From: Maia <maiakevin>
Date: Wed, 30 May 2001 10:11:08 -0700

Well, it's been an interesting month. I've been busy, but dropped in from time to time to see what folks were posting about His Dark Materials. I've been glad to read a variety of opinions on the trilogy, I suppose because I've heard much lavish praise from people I respect, yet the book failed me as a reader on so many levels. When I finished the trilogy this winter, reading all three books again in sequence, I was furious. Two days of stomping around the house, then I finally sat down and detailed the books, and then wrote, and wrote. (My novel in progress suffered that week.)

Anyway, I won't post my whole long essay here, but I'll outline the five things that disturbed me. It's still a bit long, but I have tried and tried to condense and still make sense... do feel free to skip to the next message!
(Jonathon, you spurred me to post when I was convinced that I wouldn't; Jennifer, this is also for you, for our conversation a few weeks back...)

First, the treatment of women in general and Lyra in particular. In the Golden Compass, Pullman makes an effort to distance his audience from the young protagonist, describing her as barbarian, savage, unimaginative, and half-wild, and by her behavior as moral-less, uninhibited and inconsiderate. In book two, Pullman abandons his distancing techniques (this is the book of wonderful Will), and simultaneously Lyra in response to Will undergoes a predictable, and painfully familiar, change: she alters herself. She learns to cook, clean, and be tidy; she learns to be courteous and respectful. But most of all, she learns to subsume her own desires, namely, her pursuit of Dust, under the needs of her male partner. Her truth-telling instrument even instructs her to put her mind to Will's service, to finding his father. After she loses the alethiometer by acting on her own behalf, following the questions that have meaning to her, she pledges to use it only for Will and at his instruction, effectively silencing herself. Lyra is learning to be a woman, "warm and virtuous, because she did it for Will, never for herself." Lyra's purpose, we learn, is simply to fall in love ? "all the words, all the confidence, all the vanity [will be] shaken out of her."

As for the adults, Serafina Pekkala, Ruta Skadi, and of course Marisa Coulter are defined first in the narrative by their captivating beauty, and by their almost "anbaric" abilities to affect the will of others. Too many strips of silk and un-aging women for me. Marisa is powerful because she uses sex as a weapon, but she has a shallow mind and a retreating vision; sex is her only use and purpose.

Second, I thought that Pullman was inconsistent in his treatment of the audience and of the characters. Consider twelve year old Will's sexualized response to Marisa, and the champagne simile at Roger's emergence. (Would a boy with Will's life to date know champagne so well?) But more than that, consider the ending. Will has been solid and sure during his confrontation with the angels Baruch and Balthamos, and in his faithfulness to Lyra. He is a steady rock, with a mature confidence that few adults have achieved, let alone young children. Will, like Asriel, has the power to command and frighten angels and witches, the strength to set the world on his terms. And yet at the end of the book, Will the world-walker is incapable of protecting his relationship ? as, in a message that seems a direct intrusion of the adult perspective into the universe of young love, Pullman tells us that Will and Lyra are ultimately confined to their own worlds, their own rules, irreconcilably apart forever. Love's purpose here is to flush, not to be pursued ? and with that, Pullman wrenches the story back to an adult commentary on the glorious foolishness of youth, leaving his protagonists behind. Perhaps this is why some folks find the ending anticlimactic?

Third, I was shocked at the casual abuse of children. Asriel essentially rapes and murders Roger, and yet angels, witches, and righteous humans rally to Asriel as the best hope? And Will is supposed to be like Asriel? (see Ruta's and Serafina's conversation) What does this portend for Lyra? Marisa is perversely fascinated with the sexual manipulation and destruction of children (and bats), and yet somehow magically transforms herself to risk everything for her daughter? I was appalled that it is not those who revere children who free them ultimately, but instead those who have made a practice of using and destroying them.

(I do think that "severance" must be examined as a metaphor for sexual abuse; the following passage illustrates that the unwanted touching of a daemon sounds very similar to sexual assault:

    It was as if an alien hand had reached right inside where no hand had a right to be, and wrenched at something deep and precious.
    She felt faint, dizzy, sick, disgusted, limp with shock.
    One of the men was holding Pantalaimon.
    He had seized Lyra's daemon in his human hands, and poor Pan was shaking, nearly out of his mind with horror and disgust. His wildcat shape, his fur now dull with weakness, now sparking glints of anbaric alarm...He curved toward his Lyra as she reached both hands for him...
    They fell still. They were captured.
    She felt those hands...It wasn't allowed...Not supposed to touch...Wrong...)

Fourth, white Christian ethnocentricity. In "His Dark Materials," non-whites are marginalized exotics (e.g. the Samoyeds who capture Lyra for the Station, and the Tartars with their trepanning), and almost every action is carried out by white Europeans and one Texan. In a nasty turn, it is the "Africs" who "... have a way of making a slave called a zombi. It has no will of its own; it will work day and night without ever running away or complaining. It looks like a corpse..." It is also the Africs who create the "bad spirit with a spell through its heart" ? a kind of pseudo-voodoo?

And it is this ethnocentrism, but also a misrepresentation of the complexities of the very church that Pullman does describe that is the fifth point of failure to me. The almost complete absence of other cosmologies than a rather limited Christian one gives a weight to that one theology as _the_ theology. Arguably, in making Metatron a physical, concrete reality and making Dust a real issue of matter that pervades all the worlds, Pullman yields up the glorious dimensions of spiritual ambiguity into a singular, offensive Authority.

The narrative chooses to ignore the variety in the Christian church (let alone other cosmologies) - in particular, the very Christian belief that God took flesh on this earth to free humans from a fear of death. And in the ending of The Amber Spyglass, Pullman returns us to the same kind of oppressive Authority that he seems to arguing against: if the people are good enough (interesting enough, live interesting lives), then they will not be condemned to a Hell of wandering, banned from the earth. If they are boring (had an oppressed, frightened life), then they will wander forever in gloom without their souls. We are left with fear at the end, and it is the same fear of eternity dammed.

So, to wrap, I suppose I stomped about the house because the whole trilogy felt deceptive in conclusion, like witch-oil. It failed me because it presented itself as one thing but felt like a complete other. I think that HDM is seductive to intellectuals (hey, Ruth) because it is so richly detailed and clever... Yet I almost wonder if the trilogy is Pullman's great joke on us all, seeing if we fall for his Marisa or if we perceive the soul beneath the skin?

My apologies for posting so near to the end of the month...

Maia

-mailto:maia at littlefolktales.org http://www.littlefolktales.org
Received on Wed 30 May 2001 12:11:08 PM CDT