LMcMB, Paladin of Souls
Dec. 21st, 2003 08:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyIsta has joined Harriet on the short list of my favorite literary heroines.
I think--and I know there are people who will disagree with me, and that's fine--that this is the book Bujold has been trying to write, needing to write, since she finished Memory. Paladin of Souls is finally the book about what it means to be a woman in the patriarchal world of Chalion (or Barrayar) and how women can survive that with some degree of autonomy and pride. The men are incidental to some of the most important things in the story, and one of the things I love about Illvin is that he knows it and doesn't mind.
The female characters--Ista, Liss, Cattilara, Joen, and the memory of the Provincara embodied in Lady dy Hueltar--each offer a different answer to how a woman can find self-worth in this kind of world (with the resolutely off-stage Iselle as a kind of blazing exception to all the rules). Liss has taken the standard fantasy heroine's path of opting out of women's rules, and I think one thing the book makes clear is that that is only a temporary solution. Liss can beat the men at their own game now, while she's young, but she can't change the rules. I don't think Ista realizes what she's doing in re-educating Liss into the women's world, but the nature of the world of the story means that Liss's return to that world is inevitable, and Ista (even without realizing it) is supplying her with weapons and tactics.
Cattilara is the obverse side of Liss's coin; where Liss decides to enter the playing field herself, Cattilara chooses a champion (read: a husband) and invests her entire self in the man she has chosen. Cattilara makes the conventional choice--the choice rewarded by her society--and makes it sincerely. The fact that she will do anything to keep her piece on the board is a sign, yes, that she is young and selfish and silly, but also a sign of the degree to which she has power and identity only through her husband. The narrative becomes more sympathetic to Cattilara than I ever do--it seems to just let slide her molestation of Illvin, and I can't--but she does show enough true mettle when the chips are down that I can accept the narrative choice, even if I don't agree with it.
Joen and the Provincara are an even more closely linked mirroring of choices, as Ista recognizes:
Women do have power in the world of Chalion, but it is not power that translates from household to court, private to public. To have public power, they have to find some way around the walls of their socially defined gender role. As Iselle did in The Curse of Chalion. As Liss has done. And as Ista does, through her own grief and mistakes, and through the power of her god.
The beautiful thing about Bujold's theological system is that while the gods can confer power, they can't give it to someone who hasn't earned it. Ista's regained sainthood, and the autonomy it gives her, is nothing more than the outward manifestation of the change Ista herself has undergone from the beginning of the book. In the opening chapters, she cannot get free of her oppressively solicitous household; at the end, she can--not because she can eat demons (Lady dy Hueltar clearly hasn't assimilated that) but because she learned, before the Bastard conferred that power on her, how to stand up for herself and how to believe herself worthy of being stood up for.
I like The Curse of Chalion very much, but one of the things I like best about it, now, is that it paved the way for Paladin of Souls.
---
WORKS CITED
Bujold, Lois McMaster. Paladin of Souls. New York: Eos-HarperCollinsPublishers, 2003.
I think--and I know there are people who will disagree with me, and that's fine--that this is the book Bujold has been trying to write, needing to write, since she finished Memory. Paladin of Souls is finally the book about what it means to be a woman in the patriarchal world of Chalion (or Barrayar) and how women can survive that with some degree of autonomy and pride. The men are incidental to some of the most important things in the story, and one of the things I love about Illvin is that he knows it and doesn't mind.
The female characters--Ista, Liss, Cattilara, Joen, and the memory of the Provincara embodied in Lady dy Hueltar--each offer a different answer to how a woman can find self-worth in this kind of world (with the resolutely off-stage Iselle as a kind of blazing exception to all the rules). Liss has taken the standard fantasy heroine's path of opting out of women's rules, and I think one thing the book makes clear is that that is only a temporary solution. Liss can beat the men at their own game now, while she's young, but she can't change the rules. I don't think Ista realizes what she's doing in re-educating Liss into the women's world, but the nature of the world of the story means that Liss's return to that world is inevitable, and Ista (even without realizing it) is supplying her with weapons and tactics.
Cattilara is the obverse side of Liss's coin; where Liss decides to enter the playing field herself, Cattilara chooses a champion (read: a husband) and invests her entire self in the man she has chosen. Cattilara makes the conventional choice--the choice rewarded by her society--and makes it sincerely. The fact that she will do anything to keep her piece on the board is a sign, yes, that she is young and selfish and silly, but also a sign of the degree to which she has power and identity only through her husband. The narrative becomes more sympathetic to Cattilara than I ever do--it seems to just let slide her molestation of Illvin, and I can't--but she does show enough true mettle when the chips are down that I can accept the narrative choice, even if I don't agree with it.
Joen and the Provincara are an even more closely linked mirroring of choices, as Ista recognizes:
Ista's mother had once filled her household with her authority from wall to wall. ... Yet even at her direst, the old Provincara had known her limits, and had chosen no space larger than what she could fill.
Joen, it seemed to Ista, was trying to fill Jokona with her authority as a woman filled a household, and by the same techniques, and no one could stretch herself that far.
(Bujold 406)
Women do have power in the world of Chalion, but it is not power that translates from household to court, private to public. To have public power, they have to find some way around the walls of their socially defined gender role. As Iselle did in The Curse of Chalion. As Liss has done. And as Ista does, through her own grief and mistakes, and through the power of her god.
The beautiful thing about Bujold's theological system is that while the gods can confer power, they can't give it to someone who hasn't earned it. Ista's regained sainthood, and the autonomy it gives her, is nothing more than the outward manifestation of the change Ista herself has undergone from the beginning of the book. In the opening chapters, she cannot get free of her oppressively solicitous household; at the end, she can--not because she can eat demons (Lady dy Hueltar clearly hasn't assimilated that) but because she learned, before the Bastard conferred that power on her, how to stand up for herself and how to believe herself worthy of being stood up for.
I like The Curse of Chalion very much, but one of the things I like best about it, now, is that it paved the way for Paladin of Souls.
---
WORKS CITED
Bujold, Lois McMaster. Paladin of Souls. New York: Eos-HarperCollinsPublishers, 2003.
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no subject
Date: 2003-12-21 06:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-21 09:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-21 09:50 am (UTC)I hadn't noticed that, because it feels so natural to me (and to the book) that Ista's motherhood is not how she defines herself, but considering how both Cordelia and Ekaterin--and the ways in which they can be heroes--get boxed in and inescapably defined by motherhood, that is another thing to cheer about.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-21 08:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-21 07:23 pm (UTC)I think you are right.
Did it seem to you that even the prose style of this book had moved forward a step from anything she'd written before? It did to me.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-22 05:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-22 07:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-22 05:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-24 11:35 am (UTC)Ista
Date: 2003-12-28 03:22 pm (UTC)A broader view, over books instead of within one book, as it were.
Squirrel, not very sure whether he is breaking any etiquette here, but meaning the comment.
Re: Ista
Date: 2003-12-28 09:20 pm (UTC)Thank you!
no subject
Date: 2004-06-19 11:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-19 12:09 pm (UTC)Thank you very much.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-12 08:56 am (UTC)Also, the narrative may not condemn Cattilara, but given the strong theological bent of this story, I find it very interesting to note the differences between Ista's soul-companion and Cattilara's, and what that means for them both. I also find Ista's musings on a possible "pregnancy" for Cattilara interesting, in light of the comments to this entry regarding motherhood in the two Chalion books.