Heroines

Some time ago, out of interest, I pulled a list of ‘Children’s Classics’ off Wikipedia.  There were 66 titles, and Aesop’s Fables headed the list with William Caxton’s edition of 1484.  Apart from a couple of obscure titles - at least, I have never heard of ‘A Token for Children’ by James Janeway, and ‘A Pretty Little Pocket Book’ by John Newbery - I can hand on heart say that I encountered most of them during my own childhood.  'Robinson Crusoe’, ‘Ivanhoe’, ‘The Swiss Family Robinson’, ‘The Coral Island’, ‘Journey to The Centre of the Earth’, ‘Uncle Remus’,‘Black Beauty’, ‘Treasure Island’, ‘The Happy Prince’. Tick, tick, tick.  And so on. 

What strikes me now is the extreme scarcity of heroines in these books. Fairytales apart, there are only 12 stories out of the entire 66 in which the main character is female: they are ‘Little Goody Twoshoes’ (1765), ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ (1865) and ‘Through the Looking Glass’ (1871), ‘Little Women’ (1868), ‘What Katy Did’ (1873), ‘Heidi’ (1884), ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ (1900), ‘Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm’ (1903), ‘Pollyanna’ (1913), ‘A Little Princess’ (1905), ‘Anne of Green Gables’ (1908), and perhaps Mary Lennox of ‘The Secret Garden’. There are some deceptive titles which sound as though they are going to be about heroines, such as ‘Lorna Doone’ (1869) and ‘The Princess and the Goblin’ (1871) but these are really more about the male protagonists, John Ridd and Curdie.

  

Even though the last book on the list was published in 1918, many – in fact most – of these titles formed part of my reading a full half century later. As a child growing up in the sixties, I can’t say I consciously noticed the absence of strong female characters, since naturally I identified with the hero, whoever he might be.  I swam lagoons with Jack, Ralph and Peterkin, roistered and swashbuckled with D’Artagnan, escaped across the heather with Alan Breck, roamed the jungle with Mowgli – but I did notice the rare occasions when the main character was a strong heroine. This, I think, is why so many of us loved – loved – Katy Carr, Jo March and Anne of Green Gables.  We were resigned to encountering girly girls in books. And by girly girls, I mean girls filtered though a conservatice male imagination. Girls who needed to be rescued, who swooned on manly breasts, like Lorna Doone.  Girls who were sweetly domestic, decorative, helpless and good like David Copperfield’s Dora.  Girls who were ill-treated victims like Sara Crewe.  Or else girls who simply were not there at all. It was a literary world in which boys were allowed to be Peter Pan but girls were condemned to be Wendy.

So we were thrilled when Katy lost her temper, disobeyed her aunt and swung in that swing; all the Victorian stuff about becoming an invalid and the heart of the family hardly seemed to count in comparison.  Some of Susan Coolidge's writing is still extremely funny. You can sense her delight in her heroine's realistically child-like outbursts.  Here's Katy inventing a break-time game:

…Katy’s unlucky star put it into her head to invent a new game, which she called the Game of Rivers.  It was played in the following manner: - each girl took the name of a river and laid out for herself an appointed path through the room, winding among the desks and benches, and making a low roaring sound, to imitate the noise of water.  Cecy was the Plate; Marianne Brooks, a tall girl, the Mississippi; Alice Blair, the Ohio; Clover, the Penobscot, and so on.  They were instructed to run into each other once in a while because, as Katy said, ‘rivers do’.  As for Katy herself, she was ‘Father Ocean’, and, growling horribly, raged up and down the platform where Mrs Knight usually sat.  Every now and then… she would suddenly cry out, ‘Now for a meeting of the waters!’ whereupon all the rivers bouncing, bounding, scrambling, screaming, would turn and run towards Father Ocean, while he roared louder than all of them put together, and made short rushes up and down, to represent the movement of waves on a beach.

Naturally they get into trouble, but anyone can see it's worth it to have had so much fun.  And Jo March, too, could lose her temper, and acted – in boots! – and wrote stories, and did things. While as for Anne – impulsive, rebellious, outspoken Anne –   

“How dare you call me skinny and ugly?  How dare you say I’m freckled and red-headed?  How would you like to have such things said about you?  How would you like to be told that you are fat and clumsy and probably hadn’t a spark of imagination in you?  I don’t care if I do hurt your feelings by saying so!  I hope I hurt them.  You have hurt mine worse than they were ever hurt before even by Mrs Thomas’s intoxicated husband.  And I’ll never forgive you for it, never, never!”

Such girls seemed to be going places.  The trouble was that there wasn’t really anyplace for them to go.  I don’t know why the imaginations of the women who created them could come up with so few goals in an era that was producing strong women by the bucketload: in the States, the early suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton; in Britain reformers like Florence Nightingale, Josephine Butler, the Pankhursts. Writing and teaching figured largely. Anne of Green Gables becomes Anne of Ingleside, a teacher, marries Gilbert Blythe and has children.  Jo marries Professor Bhaer not Laurie (this we could hardly forgive, though it may be more realistic!); she does become a writer, but then goes all matriarchal and nurturing and 'womanly'.  Katy travels to Europe and marries a young naval officer who is attracted to her because of her – wait for it – selfless nursing skills. No one becomes a doctor or a politician or a reformer.

So the vigorous rushing rivers of Katy’s game end up flowing decorously into the great calm land-locked sea of wife-and-motherhood.  Still, at least these books gave expression, release, validation to the passion and energy of growing girls.  Nowadays we take it for granted.  My own daughters were never very interested in Little Women or Anne of Green Gables.  They didn’t find Jo an exciting rebel but a prissy homebody taking covered baskets of Christmas dinner to the poor, selflessly selling her hair. (Her hair?  What?  Why?)

In Enid Blyton’s ‘Famous Five’, how I and my schoolfriends identified with the tomboy George, who cut her curly hair, wore shorts, owned a dog, told the truth at all costs and was brave and passionate.  How much better she was than sissy Anne (who wore a plaid skirt and a hairslide)!  And yet, and yet – that cry of hers, “I’m as good as a boy any day” – is the very mark of inequality.  Why should a girl have to masquerade as a boy to be taken seriously?  Why should bravery, independence and action be seen as masculine qualities?

