Mouth to Mouth: Storytelling and Desire in Contemporary Fairy-Tale Fiction and Film

transcript

MOUTH TO MOUTH STORYTELLING AND DESIRE

IN CONTEMPORARY FAIRY-TALE FICTION AND FILM

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

ENGLISH

MAY 2010

JENNIFER ORME

Dissertation Committee:

Cristina Bacchilega, Chairperson Glenn Man John Rieder John Zuern

Ruth Dawson

DEDICATION

I learned to love stories from a clan of storytellers whose tales are intertwined with mine

– my family. This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Jessie Ann and Dr. Michael E.

J. Orme and my brother Jimmy – three much missed lost strands of my tale. Also to my

brother Doug and sister Leslie– your threads, interwoven with mine, lend me strength

for my own telling.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank for their patience and presence my committee and especially Dr.

Cristina Bacchilega, whose wit, wisdom, charm, and patience have boosted my courage

and carried me through the rough spots. Sara Thompson and Christy Williams

contributed friendship, advice, and help with persnickety punctuation. And as always,

Gregory Aquila‘s humour, strength, and support made sure I saw it all through. Thank

you all.

ABSTRACT

This dissertation contributes to scholarship on contemporary fairy-tale fiction

and film by looking at the figures of the storyteller and listener and the act of storytelling

itself in a range of texts produced or translated into English within the last thirty years.

My focus texts include the television mini-series Arabian Nights (1999); the feature

length film Pan’s Labyrinth (2006); the collection Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New

Skins by Emma Donoghue (1997); and the embedded cycle of stories ―The Story of the

Twelve Dancing Princesses‖ in Jeanette Winterson‘s novel Sexing the Cherry (1989).

All of these texts thematize the act of narration in a variety of ways and to various

ends. I consider how the relationship of narrator and listener is played out in relation to

gendered and sexual subjectivity and the desires that the tales inscribe. I ask how each of

these texts engages with normative and queer desires, and how these desires are

represented and narratively produced through an exploration of the textual dynamics of

metanarrational comment, narrative framing, and narrative authority.

In the first half of the dissertation I examine the dynamics of narrative authority

in two cinematic engagements with the fairy tale. These chapters take the cinematic

narrator into account as a prime mover in directing the ways narrative authority flows. I

contend that in both cases narrative authority is related to gender and political and

familial hierarchies. The second half of my dissertation explores narrative and sexual

desire from a perspective that allows for a broader understanding of how hetero-

normative and non-normative subjects are textually produced both thematically and

formally. I demonstrate a reading practice that seeks ―queer possibility‖ and emphasizes

flexibility and epistemological constructs rather than the ontological status of a text as

either inherently queer or straight.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .....................................................................................iv

Abstract ........................................................................................................ v

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1

Critical Conversations ........................................................................................ 5

Fairy Tales and Feminism ................................................................................. 11

Queeries ........................................................................................................... 15

The Storyteller .................................................................................................. 19

Metanarrative .................................................................................................. 20

Frames and Framing .........................................................................................22

Narrative Authority ......................................................................................... 24

The Chapters .................................................................................................... 27

Arabian Nights............................................................................................................................. 27

Pan’s Labyrinth ............................................................................................................................ 30

Kissing The Witch & Sexing The Cherry .......................................................................................31

Chapter 1: Bedtime Stories: Re-Framing Storytelling in Arabian Nights, the

Miniseries ................................................................................................... 33

Dangerous Desires ........................................................................................... 40

Framing Scheherezade ..................................................................................... 46

Lessons Learned ............................................................................................... 52

Chapter 2: Narrative Desire and Disobedience in Pan’s Labyrinth ............. 59

Narrative Desire ............................................................................................... 61

Magic & Mimesis .............................................................................................. 64

Vidal Interrupted .............................................................................................. 73

Conclusion Without Closure.............................................................................. 78

Chapter 3: Radical Faeries and Storytellers - Bridging Some Gaps .......... 80

Disruptive Desires ............................................................................................ 81

Compulsive Reiteration.................................................................................... 83

Identity Issues ................................................................................................. 85

My Kinda Queer ............................................................................................... 89

Chapter 4: Mouth to Mouth: Queer Desires in Emma Donoghue’s Kissing

the Witch. ................................................................................................... 92

Constructing a Queer Frame .............................................................................95

Queer Moments .............................................................................................. 102

Learning a New Story ...................................................................................... 105

Mind the Gaps ................................................................................................. 107

Chapter 5: Happily Ever After . . . According to Our Tastes: Jeanette

Winterson’s Twelve Dancing Princesses and Queer Possibility ................ 112

Queer Quality or Lesbian Twist? ..................................................................... 116

Queer in the First Person ................................................................................ 120

“Sexing the Narrative” .................................................................................... 122

The Fortunes of Fortunata .............................................................................. 124

Grimm Punishment ........................................................................................ 127

Princesses, Prostitutes and Nuns .................................................................... 129

Conclusion ................................................................................................ 134

Notes......................................................................................................... 140

Works Cited .............................................................................................. 149

INTRODUCTION

―I always believe stories whilst they are being told,‖ says a perspicacious

cockroach in conversation with a storyteller and a wandering princess in A.S. Byatt‘s

―The Story of the Eldest Princess‖ (67). This conversation takes place before a warm fire

in a cottage in the woods as the Princess decides what path she will follow in her life, that

is, as she chooses the story she will live. Storytelling and storytellers often make

themselves known in contemporary fairy-tale fiction and film, whether by turning up

themselves in the narrative or by implicating themselves through a well worn phrase

such as ―once upon a time…‖ which ushers the audience into the marvelous worlds and

transformational magic of the fairy tale. As the cockroach clearly knows, stories work

best when they are believed wholeheartedly by their audience during the telling. Literary

scholars are storytellers too, though our desks tend to be rather less cozy than the scenes

of storytelling fictional storytellers are often afforded. And while we also hope that our

audiences will believe our stories whilst they are being told, the paths that we trace cover

slightly different ground.

The boom in fairy-tale studies since the 1970s began with feminist debates about

whether fairy tales were good for girls. Since then, fairy-tale studies has turned into a

rich interdisciplinary area of scholarship where the study of literary fairy tales intersects

with folkloristics, narratology, psychology, psychoanalysis and child development, and

cultural studies. A wide range of theoretical concerns has been brought to bear on the

fairy tale from feminist, post-modern, post-colonial, reader response and genre

perspectives. My dissertation seeks to take part in this interdisciplinary project by

employing narratological tools to examine contemporary fairy-tale fiction and film

through gender and queer theories.

More specifically, this dissertation contributes to scholarship on contemporary

fairy-tale fiction and film by looking at the figures of the storyteller and listener, as well

as the act of storytelling itself, in a range of texts produced or translated into English

within the last thirty years. The representation of storytellers and their narratees in

literary fairy tales has a long tradition, and, as in the exemplary case of Arabian Nights,

these figures often appear in frame narratives. The strategy of embedding tales continues

in contemporary fairy-tale texts. Why are the teller and the acts of telling and listening so

prevalent in contemporary fairy-tale fiction and film? And what does this tell us about

the concerns and possibilities for the fairy tale in contemporary multicultural Western

popular culture? My focus texts include the television mini-series Arabian Nights

(1999); Guillermo Del Toro‘s feature length film El Laberinto del Fauno or Pan’s

Labyrinth (2006); the collection Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue (1997); and the

embedded cycle of stories ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses‖ in Jeanette

Winterson‘s novel Sexing the Cherry (1989). All of these texts thematize the act of

narration in a variety of ways and to various ends. I consider how the relationship of

narrator and listener is played out in these texts to explore the dynamics of narrative

authority, gendered subjectivity, and desire that they inscribe. I study how each of these

texts engages with non-normative desire, and ask how non-normative desire is

represented and narratively produced? In a genre that has been assumed to inscribe

heterosexual marriage as the key to ―happily ever after,‖ my interest is in how multiple

desires are negotiated in fairy-tale texts. Desire plays a central role in the fairy-tale

genre. I am concerned here with multiple types of desire, most especially narrative

desire: the desire to narrate, the desire for narration to ―do‖ something for the narrator

and narratee, and even the desire of narrative itself to be told, retold, and to proliferate.1

From an examination of how narration and narrational mechanisms such as

metanarrative and narrative framing, contribute to the desire of narrative to proliferate,

I believe that narratives themselves have a kind of reproductive drive and that such a

drive can be examined particularly clearly in the continued re-production of the fairy tale

in Western culture. I have chosen to focus upon contemporary fairy-tale fiction and film

for this examination of the desire of narrative because not only does the fairy tale emerge

from a particularly ancient Western narrative tradition, but that tradition is still alive

and thriving, both in terms of old-tales re-told, and revised, but also in the production of

new fairy-tale texts which transform the genre.

Although U.C. Knoepflmacher argues that ―the hybridity and healthy self-

consciousness of the literary fairy tale have persistently been held against it‖ (15), critics

like Cristina Bacchilega (1997), Merja Makinen (2001 and 2008), Stephen Benson

(2003), and Donald Haase (2006) have celebrated this hybridity as feeding the life of the

genre. Further, as Jessica Tiffin (2009) and others have pointed out, the fairy tale also

plays an important role intergenerically in contemporary fiction and film. Contemporary

fairy tales straddle a number of generic categories at different points; they intersect with

fantasy, romance, horror and the gothic. Fairy tales have always been hybrid, and

contemporary versions are uncomfortable trying to sit still under one generic umbrella,

even one as large and strangely shaped as ―postmodern.‖ In order to explore my

hypothesis about the enduring nature of the fairy tale through its desire to proliferate in

multiple directions, I have chosen to examine texts in which the act of narration is

actively thematized. Thus, metanarration and framing mechanisms become an

important focus for my study.

My project is necessarily ideological, and I begin with the premise that stories can

be liberating—but if they can be liberating they can also be limiting, and probably most

often they are both. In the first half of the dissertation I examine the dynamics of

narrative authority in two cinematic engagements with the fairy tale. In the first, the

female storytelling subject is denied narrative authority in preference for recuperating a

mad serial wife-killer as narrative agent and pitiable victim of betrayal in Arabian

Nights. I then move on to Pan’s Labyrinth in order propose a reading that posits the

villain Captain Vidal as a monologic military monster whose narrative authority is

undercut by the fairy-tale loving young girl Ofelia and the rebel woman Mercedes. Both

of these chapters are concerned with narration and take the cinematic narrator into

account as a prime mover in directing the ways narrative authority flows. I contend that

in both cases, narrative authority is related to gender and political and familial

hierarchies.

While the construction of gender in fairy tales has been a central focus of

analysis, the queering of this genre has not. The second half of my dissertation aspires to

focus on narrative and sexual desire from a perspective that allows for a broader

understanding of how hetero-normative and non-normative subjects are produced

through the storytelling exchange in contemporary fairy-tale texts. I will link the two

halves of the project with a bridging chapter that extends the discussion of queer theory

and fairy-tales begun in this introduction. The final two chapters propose approaches to

Kissing the Witch and ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses‖ in Sexing the

Cherry in conjunction with queer theories of reading.

In what follows, I seek to set forth an overview of the critical conversations in

fairy-tales studies that have the most bearing on my project and to provide a preview of

what I bring to the conversation methodologically and critically.

Critical Conversations

This project begins where others have left off. I am interested in how literary and

filmic texts from authors and filmmakers of the last thirty years have engaged with the

fairy tale and the act of telling the tale. More specifically, I am interested in textual

figures of the storyteller and the listener as depicted in contemporary fairy-tale texts.

Excellent studies have been produced on women as storytellers—narrators and writers—

in the literary fairy-tale tradition: for example, on a grand socio-historical scale, Marina

Warner‘s From the Beast to the Blond, On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994) has

become a staple of fairy-tale studies. Focusing on twentieth-century sensibilities, Kate

Bernheimer‘s Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore their Favorite Fairy

Tales (1998 and 2002) underscores the importance of fairy tales and fairy-tale telling to

prominent women writers such as Julia Alverez, Margret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, bell hooks,

Ursula Le Guin, and others; each of whom contributes an essay about how fairy tales

have affected their thinking. Lawrence Siefert and Elizabeth Wanning Harries have

elaborated the study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women writers in France.

Harries book, Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale

(2001) discusses the important role that the conteuses of the late seventeenth and early

eighteenth centuries played in constructing the complexities of the form in comparison

to what she calls the ―compact‖ tales exhibited by the much better-known Charles

Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. These studies have had such an impact that, following

the work of scholars like Siefert and Harries, Christine Jones has argued: ―it is not too

presumptuous to say that the French tales of the 1690‘s, and notably those written by

women, established the genre that we now know as fairy tale‖ (55).

Part of the complexity of the tales written by the conteuses, as Harries shows, is

in their structure and in their self-referentiality, which, claims Harries, has continued

into contemporary fairy-tale fictions and art that employ similar complex framing

mechanisms. ―Perhaps,‖ she suggests, ―it is the late-twentieth-century obsession with, or

possession by, narrative and narrative voices that has brought so many recent writers to

frame their new versions of fairy tales‖ (115). The idea of possession in this context, as a

reference back to A.S. Byatt‘s novel of the same name, is useful because it hints at the

reciprocal relationship of desire for and by narrative that I am trying to develop.

Feminist critical discussions and creative experiments have had a major impact

on fairy-tale studies. But other social critics have also found in the fairy tale a productive

focus for thinking about narrative ideology and projects of social oppression and

liberation. Jack Zipes, arguably one of the most prolific and best known fairy-tale

scholars, has focused primarily on such a socio-historical study of the genre. His

contributions to fairy tale studies are numerous and varied, and his detailed analysis of

fairy-tale classics such as Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Walt Disney, as

much as his English-language translations of lesser known European collections, have

had a tremendous impact on how scholars in different disciplines now view the fairy tale.

Primarily concentrating on the socio-historical role of fairy tales in Western culture

through a marxist lens, Zipes‘s work has been particularly concerned with the ways in

which fairy tales are socially conservative: ―the classical fairy tales tend to be overtly

patriarchal and politically conservative in structure and theme and reflect the dominant

interests of social groups that control cultural forces of production and reproduction‖

(2006 2). However, Zipes also notes that the trope of transformation, the sense of

wonder (as opposed to fantasy), and the desire for social change that animates many

folktale plots ensure that some fairy tales defy and subvert the dominant ideology.

One of the results of socio-historical analysis has been to rethink what we mean

by ―fairy tale‖ as a genre. The work of folklorists who are bringing to bear older tales

from various cultures on the fairy-tale canon also confirms that the concept of the fairy

tale is deceptive. In fact, while my own approach is not a folkloristic one, a vital influence

of folklore studies all along has been to insist that literary scholars of fairy tales never

forget that there are few entirely ―original‖ authored texts, but in most cases multiple

oral and written versions of even the most ―classic‖ tales. Furthermore, like Zipes, other

fairy-tale scholars have scrutinized the processes by which collections that are often read

as ―authentic‖ reproductions of oral performances by the ―folk‖ were in fact produced

and filtered through the ideologies of collectors and editors. Maria Tatar‘s important

book The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (1987), for example, details the process

of collecting and editing that the seven editions of the Kinder und Hausmärchen (KHM)

went through and elucidates the effects of the ideological and aesthetic editorial

decisions by the brothers Grimm. Other sorts of recovery work—such as the editing and

republication of the stories by the conteuses, contemporaries of Charles Perrault, as well

as research on German women writers of fairy tales who were contemporary with the

Grimms, for example—have shown, not only that the literary genre has been developed

over time by both male and female authors, but that as creators of literary fairy tales,

women have been bringing gendered concerns to the genre from well before the second

wave feminism of the 1970‘s debates. The fairy tale is now viewed not as a static form—

encapsulated in Perrault‘s and the Grimms‘ collections—whose magic is indestructibly

patriarchal, but as a ―hybrid literary creation‖ (Benson, 2003 176) characterized by an

―aesthetics of transformation‖ (205).

As the discipline of fairy-tale studies has grown, its scholarly production has been

in step with changing trajectories in feminist and gender studies, folkloristics, and

narrative studies as well. Three major books have been published in the last thirteen

years that significantly contribute to my aims and methodologies: Cristina Bacchilega‘s

Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (1997), Elizabeth Wanning

Harries‘s Twice Upon A Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale (2001),

and Stephen Benson‘s Cycles of Influence: Fiction, Folktale, Theory (2003). Each of the

above scholars has contributed significantly to discussions of gender in fairy tales but

also of narration, and especially framing devices.

Cristina Bacchilega‘s Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies

foregrounds the multi-vocality of literary fairy tales, traces the ways in which the fairy

tale is a hybrid genre, and demonstrates how the metaphor of the mirror reflects,

refracts, and frames its gendered discourses. Her study employs both deconstructive and

narratological approaches to the postmodern fairy tale. For Bacchilega, postmodern is

not only a period of literary production or simply a stylistic approach; rather the

postmodern is a particular cultural endeavor that combines ―[c]omplicity and challenge‖

to previous literary and cultural discourses and ―self-consciously activates this informing

paradox of narrative‖ (20). Although I will be looking at some texts that actively take part

in the postmodern project, I have chosen the term ―contemporary‖ to group the texts I

will examine because at least one of my primary sources, Arabian Nights, does not

activate this informing paradox of narrative, but rather downplays it by distancing the

magic and wonder of story worlds from the more realistic world of mimetic external

frame narratives. Further, Arabian Nights becomes complicit in the reinscription and

naturalization of notions of a unified and stable gendered and sexual subject rather than

challenging it. Bacchilega‘s focus on how narrative voice and focalization can bend or

break a tale‘s ideological frame informs my approach to discussing multiple desires in

fairy-tale texts.

Elizabeth Wanning Harries argues in Twice Upon A Time: Women Writers and

the History of the Fairy Tale that, historically, there have been two types of literary fairy

tales: the compact and the complex. The structure of compact tales, such as those by

Grimm and Perrault, has been taken to represent the fairy tale, but the more complex

tales, which are exemplified by the tales of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century

conteuses, French women writers such as Marie-Catherine d‘Aulnoy, Henriette-Julie de

Murat, and Marie-Jeanne L‘Héritier de Villandon, whose fairy tales were obscured by

Charles Perrault‘s fame, are just as much a part of the tradition and have been woefully

neglected. ―[W]e have been less conscious and less critical of the ways the Grimms have

determined our conception of the structure of the fairy tale, of the shapes it is supposed

to take,‖ says Harries (13). I would agree, for example, that Maria Tatar‘s Norton Critical

edition of fairy tales, The Classic Fairy Tales (1999), is comprised primarily of compact

tales modeled on those published by Perrault and the Grimms and then represented later

by Andrew Lang, Oscar Wilde, and Hans Christian Andersen. Harries places these

compact tales in opposition to what she calls complex tales by the French conteuses who

like Perrault employed irony and artful language, but also used intricate narrative

framing to explore social issues that were affecting women. Harries‘s book is primarily

concerned with these French writers, but she sees their work as modeling or laying out a

tradition for the self-referentiality, framing techniques, and dialogic nature of

contemporary tales that Bacchilega terms ―postmodern.‖ Harries‘s discussion of different

framing devices—embedding and stringing tales— in particular, will be important to my

dissertation.

Also offering insight into framing, Stephen Benson‘s Cycles of Influence provides

an admirable comprehensive inquiry into the relationship between the folktale/fairy tale

and narrative theory in multiple contexts: folktales in the development of narratology,

the folktale cycle as anticipating basic concepts in structural poetics, the recycling of the

fairy tale in postmodern fiction, and the interrogation of genre ideology through

repetition in feminist fairy tales. Benson provides a lucid and thorough account of the

close relationship between narratology and the folktale in the opening chapters of Cycles

of Influence, describing ―a shift in recent literary studies away from narrative grammar

in favor of the discourse level of the narrative‖ and arguing that the earlier ―stress of

universal applicability has masked the role of gender, sexuality, and cultural specificity in

both the source narratives and the resultant categories of narratology‖ (40). The

reassessment of narratological categories, then, reaffirms the importance of context,

history and cultural specificity. My dissertation is particularly interested in the ways in

which the literary and cinematic texts I examine relate to Benson‘s story cycles, recreate

specific versions of ―classic‖ tales, and employ particular motifs or invent ―new‖ tales

through metanarrational commentary and conscious and conspicuous intertextual and

intergeneric moves that highlight storytelling as a performative act.

Recently, a number of studies have been published that focus specifically on

contemporary fairy-tale fiction and/or film. Kevin Paul Smith‘s Postmodern Fairy

Tales: Folkloric Intertexts in Contemporary Fiction (2007) examines various forms of

intertextuality in contemporary fairy-tale fiction. Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy

Tale (2008), edited by Stephen Benson, collects a range of essays about authors and

texts from what Benson calls the ―fairy-tale generation‖(2).2 Jessica Tiffin‘s Marvelous

Geometry: Narrative and Metafiction in Modern Fairy Tale (2009) is a study of the

structures and stretchings of those structures of fairy tales in postmodern contemporary

texts, that pays particular attention to the self-referentiality of this latest generation of

cinematic and literary texts. And Fairy Tales Reimagined: Essays on New Retellings

(2009), edited by Susan R. Bobby, includes essays on late-twentieth and early twenty-

first-century texts from a range of theoretical perspectives. My dissertation takes part in

the conversations begun in these publications and brings to the discussion what I hope

are innovative and useful contributions: an attention to the act of storytelling and related

forms of desire in three texts that have not been discussed in depth before, and a new

approach to queerness in Emma Donoghue‘s Kissing the Witch.

Before I move on to discuss my use of the term queer and the relevant

discussions in queer literary theory for my project, I would like to further contextualize

the role feminist critique has played in fairy-tale studies, the role fairy tales have played

in feminist discourse, and my position as a feminist fairy-tale scholar seeking to further

complicate and expand upon the intersecting subjectivities that I believe need to be

taken into consideration for a broader understanding of the political implications of the

fairy tale in Western culture.

Fairy tales and Feminism

In the 1970s North American feminist concerns with the fairy tale were primarily

framed as discussions about whether ―classic‖ fairy tales are ―good for girls.‖ Feminist

critics like Marcia Lieberman (1972), Andrea Dworkin (1974) and others argued that the

representation of girls and women in fairy tales served to acculturate girls into patriarchy

by representing them as passive, weak, and waiting for ―a prince to come.‖ These

discussions took the form of debates, primarily centering on which fairy tales feminists

were taking as their targets. Allison Lurie, for example wrote in the New York Times

Book Review (1970 and 1971) that fairy tales—especially the less known ones featuring

strong heroines—are ―one of the few sorts of classic children‘s literature of which a

radical feminist could approve.‖ Marcia Lieberman responded directly to this position by

arguing that, although there may be tales in existence that do portray strong, assertive

powerful women, ―[o]nly the best-known stories, those that everyone has read or heard,

indeed those that Disney has popularized, have affected masses of children in our

culture,‖ and further, the ―‗folk tales recorded in the field by scholars‘ . . . are so

relatively unknown that they cannot seriously be considered in a study of the meaning of

fairy tales to women‖ (186). Whatever the current value of this first debate, the point of

certain tales having broader impact than others should be taken seriously. My choice of

focus texts, thus, does lean toward the popular, including literary texts that are quite

readable, authors that most people familiar with contemporary fairy tales will know, and

films that many who are not interested in fairy tales per se will have heard of or seen.

Donald Haase‘s excellent review of feminist discussions of the fairy tale in his

introductory essay to Fairy Tales and Feminism (2004) clearly delineates the major

movements in feminist fairy-tale discussions from the 1970s to the early twenty-first

century. Feminist work with and on fairy tales has involved not only the critique of

gender socialization, but recovery projects to change the history and image of the genre,

readings of female agency and voice in classic fairy tales, and revisionist fiction-making.

In other words, early feminist debates also spurred responses from folklorists, editors,

and writers who respectively collected, compiled, and created tales to proliferate

possibilities of representations, and offer mothers and daughters other stories that

―radical feminists‖ really could be happy with. Concomitantly, feminist writers were

already revising the fairy tales they grew up with to have a shocking or transformative

effect on adult readers. Anne Sexton‘s Transformations in 1971 and Angela Carter‘s The

Bloody Chamber in 1979, are two of the most discussed and consciously feminist

revisions of fairy tales for adults. The problematics of fairy tales as socializing texts for

children, of gender representation in fairy tales, and of what constitutes the fairy tale

genre in relation to folk narratives and literary texts for children identified the fairy tale

as an important genre with which feminists should be concerned.

And some feminist critics were concerned about Carter‘s feminism in The Bloody

Chamber. Carter‘s use of graphic sexual violence, her refusal to portray female sexuality

in an unambiguously positive light, and especially the specter of pornography in the

collection have been controversial. Of course, pornography is a contentious topic in

feminist circles. And its proximity to fairy tales, even in a book that is clearly in its

complex narrative strategies aimed at adults, causes difficulties and creates debate.

Patricia Duncker (1984 and 1996), Avis Lewallen (1988), Michelle Grossman (1988), and

Robin Ann Sheets (1992) produced just some of the critical responses to pornography in

the story ―The Bloody Chamber.‖ Other critics like Bacchilega and Merja Makinen have

taken a more positive view of The Bloody Chamber.3 Most recently, Sara Gamble (2008)

summarizes these debates and concludes, ―The debate surrounding Carter‘s use of fairy

tale thus crystallizes around the issue of whether these stories are successful in their

attempt to be taken at more than face value‖ (27). Gamble, believes they are, as do I. And

like her, I am ―willing to read these stories as largely successful exercises in the

deconstruction of a form that has become appropriated by those who have a vested

interest in upholding the status quo‖ (27). I would further argue that the innovations

and bold steps taken by Carter in representation of non-normative, though heterosexual,

desires in The Bloody Chamber are forerunners of Kissing the Witch and Winterson‘s

―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses,‖ which not only represent lesbian desire in

the perceived heteronormative realm of the fairy tale, but stray further down the path

towards queer.

While much has been done in fairy-tale studies in relation to gender and the

genre, and critics have begun to widen the field by expanding ―the scope of materials still

to be studied and the productive questions still to be asked‖ in relation to ―comparative,

multicultural and transnational research‖ (Haase 2004 29), little has been said about

queer theory and what it may ―give‖ to fairy-tale scholarship. Patricia Duncker‘s critiques

of Angela Carter‘s Bloody Chamber (1984, 1996) are early exceptions. But in my view,

not only does Duncker take aim at one text and one author rather than at the limitations

of the feminist scholarship and criticism of Carter‘s work; she also employs a notion of

queer reading that is limited to the representation of lesbian desire. Her essays belong

more to the identity politics of Gay and Lesbian studies than to a reflection on the

implications of fragmentary, contingent and variable forms of non-normative, although

heterosexual, sexuality that Carter‘s text contends with and which, I would argue, do

open The Bloody Chamber to queer interpretations.

While she was writing this collection of fairy-tale revisions, Carter was also

working on a critical project, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History

(1979). In her contribution to Straight Writ Queer: Non-Normative Expressions of

Heterosexuality in Literature (2006) Madeleine Monson-Rosen writes: ―While The

Sadeian Woman is primarily concerned with the reductive quality of pornography,

Carter also holds the narrative of conventional heterosexual romance culpable in

perpetuating false and damaging notions about love and sex‖ (234). As I will argue in

chapter 5, Jeanette Winterson‘s ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses‖ in Sexing

the Cherry reflects the same opinion of conventional heterosexual romance in the fairy

tale. Winterson‘s embedding of the stories of what happened to each of the princesses

after their marriages to the princes does not so much problematize the myth of ―happily

ever after‖ as it results in exploding it, just as one of the princesses explodes her

gluttonous husband.

If Monson-Rose‘s further claim that ―for Carter, the conventional narrative of

heterosexual romance always works to reinforce the patriarchal social arrangement, but

the possibility for a non-normative heterosexuality resides in narratives that are perverse

or profane,‖ (emphasis in original 234) is accurate, then in my view ―post-Carter

generation‖ authors Donoghue and Winterson expand the types of narratives possible for

non-normative sexualities by multiplying the kinds of relationships, straight and queer,

that subvert heteropatriarchy without demanding the kinds of victimization that some of

Carter‘s fairy tale heroines accept.

Queeries

Non-normative desire is a staple of fairy tales; incest, necrophilia, uncontrollable

physical or sexual hunger are often the forces that set the tale in motion. But these over-

determined disruptive desires are usually subordinated to the reestablishment of order

with the happily-ever-after ending. What happens though, if we focus not on the

teleological outcome of the stories, the happily-ever-after of the return to the family, the

entrance into heterosexual marriage, and the establishment of a new or transformed

home forever fixed in time, but instead on the non-normative desires that drive these

tales? What if we read these disruptive desires not as problems to be fixed, but as

differences to be imagined, explored, and expanded upon?

Certainly this is one of the ways in which contemporary writers have approached

fairy tales and put them to use. These questions will be particularly pertinent to my

chapters on Kissing the Witch and the embedded tales of ―The Story of the Twelve

Dancing Princesses‖ in Sexing the Cherry. Both of these texts highlight the narrating

process and both are left radically open-ended, refusing tidy closure and leaving

possibilities of transformative desire and change open to their storyteller characters. In

addition, by having multiple narrators pass the storytelling mantle on from one teller to

the next, they also multiply the kinds of desires available to fairy-tale fiction.

