CHAPTER – IV

Reviewing Fairy Tales – Attempts at Fairy Tale

Retellings
This Chapter deals with the analysis of retellings of some well known fairy tales. It is
opportune to admit at the outset here that the intent and principle that drives these
analyses is merely to exemplify or showcase a variety of retellings with the focus on
what is to be argued in the following chapter. Hence strict attention is not paid to the
historically sequential appearance of the retellings as well as to the number of
retellings of each story analysed. It must also be admitted at this juncture that the
Chapter offers but a mere glimpse of the retold tales. Many worthwhile retellings have
escaped mention, attention and interpretation on account of practical considerations
and limitations of the present project. Most prominent among these are the retellings
by Angela Carter who is held up as “the fairy godmother of magic realism”1 and
praised as “high sorceress” and “benevolent witch-queen” by Salman Rushdie.2

Briar Rose/ Sleeping Beauty:

Christa Joyce in her article ‘Contemporary Women Poets and the Fairy Tale’3
(Bobby, 31-43) describes fairy tale heroines as “female characters who sleep through
their lives: vain representations of real women who are cloistered and trapped, they
are commonly flat, one dimensional characters who come to life only through the
actions of a male character.” (Bobby, 31) Sleeping Beauty is a prototype and
incarnation of the stereotypical images and roles that fairy tales promote and prescribe
for women. Actually these stereotypes are reflections of the real life social norms
which are reinstated/ reinforced aesthetically interestingly and therefore subtly
through the tales. Male dominated society and culture expect women to be fragile and
passive and wait for men to make their lives meaningful. This expectation is so deeply
ingrained and rooted in the female psyche that women themselves aspire for it and
consider it fulfilling. Rewriters of the Sleeping Beauty tale acknowledge this fact and
try to subvert the male oriented perception of women in fairy tales by using the tales
themselves as a tool to serve their purpose.

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The Grimm version of ‘Brier Rose’ considered less grim than Perrault’s presents a
protective father-king who orders all the spindles to be destroyed from his kingdom
lest his daughter succumbs to a “bad” fairy’s curse at the age of 15. The birthday
celebration of his long desired for daughter is marked by an evil spell on the girl by an
uninvited fairy who arrives anyway and in a fit of rage proclaims that the princess will
prick herself on a needle and die when she turns 15. Another fairy alters and softens
the curse of death to a deep sleep of a hundred years. Despite the king’s precautionary
measures the princess on her fifteenth birthday finds an old woman spinning at a
spindle and as the abetted curse will have it, she pricks herself and falls asleep for one
hundred years along with the entire kingdom. After this long period is over a prince
from the neighbouring kingdom goes through the briars around the palace and upon
noticing the beautiful princess sleeping kisses her, awakens her and the entire
kingdom. They get married and live happily ever after.

• Anne Sexton’s ‘Briar Rose’4

Anne Sexton subtitles her ‘transformed’ ‘Briar Rose’ as Sleeping Beauty giving a
modern substitute and hinting at a new perspective to look at the story. Diana Hume
George commenting on the two versions of ‘Briar Rose’ says, “The tale Sexton has
transformed here tells us only that the king dearly loved his child and that, because of
this love and fairy’s curse, he overprotected her – a circumstance that, with or without
a fairy’s curse is common enough to be normative in our culture. In her version of
‘Briar Rose’, Sexton plays out the effects of such smothering and overprotective love
on the part of fathers for the ‘purity’ and ‘safety’ of their daughters – effects also
sufficiently common to be normative.”5 Sexton transforms the overprotective and
therefore thoughtless Grimm father into a perpetrator of sexual abuse and shows that
it is the father himself who brings upon the daughter the danger from which he tries to
protect her. As Diana Hume George further says, “…the father of the prologue is the
daylight daddy, a bringer of lollipops as well as that vaguely threatening ‘root.’ …
But the father of the epilogue comes to the daughter at night ‘circling the abyss like a
shark.’ This is the flip side of the daddy who bounces her on the knee.” (George,39)

Anne Sexton in Transformations gives a transformed look to her tales not just in their
content but even in their form. Like other tales in the collection, the verse ‘Briar
Rose’ too has a tripartite structure: a prologue, the transformed tale and the epilogue.

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In the prologue, the middle aged witch-narrator of the entire collection introduces a
new and different Briar Rose who is on a backward voyage into her disturbed and
horrifying childhood – a voyage “rank as honeysuckle” (T,107-108) She is a surviving
victim of sexual abuse by her father. The ‘trance’ girl who “keeps slipping off,”
whose arms are limp and who is “stuck in the time machine” (T,107) desires security
and protection from the abuse and seeks it in her mother’s ‘pocketbook’- the place
where she was conceived, suggesting thereby her lost childhood and a desire to regain
it and start her life afresh, anew. She has been robbed of her ability to speak with the
“gift of tongues” (T,107) and wants to learn to talk again. She feels that her
childhood has been taken away: her arms “limp as old carrots” (T,107) and her
tendency to “keep slipping off” (T,107) into “the hypnotist’s trance” (T,107) suggest
numbness and disorientation; her inability to articulate her experience and her feeling
that suddenly she has become a thumb sucking two year old child “stuck in the time
machine” imply the contradiction in her actual physical and mental age. As she
attempts to articulate her “rank as honeysuckle” journey, her speech is interrupted by
her ‘hypnotist’ father who, exercising his patriarchal power over her by virtue of his
age and relation, asks the “little doll child” to sit on his knee and offers her in return
“kisses for the back of the neck,” “a penny for [her] thoughts” and “a root” (T,107) –
an explicitly phallic image. He invites her to be his ‘snooky’ – a trickster and a lover
as the slang implications of the word suggest. Here is a father who wishes to control
the daughter’s body as well as her mind. He would “hunt” her thoughts “like an
emerald” if she does not oblige to give them in return for a penny. Sexton here subtly
throws light on the commoditisation and bartering of women in patriarchy and also
perhaps hints at the historical evidences of how virgin daughters have been exchanged
“passed hand to hand/ like a bowl of fruit”(T,112) by their fathers for money.

Patriarchy values virginity of a woman and therefore, perhaps, at the same time tends
to silence, suppress and discredit expression of experiences of violation and
incestuous abuse of virginity. Sexton’s prologue hints at this cultural diplomacy and
presents the predicament of a modern day survivor of sexual abuse in childhood. In
the story that follows Sexton bluntly outpours her rage against the culture which
allows sexual abuse of women and tries to take us to the roots of this culture.

The transformed tale omits the original introduction of the Grimm tale wherein a king
and a queen desire a child for a long time; a frog creeps out of the water and

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prophecies that they would have a child; they beget a daughter within a year and the
king in his joy prepares “a great feast.”6 The transformed tale begins thus:

Once

a king had a christening

for his daughter Briar Rose

and because he had only twelve gold plates

he asked only twelve fairies

to the grand event. (T 108)

The Grimm princess who is named Briar Rose because of the hedge of briar roses
growing round the castle where she lies asleep for a hundred years is introduced as
Briar Rose and not as a princess at the outset in the transformed tale. This suggests
Sexton’s assumption of the readers’ foreknowledge of the story. The verse tale teller
does not describe the drama of how the first eleven fairies endow the princess with
different gifts and how the haughty, revengeful thirteenth barges in and curses the
child before the twelfth fairy softens the irrevocable death sentence and converts it
into a long deep sleep of a hundred years. The witch narrator merely gives the details
relevant to the ‘fall’ of Briar Rose which include the reason why the thirteenth fairy
curses the child and her description in a manner which suggests her appearance to be
an embodiment of jealousy and evil:

The thirteenth fairy,

her fingers as long and thin as straw,

her eyes burnt by cigarettes,

her uterus an empty tea cup,

arrived with an evil gift. (T 108)

The thirteenth fairy is thus presented as an a-normal, unusual creature and it is hinted
that perhaps for this reason she is purposely left out of the celebration. The court’s
reaction to this fairy’s prophecy in the verse tale suggests the sexual connotations of

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the girl’s pricking on the spindle on her fifteenth birthday – the age when a girl
reaches womanhood. Her bleeding finger on the wheel suggestive of the broken
hymen is equated with a sexual experience and perhaps the king’s fear is grounded in
the sexual connotations of the prophecy. He does not want this to happen and perhaps
has a desire to violate the girl himself which he actually does later in the verse tale.
His extreme concern for the daughter and care not to allow any stranger to meet her is
suspected by the witch speaker. It smacks of his incestuous attraction for the daughter.
Later in the tale he is shown to have purposely maddened her to fulfil his own foul
intention. Hence he is shown to be more surprised and shocked to hear the prophecy
because

Fairies’ prophecies,

in times like those,

held water. (T 108)

Sexton, through irony in instances like this, ridicules the naïve fantasy of the fairy tale
world and refuses to willingly suspend disbelief. The mitigation of the curse by the
twelfth fairy is similarly sarcastically ridiculed in a tongue in cheek manner:

However the twelfth fairy

had a certain kind of eraser

and thus she mitigated the curse

changing that death into a hundred year sleep. (T 108)

The Grimm king sends out a command that all the distaffs in the whole kingdom be
burnt. In the transformed tale, on the other hand,

each night the king

bit the hem of her gown

to keep her safe.

He fastened the moon up

with a safety pin

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to give her perpetual light. (T 109)

Biting is associated with food, sex, anxiety, violence whereas hem implies boundaries
between the child’s body and the outer world. Biting the hem would imply
maintaining the boundaries. But, in so doing, he does consume the gown and tear it.
His teeth and the safety pin to fasten up the moon imply a physical threat in the
father’s protection. His attempt to keep her in perpetual light and order to prohibit
males “without scoured tongues” make the sexual innuendos obvious. This change
clearly and drastically transforms the king’s character and the theme of the story
making readers view it in a completely different light.

Despite the curse the king and the queen of the original tale are away from the castle
on the very day when the princess turns fifteen. In their absence the princess wanders
about the whole palace and comes to an old tower with a narrow winding staircase
and a little door with a rusty key sticking in the lock. She turns the key and the open
door shows her an old woman spinning on her spindle. The woman tempts her to
touch the spindle and as per the curse the princess falls into a deep sleep which
spreads over the entire castle. These happenings are elaborately described in the
Grimm tale. The verse tale focuses more on the end result of the happenings rather
than the sequence of how it happened. It merely mentions the girl’s fall and
sarcastically describes the consequences of the curse. The sleeping animals, servants,
fire, wind and trees in the Grimm story are reduced to a trance and are “stuck in the
time machine” in the verse tale. The description of the growth of a hedge of briar
roses around the castle, the unsuccessful attempts by many princes to get through the
hedge and their miserable deaths too are sarcastically voiced in the transformed tale.
The growing briar roses form a wall of tacks around the castle, no one can pass
through them and many princes are crucified because they have not “scoured their
tongues.” Thus in spite of the curse and its mitigation the dictates of the king still
pervade and cannot be disobeyed because it is, in fact, he who really desires to dwell
with the princess, as clearly mentioned in the tale later. Biblical figures appear in the
verse tale to describe the successful and unsuccessful princes. While the unsuccessful
ones become Christ figures, the successful prince is compared to Moses crossing the
red Sea to take the Israelites to their promised land of Canaan. The description of time
too receives a sarcastic tone and once again the fairy tale fantasy is falsified:

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In due time

a hundred years passed

and a prince got through

...

[he] found the tableau intact. (T 110)

In the Grimm tale, the princess, everything and everyone else come back to their own
selves when the prince kisses the girl. The two get married and live happily till the
end of their life. The verse tale prince takes the princess out of the prison of Daddy
and brings her to her “promised land”- the land of marriage. But it is not a happily
ever after marriage. The princess becomes insomniac and is scared of sleep as she
associates it with male violence and her sexual abuse. Sleeping beauty becomes afraid
of sleep because it is sexually induced.

“I must not sleep,” she says,

“for asleep I’m ninety

and think I’m dying.

Death rattles in my throat

like a marble. ” (T 110-111)

Her nightmares about having grown old, is a death for her since her whole life has
been based on being beautiful and young. Sexton touches upon the beauty stereotype
here which is stressed and valued in the patriarchal order. Sleeping Beauty is actually
completely stunted and stuck in the time machine, objectified and commoditised to be
passed on from one man to another as they wish. Though she cannot sleep or rather
because she cannot sleep, she is almost always unconscious, injected with Novocain
and has lost all awareness of her existence. So anyone can use her the way they like
and do anything to her. For This trance girl is yours to do with

You could lay her in a grave,

an awful package. (T 111)

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She is benumbed. A single kiss on her mouth (not lips) reminds her of the atrocities
and cruelties meted out to her by her father and she cries “Daddy! Daddy!” She
discloses that it is her father who has abused her.

It’s not the prince at all,

but my father

drunkenly bent over my bed,

circling the abyss like a shark,

my father thick upon me

like some sleeping jelly fish. (T 112)

The “charred spinning wheel” now becomes meaningful signifying her father
“circling the abyss like a shark.” Sexual cruelties inflicted on her by her father make
her call him “another kind of a prison.” Careful analysis of the verse tale leaves a
scope to doubt that all that happens to Briar Rose is a consequence of a deliberately
conspired plan hatched by the father-king and the thirteenth fairy of whom the girl is
scared even in her dreams. For, there is a striking similarity between the description of
the thirteenth fairy and the “faltering crone” in Briar Rose’s dream. They seem almost
identical:

Further, I must not dream

for when I do I see the table set

and a faltering crone at my place,

her eyes burnt by cigarettes

as she eats betrayal like a slice of meat. (T 111)

The omission of the thirteenth fairy with straw like fingers suggestive perhaps of an
eating disorder, cigarette burnt eyes and an empty tea cup like uterus suggesting her
inability to bear children is perhaps a deliberate decision of the king who does not
wish any of these features in his daughter. Usually fairies are good looking and fair.
Sexton subtly points out the unusual leaving out of the thirteenth fairy from the feast.

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Ugliness and the unwomanly aspects of this fairy perhaps are the causes why the king
omits her from the list of guests, Sexton suggests. In the Grimm tale the thirteenth
fairy was inadvertently left out of the party. The verse tale on the other hand doubts
the king for deliberately leaving her out for her frightening looks. Briar Rose’s
identification later in the tale with the faltering crone and her dream that the crone
eats betrayal serve as a reminder that she, (Briar Rose) is betrayed by another woman
and also of the king’s betrayal of the forgotten fairy. Thus theirs is a story of betrayal.
Hence as said earlier by the witch speaker it is actually a tale of every woman’s
betrayal at the hands of powerful men. That is the dominant male order.

Thus the betraying king and the betrayed and yet betraying fairy seem to consciously
stunt Briar Rose’s growth making her a “moon girl”

dwelling in his odour

rank as honeysuckle. (T 109)

She becomes a forgetful insomniac haunting the horrifying cattle prod the palace has
turned into. Her journey makes her permanently afraid of “that brutal place” where
she lies down

with cattle prods

The hole in (her) cheek open. (T 111)

The consequence is amnesia:

There was a theft.

That much I am told.

I was abandoned.

That much I know.

I was forced backward.

I was forced forward.

I was passed hand to hand

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like a bowl of fruit.

Each night I am nailed into place

and I forget who I am. (T 112)

She is a sacrificial figure. Her father nails her into place, crucifies her making her lose
and forget her identity. She becomes an extreme, horrifying representative of
captivity, imprisonment and utter “fall” of women at the hands of the patriarch, the
man, his order and his violence under the guise of smothering sweetness. Patriarchy
exerts control over women, hypnotises them, makes them hysterical, stunts them, and
infantilises them. Briar Rose on her journey “further and further back” victimised by
the undue approaches by her father under the guise of caring protection is made a
lunatic, a hysteric controlled by the moon and is stuck in time to an early phase of
existence which is marked by mere biological, physical awareness. This fall to sheer
animal existence emphasises the traditionally imposed typically male belief in women
as mere objects of sexual desire.

The animal images used in the verse tale and its prologue sufficiently reflect the
assumed status of women in patriarchy and their forced journey towards accepting
that status. For instance, “she is stuck in the time machine … as inward as a snail;”
“she is swimming further and further back/ up like a salmon;” “my father thick upon
me/ like some sleeping jelly fish.” (T 112) Animals mentioned in the description of
the tableau are suggestive of the stoppage of physical activity:

The king and the queen went to sleep,

the courtiers, the flies on the wall.

The trees turned into metal

And the dog became china.

Even the frogs were zombies. (T 109)

Food images in “arms limp as old carrots,” “The fire in the hearth grew still/ and the
roast meat stopped crackling,” the faltering crone eating “betrayal like a slice of meat”
underline the point of physicality mentioned above. The verse tale ends with a
question and in turn raises a series of thought provoking questions about the voyage in

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the minds of the readers answers to which must be sought for the betterment of the
entire (wo)mankind:

What voyage this, little girl?

This coming out of prison?

God help –

this life after death? (T 112)

Through the retelling of ‘Briar Rose’ Sexton attempts a cultural critique and for the
purpose creates a new voice with which to challenge and ask the readers “to consider
personal, cultural and even critical power relationships as inseparable.”7Dawn
Skorczewski in her article on incest in Anne Sexton’s poetry says that the final lines
of the ‘Briar Rose’ tale “question the possibility of speaking within dominant
discourses without being imprisoned by silencing codes and repressive institutions.
This final voice in ‘Briar Rose’ is the voice of one who knows that the personal
trauma and the existing arrangements of speech are part of the same patriarchal plot.”
(Skorczewski 320)

•
Olga Broumas’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’8

Sexuality, sexual discourse, articulation of sexual abuse, incest etc. are, in the
dominant male order, sanctioned on the one hand and tabooed on the other. Language
is essentially a man’s privilege. Man can be expressive and openly articulates his
sexual, physical needs and desires. A woman, on the other hand, is expected not just
to curb and repress her physical needs, desires and her sexual preferences but is even
supposed not to utter a word about and against linguistic and physical abusive attacks
on her. It is interesting here to consider, may be as a point of relevant diversion, the
abusive words in the Indian languages this researcher is familiar with viz. Marathi and
Hindi. At the centre of most of the swear words in these two languages are references
to women and particularly to their sexuality and sexual organs. These words also
reflect demeaning attitudes towards the network of maternal relations which
deliberately humiliate women. It is an example of how language in patriarchy
sexually abuses and ill treats women in general. At the same time when patriarchy
gives a free hand to man to use language to express his sexual feelings, physical

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desires and necessities and allows him to express his anger even in small matters in
sexually abusive language, women’s sexuality on the other hand, is so severely
repressed that women are not just not allowed but are even not able to express it
openly.

Olga Broumas in her re-vision of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ undertakes this issue of female
sexual repression and restraint on its articulation in patriarchy and a possible
resolution to it. Like her ‘Cinderella’ discussed later in this chapter, Broumas’s
Sleeping Beauty is a subversive female character who challenges the given , blindly
accepted and sanctioned gender stereotypes concerning women’s identity and role in
the patriarchal order by probing deep and attempting to bring to the readers’ notice the
silenced, deliberately neglected and repressed aspects of a woman’s existence and
being for centuries in the conventional tales which are constructs of the same
dominant male order. It is by way of this attempt that Broumas endeavours to
articulate and voice the hitherto suppressed female desire. In this articulation she uses
an innovative language which provokes and explicitly attempts to liberate. Broumas
in her re-told ‘Sleeping Beauty’ too presumes the readers’ foreknowledge of the story
and simply alludes to the traditional tale and proceeds to tell her version. The speaker,
Sleeping Beauty, begins the tale with a first person narration mentioning the long
hours of her sleep, the lethargy spread over an extensive period of time:

I sleep, I sleep

too long,…

Broumas strikes a personal chord here by her involvement in the narrative making the
narrative naturally intimate and close to her self. The enjambment in the introductory
lines of the poem implies a deliberately ambiguous structure of the verse stanza
suggesting perhaps a continual entrapment of the narrator and the extreme intensity of
her sleep. The intense sleep for hours which ‘hound’ her also leave her ‘breathless’
with her ‘heart racing.’ Lethargic when she wakes up, the feeling is like momentary
satisfaction of a nap/ sleep peeled off “like a hairless glutton.” She dreams and the
“cold water shocks [her] back from the dream.” However it turns out that what she
calls a dream is actually a real life experience which can be confirmed and evidenced
in the fossilised “love bites” on her neck “that did exist” (italics in the original) and
could be witnessed in the mirror. Though she feels that it is dreamlike, she realises its

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actuality in the visible physical marks of the passionate moments shared with the
lover in a state of delirium. The dreamlike memory of love clings to her like “a
ceremonial necklace” tightly wrapped round and strangling her neck. This necklace of
traditional love and its memory is suddenly “snapped apart.” The lovers’ unbridled
passion is described in the lines that follow: the “vital salt” of body - blood and tears,
the “bitter, metallic” “taste of you” that “sharpens” the speaker’s tongue emphasise
the physicality of their bonding and again appear to her “dreamlike.” Nonetheless she
is aware (“I know”) as she sleeps, that her blood runs clear as salt in the lover’s mouth
and her eyes which open to a new awakening which is no more personal/ private or
hidden but in the midst of a crowded city amid traffic. This awakening is different
from the one in the original traditional tale.

This Sleeping Beauty is not choiceless and voiceless. She exercises her choice and
voices her desire in public. This Briar Rose is awakened not by a charming prince’s
kiss but a “public kiss” by her woman lover Judith’s “red lips.” The pedestrians
gathered beneath the red light are shocked to behold the public demonstration of
homoerotic love. Broumas’s mention of the red traffic light and its implication in “our
culture” – the male dominated culture – is remarkable. She underlines the significance
and implications of “red” in patriarchal culture. The red traffic light orders us to stop.
The shocked pedestrians gathered under the ‘red’ light suggest the fact that the
customary, reactionary response to this kind of bold deviation from the “sacred law”
of the male order would be to stop such blasphemy. The culture which would react
thus considers red as a warning and “men threaten each other with final violence.”
Red for them implies a sign of danger and betrayal. They are there under the red
signal signalling to the “deviant” women not to cross their ‘given’ bounds. For the
women lovers the same red colour connotes erotic desire, passionate love and
conscious, deliberate transgression of social norms and accepted customs in
patriarchal order and conventions. Broumas’s Sleeping Beauty defies the order and its
code system. And in defiance she boldly declares, “I will drink your blood” and
accepts her woman lover’s kiss in front of the shocked society’s open eyes suggesting
a total determination to not conform with the social laws guided by the male order.
She finds in this act “unspeakable liberties,” – to be her own self, to articulate her
sexuality, to defy social restraints and taboos, and above all to be able to make her

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own choice consciously. The woman’s kiss liberates this Sleeping Beauty; she gains
the power to defy and transgress.

Unlike the Grimm Briar Rose Broumas’s Sleeping Beauty does not have to wait till
the prince comes through the brambles to save and free her. Instead she herself
chooses to “wake” to her female lover’s “public kiss.” Judith, her lover, is not her
saviour. Sleeping Beauty is not saved; her happiness is not controlled by anyone else.
Rather she chooses to awaken mutually with Judith’s kiss. Both are each other’s
equals in this relationship. It is a relationship where the two women have their own
individuality intact; neither exercises control over the other; there is no suppression
but liberty and free choice which revitalises both of them. As Nancy Walker puts it,
“Broumas’s revisions reverse the central gender relationships of the traditional tales.
Men are not rescuers, but rather intruders; women are lovers and nurturers of each
other instead of jealous competitors.”9 Hence the name Judith too achieves
significance and becomes connotative. With its biblical associations the name Judith
implies feminine heroism, bravery, adventure and recklessness. The deliberate choice
of the biblical Jewish heroine who liberated her clan from oppression implies the
democratic and egalitarian approach Broumas sees inherent in a lesbian relationship.
Delighted in her new freedom and triumph they

cross the street, kissing

against the light, singing, This

is the woman I woke from sleep, the woman that woke

me sleeping.

It is thus a happy awakening for this Sleeping Beauty who is very much unlike
Sexton’s mainly because Sexton like many other re-tellers emphasises the theme of
sleep more than her awakening. Broumas does recognise Briar Rose’s sleep but
remarkably shifts her focus and the readers’ attention to a lively awakening of the girl
providing a sort of resolution to the passive reliance of women on male favours. In
doing this Broumas offers for her awakened Beauty an alternative, a possibility of a
vital and liberated life which she can live on her own terms.

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Lesbian defiance is a conscious political stance against the accepted norms of

heterosexuality. It is presented as a rebellious attack on the existing establishment
which has a rigid set of norms concerning gender and sex relations, which are
oppressive and degrading. It also serves as a feasible and liberating substitute for the
establishment and its hetero-normative values. Homosexual relationship between
women is shown in this re-vision of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ as a means of redemption of
women. Broumas’s Sleeping Beauty attains awakening through a woman who is not
her saviour but a companion on par with the girl. Thus the lesbian, homosexual
relationship offers a democratic, egalitarian option to the subordinating and
discriminatory male order. In this sense it becomes a conscious political stance. Also
the female lover and her “public kiss” in the presence of shocked believers in
patriarchy under the symbolic red light underline the feminist motto “the personal is
political.” Feminist movement considers the public articulation of the ‘private’ as an
important presupposition for creating self awareness amongst women about their
systemic suppression and entrapment and forming a community of women bound
with solidarity and a feeling of sisterhood. Broumas in her retelling brings to the
centre the peripheral aspects of womanhood that remain unarticulated in the male
dominated culture. She gives Sleeping Beauty a new alternative and a new identity
remarkably enough not through a man but by her own choice. By exercising her own
choice without affecting the other’s individuality and freedom Sleeping Beauty and
through her, Broumas utter a political statement of defiance of the order and culture,
which sanctions and represses abuse of women and demean their status as free,
individual human beings.

In ‘Sleeping Beauty’ Broumas, by demonstrating woman’s right and freedom to

exercise her choice provides women with a political statement for challenging the age
old gender stereotypes and re-define and re-establish their place, role and status in the
male dominated world.

• Sara Henderson Hay’s ‘Sleeper’10

Sara Henderson Hay’s ‘Sleeper’ is an instance of appropriation of the sonnet – a

poetic form and tool widely used by men in the history of literature. In her new vision
of the conventional tale presented in her sonnet based on the tale, Hay tries to reveal
Sleeping Beauty’s future. Sleeping Beauty when she wakes up is dissatisfied with

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the changed world she finds herself in. She hates the chaos in this “new and noisy”
world which surrounds her and wishes that “the prince had left me where he found
me.” She has also lost her peace and tranquillity that she experiences while asleep.
She was happy in her “cloistered world,” in her “rosy trance … charmed and deep.”
In fact, she is irritated with the prince who breaks her tranquillity and removes the
lovely brambles around her palace which give her a feel of being secure and safe. She,
therefore, calls the prince a “clumsy trespasser” causing her discomfort. This implies
her unwillingness to wake up to a chaotic world from a tranquil and pacifying sleep.
She has loved her “cloistered world” for a century and has set her own “pattern” of
dreams of her own. It seems a trespasser’s scheme to tread upon this world and tear
apart the pattern of her dreams just “with a kiss or two.” The princess is determined.
She will not allow anything of this sort to happen. She has decided not to wake up
from her world and break or violate her own heartfelt wishes and desires. She will not
let her privacy be encroached upon by the intervention of apparent love of man. She
will not sell her privacy in exchange for man’s deceitful love – deceitful because
under the guise of love is a plot to invade her private world wherein her mind and
body are at liberty to exercise her needs and desires on her own terms. Besides, in
such intervention and offer of love, her wishes are not taken into account or respected
and hence she rejects man in her world and his role as a rescuer and a saviour.

