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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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,

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 epistemologically driven literary pursuits because not only do the tales represent other possible worlds, but these worlds also reflect, as well as influence, how we define our primary worlds. In this way, the worlds presented by the realm of faerie make the reader aware, as Baudrillard asserts, that “meaning, truth, the real, cannot appear except locally, in a restricted horizon; they are partial objects, partial effects of the

mirror” (108). Because fairy tales are often seen as metaphorical reflections of the real or

projections from hundreds of years of collective folk experience in relation to what is

deemed common reality, the inclusion of the tales, especially in revised versions, tend to

draw the reader’s attention to the nature of their construction, which, in turn, makes the

realities that they reflect visible. Furthermore, fairy tales have had an extended history of

acting as mirrors for accepted social norms; they both reflect those norms as well as

deform them, as does a fun house mirror, exposing the inherent restrictive nature of

socially constructed and disseminated perspectives.

Bruno Bettelheim asserts the historical reason these tales “teach little about the

specific conditions of life in modern mass society” (5), which produces the sometimes

fun- house-like quality of the distorted reflections they prompt, has to do with the fact

that the tales came into being long before such a society came about. However, he further

maintains that the tales are absolutely unparalleled in their ability to connect the reader

with inner-problems and universal human predicaments. The tales have always seemed to

provide this intimate connection with inner-turmoil and challenges, but the question of

how this connection occurs and what the historical roots are that have prompted such a

connection still remains. According to Byatt, “there is neither explanation nor teaching

in a true wonder tale” (Annotated Brothers xix). Yet consistently throughout history, the

tales have been repeated, they have evolved, and they have prompted individuals to

engage in, for reasons of either intense identification or a lack thereof, “critical

engagement and ongoing self-reflection” (Haase 27). Therefore, it is important to trace the roots of the genre and to attempt to understand how the evolution of the genre has affected and continues to affect those who come into contact with the tales.

The Dissemination of the Fairy Tale

There is no decisively comprehensive theory about how fairy tales and fairy tale themes and motifs originated, were disseminated, and evolved over the thousands of years that they have been in existence. However, there are general competing theories within the field of fairy-tale studies. It is generally accepted that most fairy tale themes were influenced by myths, which deal with deities and religious epos (including semi- deities and heroes). Yet, while mythical explanations were widely adopted and disseminated by the earliest peoples in an attempt for humanity to construct a palpable order for itself in the absence of well-developed bodies of science, medicine, or law, these stories’ heroes were superhuman and the endings were often tragic or cathartic, unlike the later genre of fairy tales that featured very human protagonists and generally hopeful endings. From myth, according to Tolkien, “epic, heroic legend, [and] saga, then localized these stories in real places and humanized them by attributing them to ancestral heroes, mightier than men and yet already men” (49). Finally, the epic, legend, and saga, became more generalized and constitute the stock of fairy tales. In fairy tales the heroes, once again, are not only human beings, with all of their frailties and foibles, but are also nameless human beings, who symbolize the everyman. Folklore, then, because it retains some of the themes and shades of myth, epic, saga, and legend is the rightful progenitor of the fairy tale, and it is a category that embraces “all types of prose and poetic narrations that were transmitted orally within certain cultural group[s], before being written down by the authors of the great epos or by modern collectors” (Heutscher 18).

As a derivative of the folklore family, fairy tales have evolved time and again, moving from the realm of oral tales (volkmärchen) to that of literary art tales (kunstmärchen),

which were written down and adapted time and again by countless cultures, each time adopting the social concerns, norms, and folkways of the culture by which they were embraced.

However, because the folk tale includes such a broad range of oral tales, it is worth discussing competing theories on the possible origins of folk tales, their migration, and finally, how fairy tales came to be distinguished as a unique genre within the larger classification. There are theories of migration, springing from the German school of the

19th century, that recognize the location of India as “the generating matrix for all fairy tales” (Tartar 64). In fact, according to the Brothers Grimm, philologists as well as collectors of folk tales, the fairy tales were derived from religious myth, but the religious connotations faded over time and became secular, oral wonder tales. It is further theorized that the tales traveled from India and migrated to Europe via Persia and the

Arab world and then migrated further through trade routes and the Crusades through

Spain, Greece, and Sicily (Zipes Why Fairy Tales 46). According to this school of thought, the following process of transmission through both oral and written modes was still quite random, and numerous variants of the tales surfaced from region to region.

Other theorists locate the origins of the fairy tale, less specifically, yet similarly, in the

Orient. The 17th century French editor of the Brahmin sage Pilpay’s Fables formulates,

“the greater number of monarchies in the Orient were despotic, and the subjects in consequence, did not see themselves as free…they found this way of being able to give advice, without risking their lives, to their kings, who treated them as slaves and did not give them the liberty to say what they thought” (as qtd. in Warner 165). There is no conclusive evidence proving that the Orient was, in fact, the birthplace of the fairy tale.

However, the theme of the tales’ depth of layers that far surpasses their appearance from the surface is one that continues today and begins to illuminate the multiple connections that individuals make with them.

Perhaps because of the deep connections and individual ties that people make with the tales, there are contrasting theories as to their dissemination within the western world. It is indisputable that there are striking similarities among tales from multiple times and cultures, and because of the oral nature of the tales, it remains next to impossible to trace how and when the similarities manifested. There are, however, two major schools of thought on the issue. The first theory, referred to as monogenesis or diffusion, argues that “one parent tale in one location spawned numerous progeny the world over” (Tartar 64). This theory is in accord with those who place the origins of the fairy tale in the east. There is, however, another theory, which is often upheld by structuralists such as Vladimir Propp and Tzvetan Todorov. This view, polygenesis, seems to favor a psychological explanation for the similarities among so many folktales and contends that “resemblances among tales can be attributed to independent invention in places unconnected by trade routes or travel,” and the tales are merely a product of the

“uniform disposition of the human psyche” (Tartar 65). Polygenesists tend to focus on the meaning and significance of the tales, rather than how they have come to be and from what regions they hail. They see the origins of fairy tales as more of an indigenous phenomenon than do the diffusionists.

Despite the inexact nature of the origin of the tales, it is essential to clarify the quintessential nature of fairy tales as we have come to identify them within the larger body of the folk tale category. As mentioned above, Vladimir Propp, an eminent Russian

scholar of the wonder tale, provides a basic classification of what have become the accepted parameters of the traditional, western fairy tale. Propp primarily studied Russian tales; although, he was a scholar of folklore and, therefore, intimately familiar with tales from around the world. In his seminal study, The Morphology of the Folktale (1928), he outlines thirty-one basic functions to which the wonder tale must adhere, thereby forming the paradigm applied to the modern day western fairy tale in both Europe and the United

States. According to Jack Zipes, “by functions, Propp meant the fundamental and constant components of a tale that are the acts of a character and necessary for driving the action forward” (Why Fairy Tales 49). The general plot-line, as laid out in Propp’s thirty-one functions, assigns an almost always unnamed hero, located within the “remote past,” who is not immediately recognized as such and who must suffer “hardships, struggles, and narrow brushes with death both at home and on the road,” as he/she faces a task/quest, and in the end, he/she transforms him/herself in a happy ending that translates

“phobias and fears into palpable physical presences rather than incarnating wishes or desires” (Tartar 71). The western fairy tale genre, both oral and literary, tends to follow these elements of plot that Propp lays out, but not without exception. In order to chart the western evolution of the traditional fairy tale from the Renaissance to modernism and beyond to the postmodern, it is necessary to emphasize the etymology of the English title of the genre, “fairy tale,” as it further explains the nature of fairy tales.

The etymology of the English title of “fairy tale” enhances an understanding of how and why, over time, the genre has been repeatedly manipulated and changed, and yet still maintains some of its most basic properties. According to Marina Warner, the word

“fairy” in Romance languages:

goes back to a Latin feminine word, fata, a rare variant of fatum (fate),

which refers to a goddess of destiny. The fairies resemble goddesses of

this kind, for they too know the course of fate. Fatum, literally, that which

is spoken, the past participle of the verb fari, to speak, gives French fee,

Italian, fata, Spanish hada, all meaning ‘fairy’, and enclosing connotations

of fate […] The Middle English ‘feyen’, Anglo Saxon ‘fegan,’ mean to

agree, to fit, to suit, to unite, to bind. (15-16)

However, despite the etymological roots of the title, it remains a conundrum that although in some fairy tales the human hero confronts ostensibly supernatural occurrences, in other tales, the heroes are aided by animals or other human or humanoid characters, who only seem to possess supernatural abilities, but fairies are actually rarely present in fairy tales. Why then, is the genre not, as it is in other countries, referred to as a wonder tale, marvel tale, or as the Germans call them, märchen, which is the diminutive of the word narrative, or a little/short narrative? The inclusion of the word fairy most likely does not have to do with the characters in the tale, but instead, the word tells us something about the nature of the tales themselves. Max Lüthi, a noteable German fairy tale theorist, describes the world within the fairy tale as “an abstract world, full of discrete, interchangeable people, objects, and incidents, all of which are isolated and are nevertheless interconnected […] everything in the tales appears to happen entirely by chance—and this has the strange effect of making it appear that nothing happens by chance, that everything is fated” (as qtd. in Byatt Annotated Brothers xix). The abstract and non-specific nature of the tales, along with the connections featured between humans and animals, inanimate objects, and their innermost selves, foregrounds the type of

interconnectivity that individuals can both deeply relate to and most often place at a

premium in their own lives. Moreover, the interchangeable nature of the characters, as

Lüthi elucidates, allows the reader not only to deeply identify with the fairy tale

characters, but also to see how their fates are intertwined and how each being’s actions

affect the fate of the next being. In recognizing the profound connections that individuals

have with one another through the format of the tales, an individual can enter what

Tolkien calls the “Faerian” realm, a dramatic space in which men “can produce Fantasy

with a realism and immediacy beyond the compass of any human mechanism” (72), an

act of creation that he argues “is inwardly wholly different from the greed for self-

centered power which is the mark of the mere Magician” (73). In these terms, it becomes

clear that the fairy tale can be a space that is pregnant with creative energies and the life-

driven will to act with the efficacy of responsible choice, care, and concern.

The Codification of the Fairy Tale

In order to truly grasp the evolution, influence, and scope of the fairy tale genre, it is essential to trace the genre’s transformation from the oral tradition to the written tradition. According to Zipes, “there was no distinct and distinguishable genre in literature called the fairy tale until the seventeenth century […] because the vernacular languages had not yet fully developed into literary languages” (Why Fairy Tales 21). But after the advent of the printing press, the genre gradually began to develop. The first citation for the fairy tale was recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1750

(Wanning-Harries 6). And during the 17th and 18th centuries, the tales proliferated not

only in written form, but also in slightly different structural variants. For example, oral

tales (volkmärchen) and wonder tales (zaubermärchen) were collected and transcribed by

folklorists such as Basile, Perrault, and the Brothers Grimm. These anthologies were classified as folk collections (buchmärchen).

Even from the time of the earliest folk tale collections, the tales were appropriated from the original “pre-capitalist folk form” (Zipes Breaking the Magic 20) and

“‘instrumentalized’ to support bourgeois or conservative interests” (Bacchilega 7).

During the shift from folk tale to literary tale, many of the buchmärchen/collections began to be characterized by the public and the authors of the literary tales as old wives’ tales, idle prattle, and trifles. However, the collections were popular nonetheless, and the more authentic the folk ‘voice’ of the literary brotherhood of male authors, the more recognition and respect they were afforded by their adoring public, who credited the authors of these anthologies with so deftly simulating the emblematic “primitive and oral

[…] style and simplicity of the ‘nurses’” (Wanning Harries 24). Therefore, during the early history of the literary fairy tale, a nationalistic, patriarchal canon began to emerge, built on the backs and reputations of its feminine predecessors. The ironic stigmatization of women writers in a genre devoted to emulating the voice of the nurse, gossip, or old maid continued for centuries as the literary fairy tale continued to transform, and what began as the author’s transcription of the oral, eventually evolved into the author creating his/her own uniquely creative written tales (kunstmärchen).

In terms of the Pan-European canon of literary fairy tales, the Italians were the first to make the tradition of fairy tale writing popular as a form of national literature.

Authors such as Giovanni Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile published collections of fairy tales during the late 16th and early 17th centuries that showed a marked difference from transcribed collections of traditional oral folk tales and buchmärchen.

Starting with the Italians, the fairy tale genre established a new tradition, that of the

literary artistic tale (kunstmärchen). The kunstmärchen were no longer transcriptions of

the oral tales, but instead, in these “artistic tales, created and written by a single

individual,” both personal and universal elements entwined (Heutscher 46). Although it is

rare for an author to ignore familiar cultural themes and influences in his or her own

work, the genre retained the basic elements of the fairy tale plot. This new literary breed

of the tales was distinguishable from predecessors in the genre by the tales’ creative flair

and flavor, and as Jack Zipes estimates, many of the works by the Italian fairy tale writers

were characterized as having a “critical view of the power structures in Italian society

[and an] irreverence for authorities” (Why Fairy Tales 59). With the literary fairy tale,

therefore, for the first time, the genre of the fairy tale became a codified vehicle for social

criticism and subversive commentary.

The Suppression of the Feminine in Fairy Tales

The tradition of the socially critical literary fairy tale was continued by the French

in the late 17th century. And although Perrault has garnered most of the acclaim for the

French fairy tale tradition (Les Contes des Fées), during this time, a new tradition of

feminist literary fairy tales emerged that competed with Perrault’s buchmärchen for

recognition and readership. Perrault’s collection of tales was marketed as straightforward

and often didactic children’s literature, while the tales of several women writers in the

genre such as Marie, d’Aulnoy, comtesse de Murat, Catherine de Jumel de Barneville,

and Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, as Elizabeth Wanning-Harries asserts, were often “self-

referential ‘fairy tales about fairy tales’ or mises-en-abyme [that made] self-conscious commentaries on themselves and on the genre they were a part of” (32). Despite the well-

crafted complexity of the female tradition of fairy tales launched in 17th and 18th century

France, the overwhelming strength of the patriarchal appropriation of age-old oral tales was maintained and reinforced by the male practitoners’ subtle and unrelenting undermining of the academic authenticity of the female fairy tale phenomena.

The legacy of patriarchal appropriation and suppression of the feminine influence on the fairy tale was exacerbated as the Germans began to take hold of the genre. Donald

Haase, in his essay regarding feminist fairy tale scholarship, explores how “Charles

Perrault and the Brothers Grimm produced versions of the story that dramatically altered the oral folktale, erasing its positive references to sexuality and female power” (9). The

Brothers Grimm, who achieved fame and fortune by collecting and printing their anthology of oral folktales, Children’s and Household Tales (1812), both launched and

defined the German tradition of the fairy tale. Their tales, which were largely written by

recording oral tales told to them by middle class, intellectual female informants, were

often heavily edited by the Grimms to celebrate strong “male” values and to excise

unseemly aspects of femininity. In fact, in a series of articles on the Brothers Grimm,

Ruth B. Bottigheimer protested the effects of the Grimms’ editorial revisions to the age-

old folk tales, “including their simple lexical revisions, [which] weakened once-strong

female characters, demonized female power, imposed a male perspective on stories

voicing women’s discontents and rendered heroines powerless by depriving them of

speech, all in accord with the social values of their time” (as qtd. in Haase 11). The extent

to which the Brothers Grimm edited their tales and the subtle logic behind the edits are

integral to a complete understanding of the evolution of the fairy tale genre, and

specifically with the directions that feminist revisionists of the tales have taken, because

of the enormous influence that their versions of the tales have had on the western canon

of fairy tales. Almost all who are familiar with fairy tales attribute that familiarity to

either Perrault or to the Grimm’s versions. In light of the scope of their influence then, it

is significant to explore what types of revisions were made and for what reasons.

As MariaTartar demonstrates in her extensive study on the nuances and

widespread impact of the Grimms, The Hard Facts of the Grimms Fairy Tales, while the

Brothers Grimm “made a point of adding or intensifying violent episodes” (5), they did

all that they could to eliminate “what they coyly called ‘certain conditions and

relationships.’ Foremost among those conditions seems to have been pregnancy” (7).

Other female conditions that the brothers avoided were instances of premarital sexual activity and anything having to do with rape or incest. The oral tales from which they culled their transcriptions were filled with such themes and motifs. However, as a result of the Grimms’ heavy-handed editorial style, currently, many of the tales with which the general public is most familiar are those that reinforce the image of the fairy tale genre as a tradition that is highly sanitized. This is the tradition that Disney has upheld, popularized, and upon which the institution has capitalized.

According to Zipes in Breaking the Magic Spell, the Brothers Grimm established

a conservatism to the genre of the fairy tales within Germany and, subsequently,

throughout Europe and later the states, which was “based on plebian values of honesty,

courage, fidelity, etc. [all symptoms] of the rampant nationalism of the early 19th

century” (80). So, the tales not only reflected the values of a burgeoning German

nationalism, but they also projected rigid nationalistic ideals onto the public conception

of the genre for years to come. However, while the Grimms were establishing their

readership, the German romantics were establishing another, more philosophical, highly

critical, and far less popular experimentation with the genre. Writers like Tieck, Novalis,

Schelling, Fichte, Brentano, and Hoffman, were creating tales that “argued for taking the

imagination more seriously. These writers aimed at making the line between the fantastic

and the realistic disappear to show the unlimited potential of the human being for self-

realization” (91). The period of German romanticism had three overlapping stages

between 1796-1820. The Romantics explored the possibilities of new utopian worlds and

a return to an all but forgotten connectivity between humanity and the individual’s

surrounding world. As German nationalist ideals prompted the brutality of Nazism and

world warfare, the authors of fairy tales from the Weimar period, 1919-1933, could no

longer promote utopian ideals. Instead, these authors presented ambivalent “protagonists

caught between changing social orders, desirous of creating new structures but torn

between the old and the new” (Fairy Tales 145). Therefore, in Germany, as in Victorian

England, during the late 19th to early 20th centuries, within the fairy tale genre, there

thrived a rivalry between fairy tales that promoted the social ideals of existing

bourgeoisie establishment and tales that sought to criticize the existing world order and to

explore alternative possibilities for cultural structures through the mode of the fantastic.

The Weimar Wunderkind

The dichotomy between the traditional fairy tales, whose potency is diminished or simply used to promote ideological ends, and tales that are used to challenge and expand commonly held social norms is still widely acknowledged by fairy tale theorists such as

Tartar, Bacchilega, Zipes, Haase, Yolen, Warner, Tolkien, Lewis, and Byatt, to name a few. With the implications of this division in mind, and with a marked contemporary

surge of post modern revisions of the fairy tale genre that are often subversive in nature, I will examine how Hermann Hesse’s unique manipulations of the fairy tale genre within the modern era can be seen to have influenced its later post modern trajectory. Jack Zipes suggests that “Hesse more or less set the tone for the Weimar period” with his collection of fairy tales published in 1919, and he further states that the tales produced in the

Weimar period “are significant because they use the fairy tale discourse in a variety of startling ways to comment on social problems that were affecting the course of the civilizing process” (Fairy Tales 159).

