Good Girls and Wicked Women in Fairy Tales
These are the notes I took during the March 15 "Good Girls and Wicked Women in Fairy Tales" panel at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts.
Moderator: Helen Pilinovsky, Columbia University.
Panelists:
Ellen Datlow, co-editor of The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror and many fairy-tale anthologies.
Elizabeth Hand, fiction writer and book reviewer for The Washington Post; her story “Kronia” is in the current Year’s Best, and on our syllabus.
Nalo Hopkinson, fiction writer and anthology editor; her new novel is The New Moon’s Arms – which is about “sea people,” among other things.
Jennifer Stevenson, fiction writer; her upcoming novel, The Brass Bed, is first in a new series titled The SeX Files.
Veronica Schanoes, University of Pennsylvania.
Pilinovsky’s Ph.D. work is on the bowdlerization of fairy tales in the 19th century, which she argues led directly to the creation of the fantasy genre as we know it.
Pilinovsky: “Who are the role models in fairy tales? Who are the good girls?”
Schanoes: “I don’t look for role models in fairy tales. I think that’s a mistake.”
Pilinovsky: Some characters reinforce the values of a society, while other characters subvert those values or contradict them or break them.
Schanoes: One thing she likes best about fairy tales is their valorization of trickery, deceit and cunning. Such examples abound, but are trickery, deceit and cunning meant to represent society’s values, or a subversion of society’s values? Who are we to say that trickery, deceit and cunning have not been among society’s values all along, at least since the creation of that deceitful, cunning trickster, Odysseus?
Datlow: The princess in “The Frog Prince” is “a dimwit” who seems to make a morally repugnant bargain without any pressing need to do so. She’s not in extremis, like the heroine in “Rumpelstiltskin.”
Schanoes: To her, the frog prince is the more repugnant one because he refuses to let the princess out of her bargain, even though she’s clearly unwilling to go through with it. Is this a form of rape?
Pilinovsky: She prefers the more complicated, gender-reversed Russian version, about a frog princess who courts a human man.
Stevenson: She questions what moral, if any, is taught by “The Frog Prince.” She suggests: “Throw a prince against the wall, and if he sticks …”
Schanoes: We’re still too hung up on the Victorian insistence that fairy tales must have morals, a 19th-century invention. “I like stories in which girls perform badly and skip away happily.”
Schanoes: “Can you name me a fairy-tale character who isn’t an idiot?”
Datlow: The same could be said of Oedipus. Myth often relies on stupidity to get the plot engine in motion.
Hand: But what’s the next thing in fairy tales? What new fairy-tale paradigm is coming along that’s not just a stale role reversal or gender switch?
Schanoes: Her students say they’re already bored by the “pretty-girl-kicks-ass” trope, and they see Buffy the Vampire Slayer as just one more example of it. She tries, with only partial success, to convince her students that Buffy and Xena were groundbreaking in their time.
Datlow: The villain-as-hero trend, most famously done in Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked and the Broadway musical based on it, is certainly a current fairy-tale trend. In fact, she and Terri Windling are putting together an all-villain anthology.
Pilinovsky: Morals were present from the earliest literary fairy tales – those that were written for publication, as opposed to being passed on orally – but they often didn’t quite fit the story, and that sometimes may have been the sardonic point. Charles Perrault tells us the moral of his “Blue Beard” (1697), about a monstrous wife-killer, is “Women, obey your husbands.”
Stevenson: Novelist Jennifer Crusie says you can make it through the day without a cigarette but not without a rationalization. We tell ourselves stories all the time to justify ourselves, and the most successfully mass-marketed stories are those that successfully rationalize things for the largest numbers of people. This familiarity is one reason fairy tales are so often co-opted for marketing purposes, even though the best stories can’t be reduced to pitches for underarm deodorant.
Pilinovsky: In Emma Donoghue’s 1993 collection Kissing the Witch, each retold fairy tale turns out to be connected to all the other retold fairy tales.
Schanoes: There are many fairy tales about cooperation between women, often sisters. “In the 20th century, those are not the ones that have been popularized.”
Pilinovsky: She loves the ambiguous character of the little robber-girl in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” (1845), partially because the little robber-girl is so untypical of Andersen’s female characters. On the other hand, some fairy tales uphold rebellion by putting the heroines into situations so odious that they have to rebel.
A member of the audience says that Andersen’s heroes have success in life, while his heroines must suffer and die and achieve success only in death.
Schanoes: Only in the 19th century do the heroes and heroines of fairy tales stop achieving secular awards on Earth – fame, power, riches – and start achieving them only in Heaven.
Pilinovsky: She agrees on the chronology, but says the heavenly reward is much more likely for female characters than for male ones.
