Williams Christy R PDF
Williams Christy R PDF
IN FAIRY-TALE RETELLINGS
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
IN
ENGLISH
DECEMBER 2012
By
Christy Williams
Dissertation Committee:
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
am fortunate to have been surrounded by helpful friends who read drafts, answered
questions, and offered encouragement, sometimes without even being asked, and I would
like to acknowledge specially Carmen Nolte, Angela Gili, Jennifer Orme, Micheline
Soong, and Deborah Ross for their constant support and advice. I am grateful to Carolyn
Paskel and Heather Willard for their encouragement and wisdom, to Phyllis Frus for her
generous support at every stage, and to William Williams, who kept me sane and healthy
Stepmother as Fairy-Tale Heroine” published in Marvels & Tales 24.2 (Wayne State
University Press, 2010). The Ever After analysis in Chapter 2 is a revision of “The Shoe
Still Fits: Ever After and the Pursuit of a Feminist Cinderella” published in Fairy Tale
Film and Cinematic Folklore: Visions of Ambiguity, edited by Pauline Greenhill and
Sidney Eve Matrix (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2010). The discussion of
Splash, The Little Mermaid, and Aquamarine” published in Beyond Adaptation: Essays
ABSTRACT
specific narrative strategies. The texts I analyze are primarily American literary fiction
and films, aimed at adults and young adults, from the past twenty years. I argue that
narrative strategies affect the way gender is conceptualized in retellings even if they do
not directly engage with gender concepts on the level of story. I suggest that gender
revealing alternate possibilities, and I focus on the complexity with which retellings re-
interact, and I conclude that the more disruptive the narrative strategies are to fairy-tale
patterns, the more enabled the retelling is to question gender as a concept. Contemporary
retellings engage their intertexts in intricate and complex ways that reflect contemporary
theoretical work with gender by theorists such as Judith Butler and Judith Halberstam,
to demonstrate the varied relationships between discursive structuring and story in fairy-
tale retellings. I show how disruptive and destabilizing narrative strategies can reinforce
thematic arguments about the construction of the wicked witch character in Robert
Valente’s “A Delicate Architecture.” I explore how reliance on plots from source tales
undercuts thematic representations of gendered identity in three films, Ever After, Sydney
notably lack of narrative closure, enable conceptualizations of gender not present in the
source tales in Kelly Link’s “Swans,” “Magic for Beginners,” and “The Cinderella
Game.” I analyze how Iserian narrative gaps and blanks produce a space for
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS........................................................................................................... ii
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................... 1
CHAPTER 2: THE SHOE STILL FITS: EVER AFTER AND THE PURSUIT OF A FEMINIST
CINDERELLA ...................................................................................................................... 77
vi
CHAPTER 4: GAPS IN THE BRIAR HEDGE: THE READER’S ROLE IN AWAKENING BRIAR
INTRODUCTION
In his 1986 collection, Don’t Bet on the Prince, Jack Zipes argues, “The
significance of the feminist fairy tales lies in their Utopian functions to criticize current
shifts in psychic and social structures and to point the way toward new possibilities for
individual development and social interaction” (Introduction 32). Utopian is a key word
here as it suggests an ideal feminist fairy tale and a representation of a world in which
gender disparity either has been resolved or does not exist. But if many feminist fairy
tales in the late 1970s and early 1980s were utopian, it was because most of them
promised a future where gender equity would be the norm. The less utopian tales of
today, published some forty years since the explosion of feminist movements in the
United States, offer no such promise. Their protagonists are entangled in multiple power
structures, not gender ones exclusively, and they are more concerned with getting by than
with building a world marked simply by gender equality abstracted from other realities.
More recently, in 2009, Zipes diagnoses in feminist fairy tales a dystopian view
(though ne never uses the term), which contrasts with his more “utopian” description of
women writers nowadays tend to depict baffled and distressed women and
men caught in a maize [sic] of absurd situations. In doing this, they are
American life, but it is also a dissent that is worrisome, for it reflects how
Zipes recognizes that some contemporary women writers of fairy tales treat gender issues
these retellings are often “baffled and distressed.” His observation usefully points to a
shift in how gender issues are being addressed by women in fairy-tale retellings. For
Zipes, these trends create a “dissent that is worrisome” and speak to American
estrangement (Relentless Progress 130), meaning that he sees these trends as evidence of
a problem. Zipes sees in these new fairy-tale fictions by women a fragmenting of ideals
associated with gender issues and an abandonment of the utopian ideal. In registering an
inability to pin down these new narratives, Zipes analyzes three writers as examples of
this trend—Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, and Lauren Slater—and notes that the work of all
three resists generic categorization and results in troubling narratives. To be fair, Zipes
sees this “dissent and dissonance” as a “powerful” urge to reconsider “how we form
gender, class, and race relations” (Relentless Progress 139). But he clearly would like a
The fact that “nobody” lives happily ever after in these new fictions is a problem
for Zipes, but it is not for me. I believe that this shift is a productive one as these fictions
reflect contemporary theory and demonstrate that feminist ideals have changed in forty
years. Rather than simply abandoning the utopian ideal to reflect the stress of attempting
to navigate socially constructed norms (all the while knowing they are constructed), these
writers’ tales suggest a shift in thinking about gender that is tied much more closely to
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contemporary work in gender theory than to the feminism of the 1970s. I see this shift as
that are actually enabled by the degenerative narrative strategies employed. What I
explore is how this “dissent” and “degeneration” are recognized and enabled by
contemporary theoretical work with gender; how these fictions shift the focus from
outcomes (happily-ever-afters) to actions; and how this focus on action is tied to identity
as process, to agency within power struggles that are not limited to gender, and to gender
categories as unstable.
I will be arguing that discordant and disruptive narrative strategies that call
attention to the constructedness of the narrative affect how the notion of gender as a
construct is conceptualized in the texts. Fairy-tale retellings that rely on the traditional
narrative patterns of their sources, particularly plot, are limited in how they can
conceptualize gender because gender is so fixed in the popularized fairy tale, or at least in
the way society thinks about fairy tales. Even retellings that make direct interventions
into how gender is conceptualized, such as gender role-reversal, are still constrained by
expectations of plot. In contrast, retellings that pull fragments rather than plot structure
from fairy tales have more possibilities in conceptualizing gender because they are
removing recognized fairy-tale elements from their expected context, thereby invoking a
particular fairy tale without reproducing the source tale’s ideology through plot and other
patterns. I argue that such retellings can question or trouble gender as a concept more
effectively, even when the plot of the retelling does not explicitly question gender
constructs.
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Fairy tales are a kind of fiction that scripts lives, and how they do this is a primary
(1994) has said that fairy tales “include . . . the audience,” that “they point to possible
destinies, possible happy outcomes, [that] they successfully involve their hearers or
into which the listener may step. Who has not tried on the glass slipper?” (From the Beast
23). Warner’s point here is that tellers of tales and their audiences are all tangled up
together, and by examining tales in terms of what they suggest about their tellers and
audiences, she constructs a decidedly female history of the fairy tale. But her work also
demonstrates how fairy tales are a part of lived experience and how they become a way to
speak about social constraints, thus, Warner argues, “advocating a means of escaping
imposed limits and prescribed destiny” (From the Beast 24). In this way fairy tales
women as passive princesses that Marcia Lieberman (1972) argued reinforced limiting
notions of femininity and worked to acculturate girls into passive roles under patriarchy,
and this has been the dominant mode of explicitly addressing representations of gender in
fairy tales for decades. These more active princesses can been seen in contemporary
young-adult novels like Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted (1997, also a popular film
released in 2004), which shows a Cinderella heroine who has been cursed into
submission learning to act for herself, as well as the self-identified feminist projects like
the Attic Press Fairytales for Feminists series in the 1980s and early 1990s, or even Jack
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Zipes’s own Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North
America and England (1986). But Zipes (2009) argues that recently both feminism and
fairy tales have been “co-opted by the mass media” (Relentless Progress 129), forming a
dominant ideologies. The current market for fairy-tale retellings offers a mass-mediated
idea of feminism in which individual women can be strong and achieve equality through
personal actions that do not, however, work to challenge or change the underlying
patriarchal structure of society. Linda Pershing and Lisa Gablehouse (2010) aptly refer to
this idea as “faux feminism” in their analysis of Disney’s 2007 film Enchanted, and Zipes
lists several other examples, including Levine’s novel mentioned above. These critical
The pro-girl fairy tales that are currently popular tend to present a monolithic
feminism of individual female strength that does not account for the wide range of
feminisms that exist in academic and political circles. Furthermore, this popularized
fairy-tale fiction and film has had to feminist theory. One question that I ask is, are any
fairy-tale adaptations keeping up with the theory? If the popular books and films
marketed to young teens and adolescent girls (such as those by Levine) are the model,
then the answer is a vehement no. But this is only one way of addressing gender, and I
will examine how popular fairy-tale films differ from experimental fairy-tale fiction in
fiction (Introduction 13). “Post-Carter” fixes the work in a specific time, published after
Carter’s death in 1992 and at the cusp of the twenty-first century, but also acknowledges
the immense influence that Angela Carter has had on fairy-tale studies and fairy-tale
terms the Carter generation of fairy-tale writers and scholars, which includes authors such
as Robert Coover and A. S. Byatt (Introduction 7). Citing Carter and Zipes as
scholarship and fiction function reciprocally. More recently, Vanessa Joosen (2011)
examines the intertextual dialogue between retellings and criticism. Joosen argues that
retellings draw on criticism of fairy tales when remaking the fairy tale, and she
specifically charts how retellings engaged in dialogue with Marcia Lieberman (1972),
Bruno Bettelheim (1976), and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979). She does not
argue that the writers of the retellings necessarily have read the criticism, though it is
clear in several of her examples that they have, but rather that the writers of retellings she
discusses are concerned with the same ideas as the critics (Joosen 17).
have a different understanding of gender and narrative than was prevalent forty years ago.
Readers are able to ask different questions about gender because our understanding of
gender has shifted from that of the early feminist retellings. I refer to Judith Butler’s work
particular has changed the questions. Butler’s work has also been influential to
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contemporary fairy-tale scholars turning to queer theory to read fairy tales and retellings,
for example, Pauline Greenhill (2008), Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère (2009),
Jennifer Orme (2010), and Santiago Solis (2007). While queering the fairy tale is a very
important intervention in the field, it is not my intention to enter into that discussion here.
One of Butler’s important points in Undoing Gender (2004), which continues her
earlier work in Gender Trouble (1990/1999) and Bodies That Matter (1993), is that
others. We, in part, become “gendered for others” (Undoing Gender 25). The body is not
solely private, but has a public dimension and is socially and politically constituted
through the process of recognition. In addition, sexuality and gender are not “things”
possessed by an ego, but are a process of relating to others. Butler defines gender as “the
apparatus by which the production and normalization of masculine and feminine take
place along with interstitial forms of hormonal, chromosomal, psychic, and performative
that gender assumes” (Undoing Gender 42). Gender is a “doing”—a performative act of
reiteration and citation of norms within a socio-political matrix. But gender is also an
“undoing”—in ascribing to a gender, a person is defined and limited; and that definition
defines and limits other possibilities of gender and possibilities of gender for others.
“Gender is . . . a regulatory norm,” in that it both regulates behavior and relationships and
is produced through regulation (Undoing Gender 53). Norms produce themselves through
reiteration; gender is no exception. Butler points out that the conflation of gender with
She also explains that violence against the “otherwise gendered” is a desire to keep the
gender binary intact and natural. While theoretically very important, Butler’s work also
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has a strong political dimension, as she focuses on the experiences of doing and undoing
gender. For Butler, these theories have real consequences and are tied very much to
human experience: the processes of doing and undoing gender involve violence.
constructions of identity and narrative. I analyze retellings that engage in the creative-
critical exchange that Benson and Joosen describe above, and texts whose engagement
with contemporary critical theory is not just on the level of plot (e.g., role-reversal) but
also in how the story is told. While I am not limiting myself to feminist fairy-tale
retellings, I focus in this dissertation on how the narrative strategies used by writers of
fairy-tale fiction today intersect with these writers’ somewhat ambivalent address of
gender problems. My central concern is to examine how fairy-tale fiction at the turn of
the twenty-first century (1) conceptualizes and troubles gender as a category, and (2) how
that conceptualization intersects with destabilizing narrative strategies in the texts. More
Most of the scholarship in the field focuses on retellings that directly intervene in
gender through plot and narration interventions. They look at how the characters are
portrayed differently (the women are weak or strong, vocal or silent, etc.), how the plots
are changed (there is no marriage or the woman chooses her mate as opposed to being a
prize given away), and how narration is shifted in retellings that have first-person
These approaches are useful for analyzing representation of gendered social roles, and I
also engage in this type of criticism in this dissertation. However, what distinguishes my
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position is my argument that narrative strategies in the retellings, even if they do not
directly engage with gender concepts, do affect the way that gender is conceptualized in
the works. In some cases the narrative strategies reinforce the representation of gender in
the plot, and in others they work against how gender is represented in the plot. The
strategies work with and against how gender is conceptualized as a construct in the text.
In the process, I offer new readings of individual texts and further the conversation
institution of gender. The production of gender in fairy-tale fictions by Kelly Link and
other writers disrupts the notion of gender as a stable construction. My interest is not in
how fairy tales socialize people into gender, but rather how some contemporary fairy-tale
retellings are undoing gender constructs. By asking how fairy-tale retellings navigate
these new gender issues through narrative and by using narrative theory as a feminist
retellings. I am shifting the questions from what fairy-tale retellings say about gender to
several ongoing discussions—gender and fairy tales, the undoing of gender in narrative,
narrative and fairy tales—and working with tools and problematics from poststructuralist
notes that the pairing of feminism and fairy-tale studies is fairly logical and goes so far as
to say that “the agenda for feminist fairy-tale scholarship parallels in large measure the
agenda for fairy-tale studies itself” (“Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship” 31). Both fields of
scholarship emerged in the 1970s and asked similar questions about socialization. Haase
lists several types of projects at the intersection of feminism and fairy-tale studies: studies
in gendered socialization, interventions into the editorial history of the Grimms’ tales,
reclaiming a female fairy-tale tradition (he discusses the publication of feminist and
woman-centered folk- and fairy-tale anthologies), the use of fairy tales in female-
authored literature, and the revisionist project of retelling fairy tales for a feminist
audience.
R. Lieberman (1972) and Andrea Dworkin (1974) argued that popular fairy tales were
saturated with passive princesses and only reinforced stereotypical gender roles that
socialized women as submissive. Alison Lurie (1970, 1971), however, saw fairy tales as
offering strong female role models, in both the traditional tales and those marginalized by
sexist editorial practices. Taking as her focus the popularity of the passive heroines from
the Grimms and Disney, Kay Stone (1975) traced the path of the passive princess,
arguing that she is a minority figure in fairy-tale tradition that has been singled-out and
demonstrates that there are many active heroines in the Grimms’ collection and that oral
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Anglo-American folktales are actually full of them. Karen Rowe (1979), however, argued
that the passive princess plots have been recycled into women’s magazines and novels
via romance plots, making fairy tales “powerful transmitters of romantic myths which
encourage women to internalize only aspirations deemed appropriate to ‘our’ real sexual
functions within a patriarchy” (“Feminism and Fairy Tales” 211). Rowe emphasizes the
stories with passive princesses to demonstrate the chasm between feminism and these
popular stories, and how women become transmitters of patriarchy through repetition of
the passive-princess tropes. Also popular with representation studies was the analysis of
the marriage plot: many fairy tales figure women as prizes to be won or rewards for male
prowess and suggest that the only path for a good woman is one that ends in marriage and
proven to be varied, as women readers do not always interpret the passive princesses as
weak. In interviews conducted in 1973, Stone found that while some women admired the
passive princesses, others “transform[ed] relatively passive heroines into active ones” or
pitied the passive heroines and rejected their stories (49). The role of the female audience
in conferring agency on female characters written as without agency and the rejection of
plots that promoted female passivity both suggest a more complex relationship between
Ruth Bottigheimer’s early work examines not how female characters act, but what
they say. In “Silenced Women in the Grimms’ Tales” (1986), Bottigheimer argues that
the Grimms’ “fairy tales offered an apparently innocent and peculiarly suitable medium
for both transmitting and enforcing the norm of the silent women” (130). She equates the
silence of women with powerlessness, contrasting it to the silence of men in the Grimms’
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tales, stating, “Men could be silent, but women were silenced” (Bottigheimer, “Silenced
Women” 118). Her emphasis in this gendered distinction is that male silence is marked
by choice or limited to a short time and under specific circumstances (such as not
speaking to a particular group of people, but allowed to speak to others), while female
silence is marked by punishment or totality (such as not being able to make any vocal
noises under any circumstances). She further identifies three types of female silencing in
the tales—that which is a part of the narrative plot, the editorial choices of using direct or
indirect speech, and the lexical context of direct speech (specifically the introductory
verbs) (“Silenced Women” 125-6). Bottigheimer expands this work in Grimms’ Bad
traces the lineage of the female voice of women tale-tellers and writers from the fictional
Philomela and Scheherazade to the French women fairy-tale writers of the seventeenth
century and the German women who were sources for the Grimms’ tales in the nineteenth
century. She argues that “to tell a tale for women may be a way of breaking enforced
silences” (“To Spin a Yarn” 53). Moving outside of the world of the tale, she emphasizes
the common assertion of a female source of the tales themselves, even when attributed to
a male author (as with Philomela) or authorized by a male voice (as with Scheherazade).
Rowe also points to the common representation of female storytellers and female
fairy tales are a predominately female domain—written and told by women, for women.
Beginning with Philomela, Rowe demonstrates that weaving and spinning have long been
Jack Zipes, throughout his career, has argued for the necessity of understanding
the socio-historical context for fairy tales, and he has in the process made some feminist
interventions, though that may not have been his main purpose. In Fairy Tales and the
Art of Subversion (1988/2006), Zipes describes how fairy tales are not only socializing
narratives but have been used as a means of subverting dominant ideology. Historically,
Zipes identifies the influence of the Italian writers Giovanni Francesco Straparola and
Giambattista Basile on the French writers of the 1690s as providing them with “a
narrative strategy that enabled them to intervene in the civilizing process and allowed
them to publish and publicize subversive views that questioned the power of hegemonic
groups” (Fairy Tales 20). The ideologies expressed in fairy tales change over time, which
is accounted for by revisions of tales to meet new ideological shifts and by appropriations
Marina Warner builds a similarly large project, but she focuses on fairy tales as a
female genre. In From the Beast to the Blonde (1994), she contextualizes fairy tales as
stories from particular socio-historic settings—both the setting of the writers and editors
who recorded, revised, and wrote tales and the folk setting of the oral tales that were
of female storytellers and audiences, and the references and allusion to women’s “lived
experience” in the tales she studied (Warner, From the Beast xvi, xxiii). Warner picks up
on Rowe’s earlier connections between female storytellers and female industrial arts,
both in the metaphor of the female storyteller as spinner that Rowe describes and the
historic context of women telling tales to each other during the completion of repetitive
domestic tasks and domestic arts, like spinning and weaving. She argues that fairy tales
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offer a haven for women to speak to each other about women’s issues and that “[t]he
story itself becomes the weapon of the weaponless” (Warner, From the Beast 412).
Warner notes that women’s power is often verbal in tales, giving Scheherazade and spell-
casting witches and fairies as examples. But she also ties this verbal weaponry to
subversive retellings, noting in particular how retold tales have proved to be a weapon for
Literary critic Elizabeth Wanning Harries, in Twice Upon a Time (2001), builds
on Warner’s study and argues that the formation of the Euro-American fairy-tale canon
Warner does for the fairy tale more generally, Harries sees a great deal of women’s
history in the literary fairy-tale genre. Harries’ project is, in many ways, a feminist
reclaiming of the fairy-tale tradition, showing that not only is its oral tradition gendered
female, but the literary tradition of the fairy tale is also steeped in female writers. Not
only is Harries’ main focus on literary tales, but she also argues that the notion of an oral
peasant tradition is misleading and is the product of narrative structures created by male
writers. She suggests that unlike Charles Perrault who mimicked “peasant” voices as
narrators, “the conteuses [of the seventeenth century] often emphasize[d] their own
position as knowing, educated, worldly-wise, female subjects, with a wry and sometimes
sardonic view of the narrative constellations they are reusing and revising” (Harries 15-
16). Her study traces these complex narrative strategies of early female fairy-tale writers
to the strategies of contemporary women writers who likewise tell and retell fairy tales in
complicated ways.
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The popularity and adaptability of the fairy-tale genre makes fairy tales
particularly alluring to both feminist and postmodern writers, for whom, according to
Stephen Benson (2008), the “fairy tale offers to fiction a ready-made store of images and
plots of gender relations, class conflicts, scenarios of sexuality, and dramas of ethnicity,
each ripe for scrutiny and overhaul via a contemporary ideological agenda committed to
retellings of fairy tales take aim at gender issues, and many of them are feminist texts
operating in the mode of reversal—replacing passive heroines with active ones and
reversing gender roles or plots. However, some postmodern retellings of the fairy-tale
form and conventions, such as those of Angela Carter in The Bloody Chamber (1979),
also use parody to comment on modern ideological and social issues rather than to mock
the fairy tale as a genre. Donald Haase (2004) argues that one must read retellings for the
“the ambivalence with which women writers and other creative artists often approach the
mythmaking, after all, enacts ambivalence by simultaneously rejecting and embracing the
fairy tale” (Haase, “Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship” 30). This ambivalence is important
different types of retellings. In Fairy Tale as Myth/ Myth as Fairy Tale (1994), Zipes
suggests a pair terms to classify texts that retell traditional fairy tales: duplication, which
reproduces and reinforces the ideology, patterns, and images of the traditional tale
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creating a “look-alike,” and revision, which transforms the traditional tale and “alters” its
traditional values, patterns, and images (9). He argues that the tradition of the fairy tale is
one of duplication and revision, and that the history of the genre must take into account
this long-standing practice of repetition and repurposing. Thus, for Zipes, revision is not
necessarily a postmodern move despite the bounty of ideological retellings of fairy tales
within postmodernism. He does, instead, suggest a distinct, opposite, and general pairing
can both “reproduce” and “transform” the stories that they tell (Postmodern Fairy Tales
10). She does not suggest that the two categories are mutually exclusive, but rather that
source tales (Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales 10). Bacchilega turns to Judith Butler
retellings both cite the ideologies and narrative structures of the source texts and reveal
them as constructions at the same time. However, she too makes a distinction between
postmodern fairy tales (Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales 140-1). This both/and
position that retellings can inhabit is precisely the ambivalence that Haase notes as an
Elizabeth Wanning Harries also addresses Zipes’s pairing by arguing that revision has
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always been a part of fairy-tale tradition and that “we need to develop a new word for
procedures in retellings that go beyond simple revision” (15). Harries argues that the
traditional tale, but the narrative strategy employed in the revision. Specifically, she
offers the terms compact for traditional tales that employ “carefully constructed
simplicity” and complex to describe old and new tales that are decidedly intertextual and
“work to reveal the stories behind other stories” as alternatives (Harries 17). Harries
argues that the fairy tales of the seventeenth-century French conteuses, as well as those of
contemporary writers like Emma Donoghue, are complex, the privileged term in her
pairing. Though she resists the postmodern, historical categorization of retold tales and
their retellings, like Bacchilega, Harries shifts the focus from the ideological one
the Fairy Tale edited by Stephen Benson, Merja Makinen’s essay stands out as seeking to
theorize fairy-tale fiction. Her discussion of postmodern fairy-tale fiction (2008) echoes
Harries’ discussion of complex tales in calling for “a new way of discussing this complex,
multiple reconception” of fairy tales as postmodern “pre-texts” (Makinen 155) and at the
In examining Zipes’s initial terms, Makinen concludes, not surprisingly, that binary
of the twenty-first century, and in light of the differing ways contemporary writers use
fairy tales, fairy-tale scholarship has been struggling with how to distinguish between
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different types of contemporary fairy-tale retellings. I think this struggle for words
variety of complicated ways, and that the exclusive focus on postmodernist revision as a
retellings do. In addition, creating pairs of terms to discuss the approach to ideology or
narrative, while seemingly useful, forces a binary frame on works that, in many ways,
seek to dismantle ideological binaries. Starting to address this problem, Phyllis Frus and I
(2010) have argued for the term transformations to be used more generally for any texts
(not just fairy-tale retellings) “that move beyond mere adaptation and transform the
source text into something new that works independently of its source” (Frus and
Williams 3).
One factor in this discussion is that fairy-tale adaptations are often not categorized
generically as “fairy tales.” Rather, as retellings, they are not only different from fairy
tales, but they also cross a variety of standard genres. Angela Carter’s work (1979), for
example, brings in elements of gothic, romance, fantasy, and horror in addition to fairy
tale. Kelly Link’s more recent work also blurs multiple genres, drawing from the range of
speculative fiction categories. Folklorist Cathy Lynn Preston (2004) suggests that the
observation necessary for the genre-blurring work that Gregory Rubinson (2005) argues
and Gender,” Preston argues that “[i]n postmodernity the ‘stuff’ of fairy tales exists as
nebulous realm that we might most simply identify as cultural knowledge” (210). She
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goes on to argue that despite any “genre classification[s]” imposed on these fragments,
they can be brought into play in a variety ways, only one of which is the traditional fairy
tale (Preston 210). Preston’s argument and her analysis of fairy-tale texts focus on the
blurring of genre boundaries through the process of cultural reproduction. The fairy-tale
fragments she analyzes are found simultaneously in multiple genres: fairy tale, joke,
legend, film, reality television show, advertisement, and/or email message. The
postmodern fairy-tale texts that she presents are not restricted by genre, but instead
disrupt genre boundaries to “tell a different story” about fairy tales (Preston 211).
While it is clear that many critics have been reflecting on narrative and gender,
much work on this subject is primarily about the technique of retelling, as the above
discussion demonstrates, and how the act of retelling challenges the ideology of the fairy-
tale “pre-texts.” Furthermore, the privileging of either narrative inquiry or gender inquiry
is fairly common in the field. In some texts, the interest in narrative takes precedence; in
book that treats narrative in conjunction with gender and feminist critique, but confines
understandings of gender are enabled (or not) by the narrative strategies employed in
retelling.
Folktale analysis has long had a place in narrative studies extending back to the
work of Russian formalist Vladimir Propp (1928) and the Finnish school. Early work in
Influence (2003), synthesizes a history of fairy tales and narratology, but he also looks at
“Folktales are intrinsically unstable, furnishing perhaps the best example of the theory—
manifest in a number of versions, and it was partly a desire to account for this instability
that gave rise to catalogues of tales” (Benson, Cycles of Influence 22-23). Armed with a
catalogue of tale patterns and types, critics could impose order on an otherwise
disordered set of tales that change with each new oral or literary teller. Propp’s
Morphology of the Folktale (1928) identifies basic structures of folktales which allows
for the consistent structural analysis of plot. Basic plot types have also been catalogued
by Antti Aarne and translated by Stith Thompson in The Types of the Folktale (1961) and
classification allows the critic to identify a particular tale based on different sequences of
Readings such as those based on “general character” (Propp 3), however, have
In the case of theory, enquiry into the workings of narrative has moved
away from, indeed critiqued, the search for deep structures and abstract,
There has been a significant shift in how narrative is analyzed in fairy-tale studies. Rather
than a continuing interest in finding a stable core, some current fairy-tale scholarship uses
the catalogued structures and types to examine the instability and malleability of tale
types. The establishment and wide circulation of the specific criteria needed to construct
a fairy tale of a certain type, however, has opened up possibilities, not just for the critics
and writers of fairy-tale retellings, but also for the readers of fairy-tale retellings in
More generally, Kathy Mezei (1996) has argued that feminist narratology is
narratologies, since they are not a cohesive cluster, provide a way of talking about gender
in text that is not confined to bodies and politics of feminism. Narratological analysis is
not interpretive, and much of the debate among feminist narratologists concerns the point
Lanser (1986, 1988) presents feminist narratology as interpretation concerned with the
gender of authors and narrators. While Nelli Diengott (1988) contends that introducing a
texts outside of thematic interpretation, Robyn Warhol (1989) has argued that feminist
narratology can bring questions of gender to bear on textual discourse without imposing a
feminist interpretation. Joan Peters (2002) argues that a focus on the gender of the author,
attempts to account for the entire work from a feminist perspective, and this is not
something that narratology is designed to do” (13). In her work on feminist metafiction,
22
Peters draws on Julia Kristeva’s argument (1974) that a “woman’s” voice is one that
contrasted with conventional male discourse or parodied male discourse, the distinction
between voices is one of types of discourse (rather than of gendered bodies) and that the
female voice is identified with the subversive or new discourse. Thus female voice is a
narrative processes, not prior to them” (198, n. 23), and she argues that “women’s self-
discourses and social practices, and toward new forms of representation that disrupt those
produced through narration, like Peters, I do not focus on the gender of the author as
Robinson and many of the other feminist narratologists cited here do. Nor am I concerned
with how the discourse in the novel itself is gendered, as Peters is. Rather I am concerned
with how gender as a concept that is socially structured is produced in a text. In order to
explore this discursive construction of gender, I analyze narrative at both the level of plot
and discourse, and I explore how the interaction between these narrative levels or aspects
of a text produces ambivalence and ambiguity, which in turn affects the ways in which
narrative, my focus on gender as a category, rather than the gender of authors, narrators,
23
characters, or readers, means that much of the contextual aspect of feminist narratology is
indebted to the multiple ways of understanding how gender is present in texts beyond the
understand how certain concepts of gender are produced in a text and to explain why
retellings of fairy tales that challenge gender norms only on the level of representation
differ from those that tackle gender norms on multiple levels. I would not call my project
represented in the texts I analyze and exploring how the narrative strategies employed in
that multiple discourses can work with and against each other in a text. Retellings make
the source tale. Donald Haase has described this as “simultaneously rejecting and
embracing the fairy tale” (Fairy Tales and Feminism 30). In retellings that blur genres, as
Kelly Link’s do, this multivocality can also be seen in how the multiple genres
destabilize each other and how they appeal to multiple authorities (the latter is part of
Preston’s critique of how disrupting genre also disrupts gender). Mikhail Bakhtin’s
arguments about dialogism in the novel have, thus, been crucial in my understanding of
how fairy-tale retellings can present opposing ideas. In “Discourse in the Novel” (1975)
Bakhtin defines the novel as a “diversity” of voices (262). For Bakhtin, all discourse is
Bakhtin describes multiple ways that such heteroglossia can be organized in a novel. As
with my use of feminist narratology, I do not cite Bakhtin specifically in my readings, but
discourses, and of double-voice, the way in which an utterance conveys two positions
simultaneously.
Defining Terminology
1983), useful in describing how the different narratives I analyze are constructed. Of
tales are often narrated by external narrators with an authoritative voice. Retellings often
between narration “who speaks” and focalization “who sees” is useful in discussing
differences in voice and perspective. Mieke Bal’s (1985) additional attention to focalizer
and focalized object allows for a more subtle discussion of focalization by also
Propp, is the “act of a character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the
course of the action” (21, emphasis in original). His concept of function is useful when
discussing retellings because it is a stable, plot-based role not defined by the character;
therefore, using function in this sense allows one to differentiate, in a retelling, between
traditional fairy-tale plot). It is, however, problematic when discussing works that remove
specific functions from expected plots altogether. I take the inability to apply Propp’s
functions in a retelling as a clear sign that the structure of the source tale has been
disrupted.
A problem with drawing from multiple disciplines is the various ways in which
critics use the term story. For narratologists like Genette, story is what is being
represented by the narration—the plot, setting, and characters—and discourse is how the
story is told. But in dealing with fairy-tale retellings, in which the same plot, settings,
and/or characters are retold in a variety of different ways, story can also be used to refer
to the tale type; thus a particular work of fiction is a “Cinderella story.” Monika
Russian formalists’ term fabula for the episodic sequence that makes a fiction
recognizable as a particular tale type. She then uses plot level or fictional world for a
multiple levels across different iterations, but I am hesitant to introduce more specialized
terms than absolutely necessary given the multiple disciplines from which I draw.
