The Long Way Home…?

Transcription

The Long Way Home…?

I hereby confirm that the following dissertation is my own work and that I
understand the legal regulations regarding academic fraud.
________________________________________
SCHREINER Laure
Professeure-Candidate au Lënster Lycée Junglinster (LLJ)
The Long Way Home…?
Transforming the Fairy Tale – Medium, Genre, and the Metaphor of the Road
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Robert Frost
TO MY FAMILY
Many Thanks to Ms Agnès Prüm, Ms Emma Cullen, Ms Marie-Paule Hastert and Ms Nadine Weber
Original artwork by Mélusine Mainville
Lënster Lycée Junglinster (February 2015)
Abstract
This study examines classic and post-modern feminist strands of literary fairy tale writing, and
proposes the image of the palimpsest to articulate the different versions’ relation to each other.
While the classic narratives provide the dominant marks on the palimpsest, they coexist, and
indeed interact, with numerous “Other” versions of the tales. This comparative analysis
combines various theoretical and analytical approaches to shed new light on the dialogue
between the classic fairy tales, which both rely on and perpetuate traditional patriarchal power
structures and gender roles, and the post-modern feminist rewritings. To explore this
relationship, we examine the metaphor of the road, or the initiatory journey, at work in these
tales and draw on Arnold Van Gennep’s and Victor Turner’s conception of the rites of passage,
whose pre-liminal, liminal and post-liminal stages correspond to the various forms of stable and
unstable homes the heroines encounter on their journeys. The stability of these narrative homes
and the freedom of choice ascribed to the tales’ heroines is determined by the conceptualisation
of metaphor inherent in the tale: drawing on Ortony’s distinction between constructivist and
nonconstructivist perceptions of metaphor, we infer a fundamental clash between the classics
and the post-modern rewritings in both the configuration of the metaphor of the road and the
alternative (readings) it yields.
4
Table of Contents
I N T R O D U C T I O N – Departures................................................................................... 9
M E T H O D O L O G Y – The Red Thread ....................................................................... 17
Mapping the Palimpsest ................................................................................................................................... 17
Liminal Journeys .............................................................................................................................................. 22
Nonconstructivist and Constructivist Metaphors .............................................................................................. 26
C H A P T E R 1 – Once upon some roads there were Little Red Riding Hoods ........... 33
Embarking on Tales .......................................................................................................................................... 33
From Initial Homes........................................................................................................................................... 37
On Liminal Journeys......................................................................................................................................... 44
Through Alternative Homes .............................................................................................................................. 53
Into Final Homes? ............................................................................................................................................ 63
C H A P T E R 2 – Once upon some roads there were Cinderellas ................................. 77
Embarking on Tales .......................................................................................................................................... 77
From Initial Homes........................................................................................................................................... 82
On Liminal Journeys......................................................................................................................................... 98
Through Alternative Homes ............................................................................................................................ 106
Into Final Homes? .......................................................................................................................................... 114
C H A P T E R 3 – Once upon some roads there were Bluebeard’s Wives .................. 125
Embarking on Tales ........................................................................................................................................ 125
From Initial Homes......................................................................................................................................... 130
On Liminal Journeys....................................................................................................................................... 142
Through Alternative Homes ............................................................................................................................ 152
Into Final Homes? .......................................................................................................................................... 159
C O N C L U S I O N – Arrivals .......................................................................................... 173
Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 177
Primary Sources ............................................................................................................................................. 177
Secondary Sources .......................................................................................................................................... 178
Works Consulted ............................................................................................................................................. 182
5
List of Footnote Abbreviations
Primary Tales
Carter
Angela Carter, ‘The Bloody Chamber’, in The Bloody Chamber and Other Tales (London: Penguin Books, 1993),
pp. 7-41.
Company
Angela Carter, ‘The Company of Wolves’, in The Bloody Chamber and Other Tales (London: Penguin Books,
1993), pp. 110-118.
LRRH
Charles Perrault, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, in The Classic Fairy Tales, trans. by Maria Tatar, ed. by Maria Tatar
(London: Norton Critical Edition, 1999), pp. 11-13.
CPC
Charles Perrault, ‘Cinderella’, in Classic Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2012), pp.
74-88.
Bluebeard
Charles Perrault, ‘Bluebeard’, in The Classic Fairy Tales, trans. by Maria Tatar, ed. by Maria Tatar (London: Norton
Critical Edition, 1999), pp. 144-148.
LRC
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, ‘Little Red Cap’, in The Classic Fairy Tales, trans. by Maria Tatar, ed. by Maria Tatar
BGC
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, ‘Cinderella’, in The Classic Fairy Tales, trans. by Maria Tatar, ed. by Maria Tatar
Fitcher’s
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, ‘Fitcher’s Bird’, in The Classic Fairy Tales, trans. by Maria Tatar, ed. by Maria Tatar
Atwood
Margaret Atwood, ‘Bluebeard’s Egg’, in Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North
America and England, ed. by Jack Zipes (New York: Routledge, 1986), pp. 160-182.
Wolfland
Tanith Lee, ‘Wolfland’, in Red as Blood: Or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer (New York: Daw Books, 1983), pp.
106-136.
Clock Strikes
Tanith Lee, ‘When the Clock Strikes’, in Red as Blood: Or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer (New York: Daw Books,
1983), pp. 49-65.
Yolen
Jane Yolen, ‘The Moon Ribbon’, in The Moon Ribbon and Other Tales (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company,
1976), pp. 1-15.
Secondary Sources
ACFT
Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale, ed. by Danielle M. Roemer and Cristina Bacchilega (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 2001).
May refer to the following articles:
Cheryl Renfroe, ‘Initiation and Disobedience: Liminal Experience in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”’, in
Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale, ed. by Danielle M. Roemer and Cristina Bacchilega (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 2001), pp. 94-106.
Kathleen E.B. Manley, ‘The Woman in Process in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”’, in Angela Carter and
the Fairy Tale, ed. by Danielle M. Roemer and Cristina Bacchilega (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001),
pp. 83-93.
Stephen Benson, ‘Angela Carter and the Literary Märchen: A Review Essay’, in Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale,
ed. by Danielle M. Roemer and Cristina Bacchilega (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), pp. 30-58.
Milne
Andrew Milne, Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”: A Reader’s Guide (Paris: Éditions Le Manuscrit, 2007).
Gennep
Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1960).
Ortony
Andrew Ortony, ‘Metaphor: A Multidimensional Problem’, in Metaphor and Thought, ed. by Andrew Ortony
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Sadeian
Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (London: Virago, 2013).
6
Bettelheim
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Vintage
Books, 2010).
Baldrick
Chris Baldrick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Jenks
Chris Jenks, Transgression (London: Routledge, 2003).
PMFT
Cristina Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1997).
Don’t Bet
Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England, ed. by Jack Zipes
(New York: Routledge, 1986).
Jack Zipes, ‘A Second Gaze at Little Red Riding Hood’s Trials and Tribulations’, in Don’t Bet on the Prince:
Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England, ed. by Jack Zipes (New York: Routledge,
1986), pp. 227-260.
Marcia K. Lieberman, ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come: Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale’, in Don’t
Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England, ed. by Jack Zipes (New
York: Routledge, 1986), pp. 185-200.
FM
Margaret Atwood, ‘Running with the Tigers’, in Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter, ed. by
Lorna Sage (London: Virago Press, 2013), pp. 133-150.
Lakoff and Johnson
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Breaking
Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk & Fairy Tales (Lexington: The University Press of
Kentucky, 2002).
Remaking
Jack Zipes, ‘The Remaking of Charles Perrault and his Fairy Tales’, in Angela Carter, The Fairy Tales of Charles
Perrault, (London: Penguin Books, 2008), pp. vii-xxvii.
Subversion
Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization,
2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2006).
Symbols
Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, trans. by John Buchanan-Brown
(London: Penguin Books, 1996).
Tatar
The Classic Fairy Tales, ed. by Maria Tatar (London: Norton Critical Edition, 1999).
May refer to the following chapters:
Maria Tatar, ‘Introduction: Cinderella’, in The Classic Fairy Tales, ed. by Maria Tatar (London: Norton Critical
Edition, 1999), pp. 101-107.
Maria Tatar, ‘Introduction: Bluebeard’, in The Classic Fairy Tales, ed. by Maria Tatar (London: Norton Critical
Edition, 1999), pp. 138-144.
Negotiating
Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (Cambridge: Virago Press, 2009).
Black
Max Black, ‘Metaphor’, in Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor, ed. by Mark Johnson (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 63-82.
Abrams and Harpham
M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 10th edn (Andover Hampshire UK:
Cengage Learning, 2005).
Barry
Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 3rd edn (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2009).
OCFT
The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales: The Western Fairy Tale Tradition From Medieval to Modern, ed. by Jack
Zipes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
GFTT
The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm, ed. by Jack Zipes (London:
Norton Critical Edition, 2001).
Jack Zipes, ‘Cross-Cultural Connections and the Contamination of the Classical Fairy Tale’, in The Great Fairy
Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm, ed. by Jack Zipes (London: Norton Critical
Edition, 2001), pp. 845-869.
7
Patricia Hannon, ‘Corps cadavres: Heroes and Heroines in the Tales of Perrault’, in The Great Fairy Tale Tradition:
From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm, ed. by Jack Zipes (London: Norton Critical Edition, 2001), pp.
933-957.
Trials
The Trials & Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, 2nd edn, ed. by Jack Zipes (Abingdon Oxon UK: Routledge,
1993).
May refer to the following chapters:
Jack Zipes, ‘Prologue: Framing Little Red Riding Hood’, in The Trials & Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood,
2nd edn, ed. by Jack Zipes (Abingdon Oxon UK: Routledge, 1993), pp. 1-17.
Jack Zipes, ‘Epilogue: Reviewing and Re-Framing Little Red Riding Hood’, in The Trials & Tribulations of Little
Red Riding Hood, 2nd edn, ed. by Jack Zipes (Abingdon Oxon UK: Routledge, 1993), pp. 343-383.
DFM
Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (New York: Cornell University
Press, 1975).
Forest
Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (New York: Cornell University Press, 1967).
RP
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (London: Aldine Transaction, 2008).
America’s Cinderella
Yolen, Jane, ‘America’s Cinderella’, Children’s Literature in Education, 8.1 (1977), 21-29.
List of Stories and Protagonists
Chapter 1




Charles Perrault: Little Red Riding Hood – unnamed protagonist (Little Red Riding Hood)
Brothers Grimm: Little Red Cap – unnamed protagonist (Little Red Cap)
Tanith Lee: Wolfland – Lisel
Angela Carter: The Company of Wolves – She
Chapter 2




Charles Perrault: Cinderella – unnamed protagonist (Cinderella)
Brothers Grimm: Cinderella – unnamed protagonist (Cinderella)
Tanith Lee: When the Clock Strikes – Ashella
Jane Yolen: The Moon Ribbon – Sylva
Chapter 3