…if he thinks that with a kiss or two

He’ll buy my dearest privacy, or shake me

Out of the cloistered world I’ve loved so long

Or tear the pattern of my dreams, he’s wrong. (Hay 10)

She refutes the general claim that Sleeping Beauty needs to be saved by man. She
refuses the heroic role of man in her life and as such considers any such attempt as an
intervention and invasion. She is firm in fulfilling her heart’s desires and not letting
anyone control her body:

Nothing this clumsy trespasser can do

Will ever touch my heart, or really wake me. (Hay 10)

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She thus is not a woman without voice passively guided by her fate and conditioned
by the male ideas of a woman’s happy life. She wakes up but does not like being
awakened. She utters her disillusionment in this awakening. She refuses to be fully
awakened by the prince. In not bartering her “dearest privacy” with the prince’s kisses
she reserves her right to marry him.

Scratching the surface, one can see that at a deeper level this revised tale too hints at a
rape, a molestation of the girl’s modesty and virginity by the prince. The violation
seems to provoke her rage against the prince. The invasion of her privacy and her
being are unacceptable to her. Though the prince is responsible for her waking up, she
is not grateful to him. She has been invaded against her wishes when she was asleep.
Besides, she dislikes the world around. The girl’s anger is against the object she has
been made into when she slept. Unlike Basile’s 16th century Sleeping Beauty who
after a hundred years’ sleep gives birth to two children soon after waking up and
accepts the prince in marriage, this Sleeping Beauty refuses to accept the relation
established through sexual violation against her conscious wish. Sleeping Beauty here
thus dares to challenge her fate preordained by the fairy’s curse and blessing and
decides to exercise her own will. This is yet another portrayal of the Sleeping Beauty
seeking her own independent universe.

Sara Henderson Hay also voices the prince’s feeling and opinion after being rejected
by Sleeping Beauty. The partial awakening of Sleeping Beauty and the unmasking of
the prince’s real goals and his generous guise of a saviour, rescuer disappoints him
and leaves him annoyed at the refusal of his role and heroism in the act of rescue.
Thus in ‘The Sleeper -2’12 the prince himself wakes up to realise “far too late”

How sound she sleeps, behind a thorny wall

Of rooted selfishness, whose stubborn strands

I broke through once to kiss her lips and hands,

And wake her heart, that never woke at all. (Hay 11)

He realises that he was wrong to have considered the “slumberous look” on her face,
“the dreaming air, the drowsy-lidded eyes” during her sleep were “nothing more” than
an “artless affectation.”

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The prince represents the male order, which in the event of defeat and denial by
female rebellion attempts to accuse the defiant woman of being selfish, hypocritical,
and corrupt and of using their feminine assets to beguile men “to cling about, to
strangle, to destroy.” His irritation at Sleeping Beauty’s refusal to admit man’s
heroism, her determination and positive assertion makes him wish that he had left her
before learning how she had used her sleep and beauty to hide her revolt:

I wish I’d gone away that self-same hour,

Before I learned how, like her twining roses,

She bends to her soft, implacable uses

The pretty tactics that such vines employ

To hide the poisoned barb beneath the flower,

To cling about, to strangle, to destroy. (Hay 11)

Hay, thus, records the typical male reaction to any woman’s attempt at self assertion
and claiming the right to privacy and freedom of self.

•
Sara de Ford’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’12

Sara de Ford’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’ is another poetic version of ‘Brier Rose’ presenting
yet another Sleeping Beauty “no one can wake…no sound can shatter.” (171)De Ford
too presents a dormant and powerless beautiful maiden induced to sleep sexually and
experiencing a life of torpid unconsciousness – a shatterproof trance. “Pricking” male
relationship presents explicitly the sexuality hinted at in the original tale. In her
variation De Ford presents Sleeping Beauty as the youngest princess. Her elder sisters
are bestowed with the gifts of “goodness,” “quick bright wit,” “dower of wealth,”
“long life” and so on while Sleeping Beauty is left with only the gift by the “sly
witch,” the cruel “malignant” fairy “the spindle prick of sex.”(171) This gift would
leave her doomed in a “stuporous” life of deathlike unconsciousness. The prick is
sexual. She however, is not going to remain youthful but is destined to grow older
with time while asleep through life, her “torpid unconsciousness” (171) She is thus
left to a fate of a living cadaver – motionless, benumbed, dormant, hibernating with

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latent consciousness. She is neither dead nor alive. She sleeps all through their life on
account of the “keen wound” of love.

The story in a subtle way presents a representative state of womankind living

hopelessly in a trancelike state throughout life her desires, wishes and feelings
governed by the male dominated value system.

• Robert Coover’s ‘The Briar Rose’13

Robert Coover’s ‘The Briar Rose’ is an instance of a male attempt at rewriting the
story of the Grimms’ ‘Brier Rose’ and Perrault’s ‘The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood.’
Coover in a very interesting and novel manner exposes the sexual meaning of the
original classics through the thoughts of the prince, dreams of the princess and stories
told by the old crone/ fairy who takes care of Briar Rose during the century of her
sleep. It is an allegorical playful parody left open for the readers’ decoding and
interpretation. It is like a game used as a strategy to awaken the readers, to provoke
them to undertake critical examination of cultural norms, values, codes and
“established patterns of thought.”14

To begin with, like the rewrites mentioned earlier in this chapter Coover too assumes
readers’ foreknowledge of the original Grimm, Perrault and Basile’s versions of the
tale, begins in media res and ponders on the sleep metaphor but completely strips it
bare. The retelling attempts to take us into the psychological depths of the characters’
thoughts and dreams – their conscious and sub/unconscious psyches.

Before the well known Grimm version of ‘Brier Rose’, which became more famous
with its more reductive adaptation by Disney, the 17th century Neapolitan writer
Giambattsta Basile in his 1636 collection of 50 stories in Pentamerone included ‘Sun,
Moon and Talia’ on which Charles Perrault based his version ‘La belle au bois
dormant’ translated as ‘The Sleeping Beauty in the Woods’ in 1697. It is said that the
elements of this tale type were found in an earlier version in the 14th century French
Arthurian story Perceforest.

Whereas the Grimm tale simplistically presents and focuses on the enchantment and
release of the fairy tale heroine after a hundred years and a ‘happy ever after’ end, the
earlier Basile and Perrault versions present the heroine impregnated in her sleep.
Besides, the stories do not conclude with her awakening. The princess and her two

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children are persecuted by the cannibalistic Queen, Beauty’s mother-in-law. They are
rescued and reunited with the prince. Basile’s story has Talia, impregnated by a
married king. She gives birth to twins – Sun and Moon – during her sleep. One of the
infants sucks from Talia’s finger the flaxen fibre which had caused the enchantment.
With the removal of the fibre she wakes up. On discovering this, the king’s wife tries
to eat Talia’s children but is not successful. Perrault’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’ is relatively
less explicit and violent. It shows Sleeping Beauty having twins named Dawn and
Day born after the prince weds Beauty when she wakes up. Perrault ends his story
with a moral which Angela Carter translates as follows: “A brave, rich, handsome
husband is a prize well worth waiting for; but no modern woman would think it was
worth waiting for a hundred years. The tale of Sleeping Beauty shows how long
engagements make for happy marriages, but young girls these days want so much to
be married, I do not have the heart to press the moral.”15

Robert Coover in his hyper textual attempt at the rewrite of the tale combines all three
versions and mainly usurps the gaps in the legend with respect to the issue of Sleeping
Beauty’s dreams, which Perrault mentions parenthetically while writing his version.
Consciously inter-textual, intensely psychological, clearly postmodern in its
references to the pre-existent narratives and at the same time subverting these
“bourgeois”16 narrative traditions and “challeng[ing] linearity” (707) by creating
‘hyperspace’ for his ‘hypertext,’ Coover indeed offers a revived look to and comment
on the tale of Sleeping Beauty. Undertaking the innovative form of writing Coover
infuses the theme and content with the hypertext form and vice versa. As he himself
mentions in The End of Books “the most radical new element that comes to the fore in
hypertext is the system of multidirectional and often labyrinthine linkages we are
invited or obliged to create.” (707) So does his tale flow in many directions and make
the readers create meaning and author the tale themselves. This novel hyperfiction is
“so radically new it is hard to be certain just what it is. No fixed centre, for starters –
and no edges either, no ends or boundaries. The traditional narrative time line
vanishes into a geographical landscape or exitless maze, with beginnings, middles and
ends being no longer part of the immediate display ... topless (and bottomless)…
paragraphs, chapters and other conventional text divisions are replaced by evenly
empowered and equally ephemeral window-sized blocks of text and graphics…”
(707)

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Hypertext with its nonlinear or non sequential segments called lexias allows an
interactive, graphic, multivocal discourse and aims at empowering the reader to
interact, interpret and organise the given text “…freeing the reader from the
domination of the author,” (706) making reader and writer “co-learners or co-
writers…in the mapping and remapping of the textual…components, not all of which
are provided, by what used to be called the author.” (706) Coover, in his ‘Briar Rose’
illustrates all his insights about the hypertext thus making the retold tale itself a
metaphor for hypertext and represents it with newer intricacies and complexities.
Coover deconstructs the source tale, its story, plot and narration, and at the same time
attempts its critique targeting the arbitrary perpetration in it of archetypal social and
gender roles, identities and the archetypes of ‘appropriate’ sexual behaviour which
gets blindly transmitted in and adopted by society as morally and politically correct.
Deviating from linear, logical and causal structure, this novella offers 42 lexias which
begin in the middle and cease to move ahead of the moment where they begin. Indeed
nothing happens. There is no progression of events in either time or space. The story,
like the hypertext format itself is circular and entrapping like the young prince caught
in the thorny brambles around the castle wherein the princess lies asleep (?) dreaming
(?) entertained by the good/bad fairy with her apparently varied tales. At the end of
the novella (if one can call it an end) nothing or no one has moved on. We along with
the characters in the retold tale return to the same point where we had started. The
narration and characters are stuck in the moment and place and so are we when we
read the tale. “This one point in time, however, cannot pass, and the characters and
the reader remain right there for the length of the book.”17

In a very subtle and interesting manner Coover follows the fairy tale technique of
repetition and variation to debunk the fairy tale. His retelling itself is a re-viewed
variation on the three varied versions of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ as mentioned above.
Within it are repeated variations of the Sleeping Beauty myth. The old crone keeps
telling Briar Rose stories all of which begin with the moment in which Coover’s own
narration is caught thus delineating multiple possibilities of the ways Briar Rose can
awaken and the consequential responses to those awakenings from the prince and the
princess. These possibilities are furthered by and in fact inspire Briar Rose’s dreams
in her sleep. The fairy’s stories, the prince’s thoughts on heroism, his vocation,
adventure and frustration and the princess’s dreams keep occurring cyclically and

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perennially in a repetitive/repeated structure rendering to the retold tale what Coover

calls, “ fluidity, contingency, indeterminacy, plurality” (709), circularity sans centre
and a “dimensionless infinity.” (709)

The prince is “hopelessly in the flesh-rending embrace of the briars” (L 24) that he
slashes but they grow back “doubly forked; rearmed, he slashes them again, he must
strive.” (L 24) Heroism is his vocation and disenchanting the princess from her
century long sleep just with his magical kiss “(he has a talent for it, women have often
told him so)” (L 24) is his “fabled adventure.” (L 28) He undertakes his adventure,
therefore, with his sense of vocation and not for the fabled reward – “what is another
lonely bedridden princess?” (L 1) Though described in a sexually provocative
language the adventure, for the Prince, is not desired for the sexual pleasure but to
confront “the awful powers of enchantment…To tame mystery. To make … his
name.” (L 1) He thinks or “prefers to think” (L 3) that perhaps he is the chosen one,
that the object of his heroic quest is “Honour. Knowledge. The exercise of his magical
powers” (L3) and of course, love. He is uncertain and rather doubtful about the
outcome of his adventure. The prospect of suffering, pain and cruelty at the end of the
adventure excites him, incites him: “if there be any truth in these century-old rumours
from benighted times, this adventure could end, not in love’s sweet delirium, but in its
pain, its infamous cruelty. This prospect, however, does not dissuade him. On the
contrary. It incites him.” (L3) For, he is proudly obsessed with the fabled “heroic
task” (L6) – that of not just crossing the hurdles but on reaching the sleeper,
awakening her to the knowledge about herself and getting rewarded with the
princess’s unconditional love and honour for his favour. The embracing briars which
he slashes are the impediments that entice and lure him away from the prize inside
and dissuade him from playing “the fabled fool” (L6) for choosing an imagined prize
over “a real and present one” (L6) i.e. “the immediate gratification of flesh” amidst
the briars that “voluptuously caress him” (L9) He moves on with his manly resolve
presuming “I am he who will awaken Beauty!” (L9), thinking that it “is a marvellous
and emblematic journey beyond the beyond, requiring his unwavering courage and
dedication, but promising a reward beyond the imagination of ordinary mortals.” (L9)
As he continues to be ‘caught’ in the gnarled, entwining briars that he continues to
slash away “valiantly” (L16) it dawns upon him that the ‘beautiful’ is “a deadly
illusion.” (L14) His erotic longing for the princess is now replaced with “sympathetic

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curiosity” (L14) for her. He equates his life “driven by his dream of vocation and
heroic endeavour and bewitched by desire” (L14) with the possible “strangely
timeless and insubstantial” (14) existence of Briar Rose if no one reaches her to
awaken her from her dreams. His vocation is replaced by the fear that the journey
would be timeless and insubstantial and his doubt about whether the castle and the
princess really exist and whether the princess there is beautiful and loving or just “the
wicked fairy’s wicked creature, more captor than captive, more briar than blossom.”
(L16) However “he will remain a hero to the end.” (L21) Unable to release himself
from the “flesh-rending embrace” (L24) of the briars and imagining his “fabled” (L6)
victory and the consequent fame and happiness that would “naturally flow therefrom”
(L24) he hears the bones of his predecessors stuck and lost in the brambles, speak
about “the vanity of all heroic pursuits and of the dreadful void that the illusion of
immortality, so called, cannot conceal.” (L24) They describe the essence of heroism
as “willing self-delusion, masks, artifice, a blind eye cast toward the abyss.” (L24) He
is aware but still would ‘strive’ to make his name “for love of love.” (L24) He expects
that Briar Rose would appreciate his strife for love since she too is chosen as he
himself is or he thinks he is. Both are repeatedly pricked and stripped naked. In his
imagination – the only asset he is left with – he visualises the completion of his
“fabled adventure” and the “ever after” that follows including “the disappointments
and frustrations and betrayals, the tedium, the doubts (was it really she after all? was
it really he?), the disfigurement of time, he draining away of meaning and memory,
the ensuing silences, the death of dreams; and enrobed in pain, wilfully nameless, yet
in his own way striving still, he slips back into the briars’ embrace.” (L28) By and by
he seems utterly exhausted to the extent that he doesn’t even wish to reach her and
awaken her. Still his vocation compels him to move on. He thinks of the tranquillity
and peace in his life before this adventure and resents her “for getting him into this
mess.” (L30) In Lexia 33 the prince thinks, imagines or perhaps indeed has escaped
the briars, scaled the walls, explored the castle, found the princess, is already at her
bedside and has awakened her. Surprised as he himself may be, we too wonder
whether “he is generating this illusion himself, or if it is fairy magic.” (L33) He finds
her as per his fabled imagination and expectations: “beautiful, gentle, innocent,
devoted, submissive.” (L33) Humorously Coover presents him as “suffused with love
and desire” wanting “to take a nap” (L33) He is lost in his thoughts about his quest
while the princess tells him what a flying goose foretold her: “You will never awaken
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because the story you were in no longer exists.” (L33) The prince doubts his role as
the chosen saviour and feels that he might as well face the same fate as his
predecessors whose rattling bones talk to him about the vanity of the quest which ends
in an anonymous death/eternity “forever after.” Continuously shifting between
determination and resignation, repeatedly he imagines and thinks in his imagination
that he has broken the princess’s spell only to realise in a while that he is still caught
in the briars.

“Nothing in this castle is simply what it is, everything here has a double life,” he
realises by Lexia 35. Everything is masked, hidden and complex. He believes that the
princess would bring him out of the “thorny maze” (L35) but her questions, “When
will this spell be broken?” “When will my true prince come?” (L35) awaken him to
the realisation that “as he feared, he is not the one.” (L35) If he is not, he would like
to ‘become’ the one she dreams of but she holds a mirror up to him wherein he sees
that he is a “hairy, toothy” (L35) beast. His self-reflection “Who am I? What am I?”
(L23) is answered here. She dresses him up for the ball “with all the needles left
inside” (L35) and leads him by the paw. The hall which he enters is the perilous edge
of the world and he realises that from here “there will be no departing.” (L38)
Engulfed in pain he howls for help and release. Still trapped in the brambles, he feels
he has rescued the sleeping princess and “feels substantially unrewarded for all his
pain and suffering.” (L38) The rescue of the princess appears such “a long ago”
happening that “his memory of it is as though a borrowed one.” (L38) He analyses the
reason why he remained entrapped in the hedges: “I feel the reason I never escaped
the briars was that, in the end, I loved them, or at least I needed them…. They grew
on me…” (L37) The blossoming briar hedge is the princess’s double whom the prince
has been experiencing sensually ever since he begins his quest which for him initially
seems very easy. The briars “part like thighs, the silky petals caress[ing] his cheeks.”
(L1) Throughout Coover playfully exposes the sexual elements and symbolism in the
hero’s quest constantly referring to the spindle in association with the penis and
violation of Briar Rose’s virginity in each of her dreams of awakening. The prince
thinks he is the one chosen for the heroic task of making his name. But so did all the
preceding princes who die entrapped in the brambles: “all around him, the pendulous
bones whisper severally in fugal refrain: I am he who will awaken Beauty! I am he
who will awaken Beauty!” (L9) The princess awakens again and again and is still in

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the castle sleeping; so does the prince repeatedly reach her passing through the
brambles and scaling the walls and yet is caught, trapped, stuck, “hopelessly
enmeshed” in the hedges wounded by the pricks of the briars.

Coover in his humorous presentation of the prince in the brambles sarcastically

criticises and deconstructs the fairy tale hero and the fabled adventure of the hero as
well as the fabled notion of heroism. The hero’s task of rescuing the princess and
“making his name” (L 1,9,32, 33, 42) itself is challenged and questioned. The hero
and heroism are denied in this rewrite. Coover mocks the fabled hero and his fabled
heroic adventure. The hero here is destined to remain entrapped in his own
understanding of the happily ever after – “a fall into the ordinary” – “whether he
makes his name or not (what does it matter?)” (L28) When he ultimately feels/
imagines he has reached the princess and is stunned by her beauty, “[H]e is thinking
about the quest that brought him here. Has he made his name then? If so, what is it?”
(L33)

The princess: “She awakens to repeated awakenings as though trapped in some

strange mechanism.” (L39) She experiences repeated stabbings by the treacherous
spindle and is “impregnated with … despair” (L3) Each Lexia that presents the
princess’s dream brings near the closure of the spell but right there she is pulled back
again into a new beginning, a restart of another dream narrative, which moves round
and round (like the spinning wheel) with no hope of reaching a happy (or otherwise)
conclusion.

The princess describes herself as the one “that hurts” (L4) since she has no other
answer. She craves to know who and what she is, why she is fated to experience “an
endless stupor and its plague of kissing suitors.” (L8) “Throughout the long night of
the hundred year sleep” (L8) she confronts these questions and the fairy tries to
answer them: “You are such a door, accessible only to the adept, you are such a secret
passageway to nowhere but itself.” (L8) It is thus difficult to fathom the truth about
this Briar Rose.

Coover’s Briar Rose wakes up every time after a sexual assault “on her lifeless body”
(L19) by a band of ruffians, by “her prince or some prince anyway” (L22), by a wild
bear, by a monkey, by her king father in alliance with her mother and so on. She is
entrapped in the confusion between the dreams and awakening. “She longs to bring it

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to a standstill” (L39) but every time she wakes up with varied feelings only to realise
that it had been yet another dream sequence. Her awakenings are deceptive; the
happy endings are delusive. They torture, traumatise or mock her as well as the
readers who desire such endings. She feels destiny has been unjust to her and curses
it. To this, “her ancient friend” the fairy reacts in a consoling tone and suggests to her
that she has meted with a better fate than others: “You are one of the lucky ones, the
old crone says, wagging a gnarled finger at her. Your sisters were locked in iron
towers, lamed and stuck in the kitchen, sent to live with the savage beasts. They had
their hands and feet cut off, were exiled, raped, imprisoned, reviled, monstrously
deformed, turned to stone and killed. Even worse, many of them had their dreams
come true.” (L17) Coover in a delightfully sarcastic comment mocks the “fabled”
dream and the prize for the beautiful princess. The prize of marriage with the
handsome prince is mocked in the tale as a shattering and severe fate for the winning
beauty. Paradoxically enough the awakening - the happy end with disenchantment,
rescue, kiss and wedding of the princess - is shown as a nightmare, a horror.

Tired of the evasive and deceptive happy endings “all she longs for, as she tells the
old crone in the tower, is to sleep again.” (L42) She is again restored to her dream
wherein the fairy would lull her to sleep with yet another version of ‘Briar Rose.’ The
sleeping princess closes her eyes to such a cruel fate, but as always, it is as if she has
opened them again, and now to yet another prince arriving, bloodied but exultant, at
her bedside. “… Yes, yes, that’s right, my prince! And now, tenderly if you can,
toothily if need be, take this spindled pain away …” (L42). The novella ends on this
note of continuity and circularity suggesting “the eternal re-enactment” (L42) of Briar
Rose’s fate and her desire to rid herself of the spindled pain.

Coover perhaps depicts representatively through his ‘Briar Rose’ the continual
eternity and eternal re-enactment of painful destiny of the womankind determined by
and in the male dominated order for centuries past and to come. The princess’s and so
every woman’s “longing for integrity… is itself fragmented.” (L2) Being stabbed
again and again “by the treacherous spindle, impregnated with despair from which,
for all her fury, she cannot awaken” (L2) and she will never as the plucked goose in
one of her dreams prophecies in Lexia 33. She thus represents the male ordained fate
of women in patriarchy: “the object of male gaze or even rape.” (Redies 23), a
helpless victim of violent male sensuality and violence. “[A] band of drunken

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peasants … intent on loot … commenced to strip her, of her finery and naturally one
thing led to another and they all had a turn on her, both before she was kissed and
after.” (L15) Another band of ruffians who in fact are “her father’s household
knights” all have “a go on her lifeless body, sometimes more than one at a time.”
(L19) The answer to Rose’s and in turn every woman’s “Why?” is because “you
won’t listen!” (L19) Coover takes a trivial detail to a larger, vaster canvas to represent
the plight of women as helpless, passive victimised patriarchal subjects and at the
same time plunges into the typical male psyche and reveals the derogatory,
demeaning and dehumanising attitudes of patriarchy towards women.

As mentioned earlier in this analysis Coover in his rewrite has worked on the
suggestive, suggested and unexplored links in the tales by Basile, Perrault and
Grimm. Perrault’s tale mentions the good fairy amusing the sleeping princess with
pleasant dreams during a century long sleep. Working on this idea Coover presents a
fairy who is a combination of many female stereotypes in fairy tales. The good fairy is
also a wicked, bad, old crone. She is the one who curses her, the witch; she is the one
who blesses her, a mother figure. She is the enchanter, she, the amuser. She has
magical or at least medical powers and is at the same time a nanny with the power to
spin tales. In Lexia 19 Rose calls her mother: “Oh mother, she groans, why am I the
one? Because you won’t listen! cries the ill tempered old crone” who after a while
apologises to the child “as though to right the wrong.” She is a surrogate mother as it
were. The loving old crone is “hideously ugly and vaguely threatening, yet dearer to
[Rose] in her dreams than any other, even courting princes.” (L4) Hurt at being called
ugly, however, the good-bad fairy sarcastically thanks all those who consider her so
including the beautiful princess and without inhibitions exposes the factual issues
involved in a hundred year long sleep and the retention of the princess’s beauty: “Has
that smug sleeper paused to consider how she will look and smell after a hundred
years, lying comatose and untended in an unchanged bed? A century of collected
menses alone should stagger the lustiest of the princes.” (L5) It is this crone who
maintains the princess’s beauty during her sleep. She feels obliged to “freshen her
flesh and wipe her bum, costume and coiffure her, sweep the room of all morbidity
and cushion her for he who will come in lustrous opulence.” (L5) She nurses the
princess and amuses her too by ornamenting her dreams with moral lessons in her
stories. The stories are but “mere fancies invented for her own consolation while

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awaiting that which she herself, in her ingenerate ambivalence, has ordained.” (L5) In
a way she too is trapped and desires rescue, a way out. She too is “castle-bound as the
dreamer.” (L29) She is “a caster of spells and a manipulator of plots.” (L18) With her
talents she imagines and describes for Rose “a rich assortment of beauties and princes,
obstacles, awakenings, and what-happened-nexts, weaving in a diverse collection of
monsters, dragons, ogres, jests, rapes, riddles, murders, magic, maimings, dead
bodies, and babies… the illusion of boundaries, above all that the body has been …
thereof.” (L29) Many of her tales are about “infanticide and child abuse,
abandonment, mutilations, mass murder and cruel executions, and, in spite of the
subjects, not all endings have been happy.” (L31) She is aware that her stories
necessarily linger on suffering “often intolerable and unassuaged suffering.” (L31)
This is her wickedness.

However, her cruel façade hides a practical and well meaning intention, that of
preparing her “moony charge” for the real, the actual and the harsh. Reality is not so
simple and easy as “a quick kiss” followed by a wedding party and happy ever after
life. It is much more complex and unusual. Goodness of this wicked fairy lies in her
intention to hold before the princess a mirror that reflects the challenges of real life.
Hence she has told her “the story of the musicians at Beauty’s wedding feast who
distracted the bride with their flutes and tambourines and kettledrums, while their
dancing girls were off seducing the groom, thereby sending him to his nuptial bed
with a dreadful social disease. She has told her (also forgotten) of a monstrously evil
Sleeping Beauty and of the horrors unleashed upon the prince and all the kingdom
when he awakened her, as well as of the hero under a beastly spell who ate Beauty
immediately upon finding her so as to avoid returning to his dreary life as a workaday
prince, adding a few diverting notes about his digestive processes just to stretch the
tale out.” (L31) The princess, as the fairy tale reader, used to the formulaic romantic
tales with happy endings distrusts and doubts the tales: “it doesn’t seem right” (L32),
“she doesn’t like this story.” (L32), “That’s not how stories are” (L32), “It just
doesn’t sound right … Real stories aren’t like that. Real princes aren’t” (L26), “it’s
terrible” (L11) She clearly does not believe the tales but is repeatedly drawn to them
“back for more of the same.” (L23) The fairy loses her temper to see how despite her
promises and reprimands, the princess either bewails or doubts or dreads her fate. She
can appreciate the child dreading what she longs, as princely heroes are generally

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“unreliable and often beastly.” (L18) However the princess’s doubts about the arrival
of the prince to awake her suggest, for the fairy, “that she underestimates her own
legendary beauty and its power to provoke desire in men.” (L18)

The fairy, however, with a conviction perhaps that “the sugar coated fairy tales” are
“escapist and numbing constructions” (Redies 21) keeps on inventing and repeating
new variations of the tale having the same plot. She is frustrated to see the “empty
head” not learning “her dreamtime moral lessons” (L18), which talk of the pleasures
got from withheld satisfaction. As Brian Evenson points out Coover deconstructs the
fairy tale inside and through his story: “the text illustrates the attack on the myth as
well as the stubborn adherence to the tradition in the relationship of the old crone and
the sleeping beauty.”18

The retold tale debunks fairy tale traditions and even the conditioned expectation
/desires of the fairy tale readers mainly for structure, linearity and meaning. Rose’s
dismissal of the fairy’s tales as wrong and terrible because they deviate from the fairy
tale structure and happy endings can actually be seen as the responses of the readers
accustomed to the classical fairy tales, their traditional structure and happy endings
with sugar coated escapism.