Hesse is by no means the first author of fairy tales that uses his tales to challenge the western civilizing process; however, he challenges this process in three ways that are highly significant and distinct in their combination. Furthermore, this combination is germane not only to postmodern revisions but also to feminist postmodern revisions of the fairy tale genre. First, he is one of the forerunners in the fairy tale genre to blur the boundaries between fantasy and reality by introducing and specifically naming everyday locations, countries, and individuals within his fairy tales. This move is highly significant because it draws the reader into the tale via the uncanny, and it prompts a reevaluation of historical instances and issues that effect all within a society, allowing for a possible working through of these issues. Second, Hesse’s work with the fairy tale genre significantly draws upon the heavy romantic influences of E.T.A. Hoffman in order to make use of his figure of the “double” and to complicate common perceptions of victim and victimizer, which also opens up a space for the processing of aggression. And finally, the heroes in Hesse’s fairy tales “reveal a pattern of behavior and action critical of authoritarian behavior and arbitrary male domination [embodying] new mystical and

pacifistic norms” (160). Hesse’s denial of the violence of patriarchal hegemony and his

blurring of boundaries between real life and fantasy and dominator and dominated,

complicate commonly held notions about individual responsibility and influence, a

project taken up by and extended by postmodern and feminist authors such as Winterson,

Carter, Sexton, and Byatt, and Abu-Jaber. However, aside from Zipes, there are few, if any, further instances of substantial scholarship on Hesse’s fairy tales, as he is much better known for his novels.

The Brave New World of Postmodern Fairy Tales

Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry, is a postmodern novel that introduces the

realm of intertexuality to the conversation of how the fairy tale genre can be a literary

means of processing aggression. Winterson’s use of the fairy tale genre both extends and

complicates Hesse’s model of kunstmärchen. The fairy tale genre within Winterson’s

larger novel still serves to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, invoking a hybrid

of the characteristics of traditional volkmärchen and the genre of realism (in that the fairy

tale characters are associated with characters placed within real geographical and

historical locations), but the fairy tales are not part of a larger realist project. Her work instead introduces postmodern feminist revisions of fairy tales such as Grimm’s “Twelve

Dancing Princesses” and “Rapunzel” that challenge and complicate traditional, patriarchal notions of heroism and are located within ostensibly “true” historical settings.

These revisions, then, reinforce the novel’s larger framework of historiographic metafiction. The characters in the tales, like the 17th century Dog Woman and Jordan and

their modern day doubles, Nicholas Jordan and the female chemist/activist, act to add an

extra layer of complexity to readers’ notions of subjectivity and agency. So, not only is a

layer of complexity added to our notions of the lines that demarcate good and evil within the individual, as is usually represented by the figure of the double, but by using the fairy tales to represent inversions of gender roles in their relation to patriarchal modes of violence, Winterson also “facilitate[s] a forceful and positive radical oppositional critique

[…] in order to challenge and subvert patriarchal and heterosexist discourses” (Doan

138).

Winterson’s postmodern revisions of the fairy tale genre utilize similar modes as

Hesse’s. Specifically, both authors’ work is within the fairy tale genre; all of these works blur realism with fantasy and use the figure of the double as a means of complicating notions of subjectivity and objectivity, promoting enhanced understandings of social positioning and modes of responsibility; and all present feminist modes of processing aggression.

Chapter 1: The Fractured Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse is often best recognized for novels like Siddhartha and

Steppenwolf, works that he wrote later in his career and that led to the characterization of

Hesse’s literary oeuvre as marked by a combination of “social disenchantment […] self- identity, self-awareness, and the conflict between the individual and society” (Liebmann,

1-2). Indeed, most of Hesse’s novels are concerned with issues of the artist’s identity and the struggle that he must endure within the institutions of materialist and rationalist society, which is deemed contemporary reality, in order to illustrate eternal values not directly maintained by that reality. As Northrop Frye observed, “fantasy is the normal technique for fiction writers who do not believe in the permanence and continuity of the society they belong to” (as qtd. in Ziowlkowski viii). As an artist, Hesse was able to initiate an interplay of fantasy and realism in novels that had otherwise linear plot lines, and often this blurring of boundaries between reality and fiction allows the reader via the protagonist to question limiting social structures. As a man, Hesse defined himself as apolitical, and he privileged art to address issues of humanity; however, with increased nationalism and warmongering in Germany preceding the advent of World War I, he wrote a number of pacifist letters and essays denouncing the political climate in his country. Between 1900-1933, while Hesse penned a number of his most influential works

of fiction, he simultaneously produced a number of modern incarnations of fairy tales that

are heavily influenced by the romantic fairy tale tradition of the late 18th and early 19th

century. Although the works were not widely recognized or credited for their influence

on his larger body of work, many of Hesse’s fairy tales challenge nationalism and the

barbarism of war and are rife with personal politics, thinly veiled by the genre of the literary fairy tale. In these politically charged tales, Hesse extends the project of the romantic kuenstmärchen (art fairy tales) by his use of the fragmented figure of the double, which illustrates a basic disconnection and alienation among once connected individuals and promotes a feeling of the uncanny, a return of the repressed. In its literary manifestation, Hesse’s use of the double allows for a durcharbeitung (working through) of unresolved human issues and the possibility for the reintegration of fragmented selves, which he achieves by moving the genre of the fairy tale into the realm of the modern and juxtaposing fairyland with ostensibly realistic settings that include war zones, modern institutions, and familiar geographical locations, allowing him to take the genre and bend it, making it more outwardly subversive to the institutions in which it locates itself.

In order to distinguish the form of Hesse’s fairy tales from other fairy tale

traditions, it is necessary to identify where his work lies within the three distinct phases

of the fairy tale tradition, the traditional oral volkmärchen (folk tale), the “romantic”

kuenstmärchen (art fairy tale), and the modern fairy tales of the Weimar period of

Germany. Hesse’s tales borrow from the earlier traditions of the fairy tale in some ways

and depart from them in others, marking his tales as a unique offering to the genre.

Traditional volkmärchen are the original oral tales that existed for thousands of years prior to literary fairy tales, and these tales were largely within the realm of the adult

world. Hesse’s fairy tales follow many of the characteristics that delineate volkmärchen as a genre. However, there are some marked differences. The most pronounced of these differences is that while the protagonists always seem to be on a quest, Hesse, through his use of doubles, blurs the lines between protagonist and villain, as both seem to be intricately linked to one another. It becomes more difficult for the readers of the tales to determine who is right and who is wrong, as causes and effects become difficult to follow in a sequential order. And often the survival and wisdom that is won in the conclusion of these tales symbolizes a bittersweet victory that ironically tends to alienate the protagonist even more because he becomes aware of his disjunctive nature.

The use of the double and the subjectivity of the traditional folk tale’s “happy ending” are both significant ways in which Hesse’s modern fairy tales depart from the volkmärchen tradition. However, these deviations are clear remnants of the influence that the romantic genre of kuenstmärchen (literary art tales) had upon Hesse’s modern fairy tales. The Romantic fairy tale movement coincided with the time that most of the oral tales were being recorded and codified. But the romantic authors wrote distinctly inventive tales wherein the protagonist was pitted against oppressive social institutions.

Zipes estimates these tales were written as a “critique of the worst aspects of the enlightenment and absolutism” (When Dreams Came True 17). It was within this era of fairy tale writing that the romantic artist sought to project the utopian vision of his art to actively criticize existing social institutions that were limiting to the creative spirit and to suggest higher possibilities. However, in order to illustrate the struggle of the romantic artist, these tales very rarely ended “on a happy note. [In many of these tales] the protagonists either go insane or die” (18). These types of morosely ambivalent endings

were very uncharacteristic of the oral folk tales, and it is a characteristic that Hesse both

adopted and adapted in his fairy tales.

Within the romantic fairy tale tradition, Novalis and E.T.A. Hoffman most

significantly influenced Hesse. In Novalis’s Fragments, he claims that the “absorption of

the alien in the individual self through art involves a process of ‘romanticizing’ through

which a lower self is identified with a higher one [and through] the act of ‘magic,’ which

is linked to the aesthetic mode of harmonizing [producing] a merging of dissonances in

harmonies […] analogous to art” (Freedman “Romantic” 47). Hesse’s fairy tales actively

engage in this interplay between discordant selves, whether the selves reflect many sides

of one individual or are interdependent parts within whole communities. Through the

mode of the fantastic, Hesse adds shades of complexity to the roles that his fairy tale

characters play in order to approach “the idea of unity in multiplicity associated with

Novalis” (43). One clear way by which Hesse manipulates the subjectivity and role of the

protagonists and those who support them is by introducing these characters’ doubles or

reflections of the “real” protagonists within both his fairy tales and novels.

Freud discusses E.T.A. Hoffman’s work with the double as a signal for his

concept of the uncanny. In discussing how the double acts as a theme of uncanniness,

Freud outlines that doubling is a “dividing and interchanging of the self […] the constant

recurrence of similar situations, a same face, or character trait, or twist of fortune […] or

even a same name recurring throughout several consecutive generations” (Uncanny 85-

86). Freud also refers to doubling within narrative as a multiplication, but whereas

Novalis and Schiller stress that multiplication of images and themes within literature are

opposing poles that “act as antinomies […] to be reconciled in the play of art” (Freedman

44), Freud invokes Otto Rank to assert that doubling originates within humans from a

“primary narcissism […] and when this stage has been left behind the double […] becomes a ghastly harbinger of death”(Uncanny 86). According to Freud, when we confront some early or primitive stage of our mental existence we thought we had overcome and now seems unfamiliar to us, we experience the terror of the uncanny. For both the romantics and Freud, when we experience the terror produced by the uncanny, and we confront these images of fragments or repressed unrecognized selves, we confront our mortality and attempt to “discover hidden meanings in life […] as a working through—what Freud called durcharbeitung” (as qtd. in Lyotard 1615). In his discussion on the concept of the uncanny, Freud argues further that fairy tales can never exhibit a sense of the uncanny even if they make use of doubles because readers of fairy tales have already agreed to accept the primitive ways of thinking that encompass the “magic” of fairy tales when they agree to read them. I will address the limitations of this claim as it relates to Hesse’s fairy tales later.

Although Hesse’s fairy tales were heavily influenced by the romantic tradition of fairy tales, Hesse’s work was located within the Weimar tradition of fairy tales. As a representative of the Weimar period, his tales were characteristic of the period in the ambivalent presentation of their protagonists, “caught between changing social orders, desirous of creating new structures, but torn between the old and the new” (Zipes Fairy

Tales 145). The work of the Weimar period was marked by pessimism due to what Zipes suggests was an inability to posit the “utopian solutions” (145) the romantics had attempted in the past. Although Hesse also does not offer utopian solutions, his endings are often not as unhappy as they are bittersweet because his protagonists, who follow a

traditional fairy tale model, gain knowledge or wisdom, but they do so in such a way that

they recognize repressed feelings of disconnection within a social system over which they

have little control or influence. Beyond his romantically influenced use of doubles, what

Hesse offered that truly marked his tales as unique from both his predecessors and his

Weimar contemporaries was the use of symbols, names, and signposts for real life

institutions, individuals, and familiar geographic locations located within the fairy tales.

Paving the Way for the Postmodern

Hesse’s use of the names of “real” locations, actual individuals, and culturally

identifiable objects is what allows him to move beyond the Freudian analysis of the role

of fairy tales and to extend Freud’s claim that “in fairy tales […] the world of reality is

left behind from the very start, and the animistic system of beliefs is frankly adopted.

Wish-fulfillments, secret powers, omnipotence of thoughts […] all the elements so

common in fairy tales can exert no uncanny influence here” (Uncanny 97). Because

Hesse incorporates hints of the “real” world within his fairy tales, the reader cannot fully

consent to adopt a primitive system of beliefs, as the interweaving of the “real” within the

tales disrupts any previous expectations that the reader may have had about what systems

of belief will be encountered. It becomes unclear whether the tale is dealing in “pure”

magic or whether it is commenting on the present state of social affairs.

Hesse’s introduction of vestiges of the “real” within his fairy tales was a

pioneering strategy in the genre of the fairy tale, and it was a strategy that cleared a path

for the postmodern tradition of what Brian McHale defines as the positing of

“ontological” questions such as “what happens when different kinds of worlds are placed

in confrontation, or when boundaries are violated?” (10). I would like to adopt McHale’s

distinction between the modernist tradition, which foregrounds epistemological questions

that seek to define the “known,” and the postmodernist tradition, which brings the

ontological questions of what constitutes “being” to the fore. McHale’s distinction

between modernist and postmodernist strategies can be used to identify and place Hesse’s experimentation with the mode of fantasy within the realm of the postmodern, yet Hesse

remains a hitherto neglected figure in the scholarship on the evolution of the fairy tale

from the modern to the postmodern. Despite the lack of critical recognition afforded

Hesse in his use of blending the world of the “real,” by introducing people, places, ideas,

and “individuals who have existed in the real world,” and the “possible,” it is undeniable

that he blurs reality with possibility, which McHale argues “constitutes enclaves of

ontological difference within the otherwise ontologically homogeneous fictional

heterocosm” (28). I contend further that Hesse’s use of the blurring allows the reader to

confront the unknown by first presenting the known, allowing for what Todorov calls a

hesitation between the uncanny and the marvelous, but the move can also be seen as a

hesitation between the accepted “real” and the possibility of what lies beyond.

Baudrillard explains that the individual within a society feels a need to approach the

“possible” through the “known” by noting “our entire linear and accumulative culture

collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view” (Simulacra and Simulation 10).

Baudrillard ultimately suggests that nothing can be truly “known,” which makes the

attempt of the individual to move through the conduit of the “known” in order to

commune with “unknown possibilities,” futile. In many of his works, Hesse similarly

acknowledges the paradox of trying to access the “unknown” via what is “known”. With

his acknowledgement of this conundrum in his fairy tales, he appeals to the individual’s

need for a collective, recognizable past by offering relics of the realistic past. Hesse then, further expands the nature of the tales’ reality and injects them with the fantasy of the fairy tale genre, thereby calling the readers’ ability to “know” what the tales are about into question. Initially, Hesse’s strategy of confusing the readers’ sense of “knowing” with the possibilities of “becoming” seduces readers with the familiarity of what they think that they can understand and control in order to ultimately challenge their limited understandings.

Furthermore, by Hesse introducing remnants of the “real” in his fairy tales, the reader can experience the uncanny, which “cannot arise unless there is a conflict of judgment [concerning] things which have been ‘surmounted’ and are regarded as incredible are, after all, possible” (Freud Uncanny 97). It is this sense of the possible and the impossible that Hesse plays with in his tales, as he expands the limits of what we deem possible for ourselves. Max Lüthi, on assessing the role of the characters within fairy tales asserts, “the characters of the fairy tale are not personally delineated; the fairy tale is not concerned with individual destinies” (24). While within some of Hesse’s tales, the reader receives context clues regarding the absolute identities of the individuals within the tales, we are never sure whether the characters are representations in a dream, a double, or an alternate representation of the author himself and within which world that alternate representation resides.

War: Reflection, Rage, and Rebellion

For example, in Hesse’s tale “If the War Continues” (1917), he begins with the dialogue of an unknown protagonist, who states, “Ever since I was young, I used to disappear from time to time to reinvigorate myself, and I would lose myself in other

worlds” (Fairy Tales 204). The beginning is sufficiently ambiguous and seems like the start of a traditional folk tale, which Bettelheim characterizes as having a “deliberate vagueness […] that symbolizes that we are leaving the concrete world of our reality [that] something normally hidden will be revealed, while the ‘long ago’ implies that we are going to learn about the most archaic events” (62). Hesse lures the reader into the form of a traditional fairy tale, and as Freud points out, might lead his audience to believe that all of the action that will transpire for the rest of the tale will be in the realm of fantasy, not to be believed because, as the reader, “we understand this […] we know the truth and do not share the error” of fantastic constructions (Uncanny 99). However, as the tale progresses, the protagonist finds himself trapped in the “present” nightmarish reality of what is most probably World War I, as the protagonist gives a current date, stating,

“when I returned, it was 1920, and I was disappointed to find that people were still at war with each other all over the globe […] they began shooting the civilian population mechanically from air balloons […] they no longer cared how many of their bombs fell on neutral countries or ultimately even on the territory of their allies” (Hesse Fairy Tales

205). The reader has no idea how long the protagonist has been in “another” unidentified world, but the recurrent imagery of the violent bombing creates a sense of “helplessness sometimes experienced in dreams” (Freud Uncanny 87). Already there is a sense of the repetition, which Freud argues marks the double and invokes feelings of the uncanny.

When evoked, the uncanny brings previously repressed feelings and emotions to the fore of an individual’s consciousness. Hesse appeals to the uncanny through both the repetition of violent imagery and later, through the use of doubles and in doing so, I contend, opens up an avenue through which both the characters and the reader can work

through reemerging aggressive impulses and issues. Hesse was heavily influenced by the romantic tradition, which was interested in revealing the individual’s alienation from both his/her fellow humans and nature. Romanticism focused on this schism by illuminating the inherent interconnected nature of the world and illustrating how far humankind had strayed from that nature. Freud also acknowledges the separation of the individual from both the world and his/herself in his exploration of the ego’s detachment from the external world and the resulting phenomenon of the individual’s propensity toward the

Oceanic, a feeling of oneness with the universe. He further contends that “our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive—indeed, an all-embracing—feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it” (Civilization 15). Freud ultimately characterizes this “all-embracing” impulse as a primitive impulse, which is “so commonly preserved alongside the transformed version [of ourselves that] has undergone further development” (16). Hesse does not typify the individual’s desire to reconnect to the feeling of the Oceanic as primitive in the slightest. In fact, he deliberately creates the atmosphere of the uncanny, presenting opportunities by which to call forth previously repressed feelings of connection and disconnection via illustrations of violent impulses. This calling forth not only uncovers parallel and repressed glimpses of the self, but it also acts as a mirror upon which the willing individual can gaze to reflect on their personal development as a dynamically transforming being.

Freud argues that the individual, once his/her ego has been separated from the external world, is hopelessly alienated and that, therefore, he/she is relegated to an existence of irreversible pain and suffering. Thus, the aim of psychoanalysis is to bring

formerly repressed issues to light in order to acknowledge and release them. Freud’s

protégé, Jung, extends his mentor’s limited suppositions about the ability of the

individual to live a “connected” life. Jungian analysis asserts that all individuals have a

shadow, “which we have not realized [and] of which we are unconscious” (Von Franz

Shadow 7). For the individual to ascertain what they themselves have repressed (the

shadow), either individually or on the level of the collective unconscious, there must be

an onlooker. That is to say, as individuals, we cannot detect our own shadows unaided.

We are dependent on individuals outside of ourselves to reflect our shadows to us. Only

when we allow others to observe us and to share those observations with us, can we

recognize what has been repressed; analyze how and why we have repressed the original impulses; and attempt to work through their existence in our lives so that the impulses do not have blind control over us. We can then, either claim the violent impulses and choose to accept them and transcend them, choosing not to indulge in them, or we can embrace them, depending upon what our conditioned beliefs call for.