Charles Perrault: Bluebeard – unnamed protagonist
Brothers Grimm: Fitcher’s Bird – unnamed protagonist (younger sister)
Angela Carter: The Bloody Chamber – unnamed protagonist (pianist/musician)
Margaret Atwood: Bluebeard’s Egg - Sally
8
IN T RODUCT ION – Departures
‘This – is now my way: where is yours?’ Thus I answered those who asked me ‘the way’. For
the way – does not exist! 1
Zarathustra’s concise, yet memorable outlook on life’s myriads of possible routes, uncovers the
illusory character of prescribed single paths and meanings. It reveals the abundance and
diversity of human behaviour and perception and underlines the changeable nature of life itself.
Roads can lead onto different roads and meanings are never as closed as they appear. Just as
nothing remains unaltered or untouched by the passing of time, words and narratives are prone
to change. The present comparative analysis of literary fairy tales and their post-modern
feminist variations explores this basic postulation and attempts to test its validity. The literary
study investigates the familiar Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Bluebeard tale types by
exploring their narrative variety and variability.
This study uses the concept of tale type, as defined in the Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson tale
type index, as analytical category. 2 The three types under scrutiny are constituted by a large
number of diverse oral and literary renditions. Numerous renderings and retellings of the Little
Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Bluebeard narratives have generated a layered and complex
‘narrative history’ of these very tale types: a palimpsest for the reader to explore. The image of
the palimpsest, a document on which old lines of writing slowly wash out or are voluntarily
erased and overwritten for new usages, is revealing. Since the faded or rubbed out pieces of
writing still occasionally or persistently shimmer through the lines of successive fresh layers of
writing, the palimpsest offers a multi-layered and multi-faceted narrative composition. The
image of the palimpsest aptly lends itself to the Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and
Bluebeard tale types, revealing these stories as composite narrative arrangements of both oral
and literary traditions, marked by shifting hegemonies and narrative voices. Some of the first
voices which inscribed themselves on these tales’ palimpsests are those of vivid folk cultures,
whose emphasis on storytelling lay in their oral traditions. 3 The female voices within these folk
1
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One (London and New York: Penguin, 1969), p. 213.
2
Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, ‘The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography’, in The Classic Fairy Tales, ed. by Maria
Tatar (London: Norton Critical Edition, 1999), p. 373.
3
Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization, 2nd edn (New York:
Routledge, 2006), pp. 3, 7.
9
cultures were dominant, as they used their spoken tales as a powerful medium to relate and
comment on the realities of life. These narrative methods were also used to educate and initiate
younger women to the private and public worlds by drawing portraits of feisty heroines in
command over their own lives. However, these forceful, diverse oral voices of matriarchal
power structures were silenced or erased through successive tides of generations and varying
socio-political settings. New voices, with altered moral tastes and changing cultural perceptions
impressed and continuously impress themselves on the tales’ palimpsests.
Since producing a complete overview of these manifold variations and layers of the tale types’
palimpsests would be too voluminous an undertaking, this study will concentrate on four
noticeable literary versions of the Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Bluebeard narratives.
These four contrasting renditions will include two tales by such classic literary fairy tale authors
as Charles Perrault (1628-1703), Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859), as well
as two post-modern feminist rewritings by contemporary British and Anglo-American women
writers such as Margaret Atwood (1939), Jane Yolen (1939), Angela Carter (1940-1992) and
Tanith Lee (1947). The study’s first chapter will examine the Little Red Riding Hood tale type
through a comparative analysis of Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood, the Brothers Grimm’s
Little Red Cap, Lee’s Wolfland and Carter’s The Company of Wolves. The second chapter
tackles the Cinderella tale type, by looking at such classic renditions as Perrault’s Cinderella,
the Grimms’ Cinderella, followed by Lee’s When the Clock Strikes and Yolen’s The Moon
Ribbon. Finally the third chapter focuses on the Bluebeard tale type and, once again, begins
with Perrault’s Bluebeard, the Grimms’ Fitcher’s Bird, before looking at Carter’s The Bloody
Chamber and Atwood’s Bluebeard’s Egg.
These texts have been chosen to represent, on the one hand the classic literary fairy tale, and on
the other hand the stylistic and narrative diversity of the post-modern rewritings. The study
seeks to expose the underlying narrative power structures of the familiar tale types. Until the
second half of the twentieth century, the classic renditions have dominated the palimpsest of
the Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Bluebeard tale types and to some extent still do.
Indeed, Jack Zipes argues that their tales ‘have become the incarnation of canonical literature.
That is, they are regarded as the definitive classical fairy tales for children and adults’. 4
However, ‘these “foundational” tales, or what we might call classical tales today, tend to
reinforce patriarchal and patronizing notions of gender and power.’ (Remaking, xvii) The
4
Jack Zipes, ‘The Remaking of Charles Perrault and his Fairy Tales’, in Angela Carter The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, (London: Penguin
Books, 2008) p. xix.
10
patriarchal attitudes perpetuated by the classic narratives have deeply impressed themselves on
the tales’ palimpsests and as a result, outshine oral folk traces and ostracise “Other” new voices.
However, the study’s central axiom is that these traditional “classic” inscriptions should not be
seen as final since the palimpsest offers the possibility to rediscover old forgotten voices and to
inscribe new and/or alternative narratives. The post-modern feminist rewritings strive to regain
some of this narrative territory, by allowing faded matriarchal voices to reappear and by
engraving equitable gender representations on the palimpsest. These rewritings resist the
dominant patriarchal renditions by creating multi-faceted characters. The tales’ palimpsests are
narrative road maps, on which numerous storytellers have left their trails. Some of these paths
are clearly visible, while others remain little bypasses. Yet, together they form an astounding
multi-layered narrative tableau, on which different narrative trails can co-exist. This study
investigates to what extent the post-modern feminist rewritings propose alternative routes for
their protagonists and their readers to embark on and thus subvert the dominant narrative roads
of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. The post-modern feminist narratives allow the
protagonists and the readers to step off the beaten tracks of the classic renditions and to walk
their own paths, tracing new paths on the palimpsests. The “metaphor of the road” employed
within all of the tales will serve as a guiding tool for the present comparative analysis, which
focuses on the dynamics of the palimpsest and on disentangling the two main strands of
intertextual dialogue that fuel it within the parameters established in this study: firstly, have the
dominant binary representations of self and society and the static normative gender roles they
rely on been permanently etched into the palimpsest, and secondly, to what extent do the postmodern feminist tales deconstruct these views? To what extent are the (liberating) alternatives
they propose viable? The “metaphor of the road” employed in all the tales, serves to illustrate
the protagonists’ personal and social development. The representations of the actual physical
roads, the paths on which the tales’ protagonists wander, are metaphors for the female
protagonists’ different life stages. The young women set out on journeys from stable parental
homes, through unknown and often uncanny territories (e.g. forests, castles) until they finally
reach a stable home once more. Thus the narratives of Little Red Riding Hood are demarcated
by the female protagonist’s parental home and the home of her grandmother. Likewise, the
Cinderella tales are framed by the main character’s family home and the prince’s castle. In the
Bluebeard stories, the wives also leave their childhood homes and enter the forbidden chambers
of their husbands’ houses.
11
In the classic tales, this journey from one home to the next triggers the final stages of the young
girls’ socialisation (the passage into womanhood) according to the traditions and expectations
of the time. At the same time, it encodes the tales’ values and expectations and fuels their
normative power (to this day). While on the road, the young women learn how and how not to
behave according to prevailing social standards and gender expectations. The ultimate goal of
the protagonists’ journey is to reach a stable marital home. This “arrival” is synonymous with
finding a “proper” place in society under male domination via matrimony. The young girls, the
travellers, are socialised into the hierarchical power structures and stable gendered positions of
wifedom. In these tales, the conceptual notion of the home is binary. The homes which the girls
encounter can be ‘stable’, or stabilising (they perpetuate prevailing patriarchal value systems),
or ‘unstable’, destabilising and disruptive (they offer alternatives to classic patriarchal power
structures). It is the girls’ duty to rely on their essentially noble characters and decent moral
sense to identify the unstable homes and to find their way into stable, socially sanctioned homes.
However, often the frail girls need to rely on outside male influences to guide them into safe
matrimonial havens. At the end of their journey, they have learned a lesson and willingly accept
their allotted feminine position within patriarchal homes. Their journey is completed.
Thus, the metaphor of the road involves three stages: a stable home, from which the protagonists
set off, a journey, in which they encounter challenges and difficulties, and a final destination, a
new stable home that symbolises their transformation into fully-fledged women. This tripartite
pattern is strongly reminiscent of Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner’s liminal theories.
Their theories on human rites of passage postulate a ‘tripartite processual scheme’ of separation;
liminality and reaggregation: 5
The symbolic narrative runs inexorably from ordered world to ordered world, involving a release
(separation) and an acceptance (reaggregation). However, these symbolic footprints are punctuated by a
site of value-less, nihilistic freefall (margin or limen) where almost anything can happen. 6
The theorists identify three distinct stages during human rites of passage: a pre-liminal; a liminal
and a post-liminal. The pre-liminal stage can be considered as stable. However, the person who
is subjected to initiation rites needs to cross the threshold into the limen space. This is a space
which is characterised by a pronounced disorder and detachment from ordinary social
structures. After having passed through and survived the liminal stage, the individual will
5
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (London: Aldine Transaction, 2008), p. xi.
6
Chris Jenks, Transgression (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 43-44.
12
reaggregate into society; into the post-liminal stage. He or she will have gained a higher social
and stable personal position. The literary fairy tales of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm
follow this tripartite model and especially emphasis the protagonists’ successful reaggregation.
The girls need to reaggregate society as “elevated”, “socialised” women, ready to fulfil their
female duties. In the classic tales, the metaphor of the road, in this specific combination of a
tripartite transition and the notion of stable homes, serves the clear purpose of conveying the
protagonists’ socialisation.
Carter’s, Atwood’s, Yolen’s and Lee’s rewritings also rely on the metaphor of the road, to
depict the protagonists’ tumultuous journey from one home to another. However, they use the
metaphor to deconstruct static gender roles and traditional socialisation paths. The metaphorical
journeys of the rewritings’ protagonists also follow a tripartite scheme, yet the narratives put
greater emphasis on the liminal stage. They identify the limen space and the liminal stage as
potentially liberating. The roads are not synonymous with an initiation into rigid patriarchal
structures and gender codes. Instead these journeys are initiations into the protagonists’
tumultuous selves. The journeys do not follow a linear progression into stable matrimony or
traditional wifedom, but they let the protagonists meander along unknown paths, into the
unfamiliar territories of human self-discovery or self-construction. Neither the journeys nor the
arrivals into stable homes are fixed. The post-modern feminist fairy tales leave the notion of
home as well as the metaphorical journey in a more ambiguous state. Essentialist identities and
strict binary oppositions between safe and unsafe, stable and unstable or the inside and the
outside are broken up. Their fractured, open-ended narratives leave the protagonists and the
readers wondering and wandering. The post-modern feminist rewritings reconfigure the
metaphor of the road and inscribe new narrative paths on the tales’ palimpsest.
Finally, Andrew Ortony’s distinction between nonconstructivist and constructivist definitions
of metaphor provides the theoretical framework for my analysis of the metaphor of the road
and its diverging functions and outcomes. 7 The nonconstructivist stance identifies a clear
distinction between literal and figurative language. According to nonconstructivist thinking,
metaphors clearly differ from literal usages of language. Metaphors are linguistic, figurative
embellishments of literal meanings. Thus, not only do nonconstructivist critics believe in strict
categories of literal and figurative, they also identify clear literal meanings underlying the
metaphorical expression. The deciphering of the metaphor is teleological. It leads to a precisely
7
Andrew Ortony, ‘Metaphor: A Multidimensional Problem’, in Metaphor and Thought, ed. by Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986), p. 2.
13
identifiable literal meaning. This nonconstructivist stance underlies the classics’ “metaphor of
the road”, since the metaphor stands for a clear figurative representation of the socialisation
process. The road, its dangers and the different houses it leads to, stand for the real dangers of
sexual deviation and improper feminine behaviour and for the implied literal meaning of a
“proper” socialisation of the girls.
In contrast, the constructivist stance on metaphor does not clearly distinguish between
figurative and literal categories. The constructivist thinkers do not identify clear literal
meanings. The untangling of a metaphor will not result in a precise meaning and teleological
reading. This theoretical view on metaphor coincides with the post-modern representations of
the metaphor of the road. Here the road does not stand for a clearly identifiable meaning and
life path, but instead the life paths and roads of the protagonist remain liminal, open-ended and
insecure. With their representations of the girls’ paths, their metaphor of the road also wants to
prove that these paths, roads can leave lasting imprints on the palimpsest. The readings made
possible by these two schools of thought regarding the function of metaphor informs the present
comparative analysis.
This paper does not seek to claim that this thesis can be comprehensively and blindly applied
to all the fairy tale stories from classical to post-modern. Instead, I have chosen authors and
tales whose parallels and divergences can be explored in great detail. Thus, the comparative
study, analysing and contrasting different narrative voices, serves the purpose of showing that
narratives are never entirely closed. The juxtaposition of four dissimilar literary versions of the
same tale type allows these four different narrative layers to enter into stimulating and
enlightening palimpsestuous polylogues, accentuating their narrative diversity and
changeability. They echo Zarathustra’s postulation of finding ‘my way for the way does not
exist’.
In the next section, we will take a closer look at the theoretical Leitfaden, the “red threads”
running through this study. The methodology chapter provides further information on the sociopolitical backgrounds of the different storytellers and the theoretical backbone of this study.
14
15
ME THODOL OGY – The Red Thread
Mapping the Palimpsest
Charles Perrault’s and the Brothers Grimm’s classic literary versions will be the starting point
for each of the three comparative analyses that make up the main chapters of this study. As
already noted, these fairy tale godfathers’ well-known, popular plotlines and characters have
inscribed themselves deeply onto the tales’ palimpsests, often erasing or out-voicing the older
female folk traces. (Subversion, 7) Their versions of the initially oral material are established
as canonical. Their narratives have changed the power structures on the tales’ palimpsests,
transforming this multi-faceted composite medium into a rather static imprint, disseminating
their times’ restrictive moral views regarding specific gender codes for both women and men.
Jack Zipes remarks that Perrault’s and the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales
[…] have conserved a basic patriarchal attitude regarding gender roles, social codes of courting,
hierarchical familial and political relations, inheritance, and government. (Remaking, xix)
Indeed, their tales ‘involve some sort of a learning process for both women and men so that
they can establish their proper roles in society’. (Remaking, xvii) These ‘proper roles’ are often
confining in terms of gender models, as they emulate cultural and moral tastes as well as sociopolitical standards of their times. In order to understand the lasting marks of Perrault’s and the
Grimms’ footprints on the tales’ palimpsests, we will have to briefly look at the socio-political
conditions that inform these storytellers’ literary quests.
In the case of Perrault, appropriating and altering the folk tale material and setting up the literary
fairy tale as a genre needs to be considered in the context of the so-called ‘Quarrel of the
Ancients and the Moderns’ (1688-97). (Remaking, xiii) This late seventeenth century dispute
among intellectuals polarised two belief systems about France’s rightful advancement as a
culturally dominant nation and the vital role of the arts and literature within this development.
On the one hand, the Moderns believed that France
[…] could only make great progress and become like the great Greek and Roman empires of the past if
the French writers and artists incorporated pagan beliefs and folklore into their sophisticated works and
developed a culture of enlightenment. The point was not to imitate Greek and Roman culture but to
become different if not unique. (Remaking, xiii-xiv)
17
The Ancients, however, professed that
[…] France had to imitate the great empires of Greece and Rome and maintain stringent classical rules in
respect to the arts. (Remaking, xiv)
Perrault’s appropriation and adaptation of the oral folk tales can be seen to ‘demonstrate a
modern approach to literature’ and thus sides with the Moderns, ‘transforming several popular
folk tales with all their superstitious beliefs and magic into moralistic tales’. (Remaking, xiv)
Indeed, Perrault being a fervent upholder of the French absolutist regime appropriated the oral
folk traditions ‘in the name of a particular sex and social class’, 8 regarding it as an intellectual
mission ‘to “civilize” Europe and the rest of the world’. (Subversion, 36) The narrative
medieum of the fairy tale allowed him to substitute the socialising moral visions of French high
society in King Louis XIV’s time for the old folk narratives and their ‘symbolical cultural
pattern of matriarchy’. 9 (Subversion, 49) As Lilyane Mourey notes:
Perrault’s suppressions, omissions or additions to the folk tales allow us to conclude that he did not see
his task as restoring them in their authenticity. […]. He retained the tales which “pleased” him, which
“attracted” him for infinite and complex reasons because they offered him the possibility to develop (or
to indicate at the very least) some of his preoccupations and some of his feelings on a literary, political,
and social level. (Subversion, 46)
The author’s foremost concern was not to (re)paint a complex folkloric tableau of the Little Red
Riding Hood, Cinderella and Bluebeard narratives, but to produce tales subjected to the
‘growing influence of Christianity on life and manners’ and to the prevalent cultural standards
of his time. (Subversion, 29) His narratives are
[…] part of a socio-religious code that illuminated the proper way to shape human drives and ideas so
that children would learn docilely to serve church and state. […]. The fairy tales were cultivated to ensure
that young people would be properly groomed for their social functions. (Subversion, 38, 39)
This ‘proper way’ of rearing children, was to lead to both the ‘homme civilisé’ and the ‘femme
civilisée’. (Subversion, 39, 40) Social functions were laid out according to stringent gender
codes for both women and men, though women were especially targeted as they were supposed
to find ‘their proper place in society under masculine domination’. (Remaking, xvii) The biased
8
Jack Zipes, ‘Prologue: Framing Little Red Riding Hood’, in The Trials & Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, 2nd edn, ed. by Jack Zipes
(Abingdon Oxon UK: Routledge, 1993), p. 7.
9
Jack Zipes, ‘Epilogue: Reviewing and Re-Framing Little Red Riding Hood’, in The Trials & Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, 2nd edn,
ed. by Jack Zipes (Abingdon Oxon UK: Routledge, 1993), p. 346.
18
gender codes defined within Perrault’s writing as well as his commanding authorial voice, have
left deep and lasting impressions on the tale type’s palimpsest, up to the point where the old
folk voices have been silenced and often, even until today, remain unnoticed by modern readers.
His writings have served as guidelines for numerous authorial voices, both male and female,
which continuously model their narratives along set “standards” and sometimes
unquestioningly adopt similar restrictive gender outlooks.
Similar lasting imprints on the tales’ palimpsests were left by the legendary Brothers Grimm.
Even though their renditions of the Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Bluebeard tales
occasionally differ in terms of plotlines and character descriptions from Perrault’s, their
collection of fairy tales fits the biased agendas as well as the customs and socio-political
outlooks of their times. As Zipes asserts, the brothers’ life-long preoccupation with researching
myths, customs and the language of the German people intended to foster
[…] the development of a strong national bourgeoisie by unravelling the ties to Germanic traditions and
social rites […]. Wherever possible, they sought to link the beliefs and behaviour of the characters in the
folktales to the cultivation of bourgeois norms. (Subversion, 61)
Essentially, these ‘bourgeois missionaries’ (Subversion, 62) not only collected the tales largely
from
[…] petit bourgeois or educated middle-class people, who had already introduced bourgeois notions into
their versions. In all cases the Grimms did more than simply change and improve the style of the tales:
they expanded them and made substantial changes in characters and meaning. […] their entire process of
selection reflected the bias of their philosophical and political point of view. (Subversion, 61)
This ‘literary “bourgeoisification” of oral tales’ befitted the ‘more upright, nineteenth-century,
middle-class perspective and sense of decency’ and ‘reinforce[d] an authoritarian socialisation
process’ that placed great emphasis on traditional binary role models for both men and women.
(Subversion, 61, 64, 59) Like Perrault, the brothers altered the oral tradition in order to fit
specific private and public agendas. Perrault’s and the Brothers Grimm’s influential “canonical”
voices have changed the power structures on the tale type’s palimpsest, especially to the
detriment of strong female voices.
This marked shift in power is registered by such contemporary women writers as Yolen, Lee,
Carter and Atwood. In their post-modern feminist rewritings, they nonetheless demonstrate that
the paths of matriarchal folk narratives are still present on the tale type’s palimpsest and can
19
coexist or even reappear with new vivid forces, piercing not only through the classic lines of
writing but also enlightening their own post-modern rewritings. These authors actively seek to
write multifaceted tales, rediscovering forgotten trails as well as adding new footprints on the
palimpsest. Their rewritings demonstrate that narratives are never closed, that there is not just
one way, one outlook or one story. Instead they show that different lines of writing can cohabit
and can enter into an engaging and enlightening dialogue.
The selected tales by Yolen, Lee, Carter and Atwood, all written at the end of the twentieth
century can be characterised as post-modern texts. As such, they are concerned with what Peter
Barry identifies as
[…] a rejection of traditional realism (chronological plots, continuous narratives relayed by omniscient
narrators, ‘closed endings’, etc.) in favour of experimental forms of various kinds. 10
The post-modern rewritings boldly cross dividing lines, rejecting ‘the distinction between
‘high’ and ‘popular’ art’, mixing genres and foregrounding intertextuality. (Barry, 81, 87)
According to Linda Hutcheon, post-modern fictions represent
[…] ‘borderline enquiries’ practicing ‘writing-as-experience-of-limits’, crossing borders between genres,
and challenging ‘a definition of subjectivity and creativity that has ignored the role of history in art and
thought.’ 11
As the post-modern feminist rewritings courageously cross limits, or in other words, step off
the beaten classical tracks, they display a pronounced awareness of the narrative forerunners of
the texts. They are particularly concerned with revealing the historical ties to the realm of
folklore. Indeed, post-modern fairy tales, as conceived by Cristina Bacchilega,
[…] exhibit an awareness of how the folklore, which modern humans relegate to the nursery, almost
vindictively patterns our unconscious […]. (PMFT, 22)
Their hybrid intertextuality, working from the institutionalised classical narratives back to
various ostracised past voices, draws a complex narrative picture in which traditional binary
oppositions between “good” and “evil”, the “male” and the “female”, as well as traditionally
“closed” patriarchal endings are questioned and ultimately deconstructed. The post-modern
10
Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 3rd edn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009),
p. 79.
11
Linda Hutcheon, ‘Beginning to Theorize Postmodernism’, Textual Practice, 1.1 (1987), 10-31 (pp. 16-17 and 21-22), discussed in Cristina
Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 20.
20
texts celebrate this fragmentation as ‘an exhilarating, liberating phenomenon, symptomatic of
our escape from the claustrophobic embrace of fixed systems of belief’. (Barry, 81)
Consequently their tales not only expose forgotten or unexploited voices, but further
demonstrate that words and narratives are prone to change, as too is the balance of power
between narratives. This is partly due to evolving cultural worldviews and their underlying
socio-political patterns as well as the changing private worlds of the authors. Margaret Atwood
poignantly signals that the writer is also ‘the inheritor and bearer of a set of social
assumptions’. 12 In recasting the literary fairy tales these writers, engage in metaphorical
reflections of their own times and belief systems, just like the canonical authors did before
them. This intertextual engagement between post-modern literary fairy tales and their classic
antecedents is seen as an illuminative reading experience by literary scholar Cheryl Renfroe:
Drawing as it does on the well-known traditional versions of oral tales while simultaneously voicing the
contemporary and personal mores of its author, the literary Märchen juxtaposes both sets of values in the
mind of the reader, enabling her to traverse the ideological territory between the two. This bridging of the
traditional and the visionary, or radical, offers the opportunity for sharp comparisons and the possibility
of transitions to new modes of thinking. 13
Renfroe’s deliberations poignantly illustrate the fact that the co-existence and juxtaposition of
diverse narratives can be beneficial for the reader. Readers are travellers as well as explorers
on the palimpsest. The act of reading is seen as a positive investigation, which can conduct the
reader to unknown territories. The palimpsests are not finished or closed texts, but instead alive,
offering both the readers and the authors possibilities to continuously leave wandering
footprints. This might also explain the ongoing fascination of these narratives within almost all
domains of our own contemporary cultures. The feminist rewritings reveal this lively character
of the narratives, by showing that old and new voices can co-exist and even merge into an
illuminating polyphonous blend. The perceived imbalance of the palimpsest due to domineering
classical discourses with their binary voices of patriarchal power structures should make way
to a more nuanced literary field, on which traditional gender structures and fixed notions about
the self are fractured. The deconstruction of binary opposition and power structures, offers the
individual reader the opportunity to embark on new literary and personal discoveries.
12
Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (Cambridge: Virago Press, 2009), p. 22.
13
Cheryl Renfroe, ‘Initiation and Disobedience: Liminal Experience in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”’, in Angela Carter and the
Fairy Tale, ed. by Danielle M. Roemer and Cristina Bacchilega (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), p. 95.
21
Liminal Journeys
The tripartite narrative models of the selected tales are compatible with Arnold Van Gennep’s
and Victor Turner’s anthropological theories and their conceptions of ‘rites of passage’.
Throughout the different versions of the tales, the female protagonists cross various physical
and psychological thresholds. In his influential book The Rites of Passage (1909), Arnold Van
Gennep, points out that the concept of boundary can be considered as central to the human and
social experience. (Jenks, 42) One of his primary interests concerns the analysis of the
‘transition through or across boundaries’. (Jenks, 42) Fundamentally, these transitions are
regarded as unsettling since ‘transgression is always a step into the unknown and a step that is
without precedent’. (Jenks, 42) According to Mary Douglas, Van Gennep
[…] saw society as a house with rooms and corridors in which passage from one to another is dangerous.
(Jenks, 43)
The conception that ‘the life of an individual in any society is a series of passages from one age
to another and from one occupation to another’ prominently underlies Van Gennep’s analysis. 14
These transitions ‘from one category or status to another’ are called the rites of passage. (Jenks,
42) As Victor Turner points out: ‘Van Gennep himself define[s] “rites de passage” as “rites
which accompany every change of place, state, social position and age.”’ 15 Van Gennep
especially points to ‘the relationship between actual spatial passage and the change in social
position’ (Gennep, x):
[…] it seems important to me that the passage from one social position to another is identified with a
territorial passage, such as the entrance into a village or a house, the movement from one room to another,
or the crossing of streets and squares. (Gennep, 192)
The actual physicality of roads, paths between different homes, is also visually rendered in the
fairy tales in order to express the protagonists’ passage from one social position or private state
to another. The metaphorical image of the road, symbolising the girls’ passages through
different life stages, is portrayed via winding paths between homes. First the girls leave their
intact or destroyed initial homes (e.g. parental house), set out on liminal journeys during which
they enter limen spaces, alternative homes (e.g. the grandmother’s house, the prince’s castle
14 Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1960), pp. 2-3.
15
Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (New York: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 94.
22
and bloody chambers) and finally continue their journey, leaving behind the limen spaces and
crossing the thresholds into intact final homes, reaggregating into stable social and private
positions. These paths structurally coincide with the tripartite scheme of separation, liminality
and reaggregation, or to what Van Gennep coins the pre-liminal, the liminal and the post-liminal
stages that mark a person’s change of state or social position. (Gennep, 21) Victor Turner further
develops Van Gennep’s theories into the theory of liminality. His summary of Van Gennep’s
tripartite conception of the rites of passage bears close resemblance to the transitions the tales’
heroines go through:
The first phase of separation comprises symbolic behaviour signifying the detachment of the individual
or group either from an earlier fixed point in the social structure or a set of cultural conditions (a “state”);
during the intervening liminal period, the state of the ritual subject (the “passenger”) is ambiguous; he
passes through a realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state; in the third phase
the passage is consummated. The ritual subject, individual or corporate, is in a stable state once more and,
by virtue of this, has rights and obligations of a clearly defined and “structural” type, and is expected to
behave in accordance with certain customary norms and ethical standards. (Forest, 94)
In his theory, Victor Turner especially points out the ambiguous nature of the liminal phase and
‘the individual liminar, who Turner accounts for as a traveller or a passenger’: (Jenks, 44)
The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous, since
this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classification that normally locate
states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and
between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. (RP, 95)
The tripartite arrangement of the rites of passage as well as the notion of the liminal traveller is
especially relevant when placing the fairy tales under close scrutiny. Not only are the characters
of Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Bluebeard’s wife representative of the pre-liminal
child, the ostracised liminal girl and the post-liminal wife respectively. But these tales’
metaphorical journeys are also structured along the pre-liminal, liminal and post-liminal thread.
In the tales, the pre-liminal stage can be associated to notions of the home and of the self as
stable (initial homes); the liminal can be associated to the women’s liminal journeys during
which fixed categories are broken down and they encounter alternative notions of the home and
self (liminal journeys & alternative homes); and finally the post-liminal stage, once again
represents a vision of the home and the self as stable, even though altered (final homes).
Especially the classic tales uphold this tripartite progression. Their female protagonists set out
on “socialising” journeys. They need to find a way out of the limen and reaggregate into stable
23
homes and into society as “socialised” beings. Yet, these homes and lifelines are often liable to
normative patriarchal forces. The girls’ arrival into stable homes coincides with their
reaggregation into a particular social model and reality – it signals their simultaneous
acceptance and performance of their role and position. Their quest for identity has reached a
(preliminary) goal. The road leads to a function; an allotted part, namely that of the mother and
wife. The girls are warned against remaining “threshold people”, travellers; instead, they are
invited to fulfil their feminine duties by crossing the thresholds into stable social and private
worlds. At the end the female protagonists might have gained an altered notion of home from
the one they started out with, but one which still accepts prevailing gender constructs and power
structures.
Whereas the classical tales and their metaphor of the road stress the importance of
reaggregation, the post-modern feminist variations and their metaphor of the road, the
representation of life paths, emphasise the ambiguities of the liminal stage, since:
In this interim of “liminality,” the possibility exists of standing aside not only from one’s own social
position but from all social positions and of formulating a potentially unlimited series of alternative social
arrangements. 16
The post-modern feminist tales seize the limen space as a liberating opportunity. Traditional
static categories, fixed power structures and gender roles can be questioned and broken down.
The liminal stage identifies the characters and their life paths as fractured, changeable,
ambiguous, and constructed. Within the limen space, the women can weave and follow their
own paths. The rewritings show that the female protagonists’ journeys do not follow a static
structure. Their conflicts cannot be as easily resolved along essentialist lines, and thus a
reaggregation into a post-liminal stage is never a straight line or as neat and tidy as the iconic
classic phrase “they lived happily ever after” would have the reader believe. The post-liminal
individual is even seen as an illusion as is the post-liminal marital home (e.g. the prince’s
castle), since identities never cease to be constructed. Thus, in the case of the feminist
rewritings, the metaphor of the road with its emphasis on liminality represents the way to one’s
self: a self which is accepted and appreciated as constructed and ambiguous. At the end of the
girls’ journeys, they have a notion of the self and of the home as “ambiguous” and “multiple”.
They construct their own homes on their own terms, knowing that they are not finalised. The
female protagonists will always remain liminar’s, wanderers, travellers and explorers stepping
16
Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (New York: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 13-14.
24
off the beaten path. These wandering protagonists’ transgressive steps also invite the readers to
reflect on the perpetual and life enhancing movement of trespassing and crossing thresholds,
and of embarking on new (literary) routes. As Turner notes:
For groups, as well as for individuals, life itself means to separate and to be reunited, to change form and
condition, to die and to be reborn. It is to act and to cease, to wait and rest, and then to begin acting again,
but in a different way. And there are always new thresholds to cross. (RP, 189)
25
Nonconstructivist and Constructivist Metaphors
As we have seen, the tripartite model of the fairy tales’ plotlines and their metaphors of the road
coincide with the theories of Van Gennep and Victor Turner. While the metaphor of the road
postulated by the classic tales focuses on the reaggregation and the post-limen space (the final
home), the metaphor of the road postulated by the post-modern feminist rewritings, construct
the limen space as subversive and inviting resistance to conventional gender roles and identity
positions (through alternative life paths and ambiguous resolutions to the quest for stable
identity). These two different representations of the metaphor and their underlying gender
assumptions are inscribed into a broader debate opposing two differing schools of thought on
the conceptual significance of metaphor itself. Andrew Ortony’s distinction between
nonconstructivist and constructivist approaches to metaphor will serve as a guiding tool. In his
essay Metaphor: A Multidimensional Problem, Andrew Ortony distinguishes between
nonconstructivist and constructivist approaches in order to refer to the classical and
contemporary theories of metaphor, based on the old literal-figurative dichotomy. (Ortony, 212)
These divergent branches hinge upon the distinction between so-called precise, unambiguous
literal language and figurative, or metaphorical, language. This disagreement between
nonconstructivist thinkers on the one hand (Aristotle, Black, and Richards) and constructivist
approaches (Lakoff, Johnson) on the other raises fundamental questions about the relationship
between language and the physical world, and challenges conventional and seemingly fixed
notions of a stable external world and the human self. The traditional classical theories on
metaphor, can be associated with the nonconstructivist stance, since
[all] these views share a common feature: they view metaphor as a linguistic phenomenon, and assume a
fundamental distinction between literal and figurative (or metaphorical in its broad sense) senses. 17
Furthermore, the nonconstructivist position advances that metaphor merely has a decorative
function. Metaphor is primarily viewed ‘as a rhetorical or poetic departure from the ordinary
usage’. 18 One of these traditional theories on metaphor is the so-called substitution view, which
dates back to Aristotle. The substitution view of metaphor, a phrase coined by Max Black in
his seminal article Metaphor (1955), ‘holds that a metaphorical expression is used in place of
17
Ning Yu, The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor: A perspective from Chinese (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1998), p. 10.
18
M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 10th edn (Andover Hampshire UK: Cengage Learning, 2005), p.
212.
26
some equivalent literal expression’. 19 This view of metaphor presupposes the existence of firm
literal meanings. A literal equivalent to the metaphorical expression is always assumed possible.
According to Black, it is the reader’s task to invert the substitution, since ‘understanding a
metaphor is like deciphering a code or unravelling a riddle’. (Black, 69) Thus, in order to
understand the entirety of a metaphor, the reader engages in a mental decrypting that can
unearth the appropriate literal meaning underlying the metaphorical expression. This
teleological act of deciphering the innuendos, the implied meanings of the metaphorical
expression will guide the reader back onto a safe unambiguous line of reading, heightened by
the pleasure of linguistic ornament. Thus, the nonconstructivist position not only postulates the
strict division between literal and figurative usages of language but also identifies the metaphor
as a “solvable” linguistic riddle. It is my contention that the narratives of Charles Perrault and
the Brothers Grimm rely primarily on a nonconstructivist perception of metaphor. This is
particularly the case in their representation of the characters’ liminal journeys and the notions
of home they perpetuate. Their metaphors generate stable meanings. Their metaphor of the road,
which places great emphasis on the characters’ reaggregation, is the figurative representation
of the socialisation process and arrival within stable gender roles. The reader who engages in
the tales and their metaphor will decipher the road and thus read the final morals of the tales
also as “final” meanings. These metaphors and the narratives themselves guide the readers to
clear endings and final morals, which appear closed. It leads to a rather static and one-sided
reading in which the illusion of stability and of simplistic truths is upheld. Binaries are not
destroyed and the awareness of alternative paths and lines of conduct is repressed.
The nonconstructivist ‘faith in literal language as the only adequate and appropriate tool for the
objective characterisation of reality’ (Ortony, 1) which also shapes 1960s French structuralism
and its ‘pretentions to scientific objectivity and comprehensiveness’, 20 has been actively
contested by cognitive linguists since the 1970s and 80s. This outlook predates the pronounced
intellectual upheavals discernible within the humanities throughout the twentieth century. The
so-called linguistic turn, denoting a panoply of philosophical-linguistic discourses, prominently
headed by such structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers as Ferdinand de Saussure and
Jacques Derrida, marks an intellectual stance that impacted and changed the traditional
discourse over the relationship between language and the world, highlighting its subjective
19
Max Black, ‘Metaphor’, in Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor, ed. by Mark Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1985), p. 68.
20
Chris Baldrick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 202.
27
character. As Saussure famously points out: ‘the relationship between signifier and signified is
arbitrary, […] it is based purely on social convention’. (Baldrick, 236) If according to Saussure
the meaning of a word is constructed, then so is the meaning of the metaphor. This constructivist
approach:
[…] tends to break down the distinction between the metaphorical and the literal. Since, for the
constructivist, meaning has to be constructed rather than merely “read off” the meaning of nonliteral uses
of language does not constitute a special problem. The use of language is an essentially creative activity,
as is its comprehension. (Ortony, 2)
Contemporary linguists such as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson support this recognition of
metaphor as being essential to our understanding of the world, prominently advocated in their
seminal book Metaphors We Live By. Indeed, Lakoff states
[…] that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. […] the
way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor. 21
The ways in which ‘we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature’ (Lakoff
and Johnson, 3). This view also stands in line with post-structuralist thinkers such as Derrida,
whose analysis reveals and deconstructs binary structures. His radically destabilizing move
away from fixed and essentialist notions of identity towards the perception of identity as
constructed, also finds its expression in his views on the ubiquity of figurative language and in
particular metaphor. As Abrams and Harpham argue:
Derrida, for example, emphasizes the indispensable reliance in all modes of discourse on metaphors that
are assumed to be merely convenient substitutes for literal, or “proper” meanings; then he undertakes to
show, on the one hand, that metaphors cannot be reduced to literal meanings but, on the other hand, that
supposedly literal terms are themselves metaphors whose metaphoric nature has been forgotten. (Abrams
and Harpham, 79)
All these views are compatible with the constructivist approach. This constructivist view, in
which there is no fundamental boundary between literal and figurative language, since
metaphor is ubiquitous and since all language is figurative, challenges conventional and
seemingly fixed notions of stability of the external world and the human self, while opening up
new ways of perception and reading texts. This stance postulates that there are no clear
distinctions, stable categories between literal and figurative. The metaphor is not simply
regarded as a decipherable riddle, with stable literal meanings. Roland Barthes convincingly
21
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 3.
28
disposed of the legitimacy of deciphering true meanings or single authoritative voices. In his
pivotal essay The Death of the Author (1968), he negates the possibility of one solely valid
interpretation and reading of texts, denoting such attempts as futile bourgeois acts:
Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author
is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. […] In the
multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; […]. 22
According to Barthes, a complete deciphering is only an illusion, since there is more than just
one possible solution to a riddle. The meaning of the metaphor and its understanding are
constructed. The post-modern feminist rewritings and their representation of the metaphor of
the road follow the line of the constructivist stance, since the metaphor is not seen as a
decipherable riddle with one literal meaning (e.g. proper socialisation, and stable gender roles)
and the narrative does not result in final morals and endings. Stable notions, clear distinctions
and binary oppositions are broken down. Their writings do not presuppose the existence of
fixed and stable meanings, private and social positions. Identities and life paths are ambiguous
and constructed. Hierarchies are seen as artificial. Journeys are never closed. Just like final
inscriptions on the palimpsest are not final. Instead of a straight line, the metaphor tempts the
reader onto different paths, on which s/he constantly needs to reassess his or her position. The
reader, just like the female protagonists of the tales, is a traveller who does not know where his
or her journey ends, in contrast to the “happily ever after” of the classics’ protagonists. The
reader, just like the female protagonists can remain in an emancipatory state of limbo, stepping
off beaten paths and discovering like Zarathustra his or her own way.
So, pick up your baskets, put on your red caps and follow me on the different narrative paths of
the Little Red Riding Hoods.
22
Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (Harlow, England: Longman, 1999), pp. 144-150.
29
31
CHAP TE R 1 – Once upon some roads there were
Little Red Riding Hoods
Embarking on Tales
The tale of Little Red Riding Hood has often been referred to as the ‘most popular’ and the
‘most provocative fairy tale in the Western world’. (Trials, 343) Centuries of retelling, from its
earliest folk origins to modern literary versions, have formed a palimpsestuous narrative about
a young girl encountering a treacherous wolf in the woods. The tale type of Little Red Riding
Hood reveals its palimpsestuous character in its layered texture, simultaneously concealing and
exposing the traces of bygone versions that subsist as faded watermarks in the various versions
of the tales themselves and can only be accessed by disentangling and contextualising various
layers of writing. According to Jack Zipes, ‘fairy tales have always been truthful metaphorical
reflections of the customs of their times’, 23 allowing their authors to ‘imbue their symbolical
stories with very specific commentaries on the mores and manners of their times’. (GFTT, 845)
The first oral versions of the tale probably originated from rural sewing societies in the south
of France and north of Italy during the late Middle Ages, 24 ‘where sewing was a major home
industry, and women told tales representative of their sexual and social initiation’. (Trials, 6)
These oral traditions were strongly marked by a female perspective, sketching out resourceful
and shrewd heroines of everyday peasant life. (Trials, 7) In the early oral renditions of the tale,
the girl does not wear the notorious red cap signifying a naïve, sinful and shameful identity, but
instead has a proper name of her own and a strong female voice. (Subversion, 44) She proves
to be courageous in defending herself and ultimately orchestrating her own escape from the
wolf’s fangs.
However, the first literary version of the tale published by Charles Perrault in his collection
Histoires ou contes du temps passé in 1697, (OCFT, 301) has lost much of its original drive.
The changes to the story not only correspond to a shift in social norms and manners, but also
articulate and express these same norms and manners. Perrault’s adaptation of the Little Red
Riding Hood narrative targeted an upper-class bourgeois-aristocratic elite audience that would
23
Jack Zipes, ‘Cross-Cultural Connections and the Contamination of the Classical Fairy Tale’, in The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From
Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm, ed. by Jack Zipes (London: Norton Critical Edition, 2001), p. 845.
24
The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales: The Western Fairy Tale Tradition from Medieval to Modern, ed. by Jack Zipes (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), p. 301.
33
have been shocked by the ‘cruelness’, the ‘puerility’, and the ‘impropriety’ of the earlier oral
folk versions. (Subversion, 44) He refined and polished his tale according to accepted standards
of taste and morality and made it into ‘the literary standard bearer for good Christian
upbringing’ (Trials, 348) worthy of emulation for both the child and the adult reader. After
Perrault’s first literary version, the second most influential adaptation of the oral material in
printed form was the Brothers Grimm’s Little Red Cap in Kinder- und Hausmärchen in 1812.
(OCFT, 302) The two brothers based much of their tale on the pre-existing literary version of
Perrault. For these ‘bourgeois missionaries’, the tale also befitted the ‘more upright, nineteenthcentury, middle-class perspective and sense of decency’ and ‘reinforce[d] an authoritarian
socialisation process’ (Subversion, 62, 64, 59) which upheld strict patriarchal role models for
men and women.
Whereas the early oral folk narratives of a young girl encountering a wolf in the woods, seek to
caution peasant girls against the natural hazards surrounding them and form an integral part of
a young girl’s initiation to the harshness of daily rural life, Perrault’s and the Grimms’ later
literary versions warn ‘girls about their own natural desires, which they must tame’ in order not
to violate the moral codes of their times. (Subversion, 45) Their narratives mark a turnoff from
the matriarchal cautionary tale and distort the female perspective to fit ‘sexual regulations’ and
social expectations within a marked patriarchal environment. (Trials, 4, 7) Contrasting the
initiation narratives of the early folk tale which perpetuate a feeling of drive and new
beginnings, the violation narratives of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm foster images of female
death and sexual pain, for which the girl is to blame. Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm
altered an oral initiation tale of a young woman into a narrative of violence and rape, which
curtails the young girl’s free sexual development. 25 Their renditions both rely on and perpetuate
fixed gender roles and functions within aristocratic, bourgeois societies.
Even though Perrault’s and the Brothers Grimm’s versions of the tale are widely regarded as
canonical, their textual signposts have (mis)guided numerous authors and storytellers both male
and female on similar cautionary, biased and restrictively gendered rewritings. With the advent
of pronounced social and intellectual upheavals of the late twentieth century, new authorial
voices have dared to accompany the young Little Red Riding Hood onto unknown narrative
paths. “Liberated” rewritings of Little Red Riding Hood and other tales prominently appear
during the 1960s, attacking the classic tales’ alleged conservatism and sexist attitudes.
25
Jack Zipes, ‘A Second Gaze at Little Red Riding Hood’s Trials and Tribulations’, in Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy
Tales in North America and England, ed. by Jack Zipes (New York: Routledge, 1986), p. 227.
34
(Subversion, 72) In this wave of cultural upheaval, the classic fairy tales of Charles Perrault and
the Brothers Grimm have been reutilized:
The reutilized tales function against conformation to the standard socialization process and are meant to
function for a different, more just society that can be gleaned from the redirected socialization process
symbolized in the new tales. (Subversion, 60)
The rewritings do not allow themselves to settle into standardised, traditional socialisation trails
but instead, step off the beaten track in order to rediscover alternative and often silenced voices
from the present as well as the past. Instead of withdrawing from the original matriarchal
renditions of the tale, some authors have actively sought to link their writings to earlier folk
voices, creating new powerful polyphonous texts. Especially feminist authors have picked up
those “over-written” voices and together with their own literary voices have added fresh and
forceful textual footprints on the tale’s palimpsest. These continuous literary additions reveal
the ongoing struggle to counteract oppressive gender discourses. The ongoing fascination with
and the rewritings of Little Red Riding Hood demonstrate that within the manifold stories of a
young girl encountering a dangerous wolf in the woods,
[…] all the issues raised in this tale are crucial for establishing principles of social justice and gender
equality that have not been satisfactorily practiced in Western societies and are thus continually
readdressed in different versions of Little Red Riding Hood. (Trials, 343)
Rewriting is thus synonymous with redirecting, re-examining and possibly readjusting texts.
They illustrate that texts and narratives are never as closed as they seem since the cultural,
socio-political settings within which they are being produced and read are never final. The
rewritings prove that texts should not be allowed to settle unquestioned and passively on the
shelves of libraries and in people’s minds. Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves (1979)
from her short story collection The Bloody Chamber and Tanith Lee’s Wolfland (1983) from
the short story collection Red as Blood: Or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer, reveal the illusory
character of final morals, paragraphs as well as full stops crafted onto the Little Red Riding
Hood narrative. The notion of a “final writing” as well as “final reading” with a “stable”, “just”
ending is redundant, since the reader should not rest upon single meanings and conclusions.
Rewritings should seek to expose the possibilities for new alternative paths and to create open
endings on which the readers can continuously wander. This metaphorical journey of the reader
is also rendered in the classic and post-modern tales’ metaphorical initiatory journey on which
the young red-hooded maid in her pre-liminal stage embarks upon.
35
The classic Little Red Riding Hood leaves her stable maternal home, entering the risky, limen
domain of the forest and the defamiliarised home of the grandmother, finding a final deadly
home in the wolf’s belly as in Perrault or regaining a secure familiar home in the Grimms’
version. In the classic tales, both these endings and arrivals concluding the journey appear