Coover’s narrative strategy involves the fairy telling many variations in her repeated
tales. Historical development of oral tales constituted such endless variations within
repetitions. Coover through his narrative strategy “reveals layers upon layers of
historical development in the tale, older versions and bawdy elements found in Basile
and Perrault that were sanitised away in the Grimms’ version.” (Redies 21)

In Lexia 8 Coover makes the fairy define beauty with a capital ‘B.’ The fairy’s
answers to Rose’s questions, “Who am I?” “What am I?” could be related to what
Coover wishes to suggest cynically about the character of the fairy tale itself: “You
are all things dangerous and inviolate. You are she who has renounced the natural
functions, she who invades the dreams of the innocent, she who harbours wild forces
and so defines and provokes the heroic, and yet you are the magical bride, of all good
the bell and flower, she through whom all glory is to be won, love known, the root out
of which all need germinates. You are she about whom the poets have written: The
rose and thorn, the smile and tear: / The burden of all life’s song is here. […] You are
that flame, flickering like a burning fever in the hearts of men, consuming them with

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desire, bewitching them with their radiant and mysterious allure.” (L8) What the fairy
does not utter for the fear of terrifying the princess are the words: “You are Beauty.”
This would terrify even the readers who realise the undercurrent allusions, in these
remarks, to the form, nature and character of the fairy tale itself. The wish fulfilment
and desire for structure in the traditional, classical fairy tales produces individuals
who are “integrated into a (social) structure: desire gone wrong but transformed and
reintegrated within an accepted value system.”(Redies 25) Coover’s fairy tale desires
this gratification and attacks our adherence to the fairy tale traditions.

This hyper-textual retelling serves different purposes like parodying and at times
cynically challenging the ideas about the hero, the heroic and heroism; exploring the
notion of beauty and the beautiful in fairy tales; critically attacking the traditionally
burdened roles of fairy tale characters; commenting on the “shifting depiction of
sexuality and of male and female desire: female purity combined with passivity versus
male conquest and possession,” (Redies 25); failing, breaking down and debunking
traditional desires and expectations of the readers from the classical fairy tale and
above all deconstructing the myth, the fairy tale, its predetermined story lines and
narratives paradoxically through the redundant narratives of the old crone. The
beautiful world of the fairy tale is proved “a deadly illusion” (Redies 14) in Coover’s
attempt at this rewrite. Coover tries to explore and reveal a variety of possible
alternative approaches to and versions of the Sleeping Beauty tale by challenging the
traditional and old conventions and set rules of the fairy tale genre. As Jaroslav
Kusnir in his article maintains, Coover’s ‘Briar Rose’“ expresses the desire to
overcome the traditional, old sensibility, represented by old narrative forms; and at the
same time, […] establishes a new sensibility and new approach to reality and its
representation.”19

In Lexia 37 the princess is shown to be sitting beside the king, “the crowned and
bearded stranger” (L32) at the dining table with her heavy crown on her head. A lot of
time seems to have passed since her awakening or she is perhaps still sleeping and
dreaming the fairy’s yet another piece of entertainment. Sighing, belching and
“scratching his hairy belly” he says, “Happily ever after… It’s never quite like you
imagine it. She nods. A mistake.” (L32)

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The rewrite presents a dream reality. Within the dream many other dreams with a feel
of reality are presented/ dreamt. The prince, the princess and the fairy are forever
trapped within the tale. There is no escape from the entrapment. The circularity keeps
rolling: the prince imagines reaching the princess and still finds himself struggling
with brambles; the princess finds herself in yet another dream just when one feels she
is about to wake up; the fairy is trapped in the act of spinning the same stories with
variations repeatedly. There is no end to the story. It rolls on forever repetitively. One
could see it as Coover’s comment on and mockery of the “forever aftering” in a
manner exactly contrary to the fairy tale “happily ever after” ends.

“What is happily ever after, but a fall into the ordinary, into the human weakness,
gathering despair, a fall into death?... He imagines the delirium… the death of
dreams.” (L28) Just when the prince imagines he has fulfilled his vocation, he doubts
that perhaps he has come to a wrong castle and asks the princess, “What is your
heart’s desire? To live happily ever after, she replies without emotion.” (L33) Coover
makes fun of the happily ever after in the prince’s pinching response to the princess’s
desire to live happily ever after: “Of course, he replies, it’s yours for the asking. And
also I wonder if you’d mind watching the babies for a while? Babies - ? !” (L33) Later
in one of his imaginings he hears the princess telling him, “It doesn’t last, forget
happily ever after…” (L35)

“The bad fairy, who is also the good fairy” in Lexia40, begins her story with a happily
ever after life of a prince and a princess: “Once upon a time, she says with a curling
smile, her wicked side as usual taking over, there was a handsome prince and a
beautiful princess who lived happily ever after.” Terrified to hear this Briar Rose
objects to such a start and is repelled from the story. The witch in response
admonishes: “Happily ever after… may not be worth a parched fig, my daughter, but
it hides the warts, so don’t be too quick to throw it out!” (L40) She continues the
story.

Coover presents the cruelty of the “ever aftering” in the combination of the good and
the bad in the same fairy. She is a good fairy because she had blessed this child with
death “before suffering the misery of the ever-after part of the human span.” (L40) It
is the wicked fairy in her who keeps going the ever-aftering pain: “… the wicked fairy

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in her, for the sake of her own entertainment, transforming that well-meant gift to
death in life and life in death without surcease.” (L40)

Coover thus turns the fairy tale characters and the fairy tale endings topsy turvy
revealing the essential, hidden deception in both, in an exceptionally novel and
wonderful manner. The prince seems to have escaped but is actually trapped,
continually possessed by his vocation and desire to “make his name;” (L1) the
princess demands to wake up and be rescued but longs to sleep again and dream; the
crone endlessly spins the yarn reproducing the same tale differently. Like the
characters the reader too gets trapped and lost in the hyperspace of the text realising
like the prince, “it’s too hard to know what is real and not.” (L36)

Every new version, repetition and variation of the old tale is so intricately spun and
fused in the narrative of this ‘Briar Rose’ that an attempt to pick one of the variations
out of the many as the real or true story “just lands you in this self-reflexive thicket,
with the thorns tearing at your clothes.”20 The narrative thus becomes a metaphor for
the art of spinning the tales pricking us, entrapping us in the brambles like the prince
and at the same time like the princess keeping us in a constantly trance like state
entertained with variations on the tales for centuries to come. The book, the narrative
will continue to go on forever. At the end (?) of the tale the reader is exactly in the
same condition as of the prince at the start of the book – wondering like him “how
easy it is” (L1) to penetrate the thicket but eventually getting trapped. The spell, thus,
is never broken either for the characters or for the readers.

• Jane Yolen’s ‘Briar Rose’21

Jane Yolen’s ‘Briar Rose’ is an allegorical novel which intertwines the theme of the
Grimm fairy tale with the traumatic tale of the Holocaust. A postmodern allegorical
appropriation of the Briar Rose tale and the wielding and syncretisation of a tale of
horror with a literary genre results in an interesting and a refreshingly new outlook on
the age old tale. The fusion of the two extreme opposites suggestive of the fairy tale
of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ in a horrifying manner is striking. However it does demand an
exploration of the common grounds between the Holocaust and the fairy tale genre:
Bruno Bettelheim, the author of a legendary book on the uses, meaning and
importance of fairy tales and a well acclaimed psychiatrist himself was a
concentration camp survivor. He grew up listening to the Grimm fairy tales from his

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Viennese mother. Both as a witness to the Holocaust and a student of psychiatry and
fairy tales, Bettelheim in his book acknowledges and proves that fairy tales become a
means for a child to express its existential anxieties like the fear of death. A fairy tale
protagonist, with whom children identify, finds himself/herself in a world beyond
his/her comprehension and is threatened by the possibilities of death and triumph over
it. The fairy tale world appears threatening and incomprehensible. The plot of the
fairy tale involves a struggle to survive in the midst of a terrorising environment. The
fairy tale protagonists are themselves ordinary human beings having fears,
weaknesses and are involved in an existential struggle against odds and fatal dangers.
They are very often helpless and cast out. Such commonplace characters and their
plight in the horrific world are the commonalities between the Holocaust horror and
the fairy tale humour. The fairy tale thus also bridges the horrific world of the
Holocaust and the simple, ordinary world of the readers.

Yolen’s ‘Briar Rose’ is set in Nazi occupied Poland. It centres on the characters of
Gemma and Becca. Gemma the grandmother is a survivor of the Holocaust, almost
brought back to life from the jaws of death. However she has never conveyed to her
family about this past of hers. She is obsessive about the tale of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and
repeatedly tells it to her granddaughters. She has in fact lost her memories of the past
and tries to re-live it through the fairy tale: “I have no memories in my head but one…
a fairy tale,” she says. (Y 211)

Yolen looks upon fairy tales as a means for retelling the past metaphorically. Like
herself she makes Gemma encode her hidden memories of the horrific past
experiences using the Briar Rose metaphor. Allegorically thus the theme of the
Holocaust is depicted through Gemma’s real life story discovered through Becca’s
quest to trace Gemma’s history in Poland and to reach the truth and depths of the
coded narrative. Becca the most committed of Gemma’s granddaughters, feels on
account of the obsessive repeated telling of the story of Briar Rose, that Gemma’s
story has meaning beyond the literal. Her doubt is answered when Gemma on her
deathbed reveals that she “was the princess! ...In the castle. The prince kissed me.” (Y
16) She leaves behind her just a box of old photos and documents as clues for Becca
to explore and unfold Gemma’s past. In her quest Becca comes to know about three
different names by which Gemma was known. All of them meant or referred to Briar
Rose or princess: Gemma’s nickname Dawna or Dawn (Y 29) means Princess Aurora;

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her name recorded officially on the immigration card is Gitl Rose Madelstein (Y 62)
meaning Briar Rose and Becca discovers to her surprise another of her names,
Ksiezniczka, which means ‘princess’ in Polish. (Y 65) As children, Becca and her
sisters are impressed with the tale of the sleeping beauty for its confrontation with the
theme of death, victory over it and the power of love. As with the tale Gemma
remains connected to her terrible past and the comforting present, so does Yolen
bridge, using a fairy tale, the unimaginable Holocaust experiences of her protagonist
with her present day. The coded narrative of horror serves as an entertaining tool for
the children. For the teller the tale works as a stress reliever and a means of
expressing her feelings associated with her horrific past and at the same time, for the
listeners it resolves their own childish existential issues and anxieties.

Writers of the holocaust narratives believe and find that ordinary language falls short
of adequately expressing experiences of the unbearable and unspeakable horrors so
that they could evoke empathy in the readers. Besides, direct depiction of the
holocaust could repel the reader than make them understand the plight of the victims.
In such a situation fairy tales with their metaphoric richness serve the purpose of
appropriately conveying the horrors to and eliciting the desired responses and
emotions from the readers. Jane Yolen achieves exactly this by using a fairy tale for
portraying the unrepresentable and evoking empathy from her readers. Hence this
successful infusion of the extreme narratives.

Yolen quotes Jack Zipes to introduce and describe her novel: “Both the oral and the
literary forms of the fairy tale are grounded in history: they emanate from specific
struggles to humanise bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorised our minds
and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human
compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete terror through
metaphors.”22 Based on this conviction she uses a variety of fairy tale motifs to
metaphorically hint at different facets of the Holocaust horror. Using them efficiently
she both describes as well as disguises the horror to attain aesthetic results. For
instance the sleep motif takes on many connotations suggestive of forgetfulness,
unawareness, indifference, death which occupied the entire German nation. It
symbolises the sleeping of the conscience, of feelings of sympathy and empathy
towards fellow human beings. Gemma refers to the image of mist and fog
alternatively to make the sleep metaphor more comprehensive to include

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the indications of the Holocaust terrors. It is interesting to see how Yolen appropriates
the sleep metaphor to suggest a nationwide indifference and lack of empathy. Gemma
says, “A mist. A great mist. It covered the entire kingdom. And everyone in it – the
good people and the not so good, the young people and the not so young, and even
Briar Rose’s mother and father fell asleep. Everyone slept: lords and ladies, teachers
and tummlers, dogs and doves, rabbits and rabbitzen and all kinds of citizens. So fast
asleep they were, they were not able to wake up for a hundred years.” (Y 43-44)

Gemma refers to sleep and mist again on her deathbed: “I was the princess in the
castle in the sleeping woods. And there came a dark mist and we all fell asleep.” (Y
16) The woods, the castles and forest which are commonly found in fairy tales and
presented as dangerous, dark, mysterious and fatal too appear in her tale. She uses the
word ‘schloss’ meaning castle to describe the manor house of Kulmholf/Chelmno.
The forest is the place where all the gassed Jews, homosexuals and other marginalised
are dumped and buried. Even the thorns metaphorically imply the barbed wire around
the concentration camps and also the refugee camps in Oswego. (Y 80) The cover
page of the novel very suggestively presents this barbed wire image.

Yolen shows Gemma hiding the harsh details of her survival in the magical fairy tale
thus using the tale as a coating for the horrific experiences. The two narratives
however coexist mutually. Yolen uses the fairy tale language as a reminder of this
thematic arrangement. For instance, the fairy tale language is used in Becca’s
conversation with Stan at the airport. The names that Josef gives to the partisans in his
story of Gemma’s rescue bear resemblance to the fairy tale names. Gemma’s retelling
of the tale is unusual and repetitive. It is different in details from the traditional tale.
This irritates and terrifies the granddaughters, particularly the two elder ones. Like in
many classical fairy tales the older sisters are unsympathetic to listening to the same
story told again and again and like in such tales it is the youngest that shows goodness
and empathy towards Gemma and her story.

Gemma is Briar Rose because her names echo the meaning of princess, and Briar
Rose; her hair is red “the crown of red hair” (Y 14) and on her deathbed she whispers
“I am Briar Rose!” (Y 17) Becca, fascinated by Gemma’s account of the tale, realises
that Gemma chooses her to find the truth and identifies herself with Gemma. She thus
becomes her double and in that sense, a Briar Rose with a difference. The castle

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where the fairy tale Briar Rose lay sleeping is the extermination camp – the schloss at
Chelmno. Hitler and the Nazi soldiers of his army are equated with the bad fairy
cursing the maiden princess: “Not the bad fairy. Not the one in black with big black
books and silver eagles on her hat.” (Y 19) The partisans coming to her help could be
seen as good fairies. She being a Jew in the Hitler regime was cursed to be gassed in
the trucks on the way to Chelmno, cursed to death “from the exhaust piped in” (Y
210) In her story Gemma would refer to “[U]ncles, aunties, cousins, family… I curse
you Briar Rose, your father, mother, cousins and aunts” (Y 19) and to the effect of the
curse “everyone slept … and all kinds of citizens.” (Y 43) These people in her coded
narrative are all the Jews, gypsies and the gay who were ruthlessly massacred.

“[A] briary hedge [beginning] to grow with thorns as sharp as barbs” (Y 58) in
Gemma’s story are actually suggestive and symbolic of the spread of concentration
camps: “higher and higher the thorny bush grew…” (Y 58) Gemma in her story refers
to the prince coming riding by his troops and on seeing the hedge trying to see over it.
In her own real life, Josef Potocki is her saviour. Coming out of the woods with the
partisans he sees a heap of gassed Jews unloaded from the trucks and very (s)lightly
breathing Gemma, who they believe, could not be saved. “However, he put his mouth
on hers and as he did so it was in Josef’s mouth that she, at last spluttered and
coughed.” (Y 207) Josef’s attempt at “giving her breath for breath” (Y 238) awakens
her. Josef turns out to be her prince who causes her disenchantment and helps and
supports her till she is completely rid of the Nazi terror. When she feels completely
freed she is with child from her lover husband, Aron, one of the partisans known
mainly as the Avenger who dies a heroic death. Gemma, after her disenchantment,
experiences a considerably warm and happy ever life (till her death) with a supportive
and loving family.

Becca realises Gemma’s telling of an old version of the Briar Rose tale as a metaphor
for Gemma’s life. The fragments of her tale interspersed in the narrative create
suspense and mystery in the novel. References to the fairy tale deepen Gemma’s story
of sufferings and make it representative of the Jewish plight. Apart from Gemma’s
version of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ told in the novel through extracts there are two more
distinct narratives which Yolen interweaves with one another: the story of Becca’s
quest to find true meaning of Gemma’s tale, of her discovery and adventure; and
Josef’s narrative which provides Becca and the readers of the novel with answers

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to all the questions raised by Gemma’s coded narrative. In her search for the
knowledge of the past, Becca’s own engagement with a fellow journalist, Stan and a
mature relationship that grows between the two is presented as suggestive of likely
happy ending for Becca. Thus unfolding Gemma’s life story leads her to find her own
happy ever after tale as well and for the readers softens the effects of the traumatic
narrative of the Holocaust suffering.

Through Josef’s essential narrative, Yolen debunks the idea of glamorous hero,
heroism and courage. Given the centrality of this narrative Yolen’s second purpose –
apart from the first of presenting the unimaginable wounds of the Holocaust survivors
– of debunking and mocking the stereotyped ideas of the hero and the heroic are
underlined in the inclusion of the character of Josef and his narrative. She makes Josef
frequently refer, in his account of his Holocaust experience, to his views on heroism,
courage, human spirit and survival: “this is a story of survivors, not heroes … a man
is not a hero if he scrabbles to stay alive, if he struggles for one more crust of bread,
one more ragged breath. We were all heroes of the moment.” (Y 163) The Holocaust
brings forth in him disillusionment with what he romantically believed to be ideals of
strength and courage. He grows to a mature understanding of these notions and
experiences truly the states of being fearless. His escape from Sachenhausen gives
this feel: “he was not afraid … he had no fear left.” (Y 185) The war experiences
bring about a change in his attitudes towards survival and courage and also within
himself as a human whom the horrors of the Holocaust have numbed but at the same
time made stronger than what he was before.

The realistic touch given to Yolen’s hero serves as a comment on and a critique of the
fairy tale concept of the ideal hero, a figure perfect in every possible way, in all
matters of life and at all times. Yolen’s characters in this novel including the ‘prince’
are imperfect human beings, ordinary people with ordinary wishes and desires in life.
Josef, the hero, who resuscitates Gemma to life by actually breathing into her mouth
and helps to rescue her, is a homosexual who would never marry the princess whom
he saves. He comes to a better realisation and understanding of the heroic and heroism
and is a more enriched human being at the end of his experience of suffering and
trauma. He is an ordinary fellow trying to survive against certain death and in the
event saves and rescues Gemma. As a homosexual and as a mere layman struggling
for survival, he is far from the ideal stereotypical hero prince of any fairy tale.

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When Becca tells him he is indeed a hero though he has been modestly denying it, he
says to her, “Your own American writer Emerson said: ‘The hero is not fed on sweets
but daily his own heart he eats.’ If that is a definition you can accept, then I will tell
you I have dined long and hard on my own heart. And it is bitter.” (Y 230) Such
portrayal of the hero seems to serve an important purpose of debunking the fairy tale
concept of the hero and defining heroism anew while bringing forth the factual detail
about the Holocaust that apart from the Jews many other marginalised sections like
the homosexuals, gypsies, and mentally and physically challenged too were victims of
the Nazi terror.

Yolen thus achieves multiple aims by depicting the Holocaust through a fairy tale.
Besides such portrayal of the holocaust as would evoke empathy, she also undertakes
a successful attempt at breaking and critiquing the fairy tale stereotypes of the hero,
the heroic, heroism, the princess, her beauty and passivity. The princess of the Yolen
story is as active and determined in her escape as the unusual prince of the tale. The
values of loyalty, faith, love and commitment figure in the depiction of relations
between the characters. These values are fragmented in this rewrite. The characters
are thus appealing to the readers and therefore they empathise with the Holocaust
victims’ sufferings as well.

The two stories – the fairy tale and Gemma’s tale – run parallel to each other. The
courage and strength presented in them is the strength of the human spirit trying to
overcome difficulties and at the same time making the strugglers humbler.

Cinderella:

“… [T]he Cinderella type heroine was changed during the course of four
millennia – approximately 7000 B.C. to 3000 B. C. – from a young active woman
who is expected to pursue her own destiny under the guidance of a wise, gift-
bearing dead mother; into a helpless, inactive, pubescent girl, whose major
accomplishments are domestic, and who must obediently wait to be rescued by a
male.” 23

• Anne Sexton’s ‘Cinderella’ (T 53-57)

Anne Sexton places ‘Cinderella’ at the centre of her verse fairy tale re-visions. The
prologue to her retold ‘Cinderella’ lists casually the similar stories of luck as of

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Cinderella’s – from rags to riches – a much hackneyed theme in fairy tales, literature
and other entertaining media particularly, films. The refrain “That story” is repeated
in the prologue and is used even at the end of the story. The stories listed in the
prologue are the stories reflecting the so called ‘American Dream’, which seem mere
accidental strokes of good fortune. All these stories are cumulatively summed up in
the expression “That story.” They are described in terms of modern, cultural symbols
viz. “From toilets to riches,” “Form diapers to Dior,” “From homogenised to martinis
at lunch,” “From mops to Bonwit teller. / That story.” (T 53-54) The familiarity with
the story leaves little for the witch speaker to convey. She assumes our knowledge of
the tale and our ability to predict as reflected in the lines such as “Next came the ball,
as you all know,” “That’s the way with stepmothers,” “so she went, which is no
surprise,” “These events repeated themselves for three days,” “That’s the story with
amputation,” “Cinderella and the prince lived, they say, happily ever after.” etc. (T
53-57)

The transformed ‘Cinderella’ observes a predictable pattern. It does not give the
relevant details on account of the readers’ foreknowledge of the classical tale.
However, a number of authorial comments are sprinkled throughout the transformed
tale.

The Grimm tale emphatically presents Cinderella as good and devout as per her dying
mother’s wishes. It also explains why Cinderella is called by this name and describes
Cinderella’s ill treatment by her step mother and step sisters. In the transformed tale
the details about Cinderella’s hard work and harassment are described in one brief
line: “Cinderella was their maid” followed by the reference to her father’s
indifference to her. Sexton’s story shows the father bringing the twig for Cinderella
on his own and precious gifts for the other two daughters:

Her father brought presents home from town,

jewels and gowns for the other two women

but the twig of tree for Cinderella. (T 54)

The transformed tale describes the utility of the tree the twig has grown into and the
dove which sits in it:

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Whenever she wished for anything, the dove

would drop it like an egg upon the ground.

The bird is important, my dears, so heed him. (T 54)

The ironic tone in the lines presents the narrator as a mocking modern reader who
would not believe in such a fantasy. It is through the tone that she displays her
unwillingness to suspend disbelief. The witch narrator describes the king’s
proclamation of a three day festival when his son would choose a bride for himself in
a “marriage market” where all marketable, beautiful objects – the beautiful girls of the
kingdom – would willingly display themselves for sale. As mentioned earlier the goal
of happy marriage as the only good and secure future for girls is so deeply ingrained
and rooted in the female minds through socialisation and social expectations that
women on their own unquestioningly offer themselves to be objectified.

Sexton deletes the Grimm details of how Cinderella’s step mother asks her to collect
the lentils she has thrown in the cinders and refuses to take her despite the fact that
Cinderella accomplishes her task twice with the help of the doves, “all the little birds
under heaven.” (Grimm 65) She simply sums it up in one verse line: “That’s the way
with step mothers.” (T 55) implying thereby all the connotations that the step mother
stereotype carries with it. Sexton describes the crying Cinderella as crying “like a
gospel singer” (T 55) and sarcastically comments upon the bird’s act of dropping
down a golden dress and delicate little gold slippers:

The bird dropped down a golden dress

and delicate little golden slippers.

Rather a large package for a simple bird.

So she went. Which is no surprise. (T 55)

The personal aside comments on Cinderella’s feminine desire to be in the ‘market’

and be displayed to be chosen by the prince: She “begged to go too.” She follows the
accepted well trodden path. Hence “no surprise.” Sexton describes the intentions of
the prince in these lines:

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He would find whom the shoe fits

And find his strange dancing girl for keeps. (T 56)

Perhaps he fears the competition for gaining hold of the commodity he desires. The
verse tale unlike the Grimm shows the eldest girl cutting off her toes to fit into the
slipper on her own. It doesn’t show the mother asking her to do so. Despite the
prince’s openly businesslike attitude towards marriage, the sisters compete to win him
and his favour that could earn them a privileged and a respectable place in a male
dominated society. Sexton satirises and mocks their attempts to fit into the slipper:

The eldest went into a room to try the slipper on

But her big toe got in the way so she simply

sliced it off and put it on the slipper.

The prince rode away with her until the white dove

told him to look at the blood pouring forth.

That is the way with amputations.

They don’t just heal up like a wish. (T 56)

The other sister “cut off her heel/ but the blood told as the blood will.” (T 56) Sexton
mockingly emphasises how women caught in the trap of patriarchal values and
unaware of their victimisation and objectification unquestioningly and in an extremely
docile manner go to the extent of sacrificing and physically torturing themselves to
meet the demands of the male gaze and standards in return for which they get
compensated with a so called happy marriage. It is this patriarchal snare, which puts
women in “horizontal hostility”24 toward one another as displayed in the rivalry
between the step sisters to earn a place of respect and privilege in a male dominated
society. Masculine culture instructs women to be rivals – rivals in becoming more
acceptable in a male society. The aesthetic demands of the male gaze reside within
themselves and they willingly ‘normalise’ themselves as per male orientation. In the
process they victimise themselves and are unaware of it. In their attempt to win a
privileged position in a male dominated social structure they do not realise the extent
to which their lives are shaped by external oppressive forces in the system.

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This is precisely what Sexton seems to convey when she so emphatically presents the
ways the sisters try to fit into the slipper by hurting themselves brutally.

The mockery continues in the description of the prince tired of trying the slipper on
girls:

The prince was getting tired.

He began to feel like a shoe salesman.

But he gave it one last try.

This time Cinderella fit into the shoe

like a love letter into its envelope. (T 56)

The verse tale repeatedly critiques through mockery the naïve fantasy of the fairy
tales particularly the dove’s deeds in this story:

At the wedding ceremony

the two sisters came to curry favour

and the white dove pecked their eyes out.

Two hollow spots were left

like soup spoons. (T 56)

The falsity and unreality of the “happy ever after” end is suggested and criticised
through the mockery. As Bernard Hall calls it, such ending is “an illusion.”25
Leventen in “Transformations’s Silencings” maintains that parting shot of this story –
“Regular Bobbsey Twins/That story” – serves as an instance of Sexton’s
understanding of “the aridity of once-upon-a-time’s happily-ever after resolution.”26
Sexton does present the happily ever after as but an illusion causing the fall of both
Cinderella and her prince into a bondage and prison of a stereotype of an ideal couple
imprisoned in a museum case like “Regular Bobbsey Twins” suggesting entrapment,
objectification and passivity. Cinderella and the prince are objectified into mere dolls
implying perhaps that sudden riches or sudden transformation from rags to riches does
not make real the romantic fantasies in fairy tales with delusive promise of happiness.

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Cinderella is the prince’s “dancing girl.” They dance the dance of passion which
ultimately causes the fall of both into “a kind of coffin.” Her desire for passion is
fulfilled by the dove. Bruno Bettelheim points out that the white dove stands for “the
Holy Ghost” in religious symbolism.27 The Grimm tale may have used this
implication. However, the transformed tale seems to imply the sensual more than the
religious i.e. the dove in this tale is portrayed as an agent in helping Cinderella
achieve her sensual goals in the “marriage market.” The bird sits on the twig planted
on her mother’s grave. She calls it a turtle dove. Her desire to go to the ball where she
lures the prince and disappears into a “pigeon house” when he follows her is very
much a passionate desire intending to attract and entice the man. The turtledove
becomes the means of fulfilment of this desire. The animal symbolises here the
sensual.

