fairytales

Into the Woods: the Symposium

Last Wednesday, I hopped on the train and made my way to Melbourne Uni for the ‘Into the Woods’ symposium run by History of Emotions. You can find their program here.

It was a full and wonderful day, focusing on the forest in literature, fairy tales, poetry, contemporary culture and ecology. Unsurprisingly, I’ll focus on the fairy tale presentations I saw. If you’d like an abbreviated version, I tweeted my notes over here. I didn’t make it in time for the keynote speaker, but caught morning tea, and met the lovely Caitlyn, who, coincidentally came down on the same train, from the same town! We live less than 5 minutes away from each other. A lovely way to start the day.

And so, onto proceedings. You may want to read each speaker’s abstracts in the program for a clearer idea of what they spoke about. I’m working solely from my scribbled notes here.

Victoria Tedeschi spoke about the idea that, while we think of the forest as a dangerous place, “Fairy Tales’ most arduous trials take place inside (in the human realm), not in the forest itself.” The forest is actually a place for fostering identity: a place for growth and change. It is in the human domain that danger lies. In the beginning of the industrial age, cities became dirty and full of squalor, and so the first public parks were created… while the ‘wild’ forests were thought to be unruly, even ugly. They were seen to be in the way of agricultural progress. The ‘wild’ fairy tale forest was a place to lose oneself, and find a new identity. It is a means of escape.

I got most excited about Victoria’s reading of Hansel and Gretel. In the beginning of the story, Gretel is completely reliant on her brother. She’s helpless, relying on him to lay (unsuccessful) trails of crumbs and stones. However, after their trek through the woods, and entrapment by the witch in her candy house, she find the power to defeat the witch (by kicking her into the oven) and is the one to lead them home. Hansel, after being caged by the witch, is now lamenting the helplessness of their situation. Gretel, through her time in the forest, has formed a connection to the environment, and even enlists the help of a duck. She finds their way home, pockets full of sweets and jewels, in this way also ensuring her own financial independence. Totally blew my mind. Thanks Victoria!

By Leutemann or Offterdinger, photo by Harke [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Next up we had Rebecca-Anne C. do Rozario with Agony! Misery! Woe!: An Excess of Love in the Forest. She spoke of the forest as a place of exile and refuge, and also, apparently, full of princes! She discussed the women writers from the court of Louis XIV. They often wrote of exile to the forest while they themselves risked the danger of exile to their country estates if they displeased the King. Not the worst danger they could have faced, but it certainly met social death. Rebecca-Anne discussed Catherine Bernard and Madame D’Aulnoy, particularly D’Aulnoy’s celebration of the male body. D’Aulnoy’s The White Hind explored the idea of a beautiful old woman, much different to the old hag we usually read about in fairy tales, and also the disturbance of the usual heterosexual pairing, with a strong female friendship at the heart of the tale.

D’Aulnoy’s story Le Mouton, features a metamorphosed sheep dripping with splendid jewels, and speaks of him in sensual terms, which leads me to my favourite quote from the day, (from Patricia Hannon): “The indolent sheep is the creation of the female libido.” Don’t you love it? I want it on a coffee mug. Anyway, female writers of the time often led sexually adventurous lives themselves, and didn’t shy away from writing about female desire in their writing.

Back in the forest, Rebecca-Anne discussed Marina Warner’s view of the wolf: he is symbolic of desire itself, and a counterpoint to the old crone, or witch in the woods. The prince too, is an artifice of desire. He is chasing, not the princess in particular, but desire itself.

Athena Bellas spoke next, on An Escape to the Forest in Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood. She discussed the film and its representation of gender, resistance and space; and also the relationship between the film and the Red Riding Hood stories by the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault. There is a strong focus on what comes of straying from the path, physically and socially. Interestingly, Athena also discussed the idea of horror being in the home rather than in the wild forest (I’d really like to cover this topic in more detail in a future blog post): In the film, Ringing Hood is escaping her abusive father, and the forest is a marginal space. Through lighting and framing, it is represented as a freeing space for her. Athena has a particular interest in the voice over, where Riding Hood is in control of her own narrative.

