A Court of Mist and Fury

[inmybooktote]. "Coffee and Book." Instagram, 22 Nov. 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/ClRE_4_LbqF/

A Court of Mist and Fury, the second novel in the series, follows the main character, Feyre, after returning from under the mountain. Now, navigating through her new life as a fae and trying to maintain her old values as a human, Feyre must work through the trauma she experienced with new characters by her side. While the first novel correlates with Beauty and the Beast, the second novel can be seen as a retelling of the popular myth, Hades and Persephone. Through this new plot, the ideas of gender and mental health will continue to be discussed in relation to the characters.

It is a common assumption that a woman’s primary “duty” is to bear her spouse's children in order to carry on the lineage. Within society, there is a forceful encouragement from others for “young couples to start having children immediately after marriage” which is becoming less and less accepted by those whose lives it impacts (Ir-Shay 96). Tamlin is one man who follows this viewpoint and thinks that a “woman’s main purpose is to bear and raise children” and that they should succumb to the interests of men (Ir-Shay 96). Two months after Tamlin and Feyre’s trip Under the Mountain, he proposes to her, which leads to an array of wedding planning and living up to the “traditions and expectations” that send a message to the remaining courts and the world outside of Prythian (Maas 28). The expectation of future children is repeated throughout the conversations the characters have as any that come from Feyre would be “powerful” and “coveted” to the point where it is questioned whether other high lords might target her or her future children for “breeding” (Maas 19, 118). Even so, Feyre and Tamlin have not had a conversation about if she wants multiple children or any at all. Tamlin just assumes that it is in their future by saying “because that’s the way it is… the way my son shall do it. Someday” (Maas 92). Feyre’s gender reversal from the prior novel is no longer seen as Tamlin controls what she wears and where she goes as well as pushes her into the arms of Ianthe, the high priestess, who plans Tamlin and Feyre’s wedding. Her “reproductive function” as a woman is being seen over her “worth as a person” in a way that demonstrates how Tamlin will never see her as an equal (Ir-Shay 97). When Feyre says she does not think she can handle people calling her high lady, Tamlin simply states that “There is no such thing as a High lady” and that “High lords only take wives. Consorts,” meaning that the women in the relationship are not “equal in responsibility and power” to their husbands or mates (Maas 24, 33). How Feyre is being treated as a woman demonstrates Tamlin and society's notion that women are weaker and only needed to provide an heir.

While Tamlin sees Feyre more as his property and less as a person, Rhysand sees Feyre as her own person and makes it known that her decisions are hers to make when it comes to her body and her life. After finding out that Rhysand is her mate and accepting the bond between them, Feyre brings up the topic of children and birth control. She states that “If I am a High lord’s mate, I’m expected to bear you offspring, aren’t I?” demonstrating how Tamlin and Ianthe beat into her head the notion that children must come and quickly (Maas 542). Rhysand, appalled, quickly shoots this down by saying “You are not expected to bear me anything, Children are rare, yes. So rare, and so precious. But I don’t want you to have them unless you want to—unless we both want to” (Maas 542). In the fae world, children are rare as it is difficult to get pregnant and the pregnancy itself is typically hard on the mother. Tamlin was rushed to receive an heir because he knows how hard it is to get pregnant and to have a boy. Rhysand, however, is willing to live out the rest of his life with just Feyre if she decided that kids were not in her future. Rhysand sees Feyre as more than the person who, potentially, will carry his child and instead focuses on her as a person and their relationship.

The bias Feyre faces about her role as a female is one that is unraveled through her relationship with Rhysand. Unlike with Tamlin, she becomes his equal in every way and he only kneels for her. While the two of them learn to work through their trauma together, Tamlin is left to work on his own. The effects on Tamlin from being Under the Mountain are demonstrated early on when Feyre states that “dreams chased him from his slumber as often as I fled from mine” but instead of accepting her help her pushes her away from him (Maas 8). These dreams are a common and recurring symptom of ptsd that fall into the first cluster of symptoms while his second symptom, numbness and avoidance of reminders, falls into the second cluster (Good and Hinton 17). Tamlin proposes two months after the incident Under the Mountain which would suggest that he is doing everything in his power to keep her by his side. This fear he has after watching her die appears in their every day life as he refuses to let her off the grounds by saying “I can’t do what I need to if I’m worrying about whether you’re safe” (Maas 11). He chooses to avoid the fact that Feyre has powers she can not control by saying, “you don’t need to train. I can guard you from whatever comes our way” because his need to keep her out of the eyes of the other lords and for her to be safe is overpowering his ability to tell what she needs (Maas 86). He instead throws himself into a sexual relationship with her that becomes nothing more than an escape. Feyre verbally states her unhappiness to him when she says, “I am drowning. And the more you do this, the more guards… you might as well be shoving my head under the water” and instead of understanding he further “drowns” her by locking her in the house, causing a panic attack as she had “barely escaped from another prison once before” (Maas 100, 123). While Lucien explains to Feyre that Tamlin is “terrified of seeing [her] in his enemies’ hands” and that he “heard [her] neck break,” Tamlin’s PTSD, which fires his need to protect her, drives her away from him. This leads to his eventual siding with Hybern to get her back and to ease his depressive state.