The story of Cinderella as said at the beginning is placed at the centre of the
collection, the Transformations suggesting perhaps the central concern of the poet in
rewriting the tales – the concern with patriarchal codes for marriage, its drudgery and
boredom, and the objectification of women. This story goes a little further in stressing
the concern with objectification. In that, she presents the commoditisation of men too
in patriarchy:

Cinderella and the prince

lived, they say, happily ever after,

like two dolls in a museum case

never bothered by diapers or dust,

never arguing over the timing of an egg,

never telling the same story twice,

never getting the middle-aged spread,

their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.

Regular Bobbsey Twins.

That story. (T 56-57)

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Sexton subtly ridicules the ludicrous elements in ‘Cinderella.’ This last stanza
presents Cinderella and her prince’s ever-after existence in a museum case far from
experiencing domestic tribulations or even death. However, this too furthers the
stereotypical gender roles in patriarchy. They, the people uphold, preserve, are caught
up in and content with the patriarchal way of thinking about the sexual stereotypes.
The traditional viewpoint is so deeply ingrained in them – both men and women – that
it becomes unthinkable for them to discard not just these patriarchal gender
stereotypes but even the belief in them. They perpetually believe that a woman
marrying a rich and charming man and a man marrying a beautiful woman have a
happy and fulfilling life till the end. Sexton questions the perpetuation of stereotyped
romance in the last stanza. Frozen in time and space like “two dolls in a museum
case” both Cinderella as well as the prince maintain the gender stereotypes but in the
process become objectified and dehumanised. Their human existence and qualities are
stagnated and further stressed in their description as “Regular Bobbsey Twins.” These
are the main characters in a series of children’s novels written during 1904-1979 by
many writers under one pseudonym Laura Hope. These characters are repeatedly
shown to live happily in about 72 volumes. Reference to them suggests Cinderella and
her prince’s happy ever after life as phony, artificial and lacking in individuality and
life. It is a lifeless inanimate existence. The so called success story – That story –
upholding the male centred perspective and the tenets of patriarchy tricks, captivates,
immobilises and dehumanises people of both the sexes. Sexton attempts successfully
to suggest through the doll figures with “their darling smiles pasted on for eternity”
that patriarchy which openly victimises women is as much threatening for men too.
The male centred culture captures and holds in its thrall both women and men
draining them of their individuality, and stagnating them to the extent of they being
commoditised and immobile. In showing the prince too getting tricked into the
dehumanising trap the witch poet successfully suggests the captivating and
suffocating impact of the patriarchal snare on men as well. Men captured in systemic
thrall too are forced to remain as silent and “powerless victims frozen in – and fated to
act out – the prescribed social roles” (Leventen, 140) as women victimised by the
patriarchal culture. Unless this is realised and pondered upon “That story” continues
to seduce both men and women, captivate them and render them immobile and lifeless
in life. Being at the centre of the collection the tale reinforces and strengthens
Sexton’s concerns and claims she wants to convey through her retellings.
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However, though critically censured, the stereotyped gender roles are not drastically
revised in the retold tale by Sexton. An insight into the effects of patriarchal snare is
offered but no alternative is suggested. Perhaps the witch narrator does not intend to
do it. However, taking her cue from Sexton, Olga Broumas rewrites ‘Cinderella’ with
yet another distinct perspective attempting to provide an alternative to the
heteronormal happy endings of the tales. By opening her rewrite with a quote from
Sexton as an epigraph, Broumas connects her retelling with Sexton’s to suggest
further strengthening of the liberation of the tales from the patriarchal thrall:

…the joy that isn’t shared

I heard, dies young.

-Anne Sexton, 1928-1974.

• Olga Broumas’s ‘Cinderella’28

Broumas in her ‘Cinderella’ speaks for ‘sisterhood,’ for solidarity amongst women
who are separated from one another by the patriarchal/male order making them judge
their own kind as “inadequate, bitchy, incompetent, jealous, too thin, too fat.” (B 58)
Broumas attacks the patriarchal strategies, which use women to victimise other
women and create such constructs as ‘women are their own enemies.’ The step
mother and step sister figures portrayed in ‘Cinderella’ and for that matter in most
fairy tales and literary works, are wicked, jealous, inconsiderate and not beautiful as
per the male standards. Cinderella’s marriage with the prince is always presented as
her release from the prison, ill treatment and abuse at the hands of women. Broumas’s
Cinderella however, is emotionally hurt on account of her bondage with the sisters
being snapped and feels being estranged from her mother. She has a close sense of
belonging to her mother and sisters and hence after her marriage with the prince she
finds herself all alone amongst men in their house:

Apart from my sisters, estranged

from my mother, I am a woman alone

in a house of men

who secretly

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call themselves princes, alone

with me usually, under cover of dark. (B 57)

Broumas right at the outset defies the patriarchal construct of “horizontal hostility”
between women before demystifying the prince fantasy. Marriage with the prince is
disillusioning and unhappy for her. Broumas through Cinderella’s disillusionment
demystifies and subverts the prince fantasy and the happily ever after that follows the
arrival of and union with the dream lover. Stereotypically portrayed in fairy tales this
fantasy of the prince rescuer is shockingly challenged and attacked in Broumas’s
version. Her tale begins at the end i.e. after Cinderella’s marriage with the prince. She
becomes aware of the feelings of separation, estrangement and loneliness even though
surrounded by men. In “the house of men” she feels the absence of feminine bonding.
There she is in “a state of [domestic] siege” (B 57) like the classical Cinderella. There
is also a similar longing to escape this miserable condition. However, unlike the latter
this Cinderella does not seek her escape in marriage with a prince. In fact, on the
contrary, she has come to experience the drudgery of what is perceived as ideal,
rewarding and fulfilling for a girl. It is in this state of disillusionment that Broumas’s
Cinderella is filled with a sense of loneliness, isolation and entrapment. She is “the
one allowed in/ to the royal chambers” (B 57), yet she is lonely, apart from her sisters
and mother. Entrapped and alone in the company of princes in the royal chambers she
feels “as one piece of laundry, strung on a windy clothesline a/ mile long.” (B 58)
This hyperbolic auditory image indicates her extreme and unbearable solitude and
objectification. This feeling seems an outcome of the fact that her intelligence and
efficiency in “cracking/ the royal code” (B 57) goes unacknowledged by the men
round her. The princes praise her instead for her “nimble tongue” (B 57) – the
expression that deliberately hides sexual connotations behind its literal implications of
eloquence. She thus is a mere sexual object. Her disillusionment with the happily ever
after marriage is sharpened when she says,

What sweet bread I make

for myself in this prosperous house

is dirty, what good soup I boil turns

in my mouth to mud. (B 58)

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Despite the prosperity and comfort in her life with the princes in the royal chambers
she feels dislocated. She has no sense of belonging to the household and its male
inhabitants. There is a realisation that she has been lured into the “house of men” (B
57)by being pitted against her “own kind,” by being “co opted by promises: the lure/
of a job, the ruse of a choice,” (B 58) by being “forced/to bear witness, falsely/
against my kind.” She realises the patriarchal deception of women by allowing some
of their kind “whose small [feet] conveniently/ fill[s] the slipper of glass” (B 57)to
enjoy the seemingly happy and cosy royal pleasures and in the process keep them in a
constant state of competition and rivalry judging one another as “inadequate, bitchy,
incompetent,/ jealous, too thin, too fat.” (B 58)

Any dominant system for its own flowering and sustenance needs its victims, the
‘others,’ to remain under siege, divided and competing amongst themselves. The
dominant system accuses the victims of victimising themselves and their kind by
creating hierarchies among them and making them judge one another thus placing
them in a state of battle. Broumas here presents Cinderella as a representative of the
entire womankind isolated by choosing her conveniently to fill “the slipper of glass”
and used by the male dominated society as a tool against her “own kind.” Her
allurement into the trap is attained by the princes speaking in “their father’s language”
(B 57) and promising her rewards for her “nimble tongue.” Once entrapped, she
realises her deception in being praised, apparently for her linguistic dexterity, but
implicitly focusing on her sexual competence. She is reduced to a mere sex object.
She also realises that the recognition and identity that she gets in this social set up is
always in terms of her relation with a man:

The woman writer, the lady

umpire, the madam chairman, anyone’s wife. (B 57)

A lonely woman in the battle, she desires to re-unite with her sisters, to be with them
again. She prefers a life of hardships and her sisters’ hut to the comforts and the
princes’ royal chambers. She wishes to rid herself of the superficial and suffocating
existence in the men’s world:

…Give

me my ashes. A cold stove, a cinder-block pillow, wet

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canvas shoes in my sisters’, my sisters’ hut. (B 58)

She demands an escape lest she dies young

like those favoured before me, hand-picked each one

for her joyful heart. (B 58)

Writing in the 1970s Broumas’s retelling has a backdrop of the rising feminist
movement. Using the basic elements of the classical version of ‘Cinderella’ Broumas
challenges the cultural values and ideology of patriarchy, demystifies the happy
ending and questions the dream of fulfilment necessarily in heterosexual coupling
alone. Going against the accepted heteronormal code, she shows her heroine’s
disillusionment with and suffocation and suppression in patriarchal heteronormal set
up and stresses the importance of women’s solidarity. She desires a change – a change
in attitudes both of men and women. She doesn’t want women to be “hand-picked”
for their “joyful heart[s]” and be used against their own kind to be victims and be
victimised at their own hands. The story has a rich symbolic significance. Cinderella
symbolises and represents all women, her sisters the female community. The princes
symbolise all men dominating women’s personal, social and professional walks of
life, determining and directing women’s success and fulfilment. The royal chambers
symbolise the male dominating spheres of society or for that matter the entire society
while the glass slipper symbolises the male or patriarchal preferences. As long as she
fits the male centred standards a woman is allowed to enter the royal chambers i.e.
acquire a social status and identity only in her relation to any man. Broumas uses the
Cinderella metaphor and tale to critique the patriarchal practice of defusing female
solidarity by under-representing or not representing women as society and as
individuals. Society refuses to acknowledge a woman’s autonomous, individual
identity and sees her fulfilment in being bound domestically as “anyone’s wife” and a
mother. Worse still is the fact that solidarity amongst women is sabotaged by pitting
them against one another breaking all the female bonds. Women are confined and are
expected to confine themselves necessarily to the domestic sphere. Hence
professionally successful women are perceived as exception to the norm. Hence the
nouns identifying any profession need gender specifying modifiers in case a woman
in a particular profession is to be mentioned. As such women are usually “anyone’s
wife” or the “woman writer, the lady umpire, the madam chairman” and so on.

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Broumas attacks this discriminating value system and as an alternative offers a

community of women solidly resting on the feeling and bond of sisterhood. In the
process she subverts and demystifies the heterosexual ideal projected in the happily
ever after end in fairy tales. Bruno Bettelheim perceives the happily ever after ending
as an important factor in children’s socialisation. However other scholars of fairy tale
impact on children also see an implicit message to children through such endings and
that is that heterosexual is normal, natural and fulfilling. Any other type of union is
abnormal or a-normal, unnatural, strange and ‘queer.’ Heteronormalcy is a patriarchal
social ideal. Through fairy tales children are encouraged to believe, follow and pattern
themselves necessarily after “the omnipresent and omnipotent heterosexual script” for
their ‘good’ future.29 Happy and good future assured through heterosexual coupling
attach morality to sexual identity. “Heterosexuality is good and right.” (Lester 61)
Lester tries to prove that a child not fitting and aligning with the heterosexual ideal of
the fairy tale is negatively affected as the tale infuses him/her with a sense of guilt of
being morally wrong. With heterosexual marriages at the end, the tales condition
children’s idea of happy future – getting married and producing children. This
heterosexual norm which excludes those who do not conform with it is critically
defied by Broumas’s Cinderella who prefers impoverished sisterhood (cold stove,
cinder-block pillow, sister’s hut) to being surrounded by princes speaking “their
father’s language,” keeping her under siege in their royal chambers. Based on the
knowledge she has gained from experience – “I know what I know” (B 57) - she
confidently asserts this preference and expresses her desire to rejoin her sisters.

Broumas thus uses the fairy tale to profess her feminist agenda through her revision of
the tale. As said earlier Broumas provides an alternative to the heteronormal model of
relationship wherein both men and women as well as those who do not conform to the
heteronormal codes are oppressed. Critiquing the heteronormalcy implied in the
‘happily ever after’ fairy tale endings and defying the reinforcement of the social
belief that such endings hint at, Broumas offers an alternate ending in the form of
female solidarity and sisterhood – an alternative wherein the future of human beings
is not scripted or better still they are allowed to live life on their own terms without
getting cowed down by the oppressive social norms.

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•
Emma Donoghue’s ‘The Tale of the Shoe’30

Like other tales in her collection, Donoghue in this remaking takes the deeply familiar
tale of Cinderella and unspins it to weave its older version together and tell it anew
with an unexpected twist. The common feature of the thirteen transformed tales is that
they read between the lines of the older known fairy tales and strongly react to the
male dominated fairy tale canon. ‘The Tale of the Shoe’ initiates the polyphonic
volume in which anonymous female narrators of different ages, circumstances and
sexual orientation share and pass on their own tales sequentially, each one starting at
the point where the preceding narrator stops. Each narrator is speaker to the following
and a listener to the earlier narrator. Each one has a voice and is heard. Each one
confides in her listener while responding to the story heard earlier. Thus one woman’s
story generates and promotes and prompts another’s creating a strong bond between
women tellers and listeners.

Donoghue’s interest in women’s relationships and her intent to recast these relations
in a positive manner and explore further possibilities are reflected in her subtle
retelling of ‘Cinderella,’ ‘The Tale of the Shoe.’ The shoe motif, the story line,
innovative ideas, quotations from and allusions to various retellings of ‘Cinderella’ in
the narrative and the unexpected twist at the end function as hints that help the reader
identify the tale as a remaking of the old ‘Cinderella’ tale. It is the first anonymous
female narrator’s personal life story. This narrator knows the ‘Cinderella’ tale and
presents her own tale in the pattern of the ‘Cinderella’ plot line. As a girl her inner
and internalised voices tell her the ways of behaviour and thinking but a woman who
has the looks of a witch and a heart of a good mother and who turns out to be her
foster, god mother and later a lover patiently and lovingly prompts her to seek her
own desires and fulfil them. It is then that the girl gains courage and changes the
course of her life and of the old tale of ‘Cinderella.’ She attains a sense of
independent identity of her own self and defying her internalised voices uncovers and
reaches her own free, independent voice that with allusions to various retellings of
Cinderella attempts to emancipate her from the pre written texts and at the same time
plays with the idea of rewriting as dress making. Donoghue’s Cinderella grows from
self-loathing to self-confidence. Her female saviour offers her love and independence.
The former, unlike the traditional male hero, does not have the high handed attitude of
a saviour and a ‘giver’ but creates confidence in the girl that she herself sought her
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own freedom and hence she should take her life in her own control: “You think I have
saved you, but the truth is that your need has conjured me here…. The thing is to take
your life in your hands.” (D 11)

‘The Tale of the Shoe’ begins with the sentence: “Till she came it was all cold.” (D 1)
stressing the warmth brought in by the arrival of the woman who helped her confront
the misery and coldness she feels in life. However, at the time of narrating her
experience this Cinderella has come to awareness that her punishments were inflicted
upon her by herself: “…nobody punished me but me. The shrill voices were all inside.
Do this, do that, you lazy heap of dirt.” (D 3) The step mother and step sisters of the
Grimm tale are present within her as patriarchal voices instructing her about her
socially accepted behaviour. She has internalised these voices that keep insulting her.
She feels rejected, alienated and utterly isolated. As a result she loathes herself so
much so that not just her clothes but even her speech she feels is loathsome and
repulsive: “Every word that came out of my mouth limped away like a toad. Whatever
I put on my back now turned to sackcloth and chafed my skin.” (D 1) Realisation of
these psychological and emotional conditions is an aftermath of the loss of her
mother. Her perception about herself and her internalised voices come to the surface
in the permanent absence of her mother and her love. There is neither stepmother nor
any stepsister. However out of her sense of self-loathing she imposes upon herself the
chores and trials which in the traditional tale are inflicted by the stepmother. In
removing completely the characters of the cruel women of the Grimm tale, Donoghue
explicitly suggests that women conditioned in and by patriarchy do not need rival
women to victimise them but are themselves their own enemies. So is her Cinderella
responsible for her own abjection. And to rescue her from her self-created problems
and self-inflicted tribulations, Donoghue creates another female character whose
arrival brings warmth, self-realisation and a longing for a meaningful life for
Cinderella: “She took me into the garden and showed me a hazel tree I had never seen
before…. My old dusty self was spun new.”(D 3) The helper figure profoundly
transforms Cinderella inside out. Cinderella re-fashions herself and Donoghue, the
classical text. Since the sentence echoes and underlines the subtitle of Donoghue's
collection- “old tales in new skins,” its utterance in the initial story sparks the
beginning of the process of newly re-dressing both the fairy tale heroine and the fairy
tale tradition and text. The metaphor of spinning a new self and identity continues in

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the immediate reference to Cinderella’s new dress: “This woman sheathed my limbs
in blue velvets. I was dancing on the points of a clear glass.” (D 3) Happiness at the
idea of transformation and re-dressing is conveyed using the glass shoe metaphor. The
helper woman lets the narrator Cinderella to come to her own realisation and does not
preach or instruct her. She makes her sense, on her own, the vanity of her internalised
voices. Hence it is on Cinderella's asking that she takes her to the ball. Narrator
Cinderella's self-conscious question “Isn’t that what girls are meant to ask for?” (3)
and later her knowledge and observance of the socially accepted behaviour and
etiquettes reflect Donoghue's condescension and social comedy of the expected
gender roles and relations as well as the narrator’s awareness that she is playing a role
in a well known story: “I knew just how I was meant to behave. I smiled ever so
prettily… I refused canapé and kept my belly pulled in…. I danced with ten elderly
gentlemen who had nothing to say but did not let that stop them. I answered only,
Indeed and Oh yes and Do you think so?” (D 4) On the second night she “tittered at
the king’s jokes; … accepted a single chicken wing and nibbled it daintily… danced
three times with the prince, whose hand wavered in the small of (my) back. He asked
(me my) favourite colour, but (I) couldn’t think of any. He asked (me my) name, and
for a moment (I) couldn’t remember it.” (D 5) She describes the third night as
follows: “That night my new skin was red silk, shivering in the breeze. The prince
hovered at my elbow like an autumn leaf ready to fall…. I danced… and smiled till
my face twisted. I swallowed a little of everything I was offered, then leaned over the
balcony and threw it all up again.” (D 6)

It is the shrieking voices within her which keep prompting her to seek her future in the
balls and hence she asks the helper motherly figure to take her there. On the first two
nights the gentle helper repeatedly asks her “Had enough?” (D 4, 5) to which the
narrator, her “barking voices” (D 5) prompting her within, responded with the desire
to go back to the ball the next day. On the third night, however, when the prince
proposes to her, “As soon as the words began to leak out of his mouth, they formed a
cloud” (D 6) in which she saw her future. In the midst of the voices which were
shrieking “Yes yes yes say yes before you lose your chance you bag of nothingness”
(D 7) she realises that she had “got the story all wrong.” (D 7) She does sense and
admit the comfort and absence of insecurity in the prince’s proposal but a new
realisation dawns upon her. Wondering how she could see the beauty of the helper

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woman she “reaches out” for her. The older woman surprisingly asks her, “What
about the shoe?”(D 7)

“It was digging into my heel, I told her.

What about the prince? she asked.

He’ll find someone to fit, if he looks long enough.

What about me? She asked very low. I’m old enough to be your mother…. You’re not
my mother, I said. I’m old enough to know that.” (D 8)

She throws the other shoe into the brambles and both of them go home together. The
narrator Cinderella’s growth and self realisation are gradual and progressive. Excited
first at the prospect of going to the ball, she prepares nervously for the last one. Her
growing discomfort is suggested in the change in the nature of the voices inside her.
The voices jabbering at first start barking in the end. It is on the third night that she
gathers courage to completely defy social conventions and correct the “all wrong”
story. She is fed up to the extent of being nauseated. The same musical tune being
played “over and over,” her dance like a “clockwise ballerina,” the forced smile
twisting her face, all suggest her physical discomfort and nervous tension which
culminates into the act of vomiting everything that she “was offered.” It is symbolic
of her disgust with and rejection of the social conventions, good behaviour, polite
manners, courtship and romance – everything that the ball stands for. By the third ball
she has developed the ability to objectively assess the situation from a distance and
give a courageous response. The conventional voices urge her to accept the proposal
so that she a “bag of nothingness” could become “somebody” thus suggesting that it is
only through conformity can a woman achieve an acceptable status in society. It is
important here to know that never ever once in the story is the narrator protagonist
named or called Cinderella. She is anonymous and describes herself depreciatingly as
“sackcloth,” “heap of dirt” and on her self- realisation, too retains and reclaims this
anonymous status in a bolder way. The prince’s proposal, the heterosexual norm and
the “voices” of convention are mutely refused in her failure to speak when the prince
proposes and physically denied in her act of vomiting. She runs away to free herself
from the prince and the patriarchal and heterosexual imperatives that he represents.
She runs away to reach out to the motherly stranger who gradually makes her realise

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her own independent self and replace her self-loathing, self-deprecatory image with a
self-asserting and self-respecting one.

The sense of self-esteem that the anonymous narrator gains in the company of the
older woman figure is significant. The heterosexual relationship is completely devoid
such a sense. Secondly this relation is of dominance and domination which is absent
in the relationship of the two women. Their relationship acknowledges and respects
equality, freedom and the growth of the both involved in the relation. This sense of
liberation attracts the anonymous narrator-protagonist. In her act of transgressing her
desire for her female helper she not only rebels against the accepted social behaviour
and norms but also radically deviates from the traditional plot of the old tale and
offers an alternative to its stifling, oppressive end. The new story breaks the powerful
spell of “the constraining discourse of social advancement and compulsory
heterosexuality.”31

The speechlessness of the two women on their reunion is perhaps because of the
inadequacy of the existing language and the want of a language which could articulate
their love story. To her amazement the girl narrator protagonist realises that the story
she confronts now had always been there, she had got it wrong. She fends for words
but finds that she “must have dropped all [the] words in the bushes.” (8) Her
dumbfoundment substitutes words with touch and “I reached out,” she says. The old
body of the tale and of the female protagonist-narrator are literally given new skins as
the subtitle of the collection intends to do. Her act of throwing the shoe “into the
brambles” symbolises the refusal of the conventionally prescribed role of a fairy tale
heroine and those readers who identify with her. She approaches her happy end – so
much insisted in the fairy tale endings – in seeking and attaining self-fulfilment and
happiness.

Donoghue manipulates the emancipator potential and the subversive dimension of the
classical tale and the pre existing mockery of aristocracy imbued in Perrault and
Grimm versions. She manipulates fairy tale magic and metamorphosis to challenge
social identities, gender roles, and binary oppositions. She favours love, friendship,
sisterhood and solidarity among women while at the same time stressing the creative
role of the readers in the process of creative appropriation of old tales.

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•
Francisca Lia Block’s ‘Glass’ (2000)32

Francisca Lia Block in her ‘Glass’ (2000) presents a version of heterosexual love
story wherein the protagonist comes to a self-realisation and self-assertion through a
motherly strange woman as in ‘The Tale of a Shoe.’ ‘Glass’ is a third person
narrative. The young girl protagonist is a home maker and likes to be so. She loves to
be at home and perform domestic chores: “And she had tasks. She loved to plant…To
arrange flowers…To make the salmon in pomegranate sauce; the salads… the golden
vanilla cream custards; the breads and pie crusts that powdered her with flour. She
loved, even, to dust the things, to feel them in her hands, imagining their history.” (Bl
56-57) It is her stories which bind her with the sisters with affinity. “She had the
stories she gave to her sisters which made them love her. Or need her at least.” (Bl 56)
She is different from them. “They care more for the eyes and ears and the mouths
whispering – beautiful, beautiful.” (Bl 55) She wonders why it matters at all. “She
was free, still, like a child, the way it is before you are seen and after that you can
never remember who you are unless someone else shows it to you.”(Bl 56) She comes
across a strange woman, a fairy “who was not old, not young, who was red roses,
white snowfall, who was blind and saw everything, who sent stories resounding
through the universe” (Bl 70) This woman who “laughed at her own sorrow and wept
pearls at wedding” (Bl 60) teaches her to come out and assert herself: “You cannot
hide forever, though you may try… you are the one who transforms, who creates. You
can go out into the world and show others. They will feel less alone because of you,
they will feel understood, unburdened by you, freed of guilt and shame and sorrow.
But to share with them you must wear shoes you must go out you must not hide you
must dance…” (Bl 61)

The self-asserting new Cinder girl attracts the attention of the prince which makes her
sisters feel jealous of her. When she realises her sisters’ jealousy on account of the
prince’s attraction to her, she commits an act of sacrifice by way of running away,
losing her shoe and deprecating herself. Ultimately, however, the pursuing prince
finds her “even without her enchantments, her stories, her dress, her shoe.” (Bl 68)
Witnessing “how he looked at her, how he needed her” (Bl 69) the sisters realise the
vanity of their envy and jealousy. The story ends with the strange woman saying,
“You must reach inside yourselves where I live like a story, not old, not young,

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laughing at my own sorrow, weeping pearls at weddings, wielding a torch to melt

sand into something clear and bright.” (Bl 70)

On the whole the story transforms the Cinderella tale within the heterosexual
patriarchal confines unlike Donoghue’s ‘Tale of the Shoe.’ However in both the
retellings the focus is not on passive suffering of a girl but on her self-affirmation and
assertion by means of an elderly wise woman whose intervention and guidance lead
the young girl to discover her true self.

‘Cinderella’ being perhaps the most famous of the fairy tales has been equally
fervently retold by contemporary writers with an either feminist or sceptical bent.
Besides the three instances above there have been considerable attempts at retelling
‘Cinderella’ with the attitude to rather “correct” the story

cooked up years and years ago,

And made to sound all soft and sappy

Just to keep the children happy.33

Revisionists Iring Fetscher, Richard Gardener, Jay Williams, Judith Viorst, Jane
Yolen share Roald Dahl’s sentiment of reframing the Cinderella plot to explore and
reveal to the readers “the conditions underlying the heroine’s passivity.” (Brothers
Grimm 199) The retellings like those of Emma Donoghue reflect and suggest the need
to change cultural attitudes to gender roles and step motherly figures. Gail Carson
Levine, Priscilla Galloway, Philip Pullman, Francesca Lia Block could be cited as
instances of such revolutionary retellings. Their retellings either portray the female
protagonist as a young girl who learns to shape her own destiny or despise/ criticise
her for not actively controlling her own life. Levine, Pullman and Galloway replace
the female Cinderella with a male hero. While Levine’s ‘Cinderellis and the Glass
Hill’34 (2000) is humorous and predictable Philip Pullman in his ‘I was a Rat’35
(1999) harmonises the traditional fairy tale features of the Cinderella tale with a
contemporary late 20th century context and setting. It is a revision of Perrault’s
‘Cinderella.’

Galloway’s ‘The Prince’36 (1995) provokes the readers to believe that the pathetic
prince in the story would bring nothing but troubles and sufferings for Cinderella.