This need for an individual outside of the self to promote healthy introspection and growth builds a bridge between individuals that connects them. Jung knew this in a way that exceeded Freud’s views on the matter. According to Serrano, Jung’s aim was to

“establish a dialogue between the individual and the Universe, without destroying the idea of the personality or the Ego” (47). So, for both Jung and Hesse, once violent and/or aggressive impulses have been explored and processed, the individual might also be open to acknowledge and possibly reestablish connections with others that had been previously denied by the formation of the ego. For both men, this reconnection with the universe was the highest path humanity could take. In fact, Hesse had a professional as well as an

intimate friendship with Jung for many years of his later life, as Hesse employed the psychoanalytic services of Jung. However, their friendship went far beyond that of a patient and his physician. Jung characterized the connection between himself and his famous patient as “a magical meeting across the barriers of time and space” (as qtd. in

Serrano 12). And magic is indeed what Hesse’s fairy tales appeal to, attempting to stretch both his concept and the concepts of his readers in regards to what constitutes the fullest possibilities of reality.

Hesse, through all of his writing, but specifically through the writing of his fairy tales, attempts this expansion of accepted reality by initially blurring the reality of the readers’ identifiable world with that of fantastic worlds. He also introduces doubles throughout the tales, who act as necessary onlookers to other characters as well as for the perceptive reader, thereby providing active reflections of the shadow, which can, at that point, be identified and processed. The fairy tale is the perfect realm in which to perform this literary kaleidoscope of self exploration because, according to Von Franz:

everybody is everybody’s shadow in fairy tales, the whole cluster of

figures is compared with one another, and all figures have a compensatory

function […] every archetypal figure has its own shadow. We do not know

what an archetype looks like in the unconscious, but when it enters the

fringe of consciousness […] it manifests the double aspect. Only when

light falls on an object does it throw a shadow. (Shadow 34-35)

Hesse freely indulges and plays with the figure of the double in his fairy tales. And he goes beyond the mold of modern revisions of fairy tales by introducing doubles that represent cross sections of different worlds. In other words, all of Hesse’s doubles are not

confined to the world of the literary fairy tale of which the fictional characters are a part, which amplifies the scope of the mirror beyond the borders of the land of faerie. It is by this practice that he turns the mirror out to his readers, inviting them to identify with the fictional characters and to see them as shadows of self, who are not only restricted to the page, but who also now can cross over into the world of common reality.

Hesse experiments with the figure of the double in a way that promotes identification and possible processing of the effects of violent impulses in “If the War Continues”

(1917). In this fairy tale, when Hesse’s protagonist finds himself arrested while walking down the street with no “certificate of permission,” he is immediately taken to the police station and asked for identification by his arresting officer. It is at that point that the protagonist reveals his identity to the reader. He has asked the officer to sentence him to death, as he knows that his predicament will progressively become worse, to which the officer replies, “you’re not the only one. But it’s not so easy to die. You’re a citizen of this state and are obliged to this state with body and soul…by the way—I see that you’ve registered yourself as Emil Sinclair. Are you the writer Sinclair?” (Hesse Fairy Tales

210). It is only when the protagonist requests his own death that his identity is revealed to the reader. It is Emil Sinclair, the pseudonym under which Hesse published his novel

Demian (1919) and also the name of the book’s protagonist and its narrator. Therefore, the reader is taken into the world of the “real” or at least the semi-“real,” as Emil Sinclair is not an actual individual, but the name is the identifiable pen-name of Hermann Hesse in the realm of common reality, and in this way, the protagonist of Hesse’s “If the War

Continues” can be seen as his very own double. The fragmentation of Hesse is multiplied

“like [in] a hall of mirrors [where] the author’s works never cease to reflect his own

image” (Mileck 36). The interesting twist here is that the double is not implicit in the

text; the reader must be slightly familiar with Hesse’s life and work to be able to tap into

the uncanny. According to Freud, “the situation is altered as soon as the writer pretends

to move in the world of common reality. In this case he accepts all the conditions

operating to produce uncanny feelings in real life” (Uncanny 97). And if the uncanny

appears, given the audience, then the repressed is laid bare for both Hesse and the reader

with similar repressions to sift through and ultimately to accept and deny the repressed,

clearing a space for the individual to make new choices.

After the reader learns about the author’s double, the concept of which has now

worked to blur the lines between fantasy and reality, and with Hesse’s use of his own

pseudonym, the current year, and several mentions of the German currency, he takes

advantage of this disruption in the narrative to have the protagonist pose a series of

philosophical questions to the officer. He asks in regards to the war, “why is the whole

world exerting such tremendous energy this way? [...] what is it actually that people are protecting and maintaining with all of this? Why do you place such a high value on war?

[...] is war really a good thing at all?” (Hesse Fairy Tales 212). With these rhetorical

questions, not only does Hesse illustrate an attempt to work through unresolved issues

and negotiate between the fractured selves of himself as an author in relation to a

community from which he has become disconnected and alienated, but his question is

also reminiscent of Bakhtin’s assessment of the double. Bakhtin states, “the theme of the

manic, split personality, unrestrained daydreaming, unusual dreams, passions bordering

on madness, [and] suicides […] destroy the epic and tragic wholeness of a person and his

fate […] the possibilities of another person and another life are revealed in him” (Bakhtin

120-121). According to Freud, the potential of reconnecting to a holistic self is slim, but

it is only in avowing the current separation, in recognizing the shadow in others, or in

literature, in the figure of the double, that an individual can attempt to identify the

reasons for the initial separation and choose to reunify, which inherently promotes

change and growth in the individual. It is this fragmentation and loss of wholeness within

Hesse’s tales that make the endings of the tales, regardless of how much knowledge the

protagonist may have gained or whether or not he survives, meaningful. In terms of the

tales’ Menippean satiric qualities, the ending is inconsequential because the questioning

and the dialogue with self as “seeker of truth” is used within the mode of the fantastic,

“not as an embodiment of truth, but as a mode of searching after truth, provoking it, and

most important, testing it” (118). With Sinclair’s parting questions to the guard, the

sensitive reader is left feeling unsettled but contemplative and perhaps open to confront

repressed feelings of disconnection within the self.

Piecing the Fragments of Source

Most of Hesse’s fairy tales, especially those that are critical of war, question what is “real” and what we consider “unreal,” manipulate our understandings of what constitutes the “knowable” and the “unknown,” and promote dialogic interaction among fragmented individuals concerning the judgments individuals make based on their compliance with accepted realities. In “The European” (1918), there is no doubt from the very beginning that Hesse is placing the reader in an everyday realistic setting, identifying the protagonist of the tale as the European, which is a vague but pointed move towards the realm of the “real.” This tale also makes several allusions to biblical narratives. The beginning of the tale reveals that the earth has been submerged by a flood

sent by the lord to end the “bloody world war” (Hesse Fairy Tales 213). The Europeans erect dams to save themselves from the flood, but when asked by their enemies to evacuate the towers, the Europeans refuse, and “both sides [keep] shooting heroically to the very last hour” (214). After the flood, there remains only one existing European, who is found and saved by Noah and his ark, which contains two of each remaining species on the earth, male and female, except for the European, who remains alone. He is now the only white man alive with no mate. Hesse not only locates this fairy tale in the existing realm of Europe, but he also evokes what is considered reality by some and fantasy by others, the biblical themes of Noah and the ark. He blurs all boundaries of time and space, which is a project that Winterson and other postmodern fairy tale revisionists later take up and extend. Then, Hesse also presents the reader with “realistic” apocalyptic themes and commonly held beliefs and fears from the past, which invokes the uncanny.

Once Hesse has gained access to the uncanny, despite doing so from the genre of the fairy tale, he is able to become the story teller, who Freud claims has “a very directive influence over us; by means of the states of mind into which he can put us and the expectations he can rouse in us, he is able to guide the current of our emotions, dam it up in one direction and make it flow in another (Uncanny 98). Hesse channels and redirects the commonly held expectations and emotions of western readers. Hesse’s Noah is

African and as stated previously, the European is the only white man left in existence, but he quickly becomes unpopular with the others because he often found fault with his “kin and judged them with harsh condescension” (Fairy Tales 218). Hesse isolates the white male European, making him the victim of his own aggression and quest for global conquest and colonization. This isolated state allows for the European, with no other

choice, to finally face his repressed fears of miscegenation. For the European man, who

has isolated himself, recognizing only the socially sanctioned and wholesome aspects of

“whiteness,” miscegenation then, is a threat because it symbolizes a confrontation with

all that he has repressed within himself in order to justify the oppression and torture of

others that were previously connected to him. The doubles, in this case, are symbolized

by masculine and feminine pairings. All of the passengers on the ship besides the

European have another half, a mate. The European’s lack of mate reflects his attempt to

further alienate the colored individual, or darker half of himself, whom he has feminized

and made subordinate to himself. According to Ralph Freedman, Hesse often symbolized

the masculine’s confrontation with and acceptance or denial of the feminine as “the union of opposites…the male and the female, light and dark…and allegorical figure representing salvation, the eternally feminine, the origin of all men” (Lyrical 64). The

European’s marriage is to his ego and the logic that justifies and maintains his

disconnection with the other that allows him to colonize the other.

All of the passengers on the ark are joyful to be saved, to have life. They begin a

competition in which each animal and human showcases a talent or special ability for the

other shipmates. However, when it comes time for the European to exhibit his talent, he

tells his floating community “my talent is of a higher kind. My gift is the intellect”

(Hesse Fairy Tales 219). The un “doubled” European represents a fragmented and

alienated shell of a man, who is disconnected even regarding the significance of his place

on the earth, unable to procreate and continue his race because there is no female who is

not already partnered on the ark. Ralph Freedman further discusses Hesse’s “diverse

identifications of the relationship of the artist’s self to his experiences [that] primarily

turn on the opposition of sense and intellect associated with that of dark and light, mother and father, and sensuality and ascetic control” (“Romantic” 44). Clearly it is the lack rather than the presence of the protagonist’s double that signals “the fear of death” in

“The European” (Freud Uncanny 86). And Hesse’s protagonist can no longer rely on his intellect to perpetuate his lifeline, but he must instead temper his intellect with sensuality, a side of him that has been repressed.

Finally, with the other passengers on the ark not understanding the talent that the

European has displayed for his shipmates and how it will improve the world, he tells them desperately, “my mind […] is to solve great problems on which the happiness of humankind depends” (Hesse Fairy Tales 220). However, when his shipmates prod further and ask about how to actually achieve his proposed ideas on happiness for the human race, the European dejectedly admits, “I didn’t say I know the secret of happiness. I only said that my mind works on problems whose solutions foster the happiness of humankind” (221). Of course, after providing such an abstract answer, the inhabitants of the ark are left to wonder what the European has to offer to the repopulating of their new world, to which Noah replies, “only the man from Europe is alone […] This man has been preserved for us as a warning and motivation, perhaps as a ghost. However, he cannot propagate himself, unless he is to dip into the stream of multicolored humankind.

He will not be allowed to ruin your lives on the new earth. Rest assured” (223). The symbol of the alienated European, who relies more on “knowing” and proving that knowledge as a means to his end of the oftentimes violent subjugation of others, who he deems to have less “knowledge” than himself, is provided by Hesse as a mirror to reveal the repressed wounds that those in developed nations carry as a mark of their self-

imposed disconnection from others. This disconnection often manifests itself in further

colonization of and violent suppression of others and ultimately symbolizes a mark of the

colonizer’s disconnection to their higher selves, the higher selves that they can not

explain via “knowledge” but that they can only “be” through embracing all that they are,

both positive and negative.

Marie-Louise Von Franz asserts that the only way to overcome aggression,

violent anger, or “evil” is to adopt “a new principle of consciousness [that] dwells, so to

speak, in a center of totality between good and evil [and the fairy tale,] the innermost

center, the divine nucleus of the human psyche, is the one thing beyond the problem of

good and evil and is an absolute factor which can lead us out of the situation with which

that problem confronts us” (Shadow 325). Hesse confronts this split between good and

evil in a fairy tale called “The Dwarf” (1904). In this fairy tale, Hesse also explores the

impact of violent impulses and the devastating effects of the disconnection between

individuals via the use of the figure of multiple doubles, who act as mirrors for one

another, creating reflections of reflections, an ultimate mise-en-abyme.

The Hard Journey Home

“The Dwarf” opens up within the narrative frame of an age-old fairy tale told by

the storyteller, Cecco. From the first line, Hesse constructs this fairy tale as a tale within a

tale. Throughout the tale, Hesse also gestures towards the readers’ world of common reality, thereby layering worlds upon worlds and allowing for the reader to be drawn into

the tale. For example, Hesse makes reference to famous Italian painters of the era, and he sets the tale in Venice. Furthermore, he casts the main character as Signorina Margherita

Cadorin, the daughter of “Donna Maria from the House of Giustiniani” (Fairy Tales 9).

The Giustiniani family was historically one of the most powerful families of Genoa, who colonized the island, Chios, in the Aegean Sea and presided over that island, establishing one of the earliest trade companies between the 14th and 16th centuries (“Giustiniani”).

The tale relates the relationship between Signorina Margherita Cadorin, the most beautiful but cold noblewoman in Venice and her double, Filippo, a deformed dwarf, who himself is a talented storyteller. Cadorin cherishes Filippo as her conduit to the realm of the imagination and the fantastic. It becomes apparent from the beginning of the tale that the dwarf symbolizes the empathetic and freely loving part of Cadorin that she has repressed in order to maintain her place in a wealthy family during Renaissance Italy. She is an exquisite prize that must be won by the highest bidding suitor in order for her to maintain her family’s social prestige within a system of rigid social hierarchy. Hesse skillfully crafts Fillipo as Cadorin’s double and subsequently her shadow by immediately painting a sharp contrast and an even more inextricable connection between the two, illustrating that “as beautiful and slender as his mistress was, the dwarf was just that ugly.

If she stood next to his crippled figure, she appeared doubly tall and majestic, like the tower of an island church next to a fisherman’s hut” (Fairy Tales 3). Hesse deftly symbolizes the extreme deformation of the dwarf as a satirical comment on the highly civilized society’s obsession with outward appearances as a mark of high social standing that is used to separate the elite from the rest of society; instead, it supports the elites’ opulent lifestyles. However, Hesse also contrasts the dwarf’s outwardly grotesque appearance with Filippo’s intensely acute sense of intellect and his intimate connection to

“being” rather than the western European realm of “knowing,” which is enacted via the division of the world through classification and academic analysis.

The dwarf entertains his double, Signorina Margherita Cadorin, by telling her fairy tales, which, as they serve to connect individuals with higher possibilities of

“becoming” and allow a place within which the audience may face repressed parts of the self, symbolize her attempt at reconnecting with aspects of herself that she has denied to survive within her socially constructed “reality.” Cadorin, in her frustration and adhering to the coldness of the “nature” of her personality, is often aggressive toward the dwarf, verbally abusing and chastising him. However, in response to her callousness, Filippo patiently admonishes her, stating, “be patient […] good stories are like those noble wild animals that make their home in hidden spots, and you must often settle down at the entrance of the caves and woods and lie in wait for them for a long time” (5). When

Filippo tells the fairy tales to Cadorin, he lets them “flow smoothly until the end, like a river streaming down a mountain in which everything is reflected” (5). Here, Hesse clearly links Cadorin’s double, Filippo, with the inexplicable mystique of the ontological self. Although Filippo is outwardly subjugated by his mistress, it is clear that she is, in fact, the one who has subjugated herself to the prison of her life, the life of civilized society’s “knowing” in which she is little more than the property of her family. She is allured by Filippo’s connection to his imagination and to the world around him. In fact, the only time she feels at peace is when he tells her his tales. But instead of releasing herself to the wonder of Filippo’s tales, as she is deeply entrenched in the rigidity of her reality, she instead takes “pleasure in tormenting him a little. After all, he was her property. [And] sometimes she took all his books away or locked him in the cage of her parrot” (6-7). As in “The European,” Hesse uses the colonization metaphor to illustrate

how the enactment of oppression of the other via colonization causes individuals to

repress that which they see as unworthy or less than in the other within themselves.

The dwarf remains, at least in the beginning of the tale, a part of Cadorin that she

must repress or lock away because it is too disparate a part of herself in relation to her

position within her current reality. As much as Cadorin torments Filippo out of her

frustration over the divisive nature between what she is and what she is actually living,

she is also careful not to “irritate him too much, for everyone believed that the dwarf

possessed secret knowledge and forbidden powers. People were certain that he knew how

to talk with many kinds of animals” (8). Filippo does, indeed, possess the power to

commune with animals, which is of particular interest because this power illustrates what

Tolkien identifies as the profound desire of the individual to communicate with other

living beings. This desire, Tolkien asserts, is as old as “the Fall” and represents an

overwhelming sense of separation. In that sense of separation, “other creatures are like

other realms with which Man has broken off relations, and sees now only from the

outside from a distance, being at war with them, or on the terms of an uneasy armistice”

(84). Because Filippo is rumored to have the awesome power of connecting to previously severed alliances, he represents the embodiment of all that we deny ourselves in the name

of security, so his character is physically deformed in much the same way that individuals

tend to deform themselves psychologically.

Also, because of Filippo’s ability to commune with animals, he adopts a puppy that Cadorin gives to him, a cast off gift from a spurned suitor. Cadorin gives Filippo the small, black dog because she no longer wants the puppy after it gets into an accident that deforms its leg. Cadorin would have had the dog killed, but Filippo begs for the dog’s

salvation and becomes his caretaker, nursing the injured soul back to health with his love and adoration. Filippo, not ironically then, names the dog Filippino, a diminutive of

Filippo, and he calls him Fino for short. Fino, the dog, is perhaps more obviously than most, Filippo’s double, the shadow of his self that is subjugated despite its inherent free nature and a shadow that he attempts to nourish back to its original stature. Perhaps more interesting than the dog being Filippo’s double is the fact that he is a double of a double, as Filippo is Cadorin’s double, and the dog is Filippo’s. As a double of a double, Fino comes to symbolize the most fragile part of the human soul, and it is one that is highly susceptible to aggression. As such, despite Filippo’s attempts to shelter him, the dog is harmed.

Cadorin sees her social-self in the same way that everyone who is socially subjugated to her does. In fact, she is described by one of the other minor male characters in the tale “like one of Giorgione’s paintings,” and he states further, “though you truly can’t find much fault with his women, they’re not made out of flesh and blood. They exist only for our eyes” (Hesse Fairy Tales 11). Because Cadorin is so vain and because she exists only for herself and to fulfill what her rigid social caste demands of her, she is mildly aggressive toward Filippo, but she is never physically abusive or overtly violent.

She is not, but the man she falls in love with, Baldassare Morosini, another double for

Cadorin, is extremely callous, so much so that he is wildly violent, aggressive, and cruel.

