Guest Review: Empathizing with the Abuser: The Poet Empress by Shen Tao

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Please welcome our anonymous reviewer!

The Poet Empress by Shen Tao is a debut Chinese-inspired fantasy centered on a poor village girl who rises from a concubine to the empress-in-waiting to an abusive prince heir. In a bid to save the kingdom from the tyranny of his reign, Wei decides to kill him in the only way she can, by writing a magic poem. Only deathly poems have to be love poetry, and only by knowing him well enough to love him can she kill him.

Contrary to what you might expect, given the popularity of romantasy and enemies-to-lovers, The Poet Empress is not a romance. I do want to make that clear. Whatever faults the book has, a HEA for an abusive relationship is not one. On that note, I will be discussing the end of The Poet Empress and there will be spoilers throughout.

It is also important to note that the book itself contains content warnings for physical and sexual violence, including against children. I will be discussing these elements in my review.

The story opens with Wei taking her beloved younger brother to town during a festival and discovering that the infamous Prince Terren is newly appointed heir over his older brother Maro. The royal court is thus scouting for thirty concubines to fill Terren’s palace, for it is of utmost importance that he create at least one heir.

Although the importance of an heir is a common trope in both history and fantasy fiction, The Poet Empress lends it additional importance by intertwining the hereditary monarchy with the world’s magic system. Magic comes from the composition of poetry, which even the illiterate can scrawl in the dirt and have spells take effect. Women are barred from literacy, on pain of death, and even among the literate, magical poetry is its own skill and profession that cannot be easily completed by anyone. Then there’s a second magical system interwoven within the first: the magic of the imperial seal.

Long ago, the founder of the dynasty gained or created a great magic that would pass solely through his male descendants (with great difficulty in conception). Princes would be born with a circular mark, or seal, upon their cheek, which would eventually manifest a character that would dictate the nature of their magic. Terren, for instance, can control blades, sending swords and daggers flying across a room with a wave of his hand. The origins of the seal magic are not explored, and the book only mentions in passing that there was a time before the seal magic. Daughters are either not born at all or are completely irrelevant and not magical; I never gathered a clear picture of any possibilities relating to imperial princesses. In a book concerned with power and patriarchy, the elusion of any exploration of the male-only nature of seal magic struck me as interesting.

Returning to the story, Wei’s village is starving from a long-lasting famine, and she seizes the chance to gain favor for her village by becoming an imperial concubine. The reasoning for the court eunuch, Li Ciyi, selecting Wei is flimsy at best and reads mostly as a narrative contrivance to get to where the plot needs her to be. Her appointment to empress-in-waiting happens similarly quickly, with the implication being that Terren chooses her as an act of insolent defiance, not caring if he angers the well-placed families of the other girls.

Wei soon sees Terren’s cruelty first hand when he kills a ridiculously ineffective assassin. When he summons her to chambers at night, he never makes any sexual advances towards her but does routinely torture her. He cuts her with his knives, he forces her to eat until she vomits, he drowns her in a pond, and he forces her into a barrel of starving rats.

“Terren called on me often. Not every night, not even every week, but often enough that every day, when the afternoon light waned and the shadows of my windows’ lattices grew long on the floor, I would begin to breath fast. My chest would tighten with the panicked hammering of my heart. I would taste bitter bile in my mouth just anticipating Hesin’s knock on my door, which would surely be accompanied by the dreadful words His Highness calls you to his bedside.”

Wei’s journey through the story contains many more moments of torture. On their wedding night, Terren stabs her through the torso with a blade and leaves her to die in his drunken stupor. She considers healing herself with her illicit literacy, but she decides instead that it’s better to wait out the night and count on Terren to heal her in the morning. Later on, Wei is accused of literacy and presented with a public torture test where she inflicts magical pain on herself to prove her innocence.

For that all Wei undergoes, the torture seems to have little effect on her. Wei experiences intense trauma, but she is never traumatized. The narrative will mention how many days it takes her to physically recover, but psychological damage is never explored. The quote I mentioned above regarding her anxiety about being called to Terren’s bedchamber stands out to me as one of the very few moments where the book acknowledges any sort of psychological impact. I found a persistent emotional shallowness to the torture Wei experiences, even while the narrative describes over-the-top scenarios (such as the barrel of starving rats).

I found the emotional shallowness to be most blatant when Terren slaughters twenty-two of the servants in Wei’s quarters, sparing only an old woman whose tongue he’d already cut out before for some minor transgression and Wei’s chief eunuch, Li Ciyi. Wei had found a solace with the servants, tasking Li Ciyi to teach them to read as well as her. Wei was particularly close with her serving girl Wren.

“Wren’s hand twitched again. She was beyond help, but still alive, still suffering. I went to her, pulled one of the swords out from her torso, and plunged it into her skull.”

