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Trabajo Fin de Máster THRICE UPON A TIME: FEMINIST, POSTFEMINIST AND LESBIAN REVISIONS OF FAIRY TALES: ANNE SEXTON, ANGELA CARTER AND EMMA DONOGHUE Autor Lucía Morera Lianez Director Constanza del Río Alvaro Facultad / Escuela Facultad de Filosofía y Letras: Dpto. de Filología Inglesa y Alemana. Año Noviembre 2012 2 CONTENTS 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................. 3 2. First Chapter: Carter‘s ―The Courtship of Mr Lyon‖/ Donoghue‘s ―The Tale of the Rose‖ .............................................................................................................................. 20 3. Second Chapter: Sexton‘s ―Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs‖/ Carter‘s ―The Snow Child/ Donoghue‘s ―The Tale of the Apple‖ .................................................................. 37 4. Third Chapter: Sexton‘s ―Briar Rose‖/ Donoghue‘s ―The Tale of the Needle‖ ......... 72 5. Final Thoughts ........................................................................................................... 93 6. Works Cited ................................................................................................................ 98 3 Introduction Within the literary tradition, fairy tales have established themselves worldwide as a literary subgenre of folk tales. However, my main focus will fall on the development and proliferation of fairy tales in the Western tradition. In spite of the multiple changes that the subgenre has undergone - the initial origin of fairy tales, named das Volksmarchen and belonging to the oral storytelling tradition, their subsequent adaptation to a written tradition, their process of domestication in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the inclusion of a wide range of elements from folklore, myths and legends belonging to different communities - these external elements have not affected the essence of the fairy tale. Yet, what are the essential features that define fairy tales? In general, the definition of ‗fairy tale‘ coined by The New Lexicon Webster's Dictionary of the English Language (1990) seems to refer to fairy stories for a specific audience, with specific characters and imagery: ―a story for children about fairies, or about magic and enchantment‖ (www.surlalunefairytales.com). Derek Brewer expands the previous definition: These stories have stereotyped characters and a certainty of predictability of event. They embody the social wisdom of their communities and an implicit morality or didacticism [...]. In many tales the protagonist commits some kind of transgression, but recovers through a central ‗magic event‘ on which the plot turns, often a form of wish-fulfilment (qtd in Ellis Davidson and Chaudhri, 2006: 15). Taking into account both explanations, it could be said that fairy tales present a double function: a source of entertainment but with a moral at its core. The dictionary definition rather focuses on the modern concept of what a fairy tale is: entertainment for children 4 whose ending may be moralizing or not, whereas Brewer‘s explanation embraces the timeless, basic aspects of fairy tales, paying special attention to their moralizing nature. In fact, during the process of popularization of fairy tales, also known as conte de fées in the seventeenth century, their most prominent function was that articulating of the moral authority which was promoted by aristocratic female circles in French salons. Thus, the written tradition of the fairy tale started to be ascribed to the figure of the female writer. As Jack David Zipes states (1994), ―[t]he institution of the fairy tale was created by women‖ (31). Many aristocratic women used fairy tales to improve their knowledge and pursue a higher level of education. Owing to the success of fairy tales as a vehicle for women to acquire knowledge, it was determined that these fairy stories should be also deployed as moral tales addressed to an essentially female audience. They were considered a manual that defined the norms of female behaviour within society, all the while warning of the danger of disobedience and social ostracism. According to Sheldon Cashdan, ―[s]ome folklorists believe that fairy tales offer ‗lessons‘ on correct behaviour, advising young readers on how to succeed in life‖ (2000: 8). These first examples of stories written by women were crucial in promoting the rise of an incipient female point of view which would subsequently become feminist literary criticism. Several of these female writers, such as Madeleine de Scudéry and Madame de Lafayette, encouraged other women from aristocratic circles to write fiction, poetry or plays whose themes centred around their own female condition. As mentioned before, fairy tales included myths and motifs from different national folklores. Writers and folklorists such as Bruno Bettelheim or Bengt Holbek have stated the existence of a general use of a language of symbols in order to represent an unconscious content. In fact, Holbek stressed the importance of the use of familiar symbols of everyday life in fairy tales (qtd. in Ellis Davidson and Chaudhri, 2006: 10). 5 Nonetheless, the meaning of these symbols had been coined from a male perspective, and this patriarchal point of view excluded or manipulated the female figure in fairy tales. Thus, female characters were consigned to traditional stereotypes and symbols that were used to reassert female submission. As Donald Haase (2004) remarks, the history of the male appropriation of folk tales is the history of the male‘s attempt to control female power (16). As a reaction, once feminist literary criticism developed, one of its main aims was the revision of the symbols and imagery established by the patriarchal system. This process of revisitation is called ‗revisionist mythmaking‘ by her ideologist, Alicia Ostriker, and consists in the selection of classical fairy stories‘ patterns in order to create innovative ones. As Zipes suggests, ―[t]he purpose of producing a revised fairy tale is to create something new that incorporates the critical and creative thinking of the producer and corresponds to changed demands and tastes of audiences‖ (1994: 9). Ostriker (1985: 317) explains that this revisionist strategy in fairy tales is related to the creation of a new female identity outside the mythical canons proposed by an eminently patriarchal society, as will be shown later on. Therefore this process was strongly linked to the subversion of traditional motifs in order to offer new interpretations of fairy tales. The technique of subversion was also closely related to the postmodernist paradigm emerging in the literary world. One of the key points of postmodernist literature was the questioning of texts and the values they conveyed. From a postmodernist point of view, reality is linguistically and socially constructed and there is no such thing as an original or purely individual point of view. According to Hal Foster (1985: viixiv), the author can only deploy symbols and imagery in accordance with the interpretation and usage established by the society to which the author pertains. That is, although the author can create his own vision of the world, this latter will always be based on his society‘s 6 symbols and imagery. Postmodernist authors supported this perspective, which had been already anticipated by Modernism, and based themselves on it to claim for the inclusion and visibility of minority interpretations of reality that had been marginalized because of the influence of the mainstream view imposed by society. As regards the question of the representation of women, the lack of legitimacy or visibility given to females beyond traditional stereotypes was denounced by feminist writers as a form of repression and manipulation. In this respect, the few examples of female representation were manipulated by the traditional canons, and as a consequence of this process of manipulation a misrepresentation of femininity finally developed. This idea could be extrapolated to some classical fairy tales that maintain a system of stereotyped gender roles; the meaning attributed to the image of the heroine in classic fairy tales is connected with the emphasis on traditional female qualities such as innocence, inexperience and passivity. As Linda T. Parsons states, these stories portray women as ―weak, submissive, dependent, and self-sacrificing while men are powerful, active, and dominant.‖ (2004: 135-154). Passivity is related to the tradition of female objectification fostered by patriarchal conventions. In classical fairy tales, female characters are beautiful and defenceless objects that accept the conventions and interests of the patriarchal system. Hence, the subversion of symbols and imagery in general could be considered a rebellion against patriarchal control. When analyzing the process of revision and subversion of patriarchal motifs in fairy tales, parody appears as the most relevant postmodern strategy so as to denounce the implicit sexism that they contain. Linda Hutcheon defined ‗parody‘ as ―a form of repetition with an ironical critical distance, marking difference rather than similarity‖ (2000: xii). In this sense, one might 7 understand that parody may represent a critique of the prevailing view of other texts based on the effects of repetition and irony. Anyhow, the combination of postmodernism and feminist activism gave as a result in the literary arena the rise of feminist writing and criticism. According to Patricia Waugh, ―postmodernism is usually presented as an art of the marginal and the oppositional and as such would seem at last to offer women the possibility of identity and inclusion‖ (1989: 3). Diverse feminist writers such as Anne Sexton, Angela Carter, Emma Donoghue, Fay Weldon, Margaret Atwood or Tanith Hill, all of them belonging to the second half of the twentieth century, were classified as postmodern authors, since these female writers created a kind of literature focused on innovation from the perspective of writing as a woman. They started to re-write classical fairy tales subverting and re-evaluating their classical motifs by means of parody and irony, thus questioning the classical literary tradition. In spite of the relevance of all these authors in the development of postmodernist fairy tales, I would contend that there is a certain level of difference among them, related to their different historical and critical backgrounds. In the mid-twentieth century, Anne Sexton started to write poetry and her more prolific period coincided with the second wave of feminism. The emergence of the feminist movement fostered the development of a feminist writing which turned into one of the weapons for change in women‘s status in society. Generally speaking, feminism in literature attempted to give legitimacy and visibility to a new female construction of reality and identity beyond the image imposed by the dominant culture. In relation to Sexton, some authors, like Shiho Fukuda, have stated that this poet could not be considered a feminist author in a strict sense: 8 ―A close examination of Transformations, [...], indicates that Sexton was as yet unable to present a strictly feminist point of view at the time she penned its lines. On the verge of making the transition from a traditional to a feminist manner of writing, she appears to have hesitated before making the final commitment to what for her would be a new style. It was as if she viewed her surroundings and her times through a spy glass fitted with a set of lenses that were colored by the tenets of the patriarchal society at one end and by the feminist movement at the other. Until she could bring into focus what she viewed, it can be said that she would continue to be hesitant to adopt a purely feminist point of view‖ (2008: 31-32). In this respect, Sexton‘s poetry focused on satirical representation of old-fashioned female roles which highlighted the impossibility of her female figures to transcend their reality. Thus, some of her heroines describe Sexton‘s own internal conflicts as victim of the so-called ‗American dream‘. Although the poetry in her revolutionary work Transformations (1971) is not lyric and confessional, in contrast with other of her poetic works, but focused on the rewriting of Grimm‘s fairy tales, it could be suggested that this work is also influenced by her way of thinking about traditional female aspects associated with her own experience of being a woman such as beauty, the family, and morality. As Fukuda explains, ―Transformations may have been based on model stories that were selected at random and based solely on the impressions they had made on her psyche‖ (2008: 32). In this collection of poetry, one of her most well-known books, Sexton questioned the patriarchal association of the female with certain performative qualities in traditional heroines of fairy tales such as innocence, submission, passivity, obedience and sacrifice, considering them simple projections of male fantasies or what was called ‗the Other‘ by writer Simone de Beauvoir 1. 1For a definition of the ‗Other‘ see Simone de Beauvoir (1989). 9 Feminist writers belonging to the second wave feminist current challenged the demands of the patriarchal culture that imposed female behaviour from a male perspective. Consequently, Sexton rejected the idea of female objectification by means of the manipulation and distortion of classical female stereotypes in her poetry, more specifically by portraying classical heroines negatively. Thus, she was considered one of the first writers who highlighted the conservative point of view of fairy tales and was able to subvert it to encourage female readers in their acquisition of a new female identity. Diane Wood Middlebrooke and Diane Hume George restated this idea in the introduction to Anne Sexton‘s book of selected poems: ―Sexton was the modern woman poet who first gave extended voice to issues of female identity‖ (2000: xviii). Nonetheless, it can be argued that feminist doctrine, which influenced Sexton‘s poetry, evolved with the passing of time and finally interconnected with different currents of poststructuralist criticism giving way to academic postfeminism or ―third wave feminism‖ in the late nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties2. Meanwhile, during the period of the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies, feminist writers deployed literature as a weapon; writing became itself a way of reflecting and denouncing social, political and cultural gender inequalities. Thus, women were portrayed as victims of the submission to male power and society in general. Waugh asserts (1989): [f]eminism seeks a subjective identity, a sense of effective agency and history for women which has hitherto been denied them by the dominant culture [...] 