Therefore, I will use story in the standard narratological sense to refer to what is being
stories (multiple versions of “Cinderella,” for example), I will use tale (as in fairy or folk
tale) thus pointing to a specific plot type or fragment. When referring to the individual
elements that make a tale distinguishable, I prefer Preston’s fragments to the folklorists’
motifs precisely because fragment connotes the unbound existence of the bits of fairy
26
tales that are culturally reproduced, whereas I see motifs as more constitutive of the core
tales they combine to make up. Motifs and fragments are both the building blocks of fairy
tales, but fragment implies a divorce from context that I find useful when discussing
retellings that recontextualize bits of fairy tales by removing them from the plots and tale
types with which they are associated. Fragments can be reproduced outside of traditional
that draw attention to the constructedness of the text and remind readers that they are
reading a work of fiction. Linda Hutcheon (1980) defines metafiction as “fiction about
fiction—that is, fiction that includes within itself a commentary on its own narrative
metafiction into diegetically and linguistically self-conscious texts, and further divides
those categories into “overt”—those that call attention to their own construction—and
“covert”—those that refer to or discuss other texts within the text (Narcissistic Narrative
23). In A Theory of Parody, Hutcheon (1985) argues that parody is a type of metafiction
that is “imitation characterized by ironic inversion, not always at the expense of the
parodied text,” and “repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than
similarity” (6); thus parody is not mocking a text, but imitating a text with ironic
interventions. Margaret Rose (1979) argues that parody is “the meta-fictional ‘mirror’ to
the process of composing and receiving literary texts” (59). Metafictional parody raises
questions about the production and reception of literature. Rose explains that parody
requires that the parodist be “seen in the dual role of reader [of the parodied text] and
writer [of the “new” text]” (69), and the text be read as both itself and as a criticism,
27
encompassing two positions at once. She also argues that parody as meta-fiction shows
what is being represented as well as how it is being represented (Rose 90). Birgit
Neumann and Ansgar Nünning (2012) define metafiction as the “capacity of fiction to
reflect on its own status as fiction and thus refers to all self-reflexive utterances which
thematize the fictionality (in the sense of imaginary reference and/or constructedness) of
5).
metanarrative, and it is only recently that critics argue that the two terms are not
comments about narrative. Fludernik (2003) explains that Nünning “starts out from a
‘thematizes the act and/or process of narration’, whereas metafiction ‘discloses the
artefactual nature of the narrated on the act of narration’” (“Metanarrative” 4). Neumann
and Nünning further clarify the difference between the two terms: “whereas
narration are addressed in the narratorial discourse, i.e. narrative utterances about
narrative rather than fiction about fiction” (par. 2). Both Fludernik and Nünning explicitly
comments that refer to the process of narrating. Both critics schematize ways in which
structures, calling attention to how the narratives are constructed. While on occasion I
change in perspective and voice, interruptions of one narrative thread with another,
are not self-reflexive narrative comments. While they demonstrate the constructedness of
the text and are self-conscious of fairy-tale narrative structures, they do not comment on
the process of narration itself. Whenever possible, I refer to strategies specifically rather
when I do group them, I use the more general and widely used definition of metafiction
Finally, a word on retellings. I could have chosen a variety of terms for the fairy-
tale-indebted fictions and films I analyze. Indeed, as I hope the section “The Variety of
Terminology in Analyzing Retellings” demonstrates, what to call these texts that retell
existing fairy tales is up for debate in fairy-tale studies. Vanessa Joosen has helpfully,
reworking, parody, transformation, anti-fairy tale, postmodern fairy tale, fractured fairy
tale, and recycled fairy tale” (9). Like Joosen, I prefer the term retelling because it is
neutral and because its prefix indicates a clear connection to a source text (9). Though I
have argued for the term transformation elsewhere,1 I do not use it here. Transformation
refers to a type of adaptation that so drastically reworks the source that it may not be
recognizable as an adaptation (Frus and Williams 3). Phyllis Frus and I chose this term
because it describes the relationship of the new text to the source, in that the source is
29
transformed into something new rather than adapted for a new environment. Retelling is a
more general term in that a retelling could be a transformation, wholly reworking the
source fairy tale, but a retelling could also be an adaptation to different media codes or an
update of the source tale that does not make dramatic changes to it. The other reason that
I prefer retelling for this project is that my focus is a narrative one, and retelling
emphasizes the act of narration. Transformation or even adaptation does not suggest the
same focus on narrative changes that retelling does. A retelling is in direct engagement
with its source(s), and that engagement is, at its most basic, the act of telling again with
difference.
For the source texts, I use traditional fairy tale because it is the repetition of these
popular tales from collections by Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian
Andersen, and Walt Disney Studios that has created the tradition from which popular
cultural (as opposed to academic) expectations of fairy tales come. Readers do not need
to have read a specific version of a tale like “Sleeping Beauty” to know what to expect
cultural memory is particularly useful in understanding how fairy-tale fragments can exist
outside of specific texts. Kukkonen expands Jan Assmann’s concept of cultural memory
to include popular culture, and she uses fairy tales as her primary example. For an item to
enter into popular cultural memory, it has to have a shared audience, be constantly
263). Repetition ensures that the audience shares an understanding of “codes and
conventions,” which are created through the process of generalization (Kukkonen 262).
Elements of fairy tales that have been removed from their “textual surroundings and
30
original social contexts” are “turn[ed] into conventions, icons, character types and
standard situations of popular media texts” (Kukkonen 263). Kukkonen describes how
elements of fairy tales are fragmented from their source tales and are able to exist
independently from those tales. She explains that “[p]opular cultural memory works
through imagination and appropriation rather than through research and historical
exactitude” (Kukkonen 265). Once a fragment enters popular cultural memory, it “can
then be reconstructed in new contexts and can express or comment on them” (Kukkonen
264). The concept of popular cultural memory explains the process by which fairy-tale
fragments can be recontextualized but still be recognized as and have meaning as fairy
tales.
The Chapters
fiction and film. I examine novels, short stories, and films aimed at young adults in
addition to texts intended for older audiences. Though many of the works are explicit
retellings of specific tale types, two, Robert Coover’s Stepmother and Kelly Link’s
“Magic for Beginners,” function more as pastiche, drawing from a variety of tales and
playing with the genre of the fairy tale as a stable entity. The scope of my analysis will
also be limited to fairy-tale fiction and film in the Euro-American/ Western tradition. At
the center of my inquiry are fairy-tale works of the Angela Carter and post-Carter
generations that engage in the creative-critical exchange noted by Benson and Joosen,
and to a lesser extent Haase, that characterizes fairy-tale retellings being produced at the
Not surprisingly, the fairy-tale fictions I will analyze have been connected with
postmodern narrative strategies. Gregory Rubinson (2005) lists the most common
analytical tone; parody; satire; and a denial of realist conventions including narrative
closure” (13). Many of the texts I will analyze employ multiple techniques from
Rubinson’s list to engage in the postmodern work of challenging belief systems, and I am
parody and rewriting, the fictional fairy-tale texts I focus on often avoid linear plotlines,
preferring instead recursive, fragmented, and stalled plots (Coover), and plots that do not
have an ending (Link); use metanarrative and metafiction, both talking about stories and
and employ first- (and occasionally second-) person narrators in opposition to the
external narrator common to traditional fairy tales. These narrative strategies are not
solely postmodern, as many of them have long been a part of the fairy-tale tradition and
have been used in feminist writing. Specifically, my contribution is to examine how these
of gender.
to demonstrate the varied relationships between discursive structuring and story in fairy-
32
tale retellings. In the first chapter, I show how disruptive and destabilizing narrative
strategies can reinforce thematic arguments about identity in the story. In the second
chapter, I focus on how reliance on plots and other narrative patterns from source tales
undercuts thematic representations of gendered identity in the story. In the third chapter, I
demonstrate how narrative strategies that destabilize the source tales’ patterns enable
conceptualizations of gender in the story not present in the source tale. In the fourth
chapter, I reveal how disruptive and destabilizing narrative strategies produce a space for
disrupted. I analyze three retellings that question the fairy-tale genre’s authoritative
traditional fairy-tale witches in these texts. In troubling the good/wicked division that
orders traditional fairy tales and revealing it to be subjective, the texts also encourage
readers to recognize the gendered traits of fairy-tale villains as constructed. None of the
texts in this chapter directly address gender. Instead the constructedness of gender norms
is revealed through the ways in which female villains are represented and characterized
differently than in the source tales. The narrative strategies that support the re-
actions and the metafictional moves of creating characters aware of their own existence
in a fiction, collapsing character and tale types into single characters, and naming
characters after roles. In the first of two briefer analyses, I examine how focalization
33
through a traditional villain likewise recontextualizes her actions and how naming
characters after their roles supports thematic arguments about wickedness being
subjective in Garth Nix’s “An Unwelcome Guest” (2009). In the second of the two
recontextualizes the villain’s actions and characterizes her as a victim, thus creating
(2009). In all three cases, the interrogation of wickedness and master narratives is
about wickedness and showing that they are subjective is to raise questions about the
seem to be in line with current theoretical notions of gender, can be undercut in fairy-tale
retellings that transform representations of gender but not their accompanying gendered
plots. I analyze three films, all targeted toward a young female audience. Ever After
protagonist who does not need to be rescued. Through the negotiation of her roles as
servant and lady, Danielle demonstrates that gender is a fluid construct by performing
both hypermasculinity and tomboy female masculinity as needed. The feminist overtures
of the film and conceptualization of gender as an un-fixed, fluid category are, however,
undercut by the film’s narrative framing, its reliance on the marriage plot from the source
tale, and its reliance on patriarchal authority in both the plot and visual narrative. I also
analyze the tension between representations of gender as a constructed and fluid category
34
and the marriage plot inherited from the source tales in two more recent films. In Sydney
White (2007, a “Snow White” retelling) a range of femininities and masculinities are
represented for both women and men; however, acceptable masculinities are limited by
retelling) the same marriage plot is undermined by the film’s focus on female friendship
films.
limits the possibilities for conceptualizing gender in retellings. Retellings that reproduce
gendered plot structures from their sources are restricted to concepts of gender that allow
for the heteronormative, happily-ever-after marriage plot that dominates traditional tales.
However, literary retellings that use fairy-tale fragments that have been wrested from
their source structures are more able to freely resignify those fragments and represent
gender differently from that of the source tale. I analyze the work of Kelly Link, whose
slipstream fiction combines fairy-tale fragments with horror tropes in plots concerned
with adolescent development and finding a place for oneself. Though Link does not
thematically address gender norms in the three stories I analyze, her reliance on fairy-tale
heterosexual marriage. Specifically, I argue that Link’s lack of closure in her fiction—
ending the story before the resolution of the plot—allows for gender to be represented as
35
tale conclusion. I rely on the work of Judith Roof and Robin Warhol to demonstrate how
sexuality is ingrained in narrative and on Judith Butler to demonstrate how identity (of
which gender is a part) is constructed and regulated through social relationships and
structures. In “Swans” (2000), I analyze the lack of closure, use of first-person narration,
and explicit critique of the source tale to show its anti-heteronormative representation of
femininity. In “Magic for Beginners” (2005), I analyze lack of closure, the use of
multiple diegetic levels that do not maintain their separation, and playing with the role-
reversal technique. Additionally, gender and biological sex are represented as separate,
independent categories in the description of one of the main characters. Finally in “The
Cinderella Game” (2009), I analyze how genre ambiguity is created in the story through
blending fairy-tale structures with monstrous language. This ambiguity is disruptive and,
configurations of gender and sexuality, such as the marriage plot, also destabilizes gender
itself as a stable category. The two novels I analyze in this chapter, Briar Rose by Jane
Yolen (1992/2002) and Briar Rose by Robert Coover (1996), do not thematically
question how gender is conceptualized in their source tales, nor do they offer alternative
representations of gendered identity. Rather the unsettling of narrative structures that are
imbued with expectations for gendered identity in the novels implies that hegemonic or
focus in this chapter is on how readers are compelled by textual gaps to make
connections between different sections of these novels and how those gaps offer a space
36
for readers to imagine alternatives to what is represented in the novels. Gaps are created
from section and chapter breaks as well as changes in narrator or focalizer. Many of the
gaps are created by the metafictional narrative techniques both writers employ:
threads, and suspension and negation of closure. In examining the gaps, I foreground not
only how structural shifts relate to thematic elements of the novels but how the gaps raise
questions of gender.
The texts that I have chosen demonstrate a variety of ways in which the
characterization, relate to the narrative strategies employed by the texts. While I offer
readings that suggest representation and narrative structures can work in concert, in
categories for analyzing retellings of fairy tales like Zipes’s revision and duplication or
Harries complex and compact. Rather than provide yet another set of categories that does
not fully represent the complexity with which retellings re-envision traditional fairy tales
and the ways in which ideology and narrative structures interact, I instead offer a means
to describe how fairy-tale texts retell the traditional tales and transform the genre.
Contemporary retellings engage their intertexts in intricate and complex ways that reflect
contemporary theoretical work with gender, and the resulting degeneration of fairy-tale
ways.
37
CHAPTER 1
In Garth Nix’s “An Unwelcome Guest,” one character asks, “Wickedness depends
on where you’re standing, doesn’t it?” (32). Changing point of view, narrator, or focalizer
is an obvious way to move to another position or standpoint. Telling a story from the
as it can blur that division as well as reverse it. A shift in perspective can complicate the
reader’s understanding of the source text, forcing her to ask what led her to align herself
with one character or perspective over another. Retellings that shift the traditional fairy
tales’ perspectives, such as Gregory Macguire’s Wicked, which retells The Wizard of Oz
focalized through the Wicked Witch as the protagonist,1 help audiences see how
challenging the seemingly objective position of the narrator and revealing its subjectivity.
Retellings that propose to unmask or unmake wickedness are necessarily intertextual, but
they also have a metafictional effect by suggesting that “reality” is subjective and can be
challenged. A retelling cannot be read in isolation, as it will always invoke its source and
suggest a comparison between the retelling and its source(s). This constant reference to
and remaking of a source calls attention to the constructedness of both the source and
retelling. If the retelling critiques the ideology of the source by showing its
constructedness, the reader is further empowered to critique and question the source on
her own. With fairy-tale retellings this questioning means unraveling the moral and social
values bound up in the source tales—clearly products of specific places in time and
38
space, but naturalized as timeless and ahistorical by (1) narrative strategies that authorize
cultural perspectives as universal fact, (2) a body of scholarship that catalogues tales by
similarity across cultures, and (3) psychoanalytic interpretation of tales that argues for
ideologies, these retellings then also question the authority of such universalized values
in our everyday world—and calling forth the fictionality of such social norms or master
In this chapter, I explore how the narrative authority of the source texts are
challenged in certain retellings and how, in the process, gender norms and their
naturalization are also challenged. I argue that retellings of fairy tales that question the
encourage readers to recognize how constructed the gendered fairy-tale villain is. While
in the texts I discuss in the next chapter, narrative strategies undercut the plot-level
address of gender, here I focus on how self-conscious narrative strategies are employed to
deconstruct authorizing master narratives, and in the process the representation of gender
The wicked stepmother is a staple of the popular fairy-tale tradition and arguably
its most famous villain. The wicked stepmother can be found in a variety of well-known
Western fairy tales, although many of her folklore predecessors are natural mothers and
less obviously wicked. The Brothers Grimm feature some of the best-known stepmothers,
such as those in “Cinderella” (ATU 510A), “Snow White” (ATU 709), and “Hansel and
Gretel” (ATU 327A) as well as lesser-known stepmothers, such as those in “The Six
39
Swans” (ATU 450) and “The Juniper Tree” (ATU 720), all of whom are wicked. Walt
Disney took the Grimms’ wicked stepmother and gave her an unforgettable face in his
1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Snow White’s stepmother stands out for
her terrifying image as the wicked queen. Since then, the wicked stepmother has become
an icon, a fairy-tale type that invokes a vivid image at the mention of her role—so much
so that stepmothers in general have had to fight against their fairy-tale reflections. A
quick internet search for the term “wicked stepmother” produces hundreds of websites
dedicated to the plight of stepmothers fighting against the “wicked” moniker they have
Robert Coover’s novel Stepmother (2004) takes on the wicked stepmother figure
of fairy-tale tradition and offers a more complex depiction of the character. The plot of
Coover’s novel is quite simple; the novel, however, is far from simple. Stepmother, the
title character and the novel’s protagonist, is trying to save her daughter’s life. Her
unnamed daughter has been found guilty of an unnamed crime against the court of
Reaper’s Woods and is to be executed. Stepmother breaks her daughter out of prison, and
the two of them flee to the woods. Stepmother hides her daughter and, once the daughter
is recaptured, tries various schemes to prevent, or at least to delay, the planned execution.
She tries appealing to the Reaper, her archenemy and the authority in the woods, with
magic, sex, and reason, but she fails. Her daughter is executed, and Stepmother seeks
revenge” is not a new plot to Stepmother, as she repeats it over and again with each of
some just turn up at my door, I’m never quite sure whose they are or
where they come from—but I know where they go: to be drowned, hung,
stoned, beheaded, burned at the stake, impaled, torn apart, shot, put to the
sword, boiled in oil, dragged down the street in barrels studded on the
inside with nails or nailed into barrels with holes drilled in them and rolled
into the river. Their going always sickens me and the deep self-righteous
laughter of their executioners causes the bile to rise, and for a time
mourning, and so they come down on us again and more daughters are
caught up in what the Reaper calls the noble toils of justice and thus we
keep the cycle going, rolling along through this timeless time like those
Stepmother explains that there is nothing new in what we are about to read; she has
experienced it all before and will experience it all again. But she still has to try to save
her daughter, and as readers we are left with the impression that she will keep trying with
Stepmother: “my poor desperate daughter, her head is locked on one thing and one thing
only: how to escape her inescapable fate” (1). Throughout the novel, Stepmother and
roles. Despite recognizing the “inescapability” of their fates, they still try to change the
41
cycle of events they know will unfold by manipulating fairy-tale patterns to their
advantage. Stepmother too is engaged “in what the Reaper calls the noble toils of
justice”; as an adversary, she challenges the Reaper and his values. Unlike the Reaper,
Stepmother is not motivated by a larger cause but works to save lives, one daughter at a
time. And yet, her focused actions have a wider impact in that by trying to save the lives
of her daughters, she begins to undo the master narratives that make her daughters
victims. In attempting to change the rules, she shows that they are not “natural.” There is
no evidence in the text that she hopes to succeed, but she still fights the master narrative
with their positions in the narrative and a frustration with the predetermined roles they
enact. This creates a tension between the prescribed roles of popularized, conventional
fairy-tale characters like the wicked stepmother and a postmodern re-scripting of those
roles. Coover’s retelling wherein traditional fairy-tale figures are conflated into a few
characters, fairy tales collide in Reaper’s Woods, and characters are aware of their own
irremediable place in a fairy-tale cycle works to unmake recognizable plots and motifs of
well-known fairy tales. This collision of Coover’s retelling of the fairy-tale genre and of
the stepmother figure with what readers know and expect about fairy-tale stepmothers
creates an intertextual space that allows for the exploration of further possibilities for
fairy tales in contemporary Western societies and, as Cristina Bacchilega puts it in her
review of Stepmother, “denaturalize[s] their hold on our imaginations” (198). In doing so,
“unspecified elements” of the text are objectified out of context and become “generalized
. . . . into conventions, icons, character types and standard situations” (Kukkonen 263,
fairy-tale “canon” contrived from a few select stories from Charles Perrault, the Brothers
Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and solidified by Walt Disney—are so pervasive that
they dominate the possibilities for fairy tales in Western popular cultural memory and do
conventions in the novel Stepmother rewrites female roles in popularized fairy tales by
complicating the situations and motivations of the female characters and creating
alternate paths to the end of the story. While his characters do not escape their
predetermined fates and continue to enact the roles for which they are named, Coover’s
(embedded) under-story that complicates and contrasts the popular fairy tales we have
come to identify with the genre. I maintain that changes in narrators and focalizers,
combined with plot elements that call attention to the constructedness of both individual
fairy tales and the popular conception of fairy tales as a genre, destabilize and deconstruct
the source fairy tales and the patterns that perpetuate the popular myth of what fairy tales
character types by collapsing the mainstays of the fairy-tale genre on a diegetic level.
Though gender is not the focus of Coover’s deconstruction, his critique of master
framework, then, Stepmother performs a struggle that is aligned with that undertaken by
feminist writers who try to reshape the gendered narrative patterns entrenched within the
genre without losing the wonder that makes these fairy tales the stories to which we keep
returning.
By using well-known figures and motifs, rather than inventing wholly new ones,
Coover forces a comparison between his Stepmother and her cruel foremothers. Coover
collapses and dismantles a variety of tales, tale types, motifs, and functions in
Stepmother, challenging not only the popular conception of fairy tales in Western culture,
but also the structuralist base of fairy-tale and folklore studies. He does not change the
actions of stepmothers who have been previously identified as villains (by Vladimir
Propp) or as cruel (by Stith Thompson). Instead he shifts the focalization and the
motivations for these actions, thus recontextualizing specific acts by cruel stepmothers to
allow for meanings not possible in Propp’s rigid and gendered functions2 or Thompson’s
limiting motifs. For example, when Stepmother sends the “kind” stepdaughter on an
impossible task in an embedded recounting of tale type ATU 480, The Kind and the
44
Unkind Girls (a tale identified as including the cruel stepmother motif S31), she does so
Stepmother is afraid she is going to hurt the stepdaughter; to avoid this, Stepmother
devises ways “to get her out from underfoot” (23). The girl returns home “coughing up
gold pieces,” a curse courtesy of Stepmother’s rivals (23). When the “unkind” daughter
duplicates the task, she does so without Stepmother’s blessing and in order to stand up for
her mother. From Stepmother’s point of view, she is protecting her “kind” stepdaughter
by removing her from the house so as not to harm her. And though the “unkind” daughter
is cursed to spit toads, it is not a punishment for her and Stepmother’s greed (as it is often
explained), but it is in reaction to her actively defending her mother. The actions of
Stepmother remain consistent with those identified in the tale type, but in changing the
This generic self-consciousness relies on the reader’s familiarity with the genre
for any critique to work. Merja Makinen, in “Theorizing Fairy-Tale Fiction, Reading
Jeanette Winterson,” asserts that “[t]he fairy tale, as a well-known, culturally familiar
body of texts with an almost canonical status . . . is a ripe site for both reduplication and
rewriting, for pastiche and for parody, within a broadening of the concept of literary
historical metafiction” (148). It is precisely fairy tales’ status as popular cultural memory
that makes them such a frequent intertext for retellings. In her article “Disrupting the
Boundaries of Genre and Gender: Postmodernism and the Fairy Tale,” Cathy Lynn
Preston argues that “[i]n postmodernity the ‘stuff’ of fairy tales exists as fragments
(princess, frog, slipper, commodity relations in a marriage market) in the nebulous realm
45
that we might most simply identify as cultural knowledge” (210). I would also add
“unspecified elements” that exist out of context in popular cultural memory (Kukkonen
263). Coover’s rewriting of the stepmother figure depends on the reader’s familiarity
with the popularized stepmother character and the associated narrative conventions. 3
Coover does not work solely from the “cruel stepmother” motif (S31), but instead
popular cultural memory.4 Motifs are the smallest recognizable units of meaning in the
tales catalogued by folklorists, but fragments take their meaning from a wider cultural
context. The term “fragment” is more flexible than “motif” because it is not tied to
meaning by breaking up the motifs into smaller parts or placing them in different
contexts, thereby destabilizing motifs and opening the unit (stepmother) to multiple
possible meanings. As a fairy-tale fragment, whose reach is wider than the folklore
designation of “cruel stepmother,” the wicked stepmother exists outside of any specific
tale. She is a stock character who is evil and always has been in popular cultural memory.
This cultural knowledge of the character creates the ground on which Coover’s rewriting
stands.
The character of the stepmother has changed over the course of fairy-tale history,
and Coover’s rewriting of the character plays with and builds on her complicated history.
The villains that we know and love as wicked stepmothers were not always stepmothers
in fairy tales. As both Maria Tatar and Marina Warner, among others, have pointed out,
46
the Brothers Grimm made editorial changes to various stories from one edition of their
collection to the next. These editorial changes led to the absent mother and the wicked
stepmother becoming staples of the fairy-tale genre (Tatar, Hard Facts 36-7; Warner,
From the Beast 210-13). The mothers of Snow White and Hansel and Gretel had been the
first villains in their stories, siding with the father over the children and attempting to kill
the children they viewed as threats. As the Grimms increased the violence in their tales in
order to make them more didactic, they changed these wicked mothers into stepmothers,
effectively killing off the good mothers to make room for the villains. In The Hard Facts
of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Tatar states that “Wilhelm Grimm recognized that most
children (along with those who read to them) find the idea of wicked stepmothers easier
reason for Wilhelm Grimm’s editorial choices. Bettelheim is fixated on the psychic and
emotional development of a child who splits the mother into two people. Bettelheim
suggests that “[t]he fantasy of the wicked stepmother not only preserves the good mother
intact, it also prevents having to feel guilty about one’s angry thoughts and wishes about
her—a guilt which would seriously interfere with the good relation to Mother” (69). The
figure of the mother is split into two roles in fairy tales, says Bettelheim, as a way to
provide children with a means of handling the troubling emotion of anger toward a
beloved parent. Bettelheim’s application of Freudian theory, however, does not take into
account the editorial history of the tale, nor does he recognize the literary features of the
fairy-tale genre. Warner, in From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their
47
Tellers, argues that the popularity of Bettelheim’s application of Freudian theory to fairy
good mothers from fairy tales in all kinds of media, and to a dangerous
degree which itself mirrors current prejudices and reinforces them. His
effaced from memory the historical reasons for woman’s cruelty within
the home and have made such behaviour seem natural, even intrinsic to
Warner’s problem with Bettelheim’s reading of the stepmother figure is relevant because
of its two-pronged attack. She not only recognizes what the reading has done to the genre
by reinforcing negative female stereotypes, but she also sees the damage caused by taking
a fictional genre and using it as treatment for psychological and social discord. Had
Bettelheim’s theory not been so popular, perhaps the wicked stepmother would not be
In this case the psychoanalytic approach neglects both the editorial and the
historical origins of the stepmother. Both Tatar and Warner point out that a
(Tatar, Hard Facts 49-50; Warner, From the Beast 212-14). Both scholars refer to the
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high rates of mortality for mothers during childbirth before medical intervention was
commonly practiced: the stepmother was a common figure in history. Arguing that
Bettelheim’s approach “leeches history out of the fairy tale” (From the Beast 213),
Warner suggests that the cruelty of stepmothers found in fairy tales has a historical origin
in addition to the editorial one. With remarriage, the second wife could easily find herself
competing with her stepchildren for the very resources for which she married (Warner,
From the Beast 213). Thus, cruelty to her new husband’s biological children would be a
way to ensure survival for her own biological children. Warner also suggests that the
villainy of the stepmother figure is partially the result of “psychoanalytical and historical
interpreters of fairy tales usually enter[ing] stories like ‘Cinderella’, ‘Snow White’, or
‘Beauty and the Beast’ from the point of the view of the protagonist” (From the Beast
214). As Warner points out, popular fairy tales rarely involve first-person narration
Coover’s use of first-person narration, with the stepmother telling her own
Coover’s rewriting of fairy tales in his collection Pricksongs & Descants, Jackson I.
Cope states, “Coover in these stories accepts and preserves the integrity of the narrative
history presented him in his folk sources. The significant difference is in the place of the
narrator” (Robert Coover’s Fictions 19). Coover employs the same technique in
Stepmother; he shifts the narration out of extradiegetic narration and into multiple
narrative positions for the stories being told. Stepmother narrates four out of fourteen
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sections (including the first and last sections), and the extradiegetic narration in other
sections is focalized through other characters. In Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and
gender, class, or individuality . . . present[s] the narrator’s vision as the only possible
one” (34). Statements such as “‘there was,’ ‘there are,’ [and] ‘she was,’” when made by
discourages questioning of the narrative voice, and “naturalizes” the “social conventions”
presented by that voice (Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales 34, 35). First-person
narration, on the other hand, acknowledges the subjectivity of the narrative position.
Rather than presenting a single external narrator that functions as the moral
authority for the tale, moral judgment shifts between Stepmother and the external narrator
which prevents either authoritative voice from dominating the text. While the reader is
made to identify with Stepmother through her position as narrator, other viewpoints are
also present in the text and given authority by the external narrator. Stephen Benson, in
“The Late Fairy Tales of Robert Coover,” describes the voices of Stepmother—
Stepmother herself and the extradiegetic narrator—as “dense, elaborately loaded and
knowing,” voices “freighted with knowledge and tradition” (123). Both narrating voices
are fully entrenched in fairy-tale tradition and so carry with them the authority of that
tradition. Coover not only provides Stepmother with a voice, but with a voice
identify with Stepmother because of her first-person account, which diminishes the
50
distance between character and reader in the popular tales, and recognize that voice as
her as wicked. In telling her own story, she provides motivation and context for her
popular tales as “wicked,” or “cruel” as Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index would have it.
This challenge provokes the question, who decides that the stepmother is wicked? The
context in which a story is told is just as important as its plot and can allow for a more
complex reading than critics like Bettelheim provide. Coover avoids a single
focalization, but Stepmother never has total control over the story, as her inability to
change it demonstrates. However, aligning the reader with Stepmother through narration
and focalization encourages the reader’s identification with a traditional villain. In doing
so, Coover breaks down one of the barriers that constructs and reconstructs the
stepmother-figure as wicked.
Postmodern fairy tales that are self-conscious of genre, using and abusing the
fairy-tale form to comment on how the genre creates gender narratives without simply
reproducing or reversing them, offer rich possibilities for both postmodernists and
feminists wishing to reclaim a much-loved tradition for viable use in a culture at odds
with the master narratives popular fairy tales can reinforce. Many feminist retellings of
fairy tales in literature and popular culture often try to subvert what have been perceived
as narrowly-defined roles for women in the popular tales, with role-reversal being a
favored technique. Rather than creating “new” feminist fairy tales, these retellings seek to
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reclaim the figures of women in the better-known tales where women are constructed in
less than flattering ways: from passive objects of male desire to powerfully evil figures
working from selfish motivations. Makinen explains that part of the task of feminists
working with the fairy-tale genre is to establish a tradition in which women are not
villainous:
tellers of stories and for tales that celebrate active female protagonists and
feminine wisdom while acknowledging that these tales have been largely
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar refer to these dichotomous representations of women in
fairy tales as “the angel-woman and the monster-woman” in their reading of “Snow
roles and then exposing the limitations of those roles with both characterization that
conflicts with functions, thereby recontextualizing the functions and opening them up to
predetermined roles and express dissatisfaction with them. Though Coover characterizes
his characters against expected types (stepmothers can be kind and princes cruel), the
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roles remain stable. Here Coover is drawing on Propp’s functions from Morphology of
the Folktale, which suggest that fairy tales can be analyzed by the actions of the plot
which remain stable even as characterization changes among variants. This fixity of role
is a thematic focus of the novel. In the second section, the external narrator asserts that in
Reaper’s Woods, “nature . . . is all” and “character is character and subject to its proper
punishment; tampering with endings can disturb the forest’s delicate balance” (11). This
proclamation sets up a problem: within the fairy-tale forest, characters are defined by
their functions, as many of their names demonstrate, and the endings of their stories
cannot be altered. The external narrator speaks with the authority of fairy-tale tradition,
suggesting that the characters have no recourse against these entrenched functions;
however, Stepmother too speaks with authority and challenges this proclamation in the
sections she narrates and by the actions she takes against the Reaper, who represents the
biological relationship between Stepmother and child is less important than Stepmother’s
care-giving attitude toward the innumerable girls who need her help (1). Coover’s
conflation of fairy-tale characters is not unique to his novel, but is a part of long-standing
fairy-tale tradition. As noted earlier, the Brothers Grimm changed mothers into
stepmothers to make the violence perpetuated by the maternal villains in their tales more
palatable, and Warner has noted that in French, the word for “stepmother is the same as
the word for mother-in-law—belle-mère” (From the Beast 218). Warner describes how
53
mothers, stepmothers, and mothers-in-law present the same threat and occupy the same
role in the fairy tales they inhabit, an observation also made by Tatar. For Warner and
Tatar, female villains are anti-mothers, functioning as consumers rather than nurturers.
is no anti-mother; neither is she merely “good.” Coover avoids reducing her into a flat
fairy-tale character by writing her as one who tries to work against the predetermined
pattern of events, and by allowing her to narrate. Stepmother is not a wicked cannibal
bent on her daughter’s destruction, and although she is doomed to fail, she does try to
does not try to make a wholly virtuous character. Instead, Coover reconstructs his
stepmother as a witch who tries to destroy her fellow characters, shifting not her action,
but its context: “[Stepmother’s] wickedness is beyond dispute, nor does she dispute it
herself” (15). Stepmother has done all of the things we expect of witches—spells,
murder, cruelty, selfishness—but “she has also been wrongly blamed” for all evil in the
wood, whether it be imaginary or not (15). She is kind to her daughter, but that kindness
is also a part of her larger struggle against naturalized, traditional authority. Coover’s
vision of the wicked stepmother is not a role-reversal into a good stepmother in order to
make her into a heroine. While role-reversal would effectively challenge the ideology of
the source tales, it would not destabilize the narrative authority of the fairy-tale tradition
nor question the ways in which that ideology is authorized. By maintaining her villainy
but complicating her character so that Stepmother is also wrongly accused of evil, Coover
calls attention to the authorizing function of narrative. Coover challenges not only the
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definition of wickedness but the authority with which fairy tales represent wickedness.
than changing her into an opposite type. Thus Coover creates a new story on old patterns
Many of the characters in Stepmother are, like the title character, named for the
roles they play which emphasizes their inability to escape their fairy-tale functions.
Naming the characters for their roles restricts their available actions and allows for no
possibility for development. Even Stepmother, the character who comes closest to
breaking the fairy tale’s hold on her life by working to thwart established plotlines, is
only capable of being a stepmother figure; she did not become the stepmother figure after
being something else. Stepmother explains, “I was born a long-nosed toothless crone with
warts and buboes and hair on my chin and dugs that hang to my knees, or it seems that I
was, for I have no memories of happier, more delicate times” (25). She is able to
transform temporarily into something else, as when she transforms herself into a unicorn
to break her daughter out of jail (7), but it is only a temporary change, and she reverts
back to her “old” self earlier than she would like (22). Unlike other postmodern retellings
that, recognizing the passage of time, conflate characters so that Beauty (of “Beauty and
the Beast,” ATU 425C) ages into Granny (of “Little Red Riding Hood,” ATU 333), as in
And it’s true, I do have a few tricks, though in general it’s more useful to be thought a
witch than to be one” (2). She suggests here that characterization is more powerful than
the acts committed by the character. After being rescued from prison, Stepmother’s
daughter says, “I feel trapped by life itself, mama. I want more than this” (20). She
articulates the problem of the novel: “she is who she is” (84). The fairy-tale
characterizations are a trap and do not allow for the possibility of a richer existence.