As Lewis C. Seifert notes in his entry for ―Gay and Lesbian Tales‖ in the

Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folk and Fairy Tales (2007), while contemporary gay and

lesbian authors have found the fairy tale to lend itself to camp, ―the representation of

same-sex desire is largely absent from most folktale and fairy-tale traditions,‖ which is

―hardly surprising given the taboos surrounding homosexuality in most cultures.‖ And

yet, folktales and fairy tales do not portray sexuality unambiguously or rigidly. Seifert

reminds us that ―[i]f viewed from the perspective of homosociality, the same-gender

affective bonds that are not primarily (although potentially) erotic, many tales offer

depictions of same-sex emotional attachments that complicate the stereotypical notion

that their sole focus is heterosexual desire.‖ Much depends then on how we think of and

read sexuality in fairy tales.

Although a rapport with queer theory is only now emerging in fairy-tale studies,

this too promises to be a fruitful conversation. Roderick McGillis‘s 2003 essay in

Marvels & Tales, entitled ― ‗A Fairytale Is Just a Fairytale‘: George MacDonald and the

Queering of Fairy,‖ examines the male figures in MacDonald‘s Victorian tales. McGillis

argues that ―these tales present a vision of the male that subverts the manly figure that

prepares for life on the playing fields of Eton. Macdonald‘s vision is, in a sense, ‗queer,‘

rather than strictly feminine‖ (87). McGillis employs a definition of queer that plays with

both the Victorian usage as something strange, odd, ―that cannot finally be understood‖

and a more contemporary understanding of ―that which does not conform to convention,

that which departs from expectation, that which in its very form puzzles and confounds

(88-89).4 ―‗Beautiful, or thick, or right, or complicated‘ Queer Heterosexuality in the

Young Adult Works of Cynthia Voigt and Francesca Lia Block,‖ by Deborah Kaplan and

Rebecca Rabinowitz (2006), focuses on Voigt‘s and Block‘s representations of queer but

not necessarily same-sex relationships in fairy-tale novels for young adults. Focusing on

more canonical fairy-tale texts, Santiago Solis reads ―Snow White‖ from the intersection

of gay male sexuality and disability in ―Snow White and the Seven ‗Dwarves‘–

Queercripped‖ (2007); and Pauline Greenhill‘s ―‗Fitcher‘s [Queer] Bird‘: A Fairytale

Heroine and Her Avatars‖ (2008) produces an excellent reading of how the Grimms‘ tale

―Fitcher‘s Bird‖ overturns the Freudian myth of the castrated woman and ―subverts

patriarchy, heterosexuality, femininity, and masculinity alike‖ (147). Her essay presages

mine also in her conclusion: having learned from feminist and queer theory to distrust

universal truths, Greenhill finds that ―[m]ultiple experiences make for multiple

knowledges. Similarly, the multiple reflections and reproductions in fairy tales implicate

multiple truths‖ (164). The recognition of multiplicity of experiences, knowledges and

truths at work in fairy tale fiction is, I believe, key to understanding its vitality and to this

project.

Work at the intersection of queer and fairy-tale studies is promising and much

needed. In my recent academic journal index searches for the keywords ―queer AND

fairy tales‖ most results yielded quotations from outside of fairy-tale studies that dismiss

the fairy tale as a derivative and insignificant genre that reinscribes the heteronormative

script of the happily-ever-after heterosexual marriage. Otherwise, fairy tales are regarded

as simplistic lies that deliberately evade political discourses by throwing up distracting

glitter and frills to blind and bind us to consumerist or other disaffecting enterprises.

Alan McKee goes so far as to define fairy tales as ―simplistic and reassuring teleological

narratives of moral change‖ (21). Throughout the rest of his essay, tellingly entitled

―Fairy Tales: How We Stopped Being ‗Lesbian and Gay‘ and Became ‗Queer,‘‖ fairy tale

becomes a metaphor for the simplistic lies he believes queer academics have told

themselves in their rush to take up the queer mantle and dismiss ―gay and lesbian‖ as

useful political identities. The use of ―fairy tale‖ as a pejorative synonym for ―deception,‖

that which is ―disingenuous‖ and ―frivolous‖ clearly demonstrates a lack of awareness on

the side of queer theory of the discussions within fairy-tale studies as a discipline, while

at the same time reinforcing simplified ―common sense‖ notions of the fairy tale as a

monologic and stable fixed genre that ―everybody‖ comprehends immediately and

completely.

But, if as feminists have argued, fairy tales can be good for girls, one of my goals

is to discover whether they can be good for queers too. Fairy tales and contemporary

fairy-tale writers have posited alternatives to heteropatriarchy, and a close examination

of the ways in which tale telling, sharing, and retelling are represented in texts through

metanarrative, intertextuality, and multivocality will, in my view, profit from the

insistence on the contingent, shifty, mutable forms of difference that queer theory

embraces.

The Storyteller

My dissertation project looks particularly at the figures of the teller and the

listener and therefore is more focused upon metanarrational effects and functions within

contemporary fairy-tale fiction and film than upon the fourth-wall breakages of

metafictional effects. Before I expand on this distinction between metanarrative and

metafiction, I want to introduce and clarify some of the terminology that has bearing on

the relevance of metanarration to my study.

As my title suggests, the figure of the storyteller is the primary object of this

study. In recent years two books have been published that are also concerned to differing

degrees with the storyteller and the act of storytelling in contemporary fairy tales: Kevin

Paul Smith‘s The Postmodern Fairytale: Folkloric Intertexts in Contemporary Fiction

(2007), and Jessica Tiffin‘s Marvelous Geometry: Narrative and Metafiction in Modern

Fairy Tale (2009). Smith is interested in how his source texts, ―rely for a great deal of

their effect upon ‗fairytale‘ storytelling. They incorporate an oral narrative including

recognizable fairytale motifs addressed to a physically present narratee‖ (88). Smith

stresses that his use of the term storyteller (rather than narrator) in his project applies

to ―a character who is personified within a text and who orally narrates his or her stories

to a narratee, who also appears as a character within the text‖ (89). In contrast to

narrator or more specific narratological terms such as Genette‘s terms for narrating

―person‖ in relation to the story (heterodiegetic/ homodiegetic) and narrative level

(extradiegetic/intradiegetic/autodiegetic) formulations, Smith argues that storyteller

reminds us of the presence of a narratee. My focus on storytelling in contemporary fairy-

tale fiction and film also depends on not forgetting the presence of the narratee.

However, unlike Smith, in addition to the storyteller as homodiegetic- intradiegetic etc

narrators telling tales to a narratee (or narratees), I am also interested in the

representations of these tellers via other narrators (cinematic narrator and other

homodiegetic-intradiegetic narrators) when the storyteller figure is not narrating her or

himself. While Smith will ―use storyteller to give a degree of specificity to a particular

type of narrating agent, operating with a specific type of narrative context‖ (89), I will

use the term to signify specific and, in many of my texts, multiple characters who are

narrating agents, but who are also the subjects of narration. That is, my storytellers both

tell and listen to tales, but they are also the subjects of tales told by external narrators.

This difference between Smith‘s and my use of the term matters because, while

useful, his description of storyteller does not go far enough to include the particular

figures I will be discussing. In each of the narratives I study, narratees or listeners often

also become storytellers themselves at some point during the narrative. Or, as in the case

of the television miniseries Arabian Nights, the narratee, Schahriar, participates in and

directly affects storyteller Scheherezade‘s narrations. These shifts in narrating levels

happen through narrative framing or embedding and also have direct impact upon the

narrative authority of the storyteller figures.

Metanarrative

My discussion of storytellers then, is very much dependent upon my uses of

metanarrative, narrative embedding or framing mechanisms, and narrative authority.

Two critical texts particularly inform my understanding and use of the terms

metanarrative and metanarration: Monika Fludernik‘s ―Metanarrative and

Metafictional Commentary: From Metadiscursivity to Metanarration and Metafiction‖

(2003) and Ansgar Nünning‘s ―On Metanarrative: Towards a Definition, a Typology and

an Outline of the Functions of Metanarrative Commentary‖ (2004). A careful discussion

of metanarrative as opposed to metafiction, is imperative here for, as Fludernik argues,

―in English narratological criticism, the terms metanarrative and metafiction are on the

whole used interchangeably,‖ and the tendency is to ―equate statements about the

narrative process with metafiction‖ in order to refer to ―all sorts of techniques that

explicitly or implicitly ‗break‘ what is called the mimetic illusion generated by fictional

narrative‖ (11).

Indeed, Jessica Tiffin seems to employ metafiction as a synonym for self-

reflexivity. Referring to Patricia Waugh‘s definition of metafiction as ―writing which self-

consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose

questions about the relationship between fiction and reality‖ (Waugh 2), Tiffin goes on to

argue that the fairy tale insists on its fictionality since ―the carryover of the oral voice of

folktale constructs the tale as tale, as a created text rather than any attempt at

reproducing reality‖ (emphasis in original, Tiffin 23). Further, ―[t]he unashamed

presentation of the marvelous, as well as the unrealistic use of pattern and repetition in

describing events, similarly draws attention to a nonrealist form of representation–to the

tale as crafted object, artifact‖ (23). Similarly, Kevin Paul Smith argues that ―[b]y

drawing attention to the devices that we generally ignore when thinking about fiction

and portraying the act of fiction-making in such depth, we can identify the storyteller as

a metafictive device‖ and he continues to refer to the common understanding of

metafiction as ―fiction about fiction‖ (112). For Smith the figure of the storyteller causes

―metafictive effects‖ (88).

However, like Fludernik, Nünning shows how the two phenomena are distinct:

metanarration ―concerns the narrator‘s reflections on the discourse or the process of

narration,‖ and metafiction ―refers to comments on fictionality of the narrated text or of

the narrator.‖ Nünning does note that they are both related to self-referentiality, but they

are not synonyms (16). Both Nünning and Fludernik are careful to show the important,

but often ignored differences between the two terms. Metanarrative, then, applies to

―those forms of self-reflexive narration in which aspects of narration (and not the

fictionality of the narrated) become the subject of the narratorial discourse,‖ and as such

they may be found in non-fiction as well as fiction (Nünning 16). Important to my study

in particular is Nünning‘s observation that, ―In principle, one may assume that

metanarration, depending on the type and context, can just as well support the illusion

of authenticity created in a text and in the act of narration‖ (17). I would call none of my

texts metafictions,5 but all of them do employ metanarrational expressions in their use of

the scene of storytelling and the representation of storyteller figure(s). Each of my source

texts thematizes narrating/storytelling through different embedding or framing

techniques. Further, these metanarrational frames do not undercut the mimetic illusion

or bring attention to the fictionality of the primary narrative. Having once passed the

threshold of ―Once upon a time,‖ the viewer/reader does not reemerge to reflect upon the

fictionality of these texts until the film credits roll or she closes the book.

Frames and Framing

The concept of frames and framing in relation to narrative is multilayered and

very complex, perhaps unnecessarily so. The terms frame or framing are used to discuss

narrative literature and film in a number of not always clearly differentiated ways. The

following is a list of some of the types of frames I will be looking at.

1. The frame as structural device brings to mind either the famous ―Russian doll‖ or

―Chinese box‖ images of embedding where one tale seems to rest inside another; or

the ―beads on a chain‖ technique where a primary or external frame narration gives

over to another for a short or extended period. In both of these structures the

secondary tale can be narrated by the same or different narrator as the external or

primary narrative. William Nelles points out that this shift in narration can happen

at two levels: ―shift in narrator but not in narrative level, and with a shift of both

narrator and narrative level‖ (85). In most cases, frames that are opened are closed

again, but this is not always the case if, as Nelles notes: ―the opening frame has

provided all of the context necessary for interpretation of the embedded narrative

and the structure is felt as complete even though implicit‖ (91). In Kissing the Witch

and ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses,‖ on the other hand, the opening

frames do not supply enough information to ―complete‖ the stories, and they are both

left open-ended.

2. A second structural understanding of frame points to a text‘s opening and closing

formula such as the ubiquitous ―Once upon a time…happily ever after‖ that tells

readers they are entering and then leaving the realm of the fairy tale.

3. Paratextual framing information also often accompanies a text to assist the reader

cognitively. This information has been further subdivided by Genette (1997) into:

a. peritext –information adjacent to a text, such as chapter titles, epigrams,

opening and closing film credits or, in the case of Sexing the Cherry, graphic

symbols at the beginning of chapters or sections denote the narrator of the

upcoming section but do not have a narrative function (5).

b. epitext –information which is subsequent to the text such as interviews,

reviews, intertexts, advertising etc. (5).

4. Intertexts – texts that the primary narrative engages –either overtly or covertly– will

also work dialogically, thus, in a sense, also framing a reader‘s response to the text.

For example, Tale type ATU 306 ―The Danced Out Shoes‖ or ―The Story of the Twelve

Dancing Princesses‖ works as an intertextual frame for the embedded tales of the

princesses in Sexing the Cherry.

5. Texts are also bound by generic expectations and the extent to which they extend

beyond or remain within those ―frames‖ of expectations will determine their

recognizability as part of that genre.

6. In cinematic terms, framing is used to describe the total visual picture contained

within one frame of film; but

7. the ways in which visual content is laid out within that space may also ―frame‖ a

character—for example, between two pillars, or through a window.

8. More abstractly, texts can be framed by ideological constructs and discourses such as

Orientalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, or the concept of ―family viewing.‖

I have tried to show in the above list that frames work at different times and to

different degrees structurally, cognitively and ideologically. Because the metaphors

frame and framing are so useful and multifarious, there is often slippage between and

among these meanings.

Narrative Authority

The effects of metanarrative reflexivity, metafictional self-consciousness, and the

multifaceted types of framing tie in with problems of narrative authority. Just like the

terms frame and framing, narrative authority is often used without much reflection on or

attention to the various levels and subtleties of meaning it can invoke. Susan Lanser

insists on the importance of recognizing the relationships between narrative form and

social identity and argues convincingly for an understanding of the production of

authority as arising ―from a conjunction of social and rhetorical properties‖ (1992 6).

For my purposes, I will adapt Lanser‘s concept of discursive authority, which she

uses as a synonym for narrative authority, and employ the term narratorial authority in

my discussions of authority to come. For Lanser, discursive authority is ―the intellectual

credibility, ideological validity, and aesthetic value claimed by or conferred upon a work,

author, narrator, character or textual practice‖ and it is ―produced interactively‖ (1992

6). Because the Western literary canon has historically privileged the educated,

heterosexual, white, male voice, Lanser notes that ―[o]ne major constituent of narrative

authority, therefore, is the extent to which a narrator‘s status conforms to this dominant

social power‖ (6). While Lanser is concerned with narrative authority more generally, I

am concerned primarily with narrators or storyteller figures: I am specifically not

interested in voice or the authority of individual auteurs or authors. However, the texts I

will discuss in the forthcoming chapters each challenge narratorial authority of the

storyteller figures I examine in relation to gender, political positions, age, and/or

sexuality. For, Lanser continues, ―narrative authority is also constituted through

(historically changing) textual strategies that even socially unauthorized writers can

appropriate. Since such appropriations may of course backfire, nonhegemonic writers

and narrators may need to strike a delicate balance in accommodating and subverting

dominant rhetorical practices‖ (6-7). Along with Lanser, I acknowledge that any act of

telling claims a certain amount of authority for the speaker, and for traditionally silenced

tellers (women, colonized peoples, sexual minorities) this is no small matter. As I will

show in my discussion of Arabian Nights, claiming authority to tell is not always enough

to ensure one can retain that authority or have it accepted by one‘s interlocutors. On the

other hand, just as nonhegemonic narrators need to ―strike a delicate balance‖ in order

to retain their authority as tellers, members of the dominant discourse community, such

as Captain Vidal in Pan’s Labyrinth, are not guaranteed the ability to control the

reception of their own tales based upon their authoritative (or authoritarian) positions.

Moreover, claiming authority or the right to tell does not have to be concomitant with a

claim of authoritative mastery, but can, as I will show in my discussions of Kissing the

Witch and ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses,‖ work to create communities of

tellers and listeners who authorize each other‘s acts of telling by requesting and passing

the tale telling performance along.

My interest in storytellers and narrative desires then, means that I am also

interested in how narratorial authority is conferred to and retained or lost by storytelling

figures. In Arabian Nights, the narration of the covert but ever-present cinematic

narrator is key to the representation of the storyteller figure Scheherezade and her own

narratorial authority. Employing Seymour Chatman‘s elaborations on the cinematic

narrator and character filtration (1990), I argue that through character filtration, which

privileges the mad Schahriar, Scheherezade‘s narratorial authority is subverted, adding

to the ways in which Schahriar seeks to control her storytelling performances and even

the content of her tales. Further, the cinematic narrator‘s Orientalizing gaze, in

conjunction with paratextual information and visual claims to authenticity, serves to

support the film‘s authority over any of the female characters in the frame narrative. In

contrast, in Pan’s Labyrinth, the story of the creation of a fascist utopia that Captain

Vidal attempts to construct is undercut by the cinematic narrator and by characters,

Mercedes and Ofelia.

In Kissing the Witch and Sexing the Cherry narratorial authority is partially

conferred upon tellers by interlocutors and the very act of passing on the storytelling

responsibility– rather than competing for it. Thus, in these two texts the multiple

narrators reject a concept of narratorial authority as mastery and/or proprietorship over

any final or verifiable truth. On the contrary these narrator-storytellers offer possible,

rather than certain, interpretations of their intertexts, and moreover, they pass

narratorial authority from one teller to the next, sharing it amongst themselves and even,

perhaps, with their narratees.

These two chapters are also the ones in which queer theory particularly comes to

the fore in my study, and it is not a coincidence that I engage a theory that refuses to

calcify into an easily definable stable ―thing‖ with these texts, which work through

narrational coalitions and cooperation to offer multiple stories, multiple desires and

multiple readings—strategies and effects that the controlling figures of Arabian Nights

and Pan’s Labyrinth cannot allow.

The Chapters

Having mapped out the territory I will be covering in my stories about

storytellers, I now narrow my focus to briefly describe the particular pathways I will

negotiate in each chapter.

Arabian Nights

This chapter will look at the relationship between storytellers and listeners in the

television mini-series Arabian Nights (2000). It will consider the scene of storytelling, in

particular the reasons for storytelling and the relationships between the two primary

figures, Schahriar and Scheherezade

Narratorial authority shifts among Scheherazade, her mad Sultan, Schahriar, and

the cinematic narrator throughout the miniseries. This shifting of authority serves to

both enframe Scheherazade and diminish her authority as storyteller. At the same time,

the program‘s framing techniques work to circumvent resistant readings of this version

of the Nights by presenting itself as an authentic yet modern revision of an ancient

storytelling tradition. In claiming a certain amount of authenticity, this version of the

film is able, at the same time, to also distance itself from the gender ideologies it

professes.

In doing so, the film makes Schahriar both a sympathetic modern man beset by

mental illness brought on by triple betrayal, and also distances him from too close

identification by the audience by making him a Sultan, a foreigner, and placing him in

the un-time of a fairy-tale. He is, thus, removed from contemporary cultural critique at

three levels. In framing him in these ways the film makes an unarticulated move that

works much like Charles Perrault‘s moral at the end of his version of ―Bluebeard.‖ At the

end of this tale of a serial wife killer, Perrault leaves his reader with the moral that

If you just take a sensible point of view,

And study this grim little story,

You will understand that this tale

Is one that took place many years ago.

No longer are husbands so terrible,

Demanding the impossible,

Acting unhappy and jealous.

With their wives they toe the line;

And whatever color their beards might be,

It‘s not hard to tell which of the pair is master. (Tatar, Classic 148)

In addition to this moral and its claim that women need not really worry about

running into a Bluebeard monster-man because men are no longer prey to sexual

jealousy or abusive tendencies, it is interesting to note that most nineteenth-century

illustrations accompanying the ―Bluebeard‖ tale Orientalize the Bluebeard character,

dressing him in turban with scimitar in lush exotic palaces entirely reminiscent of the

Nights. Perhaps predictably, neither Disney nor Hallmark/RHI Entertainment has taken

up contemporary revisions of Bluebeard. Presumably, the recuperation of this male

murderer is too much even for these mainstream patriarchal production companies.

Contemporary revisions of that tale tend to come from feminist writers such as Angela

Carter, Nalo Hopkinson, Francesca Lia Block, and film-makers such as Jane Campion.

These adaptations transfer the focus of the tale from the dangers of female curiosity to

the dangers of male sexual jealousy and the threat of male sexual violence against

women.

Why focus on the Arabian Nights miniseries? In part because of its masking of

difference as sameness in a variety of colours and outfits, and because it is a big-budget

Hollywood rendition that ensures both commercial and cognitive availability to a wide

audience. The series is also very entertaining. So it is likely that this version may well

become the paradigmatic version for most North Americans and their primary

introduction to the Nights. Indeed, an internet search for ―Arabian Nights‖ that does not

have a scholarly focus finds the film listed third on Google and at the top of both

Wikipedia and Amazon. It seems reasonable to assume, therefore, that the popularity of

this version, with all of its faults and strengths, will inform the ways in which the text is

conceived of in public discourse for many years to come. The emergent status of this

Arabian Nights as exemplar text, supported by its visual attendance to cultural

authenticity and its positioning of itself as an authentic presentation of an ancient

storytelling tradition, makes a discussion of the ways in which it engages and transforms

the famous frame narrative of the Nights especially important.

Pan’s Labyrinth

Guillermo Del Toro‘s film El Laberinto del Fauno, or Pan’s Labyrinth in the

English translation of the title, addresses the problem of why we tell stories at all.

Although magic and wonder are never questioned in traditional or ―classic‖ fairy tales,

many characters in contemporary fairy-tale fiction and film find it necessary to argue

that magic does not exist. Why do so many texts end with a closing narrative frame that

denies the magic the protagonist and audience have experienced, that dismisses it as just

a dream? Does this insistence on privileging ―truth‖ over ―lies‖ by some characters in

fairy-tale fiction and film merely set up the clichéd argument that some lies tell a greater

truth than facts? Or might the invocation of this binary opposition be read as a

deconstructive fissure that emphasizes the unstable nature of such an opposition? If so,

what are the consequences?

Exploring narrative desire as discussed by Peter Brooks, Teresa de Lauretis and

Susan Winnett and then moving on to expand upon Tzvetan Todorov‘s categories of the

marvelous, fantastic and uncanny, this chapter asks, what happens if one perversely

decides to read embedded marvelous texts against the grain of phallocentric

psychoanalytic understandings of the fantasy as representing repressed desires and wish

fulfillment? What are the narrative consequences of believing along with the protagonist

that she does not live in a fantasy world, but a real world in which the strange and

seemingly impossible are not only true but must be carefully negotiated in order to

survive? I suggest that critical responses that try to recuperate magic into an

understandable, utterable, and stable ―real‖ world in films that juxtapose the marvelous

and the mimetic run the risk of allowing hegemonic readings to erase alternative models

of political resistance by dismissing them as not only ―not normal‖ but not real. What is

at stake in the repudiation of magic both within and outside of Pan’s Labyrinth is not

only the vitality and legitimacy of resistant voices, but the status of stories themselves as

anything other than ―just‖ fictions.

Kissing The Witch & Sexing The Cherry

The two main focus texts for this section of my dissertation, Kissing the Witch by

Emma Donoghue and the embedded tale of ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing

Princesses‖ in Jeanette Winterson‘s novel Sexing the Cherry, may already be ―queer‖ in

that they each portray tellers who tell of lesbian desire, but I will also ask questions about

other ways these texts might ―queer‖ storytelling. The stories in this chapter thematize

the construction of self as other and work to de-center normative concepts of a pre-

existing stable ―self‖ that needs to be ―found.‖

The tellers of these tales are in the process of altering the direction of that

essentialist tradition. In becoming tellers, these characters take stories, break them and

re-make them to create spaces for their desire and their otherness. These two texts are

narrated by women-identified women to narratees who seek them out and ask to hear

their stories. What are the consequences of this shift in the relationships between

narrator and narratee? In destabilizing the narrative voice, switching from one voice to

another (―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses‖) and passing stories along

(Kissing the Witch), these texts also create an equalizing relationship between one teller

and the next; but what of their relationship with the stories themselves?

I will ask what happens when narrational voices shift: how do narrators negotiate

the shifts that they perform? While recognizing that they are part of a story that has

already been told by others, these tellers speak from another direction. How do these

narrators negotiate tensions between the tradition they have entered and the desire to

tell the story as it means to them? In addition, unlike the competitive narrative games

played out in Arabian Nights and Pan’s Labyrinth, these texts refuse mastery and create

situations in which one teller‘s authority does not undercut or silence another‘s but calls

it into being; what happens to narration when the narrator rejects narratorial authority

(authorship, authenticity) based on competition in preference for the fragmentary and

contingent and coalitional telling of a fairy tale?

These chapters seeks to find ways in which the storytelling situation, the

relationship between storytellers and the tales they tell, and the reasons listeners request

these stories not only create spaces for specific and anti-essentialist lesbian desire, but

also create reasons for both telling and listening that encourage each listener to become

the teller of her own tale, rather than just a version of another‘s.

CHAPTER 1: BEDTIME STORIES: RE-FRAMING STORYTELLING

IN ARABIAN NIGHTS, THE MINISERIES

―Stories can save us,‖ says a market-place storyteller to Scheherezade, in the

television miniseries Arabian Nights. And certainly those who are familiar with the

frame tale of the ancient cycle of interconnected stories are aware that it is precisely

stories that save the life of storyteller Scheherezade, the women of her nation, and the

nation itself. After establishing some historical understanding of the Arabian Nights

textual tradition and its interpretations, this chapter examines how questions of

authenticity, authority, and desire affect the goals of storytelling.

In its long and varied relationship with the Arabian Nights tradition, Hollywood

has not, on the whole, been overly concerned with fidelity either to the many stories

within the ancient collection of tales or to the multi-layered complexity of its structure.

Rather, Hollywood has chosen to send audiences on ―magic carpet rides of adventure,‖

which are ―fun for the whole family!‖ Arabian Nights marks a change in the cinematic

approach to this most slippery and multifarious text. It does, of course, have ―mind-

blowing adventure and extraordinary special effects set against the backdrop of

mysterious Arabia‖ as the DVD packaging unashamedly proclaims, but this version also

introduces a number of innovations to the long-running relationship between the Nights1

and visual media. Not least of these is its attention to the frame story of Scheherezade

and Schahriar,2 which is often omitted or significantly transformed in cinematic

versions of the text. Like the textual Nights that it adapts, the miniseries is also very

much concerned with narrative: how narrators shape their stories and how stories can

shape their audiences.

The basic plot of the frame tale of the Nights is simple. The powerful Sultan

Schahriar is informed by his beloved brother Schahzenan that his wife is cheating on him

with a slave. Schahriar is so outraged by this news that he abandons his wife and his

nation to go on a journey with his brother. Early in their travels, the brothers come

across a woman, stolen by an ifrit on her wedding day and kept in a locked box. She

threatens the brothers with the wrath of the ifrit if they do not have sex with her. They

do, but the woman‘s sexual promiscuity so infuriates Schahriar that he decides that in

order to escape the perfidy of women, he will return home, have his wife executed and

marry a new woman every day then have her killed the next. After some time of this

gynocide, which threatens not only the women of his nation but the royal line of

succession and the stability of the nation itself, the famous character Scheherezade

enters the picture. She marries the Sultan and is able to suspend her death sentence, and

the death sentences of all Muslim women, by telling Schahriar stories that are so

engrossing that he spares her life every day so that she can continue her storytelling the

next night. This pattern continues until Schahriar has learned his lessons about love,

justice, and good governance from her stories. He then revokes his death sentence upon

Scheherezade, thus reestablishing the political equilibrium of the nation and ending the

frame tale.

The Nights is not a single text, but a textual matrix with a long and varied oral,

literary, and cinematic history. Also known in English as the Thousand and One Nights,

and Alf layla wa-layla in Arabic, it is a composite text comprising the famous frame

story of Scheherezade and the stories she tells. The stories in the Nights come from many

cultures and have traveled throughout both East and West. They have been passed from

the mouths and pens of so many storytellers over the last ten or so centuries that any

attempt to trace the collection to an authentic original source is nearly impossible. It is

known that many of the tales of the Nights were first compiled from oral sources around

the tenth century and that these tales, along with their narrator Scheherezade, have gone

through many manifestations ever since.

The oldest known extant manuscript was written in Arabic in the fourteenth or

fifteenth century. The earliest printed texts were created in India as Arabic language

primers rather than as scholarly works. Much later, Antoine Galland produced a French

translation in twelve volumes published between 1704 and 1718. After the popular

success of Galland‘s editions, during the height of Western Orientalist scholarship in the

late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, English translations began to appear,

many of which attempted to ―improve upon‖ the sources they employed. The most well-

known English translations, or more accurately as Husain Haddawy states of Galland‘s

text, adaptations, are those by Edward Lane (1839-41), John Payne (1882-84), and

Richard Burton (1885-86, whose version is notorious for upping the eroticism, racism

and misogyny).3

In the modern era, the Nights has gone through many transformations, a large

number of them cinematic. As Nights scholar Robert Irwin points out, ―the history of the

Thousand and One Nights on film is nearly as old as the history of film itself,‖ and this

history includes ―hundreds of films‖ although relatively few of them have included the

frame tale (―Movies‖ 92). The legacy of the Nights is not only literary and cinematic. The

tales have inspired plays and ballets; artists have depicted scenes from the tales,

including the frame story of Scheherezade and Schahriar; other characters from the

stories, such as Aladdin (a figure who may have been introduced to the cycle by

Galland4), have been taken up by the Disney corporation and turned into commercial

franchises. Nights characters turn up in British pantomime performances at Christmas

time, and North American children wear Nights-inspired costumes on Halloween.

