RE-CONCEPTUALIZING GENDER THROUGH NARRATIVE PLAY

IN FAIRY-TALE RETELLINGS

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE

UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

IN

ENGLISH

DECEMBER 2012

By

Christy Williams

Dissertation Committee:

Cristina Bacchilega, Chairperson

Miriam Fuchs
Joan Peters
John Zuern
Monisha Das Gupta
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for my father, KD Lawson,

who encouraged my addiction to stories

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my committee for their insightful criticism and

encouragement, especially Cristina Bacchilega whose mentorship has been invaluable. I

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

throughout the entire process.

The Stepmother analysis in Chapter 1 is a revision of “Who’s Wicked Now? The

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

Aquamarine in Chapter 2 is expanded from a section of “Mermaid Tales on Screen:

Splash, The Little Mermaid, and Aquamarine” published in Beyond Adaptation: Essays

on Radical Transformations of Original Works, edited by Phyllis Frus and Christy

Williams (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010).

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ABSTRACT

This dissertation contributes to scholarship on contemporary fairy-tale retellings

by exploring how gender is conceptualized, or not, as an unstable construct through

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

conceptualization and narrative structures can work in concert, in opposition, or by

revealing alternate possibilities, and I focus on the complexity with which retellings re-

envision traditional fairy tales—paying particular attention to plot, narration, and

metafiction. My purpose is to show how gender ideologies and narrative structures

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,

and the resulting degeneration of fairy-tale narrative patterns opens up fairy-tale

fragments to be signified in new and multifaceted ways.

In each chapter I engage in both narratological and interpretative analysis in order

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

Coover’s Stepmother, Garth Nix’s “An Unwelcome Guest,” and Catherynne M.

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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

White, and Aquamarine. I demonstrate how destabilizing narrative strategies, most

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

conceptualizing alternative gender configurations not present in the story in Robert

Coover’s Briar Rose and Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS........................................................................................................... ii

ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................................... iii

INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................... 1

Fairy Tales and Contemporary Feminisms ................................................................... 4

The History of Fairy Tales and Gender Criticism ...................................................... 10

The Variety of Terminology in Analyzing Retellings ................................................ 15

Narratology in Fairy-Tale and Feminist Studies ......................................................... 19

Defining Terminology ................................................................................................ 24

The Chapters ............................................................................................................... 30

CHAPTER 1: WHO’S WICKED NOW? THE STEPMOTHER AS FAIRY-TALE HEROINE ............ 37

The Making of a Wicked Stepmother ......................................................................... 43

Coover’s Unmaking of the “Wicked” Stepmother ..................................................... 48

Who’s Wicked Now? .................................................................................................. 57

Understanding Wickedness ......................................................................................... 66

Garth Nix’ s “An Unwelcome Guest” (2009) ....................................................... 68

Catherynne M. Valente’s “A Delicate Architecture” (2009) ............................... 71

CHAPTER 2: THE SHOE STILL FITS: EVER AFTER AND THE PURSUIT OF A FEMINIST

CINDERELLA ...................................................................................................................... 77
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Framing Danielle’s Feminism..................................................................................... 82

Danielle’s Masque ...................................................................................................... 87

Girl Power to the Rescue ............................................................................................ 92

The Absence of Female Power ................................................................................... 98

The Obligatory Happily Ever After .......................................................................... 100

After Ever After......................................................................................................... 102

Sydney White (2007) ........................................................................................... 104

Aquamarine (2006) ............................................................................................. 112

CHAPTER 3: AMBIVALENCE AND AMBIGUITY IN THE FRAGMENTED FAIRY TALES OF KELLY

LINK ................................................................................................................................ 120

Structured Gendering ................................................................................................ 126

“Swans” (2000) ......................................................................................................... 130

“Magic for Beginners” (2005) .................................................................................. 140

“The Cinderella Game” (2009) ................................................................................. 150

CHAPTER 4: GAPS IN THE BRIAR HEDGE: THE READER’S ROLE IN AWAKENING BRIAR

ROSE ................................................................................................................................ 166

Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose (1992/2002)....................................................................... 173

Robert Coover’s Briar Rose (1996) .......................................................................... 191

NOTES .............................................................................................................................. 206

BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................ 213

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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

feminist fairy tales from 1986:

Instead of focusing directly on gender issues and radicalizing the canon,

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

endeavoring to unravel the causes of their predicaments and use narrative

strategies that both reflect the degeneration of communication and are

somewhat degenerative themselves. The result is dissent that seeks to

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disassociate writer and reader from the brutalization and banalization of

American life, but it is also a dissent that is worrisome, for it reflects how

estranged Americans are from one another. (Relentless Progress 130)

Zipes recognizes that some contemporary women writers of fairy tales treat gender issues

as part of a larger complex of problems instead of in isolation and that protagonists in

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

“more joyful and hopeful” fairy-tale canon (Relentless Progress 139).

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

producing new conceptualizations of gender in fairy-tale retellings, conceptualizations

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 and Contemporary Feminisms

Fairy tales are a kind of fiction that scripts lives, and how they do this is a primary

concern of critics interested in fairy tales as literature of socialization. Marina Warner

(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

readers in identifying with the protagonists . . . . Schematic characterization leaves a gap

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

suggest alternative ways of being.

Many feminist retellings of fairy tales seek to counter the representations of

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

commercial project of pseudo-feminist hegemony that focuses on individual

achievements of gender equality abstracted from other realities and acceptant of

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

works suggest a disconnection between how feminism is conceptualized in commercial

fairy-tale products and how it is conceptualized in academia and fairy-tale studies.

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

representation of feminism in fairy tales is not representative of the range of responses

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

terms of gender and narrative construction.

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Stephen Benson (2008) has described contemporary fairy-tale fiction by writers

such as Emma Donoghue and Jeanette Winterson as “post-Angela Carter” fairy-tale

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

fiction. Benson describes a “rich creative-critical dialogue” that characterizes what he

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

figureheads, Benson sketches a contemporary understanding of the fairy tale in which

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).

Bringing in contemporary theory can open up readings of new fictions because we

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

with gender performativity and undoing throughout my analysis, as her theorizing in

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

gender is a relational category—a norm produced by (and producing) the recognition of

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

masculine/feminine is evidence of the gender binary being naturalized as male/female.

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.

My focus is to connect the act of troubling gender more generally with

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

generally, I ask, how do contemporary fairy-tale retellings and adaptations, shaped by

postmodernism and feminism, conceptualize gender through narrative play?

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

narrators (which give agency to secondary characters, silent protagonists, or villains).

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

chapters in my dissertation demonstrate different ways that metafictional narrative

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

between narrative studies and gender studies.

One of my contributions, then, in studying fairy-tale retellings is to shift the focus

from gender socialization to considerations of gender construction that trouble the

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

methodology, I also intervene in existing discussions on gender and narrative in fairy-tale

retellings. I am shifting the questions from what fairy-tale retellings say about gender to

how gender as an unstable construct is conceptualized through the narrative strategies

employed in fairy-tale retelling. Thus, I see my dissertation project as intervening in

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

feminism, classical and feminist narratology, and postmodernism.

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The History of Fairy Tales and Gender Criticism

In tracing the history of feminist fairy-tale scholarship, Donald Haase (2004)

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.

Early studies focused on the representations of women. The Lurie/Lieberman

debate, for example, concerned representations of heroines as passive or active. Marcia

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

popularized in Anglo-American collections of the Grimms and in Disney films. Stone

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

motherhood. However the reception of these passive representations of women has

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

tale and female audience than one of passive socialization.

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

Girls and Bold Boys (1987).

Karen Rowe (1986) focuses on the representation of women as storytellers. Rowe

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

audiences in illustrations that accompany published collections of tales, suggesting that

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

associated with female narrative voices and storytelling action.

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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

of tales by writers who wish to challenge established ideologies.

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

published. Of interest to her is a “pattern of female authorship” of fairy tales, a tradition

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

postmodern writers Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie.

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

relegated the women writers of the seventeenth century to a neglected position. As

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

the overturning of conventions of inequality and restriction” (Introduction 12-3). Most

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

[fairy-tale] genre” (“Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship” 30). He explains that “[r]evisionist

mythmaking, after all, enacts ambivalence by simultaneously rejecting and embracing the

fairy tale” (Haase, “Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship” 30). This ambivalence is important

because it can be a site of productivity.

The Variety of Terminology in Analyzing Retellings

One important discussion in fairy-tale narrative studies is how to classify the

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
 16

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

with his terms.