She also discussed the differing German and French ideas of the forest in Grimms’ and Perrault’s stories. The German forests are dark and foreboding, while the french are manicured and relatively tame. A place of looming fear vs. a place of wonder.

http://www.wmagazine.com/culture/2010/03/red_riding_hood_catherine_hardwicke_on_set_ss/photos/

Amazingly, all the above (and more) was covered in an hour. In the next session we started with Sarah Bartels discussing the the symbolism of the devil in 19th Century English Woodland. She pointed out some of the many plants that were named after the devil, for the simple reason that they were poisonous, spiky, or even just unpleasant to the taste. Sarah looked at the relationship between the natural world (plants and animals) and the supernatural one, and how the balance between the two was negotiated in the beliefs and superstitions of the time.

I then snuck into the other seminar room (multiple presentations make for some very difficult decision making!) to catch Jessica Hancock‘s paper on The Question of Experience and Fiction in Regards to Stef Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves. She discussed the postmodern idea of whether the artist can be divorced from the work they make – is the connection important? There is an expectation that when an author writes about a place (even in historical fiction) they should have been there, and the belief that with the physical experience of a place it becomes part of the story, not just background. Stef Penney wrote about the Canadian wilderness as if she had lived there all her life, and people believed she had… until it was revealed that she lived in London, was intensely agoraphobic, and did all her research at the library. Should that make us read her story differently? Many people believe so, and it is hard to keep it out of mind while reading the book, even unintentionally.

David Haworth spoke next on Silence, Speech and the Unruly Forest: From Fairy Tales to Carmel Bird’s The Bluebird Café, where:

‘Nature is silent in our culture (and in literate societies generally) in the sense that the status of being a speaking subject is jealously guarded as an exclusively human prerogative’- Christopher Manes.

In fairy tales, the forest is loud with (non human) voices, where in The Bluebird Café, the forest is forced into silence. Speech is an expressive of an internal self, a gift bestowed on the forest in fairy tales. In Red Riding Hood we are unsurprised to hear the wolf speak: he is the seductive danger of the forest: His voice is seductive, as is his ability to spin words. David spoke of semiotics as the ‘other’ of language: Not language itself, but entwined with it. In The Bluebird Café the forest has encroached on the town, taken over it. The town and the missing girl are both ghosts, both silenced. Even in flashbacks the girl is mute. The speaking human has privilege in Western cultures, but Bird’s novel makes space for the non-speaking Tasmanian forest in her narrative.

And… break for lunch. Phew. Our brains were overflowing, but the next hour was a wonderful chance to meet several people I heard speak: Sarah Bartels, Victoria Tedeschi and Rebecca-Anne were all fantastic to chat to, and I’m glad to have made their acquaintance. Working away from my keyboard in a relatively small town means I tend to forget that there are real people out there, talking and thinking about the things I’m interested in. And I can talk to them, in real life. I’m so grateful to the organisers of the symposium, and all the wonderful presenters. I haven’t covered all I sat in on, but these were the most relevant to my work, and this blog.

Many thanks to the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Melbourne University, and whoever the caterers were, for the very delicious lunch.

You can follow Victoria, Rebecca-Anne and Athena on Twitter.

Early Women Photographers: Part I (The Pioneers)

I shared a few early women photographers on Twitter a few days ago, and thought I’d go into a bit more depth here, as a follow on from my posts on Early Women Writers of Fairy Tales and Women Illustrators from the Golden Age of Fairy Tales. Many early women photographers used the fairy tale in their work: limited by social expectations, they stayed close to home and photographed their own friends and family in fashionably allegorical and fantastical scenes. But as you can see here, the very early women pioneers, those working in the 1800s before photography was a respectable hobby, were doing anything but chasing fairies…

Constance Fox Talbot was the wife of the much heralded inventor of photography William Henry Fox Talbot. She is thought to be the first woman to have made a photograph, but doesn’t get much credit for it. At least she is held up for her enthusiasm. Here’s what Maev Kennedy had to say in the Guardian:

There is also a rather dull image of four hazy lines of verse by the Irish poet Thomas Moore, a family friend. It was made by shining sunlight through the original manuscript, on to a piece of treated paper. Ovenden believes it was made by Fox Talbot’s wife, Constance, the first photograph by a woman.

