When Women Were Dragons, Kelly Barnhill, 2022
*resolutely screams into megahorn* Author Kelly Barnhill is deserving of MUCH more hype! It is my personal vocation to bring When Women Were Dragons up from 3.82 stars on Goodreads, and put her name onto booktok (how is there barely any booktok talk about her?! Preposterous).
Barnhill’s prose is clear, controlled, beautifully sensuous. Her scenes are lush with atmosphere, we care deeply for her protagonist, and her novel’s ending is both happy and believable. What more can we ask for? The novel is a microcosm for the absurdity of government censorship—how it creates stigmatization of natural female functions, how it catalysts and normalizes the management of female bodies, how it systemically appeals to patriarchy. The novel analogizes the formidable strength of sisterhood (that being by blood as well as any two ladies loving each other) and, by the metaphor of dragons, the novel embodies the daunting beauty and power that is to be a woman! There’s also notes of how someone who’s been subject to generational misogyny may be apprehensive to change, which is [probably] the novel’s greatest part because its plot stays true to how difficult it is to unlearn troublesome ideas pestered in childhood.
When Women Were Dragons is a political fairy tale about female empowerment, and Kelly Barnhill killed it at writing up a whimsy, fable-like, historical-feeling world.
Okokok
Alex tells the story of her youth, before her world was able to acknowledge the greatest strength of women—they have the power to metamorphosize into dragons when they reach some consummate point in emotion and rage. The “Mass Dragoning of 1955” is a phenomenon that Alex’s world is unable to speak of. She compares this to men talking about a women’s period, where they’ll blush with disgust contorting into their features. Dragoning was seen as too feminine, as “taboo,” so despite 642,987 women transitioning and flying away (often burning their husbands to cinders before so), the event was heeded to in media as if with a muzzle. This is 642,987 families suddenly without a mother, a daughter, a sibling, a wife, unable to talk about it. Many “house fires” were published as the explanation in papers and on news shows. Of course there were some real accounts of what happened, but they were shushed away as being lewd and profane.
Alex was in the third grade when the Mass Dragoning occurred. The teachers were whispering, the day was tense, the windows were drawn, the children were told to be good, to keep their heads down on their papers. They were told not to look at the sky. It’s the same story we’ve all heard many times when people recount their experience of the day in which some tragedy occurred. Fearful, confused, discomposed. Alex’s mother didn’t dragon (verb), which is later wondered about and explained by either her mother’s cancer or possibly that she chose to stay human for the sake of Alex. But her Aunt Marla did dragon. Alex’s baby cousin Beatrice was retrieved from Aunt Marla’s home that same day, and Alex was told that Beatrice has always been her sister. Aunt Marla was erased, had never existed. Alex, eight years old, knew that this, like many things in her home, was something to be silent about. From this point on in the novel, Beatrice is Alex’s sister.
Alex’s mother dies of cancer when Alex is fifteen. Within that same month, her father brings her and Beatrice to an apartment on the other side of town. He says he will send them a monthly check but they are on their own. This storyline not only elevates the novel’s fairy tale feel by use of the orphan trope, but it allows the novel to discuss how generational cycles are reproduced. Alex, no longer only a sister, now also caretaker and mother, is raising Beatrice on her own. Beatrice is imaginative, filled with energy, and has, more than most children, an internal urge to dragon. She’s insolent in that she won’t censor herself against her female desire. She talks about seeing dragons, plays pretend as a dragon, draws dragons on school papers. Alex, with the full knowledge that silence is wrong, is fiercely afraid of allowing Beatrice to embrace it. Her awareness and guilt, yet her inability to change it, renders strongly to the narrative. Alex says on at least three different occasions that her voice is sounding more and more like her mother’s (let it be known, too, that her mother was never a negative figure, just a woman who settled). When she shames Beatrice for her fascination with dragons, she mostly feels ashamed of herself.
Slowly the world changes and the dragons begin to return; they’re seen around town, hanging on roofs, hanging by trees. This creates a culture shift, two opposing sides, protests with signage that say our bodies, our choice, the issue of “christendom” versus “monstrous nature,” you know, the whole 9 yards, importantly so. The town librarian teaches Alex the power in research (we LOVE a librarian, man), and encourages Alex to go for further education even though her father says that’s not what women are good for. And then it’s time for prom.
(Little tangent but I love this. I love the way the novel talks about such macro-scaled important things, yet the protagonist can still be anxious about her imbecile date to senior prom. There’s also a few pages when Alex is in seventh grade that she becomes embarrassed by noticing her sweat and there’s talk of how uncomfortable it is when our breasts first bud and we get pimples and our periods. The novel isn’t afraid of taboo things, and by putting them within the same vein as something as magnitudinous as dragoning, it really has the effect of showing that our bodies are wonders. At this point, Alex also falls in love with her best friend Sonja, which I’ll add is done beautifully, as the novel doesn’t make having an lgbt protagonist feel like anything to congratulate, it’s just lovely and sweet. Oh, and I’ll also add here that the same thing is done with what it is to actually be a dragon. These dragons can live on the freaking moon if that’s what they choose, but they can also wear purses and cook dinner and knit blankets in large houses. They speak like they did before their transition, they’re the same as they were, just larger, more full. They are these monstrous fantasies, but simultaneously regular women).