Cristina Bacchilega (1997) complicates Zipes’s pairing by arguing that retellings

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

postmodern retellings do both simultaneously by reflecting, refracting, and framing their

source tales (Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales 10). Bacchilega turns to Judith Butler

and her discussions of performativity to explain how, as performances of fairy tales,

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 and other contemporary retellings, suggesting that “narrative strategies

(doubling as both deconstructive and reconstructive mimicry) and subject representations

(self-contradictory versions of the self in performance)” are the distinguishing factors of

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

important site of interpretation.

While Bacchilega focuses on fairy-tale retellings in the late twentieth century,

Elizabeth Wanning Harries also addresses Zipes’s pairing by arguing that revision has
 17

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

distinction should not be what a twentieth- or twenty-first-century tale does to a

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

presented by Zipes to one in which narrative is a key element.

In the recent collection of essays on fairy-tale fiction Contemporary Fiction and

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

same time mirrors Bacchilega’s understanding of these complex retellings as postmodern.

In examining Zipes’s initial terms, Makinen concludes, not surprisingly, that binary

categories are semiotically bankrupt when applied to fairy-tale retellings.

My point in bringing up this discussion of terminology is to show that at the turn

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
 18

different types of contemporary fairy-tale retellings. I think this struggle for words

demonstrates that fairy-tale adaptations go about the narrative work of retelling in a

variety of complicated ways, and that the exclusive focus on postmodernist revision as a

critique of ideology is inadequate when it comes to understanding what fairy-tale

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

fairy tale, though categorized as a genre, is not confined by genre boundaries, an

observation necessary for the genre-blurring work that Gregory Rubinson (2005) argues

is so crucial to postmodern critique. In her article, “Disrupting the Boundaries of Genre

and Gender,” 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 that we might most simply identify as cultural knowledge” (210). She
 19

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

others it is gender. Stephen Benson’s Cycles of Influence (2003) is a good example of a

book that treats narrative in conjunction with gender and feminist critique, but confines

feminist critique to a single chapter. In my project, I aim to focus precisely on how

understandings of gender are enabled (or not) by the narrative strategies employed in

retelling.

Narratology in Fairy-Tale and Feminist Studies

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

narratology drew on folktales to create models of narrative. Stephen Benson, in Cycles of

 20

Influence (2003), synthesizes a history of fairy tales and narratology, but he also looks at

postmodern and feminist interventions in studying narrative in fairy tales. He explains,

“Folktales are intrinsically unstable, furnishing perhaps the best example of the theory—

fundamental to narratology—that the basic constituent elements of a narrative can be

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

expanded by Hans-Jörg Uther in The Types of International Folktales (2004). This

classification allows the critic to identify a particular tale based on different sequences of

episodes and plot patterns.

Readings such as those based on “general character” (Propp 3), however, have

gone out of fashion, as Benson explains:

In the case of theory, enquiry into the workings of narrative has moved

away from, indeed critiqued, the search for deep structures and abstract,

essential geometries, in favor of a pluralistic concern for desire itself in the

productive interaction of narrative space, including the possibilities of

interactivity, in postmodernist theories; and for the specificities of context

on feminist and postcolonial concerns for a pragmatics of narrative.

(Cycles of Influence 17)

 21

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

constructing a sophisticated understanding of fairy tales and how they work.

More generally, Kathy Mezei (1996) has argued that feminist narratology is

particularly useful in “expos[ing] ambiguities and indeterminacies” in postmodern texts

concerned with “the elusive or decentered subject” (10). Feminist narratology or

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

at which the introduction of gender to narratological analysis becomes interpretive. Susan

Lanser (1986, 1988) presents feminist narratology as interpretation concerned with the

gender of authors and narrators. While Nelli Diengott (1988) contends that introducing a

feminist heuristic to narratology defeats the objective purpose of narratology to analyze

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,

narrator, character, or reader “produces yet another interpretive methodology that

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

challenges conventional discourse in order to argue that when women’s narration is

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

discourse tied to subversive forms of narration.

Sally Robinson (1991) is also interested in “how gender is produced through

narrative processes, not prior to them” (198, n. 23), and she argues that “women’s self-

representation most often proceeds by a double movement: simultaneously against

normative constructions of Woman that are continually produced by hegemonic

discourses and social practices, and toward new forms of representation that disrupt those

normative constructions” (11). While I echo Robinson’s interest in how gender is

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

gender is conceptualized. While feminist narratology may seem like an obvious

methodology for my analysis because I am interested in intersections between gender and

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

not applicable for my project.

Rather than drawing on the specific methodologies of feminist narratologies, I am

indebted to the multiple ways of understanding how gender is present in texts beyond the

idea of how gender is represented. In this project, I am using narratological tools to

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

a feminist narratological one because I am also interested in interpreting how gender is

represented in the texts I analyze and exploring how the narrative strategies employed in

the texts support, complicate, or undermine those representations.

Underpinning my argument is the idea that narrative is multi-vocal, which means

that multiple discourses can work with and against each other in a text. Retellings make

that multivocality explicit by reproducing and challenging the ideological discourse of

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

ideological, and the novel orchestrates multiple ideologically oriented discourses.

 24

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

my analysis is informed by his concepts of dialogism, of the presence of opposing

discourses, and of double-voice, the way in which an utterance conveys two positions

simultaneously.

Defining Terminology

While I am indebted to the larger aims of feminist narratology, I also find

structuralist narratology, particularly the typology developed by Gérard Genette (1972,

1983), useful in describing how the different narratives I analyze are constructed. Of

particular use is Genette’s contribution of the concept of focalization. Traditional fairy

tales are often narrated by external narrators with an authoritative voice. Retellings often

use characters as narrators to introduce subjective points of view. Genette’s distinction

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

accounting for what is perceived and what is not.

I utilize Propp’s grammar in referring to the functions of characters. Function, for

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

changes to characterization and changes in function (taking on a different role in a

 25

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

Fludernik (2006/2009) distinguishes the two meanings of “story” by returning to the

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

specific iteration or organization of those events (An Introduction to Narratology 4). I am

tempted to use Fludernik’s terminology as it provides a way of discussing story at

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

narrated in a particular fiction or film. When referring to the shared characteristics of

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

fairy tales and function on their own.

In my analysis, I examine a variety of metafictional narrative strategies, strategies

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

and/or linguistic identity” (Narcissistic Narrative 1). Hutcheon divides contemporary

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

narrative” in the living handbook of narratology, a wiki maintained by narratologists (par.

5).

Neither Hutcheon nor Rose makes a distinction between metafiction and

metanarrative, and it is only recently that critics argue that the two terms are not

interchangeable. Ansgar Nünning (2004), in making an argument for the need to

differentiate metanarrative from metafiction, limits the term metanarrative to narratorial

comments about narrative. Fludernik (2003) explains that Nünning “starts out from a

distinction between metanarration and metafiction, arguing that metanarration

‘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

metafictionality designates the quality of disclosing the fictionality of a narrative,

metanarration captures those forms of self-reflexive narration in which aspects of

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

define metanarrative as narration about narration, that is, self-reflexive narrative

comments that refer to the process of narrating. Both critics schematize ways in which

metanarrative can be further broken down as a category.

 28

My analysis focuses on narrative strategies that disrupt fairy-tale plots and

structures, calling attention to how the narratives are constructed. While on occasion I

refer to metanarrative narratorial comments, the majority of techniques I describe—

change in perspective and voice, interruptions of one narrative thread with another,

embedded stories, suspending or denying fairy-tale endings, collapsing character types—

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

than grouping them together under a metafictional or metanarrative umbrella. However

when I do group them, I use the more general and widely used definition of metafiction

and refer to the strategies’ metafictional effect.

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,

cataloged a list of terms currently in circulation: “fairy-tale retelling, reversion, revision,

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

from a retelling of “Sleeping Beauty.” Karin Kukkonen’s (2008) concept of popular

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

reproduced, and be “objectivised” or “generalised” from its textual context (Kukkonen

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

My analysis will focus on both popular and experimental fairy-tale retellings in

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

turn of the twenty-first century.

 31

Not surprisingly, the fairy-tale fictions I will analyze have been connected with

postmodern narrative strategies. Gregory Rubinson (2005) lists the most common

“conventions” of postmodernism as “genre mixing and self-consciousness about genre

convention; an explicit attention to the construction and constitution of cultural sign-

systems; intertextual references; re-readings and re-writings of old texts including

literature, myth, and scripture; metafictional authorial intrusions; a de-personalized,

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

specifically interested in how they challenge established systems of gender. In addition to

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

calling attention to the fictiveness of the story, through narrative interruptions,

metanarrative addresses to the reader (mimesis of narration), framing, and embedding;

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

narrative-destabilizing techniques are used in conjunction with the texts’ destabilization

of gender.

