Fairy Tales Updated

Jen just picked up the book Cinderella and the Glass Ceiling by Laura Lane and Ellen Haun, two young comedy writers and performers, with illustrations by Nicole Miles.

It's a collection of short retellings of fairy tales from a feminist and funny perspective. Cool!

Once upon a time there were two little girls who loved princesses... but then they grew up, gained some life experience, read some books that weren’t written by the Brothers Grimm and realized that most fairy tales are some patriarchal, heteronormative, white supremacist bullsh*t. So they rewrote them. (source)

Awesome, no? Mostly yes but the storytelling is pretty uneven. The best reimagined tales, to my mind, were Snow White, Thumbelina (not everyone wants to settle down, ya know?), Peter Pan (P.P.'s an asshole and Tink is freed!) and The Princess and the Pea (some princesses are into other princesses NOT princes).

The title story, Cinderella, was the most disappointing but mebbe that's just me. Also too, while their version of Sleeping Beauty was wickedly amusing, it was, at the same time, mega frustrating.

There’s the whole hot issue of Beauty’s “true love” being the only one who can wake her, with a kiss. How can the prince, a man she’s never met, be her “true love?” This conundrum was neatly solved in the movie Maleficent. The princely smooch OF COURSE didn’t work but a peck from her long time guardian-at-a-distance, her champion and trusted mother figure, Maleficent, did the trick. It was a tidy and much less credence straining solution

In Lane and Haun’s sketch there’s no fairy godmother to save the day. The prince DOES wake the sleeping Beauty BUT it happens amidst a huge diatribe on consent. Beauty didn’t agree or invite the kiss. That’s bad, OF COURSE it is, but she would never have woken (according to the story’s parameters) without it.

Sleeping Beauty by John William Waterhouse

The Lane/Haun prince was gonna be the bad guy, the asshole, whether he kissed or not.

In the original, Giambattista Basile, fable, Sleeping Beauty (Talia) is raped by a king who was just passing through and saw her and couldn't resist (what an entitled shitheel!). She doesn’t wake until after the twins, the result of said rape, are born. The king then, coincidentally, visits the now roused Talia.

He was overjoyed, and he told Talia who he was, and how he had seen her, and what had taken place. When she heard this, their friendship was knitted with tighter bonds, and he remained with her for a few days. (source)

Yeah, falling in love with your rapist? Sure, that's just wickedly plausible! //snort// This is also, pretty much, a dead give away that  the author, Signore Basile, didn’t know, let alone understand, any actual, live, breathing women.

Back to the Lane/Haun book – more than a few of the tales read like, maybe, they were banged out after a few drinkies. Ya know, fast, scattered and we're-on-a-deadline-here! Still, it was mostly a lot of fun.

Now I want to find Barbara Walker’s collection, Feminist Fairy Tales.