Conservatism in Fantasy: Ursula Le Guin

Abstract

Most fantasies seek to conserve those things in which they take delight: indeed it is one of their weaknesses that they are tempted not to admit loss. Their frequent looking to the past is conservative in itself: and the order to which they look and seek to re-create is usually a medieval and hierarchic one, founded on the continuance of the status quo. Many of them portray the preservation of an existing state of things as their central subject. C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra describes the maintenance of the innocence of a Venusian Adam and Eve, and his The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe portrays the recovery of the original condition of a land called Narnia through the Christ-like sacrifice of the lion Aslan. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, while admitting historical change, is concerned with the survival of being and individualism in Middle-earth, imaged in the destruction of the annihilating power of Sauron and the restoration of the rightful king to the throne of Gondor. E. Nesbit’s fairy tales are conservative in that they often end with the return of parents or the recovery of an amulet or the restoration ofa descendant to true inheritance. Charles Williams’s novels portray the removal of a supernatural irruption which has itselfilluminated the true character ofreality. Many fantasies end in disenchantment and restoration of ‘normality’.