In the world of children’s books there’s a double-whammy of bad female role models and massive under-representation. There’s only one female character to every 1.6 male characters. One of the few regular traditional roles for girls in children’s literature is that of the princess, but it doesn’t take a genius to see that the traditional princess trope doesn’t give girls many positive or useful goals to aim for: look pretty, be born into or marry into hereditary privilege and… uh… that’s it. Happily ever after. Forever. Are you bored yet? I am.

Yet plenty of little girls are still obsessed with princesses and being a princess. It might not appeal much to the grown-ups, but the trope remains strong – as does the lure of pretty things. (Personally, I still have to suppress a twinge of jealousy when I see a kid going by in a really good princess dress – with the layers of skirt and the faux-stays bodice and WHERE WERE THEY WHEN I WAS SMALL, HUH? – but it’s fine. I’m not jealous. I’m writing this wearing a £3 Claire’s Accessories tiara so it’s all OK.)

So, as it doesn’t look like we’ll escape the princess trope any time soon, it’s time to play with it instead. There’s no need to throw out the castles, dragons and bling along with the bathwater – there are plenty of good children’s books out there featuring kickass princesses who do more than just wear dresses. In this post, the first of a three parter, I’m going to give you the lowdown on some good princess role models for your sprogs/selves (delete as age-appropriate).

Disclaimer before we begin:
These books are primarily working from the Western European fairy tale trope, so whilst they may kick ass, some elements remain disappointingly similar throughout – namely that the princesses are often ‘conventionally beautiful’, often blonde, always Caucasian, and in this selection the tales all revolve around the marriage trope. I hope to uncover a wider variety of ass-kicking later, but in the meantime here are some nonetheless very good children’s books.

The Paper Bag Princess

• Written by Robert Munsch and illustrated by Michael Martchenko, published in 1980 by Annick Press

The Paper Bag Princess is a short, snappy children’s book aimed at the 3-5 age group. (Click here to hear it read to you by a kindly librarian.)

The book begins with a typical princess called Elizabeth who “lived in a castle and wore expensive princess clothes”. She plans to marry Prince Ronald, but when a dragon steals away the prince and scorches all the kingdom (including all her pretty clothes) she doesn’t waste a moment: she dons the eponymous paper bag (the only unscorched thing she could wear) and goes off to rescue her man, defeating the dragon using her wits.

Munsch has explained that he wrote the book on his wife’s suggestion:

One day my wife, who also worked at the daycare centre, came to me and said “How come you always have the prince save the princess? Why can’t the princess save the prince?” I thought about that and changed around the ending of one of my dragon stories. That made the adults a lot happier, and the kids did not mind.

(Of course the kids didn’t mind – they don’t have such strong pre-conceived ideas of narrative yet!)

But as well as the princess doing the rescuing, there’s also a brilliant message about self-esteem and moving on. The Prince, once rescued, turns out to be an ungrateful asshat, telling Elizabeth off for looking a mess: “Come back when you look like a real princess.” Upon hearing this the princess doesn’t get upset or angry. She tells the prince, “Your clothes are really pretty and your hair is very neat. You look like a real prince but you are a bum.” (or a toad if you have the UK version). The final line – “they didn’t get married after all” – is illustrated with the Paper Bag Princess dancing off into the sunset.

This book is a brilliant, simple primer for just about everyone. It teaches people that being brave, smart and kind are more important than how you look – and that when someone is mean to you, you can be the bigger person walk away. That’s a double-helix of kickass for all genders, packed into a very short picture book.

Princess Smartypants

• Written and illustrated by Babette Cole, pub. Hamish Hamilton 1986

Babette Cole has done a lot of awesome for children’s literature. Her drawings are warm, funny and just more than a bit gorgeous, and she’s also subverted Cinderella in Prince Cinders (and done plenty more amazing children’s books, but I’ll focus on this one.)

(Once again, you can have this book read to you on YouTube.)

Princess Smartypants (Best. Name. Ever.) is content with her own life: “She enjoyed being a Ms. Because she was pretty and rich, all the princes wanted her to be their Mrs.” Ten points to Cole for slipping in the Miss/Ms/Mrs thing in a fairly small, light way. Minus ten for having a princess who is both pretty and blonde.

However, wanting to put an end to the constant stream of suitors once and for all, Princess Smartypants says she will marry whoever can accomplish all the tasks she sets. This is where it gets badass – her tasks show her interests: gardening (an extreme sport when you see the slugs); feeding her monster pets; roller disco; motorbike riding – you get the idea. Princess Smartypants is accomplished, independent, and happy getting up to the stuff she enjoys.

Eventually Prince Swashbuckle does manage all the tasks, so this is where Princess Smartypants uses her plothammer card and turns him into a toad. Grumpy toad prince drives away in his red sports car, and no princes bother her again. (My plot spill is nothing without the illustrations – for the love of God, READ THIS BOOK.)

As with The Paper Bag Princess, the final frame page of this book combines the news that the protagonist doesn’t get married with an illustration of her looking very happy – in this instance, on a sun lounger, toasting the audience with a glass of something, and surrounded by her monster pets.

The message from both of these books is that you can create your own happily ever after.

The Practical Princess

• From The Practical Princess And Other Liberating Fairy Tales by Jay Williams, Scholastic 1978

Princess Bedelia is given common sense as a baby by a visiting fairy (the other two fairies bestow the more expected gifts of beauty and grace), despite her father’s complaint of “What good is common sense to a princess? All she needs is charm.”

However, when a hungry dragon demands Bedelia to eat and a dragon slayer can’t be found soon enough, the King and his advisors decide they’ll have to give her over to be eaten. Our girl takes control of her own fate with a kind of weary resignation when she realises no one else is up to the task. She makes a dummy from straw and one of her finest gowns, and stuffs it with gunpowder. Bye bye dragon.

When a powerful but age-inappropriate and unwanted suitor turns up, Bedelia sets him near-impossible tasks using her extensive knowledge of the surrounding kingdoms – and uses her sense to catch him out when he cheats. When our girl winds up in a tower with a male Rapunzel/Sleeping Beauty-type prince, she uses her common sense to undo the spell he is under, and rescue them both.

This story isn’t my favourite of the lot – I found the heroine very slightly prissy, and the details and language didn’t really warm my cockles. However, the moral of the story is pretty much ‘don’t panic, keep thinking, you’ll find a solution’, and ain’t no arguing with that. Hip-hip hooray for brains!