We shouldn’t be complacent.  I can think of plenty of independent, strong heroines in modern children’s fiction – Joan Aiken’s Dido Twite would come top of my personal list, and Harriet of ‘Harriet the Spy’, Lyra in ‘The Golden Compass', and Garth Nix's gallant Sabriel and Lirael. These girls aren’t trying to prove that they are as good as or better than boys.  They simply get on with life and grapple with its problems. But there are many books for teenagers in which the heroines need – rely on – yearn for – the strong arms and love of some idealised boy.  Compare Bella of 'Twilight'  to Katy Carr or Jo March. It's hard to imagine either of them languishing after 'perfect' Edward.  

Of all the girls in all the titles on this list of classic books for children, the most independent of all is Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who calmly steers her way through the looking glass wonderlands of her own imagination.  Alice never feels in the least inferior to any male character.   She stands up for herself in her own very feminine way, experimenting, chopping logic, lecturing herself and others, refusing to be snubbed, insulted or put in her place.  At the end of each book when her imaginary world threatens her, she pulls it down about her ears like Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple in Gaza.  She is extraordinary – and the creation of a man.  But she is pre-adolescent: what does the world really hold for ‘alices when they are jung and easily freudened’?  Carroll’s Alice touches a kind of bedrock: a certainty of self-worth that may be felt by many little girls in stable and happy families – but which is still all too easily lost as the teens commence. 

The Master-Maid: the role of women and girls in fairyland

by Ellen Renner

Recently, during a school visit, an eleven-year-old boy said he found my book Castle of Shadows 'girly' and asked, 'Did I mean it to be that way?'

I was, frankly, horrified. Castle of Shadows is about love and hate, power and powerlessness, politics and science. Charlie, the main character, is the least frilly princess imaginable. In a reversal of the fairy-tale tradition, she is the hero and her helper a boy. When I invited him to imagine the exact same sequence of events with a boy as the main character, my questioner had to admit that there was nothing intrinsically feminine in either plot or themes. It appeared that the thing preventing him from identifying with the story was that fact that it had a girl protagonist who, moreover, was a princess.

He went on to ask many more lively and interesting questions, but the incident remains with me as an example of the truism that, while girls will happily read books where the main character is a boy, the same cannot be said for boys. Which begs the question: Why?

Are girls innately more empathetic? Are there biological and evolutionary reasons which tend to make men see women as 'other', while women sometimes identify so strongly with those they love that they can lose their own sense of self? Or is the reason cultural: the fact that active female protagonists – female 'heroes' – are so hard to find in our stories and cultural myths? If the boy in that school had grown up with stories and cultural myths where 'heroes' are girls as often as boys, would he have had the same reaction to my book?

Castle of Shadows began as a fairy-tale: a missing queen, a forgotten princess, a mad king who neglects both daughter and kingdom, the corrupting desire for power. I was aware of these fairy-tale elements from the moment of inception and also of my own ambivalence towards them. I was particularly wary of having a princess for a main character. Fairy-tale princesses held little charm for me as a child.

I read mythology, folk lore and fairy-tales voraciously, yet certain tales felt inappropriate and even irritating long before I was capable of analysing why that might be. They annoyed me in the same way Barbie dolls did. These were the stories featuring passive girls, usually born or destined to become princesses, like Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella. Girls whose physical attractiveness was the sum of their identity; girls who were not so much protagonists as prizes.

I yearned for heroines I could identify with and aspire to be like. Girls who DID things. Who underwent hardship and suffering and overcame the odds by use of their own wit or courage. And I found Gerta in Andersen's The Snow Queen and the brave sister in the Grimms tale, The Six Swans. I found Gretel in Hansel and Gretel; Janet in Tam Lin; and the redoubtable, spendidly named Molly Whuppie – the female Jack who bests her giant. Molly may marry and disappear into  'happy-ever-after', but you know she will go on dominating life just the same.

I had a more complicated reaction, no doubt because of the darker themes of forced marriage and the bestial interpretation of male sexuality, to tales such as Mossy Coat, The Black Bull of Norroway, and East of the Sun, West of the Moon, but I still admired the courage and cleverness of the heroines. In these tales, a young woman is forced to perform nearly impossible tasks in order to recover a lost fiancé or husband, and sometimes their children. She succeeds with the help of magical advisers and gifts.

Similar, but missing out the forced marriage aspect, are versions of The Master-Maid as told by Andrew Lang in The Blue Fairy Book. This tale and its variants, including Sweetheart Roland, Nix-Nought-Nothing and The Battle of the Birds, are classified, by those who enjoy such things, as 'girl helps hero flee' (Arne-Thompson type 313). It's a strange classification, since the heroes in these stories are less interesting than the heroines. The 'helpers' are the true protagonists. These heroines have no advisers, are given no gifts. They succeed by dint of their own magical abilities, courage and cleverness. These are witches, one and all; daughters of ogres or giants, who wield far more power than than their mortal lovers.

In The Master-Maid, the king's youngest son goes off into the world to seek his fortune and takes employment with an evil giant. The giant sets him three impossible tasks which the prince is only able to complete by following the advice of the Master-Maid. 'Master' here means skilled, and the young woman is obviously a magician employed as a servant by the giant. Their relationship is never explained. (In some versions, she is the Giant's daughter.) The giant, suspecting her involvement, orders her to kill the prince and cook him for his supper. Master-Maid pretends to obey, but when the giant falls asleep, she puts her plan into action:

So the Master-Maid took a knife, and cut the Prince's little finger, and dropped three drops of blood upon a wooden stool; then she took all the old rags, and shoe-soles, and all the rubbish she could lay hands on, and put them in the cauldron; and then she filled a chest with gold dust, and a lump of salt, and a water-flask which was hanging by the door, and she also took with her a golden apple, and two gold chickens; and then she and the Prince went away with all the speed they could ...

Of course, the giant wakes, is fooled for a short time by the three drops of blood, who answer his calls in the Master-Maid's voice. He tastes the mess in the cauldron; the game is up and he gives chase. This pursuit was always my favourite part, but I prefer the version in The Battle of the Birds, taken from The Well at the World's End, Folk Tales of Scotland retold by Norah and William Montgomerie:

 ...the giant jumped out of bed and, finding the Prince and his bride had gone, ran after them.
In the mouth of the day, the giant's daughter said her father's breath was burning her neck.
'Quickly, put your hand in the grey filly's ear!' said she.
'There's a twig of blackthorn,' said he.
'Throw it behind you!' said she.
No sooner had he done this than there sprang up twenty miles of blackthorn wood, so thick that a weasel could not go through.

