Carina Saxon

That Weave Their Thread With Bones

The three oldest books—I still have them, separated off on a corner of my big bookshelf, on the lefthand side—are an illustrated complete Andersen, an illustrated Brothers Grimm inscribed with the date of my baby shower, and a small blue clothbound Seven Tales from Andersen, title gliding in silvery gothic font across the cover to the accompaniment of curlicues and spiral whorls. Also Alan Lee and Brian Froud’s “Faeries,” and Trina Schart Hyman’s Snow White paintings. The aural things don’t age in the same physical way. But the recordings my aunt and uncle made me, Leonard Cohen singing between readings of Little Red Ridinghood and Robert Louis Stevenson, and the hymn songs and folk melodies that my father sang to me as lullabies, though they won’t fit on bookshelves, belong among the oldest things.

As a child, I found in these objects and stories a firm foothold in time and place. I came from a place where there were others before me, others who were like me. That location, the feeling that the world was steady beneath me, allowed me to say “I” as if I meant something by it, as if I knew who “I” was. My father had heard the songs from his own parents, who had in turn heard them from their own. The stories that my Granmer told me were, she said, the stories that our ancestors in Scandinavia and Scotland told them, a chain of narrative that had bound many grandmothers and girls before us. We were old-fashioned in that way, still passing down our oral lineage as the working classes had always done, living the simple nobility of the creative poor. And my family was made up of good working-class liberals, living by the rails or in the steel mills, making sails down by the foot of Lake Michigan. I’m from the first really prosperous generation of my family, on both sides, and know it.

Fairy tales were always a thing I used, tools in my hands and never just words in books—I was the oldest child in a family of girls as well Aneka’s older sister, and there were always children to tell princess stories to. As an adolescent, I read exhaustively, memorizing as many variants as I could. I read all the Andrew Lang fairy books, and Italo Calvino’s collection, and began to see the ways that fairy stories were put together. These sets of motifs, mixed up in this particular way, constituted one tale, but I could easily break them apart to make another, as I often did. My mother and I made a new telling of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, when the tragic, punishing ending upset me. I was a toddler then, and that was when I learned that fairy tales were flexible things.

The little cousins always asked for bedtime stories, when they came to visit. Often, that was the only thing that could get them to settle down and go to sleep after the excitement of travel and play. And for a long time, Aneka and I rode the bus to school for three quarters of an hour every morning and three quarters of an hour every afternoon, and we used that time for storytelling. I wanted to tell and re-tell the Black Bull of Norroway story, or the Seven Swans, or Thomas the Rhymer. She always wanted to hear about the Talking Eggs, an African variant I’d found in one of my books of the Girl Who Spoke Roses and Diamonds. I told certain stories for a reason, looking for strong heroines who were in some way in charge of their own destinies, not wanting to give her the passive, poisonous princesses or the rapist Prince Charmings. There were no fairy godmothers in the Cinderella stories I told. I remember telling Aneka tales very late at night on a stopped train in Canada, Easter Sunday at the end of the spring holiday. We sat on the tracks all night, and she was tired, and we lay down on the floor and I told her fairy tales until the train came in. Or we’d whisper them across the room in the dark when we were supposed to be going to sleep. We’ve drifted away from that now, as we grew up.

It felt natural, when I first went away to college, that I would study fairy tales academically. My essential love for my stories drove me to college, to the declaration of an English major, to tentative plans for an academic career. I wanted to read them again, to write about them, to talk about them. They were my air and my earth and my sea, and the root of all my acts was that passion. But when I took up tilting at fairy-tale essays and academic papers in my sophomore year, I was quickly unhorsed by a strong stab from the feminist political awareness I’d always had but was only beginning to focus on. Until that moment I’d relied completely on the answers of my heart, and was in no way prepared to face the critiques of socio-political theory and activism. With my love ceasing to be enough of a justification, I flung myself at the language of reasoned argument, looking for words to fill the same space that love had made.