“The archive shows that she was caught up in the excitement of the discovery as early as 1839, and was virtually elbowing him away from the developing table, making her own experiments,” he said.

Anna Atkins and her husband were friends with the Talbots, and she soon began experimenting with photography too. She is also credited by some sources to have made the first photography by a woman. Neither Constance or Anna used a camera for their ‘first’ images, so the title is contentious. Anna is best know for her cyanotypes of botanical samples, which she began creating not long after family friend John Hershal invented the process in 1942. She published a book of her work a year later, the first photographically illustrated publication. Anna dedicated her life to the study of biology and its representation with the cyanotype process, and has left us with a beautiful and scientifically important legacy.

Geneviève Élisabeth Disdéri was an early French photographer. She also began experimenting with photography in 1842 after her marriage to fellow photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri. They ran a studio together in Brest, France until he left for Paris in 1852. She ran the studio alone, until moving to Paris and setting up her own atelier there in 1872. She worked as a portrait photographer for many years, but is best know for her architectural views of Brest.

Thora Hallager brings us back momentarily to Fairy Tales. She was a working portrait photographer, and landlady to Hans Christian Anderson. They wrote often, and she produced a portrait of him in 1869. You can read their letters if your Danish is good, or run them through Google translate, as I have done below. In that letter, he states (as far as I can tell from a clunky translation) how pleased he is with his portrait. It seems that Thora was a professional photographer her whole life, and never married.

Sofia Carolina Ahlbom is described on Wikipedia as “a Swedish drawing artist, engraver, lithographer, photographer, map maker, writer, poet and feminist.” I like her already. She supported her family as a professional artist after moving to Stockholm in 1832, and never married. She was also an active writer, and engaged in politics, particularly regarding women’s rights. Ok, now I would very much like to have her to dinner. I couldn’t find any of her photographs, but I couldn’t not include her.

Julia Margaret Cameron was probably one of the most famous of early women photographers. She started working with photographer late in her life, and photographed almost solely her friends and family, often in allegorical and legendary scenes. She also worked her neighbour, the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, to produce a photographically illustrated book of his poems. Her works were often derided as being limp and fanciful by her (male) contemporaries, but her legacy is a strong one. Her images may often be soft, but the there is no denying the life and power within them.

Julia heralded a new wave of women photographers: women who viewed photography as a means for creative expression. Mostly, these early photographers were of the upper classes, and to keep their respectability stuck subjects close to home. They photographed their children and friends, usually in the garden and grounds of their family home. Photography was suddenly a respectable hobby, which meant a flourishing of images that represented allegory, fantasy and fairy tale.

I will explore the creative lives of Victorian Female Photographers in Part II of this series, next time…

On Public Speaking: A Fairy Tale (of sorts)

Once upon a time, there was a girl who couldn’t speak. Her words caught in her throat, built up in her mouth like a river choked with rocks. She dreaded meeting new people, speaking to shop keepers, even everyday conversations with friends, but most of all she dreaded speaking in public. Anticipating a class presentation, she lost sleep and felt sick for weeks beforehand. Finally sitting down again, after struggling through words that stuck and swelled behind her tongue, she was filled with both relief and mortification. Her most intense joy at finishing school, was that she need NEVER EVER stand up and speak in public again. Of course that was far from the truth, but it did get easier. At University, people were nicer about it, and after that, for the most part she stayed happily out of the spotlight. Over these quiet years: a time of motherhood, art-making, and increasing freelance work and part time jobs that demanded interaction with other people, the blockages started to fall away and words began to run from her like water. She became increasingly passionate about sharing her love of art and stories, and found herself more and more able to discuss them with confidence and enthusiasm. She almost forgot she had a stutter, though it still emerged from time to time. She began to find it easier to speak to a crowd when she needed too, and one day when she was invited to run some school holiday workshops, she suddenly realised that she wasn’t nervous at all. They went well: she told stories and held the interest of her young crowd, they had fun, the clouds parted, birds sang, and they all lived happily ever after.

