Quiet hum is amplified

Things I've Read: The Mists of Avalon

I’ve read a few other Arthurian re-tellings that have focused on the female characters in the saga, but this one is certainly the best of them. It follows the canon (such as it is) fairly closely, incorporating almost all of the really iconic episodes from the King Arthur mythology, and I really enjoyed that. It’s nice to see creative interpretations of the stories–I’m a sucker for retold fairy tales in general–but I also appreciate it when new interpretations of old tales are still recognizable as the stories I love. Marion Zimmer Bradley succeeds admirably here.

Mists as a feminist work

The number one complaint about Mists seems to be that it’s feminist propaganda. Interestingly, I’m not certain that I really agree that it’s feminist at all. It’s definitely not quite up to modern standards of feminist thought, but it was helpful to me to remember as I read that Mists was first published in the year I was born, 1982. For a book that is almost 30 years old, I think it holds up remarkably well.

I suspect, however, that the primary reason Mists is seen as being “feminist” has less to do with the ideological content of the novel than it does with the fact that re-centering the King Arthur legend on the lives and experiences is of women is subversive in itself. Women are rare enough in fantasy fiction in general (especially in the early 80s) to make the book remarkable for its time, and it’s still sometimes seen as a radical departure from the norm to make women the focus of stories in such a testosterone- and patriarchy-fueled genre. The canon of Arthurian legend has grown in volume to near-Biblical proportions, and many people seem to reject any tampering with such an archetypal foundation of the genre as akin to blasphemy. As often as not, the descriptor “feminist,” when applied to The Mists of Avalon, is an epithet rather than praise.

Simply being a book about women does not a feminist classic (or propaganda piece) make, however, and there is a fair amount of toxicity in the relationships between the women of Mists. There is also a fair amount of women stressing out and feeling guilty, ashamed, and worthless for not having babies, not having enough babies, not being “good enough” mothers and wives, and so on. In a way, these interactions between women and the concerns over childbearing are reflective of experiences that real women have and can relate to, but at the same time it felt to me as if these experiences were shown as immutable and inevitable parts of female existence. The women of Mists are strong, complex characters, but I didn’t like the uncomfortable feeling I had throughout the book that the Maiden/Mother/Crone view of womanhood is just as limiting and harmful as the Madonna/Whore dichotomy.