The only thing that the scholars seem to be able to agree upon is that fairy tales are important to women’s lives and selves. Bruno Bettelheim, old-fashioned and classic and stodgy, says that fairy tales are vehicles for the construction of identity and the comprehension of life. They enrich the inner self and integrate the id, ego and superego. (When I told my father that I was reading Bettleheim, he groaned and dismissed him. Apparently my grandmother applied Bruno’s advice to the raising of her children, and father hasn’t yet forgiven her for it.) And what could be more central to feminist discourse than the difficulty of creating a whole self as a woman? If fairy tales are for children, those who have not developed a strong ego, and if women have been warped away from strength and egotism like bonsai trees or bound feet or any number of other metaphors, then will fairy tales not also do for oppressed women what they do for children?

As a girl-child, I had always located fairy tales and folklore and hero-legends in an idyllic sort of class re-claimation movement. By reading what I read, listening to what I listened to, telling what I told, I was celebrating the suppressed narratives of my working-class ancestors. These were the stories, I thought, that nursemaids told to the upper-class children they cared for, the stories of the folk around the fire in the winter evening, simple and wholesome and wise. And as I grew up and became more aware of the politics of my gender, several threads of utopian womanism wrapped themselves around my stories. These were women’s stories, I told myself, the good true oral tradition standing strong against the arrogant cult of the single (male) author. Women who were not allowed to write, not even taught to read, expressed their native creativity through these hearth stories and cradlesongs.

There is quite a lot of reality to this. Madame D’Aulnoy and Marie-Jeanne L’heritier de Villandon and the French ladies’ salons of the late seventeenth century proved fertile ground for folkloric writing, and that movement was driven almost entirely by women. Perrault, D’Aulnoy’s cousin and friend, drew his work from them. And the Brothers Grimm took their stories from old Dorothea Viehmann the tailor’s wife, and from the girls and women of the Wild and Hassenpflug families. Within fairy tales, women tell the stories: Scheherazade, Mother Goose, the girl who spoke roses and diamonds and the girl who spoke in only toads. Our metaphor of tale-telling is spinning a yarn, the Anglo-Saxon threads (thraettr) of story. And the language-chain of fari, fate and thus fairies but also speaking, the making of a pronouncement, all tangled together. Spinning is women’s work. Weaving is women’s work. And thus, so also are stories of fortune and fate.

But to focus only on this would be to ignore the steady subtle undercurrents of misogyny and appropriation that run through the transmission of oral narrative. Perrault may have been drawing material from the ladies’ salons, but it’s his name we remember, and the quaintly patronizing little morals he tacked on to his stories:
Curiosity, in spite of its many charms,
Can bring with it serious regrets;
You can see a thousand examples of it every day.
Women succumb, but it’s a fleeting pleasure;
As soon as you satisfy it, it ceases to be.

To take that as the moral of Bluebeard, to focus on the woman’s sin of transgression when the husband is an axe murderer with a filthy past, for heaven’s sake—this is not an egalitarianist takeover. Perrault introduced Cinderella’s fairy godmother; before him, she was just a girl trying to make her way in the world with only some emotional support from her dead mother. She had agency, and he took that from her.

And the Brothers Grimm were far worse: in the editing of their stories from folk sources, all the violence was stepped up a notch, but women’s bodies were carefully erased. The two Christian siblings went to insane lengths to remove sex and pregnancy from their stories, often rendering the tales unintelligible in the process. The bed-scene and implied sexuality that originally freed the Frog King from his transformed state turns into a ridiculous narrative wherein the princess breaks the spell by throwing her bridegroom at the wall, and all the kings and the fathers are forgiven their incest because it made Wilhelm nervous to talk about things like that. At the end of the day, the hard truth is that all the names of fairy tales, all the authors of the “sacred” canonized texts, are men. Men who edited their “folk” stories like hell, and for their own agendas.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t heard these questionings before. I’d known about them for a long time, and had managed to intuit them away, to rely completely on the truth my heart told me. But in the academic space where I’d sat myself down, reality pressed me hard and crumpled my calm certainty. The fairy tales that I’d grown up with were published overwhelmingly by men, who used the spinsters and knitters in the sun and the free maids that weave their thread with bones as a cover story for their edited versions—all the sex and pregnancy removed, men excused for their actions as rapists and fathers and wolves. In the classrooms of that year I vibrated back and forth between an elation born of theory and a terrible frustrated fear of reality. I argued. I dug in my heels and my voice got louder and louder, until even I knew it sounded desperate. Every criticism, every attack on the worth or feminism or truth of the fairy tale mythos, felt as though its barbs were aimed precisely at me.

