Dragon Queens

On women's rage, the power of art, and becoming a dragon

Photo by Winston Chen on Unsplash

Fantasy, as a genre, has never been my thing, at least not in my teen/adult years. I wasn’t a Harry Potter kind of gal, is what I’m saying. Nor was I really a Lord of the Rings girl. I’m also not really into vampires, so when my friends were obsessed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I felt a bit left out of the fun.¹ It just didn’t do for me what it did for others.

This makes me sound like a very boring person who doesn’t like magic or anything outside of realism, which isn’t true. I’m just more into speculative/historical fiction than I am fantasy, and have been known to dabble in sci-fi from time to time. One of my favorite book series — Outlander by Diana Gabaldon — is a romance/sci-fi/historical fiction mash up. There’s a little bit of fantasy in there, but it’s not the primary thing I am drawn to.

So, it’s been a bit strange that my biggest inspiration right now is coming from dragons. I mean, it’s not as if I don’t like dragons. They’re cool. I had fun watching Game of Thrones like everyone else. But as a source of power or inspiration, dragons have never really been a thing for me.

Until now, that is. Recently, I read the 2022 novel When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill, and have been constantly spinning Tori Amos’ 18th studio album In Times of Dragons (which came out in May of this year). Both of these works are direct responses to the political climate in America, and both contain the image of women becoming dragons.

In When Women Were Dragons, the “dragonings” are a metaphor for the repressed rage of women, and a physical manifestation of being oppressed, entrapped and abused.

In Times of Dragons uses the idea of becoming a “Dragon Queen” to represent the massive shift a woman undergoes post-menopause, and accepting the changes instead of suffering by resisting the inevitable.

As a perimenopausal woman watching the fascist takeover of her country, these works could not have come into my life at a better time.

When Women Were Dragons was gifted to me by one of my dearest friends. She’s a huge Tori Amos fan, like me, and we’d been nerding out over Tori’s new album, so she thought this book was a perfect companion. I devoured it in two days when I was on vacation.

The premise of the novel is that in 1955, a not-insignificant portion of women in the United States quite literally turned into dragons and burned some shit down before fleeing to parts unknown. They abandoned their families and communities, leaving behind traumatized children and the women who did not turn into dragons. A culture of silence is left in the wake of The Dragoning – all research into the event is suppressed by the government, and people just try to act like it didn’t happen. Even unaffected women participate in “the mass forgetting”.

The protagonist is a young girl named Alex, whose Aunt Marla “dragoned”, leaving behind a daughter, Beatrice. Alex’s parents take Beatrice in and raise her as their own. From there, the novel explores themes of abuse, government oppression, abandonment, denial, femininity, civil rights, and power.

Was it a perfect book? No. The last third got a bit ridiculous, if I am being honest, even if I did think it was moving. But I loved it anyway.

The time period after WWII has been on my mind a lot. Women were tasked with taking over entire industries, as most of the men were at war, and did so capably. When the men returned, they became nursemaids to combat veterans, as well as expected to be picture-perfect housewives, and plied with Valium to do so quietly. Their independence and their lives suddenly didn’t matter. Their careers didn’t matter. All that mattered was being in service to men, who were in service to capitalism.

Barnhill said she was inspired to write the book after watching Christine Blasey Ford testify at Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing. I still remember watching that hearing and feeling physically sick. While the novel may be imperfect, I found it hit on my emotions in a way that superseded any issues I had with the writing. I’m willing to forgive a lot if you can make me cry, and this book did. Several times.

“I thought I was writing a story about rage. I wasn’t. There is certainly rage in this novel, but it is about more than that. In its heart, this is a story about memory, and trauma. It’s about the damage we do to ourselves and our community when we refuse to talk about the past. It’s about the memories that we don’t understand, and can’t put into context, until we learn more about the world….it’s about a world upended by trauma and shamed into silence. And that silence grows, and becomes toxic, and infects every aspect of life.”

― Kelly Barnhill, on her novel When Women Were Dragons

Tori Amos’ record In Times of Dragons explores some of the same themes as the novel, but comes at it from a different angle, as the perspective is from an older woman.

At the simplest level of explanation, it’s a story of Tori Amos in an alternate timeline. Instead of being married to her sound engineer and living in Cornwall, she is married to an abusive, toxic billionaire who preaches “Dark Enlightenment” (there is a not-so-subtle reference to Peter Thiel, among others). She escapes his clutches and embarks on a road trip with some old friends to reconcile with her daughter and find herself. There are a bunch of characters along the way — a gay witch from Brooklyn, an “ancient order” of dragons, an estranged daughter, a band of motorcyclists called the Gasoline Girls, a “demon” billionaire. All of them contain themes and archetypes of our current world, and all of them could represent people in our lives.

Beyond the surface story, it is an allegory for the political situation in the United States, and asks us to examine our own greed and complicity while using love to fight back. On a possibly parasocial level, it’s about a post-menopausal Tori Amos looking back at her life and career, pondering the different directions her life has gone, and coming to terms with the influence of toxic men² in her life as she steps into a new phase of being.