The giant is delayed while he chops the wood down, but he's soon after them again:

'In the heat of the day, the giant's daughter said: 'I feel my father's breath burning my neck. Put your hand in the filly's ear, and whatever you find there, throw it behind you!'

He found a splinter of grey stone, and threw it behind him. At once there sprang up twenty miles of grey rock, high and broad as a range of mountains. The giant came full pelt after them, but past the rock he could not go.

He is delayed again as he digs through the rock, but the lovers' respite is brief and she once more instructs him to reach into the filly's ear:
  
This time he found a thimble of water. He threw it behind him, and at once there was a fresh-water loch, twenty miles in length and breadth.
The giant came on, but was running so quickly he did not stop till he was in the middle of the loch, where he sank and did not come up.

The giant defeated, the lovers reach the Prince's home, but their trouble is not over. The Master-Maid warns him: '... if you go home to the King's palace you will forget me, I forsee that.' But the stubborn Prince insists. And as though he were a mortal venturing into the fairy realm, she instructs him not to speak to anyone there, and especially not to eat any food, or else he will forget her. Of course, he eats and forgets. In the second half of the tale, she must use all her magic to cancel the spell and win back her beloved.
  
Most tales about the winning back of a lover or husband put the blame for his forgetfulness onto women: the mother and daughter troll; the hag and the enchantress. Only in darker versions of Sweetheart Roland do we find the heroine killing both rival witch and straying betrothed. In all other cases, it is only the rival women who are killed. From The Master-Maid:

So the Prince knew her again, and you may imagine how delighted he was. He ordered the troll-witch who had rolled the apple to him to be torn in pieces between four-and-twenty horses, so that not a bit of her was left ...

This is the first mention in the story that the young lady is a troll. It seems rather stiff punishment for proffering an apple to a man who takes your fancy, but such are the rules of fairy-tales.

As for hags, in these as in most fairy-tales, elderly women come in for harsh treatment, which doubtless says much about the social attitudes of the times in which they were written. The Master-Maid needs somewhere to live in order to win back her man, and when she spies a little hut in a small wood near the King's palace, she more or less moves in:

The hut belonged to an old crone, who was also an ill-tempered and malicious troll. At first she would not let the Master-Maid remain with her; but at last, after a long time, by means of good words and good payment, she obtained leave.

The crone is less pleased when the Master-maid starts redecorating:

The old crone did not like this either. She scowled, and was very cross, but the Master-maid did not trouble herself about that. She took out her chest of gold, and flung a handful of it or so into the fire, and the gold boiled up and poured out over the whole of the hut, until every part of it both inside and out was gilded. But when the gold began to bubble up the old hag grew so terrified that she fled as if the Evil One himself were pursuing her, and she did not remember to stoop down as she went through the doorway, and so she split her head and died.

Such is the fate of hags and crones. They are either trolls to be killed or, more rarely, advisers whom the heroine would be wise to listen to.

The best of all hags must be Baba Yaga, as powerful as she is terrifying; who eats stupid girls but offers the wise and brave ones power and life. Lucy Coats has done an excellent post on Baba Yaga and my favourite fairy-tale heroine, Vasilisa.

I can't leave hags behind without mentioning a modern fairy-tale, the brilliant 'Howl's Moving Castle', in which Diana Wynne Jones takes the motif of the fairy-tale hag and turns it on its head from the inspired moment in the book when she transforms her protagonist into an aged crone, which she remains for much of the novel. Wynne Jones knows, as all women do, that there is little difference between heroine and crone. Time's slight-of-hand – a malicious magic – and the princess becomes the hag.

In most fairy-tales, the heroine's ultimate reward is marriage, whereupon her adventures cease. But then, so do the hero's.

As for my own heroine, the princess Charlotte, I grew to know her better as I wrote the book. Like the Master-Maid and Molly Whuppie, she is girl who knows her own mind. She is, like all girls, the heroine of her own life, not merely a prize or a helper, and her story needed to reflect that reality. Castle of Shadows is no fairy-tale. Charlie resembles the real life queen, Elizabeth the First, far more than she ever will Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty. In the passing of time, she will grow to become a wise and powerful crone. And like that monarch (for Charlie is a queen now too), she may be destined never to know what happens in the land of 'happy-ever-after'.

Ellen Renner was born in the USA, in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri, but came to England looking for adventure, married here, and now lives in an old house in Devon with her husband and son. Her first book, ‘Castle of Shadows’ (2010) is set in an alternate world similar to nineteenth century England, in a city not unlike London.  Young Charlie (Charlotte) is the Princess of Quale.  Years ago her mother the Queen – a notable scientist – mysteriously vanished. Her eccentric father the King spends all his time building ever more elaborate card-castles.  Neglected and hungry, bullied by the housekeeper, Charlie runs wild and scrambles at will over the roofs of the castle, her only friend the gardener’s boy, Toby – until the day when the suavely intelligent Prime Minister, Alistair Windlass, begins to take an interest in her.  But is he a true friend, or does he have some other motive for turning Charlie back into an educated, well-dressed, 'proper' princess?  

‘City of Thieves’ continues Charlie’s story, with further focus on her friend Toby and his efforts to escape both the family of thieves who claim him as their own, and the machinations of the sinister yet strangely attractive Windlass.  Quale is in deadly danger – and Charlie and Toby are forced to take opposite sides.

The plotting is delightfully complex: more twists and turns than a chain-link fence.  These are books hard to categorise – a fantasy world with no magic, a hint of steam-punk, lots of interesting politics, some fearsome inventions, and brilliant characters you really care about.  Ellen’s writing is reminiscent of Joan Aiken’s.  If only one could introduce characters from one author’s books to another’s!  How I’d love to see tough, passionate Charlie meet Aiken’s irrepressible gamine, Dido Twite...

