The Claw of the Conciliator: Chapter VII
The Assassins
Such a curious beginning to this chapter.
This long monologue about bravery and cowardice, all hinging around raping their clients in the Matachin Tower. A form of torture perhaps worse than some of the excruciations we’ve yet witnessed. And I love how the Guild has a euphemism for this practice: abuse.
It’s so very real to life, where we might let someone go instead of firing them or a drone strike might have collateral damage, which is a far friendlier way to say we accidentally or intentionally murdered a bunch of civilians who happened to be nearby.
Severian remembers being excited at the opportunity to be the abuser in such a case because he wanted to dominate a woman, possess her.
Remember, Severian is not simply filling out a diary but writing a piece of propaganda. Over and over, including in this chapter, he tells us that women are not to be trusted, that a man’s love is a weakness, but also that a man must possess and control a woman. In his philosophizing some twenty chapters ago, he outlined what a man and woman are and how their behavior is intrinsically linked to their gender.
Now, many, here, take the next leap and say this must reflect Wolfe’s own views. And perhaps it did! But I see no reason to think that writing such a character with such a worldview is in any way a means of justifying this.
Was Wolfe a misogynist?
Maybe, but there’s no reason to tie the text here to the person there.
It’s a childish notion that authors only speak of themselves and for themselves.
But I like, too, how Wolfe goes one step further. For it’s not simply that the torturer at times rapes as a form of torture but that he rapes with an iron phallus, thus preventing potential pregnancy but also removes the biological mechanism for pleasure. The torturer rapes, yes, but he must use a tool rather than his own body.
It is, in a way, humiliation for both tortured and torturer. Of course, for one, it’s quite a bit worse. But these torturers see women the way they do and regard them the way they do in part because of the strictures of the Guild. The only women they encounter are prostitutes and clients that they torturer and eventually kill.
Never, in the proper scope of things, does a torturer in the Matachin Tower meet a woman who he may have a normal relationship with.
This is what makes Severian so naive and such a dupe when it comes to both Thecla and Agia.
And it was Agia fooling him once more, using the name of Thecla to draw him out so she might kill him.
This all fails and Severian is saved, curiously, by one of the ape men. But not just any of them. One whose hand he severed.
And then Jonas arrives to save the day after it’s been saved and we hear Agia’s simple scheme to kill Severian.
But we learn from Agia that the failure was due to the men in her employ.
And so I return to the gender dynamics.
Agia is right, of course. Severian would be dead had her hirelings listened, but she is also subverting the proper order between the genders, as Severian understands them and as he declares them.
Agia is a fallen woman, a villain, in part because she tries to possess men.
And that is not the proper way of things.
Of note is what happens between Agia and Severian when they’re left alone. She basically demands that he kill her, but he refuses. Perhaps out of cowardice. But in the moment of decision, he recalls that long ago conversation about abuse where he understands that rape is one of the forms of torture and that the iron phallus is the instrument.
He goes on to compare Terminus Est to that iron phallus as he raises it to kill Agia.
A few chapters ago, Severian told us that he will not describe every time he works his trade in the narrative that follows. And here he tells us for the first time that part of his trade is rape.
What are we to make of this? Of Severian? Of this moment between them when she begs him for death and he runs away?