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.

Fairy Tales: The Wild Wood

I’ve been working on some feminist erotic retellings of traditional fairy tales about women who love women (and sometimes fairies and shape-shifters and other creatures).

This is my blog to talk about the ideas I’ve explored while writing them. First up: the wild wood.

I’m calling the collection Into the Wild Wood because woods reoccur so many times in fairy stories. They are the places we much not stray, for fear of wolves or bad spirits or monstrous feminine creatures (of which more later), for fear of discovering things we ought not and learning to stick to the path set by our parents. Forest even spring up, unbidden, invading safe interior spaces, as in ‘Sleeping Beauty’. But in subverting the wild wood, and celebrating love and sex, woods have the potential to become a site of exploration, curiosity, adventure, self-discovery and possibility.

When writing my stories, I want the wild wood to keep its wildness, and even some of its danger, because that sort of wood has much more erotic potential. Writing fairy stories that are over-sanitised is impossible—they are stories defined by the leaking all over of a particularly gothic sort of desire. If they’re not, then they’re not really fairy tales at all. But I’m reclaiming the wild wood for all those good things too: for sexual adventure and self-realisation, and a whole world of possibilities.