Unable to connect with Filippo, her repressed double, due to society’s high demands for

Cadorin to behave in ways that are socially sanctioned for a woman of her position,

Cadorin seeks out another double, Morosini. Morosini embodies her extreme dark side.

Again, Hesse starkly contrasts the two characters, pointing out that “whereas she was

light and slender, he was dark and strong and one could see that he…was disposed toward adventure” (10).

However, when faced with her darker and more sinister self, Cadorin is utterly seduced by it. Morosini is cruel to both Filippo and Fino, but Cadorin is so enthralled by him, this part of herself, that she does not speak out against this violence, thereby never breaking free of the statuesque mold that others have placed her in. First Morosini strangles Cadorin’s parrot and disposes of him in the canal, and then he kicks little Fino into the canal and watches him drown, with relish. In response to the murder of his beloved dog, Filippo, the dwarf, attempts to confront Cadorin and bring her repressed aggression to the fore by pointedly asking, “why did you kill my dog?” (16). Cadorin replies, “it wasn’t me who did it,” but the dwarf, not accepting this lame attempt at justification, finally replies, “you could have saved him but you let him die” (16). The dwarf, as the repressed double of Cadorin, attempts to bring the aggressive acts perpetrated by her other double, Morisini, to her attention. He thus reflects her aggressive side in an attempt to make Cadorin take responsibility for the outcome of her actions, the self-inflicted murder of one of the most fragile and important parts of herself. In this tale,

Hesse suggests that complicity with aggression is, nonetheless, a form of violence, and that when individuals do not speak against violent acts, they accept even the most overtly heinous acts of brutality in the world around them. Just as Cadorin was silent when her double, Morosini, killed Fino, individuals are often silent in the face of acts of aggression, like abuse, neglect, and war. Hesse addresses the inherent perilous nature of such complicity, stating, “no idea or principle is to blame for all our wretchedness, for the nullity, the coarseness, the bareness of our lives, for war and hunger and everything else

that is evil and dismal; we ourselves are to blame. And it is only through ourselves, through our insight and our will, that a change can come about “ (If the War 32). In this radical view of human responsibility, the only way in which the individual can overcome aggression is for he or she to accept his or her role in creating that violence. For Hesse, though, unless the individual speaks out against the violence, he or she is allowing for the aggression to manifest itself both within and outside of the self.

Unfortunately, in “The Dwarf,” Cadorin is never quite able to come to terms with herself or work through her aggressive nature, as her darker side seduces her. Filippo, too, is broken once his double, Fino, is murdered without regard. The chain of Cadorin’s self sabotage is taken to its ultimate limit, when Filippo vows his revenge on her. He ultimately tricks her into poisoning her lover, Morosini, whom she realizes, in desperation, she has little control over. Filippo deceives Cadorin by telling her a fairy tale in which a mermaid tricks his very own father, a physician, into giving her an aphrodisiac to seduce a sailor, whom she loves. However, the mermaid actually uses the potion to kill her object of desire. In essence, Hesse now presents the reader with a world within a world within a world, as the mermaid is a double for Cadorin, created by her very own double, Filippo, and the sailor is a double of Morosini, who is a double of Cadorin, who is a double of the mastermind of the tale, Filippo. Ultimately, Cadorin’s selves are more concerned with dominating one another rather than acting as mirrors that reflect.

Moreover, all of the doubles, save Filippo, are not too keen on looking into the mirrors that are directed toward them. Ultimately, all of the reflections are too much for Filippo to bear, as he laments, after providing Cadorin with a poison potion with which she unknowingly kills Morosini, that he had lived a life “monotonous and meager—a wise

man in the service of fools, a vapid comedy” (Fairy Tales 26). This tragic ending, which

is compounded by Cadorin becoming mad and pacing her balcony screaming, “Save him!

Save the dog! Save little Fino!” (26), can either act as a cautionary tale to the reader, or it

can reaffirm the sensitive reader’s melancholy over a powerless life, devoid of choice and

lived in the service of fools. However, as Sartre claims, the way in which a complex tale

like this is interpreted is a matter of choice because everything that the individual chooses

is, nonetheless, a choice, and even choosing not to choose is still a choice. In this view,

the astute reader could take this tale, look at the reflection that the mirrors offer, and ask

of himself/herself, as does Sartre, “am I really the kind of man who has the right to act in

such a way that humanity might guide itself by my actions?” (20). Those who take on

questions such as these when confronted by the reflection of repressed selves are the ones

who have found a mode by which to work through their violent impulses and to affirm

the connection between individuals because in order to become aware, the individual

must “perceive all others […] as the condition of his own existence” (37). We are nothing

unless there are others to reflect to us what we are, and in choosing an identity, we thereby project it onto humanity.

For Hermann Hesse, the figure of the double as well as the lack of the double or

denial of the double signals the uncanny fear of being fractured, impotent, and alone,

barely alive, like Cadorin at the end of her descent. It is in this use of the uncanny that we

see what Freedman characterized as Hesse’s concept of the Seele (soul) “in the double

sense of nonintellectual, intuitive vision […] enabling him to move from the opposition

of creative sensuality (feminine) and controlling intellectuality (masculine) to their

integration, literally, in an Oversoul, a transcendental soul” (“Romantic” 45). In “The

Dwarf,” Cadorin diminishes her true creative sensuality to the stature of a deformed dwarf and is overcome by the damaging, internalized patriarchal norms of her age, symbolized by Morosini. Hesse is concerned with integration, and this can be seen in his extensive use of the double throughout his works as a means of balancing the dichotomies of the self out of a feeling of sensucht, a search for home. As Novalis aptly stated, “all Fabulous tales are merely dreams of that home world, which is everywhere and nowhere. The higher power in us, which one day shall fulfill our will, are, for the present muses, which refresh us on our toilsome course of sweet remembrances” (as qtd in Carlyle 217). Hesse only seeks to remind us through his fairy tales that, as Novalis acknowledges, home is a space of our inner creation because we filter our perceptions that come from outside of us through our beliefs. So whether we can recognize the “real” signposts that lead us there or we continue to seek the milestones of the fantastic on our way back to our origin, the uncanny or the unheimlich is simply a form of homesickness.

Chapter 2:

What Lies Beyond the Looking Glass: Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson, a contemporary British author whose work has garnered a high degree of critical acclaim, boldly challenges convention with novels that often subvert traditional forms and genres. However, while the unorthodox style of resistance to categorization in her writing has distinguished her prose and earned her the title of one of the forerunners in the development of a distinct lesbian feminist postmodernist tradition, violently jarring imagery and an often ostensibly disjointed style of writing have made her works the object of debate. In Sexing the Cherry (1989), Winterson’s fourth novel, she blurs the lines between fantasy and reality, fact and fiction, and time and space, by synthesizing historiographic metafiction, fairy tale, and myth. Sexing the

Cherry is not Winterson’s only work that invokes intertextuality as a means of deconstructing the common divisions between “fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, and masculinity and femininity” by rewriting and layering existing stories (Makinen 3).

However, in this novel, not only does she utilize mythical, folk, and fairy tale themes as a vehicle by which to perform revisions of traditional patriarchal histories, but in blurring the lines between historical fact and the fantasy of the faerian realm, she also evokes the uncanny and makes extensive use of the figure of the double. In using the mode of fantasy in fiction, Winterson presents an extremely unique, yet useful, model to process

the effects of aggression on an individual level. Winterson, like Hesse, illustrates the

processing of violence as an inner project. Nonetheless, while Woolf and Hesse suggest

that in order for inner-transformation to successful, it must balance the masculine with

the feminine by vehemently denouncing violent tendencies and tempering existing

masculine agency with feminist pacifism, Winterson avers that the individual, and especially the oppressed individual, must face the inner-self and deny socially

constructed male and female identities by internally acknowledging, claiming, and

enacting fantastical violence to forcefully obliterate harmful, stereotypical notions of self.

It is only after the individual begins to deconstruct the ego that a reconstruction of the self can and does occur via a grafting process. Thus, the individual seeks to graft desirable parts of others onto the self, symbolizing the need for a reintegration of the dissociated or missing parts of the self that have been excised due to the ego’s need to maintain a socially acceptable façade.

Examining Winterson’s use of the fairy tale within the fabric of the fictional realm of Sexing the Cherry produces a blurring effect between the “real” and the

infinitely “possible,” which allows her to specifically challenge the narrow patriarchal

notions of heroism that lead to violence and to hint at what might lie beyond those

notions, namely self actualization via the integration of the multiple and disparate sides of

self that are repressed by the individual in the name of social viability. Winterson’s use of

doubles both mirror and reveal the complexities of the characters within the novel, and as

almost all of her characters serve as doubles for one another, Winterson has connected

characters in disparate realms, combining the strengths of oftentimes weaker individuals.

Furthermore, her use of “real” historical figures, settings, and ideas contrasted by the

mode of fantasy make use of and extend the narrative strategies that Hesse established

with his experimentation with the fairy tale genre almost a century earlier. Interestingly

enough, although a direct connection of Winterson’s work to Hesse’s does not seem to be

immediately apparent, it is clear that she is linked to him in both her use of the uncanny

in the fairy tale and fictional realms and her repeated use of doubles. It must also be noted

that Winterson’s most significant literary influence is Virginia Woolf. Winterson herself

claims “to be a modernist and the heir to Virginia Woolf, on her own terms” (Makinen 4).

In light of the significant influence Virginia Woolf has had on Winterson as an artist and

author, the link between Hesse and Winterson is also strengthened, as Woolf and Hesse

were contemporaries who were united in a similar project.

Hesse wrote the bulk of his most influential works in the first half of the 20th century, which also marked the beginnings of modernism within most of Europe and the

United States. Although during this time period, the literature in Germany is characterized as neo-romantic rather than modernist, both Hesse’s and Woolf’s writing share some key components that separate their works from those of many of their contemporaries in their respective genres. The essential and overlapping characteristic that their oeuvres share is the rejection of patriarchal modes of thought and expressions of violence. As noted by Zipes, “Hesse’s heroes reveal a pattern of behavior and action

critical of authoritarian behavior and arbitrary male domination” (Fairy Tales 160). And

as arguably almost all of Hesse’s heroes are said to be heavily autobiographically

influenced, it can easily be proven that he was not only critical of patriarchal violence in

fiction, but also in his personal life, and, indeed, many of his critical essays support this

assumption. Woolf was also both celebrated and reviled for her pacifism and her, at

times, blatant disavowel of patriarchal modes of domination and the violent proclivities that drive them. At heart, the unique connection that Hesse and Woolf share is one that laid the foundations for their solitary brand of criticism. This criticism featured what

Woolf and Hesse identify as the destructive force behind the patriarchal mindset. Both

Hesse and Woolf are ultimately concerned with the transcendence of gender through a process of integration of the multiple sides of self, which includes a balancing of masculinity with femininity. Hesse explores these themes throughout his novels and fairy tales, suggesting that miseries induced by “socio-political repression […] need not be, that change is possible in reality” (Zipes, Breaking the Magic 39). Further, Hesse suggests that the individual might, in theory, realize all possible realities through self- liberation and a deliberate move towards self-actualization. For him, this liberation included a synthesis between the feminine or creative and the masculine or intellectual sensibilities in each individual. The explicit model for processing aggression that Hesse offers in his fairy tales is one that evokes previously repressed feelings regarding the loss of human connection, which allows for a confrontation with those repressions and then, possible transcendence through a recognition and metacognition of how the individual interacts with his or her repressed issues surrounding aggression. Hesse’s fairy tales extend this model by illustrating and rebuking the violent impulses that his multiple characters display and by revelaing how an individual’s identification with aggression will ultimately lead to ruin.

According to Ralph Freedman in his study, The Lyrical Novel: Studies in

Hermann Hesse, Andre Gide, & Virginia Woolf, Hesse and Woolf are connected in their use of the fairy tale as a part of a larger project, the lyrical novel. Freedman states that

lyrical novels are works in which “the world is reduced to a lyrical point of view, the equivalent of the poet’s “I”: the lyrical self [and that] in the masquerade of the novel, this point of view is the poet’s mask as well as the source of his personae [...] they cohere as a texture, intermingling past and present, occult and real events, mythical and historical figures with person’s in the hero’s real life (8-9). I contend that lyrical novelists, like

Hesse, Woolf, and ultimately, Winterson, Woolf’s devotee, often attract a readership that is similarly looking to apply a lyrical point of view to the world and to identify with others despite gender, time, or place in an attempt to achieve what Novalis called an

“ideal self.” In order to reach toward this ideal self, either the lyrical author, whose characters all mirror the unification of his or her inner world with the outer world, or the individual who desires transcendence, “like the poet who adopts the alien mask [of his characters], must absorb others, as he must absorb the external world, to reflect an ideal image” (23). Characters within this genre then, mirror each other and attempt to interact with one another to either reintegrate or dispense with disparate aspects of self, for which every character is a symbolic representation.

Woolf, a lyrical author like Hesse, championed a need to acknowledge and assess social repressions and, as a result, claim a “freedom from unreal loyalties,” and she adamantly advocated that individuals begin this libratory process by ridding themselves

“of pride of nationality, […] of religious pride, college pride, school pride, family pride, sex pride, and those unreal loyalties that spring from them [because] seducers come with their seductions to bribe you into captivity” (Woolf, Three Guineas 80). Both Woolf and

Hesse sought to loose themselves from the limiting bonds of the patriarchy, and Woolf, like Hesse, voraciously explored similar paths by which to do so, acknowledging the self

in others, specifically the feminine in the masculine and vice versa. Woolf labeled this all

encompassing pursuit as one of androgyny or ultimately the unity of the mind, a state in

which repression is no longer an effort because it is a state of mind in which “nothing is

required to be held back” (A Room of One’s Own 97). She is clear that in balancing the

selves, “some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the

man [and] some marriage of opposites has to be consummated” (104). This negotiation

between an individual’s innermost qualities, especially those that have been influenced

by gender and that contribute to either aggression or passivity, are the very issues that

have been adopted by Winterson, and she examines these themes in Sexing the Cherry as a means of striving toward an understanding of what separates both the sexes and ultimately, the self.

As did her predecessors, Hesse and Woolf, Winterson exposes the schisms current social reality imposes upon individuals within it. Winterson reflects upon the divided subjectivity of the self as well as the possibility for reunification of disparate selves.

However, as previously stated, unlike her predecessors, she does so by promoting a deconstructive model in which she presents graphic scenes of female on male violence.

Although Winterson is often criticized for simply assigning her female characters the undesirable masculine traits aggressive traits they strive to escape, I contend these instances of female centered aggression are necessary in Winterson’s model. The figure of the female oppressor is an integral component of Winterson’s mode of processing violence because it allows the individual the ability to enact violence on a purely fantastic level, so as to blur the stereotypical gender assignments that typically accompany violent impulses and allow for a true confrontation with this destructive impulse. Fantastic

female aggression also provides those oppressed by violence with a fantasy-based outlet through which to channel the fear and rage that can accompany being systematically dominated. In his treatise, Time and Free Will, Henri Bergson discusses the necessity of

Winterson’s second category of processing violent impulses and emotions via fantastic episodes of violence by detailing that “where emotion has free play, consciousness does not dwell on the accompanying [physical] movements, but it does dwell upon them and is concentrated upon them when its object is to conceal them” (30). That is to say that within the individual, once the moment of the violent situation or attitudes has become past tense, it does not mentally disappear. Furthermore, when individuals do not confront either freshly conscious or repressed unconscious memories of violence, but rather attempt to conceal the aftereffects of aggression, the emotions surrounding the aggression can become more concentrated or emotionally “deep-seated” (31). Therefore, sometimes the only appropriate way to dissipate and eventually integrate these deep-seated emotions into a healthy concept of self is to confront them and repeat them experientially on the level of the inner-states of our “ideas, our memories, our states of consciousness of every description, which will turn in larger or smaller numbers in a definite direction” (31).

Fantasy allows a stage on which the violent acts can be rewritten and through identification with the characters, both the author and the engaged reader can relive the

“nature of the peripheral events” (31) and the pent up physical associations that accompany violent events. Upon the individual reliving violent events and, subsequently choosing how to rewrite or recast his or her perceptions of those events, the power that the perpetrator holds over the victim can be obliterated at the hand of the victim, which allows him or her to reclaim a sense of power.

Doubles, Individuation, and the Search for Self

17th century Jordan, the protagonist of Sexing the Cherry, is the quintessential

victim of circumstance. He suffers from abandonment soon after birth, perhaps one of the

most traumatic situations that a child can face. In the wake of Jordan’s biological parents

denying him, the Dog Woman claims him. She fishes him out of the Thames, finding him

to be something that she would like to possess, as she cannot have her own biological

children. Despite the Dog Woman’s intense desire to possess a male child, she bestows

him with the symbolically elusive name, Jordan, the river in which the biblical Jesus was

said to have been baptized. This river has historically represented the divide between the

material world and the place from which all originated and wish to return, the promised-

land. In analytic psychology and literary analysis, water is often the symbol of the

feminine, and although Jordan is ripped from the waters of life, as are all children that

leave the womb and enter into the material realm, he has been violently ripped from his

biological mother, the effects of which are symbolized by the fetid water that surrounds

him when Dog Woman finds him. As crossing over into Jordan usually symbolizes a

death of the “real” or a communion with the all-encompassing, it would seem that Jordan

would have the potential to imbue the frustrated and monstrous Dog Woman with the

balancing effects of something beyond the self. Children often act as an extension of the

self. However, as Dog Woman admits after finding Jordan, the reason she hasn’t extended her legacy of self further into the material via a biological child is that in order to do so, she would have to have had a man, and as she acknowledges early on, “there’s no man who’s a match for me” (Winterson 4). Essentially, as the Dog Woman’s outward attributes would suggest, by lacking the balance of the masculine in her life, she has

overcompensated, becoming larger than the patriarchy that seeks to oppress her. She has transformed herself into a hyperbolic monstrosity, a formidable figure of aggression and timbre. Dog Woman, who admits that she was never touched by her own father after she

“broke both his legs,” acknowledges, “people are afraid of me” (21). Despite her fearful and very masculine presentation, Dog Woman is often tender with Jordan, but she acknowledges that as much as she would like to commune with her son, she “nourished him as a hill of dung nourishes a fly, and when he had eaten his fill, he left” (4).

Jordan and the Dog Woman are doubles, who once represented the balance of the masculine and the feminine beyond materiality—and the repressed memory of unity between the male and female binds them together, often summoning a bridging of the divide between the real and the fantastic, past and present, and self and other. As such, their story skips from the 1600s to the 1990s, and their paths are continually juxtaposed.