Right. Well. It goes something like that. Anyone who knows me well, knows that my feelings towards public speaking have long sat alongside my opinions on medieval dentistry and skydiving. Not for me. When placed under pressure, if my words don’t freeze, then my brain does. So, no one was more surprised than me, when I found myself speaking in front of a crowd (admittedly, of mostly 8-12 year olds) and enjoying it. I wasn’t trying to rush to the end; my words didn’t tumble and halt. In fact, I can’t wait to do it again. Being in front of a crowd has become incrementally easier over the years, and certainly doesn’t hold that same classroom terror, but this was the first time that it felt easy. And I think I’ve worked out why.

There were more people there than it looks!

There were more people here than it looks!

A few days after the workshops, I stumbled across an article about public speaking by Adam Grant on Twitter, and there was one quote that felt like a lightning bolt. ‘Don’t try to calm down… Instead of saying “I am calm,” people gave more compelling speeches when they said “I am excited.”’ Grant’s reasoning is that a calm person is a boring one, and anyway it’s near impossible to turn down the adrenaline if it’s already coursing through your veins. So, channel that fear into excitement.

I realised that’s exactly what I had been doing in the workshops. I love and get excited by the mix of art, illustration, storytelling and the representation and interpretation of fairy tales. I love thinking about it and, it turns out, I love talking about it. True enthusiasm imparts far more on-stage confidence than beta blockers and five espressos ever will. Excitement for a subject is the best confidence booster there is. Well, that and knowledge. There’s nothing like that warm feeling of knowing what you’re talking about.

I do have a stutter, and probably always will, but it’s no longer debilitating. In fact I can go days without it ever making an obvious appearance. And I now know that if I’m excited and knowledgable about an idea, I can get it across to other people. I can’t say that I won’t make a numpty out of myself next time, but at least I feel it’s something I can, and want, to do again. And that’s a good feeling.

So if you struggle with speaking, ignore the advice to stay calm or imagine the audience naked (what?) or have a stiff drink beforehand (don’t do that). Do your research, and get excited. And have that stiff drink after.

Do you speak in public? Do you enjoy it? Does it terrify the pants of you? What’s your best advice to those who would rather be getting a root canal?

Review: Marina Warner’s ‘Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale’

Imagine the history of fairy tale as a map, like the Carte du Tendre, the ‘Map of Tenderness’, drawn by Parisian romancers to chart the peaks and sloughs of the heart’s affections… (Loc 50)

So begins the prologue to Marina Warner‘s new book on fairy tales Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. At 226 pages it is a much slimmer follow up to her 1996 book From the Beast to the Blonde, but no less enlightening or engaging. Warner weaves her dialogue beautifully, sometimes slipping into a metaphorical narrative much like fairy tales themselves. This could come across as strained or twee in clumsier hands, but Warner is a confident and self-possessed writer. The great history of storytelling comes to flourishing life under her deft touch. In chapter three, Voices on the Page, while discussing the essence of fairy tales, she writes:

Think of it as a plant genus, like roses or fungi or grasses, which seed and root and flower here and there, changing species and colour and size and shape where they spring. Or think of it as a tune, which can migrate from a voice to a symphony to a penny whistle, for a fairy tale does not exist in a fixed form or medium. The stories’ interest isn’t exhausted by repetition, reformulation, or retelling, but their pleasure gains from the endless permutations performed on the original. (Loc 606)

I have a confession to make. Often, while reading academic writing, my mind tends to wander; my eyes skip over the words. I can get to the end of a piece of writing and hardly be able to tell you anything I just read. I may make something up. Not so in this case. Warner’s language is clear and poetic. She leads you along an open forest path with sure footing and a bright torch. We see fairy tales as they are; not a dusty collection of old and irrelevant stories, but stories that travel, adapt and take on new meanings. She reminds us, on every page, why fairy tales are still relevant and important today. They have never existed in solitude, and Warner leads you through their connections to psychology, feminism, fantasy and the supernatural. She evaluates their history, their meaning, and the way they have woven (and been woven into) our very lives.