2 Stephanie Genz and Benjamin A. Brabon (2009:76) consider that postfeminism has intermingled with different cultural waves leading to the development of other postfeminist currents. In the context of popular culture, it is possible to talk about the postfeminist current that conceived the idea of ―girl power‖ promoted by the Spice Girls and Madonna during the nineteen nineties. ―Girl power‖ was defined as the re-appraisal of femininity – including the stereotypical symbols of feminine enculturation such as Barbie dolls, make-up and fashion magazines – as a means of female empowerment and agency. Similarly, Genz (2010: 109) proposes other kind of postfeminist current based on female representation in the HBO sitcom Sex and the City: ―postfeminist portrayals of the singleton still feature backlash myths that record the perceived neuroses of the single, childless, thirty-something career woman. In Sex and the City, a fashionable urbanite laments that the ‗the issue of unmarried, older women is conceivably the biggest problem in New York City‖. 16 of emphasizing the idea of subversion against patriarchal discourses written in the first person that attempt to reproduce a female perspective. As Marie Von Franz points out: [q]ue una figura femenina sea la protagonista de un cuento no significa necesariamente que el cuento hable de los problemas de las mujeres, porque muchas historias que describen las aventuras o los sufrimientos de una mujer han sido contados por los hombres y son proyecciones de su imaginación, expresan sus aspiraciones y dificultades para vivir su lado femenino y para entrar en relación con las mujeres (qtd in D‘Agostino, 1998: 8). On their part, Sexton and Carter employ the external narrator so as to focus attention on the process of transformation or acquisition of knowledge instead of on the female protagonist herself. Thus, they create an ironic atmosphere in which women in the stories kept being ‗the other‘ but they may take advantage of their unfair marginal status. In this respect, the fact of not having an active role allows them to reflect on themselves. Both narrative strategies are a way of rebelling against the imposition of a male perspective in the original literary sources. As Susan Sniader Lanser (1992) argues: ―if women are encouraged to write only of themselves it is because they are not supposed to claim knowledge of men or ‗the world‘ [...]‘ (19). Another remarkable issue is the way of naming the heroines. Both Sexton and Carter deploy the names of the classical tales in order to emphasize the relevance of their meanings. Names such as ‗Beauty‘, ‗Snow White‘ or ‗Briar Rose‘ are clearly meant to remark the most valued qualities described in classical female protagonists and promoted by the patriarchal discourse. Donoghue, however, dissociates herself from this literary strategy and prefers to envision her heroines as anonymous characters; this is a way of reinforcing the female character‘s feeling of lack of identity. Moreover, there is a tendency in fairy tales to be set in an ahistorical and timeless scenario in which references to past, present and future are not completely accurate. However, Sexton‘s 17 and Carter‘s tales show references to contemporary elements and culture that are alien to fairy tales. Their intention may be to approach fairy tales to a twentieth century setting in order to highlight that fairy tales can be developed from a contemporary perspective and that they are actually related to society due to their performative and ideological value. In Carter‘s specific case, the contemporary references to technology are not so explicit as Sexton‘s ones due to the proliferation of gothic elements in, for example, ―The Courthip of Mr Lyon‖. Due to this mixture of both aspects, a certain confusion arises when one attempts to identify them separately. In her collection, Donoghue attempts to represent fluid identities. The structure of the collection, more tightly woven than the other two, enforces this idea of fluidity. In Kissing the Witch, the female protagonists become in turn both listeners to another‘s story and then tellers of their own, while the previous narrator now becomes the listener. Thus, discursive power is democratically shared, everyone is given her voice and all of them keep changing status and position. This embedded structure intertwines all the female protagonists in a nicely woven pattern: ‗Who were you before...? And .... said, Will I tell you my own story? It is a tale of a/an... (Donoghue, 1997)5. Sexton‘s collection of poetry follows the structure of the traditional fairy tales by beginning the stories with the introduction of the female protagonist through allusions to earlier periods of her life such as birth, childhood and adolescence: ―[o]nce there was a lovely virgin called Snow White. Say she was thirteen‖ (Sexton, 1971: 3)6. Hence, the abundance of verbs in the past tense. However, throughout the texts one might observe a relevant repetition of expressions such as ‗once there was‘, ‗once more‘ or simply ‗once‘ which do not appear to evoke a previous period of time. In fact, they can be considered linguistic parodies of the classical ‗once upon a time‘. The aim of the parody 5 Further references to Kissing the Witch will be to the 1997 Harper Collins edition. 6 Further references to Transformations will be to the 1971 O U P edition. 18 regarding the past is to criticize the patriarchal elements that compose fairy tales. In this respect, the most radical point of view is Carter‘s one. The author portrays the past intermingled with references to the present that provide a feeling of being inside the female protagonists‘ memories and thoughts through a stream of consciousness technique: ―[f]ather said he would be home before nightfall. The snow brought down all the telephone wires; he couldn‘t have called, even with the best news. The roads are bad. I hope he‘ll be safe‖ (Carter, 1981: 41)7. In spite of the references to a past time in their fairy stories, there are no complete descriptions of specific moments from the heroines‘ childhoods, only a few scattered memories. On the contrary, the tales‘ plots usually begin at the key point in which the female character is discovering her female identity in accordance with the patriarchal canon. According to A.M. García Dominguez (2004), ―[...] todos los cuentos toman como punto de partida el momento crítico en este adoctrinamiento, el despertar sexual, el descubrimiento del propio deseo, el inicio de la dinámica sujeto/objeto‖ (4). In general, the introduction and treatment of the female characters in all the works could be described as unconventional. At the beginning, the heroines are portrayed as having the same characteristics as in classical fairy tales: obedient, passive and beautiful. So, heroines in these contemporary fairy tales are initially portrayed in accordance with the traditional scheme of the ‗Innocent Persecuted Heroine‘, a phrase coined by Aleksandr Isaakovich Nikiforov (1927). As Steven Swann Jones (1993) explained: Nikiforov divides the female fairy tale into ―two predominant types of schemes: Tales about winning (mainly of a groom, but with a completely different morphological composition of episodes than in the [male] fairy tale about winning); 7 Further references to The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories will be to the 1981 Penguin edition. 19 [and] Tales about the sufferings of the innocently persecuted (maiden or woman)‖ (13). Although Sexton‘s, Carter‘s and Donoghue‘s heroines do not know exactly who they are, they appear not to feel comfortable in their roles, except for Sexton‘s heroines who do not have the ability to understand their female condition. In contrast with Sexton‘s female protagonists, Carter‘s and Donoghue‘s ones promptly abandon the traditional scheme to develop progressively a subversive behaviour that will take them away from the stereotypical role of the female. The female protagonists described in Carter‘s and Donoghue‘s adaptations of the fairy tale “La Belle et la Bête” (1756) are a clear example of subversion of a stereotype. To conclude this introduction I will now describe the structure of this work, which is divided into three chapters: the first chapter will analyze Angela Carter‘s ―The Courtship of Mr Lyon‖ and Emma Donoghue‘s ―The Tale of the Rose‖. The second chapter will examine Anne Sexton‘s ―Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs‖, Carter‘s ―The Snow Child‖ and Emma Donoghue‘s ―The Tale of the Apple‖. Finally, the third chapter consists in an analysis of Sexton‘s ―Briar Rose‖ and Donoghue‘s ―The Tale of the Needle‖. My main focus of analysis is going to be based on the examination of the heroines, secondary male and female characters and symbols and imagery. 20 First Chapter: Carter’s “The Courtship of Mr Lyon”/ Donoghue’s “The Tale of the Rose” In this first chapter, I will analyze and compare Angela Carter‘s and Emma Donoghue‘s revision of the literary source, ―Beauty and the Beast‖, written by Madame Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont. The structure of this analysis will focus on the comparison between Carter‘s feminist retelling, ―The Courtship of Mr Lyon‖ and Donoghue‘s postfeminist and lesbian retelling, ―The Tale of The Rose‖8. In the original fairy tale, the heroine can be interpreted as an archetype of female submission to male dominance, symbolized in the figure of his father and subsequently in the beast. Carter‘s and Donoghue‘s heroines seem also to recreate submission to male dominance but it will actually lead them to discovering their own selves; in the case of Carter‘s heroine the discovery of her sexual desire and in Donoghue‘s one the disclosure of her lesbian condition, as will be explained in the following analysis. As mentioned above, the female protagonist of Angela Carter‘s tale ―The Courtship of Mr Lyon‖ does not seem initially to dissociate herself from the heroine created by Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont: the story starts by describing a snowy landscape and a young girl who is waiting for her father‘s return. The way in which the protagonist is physically represented is similar to that of the classical heroine ‗Snow White‘: ―[t]his lovely girl whose skin possesses that same, inner light so you would have thought she, too, was made all of snow, pauses in her chores in the mean kitchen to look out at the country road‖ (41). 8 In spite of the fact that Angela Carter‘s collection, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories includes another story, called ―The Tiger‘s Bride‖, which can be considered another reworking of the original ―Beauty and the Beast‖, the influence of Gothic fiction in this story has drastically changed its structure. Owing to these changes, the tale can be considered a very loose adaptation of the classical fairy tale and for this reason it will not be analyzed. 21 At first glance, this framework could be not considered too relevant; it is quite evident that Carter exaggerates the beginning of a well-known fairy story such as ‗Snow White‘ to create an ironic atmosphere. In this sense, Carter‘s female protagonist is a parody of the traditional girl introduced in fairy tales, given that she is portrayed as fragile, ethereal and completely devoted to her home and family. Subsequently, the young protagonist will lose all these, in theory, virtues for a woman and during her stay in London she will acquire some less proper qualities for a heroine in a classical fairy tale. Nonetheless, Carter is being forceful in her message; the female protagonist abandons those qualities that transform her into a stereotype to turn into a real woman with faults in her personality: [s]he was learning, at the end of her adolescence, how to be a spoiled child and that pearly skin of hers was plumping out, with high living and compliments. A certain inwardness was beginning to transform the lines around her mouth, those signatures of the personality, and her sweetness and her gravity could sometimes turn a mite petulant when things went not quite as she wanted them to go (49). According to Beth Ellen Reith, ―[i]n Carter‘s ‗The Courtship of Mr Lyon‘ Beauty‘s fallibility and, therefore, her humanity is shown through her becoming spoiled when her father becomes rich again and they move to the city‖ (2006: 23). Personal features like petulance seem not to last too much in the heroine when she returns to the Beast‘s castle, once the search for her identity has been concluded. Likewise, Emma Donoghue‘s female protagonist of ‗The Tale of the Rose‘ is introduced as a rich young girl who has to do housework and work in the fields once her father has lost all his riches and servants. Paradoxically, one might suggest that she feels proud of her new condition. These new circumstances do not turn her into a fragile heroine but they allow her to explore aspects of herself that she did not know until then: ―It gave me a strange pleasure to see what my back could bend to, my arms could bear. 22 [...] My hands grew numb and my dark hair tangled in the sunshine. I was washing my old self away‖ (28). It seems that Donoghue subverts the classical stereotype of the heroine in fairy stories to her female protagonist‘s benefit. Similarly to the traditional fairy tales, in Carter‘s ‗Beauty and The Beast‘ the heroine‘s family is one of her essential mainstays. Bettelheim (1989) affirms that the classical fairy story written by Madame Le Prince de Beaumont offers a positive perception of the paternal figure given that, ―the father (willingly or unwillingly) causes his daughter to marry; relinquishing his oedipal attachment to his daughter and inducing her to give up hers to him lead to a happy solution for both‖ (129). Nevertheless, the figure of the father in Carter‘s tale, which is given a lot of prominence, is quite negative. Much more so than in Donoghue. He is described as a selfish man who has ruined himself and his family: ―[a]nd not even enough money left over to buy his Beauty, his girl-child, his pet, the one white rose she said she wanted; the only gift she wanted, no matter how the case went, how rich he might once again be. Beauty had asked for so little and he had not been able to give it to her‖ (41-42). However, his most negative aspect is his refusal to break the oedipal relationship with her daughter, giving as an excuse the love that he feels for her. When the father is taken prisoner by the Beast, he does not raise any objections with regards to her beloved daughter‘s replacing him in the castle with the Beast. This fact could be understood as the father‘s attempt to relinquish the oedipal relationship with her daughter. But, taking into account the father‘s behaviour, the most plausible interpretation is that he wants to take advantage of his unhealthy attachment to his daughter by leaving her as hostage with the beast: [b]ut when, as they sipped their brandy, the Beast, [...] suggested, with a hint of shyness, or fear of refusal, that she should stay here, with him, in comfort, while her father returned to London to take up the legal cudgels again, she forced a smile. For she knew with a pang of dread, as soon as he spoke, that it would be so and her visit 23 to the Beast must be, on some magically reciprocal scale, the price of her father‘s good fortune‖ (45). Therefore, it is difficult to understand the blind