The Wrestling Princesss

• From The Wrestling Princess and Other Stories, written by Judy Corbalis, illustrated by Helen Craig, 1986, pub. Andre Deutsch

The Wrestling Princess takes place in a world where some gender roles are set in stone, but some are very altered. Princess Ermyntrude is either wrestling the guards or covered in axle grease, working on her tractors and helicopters – but the King tells her she has to find a husband for the succession. The princess’s resistance and her father’s weary insistence make for a good introduction to the debate on succession. Also, Ermyntrude’s father naming the ‘feminine’ traits she needs sets them up to be deconstructed/dismissed:

“To get a husband you must be enchantingly beautiful, dainty and weak,” said the king.
“Well, I’m not,” said Ermyntrude cheerfully. “I’m nothing to look at, I’m six feet tall and I’m certainly not weak. Why, Father, did you hear, this morning I wrestled with sixteen guards at once and I defeated them all?”
“Ermyntrude!” said the king sternly, as he rethreaded his needle with No. 9 blue tapestry cotton. “Ermyntrude, we are not having any more wrestling and no more forklift trucks either. If you want a husband you will have to become delicate and frail.”
“I don’t want a husband,” said the princess and she stamped her foot hard.

The ensuing prince/groom casting-call both plays to some gender norms (it’s a rule that the prince must be taller than her) and some non-norms (the prince must be able to match her in a face-pulling contest).

This princess does eventually get married, but to a short prince who has a shared love of mechanics and loves her for who she is, and vice versa.

“You’re too short,” said the king.
“He’s not,” said the princess.
“No, I’m not, I’m exactly right and so is she,” said Prince Florizel. “Then when I saw her pulling faces and shouting insults and throwing princes to the ground I knew she was the one person I could fall in love with.”
“Really?” asked the princess.
“Truly,” said Prince Florizel. “Now, come and see my mechanical digger.”

In this book, unlike the previous two, marriage doesn’t turn out to be a thing to be avoided – provided it’s with the right person. This story is about deconstructing the existing framework of helpless princesses and dashing princes – and it also becomes about two quirky, likeable people meeting and falling in love. And falling in love is totally punk rock.

Honourable mention: The Practical Princess

• Written by Rebecca Lisle, illustrated by Joëlle Dreidemy, pub. Andersen 2008

I actually picked this one up by accident when friends were singing the praises of the other Practical Princess book (see above) – but I thought it would be worth comparing and contrasting these different practical princesses.

This book is far more recent than most on this list (the others all being from the 1980s), and it is not particularly feminist, but it does play with the trope a little.

Having read it, I’m not quite sure why this one has the name: Molly, our protagonist, is only a bit practical and she’s not actually a princess. Molly is an ordinary (read: extraordinarily beautiful, but non-royal) girl who wants to be a princess, so she enters a casting-call to find Prince Percival a bride. Her farmer parents help her by making and buying pretty clothes and shoes at great expense, and her lovely boyfriend Stan makes her a crown.

That’s right, she has a boy back home who loves her already, and – though he doesn’t want her to go – he helps her because she has her heart set on becoming a princess. He even drives her to the competition. POOR LOVELY STAN.

I don’t want to go overboard in my criticisms/analysis of children’s books here (not like the Freudian interpretation of The Cat in the Hat – no, that would be silly) but ignoring her current relationship is massively problematic for me. As is the remarkably unsisterly attitude Molly displays towards the other (real) princesses in the competition. They’re all painted as vacuous fashion victims, but I find this attitude in the writing to be uncharitable and a little lazy – as if the other competitors’ one-dimensionality will add more depth to the protagonist by default.

That said, to give her her due, our girl does realize over the course of the book that there isn’t much to recommend becoming royalty and that Stan back home is kinder and cuter than Prince Percival. When the glass slippers moment happens, Molly sticks her toes out so the shoe doesn’t fit, and defenestrates herself to escape back to her old life and lovely, long-suffering Stan.

The plus points for this book are it has a trajectory which begins in the same place as a lot of the readers (‘I’m not a princess but I want to be one’), and the conclusion – that riches and status are hollow compared to people who really care about you – is pretty universal and good. I just wish there’d been less mention of tiny waists throughout the book (no girl ever needs more indoctrination on that shit) – and our protagonist doesn’t really ‘kick ass’ so much as ‘avoids falling into the same traps as the other women.’

Also: poor Stan! You’re not good enough for him, Molly. I’ll take him off your hands.

• There will be more kickass and subversive princesses from children’s books in future articles. Hannah has a few on the list, but if there are any you think she should know about/make sure she doesn’t miss then let us know in the comments section!

New sources are always interesting, because they show just how different some of the versions were back then. This article in the New Yorker gives some examples:

Schönwerth’s Cinderella is a woodcutter’s daughter who uses golden slippers to recover her beloved from beyond the moon and the sun. His miller’s daughter wields an ax and uses it to disenchant a prince by chopping off the tail of a gigantic black cat.

Even better, that linked article suggests the collection might go farther than just focussing on princesses:

Just as girls became domestic drudges and suffered under the curse of evil mothers and stepmothers, boys, too, served out terms as gardeners and servants, sometimes banished into the woods by hostile fathers. Like Snow White, they had to plead with a hunter for their lives. And they are as good as they are beautiful – Schönwerth uses the German term “schön,” or beautiful, for both male and female protagonists.

We commented previously on how fairy tales were often warnings to young women that they should be passive and dutiful. In a society where girls had the power to cause chaos if they ever stepped outside the extreme social restrictions, families wanted children to see these dangers on a mythic level. We still do it – even in Star Wars, those who seek personal power are bad and will fall to evil. (It has also been pointed out that Governments, the Church and other authorities all promoted this mindset throughout history, and that it’s an incredibly good form of population control. The idea that niceness and power are incompatible has been socially useful, but remains untrue at least on a small scale.) Star Wars champions those rebels who seek agency for themselves against a dark Authority, but many of its other messages would fit right in with the warnings in folk tales.

While the GOOD = PHYSICALLY BEAUTIFUL trope is still ironclad across most tales, it looks as though this latest find of stories will show the rules about behaviour and the tales of young people needing rescue being applied to men just as much as women, which could be VERY badass.

One hundred of the new stories were published in German in 2010, but there’s no news on when any will be translated into English. We’ll keep an eye on this, and keep the good readers of BadRep updated! (If there’s a version where a princess kills a dragon with a sword, radio stations scanning the outer galaxy will be confused by how loud my cheering must have been to have reached them).

And if you think that we’re hoping for too much, that the tales might not be that different from the sanitised Victorian versions, read that first quote again. Cinderella – in so many versions a figure so passive that she doesn’t announce herself even when the Prince enters her house, right up to when he puts the slipper on her foot – is here the heroine who uses magic items and travels impossibly far, taking action to rescue her beloved.

Imagine if Disney had sold us that version in 1950.

Weird tales, well told

For one thing, her stories are more original, imaginative and accomplished than much of what is served up to young fantasy readers. The reason I reached for Red Spikes a few nights ago is because I wanted to be transported. I wanted a way out of my worries, and in her short stories Lanagan places you in an (often unnervingly) immediate, vivid and visceral other place.

She’s economical with the detail she gives you, winding her descriptions around dialogue or a protagonist’s thoughts rather than self-consciously setting the scene. The situations and societies she presents feel solid, brutally so at times, without you needing to be told what colour the sky is. The story is about the situation, not the setting, if you see what I mean.

