BADD 2010 2.0. No, REALLY. I'd prefer not to be healed!
And so we begin with the long version. Please take note of the preface on the previous post.
Dear Ms. Goodman. My name is Kit. You’ve never heard of me. I attended a YA lit conference in May of last year where you were one of the speakers. It was fun, watching you get into a very genteel fight with fellow fantasy-author Isobelle Carmody about the necessity of research in your worldbuilding. It was fun to hear you describe trying out ancient Chinese swordplay, just so you might really get the feeling of a blade’s impact against a body. You were clearly on the side of research, and detail and- knowing my own weakness for any book that contained calligraphy and dragons at the same time-I waited anxiously for The Two Pearls of Wisdom, later retitled Eon.
In a slightly bewildering Pan-Asia, full of dragons and feudalism and rigid gender norms, with just a dash of downright Orientalism scattered throughout, we have a girl in boy’s clothing. She is a candidate for a Dragoneye apprentice, a position that would bring wealth and power both to her mentor-responsible for the transformation of Eona into ‘Eon’-and herself. If she fails to win the place, her mentor will lose all income and shall sell her. If she is found out as a woman, she will die.
First, the outright good: Recognise this? One, it’s your book. Two, this is not a particularly uncommon idea in secondary world fantasy, and one I am especially drawn to after years of loving Tamora Pierce’s work, where her Alanna made, for a while, quite the convincing Alan. But you go further. I have read very few novels-even fewer YA novels-that are so comfortable with one’s sex and one’s gender not necessarily being the same. Your contrast between Eon/Eona and the strong, self-defined trans character-court lady Dela-was brightly drawn and confident. You own the world you made, stretching and teasing some clichés, then sitting comfortably with others. I was caught, captivated. Not just because of all this, rich as it was, but because of a thread that started glow with increasing brightness throughout your narrative, despite a beginning at seemed inauspicious, to say the least. Block quote ahead:
I let the tips of my swords dig into the sandy arena floor. It was the wrong move, but the dragging pain of my gut was pulling me into a crouch. I watched Swordmaster Ranne.... This was the bleeding pain. Had I miscounted the moon days?
“What are you doing, boy?”
I looked up. Master Ranne was standing poised...I knew he wanted to follow through and rid the school of a cripple. (2008: 3).
Oh, dear. Were you conflating menstruation with disability? Wait...no.
I tensed and stepped back. Fast. Too fast The sand shifted under my bad leg, wrenching it to the right. I hit the ground, hard. One heartbeat of numbed shock and then the pain came. Shoulder. Knee. Hip. My hip. My hip! Had I done more harm to my hip? I reached across my body, digging my fingers through skin and muscle to feel the malformed hipbone. No, there was no pain. It was whole. (4).
Malformed, but whole. As someone with dodgy lower limb abductors and whose right hip was rather dramatically cut into to mine material for what essentially became new feet, taking years to grow back, I was intrigued. And worried. This was a universe where ‘crippled’ seemed somewhere on par with ‘malignant, contagious ooze’, a few rungs below ‘woman’. Even with this background clamour, however, something slowly began to show through.
Eon-the protagonist-was disabled, and even while she mouthed-and believed-the noxious, insidious words around her. Crippled = worthless. Even as we strip the worldbuilding and exoticism away, who hasn’t, at some point, encountered that equation?
I’m only going to use one example, here, but Eon/Eona seemed to slowly prove her own words wrong. This was especially noticeable because of her place, as a disabled person, in the text. She was not an auxiliary. She wasn’t the little brother character, or the grandmother, or the lesson-learned by someone else, no matter how well meaning. She was, point blank, disabled. Her body did not function easily and painlessly within the world she was forced to inhabit. And it felt, slowly, that this was not the sort of disability that could be mentioned for the sake of ‘diversity’ just before she started running miles without a hitch.
For instance: required to perform a certain set of martial art figures as part of her introduction to the Dragon who was hopefully going to take her as an apprentice, Eon/Eona found herself unable to perform and-along with a load of panic, and pain, and frustration-was able to find another way of approaching the sequence (9) that did not involve her sitting on the sidelines waiting for some kind of psychic communion/any other magical coincidence that might, in lesser narratives, have been required to reach the desired outcome. (Apprenticeship to a dragon. Hardly a real spoiler. The subtitle of this book is Dragoneye Reborn and we have pages to go).
