really need to tell your story. 86 While there are preliminary lists for characters that are planned for The Winds of Winter, because this book is not yet completed, it won't factor into these calculations. 87 As will soon be discussed, it is not always clear who the focalizing character is. For this reason, these numbers are approximate. I used best judgment in assigning when point of view changed and whether or not a section was clearly focalized through a character or served more as simply third-person narration.
about to witness events making shifts between focalized characters clear. Erikson goes even further, taking this fairly common convention and deploying it in a unique, and often destabilizing, way.

Multiple Points of View: Their Effects
Utilizing multiple internal focalization within a text can work in an author's favor, particularly when the story they want to tell has countless moving parts and Utilizing focalization "as a means of 'restricting' the readers' vision and thus denying them access to vital plot information" (2015: 47) also allows Martin to not only generate suspense but also create a build-up to reveals. Napolitano gives the following convincing example: in Catelyn's first point of view chapter, she overhears some of the men talking about a dead direwolf found with a broken antler in its throat.
While "dread coiled within her like a snake, . . . she forced herself to smile at this man she loved, this man who put no faith in signs" (Martin 1996: 21). Though the reader is not given any further information as to why Catelyn has reacted so strongly to this information, Napolitano does note that two important clues are revealed: that Catelyn feels some kind of apprehension regarding the dead wolf and it is connected to the King's upcoming visit to Winterfell, and that there is some important symbolic meaning to the direwolf and its death. It is not until later that the reader learns that the 88 Napolitano is also careful to make the distinction between Martin's third-person narrator, and the point of view characters who are not technically narrators. The fact that the narrator makes little commentary allows it to "disappear behind the colorful personalities of the POV characters" (2015: 36). It is the POV characters' "ability to commandeer the narrative's discourse that creates the illusion of narratorial power" (2015: 36); however, they have no power over events that are out of their control. In this way, Martin seems to conform to the idea of the "primacy of events." As an example, Napolitano uses the infamous Red Wedding. While told through Catelyn's point of view, she has no control over the event itself (2015: 36). However, seeing it through Catelyn's point of view is essential to conveying the gravity and importance of the event. Therefore, "the ostensibly 'passive' ability of the POV characters to perceive and reveal events evolves toward a more significant power: the capacity to shape, and in fact, create meaning" (2015: 37). Thus, while they do not have the power to change events, they do have the power to convey to the reader what that event means and how to interpret it. . 89 This identification also helps to complicate many of the often unexplored nuances of certain archetypal characters. While it is not unheard of for socalled "evil" characters to be given depth and complexity, they more often than not 89 Napolitano likens this technique to Jane Austen, particularly in Emma. The fact that people still gravitate towards Emma, even though Austen is often quoted as saying she is making a protagonist no one would like, "has only served to reinforce the power of Austen's narrative technique" (2015: 45). The ability to see things from the character's perspective has a significant effect on the relationship between the reader and character.
remain fairly one dimensional, serving more as an abstracted Evil presence the hero must confront and overcome. 90 The internally focalized multiple point of view approach, because it presents the points of view of even unsavory or unlikable characters, keeps the reader from taking "a fully judgmental position toward the POV character, as [they] experience [the characters'] moments of self-consciousness, selfdoubt, and even self-loathing," which "facilitates [Martin's] creation of an ambiguous universe in which monochromatic characters are given a chance to exist in shades of grey" (Napolitano 2015: 46). 91 By granting point of view chapters to a variety of characters, both main and secondary, "good" and "bad," likeable and unlikeable, Martin is departing from one, easily identifiable hero whose main narrative pushes the story along, into a more complex web of competing, but mutually supporting, narratives. 92 90 Darken Rahl from Terry Brooks' Wizards First Rule is a good example of this. As is the Warlock Lord from The Sword of Shannara. 91 While Martin's text does not follow the traditional hero's quest, I am perhaps less enthusiastic than those who claim his world has no clear good vs. evil dichotomies. I think, especially if one is familiar with Fantasy tropes, that it is fairly easy to distinguish at least a core group of "good guys" and "bad guys." The claim that Martin's world is also amoral or nihilistic is also unconvincing to me. The characters that are easily identifiable as, if not "the hero" then at least the ones we should be rooting for, all have fairly traditional and conservative moral codes. And, while it is certainly possible, I find it unlikely that Jon Snow will not ultimately occupy a role similar to that of hero. 92 This web of narratives also contributes to the feeling that Martin's text seems to be continually diverging (with the divergence of storylines, the divergence of characters, particularly the Stark children), and, while there will likely be a "climactic convergence," "the slow buildup toward this unification can hardly be described as orderly, particularly according to Tasso's standards" (Napolitano 2015: 39). These shifts between different characters and plotlines recall Italian Renaissance poet Ariosto's claims that suddenly shifting away from the action is motivated by a desire to keep readers entertained, these shifts often occur when the action is getting interesting and, while these interruptions might heighten suspense, the return to that particular story line occurs at such a distance that this effect is largely dissipated.
Erikson also utilizes point of view characters to increase dramatic irony. When it comes to characters' deaths he will often shift focalizers mid scene. Often the story will be focalized through the character that dies, then will shift to a character that is witnessing an unidentifiable person being killed, not realizing who it is. This was done particularly effectively in Reapers Gale, when Toc Anaster was killed right when There is also the issue of readers' ability to remember what was last happening with the characters involved in the unfinished story. Rejecting Ariosto's approach to epic poetry, Torquato Tasso attempts to "naturalize" these shifts and emphasizes the importance of a singular plot (Rhu 1993: 42;119   but often, the reader will not-the narrative will proceed in third person, and it is not until right before another shift that the character whose perspective the preceding narrative was focalized through will become clear. Occasionally, the narrative is not focalized through a character at all, but remains in limited third person, or is split evenly between two characters whose plots are intertwined at that moment. 94  knowing whose point of view is being shown or whether that character is male or female (one often has to wait for another character to refer to them as "he" or "she" before their gender is made apparent), keeps the reader from being drawn into the same old tropes and expectations. This allows Erikson the freedom to create a world 94 This is seen in sections focalized through Telorast and Curdle, and Sinn and Grub. Stormy and Gesler's sections also commonly follow this approach. 95 During the Awl battle with the Letherii, Erikson begins a section focalized through Natarkas, but he soon dies. The section then transitions to his horse as focalized narrator. We follow the horse as it begins running away from the battle with two other riderless horses. As "the chaos in its heart dwindled, faded, fluttered away" it thinks "Free! Never! Free! Never again!" (2007: 685). Erikson italicizes those thoughts of freedom, the stylistic shift he uses to indicate characters' inner monologues.
that is less likely to fall into casting characters as types or allowing the plot to become too traditional. With such sustained switching between characters-and so many characters to switch between-a single character's narrative is even harder to point out as "the most important." Erikson creates a work that falls squarely within the Epic Fantasy genre-his secondary world is original, complex, and epic in scope, magic is at the core of the series, and the conflicts that arise have meaningful and lasting consequences-but borrows certain narrative approaches from literary fiction to push the genre in new and interesting directions.

Multiple Points of View: Two Approaches on Magical Women
Unfortunately, using internally focalized, multiple point of view narration does not guarantee a break away from archetypal roles, particularly for magical women. characterizations of magical women. It is impossible to separate out which individual aspect of their narrative approach results in their disparate approaches to magical women. By presenting these two texts-that are similar and yet vastly different-next to each other for comparison, the ways in which the vestiges of patriarchy inform the 97 The north worships the old gods of the wood, R'hllor, the Lord of Light, is an almost cult-like religion imported from Essos, and the dominant religion is that of the Seven, with seven gods for seven kingdoms. 98 Magic is consistently alluded to throughout A Song of Ice and Fire, and is constantly seething under the surface, but Martin does not populate his world with wizards, mages, or spellcasters. A Skinchanger (or warg) is certainly some kind of magic, allowing a person to enter the mind of an animal (or in Bran's case, the mind of Hodor), but there is no extended examination of how this works. Jojen Reed has greensight, or prophetic dreams. The godswoods of the old gods clearly possess some kind of magic, but what or how it can be used has yet to be fully explored-the greenseers are said to be able to see through the eyes of the weirwood, and we see some of this with Bran. The Others are more mythical creatures than magical ones. Maester Luwin even tells Bran, "Perhaps magic was once a mighty force in the world, but no longer. What little remains is no more than the wisp of smoke that lingers in the air after a great fire has burned out, and even that is fading" (Martin 1999: 332). One does sense, though, that as the storylines begin to converge, magic in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire might come to play a larger role as prophecies are fulfilled. victories would have never come to be, her ultimate goal is to place him on the throne, 99 There is some risk in making this assessment when the series is not yet complete. It is, of course, completely possible that Martin will ultimately do something unexpected with Melisandre's character. Indeed, Martin has eluded to something more than Melisandre being relegated to side-kick to further Stannis' claim to the throne when in an interview he stated: "Melisandre has gone to Stannis entirely on her own, and has her own agenda" (Asshai.com 2012). Unfortunately, we have yet to learn of that agenda or what specifically sent her to Stannis, other than a vision of him as Ahai.
Giving her a larger role in the last two books would also not erase the fact that she has spent the previous five books of the series with one point of view chapter and little else to do but Stannis' or R'hllor's bidding. 100 Stannis' other claim is that he is the next in line in the Baratheon family, as Cersei's children are the result of her incestuous affair with her brother, and not Robert's true heirs.
to assist in male ascension to power. Her power comes from the male deity, R'hllor, the Lord of Light. She is also given only one point of view chapter in the series so far, despite playing an integral part in a number of plot lines. As ever, she wore red head to heel, a long loose gown of flowing silk as bright as fire, with dagged sleeves and deep slashes in the bodice that showed glimpses of a darker bloodred fabric beneath. Around her throat was a red gold choker tighter than any maester's chain, ornamented with a single great ruby.
Her hair was not the orange or strawberry color of common red-haired men, but a deep burnished copper that shone in the light of the torches. Even her eyes were red … but her skin was smooth and white, unblemished, pale as cream. Slender she was, graceful, taller than most knights, with full breasts and narrow waist and a heart-shaped face. Men's eyes that once found her did not quickly look away, not even a maester's eyes. Many called her beautiful. She was not beautiful. She was red, and terrible, and red. (1999: 17).
Cressen's description is of a woman who is other-worldly-pale and slender, with full breasts, but unnatural. Red is not only the color of flame, the symbol of the Lord of Light, but also of passion, anger, the devil, and, of course, blood. weapons and armor, the aftermath of a deadly battle. Immediately, her rank and ability are noted: "Her arms were crossed, tight against her chest. The burgundy cloak with its silver emblem betokening her command of the 2 nd Army's wizard cadre now hung from her round shoulders stained and scorched" (1999: 57). What is immediately notable about Tattersail is not only the fact that she is a magical woman, but that she both has a command position in the military and is subject to the danger that her fellow soldiers are, sporting the stains and burns of battle-this is the importance her clothing signifies. She then participates in a meeting with the commander of the Malazan army and the other mages, offering suggestions, commentary, and comebacks. It is never remarked on that she is a woman, or that it is strange that she is there-it is simply taken as a given. Indeed, the first major battle the reader is shown is focalized through Tattersail.
While Melisandre's sexuality was often portrayed as perverse or pervertingwhen presented largely by the men who describe her through gossip, conjecture, and judgment-Tattersail's romantic relationships are introduced through her own point of view, and they are portrayed as complicated and real. Her relationships are not idealized romantic encounters between a hero and a princess, or an ill-fated cursed love affair, or the seduction and disgracing of a previously noble married man. They are rather mundane, but in their realness are emotionally impactful. Tattersail has been sleeping with Calot for a few months and, like any relationship, it is complicated.
Because this section is focalized through Tattersail, the reader is able to see the ways in which she herself navigates complex human interactions. While Melisandre's physical description is reminiscent of a number of evil seductresses, Tattersail's appearance is revealed when necessary, as an additional description to the scene, or simply in passing, not as an initial and therefore important introduction to her character. She also references her own appearance, and thus displays an ownership of her own body and physical portrayal, instead of being described purely by the male gaze. For example, as she is lying in bed with Calot, Erikson writes that Calot's "small but well-proportioned body was snug in the many soft pillows of her flesh" (1999: 62). Or, before doing a reading from the Deck of Dragons, she "lowered her bulk slowly into a kneeling position" (1999: 92). From descriptions like these we know Tattersail is, frankly, a bit fat. But this is not posited as some kind of failing (it gets about as much attention and importance as the fact that Quick Ben is quite skinny, or that Kalam is quite large). Her body and its size are simply part of her persona, one that she is perfectly comfortable with, and one that is often seen as desirable but not fetishized. 102 It also puts her outside of the common description of women in Fantasy as being slender or waifish. When Ganoes Paran, her eventual lover, sees her for the first time out of battle garb, he remarks: "My, he thought wonderingly, she's not bad, if you like them big, that is. He half grinned" (1999: 219). Her size does not prevent her from being seen as sexually attractive, and it is part of what potentially makes her so attractive, but is not sexualized in the way Melisandre's body is. 103 Indeed, Tattersail and Paran soon begin a romantic relationship. The connection between the two is expressly mutual, even though Paran is a much more typical Fantasy hero (young, handsome, a soldier who is swept along by fate, is given a powerful role, and learns to stand on his own). Erikson writes "the 102 Toc, a soldier in the Malazan army, also comments on her considerable wardrobe. However, what could easily turn into a commentary on her vanity or her frivolous love of clothing (both gendered), actually serves as a moment of light-hearted ribbing and bonding. He tells Tattersail, "I'm afraid you've provided a standing joke in the Second. Anything surprising, be it an ambush or an unplanned skirmish-the enemy invariably came from your traveling wardrobe, Sorceress" (1999: 221). 103 After Paran and Tattersail begin their relationship, Paran tells Toc that he failed to make some connection with something Tattersail told him saying "I should have made the connection sooner, but she . . . distracted me" (1999: 235). Toc's reply is to nod knowingly and say "I'm sure she did" (1999: 235). Tattersail's attractiveness is not an anomaly or a strange fetish. It is treated as perfectly normal that many men are quite attracted to her.
attraction was obvious even now, with her back to the man, she sensed a taut thread between them" (1999: 217). Moreover, their relationship is explicitly physical. After visiting Paran in hiding, Tattersail laments her exhaustion. When Paran asks how thorough her exhaustion is, "She felt the heat in his words triggering a smoldering fire beneath her stomach" (1999: 228). This is a stark contrast to Melisandre, whose sexuality and conventional attractiveness is often posited as supernatural or perverse.
Tattersail is engaged in a quite normal and unexceptional sexual relationship, unless one counts their exceptional equality.
One of the main effects of having Tattersail focalize so many of her own sections is that it equips the reader with a better understanding of her than even other characters have. Thus, when Fiddler, one of the Malazan marines, questions Tattersail's abilities and commitment, the reader already knows his assessment is wrong. It is also notable that his concerns are gendered. Fiddler remarks that Tattersail has "gone soft" after the battle at Pale where they suffered heavy losses, including Calot. He continues, saying that "It's like she's ready to cry, right on the edge, every single minute. I'm thinking she's lost her backbone, Sarge" (1999: 117). He goes on to say that if she's questioned, "she's liable to squeal" (1999: 117). Fiddler's concerns about Tattersail-that she is weak, that she might at any moment start crying-are gendered: among these hardened, grizzled marines, he sees the sorceress as a potential liability. However, readers have already seen Tattersail stand up to Tayschrenn and lead him astray (something neither Fiddler nor any of the marines are aware of), and, because of the sections focalized through her character, have a much more nuanced understanding of what she is experiencing. Instead of seeing weakness, Tattersail is more accurately viewed as a thoughtful and complex character. Whiskeyjack also corrects Fiddler, telling him that he has underestimated her, saying: "It's not common news, but she's been offered the title of High Mage more than once and she won't accept. It doesn't show, but a head-to-head between her and Tayschrenn would be a close thing. She's a Master of her Warren, and you don't acquire that with a weak you know anything about the Wars of the Roses, you know that the princes in the tower aren't going to escape. I wanted to make it more unexpected, bring in some more twists and turns" (Gilmore 2014). While the genre of Fantasy allows Martin to introduce an element of possibility into a context that would otherwise be overdetermined, his general narrative framework is influenced by historical occurrences. While he knew he wanted the Targaryn's sigil to be a dragon, he was initially unsure as to whether or not to include actual dragons. He tells Rolling Stones: "I was discussing this with a friend, writer Phyllis Eisenstein-I dedicated the third book to her-and she said, 'George, it's a fantasy-you've got to put in the dragons.' She convinced me, and it was the right decision" (Gilmore 2014). This approach to world-building also helps to explain why magic is so sporadic in Martin's world and, apart from Stannis and Melisandre, magic does not move much of the action along-Martin's main concern seems to be a fantastic retelling of the War of the Roses. 105 This also explains Martin's insistence on the gritty "realness" of his world which often manifests in his treatment towards female characters. When questioned about the violence against women, Martin gives the following explanation: "The 105 Martin also draws from other historic events. One of the most shocking scenes in the series is the Red Wedding. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Martin says that the Red Wedding was inspired by a number of events from Scottish history. The first is The Black Dinner where the King of Scotland invites the Earl of Douglas, part of the Black Douglas clan with whom the king was fighting, to Edinburgh Castle. At the end of the feast, a plate with a black boar's head was brought out, and set in front of the Earl (the boar being a symbol of death). The Earl and his men were then dragged out and put to death in the courtyard. The second is the Glencoe Massacre, when Clan MacDonald stayed overnight with the Campbell clan. While the laws of hospitality supposedly applied "the Campbell's arose and started butchering every MacDonald they could get their hands on" (Hibberd 2015). Martin concludes that "No matter how much I make up, there's stuff in history that's just as bad, or worse" (Hibberd 2015 DeVries goes on, noting that while peasants' lives were mundane and boring, they were not necessarily harsh. He points to The Canterbury Tales and the fact that Chaucer does not show the lower classes' daily existence as terrible. He argues that "the merciless brutality regularly suffered by the lower orders in fantasy works such as Martin's does not reflect reality-not least because it would have been economically ludicrous for nobles to so abuse the people on whose productivity their own livelihoods depended" (2012). While the nobles had it a bit better, "their lives were still boring" (2012). Violence was unlikely to be frequent. He writes: "There was no incest (at least none recorded), no dwarves, few assassinations" (2012). While some characters and incidents are drawn from medieval history, but Martin makes them "far more action-packed than its historic counterparts" (2012). 107 In the same Entertainment Weekly interview, Martin also addresses the concerns critics and fans have raised about the sexual violence in his work. He responds: "And itself is not as important or fundamental to his world-building as representing how he views medieval times and the power structures he sees in play. people, never sexually assault or rape each other strains believability. This is especially true given what we know of male rape, particularly in the armed forces and prison. This demonstrates that "there is a strong authorial bias toward sexual violence against women that far outweighs and overshadows any of the sexual violence against men" (2015): Martin's choice to focus on sexual violence against women is just that, an authorial choice. Following this, his other arguments fall apart. If he is seeking to depict the dark side of humanity, and to deny that rape happens is "fundamentally dishonest," one might ask if his aversion to depicting male rape is also fundamentally dishonest (2015). Of course, Canavan clarifies that he is not advocating for more male rape, but rather asks if it is at all necessary to depict any kind of rape over thirty times per average per book (2015). 108 Martin seems to want it both ways: to get out of the logical conclusions of history and then blame history for what he "has to" do to women. This also helps to explain why his magical woman, Melisandre, so faithfully embodies the medieval conception of the witch: in this case, the historical narrative aligns with a patriarchal depiction of magical women. 109 Despite her lack of interest in removing penises (a trait repeatedly assigned to medieval witches), Melisandre is a fairly typical witch: her powers come from a male deity associated with the color red and fire; she has the ability to prognosticate; she is a temptress; she corrupts motherhood and births demons; she is immune to poison; she glamours herself and others; there is a focus on her physical (but supernatural) beauty and sexuality; and she seduces a powerful man. She is also associated with fire and burning people alive, though with an important reversal-it is Melisandre who condemns others to burn. As we have previously seen, her one focalized chapter does little to challenge or complicate these basic character traits. In Martin's case, the use of focalization does not in any substantial way stand up to Melisandre's characterization as influenced by her position as a witch in a medieval inspired world.

