I often tell my students, especially my seniors, that they need to make the world a better place. They smile, they nod, they agree. They contemplate ways in which they might do that.
I’m not being flippant when I charge them with this important task. The conversation usually begins with a student’s own exploration of a social issue, a question about justice in an unjust world. A conversation follows in which we look at as many sides as we can, and I let them do most of the work. My older students, cognizant of the world they inhabit, draw some impressive conclusions pretty quickly in a classroom I’ve tried to make as safe a space as possible.
“Go out and fix the world,” I say with a smile, veering them back toward the surface lesson, something rooted in whatever text we’re studying. “Please.” I can only hope they make the genuine attempt to do so, utilizing the vast resources available to them through their education and status in the world, the myriad opportunities unfolding before them like flowers in the springtime sun.
Erika Johansen’s Tearling trilogy addresses the idea of how one fixes a broken world in a setting which appears in the first book, The Queen of the Tearling, to be undeniable fantasy. One might be forgiven for the assumption, early on, that the Tearling is in some version of medieval Europe. Armor-clad and sword-wielding knights on horseback escorting a young heir-apparent to her castle could hardly suggest otherwise. But as the book goes on, it teaches us to expand our assumptions. There is magic in this world. There is an enigmatic history involving a mass migration of people to a foreign land. There might be a chronology we weren’t expecting. Eventual allusions help us to see that the Tearling is a realm set far behind us, the readers, in technology but far ahead of us in time.
The writing is unapologetic, efficient, fearless, instructive. The protagonist, Kelsea, is a young woman whose situation offers no leeway for her impulsive—though noble-hearted—choices. The primary villain, an evil queen worthy of the darkest fairy tales, slices through our expectations the way her ruthless army cuts a swath of destruction across Kelsea’s land. If an aspiring writer wants to know how to create strong female characters who are both equal to their male counterparts and still realistic women, then Johansen’s books should be at the top of the TBR list. Beyond that, the Tearling is just a good story, engaging and gripping in the fiercest ways, filled with political machinations and peril and characters the reader can love.
The second book, The Invasion of the Tearling, drops us right into the action where the first book left off, and as we move through the story, we come to understand that the Tearling is not so much alt-history as it is a cautionary tale. Soon we meet new characters in a completely new setting, starting with Lily Mayhew, an American living in the late 21st century. And now the trilogy, as it alternates mysteriously between Kelsea’s and Lily’s disparate settings, embraces its dystopian nature full-force.
Lily’s social circle reflects the deepest emptiness of socialite life, the predecessor of which can easily be discovered in any elite community today, against the backdrop of an ominously imminent “smart” world. Here, women have again become property and technology imprisons us all. The world of Lily Mayhew is a grim combination of technological superiority and Big Brother, a fantasy world which is bleak because we must know it to be our own world, that we ourselves are just a few unfortunate choices away from bringing this near-future dystopia down on our own heads.
And Lily, along with visionary William Tear and the new community he has amassed, sail through a rift in time and place to what will eventually become the Tearling, a realm that Queen Kelsea, three hundred years later, must manage. The escape from our world to a different one is a powerful fantasy, especially now when society appears, on some days, to be devolving around us amidst the crumbles of social discourse and anesthetizing entertainment options.
Tear takes with him all of the things he imagines his utopia will need, which does not include guns or other modern weapons. They are not going with an intention to replicate their modern society with all its flaws. They know they will be starting over in so many ways, and their new society’s population has been cultivated to include the people who can best give it a chance at thriving. They carry with them medicines and doctors, artisans and utopian-minded people, textiles and books.
Books play an important role in the Tearling, and no wonder. It’s no secret that reading fiction from an early age cultivates empathy and emotional intelligence. When Tear’s utopian society experiences divisions, some of those fractures split along the same tribal lines that divide us in our real world. The characters who value books in the Tearling are not the people who, in real life, make an embittered bonfire of their school work every summer and later, as adults, refuse to believe scientific and statistical data on issues such as climate change, gun control, and whether federal money funds abortions.
Johansen’s trilogy is social critique writ large. It cautions readers to examine their own culture, their own religious institutions, their own choices, and to ask whether the concept of utopia truly can transcend human nature. The third book, The Fate of the Tearling, glaringly demonstrates the way a society begins to break down, sliding into catastrophic failure, using as its fissures the seemingly benevolent blessings of faith and devotion. As one character notes, “Few things are more dangerous to an egalitarian ideal than the concept of a chosen people… Our species is capable of altruism, certainly, but it is not a game we play willingly, let alone well.”
The character Row Finn, who inhabits all three books in varying aspects of what a person can be, is a prescient choice for a messiah: someone whose intentions may encompass a greater good, but whose methods and scruples belie a worse sort of humanity, a lack of belief in the viability of equality, a perilous arrogance about the righteousness of his own perfect vision.
Johansen also examines the question of liberty versus security: how much influence the state should have over a free society, and what its role is in protecting a community. It’s not an easy question in real life, and the Tearling story honors its complications in earnest and heartfelt ways.
***
When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, the administration of George W. Bush made a case for war which neglected one crucial component: the budget to pay for it.
