Struggling as usual to come up with the ‘pop culture’ bit of the feminist pop culture adventure that you and I are embarking on together, I hit upon a brilliant idea: I could write something about the pop culture of the 1800s! So here I am talking about traditional Anglo-American music. Problem solved.
I was also inspired by a question from @FeministInti to her twitter followers: do you know any folk songs that feature gender-based violence? The answer is yes, AND HOW. In a few moments we had amassed enough for a limited edition CD box set of traditional songs about rape, domestic violence and murdered women.
It tends to be these songs that a lot of modern folkish artists have picked up on. Yes, I’m looking at you Nick Cave. And you, Decemberists, although I love you. There are also a lot (a LOT) of waiflike folk girls with guitars singing about how love is like a cloud or they’re not sure which handbag matches their heart, as parodied by Bill Bailey.
As an antidote to the murdery and misogynist on the one hand and the mindlessly insipid and pathetic on the other I thought I would take this opportunity to share and celebrate some traditional songs in which women come out on top.
Note: Because the songs are hundreds of years old in some cases there’s quite a lot of variety over names and lyrics. I managed to find versions of nearly all of them on Spotify and have made a collaborative playlist so y’all can add any others you find: Kickass women in folk songs.
Cross-dressing adventurers
'The Female Sailor' broadsheet from the National Maritime Museum
Now THIS is what I’m talking about – songs about women dressing as sailors, hunters and highwaymen, whether to find their true love or just for kicks. Some of them sound a little unhinged: like Sovay, who is prepared to blow her lover’s head off if he gives up the love token she has given him. But the heroine in ‘The Golden Glove’ is very endearing as she cleverly arranges matters so that she can marry the man she loves (and “enjoy” him, as she sings gleefully).
If you’d like more stories of derring-do like this, I recommend Dianne Dugaw’s Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850.
Sovay
“Sovay Sovay all on a day
She dressed herself in man’s array
With a brace of pistols all at her side
To meet her true love, to meet her true love, for did she ride”
- Full lyrics
- Spotify: Pentangle – Sovay
When I Was A Fair Maid
“When I was a fair maid about seventeen
I listed in the navy for to serve the queen
I listed in the navy, a sailor lad to stand
For to hear the cannons rattling
and the music so grand”
The Golden Glove
“Coat waistcoat and trousers the young girl put on
And away she went a-hunting with her dog and her gun
And she hunted around where the farmer he did dwell
Because in her heart oh she loved him so well”
- Full lyrics
- Spotify: Alva – The Golden Glove
Bold William Taylor
“Then the captain stepped up to her, pleased well at what she’s done;
He’s gone and made her a bold commander, over a ship and all its men.”
Cowgirls
Just a couple of examples – ‘I Wanna Be A Cowboy’s Sweetheart’ is basically about a woman who wants to be a cowboy, the ‘sweetheart’ of the title is purely incidental, and ‘Belle Starr’ is about a real life wild west fugitive who had a number of famous fugitive lovers.
I Wanna Be A Cowboy’s Sweetheart
“I wanna pillow my head by the sleeping herd
while the moon shines down from above
I wanna strum my guitar, and yodellaheehoo,
that’s the life that I love!”
Belle Starr
“Eight lovers they say combed your waving black hair
Eight men knew the feel of your dark velvet waist
Eight men heard the sounds of your tan leather skirt
Eight men heard the bark of the guns that you wore”
- Full lyrics
- Spotify: Pete Seeger – Belle Starr
Bold and crafty women
The Crafty Maid and Lovely Joan outsmart their arrogant would-be seducers and make off with their horses. Sally Brown kicks the ass of the Cruel Youth, saving her own life and avenging the deaths of the ‘pretty maidens’ who went before her, and the Bonny Lass of Angelsey dances the king and 15 of his knights out of their swag.
The Crafty Maid’s Policy
“But as soon as the maid she saw him a’coming
She instantly then took her pistol in hand
Saying “Doubt not my skill, it is you I would kill
I will have you stand back or you are a dead man.”
Lovely Joan
“She’s robbed him of his horse and ring,
And left him to rage in the meadows green.”
- Full lyrics
- Spotify: Heather Wood – Lovely Joan
The Cruel Youth
“Lie there, lie there, you cruel young man,
Lie there lie there,” said she
“Six pretty maidens you’ve drowned here,
now go keep them company.”