Advertisers use scenes and images to sell products, and pornographers use the erotic

reputation of the tales to sell sex. Perhaps paradoxically, the figure of Scheherezade is so

engaging and adaptable that in addition to pornographers claiming her, feminist

theorists and storytellers also claim her as a feminist icon of female wisdom and cunning

in the face of gynocidal patriarchy. The richness and allure of Scheherezade and her

stories, therefore, have meant that very few audience members come to any version of

the Nights with no previous knowledge of some other version or image derived from the

tales.

The latest popular visual adaptation of the Nights, written by Peter Barnes and

produced by Hallmark Entertainment (since bought out by the production company RHI

Entertainment) is an international production filmed primarily in Turkey and consisting

of a multi-cultural (though primarily UK and American based) cast. It originally aired

over two nights in North America and the UK in April 2000, and has been released on

DVD in a version that runs nearly three hours. Because it is a televised miniseries and it

does not have a thousand and one nights to tell the tales, Arabian Nights embeds only

five stories. Neither Scheherezade nor the paratextual information on the DVD gives

titles to the tales she tells but they are clearly adaptations of: ―Alî Bâbâ and the Forty

Thieves‖ (353), ―The Hunchback‘s Tale‖ (23), ―Alâ-al-Dîn: or the Wonderful Lamp‖

(346), ―The Sleeper and the Waker‖ (263), and ―Prince Ahmad and the Fairy Perî Bânû‖

(355). 5 Although she recounts only five tales, Scheherezade (Mili Avital) weaves action,

adventure, comedy, romance, and tragedy into her tellings, and each tale contributes to

the moral education of Schahriar (Dougray Scott) and enables both his eventual recovery

from madness and his transformation into a brave Sultan and good husband.

The representation and expansion of the frame tale in Arabian Nights is an

important development in Hollywood‘s long association with the Nights, for in allowing

Scheherezade to reemerge as the teller of the tales, the film-makers are also ensuring

that, in the minds of a mainstream Western audience who otherwise might only be

vaguely acquainted with them, Scheherezade and Schahriar become once again, like

Aladdin and Ali Baba, major figures in popular conceptions of the Nights. In addition to

adapting and expanding the frame story for a contemporary audience, the producers are

careful to present the miniseries as an ―authentic‖ retelling but clearly do not feel bound

by fidelity to any specific previous version, even the edition by Burton that they claim

inspired this adaptation.

In the introduction to his seminal study Orientalism (1978), Edward Said notes

that, ―Every writer on the Orient . . . assumes some Oriental precedent, some previous

knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers and on which he relies‖ (2006). In Arabian

Nights this precedent is substantiated by paratextual information such as the blurbs on

the DVD box, DVD extras, the production company‘s website, and other promotional

materials that specifically link the new text to the old. Arabian Nights specifically

attaches itself to Sir Richard Burton in its ―Making Of‖ documentary. This link to an

established literary past also allows director Steve Baron to claim that the miniseries is

taking part in the storytelling tradition of the Nights as ―just another one in the chain of

those storytellers.‖ As a result, the producers can side-step accusations about infidelity

and expand and alter the frame tale significantly. The result is that Husain Haddawy‘s

observation that ―Burton‘s translation . . . is not so much a true translation of the Nights

as it is a colorful and entertaining concoction‖ also applies very well to this filmic

adaptation and points to its various Orientalizing effects (xxiii).

As Orientalism is a discursive field that tells the West as much about itself as its

fantasies about the East, Said argues that the signs of Orientalism are surface features

can be found in the ―style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and

social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to some

great original‖ (2007). In the case of Arabian Nights, the ―great original‖ is not only the

fantasy of the East, but the fantasy of any true primary version of the Nights. Through

the discursive effects of Orientalism, therefore, Arabian Nights can claim authenticity

based upon its precursors, attain authority from Burton‘s text, and at the same time

deviate from previous versions while expanding upon and supporting Orientalist

assumptions.

In addition to claims of authenticity based on established texts and the surface

fantasies of Orientalism, Arabian Nights does make gestures toward fidelity to the

source texts that other cinematic transformations have not, by emphasizing the

importance of storytelling for example. Just as in the source texts, narrative and the act

of narration take a central role, which, as Arabic literature scholar Wen-chin Ouyang

notes, is a first for cinematic renditions of the Nights. Although Ouyang praises this

version for restoring ―diversity to the Nights stories, the cultures they evoke, [and] the

geographical span they cover,‖ this cultural and textual sensitivity only goes so far: ―its

attention to authenticity of representation in the recent culture of political correctness,

and its integration of new insights regarding the function of storytelling in the Nights,

cannot disguise its essentially Western identity‖ (404, 407). In some ways then, Arabian

Nights is really a form of visual cultural tourism. The mise-en-scène establishes an

idealized imaginary Islamic culture, which, although it is long ago and far away, seems

familiar–where ―they‖ seem more like ―us.‖ As Ouyang suggests, in true Orientalist

fashion, this film is not about ―them‖ at all, it is about ―us,‖–a globalized Western ―us‖

positioned within the beautiful frame of a cultural mosaic that subordinates difference to

a universalized romantic norm. All discourses relating to cultural difference in Arabian

Nights are bound by the grand narrative of monogamous heterosexual romantic love as

the universal force that can conquer all. Further, the ―timeless‖ love story of

Scheherezade and Schahriar conceals the production‘s own political and gendered

ideologies in the imaginary space of an ancient storytelling tradition that is more

―authentic‖ to the Hollywood romance tradition than the oral or textual traditions from

which the stories of the Nights spring.

Arabian Nights constructs a world that conforms to audience expectations of

what the world of the Nights ―should‖ look like with all of the surface or external effects

Said notes. It uses brilliant special effects, continuity editing, costuming, and set

dressing to capture viewers‘ imaginations and keep them interested, not only in the

embedded tales of Ali Baba, Aladdin, and the others, but in the frame story as well. The

Arabian Nights‘ visual retelling employs state of the art special effects to produce the

iconic images we expect, such as flying carpets, magic lamps, and frightening beasts, as

well as rich textures and a bold color palette, which reproduce the fantasy of the Orient

that we have come to believe is authentic. In fact, because the cultural conventions and

stereotypes employed are as old as the history of the translations of the tales themselves,

many of these images come in large part from earlier cultural transformations of the

Nights.

In the ―Making Of‖ documentary, Mili Avital (Scheherezade) proclaims her

wonder at the imagination of the costume department since ―there are some paintings of

sort-of the period, but not really. They kind of make it up.‖ As Avital says this in voice-

over, the camera zooms in on a print by early twentieth-century French illustrator

Edmund Dulac. Set dressing and costuming are especially important in developing the

spectacle of an exotic and mysterious East, particularly the costuming of the women in

the film. In Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, Meyda

Yeğenoğlu argues that ―if we are to engage the complex significations that constitute

Orientalism we need to examine closely how the discursive constitution of Otherness is

achieved simultaneously through sexual as well as cultural modes of differentiation‖ (2).

In Arabian Nights, both sexual and cultural Otherness are achieved in no small part by

the lavish costuming and characterization of secondary female characters.

Dangerous Desires

The film begins not with Scheherezade or Schahriar, but with a dream sequence.

The title credits roll over an extreme soft-focus close-up of glimmering gold fabric. The

camera slowly pulls out to reveal, first the swaying midriff and eventually the full body of

a dark-skinned woman in harem dress (Ayesha Dharker), dancing provocatively in the

palm of a giant red ifrit or devil. This shot establishes the young woman as an exotic and

erotic Other to the audience of viewers who, as I will show, are quickly aligned with

Schahriar to whom this woman is a sexual and mortal threat.

The opening sequence moves seamlessly from the title credits and into the

narrative proper. When the young woman finishes her dance, she whispers in the giant

ifrit‘s ear and he begins to produce CGI wonders for her pleasure as she cries ―More!

More!‖ The ifrit , tired from all the magic making, lies down for a nice nap. As he lies

down to sleep, the young woman notices a man climbing down from a nearby tree. This

man, who has been spying on the odd couple, thanks her for not telling her ―friend the

demon‖ of his presence. She replies: ―He‘s not my friend, he‘s my husband‖ and

promptly plops her self on the ground at the man‘s feet and demands: ―And now you

must make love to me. . . if you don‘t, I will wake him, and he‘ll rip your head off.‖ The

man slowly bends down and reaches for the woman, but rather than gathering her in an

embrace, he begins to strangle her. A series of quick shot-reverse-shots of the struggling

woman and the man‘s sweating face as her screams swell in the background ends in a

dramatic sound change and shift of light that indicates by a match-cut that the man has

woken up. The next shot is a long-shot of him on his own bed, waking screaming from

his nightmare.

As an establishing scene this dream sequence is captivating. Shot entirely in hues

of gold, the dream-like quality is compounded by the exotic, mysterious soundtrack and

the smooth, but deliberately artificial-looking special effects of the ifrit‘s wonders. This

scene is pure spectacle and the dancing girl is at its centre. She is integral to the visual

pleasure of the opening scene, in which, as Laura Mulvey argues, woman is an

―indispensable element of spectacle … yet her visual presence tends to work against the

development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic

contemplation‖ (40). Here, the sequence of the girl‘s dance and her responses to the

wonders of the ifrit delay the beginning of the action and provide a sumptuous

background for the title credits (another framing mechanism) to roll. The scene serves as

an initial visual delay to the beginning of the plot of the film and then smoothly moves on

to establish Schahriar‘s psychological state. What it reveals is the fertile imagination of a

suffering madman to whom woman is a duplicitous erotic object who uses her sexuality

against men, first in dancing for the ifrit so he will pay her with magical visions, and then

cuckolding the ifrit by demanding sexual gratification from Schahriar. It is this dream,

moreover, that impels Schahriar‘s waking decision to marry a woman and have her killed

the next morning. The dream tells him, he believes, ―that all wives are treacherous . . .

there is only one thing to do with wives – they have to be executed!‖ 6 ―There will be a

marriage‖ he declares, ―and there will be a wedding night, but in the morning I‘ll have

her executed before she can kill me!‖

Both Fedwa Malti-Douglas and Eva Sallis have argued forcefully for the ways in

which narrative and desire are intertwined in the frame narrative of the Nights. ―Desire

swirls around her,‖ says Malti-Douglas, ―while she has little hold on it. All the more

striking by contrast is Shahrazâd‘s mastery. It is she who controls the relation between

desire and the text, at least up to a point‖ (Malti-Douglas 11). Malti-Douglas argues that

desire and longing are the impetus for all of the actions of the frame tale. Schahriar longs

to see his brother, and this homosocial desire sets in motion the journeys and discoveries

of cheating wives by the two men. In the miniseries Arabian Nights, however, desire

works in very different ways. In adapting the Nights for a Western television audience,

desire, and especially sexual desire, is framed as always negative. Love is divorced from

desire; love conquers all–including both homicidal and sexual desires.

For Malti-Douglas, ―[d]esire is at the root of the frame of the Nights, but desire as

a problem. There are proper desires as there are improper ones. Or, to speak more

precisely, there are proper and improper patterns of desire, and ways of using and

fulfilling desire‖ (15). Scheherezade must contain or at least redirect sexual desire in

order to achieve her goals. Sallis argues that sexual desire is not the real problem in the

Nights: ―sex is had and finished with on the first and every subsequent night. Clearly the

desire she manipulates is not sexual, it is narrative, substituted for the sexual‖ (102).

Since it is ―family viewing‖ though, in Arabian Nights sex is not had before the tale

telling begins and Scheherezade‘s manipulation of Schahriar‘s desires reflects Malti-

Douglas‘s understanding of the dynamics of desire: ―Shahrazâd shifts the problem of

desire from the area of sex, the realm of Shâhriyâr‘s trauma, to the superficially more

distant and more malleable world of the text‖ (22). In Arabian Nights it is not that sex is

bad, so much as that sexual desire outside of the heteronormative marriage bed is the

cause of upheaval and destruction. Unruly desire leads to death. 7

The dream sequence then, reinstates a key scene from the traditional Nights

frame tale, but restructures it to introduce the Sultan and contextualize his madness in a

new way. The dancing girl in this production is clearly analogous to the stolen bride of

the literary frame tale. In versions of the written text, when the young woman encounters

the Sultan she discovers, not Schahriar alone, but him and his brother hiding in a tree.

She demands they both make love to her and then tells them the story of how the demon

stole her on her wedding night and usually keeps her in a locked box at the bottom of the

ocean. This tale provides the bride with reason for hating and taking sexual revenge upon

the demon who ruined her life. In the miniseries, she is no longer a stolen bride; rather

she is a dancing girl who demands wonders from the ifrit as payment for her sexy dance.

Further, she has no particular motive for her very forthright sexual proposition to

Schahriar; she has lost her story and become mere spectacle and symbol of Schahriar‘s

sexual phobias. This episode with the woman who manages to deceive the ifrit no matter

how strong his powers is a pivotal encounter in the source text; it is the impetus for the

most drastic of the Sultan‘s actions afterward. Here, it has been turned into a figment of

his fevered imagination.

The elision of the woman‘s story causes her to become a symptom of Schahriar‘s

victimization and madness. Malti-Douglas explains that in the source text Schahriar

takes his cue to marry and murder a new virgin every day from the young woman: ―she

demonstrates a new rhythm to him, one based on individual revenge against the entirety

of the oppose sex . . . Her pattern is 1) threat of death; 2) copulation; . . . 3) end of

relationship. Shahriyar‘s male pattern and response will be a reverse reflection of hers: 1)

copulation; 2) death; and 3) end of relationship‖ (20). In the film, a different pattern is

established. We do not know if her sexual demands are habitual or a whim, but

Schahriar‘s rejection of sex in preference for attempted murder will be activated later in

his plan to take a wife and murder her in the morning.

Ouyang argues that in this filmic version, the episode ―is reduced to the king‘s

nightmare, which instead of driving the story now implies the state of Shahriyar‘s

psychological distress‖ (405). However, the dancing girl can only be read as an indicator

of his murderous misogyny once a shift in narration (the dissolve into the waking world)

makes it clear that this is not a real episode in the primary narrative. The revelation of

the dream sequence which seamlessly shifts into the real world of the primary frame

narrative of Schahriar does a number of things, all of them very important to viewer

reception and response to the text‘s relationship to gendered and sexual discourses in the

film, to Schahriar‘s madness and, eventually, to Scheherezade‘s role as savior.

First, it diminishes the sexist and racist nature of the representation of the

dancing girl by transforming the sequence from introducing the mise en scène of the

primary narrative as a fantasy world that includes demons and wonders, to establishing

a secondary, enframed and therefore distanced and distinct, narrative on its own. All

accusations of sexism, racism, and Orientalism have been averted by the deft

transportation of these discourses out of the primary narrative and into the imaginings

of a victimized madman.

Second, the camera shots, soundtrack and editing of the scene all align the

viewers with Schahriar, so that while the dancing girl is mere eye candy, Schahriar is the

character with whom we are made to identify.

Finally, it transforms Schahriar from being a murderer into a victim of his own

madness. Because he only tried to murder a woman in his dreams, and is clearly

violently disturbed by the dream, Schahriar is relieved of responsibility for the attempt.

At the same time, the scene following the dream establishes his piteous madness, lack of

self-control, and victimization.

Where, as Malti-Douglas points out, the episode with the stolen bride in the

source texts foregrounds the ―nexus of sex and death‖ (19), in the filmic scene Schahriar‘s

disinterest in sex in favour of trying to murder the young woman prefigures the attacks

he will make on Scheherezade whenever he finds himself sexually attracted to her. He is

a man who now equates female sexual desire and seduction with the threat of death.

The betrayal on the part of his wife occurs five years before the action of the film

and is shown in flashback sequences, repeated no fewer than four times at different

points in the film. Through them we learn that Schahriar is not merely reacting to his

first wife‘s affair with another man; her deception is much more egregious: she has taken

his brother Schahzenan as her lover, and together the two of them have plotted to

murder the Sultan so that Schahzenan can usurp the throne. Luckily for Schahriar, their

plot fails. Unluckily for his wife, she is killed by a dagger thrown by Schahriar at his

brother, which hits her instead. The action of the film begins five years later when

Schahriar must marry again to prevent the throne from passing to his brother.

Schahriar‘s madness comes to a head after forty nights of sleeplessness, rather

than the more traditional three-year-long killing spree. Schahriar devises his own

murderous plot in order to fulfill the edict that requires him to marry and at the same

time keep himself safe from the ―treachery‖ of women. In this version, Scheherezade

learns of the Sultan‘s plan before he has ever put it in action; she is the only woman who

is threatened by his madness. Moreover, there is no political unrest, for the people are

entirely unaware of the Sultan‘s madness both before and after his marriage to

Scheherezade because Scheherezade‘s father, the Vizier, has been able to hide it from

them. The combination of these elements means that Schahriar is no longer a brutal

murdering mad king but a victim who has been betrayed and traumatized by his brother

and wife, one who needs only to learn to love and trust again in order to be ―cured.‖ As a

consequence, contemporary television viewers, who would normally have a hard time

identifying with and rooting for a mad serial killer, are able to feel pity for Schahriar and

to hope that he and Scheherezade will eventually come together to live happily ever after.

Framing Scheherezade

The expansion of the frame tale demands that the Arabian Nights allow

Scheherezade and Schahriar‘s love story to emerge and reemerge often in order to keep

audiences interested in their story and their fates. Narrative frames are structural and

cognitive systems of organization; they create context, not only for the storytelling

situation, but also for the discourses in action in a text. As in all other versions of the

Nights, Scheherezade does not enter the story until Schahriar‘s story has been

established and the dangers that Scheherezade will face are clearly set up. In the film,

these opening scenes not only set up the situation, but align the audience with Schahriar,

make him pitiable, and provide him with excuses for his behavior. As it turns out,

Scheherezade herself will also provide him with excuses. As a framing technique, the

imaginative sequence of Schahriar‘s dream establishes a reading practice for the

audience in relation to the later framed stories that will also be filtered or focalized

through Schahriar‘s perspective. Rather than establishing Scheherezade as the primary

figure of the frame narrative, whose storytelling is its focus, the cinematic narrator will

frequently shift focus from Scheherezade to Schahriar.

More than the mere camera, as Seymour Chatman explains, ―[t]he ‗cinematic

narrator,‘. . . is the transmitting agency, immanent to the film, which presents the images

we see and the sounds we hear‖ (211 n1). That is, it is ―the composite of a large and

complex variety of communicating devices‖ comprised of both a visual channel and an

auditory channel (134). Scheherezade‘s frequent voice-over commentary is only one

aspect of cinematic narration; the visual images, editing and special effects that are being

represented at the same time as the voice-over are also aspects of this narrating action.

Although it is tempting to think of the cinematic narrator as an impartial device

that simply shows and tells what it ―sees‖ and ―hears,‖ like the literary narrator, the

cinematic narrator is never neutral. In Arabian Nights, narration is further complicated

because the film will shift its focalization between what Chatman calls the slant of the

cinematic narrator and the filters of Schahriar and Scheherezade. In his discussion of

focalization in Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film,

Chatman argues that there are fundamental and important distinctions between the

ways in which a text shifts between so-called points of view and the distinction between

―who tells‖ and ―who sees‖. To simplify Chatman‘s argument: slant delimits the re-

counting or re-presenting of the heterodiegetic narrator–the seemingly neutral reporter

who sits outside of the story. ―Slant‖ says Chatman, delimits ―the narrator‘s attitudes

and other mental nuances appropriate to the report function of discourse‖ (143). That is,

slant is related to the telling function of narrating. On the other hand, filter is related to

what a character sees, hears and feels. According to Chatman, the filter ―captures

something of the mediating function of a character‘s consciousness–perception,

cognition, emotion, reverie–as events are experienced from a space within the story

world‖ (144). The narration in the frame narrative of Arabian Nights is both slanted

toward and is often filtered through Schahriar from the very start.

Character filtration is indicated by eyeline matches and a shot/reverse shot

sequence of Schahriar and the things he sees in his dream. The smooth dissolve into his

waking life also aligns the viewer with Schahriar. We ―experience‖ the dream with him in

these establishing shots, and have thus been led by the narration to align ourselves with

him for the rest of the film. The consequences of this alignment are not insignificant, for

although the embedded stories Scheherezade tells throughout the film are attributed to

her, this sequence ensures that the audience is positioned to identify with Schahriar. As

the cinematic filter through which we experience most of the frame story, he is our

surrogate, and just as we view these imagined events from his perspective, the later tales

will also be framed by his imagination and are therefore primarily controlled by his

narrative authority, rather than that of the storyteller, Scheherezade.

As a young naive girl, Scheherezade is not permitted the ―intellectual credibility,

ideological validity‖ or even her own access to ―aesthetic value‖ that, according to Susan

Lanser, constitute narrative or discursive authority (or what I am referring to in relation

to storytelling figures, narratorial authority) (1992 6). On the contrary, Scheherezade‘s

naivety, inability to recognize the mortal peril she places herself in, and her need to

continually visit her storytelling mentor (a grey-bearded patriarch played by Alan Bates)

undercut her narratorial authority. Furthermore, Schahriar will continually undermine

Scheherezade‘s authority further as a storyteller by interrupting, challenging,

threatening and refusing her interpretations of her texts. In Arabian Nights, speech acts

are not only forms of power play between Schahriar and Scheherezade, but they also

establish the dynamic tension between the frame narrative and the individual embedded

tales Scheherezade is attempting to tell.

The entrance of Scheherezade into the film immediately follows Schahriar‘s

declaration that he will marry a woman from the harem and have her executed the next

morning. Scheherezade‘s father, the Vizier, who has been given the task of choosing a girl

from the harem to be the victim of Schahriar‘s paranoid plan, discusses with

Scheherezade the impossible position in which he has been put. Being the strong-willed

girl she is, and recalling her childhood crush on the boy Schahriar, she determines to

marry him herself. Her father tries to dissuade her from the idea. He begins by arguing

that the Sultan has been made mad by power, and when this logic does not work, he begs

her not to marry because he could not bear to lose her. She responds, ―I‘m not doing it

for you father. I‘m not even doing it for the girls in the harem, I‘m doing it for Schahriar

and myself.‖ Scheherezade is determined to stick to her plan even though she has clearly

not thought it all the way through: ―I can save him from himself,‖ she says, ―I don‘t know

how, but I‘ve made up my mind. I know I can do it.‖

The political ramifications of the Sultan‘s gynocide have been elided by

transforming the frame tale into a simple love story. Although her father‘s argument is

based upon power politics, the claim that ―power has made [Schahriar] mad,‖

Scheherezade persists in her discourse of the power of idealized heterosexual love. This

causes her father to change his tack, give up his politicized discourse, and appeal to her

on the basis of filial love. But in this version, Scheherezade‘s story has already become a

romance in which love for one‘s man, even if he is dangerously mad, supersedes one‘s

duty even to one‘s father. And further, a woman‘s status as member of the body politic is

completely unimportant. In fact, as the failure of her father‘s political argument

demonstrates, politics and the fate of a nation is not as important to Scheherezade as

true love. Where the source texts clearly indicate that Scheherezade is a wise and

educated woman who is aware of the political ramifications of the Sultan‘s madness and

is willing to sacrifice herself in order to save the women and the nation, this

Scheherezade is only worried about saving Schahriar from himself. She is a naive young

girl in love.8

Scheherazade ‘s first story is almost aborted because of her naiveté and

misjudgment. She tells Schahriar that sesame seeds, of which he has complained, remind

her of a wonderful story, she asks if he‘d like to hear it, and Schahriar, the petulant child,

whines, ―I don‘t like stories.‖ ―Oh, ― she says, ―but you will like this one, it is about Ali

Baba and the forty thieves.‖ Drawn in by the coincidence of the number of thieves

echoing the number of his sleepless nights, Schahriar signals that Scheherazade should

proceed. Rather than beginning immediately Scheherezade searches the room for

inspiration. So, in her very first story, Scheherazade, not yet the master storyteller, is

unsure of where to begin: she looks about her and in a move that will be repeated

throughout the film, takes inspiration from her surroundings. But as she narrates,

setting up the characters of Ali Baba, and his lazy brother Kasseem, Schahriar violently

objects. She has made a grave error, for if Schahriar does not like sesame seeds or

stories, he most certainly does not like brothers.

The frame is broken, and a wipe, which echoes the movement of Kaseem‘s

blanket, brings us back into the royal bedchamber. Scheherazade‘s frame is broken by

Schahriar‘s interruption for the first time. She notes, sadly, that a master storyteller once

told her ―you must hook your audience in the first moments, or all is lost.‖ Schahriar‘s

response that he is lost, is our first hint of the relationship of the act of storytelling to his

state of mind, and of the ways in which language will be his cure as it causes him to

reflect on his own situation. But this recognition by Schahriar that he is lost, both as an

audience member but also as a man, provides Scheherazade the chance to begin again.

This time however, she is interrupted by Schahriar‘s demand to know what a new

character she has just introduced has to do with Ali Baba.

In her discussion of narrative frames in Narratologies, Mieke Bal notes that

―When the embedded text presents a complete story . . . we gradually forget . . . the

primary narrative‖ (53). In the literary versions of the Nights, she writes, ―this forgetting

is a sign that Scheherezade‘s goal has been accomplished. As long as we forget her life is

at stake, the king will too, and that was her purpose‖ (53). In this version of the Arabian

Nights however, Scheherezade‘s skill at entrancing the Sultan is rather less effective. Her

confidence and skill as a storyteller are undercut by missteps that allow Schahriar to

break the frame she is attempting to establish. These interruptions diminish her

narratorial authority by indicating that he does not accept her story or that she has not

provided enough information. At one point he directly opposes her authority by insisting

that she is ―telling it wrong.‖ 9 One of the effects of these interruptions is to continually

bring Scheherezade and Schahriar‘s story back to the audience‘s attention and help

develop tension and suspense about Scheherezade‘s fate as well as provoke curiosity

about the embedded story that has been interrupted. But another consequence is that

these disruptions constantly put Scheherezade‘s storytelling powers into question.

In fact, her very first attempt to interest Schahriar in a story fails. This false start

to Scheherezade‘s storytelling sets up a framework for the ways in which her narration

will be negotiated throughout the film. Her stories are not entirely her own; they are

produced by inspiration from objects around her: a plate of grapes, or a cockroach

walking by, for example. Further, each morning after her life has been spared she visits a

master storyteller in the market who gives her advice on how to keep her royal audience‘s

attention. Finally, the movement and the content of the stories themselves are dictated to

an alarming degree by the reaction of her audience. 10 Scheherezade is no master

storyteller herself, and Schahriar becomes a collaborator (or perhaps given his political

position, dictator) in the storytelling. Each time he interrupts, rupturing the frame

Scheherezade is attempting to construct, he demands and attains an amount of authority

over the narrative–just as he has authority over Scheherezade as husband and Sultan.

Lessons Learned

In all versions of the frame tale in the Nights, power relations and narrative

authority are directly related. In the literary versions Scheherezade must fade into the

background in order to be a successful narrator. In this version, although it is

Scheherezade who is telling the story, it is Schahriar who dictates whether it will be told

and even how it will be told; thus we are periodically reminded of her presence as

narrator. Scheherezade tells her stories for her life–a truly wrong move does not mean

only that the story will be abandoned, but that she will be killed. Schahriar‘s sinister

threats and interruptions violently break the frame and force Scheherezade to navigate

with more finesse. Thus Scheherezade also becomes a character who develops and grows

by learning to tell stories that will entertain and distract Schahriar, and the television

audience as well.

As the nights and the stories progress, Scheherezade becomes a better storyteller,

and Schahriar learns to be a better audience for the tales. He stops interrupting as often

and begins to learn his lessons. He also gains personal insight, is cured of his madness,

and falls in love with Scheherezade. He has realized through stories that align him with

particular characters, just as the viewing audience is aligned with Schahriar, that

Scheherezade truly loves him. The viewing audience expects that he will reprieve

Scheherezade‘s death sentence and they will live happily ever after at this point, but

Schahriar is not yet free of the threat to his throne; his evil brother Schahzenan still lives

and is marching on Baghdad.

The relationship between the brothers is another key to the recuperation of

Schahriar that converts him from the two-dimensional villain of the source text into the

fallible but lovable hero of the miniseries. The loving relationship between the two

brothers in the source material is now a relationship of sibling rivalry based upon

competition, distrust, and betrayal. Because of his usurping brother, Schahriar can be

pitied further, for not only did Schahzenan steal his first wife, he wants to steal his

kingdom too. The politics of the nation are completely changed: it is the evil Schahzenan

who threatens the nation, not the Sultan. The danger is from without rather than from

within the power structure, and Schahriar can be seen as the savior of his people rather

than as their doom.

As the threat from Schahzenan‘s army looms, the frame narrative seems to leave

the embedded stories behind. But there is one more story to be told. Just as Schahriar

has learned to be a better man, Scheherezade has learned to be a better storyteller, and

she is no longer interrupted in her tale telling. In the narration of the last story, which is

the story of Schahriar‘s final conflict with his brother, Scheherezade continually

reemerges in voice-over as the audience watches the battle in progress. It is during the

battle between the brothers‘ armies that the audience discovers one more thing

Schahriar has learned from Scheherezade‘s stories: how to wage war.

