Conformity does become another important theme for Barnhill, not so much in terms of the ‘‘dragoning’’ itself, as in the response to it from government, schools, and other institutions. This may be one reason Barnhill chose to set her tale in the 1950s and early 1960s, a period in which the pressure cookers of feminism and civil rights were notably building up steam in the United States. In Ionesco, though, the transformation was largely about conformity, whereas in Barnhill’s novel it’s very much about agency, about the relentless pressure of society to keep women and women’s lives ‘‘small,’’ as some of the dragon women put it. Instead, I was reminded of Ionesco’s 1959 play Rhinoceros, in which the residents of a small town all gradually turn into rhinoceroses. I suppose there are plenty of human-dragon metamorphoses in fantasy novels, but they aren’t what immediately came to mind when reading Kelly Barnhill’s first adult novel When Women Were Dragons – in which 642,987 American women suddenly transform into dragons on a single day in 1955.
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