Geata Póeg na Déanainn

Female characters in The House of Binding Thorns April 23, 2017

One of my favourite series of books, which I have been reading and rereading since childhood, is Monica Furlong’s Wise Child and Juniper duology.* This series of books is historical fantasy, set in early medieval Cornwall and Dál Riata, and the main reason why I keep coming back to it, like a well that never runs dry, is its emphasis on the day-to-day, ordinary work of women — spinning, weaving, harvesting and storing food for winter, gathering herbs and brewing beer — which it imbues with a kind of power and magic. Most of the important relationships in these books are between girls and/or women. Although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, I feel that books like this did a lot to shape my narrative preferences, especially the idea that you can have a perfectly interesting story which involves few male characters, and focuses on stereotypically ‘female’ activies without a battlefield in sight. Consciously or unconsciously, I find myself searching for these kinds of stories — stories where the domestic sphere isn’t devalued, where a sense of community, communal activity and interdependence is prioritised, and where ‘women’s work’ drives the plot.

The House of Binding Thorns, the second book in Aliette de Bodard’s Dominion of the Fallen series, perfectly encapsulates these qualities. I knew I was in for a treat when I read one of the posts de Bodard had written in the week following the book’s publication, ‘The Fallacy of Agency: on Power, Community and Erasure’, and found myself nodding in vigorous agreement:

The other thing about dismissing powerlessness is that it devalues and erases the oppressed. It’s saying, essentially, that the less power one has, the less worthy of a story one is. That if someone is truly oppressed, and the story isn’t about some brash rebellion, some gaining of that overt power, then it’s not worth telling. That being oppressed is some sort of grey, featureless state where nothing worth notice happens—that there are no sorrows, no joys, no everyday struggles, no little victories to be snatched. That, in short, the only story of oppression worth telling is the brazen breaking of it.

The other thing that overemphasising agency does is that it makes it sound like a bad thing to be dependent on others, and especially being part of a community you can rely on. This is problematic on several levels: the first and most important one is that we are not and were not meant to be self-reliant (raising a child, for instance, is seen today as the job of a nuclear family, but it’s frazzling and exhausting and really much easier if we come back to the way it was done: by the extended family/community). Admitting that one can’t do everything alone isn’t a moral failing or a weakness: it’s deeply and fundamentally human.

This latter point is crucial in appreciating just what de Bodard has achieved, particularly with her female characters in this book. Set in a ruined, post-apocalyptic Paris run by conflicting Houses led by fallen angels, along with a Vietnamese dragon kingdom under the Seine pursuing its own agenda, The House of Binding Thorns abounds with a multiplicity of female characters. And, unlike Furlong’s work, which achieves a sense of interdependence and community by limiting women’s stories to a single sphere, de Bodard’s book allows women to exist in multiple spaces and pursue different aims. She by no means devalues the domestic: a fair portion of the book takes place in kitchens, living rooms and marketplaces, and is concerned with pregnancy and childbirth, preparing food, sharing out precious resources within immigrant communities, tending to the sick and so on. But alongside these women who concern themselves with the work of nurturing, protecting and sustaining fragile communities, there are also women exercising power overtly, politicians and wielders of supernatural power.

She allows for women who are steely and ambitious, and sets them beside women who are self-sacrificing or powerless, and gives space to all their stories. There are white women and women of colour, queer women and straight women, cis women and trans women, mothers and grandmothers and women who would never dream of having children. In other words, The House of Binding Thorns gives voice to as full a range of women’s experiences as possible. The world of the Dominion of the Fallen books is in some ways incredibly bleak: it’s a ruined and blasted landscape, rife with inequality, filled with self-interested immortals locked in endless political battles over what remains, and humans whose only choices are servitude or precarious survival outside the House system. However, de Bodard shows the glimmers of light that persist: bottles of fish sauce, hoarded and passed around migrant communities, the hard-won joy of learning a new language, the birth of a child, or the unstinting love and support of a beloved partner. There is hope amid the ruins, even if it only exists in tiny spaces, carved out at great cost.

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*Years later she published a third book in the series, Colman, but I have not read it.