So often, I find myself thinking about myself with fairy tale imagery. One of the biggest images is the deep, dark woods. More specifically, it's about the way, in the older versions of lots of the stories, the heroine finds herself back in the woods after she is rescued the first time around. And then she has to save herself, rather than having someone else save her.
Other images run strong--Characters who can't speak, either because they're not able to (the little mermaid) or because if they do, their quest will fail (the girl in the Seven Swans). Characters in quests they don't know the meaning of, where they don't know the rules, where everything hangs on actions they've forgotten by the time things come to a head. Not knowing the rules, and not knowing which actions will ultimately save them.
As often as not, I find myself identifying with the "villains" in the stories. Not so much because I think I'm bad, but just wondering about how they ended up the way they were. One of the big ones is the ogre (troll, whatever) with no heart in its body. And I find myself wondering: why take your heart out of your body? what makes these characters necessarily evil? Another one is the Sphinx--asking riddles, where people's lives hang in the balance.
Not sure where I was going with this.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Fairy Tales
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2 comments:
I think that makes a lot of sense.
I saw a good movie back when I was in college called "Closet Land." I don't recommend that you see it (seriously...not a good movie for you to see right now), so I will give away part of it if that's okay.
In it, Madeleine Stowe's character is a writer of children's books. She's living in a sort of Brave New World where she is accused of putting subversive messages into her books and is tortured for it. The entire movie has only 2 characters and it feels a lot more like a play than a film.
Anyway, she is able to withstand the torture. And you find out (here comes the spoiler, but I already told you not to see it) that she is able to withstand the torture because she was abused as a child and all the characters who she later included in her children's books were invented when she was a child. She used those same characters when she dissociated. For example, there was a bird with blue wings (or something) who she could grab onto and fly away with.
She uses the same dissociation strategy in her current situation, which is why ultimately the person trying so hard to break her spirit is unable to. It doesn't have a happy ending, but...
So, anyway, I hope that wasn't too creepy to relate, but I can totally see how a fantastic creature or a fairy tale can be a comfort to a child trying to survive.
Yeah, it does make a lot of sense. And you reminded me of part of what I'd meant to write about in this post. I think that, separate from my original interest in fairy tales, there's an entire genre of re-written fairy tales. And one collection of stories is The Armless Maiden, edited by Terri Windling. This is specifically a collection of fairy tales that deal with the issues survivors of childhood abuse face. And I think that anthology (and also a lot of Charles De Lint's stuff) helped to crystallize the fairy tale theme of transformation and redemption for me, so I guess some of it is that these re-written stories gave me my original analogies for what's going on.
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