The Feminist Architecture of Postmodern Anti-Tales

Space, Time, and Bodies

Kendra Reynolds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429513763
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This monograph aims to counter the assumption that the anti-tale is a 'subversive twin' or dark side of the fairy tale coin, instead it argues that the anti-tale is a genre rich in complexity and radical potential that fundamentally challenges the damaging ideologies and socializing influence of fairy tales.

The Feminist Architecture of Postmodern Anti-Tales: Space, Time and Bodies highlights how anti-tales take up timely debates about revising old structures, opening our minds up to a broader spectrum of experience or ways of viewing the world and its inhabitants. They show us alternative architectures for the future by deconstructing established spatio-temporal laws and structures, as well as limited ideas surrounding the body, and ultimately liberate us from the shackles of a single-minded and simplistic masculine reality currently upheld by dominant social forces and patriarchal fairy tales themselves. It is only when these masculine fairy tales and social architectures are deconstructed that new, more inclusive feminine realities and futures can be brought into being.

1 ‘Psycho’-Geographies and Gendered Maps

Reimagining the City in Feminist Anti-Tales

May God forgive London. I do not

– Tanith Lee, Cruel Pink¹

As far as romantic locations go, I’ve seen better

– Helen Smith, Alison Wonderland²

Introduction

The city as a subject for literary study has had a rich and varied history; however, there has been a renewed resurgence of interest in the urban space within literary studies, exemplified by the publication of The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature in 2014. Certainly, reading widely around various aspects of the city, the heavy scholarly interest in both the human sciences and the arts is immediately apparent, yet, glaring gaps remain unexplored. For example, this chapter posits the anti-tale as a unique take on city and gender studies. Robert E. Park in ‘The City as Social Laboratory’ highlights that ‘the urban environment represents [humanity’s] most consistent and, on the whole, [its] most successful attempt to remake the world [it] lives in more after [its] heart’s desire. But if the city is the world which [humans] created, it is the world in which [they are] condemned to live’.³ Therefore, the city is constantly shifting and being reconstructed according to human desires, reflecting the dominant values and ideologies held by our culture. This is similar to the fairy tale itself, which emerged out of folk stories told by indigenous peoples to reflect upon communal concerns, and it is no coincidence that Jack Zipes’s description of the utopian aspect of the fairy tale is similar to Park’s reflections on the urban space: the fairy tale

serv[es] to compensate for the impoverished lives and desperate struggles of many people […] there was always some sort of hope for a miraculous change. There may still be hope in the fairy tale collisions of their imaginative visions that compel us to re-create traditional narratives and rethink the course our lives have taken.⁴

In essence, both the city and the fairy tale uphold dominant social ideologies. Through the anti-tale then (with its disenchantment and refusal of a detached ‘Once Upon a Time’, pastoral setting),⁵ fairy tales and the city are ‘re-created and re-designed to counter as well as collide with our complex social realities [… They are] necessary to shake up the world and sharpen our gaze’.⁶

This chapter highlights the urban space as one emerging focus in the postmodern anti-tale’s impulse towards achieving this revolutionary vision, particularly in terms of feminist social change. Authors use the city setting to reflect upon the existing architecture of social relations and constructions, both in terms of the physical space itself and what it symbolises, or reflects, about current power dynamics. For, as Deborah L. Parsons notes in Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity:

The urban writer is not only a figure within a city; he/she is also the producer of a city, one that is related to but distinct from the city of asphalt, brick, and stone, one that results from the interconnection of body, mind and space, one that reveals the interplay of self/city identity. The writer adds other maps to the city atlas; those of social interaction but also of myth, memory, fantasy, and desire. That the city has been habitually conceived as a male space, in which women are either repressed or disobedient marginal presences, has resulted in an emphasis in theoretical analysis on gendered maps that reflect such conditions.⁷