A More Equal World
recorded history, and continue to the present day" (2015). Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale clearly delineates the functional roles witches play in these stories. The figure is introduced along with the list of villains who enter the tale in order "to disturb the peace of a happy family, to cause some form of misfortune, damage, or harm" (1968: 27). The following pages detail the different ways the witch (along with other villain figures) seeks to deceive by assuming disguises, sets the tale in motion through some evil act, and torments people. As discussed in a previous chapter, the witch can also serve as magical donor. The witch-as-donor tests the hero, attempts to destroy the hero or engages him in combat (the hero generally succeeds by turning the tables on the witch, e.g. he makes her climb into the oven to show him how), and then gifts him, intentionally or not, a magical gift. Witches also often function as helpers, guiding the hero (again, intentionally or not) out of or into a new location (1968: 81). Witches in Propp's estimation are exclusively female and overwhelmingly evil. The Malleus Maleficarum gives an exhaustive list of the characteristic of witches. There is a clear focus on the perversion of motherhood and childbirth, the bestowing of power on the witch through her pact with the Devil, the ability to sway the minds of men, and the corruption of innocents. There is also a clear obsession with the idea that a witch may remove, or shrink, penises. This last attribute thankfully does not seem to be a part of Martin's witch. turning it into a bland, egalitarian utopia: having strong female representation and conflict are not mutually exclusive.
In utilizing TRPGs, Erikson was able to not only map out the core of the world, but also the way in which individual characters might navigate through that world. 112 TRPGs owe much of their current form to Fantasy literature. TRPG's began as war games, that used miniature battlefields and counters to represent troops, and added dice rolls to introduce an element of random chance to determine how battles progressed (Cover 2010: 8). 113 (Cover 2010: 6). This randomness helps to free up TRPGs from rigid narrative formulas. 112 Erikson asserts that "RPG's both as table-top and computer/console versions are seminal in the development of Modern Fantasy literature" (Canavan 2016). Canavan argues that Fantasy RPGs and the various offshoots they have created serve as a metatext with which to more effectively analyze Genre Fantasy (2011: 6). He writes: "the RPG has distilled and adapted perceived rules and conventions of fantasy literature into a codified and systemised framework or formula and thereby described the megatext of genre fantasy" (2011: 6). He goes on to argue that the RPG "can therefore be read as a codified form of genre cliché and convention" (2011: 26). 113 Created by Herr von Reiswitz, one of the first war games Kriegspiel, was intended to educate Prussian military officers. War games moved into the popular sphere in the late-Victorian era with H.G. Wells' popular game Little Wars (Cover 2010: 8).
One of the most important aspects of D&D that can be seen in Erikson's narrative approach to Fantasy is that "There is no 'winning' in a TRPG, although characters do gain experience points for completing certain challenges, and in an ongoing game, those experience points allow the player to continue building his or her character" (Cover 2010: 6). In this way, the narrative is created through interactioneach player has a certain amount of freedom to make their own choices concerning moved onto more adaptable gaming systems like GURPS, 114 they still felt as though they were seeing a "reworking of every fantasy cliché imaginable" (Erikson). From these games, Erikson and Esslemont took the most basic tenets of gaming, but discarded those parts that didn't work and focused more on story and background. He writes: we created characters, assigned values to their basic attributes, physical and mental; we selected from a list of talents and skills and put 'points' into them to shape our character's abilities. We invented stories and plotlines involving contests and goals, and to gauge success we rolled the damned die (Erikson).
Role-playing games served as a sort of meta-Fantasy structure that highlighted the problems and limitations of the genre that Erikson and Esslemont then set off to subvert, while also somewhat contradictorily providing a framework for narrative freedom rooted in multiple, independent narratives, and limitless parameters within which the action might take place. TRPGs allowed them to create a viable Fantasy world, while "spic[ing] it with other stuff" from history, literature, film, etc. (Erikson).
If Erikson and Esslemont took from TRPGs a narrative approach to their characters and stories, then it was from Science Fiction that they took the approach to initially creating the world in which these characters and plots would take place. One of the most influential aspects of their world is the way in which they conceived their magical system and then extrapolated out from that, following the "what if" formula.
In the world of Malazan, magic can be learned, and it exists everywhere. And, because healing magic exists, almost everyone can access it, though the "quality" of the healing varies by skill level and often price. And this is where magic becomes absolutely essential for the feminist quality of Erikson's work. Extrapolating out from this simple assertion means that people lived longer, 115 men and women remained fertile for longer, infant mortality rates would lower, so birth rates would drop as people felt less pressure to have more children. As a consequence of having fewer children, women's roles were not as rigidly tied to the home or to being babyproducers, so this view of women never ossified. And so, "as a direct result of magic, in particular healing magic, . . . women were completely emancipated" (Canavan 2016). Erikson himself explains that he and Esslemont "took a meritocratic approach to magic and society, and that approach can only lead in one direction, and that direction quickly dispenses with institutional sexism and the suppression of rights based on gender, race or whatever" (Canavan Interview Part 1 2016). This is evident in the series, as there are essentially no jobs or character types that are not available to women. Often, it is impossible to tell if a character is male or female until a pronoun is used.
Given the influence of TRPGs and Science Fiction on Erikson's narrative approach to Fantasy, it is not surprising that he believes that women don't have to be oppressed in any kind of Fantasy to make it work as Fantasy. Approaching worldbuilding by extrapolating out from the magical system-something decidedly not real or historical and thus somewhat untouched by patriarchy-and not constraining that magic with preconceived, gendered expectations, one can create a more egalitarian world. And thus, the world of Malazan sees little gender based proscriptions. The narrative approach Erikson employs in his novels supports and expands upon the fundamentally egalitarian aspect of the series. By making magic foundational to his world-building and employing a narrative approach that allows readers to identify with a multitude of characters, eschewing a single hero, magical women who are able to live outside of patriarchal structures seen in Tolkien and Martin's more popular work and find the narrative space to be fully independent, unique characters.
In many ways, Tattersail is able to develop in a way that Egwene, as part of a more traditional Fantasy narrative, is not. Because it is not narratively necessary for Tattersail to in some way be subsumed under a young, male hero's narrative, it is therefore unnecessary to make her a romantic side-interest (young, nubile, conventionally attractive, an emotional or social support) or a wise mentor (aged, grey, full of cryptic teachings), or the femme-fatale (evil, tortured, beautiful but dangerous).
And, because there is no single hero's journey, her actions also do not need to be recuperated into a main narrative. Thus, Tattersail is able to develop as a wholly independent and unique character. As we have seen, one of the more noticeable ways that Tattersail diverges from most depictions of magical women (who are not evil witches, hagwives, or villains) is that she is not conventionally attractive or young (playing with the age of the magical woman is an effective way to begin breaking with stereotypical expectations and is a strategy we will also see in the next chapter). While she does "die," the function that her death plays within the narrative is vastly different.
She is not re-cast as a donor whose death spurs the hero on to save the day, nor is she a dramatic martyr, sacrificing herself for the cause/another. Her death is as much in her control as one's death can be, and through magic and her wit, she is able to find a loophole and "save" herself.
While the mage, like the witch, is a staple Fantasy character, 116 Erikson is able to avoid casting Tattersail in a stereotypical way because there is no need. Erikson is not looking back to Medieval or mythical inspirations, but rather has allowed the world to develop without limits or rigid expectations. It was also a group effort, largely influenced by actually role-playing characters within the world of Malazan.
The influence of TRPGs, and his desire to push this freedom even further, freed  (2008: 22). However, unlike Merlin, Gandalf: does not predict the future (though he has strong premonitions); does not often use his magic and does so only under great duress; does not find his downfall at the hands of women (it is Saruman who betrays him, and the Balrog that kills him); and must refuse ultimate power in order to help save Middle-earth (2008: 34-37). Most importantly, while Gandalf is, like Merlin, a teacher, he does not try to bend the will of people but rather attempts to bestow knowledge so others can make decisions and help themselves (2008: 39). While it is outside the scope of this project, Riga goes on to outline the representative texts of the Merlin tradition. After this survey, he concludes that Merlin is "most frequently shown to have come from ambiguous origins, both good and evil, and to have immense magical and occult powers. He has accurate and even astounding abilities to know the past and predict the future, a feature common to almost all accounts and variations" (2008: 31). Gandalf shares many of these attributes.
description-Lady Envy, for example, in the most pared down way, is the beautiful, but evil, sorceress with a grudge to settle-avoids this fate due to the fact that she is allowed focalized narratives through which this basic description is challenged, expanded, and often overturned, thus making that basic description misleading at best. This is in large part what Martin achieves with many of his non-magical women characters-Brienne is the warrior-woman, the girl who puts on armor and fights because she cannot be a "princess," a Fantasy trope as old as Britomart in The Faerie Queene; Cersei is the mad queen; Catelyn is the devoted wife and mother, etc. Malazan. Writers are also, of course, allowed to have favored characters whose lives they want to explore more fully, but it is unfortunate that both of the characters Erikson has chosen to give more page space to are male. Especially given that there are a number of dynamic female characters whose stories remain likewise unexplored and unresolved. Despite this, Malazan is decidedly a feminist work that rejects placing women in secondary roles, whether due to outdated structural requirements or a misplaced faithfulness to a certain version of history. 118 "Roads were made for young men": The Magical Woman as Questing Female Hero "Having found the grail, male and female heroes recognize that they are fully human and fundamentally alike. This humane and egalitarian heroic vision is the ethical foundation for the transformed kingdom" (Pearson and Pope 1981: 15).
In chapter two, I argued that the tendency of casting magical women as donors or helpers in a secondary position to the male hero's journey has been a powerful trend in literary fantasy. This narrative approach was adopted by Tolkien  notably in classical epics and folk tales. But Bujold's story is much more than thatshe takes the traditional progression of the hero's journey and reimagines it with a magical woman who is older, a mother, and a widow. Bujold maintains the basic 119 It is important to note that in their study, Female Heroes in American and British Literature, Pearson and Pope do not rely only on the realist novel, but draw from a number of non-realist genres, like science fiction and other sub-genres of Fantasy. They do not, however, address the genre of Epic Fantasy (also often referred to as High or secondary world Fantasy). This is curious, because, as we have seen, the Epic Fantasy sub-genre tends to most faithfully adhere to the traditional quest structure, making any of these works with a female protagonist an interesting and, I would argue, essential addition to their study. 120 While a number of genres utilize the male hero quest, few adhere so closely to mythic conceptions of the hero's journey, his trials, battles, and compatriots with the same faithfulness as modern Fantasy.
structure of the hero's quest while adapting its specifics to a reimagined hero as a magical woman whose magical abilities allow her to circumvent many of the pitfalls that often befall other female heroes, such as containment through marriage.
In imagining a secondary world in which the magical woman may serve as questing hero, the inclination might be to present a world in which gendered relationships are more or less equal, making her quest less of a challenge to the world's social structures. This is not what Bujold does. Instead, she presents a world that is clearly patriarchal. This allows the reader to experience the ways in which Ista, the magical woman hero, is subject to the same kinds of gendered expectations and limitations as all women who exist in patriarchal societies. In placing the hero in a patriarchal world, the ways in which Ista is able to subvert these societal prescriptions become clear. Moreover, by placing the magical woman as hero in a patriarchal society, Bujold demonstrates that the subjugation of female characters is not a necessary consequence of Fantasy works that take place in patriarchal societies.
Because so much of Fantasy is set in quasi-medieval worlds (Bujold draws inspirations from medieval Spain, though much Fantasy is set in worlds inspired by medieval England), the sexism inherent in these works is often justified as simply a by-product of the gendered relations present in historical reality, an argument we saw articulated by George R.R. Martin in the previous chapter. Dan Wohl summarizes this type of argument when he writes that when he raises the issue of sexism in Fantasy with other readers, the reply is always something like: "Sexism in (to pick the most obvious example) medieval fantasy is okay or even desirable, the thinking goes, because in the real European Middle Ages sexism was the status quo" (2012). Wohl comes to the conclusion that many others have: that's just not a good enough reason to persistently present female characters that are clearly secondary and have no major role in the action. The claim is also generically dubious. While Fantasy relies on mimesis to create worlds that feel familiar and "real," as previously discussed, its defining feature is a departure from consensus reality, and secondary world Fantasy in particular creates entirely new worlds. It seems suspiciously convenient that authors would somehow become constrained by the "realities" of the gendered historical situations within which many Fantasies are set, while modifying or discarding any number of other realistic aspects of the world. Somehow dragons and unicorns are allowable, but portraying gendered relationships as different from what they historically were goes a step too far. Gender seems to be the point at which some Fantasy authors forget that their stories are historically inspired, not actual histories.
In a more cynical reading, this offers authors an easy out for their conscious desires to present a world in which women are put "in their place" and "men can be men." But even this impulse to create male-centered, macho worlds seemingly inspired by the real world largely ignores historical realities. Tansy  Because the first book gives readers a male protagonist without placing him in a traditional quest story, whereas the second gives us a female protagonist within a traditional quest story, it establishes many of the gendered expectations of the world Ista will face on her later quest and highlights the fact that it is the female character who is given the role of questing hero. The Curse of Chalion also does much of the work of world-building that the second novel relies upon, particularly as concerns the oppressively patriarchal society that is Chalion.
In order to argue, as I do here, that Paladin of Souls reimagines not only the male hero's quest, but also the female hero's quest by positing a magical woman as questing hero whose access to magic allows her to circumvent many of pitfalls suffered by other female almost-heroes, this chapter will first examine the traditional hero's quest. This will establish the characteristics of the male hero and his relationship to the society that celebrates him that will later be transformed by female heroes. It would be nearly impossible to discuss critical work on the hero without addressing Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a work that has effected an outsized influence on conceptions of the hero and his quest, and so, while several other iterations of the hero will be examined, we will invariably return to to magic allows the magical woman as female hero in Fantasy to succeed where other female heroes often fail.

