What "Fairy Tale" Endings Meant, Once Upon a Time

'Little Red Riding Hood', Maxfield Parrish, 1897

Fairy tales are badly misunderstood. When we talk about 'fairy tale' romances, as Chloe Angyal did in The Age recently, we ignore the darker and more subversive history of these ubiquitous stories and the essential part of the women who originally told them. If you only know fairy tales from the simpering princesses in Disney films, then you're missing out on cross-dressing swordswomen, defecating girls and sexually active maidens.

While it is 200 years since the Grimms collected fairy tales as an academic exercise to preserve the folklore of Germany, the passing of time has made us forget that it is not the Grimms who invented them. Fairy tales were usually told by the fireside in the evening as people, mostly women, worked at essential chores such as spinning. It is no surprise then that the tales the women spun, such as Rumpelstiltkin, often included the spinning wheel as a symbol of their labour.

These oral tales were not specifically intended for children and early versions are frequently crude and highly sexual. In one version of 'Little Red Riding Hood' collected by the Grimms, but later made wholesome when the second edition of their Children's and Household Tales was published for a wider audience, the heroine escapes the wolf by telling him she has to go outside to "make a load". Before the Grimms removed references to sex, the witch who keeps Rapunzel imprisoned in a tower knows her not-so-innocent prisoner has been letting down her hair for a man when her clothes become too tight because she is pregnant.

'Rapunzel', Wanda Gag, 1936

Various cultures have their own variants of these tales that are perhaps not 'as old as time' as Disney suggested in their 'Beauty and the Beast', but which have a far longer history than we afford them. The Chinese equivalent of Cinderella, Yeh-hsien, dates from AD 850. In place of a fairy godmother, a ten-foot long fish rewards her with gold, pearls, dresses and food. 

In seventeenth century France, it was women who pioneered the literary fairy tale that adapted oral tales for educated adult salon audiences. History has erased these women from public view, such as Madame d'Aulnoy who coined the term contes de fées (fairy tales) and wrote several volumes of them. We tend to only acknowledge Charles Perrault, who wrote the version of 'Cinderella' (minus Walt Disney's pumpkin) that we know today.

French fairy tale writers created many stories that did not survive the process of sanitising fairy tales for children that the Grimms began in the nineteenth century. Women were not helpless princesses waiting for Prince Charming in these fairy tales. In Marie-Jeanne LʼHéritier's 'Marmoisan' (which I read recently at the Monash Fairy Tale Reading Group), the heroine, Leonore, dresses as her twin brother, Marmoisan, to take his place in war and distinguishes herself in battle. Marmoisan died in disgrace after he attempted to scale a rope ladder to rape a married woman and was impaled upon her waiting husband's sword. 

These literary fairy tales and many of the oral versions do not show women as victims and men and heroes as we expect today. Passive and obedient heroines have been gradually introduced by male collectors and re-tellers of the tales across the past two-hundred years, especially as they have sought to socialise children into masculine and feminine roles. The glittery Disney collection of princesses obscures the way that fairy tales often showed girls as mentally or physically strong. They also criticised and punished men for their exploitation of women.

While Little Red Riding Hood can kill the wolf in a pot of boiling sausage water in one early version, by the time of Perrault's first written adaptation in 1697, she is relegated to his dinner. The Grimms then transformed what was often a bawdy story to one entirely about female dependence. Their version introduces the figure of the huntsman who saves Red by cutting the wolf open with a pair of scissors.

The Grimms also excised all traces of sexuality from their heroines and instead promoted stifling ideas of feminine innocence and purity. While this is partially understandable given their intent to revise the tales for children, at the same time as deleting the sex, they ramped up the gory violence in ways not present in the oral tales they were supposedly recording. In their second edition of tales, they decided to punish Cinderella's step-sisters by having their eyes pecked out by birds. 

