Queerness and Hierarchies of Power in The Locked Tomb
I wrote this essay for my sci-fi class and a few people expressed interest in reading it, so I’m posting it! Bear in mind the initial audience I wrote it for isn’t familiar with the series (I cut out some of the straight-up summarizing because if you’re here I’m assuming you’ve read the books, but if the tone seems weird or like its explaining things that are obvious, that’s why). I do use the term “queer” throughout the essay as an umbrella term for LGBTQ experiences, as well as to refer more broadly to non-normative interactions with gender/ gender-like hierarchies. Also, this has spoilers for Gideon the Ninth, Harrow the Ninth AND for the first chapter of Nona the Ninth, so watch out for that. Essay below the cut :)
Though there has been an increase
in LGBTQ representation in popular sci-fi and fantasy, representation that ends
at same-sex attraction fails to actually explore queerness as an experience or
identity, or, most importantly, as a lens through which to see the world.
Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb series, however, is impossible to read without
exploring that lens, and as such it is able to explore queerness on more than
one level. I intend to analyze those explorations through the lens of queer
theory and apply that analysis to how we imagine normative power hierarchies as
a whole.
The queerness of the series is overt and unmistakable by the
beginning of the first book. The protagonist, Gideon, is a butch lesbian. This
is a characterization that makes this series distinct from many others of the
genre; LGBTQ representation often takes the form of
attraction and relationships between characters of the same gender, but does
little to explore other nuances of queer identity and experience. From the
beginning of Gideon the Ninth, however, Gideon’s queerness is clear by
her personality alone, outside of any relationship. She is gender-nonconforming
both as a woman and as a cavalier; she is muscular, her narration is blunt and
often crass, she resents the elaborate sacramental face paint that she is required
to wear, and her attraction to women is shameless and unmistakable.
Swordsmanship is what she excels at, but rather than the delicate rapiers that
cavaliers traditionally use, she prefers to fight with a huge two-handed sword.
Even outside of Gideon, there is an overt queerness to the setting and many of
its characters. Of the first book’s ten central female characters, at least six
are attracted to other women in some capacity. Not only this, but their
attraction to one another is framed as normal and assumed; there is no
circumstance where anyone needs to come out.
In this setting, traditional and
patriarchal gender roles take less precedence in the power dynamics between the
characters. But that does not mean that other parallel or allegorical
hierarchies are absent. Though the series has checked more than enough boxes
for queer representation, it continues to explore queerness by a broader
definition, by establishing new normative hierarchies of gender and power and
exploring the ways in which they are subverted. In the absence of traditional
patriarchal heterosexuality, the characters in the book exist within the
dynamic of necromancer and cavalier. Initially, we will explore how Gideon and
her necromancer exist within this dynamic, and the degree to which her
treatment of the dynamic is non-normative.
Gideon was not trained as a
cavalier, but when there is no one else to fill the role, she has to hastily
learn those traditions and behaviors. Already, she is in the position that many
queer people find themselves in—she must learn to successfully imitate
conformity to a role she doesn’t identify with. In order to do this, she must
learn to fight with the delicate rapier, as opposed to her heavy,
military-grade two-hander. She has to learn to apply daily the sacramental face
paint of the Ninth House, which it is made clear that she hates wearing. She
pretends to have taken a vow of silence, as her crass jokes and mannerisms
would make the ruse immediately obvious. All of this she does at the command of
her necromancer, Harrowhark, who is the heir of the Ninth House, who conforms
fully and perfectly to the standards of a necromancer, and whom Gideon hates.
When Gideon does conform to these standards, she performs exaggerated caricatures
of devotion to Harrowhark in ways that highlight her nonconformity, such as
saying things like “I am your creature, gloom mistress, I serve you with
fidelity as big as a mountain, penumbral lady…I am your sworn sword, night
boss.” (GtN 151). She pairs exaggerated, ironic declarations of
loyalty with nicknames that make fun of Harrowhark’s necromantic pretentiousness.
This reaction is a familiar one—for many people forced to embody gender roles
that they don’t identify with, irony is the most comfortable solution.