obedience that Carter‘s heroine feels for her father, whom she admits to love with fervour. The fact that she submits to him voluntarily can be interpreted as an exaggeration or mockery of the overvalued role of the paternal figure highlighted by the patriarchal discourse in fairy tales. Indeed, Beauty is being manipulated by a ‗sense of obligation‘ imposed by the patriarchal conventions represented in the figure of her father. [y]et she stayed, and smiled, because her father wanted her to do so; [...] Do no think she had no will of her own; only she was possessed by a sense of obligation to an unusual degree and, besides, she would gladly have gone to the ends of the earth for her father, whom she loved dearly‖ (45). At the end, the heroine is the one who relinquishes that relationship of dependence on his father when she prefers to leave London and return to live with the Beast in the castle. This can be considered a cathartic moment because for the first time she is not acting on her father‘s wishes: ―[b]eauty scribbled a note for her father, threw a coat round her shoulders. Quickly, quickly, urged the spaniel soundlessly; and Beauty knew the Beast was dying‖ (49). Thus, the anonymous female protagonist changes a relationship based on submission for another one focused on the idea of equality. The reason why Carter criticizes fiercely the figure of the father in ―The Courtship of Mr Lyon‖ is that he symbolizes a patriarchal archetype which Carter wants to attack openly. According to Sage, ―[f]ather and male figures and patriarchal power are attacked, deconstructed, shown to be hollow or vulnerable in Angela Carter […]‖ (1994: 155). As mentioned earlier, Angela Carter is a writer who was doubly influenced by the second wave of feminism and anticipates some of the facets of postfeminism. For example, second wave feminism is there when she illustrates male figures as dominant 24 subjects who attempt to control women‘s wills. However female ones are not portrayed as victims of male dominance at all. Most of the stories collected in The Bloody Chamber show how Carter advances certain postfeminist ideas since she rejects the acceptance of the female role of victim. In fact, the author struggles with this archetype transforming her heroines into independent and dominant beings in the sense that these females become ruling subjects of their own lives. This last perception is similar to what Donoghue reflects in her collection Kissing the Witch. This author also describes her female characters as subjects who are in the middle of a process of transformation. Nevertheless, Donoghue offers a different representation of the father in ―The Tale of the Rose‖, where the heroine‘s father could even be considered a kind of ‗involuntary male helper‘. In spite of the fact that the father is involved in similar circumstances, whose consequences cause her daughter to stay with the beast in a castle, in this case the father shows a deep feeling of remorse: ―Daughter, he said in a voice like old wood breaking, can you ever forgive me?‖ (31). At the same time, the heroine‘s reaction is very similar to that of Carter‘s heroine; both sacrifice themselves for their fathers‘ lives. However, in ‗The Tale of the Rose‘, blind obedience to her father is not the only reason why the female protagonist decides to live with the Beast in the castle. She gives her consent because he is eager to find ‗something improbable‘ (27) that may allow her to escape her fate as a woman: ―Now you may tell me that I should have felt betrayed, but I was shaking with excitement. I should have felt like a possession but for the first time in my life I seemed to own myself‖ (31). It is necessary to remember here that the intention of Donoghue in this tale is to narrate the process of discovery of the heroine‘s lesbian identity in an allegorical way. So, at the beginning of the story the female protagonist is conscious that there is a 25 different ‗aspect‘ within her that separates her from her sisters: ―It was not that I was better than my sisters, only that I could see further‖ (28). She is unable to identify that aspect or feeling because of her lack of self-knowledge. For this reason, when the heroine asks her father for a red rose just opening, she is unconsciously asking for help from her father in order to discover her true identity: ―I knew that nothing could keep the wind out, so I asked for a red rose just opening‖ (29). Thus the figure of the father can be interpreted as a male helper given that he is the one who gets the rose, in contrast with Carter‘s male protagonist in ―The Courtship of Mr Lyon‖, and introduces his daughter to the beast‘s world, the idyllic place where she will finally fully live out her lesbian identity. In this sense, one might consider that the heroine‘s settlement in the beast‘s world thanks to her father‘s help and her return to the castle without his permission is the symbolic way that they select to break off their oedipal attachment. This positive portrayal of a male character has to do with Donoghue‘s refusal to victimize her female characters in order to denounce patriarchal hegemony in terms of gender and sexual orientation. The rejection of victim status seeks to illustrate a new female status related to the acquisition of power and control in accordance with postfeminist postulates. As Sarah Gamble (2001) affirms: ―[v]ery generally speaking, however, postfeminist debate tends to crystallise around issues of victimisation, autonomy and responsibility. Because it is critical of any definition of women as victims who are unable to control their own lives‖ (43- 44). As for the maternal figure, in classical fairy tales it is classified into different types. All classical fairy stories follow the same pattern according to which the maternal figure is dead, evil, or irrelevant for the development of the plot. Furthermore, all these stories share a common ground regarding the presentation of the relationship among female characters, which in most cases is negative. Concretely, in the original literary ―Beauty 32 female protagonist achieves her long-awaited fulfilment: ―I struggled to guess these riddles and make sense of our story, and before I knew it summer was coming again, and the red roses just opening‖ (40). Another classical motif such as the book is also found in both stories. As in classical fairy tales, the book keeps being a symbol of power by means of which it is possible to obtain knowledge. In ―The Courtship of Mr Lyon‖, the author subverts this meaning with the purpose of parody. Carter introduces references to conte de fées, a kind of literature from the seventeenth century whose main focus was the education of the female readers in those aspects related to morality. In the tale, Beauty talks about these stories without any interest, highlighting the sense of uselessness of these tales whose plots do not reflect real women or life at all: She ate it as she browsed in a book she had found in the rosewood revolving bookcase, a collection of courtly and elegant French fairy tales about white cats who were transformed princesses and fairies who were birds. Then she pulled a sprig of muscat grapes from a fat bunch for her dessert and found herself yawning; she discovered she was bored (46). Through the introduction of references to this kind of books, Carter mocks these stories written to indoctrinate young women about appropriate gender values and attitudes related to the morality imposed by patriarchal assumptions. By contrast, Donoghue introduces the symbol of the book in her tale in accordance with its classical meaning: the acquisition of knowledge and consequently the achievement of power. Female achievement of knowledge means loss of power for the patriarchal system. Bearing in mind Donoghue‘s postfeminist ideology, one might conclude that the Irish author reflects the female protagonist‘s process of empowerment in this plot parallely to what happened in Western society during the eighties and nineties. Subsequently, Donoghue also parodies how the tradition of portraying powerless heroines has caused insecurity 33 in those new heroines who achieve power: ―The first book I opened said in gold letters: You are the mistress: ask for whatever you wish. I didn‘t know what to ask for‖ (34). Finally, it is possible to observe that the symbol of the mirror is employed in the two postmodern tales differently. Regarding this symbol, there are multiple interpretations about its meaning but in classical fairy tales, the most relevant meanings focus on the entrance into a fantastic world, which Carter and Donoghue do not develop in their stories, and the question of identity. In this respect, the first time that the mirror is mentioned, Carter just refers to this element giving it a positive connotation. Beauty is glad to observe the transformation that has been produced in her facial traits. She is happy to see herself become a sexual woman. This change is a symbol for her development from stereotype to real woman: ―[s]he smiled at herself with satisfaction. [...] You could not have said that her freshness was fading but she smiled at herself in mirrors a little too often, these days, and the face that smiled back was not quite the one she had seen contained in the Beast's agate eyes‖ (49). As happens in the castle, the heroine feels happy to be in London where she has achieved knowledge of herself. In this manner, it could be suggested that the female protagonist is almost finishing her process of discovery and acceptance of her sexuality. Even so, Beauty is not totally fulfilled because she has not broken the oedipal attachment with her father and this prevents her from living her own life with the beast. In this sense, the mirror turns into a key symbol because, in front of it, the heroine realizes she has to be the one to abandon her father and return with the beast, who has been her guide in her symbolic journey of self-discovery. In the case of Donoghue‘s tale, one might suggest that the author deploys the mirror‘s symbol so as to denounce the lack of visibility of lesbian identity. As mentioned before, the female protagonist has not found her self-identity yet and 34 therefore she cannot identify herself in the mirror: ―I looked in my mirror, and saw, not myself, but every place I‘d never been‖ (28). This fact could be caused by the absence of a maternal figure in the story, as was mentioned before. As D. W. Winnicot states in his revision of Lacan‘s ‗mirror stage‘ theory: the precursor of the mirror is the mother‘s face. That is, when the mother and the infant are in a symbiotic relationship before the mirror stage and the child has not drawn its boundaries between self and (m)other yet, the mother‘s face functions as a mirror of the self. If the infants do not have mother to look at, then ‗[t]hey look and they do not see themselves‘ (qtd in Aktari, 2010: 287). However the heroine sees herself in the beast‘s image and initially identifies ‗it‘ as the ‗other‘: ―Because I thought the beast must be everything I was not: dark to my light, rough to my smooth, hoarse to my sweet‖ (35). Nevertheless, by the end of the tale, the protagonist discovers that ―the other‖ is nothing but ―the same‖. Similarly to Carter‘s tale, the mirror becomes again an element full of symbolism because in front of the mirror, the female protagonist does not see her own reflection but her future. The mirror allows her to choose her future: she can stay in the cottage and not see herself reflected in the mirror anymore. In terms of symbolism, this would mean that the female protagonist will never be able to obtain a clear image of herself because her decision will fragment her personality or, on the contrary, she can go back to the castle and see her image at last by means of the beast‘s eyes. Finally, the heroine decides to go back to the castle with the beast, which means that she decides to accept her lesbian condition. Therefore, one might conclude that the analysis and comparison of both authors‘ tales present a series of similarities and differences. This fact may have to do with the different stages of feminism that influence both authors‘ context. At first glance, Angela Carter and Emma Donoghue introduce female protagonists who are initially 35 playing archaic female roles and this is the reason why they feel uncomfortable, misunderstood and unfulfilled at the beginning of the stories. This lack of resignation with regards to the female role imposed by the patriarchal system has different aims for the two authors. Carter wants to highlight the fact that women feel sexual desire similarly to men and Donoghue wants to give visibility to a lesbian identity which had never been portrayed in fairy tales before. Seemingly, the two authors‘ purposes appear unlike but, indeed, they are denouncing how women are being obliged by the double standard of morality and heteronormativity to renounce unacknowledged parts of their personalities. This fact hinders their development and the acquisition of selfknowledge. In spite of the fact that the heroines‘ process of self-discovery is being interfered by patriarchal assumptions, they are never depicted as victims of male oppression, given that Carter and Donoghue have always rejected female victimization, which was one of the most prominent features of the second wave of feminism. In this sense, their female protagonists know how to subvert the roles imposed by patriarchy to their own benefit. Turning to male representation, both postmodern tales depict clear representations of men in accordance with the perception of masculinity of each one of the authors. Carter describes the patriarchal character from a negative perspective, in the sense that he possesses negative qualities regarding his treatment of the female protagonist, whom he does not respect and attempts to submit. However, in other tales, the English author also describes male characters that are the antithesis of a male patriarchal figure, so that she is anticipating the postfeminist idea that not all men are patriarchal monsters against women. This idea is also going to be developed in Donoghue‘s tale, where she rejects male misrepresentation and does not depict Beauty‘s father as a male oppressor. The Irish author seems to be very influenced by the idea that gender is only a social 36 construction and, for this reason, she is prone to describe all her male and female characters equally as subjects. Regarding female portrayal, there is a substantial difference between both authors. Similarly to classical fairy tales, Carter employs the role of the absent mother to parody female envy whereas Donoghue attempts to take to pieces this false myth in a different way. She introduces the figure of the female helper that, in ―The Tale of the Rose‖, encloses a maternal figure and a love partner. One might suggest that this positive female representation is a parody of the popular secondary female roles in traditional fairy tales: the wicked stepmother or the evil witch. Likewise, the symbols and imagery deployed have been used with a parodic or subversive intention. Their purpose is to give new meanings to classical symbols. In this sense, this strategy is used to emphasize female issues that have been taboo until a recent period: the fact that a woman can feel sexual desire, the fact that a woman might love another one or that she may need to acquire knowledge out of the domestic realm. 