Women in Literature: Postmodern Heroines: The Fairy Tale in 20th Century Literature and Film
Session Chair: Kathleen Doyle
Rhodes College
doyle@rhodes.edu

Session A

The Unkind Survive: New Interpretations of ‘The Kind Girl and the Unkind Girl’ in Caryl Churchill’s TheSkriker and Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin

In the fairy tale “The Kind Girl and the Unkind Girl,” the kind girl is meek and solicitous of others. She helps a fairy disguised as an old woman, ends up spitting diamonds when she speaks, and gets the prince. The unkind girl refuses to help the “old woman” and ends up vomiting toads; she starves to death. In Churchill’s play The Skriker, humankind’s slow poisoning of the fairy world has turned fairy figures malevolent. Tormented by the Skriker, Lily and Josie meet her challenges in different ways. Atwood’s novel The Blind Assassin tells the story of two sisters, raised under fairy-talelike circumstances in pre-Depression Canada, and the decidedly unfairy-talelike turn their fortunes take. Both authors demonstrate a feminist recognition of the limitations and dangers of the kind girl’s approach, and suggest that unkindness may be key to survival. Both call into question the definition of “kind” and “unkind”, suggesting that pursuit of “happily ever after” may be a concern of “kind girls”, but “unkind girls” focus on survival.

Merie Kirby
University of St. Thomas
mekirby@stthomas.edu

What Happens When Women Go ‘Into the Woods?’

Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods.” seems clever and funny at first glance. A closer examination reveals interesting questions about the fairy tales’ re-interpretations in the 20 th century. This paper addresses two issues surrounding “Into the Woods” production on Broadway (1987) and its revival (2002). First, it examines how “Into the Woods” defines fairy tale heroine using the female protagonists (Witch, Baker’s Wife, and Cinderella) to compile this definition. Have women come out of the woods as heroines in their own right, or are they just “touched up” with late 20 th-century flair? The second part of my paper problematizes the working definition of heroine by using the casting decisions of Little Red Riding Hood, comparing the original (street-wise young woman) with the revival (pre-pubescent girl). Does the idea of “heroine” change when we hear each sing that the wolf “made [her] feel excited-/ Well, excited and scared?” Was the choice bold and inventive or turned back to the original warning of the Brothers Grimm? Can “happily ever after” and/or the fairy tale heroine exist in the 21 st century?

Maria Papanikolaou
Johnson C. Smith University
mpapanikolaou@jcsu.edu

Return to Ithaca: Contemporary Revisions of Penelope in Spanish Women’s Literature

Despite the suggestion of a recent anthology of Spanish women writers (Ni Ariadnas ni Penélopes:Quince escritoras españolas para el siglo veintiuno. Ed. Carmen Estévez. Madrid: Castalia, 2002.), Penelope continues to be a compelling model for writers who portray the complexities and contradictions of female identity and women’s roles in contemporary Spain. This presentation considers three literary works by contemporary Spanish women who appropriate Penelope’s character and role in the Odyssey as a discursive context through which to enact and critique the opposition between Spanish women’s professional and domestic roles.

Francisca Aguirre’s poetry collection Ítaca (1972), Carmen Resino’s play Ulises no vuelve (1984) and Ángela Vallvey’s recent award-winning novel Los estados carenciales (2002) are revisions of Homer’s heroine in which Penelope employs ambiguity, cunning and strength in order to negotiate her personal ambitions and the expectations of family, friends and colleagues. Theoretical writing on parody and intertextuality by Linda Hutcheon as well as contemporary reconsiderations of Penelope’s role in the Odyssey will serve as referents for my discussion of the Penelopes of contemporary Spanish literature by women.