In each chapter I engage in both narratological and interpretative analysis in order

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

a conceptualization of alternative gender configurations not present in the story.

My focus in Chapter 1 is how traditional fairy-tale narrative patterns are

disrupted. I analyze three retellings that question the fairy-tale genre’s authoritative

narrative patterns by unmaking the concept of wickedness, which is identified with

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-

characterization of female villains do so by dismantling traditional fairy-tale narrative

patterns. In Robert Coover’s Stepmother (2004), my primary case study, I analyze

Coover’s use of first-person narration from a traditional villain to recontextualize her

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

shorter analyses, I examine how first-person narration from a traditional villain

recontextualizes the villain’s actions and characterizes her as a victim, thus creating

reader sympathy for the villain in Catherynne M. Valente’s “A Delicate Architecture”

(2009). In all three cases, the interrogation of wickedness and master narratives is

facilitated through traditional female villains. A side effect of challenging narratives

about wickedness and showing that they are subjective is to raise questions about the

stories we construct about gender.

In Chapter 2, I argue that complex representations of gender as a construct, which

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

(1998), my primary example, is a “Cinderella” retelling that utilizes role-reversal

techniques to represent the Cinderella figure (Danielle) as a strong, independent

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

the heterosexual imperative of the plot. In Aquamarine (2006, a “Little Mermaid”

retelling) the same marriage plot is undermined by the film’s focus on female friendship

as an alternative to competitive femininities. I draw on Judith Butler’s work with

performativity, Judith Halberstam’s discussion of female masculinity, and Mary Ann

Doane’s analysis of feminine masquerade to show how gender is conceptualized in the

films.

In Chapter 3, I propose that reliance on structures from traditional fairy tales

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

fragments rather than structures results in a conceptualization of gender that diverges

from the source tales’ representation of femininity and masculinity as bound by

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

outside a heterosexual matrix by circumventing the marriage that is expected as a fairy-

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,

I argue, tied to a thematic questioning of fairy-tale gender representations.

In Chapter 4, I suggest that destabilizing narrative structures that rely on specific

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

naturalized conceptions of gender, like the narrative structures, can be unraveled. My

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:

suspension of the narrative, multiple focalization, embedded stories, competing narrative

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

conceptualization of gender in a story, through techniques like representation and

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

opposition, or by revealing alternate possibilities, I do not mean to provide a new set

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

narrative patterns opens up fairy-tale fragments to be signified in new and multifaceted

ways.
 37

CHAPTER 1

WHO’S WICKED NOW? THE STEPMOTHER AS FAIRY-TALE HEROINE

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

witch’s perspective is certainly a common strategy for deconstructing a good/evil binary,

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

narratives are constructed and naturalized as authoritative in the source tales by

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

universal themes. By pointing our attention to the constructedness of fairy-tale

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

narratives is what I refer to as these retellings’ “metafictional effect.”

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

genre’s authoritative narrative patterns by unmaking the concept of wickedness also

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

in those master narratives is also deconstructed.

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

inherited from fairy tales.

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

vengeance. The sequence “execution of her daughter and Stepmother’s subsequent

revenge” is not a new plot to Stepmother, as she repeats it over and again with each of

her daughters, the many heroines of fairy-tale tradition:

 40

How many I’ve seen go this way, daughters, stepdaughters, whatever—

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

thereafter I unleash a storm of hell, or at least what’s in my meager power

to raise, and so do my beautiful wild daughters, it’s a kind of violent

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

tumbling nail-studded barrels. (1-2)

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

each new daughter’s appearance.

The impetus of the novel is summed up in its second sentence, narrated by

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

other characters struggle against their predetermined fairy-tale characterizations 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

because it “sickens” her and someone has to.

In this postmodern retelling of fairy-tale conventions, Coover challenges the

static, predetermined roles of fairy-tale characters. His characters express dissatisfaction

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,

Stepmother challenges the authority of popular fairy-tale narrative patterns. In “Popular

 42

Cultural Memory: Comics, Communities and Context Knowledge,” Karin Kukkonen

refers to these types of popular fairy-tale patterns as elements of “popular cultural

memory” (261). Popular cultural memory is formed when a community shares

knowledge of a text, it is “constantly reconstructed,” and it is fragmented so that the

“unspecified elements” of the text are objectified out of context and become “generalized

. . . . into conventions, icons, character types and standard situations” (Kukkonen 263,

emphasis in the original). These fairy-tale patterns—perpetuated by the reproduction of a

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

not allow other stories to take root.

I argue that in this de-naturalizing project, Coover’s conflation of fairy-tale

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

Stepmother explodes the standard notions of what a fairy-tale heroine is by revealing an

(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

are. Stepmother encourages readers’ identification with a traditional villain through

 43

shifting focalization, and it unmasks the limitations of one-dimensional gendered

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

narratives that regulate identity constructs necessarily relies on a demonstration of how

gender is a constructed concept. His is a critique of the authority of narratives in general,

and narratives about gender are disrupted as a consequence. Within a deconstructive

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.

The Making of a Wicked Stepmother

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

as an act of protection. The “kind” stepdaughter is annoying and sanctimonious, and

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

context of those actions Coover challenges the traditional classifications and

understandings of the fairy tale.

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

“wicked stepmother” to Preston’s list of examples. Preston’s fragments are the

“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

Preston’s focus on “fragment” is particularly useful for analyzing Stepmother because

Coover does not work solely from the “cruel stepmother” motif (S31), but instead

combines a variety of other stepmother motifs, stereotypes, and assumptions from

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

specific academic designations. Referring to “fragment,” then, redirects the unit’s

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

to tolerate that that of cruel mothers” (37).

Bruno Bettelheim’s Freudian interpretation of the Grimms’ tales in Uses of

Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales provides a psychological

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

tales has done irreparable damage to the genre and to motherhood:

The bad mother has become an inevitable, even required ingredient in

fantasy, and hatred of her a legitimate, applauded stratagem of psychic

survival. Bettelheim’s theory has contributed to the continuing absence of

good mothers from fairy tales in all kinds of media, and to a dangerous

degree which itself mirrors current prejudices and reinforces them. His

argument, and its tremendous diffusion and widespread acceptance, have

effaced from memory the historical reasons for woman’s cruelty within

the home and have made such behaviour seem natural, even intrinsic to

the mother-child relationship. It has even helped to ratify the expectation

of strife as healthy and the resulting hatred as therapeutic. (212-3)

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

embraced as the fairy-tale villain.

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

straightforward psychoanalytic reading of the wicked stepmother figure is incomplete, as

in addition to the Grimms’ editorial practices, it neglects sociohistorical cultural context

(Tatar, Hard Facts 49-50; Warner, From the Beast 212-14). Both scholars refer to the
 48

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

(From the Beast 215).

Coover’s Unmaking of the “Wicked” Stepmother

Coover’s use of first-person narration, with the stepmother telling her own

experience of events, encourages reader-identification with Stepmother. In referring to

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
 49

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

Narrative Strategies, Cristina Bacchilega explains that “an external or impersonal

narrator whose straightforward statements carry no explicit mark of human perspective—

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

an extradiegetic narrator, present information as objective knowledge or “fact”

(Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales 34). In this way, extradiegetic narration

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

recognizable as knowledgeable in fairy-tale tradition. Thus the reader is able to both

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

imbued with the authority expected of a traditional extradiegetic narrator.

This inclusion of Stepmother as narrator makes it difficult to simply characterize

her as wicked. In telling her own story, she provides motivation and context for her

actions, thus questioning traditional interpretations of the same actions rendered in

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

interpretation of Stepmother’s character and actions by shifting narration and

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
 51

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

relegated to this victim/villain dichotomy where passivity is virtuous and activity

villainous:

feminist theorists point to the patriarchal inscriptions of the best known

tales such as “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty,” with their vaunting of

feminine passivity and rejection of feminine activity as wicked or

monstrous. Feminist fairy-tale historians argue for women’s active roles as

tellers of stories and for tales that celebrate active female protagonists and

feminine wisdom while acknowledging that these tales have been largely

suppressed by the predominantly male compilers. (148-9)

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

White” in The Madwoman in the Attic (36).

Coover challenges the hold of popular fairy-tale conventions, including the

female victim/villain dichotomy, by reducing many standard fairy-tale characters to their

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

new interpretations, and characters who show metafictional awareness of the

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

traditional fairy-tale authority within boundaries of the storyworld of Reaper’s Woods.