Women can be princesses or witches, but not much else. Stepmother is a conflation of the
powerful female characters with agency, and they are mostly if not always dangerous in
further to demonstrate that the misogyny of popular fairy tales also restricts
representations of masculinity. Princes are less charming than they are criminal in
Reaper’s Woods. Coover collapses many of the misogynistic motifs of fairy tales into the
villains conflicts with their roles as heroes. The wickedest characters are, arguably, the
two oldest prince-brothers who rape and murder maidens, mutilate their “simple” brother,
and plot his demise. But even they are acting their parts, repeating the same fairy-tale
plots of princes and brothers in the popular tales. Coover’s version is more explicit about
the rapes and murders, but the scenes recalled by the brothers invoke “The Six Swans”
(ATU 451), “Brother and Sister” (ATU 450), and “Rapunzel” (ATU 310), all Brothers
Grimm stories of maidens bedded, and sometimes wedded, after being found by prince or
king. The prince brothers hope to encounter “naked or near-naked maidens” they can
56
rescue (41). They are aware of the damsel-in-distress plot and plan their time
accordingly. Likewise, they recognize that though “their royal line is favored, . . . clever
elder brothers are not, being often ill-treated by fortune and the way things are” (42). The
popular fairy tales. They cannot act differently because they are written in this way. They
may seek to use the patterns to their advantage as they plot to use Stepmother’s daughter
to rid themselves of their youngest brother who is competition for the crown, but they are
just fulfilling their princely roles; like Stepmother, they know they will not succeed.
describing the hypocrisy with which differently-gendered characters’ actions are valued
in the context of the storyworld: “Rudeness here will get a girl in trouble quicker than
anything. Boys can get away with rape, incest, theft, torture, murder, for them it’s just
part of growing up, but a girl need only be discourteous to have the world fall upon her
like a dropped millstone,” says Stepmother (4). As the daughter’s crime for which she has
been imprisoned is unnamed, the reader does not know why she has been incarcerated,
although ultimately it does not matter because she, like her predecessors, is doomed to be
the victim, just as the princes are fated never to gain the crown. But in contrast to the
princes’ plot, it is precisely her agency that dooms her. That Stepmother speaks this
observation of hypocrisy, rather than it only being represented in the plot is important.
Stepmother’s narrative activity differentiates her from the other characters in collapsed,
fixed roles. As a character, she is limited by the fairy-tale patterns that script the action of
the plot. As a narrator, however, Stepmother is able to challenge those fairy-tale patterns
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by presenting an alternative narrative authority that actively questions and opposes the
patterns the characters must enact and the ways in which she is characterized.
to the normative gendered behaviors of the source tales reconstruct gender norms so that
a wider range of behaviors is authorized for women and men. Teresa de Lauretis argues
that “the construction of gender is also effected by its deconstruction: that is to say, by
misrepresentation” (3). The representation of gender in the source tales is tangled up with
representations of good and evil. In deconstructing one ideological set, that of good and
metafictional destabilizing eliminates the categories of good and evil that are seen as
crucial to the fairy-tale genre, not by replacing them with new categories but rather by
mixing them up so the differences are no longer clear. In light of these transformations,
no character snugly fits into the role of Propp’s villain. What is left, then, is the plot and
its relationship to pattern. The wicked elements of the story are the popularized,
authoritative in Western popular culture and fix the characters of Stepmother into well-
defined roles and plots. Coover unmakes these patterns in three primary ways: (1) he
reveals that the patterns have a stranglehold on which conventions are recognized as
58
making up the genre in popular culture; (2) he challenges the authority of those patterns
to have that hold by showing that they can be contested and are not inevitable; and (3) he
offers a way to contest those patterns by staging these conflicts from within the stories.
narratives. His use of features uncommon in traditional fairy tales, such as first-person
narration, complex and self-aware characters, and metafictional critiques, breaks genre
boundaries and expands the possibilities for fairy tales as a genre in a postmodern and
feminist culture. Coover’s work in Stepmother is similar to that in his earlier novel Briar
Rose, which suspends the “Sleeping Beauty” story (ATU 410) before the princess is
awakened and a novel I will address in Chapter 4. In both novels, characters are reduced
to functions, plots are unchangeable, and patterns are limiting. But unlike the characters
of Briar Rose, Stepmother actively tries to change the patterns. The characters in Briar
Rose do express frustration with the reiteration of pattern and even a desire to change
those patterns, but they are not able to do anything to change their situations (only inhabit
different variants of the same tale type).5 Stepmother too is dissatisfied with her lot, but
she does not accept that it is unchangeable. Stepmother, in offering possibilities for the
genre, changes Coover’s own pattern of deconstructing fairy tales. He does not
reconstruct a new ideal for the genre, but lays it bare as a genre in flux, one that can
change.
Coover does not make the fairy tale into something else but shows it for what it is:
does not show us how to use fairy tales, but shows how the fairy-tale genre is being used.
He reveals that the authority of the narratives and the authors to whom we attribute those
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narratives are not as stable and as natural as they purport to be. Coover deconstructs the
patterns without the authority that we, as authors, readers, and popularizers, give them.
The authority of the convention comes not from the tales or even their authors, but from
As such, it is only fitting that the protagonist’s greatest enemy is Reaper, the
character who thrives on patterns and is intent on reproducing them: “[The Reaper] does
not disturb the way things are and is angered by those who do; thus his unending conflicts
with Stepmother, who would hang the lot and burn the forest down if she could, and all
the world beyond it” (13). By maintaining order, the Reaper preserves his authority in
Reaper’s Woods, named after him for his constant presence. He is the authority because
the other characters recognize him as the authority. In the final pages of the novel, the
conflict between Stepmother and the Reaper comes to a head, and they discuss the
I [Stepmother] would like my daughter to be set free. I can arrange for her
Alas, madam, I [Reaper] cannot do that. She has been adjudged wicked
Others have gotten away with more. Send the barrel rolling without her.
You and I would know. Things will happen as they must. (87-8)
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Stepmother suggests removing her daughter from the situation altogether in such a way
as to maintain the appearance of fidelity to the established pattern. The Reaper, however,
This simple exchange contains the crux of the novel: the Reaper argues that
patterns do not change because they cannot change. This rhetorical move employs
discourse that naturalizes the status quo. Altering the established patterns, even subtly,
undoes their authority and jeopardizes the Reaper’s position of power. Stepmother, too,
recognizes the power in the minute changes but unlike the Reaper, she welcomes the
rupture small changes can enable. Once one daughter escapes, after all, the pattern is
broken and the possibility for further escapes exists. The immediate change that she seeks
results in the saving of a life. She argues that making this change will have no real effect
on the woods as “no one will ever know” about it. But of course the reader recognizes
this for the rhetoric it is and sees the magnitude of puncturing the Reaper’s authority: the
reader will know. While the Reaper upholds the stability of patterns and the impossibility
of altering the popularized, conventional patterns, Stepmother and the novel argue that
the possibility for change is there and that, though dangerous, it is desirable. In her fight
for justice, as opposed to the Reaper’s adherence to punishment, Stepmother argues for
the moral right of that change. But, paradoxically, by trying to work within the pattern
narrator, however, Stepmother speaks authoritatively of new patterns that she cannot
enact as a character. The narrative gives her authority that the plot does not, and the
values she speaks become the privileged ones in the novel even though her actions as a
The struggle between Stepmother and the Reaper mimics that of postmodern
feminist re-tellers of fairy tales and the fairy-tale popularized tradition they are writing
against. The Reaper’s actions to impose order on the woods recall the editorial decisions
made by the Grimms to Christianize folktales and make them more moral and proper
behavioral models for children. While the Grimms began to edit the tales for a younger
audience as the popularity of their work grew, their original intention was not to produce
didactic tales for children. Instead their goal was a scholarly one, to preserve German folk
traditions for adult audiences (Tatar, Hard Facts 11; Haase, Introduction 10; Zipes,
“Once There Were” xxiv). Like the Grimms’ initial purpose of collecting folktales to
preserve German folk culture, the Reaper seeks “[t]he revelation of some kind of
primeval and holy truth . . . the telltale echo of ancestral reminiscences” (14).
While the Reaper represents the Grimms, the socializing force behind some of
their editorial revision is represented by the Holy Mother. In seeking the revelation of
truth and to impose order, the Reaper introduces the Holy Mother, Stepmother’s other
enemy, to his woods. The Holy Mother is a Virgin Mary figure representing Christianity
and the figure of Mary in tales like the Grimms’ “The Virgin Mary’s Child” (ATU 710).
In this tale, Mary commands a girl not to enter a forbidden room, much as in “Bluebeard”
(ATU 312), and then punishes the girl when she does so by banishing her from heaven,
removing her ability to speak, and later stealing her children so that the girl is accused of
cannibalism and is to be burnt at the stake until she confesses her sins. Like the Reaper,
Holy Mother’s emphasis is on obedience and punishment. Stepmother refers to the Holy
Mother as the Ogress, recalling another staple of female fairy-tale villains. In tales like
Ogress, attempts to eat her grandchildren. In her dual naming of Holy Mother/Ogress,
Coover conflates two traits often associated with wicked or cruel stepmothers—
potentially good mother—one who wants to nurture and help her children rather than
consuming and punishing them as popularized, conventional fairy tales would have her
do. The Holy Mother/Ogress is, like the Mary of fairy tales, a character who guards souls,
not lives; collects confessions of sins rather than offers aid; and “mak[es] one feel guilty
merely for having been alive” (84). While certainly not a positive portrayal of
Christianity, the Holy Mother is introduced as a character brought to the forest by the
Reaper to possibly civilize the fairy-tale characters (12). Thus aligned with official
religion and inviolable tradition, the enemies of Stepmother represent the authority of the
popular tales against which Coover is writing and the means by which the authoritative
Coover’s most recent work, then, continues to provide a useful metaphor for the
retelling and study of retellings of fairy tales. As a stand-in for the canonical male
authority responsible for compiling and editing the most popular Western tales, the
Reaper is, as the silent pun in his name implies, Grimm. Metaphorically, this establishes a
associated with the fairy-tale genre and the authoritative male traditions that employ and
disseminate those patterns, and Stepmother, a character aligned with feminist and
postmodern writers who revolt against the patterns, trying to unmake them and resist the
tendency to repeat what has come before. The novel Stepmother enacts the challenges
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that arise in trying to rewrite the fairy-tale genre: reproducing patriarchal and
heteronormative ideology, relying on male-authored and edited stories and ignoring the
definition of fairy tales and the genre, and perpetuating the misconceptions that fairy tales
are simple stories for children. The tension implicit in these challenges stems from the
necessity of using the popular, conventional tales as fodder in order for new tales to be
Tales that adhere to the established patterns are limited by those patterns, and
Coover demonstrates how characterization and representation cannot fully rupture those
conventional patterns. As a character Stepmother is never able to truly break free from
the plot set in motion in the first lines of the novel. She makes a lot of noise, and shatters
a few of her enemies, but the cycle in which she spins remains unbroken. She is doomed
to repeat the scenario again, watching her daughters be executed to the delight of the folk
and seeking her revenge for their deaths in a “kind of violent mourning,” again and again,
“keep[ing] the cycle going” (Coover 2). She maintains the power of the traditional
wicked stepmother, with the ambiguity of her character transforming her into a believable
protagonist, but Stepmother’s authority is achieved through her role as focalizer and
narrator. Therefore the novel does break new ground and revises the fairy-tale genre,
even if plot conventions keep her character powerless. Writers of fairy tales today who
are dissatisfied with the roles of women projected by the seemingly endless reproduction
of a small canon of popular tales are struggling, like Stepmother, with the narrative
The future of postmodern feminist fairy tales lies in stories that can rewrite the
Storytelling, explains that contemporary writing of fairy tales by women does not seek to
construct a new, feminist fairy-tale canon. Rather, women write fairy tales and retellings
that challenge the canon, featuring “baffled and distressed” characters struggling against
“absurd situations,” and Zipes emphasizes these writers use of “degenerative” narrative
strategies (Relentless Progress 130). This I believe is true of Coover’s work as well.
Coover’s novel does not reveal liberated women and strong heroines in opposition to the
popular tales that are the fodder for his novel; however, by using narrative strategies that
show that carefully scripted gender roles are unsatisfying and detrimental in and beyond
the fairy-tale storyworld, Coover’s novel does feminist work, even though that is not the
main focus of his poetics. His critique of misogyny is part of his larger critique of the
Coover’s construction of Stepmother exhibits how similar the most popular fairy
tales in Western culture are by how seemingly effortlessly they are collapsed into their
characters’ roles. In making the characters aware of their ultimate fates, Coover gives his
characters, well, character. The princes, for example, though repugnant, are more
complex than their popular predecessors—they have motive for the rapes and murder
they commit and are nevertheless clever in their manipulation. The stories never reach a
level of realism, as Coover of course is not attempting realism, but they are more
interesting as characters because they are provided with motivation and agency. The plots
remain stable, but the details and distortions that Coover supplies enrich the fairy-tale
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genre he is parodying. The possibility of evolution here lies not with the characters in
Coover’s novel, but with the reader. The characters are bound by their roles, and as they
struggle to change their predicaments, they are only further embittered by the trappings of
the fairy tale. The characters are trapped by the plot, but the reader is shown how
complex fairy tales can be and is led to question the authority of the popularized
heroes are rendered less gallant, victims are availed of agency, and villains are
space for his readers, [Coover] allows them to move into the freedom that they always
have but which they sometimes are unable to perceive” (22). The reader is provided with
all of the recognizable traits of the fairy-tale genre and then plays with them. The novel
does not abandon fairy-tale patterns in remaking the genre, but instead shows possibilities
for those patterns. Coover’s work reminds us that fairy tales are not static monoliths.
Though the patterns may appear to be stable, there is room for play. Near the end of the
novel, when confronted with Stepmother’s plot to save her daughter from execution by
preventing the Reaper, a fixture at all executions, from attending the event, the Reaper
says, “Not all legends are true” (89). When the Reaper tells this to Stepmother, he is
explaining that though the pattern is for him to be at all executions, it is not a causal
relationship nor does it hold some essential truth about how executions happen. Therein
lies the future of the genre; fairy tales as they have been canonized are not “true.” Just
because a narrative pattern is pervasive, does not mean that it is essential to the genre of
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fairy tales. The tone of Stepmother is fairly pessimistic as the characters are trapped in
roles they do not want, always repeating an endless cycle. But by emphasizing the
constructedness of the patterns, the text encourages the reader to recognize those patterns
as open to change. If the patterns are constructed, then they can also be broken, and the
plot can continue. Writers can rewrite the popular fairy tale, changing the patterns, and
Understanding Wickedness
Troll’s-Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales (2009), edited by Ellen Datlow and
Terri Windling, is a collection of fairy-tale retellings for young readers that take as their
subject the villains of the traditional fairy tales. The collection works from a similar
premise as Coover’s Stepmother. It complicates the concept of “wicked” in fairy tales and
offers various models of doing so with narrative strategies similar to those used by
Coover: first-person narration by the conventional villain and the conflation of tales and
characters. Some stories also offer differing characterizations of the villains and/or
contexts for their actions, such as role-reversal, so that the traditional hero is the villain
and the villain the hero. Unlike Coover’s novel, however, most of the stories (three of the
fifteen retellings are poems) are conventional narratives and do not contain obviously
are no discussions of fiction or narrative within the stories. The stories in Troll’s-Eye
View and Stepmother are doing very different things and approach the fairy-tale genre
quite differently, in part because of the difference in audience. The stories do not
deconstruct master narratives or interrogate how narratives authorize and limit lived
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experience, as Coover’s novel does. However, these stories still invite questions about
narrative authority through the intertextual space created via their changes to
whether through characterization or shift in narrative voice and perspective, these stories
question the authority of the traditional fairy tales on which they are based. These
retellings are very different from Coover’s Stepmother, yet still manage to question
While the collection offers a variety of stories and poems of villains remade, I
focus on only two here. Both stories, like Coover’s novel, impact the reader’s
and offer a new way of understanding their “wicked” behavior. Though less obviously
deconstructive and not overtly metafictional, Garth Nix and Catherynne M. Valente, like
Coover, use shifts in narrative point of view and focalization to encourage reader
sympathy with wicked fairy-tale witches and challenge the construction of “wickedness.”
In this discussion, I show how a retelling can question the stories we tell ourselves about
gender as a part of a larger investigation into how we tell stories. Garth Nix retells the
events of “Rapunzel” (ATU 310) from a perspective that questions the moral positioning
of the source tale (what constitutes wickedness), and Catherynne M. Valente offers a
prequel to “Hansel and Gretel” (ATU 327A) that tells an origin story for the witch. In
both cases, the authors are interested in exploring the motivation of a traditional villain
(why does the witch do this?) in a way that creates reader sympathy with that villain. In
neither case does the retelling contest the events of the source tales. These witches did
indeed do what they are accused of, just as Stepmother is also guilty of her crimes in
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Coover’s novel. But by providing a different perspective, these retellings complicate their
sources and the moral ideology embedded in them. Because these stories are about
women and women’s actions and desire, and the source tales have been read as stories
that socialize women, the retellings additionally critique the gender norms embedded in
the tales.
In “An Unwelcome Guest,” Rapunzel has broken into the Witch’s tower room
and will not leave. A magic treaty between humans and magical folk prevents the Witch
from calling the police (out of their jurisdiction) or simply kicking her out (Rapunzel
invoked guest status by eating the Witch’s food), so she is left to devise a way to trick
Rapunzel into leaving. She does so by declaring Rapunzel to be a prisoner and then
facilitating her “rescue.” Rapunzel resists rescue because she is possessed by a Bad Old
One, and the Witch ends the possession by cutting Rapunzel’s hair. What is interesting
about Nix’s “An Unwelcome Guest” is not the plot twist that the bad Rapunzel is the
antagonist and possessed by one of the Bad Old Ones. It would be more original to leave
her as the annoying teenager she is described as rather than explain away her behavior
with magic. Instead Nix characterizes the Witch figure as good-natured and law-abiding,
and her actions as valid and noble. She is more complex than her fairy-tale source;
The protagonist, the Witch, is named after her role in the story, just like Coover’s
Stepmother. She does not have a proper name, but Rapunzel does. The Witch’s familiar
has two names: Jenny, her cat name, and Jaundice, her “evil” familiar name (31). Another
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familiar is mentioned in passing, as going by both Bluebell and Fangdeath (32). The
external narrator refers to the cat as Jaundice for the first three pages of the story, but
switches to Jenny after the Witch argues that Jenny is not evil and the Witch is not
wicked (32). The narrator primarily, then, refers to the familiar as Jenny, not Jaundice,
affirming the Witch’s position that they are not evil by nature. Rather the evil appellation
is a name used to enact a role dictated by outside forces. The Witch, however, is named
only for her role as a witch. Like the brownie, who is also a magical creature, the Witch’s
identity is determined by her function. What is interesting is that she could have a name
within the logic of the story, as there is another witch referred to as Decima (32). But the
fact that she does not have a name, not even Mother Gothel, the name of the witch in
some variants of the Rapunzel story, emphasizes that what is at stake in this retelling is
not who the witch is, but rather how she is seen. Nix does not alter or contest her identity
as a witch, but rather calls into question the assumption that she and her actions are
necessarily wicked.
Like Stepmother, the Witch is forceful about her identity. “I am a witch,” she
reminds her familiar and the reader (30). What she disputes is the “wicked” moniker.
“I’ve never been wicked,” she says. “Least, not by my measure. Just independent-
minded” (32). At this point her feline familiar Jenny states the point of the entire
collection, “Wickedness depends on where you’re standing, doesn’t it?” (32). The
identity of the Witch is not in question, just the idea that witches are necessarily evil or
wicked. Unlike other tales in the collection that offer motivations that humanize the
villains retold, this story questions the subjectivity of the adjective, recognizing that
wicked is a moral judgment that is relative. From Rapunzel’s point of view, the witch’s
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behavior is wicked: she imprisons Rapunzel in the tower, lets the rescuers be blinded,
cuts Rapunzel’s magical hair, and banishes her. From the Witch’s point of view, her
behavior is valid: Rapunzel breaks into the Witch’s tower and demands to be pampered,
casts the spell that blinds the rescuers, and is in fact possessed by an ancient evil. The
The changes Nix makes to “Rapunzel” are mostly plot-level changes; however,
the story is focalized primarily through the Witch and not Rapunzel. In addition, when
the story is focalized through Rapunzel, the narrator’s characterization of her encourages
reader alignment with the Witch. Rapunzel is said to be “thinking evil thoughts” (40) and
described as “scowl[ing]” (40), “snapp[ing]” (41), and “shriek[ing]” (41) when she
speaks. While the Witch is also described as angry and frustrated when speaking, her
speech is more often than not marked with “said” or “asked,” though she does once
“hiss” at Rapunzel (34). The Witch does have adjectives like “sternly” describing how
she “said” something (29), but overall the Witch is given more neutral speaking verbs
than Rapunzel. These narrative cues encourage the reader to identify with the Witch,
even when the actions are seen from Rapunzel’s perspective. This shift in focalization
results in confusion of the concepts of good and evil, which are clear in the source tale.
The choice of focalizing primarily through the Witch demonstrates the plot’s
theme by showing how a story can be dramatically different after shifting point of view.
The thematic argument that good and wicked are subjective terms, not universal moral
traits, explicitly challenges the assumption in the source tale that there are good and evil
opposites. In Nix’s story neither the Witch nor Rapunzel is truly evil, as Rapunzel is
ultimately not responsible for her actions. This argument encourages the reader to
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question the source tale: Why does the witch lock Rapunzel in a tower? Why does she
want her? How are the witch’s actions characterized? By demonstrating that the
naturalized values of the source tale are subjective, Nix arms his reader with tools for
interrogating the fairy-tale intertexts, which opens up the source tale to new
interpretations. In performing the deconstruction of one set of fairy-tale values, the story
by recounting her life as a child who lives in a house of spun sugar with her confectioner
father. Four pages into the story her father reveals that she too is a confection crafted
from sugar (147). She does not believe him, as “every girl has a mother” (147), but his
claim is shown to be true by the end. Though the story being retold is “Hansel and
Gretel,” this information is withheld until the final paragraph, effectively barring reader
bias brought from the source tale. Reader sympathy for the girl is created before it is
revealed that she is a child-eating witch. It is also four pages in that her name is revealed
to be Constanze. Unlike the unnamed witch she will become in “Hansel and Gretel,” this
girl has a name, an identity not correlated to her function. Constanze becomes a skilled
confectioner like her father, and he takes her to Vienna and the emperor. Alonzo, the
father, declares that she is not human but his greatest confection. Thus Valente also
invokes “The Gingerbread Man” (ATU 2025) as a source tale. Exiled from the court he
loves, Alonzo offers his daughter to the emperor if only he can return. In a scene that is
quite disturbing to read in first-person, Constanze is forced to her knees as Alonzo cuts
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her face to show that her blood is not real. The empress approaches, objectively and
without sympathy from Constanze’s perspective, and tastes the raspberry blood (152).
Constanze is relegated to the kitchen and strung up like a “length of garlic” and used like
reader identification with the narrator. As Constanze is objectified and consumed, the
first-person narration shows her distress, compelling the reader to empathize with her and
identify her as the victim of the story. Constanze is first objectified seven pages into the
story by the emperor who refers to her as a “thing” (150). At this point, her character and
personhood have already been established for the reader by a first-person account of her
happy childhood with an adoring father. Her father also refers to Constanze as a “thing”
(151) as well as “nothing but sugar, nothing but candy” (152). This statement is in sharp
contrast to the doting father Constanze has already described. She narrates, “My father
drew a little silver icing spade from his belt and started toward me. I cried out and my
voice echoed in the hard, white hall like a sparrow cut into a fork” (151). The reader is
not allowed to experience the events from another perspective or another character’s
interpretation of those events. Toward the end of the scene, Constanze says, “She [the
empress] looked at me, her gaze pointed and deep, but did not seem to hear my sobbing
or see my tears” (152). The reader does not know if the empress recognizes Constanze’s
distress, but the first-person point of view encourages reader identification with the
subjective view of Constanze who sees herself as a person and a victim. It is also
important to note here that the story is told in past tense, meaning that Constanze is
narrating from a point subsequent to the events of the story (after she becomes the witch).
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The objectification of Constanze by the other characters in the story, their refusal
to see her as a person despite her demonstrated autonomy, is in sharp contrast to the first-
person narrative that demonstrates her agency. Her alterity means that they see her as an
object, or at least that she interprets their actions to mean that they see her as an object.
This discontinuity encourages reader sympathy. The first-person narration aligns with
her, and being exposed only to her thoughts means that readers are not allowed to
sympathize with or be given motivation for the characters who abuse her. Readers are
clearly encouraged to see her as a victim both because of the torture plot and the
sympathy created by her first-person account of her emotional reaction to that torture. At
this point in the story, readers are not aware that she is the witch from “Hansel and
Gretel,” but allusions to “The Gingerbread Man,” in which the cookie-protagonist flees
various characters that want to eat him, are clear. After the death of the emperor,
empress, and Alonzo, Constanze is eventually released by a butler who was kind to her
when he was a kitchen boy. She is old and withered, and she flees into the forest, where
she builds a house made of gingerbread and candy from ingredients she begged from
nearby villagers. It is at this point that she identifies herself as a witch (156), and in the
last paragraph (157) it becomes clear of which story she is the villain.
justification, for the acts for which the reader knows her and which make her wicked: she
eats human children because she has been tortured and eaten by humans. But she has also
been trained by her father to enjoy the taste of bones. Constanze’s father gives her
utensils made of bone to use and tells her not to forget the children who crushed the sugar
she eats when she, herself, is a child in the first scene of the story (145). This is
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interesting social commentary on child labor and how those who enjoy the products of
that labor are complicit in the abuse of the children. But it also implies that we see what
we want to see and ignore what we want to ignore, which sets up the idea that perspective
After she tells her own story of victimization and abuse, the revelation that
Constanze is Hansel and Gretel’s witch provokes the reader to reconcile this story with
that of the source, and to perhaps see “Hansel and Gretel” from the witch’s perspective.
The use of first-person narration by the traditional witch enacts the story’s argument that
the traditional witch is not simply evil. She becomes a villain for a reason, and for
Constanze it is in response to the way she was treated by others. The argument that she is
constructed as a witch easily translates to the story as a whole and its source. It is not
difficult to make a metafictional leap into understanding how narratives like fairy tales
construct concepts of good and evil. The reader is enabled to ask why certain characters
are wicked. While Nix’s story encourages questions more along the lines of who decides
what evil is, Valente’s story encourages questions about who is telling the story and who
is the subject of that story. “A Delicate Architecture” suggests that wickedness is not a
stable identity and that characters are not wholly one or the other, enabling the reader to
While neither Nix nor Valente directly addresses gender issues in their stories,
their unmaking of wicked witches troubles the good/evil binary of fairy-tale characters
and the popular idea that fairy-tale women are either victims or villains.6 These writers,
like Coover but for a different audience, tackle larger narrative authority in their
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retellings, and in doing so question the master narratives embedded in the source tales
that regulate gender. Coover makes a direct critique of gender inequality in Stepmother,
but his emphasis is on how gendered behaviors are characterized, reminding readers that
the values associated with those behaviors are constructed. While Nix and Valente do not
directly address gender inequality, their focus on the construction of wickedness and how
why some behaviors of women are characterized as good and others as wicked.
The texts in this chapter demonstrate the restrictions of the fairy-tale genre when
Role-reversal and complex characterization can be disruptive and question the authority
of the genre, enabling readers to approach other fairy-tales critically; however, these
in the process. While they do offer critiques of gender, gender is not the primary focus of
examine texts that do take traditional constructs of gender as their thematic focus and use
films in the next chapter do not also engage in metafictional and thematic critiques of
fairy-tale authority, but rather reinforce it despite their more progressive representations
of gender. Metafictional engagement with fairy-tale authority has the potential to disrupt
not just a single source tale, but the wider fairy-tale genre. Examining fairy-tale retellings
for destabilizing and metafictional narrative strategies in conjunction with plot and
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CHAPTER 2
THE SHOE STILL FITS: EVER AFTER AND THE PURSUIT OF A FEMINIST CINDERELLA
passive fairy-tale heroines with behaviors traditionally gendered as masculine, are fairly
common feminist retelling techniques. Though it may seem like these are straightforward
particularly true in those cases where the characters demonstrate a range of gendered
behaviors suggesting a continuum of gender possibilities rather than fixed femininity and
masculinity. As readers and viewers, we attach symbolic meaning to the appearance and
behavior of the characters in a known fairy-tale retelling. We expect that the physical
descriptions in fairy tales correlate to the virtues and vices of the characters (for example,
that characters identified as pretty are good and as ugly are bad) because that is a familiar
pattern in traditional fairy tales. Twisting those characterizations in the retelling opens up
an intertextual space in the retelling for readers to question the ideology attached to those
characterizations in the source tales. Making the princess in need of rescue capable of
rescuing herself, for example, encourages a reader to question why she needs rescuing in
the first place. Princesses who slay dragons offer a different model of femininity than
those who are captured by them, and princesses who make friends with dragons
complicate that even further. It is easy to see why this is such a popular technique.
However, if this is the only major intervention to the source tale, the feminist retelling
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can fall flat, or more problematically, reinforce the very traditionally gendered behaviors
White” do, challenges the representations of femininity in the source tales and helps to
show that gender is a construct. But if this strong, more feminist princess is placed in the
same plot as her predecessors, one that emphasizes her marriage above all else, her
model of gender that challenges traditional representations of gender, but who act in a
plot that necessitates strict patriarchal gendered behaviors, most notably marriage and
rescue plots, can duplicate the gendered patterns of the traditional characters they are
and the plot she enacts—between the concept of gender represented by characterization
and the expectation for specific gendered behaviors bound up in the structure and patterns
of the plot. In this chapter, I analyze three fairy-tale films to demonstrate how plot
structure and narrative framing can contrast and complicate the feminist work of both re-
masculinities. I focus on how the marriage plot in particular limits the ways in which the
The 1998 film Ever After: A Cinderella Story, directed by Andy Tennant and
contemporary audience who has grown up with second-wave feminism and its arguments
about the problematically sexist representation of women. Unlike other popular literary
and cinematic Cinderellas who need the help of birds (Grimms and Disney), mice
(Disney), or fairies (Perrault and Disney) to accomplish chores and prove themselves
worthy of respect and love, Danielle (Drew Barrymore) wins the affection and esteem of
her prince (Dougray Scott) by being smart, caring, strong, and assertive. She does not
rely on the prince to save her or on others to solve her problems. What sets Danielle apart
from her fictional and cinematic predecessors, as well as from the other women in the
film, is her self-confidence and her lack of interest in material wealth, social status, and
prince hunting. However, she does not completely break from tradition, and the film fails
Some critics and reviewers have labeled Ever After a feminist film due to
Danielle’s strength in contrast to the expected passive heroine of popularized fairy tales.
Despite disagreements as to the merits of the film, popular reviewers have often bestowed
the “feminist,” or even “post-feminist,” label upon it,1 calling attention to its “girl-
critics have been more resistant to calling Ever After a feminist film, their analyses
emphasize characteristics that generally fit feminist ideology, and they praise the film for
its efforts at representing a strong heroine. Elisabeth Rose Gruner claims that the film
“rewrit[es] Cinderella for a feminist, perhaps even a post-feminist, future” in the article
“Saving ‘Cinderella’: History and Story in Ashpet and Cinderella” (146). John Stephens
patriarchy” in their article, “Utopia, Dystopia, and Cultural Controversy in Ever After and
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The Grimm Brothers’ Snow White” (206). And Cathy Lynn Preston argues that Ever After
attempts to “redefine gender boundaries” and “respond to the last thirty years of feminist
critique of gender construction” in popular fairy tales in her “Disrupting the Boundaries
of Genre and Gender: Postmodernism and the Fairy Tale” (206, 203). These critics’
careful wording situates the film firmly in feminist territory by recognizing what it
succeeds in this portrayal. Their resistance to explicitly making a “feminist” claim for the
film, as many of their popular counterparts do, indicates a tenuous relationship between
studies. In the early 1970s, Alison Lurie and Marcia R. Lieberman began the debate as to
whether or not traditional fairy tales could be feminist. The problem Lurie outlined was
that though there were strong female heroines in the traditional tales, they had been
hidden from view by the male-dominated publishing industry. Fairy tales, even the
traditional ones, she argued, have strong female characters and are indeed feminist.
Lieberman responded that the Disney versions constituted the primary image of fairy
tales and that the passive heroines within them superseded lesser-known heroines who
might have had some pluck. The popular fairy tales, the ones actually affecting mass
culture, she argued, were not feminist. They reinforced limiting notions of femininity and
appearance would seem to suggest that the debate over feminist/antifeminist fairy tales
has been settled. Not only is she a strong female lead who represents the ideals of girl
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power and liberal feminism, but she recaptures the strength of the older heroines Lurie
described. Preston suggests that Ever After “plays off of what both folklorists and
feminists have asked for: an acknowledgment that there have been many versions of
‘Cinderella’ and that there is a need to return, as it were, to a Cinderella figure who is a
‘shrewd and practical girl persevering and winning a share of the power’” (204).
Danielle, according to the impressed prince, “swims alone, climbs rocks, and rescues
and her actions change her individual circumstances more so than the society that created
them, despite the utopian philosophy she claims to value. Stephens and McCallum
governing female conduct, and dress regulations” (208); however, all of these changes
affect only Danielle. She overturns social hierarchy, but only for herself. In their
discussion of agency in the film, these same critics note the inadequacy of Danielle’s
shift from a “vision of a just society . . . to the more private well-being envisaged within
the schema of romantic love” (Stephens and McCallum 208). Though Danielle speaks of
changing society, her actions primarily affect her own social standing through marriage. I
agree that containing Danielle’s utopian ideology within the frame of heterosexual
feminism in which individual women can be strong and achieve equality through
personal actions that do not, however, work to challenge or change the underlying
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patriarchal structure of society,2 and these heroines can still be (sexually) desirable and
young women.3 This limited version of feminism, which draws on girl power and liberal
denaturalize the idea of feminism Ever After projects, I focus on the limited power of
Danielle’s action within the film’s dynamics of narrative authority, the highly gendered
representations of Danielle, the reversal of the damsel-in-distress plot, and the re-
gendering of the fairy godmother as male. The fragments of the “Cinderella” tale that are
maneuvered most consistently in Ever After—the phrase “once upon a time,” the dress,
the rescue, and the godmother—placate a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century
audience’s expectations of popular feminism, but fail to move the “Cinderella” story
beyond the structural misogyny bound up in the tale’s plot and reinforced by its narrative
frame.