From the audience, Sydney Duncan asks whether the traditions they’ve been talking about apply to non-European fairy-tale traditions, or just the European ones.
In reply, a member of the audience says that in African folktales, young girls are rewarded for trickery and cunning, but older women, mothers, are not. Older women are expected to be keepers of the culture; they have more responsibilities than the young girls, and thus are less free to subvert the culture.
Hopkinson: She retells an African tale about a lazy husband who asks his wife to hunt for him. The wife says OK and turns into a lion. The terrified husband climbs a tree and begs his wife to turn back into a woman. The wife says, “I will, if you’ll do your job, and let me do mine.”
Stevenson: Some of these old stories are composed of so many different stories mashed together that, to quote John Varley’s description of an ugly spaceship in The Ophiuchi Hotline, they look like “a hat rack fucking a Christmas tree.” For example, all the fairy tales about the 12th or 13th child of a family are, on one level, stories about the calendar.
Pilinovsky: In fairy tales, transgressive women who must be punished often transgress by trying to hang on to their youth or act uppity, like Cinderella’s stepsisters.
Schanoes: Danish folklorist Bengt Holbek’s Interpretation of Fairy Tales (1987) argues that many old tales have, in effect, chapters told from different points of view. Often, the more recent versions shear off the alternate points of view and the ultimate reconciliations/transformations that they convey.
Hopkinson: In the Caribbean, the only people interested in collecting the tales in the first place were the indigenous peoples, not the colonialists, so the effort to bowdlerize was largely absent from that process. Many of those folktales, moreover, were invented for subversive purposes in the first place, often adapted from African precursors.
Pilinovsky: The Grimms were vexed by sex but not by violence. They took out the sexual offenses but left in the harsh punishments, which seem even more beyond the pale as a result.
From the audience, Bryn Neuenschwander of Indiana University (who writes fiction as Marie Brennan) says much fairy-tale violence is symbolic violence, to which the characters seem largely impervious.
Datlow: She agrees, saying it’s hard to think of fairy-tale violence in which the victims actually suffer. There’s no affect.
Hopkinson: Modern sexualized fairy tales “just put the sex back in” that was present in the first place, before 19th-century and 20th-century bowdlerization.
Pilinovsky: The casual symbolic dismemberment in fairy tales tends to be more of a Northern European tradition.
Andy Duncan, in the audience, says the origin of the Tin Woodsman in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a spectacular recent example of this casual symbolic dismemberment.
Schanoes: Graphic sex and graphic sexual violence, as in Tanith Lee’s White as Snow – which she teaches – make central the parts of the fairy tale that had been elided.
Pilinovsky: She prefers Terri Windling’s The Armless Maiden.
Hand: In the United States, at least, graphic sex in fiction, even fairy-tale fiction, is hardly news any longer, has not been news for decades. What’s the novelty in continuing to do this over and over, as if we just discovered it?
Schanoes: The textbook example of what’s wrong with the Grimms “is what they did to ‘Rapunzel.’” Originally, Rapunzel was sexually active and punished for it. Without Rapunzel’s sexuality, the punishment – isolation in a high tower -- is bizarre, and the potential timely message for 21st-century American audiences is missing.
Andy Duncan asks from the audience how Pan’s Labyrinth fits into these traditions, and whether it does anything new.
Schanoes: Pan’s Labyrinth has been compared to Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves, which was based on the fiction of Angela Carter, but what Pan’s Labyrinth brings to the fairy-tale table is a consideration of politics other than sexual politics. She would have ended Pan’s Labyrinth with the death in the maze and not with the apotheosis. She felt that was “a tacked-on happy ending.”
Moderator: Helen Pilinovsky, Columbia University.
Panelists:
Pilinovsky’s Ph.D. work is on the bowdlerization of fairy tales in the 19th century, which she argues led directly to the creation of the fantasy genre as we know it.
Pilinovsky: “Who are the role models in fairy tales? Who are the good girls?”
Schanoes: “I don’t look for role models in fairy tales. I think that’s a mistake.”
Pilinovsky: Some characters reinforce the values of a society, while other characters subvert those values or contradict them or break them.
Schanoes: One thing she likes best about fairy tales is their valorization of trickery, deceit and cunning. Such examples abound, but are trickery, deceit and cunning meant to represent society’s values, or a subversion of society’s values? Who are we to say that trickery, deceit and cunning have not been among society’s values all along, at least since the creation of that deceitful, cunning trickster, Odysseus?
Datlow: The princess in “The Frog Prince” is “a dimwit” who seems to make a morally repugnant bargain without any pressing need to do so. She’s not in extremis, like the heroine in “Rumpelstiltskin.”