37 Second Chapter: Sexton’s “Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs”/ Carter’s “The Snow Child/ Donoghue’s “The Tale of the Apple” In this second chapter I will analyze and compare these writers‘ revision of the classical fairy tale entitled ―Snow White‖ and written by the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm (1812). The original literary source deals with a young female protagonist whose name highlights the enormous importance given in this story to her physical beauty. However, this beauty is not a godsend for her, since it triggers her stepmother‘s envy and the subsequent flight of the heroine from the castle towards an unknown fate. This journey can be symbolically interpreted as her journey from childhood to maturity. According to Midor Snyder, female journeys develop in a different way than the male ones: Unlike sons who set off to win their fortune, who are journeying toward adventure, the daughters are outcasts, running away. The princes usually return at the end of the story, bringing treasure and magical brides. Princesses do not return; they must forge new lives, new alliances (qtd in Windling, 1997: 10). Analyzing the concept of subversion in the postmodern adaption of this fairy tale, it could be suggested that Sexton‘s and Carter‘s retellings do not portray a heroine in the middle of a process of self-discovery who finally subverts patriarchal conventions. These postmodern female protagonists are characterized similarly to classical ones but described from an ironic, critical perspective. Concretely, Anne Sexton‘s rewriting of ―Snow White‖, entitled ―Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs‖, depicts the female protagonist following the literary pattern of Nikiforov‘s ‗innocent persecuted heroine‘ and, furthermore, other features such as passivity, tendency towards superficiality, lack of self-knowledge and awareness will 38 finally transform her, we guess, into an evil queen like her stepmother. As Shandi Wagner (2011) points out, ―Snow White is no longer the heroine who, after many trials, achieves her dream, but rather an empty-headed virgin who is beautiful and vain and little more‖ (111). With this protagonist Sexton‘s intention is to criticize the values of patriarchal society by highlighting an obsolete female stereotype. It is necessary to remember that Sexton is influenced by the second wave feminist current. In this sense, authors such as Robin Morgan have affirmed that feminist postulates are firmly against the female role promoted by Western society: ―the role all women are forced to play in this society, one way or another: apolitical, unoffending, passive, delicate (but delight by drudgery) things” (qtd in Gamble, 2001: 31). This female stereotype is interpreted by Sexton as a misrepresentation of the female image and, for this reason, Sexton satirizes this prototypical heroine by means of the exaggeration and parody of her qualities. The author emphasizes common aspects related to feminine beauty comparing them with contemporary elements of every-day life from a sardonic perspective, reinforcing their excessive importance, fragility and lack of usefulness: ―cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper,/ arms and legs made of Limoges,/ lips like Vin Du Rhône,/ rolling her china-blue doll eyes/ open and shut‖ (3). According to these similes, the female protagonist is considered fragile as cigarette paper and Limoges enamel, and very similar to a ‗doll‘ because of her appearance and passivity. Carter‘s tale ―Snow Child‖ also describes the female protagonist as an innocent heroine: beautiful, fragile and submissive to male wishes: ―As soon as he completed her description, there she stood, beside the road, white skin, red mouth, black hair and stark naked‖ (91). In this respect, Carter does not subvert the female character but her fate. In opposition to the Grimm Brothers‘ ending, Carter‘s young protagonist is not rewarded for following the female model of behaviour imposed by the patriarchal authority. In 39 fact she is punished for it by means of her death and subsequent rape. The fact that the Count rapes her dead body can be understood as a parody of women‘s passivity and objectification in sexual intercourse, as promoted by the patriarchal authority: a voiceless and inert female body that is violently penetrated and is unable to feel any kind of sexual pleasure. In this manner, Carter criticizes those patriarchal assumptions that prevent women from behaving actively during the sexual act. In fact, Carter supports Sade‘s conceptions of sex, sadism and pornography. At first, Carter‘s controversial way of thinking about sex caused a certain commotion in feminist circles who consider that sexual practices such as sadism and pornography humiliate and objectify women. As the sociologist Amitai Etzioni asserts, ―[...] we regard pornography primarily as a medium for expressing norms about male power and domination which functions as a social control mechanism for keeping women in a subordinate status, [...]‖ (qtd in Diamond, 1980: 686). Similarly to second wave feminism‘s view, Carter interprets pornography as a definited framework in which women become objects of male sadism but instead of qualifying men as aggressors and appeal to the discourse of female victimization, she prefers to highlight the figure of the woman as a female sexual subject. For this reason, Carter supports authors like Sade because he defends the female sexual right: ―He treats all sexual reality as a political reality and [...] declares himself unequivocally for the right of women to fuck as aggressively, tyrannously, and cruelly as men‖ (qtd in Sheets, 1991: 633). According to this perspective, the fact that the child melts at the end of the tale can also be interpreted from a parodic point of view; thus, Carter ironizes about the possible future of female stereotypes in fairy tales: if these female archetypes do not develop, they will be obsolete and will disappear in the same way as the innocent persecuted heroine‘s body disappears in the snow in Carter‘s postmodern tale. 40 Despite having, apparently, the same physical qualities of the classical Snow White and of her mother, whose fragility is the origin of her death at the beginning of the story, Emma Donoghue‘s female protagonist promptly dissociates herself from this female role by showing qualities than make her different from the other fragile characters: ―Though I was so much smaller than she was, I was stronger‖ (44). In fact, Donoghue‘s heroine is the only one of the three Snow Whites who begins a physical and psychological journey by means of which she finally acquires self-knowledge and personal fulfilment. In contrast to Sexton‘s heroine, Donoghue‘s anonymous protagonist is not forced to escape from the castle because of the danger of being killed by the queen‘s hunter; indeed this heroine is not afraid of the queen thanks to her strong personality and bravery: ―That night I heard many feet hammer a track to my father‘s room. I flattened my face into my pillow. I waited. No sound, cutting through the dark castle; no final word for me. The linen lay against my eyelids, still dry‖ (51). It could be suggested that one of the reasons for her flight from the castle to the forest has to do with a feeling of loyalty to his father: ―I decided not to stay to see what the day of the funeral would bring, which courtiers‘ eyes would shine with flattery, and which glitter with violence. I decided to leave it all to her, and leave her to it‖ (20). Paying attention to this last sentence, one might observe how this flight is also related to her lack of selfknowledge, which does not let her accept the attraction that she feels for her stepmother, as will be analyzed later on. During her stay in the woodsmen‘s cottage, she takes a new role as housewife, which allows her to show her physical fortitude, in opposition to Sexton‘s heroine, and to avoid reflecting on herself and her relationship with the new queen ―I guessed how to cook the food they threw on the table, gathering together from the shattered jigsaw of memory everything I must have seen the castle servants do ten thousand times. Gradually I learned how to keep hunger at bay and disease from the 41 door: all the sorcery of fire and iron and water. Hard work no hardship to me; it kept the pictures at bay. Whenever I slackened or stopped to rest by the fire, I was haunted by the image of my stepmother‖ (53). In general, the female protagonist seems to feel comfortable in this new role but not completely fulfilled. This lack of fulfilment could be the reason why her stepmother‘s images assail her at moments of rest. The possible interpretation of the heroine‘s behaviour will be developed subsequently when analyzing the queen‘s character. Overall, it could be affirmed that the three Snow White‘s figures described by Sexton, Carter and Donoghue present a similar behaviour to that of the traditional heroines‘ one, although in Donoghue‘s tale, these old-fashioned qualities are only shown at the very beginning of the story. Passivity, virginity, submission, fragility and, above all, beauty are qualities that guarantee their status as objects. Beauty has always been a dominant theme in fairy tales; in fact it is a quality that has been rewarded with a traditional happy ending but at the same time this feature has also been related to negative aspects such as danger, victimization and a process of female objectification by the patriarchal discourse. According to Lori Baker-Sperry and Liz Grauerholz (2003: 711), ―the feminine beauty ideal is viewed largely as an oppressive, patriarchal practice that objectifies, devalues, and subordinates women‖. Although in Sexton‘s, Carter‘s and Donoghue‘s postmodern tales, the beauty motif has lost its conventional positive consideration to acquire a negative meaning, beauty continues being a remarkable aspect in these stories due to the influence of different discourses that indoctrinate women to value themselves only in terms of the way they are perceived9. Therefore, one might conclude that in these Snow White‘s adaptations, heroines are still the products of a process of female objectification. In accordance to 9 On the relevance of beauty, see Naomi Wolf (1991). 48 in my skirts to make them so heavy, and I said, Knives, and he took his hand off my thigh and never touched me again‖(52). The woodsman‘s action of touching the female protagonist‘s thigh while he asks her about such as intimate issue implies that he initially looks at her as an object of desire. However, the heroine‘s quick answer suggests a possible defence in case the woodsman attempted to assault her sexually. Thus, the warning of an active defence by the female protagonist makes the woodsman stop looking at her as an object and start respecting her as a subject. Returning to Aktari‘s statements about the king‘s male gaze, one might deduce that through the fantasy of the male protagonist he can feel the sexual desire that is going to develop between the two female characters. The concept of fantasy as an imagined scene in which something imperceptible may make itself visible was developed by Elizabeth Cowie in her article ‗Fantasia‘ (1984)12. Thus, the heroine‘s comparison of her appearance with that of her stepmother has a double interpretation: ―We looked at each other, she and I, and chimed in the chorus of his laughter. [...] You see, her hair was black as coal, mine as ebony. My lips were red as hers were, and our cheeks as pale as two pages of a book closed together (47-48). On the one hand, this description can be analyzed as a process in which the female protagonist is objectifying the queen from a sexual perspective. In spite of the belief that objectification is only a practice carried out through the male gaze, the rise of the lesbian movement has socially shown that sexual objectification is also part of female desire. According to Sheila Jeffreys (1993): ―Another fundamental concept of male supremacist as well as lesbian therapy is that of objectification. [...] The new lesbian sex industry and the new lesbian therapies have undertaken the task of constructing objectifying sex for lesbians‖ (54). In this sense, 12 ―The word derives through Latin from the Greek term meaning to ‗make visible‘. However, rather than a notion of revelation, making visible what we would not otherwise be able to seeas with a microscope allowing us to see bacteria etc invisible to the ‗naked eye‘- fantasy as a term has come to mean the making visible, present, [...] of what can never directly be seen‖ (Cowie, 1984: 75). 