Ever After opens with a frame narrative in which Danielle’s elderly great-great
granddaughter, the Grand Dame (Jeanne Moreau), tells the Brothers Grimm about
Danielle, the “real” Cinderella. This storytelling scene then shifts into the primary
embedded tale that reclaims the Cinderella story for Danielle and a contemporary, mainly
female, audience before returning once again to close the frame at the end of the film. In
the final scene of Danielle’s story, after she has wed her prince, Danielle chides Prince
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Henry, “You, sir, are supposed to be charming.” He replies “And we, Princess, are
supposed to live happily ever after.” “Says who?” she challenges, and he replies, “You
know? I don’t know.” The two are in the center of the screen, framed by the window
behind them and they kiss. This scene has been cited for its genre-establishing (Gruner
150), transitional (Preston 200), and metafictional (Stephens and McCallum 204) work.
In addition to the scene’s already identified metafictional work, it also serves to question
the authority of fairy-tale formulas. The characters recognize the pattern, but not the
authority that gives it power. Jessica Tiffin, in Marvelous Geometry: Narrative and
Metafiction in Modern Fairy Tale, claims that “they leave [the pattern] uninterrupted”
(203). As the scene ends and the film returns to the frame story, the audience is prompted
to ask why the Grimms (or other fairy-tale collectors) get to establish the authoritative
version of this fairy tale. While the visual framing of the couple and the closing kiss in
Danielle’s story place the film into fairy-tale and romance genres, the dialogue opens up
questions of agency.
explores the struggle of who gets to tell stories and whose versions become most
In the case of Ever After the appeal to authority is multivocal. The film
Dame] is able to tell a different story, one that played to the competing
Similarly, Gruner argues that Ever After “finally privileges the story of woman over the
history of men, the passion of women over the rational rulings of men” (146). Stephens
and McCallum add that the frame “asserts that the story is told by a woman and therefore
presents a female point of view, and that this view is reliable. As Marina Warner suggests
about other female narrated folktales, it authenticates the tale’s misogynistic attitudes”
(203). While I would agree that the film cultivates the privileging of female voice and
desire and that it certainly questions male authority, the means by which Ever After is
constructed and the ways in which the story is told undermine the girl power and liberal
feminist stance it makes by qualifying and containing feminist action and speech within
patriarchal structures and frames. The female narrator and overtures to feminism conceal,
as Warner suggests in From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers,
While the film seems to offer an alternative to the authority of the Grimms,
Perrault, and Disney by presenting a superficially feminist heroine (who despite her
representation of a strong heroine and female narrative authority. The film begins and
ends with a crane shot of the carriage of the Brothers Grimm (Joerg Stadler and Andy
Henderson), which has brought them to an unnamed Grande Dame they address as “your
majesty.” The Grande Dame has sent for the Grimm brothers to “set the story straight.”
Their version of “Cinderella” is not correct, and due to her heritage, she possesses the
painting, the shoe, and therefore, the true tale. However, Ever After undercuts the
dominance of the Grande Dame’s version by positioning her story against the Grimms’
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and by containing it, since the audience knows that the Grimms did not change their text.
Ultimately the frame depicts the suppression of female agency and the power of men to
control narrative.
The Grande Dame imitates the narrative patterns of traditional fairy tales in telling
her story, but in doing so she grants authority to the traditional tales. She begins her story
with “Once upon a time, there lived a young girl who loved her father very much,” a
Grande Dame recognizes that her opening gesture is an allusion to the Grimms, but her
use of the phrase is ironic. As explained by Elizabeth Wanning Harries in Twice Upon a
Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale, a fairy-tale opening gesture is
usually used to distance the audience from the time and place of the tale and to denote
that a fictional space is being created (104). However for her reclaiming to work, the
Grand Dame clearly requires her audience to recognize the historical setting of her story.
This claim of truth suggests a blurring of genre identified by Preston and Gruner as
The legend status offers a narrative validity to the Grande Dame’s version of
“Cinderella” that other storytellers cannot claim. Preston argues that the shift from fairy
tale to legend “provid[es] a fictionalized historical precedent” for the assertive and
independent young women viewing the film, thus validating their own transgressive
behaviors (202). For the young female audience members who identify with Danielle’s
assertive behavior, the fairy tale-cum-legend, which blurs truth and fiction, authorizes
their own behavioral possibilities. Thus with her use of the formula, the Grande Dame
mocks the Grimms for not believing that the story could be true. However, because the
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formula “once upon a time” denotes a fairy tale, not legend or history, she undercuts her
In closing her story (and the film), the Grande Dame declares that “the point,
gentlemen, is that they lived.” As Gruner, Preston, and Stephens and McCallum have
identified, the film conflates fairy tale with legend and history, thus allowing the Grande
Dame’s assertion “that they lived” to make an argument for the validity of her version of
the tale, which would seemingly trump all other versions due to its claim of truth.
However, the use of “gentlemen” reminds the film’s audience that without the Grimms
and their authority, there would be no situation requiring the telling of Danielle’s story.
The setting of the storytelling and the narrative patterns employed by the Grande Dame
The film does not give the Grimms the possibility of revising their “Cinderella” to
mirror the authentic tale provided by the Grande Dame or to acknowledge the authority
of her tale. They come, they listen to the nice old lady tell her story, and then they leave,
taking her story with them. The brothers acknowledge other versions of the story
(Perrault’s glass slipper), but it is not those versions that the Grande Dame sets out to
correct. Though she claims higher social status, wealth, corroborating evidence, and a
historical setting for her version, the power remains with the Grimms. While her telling
of the story provides a context for the plot of the film, it does not impact the most
authoritative version of the text. The Grimms’ carriage, which begins and ends the movie,
remains a closed vessel, containing within it Danielle and the Grande Dame’s story.
contemporary audiences and points to problems with the Grimms’ story, the narrative and
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visual framing implicitly validates the authority of the Grimms’ version, thus
Danielle’s Masque
gender to the film and Danielle’s lack of normative gender performance. A young
Danielle (Anna Maguire) is portrayed as a typical tomboy who nevertheless attempts and
fails to act like a girl in her stepfamily’s presence. In the first scene of the embedded tale,
an exchange between the eight-year-old Danielle and her male, peasant playmate Gustave
(Ricki Cuttell) establishes the underlying problem. Upon seeing his tomboy friend clean
and in a dress, Gustave exclaims, “You look like a girl!” Danielle replies, “That’s what I
am, halfwit.” Danielle’s problem is that she is a girl who does not act or look like a girl.
Judith Butler argues in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity that
the repetition of bodily “acts and gestures” within social and political contexts (Butler,
Gender Trouble 173). Repeated behaviors are assigned gender labels within a regulating
Trouble 173). Danielle is not shown on camera deciding to be a boy or a girl and then
acting accordingly. Instead, she is shown responding to other characters and situations
and using a male or female identity in order to solve problems. Though it seems her own
the characters in the film and the viewing audience. Danielle is identified as female by
the romance plot that ultimately results in her marriage to a male, but her behavior in the
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and Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator,” Mary Ann Doane describes the
showing that “[w]omanliness is a mask which can be worn or removed” (Doane 427).
Like Butler, Doane notes, “Femininity is produced very precisely as a position within a
(from her blue and white servant ensemble to a variety of fancier dresses). Danielle’s
accounts for socially accepted forms of female masculinity, such as those demonstrated
by Danielle; “Tomboyism tends to be associated with a ‘natural’ desire for the greater
freedoms and mobilities enjoyed by boys. Very often it is read as a sign of independence
and self-motivation, and tomboyism may even be encouraged to the extent that it remains
comfortably linked to a stable sense of girl identity” (6). Though the characters in the
film tolerate Danielle’s masculine behavior and the audience applauds it, her
heterofemininity is never truly at risk. The balance of female masculinity with feminine
masquerade ensures that though Danielle may act like a boy, she is still recognizable as a
girl. Halberstam argues that female masculinity is less threatening when it is coupled with
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this first scene of her story. Later, when she is dressed in nice, clean clothes to meet her
girl, I can still whip you.” The two children engage in an off-screen mud fight, and when
approached by the now muddy Danielle, her father (Jeroen Krabbé) says, “I had hoped to
present a little lady, but I suppose you’ll have to do.” Because she is presented as a
tomboy, Danielle’s femininity is called into question by the authority figures presented in
the film: her father and her new stepfamily. Danielle’s father recognizes that she behaves
in a mode more masculine than feminine and points to that disjunction as a problem.
While her father hugs Danielle and laughs when speaking the chastising line, the words
themselves denote disapproval of her unladylike appearance and behavior. Resolving this
lack of sex-gender coherence is a task that she accomplishes as the film progresses.
trait. Her performance of gender varies, with Danielle performing behaviors coded as
masculine or feminize depending on the social context of the scene. Her gender
performance is also tied to class performance. The use of the term “lady” alludes to class
becomes the stepdaughter of a baroness. The scene in which she meets her new
demonstrates how these negotiations are related to class equations. It establishes a pairing
of gender and class mobility that Danielle continues to enact throughout the film, as her
occasions for performing a more intensified femininity also require her to perform
nobility.6 Halberstam has noted a greater level of gender fluidity available to those with
lower class expectations (57-8), as Danielle’s wearing of her more masculine masks
The remainder of the film, which focuses on Danielle’s adult life, reflects her
ability to alternate differing degrees of feminine and masculine behavior in a way that, to
heroine. Her stepmother acts predictably as the female villain who cannot accept
Danielle’s new or “feminist” behavior. Much later in the story, Rodmilla (Anjelica
Huston) blames what she calls Danielle’s “masculine” behavior on her “masculine”
features and on being an only child raised by a man. Indeed, Drew Barrymore, the actor
playing the adult Danielle, while certainly pretty, is not Western idealized supermodel
skinny. Though she is hyperfeminine (curves, long hair, soft edges), in her film roles and
public discourse on her life she has been infantilized in a way that presents a non-
threatening female sexuality (perhaps due to Barrymore’s child-star status and the film’s
family audience). The scene in which Rodmilla accuses Danielle of being masculine
Rodmilla gazes fondly on Danielle, recalling her similarities to her father. However any
rival for her husband’s (Danielle’s father) affection and her daughters’ future. The
stepmother acts as a female agent of patriarchy, ensuring that the patriarchal ideals of
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gender behavior and hierarchy are not solely passed on through male figures. It is clear
from Rodmilla’s comparison of Danielle to her father that masculine traits on a female
well knowing that dressing above one’s station is a crime, Danielle masquerades as a
courtier to rescue a male servant from being shipped off to the Americas (one of the few
times when her actions change the fate of others). When she demands his release, her
assertive behavior and argument attract the attention of the court, including that of the
prince. The man with whom she disputes responds to her forcefulness by shouting, and
Prince Henry chastises him, “You dare raise your voice to a lady.” Danielle’s behavior is
masculine, though her dress is feminine. The man with whom she contends responds to
the masculine behavior, the prince to the feminine and class-inflected dress. The film
for a woman, by communicating with men on equal terms and taking direct and
aggressive action to solve problems she encounters. She is, however, the only woman in
the film given this opportunity, and it is explicitly linked to a masquerade as a person of
higher class.
Danielle’s many masks present both gendered and classed positions, and she
easily changes her gender and class identifying markers as needed. Her trouble arises in
choosing the correct mask for the situation. Danielle must wear the mask preferable to the
powerful men whose gazes frame her life: her father in her childhood and Prince Henry
in her adult life. The audience is led to identify with the prince’s position through point-
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of-view shots that align the camera with Henry’s perspective in several scenes (such as
when Danielle climbs the rockface) so that we fall in love with her for her “spirit,” just as
he does. The framing gaze of men is supported by the narrative. Once Danielle’s story
has started, the narrator breaks in after the death of Danielle’s father to say, “It would be
ten years before another man would enter her life.” The elision of ten years not only
suggests that nothing important has happened, but completely ignores the plethora of
servants, neighbors, courtiers, and other males whom she must inevitably have
encountered over the time, including her best friend Gustave. The only men who matter
are patriarchs or potential patriarchs. Danielle’s story consist primarily of how two men
influenced her—one raised her to be like him, the other raised her to his own position in
society. Though she seems to have gender fluidity, the gaze of Danielle’s father and the
prince are naturalized throughout the film so that she appears to have gender coherence.
More like the young women of today than those of the time frame of the film,
Danielle, as well as the actress who plays her, is a symbol of the girl-power culture that
began in the 1990s, most famously embodied (and marketed) by the Spice Girls. Though
it has more radical roots, aspects of girl power have become a commodified form of
feminism that emphasizes individual strength and independence (while still being
sexually attractive) over working toward social or systemic change, thereby limiting the
ways in which girl power can affect social change. While not calling it girl power, Jack
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and Storytelling, takes issue with this representation of feminism in contemporary fairy
tales, claiming that “the majority of fairy tales produced for children and adults pay lip
service to feminism by showing how necessary it is for young and old women alike to
become independent without challenging the structural embodiment of women in all the
institutions that support the present socio-economic system” (129). In an earlier work,
Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and
England, he argued, “The significance of the feminist fairy tales lies in their Utopian
functions to criticize current shifts in psychic and social structures and to point the way
toward new possibilities for individual development and social interaction” (Introduction
32). Tales that “pay lip service to feminism,” often by relying on the popularity of girl
power as in Ever After, but do not challenge systemic sexism, fail to make the social
“Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty” (ATU 410), and “Snow White” (ATU 709). The value
systems within the tale that privilege certain behaviors—bravery, cleverness, dedication,
attention to beauty—remain consistent. While certainly a feminist move that accounts for
some of the girl-power heroines popular in the late twentieth century, this reversal from
passivity to activity does not necessarily challenge the systemic misogyny in fairy tales,
thus failing Zipes’s criteria for a feminist fairy tale. In the preface to Fairy Tales and
Feminism: New Approaches, Donald Haase argues, “Some feminist fairy-tale analyses
generalizations about the fairy tale’s sexist stereotypes” (ix). I would argue that his
critique is also valid for fairy-tale retellings like Ever After that remain focused solely on
representation confirms yet again sexist “stereotypical generalizations” of how fairy tale
character and to show that she is not a stereotypical weak princess. However, these
scenes are undermined by a context of male social regulation that devalues her acts of
strength. The themes of rescue and role-reversal are first associated with Prince Henry.
He is shown escaping from his tower room down a rope of bed-sheets, a scene visually
motif, this is a visual cue to the viewer that it is not the prince who will be doing the
rescuing in Ever After. In two separate scenes, Danielle subverts the damsel-in-distress
trope when the prince attempts to rescue her. The first is when they encounter Gypsies in
the forest and Danielle rescues the prince; the second is at the film’s conclusion when she
has been sold into slavery and extricates herself from danger before the prince can save
her. In both cases, her subversion is undercut. Danielle’s decisive action is transformed
into a joke and explained away. So even though these scenes subvert traditional fairy-tale
tropes about women, the deconstructive work that they do is also undermined by the
In the first scene in which Danielle subverts the damsel-in-distress plot, her role-
reversal is softened by humor. Danielle rescues Prince Henry from Gypsies in the wood.
Danielle and Henry are lost, and she has climbed to the top of a tree-covered rockface to
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get a better sense of their location when Gypsies arrive and attack the prince. They steal
her dress, which she has cleverly removed as it would have made it impossible for her to
climb the rockface, and Danielle enters the fray by jumping on a man’s back, fists flying.
The prince barters for her release, as two people are no match for a band of Gypsies.
Danielle asks for her dress and a horse, and the leader tells her she can have anything she
can carry, expecting Danielle to take the dress. Instead, she lifts the prince over her
shoulders in a firefighter’s hold and begins to carry him off. Plot-wise, this creates a light
moment in the film where everyone can laugh at Danielle’s pluck. But it also undermines
her courage and resourcefulness by turning it into a joke. The joke only works if the
audience (and the characters in the film) recognizes that Danielle is acting out of
character for a woman. She is bold and strong, and is rewarded for those characteristics
by the Gypsies with the return of her dress, the use of a horse, the freedom of the prince,
and a night of revelry. In fairy-tale tradition, there are many heroines who succeed by
being clever and strong, so this is not an original move on the part of the filmmakers.
However, in many of these tales, like “Molly Whuppie” (ATU 327B) and “Kate
Crackernuts” (ATU 306 and 711),11 the heroine’s actions do not inspire laughter in every
Danielle is only allowed to act outside of gender norms as an adult when the men
in her life—the prince, her father, Gustave, and her fairy godfather, Leonardo da Vinci—
permit it. Significantly, Danielle’s feminism and strength are superfluous when it comes
to being assertive with the prince about who she is. The day after the Gypsy revelry and
after Danielle has been beaten for her insolence at punching her stepsister (the punch is a
popular example of the film’s girl power), Danielle attempts to tell the prince she is
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Danielle De Barbarac, but he refuses to hear her as he is too excited by his own plan to
create a university. She tries to correct his misconception more than once, and he silences
her, a silence she accepts as they kiss. While in terms of plotting, this is an effective way
of deferring her revelation to the climax of the film, rhetorically this scene demonstrates
Danielle’s inability to speak when confronted by male hegemony; rather, she is seduced.
demonstrates male objectification of women as villainous. After she has been rejected by
the prince for lying about her identity, but before the requisite happily-ever-after ensues,
who, dressed in black, is a walking stereotype of male villain. Despite variations in how
the two men are presented, le Pieu and Prince Henry are not very different in their
attitudes: both wish to claim Danielle for their beds. At the masque, Henry intended to
announce their betrothal without her consent or foreknowledge. Then, after she has been
sold, Danielle is shown in shackles and the unnamed threat of rape lingers in the
exchange between her and le Pieu. Danielle’s restriction and immobility, however, is the
primary danger; she is clearly denied her freedom because she is a woman and therefore
can be possessed—either as servant or wife. Danielle has no say in either case. When told
that she belongs to le Pieu, Danielle responds, “I belong to no one.” Then she skillfully
takes his weapon when he least expects it. Using sword and dagger, she defends herself
and threatens le Pieu with death. He hands over the key to her shackles and all is well.
story pattern by “rescuing” herself, the action is qualified and framed by men. Not only
are le Pieu and Henry depicted as polarized forces, but Danielle says to le Pieu, “My
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father was an excellent swordsman, monsieur. He taught me well. Now hand me that key
or I swear on his grave I will slit you from navel to nose.” Her swordplay and courage are
attributed to her father: she is not allowed to have this moment of strength for herself. It
is not Danielle who learned well, but Danielle’s father who was a good teacher. Her
ability to defend herself is explained away by her father’s everlasting influence, just as is
her utopian personal philosophy of social equality.12 When Danielle explains to Prince
Henry that Thomas More’s Utopia is the lasting connection she has to her father, Prince
Once Danielle has left the home of le Pieu, the prince rides up to rescue her, and
is surprised that she has escaped so expeditiously. He recovers enough to propose to her,
sliding her lost shoe on her foot in the defining “Cinderella” scene. In their exchange
before the shoe is returned to its rightful owner, Danielle is struck, not by the prince’s
apology for his rejection of her, but by his use of her name. Up until this point in the film,
Henry has called Danielle “Nicole,” the pseudonym she gave Henry while dressed as a
courtier and her mother’s name. A romantic might argue that in this moment he sees her
for who she truly is and loves her for being Danielle, not a courtier who reads Thomas
More. However, the romance depends upon Danielle’s abandonment of her earlier
commitment to protecting her father’s land and property. She marries Henry, neglecting
her previous desires to run her father’s property, and goes on to become the princess and
live in the castle. She leaves everything she has been fighting for when marriage is
offered.
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“Cinderella” is with the fairy godmother in Perrault’s version and the dead mother’s spirit
in the Grimms.’ In other words, the most potent figures in both stories are women in
maternal roles who provide Cinderella with the material goods she needs to win the
prince. Warner explains that both the godmother figure and the mother’s spirit wield a
great deal of power, marking their influence for the success of the tale (From the Beast
48, 205). Jeana Jorgensen notes in “A Wave of the Magic Wand: Fairy Godmothers in
Contemporary American Media” that fairy godmothers are notably absent from many
traditional versions of “Cinderella,” but that “[l]ater literary incarnations of fairy tales
often feature fairy godmothers whose appearances erase Cinderella’s initial efficacy”
(219, 217). In other words, by “helping” Cinderella, the fairy godmother displaces the
heroine’s agency. In Ever After, this character and all of the power associated with her is
made male. The role of the fairy godmother is split between two men—Leonardo da
Vinci (Patrick Godfrey), who builds Danielle wings for the masque and breaks her out of
her cell, and the adult Gustave (Lee Ingleby), who finds Leonardo when he is needed and
enacts Danielle’s first makeover when she goes to court to save a servant. In both cases,
men provide Danielle what she needs to win the prince. Implicitly, then, power is denied
to women, but its removal is less noticeable because that act is performed by queered
men who do not threaten heterosexual romance.13 By reversing the gender of the
godmother, this feminist version reinforces male authority and removes the main locus of
The magic situated with the maternal figures in the traditional tales is replaced by
logic and science, or “forward thinking” as the prince would say, in this modernization of
the “Cinderella” story. Gruner argues that because Leonardo (and not the prince) frees
Danielle from the cellar, “art, not love, is her true salvation” (149). However, I would
argue that it is not Leonardo’s art, but his logic and science that frees Danielle. Rodmilla
has locked Danielle in the cellar to prevent her from attending the royal ball, and
Leonardo breaks her out by removing the door’s hinges. Gruner argues that magic being
solution might be as well” (147). But with that realism comes the erasure of female
power. To further deny female authority, when forced to choose by her stepfamily
between her father’s book and her mother’s dress, Danielle chooses her father. As both of
Danielle’s parents are missing from the majority of the film, these two objects, which are
always mentioned in the context of the parent who left them to her, come to symbolize
her parents. Utopia both symbolizes her father and represents Danielle’s desire for a more
just society. The dress indicates her mother’s legacy and her entry into the current social
order. She is of course denied both objects by her stepfamily, and the book is burned. The
dress resurfaces as the dress she wears to the masque, but that too is not just her mother’s
dress anymore; it has been transformed by Leonardo into a costume that marks Danielle’s
metamorphosis. Adorned by wings, her costume is symbolic of both butterfly and angel:
the heroine is transformed from the tomboy of her childhood into a virtuous woman
worthy of being a princess. Leonardo’s wings, not her mother’s dress, make Danielle’s
appearance at the masque spectacular. The mother, the woman, in fairy godmother is
erased, and her erstwhile power is firmly placed in the hands of men.
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The problem with Ever After is not that it fails as a feminist revision of
and simplified version of feminism it presents masks the elements of the film that
reinforce social and patriarchal structures that determine and limit the action of the plot
and the possibilities for Danielle as a character. The film both presents a feminist re-
Cinderellas of the past, further naturalizes gender expectations and the idea that
demonstrations of female strength are akin to gender equality. Danielle’s stylized strength
and self-reliance as a character are possible because of the liberal, sensitive, forward-
thinking men who allow her to step outside of gender boundaries, not because she herself
has fought for and won a state of gender equality in society. Female power in Ever After
is contained, undermined, and erased. The men are still in control, and despite Danielle’s
strength, she does not have more options than the passive Cinderellas with whom she is
supposed to contrast.
Masking its reliance on the patriarchal structures of the romance plot by dressing
its heroine in the mass-mediated commodification of girl power, Ever After offers no
critique of systemic gender oppression and creates in Danielle a Cinderella who may be
more outspoken, literate, and active than her predecessors, but who is ultimately sucked
gender, class, political power, and upward mobility that any power she might wield as a
the film. As a feminist character, Danielle is limited by the stereotypical girl power and
liberal feminism popular in today’s media. Her feminism has thus been distilled into a
matter of representation: show a strong woman standing up for herself and working for
equal relationships with the men in her life, and a film can be called feminist. This
because women are strong; the simplified version of feminist goals has already been met.
Its logical conclusion is that there used to be something wrong with women—they were
weak and passive—but now that they are stronger, everything is okay. Such a view does
nothing to critique social structures, and it suggests that feminism is only about women,
restrictive way in Ever After to create the tension between Danielle’s hyperfeminine
her masks reaffirms for an audience familiar with basic concepts of feminism that girls
can be physically and intellectually strong without questioning their femininity. The
characters in the film may take issue with Danielle’s masculinity, but today’s young
female audience embraces it. Gender is once again naturalized, as is its coupling with
heterosexuality. Although initially skeptical about her eventual partner, Danielle never
suspect that Danielle would have been fine if she had not married the prince, but the film
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does not allow for that possibility. Once Danielle is married, there is no representation of
her desire to reform society because her story ends there. In concluding Danielle’s story
with her marriage, the film privileges it. Tiffin, too, argues that Ever After “ultimately
celebrates a fairy-tale romance which ends in the heroine’s acquisition of wealth and
social position through marriage” (204). In his review, Michael Wilmington states that
the film “might have ended more logically and congenially if Danielle had run off to
organize and care for country peasants with the good stepsister . . . . But you don’t want
to mess with fairy tales too much. Especially when everybody knows the ending.”
Danielle believes and enacts upward mobility through the American ethic of hard work,
but reinscribes the notion that for women upward mobility is still best attained by
marrying a prince. Danielle, though a stronger and more independent heroine than her
foresisters, has yet to outgrow the glass slipper worn by the traditional, passive
Ever After is an excellent example of the kind of fairy-tale film marketed to young
adult women and adolescent girls at the turn of the twenty-first century. It is a film that
offers a safe model of feminism that appears to be on par with contemporary gender
theory and encourages girls and young women to be independent and self-reliant.
However, because the possibly subversive ideas about gender are safely undermined by
reliance on patriarchal plot structures, the feminism represented in the film is not socially
disruptive. The film demonstrates through characterization that gender is not an innate
trait but rather a social construct that can be manipulated at will; nevertheless, it
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contradicts that characterization with plots that show marriage as the ultimate goal for
women, one that supersedes any social work in which one might be interested. But Ever
After is only one example. Since Ever After was released in 1998, there have been a
variety of fairy-tale films that update popular princess stories. I briefly offer here two
additional examples of the tension between the representation of gender as a concept and
the narrative patterns retold from source tales. While the manifestation of the tension
differs in these films, they demonstrate that this discontinuity is a hallmark of this
Sydney White (2007) and Aquamarine (2006) are two more recent fairy-tale films
that rework princess fairy tales for a girl-power audience. Both films rely on the tomboy
trope, which is, as Halberstam points out, an example of potentially subversive gender
play that is safely contained by heterosexuality (i.e., being a tomboy is okay if one
eventually puts on a dress for a boy). Both films provide conflicting representations of
femininity and masculinity that demonstrate that gender is a set of acquired behaviors
that can be learned. Sydney White also offers a strong, masculine-gendered female
comply with a heterosexual marriage plot, much like Ever After does. However Sydney
White more directly represents a range of masculinities for the male characters as well.
The marriage plot in Aquamarine is itself critiqued by the film when it is in tension with
a model of femininity that does not center on competition but rather on female friendship.
In both cases, I am interested in the tension between the concept of gender presented in
the film and the marriage plot taken from the source tale.
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Sydney White is surprisingly well-done and charming despite its Snow White
meets Revenge of the Nerds premise. It has its rocky moments, clichés, and camp, and it
turns what is framed as a female-bonding story into a male-driven story, but it also
develops the political subtext of the “Snow White” fairy tale. Sydney White (Amanda
Bynes) is actively trying to take down the reigning Queen and her oppressive empire. In
this film, the protagonist attends her deceased mother’s college in hope of joining her
mother’s sorority, Kappa Phi Nu. However, Sydney’s non-traditional female masculinity
makes her unsuitable Kappa material; it also attracts Tyler Prince (Matt Long), president
of the Kappa’s brother fraternity and love object of the Kappa queen, Rachel Witchburn
(Sara Paxton). Rachel, jealous and worried about maintaining both her position as fairest
of them all according to a Hot-or-Not social website and as head of the pro-Greek student
government, decides that “Sydney White must die a social death.” Seven male outcasts,
the dorks who are modeled after Disney’s dwarfs, give Sydney a place to stay, and
together they take back the campus and help Sydney win the prince.
Like many contemporary films targeted to young women, Sydney White utilizes
the tomboy model of female masculinity. However, Sydney White employs the same
rationale used in Ever After to explain the protagonist’s masculine behavior and dress.
Sydney is a girl raised by men. Her mother dies when she is nine, and Sydney is raised by
her father (John Schnider), a plumber, and his construction worker buddies (which
foreshadows her living with the dorks as outcasts in a non-normative setting). Sydney
explains in a narrative voiceover that she was raised by construction workers, which is
construction workers follows this statement with one man at the construction site wolf-
whistling at a woman passing by and an adolescent Sydney doing the same when a boy
her age passes by. She is rewarded for her masculine behavior with a high-five from the
construction worker. Sydney’s adolescent dress mirrors the construction worker’s too, as
she wears a flannel shirt and jeans. The voiceover frames the film with Sydney asserting
her unusual upbringing to open the film and then concluding the film with the statement
that she and her friends lived “dorkily ever after.” This setting shows us that like
Danielle, Sydney has been acculturated into masculine gender codes by her father and
father-figures.
primarily at the beginning of the film at sorority events and then on dates with the prince
after she has been rejected by the sorority. However, Sydney is shown to be particularly
inept at dressing like a girl as she chooses none of the dresses in the film for herself. In
the first instance, her fellow legacy pledge, Dinky Hodgekiss (Crystal Hunt), lends her a
dress for the first sorority party. In the second instance, Rachel, the evil queen figure,
lends her a dress for the formal party. In the third instance, when she goes on her first
date with Tyler, the dorks dress her in a denim skirt and fitted T-shirt after she models
several inappropriately conservative outfits for dating. This is very much like the
makeover scenes in Ever After where Danielle’s feminine masquerade is enabled by men.
There are very few models of femininity in the film that counter Sydney’s female
Rachel’s “soothing words” are Prada, Gucci, Chanel, and Armani, and physical beauty is
a woman’s most important feature. The Kappas are called “illegally blonde” by Tyler, a
reference to the fact that all of the Kappas are blonde or become blonde (Sydney is a
brunette) and a nod to the 2001 film Legally Blonde, which shows that conventionally
attractive blonde women can also be very smart.14 In making fun of the Kappas and
reducing them to stereotype, Tyler rejects their model of femininity, which is purely
is looking for sisters at the sorority, young women who in her understanding will “like
you for who you are.” However, the model of femininity she encounters at the sorority
wardrobe, and accessories. The young women are all made-over to look and act like each
other, all the while competing for the affection of men, and more importantly, social
status and the power to control the university culture and finances.
Indeed, one very interesting aspect of the film is the statement it makes about
female bonding. Dinky tells Sydney early in the film that they will be sisters, not just
girlfriends, by joining the sorority. Sydney’s deceased mother has left her a box of
college memories that contains images of her own Kappa days with “Sisters Forever”
written on the back of one of the photographs. Sydney imagines that joining the sorority
will bring her close to her mother and provide her with the female bonding that she has
competitive danger as Rachel is quite jealous and despises Sydney on sight because Tyler
ceremony when Rachel denounces Sydney and claims that she is unfit to be a sister.
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Sydney responds to the public humiliation by saying, “If this is what sisterhood is all
about, then I don’t want any part of it” and begins to storm off. Rachel demands her dress
back, and Sydney rips it off, revealing a fitted black slip underneath (which is much more
like a party dress than a slip). This rejection of sisterhood and female formal wear is a
several other times in the film as an ally to Sydney, but their relationship is never
addressed on screen. If anything, Dinky’s appearances are more about eliminating Lenny
(Jack Carpenter), one of the dorks, as a possible romantic interest for Sydney than they
are about establishing a female friend for Sydney. Lenny has much in common with
Sydney and is a logical choice for a romantic interest; however, he is a dork and therefore
not a suitable match for the film’s protagonist. Her model of female masculinity cannot
be shown to be more powerful than Rachel’s more traditional and competitive femininity
unless Sydney wins the female competition, meaning winning Tyler Prince. Any possible
What is disturbing in the film is that even though the seven dorks present a model
of masculinity to oppose the jock/frat model of hypermasculinity, they are clearly judged
as inferior by Sydney, whose view controls the film. Though quirky, unique, and friendly,
the dorks are not accepted by the wider college society. Just as they, as outsiders, help
Sydney win her prince, she decides to help them fit in. Sydney fixes the dorks: she
recalibrates Embele’s (Sleepy/ Donté Bonner) internal clock to the correct time zone,
helps Jeremy (Bashful/ Adam Hendershott) gain the courage to speak without his puppet
Skoozer, teaches George (Dopey/ Arnie Pantoja) to tie knots so he can graduate from the
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Junior Tiger Guides to the Tiger Guides (and thus transition out of boyhood), and helps
Lenny (Sneezy) deal with his hypochondria and Gurkin (Grumpy/ Danny Strong) deal
with his antisocial behavior so that they can both find appropriate girlfriends. Spanky
(Happy/ Samm Levine) and Terrence (Doc/ Jeremy Howard) also need help as Spanky
does not know how to act around girls and comes off as creepy, whereas Terrence
graduated from college six years ago but has stayed to continue to learn so he can perfect
his “predictive analytical probability theory.” Sydney is not shown to directly intervene
in their lives as she does with the others (there is a montage where she is setting Embele’s
clock, showing George how to tie knots, etc.), but it is clear that her presence is a catalyst
for their happy endings. The film ends with Spanky being hit on by a group of lost
cheerleaders, and Terrence sells his formula to an online gambling site for ten million
dollars. Success for the dorks is fitting in, getting girlfriends, and becoming rich.