Coover conflates well-known fairy-tale stepmothers into one character, though

Stepmother is complex enough not to be an archetype or stereotype. Likewise, he blends

all fairy-tale maidens—“daughters, stepdaughters, whatever”—into a single role where

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
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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.

Coover’s characterization of Stepmother, though, is not one of role-reversal. Stepmother

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

save all of her daughters.

While Coover takes on this task of disassociating “wicked” from “stepmother,” he

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.

He develops Stepmother as a character, exploring her motivation and ambition rather

than changing her into an opposite type. Thus Coover creates a new story on old patterns

by dismantling the caricature of the wicked stepmother.

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

Coover’s “The Door,” characters in Stepmother do not have the possibility of

transcending their appellations.

By utilizing the metafictional technique of creating characters aware of their

existence in a fiction, Coover illustrates how one-dimensional victim/villain roles

reserved for female fairy-tale characters constrain representations of femininity. Initially,

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Stepmother identifies herself as a witch: “I’m a witch, I should be able to do something.

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

the fairy-tale realm.

As a part of his larger critique of traditional authorities, Coover, however, goes

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

characters of the princes and recontextualizes them so that their characterization as

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
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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

brothers’ malicious behavior is all part of the misogynistic patterns established by

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.

Coover underscores some of the gender inequality in popular fairy tales by

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.

Retellings of fairy tales that challenge gender norms by representing alternatives

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

in Technologies of Gender that “[t]he representation of gender is its construction” and

that “the construction of gender is also effected by its deconstruction: that is to say, by

any discourse, feminist or otherwise, that would disregard it as ideological

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

evil, the other is disrupted in the process.

Who’s Wicked Now?

The ambiguity in Stepmother created from the narrative, character, 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,

conventional fairy-tale patterns that have been reproduced and naturalized as

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
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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.

Coover’s deconstruction of fairy-tale narratives relies on his impeding of those

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:

a complex genre that authoritatively disseminates narratives of social construction. He

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

popularized, conventional patterns of the Western fairy-tale genre to reveal them as

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

the people who assume them to be authoritative.

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

inescapability of plot and Stepmother’s desire to change it:

I [Stepmother] would like my daughter to be set free. I can arrange for her

immediate disappearance, never to return, so she will never trouble you or

the forest again.

Alas, madam, I [Reaper] cannot do that. She has been adjudged wicked

and must be rightfully punished.

Others have gotten away with more. Send the barrel rolling without her.

No one will ever know.

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,

argues that the appearance of fidelity is not fidelity.

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

and appealing to the Reaper, Stepmother, as a character, reaffirms his authority. As a

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

character are not wholly successful.

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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

“Sleeping Beauty” (ATU 410), the mother-in-law, who is sometimes identified as an

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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—

punishment and cannibalism. She is offered as a counter-character to Stepmother,

embodying a recognizably cruel mother for Stepmother to be contrasted against as a

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

narratives are naturalized.

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

struggle between the Reaper, a representative of the popularized, conventional patterns

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

contributions of women to the genre, granting authority to an already narrowly defined

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

recognized as retellings or fairy tales.

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

patterns that came before them.

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The future of postmodern feminist fairy tales lies in stories that can rewrite the

genre without totally unmaking it. As mentioned in my introduction, Jack Zipes, in

Relentless Progress: The Reconfiguration of Children’s Literature, Fairy Tales, and

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

authority of authors and genre.

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

conventions. The reader is free to understand the characters in a new light—traditional

heroes are rendered less gallant, victims are availed of agency, and villains are

humanized. As Brian Evenson argues in Understanding Robert Coover, “[b]y clearing a

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

a way to reimagine the genre.

Though Stepmother is clearly a postmodern novel, it also is a fairy tale. It contains

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

still write fairy tales.

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

metafictional elements. As one would expect of a collection aimed at adolescents, there

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

recognizable fairy-tale plots and characters. In making a traditional villain sympathetic,

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

narrative authority through the remaking of wickedness.

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

understanding of gender as a construct by centering on wicked witches in maternal roles

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.

Garth Nix’ s “An Unwelcome Guest” (2009)

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;

however, this complexity does not result in a name.

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

Witch is the hero because she is fighting a larger evil.

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

opens up other fairy-tale constructs, such as gender, for destabilization.

Catherynne M. Valente’s “A Delicate Architecture” (2009)

“A Delicate Architecture” is narrated in first-person, and the adult narrator begins

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

other kitchen ingredients (153).

This first-person filter controls the characterization of events and encourages

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.

The discontinuity described above also provides a motivation, and perhaps

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

is subjective before the story unfolds.

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

approach its fairy-tale intertexts with a critical eye towards subjectivity.

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

it is a subjective value demonstrated specifically through female characters questions

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

it is conceptualized only in traditional ways and how it authorizes subjective viewpoints.

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

texts’ disruptive narrative strategies fortify thematic arguments about subjective

constructions of wickedness and gendered identity, destabilizing their fairy-tale intertexts

in the process. While they do offer critiques of gender, gender is not the primary focus of

these texts’ destabilizing of fairy-tale authoritative patterns. In the next chapter, I

examine texts that do take traditional constructs of gender as their thematic focus and use

similar role-reversal and characterization techniques to do so. However the fairy-tale

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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character provides a more complex understanding of the ways in which fairy-tale

retellings can disrupt generic expectations.

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CHAPTER 2

THE SHOE STILL FITS: EVER AFTER AND THE PURSUIT OF A FEMINIST CINDERELLA

As I have explained, role-reversals, including re-characterizing traditionally

passive fairy-tale heroines with behaviors traditionally gendered as masculine, are fairly

common feminist retelling techniques. Though it may seem like these are straightforward

cases of representation, these techniques do have great potential in demonstrating how

gender is a socially constructed concept inscribed onto an un-gendered body. This is

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

they seek to unmake.

Presenting a strong, independent female protagonist in contrast to her passive

traditional counterpart, as many retellings of “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and “Snow

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

characterization is limited by the expectations of the plot. Characters who represent a

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

supposed to challenge. This results in a tension between the princess’s characterization

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-

characterizing traditionally gendered princesses as strong and independent and

representing gender as a multi-faceted construct with a range of femininities and

masculinities. I focus on how the marriage plot in particular limits the ways in which the

more feminist heroines can be represented.

The 1998 film Ever After: A Cinderella Story, directed by Andy Tennant and

starring Drew Barrymore, is a delightful retelling of “Cinderella” (ATU 510A) for a

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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

to question the patriarchal structures of the “Cinderella” story.

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-

positive” (Schwazbaum) and “female empowerment” (Burr) qualities. While academic

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

and Robyn McCallum recognize it as “a story of female resistance within a dominating

patriarchy” in their article, “Utopia, Dystopia, and Cultural Controversy in Ever After and
 80

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

attempts to do with gender representation without stating directly whether or not 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

the pro-girl posturing of the film and contemporary feminism.

Resistance to calling a popular fairy tale “feminist” is not new to fairy-tale

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

worked to acculturate girls into passive roles under patriarchy.

As the heroine of a popular retelling of a traditional fairy tale, Danielle’s 1998

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

servants,” suggesting a turn in American cinema toward a strong fairy-tale heroine.

Though certainly a strong heroine, Danielle is focused on her immediate world,

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

explain that “Danielle’s free-spirited behavior overturns social hierarchy, codes

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

romance is problematic; however, my criticism is not of the film’s romantic vision of

utopia, but instead of its narrow depiction of feminism.

Ever After assumes a feminist stance, but 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
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patriarchal structure of society,2 and these heroines can still be (sexually) desirable and

marriageable in doing so. The problems identified in second-wave feminism are

simplified, emptied of radical critiques of systemic gender inequality, and marketed to

young women.3 This limited version of feminism, which draws on girl power and liberal

feminism, reinforces patriarchal authority by its focus on individual achievements and by

isolating one woman, the heroine, as an exception to standard feminine behavior. To

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.

Framing Danielle’s Feminism

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.

In positing Danielle’s story as an alternative to the Grimms,’ the frame further

explores the struggle of who gets to tell stories and whose versions become most

authoritative. Preston suggests that the film questions male authority:

In the case of Ever After the appeal to authority is multivocal. The film

invokes the historical authority of male tradition (Perrault, Brothers

Grimm, da Vinci), which it then contests through a performance of

gendered genre . . . . By disrupting genre boundaries, she [the Grande

Dame] is able to tell a different story, one that played to the competing

authority of a popularized 1990s film. (211)

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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,

the male authority behind the female voice (208-9).

