As the shape-shifting heroine of Pierce’s Immortals quartet, Daine is not entirely human: with her mother a mortal and Weiryn—god of the hunt—her father, Daine “may look like a human,” but she is not, at least not totally (1992, 70). She is also “of the People: the folk of claw and fur, wing and scale” (70). Daine is the child of a human and a god, and as such, she is both human and animal—because her god-father is affiliated with animals. Yet, Daine’s
perspective initially rejects being “of the People” (animals within this world): “‘Impossible,’ the girl said flatly. ‘Look at me. I’m pink, my fur’s patchy, I walk on two legs. I’m human, human all over’” (70). Daine rejects being of the People because she does not look the part: she is “pink,” with “patchy fur” (hair), and “two legs.” In many ways, her position marks the expected position of the adolescent girl within popular culture: you are who you appear to be. However, Daine is both human and animal, and in so being, the narration establishes appearance as unreliable: the body’s surface, Daine’s “look[ing] human” (70)— while being “of the People,” of the animal (70)—frustrates the assumed one-to- one relationship between self (being) and body (appearing), at least until she shape-shifts. The shape-shifting, while making an internal being available on the body, does not, however, invert the one-to-one relationship between self and appearance. Rather, it offers “mutation, variation, and becoming” (Seaman 2007, 247).
Furthermore, where Alanna’s cross-dressing was made possible by a shared body shape (or appearance) and where pregnancy alludes to multiplicity within, Daine’s shape-shifting unites these two narratives, while also extending the argument. In other words, Daine, as does Alanna, shares a bond with
another, and as with “normal” pregnancy, this bond occurs internally. However, unlike Alanna’s cross-dressing, Daine’s shape-shifting makes explicit exactly who she is (this internal being), even if that being is quite mutable. Moreover,
Daine’s “being of the people” does not remain, as is the case with pregnancy,97
internal, Daine’s shape-shifting makes the internal bond explicit on the body, blurring the border between human and animal in the process. Thus, this section is concerned with how Daine’s being “of the People” is manifest on her body, thus disrupting the stability of body required by both popular and media culture, as well as the hero paradigm underscoring this mythopoeic YA fantasy. The question is, then, how is she both human and People, and how is that internal “of the People” made available?
In the first instance, Daine’s internal being is made available through the narration of Cloud’s (a pony whom Daine considers family) ability to see inside Daine, because they are both “of the People.” Through this bond, Cloud can see inside Daine: “On the outside, the pony insisted. Not inside. Inside you’re
People” (1992, 70).98 This inside that he is narrated as seeing is, in fact, a seeing
of either the Gift (the “light” that “is only for humans”) or, in Daine’s case, wild magic, and while this plays into a difference between the Gift and wild magic, it also introduces a notion of outside and inside. Thus, where Alanna and Thom’s shared body shape made that reading of bodily instability possible, it is Daine’s wild magic that serves as the link—or a manifestation of the link—between Daine-the-human and Daine “of the People.” Furthermore, it is this magic that allows her to, first, join her mind with the minds’ of her animal friends,
becoming—as Numair terms it—a “magical symbiote” ([1994] 1999, 22). This magical symbiosis is here useful because it demonstrates—and makes possible—the connectedness of two conventionally oppositional
categories: human and animal, but it is also this symbiosis that directly leads to Daine’s shape-shifting.
—Make your mind like that of the animal you join […] [t]hink like that animal does, until you become one. You may be quite surprised by what comes of it, in the end.— (20, formatting original)
97 Birth is different. Yes, the internal multiplicity is made available externally—
the child, that which causes the multiplicity, can be seen—but this making available produces another distinct self, and as such, birth is discussed in the Conclusions.
Full body shape-shifting is “what comes of it, in the end”; although, the process begins with partial transformations, as Daine becomes accustomed to
“think[ing] like” different animals.
In the first instance of sustained, albeit partial, bodily transformation, Daine’s ears become those of a bat, after she joins with the mind of Wisewing, a member of the “Song Hollow Colony of bats” (144).
Her ears were tired and sore, the muscles round them cramped from use. Reaching up to rub them, Daine touched a long flap of leathery skin that flicked to and fro, catching each quiver of sound in the air. (151)
Initially, this transformation is bound up in issues of possession, of that which belongs to Daine (“her ears”) and that which does not (“the long flap of leathery skin”). In so being, this hers/not hers plays into the economies that underpin contemporary Western culture. The ears are hers, but they are also her—
through belonging, her ears identify her. Yet the simple inclusion of these other ears on Daine’s body insists that they too, somehow, belong to her—or, at least, that they are also a part of her—likely, owing to her internal “being of the people” (1992, 70). The surface of the body is here a place of amalgamation. Its liminality is made explicit. Furthermore, while the change itself disrupts the visual certainty of the body, the narration of the touch also, in offering an alternative way of perceiving the body, disrupts popular and media culture’s insistence on appearance.