49 one might suggest that Donoghue reappropriates a technique considered traditionally masculine to give visibility to lesbian representation. However, taking into account the depiction of Donoghue‘s heroine and the emphasis on the description of little physical details, another possible interpretation can be that this depiction is more focused on the heroine‘s need to recognize eroticism in another female when they mirror each other. In general, there is a difference with the king‘s gaze, which holds both together as the ―other‘ as will analyzed later on. According to the previous analysis of female objectification, it can be stated that the relationship established between the male characters and the female protagonist in these fairy tales corresponds with a kind of liaison in which the male figures, in representation of patriarchal authority, attempt to submit the heroines, with or without success. Anyway, all the female protagonists suffer the consequences of this attempt since they are forced at one time or another to take a secondary role regarding the male figure. Owing to the tendency of these male characters to dominate female ones, the logical thing would be to think that their portrayals in these tales are going to be completely negative. Nevertheless, male figures appear to be ambiguous in this sense. These three works show the male characters‘ condition of superior beings to the female protagonists but, at the same time, it is possible to observe different attitudes in their treatment of the female protagonists on some occasions. As Fukuda argues (2008), in Sexton‘s collection of poetry, there is a certain level of ambiguity as regards the portrayal of the male role: ―[...] in Transformations, Sexton is inconsistent in her portrayal of the male role. In some of the poems she interprets it according to the feminist ideals of the time while in others she upholds it according to the existing ideology of the patriarchal society‖ (45). More specifically, in Sexton‘s ―Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs‖, there are three different references to male characters: the 50 hunter, the dwarfs and, finally, the prince. Seemingly, these three male references only share a common ground: Snow White‘s objectification. However, all of them have saved the heroine‘s life at some point, intentionally or accidentally, as in the prince‘s case. Anyway, these male actions are influenced by the patriarchal vision of the Brothers Grimm original literary source, in which the heroine is not able to survive on her own. This idea is closely linked to the patriarchal belief ―man is busy, the woman idle‖ just as was denounced by Simone de Beauvoir (1989: 258). In spite of their condition of Snow White‘s ‗saviors‘, it is not possible to assure that they are the helpers of the female protagonist. The identification of the male characters as helpers is not completely accurate according to the definition of ‗helper‘ coined by Joseph Campbell and taking into consideration that Sexton‘s postmodern revision is still based on Campbell‘s theory of the ‗monomyth‘ (1949). This author defined the ‗helper‘ as a protective figure that can take a wide variety of forms, such as wizard, an old man, a dwarf, a crone or a fairy godmother, and whose main aim is to help the hero in his journey. In Sexton‘s tale, the heroine begins a physical journey from the castle to the forest in which she is indeed helped by the hunter and the dwarfs subsequently. These latter ones offer their house and protection to the female protagonist but regarding her symbolical journey of self-knowledge, none of the male figures help Snow White to maturate psychologically. Rather the contrary, they foster her view as an object: ―It‘s a good omen, they said, and will bring us luck‖ (5). From a humanist point of view, one might understand that this tendency to objectify and submit the heroine to their control corresponds to an excessive overprotection. In this sense, Snow White‘s submission could be understood as a strategy of protection by the male characters. In accordance with patriarchal authority, females are beings who are not 51 able to protect themselves. By means of the objectification and dominance of the female character, they are protecting her in the only way that they know. On the other hand, from a patriarchal perspective one might suggest that this promotion of the females as objects corresponds to the male characters‘ personal interest. If the heroine achieves knowledge of herself, she will be aware of her state as an object and will abandon her secondary role. This fact would be harmful for the male figures in the fairy tale, who would lose their powerful position. This belief of men as dominators of females is developed by the second wave feminist postulates and is based on the idea of woman as a secondary being at the service of the others, as Waugh explains: ―Women‘s experience, historically, has been defined almost entirely through interpersonal, usually domestic and filial, relationships: serving the needs of others. In existential terms her identity exists largely as being-for-others (needing to please; narcissistic vanity; mothering as institutionalized in western social practices; deriving security from intimate relations with others) rather than being-for-herself (1989: 43). In this respect, the tendency of Sexton‘s male characters to oppression and exertion of power over women seems to be the reason why the American poet portrays them negatively. As was mentioned previously, the fact that Sexton refers to the dwarfs as ‗hot dogs‘ or ‗czars‘ highlights the idea that they are beings controlled by their sexual desires and are prone to deal with Snow White as their possession. On his part, the prince‘s character appears to follow a similar tendency. Although the happy ending suggests that the female protagonist and the prince are going to have a relationship of complementary partners, given that the heroine becomes ‗the prince‘s bride‘ (8), the truth is that the classical happy ending transforms Snow White into the prince‘s ―trophy wife‖ and matches perfectly her status of object of ornamentation. 52 Contrary to Sexton, Donoghue‘s ―The Tale of the Apple‖ apparently introduces a positive overall portrayal of the male characters: the king and the woodsmen gang. Paying attention to the king‘s figure, who is the female protagonist‘s father, it is possible to observe an explicit oedipal attachment which even suggests an initial sexual contact between them: ―As I grew and grew, he bounced me on his lap till our cheeks scalded‖ (45). Indeed, the relationship between father and daughter has not always been like that, since at the beginning of the tale, the father is an absent figure because the heroine is brought up by the maid until the death of this latter one: ―After the maid, too, died in her turn, he found me wandering the drafty corridors of the castle and took me up in his stiff ermine arms‖ (44-45). Anyway, the inappropriate behaviour previously mentioned ends up when the heroine becomes a woman and the king‘s new wife arrives at the castle: ―But the day there was a patch of red on my crumpled sheet, my father brought home a new wife‖ (45). From a certain perspective, one might understand that the king‘s new marriage is the way for the father to break this attachment with her daughter. Yet, from a different perspective, the arrival of her daughter‘s first period leads the king to stop the ambiguous relationship that he maintains. One might suggest that the idea is to avoid a possible offspring from an incestuous relationship with the arrival of a new woman with whom the king can satisfy his sexual desire. In the classical fairy tale, ―Snow White‖, the wicked stepmother begins to feel threatened by the stepdaughter once she becomes a female rival for her: in other words, when Snow White turns into a woman, with her first menstruation, an event which Donoghue explicitly refers to. Contrary to the original literary source, Donoghue‘s protagonist is the one who initially feels jealousy at her stepmother, to such a point that she considers her father‘s new wife as her enemy. One might suggest that the heroine‘s feelings against her stepmother have been developed because of the accepted 53 knowledge, prejudices and patriarchal promotion of female rivalry and jealousy fostered by fairy tales. In this sense, it can be interpreted that Donoghue criticizes the negative influence of classical female rivalry in fairy tales by representing it as a prejudice that affects the relationship between the queen and her stepdaughter. It is evident that the female protagonist has not overcome the oedipal attachment with her father yet and consequently, the female protagonist attempts to take back her previous status over and over: ―He curled up on his side like a bear troubled by flies. I stood by his bed, on and off, but he was past caring‖ (49). As Karen E. Rowe (1993) maintains: ―In throes of oedipal ambiguities, a young girl who still desires dependency seizes upon her father‟s indulgent affection, because it guarantees respite from maternal persecutions and offers a compensating masculine adoration‖ (qtd in Aktari, 214). Subsequently the heroine will forget her father‘s figure by falling in love with the queen: ―My father was only a tiny picture in my mind, shut away like a miniature in lock‖ (53). Indeed, both the king and the woodsmen are not represented as perfect men who help the female protagonist in her journey of self-discovery, since they are portrayed rather as imperfect beings who make some mistakes in their behaviour towards the heroine. This treatment of the male characters has to do with Donoghue‘s postfeminist approach. The development of postfeminism is directly related to the acquisition of a new status by women during the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. The new female role turns patriarchal male behaviour into an obsolete attitude. The loss of their patriarchal attitudes transform men into troubled beings who have lost their male identity and hegemonic social role. This is also the origin of a ‗New Man‘ who personifies a revision of patriarchal masculinity, as Catherine Mackinnon explains: ―He embodies the sort of anti-sexism which is characterized by his attempts to form non- 54 oppressive relationships (2003: 13). It could be suggested that Donoghue describes these ‗new men‘ in her fairy tales and this fact has a positive purpose: to emphasize glimpses of men‘s imperfection in order to humanize them and to leave aside their possible condition of dominant and oppressive males. In spite of some misunderstandings with the woodsmen, she refers to them in this way: ―Though squat and surly, with earth in every line of their faces, these were not bad men, and considering how little my condition entitled me to, they treated me royally‖ (52). This statement shows that they try to avoid objectifying and submitting her. Nevertheless, in this tale it would not be accurate to refer to the submission of the female character given that the story deals with an exchange of interests: she keeps house for the woodsmen, whereas they allow her to stay in the cottage. At the end of the tale, the woodsmen try to oblige her to abandon the kingdom, pleading that it is a strategy of protection against the queen: the heroine will be more protected in another place where her condition as princess will be taken into account: ―But lie down, one said, you are not well yet. Until you were poisoned we had been forgetting who you are, said a second; now we‘re taking you to another kingdom, where they‘ll know how to treat a princess‖ (58). This fact can be interpreted as an indirect way of protecting the female character from her own erotic feelings for her stepmother: in other words a patriarchal authority attempting to submit the heroine to heteronormativity, as will be analyzed further. In a general sense, one might conclude that this measure has to do with a patriarchal and paternalistic feeling that asserts the alleged inability of women to take care of themselves. In ‗The Tale of the Apple‘, the female protagonist defies their decision: ―I made them set me down, and I got out of the box, deaf to their clamor‖ (58). 55 Regarding Angela Carter‘s portrayal of the male role in her work, one might affirm that what actually differentiates her work from the two others is the stress on the critique of the patriarchal male stereotype. The patriarchal figures portrayed in her tales can be perfectly qualified as inhuman. In this sense, one might suggest that Carter initially accepts the second wave feminist‘s concept of man as an aggressor coined by feminist activists such as Susan Brownmiller: ―Like other second-wave feminists, Brownmiller viewed [...] all women as potentially passive victims and [...] all men as potential aggressors‖ (qtd in Gerhard, 2001: 76). Nonetheless, Carter usually subverts this male figure in her fairy tales so that he is finally defeated by the postmodern female character. Furthermore, Carter admits the possibility of other forms of masculinity that are not patriarchal and do not submit and oppress the female characters. These nonpatriarchal male figures fit a previous version of the ‗new man‘ conceived in the early nineteen seventies which will be the origin of the 1980s ‗new man‘13. In her tale ―The Bloody Chamber‖, for example, the author introduces the French Marquis‘ character, who is described as a monster, so as to compare him with the piano tuner‘s character, who is portrayed as a male helper. In Carter, the monsters, the beast, the wolf, are eventually humanized. However, the introduction of different patterns of masculinity personified in more than one male character is not a technique developed in ‗Snow Child‘. In this adaptation, nevertheless, there is a certain level of ambiguity in the portrayal of the male role, similar to the one found in Sexton‘s and Donoghue‘s tales. At first glance, in this tale the male role can be defined as negative because among some of the qualities attributed to the male protagonist, the Count, are the tendency towards superiority, power, dominance and even a certain degree of violence. According to Kevin A. Boon, the association of masculinity with these series of 13 According to Genz and Brabon, ―[o]riginating in the 1970s, the ‗new man‘ was conceived as a ‗nurturing‘ figure seemingly in tune with the demands of feminism and women in general‘ (2009: 137). 56 features is one of the key points denounced by the second wave feminism: ―[...] there is still a perception of violence as a genetic component of masculinity. In this sense, masculinity is seen as the receptacle that encompasses ‗violent, aggressive, domineering, controlling, and fearless qualities generally associated to manhood‘‖ (qtd in Escudero-Alías, 2009: 74). Owing to Carter‘s association with the marginal side of the second wave feminism, her intention by introducing this character in the story is not only to criticize these qualities but also to denounce that they were considered only as masculine. For this reason, she portrays the Count and the Countess with the same qualities, subverting the feminine role that associates the female with the stereotype of the ‗innocent persecuted heroine‘. In this respect, these features do not draw attention in the case of the Count‘s, for they are expected as part of masculine behaviour. On the other hand, such a representation of the Countess diminishes her femininity and even her humanity, as will be seen subsequently. In this manner, Carter is trying to show that negative qualities are considered normative in men but exceptional when they are attributed to women. As Jack Zipes points out (1986), there is a very different pattern of signification for girls and women: ―What is praiseworthy in males... is rejected in females‖; (qtd in Roemer and Bacchilega, 67). The fact of ascribing the same qualities to characters belonging to different genders may be understood as a strategy; thus, she deconstructs the idea that evil and wickedness can only be attributed to masculinity or to those female characters described as desexualized or masculinised such as evil stepmothers, bad fairies or witches. Taking into consideration that Carter‘s feminism provides a reflection on male and female roles in Western society, which anticipates the subsequent idea of gender as a social construction, and redefines classical myths, one might suggest that the ambiguity in the male protagonist can be a strategy to deconstruct the gender polarity of the 57 traditional fairy tales. This polarity consists in the identification of evil with male and desexualized female characters and good with feminine characters. According to Aytül Özüm, ―[s]he (Carter) employs literary devices to impose the idea that evil and wickedness cannot be attributed to the male solely, and she deconstructs the solid link between evil and masculinity in most of the fairy-tales‖ (2010:114). Carter‘s introduction and description of certain male actions initially seem to be positive. In spite of the fact that the Count‘s behaviour is correct in certain aspects, he cannot be considered a male helper because his tendencies do not aim at protecting the female characters, as happens in Sexton‘s and Donoghue‘s works. Some actions such as his defence of the girl, twice preventing his wife from killing her: ―Is she a fish, to swim in such cold weather?