ABSTRACT
In her essay ‘The Child and the Shadow’, Ursula Le Guin discusses the interplay between fantasy literature — especially stories that centre on adolescent protagonists — and the Jungian concepts of the unconscious and shadow-selves. For Le Guin, these young fantasy characters occupy a special place in relation to a developing understanding of their shadow-self.
For the shadow stands on the threshold. We can let it bar the way to the creative depths of the unconscious, or we can let it lead us to them. For the shadow is not simply evil. It is inferior, primitive, awkward, animallike, childlike; powerful, vital, spontaneous. It’s not weak and decent […] it’s dark and hairy and unseemly; but, without it, the person is nothing. What is a body that casts no shadow? Nothing, a formlessness, two-dimensional, a comic-strip character. The person who denies his own profound relationship with evil denies his own reality. He cannot do, or make; he can only undo, unmake. (Le Guin 1980, 64)
In this chapter I examine the significance of the shadow-self in the representation of the child/adolescent heroines of Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan (1972; the second book of her Earthsea trilogy) and N. K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky (2017; the final novel of her Broken Earth trilogy). Le Guin engages directly with Jungian myth and symbol in her fiction. Jemisin, without directly referring to Le Guin’s understanding of the shadow-self, nevertheless presents a character that in many ways echoes or mirrors Le Guin’s. Both characters are positioned as shadow/other, as separate, and as dangerous; both evidence a connection to the earth and to ‘dark’ powers and are linked with oppositions such as making and unmaking, darkness and light. I will consider how, as female adolescents, these characters disrupt the typical structures of the ‘hero’s journey’. Finally, I will examine the ways both authors resolve their narratives through the connections their child/adolescent heroines forge with their shadow-selves, connections that allow them to claim their authentic selves and, as Le Guin suggests, create their own realities.
