Spelling It Out with Piers Anthony

I read A Spell for Chameleon, by Piers Anthony, because a well-read writing-group friend noted some similarities between its premise and the situation I was exploring in a new project. I hadn't read any Anthony before, though I knew the name--which says little about my knowledge, considering what a striking pen name it is.

A basic challenge for any fantasy writer is imagining and then conveying how the magic works in a given story. Like a building constructed with visible struts, this novel makes that task one of its running themes. The protagonist, Bink, is constantly meditating on and discussing how animals, vegetables, and minerals in his homeland use magic; whether limitations on magic are biological or merely cultural; what magical powers are useful and what merely decorative; etc.; etc. Indeed, at the end of the book, protagonist Bink gets the job of researching the land, called Xanth.

Most of Bink's conclusions involve magic as a survival tool, developed through natural selection. Yet many of the book's magical details are based on puns rather than such biologic logic. For example, centipedes five times larger than normal are nickelpedes, though that would make sense only in an American context. (Then again, characters say "okay" and eat chocolate-chip cookies, and you can't get more American than that, right?) As a fan of the Oz series, however, I can hardly complain about episodes shaped around puns.

I can complain about the portrayal of women, however. I hadn't read the complaints about sexism in Anthony's novels until I'd reached the end of A Spell for Chameleon and reached my conclusions. But I see from web postings that such criticism has been voiced for decades now, perhaps since the book was published in 1977. And based on this one volume, I think the pattern goes beyond sexism (discriminating on the basis of sex) to full-blown misogyny, portraying women as essentially changeable and conniving.

Three female characters appear in many scenes throughout the book:

• Sabrina, Bink's longtime girlfriend. She's pretty and smart, and Bink starts out devoted to her. It's hard to see why, however, since Anthony never really portrays her or their relationship in a lively way. That makes it harder to empathize with Bink when they break up. And how does that happen? He suddenly realizes that she was only interested in his magic. So after returning, magic and power intact, he fobs her off to a woman-hating friend.
  
• Iris, a magician with immense power in creating illusions. She's very beautiful (whenever she wants to be), smart, and extremely ambitious. She tries to seduce Bink to gain power. When he stands up to her, she becomes his enemy. At the end she marries someone else to become queen, but since her husband likes Bink, she acts friendly, even fawning, toward him.
  
• Chameleon, a woman whose physical attractiveness and intelligence wax and wane according to (I'm not making this up) her menstrual cycle. I really think it's hard to depict a trait as more fundamental to women than tying it to female biology. Did I mention that Chameleon can be either very beautiful or very intelligent, but not both at the same time? Or that when she's smart, she's especially clever at deceptive tactics? Or that when she's very beautiful, she's mindlessly devoted to Bink? Of course, he chooses her to marry.
  

So the book's three major women are all either deceptive or completely mutable.

There are some more fleeting female characters as well, without those particular traits: Bink's mother, a widowed mother he meets, another manly hero's dead wife who also happens to be a mother,... You get the picture. A female centaur lets Bink cop a feel and yet remains anatomically unavailable; she's the one female who can be both pretty and smart without being fundamentally unreliable.

Other critics have noted details that I let pass: the sex scenes that make A Spell for Chameleon adult rather than YA fantasy (and make it obvious that Anthony's definitely a breast man); a trial that seems to excuse what we'd now call "date rape"; how, according to readers of later books, all three major women above become shrewish wives. Nor would I require Anthony to show women as warriors, as Tamora Pierce does, or authority figures (Iris has ambitions to rule, but the land's magical landscape itself works to prevent that).

Indeed, I think it's clear that Anthony portrays his major female characters as naturally capable. The problem is that they're all naturally capable of alluring deception.