Fairy Tales, Myth, and Psychoanalytic Theory

Feminism and Retelling the Tale

Veronica L. Schanoes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317136774
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Teoria della critica letteraria

At the same time that 1970s feminist psychoanalytic theorists like Jean Baker Miller and Nancy Chodorow were challenging earlier models that assumed the masculine psyche as the norm for human development and mental/emotional health, writers such as Anne Sexton, Olga Broumass, and Angela Carter were embarked on their own revisionist project to breathe new life into fairy tales and classical myths based on traditional gender roles. Similarly, in the 1990s, second-wave feminist clinicians continued the work begun by Chodorow and Miller, while writers of fantasy that include Terry Windling, Tanith Lee, Terry Pratchett, and Catherynne M. Valente took their inspiration from revisionist authors of the 1970s. As Schanoes shows, these two decades were both particularly fruitful eras for artists and psychoanalytic theorists concerned with issues related to the development of women's sense of self. Putting aside the limitations of both strains of feminist psychoanalytic theory, their influence is undeniable. Schanoes's book posits a new model for understanding both feminist psychoanalytic theory and feminist retellings, one that emphasizes the interdependence of theory and art and challenges the notion that literary revision involves a masculinist struggle with the writer's artistic forbearers.

Chapter 1
Mother-Daughter Relationships in Theory and Text

In fairy tales and classical myth, the relationship between mother and daughter is rarely untroubled. The overwhelming impression of mother-figures given by the most recognizable versions of our culture’s most popular fairy tales and myths is of evil, absent, or unpleasant mothers.¹ Snow White’s (step)mother tries to kill her; Cinderella’s stepmother forces her to be a servant; Hansel and Gretel’s (step) mother convinces their father to abandon them in the forest.² Then there are the dead or absent mothers: the 12 dancing princesses have no living mother who can advise them; the Little Mermaid’s mother is equally absent and unable to help; Beauty does not have a mother to protect her from her foolish father and his dealings with the Beast; the death of Donkeyskin’s mother sets off the disturbing events of the story; Little Red Riding Hood’s doting grandmother gets eaten. As Kelly Link writes in “The Girl Detective,” “This is another thing about … fairy tales … The mother is usually missing. The girl detective imagines, all of a sudden, all of these mothers. They’re in the same place …What are they up to, all of these mothers” (246)? What, indeed?

In Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976) Adrienne Rich noted the absence of the mother-daughter romance from the canonized works of human tragedy. But traditional fairy tales do have a history of contemplating the mother-daughter bond. It is true that mothers are wicked or absent in the most popular contemporary versions of the best known fairy tales, such as Disney’s versions of Cinderella and Snow White, or the Grimms’ version of Hansel and Gretel. But it is not true of the genre as a whole, which contains a number of fairy godmothers, helpers who reincarnate a dead mother in order to protect her orphaned child, and clever mother-daughter duos. Just a little research on the part of a reader can unearth a treasure-trove of mother-daughter dyads, acrimonious, loving, or both. I would suggest that it is precisely because the mother-daughter relationship in fairy tales has been so conflicted over the past century that feminist writers seized upon it; it is a site of tension in a genre of tales that constitute and are constituted by the culture around them. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis notes about revisions of myth, revisions of fairy tales involve an intervention at a site of great power—familiar stories of childhood, fairy tales encode social and political ideologies that influence the way we look at the world. To rewrite such tales is to re-examine a world-view entrenched from childhood, and thus to intervene at a highly charged source of our ideological outlook.

The mother-daughter relationship was a primary site of attention for both 1970s and 1990s writers of fairy-tale and myth revisions; such writers fastened on the mother-daughter relationships in Rapunzel and Snow White, exploring and often recuperating them. They even create pivotal mother-daughter relationships in retellings of tales that did not originally contain such a relationship, as in “The Bloody Chamber,” Angela Carter’s revision of Bluebeard, and Deerskin, Robin McKinley’s revision of the tale of Donkeyskin.

