Wicked as Women's Magic

[1] by Eda Naz Gokdemir

art by Henry Dorr

“Teach her all, Ogion said, and what am I teaching her? Cooking and spinning?” Then another part of her mind said in Goha’s voice, “And are those not true arts, needful and noble? Is wisdom all words?  [2]

                                                                                                               - Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu

My grandmother and mother taught me how to knit, among other things. They handed me a pair of knitting needles and a single ball of yarn and told me to start with one stitch.

“Make a scarf first,” they said. So, I did. As an anxious and restless child, knitting became a refuge—it allowed my thoughts to drift without needing to focus too hard. I knit and knit, long past the point of making an acceptable scarf. Yet my mother and grandmother never taught me any other stitches, perhaps thinking my mind was too young or my fingers too small. “The work itself is good for you,” they said. “It’s good to make something.” Even if that something never ends.

Perhaps they, too, were knitting their own never-ending scarves: cooking, cleaning, mending—only to start anew every morning. The dishes would pile up again, clothes would be worn, and their stitches would be undone. Their labor remained invisible, yet their hands grew more calloused; their backs ached a little more each day. I didn’t see these things as a child. To me, the women who raised me were the most powerful people I knew: beings of pure magic, creating worlds at the tips of their fingers. 

I was often confused about how the “real” world, or at least the one I was stuck in, worked, so I sought other worlds. I read fantasy because I wanted power when I felt powerless, searched for change when I felt static, and yearned to learn magic like that of the women who raised me. Yet even in lands full of magic, women’s magic was elusive. Great mages, dragon lords, and mythical heroes were impressive enough, but they weren’t real. Maybe I was searching for the impossible: real magic. Why did I look for it in books? Wasn’t bearing witness to the impossibilities my mother and grandmother created every day enough? Perhaps even when I was little, I thought, on some level, their magic didn’t change worlds—they were stuck in their loops, their efforts endlessly sustaining others, never themselves. And fantasy didn’t often tell stories about people like us. It was a genre of kings, knights, grand battles, and the eternal clash between good and evil. Where were the stories of those who lived beneath the feet of giants, quietly creating magic of their own?

Then I met Tehanu of Earthsea.

The first three novels of the Earthsea Cycle published between 1968-1972 that precede Tehanu are what you would think of as typical fantasy books: they follow those with conventional forms of power, authority, or strength, who, like in our corner of the universe, happen to be male. In the author’s, Ursula K. Le Guin’s words:

No wonder; where are the women in Earthsea? Two of the books of the trilogy have no major female characters [...] Communities of men in Earthsea are defined as powerful, active, and autonomous; the community of women in Atuan is described as obedient to distant male rulers; a static, closed society [...] And in all three books the fundamental power—magic—belongs to men; only to men; only to men who have no sexual contact with women. [3]

Le Guin reflects on why she chose to construct her fictional world to be unquestioningly patriarchal, acknowledging the influence of the era's expectations. At the time, writers were often encouraged to "transcend" gender, an ideal that subtly perpetuated the dominance of male perspectives. She goes on to explain: “For many decades, it had been held that to perceive oneself as a woman writer or as a man writer would limit one’s scope, one’s humanity; that to write as a woman or as a man would politicize the work and so invalidate its universality.”[4] This false and misguided “apolitical” ideal of the writer, coupled with the unchallenged gendering of the traditional hero as male in classic and fantasy literature [5], even led an author like Le Guin—widely regarded as one of the pioneers of feminist science fiction—to create a world dominated by men [6]. In her words:

Since my Earthsea books were published as children’s books, I was in an approved female role. So long as I behaved myself, obeyed the rules, I was free to enter the heroic realm. I loved that freedom and never gave a thought to the terms of it. Now that I know that even in fairyland there is no escape from politics, I look back and see that I was writing partly by the rules, as an artificial man. [7]

In Tehanu, Ursula K. Le Guin revisits the fictional world of Earthsea eighteen years after its supposed conclusion to confront the biases of her earlier work. She explains:

From a woman’s point of view, Earthsea looked quite different than it did from a man’s point of view. All I had to do was describe it from the point of view of the powerless, the disempowered — women, children, a wizard who has spent his gift and must live as an ‘ordinary’ man. [8]

The novel follows Tenar, once a priestess known as Arha in The Tombs of Atuan, now living as Goha, a widowed farmer. After taking in Therru, a young girl horrifically abused and left with severe burns, Tenar is summoned to the deathbed of her former mentor, Ogion. There, she encounters Ged, the once-powerful Archmage of Earthsea, who has lost his magical abilities following the events of The Farthest Shore. Ged, now rendered ordinary, must reconcile his identity without the powers that once defined him, while Tenar navigates her role as caregiver to both Ged and Therru. Le Guin centers the story on daily domestic life, weaving themes of powerlessness, resilience, and healing into the fabric of Tenar’s quiet yet transformative journey. 