Here, a later transformation makes this questioning of appearance even more explicit: “She looked at her hands and feet. They were still human but a fine grey fuzz covered them and the tips of her nails were black claws” ([1994] 1999, 213). Daine’s body is constructed as unstable—change is introduced onto its surface. Furthermore, this narration establishes what that change is by defining what does not change: the “human” that somehow exists before, and yet also after, change has occurred. The narration of bodily transformation, in other words, establishes an opposition between changed and not change, while, simultaneously, questioning it. For, by remaining “human,” despite being
their “not changed” states appeal to a stable core, a core of “human” that has somehow not changed during this transformation.
Chappell (2007) engages this issue through the example of how, within Pierce’s Immortals (1992–1996) quartet, “death detaches the core of a person from their material body in the human realm” and yet “continuous identity is manifested in the afterlife through an identical replacement of the body left behind” (125). Chappell makes this point through the death of Daine’s mother (prior to the quartet’s start) and the narration of Daine (and Numair) meeting her when they are sent to the Divine Realms in Realms of the Gods (1996). Daine’s mother died, and her body was buried in the human realm, but here, in this space of afterlife, it (still) exists. Chappell (2007) thus suggests, “bodies […] clearly form and express a large portion of people’s continuous identities” (125), as Daine’s mother has maintained her body through life and death. However, Daine’s ability to shape-shift complicates matters. Her ability to shape-shift—to change the shape of her body, or that which should express some portion of her identity, in Chappell’s terminology—complicates popular and media culture’s economy of representation in its positing of a single, stable self. Specifically, Daine’s shape-shifting literalises the liminality of, and the bodily instability associated with, the adolescent girl, while also speaking to the wider issues of liminality associated with the period of adolescence.
This shape-shifting is, thus, quite a provocative counter to the
conventional positing of (continuous) identity requiring bodily stability. In fact, Chappell (2007) argues,
Daine’s ability to transform her body into non-human shapes yet
maintain a stable identity gives the impression that an essential self […] is a core somehow attached within but not defined by one’s spatio- temporal form. In this respect, Pierce’s series emphasises the necessity of having some essential part of oneself separated from one's body so that identity persists despite physical changes. (125)
I agree with Chappell that some sense of self—that is unrelated to the body’s appearance is necessary for Daine’s shape-shifting to occur, in that, it, like Alanna’s cross-dressing, would not be shape-shifting if Daine did not somehow remain. However, I feel that Chappell’s positing recapitulates the binary
oppositions underpinning popular and media culture, at least in as much as it presupposes the “Kantian I” that Battersby (1998) finds troubling. I am more interested in how this produces the self through a changing body.
The narration of Daine’s shapeshifting establishes a binary opposition between changed and not changed, only to immediately question it; in so being, this shape-shifting is explicitly about showing how an unchanging core is impossible to maintain. The notion is too rigid; change influences and modifies both the body and the core, as “they were still human but” demonstrates—“but” calls any stability of the body or otherwise into question (213, my emphasis). “But” introduces the possibility that neither complete change nor complete non- change has occurred thus calling the stability of both into question. The act of change produces the results of that act as existing on, or as, a continuum, effectively uniting the oppositions. In other words, while the hands and feet are claimed to be “still human,” “a fine grey fuzz” and “black claws” are not human, and while these things are now connected to the hands and feet (to that which is “human”), they are not human and potentially jeopardise the humanness of what they touch. The stability of human is worried, just as the lingering human worries the completeness of change because this is not about change/not changed, for all that the narration terms it as such; this is about Daine’s embodying multiplicity, change, and becoming.
For me, this narration of fantastic bodily change is a modelling of the very real (as in physical) changes associated with the adolescent girl: while the adolescent girl might not develop “black claws” or grow “a fine grey fuzz” (Pierce [1994] 1999, 213), she does (typically) begin growing underarm and pubic hair at the onset of puberty, while also in the West often experimenting with nail polish and other body modification techniques. Moreover, while Daine’s “human” appears to be expressed on the body—much like femininity— it also begins implementing a deeper sense of self, a depth pregnancy
foreshadowed. Here, the allusion appears in how the change only covers her hands and feet. The “fuzz” is covering a body-cum-self that has been, perhaps, obscured rather than utterly changed, a reading that the specific location of this change—on the outer extremities—reinforces. It is about layering change onto the (unchanged) body, thus the body is the site of continuum, of continuous
possibility, in Chappell’s terms. In other words, Daine’s body is still body, whether it is human-shaped or animal-shaped. Akin to Meyer’s changes in terms of her futuristic mythopoeic YA fantasy, these bodily changes are changes of degree, not of kind.
Yet, the body—her human body—holds an exalted position. Its “truth,” which happens to be female and human, makes this multiplicity possible, a reading that the other kinds of changes Daine makes develops. While Daine can entirely shift into the form of a single animal: a wolf ([1994] 1999, 303), starling (1995, 111), hyena (266-267), and golden eagle (1996, 18), for example, and while there are many instances of her transforming parts of her body into animal parts: “using bats eyes to see in the dark” (1995, 224) or “thickening the soles of her feet by changing them to elephant hide” (1996, 44), it is an attempt to shape a human mouth on a bird that best reinforces this idea of “true shape.”