Motherhood in general, and mother-daughter relationships in particular, have been highly charged sites in feminist thought, especially in the feminisms of the 1970s and 1990s, so it is not surprising to find them playing such a large role in that era’s literature. Second-wave white feminists inherited a tradition of mother blaming and mother pathologizing from the surrounding culture. Betty Friedan observed that by the middle of twentieth century, mothers were being blamed for the unhappiness of every “troubled child; alcoholic, suicidal, schizophrenic, psychopathic, neurotic adult; impotent, homosexual male; frigid, promiscuous female; ulcerous, asthmatic, and otherwise disturbed American” (189). Janet Surrey lists the various ailments that mothers have been and still are held responsible for in their children: “sleepwalking, ulcerative colitis, hyperactivity, peer avoidance, delusions, poor language development and inability to deal with colour blindness” (115). Perhaps then, it is not surprising, though it is disappointing, to find similar tendencies in classics of early second-wave feminist thought.³ However, there were some books published during the 1970s that worked toward a more sympathetic understanding of mothers, motherhood, and mother-daughter relationships (The Reproduction of Mothering by Nancy Chodorow [1978], Of Woman Born by Adrienne Rich [1976], Our Mothers’ Daughters by Judith Arcana [1978]) and it is the feminist theories of mother-daughter relationships outlined in these texts that best express the dynamics of those relationships that are at the center of feminist revisions of fairy tales published contemporaneously.

Black feminists were also articulating and theorizing their experiences of the mother-daughter relationship, and strongly arguing against the all-too-prevalent assumption on the part of white feminists that they and their experiences could speak for women as a whole. Whereas white feminism had spent some years mired in the mother-blaming endemic to Western culture as a whole, black feminists emphasized the admiration they felt for their mothers, the strength they drew from them, and the way that mothering and loving black children was a form of empowering resistance to a racist culture that seeks to denigrate and devalue black culture, black children, and black mothers. Black feminists looked to their mothers as models of both resistance and creativity, perhaps most famously articulated in Alice Walker’s essay “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens.”

Before proceeding to textual analysis, however, it is necessary to define certain terms. Within this project I am using the word “mother” to denote all maternal figures in fairy tales and myth. While stepmothers and mothers may seem to serve very different purposes in fairy tales, I consider them to be different aspects of the same figure. The evil stepmothers in several tales, such as “Snow White” and “Hansel and Gretel,” were originally evil mothers. The Grimms altered such mothers to stepmothers in order to make the tales conform to nationalist and gender ideologies. Bruno Bettelheim and other psychoanalytic theorists have argued that “stepmothers” are the result of children’s natural “splitting” of their image of the mother into “good” and “bad” in order to maintain the feelings of security, safety, and love they feel regarding the mother in the face of the mother’s anger and disapproval. Marina Warner and other more historicist critics have argued that the ubiquity of the stepmother in fairy tales represents the higher mortality rate of women in childbirth prior to the twentieth century.

Given my interest in psychoanalytic theory, I am unsurprisingly inclined toward the first hypothesis. Linda Pollack notes that although fear of death in childbed was widespread, demographic evidence indicates that far fewer women died in childbirth during the Renaissance in England than is often believed. Indeed, she cites R. Schofield’s work on maternal mortality from 1650 to 1850 in stating that the likelihood of a woman dying in such a way was probably around 1 percent during each birth, and so perhaps 6–7 percent over the course of a woman’s lifetime, no greater than the many other ways one could die in the eras before antibiotics and good hygiene (Pollack 47). Irvine Loudon agrees, noting that “as maternal mortality was declining faster than mortality from other causes in the eighteenth century, the relative risk of dying in childbirth decreased.” He too cites Schofield’s work among other studies and writes that “taking all these estimates together, there is broad agreement. It seems there was a continuous and substantial decline in maternal mortality in England from the second half of the seventeenth century to the first half of the nineteenth” (160). He posits that the credit for this statistic lies mainly in an increased number of skilled midwives “who took pains and pride in their work” (161). He also quotes Schofield in observing that “women will have known of others who died giving birth to a child, but they may also have considered it such a rare event that there was little risk that the tragedy would befall them” (163–4).⁴ In other European countries associated with fairy tales, rates were even better. The main point I am making is that risk of maternal mortality and therefore the potential for the appearance of a stepmother in a family in pre-industrial European cultures not only varies by nationality but also may well be much lower than we commonly suppose.

Returning to the question of motherhood in fairy-tale revisions, we must ask what it means to be a maternal figure. Surely such a complex question cannot be reduced to biology, and several of the second-wave feminist theorists whose work is at issue in this project, such as Adrienne Rich and Nancy Chodorow, grappled with the issue. For the purposes of this project, I consider a mother to be an older female character responsible for the welfare of and with power over a younger character, or an older female character who has borne such responsibility and power in the past. Note that such a definition does not demand any specific emotional response or action on the part of the mother, and thus it is not a prescriptive definition of a “good” mother. It is rather a description of a participant in a literary situation that produces a literary mother. As we shall see, in Angela Carter’s fairy-tale revisions, this production is necessary both for survival and for the production of human consciousness in the subject.