Paradoxically, if we want our culture to present girls and women with empowering models of femininity, in the main, the seventeenth century versions of fairy tales are better candidates than those of recent times. Some literary writers such as Angela Carter have already rewritten fairy tales in a way that returns power to their heroines. Yet the current crop of film and television fairy tale adaptations, such as Mirror, Mirror and Once Upon a Time, have the potential to overturn the popular trend of passive heroines in fairy tales in the past two centuries on a wider scale.

If we look to the history of fairy tales, we can see amid the hundreds of variants of each tale how much they have changed across time and place. The pink princess culture that absorbs many girls today is something that they have internalised from more recent conservative, sanitised versions of fairy tales that suggest that a woman's greatest achievement is to be innocent and beautiful. If we returned to telling the fairy tales of old, aspiring to be a fairy tale princess wouldn't necessarily be such a bad thing.

As part of the Glen Eira Storytelling Festival, the Monash University Fairy Tale Reading Group is hosting a fairy tale salon inspired by those of 17th Century France on 23 June at Monash Caulfield.

Victorian-Era Beauty Advertisements: Part One

I had the pleasure of being invited to speak at The Johnston Collection (which includes the wonderful Fairhall House museum) last week on beauty in Victorian girls' and women's magazines. I chose magazines in particular because the second half of the nineteenth century was a time in which more people became literate, more magazines were able to be published more affordably, and technological improvements meant illustrations and fashion plates became commonplace. Magazines were the dominant media form, especially as books remained relatively expensive. Not only were women specifically targeted as readers in the nineteenth century, but they were also newly imagined as consumers. The arrival of the the department store, a concept borrowed from France, transformed how items for the self and the home were bought, with their extensive ranges of branded goods arranged in lavish displays designed to be browsed. The illustration above of a woman selecting from a choice of hats from Myra's Journal of Dress and Fashion (Sept. 1885) is one of many depictions of women in the act of shopping that showed its new-found importance to femininity.

Most magazines became heavily dependent on advertising. Even quality publications like The Queen (which became Harper's and Queen) placed ads on almost half of its pages by the mid-1880s. While people complain about ads taking up column inches and screen space today, the strong presence of advertising in the print media is not new. For girls' and women's magazines, the ads that were included were often for products that promised to improve the reader's appearance, with corsets, skin creams and hair products featuring regularly.

Cosmetics, however, had a bad name for encouraging artifice and deception. Charlotte Yonge, the editor of the Anglican girls' magazine The Monthly Packet and author of popular books such as The Daisy Chain opposed cosmetics as a form of lie: "All attempts to pretend to beauties that we do not possess are clearly falsehood, and therefore wrong." Young women in particular were warned away from cosmetics because they were considered more vulnerable to potential damage to their "moral character" because of their sexual associations.

Cosmetics were therefore not commonly advertised but products that would purportedly improve the skin by removing freckles, tans, redness and roughness were promoted because they did not transgress beliefs about "natural" beauty being superior than artificial aids. This ad for Beetham's Glycerine and Cucumber from Woman (11 April 1894) promises to give the user soft, smooth and white skin that "blooms".

Along with facial creams, hair products also promised natural improvements to a woman's beauty. Koko for the hair, for instance, is described as a "hair food" that promises to do everything from preventing greyness to eradicating dandruff, but it was not only the hair that benefitted from treatment, as the ad suggests that Koko also stimulated the brain. After brushing with Koko readers are directed to look into a mirror to see the increased "brilliancy" in their eyes, which suggests a benefit to health and well-being, not only appearance.

In the lecture I showed a contemporary Maybelline magazine ad featuring the company's familiar slogan "Maybe She's Born With It. Maybe It's Maybelline" to show the continuation of these ideas about natural beauty (or at least cultivating the appearance of natural beauty) in advertising. It's a real conundrum that women are encouraged to desire products that will "improve" their looks, but they ought to be working to make it seem as if they were "born with" their cosmetically enchanced charms. The many contradictions surrounding women's beauty in Victorian magazines seemed to strike the audience at the lecture as none too dissimilar from those we see in the popular media today. And nowhere are these resonances more obvious than in early advertisements for weight loss, such as Trilene tablets, which promised to "cure corpulency permanently". With that degree of effectiveness, how surprising that they're not still in manufacture.