The chapters in Once Upon a Time are divided into themes. They range from the factual ‘Voices on the Page’ which introduces many of the tellers, writers and translators of fairy tales, to the barely constrained rally cry of ‘In the Dock: Don’t Bet on the Prince” which details the post-war feminist subversion of the fairy tale. Interestingly, the title references Jack Zipes’ book of feminist fairy tales Don’t Bet on the Prince. Here she celebrates, among others, the feminist works of theoreticist Ruth Bottigheimer, poet Anne Sexton and all-round-fairy-tale-feminist-superstar Angela Carter. One thing that makes this work so engaging is Warner’s refusal to stay neutral. In her dissent from fusty academic writing, she gives us sentences like “Aroused by Freud’s question, ‘What do women want?’, which lies at the centre of conjectures made by (mostly male) analysts, [feminists] seized hold of fairy tales and shook them till the stories choked, spat out the poison, and sat up ready for a different day… Fairy Tales were denounced as a blunt tool of patriarchy, the bourgeoisie, cosmetic surgeons, the fashion industry, physchoanalysts bent on curbing girls’ energies and desires.” (Loc 1522) I heard a whoop in there, didn’t you?

The ideas in this book run deep. If you’re after light bedtime reading, this is no Disney-esque romp. Like tales of old, Warner’s book does far more that skim from ‘once upon a time’ to ‘happily ever after’. There is darkness with the light, and deliberation and passion in her words. While Warner’s writing isn’t hard to read, you’ll still need to put the book down every now and then, to take a walk or stare out the window, to allow the information to sink in. The path she leads us on is clear, but the forest is dense. Your head will fill quickly with new ideas and information. But don’t see this as obstacle. You will finish this book wiser about, and more in awe of, fairy tales, human nature and the many threads that tie our world together.

Thank you to NetGalley and Oxford University Press for the advance reading copy of this book.

Fairy Tales and Narrative Structure

As you all know, I’m working on a project about the lost strong girls of fairy tales. The project involves searching out old tales with strong female protagonists, and illustrating them with my artwork. Another aspect of the project, and a part I’ve only just begun working on, is the rewriting of some of the tales. I tossed up whether to leave them as they were, or re-write, for a long time. I like the idea of keeping them as they are, in their own culture context. Unfortunately the cultural context is all over the place. Some were recorded in the 1700s, some early last century. All were originally taken from the oral tradition, removed from their true context anyway, as a story told in the moment; to a group of listeners, a child caught wandering to close to the woods, around the dying embers of a fire. The storyteller was the holder of these stories, a role vastly different to the author. A storyteller brings stories into everyday life, an author sweeps you away from it. Many of the stories were rewritten several times over several generations, to fit the fashion and morals of the time. Some stories I’ve found are on webpages that look like they haven’t been updated since 1998; without references, and with no mention of whether the story is taken directly from an old (and out of copyright) collection, or written in 1998 by the owner of the website, and therefore very much in copyright.

All of this has lead me to a point where I feel, I think, that I’d like to start afresh; to take the framework of the stories and weave my own narrative between the bones. One, because it feels like it will be a more cohesive book; two, because I want children to enjoy reading them (some of the stories are pretty hard to wade through, or written for a vastly different era); and three, because it’s fun! Really fun.

It has also got me thinking about things like narrative structure, all that cultural context (as above), and the difference it writing between eras. When I write fiction, I usually write short stories. That’s the genre I’m most comfortable in, so to me it’s important to frame my ‘new’ fairy tales within the appropriate constructs of short story. Not in all cases, but often, fairy tales go something like “Intro to characters, moral supposition, this happened, then this happened, then this, the bad people die, the good ones get married and/or untold riches, moral conclusion, everyone live happily ever after”. That, you cannot get away with in a contemporary short story. Readers want to know what characters are feeling, and why they are feeling it; they need to be shown and not told, and they don’t want to see everything laid out in black and white. The best short story, to me anyway, is made up of a whole lot of shades of grey. But not, ahem, fifty.

I feel I’m going to have a whole lot more to say about all of the above, but for now I’m still grasping for ideas, writing, and thinking about writing, and frankly, having a lovely time.

A Tender Beginning: or, why I’m not showing you my new artworks (yet)

After talking and blogging and social media-ing about fairy tales and art for a while, I’m getting back into creating new work. I have a couple exhibitions coming up and a book project waiting for me to get back on board, which means I often begin my day like this:

Not shown: strong black coffee, slice of vegemite toast, existential angst. It’s rare for a photographer to start with a blank canvas. Though, this isn’t technically the beginning of the process for me. I have already photographed the many separate elements and created the silhouettes I need. But it is the beginning of the final artwork. I’ve spoken before about how I create the silhouettes. They are all sitting in the background waiting to be added. If you look closely, you can see some of the file tabs already open behind that blank page.

