Fairy Tales: Female Monsters

I want to talk about subverting the idea of female monsters in fairy tales and other writing. I don’t want to get too bogged down here in theory about the monstrous feminine, because other people have already written about that, and better than I can here (e.g. Barbara Creed, Julia Kristeva, Gilbert and Gubar). This is more of a practical pondering about how to explore these ideas in art.

There are two main types of monstrous females in fairy stories: outright monsters of the mythical variety and crones (or witches). Fairy tales are full of primal fears, and if we look, it seems a fair few of those primal fears are around women and female entities. Some of them might be connected with physical fear of sex and death, and some with the fear of female knowledge and power. In the original versions of many fairy stories, the evil stepmothers that are rife are quite often evil mothers. So, for feminist retellings, I felt that subverting the whole idea of female monsters was important and powerful.

One of the stories I looked at was ‘Jorinda and Jorindel’, a lesser known story in the Grimm collection. In that story, there is an evil, shape-shifting fairy who steals young maidens and turns them into birds, locking them up in her castle forever. Their crime? Having been foolish enough to venture into the wild wood. I found this fairy pretty fascinating, with her shape-shifting and her fiery eyes, and her insatiable appetite for maiden capturing. So, rather than have some bloke come along and defeat her, I wondered what would happen if Jorinda and the fairy got together. What could they learn? What happens to a young woman if, rather than fearing the freaky fairy, she gets it on with her? I like to think the world wouldn’t end, but rather, both of them would come out having grown as people/freaky fairies. So that’s what I wrote.

If we’re to overcome fear, embrace growth, self-knowledge, and sex, then another way to do that is for our heroines to embody that monstrousness and fear, and still prosper and know love. In ‘Red Riding Hood’, the woods are full of danger, and the wolf represents our fears. But what if Red, the young innocent of the tale, and the wolf are combined? That struck me as a powerful way to challenge and interrupt some assumptions and taboos.

In my stories, I embrace monsters, often quite literally. Love yourself a monster, even if the monster is in you.