And those situations are genuinely unusual, strange and surprising. You can set your story on the third moon of Azkablam and still make it clichéd, formulaic and dull as ditchwater (famed for its dullness). In Red Spikes and another collection, Black Juice, a girl watches her sister killed in a tar-pit as punishment for murdering her husband, while elsewhere in a circus-y dystopia two anti-clown vigilantes carry out a hit. A girl in a paper dress graduates from Bride School, and a boy finds some tiny figures of a bear and a heavily pregnant armoured queen who grow and come to life in the night. Naturally, he is enlisted as midwife.

Lanagan’s stories are bizarre, and even when you’re in more familiar terrain they’re often told from an unusual point of view. In Black Juice a village is periodically attacked by terrifying underground ‘yowlinin’ monsters. So far, so Tremors. But the tale is told by an ‘untouchable’ outcast, treated as a monster herself, who saves the life of the boy she loves only to be rejected. However, UNLIKE the Little Mermaid, she doesn’t wimpily dissolve into seafoam, but sees him for the coward he is and strides away into her future.

These synopses have probably given you a clue that as well as being strange, Lanagan’s stories are often pretty dark. And if you think Harry Potter is ‘dark’ you may be in for a shock: the first few chapters of her novel Tender Morsels include child abuse, incest, forced abortion and gang rape.

Tender Morsels

Here’s a review that describes why I think it’s a remarkable work. But it is distressing. Briefly: 14-year-old Liga lives in the usual cottage-on-the-edge-of-the-dark-forest with her father, who repeatedly rapes her. When she becomes pregnant, he forces her to have an abortion. He dies, but she discovers she has become pregnant again. She has her baby and lives alone in relative peace in the cottage until some boys from the nearby town come to find her and sexually assault her. Liga despairs, takes her baby daughter to a ravine in the forest and tries to kill them both, but they are magically saved and wake in what seems to be a parallel world in which she is at last safe. The townspeople have been replaced with kind, two-dimensional versions of themselves, and in this world there are no men. It seems to be a heaven that Liga has created to protect herself and her daughters (she has another baby). But as her daughter grows up the membrane between their protected world and the world Liga left behind starts to grow thin, and the story becomes a reimagining of the traditional fairytale of Snow White and Rose Red.

Of course, when it was published Tender Morsels met with a fair amount of controversy, but I agree with Lanagan when she says “I guess I’m not a big fan of corralling sex, death and war into the adult world and then giving children a terrible shock when they realise their existence.” Besides, there is nothing graphic, titillating or exploitative about the descriptions of the abuse suffered by Liga in the novel. One of the things the book is about is how people take refuge and heal from trauma.

Women in fairytales

It’s also about fairytales, and women’s lot in them. Asked in this interview why she was drawn to the Snow White and Rose Red story, Lanagan said:

Mainly I was annoyed by what the Grimm Brothers had done with Caroline Stahl’s story, that is, rewritten it to deliver a very oppressive message to girls and women: At all costs, however beastly your menfolk’s behaviour, remain nice, kind and always willing to come to their aid. This kind of message is not uncommon in the collections of transcribed and revised folktales of the 18th and 19th century, and it’s distressing that those versions are often mistaken for the root stories – although they still sometimes contain the germs of the originals, they are very much products of their times and societies.

So, the irritation was the main thing, but then I couldn’t resist a story that had such a great character as the ungrateful dwarf, the kindly bear and the three bemused women, trying to make good lives for themselves in an ever stranger world.

Like Angela Carter, Lanagan seems to be interested in the rawer, messier, less moral incarnations of our familiar fairytales, but where they differ is that Lanagan’s story fully inhabits the folkloric style where Carter’s versions are self-conscious and ironic.

The final thing I love about Lanagan’s stories is that they’re full of GIRLS and WOMEN! All kinds of different ones! With different personalities! And they do things! In Tender Morsels there are two witches, both distinct and full-developed characters, with powers and flaws and everything. The novel deals with violence against women, but also with women’s sexuality and desires.

I can’t say I’d recommend them to help you get to sleep, but Margo Lanagan’s stories offer strange worlds to be explored.

But I was in for a shock one day at school, when I settled myself down in the Book Corner with the Ladybird Well-Loved Tales version of Hans Christian Anderson‘s text. The Mermaid died at the end? She didn’t marry the prince? And then was turned into a “Daughter of the Air”, and wasn’t allowed a Christian soul unless a zillion children did good deeds and something-something-virtue? What a letdown. Expecting a straightforward happy ending, I was utterly bewildered. Prince or no prince, I hadn’t been prepared for quite so much all-out morbidity, and if you asked me, this Daughters of the Air business just sounded a bit suspicious.

It’s one hell of a leap from the all-out romance of Disney’s riff on the story to Anderson. Disney takes Anderson’s curious young mermaid princess and gives her a bit of sass, focusing the story on themes of adolescence and coming of age and adding a saleable happy ending into the mix. It’s a common refrain on feminist blogs to say that Disney “sanitised the originals” (whatever “original” means). Here, though, Disney at least allows Ariel her desires, even if they are chastely presented, and allows their fulfilment at the end. By contrast, Anderson focuses on the dangers of curiosity and makes the story arc a recognisably tragic one – and later, it seems, tacked on the stuff about the Daughters of the Air to add in a moral imperative for the reader: children, be good, else the mermaid will never earn her Christian soul!

In both stories, identity and self-knowledge is a key theme – and both mermaids are willing to give up their voices and identities for love and to gain access to the exciting, adult, otherworld of the land. There’s something problematic about both of them – with Anderson’s version, as Marina Warner puts it in From The Beast To The Blonde: On Fairy Tales And Their Tellers, “the story’s chilling message is that cutting out your tongue is still not enough. To be saved, more is required: self-obliteration , dissolution.” With Disney, Warner ruminates that “the issue of female desire dominates the film… the verb ‘want’ falls from the lips of Ariel more often than any other – until her tongue is cut out”, concluding that – however much we want to cry “sanitised!” – it is more that in the film “romance constitutes the ultimate redemption, and romantic love, personified by the prince, the justification of desire”. So it’s a kind of sanitising, but it’s also a secularising.

All of which brings me to The Flight of the Mermaid, Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao‘s adaptation of the tale, a wonderful picture book, now recently reprinted by India-based publishing house Tara Books. This version re-energises Anderson’s original storyline and tells it in such a way that it becomes, devoid of its Victorian moralising, a genuinely life-affirming, feminist story. The real achievement, though, is that it keeps the Daughters of the Air stuff, and Anderson’s story structure, but tells the story in such a way that a happy ending is forged. And it’s an ending that retains the sense for wanderlust Disney gives its heroine, but doesn’t end in the mermaid trading selfhood or identity for marriage – at the same time neatly avoiding Anderson’s preachy, morbid shutdown of female desire or personal autonomy.

But let’s start with basic facts: the book is gorgeous. Check it out!