It wasn’t actually the symbolic that upset me. In fact, it made perfect sense that the famous publishables in the fairy tale field would be men, and that they’d engage in some sexist revisionism. That didn’t erase the spinners and knitters in the sun, only clarified their oppression. I knew how to make theory dance, how to slide the symbols and words and meanings about. My philosopher father taught me that the world was an illusion, the dance of maya, that reality was only the dream that we all dreamt. Literary theory only confirmed me in the understanding that words and all other symbols were both infinitely manipulable and essentially disconnected from whatever of Truth there was in the world. The signifier is never one with the signified thing, and so all meaning is constructed and inherently fluid. But my stories had real consequences, and caused real harm to real women and girls, and I could never make that go away. I was a feminist; it was my duty to confront my own assumptions, and to try to rid myself of privilege and blindness.

Look at the words, and the grammar that surrounds them: I am a feminist. It’s a statement of identity; I don’t do, I am. And though books don’t have neat grammatical formations of identity the way philosophies do, for bookish children reading does become the way we name ourselves. I’m a bookworm, I said, I’m a folklorist, I’m a storyteller. I read and tell and breathe fairy tales. These are identities, the stories that we hold close to our hearts. The philosophic lenses through which we view the world, through which we filter and name and comprehend the experience of living, are names that we take to ourselves.

I am an oral text. I played at Snow White when I had to clean my room as a child. My sister and I spend the summer swimming away from the boat to where the waves splash up against the rocks, sitting on them so as to be mermaids. When I left my home to go away to college, I thought about the princesses who go into the woods armed only with three brilliant gowns and a coat of rushes, and felt less afraid. And often times I speak in stories. My thoughts tend to take the form of narrative, the hero’s journey: I talk about my books and papers in terms of the acceptance of adventure, the descent into darkness, the return to the upper world having suffered a sea-change.

That was why it hurt so much. Since these things—stories, ideologies—are identities, they carry moral weight. It panics me to think that I’m in love with misogynistic stories, because god above what does that say about me? On the surface, my concern is and ought to be for the practical harm that fairy tales might do to real women. But the most visceral level of my anxiety is that my chosen reading reveals something dark and forbidden in me: that I am a bad person, that I’m self-hating, that I’m laboring under the delusions of false consciousness. Why would I love a story that hated me, unless I hated myself or ought to?

I was—am—living in transitional space. Sometimes I’m a grown woman, responsible and mature with a career and a lover and all the other things adults are supposed to have, but then I go home for the summer and sleep in my blue-and-gold bedroom again, where everything is just like it was when I was eleven, and my mother wakes me up in the morning. The fairy tales haven’t changed. I still love them in the same way I did as a girl. But I’ve grown into other knowledge, and the awareness that not everyone reads or feels the same way I do. I’m old enough now to see beyond my own emotions into the wider contexts of social and political structures. My terrible need to reconcile fairy tales with gender- and class-based analysis has more to do with me than it does with the texts. I feel nameless in the dark, and I desperately need my name so that I know that I’m good.

Once I chose to speak the language of academia, I was forced to confront the realities of text and the world. The Disney Princess Empire teaches girls to be only passive objects, waiting to be rescued or sent to the ball, chosen for their life by someone else. Many of the older stories in the fairy tale canon were specifically designed to resign young girls to bad marriages, instructing them that it doesn’t matter if he’s a beast, dear, he’ll turn into a prince if you just love him enough. The animated “Beauty and the Beast” film that came out when I was a kid, for all that it did take a stab at feminism, only reinforced this purpose, and that reading of the story has been linked to the psychology of women in abusive relationships; women who stay with abusers tend to identify with Belle, and stay for that reason. Even the most feminist fairy tale still posits the ultimate Happily Ever After as involving a prince and a wedding, not a career or the creation of a great piece of art. Fairy tales fetishize class mobility through marriage and glorify the consumerist fantasy of the most beautiful ballgown in the world.