Mother-Daughter Relationships in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” and “Wolf-Alice”: A Case Study

Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber is the inspiration for many of the revisions that flourished some 15 to 20 years later. With respect to Carter’s posthumously published story “Ashputtle, or, The Mother’s Ghost,” Michelle Ryan-Sautour notes that the “reader of Angela Carter cannot help but observe ambivalence about the mother figure in her writing,” but Carter is better known for her explorations of female sexuality, its revolutionary potential, and its wounds under patriarchy than for the mother-daughter relationships she depicts, but this collection is bookended by stories heavily invested in the importance of the bonds and permeable ego boundaries that second-wave feminist theorists contend can be found between mothers and daughters. Carter begins and ends her collection with stories that demonstrate the importance of the mother-daughter relationship to survival and full participation in the human experience. Her first story emphasizes the strength of the mother-daughter relationship in the face of a murderous patriarch, while the final one finds a twice-orphaned girl bringing herself and her companion into humanity by taking on the qualities of motherhood. What I hope to demonstrate in this section, then, is the centrality of the mother-daughter relationship as described in texts by foundational second-wave feminists to the foundational feminist revisions of fairy tales.⁵

More than one story in Carter’s collection opens with a father sending his daughter to a beast, but the collection begins with and is named after a story in which a mother tries to dissuade her daughter from going to a monster and then arrives to save her when she insists on going anyway. “The Bloody Chamber” is a revision of the fairy tale Bluebeard, which is about a wealthy man who weds and murders a succession of young women. Carter’s version is set in early twentieth-century France, and tells the story of an impoverished piano student who marries a much older, very rich Marquis (the allusion to the Marquis de Sade is no accident). The unnamed protagonist has always been in awe of her mother but also mocks “the antique service revolver that my mother, grown magnificently eccentric in hardship, kept always in her reticule, in case—how I teased her—she was surprised by [a tiger’s] footpads on her way home from the grocer’s shop” (Bloody 111–12). Even in eccentricity her mother is “magnificent,” according to her daughter, but that daughter believes that it is she herself who is worldly and realistic, and thus she marries to “banish the spectre of poverty from its habitual place at our meagre table” (111). But what does it mean to be worldly and realistic? As the story unfolds, we find that the protagonist is in a Gothic world, and that her mother’s assessment of the need to prepare for—rather than hide from or sacrifice oneself to—violence is far more astute.

The protagonist’s mother is a force to be reckoned with, larger than life: “My eagle-featured indomitable mother; what other student at the Conservatoire could boast that her mother had outfaced a junkful of Chinese pirates; nursed a village through a visitation of the plague, shot a man-eating tiger with her own hand and all before she was as old as I” (111). It is the mother about whom we should be reading, the daughter implies, her stories are the more interesting, rather than the daughter and her story. Indeed, in contrast to her tales of the heroic mother’s exploits, the overshadowed daughter refers to herself only as a “student” and a “poor widow’s child” (117, 114). She effaces herself again when she refers to her suitor coming to visit “my mother’s sitting room” (112). The sitting room belongs to her mother; in the wake of such an overpowering figure, how can her daughter find a place of her own? Even her musical ability is in some way a debt to her mother: “I … whose mother had sold all her jewelry, even her wedding ring, to pay the fees at the Conservatoire” (117). The daughter’s music is another testament to her mother’s heroism. At the beginning of the tale, the daughter cannot begin to hold her own in comparison to her mother. Unable to match her mother on the mother’s own terms, the daughter changes them from romantic heroism to worldly status: “Are you sure you love him?” the mother asks regarding the Marquis, the protagonist’s wealthy but disturbing fiancé. “I’m sure I want to marry him,” her daughter answers (111). But in altering the terms of success to ones by which she can establish herself, she cuts herself off from her mother: “I felt a pang of loss as if … I had, in some way, ceased to be her child in becoming his wife” (111).

