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I'll Be Your Mirror I’ll Be Your Mirror: Reflections on Doubling and the Processing of Aggression in the Post(modern) Fairy Tales of Hesse & Winterson by Brittany K. Rigdon A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida December 2009 Copyright by Brittany K. Rigdon 2009 ii Abstract Author: Brittany K. Rigdon Title: I’ll be your mirror: Reflections on Doubling and the Processing of Aggression in the (Post)modern Fairy Tales of Hesse & Winterson Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Eric Berlatsky Degree: Master of Arts Year: 2009 Traditional fairy tales represent some of the oldest and most archetypal forms of literature. However, as humanity rapidly evolves, the genre and content of traditional fairy tales still operates as a prevalent socializing agent that fails to promote pluralism. Instead, traditional fairy tales illustrate and uphold limited gender roles and expectations. This paper examines Hermann Hesse’s role as a pioneer in a now burgeoning movement of fairy tale revisions that blur boundaries between fantasy and reality by introducing specific, everyday locations, countries, and individuals coupled with a copious use of the double. This formula draws the reader into the tale via the uncanny and prompts a reevaluation of especially violent historical moments and issues that affect all within a society. Hesse’s work within this new tradition of revisions of beloved fairy tales, as well as his creation of literary fairy tales, has significantly influenced the work of key postmodern feminist fairy tale revisionists like Jeanette Winterson. iv Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge Dr. Eric Berlatsky, my thesis committee chair, professor, and friend for his tireless effort, his incredible support, and the unparalleled academic insight he offered during the writing and drafting of this labor of love. I would also like to thank Dr. Machado for gently and beneficently pushing me toward manifesting my vision for this paper when it seemed that no one else would and for being an incredible role model and an outstanding instructor. Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Trotter for always having a word of reassurance for me during this sometimes overwhelming process and Dr. Xu for her unflagging support and encouragement. Most importantly, I would like to thank my family for always believing in me and pushing me to achieve my greatness, even at the risk of bearing the brunt of my frustration. Mom, thank you for listening to revision after revision, and Dad, thank you for listening as well, even when the words that were coming out of my mouth didn’t make too much sense. Your smile is the only feedback I ever needed. Sue, my unofficial sister, thank you for being there through thick and thin. And last but not least, thank you, Ginger for hashing out the sticking points with me and for allowing me to access deeper levels of thought than I ever realized were possible. I love you. You are my partner in crime. v I’ll Be Your Mirror: Reflections on Doubling and the Processing of Aggression in the (Post)modern Fairy Tales of Hesse & Winterson Introduction: Historicizing the Fairy Tale..……………………………………………….1 Postmodernity and the Fairy Tale…………………………………………………2 The Dissemination of the Fairy Tale Genre……………………………………….5 The Codification of the Fairy Tale……………………………………………….10 The Suppression of the Feminine in Fairy Tales………………………………...12 The Weimar Wunderkind………………………………………………………..15 The Brave New World of Postmodern Fairy Tales…..………………………….17 Chapter 1: The Fractured Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse…..……………………….......19 Paving the Way for the Postmodern……………………………………………..24 War: Reflection, Rage, and Rebellion…………………………………………...26 Piecing the Fragments of Source………………………………………………...33 The Hard Journey Home…………………………………………………………37 Chapter 2: What Lies Beyond the Looking Glass: Jeanette Winterson………………….46 Doubles, Individuation, and the Search for Self…………………………………53 Time and Punishment……………………………………………………………58 Revising the Heroic………………………………………………………………63 vi Burning Down the House………………………………………………………...73 Hybridity and Balance…………………………………………………………...84 Conclusion: Befriending the Face in the Mirror………………………………………....87 Carter’s Life Blood……………………………………………………………....89 Sexton’s Witch Hunt……………………………………………………………..95 Byatt: The Healing Properties of The Fairy Tale……………………………….100 Abu-Jaber’s Female Quest Hero………………………………………………..101 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………….....105 vii Introduction: Historicizing the Fairy Tale The genre of the fairy tale dates beyond recorded history, and because of its deep historical origins, it has evolved countless times and continues to permeate almost every