I’ve felt and seen the harm that the fairy tale mindset can do. My little cousin, turning fourteen this year, learned from the Disney Channel and the pop-culture princesses that she has to be loved by a boy to have worth. My friends had near-hysterics when their proms didn’t match up to their Cinderella fantasies. I can remember vividly how excited I was when a boy asked my to the ninth grade dance; I didn’t scarcely like him, but the knowledge that someone had noticed me, that I had been chosen out of all the girls at the ball to be his partner, oh, that made me feel giddy and light. I know now that I shouldn’t have gone with him, and that he only asked me because he knew I wouldn’t say no. I worry about my cousins making the same mistake, caring too much about the wrong things. We don’t look after ourselves when we’re drunk on fairy tale dreams: we go to dances with the wrong boys, we hate ourselves despite all of our successes, we stay in broken terrible marriages because any time now the transformative power of love will kick in.

There was one clear moment, in that first year of fairy tale study, when I had to find a path. Faced with the first paper of the term, I had to find some answers. I threw myself into the attempted synthesis of the voice of my intellect and the voice of my heart. Virginia Woolf told me that women’s writing must be different, “for women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force.” And, she reminded me, any woman writer would be so constrained and tormented in such a way that “had she survived, whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination.”

I let my mind fall down her fishing-line into the water, and I found Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar speaking there. They told me a story called “Snow White and Her Wicked Stepmother,” and it was about the ways that fairy tales reflect rather the prescribe women’s lives. They told me that Snow White and her mother and her stepmother were all trying to find the way to live, either through submitting to or subverting the patriarchy in which they lived. They told me that the story didn’t have a happy ending for any of the women in it, that they were all faces of one woman failing in many different ways to be a whole self. They told me that “the girl child must learn the arts of silence either as herself a silent image invented and defined by the magic looking-glass of the male-authored text, or as a silent dancer of her own woes, a dancer who enacts rather than articulates.”

I found an answer with them in the water, and climbed back up to the river bank. In the paper that I wrote that year I argued that fairy tales were problematizing narratives, giving questions not answers. Girls continued to read and need fairy tales because they provide maps to patriarchy, illustrating the consequences of this way or that. Girls, I wrote, girls still have to find the balance between the normal desire to be found beautiful and the tragedy of destroying themselves to become so. They want to dance at the ball and be beautiful and still have the prince love them for themselves. We haven’t solved the problems of the fairy tale princesses, and so we still need their stories. Fairy tales are strained and morbid, because they are all we have, our spoken bitterness and confusion. Fairy tales narrate the ways and means of glass cages, such as the ones in which we still live.

When I finished that essay, I felt so sure. I’d found the right answer, and everything would be okay again. Well, no, not as such. The doubts have come back since. Because while my pretty little thesis managed to straighten out the theory, and even to provide a way in which fairy tales could be a real-world positive influence, the narratives of real girls damaged were still there. I had to keep listening; how could I ever face myself if I ran away from something like that? I still hear them, and remember that no matter how much I love my stories they can be perilous, and need to be handled carefully.

I keep my fairy tale books with me. In some way that I can’t quite name, it’s terribly important that they be physically there on my desk, near to me. Sometimes in sorrow I just hold them, the weight of the text comforting in my hands. They’re my seven-league boots, my flying chariot: I touch them and I’m in my own blue-and-gold room sitting by the bookshelves with my little blue Hans Andersen, or in my grandmother’s smoky living room pawing through costume jewelry and old scripts to the sound of waves that wash under the door, or in my berth out on the Big Water.

There have been moments when I’ve felt that I couldn’t possibly walk the tightrope any longer. I’ve been sure that something had to either break or vanish. But I keep working as a feminist, and I keep reading and caring about fairy tales. I keep choosing to write papers on them, to continue diving down for answers that I know now I might never find. It feels like I have no whole self, like my identity is fragmented and broken and nonexistent, but yet I manage to get up every morning and read novels and go to class and look at the sky. I might not know my answer’s name yet—and for that reason I’ll keep on chasing fairy tales in the language of reason—but it must be there, quiet and unnamed, because I am.