Picture credits:
'The Black Bull of  Norroway', by John Lawrence, from 'The Blue Fairy Book', 1975'Molly Whuppie' by unknown 19th century (?) illustrator at this link: http://nota.triwe.net/lib/tales16.htm
'East of the Sun, West of the Moon' by Henry Justice Ford
'The Giant in The Master Maid' by John D Batten
'Mollie Whuppie and her Sisters' by Errol le Cain

Fairytale Reflections (20) Ellen Renner

Ellen Renner was born in the USA, in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri, but came to England looking for adventure, married here, and now lives in an old house in Devon with her husband and son.  I’m totally impressed, because besides being a very good writer, Ellen can fence with a sword (something I've always wanted to do) and is also a weaver who can start from scratch with a hank of sheep’s wool, spin it on a wheel, and then either knit it or weave it onto cloth on her loom.  On top of which, she rides a motorbike.  (Not on top of the loom, of course. I mean, 'in addition.') 

Ellen's first book, ‘Castle of Shadows’ (2010) is set in an alternate world similar to nineteenth century England, in a city not unlike London.  Young Charlie (Charlotte) is the Princess of Quale.  Years ago her mother the Queen – a notable scientist – mysteriously vanished. Her eccentric father the King spends all his time building ever more elaborate card-castles.  Neglected and hungry, bullied by the housekeeper, Charlie runs wild and scrambles at will over the roofs of the castle, her only friend the gardener’s boy, Toby – until the day when the suavely intelligent Prime Minister, Alistair Windlass, begins to take an interest in her.  But is he a true friend, or does he have some other motive for turning Charlie back into an educated, well-dressed, 'proper' princess? 

Alistair Windlass is a remarkably complex villain - if indeed he is a villain and not a patriot, two definitions which the book demands we consider, along with what they might mean...  All of Ellen's characters are refreshingly multi-layered.  The heroine Charlie is hot-headed, loyal and brave, but increasingly the weight of sovereignty imposes its limitations upon her. In a moving passage from Ellen’s second book, ‘City of Thieves’, Charlie climbs to the high ridge of the castle roof to put herself to the test:

The sky was pearl-coloured and cold. Dew lay on the leads, shimmering between water and frost.  The rooks screamed, hoarse with excitement at the freshness of the day.  Charlie filled her lungs with silvery air. 

She took her time climbing to the ridge, pausing to watch the rooks wheel overhead and to look, when she was high enough, for the distant glimmer that was the sea.  When she reached her enemy and stood staring at its long metal backbone, she couldn’t tell whether she was shaking from fear, excitement or cold.

She knew what she was going to do.  She had thought it out during the climb.  She did not want to die. She needed to do this, but she no longer trusted in the magic of her feet and head to keep her safe.  She knew now, as she had not before, that she could die.  She knew it with her body and not just her mind.  The knowledge brought sadness.  She had lost something, and it wouldn’t come back.

‘City of Thieves’ continues Charlie’s story, with further focus on her friend Toby and his efforts to escape both the family of thieves who claim him as their own, and the machinations of the sinister yet strangely attractive Windlass.  Quale is in deadly danger – and Charlie and Toby are forced to take opposite sides.

The plotting is delightfully complex: more twists and turns than a chain-link fence.  These are books hard to categorise – a fantasy world without magic, with a hint of steam-punk, lots of interesting politics, some fearsome inventions, and brilliant characters you really care about.  It’s already been said, and I agree, that Ellen’s writing is reminiscent of Joan Aiken’s.  If only you could introduce characters from one author’s books to another’s!  I’d love to see tough, passionate Charlie meet Aiken’s irrepressible gamine, Dido Twite.  And while on the subject of strong heroines, Ellen has chosen in her Fairytale Reflection to consider the female role in fairytales, as exemplified by -

HELPERS, HEROINES AND HAGS

Recently, during a school visit, an eleven-year-old boy said he found Castle of Shadows 'girly' and asked, 'Did I mean it to be that way?'

I was, frankly, horrified. Castle of Shadows is about love and hate, power and powerlessness, politics and science. Charlie, the main character, is the least frilly princess imaginable. In a reversal of the fairy-tale tradition, she is the hero and her helper a boy. When I invited him to imagine the exact same sequence of events with a boy as the main character, my questioner had to admit that there was nothing intrinsically feminine in either plot or themes. It appeared that the thing preventing him from identifying with the story was that fact that it had a girl protagonist who, moreover, was a princess.

He went on to ask many more lively and interesting questions, but the incident remains with me as an example of the truism that, while girls will happily read books where the main character is a boy, the same cannot be said for boys. Which begs the question: Why?

Are girls innately more empathetic? Are there biological and evolutionary reasons which tend to make men see women as 'other', while women sometimes identify so strongly with those they love that they can lose their own sense of self? Or is the reason cultural: the fact that active female protagonists – female 'heroes' – are so hard to find in our stories and cultural myths? If the boy in that school had grown up with stories and cultural myths where 'heroes' are girls as often as boys, would he have had the same reaction to my book?

Castle of Shadows began as a fairy-tale: a missing queen, a forgotten princess, a mad king who neglects both daughter and kingdom, the corrupting desire for power. I was aware of these fairy-tale elements from the moment of inception and also of my own ambivalence towards them. I was particularly wary of having a princess for a main character. Fairy-tale princesses held little charm for me as a child.

I read mythology, folk lore and fairy-tales voraciously, yet certain tales felt inappropriate and even irritating long before I was capable of analysing why that might be. They annoyed me in the same way Barbie dolls did. These were the stories featuring passive girls, usually born or destined to become princesses, like Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella. Girls whose physical attractiveness was the sum of their identity; girls who were not so much protagonists as prizes.

I yearned for heroines I could identify with and aspire to be like. Girls who DID things. Who underwent hardship and suffering and overcame the odds by use of their own wit or courage. And I found Gerta in Andersen's The Snow Queen and the brave sister in the Grimms tale, The Six Swans. I found Gretel in Hansel and Gretel; Janet in Tam Lin; and the redoubtable, spendidly named Molly Whuppie – the female Jack who bests her giant. Molly may marry and disappear into  'happy-ever-after', but you know she will go on dominating life just the same.

I had a more complicated reaction, no doubt because of the darker themes of forced marriage and the bestial interpretation of male sexuality, to tales such as Mossy Coat, The Black Bull of Norroway, and East of the Sun, West of the Moon, but I still admired the courage and cleverness of the heroines. In these tales, a young woman is forced to perform nearly impossible tasks in order to recover a lost fiancé or husband, and sometimes their children. She succeeds with the help of magical advisers and gifts.

