Wheel of Time letter No. 1: Where I ask an important question

(To Robert, written August 20, 2020)

Last night I finished Fires of Heaven and this morning I started Lord of Chaos. Here’s what’s happening:

Lanfear shows up and tries to kill Rand for sleeping with another woman. Moiraine tackles Lanfear and they both fall through the portal of a ter’angreal and everyone assumes they’re dead. Rand assembles some Aiel and they go to Caemlyn to defeat Rahvin. Meanwhile, Nynaeve encounters Moghedian in Tel’aran’rhiod and leashes her with an a’dam. They travel to Caemlyn and help Rand battle Rahvin and kill him with balefire. 

The first thing I was thinking when I read this section was when Moiraine wrote a letter to Rand before her “death.” She said she discovered three possible outcomes of an encounter with Lanfear after visiting Rhuidean. It made me think of Moiraine as Dr. Strange. And then I was thinking that Nynaeve might be She-Hulk, since she can only channel while angry. Which Marvel superheroes (or villains???) would the Wheel of Time characters be? I was thinking Lan might be Captain America and Mat could be Iron-Man. Rand might be a villain, though! He’s been conquering various territories with impunity, and Nynaeve noted at the end that his face seemed hard, cold and emotionless. 

I felt again, by the end of Fires of Heaven, that Robert Jordan has some feminist leanings, but he’s not quite there yet. Rand has a big existential crisis around killing women and sending women to war, which I think reflects more of Robert Jordan’s own military experience. One of Rand’s spear-maidens approaches him before the fight with Rahvin and says that he shouldn’t feel bad about sending women to war, and that the spear-maidens “carry his honor,” that he was dishonoring them by refusing to let them fight. I think women in the US military can be in combat roles now, but there’s always been a big debate about drafting women and allowing them to fight. Since Wheel of time is set in a theoretically matriarchal society, Rand’s reluctance to allow women to fight and refusal to fight/kill women still shows the ways the book clings to patriarchal ideas outside the narrative. Rand’s conversation with his spear-maiden shows how inextricably  linked a woman’s sense of self is with what she does for a living. More broadly, I think the narrative asks the question: Should men be gatekeepers to who a woman is? Some other story beats between Rand and the Aiel illustrate how society outside of the Aiel Waste is aggressively patriarchal. Aviendha remarks to Rand that he should be allowed to grieve Moiraine’s death, but “some wetlanders still believe men shouldn’t grieve.” It’s odd that these moments are broken up by Mat’s “Women, amirite?” incredulity. These “comedic” moments blunt the seriousness and pointedness of the questions Robert Jordan asks about masculinity and its role in society.

I’m not at all convinced Moiraine is dead. Maybe I’m being a “meta-reader” but this series was written before every author callously killed off main characters a la George RR Martin. The book spends a lot of time setting up the idea of lives being cyclical, of major players in “the pattern” dying and being born again into new lives, the way Birgitte was. My pre-guess is that Moiraine will either show up again somewhere else, or that she’ll be reborn into a new life, possibly as Faile and Perrin’s daughter. I’m kind of skeptical now that the TV series will revolve around Moiraine as much as the creators say it will. It could just be that Rosamund Pike was the biggest name they could cast, and so they’re framing the series around her.

I started “Lord of Chaos” this morning, and I’m still pretty set on finishing the series. The biggest annoyance so far is that Moghedian is pronounced differently between the two books (MOG-a-dean in Fires and mo-GIH-dee-an in Lord) Do I think the Wheel of Time series is the best thing I’ve ever read? No. But it’s entertaining enough, and still good to knit to. And it’s interesting to examine the feminist issues in the book and try to determine where the author actually stands on women. He certainly has some ideas!