Personal Empowerment and Political Structures: An Approach to Fantasy Fiction’s Engagement with (Post-)Colonialism and Gender

Abstract

Every form of fiction reflects, in some way, how real-world societies are being perceived. Fantasy works are no exclusion to this, no matter how disconnected to real-world societies they may seem. In this thesis I read the Fantasy works A Game of Thrones and two novels of the Inheritance Trilogy through Dieter Petzold’s Applicative mode. I apply the structures of society presented in these two works to political structures of real-world societies. I argue that Joseph Slaughter’s framework of the connection between the individual and society can be the basis for a structural approach to reading in the applicative mode. The way in which characters gain power in their societies, a process of empowerment, reflects the underlying power structures: who can get power, who cannot, and how? In this way, Fantasy works can reflect and/or engage with the structures that might be supposed to be inherent to society. The structures I focus on are those of (post-) colonialism and gender: how are these structures presented in the novels through character empowerment, and how can this be applied to our world? I argue that in A Game of Thrones power is presented as militarized, the ability to rule over others, which is (almost) only accessible to high-born, white men. In Jon’s narrative we see that this presented in political spaces that where power can exclusively be gained by white, high-born men. At first, this is an obstacle for him in his process of empowerment, but as he gets to the Wall, where this obstacle is eliminated, he gains as a natural, single ruler. Deanerys grew up in Essos, the Other to the western Self of Wester, a view that Deanerys keeps in place as her imagined home is Westeros. Essos and the Dothraki remain the Other, even though Deanerys becomes the ‘Khaleesi’ of the Dothraki, they are still otherized. Deanerys’ obstacle on her way to power is the men in her life, her brother and her husband, because her power always depends on theirs. In these ways, A Game of Thrones underpins the general notions of (Western) society that power is the ability to rule over others, though willingly, that people of colour must always be in the position of the ‘other’, and are also orientalised. This in itself underpins the framework of thought that enabled European Colonialism. It presents the constructs of Orientalism and the Patriarchy as inescapable and inherent to society. The Inheritance Trilogy, however, shifts the perspective of the Other and the Self. Yeine is from a poor, colonized country of brown-skinned people and this is constructed as her home. Her process of empowerment is not one in which the power that is gained is rulership over others. Rather, Yeine refuses to the power of the colonizing Arameri, and with this subverts the idea that militarized power is what needs to be gained. This refusal is what gets her to be empowered in the end: the idea of power in itself is subverted. This is continued in Oree’s narrative, who has a hybrid identity, is in equal in her relation to men and completely subverts any static binary terms at all and her empowerment is not on of gaining power over others, but over herself. The Inheritance Trilogy, in these ways, subverts the idea that structures based on a concept of inferior/superior must be inherent to society at all, and subverts the very idea of power on which this concept is based.