Similar, but missing out the forced marriage aspect, are versions of The Master-Maid as told by Andrew Lang in The Blue Fairy Book. This tale and its variants, including Sweetheart Roland, Nix-Nought-Nothing and The Battle of the Birds, are classified, by those who enjoy such things, as 'girl helps hero flee' (Arne-Thompson type 313). It's a strange classification, since the heroes in these stories are less interesting than the heroines. The 'helpers' are the true protagonists. These heroines have no advisers, are given no gifts. They succeed by dint of their own magical abilities, courage and cleverness. These are witches, one and all; daughters of ogres or giants, who wield far more power than than their mortal lovers.

In The Master-Maid, the king's youngest son goes off into the world to seek his fortune and takes employment with an evil giant. The giant sets him three impossible tasks which the prince is only able to complete by following the advice of the Master-Maid. 'Master' here means skilled, and the young woman is obviously a magician employed as a servant by the giant. Their relationship is never explained. (In some versions, she is the Giant's daughter.) The giant, suspecting her involvement, orders her to kill the prince and cook him for his supper. Master-Maid pretends to obey, but when the giant falls asleep, she puts her plan into action:

So the Master-Maid took a knife, and cut the Prince's little finger, and dropped three drops of blood upon a wooden stool; then she took all the old rags, and shoe-soles, and all the rubbish she could lay hands on, and put them in the cauldron; and then she filled a chest with gold dust, and a lump of salt, and a water-flask which was hanging by the door, and she also took with her a golden apple, and two gold chickens; and then she and the Prince went away with all the speed they could ...

Of course, the giant wakes, is fooled for a short time by the three drops of blood, who answer his calls in the Master-Maid's voice. He tastes the mess in the cauldron; the game is up and he gives chase. This pursuit was always my favourite part, but I prefer the version in The Battle of the Birds, taken from The Well at the World's End, Folk Tales of Scotland retold by Norah and William Montgomerie:

 ...the giant jumped out of bed and, finding the Prince and his bride had gone, ran after them.
In the mouth of the day, the giant's daughter said her father's breath was burning her neck.
'Quickly, put your hand in the grey filly's ear!' said she.
'There's a twig of blackthorn,' said he.
'Throw it behind you!' said she.
No sooner had he done this than there sprang up twenty miles of blackthorn wood, so thick that a weasel could not go through.

The giant is delayed while he chops the wood down, but he's soon after them again:

'In the heat of the day, the giant's daughter said: 'I feel my father's breath burning my neck. Put your hand in the filly's ear, and whatever you find there, throw it behind you!'

He found a splinter of grey stone, and threw it behind him. At once there sprang up twenty miles of grey rock, high and broad as a range of mountains. The giant came full pelt after them, but past the rock he could not go.

He is delayed again as he digs through the rock, but the lovers' respite is brief and she once more instructs him to reach into the filly's ear:
  
This time he found a thimble of water. He threw it behind him, and at once there was a fresh-water loch, twenty miles in length and breadth.
The giant came on, but was running so quickly he did not stop till he was in the middle of the loch, where he sank and did not come up.

The giant defeated, the lovers reach the Prince's home, but their trouble is not over. The Master-Maid warns him: '... if you go home to the King's palace you will forget me, I forsee that.' But the stubborn Prince insists. And as though he were a mortal venturing into the fairy realm, she instructs him not to speak to anyone there, and especially not to eat any food, or else he will forget her. Of course, he eats and forgets. In the second half of the tale, she must use all her magic to cancel the spell and win back her beloved.
  
Most tales about the winning back of a lover or husband put the blame for his forgetfulness onto women: the mother and daughter troll; the hag and the enchantress. Only in darker versions of Sweetheart Roland do we find the heroine killing both rival witch and straying betrothed. In all other cases, it is only the rival women who are killed. From The Master-Maid:

So the Prince knew her again, and you may imagine how delighted he was. He ordered the troll-witch who had rolled the apple to him to be torn in pieces between four-and-twenty horses, so that not a bit of her was left ...

This is the first mention in the story that the young lady is a troll. It seems rather stiff punishment for proffering an apple to a man who takes your fancy, but such are the rules of fairy-tales.

As for hags, in these as in most fairy-tales, elderly women come in for harsh treatment, which doubtless says much about the social attitudes of the times in which they were written. The Master-Maid needs somewhere to live in order to win back her man, and when she spies a little hut in a small wood near the King's palace, she more or less moves in:

The hut belonged to an old crone, who was also an ill-tempered and malicious troll. At first she would not let the Master-Maid remain with her; but at last, after a long time, by means of good words and good payment, she obtained leave.

The crone is less pleased when the Master-maid starts redecorating:

The old crone did not like this either. She scowled, and was very cross, but the Master-maid did not trouble herself about that. She took out her chest of gold, and flung a handful of it or so into the fire, and the gold boiled up and poured out over the whole of the hut, until every part of it both inside and out was gilded. But when the gold began to bubble up the old hag grew so terrified that she fled as if the Evil One himself were pursuing her, and she did not remember to stoop down as she went through the doorway, and so she split her head and died.

Such is the fate of hags and crones. They are either trolls to be killed or, more rarely, advisers whom the heroine would be wise to listen to.

The best of all hags must be Baba Yaga, as powerful as she is terrifying; who eats stupid girls but offers the wise and brave ones power and life. Lucy Coats has done an excellent post (Fairytale Reflections 7) on Baba Yaga and my favourite fairy-tale heroine, Vasilisa.

I can't leave hags behind without mentioning a modern fairy-tale, the brilliant 'Howl's Moving Castle', in which Diana Wynne Jones takes the motif of the fairy-tale hag and turns it on its head from the inspired moment in the book when she transforms her protagonist into an aged crone, which she remains for much of the novel. Wynne Jones knows, as all women do, that there is little difference between heroine and crone. Time's slight-of-hand – a malicious magic – and the princess becomes the hag.

In most fairy-tales, the heroine's ultimate reward is marriage, whereupon her adventures cease. But then, so do the hero's.