closed, as the final moral seems to be the only “just” resolution for the girl. In the classic tales,
the “metaphor of the road” coincides with the nonconstructivist stance on metaphor. The
nonconstructivist stance advocates the existence of fixed and stable literal meanings. It
presupposes that there can be a teleological deciphering of the metaphor: one possible single
meaning and resolution. The metaphorical journey of Perrault’s and the Brothers Grimm’s
protagonist perpetuate this teleological resolution: it signifies the girls’ (failed) socialisation
process. However, the analysis of post-modern feminist rewritings opens up the investigation
to constructivist dissemination, revealing the idea of a simple teleological resolution to be a
mere chimaera. The post-modern rewritings of Red Riding Hood demonstrate that these endings
are not as final and prescriptive as they first appear but are open to alteration. The final ending,
arrival, moral or final “home” of the young girl, can change: it can leave the back door ajar for
alternative paths and interpretations. These endings challenge seemingly fixed moral systems
and notions of stability. The post-modern rewritings promote a constructivist approach to
figurative language. The notion of the home and its final interpretation has altered, as the liminal
journey progressed: it is destabilised, just as the idea of a “stable” self is questioned, challenged,
exposing identity as constructed and changeable. The emancipatory metaphorical journeys as
well as the act of reading are unlimited.
36
From Initial Homes
The opening passage of Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood paints a picture of stable and tranquil
domesticity. The girl is described as ‘a village girl’ 26 who is adored by her mother and her
grandmother. Not only is the girl tightly woven into a female family matrix, but she also lives
a carefree life within the shelter of the village community. The little red hood, which her
grandmother fashioned for her, has not yet become a symbol of her doom, but manifests the
warm familial and social relationships within which she is enveloped:
The hood suited the child so much that everywhere she went she was known by the name Little Red
Riding Hood. (LRRH, 11)
The little girl’s nickname embodies her chaperoned life within a stable social order and
community in which she can roam around safely. Similarly, the opening passages of the
Brothers Grimm’s Little Red Cap, anchors the girl within loving social and familial ties:
Once upon a time there was a dear little girl. If you set eyes on her you could not but love her. The person
who loved her most of all was her grandmother, and she could never give the child enough. Once she
made her a little cap of red velvet. Since it was so becoming and since she wanted to wear it all the time,
everyone called her Little Red Cap. 27
The red cap once again indicates her secured position within a caring female lineage and
positive social bonds. These opening passages of the classic narratives present the little girls as
inexperienced and innocent, strongly linked to their loving and ordered maternal homes and
protective village communities. The mother’s voice resonates as a guiding, normative force
within the safe domain of the house, in which the girl is taught her domestic duties and ordered
to go and take care of her sick grandmother:
“[…] Here’s a piece of cake and a bottle of wine. Take them to your grandmother. She is ill and feels
weak, and they will give her strength. You’d better start now before it gets too hot, and when you’re out
in the woods, walk properly and don’t stray from the path. Otherwise you’ll fall and break the glass, and
then there’ll be nothing for Grandmother. And when you enter her room, don’t forget to say good
morning, and don’t go peeping in all the corners of the room.”
“I’ll do just as you say,” Little Red Cap promised her mother. (LRC, 14)
26
Charles Perrault, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, in The Classic Fairy Tales, trans. by Maria Tatar, ed. by Maria Tatar (London: Norton Critical
Edition, 1999), p. 11.
27
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, ‘Little Red Cap’, in The Classic Fairy Tales, trans. by Maria Tatar, ed. by Maria Tatar (London: Norton Critical
Edition, 1999), pp. 13-14.
37
The mother clearly sets out the rules of domestic decorum and proper social conduct for her
young daughter. Her adamant warning about not straying from the path and not breaking the
household goods, expresses her anxiety about the girl’s possible failure to carry out her
domestic duties and proper social functions. Both inside and outside the safe family home, Little
Red Cap needs to follow the established, “correct” social and moral codes of behaviour. The
mother’s voice is prescriptive, limiting the girl’s voice to a parroting obedience and obeying
response, and guiding the girl into her own footsteps. The girl must follow the prescribed path
which her mother has laid out for her. She needs to walk in her mother’s shoes, follow her
mother’s example and guidance, which will ultimately carry her to a safe and socially
sanctioned form of domestic life. In both these classic tales, the mother’s home is constructed
as the norm, the starting point for a safe and proper female initiatory socialisation process. In
both of these narratives, the home space is a “fixed point”, a stable entity, cut off from the
lurking natural as well as social dangers outside, and thus also corresponds to Van Gennep’s
and Turner’s pre-liminal phase, in which the inexperienced neophyte remains unharmed.
This pre-liminal phase of stability is also significant within the post-modern rewriting of Tanith
Lee’s Wolfland, although her initial tableau of the “stable” home is more nuanced. The familiar
parental home as well as the protagonist’s beloved city, are not entirely cut off from the uncanny
natural forces encompassing them. Here, the opening passage draws a blurred picture of
familiar domestic as well as unfamiliar natural landscapes:
The twilit winter had already come, and the great snows were down, spreading their aprons of shining
ice, turning the trees to crystal candelabra. 28
In this hazy, snowed-up atmosphere of the winter skies, the shapes of the trees have lost their
distinct outlines, blending natural and domestic forms. Unlike the classic tales’ homes, the
village or the city, the home space of the protagonist is not clearly demarcated from the natural
phenomenon and landscapes surrounding it. Furthermore, the unnamed neophyte has turned
into a vivacious young blond named Lisel, whose mind and steps are free from parental
guidance.
Lisel wanted to stay in the city, skating fur-clad on the frozen river beneath the torches, dancing till four
in the morning, a vivid blonde in the flame-bright ballrooms, breaking hearts and not minding, lying late
28
Tanith Lee, ‘Wolfland’, in Red as Blood: Or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer (New York: Daw Books, 1983), p. 106.
38
next day like a cat in her warm, soft bed. […] Lisel’s mother had been dead sixteen years, all Lisel’s life.
Her father had let her have her own way, in almost everything, for about the same length of time.
(Wolfland, 106)
Lisel is a free spirit and a wanderer who delineates her own social and moral codes of behaviour.
The father’s voice is insubstantial and the mother’s voice does not echo within the girl’s
consciousness. The home space lacks a clear, authoritarian, normative parental voice, thus
leaving the girl in a state of luxurious self-indulgence, indifferent to romantic bonds and social
obligations. Unlike the ‘sittsam’ Red Cap, (Subversion, 66) Lisel does not follow prescribed
paths but can be seen as a wayward Einzelgänger, a lone wolf who is walking, dancing and
skating on her own. She deviates from any prescribed social models of behaviour while at the
same time falling back into the security blanket of her cosy city bedroom. Unlike the snowedup icy rivers and landscapes, Lisel’s comfortable bed and the illuminated ballrooms appear
unburdened by the weight and icy touch of the natural elements. However, the home space is
not hermetically sealed off from the snowy wilderness outside, and Lisel cannot completely
evade the influence of an authoritarian figure. Thus, Lisel irritatingly senses the silent yet
persistent and uncanny presence of the dark wild North embodied within the character of Anna
the Matriarch, her maternal grandmother, whose portrait hangs in her father’s house:
A portrait of Anna as a young widow hung in the gallery of Lisel’s father’s house, a wicked-looking bonepale person in a black dress, […]. Even in her absence, Anna had always had a say in things. A recluse,
she had still manipulated like a puppet-master from behind the curtain of the forest. (Wolfland, 106-107)
Although she lives in the dusky forest outside the city walls, the reclusive grandmother’s
presence is omnipresent within the confines of Lisel’s home and mind, and her voice
periodically disrupts the familiar self-indulgent domestic snugness, interfering with her
upbringing:
The girl must be educated by this or that method. She must gain this or that accomplishment, read this or
that book, favour this or that cologne or color or jewel. (Wolfland, 107)
In contrast to the classic tales, Lee does not offer her readers a picture of an old and sickly
grandmother but instead endows her with an authoritarian, imperial aura, which it is difficult to
evade or ignore. The commanding normative voice of the grandmother cannot be overheard.
Lisel accepts this interference partly because the ‘orders were always uncannily apposite’, but
foremost due to the ‘sumptuous gifts’ such as the ‘swirling cloak of scarlet velvet’ that
accompany them. (Wolfland, 107) The grandmother’s château in the wild forest up North
39
merely lingers on the fringes of her (self-)perception, thinking that the female presence of the
grandmother will only ultimately affect her financial status since she will inherit Anna’s
possessions. The girl does not recognise her own position within the female lineage of her
family, a lineage which transgresses the city walls and reaches out deeply into the gloomy
woods. Lisel does not recognise herself nor her home as a composite being and state
respectively. Her self-fashioned urban home space and the notion of herself as a woman with a
family history is limited, as she negates and shuts out her Northern influences and female family
lineage. Lisel is exposed to new unsought domains when Anna, the matriarch, summons her to
her château in the wild forest. As she starts to traverse new paths, Lisel’s liminal journey begins,
subsequently altering her notion of both herself and the home space.
The notion of the home as a composite space in which elements of the familiar intermingle with
“alien” outside forces is also prominently developed in Angela Carter’s The Company of
Wolves. In her tale, the boundaries between the home space and the surrounding wilderness blur
within a harsh struggle for survival. The opening narrative frame vividly portrays the
ruthlessness of country life with its deadly combats between men and wolves. Even though the
cottagers try to keep their home space safe, the wolves’ presence continuously pervades the
domestic sphere:
But the wolves have ways of arriving at your own hearthside. We try and try but sometimes we cannot
keep them out. 29
This ‘region of mountain and forest’ (Company, 110) does not allow for any clear divisions and
boundaries between the familiar sphere and the “alien” outside. The presence and the intrusion
of the wolves into the familiar hearths are symbols of the untameable natural forces both within
and outside the human self. Thresholds are never entirely safe. The home space as well as the
human self is not cut off from these natural wild forces. Likewise, the forest, the home of the
‘forest assassins’, (Company, 110) the wolves, is itself an ambiguous terrain:
You are always in danger in the forest, where no people are. Step between the portals of the great pines
where the shaggy branches tangle about you, trapping the unwary traveller in nets as if the vegetation
itself were in a plot with the wolves who live there, as though the wicked trees go fishing on behalf of
their friends – step between the gateposts of the forest with the greatest trepidation and infinite
precautions, for if you stray from the path for one instant, the wolves will eat you. (Company, 111)
29
Angela Carter, ‘The Company of Wolves’, in The Bloody Chamber and Other Tales (London: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 111.
40
Angela Carter’s lusciously metaphorical description of the forest is indicative of her magic
realism, 30 a literary genre which is ‘characterised by the juxtaposition of apparently reliable,
realistic reportage and extravagant fantasy’. 31 The marked anthropomorphism of this “wooden
home” and its sensuously dialogic intertextuality simultaneously weave and undo the
distinctions that separate safety from danger, thus establishing the home as both multiple (there
are alternatives) and constructed. Within this “home”, notions of lively inanimateness and
deadly animalism merge, creating a dangerous space within which straying off the path
irrevocably eradicates lifelines. It is an inhospitable environment for both men and wolves.
Their struggle for survival not only marks them out as ferocious beasts but also as pitiful,
suffering beings:
There is so little flesh on them that you could count the starveling ribs through their pelts, if they gave
you time before they pounced. […] There is a vast melancholy in the canticles of the wolves, […] that
ghastly sadness, that mourning for their own, irremediable appetites, […]. (Company, 110, 112)
Carter paints a picture of the wolf as a ferocious devourer, but at the same time is also
ferociously devoured by its own natural needs in an unforgiving struggle for survival. The
starving wolf is not just a predator but at the same time a prey within the inhospitable
environment. Thus, animalism is not just synonymous with predatory. Static notions and
imageries of the hunter, victim dichotomies are broken down. This ambiguity within the wolves
is further epitomised through the figure of the werewolf. The werewolf represents the
quintessential composite being:
[…] his torso is a man’s but his legs and genitals are a wolf’s. And he has a wolf’s heart. (Company, 113)
The merging of human and animal appearances exemplifies the transgressive structures at work
within this outer indomitable wilderness while at the same time holding up a cracked mirror to
humanity itself, visualising specifically human constitutions marked by ambiguity and
transgressive behaviours. This ‘shape-shifter’ embodies men’s distrust of the human condition
itself and reveals the idea of static human bodies and minds as illusory. 32
30
Jack Zipes, ‘The Remaking of Charles Perrault and his Fairy Tales’, in Angela Carter The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (London: Penguin
Books, 2008), p. x.
31
The Wordsworth Companion to Literature in English, ed. by Ian Ousby (Ware Hertfordshire UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), p. 584.
32
Cristina Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p.
55.
41
Carter’s anonymous protagonist “She” is an incarnation of this instability. The young She faces
a double threshold: leaving her parental home in order to re-join her grandmother is tantamount
to crossing the threshold into womanhood. Like her natural surroundings, She is a composite
being, in-between girlhood and womanhood. The red shawl that she is wearing ‘has the ominous
if brilliant look of blood on snow.’ (Company, 113) This vivid duality in terms of colour
extrapolates her inner ambiguity and limen state between girlhood and womanhood, between
virginity and sexual initiation:
Her breasts have just begun to swell; her hair is like lint, so fair it hardly makes a shadow on her pale
forehead; her cheeks are an emblematic scarlet and white and she has just started her woman’s bleeding,
the clock inside her that will strike, henceforward, once a month. She stands and moves within the
invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg; she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her
a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she
does not know how to shiver. She has her knife and she is afraid of nothing. (Company, 113-114)
She is ‘the individual liminar’, the ‘traveller’, the ‘passenger’ and ‘marked out by ambiguity’.
(Jenks, 44) She does not occupy ‘any identifiable class or fixed position’, she is ‘neither one
thing nor t’other’, her female body oscillating ‘betwixt and between’ girl- and womanhood.
(Jenks, 44; RP, 95) However, she will learn that her body is not a closed system. She will find
out about her own ambiguous desires and transgressive urges. In the “she” the girl will also find
the “he”. She will explore her own body, and discover ‘the seat of desire and the passions’, the
male animus within herself. 33 She is strong-minded and bold, deciding over her own paths.
Thus she cannot be deterred from setting out on a ‘two hours’ trudge through the winter woods’,
in order to bring some gifts to her grandmother whose house ‘stood by itself a little way out of
the village’ (Company, 113, 115) She boldly ‘wraps herself up in her thick shawl, draws it over
her head’, ‘steps into her stout wooden shoes’ and armed with a knife she crosses the threshold
of her familiar home. Thus the starting point of the tale shows both the home and the girl in a
porous pre-liminal state. The home is not a closed system, it forms an integral part of the wild
natural surroundings and its inhabitants are also not ‘unbroken’. There are spaces of ambiguity
both within and without the home, the human self.
A comparative analysis of these opening passages has shown that the four tales differ
significantly in their depictions of the “home”. While the classic renditions of Perrault and the
33
Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, trans. by John Buchanan-Brown (London: Penguin Books, 1996),
p. 893.
42
Grimms envision the home as a space of security with stable normative forces guiding the
young girls, the post-modern rewritings counteract this represented stability. In their tales, the
homes are no longer located within a sheltered pre-liminal state, but are exposed to threatening
outside natural forces. The concept of the home as well as the actual home is porous. The houses
are not hermetically sealed off.
43
On Liminal Journeys
Van Gennep’s and Turner’s tripartite conception of the rites of passage, postulates a limen
which each human needs to pass during initiatory journeys. After being propelled by their
mothers, their grandmother or as a consequence of their own desires, the four literary Red
Riding Hoods leave their maternal homes and set out on their way towards another familiar
domestic hearth, their grandmothers’ homes. The journey through the forest is representative
of the liminal state of the girls. The forest with its long shadows and deep roots symbolises a
limen space within which the girls cross external as well as internal boundaries. The
combination of forest and liminal space is not unusual in Western culture and literate (see the
Forest of Arden as a space of licensed misrule, in Shakespeare’s As You Like It for instance).
In a similar fashion, Red Riding Hood’s forest breaks down strict categories between the self
and others, the human and the animal, the natural and the supernatural, and the conscious and
the unconscious. Within the forest all four girls cross boundaries. They step off the beaten
tracks, to experience unfamiliar, disquieting, dangerous encounters and face their own secret
worlds. However, the four authors, the puppet masters of the Red Hoods, set up the liminal
journeys differently. Some let the girl run loose and allow her to lose herself while others are
permitted to run without strings and walk their own paths.
In Perrault’s classic tale, the girl’s initiatory journey, or in Turner’s terminology, the act of
separation, effectively takes place when the girl’s mother asks her to bring a basket of cakes to
her sick grandmother’s house ‘which was in another village’. (LRRH, 12) The little girl needs
to cross the forest, the liminal area between two poles of familiar domesticity. The passage
through the limen forest leaves the girl in a state of limbo. In this space she needs to choose the
correct, “proper” way (of conduct) in order to escape the wolf and to (re)enter a safe hearth.
The ‘old Neighbour Wolf [’s]’ (LRRH, 12) appearance and speech is ambiguous, displaying
both familiar and unfamiliar traits. However, the girl is too naïve to decipher the ambiguity of
his false appearances and is unable to unmask his carnivorous desires. She fails to follow the
warning that the hidden agendas and dark longings of the human mind and soul are often
concealed by external refinement and verbal flattery, as Perrault prominently formulates in the
tale’s final moral:
From this story one learns that children,
Especially young girls,
Pretty, well-bred, and genteel,
Are wrong to listen to just anyone,
44
And it’s not at all strange,
If a wolf ends up eating them.
I say a wolf, but not all wolves
Are exactly the same.
Some are perfectly charming,
Not loud, brutal, or angry,
But tame, pleasant, and gentle,
Following young ladies
Right into their homes, into their chambers,
But watch out if you haven’t learned that tame wolves
Are the most dangerous of all. (LRRH, 13)
Perrault’s moral articulates the dangers of disguised social appearances and hidden sexual
agendas. Young girls especially need to be warned against the seductive power of false
appearances. By depicting the learning experience the girl undergoes in her initiation, the tale’s
moral reminds women of their own “proper” place in society. It is the moral duty of the noble
woman to be alert to potential social and sexual pitfalls. Through a strict adherence to social
codes of behaviour and decorum, the women must unearth the dark thoughts of potentially
harmful sexual suitors, predators, and prevent their own downfall. Should a woman not follow
the models of behaviour set out for her and succumb to the deadly charms of false appearances,
then her ruin and downfall can be perceived as “self-inflicted” and “just”. A “proper” education
and socialisation will ultimately enlighten the women against these dangers and guide them
safely through their womanly duties as maidens and wives.
Little Red Riding Hood, who does not know that ‘it was dangerous to stop and listen to wolves’,
(LRRH, 12) represents the un-enlightened and un-socialised girl. Within the forest, she walks
without any moral guidance or moral compass, failing to perceive the differences between good
and evil, and ultimately loses herself. This inability to find the “proper” way and to distinguish
between the categories of right and wrong, or safety and danger, is indicative of her liminal
condition. This moral “blindness” is visibly contrasted to the wolf’s domineering lecherous
looks, and his urge to ‘eat her right there on the spot’. (LRRH, 12) His carnal desires are only
thwarted by the presence of the woodcutters, representing patriarchal authority. Whereas the
girl does not recognise the danger the wolf poses and the potentially lifesaving presence of the
woodcutters, the wolf on the other hand shrewdly observes his surroundings and masters his
desires and speech. The girl, on the other hand, does not master herself, which is also
45
exemplified by her free improvident speech. Instead of keeping the wolf at a safe distance, she
lets him partake in her journey by divulging the exact location of her grandmother’s house
I’m going to see my grandmother and am taking her some cakes and a little pot of butter sent by my
mother. […]. She lives beyond the mill that you can see over there. Hers is the first house you come to in
the village. (LRRH, 12)
The girl’s impulsive character guides the wolf towards the grandmother’s house and ultimately
directs the girl into his deadly claws. The imbalance of power between the scheming wolf and
the thoughtless girl is further accentuated through her acceptance of the wolf’s wager:
“I’ll take the path over here, and you take the path over there, and we’ll see who gets there first.” (LRRH,
12)
With the help of the wager, the wolf entices her childlike character. The wolf is well aware of
the fact that one path is shorter than the other. She lets herself be blindly misguided onto the
longer path, on which she can satisfy her not yet self-disciplined mind and body by ‘gathering
nuts, chasing butterflies, and picking bunches of flowers that she found.’ (LRRH, 12) Her
volatile, inconstant footsteps bring about her own downfall and epitomise her liminal condition
as unable to settle down.
The Brothers Grimm’s Little Red Cap bears much resemblance to Perrault’s fickle youngster.
The narrative strands of their tales overlap, diverging only at the end. Thus, once the girl has
crossed the threshold of her familiar home, closing the door on her mother’s normative voice,
she crosses the boundary into the limen and encounters the wolf: ‘No sooner had Little Red Cap
set foot in the forest than she met the wolf.’ (LRC, 14) Just like Perrault’s protagonist, the girl
remains oblivious to the potential danger of the wolf. She sees no harm in conversing with the
polite wolf. Yet again, the girl is unable to question the verbal eloquence of the wolf, directing
him towards her grandmother’s house, which stands isolated ‘deep in the woods, half an hour’s
walk from the village’. (LRC, 14) This hub of domesticity is surrounded by the forest, exposed
to a vulnerable, lonesome position away from the village community. Like the house, the
grandmother and the girl herself run the risk of being “swallowed” by the forest and are in need
of protection. However, instead of protecting the home from outside intrusions and intruders,
the girl guides the wolf straight to her grandmother’s house. She is unable to secure the family
home due to her inconsistency and her moral “blindness” in recognising categories of good and
bad. On the other hand, the wolf’s big, observant eyes do not fail to single out Little Red Cap
46
as a “perfect” prey. Within the forest, the red colour of her cap no longer symbolises the girl’s
belonging to a social and family community, sharing the warm blood of her female ancestors,
but here in the limen space, the red colour represents the blood of the prey - her blood - that she
must spill:
The wolf thought to himself: “That tender young thing will make a dainty morsel. She’ll be even tastier
than the old woman. If you’re really crafty, you’ll get them both.” (LRC, 14)
The positive lineage, bloodline that links the girl to her grandmother, is being disrupted and
inverted into the same destructive fate of spilled blood and death. The wolf does not see the
individual family members but instead senses vulnerable flesh and inexperienced blood.
Psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim further identifies the red cap as a symbol of the girl’s
immaturity, especially her sexual immaturity. 34 This time the wolf does not entice her with a
bet, but manages to draw her attention away from the road by stimulating her volatile character.
The wolf is the seducer, drawing her attention to the beautiful birds and flowers, making her
notice the sunbeams:
He walked for a while beside Little Red Cap. Then he said: “Little Red Cap, have you seen the beautiful
flowers all about? Why don’t you look around for a while? I don’t think you’ve even noticed how sweetly
the birds are singing. You are walking along as if you were on the way to school, and yet it’s so heavenly
out here in the woods.” (LRC, 14)
The reference to the ‘heavenly’ woods explicitly echoes the biblical tale of Adam and Eve’s
lost paradise. Like the archetypical Eve, Little Red Cap lets herself be seduced by evil forces in
animal disguise, and like the snake, the wolf triggers the girl’s appetite for discovery:
Little Red Cap opened her eyes wide and saw how the sunbeams were dancing this way and that through
the trees and how there were beautiful flowers all about. […]. She left the path and ran off into the woods
looking for flowers. As soon as she picked one she saw an even more beautiful one somewhere else and
went after it, and so she went deeper and deeper into the woods. (LRC, 14)
Little Red Cap’s stimulated appetite for discovering the natural surroundings becomes
insatiable, ensnaring her deeper within the liminal space, until her final deadly fall and loss of
life. The entry into the liminal state coincides with a shift in perception and worldviews. The
girl’s wide eyes symbolise a form of awakening. However, the awakening remains limited and
misleading. The girl is hunting for flowers which satisfy her pleasure. She perceives the beauty
34
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), p. 173.
47
of the natural world, the pretty flowers in the forest, but she fails to see the darker side of her
natural surroundings, namely the looming danger of the wolf, who is hunting her down for his
pleasure. Both the girl and the wolf “hunt for pleasure”, but the object of their hunt is different.
The girl only awakens to the charms of individual flowers, which only satisfy an immediate
pleasure. Like a butterfly she is a volatile being and soon she completely forgets her mother’s
orders and warnings, as well as the household goods and the glass that might break. She neglects
her family duty and the codes of “proper” social and moral conduct. In other words, she is
unwittingly embroiled in a conflict between doing what one likes to do and what one ought to
do, or, as Bettelheim argues, between the ‘pleasure principle’ and the ‘reality principle’.
(Bettelheim, 170) As Bettelheim points out, the ‘pleasure-seeking’ child spots the beauty of the
outside ‘and therein lies a danger’ since ‘this world beyond home and duty becomes too
attractive’. (Bettelheim, 170) Further, she does not recognise the dangers that can also lie within
this outside world. She remains without guidance in the forest, stepping aside accepted codes
of behaviour. When finally her greedy hands have picked so many flowers that she cannot ‘carry
them all, she suddenly remembered Grandmother and set off again on the path to her house’,
(LRC, 15) it is already too late. The road towards her grandmother’s house has merged into the
road of her downfall, her transformation into a ‘fallen woman’, (Bettelheim, 169) just like the
familiar home of the grandmother turns into another alternative limen space and the
grandmother herself is devoured by the wolf.
The classic puppet masters Perrault and the Brothers Grimm send their young girls on initiatory
journeys, and, loosened from the strings of their moral social bonds, they soon run into their
own self-inflicted downfall. These fallen and falling girls have lost their anchorage to familiar
and accepted forms of domesticity and to society in general, as with each unchecked step, they
creep ever closer towards a state of moral blindness. The limen forest is a space in which the
girls’ propriety and good moral sense is tested. However, the girls do not follow their sense but
their sensuality, which they have not yet learned to channel into “proper” domestic outlets and
consequently end up in a state of limbo. It is a loose state and the absence of a stable home and
adherence to social codes is regarded as a negative destructive condition within the patriarchal
regulations of Perrault’s bourgeois seventeenth century France and, later the nineteenth century
Romanticism surrounding the times of the Brothers Grimm. Both Perrault and the Brothers
Grimm expound their beliefs in “proper” socialisation processes which ultimately lead to
ordered and hierarchical gender codes applying to both men and women. The girls are not
allowed to develop into anything other than the role model that the authors had in mind. They
48
are certainly not allowed to make mistakes in order to test their limits, limits that should be
accepted and not challenged. In classic renditions of this fairy tale, the girls are not allowed to
step outside the accepted codes of conduct and of their positions. In stark contrast, the postmodern feminist rewritings of the tale recognise the liminar’s position as that of a traveller, a
wanderer who has the capacity to be free. These writers allow the girls to progress on unthoughtof and unknown paths. The Red Riding Hoods of Carter and Lee test the possibility of
liminality, the possibility ‘of standing aside not only from one’s own social position but from
all social positions and of formulating a potentially unlimited series of alternative social
arrangements’. (DFM, 13-14)
At the start of Wolfland, Lisel’s behaviour and perception are structured by detrimental and
static binary notions of good and bad. With her life anchored within the ordered “civilized”
world of the city, she has no desire to enter the “uncivilized” periphery of the Northern country,
where her grandmother lives. This narrow, static world view traps Lisel in a system of static
binary oppositions, whose boundaries she is reluctant to cross, as her unwillingness to follow
the summons of her grandmother to come and visit her ‘thirty miles, into the uncivilized
northern forest, to the strange mansion in the snow’ suggests. (Wolfland, 107) The two women
do not correspond to the classic image of the caring granddaughter and sickly grandmother. In
fact, Lisel has never seen her grandmother in person apart from one occasion, at ‘the hour of
her birth’. (Wolfland, 107) Since then, both women live in their respective spheres, reluctant to
leave these and to cross geographical boundaries in order to create a strong family bond.
However this division between the two women as well as the strict binaries between “civilized”
and “uncivilized” slowly break down throughout the course of Lisel’s liminal journey in the
Wolfland.
When Lisel thus leaves her safe city house and starts her journey on the northern road, riding
her father’s sledge with some servants, she is brought to an uncanny threshold:
After about an hour, the forest marched up out of the ground and swiftly enveloped the road on all sides.
There was presently an insidious, but generally perceptible change. Between the walls of the forest there
gathered a new silence, a silence which was, if anything, alive, a personality which attended any humanly
noisy passage with a cruel and resentful interest. […]. The tall pines in their pelts of snow seemed poised
to lurch across the road. […]. […] a wolf wailed somewhere amid the trees. (Wolfland, 108)
Crossing a clear threshold into the northern country is marked by ambiguity. In this limen space,
attributes of the animal and vegetal world blend together into a menacing scene of lurking
49
predatory attack. The forest has a voice, eyes, body and soul of its own. This pronounced
anthropomorphism announces the breakdown of strict “natural” divisions. Between the portals
of the forest’s snow-pelted trees, the girl’s carriage drives ‘betwixt and between’ (RP, 95) the
“natural” and “supernatural”. When Lisel steps outside her father’s sledge, walking ‘boldly’
along the road to her grandmother’s ‘demented black carriage’, (Wolfland, 110, 107) Lisel
performs the final step across this ambiguous threshold, embarking on her unknown liminal
journey through Wolfland. She leaves behind her father’s men, the “civilized” world and
accepts Anna’s escort. The grandmother’s black ‘funereal carriage’, ‘blott[ing] the white snow’
of the forest track as well as its dwarf coachman, a creature that ‘was too small to be a man, too
curiously proportioned to be simply a child’, both epitomise this ‘betwixt and between’
condition. (RP, 95) (Wolfland, 111, 109) The carriage with its stark dual contrast of black and
white and the dwarf’s name ‘Beautiful’ triggers a feeling of unease, even fright due to its ‘horrid
contrariness and its peculiar truth’. (Wolfland, 110) The contrariness, the duality, and the
ambiguity are part of the limen space.
In this limen space, the girl, like her classic counterparts, will encounter the wolf along her way.
Thus, once she has sat down in her grandmother’s carriage, ‘a horde of wolves were running,
not merely in pursuit, but actually alongside the carriage’. (Wolfland, 111) However, Lisel does
not trust these creatures, having learned that they are part of the “uncivilized” wild north, and
thus she wonders with ‘panic-stricken anger’ why the coachman does not outrun them.
(Wolfland, 111) When the wolves approach the carriage too closely, Lisel tries to keep them at
a distance by mimicking their ‘own primeval mode’, ‘her eyes also blazed, her teeth also […]
bared, and her nails raised as if to claw’. (Wolfland, 112) While trying to keep the wolves at
bay, she actually breaks down the distance between her appearance and that of the wolves’. The
limen space of the forest blurs lines of outer and inner wilderness. However, Lisel does not
permit the obscuring of strict divisions between herself and the Wolfland. Once she crosses the
gateposts to her grandmother’s mansion she feels relieved and secure, believing that she has
ultimately left the wolves and the forest behind. The wolves seem to have retreated from the
domain of the chateau, unable to cross the gateway of the mansion. However, Lisel will learn
that the grandmother’s home is an alternative limen home whose gateways are continuously
crossed and the wolves’ cries pierce through every corner of the house.
Angela Carter’s young She is different. She does not wonder about boundaries, since she has
already learned that borders of all sorts are porous and prone to fragmentation. She fearlessly
sets out on her journey through the woods, arming herself with a knife and wrapping herself up
50
in a red shawl. These protective tools are insufficient shields against the ferocious wilderness
of the forest which is ‘clos[ing] upon her like a pair of jaws’. (Company, 114) She knows about
the natural hazards and the forest’s destructive powers. She does not enter this liminal space as
a complete neophyte, but as an alert young woman aware of her strengths and weaknesses.
Thus, when she meets the ‘one’ on her way to her grandmother’s house, she stands her ground,
ready to defend herself:
When she heard the freezing howl of a distant wolf, her practised hand sprang to the handle of her knife,
but she saw no sign of a wolf at all, nor of a naked man, neither, but then she heard a clattering among
the brushwood and there sprang on the path a fully clothed one, a very handsome young one, in the green
coat and wideawake hat of a hunter, laden with carcasses of game birds. (Company, 114)
The first encounter between the ‘she’ and the ‘one’ reveals Carter’s playful yet unsettling
narrative style. The scene discloses numerous ambiguities. Even though the young girl seems
to have identified the hunter as ‘a hunter’, the reader is left in doubt about his/its human or
animal form. By delaying a complete physical description as well as a clear denomination of
the hunter as ‘young man’, (Company, 114) Carter skilfully plays with the readers’ expectations
of the classic literary fairy tale. The author leaves us in a state of uncertainty similar to the girl’s
liminal journey, during which we try to “read” this new acquaintance correctly. The readers
also need to sharpen their senses to detect any relevant evidence even beyond external
appearances, which could point towards this ‘fine fellow[’s]’ “true” animal or human character.
(Company, 114) We do not know whether the character that jumped on the girl’s path and
leaped onto the pages of the narrative, is a wolf, a man, a wolf in the disguise of a man, a man
in the disguise of a wolf, or a wolfman. His identity and very nature elude definition and
categories, thus exposing the fiction of fixed and stable literal meanings. Along the path and
along the line of reading, the reader’s fixed expectations and interpretations can falter. The
stock characters of classical fairy tales, the “hunter” and the “wolf” with their associations of
good and bad are turned upside down, since the hunter and the wolf are both predators,
visualised by the ‘carcasses of game birds’ on the hunter’s shoulders. (Company, 114)
Furthermore, the imagery of the hunter as a dashing fellow echoes other classic fairy tale strands
of the dashing charming prince, saving the girl from potential threat. This romantic notion of
“the one” is also ironically put into an ambiguous light. The ‘handsome young one’ smiling
seductively, yet ‘gleaming trails of spittle [clinging] to his teeth’. (Company, 114)
The incongruity between the reader’s position of doubt and dread and the girl’s closer insight,
reveals different levels of perception between the reader and the girl, and reverses the traditional
51
power hierarchy of the classic literary tale. The classic tales put the reader in a position of
power, of knowing what will happen to the girl should she talk to the wolf and walk off the
path. In Carter’s rewriting, even though we know the underlying classic narratives and how
they end, the reader is still left in a situation of doubt and cannot immediately and easily judge
the girl’s actions and brand her as naïve and foolish. This doubt is both an effect of and a
symptom that we are dealing with a palimpsest.
The compass which the young man carries with him is indicative of this reading. The reader,
like the girl, is held captive in a liminal narrative in which unforeseen bends spring up along
the road. The compass is also the symbol of something new. The girl has never seen a compass
before and looks at it with ‘vague wonder’. (Company, 114) It also represents the awakening to
new directions, unthought-of paths and conquering new grounds. Instead of having a very clear
path, the needle is ‘wavering’. (Company, 114) The reader loses his or her empowerment to
judge the girl and to prefigure her walk to doom and downfall with almost the same precision
as the needle points to north. But instead the author has managed to supplant within our reading
a ‘wavering needle’, the possibility of alternative readings and paths. (Company, 114)
Both Angela Carter and Tanith Lee play with the expectations of their readers knowing that ‘we
nevertheless respond to stereotyped and institutionalized fragments of these narratives’.
(PMFT, 2). The dangers in the liminal space are not presented to be as clear-cut as they are in
the classic tales. The state of limbo, the state of liminality can also be regarded as positive,
potentially lead to new shores, revealing the liminal spaces both within and outside of ourselves.
Thus Carter’s and Lee’s renditions encourage critical readings and invite readers to challenge
their own preconceived notions of the tale, and what these preconceived notions tell them about
their own inherited socio-political and moral stands. They point towards the fact that many
readers have come to accept the classic renditions of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm as the
dominant narratives on the palimpsest. These later writers show the reader that once the
puppets’ strings are cut, the puppet is not lost and doomed but can instead leave new powerful
footprints on the palimpsest.
52
Through Alternative Homes
The grandmother’s house in Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood, conveys a picture of vulnerable
domesticity. The sick grandmother needs looking after and her familiar hearth requires
protection. One of the granddaughter’s domestic duties is to take care of the sick lady and guard
her threshold. Instead, her erratic and playful character leads the wolf to the old woman’s front
door. Having freely divulged the purpose of her visit to the wolf, her imprudent speech offers
him a perfect vocal “key” to trick the grandmother and gain access to the house:
“It’s your granddaughter, Little Red Riding Hood,” said the wolf, disguising his voice. “And I’m bringing
you some cake and a little pot of butter sent by my mother.”
The dear grandmother, who was in bed because she was not feeling well, called out: “Pull the bolt and
the latch will open.” (LRRH, 12)
The unequal power relations between the rash, naïve girl and the scheming wolf are exemplified
through the wolf’s cunning ability to disguise his voice, mimicking the girl’s words. Her
imprudent speech finally causes the annihilation of her grandmother. The act of devouring the
grandmother replaces the imagery of the home as a familiar and comforting womb, with the
imagery of the wolf’s burning hungry stomach. The domestic hearth transforms into a
dangerous fiery bloody chamber. The wolf infiltrates the familiar place and hides underneath
the grandmother’s bedcovers. The grandmother’s house as well as the “grandmother” herself
have become fraught with ambiguity. Neither is representative of familiarity and security, but
instead seek to entrap and extinguish the girl. The positive, familiar meanings of “home” and
“grandmother” have been distorted.
Once again, the girl fails to realise and unravel this corruption. The fact that Little Red Riding
Hood takes off her clothes and climbs into a “false” bed, is the ultimate sign that she is unable
to perceive the mutilation of her familiar home. This act further exposes the inequality of power
between the wolf disguised as “grand”-mother and the naked “little” girl. By taking off her red
hood, the symbol of her belonging to a social and female family matrix, she has indeed become
a loose element, unanchored within any social and familiar ties. The bed has come to represent
consumption and death instead of comfort and the beginning of family lines. The illustrious
final dialogue exemplifies this disparity in power between the two protagonists:
“Grandmother,” she said, “What big arms you have!”
“The better to hug you with, my child.”
“Grandmother, what big legs you have!”
53
“The better to run with, my child.”
“Grandmother, what big ears you have!”
“The better to hear with, my child.”
“Grandmother, what big eyes you have!”
“The better to see with, my child.”
“Grandmother, what big teeth you have!”
“The better to eat you with!”
Upon saying these words, the wicked wolf threw himself on Little Red Riding Hood and gobbled her up.
(LRRH, 13)
This successive enumeration of the wolf’s four senses (touch, hearing, sight and taste) is
juxtaposed to the girl’s fatal “blindness” and incomprehension. Whereas the girl is ill-equipped
to interact with her surroundings, only displaying rudimentary sense, the wolf masters the
situation due to his trained senses. The repetitive usages of ‘big’ and ‘my child’ further
strengthen the antagonism. Referring to the girl as ‘my child’, points towards the defamiliarised relationship between the false grandmother and the granddaughter. The nurturing,
protective bond between these two women has turned into a deceptive and deadly relationship
between a powerful virile predator and a feeble and flawed effeminate victim. Perrault’s final
dialogue between the wolf and the girl, with its deadly carnal crescendo, signals the discordance
of power between the two protagonists. Through her own impudent and transgressive urges as
well as her inability to decipher the ambiguity of the Wolf properly, the girl has brought about
her own downfall and that of her family. These dual, incongruous voices of the tale’s final
crescendo have left strong impressions on the palimpsest, overwriting features of the original
folk narratives, as well as deep scars within numerous readers’ and especially women’s
consciousness. As Susan Brownmiller notes:
Rape seeps into our childhood consciousness by imperceptible degrees. Even before we learn to read we
have become indoctrinated into a victim mentality. Fairy tales are full of a vague dread, a catastrophe that
seems to befall only little girls. (Don’t Bet, 231)
Perrault’s classic tale enjoys unbroken popularity, even in modern times, which allows his
narrative to dominate the palimpsest of the original folk tale, while at the same time entangling
its readers in structural dichotomies opposing “male power” to “female powerlessness”. By
teasing out the dissonant power relations between a big wolf and a little girl in bed, Perrault’s
narrative has, over the centuries, contributed to the construction of a restrictive, alternative
“home” of female sexual insecurity and dread.
54
With his depiction of the liminal home, a home in which traditional notions of security and
domesticity are supplanted by insecurity and brutishness, Perrault reinforces traditional binary
oppositions instead of breaking them down. It is a home in which familiar notions such as
‘grandmother’ and ‘my child’ have been radically redefined. These alterations of meaning are
perceived as dangerous, and even deadly. Familiar words such as ‘grandmother’, ‘child’,
‘home’, as well as the traditional patriarchal seventeenth century values which accompany
them, remain unspoiled. If, however, individuals pervert these meanings through their own
naivety or immorality, their downfall in a final ruined home is well deserved.
The Brothers Grimm also take up these dissonant traditional voices inside the liminal home. In
their telling, once again, the wolf is able to cross the threshold of the familiar home by
disguising his sonorous voice and lewd intentions. Not only does he mimic and supplant the
girl’s voice, he also swallows the grandmother’s:
“Just raise the latch,” Grandmother called out. “I’m too weak to get out of bed.”
The wolf raised the latch, and the door swung wide open. Without saying a word, he went straight to
Grandmother’s bed and gobbled her up. (RC, 15)
This silent murder is particularly unsettling since it reveals the grandmother’s complete
powerlessness and subordination. The familiar voice of the grandmother has completely
disappeared, only leaving the gobbling sounds of the wolf inside her house. The old woman is
incapable of defending herself physically or verbally, and as such becomes the archetypal
picture of female passivity. The narrative will need the patriarchal hunter figure, appearing as
a deus ex machina, to resuscitate the overpowered voice of the grandmother. Like the wolf, the
hunter figure walks through the woods with alert senses. When he passes by the grandmother’s
house and notices the snoring of the sleeping wolf, he immediately reacts:
“How the old woman is snoring! I’d better check to see what’s wrong.” He walked into the house and
when he got to the bed he saw that the wolf was lying in it.
“I’ve found you at last, you old sinner,” he said. (RC, 15)
The hunter’s steps are determined and once inside the house, he instantly identifies the wolf as
an incarnation of evil. This confident posture stands in complete opposition to Little Red Cap’s
wavering steps across her grandmother’s broken home. While crossing the threshold, a ‘strange
feeling’ (RC, 15) overcomes her:
“Oh, my goodness, I’m usually so glad to be at grandmother’s, but today I feel so nervous.” (RC, 15)
55
Even though she feels that the house of the grandmother has changed and that her grandmother
‘looked very strange’, (RC, 15) she remains passive and unable to recognise the true harmful
nature of the uncanny change. Even when she draws back the curtains to let in some light into
the house, she still does not recognise the wolf inside the old lady’s nightgown. In short, Little
Red Cap has left her family home in pursuit of a similar, familiar destination, yet finds herself
in an uncanny environment, a stop on the journey which ultimately brings her to the final
destination of her initiation, or “home” inside the wolf’s belly.
In both the Brothers Grimm and the Perrault versions of the tale, Red Riding Hood/Cap ends
up in the wolf’s stomach. According to Turner, ‘liminality is frequently likened to death, to
being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness’. (RP, 95) This dark limen home in which the
girls end up, either eternally or temporarily, represents the just punishment for girls who do not
walk the “proper” way/paths. In their depiction of these metaphorical liminal roads and homes,
the authors reinforce traditional binary oppositions within patriarchal socio-cultural settings of
their times. The girls’ inability to clearly identify good and evil, as well as the fact of obscuring
and altering fixed notions such as “the home”, “the grandmother”, “the child” and “the wolf”,
is professed as being dangerous. This insistence on the dangers of alternatives, encoded in the
perversion of traditionally “positive” values and relationships, suggests that the classic tales
favour nonconstructivist readings of the girls’ journeys and posit the necessity for simple
resolutions to the narratives’ central metaphors, for firm, unchangeable and essential meanings,
in other words. The wolf is evil, the girl is naïve, and the home has fallen prey to the girl’s
unseemly behaviour.
Tanith Lee paints a different metaphorical picture of the limen home. The house of the
grandmother is not weak or vulnerable nor is it susceptible to corruption from external forces
and the girl’s inner imprudence. Instead, from the start, the grandmother’s old château with its
‘domestic, if curious, atmosphere’ (Wolfland, 113) is described as a home ‘betwixt and
between’ the familiar and the alien. (RP, 95) Within this alternative home, the inner domestic
world and the outer wilderness unite. The domestic hearth burning inside the castle is as ‘large
as a room’, presenting a powerful double image of excessive snugness and excessive
consumption. The forest is omnipresent within the old castle, ‘the very air seemed tinged by the
sombre wood’ and ‘the giant window of the hall, a stained glass of what appeared to be a hunting
scene’ add to this impression. (Wolfland, 113, 114) The wooden skeleton of the house with its
ancient furniture as well as its open gateway ‘left wide [open] at all times’ (Wolfland, 114) give
56
tangible form to the château’s symbiotic relationship with the forest, situated somewhere
between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Similarly, Anna herself, Lisel’s ‘strange relative’
(Wolfland, 114) is an ambiguous apparition:
[…] Madame Anna, in her eighty-first year, a weird apparition of improbable glamour. She appeared,
from no more than a yard or so away, to be little over fifty. Her skin, though very dry, had scarcely any
lines in it, and none of the pleatings and collapses Lisel generally associated with the elderly. Anna’s hair
had remained blonde, […]. But her nails were very long and discolored, as were her teeth. These two
incontrovertible proofs of old age gave Lisel a perverse satisfaction. Grandmother’s eyes, on the other
hand, were not so reassuring. Brilliant eyes, clear and very likely sharp-sighted, of a pallid silvery brown.
Unnerving eyes, but Lisel did her best to stare them out, […]. (Wolfland, 113)
The grandmother’s ‘strong yet senile’ (Wolfland, 115) appearance uncannily blurs the linear
and temporal progression of the signs of old age. She appears to be neither young nor old.
Anna’s physical, still vividly blonde appearance is incongruous and this unsettles the
granddaughter. Lisel prefers seeing the world in unambiguous binary oppositions and clear
colour codes. Thus, the white, greyish decolourisations of Anna’s teeth and nails are reassuring
signs of old age to Lisel. However, Anna’s outer as well as inner images remain ambiguous, as
her ‘sharp-sighted’, ‘pallid silvery brown’ eyes indicate. Lisel believes that she herself
perceives the world clearly, in black and white. She likes to think in binary oppositions such as
young and old, good and bad. Thus she believes that the wolves which ran alongside the carriage
were trying to attack her, when in fact, her grandmother clarifies that they were escorting her.
In this alternative home, Lisel has to learn that categories of “good” and “evil” are not as clearcut as she thought they were. Even the secured binaries of life and death are unstable, since
according to Anna: ‘Nothing dies, it simply transmogrifies.’ (Wolfland, 115)
Lisel, the sole inheritor of Anna’s possessions does not accept the entirety of her grandmother’s
inheritance. Although she is keen to possess the luxurious décor of the old castle, she
nonetheless thinks about selling the castle, as she remains unable to identify with its past and
the northern countryside. She feels no attachment to this home. Yet, everything within and
without the castle is attached to each another, forming a world of its own, the ‘Wolfland’:
“This, like the whole of the forest, was called the Wolfland. Because it was the wolves’ country before
ever men set foot on it with their piffling little roads and tracks, their carriages and foolish frightened
walls. Wolfland. Their country then, and when the winter comes, their country once more.” (Wolfland,
116)
57
Lisel has to learn to share her inheritance with the wolves as well as to accept her wolfish
inheritance. The unjust colonisation of the wolves’ territory is symptomatic of the power
struggles not only between humans and animals but also those engaged in human societies. As
the wolves’ territory has been conquered by humans, so too has Anna’s mind and body been
attacked by a brutish man. However, both Wolfland and Anna have resisted an all-consuming
conquest. The grandmother tells Lisel about her marital life with ‘Grandpère’, ‘a handsome
princely man, whose inclinations had not matched his appearance’, and who indulged in beating
and torturing his wife like a savage beast. (Wolfland, 109) Anna shows Lisel that the traditional
domains of domesticity and marriage can harbour destructive dangers. Marriage in the form of
male domination, can be a savage terrain, just like the forest. Through her own gloomy story,
Anna wants to warn her granddaughter, who is standing on the cusp of womanhood, just about
to enter the socially accepted marital age, about the dangers of falling prey to the ‘handsome’,
‘gracious’, ‘marvellous or even docile’ demeanour of a man. (Wolfland, 117) According to
Anna, the human face can just as easily turn into a beastly countenance. Anna not only questions
the notions of “husband” and “wife”, but further rejects the idea of a positive humanity itself.
Lisel feels as if she ‘[is] being told improper things’ yet ‘she desire[s] to learn more and dread[s]
to learn it’. (Wolfland, 117) Lisel feels torn between revulsion and curiosity, as the tales as well
as the Matriarch’s unconventional behaviour ‘outrage[s] the girl’s propriety’ at times.
(Wolfland, 118) She still feels like the protected spoiled city girl, who is outraged at seeing a
wolf stalking in and out of the castle:
The wolf had been in the house. Anna’s guest. Lisel was petrified for a few moments, then a sort of fury
came to her rescue. How dared the old woman be so mad as all this and expect her civilized granddaughter
to endure it? Brought to the wilds, told improper tales, left improper literature to read, made an unwilling
party to the entertainment of savage beasts. (Wolfland, 119-120)
Like those of the classic tale’s, Lee’s wolf is set loose inside the limen house, but diverges from
the traditional tellings, as her young protagonist feels certain of having identified the situation
as potentially dangerous. Believing to be the prey of this human carnivore and the victim of
Anna’s game, Lisel in a panic wants to flee back to the city, unfortunately meeting the wolf on
her way. Without hesitating she identifies the creature as a dangerous “wolf”:
[…] for any who had ever heard the name of wolf, or a single story of them, or the song of their voices,
here stood that word, that story, that voice, personified. (Wolfland, 122)
58
Lisel believes in straightforward single meanings. Her behaviour illustrates the fact that she still