Rather than epic battles or grand quests, Tehanu finds its magic in care, survival, and the rediscovery of inner strength, reimagining Earthsea from the ground up. While some critics argue that the novel diminishes women, particularly Tenar, by having her choose the role of homemaker and caregiver over pursuing the magical powers promised by the mages she knows, I argue that this choice is a strength of the story, not a weakness.  To claim that she chose wrong simply because she turned away from traditionally defined forms of power in favor of nurturing relationships and embracing traits associated with femininity perpetuates two harmful assumptions. First, it implies that there is only one valid way to exercise power, dismissing the idea that caring and nurturing can be profound acts of strength—arguably requiring more inner courage than the pursuit of “greatness.” Second, it reinforces the notion that traits commonly associated with femininity, such as care and domestic responsibility, are inferior, suggesting that for women to be powerful, they must emulate men. To believe Tenar’s choice was wrong is to devalue her agency. She may have made a choice that many women, feminist or otherwise, might reject for themselves. But the crucial point is this: it is her choice. Le Guin puts it better than I ever could:

[Tenar] chose to leave the mage Ogion, her guardian and guide to masculine knowledge; she chose to be a farmer’s wife. Why? Was she seeking a different, an obscurer knowledge? Was she being “womanly,” bowing to society’s resistance to independently powerful women? [..] She has not abnegated power. But her definition of action, decision, and power is not heroic in the masculine sense. Her acts and choices do not involve ascendance, domination, power over others, and seem not to involve great consequences. They are “private” acts and choices, made in terms of immediate, actual relationships. To those who still believe that the public and the private can be separated, that there is a great world of men and war and politics and business and a little world of women and children and personal relations, and that these are truly worlds apart, one important, the other not—to such readers, Tenar’s choice will appear foolish, and her story sadly unheroic. [9]

Le Guin is not merely interested in empowering her female characters, but also in questioning the way we think about stories of power. Le Guin observes that because these traditional Western fantasy stories are about men, “the hero-tale has concerned the establishment or validation of manhood. It has been the story of a quest, or a conquest, or a test, or a contest.” [10] Then, who would a non-male hero be? What would a story that did not center on traditional notions of manhood look like? Le Guin thus reveals the hidden heroism in everyday acts of care: when Tenar teaches Therru how to weave and the ancient words of magic, when Ged, the once-powerful wizard, makes peace with his changing role in the world and spends his days herding Tenar’s sheep, and when Tenar combs her sheep’s wool with great attention and precision, quietly transforming the ordinary into something meaningful. Le Guin says: “In Tehanu, Ged’s virtues are no longer the traditional male heroic ones: power as domination over others, unassailable strength, and the generosity of the rich.” Heroism is found “among housewives and elderly goatherds.” [11] When we question our assumptions about heroism and power, we find freedom. Le Guin writes:

Certainly, if we discard the axiom “what’s important is done by men,” with its corollary “what women do isn’t important,” then we’ve knocked a hole in the hero-tale, and a good deal may leak out. We may have lost quest, contest, and conquest as the plot, sacrifice as the key, victory or destruction as the ending; and the archetypes may change. There may be old men who aren’t wise, witches who aren’t wicked, mothers who don’t devour. There may be no public triumph of good over evil, for in this new world, what’s good or bad, important or unimportant, hasn’t been decided yet, if ever. Judgment is not referred up to the wise men. History is no longer about great men. [12]

