“When Women Were Dragons” by Kelly Barnhill is one of those novels you generally agree with because of their good intentions… And then you discover that your agreement is indeed more in general than in detail. Thus, this post will be more like a short analysis than a review, because in artistic terms, it’s a good novel. Its style is original, its protagonists are likeable, and the premise of the erased 1950s history is pretty good. However, it’s also a story that (like many others, honestly) shows that American pop feminism isn’t for all women and won’t fulfill all their needs.
“When Women Were Dragons” is still a subtle story, compared to most speculative fiction I’ve recently read. The metaphor of dragon women is simple, signifying freedom and escape, but it plays out well. Neither are the lesbian love stories tokenistic in this novel; they feel like a good, believable representation. However, the story hides not only these gems but also fallacies. I am glad that Barnhill’s book is still more complicated than most fantasy novels nowadays. But if it is better, it makes you wish it were even better.
So, what may ring different than the author intended? To sum up, the issues of work and education aren’t portrayed as brilliantly as you may think.
One of the symbols of ever-present sexism is the story of the heroine’s mother. She, you see, was an excellent math student, probably in the 1940s, but neither was her talent appreciated nor used. First, she was bullied in college, and then she quit work for her family’s sake, which she regretted. There are two problems with this storyline.
You see, our heroine’s mother wasn’t just a good student. She was brilliant. She could have been a great mathematician or economist. So what? Do we have to create genial, educationally perfect characters to prove that women always deserved higher education? Do you have to be a genius to study? Nope. Another thing is that, back then, higher education for women was a middle- and upper-class’ thing. This says nothing about the lived experience of working-class women in the 1950s, primary and secondary educated. And here is the thing: Those women’s work was often so hard that they saw the possibility of being a stay-at-home housewife as a privilege. I know it may be hard for us to understand, but we don’t have to agree with people from the past to understand their reasons.
Here is another layer of this story. Those working-class women were either BIPoC or poor whites. Guess if we meet women of colour or working-class white women in this story. Nope. Everything is about the white middle class. And the experience of the white middle class isn’t universal. What if other women’s experiences don’t fit the thesis? The worse for the experience. This isn’t intersectional feminism. This is your average pop feminism, and it’s quite visible in another aspect of the story: the framing.
Being a middle-class housewife in the 1950s is the pinnacle of oppression here, and men are only oppressor figures. The father of our protagonist… Well, he is a fairy-tale father—cartoonishly bad. Sorry, but I don’t need a cartoonish Bad Parent in a novel that was presumably intended for a broader audience. Hello, neither do children need cartoonishly bad characters in stories. What happens in “When Women Were Dragons” when the father doesn’t give a damn isn’t awful just on the plot level. It’s awful on the level of constructing a novel. It doesn’t mean that I haven’t seen such tropes in books before. I’ve seen them many times. But in a story that has so many good elements, every shortcoming is more disappointing and irritating.
Left Hand of Fiction 