Lady Hero: Teaching Models of Empowerment in Young Adult Fantasy Literature

This paper illustrates the diversity and complexity of empowerment models through exploring Tamora Pierce and Robin McKinley’s lady heroes. I first discuss how fantasy has historically been a hostile space for female empowerment, in part due to magic being used as an excuse for a lady hero’s success. I also give a brief overview of feminist history and main feminist theories to establish a working definition of empowerment through agency and identify four main models used to gain that agency: individual action, collective action, traditionally male characteristics, and traditionally female characteristics.

Through four character studies, I then illustrate how Pierce and McKinley put pressure on each of these empowerment models. From each author, I focus on two female characters and their mentorship relationship, arguing that each pair has an intentional order in which they “read” each other, either actively improving on or misunderstanding empowerment models. In Song of the Lioness and The Protector of the Small series, Pierce explores the pitfalls of gaining empowerment through individual and traditionally gendered characteristics, prescribing more collective and androgynous strategies. In The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword, McKinley builds a more complex empowerment model designed for older readers. Through her characters’ struggle to understand and explain where their own power comes from, she redefines the definition of agency. That is, she suggests that perceived effort by both the character and the reader is required to achieve true empowerment.

Pierce and McKinley demonstrate how they are committed to providing pragmatic models of empowerment for young readers. Furthermore, they show how the Young Adult genre can circumvent the problematic aspects of the fantasy genre: they repurpose the issues of agency and power inherent in fantasy for their feminist mission rather than casting the genre aside entirely.