that she didn’t understand when she made it. With the insights of contemporary feminist
theory, she understands that at the time, she was ‘writing partly by the rules, as an
artificial man, and partly against the rules, as an inadvertent revolutionary’ (7). In her
revolutionary mode, in a partly conscious attempt to create a hero from a visible
minority, Le Guin made Ged and all the good guys in the Earthsea books black, and the
bad guys white. Nevertheless, the good guys were standard male-order heroes anyway.
They lived lives of ‘continence; abstinence; denial of relationship’ (16). And they worked
in a world predicated on ‘power as domination over others, unassailable strength, and
the generosity of the rich’ (14).
But in Tehanu, the fourth and final Earthsea book, published seventeen years after
the third, Le Guin scraps male-order heroism. She creates Tenar, a feminist pro-creative,
recreative hero: ‘All her former selves are alive in her: the child Tenar, the girl priestess
Arha...and Goha, the farmwife, mother of two children. Tenar is whole but not single.
She is not pure’ (Le Guin 1993:18). The traditional male hero, the dragonslayer and
dragonlord, marked by his capacity to defeat evil, to win, and to receive public adoration
and power, is nowhere in sight. In the new mythology Le Guin creates, the dragon is
transformed into a familiar, a guide for a new female hero: ‘The child who is our care,
the child we have betrayed, is our guide. She leads us to the dragon. She is the dragon’.
Le Guin moves out of the hierarchical ordering of the heroic world, and into a new world
where the search is for wildness, a ‘new order of freedom’ (26).
The feminist tradition created in the span that includes Mitzi Myers’s rereading
Wollstonecraft, and Le Guin revisioning Earthsea, is one that celebrates maternal
pedagogies, disorder, wildness, pro-creation, re-creation and multiplicity: a large cultural
shift in a short space of time.
ReclaimingOne of the most significant feminist projects of the last twenty-five years has been the
reissuing of long out-of-print books by women authors. Many have been gathering dust
on library shelves for dozens, sometimes hundreds of years. Most had long since ceased
to make any money for anyone. But Virago and other feminist presses that grew up with
the second wave of feminism, have put many of these books back into circulation. Now
easily available in good quality paperback editions they are read for pleasure, not just
among scholars, though scholars were often the first to create the demand for these
books by finding them, writing about them and bringing them to university course lists
and to public attention.
Though there is no exactly comparable resurrection of authored fiction in children’s
literature (Angela Brazil is as unlikely to be reissued as Talbot Baines Reed), there is one
class of texts enjoying a new lease on life as a direct result of the second wave of
feminism: fairy tales. In fact, the shift in fairy tale fashions over the last twenty-five
years provides a virtual paradigm for shifts in feminist poetics.
In the 1970s, with the rise of the second wave of feminist theory, there was increasing
discomfort with the gender dynamics in popular Grimm, Andersen and Perrault fairy
tales (though Simone de Beauvoir had already drawn attention to passive Grimm
heroines twenty years earlier in The Second Sex). Girls and women play dead or
102 THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES