on feminization, heteronormativity, & the wit: excerpt from queerness and homophobia in robin hobb’s farseer trilogies, peter melville
If his designation as a royal bastard exposes him to danger and to the machinations of people who would seek to eliminate him from the royal line, then Fitz’s risk is compounded by his inclination toward the Wit. Wit magic is widely demonized and subject to all kinds of mythological distortion by the people and cultural history of the Six Duchies. Popular tradition perpetuates misassumptions about a Wit practitioner’s abilities—including the capacity to shape-shift between human and animal forms—and even prescribes ritualized methods for murdering people accused of being Witted. One piece of inherited wisdom suggests that “if a houndsman suspects that a dog boy is using the Wit to defile and divert the hounds to his own ends,” the boy should be carefully watched; but if the hounds “leave off” their natural breeding instincts or “turn aside from a blood trail and lie quiet at the boy’s word,” then the boy is to “be hanged, over water if possible [...] and his body burned” (Royal 621). This example, so misguided in its understanding of the reciprocal and respectful bonds between Wit-practitioners and their animal partners, is especially unnerving for Fitz because he himself is a “dog boy” of sorts. As is typical for people born with the Wit, Fitz feels an affinity for one particular category of animal; he bonds with animals of the Canidae family, including dogs and wolves. That he could be lynched and burned for exhibiting any outward signs deemed suspicious by a Wit-fearing public, that he could be murdered for exploring an inclination that he feels is “as natural [...] as a man can claim,” are lessons not lost on him (Assassin’s Quest 606). He comes of age at Buckkeep castle in closeted isolation, fearing the incursion of phobia-based violence, desperate for allies but daring not to “speak openly” to anyone about his desire for animal companionship (Royal 4).
He first learns to hide his Witted disposition from fellow-dweller of the Wit-closet, Burrich, who takes responsibility for Fitz’s upbringing out of devotion to Fitz’s deceased father. What Fitz acquires under Burrich’s tutelage is an education in shame. The two of them live on the margins of the royal court in a small room above the stables of Buckkeep castle, though Fitz is initially made to sleep in a box stall where he immediately bonds with a “half-grown pup” named Nosy (Assassin’s Apprentice 13). When Burrich discovers that a Wit connection has formed between the boy and dog, he confronts Fitz and, with a “grieved face,” explains: “Fitz, this is wrong. It’s bad, what you have been doing with this pup. It’s unnatural [...] It makes a man less than a man” (40). Throughout his diatribe on the evils of the Wit, Burrich’s many references to the term “man” shift ambiguously from the generic (“[it] makes you a beast [...] [u]ntil no man could look on you and think you had ever been a man”) to the gender-specific: “I’ll see that [Chivalry’s] son grows up a man, and not a wolf. I’ll do it if it kills us both” (40, 42). Burrich uses gender shaming, in other words, to deter Fitz from exploring his Witted inclinations. He fears the magic is “unnatural” because it is emasculating, “a disgusting weakness that no true man indulged” (Royal 102). He tells Fitz that the “blood of the wild hunt,” which he associates with Fitz’s “damned mother’s blood,” threatens to drown the manly “blood of kings that’s in [him]” (Assassin’s Apprentice 41, 43). If “the boy has to be taught [to be] a man,” as Burrich insists (43), then he must learn to feel shame for what Fitz later calls his “taint” (213), the effeminate magical legacy of his maternal bloodline.
Burrich’s chastisement of Fitz is ironic, since he too has a “predilection” for the Wit (Royal 1), though he has spent a lifetime repressing this aspect of himself and has much difficulty even speaking about it. Burrich’s relation to the Wit and his own inclination toward it can be thought of in terms of a queer panic triggered by the persistent instability of normative subject formation. According to Butler, regulatory ideals such as heterosexuality and masculinity install themselves in normative discourses through an “incessant and panicked” process of reiteration; they are “always in the act of elaborating” themselves, performing their own “naturalized idealization” (“Imitation” 23). This compulsion to repeat itself suggests that the normative is “perpetually at risk” of “becoming undone,” and consequently, expresses itself as “a foreclosure of that which threatens its coherence” (23). Burrich’s insistence on being a “man,” for instance, involves the corresponding and equally insistent repudiation of the queerness of his heart—all those “things” that he keeps “buried even from [him]self” (Assassin’s Apprentice 237). As is often the case with queer panic, Burrich externalizes the violence of this internal struggle by seeking to eradicate queer behaviors in others. “Don’t shame me, boy,” he tells Fitz the night before he is to begin training with Skillmaster Galen, who might read the boy’s mind and detect his predilection for the Wit. “Don’t let Galen say that I’ve let my prince’s son grow up a half-beast” (237). Fearing that a discovery of Fitz’s “beast magic” threatens his own coherence as a man, Burrich tells Fitz he would “sooner see [him] Forged” (237), which is a fate worse than death as it entails zombification or the annihilation of one’s humanity. For Burrich, living with the shame of being Witted is beyond all suffering. It is more terrifying than the living dead.