‖ (92); and his intention to please her by ordering the child to pick a rose for the Countess: ―I can‘t deny you that‖ (92), seem to indicate the Count‘s attempt to conciliate these two different female characters in his life. These actions and his subsequent sadness when he loses ‗the child of his desire‘ suggest that beyond his dominant and oppressive image there is something human within him. Nonetheless, actions such as the rape indicate quite the opposite. Bearing in mind Carter‘s ironic style it is possible to think that everything that has been previously analyzed as positive could be considered just as parody and the Count‘s actions and intentions had never been true. First of all, the male protagonist is to blame for the girl‘s death, since his desire for a girl younger than his wife is the origin of the Countess‘s jealousy. In this sense, the male protagonist takes the role of the mirror in the classical Snow White‘s tales; the Count turns into the patriarchal gaze that judges the two main female characters for their beauty and creates the conflict between them, similarly to what happens in Donoghue‘s ―The Tale of the Apple‖. The fact that Carter‘s male protagonist takes the child‘s side on some occasions does not imply a 64 even within the postfeminist movement, as Escudero Alías points out: ―Until the late 1980s, the development of feminist thinking contributed to the creation of lesbian theory, [...]. Within feminism, lesbian perspectives were seen as the dissident voices which claimed for a separatist framework‖ (2009: 34-35). Some figures related to fantasy imagery such as evil stepmothers, wicked queens, beasts and witches have also been traditionally related to the concept of the abject: something that is attractive but at the same time is rejected. More specifically, classical fairy tales usually portray the figure of the witch as a powerful personification of evil and monstrosity according to the patriarchal order. This could probably be the reason why the woodsmen suggest that the queen has to be a witch, although the stepmother has never employed witchcraft or sorcery to get her aims. Yet it is the only explanation that they find to understand that the heroine approaches the person whom, in theory, she is escaping from, and allows her to get into the cottage: ―They said my stepmother had to be a sorceress to find me so deep in the forest. [...] They lift me up and told me that my stepmother must be a witch to put such poison of idleness in my head‖ (55-56). The woodsmen‘s lack of understanding of the heroine‘s behaviour is logical to a certain point; it has to do with their male condition since their patriarchal point of view prevents them form comprehending a love and sexual relationship between women. As Aktari explains: ―The woodsmen are the voices of patriarchy which exclude sexually active women by defining her [sic] as a witch‖ (310). By means of this tale, Donoghue denounces that the patriarchal system has labelled powerful female characters or, as in this story, those that have transgressed heterosexual boundaries, as ‗witches‘. As Daly‘s ―Gyn/Ecology‖ illustrates: ―the witch played an important role in the iconography of the movement (radical feminist movement) [...] which patriarchy seeks to repress by 65 recruiting women into heterosexual relations and encouraging them to conform to a docile model of femininity‖ (qtd in Palmer, 1999: 30). Angela Carter‘s ‗Snow Child‘ draws attention to another powerful female character who is described as evil and perverse for not developing the same qualities as the heroine but others traditionally related to the male gender. In this sense, Carter‘s intention by introducing the Countess‘s character is to establish a dichotomy between both main female characters through their appearance and personalities. Thus, Carter dismantles the classical binary archetype encoded in the traditional fairy tale: the ideal of femininity/ the patriarchal construction of female evil. With this purpose, Carter‘s postmodern revision adopts a new structure in which many elements from the original literary source have been omitted and subverted in accordance to the author‘s interests. In general, one might observe that the female antagonist is not actually evil but rather her actions are addressed to preserve her status as her husband‘s female object. According to Bolaki, ―The Countess is also the product of the Count‘s desire, but she is aware that she can be replaced by a younger woman any time she stops being her husband‘s object of desire‖ (qtd in Fruss, 2010: 187). The apparition of a new girl in the story, who is called ‗child‘ so as to suggest her youth, endangers the Countess‘ status, so that she has to take drastic steps: ―[...] the countess had only one thought: how shall I be rid of her?‖ (92). Furthermore, it is necessary to remember that the Countess is not the murderer of the child and that her death has been caused by patriarchy, symbolized in the rose that pricks the female protagonist‘s finger, thus shedding her virginal blood as in sexual intercourse. Instead of changing her personality in order to be similar to the heroine, the Countess firmly keeps her personality in opposition to the girl who tries to please her and her husband by means of submission, which remarks the girl‘s fragile personality. 66 In this respect, the fact that the female protagonist dies at being pricked by the rose, whereas the Countess only feels a light sting, highlights that the Count‘s wife‘s female power and strength is what saves her life, while some qualities promoted by patriarchy like fragility are the cause of the child‘s death. Carter seems to express a preference for the Countess over the heroine. Hence, the Countess‘ wicked actions are rewarded with the maintenance of her status at the end of the tale, contrary to what happens in the traditional source. By means of this character, Carter defends the evil female figure in the reappropiation of fairy tales and saves women subjects from being victimized. Once some remarkable aspects of Snow White‘s postmodern tales have been analysed, mainly female objectification, the description of the heroine as a stereotype and the portrayal of male and female roles, the focus of the analysis will concentrate on the process of subversion carried out through symbols. Taking into consideration the previous analysis of Angela Carter‘s and Emma Donoghue‘s use of language and specific symbols, now it is necessary to concentrate on Anne Sexton‘s deployment of language and her portrayal of popular imagery in her poetry. Sexton‘s poetry characterizes itself for the introduction of American popular imagery from the twentieth century. This literary strategy has two possible interpretations: on the one hand, the use of cultural references that come from popular culture creates a sardonic vision of certain aspects that the author wants to criticize, such as the beauty canon. On the other hand, Sexton‘s employment of contemporary references approaches the mythical tale to the reality of the moment. In this manner, Sexton highlights the influence of fairy tales on women‘s lives. In spite of the fact that Sexton‘s poetry contains multiple references to her contemporary culture, the analysis will rather concentrate on the deployment of classical fairy tale‘s imagery by the three authors, their creations of new meanings and 67 subversion of the story‘s significance in accordance with each author‘s perception. First of all, in these three postmodern versions, there is a kind of dichotomy in the use of the red and white colours. According to the traditional Western artistic canon, the white and red colours might be interpreted as symbol of the binary archetype virgin/whore, which in these postmodern fairy tales is used to differentiate the heroine from the evil queen or wicked stepmother. In Sexton‘s poem, the white colour and a series of elements, in theory related to whiteness, recur throughout the poem in reference to Snow White‘s description: ‗cigarette paper‘, ‗china‘, ‗unicorn‘, ‗bonefish‘ (3). Through the female protagonist‘s comparison with this imagery, Sexton mocks the relevance of virginity in classical fairy tales, given that none of these objects is totally white. In fact, cigarette paper and bonefish may be described as beige; china is a material traditionally white but there exist other kinds of china of different colours, and, finally, although the unicorn is the only element that is really white, it is a fantastic creature, something strange to reality. The use of the unicorn can be read as a way of underlining that Snow White‘s virginity and innocence are also unreal. Following the classical interpretation, the red colour is related to the evil queen and symbolizes her wickedness. The colour red is associated with the symbol of the ‗redhot iron shoes‘ (8) and the author‘s reference to fire when she writes: ―First your toes will smoke‖ (8). In this sense, the author seems to connect the idea of evil developed by the patriarchal discourse with redness and for this reason the queen will dance with her red shoes until ‗[...] your heels turn black‘ (8). One might suggest that the stepmother will dance until her own wickedness burns with her. In this sense, it is possible to deduce that the black colour is also connected with the idea of evil. In spite of the fact that Carter‘s Snow White combines the three colours in her appearance: - her hair is black, her lips are red and her skin is white - the notion of 68 whiteness seems to be the predominant one, given that it is embodied in the snow when the naked child appears, whereas the notion of blackness and redness are mainly attributed to the Countess‘ appearance through her ‗pelts of black foxes‘, ‗high, black, shining boots‘ and ‗scarlet heels‘ (91). Thus, the dichotomy of these two female roles is accurate and fixed not only for their personalities but also for their physical appearance. This dichotomy is evident by means of the patriarchal gaze which is personified in the Count‘s figure, as happens with the king in Donoghue‘s ―The Tale of the Apple‖. On her part, Sexton keeps to the classical imagery of the mirror as the patriarchal voice. Returning to the symbology of colours, in Carter‘s tale the notion of redness is not associated with the evil queen but with sexual maturation. Blood is a highly sexual motif that indicates the heroine‘s sexual development. Moreover, it can also be interpreted as a symbolic prolepsis of her violent defloration. According to this point, this can be the reason why the girl screams and faints when she sees blood on her finger; elements such as blood and redness are strange elements for a pure girl in the same way as sexual intercourse is. As Bettelheim maintains, ―[f]airy tales prepare the child to accept what is otherwise a most upsetting event: sexual bleeding, [...] and later on intercourse when the hymen is broken‖ (1989: 202). Donoghue also introduces references to redness by means of symbols. The image of blood appears when the female protagonist‘s biological mother pricks her finger with a needle while she imagines what her daughter will look like. The three drops of blood that stain the snow may signify the heroine‘s process of conception. Furthermore, blood has another meaning when it appears in the female protagonist‘s bed; it has to do with the heroine‘s subsequent process of transformation from child to woman. As for the apple, it is a highly meaningful symbol in Donoghue‘s tale whereas Sexton‘s poem keeps its classical meaning. The Irish author preserves the association of 69 the apple motif with the acquisition of sexual knowledge, as happens in mythical stories and legends. The apple symbolizes the heroine‘s sexual desire for her stepmother and, just when the heroine bites the apple, she experiences pleasurable feelings that echo sexual pleasure or what Luce Irigaray defined as jouissance, ―a sense of pleasure, abandonment, orgasmic overflowing‖ (qtd in Garcia Zarranz, 21); ―I took the apple from her without a word, bit into the red side, and began to choke. Fear and excitement locked in struggle in my throat, and blackness seeped across my eyes. I fell to the ground (57). Thus, one might affirm that the motif of the apple loses its traditional meaning as a dangerous element as was promoted by patriarchal discourses15. While in Sexton the heroine‘s fainting and subsequent awakening are not really meaningful, these same actions become relevant in Carter and Donoghue. In Carter‘s tale, the child‘s faint and death symbolize the extinction of the old-fashioned female role of the ‗innocent persecuted heroine‘. On her part, the loss of consciousness of Donoghue‘s heroine has more positive connotations given that it does not imply death but an actual awakening. The female protagonist not only awakes physically but also awakes from a state of ignorance which prevented her from understanding and, therefore, accepting her lesbian condition. In this sense, one might suggest that the experience of loving a woman is very similar to an awakening; once the heroine knows the truth, this one cannot be obviated: ―My head was still swimming; I thought I might faint again. But my mouth was full of apple, slippery, still hard, vinegary at the edges. I could feel the marks of my own teeth on the skin. I bit down, and juice ran to the corners of my lips. It was not poisoned. It was the first apple of the year from my father‘s orchard. I chewed till it was eaten up and I knew what to do‖ (58). 15 According to Bettelheim: ―In many myths as well as fairy tales, the apple stands for love and sex, in both its benevolent and its dangerous aspect. An apple given to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, showing she was preferred to chaste goddesses, led to the Trojan War. It was the Biblical apple with which man was seduced to forswear his innocence in order to gain knowledge and sexuality‖ (1989: 212). 