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Article Excerpt
Introduction: Revisionist Myths and Fairy Tales
In August 2004 Marina Warner read fifteen of her favorite poems at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland. One was a passage from Ovid's Metamorphoses that told the story of the rape of Thetis, the sea nymph. In an interview with me that summer at her home in London, Warner explained that she chose the passage "because it's almost a description of art. She keeps changing shape as Peleas tries to pin her down." Warner's description ascribes two roles to Thetis. She is an art object, taking on different shapes or figuras, the same word that Ovid uses for his images. She is also an artist, effecting her own transformations. Warner emphasizes Thetis's creative power over her violation. In Ovid's narrative Thetis defeats Peleas only temporarily; he returns the next day and binds her so that she cannot escape. Yet Warner focuses on Thetis in motion, transforming herself, rather than constrained by Peleas's ropes. Refusing to define Thetis's rape through the suffering it causes, Warner reads it as provoking Thetis to lay claim to the power of an artist by reshaping herself.
Warner's account of Thetis and Peleas exemplifies her disconcerting approach to sexual violence in fairy tales and myths. Through quite different types of texts, such as her study From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994); her novels, including Indigo; or, Mapping the Waters (1992) and The Leto Bundle (2001); and her short story "Ballerina: The Belled Girl Sends a Tape to an Impresario" (1996), Warner explores the issue of sexual violence in terms of being, paradoxically, a potential catalyst for women's self-empowerment. Rather than depict women as helpless victims of sexual violence, Warner portrays women actively responding to violation through new forms of creativity and self-expression. In this way, Warner opposes stereotypical associations between female sexuality, victimhood, and passivity She challenges the assumption, which Sabine Sielke notes is common to much feminist writing, that "the violation of women's bodies [involves] ... the denial of women's personhood or subject position" (12). Like the rereadings of rape that Sharon Stockton calls for in The Economics of Fantasy: Rape in Twentieth-Century Literature (2006), Warner explores the subjectivity of violated women in ways that do not focus solely on their ability to refuse or consent to sex. (1)
Warner's depictions of the potentially positive consequences in fictional cases of sexual violence can appear to condone that violence. In From the Beast to the Blonde, for instance, Warner examines women's longing for beasts in modern versions of "Beauty and the Beast." In her novel Indigo, Warner imagines a Miranda aroused by the Caliban figure who violates her. However, without neglecting the harm that sexual violence can cause women, Warner is more interested in the different ways that women can react to it. She challenges what Tanya Horeck has referred to as the "feminist taboo against rape fantasy" (132), exploring how such fantasies might manifest themselves and what implications they might hold for women. Warner does not claim that all women--or any women--experience what her heroines do. Her imagery hints that she is imagining possibilities rather than offering realistic accounts of assault. This is clear in her rape stories, in which humans become animals and body parts change into inanimate objects. The fantastical events underscore the fictionality of the stories. As she says about fairy tales in From the Beast to the Blonde, her fiction is in the optative mood (xvi). She muses: suppose something happened like this ...
Warner's readings of mythic and fairy-tale rapes set her apart from several feminist writers whose revisions of old stories address sexual violence in ways that often limit their heroines' possibilities. In Sara Henderson Hay's poem "Syndicated Column" (1961), for instance, Bluebeard's wife is left isolated when an advice columnist tells her to lose a few pounds and stop brooding over her husband's locked room (27). In Olga Broumas's "Rumpelstiltskin" (1977), the speaker, trying to express herself after a lifetime of repression, feels like she is "stubbing / her bound up feet on her dammed / up bed" (66). In Anne Sexton's "Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)," a young woman raped by her father lies "still as a bar of iron ... this trance girl" (111). Each of these poems represents the female victim of male violence in terms of isolation, confinement, and passivity; in other words, she is limited to the position of victim. In contrast, Warner envisions her heroines as actively exercising control over the ways violence affects them.
Warner's interest in female characters who are attracted to aggression connects her to Michele Roberts, who also reimagines fairy tales and myths in ways that problematize traditional feminist approaches to sexual violence. In Roberts's Daughters of the House (1993), the young protagonists, Therese and Leonie, are aroused while playing lions and martyrs, a make-believe game in which Leonie pretends to torture and devour Therese (63-65). In her short story "A Bodice Rips" (2001), ten-year-old Maria playacts a rape with her cousin and relishes "the exquisite painful explosive need" of the heroine about to be ravaged (150). As this short synopsis of Roberts's work might suggest, the work of Angela Carter supports these at times unsettling approaches to sexual violence.
Carter's work clearly has influenced that of Warner with respect to rethinking female villainy and victimhood. In a review of From the Beast to the Blonde, Roberts dubs Carter the book's "presiding fairy godmother" ("On Fairy Tales" 71). From the Beast to the Blonde was published two years after Carter's death. It opens with a parable from her Virago Book of Fairy Tales about the importance of stories. For Warner, Carter is an exemplum of fairy-tale revision: "Once this imagined voice [of the storyteller] was established as legitimate for certain purposes--the instruction of the young--writers co-opted it as their own, using it as a mask for their own thoughts, their own mocking games and even sedition--from the elite salonniere in the old regime to Angela Carter in our time" (From the Beast xx). Warner's 1986 BBC 2 film, Cinderella, which intersperses interviews with film clips in the all-embracing mood of From the Beast to the Blonde, includes comments on the tale by Carter. The influence of Carter's attention to sexual symbolism--for instance, Cinderella's bloody shoe--is evident in Warner's analysis of the sexual undertones in illustrations of "Bluebeard," discussed in the following section.
In the preface to "Ballerina: The Belied Girl Sends a Tape to an Impresario," in Marvels & Tales, Warner states: "The Bloody Chamber wasn't the first book by Angela Carter that I read, but it was the one that turned the key for me as a writer" ("Ballerina" 239). It rewrote fairy tales "in the light of her sadeian woman," inverting villains and victims in stories such as "The Tiger's Bride," a variation on "Beauty and the Beast," and "The Company of Wolves," a revision of "Little Red Riding Hood" (Warner, "Ballerina" 241). "The Company of Wolves" ends with Little Red Riding Hood stripping off her clothes, throwing them onto the fire, and lying down in her grandmother's bed with the wolf. "[S]he knew she was nobody's meat," Carter writes, playing on the connotations of "meat" as sexual plaything and as food. Red Riding Hood wakes up "between the paws of the tender wolf," and the word "tender" may suggest that the wolf has become caring and gentle, or that he is "tender" like a cut of meat, the victim that the girl refused to...
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