They are so connected that when Jordan is an infant, the Dog Woman inscribes a medallion with the maxim: “remember the rock from whence ye are hewn and the pit from whence ye are digged” (3). The aphorism on the albatross-esque medallion Dog

Woman hangs around Jordan’s neck would imply that they are, in fact, biologically linked, when in reality, their connection is one of a set of doubles. Jordan summons the repressed in Dog Woman and, eventually, she in he. I contend that the doubling of

Jordan and the Dog Woman can be explained by Jung’s concept of the process of individuation. Jacobi examines this Jungian concept, stating that individuation is a:

process of psychic development that aims at the broadening of

consciousness and a maturation of the personality […] highly variegated

signs accompany the process and mark its stages like milestones. They are

based on definite archetypes, which appear regularly in the material of the

unconscious, e.g, in dreams, visions, fantasies, and which compel the

individual to come to terms with them. (113)

Because Jordan considers Dog Woman his mother figure, he must also, as an infant,

consider himself an actual extension of her. Noelle McAfee summarizes Julia Kristeva’s

detailing of this phenomena, explaining that when the infant is born, he does not see

himself as a separate subject, but instead, “the infant comes into being without any

borders, “as he is habituated to “a realm of plentitude, of a oneness with our environment,

and of the semiotic chora” (45). This oneness is Jordan’s legacy, his namesake, and he

seeks it tirelessly in the novel. However, as is required of all functioning members of

society, a child must differentiate himself, establish his sense of the psychoanalytic “I.”

According to Kristeva, he does so by a process called abjection, what Mcafee elucidates is a “process of jettisoning what seems to be a part of oneself. The abject is what one spits out, rejects, almost violently excludes from oneself…what is abjected is radically

excluded but never banished altogether” (46). The abject is more than the repressed,

never entirely disappearing from consciousness and always obscuring the boundaries

between the self and the other. As Jordan begins to differentiate himself from his surrogate mother, he is drawn back toward the feminine, symbolized by his magnetism to

the sea and his dedicated search for Fortunata. Furthermore, he continually searches out

and develops the feminine in himself because Dog Woman, his primary caretaker,

regularly demonstrates masculine traits that are aggressive and inclined towards

domination. Jordan, thus, is psychologically imbalanced. He elides his desire for the

feminine, the repressed in Dog Woman and, by proxy, himself, by asserting that his

travels are inspired by a desire for exploration, discovery, and conquest. Jordan, though, is also confronted with his mother’s lack of femininity around the time of his adolescence, when she paradoxically adopts the very feminine role of the overprotective mother who wants to hold onto her son at all costs. Jordan reflects upon the Dog

Woman’s impulse to hold onto him, which invokes the uncanny (return of the repressed), his desire for a hitherto underdeveloped femininity. So begins his quest.

Nicholas Jordan, who is on a similar quest for a balanced self, is the 20th century double of the 17th century Jordan. Like Jordan, Nicholas Jordan is also obsessed with traveling the world and sailing the seven seas, but he does so as a sailor in the Navy and as an adolescent, obsessively inspired by a children’s book called The Boys Book of

Heroes. However, Nicholas Jordan, both a double and extension of Jordan, is not solely motivated by patriarchal ideals of heroism or the submarine films that his father watches religiously. Like Jordan, Nicholas Jordan also muses about the divine and the all- encompassing nature of the search for the inner self, wondering how long it will take humanity to evolve enough to desire a true “journey inside, down our own time tunnels and deep into the realms of inner space” (Winterson 136). His search for a missing feminine side—repressed by a society in which if you are a hero, then “you can be an idiot, behave badly, ruin your personal life, [and] have any number of mistresses”

(133)—emerges and ultimately prompts him to find the Dog Woman’s 20th century counterpart and his own double, both in the 17th and 20th centuries, the female chemist.

Just as Jordan, who is in search of a repressed feminine side, goes in search of Fortunata,

Nicholas Jordan, upon reading about the female chemist in a newspaper article, has an

inexplicable feeling that he knows her, although he does not understand why and vows that he will “find her” (159).

Although Nicholas is not of the fairy tale realm within the novel, he is Jordan’s double who attempts to live with prostitutes, hoping to cull the secrets of their femininity by cross-dressing as a woman. Within the 17th century, Jordan is also the conduit for the postmodern revisions of the fairy tales, “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” and

“Rapunzel,” as he is the reason the severely bedraggled remaining eleven princesses share their stories of woe. When Nicholas arrives looking for Fortunata, he instead finds her sisters, and his arrival allows them to vocalize these feminized versions of the fairy tales that have not traditionally been told. Fortunata is also Jordan’s double, which is evident when Jordan asks himself: “was I searching for a dancer whose name I did not know or was I searching for the dancing part of myself?” (39).

Through his unflagging quest to find Fortunata/himself, he finds himself on the receiving end of Fortunata’s Artemis and Orion myth. In his tumultuous search for the unsatisfying male version of heroism, he posits, “when we’ve been everywhere […] where will we go next, when there are no more wildernesses?” (136). Like any stock fairy tale character, Jordan must leave his home on a quest of epic portions, and along the way, he meets innumerable challenges and is assisted by others who hale from the world of fiction and the realm of the fantastic. Therefore, it is via the search for an inner self conducted by Winterson’s main realist fictional characters that a melding of worlds begins to take place, and not only do the fictional characters take on aspects of the realm of the fairy tale, but they are also confronted by characters from the fantasy realm, who mirror their innermost desires and shape their paths throughout the novel. In his study on

the meaning of fairy tales, Sheldon Cashdan asserts, “as the protagonist travels deeper and deeper into forbidden territory, so the reader is transported into unexplored regions of the self. And just as the hero or heroine is forced to face conflicts and dangers in the narrative […] so the reader is forced to confront struggles and threats in the psyche” (31).

In Sexing the Cherry, the forbidden territories that the characters draw both themselves and their readers into are those of the fantastic, where nothing and no one are what they seem to be because everything and everyone is a symbolic double for the self. This territory is forbidden because it represents the repressed, the unexplored and labyrinthine inner reaches of all possible selves, some that have been denied because of oppressive social gender labels and others that have simply gone unnoticed or have been undernourished.

Time and Punishment Winterson first introduces the 17th century characters of Jordan and his adoptive mother, the Dog Woman, and then, links them to their 20th century counterparts, the jilted female chemist and Nicholas Jordan. Dog Woman and Jordan are rooted in the historiographic metafictional realm of the novel, just as Hesse injected historically viable characters, contemporaries, and easily identifiable geographical locations. Both Dog

Woman and Jordan are also surrounded by authentic historical characters, such as John

Tradescant, gardener to royalty, collector of curiosities, traveler and importer of exotic plants; King Charles the I, executed to facilitate the birth of the Commonwealth; and

Oliver Cromwell, Lord protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland. However, both Dog

Woman and Jordan are infused with uniquely fantastic characteristics from the beginning, throwing reality itself into question. For instance, Dog Woman is an ostensibly

superhuman character, who towers over others, a grotesque eyesore describing the craters

in her face to be “home enough for fleas,” whose massive body “forced an elephant into

the sky” and whose mouth is gigantic enough to easily “hold a dozen oranges […] at

once” (Winterson 21). Jordan, who although he does not compare to his adoptive mother

in sheer mass or in brutal courage, also seems fantastical in nature, evidenced by his

recondite origins, “fished as he was from the stinking Thames […] not bound to anything,

just as the waters aren’t bound to anything” (3-4). Winterson deftly creates a believable

historiographic backdrop that can be easily be mapped, and drops the oddballs, Dog

Woman and Jordan, into the seemingly known and historically understood realm of 17th century England. She does this in order to challenge commonly held conceptions about that era and to comparatively mirror, through the fantastic characters’ realist ficitional counterparts, how little a still patriarchal society has advanced over the space of more than 300 years. J.R.R. Tolkien details Winterson’s tactic of introducing the fantastic into the space of the mundane by suggesting that the mode of the fantastic is “not an end in itself, its virtue is in its operations: among these are the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires. One of these desires is to survey the depths of space and time” (41).

Because the novel incorporates the fantastic, it also shares the mode’s ability to draw the characters and the readers into contact with their most inner drives and private, unexplored corridors, those that transcend the binds of linear understandings of time and space.

In Sexing the Cherry, Winterson experiments with the relativity of time from the

beginning of the novel, featuring an epigraph that states, “the Hopi Indian tribe have a

language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present, or future. The division

does not exist. What does that say about our time?” (Winterson). Winterson uses the mode of the fairy tale to examine the relativity of time because the fairy tale lies, by definition, outside of the boundaries of our formal conception of a linear time progression. Fairy tales are timeless, and because the stories manipulate Newtonian concepts of time, they also mirror the subjectivity with which each individual approaches his or her relationship with time. Henri Bergson suggests that time is, in essence, a qualitative entity, but because human beings must experience and make sense of time in a way that incorporates the external space in which they interact, each individual defines duration as an event that is quantitative, that is, we separate events as occurring one after another in a sequential manner and along a spatial line within a homogeneous medium

(122-24). Bergson theorizes further that individuals conceive of time in such a quantitative fashion in order to differentiate between same and other. The only way, however, in which the individual can return to a “domain of pure consciousness” is to

“deprive the ego of the faculty of perceiving a homogenous time” (126), which is realized

“when we dream; for sleep, by relaxing the play of the organic functions, alters the communicating surface between the ego and external objects. Here we no longer measure duration, but we feel it; from quantity it returns to the state of quality” (126). Dreaming, though, is not the only means by which the individual can access time as a qualitative entity rather than a quantitative one. For some, interacting with the mode of the fairy tale can also allow for a space in which the individual can suspend his or her quantitative experiences of time and step into an experience of what is referred to as inner-time. The mode of the fairy tale specifically summons an experience of qualitative inner-time because when one steps into the world of the fairy tale and identifies with the different,

yet connected mien of its characters, the ego is temporarily surrendered to the symbolic

function of those within the realm of the story. Ralph Freedman, in identifying the

characteristics of lyrical writing, likewise suggests that lyrical authors, like Hesse, Woolf,

and Winterson are concerned with creating a poetic whole by unifying the protagonists inner world with that of the external world in which he or she operates, and in so doing, a qualitative experience of time is actualized. Fairy tales are often used to achieve this effect because within the fairy tale, “the self is the point at which inner and outer worlds are joined […] the ‘world’ is part of the hero’s inner world; the hero, in turn, mirrors the external world and all of its multitudinous manifestations. He distorts the universe or dissolves it into hallucination or dream in which it’s ‘true’ (infinite and organic) nature is revealed” (The Lyrical Novel 21). The fairy tale then, is often a fantastic and dream-like

vehicle through which the individual can free himself from the ego, one’s concept of self

that separates self from other, and focus more deliberately upon the “magic” of the

infinite possibilities of connection between the inner-self and the external world.

Hermann Hesse recognized that by accessing inner-time, the fairy tale allows for an

opening of the liminal space between the sensual and the soul.

Catherine Bernard posits that Winterson’s use of fantasy also introduces a realm of inner-time. She claims that through Winterson’s revisions of traditional fairy tales and

her use of fantastic themes, she “takes representation to a point of tension where, out of

breath, it discloses something of its inner rhythm” (178). All of Winterson’s critics seem

to concur that when the traditional narrative is disrupted or the readers’ expectations of

the narrative withheld, the intimate and private workings of those narrative forms are

revealed. Winterson’s attempt to disrupt expectations and unravel mystification by

rewriting the fairy tale genre is celebrated as an “experimental strategy [used] in order to reimagine [traditional historical] relationships […] offering readers a more disrupted, fragmented version of history, requiring them—us—to work harder to fit the pieces together, to reconstruct chronology” (Rozett 147). Winterson’s use of the tales, besides allowing her to reposition both the marginalized and the dispossessed within traditionally male dominated and linearly constructed structures by disrupting the order and placement of expected roles, also “questions what we assume to be historical reality by tracing solid, though illogical parallelisms between” (Martin 194) the characters in the tales from the

17th century and their 20th century counterparts, with whom they interact. The use of the fairy tales then, creates a fluid notion of time and space rather than reinforcing the widely accepted dichotomy between the two. By using the narrative strategy of revising the fairy tale genre and weaving it into the linear narrative of the novel, Winterson is able to “close the gap between past and present […] and [instill] a desire to rewrite the past in a new context” (Clingham 61). This rewriting of the past is possible with Winterson’s manipulation of the fairy tale, as she manages time and popular collective notions regarding historical truths across time, prompting the reader to reify the possibilities of previously unsung and, therefore, unrecognized voices outside of the ego of the privileged. But through her revisions of the traditional fairy tale, she also creates a symbolic representation of the self as connected to the other, or the double, which allows for a qualitative experiencing of time and creates the possibility for a profound analysis of the self that explores the ways in which the individual makes “conscious states from within…break off not only from one another, but from ourselves” (Bergson 138).

Revising the Heroic

Some of the most significant postmodern feminist revisions used by Winterson as a tool to disrupt both the order of patriarchally defined gender roles and the order of the

Newtonian acknowledged space and time continuum are her re-workings of the traditional fairy tales, “Rapunzel” and the “Twelve Dancing Princesses,” both originally from the Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales (1812). Her revision of “Rapunzel” is relayed to Jordan on his quest to find Fortunata, who is one of the twelve dancing princesses. Fortunata’s sister, another dancing princess, who happens to be the wicked witch figure from the tale, tells Jordan this revision of the traditional fairy tale,

“Rapunzel.” Winterson blurs boundaries between the identities of characters like Jordan from the 17th century metafictional historiographic account or the 20th century Nicholas

Jordan from the realist fictional narrative and characters, like Fortunata, from the fairy tale realm. Fortunata’s sister explains to Jordan that Rapunzel had been her lover and that they had shared a passionate relationship. She explains that Rapunzel’s family was so angered by her lesbian love affair and her refusal to marry the “prince” that “they vilified the couple, calling one a witch and the other a little girl” (Winterson 52).

Winterson introduces the element of lesbianism to her revision of the traditional tale of “Rapunzel” in order to blur traditional beliefs about gender identities. She recasts the role of the heroic prince who must save the life of the damsel in distress with that of the marginalized witch, who is unable to maintain her healthy and loving relationship with her lover, Rapunzel, only as a result of society’s intolerance of romantic female love. Winterson illustrates how a traditionally vilified and violent character such as the witch is truly as connected to the Rapunzel (or the self) as the figure of the traditional

prince has been in prior versions. Furthermore, by recasting the witch as the part of the self that is truly passionate and sensual, but that is often required by society to be repressed by the individual, and by recasting the traditional hero, the prince, as one who is violent toward the witch and, therefore, not heroic, Winterson allows for a reexamination of the motives of the perpetrators of violence. Her recasting of the roles of the witch and the prince also allows for the possibility of reclaiming of a self that has been circumscribed by a sexually inhibited society, whether those inhibitions originate from prescribed gender roles or simply from undefined socially unacceptable and, therefore, repressed impulses. In Winterson’s revision of “Rapunzel,” the lovers tried to escape the harsh reactions of Rapunzel’s family by moving into a tower together. In an attempt to keep prying family members away, the traditional aspects of the fairy tale,

“Rapunzel,” are reinforced in terms of Winterson’s inclusion of the sealed up tower and the witch coming and going by climbing Rapunzel’s hair. Winterson provides an ironic twist to her tale by explaining that Rapunzel also came and went as she pleased, but when she did so, she “got in by nailing a wig to the floor and shinning up the tresses flung out of the window. Both of them,” the witch explains, “could have used a ladder, but they were in love” (52). The prince, in his infinite heroism, must spare Rapunzel a life that is

“unsuited” to her, and so, dressing as Rapunzel’s lover, he climbs into the tower and forces her to watch, when upon her return, he blinds Rapunzel’s lover, the witch, in a field of thorns. After that, the prince and his reclaimed maiden “lived happily ever after, of course” (52).

Elizabeth Wanning Harries asserts that the logic behind many postmodern, feminist revisions of fairy tales affords the tales the ability to “pry the old stories open,

revealing their inadequacies and their silences” (101). She acknowledges the need for this

type of prying because of the one-dimensional nature of characters in traditional fairy

tales, which often polarized women, labeling them as either maidens in distress or

wicked/evil shrews. Therefore, by revising these characters and by adding layers of

complexity and depth to them, the patriarchal and often sexist systems that upheld the

narratives of traditional fairy tales are revealed (100). Winterson exposes the often

ridiculous and repressive nature of male heroism throughout her revisions of traditional

fairy tales in Sexing the Cherry, where previously valiant princes often play the role of

the cowardly oppressor, acting out of fear. By doing so, she not only subverts oppressive patriarchal binaries, but she also blurs boundaries between her constructed worlds across narrative frames and across narrative chronology.

Jordan, of the 17th century, feels compelled to establish himself as a hero, as does

Nicholas Jordan, his 20th century double. Jordan longs to make discoveries in foreign

lands as does his friend Tradescant because, as he says, “England is a land of heroes,

every boy knows that “ (85). His desire to separate himself from the feminine influences

in his life truly prompt him to seek the label of “hero.” Jordan acknowledges that as an

explorer, he could “bring back something that mattered and in the process find something

[…] lost […] in [his] mother because she is bigger and stronger […] and that’s not how

it’s supposed to be with sons” (113). However, Jordan’s search for his feminine self,

Fortunata, eventually overwhelms him and lures him beyond any desire for heroism.

Ultimately, Jordan privileges the inner-quest for a higher self symbolized by Fortunata

over the socially endorsed outer-quest for the rewards that accompany patriarchal

heroism. He seeks her willingly, despite knowing full well that she represents something

bigger than he, and in Jordan’s search for his repressed femininity, he embraces Novalis’s

notion of transcendental heroism, in which the lower self identifies with the higher self

and in which the known and socially accepted is superceded by the higher or infinite

nature that exists in the realm of fantasy and art (Freedman The Lyrical Novel 23).

Finally, in his quest for Fortunata, Jordan encounters her sisters, the twelve dancing

princesses, hears the revised fairy tale accounts of their lives, and crosses the boundaries

between worlds. This blurring between the realist fictional world, the metafictional

historically “real” world of figures like Cromwell and Tradescant, and the fairy tale realm

all produce pockets of timelessness in which the characters and perhaps the active reader

may entertain “inward [lives that] tell us that we are multiple not single, and that our

existence is really countless existences holding hands like those cut-out paper dolls, but

unlike the dolls never coming to an end” (100). In entering these pockets of timelessness,

Jordan begins to realize that maybe he is not looking for a dancer named Fortunata, but

that instead, he may be seeking the dancing part of himself (39). The quest for self then,

in Sexing the Cherry, is given a force that allows it to both challenge and add

dimensionality to patriarchal ideals of the heroic.

Another tale that Winterson incorporates into the fabric of Sexing the Cherry that extends her use of the mode of the fantastic as a means of challenging and adding dimensionality to patriarchal notions of heroism is her revision of the Artemis and Orion myth.1 Winterson reveals her version of the myth as a story relayed to Jordan by

Fortunata, who sends Jordan away once he finally finds her, telling him the tale as a

1 Julius Heutscher conducts an exhaustive study, explaining how myths, the original oral tales evolved into folk tales over time. He traces further how the folk includes sagas, and legends, and fairy tales. pp 34-98.

means of explaining why she is in the service of Artemis. Winterson’s revision of the

myth, which is a myth that has been revised so frequently that it is unclear whether or not

its origins predated the Greek version (Coffey), paints Artemis as a fiercely independent

young goddess. Winterson’s Artemis begs of her father, Zeus, “a bow and arrows, a short

tunic and an island of her own, free from interference” (150). As in the Greek myth, she

sets off into the forest and becomes an expert huntress, whose hunting acumen makes her

famous for having both the ability to grant life and, just as easily, to take it away.