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A self-indulging prince with a foot fetish narrates this tale. This prince is highly
narcissistic, self-obsessed and self-absorbed. In his first person narrative he reveals
his homosexual affair with his tutor Stephen whom his father punishes with a death
sentence since he does not approve of the relationship. The king arranges a ball for the
prince wherein he would choose a wife for the prince if the latter fails to do it himself.
The prince does not desire to marry and takes an oath he would not. Still he dances
with the princess wearing glass slippers. The princess’s toes remind him of Stephen
and his own foot fetish. The glass slipper left behind by Cinderella induces his
obsession with finding the girl.

Throughout the story the focus is on the prince’s narcissism and his foot fetish. His
quest for Cinderella too is self-satisfying and obsessive. Hence it is suggested towards
the end that even if Cinderella gets him as her husband she cannot hope to be happy,
but on the contrary would invite troubles and sufferings. Galloway thus brings forth
the ambivalence of the happy endings of this particular tale and fairy tales in general.

Babette Cole’s ‘Prince Cinders’,37 Ellen Jackson and Kevin O’Malley’s ‘Cinder
Edna’38 and Melissa Kantor’s ‘If I Have a Wicked Stepmother, Where’s My
Prince?’39 are re-workings which relocate the Cinderella tale in an easily recognisable
context of the 20th century reality. Ann Jungman in her humorous feminist re-vision
‘Cinderella and the Hot Air Balloon’40 presents Ella who knows and pursues her
mind’s desires. It is she who actively helps Bill, the prince, who wants to run away
from his dominating father. Ella helps him in his endeavour and because she starts
liking him flies off with him in a hot air balloon. The humour in the tale serves two
purposes of bitingly exposing, criticising the gender biases prevalent in the traditional
tale and thereby reverting gender identities but with an acceptable human(e)
perspective.

•
Roald Dahl’s ‘Cinderella’41

Roald Dahl who begins his Revolting Rhymes with the Cinderella tale calls the
classical tale ‘phoney.’ The “first bit” of the tale till Cinderella's departure leaving
behind her shoe, he says, is “right”. The rest of the tale he assures the readers “was
cooked up …just to keep the children happy” (RD 5)

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Dahl’s Cinderella authoritatively dictates the “Magic Fairy” to get her to the Ball well
dressed and decked up in a coach. She is shown to hold the prince

very tight and pressed

herself against his manly chest.

The prince himself was turned to pulp,

All he could do was gasp and gulp. (RD 6)

Thus even the part of the traditional tale that he calls “right” is reformed by showing
Cinderella quite assertively expressing her desire to attend the ball with the intention
to impress and entice the prince and make him fall for her. At midnight when she
hastily rushes away from the prince he grabs her dress “to hold her back.”

As Cindy shouted, ‘Let me go!’

The dress was ripped from her head to toe.

She ran out in her underwear,

And lost one slipper on the stair. (RD 8)

Then the prince makes the famous announcement of marrying the girl who fits the
shoe. From here on Dahl’s story changes. He calls his version real, “much more
gory.” (RD 5) The prince puts the slipper “rather carelessly” (RD 8) on a crate of
beer. One of the Ugly Sisters, “the one whose face was blotched with blisters” (RD 8)
flushes the dainty shoe quickly down the loo and replaces it with her own slipper
smelling “a wee bit icky.” (RD 9) After trying it vainly on “thousands of eager
people” (RD 9) the Ugly Sister’s “hot and sticky” foot fits the slipper:

…The Prince screamed, ‘No!’

…went white from ear to ear. (RD 9)

The girl persists: ‘Oh no you don’t! you made a vow!

There’s no way you can back out now!’ (RD 10-11)

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The prince orders her head to be chopped off. The prince’s pervert and cruel nature is
revealed when he is shown to be pleased with the act of extermination:

This pleased the Prince. He smiled and said,

‘She’s prettier without her head.’ (RD 11)

The second Ugly sister too is beheaded at once. Cinderella working in the kitchen
comes out hearing the “thuds/of bouncing heads upon the floor” (RD 11) She is
startled and troubled at the Prince’s cruelty and insensitivity:

Poor Cindy’s heart was torn to shreds.

My Prince! She thought. He chops off heads! (RD 11)

What follows depicts a girl wise enough to change her decision and practical enough
to change her criteria while choosing her man:

How could I marry anyone

Who does that sort of a thing for fun? (RD 12)

The Magic Fairy who intervenes before the prince victimises Cinderella asks her to
make a wish which she promises to fulfil. Cinderella wishes for “a decent man…hard
to find” (12) She desires “No more Princes, no more money.”(12) Her wish is fulfilled
and immediately she is married to a simple and lovely ‘feller’, a jam-maker “who sold
good home-made marmalade.” (RD 12)

Hers is a successful happy marriage:

Their house was filled with smiles and laughter

And they were happy ever after. (RD 12)

Giving an original comic twist to the classic tale and calling this tale real, Dahl
surprises and shocks the readers, who passively relish and pass on the traditional tale
with all its hidden biases and values. Dahl breaks the readers’ complacent acceptance
of the classic tale and hilariously presents the revolting tale “with bite.” (Cover page 2
of the book)

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Judith Viorst’s tale too has this biting and revolting quality with which it shakes the
accepted reception of the tale. The title of her Cinderella tale is of almost half the
length of its content. In fact it could be read along with and as part of the tale that
follows. The title ‘…And Then the Prince Knelt Down And Tried to Put The Glass
Slipper On Cinderella’s Foot’42 assumes the readers’ foreknowledge of the incidents
in the tale and at the same time discounts the importance of the happenings till the
prince reaches Cinderella. The focus of the story is on Cinderella’s decision and the
surprising and amusing twist. The four verse lines that the retold tale constitutes are
eloquent and depict a sensible, wise and assertive Cinderella who has made up her
mind to deny the prince on the pretence that the glass slipper does not fit her. Though
she takes this decision on account of his physical looks, which she does not notice
earlier, the fact and point that she has the courage to decline the prince with all the
social and economic benefits that accompany him and follow her mind’s voice puts
before us a thinking Cinderella who has her say anyway:

I really didn’t notice that he had a funny nose.

And he certainly looked better all dressed up in fancy clothes.

He’s not nearly as attractive as he seemed the other night.

So I think I’ll just pretend that the slipper feels too tight. (29)

Dahl’s and Viorst’s funny feminist renditions employ humour to mock outdated sexist
notions in the classical tales, which have still retained their impact on adults who
delightfully relate the stories to the young ones. These humorous attempts ironically
present the farcical aspect of the sexist attitudes and expectations the traditional tales
perpetuate.

Little Red Riding Hood:

Continual retelling of different versions of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in the western
world is seen by Jack Zipes as a consequent offshoot of the issues raised in the classic
tale about “gender identity, sexuality, violence, and the civilizing process in a unique
and succinct symbolic form that children and adults can understand on different
levels.”43 These issues, according to him, play a vital role in establishing “principles
of social justice and gender equality that have not been satisfactorily practised in

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Western societies.” (TT 343) and hence we get repeated attempts at addressing these
issues in variant retellings of the tale.

This tale orally emanated in the 17th century Europe, particularly France, Tyrol and
Northern Italy, where women told tales of sexual and social initiation while sewing.
These tales led to the rise of warning tales explicitly intended at children. Zipes cites
Marianne Rumpf’s research on the social emergence of the tale. Rumpf points out
instances of werewolf trials during 15th, 16th and 17th century France and traces the
origin of the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ tale in the regions where these trials were
practised and the fear of werewolves was widespread. She maintains that it was
Perrault who replaced the werewolf villain of the original French tale to a simple
ferocious wolf (TT 19) since werewolves were no longer significant and relevant after
the practice of witch hunting had stopped or declined. Perrault also expurgated a
number of violent elements in the oral tale, namely for instance, the werewolf killing
the grandmother and keeping a slice of her flesh and blood for the girl to eat, the girl
consuming her nanny’s flesh and blood and later strip teasing herself and asking the
wolf where to keep each of the garments she removes and so on. Perrault “refined”
and “civilised” the tale for the upper class audience who upheld values, standards and
a worldview different from those of the poor. Zipes also cites Gottfried Hensses who
while exploring the oral tales of warning in Europe and Asia which might have
influenced Perrault, points out that in the oral versions of the tale the motif of red
hood and red colour was absent and the girl was not killed by the wolf or saved by her
father or the hunter but she herself “outwits the wolf and saves herself” (TT 23) The
act of the girl consuming her grandmother’s flesh and blood in the oral tale has been
interpreted as a symbolic act of self assertion by replacing the grandmother. Literary
versions of the tale simply reduce the grandmother to a sex object. This reduction is
not intended at in the oral tale. On the contrary “her death in the folk tale signifies the
continuity and reinvigoration of custom, which was important for the preservation of
society.” (TT 24) This aspect along with the ones mentioned earlier suggests that the
oral tale of the masses stresses self-assertion and self-dependence or independence of
a young girl rather than the normative sexual behaviour and consequences of breaking
away from it as focused in the literary tale developed from Perrault onwards.

Against the backdrop of newly emerging awareness of the difference between the
terms ‘child’ and ‘adult’ and changes in the process of civilisation, Perrault

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completely transformed the character of the little girl from a shrewd, brave and self
dependent peasant girl to a completely defenceless, helpless, spoilt pretty girl. The
Red hood gifted by the grandmother was a major addition by Perrault, suggesting the
spoilt nature of the girl who is held subconsciously responsible for and inviting her
own rape by talking and listening to the wolf, amusing herself and lingering in the
woods while on her way to the grandmother’s house. Writing for both children and
adults like the other French fairy tale writers of his time, Perrault sought to set
standards of virtuous behaviour and bourgeois aristocratic values to improve the
minds of children by depicting model characters and manners in the tales. In keeping
with his intent, he infused the tale and character of the girl with a new ideological
content. He appropriated the folk tale and motifs therein to suit and teach the upper
class child audience and at the same time amuse the adults. Perrault’s own male
chauvinistic views and opposition to women’s independence and assertion also
contributed to the shaping of the tale and the character of Little Red Riding Hood. The
literary tale thus is “a projection of male phantasy” (TT 31) and the changes in its
discourse indicate real shifts, conflicts and ruptures in the Western civilising process.”
(TT 31)

Changes in the ideas about prudent and prudish child rearing in the 19th century
brought about a transformed Little Red Riding Hood in the form of Grimm Brothers’
Little Red Cap. The prevalent social ideas of socialisation of children made the
Grimms revise the content and intent of the tale. The Christian and male lessons of
the Perrault tales were to be retained and at the same time the explicit cruelty,
sexuality and tragic end were needed to be expurgated. The Grimms did so and
produced a more helpless, naive, beautiful, little Victorian girl who is punished for
her disobedience, temptations and indulgence in sexual pleasures of the woods.
However, unlike in the Perrault tale, she is saved at the end first by the hunter and
then by the old grandmother without whom she would be totally lost. Thus by saving
her she is shown at the end of the tale to be grown to a rational child who promises
not to “wander” (sexual repression) and obey the normative standards of behaviour
set for her by adults. So by the end of the 19th century “a frank oral tale about
sexuality and actual dangers in the woods became...a coded message about
rationalising bodies and sex.” (TT 34) It is assumed that the Grimms infused the tale
with a political suggestion while transforming the French Perrault version.

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Symbolically Little Red Cap is seen as the German youth attracted by the French
revolutionary and once in his grip, repulsed by his violence, harshness and
barbarism. The Grimms obliquely present the temptations of and destruction at the
cost of Revolution and justify absolute conformity with and reverence for law, order
and patriarchal rule. The Grimms’ puritanical revisions suited the Victorian middle
class values better and hence despite Perrault’s popularity the Grimm versions of the
tales became more viral and fashionable in the upcoming bourgeois society of the
19th century. General middle class ideas about childhood, maidenhood, child rearing
and behaviour are voiced in the Grimm version. Interestingly, a majority of the later
adaptations and translations of this tale are based on the Perrault and Grimm
versions. Both the model versions and their adaptations present a male idea and
image of childhood, maidenhood, sexuality, standards of behaviour and conformity
with these. A general middle class acceptance of these ‘male’ cultural notions and
fear of consequences of non-conformity led to an unchallenged, unquestioned
reception of the tale for almost three centuries more. Though the Perrault and Grimm
versions still exercise their influence over the minds of readers – old and young
alike, in the early 20th century the dominant traditional plot was started being revised
and radicalised. Most of these were intended for adult readers. However almost till
the 50s strict obedience of law and order and conformism were still the implicit
messages of the revised tales.44 Towards the 1950s however, the tale saw radical,
rebellious changes throughout Europe and America.

Zipes points out three major currents in the revisions of the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’
tale during 1950-1993 viz.: 1) Retellings that projected Little Red Riding Hood
growing into an independent girl without any help from men. The girl in these
different adaptations is not disobedient, helpless and innocent but on the contrary,
quite brave, brilliant and confident. She is able to learn and grow through experience
and be independent of male help and support. Merseyside Fairy Story Collective’s
‘Red Riding Hood’ (1974), Tony Ross’s ‘Little Red Hood: A Classic Story Bent Out
of Shape’ (1978), Anneliese Meinert’s ‘Little Red Cap’ (1965), etc could be cited as
some examples belonging to this current. 2) Tales which tend to “rehabilitate the
wolf.” (TT 59) These tales present the wolf’s perspective and challenge his bad
reputation in Perrault and Grimm versions. The wolf is shown in these tales to help
the girl or to teach human beings a lesson or to reveal the wolf in us in order to

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suggest the extinction of human species in technological progress. He is not

presented as a threat in these revisions. Rudolf Otto Weimer’s poem ‘The Old wolf’
(1976), Tomi Ungerer’s ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ (1974), ‘Little Aqua Riding Hood’
by Philippe Dumas and Boris Moissard (1977) with the moral “certain men are more
dangerous than wolves” (TT 63) could be seen as such revisions seeking the wolf’s
rehabilitation. 3) Revisions which sought to liberate readers to question the
traditional cultural patterns presented in the classic tale. These tales completely
debunk the traditional narrative and contents of the tale and mock and criticise
conventional ideas of socialisation, social behaviour, sexuality, and gender roles.
Jean Merrill’s ‘Red Riding’ (1968), Anne Sexton’s ‘Red Riding Hood’ (1971),
Angela Carter’s ‘The Company of Wolves’ (1979), Olga Broumas’s ‘Little Red
Riding Hood’ (1977) fall into this current.

All these revisions have more or less radically challenged the powerful and enduring
influence of the tale which Zipes describes as “a cultural configuration of legalised
terror.” (TT 74) Some of these stories here are analysed to demonstrate how this
challenge is managed by the re-writers of the tale. It is interesting to see however,
that despite these radical revisionist currents the ever dominant Perrault and more so
Grimm versions of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ continue to capture even the 21st
century audience. It takes a long time to accept changes and defy the ideas so
strongly rooted in the social psyche. As Zipes rightly says: “...it took 200 years of
hunting witches and werewolves to give birth to the traditional helpless Red Riding
Hood and restrictive notions of sex and nature, then another 200 years to establish
the proper bourgeois image of the obedient Red Riding Hood learning her lessons of
discipline; it may take another 200 years for us to undo all the lessons Red Riding
Hood, and the wolf as well, were forced to learn.” (TT 81)

• Anneliese Meinert’s ‘Little Red Cap 65’ (TT 239-240)

‘Little Red Cap 65’ by Anneliese Meinert depicts a spoilt Little Red Cap “a friendly
person” (TT 239) who despite her unwillingness to carry cake and whiskey to her
granny zooms through the woods in her sports car without stopping for the wolf who
signals “to hitch a ride” (TT 239) and almost running him over. Granny is not happy
to see her since she has a bridge party nor does she want cake and whiskey since she

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is on a diet. “Get that stuff out of here before I’m tempted,” she says. (TT 239) To
Red Cap’s questions Granny gives interestingly funny answers:

“Granny, how come you have such sparkling eyes?”

“So that I can see you better,... Contact lenses. They’re much better than glasses.”

“How come you wear such big ear-rings?”

“So that I can hear better. This is the latest invention. The hearing aids are built into
the ear-clips.” (TT 239)

About the unusual mouth she says, “That’s so I can eat you better! No, that’s not it.
I’ve got new dentures...” (TT 240)

After this conversation Little Red cap drives off to meet her date – Hans Hunter. He
questions her for being late and asks if she didn’t meet anyone on the way to which
she answers, “Oh, just old Mr Wolf. He wanted to hitch a ride, and I almost ran him
over.” (TT 240) Hans eats the cake and drinks the whiskey on the way through the
woods over the highway. Neither he nor Little Red Cap notices the pretty flowers
along the roadside and under the trees. In fact, Red Cap had never noticed them even
before. “How could she, especially when one is going a 100 miles an hour!” (TT
240)

The revision presents a somewhat rash and careless but liberated independent Red
Cap who is her own person and does not bother about the old ‘wolves’ and shares an
equal status with her man. The neglect and almost running over of the “old” wolf
could be seen to symbolise irreverence of the old conformist ideas, views and values.
The light-hearted, casual treatment of the classic tale and the humour in the revision
serves the purpose of mocking the excessive importance, and value attached hitherto
to the traditional tale and its implicit messages.

• Merseyside Fairy Story Collective’s ‘Red Riding Hood’ (TT 251-255)

Feminists Andrey Ackroyd, Marge Ben-Tovim, Catherine Meredith and Anne

Neville present in their revision a Red Riding Hood who grows to overcome her
timidity and fear of the dark and of the wolves. Little Nadia who wears her great-
grandmother’s thick red cloak with a hood and therefore called Red Riding Hood is

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a quiet and shy girl. She loves to visit granny living in a cottage in the forest but is
extremely scared to walk through the forest alone. She is frightened by many other
things like going to bed alone, dogs, thunder and strangers. As such she is portrayed
as a representative of all children who too are unusually scared of these things. Her
parents mock her for her fear of the forest and wolves. But her great-grandmother
trusts her and tells her that the speaking guy wolves exist. She confides in her that as
a strong and agile child she fought and killed the wolf with her hatchet. Now that she
is very old and weak she needs others to cook for her and to accompany her. As such
Red Riding Hood goes to her everyday either with her parents or with some other
children. Her fear of cutting herself on a sharp knife deters her from making a winter
jacket in school. While other children in school proudly cut and stitch their own
jackets for the bitter winter, Red Riding Hood wishes to wear the worn out red cloak
and hood which can hardly protect her from the harsh weather. While the parents are
worried great-grandmother promises to make a sheepskin lining for her cloak when
she goes to her after school the next day. Now Red Riding Hood would have to go to
the granny alone since the parents have other engagements. So though she is happy
at the thought of getting a new sheepskin lining done, she is frightened of the
prospect of going through the forest all alone. Throughout the next day she is
haunted by this fear so much that she does not even eat at the dinnertime. Out of fear
though in the morning she prepares to go to great-granny with brown eggs,
chocolate, blackberry jam, a special needle and thread and a sharp knife in her
basket, she changes her mind against her wishes. As she starts walking back towards
her home, however, she hears grey wolves howling and becomes worried about the
lonely great-grandmother who is no longer young and agile. She turns around and
starts running toward great-granny’s cottage when she hears a cold voice asking her
to run back home. “This is the night of the wolf.” (TT 253) Just before reaching the
cottage she sees a streak of grey moving towards it. Tired, with great efforts she
drags herself to the cottage. The well known conversation between Red Riding Hood
and the wolf in the guise of granny takes place. However while asking her last
question about great-granny’s big teeth she backs away and as the wolf leaps from
the bed to catch her she hears great-grandmother calling her from outside to open the
door. The old woman pulls a blazing branch from the stove to frighten the wolf with
the flame. The thoughtful Red Riding Hood imagines what would happen once the
branch burns out completely. She remembers how other children cut through
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the animal skins to make their winter jackets. She pulls out the sharp knife from her
basket and heroically just at the right moment kills the wolf. At a very critical
moment she emerges absolutely fearless. Her timely rush to the forest and killing of
the wolf with a sharp knife brings her face to face with her inner courage, presence
of mind and confidence. She grows to self-awareness and an awareness of her own
brave spirit. She grows to realise the vanity of her fear of the dark, the wolves, the
knives and everything else.

While skinning the wolf and making a lining of his fur the old woman tells Red
Riding Hood “…this cloak now has special powers. Whenever you meet another
child who is shy and timid, lend that child the cloak to wear as you play together in
the forest, and then, like you, they will grow brave.” (TT 255) The little girl does so
and for many years explores deeper and deeper into the forest.

The revisionist Merseyside writers convert the tale and its message and transform its
protagonist into an exemplary model to be followed by other children who should
shed the fears of the dark, the unknown and the wolves with all their symbolic
connotations in the traditional tale and instead confront them fearlessly. Departing
from the traditional tale and its message, the group of re-writers here depict a fearless
old woman and little girl who confront the challenges before them independent of
any male support and emerge victorious. The message is the need for women and
girls to gather courage and fight the oppressive forces intending at threatening and
consuming/devouring their very being. Susan Brownmiller in her book Against Our
Will (1976) says, “Fairy Tales are full of a vague dread, a catastrophe that seems to
befall only little girls.” (TT 350) This retelling in a way suggests a solution to
overcome these fears. It completely overlooks and does away with the “male
oriented sexual pedagogization” (TT 39) and the loaded warnings for children of the
traditional tale in this revision.

Conventional male attitudes reveal that men and patriarchal system in general
consider women responsible for their rape. Even if men are the victimisers, imposers
and offenders, women are made to appear a willing party to the act of their own rape;
they are shown to desire being raped. Moreover it is some man who comes forward
to protect the helpless victim. Thus as Brownmiller contends, men establish and
assert “the supreme rightness of male power either as offender or protector.”

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(TT 351) The two retold tales discussed above challenge this codified male ideology
in the classic versions and present a girl attaining mature understanding and a
fearless spirit for fighting independently without any male help. They demonstrate a
confident and intelligent Red Riding Hood who is able to grow and learn through
experience, help herself and gain an independent self-identity.

As said earlier some revisions take into account the wolf’s perspective and present it
to expose the falsity of the classic tale which projects the wolf as a male predator.

• Rudolf Otto Weimer’s ‘The Old Wolf’’ (TT 265)

In this very short verse retelling Weimer presents the “now piously old and good”
wolf complaining to Red Riding Hood, when they meet again, that ‘wild’ stories are
spread about him and he blames the Brothers Grimm for his bad reputation:

... Incredible, my child,

What kinds of stories are spread. They’re wild.

As though there were, so the lie is told,

A dark murder affair of old.

The Brothers Grimm are the ones to blame.

Confess! It wasn’t half as bad as they claim. (TT 265)

The wolf’s order ‘confess’ perhaps makes Little Red Riding Hood shiver and remind
her of the old incident. She looks at the wolf’s bite and stammers in agreement to
what he says:

Little Red Riding Hood saw the wolf’s bite

And stammered: “You’re right, quite right.”

Whereupon the wolf, heaving many a sigh,

Gave kind regards to Granny and waved good-bye. (TT 265)

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The ironic tone comments on how the tale has been appropriated by the Grimms and
their followers. However at the same time the wolf’s command and Red Riding
Hood’s stammering affirmation are suggestive also of the terror that the wolf was
and is capable of inflicting upon/ generating in the minds of Red Riding Hood and
her kind. It seems that Red Riding Hood’s expected positive response to his
complaint keeps him cool and he satisfactorily bids her good-bye. His sighs may be a
sign of regret at the past act, or perhaps the sigh about the ‘wild’ false lies spread
about him. It however shows his changed, good being.

• Tomi Ungerer’s ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ (TT 261-264)

The attempt at rehabilitating the wolf is more emphatically witnessed in Tomi

Ungerer’s “Re-rumination” of Little Red Riding Hood.45 Ungerer’s re-rumination
begins “once upon many times.” (TT 261) At the centre of the tale is the wolf –
“mean, broody and ferociously ferocious.” (TT 261) The story presents him as the
ruler and owner of a castle in a “godforsaken forest.” (TT 261) He doesn’t have a
wife or an heir and looks forward to having one. One day a watchcrow brings him
news about a girl “dressed in reds all over like a stop sign,” picking berries off his
domain. The wolf happy to hear this goes off to meet the girl – Little Red Riding
Hood. The writer expressly acknowledges the readers’ familiarity with the character
of Red Riding Hood but wants them not to consider her because this Riding Hood, he
says, is “not the one you might already have read about. No. This Little Red Riding
Hood was the real, no non-sense one, and this story is one-hundred-to-a-nickel
genuine.” He describes her beauty using funny comparisons and metaphors: her
blond hair shone like fresh bread. Description of her beauty is followed by one
pinching statement – “Besides, she had wit and sense.” (TT 262)

Ungerer discounts all the hitherto notions and connotations of the red hood which the
original Red Riding Hood wears as her grandmother’s gift. He mocks the idea of
being in reds all over: “She was dressed in red because it was one of her mother’s
outlandish notions that her daughter might easily be spotted that way. Little Red
Riding Hood didn’t mind. She thought it made her special.” (TT 262) It is also
shown as the mother’s gift rather than grandmother’s since the grandmother is
portrayed later in a very negative and dark light. She is “mean and cranky” (TT 262)
and needs “a weekly supply” of hogheads, rendered lard, applejack and bread.

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She superstitiously believes that “smithereened voice” could be restored by eating

pig heads. Disgust about her character is intently and comically suggested by
Ungerer in the statement “Her place was buzzing with flies who liked pigs’ heads,
too, in summer especially.” (TT 263) Little Red Riding Hood hates her grandma and
her visits to her. She calls the old woman “vicious to the core.” (TT 263) She carries
the bluish marks of the old woman’s beatings and bitings on her tender skin and in
order to delay reaching there she purposely stops in the shade of the forest and picks
berries: “I might just as well stop and be late and rest.” (TT 263) After all what she
gets there is “blows and insults” and accusations for things she hasn’t done “and so
beside the point, the comma, and the asterisk.” (TT 263) The comic undercurrent
continues throughout the tale. Quite a few things in the original tale are reversed. For
instance, there Little Red Riding Hood has to carry simply a piece of cake and a
bottle of wine to her grandmother but in this revision she has to carry a number of
things mentioned above every week. In the original classic it is the wolf who tries
and succeeds in distracting her attention and persuading her to linger and loiter in the
woods. In the revision however, she herself decides to slow down and linger in the
forest to delay the experience of what is in store for her – blows, insults and
accusations. The kind and loving grandmother of the old classic is atrocious, wicked
and almost witch-like in this retelling and the malicious wolf, on the other hand, is a
kind hearted, helpful duke in search of a lady love. Startled by the wolf’s sudden
appearance, Little Red Riding Hood tries to justify her unawareness about whose
bushes she was picking the berries from and tells him about her visit to her “mean
old grandmother who lives by the green fly pond.” (TT 263) Asking her to call him
Duke instead of Prince as she does, he offers to carry the heavy baskets in his “strong
arms” not to the old woman’s house since “her reputation is worse than mine” but to
his own castle. He promises her all the comforts and luxuries she could dream of.
“I’ll make you happy, you’ll make me happy, as in a fairy tale.” (TT 264)

Ungerer’s mockery continues throughout: Not knowing the meaning of reputation

Little Red Riding Hood seeks an explanation. “A reputation is what people think you
are. Reputations come in all sizes. Some are good, some are bad or very bad, like
mine.” (TT 263) When in distrust Little Red Riding Hood expresses her fear of being
eaten by the wolf with his big mouth, he calls this fear “a mere slander. ...Wolves
feed only upon ugly children, and then only on special request.” (TT 264) She goes

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on asking him further questions about his enormous jowls and the pink tongue. He
tries to satisfy her quest. However, as she goes even further as in the original tale, he
interrupts her saying, “Stop asking foolish questions.... Questions are bad for your
happiness.” (TT 264) Lifting the baskets he asks her to accompany him. Little Red
Riding Hood willing to go with him asks him, “What happens to my parents and my
mean grandmother?” This question also in the minds of the readers is answered by
the wolf cleverly: “Read the end of this story, and you’ll find out.” (TT 264) As per
the end they invite Red Riding Hood’s parents to the wedding. “Off they went to live
happily ever after. They did get married and they had all sorts of children who lived
happily, too.” (TT 264) The old woman left to herself, without food “shrank and
shrank until she was just six inches high. When last seen, she was scavenging
someone’s larder in the company of a Norway rat. And, tiny and hungry, she was just
as mean as ever.” (TT 264)

In this attempt at rehabilitating the wolf the re-teller of the tale positively suggests
that the wolf is not a predator and that on the contrary, the girl is victimised by her
parents and grandmother with their fears and needs. By making her happy and by
understanding her, the wolf attempts to erase his ‘very bad’ reputation and proves
that the grandmother representing old morals and conventions perhaps is worse
reputed than he. The focus of the conventional tale and its interpretations is
completely shifted in this retelling from the symbolic sexual innuendos and rape to a
more positive acceptance of one’s own sexuality and lack of fear of sex. Little Red
Riding Hood in this revised tale learns to trust her own senses and that is the lesson
Ungerer wishes to convey. Hence the slandered wolf is shown not as a carnal symbol
but as a helpful, considerate though moderately shrewd being with human emotions
and ability to give happiness.