The arrival of Schahzenan‘s army changes the purpose of Scheherezade‘s

storytelling. Until this point she has told the tales to save her life and to instruct

Schahriar in becoming a better man and a wiser ruler, but the earlier embedded stories

are now also key to helping Schahriar vanquish Schahzenan and his army. Rather than

teaching him lessons about the responsibilities of great power, the evils of violence and

domination, and the importance of diplomacy and cooperation to a wise ruler,

Scheherezade‘s ultimate triumph is in preparing her husband to become a warrior king.

Schahriar has learned from her tales, not to dispel conflict peacefully, but to engage in

cunning battle strategies and to dispense death in imaginative ways in order to retain his

kingdom and prove his supremacy over his brother.

As we watch how Schahriar employs important stratagems from Scheherezade‘s

stories to wage war on his brother, it would seem that Scheherezade finally has full

narratorial authority. She is now a war queen who watches the battle from the sidelines

and is united with her victorious husband with a kiss. However, Arabian Nights has one

more narrative twist. Rather than ending with the happily ever after of a battle won and

the lovers‘ kiss, we learn that the story of the battle that Scheherezade has been narrating

is framed yet again. The story we have been watching was being told by Scheherezade,

not to her husband, the Sultan Schahriar, but to her two young sons many years after the

events took place.

Neither the narration of the battle nor the addition of yet another narrative frame

in which Scheherezade is discovered to have been telling the whole thing to her two sons

appears in the source material. These embellishments add further layers of narrative

complexity, and they affect the story in numerous ways. Schahriar has been freed from

his madness, his loneliness, and, as a result of these additions, from the tale itself. He is

no longer contained by the frame at all, for he does not appear in the last shot of

Scheherezade and their children. Having been freed from his madness he apparently no

longer needs the stories that saved him. Eva Sallis notes a similar effect of the closing

frame in textual versions of the Nights in which Scheherezade concludes her nightly

storytelling performances by telling Schahriar his own story: ―As the framing of

Sheherazade and Shahriyār is told as an enframed story, it is transformed. Up to this

point it has been the real world, distinct from the worlds of the told tales, . . . Once told

as one of the tales, it becomes sublimated, and fixed into the world of story and legend,

and at the same time Shahriyār is freed from it . . . The events cross over into that less

volatile and destructive sphere of story, and live on‖ (98). 11

But Scheherezade must continue to tell them. She is significantly less free even

than she was at the beginning of the film, when she could roam around the palace at will

or go to the marketplace whenever she chose. Now it would seem she is bound to repeat

the stories she once used to save her life, to entertain the sons of the man who threatened

it. The frame and the film close with Scheherezade having transformed her mad Sultan

into a warrior king, and herself from a naive young girl and novice storyteller into a

mother and an entertainer of children. Significantly, the two little boys look remarkably

like younger versions of Schahriar and Schahzenan. This resemblance, revealed as it is

immediately after the scene in which Schahriar kills Schahzenan, raises a troubling

question. If Scheherezade‘s earlier stories were meant to save both her life and Schahriar

from himself, what is this story about deadly rivalry and fratricide meant to teach her

young sons?

This closing scene re-frames the whole program and causes the audience to

rethink the context of the stories they have been watching so far. Ironically, the battle

between brothers, in conjunction with the closing frame, works to doubly negate

Scheherezade‘s thesis that stories can save us. Rather than teaching her sons, and her

television viewing audience, that storytelling can be a diplomatic, nonviolent means of

problem resolution, the battle in which Schahriar employs her stories to wage war and to

murder his brother overrides the original purpose of the stories entirely: in the end they

are used to bring death rather than to preserve life. Not only does the battle scene

privilege violence as a means of problem solving, but the final shot of Scheherezade with

her sons works to dismiss the whole adventure, from Schahriar‘s dream to the couple‘s

loving kiss, as mere entertainment. For, although Scheherezade explicitly claims that

―stories can save us,‖ this ending metanarrative sequence seems to indicate that, after all,

it was just a story.

In reintroducing the tale of Scheherezade and Schahriar to this contemporary

transformation of the Nights, and in focusing upon the importance and power of

storytelling to shape the way we see the world and affect how we act within it, Arabian

Nights performs an important service to its viewing audience and contributes to the

history of the text itself. However, by trying to make the story of Schahriar and

Scheherezade more palatable and entertaining to contemporary Western audiences,

Arabian Nights also does a disservice. It is not the fact that the filmmakers attempt to

make the film seem authentic and relevant to contemporary audiences that is the root of

the problem, but the choices they make in doing so. By altering the fundamental

relationships of characters to each other and to the story, presenting the tale of the two

protagonists as first and foremost a love story, and shifting the political threat away from

the Sultan and to his brother, the film undercuts its own message about the power of

storytelling. Arabian Nights creates in its portrayal of Scheherezade a young girl who is

not only willing but eager to enter into a relationship with an abusive ―mad‖ man.

Furthermore, her most redeeming quality, her power as a storyteller, is constantly

undermined by the man who is threatening her life. At the same time, Arabian Nights

excuses Schahriar‘s villainy by making him a pitiable victim of an egregious crime. In

this version, Schahriar needs only the unconditional and self-sacrificing love of a good

woman in order to be ―cured‖ of an understandable but misdirected anger for which he is

not actually responsible. This victimization of Schahriar shifts the political implications

of the frame tale by making Schahzenan and Schahriar‘s first wife irredeemably evil and

the cause of Schahriar‘s suffering. And in adding the battle between the brothers‘ armies,

Arabian Nights subordinates the lessons of cooperation, negotiation, and non-violence

to the excitement and adventure of a seemingly inevitable war. Finally, the insertion of

the final narrative frame of Scheherezade and the two little boys ultimately reframes all

the other stories, including her own, and reduces them to mere infantile entertainment,

which is not really very important after all.

And that is what is most troubling about this transformation of the Nights. It is a

beautiful film, full of action, adventure, magic, and mayhem. The stories it adapts within

the frame tale are entertaining and a great deal of fun. But its entertainment value

creates a strange irony. Although Arabian Nights claims that storytelling is important,

that it shapes how we see the world and can help us cope with and solve real-life

problems, the final frame shot of bedtime storytelling overthrows that claim. The

Arabian Nights miniseries in DVD format is likely to become the introduction to the

Nights for many North Americans in the near future. These audiences are in for a

wonderful experience in many ways, but if we listen to Scheherezade‘s claim that ―stories

can save us,‖ we must also recognize that they can trick us into underestimating their

power. We must listen to our stories carefully to hear what they are telling us but also

listen to what is hiding between the frames, and consider the contradictions as well as

the truths embedded within them. In other words, we must not dismiss them as mere

entertainments.

CHAPTER 2: NARRATIVE DESIRE AND DISOBEDIENCE IN

PAN’S LABYRINTH

In an early scene in Guillermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinth, Carmen, the very

pregnant mother of the protagonist Ofelia, takes a book of fairy stories from Ofelia‘s

hands and says, ―I don‘t understand why you had to bring so many books, Ofelia. Fairy

tales, you‘re a bit too old to be filling your head with such nonsense.‖1 As soon as the

words pass her lips, Carmen feels a sudden need to vomit. And thus an important theme

of the film is presented as a warning: rejecting fairy tales will make you barf.

While I raise this warning as a joke, the importance of story and storytelling to

Pan’s Labyrinth is no joking matter. Attention to story is paramount in this film, and not

as a panacea for the hardships of ―real‖ life; the relationship between characters and

various types of narrative is key to survival, both of stories themselves and of the

characters that tell them. This chapter asks how the narrative desires of the characters

interact at the level of story (―what‖ is being told) and how the desires at work in the

narrative itself play out at the level of discourse (―how‖ a story is told—in cinematic texts

in terms of mise-en-scène and editing). Key to my reading of Pan’s Labyrinth is the

notion of disobedience: the refusal of characters to submit to the narrative desires of

others at their own expense, as well as the disobedience of the film itself to satisfy

audience desires and conventional generic expectations. In this reading, the fairy tale is

the vehicle through which the film problematizes and resists the reductive and regulatory

discourses of particular characters within the text, but also through which the film

challenges audiences and critics tempted to produce reductive readings or employ

totalizing textual theories.

Pan’s Labyrinth is an original cinematic fairy tale that makes clear visual and

verbal references to oral, literary, and cinematic fairy tale traditions. In its intertextual

references, Pan’s Labyrinth announces its fealty to the fairy tale in the alignment of its

heroine with well-known fairy-tale heroines like Snow White, Lewis Carroll‘s Alice (Alice

in Wonderland 1865), and Dorothy of MGM‘s The Wizard of Oz (1939). Her connection

to these characters is particularly apparent in Ofelia‘s appearance: her black hair, white

skin, and red lips; the dress and pinafore she is given by her mother; and the red shoes

she taps at the end of the film. Intertextual references also contribute to the hybrid

nature of this particular text, which employs familiar imagery, plot structures, and

character types from fairy tales but also from other genres such as the period political

drama, horror, and dark fantasy. Thus, Pan’s Labyrinth‘s hybrid nature itself constitutes

a form of disobedience to audience expectations of each of these genres by combining

genres that are normally distinct. Also notable are the ‗disobedient‘ or unconventional

choices Guillermo del Toro made as the writer, director, and producer of the film and

which he remarks upon in his extra-diegetic voice-over commentary on the DVD.2

Disobedience is an important factor in fairy tales, so much so that Vladimir Propp

notes ―interdiction‖ and ―violation‖ of the interdiction as functions II & III in

Morphology of the Folktale. Indeed, it is often a specific disobedient act that sets the tale

in motion, or continues it on its trajectory. Snow White disobeys the dwarves and

answers the door to the witch; Dorothy runs away from the farm; Alice leaves her sister

to chase the white rabbit. In Pan’s Labyrinth, disobedience is a primary theme, which is

coded as positive and even essential to survival. More than that, I would like to argue

that disobedience functions not only as a theme within the narrative of Pan’s Labyrinth,

but also at the level of discourse, and is closely related to narrative desires.

Narrative Desire

Discussions of narrative desire and the dynamics of reading pleasure are most

often inflected by psychoanalysis, as shown in Peter Brooks‘s Reading for the Plot and

Teresa de Lauretis‘s Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, and Cinema, both published in

1984. Because these two texts continue to inform discussions of desire in narrative, I‘d

like to return to them in order to contextualize my examination of Pan’s Labyrinth.

For Brooks, narrative desire works at both the levels of story and of discourse:

―Narratives both tell of desire—typically present some story of desire—and arouse and

make use of desire as dynamic of signification‖ (37). His discussion of narrative desire is

influenced by a Freudian model because, as he sees it, ―Desire as Eros, desire in its

plastic and totalizing function . . . [is] central to our experience of reading narrative‖;

Brooks believes that ―Freud‘s work [provides] the best model for a ‗textual erotics,‘‖ thus

accounting for aspects of textual pleasure that formalist and structuralist theories cannot

(37). While Brooks‘s theory of narrative desire does account for the ―forces‖ that make

readers want to read, that make characters and authors want to tell their stories, and that

inscribe the dynamics of signification within texts themselves, it is founded on gender

privilege that takes heterosexual male desire and pleasure as universal, transhistorical

and transcultural. Desire is, by definition in this view, masculine: it moves through the

plot towards closure as modeled by the metaphor of male sexual pleasure: arousal,

energetic movement, climax and exhaustion of the energies that desire has aroused. The

desire of women is conceived entirely in relation to male desire, as Brooks tells us in a

note: ―the female plot [is] a resistance and what we might call an ‗endurance‘: a waiting

(and suffering) until the woman‘s desire can be permitted response to the expression of

male desire‖ (330, n3). Even putting aside the question of exactly who has the authority

to ―permit‖ the woman to respond to male desire, it is clear that in Brooks‘s discussion,

women have no desire of our own, but rather must wait to discover and then be allowed

to resist the desires of men.

In contrast, de Lauretis‘s chapter ―Desire in Narrative‖ turns to the

psychoanalytic model to problematize notions of narrative desire that are dehistoricized

and naturalized through the masternarrative of Freud‘s Oedipus. De Lauretis notes that

the desires inherent in the Oedipus narrative are those of the stories that are dominant

in our ―culture, history and science‖: narratives that do not ask questions from any point

of view other than Oedipus‘s, and in which the hero subject is always male.

In a theory that employs the Freudian model as the foundation for all narrative

desire, female narrative desire and subjectivity are always delimited by the masculine

Oedipus: ―the movement of narrative discourse, which specifies and even produces the

masculine position as that of the mythical subject, and the feminine position as mythical

obstacle or, simply the space in which that movement occurs‖ (de Lauretis 143). Female

spectators then, are ―seduced‖ into femininity by identifying both with the (masculine)

subject and the (feminine) other (143). In her conclusion to ―Desire in Narrative,‖ de

Lauretis calls for women‘s cinema to work through desire, ―to enact the contradiction of

female desire, and of women as social subjects . . . with the constant awareness that

spectators are historically engendered in social practices, in the real world, and in

cinema too‖ (156). However, she does not stop there. At the end of this chapter De

Lauretis suggests that ―[i]t may well be, however, that the story has to be told

differently,‖ and she goes on to posit some alternative Oedipal stories (156). Telling the

story differently does not have to silence previous versions: de Lauretis is careful to note

that she is ―not advocating the replacement or the appropriation or, even less, the

emasculation of Oedipus. What I have been arguing for, instead, is an interruption of the

triple track [language, narrative, and Oedipus] by which narrative, meaning and pleasure

are constructed from his point of view‖ (157).

Also writing from a feminist perspective, Susan Winnett takes de Lauretis‘s

critiques further in ―Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of

Pleasure‖ (1990). Winnett clearly shows how accounts of narrative desire that rely upon

gender hierarchies do not adequately account for female narrative desire. She goes on to

argue that, ―Once we recognize how a psychoanalytic dynamics of reading assumes the

universality of the male response, we have little difficulty noticing how arbitrary the

foundations of its universalizations are‖ (511), and so her critique of theories of narrative

desire, particularly by Brooks and Robert Scholes, extends to psychoanalysis as well. But

simply recognizing chauvinistic masternarratives and limiting foundations of a theory

does not make them go away or even significantly minimize their cultural power. There

must be other solutions. Winnett calls for feminist readings that ―foreground narratives‘

own resistances to the theoretical paradigms that would predetermine the gender and

hence the trajectory of desire‖ (―Desire,‖ Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory).

To take Winnett‘s proposition one step further, it is not only the predetermination of

gender that needs to be examined, but the predetermination of other markers of identity

that intersect with gender in subjectivity. I am suggesting that narrative desires are

neither universal nor are they constructed only in relation to sex and gender, but that

desires expressed, elicited, and enacted in narrative are multiple, variable, and

intersectional.

This chapter presents a reading of Pan’s Labyrinth from a perspective that differs

from many of the early academic and popular reviews and readings of the film. Because

every interpretation is itself a kind of storytelling, the essay participates in the

production of more stories from many – and different – points of view that, as de

Lauretis suggests, can interrupt the power of universalizing masternarratives. My goal is

not to silence other readings, but to provide close attention to one particular aspect of

Pan’s Labyrinth as visual and verbal text: its disobedient storytelling. Disobedience in

the film works to fulfill at least this reader‘s desire for multiplicity, contingency, and

resistance to universalizing forces.

Pan’s Labyrinth both articulates the kinds of resistances proposed by Winnett

and enacts the proliferation of stories from multiple perspectives. The film resists

militaristic patriarchal masternarratives thematically, through the figure of the

housekeeper Mercedes, who is a member of the anti-fascist rebels, and through the

disobedience of the protagonist Ofelia; but it also resists universalizing or totalizing

theorization at the level of discourse through multivocality, generic hybridity, and

intertextuality. The film intertwines distinct stories and storylines; engages both the

genres of the fairy tale and the historic political resistance film; and openly declares its

alliances with folkloric, mythic, literary and cinematic texts. Finally, Pan’s Labyrinth

actively pits the monologic monovocality of Captain Vidal and fascism against the

dialogic multivocality of Ofelia, Mercedes and the fairy tale.

Magic & Mimesis

Set in post-Civil War Spain, Pan’s Labyrinth is the story of Ofelia, a young girl

who goes with her mother Carmen to live with her new stepfather, the fascist Captain

Vidal. As Carmen‘s difficult pregnancy progresses, Vidal, who has insisted that his son

must be born where his father is, is engaged in an on-going military struggle against

anti-fascist rebels in the mountains around the mill where the family lives. Ofelia is

befriended by the housekeeper and secret rebel collaborator and spy, Mercedes; Ofelia

also meets a magical mythical faun in the ancient and crumbling labyrinth near the mill.

She must then negotiate life in two worlds: one in which she is the ignored and unwanted

step-daughter of the villain Captain Vidal, and one in which she must prove herself to be

Princess Moana of the Underground realm and return to her fairy-tale father‘s world by

successfully accomplishing three tasks. In the final scenes of the film, the two worlds

collide explosively as Ofelia is confronted with the impossible decision of surrendering

her newborn brother to either the Captain or the faun. Ofelia refuses both and, as a

result, is shot and killed by Vidal, but ―lives on‖ in the Underground Realm ―happily ever

after.‖

As a disobedient text, Pan’s Labyrinth produces critiques of patriarchal forms of

political rule of the family and the nation, critiques which emerge in the film as directly

related to narrative. That is, the film highlights and endorses disobedience through

strategic play– by deliberately alternating between its own adherence to and

disobedience of narrative desires as they have been constructed and endorsed by

narrative genres (and critics) themselves over time. Brooks‘s account of the ―ambitious

hero [who] stands as a figure of the reader‘s efforts to construct meanings in ever-larger

wholes, to totalize his experience of human existence in time, to grasp past, present, and

future in a significant shape‖ could easily be mapped onto the figure of Captain Vidal,

whose desires of and for narrative are to construct and control meaning for himself, his

family and his nation (39). But Captain Vidal is unambiguously the villain of the piece

and, as such, viewers are not encouraged to identify with him. Rather, like Ofelia and

Mercedes, we resist Vidal and his attempts at totalizing meaning-making by recognizing

and abhorring his ideology and his methods of enforcing it upon others. Audience

resistance to Vidal consists of our identification with and endorsement of Ofelia‘s

disobedience and story-making as well as Mercedes‘s disruptions of his narrativizing.

This resistance is constructed through fairy-tale telling as disobedient desire in the film;

it is, in addition, produced cinematically.

A reading of the film that comes from a position that revels in multiplicity,

fragmentation, heteroglossia, and proliferation will highlight the film‘s juxtaposition of

the fairy tale with the period film of civilian political resistance as refusing to absolutely

privilege one over the other. That is, from this perspective, neither the mimetic world of

fascist Spain nor the magical Underground Realm is more real than the other; this

juxtaposition of congruent realities produces critiques of monologic totalitarian

discourses and endorses stories of magical transformation as forms of resistance and

vehicles of hope.

The early reviews of Pan’s Labyrinth that appeared in both popular and academic

journals after its 2006 appearance on North American screens discuss the tensions

between the ―real‖ and ―unreal‖ worlds, and tend to refer to the film primarily as a fairy

tale for adults. In this respect, Pan’s Labyrinth destabilizes generic expectations of

contemporary popular fairy-tale films (such as the Shrek series) as mere children‘s

entertainment that can also be enjoyed by adults. Pan’s Labyrinth is not marketed as

―fun for the whole family!‖: rather it is ―R‖ rated, as its label says, ―for graphic violence

and some language,‖ (but significantly not for ―sexuality‖). So, even in its paratextual

information, Pan’s Labyrinth signals its disobedience to audience expectations of the

fairy tale as light entertainment meant to acculturate children into contemporary

morality; this view of fairy tales arose out of eighteenth-century constructions of the

child, and has since been problematized by second-wave feminist debates about the

social role of the fairy tale as developed by scholars such as Marcia Lieberman, Kay

Stone, and Jack Zipes. Pan’s Labyrinth also questions the presumed political innocence

of the fairy tale in its use of a child as the central figure whose violent and terrifying

adventures echo mid-twentieth century horrors.

The film‘s generic hybridity however, does not sit well with all reviewers. Lucius

Shepard, whose review in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction also includes

the Korean horror film The Host, believes Pan’s Labyrinth does not live up to its hype

and that this is due to its refusal to adhere to genre expectations: ―While it‘s true that

fairy tales have different requirements than do tales of suspense, this particular fairy tale

is a two-hour-long film and must be appreciated as such‖ (136). On the basis that the

film is both too much and not enough of a fairy tale, Shepard wishes ―that del Toro had

chosen to make either a film about the Spanish Civil War or a fairy tale‖ (137). In his

desire to read Pan’s Labyrinth as either one thing or another, Shepard is unable to take

anything away from the film, ―apart from the verities that fascism is bad and young

children are vulnerable‖ (137). Shepard‘s inability to recognize the productive nature of

the combination of drama and fantasy means that the larger political critique of tyranny

and the endorsement of the necessity of individuals to act according to their beliefs

during times of national crisis are lost.

In questioning the very association of the fairy-tale genre with politics and ―real

life‖ issues, this reviewer seems to build on some influential generic distinctions and

value judgments that insulate the fairy tale as ―marvelous.‖ In his seminal book The

Fantastic (1973), Tzvetan Todorov categorizes the fairy tale as exemplary of the

marvelous, because ―[in] the case of the marvelous, supernatural elements provoke no

particular reaction either in the characters or in the implicit reader. It is not an attitude

toward the events described which characterizes the marvelous, but the nature of these

events‖ (54). Rather, for Todorov, the marvelous makes itself known at the level of

discourse: ―what distinguishes the fairy tale is a certain kind of writing, not the status of

the supernatural‖ (54). Todorov‘s structural approach necessarily excludes the political

from this discussion, but Rosemary Jackson‘s later, also influential, book Fantasy: The

Literature of Subversion (1981) will argue explicitly that the fairy tale is a passive genre:

It is a form which discourages reader participation, representing events

which are in the long distant past . . . and carrying the implication that

their effects have long since ceased to disturb. . . . The effect of such

narrative is one of a passive relation to history. The reader, like the

protagonist, is merely a receiver of events which enact a preconceived

pattern. (emphasis in original 33)

As early as the opening sequence, Pan’s Labyrinth troubles the boundaries of both of

these views of the fairy tale. These early establishing shots employ the discourse (or ―way

of writing‖) that Todorov indicates, but also the cinematic techniques that indicate

mimesis. Further, the sequence of shots realigns the temporal distancing that Jackson

laments by situating the events of the fairy-tale storyline within the real historic moment

of mid-twentieth century post-civil war Spain.

An omniscient narrator introduces the tale of Princess Moana and her escape

from the Underground Realm with the fairy tale framing formula, in English usually

―Once upon a time‖ but here, the just-as-recognizable translation: ―A long time ago.‖

The tale of the Underground Realm begins in the long-distant past, and the narrator

employs the ―impersonal authoritative, all knowing voice‖ that Jackson attributes to the

narration of marvelous fairy tales; however, Pan’s Labyrinth does not follow the other

aspects of Jackson‘s definition. For Jackson, the narration of the fairy tale contains ―a

minimum of emotional involvement‖ and has a ―passive relation to history‖ (33). But in

Pan’s Labyrinth the dramatic color palettes, camera work, soundtrack, and brilliant

continuity-editing all work to enhance emotional involvement, leading to the critique of

oppressive political regimes—the effects of which certainly do continue to disturb, both

in the film and in our real world.

During the complex and multi-layered opening sequence, before the fairy-tale

narrator‘s introduction of the Underground Realm, the ―real‖ historic moment of 1944

Spain is established in white titles over a black background. The use of written titles to

introduce the story of the political unrest of post-civil war Spain employs a type of

omniscient narrator that Jackson identifies as signaling the mimetic through ―openings

[that] make an implicit claim of equivalence between the represented fictional world and

the ‗real‘ world outside the text‖ (34). In this way, the opening sequence of Pan’s

Labyrinth employs both the narrative styles of the fairy tale and the mimetic period film,

thus actively engaging the audience in two worlds at once.3

Unlike Lucius Shepard, many reviewers praise the film‘s use of the fairy tale and

admire the editing and effects that achieve the dynamic tension between the worlds, but

it would seem that even some of these viewers feel discomfort with the blending of

mimesis and magic. Early reviews overwhelmingly read the magic world of the faun and

Princess Moana as purely psychological rather than as engaging in and contributing to

the film‘s political critique. Most reviewers see the magic as part of a fantasy created by

Ofelia in order to help her cope with the ―real‖ horrors committed by her stepfather and

the fascists. Kira Cochrane‘s review in The Guardian says, ―Like so many unhappy

children before her, Ofelia finds escape in a dreamworld of her own making,‖ and Laura

Hubner believes that ―it is clear that the woodland is the place that ignites Ofelia‘s

imagination and where she lives out her fantasies‖ (2). Jack Zipes argues that ―she wills

herself into this tale, and for all intents and purposes, it is she who appropriates the tale

and creates it so that she can deal with forces . . . impinging on her life‖ (emphasis in

original 238). Finally, Julian Smith complains in Film Quarterly of the ways in which the

clear opposition between the real fascist Spain and Ofelia‘s fantasy world are blurred:

―There are, indeed, gaping holes in the plot where elements first presented as fantastic

are later revealed to have empirical presence in the real‖ (8).

Smith goes on to excuse these holes, recalling the psychoanalytic language of

desire and describing the director Guillermo del Toro as a master of narrative seduction:

―The fact that we experience no sense of discontinuity of perspective throughout Pan’s

Labyrinth, seduced by its expert plotting and pacing, is a tribute to del Toro‘s mastery of

story and technique‖ (8). However, if we heed Winnett‘s call and read the magic in Pan’s

Labyrinth as a form of resistance, the ―gaping holes‖ that Smith notes are in fact not

holes at all, but moments of disobedience of the normative desire for clear differentiation

between the mimetic and the marvelous; that is, narrative indications that the magic that

Ofelia encounters is as real as the violence the Captain commits.

Other reviewers have indeed noted the importance of story and the complexity of

the film‘s structure in relation to story. Peggy Yocom astutely argues that ―[e]very major

character has compelling, contradictory relationships to story, especially the Captain‖;

more specifically, ―the Captain also keeps his stories, like so much else, locked away.

Only he can know them; only he will decide when, and if, they will be told‖ (347). A. O.

Scott‘s review in the New York Times also recognizes how vital the complexity of the

film‘s narrative structure is: ―That realm, in which Ofelia is thought to be a long-lost

princess, may exist only in her imagination. Or maybe not: its ambiguous status is crucial

to the film‘s coherence.‖ This ambiguity is also crucial to the film‘s social critique of the

systemic violence employed by militaristic regimes that wish to create, as Vidal says, a

―clean‖ and decidedly unambiguous world by destroying all that is disobedient—all that

does not fit into the masternarrative of totalitarianism. As the representative figure of

the totalitarian storyteller, Captain Vidal‘s responses to the magic of the liminal fairy-tale

world support not their impossibility, but their power. It is during those moments when

the mastery of his narratives is threatened and he loses control that the film disobeys

both audience expectation that magic is unreal and Vidal‘s tight grip on the mimetic

narrative.

For example, his reaction to the mandrake root that magically eases Carmen‘s

pregnancy (one of the ―holes‖ noted by Smith) is overdetermined and placed in direct

relation to storytelling. Vidal shouts at Carmen: ―This is because of that junk you let her

read!‖ He must be mollified by Carmen and sent away because his rage at the intrusion

of this magical ―junk‖ into his ordered world is uncontrollable. Carmen then takes up

Vidal‘s argument and shouts at Ofelia that she must stop believing in magic ―even if it

hurts‖ and hurls the mandrake root into the fire. The mandrake screams as Carmen

clutches her pregnant belly and slides to the floor. Carmen‘s actions, both in rejecting

Ofelia‘s fairy tales and also in destroying the mandrake, illustrate her fatal

misunderstanding of the desire of fairy-tale plots and the danger of denying

transformative magic. Carmen‘s complicity with Vidal‘s narratives that reject magic and

wonder for violence and domination shows the destructive potential of privileging the

―realist‖ or ―practical‖ view of the world and of rejecting the fairy tale. Just as her

previous denial of magic and stories seemed to cause her to be ill, the sacrifice of the

mandrake has caused early labor, which the baby, but not Carmen, survives.

Another of the ambiguous intersections between the two worlds occurs at a

moment when Vidal has similarly lost control. Near the end of the film Vidal chases

Ofelia, who has stolen the baby from him, into the labyrinth. Vidal comes upon Ofelia at

the center of the labyrinth as she is talking with the faun. We see his approach behind

Ofelia in an eyeline match from the faun‘s perspective. Then, in a shot-reverse-shot

eyeline match from Vidal‘s point of view, it appears that Ofelia is standing alone with the

baby, talking to no one—Vidal does not see the faun. This discrepancy would seem to

indicate that the faun does not exist and that the magic is only in Ofelia‘s imagination.

However, if we return to Todorov and his category of the uncanny-fantastic or the

supernatural explained, we find that supernatural events can be dismissed or explained

away when the narration indicates that ―what we imagine we saw was only the fruit of a

deranged imagination (dream, madness, the influence of drugs)‖ (45). In a striking

reversal, the character‘s altered state in Pan’s Labyrinth may not ―explain away‖ the

supernatural at all. Previously, in order to get the baby away from Vidal safely, Ofelia

secretly drugged his drink; when Vidal fails to see the faun in the labyrinth with Ofelia,

his vision is distorted. So, rather than reading the faun as a projection of Ofelia‘s

imagination (which supports the reviewers‘ ideas that the Underground Realm is all in

Ofelia‘s mind), we can read Vidal‘s failure to see the faun as an hallucination caused by

his altered state. Such a reading not only supports Ofelia‘s worldview and the reality of

the magical realm within the text; it also confirms the unreliability and instability of

Vidal‘s grasp of narrative control.

