When Women Were Dragons

From her infancy, Beatrice is a bright, fierce, ferocious girl. She becomes infatuated with dragons early on, never resisting their existence or her relationship to them. She never surrenders this passion, either, and through the course of the novel, Beatrice moves from a buoyant and carefree child to a rebellious and sometimes sullen young woman who longs to transform into the dragon she is meant to be. Like Alex, she is stifled by the community she is raised in. Unlike Alex, however, she does not deny that dragons exist. Thus, she operates as a foil against whom Alex compares her own fears, desires, and dreams.

By the end of the novel, Beatrice changes into what she was always meant to be, fully sanctioned by the love and acceptance of her family. In this way, she becomes, for Alex, an example of what happens when a person is given the choice to manifest their true self. Beatrice’s transformation in the novel, which comes only after her family realizes that forcing her to remain a girl is draining her of her life, sparks a turning point for the world that Barnhill builds. As Beatrice transforms, communities begin building themselves around dragons until, as Beatrice does, they have been fully redesigned to protect dragons rather than shunning them and denying their existence.

Bertha Green is Alex Green’s mother. Though she dies early in the novel, her memory is carried through Alex, and the many limitations she placed upon her daughter have a lasting effect on Alex’s psyche long after her mother dies. Bertha is sick at the beginning of the novel, and although she changes considerably over the course of a few chapters, she ultimately falls ill again and does not recover. Her illness is implicitly tied to her decision to deny her inner self and resist transforming into a dragon. Rather than embracing her desire for freedom, Bertha chooses to surrender her potential identity and instead dedicates herself to being a mother to Alex and a wife to Mr. Green. She is silent and fierce, and the dragonish aspects of her character are only revealed in her interactions with her sister Marla or through the intricate knotwork that is designed to suppress her inner self.

Bertha’s life choice becomes a point of contention and guilt for Alex; as the prevalence of research into dragoning eventually proves, making the choice to dragon might have saved her mother’s life and spared her from the cancer that ate her from within. However, Bertha chooses to stay with her daughter, and with Beatrice, because she wants to be a mother to them—to protect them from a world that doesn’t understand them. Despite her efforts to suppress the girls’ true natures in one way or another, neither Alex nor Beatrice can deny their need to become something more, and Bertha—through her constant repetition of her favorite poem by Tennyson—learns that she can never really eradicate that desire within herself, either.

Like Beatrice is for Alex, Marla is Bertha’s foil, and their relationship becomes a model for Beatrice and Alex: one they eventually subvert. Marla is a gay woman living in an extremely restrictive society that does not accept her, and she suffers ruinous rejection even from her own sister, who refuses to acknowledge her true nature. Despite the fact that Marla is in love with another woman, she initially gives in to society’s expectations, marrying a man and birthing a child in an attempt to fit in and build a “normal” life. Still, she wears slacks and works in an auto mechanic shop—very unlike many women during this period; in this, her character is designed to represent the defiant attitudes of post-1950s feminists who consciously challenged the restrictive status quo of American society at the time.

It is important to note that of all the people in Alex’s life, Marla is the only one to call the girl by her chosen name; this tendency highlights from the very beginning that Marla possesses the rare quality of openly accepting people for who they choose to be. This tendency therefore makes her defection from “normal” life an inevitability; she is unhappy living a life that is not her own and becomes one of the many women who dragon in April 1955. She leaves Beatrice, Alex, and Bertha behind before eventually returning as a dragon to be with her family once again—but on her terms. Eventually, she returns to her daughter and niece and happily retains her dragon form alongside her true life partner, Edith, to whom she remains devoted.

Mrs. Helen Gyzinska is a wealthy philanthropist, librarian, and activist who works actively with Dr. Gantz, the foremost authority on the phenomenon of dragoning. She fights against the oppression of women in many ways throughout the novel, advocating the quest for further knowledge of dragoning and the need to fully educate women in the choices available to them. Although it takes Alex a while to fully embrace the support she offers, Helen Gyzinska is Alex’s staunchest supporter because, like Alex, she was once similarly oppressed by the society in which she was raised. Despite these early difficulties, she married into wealth, and once widowed, she is able to turn her fortune into a platform to uplift women and further the advancement of knowledge across the United States.

Sonja Blomgren, a girl with blonde hair, fair skin, and large, hazel eyes, is Alex’s childhood friend and love interest. The memory of Sonja becomes a sore topic for the young Alex when her family forces her to deny her passionate feelings for her friend. Rather than simply denying Alex the chance to see her friend again—an action that is cruel enough in and of itself—Alex’s father goes so far as to use his connections at the bank to force Sonja’s family to leave the town entirely. This action of his is never explicitly confirmed, but when Alex discovers that the bank at which Mr. Green works has taken over the house that Sonja’s family used to rent, the connection is clear. Thus, Sonja comes to represent a hint of the forbidden identity as a gay woman that Alex is forbidden to fully experience as a girl.

When both characters are grown women, they reconnect and rekindle their relationship, but once again, Sonja comes to embody yet another version of love that is lost, for Alex must ultimately let her beloved go when Sonja decides to dragon. In this, Sonja follows in her mother’s footsteps, but her choice to dragon is not one that Alex can bring herself to mirror. Thus, although the two are able to reconnect with each other and heal many mutual wounds, they must ultimately come to accept the interplay of Personal Agency and the Expression of Unconditional Love, and let each other go once more.

Dr. Henry Gantz represents the detached voice of reason that supplements Alex’s very subjective memoir with a variety of sober-toned historical documents. He is the primary researcher of the phenomenon of dragoning, and despite society’s many attempts to censor his work, he finds innovative ways to publish and distribute his findings via the efforts of the Wyvern Research Collective. Although he appears only indirectly throughout the majority of the novel, his influence has a prominent impact on Alex’s understanding of dragoning both as a child and throughout her adolescence and young adulthood. Though Dr. Gantz does not undergo much change himself and remains a fairly static character throughout the novel, his frequent discoveries about dragoning and his efforts to force society to acknowledge the phenomenon as real and valid allow the young Alex to embrace essential changes within herself and her family as a whole.