While Sydney was raised by construction workers, which has led her to favor a
masculinity. The dork or geek masculinity presented in the film is what R. W. Connell
would call a heterosexual “subordinated masculinity” (79). This lack of strength, a trait of
dominant masculinity that Sydney herself embodies, is reinforced in scenes like the one
in which Sydney and the dorks are hammering campaign signs into the ground. Sydney
does hers by herself (though Tyler gives her an expensive hammer), but the dorks each
require two men per sign. So while the film celebrates dorkiness and difference at the
end, Sydney works to bring the dorks more in line with the dominant masculinity of the
film so that they can be accepted into the college society. As I have shown with female
non-threatening; while they are not mating material for Sydney, their masculinity has to
be functional within a heteropatriarchal society, and they have to be able to talk to girls.
The non-romantic plot of the film shows Sydney uniting the disenfranchised
groups on campus to topple “Greek oppression.” She and the dorks are running for
student government to stop Rachel (and Tyler, for that matter) from continuing a regime
that only spends money on Greek needs. Following the advice of a political science
the ROTC; the Jewish Student Union; the marching band; the Gay, Lesbian, Transgender,
and Searching Alliance; and the unorganized fans of Gurkin’s anarchy blog. The film
embarrassing trait (embarrassing because it does not fit with mainstream gender
assumptions, such as the football team’s tight end being a champion ice skater) and then
state “and I’m a dork.” While this show of solidarity is portrayed as a celebration of
masculinity and femininity. The competitive model of femininity that Rachel exemplifies
candidacy speech, kick Rachel out of the sorority. This is a symbolic rejection, however,
as the women leave the grounds chanting the sorority song that Rachel wields at the
beginning of the film and which marks Kappas as superior women. They do not accept
Sydney back into their fold or embrace the others oppressed under the Greek system, nor
is there anything in the film to suggest that the system of which they are a part is a
problem. Rather it is Rachel only who is a bad apple, and the social system itself is not
questioned. Sydney and Dinky, though, are shown to have escaped the system, working
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with the dorks and Sydney’s constructor-worker friends to repair the home she shares
The ways in which representation is constrained by plot and pattern is not limited
to gender. Other identity markers that are socially constructed are also limited when the
patterns of the tale depend upon and reinforce specific constructions. Snow White’s
whiteness, for example, is an integral part of the plot, and making her dark-skinned in a
retelling, as an attempt to represent racial diversity, does not challenge the underlying
racial hierarchy that makes one skin color superior to another. The “Snow White” tale is
an obvious example of how assumptions about race are ingrained in plot, as she is
defined as a character by the whiteness of her skin, but this is true for other popular fairy
tales as well. Changing the skin color of the characters does not necessarily change the
characters’ race, as race is a socially constructed category and skin colors signify
differently in different places. Making one of the dwarfs black in Sydney White (Embele/
Sleepy is from Nigeria), for example, is an act of tokenism as is the presence of the
Pacific Islanders Association which, like the Jewish Student Union, is a representation of
racial otherness for the express purpose of making Sydney White a better person/leader
than Rachel. All of the special-interest groups are dressed in blatantly stereotypical
costumes of the culture they represent (the Pacific Islanders in grass skirts and the LGBT
students in drag, for example) which calls attention to their tokenism. Their presence is a
stark reminder of just how naturalized whiteness is in the “Snow White” tale.
Cinderella is another example of how racial representation alone fails to transform the
tale. The movie boasts a multiracial cast that is never addressed on screen: Brandy as
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Cinderella, Whitney Houston as the fairy godmother, Paolo Montalban as the prince,
Whoopi Goldberg as the queen, Victor Garber as the king, Jason Alexander as the
prince’s valet, Bernadette Peters as the stepmother, and Natalie Desselle-Reid and
Veanne Cox as the stepsisters. I applaud the movie’s producers and director for casting
based on the actors’ abilities, not the characters’ racial identity, and choosing a
multiracial cast. But the presence of a multiracial cast with no discussion of race in the
Garber and the Philippine-born Paolo Montalban as their son. (The fact
that this racial utopia exists in a fairy tale only emphasizes its distance
from reality.)
The “racial utopia,” as James calls it, does not problematize constructions of race so
much as it reinforces the ways in which whiteness is a part of the pattern. The casting
necessarily brings race to the forefront and encourages viewers to be aware of racial
expectations for fairy tales they might have taken for granted. Though the narrative does
not call attention to the racial make-up of the cast, the assumption of whiteness in the tale
type does. Even in my own analysis I have not identified the skin color or race of
characters because I have not needed to. It is assumed that fairy-tale princesses are white,
not just from popular cultural memory, but from the dominance of traditional European
fairy tales that specifically describe princesses as white, fair, and/or golden haired, and
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associate these traits with extreme, at times divine, beauty. Race is only mentioned when
it does not conform to the expectation. The representation of multiple multiracial families
alone is not enough to move the racial utopia from the realm of fantasy. What
representation can do, and what I believe it does when critically engaged, is help to reveal
Aquamarine (2006)
Aquamarine, based on an Alice Hoffman novel of the same name, retells the story
of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Little Mermaid.” Like Ever After and
Sydney White, Aquamarine draws on a variety of intertexts including the Disney film and
Princess product line. Fairy-tale retellings are necessarily intertextual, and, as I have said
before, all retellings necessarily offer comment on their source texts. Significantly,
Aquamarine critiques the love story central to Disney’s retelling more directly than it
comments on either the Hoffman novel or Andersen’s fairy tale. The film focuses on the
two girls who befriend the mermaid, Aquamarine (Sara Paxton). In this version, the
mermaid comes to land to prove to her father that love exists as part of a pact made to
enable her to escape an arranged marriage. Unlike her predecessors who seek marriage,
Aquamarine is trying to escape it. This mermaid does not sacrifice anything to complete
her task, but gains friendship. Aquamarine must make the “hot” lifeguard Raymond (Jake
McDorman) fall in love with her in three days to prove that love exists, the same time
frame Disney’s mermaid has to complete the same task. The sacrifice that one expects
based on the mermaid source tales is made by the two girls who befriend her, Hailey
(Joanna “JoJo” Levesque) and Claire (Emma Roberts). Claire must overcome her fear of
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the water specifically and life more generally to help her friend. More importantly, the
girls must decide to forgo making a wish (granted by Aquamarine as a reward for helping
her) to prevent Hailey and her mother from moving to Australia. Both girls learn to put
aside their selfish desires and their fears—of the water and risk for Claire and of the
move for Hailey—in order to help someone they love, Aquamarine and Hailey’s mother.
The love that Aquamarine seeks resides not in the romantic relationship she develops
with Raymond, but the friendship she finds with the girls.
femininity in which women use beauty and their feminine wiles to compete for men. In
Disney’s The Little Mermaid the subversive gender performance suggested by the sea
witch Ursula is undercut by the film’s adherence to traditional values that beauty and
femininity are of utmost importance and that a girl’s only desire should be to get married.
But in Aquamarine these same values are critiqued. Gender is taught in Aquamarine
through teen magazines, Cosmogirl and Seventeen, and trips to the mall. But Hailey and
Claire are still girls, not yet women, as is evident from their clothing. The girls are
presented androgynously, in gender-neutral shorts and T-shirts, for a great deal of the
film, only dressing in girls’ clothes when they go shopping to dress up for a party. They
do not dress like sexualized women, but wear one-piece bathing suits and coverups. They
do not wear makeup or carry purses or any of the other adornments of women adopted by
the villains of Aquamarine, the popular girls who are ultimately jealous of Aquamarine’s
seemingly natural and breezy beauty and confidence. The lessons learned about
femininity are rendered ridiculous on screen as they are shown to be ineffective and part
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of a phase. Claire and Hailey are only playing at being women, as evidenced by their
frequent giggling.
The villains are the girls who are successful in donning traditional femininity and
using it to compete with other women for men, such as Raymond. While Cecilia (Arielle
Kebbel), leader of the popular girls, competes with Aquamarine for Raymond’s affection,
Hailey and Claire, who are shown obsessing over Raymond in the beginning of the film,
give up any prior claim they might have on Raymond for the opportunity to help
Aquamarine. Even though the girls are promised a wish as a reward for their help,
friendship is still their motivation as they plan to use their wish to keep from being
separated by Hailey’s impending move across the globe. This rejection of femininity
based on conventional beauty for the sake of obtaining a man suggests an alternative to
Disney’s Ariel. Aquamarine still becomes a conventional beauty for the sake of fitting in
and competition, but Claire and Hailey do not. Aquamarine shows the girls the
confidence that they cannot find in the fashion magazines and competitive woman-
against-woman culture the magazines and their schoolmates endorse. Gendered bonding,
Aquamarine directly critiques the values of Disney’s The Little Mermaid in how it
represents romance. When Aquamarine first meets Raymond, she asks him if he loves
her, and he replies “No, but I think you’re hot,” which contradicts the earlier “true love”
model presented by Disney’s film. At the end of the film, Aquamarine repeats her
question and Raymond stutters: “Well, I mean, we’ve had one date. Don’t get me wrong.
I like you.” He is not able to fall in love with Aquamarine after knowing her for only
three days. This version harkens back to Andersen’s tale, in which love is not achieved in
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an instant, and the repetition of the kiss-in-three-days task offers a direct comment on the
The Little Mermaid,” points out, turning “the process of human love into a rushed affair”
has the effect of equating love with “physical sexuality” (par. 9). Whereas Ursula tells
Ariel “the prince must ‘fall in love with you—that is—kiss you’” (Trites par. 9),
Aquamarine challenges that assertion by demonstrating that sexual attraction is not love.
If all it took was sexual attraction, then Aquamarine would have no problem, but this film
suggests that true love is far more complex. Unlike Andersen’s story, in which divine
intervention is necessary to soften the fatal effect of the absence of romantic love, in
friends and among family. Sacrifice is still a part of this love, but it is a matter of
Part of the “sad” ending of Andersen’s version, that there is no such thing as love
at first sight, is contradicted by the ending of Aquamarine. The result is the same—the
prince does not love the mermaid because he has not had the opportunity to fall in love
with her—but it is not sad for Aquamarine and certainly not fatal (Andersen’s mermaid
commits suicide after the prince marries another princess). The girls who befriend
Aquamarine know her much better than Raymond does and they do love her, as
evidenced by the lengths they go to so as to help her. It is not the kiss but the female
bonding and friendship that save Aquamarine. Much like the sisters in Andersen’s story,
who demonstrate sisterly love by trading their hair for a way to save the little mermaid,
family and same-gender friends, not romantic conquests, take risks and make sacrifices in
Aquamarine. As Trites has pointed out, the Disney film “destroys” the strong female
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characters and female-female relationships in its emphasis on the marriage plot (par. 30).
These supportive female relationships are absent in many fairy-tale films, Ever After and
Sydney White included, reinforcing the assumption that female relationships are
necessarily competitive. This naturalizing is in part due to the marriage plot, in which
women literally compete over who gets to marry the prize prince and other women are
What makes Aquamarine stand out is that, despite engaging in the standard
tomboy trope and following the marriage plot—which is not the emphasis of Andersen’s
“The Little Mermaid” but is nonetheless part of the mermaid fairy-tale popular cultural
memory due to Disney’s film—the film emphasizes same-sex bonding and undermines
the marriage plot by subverting narrative expectations at the climactic rescue scene. In
the expected damsel-in-distress plot, the prince rescues the princess. At the climax of
Aquamarine, when Aquamarine is pulled back to sea for the arranged marriage forced
upon her by her father, Raymond goes to rescue her. He is a lifeguard and runs back to
the beach to retrieve his surfboard before jumping in the ocean to get Aquamarine. Hailey
and Claire, however, take off their shorts and jump in. This an important moment in
Claire’s story because her fear of the ocean has kept her out of the water since her parents
were lost at sea years before. She is shown screaming hysterically earlier in the film when
someone threatens to throw her into a pool. This act of bravery by Claire is evidence of
her love for Aquamarine. Hailey too shows bravery in that when she and Claire reach
Aquamarine, who has grabbed onto a buoy to keep from being pulled into deeper water,
she gives up the magic wish to keep from moving to Australia so that Aquamarine can
use it to free herself of the arranged marriage. These acts of sacrifice and bravery, when
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coupled with Claire’s statement that “we love you, Aqua,” demonstrate to Aquamarine’s
When Claire’s tears hit the ocean, the storm that Aquamarine’s father has created
disperses, and the water calms. It is only at this point, post-rescue, that Raymond joins
the girls. Raymond and Aquamarine agree to go on a second date after she deals with
problems back home. By replacing romantic love with friendship and by featuring no
marriage (indeed a revulsion to marriage as Aquamarine is fleeing from one marriage and
never mentions the concept of marriage in relation to Raymond), the film presents a very
different model from Disney’s film of what is important to the female characters and
young female audience. Heterosexual romantic love is presented much more realistically
and same-sex friends’ love is depicted as precious. In contrast to both Ever After and
Sydney White, here we see that female friendship can be quite powerful, more powerful
Cecilia, who competes with Aquamarine for Raymond’s affection and loses the support
of her own friends in the process. The tension between representation of female
masculinity and gender performance in the characterization of the girls and the movie’s
that moves the marriage plot to a secondary level in the film and by shifting the focus
Aquamarine is more successful than Ever After and Sydney White in resolving the
tension between the marriage and rescue plots, and it offers a socially constructed model
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of gender that allows for a range of possible gendered behaviors because, though it
invokes the marriage plot, it is not constrained by it. Like the other two films,
femininity is performed for the express purpose of catching a man; however, it also
acknowledges the possibility of same-sex friendships that are not restricted by the matrix
of heterosexual romance. Whereas all female relationships in Ever After and Sydney
White are filtered through competition for a mate, Hailey and Claire’s friendship exists
outside of that triangulation. Heterosexual romance is still a vital part of the film and
shown as an eventuality, but it is not the primary plot of the film, as it is in Ever After. In
Sydney White, there is also an attempt to minimize the marriage plot by emphasizing the
fight against social oppression embodied by the Greek system; however, the attempt fails
because the dorks cannot win their place as leaders in society until Sydney transforms
them into more acceptable representations of masculinity. They are still regulated by
heterosexual romantic norms. And the bitterness between Sydney and Rachel, which is
The tension between characterization and plot in these films exists because the
marriage plot is seen as vital to the fairy tale. Would there really be a “Cinderella,”
“Snow White,” or “The Little Mermaid” retelling without the marriage and rescue plots?
These films argue no. As Wilmington states, “[Y]ou don’t want to mess with fairy tales
too much. Especially when everybody knows the ending.” This emphasizes the ending,
the plot, as the defining feature of the fairy tale; that is what makes it recognizable. This
belief relies on the idea that what audiences expect and want is the happily-ever-after
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wedding. But the happily-ever-after marriage is not necessarily a defining feature. Other
retellings, such as those by Kelly Link discussed in the next chapter, take fairy-tale
fragments out of their recognizable plots and spin new tales for them. There are retellings
Donoghue’s collection of retellings Kissing the Witch. If Danielle had run off with the
good stepsister but not away from Danielle’s land and social responsibilities, as
Wilmington suggests is logical, it would still be a Cinderella story, but one in which the
heroine finds a way to transform and elevate herself in society that does not depend on
marriage, or one in which she rejects one set of values for another. Even when absent,
marriage will be an implicit option because the story is a retelling; thus the marriage plot
can be invoked without being repeated, fragments and scenes can be freed from the plots
in which they are bound. But when retellings only intervene in characterization, and do
not “mess” with the plot, when reconfiguring the concept of gender represented in the
tale, they are limited by possibilities for gender allowed by that plot.
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CHAPTER 3
In the previous chapter, I showed how the repetition of the marriage plot in Ever
After constrains the feminism suggested by the film’s representation of gender as a fluid,
socially constructed category that spans a continuum of femininity and masculinity. The
plot that denotes the traditional fairy-tale happily-ever-after ending. Retellings that do not
representations of gendered identity than those that do. Dark fantasy fairy-tale retellings
that deny the happy ending (such as those by Tanith Lee) and other retellings that flat-out
reject heterosexual marriage as necessary for a happy ending (such as Patrice Kindl’s
resolving the fairy-tale plot offer further possibilities. In this chapter, I explore how the
disruptive narrative strategies used by one author, Kelly Link, decouple fairy-tale
plots allows the fairy-tale elements to come untangled from the plots that housed them.
Working from fragments enables writers to use the fairy-tale genre to question concepts
of gender because they are not reproducing the gendered ideology bound up in the source
tale’s plot. Instead, extracted from the plot, the fragment can be more freely resignified.
By denying the reader a resolution to the plots in her stories, Link deemphasizes what
makes an ending a happy one and focuses more on the desire and action of the characters.
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Because she does not replace one model of gender with another, but questions the
Link uses a variety of discordant narrative strategies that trouble not only the tales
and traditions she draws upon, but also the reading experience itself. I will explore how
the destabilizing narrative strategies Link uses reinforce the conceptualization of gender
Judith Butler’s work in Undoing Gender (2004). As Vanessa Joosen explains in Critical
retelling and a critical work without the writers’ having read the critical work. Rather it is
the “overlappings of concern” between retellings and criticism that Joosen highlights (3).
I do not argue that Link’s short fiction represents or demonstrates Butler’s theories, but
rather that both she and Butler are interested in the same process of identity formation
through social relationships. While there are many aspects of identity that are socially
constructed and regulated, my primary focus is on how femininities and masculinities are
I analyze three stories in this chapter, two of which (“Swans” and “The Cinderella
Game”) were published in collections for young readers and all of which are focused on
adolescent protagonists. I also focus on three narrative strategies that disrupt fairy-tale
structures: (1) lack of closure, which I discuss in “Swans” and “Magic for Beginners”; (2)
playing with the reversal technique, in “Magic for Beginners” and “The Cinderella
Game”; and (3) blurring genre boundaries in “The Cinderella Game.” Even though I
focus my analysis of genre on “The Cinderella Game,” the blurring of genre, specifically
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of horror and fairy tale, occurs to a lesser extent in “Magic for Beginners” as well. I do
not explore genre blurring in “Magic for Beginners” in this chapter, however, because
though present, it is a trait of Link’s slipstream writing style that informs all of her works,
while the genre blurring in “The Cinderella Game” is the main strategy of disrupting
Link’s fiction has been termed slipstream because it spans both speculative and
literary genres and is often characterized by its strangeness. In his article “Slipstream,”
Bruce Sterling, who coined the term with Richard Dorsett in 1985, explains that
slipstream is not so much a genre as “a contemporary kind of writing which has set its
occasion, but not rigorously so” (par. 16). For Sterling, “the heart of slipstream is an
attitude of peculiar aggression against ‘reality.’ These are fantasies of a kind, but not
fantasies which are ‘futuristic’ or ‘beyond the fields we know.’ These books tend to
sarcastically tear at the structure of ‘everyday life’” (par. 26). Particularly interesting is
the way in which slipstream uses source texts: “Slipstream tends, not to ‘create’ new
worlds, but to *quote* [sic] them, chop them up out of context, and turn them against
themselves” (Sterling, “Slipstream” par. 29). The process Sterling describes here is one
them in a way that frees them from the patterning of the source, which Sterling describes
Sterling’s list of slipstream authors and books includes such notable postmodern
authors as Angela Carter and Robert Coover, and any student of postmodern literature
would be well familiar with the authors he names. However, he rejects the postmodern
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label for this literature because the phrase he considered, “Novels of Postmodern
Sensibility,” “looks pretty bad on a category rack, and requires an acronym besides”
(“Slipstream” par. 17). In a follow-up article, “Slipstream 2,” Sterling adds that
slipstream is “post-ideological” and closely aligned with Cultural Studies (8). Slipstream
is a simpler term, but it is also a slippery, indefinable category that is recognized more by
Slipping between genres is part of what enables Link’s stories to move out of the
traps that ensnare other fairy-tale retellings, which I will demonstrate in the section
dealing with “The Cinderella Game.” The strange elements of Link’s fiction are part of
what may turn off readers expecting more traditional fairy tales and more traditional
fairy-tale retellings that follow fairy-tale plots, as well as more straightforward and easily
categorized works of fantasy. But it is this strangeness that helps to change reader
expectations.
Children’s Literature, Fairy Tales, and Storytelling that contemporary protagonists are
more likely to be distressed than triumphant and that their trials are not solely caused by
gender injustice is useful in understanding how Kelly Link’s fiction troubles fairy-tale
patterns (130). He makes the point that Link is not a commercial writer and is therefore
individual achievements of gender equality abstracted from other realities and that
accepts dominant ideologies. His larger argument is that feminism and fairy tales have
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been “co-opted by the mass media” and consumerism (Zipes, Relentless Progress 129),
and he presents Link as one example of a contemporary writer who avoids the
commercial trap. Though he finds Link’s work “unnerving” and “sometimes boring”
because of her discordant narrative strategies and unresolved endings, he is right on target
when pointing to these unsettling qualities as the key to her work (Zipes, Relentless
Progress 133). It is this refusal to settle down that is reminiscent of Angela Carter.
Kelly Link’s work is undeniably indebted to fairy tales and to the rich tradition of
retelling those stories, and it is no surprise that she identifies Angela Carter as an
influence (Jamneck par. 11; Timberg par. 18-19). In The Bloody Chamber, Carter works
within the patriarchy embedded in canonical tales to undo it rather than dismissing or
representation in Carter’s tales is contingent upon its context, and her vision of a feminist
patriarchy is advanced by contemporary writers of fairy tales like Kelly Link who refuse
to isolate gender and ignore its place in a larger complex of oppressive systems. Link
does not treat gender simply in order to present a feminist happy ending, but instead she
troubles assumptions of gender and works within plots to disrupt the happy ending.
Characters are identified as not just “women” and “men,” but as humans who inhabit
complex social positions in the storyworld, and gender structures are not simply
Like Carter, Link does not provide easy answers and happy endings. Many of her
stories end before the resolution: “The Faery Handbag,” “Magic for Beginners,” and
“Swans” are just three examples. Still others openly reject and mock the possibility of a
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happily-ever-after ending, as in “Catskin,” “Shoe and Marriage,” and “Travels with the
Snow Queen.” Endings are not a big part of Link’s repertoire, but her stories are not
is that the characters suffer and try to do something about it irrespective of signs that a
happy ending is not guaranteed. Success is less important than the choice to act. Of the
stories mentioned above, “Magic for Beginners” has a particularly ambiguous and
unsettling ending.
turn sleeping beauties and waiting maids into strong, active heroines who go out to seek
their own fortunes and find their own princes, such as Gail Carson Levine’s Ella
Enchanted and Patrice Kindl’s Goose Chase. Recently, however, some fairy-tale
retellings for young adults have begun to approach gendered identity in fairy tales more
complexly than simple role-reversal. Instead of starring strong and confident young
women, these stories present female and male protagonists who may be strong, but are
also confused and just trying to get by. These stories also treat gender as part of a larger
Kelly Link draws on fairy tales in much of her young-adult work, and like earlier
feminist revisions of fairy tales, her stories do not feature passive princesses waiting to be
rescued. Unlike earlier feminist revisions, however, Link’s stories do not hinge on a
feminist utopia where girls are strong and everyone is equal. Instead, her protagonists
struggle with their identity and with making their way in a world marked by a variety of
inequities, of which gender is just one. Link’s fiction is troubling, not just because her
strong characters are not guaranteed a happy ending, but also because the readers are not
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provided tidy stories, as is expected with fairy tales. Link employs a variety of narrative
techniques that disrupt traditional fairy-tale patterns and leave the readers with fragments,
and leave them just as confused as the protagonists. Most notably, she rarely concludes
the plots of her stories. The following sections discuss how these narrative strategies
Structured Gendering
princesses with active ones. Strong Cinderellas and Sleeping Beauties who do not sleep
are fairly commonplace now and quite popular in novels and films for young adults (Ella
Enchanted, Ever After, Sydney White, Aquamarine, etc.). But as I demonstrated in the
previous chapter with Ever After, this role-reversal is problematic when one model of
gendered behavior replaces another but does not disrupt the script in which the
representation of gender is located. Making heroines strong can only go so far when they
still are continuously presented with the same choices for heterosexual romance, even
when they choose not to marry. Many traditional collections of folk and fairy tales, such
as those by Joseph Jacobs, feature strong, clever girls such as Molly Whuppie and Katie
princess, they are not, unfortunately, as popular, and even these strong women are
scripted into heteropatriarchal marriage plots. For example, Molly Whuppie’s reward for
her cleverness and bravery is, after all, a royal marriage. But I am interested in retellings
of fairy tales that may take role-reversal as a starting point for exploring gendered
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identity but complicate it by changing the context in which the protagonists act by
configurations of gender is one that has been made before in reference to fairy-tale
retellings. Angela Carter has been criticized for not presenting a clear representation of
strong feminist heroines. Her collection, The Bloody Chamber, was published in 1979
and rewrites canonical fairy tales mostly within their recognizable plots and motifs. Not
all of her stories stick to their source texts’ formulas, but most do. This reliance on older,
patriarchal texts, such as those by Charles Perrault, is one source of the criticism against
her work. Patricia Duncker, in her article “Re-imagining the Fairy Tales: Angela Carter’s
amplifies and re-produces rather than alters the original, deeply, rigidly
Duncker’s critique rests on two observations. The first is that Carter’s method relies
primarily on changing the standard narration of the fairy tales she retells from third-
allows for agency. The second is that Carter’s interventions in the fairy tales are erotic,
bringing to the forefront the sexuality that had been repressed and buried through
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multiple translations and editions of her source texts. The problem that Duncker identifies
with women as objects of desire. The heroines who desire in Carter’s work are, according
Duncker makes some astute observations and certainly asks feminists to think
about what we expect from a feminist text. Though her criticism is indispensable for a
thorough critique of The Bloody Chamber, I think that Duncker misses the point. Yes,
Carter works within a patriarchal frame, but she does so with the effect of making that
frame livable. Carter does not leave the patriarchy behind in her feminist revisioning.
Instead, Carter engages it. The Bloody Chamber challenges assumptions about the roles
enjoying their (hetero)sexuality. But Duncker argues that Carter “could go much further
than she does” (12) in her exposure of the sexual symbolism of the older tales.
Unfortunately for us, Duncker does not explain what Carter could have done or what a
that there is something disconcerting about a feminist fairy tale that does not actively
reject the patriarchy of its source tales. Duncker is, after all, attempting to identify a
feminist project of retelling canonical fairy tales. Her argument that “Carter is rewriting
the tales within the strait-jacket of their original structures” is key (6); however, Duncker
is concerned with representations of gender and sexuality in Carter’s work and so does
not delve into how heteropatriarchy is structurally mandated. In Comes as You Are:
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Sexuality and Narrative, Judith Roof has argued that traditional narrative structures are
fundamentally heteronormative, and that a text must change the structure of the narrative
“Queering the Marriage Plot: How Serial Form Works in Maupi’s Tales of the City” (a
serialized novel about gay sexuality by Arimstead Maupin), explains that serialization
undermines the domestic marriage plot by suspending closure and “unraveling instances
of closure that turn out to be only provisional and temporary” (232). She argues that the
form of serialized novels “(in concert with its overt content) has the potential to subvert
While Kelly Link’s work does not overtly address sexuality, her habit of
suspending closure to plot undermines the heterosexual marriage plots inherited from her
turns to Roof to explain the connection between narrative structure and sexuality,
explaining that “Roof has argued that there is something intrinsically straight, something
essentially heteronormative about narrative—all narrative, any narrative that comes (as
most narratives do) to closure” (“Queering” 233). Warhol identifies this essential
something as the marriage plot (“Queering” 233). She states that texts cannot only change
the content of the story to account for “alternative sexualities” if they follow traditional
narrative patterns; instead, they must “employ radical innovations in their discursive
narrative pattern are necessary to effectively subvert that plot. With retellings like Ever
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and sexuality is collapsed into gender. Roof and Warhol argue that heterosexuality is
ingrained into the narrative structure of closure in the marriage plot. By removing the
expected fairy-tale endings and by using narrative strategies that disrupt fairy-tale
structures, Link decouples gender from sexuality so that gender is not only being
“Swans” (2000)
In the children’s story “Swans,” Kelly Link creates a stronger and more
independent heroine than the ones in popular fairy tales, but she also challenges the idea
that there are appropriate gendered model behaviors and encourages her audience to
critique the models we are given. “Swans” is published in A Wolf at the Door and Other
Retold Fairy Tales, one of Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s anthologies aimed at
to the publisher) plays a part in Link’s enabling the heroine to break type. The young
protagonist and first-person narrator, Emma Bear, age eleven, while old enough to be
married in the more traditional fairy tales in which girls are eligible for marriage at the
onset of puberty, is not old enough to be married by today’s Western social standards.
The concept of the child is, like many identity categories, a constructed one that has
changed over time and extends to a greater age range today. The choice not to make the
protagonist of marriageable age and to keep her young helps to remove marriage from the
plot.
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the fairy-tale plot is resolved; rejecting the solution of the source tale, with Emma calling
it “silly”; and using first-person narration to provide agency for a traditionally silenced
supported by these three elements that disrupt the expected fairy-tale plot and patterns.
The first and third elements break traditional fairy-tale narrative patterns, and the second
is a direct, intertextual critique of the logic of the source tales. The model of femininity
represented by Emma challenges that of the source tales, but it is also shown to be
produced by a complex system of relationships that does not place Emma within
heterosexual romantic relationships as the source tales do. This is not just a matter of a
plot-level change, however, as the deferment of the expected resolution is a key part in
“Swans” draws from several fairy tales. Emma’s surname, Bear, connotes
“Goldilocks and the Three Bears” (ATU 179), but bears are also present in a variety of
beast tales, such as “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” (ATU 425A). Emma’s mother is
godfather, as well as Cinderella’s (ATU 510), and he loved Emma’s mother (75).
Emma’s favorite of the quilts made by her mother depicts a scene from “Rapunzel” (ATU
310), and the principal of her middle school is Mr. Wolf, a name that invokes the “big
bad wolf” from tales like “Little Red Riding Hood” (ATU 333) and “The Three Little
Pigs” (ATU 124). However, the primary fairy tale retold is of “The Maiden Who Seeks
Her Brothers” tale type (ATU 451),1 which includes stories by Jacob and Wilhelm
Grimm (“The Six Swans”) and Hans Christian Andersen (“The Wild Swans”).2 The basic
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plot for this tale type involves the royal sons of a family being transformed into birds (in
several variants, it is a wicked stepmother who curses them), and the youngest child, a
daughter, saving them. The girl undergoes a period of silence in which she must weave
shirts for the boys out of a specific plant (the plant varies among versions, but in
Andersen’s it is stinging nettles, making the task painful as well as difficult). Her task
takes many years, and she cannot utter a sound or she risks undoing the magic. A king
comes across her during the task, takes her to his home, and marries her. She meets with
misfortune during this time, as she is falsely accused of either witchcraft or cannibalism
of her own children and is to be burned. She cannot defend herself, having to maintain
silence for the sake of her brothers. Her bird brothers fly around as she is to be executed,
and she throws the shirts over their heads, returning them to their human forms. In some
versions, the youngest brother receives an unfinished shirt and is left with one wing. At
this point she is able to speak and defend herself, although in Andersen’s story, her
brothers explain what happened as she faints upon proclaiming her innocence.
In Kelly Link’s “Swans,” Emma’s stepmother turns her brothers into swans
because they are too noisy. Emma, who is still mourning the death of her mother, does
not speak and is therefore safe from her stepmother’s curse. The stepmother is not evil,
but is in distress and unsure of how her magic works (85). The stepmother is a bird who
is trapped in human form for some unknown reason. After she turns Emma’s brothers,
father, teachers, and friends into swans—all for being too noisy—she turns back into a
bird and flies away. At first Emma likes her brothers being swans: it is fun and she finally
gets to have pets (84, 86). Her brothers were also fairly mean to her, pulling her hair and
such (80). At the end of the story, after everyone has become a swan, Emma yells
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“WHAT?” at her stepmother in anger (89). It is when she yells that the stepmother
becomes a bird and flies away. Emma’s reaction is to call after her, “I want to be a swan,
too! I want my mom!” (89). After crying, Emma decides to do some research to solve her
problem. She narrates, “My fairy godfather is never around when you need him. This is
why it’s important to develop good research skills, and know how to find your way
around a library. If you can’t depend on your fairy godfather, at least you can depend on
the card catalog” (90). Through her research, she finds a way to return the swans to their
human form; however, she thinks the fairy-tale solution of making shirts out of nettles
sounds painful, is not practical, and is “silly” (90). Instead she decides to use her
mother’s quilting supplies to make a giant quilt with swans on one side and shirts on the
other that can cover all the swans. The whole story is narrated by Emma after she has
made the decision to make the quilt, but before she has started the process, as evidenced
“Swans” ends after the protagonist has decided to act but before the main action
of the plot is resolved, in effect denying closure. The gendered expectations for Emma’s
character are subverted by this shift in focus because the marriage-plot ending is never
introduced. By shifting focus to Emma’s choice to save her brothers and not the
heteronormative subplot of the fairy tale, “Swans” disrupts the embedded heterosexual
impetus of the traditional ending. Denying the marriage plot opens up a way for
competition, both important parts of “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” tale type
and the fairy tales I discuss in the previous chapter. Emma’s young age alone is not
film Aquamarine in the previous chapter demonstrates. The marriage plot in Aquamarine
friendship; however, it is not the age of the adolescent protagonists that allows for a
it is the denial of the marriage plot by suspending closure that allows the story to present
Emma gets her happily-ever-after; it is just not the one the reader might have been
expecting. There is nothing in the story to suggest that Emma’s plan will not work, unlike
in “Magic for Beginners” where the result of Jeremy stealing the books is left ambiguous.