Tamlin sees himself as incapable of healing on his own. Meanwhile, Rhysand and Feyre work through their traumas together while encouraging the other to save themselves. Rhysand suffers from PTSD after his time as Amarantha’s whore. When speaking to Feyre of the impending war he states, “I was tortured and beaten and fucked until only telling myself who I was, what I had to protect, kept me from trying to find a way to end it” because to him family is everything and he will endure to make sure they are safe (Maas 111). He tells Feyre while in the Court of Nightmares that “it’s just your body reacting” when she’s embarrassed about being turned on because that is what he told himself for fifty years when his body would react to Amarantha (Maas 416). Even so, Rhysand still shares with Feyre a part of himself that almost died to keep hidden: Velaris, the City of Starlight. He works to not be scared of intimacy but makes sure everything is entirely consenual for both her and himself. Rhysand opens up fully after Feyre discovers that he is her mate by describing everything that happened during the first war to finding her. How he made Amarantha “beg, and scream” so that she would “crave more” in order to protect his court from her wrath and plot her death but after a decade “stopped expecting to see [his] friends” and “stopped hoping” that things would get better (Maas 520-521). His ability to open up about his trauma and not let it control how he treats her demonstrates how Rhysand’s healing for his PTSD has begun.

While Rhysand encourages Feyre to heal, in the beginning of the novel she was all alone. Feyre’s depression is severe and shown after she wakes from a nightmare that ends with her stabbing herself through the heart. This recurring symptom is similar to Tamlin’s, who refuses to check on her when she vomits each night. Each night ends with the same dream where Feyre deems herself a murder, a monster, and believes that she should have stayed dead, which falls into the self-blame category of PTSD (Ir-Shay 18). She experiences a loss of interest in activites that used to bring her happiness, such as painting, because she hates that “all that blank canvas” is waiting for her to “pour out stories and feelings and dreams” (Maas 13). Feyre is not ready to confront those feelings or to let herself have content or happiness from it. This lack of help eventually leads to Feyre’s panic attack at her wedding after she realizes “how unfit [she] was to be clothed in white when [her] hands were so filthy” with the blood of the fae she had killed (Maas 41). Any reminders, such as the red flower petals, can lead to episodes like these (Ir-Shay 17). Only when sparing with Cassian does she truly release her trauma and realize that while Tamlin did fight for her, she fought harder to the point where she shattered her soul sobbing, “it should have been me” (Maas 297). From there, Rhysand encourages her by saying “you will feel that way every day for the rest of your life… you can either let it wreck you, let it get you killed… or you can learn to live with it” (Maas 298). This statements lets Feyre know that it is okay to recognize and heal the part of herself that is grieving those young fae and is a step in the right direction of her healing process.

The ideals of gender and mental health within this series continue to flow as Feyre adapts to her new life as a Fae. She is met with an incredible gender bias that views her ability to reproduce over her value as a person and also learns how she should be treated. Tamlin’s mental health continues to decline while Feyre and Rhysand work through theirs and learn that they have to save themselves in order to continue to grow. The next novel, A Court of Wings and Ruin, will continue to work through these themes and finally dive into how sexuality plays into the series.

Work Cited

Good, Byron J., and Devon E. Hinton. “Introduction: Culture, Trauma, and PTSD.” Culture and PTSD: Trauma in Global and Historical Perspective, edited by Byron J. Good and Devon E. Hinton, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016, pp. 3–49. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt18s318s.3.

Ir-Shay, Ronit. “Family Planning: A Halakhic-Gender Perspective.” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues, no. 12, 2006, pp. 95–128. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40326654.

Maas, Sarah J. A Court of Mist and Fury. Bloomsbury, 2016.