Although he continues to explore his Witted nature, Fitz internalizes the deep sense of shame that Burrich feels for it. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick observes, shame can be “peculiarly contagious” even as it is “peculiarly individuating”: the other’s shame “can so readily flood me [...] with this sensation whose very suffusiveness seems to delineate my precise, individual outlines in the most isolating way possible” (50). Fitz’s shame comes not from within but from the other. He inherits his shame; but in the process of being given shame, the inheritance alienates him from others inasmuch as it “turns the self,” as Sara Ahmed says, “against and toward the self” (105). Fitz goes from merely witnessing shame in others to feeling ashamed before the other—ashamed of his own inability to resist further temptations of the Wit. Feeling shame for such desire compels him to withdraw and conceal himself from others.
After Burrich removes Nosy and other temptations from Fitz’s life, for instance, Fitz finds himself cringing in embarrassment when he inadvertently bonds with a dog named Smithy, given to him by his father’s widow, Lady Patience. As the dog is thrust into his arms, Fitz is consumed by the “heady” connection that forms between them; but when Patience interrupts the intoxicating encounter to reproach him for not paying attention to her, Fitz admits: “I winced, expecting a rap from Burrich, then came back to awareness of where I was” (223). Burrich is absent from this scene, but his presence is felt in what Ahmed calls the “return of the gaze” which intensifies the “apartness” of the subject of shame (105). Having momentarily lost awareness of himself in a shameful act, Fitz instinctively recoils from this gaze, recalling perhaps an earlier incident in which Burrich rebukes him for “daydreaming” in a way that would “pervert” the beasts in the stables (194). Presently “distracted” by the queer fantasy of bonding with another pup, he feels similarly exposed before the other’s reproachful stare. “Did you see how he was sitting there, staring at the puppy?” asks Patience’s maid Lacey. “I thought he was about to go off into some sort of fit” (223). Patience, “clearly displeased,” informs Fitz that “[i]t is quite one thing for an adult to be pensive [...] and another for a boy to stand around looking daft” (223). Although ignorant of the Wit bond that forms before their eyes, Patience and Lacey evidently perceive Fitz’s behavior as queerly unconventional. Unable to bear the sight of him, Patience averts her eyes to stare out the window before abruptly changing the subject of their conversation. The incident reminds Fitz of “how profoundly alone” he has felt (223), but it also imparts a warning: if a Wit bond is to assuage his feelings of isolation, then he must nurture that bond in secret, away from the eyes of others.
Retreating further into the closet, Fitz accepts what Ahmed calls “the cost of not following the scripts of normative existence” (107). His failure to “embody an ideal” (108)—whether in terms of Patience’s expectations for a boy or becoming a “man” in the eyes of Burrich—gives shape to his identity in shame and frustrates his relationships with those closest to him. In addition to fearing the disappointment of Patience and Burrich (who are like mother and father to him), Fitz likewise pays a high price for failing to embody the ideal of heterosexual lover to his partner Molly.
Having developed romantic feelings for one another as adolescents, Fitz and Molly’s relationship is stifled by the many secrets Fitz is compelled to keep. He leads multiple closeted lives, as a practitioner of the Wit, as an apprentice to the Royal assassin Chade Fallstar, and as a sworn servant to the King. His inability to speak openly about these lives with Molly is “certainly why I lost her,” he says (Royal 5). I would argue that Fitz’s confidential life as an assassin’s apprentice is a variation of his function as a queer-coded character. After all, he accesses this life through an actual closet—a “secret door” that “beckon[s]” to him from the corner of his room in Buckkeep castle and leads to the chambers of his mentor, Chade, who only leaves his private domain in transgender female form (80). Of the secrets he keeps, however, it is his Wit-life that most inhibits physical intimacy between himself and Molly.
In the peaceful moments following his first sexual encounter with Molly, for example, Fitz is startled when Nighteyes (the wolf with whom he forms his most enduring Wit connection) telepathically intrudes on his consciousness to express satisfaction: “Brother, this is good” (Royal 251). The interruption causes Fitz to leap “like a hooked fish” (251), a simile that vividly captures for Fitz the impossibility of heteronormative complacency. He is horrified at the thought of having shared his sexual feelings with his Wit-partner, even as he is terrified of having exposed his Wit-bond to his sex partner. When Molly, who “jolt[s]” at the reaction, asks what has happened, Fitz sheepishly complains of a “cramp” in his calf (251). “So simple a fib,” he writes, “but I was suddenly shamed by the lie, by all the lies I had ever spoken and all the truths I had made into lies by leaving them unspoken” (251). Though fabricated, Fitz’s leg cramp returns the following evening to foil a second attempt at intimacy with Molly: “[j]ust a moment,” he tells her as Nighteyes intrudes on his mind once more, “I’ve cramped a muscle” (276). As an involuntary reflex of the mind, Fitz’s fitful emotional response to his Wit-partner’s interruptions inhibits expressions of sexual desire. It occurs to him as a painful reminder of unspoken infidelities and his inability to reconcile the unconventional demands of his closeted lives with the expectations of heteronormative relations.
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