I’m not sure if I even feel like a photographer at this point. The creation of the final image is a tentative process of layering, pushing and moulding the work into life. Something like painting, sculpting and kindergarten cut-and-pasting all in one.

The Stolen Bairn and the Sidh I (detail)

I usually begin with the silhouettes against a white background, so I can see where they are fitting together, and to make sure I’m not leaving stray bits and pieces when I’m erasing the elements I don’t need. Sometimes, if the background is integral to where the silhouettes are placed, I’ll have it in place, and toggle it on and off when needed. Often, if the background is there simply for atmosphere, I won’t even know what image I’ll use until everything else is in place. Whenever a new layer is pasted in, I alter its blending mode if needed. ‘Multiply’ is wonderful for placing silhouettes with residual tonal detail, as it settles them into the images in a softer way than a direct overlay. They are then scaled and flipped if necessary with the Transform function. (Apologies to those who have no idea what I’m talking about – I’ll be brief I promise). The ‘Liquify’ tool is my friend if slight adjustments are needed to the shape of a silhouette – longer hair, fabric not flowing smoothly, a tree branch not quite reaching the right way. All those layers start to add up, especially when trying alternatives of the same elements and adding multiple adjustment layers. It’s not unusual for the image file to gather 50+ layers and start tipping 3GB in size.

When everything is in place, then begins the long process of standing back, squinting, head tilting and stepping back in to move something three pixels to the left, or dodge and burn parts of the background, or resize a leaf fourteen times, a pixel at a time, before it looks right. The process of tweaking takes at least as long as putting the image together, usually longer. It’s a process of highlighting the important bits, balancing out the composition and making that frankenstein of an image look like a cohesive whole.

The Stolen Bairn and the Sidh I (detail)

The final piece feels raw and still made up of its separate pieces. It is not yet the sum of its parts; a fragile thing, part newborn baby, part freakish conglomeration of arms and legs and liver and lungs, stitched with careful threads. I look at it and see the separate parts that make it; can’t see the forest for the trees. At this point I try to walk away and let it settle for a day, but usually I can’t help peeking in; a nervous new mother checking on a peacefully sleeping baby. I want to show everyone, to see if they see it like I do, but I feel protective of it too. It needs time to grow into itself, to heal from its stitches and become whole. In reality it’s sitting here on the hard drive, a collection of code, but in my mind it’s coming to life. It was a thing that didn’t exist, and now it does. It belongs in the world, but not yet ready to face it.

~~~

I’d love to hear your feelings about the creative process, knowing when something is ‘finished’, and letting go.

Hedgespoken

I tried to work out yesterday how long I’ve been following Rima Staines at The Hermitage. A few years? As long as ten? I really couldn’t tell you. I feel like her work has seeped its way into my being; like it’s been there forever.

Rima’s work feels both contemporary and a very real part of the myth and story of her heritage; as if it has been in our collective conscious for the whole history of storytelling. Her work is about storytelling, and myth, and history, but it has the magic of speaking not as an observer of all that, but from within. Which is why I was so exciting when she announced her new project Hedgespoken.

Rima and her equally incredible partner Tom plan to convert an old Bedford truck into a travelling, off-grid theatre, and home for the two of them. It’s the kind of thing many of us dream of doing. It’s a ‘one day’ thing. But Rima and Tom are doing it now. An artist and a storyteller, both a little of each other, will roam the countryside telling stories; bringing some of their magic to all they touch.

I’ll let them describe a little bit more themselves.

With its drop-down stage, fancy awning and proscenium arch, Hedgespoken will serve as a stage wherever it goes. Whether it’s Tom and Rima telling tales and making mischief with handmade puppet shows, or it’s other actors, musicians or sword-swallowers using the stage-space as part of the Hedgespoken travelling show, our aim is to spread a little old magic by doing what we love. Hedgespoken has the wherewithal to act as a mini-theatre, a cabaret stage or acoustic music venue, anywhere. Perhaps your village green, or that disused urban space, wayside or park – Hedgespoken arrives, makes magic, plants seeds of imagination, and then leaves, in the tradition of wandering bards, travelling storytellers and itinerant puppet theatres and circuses that are so much part of our heritage.

Don’t you wish they’d roll into your town? Tomorrow, at the latest, thank you. I’m writing from afar, and it will be a very long time, if ever, before I see the fruition of their labour in the flesh, but it doesn’t make me any less excited for their project. I have made a donation, for which there are incredibly generous rewards, and I hope you will too. It’s an investment in a dream – one they are living for real, and one I will be living vicariously, all the way down their winding road.