Vidal Interrupted

This refusal to create firm boundaries between the magical and the real is one of

the ways in which Pan‘s Labyrinth formally participates in the disobedience it highlights

and endorses in the film. Another way the film is disobedient to both audience

expectations and psychoanalytic notions of narrative desire is in its refusal to employ the

female body as object of heterosexual male desire and, I would argue further, to

eradicate the representation of sexual desire entirely.

Although Julian Smith argues that ―Vidal‘s scenes with housekeeper Mercedes

have an icy erotic menace‖ and that ―it is not just sex that is perverted here‖, the erotic

menace he envisions is not borne out in the text. At no time does Vidal make any overt

sexual moves or even unambiguously leer at Mercedes, or appear to desire Carmen or

anyone else for that matter. The representation of sex or even eroticism is notably absent

in Pan’s Labyrinth. Nevertheless, sexuality, and specifically male sexual violence against

women by Vidal, is raised in audience expectations; but it is redirected toward his desire

for narrative. Vidal‘s desire for sole narrative authority and command is almost obsessive

in his silencing of others and repetition of his preferred stories.

Very early in the film, the sexual relationship between Vidal and Carmen is shut

down. On the day that Carmen and Ofelia arrive, Captain Vidal announces that, in order

to ensure his wife‘s rest, he will sleep downstairs in his study. Thus, he effectively closes

the door on the marital bedroom as the site of the sexual relationship and intimacy

between husband and wife, which has the unintended transformational effect of allowing

the bed to become narrative space: Mother, daughter, and unborn child lie together for

physical and psychic comfort, and Carmen asks Ofelia to tell her overactive unborn

brother a story to calm him down.

The tale that Ofelia tells integrates the aural and visual channels of film narrative

to stunning effect. As she begins her tale of a magical rose that would confer immortality

on anyone who plucked it, the camera smoothly pans down from a close-up of her face

resting on her mother‘s stomach and into Carmen‘s womb, where the baby floats. As she

continues her tale in voice-over narration, the camera passes by the baby and in a

continuous slow and seamless pan reveals the flowering rose atop the mountain of stones

Ofelia describes. The praying mantis introduced in the opening scenes of the film comes

into the shot and the camera follows it, away from the mountain and back into the ‗real‘

world of Ofelia‘s and Carmen‘s bedroom window as Ofelia explains that no one ever

plucked the rose because of its poisonous thorns. Instead, people spoke of their fear of

death and pain ―but never about the promise of eternal life.‖ Ofelia concludes her tale,

―And every day, the rose wilted unable to bequeath its gift to anyone . . . .‖ The shot fades

into Vidal‘s study and begins a slow zoom toward him. And as Ofelia says ―forgotten and

lost at the top of that cold, dark mountain, forever alone, until the end of time‖ we see

Vidal sitting at his desk and cleaning the interior of his pocket watch.

The narration of this story is complex and deserves more analysis than I can offer

here, but what is particularly pertinent to my reading in relation to Vidal is the

juxtaposition of the solitariness of Vidal and of the potential immortality-giving flower.

The verbal narration and visual attention to Vidal echo both Vidal‘s isolation and his

attempts to capture immortality through his son. As we will see later, in the film and in

this chapter, the pocket watch is linked to a narrative about father-and-son relations that

define Vidal‘s understanding of powerful masculinity and politics.

Although Captain Vidal is clearly portrayed as heterosexual and virile, with his

shiny boots, erect posture and very pregnant wife, there is a distinct lack of eroticism at

the mill. One might argue that generic cinematic expectations are perverted by not

fulfilling audience scopophilic desire for sexual violence usually offered in contemporary

films where a woman is captured by the male villain. For instance, in the scene where

Mercedes has been captured and brought to the barn, the audience can, and many will,

read the Captain loosening his top shirt button while telling his henchman to leave as

containing the ―erotic menace‖ (in other words, the threat of rape), that Smith notes—

but this ―erotic‖ part of the menace is not carried out. Contemporary film audiences have

come to expect the male villain to believe all women are his sexual property. Vidal, while

clearly seeing Mercedes as his property, does not see her as his sexual property, but as a

captive audience for his storytelling. Vidal examines Mercedes as if seeing her for the

first time; and indeed she is at this point telling him she was a successful spy because, as

a woman, she was ―invisible‖ to him. Then, in a repetition of the torturer narrative that

he played out for the captured male rebel earlier, which is also echoed in the sequence of

camera angles and the mise-en-scène, Vidal turns his back on her and begins to retell,

almost word for word, the story that is integral to his torture technique. But Mercedes

interrupts him. Using a hidden knife, she cuts the ropes that bind her hands and stabs

Vidal from behind and then, when he turns toward her, slashes his face, creating a

bloody gash from the side of his mouth to his cheek. So, although the audience expects

sexual violence in a scene where a woman is held to be tortured, the sexual tension is

transformed through repetition of the almost identical torture scene with the male rebel

earlier. In both scenes, the tension is fundamentally narrative, arising from Vidal‘s need

to tell his victims exactly what he is going to do to them. Mercedes‘s violent interruption

transforms Vidal‘s verbal and physical violence against women and men into a silencing

violence by a woman against monologic, militaristic, patriarchal, masternarratives.

Mercedes‘s interruption is one of the key ways in which Vidal‘s narrative desires, his

compulsion for repetition and his silencing of others, are frustrated, leading eventually to

his undoing.

Unlike Carmen, who dismisses stories as nonsense by telling Ofelia that she is too

old for fairy stories and must learn that magic is not real, Vidal attempts to control story

through silencing other tales and repeating his own. For Vidal, a powerful political

figure, the combined narrative of paternity and masculine pride and valor is a

particularly potent masternarrative, one that he repeats over and over again and

attempts to impose on others by rejecting alternative interpretations and versions. When

the doctor asks how he knows that Carmen‘s baby will be a boy, Vidal sees no need to

explain himself, but sneers only: ―Don‘t fuck with me.‖ Similarly, when a dinner guest

tells the story of Vidal‘s father‘s death and how he smashed his watch so that his son

would know what time he died, Vidal stiffly dismisses the story: ―Nonsense,‖ he says,

―[my father] never had a watch.‖ But we know that he does have this broken watch and

that he cleans it obsessively in his study when he is alone. With the denial of another‘s

version, Vidal attempts to retain mastery of the tale by effectively preventing anyone

from telling it but him. This exclusive mastery over the story also allows him to rewrite it

and place himself as the central figure. However, his is only a partial victory over this

story since the cinematic narrator has already given away his secret obsession and

Mercedes will prevent it from being told again.

After Vidal shoots Ofelia in the labyrinth for her ultimate disobedience, that of

stealing the baby, he is almost immediately caught by the rebels, led by Mercedes.

Recognizing his defeat, Vidal attempts one last repetition of the previously denied

paternal tale of the watch, clearly believing that if he must die at least his story will live

on in his son. Vidal returns to the story of his father‘s watch in an attempt to ensure that

the narrative of male military valor and bravery will continue past his death. ―My son,‖

he says removing the ticking watch from his pocket and transferring it to the opposite

fist, ―Tell my son . . . Tell him what time his father died. Tell him that I –‖ but he is cut

off by Mercedes, who once again interrupts his narrative. With the child in her arms and

the rebels at her back, she spits, ―No. He won‘t even know your name.‖ Mercedes‘s final

interruption and rejection of his narrative leave Vidal to die with his story untold. She

effectively prevents him from passing on the paternal story cycle that began with his

father and that he intended to be repeated, with its political and ideological implications

unchanged, into the next generation.

This rebellious overriding of Vidal‘s power is not a total victory. With the death of

the villain, the film returns to Ofelia who is dying at the centre of the labyrinth. Mercedes

comes to her and holds her, weeping and humming a lullaby. She prevented Vidal from

continuing his tyranny, but the fascist rule of Spain will continue. Nor is she able to save

Ofelia—Mercedes is left without words. Pan’s Labyrinth has one last rebellious act:

rather than satisfying the desire for closure with the appropriate generic bittersweet

ending of the villain vanquished and innocence lost, the film continues. It returns to its

own opening shot of Ofelia lying on the stony ground, and then pans swiftly down into

the labyrinth and the Underground Realm where, we are told by the returning voice-over

narrator, she lives and rules for centuries to come.

Princess Moana‘s return to the Underground Realm of her father can be troubling

to a feminist reading that commends the resistance to patriarchal dominance throughout

the film. In these final shots, Princess Moana has not only returned to her father to live

under his rule, benign as it may be, but he and the queen/Carmen are sitting upon tall

elegant and dominating thrones that are hard to see as anything other than phallic – in

fact they look like giant erect penises - no nuance at all. And of course, the king‘s phallus

is the tallest of them all. This scene seems to recuperate Ofelia/Princess Moana into the

Brooks model of narrative desire for closure. However, if we keep Winnett‘s call to read

for resistance in mind, the first and final acts of Princess Moana may provide a hint of

possible continued opposition to patriarchy. The first and last acts of Princess Moana, we

are told by the omniscient voice over narrator, are her escape from the Underground

Realm to the world above and her leaving a piece of herself behind in the form of a flower

once she returns below. Like Ofelia‘s refusal to capitulate to either Vidal or the Faun,

each of these acts can be read as a refusal to choose one world over the other; that is, to

accept unreservedly one form of patriarchy over another.

Conclusion Without Closure

The final narrative desire played out in Pan’s Labyrinth’s double ending enacts

and elicits the desire for more stories. Pan’s Labyrinth pits monologic discourse—and

its attempts to control and limit the number and types of stories that can be told—against

dialogic discourse and the proliferation of stories. Its employment of the fairy tale, a

form of storytelling popularly conceived to be simple, monologic and moralistic, works to

complicate and repudiate these assumptions and to enact multiple forms of

disobedience. In Pan’s Labyrinth, the fairy tale is disobedient both to a contemporary

cinematic audience‘s generic expectations and to the rigid totalitarian narratives of

fascism and patriarchy. Specifically, as a dialogic and hybrid form, the fairy tale in Pan’s

Labyrinth is a dynamic genre of transformation and wonder that, far from being

soothing fiction, provides different ways of telling and different ways of reading 4 that do

not have to subscribe to the universalizations of psychoanalysis, or any other totalizing

theory. The fairy tale of Princess Moana provides Ofelia with justification to disobey her

hated stepfather; but just as importantly, it is in the fairy tale that Ofelia actively pursues

her own goals and desires without deference to Vidal or his world, while at the same time

causing real effects in that patriarchal space.

Ofelia‘s refusal to give the baby to either Vidal or the faun suggests that she does

not have to obey the desired narrative closure of others and that, therefore, neither do

we. Pan’s Labyrinth presents both the ending in which Ofelia dies and the open

conclusion in which she lives on in the Underground Realm as possible at the same time.

Similarly, in leaving traces of herself behind, Princess Moana also leaves traces of stories

of the Underground Realm ―for those who know where to look‖.

So I, too, now return to the beginning of this chapter and the warning I

presented—in order to propose multiple paths down which narrative desire may lead:

if, like Carmen, you deny the desire for fairy tales and the possibility of

transformative magic, becoming complicit in the masternarratives of oppression, you‘ll

not only get sick —you‘ll end up dead.

If, like Vidal, your desires lead you to try to master story—to create and control

monologic masternarratives to support patriarchal militaristic oppression, not only will

you end up dead—your stories will die with you.

However,

if like Ofelia, and the film itself, you refuse to obey the narrative rules of the

monologic masternarrative and its storytellers, reject the primacy of mimetic realism in

favor of multiple narratives and the transformative magic of the fairy tale . . . well, you

may still end up dead—but only in one story.

CHAPTER 3: RADICAL FAERIES AND STORYTELLERS

BRIDGING SOME GAPS

In my ―Introduction‖ I observed how non-normative desire—from incest to

uncontrollable physical or sexual hunger–is a staple of fairy tales and how these over-

determined, disruptive desires are often subordinated to the reestablishment of order

with the happily-ever-after ending. I asked what happens though, if we focus not on the

teleological outcome of the stories, the happily-ever-after of the return to the family,

entrance into heterosexual marriage and the establishment of a new or transformed

home forever fixed in time, but on the non-normative desires that drive these tales? 2

What if we read these disruptive desires not as problems to be fixed, but as differences to

be imagined, explored, and expanded upon?

I have begun to explore the problems that non-normative desire projects into two

cinematic texts that ostensibly represent heterosexual desire exclusively. The first,

Arabian Nights, is concerned with, on one level, the recuperation of a madman whose

illness is brought on by sexual betrayal and manifests itself in sexual dysfunction that

substitutes the desire to murder for sexual desire. The second, Pan’s Labyrinth, I have

argued, downplays overt sexual desire by subverting audience expectations at points in

the narrative when many films would exploit and expose the female body to male sexual

violence and the audience‘s scopophilic desire. I also briefly noted the lack of eroticism in

the film. However, in keeping with the focus of the second section of my dissertation, I

will now briefly look at both films through a queer lens.

Disruptive Desires

In order for a story to really get going, argues Judith Roof in her discussion of

sexuality and narrative, something perverse has to happen to threaten the equilibrium of

the story world: ―perversions are absolutely indispensable to the story; their possibility

and presence complicate the narrative of sexuality‖ (217). In Arabian Nights the

heterosexual life plan that moves from birth, to courtship, marriage, reproduction, and

death is disrupted by Schahriar‘s proposal of a new plan that cuts out two vital stages,

courtship and reproduction, and skips from marriage to death within twenty-four hours.

Schahriar‘s perversion of the heteronormative life cycle acquires ―its meaning as

perversion precisely from its threat to truncate the story; it distorts the narrative,

preventing the desirable confluence of sexual aim and object and male and female,

precluding the discharge of sexual substances, and hindering reproduction. And yet the

aberrations are the foreplay necessary to ever getting to the end at all‖ (Roof 217). Roof‘s

description of the dynamics of perversion is particularly apt, in this case because of

course, it is precisely Schahriar‘s perversion that is the disruptive desire that initiates the

need for Scheherezade‘s reverse talking cure of storytelling in the first place. His

murderous perversion disrupts the heteronormative romance, which must then be

reestablished before Scheherezade can cure him of his temporary madness and the story

can end. At the same time, having recovered from a brief destabilization,

heteronormativity also regains and retains its hegemonic privilege over the perverse love

of Schahzenan for his brother‘s wife–a love that ghoulishly continues into (implied)

necrophilia after her death. This perversity is also ―cured‖ and ceases to disturb

normativity by Schahzenan‘s death at his brother‘s hands.

Neither of these two cinematic texts overtly questions the primacy of

heterosexuality or the naturalness or inevitability of heterosexual marriage.3 Arabian

Nights employs Schahriar‘s non-normative desires as the (temporary) evil that true

(heteronormative) love must conquer. In Pan’s Labyrinth sexual desire is almost entirely

elided or diverted to other forms of desire for political mastery over all bodies. However,

although Vidal‘s heterosexual virility is not questioned, as I argued in chapter 2, not all

sexualities in the film are necessarily heterosexual. Mercedes‘s sexuality is ambiguous for

example, if only because–other than her maternal feelings for Ofelia–the only person

with whom she has an emotional tie is her brother. This relationship, if read queerly–

without the presumptions of heteronormativity–might point to a non-normative

relationship between the two. When Mercedes and the doctor go into the forest to meet

the rebels, she is greeted by a young man. She grasps him in an emotional, not to say

passionate, embrace and kisses him murmuring ―Pedro, Pedro.‖ The nature of the

embrace and of the relationship between the pair is clarified when she continues, ―my

brother.‖ The assumption that this soldier is her lover or husband is transformed by her

pronouncement of the familial tie. The question becomes, is this embrace the symbol of a

close bond between siblings, or an indication of an incestuous relationship? Because

there are no other specific indications of incestuous love between the two, a

heteronormative reading will assume a normative relationship. A queer reading will not.

In the next two chapters I will propose queer readings of Kissing the Witch and

Sexing the Cherry. I will look more closely at the representations of sexual desires in

these two literary fairy-tale texts, which center on female figures as active agents of their

own desires, rather than on female responses and reactions to gendered imbalances

caused by male desires.4 Kissing the Witch and Sexing the Cherry are written by self-

identified lesbian women and both represent lesbian desire. However, I will argue that

the proliferation of narrative voices in the form of multiple storytellers and the different

desires of these different female figures do not necessarily make them queer texts, but do

invite queer reading and open fairy tales to queer possibility.

Compulsive Reiteration

Judith Butler‘s work, in particular, points to the ways in which the normative

aspects of gender performance are constructed by and entirely dependant upon the

illusion of primacy and origin, which can only be produced as an effect of a failure or

imperfect copy of a naturalized so-called norm: ―gender is a kind of imitation for which

there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the

original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself‖ (emphasis in original, 1991

1520). These illusory effects constitute the performative in Butler‘s model, the

(compulsory) compulsion to reiterate traits, practices and discourses that through this

very reiteration have produced the illusion of origins. The repetition or citation of norms

in fact constitutes those norms: ―acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires create

the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained

for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive

heterosexuality‖ (136). This ―obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality‖ is a large

one, and among its regulatory institutions is structuralist narratology.

Classical or structural narratology maintains an objective stance in relation to

narrative; it observes and catalogs narrative forms and functions. It is able to detect and

describe them through repetition observed within a sample of texts.5 Because of its

claims to scientificity and ahistoric universalizations, structuralist narratology has

historically refused to be concerned with pressures at work outside of the text, such as

gender and/or sexuality. In the latter years of the twenty-first century, some theorists

argued that contextual and cultural information are relevant to the concerns of

narratology, and because of these arguments the scope of narratology has widened and

become more interdisciplinary.6 The entry on ―Queer‖ in the Routledge Encyclopedia of

Narrative Theory provides a succinct description of how the assumptions of classical or

structural narratology are troubled by queer approaches and what queer analysis can

bring to the study of narrative:

The legacy of structuralist narratology tends to identify the traditional

linear plot with normative heterosexuality, particularly in the marriage

plot, which equates the ‗happiness‘ of its ending with a heterosexual

consummation that promises patriarchal succession. In contrast,

narrative analysis informed by queer theory often explores the ways that

narrative structures can depart from such traditional principles of plot

coherence and closure. Queer analysis of narrative sometimes emphasise

[sic] how certain plots move not in accordance with heterosexual rhythms

or toward procreative ends, but instead in accordance with the less

predictable vicissitudes of non-normative sexual practices or toward less

secure futures; hence, such readings might illustrate not only the

eccentric kinds of sexuality that appear thematically in narrative texts . . .

but also how these expressions of desire allegorize narrative movement

(478).

Queer analysis then, can expose to critique those fairy tales throughout the fairy-tale

canon and the continual revisioning of the same tales that reiterate –enact and re-enact–

desires that create and support the illusion that happily ever after comes with a wedding

Further, it will also expose the seemingly inevitable and incontrovertible linear

fairy-tale structure as an edifice that supports heterosexual hegemony– merely adding

glitter to the ―obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality‖. However, as Cristina

Bacchilega demonstrates in her discussion of postmodern fairy tales: ―performance is

always already implicated in the citation of a norm, whether it be gender, subjectivity or

narrativity, but can re-articulate this norm by way of exposing its constructedness‖ (1997

22). As Bacchilega suggests, this is precisely what some contemporary fairy tales do. If

the paradigmatic norm of fairy tales is the teleological structure of the marriage plot,

Kissing the Witch and Sexing the Cherry re-articulate, or rather, re-shape the frame by

exposing gaps, leaving their tales open-ended, and by passing narrative authority along,

perhaps even so far as to pass it outside of the text and onto the reader.

Identity Issues

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has claimed that ―The relation of gay [or queer] studies

to debates on the literary canon is, and had best be, tortuous‖ (emphasis in original

1990, 48). It would seem that what is precisely meant by ―queer‖ in relation to literary

and other cultural productions continues to be, if not exactly tortuous, at least

troublesome. Sedgwick stresses the importance of not setting fixed boundaries for queer

texts. Critical work from a queer perspective, she writes, tends to ―share a relaxed,

unseparatist hypothesis of the much to be gained by refraining from a priori oppositions

between queer texts (or authors) and non-queer ones, or female ones and male‖ (1997,

1). This kind of careful thinking about the essential characteristics of texts (and authors)

owes a great deal to other discussions by Teresa de Lauretis, Judith Butler, and others in

the early 1990‘s. These critics began to ask questions and propose possible ways of

employing the instability of identity categories to positive political ends, thus beginning

discussions that would proliferate in many disciplines and come to jostle about under the

heading of ―queer theory.‖

In these early essays, both de Lauretis and Butler are concerned with formulating

new ways of discussing gay and lesbian subjectivities. For de Lauretis, the use of the term

queer in the context of the special issue of the journal differences, ―juxtaposed to the

‗lesbian and gay‘ of the subtitle, [and] is intended to mark a certain critical distance from

the latter‖ (1991, iv). For de Lauretis, the differences between gay men and lesbians ―are

less represented by the discursive coupling of those two terms . . . than they are elided by

most of the contexts in which the phrase is used; that is to say, differences are implied in

it but then simply taken for granted or even covered over by the word ‗and‘‖ (v-vi).

Butler, who does not use the term ‗queer‘ in either the first edition Gender Trouble

(1990) or ―Imitation and Gender Insubordination‖ (1991), looks at the elision of

―lesbian‖ in political discourse from a slightly different angle, but comes to similar

practical conclusions. Since, ―identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory

regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying

points of a liberatory contestation of that very oppression,‖ in order to disrupt the

regulation inherent in identity categories Butler posits possibilities that may arise from

―hav[ing] it permanently unclear what precisely that sign [lesbian] signifies‖ (1991,1514).

Further, Butler asks if there is a way in which, rather than attempting to naturalize the

identity category lesbian, there may be useful political potential in ―negative

constructions of lesbianism as a fake or bad copy [that] can be occupied and reworked to

call into question the claims of heterosexual priority‖ (1516/1517). Butler‘s insistence in

retaining the instability of the sign lesbian has since been transferred to theoretical uses

of queer. That is, while gay and lesbian retain their signifying status as relatively stable

tools for political action and have been institutionalized in academia under Gay and

Lesbian or Lesbian and Gay Studies, queer insists on instability, fluidity, and resistance

to the regulatory practices of identity categories and remains interdisciplinary in scope.

I do not wish to be caught up in what Allan McGee has called–with extreme

derision–the ―fairy tale‖ that transformed the term gay and lesbian or lesbian and gay

into queer. Coming after the problematizing of identity categories and the first waves of

queer theorizing in the academy and its parallel emergence into popular media as a

synonym for gay and lesbian, McGee complains that lesbian and gay is the ―bad-old‖

term in opposition to the ―good-new‖ term queer. In the presence of queer, McGee

argues, lesbian and gay ―becomes a term which carries within it implications of gender

blindness, racism, crude identity politics‖ (23). While I am using a queer approach and I

do counter it to the lesbian-feminist approaches that Patricia Duncker, Laura Doan and

Paulina Palmer bring to Kissing the Witch and Sexing the Cherry, I do not wish to imply

that their readings are inherently ―crude‖ or should be dismissed or replaced by my own.

As my discussion of Duncker‘s objections to the lack of lesbian representation in

the work of Angela Carter in chapter 4, and of Laura Doan‘s and Paulina Palmer‘s

readings of ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses‖ in chapter 5 will show, the

tendency to focus upon the category of lesbian as stable or essential in these and other

texts has the danger of reducing them to being ―lesbian friendly‖ or not, and does not

take into account the other heterosexual but non-straight subjectivities that the texts

engage. My own approach attempts to examine the tale cycles by Donoghue and

Winterson more holistically and finds that both are more politically radical and do more

than make the fairy tale available to lesbian subjects (though this is one important move

that they make) A queer approach to representation, themes and structure demonstrates

that Kissing the Witch and Sexing the Cherry shake up the seemingly timeless, knowable

and unchanging fairy tale in ways that make it difficult to read any fairy tale ―innocently‖

again. At the same time, I do not make the claim that either of these texts are inherently

queer, or that I am ―queering‖ them.

Alexander Doty has problematized the notion of queering as a verb in ways that I

find useful. He reflects that he would rather think of ―queerness inside texts and

production, and to think of queer reading practices as existing alongside straight ones,‖

because he sees ―any text is always already potentially queer‖ (2000, 2). ―Along the same

lines,‖ he says, ― I now feel that maybe I/we should drop the idea of ―queering‖

something . . . as it implies taking a thing that is straight and doing something to it. I‘d

like to see queer discourses and practices as being less about co-opting and ―making‖

things queer …and more about discussing how things are, or might be understood as,

queer‖ (2000, 2). In theorizing the ways in which fairy tales and queer and narrative

theory can or might work together, I have also struggled with the problematic notions of

―doing something‖ to a genre that is often emphatically read as straight and using the

tools of narratology to prove or dis-cover queerness within. Rather, Doty‘s notion of how

things ―might be understood‖ as queer appeals to me for its flexibility and its emphasis

on epistemological constructs rather than the ontological status of a text as queer or

straight. For this reason in the following two chapters I have attempted to look at the

ways these texts that thematize multiple female desires work to ―invite‖ queer reading or,

to put it another way, invoke queer possibility.

My Kinda Queer

My methodologies and interests in Kissing the Witch and Sexing the Cherry

intersect at some points, but are ultimately different from Doan‘s and Palmer‘s. Their

discussions of Sexing the Cherry as lesbian-feminist text, for example, cause them to

concentrate on only particular character representations. My own understanding of

queer, however, is not exclusive to a heterosexual/homosexual binary and therefore my

interest is in the cumulative effects of the representations of multiple desires in the text.

Further, my arguments about how the narrative structures of the texts contribute to

queer possibility are predicated on an understanding of queer that exposes gaps,

disruptions, and instability of not only gender and sexuality, but narration as well.

While I will not be dwelling on the sexual identity categories of either the authors

or the characters in the texts in the second section of my dissertation, I would argue that

attention to their resistance to the regulatory structures of the fairy tale may also prove

useful for both exposing and loosening the grip of heteropatriarchy upon the genre. So,

rather than simply dismissing identity categories and identity politics as restrictive or

―crude,‖ or opposing my queer approaches to straight, gay and lesbian, feminist, or any

others, again I concur with Doty that queer ―can now point to things that destabilize

existing categories, while it is itself becoming a category—but a category that resists easy

definition. That is, you can‘t tell just from the label ‗queer‘ exactly what someone is

referring to, except that it is something non-straight or non-normatively straight‖ (2000

8). The understanding of queer that informs the following chapters then, is of a political

mode of interrogation and critique that takes heteronormative, patriarchal, hegemonic

discourses as its object and is often deconstructionist in its methodology. It explores gaps

and fissures, and recognizes the shifting and fluid desires and identity formations of the

marginalized, both male and female, hetero and non, as contingent, specific and

transgressive. Further, queer insists that the power of the myth of the normal, dominant,

and natural, is very much indebted to its opposing myth of ―abnormal,‖ ―minor‖

perversity. Kissing the Witch and ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses‖ expose

the indebtedness of heteronormativity to non-normativity by contrasting the often

painful and unnatural contortions and sacrifices some of their characters make in

attempts to fit into hegemonic fairy-tale discourses to the relief and liberation they feel

when they reject these discourses in favor of following their own (―natural‖) desires. At

the same time, they do not represent this liberation as unproblematically utopian or

suggest that following one‘s non-normative bliss will be either easy or unopposed.

Donoghue and Winterson do not simply critique the fairy tale and dismiss it as a

bad business; the playful exuberance that both demonstrate in their revisions shows the

genre‘s flexibility and vitality, in spite of the perceived strictures of their pre-texts.

Donoghue and Winterson destabilize the form, but they also strategically adhere to its

generic traits while also expanding them. For example, Fortunata, the youngest of the

twelve dancing princesses, is the only narrator to be given a name in either Donoghue or

Winterson. This lack of naming has an interesting effect. Princesses and heroines of the

classic innocent persecuted heroine 7 are generally named for their physical attributes–

the most well known being Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Beauty of

―Beauty and the Beast‖–or are not named–the princess in ―Goose Girl‖ and the wife of

Bluebeard, for example. The often reiterated traits of these otherwise un-individualized

heroines have come, overtime, to signify what I will call ―princessness‖.8 Part of the

classic heroine‘s charm is her lack of very distinct personality or psychological depth

because this lack leaves her open to deep audience identification with her. This generic

lack of individualization and flat characterization is a recognizable trope of the fairy tale,

and Donoghue and Winterson adhere to it in their tellings.

In doing so the multiple desires that their heroines express begin to adhere to the

fairy-tale heroine/princess; that is, their attributes add to the meager stock of princess

qualities. Thus for those who meet these fairy-tale heroines, the lot of the fairy tale

princess has expanded. In Donoghue and Winterson, she is still the generic signifier of

princessness, but her romantic and desiring options have expanded exponentially.