70 Consequently, when the heroine awakes in the glass coffin, she is prepared to accept her lesbian identity and return to the castle together with her beloved. In general terms, one might conclude that all these postmodern adaptations reflect a physical journey of the protagonist from her home to an unknown place. Despite being described as an enriching experience, in some cases the heroine does not acquire any knowledge of herself. When this fact happens this is because the authors are trying to criticize a specific female stereotype. On the other hand, it is possible to observe how the process of female objectification is only slightly parodied and criticized and subsequently discussed by Sexton whereas it is totally rejected and subverted by Carter and Donoghue. This has to do with the authors‘ historical background. As mentioned above, Sexton was a poet related to second wave feminism during the sixties and seventies, and from her writings can be deduced an incipient awareness of female objectification in the sense that was criticized by Simone de Beauvoir: the adolescent girl ‗becomes an object and she sees herself as an object; she discovers this new aspect of her being with surprise: it seems to her that she has been doubled; instead of coinciding exactly with herself, she now begins to exist outside‘ (Beauvoir 1989, 316). Sexton‘s strategy to fight objectification is the description of those females that represent male fantasies as useless and ignorant women. With the passing of time and the subsequent publication of Laura Mulvey‘s pioonering essay ―Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema‖, many feminists and post-feminists took consciousness of this problem and have attempted to express their rejection of female objectification in different ways. In Carter‘s case, the strategy selected is the graphical representation of male violence against the female object, and Donoghue‘s one is the sexual objectification by means of the female gaze. 71 Similarly, the evolution in male and female representation is clear. Although, there is a certain ambiguity as regards male characters, they continue being shrouded in evil due to the feeling of dominance and submission that their presence instills. However, this feeling decreases progressively as the feminist movement advances. The same development is experienced by female characters. These ones end up by rejecting victimization due to the arrival of new female roles and the acknowledgement of the obsolescence of other female ones. As for symbolism, some relevant imagery from the classical fairy tale has been omitted or subverted to create a transgressive and parodic perspective. Sexton keeps a very similar structure to the original fairy tale and therefore most of its symbols have been introduced in the reworking with their initial meaning. Yet Carter and Donoghue‘s rewritings present certain levels of subversion. Accordingly, one might affirm that Carter‘s revision has simplified Snow White‘s tale to concentrate on the relationship of the main female characters, the origin of their rivalry and the Count‘s gaze, which symbolizes the motif of the mirror as symbol of the patriarchal voice and of objectification. In this sense, Donoghue‘s king also embodies the mirror‘s function, although with a more unexpected ending. Another subverted motif is the rose, which abandons its initial meaning to symbolize patriarchy: the rose kills the child but only bites the Countess. One possible explanation is that under the dominance of patriarchy fragile women such as Carter‘s girl, are condemned whereas those women who are strong enough can be free of oppression and submission. 72 Third Chapter: Sexton’s “Briar Rose”/Donoghue’s “The Tale of the Needle” In this third chapter, I will concentrate on two postmodern fairy tales based on Charles Perrault‘s original literary source, Belle au Bois Dormant (1697). Subsequently, the German authors Jakob and Wilhem Grimm also wrote a similar fairy tale entitled Dornröschen (1812). The classical fairy tale‘s story describes a young heroine who is the victim of a powerful spell because of a fairy‘s curse: when the female protagonist becomes a teenager, she will prick her finger with a spinning wheel and will fall into an unconscious state between life and death. The heroine remains in this state until she is finally awaken by means of a prince‘s kiss. From a psychological point of view, it might be deduced that this state of unconsciousness represents a symbolic process of maturation from her childhood into adulthood: in other words, she will ―sleep‖ until the moment when she is prepared to become a wife and a mother, as is represented with the arrival of the prince to rescue her. Feminist and postfeminist authors such as Anne Sexton and Emma Donoghue rewrite this story and introduce plenty of changes. In spite of the abundance of changes, the concept of a period of physical stagnation in the female protagonist has been maintained by both authors. However, this idea has been subverted and developed, changing its initial meaning in Sexton‘s and Donoghue‘s versions16. Therefore, my main focus of analysis is going to be Sexton‘s ‗Briar Rose‘ and Donoghue‘s ―The Tale of the Needle‖. Both Sexton‘s and Donoghue‘s female protagonists follow the same features of Nikiforov‘s ‗innocent persecuted heroine‘: 16 On her part, Angela Carter also wrote a story called ―The Lady of the House of Love‖ which could be loosely based on ‗Sleeping Beauty‘. Although this tale can be interpreted as an adaptation of Perrault‘s fairy tale, the huge influence of Gothic fiction in the plot has blurred its indebtedness to ―Sleeping Beauty‖. 73 passivity, fragility, innocence and lack of knowledge. At the beginning, Sexton‘s heroine is depicted in this sense, as a fragile and ethereal being: ―Consider/ a girl who keeps slipping off,/ arms limp as old carrots,/ into the hypnotist‘s trance,/ into a spirit world/ speaking with the gift of tongues‖ (90). However, paying attention to this description, one might deduce that the female protagonist‘s fragility is excessive and her alleged ethereality is, indeed, a tendency to silence in order to escape from reality. The heroine‘s portrayal promotes the idea that there is something that goes beyond the typical female submission in fairy tales. It could be suggested that Briar Rose‘s behaviour highlights the idea that there is something within her, in her personality, which does not work properly. According to the psychiatrist Judith Herman, ―[t]he psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it‖ (1997:1). Subsequently, the poem reveals that this ‗something‘ that does not work properly has to do with a traumatic experience of sexual abuse by her father. This fact is maintained in secrecy by Briar Rose. In fact, Sexton describes that experience using a veiled language, as if it were necessary to create a new language to discuss what is traditionally considered taboo. The author‘s employment of language is full of contemporary references that highlight an approach from the atemporal fairy tale to a twentieth-century setting. Moreover, Sexton‘s poem is full of symbolism and hidden meanings that create an ambiguous atmosphere in which something terrible like incest is suggested but not explicitly mentioned until the ending: ―It‘s not the prince at all,/ but my father/ drunkenly bent over my bed,/ circling the abyss like a shark,/ my father thick upon me/ like some sleeping jellyfish‖ (95). The female protagonist‘s impossibility to talk about this terrible event is the cause of stagnation in her behaviour, which is portrayed by means of allusions to a previous 80 rules by visiting the tower on her own: ―I took my mother‘s keys from where they hung, slipped away to the west wing and waited in the shadows for what felt like an hour‖ (175). This act of rebellion goes beyond the typical disobedience between a teenager and her parents. It symbolizes that she is rebelling against the patriarchal authority that obliges her to be submissive and to accept her fate of wife and mother as the rest of female members of her family. It will be precisely in the tower that she will know another female character that rebelled against her fate and who will become her helper, as will be analyzed later on. It might be concluded that this female helper is responsible for the female protagonist‘s transformation but, indeed, the only one responsible for her change is the heroine herself, who decides to take the control of her own life and does not obey patriarchal rules any longer. Therefore, the struggle against patriarchal authorities personified in her parents‘ will is the only way for the female protagonist to abandon her passive role and become a useful and active character. So far, it might be concluded that parental control is a relevant factor in the personal development of the female protagonists. Although it is possible to observe different reactions in Sexton‘s and Donoghue‘s female protagonists regarding the influence of parental figures in her lives, in both postmodern tales the process of self-discovery is closely linked with the heroine‘s state of mind. In these two stories, the heroines‘ state of mind has been caused by the paternal figure, and also maternal one in Donoghue‘s text. As a consequence of their improper actions, the heroines do not make any progress in their attempts to acquire knowledge. In Sexton‘s tale, from a psychological point of view, Briar Rose is an absolutely destroyed girl because of her father‘s sexual abuses. At the beginning of the poem, Sexton describes Briar Rose‘s father, the king, as an ambiguous character whose expressions of affection appear to be innocent but at the same time can also be considered disturbing given that they would be similar to sexual 81 expressions in an initial stage of a carnal relationship: ―Sit on my knee. I have kisses for the back of your neck. A penny for your thoughts, Princess. I will hunt them like an emerald‖ (90). It seems here that, opposite to other male portrayals in Sexton‘s poetry whose ambiguity seems to be aimed at the female protagonist‘s protection in some cases and at patriarchal dominance of females in other ones, the actions of the king have a different significance. The father is not focused on the protection of her daughter in accordance with his status of paternal figure but in the physical objectification and dominance of her body. As was observed before, Anne Sexton‘s male characters tend to objectify female characters by means of the process called ‗scopophilia‘. This process objectifies female bodies through the male gaze, and in this manner men turn into the possessors of the females, already objectified, and feel free to submit them to their wills. Nonetheless, the author goes beyond this process in this poem, depicting a male figure objectifying her daughter‘s body not only by means of the gaze but also by abusing her body sexually when she is in an unconscious state. According to Anette Karjalainen, ―[t]he sexualisation of the female body is a central theme in Sexton‘s poem. In ―Briar Rose‖, Sexton critiques the patriarchal sexualisation and possession of the female body‖ (2010: 19). In this sense, one might suggest that Sexton‘s intention in talking about a taboo issue like incest is to criticize the male objectification of women, widely rejected by second wave feminism, by means of one of the most serious sexual abuses within Western society: the father‘s sexual abuse of her daughter. As Professor of Clinical Psychiatry Clarice J. Kestenbaum affirms, ―fathers as well as mothers contribute to the development of the female self-concept. [...] fathering provides nurturing affection, guidance, approval, and availability to love and be loved, admired, emulated, and obeyed‖ (1983: 119). Taking into account these statements, one might understand why 82 the female protagonist is so psychologically damaged: the person who should show Briar Rose her worth as a human being and not only as a body, is precisely the first male figure that objectifies her; the person who should protect her from external danger is the one that most harms her. In fact, the American author suggests in this poem that physical suffering does not compare to the negative effects of this traumatic experience: ―You can stick a needle/ through my kneecap and I won‘t flinch./ I‘m all shot up with Novocain./ This trance girl is yours to do with. [...] But if you kissed her on the mouth/ her eyes would spring open [...]‖ (94). As mentioned above, the consequences of this traumatic experience are so deep than she is unable to feel comfortable among men and, subsequently, to be happy in her marriage with the prince. For the female protagonist, every man is similar to her father. This thought has to do with the second wave feminist tendency to associate the patriarchal attitude with masculinity and, thus, consider male figures as inhuman. In ‗Briar Rose‘, this fact may be observed in the way in which she identifies every man in the court with her father because of their smell: ―He forced every male in the court/ to scour his tongue with Bab-o/ lest they poison the air she dwelt in./ Thus she dwelt in his odor‖ (92). This is the king‘s strategy to keep her daughter away from the men in the court, which could be seen as a protective measure over Briar Rose, as happens in other Sexton‘s tales. However, taking into account the sordid relationship between father and daughter, the most plausible interpretation has to do with jealousy and the female protagonist‘s status as a possession. Anyway, the father‘s strategy achieves its purpose but not in the expected way. The heroine is the one who rejects the presence of male figures and is not able to have any relationship with them except with her husband. Although the prince is never described as a tyrannical character, the female protagonist cannot avoid acknowledging him as the 83 figure of patriarchal control who now possesses her body. Briar Rose‘s inability to socialize does not only concern male figures but people in general, and it causes a tendency towards reclusion and solitude in her. According to A. Venezia, ―[h]er relationship with her father was also incestuous, further secluding her, and making it even more difficult for her and society to accept each other. Her relationships are dysfunctional because of the incest that occurred earlier in her life‖ (2005: 86). Bearing in mind the heroine‘s tendency towards solitude, one might suggest that Briar Rose is a prisoner of her memories. In fact, the king‘s presence is remarkable throughout the poem due to the incapability of the female protagonist to stop thinking of him. Therefore, it seems that the heroine will never be free of her father‘s influence because his presence and actions are kept in her memories. Similarly to Sexton‘s story, the parents‘ influence is a very remarkable point in Donoghue‘s tale, given that the female protagonist‘s first years of life are imprinted in her mind. Her subsequent rebellion is what prevents this influence from ruining her whole life. The Irish author keeps to her usual portrayal of male characters; In this sense, male characters are represented from a humanist perspective since Donoghue‘s intention is to describe them as imperfect beings who make mistakes in their behaviour towards the female protagonist. More specifically, in the tale the king is described as a loving father whose excessive overprotection and overvaluation of her daughter have as their objective to protect her from external dangers and help her to know how valueless she is: ―The day I was born they lifted me into my father‘s hands, and he roared out so all could hear: This is my beloved daughter, in whom I am well pleased‖ (169). Bearing into mind these ideas, it is possible to interpret the father‘s behaviour as something positive and even, in this sense, the king can be considered a male helper. On the other hand, this male attitude can be interpreted as negative from a feminist perspective 84 because the ideas put forward are that woman needs to be protected from the external world and only valued in accordance with the premises imposed by