David R. Thompson
Luther College
dthompson@mail.millikin.edu

Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus as an Anti-Fairy Tale: An Appeal for Vigilence

Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1986) centers itself on the aerialiste Fevvers, a gargantuan winged woman. As the narrative progresses, Carter distracts the reader’s attention from Fevvers’s history by introducing other female characters with their own extraordinary experiences and traits. The text resists heteronormative attitudes towards human relationships and challenges the patriarchal order that fairy tales often seek to maintain. Instead, Nights at the Circus critiques any attempt, even the most altruistic, to create stability within a fragmented society by promoting a view of femininity, sexuality, and humanity that operates outside of the rigid definitions offered by patriarchal traditions. The novel also critiques any feminist ideology that would replace a repressive patriarchy with an equally stifling matriarchy. Instead, the text anticipates Gayatri Spivak’s call for an “absolute vigilance” against a reconstruction of patriarchal structures in the name of feminism. I argue that by reading the text as an “anti-fairy tale,” Carter’s work can be viewed as an attempt to create a discourse of liberation that does not seek to punish or privilege any particular group.

Joseph D. Vasquez
California State University, Los Angeles
jvasque8@yahoo.com

Session B

When the Oldest Daughter is the Most Beautiful: Fairy-tale, Romance, Gothic, and the “real” in Iris Murdoch’s The Green Knight

In Iris Murdoch’s The Green Knight, there are three girls, like “fairy-tale damsels.” This is not, however, a medieval scene. The Green Knight is set in modern day England. The Green Knight is a peculiar hybrid of charm and menace. Held in constant ambiguity, we cannot be certain how to read the various “stories” in this text.

Both mundane and mystical explanations exist simultaneously for the heightened yet chaste relationship between Harvey and Aleph, the youngest daughter, Moy’s, “telekinetic” powers, and the resurrection of Peter Mir, a man thought murdered by an evil “step-brother.” This tension between the “known” and the “unknown” leads to a complicated network of challenges and questions, creating a mysterious space, in which we never quite feel comfortable.

Elements of the fairy tale, the romance, the Gothic, the mystical, and even the realistic force us to question the motivations and rationales of various characters. The “truthfulness” of any one story is called into question through this mishmash of genres, as each “voice” undermines, challenges, or exposes the other. Unlike conventional views of “genre fiction” as highly ordered and simplistic, Murdoch’s hybrid ground creates a place where nothing can be taken for granted.

Elizabeth.Neiman
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
eaneiman@uwm.edu

The Magic Mirror of Sexton's Transformations: The Inadvertent Reshaping of the Fairy Tale Female

In her fifth book of poetry, Transformations, Anne Sexton takes sixteen Grimm’s fairy tales and transforms them into something distinctly modern—and something distinctly Sexton. Sexton’s tales have much in common with the Grimm’s tales, but, as Sexton herself explains, “I take the fairy tale and transform it into a poem of my own, following the story line, exceeding the story line and adding my own pzazz.” (Middlebrook 336). This paper will explore three poems in particular in the Transformations collection, poems that most strikingly bear the Sexton confessional stamp, despite the fact that many, including Sexton herself, believed these poems were a move away from her confessional work. By writing new stories within the shell of the originals, and by looking staunchly inward as Sexton was so inclined to do, Sexton begins to inadvertently reshape the prototype of the fairy tale female. Sexton sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails as a poet in these poems, but the almost accidental challenge she sets for the reader—to rethink and reform the female archetypal roles of women—succeeds in full.

Andrea Witzke Leavey
University of Texas at Dallas
aleavey@utdallas.edu

Feminist Frauds on the Fairies? Didacticism and Liberation in Recent Retellings

In Twice Upon a Time, Elizabeth Wanning Harries analyzes how women writers appropriate fairy tales to liberate women from the passiveness of many classical tales by Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Andersen. But how is this liberation accomplished? Jack Zipes argues that fairy tales are either “duplicates” (those reinforcing sexist stereotyping) or “revisions” (those altering “the reader’s views of traditional patterns, images, and codes”). My talk evokes Dickens’s famous essay “Frauds on the Fairies” (1853), which attacked George Cruikshank’s didactic moral retellings. Can feminist revisions commit a fraud on the fairies by transforming tales into didactic feminist propaganda? Barbara Walker duplicates and retells various classical tales, but her overt feminist didacticism destroy the integrity of the tales, thus committing the very fraud on the fairies that Dickens argued against. I will then examine retellings by Francesca Lia Block and Emma Donoghue to suggest how feminist and gender concerns can be integral to fairy tales without destroying the aesthetic integrity of these works.

John Pennington
St. Norbert College
john.pennington@snc.edu.