PART TWO TO COME...

Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls Conference, 13-14 June 2012

The poster for the Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls conference is now finished. Kristine Moruzi and I are very excited to be hosting so many people from around the world whose work we admire in Melbourne in June.

Our keynote speakers are historian Professor Angela Woollacott from the Australian National University and English scholar Associate Professor Cecily Devereux from the University of Alberta, Canada. Professor Devereux's lecture will be a free public lecture on the evening of the 14th of June from 6.00pm in Elisabeth Murdoch, Theatre A, at the University of Melbourne's Parkville campus. The talk is entitled "Fashioning the Colonial Girl: ‘Made in Britain’ Femininity in the Imperial Archive".

Registration is now open for the two conference days. We have a conference site ready with further details about the event and a link to our secure registration site.

Book Cover: A Thorny Way, Mary Bradford Whiting

Part of the difficulty of working on historical books for young people is that much of the basic information that you can readily find for adult literature has not yet been compiled. Though there are some excellent bibliographies of Australian children's literature, it's still not that simple to locate everything that is out there, nor much reliable biographical material about the authors themselves.

Kerry M. White lists Mary Bradford Whiting among lesser-known Australian authors of girls' family stories, yet I can't find much about her that indicates that she lived in Australia at any point. A Thorny Way was published by Thomas Nelson and Sons in London, and it was not an uncommon route for Australian children's writers to publish via an English publisher. What I can find suggests that Bradford Whiting predominantly wrote religious publications for the Christian Knowledge Society and Religious Tract Society.

We cannot accuse her of not embracing diversity as, in addition to her foray into girls' books, she also published a book on Dante with Cambridge and wrote Shakespeare criticism in the Gentlemen's Magazine. Some of these publishing avenues suggest that she had nothing to do with Australia whatsoever. Yet Austlit shows that she published several children's books set in Australia, including Peggy and Pat: A Tale of the Australian Bush (1931), Josee: An Australian Story (192-) and Wallaby Hill (189-). And let us not forget A Daughter of the Empire (1919), which looks like a must-read.

Sadly for me, it seems A Thorny Way is set in England, so I will join the heroine in casting my head down on the desk in despair.

Book Cover: Gem of the Flat, Constance Mackness

For the 3-year project I'm working on, 'From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Australian, New Zealand and Canadian Print Culture, 1840-1940' , I've begun buying Australian girls' books in earnest. British girls' books, I'm finding, are much more readily available for sale online, possibly because they had much larger print runs. Some of the Australian titles are simply not to be found, or rare copies are being sold for hundreds of dollars.

Many of the covers are very striking and ornate, so I'll share a few here. This copy of Gem of the Flat (Angus & Robertson, 1914) by Constance Mackness has its paper spine illustration intact. I was surprised to see that the cover images were illustrated by May Gibbs, of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie fame. These sorts of girls' books with elaborate covers were often given as gifts and prizes, as was this one, which is inscribed "To Mary, With much love from Auntie Minnie + Uncle Sidney, Ballarat, Australia, October 1930."

Stepping Back in Time: Reviewing Caitlin Flanagan's Girl Land

The first I knew about Girl Land was a parody produced by Bitch magazine to mimic LOLcats. A series of cat photographs were overlaid with old-fashioned quotations about how girls should be. This sounded intriguing. First: here was a book about the history of girlhood. Second: feminists hated it.

Caitlin Flanagan’s Girl Land will not be released in Australia until April, but I bought an ebook and started reading on my laptop straight away. Part of the criticism levelled at Flanagan is that she has not talked to any actual girls in order to write her book. As I work on girlhood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I think a lot can be gained by understanding how girlhood was culturally constructed in the past and by comparing how these constructions have changed. A book on how girlhood has transformed in the United States from the 1920s could be extremely valuable, but, sadly, Flanagan has not fully exploited the potential of the histories of girlhood to help us think about contemporary girlhood.