As for my own heroine, the princess Charlotte, I grew to know her better as I wrote the book. Like the Master-Maid and Molly Whuppie, she is girl who knows her own mind. She is, like all girls, the heroine of her own life, not merely a prize or a helper, and her story needed to reflect that reality. Castle of Shadows is no fairy-tale. Charlie resembles the real life queen, Elizabeth the First, far more than she ever will Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty. In the passing of time, she will grow to become a wise and powerful crone. And like that monarch (for Charlie is a queen now too), she may be destined never to know what happens in the land of 'happy-ever-after'.

Picture credits: 
'Ellen Renner' - courtesy of the Western Morning News
'Girl beside a Stream'  by Arthur Rackham, Sheffield City Art Gallery
'Molly Whuppie' retold by Walter de la Mare, illustrated by Errol le Cain
'East of the Sun, West of the Moon' by Henry Justice Ford
'The Giant in The Master Maid' by John D Batten
'Mollie Whuppie and her Sisters' by Errol le Cain

Fairytale heroines

Heroines, you will note, not ‘fairytale princesses’. For though princesses do figure in fairytales, the heroine is just as often a peasant – or a farmer’s daughter – or perhaps the child of a powerful magician. Even in the so-called Classic Fairytales, the ones which have been anthologised and Disneyfied almost to death, Sleeping Beauty and Snow-White are princesses, yes. But Cinderella and Beauty are merchant’s daughters; Red Riding Hood is an ordinary little girl; Rapunzel is a peasant woman’s child; the heroine of Rumpelstiltskin is a miller’s daughter – and so on.

There’s a widespread notion that fairytales present a very passive picture of women and are dreadful role-models for little girls. This is due to ignorance. Many people who do not actually read fairytales, or have not read any since childhood, vaguely associate them with a picture of a Barbie-blonde lady wearing a pink silk dress and diamonds, lying on a bed in a tower, awaiting rescue from a prince on a white horse, and ‘love’s first kiss’. Like this illustration by Rene Cloke from ‘My First Book of Fairy Tales’, which I was given as a child.

Sleeping Beauty herself may not be a brilliant role model. But though the Freudians among us are no doubt correct about the story’s underlying imagery (the tower, the young girl’s awakening to sexuality, etc), for me what really makes the tale stand out is the arresting of time within the castle walls. There’s beauty and terror there: the whole little jewelled world frozen and forgotten, like Pompei under its ash, for a hundred years. (There are other tales of unearthly sleepers, like King Arthur’s knights under their hill, who still haven’t woken.) No one, to my mind – not even Robin McKinley in ‘Spindle’s End’, and certainly not the Disney film – has yet retold ‘Sleeping Beauty’ in a way which does the story justice: because nobody can find a way to dramatise that hundred years of sleep. And what’s the point of the Sleeping Beauty if she sleeps for only a few hours? My own daughters have regularly done better than that.

Getting back to heroines: fairytale heroines to me do not signal passivity and helplessness. Far more often they exhibit resourcefulness, resilience, ambition, courage – even ruthlessness. Cinderella does get to the ball, and in some of the earlier versions she is not helped by a fairy godmother, but by the hazel tree planted on her mother’s grave, suggesting that the strength and riches she finds come from within, from her own heredity. Beauty, of Beauty and the Beast, is braver than her father (seen here losing his wig in fright at the beast's approach).  Beauty ventures alone into the Beast’s castle and learns to distinguish the true worth behind his ugliness. (And yes – Freudian deconstruction says this too is all about the awakening of sexuality. But really, wouldn’t you rather have the story than the moral?) In the original tale, the Beast treats Beauty from the beginning with melancholy courtesy: she has no need to teach him manners as in the cartoon.

And what about the many, many heroines of less well-known tales? What about Mollie Whuppie, abandoned in the woods by her parents, whose quick wits defeat a giant and win the hand of three princes in marriage for her and her two sisters? Or Kate Crackernuts, who, when her own mother conjures a sheep’s head on to her prettier stepsister’s shoulders, takes ‘a fine linen cloth and wrapped it around her sister’s head and took her by the hand and they both went out to seek their fortune.’ They come to a king’s castle ‘who had two sons, and one of them was sickening away to death, and no one could find out what ailed him.’ Kate offers her services, and when the prince rises at midnight she follows him into a green hill where he dances all night with the fairies until he drops from exhaustion. By persistence, courage, and intelligence, Kate manages to cure both the prince and her sister, and: ‘The sick son married the well sister and the well son married the sick sister, and they all lived and died happy and never drank out of a dry cappy.’ Katherine Briggs wrote a full length novel based on this tale – ‘Kate Crackernuts’ – and very good it is, too.

Then there’s the Norwegian fairytale ‘The Master-Maid’ in which the prince would be eaten by the troll to whom he has pledged his work, were it not for the wisdom and power of the ‘Master-Maid’ who lives in the troll’s house. The prince succeeds at each perilous task only by following the Master-Maid’s advice. Finally the troll orders the Master-Maid to kill the prince and cook him, but the Master-Maid cuts her finger and lets three drops of blood fall. Then, as the troll sleeps, she escapes with the prince and a great deal of magical treasure; and when the troll awakes to demand if the meal is cooked, the drops of blood answer for her: ‘Not yet,’ ‘Nearly’, and ‘It is boiled dry’.

The troll pursues the couple, but the Master-Maid flings magical impediments in his path which change into mountains and seas. In the end, prince and Master-Maid are married, but not without a further development in which the prince forgets her, and is rescued on the verge of marrying the wrong woman…

Clearly, in this kind of story, women are more than matches for men. The fact that the happy ending is nearly always marriage does not invalidate the energy and determination of these heroines. Marriage-with-the-prince is a metaphor for success in life. These tales aren’t telling us to wish for Prince Charming and a life of idle luxury. They are telling us to be active, to use our wits, to be undaunted, to see what we want and to go for it.

In one of my favourite English fairytales, ‘Mr Fox’, a version of ‘Bluebeard’, the heroine Lady Mary may be initially taken in by the sly flattery of her suitor, but she is inquisitive and brave as well as rich and beautiful, discovers for herself the bloody secrets of Mr Fox’s castle, and turns the tables on him in the neatest and most self-possessed of ways. The story quite definitely approves of female curiosity and courage; without these qualities, the heroine would have joined the list of this serial killer’s victims. There is no marriage at all at the end of the tale, and one feels Lady Mary will give the next suitor a very hard look indeed.