The (Male) Hero and His Quest
The hero is a figure that appears in our earliest literature and whose grip on our collective consciousness has yet to wane. Victor Brombert argues that "so long as man projects an image of himself in myth and art, so long as he somehow tries to justify this image or to deplore it, the notion of the hero is certain to stay alive. . . . The very concept of man is bound up with that of the hero" (1969: 11). While the hero remains as a figure in our myths, literature, television, movies, and society, who he is undergoes frequent modifications. For Brombert, the hero is not only (or always) a representation of the divine, but represents "the historical and political realities of our civilization" (1969: 11). And naturally, as those historical and political realities change, so too must the hero. But what endures is the draw of these figures, the impulse to look to heroes, to see someone who struggles, who fails, who both finds and loses hope, and who represents the worst and the best of us. The hero represents these desires, to come into our own (Attebery 1980: 13), to save the day, to become more than we are. Whether it be a Hobbit from the Shire, a Greek warrior defending his honor, or a genius billionaire playboy who builds himself a meccha, the hero, though ever-changing, remains a profoundly powerful figure of the human imagination.
My use of the pronoun "he" in this section so far is a conscious choice: early conceptions of the hero imagined him almost exclusively as male. Even in those works that conceded the existence of female heroes, the subsequent analysis made it clear that these critics were not truly interested in examining female heroes with the same rigor with which they approached their male counterparts. Part of this is, of course, due both to the materials many theorists used as their exemplars of heroes and what their heroes were meant to accomplish, whether in literature or the mundane world.
Two such examples of this are the idea of the hero as a Great Man, 122 popular in the 19 th C, and the Romantic, or Byronic, hero 123 of literature, who emerged in the Romantic period but remains popular today. The hero as Great Man necessarily takes 122 In this sense, the hero is more clearly a historical and social figure, and, subsequently, a male one. In Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1840) Thomas Carlyle writes: "They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or attain" (1840: 3). He identifies six classes of heroes through which we may glimpse "into the very marrow of the world's history," such as the Prophet and the King (1840). Carlyle ends his study by telling the reader that this subject of heroes "enters deeply . . . into the secret of Mankind's ways and vitalest interests in this world, and is well worth explaining at present" (1840: 287). The Great Man was also of interest to Georg Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel. In The Philosophy of History, Hegel argues that historical men, those "whose own particular aims involve those large issues which are the will of the World-Spirit. They may be called Heroes, inasmuch as they have derived their purposes and their vocation" (1900: 30). These men, "the Heroes of an epoch," are the best of that time, but their purposes are to satisfy themselves, not others. Others follows these great men because "they feel the irresistible power of their own inner Spirit thus embodied" (1900: 31). Critics like Herbert Spencer would disagree with Carlyle's focus on Great Men as heroes, pointing to the fact that these rulers and generals could not have accomplished their great feats without troops in the present, and what they inherited from those who came before them (1880: 35). 123 This hero has ambition, aspiration, aggressive individualism, and a "Promethean spark" (Stein 2004: 1). According to Atara Stein, the Byronic hero "creates his own rules and his own moral code, and while he may break the law in pursuit of his goals, he takes responsibility for his actions. With his superior capabilities, the Byronic hero . . . provides his audience with a satisfying vicarious experience of power and empowerment, autonomy, mastery, and defiance of oppressive authority" (2004: 1-2). On the other hand, the Byronic hero also "doesn't know how to relate to other people, he is a self-absorbed egotist, and he makes annoying, gratuitous displays of his powers, unaware of any other means of human interaction" (2004: 2). Like the hero as a Great Man, these heroes "fulfill a fantasy of the powerful leader who will make the right decisions and take decisive action on the side of justice" (Stein 2004: 4).
as its subject male heroes as it looks to leaders of men and figures throughout history such as the Priest, Prophet, and King (roles that have historically excluded women).
These critics view the hero as one who inspires or leads other men to greatness.
Likewise, the Byronic hero is also imagined as always male. And, while there are conceptions of the Byronic heroine, 124 the Byronic hero remains an almost exclusively male character. The tendency to imagine heroes as exclusively male extends to the studies on heroes that are of most consequence to this chapter, the questing hero found throughout the literatures of the world.
One of the first meta-studies of the hero as a figure in literature is Lord  125 Raglan writes that he is interested in tradition, which is different from history. The traditional narrative is one that has "really been handed down by word of mouth from time immemorial " (1956: 17). He takes several well-known traditional figures and shows that "there is no good reason to believe that any of them had a historical existence " (1956: 45). 126 Raglan is also concerned with the differences between and interconnectedness of stories, history, and myth. He argues that the heroes of traditional stories are really heroes of myth, and the saga is also based on myth (1956: 117). If traditional heroes have no claim to historicity, Raglan concludes that they were not men, but gods, and their stories were not accounts of fact, but rather of myth. 127 Raglan's traits of the hero are as follows: 1) his mother is a royal virgin, and 2) his father is a king, 3) who is often a near relative of his mother; 4) the circumstances of his conception are unusual, and 5) he is reputed to be son of a god; 6) at birth an attempt is made to kill him (often by his father), but 7) he is spirited away and 8) In a televised interview, Campbell says that raised by foster parents in far country; 9) we're told nothing of his childhood, but 10) on reaching manhood he returns or goes to his future kingdom; 11) after victory over a king and/or giant, dragon, wild beast, etc., he 12) marries a princess, 13) becomes king, 14) rules uneventfully, and 15) prescribes laws; he then 16) loses favor with gods and/or subjects and 17) is driven from throne and city; 18) finally, he meets a mysterious death, 19) often at the top of a hill; 20) his children, if any, do not succeed him, and, 21) his body is not buried, but 22) he has one or more holy sepulchers (1956: 174-75). 128 Campbell believed that scholars tended to overspecialize, which is one of the reasons he left his own PhD program. However, as Mary R. Lefkowitz notes, specialization has its merits, as Campbell's desire to prove that myths are "valid for life" leads him to get some of the facts wrong and to bend the specifics of certain myths to conform to his own interpretations (1990: 430-31). She uses as one of her examples his mistaken attribution of Menelaus' journey to ask Proteus for a way home, to Telemachus, claiming he was asking where his father was. 129 For Carl Jung this was further proof of a collective unconscious manifesting itself through the archetype of the hero. For Jung, the personal unconscious, the one that was of interest to Freud, rested upon a much deeper, inborn, collective unconscious which is universal, not individual (Jung 1972: 2). The content of the collective there is a certain typical hero sequence of actions which can be detected in stories from all over the world and from many periods of history. Essentially, it might even be said there is but one archetypal mythic hero whose life has been replicated in many lands by many, many people. (Campbell 1991: 166) From his study of a number of myths, from Classical Greece, to Native American, to Indian, Campbell works out a basic journey pattern that each of his heroes progresses through. While each stage is divided into more specific sub-sets, the general progression is departure-initiation-return. Campbell's analysis of the hero's journey would have widespread impacts, though perhaps the most notable and openly acknowledged is his influence on film. In a telling anecdote, Bill Moyers describes Joseph Campbell's excitement over the Star Wars movies, with Campbell exclaiming that George Lucas "'has put the newest and most powerful spin' to the classic story of the hero," foregrounding the idea that the hero's journey is not about selfaggrandizement or an affront to reason, but rather "by overcoming the dark passions, the hero symbolizes our ability to control the irrational savage within us" (Campbell 1991: xiii). 130 unconscious is the archetype, which is altered and influenced by the individual when they become conscious. Myth is one of the ways that these unconscious archetype's attain conscious form. However, through a feminist reading of Jung's theories, Naomi R. Goldenberg convincingly argues that Jung is much more concerned with the male archetype and devolves into stereotypes of femininity and masculinity (1976). Ronwin Goodsir Thomas writes that "It is arguable . . . that what, in fact, he has delineated for us are stereotypes, the types of human psyches repeated without change because the basic situations within which they have developed have not changed" (1983: 160). Thus, because Western society is patriarchal, the male and female "archetypes" Jung discusses can be viewed instead as stereotypes. 130 Campbell's influence on film is widely recognized. See Rensma 2009: viii-ix;Moyers 1991;and Kerr 1999. Of course, those ambiguous "conditions of life" are largely socially determined by those in power, namely men. As Terri Frontgia notes, this is also problematic as it resurrects a kind of biological determinism in recognizing a general and simplistic truth-women give birth and men do not. 132 She concludes that, while equating heroism with motherhood is good recognition, it "imprisons women in an all-too familiar conceptual and representation 'box'" (1991: 15). Campbell also precludes the female hero specifically from the quest, as it fundamentally requires one to be "out there" and not confined to the home. Women are further excluded from the hero's journey in the way Campbell emphasizes not only an external, physical journey, but also an "inner journey" or "quest for identity"-this is why so many works of modern Fantasy so closely resemble the Bildungsroman. However, Campbell's conception of a girl's passage to maturity is one of inevitability. Frontgia writes that: His perception of a girl's becoming a woman, on the other hand, involves none of these prescriptive implications of a cultural rite of passage into maturity.
The actual possibility of the hero's journey, and therefore heroism, is thus implicitly denied women, for they have supposedly reached their maturity, their developmental being, through the advent of normal reproductive functions. If there is no separation and journey, no choices to be made and trials to face, no revelation and acquired boon to bestow upon the return, then there can be no heroine. Also, since there is no journey, there is no real identity quest either: biology has already provided the ready-made answer to a woman's identity. Coming from the mother and soon becoming the mother, her identity described and inscribed in a closed loop, she does not need to 'start forth' to find her 'father,' her own character and destiny, for these are already predetermined by biology: girl-woman-mother. (1991: 16) The hero must be able to have adventures, to discover himself and prove his abilities, in order to become a hero and return with their prize. Campbell's claim that motherhood is the equivalent of male heroism falls apart almost immediately. And so, despite his claims that women can also be heroes, it is functionally improbable. and 20 th centuries, the study of the female hero would find a strong foothold.

