Olivia Kinane - Earthsea

Question:Note while you are reading A Wizard of Earthsea Le Guinn's depiction of race and gender. Is there anything surprising in this? Why?

In Ursual Le Guins 'The Wizard of Earthsea' there is a range of controversial themes. The role and portrayal of women was extremely against the times upon which Ursual le Guin wrote Earthsea. In a contrast to this her portrayal of coloured characters and ethnicity was incredibly ahead of her time.

There are hardly any woman in Ursula Le Guins novel Earthsea. The woman who are in it are portrayed as weak or inferior to the men. Comments from Ged such as “Weak as Womans Magic” (Le Guin, 1983) keep an undercurrent of sexism throughout the book. Tax (2002) mentions how the Book EarthSea is about a huge political change and shift, Ged faces resistance everywhere he goes, his father, the college at Roke, Ogion ect. This is similarly a reflection as to what was going on in Ursula Le Guin world as she wrote Earthsea. This huge sweeping change of the feminist movement and series of unrest is surprisingly unnoticed in the book by the betrayal of female characters.

Ursula Le Guin wanted everyone in her world to be of a dark skin tone; she didn't want to conform to the formulaic and racist pattern of the white protagonist male. The fantasy genre rarely has many black characters, let alone only black characters. Ged is the only character within the book that is of a slightly lighter skin tone to the rest of the characters, and is described as being of a light reddy brown colour (Le Guinn, 1983). In Agosto, Hughes- Hassell and Gilmore-Clough’s (2003) article they mention a study done by Bishop, on a study done in 1982 on children's fiction the amount of coloured people represented in a positive light was incredibly limited, this study also highlighted the negative stereotype upon which they were displayed.

I think Ursla Le Guin was a very conflicted writer. In the book she wants to go against society by making all of her characters have a dark skin tone; this is to avoid and demolish the ‘white privilege’ and common white stereotype of the protagonist. This is very big and great move in the literary world and especially in the fantasy world. However she goes against the huge feminist movement which was happening at the time when she wrote Earthsea. As a lot of the female characters are portrayed as feeble and practically useless.

Citations

Le, G. U. K. (1983). A wizard of Earthsea. Harmondsworth: Puffin.

Agosto, D., Hughes-Hassell, S., & Gilmore-Clough, C. (2003). The All-White World of Middle-School Genre Fiction: Surveying the Field for Multicultural Protagonists. In Children's Literature in Education (4th ed., Vol. 34, pp. 257-275).

Tax, M. (2002). In the year of Harry Potter, Enter the dragon. In The Nation (2002 ed., Vol. 274).

Total word count, not including citation list: 393