Flight of the Mermaid – skipping out the diminuitive little from the title for a start – is a treat for the senses from start to finish. Beautifully letter-pressed on tactile, thick-grain paper, the cover has a press-out fish shape which doubles as a bookmark and reveals the mermaid herself underneath. The book is fully illustrated with acclaimed artist Bhajju Shyam‘s distinctive artwork in the Gond tribal style, and the results are a wonderful, fresh contrast to the European visualisations of this story I’ve become so used to. Look how colourful it is!

The title of the book also describes the ending (skip to after the grey blockquotes if you don’t want the detail spoilered!) – the mermaid comes to the realisation that the prince, though he is fond of her, does not love her romantically. She is saddened, but will not kill him – the only way she can save her own life – and chooses to sacrifice herself instead: yes, familiar Anderson territory. And yet:

Slowly, the truth came over her – her plight had nothing to do with the prince at all… he knew nothing of her, and could not carry the weight of her dreams.

And at the point where, in Anderson, her tragic end is mitigated only by the Daughters of the Air announcing “welcome to the airy feminine purgatory party!”, Wolf, Rao and Shyam show the mermaid’s transition into the air as a change, not an ending:

“Who are you?” she asked, and found that her voice had returned.

“We are the daughters of the air, they answered. “And now you are one of us.”

The mermaid was delighted. “I was born into water,” she said to them. “And I know the world on the shore too. Only the air is left to explore, and it seems to hold more freedom than sea or land.”

The air is, logically, her next destination on a continuous journey. Always on the move, the mermaid’s real aim is constant self-discovery and adventure. Visually, in each of her phases on land, sea, and air, she retains her flowing hair and colourful attributes, whether they are feathers or scales. Her identity is always hers, and is never relinquished.

It’s a wonderfully executed blend of the positive points of both Anderson’s text and the optimism the Disney generation have come to expect from the story, and for parents, schools and people who love beautifully made books, I just can’t recommend Tara Books highly enough.

We managed to grab five minutes of co-author Gita Wolf’s time, via email, to ask her a little about the book – why this story?

“We felt that the story had universal resonance,” says Gita. “It was both a coming-of-age tale as well as the story of a journey (both literal and spiritual). When we first told the story to Bhajju Shyam, he related to it right away. ‘That’s exactly it!’ he said, ‘That’s what it feels like to come into a completely new element – like when I traveled to another country for the first time. I lost my language, and it felt like I was [as Anderson’s mermaid experiences when she loses her voice] walking on knives.'”

How about the ending? “We wanted to give the tale a feminist twist, and not focus on the loss of the prince as an absolute tragic end of everything – nor did we want the Disney ending. In keeping with Anderson’s basic narrative, the Mermaid in a sense does go up in the air, but the air is here a new element to explore, and her journey will continue.”

All hail the flying mermaid!

Order your copy from Tara’s UK distributors or on Amazon.

Find out more

• See more of the interior of the book at Drawn.ca here
• Check out the Tara Books blog here, and read about their work in their recent article on For Books’ Sake. Be sure to check out their catalogue (available on their homepage as a PDF file – I’m especially excited for Sita’s Ramayana!

Warm thanks to Maegan Chadwick-Dobson, Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao at Tara Books for taking the time to talk to us, sending us parcels and being generally lovely.

The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.

– Angela Carter, The Tiger’s Bride

Fairy tales weren’t always Disney cartoons. Once upon a time, they were part of an oral tradition passed down from mother to child, cautionary tales about the horrors that lurked in the woods, and the dangers of going off the path. They were much bloodier back then, much scarier, and with a lot more impact. Then along came the Brothers Grimm and Hans Anderson, and other men who liked writing things down and only wrote down what they liked. The fairy tales got sillier from there, cautionary tales without any of the blood and violence that made them worth paying heed to in the first place. They only got worse with Disney (though some of us love Disney movies, occasionally even with good reason).

Fortunately, it doesn’t end with a happily ever after. Modern authors have taken the sanitised narratives we were all told as kids, and twisted them, into something we recognise but appreciate in a very different way. They’re still the stories we know, but not only has the blood and gore reappeared, they’ve grown up in much the same way as our society has grown up. Rather than warning our children that they should stick to the route life’s prepared for them, walk the road to happy marriage and 2.4 kids, they instead encourag stepping away from the traditional routes, rebelling against authority, and reclaiming traditional feminine roles which are often painted in a negative light. Or they tell grown-up stories about characters traditionally relegated to the most sanitised view of childhood. There are countless modern fables which also play much the same roles as traditional folk tales, from the insanely popular wizard kids of Harry Potter to fables shrouded in mystery and played on a concept album.

Through all of this, there’s one book which, in my opinion, has succeeded in reclaiming stories once used to repress and control women (and by extension everyone else) to a far greater extent than any other: Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. As Carter herself asserted, the stories therein are not simply updated or “adult” versions of the traditional stories (she really hated this idea). Rather, they build on the essence of the originals; not those set down by the likes of Perrault, but the original stories, those told in the oral tradition. From a linguistic or anthropological point of view, it’s a fascinating experiment: how would those stories have evolved and changed over the years if the game of Chinese whispers that is oral storytelling hadn’t been brought to a stop?

The result, updated versions of Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast (twice), Puss In Boots, Snow White (kinda), Red Riding Hood (two or three times), plus a vampire story and a sort of
Red Riding Hood/Alice Through The Looking Glass amalgam, is a brilliantly charged piece of work. Charged emotionally, through our strongly forged connection to these stories; charged sexually, through the transition of the stories from cautionary tales to fables of teenage awakening; and crammed with ideas and themes, many of which it’s fair to say would be beyond the young minds to which these stories were once told. Instead of telling children how to behave themselves, they tell adults how not to behave themselves.

As I mentioned above, the traditional versions of these stories are very often about staying “on the path”, the course society sets for an individual based on their gender and circumstances. Nowhere is this more evident than in the traditional Red Riding Hood story; a little girl follows a shortcut through the woods, deviating from the way she’s been told to go, and as a result she and a matriarchal figure are murdered by a vicious beast, or rescued by a male hero who is otherwise absent from the story. In Carter’s versions, the little girl leaves the path, and the rewards, while terrifying, are great. In The Company of Wolves, the wolf becomes an image of feral sexuality, with the adolescent Red Riding Hood sleeping with him at the end. In The Werewolf, Granny herself is the wolf; a certain metaphor for how traditional ideas of the feminine role are monstrous – Red Riding Hood kills her, and inherits all her stuff. In Wolf Alice, which merges a variant of the story with elements of Through The Looking Glass, the titular character emerges from a feral childhood, not into the socialised womanhood which the nuns taking care of her demand, but instead redeeming the vampiric Duke in whose care she is left by the power of her sexual awakening.