The Female Hero and Her Quest
If, as I stated earlier, the hero represents our desires to come into our own, to save the day, to become more than we are, then it matters who the hero is. As C.M.
Bowra writes, "Their stories are the more absorbing because they themselves are what they are" (1969: 22). A personal identification with the hero, not just the stages of the hero's quest, is essential-we must see ourselves in the hero-as-person via the details of their lives, thoughts, and emotions in order for their sacrifices and triumphs to more effectively affect us. With the wealth of new literature featuring female protagonists, the female hero becomes an undeniably possible figure, though the specifics of her quest are necessarily different from her male counterpart. The working through of the social issues that constrain the female quest in literature has "led to the development of a separate tradition of quest-romance, a distinct history of female heroes and an equally distinct, although more recent, feminization of quest form that has made viable woman's unique pattern of human development" (Heller 1990: 9). The heroic woman is in a position to challenge societal conceptions of not only the hero, but also of power. The male hero's isolation is impermanent, in that he will never pose a real threat to patriarchal authority. He will not "divide power from sex, gender from honor, strength from violence, and society from male supremacy"-male heroism is a strategy of containment, as, while things might be rearranged, the central terms of order are maintained (1984: 9). But the female hero challenges these relationships, and thus poses more of a risk to traditional power structures. Because the quest involves both an internal self-discovery and a journey outward, women living within patriarchal societies face obstacles their male counterparts never do. 133 In response, the female hero's quest presents a unique structural model that does not simply exchange the genders in Campbell's monomyth, but also takes into account the societal, historical, and political obstacles female heroes face.
Some theorists have approached the female hero in the same way that Lord Raglan maps out the numerous character traits of the male hero, finding that, while different, the female hero does in fact display a pattern to her life story. 134 Other 133 Heller argues that "Rather than opening new territories and creating new alternatives to social convention, the female quester develops in accordance with a society that confines her, reshapes her aspirations, makes her aware of limitations, and leads her to resolve her quest only in socially available terms " (1990: 26). While this tends to hold true for early female heroes of realistic novels, it will become apparent that the magical woman as female hero of the Fantasy novel is able to resist this type of resolution. 134 After attempting to apply Lord Raglan's hero traits to various female heroes and finding his structure insufficient, Mary Anne Jezewski compiled her own list of eighteen traits that comprise a consistent pattern found in Greek female heroes. Those traits are: 1) her parents are royal or godlike, and 2) they are often related; 3) there is a theorists of the female hero take as their paradigmatic example Apuleius' Psyche before moving on to the female protagonists of realistic novels, attempting to reclaim the title "hero" for female characters. 135 These theorists argue that women in early myths were often presented on the sidelines-as the hero's mother, an obstacle he had to overcome or destroy in the specter of female sexuality, or the prize to be won (Lichtman 1996: 11)-but Apuleius' Psyche is clearly the protagonist of her tale as she is faced with a number of trials to complete in order to gain her ultimate prize, whatever it is. Psyche represents heroism that is not based on external actions alone (actions which are often based on feats of strength, military prowess, or social or political power-areas where women are often limited due to physiology or culture) (Edwards 1984: 11). Dana A. Heller also points to Psyche as an example that a search for prototypes of the female hero does not reveal a scarcity of bold women, but rather a teleology that undervalues female heroism (1990: 22). This bias is the only reason mystery surrounding her conception and/or birth; 4) little is known of her childhood; 5) she herself is a ruler or goddess; 6) she is charming and beautiful; 7) she uses men for political purposes; 8) she also controls men in matters of love and sex; 9) she is married; and 10) she has a child or children; 11) she has lovers; 12) her child succeeds her; 13) she does a man's job or deed; 14) she prescribes law; 15) there are conflicting views of her goodness; 16) her legend contains the Andromeda theme; and 17) the subsequent resolution of this theme is by treacherous means resulting in untimely death, exile, incarceration, etc; and 18) her death is uneventful and may not be mentioned in her legend (1984: 57-58). By applying these traits to various female heroes, both literary and historical, Jezewski demonstrates that not only are Raglan's hero traits not gender-neutral, but that the female hero does in fact display a pattern in her life story. 135 Mary R. Lefkowitz has a less flattering reading of Psyche's story, noting that, unlike her male counterparts, Psyche can accomplish nothing without assistance, and her story ends after her child is born (1981: 45). While Lefkowitz's criticism concerning the coincidence of of Psyche's heroic quest and her entrance into motherhood is valid, it is important to remember that no heroes complete their quests without significant assistance.
hero and popular imagination. 136 Even Joseph Campbell points to Psyche as completing a successful hero's quest; however, he also calls it the "most charming" example of the tasks and trials a hero must often face, trivializing her quest (Campbell 1949: 97). For feminist critics like Heller and Edwards, Psyche stands as an important figure in studies of the female hero-among Odysseus, Achilles, Jason, and Heracles, Psyche also sets out, completes her quests, and gains her ultimate boon, demonstrating that "hero" is an available archetype for female characters.
The societal obstacles faced by 19th century female almost-heroes would also prevent many of the would-be quests of the growing number of female protagonists in late 19 th and 20 th century works from achieving completion. For example, characters like Jane Austen's Emma, or Susan Warner's Ellen Montgomery can be called heroines, but they don't quite achieve hero status, for they remain trapped by social restrictions and ideas of female "goodness." 137 In these instances, social prescriptions on femininity and womanhood prohibit a completion of the entire hero's quest that has 136 Psyche's story also foregrounds the power of love. All heroism, Edwards claims, is an appeal to love. This love, as Edwards notes, does not have to be sexual or romantic. The Iliad ends not with Hector's bloody body, but with Achilles and Priam "joined in prayer, reconciled, if only for a moment." It is a social, not private, impulse that "seeks expression in public form and brings about a change from an old idea of community to a new ideal" (1984: 13). 137 Heller notes that feminist critics have identified an absence of "heroic female selfimage." She attributes this to the fact that "Women have been blocked from identifying themselves with the active subject of the quest-romance because they have internalized an image of themselves as passive objects, framed by the classic structure of myth, removed from the very symbols and activities the quest traditionally evokes" (1990: 6). This further reinforces the idea that the figure of the hero, being able to see oneself in the personality of the hero themselves, is an integral and important act in demonstrating to readers available ways of being.
historically been made available to male characters and, consequently, has reflected the possibilities open to male readers but not female ones. While many of these protagonists come close to satisfying some of the facets of the female hero, they are typically constrained in some way. If they manage the first stages of the quest, they are typically thwarted at the end of their journeys, often through marriage (Heller 1990: 26). Jane Eyre is a paradigmatic example of this: she is able to venture out and embark on a journey of self-discovery, overcoming several obstacles, but in the end, marries, and by marrying Mr. Rochester and becoming Mrs. Rochester, Jane accepts her new social role as wife and ultimately becomes not a hero, but a heroine. For Edwards, this serves only to take rebellious and intellectually aggressive women and reinforce their subordination. 138 Edwards also argues that the female almost-heroes are "defeated by the authors' sense that the tests involved are impossible for the would-be hero to perform" (1984: 16). 139 In later works, instead of marriage, many female almostheroes experience suicide, madness, or fatal illness before completing all stages of 138 Edwards notes that, while Psyche's tale also ends in a happy marriage and a child, Psyche moves from an earthly realm to a heavenly one and gives birth to a daughter, while Emma, Jane, and Dorothea remain worldly beings and all give birth to sons. Edwards explains that "the sex of their offspring serves to suggest the abatement of their power. Trapped between their husbands and their sons, Emma, Jane, and Dorothea are reduced to fit the narrow dimensions of their final role"-not the hero, but the heroine (1984: 103). 139 Edwards gives Jude the Obscure, The Awakening, and The Portrait of a Lady, as examples of this type of marriage. In these works, the traditional, conventionalizing power of marriage is shown in the ways this power destroys the autonomy of the female characters and warps their sexuality (1984: 109). What is unique about this approach is that this "bad" marriage is not a transitional phase to a future, more enlightened union. their quest. 140 As women gained more power politically, it seems that more drastic measures had to be taken outside of marriage to curtail their quests.
By the twentieth-century, authors begin inventing maneuvers whereby their hero can break out into the world-a necessary step in the hero's quest and the one most frequently blocked, or resolved, by marriage or insanity. This was largely engendered by the new historical opportunities for women to venture more confidently out into society, giving female protagonists new things to do and giving new shapes to the plots in which they find themselves (Edwards 1984: 145). The new possibility of work outside the home, allowing not only for economic compensation, but also for a communal structure as a replacement for domesticity, left these newly heroic figures "free to invent new modes of human intercourse, [moving] from the periphery of a hostile society to the center of a new communal form" (Edwards 1984: 236). Finally, this ability to venture out, one of the foundational moves of the hero's journey, becomes more available to female characters as women themselves are able to venture out of the private sphere.
However disappointing the earlier aborted quests of female almost-heroes may be, they serve as important steps to achieving a female hero that completes all the stages of the hero's quest. Each addition or attempt at a female hero quest reveals the obstacles that confront the female hero, and each text plays out "one move in an ongoing game and makes the attentive reader conscious, as the hero is conscious, that 140 Rather than viewing these as failures, Heller sees "a flight into strategic self destruction as women writers struggle to discover an authentic expression of woman's plight in patriarchal society. Death, in this sense, must be understood as no mere gesture of defeat but as a cry for action and an appeal to readers" (1990: 30).
future moves must require untried strategies" (Edwards 1984: 16). 141 With this, we see a forward momentum in the ability of the female hero to alter structures of power and complete a quest that mirrors in its general structure that of the male hero. Likewise, Lichtman notes that it is only recently that women writers have had an opportunity as seeing themselves as heroes, and have begun imagining alternatives to an end in marriage or death (1996: 9). 142 It is evident from these studies that the ability for women to accomplish the stages of the traditional hero's quest, imagined as undertaken by a male figure, necessitates a certain socio-political status for women in the actual world. This highlights a reciprocal, recursive relationship between literature and life: as women in the "real" world are given more opportunities, female heroes have more space to branch out, and the female heroes of literature show women in the "real" world myriad possibilities for enlarging their sphere and having adventures. As women continually gain more equality and opportunity, the hero's quest becomes more attainable in realistic fiction, making "hero," like "mother" and "wife," a viable label for female protagonists.

One of the most expansive studies of the female hero is Carol Pearson and
Katherine Pope's The Female Hero in American and British Literature (1981). What makes Pearson and Pope's work so appealing to this study is that they replicate 141 A chronological investigation of female heroes in modern Fantasy would be an interesting and worthwhile endeavor. I predict one would find a similar forward momentum, but accomplished in unique ways within the confines of the genre. 142 Lichtman is particularly interested in examining the remnants of the Goddess worshipping matrilineal cultures that patriarchal societies would displace and "the denigration of female consciousness that leaves control over the life processes to the male" (1996: 24)-a character who is an archetypal hero that passes through the three stages of virgin, mother, crone.
through the lens of the female hero. Pearson and Pope's study is one of reclamation.
They write that "The present book is itself an example of literary criticism that reclaims the female heroes of traditional literature and reinterprets them in the light of feminist analysis" (1981: 8). 143 However, like previous studies of the female hero, they acknowledge that in prefeminist literature it is often difficult for authors to resolve the female hero's quest or to supply her with a plot that allows for her to fully realize her potential. 144 Often the female hero must compromise. But before a female character can even consider beginning her journey, Pearson and Pope note that she must identify four main myths-or "dragons" that must be slain-that serve to "leave the potential hero content with being a heroine only" (1981: 18). 145 Once the female protagonist slays these dragons "she recognizes that she is not what 'they' say she is, and that she is in fact valuable and strong" (1981: 67). If these dragons are overcome, the female hero may start her journey. Pearson and Pope mirror Campbell's division of the quest 143 As a primary example they give the fallacious assumption that female protagonists rarely travel (departure, of course, being the first stage of the hero's quest). In fact, female protagonists travel all the time, and often great distances. Geoffrey Chaucer's Wife of Bath, Shakespeare's Rosalind, Defoe's Moll Flanders, Doris Lessing's Martha Quest all embark on often multiple journeys. Of course, Dorothy goes to OZ and Alice travels through the looking glass (1981: 9). 144 They write that realistic literature "in order to seem credible, must conform to people's beliefs about reality" (1981: 11). Thus, even though many early works have female protagonists who travel, their main concern is courtship and marriage and thus conform to versions of the love story. 145 Edwards makes a similar observation concerning the heroine. She writes: "A primary character, the hero inspires and requires followers; the heroine obeys, falls into line, takes second place. Although a hero can theoretically exist in a narrative without a heroine, the reverse is not the case…. The hero possesses vision, daring, and power: to charm, move, break with the past, endure hardship and privation, journey into the unknown, risk death and survive-at least in spirit. The hero dances in the spotlight. The heroine is eclipsed, upstaged, in darkness" (1984: 5-6).
into three broad phases of departure-initiation-return but reimagine them: departure becomes Exit from the Garden; the Emperor's New Clothes and A Woman is Her Mother serve as the initiation stage; and return is cast as New Family and The Kingdom Transformed. Within each phase "the protagonist is faced with a powerful figure to interpret, a dragon to slay, and a treasure to win" (1981: 68). 146 Because they so clearly divide the female hero's quest into discrete stages, and they use a wide breadth of literature, Pearson and Pope's terminology and the ways in which they describe the structure of the hero's quest for the female hero are useful for analyzing Ista's quest and the ways in which it both echoes and diverges from the male hero and female hero's quest. 147 I will refer to their study frequently as it enables me to clearly contrast Campbell's hero stages with the stages experienced by a female hero.

Studies of the Female Hero in Modern Fantasy
146 The female hero exits the garden when she realizes that those figures who had previously served as guides for her life are in fact her captors. These figures include parents, husbands, and religious or political authorities. In order to free herself, she "must leave the garden of dependency . . . slay the dragon of the virginity myth, and assume the role of spiritual orphan" (1981: 68). In the second stage she meets the seducer. While he often introduces her to a world of experience, he ultimately turns out to be another captor, thus requiring the hero to "slay the dragon of romantic love and demythologize the seducer" (1981: 68). Once she discovers that sexuality and independence-qualities society defines as male-are hers, she achieves autonomy and wholeness. In the third stage, the hero travels to her ancestral home (literally or symbolically) in search of her father, only to discover that it is her "mother with whom she seeks to be rejoined" (1981: 68). The hero, with an aid, frees herself from the myth of female inferiority and identifies a "viable female tradition" (1981: 68). 147 For the purposes of this study, Pearson and Pope are perhaps too quick to bestow the label of "hero" onto the female protagonists they study. Any female protagonist that completes even a portion of the hero's journey is eligible for the designation "hero," whereas I am more interested in female characters who clearly complete every stage of the journey, as their male counterparts have been doing for centuries.
If the female protagonists of more realistic literature find their hero's quest interrupted or curtailed by the societal expectations of the time in which the protagonists lived, then a genre that is not limited by realistic expectations of worldbuilding should offer more creative opportunities for female protagonists to become female heroes, particularly if that genre is also intensely interested in the hero's quest.
Unfortunately, as we have seen, Fantasy is not immune to replicating gendered relations and expectations, even within entirely created secondary worlds-Fantasy authors are, of course, still products of their own times and biases. Like realistic literature, however, Fantasy has also come a long way in presenting female heroes.
This makes the sporadic way in which female heroes in Fantasy have been addressed in critical scholarship, while not surprising, certainly disappointing.
In studies on the female hero in Fantasy, the work of Patricia McKillip often arises as an example of an author who presents more or less successful female heroes; however, her female heroes are not completely successful in completing their quests.

Sharon Emmerichs writes that
In her fantasy fiction, McKillip quite clearly maps heroic qualities upon her female heroes, but at the same time makes an extremely self-conscious effort to keep them within "traditional" high fantasy conventions, thereby avoiding the tendency to portray female heroes as "modified male[s]" playing "traditional male roles" (Spivack 8 McKillip is also credited with presenting a female hero as part of a duomyth in her Riddlemaster trilogy. Christina Mains argues that "after undertaking a journey towards identity no less difficult than that of her male counterpart, [Raederle] realizes both a sense of her own power within the community and a loving relationship in which both are equal partners" (2005: 24). Mains goes on to write that the quest is "shared equally between a male and a female hero who together achieve not only a sense of selfhood and autonomy but also a loving union with the other" (2005: 24). 148 But even the duomyth does not completely elevate Raederle to female hero: Morgon, his attainment of his crown, his journey to claim Raederle as his prize, and the trials he faces on this journey, occupy the entire first volume of the trilogy; the Riddlemaster of the series title is Morgon, who wins his crown in a riddle game with the ghost of a cursed king; and the reader is still left with a "not-quite-happily-ever-after" as Raederle, while equal in strength and magical ability to Morgon, does not hold the equal position of High One he does, "her status would seem to be that of the High One's wife or partner" (Mains 2005: 31). 149 While reading the trilogy as a duomyth is perhaps more satisfactory, it takes some creative re-imagining of the first book of the trilogy and the title itself to sustain Raederle as an equal hero.
The most extended treatment of female heroes in modern Fantasy is Lori M.