It seems likely that part of the Marquis’s allure derives from the girl’s desire to separate herself radically, as described by Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born only two years earlier, from her indomitable mother, but that separation pits birth and motherhood against death and the husband. Her fiancé first usurps the mother’s role in providing his bride’s trousseau, and he then sends the protagonist’s mother a black dress to wear to the wedding—her daughter’s wedding is her occasion for mourning. In sending her the black dress, the Marquis is also forcing the mother to be the jinx, the figure of ill fortune, at the wedding, displacing his own responsibility for the inevitable violence he does his wives. The daughter’s escape from overpowering mother to unguessable husband is illusory; she is welcomed to “his castle” (emphasis added) by the “amniotic salinity of the sea”—a maternal metaphor that threatens to annihilate her as the sea cuts the castle off from all aid for half of each day (116). This threatening sea pervades the castle, as “No room, no corridor … did not rustle with the sound of the sea and all the ceilings … were stippled with refracted light from the waves” (117). The Marquis’s home re-creates the most threatening of maternal aspects: engulfment and omnipresence. However, it is in this threatening setting that the girl finds a small place that is hers (“my music room” [134]), and comes into her own as a woman who incarnates and is connected to her mother.

Her mother returns in spirit, infusing the daughter with courage and determination after she has discovered the corpses of her husband’s previous wives in his secret chamber. In the bloody chamber she also discovers herself not as “a poor widow’s child” but as her mother’s daughter, just as it is from her mother’s bloody chamber that she was originally dis-covered: “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, into the dreadful place, in a cold ecstasy to know the very worst” (131). The narrator’s “ecstasy” comes as she takes on the attributes of her own mother. In this moment, the daughter becomes herself by experiencing a deep connection with her mother; no longer a mere “student” without an identity commensurate with her mother’s, she has “inherited nerves and a will” from that mother. After this point, the protagonist reclaims her identity as her mother’s daughter and associates that identity with courage. She says of the blind piano tuner that “he looked far more terrified of me than my mother’s daughter would have been of the Devil himself” (134). Thus courage and strength of character, instead of separating her from her mother as they did early in the story, form a bond between them, a legacy or dynasty that stands up to and defeats the Marquis’s traditional, feudal powers.

That psychic bond is the daughter’s salvation, as “maternal telepathy … send[s] [her] mother running headlong from the telephone to the station … I never heard you cry before, she said, by way of explanation. Not when you were happy” (143). At the same time as the daughter is partaking of her mother’s nerves and will, so too does the mother take in her daughter’s distress. The mother arrives in the nick of time and puts down the Marquis just as she had the man-eating tiger, with the antique service revolver her daughter had mocked—but only after the daughter springs up to open the castle door and let her mother in. The mother’s power is dependent upon her daughter’s action. Mother and daughter are not separated again; they keep enough money to live on and retire to a quiet life with the daughter’s new husband, a shy piano-tuner, and the daughter notes that “I do believe that my mother loves him as much as I do” (143). Thus mother and daughter are joined in this shared love where romance had before divided them, and the daughter re-embraces her mother’s choices by “beggar[ing] herself for love” (111). Having established her own bravery, the daughter no longer feels confined; she shares ownership in her own right rather than being a tenant in her mother’s rooms (“I felt I had the right to retain sufficient funds to start a little music school” [143]) and the closing references to material comfort belong to all three: “We do well enough” (143). The protagonist’s bond with her mother allows her to thwart the repetition of spousal murder that the Marquis insists on re-enacting; that bond is also the essence of the difference between Carter’s tale and the original: in Perrault’s version, the heroine is saved by her brothers, and the moral admonishes women for their curiosity.

Thus Angela Carter’s opening salvo in her feminist project of fairy-tale reclamation is one in which salvation comes about through the psychic joining of mother and daughter (“maternal telepathy”) and the happy ending is not of a woman abandoning the family of her childhood in order to live happily ever after with a man, but of a woman able to maintain her connection with her mother while also loving a man who is able to appreciate the artistry and musical skill of the daughter. The indivisibility of mother and daughter at first generates rebellion, a desire to perform what Adrienne Rich calls “radical surgery” in separating oneself completely from one’s mother, then a reincarnating of the mother in the daughter, and finally a reunion based on the psychic fluidity between mother and daughter.

The book ends with a story that similarly emphasizes the importance of mother-daughter relationships to the possibility of becoming human. In the final tale of Carter’s collection, identification with motherhood transforms the beastly into the human; becoming human is synonymous with becoming a mother. “Wolf-Alice” is the tale of a girl raised by wolves who has been taken from her wolf-mother by the hunters who killed that mother.⁶ She is trained by nuns to perform s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Mother’s Looking-Glass
• 1 Mother-Daughter Relationships in Theory and Text
• 2 Revisions of Motherhood and Daughterhood
• 3 Revision and Repetition
• 4 Through the Looking Glass: Mirrors, Fantasy, and Reality
• 5 Double Vision: Women and Fantasy
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index