Schanoes: To her, the frog prince is the more repugnant one because he refuses to let the princess out of her bargain, even though she’s clearly unwilling to go through with it. Is this a form of rape?
Pilinovsky: She prefers the more complicated, gender-reversed Russian version, about a frog princess who courts a human man.
Stevenson: She questions what moral, if any, is taught by “The Frog Prince.” She suggests: “Throw a prince against the wall, and if he sticks …”
Schanoes: We’re still too hung up on the Victorian insistence that fairy tales must have morals, a 19th-century invention. “I like stories in which girls perform badly and skip away happily.”
Schanoes: “Can you name me a fairy-tale character who isn’t an idiot?”
Datlow: The same could be said of Oedipus. Myth often relies on stupidity to get the plot engine in motion.
Hand: But what’s the next thing in fairy tales? What new fairy-tale paradigm is coming along that’s not just a stale role reversal or gender switch?
Schanoes: Her students say they’re already bored by the “pretty-girl-kicks-ass” trope, and they see Buffy the Vampire Slayer as just one more example of it. She tries, with only partial success, to convince her students that Buffy and Xena were groundbreaking in their time.
Datlow: The villain-as-hero trend, most famously done in Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked and the Broadway musical based on it, is certainly a current fairy-tale trend. In fact, she and Terri Windling are putting together an all-villain anthology.
Pilinovsky: Morals were present from the earliest literary fairy tales – those that were written for publication, as opposed to being passed on orally – but they often didn’t quite fit the story, and that sometimes may have been the sardonic point. Charles Perrault tells us the moral of his “Blue Beard” (1697), about a monstrous wife-killer, is “Women, obey your husbands.”
Stevenson: Novelist Jennifer Crusie says you can make it through the day without a cigarette but not without a rationalization. We tell ourselves stories all the time to justify ourselves, and the most successfully mass-marketed stories are those that successfully rationalize things for the largest numbers of people. This familiarity is one reason fairy tales are so often co-opted for marketing purposes, even though the best stories can’t be reduced to pitches for underarm deodorant.
Pilinovsky: In Emma Donoghue’s 1993 collection Kissing the Witch, each retold fairy tale turns out to be connected to all the other retold fairy tales.
Schanoes: There are many fairy tales about cooperation between women, often sisters. “In the 20th century, those are not the ones that have been popularized.”
Pilinovsky: She loves the ambiguous character of the little robber-girl in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” (1845), partially because the little robber-girl is so untypical of Andersen’s female characters. On the other hand, some fairy tales uphold rebellion by putting the heroines into situations so odious that they have to rebel.
A member of the audience says that Andersen’s heroes have success in life, while his heroines must suffer and die and achieve success only in death.
Schanoes: Only in the 19th century do the heroes and heroines of fairy tales stop achieving secular awards on Earth – fame, power, riches – and start achieving them only in Heaven.
Pilinovsky: She agrees on the chronology, but says the heavenly reward is much more likely for female characters than for male ones.
From the audience, Sydney Duncan asks whether the traditions they’ve been talking about apply to non-European fairy-tale traditions, or just the European ones.
In reply, a member of the audience says that in African folktales, young girls are rewarded for trickery and cunning, but older women, mothers, are not. Older women are expected to be keepers of the culture; they have more responsibilities than the young girls, and thus are less free to subvert the culture.
Hopkinson: She retells an African tale about a lazy husband who asks his wife to hunt for him. The wife says OK and turns into a lion. The terrified husband climbs a tree and begs his wife to turn back into a woman. The wife says, “I will, if you’ll do your job, and let me do mine.”
Stevenson: Some of these old stories are composed of so many different stories mashed together that, to quote John Varley’s description of an ugly spaceship in The Ophiuchi Hotline, they look like “a hat rack fucking a Christmas tree.” For example, all the fairy tales about the 12th or 13th child of a family are, on one level, stories about the calendar.
Pilinovsky: In fairy tales, transgressive women who must be punished often transgress by trying to hang on to their youth or act uppity, like Cinderella’s stepsisters.
Schanoes: Danish folklorist Bengt Holbek’s Interpretation of Fairy Tales (1987) argues that many old tales have, in effect, chapters told from different points of view. Often, the more recent versions shear off the alternate points of view and the ultimate reconciliations/transformations that they convey.
Hopkinson: In the Caribbean, the only people interested in collecting the tales in the first place were the indigenous peoples, not the colonialists, so the effort to bowdlerize was largely absent from that process. Many of those folktales, moreover, were invented for subversive purposes in the first place, often adapted from African precursors.