It was harder to shape a human mouth and voice box in a bird that it was to give her two-legged self raptor’s eyes, or bat’s ears. She had no idea why that was true; it just was. (1996, 246)
While Daine may have no idea, the narration makes it quite clear: the bird is not her “true shape,” thus it is not the body on which (or from which) these changes take place. Her human shape provides the base from which these
transformations occur.
However, while Daine’s human body may hold a privileged position in narration, the construction of this body is also more complicated: this is not a simple veneration of the human body. This is, rather, a complex offering of the body’s liminality—its in-betweenness, and its potential—a point evidenced by the narration of Daine’s relationship to “the wolf-shape.”
Sitting down, she began to recover her true shape. It was harder than she had expected. Her body liked the wolf-shape. Bruises and hot feet
notwithstanding, the wolf-shape felt good, even natural. The girl had to fight a sense that she was meant to stay a wolf […]. At last she found her two-legger self, and slid into it. Opening her eyes, she made an unhappy discovery.
Daine shares a particular affinity with wolves, “liked the wolf shape” and “the wolf-shape felt good, even natural.” While this narration develops that affinity quite thoroughly, it is Daine’s return to her “true shape,” in the face of that affinity, that is here interesting, especially, as it speaks to Levana’s “true skin” (Meyer 2015b, 96). Both these figurations—“two-legger self” and “true skin”— speak to the physicality of the body and appear to establish it as site of “truth.”
In one sense, Daine’s transformations (the animal shapes that she puts on) function similarly to Alanna’s clothes and hair, to those superficial things that change in order for her disguise to occur; poignantly, changes that occur, for both girls, in order to match their external appearing with their internal being: Daine is “of People” and Alanna is coded as masculine. In this figuration, the body is the site of change and any “truth” is produced not through
unwavering stability but through that change.While this passage also possibly questions the supplementarity of actual clothes—in that, Daine’s clothes are gone, when she returns to her human form—the narration does so for a reason: the human form isboth the clothes that she “slid[es] into,” and the
manifestation of, what the narration terms elsewhere, her “inner-self” (1992, 182), a self that is aligned with the human—despite its affinity with the wolf shape and its ability to shape-shift.
However, the body is alsonot clothes—because it is her “true shape,” as evidenced by the fact that “her clothes were gone,” and that it is from her “true shape,” and only it, that multiple bodies can be formed. The body is both, and this is key. It is more than one or the other, in part, because it is the very place of all these changes but also because it is the liminal space between
surface/depth, and outer/inner. Sheryl Vint (2007) discusses this notion of the body as liminal in Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity and Science Fiction.
The body is a type of threshold, occupying the liminal space between self and not self, nature and culture, between the inner ‘authentic’ person and social persona. (16)
Vint’s point is sound, though I contend that the body is not just “a type of threshold” but that it is, rather, the archetypal threshold, the single most
ubiquitous limen. There is a body associated with every self, no matter if that self is human, animal, or cyborg. Thus, a second point of contention with Vint, despite a desire to explore the post—as in expanded sense of, human—Vint’s reading still prioritises the human. For one, self and culture are human
privileges. Daine’s shape-shifting includes the animal within a conceiving of the body/self, an idea that Meyer’s mutant wolf soldiers initiated, while Cinder’s cyborgian state does the same for the machine.
This blurring of the human and animal within mythopoeic YA fantasy is not confined to Pierce’s work. Sarah J. Maas’s Throne of Glass series (2012–on- going) offers a particularly poignant supplement to my reading.99 In Maas’s
Erilea (a Secondary World), Aelin Ashryver Galathynius—otherwise known as Celaena Sardothien and Adarlan’s finest assassin—is half human, half Fae. Within this world, the Fae are immortal beings, often gifted with magical powers. Aelin is, for example a fire wielder, as Heir of Fire describes (2014a). The Fae are also shapeshifters, of a kind.
All Fae possessed a secondary animal form. Celaena was currently in hers, her mortal human body as animal as the birds wheeling above. But what was his [Rowan’s]? He could have been a wolf, she thought, with that layered surcoat that flowed to midthigh like a pelt, his footfalls so silent. Or a mountain cat, with that predatory grace. (14)
While Rowan’s animal form is, despite Celaena /Aelin’s fanciful musing, a “white-tailed hawk” (4), it is Aelin’s that is the most interesting: “her mortal human body as animal as the birds wheeling above.” This narration, rather than thinking the relationship of humans and animals as binary (human/animal), offers a human-animal relationship, where human describes the kind of animal one is, much like wolf-animal or bird-animal would also work.100 Thus, through
99 Not least owing to the fact that this is another reworking of the Cinderella
narrative, only if Cinderella had become an assassin after becoming orphaned; see Maas (2012) and (2014b).
100 There are full-body shape-shifters within Maas’s world, and Lysandra, a
courtesan and friend of Aelin’s, is one (2015, 310). Of this ability, Aelin muses: Holy gods. What was fire magic, or wind and ice, compared to shape- shifting? Shifters: spies and thieves and assassins able to demand any