Welcome back to my re-read, recap, and reaction to Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. This post will only have spoilers through the current chapter.
You can find my previous chapter recaps HERE.
Chapter 28: Bread and Cheese
NOTE: The following chapter summary comes from wot.fandom.com
Point of view: Matrim Cauthon
Mat still has a hangover from drinking too much with Birgitte the night before. Now that he has agreed to move into the Tarasin Palace, he has to let his men know and get things started. Vanin will continue to watch Carridin‘s palace to see who comes and goes. Caira is upset about the women coming to visit Mat even though he didn’t invite them. His rooms are luxurious and everything he could want except for them being just down the hall from Queen Tylin‘s rooms. Tylin enters and begins pursuing Mat around the room as he tries to back away and come up with an excuse to leave.
Thom and Juilin arrive, providing the excuse Mat is looking for to get away from Tylin. They explain to Mat how they found out the women are able to use the One Power to disguise themselves, which is how they avoided all the watchers he tried to use. Elayne and Nynaeve finally return and immediately set Mat to watching the house where the Kin live. Nothing happens the rest of the day so he returns to the Palace and finds a note indicating Tylin is having him for dinner. Instead he locks the door and goes to bed but is unable to sleep with wondering if Tylin won’t find a way in anyway.
The next day he is asked to continue his watch while the women disguise themselves and watch Carridin. Birgitte joins him and Nalesean, but not much happens that day or the next. Mat arranges to have Olver moved into his rooms to keep Tylin out but finds out that she has ordered that Mat gets no food from the kitchen. When he wakes up on the morning of the Festival of Birds, the dice are spinning in his head again.
REACTION:
This whole section with Mat and Tylin is… uncomfortable. It is pretty obviously supposed to play as comedy. The ‘womanizer’ Mat goes through some turnabout, or whatever, but we have never seen Mat chasing / manhandling any women, ever, who are protesting. But you know, lacking the mental framework to deal with the comparatively more unusual situation of a woman having a power dynamic advantage over a man, the characters in the story (Thom / Juilin) and the readers to a large degree just snicker at his situation. I can only imagine how Elayne and Nynaeve would / (will?) react. They’d likely be angry and blame Mat, if I had to guess. Or maybe they’d just laugh at him and say he deserves it.
I think this is why the phenomenon of female school teachers who are predatory over male underage students has become such a common occurrence in the U.S. It’s a relatively safe (from criminal consequences) crime. They have the power dynamic advantage and the teenage boys (who are inexperienced even with the more traditional power dynamics) don’t know how to respond to that so they give in. The boys have to wrestle with a cultural belief that they’re supposed to be happy about this happening, and then most of the people who then later find out about it act like they won a prize or something, or that they had capacity to be the instigator. It’s really messed up.
Are local customs sacrosanct and a valid excuse for this OR is it that some cultures and some customs are just worse than others? I’m in the camp that Ebou Dari culture needs some changes.
THAT SAID… unlike a teenage boy, Mat is an adult. He’s got the benefit of hundreds of years of other men’s memories in his head, too, so he’s even more of an adult than most. He’s a more than capable fighter if he needs to get away from the Queen. He could leave the Palace at any time, and he went there despite knowing how this would go (he mentions it to Nyn and Elayne without them picking up on it when they asked him for his help and apologized to him.) We also see him, in the midst of his protests to Tylin, noticing the Queen’s cleavage and assessing her attractiveness.
He might not *quite* protest this situation as much as his POV suggests – in the same way that he doesn’t want to get away from Rand, or his duties, quite as much as he lets on even to himself. Mat is written in a way where he lies to himself a lot, actually. That doesn’t excuse the Queen, but it might reduce the perception that she just sexually assaulted Mat.
I suspect we’ll revisit this topic again, but those are my initial thoughts.
Mat sees through Elayne and Nynaeve’s cooperation because he completely and accurately picks up on the fact that their agreeableness means they just got themselves into serious trouble only moments before. Let’s say that again. Mat knows they are lying to him because they are being civil toward him. That’s messed up.
I just chuckle when I see people arguing that this is a pro feminism series. It’s a vanishingly rare thing in this series wherein Jordan presents female leadership (or just women in general) in an entirely positive light.
Fortunately for the readers, Mat does get to be around one really good woman in this chapter – Birgitte Silverbow. I guess that’s how things balance out. I would absolutely read whole novels of these two and some friends going on side quest adventures. She’s possibly the only woman Mat ever interacts with who gives him any peace at all. Birgitte is such a rarity that she is canonically reborn over and over again and stands out in her culture / the world every time. I’m pretty sure the Heroes of the Horn lists that we’ve read tilts in a male direction, so she’s especially rare. The Pattern (i.e. the universe) itself relies on her uniqueness. It’s not just her skill with the bow, either. It’s her innate nature. You’ve gotta remember there are ages where nobody uses a bow and she has to be spun out in those ages, too, right? She’s a hero because of who she is. It’s just crazy how starkly and obviously her distinguishable character differences are from nearly every woman we meet in this series (at least from Randland proper.) The Aiel produce really good women. The Shienaran women were pretty good. Egwene’s mom was pretty good. Maybe for Jordan, being from a warrior culture was a necessary element of writing women who aren’t a slog to read. There’s no time for nonsense when you’re an eyelash away from brutal violent death.
If so… that’s a pretty bleak outlook.
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