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| The 1993 Penguin Book cover design. |
I was ecstatic I got to read A Wizard of Earthsea again for my Readings in the Genres class at SHU because The Earthsea Quartet is one of a very few epic fantasy series that I've read and loved. Not only that, but it's
a fantasy series that touched me so deeply that it's shaped not only who I am
as a fantasy writer, but it shapes the fantasy that I write. However, that's an
enormous topic to get into (which I'd prefer to save for my final paper and future blogs) so I'd
like to dive into something else related to Earthsea that I've followed for
years--the issue of race.
Because I love Ursula Le Guin and the Earthsea Quartet so
much, I'll still read about it in blogs and articles in my spare time. And the
thing that's fascinated me the most is the concept of "whitewashing"
Earthsea and how often Le Guin has to step in to remind people that her lead
characters are of many different, darker colors. She shouldn't have to constantly remind
audiences what her characters look like, especially when she clearly describes
them in the text, but she's had to anyway; which I think speaks to a
larger and quite serious issue with race
and the fantasy genre overall.
I mentioned in our previous on-board discussions in class (as well as on this blog) some of the
tropes that occur with epic or high fantasy (although it was mostly about maps,
I did briefly mention fantasy settings). Although modern fantasy continues to
grow and thrive and explore different worlds and races, there is still the
perception that epic
fantasy is stuck in Medieval Europe. To oversimplify, Medieval Europe
=white people, usually of nobility or royalty. If Medieval Europe is the default world building model for high fantasy,
that means high fantasy casts by default will also be white.
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| The Three Knights by Edward Hasted, 1793 |
Although A Wizard of
Earthsea is epic fantasy, it doesn't fall under the default settings for
the genre. Ged and Ogion, like many other characters, are Gontishmen or from
the Archipelago, meaning they are "dark copper-brown" (25) or
described as "reddish brown" (44).
Vetch is referred to as "black-brown" (44). It's not that
there aren't white people in Earthsea--there are races like the Kargs, and
characters like Skiorh and Serret, who are described as white; although Serret
is referred to more as "sallow" (28). But overall, the lead characters,
and even the top supporting characters, happen to be people of color. Well, not just happen to be--this was a deliberate choice made by Le Guin:
"My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start.
I didn't see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or
Joe or Bill. I didn't see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and
why all the leading women had "violet eyes"). It didn't even make
sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now—why wouldn't they still be either a
minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?
The fantasy tradition I was writing in came from Northern Europe, which is why
it was about white people. I'm white, but not European. My people could be any
color I liked, and I like red and brown and black. I was a little wily about my
color scheme. I figured some white kids (the books were published for
"young adults") might not identify straight off with a brown kid, so
I kind of eased the information about skin color in by degrees—hoping that the
reader would get "into Ged's skin" and only then discover it wasn't a
white one." (Le Guin, Slate Magazine).
Race may never matter to certain fantasy readers or
writers…but even so, there are few novels that are said to
define the entire fantasy genre like
A Wizard of Earthsea does. The fact that this small tome climbed to fame
and importance the way it did is an enormous deal, because it's a fantasy that
primarily involves a multi-racial cast. And yet for a book so powerful, it
still meets with resistance--there is a population of readers, directors,
producers, designers, etc.--who cannot seem to let the characters look the way
the author intended.
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| Compare this to the book cover above. Syfy's Ged is the polar opposite of Le Guin's Ged. Image Source |
Le Guin has been very
vocal about this issue. Probably one of the most famous examples of her
frustration is the Syfy channel's miniseries adaptation Earthsea, which combines and adapts the plots from A Wizard of Earthsea and the Tombs of Atuan. I remember when it
debuted, and I watched maybe an hour of it and personally thought it sucked. On
top of that, there was a glaring problem--aside from Ogion (Danny Glover) no
other leads were of color. Especially
Ged. Le Guin wrote a marvelous article for Slate magazine with the subtitle How the Sci-Fi Channel Wrecked My Books
where she lambasted casting choices and felt like she had to apologize to her
reading audience for the choices the network made without her approval. Her Slate article is probably the most
famous, but she catalogued several of her various responses about the
whitewashing of Earthsea, which you can read here.
Another famous treatment of the Earthsea stories is StudioGhibli's Tales from Earthsea which
came out in 2006. Studio Ghibli is home of the noted works by Hiyao Miyazaki,
although it was in fact Miyazaki's son Goro who directed Tales from Earthsea. Anyway, I also watched this adaptation and
thought it was visually gorgeous but overall disappointing (an "almost, but not quite" reaction). As for the racial
depiction of characters, Studio Ghibli didn't make the story as white as Syfy
did. Characters have dark brown or black hair, and the skin…I'm not sure how to
describe it. I think they're too light-skinned, but on the other hand, they
aren't exactly the pale ivory skin
that's so lauded in medieval high fantasy...but I do think they are paler than
Le Guin intended. You can read more about race in both the Syfy and Studio
Ghibli film here
as well as Le Guin's own response to the film here. I
can say Studio Ghibli did improve on the debacle Syfy created.
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| Prince Arren and Ged, from Tales of Earthsea. Image Source |
Perhaps the most infuriating aspect of whitewashing (to me,
anyway) of A Wizard of Earthsea are
the actual book covers themselves. I could possibly understand why film ignores
the wishes of authors simply because Hollywood has a long-established track
record of ruining fiction (not that that's a good excuse); but since the
original medium of the story is in fact a book, you'd think at least publishers
would get it right. Nope. This
article shows how with Earthsea,
like many other books, publishers have falsely depicted character races on the
actual book covers. An even more
thorough article, One
of the Most Whitewashed Characters in Fantasy/Science Fiction is Ged shows
various interpretations.
I feel incredibly lucky that the copy of the Earthsea
Quartet I picked up in Carmarthen was the Penguin UK edition that
depicted Ged mostly
the way I imagined him in my mind. There's no mistaking it: every character
on that cover has black hair and reddish-brown skin. I cannot think of any other
better visual representation of the characters that has appeared on a book cover. But honestly, there should be more than one example of
art in existence that properly reveals race in the series.
Oh, wait a minute--here's something awesome!
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| Earthsea comic art by deviant artist MelanieComics. (CC Licensed) |
So!
What can we as authors do when these long-existing issues
with race and whitewashing can't seem to
go away? First of all, we can help break down the old high fantasy tropes by
actually breaking away from them. Write fantasy that isn't defaulted to the
white, European medieval based traditional epic. But even if we do that, though, as
the treatment of Le Guin's books show us, there's a good chance the work will be
whitewashed anyway--by publishers, filmmakers, producers, etc. So what do we do
then? We can emulate Le Guin and defend our work as we have written it. Le Guin
may have had her books horribly misrepresented multiple times, but she doesn't
go down without a fight!
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Works Cited
LeGuin, Ursula K. The Earthsea
Quartet. London: Penguin, 1993. Print.
LeGuin, Ursula. "A Whitewashed
Earthsea." Editorial. Slate.com. The Slate Group, a Division of the
Washington Post, 16 Dec. 2004. Web.
<http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2004/12/a_whitewashed_earthsea.html>.