~~~

You can follow Rima, Tom and Hedgespoken on Twitter, donate to Hedgespoken on Indigogo and visit Rima’s website and blog to see more of her work.

Those Tiny Slippers

Did you know that the earliest known version of the Cinderella story was recorded in AD 850-60, in China? The story was already well known in the oral tradition, as Marina Warner points out in her book From the Beast to the Blonde [1], and may have been around much, much earlier.

http://wri10.pbworks.com/w/page/47054203/Heroine

The story centres around Yeh-hsien, a girl who finds herself in servitude to her scheming and envious aunt/stepmother. She is helped by the bones of a fish that was possessed by the spirit of her dead mother, visits a gathering in fine robes, and slips away, leaving behind a single tiny golden slipper. (Sounding familiar?) The king wants to find whoever owns the slipper, the smallest he has ever seen, and… well you know the story. It’s Cinderella, no doubt about it, but a good millennium earlier than the versions we know as the ‘real’ Cinderella. What struck me, and you may have had the same thought too, was how the obsession with the tiny slipper suddenly gains significance when you factor in the cultural context of foot binding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_binding

Foot binding has a long tradition in China, and had horrendous consequences for the girls it was inflicted on. Bones are broken, toes bent under… (Look it up if you dare, but a google image search isn’t for the faint of heart.) The ideal length for a ‘lotus foot’, named for the shape of the bound foot, was 8 centimetres. That’s 3 inches. Women who had their feet bound to dainty points could barely walk, and consequently their freedom was severely restricted. The smaller the foot, the more desirable it was, in part because any wife so crippled by her delicate lotus feet wouldn’t be wandering far.

So, while the tiny glass slipper in contemporary Cinderella stories signifies her delicate beauty in a relatively innocent way, tying it back into its earlier cultural context suddenly brings a much darker significance to the tale. Cinderella wouldn’t have been dancing until midnight on those tiny feet.

1. Page 202, From The Beast to the Blonde, Marina Warner, 1994

Brave Girls of Fairy Tales

For those new to my work, I thought I’d give you a brief introduction into what I do. My recent artwork has been focussed strongly on strong girls and women in fairy tales.

Vasilisa

They may be Vasilisa who outwitted the Baba Yaga and her own wicked sisters, the Scottish single mother who rescued her son from the faery-like Sidh, the Japanese daughter of the Moon who refused an earthly marriage, the African Moremi who questioned her people’s blind faith in those disguised as gods and ventured alone into an enemy town. They are the women who acted bravely and independently within a male dominated society, and those who ruled their own. They are the girls who survived and prospered because of their own bravery, kindness and wisdom. They are the characters and protagonists who all but disappeared in the face of the Victorian era’s dictates on the female place in society. They are the girls and women who deserve to have their stories brought back to new readers.

Baba Yaga’s House

The advent of the fairy tale’s golden age in the late 19th and early 20th Century was a boon for the cultural spread of traditional stories, and for fairy tales as we know them today, but a great loss for the representation of girls and women in those tales. The imposition of Victorian values onto the stories meant that any female character with a whiff of independence or initiative was rewritten, or written out, completely. My hope is to bring those protagonists back to light.

A Mother’s Gift I & II

A Mother’s Gift I & II were created as illustrations for an old Gaelic fairy tale; The Stolen Bairn and the Sidhe. The story evokes the power of a mother’s love, in the telling of a woman who bribes her baby back from the fairies who have taken him, thinking him an orphan. She makes a harp from driftwood and bones, and strings it with her own hair, and a blanket woven also from her hair. As they were given of herself and made with a mother’s love, the blanket is the softest ever felt, and the harp the sweetest sounding. The fairies can’t resist her gifts, and she is reunited with her baby boy.