No power hierarchy, least of all a patriarchal hierarchy, is simple. Hierarchies that deal with both power and
identity are at risk of being oversimplified into a win-or-lose model, but I
think that that is a misrepresentation. To imagine patriarchy as a game in
which men oppress women for their own gain assumes that men are the winners in
the dynamic. In reality, I would argue that there is no winner. I think the
most helpful way to imagine patriarchy is as a hierarchy, but not one
with men at the top. In fact, I would argue that no one is at the top,
except for, perhaps, patriarchy itself. In a patriarchal model, women are
trapped as the objects of desire; their bodies exist to be exploited and
consumed. The objective ideal of patriarchal femininity is characterized by
smallness, by the ways in which women are available recipients of power or
sexual desire. Men, however, are trapped too. They are trapped as the desirers,
divorced from emotion and intimacy, except in those instances where they are
desiring women or engaging in violence with other men. The objective ideal of patriarchal
masculinity is characterized by the ways in which men exert physical and sexual
power over both women and other men, with varying degrees of associated
violence. Both men and women are rewarded for the ways in which they conform to
these ideals and punished for the ways in which they fail. Critically, however,
those objective ideals cannot be reached. Judith Butler, in Performative
Acts and Gender Constitution, describes gender as “a performance with
clearly punitive consequences…” explaining that “those who fail to do their
gender right are regularly punished.” Butler continues, arguing that “there is
neither an ‘essence’ that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective
ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact…” (Butler 552). There
is no way to successfully embody normative masculinity in ways that will not
cause oneself harm, just as there is no way to successfully embody normative femininity,
because both of these standards exist somewhat divorced from the complexities
of real personhood. Though queerness, by nature, defies definition, I am defining it in part as the instances in which people fail to conform to these hierarchies, and how, in doing so, they construct and embody non-normative models of gender.
In the power dynamic between
necromancer and cavalier, even the most normative, conforming participants find
themselves punished by the ways in which they have failed to conform perfectly,
often by the inevitable incompatibility of that perfection/ideal and their
personhood. The hatred between Harrowhark and Gideon is mutual and codependent,
and is perhaps one of the only ways in which Harrowhark fails to conform to her
role. This power dynamic continues to function as an allegory for patriarchy,
in which Harrowhark benefits from the power she holds over Gideon, but
nevertheless is both trapped and harmed by her role in it. Because Harrowhark’s
existence as a necromancer depends on her exploiting people like Gideon, she is
consumed by and beholden to the guilt of her position. She resents it, and
because she has no one except for Gideon, she has hated her for her entire
life. Likewise, men benefit from their position in a patriarchy, but
nevertheless are trapped within it, and harmed by the roles they are asked to
embody.
Even the first Lyctors, who worked
alongside God since The Great Resurrection, who created the
framework and thus should conform to it perfectly, are hurt endlessly by it.
The first Lyctors are characterized as bitter and hateful in general and toward
one another. Though many of the details of their history and origins are vague,
we know that the love they had for their cavaliers has taken the form of
ten-thousand-year-old grief, even as their necromantic power continues to feed
on those souls. One of the Lyctors says, referring to another, “I never saw her
cry except once…the day after…When she became a Lyctor. I said There was no
alternative. She said…We had the choice to stop.” (HtN 121).
How else are these dynamics complicated
in the other houses, and within Lyctorhood? We see several examples throughout
both Gideon the Ninth and its sequel, Harrow the Ninth, but some
stand out more than others. Putting Gideon and Harrowhark’s Lyctorhood aside
(for they do, tragically, achieve it), there are several other characters that
stand out and complicate our understanding of the dynamic. The characters that
most clearly subvert the dynamic of necromancer and cavalier are the pair from
the Sixth House: Palamedes and Camilla. Throughout the first book, they are depicted
much more as equals than many of the other duos. They are lifelong friends, and
though there is no romance between them, they are close and familiar in a way
that makes Gideon uncomfortable to see, as her own necromancer-cavalier relationship
is so fraught. In the first book, the characters face a series of tests which
introduce many of the component parts of Lyctorhood. In several of these tests, the
necromancer is not yet asked to kill their cavalier but is required to use
their body or soul in some way, and the cavalier is required to submit to that
process. Palamedes is one of the first necromancers to realize what Lyctorhood will eventually
require, and refuses to engage with any test that has the potential to harm
Camilla. When she does come to harm, he cares for her wounds. At the end of the
first book, he sacrifices himself to save several of the other characters,
Camilla among them. In all of these instances, he refuses to conform to a
dynamic which would put him in a position to hurt her. Though neither of these
characters are explicitly queer in the traditional sense, the way that they
subvert the dynamic of Lyctorhood functions as a queer-ing of the normative hierarchy.
