Charlotte Kersten

“Sorrow is no more your name,” Ama announced, her voice louder. “Now I call you Fury.”

Year published: 2018

Categories: YA, fantasy

Summary: Ama awakens in the arms of a handsome prince, remembering nothing of her past or who she is. She is told that she has been rescued from a fearsome dragon, that she is the prince’s Damsel, won through the glory of battle and signifying his right to the throne, destined to become his bride and bear his son. She is told that the danger is past, but nothing could be further from the truth.

My Thoughts: the phase “feminist YA fantasy” sure does get tossed around a lot lately. Most of the time I’ve found these books to be quite disappointing in the feminist sense, in that they mostly revolve around one girl who is more special than all the other girls and wants to be the queen of a country, killing a lot of people in the process. This book is what I’ve been craving the whole time, I think. Its words drop like jewels, deliberate and precise in their fury, the atmosphere of dread growing and growing – this is by no means an easy book to read, but I consider it all the more important to read because of this fact.

Damsel examines the typical dynamics of a fairy tale to tell the story of a sexist world, one that wants a girl to be nothing but a helpless decoration, important as a status symbol and unimportant as a human being, valued only for her capacity to create more male life. Ama learns of duty and she learns of submission, and she learns of the constant contrasting demands that the world makes of women:

Everything was her blame. Too stupid to find her way back to her room. Too effusive with her emotions. Too inquisitive with the kitchen girl. She was too much and not enough, both in the same instant. Too big and too small, too bright and too dull, too affectionate and not affectionate enough.

At the heart of the story is the relationship between Ama and her pet lynx Sorrow. Throughout much of the story Sorrow is what Ama clings to with love and desperation, and ultimately she decides to let the cat go free when she realizes that further confinement and “breaking in” will kill the cat. In the process she renames her Fury and gives her the kind of wild freedom that she cannot find for herself. It’s an effective and tragic metaphor for her own confinement and process of being broken over the story, as well as her eventual act of breaking free. The change from Sorrow to Fury is one of moving from paralysis and hopelessness to action and insistence upon change.

Ama is a revelation of a character. In many ways she is quiet and passive and overwhelmed, which is not surprising because she is learning how to be a person after awakening with no memories and her entire reality being shaped by what Emory tells her- and specifically he tells her that what she wants does not matter, that who she is beyond being his Damsel does not matter. The remarkable thing is that that Ama insists the opposite in her own quiet way: that what she wants matters, that she matters:

“And if something is the way that it has always been, who are we to wish it otherwise? Who are we to want anything at all? Who are we to desire?”

Unbidden, in a flash, came the image of Fury bounding through snow under a bright-blue sky.

“I desire,” said Ama.

What is especially interesting about Damsel is that it is conscious that Ama is both oppressed and privileged at the same time. Notably, when Emory publicly humiliates Ama at one point the queen chastises him only because he treats her as though “she were a scullery maid and not your future queen.” Ama’s relationship with her maid Tillie is also very interesting – at first she thinks that she is being magnanimous to Tillie and putting them on equal footing by asking her to be honest with her, but she realizes that ultimately the power dynamic would still exist in their relationship, and that she would still be asking Tillie to carve away pieces of herself in the same way that Ama is forced to carve away pieces of herself:

That is the way of being a woman, to carve away at herself, to fit herself to the task, but, also, to be able to carve herself in a different way, when a different shape is needed.

Damsel portrays the ugliness that underlies the principle of chivalry and its alleged kindness. This book shows that misogyny comes in many forms, some of them outright cruel and violent and others much more subtle and insidious – and that ultimately, they are two sides of the same coin. Emory’s chivalry makes Ama an object and a conquest, and it engenders his sense of entitlement to her body and the utter control he enacts over her life. The dynamic of violation in the relationship between Ama and Emory is an incredibly difficult one to read, and ultimately it is revealed that the very act of rescuing her was founded in rape. In my review of Le Guin’s Tehanu, I spoke of the way that toxic masculinity builds itself upon false power. The same is true here, and it turns out there are many ways for that power to come tumbling down. In this case, it was a visceral joy to find out.

One thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about is the way that Ama’s liberation ultimately comes about. It reminds me a lot of the final confrontations in Deerskin and Tehanu – the abused girl suddenly discovers a reserve of magical power that was previously unknown, and uses that magic to defeat her abusers and liberate herself once and for all. I can’t help but feel that the use of random magic as these girls’ means of escaping patriarchal control is always a little bit disappointing from a feminist perspective; I’d probably prefer if their liberation came about through a different means other than sudden magic. However, I suppose that you could make the argument that their magic powers can serve as a metaphor for other forms of empowerment.

Overall, though, this book seeped its way into my heart and I know I will be thinking about it for a long time to come. It is disconcerting, visceral and full of the pain and anger that many of us already know all too well. May Sorrow become Fury for every person who reads this book and already knows Ama’s story because it is part of their own.