Tomi Ungerer’s retelling does successfully convey his non-conformist stance and
values. Radical revisions like his tend not to present the wolf as a real threat. Zipes
offers two major explanations for this reversal: 1) Wolves have been almost extinct
in Western societies and therefore do not represent any threat any longer. 2)
Symbolic carnal connotations associated with the wolf no longer hold in the present
since with greater scientific control over the body fear about sex has reduced and
acceptance and expression of one’s own sexuality has increased. Thus in the versions
rehabilitating the wolf “the assumptions of the traditional cultural pattern” (TT 63)

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are undermined. This trend continues even in the third current of re-visionist
retellings of ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’

• Anne Sexton’s ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ (T 76-79)

Anne Sexton’s ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ centres on the theme of deception.
Naturally the deceiving wolf is presented as the hero of the “transformed” tale. The
prologue for the tale begins casually affirming the existence of a number of deceivers
and listing some of them. The list includes the suburban matron in the supermarket
pretending to perform household duties but actually thinking of her lover and
planning to meet him in the church parking lot, two apparently respectable ladies
who rob an old woman of her savings, the stand up comic who entertains the
audience at night but commits suicide the very next morning. In this list she includes
herself as well: “And I, I too.” She admits that behind her suave appearance hides a
self which undergoes an open heart surgery in its head and the heart. This heart is an
eyeless (I-less) beetle which is dissected by the head. The open heart surgery thus
implies that the rational tries to open up the I-less self-less other. There is a kind of
deception even when the speaker Dame Sexton builds a “simple A frame house.”
Description of this experience of being haunted by the reproaching figure of the
mother echoes the lines of Emily Dickinson:

One need not be a chamber to be Haunted

One need not be House

The brains has corridors – surpassing

Material Place...46

Concern with the mother-daughter relation which Anne Sexton comments on in her
other “transformed” tales is touched upon and rendered trivial in ‘Red Riding Hood.’
The instructions given to Red Riding Hood by her mother in the Grimm tale are
dropped in the transformed story because that is not the point that the tale wants to
establish or stress. The witch-narrator calls it a digression and decides to begin the
story at its ‘proper’ beginning:

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In the beginning

There was just Red Riding Hood

so called because her grandmother

made her a red cape and she was never without it. (T 76)

Her mother sends her to the grandmother with wine and cake:

Wine and cake?

Where’s the aspirin? The penicillin?

Where’s the fruit juice?

Peter Rabbit had camomile tea.

But wine and cake it was. (T 76)

Red Riding Hood’s love for her red hood and greater love for grandmother (But
more than she loved her riding hood/ she loved her grandmother) and the detailed
description of the redness of the blanket in the verse tale make explicit the
associations of the red colour with sexuality and at the same time suggest a sexual
attraction and attachment between the two women. The sexual undertones deepen
with the description of the grandmother’s house:

There among the roots and trunks

with the mushrooms pulsing inside the moss

he planned how to eat them both,

the grandmother an old carrot

and the child a shy budkin

in a red red hood. (T 77)

The verse tale describes Red Riding Hood’s wandering off deeper and deeper into
the forest in psychological terms. It does not moralise about this wandering off the
path despite the mother’s warnings, which too are omitted from the verse tale.

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The wolf’s act of donning grandmother’s night dress and cap is seen as a sexual
abnormality in his character. He is a deceptive fellow engaging in transvestism. This
transformed aspect of his nature is what introduces him at the beginning of the tale:

Long ago

there was a strange deception:

a wolf dressed in frills

a kind of transvestite.

...

A deceptive fellow. (T76)

His odd looks in grandmother’s clothes are ironically and comically described:

Grandmother looked strange

a dark and hairy disease it seemed. (T 77)

Red Riding Hood’s questions to the strange grandmother are all summed up in just a
couple of verse lines in this retold tale:

Oh Grandmother, what big ears you have,

ears,eyes,hands and then the teeth.

The better to eat you with my dear. (T 77)

The comic manner in which the wolf’s gluttony is described focuses on the relation
between the two women and on the wolflessness of the wolf while asleep. The word
‘wolfless’ is stressed by isolating it:

Now he was fat.

He appeared in his ninth month

and Red Riding Hood and her grandmother

rode like two Jonahs up and down with

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his every breath. One pigeon. One partridge.

He was fast asleep,

dreaming in his cap and gown,

wolfless. (T 78)

Red Riding Hood’s destination is among the “roots and trunks.” She is made to look
at and collect bloodroot, bunchberry and dogtooth. Her journey through the woods
becomes a sexual exploration whose destination is the dark belly of the wolf. It has
explicit echoes of animality, sexuality. The two women, Red Riding Hood and her
grandmother, are united in the kingdom of the belly for a short time and are released
again by a huntsman. He suspects the loud and ‘contented’ snores of the grandmother
and hearing them believes that “that was no grandmother.” (T 78) The word
‘contented’ is stressed perhaps to suggest the supposition that women can never be
contented or cured. For it is the ‘ill’ grandmother who the huntsman believes cannot
sleep peacefully. It suggests eternal dissatisfaction of women in life. The verse tale
almost imitates the source tale in its discussion of how the hunter decides to shoot
the much wanted wolf but thinks of saving the grandmother except the short
narratorial comment that describes the cutting open of the wolf as “a kind of
caesarean section.” (T 78)

The ‘carnal knife’ brings out Red Riding Hood from “kingdom of the belly” like
poppy and grandmother also comes out still with the desire to have wine and cake –
again an indication of discontent. The wolf dies of the weight of the stones. The
moral of the story becomes clear that if one deceives the weight of deception kills
him. “Many a deception ends on such a note.” (T 79) The story does not end here.
Sexton further comments on what happens to the grandmother and the girl. The two
with the huntsman sit down by the wolf’s corpse and have a meal of wine and cake:

remembering

nothing naked and brutal

from that little death,

that little birth

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from their going down

and their lifting up. (T 79)

This takes us back to the story’s end where the two women are substituted by stones.
Outside the dark belly too the two are stone like as their indifference to the dead wolf
and the way they have their wine and cake shows. This equates them with the stones
they are replaced with. Perhaps that is the reason why the wolf does not realise the
difference when he wakes up and tries to run away only to be killed by the weight.
The two women do not learn anything from the “naked and brutal” journey of and
experience of death and birth. They do not even remember it.

Omissions of the mother’s instructions to the girl in the verse tale logically invites
the absence of the lesson that the Grimm Red Riding Hood learns and therefore
decides not to wander off into the forest when her mother forbids it. No lesson is
given at the end of the verse tale except the possible implication that women keep
committing the same mistakes as in the past because they do not learn from their
experiences and remember nothing from it. They will continue to fall a prey to
deception, despite experiencing its consequences.

• Olga Broumas’s ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ (TT 272-273)

Olga Broumas’s ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ amounts to a poem of self-expression with
personal references revealing unawares quite a few things about herself as a woman.
She represents women who are free of men and their ideas of sexuality. Within the
framework of the Grimm tale Broumas critically and minutely observes the
phallocentric exclusive notions of womanhood and femininity. These notions in
patriarchy exclude women who love women because the idea of femininity in this
system can be attained necessarily with male involvement that results in the birth of a
child. Critical interpretations of the old tale ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ focus, as
mentioned earlier, on the sexual initiation of the girl, her disobedience and the
implicit connotations of her rape as a consequent punishment. However that the girl
is brought out of the wolf’s belly and is born again is not stressed much. Anne
Sexton makes a tangential reference to the “caesarean section” in her retelling. But it
is Broumas, however, who brings this circumstance of Little Red Riding Hood’s
birth cycle to the focal point and discusses the idea of male centric femininity and

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womanhood. Little Red Riding Hood is born from a man (the wolf) and delivered by
a man (the huntsman) and as such she is produced for men and is tied to male
sexuality. Olga Broumas compares her own birthing experience with Little Red
Riding Hood’s. She is delivered not by a male doctor but a midwife. Her emergence
into the world is naturally “guided” by the midwife’s hands rather than forcefully
pulled by the forceps of the doctor:

... I slipped out like an arrow, but not before

the midwife

plunged to her wrist and guided

my baffled head to its first mark. (TT 272)

As such, unlike Little Red Riding Hood, she is free of the ties of male sexuality and
has a say in her own being, her own existence. She is free to “become” and
determine her own self. The midwife’s hands “guide” her. The “good woman”
however, does not do what the “high forceps” of the doctor can:

... High forceps

might, in that one instant, have accomplished

what you and that good woman failed

in all these years to do: cramp

me between temples, hobble

my baby feet.(TT 272)

By birth she is not hobbled to a male defined womanhood nor are her rationality and
intellect cramped by the high forceps. The symbolic value of forceps and the word
hobble cannot be overlooked. The forceps cramping her temples suggest control over
her ability to think and be rational and hobbled feet suggest control over her actions
and movements. The fact that she is guided into this world by a midwife and not the
forceps implies that she is no longer owned or marked by men for men. She is
autonomous. She is free of men. Dressed in her red hood – the blood – she evades

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the male bondings and grows more and more skilful at the act of evading male
forceps in life.

... Dressed in my red hood, howling, I went—

evading

the white-clad doctor and his fancy claims: microscope,

stethoscope, scalpel, all

the better to see with, to hear,

and to eat – straight from your hollowed basket

into the midwife’s skirts. I grew up

good at evading.(TT 272-73)

Echoing the wolf’s lines in the Grimm tale Broumas personifies the doctor as a wolf
and at the same time equates him with the huntsman who performs a C-section on
the wolf for ‘re-producing’ Little Red Riding Hood.

As per her mother’s instructions she keeps to her self-determined road.

... When you said

‘Stick to the road and forget the flowers, there’s

wolves in those bushes, mind

you get there.’ I

minded. I kept

to the road.... (TT 273)

She defines and determines her own course of life. It is her own decision to keep her
femininity and womanhood untouched by men:

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... I kept

...

the hood secret, kept what it sheathed more

secret still. I opened

it only at night, and with other women

who might be walking the same road to their own

grandma’s house, each with her basket of gifts, her small hood

safe in the same part. (TT 273)

The hood has direct implications of the hymen kept protected from men and exposed
only to other women of her kind. She refers to her autonomously accepted lesbian
affiliations and sexual preferences. She has the satisfaction of determining and
following the path of her own life. However there is a sense of grief and grievance
she feels within and seems to seek an answer to the stagnated question in her mind.
With the growing age she seems to be filled with a feeling of incompleteness.
Without a child of her own she has no one to send to her mother with her “laden
basket of love” on the one hand and on the other, not a mother herself she finds
herself growing “old,old” without her mother, “the landscape of her heart.” There is
pain and grief of loneliness in the repeated expression of old. She addresses both her
own mother “the architect of my body” and the mother that she could not be. Her
mother gave her body a structure and her body was structured to be a mother. Her
autonomous self struggles with this sense of loss and lack of attachment of that
womanhood which patriarchy prescribes and subscribes to. She wishes to “conceive”
some other gesture which would match with this idea of womanhood:

... what other gesture

can I conceive

to make with it

that would reach you. (TT 273)

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With an intercourse with this substitute gesture she wishes to reach her lonely mother
awaiting her. The two are apart from each other. She wishes to reach out to the
mother alone and waiting:

... across this improbable forest

peopled with wolves and our lost, flower gathering

sisters they feed on. (TT 273)

As per patriarchal prescriptions she is not a complete woman. However she seeks to
go across, beyond this brutal system, the “improbable forest” run by “wolves” that
feed on “our lost, flower gathering sisters.” The system, in its idea of femininity and
womanhood, discounts women like her. As such she does not fit this idea of
femininity nor is her conception of femininity accepted by the system. She needs a
way to find a substitute gesture that would accommodate women of her kind and
their femininity. She yearns for such a more accommodating ‘conception’ and
generous acceptance of this womanhood.

• Roald Dahl’s ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ (RD 36-40)

Roald Dahl takes a comic, ironic take on the classical tale and presents a new tale
whose main character – the girl, is carried on to the next revolting tale in his
collection. The revolting ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ first introduces the wolf who
wants to have “a decent meal” and eats up grandma in “one big bite.” However he
doesn’t feel full enough and waits for Miss Red Riding Hood to arrive so that he can
have “another helping.” The story begins in-media-res. The readers’ foreknowledge
of the tale is taken for granted. The mother’s instructions to the little girl are omitted.
In fact, the characters of parents and the hunter are totally dispensed with in the
‘revolting’ version. The hungry wolf is depicted in a comic light and almost like any
human being or more like a hungry child. The wolf is not given any attributes that
the Grimm tale and many other adaptations have. He is just a wolf with a capital
‘W.’ He is hungry and almost as a matter of fact he goes to grandmother’s house to
eat her up:

As soon as Wolf began to feel

That he would like a decent meal,

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He went and knocked on Grandma’s door.

...

He ate her up in one big bite.

But Grandmamma was small and tough,

And Wolfie wailed, ‘That’s not enough!’

‘I haven’t yet begun to feel

‘That I have had a decent meal!’

He ran around the kitchen yelping,

‘I’ve got to have another helping!’ (RD 36)

His frightening, scary nature too is defused with the use of humour. To have a
second helping he decides to wait for Little Miss Red Riding Hood. He would wait
as her Grandma would and hence he dons her clothes which is quite wittily and
connotatively mentioned:

He quickly put on Grandma’s clothes.

(Of course he hadn’t eaten those.)

He dressed himself in coat and hat.

He put on shoes and after that

He even brushed and curled his hair,

Then sat himself in Grandma’s chair. (RD 38)

On the arrival of the “girl in red” the famous “What big...” conversation between her
and the wolf takes place and through this dialogue as the wolf imagines how the girl
would “taste like caviare” the tale takes an unexpected and interesting twist:

Then Little Red Riding Hood said, ‘But Grandma,

what a lovely great big furry coat you have on’ (RD 38)

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Little Red Riding Hood strays from the old script and the wolf chides her for that:

‘That’s wrong!’ cried Wolf. ‘Have you forgot

‘To tell me what BIG TEETH I’ve got?

The Wolf knows by heart the sequence of the old tale, his role in it, the questions the
girl would ask, his own answers to them and what follows as per the canonical text.
He is clearly aware of being in a frequently told tale and playing his part. Like an
actor annoyed at the fellow actress for forgetting her lines, he tries to “correct” her.

An interesting thing happens at this juncture. In that, the readers who too are aware
of the story and its sequential development into its supposed end are identified or
equalled with the Wolf. Their expectations fail as the Wolf’s. Like the Wolf the
readers too expect that at any cost the Wolf would eat her up:

‘Ah well no matter what you say,

‘I’m going to eat you any way.’ (RD 40)

However nothing happens as both expect. The final twist in the plot surprises both
and while it turns out to be fatal for the Wolf, it amuses and delights the readers. This
identification with the Wolf, however, serves the purpose of killing, like the Wolf,
their own belief in the old text and its implicit messages.

The girl’s smile at the Wolf’s confident compliance with the canon and the expected
consequence is very suggestive. She strays much too far from the “given” text:

The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers.

She flips a pistol from her knickers.

She aims it at the creature’s head

And bang bang bang, she shoots him dead. (RD 40)

Dead is the Wolf and so are the established notions about the helpless naive girl and
her lessons generated by the classic tale. The surprising twist continues as the
narrator of the revolting tale appears on scene:

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A few weeks later, in the wood,

I came across Miss Little Riding Hood

But what a change! No cloak of red,

No silly hood upon her head.

She said, ‘Hello, and do please note

‘My lovely furry WOLFSKIN COAT.’ (RD 40)

She has dropped her “silly hood upon her head” after her successful encounter with
the Wolf. The implicit sexual connotations here and earlier in drawing the pistol
from her knickers are suggestive of the naive girl’s growth to mature womanhood
with the changing times. This mature and worldly wise riding girl without hood
reappears in Dahl’s next and last of the revolting tales of three little pigs who are
threatened by a wolf. This wolf huffs and puffs and blows down the stick and straw
houses of two “juicy little pigs.”(RD 43) The third, the wisest, calls the wolf killer,
Red Riding Hood still called and remembered as ‘Miss Hood’:

‘I know you’ve dealt with wolves before,

And now I’ve got one at my door!’ (RD 46)

The “brave Miss Riding Hood” comes to the piglet’s rescue:

Once more the maiden’s eyelid flickers.

She draws the pistol from her knickers.

Once more, she hits the vital spot,

And kills him with a single shot. (RD 47)

However a more unexpected twist in the tale occurs when the end suggests violation
of the piglet’s trust in the girl. She is now seen in the forest with two wolfskin coats
and a PIGSKIN TRAVELLING CASE. The story of Little Red Riding Hood ends
here in the real sense of the term. Her true nature is revealed in this tale. That she is
no longer innocent and naive was already established in the first tale but here her
heroism is tinged with selfishness and shrewdness. Her selfish materialistic

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ambitions make her villainous. Her wickedness presented in a humorous light

acquires a garb of practical wisdom for accomplishing her practical, materialistic
needs. Without much male intervention this Riding Hood over a period of more than
a couple of decades is shown to have grown self-dependent, practical, worldly wise
and materialistic.

A more serious instance of a retelling of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ with the girl
shooting the wolf dead is Francisca Lia Block’s ‘Wolf.’ Canonical fairy tale
narrative discourse, its motifs, contents and conservative values and expectations are
torn apart by these revisionist writers. Let us consider one more such anti-canonical
revision to conclude the analysis of the retold ‘Little Red Riding Hood’

• Gianni Rodari’s ‘Little Green Riding Hood’ (TT 256-257)

Readers’ age-old conditioned expectations are defused in this retold version of ‘Little
Red Riding Hood.’ The narrator of this tale is an old man who mixes up the
narrative, content, plot and characters of the old tale. The grandchild well-versed
with the oft heard story keeps correcting him every time and in the end accepts the
new details “all the same.” (TT 257) Grandpa begins with a little girl called Little
Yellow Riding Hood. “No! Red Riding Hood!” the child says. Despite corrections
the old man refers to the little girl in the tale every time by colours other than red –
yellow, green, black. Grandpa corrects himself and gives yet another wrong detail to
be corrected by the listening child: “Oh yes, of course, Red Riding Hood. Well, one
day her mother called her and said: ‘Little Green Riding Hood’

‘Red!’

“Sorry! Red. ‘Now, my child, go to Aunt Mary and take her these potatoes.’”

“No! It doesn’t go like that! ‘Go to Grandma and take her these cakes.’” (TT 256)

This goes on. With every wrong detail like – the girl meeting a giraffe in the woods,
the wolf asking her, ‘What’s six times eight?’ – the child gets annoyed and says,
‘What a mess you are making of it!’ (TT 256) However even after the grandchild
correcting him, this time Grandpa substitutes the wolf with a horse which gives the
girl lost in the woods following directions: ‘Take the 75 bus, get out at the main
square, turn right, and at the first doorway you’ll find three steps. Leave the steps

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where they are, pick up the dime you’ll find lying on them, and buy yourself a packet
of chewing gum.’ (TT 257) By this time the child is quite fed up with the mistakes
and the act of correcting them. He certifies the grandfather as a wrong and bad
storyteller and doesn’t seem to be interested in listening to him ahead. He says,
‘Grandpa, you’re terribly bad at telling stories. You get them all wrong. But all the
same, I wouldn’t mind some chewing gum.’

‘All right. Here’s your dime.’ And the old man turned back to his newspaper. (TT
257)

Both the grandpa as well as the grandson get rid of the story: neither the child wishes
to go ahead with the wrongly told old tale nor is the old man interested in continuing
with his own totally new version of it. The casual giving up of the tale half-way by
both is suggestive of the denial of the tale – old and new – with whatever messages it
conveys. The traditional narrative discourse is completely dispensed with displaying
a view that it hardly matters if the tale is told wrongly or left untold. One of the most
remarkable aspects of this short retold version is that except for the last sentence the
entire tale is in dialogic form and it is only through the dialogues that we come to
realise the characters’ relation with each other. Also, it is only once and that too in
the last sentence of the tale that the grandpa is referred to as ‘the old man.’ Neither of
them is given a name which makes them representatives of the generations past and
present while the tale itself becomes a representative defying discourse of revolt.

Snow White:

In a very impressive and important discussion of ‘Snow White,’ Sandra Gilbert and
Susan Gubar underline the relevance of this multilayered tale that could illustrate
how two female archetypes devised by men “to lessen their dread of [a woman’s]
‘inconsistency’ and ... to possess her more thoroughly”47 are constructed and
possibly subverted.

• Anne Sexton’s ‘Snow White’ (T 3-9)

Anne Sexton calls her ‘transformations’ “an enlarged paper clip” with a potential to
become “a piece of sculpture.” This implies as suggested earlier in this analysis and
later, in the following chapter, the new retellings intend to broaden the earlier
perspectives on and perceptions of the classic tales. The previous parochial, narrow

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views are magnified so that the readers/listeners can see the yet unprobed or
overlooked subtleties more clearly. It has been a daring endeavour on part of the
revisionists. Anne Sexton herself raises a doubt about the aesthetic potential of her
retelling efforts and herself pacifies and reaffirms their creative authenticity and
aesthetic potential:

Transform? As if an enlarged paper clip

could be a piece of sculpture

(And it could!) (T 2)

Her revolutionary take on the classic tales reaffirms the “black art” of spinning the
yarn and validates it. The preface raises our expectations and curiosity. Following
this prefatory tale ‘Snow White’ initiates Sexton’s transformed tales each of which
begins with a prologue wherein she finds space for addressing social issues and
whatever thoughts the tales evoked in her. “[T]hat’s where ... I expressed whatever it
evoked in me.”48 It is the prologues which greatly help us understand the transformed
elements of the tales and Sexton’s stand on various issues. More than her direct
sardonic comments and hints throughout the stories, it is the prologues which offer
us the context and clues to interpretation and introduce the context of the tales
providing a thematic focus for the following stories. Their indentation suggests their
supplementary nature. It appears that the traditional tale does not offer Sexton
enough space to articulate her views and accommodate the transformed tale. The
prologues provide her with this extra space wherein she directly expresses what she
only hints at in the transformed tales. Sexton perhaps doubts the ability of the
transformations to prove the point she wants to make and so she uses an additional
tool and space of the prologue to make a clean breast of her perception of the tales
and her interpretations of them. Hence perhaps they appear irrelevant and do not
necessarily seem to pass a comment, except tangentially, on the stories to follow.
However a close study of the retold tales and images therein establishes the link
between the tales and the prologues.

It is the description of a “ lovely virgin” in the prologue to the transformed ‘Snow

White’ that connects its prologue with the tale and explicitly determines the line of
Sexton’s sardonic attack on the presentation of women in fairy tales. The unsoiled,

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white as bonefish virgin with fragile cheeks, delicate arms and legs, enticing lips and
rolling china-blue doll eyes is a desirable object (“number”) irrespective of the kind
of life she lives. This description of the lovely virgin in the prologue is at once
followed by the beginning of the transformed tale:

Once there was a lovely virgin

called Snow White. (T 3)

The very first line announces the expected transformation of our perception of the
classically represented innocent, virtuous, good Snow White. The implied meaning
of the expression ‘lovely number’ as defined in the prologue at once gets associated
with the character of Snow White. She is a girl with all the qualities the expression
implies suggesting clearly passive objectification, dumbness, fragility, concern with
beautiful appearance like a china-blue doll and fear of male domination and phallic
thrust. All these implications recur throughout the transformed tale. The transformed
Snow White is a beautiful adolescent girl of thirteen unlike a seven year old in the
Grimm tale. She is soon to replace/succeed the middle aged queen who “eaten...by
age” (T 3) is no longer beautiful as per the accepted standards of male society and
who dies in the hot iron shoes for losing her status of acceptance. The change in the
age of transformed Snow White hints at Sexton’s aim of showing a slow
transformation of an innocent virgin unaware of her beauty into a beauty conscious
woman; of a daughter into her mother; of innocence into corruption; of an unaware
innocent virgin into a cautious, conscious, corrupt woman; of a living woman into an
object of beauty and desire, which is left unnoticed once its utility is exhausted.

Sexton does not mention Snow White’s own mother who, in the Grimm tale, desires
to have a beautiful child with skin “as white as snow, lips as red as blood and hair as
black as ebony.” (Grimm, 70) It is this desire however, that triggers her definition of
the beautiful virgin in the prologue and the presentation of Snow White as a lovely
virgin. The girl is not seven but thirteen years old, as mentioned earlier. As such both
the mother and the daughter are at a crucial phase in their lives: one, the older, on the
verge of being rejected by the social system that is conscious of a woman’s utility
value on the basis of her beauty and the other, the younger, on the verge of being
welcomed by the same society only to be rejected later once she steps into her
mother’s shoes. The mirror in the transformed tale is “something like a weather

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forecast” (T 5) implying thereby perhaps the traditional metaphor of stages in human

life corresponding with the four seasons of the year. The question regarding beauty
addressed to the mirror receives similar answers both in the Grimm and the
transformed tale, with just a difference of one pronoun. The Grimm answer “You are
fairest of them all” (Grimm 70) becomes “You are fairest of us all.” (Italics mine) (T
5) Sexton’s witch-narrator perhaps wishes to include herself among the women
contesting for acceptance in ‘male’ society.

Sexton describes the proud, overbearing nature of the stepmother in expressions like
“pride pumped in her like poison.” (T 5) Sexton deflates the stepmother’s pride and
abruptly sums up her jealous reaction to the mirror’s rejection of her as the fairest
woman:

Until that moment Snow White

had been no more important

than a dust mouse under the bed.

But now the queen saw brown spots on her hand

and four whiskers over her lip. (T 5)

Brown spots and whiskers, the indicators of ugliness, repulsiveness and jealousy,
replace the description of the queen’s jealousy in the Grimm tale. Jealousy and
hatred however, are less focussed in the transformed tale than the queen’s hurting
disappointment with herself on becoming less desired than the step daughter. It is the
idea of losing the status of “the one (and the only) beauty of the land” (T 5) that
disturbs her more and compels her to condemn Snow White to be “hacked to death.”
(T 5)

Elaborate description of the hunter’s reactions to Snow White’s pleas and his act of
mercy is covered in a single verse line:

The hunter, however, let his prisoner go

and brought a boar’s heart back to the castle. (T 5)

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The queen chews it up “like a cube steak” while Snow White fearfully walks in the
dark and lonely unacquainted places. The much discussed hidden, psychological
connotations of Snow White’s fright are made explicit in the transformed tale in the
expressions like “the wild wood,” “doorways,” “hungry wolf” lolling out his tongue
“like a worm,” lewd calls of the birds “talking like pink parrots,” snakes hanging
down in loops. Sexual undertones of this description are quite clear. The queer little
house that the Grimm Snow White reaches accidentally is in the transformed tale
suggested almost as her chosen destination:

On the seventh week

she came to the seventh mountain

and there she found the dwarf house. (T 6)

The clean and pretty dwarf house described in great detail in the old tale becomes in
this retold version a “droll...honeymoon cottage” again suggesting sexual undertones
in Snow White’s confrontation with the dwarfs who are described in the verse tale as
“little hot dogs” (T 6) walking around her three times as dogs do around a bitch. The
phallic implications of the dwarfs are explicit. As Bettelheim mentions, “Anne
Sexton’s poetic rendering of ‘Snow White’ suggests their phallic nature, since she
refers to them as ‘the dwarfs, those little hot dogs.’” (B 210)

These dwarfs have a businesslike attitude towards her and consider her a “good
omen.”