thinks along well-defined dichotomies of good and evil. Her attempted escape back to the city
and her final flight into unconsciousness reveal her regulated and self-limiting steps. It is the
revelation of her grandmother which opens up new paths to her and illustrates that words and
signs are never as unambiguous as they seem:
“[…] What a little dunce you are, Lisel. I am the beast you saw last night, and you had better get
accustomed to it. Grandmère is a werewolf.” (Wolfland, 126)
The reader is drawn back to the classic path of the tale as Lisel fails to decipher the ambiguity
of the “wolf”, the ‘transmogrifite’ Anna. (Wolfland, 126) Notions of animalism and humanity
are broken down, although they leave the female family bond between the grandmother and the
granddaughter intact. Thus the encounter with the wolf is not deadly: ‘Eat you? Hardly
necessary. […] I wouldn’t stoop to devouring a blood relation’, the grandmother amusedly
declares. (Wolfland, 126) The matriarch not only recognises the familiar blood between the two
of them but further professes a similar spirit: ‘I like this wretched granddaughter of mine. She’s
very like me.’ (Wolfland, 127) Within the liminal home of the grandmother, the granddaughter
slowly recognises this relationship and experiences new unsettling feelings. Thus the alarming
howls of the wolves slowly become a thrilling source of unknown pleasure to the girl:
Yet, as it went on and on, Lisel became aware of a bizarre exhilaration, an almost-pleasure in the awful
sounds which made the hair lift on the scalp and gooseflesh creep along her arms - the same sort of
sensation as biting into a slice of lemon. (Wolfland, 119)
The limen house is also a space of awakening. The experiencing of unfamiliar emotions and
pleasures leaves the young girl in a state of limbo in which she discovers dark and unthoughtof inner secrets. Her inner world slowly transforms into an outer wilderness. Her insights into
the Wolfland, the château and herself become deeper and more meaningful, the more she
embraces this limbo state. Lee’s Red Riding Hood gains a particularly clear vision of the
château as a liminal home, an alternative home of transformation, as she looks upon the grand
stained window:
Lisel prowled about, gazing at the dubious stained glass, which she now saw did not portray a hunting
scene at all, but some pagan subject of men metamorphosing into wolves. (Wolfland, 124)
This alternative liminal home is different from the one described in the classic tales, and is a
space in which strict boundaries between good and evil, wolf and men, the wild and the
59
domestic are broken down, and in which unthought-of relations are brought to light. Angela
Carter’s imprint on the palimpsest of the Red Riding Hood tale type shares Lee’s concern with
the hybridisation of both humans and their homes. Carter’s liminal home is one in which
transformation, the passing of time, the transformation from one generation to the next, life and
death, is considered as beastly but also natural. In her tale, both the house of the grandmother
and the grandmother herself linger on vulnerable thresholds. While the home stands on its own
‘a little way out of the village’, (Company, 115) on the threshold between the forest and the
village, the old woman herself rests on the threshold between life and death:
Aged and frail, granny is three-quarters succumbed to the mortality the ache in her bones promises her
and almost ready to give in entirely. (Company, 115)
The grandmother’s picture is that of a sick and tired traveller. She is a woman with a solid past,
a frail present and an unknown future. In her life she has travelled numerous paths and
performed many passages, crossing the traditional female thresholds of girlhood, womanhood,
wifehood and widowhood, thus reclaiming the matriarchal outlook of the oral folktales and
bring half-forgotten values and traditions to the fore, making them visible, once again through
the layers of the palimpsest. She has completed a social journey and now hears ‘the grandfather
clock tick[ing] away her eroding time’. (Company, 115) The home is a space of stabilised
domesticity, in spite of each corner echoing the uncanny sound of time passing by. Her cosy,
yet lonely domestic hearth seems to have outrun its time, awaiting a new beginning. Lying in
bed, ‘wrapped up in the patchwork quilt she made before she was married’, (Company, 115)
the frail immobilised woman will remain a passenger, moving into the imminent liminal realm
of death. This movement is seen as a natural but also potentially brutal act.
The Company of Wolves plays with the notions of old and young and “old” and “new” lifecycles.
The narrative supplants the silent images of the grandmother’s old weak body with the
powerful, eroticized, virile appearance of the “wolfman”. In this description, human and animal
features blend into a picture of exuberant ferociousness: ‘The last thing the old lady saw in all
this world was a young man, eyes like cinders, naked as a stone, approaching her bed.’
(Company, 116) The images of the naked man and the bed, could stand for new beginnings,
new lifelines, however the wolfman has put a brutal end to hers. The grandfather’s old clock,
continuously ticking inside the house, has become irrelevant. The wolfman has supplanted the
old regime with new calculations of time. A new time has started. Thus the home of the
grandmother has been transformed into a limen threshold, a space of transformation and
60
replacement. The wolfman is the imagery of the end of the widowed grandmother’s story, but
also the new beginning of the girl’s. The wolfman now awaits a new bloodline to “set up house”
with:
He plumped up the pillows and shook out the patchwork quilt, he picked up the Bible from the floor,
closed it and laid it on the table. All was as it had been before except that grandmother was gone. The
sticks twitched on the grate, the clock ticked and the young man sat patiently, deceitfully beside the bed
in granny’s nightcap. (Company, 116)
He restores the bloody chamber to a picture of a safe domestic home. The house seems ready
for a new “union” a new “family”. However, this home is fraught with ambiguity and insecurity.
This liminal home could offer the possibility of a new alternative connubial beginning of two
differing lives, or represent the brutal end of one of them. The girl, as well as the reader is
caught between these two possibilities, once she walks into the house and the wolf shuts the
door behind her. However, the girl does not remain immobile in this ambiguous home:
Now a great howling rose up all around them, near, very near, as close as the kitchen garden, the howling
of a multitude of wolves; […].
Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves. Look out of the window and
you’ll see them. […].
It is very cold, poor things, she said; no wonder they howl so.
She closed the window on the wolves’ threnody and took off her scarlet shawl, the colour of poppies, the
colour of sacrifices, the colour of her menses, and, since her fear did her no good, she ceased to be afraid.
(Company, 117)
The howls of the wolves, of his “family”, invade the alternative home. The wolfman initiates
the girl to this new alternative family, which has replaced the traditional. Listening to their cries,
the girl can emotionally relate to these ‘brothers’. Unlike the classic Red Hoods and their
grandmothers, this girl does not remain a passive victim in the face of the liminal and unknown.
She is a picture of vitality, ready to embark on unexplored paths. The alternative house is not a
prison, but actually offers her a new terrain for exploration. The red of the poppies, the flowers
blooming outside, as well as the red of her menstruation, her budding womanhood symbolise
the link between interior and exterior worlds. In this limen home, the outside and the inside
blend into a picture of fiery wilderness. The acts of closing the window and taking off the red
shawl symbolise her free steps, exploring now the inner worlds of this bloody chamber and of
her own sexuality. Staying inside the bloody chamber and transforming it into a love nest,
instead of trying to escape outside, makes of her the “outsider”. She walks outside of prescribed
61
norms, entering new unfamiliar relationships, and setting up alternative homes in which she can
explore her own desires. She is the archetypical traveller, the liminal persona walking selfdeterminedly with the unknown wolfman, not knowing where the journey will end. Angela
Carter’s and Tanith Lee’s post-modern narratives depict alternative homes, limen spaces in
which familiar notions of the home have broken down. Both the characters within the stories as
well as the readers have to explore new meanings, leaving the narrative construction open to
possible narrative shifts and back passes, not letting the reader or the characters know where
they will end up.
62
Into Final Homes?
The narrative outline of Charles Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood, coincides with the two major
theoretical strands of this paper. Firstly, the reading of the tale parallels the cyclical, linear
structure of Van Gennep’s and Turner’s rites of passage. In Van Gennep’s and Turner’s models,
the emergence from the interim space of the limen is achieved through an act of reaggregation
into a particular elevated form of social functions and patterns. The post-liminal space once
again represents an ordered space, an acceptance of a new position and a re-assimilation into
social groups. Secondly, the tale relies on the teleological structure of the nonconstructivist
view of metaphors, and posits the possibility of final literal resolution of metaphorical
ambiguity. Similar to this view on metaphor, which upholds strict divisions between the literal
and the figurative, the ending of Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood reinforces fixed notions of
stable and unstable, male and female, good and evil, resulting in the final moral:
And it’s not at all strange,
If a wolf ends up eating them. (LRRH, 13)
In combination with the concluding lines of the moral, Little Red Riding Hood’s ultimate fate,
validates the strict social codes of behaviour that especially women and young girls were
expected to adhere to within seventeenth century French bourgeoisie. The ‘fear of sexuality and
stringent sexual codes’ became increasingly pronounced with the advent of ‘authoritarian
patriarchal societies’. (Subversion, 65) Diverging from “proper” lines of conduct on an impulse
to follow one’s transgressive urges will thus inevitably bring about deserved social alienation
and to the ruin of both the “guilty” party and their family. The tale portrays the female sex as
being particularly frail and prone to falling prey to improper (sexual) impulses. Jack Zipes
explicitly links this frailty to the figure of the wolf and the ‘natural drives’ he comes to represent
and embody:
[…] Little Red Riding Hood is chastised because she is innocently disposed toward nature in the form of
the wolf and woods, and she is raped or punished because she is guilty of not controlling her natural
inclinations. (Subversion, 45)
In other words, they [young girls] must exercise control over their sexual and natural drives or else their
own sexuality will devour them, in form of a dangerous wolf. (Subversion, 40)
These natural ‘inclinations’ or ‘drives’ threaten the author’s notion of the ‘ideal “femme
civilisée” of upper-class society’, who is ‘beautiful’, ‘polite’, ‘graceful’, ‘industrious’, ‘properly
63
groomed’, and ‘knows how to control herself at all times’. (Subversion, 40-41) The girl’s final
home within the stomach of the wolf exemplifies the end of a potential, cutting short the girl’s
blossoming into a ‘femme civilisée’. She will not step into her mother’s shoes and set up her
own domestic hearth. Instead she is doomed to a painful death. Unable to reaggregate into an
elevated domesticity of her own, she finds her final home as a raped, defiled body inside the
wolf’s belly. The broken body can travel no more.
Having failed to decipher the wolf’s dangerous ambiguity correctly on the one hand, and to the
prescribed modes of decorum on the other, the girl has revealed herself to be a “bad reader”.
However, Perrault’s tale targets good “readers” and urges its readers to be “good”. The
moralising ending is not designed to leave a space for alternative readings and ambiguities, but
conforms to seventeenth century patriarchal moral visions concerning the proper spheres for
both genders. Perrault hammers a final glyph – a full stop, as it were – onto the parchment of
his narrative. It is important that this full stop appears on his parchment, but it is so strong that
it shines through the layers of the palimpsest. The moral allows the reader to shut the book now
that s/he has gained a “proper” sense of moral and social direction. The tale becomes an
immobile medium, a tract for “conducted conduct”.
However, as we have already witnessed, narratives are never fully closed and thus the Brothers
Grimm soon glossed over this “final” full stop Perrault’s version imprinted onto the tale types’
palimpsest. Their narrative line takes an unforeseen bend, offering the girl a new, although
similarly restrictive final “home” at the end. Underneath the feet of the authoritarian huntsman
figure, the road that has come to represent liminal paths of doom in the story, now transforms
into a path of rescue. Unlike the girl, the huntsman immediately detects the abnormal situation
while passing by the house: ‘How the old woman is snoring! You’d better check to see what’s
wrong.’ (LRC, 15) Once inside the house, he unhesitatingly identifies the intruder:
I’ve found you at last, you old sinner. […]. He pulled out his musket and was about to take aim when he
realized that the wolf might have eaten Grandmother and that she could still be saved. Instead of firing,
he took out a pair of scissors and began cutting open the belly of the sleeping wolf. (LRC, 15)
Not only is the hunter able to correctly identify the wolf despite his disguise, he also
thoughtfully deduces the best line of conduct in order to save the girl and her grandmother.
Unlike the girl, the experienced man knows how to control his emotions, not allowing his anger
to lead him to rash actions with destructive consequences. (Bettelheim, 77) The hunter is able
to look beyond appearances: he dissects the wolf’s innards and with the resurrection of the two
64
women, reveals the wolf’s corrupted appetite. This patriarchal father figure functions as the,
who counterbalances the girl’s inability to decipher the wolf’s ambiguity and brings order back
to both house and family. The tale entrusts the male figure with the restoration of the house,
encoding the (new) home as a space to be re-born. Bettelheim underlines his regulatory and
protective function in the tale:
In the unconscious the hunter is seen as the symbol of protection. […]. Hence the hunter of fairy tales is
not a figure who kills friendly creatures, but one who dominates, controls, and subdues wild, ferocious
beasts. On a deeper level, he represents the subjugation of the animal, asocial, violent tendencies in man.
(Bettelheim, 205)
By delivering the house from the wolf, the hunter also frees its inhabitants from ‘all the asocial,
animalistic tendencies within [them]selves’, which the wolf represents. (Bettelheim, 172) Once
the liminal phase of being inside the belly has come to an end, the girl reaggregates onto ‘a
higher plane of existence’, ‘no longer a child’ but ‘a young maiden’. (Bettelheim, 183) This
painful rebirth: ‘Oh, how terrified I was! It was so dark in the wolf’s belly!’ (LRC, 15) has
enlightened the girl about the dangers of ambiguity. Thus she proves that she has learned her
lesson, and is now a “socialised” and fully reaggregated maiden who displays her new status
clearly through her actions, in helping the hunter to kill the wolf by filling his belly with stones.
With this assertive act, she shows that she has learned about the possibilities of hidden dangers
both within people’s bodies and minds. She is able to alter the power relations and it is the wolf
who does not notice the final substitution, the rocks leading to his downfall:
When he awoke, he was about to bound off, but the stones were so heavy that his legs collapsed and he
fell down dead. (LRC, 15)
Thus, the death of the wolf marks the end of this agile yet dangerous wanderer as one who has
been supplanted by another wanderer: the huntsman. The man, who chased after the wolf, has
finally become the master, walking back home with the trophy of the wolf’s pelt. This final
image of the skinned wolf is striking, since it signals the elimination of deadly ambiguity by
the patriarchal father figure, the head of the house. The power relations are set to a stable status
quo:
Grandmother ate the cake and drank the wine Little Red Cap had brought her and recovered her health.
Little Red Cap thought to herself: “Never again will you stray from the path and go into the woods, when
your mother has forbidden it.” (LRC, 16)
65
Whereas it is normal and even perceived necessary for the huntsman to roam around the
countryside, keeping it safe by chasing after the wolf, the girl’s movement is curtailed in this
final picture of secured domesticity. This restriction is perceived as a positive consequence of
the girl’s new status, as the addendum to the story implies: the girl meets another wolf in the
forest; he too tries to divert her, but this time she keeps ‘right on going’ (LRC, 16). Similarly,
the grandmother’s character has changed, keeping her house now safely locked. Both women
have recognised the vulnerability of the home space and the vital necessity of securing it. Thus
when the wolf tries to attack the women again, they now know how to defend themselves and
their home, by filling the stone trough outside the house with water of boiled sausages:
The smell of those sausages reached the wolf’s nostrils. His neck was stretched out so long from sniffing
and looking around that he lost his balance and began to slide down. He went right down the roof into the
trough and was drowned. (LRC, 16)
The fall of the wolf from the roof into the trough once again symbolises the reversal of power.
The women are now in a position of power within their proper sphere (domesticity), the safety
of which is guaranteed by the patriarchal structures which define them. They are now able to
deceive and outsmart the wolf. This time it is the wolf who is unable to decipher the ambiguity
of the water. The women have managed to deceive the sensory organs of the wolf which
previously represented a deadly threat. The wolf’s senses now misguide him onto a path which
will lead to his own demise, while Little Red Cap’s good sense makes her walk home
‘cheerfully’ without any harm. (LRC, 16) The roads and the homes have become safe again.
The Grimms’ tale follows the tripartite set up of the rites of passages, but unlike Perrault’s, it
allows the girl to reaggregate into a familiar social setting, though it broadens the notion of the
home. Without any moral supervision, and by straying off the path, the familiar home can
transform into the unfamiliar. The girl has experienced the nefarious consequences of
transgressing boundaries. In the end, the boundaries between good and evil are not broken
down; on the contrary they are reinforced. Such clear boundaries align well with the nonconstructivist view on metaphor and its stance on meaning. Neither Perrault nor the Brothers
Grimm break down binaries of good and evil, or masculine and feminine, but on the contrary,
they reinforce clearly outlined, and above all gendered, spaces and demonstrate the
destructiveness of transgressing these prescribed domains. Their two endings and narrative
visions of a final home do not question the prevailing social order(s). These storytellers have
narrowed the tale’s narrative paths down to functioning as a ‘warning tale’ that ‘provides a
66
model of behaviour for girls’. (Subversion, 40) These two final homes are static, circumscribing
the steps of the girl:
The literary tradition of “Red Riding Hood” therefore does lock the protagonist into a gendered and
constricting chamber. Whether she survives her journey into the outer world or not, the girl is inside when
the tale ends – inside the wolf’s belly for Perrault, or her grandmother’s home for the Grimms. Devoured
or domesticated, charged with sin or in charge of the feminine hearth […]. When the wolf punishes the
girl’s curiosity, and when the hunter saves her and the grandmother, males determine feminine limits.
(PMFT, 58-59)
However, these limits are not insurmountable, and traditional and restrictive stop signs
pertaining to both syntax and linguistic landscapes generated by traffic signs can be
transgressed on the paths of alternative narrative lines. This is illustrated by the post-modern
feminist rewritings which navigate along all sorts of cardinal points, moving along hidden roads
and re-imagining a lost matriarchal tale tradition from barely discernible trails. These writings
echo Zarathustra’s assessment of the illusion of the way. The feminist rewritings refuse to close
the narratives and let strong female voices reappear on the palimpsest of the tale. Just like the
red-hooded girl, the tale type is granted yet another incarnation, a rebirth of sorts, and a
reaggregation into new social forms. The resulting intertextual and polyphonous dialogues have
been characterised by Bacchilega as ‘acts of fairy-tale archaeology that release [the] story’s
many other voices’. (PMFT, 59) However, the reaggregation of neither girl or tale are ever
clear-cut, and the emergence from the limen space remains ambiguous.
In Tanith Lee’s Wolfland, the girl’s final reaggregation into domesticity and passage from the
limen to the post-liminal stage is jeopardised by the protagonist’s dawning comprehension of
the cause of her grandmother’s past reaggregation into the limen Wolfland. Under the influence
of the Wolfland-flower wine, Lisel is shown hallucinatory scenes of Anna’s past conjugal
martyrdom and her escape and shelter which she found as a transmogrifite in the limen forest.
Within the alternative domestic house of the grandmother, the soaring ferocious voice of the
grandfather has drowned all other female voices. The alcoholic brute of a husband is the
personification of death: ‘He was a big man, dark, all darkness, his features hidden in a black
beard, black hair’. (Wolfland, 128) He tries to kill the female voices and subjects inside the
house because he is afraid of them, though the exact source of his fright remains mysterious,
hidden among the (lost) layers of the tale type’s palimpsest:
Anna’s husband dislikes the clearing. He had forgotten he would have to go through it, for generally he
is mounted or in the carriage when he passes the spot. There is some old superstition about the place. He
67
hates it, just as he hates the stinking yellow flowers that grew in it before he burned them out. Why does
he hate them? The woman who nursed him told him something and it frightened him, long ago. (Wolfland,
132)
The female narratives that are being passed on are a source of dread for the man. This verbal
and magical female heritage, represents a frightful alien territory to which he feels no
connection. The yellow flowers, which grow outside in the forest, beyond the gates of his
power, are symbols of the untamed, the wild, the “Other”. These subversive narratives are
destabilising, since they offer no clear cut boundaries. They are part of the mysterious wolfmagic, symbolising female power and a strong matriarchal bond, a bond that he feels could
threaten his authority and thus needs to break.
Anna however is able to reconnect to this bond. She leaves the darkness and the limen space of
the patriarchal house behind, reaggregating into another limen space of wolfish sisterhood.
Thus, during a ‘black night bleached with whiteness’, Anna stands on the clearing, eating the
forest’s flowers and transmogrifying into a werewolf:
She wears a scarlet cloak, but the moon has drained its color. […]. Something is drawn there, too, in the
snow, a circle, and another shape inside it. […]. All at once a wind begins to come through the forest. But
it is not wind, not even storm. It is the soul of the forest, the spirit of Wolfland. […]. It is difficult to see,
to be sure - a glimpse of gold, two eyes like dots of lava seven feet in the air, a grey jaw, hung breasts
which have hair growing on them, the long hand which is not a hand, lifting – And then every wolf in the
forest seems to give tongue, and the darkness ebbs away. (Wolfland, 131)
The welcoming howls of the wolves, the circles in the snow and the lifted hand of the north
goddess represent Anna’s reaggregation into a new family. Within the forest, family ties are
formed and cut. Thus when her brutish husband is walking through the forest on his way back
home, Anna is able to break from his power over her and their brutish matrimonial relationship.
Unarmed against the carnivorous transmogrifite, his steps become powerless. By tearing out
his throat on the forest track, Anna denies him his goal: to reach the gates of the château and
receive a final entry into the safe home. Her red cloak, which symbolises her victimisation, does
not shine red anymore. She is no longer a passive woman, but an active wolf-woman in a pelt
of her own, covering her husband with his own red cloak: his own blood. Through the spilling
of the grandfather’s blood, Anna was able to save her female bloodline, as she explains to her
sympathising granddaughter:
68
“[…] He’d have killed your mother at the very least. You would never have been born.” (Wolfland, 133)
[…] Lisel became aware her teeth were clenched in spiteful gladness, as if on a bone. […]. Grandmother
and granddaughter confronted each other a second, with identical expressions of smiling and abstracted
malice. (Wolfland, 134)
Lisel’s and Anna’s lives are intertwined. Just like Anna has saved Lisel’s life by killing the
grandfather, Lisel can rescue her grandmother from the fate of being eternally bound to the
earth, by becoming a transmogrifite herself.
However, Lisel cannot accept this resemblance and heritage. Anna has to shake the ‘little
dunce’, the ‘fool’ (Wolfland, 126, 134) out of her numbed, static state of childishness, leading
her onto new paths towards another self:
Anna came to her feet. She crossed to Lisel and shook the shrieks out of her, and when she was dumb,
thrust her back in the chair. “Now sit, fool, and be quiet. I’ve put nothing on you that was not already
yours. Look in a mirror. Look at your hair and your eyes and your beautiful teeth. Haven’t you always
preferred the night to the day, staying up till the morning, lying abed till noon? Don’t you love the cold
forest? Doesn’t the howl of the wolf thrill you through with fearful delight? And why else should the
Wolfland accord you an escort, a pack of wolves running by you on the road. Do you think you’d have
survived if you’d not been one of their kind, too?” (Wolfland, 134)
This scene is reminiscent of the little girl’s inability to recognise the wolf she is sharing a bed
with or to correctly interpret its animal features in the classic tales. This time, the young girl
has to question her own appearance and recognise her grandmother as well as the wolf in her.
The pact with the wolf goddess, like the pact of maternity, is mutually binding. The continuation
of the female line guarantees a safe ending of the pact with the wolf goddess, resulting in a final
liminal state of freedom: death.
“[…] Once you have swallowed the flowers, once she has acknowledged you, you belong to her. At death,
I escape her sovereignty, which would otherwise bind me forever to the earth in wolf form, phantom form.
A bargain: You save me. But you too can make your escape, when the time comes. Bear a child. You will
be mistress here. […]. You are fit to take my place. Your child can take yours.” (Wolfland, 135)
Anna needs to cross this final threshold into freedom. Unlike the classic tale of the Brothers
Grimm, it is not the patriarchal father figure of the huntsman who saves the grandmother from
entrapment, but it is the granddaughter by entering the liminal stage herself. Like the wolf in
the classics, she is now taking over the place of the grandmother inside her home. The women
must keep the female line alive, in order to enable their foremothers to reach a final state of
69
freedom. Together, they form a strong female lineage of past and present lifelines. Lee’s tale
itself can also aspire to such connection, and indeed to such lineage: by reclaiming oral folk
traditions and their matriarchal initiation narratives and making them her own, Lee
simultaneously reconfigures the tale type and establishes ties between her tale and its distant
forebears through the lines and roots of kinship. In this tradition, the oral folk tale of a young
girl encountering a werewolf served as ‘a metaphor for the maturing process’: (Subversion, 65)
The little girl who meets a werewolf and drinks the blood and eats the flesh of her grandmother, acts out
an initiation ritual […]. […] the tale was related to the needlework apprenticeship, which young peasant
girls underwent, and designated the arrival of puberty and initiation into society. The girl proves that she
is mature and strong enough to replace the grandmother. (Subversion, 45)
Lee is drawing on the oral folk tradition and the old matriarchal initiation narratives. She thus
highlights the strong female family bonds as well as her tale’s alignment to these oral folk
influences. However, unlike the classics, Lee’s version does not present its readers with a
“closed” ending:
“You’re hateful!” shrieked Lisel. She had the wish to laugh. […]. Of course, it was all a lot of nonsense.
She hastened out through the doors and over the winter park and followed her grandmother away into the
Wolfland. (Wolfland, 135, 136)
Lisel’s mixed feelings regarding her passage into Wolfland, shrieking and laughing at the same
time, demonstrate that the limen space, the Wolfland, is on the one hand scary and threatening,
and on the other hand exhilarating and liberating. Lisel’s journey will continue. Lee’s openended narrative trespasses the boundaries that protect the classic endings, scratching her
feminist ink onto the palimpsest, tracing another narrative path. There are no clear-cut stable
homes or post-liminal reaggregation, here. Lisel remains a luminal wanderer in Wolfland, and
the ambiguities and uncertainties generated by the tale’s metaphors remain unresolved and open
to multiple readings and interpretations.
Like Lee’s character, the protagonist of The Company of Wolves too recognises her own
ambiguous identity. Our next storyteller, Carter, tells the tale in which the girl realises that there
is also a ‘he’ inside the ‘she’. The notion of the home, symbolised by the domestic hearth, the
fire burning inside the grandmother’s home undergoes different stages. First the fire warms the
old woman, then the wolf burns her bodily remains in the fire and then the fire consumes the
clothes of the girl. The burning of the clothes is associated with wolfishness:
70
Seven years is a werewolf’s natural span but if you burn his human clothing you condemn him to
wolfishness for the rest of his life, […]. (Company, 113)
Under his supervision and guidance, she is initiated, reaggregated into a new limen home and
family. His voice resembles that of a parent figure, telling the girl what she must to do next:
What shall I do with my shawl? Throw it on the fire, dear one. You won’t need it again. […]. What shall
I do with my blouse? Into the fire with it, too, my pet. (Company, 117)
The red colour of the shawl, mingling with the red flames of the fire symbolises the “burning”
of her virginity. Although Perrault likened the stripping away of the girl’s clothes to a (social)
death sentence, Carter revalues the burning of the clothes, the intertwined marriage of the red
shawl with the red flames as the beginning of a new union. In that sense, the spilling of her
virginal blood, is seen as a positive act. Bacchilega has pointed out the ‘symbolic revaluing’ of
women’s bleedings as ‘essential to the transformation of the heroine’s subjectivity’. (PMFT,
66) According to her, the story ‘defiantly represent[s] lifeblood as empowering’. (PMFT, 66)
The girl’s ‘ritual strip-tease’ (PMFT, 63) will not lead to a raped, mutilated corpse, as it would
in the classics, but instead taking off her clothes reveals another lively layer of the girl’s identity:
her animus side. The burning of a shawl which should protect her against the cold and harsh
outside world, represents that she no longer needs to protect herself against the elements, since
she has discovered the outside wilderness inside herself.
Carter also echoes the classic crescendo of the “not-recognising scene”, transforming it into an
illuminating moment of epiphany, in which the girl learns about her own body and desires:
What big arms you have.
All the better to hug you with.
[…]
What big teeth you have!
All the better to eat you with.
The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat. She laughed at him full in the face, she
ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing.
(Company, 118)
Angela Carter accompanies the classic deadly duet between the wolf’s dominant voice and the
fearful questioning voice of the girl, with a cacophony of sounds such as the howling of the
wolves and the blizzard outside, the cracking of the fire and the ‘terrible clattering’ of the
grandmother’s old bones under the bed. In this cacophony, ‘the outside and the inside, cold and
71
warmth, the wild and the hearth are no longer separate’, (PMFT, 63) and the story finds its final
climax in the girl’s liberating laughter and the kiss that she promised the wolf. She realises that
she is not meat but flesh, not an “object of desire” but a “desiring subject”. This active stance
echoes ‘Bataille’s theory of active sexuality as the assertion of human freedom’ against
oppressive social laws. 35 She freely kisses him and gives herself away to ‘a savage marriage
ceremony’ in which traditional power relations have changed, laying his ‘fearful head on her
lap’. (Company, 118) For Margaret Atwood, the willingness to lie – fearlessly – with your
(ancestral) enemy is the key to transformation and hence progress:
[…] this ‘wise child’ wins the herbivore-carnivore contest by refusing fear, by taking matters into her
own hands, by refusing to allow herself to be defined as somebody’s meat, and by ‘freely’ learning to –
if not run with the tigers – at least lie down with them. […]. She has played both the lamb and tiger, but
at the end she is neither; […]. 36
The human and animal characteristics merge into a picture of a silent night:
The blizzard died down, […]. Snowlight, moonlight, a confusion of paw-prints. All silent, all still.
Midnight; and the clock strikes. It is Christmas Day, the werewolves’ birthday, the door of the solstice
stands wide open; […]. See! Sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender
wolf. (Company, 118)
This final picture seems to offer a new stable home to the girl. However, the allusion to
midnight, Christmas Day and the solstice points to the fact that in the world of these s/he beings,
everything will remain betwixt and between. As Andrew Milne points out, the winter solstice
is ‘a hybrid place, a space of transformations, where order no longer reigns’ and which is
followed by ‘the god Janus, the two-headed god, the guardian of the door that allows us to move
from one year into the next’. (Milne, 154) Thus the final home is a home of the limen. The
sexual climax has passed into an ambiguous transformation, leaving an open ended reading of
the “lovers” final appearances and states of mind.
In conclusion, this comparative study has revealed the two different paths that the classic and
the post-modern feminist authors embark upon. The classic Little Red Riding Hoods leave their
stable maternal homes to enter the risky limen domain of the forest with its “defamiliarised”
homes, weak grandmothers and ultimately find either a “final” deadly home in the wolf’s belly
35
Andrew Milne, Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”: A Reader’s Guide (Paris: Éditions Le Manuscrit, 2007), p. 154.
36
Margaret Atwood, ‘Running with the Tigers’, in Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the art of Angela Carter, ed. by Lorna Sage (London:
Virago Press, 2013), pp. 146, 150.
72
(Perrault) or regain a “secure” familiar home (the Grimms’ version). In the classic tales, both
these endings or “arrivals” of the girls’ liminal journey seem “closed”, backed up with strong
and overt morals which appear to be the final, “just” resolutions. These morals neatly fit into
the dominant socio-political discourses of the authors’ times. The classic tales also align
themselves with the non-constructivist stance, since their metaphor of the road allow for a
teleological reading, advocating the existence of fixed, stable meanings, and upholding binary
oppositions via the existence of clear morals and endings.
Both Carter’s and Lee’s rewritings reveal to the reader that narratives and readings are never
closed. The homes their heroines reach as they complete their initiatory journey are neither
stable nor final. The doors to “bloody chambers” and alternative paths are left open. They
challenge seemingly fixed endings and fixed notions of stability and thus the post-modern
rewritings endorse constructivist or post-structural approaches to figurative language, revealing
the posited simple teleological readings and resolutions as chimaeras. The notions of the home
and of the self are perceived as constructed and changeable. These “stable” notions are
destabilised along the metaphorical liminal journeys of self-realisation. The limen state is not
perceived as transitory but as inherent to the human condition. The girls’ initiatory journeys,
leading them to new alternative family ties and genealogies also mirror journeys of the tales’
readers. These post-modern acts of reading function as palimpsestuous maps, guiding the
readers onto unknown passages towards early oral folk narratives and traditions. The original
folk tale about a strong young woman encountering a wolf supports the pagan folk tradition’s
‘archaic belief about witches and wolves as crucial for self-understanding’. (Subversion, 45)
According to this tradition, the domains of the “wild” and the “civilized” are not mutually
exclusive but enter into an indispensable symbiotic dialogue:
In the archaic mentality, the fence, the hedge, which separated the realm of wilderness from that of
civilization did not represent limits which were unsurpassable. On the contrary, this fence was even torn
down at certain times. People who wanted to live within the fence with awareness had to leave this
enclosure at least once in their lifetime. They had to have roamed the woods as wolves or “wild persons”.
That is, to put it in more modern terms: They had to have experienced the wilderness in themselves, their
animal nature. For their “cultural nature” was only one side of their being, bound by fate to the animal
like fylgja, which became visible to those people who went beyond the fence and abandoned themselves
to their “second face”. […]. In facing the werewolf and temporarily abandoning herself to him, the little
girl sees the animal side of herself. She crosses the border between civilization and wilderness and goes
beyond the dividing line to face death to live. Her return home is a move forward as a whole person. She
is a wo/man, self-aware, and ready to integrate herself in society with awareness. (Subversion, 45)
73
In this folk tradition, the wo/men’s confident act of crossing dividing lines between “exterior”,
“interior”, “animal”, “human”, “wilderness” and “civilization” is regarded as a necessary, life
enhancing experience, which has them gain new insights into the outside as well as inner
workings of their selves and social surroundings. The post-modern literary fairy tales pick up
on these trespassing wo/men, s/he, while at the same time blur the very definitions of lines,
boundaries and borders. As on the palimpsest, their lines of writing merge with other narrative
lines, forming new explorative routes off the beaten track of demarcated literary genres. Their
protagonists are free to wander around, as their readers are.
Having thus completed the first stage of initiation with Little Red Riding Hood, let us now put
on our glass slippers and follow Cinderella into the literary carriage that will lead us onto
unknown roads concealed within this well-known tale.
74
75
Cinderellas
Embarking on Tales
Let us continue the literary journey in medias res, on a tale whose origins remain as elusive, as
its plotlines diverge. According to the Aarne-Thompson index of tale types, the Cinderella
stories pan out into two divergent narrative strands: AT 510A Cinderella and AT 510B
Catskin. 37
The plots of “Cinderella” stories are driven by anxious jealousy of biological mothers and stepmothers
who subject the heroine to one ordeal of domestic drudgery after another; the plots of “Catskin” tales are
fuelled by the sexual desire of fathers, whose unseemly behaviour drives their daughters from home.
(Tatar, 102)
Whereas these two plotlines used to equally dominate the palimpsest, over time the Catskin
stories, which ‘celebrate daughters as agents of resistance’ have begun to fade from the surface
of the parchment. (Tatar, 106) These feisty narratives, as well as the representations of male
Cinderellas, Ash-boys, which ‘abound in the folklore of many cultures’ have lost their
anchorage within the changing socio-political cultural manuscripts of our times. 38 (Tatar, 106)
Maria Tatar perceives the reasons for this suppression in the fact that:
[…], the [Catskin] story’s critique of paternal authority and its endorsement of filial disobedience turn it
into an unlikely candidate for bedtime reading. (Tatar, 105-106)
Indeed, the imbalanced exposure and exploration of these two tale types also points towards
significant shifts in social manners and structures. The stock characters of the wicked
(step)mother and the damsel in distress have by far out-written the negative father types. The
iconoclastic subversions of patriarchal models have slowly disappeared from ‘our own cultural
horizon’ (Tatar, 106), relinquishing the literary field to the imprisoned benevolent maid and
her evil stepmother and complying with dominant socio-political structures.
37
Maria Tatar, ‘Introduction: Cinderella’, in The Classic Fairy Tales, ed. by Maria Tatar (London: Norton Critical Edition, 1999), p. 102.
38
Jane Yolen, ‘America’s Cinderella’, Children’s Literature in Education, 8.1 (1977), p. 22.
77
The narratives of Cinderella that depict a young girl who is mistreated by members of her own
family have no clear-cut oral “departures”. Instead, this tale type has embarked on a narrative
intercontinental journey through various cultural domains, finding a universal audience. As
Jane Yolen puts forth in her essay America’s Cinderella:
The story of Cinderella has endured for over a thousand years, surfacing in a literary source first in ninthcentury China. It has been found from the Orient to the interior of South America and over five hundred
variants have been located by folklorists in Europe alone. This best-beloved tale has been brought to life
over and over and no one can say for sure where the oral tradition began. (America’s Cinderella, 22)
This globe trotter of a narrative was, however, put into a significant and extensive printed shape
by Italian poet Giambattista Basile in his fairy tale collection Il pentamerone (1634-6). (OCFT,
95) Since then
[there] have been hundreds if not thousands of literary, dramatic, musical, poetic, and cinematic versions
of ‘Cinderella’ […], and the ‘heroine’ of the story has become the icon of a rags-to-riches success story.
(OCFT, 97)
The story of a young girl, lost within a web of negative family ties, has continuously been
moulded into a story with a positive resolution, a happy end. Indeed, the majority of narratives
elevate the ostracised servant/daughter to a socially recognised woman/wife. This traditional
teleological narrative path resulting in a “happy ever after” should however not be regarded as
a simple ‘success story’ but as Jane Yolen professes, a story of ‘regaining’ lost identities and
social terrains:
“Cinderella” is not a story of rags to riches, but rather riches recovered; not poor girl into princess but
rather rich girl (or princess) rescued from improper or wicked enslavement; […]. It is really a story that
is about “the stripping away of the disguise that conceals the soul from the eyes of other…” (America’s
Cinderella, 21)
Like the Little Red Riding Hood character, the Cinderella character is a cloaked persona.
Covered and burdened by an unjust and oppressive layer of dust and cinders, she is struggling
to regain a proper identity and space of her own. This is an idea that can be applied to the
narrative texture of the tale: it is not only the character of Cinderella which is “cloaked”, there
are ‘riches’ to be ‘recovered’ within the very lines of the tale. Underneath the multifarious
adaptations of the Cinderella story and their demure and often passive heroines seethe
emancipated and gregarious female folk voices, as Zipes notes:
78
In “Cinderella” we should recall that the different oral folk versions emanated from a matriarchal tradition
that depicted the struggles of a young woman (aided by her dead mother as the conserver of society) to
regain her stature and rights within society. After Cinderella is humiliated, forced to put on rags, and
compelled to perform hard labor, she does not turn her cheek but rebels and struggles to offset her
disadvantages. (Subversion, 46)
The oral matriarchal folk traditions, in which the female heroine was sketched out as a strong
character, openly claiming access to her rightful power, have been superseded by the narratives
that champion strict and gendered moral codes. These cast women in a flagrantly passive role
so pervasive that it gave birth to the ‘Cinderella complex’, the archetype of ‘a troubled woman
who cannot determine her own destiny’ (OCFT, 97) as Tatar observes that
[…] the shrewd, resourceful heroine of folktales from earlier centuries has been supplanted by a “passive
princess” waiting for Prince Charming to rescue her. (Tatar, 102)
In her essay America’s Cinderella, Jane Yolen contrasts
[the] hardier European and Oriental forbears, who made their own way in the world, tricking the
stepsisters with double-talk, artfully disguising themselves, or figuring out a way to win the king’s son.
(America’s Cinderella, 21)
and the ‘well-bred’ protagonist of Perrault with her ‘female traits of gentility, grace, and
selflessness’. (America’s Cinderella, 21) These feminine attributes also mark out the Brothers
Grimm’s Cinderella. In fact, both the narrative of Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella have
been drastically changed and channelled into strict ideological paths by these classic authors.
The resilient ‘folkloric ancestors, who refuse to stay at home suffering in silence and who
become adept at engineering their own rescues’ (Tatar, 102) have been guided towards a
passive resolution of their struggles and destinies which hold no more than accepting the
prince’s hand. This “desirable”, “positive” matrimonial vow has engraved itself onto the
parchment of the palimpsest as the ultimate signpost for young girls’ life paths. In these
reactionary bridal tales, the self-effacing qualities of the heroine are elevated to a behavioural
standard, as in Perrault, or as we shall observe in the Grimms’ tale, the girl’s vaulting
independent steps are kept within the bounds of respectability and propriety by male patriarchal
figures. These classic authors neatly culminate the young protagonist’s struggle by awarding
the ultimate prize: she is a suitable marriage companion for a respectable prince. She progresses
from a state of alienation to a state of recognition.
79
The metaphor of the road, the girl’s physical as well as metaphorical journey from an initial
childhood home to a final matrimonial home is teleological and prescriptive. The tripartite
model of the rites of passage once again operates in these tales, emphasising the absolute
necessity of the protagonist’s escape from the liminal stage. Whereas, the Little Red Riding
Hood character is representative of the pre-liminal being, Cinderella stands for the archetypal
liminal persona. The initial stable maternal homes from which the Cinderella characters embark
soon transform into hostile insecure territories. Through the usurpation of the stable home space
by outer evil forces such as the stepfamily, the defamiliarised home offers no secure position
and reduces the daughter to an insignificant individual: a servant. The magical coach rides,
representing liminal journeys to the prince’s castle will reveal the “true”, “noble” character and
appearance of the girl, offering her a temporal escape from her liminal state and allowing her
to glimpse at an alternative “dream home”, the castle of the prince. This “perfect”, “idealised”
home in which she quite naturally appears as the respected and respectable woman will
eventually become a stable home through the acceptance of the prince’s hand. In order to cross
the threshold from her liminal state and to set foot in a final nuptial home, to properly
reaggregate into society, she needs the help of the men, finding glass slippers and putting them
on her feet. Thus, the metaphor of the road and its tripartite set-up puts great emphasis on the
reaggregation, the final fit of the shoe. The metaphorical journey to a state of matrimony and
the notion of the home, follow both stable and unstable dichotomies. The girl needs to leave the
unstable liminal state and reaggregate as a wife into stable social structures, under male
domination. The classics’ views and their metaphorical narrative rely on nonconstructivist
conceptions of figurative language. The possibility of a teleological resolution, a “final” end, is
given. Here the metaphor of the road is synonymous with the girls’ socialisation and the
rediscovery of a “true” noble self, leading them to a “happily ever after” which upholds strict
social hierarchies and, consequently, patriarchal views on gender roles.
This teleological development and resolution, as well as the dominance of these traditional
patriarchal plotlines and stock characters we find inscribed on the palimpsest, are voluntarily
subverted by the post-modern feminist rewritings of Tanith Lee and Jane Yolen. Lee’s When
the Clock Strikes (1983) from her collection of fantasy retellings of classic literary fairy tales
Red as Blood: Or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer and Yolen’s The Moon Ribbon (1976) from
her short story collection The Moon Ribbon and Other Tales demonstrate that the dominant
traditional narratives do not represent final inscriptions on the tale’s palimpsest. While Tanith
80
Lee models her narrative on the pre-existent storyline of the classic tales especially that of the
Brothers Grimm, Yolen’s tale follows a different plotline, solely keeping the binary strand
between the evil stepmother and good daughter alive. In their rewritings they put new emphasis
on past female bonds allowing lost voices to re-emerge, since for the post-modern, a meaningful
future path can only be embarked on by revaluating the past female paths. Their metaphorical
journeys are also structured along the tripartite pre-liminal/liminal/post-liminal framework. Yet
the physical roads the girls must walk parallel their metaphorical journeys and lead not to a
prescribed matrimonial end, but instead emphasise the state of liminality. A final reaggregation
as in fixed and stable matrimonial dominated states is not given. On the contrary, the authors
leave their tales open-ended, emphasising the fact that the journeys along metaphorical roads
are explorative. It does not represent a fixed socialisation and unproblematic rediscovery of an
“essential” self, but symbolises a multitude of unsettling self-discoveries. The post-modern
feminist rewritings and their depiction of the metaphorical road seem to support a constructivist
reading of metaphor and figurative language. This view challenges seemingly fixed notions of
hermeneutic stability. Instead of single meanings and clear categorisations, ambiguities are
upheld. The constructivist view, states that there is not just one possible solution and that the
reader needs to disentangle possible layers of meanings. The metaphor takes the reader onto
different paths, on which s/he constantly needs to reassess his or her own position. The reader,
just like the female protagonists of the tales, is a traveller who does not know where his or her
journey ends, in contrast to the “happily ever after”, the reader is left with points of ellipses and
question marks at the end.
81
From Initial Homes
The opening passages of Perrault’s Cinderella portray a disrupted family in a defamiliarised
home space. The untimely death of the mother and her absent voice leave behind a power
vacuum in the regulative domestic sphere, which is now being “colonised” by foreign voices
and family ties. This struggle between a vanishing “familiar” rule and the advent of its
“unfamiliar” bawdy replacement is representative of the changing socio-political realities of
Charles Perrault’s courtly world. The once stable seventeenth century aristocracy found itself
in an unsettling transitional state in which a new bourgeois mercantile power threatened to
overthrow the old elite. In this ‘unstable world’, the aristocracy had to ‘share power with [the]
bourgeois’ and were ‘obliged to compete with [these] newcomers in order to survive’. 39 The
tale’s deeply divided home and its concern with legitimate and illegitimate heirs and
inheritances articulates anxieties about the changing balance of power and the shifting sociopolitical realities, triggering feelings of resentment between different social classes. ‘The evil
stepmother, perhaps the daughter of a financier or other successful parvenu’, enters the stable
noble household from an outsider position. (GFTT, 946) She and her daughters are indeed
foreign newcomers. They represent the “Other”, the ‘nouveau riche’, whereas the representative
of aristocratic paternalism, the tale’s father figure, ‘an impoverished noble’, is in need of new
reviving mercantile bonds. (GFTT, 946, 948)
The marital vow between the father and the stepmother should have restored the family home.
However, through this connection, the home is no longer a space of union, but a space of “mis”union and disunion. Instead of reinstating the former idyllic home, the stepfamily’s arrival
transforms the domestic space into an unstable battle ground between two discordant family
branches in an infirm family tree:
There was once a gentleman whose second wife was the haughtiest and most snobbish woman who had
ever lived. She had two daughters by a previous husband, who took after her and were exactly like her in
all things. Her husband, likewise, had a young daughter by his first wife, a girl who was unequalled in
goodness and sweetness of temper, in which she took after her mother, who had been the best creature in
the world. 40
39
Patricia Hannon, ‘Corps cadavres: Heroes and Heroines in the Tales of Perrault’, in The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and
Basile to the Brothers Grimm, ed. by Jack Zipes (London: Norton Critical Edition, 2001), p. 949, 953, 954.
40
Charles Perrault, ‘Cinderella’, in Classic Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2012), p.74.
82
The superlative description of ‘the haughtiest and most snobbish woman’ juxtaposed with ‘the
best creature’, locates the two women and their offspring on resolutely separate branches, thus
symbolising the split within the family and the dissolution of the ties that hold it together. The
mercantile marriage vow does not revive the family tree, but on the contrary threatens to corrupt
the entire home space. The stepfamily’s lineage appears to be completely opposed to the
positive maternal bond uniting the girl and her biological mother. The offspring seem to
inevitably follow their mother’s footsteps both in character and appearance. The girls’ identities
are represented as “essential” to them, “naturally” taking after their mother. As Marcia K.
Lieberman points out, the ill-temper of the stepsisters and goodness of the Cinderella character
appear to be genetic. 41 Both malice and graciousness are essentialising “feminine” types, and
their dichotomous attribution to the protagonist and her rivals can be considered expressions of
the aristocratic/bourgeois struggle. The refined noble bloodline and portrait of the mother is
polluted by the coarse lineage and depiction of the common step-mother. The prefix “step”
points to the “corrupted” notion of mother. As Patricia Hannon states, it was not uncommon for
Perrault’s contemporaries to liken marital misalliances of noble (wo)men with ‘pretentious
arrivistes’ (GFTT, 948) as ultimately fatal for the status of aristocratic families:
[…], misalliance […] can signal perverted or corrupted blood together with endangered family
hierarchies. […] From the standpoint of the aristocratic ideology of lineage, misalliances “ne sont pas
moins communes que fatales à la decadence des Maisons.” (GFTT, 953, 947)
Unfortunate or unsuitable alliances can threaten the very edifices of aristocratic power and their
inhabitants: Indeed ‘the purity of the bloodline’, (GFTT, 947) the highborn lineage, is secured
via marriage, keeping the aristocratic houses “ordered” and their family trees healthily
“blossoming”.
This essentialist reasoning underlies the representation of the defamiliarised original home of
the girl. The misalliance between the father and the stepmother transforms the house into a
chaotic space in which power relations are turned upside down. The stepmother taints the
father’s perception, and he ends up ‘completely ruled by his wife’. (CPC, 75) This reversal of
power is destabilising and even hostile to the girl who is left ‘ignored’ by her father. (CPC, 75)
Soon the blue-blooded girl finds herself completely alienated, a “misfit” in a colonised home.
41
Marci K. Lieberman, ‘Some Day My prince Will Come: Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale’, in Don’t Bet on the Prince:
Contemporary Fairy Tales in North America and England, ed. by Jack Zipes (New York: Routledge, 1986), p. 196.
83
The stepmother’s commanding voice ostracises the girl, relegates her into a servant position,
and sets her apart from the rest of the household:
No sooner were the wedding celebrations over than the stepmother began to show her true colours. She
could not bear the good qualities of her pretty stepdaughter, the more so because they made her own
daughters appear even worse. She kept her busy doing all the menial work in the house – She scoured the
dishes, tables and floors and scrubbed her stepmother’s chamber and those of her stepsisters. (CPC, 75)
The parental home has become unfamiliar, offering the girl neither emotional nor material
comforts. However, though the stepmother is not a decent mother for the young girl, her
behaviour does reveal an honest preoccupation with her own daughters’ welfare, upbringing
and advantages. These were common concerns for seventeenth century widowed mothers, but
the narrative takes a decidedly biased stance on these issues and glosses over them in favour of
an unbalanced description of the stepmother as essentially wicked. Patricia Hannon describes
the reality of these women’s precarious family positions and maternal anxieties as follows:
The despised stepmother or mother-in-law reflects the conflicting interests that could pit younger and
older generations of women from different families against one another. New wives of widowers were
particularly sensitive to the needs of their own children, whose interests could be compromised by the
offspring of their husband’s first marriage. (GFTT, 947)
Perrault’s narrative offers no understanding of these real existential fears. Instead his portrait
of the stepmother clearly pitches as the embodiment of an archetypal dark jealousy against an
essential goodness of the girl. Through her foul deeds, the stepmother forces the stepdaughter
into undeserved exile. Yet, Cinderella’s inborn noble character cannot be obliterated:
Despite her ragged clothes, Cinderella was 100 times more beautiful than her sisters, though they were
always very richly dressed. (CPC, 75)
The girl’s purity is innate, threatening to outshine and wipe away the outer pretentious and
artificial veneer of nobility that conceals the step-daughters’ and their mother’s ‘true’ origins,
which they try to cover up with the help of their looking glasses, which are so big that they can
‘see themselves at their full length, from head to toe. (CPC, 75) Talking ‘all day long of nothing
but what they would wear’, (CPC, 75) the girls as well as the mother
[…] embod[y] the forces of luxury which were blamed for undermining the society of orders by obscuring
the distinctions of rank. Ostentation and expense mark the new wife, who insinuates herself into the
aristocratic milieu by rectifying the gentlemanly widower’s financial distress. (GFTT, 947)
84
The step-women, the newcomers of Perrault’s tale are eager to “step up” the social ladder, trying
to conceal their undeserving characters underneath luxurious clothes and extravagant make-up.
However, no matter how hard the stepsisters try to transform into noble ladies, in essence they
will never reach a high standing. This is symbolically represented by the hopeless fitting of
Cinderella’s shoe and the breaking of ‘more than a dozen laces in trying to have their corsets
so tightly laced that they would have a fine slender shape’. (CPC, 76) Cinderella’s virtuous
demeanour and heritage contrasts with the artificiality of the step-women and functions as a
catalytic looking glass, piercing through the outer layers of “false” nobility. The girl reflects
back at them the unembellished truth of the step-women’s inferior rank. The stepmother tries
to cover up this “painful” mirror, by letting the girl do the menial housework, leaving her all
covered in ashes and dust. The cinders coating the girl function as a veil meant to disguise the
young noblewoman, thus letting the stepdaughters appear more elevated in rank and origin. The
noble girl is consciously transformed into a “strange” ‘Cinderpants’ and ‘Cinderella’. (CPC,
75) These belittling nicknames reveal the young girl’s familial and social estrangement as well
as her hazardous status as liminal persona. As Van Gennep notes, ‘when a child is named, he is
both individualized and incorporated into society’. (Gennep, 62) However, the act of naming
the young girl ‘Cinderella’, marks the exact opposite. It is not a ‘rite of incorporation’ (Gennep,
63) but a rite of isolation. Her alienated position inside the household is expressed by her living
‘among the cinders and ashes’, sleeping in the chimney corner. (CPC, 75) The burned firewood
in the chimney symbolises the destruction of the fruitful family tree, a destruction that takes
place in the home’s very hearth, at the heart of the protected domestic sphere. The home space
has become a broken space, a space of the limen in which traditional hierarchies and orders are
destroyed. She is the liminal persona, and as such, she has ‘no status, property, insignia, secular
clothing indicating rank or role’ as Tuner indicates. (RP, 95) The condition of the liminal
persona ‘is indeed the very prototype of sacred poverty’. (Forest, 99) Further, Turner specifies
that ‘the passage from lower to higher status is through a limbo of statuslessness’ and the
behaviour of liminal personae ‘is normally passive or humble’, (RP, 97, 95)
[…] accept[ing] arbitrary punishments without complaint. It is as though they are being reduced or ground
down to a uniform condition to be fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to enable them
to cope with their new station in life. (RP, 95)
Cinderella’s behaviour matches these criteria: she does not dare tell her father about the
mistreatment; she endures everything patiently and comes to identify herself with the cinders,
and when one of her stepsisters asks her whether she does not wish to visit the prince’s ball,
85
she softly replies: ‘It is not for such as I to go there.’ (CPC, 76) Her subservient response
underlines her outward subordination. While the wicked women leave the house and go to court,
Cinderella remains a symbol of passivity. This passivity however also embodies the “decent”
and “righteous” feminine behaviour of courtly seventeenth-century society. She remains a
paragon of respectable breeding and her quiet and decent conduct is ultimately rewarded by her
fairy godmother, allowing her to attend the prince’s ball:
“Well,” said her godmother, “be a good girl and I will arrange things so that you can go.” (CPC, 76)
It is not Cinderella herself who strives to regain her familial and social position, but a deus ex
machina, the fairy godmother intervenes to set her off on her magical midnight journey to the
princely castle and to an image of herself as “true” bride.
All in all, Perrault’s depiction of the initial home of the protagonist is that of a defamiliarised
home within which the girl has to persevere as a liminal entity. This vivid representation of an
endangered home space certainly takes into account some of the growing socio-political fears
of Perrault’s highborn contemporaries. The unsettling domestic battle ground between two
opposing family lineages, metaphorically renders the power struggles between a financially
stricken aristocratic elite and an advancing bourgeois mercantile power. The binary images
created via the home space are marked by their essentialism. Cinderella, the “lost” daughter
remains a “naturally” born princess. The liminal journey, the magical coach ride, is
representative of the girl’s re-figuration and the uncovering of her real noble self.
The Brothers Grimm also open up their Cinderella tale by outlining an unstable family home.
Even though their divided home does not refer to the power struggles between competing social
classes, the domestic sphere remains a battlefield on which two opposing visions of supportive
and oppressive motherhood collide. Within the tale, the mother figure is the central purveyor
of morals and normative social codes, holding the keys to her offspring’s private and social
advancement. She represents a role model of respectability which her children should emulate,
especially the girls. Through her own “proper” conduct, the mother helps guide the children
onto respectable social paths: paths that will lead them to female domesticity, fulfilling a vision
which was largely dominated by patriarchal hierarchies within eighteenth century bourgeois
German circles. The biological mother of the protagonist is representative of this socialising
force while the stepmother is seen as an oppressive alienating power. On the one hand, the
benevolent mother is a paragon of feminine virtue advising the girl on “suitable” behaviour,
and her beneficial influence persists beyond death, as she has bequeathed her with the necessary
86
attire to allow her to attend the prince’s ball. Her role is to socialise the girl into a benevolent,
‘good’ girl, to permit her to rise to respectable social stations and eventually take on the role of
the mother within the family household. On the other hand, the jealous stepmother, whose moral
corruption extends to her daughters, forces demeaning tasks and old rags on Cinderella, thereby
denying her access to both the status and rights she is entitled to through her descent. She is not
the role model the girl should emulate. Thus, the tale’s two visions of motherhood diverge in
their conflicting socialising missions.
In their telling of the Cinderella story, the Brothers Grimm allow the biological mother’s
normative socialising voice to imprint itself one last time on the girl’s mind before her body
passes away:
When she realised that the end was near, she called her only daughter to her bedside and said: “Dear child,
if you are good and say your prayers, our dear Lord will always be with you, and I shall look down on
you from heaven and always be with you.” Then she shut her eyes and passed away. 42
The dying mother, the harbour of stable domesticity, guides her daughter a final time by
explicitly identifying the behavioural code that she must adhere to. She bestows the domestic
legacy onto her daughter. As long as the daughter remains a pious and modest girl, the mother
will be by her side guiding her. Goodness and devotion will keep the maternal tie intact. Thus,
even after death, the former stable supportive maternal home has transformed into an invisible
bond which the daughter keeps alive by visiting her mother’s grave every day. This emotional
tie between the mother and the girl cannot be severed. Even though time passes and the
tombstone is covered with the leaves and snow of successive seasons, while the interior home
is ransacked by her new stepfamily, the mother’s tomb still remains a supportive anchorage in
the girl’s life. However, this spatial shift from an interior to an exterior supportive maternal
home is representative of the girl’s displaced position as a liminal persona. The new unsettling
regime of the stepmother has transformed the idyllic home space into an unwelcoming and
alienating terrain. The stepmother and her daughters conquer and colonise the house, which
[…] meant the beginning of a hard time for the poor stepchild. “Why should this silly goose be allowed
to sit in the parlor with us?” the girls said. “If you want to eat bread, you’ll have to earn it. Out with the
kitchen maid!” (BGC, 117)
42
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, ‘Cinderella’, in The Classic Fairy Tales, trans. by Maria Tatar, ed. by Maria Tatar (London: Norton Critical
Edition, 1999), p. 117.
87
In this subjugated household, the ostracised girl loses her name and family identity. She stops
being the beloved ‘daughter’ and ‘dear child’, instead she becomes the ‘silly goose’, the
‘stepchild’, the ‘kitchen maid’ and finally ‘Cinderella’. (BGC, 117) Like Perrault’s Cinderella,
the young girl loses all social ties within the house, and becomes a liminal persona. The stepsisters make her wear ‘an old grey smock’, ‘wooden shoes’ and ‘tak[e] her out to the kitchen’
where they let her work and sleep among the cinders. (BGC, 117) They remove all signs of her
former social status and position within the family.
However, as we have seen, the girl is not completely cut off from supportive motherly bonds.
The young girl not only passively bemoans the death of her mother but also actively keeps her
memory alive by planting a hazel sprig on the mother’s garden tomb. The branch, which she
asks of her father as a present instead of more valuable material objects, is a symbol of the
strong unperishable maternal tie, and by planting the sprig on her mother’s grave, the girl
substitutes a comforting natural link for the lost filial bond:
She wept so hard that her tears fell to the ground and watered it. It grew and became a beautiful tree.
Three times a day Cinderella went and sat under it, and wept and prayed. Each time a little white bird
would also fly to the tree, and if she made a wish, the little bird would toss down what she had wished
for. (BGC, 118)
The mother’s grave, connected to the enrooted hazel tree, has become a protective shelter, a
new home outside the home. In Old Germanic and Norse cultures, the hazel tree was often
referred to as the tree of fertility. (Symbols, 476) Thus, in the tale, the hazel tree, a vegetal
tombstone as it were, is not a symbol of death but of fertility and enduring female bloodlines:
the tree’s deep roots and its blossoming branches on which birds are nesting represent the
healthy family lineage and a supportive motherly bond. It symbolises the girl’s heritage as well
as her future, and signals that neither have been cut down by the unjust colonisation of the
interior home space. Moving from this exterior symbol to those within the conquered house,
the reader can still perceive girl’s ties to her mother in the subdued traces she has left in and
about the house. The cinders are an example of such a trace: though they symbolise the girl’s
rejection and denigration within the defamiliarised, colonised household, they also draw
attention to her demure character and her devotion to her dead mother. A further instance of the
cinders’ function as a ‘trace’ of the lost filial relationship between mother and daughter can be
found in Bruno Bettelheim: referring to the practice of covering oneself with ashes as a symbol
of mourning, he infers a ‘close connection between the dead and ashes’. (Bettelheim, 255) The
88
original supportive home is not entirely lost but is instead transformed and relocated to the
outside garden and given new symbolical expressions.
Both the interior and external homes are representations of the limen space in which alternative
laws operate. The former original home has transformed into a destabilising chaotic prison, in
which the legitimate heir is condemned to forced labour and spends hours steeped in soot,
separating the peas and lentils. Here, the traditional hierarchical set-ups of the family are turned
upside down. Further, the outside limen home of the mother is enchanted: a magical gateway,
it enables the young girl to regain her lost familial and social terrain by bestowing luxurious
dresses for her magical voyage to the prince’s castle on her. Cinderella is drifting between these
two limen homes, unable to settle down in the princely castle once she has arrived. As Turner
notes, ‘the state of the ritual subject (the “passenger”) is ambiguous’. (Forest, 94) She remains
a liminal wanderer until her volatile steps are anchored within a final matrimonial home by the
socialising forces of patriarchal figures.
Charles Perrault’s and the Brothers Grimm’s version of the Cinderella tale both start out by
presenting their readers with endangered traditional homes. The homes are no longer stable, as
both the aristocratic house and the supportive socialising maternal home have been usurped.
They are limen homes out of which the girls need to escape. In the case of Perrault, it is the
outer intervention of a fairy godmother that leads the girl on a magical liminal journey. The
Brothers Grimm in turn offer a representation of the reincarnation of the dead mother’s spirit:
her garden tomb is the external limen home that offers the girl an alternative gateway to start
her voyage towards the home of her future husband.
In her post-modern feminist rewriting When the Clock Strikes, Tanith Lee portrays a similarly
endangered parental home, although the tale’s conclusion suggests different interpretations.
Ashella’s story sets off with the illicit conquest of her mother’s home. The former grand
aristocratic house of the mother as well as her entire noble lineage have been brutishly
subjugated and erased by the crimes of a usurping Duke:
It was rumoured that the Duke had obtained both his title and the city treacherously. Rumor declared that
he had systematically destroyed those who had stood in line before him, the members of the princely
house that formerly ruled here. He had accomplished the task slyly, hiring assassins talented with poisons
and daggers. But rumor also declared that the Duke had not been sufficiently thorough. For though he
had meant to rid himself of all that rival house, a single descendant remained, so obscure he had not traced
89
her – for it was a woman. […]. Royal and proud she was, and seething with bitter spite and hunger for
vengeance, and as bloody as the Duke, had he known it, in her own way. 43
Through the Duke’s devious attacks, the original home is conquered and traditional hierarchies
of succession are overruled. Ashella’s ‘royal’ and ‘proud’ mother has been robbed of her family
and her status. Even though as a woman she is ignored as a potential rival to the Duke’s power,
Ashella’s mother proves to be a “worthy” iconoclastic opponent to his reign. She is not a mere
passive victim but chooses to fight for her rightful place. Banished from her home and lineage,
with no access to her legitimate power, the woman uses her exile position in order to subvert
the prevailing unjust power hierarchies. Not wanting to subdue herself to the Duke’s regime,
yet having no socially meaningful means at her disposal in order to regain her lost terrain, she
chooses to step outside social norms, employing black magic to reach her goals:
In the dead of night she would […] practise witchcraft against the Duke. […]. The woman was capable
in what she did. The Duke fell sick. He lost the use of his limbs and was racked by excruciating pains
from which he could get no relief. (Clock Strikes, 51)
This dark sorcery helps her set up an alternative power hierarchy within which she holds the
upper hand. She uses this subversive strength in order to recover her valid position from an invalid Duke, by transforming and bewitching him into an actual invalid. The eradication of the
Duke and her planned murder of his son should reinstate her family line and original powerful
home. Lee’s rewriting breaks down strict categories of good and evil, just and unjust. Ashella’s
beloved mother is a merciless torturer and the murderous Duke is also a loving father. The tale’s
protagonists represent no archetypal stock characters but ambiguous personalities. In her
rewriting, Lee does not stick to the traditional gender codes of the classic fairy tales. Unlike
Perrault’s and the Grimms’ version, which portray mother figures as benevolent, socially
restorative magical helpers, Ashella’s mother is a willing outsider, forming asocial sorcerous
bonds with Satan. Her voice is not normative but instead subversive, providing her daughter
with an alternative education of her own. Instead of socialising her into a ‘good’ and devout
young woman, the mother initiates the daughter into her dark witchcraft, making her the
helpmate and heiress of her vengeful plans. In order to disguise her identity as a powerful
aristocratic witch, the mother marries a rich merchant ‘a good fellow but not wise’. (Clock
Strikes, 50) She uses her matrimonial status as a social cover up. Here, the author comically
reverses the traditional view of marriage as the ultimate and desirable social and personal goal
43
Tanith Lee, ‘When the Clock Strikes’, in Red as Blood: Or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer (New York: Daw Books, 1983), p. 50.
90
for women into an alibi position from which the woman refigures her own power. However the
mother’s identity is eventually unmasked, the whispered maledictions between her and her
daughter overheard and the bewildered husband sends out armed men to bring her down:
The woman and her daughter heard the shouts below and saw the torches in the garden. […].
“Listen to me, my daughter,” she cried, “and listen carefully, for the minutes are short. If you do as I tell
you, you can escape their wrath and only I need die. And if you live I am satisfied, for you can carry on
my labor after me. My vengeance I shall leave you, and my witchcraft to exact it by. Indeed, I promise
you stronger powers than mine. I will beg my lord Satanas for it and he will not deny me, for he is just,
in his fashion, and I have served him well. Now, will you attend?”
“I will”, said the girl. (Clock Strikes, 52)
This dramatic scene marks the earthly separation between the two women. It describes the
daughter’s induction into the ‘fellowship of Hell’ (Clock Strikes, 52) making her the inheritor
of her mother’s dark powers and quest for vengeance. This alternative family pledge allows the
daughter to continue the subversive lineage of her mother. Having always chosen her own paths
in life, the mother kills herself before the arrival of the men and her daughter is brought back
into the house by the father. Her life is spared because of her ability to act out the beautiful
innocent victim. From now on, she disguises her identity as a dark descendant of her mother by
excessively mourning her innocence and repenting for her sins. She willingly transforms into
the demure, self-ostracised daughter, renaming herself Ashella, and covering herself in thick
layers of ashes:
People forgot her beauty. She was at pains to obscure it. She slunk about like an aged woman, a rag pulled
over her head, dirt smeared on her cheeks and brow. She elected to sleep in a cold cramped attic and sat
all day by a smoky hearth in the kitchens. When someone came to her and begged her to wash her face
and put on suitable clothes and sit in the rooms of the house, she smiled modestly, drawing the rag or a
piece of hair over her face. “I swear,” she said, “I am glad to be humble before God and men.” (Clock
Strikes, 54)
Ashella’s statuslessness as a grimy negligent family entity is not due to a victimisation at the
hands of her stepfamily. On the contrary, the stereotypical representation of the jealous
stepmother and evil stepdaughters is turned upside down. In fact, the rich merchant remarries a
pleasant and ‘harmless widow’, a ‘normal cheery wife and the two sweet, rather silly
daughters’, (Clock Strikes, 54) who continuously try to integrate Ashella into their domestic
world, as the following dialogue between the father and the stepmother illustrates:
91
“Can you do nothing with the girl?” she demanded of her husband. “People will say that I and my
daughters are responsible for her condition and that I ill-treat the maid from jealousy of her dead mother.”
“Now how could anyone say that?” protested the merchant, “when you are famous as the epitome of
generosity and kindness.” (Clock Strikes; 55)
Through this witty inversion of the classic narrative strands, Lee points towards the artificiality
of stock characters and their detrimental representations and simplifications of complex human
motivations and emotions. The binary logic, especially strong in the representation of female
characters within the classic Cinderella narratives, have also influenced the (child)readers’
‘associational patterns’ in unwholesome ways, as Lieberman points out:
Good-temper and meekness are so regularly associated with beauty, and ill-temper with ugliness, […].
The most famous example of this associational pattern occurs in ‘Cinderella,’ with the opposition of the
ugly, cruel, bad-tempered older sisters to the younger, beautiful, sweet Cinderella, […]. (Don’t Bet, 188)
Tanith Lee dyes these black and white stock characters with a more human tint, portraying them
as multifaceted individuals with bright and dark sides respectively. Her rewriting derides a
perceived artificiality in Cinderella’s “beautiful” character by focusing on a sarcastic depiction
of the “dirty”, yet physically beautiful, Ashella. Both her murky appearance and the name
‘Ashella’ are ambiguous. Firstly, they allow her to masquerade as a humble and devote
Christian servant and to conceal her presence within the household of her father in order to
silently pursue her gloomy passion. Secondly, both the cinders and the name Ashella signal her
alliance with the dark powers of her mother as well as with her original home. The ash and the
cinders are reminiscent of her broken house, her broken family line, which she carries in herself.
The home of the mother has fallen apart, only the “cinders” of its former power remaining.
Whereas in the classical tales the death of the mother marks the involuntary passage into the
limen, Ashella freely cuts herself loose from the family and social ties encompassing her. She
develops into an increasingly unfamiliar, strange person, a liminal persona, appearing like a
lunatic. Yet she is not the lost daughter but a scheming avenger. She could find happiness in
her father’s home, yet the significance of “home” has changed. Because of her self-imposed
exile, home has come to represent the liminal for her. This is also represented through the
garden tomb of her mother. Following the Brothers Grimm’s narrative strand, Lee’s protagonist
upholds a maternal bond with her dead mother through her tomb. After her suicide, the mother’s
body is burned ‘and the ashes put into consecrated ground beyond the city gates’. (Clock Strikes,
53) The urn containing her ashes is, however, retrieved by the daughter. She buries the mother’s
92
ashes outside the parental home in the garden, once again geographically symbolising the
mother’s removal from the home and expected social norms:
In the twilight, padding along through the narrow streets and alleys of the city, the girl brought the urn
homewards. In the garden at the foot of the old tower, gloom-wrapped, unwitnessed, she unstoppered the
urn and buried the ashes freshly. She muttered certain unholy magics over the grave. Then she snapped
off the sprig of a young hazel tree, and planted it in the newly turned ground. (Clock Strikes, 56)
The burial of the ashes and the planting of the hazel sprig call forth images of a strong
attachment to her maternal heritage, thus echoing the Grimms’ narrative. However, the
heartrending, sentimentalized portrait of the mourning classic Cinderella is distorted through
Ashella’s ‘unholy’ litanies. The tree itself also generates ambiguous imagery. On the one hand
its blossoming branches reach out into the sky, while its roots pierce covertly through the dark
soil. This dual yet wholesome vegetal organism is representative of Ashella’s oblique character.
Her outer displays of devotion reach out towards a benevolent Christian God while her inner
thoughts and suppressed iconoclastic murmurs link her to the underworld, the fellowship of
Hell, and her maternal heritage. Thus the tree symbolises Ashella’s connection to the alternative
limen outside, outcast sorcerous home both within and outside herself. As in the Grimms’ tale,
this vegetal tombstone is a magical gateway, though it bypasses the path towards a social
integration via attending the prince’s ball and accepting his hand. On the contrary, this gateway
empowers Ashella to set forth on her liminal crusade, (re)conquering such “familiar” edifices
as the prince’s castle, recasting perceived inequalities of power.
The pervasiveness of disparate power structures between the protagonists of the Cinderella
narratives is also picked up on by Jane Yolen. Her imaginative narrative The Moon Ribbon
exposes the power imbalances between the various Cinderella narratives themselves. The tale
follows the classic narrative strands of an orphaned daughter faced with the usurpation of her
original home. Nonetheless, within this lost terrain, a resilient maternal bond persists. The
powerful relationship between the mother, the daughter and their line of foremothers is
particularly emphasized. Already the first paragraph establishes the strong lineage between
different generations of women through the imagery of the protagonist’s maternal heirloom, the
silver ribbon of grey hair:
93
There was once a plain but goodhearted girl named Sylva whose sole possession was a ribbon her mother
had left her. It was a strange ribbon, the color of moonlight, for it had been woven from the gray hairs of
her mother and her mother’s mother and her mother’s mother’s mother before her. 44
Even though Sylva’s mother has passed away, the bond between these two family members and
preceding generations of women is still existent. Unlike the Grimms’ portrayal of the maternal
bond, this bond is not a normative socialising force, advising the girl to be good and demure,
but stands for an enduring colourful and polyphonous female tradition. Yolen’s protagonist’s
name exploits this buoyant imagery. ‘Sylva’, Latin for forest, carries in it connotations of the
evergreen woods. Furthermore, the imagery of the moon traditionally refers to ‘the female
principle’ and the colour grey symbolises ‘the resurrection of the dead’. (Symbols, 669, 456)
Thus, both her name and the moon ribbon stand for a vigorous female family tradition. The
different strands of tied up grey hair represent a powerful union of individual female lives and
emanates a multifaceted glow and power of its own.
Sylva’s strong connection to the deceased is further emphasized by the ‘great house’ of her
mother, in which the young girl leads a comfortable and stable life with her father. Yet, this
familiar maternal terrain falls prey to the “faux pas”, the injudicious marital choice of her father,
and is soon invaded by the conquering steps of the stepmother and her daughters. Pronouncing
the marriage vow has robbed the father of his own independent voice, leaving him utterly
paralysed, ready to die ‘in order to have some peace’. (Yolen, 2) The house now passes on to
the stepmother, whose mean tongue menacingly reverberates within the family home, drowning
all other voices. Not only does she rob Sylva of her name, ostracising the girl into a limen space
of statuslessness and homelessness, but further conquers the entire house (leaving it in disarray),
represented by her expulsion of the servants:
She dismissed the last of the servants without their pay. “Girl,” she called out, for she never used Sylva’s
name, “you will sleep in the kitchen and do the charring.” And from that time on it was so. (Yolen, 2)
The abandoned house without the servants, and Sylva’s exile position in the kitchen and later
in the animal shed, symbolise the authoritarian rule of the stepmother. The initial polyphonous
home within which different generations of female voices could resound has transformed into
a static autocratic regime in which solely the voices of the stepmother and her daughters reign.
44
Jane Yolen, ‘The Moon Ribbon’, in The Moon Ribbon and Other Tales (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1976), p. 1.
94
Similarly to the classics, Yolen does not break down the notion of hierarchies and strict binary
oppositions between “familiar”, “unfamiliar”, “evil” and “good”. She follows the classic
narrative strands of an unjust stepmother versus a demure first daughter, turned into a liminal
persona who accepts the chaotic foreign reign and her fate obediently. However, unlike the
classic narratives, Yolen does not use these binary strands and representations in order to
demonstrate the protagonist’s essential noble qualities, or to mark the opposition between
socially supportive and oppressive mother figures. Instead the author uses these static constructs
and the notion of the “home” to stress the ongoing power struggle between different types of
narratives on the tale’s palimpsest. Yolen uses the stock characters of the wicked stepmother
and the alienated girl with the intention of pointing towards the unjust historical colonisation of
early oral matriarchal folk narratives, through traditional literary discourses and their
underlying patriarchal assumptions and social outlines. The conquering voice of the stepmother
can be seen as representative of the dominant narratives of Charles Perrault and the two
stepsisters can be seen as representative of those of the Brothers Grimm. The stepfamily’s
dominant voices represent the dominant classical narratives of the Cinderella type that have
over the centuries out-voiced the polyphonous female folk narratives. The stepfamily’s
appearance corresponds to a colonising narrative while the disappearance of the girl’s female
ancestors represent the fading of old matriarchal folk narratives of a female tradition with their
resourceful protagonists. Yolen tries to recapture the positive female assertiveness of these
“cloaked narratives”. Through her rewriting, she allows the silenced female narrative tradition
to gain new impetus on the tale’s palimpsest, which is represented by her protagonist’s
rediscovery of a strong maternal bond, the Moon Ribbon.
Unlike the Brothers Grimm’s depiction of an undying maternal bond that provides the girl with
dresses and jewellery in order to attend a ball and to ultimately rise back, reaggregate into
accepted patriarchal matrimonial domination, Sylva’s maternal bond, the Moon Ribbon
introduces her to a strong female oral (family) tradition, which ultimately guides her to a selfdetermined space of her own. The Moon Ribbon, the “umbilical cord” which ‘was rough and
smooth at once and shin[ing] like the rays of the moon’ (Yolen, 3) links her to previous
generations of women and their narratives. She realises that this tradition was lost on her but
with the discovery of the ribbon it resuscitates. This resurrection of lost voices supports Yolen’s
foremost authorial concerns:
One of Yolen’s main goals has been to recapture the flavour and spirit of the oral tradition in her literary
fairy tales. […] one of her major achievements has been to subvert the male discourse that has dominated
95
the fairy tale as genre so that the repressed concerns of women are addressed, and the predictable happy
endings that signify male hegemony and closure are exploded or placed into question. (OCFT, 560)’
The fact that Sylva finds the Moon Ribbon inside an old desk is indicative:
One day, when she was cleaning out an old desk, Sylva came upon a hidden drawer she had never seen
before. Trembling, she opened the drawer. It was empty except for a silver ribbon with a label attached
to it. For Sylva read the card. The Moon Ribbon of Her Mother’s Hair. She took it out and stared at it.
And all that she had lost was borne in upon her. (Yolen, 2-3)
The imagery of the old desk, the archetypal symbol of stable (male) authorial command and
traditions is destabilised by Sylva’s shaking hands, reaching towards the excluded, neglected,
hidden female narratives of her own, namely the Moon Ribbon. The girl investigates this
unknown territory and inside she discovers the moon ribbon, her own family history and female
narrative heritage. The original home, the ties to and stories of a matriarchal oral tradition, has
been lost on Sylva. Traditionally the palimpsest was dominated by often restrictive ‘male
discourses’, undermining the tale’s lively polyphonous oral tradition. This complex polyphony
also finds its expression in the representation of the Moon Ribbon itself, with its various
glowing strands of grey hair, and its ‘rough’ and ‘smooth’ textures. However, the stepmother
dismisses this positive polyphony, as in her hands the ribbon transforms into a lifeless,
unpleasant and disposable object:
But when the stepmother picked it up, it looked like no more than strands of gray hair woven together
unevenly. It was prickly to the touch.
“Disgusting,” said the stepmother dropping it back into Sylva’s hand. “Throw it out at once.”
“Burn it,” cried one stepsister.
“Bury it,” cried the other. (Yolen, 3)
Inside the defamiliarised home, the ribbon has become worthless, representing the crushed,
cloaked female line that Sylva belongs to. Just like the oral matriarchal folk version on the tale’s
palimpsest, the moon ribbon’s positive “otherness” is glanced over. However, Sylva actively
speaks out for the Moon Ribbon and is able to save it from its destruction, enabling her to
embark on a magical voyage out of the colonized home, resurfacing within, rediscovering
alternative welcoming houses. Likewise, Yolen tries to preserve the lost female voices,
underlining the importance of a polyphonous female orality, which can instigate enriching
literary as well as personal experiences.
96
Both Lee’s and Yolen’s depictions of the initial homes differ greatly from those of the classic
tales. Although all four renditions start out by portraying the homes as subdued by outside
injurious forces, different perceptions of order underlie these complex power structures. In the
classic tales, the power inequalities between the stepfamily and the daughter of the house are
synonymous with a social reign, in which traditional hierarchies are upset. Lee’s and Yolen’s
representations of the initial home also focus on power struggles. However, the imbalance of
power does not point towards an ordered society which has fallen into chaos. Instead these
disparities should expose prevailing gender inequalities and the narrative imbalances on the
palimpsest of the tale. In these homes, the women have been robbed of their power. The
journeys of the post-modern rewritings are not undertaken in order to regain a lost identity, but
they are journeys of discovery into unknown identities. The journeys concentrate on the
discovery of the unknown, rather than looking for a rediscovery of essentials.
97
On Liminal Journeys
In both her roles as the well-bred noble maiden and the parlour maid, Perrault’s Cinderella is
denied control over her own steps. She embodies the exemplar docile, obedient female, talking
and moving along strict social protocols. As her stepfamily’s servant, she follows each of their
orders diligently, remaining passive and silent in view of possible emancipatory actions. As a
symbol of female dependency, she is unable to change her dreary circumstances, ultimately
relying on outer forces to (re)define her. Thus it is the fairy godmother who transforms the
subjugated Cinderella into a marriageable princess, sending her on her journey out of the liminal
defamiliarised home to another kind of liminal space, the prince’s ball:
At last the happy day came – they went to court and Cinderella followed them with her eyes for as long
as she could.
[…]
“I wish I could … I wish I could …” but she was prevented by her tears from saying anything else.
This godmother of hers, who was a fairy, said to her, “Is it your wish to go to the ball?”
“Yes!” cried Cinderella, with a great sigh.
“Well,” said her godmother, “be a good girl and I will arrange things so that you can go.” (CPC, 76)
Cinderella’s longing eyes and the points of ellipsis in her speech indicate the girl’s inability to
overcome her demure position and to stand up for herself. She does not dare to tread on her
rightful way up the social ladder to the prince’s court. It is the fairy godmother who enables her
to articulate her wishes and to metamorphose the hesitating dots into a concrete, yet magical,
road. According to Karen E. Rowe, this ‘supernatural helper is not a random apparition, but the
natural mother reincarnated into a friendly creature’. 45 As with the Brothers Grimm, this
alternative mother figure presents her daughter with her rightful hereditary path, her “true”
noble lineage. With the help of her magic wand, she allows the young girl to regain her noble
attire and entourage in order to gain access to a worthy alternative home, within which private
and public hierarchies are stable. She assists Cinderella’s journey back up the social hierarchy
by equipping her with the adequate representational tools. These include the footwear, ‘a pair
of glass slippers, the prettiest in the whole world’ as well as the beautiful dresses tailored from
‘cloth of gold and silver, all sewn with jewels’. (CPC, 79) The provided utensils are material
externalisations of the heroine’s inner virtues, their delicate exquisite structures emphasising
the girl’s gentle feminine posture. Further, the fairy turns pumpkins into coaches, mice into
45
Karen E. Rowe, ‘Feminism and Fairy Tales’, in Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England,
ed. by Jack Zipes (New York: Routledge, 1986), p. 214.
98
beautiful horses, lizards into footmen, a rat into a coachman and a ‘cinderpants’ into a princess.
However, Cinderella, the coach and the footmen who accompany her on her journey to the
prince’s castle are all representative of the “betwixt and between” position of the liminal phase.
They remain ambiguous, hybrid beings or to quote Jenks: ‘They are, in the well worn phrase,
neither one thing nor t’other.’ (Jenks, 44) Cinderella’s position is not stabilised yet. The magic
of the godmother is only transitory. The glass slipper can easily break or slip off and the girl
must return back from the “dream castle” to her “false” home by midnight:
Thus decked out, Cinderella got into her coach, but her godmother commanded her not to stay past
midnight, telling her that if she stayed at the ball one moment longer, her coach would be a pumpkin
again, her horses would turn into mice, her coachman a rat, her footmen into lizards, and her clothes
would become ragged again. (CPC, 79)
Crossing the threshold of the princely castle is only a provisional reaggregation into noble
society. It allows the party guests and the readers to get a glimpse at the “perfect” incarnation
of the noblewoman. This sublime sparkly image is, however, highly essentialist, since the
notion of the noblewoman presupposes inbred nobility, a nobility which is essentially given to
certain elect people. Cinderella’s liminal magical ride to the palace is representative of her
journeying to her “essential” noble self. Even though the godmother’s magic has temporarily
brushed off the dust of Cinderella, uncovering the girl’s inborn grace, it is the final “fit” of the
glass slipper, the acceptance of the prince’s hand that casts this social “outcast”, “misfit” back
into the role of the noble bride, joining both her outer and inner layers of nobility.
While Perrault’s depiction of the liminal journey retraces a rediscovery of a person’s essential,
noble self, the Brothers Grimm’s version highlights the girl’s volatility and the need for
stabilising, socialising forces. Their protagonist’s passage through the limen space is marked
out by a new freedom of movement. First, the dead mother functions as a role model of
traditionally constructed femininity, and the mother’s reincarnated spirits, the birds and the
hazel tree allow the girl to walk in her footsteps, to regain a socially accepted standing by giving
her the appropriate clothes and footwear.
Now that no one was at home any longer, Cinderella went to her mother’s grave under the hazel tree and
called:
“Shake your branches, little tree,
Toss gold and silver down on me.”
The bird tossed down a dress of gold and silver, with slippers embroidered with silk and silver. She slipped
the dress on hastily and left for the wedding. (BGC, 119)
99
The mother’s natural tomb is the gateway to her rise back up the social ladder and arrival in an
alternative stable home in the shape of the princely castle. Although the girl follows her
mother’s life path into a sanctioned home she does not want to settle down inside this edifice
as the following scenes illustrate:
Cinderella danced until it was night, then she wanted to go home. The prince said: “I will go with you
and be your escort,” […]. But she managed to slip away from him and bounded into a dovecote. (BGC,
119)
Her second visit to the castle ends in a similar vein:
At night she wanted to leave, and the prince followed her, hoping to see which house she would enter.
But she bounded away and disappeared into the garden behind the house, where there was a beautiful,
tall tree from whose branches hung magnificent pears. She climbed up through the branches as nimbly as
a squirrel, and the prince had no idea where she was. (BGC, 120)
These two hasty escapes show the girl’s liminal position as well as her affiliation to the natural
world. She is not yet entirely socialised and her steps fluctuate between the defamiliarised
parental home, the hazel tree and the prince’s castle. Within the liminal space, the girl’s steps
are volatile. Her journey is marked by the absence of male dominance. It will be the duty of the
men to settle down her wandering steps, to give them an adequate social foothold from which
she can safely cross the threshold into a reaggregated and elevated social position. By capturing
the girl’s silver shoe, the prince and the father, the two patriarchal figures are able to guide the
outsider back into a stable interior family home. She cannot remain a passenger, a liminal
persona, caught between inside and outside, integrated and disintegrated worlds. Thus, the men
use tricks and powerful tools to change the girl’s position and to bind her to the prince’s hand.
The magic glass and silver shoes of both Perrault’s and the Brothers Grimm’s Cinderellas do
not symbolise adequate walking equipment for self-assertive, independent travellers. They are
prone to slip off and do not guide the girls towards self-determined futures. The footsteps which
they impress on the ground fit the templates of the social norms of their times and follow the
path of female acculturation along gender-biased roles. Their liminal journeys to the prince’s
palace are undertaken in the optic of escaping the limen space and ultimately reaching an
ordered private and public bastion. The post-modern feminist rewritings let their leading ladies
step out of these guided footprints and add some new trails for them to walk on.
100
Ashella, the “black” rancorous daughter, uses her magical powers to guide her on a vengeful
voyage to the prince’s ball and heart. The hazel tree once more incarnates the deceased mother’s
spirit, whose powers combine with those of the girl, conjuring a dense miasma of unholy
images:
[…] she was in the garden beneath the old tower, standing over the young hazel tree […]. She chanted
under her breath. At length a pale light began to glow, far down near where the roots of the tree held to
the ground. Out of the pale glow flew a thin black bird, […]. Together, the girl and the bird passed into
the old tower. […]. Shapes that were not real and barely seen flitted about. Rare perfumes, the rustle of
garments, the glint of gems as yet invisible filled and did not fill the restless air. (…) the attendance upon
a witch of her familiar demons. (Clock Strikes, 59)
The transformational scene discloses the character’s liminal stage, betwixt and between the
elements and senses. Lee playfully subverts the traditional Cinderella makeover scenes. She
lets her readers observe the scene through a broken looking glass, mirroring distorted and
fractured images of the classic narrative strands. At the end of Ashella’s conversion, both the
reader and the girl are presented with an ambiguous reflection of “beauty”. The girl’s ‘moping
greyness’ has disappeared, revealing her vivid beauty, her ‘rich dark red’ hair and ‘reddishgolden amber’ eyes. (Clock Strikes, 55, 51) However, the “beautiful” countenance which we
behold is ambiguous, the mirror is cracked. The associational pattern between beauty and
goodness does not function and the traditional beauty contest between Cinderella and her
stepsisters is undermined as an unhealthy construction that puts ‘the focus on beauty as a girl’s
most valuable asset, perhaps her only valuable asset’. (Don’t Bet, 188) Ashella’s beauty is a
painful one, as the arrival scene to the palace illustrates:
Six black horses drew it. The coachman and postilions were clad in crimson, and strangely masked as
curious beasts and reptiles. One of these beast-men now hopped down and opened the door of the carriage.
Out came a woman’s figure in a cloak of white fur, and glided up the palace stair and in at the doors. […]
For an instant she stood there, all white, as though she had brought the winter snow back with her. And
then she loosed the cloak from her shoulders, it slipped away, and she was all fire. […]. She was so
beautiful it was hard to look at her for very long. (Clock Strikes, 59-60)
The presence of the coachmen, neither being identifiable as beasts or as men, as well as
Ashella’s excessively radiant appearance while still remaining a complete stranger, point
towards their outer and inner ambiguities. They combine familiar, alien, safe and dangerous
traits. In order to point out these tantalising ambiguities, Lee employs a distinct colour code.
Especially the colours black, white, and red possess a ‘symbolic ambivalence’. (Symbols, 792)
101
Red is both the colour of fire and blood, sometimes regarded as the ‘basic symbol of the lifeprinciple’ associated to the ‘diurnal, male’ ‘with vast and irresistible strength’. (Symbols, 792)
At other times it can be the complete opposite, ‘nocturnal, female, secret’ standing for ‘the
mystery of life’. (Symbols, 792) Likewise, white can stand at either end of the colour spectrum,
signifying ‘either the absence of colour or the sum of all colours’. It ‘possesses the properties
of a boundary’, ‘it is the colour of ‘passage’’. (Symbols, 1105) Finally, black can also be
[…] set at either end of the chromatic scale as a boundary to both warm and cold colours. Depending on
its mattness or its glossiness, black can become the absence or the sum, the negation or the synthesis, of
colour’. (Symbols, 92)
In her depiction of Ashella, Lee associates the hybrid pictorial and symbolical boundaries of
these colours with her leading lady’s ‘betwixt and between’ position as a liminal persona. She
mixes these three suggestive colours into an unholy graphic blend, concocting a new image of
the fairy tale princess which blurs traditional dichotomies and associational patterns. Characters
are never just black and white, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, since the colours or the
underlying morals which taint them are never absolute. They all carry an inherent ambiguity.
By repainting and inverting the classic magical transformations and liminal journeys to the
castle, the narrative is able to undermine certain fixed binaries, opening them up to a variety of
images and paths.
Jane Yolen’s representation of Sylva’s liminal journey via the Moon Ribbon also initiates her
protagonist and the readers to new alternative and empowering discoveries. The Moon Ribbon
is Sylva’s gateway to two consecutive magical voyages. Throughout these journeys, Sylva
encounters lost familiar voices and regains a new self-assertiveness. While her first voyage
shows Sylva hesitating, her second voyage is more self-confident.
During a frosty night, Sylva lies down miserably on the grass in front of the defamiliarised
home. The tears falling from her cheeks onto the silver ribbon transform the tied bundle of her
foremothers’ grey hair into a ‘silver river’: (Yolen, 4)
Suddenly the ribbon began to grow and change, and as it changed the air was filled with a woman’s soft
voice speaking these words:
“Silver ribbon, silver hair,
Carry Sylva with great care,
Bring my daughter home.”
[…]
102
She thought the river would wash away her sorrows, and without a single word, she threw herself in.
(Yolen, 4)
Sylva’s plunge into the silver river and the welcoming female voice referring to her as
‘daughter’ visualizes her desire of belonging and being reborn to a new and better ‘home’. The
river with its soft current guides her on her limen voyage, ‘float[ing] like a swan’ ‘past houses
and hills, past high places and low’ towards an alternative limen space: (Yolen, 4-5)
At the meadow’s rim, near a dark forest, sat a house that was like and yet not like the one in which Sylva
lived. (Yolen, 5)
Her journey towards and inside this “Other” home is marked by her hesitating steps:
So she made her way across the meadow and only where she stepped down did the grass move. When
she moved beyond, the grass sprang back and was the same as before. And though she passed larkspur
and meadowsweet, clover and rye, they did not seem like real flowers, for they had no smell at all. “Am
I dreaming?” she wondered, “or am I dead?” But she did not say it out loud, for she was afraid to speak
into the silence. Sylva walked up to the house and hesitated at the door. She feared to knock and yet feared
equally not to. As she was deciding, the door opened of itself and she walked in. (Yolen, 5)
Sylva’s passage through the meadow up to the house is silent and filled with doubts. The
meadow is representative of the “alien”, unexplored terrain of a familiar female tradition. It is
a virginal landscape whose flowers have not properly bloomed yet, giving off no aromas of
their own. The territory lies dumb at her feet, appearing strange as if in a dream. The fact of her
not knowing whether she is dreaming or not, point towards her own clouded senses. She does
not seem to connect to the environment, also shown by her insubstantial, insecure footsteps
leaving no prints on the grass. Sylva is afraid to enter the house, to step into the unknown
alternative. But it is here that she will encounter new supportive, emancipatory voices, and
where she will discover familiar ties to a female tradition. Sylva’s hesitating steps on this terrain
and silent fearful passage into the house is representative of her alienated position towards an
undiscovered female past, female family bonds and their narratives. The house is also
representative of a silenced female folk culture and its powerful matriarchal narratives. This
tradition is a welcoming tradition, visualised by the door that opens of itself. Inside this alien
yet familiar welcoming house, doors open up to Sylva allowing her to cross new thresholds and
to enter into a dialogue with a new acquaintance. Inside the house she meets the presence of a
woman ‘dressed all in white’, ‘silver-white hair’ (Yolen, 8) and a silver ribbon around her neck
greeting her as her daughter:
103
“Welcome, my daughter,” she said.
“Are you my mother?” asked Sylva wonderingly, for what little she remembered of her mother, she
remembered no one as grand as this.
“I am if you make me so,” came the reply.
“And how do I do that?” asked Sylva.
“Give me your hand.”
As the woman spoke, she seemed to move away, yet she moved not at all. Instead the floor between them
moved and cracked apart. Soon they were separated by a great chasm which was so black it seemed to
have no bottom. (Yolen, 8)
The mother figure’s outstretched hand symbolises the possibility of Sylva to connect the present
with the past. Sylva can, if she heartily desires it, regain a familiar tie. She is not lost on her
own, but belongs to a female tradition. This unknown mother figure is representative of the lost
‘grand’ mother figures and female role models in her life as well as their narratives. However,
the gulf which separates them during their conversation epitomises Sylva’s yet insecure and
alienated position. Thus Sylva cries out:
“I cannot reach,” said Sylva
“You must try,” the woman replied.
So Sylva clutched the crystal knob to her breast and leaped, but it was too far. As she fell, she heard a
woman’s voice speaking from behind her and before her and all about her, warm with praise.
“Well done, my daughter. You are halfway home.” (Yolen, 9)
Sylva’s courageous jump into the growing schism is representative of her bravely following
“Other” female voices. She has dared to jump into a ‘home’ which remains hidden in the dark.
This ‘home’ which she is about to re-enter is symbolical of the home of lost female narratives
and supportive bonds. When she regains consciousness and lands once again in her “real”
stepmother’s house, the girl and her narrative are immediately held captive. Sylva’s voice is
silenced inside the corrupted home and the doorknob, the fiery jewel in her hand, the symbolic
representation of her having surmounted separations, and crossing undiscovered borders to the
past, is stolen by the stepmother and sold in the city. Once again, Sylva is overruled and silenced
by a consuming and domineering voice. Yet, Sylva’s (self-) discovering journey to a new home
is still ongoing.
Sylva’s second liminal journey via the Moon Ribbon, brings her to an alternative home in which
she finds her own voice, her steps are self-determined. For a second time, Sylva finds herself
outside in the moonlit meadow, holding the Moon Ribbon inside her hands. In order to gain
104
some comfort, she starts singing the song which she heard the unknown female voice sing
before. The Moon Ribbon metamorphoses into a ‘silver highway that glittered and glistened in
the moonlight’ (Yolen, 10) bearing her once more to the dream house. Her second magical
journey is more empowering. Sylva is no longer afraid to use her voice, to sing the song and to
set out towards the “Other” house. Her steps are not as tentative as before:
Without a moment’s hesitation, Sylva got up and stepped out onto the road and waited for it to bring her
to the magical house. […]. Sylva strode purposefully through the grass, and this time the meadow was
filled with the song of birds, the meadowlark and the bunting and the sweet jug-jug of the nightingale.
She could smell fresh-mown hay and the pungent pine. The door of the house stood wide open, so Sylva
went right in. (Yolen, 10-11)
The second passage through the meadow portrays Sylva as a steadied, open-eyed explorer. Her
senses are sharpened and she now perceives the terrain’s lively nature. It has become more
familiar, more “natural” to her and she indulges in its colourful sensual diversity. This bustling
garden as well as the house with its wide-open door, are both striking illustrations of the
continuing vitality of neglected past female oral folk traditions. The oral matriarchal folk
narratives, await the resuscitating glances and steps of inquisitive discoverers. Sylva has
become such a “wondering” wanderer, engaging with her surroundings. Inside the house Sylva
is able to cross new thresholds, to open up new doors and to gain alternative perceptions of
herself.
105
During the liminal journey towards Cinderella’s essential noble self, Perrault’s depiction of the
princely castle exemplifies the ideal home that the heroine should aspire to settle down in. It is
a home in which the ball guests and the readers recognise Cinderella’s striking beauty and
virtuous noble character. Within this space, Cinderella is once again defined through the eyes
of others. However, this time she is elevated to her rightful social standing as a respectable lady.
Inside the palace, the liminal persona’s journeying steps come to a momentary rest. Especially
the prince is a stabilising force, holding her hand and conducting her through the evening:
The king’s son, who was told that a great princess, whom nobody knew, had arrived, ran out to receive
her. He gave her his hand as she alighted from the coach, and he led her into the hall, among all those
present. […]. The king’s son conducted Cinderella to the most honoured seat, and later took her out to
dance with him. She danced so gracefully that all the guests admired her more and more. (CPC, 79-81)
With the help of her “leading man”, the formerly shunned Cinderella now gains a ‘most
honoured’ position inside the courtly world. The prince, the “guiding” husband-figure,
constantly directs her graceful movements. She is not a powerful dancer of her own but an
elegant and gentle companion. The ballroom scenes epitomise this noble lady’s passive bearing,
being controlled and judged by outer forces. Due to the prince’s recognition of her as an elect
“bride”, the outer world responds positively to her. This askew power structure of Perrault’s
narrative is picked up on by Lieberman who notes that within these narratives:
[…] the heroines are chosen for their beauty (en soi), not for anything they do (pour soi), they seem to
exist passively until they are seen by the hero, or described to him. They wait, are chosen, and are
rewarded. Marriage is the fulcrum and major event of nearly every fairy tale; it is the reward for girls, or
sometimes their punishment. (Don’t Bet, 189)
The prince’s affectionate yet dominant behaviour, ‘never [leaving] her side’ (CPC, 82) alludes
to the traditional hierarchical noble household. Being the object of desire, instead of an
independent subject, Cinderella incarnates the ‘femme civilisée’, (Subversion, 40) remaining
appropriately passive as well as a beacon of beauty and sociability at all times. Thus she proves
her worthiness by sitting down with her evil stepsisters:
[…], showing them a thousand civilities and giving them some of the fruit with which the prince had
presented her. This surprised them very much, for they did not know her. (CPC, 81)
106
Whereas Cinderella’s generosity and gracefulness are exemplary, her stepsisters’ baser
characters and moral blindness are further accentuated by the fact that they do not recognise
Cinderella as the noble princess. However, this social recognition is not fixed yet. She must
leave this alternative stable home and revert to a precarious liminal position before midnight:
While Cinderella was amusing her sisters she heard the clock strike 11 and three quarters, so she
immediately made a curtesy to the company and hurried away as fast as she could. (CPC, 81)
The prince’s ball marks only a transitory stable stage within her liminal journey. She must return
to the defamiliarised family home once the clock strikes midnight. The palace remains a wishful
alternative home, a dream castle. The passage back into the limen is again not self-directed. The
magic of her fairy godmother dictates her steps. Likewise her second visit to the castle which
she wishes to undertake ‘because the king’s son had desired her’ (CPC, 81) is interrupted by
the resonating gongs. Immediately, she runs away ‘as nimbly as a deer’, (CPC, 82) losing one
of her glass slippers during her flight. The hunter imagery of the chased prey as well as the lost
glass slipper illustrates the discordant power relations between Cinderella and the prince. This
iconic literary fairy tale moment visualises the seventeenth century unequal gender relations.
Her sparkly glass slipper does not offer her the same governing, masterful public and private
anchorage and freedom. In her critical essay Heroes and Heroines in Perrault, Patricia Hannon
remarks that:
[…] the heroine’s fragile slippers suggest fettered mobility, […]. Cinderella’s glass slippers should keep
the heroine well within the bounds prescribed for her by the century’s theorists on the nature of women
(GFTT, 949)
The glassy material of the girl’s ballroom shoes is prone to break. Wearing these slippers
automatically delineates the girl’s radius of action. Since the shoes do not allow her to actively
run in the “outside” world, her adequate “natural” terrain is that of the “inside” home. This is
also expressed by her involuntary departure from the prince’s company. The young girl wants
to remain inside the castle. Hannon further argues that this behavioural code marries itself with
some of seventeenth-century social theorists’ views on the “proper” place for women:
[…] Fénelon warned that “les fréquentes sorties de la maison et les conversations qui peuvent donner
l’envie de sortir souvent, doivent être évitées.” Grenaille too, conceded that, while “les Dames doivent
être un peu remuantes … J’aime bien mieux qu’elles soient invisibles dans les maisons.” (GFTT, 949)
107
Inside and outside the house, the high born ladies best remain ‘invisible’. These women remain
‘cloaked’ personas, whose personal and public freedoms are curtailed through patriarchal
forces. It is the task of the men to keep their households ordered and to keep their women in
check. This hierarchy is also represented in Perrault’s narrative through the shoe-fitting scene.
By putting on the two glass slippers, Cinderella’s feet are stabilised within her role as ‘femme
civilisée’ (Subversion, 40) and is able to reaggregate patriarchal society as the prince’s elected
bride.
The Grimms’ Cinderella’s liminal journey also carries her to the princely ball. Yet, unlike
Perrault’s Cinderella, this party guest’s steps are more dynamic and unpredictable. The prince’s
castle is once again presented as an alternative dream home, which the girl should not only
aspire to enter as a visitor, but stay in as a wife. However, Cinderella is not entirely socialised,
thus she runs away from her defamiliarised home but also from the alternative palace. While
Perrault’s character is commanded to leave the ball before midnight, The Grimms’ Cinderella
wants to leave the castle of her own accord. She visits the princely home three times, each time
managing to abscond from the prince’s company. These hasty escapes visualise the girl’s
liminal position. Her steps fluctuate between the defamiliarised parental home, the hazel tree
and the prince’s castle. She continuously crosses thresholds, not able to settle down within the
stable home. This liminal wanderer’s volatile steps need to be given a new socially adequate
and steadied footing. She cannot remain a traveller, a limen persona, caught between the inside
and the outside world, the social and the natural world. The amorous prince thus holds her tight,
conducting her through the evening:
The prince approached Cinderella, took her by the hand, and danced with her. He didn’t intend to dance
with anyone else and never let go of her hand. Whenever anyone else asked her to dance, he would say:
“She is my partner.” (BGC, 119)
Although the prince desires her as his sole partner, the elected “bride” ultimately flees his
escorting hands. It will need cunning tricks and powerful tools for both the prince and the father
to help bind the girl to the prince’s hand:
The prince waited until Cinderella’s father arrived and told him that the strange girl had bounded into the
dovecote. The old man thought: “Could it be Cinderella?” He sent for an axe and pick and broke into the
dovecote, but no one was inside it. (BGC, 119)
After Cinderella’s second escape, the prince awaits the father’s help once more:
108
The father thought: “Could it be Cinderella?” and he sent for an axe and chopped down the tree. But no
one was on it. (BGC, 120)
The father’s authoritative tools, the axe and the pick, destroy such natural habitats as the
dovecote and the pear tree, symbolising the girl’s wild character. The two men would like to
put an end to the girl’s liminal journey in order for her to reintegrate society as a married
woman. However, the girl manages to escape their “socialising” hands, running towards the
hazel tree where she slips out of her glamorous apparel, back into the shabby clothes of the
liminal Cinderella. As in Perrault, the male figures come to represent hunters, trying to chase
the girl and determine her social standing. The traditional power imbalances between the male
chaser and the female chased are held up. During her third visit to the castle the girl
involuntarily has to leave behind one of her golden slippers:
At night, Cinderella wanted to leave, and the prince wanted to escort her, but she slipped away so quickly
that he was unable to follow her. The prince had planned a trick. The entire staircase had been coated with
pitch, and as the girl went running down the stairs, her left slipper got stuck. The prince lifted it up: it was
a dainty little shoe covered with gold. The next morning he went with it to the father and said to him: “No
one else will be my bride but the women whose foot fits this golden shoe.” (BGC, 120-121)
Through a ruse the prince managed to overpower her steps. Holding the ‘dainty little’ golden
slipper in his hands is representative of the traditional power hierarchies. The prince will find
her and guide her into his house. She will not remain a liminal persona, stepping outside social
norms but she will fit into the slipper, into his household.
The grand castle of Tanith Lee’s orphaned prince is also the “lost” home of Ashella’s dead
mother. Ashella’s entrance to the glittery courtly world, strikes the prince as a lightning bold,
setting his heart on fire at first sight. The love stricken prince, transfixed by this dream
apparition mutates into an uncanny automaton. This powerful ruler over the city has lost his
stronghold and mastery over his own steps:
The prince got up from his chair. He did not know he had. Now he started out across the floor, between
the dancers, who parted silently to let him through. He went toward the girl in the doorway as if she drew
him by a chain. (Clock Strikes, 60)
The power relations between the beautiful visitor and the master of the house are turned upside
down. He has fallen under her spell, reduced to a mere pawn in her vengeful game. Ashella
knows exactly how to move her chessman on the ballroom floor to her advantage, asking him
109
for a dance: ‘Out of all these ladies, can it be you will lead me in the dance?’ (Clock Strikes,
60) However, this scheming player deliberately makes whimsical moves, unsettling her dancing
partner, her opponent, as the following scene illustrates:
The prince grew weary of dancing with the girl and losing her in the dance to others and refinding her
and losing her again. (Clock Strikes, 61)
It is not the prince who is leading the girl, but the girl who is leading the prince towards his own
downfall. The castle has transformed into a board of power, a battleground on which the prince
tries to capture the girl in marriage, and the girl tries to seize his power. She does not want to
marry him, instead she is overpowering him by conquering his heart. ‘She danced, as she
appeared, like fire’ (Clock Strikes, 61) and as fire she burns down the unlawful edifice of his
rule, melting his heart and mind:
“I am being foolish,” said the prince to Ashella on the terrace. “But perhaps I am entitled to foolishness,
just once in my life. What are you saying?” For the girl was speaking low beside him, and he could not
catch her words.
“I am saying a spell to bind you to me,” she said.
“But I am already bound.”
“Be bound then. Never go free.”
“I do not wish it,” He said. He kissed her hands and he said, “I do not know you, but I will wed you. Is
that proof your spell has worked? I will wed you, and get back for you the rights you have lost.”
“If it were only so simple,” said Ashella, smiling. “But the debt is too cruel. Justice requires a harsher
payment.” (Clock Strikes, 61-62)
This alternative love scene exemplifies Ashella’s subversive powers. The “gentle” hearth of
familiar traditional domesticity and wifehood, which the prince wants to offer her in order for
her to regain a high social standing, is unacceptable to Ashella. It would compromise her
authority since she could only gain a limited access to power via accepting the prince’s hand.
As a lawful wedded wife, she would still be subjugated to his unlawful rule, remaining a
stranger in her own home. The marriage oath is not the adequate formula to regain her power
and lineage. Therefore, at midnight, she whispers a dark vow of her own, a spell that ultimately
overthrows his. At the twelfth strike, the girl transforms into the figure of death, driving the
prince mad. The clock heralds the end of his reign and the beginning of hers, a new time has
come for a new narrative:
At the tenth stroke, he saw a change in the loveliness before him. She grew thinner, taller. At the eleventh
stroke, he beheld a thing in a ragged black cowl and robe. It grinned at him. It was all grin below a triangle
110
of sockets of nose and eyes. At the twelfth stroke, the prince saw Death and knew him. […]. The
conjuration of Death vanished from the terrace. Only one thing was left behind. A woman’s shoe. A shoe
no woman could ever have danced in. It was made of glass. (Clock Strikes, 62)
After this unholy apparition, the prince loses his mind and power ‘from the spells the young
witch had netted him in’. (Clock Strikes, 63) Interestingly, in Old High German and Old English
the word ‘spel(l)’ means ‘tale’ or ‘recital’. 46 Thus, by uttering her spells, Ashella also performs
a tale, or narrative of her own, opposed to the classic Cinderella stories. In her version, the
prince is no longer the hopeful male saviour of the girl’s liminal condition, but becomes himself
a “lost” person, a liminal wanderer, a lunatic. She robs him of his title, degrading him to a fool,
since he has never been really “entitled” to his governing power. In order to possess the woman
whose shoe he is holding in his hands, he loses his earthly possessions and sanity. The castle
itself becomes unfamiliar to the prince, who turns into a restless traveller, being chased by and
chasing after the chimera of the vanished princess. He no longer has any control over his city,
his home and himself. Instead, he turns into one of Ashella’s followers, a liminal persona
walking down unwholesome dark paths. Only the cinders, the ashes of his former power remain.
These cinders are representative of Ashella’s dark power which has transformed the home of
the prince into a ‘cold and bitter hearth’, and thus ultimately allowing her to regain her space.
(Clock Strikes, 60)
The Moon Ribbon has offered Sylva a second voyage and once again, Sylva sees herself
confronted to the alternative home. However, the girl has become a “wondering” wanderer,
eagerly examining and exploring her position. Her mind and eyes are wide awake, a mental and
physical state which is also reflected within the house itself: ‘The long hall was no longer dark
but filled with the strange moonglow.’ (Yolen, 11) Inside this illuminated house Sylva is able
to cross new thresholds, to open new doors and to gain alternative perceptions of herself:
And when she reached the crystal door at the end, and gazed at her reflection twelve times in the glass,
she saw her own face set with strange gray eyes and long gray hair. She put her hand up to her mouth to
stop herself from crying out. But the sound came through, and the door opened of itself. (Yolen, 11)
The limen house is a space in which the girl perceives her identity as constructed. Her mirrored
faces illustrate that she is formed by a panoply of reflections. Multifarious female identities and
46
‘spell2’, in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. by T. F. Hoad (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996),
p. 452.
111
voices have given shape to her. The grey hair and eyes also symbolise that she is linked to
previous women and their narratives. These different voices of her foremothers resonate inside
her. She is a composite female. This revelation is at first shocking. It is the cry of the reborn, a
wake-up call, a new found voice that she can no longer suppress. It is the key that triggers a
personal epiphany:
“Welcome, my sister,” the woman said.
“I have no sister,” said Sylva, “but the two stepsisters I left at home. And you are none of those.”
“I am if you make me so.”
“How do I do that?”
“Give me back my heart which you took from me yesterday.”
“I did not take your heart. I took nothing but a crystal jewel.”
The woman smiled. “It was my heart.”
Sylva looked stricken. “But I cannot give it back. My stepmother took it from me.”
“No one can take unless you give.”
“I had no choice.”
“There is always a choice,” the woman said.
Sylva would have cried then, but a sudden thought struck her. “Then it must have been your choice to
give me your heart.” (Yolen, 12)
Inside the alternative liminal home, while talking to her alternative sisterhood, Sylva comes to
understand the meaning of ‘choice’. She does not have to be the silent victim, overruled by her
stepsisters and stepmother. Her voice can become active, creating its own narratives and visions
of the self. She does not have to belong to the classic Cinderella family within which she takes
on the part of ‘the patient sufferer, an object of pity’ as Lieberman observes. (Don’t Bet, 194)
Sylva does not have to follow this “role model”, since, as Lieberman further argues, it
[…] is partly synonymous with female martyrdom. […] her loneliness and her suffering are
sentimentalised and become an integral part of the glamour. ‘Cinderella’ and the other stories of this type
show children that the girl who is singled out for rejection and bad treatment, and who submits to her lot,
weeping but never running away, has a special compensatory destiny awaiting her. […]. The child who
dreams of being a Cinderella dreams perforce not only of being chosen and elevated by a prince, but also
of being a glamorous sufferer or victim. (Don’t Bet, 194)
These injurious narratives do not have to stand out the most prominently on the Cinderella
palimpsest. Yolen shows that other narratives can co-exist alongside these. These alternative
subdued narratives can guide girls onto more fulfilling personal paths. Sylva does not want to
be a silent victim, and chooses to belong to another “family” (of narratives) as the scene of the
112
two women holding their hands and exchanging their hearts visualises. The “new” heart which
is beating in her chest and the ‘fiery red’ jewel lying in her hand, give her ‘such comfort as she
had not in many days’. (Yolen, 13) She has regained a supportive bond which encourages her
to reconquer her colonised home.
Thus both Perrault and the Grimms portray an alternative home to the defamiliarised homes of
their protagonists. This alternative home is a dream home, serving as a role model for the
women. Inside these homes, the women are recognised for their righteous virtues and are being
conducted by a male figure. Yet, this home is only transitory. The women have to leave the ball
before midnight. In the end it will be the duty of the men to guide them over the threshold into
stable matrimonial homes. When the Clock Strikes and The Moon Ribbon depict homes in which
the power relations are turned upside down. Ashella transforms the dream home into a
dangerous territory. The prince’s mind, just like the home itself, crumbles down. She
destabilises the home and the prince. Sylva experiences an ambiguous, polyphonous home in
which the static binary power relations reigning inside her colonised home are subverted. In
this alternative home, Sylva gains an emancipated voice of her own.
113
Into Final Homes?
The loss of one of her glass slippers symbolises the still unstable position in which Perrault’s
Cinderella finds herself, caught between the defamiliarised parental house and a desirable
courtly home. The prince’s declaration of marriage to the woman whose foot fits the glass
slipper signifies her entrance ticket to a stable existence:
He invited Cinderella to sit down and, putting the slipper to her foot, he found it went on very easily, and
fitted her as if it had been made of wax. Her sisters were absolutely amazed, but even more so when
Cinderella pulled the other slipper out of her pocket and put it on her foot. Then in came her godmother,
who touched Cinderella’s clothes with her wand, making them richer and more magnificent than any of
those she had worn before. (CPC, 84)
The fitting of the two shoes symbolises the reconciliation with her “true” noble self and her
willingness to reaggregate society as a married woman. The marriage bond between her and the
prince is the ideal union of rightful nobility. This reaggregation is completed by the magic of
the fairy’s wand. The godmother having been present at the girl’s birth, now assists her a rebirth as the noble bride, banishing the Cinderpants once and for all, establishing a final home
in the prince’s castle:
She was brought to the young prince, dressed as she was. He thought her more charming than ever and
married her a few days later. (CPC, 84)
Like a phoenix she has arisen from her depraved situation through the help of the prince and
the godmother. Cinderella’s liminal journey has come to a “happy end”. According to Turner,
this hopeful model of resurrection characterises the
rituals of status elevation, in which the ritual subject or novice is being conveyed irreversibly from a
lower to a higher position in an institutionalised system of such positions. (RP, 167)
The ‘system’ into which the girl reaggregates is, however, structured along traditional
patriarchal hierarchies. Even though she has attained higher social standing, her situation is not
that of a liberated woman. ‘The finality of the perfect fit’ (GFTT, 952) and wearing the glass
slippers is also a sign of her submission to traditional gender roles. The delicate shoes are not
self-empowering tools, but keep her within prescribed bounds. As Hannon further points out:
Cinderella’s magic slipper metaphorically encloses her within what the century considered women’s most
valued and mysterious function. Fitting the body to the object restricts its mobility by confining it to the
114
courtly sphere of established order. […]. Perrault responds by a symbolic eradication of female
sovereignty. His fairy tales mockingly yet decisively put severe limits on the reign of women. (GFTT,
952, 953)
The “final fit” of the shoe, not only stabilises the girl’s social position as a married noblewoman,
but also settles her into a prescriptive position as “woman”. It reinstates traditional hierarchies
and gender roles, as Hannon remarks:
Perrault at times appears to agree with Fénelon, who asserted that women’s functions should correspond
to their “natural” gifts for housewifery: “Here are then women’s occupations … to keep a house in order,
to make a husband happy, and to raise children in a proper way.” (GFTT, 953)
The girl exemplifies the ideal housekeeper, and as a ‘woman of nobility, [functions as the]
guarantor of the blood line’. (GFTT, 953) This “model” woman also forgives her stepsisters
and arranges their marriages with ‘two great lords of the court’. (CPC, 84) This stabilised
female position inside the matrimonial household is regarded as the ultimate private and social
“arrival” for the women. As Lieberman remarks, ‘marriage is the fulcrum and major event of
nearly every fairy tale; it is the reward for girls’. (Don’t Bet, 189) At the end of the stories,
traditional positions and hierarchies are reinstated, which is also represented by the stepfamily’s
humble acceptance of the bride’s elevated position:
They threw themselves at her feet to beg her pardon for everything they had done to her. Cinderella raised
them up and as she embraced them she said that she forgave them with all her heart and asked them
always to love her. (CPC, 84)
The limen hostile space of the family home transforms into a respectful, even loving
environment. At the end, the notion of “home” once more presents stable hierarchies in which
the woman’s position as guardian of the lineage and as a good housewife is secured.
In the Grimms’ version of the tale, the two stepsisters, the usurpers of Cinderella’s secure
position inside the family home, try to press their mutilated feet into the golden shoe. The fact
that the stepmother commands her daughters to mutilate their feet by cutting off toe and heel
expresses the unstable, broken quality of the family home. The girls unlike Cinderella will never
be able to walk up the social ladder respectfully. This is also revealed by the doves, the
incarnation of Cinderella’s mother’s spirit:
“Roo coo coo, roo coo coo,
blood’s in the shoe:
115
the shoe’s too tight,
the real bride’s waiting another night.” (BGC, 121)
The hazel tree with its guarding doves proves to be an impassable threshold for the “false”
brides. Their warning cries alert the prince to his mistake, escorting the stepsisters back to their
home. These are doomed to remain immobilised, their corruptness visualised by the bleeding
feet, preventing them from passing to a higher level of society. Cinderella on the other hand
will pass the test. The shoe fits perfectly and the hazel tree, the gateway to her new matrimonial
home marks her out as the ‘true bride’. (BGC, 122) Her journey as a ‘silly goose’ and ‘kitchen
maid’ has come to an end. Putting on the golden shoes anchors her within a stable matrimonial
setting. Thus, the once capricious liminal wanderer is lifted onto the prince’s horse and carried
away to his castle. Her steps are now escorted and kept within the bounds of the socially
reaggregated bride. As a symbol of this new docility, the doves now sit on her shoulders. They
are no longer part of the limen but instead the guardians of order. They punish those who do
not follow accepted social boundaries and moral paths. The stepsisters are being punished for
their moral blindness:
When the couple went to church, the elder sister was on the right, the younger on the left side: the doves
pecked one eye from each one. […]. And so they were punished for their wickedness and malice with
blindness for the rest of their lives. (BGC, 122)
The power reversals at the end demonstrate the fact that the undeserving girls will have to
meander through the limen, whereas the virtuous girl has escaped this blackness by being
elevated into a safe matrimonial home. Marriage once more presents the ultimate reward and
salvation for the girl.
Lee inverts the usual binary representations and narrative patterns of the fairy tale. After
Ashella’s ballroom visit, the prince turns into a bedraggled madman:
His clothes were filthy and unkempt. His face was smeared with sweat and dust…it resembled,
momentarily, another face. […]. A lunatic, he rode about the city. […]. Every woman, young or old, maid
or married, must come forth from her home, must put her foot into the shoe of glass. They came. They
had no choice. Some approached in terror, some weeping. […]. One alone did not come. (Clock Strikes,
64, 63)
116
Not the handsome knight in shining armour sets out to find his princess, but a deluded fanatic
whose outer appearance comes to reflect more and more Ashella’s own dark dusty world.
Marriage to the prince, is no longer a desirable prospect for the women but a source of terror.
The “dream home” has transformed into a nightmarish vision. The prince falls deeper and
deeper into a schism, driven by an impossible mission. In fact the shoe is bewitched,
continuously changing its shape. Thus the prince loses all his points of reference, wandering
directionless ‘without guard or attendant’ around the city until he is slain by intriguers ‘on the
road’: (Clock Strikes, 64)
As he fell, the glass shoe dropped from his hands, and shattered in a thousand fragments. (Clock Strikes,
64)
Killed on the road, the mad prince comes to present the “lost” liminal wanderer. He will remain
an eternal traveller, joining Ashella’s dark underworld. The glass slipper which he carries
around is not a symbol of stability and reaggregation, it is instead a trickery tool employed to
shatter the prince’s reign. The fractured pieces of the shoe symbolise the destroyed power as
well as the takeover by Ashella’s destructive reign. There is no final (marriage) union, but only
disintegration of the social order. Since the night of the ball, the girl has disappeared. She has
never returned to the house of the father, taking nothing with her, except the ‘young hazel from
the garden beneath the tower’. (Clock Strikes, 64) Ashella will never again be part of society
but instead remain an invisible liminal subversive force. After the prince’s miserable demise,
the city falls to cinders over the course of successive political power struggles:
Those who usurped the city were villains and not merely that, but fools. Within a year, external enemies
were at the gates. A year more, and the city had been sacked, half burnt out, ruined. […]. And it is not
now anything for a man to be proud of. As you were quick to note, many here earn a miserable existence
by conducting visitors about the streets, the palace, showing them the dregs of the city’s past. (Clock
Strikes, 64)
The cinders and ashes of the burned city and castle are Ashella’s natural territory. Even though
no one has seen the girl after her disappearance from the ball, she remains an invisible chaotic
force within the city, spreading her dark spells. Via her reign of disorder, she has taken up her
lineage as a ruling force. She has regained a final subversive home, the decaying city. Ashella’s
final home is the destruction and fall of the entire city. Her steps will always be those of a
liminal wanderer. Lee’s rewriting overthrows and fractures traditional narrative strands with
their strict dichotomies, gender models and teleological endings. Ashella’s fate remains in the
117
dark. This open ending, the fact that there is no reaggregation, no “happy ever after”, leaves the
narrative’s path open-ended, hence the points of ellipses and the question mark. However, there
are also new possibilities which arise from these insecurities.
Sylva’s liminal journeys brought her through the alternative homes, in which she could recover
her own emancipated voice and posture. Having gained this new empowerment, the altered
perception of herself as a hybrid personality and the recognition of the polyphonous lively
character of past narratives, she now reaggregates her familiar home as a self-determined
woman. The unequal power relations between a domineering stepfamily and the silenced girl
are inverted through Sylva’s new power. Sylva stands up for herself and for her heritage. Thus
when the stepmother wants to snatch away the jewel, the “stone of wisdom” from her, Sylva
defends herself:
The stepmother’s eyes became hard. “Girl, give it here.”
“I will not,” said Sylva. (Yolen, 13-14)
Her determined refusal emphasises Sylva’s new self-assertiveness and independence. She has
a voice and a will of her own, which ‘will not’ be overruled by her stepfamily. Sylva has found
her path via the Moon Ribbon. Yet, her greedy stepmother wants to possess this heritage in
order to gain a fortune. She snatches the Moon Ribbon from Sylva:
Her face broke into a wolfish grin. “Fool,” she said, “the magic is herein. With this ribbon there are jewels
for the taking.” […]. The stepmother flung the ribbon down. In the early morning sun it glowed as if with
a cold flame.
“Say the words, girl,” the stepmother commanded. From the doorway Sylva whispered:
“Silver ribbon, silver hair,
Lead the ladies with great care,
Lead them to their home.”
The silver ribbon wriggled and writhed in the sunlight, and as they watched, it turned into a silver-red
stair that went down into the ground.
“Wait,” called Sylva. “Do not go.” But it was too late. With a great shout, the stepmother gathered up her
skirts and ran down the steps, her daughters fast behind her. And before Sylva could move, the ground
had closed up after them and the meadow was as before. On the grass lay the silver ribbon, limp and dull.
(Yolen, 14-15)
This climactic scene lets some of the classical fairy tale motives resurface. The stepmother with
her wolfish grin epitomises the threatening and inhibiting wolf figures of such patriarchal
cautionary tales as Little Red Riding Hood and Little Red Cap. Her lecherous greedy looks
118
reveal her as a predator to Sylva’s freedom. She wants to possess a ‘fortune’ but does not
recognise the true value of the Moon Ribbon. She is only interested in the ribbon’s economic
value. This also alludes to the often mercantile aspects of the classic narratives of Cinderella
by Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, since in their tales, the reward for the girls’ hardship is
presented as a worthy and enriching marriage to a prince. The figure of the stepmother
incarnates some of these injurious narrative strands which stick to the biased gender codes of
their authors’ times. These narrative strands have however come to dominate the Cinderella
narratives in favour of the spirited polyphonous oral folk narratives of the Cinderella story.
Sylva’s new freedom of expression counters these traditional narratives. The reference to the
sun is indicative. The sun, often associated with the male principle, (Symbols, 948) stands in
opposition to the soft moon glow of Sylva’s ribbon and its female tradition. In the moonlight,
the shiny ribbon gains its power and exposes hidden lineages which subvert established
androcentric hierarchies. However, in the ‘morning sun’ and in possession of the stepmother,
the ribbon does not transform into a life-giving river or an advancing silver highway but instead
into a descending staircase. Whereas Sylva whispers her song, the stepfamily’s voices vanish
in the limen space, underneath the surface of the world. This disappearance visualises the shifts
of traditional patriarchal power structures and their narrative predominance on the tale’s
palimpsest. The defamiliarised home, with the conquering voices of the stepfamily, is once
again turned into a self-determined place for Slyva: ‘Sylva smiled, put the silver ribbon in her
pocket, and went back into her house.’ (Yolen, 15) She has regained a home in which her voice
and those of her foremothers reconnect and resound. She reaggregates ‘her house’ as an
independent woman. The seven silver strands and grey eyes are the physical externalisations of
her female heritage. These outer signs of the elderly are also representative of the female voices,
narratives which continue to live in her and which she will pass onto the next generations:
And when she was married and had a child of her own, Sylva plucked the silver strands from her own
hair and wove them into the silver ribbon, which she kept in a wooden box. When Sylva’s child was old
enough to understand, the box with the ribbon was put into her safekeeping, and she has kept them for
her own daughter to this very day. (Yolen, 15)
Whereas in the classic narrations, Cinderella’s marriage and resulting motherhood forms an
integral part of her elevated position within patriarchal domestic structures, Sylva’s marriage
and motherhood represents a means of passing on a varied female heritage. The wisdoms and
narratives of the foremothers are carried on via the Moon Ribbon. Weaving in more and more
grey hair to the ribbon adds to its polyphonous matriarchal power. The pronoun ‘them’ also
119
points to the multiplicity of voices. In the end, Yolen’s tale presents the readers with a
physically reconquered maternal home. Yet, more important than the actual house is the Moon
Ribbon itself, the tie to polyphonous female narratives. Yolen does not depict a final home such
as the prince’s castle, but instead, through the imagery of the ribbon, emphasises the
reconnection with, as well as the continuation and growth, of female narrative traditions.
All in all, the feminist tales examined in this chapter portray endings that remain open-ended.
Their homes are not final. Just like Sylva, the Ashella character remains a liminal wanderer,
questioning the notion of stable arrivals and single meanings. Sylva’s home is not finalised
either, but points towards the hopeful possibility of the continuation of female narratives: a
powerful polyphony, mixing past, present and future voices. Yolen’s narrative seeks to regain
some of the folk magic, since for her ‘the magic of the old tales has been falsified’. (America’s
Cinderella, 27) In the classic tales, the magical rides to the Prince’s castle, the metaphor of the
road is decipherable as the acculturation process by which the female characters internalise
traditional gender roles. The metaphor follows the nonconstructivist approach since the
metaphorical ambiguity can be resolved and stable categories are upheld. Bruno Bettelheim’s
position regarding the beneficial interplay between fairy tales and the child reader supports this
view. The psychoanalyst puts forth that the narrative structure of the literary fairy tales offer a
solution to the encountered problems and dilemmas, bringing order to the chaos. They allow
the child reader to work through conflicts in a structured way and therefore ‘give better direction
to his life’. (Bettelheim, 7) ‘According to Bettelheim, fairy tales present existential dilemmas in
a clear-cut manner so that the child can easily grasp the underlying meanings of the conflicts.’ 47
Bettelheim asserts:
Fairy tales, unlike any other form of literature, direct the child to discover his identity and calling, and
they also suggest what experiences are needed to develop his character further. (Bettelheim, 24)
The narrative structure of the classic literary fairy tale, with its optimistic resolution of
problems, can give direction to the child’s disordered thoughts and feelings, helping him or her
to thrive in a highly normative environment. Zipes radically opposes this view:
The patterns of the fairy tales allegedly foster ideal normative behaviour which children are to internalize;
yet, some of these literary patterns like the forms of social behaviour are repressive constructs which
violate the imagination of both children and adults alike. (Breaking, 185)
47
Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk & Fairy Tales (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002), p. 182.
120
While the classic protagonists’ journeys lead the women towards reaggregation by accepting
and appropriating behavioural codes and value systems regarding specific sexual roles,
Ashella’s and Sylva’s journeys are still ongoing. The notion of identity is perceived as
constructed and changeable. The post-modern rewritings demonstrate that these classic endings
are not as final and prescriptive as they first appear, but are open to alteration. The conception
of the metaphor of the road underlies constructivist theory, challenging fixed categories and
teleological resolutions.
The frame narrative of Tanith Lee’s When the Clock Strikes is revealing in that sense. The tale
exposes the artificiality of “closed” endings, showing that there cannot be a final version to a
narrative. The unnamed narrator relates the story of Ashella to a visitor of the run-down castle.
This tourist, who is not given an open voice in the dialogues, is familiar and yet unfamiliar with
the story which s/he is being told:
And what will happen when the clock strikes? Your face announces that you know. Be patient; let us see
if you do. […]. Did you intend to protest about the shoe? Shall I finish the story, or would you rather I
did not? It is not the ending you are familiar with. Yes, I perceive you understand that, now. (Clock
Strikes, 61, 62)
Via the interchanges between the guide/storyteller and the visitor/listener, Lee is able to point
out the “familiarity” of the traditional classic Cinderella story and the associational patterns to
which readers respond. We have grown accustomed to the stock images and key moments of
the classic Cinderella tales (the shoe, the clock, etc.). However, the narrator “guides” the visitor
onto other storylines. This discovering departure away from static images and plotlines appears
daunting, since it shakes the visitor/listener and the reader out of their comfort zone. New
pictures arise and unpredicted outcomes are possible. The reassuring “happy ever after” is
replaced by points of ellipsis and a question mark. The journey is mysterious. The final passage
of the tale wraps up the frame narrative, but leaves it curiously open-ended. The time of
departure has come, the carriage of the visitor has arrived, s/he is ready to leave the broken city:
But I am very sorry the story did not please you. It is not, maybe, a happy choice before a journey.
And there is your carriage at last.
What? Ah, no, I shall stay here in the ballroom where you came on me. I have often paused here through
the years. It is the clock. It has a certain-what shall I call it-power, to draw me back.
I am not trying to unnerve you. Why should you suppose that? Because of my knowledge of the city, of
the story! You think that I am implying that I myself am Death? Now you laugh. Yes, it is absurd. Observe
121
the twelfth figure on the clock. Is he not as you have always heard Death described? And am I in the least
like that twelfth figure?
Although, of course, the story was not as you have heard it, either. (Clock Strikes, 64-65)
Even though we do not hear the traveller’s voice, we sense a growing anxiety. The unnamed
narrator remains a mysterious dubious figure. The clock holds some uncanny power over
him/her. Maybe s/he is only a guide or maybe one of Ashella’s dark servants, a citizen of the
limen. The dialogue and character unnerves the visitor. S/he no longer knows whom and what
to trust. This curious exchange should alert us readers to what induces us to trust narratives and
narrators. We all have fixed images in our minds, images about the world and life, such as the
deathly figure with its ‘triangle of sockets of nose and eyes’. These representations are however
entirely subjective. As critical readers we need to question these preconceived images and
narratives, recognising them as artificial constructs. The classic narratives of Perrault and the
Brothers Grimm are also constructs of their own times and morals. Their images and social
messages are not fixed. Just like the “face” of death, they are illusions trying to stabilise
concepts, giving the individual a sense of reassurance and order. However, this reassurance is
broken down by the post-modern authors. Their images are blurred, there are no clear outlines,
shapes and templates left. There are no safe paths to follow. The broken city and castle are the
representations of an all-encompassing liminality. How does the story end? Will the traveller
or the reader climb into the carriage and leave the limen space, back to the happy endings, or
will alternative narratives carry us onto unknown paths and insecure arrivals…? For now we
will remain seated in the carriage, following Bluebeard’s wives along their matrimonial horror
trips.
122
123
Bluebeard’s Wives
Embarking on Tales
One day my prince will come! But how does the story unfold after his arrival and the acceptance
of his hand…? The answer to this question is highly ambiguous. Crossing matrimonial
thresholds does not finalise private and public journeys. On the contrary, the Bluebeard tales
demonstrate that within conjugal “dream homes” there remain secret gloomy passages on which
spouses can get lost. The appended horror story to Cinderella’s “I Do” questions stable postliminal positions and challenges the myth of romantic love encapsulated in the “happy ever
after”. The Bluebeard tales show us women ‘leaving the safety of home and entering the risky
domain’ of matrimony. (OCFT, 56) While the marital home becomes dangerous territory, the
parental houses and the heroines’ families are seen as protective shelters:
In its bold proclamation of the perils of some marriages, “Bluebeard” endorses, above all, allegiance to
family and celebrates a return to the safety and security of home, a regressive move back to the household
of the heroine’s childhood. 48
According to Maria Tatar, this positive evaluation of the heroine’s childhood household and
the ‘depiction of marriage as an institution haunted by the threat of murder’ (Tatar, 139) is not
surprising, since ‘anxious fantasies about sex and marriage’ were widespread
[…] in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, where women married at a relatively young age,
where the mortality rate for women in childbirth was high, and where a move away from home might
rightly be charged with fears about isolation, violence, abuse, and marital estrangement. (Tatar, 140)
The romantic quest of finding a husband and setting up house is not always a stabilising social
undertaking, but can also be an unsettling private experience. Similar to the Little Red Riding
Hood and Cinderella tale types, the Bluebeard narratives’ starting point is the earthly, ribald
oral folk tale tradition of peasant cultures. (OCFT, 54) Bluebeard cannot be said to be based on
any specific historical facts, the character remains ‘a construction of collective fantasy, a figure
48
Maria Tatar, ‘Introduction: Bluebeard’, in The Classic Fairy Tales, ed. by Maria Tatar (London: Norton Critical Edition, 1999), pp. 139,142.
125
firmly anchored in the realm of folklore’. (Tatar, 138) In this folkloric tradition, the heroine is
presented as ‘a resourceful agent of her own salvation’. (Tatar, 142) Indeed,
The folk heroines of ‘Bluebeard’ delay their executions by insisting on donning bridal clothes, and they
prolong the possibility of rescue by recounting each and every item of clothing. […] Most importantly,
folk versions of the tale do not fault the heroine for her curiosity. On the contrary, when these young
women stand before the forbidden chamber, they feel duty-bound to open its door. […] These folkloric
figures are described as courageous […]. (OCFT, 56)
The early folk heroines are able to escape the murderous husbands on their own by concocting
clever plans. The tale’s first literary version appears in Charles Perrault’s fairy tale collection
Histoires ou contes du temps passé (1697). (OCFT, 54) His version is ‘the first real version of
the Bluebeard tale as we know it in modern terms’, (Milne, 11) but there exist many cultural
inflections of the story. Thus, in Italy Bluebeard is known as “Silver Nose” and in England as
“Mr Fox”. (Tatar, 138, 139) The Aarne-Thompson classification system identifies two related
yet distinct branches of the Bluebeard tale type: AT311 Rescue by the Sister and AT 312 The
Giant-killer and his Dog (Bluebeard). (Tatar, 373, 374) Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard is a
representative of the AT 312 narrative, in which the youngest sister is threatened with death for
her disobedience and needs to be rescued by her brothers. Similar to Perrault’s rendition of
Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard is a ‘cautionary story warning about the hazards of
disobedience and curiosity’. (OCFT, 56) The wife is represented as a woman who ‘suffers from
an excess of desire for knowledge of what lies beyond the door’. (Tatar, 139) She is blamed for
her misfortunes. Instead of the bold and clever folk heroines, the wife wants to pray in order to
repent her sins. She is the ‘prime example of the helpless damsel-victim, desperately waiting
for a rescuer’. (Don’t Bet, 194) The Brothers Grimm’s Fitcher’s Bird is a representative of the
AT 311 narrative. Here, the heroine is able to rescue her own life and that of her sisters. Even
though the Grimms’ Fitcher’s Bird is different in that the tale is more aligned to the courageous
folk heroines, it still links curiosity and misbehaviour to negative female sexuality. Indeed, in
both of these classic tales, the women’s transgressive desires, their “infidelity” is revealed by
the blood-stained eggs and keys of the stories.
Perrault’s and the Brothers Grimm’s tales are often referred to as canonical. The feminist
rewritings of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979) and Margaret Atwood’s Bluebeard’s
Egg (1983) engage with these canonical texts while at the same time investigating ‘the rich and
varied folkloric tradition of “Bluebeard”’. (PMFT, 107) By focusing on the Bluebeard material,
especially by looking at initiation and survival within these texts, these women writers are able
126
to demonstrate the narrative diversity of the tales’ palimpsest. They seek to inscribe new
renditions on the palimpsest, which also focus on contemporary gender issues. The impetus of
the sexual revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s have caused many contemporary women writers
to engage in ‘disquietingly savage analyses of patriarchy’, (ACFT, 31) revealing some of the
classic fairy tales’ pernicious morals regarding gender roles. As Karen E. Rowe puts forth:
[…] fairy tales are not just entertaining fantasies, but powerful transmitters of romantic myths which
encourage women to internalize only aspirations deemed appropriate to [their] ‘real’ sexual functions
within a patriarchy. (Don’t Bet, 211)
As the comparative analysis of Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella has already revealed, the
classic fairy tales’ “closed” morals have tried to acculturate women and men to specific and
biased gender codes. The classic narratives have inscribed themselves on the palimpsest. The
post-modern feminist rewriters recognise these dominant lines of writing on the palimpsest and
reutilise them in order to produce new critical narratives, incorporating the socio-political
reflections of their times. The Bluebeard material proves especially adequate for this
undertaking, since it raises fundamental questions about gender equality and power structures.
From the 1960s through the 1990s, the Bluebeard story captured the imagination of many women writers,
artists, and filmmakers. Serving as a vehicle for addressing anxieties about romance, marriage, and marital
fidelity, it offered an opportunity to use the optics of another time and place to envision the ways in which
women cope in marriages imperilled by sexual betrayal or domestic violence. (Secrets, 110)
The feminist authors launched new critical debates on gender hierarchies and demystified
traditional biased notions about love and sexuality. Creatively merging the narrative medium
of the literary fairy tale with a critical scrutiny of gender issues has allowed authors such as
Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood to add new engaging narrative paths onto the palimpsest.
Their narratives demonstrate that an uncritical reliance on patriarchal structures is damaging to
both men and women. Their stories illustrate to what extent biased static gender roles can turn
individuals into dehumanised character types. These types fail to reflect the diversity of human
behaviour and the complex interplay between both genders. Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and
Atwood’s Bluebeard’s Egg can make the readers aware of these limited representations, and
show that there are always new characters to discover within narratives as well as new character
traits within oneself. These rewritings do not guide the readers onto prescribed paths with an
established final moral; instead they allow the readers to engage critically with other subtexts
of the stories. These subtexts include such biblical and mythical figures as Eve; Pandora and
127
Prometheus. These subtexts do not only infuse the Bluebeard narratives, but their inscriptions
have left deep marks on the palimpsests of our cultures. However, these stories have also tainted
our perceptions on gender equality. Bluebeard’s curious wives bear a close resemblance to the
knowledge-seeking women such as Eve and Pandora. The women’s quest for knowledge is
depicted as a destructive transgression:
Woman’s problematic relationship to knowledge becomes evident in reading the stories of Eve and
Pandora, two women whose curiosity leads them to engage in the transgressive behaviour that introduces
evil into the world. (Secrets, 3)
Eve, Pandora and Bluebeard’s wives are women who willingly transgress their allotted power
domains. They are curious explorers, wanting to illuminate the dark secrets. Yet, this curiosity
and disobedience is regarded as sinful. These shameful “infidels” have disregarded their
master’s commands and thus threaten “natural” hierarchies and orders. They bring about ruin
and misfortune onto themselves and all of humankind. On the other hand, man’s quest for
knowledge, as exemplified by Prometheus’ theft of fire, is hailed. Women’s knowledge and
transgression is associated with ruin while men’s is associated with progress:
The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the myth of Prometheus’s theft of fire from the
gods link curiosity with knowledge, sexuality, evil, and mortality in powerful ways. These two stories
have functioned as compass roses for our culture, helping us to navigate reality, define our values, and
reflect on the value of intellectual inquiry. And yet these stories are also powerfully symptomatic of
gender asymmetries. […]. The intellectual curiosity of men may have given us fire, divided us from
animals, and produced civilization, but the curiosity of women – as we know from the stories of Pandora,
Eve, Psyche and Lot’s wife, among others – has given rise to misery, evil, and grief. (Secrets, 2-3)
These narratives or cultural compass roses have often guided us along gender-biased paths.
However, these paths are not mandatory and the traditional narratives as well as their gender
constructs can be deconstructed. The post-modern rewritings want to ‘demystify, debunk and
deconstruct these sacred cultural texts, showing how they are implicated in perpetuating
stereotypes and reproducing social ideologies’: (Secrets, 115)
Angela Carter once described herself as a writer who traffics in the “demythologizing business,” seeking
to interrogate stories that are part of our collective cultural archive. (Secrets, 115)
Angela Carter’s and Margaret Atwood’s rewritings are ‘part of a slow process of decolonising
our language and our basic habits of thought’. (Secrets, 119) The colonisation of our cultures’
palimpsests through dominant narratives, which uphold essentialist binary oppositions between
128
men and women, needs to be counteracted. This act of resistance can only be undertaken by
adding new alternative narratives to the palimpsest, by making the palimpsest become more
hybrid. The readers are then left with multi-faceted narrative choices. They can navigate
through the ‘collective cultural archive’: the palimpsest, critically examining the juxtaposed
narratives and thus drawing their own conclusions. Being presented with these choices is a
liberating activity.
Furthermore, they demonstrate that all narratives are ‘hybrid texts’ in which different stories
conflate. (Secrets, 118) They all draw on a variety of intertexts. Thus apart from the biblical,
mythological and folkloric intertexts, Atwood and Carter use such varied intertexts as de Sade’s
Juliette; Jane Eyre; Dracula; Fitcher’s Bird and Cinderella. (Milne, 11-12) These various
intertexts ‘weave a system of echoes’. (Milne, 152) These different voices which enter into
critical dialogue enliven their narratives and set the readers onto new paths. Danielle Roemer’s
views on the literary fairy tales’ intertextuality are especially revealing at this point:
Roemer sees the particular intertextuality inherent in the narrative form of the literary Märchen as
necessarily liminal. Drawing as it does on the well-known traditional versions of oral tales while
simultaneously voicing the contemporary and personal mores of its author, the literary Märchen
juxtaposes both sets of values in the mind of the reader, enabling her to traverse the ideological territory
between the two. This bridging of the traditional and the visionary, or radical, offers the opportunity for
sharp comparisons and the possibility of transitions to new modes of thinking. (ACFT, 95)
The reader becomes a liminal wanderer, traversing unknown ideological territory. They can
meander on the tales’ palimpsests, discovering old as well as new lines of writing and possibly
follow their own interpretative paths.
129
From Initial Homes
The heroine’s move from the parental to the conjugal home, or in other words, her leaving the
patriarchal sphere of the father to regain that of her husband’s sets Perrault’s story into motion.
This change of homes should allow the protagonist to establish a stable social position as a wife,
by leaving her liminal status as an unmarried daughter behind, a position which was often
regarded as problematic for the family. However, switching to a new model of womanhood as
well as the shifts of power between the two homes creates the drama and tension of the tale.
The centre of attention relocates from the heroine’s parental to Bluebeard’s matrimonial home.
This new Schauplatz, domestic arena, offers a luscious display of wealth, which by far “outshines” the childhood home. Indeed Bluebeard’s home is a space in which the exposure,
Zurschaustellung of his riches should arouse deep admiration and respect. Perrault’s tale opens
with an enumeration of the man’s valuable possessions:
There once lived a man who had fine houses, both in the city and in the country, dinner services of gold
and silver, chairs covered with tapestries, and coaches covered with gold. 49
The fact that the heinous Bluebeard possesses ‘fine’ country and city houses visualises the
man’s powerful grip over his surroundings. His wealth is omnipresent and visible to everyone.
The wide radius of his mercantile power and his comfortable economic position is also
expressed via the imagery of the gilded coaches. They symbolise his advancement up the social
ladder. Some critics have interpreted Bluebeard’s ‘sumptuous dwelling[s]’ as a sign for ‘his
profession as a financier’. (GFTT, 941) This view of Bluebeard as another example, besides
Cinderella’s stepfamily, of the ‘successful parvenu’, (GFTT, 946) is further emphasised by the
employed colour code. Traditionally, the colour blue ‘connotes infamy when associated with
the villainous commoner’. (GFTT, 941) The blue-bearded murderer represents the vicious
commoner who tries to infiltrate himself into the noble ranks via money. His mercantile power
anchors him within the upper classes of society and even surpasses the parental home of the
heroine, whose mother is reduced to merely ‘one of his neighbors’. (Bluebeard, 144) This
deferral of power between the protagonist’s home and Bluebeard’s is also symptomatic for a
general power shift between impoverished nobles and powerful mercantile bourgeois:
It was not uncommon for fathers and brothers to seek intermarriage of their daughters and sisters to
commoners, in order to secure the financial interests of the family. In some cases, sacrificing a noble
49
Charles Perrault, ‘Bluebeard’, in The Classic Fairy Tales, trans. by Maria Tatar, ed. by Maria Tatar (London: Norton Critical Edition, 1999),
p. 144.
130
daughter, particularly a younger one such as the heroine, was the only alternative to maintaining the
lineage. (GFTT, 941)
The struggling nobility tried to preserve their economic status and lineage via arranged
marriages. The growing monetary imbalance between the competing social classes could only
be remedied by accepting the ‘loath[ed] marriages of mixed rank’. (GFTT, 940) French literary
critic Jean-Pierre Collinet also voices his opinion that:
“Le mariage du début ressemble à ces alliances monstrueuses qu’une aristocratie désargentée conclut
avec des roturiers enrichis.” (GFTT, 941)
According to the aristocratic ideology of lineage, the marital misalliance contaminates the
bloodlines. (GFTT, 940) The threatened and weakened aristocracy stands ‘in conflict with the
emerging power of the monetary’ bourgeois. (GFTT, 944) However, ‘putting financial solvency
before the interests of the bloodline unleashes lethal’ private consequences, as exemplified by
Perrault’s tale. (GFTT, 943)
However, Perrault’s Protagonist and her family are blind to this potential danger. In the light of
the villain’s golden and silver treasures, the sinister blue of his beard and his low origins start
to evanesce in their eyes. Indeed, his fortune allows him to create social ties with the blueblooded class, singling out two noble sisters as eligible marriage companions. In order to gain
their attention, he organises a party at one of his country houses. Even though ‘women and girls
alike fled at the sight of him’ (Bluebeard, 144) the summoned guests are still attracted by his
outer signs of wealth and accept the invitation:
In order to cultivate their acquaintance, Bluebeard threw a party for the two girls with their mother, three
or four of their closest friends, and a few young men from the neighbourhood in one of his country houses.
It lasted an entire week. Every day there were parties of pleasure, hunting, fishing, dancing, and dining.
The guests never even slept, but cavorted and caroused all night long. (Bluebeard, 144)
The country house is removed from ordinary everyday life and the watchful eyes of high
society. Cut off from the village and set apart from the parental home, Bluebeard’s “pleasure
house” represents a limen space within which alternative social laws operate. The master of the
house dazzles the visitors with his show of wealth:
There were looking glasses, in which you could see yourself from head to toe, some of which had frames
of glass, others of silver or gilded lacquer, but all of which were more splendid and magnificent than
anyone there had ever seen. (Bluebeard, 145)
131
The allusion to the looking glasses points towards the superficial character of this show. The
precious mirrors reflect the guests’ and the protagonist’s vanity. Especially the young girl sees