Sexual power is a primary theme in many of the stories. Carter refutes the view of female sexuality as passive and submissive; such sex is presented as a sterile, pleasureless experience. The titular story, and also the longest, goes into this in detail with a version of the Bluebeard story set in the 1930s. The narrator, also the heroine, marries the familiar murderer. Rather than merely dying, as in some versions of the fairy tale, or being rescued by a male saviour, it is her mother, a badass world-travelling tiger hunter, who comes to the rescue. The “saviour male” is replaced with a blind piano tuner who ultimately becomes the heroine’s lover, taking the sexual emphasis away from the visual with which Bluebeard is so obsessed, and placing it firmly where it belongs: in the realm of the sensual.

For Carter, the beasts are not terrifying, but liberating; in one of her takes on Beauty and the Beast, The Tiger’s Bride, Beauty herself becomes a beast, instead of bringing the Beast back to humanity. I have to say this is probably my favourite story in the collection, with its beautiful emphasis on primal power and strength rather than civilised control. Beauty is at first an object, a thing given to the Beast to repay a gambling debt. It’s through her own acknowledgement and understanding of her bestial side that she claims freedom, and achieves her transformation, which in a reversal of the traditional fairy tale beast transformation is not a horrifying punishment, but a liberating reward.

In many ways, these stories aren’t for children. They’re complex narratives which many adults would struggle with. On the other hand, these stories, which challenge the expected ideas and cautionary tales of behaving like good girls and boys, are in a way exactly what we should be telling our kids: there are terrible things out there, and some of them are you. It’s no longer worth staying on the path. It’s time to explore the woods.

New to Carter? Other things to try:

• The Company of Wolves was turned into a film, although it’s more based on Carter’s radio version of the story. Contains more fairy tales, and is a better werewolf movie than some recent films.
• For more Angela Carter, there’s The Magic Toyshop
• For more modified, subversive fairy tales, you could do worse than check out Neil Gaiman. His short story Snow, Glass, Apples, which is available in Smoke and Mirrors, recasts Snow White as a vampire. He’s also tackled a number of other fairy tales from various cultures in his numerous different works, and written a few fables of his own that aren’t too far removed.

In his time, Russell has worked both on and off stage in theatre, and is currently working on the fringes of the legal profession. In his spare time, he can usually be found hanging round the comments on BadRep like a bad smell.<---- his words, not ours! ;)

The drill, as per Part One: to take a look at some fairytale-inspired pop songs (and occasionally, where appropriate their music videos). Just a personal list, no order of preference, and please do leave your own links and recs in the comments! And now, ONWARDS.

PART TWO OF MIRANDA’S PILE OF POP PRINCESSERY, FROM 5 to 1!

5. Paramore: Brick By Boring Brick

Continuing the pop-punk theme from number 6 (Skye Sweetnam), here’s Hayley Williams, demanding that you GO GET YOUR SHOVEL so that we can BURY THE CASTLE. Heavy handed and earnest the sentiment may be, but I won’t hear anything against it. Never did like the video much – it’s like a depressing version of the 1980s Clarks Magic Steps shoes ad (remember that?). Hayles is a ball of energy when she sings live, but here she spends most of the sequence dolefully marooned on a giant swing while her younger self gets lost in a castle – but the song’s catchy as hell. BA-DA-BA BA-DA-BA-BA-DA!, etc.

4. Sara Bareilles – Fairy Tale

Piano-hammering, bluesy Sara Bareilles nails it with this neat slice of deadpan songwriting, and the video’s a delight. The tall blonde lets out a cry of despair, says/”Woulda cut it myself if I knew men could climb hair!/I’ll have to find another tower somewhere / and keep away from the windows…”

3. Nicki Minaj: Moment 4 Life

In itself, the song’s not about fairytales per se, until you watch it with the video, and look at what R&B/rap diva Nicki Minaj has done with it.

Nicki’s Barbie-inspired image and oft-compared-to-Lil’ Kim/Lady Gaga aesthetics have inspired some debate, which I won’t go into here. This vid, on the surface, is a standard fluffy fairytale wedding sequence with some added bling. But it contains some little touches that made me smile – like the Disney-style manuscript page at the start: Once Upon a time there was a King named Nicki. One day, while sitting on her throne… The use of “king” alongside the female pronoun is striking, especially when Nicki doesn’t then show up in a Do It Like A Dude-style scenario – instead, we find her dolling up in a ballgown and sparkly ultra-femme Cinderella-style heels. In this very moment I’m King / In this very moment I slay Goliath with the sling, is her battlecry as she flounces off to her fairytale wedding (in a pink wig) to Canadian rapper Drake (who alludes a little to kingship in his own lyrics. Sorry Drake, but the Magic Kingdom belongs to King Nicki. You’ll have to be the royal consort). It’s also a nice touch that Minaj plays her own fairy godmother in the opening preamble, and that it’s not clear what either of them wants (though I concede this also owes quite a bit to the bewildering mixture of clunky dialogue, pointless Minaj fanbase in-jokes, and a cringingly bad attempt at a Brit accent). Thanks to these little quirks, the whole vid’s a slightly left-of-centre affair, and much the better for it. Within the parameters of what she’s doing, Nicki Minaj is doing genuinely interesting things, and making great pop to boot.

2. Natalia Kills: Wonderland

I include this, perhaps reluctantly, as it’s on the soundtrack to Beastly, the recent (and mind-numbingly bland) teen-movie retelling of Beauty and the Beast. It wants to be a punchy, stompy serving of electropop, but it’s somehow just not very memorable. Never mind, though: the video is here to HEAVILY COMPENSATE and hit you round the face with ANGELA CARTERY TROPES BINGO! It’s as though Natalia’s pitched a tent down the road from Nicki Minaj, but in an effort to kick some carnality into the visuals she’s kicked the heart out too. It’s like Sucker Punch in music vid form – Red Riding Hooded Natalia is arrested by riot police (off to a good start, I thought, until the words LOVE IS PAIN flashed across the screen) and escorted, struggling, to a mad hatter-style party where she eats some food suggestively and picks her way along a table littered with cupcakes decorated with Barbie-doll body parts. This all happens between bursts of GRAPHICS++ where the word CENSORED keeps appearing on her mouth and occasionally covers the whole screen. This isn’t a critique of anything, more just a reminder that THIS SHIT IS EDGY. The whole thing’s a bit like Cliff Notes: The Bloody Chamber mashed in a blender and then force fed through your eyes, and with all the subtlety of “Woman! Woe, mannn!”. It’s as thematically undemanding as Minaj’s effort but without the endearing quirks, or at least, none that don’t feel forced and nicked from Lady Gaga’s cutting room floor.

The best thing in the whole video is the rabbit.

1. The Imagined Village: Tam Lin Retold

And now, I throw aside towers, princesses and dresses (and, arguably, “pop”) in favour of something slightly different.

Rob’s post yesterday mentioned that fairy tales are more diverse than we often care to think. There’s an entire tropeful of “quick witted women” out there alongside the “passive princess” stereotype, if you do your reading, and the Scottish ballad/folk story of Tam Lin is an example.

