Your life as a fairy tale
Issue one: Craft essay by Carina Bissett
I cannot remember a time in my life that wasn’t touched by fairy tales. My childhood bible was a double-sided volume from The Companion Library series containing Andersen’s Fairy Tales and Grimm Fairy Tales. I read it so many times that the binding crumbled and the spine cracked. As a child growing up in poverty, this tome offered a welcome escape. If I was hungry, I could imagine delectable dishes served up by the wishing table at my command. If I was cold, I could pretend to find warmth from a robber girl’s boots and the Snow Queen’s mantle. If I was lonely, I could spend time with familiar friends as they sewed nettle shirts, swept out the scullery, and dreamed of a future free from peril. These stories created a framework for my life. They offered a way to navigate the real world, and they continue to do so to this day.
In Once upon a time: A short History of fairy tale, folklorist Maria Warner explores the enduring allure of wonder tales, charting stories that slip past boundaries of space and time. “Fairy tales,” she writes:
are stories that try to find the truth and give us glimpses of the greater things—this is the principle that underlies their growing presence in writing, art, cinema, dance, song. They have been widely accepted as a most valuable and profound creation of human history and culture; they have come to be treated as scriptures from an authentic inaugural time of imaginative activity, a narrative blueprint when it was all set down, right and true (Warner 178-179).
Perhaps this is something I recognized even as a child. As fabulous and strange as these stories are, they offer insight into the human condition. Cristina Bacchilega writes that:
For some, fairy tales instigate compensatory escapism, while for others they offer wisdom; alternatively, fairy tales are seen to project social delusions that hold us captive under their spell; or else they promote a sense of justice by narrating the success of unpromisingly small, poor, or otherwise oppressed protagonists … Our ideas about the genre’s poetics depend on whether we associate the fairy tale as symbolic act with wish fulfillment, role-playing, idealization, survival, or something else; in other words, on how we use the genre (2013, p. 4).
As a teen, I lived in a house built from a library of books, a fort of fairy tales stacked around my bed. That was when I discovered the blood-soaked older versions of the tales that had been sanitized and sterilized for consumption by children. These stories were filled with murderous mothers, cannibal kings, and seductive sirens. They were not the versions I’d memorized as a girl, but they were familiar all the same.
The fairy-tale scholar Jack Zipes asks what we must do, as individuals, to adapt to new and unexpected situations.
Does a person become heroic through a special kind of adaptation? What does a person have to do to maintain power so that she or he can survive? (2006, p. 27)
These are questions I navigated as I moved from adolescence to adulthood. In my late teens, I traded a narcissistic mother for an abusive husband. In my early twenties, I got divorced and started college, only to discover another fork in the road with an unexpected pregnancy. Facing this new challenge, I adapted again, trying to find a way to balance my life as a single mother of twins.
This time, when I turned to fairy tales, I decided to write my own.
The fairytale repertory of fantastic possibilities continues to provide writers and others with a fine scalpel to probe and test the conditions of daily survival, and then imagine alternatives and redress (Warner 2014,p. 157).
This is true not only for me, but for countless others who turn to fairy tales as a means of interrogating their lives through the lens of wonder.
In short succession, I discovered Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Anne Sexton’s Transformations. In The Bloody Chamber, a self-referential Carter reframes the patriarchal tales of Charles Perrault with sophisticated sociopolitical commentary. Like Carter, the Little Red Riding Hood character in ‘The Company of Wolves’ knows she’s “nobody’s meat” (1993, p. 118). Sexton undertakes a similar feat by interrogating Grimm’s fairy tales in confessional poems rife with sardonic wit.
Sexton opens the collection with her take on the Grimm tale ‘The Golden Key’:
The speaker in this case
is a middle-aged witch, me—
tangled on my two great arms,
my face in a book
and my mouth open wide,
ready to tell you a story or two.
In these tales, Snow White has cheeks “as fragile as cigarette paper”; Iron Hans is transformed “[w]ithout Thorazine / or the benefit of psychotherapy”; and Cinderella’s rags-to-riches is echoed in a tale of a nursemaid who lands an heir: “From diapers to Dior. / That story” (1999, p. 223). She spins new life into these familiar yarns. She makes them her own.
We cannot fully predict or control which stories mingle with, influence, anticipate, interrupt, take over, or support one another because every teller and recipient of a tale brings to it her or his own texts; we also cannot fully anticipate how a story, no matter how the teller or writer intends it, will act on its listeners/readers/viewers (Bacchilega 19).