Where once she was destined for marriage with a man, now she is just as likely to fall for

another princess, a witch, or decide to live within a community of supportive women, or

even happily remain alone. Further, her story does not end with a wedding. She is no

longer straight-jacketed into a static blissful state of matrimony ―ever-after‖ but is

permitted a wider range of emotional and psychic experiences, which include

uncertainties, frustrations and occasional unhappinesses, without guilt or a sense of

failure for non-conformity to utopian and unrealistic expectations of undifferentiated

―happiness‖ that their fairy tale heroine predecessors were doomed to.

The recognition of these characters that they are living stories and that they have

the power to change them, to transgress and move beyond or reject altogether the

traditional linear marriage plot frees them from artificial (rather than intrinsic)

structures that have confined their fairy-tale predecessors (and some fairy-tale critics).

As I will demonstrate, they break those structures, and in following their own changing

desires, and passing their stories and the authority to tell from one to the next, these

fairy-tale heroines ensure that the tales they inhabit remain open to re-articulation,

rather than simple endless repetition. They reveal ways other queer princesses,

persecuted heroines and ―radical fairies‖ may shape fairy tales of our own.

CHAPTER 4: MOUTH TO MOUTH: QUEER DESIRES IN

EMMA DONOGHUE’S KISSING THE WITCH.

Exemplifying the intertextuality of what Stephen Benson has called ―post-Carter

generation‖ fairy-tales, Emma Donoghue‘s Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins

(1997) can be seen to ―re-engage contemporaneously with an already multilayered

polyphony, adding a further critical layer to the plurality‖ of the genre (Makinen151).

Kissing the Witch consists of twelve revisions of ―classic‖ literary fairy tales from Charles

Perrault, the brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen, and one final, ―new‖, story.1

Each tale recounts the trials of an innocent persecuted heroine figure based upon well-

known characters such as Cinderella, Snow White, or the Little Mermaid, but here

narrated in the first person from the perspective of an older, wiser self. Most of these

heroines come to a kind of awakening to their own desires, and experience a personal

transformation with the help of a female character; usually older, this helper is often the

fairy godmother or wicked fairy/stepmother/witch transformed from their pre-texts into

caring mentor figures. As each narrator reaches the end of her telling, she turns to this

mentor character and asks to hear a tale in turn. On the page following the conclusion of

each tale, set off in a framing border, italicized, and centered on the page are variations

of these lines, which follow the narration of the first tale, ―The Tale of the Shoe‖:

In the morning I asked

Who were you

Before you walked into my kitchen

And she said,

Will I tell you my own story?

It is a tale of a bird.

For each successive tale, the time and place of the first line, the meeting of the

third, and the final line that becomes the title of the next story, alter appropriately to

make specific links between the narrations that precede and follow it. These interstitial

moments work as an internal structural framing device that provides a formula for the

passing on of the storytelling responsibility continuity between the tales, and cohesion

for the book as a whole.

Because of its recursive narrative structure, the proliferation and staged orality of

its voices, and its overt representation of multiple types of female desires, Kissing the

Witch is a particularly complex text to read from any perspective. These traits, as well as

its resistance to easy generalizations, make Kissing the Witch a particularly apposite text

for queer reading as I have discussed in chapter 3. The desires encoded in the stories are

as varied as the tellers themselves. They include same-sex sexual desire between women;

heterosexual desire of women for men; desires for autonomy and freedom; and desires

for individual subjectivity, for belonging, and for knowledge. Kissing the Witch can

unreservedly be called a feminist text, but as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick makes axiomatic in

Epistemology of the Closet, feminism and the study of sexuality are not coextensive: that

is, ―gender and sexuality represent two analytic axes that may productively be imagined

as being distinct from one another as, say, gender and class, or class and race‖ (30). Part

of this productive distinction makes intelligible the characterization of Kissing the Witch

as feminist text but not necessarily as queer text. Kissing the Witch does represent

various women‘s struggles for autonomy in heteropatriarchal culture; but it does not

attempt to conflate and then redress sexual and gendered hierarchies by merely

presenting one or two universalized lesbian characters in opposition to heteronormative

desire. Instead, each tale tells of the different complex and contingent desires of its

female protagonists; it is in the reader‘s approach to these desires, and in the book‘s

structure, that a queer reading can, but by no means automatically will, be produced.

In fact, Kissing the Witch frustrates not only hegemonic patriarchal discourses

and normative desires, but even the desires of the critic who wishes to describe its

structure and themes in a tidy package. This structure is not amenable to diagramming,

and all that can be said consistently of the stories—except the last, original tale—is that

they reimagine some of the best known fairy tales; that all of the narrators are women—

except when they are birds or horse skulls; and that each of them learns something from

the figure to whom she passes on the narration of the next tale. Several of the stories

represent lesbian love stories, but others describe heterosexual relationships. Some of

the stories end with lovers united and some with women in isolation, and either fearful

or joyous at the prospect. At least three do not seem to represent sexual love at all, but

the desire of a child or young woman for a familial bond or place to belong.

The book as a whole employs particular framing structures that ―embody‖ the

oral storytelling voice, a common device in literary fairy-tale collections. But the frames

of Kissing the Witch are left radically open, and so can be said to formally present the

linked stories as contingent upon a cooperative reading process. This cooperative

storytelling situation creates the opportunity for multiple possible readings and

meanings of the tales that the tellers revise. At the same time, the passing of story from

teller to teller also leaves significant gaps in the characters‘ lives, thus suggesting that

these tales are ―in process‖ and never entirely closed. Finally, the particular way in which

storytelling performance is represented in the text, the narration, not only resists closure

through multi-vocality but also works to interpellate the reader as a teller of her own

tale, which adds to the proliferation of stories, each tale proposing the teller‘s desire as

one among many and prompting the desire for more stories in each narrator and in the

reader/narratee.

The radical openness and fluidity of the structure and its troubling gaps,

especially as highlighted in the final tale, then, along with the destabilizing narration and

the multiple desires articulated in the text by a plurality of voices, invite a queer reading

of Kissing the Witch. I will be concentrating on two tales, ―The Tale of the Rose‖ and

―The Tale of the Kiss‖ in an attempt to accept Kissing the Witch‘s queer invitation. First

though, a discussion of reading practices and structures of framing will contribute to a

more specific explanation of what I mean by queer.

Constructing a Queer Frame

Veronica Hollinger‘s 1999 essay, ―(Re)reading Queerly: Science Fiction,

Feminism, and the Defamiliarization of Gender,‖ suggests that science fiction is

particularly suited to ―queering‖ and that ―complex and sophisticated inquires into

gender issues are by no means new to science fiction, even if our theoretical

representations of these issues have not always kept pace with the fiction‖ (1). However,

Hollinger goes on to claim that ―All too often, heteronormativity is embedded in both

theory and fiction as ‗natural‘ and ‗universal,‘ a kind of barely glimpsed default gender

setting which remains unquestioned and untheorized‖ and that ―[b]oth science fiction as

a narrative field and feminism as a political and theoretical field work themselves out, for

the most part, within the terms of an almost completely naturalized heterosexual binary‖

(2). I would suggest that the fairy tale engages in a similarly sophisticated inquiry into

gender and sexuality that nevertheless works within a naturalized heterosexual binary in

fairy-tale studies. In her book Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of

the Fairy Tale (2001), Elizabeth Wanning Harries argues that Donoghue‘s Kissing the

Witch ―insists on the possible links between the best-known tales and the system of

gender relations that they reveal‖ (130). I completely agree with her, as far as she goes,

but Harries‘ reading of Kissing the Witch tends to gloss over a very important related

point. These tales, narrated by and to woman-identified women, also disturb the

unquestioned and normative binary of sexual relations that they reveal. Harries makes

only glancing reference to lesbian desire in her reading of the text: she notes that the

narrators of Kissing the Witch ―are redeemed not by the traditional marriage plot but by

the possibility of romantic love between women‖ (130). However, for Harries, this

possibility is less significant than the book‘s complex framing technique,―[t]he most

startling innovation of Donoghue‘s book‖ (131). Like Harries, I too am concerned with

this ―startling innovation,‖ but I argue that it is, in part, such framing techniques and

structures of Kissing the Witch that encourage a queer reading. In conjunction with the

thematic dynamics in the text, this structure in Kissing the Witch enacts a queering of

fairy tales.

As I outlined in my introduction, the term ―frame‖ may refer to structural

devices, cognitive aids, or ideological underpinnings of a text. The multifaceted nature of

the term, as useful as it is, can cause critical discussions of frames and framing to

become confused depending on the aims of the critic considering them.2 Key to an

appreciation of the complexity of Donoghue‘s innovation is an understanding of how

frames have been discussed to different (though not incompatible) ends by scholars in

fairy tale studies. Cristina Bacchilega produces an examination of frames in Postmodern

Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (1997) that attends to the ways fairy tales

are socially, ideologically and narratively shaped. In her discussion of frames in ―Snow

White,‖ Bacchilega ―seek[s] to magnify norms at work in the fairy tale, the narrative

frame which measures the voices, gazes, and actions of all the genre‘s female heroines‖

(29). In doing so, Bacchilega draws connections to the ways in which framing strategies

of diegesis and focalization in ―classic‖ fairy tales are linked to gender, ideological

hierarchies, and naturalizing tendencies in narrative productions. Her deconstructive,

feminist, and narratological approach highlights the ways in which the ―[performative]

context can be framed and reframed, resulting in different meanings which no one

subject can master‖ (19). Frames shape, enclose, measure, provide methodological

structures upon which to rest (or climb); they are cognitive, social, and ideological

structures that naturalize reading practices.

Similarly, Elizabeth Wanning Harries considers how framing demarcates the

borderlands of the tales. She focuses on how stories frame other stories, on the ways in

which layers of embedding, whether stories rest within stories or linked in a chain, work

to place different discourses in relation – or conversation – with each other. Structural

framing devices are an accepted and even expected marker of the fairy-tale genre; as

Harries notes, ―Nearly all fairy tales are framed in some way. When we think of fairy

tales we think of them as bracketed between ‗once upon a time‘ and ‗happily ever after‘‖

(104). The formulaic opening and closing phrases constitute a frame that invariably

indicates to the reader that she is entering into or moving out of a fairy tale. This framing

tells her that she can expect to encounter particular types of characters and certain

generic motifs. The ―once upon a time‖ formula, however, is only one type of structural

frame. For Harries, it is particularly indicative of the ―compact‖ or single-plot tales made

famous by Charles Perrault and the brothers Grimm. These compact tales have, says

Harries, outshone the more multilayered ―complex‖ literary tales that have existed

alongside the better-known texts of Perrault and the Grimms. For Harries, ―[t]hese

‗compact,‘ short narratives have dominated our conception of the fairy-tale genre and

make it difficult for us to understand, appreciate, or perhaps even notice the more

complex nested narratives that have been part of its written tradition since the

beginning‖ (108). Harries argues that a ―more traditional and extended structure . . .

strings the various tales along like beads on a narrative chain‖ and that ―the embedded

tales and the frame that joins them are always symbiotic‖ (107). Kissing the Witch takes

part in both of these traditions, revising ―compact‖ or ―classic‖ tales, but linking the tales

within a complex narrative chain that is visually and verbally marked in between

individual narratives.

Stephen Benson‘s Cycles of Influence: Fiction, Folktale, Theory (2003) provides

yet another important discussion of framing in relation to folktale and fairy-tale

narrative cycles such as The Ocean of Streams of Story, Arabian Nights, Il Pentamerone

and Piacevoli Notti. In addition to the ideological or cognitive contextualization and

narrative structuration of Bacchilega and Harries‘ discussions, Benson stresses the ways

frames work to lend authority and authenticity to the embedded tales. As ancient stories

that have moved from orality to textuality (and often back again) these are ―liminal texts,

situated on the fertile boundary between the oral and the literary‖ (46). The early textual

cycles Benson discusses present storytelling figures who frame the embedded tales so

that the embedded tales seem ―ostensibly authentic but implicitly literary [as they] . . .

are structured, both implicitly and explicitly around a staged orality: they mimic orality

by staging the event of their narration, thus initiating a series of narratives which have

narrative as their subject‖ (46). Frames, then, also establish a storytelling situation or

narrational context in which to place the embedded tales that, to one degree or another

and depending on the length and complexity of the frame narration, create a relationship

that Harries calls ―symbiotic,‖ between the individual tales and with the encompassing

primary narrative.

Framing, for Benson, also contributes the impression of authenticity to the

storytelling situation as a ―sign of historical provenance‖ (46-47). Nicholas Paige argues

that ―[w]hat storytellers encode in their frame tales and embedded narratives is a record

of how authors and readers understand their always changing relations to print and how

generic conventions are modified by historical conditions that are no longer those that

gave rise to the conventions in the first place‖ (143). Paige maintains that the storyteller

figure in early French novels (and by extension other early European novelistic

productions) works as a literal go-between from oral to written storytelling, one who

smoothes the way and acts as a cross-generic figure by modeling to readers how novels

should be read and understood. Paige‘s hypothesis seems to mirror Walter J. Ong‘s

comment that ―[e]arly writing provides the reader with conspicuous helps for situating

himself imaginatively. . . so that the reader can pretend to be one of the listening

company‖ (qtd. in Benson 47). The storytelling situation–whether it is Scheherezade

telling tales for her life, a group of people passing the time as they wait for the plague to

go away, or a wise storyteller imparting life lessons to the next generation–provides a

context for the embedded tales, literalizes a storytelling ―voice‖ that creates the feeling of

an oral performance, and also lets readers know why the embedded tales are important

and how to read them. In Kissing the Witch, these ―helps‖ appear primarily in the

passages between the tellings and in moments of direct address to the narratee as an

unnamed ―you.‖ They encode dialogue between tellers that creates a feeling of intimate

reciprocity among narrator, narratee, and reader.

While Bacchilega shows how postmodern writers work to ―unmask naturalizing

gender constructions‖ in individual tales and tellings, Harries suggests that

contemporary writers continue the literary fairy-tale framing tradition ―as a way to direct

our readings into new paths‖ (102); Benson argues further that the formal framing

structure of fairy-tale cycles critically informed the theoretical systems that aimed at

describing all narrative: ―it is in the representation of the commonplace act of narration,

including the telling of tales about tales, that this paradigm of the framed story cycle self-

consciously manipulates what later came to be proposed as the structural properties of

narrative‖ (65).

My argument is that Kissing the Witch unmasks naturalized constructions of

gender and sexuality through tales of non-normative subjects and desires that actively

resist heteropatriarchal ideologies. Its shifting narration, the proliferation of tales, and

the gaps between them direct our reading toward multiple new pathways. As a

consequence, while this ideological and narrative framing is not exclusive to a queer

structure of desire or narrative system, I propose that it does generate the possibility of

applying queer reading strategies to fairy-tale texts. In doing so, Kissing the Witch

enables queer readings of its intertexts, and realigns reader expectations and

assumptions about what it is possible for the fairy tale to do.

Queer theory has yet to significantly influence fairy-tale studies, but there are

indications that our readings are beginning to change.3 In the introduction to the recent

Special Issue of Marvels & Tales on Erotic Tales (2008), Cristina Bacchilega, with a nod

to the epigraph of her essay which comes from Kissing the Witch, concludes her remarks

by insisting on the importance of ―learning to read sexuality in fairy tales more openly,

maintaining a critical tension between the language of heteronormativity and the

languages of transgressive and queer desires‖ (20). And within that volume too, Pauline

Greenhill‘s essay ―‗Fitcher‘s [Queer] Bird;‘ A Fairytale Heroine and Her Avatars,‖

produces an analysis that reveals the tension between normative discourses of ―The

Robber Bridegroom‖ and ―Bluebeard,‖ and the languages of strange desires of ―Fitcher‘s

Bird‖ that demonstrates the potential of reading queerly. Nevertheless, queer is only now

coming to fairy tale studies - and I might add, queer theory hasn‘t even noticed us yet.

Before this special issue of Marvels & Tales, two critical articles on Angela Carter

by Patricia Duncker numbered among the earliest essays that seriously problematized

compulsory heterosexuality in fairy-tale fiction. Duncker‘s essays, ―Re-Imagining The

Fairy Tales: Angela Carter‘s Bloody Chambers‖ (1984) and ―Queer Gothic: Angela Carter

and the Lost Narratives of Sexual Subversion‖ (1996), take Carter to task for her lack of

representation of lesbian desire. In the earlier essay, ―Re-Imagining the Fairy Tales,‖

Duncker argues that Carter reproduces a ―rigidly sexist psychology of the erotic‖ (6) in

The Bloody Chamber and that, although Carter boldly takes on the daunting task of

unmasking patriarchy in fairy tales, ultimately ―she still leaves the central taboos

unspoken. Some things are unthinkable. She could never imagine Cinderella in bed with

the Fairy Godmother‖ (8). (Interestingly, as it happens, Donoghue does encourage us to

imagine just that in the first tale of the collection.) Duncker‘s primary criticism of The

Bloody Chamber is that it could have been a more radical ―re-writing‖ and ―re-

imagining‖ of fairy tales ―had [Carter] studied the ambivalent sexual language that is

there in the original tales‖ (12). Twelve years later Duncker returned to Carter‘s work,

expanding her analysis to also include post-The Bloody Chamber novels. Again Duncker

voices her frustration at Carter‘s shortcomings. She accuses Carter of ―never

attempt[ing] to imagine queer subjectivity, although male subjectivity presents no

problems‖ (67). Although Duncker is absolutely correct that there is no representation

of lesbian subjectivity in The Bloody Chamber, and all problems are worked through

within the heterosexual matrix, I am not as sure as she is that Carter is dedicated to such

a normative conception of heterosexual relations that she can be simply dismissed for

not being feminist or queer enough.4

Looking back on them today, Duncker‘s essays seem to owe more to the Gay and

Lesbian Studies model of identity politics that calls for representation and legitimation

of gay and lesbian subjects than to a contemporary queer theory that has also grown out

of the more de-centering, identity troubling impulses of poststructuralism and post-

second-wave feminisms, movements that see intersecting forms of difference as integral

to an understanding of gender oppression.

Queer Moments

In her Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (2003), Nikki Sullivan states that

―Queering popular culture . . . involves critically engaging with cultural artefacts in order

to explore the ways in which meaning and identity is (inter)textually (re)produced‖

(190). Sullivan refers to Alexander Doty and the ways in which ―queer moments‖ in

literature ―could be described as moments of narrative disruption which destabilise

heteronormativity, and the meanings and identities it engenders, by bringing to light all

that is disavowed by, and yet integral to, heteronormative logic‖ (191). Sullivan also

points out that: ―Rather than functioning as a noun, queer can be used as a verb, that is,

to describe a process, a movement between the viewer, text, and world, that reinscribes

(or queers) each and the relations between them‖ (192).

It is important to note how Sullivan, Doty, Hollinger, and others insist on queer

reading as a practice and process. As they would not, nor would I claim that Kissing the

Witch is a queer text, but that it particularly lends itself to queer reading through ―queer

moments‖ that rise from the dynamics of the text. Keeping Harries‘s reading of Kissing

the Witch in mind, it is clear that, although woman-identified women and lesbian desires

are thematized in the text, this does not make the text queer or queer reading inevitable.

My reading of Kissing the Witch is an attempt to magnify the ―queer moments‖ (textual

and formal) that any reader may (or may not) notice, and to (re)focus those moments so

that their disruptions come to the fore, thus realigning the relationship between reader

and text. My hope is that, in doing so, this reading process will contribute to an

understanding of the ways in which Kissing the Witch, in conjunction with its reader,

can be said to queer fairy tales. My assumption is that having produced such a reading

once, it becomes easier to produce, if not more difficult to avoid, similar queer readings

of Kissing the Witch‘s intertexts and, by extension, of the fairy-tale genre itself.

A queer reading of fairy tales, then, will be dedicated to interrogating the themes

and structures that contribute to the fairy tale‘s popular reputation as a genre that has

historically championed restricted subjectivities, and it will search for ways in which

some fairy tales might not also do the work of de-centering, shifting, and troubling

discourses that would wish to keep the genre fixed, stable, enmeshed in hegemonic

discourse, and therefore predictable and immediately comprehensible.

As I have suggested, the disruptions enacted by Kissing the Witch are largely

indicated by narration. Mieke Bal notes the importance of forgetting the narrator in her

discussion of frames in Narratologies: ―When the embedded text presents a complete

story . . . we gradually forget . . . the primary narrative‖ (53). And in the literary versions

of Arabian Nights ―this forgetting is a sign that Scheherezade‘s goal has been

accomplished. As long as we forget her life is at stake, the king will too, and that was her

purpose‖ (53). However, in Kissing the Witch we do not have a primary narrative or

narrator who can recede during the narration and then be recalled to provide context

and continuity. The structure of the Kissing the Witch prompts a different kind of

forgetting; in fact, the radical openness of the text rests on this point.

Unlike The Arabian Nights, there isn‘t a single storytelling situation with a

primary narrator and narratee to provide an external structuring frame for the tales in

Kissing the Witch. Although the style, voices, and diction of the narrators indicate an

oral storytelling situation, we do not know where the stories are being told or, for the

first and (possibly) last stories, to whom the stories are being told. Each of these

narrations begins at the end of another, but its action is set in an unknown time and

place earlier in the life of the new narrator, and the events in the new story will end

before the new narrator and the narrator of the previous tale have met. The linking

intradiegetic and sectioned off pages in which each previous narrator poses a question to

the succeeding one, as well as the first lines of each story, seem to indicate that each of

these stories is related tête-à-tête. By the end of each telling, we have been so caught up

by the new voice, the drama of new obstacles to over-come, and the swirl of new desires,

that we have forgotten the previous teller, who is also the ostensible narratee. Just as

Scheherezade must disappear into the background during her storytelling in the Nights,

each previous narrator in Kissing the Witch fades into the background during the

successive telling, and is barely discernible by the end of the tale and the transfer of

narrating duties from one teller to the next.

In the recounting of her tale, each protagonist discovers and reveals her own

desires. Not all of these desires are sexual, but each in their own way is disruptive to the

ideologies and normative behavioral codes embedded within their pretexts. In speaking

their desires, these characters reveal the normative, and therefore usually invisible,

restrictive behavioral codes at the intersecting points of gender, sexuality, class, and/or

cognitive ability. These characters often demonstrate disruptive queer desires, but even

these are not fixed; rather, desires shift and realign themselves as the characters develop.

Often the narrators are not sure where their desires will take them, but they suspect

these paths will be neither predictable nor straight.5

I turn now to two tales in particular, ―The Tale of the Rose‖ and ―The Tale of the

Kiss,‖ not because they are more exemplary of queer desires than any of the others, but

because they do represent different lesbian relations and because they stand out in terms

of metanarrational commentary, a combination which allows me to magnify queer

moments of narrative desire in storytelling and in fairy tales in particular.

Learning a New Story

―The Tale of the Rose‖ is a reimagining of ―Beauty and the Beast‖; it is narrated

by the Beauty character, and its plot follows the most well-known variants of the tale

closely. Its queer moments arise from its attention to desires encoded in narrative, as

well as the narrator‘s discovery of the desires‘ constructions and her decoding of them.

As in most versions of Beauty and the Beast, the Beauty character is promised by

her father to a beast in a castle who has offered him shelter after his fleet of ships is lost

at sea. When this Beauty comes to the castle of the masked Beast, she finds a door with

her name on it, ―dresses cut to [her] shape‖, and keys to every door except to the beast‘s

bedroom. She finds she is in need of nothing: ―I had a room of my own, and time and

treasures at my command. I had everything I could want except the key to the story‖

(34). The shelves in her room are so full of wonder tales that she ―could live to be old

without coming to the end of them‖ (36). However, although she has the minimum

requirements Virginia Woolf indicates as necessary for a woman‘s creative

independence, neither the fairy tales nor feminist politics provide her with the key she

needs to understand this story. The desires and relations of her new life are not

accessible to either heteropatriarchal or heteronormative feminist discourses, and their

logics cause her to misread her situation.

As she is leaving the beast to return to her father, the beast stops her and says, ―I

must tell you before you go; I am not a man.‖ The narrator thinks that the stories she has

read have prepared her for this revelation: ―I knew it. Every tale I had ever heard of

trolls, ogres, goblins, rose to my lips. The beast said, You do not understand‖ (37). It is

not until she returns to the dying beast and discovers that behind the mask is a woman,

and that she loves her, that the narrator really begins to acknowledge and struggle with

the queer desires of her relationship with the beast: ―This was a strange story, one I

would have to learn a new language to read, a language I could not learn except by trying

to read the story‖ (39). The queer moment of the discovery of the woman behind the

mask disrupts Beauty‘s reading of her own desires and leads her to try to unmask other

normative discourses she has never before questioned.

But this new language is not an easy one to acquire; she calls herself a ―slow

learner but a stubborn one,‖ and it takes her some time to understand that the woman is

not monstrous for ―refusing to do the things queens are supposed to do‖ or why she

would choose ―the faceless mask and the name of a beast . . . over all the great world had

to offer.‖ Finally, ―[a]fter months of looking, I saw that beauty was infinitely various, and

found it behind her white face‖ (40). This learning process becomes an extended queer

moment that awakens the narrator to the subversion, not only of heteronormative desire

and naturalized feminine behavioral codes which insist on the search for happiness in a

husband, but also of the reading practice that takes these discourses of desire as natural,

normal, and inevitable. The narrator understands that it takes a concerted effort to resist

hegemonic discourses, and further, that learning to read queerly does not entail that

others will be able or willing to participate in this kind of reading.

Although they live by themselves in the castle, these women do not live in total

isolation and their story is not told, read, or interpreted by them alone. At the very end

of the tale, before she asks who her lover was before she ―chose a mask over a crown,‖ the

narrator turns our attention to the larger social community and other possible readings

of their tale: ―And as the years flowed by, some villagers told travelers of a beast and a

beauty who lived in the castle and could be seen walking on the battlements, and others

told of two beauties, and others, of two beasts‖ (40). In looking outside of her own story

and recognizing the divergent interpretations, the narrator further destabilizes ―The Tale

of the Rose‖ and reminds the reader of the multiple possible readings of any story,

including one‘s own as well as how hegemonic and anti-hegemonic readings are

constantly in dialogic competition with each other. With the lack of evaluative

statements or indication of which of the villagers‘ tales is the ‗right‘ version, the narrator

seems to further support the notion that any reading is contingent upon often unnamed

and unquestioned discourses that impinge upon the tale‘s reception. In this way the ―The

Tale of the Rose‖ emphasizes its own dialogism, while at the same time providing clues

for a queer reading - should the reader wish to learn to read that story.

Mind the Gaps

The power and danger of social norms upon bodies, lives, and desires is recalled

in ―The Tale of the Kiss.‖ The witch of the previous tale relates her own multiple

transformations. As a young woman she discovers that she is barren and, knowing that

she will be considered worse than useless by her community, seeks freedom by going to

live alone in a cave. Once there, she learns that the people of the nearby town believe

that, as a solitary woman living on the outskirts of society, she must be a witch; because

they believe it to be true, that is what she becomes. She is mocking of the power they

have conferred upon her, but she is also wary, knowing that this power came ―not from

my own thin body or my own taut mind, but was invested in me by a village. Power I had

to learn how to pick up without getting burnt‖ (213). Living as a feared outsider with

borrowed power, she finds that over time she begins to desire less and less: ―All that was

different about me was that every year my needs were fewer. . . Nothing touched me in

the night except the occasional spider. I was complete‖ (214-215). In contrast to the

cinder-girl of the first story who believed she deserved nothing, the witch believes she

desires nothing until her solitude and self-containment are broken by a girl who dares to

kiss her. The kiss shatters the witch‘s equilibrium and shakes her self-knowledge,

causing her to wonder if ―[p]erhaps it is the not being kissed that makes [one] a witch;

perhaps the source of her power is the breath of loneliness around her. She who takes a

kiss can also die of it, can wake into something unimaginable, having turned herself into

some new species‖ (226).

Just as the only thing more useless than a woman past childbearing is a barren

woman, the only thing more queer than a solitary woman is an older woman in love with

a younger one. The witch understands that as much power as the villagers have bestowed

upon her, they also hold over her, and she must consider carefully whether she will risk

their censure and possible reprisals by leaving her cave to search for the girl who has

awakened new desires within her.

―What could I do?‖ she asks, ―Could I bring myself to follow her down into the

village? Could I lower myself so far, to let the little children throw sand at me? . . . And if

I did, I swore to myself . . . I would not let pride stop up my mouth. I would ask her to

come live in my cave and learn all I knew and teach me all I didn‘t. I would give her my

heart in a bag and let her do with it what she pleased. I would say the word love‖ (227).

With these considerations the witch seems to have come to the end of her tale, having

rediscovered desire and a willingness to risk everything in its pursuit. But then she

suddenly shifts her attention to her narratee: ―And what happened next you ask? Never

you mind. There are some tales not for the telling‖ (227-228). In shifting from

speculation in the past tense to direct address to the narratee in the present, the witch

refuses to offer closure to her story. We are never to discover if she sought the girl, if she

found her, if the girl accepted her love or not. Instead, her refusal to end the story opens

the way for further speculation, ―whether because [the tales] are too long, too precious,

too laughable, too painful, too easy to need telling or too hard to explain‖ (228). The

frustration of the narrative desire for closure works here to multiply the possible stories

that may exist; rather than an ending, we are left with the potential for more stories and

more desires.