Here’s a neat blog post about the Tam Lin story which compares it a little to Beauty and the Beast. In short, daughter of a nobleman becomes pregnant by Tam Lin, notoriously predatory forest-dwelling faery guy. She sets out to claim him as the father and learns that he is in thrall to the Faery Queen, who may soon be sending him to Hell as part of a tithe of souls she has agreed to pay. Janet decides to rescue him, and ultimately succeeds. Rescuing him involves pulling him off his horse, and holding on to him while he transforms into various wild beasts (a la Peleus and Thetis, but with the gender roles reversed and more consensual!), and hot coals, at which point she sensibly chucks him into a well.

This version of the story, recorded for the Imagined Village project, updates the setting and has the Tam Lin character as an illegal immigrant. After an initial one night stand at a club, Janet seeks him out during her pregnancy and agrees to attend his court hearing, during which his transformations are metaphorical rather than physical as the lawyers paint him as a “victim” and a “loser”, and so on. The song is a mesmerising fusion of musical styles and cultures – dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah provides vocals, with assistance from folk singer and musician Eliza Carthy.

This take concentrates on Tam Lin and Janet as a unit, which means Janet’s status as the POV character is changed, and it’s less about her sole quest to tame the wild, fae Tam Lin (and resolve the social isolation her unmarried pregnancy threatens by claiming the husband of her choosing). Instead, it’s centred round their efforts together to change the court’s view of Tam Lin as an “alien” so that they can be together. It really works, though, and I think it illustrates the fact that folk and fairy tales are enduring not simply because of “patriarchal norms” or “tradition” per se, but also because they are patient to a whole range of interpretations and ways to tell a story.

Bonus Track:

• The Mountain Goats and Kaki King: Thank You Mario! But Our Princess Is In Another Castle! – a song from the POV of Toad from Super Mario. Poor Toad! His entire purpose is to thanklessly occupy castles and tell Mario that the Princess is not in them. And then guide Mario on to the next castle. Personally I think there’s scope for some Marxist Class Struggle here; Toad should rebel! And form the Toadstool Republican Popular Front! But that’s just me. Anyway, it seemed appropriate to include a nod to the Absent Prize Princesses classic games like Mario and Zelda are built around, despite the fact they’re hidden off-screen for almost all the action.




That’ll be all from me. Feel free to rec your own songs, vids, and bands in the comments!

]]> /2011/05/06/fairy-tale-fest-ten-postmodern-pop-fairytales-for-your-ipod-part-two/feed/ 11 5280 /2011/05/05/fairy-tale-fest-twelve-postmodern-pop-princesses/ /2011/05/05/fairy-tale-fest-twelve-postmodern-pop-princesses/#comments Thu, 05 May 2011 08:00:11 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=5107 On the morning of the Royal Wedding, the street outside BadRep Towers was saturated with grown women wearing plastic tiaras. Rob and I became vaguely concerned we might get turned into pumpkins or something, and decided to take refuge in the (weirdly, wonderfully empty) British Museum for the day to regain a sense of perspective.

But it seems we’re all in the pink plastic grip of fantasy princesshood, so I’ve decided to give in for a moment and take a look at some fairytale-themed pop music – but with a little bit of smarts and sass thrown in. Songs that turn tropes upside down or inside out, or give the princesses unexpected vigourous voice. In this post-Shrek epoch we’re living in, it’s a pretty well-travelled road, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun.

The reliably-entertaining folks over at Comics Alliance are also having a Princess Moment, which this post is intended as a sort of humorous companion to. It’s not really an Order of Preference so much as a Pile of Stuff, because I’m not in the mood today to be ranking things in a heirarchy. A Pile of Stuff is way better.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: This isn’t, of course, the be-all and end-all of anything – just a personal take – so I’d love to hear your own suggestions in the comments, with no rules on style! The only rules were 1) fairytale themed; and 2) attempting (if not always succeeding) to do something interesting.

PART ONE OF MIRANDA’S PILE OF POP PRINCESSERY, FROM 10 to 6!

10. Janelle Monae: Sir Greendown

I throw up my hands here – this is a flagrant excuse for me to talk about Janelle Monae. Her image is more robot warrior rock star than princess. This track is one of her dreamier moments, and I admit that aside from a faintly Angela Carter-esque meet me at the tower/the dragon wants a bite/of our love moment, it’s actually pretty straightforward prince-awaitin’ fare – but actually that makes it a funny little island in the context of the rest of her work (check out the bolshy Motown-tinged slice of pure aural glory that is Violet Stars Happy Hunting! and you’ll see what I mean). Monae is fond of her concept albums, and combines a sci-fi android alter-ego with a deep- seated love for The Wizard of Oz. But the forbidden love of her android persona Cyndi Mayweather and the human millionaire Greendown (the storyline of her album and EPs) kinda is a space-age fairytale. (Oh, and go and listen to Wondaland, too.)

9. Kate Bush: The Red Shoes

Because it’s good to be obvious. For the unfamiliar, Kate made an entire album based on both the Hans Christian Anderson fairytale of the same name (as well as the 1948 film, which also drew on the same text). The story itself is unrivalled, if nightmarish, lecturing Victoriana is your thing – read Anderson’s text here and cringe! – but for Bush it proved fertile songwriting ground. The story’s about a girl whose vain attraction to a pair of red shoes (RED! IN CHURCH! SCANDAL) is punished by an angel – she finds she is unable to take the shoes off, or stop dancing, and ends up having to ask the local executioner to cut off her feet. Which then chase her around. Yeah, her disembodied feet, still dancing, follow her around and haunt her. In the end she repents thoroughly …and dies. As you do. Kate Bush’s version, on the other hand, is a hymn to dancing the dream and making the dream come true and enjoying your desires, even so-called dangerous ones. Or as Prof Bonnie Gordon puts it in this essay, “by singing and reclaiming this story meant to constrain women’s bodies and their erotic potential, Bush confronts and overturns its original inherent violence.”

8. Emilie Autumn: Shallott

Ah, Madame Autumn. Prone to self-indulgence on occasion she may be (The Art of Suicide just bores me, for example) but when she’s on form, she’s good fun. I much prefer her when she’s interacting with a story or old folk tale trope that already exists, like, say, with Rose Red from her debut album Enchant, as opposed to when she’s languidly drawling about how Dead Is The New Alive on far less ethereal later LP Opheliac. Here’s Shallott, in which the famous tragic lady of Arthurian legend and Tennyson’s poem gets a soapbox of her own. Driven to distraction by sheer boredom, preternaturally aware that her life story’s already been written for her, archly quoting her own poem, and almost determined to die as flamboyantly as possible, Autumn’s take on the Lady may be angsty, but she’s also deliciously sarcastic – now some drama queen is gonna write a song for me!, she spits. Worth braving the gothic-girl-lost frills and flounces for.