Campbell's collection of essays titled A Quest of Her Own: Female Heroes in Modern
Fantasy (2014). In this collection, we find: a number of essays that examine women in folktales and romance; several that attempt to reclaim or recast female characters from the work of Tolkien; a section on villains and villain-heroes; as well as one on sidekicks and helpers. 150 The section that should have most clearly examined the questing female hero, "Underestimated Overachievers: Unlikely and Unstoppable Female Heroes," contains essays almost exclusively on YA or children's fantasy works. 151 The first essay most clearly deals with a potential female hero from Ursula K. LeGuin's Tehanu. 152 Here, Erin Wyble Newcomb makes a compelling argument 149 Mains herself acknowledges this complication to the reading of Riddlemaster as a duomyth. However, this ending does in fact make sense if one acknowledges that the hero of the trilogy has always been Morgon, the Riddlemaster himself. 150 All of these essays are important and thought-provoking analyses of works of modern Fantasy and add much needed dimension to studies of the female hero, yet, for the purposes of this study, none clearly address the female questing hero, a figure that is so prevalent when the questing hero is male. 151 The one exception is Erin Wyble Newcomb's "'Weak as woman's magic': Empowering Care Work in Ursula Le Guin's Tehanu" and, while I appreciate the need to recast these kinds of labors as heroic actions, I am reminded of Edward's admonition of Campbell's claim that motherhood is woman's most heroic act, relying on stereotypically feminine roles in order claim heroic status. Somewhere I would like to see recognition of the female hero venturing out as the male hero has always done. 152 Newcomb notes that the critical consensus is that Le Guin returns to Earthsea as part of her burgeoning feminist consciousness. Tehanu deals with the importance of female experience and knowledge in order to act as a feminist intervention in the Earthsea world. She accomplishes this by placing Tenar at the center of the text (2014: 95).
for seeing Tenar, the central figure in this addition to the Earthsea series, as not only a reconsideration of the Fantasy genre but also of the hero itself. According to Newcomb, Tehanu "simultaneously destabilizes the male monopoly of heroism and elevates ordinary women's work to the potentially extraordinary. Tenar is a female hero, however seemingly unlikely, precisely because of her commitment to care" All of the critical works discussed above offer nuanced readings of different sub-genres of Fantasy, and work like this on the wide array and vast diversity of women characters in Fantasy is long overdue; however, literature in general, and Fantasy in particular, is replete with stories of male heroes who participate in successful quests. While many of these studies make compelling arguments for seeing certain female characters as heroic, the works that posit a female character as the hero seem to in some way qualify her heroism. What the remainder of this chapter will demonstrate is that the female hero, one who participates in the same type of quest as the male hero, does exist in Fantasy. In fact, Fantasy is the most natural place for her to exist. It is structurally based on traditional quest narratives, and the use of magic allows the female hero of Fantasy an advantage her realistic counterparts do not have: access to a power outside of patriarchal control.

Chalion, or Bujold's Patriarchal World
While I am specifically interested in the female hero's quest as undertaken by Ista in the second book of the series, Paladin of Souls, understanding the first novel adds an integral dimension to the way in which Ista's journey unfolds and its importance not only within the world of Chalion, but meta-textually within the Fantasy genre itself. 153 The Curse of Chalion is a story that focuses mostly on political intrigue and interpersonal relationships. Lupe dy Cazaril, after a betrayal that sends him to the slave ships of the Roknari, returns to the Royacy of Chalion and the family he served as a young boy hoping for some minor position within the household.
Recognized by the old Royina, his vast academic and experiential skills are put to use as he is appointed head tutor to the Royesse Iselle. Eventually, Iselle and her brother, Teidez, are called to the capital city by their half-brother, the current, and ineffectual, Roya Orico. While there, Iselle's brother (next in line to the throne) proves over and over again how unfit he is to rule: he is easily flattered, petulant, and manipulated.
Contrary to Teidez, Iselle quickly learns the intricacies of court life, discerning who is a danger and who is a potential ally, and she demonstrates quick wit and intelligence as well as a mastery of the languages of neighboring realms (though Teidez's claim to the throne is never questioned). In an attempt to gain power, Orico's most trusted advisor, Martou dy Jironal, arranges a marriage between Iselle and his younger brother Dondo, who, by all accounts, is a vile and cruel man. When Dondo is killed, Iselle knows she must secure her own fate. In secret, she sends Cazaril to negotiate her marriage to the young prince of a neighboring kingdom. She succeeds and manages to thwart dy Jironal's attempt to take the throne. Iselle's union turns out to be advantageous, as she manages to maintain her own title of Royesse of Chalion, striking a much more egalitarian bargain than any that awaited her in Chalion. 154 Throughout the novel, Iselle is reminded repeatedly of her place and worth within the social structure of Chalion. The expectations for Iselle are clearly outlined: "An attractive, fresh young royesse was a pawn, not a player, in the politics of Chalion. Her bride-price would come high, but a politically and financially favorable marriage might not necessarily prove a good one in more intimate senses" (2001: 31).
In explaining the relative disinterest many of the young men at court have for Iselle, Cazaril explains that "They all know she must be sold out of court, probably out of Chalion altogether, and is not meant for them" (2001: 122). Indeed, Iselle originally has no say in who she is married to, as her half-brother Orico may arrange whatever marriage he pleases to gain the most political advantage. And he does, pledging her to Dondo, a man she has made clear she despises, telling her that "A lady of your rank does not marry to please herself, but to bring advantage to her house" (2001: 166). As has been made clear, Iselle is nothing more than an object for trade, valued only for the advantageous marriage she might one day make.
The Curse of Chalion is not a quest Fantasy. In fact, nearly the entirety of the novel takes place within the castle walls and its concern lies mostly with character development and interpersonal relationships. And while the plot can be relayed, as I have done above, without mentioning magic, magic is what drives nearly all the action. The royal house is under a curse, a curse that can only be broken if someone willingly dies for them three times. In order to save Iselle from her fate as Dondo dy Jironal's future wife, Cazaril performs death magic, a ritual that is supposed to kill both the caster and their victim, but, while dy Jironal dies, Cazaril is brought back to life as a saint, with the ability to see not only the black shroud of the curse that surrounds the members of the royal family, but also the glow of other saints. He dies once more when he is stabbed with a sword during Martou dy Jironal's attempt to reclaim Iselle. It is later revealed that Royse Bergon of Ibra, the prince Iselle marries, was in fact a young boy Cazaril met on the slave ship, whose life Cazaril saved by sacrificing his own (though he was later revived). This makes three times Cazaril willingly sacrifices his own life for the royal family, thus breaking the curse. He is able to accomplish many of these things because after performing death magic, Cazaril opens himself to the Mother, one of the five gods of Chalion, and becomes a saint.
The use of magic in The Curse of Chalion is an important precursor to Paladin of Souls, particularly the relationship between magic and the male protagonist.
Cazaril's stint as a saint (he loses his powers after his third death) is characterized as one of sacrifice. It is not necessarily a gaining of power, but of emptying, of surrendering and allowing one's body to become a vessel. A fellow saint explains to Cazaril that "A saint is not a virtuous soul, but an empty one. He-or she-freely gives the gift of their will to their god. And in renouncing action, makes action possible" (2001: 199). Through Cazaril's working of death magic, Dondo's spirit, along with the demon who was to claim it, becomes trapped within Cazaril. Cazaril thus literally becomes a vessel, not only for the god who uses him, but also for the soul of dy Jironal and the demon itself. 155 The "tumor" containing these two spirits is held within Cazaril's belly and its relation to pregnancy is a clear one. When Cazaril expresses disgust with his new role as vessel, Beatriz (Iselle's close friend and Cazaril's love interest) reminds him that "you can't expect us to get all squeamish just because you're…inhabited. I mean…[women are] expected to share our bodies someday. Doesn't make us horrible" (2001: 282). Cazaril's history as a young castellar, beloved by his men and friends, who bravely defends his post against unbeatable odds, is betrayed twice and sent to suffer on a slave galley, but overcomes all of this and makes it back to a place that was once his home would normally make up the bulk of a modern Fantasy novel. However, this narrative is relegated to backstory, revealed in asides and through dialogue, while in the story's present, he spends most of his time in the company not of soldiers or fellow travelers, but of two young women.
Cazaril and his willingness to submit, sacrifice, and to host powers that are not his are the focus of The Curse of Chalion. Such passive or feminine attributes do not tend to be the defining characteristics of the fantasy hero, and to do these things not during a clear battle between good and some great evil, but rather to help a young girl who he has been tasked to mentor and protect from an unhappy marriage is even more peculiar to the genre. This presentation of the protagonist in the first novel helps to distinguish Royina Ista's unique relationship to magic, making the second novel-the one whose protagonist is not a dashing young castellar but an older, widowed mother-the Fantasy hero's quest.

Royina Ista, or the Mad Woman in the Attic
We first meet Royina Ista in The Curse of Chalion, though only through her very brief encounters with Cazaril and through second-hand accounts. This is because her family believes her mad, and largely confines her to her rooms in the castle towers.
Cazaril notes that, while marriage tends to be a one-way journey for the bride, "the dowager royina had returned…broken," and he becomes concerned that perhaps Thus, the truth of Ista's "madness" is already suspect to Cazaril and to the reader. It will become more so after Cazaril becomes a saint.
In the Zangre, the castle in the capitol of Chalion where Cazaril becomes a saint, he is able to see the ghosts that inhabit the castle as well as the aura of other saints and the curse that shrouds itself around the royal family. Upon returning to Ista, then, had never been mad. She had simply experienced something that others did not understand, and her attempts to tell them were seen as madness and she was treated accordingly-isolated, patronized, always supervised. 156 Paladin of Souls opens with Ista's mother's death, as the responsibility for her continued imprisonment is passed on to the castle warder. She remarks that her mother's keys had been "handed back for permanent safekeeping not to [Ista], but to good, old, honest dy Ferrej. Keys to lock out all danger…and, if necessary, Ista in" (2003: 1). Ista has been deemed mad by those around her, and yet, it is her isolation, her confinement to the home and domesticity, that is stifling her. Cazaril himself wonders what she does all day. He notes that "She did not sew, apparently, nor did she seem much of a reader, nor did she keep musicians of her own. Cazaril had seen her sporadically at prayers . . . Other times weeks would pass when she seemed to keep no observances to the gods at all" (2001: 82). But it is through Cazaril that we know Ista never was mad to begin with. Distraught and overcome with grief for a period of time, but never mad. However, this perceived madness becomes integral to how she manages to begin her quest.

Departure, or The Journey Begins
Traditionally, the hero's departure begins with a call to adventure, often signified by some type of herald. Campbell notes that the call may come in the form of a blunder, or "one may be only casually strolling, when some passing phenomenon catches the wandering eye and lures one away" (1949: 58). For those who do not refuse the call, 157 the journey often begins with a protective figure "who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass" and who signifies a kind of protective power (1949: 69; 71-72). Once the hero (with his guide) begins the journey, he comes to the first threshold, whose guardian stands "for the limits of the hero's present sphere, or life horizon. Beyond them is darkness, the unknown, and danger" (1949: 77). The hero must journey out beyond the safe boundaries of the village, or depart, for his quest to truly begin.
The initial stages of Ista's quest closely resemble those outlined by Campbell and, by extension, Pearson and Pope, for whom the safe village is reimagined as a garden, and the first step of the female hero's journey is the exit from this garden (though this garden is often imagined as a confining house). While they acknowledge that the heroic exit is available to women at any stage of their lives, it is often old age that seems to encourage, rather than prohibit, this exit. Of course, the exit does not promise a happy ending, but it does provide independence, integrity, and self-respect (1981: 83). It is clear that Ista experiences the stifling nature of a confining house.
After her mother's death and the transfer of the keys to the castle warder, Ista "knew what she feared-to be locked up in some dark, narrow place by people who loved her" (2003: 1). It is literal confinement, believed by those who love her to be a protection for her in her madness. Her age and position as a widowed mother in a patriarchal society also serve to unmoor her. For her entire life, she has been defined by her relationship to those around her. She realizes: "The duties that had defined her, all accomplished. Once, she had been her parents' daughter. Then great, unlucky Ias's wife. Her children's mother. At the last, her mother's keeper. Well, I am none of these things now" (2003: 2). Those ties that are generally used to define women within patriarchal societies-as daughter, wife, mother, caretaker-no longer apply. Ista is simultaneously freed from certain expectations and left without the identity conferred by her relationships. It is freeing in its erasure.
While the traditional hero's quest begins with the call to adventure, the female hero's quest often begins with "a single voice . . . telling her that she is worthwhile, that she has a right to happiness and fulfillment, and that she has the ability to find it" (1981: 83). While in both cases the hero is prompted to begin their quest, for the female hero this quest is explicitly linked to her own worth, to a kind of impulse to move beyond proscribed limitations. Ista's desire to begin her quest starts with a "commanding impulse from within" (Pearson and Pope 1981: 84)  This makes clear that this quest will not function in the same way as much Fantasy, with the stereotypical and common hero's journey. Indeed, Ista's first attempt is poorly planned and soon aborted. After feeling this sudden urge to take to the road, she simply begins walking, in her mourning dress, down the road. After about an hour of stumbling in the mud with no provisions, no money, and no plan, she is found by the castle warder, loaded onto a groom's horse, and brought back to the keep. This is not an uncommon first misstep, as "without the necessary confidence and determination, the hero may exit for a time and then return prematurely to the garden" (Pearson and Pope 1981: 88). But it is on this premature exit and return that Ista begins devising her plan to begin her quest.
According to Pearson and Pope, the exit becomes possible once the female hero identifies the specific figures who have worked to restrict her and who have convinced her that she must doubt and repress herself. These figures are often, in a sense, captors: parents and husbands or lovers are common figures (1981: 104). Ista is in large part freed from her primary captors by their deaths. What now constricts her is the belief that she is mad. She does not need to necessarily "convert her captor" or free herself from her "dependence on the love and approval of her captors" (Pearson and Pope 1981: 104), she needs only to find a way to liberate herself from their careful, watchful eyes. Her literal imprisonment necessitates more than simply her desire for adventure or her ability to cast off the expectations of others: she must literally find a way to escape, or at least to trick them into letting her go. Her plan comes from a widow she met on her first, failed exit. 158 Ista's cover is a religious pilgrimage, for who could refuse a grieving daughter a pilgrimage in humility?
While in many of the works Pearson and Pope examine, the journey moves from innocence and unconsciousness to consciousness, Ista's age and life experience also modifies this transition. Most heroines (and heroes) begin their quests in their youth. Indeed, part of the quest is in fact this transition to adulthood. However, Ista is well past her girlhood, and so, marriage and motherhood are already markers of womanhood that she has achieved and moved past. Her age thus also expands the idea of the female hero. Much like the way Cazaril's journey is relegated to backstory, so too is Ista's past (a series of events that by themselves would often constitute their own novel in a Fantasy series). Ista has already fallen in love, borne children, been betrayed, faced a trial, and suffered loss. She has little faith in the myths of "happily ever after." However, all of these actions were done still within a patriarchal structure, while fulfilling expected roles of wife and mother. It is this new journey in which find a new identity, one that is not reliant on these previous relations.