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

displays of independence still needs a happily-ever-after with a charming prince to be

satisfied) in a female-narrated story, the frame ultimately undermines the film’s

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

phrase that immediately establishes Danielle in relationship to a patriarchal figure. The

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

“legend” (201) and Stephens and McCallum as “historical narrative” (206). 4

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

own assertion of truth.

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

are reactionary and framed by male authority.5

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.

Though the film offers an alternative version of “Cinderella” more amenable to

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

undermining the feminist ideology of the entire film.

Danielle’s Masque

The establishing scenes of Danielle’s happy childhood introduce the issue of

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

gender is performative. Rather than expressing an essential identity, it is constructed by

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

social practice, which Butler identifies as “reproductive heterosexuality” (Gender

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

choice would be a potentially androgynous tomboy position, her behavior is gendered by

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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film is a mix of gendered behaviors ranging from hyper-feminine to tomboy. In “Film

and Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator,” Mary Ann Doane describes the

performance of hyperfemininity as a masquerade that distances the female spectator from

the on-screen, amplified expression of femininity, thus constituting “an

acknowledgement that it is femininity itself which is constructed as a mask—a decorative

layer which conceals a non-identity” (426). The masquerade “flaunt[s] femininity”

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

network of power relations” (434).

Though gender performance is not as simple as a changing of clothes, Danielle’s

performance of femininity and masculinity is often marked by her change in wardrobe

(from her blue and white servant ensemble to a variety of fancier dresses). Danielle’s

masquerade—her donning of the costume, mannerisms, and behavior of a lady—is

contrasted with her masculine behavior. In Female Masculinity Judith Halberstam

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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easily identifiable heterosexual behavior. Thus, Danielle’s masculine behavior as an adult

is rendered unthreatening because she is playing a part in a heterosexual romance, and

her masculine behavior as a child is naturalized as a phase to be outgrown.

Danielle’s gender performance is in negotiation, and she cannot conform to either

expectation presented in this early scene. Danielle is quickly identified as a tomboy in

this first scene of her story. Later, when she is dressed in nice, clean clothes to meet her

new stepfamily, at Gustave’s identification of her as a girl, Danielle responds, “Boy or

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.

Through Danielle, gender is depicted as constructed rather than as an essential

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

position as well as femininity. Danielle is the daughter of a merchant landowner and

becomes the stepdaughter of a baroness. The scene in which she meets her new

stepfamily foregrounds Danielle’s gender as a product of social negotiations and

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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

while in servant dress demonstrates.7

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

contemporary spectators, still falls comfortably within her representation as a female

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

begins as a touching implication of the possibility of mother-daughter bonding, as

Rodmilla gazes fondly on Danielle, recalling her similarities to her father. However any

possibility of a reconciliation is harshly cut short as Rodmilla reidentifies Danielle as a

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

body/mind are unacceptable.

Danielle’s transgressive behavior is enabled by men, in reaction to men, or framed

by men, and is thereby safely contained in a clearly patriarchal structure. As an adult,

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

seemingly offers flexibility in defining femininity. Danielle is able to act out-of-character

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.

The tomboy is naturalized as a phase and the hyperfemininity of masquerade is expected

behavior for a princess.

Girl Power to the Rescue

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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Zipes, in Relentless Progress: The Reconfiguration of Children’s Literature, Fairy Tales,

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

criticisms that mark many feminist fairy tales as potentially transformative. 8

A common strategy in feminist fairy-tale retellings is to empower a traditionally

passive heroine, popularized in tales of the innocent persecuted heroine 9 like

“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

remain stuck in a mode of interpretation able to do no more than reconfirm stereotypical

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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

reversing the representation of the traditionally passive heroine. An exclusive focus on

representation confirms yet again sexist “stereotypical generalizations” of how fairy tale

heroines are supposed to behave.10

Role-reversal is employed in Ever After to demonstrate Danielle’s strength as a

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

reminiscent of “Rapunzel” (ATU 310). As a reversal of the princess-locked-in-a-tower

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

ways in which female strength are contextualized.

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

witness to her cleverness.

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.

The second scene in which Danielle defies the damsel-in-distress stereotype

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,

Danielle is sold by Rodmilla to Pierre le Pieu (Richard O’Brien), a lascivious neighbor

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.

Even in this moment of triumph, when Danielle is subverting the princess-rescue-

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

Henry exclaims, “That explains it.”

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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The Absence of Female Power

The only undeniable location of female power in the traditional versions of

“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

female power from the story entirely.

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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

replaced by rational thought implies that as “Cinderella’s situation is realistic, her

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 Obligatory Happily Ever After

The problem with Ever After is not that it fails as a feminist revision of

“Cinderella.” It is certainly a feminist film that undermines traditional representations of

femininity from popular versions of “Cinderella.” However the popularized, restricted,

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-

envisioning of “Cinderella” and reinforces patriarchal authority. The reversal of the

passive-heroine trope, while certainly offering an alternative to the weak-minded

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

surfaces in reaction to and is enabled by hetero-patriarchal ideology. Her independence

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

back into heterosexual romance. She is so embedded in the naturalized complex of

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gender, class, political power, and upward mobility that any power she might wield as a

strong, feminist individual is bound by the patriarchal authority demonstrated throughout

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

perspective on feminism suggests that as a social movement it is no longer necessary

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,

not about gender and society.

Furthermore, the feminist idea of gender as socially constructed is used in a

restrictive way in Ever After to create the tension between Danielle’s hyperfeminine

masquerade and her supposedly inherent androgyny or masculinity. The multiplicity of

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

challenges the romantic myth of compulsory heterosexuality, embracing the soulmate

wedding and happily-ever-after ending when it is presented to her. As an audience, we

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

Cinderellas of Charles Perrault, the brothers Grimm, and Walt Disney.

After Ever After

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

subgenre of fairy-tale films for a young female audience.

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

protagonist and a continuum of gender possibilities, but restricts those possibilities to

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 (2007)

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

like being “raised by wolves.” An example of Sydney being raised by wolfish

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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.

This potentially subversive gendering is, however, revealed to be non-threatening

as Sydney “clean[s] up nice” on multiple occasions when expected to perform femininity,

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.

So too is Sydney’s femininity a performance staged by others.

There are very few models of femininity in the film that counter Sydney’s female

masculinity. Rachel exemplifies the dominant model, which is very consumer-based.

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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

appearance-based. Sydney eventually rejects it as well because of its destructiveness. She

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

encourages competition between women, which is fought with beauty regimen,

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

never experienced in her male-dominated life. However, sisterhood is fraught with

competitive danger as Rachel is quite jealous and despises Sydney on sight because Tyler

shows an interest in Sydney. This competitiveness comes to a head at the pinning

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

rejection of traditional femininity and competitive female relationships. Dinky appears

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

romantic relationship between Sydney and Lenny is quickly rendered platonic by

introducing Dinky as a better-suited mate for Lenny.

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

very strength-oriented masculinity, the dorks perform more of a knowledge-based

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

masculinity, this necessarily includes a heterosexual dynamic to render dork masculinity

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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

professor, they campaign to special interest groups—the Pacific Islanders Association;

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

ends in a celebration of difference over conformity as several characters confess to an

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

difference, it is undercut by the film’s constant reinforcement of mainstream heterosexual

masculinity and femininity. The competitive model of femininity that Rachel exemplifies

is problematized when it is rejected by the sorority sisters who, emboldened by Sydney’s

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

with the dorks.

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.

The 1997 Disney television movie version of Rogers and Hammerstein’s

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

narrative rings false. In a review, critic Caryn James points out:

The matter-of-fact racial casting works so smoothly that it becomes one of

the show’s happiest effects. There is no cause to wonder why one

stepsister is black and one white. The entire kingdom is blissfully

multiethnic, with a black queen in Ms. Goldberg, a white king in Victor

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

the ways in which identity is constructed through social relationships.

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.

Aquamarine, then, promotes female friendship as an alternative to the model of

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,

not the competition taught by Cosmogirl, supports the characters’ transformations.

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

Disney formulation of love. As Roberta Trites, in “Disney’s Sub/Version of Andersen’s

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

Aquamarine the idea of love is expanded to include nonromantic relationships between

friends and among family. Sacrifice is still a part of this love, but it is a matter of

sacrificing selfish desires, not one’s self.

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

seen as competition for resources.

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

father that love exists.

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

even than romantic heterosexual relationships. In addition, a positive model of female

bonding is offered in opposition to the competitive female relationships exhibited by

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

adherence to the marriage plot is softened in Aquamarine by the narrative restructuring

that moves the marriage plot to a secondary level in the film and by shifting the focus

from romantic love to friendship.