A further consequence of this potential proliferation of tales is a drastic

realignment of the relationship between the reader and the text. The surprising shift in

the witch‘s narration from an experiencing-I of the past to the narrating-I of the present,

who is also directly addressing her audience, both pulls the reader further into the

storytelling situation and simultaneously pushes her further out. If not all stories are for

the telling, then what stories have we been missing all along? This denial recalls the

initiating appeal to memory followed by a kind of forgetting which takes place during the

narration of each tale. The formulaic question: ―Who were you before…?‖ is a call to

memory as well as a request to learn about another woman‘s story. This transition marks

a ―passing on‖ of the storytelling performance, but also a desire to fill in gaps and re-

focus upon the helper/donor/sought for person of the previous tale. The response: ―Will

I tell you my own story? It is the tale of a …‖ is an answer to the question, an acceptance

of storytelling responsibility and authority, but also a promise. The answering formula

promises to fill the gaps, to address the curiosity that the previous narrator/heroine has

about the other main character in her own story. But in beginning her own story the next

teller does not entirely fulfill her promise. She never tells her whole story, only the part

of her story that responds to the story she has just been told. We never learn how the

beauty of the ―Tale of the Rose‖ became the bird that embodies and engenders the desire

for freedom to the narrator of ―The Tale of the Bird,‖ or what circumstances brought that

narrator to the kitchen of the narrator of ―The Tale of the Shoe,‖ or for that matter,

where her story will go after her telling. As queer moments, these gaps alert the reader to

the contingency of the narrative choices made in the telling. Each narrator has chosen to

tell only part of her story, and she has chosen to leave much out. The fairy tale as unified

and coherent whole is disrupted by these gaps, which expose its narration as partial and

fragmented while also destabilizing the ―ever after‖ part of happily ever after.

Although many of the tales do end in relative happiness, these gaps show that

there is always more to the story. Each tale is narrated in the past tense, related in an on-

going present of storytelling that does not develop toward an inevitable ending, but

elaborates upon an in-progress queer futurity that does not depend on heterosexual

marriage or procreation for its meaning. Instead, the stories are open-ended, and the

narrators are aware of the uncertainty of their futures and the unlikelihood of unending

happiness. The proof of this lies in their transformed appearance in the tales of other

women later in their lives.

Another effect of the direct address to ―you‖ at the end of ―The Tale of the Kiss,‖ is

that the narratee of the witch‘s story becomes particularly ambiguous. In the very last

line of the book, the witch passes on the responsibility of the storytelling task to the next

teller. ―This is the story you asked for,‖ she says, ―I leave it in your mouth‖ (228).

Although when we stop and think back to the beginning of the tale, the narratee would

logically be the young woman from the previous tale, we find ourselves in a metaphoric

game of hot potato: A passes telling to B who tells and passes to C and so on until finally

the stories and the telling are passed to U and are left ―in your mouth.‖ If we accept my

proposal that a kind of temporary forgetting is necessary to learn to read these tales, a

forgetting, not only of normative gendered and sexual relations based on linear marriage

plots and static happily ever afters, but also a forgetting of the individualized voice of

each previous tale, then we must also ask, to whom is the last sentence of the book

addressed? I would suggest that the answer produced through queer reading will always

be ―me‖: the real reader who has actively explored and expanded the ―queer moments‖

throughout the text. A sense of intimacy is established in the passing of stories from one

mouth to another that draws the reader not only into the tale-telling cycle, but also into

its sensuality, reminding her of her own desires while at the same time daring her to

voice them. The witch‘s final declaration is a gift that presents a choice: what will you do

with the stories? Chew on them, swallow them, spit them out, or pass them along with

stories and kisses?

CHAPTER 5: HAPPILY EVER AFTER . . . ACCORDING TO OUR TASTES:

JEANETTE WINTERSON’S TWELVE DANCING PRINCESSES AND QUEER POSSIBILITY

During his fantastic journeys, Jordan, one of the narrating protagonists of

Jeanette Winterson‘s Sexing the Cherry, makes a visit to the home of the Twelve

Dancing Princesses. All of the sisters but one are living together again since their

marriages to the princes of their tale have ended. During Jordan‘s visit they each tell him

the stories of their lives after the supposed ―happily ever after‖ of their wedding day.

Before he sets out on his voyages, Jordan recalls his discovery ―that my own life

was written invisibly, was squashed between the facts, was flying without me like the

Twelve Dancing Princesses who shot from their window every night and returned home

every morning with torn dresses and worn-out slippers and remembered nothing‖ (2). In

an effort to find and understand this other life, Jordan sets out to recount the journeys

that his discovery sent him on: ―Not the ones I made, but the ones I might have made, or

perhaps did make in some other place or time‖ (2). Early in his travels Jordan glimpses a

dancer from afar. He immediately falls in love with her, and from that point on one of his

goals is to find her. After visiting many people in fantastic cities and towns, including a

―pen of prostitutes‖ who are literally interchangeable with the nuns who live in a nearby

convent, Jordan arrives at the home of the Twelve Dancing Princesses. ―Thinking that

one dancer might well know another and that a dozen of them must surely know one,‖ he

knocks on their door (44).

The Princesses welcome him into their home. The eldest sister whose beloved, a

mermaid, has accepted and gobbled Jordan‘s offering of herrings, quickly recounts the

―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses‖ (ATU 306, ―The Danced Out Shoes‖). She

ends this brief summary on a surprising note: ―and as it says [we] lived happily ever

after. We did, but not with our husbands‖ (48). Each sister then tells of her less-than

happily ever after with her prince and how she returned to her sisters. Six princesses kill

their husbands, four abandon them to their own fates. The fifth sister tells Jordan a

version of ―Rapunzel‖ in which, as the girl‘s lover, she is cast as the witch of the piece by

Rapunzel‘s family. Rapunzel is captured and carted off to her own imposed ―happily ever

after‖ by a prince in drag. In the final lines of her tale the fifth princess incidentally

reveals that hers is the only husband to live with the women. His presence in the house

of the dancing princesses does not compromise its status as an all-female enclave

however, because the first time she kissed him her husband turned into a frog (52).

Much later in Jordan‘s narrative he will finally meet Fortunata, the dancer he has

been seeking and the youngest of the Twelve Dancing Princesses. Fortunata will tell

Jordan her version of the events of the tale of the sisters, proving that she remembers

very well her time in the world in the sky where she and her sisters danced their shoes to

pieces. Fortunata‘s clear memories of the floating city and the time she and her sisters

spent there challenge Jordan‘s personal interpretation of the tale as one about forgotten

or missed aspects of one‘s life that one must spy out ―like a jealous father‖ (2). Her

version also challenges other versions of ATU 306 ―The Danced Out Shoes‖ including the

most familiar versions to English language readers– the Grimms‘ ―The Worn-Out

Dancing Shoes‖ (KHM 133) and Andrew Lang‘s ―The Twelve Dancing Princesses.‖ The

tales recounted by the sisters extend the story beyond the traditional endings of their

pre-texts. They also exceed critical interpretations of the ultimate meaning of the tale.

Where psychoanalytic approaches have read it as a tale about ―sexual temptation‖

(Cashdan 33), more feminist inflected readings have seen it as ―a story about patriarchal

control and the duplicity of women‖ (Morrison, ―Who Cares‖ 107). In the mouths of

Fortunata and her sisters, ATU 306 becomes a multilayered and polyphonous tale of

resistance to heteronormative marriage and, perhaps, an example of a queer fairy tale.

Fortunata‘s version of the tale recalls but is different in significant ways from the

Grimms‘ or Lang‘s versions. In her story the twelve sisters do escape nightly to another

world to dance until their shoes are worn through, but rather than descending to a

netherworld arrived at via a secret stair beneath the eldest princess‘s bed and

approached through forests of silver, gold, and diamonds and followed by a short sail

across a lake to a ball populated by enchanted princes; in Fortunata‘s tale these

princesses lie on top of their beds waiting to be pulled through their bedroom window

and into the ether by the gravitational pull of a floating city. This city is populated by

people who, rather than walking to get from point to point, dance in points of light. Like

their Grimm sisters, these princesses are found out by a man, one of many set to the task

by their father the king. In the Grimms‘ this man is a poor wounded soldier and in Lang

he is an ethereal but humble gardener, but in Fortunata‘s tale, he is the youngest prince.

A ―cunning fellow,‖ like his literary predecessors, he pretends to drink the sleeping

draught the princesses serve him and makes himself invisible in order to spy on the

princesses and report back to their father. In each version, once he has reported to the

King of his daughters‘ nocturnal forays, the spy is rewarded with the hand in marriage of

his princess of choice. The kindly poor soldier in the Grimms‘ tale gallantly chooses the

eldest sister, for, he says ―I am no longer young‖ (435). The tale ends with the promotion

of the lowly spy to husband of a princess and heir to a kingdom, and the princesses‘

dancing partners in the netherworld are ―compelled to remain under a curse for as many

nights as they had danced with the princesses‖(435). In Lang and Winterson all of the

princesses find themselves betrothed at the end of the story. Lang‘s gardener has fallen

in love with the youngest princess and asks for her hand while her sisters each choose a

husband from the enchanted dancing princes of the underworld. In the rather less

romantic version told by Fortunata, the prince has eleven brothers and each is assigned a

sister to marry. These cunning princes ensure the presence of the princesses at the mass

wedding by chaining their ankles (111). But where other versions end with a wedding,

Fortunata and her sister‘s tale is not finished. When Jordan meets them, the princesses

have shed their husbands and taken upon themselves the responsibility for telling of

their own stories to explain what happened to them after the so-called happy ever after

of the wedding ceremony.

In a twist of narrative logic consistent with the eccentric temporal structure of

Sexing the Cherry as a whole, Winterson first has the Princesses recount the stories of

their married lives and then sends Jordan back on his journeys for some time before he

finally meets Fortunata, who recounts the version of ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing

Princesses‖ glossed above. She also tells the tale of her own escape from the forced

marriage and how she came to live as a dancing instructor on an isolated island.

Winterson‘s version of the tale makes one reversal (the floating city for the underground

realm), extends the events of the tale past the wedding day, leaves the tale open-ended,

permits the princesses to narrate their own versions, and allows for contradictory

versions between the sisters.

The combination of these narrative changes, in conjunction with the multiple

desires voiced within this version, have always seemed to me to be particularly queer. In

fact, in my teaching of this text and in earlier readings of it, I have boldly claimed that

―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses‖ in Sexing the Cherry ―queers the fairy-tale

genre.‖ I should have known that – even though I am on their side – these transgressive

sisters who resist patriarchal parental control, subvert normative ideals of heterosexual

marriage, and refuse to account or apologize for their actions in pursuing their desires,

would not simply allow me to make of them what I will. As I have been struggling to

make them fit into logical arguments about queer representation, fairy-tale narrative

structuration, multi-vocality and the proliferation of desires, I have discovered that my

desire to claim some kind of inherent queerness for ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing

Princesses‖ was being continually frustrated. In fact it may be a futile pursuit, and

perhaps not so desirable after all.

Queer Quality or Lesbian Twist?

As I wrestled with the princesses I began to ask myself, what makes me believe in

this queerness? Where does it reside and how can I justify my bold declaration in

relation to the princesses and their effect upon the fairy tale? Is it merely the presence of

same-sex desire of some of the princesses? Is it the fact that Jeanette Winterson is a self-

identified lesbian and is often labeled by those engaged in critiquing her work as a queer

postmodern writer? Why not just say that the ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing

Princesses‖ is postmodern with a lesbian twist? Certainly the postmodernity of much

contemporary fairy-tale fiction has been well explored and established within fairy-tale

studies (see especially Bacchilega 1997, Harries 2001, Smith 2007, Makinen 2008). But

queer subjectivity has not been as deeply investigated.1

Appearances of the princesses in other contemporary adult literature and film are

few, and although they turn up in the poetry of Anne Sexton and Stevie Smith and often

in literature and visual media for children, the princesses are less popular characters for

revision than the likes of Little Red Ridding Hood, Cinderella, Beauty and her Beast or

even Bluebeard and his wives, who appear in short story collections by Angela Carter

(1979), Emma Donoghue (1997), Francesca Lia Block (2000), and Nalo Hopkinson

(2001). As a result of their reticence to emerge in contemporary revisions–other than in

work on Winterson–critical literary essays on ATU 306 in contemporary adult literature

are also few and far between.2

The critical responses to Winterson come from different theoretical and

methodological positions but usually include relatively brief discussions of the fairy tale

in Sexing the Cherry. In their examinations of the fairy tale in Winterson‘s work, critics

like Laura Doan (1994), Paulina Palmer (1999, 2004), Jago Morrison (2003, 2006),

Merja Makinen (2008), and Paul Smith (2009) have tended to focus upon the fairy tale

in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, or only to engage with ―The Story of the Twelve

Dancing Princesses‖ in passing within larger discussions of Winterson and her use of

fairy tales as a postmodern, feminist and/or lesbian writer.

Doan and Palmer both approach Winterson from lesbian-feminist perspectives

that have been important to my thinking about ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing

Princesses‖ as queer fairy tale. Palmer recognizes that ―lesbianism does not enjoy a

privileged position in the novel but is treated as one of a number of transgressive

sexualities, including homosexuality, bisexuality and sadomasochism‖ (1999, 49).

Although Palmer does note that Dog Woman, Jordan‘s mother and another narrator of

other sections of the text, ―merits the term ‗queer,‘‖ her own examination of the fairy tale

in Winterson does privilege lesbianism over the other transgressive sexualities she

identifies in the text (51).

Similarly, Doan argues that the proliferation of these non-normative sexualities,

in both ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses‖ and Sexing the Cherry as a whole,

permits Winterson to envision ―a social order that would permit the breakdown of

oppositions . . . call appearances into question and, through the disruption of normative

gender relations, reveal them as artificial and arbitrary constructions‖ (150). Recalling

Judith Butler‘s troubling of normative gender relations, which has been central to the

emergence of queer theory (Butler 1990, 1991, 1993), Doan appears to be moving toward

a queer reading. Butler suggests that the instability of the identity-category ―lesbian‖ can

be put to political use to also destabilize hegemonic discourses about gender and

sexuality (1991). Doan, however chooses to focus upon only one sister‘s tale and what

she reads as the failure of lesbian ―parody or imitation [of the heterosexual institution of

marriage] as an effective way to undermine normative gender ideology‖ (151). Because

she looks at only one of the marriages represented by the princesses, she fails to see the

ways in which the proliferation of multiple transgressive desires–both lesbian and non-

lesbian–combine to successfully undermine both the institution of marriage and

normative gender ideologies.

For Palmer and Doan, Sexing the Cherry is primarily a lesbian feminist text, and

they focus their short discussions of ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses‖ upon

the two lesbian tales in the cycle: the fifth sister‘s Rapunzel tale and seventh sister who

reveals that ―The man I had married was a woman‖ (54). In choosing to privilege some

tales over the others, Palmer and Doan ignore queer possibility in the embedded section

and Sexing the Cherry as a whole. Similarly, but coming from a position within fairy-tale

studies, in her otherwise astute examination of Winterson and fairy-tale fiction Merja

Makinen‘s brief discussion of ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses‖ seems to

reduce the tale cycle to a critique of the institution of marriage. Makinen argues: ―[t]hat

marriage is not an institution that can promise happiness and that phallocentric society

denigrates women and persecutes lesbians is as much as can be gleaned from the tales.

The refusal to make grand generalizations appears deliberate‖ (172). While I agree that

the refusal to make generalizations about desire and marriage is deliberate, I think that

there is more to be gleaned from the Princesses‘ narrations.

From a queer perspective, what is suggestive is not so much the representation of

non-normative desires in and of themselves, though they are very important, that makes

a difference, but the ways multiple desires in ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing

Princesses‖ can exist as siblings, none more ―natural,‖ ―normal,‖ or ―acceptable‖ than

any other. At no point do the tales reaffirm heterosexuality as the norm that tolerates the

―other‖ of difference. Rather, because each sister narrates such a different tale from each

of the others, ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses‖ works as a heteroglossic

proliferation of desires. Even the princesses who wish that their (male) husbands would

love them ultimately reject as impossible the romanticized notion of straight wedded

bliss. The eldest provides a clue as to why her and her sisters marriages did not ―work

out.‖ In describing Fortunata to Jordan she says, ―She didn‘t burn in secret with a

passion she could not express; she shone‖ (61). Coming as it does after a comparison of

the present sisters to the missing one, the negative construction of this sentence (―She

didn‘t. . .‖) suggests that the contrastive statement ―we did‖ is absent but implied. In

reading the eldest sister‘s evaluation of their different fates in this way, it is not the

institution of marriage that is the sole culprit of female unhappiness; the princesses must

take some responsibility for their failure to shine with their own passions. The eleven

princesses‘ acceptance of the fairy-tale wedding as the inevitable end to their stories and

therefore lives as passionate dancers is contrasted to Fortunata‘s refusal and decision to

follow her desires beyond the tale.

Queer in the First Person

The issue of self-identification and external identification is an important

challenge for unpacking my troubles with Winterson‘s use of the fairy tale. It would seem

to become even more difficult in view of her own resistance to being labeled as a

―lesbian‖ or ―queer‖ author and in light of her more recent work, which seems to be

moving away from the radical lesbian feminist ideologies she was celebrated for

championing earlier in her career. Jago Morrison has argued that Winterson is moving

away from queer in her most recent work: ―In her latest writing especially, Winterson‘s

indebtedness to [a] Christian sensibility forces us into a new kind of reading, almost

completely foreclosing the lesbian feminist Winterson we have enjoyed and admired‖

(2006, 170). Morrison goes on to note the paradoxical position for ―critics and fans alike‖

who are ―guarding and conserving an institution of queer postmodernism, whilst at the

same time, at a side window, the writer herself seems to be engaged in an escape

attempt‖ (171). So I find that like Morrison, I must grapple with ―writer Jeanette

Winterson, on the one hand, and the polymorphous cultural institution ‗Jeanette

Winterson‘ on the other‖ (170).

My struggles with the paradoxes, contradictions and instability when dealing

with terminology that, like Winterson and her princesses, seems to always be slipping

out through a window just as I approach have been alleviated somewhat by Alexander

Doty‘s discussions of the term ―queer.‖ Doty provides a list of the ways in which ―queer‖

has been used in relation to cinematic and literary texts. Of the descriptions he provides,

the last is most relevant to my pursuits. Queer, he says, has been used ―[t]o describe

those aspects of spectatorship, cultural readership, production, and textual coding that

seem to establish spaces not described by, or contained within, straight, gay, lesbian,

bisexual, transsexual, or transgendered understandings and categorizations of gender

and sexuality— this is a more radical understanding of queer, as queerness here is

something apart from established gender and sexuality categories, . . .‖ (2000, 7).

As I began working through these problems, I came to believe that it is not so

much that this version of the well-known fairy tale is queer, that is, it does not possess

queerness as an ontological trait. Rather, my identification of queerness is actually an

identification of a type of reading practice that I produce when encountering it. This

practice is less important in relation to either my or ―Winterson‘s‖ gendered or sexual

identity, but is borne out of a space that will not be settled with/by one kind of

understanding of gender and sexuality. That is, for me, the princesses and their multiple

desires and modes of articulation in ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses‖ invite

or encourage queer reading–but I cannot presume that they demand it from other

readers. In attempting to articulate the queerness of this text, or the possibility of

queerness, rather than more narrowly its representation of lesbian desire, I am making a

political move of identification with and celebration of resistance to normative desires

and expected forms of articulation in the fairy tale genre as embodied especially in the

Grimms—whose institutional relationship to us now is not as brothers, but authoritative

grandfathers.

At this point in my journey with the Princesses, I tend to agree with Doty that

―any text is always already potentially queer,‖ and like him, ―I‘d like to see queer

discourses and practices as being less about co-opting and ‗making‘ things queer . . . and

more about discussing how things are, or might be understood as, queer‖ (my emphasis

2000, 2). What Doty begins to reject in the idea of ―queering‖ as a verb is that ―it implies

taking a thing that is straight and doing something to it‖ (2). That is, rather than

subjecting an intrinsically straight text to various circumlocutions, stretchings, shakings

up, and turnings over in order to make it queer, Doty suggests that beginning with the

assumption that all texts are always already potentially queer frees one to explore how

the possibility of queerness obtains in the text. In addition to representation of multiple

desires, I believe that queer potential or possibility may reside in the narrative structures

and forms of narration that disrupt what Elizabeth Wanning Harries calls the ―compact‖

fairy-tale form as exemplified in the tales of the Grimms and other literary fairy-tale

―grandfathers‖ such as Charles Perrault and Andrew Lang.3

“Sexing the Narrative”

Although the importance of gender and sexuality to the structure of a text is still

controversial in narratological circles, I believe, following Susan Lanser and Ruth Paige,

that attention to these socializing regulations will afford important information about

how texts work. Lanser first raised the issue of the possibility of a ―feminist narratology,‖

that is, the consideration of gender as relevant to the study of the formal and structural

aspects of narrative, in the mid 1980s. Until that point, narratology had considered itself

a wholly objective methodology for the study of universal narrative traits, and thus

questions of gender were precluded from narratological discussion because they were not

related to the formal elements of the text (Lanser 1986). Lanser later began to theorize

the possibility of sexuality as also relevant. She argues that Written on the Body, another

of Winterson‘s texts, ―points to sexual aspects of narrative that are ‗proper‘ to

narratology even in its classical sense‖ (1995, 85). More recently, in her essay on the

controversy, consequences, and developments of Lanser‘s original proposal, Ruth Paige

hints at the ways in which queer theory may also invigorate post-classical narratological

methodologies. For my part, I feel that the potential queerness of a text will bear itself

out in the form as well as the content; in other words, I suspect that the queerness I am

attempting to identify in Sexing the Cherry and other contemporary fairy-tale fiction,

such as Emma Donoghue‘s Kissing the Witch or even some of the tales in Angela Carter‘s

The Bloody Chamber, will also be born out in their poetics.

While Lanser argues for ―sexing the narrative‖ in relation to the gender and

sexual identity of narrators, I would like to provisionally suggest that other narrational

aspects may inform queer readings. The shifting of narrative voice from princess to

princess, the openness of the embedded tale, and the deferrals, interruptions, and

disruptions to the order in which the events of the princesses‘ lives are told are cues to

the narrative techniques that may also queer this particular extended fairy tale.

Each story is presented with minimal or no obvious narrational mediation or

apparent evaluation by Jordan. In this way, even when they do not narrate them

themselves, the Princesses‘ stories are truly their own and rest on their narrative

authority, rather than on the ―simple but powerful narrative strategy that stands as one

of the narrative rules for fairy–tale production: an external or impersonal narrator

whose straightforward statements carry no explicit mark of human perspective‖

(Bacchilega 1997, 34). Most, but not all of the princesses narrate their own tales within

the embedded chapter. The fifth recounting, for example, is narrated in the first person

by a princess who addresses Jordan, and possibly the reader, at the beginning of her

recitation: ―You may have heard of Rapunzel,‖ she begins (52). She also responds to

Jordan‘s unrecorded questions: ―My own husband? / Oh well, the first time I kissed him

he turned into a frog. / There he is, just by your foot. His name‘s Anton‖ (52). Others

seem to employ free direct thought, expressing their inner thoughts and feelings

unmediated by obvious narrational control or comment and directed inward rather than

to Jordan as narratee. The tales of the second and third princesses are narrated at one

remove by Jordan who presents the tales as direct discourse, indicated by tags such as

―she said‖ or simply the appearance of quotation marks at the beginning and ending of

each paragraph. The complex use of multiple types of narrative discourse both between

stories and within single stories contributes to the polyphony of the tale telling situation.

Each princess has not only her own story and her own desires, but her own voice, and

her own way of telling.

The structure of the embedded tales told by the sisters early in Jordan‘s voyages

at first appears to be radically open-ended. Each sister tells her tale but the final sister is

absent; thus ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses‖ is actually ―The Stories of the

Eleven Dancing Princesses.‖ Jordan‘s eventual discovery of Fortunata seems to promise

closure to the tale, but even this is not so simple. Although the revelation of Fortunata‘s

tale is delayed in Jordan‘s narrative until long after he has left the home of her sisters, it

cannot be totally dissociated from the original setting. Nor can it be said to offer

complete closure to the many adventures of the sisters. Fortunata returns to the tale

from a different direction, and places upon it her own narrative logic.

The Fortunes of Fortunata

The events of Fortunata‘s story begin after the well-known adventures of the

princesses‘ nightly dancing expeditions, but before the sisters are married. She describes

the days with her sisters just before the wedding when they worked together to build a

garden and then a church out of ice and snow. The ―basic color triad‖ of white, red, and

black recurs often in this telling, thus intertextually recalling both specific fairy tales

(such as ―Snow White‖) and the fairy-tale genre more generally into her narrative (Vas

da Silva). She concludes this part of her tale with the sisters‘ wedding and her escape

from her fiancé: ―At the last possible moment I pushed him aside and ran out of the

church through the crowds of guests . . .‖ (105). In just a few more lines, she details her

journey across the seas to open the dancing school on the island where she and Jordan

are talking.

The return to the ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses‖ destabilizes the

structure of the fairy tale. Coming as it does at such a distance in the text from the

embedded tales of the Princesses, Fortunata‘s turn as narrator dis-orders the action of

the tale of the princesses‘ story. Her tale repeats but also contradicts parts of the tale as it

has been narrated so far. While at first it seems the earlier embedded tale cycle will be

left open-ended by omitting one princess‘s tale and thereby refusing closure in

preference for openness, this return to the missing sister, rather than providing tidy

closure, adds further layers and complications. Not only does Fortunata‘s turn as tale-

teller challenge Jordan‘s remembered version of the story, it raises questions about the

story she shares with her sisters. When Jordan tells her that the tale her sisters told of

her fantastic escape was different from her recounting she laughs and asks, ―How could

such a thing be possible?‖ (106). Jordan counters that the floating city to which the

princesses escaped each night could not exist either, to which she replies, ―Are there not

such places?‖ (106). Before Fortunata continues her tale with a history of the floating

city, a narrative vignette titled ―Lies 8‖ interrupts Jordan‘s narration of his meeting with

Fortunata and her embedded narration of her own tale. 4 This digression provides

metanarrational commentary on memory and truth in storytelling. It is only a few lines

long, but it suggests that the value of storytelling is not the sustained and

incontrovertible mimetic relation of facts but a different kind of truth because, ―what we

have told you is true, although it is not‖ (106). As a storyteller Fortunata challenges but

does not discount alternative versions of her tale. On the contrary, her questions trouble

the notion of the possibility of the existence of any one authoritative version of any tale

and therefore her own metanarrational questions about the veracity of the versions

Jordan is familiar with trouble, but do not detract from the narratorial authority of her

sisters.

Fortunata then goes on to recite the history of the floating city, stopping for

metanarrational commentary at one point in order to prove the veracity of her tale in

spite of its fantastic nature: ―Now I have told you the history of the city, which is a logical

one, each piece fitting into the together without strain. Sure that you must believe

something so credible I will continue with the story‖ (108-109). She goes on to relate an

extended version of, not ATU 306, but ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses.‖

That is, as a character-narrator or autodiegetic narrator, Fortunata‘s focus is upon the

adventures of the princesses in the floating city rather than on the trials and tribulations

of the male ―hero.‖ Her story comes full circle at the end. Having reached the point at

which she began–the day of the wedding–she abruptly stops: ―And the rest you know‖

(112). The recursive structure would seem to indicate that the radical openness I have

argued for is in fact a closed circuit. The ending of Fortunata‘s tale seems to bring us

back to the tales of each the sisters, the ones we already know. But the narrative breaks

created by the contradictions between the eldest sister‘s version of the tale and

Fortunata‘s as well as the interruption of the vignette, which breaks the fairy-tale frame

and reinforces the impossibility of language to faithfully reproduce reality, preclude tidy

closure. The relationships between each section of the telling of the tale suggest that, just

as Jordan (and the reader) did not really know the ―true‖ tale of ―The Story of the Twelve

Dancing Princesses‖ when he (we) first met the princesses, he (we) still do not and never

Winterson does more to the fairy tale in Sexing the Cherry than a mere revision

of the tale of the Princesses‘ nightly pursuit of their own pleasures and desires. The

Princesses are central to the larger context of Jordan‘s searches for himself, his beloved,

and his desire to become a hero in Sexing the Cherry. Winterson herself hints at the

centrality of this fairy tale on her website: ―The narrative moves through time, but also

operates outside it. At the centre of the book are the stories of the Twelve Dancing

Princess . . . The stories aren't just parachuted in there, they are integral to the whole. . . .

That is, they tell us something we need to know to interpret the book.‖ The stories of the

princesses are not just central to the book; their influence and presence radiate

outward–forward and backward within the text. Thus the delineation of the multiple

desires they reveal, the subversions, reversals and troubles they cause in terms of sexual

and gender representation are key to a queer understanding of Sexing the Cherry. In

addition, the radical open-endedness caused by the youngest sister‘s absence from the

initial tale -telling situation, her re-appearance later in the novel and her alternate

version of ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses‖ disrupt the possibility of

teleological reading and ultimate closure of the fairy tale‘s structure.