It seems it is something a sport to tear the book to shreds, but I must join the chorus of critique, even if I did find some sections of the book illuminating. To begin with the obvious, the very title and concept of female adolescence as “Girl Land” is a bit twee, suggesting it is an almost “magical” state that is lost through sexual maturity. Boys don’t feel the same way, it seems. They don’t even care about their old toys, unlike girls who feel emotionally connected to them because they mourn the loss of their childhood. Flanagan must have watched Toy Story to gain this information.

One of the central premises of Girl Land is that a girl is “a creature designed for a richly lived interior life…in a way most boys are not” (6). This means that girls like to spend time alone in their room pondering, writing in diaries and reading. Flanagan hit a raw nerve when she jumped from this nostalgic idea of diaries with little metal locks and keys, to suggesting that girls should not have computers with access to the internet in their rooms.

I agree with Flanagan’s suggestion that how girls choose to record their interior lives has changed, and that through using the internet they both reflect “on their emotional lives" and "broadcast the ephemeral enthusiasms of their Girl Land" (61). Well, I don’t know about the “Girl Land” bit, but there is indeed pressure to keep up another kind of online identity, composed of Facebook photos, carefully worded profiles and suitably up-to-date references and memes. We have seen problems with cyberbullying, in that young people no longer come home and escape from schoolyard problems. Harassment can continue at any time of the week online via email or on social networks, or via text messages.

Yet Flanagan does not fully draw out what being part of the first generation raised from birth with computers and the internet is like. I’m quite amazed to see the kinds of websites girls now code and design in a way that I could not manage as an adult, as well as the online comics and stories they create. What might be the positive and empowering aspects of access to the internet for girls? Instead of considering the answer to this question, Flanagan recalls her own girlhood periods of respite in her bedroom in her “forest green tracksuit” (it sums up the lack of social pressure within the sanctuary of a girl’s bedroom) and suggests that the internet “violates” the sacred space of the room “and robs [girls] of the essential requirements of keeping a diary” (62).

I think this is where we find the launching pad for criticism to get ugly. Who says keeping a diary is essential to girlhood? Girls are writing blogs, making sophisticated compilations of images (some of which they have photographed themselves) on sites like tumblr, and keeping their thoughts on their own Facebook pages. If these are kinds of diaries, then it would have been useful to include more evidence about what the transformation from private to public actually means in terms of diaries. Do girls see it as a kind of “performance” as Flanagan argues (63)? And how different is it to “perform” some of the time, as she acknowledges they did in the halcyon days of the early twentieth century, versus “all the time”?

The fodder for ugliness continues in the chapter on dating, which argues that girls are extremely vulnerable to assault. This claim is borne out by Flanagan’s personal recollection of a boy who wouldn’t take no for an answer on a date until she began yelling and kicking. It is indeed true that many women are subject to sexual assault and that it is a serious and real issue for girls and women, especially in developing countries beyond the United States, which is Flanagan’s focus. Setting back the cause of feminism somewhat, Girl Land proclaims: “The father is the first line of defense between between a girl and the men who would exploit her sexually”(31). Flanagan describes the tradition of boys meeting fathers as serving as a kind of “warning” not to assault, and in her concluding section, in which she provides ham-fisted advice on how to raise today’s girls, she asserts that the number of single-mother households is to blame for an increase in date rape (132).

And it doesn’t get any better in the chapter on menstruation. Critics have seized on Flanagan’s claims that today’s girls “anticipate menstruation with excitement, as a marker of the coming glamour of the teen years” (34). Now, not that my own memories are any better evidence than Flanagan’s, but I was absolutely mortified by menarche, as I was not yet eleven, and there were very few girls who had their period in grade six. After a younger child found a used pad or tampon in one of the toilet cubicles, a special toilet was designated with a sanitary bin inside and a sign on the door that read “Grade 6 and 7 girls only”. This meant that anyone who went inside had their period. No one ever went inside that toilet in front of anyone else. As far as I know no girl ever used it. It was not a marker of pride or joy twenty years ago, but who is to say that today’s girls are not connecting painful cramping and stained underpants with boyfriends and romance as Flanagan contends?