Their dynamic exists in contrast to
that of the Third House. Long before it is necessary, the necromancer Ianthe
uses the body of her cavalier, Naberius, as fuel for her necromancy. “At one
point [Ianthe] beckoned Naberius forward and, in a feat that nearly brought up
Gideon’s dinner…ate him: she bit off a hunk of his hair, she chewed off
a nail, she brought her incisors down on the heel of his hand. He submitted to
all this without noise.” (GtN 188). Ianthe is the only one of the
necromancers who willingly and intentionally becomes a lyctor. Her relationship
with her cavalier is antagonistic, but both of them know their roles; she treats
him almost like an annoying pet—dismissing him, mocking him, nicknaming him
“Babs”. This hardly matches the loyalty and devotion we see in the other pairs,
but as a result, Ianthe is the perfect candidate for Lyctorhood. She was
consuming her cavalier before she was even aware of what Lyctorhood would
entail. However, though she is rewarded for conforming to and embodying that
hierarchy, she does not escape the harm entirely. She has a twin sister,
Coronabeth, who is neither necromancer nor cavalier, but who trained in the
ways of a cavalier in the desperate hope that her sister would choose her
instead of Naberius. When the others find that Ianthe has killed Naberius, they
also find Coronabeth, “eyes swollen from crying,” sobbing and “utterly
destroyed.” She tells them, “She took Babs,” seeming in every way as if she is
mourning the death of Naberius. But then she continues, “And who even cares
about Babs? Babs! She could have taken me.” (GtN 394). In
the second book, Coronabeth offers her life again to a different necromancer,
one who she has loved since childhood. She says, “Save me…bind me to you, or
who knows where I will go? What throne will I mount, if you don’t bind me
down?” (HtN 551). Again, she is refused because the necromancer in
question loves her. Coronabeth is heartbroken by the refusal to take her life
because, as someone in the position of a cavalier, the only way she knows how
to love someone is through literal self-sacrifice. Ianthe loves her sister more
than anything else, but she is divided from her by her refusal to kill her.
Even Ianthe, who embodies the power hierarchy perfectly, is harmed by the structure
of Lyctorhood and its incompatibility with the complex love she feels for her
sister.
The Locked Tomb deals with two notions of queerness:
the first is the representation of LGBTQ characters whose identities don’t
conform to traditional, patriarchal ideas of gender, and the second is the
subversions of the normative power hierarchies that are unique to the story’s
setting. These two levels of exploration don’t occur completely separately,
however. In fact, as the story develops, we begin to see the interaction between
these two kinds of queerness literally embodied in certain characters. In the
third book of the series, Nona the Ninth (I will reference only the
first chapter, as the full text has yet to be released), there are at least two
characters whose Lyctorhood has been performed incorrectly in some way. Palamedes,
the Sixth House necromancer who sacrificed himself in the first book, used
necromancy to prevent his soul from truly dying. When we encounter him again in
Nona the Ninth, his soul is living in his cavalier’s body, alongside
Camilla’s own. Again, in normal Lyctorhood, the cavalier’s body is killed, and
their soul is consumed by the necromancer, effectively killing the cavalier
outright. But in the instance of the Sixth House pair, it was the necromancer’s
body that died, and both their souls live in the cavalier’s body, neither
consumed by the other. In every way, this pair subverts and outright reverses
the standard operation of Lyctorhood.