When not directly interpreting fairy tales, I often still use them as inspiration, as in Wild Swans below.

Wild Swans

All of my work is created through the medium of photography. I photograph each element of the image separately, then digitally manipulate and montage them together. In the case of A Mother’s Gilft I & II, about twelve individual photographs were used for each image. Many of my other images have used upwards of fifty. I will talk further about my process in a future post.

If you’d like to see more of my work, you can visit my website here, and watch the short video below.

The Impostor Mother: Stepmother as Scapegoat in Fairy Tales.

When you think of the ‘bad’ mothers in contemporary readings of fairy tales, what do they have in common with each other, apart from a selfish and wicked personality and, more often than not, unenviable looks? It is the distancing from the real mother, that important and literal step away from true motherhood. The stepmother in fairy tales, unlike the true good mother, is unmoved by the presence of the child; often she is actively aggressive towards the story’s small protagonist. She is the maleficent other.

http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/The_Evil_Queen

In reality, what mother hasn’t felt like the evil stepmother some days? We are flawed and human, and complicated. We are not ‘just’ mothers. We feel anger and jealously and frustration, and sometimes, inevitably, our children feel the impact.

So why, in children’s stories, do we divide the mother so starkly? A true mother is perpetually kind, patient and lovely (and usually dead before the beginning of most fairy tales, but that’s a subject for another day) while the selfish and snappish parts of us are embodied by the impostor; the stepmother. She will be a threat, a hateful thing, and usually dead, this time by the end of the story. She won’t be grieved.

This wasn’t always the case. In early versions of the Grimms’ telling of Snow White for example, as Marina Warner points out in her chapter on the absent mother in From the Beast to the Blonde, the Queen felt rage and jealousy towards her own daughter. The brothers later demurred, and transformed her into a stepmother. But why?

http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Lady_Tremaine

Undeniably the stepmother, especially in European tales, has been a common presence. In the 18th Century, when many stories were being recorded for the first time, divorce was not common, but death was; through illness and childbirth. The single father was a rare and impractical thing indeed, so widowers were quick to remarry. Not for love, but as a mother for their children and runner of their household. Widows on the other hand were absorbed back into their families. So, with their mother not long dead and barely given the chance to take in their loss, let alone grieve, children were often placed in charge of a new mother, childless or sometimes bringing her own. But is this enough to explain the power and abundance of the wicked stepmother in fairy tales?

Freud claimed that a child cannot possibly comprehend the coexistence of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in their own mother, and needs to split them into two distinct beings. Fairy tales help to delineate the difference, and give the child comfort in the reinforcement of their mother as benevolent and kind.

Lorena Carrington @2014

However, I feel the denial of the flawed mother in stories might be more related to our own adult ideals and desires. Children are cleverer and more perceptive than we give often them credit for, while were are often blind to our own faults. Raised on fairy tales ourselves, we want to be on the side of good. Sometimes we hurt our children with careless words. Sometimes we are jealous of them. Our children know we are flawed, but by giving them the safety of the good and pure mother in stories we construct an ideal of ourselves which they (and we) hold on to, because what is the alternative? The cloak swishing, claw fingered impostor mother. She might make an appearance at the end of an exhausting day, or in the third hour of an interminable car trip, but when we tuck our children into bed at night, we are ourselves again, the gentle, kind and true mother. Stories let both our children and ourselves hold onto the conviction that, at the end of the day, the wicked impostor has been banished and truly we are good.

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Further Reading:

For a modern and deliciously terrifying interpretation of the impostor mother, read Neil Gaiman’s Coraline.

Danielle Wood doesn’t shy away from duality and complicated emotions of motherhood in her recent book Mothers Grimm. Based on four of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales, she writes unflinchingly about contemporary motherhood.

If you’re interested in the meaning and history of fairy tales, Marina Warner’s From the Beast to the Blonde is deep and wonderful. You’ll need to read it several times to absorb the wealth of information held within.