patriarchy: beauty, passivity, innocence, lack of knowledge of the external world and disposition to become a wife and a mother. As Carolina Fernández Rodriguez points out, the princess of ―The tale of the Needle‖ is shrouded in an atmosphere of inactivity and lack of knowledge: ―Solo el conocimiento de las gracias femeninas estaba a su alcance sin cortapisas. El sistema en el que la princesa de Donoghue ha nacido desea hacer de ella una mujer en el sentido patriarcal, es decir, bella y durmiente‖ (1999: 133). It is also worth mentioning that the figure of the mother in Donoghue‘s tale matches perfectly this patriarchal female behaviour and, so much so, that she seems to represent a secondary patriarchal authority, as will be explained later on. Consequently, one might consider that the two parents represent the same patriarchal authority and both of them assume dominant and oppressive roles justified by feelings such as love and affection to her much-desired daughter after so many years of infertility: ―You see, before they had me they were both so old they thought for sure they were barren. They swore complicated vows, swallowed medicines made from boiled frogs, and went on pilgrimages for months at a time. At last, like a gift from above, my mother grew big, and my father put a chicken in the pot of every family on our estate‖ (168). Again, this description highlights the idea that Sleeping Beauty is a much-loved daughter and for this reason they do not want her to be damaged in any way. However, it may also be argued that the couple‘s happiness at becoming parents is not so much a personal achievement as the pleasure in being ―normal‖ and fulfilling social expectations. Developing this idea beyond, it is possible to understand that all these displays of love and affection are another way of objectifying the female protagonist. Until now, the processes of objectification analyzed consisted in the objectification of 85 the female body by means of a male gaze somehow invested with sexual desire. In ―The Tale of the Needle‖, there is no male desire but we encounter the same procedure of objectification: once the heroine is born, she is objectified by means of her parents‘ look and thus she turns into her parents‘ possession. From this moment, the heroine is looked after and kept far from the external world as if she were a priceless object of ornamentation: ―From the very first day of life I wore gold mesh gloves so that nothing would ever soil my fingers. [...] For many years I didn‘t learn to walk, because I was carried everywhere - not by my parents, who had grown frail, but by the most surefooted of the servants‖ (169). In this light, one might conclude that the king and the queen do not love her daughter as a subject but as an object which they own. In this sense, the fact that the queen looks at her daughter as an object instead of a subject highlights to what extent she has interiorized the precepts of patriarchy. The mother encourages in her daughter‘s behaviour all these classical female qualities valued in fairy tales; all of them transform her into an object of ornamentation. In this respect, the queen‘s conduct seems to imply that she also possessed the qualities previously mentioned and was objectified in the same way as previous female members in her family. Consequently, she considers this process of female objectification as a usual procedure that accords with patriarchal hegemony and turns her into an oppressor. Despite the mother‘s female condition, she is another patriarchal authority that exerts dominance over the female protagonist. By means of this character, Donoghue may have attempted to criticize those females whose old-fashioned ways of thinking support patriarchal premises and foster female submission. Yet the queen‘s patriarchal behaviour does not imply that she is not a good mother. In fact, the queen‘s feelings of love and affection for her daughter appear to be so deep that it is difficult to identify her with a patriarchal figure. 86 In Sexton‘s tale, the maternal figure also seems to be another classical female character of fairy tales. Although there are no accurate descriptions of this character, the explicit reference to the queen‘s figure refers to her as an appendage of her husband: ―The king and queen went to sleep‖ (92). There are no references to this character as an independent being. The influence of patriarchal authority personified in her husband‘s figure could be the reason why the mother does not check the disturbing attachment between the king and her daughter. In this way, the mother could be considered an accessory of her husband‘s abuses on Briar Rose. On the other hand, the lack of references to the queen in the poem might have to do with the queen‘s portrayal as an absent mother, an absence which influences the heroine‘s subsequent behaviour. In the first lines of the poem, Briar Rose seems to invoke implicitly the help of her mother. When the female protagonist alludes to ‗her mother‘s pocketbook‘ (90), she is, indeed, depicting the image of a uterus. By means of this reference to a metaphorical uterus, the heroine invokes the queen‘s present protection as she protected her when she was a fetus. Apart from the need for protection, Briar Rose needs a maternal figure with whom to identify. Again, Kestenbaum underlines the importance of the parental figure in the development of children‘s personality, more precisely the maternal figure in the case of young females: ―Feminine behavior in girls, it was presumed, was derived chiefly from identification with the maternal figure. The daughter is implicitly female as is her mother; she imitates her mother's behavior, and her primary identification is with her mother‖ (1983: 119). Nevertheless, Briar Rose‘s invocations are in vain and in addition to the constant sexual abuses by her father, the female protagonist also has to suffer the absence of her mother. As Venezia explains, ―[...] one can conclude that [the mother‘s absence] has some relevance in it; she may be searching for a maternal substitute‖ (2005: 85). Owing 87 to her need for protection, the heroine appears to find a female helper in the twelfth fairy who softens the thirteenth fairy‘s mortal curse: ―However the twelfth fairy/ had a certain kind of eraser/ and thus she mitigated the curse/ changing that death/ into a hundred-year sleep‖ (91). Returning to Donoghue‘s female protagonist, once she realizes that she is never going to obtain any knowledge from her parents, she makes the decision to begin her learning on her own. The action of approaching the tower, a place which her parents do not want her to enter, is the first physical activity that she decides to carry out by herself: ―I took the stairs one by one, oddly frightened of what they might lead to‖ (176). By getting into the room, she senses that the person who lives there is going to be relevant in her journey of self-discovery even before the heroine sees who it is. This new character is a female one and, like all the female characters who have kept their distance from the patriarchal female archetype of wife and mother, she is described as an old, dirty and ugly woman: ―I forgot all my sorrow when I peeped into her room. There she sat, an old woman I had never seen before, [...]. Dirty white hair hung about her face like ivy‖ (176). Through this parodic description, Donoghue denounces that the patriarchal system stigmatizes powerful and active female characters or, as in other stories, those who have transgressed patriarchal sexual boundaries. Nevertheless, in ‗The Tale of the Needle‘, the Irish author gives predominance to the transformation of females into active subjects, leaving aside the issue of their sexual preferences. Likewise, Sexton‘s thirteenth fairy is also represented as an ugly hag. ―The thirteenth fairy,/ her fingers as long and thing as straws,/ her eyes burnt by cigarettes,/ her uterus an empty teacup,/ arrived with an evil gift‖ (91). In this respect, Sexton‘s intention in portraying this female character so negatively seems to satirize the association between female empowerment, ugliness and evil imposed by the patriarchal 88 order. More specifically, the reference to ‗her uterus an empty teacup‘ appears to reinforce the idea that those women who reject the wife and mother roles are embodiments of evil17. In this sense, Sexton‘s portrayal seems to anticipate the subsequent denunciation by Donoghue of female misrepresentation18. Anyhow, the old female character introduced by Donoghue is not a witch but an active woman who has preferred hard work to being a passive female and being submitted to her husband and children‘s wills. Her tendency towards activity and knowledge could be the reason why she is enclosed in a tower; her disobedience of the rules imposed by the patriarchal system has condemned her to social ostracism. The fact that she is enclosed in a tower highlights the idea that she knows the consequences of not following the norms established and this experience will be beneficial for the heroine: ―Listen, girl, she said, they‘ve tried to stop me teaching any of the things I know. Now they‘re trying to prevent you from learning all the things you don‘t‖ (178). Taking into account her tendency towards activity and knowledge, it can be affirmed that the representation of this female character is quite positive. In folklore, she would be the old wise woman. Apart from the female helper‘s negative physical portrayal, there is positive evidence in her favour. First of all, before being seen by the female protagonist, the heroine hears her voice and this underlines the idea that only the women who are free from prejudices and established rules have the right of expressing themselves and being listened to. The voice is a powerful weapon of female expression and resistance. For this reason, the female ability to talk is not considered important, in comparison with such eminently feminine qualities as beauty, discretion and decency 17 Paradoxically, by analyzing the thirteenth fairy‘s curse, her character could be considered a female helper, as will be developed further in the examination of symbols and imagery. 18 Susan Faludi denounced the promotion of negative stereotypes against career-minded women and the return of women to the traditional forms of femininity such as the old-fashioned concepts of marriage and motherhood in the media during the eighties and nineties. See Susan Faludi‘s Backlash. The Undeclared War against American women (1991). 89 fostered by classical fairy tales. Furthermore, this old female character is the first person who dares to say the truth to the female protagonist. In this manner, the Irish author also seems to criticize the representation of women as misleading characters. In fact, the old woman is so honest that she seems rude: ―Delicate, my arse! she said. What do you mean by that? [...] What‘s there to hurt you in a bit of work? the old woman asked‖ (178). The reason for her rudeness is to call the heroine‘s attention, who is completely astonished at the way in which this woman talks to her. One might understand that the old woman is trying to open her eyes to the relevance of being able to manage on her own: ―Wake up, princess, snapped the old woman, clapping her hands in front of my nose‖ (180). According to Garcia Zarranz, ―[a]nd indeed the princess wakes up, no thanks to the kiss of a Prince Charming but with the help of a wise old woman‖ (2005: 53). In this quotation, the expression ‗wake up‘ is a sardonic selfconscious message addressed to the traditional fairy tale. Contrary to the traditional tale ‗Sleeping Beauty‘, the heroine in ‗The Tale of the Needle‘ is the only one who has to make the decision of becoming an active subject, or remaining in her condition of passive object. After a while, the heroine affirms having ‗woken up‘, alluding to the original literary source again, and finally decides to take control of her life: ―All of a sudden I felt quite awake. [...] I sat down on the stool and said, Please. Show me how‖ (182). In the final part of this chapter, I will turn to the two stories‘ use of symbols and imagery coming from the traditional fairy tale, although it is true there are only a few remarkable examples. One of the most relevant ones is the spinning wheel. According to the classical fairy tale, the heroine is damned to death due to the thirteenth fairy‘s curse, which is that the female protagonist will prick her finger with a spinning wheel. The elements of the curse and the spinning wheel are kept in Sexton‘s tale, although in 96 one might suggest that Carter advances the assumptions that will subsequently influence the development of the postfeminist current. The second wave feminist current evolved progressively to another way of understanding feminism which was epitomized in some authors such as Emma Donoghue. The most prominent point of the postfeminist current encloses the idea of gender as a social construction and, therefore, that female and male categories have been created through discourses of power. Many postfeminist authors such as Donoghue support this idea and avoid reflecting gender differences that may provoke female victimization and male demonization. Their main aim is to preserve literature as a form of expression and not a tool to denounce gender differences. In Donoghue‘s specific case, it is necessary to take into account her condition of lesbian writer. Her collection of fairy tales entitled Kissing the Witch can be interpreted as a transgression not only of gender boundaries but also of sexual ones, adding a new polarity, heterosexuality/homosexuality. The author‘s intention is the visibility and legitimacy of the lesbian condition in those literary texts from which the patriarchal tradition had silenced them. However, Donoghue‘s tendency towards the idealization of lesbian relationships, goes so far as to describe idyllical endings based on what can be seen as social ostracism: in other words, promoting life in lesbian ‗ghettos‘ as the only way to escape from heteronormativity. In general, one might observe that Sexton, Carter and Donoghue attempt to awake consciousness and open the readers‘ minds to another reality beyond the traditional fairy tale canon by means of the discovering of new forms of understanding femininity, masculinity, love and sexuality. The most remarkable conclusion I reached when interpreting these postmodern fairy tales is that each one of these female writers, regardless of the feminist current to which they belong, has found her place in the 97 world and this is very different from what the fairy tales represented. In this sense the three authors have known how to subvert classical fairy tales to adapt them to their own realities and at the same time keep their mythical base. Definitely, all of them have been successful by putting new wine in old bottles and making these bottles explode19. 19 On this, see Angela Carter (1983). 98 Works Cited Abraham, Julie 1996. Are Girls Necessary?: Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories. 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