Thanks for your response, Giles.

Yes, I am aware that the fire/dark dichotomy is not a simplistic moral binary — but my points do not rely on a moralisation. What you may be reading as a moralisation is my exploration as to how the text justifies violence against its female characters. I’ve no interest in whether the dark itself is ‘truly’ evil — I’m simply examining how the narrative uses this in connection to gender. As you say, it “make[s] logical sense” for the dark to be associated with “the feminine” — and part of my argument here is to examine that logic, which is rooted in an essential picture of gender. Of course, this logic may present itself as reverence — but we should be critical of how that reverence operates, and how — for instance — it is used to justify the mistreatment of many of the female characters in the text.