Annotated Bibliography

Carina Saxon

Andersen, Hans Christian. “Seven Tales”. Le Gallienne, Eva trans. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1959.

I have a really ambivalent relationship to Andersen. His stories as terribly morbid and bent, but I love them. I was obsessed with them as a kid. Maybe because of this book—small blue hardcover, gothic font, illustrated. A beautiful little book, and I knew it. The beauty of the physical book, I think, drew me to the stories. I liked to hold it, and so I read it. “The Fir Tree” was my favorite, and for the life of me I can’t fathom why. I don’t understand my childhood self’s love for those seven stories. I really don’t get it. This was the book I read when mother painted my portrait. I was maybe seven, I think, and her studio was down town, second story. Summer, the window open, the hot dog shop with the good lemonade right downstairs. The red vinyl chair with the rivets, sticky. Naked with my book, content to sit still as long as I could keep reading it. Now I like “The Red Shoes” best.

Atwood, Margaret. Good Bones and Simple Murders. New York: Doubleday, 1994.

Short stories, the sort that I would kill to be able to write. Somewhere in-between essays and stories and poems, engaging texts and critical philosophies. Reading against the text, questioning the unfairness of fairy tales and speaking for the silent characters. Iterates the incredible importance of fairy tales to feminist consciousness, which I like. Love them or loathe them, we can’t get away from folk narratives.

Baez, Joan. “Barbara Allen.” Joan Baez, Vol II. Vanguard Records, 2001.

A song from my childhood, derived from an old folk tradition. A melancholy ballad about love, rife with symbolism. A thing that I love intensely, despite the problems that my feminism has with it. Connected both to my possibly incorrect reverence for folk artifacts, and to my stubborn love for old things that are not feminist-friendly, though I feel that in some veiled way they are. I also know the Pete Seeger version, and thing it probably says a lot about me that I prefer the Baez—it’s far more elevated in tone, simple and female where Pete is folksy and twanged.

Cocteau, Jean, dir. Belle et la bete, la. DisCina, 1947.

Black and white film, in French. The library had it on laserdisc, and so we could rent it whenever we wanted because there was no money involved. I think I was pretty little the first time we took it out—certainly before third grade, because I remember showing it to my friends that year. I loved it, passed it around, told everyone they just had to see it. The atmosphere was just right—the hands and faces in the Beast’s castle, the magic mirror, the statue of Diana that shot the intruding man and transformed him. I lied, and still do, the incomprehensibility of the plot. Fairy tales make no linear sense at all, and Cocteau is just fine with that. Men become beasts and beasts become men, but without the heavy-handed moralizing of the Disney film. Ambiguity, obscurity, the sublime: these rule the piece.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan. “Snow White and her Wicked Stepmother”. The Classic Fairy Tales: A Norton Critical Edition. Tatar, Maria ed. New York, W. W. Norton and Company, 1999.

The most perfect essay I’ve ever seen. Draws beautiful lines between the three women of the story and glass—the queen who looks out through the glass window, the stepmother who looks into herself through the glass mirror, and Snow White who is looked at in the glass box. Images, paradox, narratives of female existence. Fighting for a self, fighting to be accepted into society, killing other women, killing one’s own self. The invisibility of the father-king-patriarch. The basis of my own positioning of fairy tales as not exempla but as narratives of struggle, trying to find a way in a hostile world, compromising but still fighting, seeing.

Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Adams, Richard ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1981.

A large paperback, illustrated, tattered. Inscribed on the inside leaf: baby shower, 19 April 86 Can’t wait to see you, Love Jefferson. My first collection, and the one I know best. I was fascinated by the drawing of the Golden Bird. I know most of these stories by heart, and have an odd attachment to their exact language which is deeply at odds with my pomo bits.

Hyman, Trina Schart. Various Illustrations (Snow White, St. George and the Dragon, Little Red Riding Hood, Peter Pan).

I still look at these pictures all the time. Evocative. Favorites: Snow White’s mother looking out the window, Snow White being laced into the witch’s corset, the witch at her mirror, St. George’s wedding, Tinker-bell, Wendy and the Lost Boys beseeching Peter, the mermaids. As a little girl, I always wanted to look like Hyman’s Snow White. It was a long time before I reconciled myself to my fair hair. I know hwe Snow White the best, or maybe Peter. Hers were the editions I had as a kid, the ones I looked at all the time.Nightengale (pseudonym). Persephone: REDUX. yuletide treasure challenge, 2006.

http://yuletidetreasure.org/archive/27/persephoneredux.html

Beautiful story from yuletide 2006, re-interrogating my assumptions about the abducted maidens, the princesses in the tower and their lack of agency. Because women shouldn’t have agency—rape used as a cover-up for female sexuality, as in the rape fantasy wherein it’s okay to enjoy sex because it’s not your fault, you did nothing. Made me wonder if all those imprisoned girls were really there against their will, or if that was just the lie we told to cover up our insecurities about women on top. I like this idea, though I’m not sure I like the way it de-politicizes rape.

Porter, Jefferson, Mathias-Porter, Melinda, and Porter, Hilde. Fairy Tale Cassette. Chicago: Jefferson’s recording studio,1989Fairy tales read aloud on cassette by my aunt, my uncle, and his mother. “The Three Little Pigs,” “The Three Billy Goats Gruff,” “Little Red Ridinghood,” a few Robert Louis Stevenson poems, and music. Possibly other stories that I can’t remember, but I know those. The tape terrified me for a long time—the Billy Goats Gruff story was particularly gruesome. Hilde is Norwegian, and I suspect that she was using the classic Abjornsen and Moe telling, not noted for its gentleness. But the tape meant that when I started reading, the rhythms and sounds of “Little Red Ridinghood” were right there in my mind.

Preston, Cathy Lynn. “Disrupting the Boundaries of Genre and Gender: Postmodernism and the Fairy Tale”. Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches. Haase, Donald ed. Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 2004.

I read this essay two years ago, for Lori Haslem’s class, and it disrupted me. It talks about the integration of harmful fairy tale narratives into female consciousness, tv shows like “Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire” and the film “Ever After”. Women’s falling into passive damsel-in-distress roles, the harm that the princess stories do to girls’ sense of themselves as people who can act upon the world, the bad class politics inherent in the fairy-godmother-rags-to-riches thing. It confronted me with the very real consequences of my pretty little stories, made me realize that the wrongnessess of popular narratives can effect the world. Asked me: can I continue to defend these stories, being now aware of what they do to actual women? I said yes, but I’m not quite sure how.