Le Guin writes a history of people rendered ordinary by choice or circumstance, who reject the patriarchal “heroism of the old tradition.” This rejection leaves them “helpless,” as “no magic, nothing they know…can stand against the pure malevolence of institutionalized power.” [13] Le Guin demonstrates that her characters, like ourselves, cannot depend on the established systems of power to overcome their struggles, as these systems are the very source of their suffering. “Their strength and salvation must come from outside the institutions and traditions. It must be a new thing.” [14] In Tehanu, this new promise is Therru, an abused orphan who is revealed to be half-dragon and half-human. In the earlier books, dragons symbolize wildness—“what is not owned” and cannot be owned. But in Tehanu, they come to represent something greater: “subversion, revolution, change.” [15] Therru becomes the bridge between the old order, which left her burned and scarred, and the promise of a transformed world. “A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended,” and Therru does just that, transcending her suffering by growing literal wings. [16]

At the novel’s climax, Therru saves Ged and Tenar from Aspen, a corrupt mage and his men, who embody the oppressive old order and seek to harm them. They summon a dragon to threaten Ged and Tenar, but it is ultimately Therru who commands the dragon, demonstrating her power as a force of transformation. Notably, Tenar is the only person able to look the dragon in the eye, a feat that even the greatest mages of Earthsea are warned against attempting. Yet Tenar—a widowed farmer, an outsider—is able to meet the mythical being’s gaze. According to Le Guin, this ability stems from Tenar’s choice of freedom over power:

And so, she’s freer than any of them to connect with a different world, a free world, where things can be changed, remade. And the pledge of that connection is, I think, her adoption of the child who has been destroyed by the irresponsible exercise of power, cast out of common humanity, made Other. [17]

For me, this message carries an inherent sense of hope: a housewife, considered powerless by those in power, can—if not undo—then at least repair the harm inflicted by the destructive system that seeks to strip her of her power and hurt those she loves. Her habits of care end up being more powerful than magic itself. Through the quiet persistence of daily acts of kindness, she embodies care and responsibility, enabling her to confront the dragon and envision a world shaped by a more compassionate ideal. This ideal ends up saving the world, as Therru, whose actual name we learn to be Tehanu, the name of a star, plays an instrumental role in the final book of the series, The Other Wind, in saving the world. 

Maybe I do not believe the world can be saved anymore, but at least Le Guin helped me reclaim my hope in daily acts of magic. I had lost my belief in the women who raised me, for I had seen how they were stuck in patriarchal family systems, my mother giving up her job to raise me, my grandmother forced to give up her education for a marriage. In my frustration and desperation, I had renounced their acts of care as performances of submission. But now, in their acts of care, I see a fighting spirit that transcends the confines they were placed in. They taught me that to care is not weakness but strength, labour not a burden but a celebration, and love not perfection but persistence. Perhaps like Tenar, they were unable to dismantle the system itself, but gave my fingers enough practice so that I could knit myself a pair of wings to help me soar above.

[1] “Wicked as woman’s magic” is a phrase that Ursula K. Le Guin uses the Earthsea Cycle to reveal her fictional society’s attitudes about witchcraft, or women’s magic, in comparison to the “real magic” practiced by male mages.

[2] Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu (New York: Atheneum, 1990), 120.

[3] Ursula K. Le Guin, “Earthsea Revisioned,” in The Books of Earthsea (London: Gollancz, 2018),  981-992,. 983.

[4] Le Guin, “Earthsea Revisioned,” 981

[5] Le Guin, “Earthsea Revisioned,”  981.

[6] In The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Ursula K. Le Guin challenges traditional gender norms by introducing the androgynous inhabitants of Gethen, who shift between male and female states. While the novel is considered groundbreaking in its exploration of gender fluidity, it has faced criticism for reinforcing binary gender assumptions through the use of masculine pronouns and for centering male perspectives in the narrative. Despite these limitations, it remains a seminal work that paved the way for more nuanced discussions of gender in science fiction.

[7] Le Guin, “Earthsea Revisioned,” p. 982

[8] Ursula K. Le Guin, interview, The Guardian, Feb 9, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/feb/09/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.ursulakleguin.

[9] Le Guin, “Earthsea Revisioned,” 985.

[10] Le Guin, “Earthsea Revisioned,” 981.

[11] Le Guin, “Earthsea Revisioned,” 986.

[12] Le Guin, “Earthsea Revisioned,” 985.

[13] Le Guin, “Earthsea Revisioned,” 988.

[14] Le Guin, “Earthsea Revisioned,” 988.

[15] Le Guin, “Earthsea Revisioned,” 990.

[16] Le Guin, Tehanu, 108.

[17] Le Guin, “Earthsea Revisioned,” 990.