The Wheel of Time Turns Back Toward Reading

As I was saying in the lead post, I’m a latecomer to The Wheel of Time. Not that I didn’t pick it up back when it was new. I couldn’t drive yet in college, so I started reading The Eye of the World on bus rides. I don’t remember exactly how far I got, but it was less than halfway.

So what stopped me? Probably a lot of little things. For one thing the casual pace of the first few chapters – back then I didn’t have the patience and even love I have now of a slow start, which is funny given that Tolkien was my main role model. As a judgy little teen brat I sometimes rolled my eyes at the most overt borrowings from Tolkien and folklore, especially when it came to names. Oh, you’re celebrating Bel Tine? Aren’t you rich!

I was also very deep in 90’s second-wave feminism feels, and that really colored my perception of the opening scenes. Why give me a world in which women have real magical and political power, only to have the gender war playing out in all the same ways in spite of that? Speaking of which, why did almost every female character have to come off as shrewish and unreasonable? Why did the female Aes Sedai get jipped on raw power? Why weren’t the elemental attributions at least “right,” which would have given women earth and men air? What was the deal?

Gender essentialism? A little?

I don’t see these as dealbreakers now. Egwene and Nynaeve come off as shrewish and bossy because they don’t know how to manage their heightened maturity and feelings of responsibility yet. Anyway, all the Emond’s Field kids have problems, don’t they? Mat is a troublemaker who can’t sit still, Perrin is bigger than he knows how to deal with so he slows himself to a crawl. Poor Rand is sort of a piece of mush who’ll do whatever the nearest friend to hand tells him to do.

Why do the female Aes Sedai get jipped on elements? Well…they don’t. I’d missed how this was one of the first things Moiraine said about the Power. A tendency toward correspondence, a bell curve as it were, is not a law of nature. I hope that plays out: I hope to see some firey women and watery men up in this business sometime. Lots of books, there should be time.

Why are they jipped on power? At this point, everyone is. Men can’t get away with channeling at all because the taint on their side drives them a particular kind of insane that blows up everything around them. I do have a few spoilers from my husband, so I know that with many of the female Aes Sedai choosing celibacy too, the talent is effectively being selected out of the gene pool.

Honestly, at this point my question is more, why does the Power have two genders in the first place? Is that strictly necessary, and if so, must it express in how humans draw upon the Power? The former I can give on: there are whole schools of magic that run on polarities, after all. The latter is a bigger question – what would happen with a trans character, for example? – but I accept that this is a work of its time. The angle he’s taking on gender is “we’re sunk if we don’t work together,” a fair place to be during the second wave. I’ll take it.

Oops, where did the time go?

I’ve said so much about what I’ve decided the book isn’t, there’s no space to talk about what it is. I guess we’ll get into that next week! Meanwhile, I hope you’ll share your own thoughts with me. (Spoiler-proof if you refer to something past Eye. That way y’all old hands can talk out ahead of me without me knowing more than I should. Laugh together behind my back, I don’t even mind!)

Go back to the front page of the reading blog

Next in this series: Don’t Choose Me!