The intertextuality of fairy tales opens avenues of possibility in interpretations cast as retellings, adaptations, and transformations. But perhaps even more intriguing is the way these stories have left indelible impressions on the artists who are drawn to this source material. To that end, author and scholar Kate Bernheimer asked contemporary writers to reflect on the ways fairy tales “affected their thinking about emotion, the self, gender and culture”(1998, p. xviii); the resulting essays, collected in Mirror, mirror on the wall: Women writers explore their favorite fairy tales, explore a wide range of responses including critical readings, structured analyses, philosophical interrogations, poetic explorations, and autobiographical narratives.
To write about the tales, one must participate in a kind of reevaluation, a retelling of the story in a different way. And in similar fashion, collecting the responses of women in particular becomes a way of presenting a multiplicity of feminisms, in the political tradition of folk literature. Some women regard the fairy tales as essentially female forms of subversion; others see them as essentially misogynistic. Still others describe the works, with their enduring power as oral tradition, as a symbol of women’s historical expressiveness (Bernheimer 1998, p. xxiii).
In one of my favorite essays in Mirror, mirror on the wall, Maria Flook reflects on her mother’s toxic behavior towards her daughters in ‘The Rope to Bridge Sex’. The author begins with the familiar mother-daughter dynamic present in ‘Snow White’ but then switches to ‘The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf’. As Flook writes:
I recognized how fairy tale characters often flee from their homes to begin unassisted journeys into dark woods or perilous terrain … Fairy tale characters had to decipher antique maps or draw their own itineraries, choose the ‘high road’ or the ‘low road’; their decisions were crucial and would alter their journey for better or worse. To reach the safety of new shores, characters might need to ford a river, shinny over a log, scale a wall, dupe trolls at a magic kiosk, edge across a rope bridge, or teeter on insecure stepping stones (Flook in Bernheimer 1998, p. 124-125).
The author successfully stays under the radar when it comes to her mother for a while, but eventually Flook’s sexual maturity makes her a threat, and she takes the path forged by her older sisters. With two years left to complete high school, the author departs from her family home to engage in an “erotic education”: “I have come to recognize that my maternal example is the toxic taproot of my vision, a sexual consciousness that drives my flight and my flight to art” (Flook in Bernheimer 1998, p. 139).
Today, this inter-connected, autobiographical approach, tying memoir and fairy tale in a braided narrative, has gained even more popularity. A few key examples from recent years include ‘The Crane Wife’ by CJ Hauser, Happily: A personal history with fairy tales by Sabrina Orah Mark, and In the dream house: A memoir by Carmen Maria Machado. Machado writes, in the introduction to her book, that:
memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection. Memoirists re-create the past, reconstruct dialogue. They summon meaning from events that have long been dormant. They braid the clays of memory and essay and fact and perception together, smash them into a ball, roll them flat. They manipulate time; resuscitate the dead. They put themselves together, and others, into necessary context (2019, p. 5).
Fairy tales continue to guide my writing, regardless of form. As such, my stories and poems are replete with themes and motifs mined from the rich tradition of wonder tales. The possibilities are endless, the plots and characters open to interpretation, the flexible narratives and symbolic code accessible and ready for yet another permutation in the chain of repetitions, retellings, and reimaginings. It is up to us to help them find their way.
WRITING EXERCISE
When a fairy tale calls to you on a personal level, there is often something there waiting to be explored. Your challenge is to heed that call and use the tale that call you as a launching point to write about your personal experiences and the ways they relate to your selected story. Treat it like an experimental prose poem, or work within the constraints of form poetry. Later, you can go back and sift through the words for story seeds. You might be surprised by what you discover.
Resources
Bacchilega, Cristina 2013, Fairy Tales Transformed?: Twenty-First Century Adaptations & Politics of Wonder, Wayne State University Press, Detroit.
Bernheimer, Kate (ed) 1998, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales, Anchor Books, New York.
Carter, Angela 1993, The Bloody Chamber. Penguin Books, New York.
Hauser, CJ 2019, ‘The Crane Wife’, The Paris Review, July, Accessed 29 March 2024, <https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/07/16/the-crane-wife/>.
Machado, CM 2019, In the Dream House: A Memoir, Graywolf Press, Minneapolis.
Orah SM 2023, Happily: A Personal History with Fairy Tales, Random House, New York.
Sexton, Anne 1999, The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton, Mariner Books, New York.
Warner, Maria 2014, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Zipes, Jack, 2006, Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre, Routledge, New York.
Carina Bissett is a writer and poet working primarily in the fields of dark fiction and fabulism. She is the author of numerous shorts stories, many of which are featured in her debut collection Dead Girl, Driving and Other Devastations (2024), and she is also a co-editor of the award-winning anthology Shadow Atlas: Dark Landscapes of the Americas (2021). Her poetry has been nominated for the Rhysling Award, the Pushcart Prize, and Sundress Publications Best of the Net. Her nonfiction has been nominated for the Bram Stoker Awards®. Links to her work can be found at http://carinabissett.com.