Bibliography
May. 5th, 2009 08:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyA Vindication of the Rights of Women - Mary Wollstonecraft
I was recommended to follow Emile with this, mainly because Wollstonecraft is very rude about it in a terribly polite way. The essential thrust of her argument is that men only want women to be these odalisque, attractive, helpless figures, who are then utterly incapable of achieving full human virtue. It is the education of women, or rather, the lack of it, that leads to the failings and characteristics that men perceive in them; if girls are allowed to do nothing else but obsess over dolls' clothing, then it is a natural consequence that they will eventually obsess and preen over their own appearance. Equally, if a little girl never sees her mother do anything but fuss with her own appearance, that is what she will imitate. Wollstonecraft is very good at pointing out the vicious circle in the argument.
She also writes deliciously - full of passion, full of verve, demanding equality in the loudest voice she can, being strident that women can achieve equal virtue with men and that it is only men's fear of having to face women who are their intellectual equals that makes a false virtue like 'modesty' so attractive.
It's rather strange to read Wollstonecraft, because in some ways, she still sounds like a rallying cry to the modern woman. Some basic attitudes simply have not changed, which is rather sad - but this is an inspirational call to carry on the good fight. I shall have to come back to this, and suspect I shall be doing so repeatedly.
The next three items come becausetaimatsu is writing her undergrad dissertation on modern reworkings of the Little Red Riding Hood story, and to be helpful, I felt like reading along. And when you start reading along, and you're me, you don't just read the stories and poems your friend is actually working on, you read the entire book the story or poem is contained in...
The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter
I had wanted to read the Carter anyway, so this was the gateway into the current pile of revisionist fairy tale fare. There's no point in me giving individual story synopses, so let me try to give an overall picture. First, Carter is a wordsmith. Her use of language is gem-like - a perfect tone, never a misstep. Second, she plays variations. She will take one fairy tale and retell it a number of different ways - for instance, there are two versions of Beauty and the Beast. Third, this is a work in some ways that grows out of the feminist movement; a lot of them are interested in ideas of recapturing female agency that fairy tales in some ways try to take away, or exploring that sense of agency and victimhood.
I very much enjoyed reading this collection, and have to say that it set a very high bar for the works that followed.
Snow White, Blood Red - eds. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
This was much more choppy than the Carter. In some ways, that's inevitable; it's a collection, and it has slightly different aims. It wanted to collect stories that took the fairy tale rubric and brought it into the 'adult fiction' world of horror and fantasy literature. Some of the tales are a bit spine tingling, but not many of them. Some of them are, frankly, badly written. Some of them are very good. But the mixed bag nature of the collection is quite a let down after the Carter. I mean, I know that the different directions the authors are going in with the brief is going to lead to some variable results, but at the same time... some of them are really awfully symbolic.
What I mean is, I'm coming to realise with fairy tales that there are two ways of reworking them. One is to take the original symbols and characters from your base story, and then be Really Really Clever in your writing to Signal What Stands for What - a prime example, as I have whinged totaimatsu, being the description of Little Red Riding Hood's cloak as 'red as menstrual blood', which just screams 'look, look, I am so clever! I have found the male oppression and am reincorporating it in a way that is not repressed by taboo! Love me!' This sort of thing gets old very, very quickly. The other way, the way that Carter does excellently and that some of the writers in this collection do too, is to seek out those same symbols and characters and work out interesting ways of shifting, challenging, changing them.
Irritatingly, for every good piece of work in this collection, there are two that aren't really worth reading. I'd stick with the Carter, myself.
Transformations - Anne Sexton
I suspect I don't know enough about modern poetry to really enjoy these. These are far more 'faithful' retellings of fairy stories - that is, they take a fairy story and tell it in poetry, but add a 'modern' preface to it - a strange mix of the now and the other, and trying to draw the links between the two is often frustratingly difficult. They're very much built like intellectual puzzles - as if what is going on in the lower level of the fairy tale is what provides the underlay for the modern phenomenon, and it is up to the reader to figure out the correlations. But honestly? For me, it's a bit too clever by half. The use of language doesn't grab me. The modifications and the shifts in the stories aren't half as interesting as some of the other versions I've seen in this reading. It feels far more like a literary exercise than poetry - a feature that a lot of the American poetry I have read from the second half of twentieth century shares. It doesn't happen in Hughes, or oddly quite as much in Plath, or in other poets who write in Britain (even if they're not British, a la Plath) - but the Americans seem to reduce poetry into this intellectualised thing that honestly gives me very little joy to read.