Okay. And then it’s time for prom. This scene is fucking fantastic. Alex has never been characterized as a social butterfly, but at the prom she finds herself as part of a group of girls, clustering (gosh I could cry). Girls are leaving their male dates to the side, girls are “glittering,” confidently. It isn’t said but we know they feel beautiful. They’re complimenting each other’s dresses, each other’s shoes; they’re moving, dancing together as one energetic force. And then, AND THEN, another dragoning occurs. It’s like the dance was one big sistering, and there’s power in numbers, and rage begets rage, and the dance floor is ruled by some electricity, some change, and then they’re unbound to their bodies and there’s something sensual or desirous and then bam, one by one they’re dragoning.
Alex wonders why she doesn’t dragon. The novel simplifies this down to choice. I understand it that she has a subconscious loyalty to her mother, or some unidentified, deeply laden fear of freedom. This is sad, actually, but it’s a reality. Anyway, if she’s one character who doesn’t get a best case scenario ending, Beatrice is one who does. Beatrice dragons, euphorically so. She grows into a speaker/activist for dragons—this makes Alex proud. The world is changing for the better when Alex passes away in her old age as a widowed woman with a garden, listening to cicadas while thinking of things in retrospect. She has a dragon daughter/sister/cousin as caretaker. What a dream!!
Ahhh so much fun and so much meaning and such beautiful prose!! I give this a 4/5 stars (instead of a full 5) because I lost some rapport with it toward the falling climax, but I suspect that’s more to do with things on the receiving end rather than the book itself.
Trigger Warning in here for some burdensome misogynistic male voices that may piss you off.
*shouts with megahorn once more* Quotes Quotes Quotes!
I think, perhaps, none of us know our mothers, not really.
The universe became more of itself once Beatrice was in it.
My required presence at the dinner table—to practice social graces, and sit still, and speak only when spoken to—went from a mere annoyance to an interminable chore.
There is nothing lewd about biology, research, or basic facts, gentleman, and you make yourselves fools when you try to classify the quest for understanding as obscene. The only thing more patently obscene than ignorance is willful ignorance. Arrest yourselves.
“I don’t think I’ll be telling my mother,” I said frankly. I explained to them how excellent my mother was at silence.
May my last sorrowful breath be a testament to my wrongs against you, and to the terrible audacity of men.
The sky was so blue it broke my heart and the world smelled of something beginning. We landed in the leaves, which pillowed around us. There were leaves in her bright hair, framing her face. The empty branches held up the sky. I remember how they curled around her head like a crown as she leaned over me, catching her arms and telling me I was her prisoner, and oh, Sonja, what a willing prisoner I was! I remember rolling in the leaves, the whispery rustling sound they made beneath me and the paleness of Sonja’s arms next to the dirt on my own, and the delicacy of Sonja’s tapered fingers next to the stubby brusqueness of my own, and Sonja’s cheek against my cheek and Sonja’s hair in my hair and Sonja’s mouth brushing against my mouth, and oh, Sonja, Sonja, Sonja.
It was November, with its sudden, quaking cold.
“It looks like you thought of everything. Be sure to keep your ideas to yourself.” 😂
Sometimes, all these years later, I do try to be charitable. Maybe he couldn’t bear it. Maybe it hurt too much to watch her slip away. Maybe he wasn’t raised to be a strong man. Maybe he loved her too much to lose her.
My mother was dead. I was the only person awake. People walked back and forth in the hall, but I did not call out.
Others, like my father, simply languished.
Eunice Peters suddenly had teeth made of diamonds. She didn’t seem to notice. One of the nuns began turning green. No one noticed that either. In that tangle of cries and motion, of heat and change, of transformation and velocity, I stood, rooted to the ground, perfectly still. A fixed point in an otherwise chaotic universe. The dragons held vigil. The moment swirled around me. They would all change, I understood, deep in my bones. And I would not. I didn’t know why. But I knew it was true.
Glass shards, hard and bright as memories, rained suddenly down.
It felt nice, actually, being held up by people who loved me. I couldn’t remember the last time this was true.
Sometimes, I feel that we are all tricked by love, and its rigid requirement of pain.
I pick a bowl of ground-cherries and hunt for eggs. And then I rest on the lounge chair in the garden and look at the sky. Birds circle overhead. Nearby, a dog barks. Nearby, an engine hums. I close my eyes and listen to the drone of cicadas, calling to one another from tree to tree. Memory is a strange thing. It reorganizes and connects. It provides context and clarity; it reveals patterns and divergences. It finds the holes in the universe and stitches them closed, tying the threads together in a tight, unbreakable knot. I learned this from my mother. And now I will teach it to you.