herself cast within a new role: the wife. Instead of being a mere visitor, she wants to become a
part in the master’s wealth:
Everything went so well that the younger of the two sisters began to think that the beard of the master of
the house was not so blue after all and that he was in fact a fine fellow. (Bluebeard, 144)
She lets herself be blinded by the riches surrounding her. Mesmerised, her senses are clouded
and fuelled by the desire to marry “well”. Instead of looking for a “valuable” husband, she is
looking for valuables. Inside the limen space of the party house, “unnatural”, “monstrous” ties
are formed, thus ‘as soon as they returned to town, the marriage was celebrated’. (Bluebeard,
144) This Schauplatz which all the friends and neighbours flock to see, however, is also
repugnant: ‘They had not dared to call while the husband was there, because of his blue beard,
which frightened them.’ (Bluebeard, 145) The matrimonial house is an ambiguous space. It is
not really a welcoming place but leaves room for anxiety. The golden and silvery splendour of
the house diverts them from the horrid blue of the master’s beard. The gold and silver are a
cover, the outer layer to a dubious home with its own secrets and revulsion. It is a limen space
and thus the post-liminal phase of the wife, having reaggregated into society, is in fact only an
illusion. Her senses are clouded by the outer layers of wealth under which her husband disguises
his blue beard and his corruptness. She is willingly deluded and thus endangers her life as well
as the “proper” lineage of the family, as Hannon remarks:
The century’s professed loathing of marriages of mixed rank fell disproportionately upon women, perhaps
because noblewomen who married commoners forfeited the right to noble status for their offspring.
(GFTT, 940)
By giving in to her vanity and greed, choosing the wrong husband will not only cause her own
downfall, but also that of the family. After having accepted the master’s hand, her liminal
journey into the hidden and bloody chambers of the matrimonial house begins.
The notion of disguise, of covering up dark secrets, is also central to the Brothers Grimm’s
Fitcher’s Bird. Instead of a blue bearded villain, the Grimms’ unholy husband figure is a
treacherous sorcerer who is living in a ‘splendid’ house, out of sight ‘in the middle of a dark
132
forest’. 50 Neither the sorcerer nor his house belong to a community. Unlike Perrault’s
Bluebeard, who disguises his torturous nature behind a socially respected wealth, the Grimms’
sorcerer hides his criminal nature underneath old garments, appearing ‘like a poor, weak
beggar’, (Fitcher’s, 148) trying to collect charitable gifts. The sorcerer incarnates instability,
changing his appearance at will:
There was once a sorcerer who would disguise himself as a poor man, then go begging from door to door
in order to capture pretty girls. He asked for something to eat, and when the eldest girl went to the door
and was about to hand him a piece of bread, he just touched her and she jumped into his basket. Then he
made long legs and rushed off to get her to his house, which was in the middle of a dark forest. (Fitcher’s,
148)
Due to his volatile magical character, “hopping” from house to house, the man is able to abduct
young girls. The parental homes of the ‘pretty girls’ are under attack by this uncanny outside
force. Like the Little Red Riding Hood and Little Red Cap characters, the girls, who are standing
on the threshold of their houses and on the threshold to womanhood, do not recognise the
looming danger. The girls are fooled by the beggar’s falsely poor appearance and willingly
open their doors. Having left their homes’ thresholds unguarded and unwarily opening their
doors, will bring about the girls downfall. As in Little Red Cap, the imagery of the girls being
devoured is striking. In their naivety, the girls want to offer food but eventually become
“consumable” goods themselves. The imagery of the basket is also reminiscent of the Wolf’s
belly. With the help of this “womb”, the girls are being “reborn” to a new liminal home, outside
the boundaries of society. Furthermore, the ‘long legs’ of the sorcerer mark him out as an agile
and volatile character. He stands apart from his surroundings, with his erratic and changeable
appearance. Like a bird, he leaves his nest, his house deep in the forest in order to catch his
prey, stealing the daughters of other families and setting up a new unlawful matrimonial home
with them:
“My darling, I’m sure you’ll be happy here with me, for you’ll have everything your heart desires.”
(Fitcher’s, 148)
The sorcerer takes on the role of the patriarchal caretaker, the husband figure; yet, the absconded
girls are not married to him. They do not live in a sanctioned union. The house is not a space of
security and comfort but is a limen home of death. Inside the home, the girls do not have a fixed
50
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, ‘Fitcher’s Bird’, in The Classic Fairy Tales, trans. by Maria Tatar, ed. by Maria Tatar (London: Norton Critical
Edition, 1999), p 148.
133
social position as daughter of bride. They exist namelessly and their bodies are interchangeable.
The sorcerer is also not a stable character, he is always on the move and thus he leaves the girls
very soon to journey forth:
“I have to take a journey and must leave you alone for a short while. Here are the keys for the house. You
can go anywhere you want and look around everything, but don’t go into the room that this little key
opens. I forbid it under penalty of death.” (Fitcher’s 149)
He also gives the girls a key and an egg: “Carry it with you wherever you go, because if it gets
lost, something terrible will happen.” (Fitcher’s, 149) As Bruno Bettelheim has pointed out,
‘the egg is a symbol of female sexuality which, so it seems, the girls in “Fitcher’s Bird” are to
preserve unspoiled’. (Bettelheim, 300) The key and the egg which the sorcerer presents to his
potential brides are ambiguous, dual signs. Once more the key is not a symbol of freedom, but
a symbol of imprisonment and the egg, which often symbolises the beginning of life, is
representative of the looming death of the girls due to their (sexual) infidelity. After his
departure, the women open the forbidden door. They are overruled by their curiosity, and
disobey his orders. The eggs which the two sisters have carried with them fall into the blood
and become the tell-tale signs of their transgression. Inside this limen house, the women also
become erratic, walking along paths that they should not be walking on. As a consequence they
will be killed by the sorcerer.
He threw her down, dragged her in by the hair, chopped her head off on the block, and hacked her into
pieces so that her blood flowed all over the floor. Then he tossed her into the basin with the others. “Now
I’ll go and get the second one,” said the sorcerer, and he went back to the house dressed as a poor man
begging for alms. (Fitcher’s, 149)
The bloody basin inside the forbidden chamber is the absolute antipode to the familiar
domesticity and sanctity of the marriage bed. In this limen home, transgression is warned
against, but at the same time, desired. He feeds off the women’s transgression, which allows
him to commit his murders: the most powerful transgression of all. As Hannon explains,
‘Bluebeard counts on his wives’ disobedience: he relied on their perception of the bloody
chamber in order to confirm his power’. (GFTT, 944) The limen home is the ultimate space of
transgression and instability; moral and social rules are broken down.
Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber also destabilises the notion of home and post-liminal
security. The power balance between the unnamed seventeen-year-old narrator’s familiar
maternal home and the new unfamiliar marital home is out of tune. The train ride towards her
134
husband’s castle, which she believes will carry her on ahead towards wealth, power, new social
status and sexual knowledge, is reminiscent of the stereotyped fairy tale images of the elect
princess’s “happy ever after”-carriage ride. (ACFT, 97) However, Carter skilfully underscores
this teleological fantasy by emphasizing the protagonist’s anxiety and feelings of loss during
her journey. As she rides along towards the Marquis’s castle, the girl experiences the growing
physical distance to her childhood home and her mother as a saddening and unsettling situation:
And, in the midst of my bridal triumph, I felt a pang of loss as if, when he put the gold band on my finger,
I had, in some way, ceased to be her child in becoming his wife.
[…].
[…] the pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore
me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of
my mother’s apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage. 51
Her mixed feelings of ‘triumph’ over her “good match”, and of melancholy over leaving behind
her past life, are also expressed through opposing imageries. First of all, the colour ‘white’,
which the girl associates with her beloved childhood home, is clearly outshone by the ‘gold’ of
the wedding ring. Further, the train with its rustic iron shape, dark smoke and rhythmic
movements of the ‘great pistons’, evokes sexualized images of the male body. (Milne, 16) The
dynamic representation of the train echoes the Marquis’s own forceful ‘heavy, fleshy
composure’. (Carter, 9) The train’s ‘syncopated roar’ as well as the ‘even steady breathing’ of
the marquis inside the cabin dominate over the ‘enclosed quietude’ of the mother’s ‘meagre’,
poverty-stricken apartment. (Carter, 7, 8) In order to provide her daughter with a musical career
and economic security of her own, the widowed mother had to sell ‘all her jewellery, even her
wedding ring to pay the fees at the conservatoire’. (Carter, 13) On the other hand, the Marquis,
‘the richest man in France’ (Carter, 12) appears to the girl as an omnipotent sovereign, under
whose command, ‘all that might of iron and steam had paused only to suit his convenience’.
(Carter, 12) The train is a representation of his wealth and overarching masculine dominance.
However, these somewhat stereotypical binary representations of masculine and feminine traits,
and the power imbalances between a ‘leonine’ husband with his ‘opulent male scent of leather
and spices’ and a poor mother, are counteracted by a striking characterization of the mother
herself. (Carter, 8) The domineering master figure should not monopolise the narrative and the
protagonist’s mind. While growing up as a daughter of a rich tea planter in Indo-China, the
mother ‘had outfaced a junkful of Chinese pirates, nursed a village through a visitation of the
51
Angela Carter, ‘The Bloody Chamber’, in The Bloody Chamber and Other Tales (London: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 7.
135
plague, [and] shot a man-eating tiger with her own hand’. (Carter, 7) She incarnates the spirited
woman warrior, a daring explorer who fights for her rights for self-determined life paths. Her
adventurous behaviour has set her on unconventional social trails. Thus she ‘gladly,
scandalously, defiantly beggared herself for love’ by marrying a poor soldier. (Carter, 7-8) The
‘eagle-featured, indomitable mother’ (Carter, 7) is also a ‘leonine’ fighter, with an independent
will and voice. Unfortunately, this powerful and critical voice is drowned by her young
daughter’s jubilant exclamations at the sight of her luxurious wedding gifts:
Are you sure, she’d said when they delivered the gigantic box that held the wedding dress he’d bought
me, wrapped up in tissue paper and red ribbon like a Christmas gift of crystallized fruit.
[…].
‘Are you sure you love him?’
‘I’m sure I want to marry him,’ I said. (Carter, 7)
While the mother does not let herself be blinded by the sumptuous gifts, the daughter has lost
her critical distance, being ‘drawn away’ as if ‘on a string, like a child’s toy’ towards the
matrimonial home: (Carter, 12)
This ring, the bloody bandage of rubies, the wardrobe of clothes from Poiret and Worth, his scent of
Russian leather – all had conspired to seduce me so utterly […]. (Carter, 12)
The Marquis’s economic power and impressive male stature have mesmerized the girl. She
mistakes her own vanity of becoming a ‘little Marquise’ with genuine emotions of love. (Carter,
9) By accepting the Marquis’s hand, she forfeits her own musical ambitions and supportive
maternal home in favour of her mercantile aspirations. The red ribbon with which the wedding
dress is wrapped, and the ‘bandage of rubies’ which he offers her as a present, visualize her
willing entanglement within his world. These new economic ribbons tie the daughter to the
Marquis while the mother is left abandoned: ‘linger[ing] over this torn ribbon’, ‘folding up and
putting away all my little relics, […].’ (Carter, 7) The original home of the mother and the bond
between the two women is replaced by her new marriage vow.
Yet, the Marquis’s world remains ambiguous. The girl refers to her new home as an ‘anchored,
castellated ocean liner’, which is ‘at home neither on the land nor on the water, a mysterious,
amphibious place’. (Carter, 13, 14) Once the tide sets in, the castle is ‘cut off by the land for
half a day’. (Carter, 13) The causeway, the arterial road connecting the building to the village
communities, continuously submerges and resurfaces. It is a hybrid space, without geographical
stability: ‘Sea; sand; a sky that melts into the sea – a landscape of misty pastels with a look
136
about it of being continuously on the point of melting.’ (Carter, 13) This feeling of instability,
of shifting tides and effervescent skies is also mirrored in the girl’s feeling of insecurity: ‘how
tenuous, I thought, might be my authority here!’ (Carter, 14) Instead of steadied post-liminal
wedlock, the young wife feels powerless in view of her husband’s extravagant castle. His palace
and her life within it still lies beyond the grasp of the girl’s imagination:
[…] that magic palace, the fairy castle whose walls were made of foam, that legendary habitation in which
he had been born. To which, one day, I might bear an heir. Our destination, my destiny. (Carter, 8)
Her private and public “arrivals” as a married woman remain vague. She has difficulties
envisioning her future as a wife, but also her husband’s elusive past. Even though she knows
that the Marquis was previously married to three wives, the circumstances of these failed
relations remain nebulous. Thus, the wedding ring; the ‘gold band’ also glitters dubiously on
her finger. However, this token of affection does not stand in for a wholesome union but carries
with it connotations of broken (life/marriage) circles. When her nurse asks her about the ring:
‘And did he give it to his other wives and have it back from them?’, (Carter, 9) she senses that
the ring, a symbol for her husband’s marriage vows, is not representative of “undying” love.
Furthermore, the colour red, symbolising romantic love and the continuation of the bloodline
through children, also uncannily symbolises the Marquis’s family’s blood-stained past. The red
chocker of rubies, once belonged to his grandmother, so it was ‘the family heirloom of one
woman who had escaped the blade’ of the guillotine during the French revolution. (Carter, 17)
The woman wore the ‘flashing crimson jewels […], bright as arterial blood’, around her neck,
looking ‘like an extraordinarily precious slit throat’, a ‘red ribbon like the memory of a wound’.
(Carter, 11) This valuable present is not a declaration of the Marquis’s devotion and a sign of
their family union but foreshadows her decapitation, a death which binds the young girl to the
“doomed” women of his past. In the end, her nocturnal train ride, her Siegeszug celebrating her
‘stunning marriage’ carries her away from a secure home, into matrimonial exile: ‘Into
marriage, into exile; I sensed it, I knew it - that, henceforth, I would always be lonely’. (Carter,
12)
While Angela Carter metaphorically defines her rewriting as ‘new wine in old bottles’, (ACFT,
96) using Perrault’s classic narrative as a template, Margaret Atwood transforms the Bluebeard
material more radically. Her story Bluebeard’s Egg, is set within a contemporary household.
The opening scene shows the protagonist Sally in her kitchen, looking out of the window while
137
‘waiting for the sauce she’s reducing to come to a simmer’. 52 She will serve her ‘sauce
suprême’, (Atwood, 167) a recipe which she has learned during one of her Gourmet Cookingevening classes, to her dinner guests tonight. Even though on the outset, the scene presents a
picture of tranquil domesticity, the boiling, bubbling sauce mirrors Sally’s psychological
condition. Sally’s thoughts are not at rest. Her eyes watchfully gaze out of the kitchen window,
inspecting her garden. The presence of her stepchildren’s old playhouse at the back of the
garden unnerves her:
She thinks drunks sleep in it, the men who live under the bridges down there, who occasionally wander
over the fence (which is broken down, from where they step on it) and up the hill, to emerge squinting
like moles into the light of Sally’s well-kept back lawn. (Atwood, 160)
The thought that strangers step onto her property worries her and consequently she wishes the
playhouse to be removed. She wants to protect her home, which she feels underlies her
supervision and control. The broken fence, however, proves that this home is not
hermeneutically sealed off from intruding forces. Still, Sally sees herself as the guardian and
master of the house. She especially feels superior to her husband, as her musing over his
character reveals:
He is just so stupid. Every time he gives her another piece of evidence, another tile that she can glue into
place in the vast mosaic of his stupidity she’s continually piecing together, she wants to hug him, and she
often does; and he is so stupid he can never figure out what for. (Atwood, 161)
Her husband Ed, whom she sometimes condescendingly refers to as ‘Edward bear, of little
brain’ with reference to Winnie-the Pooh, stands at the heart of her daily preoccupations.
(Atwood, 160) (Tatar, 157) She continuously observes him, like a detective. However, she only
collects the clues that she needs in order to generate a picture of their marriage in which she
assumes the dominant position. She believes Ed should feel lucky to have her partner; him being
the ‘child of luck’ that managed to ‘end up with the princess’. (Atwood, 161) However, this
self-elected princess feels a certain dread regarding her position. Personal insecurities underlie
her domineering attitude. In fact, Sally is aware that as an attractive heart surgeon, Ed is a
desirable man for other women, as she once tells Ed:
“[…]. They think you’re delicious. They’ll gobble you up. They’ll chew you into tiny pieces. There won’t
be anything left of you at all, only a stethoscope and a couple of shoelaces.” (Atwood, 171)
52
Margaret Atwood, ‘Bluebeard’s Egg’, in Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England, ed.
by Jack Zipes (New York: Routledge, 1986), p. 160.
138
Just like she herself ‘hunt[s] him down’, (Atwood, 161) Sally is aware of other women’s
flirtatious “attacks” on her husband. They try to ‘corner him on sofas, trap him in bay-windows
at cocktail parties’, telling him about their heart problems ‘right there in Sally’s living room’,
who is ‘[w]atching all this out of the corners of her eyes while serving the liqueurs’. (Atwood,
164, 165) Sally pretends not to be threatened by these performances, relying on her perception
of Ed as a simple, imbecile, hillbilly character. In fact, she pities him as the helpless prey that
she needs to save from the women’s clutching fangs. Here, the traditional gendered hunter-prey
dichotomy of the fairy tales is inversed. The man is associated with the weak body and is being
attacked by the lascivious women, while the woman mindfully engineers his rescue. Reingard
M. Nischik also points out that:
One of Atwood’s representative principles is inversion: thus, the male figure is sometimes reduced to his
body, whereas the female figure is associated with the mind. 53
Within their marriage, Sally presents herself as the master mind, feeling in control over her
husband and able to manipulate social situations, as her enjoyment of dinner parties illustrates:
What she likes best about these dinners though is setting the table, deciding who will sit where and, when
she’s feeling mischievous, even what they are likely to say. Then she can sit and listen to them say it.
Occasionally she prompts a little (Atwood, 167)
Sally feels confident about her knowledge of human nature, to the point where she actively
manipulates social situations. Her home is her incontestable arena. In her mind, she has a very
precise image of what she wants her home to look like for herself and how it should look to
other people. Thus when she wants to redecorate her house, she asks her friend Marylynn, an
interior designer, to help make her visions come true. She has charged Marylynn to redesign
the bay-windowed alcove off the living room, purchasing a nineteenth century keyhole desk.
This desk reminds Sally of a ‘1940’s advertisement for coffee’ in which ‘the husband was
standing behind the chair, leaning over, with a worshipful expression on his face’ looking at his
wife. (Atwood, 163) The desk and the house are to mirror Sally’s idealized vision of her
marriage in which she sees herself at the centre of Ed’s attention. Her attempt to recreate an
illusion of traditional wifedom and domesticity by refurnishing her house, points to Sally’s un-
53
Reingard M. Nischik, Engendering Genre: The Works of Margaret Atwood (The University of Ottowa Press, 2009), p. 7.
139
emancipated position. Indeed, Sally a well-educated, hard working woman contents herself
with being her incompetent boss’s helpmate:
Sally runs the show. This man gets the official credit for everything Sally does right, but the senior
executives in the company take Sally aside when no one is looking and tell her what a great gal she is and
what a whiz she is at holding up her end. […]. But she’s just fine where she is. Jokingly, she says she’s
reached her level of incompetence. She says she suffers from fear of success. […]. […], though she stops
short of behaving like a secretary: she doesn’t bring him coffee. (Atwood, 165, 166)
Even though she knows that she is being exploited, not receiving any official recognition for
her work at the trust company, she settles for an illusion of power. Unlike her husband, who is
a socially respected heart surgeon, Sally makes herself invisible, selling out her qualifications
with no aspirations to progress. She feels as if she has reached a secure place. Yet, she lives in
a self-complacent bubble, sticking to traditional gender roles and power hierarchies. What she
believes to be stability is in fact stagnation. Even the attendance of her different evening classes
does not arise from a genuine interest in the subject matters and her intellectual development,
instead ‘she may have begun taking the courses in the belief that this would make her more
interesting to Ed’. (Atwood, 167) Sally identifies herself through her husband’s eyes. She is not
the guardian over her home and Ed, but the incarcerator: imprisoning herself within restrictive
gender roles.
Her thoughts about Ed dominate her mind. Sally’s private and public worlds completely centre
on Ed. Especially Ed’s past continuously preoccupies Sally. Ed is a divorced man with two
failed marriages and two children, and Sally is an outsider in Ed’s home. Although the
relationship to her stepchildren is good, she does not represent an authority figure to them and
thus she often feels left out ‘as if the house wasn’t a place she lived in’. (Atwood, 172) Now
that the children have left the house, her study, which ‘used to be one of the kids’ bedrooms’,
has not yet been redecorated. (Atwood, 171) Sally has troubles claiming the home space for
herself. However, what unnerves her most is the fact that she does not know why and how Ed’s
marriages failed. Since Ed is unable to say what went wrong during the marriages, the ex-wives’
‘fates have always been vague to Sally’: (Atwood, 172)
But it’s also cause for anxiety: if he doesn’t know what happened with the other two, maybe the same
thing could be happening with her and he doesn’t know about that, either. […]. What if he wakes up one
day and decides that she isn’t the true bride after all, but the false one? Then she will be put into a barrel
stuck with nails (punishment frequently meted out to fairy-tale villains) and rolled downhill, endlessly,
while he is sitting in yet another bridal bed, drinking champagne. (Atwood, 162)
140
Sally’s growing insecurity about her husband’s past and repressed emotions is rendered via the
intertext of the classic Bluebeard narratives. ‘His inner life becomes a kind of secret chamber,
a space that Sally is unable to penetrate.’ (Tatar, 143) The blue-bearded master’s scimitar, with
which he cuts off the heads of his “false brides” is now metaphorically replaced by the sword
of Damocles hanging over Sally’s head, letting her live in fear of a sudden rejection. The threat
of becoming one of Ed’s divorced wives weighs Sally down. Like Bluebeard’s wives, she wants
to find out what is hidden behind the façade. Ed’s aloof and mysterious character alarms her
and drives her into an obsession:
But what is it she’s afraid of? She has what they call everything: Ed, their wonderful house on a ravine
lot, something she’s always wanted. (But the hill is jungly, and the house is made of ice. It’s held together
only by Sally, who sits in the middle of it, working on a puzzle. The puzzle is Ed. If she should ever solve
it, if she should ever fit the last cold splinter into place, the house will melt and flow away down the hill,
and then …) It’s a habit, fooling around with her head this way. It does no good. She knows that if she
could quit she’d be happier. She ought to be able to: she’s given up smoking. (Atwood, 174)
Sally keeps the vision of her “dream home” erect, by continuously obsessing about Ed. The
home is not stable but will melt away, once Sally gives up her subordinate position. Like the
ice house, Sally’s stable independent personality is dissolving: ‘Sometimes he makes her so
happy she thinks she’s about to burst; other times she thinks she’s about to burst anyway’.
(Atwood, 170) Sally has lost her points of reference within her marriage, and has become
dependent on solving the “riddle” of her husband. In the process of finding out about Ed’s inner
life, she loses herself. Finding the final ‘splinter’ has become her preoccupation, but at the same
time, she senses that this missing part threatens to pierce through her bubble, destroying her
self-fashioned marital Luftschloss, (castle in the air) unleashing unimaginable private horrors.
The comparative analysis reveals that the four renditions start off with similar portrayals of the
home. The parental homes are either seen as vulnerable or as having lost their governing power
in the sight of the conjugal home. Yet, these new matrimonial homes do not offer the women
stable post-liminal positions. The homes as well as the inhabitants are highly ambiguous.
141
On Liminal Journeys
Perrault’s heroine’s reaggregation into a post-liminal stage as a wife is only temporary, since
the matrimonial home does not offer her stability. She lives isolated from the rest of society,
since her friends and neighbours shun the house while her husband is present. Furthermore, the
fact that she is left in the dark about his previous wives’ fates is cause for anxiety. These blind
spots of her husband’s biography will, however, be illuminated during her unlicensed
expedition inside the house. Her curiosity will guide her along the castle’s dark corridors and
will push her to unlock the secret chamber. The imagery of the key with its twofold function of
unlocking and locking is significant throughout the tale. (Symbols, 564) The key is an
ambiguous instrument, representing dual aspects of power, both serving as a helpful or injurious
tool. First, the manifold keys which Bluebeard gives his wife can be perceived as a positive
sign of her new matrimonial position, as she has gained access to all his stored treasures:
“Here,” he said, “are the keys to my two large store rooms. Here are the ones for the gold and silver china
that is too good for everyday use. Here are the ones for my strongboxes, where my gold and silver are
kept. Here are the ones for the caskets where my jewels are stored. And finally, this is the passkey to all
the rooms in my mansion. (Bluebeard, 145)
Due to her wedding ring, she gets hold of his crowded key chain. Yet, the repetitious usage of
‘my’ does not leave any doubts about the fact that he is the master over all the possessions.
Even though she can partake in his wealth, she will always remain subordinate. The keys are
not a symbol of equal rights and freedom; instead they call attention to unequal power
structures. This is further exemplified by the last key which he is handing out:
As for this particular key, it is the key to the small room at the end of the long passage on the lower floor.
Open anything you want. Go anywhere you wish. But I absolutely forbid you to enter that little room, and
if you so much as open it a crack, there will be no limit to my anger. (Bluebeard, 145)
She is not a free wanderer on an equal territory, but is ordered to remain within prescribed
limits. While the husband is the active man, permitted to walk on whatever path he wishes and
soon after their marriage leaving his wife to pursue ‘some urgent business in the provinces’,
she is ordered to follow prescribed, narrow paths. (Bluebeard, 144) Those paths, which are
illuminated by his golden and silver treasures, are safe to walk on but she should not step off
them, since these paths will lead her towards darkness.
142
The key is not a tool with which to overcome boundaries, crossing thresholds in order to unite
within matrimony, but it is the symbolic representation of being cut off from any stability.
Inside the house, her status as wife is disconcerting. Instead of having “settled down” quietly,
she becomes more and more “unsettled”. She incarnates the wandering transgressor, so
overruled by her emotions that she is about to lose herself completely:
So tormented was she by her curiosity that, without stopping to think about how rude it was to leave her
friends, she raced down the little staircase so fast that more than once she thought she was going to break
her neck. (Bluebeard, 145)
Running down the staircase vividly symbolises the breaking of established order and
hierarchies. It is a subversive act, which uncannily foreshadows her ruin, her potential death by
decapitation. She wants to unearth, bring to light the dark secrets of the ‘lower floor’. Her
hopeful entrance into the blissful matrimonial hearth is being inverted by the boisterous
entrance to the alternative home’s destructive heart.
While Charles Perrault only depicts the liminal journey of one of Bluebeard’s unfortunate
wives, her two predecessors having already met their deadly fates, the Brothers Grimm in turn
recount the liminal journeys of three abducted sisters. The two older sisters quickly fall prey to
the sorcerer’s despotism, ending up dismembered in a bloody basin. Similar to the sorcerer, the
two sisters turn into erratic liminal entities. They are unable to control their steps, and the
intermediary position of having partly obeyed (carrying the egg with them at all times) and
party disobeyed his orders (not to enter the secret chamber) result in their demise. They have
failed the test which the sorcerer set out for them. They have given in to their emotions and
tainted the egg with their infidelity. The third and younger sister, however, will walk a steadier
path. Indeed, she breaks the pattern of the liminal and inverts the power relations by completely
disobeying the sorcerer:
The man went to fetch the third daughter, but she was clever and cunning. After handing over the keys
and egg, he went away, and she put the egg in a safe place. She explored the house and entered the
forbidden chamber. And what did she see! There in the basin were her two sisters, cruelly murdered and
chopped to pieces. But she set to work gathering all their body parts and put them in their proper places:
heads, torsos, arms, legs. When everything was in place, the pieces began to move and joined themselves
together. (Fitcher’s, 149)
The girl disobeys him by not carrying the egg with her and by entering the forbidden room.
This disobedience is however, a positive act of resistance. The girl does not fall prey to his
143
liminal reign. Unlike the sorcerer, the girl stays calm and her steps are stable. The fact that she
pieces together her sisters’ body parts marks her out as a stabilizing presence inside the liminal
home. She rescues her sisters and guides them back to their parents’ house. Thus, the third sister
epitomises the complete opposite of the sorcerer. Her journey through the liminal home
illustrates that she does not accept the wizard’s deadly chaotic reign and that she is able to turn
the power relations by relying on her clear senses and stable mind. After having passed his test,
the sorcerer wants her to be his bride, but the man no longer holds any power over the girl. She
has become a confident mistress over her own steps and now directs his. She orders him to
carry a basketful of gold to her parents’ house. Inside the basket, she has also hidden her two
sisters:
“Pick up the basket and go. But don’t you dare stop to rest along the way. I’ll be looking out my little
window, keeping an eye on you.”
[…].
The sorcerer lifted the basket onto his shoulders and set off with it. But it weighed so much that sweat
began to pour down his face. […] Whenever he stopped, the voice called out and he had to move along
until finally, gasping for breath and groaning, he carried the basket with the gold and the two girls in it
into their parent’s house. (Fitcher’s, 150)
Together, the three girls have tamed the wizard, who is now ‘walking back home very slowly’.
(Fitcher’s, 150) With the help of their younger sister, the two girls find a way back to a stable
home. Being once more inside the wizard’s basket represents a reversed liminal journey. The
girls are again reborn into their stable homes. In the end, the image of the liminal journey is
replaced by a strong family bond which carries the girls towards a safe homecoming.
Carter’s protagonist’s liminal journey is synonymous with an increasing self-alienation. In fact,
the relationship to the Marquis threatens the young pianist’s independent subjectivity.
Throughout her marriage, she conspicuously allows the man to objectify her. As Kathleen E.B.
Manley notes, ‘Carter’s protagonist appears to be the blank page upon which her husband will
inscribe his story of her’. 54 Indeed, the Marquis regards the inexperienced girl as one of his
“chefs-d’oeuvre”. As a self-appointed art connoisseur, he enumerates his most cherished
54
Kathleen E.B. Manley, ‘The Woman in Process in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”’, in Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale, ed. by
Danielle M. Roemer and Cristina Bacchilega (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), p. 84.
144
canvases from his private collection, deeming his young bride a suitable subject matter to join
the elite rank:
He had amply indulged his taste for the Symbolists, he told me with a glint of greed. There was Moreau’s
great portrait of his first wife, the famous Sacrificial Victim […]. […]. He broke off his catalogue of
treasures abruptly. Your thin white face, chérie; he said, as if he saw it for the first time. Your thin white
face, with its promise of debauchery only a connoisseur could detect. (Carter, 20)
The thought of having discovered this exquisite raw gem, a neophyte whom he can model
according to his dark lascivious desires, exhilarates the man. After having acquired all these
‘treasures’, the husband wants her to become part of his “collection”. His wealth and vigorous
male stature impress the young woman, up to the point where she feels flattered by this
objectification:
Married three times within my own brief lifetime to three different graces, now, as if to demonstrate the
eclecticism of his taste, he had invited me to join this gallery of beautiful women, I, the poor widow’s
child […]. […] I remained a little bemused that, after those others, he should now have chosen me.
(Carter, 10, 9)
She feels magnified through his inspecting eyes, his “knowledgeable”, “artistic” gaze which is
also ‘strangely magnified by the monocle lodged in his left eye’. (Carter, 11) Another of his
wedding gifts, ‘an early Flemish primitive of Saint Cecilia at her celestial organ’ (Carter, 14)
exemplifies the kind of part which he wants her to take on, namely that of the martyred virgin,
calling her ‘my little nun’ and ‘Baby’. (Carter, 17) She lets herself be framed by this authorial
figure into an image, an object of his desire, yet as Maria Tatar puts it: ‘To be the object of
desire is to be defined in the passive case.’ (Secrets, 117) Indeed, the young bride only exists
passively especially in terms of sexual relations. This becomes evident during the newly –weds’
“nights of love”:
And there lay the grand, hereditary matrimonial bed, itself the size, almost, of my little room at home,
[…]. […]. Our bed. And surrounded by so many mirrors! Mirrors on all the walls, in stately frames of
contorted gold, […]. […]. The young bride, who had become that multitude of girls I saw in the mirrors,
identical in their chic navy blue tailor-mades, […]. A maid had dealt with the furs. Henceforth, a maid
would deal with everything. ‘See,’ he said, gesturing towards those elegant girls. ‘I have acquired a whole
harem for myself!’ […]. And so my purchaser unwrapped his bargain. […]. A dozen husbands impaled a
dozen brides while the mewing gulls swung on invisible trapezes in the empty air outside. (Carter, 14,
15, 17)
145
‘His great ancestral bed’, (Carter, 8) the hopeful birthplace of a new generation, is now the
battleground on which she sees her “self” being invaded and fractured by her husband’s
objectifying lust. Inside the master’s bedroom the young bride is confronted with an unsettling
“transaction” and uneven “fight”. The mirrors once more reflect the mercantile marriage
interests of the protagonist. Perrault’s unfortunate heroine contemplated herself inside the
golden mirrors, and was so smitten by her own affluent reflection that she was blind to the dark
realities of being married to a blue-bearded villain. Later when she sees her own reflection
within the pools of blood of her predecessors, she eventually recognizes that she sold herself to
false imageries. Carter’s heroine also sees herself enhanced through the Marquis’ wealth.
Leaving her ‘little room’ behind and entering her husband’s castle as the new ‘châtelaine’, ‘the
Queen of the Sea’, (Carter, 13, 14) her husband has not only given her access to all his riches,
but has also made of her a mere ‘bargain’. The sexual act, the husband ‘impaling’ the bride, is
similar to a horrible crime: rape. Later the bride recognizes that ‘there is a striking resemblance
between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer’. (Carter, 27) Love-making does not
express a mutually positive devotion but a ‘sado-masochistic ritual in which the encounter of
two bodies, two individuals, is in fact merely a gendered, socio-economic interaction’. (PMFT,
123) Indeed, the consummation of the marriage confines both the man and the woman within
strict gender roles and unequal power relations. It is not a tender consummation but resembles
the rapacious carnivorous consummation of sacrificed defenceless flesh. Indeed, the husband
can be compared to the lecherous wolf figure of such classic fairy tales as Little Red Riding
Hood. When the girl wants to postpone the intercourse by referring to the ‘broad daylight’, the
Marquis’ reply echoes that of the wicked wolf: ‘All the better to see you.’ (Carter, 17) Once
again, the power relations are clearly imbalanced, the girl being the prey and the husband being
the predator. Carter further theorises on sexuality, in her remarkable literary analysis of the
Marquis de Sade’s pornographic writings reflecting contemporary gender theories. Both de
Sade’s writings as well as contemporary views on sexuality, expound dualistic belief systems.
Sexuality is often portrayed as unequal, as are the power relations between men and women.
Within such biased gender views, pain is accepted as an integral part of pleasure, or as Carter
remarks: ‘the gratification of sexuality involves the infliction and the tolerance of extreme
pain’. 55 However:
55
Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (London: Virago, 2013), p. 27.
146
Sexuality in this estranged form, becomes a denial of a basis of mutuality, of the acknowledgement of
equal rights to exist in the world, from which any durable form of human intercourse can spring. (Sadeian,
165)
The sexual act thus mirrors ‘traditional conception of gender, aggressive masculinity and
passive femininity. 56 This ‘lamb-and-tiger dichotomy’ of Sadeian pornography reflects ‘a sort
of distilled essence of the entrenched binaries of patriarchal gender relations’. (ACFT, 37)
Margaret Atwood also notes that:
For de Sade, women can escape sacrificial lambhood (the ‘natural’ condition of women, as exemplified
by Justine and defined by men) only by adopting tigerhood (the role of the predatory aggressor, the
‘natural’ role of men, as exemplified by Juliette and also defined by men.) (FM, 134)
Yet, according to Atwood, Angela Carter’s narrative explores the lamb-and-tiger dichotomy
and tries to investigate ways in which:
[…] the tiger and the lamb, or the tiger and lamb parts of the psyche, can reach some sort of
accommodation. […]. It is Carter’s contention that a certain amount of tigerishness may be necessary if
women are to achieve an independent as opposed to dependent existence; if they are to avoid – at the
extreme end of passivity – becoming meat. […]. Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either
gender, and in the same individual at different times. (FM, 136-137)
Carter’s narrative should make the readers become aware of the fact that gender roles are
constructed. Atwood notes that: ‘The nature of men is not fixed by Carter as inevitably
predatory, with females as their ‘natural’ prey.’ (FM, 137) However, both the Marquis and the
young bride play along these constructed and binary gender roles. Even though men and women
do not have to accept fixed gender positions, unfortunately both genders let themselves be tied
down to restrictive dichotomies by adopting misguided conventions. One of these conventions
is the painfully self-sacrificial romantic love. The wedding night scene epitomizes what Tatar
has referred to as ‘western myths that celebrate voluptuous self-annihilation through romantic
passion’. (Secrets, 117) However, Carter’s writing demonstrates that these myths and fantasies
are damaging. The young bride has also internalized some of these fantasies and becomes ‘the
willing victim, the image of the girl wrapped in white muslin and red ribbon’. (PMFT, 123)
According to Tatar, the young musician ‘becomes complicit in her own seduction by giving in
56
Stephen Benson, ‘Angela Carter and the Literary Märchen: A Review Essay’, in Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale, ed. by Danielle M.
Roemer and Cristina Bacchilega (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), p. 36.
147
to her masochistic desires’. 57 The unequal relationship between these two individuals arouses
new destructive and self-alienating feelings within the girl. The fact that she identifies the
Marquis as ‘a great man whose key ring was as crowded as that of a prison warder’, ‘the bunch
of keys […] jangl[ing] at every step like a curious musical instrument’, illustrates her willingly
subordinate position. (Carter, 19, 35) Indeed, the keys become an integral, yet dubious symbol
of their unequal marriage:
Then, slowly yet teasingly, as if he were giving a child a great mysterious treat, he took out a bunch of
keys from some interior hidey-hole in his jacket – key after key, a key, he said, for every lock in the
house. Keys of all kinds – huge, ancient things of black iron; others slender, delicate, almost baroque;
wafer-thin Yale keys for safes and boxes. […]. Keys, keys, keys. […]. One single key remained
unaccounted for on the ring […]. […]. He dangled the key tantalizingly above my head, out of reach of
my straining fingers; those bare red lips of his cracked sidelong in a smile. (Carter, 19, 20, 21)
On the one hand, the keys which he is offering her should give her the illusion of power and of
belonging to a meaningful marriage bond. On the other hand, the little key with which he is
teasing her illustrates his power and their sado-masochistic relationship. The repetitious usage
of keys and the word’s phonetic resemblance to kiss further underlines the eroticized power
relations. Like the performance of the Liebestod, which they went to see at the opera during
their engagement night, the Marquis’ and the girl’s love duet ‘carries a charge of deathly
passion’. (PMFT, 123) Yet, she willingly plays the sacrificial part within this show, this ‘game
of love and death’, craving for an encore: (Carter, 35-36)
[…], I felt a vague desolation that within me, now my female wound had healed, there had awoken a
certain queasy craving like the cravings of pregnant women for the taste of coal or chalk or tainted food,
for the renewal of his caresses. […]. I lay in our wide bed accompanied by, a sleepless companion, my
dark newborn curiosity. (Carter, 22)
The Marquis’ flesh and speech, have ensnarled the young woman within an ominous mixture
of passion and pain. She lusts for his cruel kisses and her mind becomes obsessed with the key,
the key to his heart. Yet, the path to his heart is actually the path to her doom. He controls her,
and like a puppet master has set her on her way to the castle’s heart, the bloody chamber.
57
Maria Tatar, Secrets beyond the Door: The story of Bluebeard and his Wives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 117.
148
Sally’s marriage to Ed is also synonymous of her liminal journey; her self-estrangement. In the
process of deciphering her husband’s inner world, she has lost her own. She has given up her
independent identity and replaced it with that of being Ed’s caretaking wife. She identifies
herself solely in terms of their partnership and believes to be Ed’s saviour. According to her,
she needs to rescue Ed from his ‘colossal and endearing thickness’: (Atwood, 161)
[…] if it weren’t for her, his blundering too-many-thumbs kindness would get him into all sorts of
quagmires, all sorts of sink-holes he’d never be able to get himself out of, and then he’d be done for.
(Atwood, 162)
Without her, she believes Ed would be lost. She sees herself in charge of Ed. However, Ed’s
‘stupidity’ also causes her pain: (Atwood, 161)
His obtuseness is a wall, within which he can go about his business, humming to himself, while Sally,
locked outside, must hack her way through the brambles with hardly so much as a transparent raincoat
between them and her skin. (Atwood, 161)
Atwood makes ironic use of pop culture fairy tale motives, prince charming fighting his way
through the rose bushes to rescue the dormant princess. Yet, in Sally’s case, it is not a
glamourous romanticized picture, but a hurtful one. Ed is seen as a free agent, roaming around
his shuttered inner world, while Sally’s position is dangerous and restricted, as she further
reflects:
In her inner world is Ed, like a doll within a Russian wooden doll, and in Ed is Ed’s inner world, which
she can’t get at. […]. Ed’s inner world is a forest, which looks something like the bottom part of their
ravine lot, but without the fence. He wanders around in there, among the trees, not heading in any
direction. Every once in a while he comes upon a strange-looking plant, a sickly plant choked with weeds
and briars. Ed kneels clears a space around it, does some pruning, a little skilful snipping and cutting,
props it up. The plant revives, flushes with health, sends out a grateful red blossom. Ed continues on his
way. […]. At set intervals an angel appears, bringing him food. It’s always meatloaf. That’s fine with Ed,
who hardly notices what he eats, but the angel is getting tired of being an angel. Now Sally begins thinking
about the angel: why are its wings frayed and dingy grey around the edges, why is it looking so withered
and frantic? This is where all Sally’s attempts to explore Ed’s inner world end up. (Atwood, 173)
Sally’s elaborate metaphorical description of their marriage reveals the power imbalances
between the two partners. While Ed is indeed the free agent, wandering around his inner world
without any fences, practising his medicine, Sally is the comforting angel, whose presence is
only vaguely remarked by Ed. Sally restricts herself within the role of the supportive wife, who
149
slowly loses her own support. She is unable to clearly define her position and remains deluded
about her own power. Throughout their relationship, she has built her life and self-esteem
around him. In order to appear more interesting to Ed and to divert herself from a growing
nervousness, she enrols in the Forms of Narrative Fiction evening class. While previous
evening classes were not able to really trigger Sally’s interest, ‘nothing enter[ing] her’,
(Atwood, 174) it is this particular literature class which offers Sally new as well as unsettling
insights into her own character. At first, she belittles her class on folk tales and the oral
tradition, in front of Ed. She does not want him to think of the class as too serious. Her
behaviour once again displays her insecurities and subordination. For her class, Sally is
assigned to write a five-page variant of Fitcher’s Bird. As part of the task, she has to choose a
point of view from which she wants to relate her modern realistic take on the story. Sally is
excited about the task and sets out with clear character types in mind. She uses her own
experiences of her marriage and Ed as an influence:
And Ed certainly isn’t the wizard; he’s nowhere near sinister enough. If Ed were the wizard, the room
would contain a forest, some ailing plants and feeble squirrels, and Ed himself, fixing them up, but then,
if it were Ed the room wouldn’t even be locked, and there would be no story. […]. Ed isn’t the Bluebeard:
Ed is the egg. Ed egg, blank and pristine and lovely. Stupid too. Boiled, probably. Sally smiles fondly.
(Atwood, 177, 178)
In the end, Sally decides to write her story from the point of view of the egg. She believes that
none of her other classmates will come up with such an ingenious idea. Her pleased
proclamation that ‘no one will think of the egg’ (Atwood, 178) also echoes the common
denouement of murder mysteries in which no one could foresee the identity of the actual killer.
To her, the egg is ‘the innocent and passive cause of so much misfortune’. (Atwood, 178) The
egg remains aloof from the horrid happenings around it. Therefore it presents itself as the ideal
object to characterize Ed, who also remains ‘a surface, one [Sally] has trouble getting beneath’.
(Atwood, 173) She does not characterize Ed as the villain, but again as the victim, the passive
“damsel in distress” whom she must rescue.
Sally’s ideas for her rewriting reflect once again her misguided perception of her husband and
of herself. The egg and Sally’s simplistic characterizations are prone to break. Ed might reveal
himself as the villain and the egg might not be a symbol of passivity but a ‘fertility symbol, [...]
something the world hatched out of’, (Atwood, 178) unleashing a new destructive force. The
Fitcher’s Bird characters seem removed from her reality. But she will realise that the people in
her life, the characters whom she thought she knew, and those she thought were closest to her,
150
are also removed from her self-fashioned reality. She will see that plot lines and character
sketches can change. So far, Sally has let herself be guided onto simplistic paths, but during her
conjugal journey she has lost herself and her clear perception. She will have to realise that there
are other paths available to her. The intertextual dialogue between her rewriting and the
Brothers Grimm’s Fitcher’s Bird, will guide her onto new paths towards a more complex yet
fuller understanding of herself and of the marriage plot.
In their representations of the heroines’ liminal journeys the narratives strongly diverge. The
classic tales demonstrate the nefarious consequences of women being tempted by their (sexual)
desires and curiosity. The women are “running free”, transgressing prescribed limits of
behaviour. Perrault’s heroine and the two older sisters in Fitcher’s Bird are liminal wanderers,
because they are moving out of their allotted power domains and exploring “forbidden” paths.
Their transgression is that of the unwise and the emotionally and sexually insecure. They have
been infidel and have stained the key and the egg. They gave in to the liminal space and thus
their fate is to die. The third sister’s disobedience and transgression is, however, seen as
positive, since she revolts against the sorcerer’s liminal reign. She does not let herself be
overruled by her emotions and does not blemish the egg. The post-modern rewritings invert this
depiction. They define liminality not as a state of detachment from socialising normative
structures (as “running wild”), but instead as a state of inhibition. Their protagonists are not
free wanderers. The women have subdued themselves to, and accepted oppressive gender roles.
Angela Carter’s and Margaret Atwood’s heroines are on their liminal journeys of selfestrangement, self-alienation. They have lost themselves inside the matrimonial homes, moving
further and further away from a clear understanding of their situation. In the case of Angela
Carter’s heroine, she is giving in to a hurtful conception of sexuality and love, based on unequal
gender dichotomies. In the case of Atwood, Sally is deluding herself and acting out internalised
gender codes and patterns.
151
Following in her bridal forerunners’ footsteps, the young aristocratic woman arrives in front of
her husband’s forbidden chamber. Gasping for breath and with trembling hands, she unlocks
the door. After her eyes have become accustomed to the darkness reigning inside the chamber,
all the windows being shuttered, she slowly begins to “see” clearly. She now perceives the room
in all its horridness, recognizing it as a torture chamber and sepulchre:
[…], she began to realize that the floor was covered with clotted blood and that the blood reflected the
bodies of several dead women hung up on the walls (these were all the women Bluebeard had married
and then murdered one after another). (Bluebeard, 145)
The murdered wives’ corpses, lined up on the wall epitomize the alternative, deadly family
portrait gallery of her husband. This pang of realization is further underscored by her dropping
the key into the pool of blood on the floor. The jingly sound of the key falling onto the red floor,
heralds the beginning of a new self-consciousness and understanding of the notion of “home”.
The original notion of the matrimonial home as a space of luxury and stable post-liminal
identity is fractured. She now recognizes the existence of alternative, dangerous “homes” and
her distorted self-perception as wife. She is not a “fortunate” wife, but the unfortunate victim
of her own misguided choices. Likewise, the husband is not only a “fortunate” man with an
unfortunate blue beard, but the culprit whose hands with their gold and silver rings are covered
in blood. The home has become a prison. She cannot escape her fate, doomed to become one
of the ghastly portraits in his gallery. The Sisyphean labour of scraping off the bloody marks
from the enchanted key visualizes her hopeless entrapment:
Having noticed that the key to the room was stained with blood, she wiped it two or three times, but the
blood would not come off at all. She tried to wash it off and even to scrub it with sand and grit. The blood
stain would not come off because the key was enchanted and nothing could clean it completely. When
you cleaned the stain from one side, it just returned on the other. (Bluebeard, 146)
Having made use of the key’s “empowering”, “unlocking” faculty, she will now suffer the key’s
other, “imprisoning” power. The fact that she (ab)used the key as an empowering tool to satisfy
her curiosity, to gain knowledge and in that way to disobey her husband, is seen as a
reprehensible trespass. By entering the forbidden chamber, she metaphorically broke the
husband’s and wife’s respective spheres of power. She disregarded her allotted, limited position
within patriarchal matrimony. The key with its uncanny magical power symbolises the
152
husband’s patriarchal power which the woman has improvidently undermined. Consequently,
the key is now holding her hostage allowing the husband to meter out his punishment and
demonstrate his ruling power over her:
“[…]. Well, madam, now that you have opened it, you can go right in and take your place beside the
ladies whom you saw there.” (Bluebeard, 146)
By wanting to discover the heart of the house, the secret chamber, she has undermined
traditional arrangements. Like Eve she has let herself be tempted by the tree of knowledge, and
as a consequence of her sinful disobedience, she must now accept her “fall”. Only one way
seems left to this “fallen woman”.
Through a joined effort, the three sisters of Fitcher’s Bird, have overturned the power relations
between themselves and the sorcerer. Having tricked the wizard into carrying the two older
sisters back home to the parental house, the younger sister now prepares her own escape from
the sorcerer’s limen home. She appropriates the sorcerer’s cunning ability of disguising. She
pretends to become his loving bride, ‘sweep[ing] the house all the way through’ in preparation
for the wedding celebration and now impatiently looking out of the attic window and waiting
for his return: (Fitcher’s 150)
She took a skull with grinning teeth, crowned it with jewels and a garland of flowers, carried it upstairs
and set it down at an attic window, facing out. (Fitcher’s, 150)
Yet, the imagery of the loving bride is not real; it is meant to divert the wizard and entrap him
inside the house, where he will eventually meet his rightful punishment. The mock imagery of
the bride with her garland of flowers does not stand for a positive marriage, but instead
symbolises death. Though it used to be the wizard who disguised himself, it is now the young
girl who creates false images in order to imprison him:
When everything was ready, she crawled into a barrel of honey, cut open a featherbed and rolled in the
feathers until she looked like a strange bird that not a soul would recognize. (Fitcher’s, 150)
The wizard is no longer the only one who is able to disguise himself. She has disguised herself
as a bird, a symbol of volatility. The escaped bride demonstrates that the wizard’s despotic reign
can be broken. She is able to turn the power relations and to find back to her home. The fact
that the wizard is walking back to his house very slowly, visualises the new power imbalance.
153
Through her disguise and the false image of the bride, she is able to delude the guests and the
wizard to enter the house. Here, the brothers and the relatives of the bride are already awaiting
their arrival, ready to set the house on fire:
They locked the doors to the house so that no one could escape. Then they set fire to it so that the sorcerer
