The Way of the Fantasist: Ethical Complexities in the Taoist Mythopoeic Fantasy of Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea

Master storyteller Ursula K. Le Guin engages postsecularist spiritual sensibilities and chooses to build her mythopoeic subcreation, Earthsea, upon explicitly Taoist philosophical foundations. Le Guin’s Taoist religious perspective and dualistic moral worldview are just as fundamental to her mythopoeic writing as the doctrines, morality, and narrative structures of Christianity are for other such mythopoeic writers of children’s and young adult fantasy literature as George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Madeleine L’Engle. Readers can escape into Earthsea not only to recover a sense of mystical wonderment absent from secularist perspectives, but they can also rediscover a faith in the possibility of moral instruction and personal improvement. Despite some unresolved philosophical paradoxes and because of her nuanced integration of lesser known Taoist principles, Le Guin creates a comprehensive mythopoeic fantasy novel that both delights and edifies the postsecular imagination that is open to such fabulation and willing to explore, analyze, and contemplate the spiritual blessings and philosophical paradoxes that is Earthsea.