About Jessica in “Dune” — & Why She’s Still Kickass After 50 Years
On Mother’s Day a few year’s back I decided to write a feature post on some of the great mothers in speculative fiction — only to discover how few there really were, certainly cast as major characters in the stories.
But there was still Jessica from Frank Herbert’s Dune. She is one of the most kickass women characters I can think of in SFF and still one of the very few (I know: 50 years later!) where being a mother is central, not peripheral, to her part in the story.
If you read yesterday’s retrospective on Dune, you’ll know that Jessica is Paul Atreides’ mother, part of the secretive order of Bene Gesserit “witches”, and that betrayal and murder forces them to flee together into the deep deserts of the planet, Dune, where they join the native Fremen.
From the outset of the book Jessica is a major “player character”, who has defied her Bene Gesserit order to give birth to a son rather than a daughter, and has been training Paul in the secret Bene Gesserit arts, including unarmed martial arts. When they flee to the desert, Jessica is the leader, not Paul (who is still in his teens), and she has to fight and defeat a Fremen warrior to persuade them to take her into their community as well as her son.
Once accepted into Fremen society she still occupies a leadership role as a “Reverend Mother”, a community leader with religious overtones. Although Paul matures to become the overall political, military, and mystical leader of the Fremen, Jessica remains not only a significant player throughout the story, but the book’s major secondary character.
On balance, I believe that Jessica is still a standout female character in the SFF pantheon, not just because of her complexity, but because she is an astute and courageous leader, capable and literally “kickass”, and also a woman whose relationships with her lover and de facto partner (Paul’s father) and her children, chiefly Paul but also his sister Alia (born after they join the Fremen), are central to her life and to the story.
Totally agree with you, Jessica is awesome. She loved and protected her family, but still had power outside the home.
Frank Herbert’s Dune series has an interesting relationship with women, sometimes I can’t figure out if he is really misogynistic or just far ahead of his time. I wish he had continued with Jessica in the same way as Duncan Idaho, who we get to see develop throughout the novels.
Duncan Idaho was one of my favourite characters in Dune and I recall (as a relatively young reader 😉 ) being devastated when he died. I never really gel’d with the character as reintroduced in the later books, though, even though I really wanted to — but I guess that’s always a risk when reintroducing and reshaping a great character.