She told them

about the mirror and the killer queen

and they asked her to stay and keep house. (T 6)

Their warning to her is stressed in the verse tale:

Beware of your stepmother

...

While we are away in the mines

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During the day, you must not

Open the door. (T 7)

The queen’s disappointment, her anger, jealousy and thought of Snow White’s
murder on hearing from the mirror about Snow White being alive are briefly and
speedily summed up:

The mirror told

and so the queen dressed herself in rage

and went out like a peddler to trap Snow White. (T 7)

Snow White’s “dumbness” in buying the lace is stressed suggesting her slow
realisation of and attraction to the norms of beauty and physical appearance. She is
slowly moving towards her transformation into a beautiful object, which is
emphasised by references to the modern consumer culture of America:

The queen fastened it tightly

around her bodice,

as tight as an Ace Bandage

so tight that Snow White swooned.

She lay on the floor, a plucked daisy. (T 7)

Her attempt at beautification objectifies her to “a plucked daisy.” After the dwarfs
unlace her she “revives miraculously” and is as “full of life as soda pop.” On many
occasions like this one Sexton through sarcasm notes down the inability to ‘suspend
disbelief.’ Assuming the readers’ familiarity with the Grimm tale Sexton hastily
mentions the other two instances of the queen’s attempts to ‘trap’ Snow White:

Looking glass upon the wall...

once more the mirror told

and once more the queen dressed in drags

and once more Snow White opened the door.

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...

but the mirror told,

the queen came,

Snow White, the dumb bunny,

opened the door. (T 7-8)

More than the stepmother’s wickedness it is Snow White’s dumbness, impulsiveness

and vulnerability to the idea and thoughts of beauty that are emphasised. Snow White
dumbly lets the disguised queen comb her hair and falls unconscious. The dwarfs
remove the “curved eight inch scorpion” and she revives miraculously again opening
her eyes “as wide as Orphan Annie” (T 8) The queen’s third and last attempt to kill
Snow White is presented as the near completion of Snow White’s objectification:
“She lay as still as a gold piece.”(T 8)

Sexton describes all the attributes of Snow White’s beauty in terms of objects –
number, cigarette paper, Limozes, Vin Du Rhoe, China-blue doll. She is an
“unsoiled” doll, a sleeping virgin, a gold piece, a plucked daisy; she is associated
with soda pop, Orphan Annie; she becomes “it” – “the glass Snow White,” “a good
omen.” This objectification in turn leads to and implies helplessness and passivity.
As such Snow White is rendered an epitome of passivity that is closely associated
with the idea of beauty. She becomes passivity incarnate, a personified object. This
objectification is aggravated by the various “falls” of Snow White. She falls for
beautifying objects. The lace and the comb – pointers of beauty – cause the first two
falls and the final fall is a result of an apple bite objectifying her completely, turning
her into a gold piece lying in the glass coffin till her prince arrives. It has
implications of complete entrapment, constraint and captivity. The objectified
captivity, the various falls and revival only by external efforts concretise Snow
White’s intellectual dumbness as well.

The dwarfs in the transformed tale are shown to bear a business minded attitude
towards Snow White’s still existence:

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The seven dwarfs could not bring themselves

to bury her in the black ground

so they made a glass coffin

and set it upon the seventh mountain

so that all who passed by

could peek in upon her beauty. (T 8)

Her last miraculous revival by the prince results in her marriage with him: “And thus
Snow White became the prince’s bride.” (T 9) She attains the status of a queen and
as such her ultimate transformation from an unaware innocent object-like virgin to a
conscious beautiful object is complete. On her “becoming” the queen, the other
queen has to perish. She is now a worn out object and is no longer required. This
queen was aware of her fate and hence undertakes all types of endeavours to
maintain her status as a socially accepted entity. Her feelings of jealousy and hatred
on her realisation that she is no longer the most beautiful one are given a slight twist
and a detailed description of the burning queen follows:

First your toes will smoke

and then your heels will turn black

and you will fry upward like a frog

she was told.

And so she danced until she was dead,

a subterranean figure,

her tongue flicking in and out

like a gas jet. (T 9)

Snow White witnesses her predecessor dying out of passion for beauty and
acceptance from society. However, she cannot and does not learn to defend herself
against such fate. While the wicked queen is dying Snow White holds court,

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rolling her china blue doll eyes open and shut

and sometimes referring to her mirror

as women do. (T 9)

A cycle of victimisation and objectification will continue. Ironically, also the queen
herself who is cautious not to let Snow White surpass her beauty makes the girl
aware of her own beauty and its value in a social system ruled by men. The mirror
makes a woman objectify other women. Snow White is made a representative of the
entire womankind who thus objectifies and is objectified at the “mirror’s” bidding.
As Carol Leventen says, “Sexton is hardly sanguine about Snow White’s ability to
break the cycle. Just as the girl succumbs to the step mother’s proffering of
conventionally feminine ornamentation (the laces and the comb), she succumbs to
the temptations of the mirror; her future is her (step)mother’s past.” (Leventen 144)
Women’s “simple passion” for beauty ruins them and they continue to fall a prey to
such ruinous scheme. As Barbara Swan mentions, the mother in the transformed tale
is shown to symbolise “the universal problem of aging beauty, needing every prop
available, and the young girl, smug and indifferent, temporarily secure in her
glorious youth. ... you know that twenty years later she, too will face a middle age
crisis.” (Swan 86) Snow White holds and consults the same mirror which dictates a
step by step death dance of the queen. It is the mirror that objectifies and makes
women objectify themselves and others. Through the mirror the verse tale does not
emphasise narcissism as much as it does its male voice and male gaze determining
the social acceptability and utility of women as the basis of male standards of beauty.
This essence of the transformed tale is concentrated in the picture of Snow White
referring to this mirror “as women do.” Ellen Cronan Rose’s remarks on this are
quite relevant and insightful: “The cool mockery of Sexton’s tone might seem to be
directed against women, were it not for the evidence in the prologue and throughout
the poem, that the cause of female narcissism is a male dominated culture that
perceives women as objects and conditions them to become objects.”49

Taking their cue from sexton’s revolting re-vision of the old Grimm tale Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar in 1979 called the mirror’s voice as the king’s, the
patriarch’s: “His surely is the voice of the looking glass, the patriarchal voice of
judgement that rules the Queen’s and every woman’s self-evaluation. He it is who

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decides, first, that his consort is ‘the fairest of all,’ and then, as she becomes
maddened, rebellious, witch-like, that she must be replaced by this angelically
innocent and dutiful daughter, a girl who is therefore defined as ‘more beautiful still’
than the Queen.” (GG 38) At the root of women’s objectification by the male power
is man’s fear of female power. Men do not want women to overpower them and
hence as part of power strategy women are kept constantly struggling with one
another for their acceptable social status and in the process are objectified. They are
objectified because though men fear women they cannot abolish the latter altogether.
They need women, glorify and adore them but at the same time want them to be
powerless. Hence the male system builds “constructs” to ward off its fear by
objectifying women. Folk and fairy tales become conveyors of such constructs as
Nancy Chodorow points out: “Although a boy fears [a woman], he also finds her
seductive and attractive. He cannot simply dismiss and ignore her. Boys and men
develop psychological and cultural/ideological mechanisms to cope with their fears
without giving up women altogether.”50

For Gilbert and Gubar the conflicting – “essential but equivocal” relationship
between Snow White and the queen is centrally so dominant a theme of the tale that
they would rename it ‘Snow White and Her Wicked Stepmother.’ It is, according to
them, the relationship between “the angel woman” and “the monster woman” that
instigates the central and the only action of the tale:

“... the central action of the tale – indeed, its only action – arises from the
relationship between these two women: the one fair, young, pale, the other just as
fair, but older, fiercer; the one a daughter, the other a mother; the one sweet,
ignorant, passive, the other both artful and active; the one a sort of angel, the other an
undeniable witch.” (GG 36) These two female characters, the “two mythic masks”
(GG 17) and the conflict and competition between them are foregrounded while the
father though physically absent from the scene actually is the driving force, in the
persona of the mirror, behind the fight. The women’s entrapment within a patriarchal
frame is symbolically suggested in ‘the transparent enclosures’ of the glass window
frame, “a magic looking glass (and) an enchanted and enchanting glass coffin.” (GG
36) For Gilbert and Gubar these are the tools that patriarchy indirectly instigates
women to use against themselves to ruin themselves leaving ‘man’kind blameless.

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As patriarchal subjects and objects women are fatally set against one another within
a patriarchal frame. Angela Carter rightly says:

To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case.

To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case – that is to be killed.

This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman.51

Gilbert and Gubar point out that the mirror – the patriarch, patriarchy – determines
women’s fate and rules over them. As such ‘he’ is the author and the authority and
thus becomes a metaphor for textual paternity as well. Through the tale of Snow
White the mirror “reproduces a cultural script in which women are enmeshed in a
discourse connecting beauty, death, and femininity. Beauty as reflected in the glass
and seen through the coffin, may be attractive, but its seductions have a sinister,
lethal side.”52 Also the objectified, passive, inert body of a woman itself becomes a
mirror projecting and reflecting male desire and ego. A systematic, schematic
elevation of the female body contributes paradoxically to the debasement and
dehumanisation of women. Cold, static, inert and silent female body fascinates and
arouses men as an art object. They look upon it not as a human being but as an
enchanting object of beauty and desire to be enchanted by it. Patriarchal tendency
and agenda to objectify women in its thrall dehumanises them at their own hands and
refuses them a right to a dignified life of their own desires and its fulfilment. The
magic mirror’s strategy of objectifying women affects and victimises not just women
but even and perhaps more stifles the men themselves. Robert Coover in his rework
‘The Dead Queen’53 (1973) undertakes the attempt to explore and reveal these effects
of the objectifying strategies of patriarchy on women as well as men.

• Robert Coover’s ‘The Dead Queen’ (704-711)

Coover’s revision is a first person narrative by the prince. The story opens on the
second day of the prince’s wedding to Snow White. It is the occasion of the queen’s
funeral. The glass coffin in which Snow White was lying till the wedding day now
contains her dead stepmother. As he speculatively looks at the dead queen in the
glass coffin he narrates this narrative using flashbacks. The very initial image of the
glass coffin containing Snow White and now the queen is suggestive of what Sexton
and the feminist critics have said about women’s fate in patriarchy – continuation of

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the cycle of objectifying and getting objectified, replacing and being replaced by
more desirable objects. However depicting lifelessness and objectification of women
has an added facet of how they could impact even men.

Coover invests the queen with the power and energy of an immaculate artist, a
schemer, a plot-maker and its director. One is not sure but perhaps like Anne
Sexton’s ‘Snow White’ Coover’s rework too offered interpretive clues to Gilbert and
Gubar when they said that the queen is “a plotter, a plot-maker, a schemer, a witch,
an artist and impersonator, a woman of almost infinite creative energy, witty, wily
and self-absorbed as all artists traditionally are.” (GG 38-39) Coover’s prince
looking at the grin on the dead old Queen’s face at the time of her burial in the
mountains says, “I knew then it was she who had composed this scene, as all before,
she who had led us, revelers and initiates, to this cold and windy grave site, her the
design, ours the enactment, and I felt like the first man, destined to rise and fall, rise
and fall, to the end of time.” (C 704) She “the master of disguises” (C 708), “the old
clown” (C 711) is likely to have no feelings – either of love or hatred – towards
Snow White at all, considers the Prince. “And thereby (she) hatch(es) a plot” (C 705)
which she ends ironically with her own cruel death dance in the red hot iron shoes.
However while probing the drives that compel her to design the tale the Prince says,
“... she had lusted for ... a part in the story, immortality, her place in guarded time.
To be the forgotten stepmother of a forgotten princess was not enough. It was the
mirror that had fucked her, fucked us as all. And did she foresee those very boots, the
dance, that last obscenity? No doubt. Or something much like them. Just as she
foresaw the Hunter’s duplicity, the Dwarfs’ ancient hunger, my own weakness for
romance. Even our names were lost: she had transformed us into colours, simple
proclivities; our faces were forever fixed and they weren’t even our own. ... we’ve all
been reduced to jesters, fools; tragedy she reserved for herself alone.” (C 705-6)
Appreciating her subtlety the Prince calls “her use of a princess with hair as black as
ebony, a skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, ... her use of miners of gold” (C
711) and her use of the mirror “as a door” a “Great Work.” (C 711) The Prince
breaks away from the traditional one-dimensional, unquestioning role of a hero. He
is inquisitive, curious and reflective.

At the wedding feast the night before the Queen’s funeral, he is puzzled by Snow
White’s reaction to her “stepmother’s terrible entertainment,” (C 704) her death

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dance in the red hot iron shoes. He wonders at her cheeks becoming even rosier with
the merriment and cheerfulness at the sight of the “awesome execution.”(C 705) Her
excitement, squealing applause and clapping make him wonder whether despite all
their “watchfulness” (C 705) the innocent child had “become the very evil she had
been saved from.”(C 705) He wonders whether she has become heartless and her
“good and simple soul envenomed” (C 705) enough to vindictively arrange for her
tormentor’s “death dance” or whether she is the same innocent child unaware of any
pain, malice or risks. He cannot really understand her. He suspects that she has
become corrupt from within and by no means can he probe deep into her true self: “I
could vouch for her hymen from this side, bur worried that it had been probed from
within.” (C 705) On the wedding night he is troubled by the true meaning of the
name Snow White, “her taste for luxury and collapse,” (C 707) and also the
compulsion leading him to the mountain, “the birdshit on the glass coffin.”(C 707)
The revelation comes to him at last and he realises for the first time in his life that
Snow White is a “frozen void,” (708) that she is an inaccessible, heartless virgin
beyond change or growth, as lifeless as the dead Queen. The Prince’s gaze into the
mirrors to view Snow White’s “paradigmatic beauty” (C 709) reflects not the girl but
the old Queen “flailing about madly in her red hot shoes.” (C 705)

After a passionate wedding night the Prince in a state of “delicious annihilation”

finds at dawn “the bed unmussed and unbloodied, her hymen intact.” (C 710) Intense
speculations lead him to think that “she’s suffered no losses, in fact, that’s just the
trouble, that hymen can never be broken, not even by me, not in a thousand nights,
this is her gift and essence, and because of it, she can see neither fore nor aft, doesn’t
even know there is a mirror on the wall. Perhaps it was this that made the old Queen
hate her so.” (C 705)

Thus the Queen was fully aware of the mirror’s authority and power but Snow White
is taken in by this authority and framed by it unawares, completely unconsciously.
The grip of the mirror on them is so strong that though with all her creative energy
she plots and struggles to escape the mirror she has to remain within the narrative
frame that sentences her to death. No matter how desperately she may try to free
herself and “to jump out of her skin” (C 706), she has to return to the “mirror.” She
tries to break away from the mimetic conventions and narrative norms of the fairy
tale genre but is herself captured and victimised by it. The prince says, “... it could be

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argued that she had invented, then pursued the impossible, in order to push the
possible beyond her reach, and thus had died as so many have believed, of vanity,
but ... the fact is she was her own consummation, and we, in effect, had carried out –
were still carrying out – our own ludicrous performances without an audience.” (C
706) He feels that the Queen “had poisoned us all with pattern. In the end, in spite of
everything, she had been accepted as part of the family, spared the outcast’s shame,
shrouded simply in black and granted her rings and diadems.” (C 706)

Like the Queen the Prince too is victimised. His questions: “Why did things happen
as though they were necessary?” (C 707), “Why hadn’t I been allowed to disenchant
her with a kiss like everybody else?” (C 709) show his irritation with disallowance to
conform. He questions the narrative in which he plays a part, resists it, recognises the
role of the mirror in the Queen’s rivalry with Snow White, and identifies the Queen
as a constructor of this narrative, however, fails to see the Queen’s own conformity
with the narratological, framed, mimetic conventions of the fairy tale. Against his
father’s disapprobation and disapproval he too desires and attempts to change the
plot: “the old Queen had me now, ... I knew now the force that had driven her, that
had freed me, freed us all, that we might live happily ever after, though we didn’t
deserve it.” (C 711) Out of this revelation he kisses the dead Queen with a hope to
disenchant her. Trying to reject the old narrative he is ironically caught in it. His
expectation to disenchant reflects the romantic disenchantments by the fairy tale
heroes: “If I had expected something, it did not occur. She did not return my kiss,...
I’d been wrong about her, wrong about everything...” (C 711) He could not, was not
allowed to resuscitate Snow White. And now to the dismay and horror of the
onlookers including his father who is angry and in tears and Snow White, who faints,
the Prince out of pride and affection rather than expectation and hope, kisses the
stinking Queen for the second time. Nauseated and hopeless, the Prince wants to try
once more thinking this time it would work, when he is whisked away from the dead
Queen. He pleads; the guards restrain him; his father utterly unhappy about the son’s
act turns his back. “The Queen’s corpse [which had tumbled down is] dumped
hastily back into the coffin and quickly interred, everyone holding his nose.”(C 711)
The story ends with the Prince thinking: “if this is the price of beauty, it is too high. I
was glad she was dead.” (C 711)

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Thus in fact, the conventions and norms of a fairy tale hero and narrative that the
Prince wishes to part with, he observes in the most conventional manner possible. He
desires a romantic role of a hero and an act of disenchantment. His disillusionment
with this expectation makes him say, “It was the mirror that had fucked her, fucked
us all.” (C 705)

The mirror restricts choices of both women as well as men. The framework of the
mirror maddens everyone. It victimises and stifles all. Most of the contemporary
retellings and critical thinking on ‘Snow White’ discounts magical meaning and
function of the mirror. As seen earlier in this analysis the mirror has been invested
with metaphorical meaning and function. It stands for authority. Different retellings
and interpretive criticism see beyond its literal reflective function. As discussed
earlier Gilbert and Gubar call the mirror’s voice the voice of the father, the patriarch.
Bettelheim sees the mirror as a symbol of the young girl projecting her oedipal
feelings on her mother. For Shuli Barzilai the mirror stands for the inner voice of the
Queen who cannot accept the natural phenomenon of ageing and her daughter’s
growing independence.54 While Steven Jones maintains it is the voice of both Snow
White’s and society’s,55 Girardot hears the voice of truth in the mirror56. Irrespective
of what the mirror is learnt to stand for it definitely is a powerful, dictating image
and an intertextual link between the retold tales and the old Grimm tale.

Mirror as a mouthpiece of patriarchy:

Patriarchy sustains by controlling women with restrictions on her body and mind.
Her continued confinement alone could ensure its existence. As a result the system
pits women against one another and keeps them in a continual competition/ rivalry.
The three female figures in ‘Snow White’ - Snow White herself, her own mother, the
Queen and her stepmother, the wicked Queen – are all entrapped in glass enclosures.
Snow White’s mother looks through a window at snow while wishing for a child, the
new Queen consults her magic mirror whereas Snow White is placed in a glass coffin
till her resuscitation. The continuity of entrapment is symbolically suggested in the
succession of one female figure by the other. The magic mirror’s patriarchal voice of
judgement and gaze determine the Queen’s and thereby “every woman’s self-
evaluation.” (GG 38) It is his rule that the “maddened, rebellious, witchlike” Queen
be “replaced by [his] angelically innocent and dutiful daughter, a girl who is

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therefore defined as ‘more beautiful still’ (my italics) than the Queen.” (GG 38) Six
years before Gilbert and Gubar’s interpretation of ‘Snow White’ in these terms,
Coover had thematically articulated the above mentioned thought in his retelling. He
presents not only the evaluation of the Queen but even a suggestive confirmation of
the Queen’s status and spirit /traits in Snow White. The fixation of angel-monster
images of women finds an explicit expression in the tale. Prince Charming, the
narrator of the tale and the to be king and patriarch, trembles at the incomprehensible
expression on the dead Queen that is suggestive of greater power than she is
expected to have. He looks at his father who reassures him: “no, it was a mere
grimace, the contortions of pain, she had suffered greatly after all, torture often
exposes the diabolic in the face of man, she was an ordinary woman, beautiful it is
true, and shrewd, but she had risen above her merits, and falling, had lost her reason
to rancor.” (C 705)

Patriarchy masks women’s revolt and positive self assertion as madness, irrationality
and aggression. Their attempts at voicing themselves are sidelined and their
sufferings are stressed. The King in the tale too masks the Queen’s superiority by
stressing her suffering, thus suggesting that she is not victorious but defeated.
Remarkably enough the Prince mentions that he sees that the Queen is “masked to
hide her eyes, which to what my father called a morbid imagination might seem to be
winking, one open, the other squeezed shut.” (C 706) The dead Queen’s wink is
indicative and ironical. It is suggestive of the subversive indications underlying the
surface of the masks that patriarchy imposes on women. Prince Charming does not
believe in the mask his father tries to force on the Queen’s face: “But I did not
believe him, I could see for myself, did not even entirely trust him, this man who
thought power a localised convention, magic a popular word for concealment, for
though it made him a successful King, decisive and respected, the old Queen’s grin
mocked such simple faith and I was not consoled.” (C 704)

Gilbert and Gubar in their assessment of the tale identify Snow White and the wicked
Queen and argue that in patriarchy every angelic woman has a monster hidden
within. Coover too thematises this idea when his Prince Charming witnesses traits of
the Dead Queen in his bride. While he recognises the whole experience of the
Queen’s death and his wedding as a plot hatched by the Queen herself and realises
himself playing a role determined by her, when he sees Snow White full of joy and

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“outrageous” (C 705) excitement at the Queen’s death dance, he suspects Snow

White of plotting this end for her mother in order to replace her: “... was it she who
had invited her old tormentor to the ball, commissioned the iron slippers, drawn her
vindictively into that ghastly dance? Or did she simply laugh as the righteous must to
see the wicked fall? Perhaps her own release from death had quickened her heart,
such that mere continuance now made her a little giddy. Or had she, absent, learned
something of hell?” (C 705) “Mere continuance” is the fate of all women in
patriarchy. The “inexorably and inescapably monstrous” (GG 31) traits of Snow
White’s character are suggested through her association with hell.

What patriarchy deems punishable in women is actually their potential to act and to
create. It is actually the artistic potential of the Queen, her desire to have “a part in
the story” for which she is termed wicked and punished. Snow White too is seen by
the Prince as a plotter, and artist who will confront a similar, inevitable fate.

On their wedding night the Prince sees Snow White and the Queen almost merged
with each other in the mirror: “I gazed into the mirrors to see, for the first time, Snow
White’s paradigmatic beauty, but instead it had been the old Queen I’d seen there,
flailing about madly in her red hot shoes.”(C 709) The mirror prophecies Snow
White’s future by reflecting the dying Queen in her place. Later in the tale the
interchange between the two women characters’ fate is shown to be mutual. Like
Snow White turning into the Queen, the latter too is buried in the same glass coffin
which displayed Snow White before her revival to life. The Prince even imagines
deliberate purpose in her dying in this manner: “to lead me away from the merely
visible to vision, from the image to the imaged, from reflection to the projecting
miracle itself, the heart, the pure Snow White...!” (C 711)

Considering himself to be the focus of her art, the Prince slips into a patriarchal
reading of the tale. He imagines that it is for him that the Queen died and now
assumes the role of a traditional hero, a disenchanter and an awakener. When he
cannot awaken the Dead Queen he confirms the message of the traditional tale that
the Queen had to pay the price for wanting to be the fairest in the world. His
disgusting attempts at kissing the stinking Queen with the hope of awakening bring
him to realise the vanity of imagining the Queen to have lived and died for him and
awaited him. Though his illusion is unmasked as “the mask fell away from her open

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eye, now milky white,” (C 711) and he is rendered comic, his revelation critically
underlines and deconstructs the traditional assessment of the Queen and Snow White.
It presents Snow White as not really angelic while the Queen not that monstrous.
With her mastery in disguises the Queen succeeds in subverting patriarchy and
shaking monarchy. While the King loses his composure, is enraged and ashamed at
the act of the son, the future king’s dignity is lost to the extent that he might not be
considered worthy enough to succeed the throne. Everyone including Snow White is
disgusted with him. The Queen thus undermines patriarchy and as such is victorious
in subverting male-order. She triumphantly kills the patriarchal ideals of beauty,
innocence and resignation that Snow White represents.

•
Patricia Carlin’s ‘The Stepmother Arrives’ (2002)57

The unidirectional transformation of Snow White into her stepmother, of the angel
into a monster is cyclical. It is suggested in many retellings including the ones
discussed above. As Gilbert and Gubar explicitly point out Snow White “in fiery
shoes will do a terrible death-dance out of the story, the looking glass, the transparent
coffin of her own image.” (GG 42) Patricia Carlin in her retelling shows this pattern
but even expresses the wish for this cycle to stop. For the purpose perhaps she very
emphatically and forcefully relates the end of the two women:

The stepmother dies

in her burning shoes. Her dancing

days are over. The girl acquires

a castle, a kingdom, a mirror,

and a new daughter.

She dances away her days in the castle.

“Mother, my glass eyes

are open,” she sings

at night in her silent dream mouth.

The face in the mirror changes.

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It’s time for an ending.

Upstairs they are heating the iron shoes. (47)

Snow White in Carlin’s retelling “acquires” after her stepmother’s death the rewards
of beauty and innocence along with a mirror and a new daughter to continue the
cycle. In the quiet of the night she calls her mother to tell her that her eyes are open.
There is a clear intertextual reference to Anne Sexton’s retelling wherein Snow
White is described as having china-blue doll eyes rolling open and shut. Besides, it
suggests on the one hand, the girl’s awareness of her forthcoming fate and on the
other, an insightful moment of awakening. Writing in 2002 with a reference to
Sexton’s revolutionary retelling of the 1970s, Carlin presents how Sexton’s Snow
White who at the end of the tale looks into the mirror “as women do,” has changed
over time and come to understand her mother. Her “glass” eyes strike an association
with the mirror. She too now opens up to the looking glass. The ambiguity of this
image continues in the line that follows:

“The face in the mirror changes.”

It could mean, on the one hand, a change in Snow White; both physical and
psychological/attitudinal and on the other, that she is being replaced by her “new
daughter.” The pessimistic assertion of the cyclical pattern also expresses the
urgency to end this fate for women. Though it literally suggests that Snow White’s
days are over, the line “It’s time for an ending,” indicates the ending of the poem, of
Snow White and mainly the urge and desire to put an end to the cyclical pattern.