Hence, I explore the subversive use of Parsons’s ideas of the city linked to ‘myth, memory, fantasy, and desire’, and ‘the interconnection of body, mind and space’ in the ‘gendered maps’ created through Tanith Lee’s Cruel Pink (2013) and Helen Smith’s Alison Wonderland (2011). I will also touch briefly on other anti-tales in order to highlight the city as an emerging motif across the genre as a whole and illustrate that this trend extends beyond London into other international contexts, by also discussing the Russian novel of Ekaterina Sedia titled The Secret History of Moscow. By first providing a theoretical and literary framework, this chapter opens with a panoramic view of the city as a general source of academic study to the city and gender; the city in literature; and, more specifically, the city in feminist literature, before zooming in on Lee and Smith’s adaptations of, and position in relation to, these theories within their stories (including debates around the flâneur/flâneuse and bodies/cities). The texts discussed here are prime examples of what Adam Zolkover describes as the emergent genre of ‘urban fantasy’.⁸ It should be noted that critics often tend to discuss either the city in urban texts or fairy-tale elements rather than addressing their complex interactions, therefore this chapter aims to discuss both simultaneously. In addition, Lee, Smith, and Sedia’s novels also provide a unique take on the now ‘in vogue’ concept of psychogeography. The authors even use the idea of ‘psycho’ literally through mentally ill characters and their relations to the urban environment in order to convey a feminist message: unstable minds reflecting an unhealthy society. A psychogeographical approach, combined with the underground or unseen aspects of the urban environment, and the balance of fantastical and more realistic strands of the stories, draws attention to hidden truths and the transformative potential of what Merlin Coverley dubs, ‘the magical realm behind our own’.⁹ Certainly, Sedia literally depicts her characters escaping the dreary streets of 1990s Moscow to an underground realm inhabited by mythical creatures, glowing trees, and magic. An imaginative approach to the city can implement the utopian fairy-tale impulse to indicate the possibility of social change. Ultimately then, it is clear that the anti-tales discussed in this chapter utilise London (and Moscow) as much more than a simple backdrop or setting for their stories and, it is argued that, by using feminine outsider positions, bodies, and psychogeographies to construct the urban space of their narratives, anti-tale authors allow an alternative feminine city to emerge in their stories, which shatters the restrictive neatness, rationality, and exclusionary impulses of the existing patriarchal city we inhabit.

Definitions: What Is a City?

First, the question – ‘what is a city?’ – is not easily answered and the more thought that is given to it, the more difficult it is to find an apt definition – as illustrated in the ongoing nature of the critical debates and discussions around urban space. After all, it is not only modern critics from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century that have contributed to this conversation. As Raymond Williams has emphasised, discussion of the city ‘reaches back into classical times’, long before the Industrial Revolution and rise of capitalism in the Victorian era.¹⁰ Certainly, Balasopoulos’s ‘Celestial Cities and Rationalist Utopias’ and Susan Stephen’s ‘The City in the Literature of Antiquity’ look back to the ancient cities of ‘Athens, Alexandria, Rome, and Jerusalem’ in order to emphasise the origins of contemporary ideas about the urban space.¹¹ In answer to his question – ‘What is a city?’ – Balasopoulos notes how

the question is foundational in a double sense: it is a question about the origins of social and political life, and it is also a question that haunts the very beginnings of the western tradition of thinking about the nature and goals of collective life. It is also, perhaps by virtue of being authentically foundational, an obscure question.¹²

Williams, however, is often quoted as a starting point for anyone approaching, or trying to make sense of, the idea of the city and urban studies. His definition is established through the binaries of The Country and the City:

‘Country’ and ‘City’ are very powerful words, and this is not surprising when we remember how much they seem to stand for in the experience of human communities […] On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre: of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation.¹³