In fact, the tone of the narration in the final lines is extremely confident and determined;
at no point is doubt introduced. Emma states, “I’m going to turn them back into people.
The quilt is going to be as beautiful as sky. It’s going to be as soft as feathers. It’s going
to be just like magic” (91). In both cases, however, not resolving what seems to be the
main problem of the plot shifts focus from the action to the choice to act, suggesting that
the decision itself is what is interesting. The lack of resolved plot forces the focus of the
story onto the act of the characters making choices, not the results of the choices or the
choices themselves. For Emma, it shifts the fairy tale from being about a girl who
sacrifices her autonomy to save her brothers to a story about a girl finding the confidence
to assert herself. What matters is not that Emma saves everyone, but how and why she
decides to save everyone. So even though it seems safe to assume that Emma’s rescue
will be successful, in part due to the confident tone of the text, the effect is very similar to
the effect in “Magic for Beginners” in undoing the fairy-tale patterns on which the story
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is built. The happiness of the ending is not questioned as it is in “Magic for Beginners,”
but closure is still denied in that the resolution to the fairy-tale plot is not part of the
story.
Emma rejects the solution of the source tale, calling it “silly,” thereby directly
critiquing the fairy-tale logic. This assumes that the young audience of the story would be
familiar with one or more versions. Emma’s research takes her to the “enchantments”
section of the library (90). One can assume that readers of “Swans” will know that it is
based on a fairy tale, as “Retold Fairy Tales” is in the title of the collection, and Link’s
author’s note states that she “wanted to retell the story of the girl who makes shirts out of
nettles for her brothers, who have been turned into swans by their wicked stepmother”
(92). “Nettles” is a direct reference to Andersen’s version, but neither “The Wild Swans”
nor any of the Grimms’ versions, have been made into films or carry the popular cachet
”Swans” critiques the source tale, explicitly showing that the behaviors that
for all of the birds and throw the shirts over their necks. I need to sew
these shirts out of nettle cloth, which doesn’t sound very pleasant. Nettles
burn when you pick them. Really, I think linen, or cotton is probably more
practical. And I think I have a better idea than a bunch of silly shirts that
no one is probably going to want to wear again, anyway. And how are you
Emma’s critique is multilayered. First, she recognizes the pain involved in the earlier
enchantment, as well as the impracticality of using nettles, making shirts for a single
wearing, and making shirts for birds. Her method of solving the problem—doing research
thinking. Traditional heroines do break the spell, but they do it by following orders;
Emma makes logical, well-reasoned decisions for herself. In addition, the story itself
rejects the silence required for the source tales’ heroines to be powerful by directly
Unlike her fairy-tale predecessors, Emma has agency. The act of narration takes
place after Emma has regained her ability to speak, meaning that she tells her own story.
Silence is a key part of breaking the spell in many of the tales in this tale-type. This
means that the protagonist cannot ask for help, nor can she express her feelings,
communicate with others, give her consent, or defend herself against false accusations.
Emma, however, does communicate, even when she is silent, through writing and
gestures. More importantly, she narrates her own story. Using first-person narration in
retelling is not unique, and other writers have made that choice in retelling this tale type. 4
As I explain in the first chapter, first-person narration emphasizes the subjectivity of the
narrator’s view and encourages the reader to identify with the character-narrator. Making
the silent sister the narrator gives the character more depth, creating a complex character
in opposition to the stock figure of the source tales. Her emotions, thoughts, and desires
are part of the story. It also shows her dilemma, what is at stake for Emma, and the fact
either, which makes the stepmother less of a fairy-tale villain and more like another
victim of a curse. The stepmother is not presented as a counter to Emma or her mother.
She is, like Emma, confused by the current situation and not quite herself. Emma
suspects that she is either a witch or enchanted because “[w]itches and people under
spells, magic people, always have sweet tooths,” and the stepmother eats a lot of dessert
(80-1). But she and Emma get along, and Emma understands her stepmother’s aversion to
her brothers’ noise. The stepmother has been transformed from her bird form and caged
in a human body. She transforms back into a bird when Emma, in anger, yells at her,
breaking Emma’s silence. The description of the stepmother in bird form suggests a
phoenix: “She was like an owl, but bigger, or maybe a great auk, or a kiwi. Her feathers
looked fiery and metallic. She had a long tail, like a peacock. She fanned it out” (89). The
imagery of the phoenix, a mythological creature for whom death is temporary, both
reinforces the deferment of closure and the idea of death as transformative. In the scene,
Emma mirrors the stepmother’s actions, pointing at her as she in turn points at Emma.
looked extremely relieved” after her transformation (89). When Emma yells after her, she
yells, “I want to be a swan, too! I want my mom!” (89). It is at this point that Emma cries,
something she says she was not able to do when her mother died (80).
is a part of mourning. Judith Butler explains in Undoing Gender that “one mourns when
one accepts the fact that the loss one undergoes will be one that changes you . . . possibly
forever, and that mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation the full
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result of which you cannot know in advance” (18). Emma’s becoming undone by grief
for her mother propels her into becoming the confident narrator of the story. At the start
of the story, Emma has been commissioned as a seamstress by Rumplestiltskin (76) and
is working on a quilt started by her mother, but she is not willing to finish it (77). In
neither instance does she initiate the project. At the end of the story, she designs her own
enchanted quilt, transforming her grief into magic. Emma breaks her period of mourning
and is transformed by her angry outburst and loss of identity at becoming the only human
Because this story retells a traditional tale type that locates female power in
domestic arts and models silence, submission, and sacrifice as the appropriate behaviors
for women, it is important to underscore the narrative choices in Link’s text that undo this
restrictive idealization of womanhood: ending the story before resolving the plot, having
Emma reject and judge the solution of the source tales, and giving Emma agency. The
ambiguity of Link’s narrative questions the fairy-tale patterns on which it is built, and as
those patterns are highly gendered, the ambiguity disturbs notions that these concepts of
gender are fixed. The lack of a conclusion means the focus is not about action or being
strong, but about desire. Emma is not presented as an active heroine in contrast to a
passive one. Silent as they are, it would be a mistake to refer to the protagonists of this
tale type as passive. They are very active and are clearly powerful women, despite their
inability to protect themselves. Link does not present a strong model of how girls should
behave, but rather shows a character who can decide for herself how to act. The focus on
the choosing rather than the action suggests that there is a choice. Emma does not have to
do what her fairy-tale sisters did, and neither does the young reader. While it is overly
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simplistic to argue that fairy tales provide models of behavior only, the history of reading
and critiquing fairy tales as socializing children into gender roles makes the criticism of
critics like Marcia Lieberman an intertext for retellings, particularly those with a young
identified in popularized fairy tales, the behavior that “Swans” promotes is that one
should do research to solve problems. That is not particularly gendered, nor opposite to
fairy helper; she finds it herself by means of her agency and intellect. She is strong and
independent, but she is also weak at times, given to impulse, and grieving. “Swans”
provides a more complex critique of gender than replacing a passive character with an
active one or giving a voice to a character who did not have one. “Swans” questions the
very notion that there is a model for appropriate gendered behavior by explicitly rejecting
the model of femininity in the source tale and focusing not on the happy ending but the
desires and choices that enable any ending. By not revealing if Emma’s actions are
successful or not, Link avoids replacing one model of femininity with another. Crucial
her fairy-tale intertexts, which reinforce the thematic focus on action and agency,
subverting gendered fairy-tale patterns while producing a text that is still recognizably a
fairy tale.
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“Magic for Beginners,” published in Link’s short story collection of the same
name,5 is not aimed specifically at an adolescent audience like “Swans” and “The
levels. The external narrator begins by saying that there is a “television show called The
Library,” an episode of which stars Jeremy Mars (203). Within Jeremy’s episode, other
episodes of The Library are watched by the characters, the most important of which is
one in which Fox, a character on the show, apparently dies. Jeremy’s episode is the frame
story for the story of Fox’s death, which is an episode within an episode. The episode
starring Jeremy is described by the narrator and enframed by the introductory remarks of
the narrator: “Fox is a television character, and she isn’t dead yet. But she will be, soon.
She’s a character on a television show called The Library. You’ve never seen The
Library on TV, but I bet you wish you had” (203). The diegetic levels collapse as the
story progresses and the episode starring Jeremy and the episode he watches collide in
dreams and through phone calls so that what happens in one affects the other. The
narrator describes other episodes of The Library which are separated by line breaks from
the narration of Jeremy’s episode and describes episodes that Jeremy watches, making
some episodes external to Jeremy’s and others embedded within Jeremy’s episode. At
one point, the narrator gives a plot summary of Jeremy’s episode in the same style in
which the other, external episodes are narrated (250-1). This section is separated from the
more detailed narration of Jeremy’s episode, the primary diegetic level of the story, and
fills in information missing from the primary level. In addition, the narrator’s
introductory remarks are not matched with closing remarks so that the frame at the
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highest diegetic level is not closed. Because the boundaries between diegetic levels blur, I
will refer to the different levels by the character who is the subject of each story rather
than the level of embedding: Jeremy’s episode is the first embedded story, and Fox’s
difficult story to summarize. In brief, it begins with the following line: “Fox is a
television character, and she isn’t dead yet” (203), and ends with the protagonist, fifteen-
year-old Jeremy Mars, waiting to see if he has saved Fox. Jeremy and his friends are
obsessed with The Library, a pirate television show that airs irregularly on random
channels. And it would seem that Jeremy is the protagonist of a meta-episode of the
show, for in addition to being a viewer, Jeremy, like Fox, is a character on the show.
Even more befuddling, The Library does not have a set cast. The actors swap roles in
every episode; only the actors in the lead romantic roles remain the same, a nod to the
ways in which romance plots fix characterization in fairy tales. Fox, seemingly the most
popular character, is played by both women and men, and is recognizable by her body’s
“public dimension,” to borrow a term from Butler ( Undoing Gender 21): her costume,
body language, and “breathy-squeaky voice”—those parts of the character not tied to a
specific actor’s body but make her character recognizable (Link, “Magic” 210). She is
and has a mysterious past. . . . She is always beautiful” (210). And she is always gendered
In Jeremy’s episode, his parents are not speaking to each other, he is in love with
two girls, his best friend is jealous of him, and he and his mother are about to embark on
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chapel in Las Vegas. During Jeremy’s episode, an episode of The Library airs in which
Fox is, apparently, killed. The evidence on the show suggests that she is dead; Jeremy
and his friends hope that she is not. Jeremy and his friends are not convinced that The
Library is just a television show—it could be magic, or real, or a retelling of a legend and
“this is just one version of how it happened” (241); the show is simply too good to be just
a television show. They want it to be real, and Jeremy is afraid that if it is real, then Fox
is really dead (240). As Jeremy’s story progresses, he begins to communicate with Fox
via dreams and his inherited phone booth. Fox sends Jeremy on a mission to steal three
books from a library in Iowa for her. Though she does not tell him this will save her, he
assumes that is his task, and Link’s story ends with Jeremy in the wedding chapel in Las
Vegas, sitting on a couch as a new episode of The Library airs and waiting to “find out if
The possible rescue in the Jeremy episode is parallel to a rescue plot in the
episode of The Library in which Fox is killed. The episode begins as Fox is about to
rescue the romantic hero, Prince Wing. He has been turned into a teapot, smashed into
bits, and buried under a statue of George Washington in the “Angela Carter Memorial
Park on the seventeenth floor of The World-Tree Library” (209). Fox finds Prince Wing,
pieces him back together, and turns him back into a human. At which point, he attacks,
mutilates, and kills her. After he leaves, Fox is cleaned up by the librarians who have
been hiding, and then she is taken out of the library, something that, according to
Though both are fictional characters in the same story, and both are identified as
television characters by the narrator, Fox and Jeremy are presented as inhabiting separate
storyworlds. Jeremy does not consider Fox to be “real” until it becomes possible that she
has died and his “reality” begins to merge with what he watches on television. At one
point in Jeremy’s story, he discovers that the reason his parents are fighting is that his
novelist father has written Jeremy into a story and killed him. Following this revelation,
the narrator, focalized through Jeremy, states, “Now Jeremy and Fox have something in
common. They’re both made-up people. They’re both dead” (226). When Jeremy later
speaks to Fox, he asks, “Are you real?” (246). When Jeremy again in their conversation
refers to a part of the “real” world, suggesting that Fox is not a part of it, she is “amused”
(246). Though he sees the two as distinct—he is reality and she is fantasy—that
conception is challenged as events unfold. Butler explains that “[t]he critical promise of
fantasy, when and where it exists, is to challenge the contingent limits of what will and
will not be called reality. Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others
otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it
is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home” (Undoing Gender 29). Though Butler is using
fantasy to describe multiple articulations of gender and the political presence of those
articulations that allows for imagining gender outside of a heterosexual binary, her point
is useful here. As embodied fantasy, Fox creates a situation that enables Jeremy to
disidentify with the parameters of his character at the beginning of the story and
undone.
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For Butler, undoing is not simply a relational activity, although that is the place to
start conceptualizing becoming undone. Her discussion of undoing focuses on the ways
in which recognition (both of self and other) alters identity by both “conferring
recognition of others, we undo and are undone by those relationships. Ecstasy and grief
are two models that Butler presents to conceptualize becoming undone. Butler’s work
with this concept focuses both on undoing “restrictive concepts of sexual and gendered
life” and undoing personhood: “undermining the capacity to persevere in a livable life”
and undoing “a prior conception of who one is only to inaugurate a relatively newer one
that has greater livability as its aim” (Undoing Gender 1). At stake is the production of
the category of human and who does or does not qualify as human. As her book is titled
Undoing Gender, many of her examples center on how those “restrictive” categories of
evident when he changes names. Throughout the story, Jeremy—who is always called
Jeremy by the narrator—is called by his name, Jeremy, and by his nickname, Germ. Fox,
in the above-mentioned telephone call, refers to Jeremy as “Jeremy” until he accepts her
task. She then calls him “Germ” when asking him to promise not to tell anyone about her
(247). As it is only Jeremy’s friends and parents who call him Germ (205), this change in
address signifies a change in his and Fox’s relationship. Fox is now reidentified as his
friend, undoing her earlier identity of fictional character. Jeremy’s acceptance of her as
real marks his recognition of her life as livable and thus worthy of rescue. Because he
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sees her as real, and now as a friend, he can risk himself and his conception of self to
undo her death instead of just grieving her loss. Jeremy follows up Fox’s use of his
“Only if you promise you won’t call me Germ,” Jeremy says, feeling
really stupid. “I hate when people call me that. Call me Mars instead.”
“Mars,” Fox says, and it sounds exotic and strange and brave, as if
Jeremy has just become a new person, a person named after a whole
heterosexual relationships. In the beginning of the story, he is a person who does not kiss
girls, a fact introduced immediately after the introduction of his nickname (205). But as
the story progresses, Jeremy, who is attracted to two girls, has kissed both girls. He has
become a person who does kiss girls, which is part of the new identity he has assumed
and which is marked by his new name, Mars. But it is not the act of kissing girls and
entering into heterosexually charged relationships that undoes Germ. Rather it is the
recognition of Jeremy’s change that undoes Germ for Mars. Butler explains that “our
very sense of personhood is linked to the desire for recognition, and that desire places us
outside ourselves, in a realm of social norms that we do not fully choose, but that
provides the horizon and the resource for any sense of choice that we have” (Undoing
Gender 33). Jeremy’s previous identity is undone by his desire to be recognized within
It would be overly simplistic to say that Jeremy is undone only by his relationship
to Fox. While this relationship is the most dramatic, Jeremy’s episode is a story of
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becoming undone and undoing. His conception of who he is changes throughout the story
from interactions with his friends, his parents, and Fox. Likewise he undoes others, as
they are recognized in relation to him. Part of this undoing is the conceptualization of
plots of Fox and Jeremy enable Jeremy’s undoing, his “inauguration” of a newer self, and
the undoing of the restrictively gendered fairy-tale rescue plot. The rescue of Prince Wing
by Fox subverts the gendered coding of the prince-rescues-princess motif and challenges
the assumptions of rescue by not facilitating a happy ending. Jeremy’s attempt to rescue
Fox is tenuous at best and not guaranteed to succeed. It requires that he alter the
assumptions of his own identity and morality: from one who does not steal to one who
does.
Many retellers of fairy tales have subverted the princess-rescue-plot by having the
female victim rescue herself, or by reversing the gender roles so that the woman rescues
the man (both occur in Ever After, for example); one only need be reminded of the Shrek
franchise to see that move as a feminist cliché. It is less common to see the rescue fail, or
the rescuer betrayed and killed by the one she saves, as happens in the case of Fox and
Prince Wing. Link uses a standard feminist retelling technique and troubles it,
questioning the implied assumption that reversing the gendered binary roles of the fairy
tale is adequate. The female character embodies the rescuer role, and is successful, but
her triumph is interrupted and denied. Additionally, it is unknown if the body in Fox’s
clothes is biologically female, as the gender of the TV actor is not tied to the female
gender of the character. The actors perform Fox and her gender. The possibility of gender
ambiguity here implies that biological sex, performed gender, and executed gender roles
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are not fixed, but changeable. They can be done and undone. The truncated success of
Fox’s rescue also suggests that maintaining the restrictive gender roles of the fairy-tale
plot, either by employing or reversing the binary, is problematic. She is not successful
just because she is a feminist heroine in a feminist fairy tale—and her success is only
provisional.
These parallel rescues destabilize the expectations for closure in rescue plots. As
readers of fairy tales, and consumers of romance and adventure stories that hinge on a
rescue, we expect rescuers to succeed. The prince rescues the princess, and they live
happily ever after. In fairy tales of this type, the rescuer-hero represents ideal masculinity
just as the passive princess has been demarcated as idealized femininity. In “‘Some Day
My Prince Will Come’: Female Acculturation Through the Fairy Tale,” Marcia
Lieberman identifies this pattern in popularized tales like “Snow White” and
“Cinderella,” saying “Girls win the prize if they are the fairest of them all; boys win if
they are bold, active, and lucky” (385). Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, which draws on the
quest narrative of medieval romances, exemplifies both ideals, depicting a brave prince
battling with a dragon to save a beautiful princess. The male hero attains his happily-
ever-after ending by action that is coded in the various fairy tales as noble; for example,
tales, is tied to a heterosexual relationship in which the male is assertive and the female is
submissive. The binary that has long been characterized as limiting the possibilities of
female behavior to primarily submissive roles also limits male behavior to primarily a
rescuer-role. The implied guarantee by the fairy-tale structure, though, is that the rescue
will succeed and herald a happy ending. In Link’s narrative, Jeremy and Fox, as rescuers,
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do not have that guarantee. Fox’s happily-ever-after is violently cut short, and the
intervention into the success of her rescue-plot is traumatic for Jeremy, undoing his
identity and throwing into question the viability of rescue as a productive action.
Jeremy cannot immediately re-watch the episode in which Fox is killed (211) as
the other devotees can, and the narration of the violence is delayed and strung out over
several scenes in the story. By interspersing the details of the episode in which Fox dies
with depictions of Jeremy’s problems with his family and friends, Link certainly
heightens the drama of the stories, but she also demonstrates Jeremy’s inability to accept
the death of Fox and the subversion of the rescue-plot. This narrative strategy prompts
the reader to consider the possibilities of rescues that never play out. When it is Jeremy’s
turn to rescue the damsel-in-distress, he does so not knowing if she is even real, thinking
she is already dead, and with the message that recues are not guaranteed to turn out the
Also troubling for Jeremy is the form his rescue must take. Like in many stories
with teenage protagonists, Jeremy must negotiate his morality in an imperfect world
where lines between good and bad are not as clear as they are in stories with happy
endings. Much of the family drama in Jeremy’s life stems from his father, a horror
novelist, and his quirks, one of which is to shoplift, an action that Jeremy thinks is wrong
(249). Before leaving for Las Vegas, Jeremy asks his father to promise not to shoplift
(239). But on the day of departure, Jeremy asks his father for advice on how to steal so
that he can rescue Fox (249). The rescue Jeremy undertakes requires a moral
compromise. He must embrace the values of his family patriarch, at least to a limited
extent. In his efforts to become a rescuer, even if a potentially unsuccessful one, Jeremy
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has to take cues on masculinity from his father, whose representation of masculinity is
not met with approval by the Jeremy we encounter at the start of “Magic for Beginners.”
The story begins and ends with the uncertainty of Fox’s life and death. It is not
important to the resolution of the story if Fox is dead or not. The story is not about
whether or not Jeremy’s rescue attempt is successful; after all, as shown by Fox’s rescue
Jeremy’s decision to act, without any evidence that his actions will have the desired
effect or if the problem he wants to solve is even real, that is crucial in the story. Despite
the ambiguity of the situation, Jeremy tries to rescue Fox. It is helpful to think of the
ambiguity in Link’s story in terms of Butler’s concept of undoing gender and her
example of being undone by grief. As I quoted earlier, Butler explains that mourning is a
transformative experience, one in which a person “cannot know [the full result] in
advance” (Undoing Gender 18). It is the not knowing that is significant here. When
Jeremy begins to mourn Fox’s death, he undergoes a significant change in how he sees
himself. Butler states that when we lose someone, “we lose our composure in some
fundamental sense: we do not know who we are or what to do” (Undoing Gender 19). It
is the loss of Fox, and with her the loss of Jeremy’s comfortable identity, that opens
Jeremy up to other possibilities. That undoing of self enables Jeremy to then accept the
ambiguity and fantasy of the rescue. The disjointed narrative and fragment fairy-tale plots
expected narratives.
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Tales, it is not the ending but the character roles and genre that are ambiguous. “The
Cinderella Game” is narrated by an external narrator and is focalized through Peter, the
twelve-year-old protagonist. He and his eight-year-old stepsister, Darcy, are home alone
after the babysitter has had to leave for an emergency. The story begins with Peter in his
stepfather’s “forbidden room” watching a werewolf movie (185). Darcy interrupts the
movie and bribes Peter into playing a make-believe game with her, and Peter insists that
she be the evil stepsister and he be Cinderella. Almost immediately, Peter makes
Cinderella “evil” as well, insisting that the abuse from her stepfamily justifies the
transformation (191). Evil, for Peter, means that Cinderella is violent and destructive, and
that the story of “Cinderella” is devoid of magic helpers and happy endings (191). Darcy
adds hide-and-seek to their game and hides. While Peter is searching for her, he catches
his reflection in a mirror, leading him to contemplate his own dark side and realize that
others see him as a problem. When Peter finds Darcy hiding under the kitchen sink, she
stabs him in the leg with a fork because she’s “the evil stepsister,” saying, “Of course I
stabbed you. I’ll stab you again if you don’t do what I say” (195). They argue, she pushes
him, and he hits her while trying to catch his balance, knocking Darcy to the floor. His
reaction is fearful and he shakes Darcy, yelling, “I don’t know what I’m doing here! Tell
me what I’m doing here (196). Darcy responds, “You’re Peter” and “You’re being my
stepbrother” (196). She begins cleaning up the mess while Peter sits on the floor. When
their parents arrive home, Darcy distracts her stepmother, Peter’s mother, with a hug and
by calling her “Mommy” (198). She tells their parents about the game, leaving out the
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fight. The story ends with Peter planning to run upstairs and clean up any evidence of his
presence in the forbidden room, and Darcy wiping Peter’s blood off her hand and onto
invoking werewolves and zombies, and both child characters play at being evil in their
game of “Cinderella” (ATU 510). Peter and his younger stepsister Darcy argue over who
gets to be Cinderella and who is the evil stepsister. Peter claims the role of Cinderella and
immediately turns her “evil,” transforming the traditional heroine into another villain.
The word evil is used thirteen times, almost always in relation to the characters of the
stepsister and Cinderella in the game. The “new, improved version” of “Cinderella” Peter
imagines contains no heroes, princes, nor magical helpers (191). If everyone can be
“evil,” the fairy-tale conventions break down, and the fairy-tale game the children in the
In the author’s note to her story, Kelly Link says that “everyone in it could be a
villain. It just depends on which fairy tale you think you’re reading” (200). Link’s
comment highlights both the importance of focalization and the idea that villain is a
relational term. The ambiguity of the villain that Link addresses is created in multiple
ways: lack of a clear hero, slippage between villain and monster so that every character’s
monstrous traits make her or him possibly a villain, and the blending of fairy-tale and
horror genres. These three ways intersect throughout the story and often work together to
Cinderella Game” are disrupted and transformed by questioning both the concepts of
gender and evil, and by suggesting that one is constructed as monstrous by others. As
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such, villain becomes a relational term: who the villain is depends on from whose point
of view one is seeing the story; it is not a matter of opposition to the hero.
works against the protagonist’s desires. Vladímir Propp, in his structural analysis of
Russian fairy tales, Morphology of the Folktale, identifies the villain as one of the
primary dramatis personae in fairy tales. That Propp uses dramatis personae instead of
characters here is important in that each dramatis persona is associated with a sphere of
action, and multiple characters can perform the acts associated with that sphere.
According to Propp, the characters who perform the actions can change among different
variants of the same tale, but structural analysis is still possible by focusing on dramatis
personae and functions which, he argues, are stable. He identifies the villain’s sphere as
struggles against the hero (79); for the hero, the sphere includes leaving on a quest
(seeker-hero only), reacting to magical aid, and wedding a princess (80). The last two
acts are performed by both seeker- and victim-heroes. While it is possible to match up
dramatis personae with specific characters in a fairy tale, Propp also allows that one
character can be “involved in several spheres of action” (80) or that “a single sphere of
action is distributed among several characters” (81). While Propp focuses his examples
on the many ways that different characters can fulfill the helper or donor spheres,
including the hero being his own helper, villainy can also be spread amongst multiple
the hero, then all characters at odds with the hero participate in the villain’s sphere of
action.
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outsider, possibly crazy, but definitely a troublemaker. Or at least that is how he thinks
others see him. The game of Cinderella is a plotting device that tells the reader to read
Peter as the Cinderella-figure in the story despite the monstrous language that makes him
seem more villain than hero. Darcy is obviously the stepsister whose meanness and
higher familial status turns Peter’s Cinderella evil. But she also fulfills the role of helper
in that she, who is first described with her “holstered . . . fairy wand” (186), grounds
Peter when he is panicking and cleans up the mess of their game, protecting Peter (and
herself of course) from the punishing adults.7 Doling out punishments is a task assigned
to Propp’s princess (a sought-after person) and her father (the two of whom always exist
in concert for Propp). Darcy orders the chaos left in the wake of their game. Peter, then,
is the hero, but even in this reading who is the villain remains unclear. Who is Peter, as
imagery characterizes him as wolfish, as a typical fairy-tale villain. My goal here is not to
offer a fixed reading in which I fit the characters of the story into Propp’s dramatis
personae, but rather to show how the ambiguity in the story makes it impossible to pin
the characters down. Here, as in “Magic for Beginners,” characters assume fairy-tale
roles consciously, as actors. This distancing technique allows for a kind of commentary
and reflection on the tales from the standpoint of the stories’ characters. The stories break
traditional fairy-tale patterns in terms of plotting and narrative structures, but the
metafictional commentary that reinforces the structural disruptions to the fairy-tale genre.
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The ambiguity of the villain is created in part by slippage between the concepts of
villain and monster, as the two terms are interchangeable in this story. Fairy-tale villains
are often monsters—talking wolves and bears, ogres, witches—so it is no surprise that
itself a relative term as it implies a distancing from society and recognizing another as
nonhuman. Jeffery Jerome Cohen explains in “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” “The
monster is difference made flesh, come to dwell among us. In its function as dialectical
Beyond” (7). For Kevin Alexander Boon in “Ontological Anxiety Made Flesh: The
Zombie in Literature, Film and Culture,” “That which is defined as ‘monstrous’ . . . was
not supposed to happen; that is, it is ‘unnatural’ and as such a malformation of some
universal design” (34). The monstrous divides that which is human from that which is
as nonhuman. Monsters in fairy tales have human traits—they are intelligent, speak, and
have a role in the social order of the storyworld—and many horror monsters are often
hybrids, creatures who were once human but have been transformed. In his preface to
Monster Theory: Reading Culture, Cohen argues that the monster is “a category that is
formation” (ix). While cultural-studies analyses of monsters might demonstrate how they
are symbolic of social issues and fears, I am more interested in how the construction of a
killers) are mixed with descriptions of evil throughout the story. Sue Short, in Misfit
Sisters: Screen Horror as Female Rites of Passage, explains that a blending of fairy tales
maturation. (vii-ix)
This distinction, however, is that “far from aiming to reassure its audience, horror aims to
unsettle us, even as it draws upon many of the same motifs” as fairy tales (Short 6-7).
subverting the expectations of the reader. The fairy-tale structures, here exemplified by
Propp’s dramatis personae, cannot be maintained when the horror element is introduced
to the story.
All of the characters are described by the external narrator with monstrous
authoritative way. Peter is primarily described in wolfish terms drawn from fairy-tale
villains and werewolf legends; even his name connotes the orchestrated Russian
children’s story that was adapted by Disney, Peter and the Wolf. When Peter is
initial contact with Darcy, the werewolves in the background are continually referenced.
blood” in a scene that foreshadows the children’s own bloody game of hide-and-seek
(187). There are sixteen wolf references in relation to Peter, including the werewolf film
he is watching. The big bad wolf from fairy tales is alluded to four times, twice each from
“The Three Little Pigs” (189, 192) and “Little Red Riding Hood” (190, 196). Peter is also
described as “wolfish” (192), “howling” (194, 196), and “wild” (192, 197).
The monstrous references that surround Darcy paint her as something inhuman,
both undead and beastly, blending fairy-tale and horror genre tropes. Darcy is introduced
as a sort of zombie princess, feral and rank. The very first description of her begins with
her hair, which is “black and knotted and stringy” (185). She is “wearing one of her
dozens of princess dresses,” but the dress is tattered and faded, “like something a zombie
would wear to a fancy dress party” (185). There are seventeen references to Darcy’s
appearance or behavior that call attention to her lack of civilization, including the
reference to zombies above. The terms used to describe her are not as connected as
Peter’s wolf allusions, but the combination of adjectives and phrases about her “ratty”
(196) appearance and “feral smell” (188) paint her as a feral animal-child, including a
reference to her “abandonment issues” (190) and her “monstrously loving hold” (198).
Darcy’s father is painted in imagery that marks him more as a human monster
who does not abide by social regulations; in this case, a serial killer who is clearly a
(185, 199), his wealth, and his collecting are easily seen as “Bluebeard” references in the
However, it is unlikely that the young audience would be as familiar with the story of
“Bluebeard” as they would with the other fairy tales referenced, owing to its lack of
Peter’s mother is the least described in monstrous terms, but that may simply be
a fairy-tale context. It requires far less description to establish her as villainous when
readers familiar with fairy-tale tropes expect stepmothers to be villains. She is described
as poor, and Peter suggests that she married his stepfather for money (187). Mostly her
recognize here that the descriptions are focalized through Peter. Though in external
narration, the descriptions are clearly filtered through Peter’s perspective. She is “only
going to pay for half” of the new laptop Peter needs because his is ruined (188, italics
mine). “Only” emphasizes judgment, suggesting that from Peter’s perspective half is not
enough. When Darcy teases Peter that she has to be nice to him until he “die[s] or get[s]
sent away to military school or something” (189), Peter at first assumes that military
school is his stepfather’s idea. Then he decides that “maybe it was his mother, still
working out the details of her new, perfect life, worrying that Peter was going to mess
things up now that she’d gotten it” (190). This description emphasizes both Peter’s fear
that his mother does not love him and his low image of himself as a troublemaker.
While the other characters’ monstrosity is built objectively into the text as
descriptions from the external narrator, for Peter’s mother, monster depends not only on
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the tradition of the fairy-tale stepmother as wicked, but by the narratorial judgments of
her son. Peter’s mother becomes monstrous by neglecting her biological child for the
stepchild, a reversal of the standard wicked stepmother, who neglects the stepchild for
her biological one. She is also shown to have “changed” from Peter’s perspective,
wanting a daughter and insisting that Peter become a role model (193). She is described
as giving Darcy preferential treatment because she’s a girl (193). Peter’s jealousy of his
stepfather also comes through in how he sees his mother as “happy” (194) and “laughing”
(197) in her husband’s presence only. When she enters the house at the end of the story,
the narrator states, “It was one of the things Peter hated most about his stepfather, how
quickly her face would change from laughter, when she talked to Peter, or like now, when
she looked over and saw Darcy at the sink, Peter on the floor” (197-8). His mother
immediately assumes that something is wrong and presumably Peter’s fault, but is
This slippage between villain and monster is furthered still by the transformation
of the one traditional heroine, Cinderella, into an evil figure. In making Cinderella evil,
no one character is left untainted. It is important to note that the good/evil binary begins
to be disrupted when the children question and undo the fixed gender-role of Cinderella
as a girl, which in turn allows the story to unravel. When Peter suggests that he be
Cinderella, Darcy reacts by yelling, “You can’t be Cinderella!” (189). When Peter asks
why, she explains, “Because you’re a boy” (189). When pushed to explain why boys
cannot be Cinderella, “Darcy seemed to have no answer to this,” and she changes the
gender to biological sex—completely changes her role in the story of “Cinderella,” and
While there are versions of the Cinderella tale-type (ATU 510) that feature boys,
Darcy says that Peter cannot be Cinderella “[b]ecause [he’s] a boy” (180). For her and
Peter—and thus the logic of the storyworld—Cinderella’s gender is part of her character
and what makes her Cinderella. The version of the Cinderella invoked in the story is one
derived from popular culture memory, which is dominated by Disney’s version rather
than the variety of tales known to folklorists. Both children refer to Disney’s version in
their crafting of the game (191). Darcy’s inclusion of mice as a defining characteristic
makes it clear that she is referencing the Disney version: “Cinderella isn’t evil. She gets
to go to the ball and wear a princess dress. And mice like her” (191). Peter also invokes
Disney’s version to justify making Cinderella evil: “Everybody treated Cinderella like
she was a pushover. Didn’t she sleep in a fireplace? ‘If her evil stepsister keeps making
fun of her and taking away her PlayStation, she might burn down the house with
everyone in it’” (191). Disrupting the male/female binary also disrupts the good/evil one.
