ABSTRACT
Discourses of magic are alive and well in contemporary fantasy, often featuring girls whose paranormal abilities afford them power that they would not otherwise enjoy. At the beginning of Terry Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men (2003), nine-year-old Tiffany Aching, the young daughter of a farming family, discovers to her surprise and pleasure that she is a witch.1 The Tiffany Aching novels trace Tiffany’s progress as a witch in training and eventually the heir of her grandmother as the witch of the Chalk, a region of Discworld that closely resembles Wiltshire. A similar insistence on lineage permeates Tamora Pierce’s Beka Cooper trilogy, in which Beka comes to learn that she, like her father, possesses the ability known as an Air Gift; her ability equips her to commune with the spirits of the dead, enabling her to track down the criminals she pursues as a trainee in the Provost Guard of the kingdom of Tortall.2 And in Justine Larbalestier’s Magic or Madness trilogy, the protagonist, Reason Cansino, is a mathematical genius who inherits her access to magic from her maternal grandparents.3 The narratives of these fantasy novels hinge on magical abilities possessed by young girls who are at first ignorant of their special powers. Their magic brings with it ethical choices; for instance, how and for what reasons to use their abilities and to what extent their magic impacts on intersubjective relations. These narratives of magic locate girls in settings where they exercise power over non-magic characters and entities. But magic is not merely a matter of casting spells or creating effects; rather, these novels deploy tropes of magic to comment on or advocate girls’ agency and independence in the real world.
