“Such a waste of a girl, such rumination. I am obsessive. I contain nothing but the replay. I am blood and blood and replay. I am please don’t go”
– Lisa Marie Basile, I Put The Coffin Out To Sea
St. Alia of the Knife, forever the patron saint. Her mother cast her away. Her brother abandoned her. She was pushed into the position of Priestess and then pushed into the position of Leader. Then her husband left. And her niece and nephew just gave her up.
She’s born an abomination, it’s nobody’s fault but Jessica’s. Yet, she is the one called abomination. In short, she was born a crime. At the beginning of messiah, when that guy is being interrogated, he said, “I can imagine no greater rape than that” in regard to Alia and her condition. This just kind of echoes her affliction. Alia wants nothing more than to be Paul. I think the thing people mistake about Paul and Alia’s relationship is that at least I never interpreted their relationship as romantic. It’s a plot point that they should get together to continue their bloodline, but the option is never really explored or considered by the characters.
I think Alia is in awe of her brother, everything she does is for Paul. Yet, at the same time, she is keeping her internal struggle a secret because again she only thinks Paul is important. When Paul and Chani die, Alia is all of a sudden crowned in the place of her brother. She immediately feels inadequate seeking to awaken her prescience through the spice orgies. The only choice Alia made in her name was to marry Idaho. Idaho loves Alia when nobody, not even her mother wants her. Idaho and Paul were the only people not to see her as an abomination.
Now there are parts of the “Dune” novels where it’s described that Alia is aroused by the thought of her brother. However, what people seem to forget is that at this point Alia is possessed by the Baron who was sexually attracted to Paul. I interpret that the Baron was twisting Alia’s admiration for Paul into a sexual one. For me, that thought always terrified me, and made Alia’s position more tragic.
Alia is slipping further and further into abomination. What she needs is help. Idaho begins to abandon her. She sees this as a betrayal, and the killing blow is when she finds out that the preacher roaming Arrakis is Paul. She has wanted nothing more than her God brother to swoop in and save them, to save his empire, and her from said abomination. To find out that that person is not only alive, but he won’t help and is actively opposed to everything she tries to do, was crushing. Idaho and Paul’s abandonment affects Alia more than her mother’s.
With everyone turned against her, Alia begins to rely on the Baron more. He twists one of the universe’s great killers to kill Paul’s empire. Alia goes along with it just to watch the world burn.
When Leto II confronts Alia at the end of “Children of Dune,” Alia is in full possession, and I think that’s why she fights Leto. However, when she sees that Leto is something more than human-like Paul, and her mother is buried in the arms of an enemy Corrino. Helping him more than she ever helped Alia. She casts herself out the window and falls silently, finally free from the torment of her affliction and the abandonment of her family.
Alia has a tragedy that rivals Paul’s, but in Alia’s case, it isn’t really through any choices she makes for herself. At least in the beginning. She spends her early life dealing with the consequences of mistakes and choices that others have made.
However, Alia was corrupted by power even before the Baron possessed her, perhaps as a result of her brother leaving her as regent or her mother dipping out to Caladan after Paul’s “death.” She was definitely corrupted before the Baron entered her, leading an actual cult.
The character of Alia is wonderfully complicated and burdened. A child awakened into horrible awareness, becomes a living saint burdened with responsibility but always unable to gain the prescience that her brother had.
The whole Atreides family is cursed (Paul himself mentions this in “Children of Dune”). The word “Atreides” refers to the descendants of the Greek King Atreus of Mycenae, father of the legendary “King of Kings” Agamemnon from Greek Myth (who coincidentally, appears to Alia as an ego-memory when she is succumbing to an abomination). In the Dune books, Agamemnon really existed and is the ancestor of Leto, Paul, Alia, etc.
The House of Atreus was notoriously cursed by the Greek Gods for several generations, starting with Atreus’ grandfather Tantalus. Tantalus, in his desire to test the gods of Olympus’ omnipotence, chopped up his son Pelops and put him in a soup to be fed to the Gods. The Gods upon being served the soup, realized right away what Tantalus had done and refused to eat it. Tantalus was thrown into the deepest pit in Tartarus for his betrayal.
Pelops was revived by the Gods, but the family curse continued. Misfortune befell the family time and time again. Acts of incest, cannibalism, kin-slaying, madness, and hubris became synonymous with the family, until finally, Agamemnon’s son Orestes ended it by killing his mother and taking the full brunt of the curse upon himself, driving him mad.
Alia’s entire life she was an outsider. She was different. She was never allowed to emotionally and mentally mature as herself before she was required to be an adult. She loved her brother so much. She had the memories of her mother’s love for him and she watched him become the greatest warrior the Imperium had ever seen.
Desperation destroyed her in the end. Desperation and disconnection. She cracked under the weight of the leadership asked of her and the projections of the masses expecting her to be divine. Many seek control because through power they can ensure their needs are met. She wanted to feel safe and capable.
I think Paul deciding she was a lost cause after her possession truly broke Alia. That was the point of absolute no return for her when she stood there wanting to cry out for her brother but couldn’t speak. Paul was probably right that she couldn’t be truly saved, but she suffered a lot because of his flaws and preoccupation with other details of the future than her state of being. I’m sure that added to his shame and self-loathing too.
I like to think of Alia as the opposite of the coin of Leto II. She is representative of the dangers of prescience and ancestral memory. That a single will cannot combat a multitude and win. That the resistance will wear you down until you are dominated by the basest and cruelest of human intentions. The way forward is not through solitary conquest but a great collaboration at the expense of yourself. To “win” is no longer a competition but to entirely embrace a system, to become a single part of a working whole. A community striving toward one goal. Where do you go, once your ‘messiah’ god-figure brother is gone and you’re left holding the reins to his legacy, living in his shadow?
I thought it was interesting that Alia fell to her death on the same steps her brother was stabbed to death ~10 minutes earlier. A quote from “Messiah” reads, “In truth, Emperor and sister are one person back to back, one-half male one-half female.”
Like the Roman god of time Janus, who has one face looking to the future, the other to the past. Paul was undone by prescience, and visions of the future, while Alia was undone by memories of the past. And they died within minutes of one another on the same steps. Poetic irony.
Among the many things that make Alia so sad is, just like many within the House of Atreides, it feels like her fate was pre-written. But while Leto II gets to be God Emperor and Paul is Muad’Dib, names that would live on forever, Alia fades into the background of history by the time we get to the later books of Frank Herbert’s Dune. Her sacrifice is not treated as the same noble sacrifice as her brother’s and nephew’s but as her last chance at salvation.
Even the cult that rises around her refers to her as Saint Alia of the Knife. She was only allowed to be a tool for others, a lesser important result of “the Jessica Crime” to reproduce for love.
Naturally, this is why she is the character I love the most in “Dune” and who I believe is the most misunderstood. The born-wrong girl who commits familicide at two and spends the rest of her short life being tormented by the mistakes and choices of others, never being able to escape the trap of her preborn mind.