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,

Aquamarine demonstrates that gender is regulated by heterosexual reproductivity, as

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

Sydney’s motivation for running for student government president, is motivated by

jealousy over Tyler.

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

that promise lesbian romances and disappointing heterosexual relationships, as in Emma

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

AMBIVALENCE AND AMBIGUITY IN THE FRAGMENTED FAIRY TALES OF KELLY LINK

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

range of femininities and masculinities available is limited by the heterosexual marriage

plot that denotes the traditional fairy-tale happily-ever-after ending. Retellings that do not

result in typical happily-ever-afters are able to present a broader range of acceptable

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

Goose Chase) represent gendered possibilities outside of the heterosexual imperative.

Retellings that do not even engage in the possibility of a happily-ever-after by not

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

fragments from fairy-tale plots, enabling more open productions of gender.

Using fragments (see my earlier discussions of Preston and Kukkonen) instead of

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

parameters of the construct, she avoids reproducing binaries.

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

as a social category formed through relationships, an articulation of gender that mirrors

Judith Butler’s work in Undoing Gender (2004). As Vanessa Joosen explains in Critical

and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale

Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings, an intertextual relationship can exist between a

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

shown to be formed through the socially regulated interaction between characters.

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

fairy-tale structures in the story.

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

face against consensus reality. It is a [sic] fantastic, surreal sometimes, speculative on

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

of fragmentation—quoting elements of popular cultural memory and recontextualizing

them in a way that frees them from the patterning of the source, which Sterling describes

as “turn[ing] them against themselves.”

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

strangeness than by literary technique or thematic focus. Of importance to Sterling’s

description is that slipstream works defy genre categorization.

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.

Jack Zipes’s observation in Relentless Progress: The Reconfiguration of

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

not participating in the commercial project of feminist hegemony that focuses on

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

reversing representations of women as weak objects of male desire. Gender

representation in Carter’s tales is contingent upon its context, and her vision of a feminist

world is ambiguous. Similarly, Carter’s refusal to provide a straightforward alternative to

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

manifested as oppressive heterosexual relationships.

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

unfinished or incomplete; closure is simply irrelevant. What is significant in these stories

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.

A common approach in fairy-tale fiction that retells traditional fairy tales is to

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

complex of social identities.

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

enable the complex conceptualization of gender in Link’s fairy-tale fiction.

Structured Gendering

Many young-adult retellings of fairy tales address gender by replacing passive

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

Crackernuts. While these collections do offer a contrast to the popularized passive

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

changing the narrative structure of the fairy tales being retold.

The argument that reproducing structure reproduces heteronormative

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

Bloody Chambers,” argues,

Carter is rewriting the tales within the strait-jacket of their original

structures. The characters she re-creates must to some extent, continue to

exist as abstractions. Identity continues to be defined by role, so that

shifting the perspective from the impersonal voice to the inner

confessional narrative as she does in several of the tales, merely explains,

amplifies and re-produces rather than alters the original, deeply, rigidly

sexist psychology of the erotic. (6)

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-

person to first-person, giving voice to previously silenced heroines, which effectively

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

is that Carter’s representation of the erotic relies solely on heteropatriarchal sexuality,

with women as objects of desire. The heroines who desire in Carter’s work are, according

to Duncker, not representative of a female-empowered sexuality, but reinscribe male

sexuality because the heroines are shown desiring to be objectified by men.

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

of women in heterosexual relationships and represents women taking control of and

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

more satisfying feminist fairy tale would look like.

Despite disagreeing with Duncker’s reading of The Bloody Chamber, I do agree

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

as well as the content to truly subvert heteronormativity in text. Robyn Warhol, in

“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

dominant ideologies of sexuality” (Warhol, “Queering” 232). Warhol’s emphasis on form

is what is relevant here.

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

fairy-tale sources by removing emphasis from the happily-ever-after ending. Warhol

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

forms” in addition to representing alternative sexualities (Warhol, “Queering” 233).

Because the marriage plot is “intrinsically” a part of narrative structure, changes to

narrative pattern are necessary to effectively subvert that plot. With retellings like Ever
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After, gender is understood primarily in terms of heterosexuality within a marriage plot,

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

understood in terms of heterosexual relationships.

“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

adolescents. The age range of the intended audience (eight-to-twelve-year-olds according

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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I am interested in three primary aspects of “Swans”: ending the narrative before

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

character. The plot-level representation of an independent, critical, and vocal girl is

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

reconfiguring the fairy tale.

“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

the maiden from “Rumplestiltskin” (ATU 500). Rumplestiltskin is Emma’s fairy

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

through her verb tense shifts.

“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

femininity to be represented as not dependent upon heterosexual relationships or female

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

enough to deny the introduction of gender as a sexual performance, as my analysis of the

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film Aquamarine in the previous chapter demonstrates. The marriage plot in Aquamarine

is effectively questioned through a redefining of love that emphasizes same-sex

friendship; however, it is not the age of the adolescent protagonists that allows for a

configuration of gender as separate from heterosexual romantic relationships. In “Swans”

it is the denial of the marriage plot by suspending closure that allows the story to present

a non-sexualized model of femininity.

One reason this deferment technique works in “Swans” is because of course

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

of the many princess movies made by Disney.3

”Swans” critiques the source tale, explicitly showing that the behaviors that

worked in the past are no longer appropriate for today:

It seems that to break my stepmother’s pinkie spell, I need to make shirts

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

supposed to sew a shirt for a bird? Is there a pattern? (90)

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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

and then coming up with a plan—emphasizes independence, research, and critical

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

contradicting that part of the magic.

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

that she wants to be a swan too.

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Emma’s desire to be a swan means she is not in opposition to her stepmother

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.

(The stepmother transforms people by pointing at them.) According to Emma, “She

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).

It is important to recognize that Emma’s silence is not a condition of her power; it

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

in a school full of swans.

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

target audience. In contrast to the promotion of female passivity that Lieberman

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

earlier versions. The emphasis is on choice, not following prescribed patterns.

Emma Bear is not granted independence or shown her abilities by brothers or a

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

here is Link’s deferment of closure, use of first-person narration, and fragmentation of

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” (2005)

“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

Cinderella Game.” Its distinguishing characteristic is its structuring on multiple diegetic

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

episode is embedded in Jeremy’s.

Primarily due to its complex narrative structure, “Magic for Beginners” is a

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

“funny, dangerous, bad-tempered, flirtatious, greedy, untidy, accident-prone, graceful,

and has a mysterious past. . . . She is always beautiful” (210). And she is always gendered

female, regardless of who plays her.

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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an “adventure” (225) to claim an inherited phone booth and horror-themed wedding

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

he’s saved Fox” (256).

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

narrator, has never happened before—nobody leaves The Library.

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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

reimagine himself otherwise. As the reality/fantasy binary collapses for Jeremy, he is

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” and “withholding recognition” (Butler, Undoing Gender 2). Recognition

fixes a person as a specific identity, undoing previous ones. As we identify through

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

gender and sexuality undo people and in turn, can be undone.

Jeremy’s becoming undone by his relationship with Fox is most symbolically

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

nickname with a request:

“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

planet, a person who kisses girls and talks to Foxes. (247-8)

Germ is undone, and Jeremy’s new conception of himself, Mars, is marked by

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

the social context of heterosexual norms.

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

formations of masculinity in heterosexual and homosocial contexts. The parallel rescue

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,

as in innocent persecuted heroine stories6. This masculinity, in many canonical fairy

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

way one expects them to.

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

attempt, success is not equivalent to a happy ending. Like Emma in “Swans,” it is

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

perform Jeremy’s changing and disjointed identity as he navigates the breakdown of

expected narratives.
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“The Cinderella Game” (2009)

In “The Cinderella Game,” published in Troll’s-Eye View: A Book of Villainous

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

her tattered princess dress.

Every character in “The Cinderella Game” is painted with monstrous imagery,

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

story play slips into the horrific.

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

destabilize fairy-tale patterns. The fairy-tale conventions invoked in Link’s “The

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.