Downtrodden heroines more often rescue themselves than they are rescued. The heroine of the story variously known as ‘Donkeyskin’, ‘Ashiepattle’, ‘Allerleirauh’, or ‘Cap o’ Rushes’ has to flee her father’s house either because, like Cordelia in ‘King Lear’, she has given what he considers insufficient proof of filial affection, or in some versions because she is the spitting image of her dead mother and he has incestuously decided to marry her. (Robin McKinley wrote a magnificent version of this tale: ‘Deerskin’; to my mind even better than Margo Lanagan's recent 'Tender Morsels'.) Disguised in extraordinary shabby clothes, a donkey skin, a coat made of all kinds of different furs, or a cloak made of rushes, she sets out for another kingdom and finds rough work in the palace kitchens, thereby demonstrating independence and resilience. On seeing the prince or heir of the house, she obtains his attention by a series of tricks (mysterious appearances at dances; golden rings dropped in winecups) and finally marries him. I call it enterprising.

Many are the heroines who get the better of the Devil himself (this dark gentleman rarely does well in folktales.) Remember the farmer who sells his soul in return for twenty years of good harvests? And when the time comes to pay up, his clever wife saves him. “My man won’t be a minute, sir, he’s just getting his things together, and please take a mouthful to eat while you wait!” she calls to the Devil, handing him a pie into which she has baked a red-hot griddle. When he bites into it, burning his tongue and breaking his teeth, she interrupts his howls with the merry cry, “And I’m coming too, to cook for you both!” – at which the terrified Devil takes to his heels. Of course it’s comical: but note that the farmer’s wife employs her wits and her skills, and defeats the Devil in a particularly feminine way.

Alison Lurie, in ‘Don’t Tell the Grownups’ (Bloomsbury, 1990) points out that ‘Gretel, not Hansel, defeated the witch’, and adds, ‘In the Grimms’ original ‘Household Tales’ (1812), there are sixty-one women and girl characters who have magic powers as against only twenty-one men and boys: and these men are usually dwarfs and not humans.’ Compared to the ‘classic’ children’s literature which I wrote about last week, in which only 12 out of 66 titles featured girls as the main character, this is pretty impressive.

When the king’s daughter saw there was no hope of turning her father’s heart, she resolved to run away. In the night when everyone was asleep, she got up and took three different things from her treasures, a golden ring, a golden spinning wheel, and a golden reel. The three dresses of sun, moon and stars she placed into a nutshell, put on her mantle of all kinds of fur, and blackened her face and hands with soot. Then she commended herself to God and went away.

('Allerleirauh': in which the princess saves herself from an incestuous marriage and wins a prince.)

The maiden went forth into the wide world to search for her brothers and set them free, cost what it might. And now she went onwards, far, far, to the very end of the world. Then she came to the sun, but it was too hot and terrible, and devoured little children. Hastily she ran away, and ran to the moon, but it was far too cold, and also awful and malicious, and when it saw the child it said, “I smell, I smell the flesh of men.” …So the maiden went onwards until she came to the Glass Mountain…

('The Seven Ravens': in which the princess saves her long lost enchanted brothers.)

When they [father and daughter] had dug nearly the whole of the field, they found in the earth a mortar made of pure gold. ‘Listen,’ said the father to the girl, ‘as our lord the King has graciously given us this field, we ought to give him this mortar in return for it.’ ‘Father,’ said the daughter, ‘if we have the mortar without having the pestle as well, we shall have to get the pestle, so you had much better say nothing about it.’ But he would not obey her, and carried the mortar to the king…

('The Peasant’s Wise Daughter': the daughter’s wit and courage saves her father and wins marriage with the king – whom she later kidnaps to teach him a much-needed lesson.)

The heroines in these tales know their own minds and make their own decisions. They are wise, prudent, determined, wily and brave. They are so far from the stereotype of the fairytale princess that one has to ask how it arose, and to wonder whether late 19th/early 20th century editorial bias – to say nothing of rewriting – had anything to do with choosing more ‘properly behaved’ heroines for children’s anthologies?

Heroines

Out of interest, the other day, I pulled a list of ‘Children’s Classics’ off Wikipedia.  There are 66 titles, and Aesop’s Fables heads the list with William Caxton’s edition of 1484.  Apart from a couple of pretty obscure titles - at least, I have never heard of ‘A Token for Children’ by James Janeway, and ‘A Pretty Little Pocket Book’ by John Newbery - I can hand on heart say that I encountered most of them during my own childhood.  ‘Robinson Crusoe’?  Tick.  ‘Ivanhoe’?  ‘The Swiss Family Robinson’? ‘The Coral Island’?  Tick.  ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’?  ‘Uncle Remus’?  ‘Black Beauty’?  ‘Treasure Island’?  ‘The Happy Prince’? Tick, tick, tick.  And so on. 

The list is familiar even though I doubt many of today’s children would consider ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’, ‘David Copperfield’, or even ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ to be tremendously riveting stuff.  Nor were many of them expressly written for children.  But so what?  We were tougher nuts back in my childhood.  I happily gnawed my way through ‘Ivanhoe’ and ‘The Children of the New Forest’.  I expected roughage in my reading, and I got it. 

What strikes me now, though, is the extreme scarcity of heroines. Fairytales apart, there are only 12 stories out of the entire 66 in which the main character is female: these are: ‘Little Goody Twoshoes’ (1765), ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ (1865) and ‘Through the Looking Glass’ (1871), ‘Little Women’ (1868), ‘What Katy Did’ (1873), ‘Heidi’ (1884), ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ (1900), ‘Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm’ (1903), ‘Pollyanna’ (1913), ‘A Little Princess’ (1905), ‘Anne of Green Gables’ (1908), and perhaps ‘The Secret Garden’. There are some deceptive titles which sound as though they are going to be about heroines, such as ‘Lorna Doone’ (1869) and ‘The Princess and the Goblin’ (1871) but these are really far more about the male protagonists, John Ridd and Curdie.