However, although in Greek mythology, Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo and the

virginal huntress, there was a pre-hellenic figure of the goddess, Artemis, located in the

temple of Ephesus, modern day Turkey, who “is not a virgin, but is instead featured

[there] in a sculpture with many breasts, thus, signifying that she is the mother of all life”

(Coffey). As the mother of all life, the figure of Artemis is one that carries considerable

power, and perhaps, the Greek incarnation of Artemis, the unattainable yet always

tempting figure of desire to men, is what made her such an intriguing figure for

Winterson to feature. The Greek version of the myth portrays her as dangerously

powerful and, therefore, alienated from the masculine.

In essence, as both a maternal and a virginal figure whose powers to take life rivaled that of men, the figure of Artemis is deified by the women in Winterson’s revision

of the myth, and they want to join her in her quest for independence. Artemis is equally

reviled by heroic males like Orion, to whom she is both an overwhelming threat, and

therefore, also an alluring challenge to be overcome through domination. The way in

which Orion is introduced in Winterson’s version of the myth is particularly striking in

light of the transformation that occurs in Artemis caused by Orion’s appearance in her

world. Directly before Orion’s arrival, Artemis’s character shifts from an ardent impulse

for independence to an ultimate introspective search for self-integration. This abrupt

fluctuation in Artemis’s perception of herself indicates that Orion is not Artemis’s captor,

nor is he her oppressor, but rather, he is her double, representing the return of the

masculinity that she has repressed as a goddess, who indulges in the life of a solitary huntress yet feels guilt and disconnection for indulging in the “masculine” activity. In the beginning of the myth, when Artemis seeks her independence, she does so because she

“envied men their long-legged freedom to roam the world and return full of glory to

wives who only waited [and] she knew about the heroes and the homemakers, the great

division that made life possible” (Winterson 150). She does not particularly desire this

division between the sexes. Although it is what would be required of her as a human enmeshed in a patriarchal reality, as she is a goddess, she denies the outward pressures that would have her repress her desires, but she remains alienated. One night after

Artemis loses her quarry, she muses, “what would it matter if she crossed the world and hunted down every living creature so long as her separate selves eluded her? In the end, when no one was left she would have to confront herself” (150-151). Immediately after

Artemis begins to question the separation between her disparate selves, which is largely created by her inability to freely assert her “masculine” impulses and desires in an integrated manner, Orion appears, almost as if in answer to her supplication. Orion symbolizes Artemis’s double, her primitive, unchecked id impulses. Like Artemis, Orion is also “a mighty hunter […] as good as a god” (151). And, indeed, Artemis does initially celebrate the hunt, as an exercise that nourishes her impulses to assert her independence, but in doing so, she “simply hope[s] to take on the freedoms of the other side” (151). In

hunting, all she desires is a space in which to experiment with her ability to dominate, to best another being, thus proving her worth and transcending the brand of passivity associated with her gender. She realizes, however, that in the singular attempt to assert her dominance, she is ignoring the balance within herself, instead seeking outside approval from the masculine world to validate her. Orion serves as a cautionary figure to

Artemis because he ultimately mirrors the vacuous nature of the “hunt” to her, and he reveals the absolute baseness and vanity that overwhelms the unchecked power of one who has the ability to take life indiscriminately. At first, she is frightened of him, being familiar with his brutal reputation and his savage nature, but soon she lets down her guard and shares with him her ambitions and heartfelt desires to “stay until she was ready to go

[because] the journey itself was not enough” (151). Artemis, who is also Fortunata’s double, who is Jordan’s double, has revealed her newly acknowledged and, perhaps, most fundamental desire, to delve into herself, as she is and where she is, instead of searching for external meaning. As soon as she allows herself to become vulnerable to the repressed part of herself that has returned to confront her, she is violated by it.2 Orion rapes her and immediately falls asleep.

Artemis’s reaction to Orion, her double, who is both her rapist and the undesirable side of herself, is one of quick yet calculated rage. She kills Orion with a scorpion.

Ironically she indulges in the very brand of unbridled violence that she seeks to rid

2 Freud details the struggle that individuals face when confronted with a return of the once repressed. He explains in “Remembering, Repeating, & Working Through” that when an individual becomes vulnerable to a repressed memory that has not been dealt with, before he or she can work through the issue that has been repressed, he or she repeats the negative symptoms that surround that which has been repressed. He states further that pathological character traits will surface during the initial confrontation with the repressed material.

herself of by murdering Orion, this darker side of herself. In discussing the most efficient

means by which to process the damaging effects of aggression and working through

trauma in order to achieve catharsis, Freud suggests that when an individual is confronted

by the repressed (in Artemis’s case, her double, Orion), he or she faces the essential

primary step of remembering. He further claims that when an individual begins to

remember what has been repressed, “it cannot always be harmless and unobjectionable”

(Remembering and Repeating 152). Clearly, Artemis’s confrontation with the dark side

of herself, Orion, is anything but harmless, but it is how she reacts to the confrontation of

what she has repressed that is revealing. She fights violence with violence and id with id.

Freud refers to this behavior of acting out as repeating. It is virtually impossible for an

individual to attain an immediate catharsis when he or she is dealing with inveterate

patterns and ways of being. Therefore, it is quite common, according to Freud, for the

individual, especially the resistant individual, to enact a repetition of the undesired trait to

replace the act of simply remembering the undesirable experience or the undesirable trait

produced by the experience (151).

Artemis finds herself in this state of repetition after she disposes of Orion. Time

begins to slow down drastically for Artemis, as she enters an almost hypnotic state,

seeing “her past changed by a single act. The future is intact, still unredeemed, but the

past is irredeemable. She is not what she thought she was. Every action and decision has led her here” (Winterson 152). After her vicious act, Artemis realizes that she is, indeed, not what she thought she was. The ways in which she had previously defined herself were incomplete, and through her consideration of the murder, she effectively challenges her existing ego and is beginning to reveal to herself what lies beneath this former and

incomplete version of herself. The significance of her simultaneous complicity with and

the murder of a part of herself is an act that can only change her past, as everything that

she has been, is, and will be has always and will always be present within her, even

though she was previously unaware of this. In her past, though, because she had

repressed multiple impulses due to her external gender demands, she had been blinding

herself to the complexities of her complete reality by denying her propensity for violence,

letting it manifest outside of her in the form of oppression at the hands of men.

Winterson utilizes the revision of the Artemis and Orion myth as an integral

strategy to blur the lines between fantasy and reality, time and space, and the feminine and the masculine. In this case particularly, the blurring provides Fortunata, Jordan’s double and his dissociated feminine side, with a necessary arena in which to assist Jordan in coming of age. While both Dog Woman and Jordan are central characters in this novel, the novel is essentially a Bildungsroman. Jordan is the centerpiece of the book because he is the one who is searching for himself. All of the other characters then, are extensions of him in that search and could be viewed as reflections of what he is trying to find and ultimately illuminate within himself. Obviously, both Dog Woman and Fortunata represent Jordan’s need to balance his masculine desire for heroism and the need to achieve with the creative force of femininity. It is unclear whether or not Dog Woman

truly exists, as she has a 20th century counterpart, the woman chemist, who is also a

protagonist questing for an inner-self. She serves as a mirror for Jordan that reflects the

way in which the patriarchy creates and fosters violence that festers and grows to

monsterous proportions and that must be violently deconstructed in order for synthesis

and reconstruction to occur. But Jordan must first confront Fortunata before he attempts

to confront Dog Woman, who represents a larger set of repressed issues. Therefore, when

Jordan finally finds Fortunata, directly before he relays her story of Artemis and Orion to his mother, he discovers that Fortunata, his link to the fantastic, does not truly exist. She is his feminine double, and she teaches him perhaps the most important lesson: in order to successfully make the transformation from childhood to adulthood, Jordan must never deny any part of himself. Fortunata enlightens Jordan about the dangers of killing any part of the self when she relays her version of the Artemis and Orion myth, and then she sets him free because for him, it is a lesson well learned.

When he returns from Fortunata’s island and is reunited with Dog Woman, she asks him about the necklace of Fortunata’s that he carries, and he confidently replies, “It was given to me by a woman who does not exist. Her name is Fortunata” (149). This is the first time that Jordan admits that Fortunata is not an actual individual and the last time that he mentions her in the novel, proving that Fortunata has served her purpose as

Jordan’s double and that he no longer needs her, as he has become an adult. In examining the purpose of doubling in fairy tales and fantasy, Sheldon Cashdan suggests that:

in a child’s fairy tale, destruction of the [evil character] leads everyone to

living happily ever after, [signaling] the death of unwanted tendencies, the

banishment of all that is undesirable in the self. Once [the evil character] is

gone, the story progresses to its inevitable happy ending. Not so in adult

splitting tales. Except in rare instances, no one lives happily ever after.

Killing off the sinful part of the self ends in the destruction of the entire

self. (162)

As Jordan’s double, Fortunata represents his repressed and, therefore, unexplored feminine side, but she only plays the role of his double insofar as she is needed to prove to him that it is futile to kill off one’s double. Although she is pleased that Jordan has sought her out, she uses the opportunity of their reunion to share the Artemis and Orion tale with him. And while Fortunata’s Artemis repeats her repressions and kills off her double, Fortunata offers her story to Jordan as a means of allowing him to both acknowledge the danger in taking such a risk and the absolute necessity of confronting the desire to kill undesirable traits in the self with bravery and honor in order to accept the existence of these traits and integrate them into the self. Ultimately, Fortunata reminds Jordan that she is in the service of Artemis, and as this is the case, it is her fate to not be tied down to him or to any other individual; this feminine side of the self must be given freedom of expression. By facing the violence perpetrated by Orion and repeated by Artemis, Fortunata is able to reveal to Jordan the resistance that he holds against acknowledging the naked aggression that often accompanies the figure of the hero. And in simply acknowledging another side of the reality of this desire, Jordan crosses the threshold of childhood and enters into adulthood, opening up the space for a continued dialogue with the resistance with which he has now become familiar. Ultimately this is what enables him to work through the realities of and the effects of that aggression, “to overcome it by continuing, in defiance of it” (Freud “Remembering Repeating” 155).

Burning Down the House

“The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.” –Carl Gustav Jung

Although Jordan lets Fortunata go, as a result of confronting and entering into a

dialogue with the aggressive underpinnings of heroism, her use of the Artemis and Orion

myth is not the first example, nor is it the last, that displays women, not men, as brutally

violent. And while the fantastic elements are deftly woven into the double-blend fabric of

the historiographic metafiction and realist fiction, Winterson continually utilizes the

fantastic interstices to explode gender binaries, with female characters who readily adopt brutal aggression, like the twelve dancing princesses, most of whom violently slay their

husbands or Dog Woman, who sexually humiliates, violates, and murders male

characters. Before Jordan’s final reunion with Fortunata, he encounters individuals from

Winterson’s revised version of the “Twelve Dancing Princesses.” He inquires about

Fortunata’s whereabouts, and the sisters share their stories with him and explain how, in

large part, their happily ever afters have eluded them and how and why the endings of

their tales differ from that of the traditional fairy tale version of the princesses. The

dominant difference between the traditional fairy tale version of the “Twelve Dancing

Princesses” and Winterson’s version is the role that the princes play in the endings of their individual tales. In the traditional version, the princesses travel across a subterranean

lake in order to dance the night away with twelve handsome princes, and their late night

dalliances with the princes ultimately set them free because, as Cashdan asserts, “they are

ready for love” (162). In the case of the traditional tale, the marriages of the princesses to

their debonaire dance partners represents adulthood and freedom because not only do

they get to express their love for these handsome princes, balancing feminine with

masculine energies, but they also get to freely chose their mates. The most popular

version of this tale was written by the brothers Grimm, and during the 19th century when

it was written, freedom to choose a mate would have been no small accomplishment for a woman of significant social standing.

However, in Winterson’s version, the princesses’ escape is the dance itself, and they secretly fly to a suspended city every evening to assert their independence by dancing throughout the night and returning in the morning undetected. In this version, their freedom of choice to pursue personal desires is limited by the prince, who catches them flying out the window, and captures them, marrying them off to himself and his eleven brothers. When Jordan finds the sisters, they are all living together, sans husbands, but as one of the sisters explains, this is only because their ideal of living happily ever after is not the one that society has written for them. She explains that they find their happy endings eventually, “but not with [their] husbands” (Winterson 48). The subsequent actions of the sisters in Winterson’s version disrupt the patriarchally driven narrative upheld in most traditional versions of fairy tales through a hearty dose of female perpetrated violence. One sister, trapped in a marriage with a prince who is in love with a boy, calmly explains to Jordan that she “pierced them with a single arrow where they lay”

(50). Another sister, married to a glutton, poisons her husband with little more emotion than the first. A third, held captive by her husband, chained by him to their bed, and described by him as a dangerous threat to his wellbeing, “tore his liver from his body […] and left him on the bed with his eyes open” (57). After the heinous act, she muses that her husband had created the image of her and that she had simply conformed to that image.

Some of the sisters end up taking leave of their husbands, displaying no aggression and experiencing no consequences. However, they all leave their husbands in the search for themselves. In doing so, they fulfill a shared fate, to loose themselves from oppressive

patriarchal binds. And in Winterson’s revision, they are all Jordan’s teachers in the

lessons that he must learn in facing the origins and devastating effects of an oppression

bred by hierarchical imbalances of power created by gender roles.

Essentially, Winterson revises this fairy tale to reveal the effects of the

colonization of the feminine. Frantz Fanon discusses aggression among colonized

individuals, specifically suggesting that colonized peoples often tap into supernatural and fantastical realms via dance and possession. He avers the colonized individual’s

“relaxation takes the form of a muscular orgy in which the most acute aggressivity and the most impelling violence are canalized, transformed, and conjured away” (57).

Similarly, the princesses in Winterson’s revision, who are colonized by the patriarchy, utilize dance as a mode of achieving freedom. The dance provides them an outlet through which they can release aggressivity and impulses to reclaim stolen freedoms by any means necessary. It is not surprising, then, that Fortunata, who never married, but instead flew away on the day of her wedding, is described by her sisters as the best dancer of them all, who “did it because any other life would have been a lie” (Winterson 61). She is the one, who, although she has not fully integrated her femininity with the masculinity that colonizes her, has, instead, learned to express her freedom and passion through

dance, which lets her work through what oppresses her and to experience who she truly is.

Although Fortunata has averted the expression of pent up aggression by dancing and spinning until she becomes her true self, a point of light, some of the other sisters, and indeed, also the character of Dog Woman do indulge in overt acts of violence as a means of expression. In Fanon’s, The Wretched of the Earth, he advocates absolute

violence as a necessary means for the oppressed to overthrow their colonizers, describing decolonization as an always “violent phenomenon” (35). Fanon further suggests that the violence that necessarily accompanies decolonization is an absolute necessity, and it is only through a violent confrontation between the colonized and the colonizers that the oppressed can reclaim a stolen identity. For centuries, the bodies, minds, and social lives of women have been colonized by the patriarchy. For example, although fairy tales were originally created and disseminated primarily by women, they were appropriated by men and incorporated into literary fairy tales in which women were vilified and made into weak and defenseless creatures to be saved or silly young girls to be pitied. Winterson, among others, has sought to provide readers with an outlet through which formerly colonized individuals could reclaim, through a violently fantastic deconstruction of the colonizer, an identity that is self-defined instead of one defined by socially repressive mandates. Fantasizing about violently abolishing restrictive social elements lessens the influence that these elements have over individual’s lives. For example, in addition to the gory slayings that the princesses partake in, Dog Woman does her fair share of brutal murdering. She, much like the princesses, murders and maims in response to the oppressive colonization of 17th century England at the hands of the Puritans, who suppress the sexuality and expressive natures of the men, but especially of the women in that society. Dog Woman, as a Royalist avenging the King’s murder, goes on a carnal killing spree, first pulling an old Puritan off his horse after he whips the animal. She recounts the killing with relish, exclaiming, I “popped his eyeballs with my thumb, and then, forcing open his jaw as I would to get a chicken bone out of a dog, I loosened his teeth with my heel and soon had them mostly out and wrapped up in his own

handkerchief” (92). She goes on to kill several more indiscriminately, collecting “119 eyeballs…and over 2,000 teeth” and stating proudly, “I fed the eyeballs to my dogs and used the teeth as drainage for my watercress bed” (93).

One might think that over 119 murders would have satisfied Dog Woman, but she continues her rampage with no remorse, assisting a prostitute and friend in the

Spitalfields brothel to murder the Puritans that visit the brothel. There, she attempts to expose the hypocrisy of these religious zealots. In Spitalfields, she encounters two particularly ruthless Puritan prelates for whom she has had an inveterate disdain,

Preacher Scroggs and Neighbor Firebrace. Catching these two in perverse sexual acts, she subsequently beheads Preacher Scroggs, and she boasts of picking up Firebrace by the neck, “the way a terrier does a rat” and using “two strokes before I could fully severe his head” (98). Arguably, Scroggs and Firebrace are simply acting out their repressed sexual impulses, as they usually adhere to the austere tenets of Puritanism, denying themselves overt sexual expression. Dog Woman’s violent reaction is not in response to the men indulging in an outlet by which they can release their repressed sexual desires, but rather, she is enraged by the men’s behavior, as it is extremely hypocritical in nature. These two characters are symbolic vanguards of a puritan crusade that strips life of its sensual enjoyment and paints women’s sexuality as something that is dirty and, therefore, to be hidden. As such, they are integral agents of sexual oppression that must be destroyed in order for new growth to occur.

Although Dog Woman is one of the primary characters in the novel, she is presented in a fantastic, almost superhuman manner, and the twelve princesses are certainly located completely within the fantastic realm, as the characters of a revised fairy

tale. In light of a narrative infusion of the fantastic into the characters and their violent expressions, their aggressive acts provide a literary means by which both Jordan and the perceptive reader can process the aggressive impulses that arise in response to being oppressed. Freud states once an individual remembers repressed impulses, they tend to repeat these impulses, acting them out for a time. However, he further states that a compulsion can be rendered harmless, “and, indeed, useful, by giving it the right to assert itself in a definite field. We admit it into the transference as a playground in which it is allowed to expand in almost complete freedom” (“Remembering and Repeating” 154). In

Winterson’s novel, the mode of the fantastic is utilized in such a way that it provides a field in which an individual can transfer his or her “pathogenic instincts” (154), thereby coming into acknowledgement and into dialogue with them.

Winterson’s use of almost gleeful displays of violence departs from Hesse’s modern fairy tales that take on the project of critiquing the barbarism of violent acts.

However, Winterson’s use of the tales, as violent as they may be, is simply the postmodern narrative strategy that she employs. This strategy, through the use of her fairy tales, presents yet another model of processing aggression or “durcharbeitung.”

