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race in Earthsea
Jun. 1st, 2011 05:59 pmHere's a report on an interesting Wiscon panel, "How To Describe Nonwhite Characters Sans Fail". It occurred to me to take a look at how Ursula Le Guin did it. Le Guin has spent a good portion of her later life trying to apologize and compensate for what she's come to see as unthinking sexism in the earlier Earthsea books, but she can remain justly proud of A Wizard of Earthsea as a model for a novel by a white author in which the characters' default race is not white. Cover illustrations and movie versions with a bleached Ged properly earn scorn.
So I went through A Wizard of Earthsea looking for descriptions of the color of the human characters' skin - and hair and eyes, as those were described in association. A detailed accounting is below; the summary is, there isn't much. This is a formal, slightly distant story without a lot of physical description or the more inward forms of thought. Specifically, she doesn't go in for evocative synonyms. Dark, copper, light, pale, sallow, and the simple color names about exhaust her descriptive vocabulary. There's a few nature-oriented similes.
Le Guin's way of introducing her hero's red-brown color is interesting. She avoids it at first, implying it by contrast. The first physical description is of the brutal invading Kargs: "a savage people, white-skinned, yellow-haired," the word savage and the specific citation of their skin and hair color as the first distinguishing characteristics in the book right away suggesting that there's something alien about these central-casting Viking types. Serret as a girl is "very sallow, almost white-skinned," due to her foreign mother, another alienation of the white, and for further impact Ged finds her ugly. Only among and after these are we told, equally casually, that Ogion and Ged and Jasper are red-brown or copper-brown, and, oh yes, Vetch is black-brown, and that these are the normal colors in the lands of their births.
However, Le Guin can't avoid the white default altogether. The character who gets by far the most physical page-time is the adult, seductive Serret, and she is white and bright and light, with the strong suggestion that Ged no longer considers her ugly. I'm not sure what to make of the passing reference to a boy "red-faced" with exertion when he's from an island where the people are black.
There's a lot of imagery of light and dark outside of skin and hair color in this book, and light is good and dark is evil in this context, but by repeatedly describing the altogether good Vetch as "dark" and emphasizing the cold, chilling evil of the "pale, bleached" (not positive associations of white) North, I trust that Le Guin manages to differentiate her imagery from skin color.
( Color references in A Wizard of Earthsea )
So I went through A Wizard of Earthsea looking for descriptions of the color of the human characters' skin - and hair and eyes, as those were described in association. A detailed accounting is below; the summary is, there isn't much. This is a formal, slightly distant story without a lot of physical description or the more inward forms of thought. Specifically, she doesn't go in for evocative synonyms. Dark, copper, light, pale, sallow, and the simple color names about exhaust her descriptive vocabulary. There's a few nature-oriented similes.
Le Guin's way of introducing her hero's red-brown color is interesting. She avoids it at first, implying it by contrast. The first physical description is of the brutal invading Kargs: "a savage people, white-skinned, yellow-haired," the word savage and the specific citation of their skin and hair color as the first distinguishing characteristics in the book right away suggesting that there's something alien about these central-casting Viking types. Serret as a girl is "very sallow, almost white-skinned," due to her foreign mother, another alienation of the white, and for further impact Ged finds her ugly. Only among and after these are we told, equally casually, that Ogion and Ged and Jasper are red-brown or copper-brown, and, oh yes, Vetch is black-brown, and that these are the normal colors in the lands of their births.
However, Le Guin can't avoid the white default altogether. The character who gets by far the most physical page-time is the adult, seductive Serret, and she is white and bright and light, with the strong suggestion that Ged no longer considers her ugly. I'm not sure what to make of the passing reference to a boy "red-faced" with exertion when he's from an island where the people are black.
There's a lot of imagery of light and dark outside of skin and hair color in this book, and light is good and dark is evil in this context, but by repeatedly describing the altogether good Vetch as "dark" and emphasizing the cold, chilling evil of the "pale, bleached" (not positive associations of white) North, I trust that Le Guin manages to differentiate her imagery from skin color.
( Color references in A Wizard of Earthsea )
