But if the fairy story manifests today in splintered form, warping and wefting in and out of other newer and more complicated tales, the original stories, their narrative structures and dramatis personae, continue to sound in everyday life and to offer, at moments of crisis, the childhood comfort of a contained universe. Fractured fairy stories are the commonplace of 101 Creative Writing, the analysis of arch-narrative begins the teaching of many film-studies courses, and the World Wide Web provides fan-fiction writers with an endless opportunity to pervert or dismantle any tale that hints at a traditional form. This rewriting, dismantling, and redeployment of the fairy story has continued apace throughout the later decades of the twentieth century.The most startling version of this is perhaps His Dark Materials 4, a trilogy in which Philip Pullman draws on elements of the fairy tale to introduce a generation of young readers to the death of God. For decades now, children have read Roald Dahl’s wicked rewritings, in which heroes are horrid and villains sweet. Pullman, His Dark Material, Laurel Lead Random House, New York, 2003.ģThe young women of my generation were delighted by the discovery of such versions and by the contemporary rewriting of fairy stories by authors such as Angela Carter, who reversed the narrative and dramatis personae of fairy tales to provide girls with villainous and victorious models of femininity. The girl makes off while the wolf is left waiting for his dinner, until in a final loss of dignity he calls out: “Little Red Riding Hood are you making a load?” I wonder what Bettlelheim 3 would make of this displacement, in which the girl hero wins out by a witty deployment of faeces? In this older version of the story, Little Red Riding Hood escapes being devoured by the feminine ploy of pretending to need to go to the toilet.
In one I particularly like, the girl outwits the wolf by answering his orality with a sardonic anality. Today, I cannot view Little Red Riding Hood’s innocent picture without being reminded of other versions of the tale. In other words, it is to remember those youthful moments when the inequities of the fairy story registered as signifying real constraints on a sexed self.
Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Knopf, New (.)ĢTo see Puss in Boots is to remember not only the enchantment of a canny and mischievous cat, but also to recall an adolescent yearning to feel feet slip into oversized soft leather boots capable of transforming the constrained steps of an adolescent girl into the seven-league leaps of an o’er vaulting ego. The underbelly of this fantasy of the good nation has been the dispossession of indigenous Australians, The White Australia Policy, the assimilation practices of the twentieth century, a pronounced antipathy towards the feminine and the intellectual, and the continued cultural policing of traits that carry the stain of difference. Elsewhere I have called this fantasy structure the Australian Good, and argued that the fantasy of Australia as a good and neighbourly nation repeats and frames a disparate set of cultural practices, discourses and historical epochs. Intense antipathy to indigenous Australians and non-Anglo migrants has been integral to Australia’s culture and history, but in white mythology, Australia is a culture of an enhanced generosity and goodness. I suggest here, that the fairy story - an essentially conservative and mythologising narrative - provided the retroactive means for the Australian nation to internalise and narrativise the emergence of a populist far-right party in Australia in the1990’s. In this essay I’m interested in the retroactive invention of Hansonella, a fairy-tale heroine created to assimilate the Australian nation’s racist excess.
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