and his crew burned to death. (Fitcher’s, 151)
The alternative false home, her prison has now transformed into a death trap for the wizard and
his guests. She proves herself to be a “worthy” opponent in his deadly liminal game. She does
not allow herself to be ruled over by her emotions and to spoil or to blood-stain her “egg” which
symbolises “virginity”. She manages to stand aloof and to recognise the virtuous, righteous
path.
Carter’s heroine’s misguided self-alienating voyage through the ‘country of marriage’ is
dramatically paralleled in the young woman’s tour of the exhibited corpses inside the bloody
chamber. (Carter, 7) The ‘door creak[ing] slowly back’, she begins to perceive the atrocious
interior of the room as well as the dark core of her marriage. (Carter, 27) The walk around the
chamber not only reveals the fate of his past wives, but also illuminates her own liminal voyage.
I fumbled for the matches in my pocket; what a dim, lugubrious light they gave! And yet, enough, oh,
more than enough, to see a room designed for desecration and some dark night of unimaginable lovers
whose embraces were annihilation. (Carter, 28)
Like the bridal corpses, she too has experienced the painful caresses of her lover. The horrible
room that she is about to discover bears some striking resemblance to her marriage bedroom.
The husband has filled both rooms with ‘an armful of the same lilies’, (Carter, 28) the
ambiguous symbol of innocence and virginity, but also the flower of intense unfulfilled painful
love. (Symbols, 608) On her marriage bed she has discovered an alternative self, and inside the
bloody chamber she discovers a destructive alternative home. Horror-struck she realises her
belonging to ‘the fated sisterhood of his wives’. (Carter, 29) Indeed, the individual deaths of
the wives mirror the girl’s personal unholy development from a young naïve young girl to a
bride complicit in her own destruction.
Thus, after having strangled his first wife, the opera singer, the Marquis has embalmed his
“princess” and laid her down into a catafalque. The skull of his second wife, a painter’s model,
154
has been hung up as an image of the “happy” bride: ‘it had been crowned with a wreath of white
roses, and a veil of lace, the final image of his bride.’ (Carter, 29) And finally, the third wife,
the Romanian countess has been ‘pierced, not by one but by a hundred spikes’ of an Iron
Maiden. (Carter, 29) These three horrible fates mirror the different stages of the heroine’s life
path. First she was the unaware “sleeping beauty” kissed awake and crowned as a “wealthy
bride”, a bride, turning into an “iron maiden”, a woman who craves for a hurtful passion. Her
gradual discovery of these horrific tableaux, generates the epiphany that she has willingly
walked down a dehumanising path, reducing herself to the incarnation of female types. This
path can only lead to yet another deadly image: the martyred musician. The narrative climax,
the moment of epiphany is underscored by her dropping the key in the pool of blood. At the
end of her tour, seeing the key lying in the blood of her predecessors she becomes aware that
with the acceptance of the wedding ring, she ‘had sold [her]self to this fate’. (Carter, 29) The
young musician will become the next display in his horrible gallery. In this alternative home,
in this bloody chamber she understands about her liminal journey, about the fact that she is an
accomplice in her own downfall by having accepted the lamb-tiger dichotomy. She now sees
that her game of love is in fact a game of power, in which she carelessly sided with the losing
party.
I knew I had behaved exactly according to his desires, had he not bought me so that I should do so? […].
The secret of Pandora’s box; but he had given me the box himself, knowing I must learn the secret. I had
played a game in which every move was governed by a destiny as oppressive and omnipotent as himself,
since that destiny was himself; and I had lost. (Carter, 34)
She now realises that she has let herself be abused as a pawn in a game, as the willing victim.
She has been a willing accomplice in his manoeuvres, which will now lead her to his finale.
However, having discovered this alternative home with its horrid family “portraits” and
predetermined lifelines, reminds her of her own family background. Thus she finds a new
interior strength by remembering her mother’s independent personality and the strong bond that
unites them:
Until that moment, this spoiled child did not know she had inherited nerves and a will from the mother
who had defied the yellow outlaws of Indo-China. My mother’s spirit drove me on, […]. (Carter, 28)
Her mother’s “portrait” helps the girl to remember her own tigerishness. As Atwood points out:
‘The mother is not only a tiger-shooter [but] she herself partakes of tigerhood.’ (FM, 139)
155
The girl now walks in her mother’s footsteps, realizing that she can be brave too. Her
development as an independent woman is ‘grounded in the mother daughter matrix’. (ACFT,
41) Her mother’s biography and character provides her with a role model to follow, in order to
find the way back to self-determined paths. One of these paths is the rediscovery of her creative
and regenerating passion, namely her music. Instead of the sado-masochistic passion which she
shared with her husband, and her identification with Saint Cecilia, the martyred musician, she
rediscovers her musical talent and embraces her identity as a passionate music student. As a
learning, questioning, examining, practising student, she is in the process of regaining a subject
position which she recognizes ‘as an alternative to her position as object in someone else’s
script’. (ACFT, 90) Recognising an inner (female) strength and a willingness to learn and
progress will move her out of the alternative destructive home and set her off on self-enhancing
independent paths.
The night of her dinner party, Sally’s keyhole desk arrives and is placed into the bay-windowed
alcove of the living room. It is the piece of furniture that Sally needed to act out her romantic
visions of her marriage. Satisfied with the purchase, she gets ready for her big night, painting
her nails with her nail polish: Nuit Magique. Slowly her husband’s work colleagues, their wives
and her friend Marylynn arrive. The sauce suprême, which has been simmering all day on the
stove, is ready to be served and praised by the guests. She is the perfect hostess, easily ‘mov[ing]
from guest to guest, smiling, making sure everything is in order’. (Atwood, 180) So far Sally’s
night is a great success with her being the picture-perfect housewife. Yet the lustre of this Nuit
Magique and of Sally’s dazzling performance suddenly wears off, when she stumbles across
Ed and Marylynn, in the alcove:
She [Sally] walks towards the alcove: they must have finished with the desk by now. But they haven’t,
they’re still in there. Marylynn is bending forward, one hand on the veneer. Ed is standing too close to
her, and as Sally comes up behind them she sees his left arm, held close to his side, the back of it pressed
against Marylynn, her shimmering upper thigh, her ass to be exact. Marylynn does not move away. It’s a
split second, and then Ed sees Sally and the hand is gone; there it is, on top of the desk, reaching for a
liqueur glass. (Atwood, 180-181)
The keyhole desk, the piece of furniture which fits so perfectly into the alcove, and which
should have served as one of the props in Sally’s idealized wifehood scenarios, has now become
the décor to Ed’s and Marylynn’s intimacy. The image, the “still-life” of Ed and Marylynn
156
standing next to the desk, is the last missing piece of the puzzle, which Sally dreaded to find.
Now the puzzle of Ed’s inner life is complete, all the evidence of him being unfaithful is lying
clearly under her eyes. Yet Sally is still unable to interpret this image correctly, partly because
Ed shows no signs of guilt, his face being ‘as level as ever, a flat plain with no signposts’,
(Atwood, 181) but also because she does not want to understand the scene presented to her:
Now she isn’t sure whether she really saw what she thought she saw. Even if she did, what does it mean?
Maybe it’s just that Ed, in a wayward intoxicated moment, put his hand on the nearest buttock, and
Marylynn refrained from a shriek or a flinch out of good breeding or the desire not to offend him. Things
like this have happened to Sally. Or it could mean something more sinister, a familiarity between them,
an understanding. If this is it, Sally has been wrong about Ed, for years, forever. Her version of Ed is not
something she’s perceived but something that’s been perpetrated on her, by Ed himself, for reasons of his
own. Possibly Ed is not stupid. Possibly he’s enormously clever. (Atwood, 181)
At first, Sally continues deluding herself by taking on the role of the passive audience. The fact
that in the past she accepted the indecent macho behaviour of men illustrates Sally’s unemancipated position. She tries to sugarcoat Ed’s behaviour as a case of unfortunate yet
harmless and common sexual harassment. However, Sally slowly begins to change positions.
She develops from a passive gullible onlooker into an examining critic. She not only starts
scrutinising and doubting the alcove-scene, but the entire spectacle of her marriage and in
particular her husband’s role in it. Over the years, his performance as ‘Edward Bear, of little
brain’ has been so convincing that Sally was never really able to look behind the mask of
‘darling Ed’. (Atwood, 160) In fact, he might not at all be the nutty professor-character, the
dumb ‘heart man’ but a scheming hard man. (Atwood, 164) Sally also begins to worry about
Ed’s impolite behaviour towards Mrs Rudge, their cleaning lady, ‘who has been with them for
three years’, and whom he keeps referring to as the woman, ‘and Mrs Bird before her, as though
they are interchangeable’. (Atwood, 182) This ill-mannered behaviour irritates Sally and
reminds her of Ed’s inappropriate coldness, while he tested a new medical facility on Sally.
Wanting to pick Ed up from the hospital in order to have dinner, Sally visits him in his cabinet.
There, Ed shows her his new heart x-raying facility. Out of pure interest, Sally wants him to
test the machine on her heart, so that she can see a picture of it. Even though it was her idea,
the experience has deeply marked Sally:
It was in a cramped, darkened room with an examining table in it. […]. Sally lay prone on the table,
feeling strangely naked. […]. ‘There,’ he said, and Sally turned her head. On the screen was a large grey
object, like a giant fig, paler in the middle, a dark line running down the centre. The sides moved in and
out; two wings fluttered in it, like an uncertain moth’s. ‘That’s it?’ said Sally dubiously. Her heart looked
157
so insubstantial, like a bag of gelatin, something that would melt, fade, disintegrate, if you squeezed it
even a little. […]. ‘That’s wonderful,’ she said. He seemed so distant, absorbed in his machine, taking the
measure of her heart, which was beating over there all by itself, detached from her, exposed and under
his control. Ed unwired her and she put on her clothes again, neutrally, as if he were actually a doctor.
Nevertheless this transaction, this whole room, was sexual in a way she didn’t quite understand; it was
clearly a dangerous place. […]. ‘Thank you,’ said Sally. (Atwood, 169-70)
The entire scene is reminiscent of the “bloody chamber”-scenes of the Bluebeard narratives.
Even though Sally’s life is not threatened, she partakes in a demeaning experience, an unequal
transaction of power. While lying on the examination table, the x-rays piercing through her
body, Ed remains unaffected by Sally’s emotions and continues fidgeting with his machine. In
this dark chamber, Sally sees her “dismembered” body, her heart beating on its own: her
loneliness. She has given herself away to Ed, yet under his cold practitioner’s gaze Sally’s heart
is reduced to a mere ‘interchangeable’ object. Yet, Sally partakes in this objectification; she
even thanks Ed, not knowing how to respond to her alienated position. Her dependency on Ed
and her inability to recognise herself as an independent subject, have blinded her to Ed’s
insensitiveness. She realises that she was not able to pierce through, to x-ray Ed’s shady
character, because that would also have meant critically analysing her own position. At the end
of the evening, it dawns on her that she has been living in a sham, parallel world: an alternative
home.
By discovering the bloody chambers, the existence of alternative homes, the women have
gained new insights into their own positions. The classics’ protagonists recognise and accept
their positions as limited. The women have to conform to patriarchal hierarchies and biased
gender roles. These classic heroines will have learned that negative transgressions will bring
them to a deadly alternative home. Carter’s and Atwood’s “leading ladies” become conscious
of the fact that they have surrendered their power. They are not “leading” independent lives.
However, the discovery of the bloody chamber’s horrifying “tableaux”: the dead wives, the
murderous husband, the cheating husband and the deceived wife, pushes them to open their
eyes to new self-images. There are still alternatives left.
158
Into Final Homes?
After having discovered the bloody chamber and realised that homes can become unstable if
allotted power domains are not respected, Perrault’s heroine becomes the epitome of passivity.
Her former hasty inquisitive steps have lost their drive and she falls back into immobility.
Bluebeard now has power over her path, telling her where she must go next, namely to her
death:
She threw herself at her husband’s feet, weeping and begging his pardon, with all the signs of genuine
regret for disobeying him. […]. “You must die, madam,” he declared, “and it will be right away.”
(Bluebeard, 146)
The distressed wife remains a passive victim, hoping for the forgiveness of her husband. Saying
her prayers might delay her execution, but the wife is also genuinely pious and repentant. The
woman is unable to change her fate single-handedly and relies on spiritual succour and the
assistance of her family. Furthermore, her geographical position within the castle manifests her
immobile position. She precariously lingers between life and death, the lower floor where her
husband’s scimitar awaits her and the attic where her sister looks out for the rescuing brothers.
Her marriage to Bluebeard has literally led her to a dead end. She is caught in the middle,
betwixt and between the “fall” and the rescue. This up/down dichotomy mirrors heaven and
hell. Hell being the cellar, the bloody chamber where she will become another of his
dismembered wives, and heaven being the attic, where the sister awaits the hopeful arrival of
the avenging brothers. The brothers’ approach to the castle is rendered dramatically:
Sister Anne went up to the top of the tower, and the poor distressed girl cried out to her from time to time:
“Anne, Sister Anne, do you see anyone coming?”
[…].
“I see nothing but the sun shining and the green grass growing.”
[…].
[…].
“I can see a great cloud of dust coming this way,” replied Sister Anne.
“Is it my brothers?”
“No, oh no, sister, it’s just a flock of sheep.”
[…].
“I see two horsemen coming this way, but they’re still far away,” she replied. (Bluebeard, 146-147)
159
The metaphor of the road is significant here. It symbolises the rescue of the heroine from the
limen space via her positive family lineage. Perrault allows the fallen heroine, the trespassing
Eve, to reaggregate into the stable family home. The ‘poor distressed’ woman needs the help
of positive patriarchal ties to re-establish the traditional order and hierarchies. Due to her strong
brothers, one a dragoon and one a musketeer, both powerful images of masculinity, the woman
escapes her alternative family home, the deadly lineage of her husband’s matrimonial pedigree:
Then, taking her by the hair with one hand and raising his cutlass with the other, he was about to chop off
her head. […]. Just at that moment there was such a loud pounding at the gate that Bluebeard stopped
short. The gate was opened, and two horsemen, swords in hand, dashed in and made straight for
Bluebeard. He realized that they were the brothers of his wife: the one a dragoon and the other a
musketeer. He fled instantly in an effort to escape. But the two brothers were so hot in pursuit that they
trapped him before he could get to the stairs. Thy plunged their swords through his body and left him for
dead. (Bluebeard, 147)
The crescendo of the final scene vividly demonstrates the brothers’ superiority over the
villainous husband. Unlike the cutlass, the brothers’ swords are positive images of male combat
and prowess. They are able to “cut down” the fleeing coward’s life path; barring his passage up
the stairs, his social ascension. With the help of her brothers, the widow is now able to
reaggregate back into meaningful familiar ties. The fact that Bluebeard has left no heirs, is yet
another proof of his “infertile” marriage bonds, and makes the widow mistress over his entire
estate. In the end, she reaffirms her positive family ties by ‘devot[ing] a portion of it [the money]
to arranging a marriage between her sister Anne and a young gentleman with whom she had
been in love for a long time.’ (Bluebeard, 147) She has now an altered perception of the notion
of home. She does not use the money blindly but supports her family. She makes intelligent use
of the money, ‘combining ‘noble generosity and “bourgeois” commercial sense’. (GFTT, 945)
Thus, she uses it ‘to buy commissions for her two brothers’. (Bluebeard, 147) And finally the
rest of the money serves as her dowry ‘to marry herself to a very worthy man, who banished
the memory of the miserable days she had spent with Bluebeard.’ (Bluebeard, 147-148)
Unlike Perrault’s passive heroine, the Grimms’ cunning third sister has successfully fled the
liminal home and found a way back to her parents’ house. In the end she has managed to rescue
herself and to enrich her family. The sorcerer’s liminal home is completely destroyed by her
retaliating male relatives. The story celebrates the girl’s reaggregation to the safety of her
160
domestic home. However, this reaggregation was only possible due to the girl’s “correct”
behaviour. She did not give in to the liminal condition and stained her egg, her virginity. Instead,
she was able to flee the liminal home by disguising herself as a liminal being; a bird, and thus
fooling the wizard. The notion of home has changed for the heroine. She now knows that homes
are vulnerable. Girls should not carelessly open up their doors. It is vital to protect their
thresholds against disguised dangers. Furthermore, homes can become liminal under the erratic
rule of false husbands; false patriarchs. The wizard is not an image of stabilising patriarchal
power. He lures the girls into transgression. Within his alternative home, the liminal space of
the false husband, the girls’ duty is to remain steadfast. They should not let themselves be
tempted into transgression and let their emotions run wild too. They need to reason clearly and
follow “proper” lines of conduct. Then they will be able to find a way out of the liminal space.
In the end, the liminal space, the alternative home will be destroyed by the “proper” family, the
“true” male caretakers. Even though the Brothers Grimm do not marry their heroine off to
another husband, the happy ending of the tale illustrates how important a stable (matrimonial)
home with stable inhabitants is.
The impact of the key onto the bloody floor of the chamber startles Carter’s protagonist into a
new consciousness. The young musician becomes aware of the fact that the marital home and
herself are subjected to her husband’s dominance. In order to escape his power, she concludes
that inside the limen house, the ‘music room seem[s] the safest place’. (Carter, 30) Through
her music, or in other words, the musical education which her mother provided her with, the
girl tries to regain a subject position:
I opened the lid of the piano; perhaps I thought my own particular magic might help me, now, that I could
create a pentacle out of music that would keep me from harm for, if my music had first ensnared him,
then might it not also give me the power to free myself from him? […]. I told myself, if I played them all
through without a single mistake – then the morning would find me once more a virgin. (Carter, 31)
By playing her piano songs, the woman is creating a space of her own, hoping that her ‘magic’
might cure her abused mind and body. Finding her way back to a virginal state is synonymous
with regaining her freedom and subject position. The melodies are her recovered independent
“voice”. A voice, which will help her tie a positive human bond. It is the young blind pianotuner who is drawn to her music. Mesmerized by her fine touch, the young man’s white cane
falls onto the floor and she discovers an alternative audience. Instead of the domineering
161
husband, who wants to possess, her ‘white gift of music’, (Carter, 36) the piano-tuner is a
pleasant supporter:
He had the most touchingly ingenious smile. […].My head throbbed. To see him, in his lovely, blind
humanity, seemed to hurt me very piercingly, somewhere inside my breast; his figure blurred, the room
swayed about me. After the dreadful revelation of that bloody chamber, it was his tender look that made
me faint. (Carter, 32)
Seeing the blind piano-tuner, makes her painfully aware of the fact that she has been blinded
by a false picture of “masculinity”. The young man’s ‘slight, stooping figure’ and his tender
blind gaze stand in complete contrast to the Marquis’ ‘enormous’ figure and ‘his eyes, dark and
motionless as those eyes the ancient Egyptians painted upon their sarcophagi’. (Carter, 12, 31)
The piano-tuner sees her ‘clearly with his heart’, (Carter, 41) and her heart is being pierced not
by the pangs of a destructive passion but by a curative emotion: love
He took my hand; he pressed his arms about me. […], I felt a great strength flow into me from his touch.
(Carter, 32)
Unlike a sado-masochistic relationship, in which she loses her subject position and runs the risk
of being dismembered, the encounter with the piano-tuner builds her up. The fact that she refers
to him as her ‘lover’, is a sign of a warm and respectful mutual recognition as equal subjects
instead of an imbalanced and harmful sexual transaction. Furthermore, the piano-tuner
positively reconnects the girl with the outside world. Being ‘a blacksmith’s son from the village
across the causeway’ and ‘his speech ha[ving] the rhythms of the countryside, the rhythms of
the tides’, makes the piano-tuner a symbol of appeasing stability. (Carter, 23, 32) Indeed, the
symbolism of the smithy is often linked to the healing of the sick. (Symbols, 97) The act of
tuning a piano also refers to a regulative and acoustically enhancing force. The piano-tuner
amends the discordant sounds and allows the instrument to unfold its full acoustic potential.
The fact that he actually has a tangible past and is referred to by a proper name, Jean-Yves,
stands in even greater contrast with the mysterious husband figure. The young heroine also
begins to perceive herself differently. She no longer refers to herself as the little marquise or
the châtelaine, she thinks of herself once more as ‘my mother’s daughter’. (Carter, 31) She also
feels far more at ease in her unaffected ‘old serge skirt and flannel blouse, [her] costume of a
student, […] than in any of [her] fine new clothes’. (Carter, 23) The piano-tuner and the
musician give each other guidance and together they find a way out of the ‘castle of murder’.
(Carter, 33) The metaphor ‘let the blind lead the blind’ which the Marquis mockingly employs
162
to characterise this new relationship, is indeed quite fitting. The girl thus tells Jean-Yves that
she has been the blind puppet which unthinkingly helped the Marquis stage his scripted
performance:
‘You disobeyed him,’ he said. […].
‘I only did what he knew I would.’
‘Like Eve,’ he said. (Carter, 37-38)
She has let herself be cast into the role of Eve with its destructive “fall-narrative”. The story of
Eve, the story of a knowledge-seeking woman who brought misery onto humankind because of
her thoughtless transgression, still represents a powerful transmitter of ‘gender asymmetries’.
(Secrets, 2) According to Tatar, some of the dominant narratives of western cultures display
gender inequalities, to the detriment of both men and women. Even though these narratives
might have taken on a dominant position on our cultures’ palimpsests; they can still be
questioned and juxtaposed to other narrative lines. Like the performance of the Liebestod, the
Marquis’ favourite opera, characters, plotlines, and entire narratives can change. The young
bride, her mother and the piano-tuner resist the Marquis’ version of the Liebestod and start
acting out a different self-determined ending for their characters. Thus, together, their actions
and voices re-orchestrate the deadly scenario:
My lover kissed me, he took my hand. He would come with me if I would lead him. Courage. When I
thought of courage, I thought of my mother. Then I saw a muscle in my lover’s face quiver. ‘Hoofbeats!’
he said. I cast one last, desperate glance from the window and, like a miracle, I saw a horse and rider […].
A rider, her black skirts tucked up around her waist so she could ride hard and fast, a crazy, magnificent
horsewoman in widow’s weeds. As the telephone rang again. ‘Am I to wait all morning?’ […]. Slowly,
slowly, one foot before the other, I crossed the cobbles. The longer I dawdled over my execution, the
more time it gave the avenging angel to descend… […]. ‘Such a pretty neck’, he said […]. […]. The
whizz of that heavy sword. And – a great battering and pounding at the gate, the jangling of the bell, the
frenzied neighing of a horse! The unholy silence of the place shattered in an instant. The blade did not
descend, the necklace did not sever, my head did not roll. For, for an instant, the beast wavered in his
stroke, a sufficient split second of astonished indecision to let me spring upright and dart to the assistance
of my lover as he struggled sightlessly with the great bolts that kept her out. […].The Marquis stood
transfixed, utterly dazed, at a loss. It must have been as if he had seen watching his beloved Tristan for
the twelfth, the thirteenth time and Tristan stirred, then leapt from his bier in the last act […]. The puppet
master, open-mouthed, wide-eyed, impotent at the last, saw his dolls break free of their strings, abandon
the rituals he had ordained for them since time began and start to live for themselves; the king, aghast,
witnesses the revolt of his pawns. […]. The heavy, bearded figure roared out aloud, braying with fury,
and, wielding the honourable sword as if it were a matter of death or glory, charged us, all three. […].
163
Now without a moment’s hesitation, she raised my father’s gun, took aim and put a single, irreproachable
bullet through my husband’s head. (Carter, 38-39)
In a mutual effort, the three players have changed the traditional score of the Marquis’
Liebestod. The sonorous notes of the Marquis’ commanding roars and the swishing sound of
his sword are drowned by the ‘hopeful note’ of the hoofbeats, the heroine’s slow tiptoeing
footsteps, the ‘great battering and pounding at the gate’, until the final note: the rescuing
gunshot of the mother. The Marquis’ leading part has been erased from the scene. The three
players have successfully demonstrated that scores, characters and plotlines are not static but
can be re-appropriated and performed differently.
They can now tune into the coda, the final passage of their own piece. In the aftermath of their
performance, they ‘lead a quiet life’. (Carter, 40) The mother, the daughter and Jean-Yves now
live together in the maternal house. The young widow willingly ‘embrace[s] the marriage values
of her mother, or perhaps even carr[ies] her mother’s defiant refusal to marry for money a step
further by not marrying at all.’ (ACFT, 97) The money which she has inherited passes over to
charities and is used to transform the doomed castle into a school for the blinds. The young
musician builds up a career of her own and runs a little music school. The fact that she relies
on her own talents to make a living, and her transformation from a student into a teacher,
characterises her reaggregation as an emancipated, knowledgeable person. She is no longer
interested in acquiring wealth and occupying a dashing social position, instead she now
cherishes her freedom. Thus, reaggregation does not mean finding a final matrimonial home,
but finding a union and inner stability in oneself. She does not want to fit into artificial private
and public templates anymore, knowing that these are “mehr Schein als Sein”. She is now
walking her own path and not minding the Schein of normative social prescriptions. Together
as a family, she; her mother and Jean-Yves live outside the ‘box’:
Sometimes we can even afford to go to the Opéra, though never to sit in a box, of course. We know we
are the source of many whisperings and much gossip but the three of us know the truth of it and mere
chatter can never harm us. (Carter, 40)
The three family members do not need the approving looks of other people. People whisper and
chatter about the “indecent” break-up and the “improper” family union, since the penniless
lovers live out of wedlock. Yet these normative voices are counteracted by the girl’s new voice.
She has ‘escape[d] the tale patriarchy wished to tell of her’, and is now able to recount her own
story from a strong subject position. (ACFT, 91, 92) In the end, the young girl, the daughter,
164
the bride, the wife, the marquise, the châtelaine, the widow, the lover has become the narrator
with a distinct “voice”.
After her guests have left, Sally, the attentive host of the “perfect” dinner party is left not only
with an unsettling suspicion regarding her husband and best friend’s affair, but also with the
cleaning up:
Sally concentrates on the scraping: dollops of sauce supreme slide into the plastic bag, shreds of lettuce,
rice, congealed and lumpy. What is left of her afternoon. […]. Ed has gone to bed. Sally roams the house,
fidgeting with the debris left by the party. […]. After a while she realizes that she’s down on her knees,
looking under a chair, and she’s forgotten what for.’ (Atwood, 182)
The dazzling Cinderella princess transforms into the Cinderpants, the liminal persona who
aimlessly wanders around the house. She has lost her enchanted visions of herself as the “true
bride” and is now faced with the ‘debris’ of her shattered self-image and marriage. The
congealed lumps of sauce supreme visualise Sally’s dream-life gone bad. Throughout her
marriage she has been paralyzed within artificial role models and hierarchical power structures.
These internalised structures have prevented her from gaining a strong independent posture
within the home, as her mechanical kneeling down illustrates. She has continuously
misinterpreted her own part and that of Ed’s. While the character of ‘Edward Bear’, is becoming
more and more sinister, Sally’s is becoming more vulnerable. (PMFT, 115) She goes upstairs
and wipes off her make-up, the mask of the happy pleasing wife. Taking off this veil with which
she has embellished herself and everything else makes her vulnerable, but also allows her to
confront repressed dangers and alternative thoughts. As she is lying in her marriage bed on the
threshold between dream and reality, oblivion and consciousness, the story of Fitcher’s Bird
reverberates in her mind:
But now she’s seeing the egg, which is not small and cold and white and inert but larger than a real egg
and golden pink, resting in a nest of brambles, glowing softly as though there’s something red and hot
inside it. It’s almost pulsing; Sally is afraid of it. As she looks it darkens: rose-red crimson. This is
something the story left out, Sally thinks: the egg is alive, and one day it will hatch. But what will come
out of it? (Atwood, 182)
The egg, as a symbol of creation and ‘holding the seed from which manifestation will spring’,
(Symbols, 337) metaphorically reflects Sally’s ebullient inner life. Although she thought of the
egg as an innocent prop, she now realises that she misinterpreted the story and her own
165
marriage. She stands on the brink to a new revelation of herself as the “false bride”. (PMFT,
114) The Brothers Grimm’s text has sparked a new powerful insight and has set her loose on a
critical self-discovering journey, a rebirth to a new subject position. According to Tatar:
“Fitcher’s Bird” becomes the text that challenges Sally to consider the role that she plays in her marriage
and to reflect on how her own story conforms to or deviates from the terms of the old tale. Once Sally is
absorbed in the exercise, there is no turning back. “Fitcher’s Bird” becomes the text that goads her into
knowledge and that obliges her to confront anxieties that manifest themselves as the “dread that seeps
into things.” (Secrets, p. 112)
Atwood’s ending shows that Fitcher’s Bird, the intertext, is still vivid and enters into an
elucidating dialogue with the protagonist’s story. This intertextuality not only challenges Sally
to consider her own story but also challenges us, the readers, since we too ‘enter into this selfreflexive process, producing our own versions of “Bluebeard” as we work through Sally’s rescripting of [the] story’. (Secrets, 114) Thus, this particular intertextuality demonstrates that old
narratives remain alive and can drive the readers onto distinct individual interpretative roads.
Sally is a reader too and as such, she remains a liminal wanderer. She is not the reaggregated
post-liminal wife, but her identity is complex and stands within a continuous interplay of
different narratives, which she has to interpret for herself and which will guide her towards an
independent reflective subjectivity. Sally stands at the beginning of these critical examinations,
the journeys on her independent life paths. Yet the story of Fitcher’s Bird has given her a ‘key’
with which to open the door onto these new paths, as Tatar observes:
Sally appropriates the story of Bluebeard, using it as a key to open the door to realities that – however
painful, disruptive, and disturbing – have an emancipatory potential. As a reader of “Fitcher’s Bird,” she
knows that the clever, cunning heroine – especially the third in a series of wives – can rescue herself
rather than await rescue from distant brothers. And if she does not yet know for certain how her life will
play itself out against the folktale, she knows that she does not have to repeat the old story. In rewriting
“Fitcher’s Bird,” she becomes aware of the way in which the old stories can be redesigned to produce
new endings that will lead to fresh beginnings (Secrets, 114)
The open ending of Sally’s Nuit Magique, the start of her self-discovering journeys towards a
subject position, is refreshing. She does not need to fight a wife-killing husband, but she needs
to fight her own internalised biased positions and recognise that narratives can change. This
‘initiation is not accomplished, but is in process.’ (PMFT, 115) The pulsing egg is about to
break, just like closed chambers are unlocked and traditional power structures broken down. As
166
readers we do not know how Sally will accomplish her five-page rewriting of Fitcher’s Bird,
but we remain hopeful that she will find an independent narrative voice.
After her brothers’ rescue, Perrault’s delicate heroine reaggregates into patriarchal society. The
final home is once again stabilised, and the woman has learned her lesson. She apprehends that
her curious and imaginative behaviour was sinful and that she must exercise self-control.
(Subversion, 40) The two appended morals to the tale, which as Bacchilega remarks look back
nostalgically ‘to a time of innocence and absolute male power’, reiterate the importance of
women’s humility and self-discipline. (PMFT, 105) Instead of critically commenting on the
husband’s serial murders, the morals explicitly condemn female curiosity and downplay the
importance of knowledge for women. (ACFT, 99) This regulative outlook might stem from a
real ongoing fear of men about possible socio-political changes once women attain their ranks,
as Hannon notes:
Perceived as a threat to order, women’s intellectual aspirations would presumably enable them to assume
public functions traditionally exercised by men. (GFTT, 945)
Thus, in the end, the avenging brothers, not only save the woman from the fangs of a murderous
husband, but also re-establish the family lineage and order, and therefore, social order. The
woman is no longer a liminal wanderer, but keeps to her assigned familial and social spheres.
Even though the Brothers Grimm’s tale does not end with an account of the sisters’ happy
marriages, nonetheless, the tale illustrates the girls’ reaggregation into stable private and social
positions. In the future, they will not leave their house’s threshold unguarded and lose
themselves within liminal spaces. Now they know that giving away to their emotions will
“brand” them, like the bloody mark on the egg, and prompt their downfall. They have reached
a fuller understanding of their positions at the end of their story. The sorcerer’s liminal home is
burned down by the male relatives and the notion of home is again stable.
Angela Carter’s protagonist does not reaggregate into post-liminal stability. Her matrimonial
horror trip has given her new insights into her position; however, the fact that she narrates her
own story shows that she is continuously trying to come to grips with her past, and exploring
her subject position. She has gained an inner strength and is in the process of becoming an
independent subject. Her story aims to ‘break the spell of narratives that glamorize selfimmolating passion’. (Secrets, 119) She has learned that ‘women can be complicit with what
167
captivates and victimizes them’. (PMFT, 129) She does not let herself be objectified anymore,
but has gained an emotional stability through her mother and Jean-Yves. ‘Both matriarchal
filiation and reciprocal desire […] triumph over perversity’. (Milne, 25) However, this
emotional stability is not anchored within a socially accepted home. Indeed, she has become a
sceptic of traditional matrimonial paths and does not wish to marry at all, thus living outside
traditional conventions and set social norms. She rejects narrow, prescriptive role models and
she slowly becomes aware of her new possibilities as an independent subject. Her retelling of
her story is a first step in this endeavour. She will further continue to explore her narrative voice
and discover new storylines. She is the author of her own paths, moving out of victimizing
plots. (PMFT, 129) Restrictive narratives of the “branded, fallen woman” are not final, since
there are other alternative narratives that can lead the individual on to new emancipatory
discoveries.
Finally Atwood’s protagonist, the ignorant, cheated wife, is also gaining new emancipatory
knowledge about herself. Sally is in the process of discovering her own narrative voice. She
tries to come to terms with the Grimms’ Fitcher’s Bird. This intertext introduces Sally to
powerful revelations about her own life. Tatar notes that:
Atwood suggests that engagement with our cultural stories can open our eyes to realities that – however
disruptive, painful, and disturbing – are not without a liberating potential. Hence the story ends on an
ambiguous note, with a sense of anxiety but also with the possibility of hope about what will hatch from
the “almost pulsing” egg of Sally’s dream vision. (Tatar, 144)
Thus, engaging with the intertext and other cultural stories, such as Eve and Pandora, can set
us onto new paths. While we read them we adopt the point of view of the protagonist, we
identify with the protagonist, but we also ‘adapt the story, producing a new text that conflates
the words on the page with the experience of real life’. (Secrets, 112) These two post-modern
variations and their metaphors of the road are liberating. Since they show that while we are
reading, both the protagonist and we as readers enter into this self-reflexive process, producing
our own versions of Bluebeard as we work through Sally’s re-scripting of the story. (Secrets,
114) They show that the lines coexisting on the palimpsest are positive, and that all sorts of
intertexts, both positive and negative, can help us to position ourselves. Thus their narratives
and the conception of the metaphorical journey of the protagonists echo the constructivist view
on metaphor since the metaphorical journey does not really end. Her subject position is still
under construction, as she has not reached a final post-liminal position. She is still trying to
come to terms with her own story, as her perception of the mark of shame on her forehead
168
indicates. She still needs to reflect on what has happened. Her protagonist’s character
development, her metaphorical journey from self-alienation to a looming and possible
emancipation, does not result in final endings nor a teleological conclusion. In contrast, the
classic metaphor, just like the road, has led the protagonist and the reader to a clear resolution
with an underlying message and moral. The protagonists are led to stable homes and
destinations, and so are the readers. The binary oppositions between stable and unstable, good
and bad, are not broken down but accentuated. The traditional power relations are not
challenged. The classic heroines are out of trouble, while the post-modern protagonists are still
facing the troubling part of coming to terms with their own narratives and those of “branded”
women such as Eve and Pandora: ‘No paint nor powder, no matter how thick or white, can
mask that red mark on my forehead; […].’ (Carter, 41) The women are branded, marked,
scarred, just like the palimpsest has been scarred, but these scars can be opposed, counteracted
by proposing new paths. As Angela Carter herself said, it is important to engage with the past
narratives, to confront them actively, in order to reconfigure the future:
That I and many other women should go looking through the books for fairy-tale heroines is a version of
the same process - a wish to validate my claim to a fair share of the future by staking my claim to my
share of the past. 58 (PMFT, 128)
Carter’s statement extends both the significance and the relevance of the palimpsest, which now
becomes a record of intertwined (past) narrative, bridging past, present and future, and opening
up new roads towards resistance:
Disobeying orders, violating bans, and intruding on prohibited terrain may get literary characters into
trouble, but these actions also open the gateway to adventure, taking figures on enchanted voyages of
discovery. Wonder inevitably produces the desire to wander[,] [to] experience an exhilarating sense of
liberation and [to] discover new domains for action through transgression. (Secrets, 1)
The Palimpsest shows how exciting it is to go about things differently, ‘it tells about the
seductive power of border crossing’, (Secrets, 1) or as J.R.R. Tolkien professes: The ‘Locked
Door’ represents an ‘eternal Temptation’. 59
58
Angela Carter ‘Introduction’, in The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, ed. by Angela Carter (London: Virago Press, 2003), p. xvi.
59
J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘On Fairy-Stories’, in The Tolkien Reader, ed. by Peter S. Beagle (New York: Ballantine, 1966), p. 32.
169
171
CON CLU SION – Arrivals
This analysis has established the existence of two divergent strands of fairy tale writing and
opened up a multitude of bypasses and crossroads. Though both strands rely on Van Gennep’s
and Turner’s conception of rites of passage, their take on the function of initiatory journeys
differs strongly in relation to the accessibility of single true meanings. This particular aspect
radically affects the metaphor of the road and its mechanisms: for the classics, the liminal quest
generates a true arrival, a full reaggregation and a reinforcement of prevailing social structures;
the post-modern rewritings, on the other hand, free the metaphor from the yoke of direct
signification, and open up new readings and new paths. Red caps, glass slippers and bloody
keys are some of the indispensable signposts along our investigative road. However, in the end,
the comparative study of the selected tale types has yielded a complex narrative map with
numerous markers for the literary investigator to pursue.
The three tale types’ numerous variations form palimpsests in which textual layers engage in
an implicit dialogue. The palimpsests of the Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Bluebeard
narratives are still dominated by the classic renditions of Charles Perrault and the Brothers
Grimm, and in their versions of the tale, the metaphor of the road and the girls’ initiatory
journeys ease them into a world of clearly defined hierarchies and gender roles. Starting out
from initial homes, these girls’ turbulent journeys are seen as completed once they have settled
down in a secure home that simultaneously defines their protected position within traditional
passive femininity. If they do not complete their arrivals, their full socialisation, by settling into
these final homes, it will be due to their own misguided actions: they are considered fallen
because they failed to heed the guiding authoritative voices. If they do make it, however, they
have learned their lesson and so has the reader, presumably, whether the central message of the
tale is spelled out in the final moral or not. The classic stories take the reader by the hand and
guide them as they explore the teleological and moralising resolutions of the metaphor of the
road. Once the reading is completed, the book can be safely shut, left on the shelf, while the
tales’ protagonists (and the reader) are empowered to live happily ever after through the
knowledge they have gained: the “correct” path is also the safe path. The story and the lesson
are over. The End.
Yet, this normative incarnation of the metaphor of the road does not go unchallenged: it is
merely one line of reading out of a multitude. The post-modern rewritings of the tales propose
a very different version of the metaphor: they reconfigure the palimpsest and demonstrate that
173
seemingly fixed stances can fade and that many narrative lines may coexist on the parchment.
The palimpsest, like the cultures and traditions it brings to life, is changeable and polyphonous.
Even though, the metaphor of the road in classic narratives and the initiation into biased gender
roles and social models appear closed, the post-modern rewritings shatter these certainties: the
end is also a new beginning; arrivals are also new departures. The ending is not the ending in
more ways than one. The post-modern heroines may complete the first stage of their
transformation at the end, but the reading too undergoes a rebirth, or a new genesis: the contrast
between the classic and revisited versions forces the reader back into the narrative and onto a
new journey of (self)-discovery. To quote Lisel’s wolfish grandmother in Lee’s Wolfland:
‘Nothing dies, it simply transmogrifies’. (Wolfland, 115) The post-modern reinventions of these
stories do not patronise the readers – indeed, they resolutely refuse to take us by the hand – but
instead they let us wander and wonder freely. These stories question stable arrivals and morals.
Their journeys do not end up in stable homes; indeed, they reject stable notions of the self and
destabilise patriarchal social structures. Their metaphor is neither teleological nor moralising,
and there is no final destination. The heroines may have gained new insights into how they
came to be who they are, but they remain liminal wanderers, continuously aspiring to new
knowledge about themselves and their worlds. They embark on new liminal journeys,
continuing their quest for self-discovery along paths that remain ambiguous and uncertain, and
that leave new, liberating traces on the palimpsest.
The palimpsest is thus never a closed book: it remains open to new inscriptions and discoveries.
Seemingly dominant lines coexist next to other hidden paths. The more narratives are inscribed
on the palimpsest, the more hybrid, but also powerful, it becomes. This narrative diversity pits
dominant strands against “other/Other” versions, and offers the reader the possibility to engage
in individual discoveries. The reader chooses which narrative paths and lines of reading s/he
wants to follow, and for those who wish to see it, the palimpsest is there to be explored. By
investigating old and different narratives we might find a way to new readings, readings that
might lead to emancipatory personal and socio-political self-awareness. The act of writing and
reading thus becomes enhancing and liberating, but remains daunting and unsettling, as
Margaret Atwood’s discussion of the narrative process implies:
Going into a narrative – into the narrative process – is a dark road. You can’t see your way ahead.
(Negotiating, 158)
174
Engaging with texts, might appear disorientating, but the inquisitive mind courageously steps
onto dark roads and welcomes possible points of ellipses and question marks. They might bring
about the conditions for new visions.
175
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Carter, Angela, The Bloody Chamber and Other Tales (London: Penguin Books, 1993)
——— ‘The Bloody Chamber’, in The Bloody Chamber and Other Tales (London: Penguin
Books, 1993)
——— ‘The Company of Wolves’, in The Bloody Chamber and Other Tales (London: Penguin
Books, 1993)
Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm, ‘Cinderella’, in The Classic Fairy Tales, trans. by Maria
Tatar, ed. by Maria Tatar (London: Norton Critical Edition, 1999)
———, and Wilhelm Grimm, ‘Fitcher’s Bird’, in The Classic Fairy Tales, trans. by Maria
———, and Wilhelm Grimm, ‘Little Red Cap’, in The Classic Fairy Tales, trans. by Maria
Lee, Tanith, Red as Blood: Or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer (New York: Daw Books, 1983)
——— ‘When the Clock Strikes’, in Red as Blood: Or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer (New
York: Daw Books, 1983)
——— ‘Wolfland’, in Red as Blood: Or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer (New York: Daw
Books, 1983)
Margaret Atwood, ‘Bluebeard’s Egg’, in Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist
Fairy Tales in North America and England, ed. by Jack Zipes (New York: Routledge,
1986)
Perrault, Charles, ‘Bluebeard’, in The Classic Fairy Tales, trans. by Maria Tatar, ed. by Maria
Tatar (London: Norton Critical Edition, 1999)
——— ‘Cinderella’, in Classic Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan,
2012)
——— Classic Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2012)
177
——— ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, in The Classic Fairy Tales, trans. by Maria Tatar, ed. by Maria
Tatar (London: Norton Critical Edition, 1999)
Yolen, Jane, The Moon Ribbon and Other Tales (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company,
1976)
——— ‘The Moon Ribbon’, in The Moon Ribbon and Other Tales (New York: Thomas Y.
Crowell Company, 1976)
Secondary Sources
Aarne, Antti, and Stith Thompson, ‘The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and
Bibliography’, in The Classic Fairy Tales, ed. by Maria Tatar (London: Norton Critical
Edition, 1999)
Abrams, M.H., and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 10th edn (Andover
Hampshire UK: Cengage Learning, 2005)
Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale, ed. by Danielle M. Roemer and Cristina Bacchilega (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 2001)
Atwood, Margaret, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (Cambridge: Virago Press,
2009)
——— ‘Running with the Tigers’, in Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter,
ed. by Lorna Sage (London: Virago Press, 2013)
Bacchilega, Cristina, Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997)
Baldrick, Chris, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004)
Barry, Peter, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 3rd edn
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009)
Barthes, Roland, 'The Death of the Author', in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader
(Harlow, England: Longman, 1999)
178
Benson, Stephen ‘Angela Carter and the Literary Märchen: A Review Essay’, in Angela Carter
and the Fairy Tale, ed. by Danielle M. Roemer and Cristina Bacchilega (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 2001)
Bettelheim, Bruno, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
(New York: Vintage Books, 2010)
Black, Max, ‘Metaphor’, in Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor, ed. by Mark Johnson
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985)
Carter, Angela, The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (London: Penguin Books, 2008)
——— The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (London: Virago, 2013)
Chevalier, Jean, and Alain Gheerbrant, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, trans. by John
Buchanan-Brown (London: Penguin Books, 1996)
The Classic Fairy Tales, ed. by Maria Tatar (London: Norton Critical Edition, 1999)
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. by T. F. Hoad (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1996)
Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England,
ed. by Jack Zipes (New York: Routledge, 1986)
Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter, ed. by Lorna Sage (London: Virago
Press, 2013)
The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm, ed. by
Jack Zipes (London: Norton Critical Edition, 2001)
Hannon, Patricia, ‘Corps cadavres: Heroes and Heroines in the Tales of Perrault’, in The Great
Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm, ed. by Jack
Zipes (London: Norton Critical Edition, 2001)
Hutcheon, Linda, ‘Beginning to Theorize Postmodernism’, Textual Practice, 1.1 (1987)
Jenks, Chris, Transgression (London: Routledge, 2003)
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2003)
179
———, and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989)
Lieberman, Marcia K., ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come: Female Acculturation through the
Fairy Tale’, in Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North
America and England, ed. by Jack Zipes (New York: Routledge, 1986)
Manley, Kathleen E.B., ‘The Woman in Process in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”’,
in Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale, ed. by Danielle M. Roemer and Cristina Bacchilega
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001)
Metaphor and Thought, ed. by Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
Milne, Andrew, Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”: A Reader’s Guide (Paris: Éditions
Le Manuscrit, 2007)
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One
(London and New York: Penguin, 1969)
Nischik, Reingard M., Engendering Genre: The Works of Margaret Atwood (The University of
Ottowa Press, 2009)
Ortony, Andrew, ‘Metaphor: A Multidimensional Problem’, in Metaphor and Thought, ed. by
Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales: The Western fairy tale tradition from medieval to
modern, ed. by Jack Zipes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
Renfroe, Cheryl, ‘Initiation and Disobedience: Liminal Experience in Angela Carter’s “The
Bloody Chamber”’, in Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale, ed. by Danielle M. Roemer
and Cristina Bacchilega (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001)
Tatar, Maria, ‘Introduction: Bluebeard’, in The Classic Fairy Tales, ed. by Maria Tatar
(London: Norton Critical Edition, 1999)
——— ‘Introduction: Cinderella’, in The Classic Fairy Tales, ed. by Maria Tatar (London:
Norton Critical Edition, 1999)
180
——— Secrets beyond the Door: The story of Bluebeard and his Wives (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2004)
The Tolkien Reader, ed. by Peter S. Beagle (New York: Ballantine, 1966)
The Trials & Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, 2nd edn, ed. by Jack Zipes (Abingdon
Oxon UK: Routledge, 1993)
Turner, Victor, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (New
York: Cornell University Press, 1975).
——— The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (New York: Cornell University Press,
1967)
——— The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (London: Aldine Transaction, 2008)
Van Gennep, Arnold, The Rites of Passage, trans. by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L.
Caffee (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960)
The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, ed. by Angela Carter (London: Virago Press, 2003)
The Wordsworth Companion to Literature in English, ed. by Ian Ousby (Ware Hertfordshire
UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1994)
Yolen, Jane, ‘America’s Cinderella’, Children’s Literature in Education, 8.1 (1977)
Yu, Ning, The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor: A perspective from Chinese (Amsterdam:
John Benjamins Publishing, 1998)
Zipes, Jack, ‘A Second Gaze at Little Red Riding Hood’s Trials and Tribulations’, in Don’t Bet
on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England, ed.
by Jack Zipes (New York: Routledge, 1986)
——— Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk & Fairy Tales (Lexington: The
University Press of Kentucky, 2002)
——— ‘Cross-Cultural Connections and the Contamination of the Classical Fairy Tale’, in The
Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm, ed. by
Jack Zipes (London: Norton Critical Edition, 2001)
181
——— ‘Epilogue: Reviewing and Re-Framing Little Red Riding Hood’, in The Trials &
Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, 2nd edn, ed. by Jack Zipes (Abingdon Oxon UK:
Routledge, 1993)
——— Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the
Process of Civilization, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2006)
——— ‘Prologue: Framing Little Red Riding Hood’, in The Trials & Tribulations of Little Red
Riding Hood, 2nd edn, ed. by Jack Zipes (Abingdon Oxon UK: Routledge, 1993)
——— ‘The Remaking of Charles Perrault and his Fairy Tales’, in The Fairy Tales of Charles
Perrault, (London: Penguin Books, 2008)
Works Consulted
Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory: An Introduction, Anniversary edn (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2008)
Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, The Complete Fairy Tales: The Brothers Grimm (Ware
Hertfordshire UK: Wordsworth Editions, 2009)
Kövecses, Zoltán, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010)
Ricoeur, Paul, The Rule of Metaphor: The creation of meaning in language, trans. by Robert
Czerny (Abingdon Oxon UK: Routledge Classics, 2003)
Sage, Lorna, Angela Carter, 2nd edn (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2007)
Stellardi, Giuseppe, Heidegger and Derrida on Philosophy and Metaphor: Imperfect Thought
(New York: Humanity Books, 2000)
182

The Long Way Home…?

Transcription

Similar documents

presentation Engelenhoeve

I`m Daisy. I represent all parts of the Girl Scout Law!

What Juniors Do - GirlScouts.org

Teach The classics Through Modern liTeraTure!

humor - Waukesha Public Library

A Wrinkle in Time

5 TV Shows You Should Watch This Fall

Late Night Tales Mixed By Royksopp

girl`s life flyer - Mount Carmel College of Nursing

“A Magical Evening”