The villain is traditionally understood to be the antagonist in a story—one who

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

characters, as occurs in “The Cinderella Game.” If villain is defined by struggle against

the hero, then all characters at odds with the hero participate in the villain’s sphere of

action.
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There is a fairly straightforward reading of the story in which Peter is

Cinderella—an innocent persecuted hero. He sees himself as neglected, unloved, and an

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

hero, struggling against? Everyone. He is opposed to everyone, and the monstrous

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

characters’ awareness of their own troubling of fairy-tale patterns provides a

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

monstrous imagery would be deployed in setting up a fairy-tale villain. But monster is

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

Other or third-term supplement, the monster is an incorporation of the Outside, the

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

not, and that which is constructed as monstrous is marginalized—separated and othered

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

itself a kind of limit case, an extreme version of marginalization, an abjecting

epistemological device basic to the mechanics of deviance construction and identity

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

monstrous other in a text is linked to representations of how identities are formed.

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References to monsters from horror films (werewolves, zombies, and serial

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

and horror is actually a logical one:

Horror’s kinship with fairy tales is demonstrated through several shared

elements, including an emphasis on fear . . . often involving the

transgression of existing laws and boundaries; and what many critics

perceive to be the social function of both forms: their invocation of

particular initiation rites—with plots highlighting the necessity of

separation from friends and family (and comforting familiarity) prior to

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).

Unsettling the audience is something at which Link excels, and it is achieved by

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

imagery, which marks each character as a potential villain in a seemingly objective,

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

introduced, he is in his stepfather’s forbidden room watching a werewolf movie. In his

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initial contact with Darcy, the werewolves in the background are continually referenced.

One werewolf is “roaming through a house, playing hide-and-seek” amongst “puddles of

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

villain. He is described as a Bluebeard figure. The references to his “forbidden room”

(185, 199), his wealth, and his collecting are easily seen as “Bluebeard” references in the

context of the physical description of his “bearish, bluish-blackish beard” (198).

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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

popularity in children’s collections. The use of “bearish,” however, also suggests a

beastliness reinforced by the portrayal of his daughter as animalistic. Neither of the

parents has a name.

Peter’s mother is the least described in monstrous terms, but that may simply be

because she, as a stepmother, is most easily identified by an audience as evil or wicked in

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

behavior in regards to Peter is described from his perspective as unfair. It is important to

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

quieted by Darcy’s use of the name “Mommy” (198).

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

topic (189). Allowing Cinderella to be played by a boy—thereby not matching character

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gender to biological sex—completely changes her role in the story of “Cinderella,” and

the fairy tale falls apart.

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,

Cinderella is no longer a victim-hero, but neither is he a seeker-hero, as he does not fulfill

the actions that, according to Propp, are associated with heroes: leaving to go on a quest,

reacting to magical assistance, and wedding a princess. Peter unmakes Cinderella as a

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

interpretation of social interaction. Peter’s understanding that he is monstrous and

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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Peter’s view of himself is transformed into an issue of relational identity

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

mirror, and he was in it. He paused to look at himself. No Cinderella here.

Something dangerous. Something out of place. He felt a low, wild, wolfish

delight rise up in him. His mother looked at him sometimes as if she

wasn’t sure who he was. He wasn’t sure, either. He had to look away from

what he saw in the face of the mirror. (192)

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

boy feeling like he is a disappointment to others to issues of identity as part of social,

relational context.

The narrative transformation of Peter’s feelings of rejection into discourse about

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

by commercial interests, it has also diagnosed an identification that children themselves

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

identification through relationships: one is constructed as monstrous by others.

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,”

implies acting, pretending; he is playing the role of a stepbrother. It is a continuous action

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

within the structure provided by the Cinderella narrative of stepfamilies.

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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

monstrous as well. Evil has a different connotation, suggesting something otherworldly or

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

recontextualizing fragments of “Cinderella.” The narrator’s seemingly objective

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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Carter. In The Bloody Chamber, Carter refuses to provide a straightforward alternative to

patriarchy and offers multiple retellings of the same tales, each presenting different

variations of femininity and masculinity, sexuality, and feminism. Though still structured

by heterosexual relationships, Carter’s reluctance to fix feminism in a utopian frame or

reject patriarchy wholesale in her retellings acknowledged gender’s place as part of a

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

as constructed by fantasy. By reading Link’s stories as stories of undoing gender,

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

human. Though dangerous and potentially devastating, as Butler demonstrates, this

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

leave the fragments open to be resignified again.

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CHAPTER 4

GAPS IN THE BRIAR HEDGE: THE READER’S ROLE IN AWAKENING BRIAR ROSE

As I explored in Chapters 2 and 3, fairy-tale structures contain within them

configurations of gender and sexuality that limit what can happen in the stories. In

Chapter 2, I showed how complex representations of gender as constructed, performative

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

unsettle and call attention to fairy-tale narrative patterns.

I use Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory and Linda Hutcheon’s arguments

about metafiction to show how a metafictional retelling can, by destabilizing fairy-tale

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

normative conception is given weight by its proximity to the gaps.

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

seem counterintuitive to analyze them together because Coover’s novel is usually

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

symbolic narrative to communicate an experience of inexplicable atrocity is celebrated

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

multiple versions of the “Sleeping Beauty” tale.

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

the reader to participate in the narratives’ thematic construction. The intertextual

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

page as well as the juxtaposition of narrative threads further encourage comparison by

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

alternatives to the concept of gender presented.

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

(2010), now offer strong-willed, ninja-like heroines instead of passive princesses.

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

Coover, contradictory and competing narratives. Switches between narrative threads,

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

Linda Hutcheon’s work helpful in reading these challenging narratives.

Wolfgang Iser explains in The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response

(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

ellipses or asterisks, or in the work’s dynamic differences between perspectives of author,

narrator, character, and reader.

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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”:

[A blank] is an intentional, often carefully crafted, suspension of

connectivity in order to make us provide links for what is disconnected. . .

a gap allows readers to indulge in their own projections (or suspicions); a

blank compels them to set up relations between their own imaginary

projections and the world of the text and thereby prevent a mere

identification with either one of them. (Fluck 188)

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

Metafictional Paradox, argues that reading metafiction is problematic because “while he

[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

Hutcheon’s focus on metafiction, the emphasis is on the construction of a thematic

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 [. . .]

sets up the theoretical frame of reference in which it must be considered” (Narcissistic

Narrative 6). The gaps direct the reader in how to interpret the texts and their makings,

by suggesting specific connections.

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Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose (1992/ 2002)

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

presented in an investigative mode with the protagonist trying to validate her

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

together: fairy tale as metaphor, historical reconstruction, and personal testimony.

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

embedded narration of personal testimony. The novel is narrated by an external narrator,

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

of gender and sexuality.

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,

psychological, and narrative implications of this representation. Marianne Hirsch and

Irene Kacandes, in their introduction to Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust,

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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

cannot—why the Holocaust happened.

Explaining why—offering a rational understanding of the Holocaust in a coherent

narrative—is itself problematic as it suggests that the extermination of millions of people

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

Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children’s Literature, Kidd 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

exposing young readers to the historical atrocities of the gas chambers.

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

opens up space to question issues of representation—about the Holocaust, certainly, but

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

to question other, non-thematic elements of the novel.

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

extermination camp. The odd-numbered chapters, printed in italics, are presented as

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

to her great-grandchildren. The grandmother’s story is suspended by regular interruptions

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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The novel’s structure is further complicated by a multi-chapter embedded

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.

Alternating between narratives encourages the reader to make a thematic

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

previous odd-numbered chapters.

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.

Thematically, the reader is invited to compare Becca’s investigation to the indifference

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

about the past.

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

an ‘interpretative device’ to understand, even if retrospectively, the child’s physical

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

a psychological coping mechanism for the children.

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

The Uses of Enchantment (1976).1 Additionally Margarete J. Landwehr argues in “The

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

knowledge and emotional understanding,” “consist of powerful and evocative metaphors

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

commonplace world of the reader” (Landwehr 156).

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

“readers at a historical or cultural remove co-witness the stories in the text by

acknowledging and explicating those stories as uncompleted attempts at recounting

individual or collective trauma,” though Kacandes cautions cowitnesses to be “as self-

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

metaphor, historical reconstruction, and personal testimony—but each is incomplete

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,

whose meaning cannot be conveyed through words. Any narration is assumed to be

inadequate, and the three narrative styles presented in Yolen’s Briar Rose enact those

inadequacies. The metaphor may convey the “overpowering evil . . . unimaginable

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

the value of a multivocal text.

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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of life—mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. This focus on the “prince” and the subsequent

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

rescues her? And why does she have to marry him?

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.

The historical context of Josef’s internment because of his homosexuality also

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 direction of fairy tales. The presence of homosexuality in a traditionally

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

for the rescuer.