Likewise, there is another Lyctor who
failed to completely consume the soul of his cavalier. When the soul of that necromancer
was killed, his cavalier’s soul, named Pyrrha, surfaced and now lives in his
body. Palamedes lives in the body of his cavalier, who is a woman, and Pyrrha
lives in a body that previously belonged to her male necromancer. Pyrrha is
very much a woman whose body would be traditionally thought of as male, and Muir
doesn’t shy away from describing her as such. In the first chapter of Nona
the Ninth, for example, she is described as “wearing pyjama pants and a
string vest and no shirt, so the orange glow of the hot plate ring lit up all
the scars on her wiry arms.” Later in that same scene, she
shaves her face. In the case of Palamedes and especially Pyrrha, their
subversion of the Lyctorhood dynamic results in bodies that embody gender in
non-normative ways.
(note: that bit was kind of hellish to write, because my audience is unfamiliar with the series and I’m already cutting out so much of the convoluted plot, so I just did my best to leave out the fact that two essential characters have the exact same name lmao. In any case, that is why I did not name G1deon here.)
The phrase that repeats throughout
the series is “one flesh, one end.” It refers to the bond between a cavalier
and a necromancer, and it is the oath they make to each other. As Gideon sees
cavaliers and necromancers who care for one another deeply and as equals, it is
implied that this phrase refers to the epitome of devotion to one another, a
dynamic in which the cavalier and the necromancer are equals. However,
as the true process of Lyctorhood is revealed, the phrase’s meaning turns dark,
referring instead to a process in which the necromancer’s body and power is
both the flesh and the end. However, though Lyctorhood grimly recontextualizes
this phrase, it doesn’t change the interactions that Gideon sees between many
of the cavaliers and necromancers. At one point, the Fourth House cavalier asks
Gideon if she and Harrowhark have been paired for a long time. Before she
answers, Gideon sees Palamedes bandaging Camilla’s wounds, and sees the
necromancer from the Fourth House braiding his cavalier’s hair, and she
“contemplate[s] the sight of the growing braid, and the sight of Palamedes
squeezing the noxious contents of a blue dropper into Camilla’s wound… [as] Harrowhark
lurked next to them, pointedly not looking at Gideon…[Gideon] still didn’t
understand what she was meant to do or think or say: what duty really meant,
between a cavalier and a necromancer, between a necromancer and a cavalier.”
(GtN 275-6). Though the dynamic between the two is modeled after a
relationship built around harm and unequal power, the relationships that occur
within that framework do not always emulate that harm or imbalance. This
reflects a real phenomenon, in which the ways that we might define gender
within a patriarchal framework are disproven by many of the people embodying
those identities.
In some ways, the
dynamics of gender do exist as a result of the framework of patriarchy; that
the ways by which we define femininity or masculinity revolve around their roles
within heterosexuality. As with any categorization
of identity, however, there are always people whose performance and engagement with the
category defy the bounds of its definition. Likewise, though the normative
necromancer-cavalier relationship is epitomized by the self-sacrificial,
grief-filled, exploitative model of Lyctorhood, there are versions of that
dynamic that defy that definition, that subvert it or refuse the harm that is
seemingly inherent to it. The pairs that seem to embody the initial
understanding (and not the later, darker meaning) of “one flesh, one end” most
strongly are pairs such as Palamedes and Camilla, who would refuse to ascend to
Lyctorhood once they know the cost.
In deconstructing the patriarchal
framework that defines femininity and masculinity, I often feel that the
question is: what is salvageable here? Is anything? The Locked Tomb series
argues, in part, that we are shaped by our broken cultures, and that to accept
the rewards of such hierarchies is to inevitably hurt one another. There is a
cynical way of looking at it, and that cynicism is characterized in Harrow
the Ninth by a letter left by an enemy commander, a character who hates
everything that the nine houses stand for. She says, “The only thing our
civilization can ever learn from yours is that when our backs are to the wall
and our towers are falling all around us and we are watching ourselves burn, we
rarely become heroes.” (HtN 403). This commander, however, is
characterized almost entirely by her hatred, and though her letter sums up this
argument well, I believe that it is only half of what the series is saying. The
Locked Tomb says that there are things here that are salvageable;
even if we are shaped by our broken cultures, even with our backs against the
wall, there are ways to reject that harm without leaving ourselves and our
identities behind. It argues that the nature of humanness is that we, as
people, will always love one another in ways that fail those hierarchies. Though
the hierarchies of identity, gender, and power only ever give us options to
love in ways that hurt one another, our personhood is complex in ways that
makes queerness and queer love inevitable.
