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Article Excerpt
I was not raised to think that some day my prince would come. I did not even see the Disney Snow White until I was working on my BA. I didn't identify with princesses. I was two and a half when my grandmother gave me my first folktale book, Fairy Tales from Many Lands (Herda). Frankly, I found some of the illustrations quite frightening. I loved it, though, perhaps because it was almost princess-free. I did identify with the younger sisters, being one myself. And like the younger sisters in the fairy tales, I watched my older sister make all the mistakes and then I learned from them. What I discovered, as in the stories, was the importance of being secretive, not disclosing to authority figures what you knew or what you did. Like the parents in the fairy tales, mine always seemed to be trying to shield me from knowledge and experience--what I most desperately wanted.
My favorite stories, whose main characters I wanted to be, were "The Boy Thirteen" and "Clever Brother Hare." The title character in "The Boy Thirteen," the youngest (of course) in his family, starts out as a cowherd, becomes the king's singer, outwits a jealous courtier by performing three impossible tasks, and gets the king's crown and the princess in the end. Let me be clear; I didn't want to have a man like that, I wanted to be a man like that.
But the best fairy-tale character was Clever Brother Hare. He's a bit of a dandy Preparing for a meeting with Brother Lion, who plans to eat him for dinner, Clever Brother Hare "washed himself very carefully, put on his best suit, chose his prettiest tie, twirled the ends of his moustache, put his walking stick under his arm and left the house" (Herda 199-200). The central color illustration for this story--which, I must say, was my very favorite visual image in the book--has no textual reference (fig. 1). This depiction of Clever Brother Hare's self-scrutiny evokes the Lacanian mirror phase, when "the child imagines itself to be a whole and powerful individual by identifying with its own more perfect mirror image" (Thornham 54). In this scene, clearly about Clever Brother Hare's imagining, appreciating, and enjoying his power, his wife and children in the background are so busy prematurely mourning his death that they fail to see how swell he looks. Clever Brother Hare, on the other hand, seems totally engrossed in the mirror stage; he watches only his own reflection, unaware of his effect on his family Yet his contemplation of himself--of his self-creation--is also mirrored later, when the reader learns that his autospectatorship is not mere vanity, but profound self-knowledge. Clever Brother Hare uses the mirror; it is his tool to construct himself in such a way as to manipulate Brother Lion.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
The mirror stage is supposed to occur "at a time when children's physical ambitions outstrip their motor capacity, with the result that their recognition of themselves is joyous in that they imagine their mirror image to be more complete, more perfect than they experience in their own body" (Mulvey 61). In fact, Clever Brother Hare's image, fabricated and confirmed in the mirror, is simply the vehicle by which he uses his brilliant mind to manipulate and outwit Brother Lion, tricking the feline adversary into thinking that his reflection in the water at the bottom of a deep hole is a rival lion (fig. 2). Brother Lion jumps in to devour his enemy, and instead drowns. The mirror is again central, this time both in the text and in the illustration, where it's absent from depiction but crucial to understanding the image. Brother Lion, unclothed, mistakes himself for another lion. Clever Brother Hare gestures toward the mirrored lion down the water-filled hole, but looks at the actual one; he's the only character who sees clearly and correctly, who knows that the figure in the mirror is the self. Clever Brother Hare saves himself, his family, and the other animals from becoming Brother Lion's dinner by transcending the patriarchal moment of self-recognition via cognition.
My childhood love of Clever Brother Hare has been supplanted by a firm identification in adulthood with Fitcher's Bird. As I will suggest, despite their gender differences, these two characters have remarkable similarities. The female protagonist's multiple self-replications in "Fitcher's Bird," like Clever Brother Hare's reflective schemings, dismantle traditional psychological notions of the mirror stage. But Fitcher's Bird takes the figuratively multiplying trope of reflection to the literally multiplying trope of replication, and thus by implication revisions the constitution of women beyond the patriarchal gaze. Specifically, women can reproduce themselves by themselves. They don't want the men who want them, and they certainly don't need these murderous patriarchs.