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

novel ultimately upholds heteronormativity in the conclusion of Gemma’s tale and

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

representation of homosexuality alone cannot destabilize that structure. As I explained in

Chapter 3, Judith Roof and Robyn Warhol have both shown that the representation of

homosexuality in a traditionally heterosexual plot alone does not successfully subvert

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heterosexual marriage as normative. To be truly subversive, the structure of marriage as

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

City, Warhol’s case study, is “queered” by reconfiguring familial relationships in

decidedly non-nuclear formations (“Queering” 234-5) and “detouring” from the

traditional marriage plot (“Queering” 236). Closure is deferred in Briar Rose by

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 configured differently, almost as an afterthought as opposed to the desired outcome.

The representation of marriage in the fairy-tale narrative embedded in Briar Rose

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

an adult Becca is part of the audience of Gemma’s retelling, begins,

“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

happily ever after.”

“The prince, too, Gemma?” asked Becca. “I don’t think I was ever

really clear in that point.” (238)

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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.

The characterization of Gemma as a mother and grandmother emphasizes this

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

narratives of the Holocaust that emphasize motherhood and pregnancy do so because

“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

of a new generation is emphasized by the fairy tale as well, as Gemma’s happily-ever-

after ending highlights the birth of a beautiful child (238). That Gemma has a child is

something to be celebrated as it emphasizes the value of human life in a context of

dehumanization and mass execution. Nothing is mentioned of the prince, husband, or

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

of traditional gender roles in Holocaust narratives “may serve to restore a sense of

manhood or womanhood shattered by atrocity” (116). However because motherhood

replaces marriage as the ultimate goal for women, the novel reinforces these roles rather

than dismantling them as it does for marriage.

The happily-ever-after conclusion—that is, a woman survived extermination to

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

of the embedded tale with other versions of “Sleeping Beauty.”

By depicting Becca’s assumptions about the prince’s sexuality and relationship to

Gemma as constructed, the novel demonstrates that other assumptions about gender and

sexuality are also constructed. Even though the plot treats gendered relationships fairly

traditionally and emphasizes heteronormative reproduction, the blanks are a space to

dwell on the questions negated by the plot, and they call attention to the possibility for

other configurations. They offer the reader the possibility of dissociating

heteronormativity from the fairy-tale structure. The implications of how connected

narrative structure and the conceptualizing of gender and sexuality are unfold throughout

my chapters, pointing to different possibilities for addressing that relationship. In this

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case, as in Coover’s novel, the narrative blanks offer anti-hegemonic possibilities to the

reader and the genre.

Robert Coover’s Briar Rose (1996)

Unlike Yolen’s novel, which destabilizes fairy-tale narrative as part of a larger

educational and historical project, Coover’s Briar Rose is a self-reflexive tale of

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

progress in time. It is composed of forty-two separate sections narrated by an external

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

between discordant sections also direct readers to reconstruct meaning by making

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

readers to imagine possibilities not present in the source fairy tales.

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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

be rearranged without changing the overall thematic content. It is centered on the

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

Coover’s fiction as “the organization of communities and their discourses, the

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

conclusion to the plot elements of the sections.

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’s characters are constrained by the plots he is retelling.

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

this in Yolen’s novel, their function is analogous.

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

sentence fragment punctuated by an ellipsis. These concluding punctuation marks direct

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

characters’ roles. [. . .] Through these strategies, Coover offers a variety of possibilities

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—

reference multiple versions of “Sleeping Beauty” (such as Giambattista Basile’s “Sun,

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

Reawakening of The Sleeping Beauty” (99).

Much of Coover’s commentary on the source tales is explicitly about sexuality

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

psychoanalytic interpretations of fairy tales that reduce them to stories of repressed

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.

The fragmentation of identity and self in the characters is complemented and

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

fragmentation of the princess as a character reinforces the fragmented structure of the

novel.

The characterization of the prince as a man on a quest unable to move forward

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.

Thematically, the novel demonstrates the lack of a singular identity by offering

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

scene is married, as is common in versions of “Sleeping Beauty” such as Basile’s. He is

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

one in consideration of the other.

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While a connection between scenes is encouraged by the blanks, the creation of a

comprehensible, linear narrative is impossible. Regardless of thematic connections, the

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

denied, and all of the sleeping princesses are one, interchangeable.

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

encouraged to make thematic and chronological connections between scenes, thus

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

constantly being reshaped and is never stable.

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

follows. One major element of these expectations, as identified by Elizabeth Wanning

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

quotation marks around spoken text.

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

progression because the characters are trapped by their roles.

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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

possibility disrupts the reader’s narrative expectations, constantly negating closure in a

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

“Sleeping Beauty” is a marriage plot. Coover’s point is not so much to provide an

alternative, but to unhinge the expected components of a well-made narrative and

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

explore other possibilities. Complicating sexuality and gender becomes inevitable, as

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

Beauty” tale demonstrate, does not lead to a happy ending.

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

suspension of the narrative, multiple focalization, embedded stories, competing narrative

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,

and of institutionalized discourses, epistemologies, and critical practices, as well as

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

groundbreaking for today, this concept is foundational to poststructuralist feminist theory

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and the gender theory I have engaged, and it leads me to believe that Yolen’s and

Coover’s kind of secondary, side-effect destabilization can be just as or even more

subversive than a direct challenge to constructions of gender, such as offering different

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

Transformation,” for a full discussion of transformation.

Chapter 1: Who’s Wicked Now? The Stepmother as Fairy-Tale Heroine

1. See Salman Rushdie’s The Wizard of Oz and Alissa Burger’s “Wicked and

Wonderful Witches: Narrative and Gender Negotiations from The Wizard of Oz to

Wicked” for a deconstruction of the good/evil binary in The Wizard of Oz film.

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

his analysis despite his intentions.

3. Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature identifies several motifs

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

large entry with sixteen tale types associated with it.

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4. While Coover certainly tackles Propp’s functions and Thompson’s motifs in

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

is specific to folklore studies.

5. For an analysis of Briar Rose, see Sünje Redies, “Return with New

Complexities: Robert Coover’s Briar Rose,” Jaroslav Kusnír, “Subversion of Myths:

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

Playful Reawakening of The Sleeping Beauty.”

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

World for a sampling.

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

Times (Turan) and Chicago Tribune (Wilmington).

2. Linda Pershing and Lisa Gablehouse aptly refer to this idea as “faux

feminism” in their analysis of Enchanted.

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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

“generic complexity” of films like Ever After.

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

appropriation” (188). Zipes is responding to an earlier version of this chapter published in

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

version of “Cinderella” is the one that matters.

6. Danielle’s performances of class reflect American ideology rather than the

historical truth the frame implies. The American myth of a classless society,
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demonstrated by Danielle’s ease in moving from merchant’s daughter to servant to

courtier to princess, is further enacted by Prince Henry’s desire to open a free university,

suggesting the possibility of upward mobility through education.

7. Though she is not originally of the servant class, this is the most common

class-descriptor used in reference to Danielle.

8. Kim Snowden discusses both antifeminist postfeminism and girl power as

understood in the undergraduate classroom in her consideration of literary and film

versions of Angela Carter’s retold fairy tales.

9. See Cristina Bacchilega and Steven Swann Jones for a discussion of the

innocent persecuted heroine genre.

10. Many of the fairy-tale princess/heroine stereotypes that Ever After engages are

described at length in Ming-Hsun Lin’s discussion of “the princess’s role.”

11. See Pauline Greenhill and Emilie Anderson-Gregoire for a discussion of these

tales as explorations of androgyny and transgender.

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

presented as sexualized—one is a father-figure and both are queered—and both are

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artists, a feminized career-path in present day. While powerful, they are no threat to the

prince.

14. In Legally Blonde, a stereotypical blonde airhead who is only interested in

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.

Chapter 3: Ambivalence and Ambiguity in the Fragmented Fairy Tales of Kelly

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,

very similar and better well-known today.

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.

4. See for example Juliet Marillier’s Daughter of the Forest.

5. “Magic for Beginners” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy &

Science Fiction (2005).

6. See Cristina Bacchilega and Steven Swann Jones for a discussion of the

innocent persecuted heroine genre.

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7. My thanks to Stephanie Nakamura for suggesting that Darcy is a fairy-

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.

Both scholars draw on research about trauma and the Holocaust.

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

Holocaust’” and an overview of the debate in this area (45).

4. There are other references to homosexuality in the novel as well—one of

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

is working on a “fairy story” as an article about gay rights (110).

5. This detail is also noted by Hennard Dutheil de la Rochére and Viret in their

essay (418).

6. Gemma is called many names in the novel—Gitl Rose Mandlestein,

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

is given, a common pattern in fairy tales.

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

power of discourse to shape reality will remain.

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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