  

Even though the last book on the list was published in 1918, many – in fact most – of these titles formed part of my reading a full half century later, as a child growing up in the sixties. I can’t say I consciously noticed the absence of strong female characters, since naturally I identified with the hero, whoever he might be.  I swam lagoons with Jack, Ralph and Peterkin, roistered and swashbuckled with D’Artagnan, escaped across the heather with Alan Breck, roamed the jungle with Mowgli – but I did notice the rare occasions when a feisty heroine was presented to me.  This, I think, is why so many of us loved – loved – Katy Carr, Jo March and Anne of Green Gables.  We were resigned to girly girls in books.  We were used to them needing to be rescued, and swooning on manly breasts (Lorna Doone).  Or being sweetly domestic, decorative, helpless and good.  (David Copperfield’s Dora.)  Or ill-treated victims (Sara Crewe).  Or simply not there at all. It was a literary world in which boys were allowed to be Peter Pan but girls were condemned to be Wendy.

So we were thrilled when Katy lost her temper, disobeyed her aunt and swung in that swing; and all the Victorian business of being an invalid and becoming the heart of the family hardly seemed to count in comparison.  Some of Susan Coolidge's writing is still extremely funny, and you can sense her delighting in her heroine's realistically child-like outbursts.  Here's Katy inventing a break-time game:

…Katy’s unlucky star put it into her head to invent a new game, which she called the Game of Rivers.  It was played in the following manner: - each girl took the name of a river and laid out for herself an appointed path through the room, winding among the desks and benches, and making a low roaring sound, to imitate the noise of water.  Cecy was the Plate; Marianne Brooks, a tall girl, the Mississippi; Alice Blair, the Ohio; Clover, the Penobscot, and so on.  They were instructed to run into each other once in a while because, as Katy said, ‘rivers do’.  As for Katy herself, she was ‘Father Ocean’, and, growling horribly, raged up and down the platform where Mrs Knight usually sat.  Every now and then… she would suddenly cry out, ‘Now for a meeting of the waters!’ whereupon all the rivers bouncing, bounding, scrambling, screaming, would turn and run towards Father Ocean, while he roared louder than all of them put together, and made short rushes up and down, to represent the movement of waves on a beach.

Of course they get into trouble, but anyone can see it would be worth it to have such fun.  And Jo March, too, could lose her temper, and acted – in boots! – and wrote stories, and did things.  Mary in ‘The Secret Garden’ is angry – very angry – for a lot of the time.  Even transplanted Heidi yearns for her Alp and her grumpy grandfather, and eventually gets her way.  While as for Anne – impulsive, rebellious, outspoken Anne –   

“How dare you call me skinny and ugly?  How dare you say I’m freckled and red-headed?  How would you like to have such things said about you?  How would you like to be told that you are fat and clumsy and probably hadn’t a spark of imagination in you?  I don’t care if I do hurt your feelings by saying so!  I hope I hurt them.  You have hurt mine worse than they were ever hurt before even by Mrs Thomas’s intoxicated husband.  And I’ll never forgive you for it, never, never!”

Such girls seemed to be going places.  The trouble was that there wasn’t really anyplace for them to go.  I don’t know why the imaginations of the women who created them could come up with so few goals in an era that was producing strong women by the bucketload: in the States, the early suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton; in Britain reformers like Florence Nightingale, Josephine Butler, the Pankhursts. But it was an era where perhaps to be a little girl was to have more freedom of behaviour than a grown woman.  Anne of Green Gables becomes Anne of Ingleside, a teacher, marries Gilbert Blythe and has children.  Jo marries Professor Bhaer not Laurie (this we could hardly forgive, though it may be more realistic!); she does become a writer, but then goes all matriarchal and nurturing and 'womanly'.  Katy travels to Europe and marries a young naval officer who is attracted to her because of her – wait for it – selfless nursing skills. 

So the vigorous rushing rivers of Katy’s game end up flowing decorously into the great calm land-locked sea of wife-and-motherhood.  Still, at least these books gave some expression, some release, some validity to the passion and energy of growing girls.  Nowadays we take it for granted.  My own daughters have never been interested in Little Women or Anne of Green Gables.  They don’t find Jo an exciting rebel but a prissy homebody taking covered baskets of Christmas dinner to the poor, selflessly selling her hair. (Her hair?  What?  Why?)

In Enid Blyton’s ‘Famous Five’, how I and my schoolfriends identified with the tomboy George, who cut her curly hair, wore shorts, owned a dog, told the truth at all costs and was brave and passionate.  How much better she was than sissy Anne (who wore a plaid skirt and a hairslide)!  And yet, and yet – that cry of hers, “I’m as good as a boy any day” – is the very mark of inequality.  Why should a girl have to masquerade as a boy to be taken seriously?  Why should bravery, independence and action be seen as masculine qualities?

We shouldn’t be complacent.  I can think of plenty of independent, strong heroines in modern children’s fiction – Joan Aiken’s Dido Twite would come top of my personal list, in books like ‘Night Birds on Nantucket’ and ‘The Cuckoo Tree’; and Harriet of ‘Harriet the Spy’; Lyra in ‘The Golden Compass', the gallant Sabriel of Garth Nix's 'Sabriel' . These girls aren’t trying to prove that they are as good as or better than boys.  They simply get on with life and grapple with its problems. My own books have so far figured boy and girl main characters of equal rank.  Hilde in the Troll books is much more confident and outgoing than diffident, self-doubting Peer, while Nest, heroine of ‘Dark Angels’/’The Shadow Hunt’ is at least equal to the young hero Wolf in passion and poise.  But there are still many books for teenagers in which the heroines need – rely on – yearn for – the strong arms and love of some idealised boy. ‘Twilight’ springs instantly to mind. Compare Bella to Katy Carr or Jo March - it's hard to imagine either of them languishing after 'perfect' Edward.  

Of all the girls in all the titles on this list of classic books for children, the most independent of all must be Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who calmly steers her way through the looking glass wonderlands of her own imagination.  Alice does not feel in the least inferior to any male character.   She stands up for herself in her own very feminine way, experimenting, chopping logic, lecturing herself and others, refusing to be snubbed, insulted or put in her place.  At the end of each book, when the world threatens her, she pulls it down about her ears like Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple in Gaza.  She is extraordinary – and the creation of a man.  But she is pre-adolescent: what does the world really hold for ‘alices when they are jung and easily freudened’?  Carroll’s Alice touches a kind of bedrock: a certainty of self-worth that may be felt by many little girls in stable and happy families – but which is still all too easily lost as the teens commence.