Initiation, or the Trials of the Hero
For both the male and female hero, once they have begun their journey, they must face a series of tests before encountering the final trial. The initiation stage comprises the journey proper, where the hero is out in the world encountering various trials. These may be tasks to be completed or minor trials to be overcome, but they are "preliminary victories, unretainable ecstasies, and momentary glimpses of the 158 It is certainly no coincidence that her method for escape is given to her by another older (not)woman.
wonderful land" (Campbell 1949: 109). It is during these trials that the hero also often falls in love. The theme of romantic love and sexuality are essential to Ista's journey, though with some important twists. Bujold effectively sets up, then knocks down or inverts, familiar Fantasy romantic narratives. As a mother and widower, Ista has already fulfilled most of the stringent requirements of her sex. However, as a widow, she is of course, expected to remain chaste for the rest of her days. Though not something she had given much thought to before leaving the confines of her mother's home, once she has begun her journey, love becomes a possibility once again. While on her pilgrimage, her company is attacked by raiders from an enemy state. In typical Fantasy fashion, a lone horse-man comes to her rescue. Upon first seeing him, "Ista's breath caught in a chill, or was that a thrill?" (2003: 114). Bujold then devotes several pages to Ista's rescue, paying particular attention to not only the horseman's features, but his impressive skill with his sword and Ista's apparent admiration. 160 On their ride back to his keep, Ista has a chance to study him more fully. Impressed by both his level-headedness, skill, and appearance, Ista thinks: A stunning first impression was not the same thing as love at first sight. But surely it was an invitation to consider the matter. What of her and love, after all? At eighteen she had been lifted up by Lord dy Lutez into the bright, easy, poisoned triumph of her high marriage to Roya Ias. . . . For all the relentless idealism surrounding virginity, fidelity, and celibacy-for women-Ista had nature of available female approaches to sexuality-that one may be either sexual, or virtuous. Both reader and hero must learn to reject that duality. 160 The encounter, however, is not without some comedy, as immediately after being cut free, Ista must find some bushes behind which to relive herself, as her captors had not stopped during the night. Illvin incapacitated as in a coma for all but a few hours a day, when dy Lutez would resume his "death" so Illvin could eat and drink. Neither man was aware of this.
But Ista does find love. In a reversal of the Sleeping Beauty trope, it is Illvin who Ista "wakes" and eventually falls in love with. She first sees him, "sleeping," in bed: "He rested atop the counterpane not like a man in a sickbed, but like a man who had lain down for but a moment in the middle of a busy day. Or like a corpse laid out in best garb for his funeral " (2003: 187). Ista is first brought to see Illvin by his caretaker, who demands that Ista kiss him. When she asks him to explain himself he says: "It was a princess put him here. I thought maybe you could wake him. Being a royina and all" (2003: 18). Despite telling him that that was only a children's story, Ista is convinced by his desperation to give it a shot, and allows herself to believe, for a moment, that it might work. It does not. Ista is eventually able to save him, but only after she manages to overcome the trial of her magic. 161 Pearson and Pope note that after the female hero rejects "both the man she finds and the idea of being a helpmate, object, or symbol in his heroic journey, she elects instead to develop within herself the heroic qualities society has seen as male " (1981: 177). For Ista, in a fantasy hero's quest, this means mastering her magical ability.

Magic and the Power Within
The nature of magic in Chalion was introduced in the first book,  (2003: 414). Ista learns that she now has the ability to find demons, separate them from the bodies and souls they are inhabiting, and return them to the Bastard's realm. Indeed, this is the task that is set out before her. While the male hero receives a boon to bring back to his community, Ista's boon is her ability to finally control her magical powers, and it is this ability that allows her to take control of her own life and set the terms of her future.

Return, or The Hero Comes Home
The last stage of the hero's journey as described by Campbell is return, where the hero brings the boon back to the community, nation, planet, etc., in order to transform and renew it (1949: 193). 165 In "The Crossing of the Return Threshold," the hero comes back from the darkness to the land we know, but, what winds up being revealed is that the two kingdoms are the same and the hero's ultimate task is figuring out how to render what he has learned into language our world will understand.
Finally, the hero acknowledges that he lives in the current moment, without fear and anxiety over the future or past. This does not always end in the hero's happiness, as he is changed, able to reconcile individual consciousness and universal will, but his community has not always changed with him.
The female hero's return is markedly different. While the female hero returns transformed, it is the discovery of her whole and authentic self that is the treasure she claims (Pearson and Pope 1981: 223). Having fully discovered her self, "the hero even more firmly refuses to conform to the patriarchal myths of ideal womanhood" (1981: 225). While the kingdom might not be transformed, the female hero usually finds community on a smaller scale. However, because culture restrains the female hero in 165 Campbell notes that if the hero's triumph is achieved with the blessing of the gods, then they support him in his return; if it was not, then he is often (comically) obstructed. Occasionally, the hero will still need assistance from without to make his return, "For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the selfscattering of the wakened state" (1949: 207

Conclusion
What is compelling about Bujold's Chalion series is that not only is Ista a magical woman, but that she is also middle aged, widowed, and a mother, all of which is perfectly poised to be one of these heroes and this analysis clearly demonstrates that it is not only possible to have a questing female hero, it is necessary in order to not only expand the genre of Fantasy and maintain its validity as anything more than an outdated genre, but to present readers with new ways to imagine the hero and new opportunities to see within themselves the heroic.
Widow was treated in marketing and merchandizing campaigns. Black Widow's lack of merchandising has long been a sore spot for fans (See Robinson 2015;Frevele 2015;and Chittal 2015). It seems that the newest addition to the Star Wars franchise did not learn from Marvel's mistakes with its female hero. While the hero of the movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens is clearly Rey (played by Daisy Ridley), a young woman who was left on the planet Rakku as a child, she was largely excluded from Star Wars toys and merchandising. Hasbro, the company responsible for making the toys, claimed the lack of Rey toys was in order to avoid movie spoilers. As Erik Kain notes, "That rings a little hollow, since we all knew before the movie came out that Rey was a major character in it and it isn't exactly difficult to release toys that don't contain spoilers" (2016). This is reinforced by an industry insider who was present at merchandising meetings and who revealed that they were told, "No boy wants to be given a product with a female character on it" (Davis). Heroic Girls founder John Marcotte also revealed that in speaking with Disney's people, he was told that they had expected Kylo Ren to be the breakout role and were blindsided by Rey's popularity (Davis 2016). Why they imagined that the character aligned with the dark side who appears in significantly less of the film would be more popular than the obvious hero is confounding. "I paint a picture": Postcolonial Fantasy and The Magical Woman "Fantasy-despite, or even perhaps because of, its long reception as a genre designed to 'serve rather than subvert the dominant ideology'-has considerable power to dig up long-buried histories of colonization and imperialism and to challenge the assumptions on which their power structures rely by offering new perspectives" (Young 2016: 114).
Throughout this study we have encountered different types of magical women who manage to break free not only from the narrative constraints of Epic Fantasy but also the limiting archetypal expectations of the hero (as male) and the hero's journey (as a male quest that follows the basic steps outlined by Joseph Campbell Oree's depiction as a black, disabled character who also uses magic might, on first glance, conjure images of the magical-negro. Typically seen in cinema, the magicalnegro is a trope that also appears in literature. According to David Ikard, the magicalnegro "tends to be self-sacrificial to a pathological extent, existing almost exclusively to usher whites through emotional, social, or economic crisis (2017: 10). Ikard goes on to note that this trope is "designed to erase blacks' complex humanity, authenticate white paternalism, and explain away, if not justify, white domination" (2017: 11). It becomes quickly apparent that Oree reflects none of these characteristics: she is not self-sacrificial, but makes decisions that she feels are best for not only others, but also herself; she is in no way a side-kick, inserted into the narrative to support a white protagonist; her humanity and past are integral parts of the novel, and, as the firstperson narrator it is her journey we are interested in; and, far from authenticating white paternalism and domination, Oree's experiences explicitly challenge these racial assumptions.
world. Her position as a black woman from a colonized people highlights the ways in which race and gender work to determine her place in the world. Jemisin examines these issues in her created world, making use of secondary-world Fantasy's ability to create space to explore tensions and disparities that exist in our world, thereby preparing us to "look the world's harsh realities in the face" (Webb 2007 Helen Young argues that the lack of attention paid to Fantasy dealing specifically with colonialism is due to a number of factors. First, she argues that it receives less attention than Science Fiction largely due to the legacy of Marxist 174 I agree with John C. Hawley's assertion that any term like "postcolonial that presumes to describe a matrix of shifting components and extreme complexity must fall short" (2001: 2). However, as Leela Ghandi notes, the term is useful as "a theoretical resistance to the mystifying amnesia of the colonial aftermath," and, as Ania Loomba writes, the term is useful "in indicating a general process with some shared features across the globe" (qtd in Hawley 2001: 2). I use the term in that sense, to refer to the general features of societies who have experienced, or are experiencing, colonization and the theories that seek to explore or explain these relationships. 175 Some critical attention has been paid to Robin Hobb's Soldier Son trilogy. See Young 2014. thought that labeled fantasy as "reactionary and nostalgic" as we saw with Suvin in the first chapter (2014: 33). Without the novum of Science Fiction, Suvin argues that Fantasy engenders only melancholy and political paralysis, offering a way for its readers to essentially bury their heads in the sand (Suvin 2016: xxxiii). Secondly, Fantasy has long been considered a Eurocentric genre, one that is "by, for, and about White people" (Young 2016: 1). 176 Thus, Fantasy works were widely assumed to be "uninterested in, and therefore uninteresting to, non-white audiences, and non-white writers" (Young 2014: 33). 177 Young utilizes Sara Ahmed's concept of "habit worlds" 176 Young goes on to argue that early in the genre-culture, Fantasy formed "habits" of Whiteness and those habits take multiple forms, whether in the bodies that dominate its spaces in both the real and imagined worlds, or with the voices that are most audible. Fantasy is now struggling to break these habits (2016: 10). She uses habit instead of convention when referring to anything more than the features of the textual material, so the entire cultural and popular milieu surrounding Fantasy texts. Likewise, Laura Miller writes that "a casual observer might assume that big, continent-spanning sagas with magic in them are always set in some imaginary variation on Medieval Britain. . . . there often aren't any blackor brown-skinned people, and those who do appear are decidedly peripheral; in "The Lord of the Rings," they all seem to work for the bad guys. Our hypothetical casual observer might therefore also conclude that epic fantasy-one of today's most popular genres-would hold little interest for African-American readers and even less for African-American writers" . 177 This idea has been challenged, most famously by RaceFail, a primarily online conversation encompassing discussions of race/racism, appropriation, and representation in science fiction and Fantasy, in 2009. While it's hard to pinpoint an exact start or a clear timeline-the conversation eventually spanned a number of social media platforms, blogs, conventions, and websites-it is typically traced back to a response Elizabeth Bear wrote to Jay Lake (his post was itself a response to a post on  179 Of course, they are not, but they are rarely easily broken. The habits of contemporary popular Fantasy are inherited from "the twentieth century society in which it was founded" and whose key authors were "all themselves British or American white men who drew heavily on European myths, literature, and history for inspiration, and who populated their worlds largely with White protagonists" (2016: 11). 180 Thus the "habit worlds" of Fantasy, the texts and characters, the authors, the assumed audience, are read as Eurocentric/White. This influences expectations and structures that begin to seem innate and unchangeable. In characters are prevented from having the fully realized lives of their white counterparts (among other things-the post is expansive in its archeological catalogue of this phenomenon). The conversation ballooned out from there. Seeking Avalon has put together an incredibly useful timeline charting the main posts and responses ("A Timeline" 2009). N.K. Jemisin would later say: "RaceFail was a good thing. In fact, I think it was a necessary thing-not just for me and other writers/fans of color, but for the SFF field as a whole" ("Why I Think" 2010). 178 While Young is, of course, using this theory to discuss race in Fantasy, it can also be applied to gender in this case. Instead of the racialized body of Young's study, the gendered body also faces proscriptions-if Fantasy consistently portrays the male body as inhabiting certain roles, then those roles become coded as male, and it becomes more difficult to imagine a differently gendered body performing the same acts. 179 Young prefers the term genre-culture as a way to emphasize that "neither would exist without the other" (2016: 5). Genre-culture is a material-semiotic system, which includes "both material 'things' and semiotic 'concepts'" (2016: 5). 180 Young quotes Samuel Delany in reminding us that much of Fantasy and science fiction's early years took place in magazines and authors were known only by their names. And, in a field and during a time when pen names were more popular than using one's real name, "we simply have no way of knowing if one, or three, or seven of them-or even many more-were blacks, Hispanics, women, Native American, Asians or whatever" (qtd in Young 2016: 15). However, as Young reminds us, the authors who were most visibly influential were White men.
her introduction, Young concludes that "Fantasy creates worlds structured by imperialist nostalgia. For much of its history, the Fantasy genre has avoided engaging with imperialism and colonialism in any critical way, as has most Western popular culture" (2016: 12). Jemisin herself speaks to this idea when she states: All people who grew up with science fiction, and fantasy, and horror went through the whole acculturation process of the genre. We were all told to read the golden age writers. We were all told Heinlein, and Asimov, and all these straight, white male, although some of them were Jewish. Some of them may have been queer, but not out. We were all told to read the same kinds of stuff.
To some degree some of us actually just want to read more of that stuff. Dreaming, and the ways in which her broadened familiarity with these kinds of texts affected her world-building. She traces this shift through the differences between the 181 Young points to a number of issues that delayed the investigation of these kind of social and historical issues within the Fantasy genre: as already discussed, the genre was/is largely coded as White; mass marketing prioritized works that more closely resembled those of Tolkien (2014: 58); there is a proclivity for medieval settings (2014: 115); and the tendency in Fantasy to link biology to physical and psychological traits (2014: 41). Young also notes that Fantasy is "not alone in this failing" (2014: 114). She quotes Kent A. Ono, and his study of how modern media engages with colonial history, who concludes: "Not only is colonialism not commonly recognized as part of contemporary culture, . . . processes of forgetting colonialism have taken place in the nation's [America} history that make trying to piece together the history of colonialism difficult" (2014: 114).
first draft of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and the second, revised twelve years later. She points to five major differences between these two versions: 1. In the first version, the world was happily Itempan; in the revised version, people remember the force and coercion required to make the world.
Itempan and most cultures retain pockets of their old faith, even if it is practiced in secret; 2. In the first version, all races had been assimilated and mixed so all but the Amn were "vaguely uniform brown"; in the revised version, cultures had been forcibly assimilated but retained some of "their own language, their own customs kept in secret, their own phenotype-and [were] poorer as the direct result of policies implemented by the Amn and global bias against those cultures deemed 'darkling' (those that had been forced to assimilate, versus voluntarily doing so)"; 3. In the first version, the enefadeh (the gods imprisoned and forced to serve the Arameri) while treated as weapons, were still given honorifics like "lord" and "lady"; in the revised version, "The Arameri make a calculated and sustained effort to disrespect and dehumanize the captive gods-not just abusing them physically and sexually, but destroying their worshippers and maligning their contributions in doctrine and history, and even refusing to acknowledge that they are gods"; 4. In the first version, the protagonist was male; in the revised version, there was a female protagonist that allowed Jemisin to more fully explore the ways in which Darren sexual and reproductive customs were altered to suit the Arameri (this also makes Dekarta's sin not marrying below her station, but interbreeding with the other); 5. In the first version, gods are gods; in the revised version, gods are still gods, but they are also a sentient species sharing the planet with all the cultural and power-balance implications that implies (2011).
Of course, these changes to the world-building for the first book in the trilogy set the Much of what occurs in The Broken Kingdoms is a result of the Arameri attempting to maintain the power they have been able to amass over the past two thousand years, but finding new ways to do this without having recourse to their enslaved gods. While Oree becomes aware that the power of the Arameri is not absolute, the rest of the world does not. 183 Young devotes some space to discussing the inner workings of the Arameri imperial family in the first book and the ways in which they justify their colonization of the world (2014: 131-33). (along with some of the godlings who sided against him) to thousands of years as the slaves of the Arameri, a human family who ruled a small part of the world. The Arameri use the power of their god-slaves to assert themselves as absolute rulers.
They established Bright Itempas as the land's only god and punish those who defy them. It was a time of peace. Or oppression. As Jemisin so artfully demonstrates by using Oree as a first-person narrator, it's all a matter of perspective.
The first novel in the series takes us inside Sky, the palace of the Arameri. Our first-person narrator in this novel is Yeine, a Darre woman and blood relative of the Arameri. She is summoned to Sky in order to take part in a ritual of succession, where a new leader of the Arameri family is chosen. While in Sky, Yeine meets the imprisoned gods Nahadoth and Sieh. She falls in love with both of them, and is convinced to take part in their plan to break free from their imprisonment. The plan succeeds in freeing the gods from Arameri control, but also has the unintended sideeffect of turning Yeine into one of the three. Yeine begins the novel as a pawn of the Arameri, forced to participate in their crowning of a new monarch-an act that requires Yeine give her life-and she ends the novel as one of the three most powerful beings in the universe, effectively breaking the Arameri control over the enslaved Oree also experiences colonization's effects on the way in which her own body is perceived by the dominant culture. As Laura Mulvey writes of cinema, "The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure" (1999: 837). She goes on: "Women displayed as sexual object is the leit-motiff [sic] of erotic spectacle" (1999: 837). The novel begins with a description of how the Arameri, a people with pale skin, perceive Oree's body and, more specifically, how the Arameri men who are sexually interested in her interact with her body. While Oree technically has the same rights as others in the Arameri empire, her position as a colonial subject in the metropole evokes these power dynamics, particularly in the way she is treated by her Arameri lovers. Hsu-Ming Teo notes that while European women were not permitted to have sexual relationships with "native" men, that proscription did not apply to European men and "native" women. This is because "men's sexual relations with a 'native' woman symbolised colonial conquest. In the age of empire, the female body symbolised the gendered boundaries of the imperial nation" (2011: 22-23). Oree notes how she is admired, but only in parts: "Men praise parts of me endlessly-always the parts, mind you, never the whole." Oree's objectification is highlighted when she adds: "'Lovely,' they would say, and sometimes they wanted to take me home and admire me in private" where they "positioned and posed and polished" her (2010: 23).
That she might be admired, like a prized object, is also dependent upon the isolation of her body, that she be seen as parts and not a whole person. There is also an isolation of her from the public: Oree is not openly adored but hidden away as a kind of exotic secret. This kind of objectification of the female body is, of course, not new nor limited to post-colonial texts. 189 Oree reveals that her body is not only objectified as gendered other, but also exoticized as racial other. The "erotic spectacle" of her body is complicated by the fetishization of her race. She notes that "Most of the men in Shadow were Amn, so they also commented on my smooth, near-black Maro skin" (2010: 24). It doesn't matter that, as Oree notes, "there were half a million other women in the world with the same feature" (2010: 24). This situation, a man from the culture of the colonizer objectifying, with specific reference to the color of her skin, a woman from the culture of the colonized clearly echoes the power dynamics of colonialism. This is true particularly for Black women, whose bodies are routinely fetishized by Western cultures. 190 The erotic appeal of Oree's "otherness" through her body is clear. participate physically with those who objectify her and that she is entirely aware of why they find her physically attractive. But because she cannot see the humans she sleeps with, this pleasure is not available to her. However, because she can see magic, she can see godlings. This is only a part of her mutually satisfying, but complicated and complex relationship with Madding, one of the godlings now living in Shadow. 191 Oree is clear about the difference in experiencing the exoticization of the Arameri men and that of Madding. She says: "Naked before Madding, I felt for the first time that someone saw the whole of me, not just my parts. He found my eyes fascinating, but he also waxed eloquent about my elbows. He liked it all" (2010: 79). Their relationship is generally tend to regard their conquering of the world as an overwhelmingly positive thing. Lady Serymn, a full-blood Arameri, explains to Oree that "the world has enjoyed the longest period of peace and prosperity in its history" (2010: 189). While she admits that there have "been losses" she believes they have "been outweighed by the gains" (2010: 189). This, of course, echoes the claims made by colonizers throughout history. The idea that colonization and subjugation are justified, because the colonizing force is bringing peace/God/culture/technology to the world, is a wellworn argument. However, because the book is narrated through a first-person perspective and our protagonist is one of those people who count as some "losses," her response to this line of thinking by one of the colonizers is swift and accusatory: How many nations and races have the Arameri wiped out of existence? . . . Thus, the proclaimed benefits of colonization are subjective and depend entirely on one's position as colonizer or colonized. Indeed, despite the fact that something has clearly changed-godlings have returned to the Earth, a large tree has grown into Sky creating the city of Shadow, there is more magic in the world-the Arameri hope "to convince the rest of mortalkind that the world is as it should be. That despite the presence of all our new gods, nothing else should change-politically speaking. That we should feel happy… safe… complacent" (2010: 175). Despite their loss of power, the Arameri remain convinced that power structures should remain as they have always been-with their complete and total dominance. 193 What the Arameri desire, a single "benevolent" ruler also reflects the tendency for Fantasy to uphold this same idea-"Genre conventions . . . suggest a single rule" (Young 2014: 134). The great king, the chosen one who ascends the throne, the emperor (or, less commonly, the empress) all suggest that stability comes from the anointed single ruler. Jemisin reveals that this type of rule does not, and likely cannot, represent the diversity of the worlds these rulers conquer and preside over.
Oree herself displays the lasting traumas of a colonized people, despite her desire to distance her present from her people's past. Oree tells us that the Maroneh people named their children in response to the trauma her people suffered. Her own name comes from the "cry of the southeastern weeper-bird. . . . It seems to sob as it calls, oree, gasp, oree, gasp. Most Maroneh girls are named for such sorrowful things.
It could be worse; the boys are named for vengeance" (2010: 17). The destruction her people faced at the hands of the Arameri was not only a past event, but an ever-present threat that hangs over not only the Maroneh but all people under Arameri rule. And the Maroneh reproduce this disempowerment through the gendered expectations they place upon their children: women weep and men take revenge. Except that revenge is not possible, not while it is believed the Arameri still possess the power of the gods, and so her people are in a sense, stuck. Oree also reveals that Maroneh parents do not tell comforting bedtime tales. Just as we name our children for sorrow and rage, we also tell them stories that will make them cry and awaken in the night, shivering with nightmares. We want our children to be afraid and to never forget, because that way they will be prepared if the Nightlord should ever come again" (2010: 174).
Despite Oree's insistence that the destruction of the Maroland "happened to my ancestors, not to me," much of her and her people's lives are dictated by the effects of that "long-ago tragedy" (2010: 162). And her people have never recovered. They still live on the "reservation" of the Nimaro peninsula, that Oree notes was given to her people "as a 'humanitarian gesture'-not an apology" (2010: 232). Part of Oree's story is claiming for herself a fate that is not dictated by this history, though she can never escape it. Oree does not spend the novel "weeping"-she is strong, resilient, and resourceful, and, while we may not call what she gets "vengeance" she does begin the long process of stripping the Arameri of their power over the world.
The fact that Jemisin chooses to write in first person is also intimately tied to the ways in which the reader experiences the world of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. The story is told through Oree's thoughts and perspective, and we are more likely to identify with her experience of the colonial project. Oree's blindness also serves as an effective strategy to introduce readers to the city and all it holds. While Oree's magical sight allows her to see things others can't, the fact that she is blind also means she is sometimes caught off guard by what's happening around her and is, in a sense, figuring it out with the reader. This narrative "of the outsider navigating the halls of more dominant powers-both the Arameri and the pantheon of gods . . .
[feels] more convincing and contemporary than the farm-boy-goes-questing-andgains-political-power narrative that is so common in epic fantasy" (Roundtable 2011).
Jemisin's deviation from this model also introduces uncertainty into the narrative-it is often unclear exactly "what it is [the characters] are supposed to succeed at. . . .
There is no prophecy to fulfill and no simplistic wrong to be righted" (Roundtable 2011). Oree navigates through a cosmopolitan city and, through her first-person narration, takes the reader along with her.
By orienting the narrative through Oree, Jemisin fleshes out the ways in which, as a gendered and racialized colonial subject, she navigates the power dynamics present in Shadow. While in the first book Yeine laid bare the insidious ways in which the Arameri royal family abuses and exploits their god-slaves in order to impose their rule across the entire world, Oree highlights the ways in which actual subjects experience this often times brutal colonization. Given her position as both a woman and a woman of color, 194 whose physical body telegraphs her connection to her people's colonial past and present, Oree cannot escape the ways in which power sets up not only inequalities but also circumscribes opportunities. While as an artist living amongst the lower socio-economic caste in Shadow Oree finds a sense of community, the power and influence of the Arameri still infiltrate even that isolated community.
Oree's position as gendered and racialized colonial subject are inescapable aspects of her character, not simply afterthoughts. Discarding them would fundamentally change the way in which her character interacts with not only other characters but also the world.