Both Freud and Fanon stress the role of fantasy in allowing an individual to work through aggressive impulses: Freud does so by claiming that the fantastic provides a separate space to which the individual can transfer the tendencies and, thereby, be in conversation with them, while Fanon cites the usefulness in “symbolic killings, fantastic rides, imaginary mass murders [which]—all must be brought out” (57). Fanon suggests that by indulging in the fantasy of aggression, individuals can free up stagnant violent impulses and let them “flow away” (57). Ultimately, the involvement in such fantastical vignettes

of aggression can provide a positive outlet to those who are denied venues in which to freely assert the power to choose for themselves.

Winterson has been criticized for what some argue is an internalization of the very patriarchal modes of violence that she, as a feminist and marginalized lesbian author, should seek to overcome. However, as Linda Hutcheon points out in A Poetics of

Postmodernism, “postmodernism is a contradictory cultural enterprise, one that is heavily implicated in that which it seeks to contest. It uses and abuses the very structures and values it takes to task” (106). I contend that Winterson’s use of inverted expressions of violence along lines of gender, as represented in her revised postmodern fairy tales, is a mode of claiming subjectivity for marginalized figures as well as a means of adding a layer of complexity to our expectations of gender. Toward the conclusion of the novel,

Dog Woman complains of the corruption of the city, stating, “we are corrupt and our city is corrupted. There is no whole or beautiful thing left […] this city should be burned down” (Winterson 163-164). Dog Woman identifies the corrupt nature of the patriarchal society in which she is enveloped, and she uses the first person plural pronoun, “we,” to do so. Her use of the first person is significant because Dog Woman does not place the blame for her situation and that which she has repressed outside of herself, but rather identifies her complicity with the corruption. This acknowledgement is integral to the quest for the highest self because in order to confront and eventually integrate repressed or dissociated selves, one must acknowledge his or her connection to those selves.

Immediately after the 17th century Dog Woman expresses the need to cleanse the city of

London in a fire, the scene flips to the 20th Nicholas Jordan, who after having seen an article in the newspaper about the chemist protesting a corporation’s pollution of the

river, feels the inexplicable need to find this woman and assist her. When Nicholas does

find the female chemist on the banks of the polluted river, he sits and talks with her,

watching the stars with her until she finally suggests to Nicholas Jordan that he and she

should “burn the factory down” (165). The final cooperative violent act the female

chemist and Nicholas Jordan perform provides the reader with another means of

processing violence by channeling it through a fantastic outlet. While Winterson

discusses violence and paints violent pictures, they merely provide an outlet to those

whose society, in the form of corporate imperialism, oppresses them by colonizing their

minds, seizing their financial and material resources, and practicing a more subtle,

insidious form of violence on them—the poisoning of the environment. This is an almost imperceptible form of violence that is not only patriarchally endorsed in the name of

expansion and competition, but it is one that also affects each and every human being on

the planet, killing all slowly and silently. This example blurs the boundaries regarding the

gendered nature of aggression and provides a fantasy-driven clearing in which to build

new concepts of self as related to other.

Throughout her novel, Winterson clearly shows how the oppressed must become

the oppressor in order to expose overwhelmingly oppressive institutions that promote

dysfunction and widespread disconnection among individuals. Winterson explodes

binaries. She does so in such a way that there is a “durcharbeitung” of not only the causes

and effects of violence within the past and present, but as Rozett suggests, she “also

traces the process through which those causes began slowly to produce their effects”

(145). By blurring lines of gender and performing narrative sleights of hand, i.e.,

presenting Jordan as a cross dresser and casting the ultra-violent Dog Woman as Jordan’s

male role model, Winterson is able to play with the subjectivity of the characters along lines of gender and critique violence as an always already patriarchal pastime, subverting the very narrative materials she seems to adopt.

By blurring the subjectivity of her characters, especially the female characters, whom she endows with stereotypically male characteristics, Winterson also blurs the boundaries between the figures of the oppressed and the oppressor. She blurs these boundaries to cast typically oppressed figures, like the princesses, whom society wants to marry off and be done with and Dog Woman, who is socially marginalized as a grotesque freak, as those with the power to oppress others. Winterson grants these “colonized” women the agency not only to give life, the creative role that society has limited them to, but also to take it away, a role usually only granted to the state or the church in times of war and retribution. In the preface of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre argues that in terms of asymmetrical hierarchies of power, when the oppressed are silenced or denied their agency, it is essential to acknowledge that as an individual in such a position, “even your non-violent ideas are conditioned by a thousand year old oppression, [and, therefore,] your passivity serves only to place you in the ranks of the oppressors” (23). In granting the women characters agency, albeit an agency of aggression, Winterson illustrates that every individual has the capability of being both the oppressed and the oppressor, but it is only in acknowledging and claiming those parts of the self that an individual can affect the power of self, and thereby display true efficacy.

Fairy tales have always been a useful genre by which to reaffirm the existence of

“marginalized or oppositional cultures;” however, in Jameson’s estimation, a pluralistic rediscovery of isolated groups through the fairy and folk tale genre is not enough, and he

claims that “only an ultimate rewriting of these utterances in terms of their essentially

polemic and subversive strategies restores them to their proper place in the dialogical

system of the social classes” (1948). Winterson’s use of the fairy tale genre within the

larger framework of her metafictional historiographic narrative is a radical revision that

not only allows her to open up a space for women within the social/literary hierarchical power structure, but also allows the reader to reaffirm the existence of the marginalization of women in a way that traces how they have come to inhabit their current positions within that power structure, how violence has been historically enacted, and for what reasons. Her postmodern revisions are, then, as Crisitina Bacchilega

characterizes them, “hyperbolic cases,” producing “twisted effects which expose the

norm as fantasy and compulsion” (22). These revisions recast heroes, shedding light onto

their villainy and in so doing, invert our current social understandings about what we

define as just and how in claiming absolute right, individuals and societies repress the

knowledge of what and whom have been oppressed in order to maintain that dominate

position. However, although Winterson does make use of the twisted, exaggerated

fantastic creations that she intertwines with both historically and currently acceptable

attitudes about social reality within the novel, she ultimately does so to exhibit the

undeniable importance of self-balance through hybridity. The complexity and intricate

construction of the number of different genres that are incorporated in the book along

with Winterson’s extensive use of doubles, different chronological eras, and the inversion

of gender roles are all invoked to challenge absolutism and to model how the notion of

hybridity promotes a fuller understanding of others as well as the self.

Hybridity & Balance

Merja Makinen expounds upon the issue of the hybridity within Sexing the

Cherry, which can represent both liminal gender spaces and intertexuality, even further by asserting “no object may be viewed in its entirety, but instead it presents different qualities to the observer in different circumstances” (106). This observation, borrowed from Quantum Theory, reminds the close reader that Winterson’s metaphor of the hybrid cherry suggests that blurring the boundaries between gender and textuality merely gestures towards the point that no matter which gender we categorize as “acceptable” or which textual world we attempt to label as “real,” the attempt provides but a mere glimpse of a much larger, unnamable and interconnected phenomena. We constantly project ourselves onto others and vice versa, but in recognizing this projection and harnessing the creative potential within it, it is possible to broaden the field of vision and to enlarge the parameters of the quest, making it more inclusive. In the spirit of hybridity,

Jordan, the protagonist of Sexing the Cherry, relates the metaphor of his grafting experiment with Tradescant, explaining that “grafting is the means whereby a plant, perhaps tender or uncertain, is fused into a hardier member of its strain, and so the two take advantage of each other and produce a third kind, without seed or parent. In this way fruits have been made resistant to disease and certain plants have learned to grow where previously they could not” (Winterson 84). Jordan is constantly grafting himself onto others to produce new possibilities within his life and theirs, ones that did not previously exist. And whether he is a reflection of his foster-mother, Dog Woman, an extension of the heroic Tradescant, or the missing piece to complete or be completed by Fortunata, he creates through his connection with and growth toward others. Jordan’s grafting project

allows him to gain glimpses of his “self” from multiple perspectives. Jordan intuitively reveals that he is running away, trying to get a fuller sense of the picture of the world that contains him, a classical epistemological pursuit, but later in the narrative, he suggests that he has adopted a more panoramic, ontological vantage point, stating, “I thought I might become someone else in time, grafted onto something better and stronger. And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet footed self, living another life in a different way” (87).

Once Jordan acknowledges that his view of the world is but a partial glimpse of a much larger picture, he is then, able to actively seek out new possibilities; he imagines and encounters other possible paths or worlds; and achieves the power to create these possibilities, paths, and worlds. Winterson blurs boundaries between the recognized and generally agreed upon Newtonian values of space and time and notions of space and time that lie beyond that recognition in order to highlight that all worlds can exist simultaneously and that, as her narrator states, “there will be a moment (though of course it won’t be a moment) when we will know (though knowing will no longer be separate from being) that we are a part of all we have met and that all we have met was already a part of us” (99). In making a direct textual assertion that epistemology and ontology are not separate entities and that they are, in fact, only two sides of a much larger, inextricable entity, she opens up the possibility that any gendered character in the novel is but shades of another gendered character.

Consequently, then, every character within the narrative could ostensibly act as the figure of the double for any other character, and any created world within the novel, whether it be fictional realist, historiographic metafictional, mythical, faerian, or

otherwise, exist as equally valid constructions. In other words, we cannot “know” without

being and we cannot “be” without knowing that we are being. Her admission of this

condition grants her incredible creative power. Lyotard comments on the overwhelming

power of those who wield such postmodern narrative strategies, stating, “they thus define

what has the right to be said and done in the culture in question, and since they are

themselves a part of culture, they are legitimated by the simple fact that they do what

they do” (Postmodern Condition 23). Jeanette Winterson has extended the projects of both Hesse and Woolf by using the mode of the fantastic to create a unique vision of the

unlimited potential of the individual who has the courage to challenge that which limits

him or her and in so doing, to explore what lies beyond the social structures that relegate

its citizens to a life of dissociation as a survival technique. She is able to examine these

limits by challenging herself, her characters, and her readers to join her in this quest to unveil the social mechanisms that have assigned us to this isolated fate and to continue to strive toward a decentralized community built upon the shared project of self-exploration; and she is able to do so because she said so.

Conclusion: Befriending the Face in the Mirror

As discussed above, Hermann Hesse’s fairy tales are some of the first that overtly challenge patriarchal hierarchical instability and the senseless aggression, alienation, and strife that result from such imbalances via his frequent use of doubles. These figures promote characters to evaluate their actions and experience the other side of often unexplored and poorly conceived gender and social roles. He was, of course, not the first to experiment in these realms. Although, he is a key figure who paved the way for postmodern and feminist revisions of traditional fairy tales by being one of the first to actively challenge the boundaries of the fictional worlds he created through doubles and the introduction of specific real world elements into the previously deliberately crafted ambiguous fabric of the fairy tale genre. His is a quest to write characters that plumb the depths of the inner realms of the human mind and examine the ego and beyond. He embarks on this journey in an attempt to promote a depth of personal responsibility and to create an arena in which the reader might also participate in fantastical worlds as a means by which to uncover complexes and repressed or dissociated selves, thereby entering into a dialogue with these selves and possibly, especially in terms of aggression and its roots, in order to emotionally assimilate these formerly denied parts of self.3

3 Both Freud in “Remembering, Repeating & Working Through,” pg. 151 and Jacobi in Complex/Archetype/Symbol, Pg. 11, discuss the psychoanalytic process of confronting the repressed within the subconscious in order to come into a prolonged dialogue with the issues and finally working- through the issues.

Hesse was unique in his use of doubles who resided within the fairy tale realm juxtaposed by the realm of fictional reality. His work with doubles blurs the boundaries between fantasy and reality and fiction and metafiction, summoning the uncanny and leaving a gap between worlds and subjective labels of self, especially those that are defined by gender, others The astute reader can enter into the gaps that Hesse creates and probe the limitations of ossified states of selfhood. His experimentation with this specific brand of realist/fantasy was conducted in order to explore the effects of aggression and in an attempt to balance masculine and feminine energies.

Similar projects were furthered by contemporaries such as Virginia Woolf, specifically in her novel, Orlando,4 and these types of projects have been extended and utilized as a space for the revision of traditional fairy tales and the exploration of gender roles as they apply to the creation of and the propagation of the unconscious roots of aggression. Winterson, a Woolf devotee, provides a striking fantastical model of the processing of aggression as it relates to gender roles in Sexing the Cherry. This model reassigns formerly associated masculine labels of aggressive traits to female characters, who have both masculine and feminine fantastic doubles, in order to subvert commonly held beliefs regarding violence and gender and to allow for all genders to identify with and, thereby, recognize violent impulses within the self. However, Winterson, although her aim is similar to that of Hesse and Woolf, presents only one among many models of the processing of aggression, the aim of which has been adopted, extended, and is

4 This novel experiments with the concept of androgyny, when a young English nobleman, suddenly finds himself transformed into a woman, and he/she must learn to negotiate the treacherous effects of the ensuing gender vertigo.

constantly evolving in a vibrant tradition of feminist fairy tale revisions, practiced by many, like Angela Carter, Anne Sexton, A.S. Byatt, and Diana Abu-Jaber; all four introduce slightly new revisionary elements by which to confront aggression. Carter’s revisions suggest that the individual must both understand and accept aggression before making a transformation to transcend its effects, Sexton examines the horrors of the disconnected life and seeks to provide the artist with an outlet within which he or she can come into dialogue with the often violently repressed, A.S. Byatt deftly negotiates several interwoven metanarratives to comment on the power of the fairy tale in dealing with repression, and Diana Abu-Jaber illustrates how the search for self is a quest that is won through “being”, which transforms both the self and the other.

Carter’s Life Blood

Angela Carter’s seminal 1979 work, The Bloody Chamber, provides a number of subversive feminist revisions of traditional fairy tales, many of which were revisions of

Charles Perrault and the Grimms Brothers tales, as she herself translated Perrault’s tales and edited several collections of folk and fairy tales. 5 In these tales, she presents complex female heroines, who confront gender related aggression, perpetrate that violence at times, and acknowledge aggressive tendencies, opening a space for the transcendence of these modes of aggression. Specifically of interest are her revisions of

“The Beauty and the Beast” fairy tale, “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” and “The Tiger’s

Bride.” Both of these tales invoke a sense of the uncanny, and play freely with issues of repression via the figure of the double. Like Hesse and Winterson, Carter utilizes doubles

5 Marina Warner credits Angela Carter with several collections of feminist fairy tale revisions, like Wayward Girls & Wicked Women: an Anthology of Subversive Stories, American Ghosts, & Old World Wonders.

in order to promote a balancing of skewed gender reifications that ultimately lead to aggression. Carter’s tales, though, tend to be most similar to those of Hesse in their almost steadfast adherence to the outer frame of the traditional fairy tale, unlike

Winterson’s tales, which are embedded within and interact with the fictional worlds in which they are placed.

According to Elizabeth Wanning Harries, the beloved fairy tale, “Beauty and the

Beast,” is from the French tradition and first emerged in written form as part of the 1740 novel, La jeune Ameriquaine, et les contes marins, by Gabrielle de Villeneuve. However, the version from which Carter draws her feminist revisions of the piece is Mme. Leprince de Beaumont’s much condensed version that appeared in her 1756 piece, Magasin des enfants (153). In the Beaumont version, a fifteen year old Beauty spurns the advances of many a suitor until her merchant father’s wealth is suddenly lost. Thrust into poverty,

Beauty becomes her father’s caretaker, until he carelessly allows himself to become entrapped by the Beast, at which time, she selflessly offers to take her father’s place as the Beast’s prisoner and to die in his stead. As stated in Karen E. Rowe’s 1979 study,

“Feminism in Fairy Tales,” Beaumont’s traditional version of the tale poses the institutionalized and “problematic oedipal dependency of young girls [of the time],” and she asserts further that “Beauty’s three decisions—to stay, to serve, [and] finally to sacrifice her life—establish her willing subservience to paternal needs” (215). In the

Beaumont tale, Beauty’s lack of regard for herself as the property of either a father, a husband, or a beast is inimical to her concept of self worth at best and illustrates the insidious and oftentimes internalized aggression accompanying female bondage in a strong patriarchal system.

In The Bloody Chamber, Carter pens two consecutive revisions of the “Beauty and the Beast tale,” “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride.” These revisions provide the reader with sequential interpretations of the traditional tale, the second building on, or rather peeling back a layer from the first. The revisions are structured like Russian nesting dolls, with the first tale reflecting the outward appeal of the classic French fairy tale. Essentially, the tales themselves can also be seen as doubles of one another, as the first revision presents an illustration of a carefree and selfless young heroine who has actually repressed her desires for freedom and equality in order to maintain her established position in the patriarchy, and the second revision confronts the repressed desires of the protagonist and reflects the character’s quest to work through that which she has repressed in the first tale. Carter acknowledges the superficial nature of her first revision, “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon,” from the beginning. In the setting of Mr.

Lyon’s palatial mansion, Carter playfully nudges the reader, describing a “pervading atmosphere of a suspension of reality…a place of privilege where all the laws of the world [we know] need not necessarily apply” (42). Throughout the first revision, Carter lays out a fantastical and deliciously naïve world of “magic,” while simultaneously presenting underlying and ongoing metafictional narrative. What she creates on one level, she erases on another, exposing the constructed nature of this most beloved traditional fairy tale.

Like the Beaumont version, in “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon,” Beauty’s father has no intentions but the best for his cherished daughter, “his girl-child, his pet” (41), and like the traditional version, he only wants to please her, as “she asked for so little and he had not been able to give it to her” (42). However, Carter highlights the irony of the loving

care and concern that Beauty’s father bestows upon her by including the title that he uses for his daughter, to whom he refers as his “pet” (41), for he lavishes his attention on his daughter as one would attend to an animal, one who is completely dependent upon its master in order to survive. Jack Zipes refers to Carter’s “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon,” with “all of its subtle revisions […] a ‘duplicate.’” (as qtd. In Wanning Harries154) of the traditional French versions. This characterization of the tale is problematic, as Carter is well aware of the proxy that she creates and does so to examine the façade of this tale and to dissect the deleterious, but often ostensibly innocuous social and psychological effects of complicity with patriarchal domination. Nonetheless, as in the original versions of

“The Beauty and the Beast” tales, Beauty does sacrifice herself for the good of her father.

On one level, Beauty’s sacrifice is in keeping with a woman’s thoughtless acceptance of her subjugation, and not surprisingly, Carter presents a self-referential narration regarding this decision, stating, “do not think that she had no will of her own; only she was possessed by a sense of obligation to an unusual degree, and besides, she would gladly have gone to the ends of the earth for her father, whom she loved dearly” (45-46). In this version, Beauty does, in fact, end up willingly going with the Beast, Mr. Lyon.

Furthermore, over time, after Beauty gets familiar with Mr. Lyon, leaves, and returns, she realizes that she has loved the beast all along, and she marries him.