Nevertheless, the menstruation chapter does highlight some of the achievements of the book in re-telling the social history of American girls. Girl Land provides a fascinating description of the evolution of sanitary products and how their marketing became entwined with the new world of teens in advertisements such as "The Story of Menstruation", which was funded by Kotex and animated by Disney. Sections in the dating chapter that draw together historical books and pamphlets of dating advice for girls, as well as parenting manuals, are entertaining and revealing.

However, it is just one problematic aspect of Girl Land that sources such as G. Stanley Hall’s Adolescence, Flanagan’s own memories of girlhood, The Diary of Anne Frank and fictions such as Judy Blume’s Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret? and, I kid you not, The Exorcist are treated as equivalent sources of evidence. Each of the eras considered in Girl Land ought to be grounded in a broader sense of what concepts of girlhood were like and how it was evolving in relation to social and cultural norms. More recent history suffers the worst fate by allowing Blume and the possessed Regan to explain the transition between bobby soxers and Team Edward.

The prom chapter also offers something worth the attention of girls' studies scholars, not only in the form of quotations from early guides to hosting proms, but in the actual analysis of prom that Flanagan offers up. Prom had its origins in the 1920s, and was in some ways directed by girls in a manner that debutante balls were not, but also, Flanagan argues, prom allowed parents to reel in the liberation the girls and women had fought for in the previous decade, specifically during the war. Flanagan is not sufficiently anti-feminist to deny the socially conservative origins of prom in its adult intervention into girls’ romantic life and the return of adult supervision and formal protocols of restraint. It is also useful to consider how little prom has changed, as Flanagan argues, in that superficially the traditions of boys turning up on the front porch with a corsage in hand and the strict pronouncements on how girls and boys may interact at prom remain in place. Nevertheless, Flanagan suggests that what has changed is the after-party ritual at which “Pimps and Hos” is supposedly the usual theme. Flanagan explains that this produces a contradiction: “Girls have intentionally combined two events, one composed of traditions that suggest a very formal way of being a teenager, and one composed of behaviors that suggest the exact opposite” (110).

I don’t disagree with the idea that girls and women are increasingly barraged with competing images and ideals of how to be. But many of the causes Flanagan identities for these contradictory ideals and proposed solutions for making girls’ lives better are devoid of any solid foundation. The popular media definitely encourages an “increasingly sexualized teen culture”, but Flanagan inexplicably blames rap music in particular (123), and, subsequently, the mainstreaming of pornography. She is not simple enough in her thinking to fall for the moral panics over “rainbow parties” and “oral sex crazes”, instead measuring her assessment to note “a major shift in modern sexual habits and expectations” (118). I came away from Girl Land without an understanding of what this shift entails and what it means for girls, apart from a sense that mothers and fathers need to rally to protect their children “in a kind of postapocalyptic landscape…from pornography and violent entertainment” (125).

In all this, girls are victims and girls should be, and are, afraid. Girls suffer a greater emotional drain during adolescence because “they are forced to confront the sexual attention of men” (45) while “men and boys are not as likely to be wounded, emotionally and spiritually, by early sexual experience, or by sexual experience entered into without romantic commitment” (123). It is disappointing that a woman who has spent significant time reading through many historical advice manuals to girls and parents could not see how her own claims reproduce sexist ideas about girls. Much like Bettina Arndt’s article in the Age today that argues men cannot help staring at breasts, Flanagan also reproduces sexist ideas about men.

Lego Friends Video

It's heartening to see that the criticism of the Lego Friends range for girls is rolling on. The following video, produced by Feminist Frequency, draws together some intriguing Lego ads from the 1980s onward that show the company's attempts to produce a range to entice girls to enter the world of Lego. It is dispiriting to realise that the collective picture of these attempts is that girls want to make jewellery, click together simple pieces that have pre-determined outcomes and fantasise about princes.

I'm looking forward to part two of this series, which promises to take us on a historical tour of advertisements for Lego featuring boys, including Zack the Lego Maniac.