I’d suggest that the answer can be found in Marina Warner’s explanation of the attraction fairy tales held for her as a young reader—and continue to into her adult life. The following quote comes from her wonderful book From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers. If you haven’t ever read it, I highly recommend it to you.
When I was young and highly robust, I still felt a great hunger for fairy tales; they seemed to offer the possibility for change, far beyond the boundaries of their improbable plots or fantastically illustrated pages. The metamorphoses promised more of the same, not only in fairy land but in this world, and this instability of appearances, these sudden swerves of destiny, created the first sustaining excitement of such stories. Like romance, to which fairy tales bear a strong affinity, they could “remake the world in the image of desire”.
I think you can see how this capacity for “remaking the world”
would be appealing to teenagers! But it’s also this transformative
capacity of the fairy tale that allows contemporary writers to re-imagine
the stories for a youth audience living in a world and a society very
different from that of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Charles Perrault and Madam
Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont.
So, as you may well imagine, many of these contemporary retellings evidence
a feminist ideology in the depiction of, in particular, the central heroine,
and in the romance and marriage plot common to so many fairy tales. Marina
Warner claims that (feminist) “critics in the 1970s found (for example)
Cinderella’s story an oppressor’s script for female domestication—the
prince’s castle as a girl’s ultimate goal” and these
sorts of criticisms have obviously taken hold in popular thinking. Indeed,
it would be difficult to imagine a contemporary retelling of a fairytale,
the Disney “princess” movies being an arguable, if obvious
exception, that has not been influenced by the feminism of the second
half of last century; indeed, as time has gone on, away from the overtly
feminist Jack Zipes edited collection Don’t Bet on the Prince
(1986) and Jay Williams’ collection The Practical Princess and
Other Liberating Fairy Tales (1978), the influence of feminism on
retellings has become less foregrounded in the stories; instead, a feminist
reinterpretation of the heroine, and of love and marriage has become more
organic to the tale as it is reimagined for the modern age.
But it’s not just feminism that has left its mark on the retellings.
In a post-Freudian, post-Jungian world, it is inevitable that the retellings
have been interested in exploring the complexities of character within
the familiar tales, and by character I don’t just mean the literary
device of, for example, the hero, or the villain, but character as in,
as the Macquarie Dictionary puts it, the “moral constitution”
of a person. And so these novels frequently investigate the character
of the hero, or the villain. Rarely in these novels—and I would
argue never in the successful ones—does the author merely offer
the reader simplistic stock figures—if they do, it is only to then
challenge and overturn the readers assumptions about what constitutes
a hero… a villain…
I have also been fascinated to find a meritocratic spirit alive and well
within many of the retellings—again, in a modern world, it is hard
to imagine a re-examination of the fairy tale that doesn’t give
at least a passing consideration to the now rather outmoded notion that
virtue and merit are solely tied into one’s inheritance and accident
of birth. The question is, how does—or indeed, can one—one
challenge the concept of aristocracy, so central to so many of the tales,
and yet still be writing a fairy tale.
Just a brief aside here; many of you will be familiar with the books by
the Australian author Pamela Freeman, in particular her "Floramonde"
trilogy, a fantasy sequence heavily influenced by and interrogative of
the European fairy tale. Pamela was one of a handful of authors invited
to meet Crown Prince Frederik and Crown Princess Mary on their recent
visit to Sydney; the function was the dedication of the Hans Christian
Andersen statue at Observatory Hill. Now, Pamela is currently writing
her doctorate in creative arts at UTS, and her dissertation is on the
question of the monarchy in fantasy literature—I believe she is
calling it “Kings! What a good idea!”, which is a quote from
that brilliant iconoclast Terry Pratchett. Anyway, the opportunity to
test-run her thesis on an Actual Monarch (or monarch to be) was too much
for Pamela, and so she marched up to Prince Frederik and asked him own
thoughts on the question of the divine right of kings. By Pamela’s
own account, they had a fascinating exchange on the nature of monarchy,
and the Danish monarchy in particular, and she came away with a highly
favourable impression of the character and intelligence of the Crown Prince,
including the opinion that he is utterly besotted with his wife. It would
appear that the media’s free bandying around of the term “fairy
tale marriage” may for once be true…
And so, onto the books themselves. There are so many of these fairy tale
re-tellings now available to young adult—and younger, and older,
readers—that the challenge for me in putting this paper together
was finding a coherent way of organising the books; do I go by author,
or by original tale, or by ideological re-positioning. You’ll note,
I hope, that so far I have stuck to the fairy tale rule of organising
things in threes, but I think from here on in I am going to have to abandon
this tidy and familiar structure in order to try and cover as many of
the books as I can. So in no apparent order, and for no apparent reason,
I am going to begin by looking at some of the novels which place the villain
of the piece in the centre of the tale—the ugly stepsister, the
witch-mother, the beast. These are in fact some of my favourite books
of the genre, perhaps because they satisfy what I would have characterised,
until recent world events overtook us, as a distinctly modern imperative
not to view the world in simple tones of evil versus good, but to look
into the heart of darkness in order to seek understanding and, perhaps,
forgiveness.
©Judith Ridge 2005