Alanna: The First Adventure

I’ve forgotten what it’s like to read a fantasy story after so many semesters of reading Victorian and American literature. The language and plots of those works are so formal and mature. In Alanna, there are morals, but they aren’t overbearing on the reader and the stories and characters aren’t as dark. I will say that the language and sentence structure implies that the book was written for an age range in early young adult fiction.

The fantasy aspect is appealing to children and teenagers. That would be the thing that I would focus in if I were a teacher. The story is light and uncomplicated. The motifs of gender-swapping and rebelling against societal expectations are what people like to read about in general. Shakespeare used it many times and his audiences have loved it to this day.

“If you want to pay for those lives you do take, use your healing magic. Use it all you can, or you won’t cleanse your soul of death for centuries. It’s harder to heal than it is to kill. The Mother knows why, but you’ve a gift for both.” (11) I see an important message about balance in this passage. It would be damaging to one’s personality and soul to become obsessed with killing and fighting. If a knight were to be killing all the time without giving thought to the lives that he is taking away, then that knight’s sense of humanity would be stripped from him. So the fact that Maude warns against this is important. If Alanna practiced healing magic, then she would be able to balance her ideals.

“I’ll speak with you later, Ralon,” the dark-haired boy instructed. “In my rooms, before lights-out.” When Ralon hesitated, Jon added in a soft, icy voice, “You’ve been dismissed, Malven.” The first thing I thought of when I read this line was the almost homosexual overtone. I realize that this probably isn’t what the author intended for us to read into it, but the line just seems to be extraneous. The text would have been fine if it had been, “I’ll speak with you later,” but for the Prince to then emphasize the “in my rooms, before lights-out,” it sounds a little more suggestive.

“She even saw a troop of women dressed in armor, the guard of the Temple of the Great Mother Goddess. These women were armed with great double-headed axes, and they knew how to use them. Their duty was to keep men from ever setting foot on ground sacred to the Great Mother.” (23) This Goddess system of religion is really intriguing to me. You would think that because a female is the divine deity for this world, that the political system would be more matriarchal as well. Throughout real history, women have been oppressed since the Dark Ages because God is male and because of the Adam and Eve tale in which Eve was to blame for the fall of man. Thus, women were to blame for most of society’s problems.

Perhaps the religion of Pierce’s world doesn’t have a canon like our world, however, so although the deity is a female, males have worked their way to having dominance in the political system.

Question: I see some inconsistency with the informality of speech. Some characters, particulary Coram and Maude in the beginning, speak with a country accent despite the fact that they have been trained in magic and knighthood. Coram even said that he was a knight in the capital city for the king. Why is it that he still talks with informal English?