What's Magic Got to Do with It?
Understanding Oree's position as a colonial subject is crucial to understanding not only how her magic is perceived but also how it is used as well as the consequences of both. In colonial constructions, the metropole is the seat of political, economic, and military power. In The Broken Kingdoms, it is also the seat of magic, and it is this magic that "called to [her]" (2010: 373). In Jemisin's novel, magic is always in some way explicitly tied to power, and within the colonial framework of the world Jemisin has built, power plays an unavoidable role in all interactions. This makes it unsurprising that magic is one of the primary ways in which the Arameri not only maintain their power but also why Oree's ability to use magic is such a threat to established power structures.
After the God's War, all godlings had to return to the God's Realm, leaving only Nahadoth, Sieh, Kurue, and Zakkarn, the gods enslaved by the Arameri, on Earth.
This also leaves the Arameri in control of the most powerful magic left in the world.
After Yeine becomes the Grey Lady by absorbing what is left of Enefa's soul and the enslaved gods are freed, the other godlings are allowed to return to Earth; however, fearing their destructive tendencies, Yeine decrees that they cannot leave Shadow.
This concentrates magic within the borders of the capital city of the Arameri.
However, gods are obviously not the only ones with magic. The Arameri also train scriveners who use sigils to enact small acts of magic. There are also those who seem to naturally possess the ability to perform magic-Oree notes that "Many mortals had magic; that was where scriveners . . . came from" (2010: 105). While magical ability was spread throughout the world, Oree explains, "Magic was power meant for those with other kinds of power: Arameri, nobles, scriveners, the Order, the wealthy. It was illegal for commonfolk, even though we all used a little magic now and again in secret" (2010: 40). General practice of magic would challenge the monopoly the Arameri hold over this power, thus they closely guard its use. In the same way the Arameri, and other colonial powers, replace languages, religions, and educational systems, magic becomes a closely guarded resource whose use by colonized people is forbidden.
If Itempan priests, known as Order-Keepers, find you using magic, the result is often death, and their presence is ubiquitous. Oree says that "Everyone, no matter their nation or race or tribe or class, knew Itempan priests on sight. They wore shining white uniforms and they ruled the world" (2010: 38). Aside from visible regulation from above, there is also self-regulation of magic. The dangers for Oree revealing her magic were drilled into her at a young age by her parents. Her father also possessed magic, though his manifested through song. Oree remembers that The beauty and magic that I loved in him was an easily perceptible thing, though no one else ever seemed to see it. Yet they noticed something about him, whether they understood it or not. His power permeated the space around him, like warmth. . . . So on that long-ago day, when power changed the world and everyone from senile elders to infants felt it, they all discovered that special sense, and then they noticed my father and understood at last what he was. But what I had always perceived as glory, they had seen as a threat. (2010: 191) Upon realizing that Oree's father had magic, the townspeople stone him to death.
While the family-head of the Arameri was in many ways like a monarch, and the Order-Keepers were far spread, the Arameri empire is so vast that the proscription to punish necessarily was spread out amongst not only empire officials but also amongst the people themselves. This, of course, clearly recalls Foucault's theory of the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish. In the prison, prisoners can be constantly watched and taught to be good citizens by monitoring themselves and each other.
Foucault writes that "He who is subject to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection" (1977: 202-03).
When this extends out into society, all subjects play a role in disciplining not only themselves, but each other. This allows the Arameri to more effectively govern their empire. The threat of retribution from the Arameri, their tendency to punish swiftly and completely, creates a fear of difference, a desire to self-correct any person who might bring the wrath of the Arameri down on the entire community.
As with all things, control is not absolute. While the Arameri control the most powerful magic, they cannot completely prevent others from accessing something that is available in a largely intangible way. Small magic is performed by many: "Every woman knew the sigil to prevent pregnancy, and every neighborhood had someone who could draw the scripts for minor healing or hiding valuables in plain sight" (2010: 40). Before he was killed, Oree's father would often sing to her using his magic. With the return of the godlings to Shadow, magic is harder for the Order-Keepers to police, as it is often difficult to tell godlings and mortals apart (2010: 40). However, as Oree notes, "That still didn't make it smart to do certain things right under their noses" (2010: 11), and so Oree tries to hide her magic.

