O then I see Queen Mab hath been with you
An insufferable English major becomes pregnant with MEANING, in 1991's "Tam Lin"
Tremble, creatures! In this edition, it’s back we hie to the early ’90s for a book about self-absorbed, quotation-addicted liberal arts students who encounter a supernatural reality with which they’re utterly unequipped to cope. Yes, that’s right… I re-read Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin.
And So I Came to Carterhaugh, A Cauldron of Illicit Loves
Tam Lin! This book came out in 1991 and has been inspiring love, hate, and love-but-then-I-reread-it-as-an-adult-and-yikes ever since. I experienced all three of these reactions upon rereading!
Tam Lin is a riff on the ballad, in which a girl meets a captive of the Queen of Elfland, he gets her pregnant, and she must save him from his merciless mistress. In Pamela Dean’s version the story takes place at a liberal-arts college in the 1970s, shortly after Roe v. Wade. The Queen of Faerie is a Classics professor, the heroine Janet is a professor’s daughter, everybody obsessively quotes Shakespeare and there are Meaningful productions of Hamlet and Stoppard and Jacobean drama and The Lady’s Not for Burning.
I ended up thinking this book did what it set out to do, in spite of itself: In the afterword Dean writes, “At the moment, if you asked me, I would say that this book is about keeping the heart of flesh in a world that wants to put in a heart of stone; and about how, regardless of the accusations regularly flung at them from all quarters, learning and literature can help their adherents accomplish that.” And the specific way in which Tam Lin lets literature shape its heroine’s choices made me think maybe I should have added this book to the list I made for The Pelican about art depicting abortion and the choice for life.
But before you get to the good part, my friend, you have to fight your way through dangers untold and hardships un-%$#@-numbered. I loved this book in high school, because of my defects of character, and upon rereading I hated it before I loved it again.
The first hardship is our heroine. Notice that defensive edge in Dean’s voice, “regardless of the accusations regularly flung at them…”? Yeah, so Janet is insufferable. She’s a snob who treats anyone who doesn’t love books—who doesn’t love the exact same books she does!—with open contempt. And we’re very tightly in her POV. There are hints that Dean herself sees the cruelty in Janet’s attitude, but mostly the narrative voice itself seems to think you’re subhuman if you prefer engineering to The Wind in the Willows.
I read one reader’s comment which was basically, “This book made me decide to be a science major instead of English,” and tbh, that’s what Tam Lin deserves.
Also what is happening with this book’s structure?! Freshman year takes like 300 of its 400+ pages, and freshman year I enjoyed, the nature description is lovely and the whole book felt swollen with hints and clues and misdirections… but I found myself thinking, Oh, I guess the climax takes place sophomore year? I would have thought senior. And it is senior! That’s the right choice, graduation is death etc etc, but that means we have like ten pages each for sophomore and junior years. The whole thing is drastically unbalanced. Huge intense freshman year, quick pointless wheel-spinning in sophomore and junior, and then big emotions at the end which feel simultaneously delayed and rushed. Also lol there are these hints of factions or dissension within the Fairy Court, but spoilers, absolutely none of that will matter.
ALSO there’s five thousand pages of the plays they went to freshman year but the actual Fairy Queen is basically sidelined and not that scary??? She has a couple cameos and then she’s there at the end and that’s it. She’s explicitly compared to La Belle Dame Sans Merci. MAKE HER HATH ME IN THRALL!!! I demanded to be in thrall and this book did not deliver.
But then… the descriptions of Janet’s university life were uncannily right. The fantasy of it—the giant sprawling campus, with multiple bridges and multiple lakes and a decaying lilac maze—enhanced the emotional reality of college as Elfland. The steam tunnels, the incongruous overthought architecture, the door behind ivy: everything hidden, cryptic, hagridden by ideas. The lilac maze never “comes into play” and I didn’t even miss it, because the whole college felt so vivid, so wrapped in autumn mist and winter ice and sudden late-summer storms. Nobody gets chased through the lilac maze and I didn’t even care!
At first Janet’s relationship to literature was precious and pretentious. She criticizes someone for “getting wrong” a translation of a famous line from Dante and like… it’s a translation??? It’s an extremely normal variant translation! It seemed at first like her supposed love of Shakespeare etc was more about maintaining her self-image as a deep, knowledgeable intellectual (with empathy! LOL) than about being guided and changed by thoughts greater than her own.
But the thing she said she was trying to do, the project of understanding oneself through Great Books, isn’t pretentious in itself. It’s good #actually. Lol I said my piece on this when I read the arguably-execrable If We Were Villains so I won’t reiterate. But if the bulk of Tam Lin proves that English majors are awful, the ending offers a hopeful vision of what the liberal arts can do.
The characters don’t state the motivations I’m about to attribute to them, at least not quite. And I’m not sure whether my willingness to find their motives deeply moving is a tribute to Dean’s skill as an author or my skill as an IMAX projector. But Janet’s pregnancy is an accident—on Thomas’s part, as well as hers. He genuinely wasn’t trying to trick her into pregnancy so she could save him. He knew what it was like to be used and he didn’t want to use her, even if using her would save him from something worse than death.
And she finds herself equally unwilling to save Thomas and then get the abortion she’d planned. She doesn’t know if what’s uncoiling inside her is “a baby,” but she knows it isn’t currency, to be spent and then forgotten. That’s how the Fairy Court treats human lives and she won’t treat her pregnancy that way. So her decision to save Thomas is also a decision to have a baby: an unimaginable future.
And this is the English-major perspective, of course, where nothing is merely currency. Nothing has purely instrumental value. This was one of the engines of my conversion: All beings, from an embryo to the stain on a bathroom wall, are charged with some deep meaning and deserve to be encountered, not simply used and discarded. “Objects in the world are words spoken by God,” as I eventually learned to put it.
Apparently every book I read this year is going to be about the gap between what we mean to others and what we mean in ourselves or to ourselves. Well, it’s good to have obsessions—they entertain your fellows.
Now Playing
Anais Mitchell, “Tam Lin.”
The pacing of this book is indeed INSANE, but I loved it. I read it at the perfect time: the end of my freshman year, while I was: working on a production of R&J, had no stable housing for the show, had a crush on someone on the production team, cut my finger open with a swiss army knife and had to get three stitches.
I literally stumbled across the book in the Stacks while looking for something else, and it was the kind of moment where you feel like you'll go to return it and the book won't be in the library system because the book is just for you.
I also only discovered some years after that The Revenger's Tragedy is a *real play*
All beings, from an embryo to the stain on a bathroom wall, are charged with some deep meaning and deserve to be encountered, not simply used and discarded. “Objects in the world are words spoken by God."
WOW...just...wow