I was recommended to follow Emile with this, mainly because Wollstonecraft is very rude about it in a terribly polite way. The essential thrust of her argument is that men only want women to be these odalisque, attractive, helpless figures, who are then utterly incapable of achieving full human virtue. It is the education of women, or rather, the lack of it, that leads to the failings and characteristics that men perceive in them; if girls are allowed to do nothing else but obsess over dolls' clothing, then it is a natural consequence that they will eventually obsess and preen over their own appearance. Equally, if a little girl never sees her mother do anything but fuss with her own appearance, that is what she will imitate. Wollstonecraft is very good at pointing out the vicious circle in the argument.
She also writes deliciously - full of passion, full of verve, demanding equality in the loudest voice she can, being strident that women can achieve equal virtue with men and that it is only men's fear of having to face women who are their intellectual equals that makes a false virtue like 'modesty' so attractive.
It's rather strange to read Wollstonecraft, because in some ways, she still sounds like a rallying cry to the modern woman. Some basic attitudes simply have not changed, which is rather sad - but this is an inspirational call to carry on the good fight. I shall have to come back to this, and suspect I shall be doing so repeatedly.
The next three items come because
taimatsu is writing her undergrad dissertation on modern reworkings of the Little Red Riding Hood story, and to be helpful, I felt like reading along. And when you start reading along, and you're me, you don't just read the stories and poems your friend is actually working on, you read the entire book the story or poem is contained in...The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter
I had wanted to read the Carter anyway, so this was the gateway into the current pile of revisionist fairy tale fare. There's no point in me giving individual story synopses, so let me try to give an overall picture. First, Carter is a wordsmith. Her use of language is gem-like - a perfect tone, never a misstep. Second, she plays variations. She will take one fairy tale and retell it a number of different ways - for instance, there are two versions of Beauty and the Beast. Third, this is a work in some ways that grows out of the feminist movement; a lot of them are interested in ideas of recapturing female agency that fairy tales in some ways try to take away, or exploring that sense of agency and victimhood.
I very much enjoyed reading this collection, and have to say that it set a very high bar for the works that followed.
Snow White, Blood Red - eds. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
This was much more choppy than the Carter. In some ways, that's inevitable; it's a collection, and it has slightly different aims. It wanted to collect stories that took the fairy tale rubric and brought it into the 'adult fiction' world of horror and fantasy literature. Some of the tales are a bit spine tingling, but not many of them. Some of them are, frankly, badly written. Some of them are very good. But the mixed bag nature of the collection is quite a let down after the Carter. I mean, I know that the different directions the authors are going in with the brief is going to lead to some variable results, but at the same time... some of them are really awfully symbolic.
What I mean is, I'm coming to realise with fairy tales that there are two ways of reworking them. One is to take the original symbols and characters from your base story, and then be Really Really Clever in your writing to Signal What Stands for What - a prime example, as I have whinged to
taimatsu, being the description of Little Red Riding Hood's cloak as 'red as menstrual blood', which just screams 'look, look, I am so clever! I have found the male oppression and am reincorporating it in a way that is not repressed by taboo! Love me!' This sort of thing gets old very, very quickly. The other way, the way that Carter does excellently and that some of the writers in this collection do too, is to seek out those same symbols and characters and work out interesting ways of shifting, challenging, changing them. Irritatingly, for every good piece of work in this collection, there are two that aren't really worth reading. I'd stick with the Carter, myself.
Transformations - Anne Sexton
I suspect I don't know enough about modern poetry to really enjoy these. These are far more 'faithful' retellings of fairy stories - that is, they take a fairy story and tell it in poetry, but add a 'modern' preface to it - a strange mix of the now and the other, and trying to draw the links between the two is often frustratingly difficult. They're very much built like intellectual puzzles - as if what is going on in the lower level of the fairy tale is what provides the underlay for the modern phenomenon, and it is up to the reader to figure out the correlations. But honestly? For me, it's a bit too clever by half. The use of language doesn't grab me. The modifications and the shifts in the stories aren't half as interesting as some of the other versions I've seen in this reading. It feels far more like a literary exercise than poetry - a feature that a lot of the American poetry I have read from the second half of twentieth century shares. It doesn't happen in Hughes, or oddly quite as much in Plath, or in other poets who write in Britain (even if they're not British, a la Plath) - but the Americans seem to reduce poetry into this intellectualised thing that honestly gives me very little joy to read.