7. CocoRosie: Werewolf

When I saw CocoRosie live a year or two ago, they took the stage in fake moustaches and proceeded to blow me away. Lyrically, only they know what Werewolf is really about, but I love the sudden changes of direction, the stream-of-consciousness narratives, and the thoughtful melancholy that hangs around my speakers in clouds after the music’s stopped playing. Corny movies make me reminisce / They break me down easy on this generic love shit / First kiss frog and princess … I’m-a shake you off though, get up on that horse and / Ride into the sunset, look back with no remorse…

6. Skye Sweetnam: Part Of Your World

I wanted to include a Disney cover- something done as a pop-punk number with a gutsy, bouncy female vocal. In my head, with a change of context, some spit and elbow grease, the song might come out kinda like the Disney Princess version of No Doubt’s Just A Girl.

A survey of YouTube’s trove of punk/rock Disney covers reveals a really male-heavy bunch of bands. (Ladies, where are you? Where’s my hardcore cover of Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo, eh?) This was the closest match for a female-voxed attempt at this song (Ariel’s big ballady number from The Little Mermaid) that YouTube could offer me – I’d have preferred something rougher round the edges, but it’s still good fun. Avril-esque Skye Sweetnam, then: she’s supported Britney live, provided Barbie’s singing voice on a Mattel DVD, fronts metal band Sumo Cyco – VARIED CAREER TRAJECTORY – and overall sounds like Bif Naked on a sugar high (no bad thing in my book). Album B-side Wolves and Witches is also sugary fun, if lyrically a bit join-the-dots.

Haters should note that Miley Cyrus has also had a crack at this song, and by God, she phones it in like nobody’s business, making Skye’s effort sound edgier than Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring by comparison.

SO! Readers. Could you do better than Skye? Dust off your Fender. Record it. Get in touch. And I will lavish THE FAME OF BADREP upon you. Provided you don’t sound like a cat in a tumble dryer. (Possibly even if you do.) Extra points if you do Gaston from Beauty and the Beast as a B-side. No wildly feminism-relevant reason. I just like it. (I use antlers in all of my DECCCC-o-rating…)

On that note, come back tomorrow morning for Part Two, in which we discover why Nicki Minaj, Paramore, and … Benjamin Zephaniah (trust me, he’s relevant) are rubbing shoulders.

]]> /2011/05/05/fairy-tale-fest-twelve-postmodern-pop-princesses/feed/ 4 5107 /2011/05/04/fairy-tale-fest-fairy-tales-in-context/ /2011/05/04/fairy-tale-fest-fairy-tales-in-context/#comments Wed, 04 May 2011 07:05:39 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=5214 Okay, it’s probably not a hugely shocking revelation to point out that stories are influenced by the social conditions surrounding their writing. As a general principle this is pretty obvious. However, more specific examples and details may be slightly less obvious, so what we’re going to do here is take a look at the differences in the role of female characters between 15th and 16th century fairy tales, and the changes in society at the same time. Hopefully this will be both interesting and illustrative.

Begin the Béguinage

In the late middle ages (and please note that I am by no means suggesting the late middle ages were a good time to be in, I’m just covering some things that would become unavailable in later centuries) there were several avenues by which a woman might live independently. Béguinages offered something akin to the male guild systems, a community by which women might live collectively and pursue a trade, functioning much like convents but without the whole “retiring from the world to pursue a life of spirituality” element.

Many small industries were dominated by female crafters at the time, particularly the production of votive candles, and the brewing of beer (which, prior to increases in production scales in the 1500s was mostly a home industry).

Lastly, at the opposite end of the scale to the beguinages, there was the sex industry. (This is not to suggest that independent woman meant prostitute in the late middle ages, as some people often imply. See above for counter-examples.) Disclaimers aside, municipally sanctioned prostitution was both common and acceptable in the latter part of the 15th century, and provided one route to an independent life.

…the courtesan was not a phenomenon on the margin of society, but one of its essential components… and constituted an important stage in the diversification of social roles and of labour.

-Achillo Olivieri, Eroticism and Social Groups in Sixteenth-Century Venice

By the mid-16th century, much of this had changed. Economic conditions had all but eradicated the béguinage; the production of goods had switched to a male-dominated large scale industry; the rise of Protestantism had seen the closure of many convents; and socially acceptable sex-work was done away with by changing religious mores and the increasing prevalence of syphilis (the “French evil”) and other STDs as public health threats from 1493 onwards. The Renaissance may have improved overall quality of life, but in many ways it proved a step backwards for the opportunities of Western European women.

Meanwhile, in the world of fiction…

So, that’s how society changed; what do we see happening in fiction over the same time period? In pre-16th century work we find heroines taking on roles the Grimms would later depict as “bad for a girl but bold for a boy”. We see, in an early Catalan variant of The Waters of Life, an adventurous princess succeeding where here brothers have failed, winning out through bravery and compassion to restore her home. In the fabliaux of France and Italy we see female characters taking the lead in stories that range from the bawdy to the obscene, which reflect the assumption that of course women will sometimes take the initiative.
Even moving away from the fantastic and magical tales we find similar characterisations in more serious works such as that of Madonna Lisetta in Boccaccio’s Decameron.

By the mid-16th century the characters were beginning to take the forms that would be most recognisable to most modern readers. Here we see the shift from the active, protagonistic female character to the passive, receptive object to whom fairy tales happen.

Straparola’s magic tales, dating to 1553, deliver a mixed message on sex and gender. The older tales in the collection stay fairly true to their roots, but the newer ones show female characters who must fear men, who must fear the consequences of associating with them. No longer do they take the lead, instead they are there to be won, as with the story of three brothers who rescue a princess and fall to arguing over who should wed her. She doesn’t get a say in the matter.

If Straparola’s collection shows the transition, Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone (1636) gives us the conclusion. By this point all the stories reflect the new order of things. Female characters are there now almost entirely to receive the actions of the male leads, without much choice in things themselves. A large portion of Basile’s tales revolve around unwanted and involuntary pregnancies. This tone continues all the way through to at least the early 19th century, and provides the link to the next point of this post.

And now, speculation!

Right, this next bit is somewhat more speculative: There is some research suggesting that up until around the start of the 16th century women had a good deal of control over their fertility (check the further reading section at the end here for more details). Between 1500 and 1700 this ability substantially declined, leaving women far more susceptible to the consequences of sex. We can suggest a few reasons for this decline: Firstly, there was the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum in 1487, which branded midwifes who provided abortifacients as witches, and lead to witch-hunt panics through Western Europe. At the same time there was the rising tension caused by the Protestant Reformation, which saw increased conflict between Reformers and Counter-Reformers, and lead to both the Protestant and Catholic churches being increasingly zealous in order to demonstrate their own faithfulness.

There are arguments (see particularly Ruth Bottigheimer’s essay Fertility Control and the Modern European Fairy-Tale Heroine available in this anthology) that the change in the role of the fictional woman and the change in real life control over fertility are utterly bound together. The real dangers of sex became the over-arching dangers of the fairy-tale plot, the imprisonment in towers, the kidnappings, captivity, and general disempowerment. Thus the tales of the Grimms, in which “men act, women are acted upon.”