- Full lyrics
- YouTube: Gerri Gribi – The Cruel Youth
The Bonny Lass of Angelsey
“She’s taken all their bucklers and swords
She’s taken their gold and their bright money
And back to the mountains she’s away
The bonnie lass of Anglesey”
Silver Dagger
The woman in Joan Baez’s version of the Silver Dagger decides not to risk getting her heart broken by keeping clear of love altogether. Whether she’s right or wrong, I like that she makes a choice.
“My daddy is a handsome devil
He’s got a chain five miles long
And on every link a heart does dangle
Of another maid he’s loved and wronged.”
- Full lyrics
- Spotify: Joan Baez – Silver Dagger
Thanks to my main song sources, Mudcat and Creative Folk!
Found Feminism: NASA doll from Fox News Shop
Bit of a shocker on the Found Feminism front. Our Viktoriya was on her travels recently and saw this at the airport…
NASA doll
…in a Fox News shop of all places.
It’s a female astronaut doll.
Now, no doubt you’re still reeling from that the shock that Fox News – bastion of feminism-hating, Sarah Palin-supporting, “family values” madness – is fielding a toy for girls that encourages them to study science and quite literally reach for the stars.
Here’s another doozy.
Look closer and you will see that – pink casing aside – there’s almost no other “girlification” going on with this toy. Sure, she’s standard issue doll shaped, but wearing a very functional, non-revealing, blue and black NASA jumpsuit. Even the tagline reads as pleasingly gender neutral: “Space Crew”.
And to cap it all off, she’s not even blonde.
Unlike Barbie.
Who when she went to space looked like The Invasion of The Ghastly Metallic Pink Shoulder Pads (clicky the link, but don’t say I didn’t warn you).
I can’t believe I’m typing this, but looks like we’ve got a genuine Found Feminism from Fox News. Wonders will never cease. Feeling pretty chuffed about that, actually – it’s one thing that you can see progress being made from friends, quite another from enemies.
Feminism: to infinity, and beyond!
- Found Feminism: an ongoing series of images, videos, photos, comics, posters or excerpts – anything really, which shows feminist ideas at work in the everyday world. What’s brightened your day? Share it here – send your finds to [email protected]!
Joanna Russ 1937-2011
Influential sci-fi author Joanna Russ died recently, aged 74. She was one of the first not only to be a major name in a male-dominated market, but to write specifically feminist SF.
I’m only familiar with a tiny portion of her work, but there are many memorable quotes which immediately show just where she was coming from (thanks to Ian S who sent in the third one to our Facebook page!):
“There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women.”
“Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.”
“In a perfect world, I would not have to be a feminist and gay activist, and I could spend my life discussing H.P. Lovecraft.”
I was going to compare Joanna Russ to an author who wrote in the same period but is now much more famous: Ursula Le Guin. What I didn’t know until yesterday was that Russ’s blistering short story “When It Changed” was directly inspired by Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Le Guin tried to break down gender expectations by showing universality – in Left Hand she has a planet of genderless people. What Russ was infuriated by was that the pronoun “he” was still used in that novel by default.
Joanna Russ was not aiming for that universality – she was all about binary. Her message wasn’t that gender expectations shouldn’t be forced onto individuals, it was that women are oppressed by men. Right now. Le Guin was often much more subtle – despite many aspects of feminism (and anti-patriarchy) in her most famous books such as the Earthsea Trilogy, she wouldn’t be as specific as this until she wrote Tehanu. In later novels such as Voices it is quite a few pages from the start of the book before the reader even discovers that the narrator is female – it is simply not important. With Russ, it was central and vital.
It’s tempting to look at some of the first feminist SF in the 1960s and 70s as being too enthusiastic: less considered or accurate because it had to shout twice as loud and was opening new ground. Russ did shout loudly, but she was dead right, and wow could she show it.
I’ve heard one account personally (and another on the internet) of women reading When It Changed and crying in the bookshop. It is only 8 pages long, and describes the coming of four men to a planet which suffered a plague 30 generations ago; all the male colonists have died, and women now reproduce by artificial fertilisation. They marry, work, explore, fight duels, and it doesn’t occur to anyone that men could be part of the picture. When the four newcomers greet them, their assumptions are so alien that the two groups can barely hold a conversation.
It won the Nebula award and was nominated for a Hugo. It is bitterly sad, and the men’s repeated assurance that “they have sexual equality on Earth, now” doesn’t even sound likely to the character saying it.
That female-only planet is an important part of Russ’ best-known work The Female Man. There, it is one of four places which she uses to explore the situations women are imprisoned by and wonder what could be instead. There is a version of the real world (at the time of writing); a much poorer America where the female character’s only hope for survival is marriage; the all-female planet from her previous short story; and a world where men and women are openly fighting a cold war against each other.