As the conflict dragged on, seemingly without end, the federal budget every year failed to make appropriate provisions for the war. Perhaps in an effort to make our involvement in Iraq more palatable to the American people, Bush never came out and asked the country to make sacrifices.
The nation made sacrifices, yes, tremendous ones, especially in people and cultural values, but at no point were we asked to cut back on anything. Not on spending, not on the near-pathological celebration of ideology, not on the consumption of our resources. In fact, just the opposite: the American public was urged to spend, spend, spend to help bolster the economy. There were no victory gardens for the Iraq War, only a steadfast belief in the dark Dickensian aphorism that whatever is, is right.
The idea of sacrifice has become taboo in our culture. The idea that a family might want to tighten its metaphorical belt during stressful financial times has become shameful, even though in reality, there is greater dishonor in irresponsibility. The idea that one might have to give something up has grown so unpleasant that we as a culture, obsessed with instant gratification, can barely stomach it. We don’t, as a society, even acknowledge something as basic and undeniable as the physical sacrifices a woman makes to carry and birth a child; every tabloid and magazine cover in the checkout line at the grocery store will assure you these circumstances are a disgrace.
The final book of the Tearling trilogy unflinchingly explores the idea of sacrifice, forcing the characters and the reader to confront the question of what types of sacrifice are meaningful and appropriate, and when they can be righteously made. What, for example, must a queen sacrifice for her realm? What must a citizenry sacrifice for a functioning, civil society? What if that sacrifice includes one’s own assumptions? As one character insists, “These people are so damned proud of their hatred! Hatred is easy, and lazy to boot. It’s love that demands effort, love that exacts a price from us. Love costs; this is its value.”
Johansen offers confident and intense answers to these questions, and while I won’t tell you how the story ends, I will tell you that the conclusion of the Tearling trilogy is—like all the best endings—at once satisfying and shocking, unpredictable and yet inevitable.
***
In the author’s note at the end of the third book, Johansen charges us all with going out to make a better world, which is the central theme of Queen Kelsea’s life’s work. It is the task given to her by her guardian, whose memory haunts Kelsea throughout her reign. It is the underlying quest of all the characters Kelsea meets or becomes in her fugue states, those original settlers of the world which became the Tearling.
And the ways in which they fail or succeed are meant to challenge us, the readers, to make us question our own complicity in creating the world we have perhaps tried to escape through reading.
About the Author
Angélique Jamail’s poetry and essays have appeared in over two dozen anthologies and journals, including Time-Slice (2005), Improbable Worlds (2011), Pluck Magazine (2011), The Milk of Female Kindness—An Anthology of Honest Motherhood (2013), and Untameable City: Poems on the Nature of Houston (2015). Her work was selected as a Finalist for the New Letters Prize in Poetry in 2011. Her magic realism novelette Finis. (2014) has been praised by fiction writer Ari Marmell as having “some of the most real people I’ve encountered via text in a long time,” and by poet Marie Marshall as “a witty tale of conformity, prejudice, and transformation, in a world that is disturbing as much for its familiarity as for its strangeness.” An illustrated edition of Finis., with drawings by Houston-based artist Lauren Taylor, was released in 2015. She teaches Creative Writing and English in Houston. Find her online at her blog Sappho’s Torque.
Too good not to share: Paulina Porizkova’s op-ed in the New York Times about how 
So one of those lost summers, when I picked up 
Camille Paglia captures all her best provocations, smoke bombs, and sturdy anti-establishmentarianism in this collection of essays, opening with excerpts from her hefty and admittedly groundbreaking 
The relentless self-satisfaction and feelings of superiority aside, Paglia’s intellectual endeavors of the past 27 years are full of striking common sense. Abortion, she declares, should be legal on the sheer fact of constitutional rights. She’ll concede pro-lifers the moral high ground, given their feelings about the sanctity of life, but she comes down staunchly libertarian on this political spectrum. Madonna, she noticed early on, is a “real” feminist: “She shows girls how to be attractive, sensual, energetic, ambitious, aggressive, and funny—all at the same time” (50).
Paglia gets less pleasure out of celebrating the things she does like, however, than she does out of bashing the things she hates. Paglia’s praise is warm but mild, but her glee when she holds the sledgehammer is glorious to behold. Most of the book is a strident and, by the end, well-rehearsed tirade against the same set of targets: mainstream Western feminism (“Infirmary Feminism”) and feminists, with their “moldy neuroses,” women’s studies centers, poststructuralist theory (oh, how Paglia loathes poststructuralism! she trots out her best insults on this rampage), and the Victorian coddling of college students over date rape.
Libertarian as she is, as noted, Paglia fails to see how a good dose of bucking up, showing some backbone, slinging insults, and—in the case of real women leaders, like female presidential candidates—maybe have a little military training can not immediately solve the problems women have created for themselves by being born into a world where men have invented technology, culture, government, sports, and fashion. Paglia might be more persuasive if she were more inclined to negotiate, consider all sides, explore, rethink, and potentially compromise—best seen in her lecture at MIT, when she howls with outrage over a presentation she had to sit through with a feminist scholar critiquing fashion photography. Beauty is all! Paglia says, not ever considering how a young and impressionable girl might be led to decades of hating and disfiguring her own body because she doesn’t live up to these highly managed and curated images. But Paglia is having too much fun to put down the sledgehammer, and besides, she hates sissies.