…old concepts took on a new force and came to dominate… Women in tale collections no longer survived by their wits… Instead, their bodies became vehicles of “honour” and “dishonour”.
– Ruth Bottigheimer

So yes, the overall point here is that considering the representations of gender in fairy tales is not quite so simple as just going “Cor, Disney/Grimm/Perrault were a bit crap at gender, eh?” There are myriad other factors that go into the formation of a story, as hopefully this (incredibly brief) overview of some has demonstrated.

Other stuff on vaguely related notes that’s worth reading:

• John Riddle’s Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West
• Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale
• Patricia Hannon’s Fabulous Identities: Women’s Fairytales in Seventeenth Century France
]]> /2011/05/04/fairy-tale-fest-fairy-tales-in-context/feed/ 2 5214 /2011/05/03/fairy-tale-fest-is-it-really-disneys-fault/ /2011/05/03/fairy-tale-fest-is-it-really-disneys-fault/#comments Tue, 03 May 2011 08:00:49 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=4223 Disney princesses have a BadRep with feminists, and let’s face it, it’s easy to see why. Even the recent ones have waists which are about as thick as their wrists, and the individual life lessons from each could be perceived as so warped as to have become an internet meme.

But is this really a case of “Disney-fication”, with the studio taking fairy tales and imposing ruthless mainstream norms on them? There is a huge body of work which looks at folk stories from a feminist perspective, and I’m not so qualified to talk about that. What I do find interesting is how incredibly polarised much of the source material was in the first place.



Witches: warts, not waifs. (Source: Wikipedia.)

In the European fairy tales which made it big in England and the US (mostly Grimm and some French romances), good people are Beautiful and bad people are Ugly. This is true whether you’re a stepsister, a witch or an ogre; physical ugliness goes along with agressive or dangerous behaviour every time. Good = Beautiful, and this is not negotiable. (Try the reverse: try finding anyone ugly who you’re meant to cheer for. You’ve got maybe a 1% chance. Less if they’re female.)

It gets better though, because that “bad” behaviour is very specific: it is always an act against the interests of the Heroine or Hero. Being a female magic-user doesn’t make you a witch; you could be a fairy godmother. No-one asks the Godmothers what they spend the rest of their time doing, they are entirely defined by whether they bless or curse the Heroine. In some tales, it’s only because one out of thirteen of them is not given an invitation that she decides to curse the child – would the others have acted similarly if it had been one or more of them instead? We don’t know. But once the curse is given, that Godmother is fair game for a horrible death and probably had a secret hooked nose all along. The Disney versions of Fairy Godmothers may be tittering clouds of pink benevolence, but they aren’t often described as “kind” in the tales – they are only judged as “Good” or “Bad” by whether they’re currently on our side or not.

It’s also problematical if we use behaviour to judge who the “good girl” is. The modern versions of Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are all very similar: beautiful, virtuous daughters who get into trouble and need rescuing. It might be a fall into poverty, or danger from an outsider (new stepmother, hot men a wolf) but there’s one critical element to being the Good girl and that is passivity. Red Riding Hood doesn’t kill the wolf. Cinderella runs away and is found (hunted down door-to-door, really) by the Prince, without announcing herself even up to the moment that the shoe goes on. He and her fairy Godmother are the ones taking all the action to save her. Snow White / Sleeping Beauty are unconscious/dead.

We already saw in Markgraf’s movie review of Red Riding Hood that a young woman choosing the wrong man could derail society’s plans (in a time when arranged marriages to a virgin were crucial). All these messages are saying that you need to be compliant, dutiful and passive. If you are a woman who is aggressive, demanding, loud, insists on her own needs or has control over her life, chances are you’re a wicked stepmother and only a few days away from the awesome kind of ending Disney oddly decided to leave out:

“That she should be thrown into a cask stuck around with sharp nails, and that two white horses should be put to it, and should drag it from street to street till she is dead.”
The Goose Girl – Brothers Grimm

The destiny of the Hero is often no less automatic. He is invariably given a beautiful Princess as a prize, to be his wife. Winning her hand is sometimes the only reason he takes on the quest in the first place. The task is often set by her father, who expects the Hero to be killed instead of succeeding, and at no time does the woman have any say in this arrangement.

So given the source material for the stories which Disney decided to take on, if they remained roughly true to the spirit of the tale, is it really fair to bash Disney as much as we do?

Oh hell yes.

First of all, they have a choice on which ones to produce. Chrissy Derbyshire in her essay “Toads and Diamonds” for the anthology “Vs” (which looks at Duality in magic, mythology and religion) points out that there are tales where the magic is entirely neutral, such as a Genie granting wishes. If the person making the wish is bad, sucks to be them. If they are altruistic and peaceful, they’ll probably be okay. There are plenty of tales Disney could have gone with which say “a person’s actions define them”, not “poverty and an evil stepmother can only be solved by marrying the right guy”.

Now okay, not all of the stories which deviate from the “good gets rewarded” trope would make great movies. I think it’s a Brothers Grimm tale which reads roughly (and I am not making this up) “Little Erik was a good boy and never did anything wrong, but one he died anyway because that’s just how it goes sometimes.” I can see how choosing your targets for conversion to animation is a valid excuse.

Even within that though, there’s still the question of the famous Disney poetic licence. They have a history of sanitising and whitewashing these stories for maximum profit, and it’s very rarely to inject any feminist ideas. Sure, in the 90s the women such as Belle in Beauty and the Beast became Independent and Argumentative… but only in strictly approved mainstream ways, to entirely fit the current belief of what would be PC. There are no lesbians in Disney, no women who don’t want a lifelong relationship by the end. It may be that the Victorians had already santised the tales by the time Disney picked them up, but that only works as an excuse for so long.

Okay, Sleeping Beauty physically can’t save herself – there’s no way Disney could have got around that – but even when they try to be PC in recent efforts it is only ever in a way which won’t scandalise the lowest common denominator of American audiences. The source material may praise beauty, passivity and rescuing, but Disney have never hesitated to edit other aspects of the stories to something more palatable. Even in recent times when the female characters actually have, well, character, the one aspect which apparently mustn’t change is the straining of credibility that their tiny bodies wouldn’t collapse under the weight of their own organs. (Check the link in the first paragraph. Look at Jasmine’s waist and wrists. Or Ariel’s. Sleeping Beauty is presumably wearing a corset, but I’m not sure if that’s an improvement when you’re marketing at six year-olds.)

Now, I’m a guy who hasn’t seen many of the Disney Princess movies more than a dimly-remembered once, I haven’t read the reconstructed feminist versions of fairy tales, and my love of Angela Carter aside I’m much less qualified to write about this stuff than… well, most of the rest of Team BadRep.

So we’re going to town on this one. Oh yes.

All this week we’re having a Feminist Fairytale Fest here at BadRep. We’ll be looking at the incredibly brutal original versions which became censored, at modern reworkings, and at comment from feminists on how to find amazing nuggets of self-agency and adventuring by women in well-known classics!

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