It is a staggeringly influential book. I can remember seeing it on every library sci-fi bookshelf since I was a child. The number of authors who quote it or write about it is huge.
“C.J. Cherryh and Lois McMaster Bujold have taken their cue from Russ, writing gung-ho Realpolitik space operas that make the author of ‘Gor’ look like the wimp he was.”
– Thomas M. Disch, ‘The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of’
“In my humble opinion Joanna Russ is simply one of the most important writers who has written in the United States in the last 50 years.”
– Samuel R. Delany
There is an entire book named On Joanna Russ.
The explicitly binary approach I’ve mentioned above can read offensively now, though Russ also shared many ideas in common with third-wave feminism and was a voice in later decades too. She praised Buffy when it first started, and was positive about slash fiction. But Joanna’s writing is not without its critics, especially regarding one aspect of The Female Man. There is a section (in the alternate world which has men and women openly at war) where any men deemed less masculine than others are used degradingly as ‘substitute women’ by the others. It is extremely offensive to trans people, and there is discussion online about how much this should count against Russ today. Her focus on a strict male/female binary was very much a product of the time, and she (quite truthfully) illustrated how men can bully those perceived as weaker, and how femininity in men is almost always linked with weakness, from the school playground onwards. (This is exactly what I was talking about in my post on modern alpha males, and why they can’t allow themselves to ever be seen to be ruled by a woman, even briefly.) The issue of Russ’s writings in the 70s is more complicated than that, though, and we’re hoping to look at that decade’s approach in more detail here on BadRep at some point in the future. Russ did, at least, retract her views in later life, albeit in an interview given at a convention rather than in any published work. For now, it should be noted that we’re not recommending her work without reservation – there are criticisms which need to be recognised.
Generally though, she continued to be acclaimed as a feminist in recent years after producing non-fiction works such as How To Suppress Women’s Writing and also further fiction. Her sci-fi isn’t as famous with modern readers as I feel it ought to be. When I was scouring the library bookshelves as a child and teen, her name (highly ranked in Feminist SF circles) never came up as a force in mainstream SF. I think it deserves to – When It Changed hasn’t lost any of its urgency or relevance, and I’ll certainly be reading The Female Man this week.
Here’s to a visionary and ground-breaking author who was able to brilliantly show the incredible web of assumptions and rules which not only affected women’s lives, but affected how they were allowed to write about it. Rarely has someone been able to show men’s assumptions as the intrusive, arrogant and bewildering prisons they can be.
“If you expect me to observe your taboos, I think you will have to be more precise as to exactly what they are.”
– Joanna Russ
At The Movies: Thor
I was very worried about this film, having watched the trailer and become fearful that it might go the way of the Hulk franchise. It had a similar feel to it – lots of rippling muscles and anger with cars being thrown around.
I am pleased to say that I was wrong. And Thor is, in fact, awesome. In all ways. Although especially in the way that Chris Hemsworth is jaw-droppingly attractive and takes his shirt off for extended periods. Also his biceps appear to be gearing up to eat Tokyo. And there’s mud wrestling.
The film uses a lot of beautiful scenery, which I'm sure you will appreciate.
Now, when I tell you the plot you’ll tell me that I have gone mad for liking it, and that I was blinded by the sight of such a perfect male specimen. In my defence, this is an actor cast to play Thor, so he needs to be at least a bit buff.
Bear with me.
The Aesir here are basically alien-space royalty and live on this beautiful world with crystal palaces and epic science/magic. The rainbow bridge (guarded by Heimdall, played by the brilliant-in-everything Idris Elba) allows them to blast their way to other planets. Using the argument that any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic, they are worshipped as gods by the primitive Vikings.
Thus when a chap falls to earth (landing in a small town somewhere in the sandy square states) and proclaims himself Thor, everyone thinks he’s a bit mad. Especially when the rampaging starts. However, some handy scientists need him for some handy science, and then there’s this hammer that no-one can lift…
This all had the potential to be cringingly awful and cheesy, but fortunately it was handled in a rarely-seen triumphal triumvirate of sensitive and nuanced acting, balanced direction (Kenneth Branagh at the helm, and he’s a man who can deal with a lot of ham) and a script that focused on that shyest of all beasts in the comic book action genre: character development.
Mark Millar's Moody Thunder God
That’s right. Character development. Get in.
Anthony Hopkins, who plays Odin, is seen here in an interview calling Thor “a superhero film with a bit of Shakespeare in”, which is a good summary. The almost unbelieveable plot is rescued from itself by the way in which it allows characters to grow.