Peter questions the fixed gender roles of the tale as they have been told it, and his
questioning is enough to open that role to other possibilities: Cinderella can be a boy and
evil. Darcy attempts to enforce gender roles, not just that Cinderella is female, but that as
a girl, she is also good, a domestic servant, and a victim—traits marked by Cinderella’s
crying and singing and Darcy’s ordering Peter-Cinderella to get her food and toys (190).
Peter rejects not just the gender of the character, but also how she is characterized,
rationalizing that a person who is constantly ordered around will eventually snap and
“burn down the house with everyone in it” (191). Because the gender and gendered
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behavior of Cinderella is so ingrained in the narrative as Darcy and Peter know it, a small
question about gender ideology embedded in the narrative ruptures the story. As a boy,
the actions that, according to Propp, are associated with heroes: leaving to go on a quest,
hero by making her male, active, and evil. Darcy’s reaction to Peter’s rupture—“This
isn’t how the story goes. This is stupid” (191)—demonstrates how deeply the story is
changed for the children. Cinderella is no longer Cinderella, but Darcy plays along, and
both children embrace their evil roles. Once the parameters of the game have been set—
all roles are evil ones—there is a line break, and the next section begins with Peter seeing
himself as dangerous.
Perspective is key here, and it is through the focalization of a troubled boy that
ambiguity is in part created. In one scene Peter is seeking the hidden Darcy. As he
searches, he recalls the first time he visited the house he now lives in. The narrator
describes what he thought and how he purposely was rude at dinner. Then the narrator
says, “Everyone was always watching him. Waiting for him to mess up. Even his friends
at his last school had acted sometimes like they thought he was crazy” (193). This
passage demonstrates how Peter defines himself and his role as villain through his
possibly evil is connected to how he perceives others as viewing him. They expect him to
“mess up” and be “crazy,” which in turn makes him see himself as such.
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formation through narrative style. In this scene, Peter looks at himself in a mirror while
hunting Darcy:
Back in the dark hallway again he saw something and paused. It was a
wasn’t sure who he was. He wasn’t sure, either. He had to look away from
This passage is one of those that paint Peter as monstrous, connecting him with
something wolfish and—through the context of the horror film he has been watching—
werewolfish. But it also shows how his view of himself is framed by how he perceives
others as viewing him. The language of the first passage, “messed up” and “though he
was crazy,” gives Peter’s thoughts in free indirect discourse. Readers are shown his
childish understanding of how others see him. In the second passage I cite, while
focalized through Peter, the descriptions are the external narrator’s phrasing and are more
sophisticated in tone. The more literary language in the scene broadens the scope from a
relational context.
identity creates his monstrous alter ego. Marina Warner explains, in Monsters of Our
Own Making: The Peculiar Pleasures of Fear, that the monstrous alter ego has become a
standard in children’s texts: “Monsters have become children’s best friends, alter egos,
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inner selves. While the monster mania of the last few years has obviously been fostered
willingly and enthusiastically accept” (Warner, Monsters 15). For Warner, monsters in
children’s texts reflect “our expectations of children and our images of ourselves, in
potentia” (Monsters 16). Seeing the monstrous potential in one’s self becomes a way of
confronting fear and anxiety. Here, Peter’s fear is shown to be that his perception that
others see him as monstrous is true. It is that possibility that scares him—that he truly is
the villain and not a victim-hero. What this scene demonstrates is the power of
Peter’s identity is also formed by his place within the social relationships of his
new blended family which mirror the fragmented functions of the fairy tale the children
enact. After their fight in which Darcy is injured and Peter cries out, “I don’t know what
I’m doing here! Tell me what I’m doing here!,” Darcy responds “You’re Peter” and
“You’re being my stepbrother” (196). The word choice, “You’re being my stepbrother,”
rather than a state of being (You are my stepbrother). For Butler, being can be a doing in
that one’s actions can make up one’s existence, but one’s actions inscribed within social
relationships are not of one’s choosing (3). Darcy defines Peter’s identity for him as a
product of a relationship that neither of them chose. Also important is that Darcy does not
use the term “evil” now that they are not playing the game anymore. Peter responds,
“Your evil stepbrother” (196). Here the context is still one of action, as it is a reference to
Darcy’s comment; he is being her evil stepbrother, trying to understand his identity
The use of evil rather than a different adjective, such as wicked or bad, both terms
used in conjunction with fairy-tale characters referenced in the story, invokes the
inhuman. Peter laughs when he says that he is evil, and the narrator describes it as “a
wild, evil laugh” (197). This description and the line about the evil stepbrother above are
the only times in the story in which evil is not used to refer to Cinderella or her stepsister.
When Peter says he is Darcy’s “evil stepbrother,” he is still using the narrative of
Cinderella to make sense of his role in his family. However, in describing Peter’s laugh,
evil is being used by the narrator, and it does not describe the roles in the game. Children
can easily be described as having wicked or bad behavior, but an evil child suggests
something more sinister and invokes the horror genre as it implies something beyond the
human and monstrous. That the story ends here, when the evil of the game bleeds into the
context in which it is played, furthers the ambiguity created from blending genres and
description of Peter’s laugh as evil suggests that Peter has moved from the open and
shared category of villain in the game to a monster in the story about his family. The
villain of the story is left ambiguous, though, as he is not the only monster.
The ambiguity of Link’s narratives, in which the resolution of the action is not the
conclusion of the story, questions the fairy-tale patterns on which it is built. And as those
patterns are highly gendered by a heterosexual binary, the ambiguity troubles notions that
these concepts of gender are fixed. Like Angela Carter, Kelly Link works within the
patterns of the tales that came before her. But Link also builds on the legacy left by
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patriarchy and offers multiple retellings of the same tales, each presenting different
variations of femininity and masculinity, sexuality, and feminism. Though still structured
complex and troubling matrix. Link continues Carter’s work, treating gender as part of
identity in her stories, but not as the most important or even most interesting part. The
ambiguity created by Link not only troubles questions of gender, as Carter’s work does,
but it also troubles concepts of reality and identity, and the expectations of those concepts
identity, and the social conceptions of these categories rather than as just a complication
of fairy-tale plots, we can see how, even when framed by heterosexual relationships,
gender and gendered identity are more complex than their heteronormative frame would
allow.
Though it is perhaps a stretch to say that the passages I quoted from Zipes in the
beginning of this chapter set up a binary of commercialized and utopian feminist fairy
tales against “dissident” and “troubled” feminist fairy tales, it is a contrast that holds
(Relentless Progress 130). While Zipes clearly comes out on the side of the dissident
voices, he expresses dissatisfaction with the “baffled” and “distressed” protagonists and
their “degenerative” tales: “it is also a dissent that is worrisome, for it reflects how
estranged Americans are from one another” (Relentless Progress 130). It is here that I
disagree. Tales like Link’s do not reveal social estrangement, but dependence. Feminist
and queer interventions into identity formation, such as Butler’s arguments for doing and
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undoing gender, show us that we are irrevocably dependent upon one another for our own
identities, and that in our recognition of ourselves and others, we produce what it is to be
power does not separate us, but binds us together. Link’s degenerative narrative
strategies, which fragment and rupture fairy-tale patterns, open up the traditional fairy-
tale genre to represent and perform more complex social formations. These disruptive
narrative strategies resignify fairy-tale fragments with new meanings that both reflect the
ways in which our understanding of social construction and regulation have changed and
CHAPTER 4
GAPS IN THE BRIAR HEDGE: THE READER’S ROLE IN AWAKENING BRIAR ROSE
configurations of gender and sexuality that limit what can happen in the stories. In
identity are constrained by adherence to the marriage plot. In Chapter 3, I explored how,
when structure is not reproduced, fragmentation and lack of closure open up fairy-tale
retellings to a wider range of possibilities for conceiving of gender and sexuality. In this
chapter, I explore how destabilizing narrative can also destabilize gender as a side effect
even if the plot does not make interventions into how gender is conceptualized or if
gender is not a thematic element of the retelling. The two novels I analyze in this chapter,
Briar Rose by Jane Yolen and Briar Rose by Robert Coover, do not wholly abandon
fairy-tale structures as Kelly Link often does. Yolen and Coover repeat structure,
including the marriage plot, in their retellings, but in doing so both novels extensively
narrative patterns, also question conceptions of gender. The gaps that are a product of
destabilizing the narrative in these retellings of “Sleeping Beauty” do two things. First,
they direct readers to bridge the gaps, inviting interpretation by linking separate sections
of text, and second, they give space within the text to questions of gender, so that even
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when the plot is fairly traditional in its treatment of gender, the questioning of its
Jane Yolen and Robert Coover take established fairy-tale narratives that would be
familiar to most adult or young-adult Western audiences and transform them into new
tales. They base their retellings of the “Sleeping Beauty” fairy tale (ATU 410) on popular
variants by Charles Perrault, “Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” (“La Belle au bois
dormant,” 1697), and the Brothers Grimm, “Little Briar Rose” (“Dornröschen,” 1812,
1857). The animated Disney film Sleeping Beauty (1959) is also a well-known popular
version. Yolen’s Briar Rose (2002) is the story of a young woman who, when faced with
her dying grandmother’s claim that “I am Briar Rose” (17), embarks on a journey to
prove the claim true and learn who her grandmother really is. Coover’s Briar Rose
(1996) is the story of the prince, the sleeping princess, and the fairy who cursed the
princess into dormancy and now fills her dreams with different versions of their own tale.
Both writers’ projects have a metafictional focus. Yolen uses the “Sleeping Beauty” tale
to mediate a story of the Holocaust and demonstrates both the limits and possibilities of
narrative in representing the Holocaust, and Coover blends several versions of the fairy
tale together, each interrupting the previous one, to reveal the instability of narrative.
Even though both Coover’s and Yolen’s works rewrite the same fairy tale, it may
mentioned in connection with his other deconstructive fairy-tale retellings, most notably
those in Pricksongs and Descants, and Yolen’s novel has at its center such a difficult and
complex subject matter. Coover’s Briar Rose deconstructs fairy tales to illustrate that
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they are stagnant narratives with no possibility for expansion outside of the fairy-tale
structure and, at the same time, flexible tales full of endless possibilities with ever-
changing variables. Yolen’s Briar Rose is notable for its coverage of the Holocaust for a
young adult audience. Her novel reveals the embedded fairy tale to be a powerful
metaphor for a real-life horror story that is unspeakable. In Yolen’s work, the power of
while, at the same time, recognizing the limits of what narrative can convey. The two
writers’ projects in these novels are incommensurable, and their expected readerships
quite different.
Seemingly all the two Briar Rose novels have in common is the story of
“Sleeping Beauty”; however, as I will be arguing, they expand notions of the fairy tale
and use similar metafictional narrative strategies to do so: suspension of the narrative,
multiple focalization, embedded stories, competing narrative threads, and suspension and
negation of closure. Yolen’s and Coover’s Briar Rose novels are both constructed in
ways that compel the reader to interpret the text in specific ways via the negotiation of
the gaps created. The gaps also encourage readers to imagine additional possibilities for
the fairy tale, such as how gender and sexuality are configured in the tale, due to the
destabilizing of fairy-tale narrative structures and the ways in which both novels explore
Each novel contains three different lines of narrative that converse with one
another, textually creating an undercurrent that questions the novels’ thematic stance on
the place of narrative, specifically fairy tales, in the “real” world. The competing
narrative positions reveal a more complex and ultimately more satisfying understanding
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of the discursive work of fairy tales than the individual stories the novels provide. Thus,
both retellings of Briar Rose celebrate the expansive possibilities of the fairy tale, not by
the introduction of new subject-matter to the work, but by the gaps in the text that invite
elements of the retellings create a third text where the reader not only relates the disparate
sections in each novel to each other, but relates the retelling back to the traditional
versions of “Sleeping Beauty” that are being rewritten in the novels. Among the narrative
strategies used in the two Briar Rose novels, the gaps that create a visual space on the
creating a space within the reading experience of the novel to contemplate that
comparison. I will show how these gaps encourage the reader to question normative
conceptions of gender even if the plots of the novels do not offer direct challenges or
Feminist retellings that make direct interventions into the concepts of gender in
the source tale are fairly common, and even Disney fairy-tale films, as seen in Tangled
However, as I have explained in earlier chapters, this kind of modified gendered behavior
does not destabilize concepts of gender as much as offer a new stable replacement of
femininity. Retellings that complicate popular fairy-tale narrative structure, like these by
Yolen and Coover, disrupt and question the source tales rather than offer new stable
versions of the tales. The novels unsettle ideological constructs, like concepts of gender,
by playing with what Stephen Benson, in Cycles of Influence: Fiction, Folktale, Theory,
terms the “intrinsically unstable” aspect of folktales (22-23) and by destabilizing the
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progression of narrative itself. Both Briar Rose texts disrupt the linear structure of the
source fairy tales, offering instead multiple, fragmented, jumbled, and in the case of
focalizers, and embedded stories create gaps that play a significant role in readers’
interpretations of Yolen’s and Coover’s retellings. I have found both Wolfgang Iser’s and
(1978) that a text is dynamic, deriving its meaning “as the reader passes through the
various perspectives offered by the text, and relates the different views and patterns to
one another” (21). The thematic elements of the work are a negotiation between text and
reader; however, the reader does not simply bring to the text a set of interpretations.
Rather, through various techniques, the text invites those readings, creating a space where
reader and text interact. Gaps are created by the distance between the text and the
reader’s experience of the same narrative, and are initiated by what is not in the text.
What is missing from a scene or section solicits a reaction from the reader to fill in the
gap and interpret the meaning of what is not there in relation to what is there. These gaps
focus the reader’s attention on connecting elements of the text to make meaning of it. The
resulting interaction between reader and text creates what Iser calls a “virtual work,”
which is not located with the text or the reader but as a third text constructed through
constant negotiation (21). Gaps can occur within the story when new characters or
settings change the scene, or on the page through chapter and page breaks, series of
Blanks are a type of gap that, according to Iser, “indicate that different segments
of the text are to be connected, even though the text itself does not say so” (182-3). They
are formalized breaks that suggest the need for connection. Gaps and blanks are not
interchangeable despite the fact that they are treated as synonyms in some translations of
Iser’s earlier work. The primary difference between the two is the way in which they
direct the reader. Gaps signal “the need for completion,” whereas blanks signal “the need
for combination” (Iser 182). Gaps direct the reader to fill in missing information, and
blanks suggest that two sections of text need to be connected. Winfried Fluck explains
that blanks, which are described in Iser’s The Act of Reading, are a reworking of Iser’s
earlier ideas about negation, and she carefully differentiates between the two concepts in
“The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s Literary Theory”:
projections and the world of the text and thereby prevent a mere
Gaps direct the reader to fill in missing information, but do not tell her with what to fill
the gap. Blanks compel the reader to fill in missing information by making a connection
between specific sections in the text. For instance, the division of the text into sections
implies a relationship between sections to which the reader must ascribe meaning. In this
chapter, I primarily discuss these structural blanks created by the division of the texts into
sections, chapters, and scenes. Vacancies occur when, through negotiation of the blanks,
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one section of the text replaces the other as a privileged “thematic” element (Iser 198).
Readers can fill the vacancy of the replaced text as a way to understand the thematic
relevance of the new section. The reader, in this sense, is not a real person but rather a
reader produced by the text through the cues that suggest a particular interpretation
By switching among the three narratives, the novels also break narrative
expectations, reminding the reader that this is a constructed work. Metafiction is fiction
in which the narrative text calls attention to its own construction by reminding the reader
that she is reading a textual production. Linda Hutcheon, in Narcissistic Narrative: The
[sic] reads, the reader lives in a world which he is forced to acknowledge as fictional.
However, paradoxically the text also demands that he participate, that he engage himself
intellectually, imaginatively, and affectively in its co-creation. This two-way pull is the
paradox of the reader” (7). Hutcheon’s interest in the reader hinges on her argument that
reading requires active participation on the part of the reader, not just the passive
consumption of a text. What Hutcheon describes is parallel to Iser’s concept of the virtual
text created when text and reader interact to construct the thematic reading. However, in
interpretation that accounts for how narrative works. “The point of metafiction” argues
Hutcheon, “is that it constitutes its own first critical commentary, and in doing so [. . .]
Narrative 6). The gaps direct the reader in how to interpret the texts and their makings,
Thematically, Yolen’s Briar Rose uses the symbols already present in the
“Sleeping Beauty” tale to tell a story about the Holocaust for young readers. The story is
grandmother’s dying claim that she is the real Briar Rose. The novel consists of three
types of narrative discourse presented as separate narrative threads that do not join
Though structurally separate, it is implied that two of narrative threads (the fairy tale and
testimony) are embedded in the third. The three narratives disrupt each other, with the
first and last sections of the book (“Home” and “Home Again”) alternating between fairy
tale and historical reconstruction, and the second section (“Castle”) presenting an
and each section focuses on the experiences of one of three different characters. Though
each narrative tells a story of one woman’s experience during the Holocaust, none can
represent her experience alone. The novel suggests both that fairy tales are a way to speak
the unspeakable and that a single narrative is not able to fully convey the atrocities of the
Holocaust. Though thematically the novel focuses on the Holocaust and storytelling, the
strategies that disrupt the three narratives also open spaces in the text that trouble notions
Discussions of Yolen’s novel quite logically focus on how she uses the fairy tale
as a metaphor for the Holocaust in young adult literature and the various ethical,
argue that when studying texts about the Holocaust, it is important to discuss not just
what the texts say about the Holocaust, but also how they say it, including how the texts
address the debate over how to represent the Holocaust. In My Mother’s Voice: Children,
Literature, and the Holocaust, Adrienne Kertzer explains that a particular concern in
children’s literature is the focus on hope and constructing a coherent narrative despite the
reality of the murders of millions of people and the understanding of the Holocaust as
something that cannot be explained. Kertzer describes the Holocaust as that which cannot
be narrated and states that most writers of children’s literature avoid bringing the reader
into the concentration camps, and yet try to explain what adult works about the Holocaust
is understandable. Both Kertzer and Kenneth B. Kidd explore the ethical issues of
children’s fiction that presents the Holocaust as part of a story of hope or which draws
from it a lesson about humanity at the expense of historical facts and complexity. In
particular discusses children’s literature that appropriates the Holocaust “to authorize
personal loss,” a move that he identifies as clearly problematic and “abusive as defined
by [Lawrence] Langer” (195, 192). Kidd suggests that Briar Rose offers “emotional
truth” but “not necessarily the truth of historical accuracy” (188) and cites Kertzer’s
claim that the plot of Briar Rose is ridiculous (Kidd 188, Kertzer 69). While Kertzer does
say that the plot of the grandmother telling her family nothing of her past is “absurd”
(69), Kidd misses Kertzer’s larger point that Yolen presents a “double narrative” that
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both represents the “hope and happy endings” of the fairy tale (75) and the “reality of
historical facts and the difficulty such facts pose for representing this particular history”
(67). Kertzer focuses on the Author’s Note at the end of Yolen’s novel that contradicts
the fairy tale of the grandmother as a Holocaust survivor by stating that no woman
survived that particular extermination camp and by giving its death toll (Yolen 240-1).
Kertzer draws attention to Briar Rose as a novel that successfully meets the challenge of
Yolen does not attempt to explain why the Holocaust happened, but rather
explores this difficulty in talking and writing about the Holocaust, especially for a
younger audience. She uses the symbolic properties of fairy tales by presenting a fairy-
tale mediation of the Holocaust in contrast with accounts represented as factual. Yolen’s
sophisticated narrative strategies allows the novel to do multiple things at once, so that it
also about other concepts present in the novel—and the role of fairy tales as
representative texts. Her novel gives young readers a “comprehensible” narrative of the
Holocaust, but it also shows them how to question and deconstruct it and other narratives.
The analyses of Briar Rose I discuss focus on the complicated ways that the novel
represents the Holocaust, trauma, and fairy tales and storytelling as a means of
psychological defense. Here I also examine how the narrative strategies open up a space
The structural blanks in Yolen’s Briar Rose are demarcated with traditional
chapter headings (twenty-four in the section “Home,” six in the section “Castle,” and
three in the section “Home Again”) and switches in narrative style. The chapters are
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further broken into three sections marked by headings and epigraphs. The blanks that are
created by these formal breaks of alternating narrative threads direct the reader to make
connections between the three different sections and the alternating chapters. The first
and third sections of the book are narrated by an external narrator and focalized through
Becca, the protagonist. The chapters of these two sections alternate between the fairy tale
of “Sleeping Beauty” and Becca’s search for evidence that her grandmother is Briar
Rose. The even-numbered chapters are about Becca reconstructing her grandmother’s life
and discovering that her grandmother lived through the Holocaust and escaped an
Becca’s memories of different situations in which her grandmother, Gemma, told her
version of “Sleeping Beauty” to a child audience of which Becca is always a part. The
time frame of these narrative settings progresses from Becca as a toddler to Becca as an
adolescent, to the last section in which she is an adult aunt and Gemma is telling the story
from the novel’s plot about Becca’s research (in even-numbered chapters) and
intervening sections, placing the chapters that contain Becca’s reconstruction of her
grandmother’s story in conversation with the chapters that contain the grandmother’s
fairy tale. Becca’s story and her grandmother’s telling of the fairy tale are chronologically
separated and not joined at any point in the novel. The book begins and ends with
Gemma telling her fairy tale; however, despite this framing, Becca’s story is on the
highest diegetic level, meaning that it is the primary narrative. The italics and fragmented
narrative settings of Gemma’s telling suggest these chapters are to be read as Becca’s
memories.
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narrative of a personal account of Gemma’s survival from one of the men who saved her.
The second section of the novel, “Castle,” is not interrupted by the grandmother’s tale
and, though divided into chapters, it is one consistent narration. Josef Potocki tells Becca
and her Polish guide and translator, Magda, the story of his life during the Holocaust as a
homosexual man sent to a labor camp and how he met Gemma. Josef is the narrator of
this embedded story, but he talks about himself in the third person. The only direct
textual clue that the narrator is different from the narrator in the rest of the novel is the
diegetic tag “he said,” parenthetically inserted at the beginning of each chapter, and the
context of this narrative moment in the framing chapters. This multi-embedded structure
that uses different narrative styles calls attention to itself as constructed, which reminds
the reader that this story of the Holocaust is fiction, a fact reinforced by the Author’s
Note at the end of the novel, which states that no woman survived the extermination
camp that Gemma is supposed to have escaped (241). But the narrative structure also
raises questions about narrative style and makes an argument for interpretation in the way
described by Hutcheon.
connection between the “invent[ed] details” of Gemma’s fairy tale and the details of the
Holocaust unfolding from Becca’s investigation in each subsequent chapter (37). Becca
suggests that the grandmother’s story of “Sleeping Beauty” is a metaphor in the second
chapter, but she does not know what it is a metaphor for, and the rest of her family
dismisses the idea in this and subsequent chapters (13). That statement directs readers to
look for connections between the alternating chapters, as do structural blanks created by
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switching from one chapter to the next that tell the reader to look for a connection
between the chapters, and specific readings are prompted by what is common to both
sections—details, themes, and questions. With each even-numbered chapter, the reader is
provided a new piece of information with which to make sense of the symbols in the
The invented details of the fairy tale in the odd-numbered chapters, the details that
do not match popular versions of “Sleeping Beauty,” are given thematic relevance once
the plot of the even-numbered chapters has been developed. Chapter 9 contains the
portion of the “Sleeping Beauty” story where the briar hedge grows. Gemma describes
the hedge as having “thorns as sharp as barbs” (58). The character of Becca as a child
asks what barbs are, calling the reader’s attention to the added detail of the barbs. A later
chapter reveals that the refugee shelter in which Gemma lived in the United States was
enclosed in barbed wire. This pattern of introducing an added detail to the “Sleeping
Beauty” tale in an odd-numbered chapter and then prompting a connection (by questions
and repetition across the blank) to something in the following even-numbered chapter
that explains it continues throughout the novel. Additionally, chapter 9 emphasizes the
willful blindness that outsiders had toward the Holocaust as it occurred, by Gemma’s
added detail that “no one cared to know about the sleeping folk inside” (58). This detail is
highlighted by a parallel in the plot in that the girls are more interested in engaging in
sibling rivalry than in listening to the story, so Gemma stops telling her story.
on the part of the outsiders in the fairy tale because of the repetition of the theme, which
occurs again in chapter 22 when Becca visits the site of Chelmno, the extermination
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camp in Poland from which Gemma escaped, and none of the villagers will speak to her
The fairy tale is represented as a way for Gemma to distance herself from the
horror she experienced and still tell her story, while the details Becca uncovers provide
her (and readers) with a way to interpret the tale and uncover some of the past that
Gemma is only able to convey through metaphor. At no point is it revealed that Gemma
spoke directly of her experience to her family, including to her daughter. In fact, Yolen
makes it clear that Gemma’s family know nothing of her history before she immigrated to
the United States, including her real name (25, 29) and that she came to the United States
during World War II and not before the war as she told her daughter (24, 30, 44).
Gemma’s memory loss of her time in the camp and before is explained as a side effect of
the gassing which was supposed to kill her, a narrative strategy that Kertzer identifies as
allowing Yolen to “protect [her] readers” from this experience (Kertzer 70). However,
Gemma’s fairy tale also covers the period after her awakening and recovery, during her
time living in the forest with the partisans and her marriage, the death of her husband and
her escape from Poland, ending with the birth of her daughter in the United States at a
refugee camp, events she has not revealed to her daughter or anyone else.
Using fairy tales as metaphor to distance oneself trauma in the way that the
grandmother does in Yolen’s fiction is not new. Donald Haase, in his article “Children,
War, and the Imaginative Space of Fairy Tales,” explains that “the fairy-tale is adopted as
displacement and emotional trauma” (372). Haase bases this observation on testimonials
and documentation of the exile and displacement of children during World War II and the
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Holocaust. He explains that the fairy tale functions as an interpretive device in two ways.
First, children associate the “distressing disfigurement of familiar places and dislocations
such as imprisonment with the landscape and physical spaces of the fairy tale” (Haase,
“Children” 362). The dark forests, castles, towers, huts, woodland cottages, and cages of
fairy tales are often locations that isolate or trap characters or are otherwise associated
with violence and danger. Fairy-tale spaces are open symbols of danger onto which
children can map their own violent environments. Second, “within that imaginative
space, [children] transform their physical surroundings into a hopeful, utopian space as a
psychological defense and means of emotional survival” (Haase, “Children” 362). The
hopefulness and utopian ideals that mark the fairy-tale happily-ever-after ending provide
The symbols of death and danger already exist in fairy tales and can be given a
context, making them a useful frame for negotiating trauma too difficult to face without
mediation. In fact, Kidd explains that “the fairy tale has been remodeled as a key genre of
the children’s literature of atrocity” (187), which he traces back to Bruno Bettelheim’s
Fairy Tale as Allegory for the Holocaust: Representing the Unrepresentable in Yolen’s
Briar Rose and Murphy’s Hansel and Gretel” that fairy tales are particularly well suited
as allegories for the Holocaust because they “resolve . . . the tension between historical
that portray unspeakable horrors,” and feature “protagonists that not only survive, but
thrive” (154, 157, 162, emphasis in the original). Landwehr, like Haase, identifies the
symbols of horror and violence in combination with the hopeful tone of fairy tales as the
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traits that draw writers to fairy tales as frames for stories of the Holocaust. 2 However, she
also addresses the issue of authenticity and empathy, arguing that fairy tales provide for
authors attempting to represent the Holocaust in fiction a means of “put[ting] the horrific,
the unimaginable, into comprehensible form” (Landwehr 155). Landwehr argues that the
fairy tale allows Yolen and other writers who use the tales to include historical facts and
provide children with a means of emotionally contextualizing those facts; thus, she
claims that the fairy tale is “bridge between the horrific world of the Holocaust and the
Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère and Géraldine Viret also see the fairy tale
functioning as a bridge in Briar Rose, both for the grandmother and the reader. Hennard
Dutheil de la Rochère and Viret analyze Briar Rose as a trauma narrative in “‘Sleeping
Beauty’ in Chelmno: Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose or Breaking the Spell of Silence,”
explaining, “The fairy tale . . . mediates between traumatic memory and consciousness,
past and present, reality and fantasy, insofar as the old woman’s compulsive retelling of
the tale both articulates and disguises an intimate truth that resists language, logic, order
and coherence” (401). They explain that readers are encouraged to empathize with Becca
as a cowitness, a concept drawn from Irene Kacandes’s work. Kacandes explains that
conscious as possible about the stories they construct about trauma narratives” (Hirsch
and Kacandes 18, emphasis in the original). Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère and Viret
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argue that Becca, as a cowitness, demonstrates for readers a model of empathizing with
the victims of trauma while still understanding the story as a construction (406).
The metafictional theme of the novel is that stories are powerful and contain truth.
The different sections of the book each represent a different mode of storytelling, but
they do not merge, which counters the thematic suggestion that the Holocaust can be
represented through stories. Gemma’s fairy tale, Becca’s investigation, and Josef’s
testimony represent three different ways of telling the story of the Holocaust—fairy-tale
without the others. One problem with writing about the Holocaust in children’s literature,
as Kertzer argues, is deciding how to tell the story, particularly how one can recreate the
horrors inside the camps. The Holocaust is often referred to as an unspeakable event,
inadequate, and the three narrative styles presented in Yolen’s Briar Rose enact those
villains,” and terror (Landweher 155) and the traumatic “isolation, danger, and violence”
(Haase, “Children” 364) that Landwehr and Haase identify as part of fairy tales, but it
cannot be interpreted without the facts from history and testimony. The historical
reconstruction and testimony need each other as verification, but they also need the “hope
and happy ending” of the fairy tale to make reading about the atrocities bearable (Kertzer
75). The metafiction of Yolen’s book creates tension by alternating among the three
different styles of discourse. Ultimately it is this tension between the three narrative
discourses that creates meaning in the story. The blanks created by switching from one
narrative style to another directs readers to connect the different sections of text and read
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the fairy tale as a metaphor for the Holocaust, and the interplay among them emphasizes
However, these blanks that direct interpretation also open a space that raises
issues of gender and sexuality not directly addressed in the plot. Chapter 13 introduces
the question, “Why is it always a prince that rescues her?” (86), and the subsequent
chapter introduces information about Josef Potocki, who later is revealed to be the prince-
rescuer figure. Gemma responds dismissively to the question asked by the child Becca:
“You watch too much television [. . . .] Too much women’s rights. In the old days, it was
a prince” (86). The answer given to Becca’s question in the text implies that what she is
actually asking is why is it always a man that rescues a woman. Readers may note that
the question “Why is it always a prince that rescues her?” also interrogates class position
and the need for a rescue. Though the possibility of a female rescuer is dismissed in the
plot, it is given presence in the novel by the gap that follows it. The reader is compelled
to give weight to the question about gender as it calls attention to what is not part of the
source tale. The blank created by switching chapters and narrative styles directs readers
to connect this question about gender patterns with the story that follows.