After Wei mercy-kills Wren, the servant girl is only brought up once more, when Wei visits the graves of the servants while trying to decide whether to go through with her assassination of Terran. She has grown a taste for the power the empress holds, and she is recently betrayed by Terran’s rival, Prince Maru. At the graves of those Terren brutally murdered, Wei decides to let him live:

“Maybe there did not have to be war, or conquest, or pain. Because I would be Terren’s empress. Because I was going to sit on the throne next to him, keep close to him, guide him onto a better path. Not the right one -- that was overly ambitious, even for the best of us -- but at the very least, a better one.

I had not become so wicked in my heart that I had stopped believing people could change. If a gentle child could turn into a monster, I thought, then surely a monster could become gentle again.”

So far I have focused this review on Wei’s suffering, but I will turn now to the narrative’s main interest: Terren’s suffering. The central questions of The Poet Empress are “What caused Terren to become so monstrous?” and “How can Wei find the humanity within him?”.

And here lies my core problem with The Poet Empress. I find the questions at the heart of it the fundamental flaw. Our culture is obsessed with seeking the humanity behind violent, abusive men. Surely there is good within him! He can’t be all bad. His future potential shouldn’t be denied because of a few past mistakes. I have heard all of these before. “Abusers are humans too,” is not a novel statement. It is tired and so often used to drown out the voices of the abused.

In the course of seeking out Terren’s backstory, Wei discovers he started as a happy child who underwent his own suffering, from betrayal of those closest to him to ongoing sexual abuse on the orders of his unloving mother. His mother herself was sold to a brothel at age nine and seems to see no problem with her young son being repeatedly raped to ensure the conception of a new magic prince.

Cynically, I think Terren’s background of childhood sexual abuse gives the narrative a rationale to avoid Wei experiencing rape. To be clear, I do not think the book would be improved by including Terren sexually assaulting Wei. I think the book would be a lot worse for it, especially given how shallow the existing treatment of torture is. I do think, though, that if Terren’s violence were sexual in nature, it would be harder for the book to maintain its focus on Terren’s humanity despite the violence he inflicts on others. At the same time, I notice that Terren’s own sexual abuse is given so much more weight than anything he inflicts on others. Terren can cut out people’s tongues when he’s in a bad mood or go on killing sprees through servants quarters. The trauma Terren inflicts on Wei slides off her, but Terren’s own trauma turns him into a sadistic killer.

The Poet Empress takes pains to show Terren’s humanity under his monstrosity. He loves fish, and he tries to save the carp from freezing during a blizzard. He was once a happy child who loved his older brother. He leaves Wei tea after the literacy test tortures. While The Poet Empress focuses on Terren’s humanity, I feel that it forgets the humanity of his victims. Wren, the slaughtered servant girl, was just as human as Terren, with her own dreams of returning to working in the palace menagerie and her excitement to learn to read. Terren mutilates her and leaves her to die in the grass, and she is hardly mentioned again. Meanwhile, the story ends with Wei giving Terren the quiet funeral he requested.

Yes, Wei does ultimately kill Terren, but only after she saves his life. She decides that she can temper Terren’s cruelty, that she can do good as his empress, and besides, she doesn’t wish for Terren’s older brother (who participated in the abuse that so shaped Terren) to take the throne. Wei takes the killing poem that she wrote and transforms it into a life-saving poem, bringing Terren back from the brink of death.

It is only when Terren kills Prince Maru that Wei decides she will kill Terren after all. The choice is no longer between Terren and Maru, but between Terren and his rarely mentioned younger brother, whose fruit magic may help the starving villages.

At the end, Terren accepts his death, recognizing that his abuse has so warped him that the only solution is death.

“The world melted away entirely as I focused on the prince. I sensed his breaths calming as the moment dragged on, saw his expression becoming more peaceful under the wind-stirrings of his damp hair. He kissed me tentatively at first. Then he found his courage after all and kissed me harder, blood and salt. And maybe he was laughing a little, I didn’t know. All I knew was that the moment he closed his eyes was when I stabbed him in the heart.”

Although, in a way, the book posits, did Terren truly die with the abuse of the little boy he was? When Wei visits the brothel where Terren was abused, she finds his ghost as a child and remarks that she’s never before seen the ghost of someone living. Nauseatingly, the child ghost reappears happy and content at the end of the novel, when Wei is burying Terren. In The Poet Empress, abuse either leaves one fundamentally unchanged (Wei) or twists one so terribly that death is preferable (Terren).

The Poet Empress is not a romance novel with its requisite HEA, but it is a love story focused on humanizing a violent, abusive man. Perhaps the intent was to make a commentary on recent romantasy novels that do give their abusive men HEAs, but I do not find The Poet Empress successful in any repudiation of this trend. Its central concerns stll focus on the abuser: What about his trauma? What about his humanity? These questions are stale, and so often used to redirect focus away from the abuser’s victims.