culture. However, since the shift from the oral mode of the folk fairy tale to the written form of the literary fairy tale, individuals have appropriated and manipulated the genre in an attempt to anchor it in “traditional” models that would uphold and reinforce specific cultural norms and conventions. A.S. Byatt suggests the appropriation of fairy tales is divisive and that currently, the tales: thrive in two very different cultural regimes. On the one hand, we have the literary tradition, a powerful folklore that has, for the most part, migrated into the nursery in the form of monumental national collections from earlier centuries, the many stories reissued, adapted, and retold, and the subtle appropriations of fairy tale plots. There is another archive as well […] versions of fairy tales in a more elastic form, supple enough to be invoked as we try to understand daily experience and to work through events. (Annotated Brother’s xlvi) The gap between the opposing forms of the fairy tale genre that Byatt illuminates has existed for centuries, but it is one that is currently gaining academic attention as we seek to add depth to our understanding of the possibilities of the genre. In fact, the widening gap between the rigidly conventional and the more flexible exploratory modes of the 1 fantastic, offered by radical revisions of fairy tales, is commonly recognized by many contemporary fairy tale theorists. These theorists describe the growth of an overwhelming dichotomy in which the genre of the fairy tale represents either an institutionalized entity, “produced and consumed to accomplish a variety of social functions in multiple contexts and…more or less explicitly ideological ways” (Bacchilega 3) or a narrative strategy used in an attempt to habituate the mind to a Coleridgian “Vast.” The latter uses of the fairy tale genre have necessitated the teller to use any means necessary to encourage literary cultures to progress past limited understandings that are reinforced by the former’s uses of fairy tales. In this spirit, tellers of the more flexible category of these tales have commonly adopted subversive means by which to question staid concepts regarding limits placed on humanity, and these means are reflected in the narrative strategies that their tales employ. Postmodernity and the Fairy Tale Within the last few decades, the burgeoning trend of authors using the genre of the fairy tale to implement a flexibility and self-awareness that promotes an ever- expanding practice of pluralization and subversive multivocality has been, perhaps, most prolific within the realm of postmodern prose. The proclivity of the postmodern toward fairy tales can be explained by its tendency to embrace what Said references as the “actuality of ‘mixing,’ of crossing over, of stepping beyond boundaries, which are more creative human activities than staying inside rigidly policed borders” (as qtd. in Hutcheon 54). Literary postmodernism moves beyond the modern in its rapacious quest to highlight exactly the topos of “mixing” that Said focalizes, and using fairy tales is one of the many ways in which postmodernism can overstep boundaries, “mixing” the real with fantasy, 2 while simultaneously prompting the reader to question the validity of both. Formerly, both in the tradition of modernist literary fairy tales and especially previous to this literary era of the genre, fairy tales themselves often adhered to the boundaries of the rigid borders that those who relegated the tales to the nursery as reinforcing agents of the social order had mapped out for them. However, more recently, the tales have served postmodernism in adding to the trend of the overstepping of literary boundaries by providing what McHale characterizes as an ontological foreground, “a description of a universe, not of the universe; that is, it may describe any universe, potentially a plurality of universes” (27). Fairy tales then, when used by postmodern authors, can be presented in many different ways, but regardless of the actual presentation of the tale, whether it be an autonomous revision of a popular traditional oral tale or the use of prevalent fairy tale themes within a larger fictional framework, the mode of the fantastic serves to complicate readers’ notions of what constitutes a central reality. In other words, the genre of the fairy tale can be utilized as a means to an end in the postmodern project, which seeks to distance itself from a single “center of consciousness” (9) and to move in the direction of “variation, experimentation, and transformation” (Wanning Harries 161). Specifically, the incorporation of the fairy tale within a number of postmodern works serves as a useful strategy in the decentralization of formerly
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