Pilinovsky: The Grimms were vexed by sex but not by violence. They took out the sexual offenses but left in the harsh punishments, which seem even more beyond the pale as a result.
From the audience, Bryn Neuenschwander of Indiana University (who writes fiction as Marie Brennan) says much fairy-tale violence is symbolic violence, to which the characters seem largely impervious.
Datlow: She agrees, saying it’s hard to think of fairy-tale violence in which the victims actually suffer. There’s no affect.
Hopkinson: Modern sexualized fairy tales “just put the sex back in” that was present in the first place, before 19th-century and 20th-century bowdlerization.
Pilinovsky: The casual symbolic dismemberment in fairy tales tends to be more of a Northern European tradition.
Andy Duncan, in the audience, says the origin of the Tin Woodsman in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a spectacular recent example of this casual symbolic dismemberment.
Schanoes: Graphic sex and graphic sexual violence, as in Tanith Lee’s White as Snow – which she teaches – make central the parts of the fairy tale that had been elided.
Pilinovsky: She prefers Terri Windling’s The Armless Maiden.
Hand: In the United States, at least, graphic sex in fiction, even fairy-tale fiction, is hardly news any longer, has not been news for decades. What’s the novelty in continuing to do this over and over, as if we just discovered it?
Schanoes: The textbook example of what’s wrong with the Grimms “is what they did to ‘Rapunzel.’” Originally, Rapunzel was sexually active and punished for it. Without Rapunzel’s sexuality, the punishment – isolation in a high tower -- is bizarre, and the potential timely message for 21st-century American audiences is missing.
Andy Duncan asks from the audience how Pan’s Labyrinth fits into these traditions, and whether it does anything new.
Schanoes: Pan’s Labyrinth has been compared to Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves, which was based on the fiction of Angela Carter, but what Pan’s Labyrinth brings to the fairy-tale table is a consideration of politics other than sexual politics. She would have ended Pan’s Labyrinth with the death in the maze and not with the apotheosis. She felt that was “a tacked-on happy ending.”
posted by Andy Duncan at 2:09 PM
5 Comments:
You know, it occured to me that you never hear this kind of analysis of male characters. It's almost as if male characters (at least, protagonists) represent the androgenous ideal or subset that they are a part of, but once you make a character female, you are automatically pulled into a feminist statement (whether that has anything to do with anything or not).
Though this is sort of beside the point, I wonder if you can even have a true strong male hero anymore. We discussed this some last class with the "dim-witted, beer-guzzling, couch potato" that commercials portray. And if you can't have a strong male hero without seeming anati-feminist, and if it's true that everyone's tired of the Xena/Buffy type heroines (though I really hate to put them in the same class), what's left? I would really hate to see literature go the way of destroying the hero story entirely and present humans as weak, cringing things or as only noble with respect to heavenly rewards.
Eh, I'll pretend that had some sort of coherent point and leave it at that.
That is really interesting. I read "White as Snow" in high school. I believe I remember the foreword explaining the de-sexualization of fairy tales with the Grimm Brothers. This conversation would probably also be of interest to the "Witches and Bitches" students.
Tara, what you said about the possibility of our inability to have strong male heros without criticism or backlash struck me. I can't really think, off the top of my head, of a any really verile, hairy chested, Hercules-type male hero that isn't somewhat of a punch line. There's Harry Potter, but he's a boy.
Also, the "all-villian" anthology that Daltow mentioned sounds cool.
I think an interesting paper topic would be the Evolution of Women's Rights and Roles "in the real world" vs. the same evolution in fantasy writing.
Sorry to comment on this so late but on the topic of the inherent sex in fairy tales I thought it would be prudent to point out comic book god Alan Moore's controversial "Lost Girls" graphic novel. I have not read it as the only edition of it is a deluxe $75 hardcover edition and I was skeptical about the project in the first place.
Anyway, the book is about Alice (from Wonderland), Wendy (Peter Pan), and Dorothy (Oz) after their published adventures. The story is set months prior to WWI and imagines that the three women are all real people each the appropriate age to her story's original publication (Dorothy is in her 20s; Wendy her 30s; Alice her 50s). They all meet in an Austrian resort and become friends. However, what caused so much controversy about this work (and what makes it relevant to this discourse), this is a work Moore brazenly refers to as pornography.
Backtracking, this is still Alan Moore so it is conceived with a great deal of intelligence and is, by all accounts, a well told story. It simply features the three women becoming lovers and detailing their sexual exploits throughout the years and a Freudian retelling of their stories.
Again, I have not yet been able to look at the book, but I have to imagine it would be interesting to see how the sexual politics are addressed and would be interesting to compare with some of the pre-Grimm stories that were referenced.
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