• Emma Donoghue’s ‘The Tale of the Apple’ (1997) (41-58)

Emma Donoghue in her retelling retains most of the motifs in the original tale and
specifically presents intertextual links with the mirror in an interesting manner.
Explicitly in tune with Gilbert and Gubar’s views on the mirror as a mouthpiece of
patriarchy Donoghue literally puts the words of the mirror into the king’s mouth.
There is no mirror in the tale. However when the King sees his daughter and
newlywed bride in his bed, he says, “Two such fair ladies,..have never been seen in
one bed. But which of you is the fairest of them all?...Tell me,...how am I to judge
between two such beauties? ” (D 47-48) It is this question of his that sets the two
women “like mirrors set opposite each other, making a corridor of reflections,

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infinitely hollow.” (D 48) It is the father’s comparison that instigates rivalry between
the two of them: “We looked at each other, she and I chimed in the chorus of his
laughter. Am I imagining in retrospect that our voices rang a little out of tune?” (D
47) Before his words the women, particularly Snow White, prejudiced against each
other have started building a bond of friendship. Fragility of this bond is on account
of first, preconditioned beliefs Snow White has gathered from her childhood songs:
“...I knew from the songs that a stepmother’s smile is like a snake’s, so I shut my
mind to her” (D 46) and second, it is she who is more jealous for being replaced by
the new Queen: Before she came “it was me who was mirrored in my father’s fond
eyes; mine was the first apple from the orchard.” (D 46)

Donoghue in her work puts a share of blame on Snow White too. It is rather the
“infinitely hollow” standards of beauty dictated by the King-father who desires a son
and curses both the Queens for failing him and the internalisation of these standards
by both the women that really sets them apart. Donoghue implicates Snow White in
the growth of rivalry between her and the Queen. For at one point Snow White says,
“I know now that I would have liked her if we could have met as girls, ankle deep in
a river. I would have taken her hand in mine if I had not found it weighted down by
the ruby stole from my mother’s finger. I could have loved her if, if, if.”(D 46) It is
Snow White who is more jealous of her new mother: “... I could tell she would be my
enemy. There was only room for one queen in a castle.” (D 45)

The Queen initiates friendship and softens Snow White. Slowly the closeness
increases. She would lace up Snow White’s stays, comb her hair and feed her fruit.
However Snow White is hesitant in the relation: “Though I never trusted her, I took
delight in what she gave me.” (D 47) The father initially “cheered” to see them so
close later rifts them apart to the extent that when the Queen fails to bear a child even
after a year of marriage, he forbids her “to go walking in the orchard [with Snow
White], or lift a hand, or do anything except lie on her back and wait to find herself
with a child, the child who would be his longed-for son.” (D 48-49) From here
onwards the Queen snaps her bond with Snow White and after a year when the king
is sick past caring, cursing his enemies, wives and the son he cannot beget, the
Queen asserts her power and wishes Snow White to disown her right to it. The tussle
between the two displays the challenge they throw to each other and is interspersed
with intertextual references:

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“Say that I am queen, she said.

You are my father’s wife, I replied.

I will be queen after he is dead, she said.

I made no reply.

Say that I am queen, she repeated, her fingers whitening around the sceptre.

If you really were, I told her, it would need no saying.

She stood on the pedestal above me.

The moment I am a widow, she said, I could have you cast out.

Indeed.

If you cross me in this, she said confidingly, I could have a huntsman take you into
the forest, chop your heart, and bring it back on a plate.

Strong meat, I murmured.

I can do it, she howled, I have the power.

I said nothing.” (D 50-51)

To prove and assert herself and her power the Queen gets the King killed the same
night. Here the retold story takes a new twist.

Snow White sensing the threat to her life decides to leave the castle and manages to
escape: “I decided to leave it all to her, and leave her to it. I filled my hems with gold
pieces and slipped away.” (D 51) In the forest beyond the castle wandering for many
days she is picked up by a gang of woodsmen. Just as her practical wisdom is
displayed in her timely decision to run away from the castle, so is it reflected even
when she defends herself against the possible sexual assault on her by one of the
woodsmen: “One of them asked what was in my skirts to make them so heavy, and I
said, Knives, and he took his hand off my thigh and never touched me again.” (D 52)
She works hard for them to keep the bad memories at bay. However she is haunted
not by her father but the stepmother and to her surprise, picturing to her mind the
stepmother’s life as the Queen, she sees strangely striking similarity in their lives:

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“long days in charge of fire, and iron, and water. Her hands would stay smooth as
lilies while mine were scrubbed raw day by day, but we were living much the same
kind of life.” (D 53) Slowly Snow White gets sympathetic towards the stepmother
though she fears being killed by her: “The thread between us was stretched thin,
wound round trees and snagged in thickets, but never broken.” (D 54) The Queen
comes searching for Snow White apparently, to her, to kill her. However she is
different. The first time she comes she seems to have changed: “There was nothing
of the wife about her when she smiled.” (D 54) Snow White refuses entry to her into
the household but when out of curiosity looks out to see whether the queen has gone
she sees her still there under a tree. She lets her in for a moment. The stepmother
tells her, “I keep breaking mirrors.” (D 55)

Female bonding is shown to form between the traditionally polarised angel-monster

figures. Gilbert and Gubar do not deem it possible in patriarchy. Donoghue, in her
attempt to put new skin on the old tale shows this possibility gradually building in
the breaking of mirrors. Snow White while sitting by the fire with her stepmother
gets nostalgic about their relation. The stepmother laces up her stays tightly. Snow
White is lost in a stupor like state. The men who never bother to know what is in her
mind get angry to see no food cooked for them. This visit becomes a sort of one of
Snow White’s daydreams till after some weeks her mother visits her again. This time
“there was nothing of the queen about her.” (D 55) She urges Snow White to return
home. For life without her is “like dancing in shoes of red hot iron.” (D 56) Snow
White turns down her offer. With her jewelled comb the Queen starts combing Snow
White’s hair, “patient with all the burns and knots my new life had put in it.” (D 56)
Snow White shuts her eyes and lets her comb dig into the scalp “scraping down to
the kernel of memory.” (D 56) It puts her to sleep and thus again when the men come
home they curse the Queen calling her a “witch to put such poison of idleness in
[Snow White’s] head.” (D 56) They warn her to stay inside the house and not let
anyone in. As she resumes her life as per their dictates her hair knot again and her
stays hang loose. The stepmother returns after a few weeks in early autumn. This
time “there was nothing of the mother about her.” (D 57) She has a half ripe apple –
one side green the other red – in her hand. She bites into the green side and Snow
White the red. The latter begins to choke with fear and excitement and swoons.
When she wakes up she realises she is being carried in an open coffin to another

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kingdom, as the men tell her, to be treated like a princess. Her mouth is full of apple
and as she chews it she realises that it is not poisonous but is “the first apple of the
year from [her] father’s orchard.” (D 58) This last act of her stepmother softens her
completely. The Queen symbolically returns to Snow White her rightful place in the
kingdom and biting into the green part of the first ripe apple and offering Snow
White the ripe side she shows her willingness to accept her secondary status to Snow
White. Above everything else she initiates to re-establish and strengthen the fragile
bond with Snow White and patiently waits for Snow White’s willing acceptance of
this bond. Realising the stepmother’s loving attempts at winning her heart and her
true sacrificial love for the stepdaughter, Snow White chooses to join the Queen: “I
made them set me down, and I got out of the box, deaf to their clamour. I stared
around me till I could see the castle, ... I turned my face toward it, and started
walking.” (D 58) Her observation “there was nothing of the mother about her” points
to the dissolution of the mother-daughter relationship between the two and its
substitution with a bond of sharing, love and care.

The traditional tale of Snow White and most of the retellings including the ones
considered above generally focus on the individual character of Snow White and her
happiness. This is true about other tales and their retellings as well though in feminist
retellings personal choices of the heroine could be seen as representative. For
instance, Marxist retellings present a utopia not for an individual character but with
their anti-royalist, anti-capitalist messages they desire and design a happy existence
for the entire society. Merseyside Fairy Story Collective’s ‘Snow White’ undertakes
this Marxist agenda in combination with the feminist concerns of gender equality.58
Egalitarian thought incorporates emancipation of all the suppressed and the
victimised. As such retellings with a Marxist agenda attempt to assert women’s right
to liberation while also at the same time voice loudly the suppressed voices of the
lower classes and bring to the fore oppressive and artificial class differences. In
doing so these retellings intend to advocate an absolutely non-discriminating social
system that gives everyone his/her due. Mary Maher’s ‘Hi Ho, It’s Off to Strike We
Go!’(1982)59 and ‘Snow White’ by Merseyside Fairy Story Collective (1972)
exemplify and represent retellings, which attack idealised values of beauty, riches
and royalty in the classical tales. They present a different view on happiness.
Breaking away from the traditional happy ending which focuses mostly on the royal

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couples these retellings end with happiness in society at large and suggest
revolutionary political changes substituting monarchy with democracy and
capitalism with socialism.

• Merseyside Fairy Story Collective’s ‘Snow White’ (74-80)

Merseyside Fairy Story Collective’s ‘Snow White’ presents a Snow White who
rebels against monarchy and successfully fights for the rights of the poor and the
low. The Queen here is an epitome of oppression and cruelty. She has power and
uses it tyrannically. Her question to the magic mirror that she always carries in her
hand and that reflects everything happening in her kingdom which leaves very little
scope for her subjects to act against her wishes, echoes the question in the traditional
tale. However ‘fairness’ of the original question is replaced by happiness. She returns
to the mirror always to ask:

‘Mirror, mirror in my hand

who is the happiest in the land?’

She would be pleased to hear the mirror announcing each time:

‘Queen, all bow to your command,

You are the happiest in the land.’ (74)

Nothing useful and beautiful belongs to the people. They have to offer everything
they own and make to the Queen of the Mountains. Everyday people in long
processions toil the steep path to the castle to submit things they have made of which
the Queen keeps the best to herself and allows the subjects to take whatever is “left
over or spoiled.” (74) Pale little Snow White belongs to the mining community living
in “the diamond mines beside the distant sea” (75) and is a skilled jewellery
designer. The Queen forces the miners to mine diamonds and present to her a
chestful of them every year. She accumulates these jewels in glass jars.

The story presents the year when Snow White accompanies the seven little dwarfs.
When the Queen learns that the beautifully well-made diamond necklace is made by
Snow White she orders her to “stay in the castle as a jewellery maker.” (75) Snow
White, her pale cheeks turning red, is about to cry “No!” when all the dwarfs putting

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their fingers to the lips warn her to be silent. They are led to the workshop where
jewels are stored. The light from the accumulated jewels gives Snow White a
headache. While bidding her goodbye the dwarfs call her lucky, for henceforth she
would no longer be poor or lead a hard and dangerous life toiling underground for
long and weary hours: “Here servants will wait on you. You will sleep in a soft,
scented bed and be brought whatever delicious food and drink you want. And, if the
Queen is especially pleased with your work she will give you rich rewards.” (75-76)
Snow White however does not long for such happiness. Her happiness and comfort is
where her poor fellowmen are, despite the hardships and misery that accompany
such a living. She works to please the Queen and win a reward. But for her the “rich”
reward is to go back home. The Queen angrily disallows and shows her in the mirror
the dwarfs and others toiling in the mines. She does not understand Snow White’s
idea of happiness in longing to return to the miserable existence: “You could have
anything your heart desires and yet you ask to return to that miserable life!” (76) The
Queen’s (Capitalist) mentality of enjoying comforts and happiness at the expense of
others’ hard labour and by exploiting those who toil for her makes Snow White
restless. She makes one more beautiful piece of jewellery for the Queen so that she
calls her before the throne. When the Queen does so and asks Snow White to speak
her heart’s desire Snow White replies, “Majesty, ... what I ask for is this: take only
what you need from the people of the kingdom and let them keep the rest so that they
can no longer be cold and hungry and miserable.” (76) Controlling her anger, since
she does not want to lose the skilled artist useful to her, the Queen makes Snow
White look into the mirror that reflects a strange image of Snow White wearing a
rich gown and adorned with pearls and rubies with a golden crown on her head the
Queen says, “You could be a princess.” (77) However this possible future does not
tempt Snow White. She remembers the words of a song she would sing with her
friends while returning from mining:

Emerald’s green but grass is greener.

Sapphires pale beside the sea.

No jet as black as the wild night sky,

No ruby red

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No ruby red

No ruby red as hearts which cry to be free. (77)

She like her friends and fellowmen longs for freedom which the Queen has denied to
them, freedom which every human is naturally endowed with, freedom which every
human is entitled to. The closeness to nature that these miners share is contrasted
with the Queen’s appreciation of artificial beauty: “No flower in all my gardens is as
delicately shaped as these ear-rings you have made,” (77) she says. Snow White
keeps making beautiful jewellery for the Queen but does not ask for any reward. The
Queen tempts her to be a princess but Snow White’s denial enrages her and she
tightens the vigil on Snow White. After a year Snow White sees the dwarfs carrying
up the castle the chest of diamonds. However she is not allowed to meet them. While
the Queen keeps a watch on the dwarfs through the mirror, Snow White empties the
chest herself and manages to escape the tower. The Queen watches the dwarfs go
further and further away from the castle and by the evening is shocked to hear the
mirror tell her:

Though all bow to your command,

Snow White is the happiest in the land. (78)

The Queen sees Snow White joyfully appearing out of the chest of drawers and is
filled with terrible rage. After ordering the soldiers waiting on Snow White to be
thrown from the castle walls for their negligence and thinking overnight how to
punish Snow White, she orders her soldiers to seal up the entrance of the diamond
mines so that Snow White and her companions would die underground while at
work. The soldiers are horrified but dare not disobey her. She sees in the mirror how
the soldiers seal up the way out of the mine and is happy. The news spreads and
people gather in crowds to witness the Queen’s cruelty. Throughout the night a great
crowd of people waits at a distance from soldiers guarding the mine and whisper in
low voices about the cruelty of the Queen. However suddenly they hear a tapping
sound and see a rock moving. Soon one of the dwarfs appears from a narrow passage
and is followed by all others, Snow White one among them. The oldest of the dwarfs
is reminded of another way out of the mine and all of them dig up in the dark until
that way is opened up. The people as well as the soldiers are amazed to see this

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happen. People start cheering. Some of the soldiers join them too. However some
soldiers ask Snow White to surrender and return to the castle. Before this huge crowd
Snow White refuses the soldiers point-blank and speaks out people’s mind aloud: “I
will not go back to the castle and we will send no more diamonds to the Queen.
Everyone will keep the things they make and send nothing to the Queen of the
Mountains.” (79) On being threatened to be killed she courageously confronts them
saying, “You may kill some of us... but in the end you will lose for there are far more
people than there are soldiers.” (79) She has given vent to the people’s suppressed
emotions as a result of which people join Snow White’s rebellion and dauntlessly
surround the soldiers to snatch the weapons from them. The Queen is enraged to see
the people rising against her and expresses her anger at the instigator of this rebellion
by breaking into pieces all the jewellery made by her. The uprising renders even the
mirror disobedient. When she orders it to “Make them bow to my command,” the
mirror expresses its inability by saying,

‘Queen who was so rich and grand

The people cast you from the land.’ (80)

So saying the magic mirror mists over and beyond the mist the Queen can see
nothing but herself. She tries to fling the no longer useful mirror from the castle wall.
But the mirror is stuck to her hand and as she lifts it above her head and throws it,
she falls with it screaming deep down until she is shattered into pieces on the rocks.

The story ends with the Queen’s end before which Snow White has announced the
beginning of a social structure where one would reap and own the fruits of one’s
labour. A utopian revolutionary social set-up without any authoritarian, oppressive
control is imagined and projected in the tale. The Queen and the mirror are
identified. They end together and in a similar manner. Their complete destruction
symbolises total denial of centralised power which affects the marginalised sections
of society and introduces a rift between classes. A classless society where everyone
would be treated equally and everyone would fulfil his/her needs and be happy, is
dreamt and established at the end of this retelling.

Though the focus of the tale is political it does not do away with the feminist concern
with gender. It does not have a prince nor is the mirror a patriarchal voice.

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However that it is Snow White who acts as a rebel and a spokesperson of equality
and that the mirror and the Queen who is the epitome of power are identified, hint at
the feminist aspects of the tale since patriarchy necessarily denotes power and
authority concentrated in the hands of men. Thus through its Marxist agenda this
revision of the traditional ‘Snow White’ touches upon gender issues as well.
Marriage with a rich prince or a dream of being a princess is just dispensed with and
happiness is seen not necessarily in financial well being. Traditional happy ending in
marriage here is replaced by a revolutionary political change suggesting a profound
change in the status-quo.

As rightly observed by Vanessa Joosen many retellings of ‘Snow White’ like Gilbert
and Gubar’s analytic discourse on the tale view it in a broader literary context; depict
the character’s psychological depth rather than presenting them in black and white
shades; fill in the gaps like the disappearance of the king from the tale; challenge or
question the happy endings by presenting alternatives and lastly, rationalise the
supernatural role of the magical mirror.60 Many of Gilbert and Gubar’s concerns are
reflected in these retellings, particularly in the depiction of the wicked Queen as a
creative plotter/schemer. In most cases she is presented in a positive light while it is
the King, physically absent but exercising his authoritative role through the mirror,
who is assigned negative features.

Retellings like those of Donoghue's ‘The Tale of the Apple,’ Grainne Healy’s ‘Snow
Fight Defeats PatriArki’61 (1989) offer female bonding as an alternative to the
traditional happy ending. Retellings like Coover’s present a male character’s
perspective maintaining a distance from the narrative. Writers like Hubert Schirneck
in his ‘The Latest News from the Seven Dwarves’62 (2000) present ‘Snow White’
from the dwarves’ perspective. Herein the dwarves see Snow White as an ungrateful
child. This retelling aimed at children invites children to self-critically identify
themselves with Snow White rather than see her either as a victimised or idealised
role model.

Retellings of ‘Snow White’ range in narratological perspective from the Queen,

Snow White, the dwarfs, the prince and in some cases the mirror63 and even the
apple64. However, no retelling has been attempted through the king’s or the hunter’s
perspective. That fairy tale retelling has been greatly influenced by feminist criticism

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and the limited role performed by the two characters in the original tale could be the
reasons why retellings from their viewpoint are absent.

It is in their 1994 book No Man’s Land that Gilbert and Gubar return to ‘Snow
White’ and its retellings. They confirm the need to retell the old tales (not just ‘Snow
White’) in order to understand the variety and complexity of roles women have been
and are able to play as authors and characters: “... the old fairy tales about relations
between men and women have mutated in increasingly complicated ways, so that
many of us – feminist critics, cultural historians – seem to be lost in a forest of
stories about the future of sexuality and sex roles.”65 Feminist literature and criticism
have remarkably shaped the attempts at retelling fairy tales. Gilbert and Gubar
themselves at the end of the book present retellings that “crystallise controversies
about the erotic that have persisted from the turn of the century to the present.”66
Readers, particularly women, are offered a choice to select their favourite retold
version and even visualise and create their own stories. Thus retelling provides
writers and readers with a means through which socio-political and humanitarian
perspectives could be discussed though to some extent at the expense of literariness
of the tales.

As said above this Chapter showcases a few varieties of retelling and through their
analysis, particularly of the tale ‘Snow White,’ also attempts to project the creative
and critical interaction that occurs within the scope of fairy tale retelling.

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NOTES

1
Johnson Daniel, “Books Barely Furnish a Room,” The Times 16 Sept. 1992:3.

2
Salman Rushdie, “Angela Carter, 1940-1992: A Very Good Wizard, A Very Dear

Friend,” The New York Times 8 Mar. 1992. 13 May 2008.

[Link]

Carter was not much analysed in this project also because she deals with the

Charles Perrault tales and the present project mainly assesses the Grimm fairy tales.

3
Christa Joyce, “Contemporary Women Poets and the Fairy Tale,” Fairy tales

Reimagined: Essays on New Retellings, ed. Susan Reddington Bobby (North

Carolina: McFarland, 2009) 31-43. Subsequent references are given parenthetically

as (Bobby, ).

4
Anne Sexton, “Briar Rose,” Transformations (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971)107-

112. Subsequent references are given parenthetically as (T, ).

5
Diana Hume George, Oedipus Anne: The Poetry of Anne Sexton (Urbana: U of

Illinois P, 1987) 38. Subsequent references are given parenthetically as (George, ).

6
F. Jacobi, Fairy Tales of Jacob Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen (New York:

Modern Library, 1952) 48.

7
Dawn Skorczewski, “What Prison is This? Literary Critics Cover Incest in Anne

Sexton’s ‘Briar Rose,’” Signs (Winter,1996, 309-342): 320.

8
Olga Broumas, “The Sleeping Beauty,” Beginning With O (New Haven: Yale

UP, 1977) 50-53.

9
Nancy A. Walker, The Disobedient Writer (Austin: Texas UP, 1995)60.

201 
 
 

10
Sara Hendersen Hay, “Sleeper,” Story Hour (Fayettville: U of Arkansas

P, 1998)10.

11
Sara Hendersen Hay, “Sleeper - 2,” Story Hour (Fayettville: U of Arkansas

P, 1998)11.

12
Sara de Ford, “The Sleeping Beauty,” JSTOR and Poetry Foundation, 171.

13
Robert Coover, “Briar Rose,” (Hypertextual version)

[Link]
Rose/texts/[Link] 1-42 Subsequent references are given parenthetically as (L

) L for Lexia.

14
Larry McCaffery, The Metaphorical Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald

Barthelme, and William H. Gass(Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1982)14.

15
Angela Carter, The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (London, US: Penguin,

1977, 2008) 25.

16
Robert Coover, “The End of Books,” The New Media Reader, ed. Noah Wardrip-

Fruin and Nick Montfort (London: The MIT Press, 2003) 707. Subsequent

references are given parenthetically.

17
Sunje Redies, “Return With New Complexities: Robert Coover's ‘Briar Rose,’”

Marvels and Tales, 18.1 (2004:9-27)14.

18
Brian Evenson quoted by Redies, 25.

19
Jaroslav Kusnir, “Subversion of Myths: High and Low Culture in Donald

Barthelme’s ‘Snow White’ and Robert Coover's ‘Briar Rose,’” European Journal

of American Culture, 23:1 (2004): 47.

202 
 
 

20
Michael Gerra, “The Awakening,” The New York Times Books, (February 16,

1997) 2.

21
Jane Yolen, Briar Rose (New York: TOR Book, 1992) Subsequent references are

given parenthetically.

22
Jack Zipes quoted from Spells of Enchantment on the introductory page of Yolen’s

novel.

23
Jack Zipes, Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (2nd ed.

New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2002) 195. Subsequent references are given

parenthetically as (Brothers Grimm ____).

24
The term has been used often by feminists since the 1970s to refer to factionalism

and infighting within feminist movement which mostly is instigated by men or

patriarchal interests directly or indirectly.

25
Caroline King Bernard Hall, Anne Sexton (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989) 106.

26
Carol Leventen, “Transformations’s Silencings,” in Critical Essays on

Anne Sexton ed. Linda Wagner-Martin, (Boston: G K Hall, 1989)136.

27
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy

Tales (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976) 102.

28
Olga Broumas, “Cinderella” 57-58.

29
Neal A. Lester, “(Un)Happily Ever After: Fairy Tale Morals, Moralities and

Heterosexism in Children’s Texts,” Journal of Gay and Lesbian Issues in

Education 42(2007): 69.

30
Emma Donoghue, “The Tale of the Shoe,” Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New

Skins (USA: Joanna Cotler Books, 1997) 1-8.

203 
 
 

31
Susan Reddington Bobby, ed. Fairy Tales Re-imagined: Essays on New Retellings

(USA: McFarland &[Link], 2009) 24.

32
Francisca Lia Block, “Glass,” The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold (New

York: Joanna Cotler Books, 2000) 53-70.

33
Roald Dahl, Revolting Rhymes 1982, Illus. Quentin Blake (New York: Puffin

Books, 2009) 5.

34
Gail Carlson Levine, Cinderellis and the Glass Hill (New York: Harper Collins,

2000).

35
Philip Pullman, I Was a Rat! Illus. Kevin Hawkes (New York: Dell Yearling, 2000).

36
Priscilla Galloway, “The Prince,” in Truly Grim Tales (New York: Bantam

Doubleday Dell, 1995).

37
Babette Cole, Prince Cinders, 1987, (London: Puffin, 1997).

38
Ellen Jackson, Cinder Edna Illus. Kevin O’Malley (New York: Lothrop, 1994).

39
Melissa Kantor, If I Have a Wicked Stepmother, Where’s My Prince? (New York:

Hyperion, 2005).

40
Ann Jungman, Cinderella and the Hot Air Balloon Illus. Russell Ayto

(London: Lincoln, 1992).

41
Roald Dahl, “Cinderella,” 5-12.

42
Judith Viorst, If I Were In Charge of the World and Other Worries: Poems for

Children and Their Parents (New York: Alladin Paperbacks, 1981).

43
Jack Zipes, ed. 1983Trials and Tribulations of Little Red riding Hood 2nd ed. (New

York: Routledge, 1993) 343. Subsequent references are given parenthetically as

(TT _).

204 
 
 

44
Ibid, 49-58.

45
Zipes describes the title of his retold tale as ‘Little Red Riding Hood-Re-ruminated
by Tomi Ungerer’, pg 261.

46
Thomas H Johnson, ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little

Brown, 1960) 333.

47
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer

and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979) 17.

48
Steven E Colburn, ed. No Evil Star – Selected Essays, Interviews and Prose (Ann

Arbor, Michigan: U of Michigan P, 1985) 145.

49
Ellen Conan Rose, “Through the Looking Glass: When Women Tell Fairy Tales,”

The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development eds. Elizabeth Abel et al (London:

UP of New England, 1983) 215.

50
Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and Sociology

of Gender (Berkley: U of California P, 1975) 183.

51
Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (New York:

Pantheon, 1979) 76-77.

52
Maria Tatar, The Classic Fairy Tales (New York: Norton, 1999) 77.

53
Robert Coover, “The Dead Queen,” Spells of Enchantment: The Wondrous Tales of

Western Culture, ed. Jack Zipes (New York: Viking Penguin, 1991) 704-711.

54
Shuli Barzilai, “Reading ‘Snow White’: The Mother’s Story,” Signs 15 (1990): 515-

534.

55
Steven Swann Jones, “The Innocent Persecuted Heroine Genre: An Analysis of Its

Structures and Themes,” Western Folklore 52.1 (1993): 13-41.

205 
 
 

56
N J Girardot, “Initiation and Meaning in the Tale of Snow White and Seven

Dwarfs,” Journal of American Folklore 90 (1977): 274-300.

57
Patricia Carlin, “The Stepmother Arrives,” The Poets Grimm: Twentieth Century

Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales, eds. Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson

(Ashland: Storyline, 2003) 46-47.

58
Merseyside Fairy Story Collective, “Snow White,” Don’t Bet on the Prince:

Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England, ed. Jack Zipes

(New York: Routledge, 1989) 74-80.

59
Mary Maher, “Hi, Ho, It’s Off to Strike We Go!” Rapunzel’s Revenge: Fairy Tales

for Feminists eds. Anne Claffey, et al, (Dublin: Attic, 1985) 31-35.

60
Vanessa Joosen, Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual

Dialogue between Fairy Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings (Detroit,

Michigan: Wayne State UP, 2011) 291.

61
Healy Grainne, “Snow Fight Defeats Patri Arky,” Sweeping Beauties: Fairytales for

Feminists eds. Elaine Crowley, Rita Kelly and Maeve Kelly (Dublin: Attic, 1989)

39-45.

62
Hubert Schirneck’s “The Latest News from the Seven Dwarves” is an originally

German retelling. This reference is taken from the translated extracts of the tale and

its analysis in Vanessa Joosen’s book mentioned above in note 59.

63
Examples: a) Mette Ivie Harrison, Mira Mirror (New York: Speak, 2004).

b) Alice Friman, “Snow White: The Prince,” 1984, Beaumont and

Carlson, 218.

206 
 
 

c) Thylias Moss, “Lessons from a Mirror,” 1989, Beaumont and Carlson,

169.

64
Sue Owen, “The Poisoned Apple,” Beaumont and Carlson, 110.

65
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer

in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994) 359.

66
Ibid, 363.

207