Taken as part of the whole novel, this early questioning of the tale sets up how
Yolen changes the expected “Sleeping Beauty” tale in the second section of the novel,
“Castle,” in which the rescuer is a prince but not a romantic interest. The prince is Josef
Potocki, a descendent of Polish aristocracy (the Potockis are a real Polish noble family),
and he was sent to a labor camp for his homosexuality (he has escaped the camp at the
point he meets Gemma). Gemma, known as Księźnicka (princess) at this point in the
story, marries a partisan, Aron Mandlestein, but not the one who revived her with a kiss
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refiguring of the role calls into question the reader’s assumptions about the fairy tale, and
the gaps provide a space for the reader to think about that—why is it always a prince that
The characterization of Josef that distances him from fairy-tale princes mirrors
and emphasizes the narrative strategy of the gaps that focus readers’ attention to what is
not being said. Becca’s own construction of her grandmother’s history as a fairy tale
duplicates the process of interpretation in which the reader engages, but it also leads the
reader to make similar assumptions about the plot of the novel based on fairy-tale
patterns they associate with the “Sleeping Beauty” tale. Once Becca recognizes Josef
from photos and identifies a family ring as his, she immediately assumes that he is her
grandfather (156). Becca knows that he does not look like her, her siblings, or her
mother, and all the evidence that she has is a passport photo and a ring with his initials
(156). But she assumes that if he is the prince, then he must also be the husband and true
love of her grandmother. There is nothing in the text to suggest a marriage except the
frame of the “Sleeping Beauty” story, but Becca assumes that the prince and the husband
are the same character and that the kiss is romantic solely based on the fairy-tale pattern.
mirrors and complicates specific narrative gaps. While Josef’s sexuality initially disrupts
the fairy-tale pattern, the primary purpose of this characterization is to educate young
readers about the multiple reasons people were imprisoned and killed during the
Holocaust. While the majority of the millions of victims of the Holocaust were Jewish,
victims also included the mentally and physically disabled, the Roma-Sinti (Gypsies),
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homosexuals, people racially constructed as non-Aryan, and those that opposed the Nazi
party.3 The plot twist makes the story more historically accurate by acknowledging the
different types of victims during the Holocaust. The novel brings up sexuality in a
historicized context, but its disruption of the expected fairy-tale pattern also questions the
heteronormative tale encourages the reader to question the heterosexual romance of the
source tale.4 It destabilizes by compelling readers and Becca to assume an outcome based
on fairy-tale patterns, realize this assumption is wrong, and then question why they/we
made the assumption. In the novel, romance and sexuality are decoupled from the kiss-
rescue. The kiss is not romantic, and the rescuer and rescued do not engage in a sexual
relationship. The love match comes later and is treated as a separate part of the story, in
both Gemma’s retelling of the fairy tale and Josef’s telling of the past. Separating
marriage from the rescue disrupts the fairy-tale structure in which marriage is the prize
Structural disruptions sufficiently weaken the marriage plot in a way that enables
readers to see alternate sexualities and alternate closures for the fairy tale even though the
Becca’s plotline, which presents her beginning a romantic relationship with a man and
promises that they will “get to happily ever after eventually” (237). Heterosexuality is
embedded in the fairy-tale structure that ends with marriage, so much so that the
Chapter 3, Judith Roof and Robyn Warhol have both shown that the representation of
narrative closure must be disrupted. Warhol demonstrates this through her analysis of the
serial format that defers closure from episode to episode or presents temporary closures
that are undone in subsequent episodes. The search for romantic partners in Tales of the
suspending one narrative thread for another. The happily-ever-after expected in the
“Sleeping Beauty” story is not only interrupted by the other two narratives, but marriage
is not traditional, which reflects the structural deferment of the marriage plot and its
unsettling by gaps that question its necessity. Marriage as the prize for the good deed of
the rescue is negated and replaced with motherhood as the reward for survival. I have
explained that prince and husband are different characters in the recounting of Gemma’s
life. In the fairy tale, that detail is left ambiguous. The final chapter of the book, in which
“And as he did so, giving her breath for breath, she awoke saying ‘I am
alive, my dear prince. You have given me back the world.’ After she was
married, she had a baby girl, even more beautiful than she. And they lived
“The prince, too, Gemma?” asked Becca. “I don’t think I was ever
Gemma does not answer the question, merely replying “Happily ever after [. . .] means
exactly what it says” (239). This exchange shows us that as a listener the adult Becca
questions the role of the prince in the princess’s happily ever after before Gemma dies
and therefore before Becca makes assumptions about Josef being the prince; however,
though the character has this doubt, in reconstructing Gemma’s past she still assumes that
prince (Josef) and princess (Gemma) are married based on the fairy tale. And yet, there is
nothing in Gemma’s retelling to say that the prince marries the princess. The “they” in
“And they lived happily ever after” grammatically refers to the princess and her
daughter.5 There is no statement that the prince and princess are married, just that after
she wakes, she marries. The husband is never mentioned. It is only knowledge of other
versions of “Sleeping Beauty” where the princess marries the prince-rescuer (and
knowledge of the more general marriage plot of many princess-rescue fairy tales) that
would lead Becca and a reader to assume that the prince marries the princess.
negation of marriage as the expected closure of fairy tales. In Gemma’s fairy tale,
motherhood is the reward for her survival, and in the reconstruction of her history, her
position as a mother and grandmother is at the forefront. The primary name used for her
in the novel, Gemma, is a version of her role Grandma because one of Becca’s sisters
couldn’t say Grandma when she was little (25).6 Motherhood is also emphasized
thematically by the stories Josef tells Becca and Magda. In Josef’s story, most of the
women he encounters are identified either as mothers or as being in a motherly role. His
fellow partisans tell a story at one point of a mother who “fought like a lioness” (181).
When an S.S. officer demands her child, she refuses to give the baby up. The officer
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takes the baby and throws it out of a window, but the partisans find the mother’s refusal
to acquiesce courageous—“she did not turn the baby over to them on her own” (182).
Josef does not respond in the same way, thinking “a dead child is a dead child” (182).
This story of female bravery is noteworthy because it identifies for the partisans a way
that women can be brave; and for the female partisans who have lost their children, as
Mutter Holle who participates in the telling of this anecdote exemplifies, it offers hope. In
her essay “Gender and Holocaust Representation,” Sara R. Horowitz suggests that
“pregnancy becomes a biological inner resistance that triumphs over external evil” (166).
In contrast to Gemma’s experience, the embedded story of the mother who “fought like a
lioness” accentuates how rare it was for a child to survive the Holocaust. The importance
after ending highlights the birth of a beautiful child (238). That Gemma has a child is
princess at the conclusion, but the baby’s girl’s beauty is commented on, calling attention
to that character and elevating her above the others. Horowitz indicates that the emphasis
replaces marriage as the ultimate goal for women, the novel reinforces these roles rather
have a child—is, however, undone by the novel’s Author’s Note. The note is presented as
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part of the text; it comes after a formal chapter break and is formatted like the even-
numbered chapters. The resulting blank directs the reader to connect the note to the
previous sections of text. Yolen writes, “This is a book of fiction. All the characters are
made up. Happy-ever-after is a fairy tale notion, not history. I know of no woman who
escaped from Chelmno alive” (241). A tension ensues between these two thematic
constructs of fairy tale and history throughout the novel, but the reader is encouraged to
elevate the fairy-tale metaphor as the privileged narrative because it begins and ends the
novel and is the impetus for the novel’s plot. Here, Yolen explicitly tells the reader that
the fairy tale she has written is constructed. Kertzer pays special attention to the Author’s
Note, which she argues “deliberately takes [. . .] away” the hopeful happy ending: “The
lesson that emerges in this sophisticated interplay between text and peritext is not the
consoling lesson of spiritual triumph but a much harder one in the reality of historical
facts” (252). The negation of the fairy tale by the peritext, in light of the novel’s structure
and plot—which emphasize the value of fairy tales as metaphor—forces the reader to link
the different styles of discourse and consider how they complicate each other. The
negation creates what Kertzer’s terms “a double narrative” (253). Iser defines negation as
the introduction of what would be familiar to the reader, which is then canceled by the
following text. However, the negated material still exists on a textual level, requiring the
reader to “adopt a position in relation to the text” (Iser 169). The double narrative
suggests that one style of discourse is not sufficient when dealing with such complex
subject matter.
Yolen’s use of fairy-tale intertexts depends on familiarity with the tale through
popular cultural memory. Even a reader who has not read popular versions by Charles
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Perrault and the Brother Grimm or seen the Disney film will be familiar with the
fragments of a sleeping princess, a briar hedge, and a kiss of life. Without knowledge of
the “Sleeping Beauty” in popular cultural memory, Becca would not be able to make the
inferences about gender, sexuality, and romantic relationships that she does, and the
reader would not be compelled to make similar inferences. Yolen does not provide any
other versions of “Sleeping Beauty” in the novel but refers to the fact that there are others
by having characters take exception to some of the differences between Gemma’s telling
and others they know. Twice in the retelling chapters, friends of Becca dispute Gemma’s
version of “Sleeping Beauty” saying, “That’s not how it goes. You’ve got it wrong” (34)
and “There aren’t any kidnappers in Sleeping Beauty” (99). These interruptions call
attention to other versions of “Sleeping Beauty” and further mark Gemma’s version as
metaphor. This means that part of the mystery of the novel relies on the intertextual play
Gemma as constructed, the novel demonstrates that other assumptions about gender and
sexuality are also constructed. Even though the plot treats gendered relationships fairly
dwell on the questions negated by the plot, and they call attention to the possibility for
narrative structure and the conceptualizing of gender and sexuality are unfold throughout
case, as in Coover’s novel, the narrative blanks offer anti-hegemonic possibilities to the
destabilized fairy-tale narrative that turns the timeless quality of many traditional fairy
tales (in that they are relevant across time) into the stagnation of a story that does not
narrator and focalized through three different characters—a fairy, a princess, and a
prince. As in his novel Stepmother, these characters are trapped in fairy-tale roles they no
longer want to inhabit, and they perform repeatedly the many variants of the “Sleeping
Beauty” tale invoked in the novel. The fragmented structure denies a clear, linear
narrative, progression of plot, and closure, thus supporting the thematic questioning of
identity, reality, and controlling narratives. However, the blanks created by moving
connections between disconnected sections and ordering them. These blanks also create a
space in the text for possibilities not directly addressed in the plot. As with Yolen’s Briar
Rose, and even Coover’s Stepmother, destabilizing and questioning fairy-tale narrative
patterns effectively disrupts those patterns so that issues of gender can be interrogated as
well. Coover does not directly address gendered identity or gender as a concept, but his
fragmenting of the concepts of identity and reality, as well as the resulting gaps, invite
The plot of Coover’s novel is suspended in time with no story arc to guide a
reader through the action (which is constantly negated), suggesting that the scenes could
sleeping beauty waiting to be woken, the fairy who entertains her and cares for her during
her sleep, and the prince who is present to rescue her. Each section is focused on and
focalized through one of these characters. While the sections do seemingly bleed into
each other, each is self-contained without clear plot connections among them. The
sections repeat the iconic part of the plot—prince wakes princess—drawing on the
multiple variants of the “Sleeping Beauty” tale. The sleeping princess wakes up in
multiple sections, to different princes with different results each time. The prince fights
his way to the castle only to be returned to the briars in the next section centered on him.
The fairy tells the princess multiple stories and must repeat herself to the princess. The
unstable structure prevents the reader from reconstructing a linear plot for the novel as a
whole. Instead the reader is prompted to make connections between scenes by bridging
the blanks between them. This Briar Rose is also available online in a hypertext version
constructed by Robert Scholes that encourages readers to read the sections in any order
they choose, further clouding the ability to detect a single, consistent narrative thread. 7
This instability of structure itself raises questions about fairy tales, identity,
reality, discourse, and desire. Sünje Redies, in her article “Return with New
Complexities: Robert Coover’s Briar Rose,” lists the common thematic elements of
relationship of the real and the fantastic in fiction, the role of storytelling in human
discourse, and the significance of myth and fairy tales in society” (11). Redies describes
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Briar Rose as a “metafictional deconstruction” (12) that both celebrates and repudiates
the fairy tale (13). She argues that the ways in which Coover breaks traditional fairy-tale
structures and narration, particularly the lack of chronological order to the tale, allows all
possibilities for the plot to exist simultaneously. I agree with Redies, but would argue
further that possibilities not present in Coover’s plot are also enabled by reader
negotiation of the gaps and blanks. In Coover’s Briar Rose, blanks occur when the
focalization shifts from one character to another. This transition is marked visually by a
literal blank on the page. The text connecting one fragment of text to the next is not there,
resulting in the need for the reader to make the connection. Redies refers to these sections
as “scenes, similar to film cuts” (14). These scenes, however, do not necessarily offer a
There is much questioning in Coover’s novel, but the sex and gender of the main
characters remain stable. Class is questioned in some scenes, as ruffians, thieves, the
king, etc., wake Sleeping Beauty. In scene 25 the prince is replaced by a monkey. But the
one who wakes the princess is always male, and the sleeping beauty is always female,
and the gender of the characters is not destabilized. Rather the romance of the story or the
idealized parts that are romanticized in other versions are subverted. There is no “true
love’s first kiss,” to quote the Disney version. At times, the prince imagines the princess
or dreams her to be dead and decaying, or not the object of beauty he expects. Once he is
a vampire (57). The princess is surprised, and questions the fairy’s stories in which the
prince is married or the princess has babies. She does not like the less-idealized versions
of the story. The fairy is frustrated with how Rose (the princess) cannot learn or will not
listen (32-35). The fairy tells Rose versions of the story that hinge on suffering to prepare
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Rose for the “reality” that awaits her (60). The fairy’s stories are practical, not idealized,
in contrast to the variants with which readers will be familiar. The fairy’s frustration with
the princess’s inability to change mimics the narrative’s inability to move forward.
Coover does not resolve any of the questions he raises, nor does he offer a new
stable “Sleeping Beauty” story in place of the variants he destabilizes through negation.
But his unsettling of the narrative is not limited to issues of narration and the possibilities
printed on the page. Frustration permeates every aspect of the text so that even elements
not directly questioned by the plot are destabilized simply by virtue of being in the story.
Gender, which as I stated earlier is not explicitly questioned in the plot, is destabilized by
the unraveling of fairy-tale patterns that rely on specific configurations of gender. While
the use of the narrative blanks and degree of self-referentiality are quite different from
In this retelling, the blanks direct the reader to connect scenes despite it being
clear from character speech and focalization that the scenes are not related, which results
in emphasizing the multiplicity of fairy tale variants over a single “Sleeping Beauty” tale.
Of the forty-two scenes, seven end with questions and five end with a sentence or
the reader as to how to fill the gap. The first scene that ends with a question is the
fourteenth one,8 asking, “Does she ever dream of her disenchantment? Does she ever
dream of him?” (26). Scene 14 is focalized through the prince as the character of the
prince is meditating on his position stuck in the briar hedge. The questions supplied by
the narrator reflect the character’s “musing[s]” (26). Scene 15 offers an answer:
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“Certainly she dreamt of her sweetlipped prince all the time, says the fairy, in reply to
Rose’s question” (26). The two sections are not connected chronologically. The fairy in
scene 15 is not answering the question at the end of section 14. But the placement of the
question and seeming answer suggests that the two sections are simultaneous or at least
overlap. The reader bridges the blank space on the page by reading the first line of scene
15, focalized through the fairy, as an answer to the last line of scene 14, creating a
chronological connection not supported by the plot. The characters of the prince and
princess have no knowledge of each other and can only imagine the other. The prince-
character expects there to be a sleeping princess, and the princess-character expects there
to be a prince-rescuer because they are both familiar with the fairy tale. The reader of
Coover’s novel is also familiar with the fairy-tale pattern and expects a connection
between the sections, thus providing the chronological one suggested by the text.
The reader is not just negotiating the space of the single text, but she is also
negotiating the spaces between the retelling and the source texts and this destabilizes
both. Briar Rose, both Coover’s and Yolen’s, has a reciprocal relationship with its
intertexts, creating yet another virtual text through reader involvement in the process of
narrative construction. Intertextuality is not a one-way transmission where only one story
informs the other. A mutual relationship exists where the source tales influences the new
one and the new ones influences the intertexts. When a reader goes back to the “Sleeping
Beauty” stories by Perrault and Grimm, the reading experience will be different as a new
virtual text will be created when the reader interacts with the story. Jaroslav Kusnír, in his
article “Subversion of Myths: High and Low Cultures in Donald Barthelme’s Snow White
and Robert Coover’s Briar Rose,” characterizes Coover’s story of Briar Rose as an
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“invasion” of the “Sleeping Beauty” fairy tale (43). The questions raised by the
characters, for example “But why does he have to kiss her” (Coover, Briar Rose 57),
challenge the source text as well as other retellings, which makes Kusnír’s choice of
wording, invasion, so suitable. Kusnír explains that Coover uses “two basic strategies:
these characters’ self-reflexive contemplation and the alteration of the meaning of these
which alter not only the meaning of the original fairy tale, but also its impact on the
contemporary reading audience” (42-3). Coover is changing the “Sleeping Beauty” tale
by challenging not only the individual variations, but the idea that there is a single
“Sleeping Beauty” tale. The fairy’s different stories—the ones that she tells Rose—
Moon, and Talia,” in which the sleeping princess is raped and wakes after giving birth to
twins, and Perrault’s tale in which the princess says she has been dreaming of the prince),
which validates the different stories and denies an original “Sleeping Beauty.” Marie C.
Bouchet identifies this “repetition with variations” as the central feature of the novel in
her essay “Between Wake and Sleep: Robert Coover’s Briar Rose, A Playful
and desire, which challenges popular culture understanding of fairy tales as children’s
literature. Though clearly part of the “Sleeping Beauty” tradition, as seen in Basile’s
seventeenth-century version, for example, sex and desire are not explicit in popular
versions but rather implied through beauty, chaste kisses, and weddings. In Coover’s
Briar Rose sexual imagery and desire are explicit. Bouchet suggests that Coover is not
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just destabilizing popular conceptions of fairy tales and “Sleeping Beauty” by “laying
bare the sexual symbolism encoded in [the tale],” but that the novel also challenges
sexual desire (102). She points to the humor in the novel as part of the multiplicity that
undermines single interpretation. Desire is the focus of many sections, though not all of
the desire is sexual. There is the desire for closure, which is disrupted and questioned,
desire to be awake, desire for heroism, etc. There is “longing” that is “fragmented” (2).
The princess longs for integrity and wholeness, but is denied that through the constant
negation of scenes.
amplified by the fragmentation of the expected linear fairy-tale plot, which is never
represented in full and is visually broken by blank space on the page between scenes.
Pain gives a center for the characters, a focus in the fragmented desire. For the princess,
physical pain “locates a self when all else in sleep unbinds and scatters it” (5). While the
physical anchors the princess to reality, there is no “real” story to bring her back to. The
one stability for the princess in the plot of this novel is sleep. She is the sleeping princess
because that is her role in any version of the story and the one to which she always
returns. The princess is stuck in her role as the sleeping princess, waiting to awake. She
desires to be awoken, and many of her sections are concerned with her waking. That this
awakening, which is usually more sexual than a kiss and is often violent, has an audience
calls attention to sexual desire as socially regulated. Though the pain and desire to wake
provide some sense of stability for the princess, the multiplicity of princesses and desires
prevents the construction of an integrated, stable character. The princess always sleeps
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and always wants to awaken, but other characterizations differ from scene to scene. The
novel.
likewise mirrors and reinforces the inability of the plot to progress due to the repetition of
the core scene in the tale. The prince is produced by his quest; his identity is contingent
upon his role in the story as a rescuer: “It is almost as though his questing [. . .] were
inventing him” (15). Social scripts determine one’s role, which in turn determines one’s
identity. The brand of masculinity that the prince inhabits is determined by his
princely/quest role just as the princess’s passivity is inevitable because of her role as the
sleeping princess. In a different story, he would be a different man. The prince is the
product of social (and narrative) construction, and his type of masculinity is determined
by his role in the fairy tale. In one scene, the prince no longer wants to find Beauty, but
he is “compelled by vocation” to move forward (58). He is the hero (38) and trapped by
that role, unable to move on. Once he succeeds in his quest, there is no role left for him in
the fairy tale unless he begins again. This is represented in scene 38, when, after the
awakening, the princess and prince marry and the bored prince decides to rescue another
princess. Structurally, the story too never progresses. Closure—the happy ending—is
denied. An ironic instability is created by the repetition of the tale as the three characters
stay in place from one scene to the next despite the suggestion of movement and
progress, but they and the readers are never clear about which variant they inhabit. It
varies in each scene, and though many different variants of the tale are referenced, the
princess never awakens and the prince never leaves the briars. Even when they do, they
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return to the same place in the next scene. The ending is negated, and even the possibility
of an ending is questioned. This deferment and denial of closure is played out through the
different scenes.
multiple variations of the rescue of the princess in which the prince and princess are
characterized differently and enact the rescue differently. Scene 26 ends with Rose
saying, “Real stories aren’t like that. Real princes aren’t” (51). The twenty-seventh scene
begins with, “Her prince has come. The real one” (51). Focalization shifts from the fairy
in scene 26 to the princess in scene 27. In this case, the not-real prince of the twenty-sixth
contrasted with the prince in the twenty-seventh scene, who is shown to be more
interested in the items of value in the castle and his own handsome appearance than in
waking the sleeping woman. In addition, he did not have to go through an “ordeal” to
reach the castle (53). He has come for what is his, not to rescue anyone. Comparison
between these two princes—one modeled after a traditional fairy-tale prince and one
modeled after the vain and materialistic stereotype of the modern-day playboy—is
invited by the blank between scenes that directs readers to see the scenes as connected.
The paired wording suggests a thematic relationship: both scenes are about “real” princes
who are disappointments compared to the princess’s (and the reader’s) idealized
expectations. The pairing of the words “real” and “prince” on either side of the blank
encourages the reader to see a thematic relationship between the two scenes and to read
difference between dream, memory, desire, fear, and story in the various scenes remains
unclear, and a stable reality of the storyworld is denied. Readers are able to recreate a
semblance of order by making links between sections; this new order, however, is also
destabilized as one set of connections between scenes is undermined by the next. Blanks
compel readers to link scenes, but those connections cannot be maintained throughout the
novel as subsequent blanks direct readers to make new connections, negating the
previous ones. Any order the reader creates is temporary and cannot be sustained. The
disappointment of the reader who cannot achieve comprehension is mirrored within the
novel by the disappointment of the characters with each new awakening. The prince is
also depicted as a rapist, thief, monkey, and vampire, as well as other unsavory types.
The princess is shown to disappoint the prince by not meeting his expectations in
different ways, the most dramatic being when she is dead. She is raped and humiliated in
some scenes, or rather a Sleeping Beauty is. In some cases, these are dreams of the
princess, in others the fairy’s stories. As with the whole piece, the reality of the story is
Redies claims that there is “no clear ‘highest’ diegetic level” in the text, one story
in which the variations are all embedded (18). She allows for a reading of the text in
which all events are part of the princess’s dreams; however, she argues that this is a
problematic reading due to the multiple focalizers and “illusion of a number of diegetic
levels” (Redies 18). Redies points to references to the fairy controlling time and the
princess’s dreams as elements that undercut the possibility of the princess’s dreams being
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the first diegetic level of the text. But those details also make it possible that the sections
focalized through the fairy are the frame, as she repeatedly retells the many versions of
“Sleeping Beauty.” Though the plot does not privilege one focalizer’s sections over
another and multiple scenes can be interpreted as dreams of the princess, daydreams of
the prince, or stories told by the fairy, within the process of reading the book the reader is
creating a privileged diegetic level in her construction of the text. The diegetic phrases
that introduce the fairy’s stories (“the fairy relates”), the princess’s dreams (“she
dreams”), and the prince’s daydreams (“he has, in his imagination”) within each scene
delineate the embedded stories, suggesting that there is a frame story between scenes as
there must be an external narrator to utter these phrases. It is, however, a frame that is
Some blanks encourage the reader to fix two scenes as part of one storytelling
episode; however, using a traditional fairy-tale opening gesture keeps the time frame
vague, thus destabilizing it. The use of opening gestures (“There once was” and “Once
upon a time”) directs the reader to impose fairy-tale genre expectations on the story that
Harries in her discussion of framing gestures in Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and
the History of the Fairy Tale, is that fairy tales often occur in ambiguous settings where
time is unfixed (104). Scene 10 ends with the fairy saying to the princess, “Let me tell
you a story . . .” (17). Scene 11 begins, “There once was a beautiful young princess,
relates the fairy [. . .]” (18). Though not chronologically connected, the first of these two
scenes supports the setting for the second. The reader is induced by the blank to connect
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the two scenes and read them seamlessly with scene 11 as an embedded fairy-tale told by
the fairy to the princess. This particular pairing is repeated once more with scene 25 (“Let
me tell you a story”) and scene 26 (“Once upon a time, the fairy relates [. . .]”) (49).
Unlike the sections that end with questions, the ellipses suggest one narrative moment,
the fairy telling a story to the princess, where the focalization shifts from narratee to
narrator at the onset of the embedded story. The external narration is maintained by
diegetic tags, such as “the fairy relates” or “says” that denote dialogue despite the lack of
The layering and disconnecting of plots in Coover’s Briar Rose erode the
structure of the fairy tale and novel. The distinction between the embedded level of
narration told by the fairy and the frame story is diminished as the story progresses so
that the reader is left, at times, unsure of which story she is reading. The characters
themselves are often unaware of which story they are in as the “reality” of the story world
breaks down with each new layer of narration. By destabilizing narrative order in such a
confusing way, the concept of a “real” or original story is denied. Each is just as valid as
the others. Thematically this suggests that the world is made up of multiple stories
without an anchoring reality. Discourse is all there is, and multiple contradictory stories
can all be true. The final section ends with an ellipsis, instead of a period, suggesting that
the end is no end at all. The sections, while seemingly offering plot progression, are
interchangeable in terms of the time frame of the story: the prince remains in the briars,
the princess remains in her bed, and the fairy remains in her tower room. There is no
The happily-ever-after is, thus, certainly questioned in both print and hypertext
versions of Briar Rose. It is clear in the plot that marriage will not satisfy these characters
because of variants that are told in which the marriages that ensue are unhappy.
Presenting these unhappy endings, followed by a gap, and then a scene with a different
method similar to the serials analyzed by Robyn Warhol. One cannot help but ask, why
should they get married? and why does Coover not allow for other possibilities? For the
characters, the possibility of doing something else does not exist because the plot of
heteronormative plot. The constant repetition of the kiss/awakening scene and the
deferment of marriage effectively ruptures the pairing of the two elements, so that the
awakening of the sleeping beauty is broken off from the happily-ever-after marriage. As
heterosexual marriage is the expected end to fairy tales, denying that closure disrupts the
sexuality ingrained in the plot. The plot-level representation of unhappy ending after
unhappy ending questions the expectations about gender and sexuality in the sources. The
negation of closure aids that disruption on a structural level by denying the possibility of
a single happy ending with marriage. Though Coover does not offer other configurations
of sexuality or gender, the gaps and blanks provide a space in which the reader can
Coover exhausts the options available within normative gender and sexual patterns.
Coover represents the characters as stuck in particular roles, unable to act outside of the
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normative fairy-tale script, but the script, as the multiple iterations of the “Sleeping
Yolen’s Briar Rose and Coover’s Briar Rose seem to be making different
arguments about narrative if one only reads for story, particularly due to their very
different thematic focuses. However, if we examine how the novels destabilize fairy-tale
narratives, they are structurally very much alike. Gaps are created in both texts through
threads, and suspension and negation of closure. Blanks occur in the text when a new
section is started and when the fairy-tale narrative is suspended by an interruption from
an alternative narrative, enticing the readers to relate the text to the overall story arc of
the “Sleeping Beauty” tale. The interruption of fairy-tale and novel narrative patterns that
results from these interwoven and fragmented narratives additionally destabilizes the
ideologies of gender of the source tales. In terms of gender theory, this destabilization
suggests that gender, like narrative, is a construct. It is, as Teresa de Lauretis explains in
The Technology of Gender, “the product of various social technologies, such as cinema,
practices of daily life” (2). I would add fairy tales to her list of social and narrative
technologies.
Though interventions in the production of gender are not at issue in the plots of
either novel, calling attention to how gender is constructed is. As de Lauretis further
argues, “The representation of gender is its construction” (3). While not particularly
and the gender theory I have engaged, and it leads me to believe that Yolen’s and
possibilities for femininity, because it is secondary and deconstructive. The blanks and
deconstructive mode here set more reflection and unease in motion in readers and
audiences than the “new” role models in films such as Ever After. These two novels
undermine not just specific representations of gender, but the very stability of normative
gender constructs.
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NOTES
Introduction
1. See Frus and Williams (2010), “Introduction: Making Case the for
1. See Salman Rushdie’s The Wizard of Oz and Alissa Burger’s “Wicked and
2. Propp analyzed one hundred tales to develop his functions, which primarily
feature male protagonists, as his examples demonstrate. In his dramatis personae, the
hero is identified as male, and the princess (a sought-for person) and her father are
identified as another, combined persona. The functions feature male heroes, and Propp
only accounts for female heroes in the case of the victimized hero (he parenthetically
allows for male victimized heroes but not female seeker heroes). Propp says that
character sex is not tied to function (87); however, hero is not a gender-neutral term in
associated with stepmothers, and while most of the motifs are worded to suggest that the
stepmother acts in opposition to the desires of the hero(ine), clearly aligning her with
Propp’s villain, only one is identified as “cruel” (S31). However, “Cruel stepmother” is a
his novel, he is also working with the popularized conception of the stepmother figure as
wicked, and it is this popular understanding of the character that I examine in this
chapter. I refer to the stepmother figure throughout as “wicked,” rather than “cruel,” to
avoid confusing the popularized wicked stepmother with the cruel stepmother motif that
5. For an analysis of Briar Rose, see Sünje Redies, “Return with New
High and Low Cultures in Donald Barthelme’s Snow White and Robert Coover’s Briar
Rose,” and Marie C. Bouchet, “Between Wake and Sleep: Robert Coover’s Briar Rose, A
6. Fairy tales are of course much more diverse than the popular canon, and there
are a variety of female heroes and complex female characters in tales from around the
world. See Angela Carter’s The Old Wives Fairy Tale Book and Kathleen Ragan’s
Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales from Around the
Chapter 2: The Shoe Still Fits: Ever After and the Pursuit of a Feminist Cinderella
1. For a sampling of reviews that use “feminist” to describe the film, see The
New York Times (Holden) and People (Rozen); for “post-feminist,” see Los Angeles
2. Linda Pershing and Lisa Gablehouse aptly refer to this idea as “faux
3. For a discussion of the marketing of Ever After to teenage girls, see Moira
McCormick.
4. See Cristina Bacchilega and John Rieder’s essay for a discussion of the
5. In The Enchanted Screen, Jack Zipes argues that I “misinterpret” the frame of
the narrative, which he says “raises important questions of authenticity and narrative
a collection of essays on fairy-tale films. I agree with Zipes that the frame “raises
questions of authenticity and narrative appropriation,” which I explain above. I also agree
with his argument that “who gets to tell his or her story” is important (Zipes, Enchanted
188). The film most certainly raises the question and suggests that the Grand Dame holds
the power in the scene because it is her story to tell. But her authority is undercut by the
visual narrative of the film. Zipes suggests that the Grimms “do not protest” the Grand
Dame’s version of the story and that they are “apparently jostled by the ‘truth’” (Zipes,
Enchanted 188). This is true, but the Grimms are still the most important people in the
scene; that is why the camera follows them after they have been dismissed by the Grand
Dame. She holds the power in the plot of the film’s frame—summoning the Grimms,
correcting their mistake, and dismissing them. But film is also a visual medium, and the
visual narrative does not end with the Grand Dame and her authority; it ends with the
Grimms leaving the realm of her authority and going back into the space where their
historical truth the frame implies. The American myth of a classless society,
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courtier to princess, is further enacted by Prince Henry’s desire to open a free university,
7. Though she is not originally of the servant class, this is the most common
9. See Cristina Bacchilega and Steven Swann Jones for a discussion of the
10. Many of the fairy-tale princess/heroine stereotypes that Ever After engages are
11. See Pauline Greenhill and Emilie Anderson-Gregoire for a discussion of these
12. Danielle’s demonstrations of strength (the girl power and feminist moments
cited by reviewers) are enacted out of a greater understanding of morality, formed by her
schooling in socialism at the foot of her father and Thomas More. She dresses above her
station and lies to the prince about her identity to save a servant sold into slavery. Despite
her selfless motivation, she does not take any action to better society (other than chastise
the prince).
13. Both Leonardo and Gustave hint at a different kind of masculinity: neither is
artists, a feminized career-path in present day. While powerful, they are no threat to the
prince.
clothes and makeup goes to Harvard Law School to win back a boy, only to discover she
is actually smart. Her interest in fashion gives her a legal edge over the other more
serious students.
Link
1. See my article “The Silent Struggle: Autonomy for the Maiden Who Seeks
Her Brothers” for how “Swans” fits in with other retellings of this tale type.
2. The Grimms have two other stories of this tale type, ‘‘The Twelve Brothers’’
and ‘‘The Seven Ravens,” which feature tasks for the heroine different from the ones
described here. Their “The Six Swans” and Andersen’s “The Wild Swans” are, however,
3. There is an adaptation that blends the Grimms’ “Maiden Who Seeks Her
Brothers” tales as part of Jim Henson’s The StoryTeller series, titled “The Three Ravens,”
which is much more likely to be familiar to adolescents now that it is available on DVD.
5. “Magic for Beginners” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy &
6. See Cristina Bacchilega and Steven Swann Jones for a discussion of the
godmother figure.
Chapter 4: Gaps in the Briar Hedge: The Reader’s Role in Awakening Briar Rose
1. There is a variety of literature and scholarship about fairy tales and trauma,
particularly trauma from sexual abuse; however, here I only draw on work about fairy
tales and trauma that specifically discusses the Holocaust, including Kidd.
2. The novels that Landwehr analyzes by Yolen and Murphy are not texts written
by Holocaust survivors, whereas Haase focuses on narratives from adults who were
children that experienced trauma during World War II, Corinna Sargood and Magdna
Denes, in addition to Dear Mili, a story written by Wilhelm Grimm about a girl displaced
by war and illustrated by Maurice Sendak who alludes to the Holocaust and World War II
in his illustrations but is not a child survivor himself. Haase also discusses the testimony
of Dinah Babbitt Gottlieb, an adult survivor of Auschwitz who recalls children in the
camp wanting her to paint images from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Haase calls attention to the differences between narratives by trauma survivors and those
about trauma survivors, but argues that both utilize the fairy tale for the same reasons.
3. See Doris L. Bergan’s essay “The Barbarity of Footnotes: History and the
Holocaust” for a discussion of “who belongs inside the category ‘victims of the
Becca’s mentors is a lesbian (50), Becca assumes a possible rival for her love interest’s
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affection is a lesbian (76, 77), and a colleague misunderstands Becca’s statement that she
5. This detail is also noted by Hennard Dutheil de la Rochére and Viret in their
essay (418).
Genevieve, Dawna, Księźniczka, Princess Briar Rose, Eve, Eva Potocki—but none are
given as her “real” name. All are names given to her by other people after she awakens
from the gas poisoning. She is identified by her role in the story and the role she occupies
in the “Sleeping Beauty” plot. Each name is symbolically linked to her role at the time it
7. Scholes’s hypertext option creates a different virtual text from the one created
by a reader interacting with a book version of the novel. In the hypertext version, the
reader is encouraged to navigate the scenes in whichever order she arbitrarily chooses.
And yet, the breaks between scenes are still blanks that invite a reader to see scenes in
relation to other scenes. Because the text uses the same patterns repeatedly, rearranging
the sections, while resulting in a different order, the blanks still induce a reader familiar
with fairy-tale and narrative structure to make connections not necessarily supported by
the plot. However, because the scenes are interchangeable, themes of multiplicity and the
8. The scenes are not numbered or in any way titled in the text. I refer to
numbers only for convenience. My numbers match those of the hypertext version.
213
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