An example of this simple contrast between pastoral fairy-tale world and disenchanted modern cityscape as a feminist method is illustrated in Karen Best’s satirical anti-tale ‘Blizzard Season’. In this story, a portal opens ‘with the first snowflakes of winter’ bringing fairy-tale Snow Whites – ‘like unassuming plants coming into bloom, they were suddenly everywhere’ – into ‘the edges of empty parking lots and suburbs-to-be’.¹⁴ These heroines, normally creations of environmental elements (Snow White’s mother looking out of a window and constructing her daughter from the white snow and black raven in the Grimms’ tale, for example), are now out of place, literally, and part of an artificial and man-made world. This is depicted in Best’s parody of the common fairy-tale aesthetic description: ‘Hair as black as asphalt, lips like blood. No: Stoplights’ (17). She is now a product of the new city space, dehumanised by a material, post-capitalist consumer reality, but also a literal commercial product or walking advertisement: ‘Black hair dye and red lipstick sold out in drugstores’ (19). Hence, the fairy-tale ideal is once again sold to modern women as the ideal vision of femininity: ‘by then it was hard to tell which ones were genuine and which ones were imitators’ (19). Yet, as well as utilising Williams’s binary definition of natural idealism versus the city as a ‘powerful’ and ‘hostile’ space, Best also satirises the ‘innocence, and simple virtue’, as well as the ‘backwardness, ignorance, and limitation’ of the pastoral (symbolised by the Snow Whites), in contrasting them to the city as ‘an achieved centre of learning, communication, light’ (symbolised by the male ‘you’ the narrator refers to):

The girls came from a world of soot and straw and iron shoes […] you let her stay. It wouldn’t have been right to make her go back onto the street […] you grew tired of explaining for the nth time, with the picture of your ex-girlfriend in your hand, that you hadn’t painted a picture of your ex; that there were these things called cameras and they made photographs, while she nodded her pretty head.

(18–20)

Best details how she (a Snow White) looks out of the window (a parallel to her mother’s position at the exposition of the Grimms’ story) onto the city and ‘tentatively poked at the mini-blinds, you wondered how she was going to survive’ (18). While her mother’s window scene marks the literal ‘birth’ of the Grimms’ narrative, we certainly do wonder if this Snow White’s story can survive so out of context. Exploiting the binaries in Williams’s definition, Best is thus able to subvert the traditional ‘innocent persecuted heroine’ trope as a backward ideal that has no place in the harsh realities of the modern city, while at the same time hinting that there are frightening parallels to the modern female position as an outsider, vulnerable to patriarchal and capitalist ideologies within the urban environment. In summary, Best’s story clearly offers an example of how anti-tales can use the city and its contrasts to the pastoral fairy-tale world as a subversive strategy in feminist retellings.

However, the anti-tale novels I discuss here complicate this. Their stories follow postmodern approaches to, and definitions of, the urban space. Feminist and philosophical theorist Elizabeth Grosz offers such a stance, suggesting that the question ‘What is a city?’ requires a more multifaceted response:

By ‘city’, I understand a complex and interactive network that links together, often in an unintegrated and ad hoc way, a number of disparate social activities, processes, relations, with a number of architectural, geographical, civic, and public relations. The city brings together economic flows, and power networks, forms of management and political organisation, interpersonal, familial, and extra-familial social relations, and the aesthetic/economic organization of space and place to create a semi-permanent but everchanging built environment or milieu.¹⁵

The city is now understood as a conduit of networks and forces that cannot be simply understood solely as a tangible physical space, but must also be thought of as a symbolic one, in which cultural and social ideologies are played out in complex ways. Its ‘everchanging’ nature is an aspect embraced by feminist writers, as will become evident in a discussion of the novels to follow. These writers have what Peter Preston and Paul Simpson-Housley call a ‘post-modernist view of the city’.¹⁶ Refusing to tie the city down to a set of givens or to sum it up with a concrete definition, they leave the urban space open to being shaped and redefined through their stories. The ‘magic’ or fantastical side to the ant...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Psycho’-Geographies and Gendered Maps: Reimagining the City in Feminist Anti-Tales
• 2 Feminist Journeys ‘Into the Woods’: The Use of Ecofeminist Landscapes in Postmodern Anti-Tales
• 3 ‘Once Upon Many Times’: Subversive Temporalities in Feminist Anti-Tales
• 4 Intergenerational Time: Feminist Revisions of Youth and Ageing in Postmodern Anti-Tales
• 5 Embodying the ‘Inbetween’: Subversive Bodies in Feminist Anti-Tales
• Feminine Conclusions: New Architectures, New Futures
• Bibliography
• Index