It’s BRILLIANT, and I know I say that about her a lot, but this album works on every single level³. It’s brave, ambitious, generous, and moving. It speaks to our current moment and asks us to look at the darker sides of ourselves, and all the ways we may have failed so we can understand how to move forward, but does so in a way that leaves you feeling hopeful rather than defeated. This is what art is all about.

These blades
Shooting through my back
Are killing me
Can you take this away
From me?

I need your help
To change me back
Back into the woman I want to be
so this dragon, half-dragon, half-woman thing
Take this burden
Away from me

-Tori Amos, “23 Peaks”

Not long from now, I will no longer be subject to the sexual gaze of men, which frankly, will be a relief. I will no longer be able to bear children, which is also kind of a relief, but also very strange. I’ve done nothing but worry about getting pregnant for more than 30 years, and now, my chances of conceiving naturally are slim to none.

Menopause is the penultimate change in a woman’s life. Her body changes form. Her energy changes form. The process of accepting that I am moving into this phase of my life and having to accept my limits has been agony. Going through this while watching the world I know become unrecognizable is more disorienting than anything I’ve ever experienced.

I was watching some of the videos from Erica Kirk’s recent Turning Point event, and saw many young women insist that they were fine with giving up their right to vote, ceding their power to whoever is the male head of their household. I am tired of saying how stupid this is, because clearly, they have gotten through to a staggering number of young women the same way the manosphere got to our young men. I find the entire thing devastating and bewildering, and my X-ennial soul cannot bear women being completely willing to give up their voice and their vote, a right our foremothers fought so hard for.

I know that there are a lot of valid criticisms of the feminism of the past – too white, too wealthy, too heteronormative. But these movements were of their time, and they aimed to both preserve and advance our civil rights. These movements were always supposed to evolve with progress in mind, and to ensure that life was better for the generations to come.

Now we have been set back decades by the long game that the GOP played — facilitated by male rapists in the robes of the court, in blue suits in the Oval Office, in black turtlenecks at the desks of tech companies, in camo pants in front of podcast mics, and in the garb of the clergy before peeling off in a fucking Maserati that their parishioners paid for.

These young women are clearly brainwashed by the Christian Right, but more troubling than that, they are also searching for some kind of meaning to their lives in a world that increasingly wants our lives to be meaningless.

I want to tell these women that they are consigning themselves to the same violence and oppression that created the circumstances in which they would choose to give away their power. I want to tell them that these charlatans and social media influencers are lying to them. I want to tell them that Erica Kirk is a liar and a fraud. But I also know they would not listen, because they live in an entirely different media ecosystem, and because many of them consider me old and out of touch.

It shouldn’t be this way. It didn’t have to be this way. It makes me more angry than I can express.

The anger of what could have been and what can never be is the hardest thing to get past.

When they say they want to “submit” to their husbands, I can feel my eyes turning gold with slitted pupils.

When these men say that women are just vessels, I feel my breath becoming fire.

When there is no punishment for the men who have ruined our lives, I can feel the wings emerging from my back.

The last song on In Times of Dragons is called “23 Peaks”. It’s unlike anything in Amos’ catalog. It is a prayer, a plea, a hymn. It is Tori Amos – at 62 years old – begging the universe to stop what is happening to her. Begging to heal rather than turn into something she doesn’t want to be. She wants to go back to the woman she was before.

But she can’t. And neither can we.

And so, here I am, along with so many of you, on the verge of our Dragoning.⁴

It would be cathartic to fly around and terrorize the men who hurt us. To torch data centers, ICE warehouses, behemoth office buildings that trapped us at desks in pantyhose. To terrify those who ignored our pain. To abandon the lives that aren’t working for us anymore. To spread our wings and finally, at long last, be free.

I’m not sure that’s what this Dragoning is all about, as badass as it sounds. I’m not sure that destruction will be the best use of our strange powers, though I suppose it may have to be in the end, but assuming it doesn’t…

What will be the best use of our power, now?

What can we become when we are no longer viewed as sexual playthings for men? When we are no longer under the threat of forced birth? When we look at the younger generation of women and feel the drive to protect them and fight for them, even the ones who are actively working against us?

What can we accomplish when we stop trying to stop changing? When we no longer resist our true selves?

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to find out.

but the truth is, Darling One
you will suffer, they’ll grow back every time
because you need
you just need to accept
that this will be, this will be
you’ll become, become, become
a Dragon Queen

1. A notable exception for me was animal fantasy — where animals take on human characteristics. Charlotte’s Web is a good example, as well as the Redwall series by Brian Jacques. Since I anthropomorphize animals anyway, those were the narratives that stuck with me.

2. Fuck Neil Gaiman, forever and ever, AMEN.

3. I wrote about the opening song, “Shush”, in an earlier post.

4. I like the idea of being a Dragon more than being a Crone, if I’m being honest.

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