Grimm Punishment

Certainly, ―The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes‖ is one of the few fairy tales in the

Grimms‘ collection in which the female protagonists escape severe punishment for their

transgressions of heteropatriarchy. Where other wayward women have their eyes pecked

out by birds (―Cinderella‖ KHM 21), have millstones dropped on their heads (―The

Juniper Tree‖ KHM 47), or are forced to dance to death in red-hot shoes (―Snow White‖

KHM53), the princesses are let off without a specific punishment. While Hayley Thomas

does not agree with D.L. Ashliman‘s argument that the princesses ―pay nothing‖ for their

transgressions or that the eldest sister ―loses nothing‖ in marrying the poor soldier (178),

she concurs with Ashliman that in ―The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes‖ ―the end of the tale

does manage to avoid the cloud of degradation which has inevitably surrounded other

immodest women, even if its teleological impulse demands the usurpation of her/their

powers‖ (179). Thomas highlights the Princesses‘ nightly subversion of the ―fairy-tale

happily-ever-after teleology‖ and how the princesses ―manage to frustrate male

interference in their acts of self-assertion‖ (171). But she is also careful to note the

transitory nature of this female resistance to heteropatriarchy by prudently including

qualifiers in her discussion of the power the Princesses are able to assert. Theirs is a

―partially successful bid‖ in which they ―initially manage‖ to hoodwink their father the

king, and ―[f]or a time‖ they are able to protect their secret from prying patriarchal eyes

(171). After the wedding, the princesses return to their initial resistance to masculine

control of their lives and bodies by leaving their husbands and their bids become more

fully successful through the creation of an all female community where they are able to

live free of male control.

On the other hand, many of the princesses have had to leave their husbands and

their homes under one form of duress or another. The fifth sister and her lover are

persecuted by her lover‘s family and eventually the lover is taken away. The seventh

sister, who reveals that ―the man I had married was a woman,‖ kills her before ―they‖ can

catch and burn her. The tragic consequences of the incursion of society into these lives

point to the continued struggle and difficulty of creating a queer life freely and without

hindrance from the hegemonic heteronormative world in which marriage and

childbearing are presumed to be a woman‘s primary and most natural desires. On the

contrary, the fact that the sisters come to live together in a house away from society and

free from childrearing, underscores not only the support provided by a sorority of

women, but its necessity for safety.

Even those princesses who accepted and desired marriage, who loved or wanted

to be loved by their (male) husbands, come to live in the castle with their sisters when

their marriages end. But if, as Makinen says, ―marriage becomes the allegory for the

tower in which the dancing princesses are confined by patriarchal power,‖ they are still,

in a way, confined within their new home with their sisters. (171). Their stories suggest

that at least a few of the sisters are living primarily through their memories rather than,

like Fortunata, finding new lives to live and dancing on their own terms. The individual

stories the sisters tell from within the isolation of the home they have created together

hint at the many struggles of queer existence. Far from utopian free-for all, these queer

sisters live with the memories of the dangers they have survived and sacrifices they have

made in order to gain their freedom.

Princesses, Prostitutes and Nuns

Michael Mendelson argues that ―The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes‖ is one of the very

few stories in Kinder und Hausmärchen (KHM) that features female cooperation in

opposition to the ―career märchen‖ of the male centered tales in KHM. However, he also

remarks that the sisters are undifferentiated and that ―the princesses are not exactly a

positive social force, since their collective dalliance leads to the beheading of many

suitors,‖ although he immediately acknowledges that, ―in truth, their deviance is forced

upon them by a father who would control their lives and passions‖ (117). In Winterson‘s

text, Fortunata and her sisters do work collaboratively to defy their controlling father.

The first time they find themselves pulled toward the floating city they ―held a council

amongst [them]selves‖ and voted unanimously to ―open [them]selves to whatever might

happen‖ (110). And although they are initially destined to be separated by marriage to

the princes, they work together to build the church of ice in which they are to be wed

(105). But cooperation as a form of defiance in Winterson‘s multi-voiced text is not

limited to the princesses.

Early on in his search of his beloved dancer, Jordan discovers a house of

prostitutes that is owned by a rich but not very clever or observant man. These women

are shut up away from the world, they are kept by the rich man for his pleasure and the

pleasure of his male friends. The prostitutes like Jordan and tell him to return to them,

but for his safety, they urge him to dress as a woman. During his time with the women,

Jordan learns that they are not as isolated or as victimized as he might have thought.

Like the Princesses in Grimm, the prostitutes escape from the rich man‘s house every

night by descending below the house where there is a stream. The stream‘s current

brings them past the nearby Convent of the Holy Mother where ―It was the custom of the

nuns to keep watch over the stream through the night, and any of the women seen

shooting past the convent vault was immediately fished out in a great shrimping net by

the nun on duty‖ (28). In this way, the clever prostitutes and, indeed, the nuns and other

women of the area, are able to completely hoodwink the rich man: ―He did not know it

but this selfish man, to whom life was just another commodity, had financed the futures

of thousands of women. . . He had also, singlehanded, paid for the convent‘s renowned

stock of fine wine and any number of altarpieces‖ (28).

While the portrayal of supportive separatist women‘s communities and the

stupidity, villainy and/or perversion of many of the male characters in Sexing the Cherry

can and has been read as merely a kind of lesbian man-hating counter sexism (see for

example, Roessner 120), Makinen reads it ―as a story of female escape from patriarchal

inscriptions, rewriting the traditional marital closure through eleven narratives that

confound heterosexual marriage, unmasking its cruelty to those forced to live within its

confines. The happiness of those brave enough to escape cultural expectations to live

otherwise, with women or mermaids . . . reinforces the point‖ (171). The collective

communities that the prostitutes, nuns and the princesses create are spaces of freedom

from patriarchal sexual oppression. The literal ―free flow‖ of women between the house

and the convent allows for sorority and mutually beneficial social structures that subvert

patriarchal strictures upon women‘s bodies, minds, movements, and labor. These diverse

groups of women work cooperatively and independently, creating cultures in which

women support and love each other in spaces that might otherwise be assumed to be

inimical to them because of their isolation from larger society and from men in

particular. Yet these women are not man-haters; they each welcome Jordan as a fellow or

even as an honorary sister and freely show him the ways in which they exploit the

structures and institutions that are meant to contain them.

In Sexing the Cherry the prostitutes‘, nuns‘ and princesses‘ all-female societies

recall the literary tradition of separatist feminist utopias, where the female characters

believe that the only way to escape patriarchy is for women to create completely separate

societies in which men are absent or their presence is minimal and controlled by

matriarchy.5 However, Dog Woman‘s grotesque life on the margins of society, and the

cities that Jordan visits, such as the city of floating words, the city where love is a plague,

or the city without floors where Jordan first sees Fortunata, indicate that separatism is

not the only option, or even the best option for all women. The movement of women

between the house and the convent suggests that all-female enclaves are potential spaces

of respite from heteropatriarchy, but that they can also become prisons themselves. The

women‘s eventual whole-sale abandonment of the rich man‘s house to create lives

independent of either the institutions of prostitution or the church, and their thefts from

the man who kept them suggest that it is economic freedom that enables these women to

create new lives and sustain themselves as subjects in mixed gendered society. The

multiple desires of female characters in Sexing the Cherry exceed any one social

paradigm of either heterosexual marriage or lesbian feminist separatism, and the

multiple societies women live in and deal with indicate that a claim for Sexing the

Cherry as primarily a lesbian feminist text significantly limits it to subscribing to a single

overarching desire or solution to women‘s desires.

In Winterson‘s ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses‖ the Princesses are

not recouped into heteropatriarchy, but remain with their sisters, and like the prostitutes

and the nuns, they are free from the judgmental eyes and limiting social controls of

hegemonic society outside of their walls. Although Fortunata has been an object of

Jordan‘s desire since he first saw her early in the narrative, she does not fall in love with

him or allow him to ―rescue‖ her from her solitude. Rather than immediately accepting

the man who ―discovers‖ her and assumes possession over her, Fortunata tells Jordan

her own story and that she learned to ―dance alone, for its own sake and for hers‖ (112).

She will not be the agent through which Jordan achieves his dream of becoming a hero.

Like the feminist interventions and revisions of fairy tales that came before

Sexing the Cherry and since, the stories of the princesses reflect back upon their pre-

texts. Once having met these princesses one can not go back to ―The Worn-Out Dancing

Shoes‖ and read it in the same way again. Winterson is certainly not alone in raising

questions about how the voiceless heroines of traditional fairy tales may have felt about

their fates. Her princesses belong to a larger sorority of revisioned fairy tale heroines in

poetry, fiction and film. Winterson‘s version of ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing

Princesses‖ does ―do something‖ to the fairy tale as a genre; it makes, if not probable, at

least possible, serious inquiry into the queer aspects hidden behind the omniscient

narrational voice within ―classic‖ tales by opening spaces for queer voices and queer

choices and our queer potential.

CONCLUSION

The title of my dissertation is Mouth to Mouth: Storytelling and Desire in

Contemporary Fairy-Tale Fiction and Film. The project is first and foremost, about

storytelling and the figure of the storyteller as it is constructed in four texts that are

linked generically to the fairy tale tradition and temporally as products of the late

twentieth and early twenty-first-centuries: Arabian Nights, Pan’s Labyrinth, Kissing the

Witch, and ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses‖. As a kind of conceptual frame,

Mouth to Mouth brings together the major threads of my project in terms of orality, the

passing on of narration, the desire for the preservation and proliferation of stories, and

sexual desires.

The first thread is drawn from the mouth of the storyteller figures I engage. It

emphasises the importance of orality and therefore the narrative techniques that create

the effect of one character telling her or his stories to listeners. Following this thread, I

examine narration and narrators, but also the characterization of and the negotiations

between characters who are also narrators themselves. Rather than evoke the narrator in

my title, I have chosen to use storyteller in order to highlight the social relations of these

figures with other characters within their texts, and at times, with the audience. My

storytellers are characters who are narrating agents, but they are also the subjects of

narration. That is, they both tell and listen to tales, but they are also the subjects of tales

told by other narrators.

Stories about storytelling tend to employ one form of structural framing

mechanism or another, and this is certainly the case in my focus texts. They employ

frame narratives, such as Scheherezade and Schahriar‘s story, or are embedded within a

larger narrative, as in ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses‖ within Sexing the

Cherry. The voice-over narrator‘s opening and closing of Pan’s Labyrinth can be thought

of as a ―picture fame‖ formula that encompasses the two competing and intersecting

narrative worlds of historical Spain and the fantastic Underground Realm. And, in

Kissing the Witch, the passing on of tales from one storyteller to the next resembles a

beads on a chain structure.

Framing mechanisms, in turn, seem to demand a certain amount of

metanarrational commentary. In the preliminary chapter of the dissertation I respond to

the recurring problem of the tendency of some fairy-tale scholars to confuse metafiction

with metanarration. This distinction is important because the common use of

metafiction to refer to any type of self-referentiality tends to dilute its constitutive aspect

as fiction that comments upon its own fictionality. Metanarration, on the other hand,

rather than breaking the mimetic illusion, can and often does act to support this illusion.

The importance of the difference between metafiction and metanarrative to my texts is

key to the status of the narrating storyteller figure and narratorial authority. For

example, when Schahriar interrupts Scheherezade‘s narration to comment that she is

―getting it wrong,‖ his interruptions work at the level of metafiction only in relation to

the embedded tale Scheherezade is telling. The audience is drawn out of the story being

told by Scheherezade and is reminded that she is constructing the tale as she goes along.

At the level of the story of Schahriar and Scheherezade, on the other hand, his

interruptions and comments upon her storytelling ability actually serve to further

support the mimetic illusion of the frame tale, while a the same time, raising tension

between the characters and placing Scheherezade‘s authority as a storyteller into

question.

In Kissing the Witch the metanarrational passages between stories, ―Who were

you before…Will I tell you my story? . . . ,‖ rather than highlighting the fictionality of the

tales in question, support the illusion of reality and in fact further develop the status of

the linked stories as valid alternate versions of well known tales as experienced by their

narrator protagonists.

And here I come to the second strand of the title, which leads from the mouth of

one storyteller to the mouth of another. The passing on of tales and of the telling

performance are highlighted in the repetition of the word mouth in the title, but it is not

only the storytelling that is passed from mouth to mouth. The interstitial passages

further establish and pass on what I call narratorial authority. In Kissing the Witch and

―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses‖ especially, narratorial authority is based

upon the sharing of tales rather than on competition for the correct version of any one

tale. The structures of these texts, therefore, work to support and endorse the

multivocality and plurality of the fairy tale. In addition, the storytelling situation in

which the performance is passed on from one figure to the next, calls attention to the roll

of the listener/narratee of the tales. Listeners play a key role in each of my focus texts by

asking for tales, commenting upon them, and often becoming storytellers themselves.

The third thread of my title is woven into the mix through the familiarity of the

phrase and life saving technique of mouth to mouth resuscitation. This life preserving

aspect of storytelling is literalized in the frame tale of Scheherezade and Schahriar in the

Nights tradition. Scheherezade preserves her own life, ―saves‖ Schahriar from his

madness, and liberates other women from the fate he has decreed–all by telling stories.

In Pan’s Labyrinth the opposite is true. Captain Vidal attempts to control stories for his

own political goals, using them to validate military command and murder. Ultimately

though, his narrative strategies backfire on Vidal and with his death his stories are lost.

But it is because of her love for and knowledge of fairy-tale plots and motifs that Ofelia

acquires the ability to negotiate the dangers she encounters in both of the worlds she

inhabits; and although she does die in Vidal‘s Spain, she is given a second chance to live

on in the Underground Realm and in the story she has inspired.

In very real ways the production of contemporary fairy-tale texts also is an act of

preserving the life of the fairy tale. Through intertextual overt and covert references to

other specific tales, either the ones they re-vision, or in references to characters, motifs,

and images in famous fairy tales, these texts are keeping those stories alive Through

revision, but also through reference, the genre itself is constantly being resuscitated–new

life is breathed into it. This is not to say that I believe that fairy tales are dying and

therefore in need of resuscitation; rather, they are a vital form precisely because they

lend themselves to retelling, revision, and intertextual reference–each of which has

preserving effects and contributes to the longevity of the genre.

Finally, Mouth to Mouth also raises the sexiness quotient of the project by

suggesting the sensuality of mouths on mouths–it is not only stories, but kisses, that pass

between them. Thus Mouth to Mouth alludes to desire, the second part of my subtitle

and another important concept in the project, particularly in relation to queer theory.

If we simply look at the representation of lesbian and gay desires as they appear

in the fairy tale, then we will not come up with many ―classic‖ tales to play with; even in

contemporary revisions and new fairy tales, the number is still small. This is in part

because of the bad rap the fairy tale has received as a restrictive genre than reinscribes

heteropatriarchy at every turn. However, this representational kind of reading places

much of its emphasis on the teleological structure of the tale as always and inevitably

moving toward heterosexual marriage as the constituting force of happily ever after.

My interest is in how multiple and disruptive desires are negotiated in fairy-tale texts.

One of the questions I asked in approaching my texts was whether or not fairy

tales can be good for queers. Queer theory is very new to fairy-tale studies and my

project has sought to develop a relationship between queer and fairy tales that accounts,

not only for the prevalence of disruptive non-normative desires as a driving force in the

genre, but also for techniques that I argue invite queer reading or point to queer

potential encoded in the text both thematically and formally.

My own early explorations into fairy tales came from what I think now of as a

queer affinity, but clearly this has not been felt by all readers and is not inevitable. At the

same time, I do not believe that my readings are simply idiosyncratic. I focus on what is

there in the text. I argue that the combination of the representation of multiple desiring

subjects with different non-normative desires–both lesbian and straight–in conjunction

with formal aspects, particularly of the structuring of Kissing the Witch and Sexing the

Cherry, provide real textual evidence of this queer potential. Structurally both texts

refuse the desire for closure by leaving the frames of the tale cycles radically open. ―The

Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses‖ in Sexing the Cherry begins after the happily

ever after of the marriage and the embedded tales of the princesses are left open due to

the delay between the eleventh sister‘s story and the tale of the twelfth. Even when

Fortunata has told her version of the story, the tension between the versions of her

sisters and her own remains in the exchange between her and her narratee at the end of

the telling. In Kissing the Witch, the complex recursive structure and narrative gaps

between tales also contribute to openness. The question of what happens before and

after each tale is left unanswered–is not only the witch in the final tale who has secrets

not to be told or discovered.

Rather than attending to the teleological desire for closure with the seemingly

unavoidable happily ever after wedding, which is often seen as the defining aspect of the

fairy tale, Kissing the Witch and Sexing the Cherry demonstrate multiple alternative

approaches and desires for something other than a nice handsome prince. Further, they

negotiate narrative authority in ways that figure a kind of collaboration and cooperation

rather than competition that is demonstrated in Arabian Nights and Pan’s Labyrinth.

Their exploration of non-normative desires narrated in the first person, their radical

openness, and their multivocality also engage readers in their tellings and encourage

them to reflect on their own tales and desires.

At the beginning of the dissertation I made the claim that scholars are also

storytellers, I conclude with a final metanarrational comment about my own narrative

desire as a storyteller passing along her own tale about fairy tales and their tellers. As a

way to remind my readers of their work in textual production and my desire for

collaboration rather than authoritative mastery, I address the reader in the closing of

each chapter and I do so here as well. I hope that like Byatt‘s cockroach, you always

believe tales whilst they are being told and that like me, you delight in the desire to

nibble and savor fairy tales as you too pass them on, mouth to mouth.

Introduction

1 I recognize the danger in anthropomorphizing narrative by claiming for it such a

human quality as desire. However, I justify this move as an apt metaphor that develops

out of my belief that stories are, metaphorically, alive. Indeed, much of this project

developed out of my own conviction and desire to further understand fairy tale‘s

tremendous and enduring vitality.

2 Benson also suggests the alternative title ―Angela Carter generation‖ for authors

such as Robert Coover, A.S. Byatt, Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie because of the

influence of her work as specifically commented upon by some of these authors and

―because her work establishes in such vibrant and polemic fashion what might be called

the contermporaneity of the fairy tale‖ (2).

3 For detailed discussions of the debates see Stephen Benson ―Angela Carter and

the Literary Märchen: A Review Essay‖ (1998) and Sara Gamble ―Penetrating the Heart

of the Bloody Chamber: Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale‖ (2008).

4 McGillis‘s use of the term coincides with Judith Butler‘s understanding of

―queer‖ and ―queering‖ as they were used in Nella Larsen‘s Passing: ―At the time, it

seems, ‗queer‘ did not yet mean homosexual, but it did encompass an array of meanings

associated with the deviation from normalcy which might well include the sexual. Its

meanings include: of obscure origin, the state of feeling ill or bad, not straight, obscure,

perverse, eccentric. As a verb-form, ‗to queer‘ has a history of meaning; to quiz or

ridicule, to puzzle, but also to swindle and to cheat‖ (1993, 176).

5 One exception may be the final lines of Kissing the Witch, which seem to

address the reader directly. However, I read this moment in which the narrator

essentially passes the storytelling mantle on to the reader as not breaking the mimetic

illusion or highlighting the text‘s fictionality, but actually supporting the mimetic illusion

of the text and perhaps even extending the fiction past the end of the text to bring it into

the ―real‖ world.

Chapter 1

1 In order to minimize confusion, from this point on I will use Nights to refer to

the long-standing tradition of the Arabian Nights and I will refer to the specific version

with which this chapter is concerned by its title Arabian Nights.

2 The spellings of names of the characters in the Nights in print are not stable,

change from version to version, and in critical work. I have chosen to use the spellings

used by the producers of the miniseries because it is my primary source. Spellings in

quotations from other texts are consistent with their sources.

3 For further information on the textual history of the Nights, see Husain

Haddawy‘s Introduction to The Arabian Nights; Robert Irwin‘s The Arabian Nights: A

Companion, especially the second chapter, ―The Book Without Authors,‖ and Ulrich

Marzolph and Richard van Leeuwen‘s The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia.

4 See Haddawy (xiii).

5 Titles as listed and numbered in The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia. Vol. 1

Ulrich Marzolph & Richard van Leeuwen, eds.

6 These declarations come in an exchange with the vizier that reveals the

misogyny of the film more explicitly than any of Schahriar‘s ranting and ravings. The

vizier not only tells him that his previous wife‘s attempt at killing him was ―merely a bad

experience‖ and his murder of her was ―an accident,‖ but in a ―joke‖ after Schahriar‘s

declaration that all wives must be executed, the vizier mutters sotto voce, ―Well, I‘m sure

we‘ve all felt like that.‖

7 In the case of Schahriar‘s brother Schahzenan, unruly desire actually surpasses

death. We discover near the end of the film that he carts the remarkably well-preserved

dead body of his lover, Schahriar‘s first wife, wherever he goes–even onto the battlefield.

8 For an interesting and detailed discussion of the different representations of

Scheherezade‘s motives in European translations of the Nights, see Eva Sallis

―Sheherazade/Shahrazād: A Commentary on the Frame Tale‖ in Sheherazade Through

the Looking Glass (esp. 103-105)

9 This situation may also bring to mind another cinematic adaptation of a fairy-

tale novel, The Princess Bride. At one point in the film when the young boy being told the

story does not like the way the plot is progressing he tells his storytelling grandfather to

―Get it right!‖ The grandfather threatens to stop reading the story altogether if the

grandson does not stop interrupting. Unlike the relationship between Scheherezade and

Schahriar, in The Princess Bride it is the storyteller who holds the authority and has all

the power over the telling of the tales.

10 It is commonplace that a good storyteller adjusts her performance in response

to her audience‘s verbal or non-verbal feedback. In this case, however, the power

relations between teller and audience and the deadly consequence of a story going

unappreciated make both Schahriar‘s comments and the Scheherezade‘s need for

narrative finesse of grave concern.

11 Although many texts do not include a closing frame, as Sallis notes: ―The

variants of the close [sic] differ much more widely than those of the opening; in fact

closure of the tale ranges from not at all . . .to extended and diffuse narratives on the

festivities generated by the satisfactory outcome‖ (97).

Chapter 2

1 Pan’s Labyrinth is a Spanish-language film. As a non-Spanish speaker, I have

used the English subtitles on the DVD for all quotations from the film.

2 In particular del Toro notes scriptwriting choices, such as allowing loose ends to

remain loose and unresolved to encourage audience speculation, and casting against type

as moments of his own ―disobedience‖ to Hollywood cinematic conventions and

production decisions.

3 The opposition of text and orality arise in this opening sequence as well, since

the Spanish setting is established in white titles on a black background, while the fairy-

tale realm is introduced orally. One might note the chains of oppositions that this

opening sequence sets off: Spain

1944/written/authoritative/logic/culture/masculine/realistic narrative/history/Vidal

vs. Underground Realm/oral/authentic/belief/nature /feminine / fantasy narrative/fairy

tale/Ofelia, and how they are deconstructed by the narration of the film, presented

visually, orally, and (when viewed with subtitles) textually. As I am endeavoring to show

in my argument, disobedience works to continually put the lie to these and other

naturalized oppositions.

4 And different ways of seeing, as Jack Zipes argues in his review of the film.

Chapter 3

1 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick lists ―radical faeries,‖ and ―storytellers‖ among the many

possible identities that ―queers‖ may choose as self-descriptors at different times (1993,

2 The texts I will be discussing in the next two chapters deal almost exclusively

with a particular kind of fairy tale. Kissing the Witch and Sexing the Cherry engage with

what Cristina Bacchilega has called ―innocent persecuted heroine‖ tales (1993)–those

tales that center upon a female protagonist whose trials and tribulations lead to the

eventual reward of marriage to a handsome prince, or at least a nice hero. The two

exceptions are Donoghue‘s revisions of clever-girl tales: ―Hansel and Gretel‖ in ―The Tale

of the Cottage‖ and ―The Snow Queen‖ in ―The Tale of the Brother.‖ Vladimir Propp‘s

morphology notwithstanding (see below, n 5), not all fairy tales end with a wedding. The

lack of male heroes in my primary texts and in my analysis is due to the specific

gendered concerns my primary texts bring to the tales they revision. Studies of other

contemporary fairy-tale texts that do focus on male protagonists and include ambiguous

or gay and lesbian desires are, as I write this dissertation, yet to be published. The fairy

tale fantasy hybrid Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner and The Fall of the Kings by Kushner

and Delia Sherman; Salman Rushdie‘s Haroun and the Sea of Stories; and Neil Gaiman

and Charles Vess‘s graphic novel Stardust and its corresponding novel and cinematic

adaptation come to mind.

3 But Ofelia does disrupt the reproductive aims of heteronormativity when,

witnessing her mother‘s difficult pregnancy, she declares that she will never have a baby.

4 Although I argued in chapter 2 that ―Ofelia actively pursues her own goals and

desires without deference to Vidal or his world,‖ her adventures are elicited and directed

by the male faun as an agent for Princess Moana‘s father, and so are not entirely the

result of unalloyed female agency.

5 Vladimir Propp‘s Morphology of the Folktale, for example is able to use a

sample of one hundred folktales to describe the seven dramatis personae and thirty-one

functions inherent to the fairy tale. The thirty-first function, the ending of all tales, is

called ―The Hero is Married and Ascends the Throne (Definition: wedding).‖ Propp

discerns six possible variants, two of which do not include the bride, but only the reward

of upward mobility (63 and 64).

6 These debates arose as a result of the impact of cultural studies, which insists on

the recognition of cultural context as salient to the production of texts and the post-

structuralist shift from universals toward more constructivist paradigms. For more on

the controversies and debates that rose around what have come to be called ―classical‖

and ―post-classical‖ narratology see Rimmon Keenan and David Herman. For a

discussion about feminist narratological debates in particular, see Ruth Paige. I will

discuss Susan Lanser‘s proposals for ―feminist narratology‖ and ―sexing the narrative‖ in

more detail in chapter 5.

7 See note 2

8 How one reads princess-ness depends upon one‘s political stance. For many

women, the fairy-tale princess is the model of sought-for beauty and blissful

heterosexual accomplishment; for some feminists she is the epitome of passivity and

weakness, a woman defined only by her appearance and willingness to transform herself

at any cost for male sexual desire. For the Disney corporation, she is a gold mine: a really

great shopper and lover of all things pink. Nonetheless, her beauty, passivity, and

marriageability are her primary attributes.

Chapter 4

1 The pre-texts are, in order of appearance: ―Cinderella‖ (―The Tale of the Shoe‖);

―Thumbelina‖ (―The Tale of the Bird‖); ―Beauty and the Beast‖ (―The Tale of the Rose‖);

―Snow White‖ (―The Tale of the Apple‖); ―The Goose Girl‖ (―The Tale of the

Handkerchief‖); ―Rapunzel‖ (―The Tale of the Hair‖); ―The Snow Queen‖ (―The Tale of

the Brother‖); ―Rumpelstiltskin‖ (―The Tale of the Spinster‖); ―Hansel and Gretel,‖ (―The

Tale of the Cottage‖); ―Donkeyskin‖ (―The Tale of the Skin‖); ―Sleeping Beauty‖ (―The

Tale of the Needle‖) and ―The Little Mermaid‖ (―The Tale of the Voice‖). Many of the

tales also make additional intertextual references to other motifs and tales. For example,

the Cinderella figure in the ―Tale of the Shoe‖ says, ―Every word that came out of my

mouth limped away like a toad‖ (1) in reference to the ―Kind and Unkind Girls,‖ and the

narrator of the ―Beauty and the Beast‖ variant, ―The Tale of the Rose,‖ alludes to

―Bluebeard‖ when she says that she was given all of the keys to the house except one

(34). This character will also make a reference to Virginia Woolf‘s ―A Room of One‘s

Own.‖

2 In 1997 Manfred Jahn noted more than ten different uses in literary theory

alone (441).

3 For example, Santiago Solis‘s ―Snow White and the Seven ‗Dwarves‘ –

Queercriped.‖ in Hypatia 22.1 (Winter 2007). Pauline Greenhill‘s essay, ―‗Fitcher‘s

[Queer] Bird;‘ A Fairytale Heroine and Her Avatars‖ is discussed below. Martine

Hennard Dutheil also looks at Kissing the Witch in her chapter ―Queering the Fairy Tale

Canon: Emma Donoghue‘s Kissing the Witch‖ in Fairy Tales Reimagined edited by

Susan Bobby.

4 In fact, Carter‘s representations of BD/SM relations that problematize the

simple victim/villain binary in bi-sexual relationships and recognise pleasure in

masochism, particularly in ―The Bloody Chamber,‖ indicate that Carter‘s interventions

into fairy tales could easily be read through a queer lens that complicates, rather than

capitulates to, normative heterosexual sexual relations.

5 Pun intended

Chapter 5

1 Essays by Santiago Solis (2007), Pauline Greenhill (2008), Martine Hennard

Dutheil (2009) show that this is beginning to change.

2 A forthcoming essay by Sidney Eve Matrix on Stanly Kubrick‘s Eyes Wide Shut

is an exception. Matrix demonstrates the ways in which the film transforms ATU 306 for

a contemporary big-budget Hollywood production. Matrix produces a reading of the tale

and the film that ―reveals each to be a story about the enigma of female desire, the

difficulties of domesticity, and the challenge of marital fidelity for both genders.‖

3 Harries contrasts ―compact‖ tales to the more ―complex‖ literary tales as

exemplified by the French conteuses who employed artful language, irony and

sophisticated word-play in their work but also used intricate narrative framing

techniques to explore social issues that affect women. See my Introduction for more

details.

4 As the numerical title of the vignette suggests, ―Lies 8‖ is one of a number of

digressions or interruptions that appear during Jordan‘s narrations in Sexing the

Cherry.

5 For further discussion of the complexities of feminist separatist utopias see

Libby Falk Jones and Sara Webster Goodwin‘s anthology Feminism, Utopia, and

Narrative.

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