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 /2011/05/03/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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