41 pages • 1-hour read
The River Has Roots
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and gender discrimination.
The Power of Language
The River Has Roots argues that language has immense power to impact human lives and perceptions. The novella represents this power in a variety of ways, often by making abstract grammar, wordplay, and literary devices literal and concrete. In particular, the novella focuses on the power of language to effect change, depicting this as both redemptive and dangerous.
Literal and figurative examples of language’s impact drive much of the novella’s plot and characterization. Riddles and wordplay facilitate Esther and Rin’s relationship, allowing them to cross the boundaries between their lands and cultures. Words also help bring Esther back to her own body and identity after Pollard murders her and the river transforms her into a swan. Similarly, riddles and songs represent (and help create) the unbreakable bond between Esther and Ysabel, which helps Esther prove Pollard’s crime and allows Ysabel to visit Esther in Arcadia in the conclusion. Through such examples, the novella stresses language’s ability to right wrongs, to connect people to one another, to affirm identity, and even to give or restore life—literally, in Esther’s case, but figuratively in its capacity to preserve a person’s memory.
In the novella’s framing, language has these powers because of its relationship to Arcadia, the land of Faerie. By imagining grammar as a kind of transformational magic, the narrative heightens the figurative and symbolic power of language into a concrete force that has real, physical impacts on people and their world. The association with Arcadia is telling, however, as Faerie and its magic are often deeply ambivalent in folklore, harming humans as often as helping them by changing them in mysterious ways. This is why the “grammar” of the River Liss cannot be used by humans until it is conjugated by the willows and cultivated by the Hawthorns in a process that mirrors efforts to codify language and apply it systematically to the world. In the final pages, the novella explicitly compares the two kinds of language, noting, “There is grammar that is ruled like a kingdom, and grammar that is ruled like a composition book, and there is always, always the wild, unruly grammar of ballads and riddles, and this is the grammar of Arcadia, which breaks the real into the true” (98). Here, the novella distinguishes between language that is orderly and language that is “unruly,” with the power to disrupt reality via symbolic meaning.
Thus, while the novella mostly depicts language as a force for good, its descriptions of Arcadia serve as a reminder of language’s ability to evade human control or understanding. This ambiguity, the novel suggests, is the source of language’s power—hence the novella’s reliance on puns and other kinds of double meanings—but it also means that language is not to be taken lightly.
The Importance of Sisterhood and Familial Bonds
The second major theme focuses on the sisterly love between Esther and Ysabel. In so doing, the narrative resists several common themes and tropes of traditional folklore and folkloric ballads. Such tales often idealize romantic love over familial love and pit women (especially sisters or mothers and daughters) against each other. The River Has Roots instead argues that familial bonds, such as the love between sisters, are just as important as romantic love, even suggesting that this sisterly love is powerful enough to defy death.
The novella depicts two sisters who love and support each other without reservation. The older sister, Esther, is unwavering in her belief that Ysabel deserves the best the world has to offer. If the younger sister, Ysabel, exhibits some mild jealousy over the attention that Pollard gives to Esther, her romantic interests never supersede her love. Similarly, Esther explicitly states to Rin that though she loves them and would gladly live with them forever, she is a sister first and foremost and her love for Ysabel comes above all else. She then proves that statement by choosing to become a harp, motivated by the need to protect Ysabel from Pollard’s machinations.
This act prompts Rin to tell Ysabel that “[t]he promise [Esther] made to [Ysabel] brought her back from the dead” (97), framing the love between the sisters as life giving. The novella reinforces this depiction with Ysabel’s choice to release Esther from her promise never to leave Ysabel for Arcadia, thus allowing Esther to live fully—as a human woman and as Rin’s wife. This selflessness marks important character development for Ysabel, who acknowledges that her love for Esther has, in some ways, been “so selfish.” It also offers a stark contrast with the control that Pollard associates with love. For him, love is merely a form of possession, typified by jealousy, selfishness, and violence (physical or emotional) in the face of rejection. Meanwhile, Esther and Ysabel demonstrate what genuine love looks like: It is supportive, accepting, self-sacrificing, and unwavering. Although such qualities can exist in romantic relationships, the novella suggests that they thrive especially in familial bonds, which is why it gives primacy to the sisterly love between Esther and Ysabel. Even the last line of the novella turns its gaze not to Esther and Rin but to the sisters, whose “joy runs together like rivers, like voices, like families” (99), underscoring again the importance of sisterhood.
Resistance to Patriarchal Oppression
The novella highlights the patriarchal patterns within traditional folklore and ballads while revealing the ways that women attempt to resist those patterns. The “Two Sisters” murder ballad, like many other ballads and folktales, employs inherently patriarchal/sexist formulas, such as the centrality of men and romantic love to women’s lives and the jealousy and violence that women enact upon each other in response. Rather than echo and reinforce these formulas, The River Has Roots actively defies them.
Indeed, the novella itself constitutes an act of resistance in its subversion of the most misogynistic elements of the original ballad. The sisters, especially Esther, explicitly reject the formulaic roles usually assigned to them. Esther is not jealous of Ysabel but protective, willing to sacrifice her life and happiness for Ysabel’s sake. In fact, rather than casting Esther as the murderous sister, El-Mohtar makes her the murder victim. In this, too, the novel challenges the sexism of the source material, refusing to reduce Esther to her victimhood. Esther keeps her voice and agency in choosing to return to the human world for her sister’s sake. By contrast, the murdered sister in the original tale becomes a mere passive object, her body turned into a harp following her death.
Similarly, the narrative uses the character of Samuel Pollard to reveal the depth and violence of patriarchal oppression in both folklore and women’s lives. Pollard embodies a particular kind of patriarchy that hides beneath a veneer of gentility, outwardly showing respect and even deference to women while enacting their control and manipulation through subtlety and charm. Nevertheless, he resorts to violence when rejected, revealing the misogyny underpinning traditional chivalry. His status as a landowner and his desire to combine his lands with the Hawthorns’ are also significant, suggesting the close ties between misogyny and modern property ownership, which relies on a patriarchal system of inheritance. In fact, the novella’s description of his ambitions evokes the transition from older forms of social organization to this patriarchal one: “A union between their families would bring about a union of their lands, and draw the Hawthorns closer to the wholesome, settled tameness of Thistleford” (16). Here, “civilization” becomes synonymous with patriarchy, whereas the Hawthorns represent an older order more closely aligned with the natural world and with women’s authority.
Ultimately, Pollard’s ambitions fail, thanks largely to the resistance of the novel’s female characters. The strength of Esther and Ysabel’s bond, coupled with the power of language, results in Pollard being brought to justice. Moreover, in marrying Rin, a nonbinary character from the “wild” land of Arcadia, Esther effectively opts out of the entire patriarchal system; Rin even takes Esther’s last name, as a woman marrying a man conventionally would. By contrast, the novella’s conclusion implies that Ysabel is married to a man, yet her husband never appears, nor does he interfere with her visit to Arcadia. In the end, both sisters thus triumph over a system designed to oppress them.
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