Yeah, sure, figuring out that there is historical precedent for candidates to perform “Horse Dragon Second,” rather than “Mirror Dragon Third,” (here is an example of the broad pan-Asia...) is convenient and plot driven, but modifications that work are so bloody rare in real life, that it’s rather delightful to read them in my books. Of course, other characters mock and thwart and injure and curse, and it transpires that this is a world where ‘cripple’ is explicitly worse than evil according to the popular belief, which is rather dubious, but when I read about that blessed modified pseudo-kung-fu I cheered aloud. In this case, it felt like it was the thought that counts in truth, because that enabling thought was had so rarely. She could not do everything, and could not do it in what was perceived as the right order, but she could do.
It says a lot that I was prepared to swallow the truly disturbing revelation that her mentor had had her run over by a cart to smash up her leg (272) so that her disguise would remain intact because as a visible cripple people would be less inclined to touch her. I kept reading because, as I have said, your character’s existence and interaction with others rendered this entirely untrue. 200 pages in, we already have a love interest, friends, and a generally more positive network of protection around Eon/Eona’s secret. She both kicks and stumbles her way through battles, towards a tense, climactic point where the sequel waited, far off and blurry, in 2011. All that remains is for the character to finally embrace the power of her gender, accepting it and thus the power of her dragon, who’s been beating at the metaphysical walls for the entire story, waiting for her to finally work out that her dragon is the ‘Mirror dragon’, long lost because she is female, and there have been no woman Dragoneyes for centuries. (Words that haunt the reader very neatly from the prologue). Basically, by pretending to be a boy, Eon/Eona hasn’t been gaining power, she’s been blocking it. Sudden realisation. Big reveal. Golden light. Sparkles. Trumpets. Villain left shaking and tormented with the reawakening of a conscience. Eona, battered and ragged, but triumphant. Herself.
Clutching together the remnants of the tunics, I started towards the gate. Even as I made the first step, I knew something fundamental had changed, I knew something fundamental had changed: (422, emphasis mine).
(Oh, hell).
...my hip was flexing into a new stretch of muscle and sinew.
(Please, Ms. Goodman. Are you really doing this? Is this the point where I get yelled at for, ‘Taking a fantasy work too seriously’, because don’t I know that, in their heart of hearts everyone wants...)
No pain. No awkward gait. I stopped, disoriented.
(Wish I could).
...again, a longer stride that should have buckled into a limp. But it was straight and true.
(This language is more loaded than an idler in Monaco. And here we have the true physiognomic epiphany to go with it!)
I yanked back the edge of the tunic (423) and touched the pale skin over my hip. It was smooth. No scar. I was whole again. A laugh broke out of me. My dragon healed me, too.
This is the point where the acid of my rage eats through all parentheses. Eona is a character who has spent the entire story terrified of being exposed, and now she is smooth, pale, and whole, she’s joyously running around half naked. The Mirror dragon reflected Eona’s “true self” back to her, and there was no way that any true self was going to be gimpy. Oh, you might say, but she was blighted! By her master! She was made disabled, it wasn’t real! The damage was done to Eon, not Eona!
Yes, well. I get your symbolism. I have, in fact, been hit stunningly hard over the head with it. But if you did use disability that way, is that in any way a good thing? Being used hurts.
Miracle cure narratives of the Francis Hodsgon Burnett/Johanna Spyri/Susan Coolidge era have a message that seems to run something like this: a cripple (I’ll stick to the novel’s favourite descriptor) is brave, good, befriended, kind, and then better-preferably in that order. The bedbound boy runs through flowers to the father who once had been afraid to look at him; the girl takes tentative steps from her wheelchair, finally achieving the rewards her goodness deserves. Katy Carr, aware of the torment she had once given to others, which she has spent years slowly, painfully reliving upon herself, finds she is suddenly able to make her way downstairs.
The Dragoneye Reborn simply updates the trope: if you are awesome enough, and true to yourself, you shall be healed.
Eona was awesome. She had an identity crisis, and a world that told her there was something inherently wrong about her body, on any number of levels. Does the fact she was told that necessarily make it true?
Think about that. I still am.
And please don’t heal me!
Yours sincerely,
Kit. (No dragon, plenty of limp, occasional identity crisis).
Goodman, Alison. Eon. (2008). Sydney: Harper Collins
Keith, Lois. Take Up Thy Bed and Walk: death, disability and cure in classic fiction for girls . (2001). NY: Routledge