a thought on fairytales

[lotesse]

If there's one point that I continue to waffle about with wrt fairytales, it's their fitness as feminist or woman-positive artifacts. I took them as such in my thesis last year in a tradition of thirdwave/minority feminist concepts of wholeness, subversion, and reappropriation - but I still haven't completely shaken my anxieties.

Okay, but. I was reading fairytale stuff this afternoon, for no particular reason, and I'm just going to go ahead and quote at length.

From Maria Tatar, Off With Their Heads!: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood - "[the argument is based] on the assumption that fairy tales 'represent the child's point of view' and are thus constantly turning parent-victims into parent-oppressors, a line of thinking similar to the one followed by Freud in his qualified rejection of patients' stories about incestuous seduction.... The 'guilty' child simply projects its own sins and transgressions onto the 'innocent' parent. Were this so consistently the case...then 'Hansel and Gretel' would be a story that is ostensibly about children abandoned by their parents in the woods, but in reality about parents left to starve by their children. Or, more to the point for our context, 'Beauty and the Beast' would not really be about a girl who is forced into marriage with a beast by her father, but about a father who is forced into an undesirable marriage by his daughter. That the propositions are so preposterous for these two tales suggests something amiss."

And here's my thought: if patriarchy feels like it has to contort itself into such utterly bizarre readings of fairy tales, there's got to be something scary, something major, hidden there. Obviously the tales as they stand are for some reason deeply offensive to the literary sensibility of the patriarch. And I figure, anything those guys are so scared of is probably something I want a closer acquaintance with.

If fairy tales were simply and fundamentally patriarchal, male critical responses to them would be equally simple. As Tatar points out, though, they're not. Dudely philosophes apparently couldn't just let fairy tales stand. And in order to sanitize them, they had to resort to Orwellian doublespeak: oh, these stories obviously mean the exact opposite of anything you'd expect! Abandoned children? No, those are clearly horrid brats who drive their parents to distraction! It's victim blaming, and it's crazy, and its presence indicates a latent power in fairy tales.

Sometimes you can best see your allies by noticing who's furthest away from your enemies.

Comments

[slashfairy.livejournal.com]

i have some- not quite thoughts, but impressions, inner dialogues- around this same area. when/as they coalesce, i'd like to talk with you about them. cos i think you're definitely talking about something real and true, there.

[lotesse]

Lemme know when you've got stuff - I'm never not happy to talk fairytales!

[executrix.livejournal.com]

For centuries, fairy tales were below the dudely radar--stories that *women* told *children,* so nobody cared until somebody started to wonder whether a) there was a buck in it somewhere, and b) what kind of stuff the future patriarchs were being told by never-going-to-be-patriarchs.

[lotesse]

Exactly. But the thing that I'm reaching after is evidence that even after the patriarchs wised up, traces of the original nature of the tales remained. We have access to so few unmediated fairy tales - I never quite know how far I have to dig down before I can find something authentically "outside".

[almostinstinct.livejournal.com]

One thing that I love is that one of the most common genres of ballads and fairytales is the "clever girl" genre, where the female main character outwits all of her (male) adversaries. Ballads seem to be one of the few places you can find female heroines who succeed and are given credit for their success. ♥ (See: Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight, The Knight and the Shepherd's Daughter, Eppie Morrie, The Bonny Lass of Anglesley, The Fair Maid on the Shore). Tales: Fitcher's Bird/,a href="http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/authors/asbjornsenmoe/olddamehen.html">The Old Dame and Her Hen/How The Devil Married Three Sisters (all variants of Bluebeard; Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight is similar (but my Anthropology says it's not a variant).

[lotesse]

Have you ever read "The Water of Life"? It's basically an Ash Lad story, but with a younger sister instead of a third boy - so she succeeds where both of her brothers before her have failed. It was one of my mega-favorites as a kid, for this reason exactly. I lurve me some clever girls!