I was very happy that the writers had chosen to riff heavily from Mark Millar‘s Ultimate Thor rewrites, in which Thor is styled as a hero struggling with self-doubt and the agony of everyone thinking that he’s actually suffering from delusions that make him think he’s a god.
In the film, Thor gets kicked out of Valhalla by Odin for being an annoying, spoilt teenager who picks fights and starts wars. He needs to make good and get some responsibility.
We follow Thor on his journey from arrogant, angry young man to being, well, a grown up. His essential good-naturedness and charm, as well as obvious desire to do good, make this neither pat nor schmaltzy, but wholly believable, and at times exceptionally moving.
In the meantime, his brother Loki is also trying to find himself. Rather than the standard trope of being evil because he’s a villain (although he is of course played by an English actor), the whole thing is carried off with depth, subtlety and aplomb by Tom Hiddleston.
Like Thor, Loki grows into himself, and it is only at the end that he makes the transition from a young warrior of potential into someone capable of evil. You know, the thing that George Lucas tried to do with the backstory for that guy in the black armour, but ended up just embarrassing everyone?
I bet Natalie Portman (playing handy scientist Jane Foster) was glad to get that storyline right this time.
Speaking of Natalie Portman, let’s have a look at the female characters. They are admittedly thin on the ground, but those that are there are pretty good. Portman and Kat Dennings (playing Darcy) give good scientist and political scientist respectively, with the Jane Foster character updated from nurse to physicist. Both women avoid the dull stereotype of being either predictably “spirited” or annoyingly wet.
Sif kicks ass. Fact.
The kickass Jaime Alexander plays Sif (Thor’s wife in the mythology, but we’ll leave that for the sequel, I suppose), heads up Team Junior Aesir in their fight to rescue Thor from Earth, and gets as much, if not more, fighting screen time as the rest of them.
She’s also wearing a costume that looks appropriate to fighting in, which is a personal bugbear of mine. No-one can fight crime in a bustier. No-one. Pay attention, people allegedly, eventually, making Wonder Woman. I said no-one.
There’s also some ice giants in it, but realistically the action element plays second fiddle to the storyline, and although there were a lot of fighting sequences my overall impressions of the film were about people and personalities rather than a barrage of things crashing into other things.
Which is no bad thing. I love action films, but I love them even more if there’s more to them than just action (are you listening, Michael Bay?)
And the action wasn’t exactly light on the ground – there were some very pleasing fights on all realms of reality from soldiers to robots to lots of ice giants getting hit in the face. A personal favourite caused me to turn and hi-five the person next to me (fortunately, Miranda, and not a stranger) because Thor had just smashed his hammer into the face of an enormous ice-beast and SAVED THE DAY in epic hero style.
YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- You like comic book adaptations or action films
- It has an amazing cast acting their socks off
- You want to see how EPIC Norse Gods can be whether they are good or evil
- You want to sing this song over and over in your head when you’ve left the cinema
- Just go and see it already!
YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- You are allergic to bling, muscles, fighting, deep voices or CGI ice giants.
- You realise that they didn’t put Fenris Wolf in, OR cast Brian Blessed as Odin, and that makes you a bit sad.
Movie Adventure postcards now on sale!
HEY GUYS.
Guess what finally dropped in the BadRep shop!
YES INDEED! Postcards! Sweet!
Note: more about the decision to sell these (apart from the fact you lovely people were asking) is in this post by the artist, who is of course the inimitable Markgraf.
There’s a BadRep logo on the reverse, but plenty of room to write your own messages. Stick them all over your walls, send them to your aunt, baffle your colleagues and delight your friends. The images we picked are:
- “The Reptile Whisperer”
- “Fools! I know surgery!”
- “Action Hero Academy”
- “We must leave the Crusades at once!”
(The original posts they were done for live in the “Cinematical” category on the side bar over on the right.)
The set is £5.99 plus postage. We hope you like!
By the way, cheers massively to everyone who’s read, publicised, pitched articles to, and said nice things about BadRep! We hit six months of being live the other week. ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: CELEBRATORY MUG OF TEA.1
- I’m hardcore. [↩]
I think I first encountered the Little Mermaid story when Disney’s film dropped in 1989. Mermaid Mania quickly descended, and “mermaid!” began to trump “fireman!” when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I’ve had a soft spot for mermaids and sea sirens ever since.
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.
Guest post time again: regular reader Russell reminds us why Angela Carter should still be on your Essential Reading list, or if you’ve never read her, why you should start…
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! ;)
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.
Fairy Tale Fest: Fairy Tales in Context
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