Fairy Tales: Women as Allies and Lovers

 

In fairy stories, as in a lot of stories, women are often pitched against each other. So one thing I’ve thought about a lot is portraying women as allies, and as lovers. In some of my fairy stories, I’ve just removed the male characters completely, and let the women get on with helping each other, loving each other and saving each other, or themselves. It’s not a matter of everyone holding one another’s hand and being lovely all the time. I still want to retain the darkness essential to fairy tales. The women have hopes, dreams and desires of their own. But often, those can be better achieved by working with other women, and not against them.

‘Snow White’ was one of the stories I really wanted to pick apart in this way. The two main female characters, Snow and the Queen, are pitched against each other, but their battles are defined by the men in the story. The King (Snow’s father, the Queen’s husband) defines a lot of what drives the story: the women’s relationship, the terms of what is beautiful, the relations of power. And the problems are resolved by a prince at the end. The prince had to go, obviously. None of the women in my stories need saving by men. So he didn’t even make it into the story. Then the women need their own aims and desires. The King’s still in the story, but he has to go too. So Snow and the Queen must redefine their own relationship, their aims, their conception of beauty, and then they need to redefine the relations of power. Toppling a patriarch seemed like a good way to kick the collection off.

I’ve thrown out the idea that women must be antagonists. I’ve embraced the idea that friendship and love between women can be both empowering, enlightening and healing.

I want friendship and love between women to be a source of power and magic in my stories, a source of self-discovery and growth. Not all the love with last. Not all the love will be the reason for the happily ever after, but it will help the main character along the path to defining their own happily ever after, and that’s the important thing.