Magic in
The Inheritance Trilogy is, in its simplest form, possibility. As long as one believes, one can create anything (2010: 349). The gods do this effortlessly, simply willing things to be. Mortals often require more practice or a workaround-the magical sigils of scriveners, for instance-in order to achieve similar results. Mortals gain this power through their ancestry: before the God's War, gods, godlings, and humans lived together and also interbred. Madding tells Oree that these children "could dance among the stars as we do; they had the same magic. Yet they grew old and died, no matter how powerful they were. It made them…very strange" (2010: 115). When it was discovered that the blood of these children could kill gods, they were hunted down and mating with mortals was forbidden. Miscegenation is a theme that runs throughout this novel and also echoes colonial concerns. Oree's relationship with Madding is viewed as an abomination by those in the New Lights. Despite the attempt by the gods to eradicate all demons, magic had already come to mortalkind.
Not all the demons were killed and Oree is the descendant of one of these god-human hybrids referred to as demons. Oree's magic manifests in her ability to paint "doorways." That is, she paints a picture, and then wills it into being. Oree's magic is also more powerful than most mortals'. The gods opened the door for humans to use magic, "but in most mortals that door is barely ajar. Yet there are some few . . . who are born with more. In those mortals, the door is wide open.
[They] need no sigils, no years of study. Magic is ingrained in [their] very flesh" (2010: 213). While Oree's demon ancestry gives her the ability to use magic, it also inscribes her into another power struggle with the Arameri-their magical resources are still larger, and stronger, than her own. It also aligns her with another destroyed people, a group that was hunted down and killed because they could possibly upset the established power structures of the gods. Oree quickly learns to better control her magic, eventually progressing to where she doesn't need to paint something, but simply will it into existence.
This tenuous relationship to the power structures at play in the work-her magic poses a threat to the Arameri ruling class, and her blood poses a threat to the gods-collide when the New Lights realize what she is and how they can use her. The New Lights kidnap her and begin draining and distilling her blood in order to create a weapon against the gods. 195 Because the Arameri have lost their god-slaves, demon blood and its ability to kill gods would act as leverage in order to maintain their position of authority over the gods. But it is this same blood that gives her her magical ability, and, because of her friendly relationship with the godlings, she is willing to use her power to save them. Because magic is nothing more than willing something into being and then believing that it is, Oree is able to call forth the full form of Bright Itempas into the punished, diminished form of Shiny. Yeine tells her that she "bent the 195 The New Lights witness Oree using magic when she is cornered and they begin beating Shiny. She panics, and accidentally kills some of the Order Keepers by momentarily opening a portal in a painting she made on the ground. Unfortunately, she only keeps it open long enough for half of their bodies to pass through before it closes.
chains we placed on Itempas and released his true power, even if only for a moment" (2010: 374). Oree's magic challenges not only the Arameri monopoly on magic, but also the gods' own decrees: Shiny was not supposed to be able to access his true form (Bright Itempas), but Oree was able to restore him, if only for a moment.
Oree's magic did not defeat the great evil plaguing the land-it would be hard to identify exactly what, precisely, the great evil is. Certainly the Arameri would be up for that distinction, but overthrowing the Arameri would not suddenly "restore the land" or return good to the world-despite their rationalizations, they are correct in that if people learn that the Arameri can be defeated, "Every noble clan and ruling council and elected minister will want the chance to rule the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. And if they all strive for it at once . . . There will be war" (2010: 176).
Especially those the Arameri forcibly converted to the worship of Itempas "have never forgotten, or forgiven, what [the Arameri] did to them" (2010: 177). Oree's defeat of the New Lights and the discovery that the Arameri no longer possess their god-slaves did not topple the Arameri Empire, or even significantly weaken its hold over the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. The Arameri remain in control, and their weakened state is kept secret. She also does not heal the rift between Itempas and the other gods, ending his banishment.
This uncertainty underscores the ways in which Jemisin is complicating the genre of Epic Fantasy: Oree succeeds in a number of ways-she saves Shiny, foils the plot to use demon blood to kill the gods, and exposes the New Lights-but the world is too complex for a single heroic act to suddenly right all wrongs and redress all injuries. And while Oree might not have vanquished the "dark one," her perseverance, sacrifice, bravery, and love do have lasting impacts. When Nahadoth and Yeine come to tell her that Shiny has to leave, Oree is already pregnant. She notes that, as the god who creates, there's no way Yeine would not have realized this. And yet, despite the fact that her child would be a demon, Yeine does nothing. Oree gives birth to a girl who plays a major role in the next book of the series. Then, in a short novella called The Awakened Kingdom, Jemisin reveals that far in the future those with magic are trained to be enulai, or guardians and companions to the godlings living on earth.
Eventually, humans themselves are able to become gods. However, even with this progress, Jemisin does not present a utopia-there are those who are still subjugated, who still have no say in their futures, no rights to make their own choices-and there are those who are still cruel "because that's what people are, sometimes" (2014).

Conclusion
If success can be measured by the number of people you piss off, then Jemisin has been very successful. In 2013, upset about the seeming trend the Hugo Awards (Fantasy and Science Fiction's highest honors) were taking towards more literary or "politically correct" works, disgruntled fans decided to try to form a voting bloc in order to nominate more "swashbuckling" and "space adventure" novels. Many quickly discerned that their real issue was that "nominees for the Hugo awards have become substantially less white and less male" (Berlatsky 2015). The initial group that spearheaded this attempt was called the Sad Puppies, but later branched out into the Rabid Puppies who nominated similar, but not always overlapping, authors. While they often claim not to be racist or sexist, but suggest they are merely advocating for overlooked authors of Science Fiction and Fantasy that are being ignored in favor of more social justice type works, the following quote from Theodore Beale (aka Vox Day), the founder of the Rabid Puppies, in response to a speech Jemisin gave in which she called for a reconciliation within Science Fiction and Fantasy, 196 speaks largely for itself: Being an educated, but ignorant half-savage, with little more understanding of what it took to build a new literature by "a bunch of beardy old middle-class middle-American guys" than an illiterate Igbotu tribesman has of how to build a jet engine, Jemisin clearly does not understand that her dishonest call for "reconciliation" and even more diversity within SF/F is tantamount to a call for its decline into irrelevance (2013).
In the same post he also clarifies that "it is not that I, and others, do not view her [Jemisin] as human, (although genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens), it is that we simply do not view her as being fully civilized for the obvious historical reason that she is not" (2013). 197 In response to this backlash against her and authors like her, Jemisin is able to see a positive side to the Puppies, both Rabid and Sad. She says, What I find heartening, . . . is the sheer amount of laughter the Puppies are engendering as they demand that what they call 'affirmative action' works no longer be considered, but really at the same time, they're putting only their own friends on the ballot. So they're actually asking for their form of affirmative action to replace what they think of as affirmative action. And everyone is realising it. People are looking at these authors [like Vox Day and Puppies leader Brad Torgerson], who they once took seriously, and now just pointing and laughing. (Berlatsky 2015) And Jemisin seems to be right-the Sad and Rabid Puppies, while they were able to get a number of their selected works nominated, have not managed to meaningfully sway the results. In fact, in 2017 women won in nearly every category (Jemisin won another Hugo for Best Novel for The Obelisk Gate, the sequel to The Fifth Season, which also won the award in 2016). The clear trend seems to be for more diversity within both Science Fiction and Fantasy, and this seems to be translating into more diversity in characters. Jemisin succinctly summarizes the potential of Epic Fantasy, saying that "The genre can go many, many more places than it has gone" .
I examine Jemisin's novel in the final chapter of this study because it is representative of this important turn in Fantasy and it is imagined through the figure of the magical woman. Jemisin's work is decidedly engaged in conversations surrounding colonialism, power, white supremacy, race, and trauma. It demonstrates with clarity that Fantasy works can retain their sense of epicness and magic and adventure while rejecting the "habits of whiteness" that much of the genre still operates within. Jemisin herself notes that in many ways "it does take an outsider to a degree to come in and look around and read the stuff that's key in the genre and be like, whoa something is really missing here" (Newkirk 2016). 198 She brings her own experiences of the world as a black woman to her work in apparent and destabilizing ways.
But reworking a genre with a long and ingrained way of imagining itself is no easy task. Jemisin has been extremely forthcoming in her own struggles writing convincing black female characters. In an interview with Laura Miller, Jemisin recalls that she read almost exclusively male authors, and, when challenged by her father to write a story with a black female protagonist, found she couldn't do it (2011). This led her to a more active search for more innovative authors like Octavia Butler, who is a groundbreaking figure in the genre of Science Fiction. Miller goes on to note that while the idea of envisioning different futures is essential to the form of Epic Fantasy, Science Fiction is more known for black authors like Butler and Samuel Delany, while much of Epic Fantasy remains more conservative, hearkening, like Tolkien did, to a preindustrial world and all the power structures that entails (2011). Though some authors have expanded the borders of Fantasy-Le Guin's Earthsea books are a common example, though, as we have already seen, the change she inspired did not seem to extend to the racial identity of Fantasy characters-Jemisin admits that when she attempted to write Epic Fantasy in graduate school, "she found herself abiding by 198 Jemisin was explicitly referring to her Hugo Award winning science fiction novel, The Fifth Season. Discussing science fiction, Jemisin adds: "But I don't think that I was the first outsider to do so by any stretch. Most of the writers of color who have come into the genre have come and looked around and had that moment. Of course, Octavia Butler being the first and foremost who came in and looked at the alien colonization story and said, 'Oh, hey it's a lot like what happened to [black people]! Why don't we just make all that stuff explicit? Instead of rape, why don't we include aliens trying to assimilate our genes?'" (Newkirk 2016).
some of the genre's most shopworn conventions" (2011). Jemisin says of this first attempt: "I was thinking it had to have a quest in it, with a MacGuffin of Power being brought to a Place of Significance," and the main character was a man .
The book didn't work. When she returned to it years later, she made a number of changes that have already been detailed in this chapter. Most significantly, she made the main character a black woman. She says of this rewrite: "I knew that what I was writing was inherently defiant of the tropes of epic fantasy, and I wasn't sure it would be accepted" .
What Jemisin is implicitly (and often explicitly) doing is questioning the ways in which Epic Fantasy has been received and created as a genre. She says, "it doesn't make any sense to write a monochromatic or monocultural story, unless you're doing something extremely small-a locked room-style story. But very few fantasy worlds ever do that. In fact, epic fantasy should not do that" (Berlatsky 2015). And so, the idea that Fantasy worlds should be restricted to a replication of Western, medieval landscapes makes no sense, 199 especially if that Fantasy wants to do something new, to stop recycling many of the old tropes and stories. Jemisin notes that "As a black woman, I have no particular interest in maintaining the status quo. Why would I? The status quo is harmful, the status quo is significantly racist and sexist and a whole bunch of other things that I think need to change" (Berlatsky 2015). With The Broken Kingdoms, Jemisin attempts to make those changes, not only through her world-199 Authors like Saladin Ahmed are also working within the Fantasy genre to present alternatives to white, medieval works. His novel Throne of the Crescent Moon, is set in a Middle Eastern city, and his protagonist, Dr. Adoulla Makhslood, is old and overweight.
building and mythology, but through her protagonist, a black magical woman. Oree is for all intents and purposes traditionally powerless-she is black, a woman, poor, blind, and from a nearly destroyed people. Oree's very person highlights the disparate power structures at play in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and the ways in which this power operates on bodies. Through her magic Oree is able to challenge these power structures, but it is not her magic alone that makes Oree a compelling character.
At the end of the novel, Oree has lost her magical ability (a side effect of staring too long at the full form of Bright Itempas), but this story is being told because Oree is telling it to her and Shiny's child-a daughter, another magical woman and one of many new demons. This allows Oree to reclaim the storytelling tradition of her people, one that was perverted by the destruction of her homeland by the Arameri. Oree's story is one of tragedy and sadness, of death and exploitation, but it is also one of hope. Changing power structures that have been in place for thousands of years will take generations, but it can be achieved. However, as the novella The Awakened Kingdom shows, while one avenue of power relations might shift and change, another can easily take its place.
Conclusion "Roads go ever on": The Future Possibilities of Epic Fantasy "People tell me they don't read fantasy 'because it's all just made up,' but the material of fantasy is far more permanent, more universal, than the social customs realism deals with. Whether fantasy is set in the real world or an invented one, its substance is psychic stuff, human constants, imageries we recognise. It seems to be a fact that everybody, everywhere, even if they haven't met one before, recognises a dragon" (Le Guin 2016: 19). Fantasy's most fundamental narrative structure-the hero's quest-and reimagines it with a magical woman as hero. In so doing, she not only modifies the specifics of the quest itself, but also demonstrates that the magical woman as questing hero is not only a viable approach, but a successful one. Finally, the fifth chapter demonstrates the ways in which race and gender intersect through the character Oree, the magical woman protagonist of N.K. Jemisin's The Broken Kingdoms. Her unique position as marginalized Other exposes the ways in which power operates within the colonial project, but her position as magical woman also demonstrates the ways in which one might work within and challenge these powers.
The works in this study belong clearly in the genre of Epic Fantasy and yet they do not simply repeat a tired, old formula. Many of them take generic conventions and subvert, or modify, them. Fantasy, even more traditional or conservative Fantasy, has always been about power: who has it, how they got it, whether they deserve it, what they do with it, accepting the consequences of power, etc. But the nature of this power has changed. Authors are increasingly interested in challenging ideas of the virtuous hero, the good king, the triumph of good and evil, and the dominance of patriarchal narratives. Along with this comes a reimagining of archetypal roles that makes available new narratives and functions for female characters.
When I began this study, my intention was not to organize the chapters chronologically, as I was wary of implying a kind of teleological progress within the genre ending in a triumphant victory over patriarchal narratives. This would be disingenuous-there are feminist works that appear throughout the history of the genre and there are decidedly not feminist works that are appearing now. And there is, of course, still mixed progress. It would be wrong to consider the status of the magical woman within a text as a kind of litmus test. There are works that can, and do, present magical women as fully independent, capable characters, who do not type-cast her or contain her power through narrative structures, that still miss the mark. One recent example is Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy (2006-08). The story follows Vin, a young Allomancer (one who can use metals to enhance physical or mental abilities) who can use every metal, and is known as a Mistborn (most can use only one metal).
The first book is narratively split fairly evenly between Vin and Kelsier, an older Mistborn and her mentor, though it is clear that it is Vin's story that is most compelling (this is confirmed when Kelsier is killed at the end). And while Vin herself is a complex character-strong, vulnerable, smart, powerful-whose inner and outer life Sanderson explores fully, she is, for all intents and purposes, the only woman in the series. 200 And the absence of other women is baffling. The first book sees a motley crew assembled in order to take down the Lord Ruler-they are all men. In the second book, as the new king seeks to establish a just and fair kingdom, much attention is paid to class differences with literally no mention of gender equality. 201 He establishes an assembly made of the different classes-naturally, they are all men. Female characters are scarce, and when they do appear are nearly always love interests, do not further the plot in any important way, and are given only minimal opportunities to speak while a number of influential and important male characters exist within the work. This reliance on female exceptionalism-that a female character is only 200 In the first book, Mistborn, there is a woman who comes to cut Vin's hair, a court gossip, and a romantic rival who, combined, get maybe two pages of dialogue before they disappear from the text. Tindwyl fares slightly better in the second book in terms of page length. She is brought in to tutor the new king and becomes the love interest of one of the main characters. Of course, she dies near the end of the book, causing him to re-evaluate his philosophical convictions and her conversations with Vin revolve nearly entirely around Vin and Elend's romantic relationship. The second book also hints that Allriane, a noble-woman (and love interest of a different character) might play a bigger role in the third book, but she does not. One other woman, Beldre, makes a few appearances, but is again a love interest and does not do much of note. Vin eventually sacrifices herself and it is revealed that she never was the Hero of Ages (the true Hero of Ages turns out to be a scholar, a conclusion I am not entirely opposed to). 201 Racial equality also does not register, but, as the world seems to consist of only two races (the small numbers of remaining Terrismen and literally everyone else), that is not surprising, though troubling for other reasons.
important if she is exceptional in some way while no other female characters are given substantial page space-is troubling.
Powerful women have always existed in Fantasy. While in this study I examine the figure of the magical woman, other female characters would also offer interesting and complementary sites of feminist analysis. The warrior woman, the princess, and the thief are just a few character types found throughout the genre that inhabit their own stories and rely on their own unique access to power (e.g. impressive fighting skills, political and social influence, the ability to sneak, and knowledge of the underground). The hero's narrative also offers an almost limitless field of analysis in Fantasy. While I demonstrated how casting a magical woman necessarily modified the hero's quest as white male endeavor, investigations of heroes of color, queer heroes, and disabled heroes would all produce interesting variations on what is considered heroic and who is called hero.
These evolutions have been met with resistance. As the genre becomes more hospitable to non-white, non-male authors and at the same time non-white, non-male characters, those who find comfort and power in traditional patriarchal, colonial, ableist, and racist narratives have voiced their displeasure. But despite this pushback, Epic Fantasy is moving in new and exciting directions, without discarding those features of the genre that make it the core of Fantasy literature. Great adventures and quests are no longer the purview of white male heroes and powerful women no longer need be contained within the narrative.