For another, Paglia’s critique of women’s studies programs and the way academic feminists train other academic feminists deserves some serious consideration. Her plea to inject some self-possession and some real common sense—and some basic knowledge of science, including biology—into mainstream feminism should be taken seriously, too. Last but not least, her prose, even when she’s at her most insulting, has a spare, lithe, powerful beauty. The book is simply fun to read, occasional howlers aside.
Depending on how you look at it, feminism has either become more acceptable and mainstream, or it continues to be perceived by most young women as a radical dogma that requires one to forego personal grooming and to revile men. Feminism is either strong, better, more pervasive than ever before, or it’s been hijacked into a marketing ploy that “liberates” young women by insisting they express themselves by the clothes, make-up, and accessories they buy and wear. Second-wave feminism is dead but third- and fourth-wave feminism are thriving. Wave feminism is archaic and waveless feminism is the thing. Feminism is a global cause or Western feminists have to be very careful about how they try to foist their imperialistic views on others. Feminists are still mainly white and ignorant of the battles of their less privileged sisters. Intersectionality is where it’s at. The future face of feminism is young, multi-colored, and somewhere outside the restrictive gender binary. Feminism is everywhere. Feminism is you.
Okay, that last one is easy. I think a rebuke is definitely called for in the last instance. Better yet, I will direct the privileged sister to read Dina Leygerman’s great blog post, 
This is a dense book aimed at fellow feminist historians, but it’s a huge contribution to the history of second-wave feminism in the United States, and an absolute must-read for anyone interested in how the wave got halted and the different camps, feminist vs. anti-feminist, so divisively bitter. Spruill begins with the dramatic assessment that the National Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas, in 1977 was a dramatic watershed moment in the advance of women’s rights in the United States, and she spends the bulk of the book in a detailed inquiry of what led up to the conference, and what happened there, with the last segments devoted to a summation of what has happened for women’s rights in this country between then and now.
It takes some persuading to the see the NWC as a fundamental accomplishment, especially since Spruill, both times she talks about it–in the introductory chapter, and then in the middle chapters exploring the Houston event–spends at least as much time discussing the anti-feminist, anti-ERA rally taking place alongside, an event that seems to have been louder, better-attended, and even more self-congratulatory. For those curious about what the recent Women’s Marches following Trump’s inauguration have accomplished, this book is a good reminder that protests galvanize, provide solidarity, and develop loyalty among a group. It is also testament to the fact that, when you have two equally heated opinions that are dead-set against one another, nothing gets done beyond a lot of screaming, insult-launching, and exaggerated hyperbole.
This is best seen in the chapters devoted to the state conferences preceding the NWC, whose job it was to elect delegates to the national convention and determine a platform to submit. Here there is a tragic arc to the narrative as well. While legislative and popular support for the ERA in particular and the idea of women’s rights in particular was high in the initial stages, the conventions did what they were supposed to do: elect a diverse set of delegates and develop a platform that reflected a progressive agenda of full civil rights, including reproductive rights and non-discrimination, for the national platform that would eventually be submitted to the president. Once the anti-ERA forces got into action—the forces who passionately believed that the traditional family structure, with the woman at home dependent on the husband, were the only right model for everyone—the book becomes a wearying account of how, state by state, busloads of smug white evangelical women and their husbands descended on conventions, disrupted any fruitful discussion, congratulated themselves for being family champions, and then went back home to their safe, white houses.
Spruill doesn’t shy away from how the anti-forces deployed all sorts of others groups, including the KKK, to bulk out their protest numbers (an association Schafly always denied). In short, these chapters pound home the point learned from watching the U.S. Congress in action for the last six years: those who can make every effort available to obstruct an agenda that might mean more social justice for the broader population can usually manage to succeed. But the book also doesn’t shy away from showing the divisions within the feminist ranks—the arguments over how far to embrace LGBT rights, for example, and how to handle the abortion question—that led to factions and fissures there that generally left the middle-of-the-road feminists and the pro-life feminists with no place to go. As the more progressive voices won out, some of the middle who weren’t prepared to go that far get left behind—which is why the popular opinion still prevails among my students that feminists are strident, bra-burning, man-hating radicals, which means productive conversations about how to promote equal rights and just treatment for all genders get derailed quickly.
The major women on the scene emerge as courageous, charismatic, dedicated, impressive people, among them Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan (all pro-ERA), and Phyllis Schafly (anti). The story of how Schafly nearly single-handedly organized the resistance and halted such an enormously important piece of legislation as equal rights for all genders is awesome and—if you happen to be on the side of equal rights for women—a completely demoralizing example of how the shrill misuse of information and incitement of fear can stop any real dialogue and any positive change from happening (something we continue to see happening in the discussion on women’s rights up to this day). In this way, Spruill’s history is a revealing and explanatory account of just how the divisions between the progressives and the conservatives got so deep and the rhetoric got so heated to the point that there seems no middle ground remaining.