I met "Pitcher's Bird" only as an adult. In childhood, perhaps all too engrossed in my own mirror stage to appreciate their evocative qualities, I found the Grimm tales boring and rejected them in favor of all those Andrew Lang colors: The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book The heroine of "Fitcher's Bird," like Clever Brother Hare, is a perverse self-creation, and, like him, she is smart, a dandy, and a trickster. The transvestism that finally saves her, and results in the demise of evil and patriarchy, is her disguise as a bird--a fantastic bird, a possibly androgynous bird. I begin uncovering the story's meaning with a close reading of the text. In a reading very much indebted to Luce Irigaray's critique of patriarchal psychoanalysis, I then move to reflect further on its implicit criticism of the notion of the mirror stage, and on its transgressive representation of women. Here I undermine the Freudian and Lacanian reliance upon the visual--and, indeed, upon the presumptively male gaze--in a turn with Irigaray and Monique Wittig to another sense--feeling, the tactile.
[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]
Three Tales: Murderous Men and Wily Women
I must also admit to considerable initial difficulty in approaching "Fitcher's Bird," despite my personal fascination with it. I seemed to instantiate Irigaray's concern about women and language: "The feminine can try to speak to itself through a new language, but cannot describe itself from outside or in formal terms, except by identifying with the masculine, thus by losing itself (This Sex 74). The story seemed almost too obvious, manifest, evident. While I reveled in its incidents, lost inarticulately in the symbolic, I could not get beyond them.
A beginning for me was to employ a comparison of "Fitcher's Bird" (Zipes 155-58) with two other tales that appear in Jack Zipes's translation of the Grimm tales: "The Robber Bridegroom" (141-45) and the "omitted tale" (xiv) "Bluebeard" (610-12). (1) My lack of reading knowledge of German means I have been unable to examine the texts in their original redactions. The Zipes translation--my only textual source--seems an excellent solution, the work of a scholar who is not only a Grimm expert but also one who understands the subtleties of feminist analysis. In my defense, even the Grimm versions, multiply edited revisions in themselves, are by no means authentic original tales transcribed directly from the lips of the unspoiled folk, if such an entity ever actually existed outside the imaginations of romantic nationalist writers. The Grimm tales' iconic status in Euro-North American culture and the basis of my analysis in images and themes that go beyond a simple textual reference, as well as its extension beyond the tales themselves, I hope, allows this work to contribute even given its admitted limitations.
Stephen Benson's gender-sensitive folktale and feminist theory analysis addresses the identical "knot of folktales" (198). His work helpfully traces diachronic and synchronic links and disjunctures based not only on European versions of the folktales, but also on literary revisionings. Those who are interested in more nuanced, feminist-informed readings of different versions of these and similar tales should consult his work and that of Cristina Bacchilega, Maria Tatar, and Marina Warner, among others. Following on their work, I suggest that despite significant structural commonalities between the three narratives (see table 1), (2) "Fitcher's Bird" is ultimately the least directed by heterosexual imperatives, and the least committed, in the end, to patriarchal systems. Though it presents what could be seen as a realistic, if somewhat stark, view of patriarchal relations in terms of serial violence and fetishism, (3) "Fitcher's Bird" queers patriarchy by its representation of the central female figure. My use of "queer" as a verb takes advantage both of its older meaning as a type of destabilizing redirection, and its more recent sense as a reference to sexualities beyond the hetero, both of which are implicated in my reading. (4) Unnamed, except as Fitcher's Bird, the main protagonist is an everywoman who undermines actual and symbolic patriarchy by a series of actions that also expose the Freudian and Lacanian creation myths about women. (5) The story subverts patriarchy, heterosexuality, femininity, and masculinity alike.
Of the three tales, "Fitcher's Bird" is also the most women-centered. Its title character is the heroine (the other two characters are named after the primary males). It's the only tale of the three in which the protagonist textually has a mother, not only a father. She also has two female helpers--her sisters. Contra-patriarchally, connections with female characters in all of these tales give or demonstrate the heroine's power; connections with male characters remove her autonomy and may even threaten her life. Equally contra-patriarchally, the story requires readers/hearers to identify with a woman in order to survive at the end. (6) It thus disrupts conventional representations in which "pleasures operate for the male spectator, whilst the figure of 'woman' functions as a fetishised object of desire or object of narrative punishment" (Thornham 2). While these processes of male looking and the objectification of and violence against women do take place in...
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