62 pages • 2 hours read
Brandon SandersonTress of the Emerald Sea
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Identity and Change
Tress of the Emerald Sea reveals the impact of one’s surroundings and experiences on identity; identity is fluid, changing as one’s life changes. Both Tress and Charlie become different people through their journeys. Their fundamental values remain, but broader experiences allow them to learn about themselves and others more deeply, altering their paths. When Hoid introduces Tress and Charlie to the reader, they are both unassuming people. Tress washes windows, cares for her family, and collects cups from sailors passing through the Rock. Even her parents note that she never asks for anything—she never wants to impose, and she is content with her life on the Rock. Charlie, despite being the son of a cruel duke, is kind and loves telling stories. Neither of them wishes to be a hero.
The duke’s actions, however, change their situation. As Hoid (as narrator) explains, “Truth is, people are as fluid as time is. We adapt to our situation like water in a strangely shaped jug, though it might take us a little while to ooze into all the little nooks” (388). By sending Charlie to the Sorceress, the duke forces Charlie into a cursed life. Tress at first believes she is helpless in the situation, hopeless and continuing her life on the Rock. Tress, though, loves Charlie, and she believes in helping people. Although a dangerous adventure was never something she would have chosen, the decision to go after Charlie is in line with who Tress is because it aligns with her love and her values. Charlie, living as Huck the rat, is frightened and does not want to live as a rat, but he cares for Tress and tries to save her by sabotaging her.
Both Tress and Charlie change as a result of the choices they must make to save themselves and others. Enduring many dangerous events and putting her mind to work on ingenious plans to save herself and the crew push Tress to recognize parts of herself that she had not known existed. When she finds the fake Charlie, who seems so unchanged by his experience, she recognizes how much she herself has changed:
Tress was not the same. She’d changed so much in the course of her time away from the Rock. She found she didn’t care about pies, or window washing, or even cups in the same way. She cared about spores, and what she could do with them. About sailing, and her crew. All of this…all of this meant she couldn’t go back to being the same person. She, you see, had been scarred (440).
Tress is no longer the same girl, even though she has some of the same values and personality traits. She has learned how courageous and intelligent she truly is.
Another way Tress changes is by learning how to ask for and accept help. She has never wanted to impose on others, but she faces more daunting tasks than ever before. Through the camaraderie she builds with the crew, she realizes that it is all right to ask for help and to rely on others. This all comes to a head when Salay offers her the chance to choose help over isolation:
Then Salay asked simply, ‘Do you order us to turn around?’ Did she? Could she? Dared she? In that moment, the decision was made. The rock tipped and the avalanche of change that had been building in Tress started tumbling down. ‘No,’ Tress whispered. ‘Please help me’ (451).
Tress learns how to take up space in the world, although it happens in increments. Even as their story nears its end, when Charlie says he can let the others into the tower to help, Tress says, “‘If it’s not too much trouble,’ she said. Yes, she’d changed. But even big events change us only a little at a time, and she was still Tress” (454). Tress may be a new Tress, but her identity is not unrecognizable. Both Tress and Charlie have adapted, discovering new parts of their identities, but they remain, fundamentally, themselves—simply altered.
Flipping the Gendered Script
Tress of the Emerald Sea flips the gender roles of typical adventure stories, exploring how women can be heroes and even save men in distress. Tress illustrates the strength and intelligence of any hero. In the Postscript to the novel, Sanderson writes about how the gendered plot line to the film The Princess Bride inspired Tress. Sanderson notes that his wife wonders “What would that story have been like if Buttercup had gone searching for Westley, instead of immediately giving him up for dead?” (478). With this question as a seed, Sanderson flips the script of most adventure stories, providing Tress with the initiative and bravery often denied to women in typical fantasy, who often only exist as love interests of the (male) hero. Unlike Buttercup, when Tress realizes no one else will save Charlie, she decides she must do so. Like many of her male counterparts in the genre, Tress embarks on her journey reluctant to be a hero and afraid of the many dangers, but determined to save the one she loves.
Tress is not the only powerful female figure in the story; the novel is full of women contradicting traditional gender roles. The antagonist, Captain Crow, is a woman who is as brutal as the male antagonists from traditional adventure stories. The crew, called “the Dougs” by Hoid, is composed of a mix of men and women, and two of the highest-ranking crew members are Salay and Ann. Hoid highlights their strength and determination, noting that the Sorceress “hadn’t counted on a woman like Salay [to successfully navigate the rocks securing the tower] […]. A woman who would not back down when the lives of her friends were at stake” (456). Tress’s world illustrates the strength and determination of women, equal to that of the male heroes in traditional adventure stories.
Further, the fact that there are so many women playing key roles in the adventure plot is assumed as natural within the world of the novel. In this way, gender does not take on as significant a meaning as a character’s other qualities. The traditional fantasy adventure is dependent on old-fashioned gender dynamics for its plot. Sanderson creates an adventure story that really does seem to have love—romantic, familial, and platonic—rather than gender at its core.
Fear and Knowledge
Tress of the Emerald Sea reveals the power that knowledge has to help humans alleviate or eliminate fear. The primary way the relationship between knowledge and fear is explored in the text is through humans’ relationship with spores. Most humans on Tress’s world fear spores, varying from a mild fear and respect to outright terror. At the beginning of the novel Tress leans toward the latter; she believes a butterfly risking flight over the spore seas is attempting suicide, and she covers her mouth and nose frequently to avoid ingesting any that might sprout inside of her and kill her.
Yet, Tress is forced to interact with spores more closely to survive on her journey. One of the Dougs passes off the work of filling bags with spores for the cannons to her, since she becomes the lowest member of the crew at first. Then in her desire to stay on board to save the crew, she convinces Captain Crow to keep her on by offering to take over the role of ship’s sprouter, forcing herself into even closer contact with spores. She dives into the work, using the previous sprouter’s schematics to learn about how spores work and experimenting with what she could use them for. Exposure helps Tress: “the more she learned the less afraid she had become. It is that way with most topics, as fear and knowledge often play on different sides of the net […] for humans at large, knowledge usually equates to empathy, and empathy leads to understanding” (335). Tress of the Emerald Sea reveals the power of knowledge to help people become braver and more open-minded.
Knowledge does not always eliminate fear, however. Sometimes knowledge simply lessens the fear, helping someone face what they fear while the fear itself helps the person to be careful. In fact, the danger of some activities might provide a fascination. Tress realizes why spores fascinate sprouters: “It all had to do with fear. While a healthy measure of foolhardiness drove our ancestors toward discovery, fear kept them alive. […] We need it, but the thing is, our heritage taught us to fear some of the wrong things […] And when one abandons certain fears and assumptions, an entire world opens up” (305). Tress learns how to live with a healthy dose of fear while also learning how not to limit herself simply because of fear. Tress’s journey of self-discovery and leadership is one of balancing her fears with ever-increasing knowledge, while pushing the limits of her fears with this newfound knowledge.
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By Brandon Sanderson