However, while the first revision of “The Beauty and the Beast” casts Beauty as naively accepting of her fate, as Carter explains that the backdrop is “a place of privilege,” (42), or a constructed world, the second revision, “The Tiger’s Bride,” probes deeper into the tensions and rapacious nature of the isolated life of a woman, torn apart by the trafficking of her flesh in a patriarchal marketplace. As Marina Warner asserts,

here Carter develops “Freud’s polymorphous perversity with panache” (195). And,

indeed, this version of “The Beauty and the Beast” tale is a twisted and distorted version

of the first, replete with doubles, masks, and mirrors, which all reflect the “psychic

experience,” dealing with the “repressed and the forbidden” (Wanning Harries 154). Like

those of both Hesse and Winterson, Carter’s second revision blurs the boundaries

between fantasy and reality by setting the tale in the discernable geographical location of

Russia and by having Beauty’s father lose all of his money in a gambling debt to the grand seigneur, the beast, whose hereditary palazzo’s walls are lined with actual, famous renowned Italian artists, like Mantegna, Giulio Romano, and Cellini.

Similar also to the work of both Hesse and Winterson is Carter’s use of the double throughout “The Tiger Bride.” In this version, the father loses Beauty to the beast in a gambling match, and she finds herself, quite against her will, a slave in the beast’s lair.

Carter crafts a complex picture of both Beauty and her beast in this version, as both battle torn psyches, attempting to reconcile themselves with the violence and alienation that is created when men and women are stripped of their agency and tightly bound into social roles that cast women as property and men as those whose role it is to dominate women for their own pleasure and gain. The beast wears a mask, a flimsy veil for his primitive animalism, and Beauty describes him as “not much different from any other man, although he wears a mask with a man’s face painted beautifully on it […] but one with too much formal symmetry of feature to be entirely human: one profile of his mask is the mirror image of the other, too perfect, uncanny” (53). Although the beast’s mask presents an obvious ruse to those who encounter him, in order to play the game of high society, the beast continues to cover his true self with the mask. Once the beast’s prisoner,

Beauty, too, faces a representation of the desires that she has repressed to be seen as the quintessential lady of nobility and of honor, she faces her double in the form of a mechanical doll that the beast gives her as a chamber maid, a simulacra of herself. Beauty muses about her relation to this double, contemplating how she has “been bought and sold, passed from hand to hand, “and she wistfully questions her relationship to this double, stating, “that clockwork girl who powdered my cheeks for me; had I not been allotted only the same kind of imitative life amongst men that the doll-maker had given her?” (63). In this version of the tale not only has Beauty repressed her own natural desires to escape her minimized fate as a currency in the hands of male captors, but the beast has also repressed his desires to be sexually unrestrained with a woman to whom he is unmarried, without shame or social retribution. For both then, to wear a mask is to be human and to be “human is to be a selfish machine without a heart; to acknowledge [an] animal nature and sexual desire […] is to be transformed” (Wanning Harries 155). So, the only way in which these two characters can achieve transformation is to drop the mask, or ego, and strive to transcend the limitations that human beings place on one another and, by proxy, upon themselves in the name of gender, among other categorizations. In the second revision of Carter’s “Beauty and the Beast” revisions, this transformation takes place every time Beauty looks in the magical mirror. At first, she sees her father’s face leering at her in disapproval and bellicosity, which represents her disconnection with the masculine side of herself. Though finally, when she surrenders herself to the beast’s desire to see her nude, stripped of all her pretenses, her fears of being devoured begin to diminish. Upon Beauty’s confrontation with that which she had repressed and her subsequent surrender, she sees her father for the last time in the mirror, a smile of

gratification on his lips, and then, she sees only herself. Virginia Woolf, in A Room of

One’s Own, describes the necessity for a reconciliation of similar feelings of aggression

and neglect to those that Beauty attaches to her father and, by projection, all men by

emphasizing the need for the feminine and masculine influences within the mind to unite

“in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness” (98). And, indeed, by the time that

Carter brings us to the core of her second embedded revision of “The Beauty and the

Beast,” Beauty has finally processed the pressures of patriarchal disregard for women by

allowing herself to willingly surrender to the beast, as he licks away the layers of her

skin, her feminine and worldly identity. Like Hesse and Woolf, Carter stresses an active

awareness of the ills produced by an imbalance between femininity and masculinity, but

unlike Woolf, Carter presents a model for processing aggression in which her

protagonists use their wit and guile in recognizing the often violent state of the world.

Ultimately, through this process, Carter’s protagonists accept and surrender to the nature

of the aggression and disregard that occurs between the sexes. Through a non-judgmental

acknowledgement of the nature of violence in the world and an embracing of the violence

within themselves as well as without, Carter’s characters create transformation.

Sexton’s Witch Hunt

Anne Sexton, yet another feminist revisionist of traditional fairy tales, accesses

this brand of the transformation of angst, aggression, and the neuroses behind it in her

collection of several of the brothers Grimm fairy tales aptly titled Transformations

(1971). Anne Sexton’s work, unlike the work of Hesse, Woolf, & Carter, is poetry, and

the format in her collection, too, is unique, as the initial poem of the collection acts as a frame for the revisions contained within. In this poem called “The Gold Key,” Sexton

refers to herself as both a guide through the revisions and an active participant in the

transformations that she will yield upon the tales and, perhaps, their readers. Sexton takes

on these roles by beginning the collection with a first person narrator who refers to

herself as “a middle-aged witch, me—tangled on my two great arms, my face in a book

and my mouth wide, ready to tell a story or two. I have come to remind you, all of you

[of] forgotten 10 p.m. dreams where the wicked king went up in smoke” (1). In

interviews, Sexton often referred to herself as a witch, as in a letter that she wrote to her editor at Houghton Mifflin, Paul Brooks, stating “of course I am a witch, an enchantress of sorts and have already been hung in the same order” (as qtd. In Wanning Harries 124).

Sexton recognized that as a middle-aged female author writing during the 1960s and 70s and casting unpopular and often time brutally honest and horrifically grotesque reflections back at her Western audience would raise the contempt of many and that she

would, subsequently, be demonized for the attempt. But she was consumed by her quest

to remind her readers of the futility of half-lived lives and the agony of living in the

clutches of repression and desperation of malaise, often caused by the circumscription of

gender roles.

Interestingly enough, Sexton invokes Hermann Hesse in both the dedication of

this collection and in the frame-poem that begins it. The collection is dedicated “to Linda, who drinks clam chowder and reads Hesse.” This dedication indicates Sexton’s fondness for those connected to the influential works of Hesse, but like Winterson, Carter, and a long line of feminist fairy tale revisionists who recognize that Hesse may have been a pioneer in this investigatory genre of writing, Sexton states, “it is not enough to read

Hesse and drink clam chowder; we must have the answers” (2). Unlike her predecessor,

Hesse, Sexton is not content to merely question the status quo, but she rather doggedly

highlights the macabre, examining the seedy underbelly of what disjunction within the

society and the self can produce, all the while attempting to unearth some answers. While

Woolf and Hesse call for the integration of the self, Sexton, like Winterson, presses the

need for, as Alicia Ostriker asserts not “ a single subject or voice but ‘multiple

intertwined voices’—that is, a multivocality of ‘divided voices, evolv[ing] divided

selves’ and ‘challeng[ing] the validity of ‘I’ of any ‘I’” (as qtd. In Haase 22). Sexton emphasizes the need for multivocality by presenting a number of disenfranchised voices, many of whom never find an integration of self, nor do they experience the neat and happy endings present in the Grimm’s tales after which they are modeled.

Sexton admits that these poems are personal, stating, “I wrote them because I had

to […] because I wanted to […] because it made me happy […] they are just as much

about me as my other poetry” (as qtd. In King Barnard Hall 97). Because they are so personal, these revisions, more than many other revisions of traditional fairy tales,

illustrate the power of revising fairy tales. Sexton’s revised fairy tales also allow for identification with the characters within the tales, and the themes serve as a platform to work through unresolved issues. Along these lines, Freud theorizes about individuals, who “make ‘fairy tales into screen memories’ so that the fairy tales themselves come to symbolize submerged feelings and conflicts actually ‘tak[ing] the place of memories of their own childhood’” (Uncanny 97). According to Caroline King Barnard Hall, Freud

also suggests that the creative writer is “at some instinctive, subconscious level in

especially close touch with the meaning of fairy tales and dreams […] ’it sometimes

happens that the sharp eye of the creative writer has an analytic realization of the process

of transformation of which he is habitually no more than a tool’” (98). Sexton, then, as all of the authors discussed in this project, has created revisionary works that tap into the transformational process of seeking the self through examining the manipulation of the sum of its parts, the many voices and characters that reside within. She acts as the witch, who casts spells and mixes concoctions that both delight and confuse the reader and that contain the essential elements of real geographical locations, mirrors, and doubles, all of which are located within a fairy tale stock.

An example of the exploration of the real via fantasy is present in Sexton’s revision of “Rumpelstiltskin.” In Sexton’s revision of the tale, she casts, the main character, Rumpelstiltskin, as a character that is within “many of us […] a small old man who wants to get out […] he is a monster of despair. He is all decay. He speaks up as tiny as an earphone with Truman’s asexual voice: I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams […] your Doppelganger” (17). As in the original version of the Grimm’s tale, the dwarf assists the miller’s daughter in avoiding her imminent demise at the hands of the king who would have her spin straw into gold. Unlike the traditional version, in the end, the dwarf, being discovered by his own double, the miller’s daughter, literally deconstructs himself, tearing himself in two and laying his two halves beside one another: “one part soft as a woman, one part barbed hook, one part papa, one part

Doppelganger” (22). The miller’s daughter refuses to give into the fear of not being able to succeed at the ludicrous requests that the king has presented her with, and thereby, dying violently by his hand. She faces her fears of not being able to escape the wrath of restrictive patriarchal binds and, thus, dispenses with these fears, as her true dichotomous nature is revealed and transcended.

“Rumpelstiltskin” is one of the few revisions that Sexton wrote that presents

transformation in the form of a “happy ending” for the protagonist, who dispenses with

that which would restrict her from achieving her goal. In almost all of the other revisions,

Sexton exposes the horror and violent impulses that plague those entrapped by ill-defined

gender roles. For example, in her feminist revision of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,”

unlike in Winterson’s revision of the tale, Sexton remains true to the Grimms version of

the tale, where the soldier discovers the dancing princesses’ secret escape, and the

princesses are married to him and his brothers. Winterson rewrites the tale so that the

princesses are able to leave their unwanted mates, either through perpetrating violence or

running away, but Sexton’s characters must accept their fates and embrace the

expectations of their gender roles, all the while “sagg[ing] like old sweatshirts” (92). In

Winterson’s revision of the tale, many of the princesses enact hyperbolic fantastic scenes

of aggression upon their would-be princes or escape to dance in order to confront and

work through their repressed desires for independence and social viability and to embrace

their true selves, but in Sexton’s version of the tale, the narrator muses, “if you danced

from midnight to six A.M. who would understand?” (87). For Sexton, the realm of fantasy, indeed, exposes other voices and sides of self, but she is acutely aware of reality’s often oppressive reaction to those who seek to expose their own agency via recognizing multivocality. Like Hesse, Winterson, Carter, and others, Sexton’s revisions of these tales not only expose the hypocrisy of the traditional tales but also that of the societies that produced and continue to produce tales that promote a limited scope of gender. Unlike Winterson and Carter, Sexton’s protagonists rarely transcend these limitations within the fairy tale realm, and like the protagonists in Hesse’s tales, are left

confronting their repressions, enmeshed in an oppositional dialogue with the sometimes

overwhelming reality of a system that seeks to control both their fantasies as well as their

realities.

Byatt: The Healing Properties of the Fairy Tale

Like Sexton, there are a number of other contemporary authors that manipulate

the mode of fantasy, specifically through the fairy tale, in order to expose restrictive

social regimes, to examine imbalanced gender roles and expectations, and to provide a

stage upon which readers can confront repressed issues in order to process the damaging

effects of aggression on the psyche. As the genre of fairy tale revisions evolves in

response to changing gender expectations and new forms of social aggression, the models

for processing gender related aggression presented within fairy tale revisions also varies.

For example, both A.S. Byatt and Diana Abu-Jaber, like Winterson, embed the fairy tale

genre within the realist universes of their fictional novels in order to double the fictional

characters and provide them with a fantastical stage on which fairy tale characters are

given free reign to mirror repressed conflict and growth to the primary fictional

protagonists. In Possession, Byatt creates the fictional world of two 20th scholars, Roland

and Maude, within academia that become possessed by the stories and lives of the 19th century authors whom they are researching, Randolph Henry Ash and Christobel

LaMotte. In this novel, the fictional characters are twice removed from the fairy tales that they discover were written by Christobel LaMotte. As Roland and Maude discover these tales, they also discover that the tales mirror a socially unsanctioned affair between the married Ash and the unmarried and possibly bisexual LaMotte, who does leave her female “companion” to be with Ash, but who will not entertain the idea of entering into

100

the institution of marriage with him. In Possession, according to Victoria Sanchez, the

folk and fairy tale motifs illustrate “a continuity of imagery, description, and action

which spans the fairy tale world, the nineteenth-century world, and the twentieth century

world […] resulting in the linking of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century—

plots, characters, lovers, worlds—in the timeless realm of the fairy tale” (41). The fairy

tales, which serve to cast their feminine protagonists as having the agency to make

unpopular and socially unacceptable decisions, provide LaMotte with the courage to live

her life outside the bounds of traditional gender expectations. Through the 20th century

realist fictional characters, this trend is continued through the feminist Maude, who

becomes involved with Roland, but who chooses to retain her independence and position

of dominance within that relationship. Like her successors, Byatt utilizes fantastic

doubles to create a sense of the uncanny, blur boundaries between different time periods

and characters, and unearth repressed issues that her characters then, face and with which

they enter into dialogue. She offers the unique self-referential element of the power of

individuals using the fairy tale by creating fictionalized academic and intellectual

characters whose doubles write the fairy tales that will transform their loves themselves.

Abu-Jaber’s Female Quest Hero

Diana Abu-Jaber also provides a slightly different model of processing aggression

through her use of fairy tale themes within a larger fictional realm. Her model is of

particular interest because it addresses the aggression and related issues resulting from

the current series of wars between the Unites States and the Middle East. Because Abu-

Jaber’s readership is largely American and because these wars are ongoing, the readers of this novel can specifically relate to the themes contained within. In Crescent, Abu-Jaber’s

101

female characters exemplify the archetype of the quest-hero and the significance of that exemplification in terms of how the categorization of these characters subverts the patriarchal brand that often marks this archetype.

Within Abu-Jaber’s novel, it is only through the fairy tale doubles of the realistically portrayed female characters that these female characters symbolize the quest- hero. The female characters, located within the current day setting of a United States of

America at war with Iraq, in the novel are characterized as traditionally stereotypical passive Arab American women, who cook, gossip, and wait for an equally stereotypical powerful man to sweep them off of their feet. In their passivity, it appears that they would allow those men to determine their futures as the war rages. However, by contrast, the fairy tale doubles of these characters are cunning, strong willed, and driven women, who actively question the violence and foolishly blind actions that the lost men whom they love undertake in the name of conquest, pride, and isolation as a byproduct of their vanity. The fairy tale women’s actions prompt their men to work through their isolation and to reevaluate their priorities. Similarly, in Crescent, Iraq acts as a double for the

United States, as the U.S. has feminized Iraq, making it subordinate to its governmental rule and financial sanctions. The Iraqi characters within the novel, both realist fictional and faerian, act as mirrors that reflect the repressed emotions of the oppressor, who must deny his connection to the other (in the form of the Iraqis) in order to justify the sustained violent acts carried out in their names. As with Hesse and Winterson, the agency of the characters is complicated by the ambiguity of the power wielded by the real versus the fantastic. Again, real world locations and current global conflicts draw the reader in, but the characters within the fairy tales affect the trajectory of the plot in relation to those

102

issues, further blurring the boundaries between the reality of what merely is and what is

possible beyond rational belief. Northrop Frye explains that the figure of the quest hero is

often deferred to the realm of the fantastic because the “quest romance is the search of

the…desiring self for a fulfillment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but still

contain that reality” (193-194). Therefore, it is only within the realm of the fantastic that

the female characters are fully realized in their quest for totalization and fulfillment, but

that is because this is the most productive realm within which they can practice

maximized subjectivity in a way that promotes the uncovering of unacknowledged or

merely forgotten inherent realities within the confines of western patriarchal society.

Abu-Jaber’s project then, can be characterized as both postmodern and feminist and presents an alternate mode to both Hesse and Winterson of using the fairy tale genre to process violence and promote fulfillment.

Feminist fairy tale revisions are experiencing a robust period of growth and recognition. As gender roles are also expanding and shifting, there is a burgeoning metacognition regarding these issues which brings them a new academic relevance. Both females and males face new challenges and must negotiate their diversified relationships with the elusive nature of aggression. Because the influence of fairy tales, both traditional and revised, reaches across national and cultural boundaries now, more than ever, it is essential for new versions of traditionally restrictive tales to launch a reinvigorated dialogue about the issues of the relation of the self to other. The world is becoming more connected than ever through rapidly advancing technology and imperialism that is insidiously represented as “globalization,” a patriarchal movement that separates individuals rather than uniting them. Within this climate, these tales provide historically

103

oppressed people with a voice and a means of reimagining both their relations with violence and their efficacy to either accept their roles in the creation of that violence or to make a new choice and use their newfound voice to protest or to tell a new and more inclusive story

104

Works Cited

Bacchilega, Cristina. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Characteristics of Genre and Plot Composition in Dostoevsky’s Works. Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader. Ed. David Sandner, Westport & London: Praeger, 2004. 116-134.

Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra.” The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.

---. Simulacra and Simulation. 1981. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994.

Bergson, Henri. Time & Free Will: An Essay on The Immediate Data of Consciousness. 1910. Trans. F.L. Pogson. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1959.

Bernard, Catherine. “A Certain Hermeneutic Slant: Sublime Allegories in Contemporary English Fiction.” Contemporary Literature 38 (1997): 164-184.

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.

Burns, Christy L. “Fantastic Language: Jeanette Winterson’s Recovery of the Postmodern Word.” Contemporary Literature 37 (1996): 278-306.

Byatt, A.S. Introduction. Annotated Brother’s Grimm. By Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Ed. Maria Tartar. Trans. Maria Tartar. New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 2004. xv-xlvii.

Carlyle, Thomas. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. 1839. Vol 2. London: Chapman & Hall, Ld., 1893.

Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber. New York: Penguin Books, 1979.

Cashdan, Sheldon. The Witch Must Die: The Hidden Meaning of Fairy Tales. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

105

Clingham, Greg. “Winterson’s Fiction and Enlightenment Historiography.” Bucknell Review 41.2 (1998): 57-85.

Coffey, Melissa. "Artemis." Images of Women in the Ancient World: Issues of Interpretation and Identity (Spring 1998): Web Oct 2009.

Doan, Laura. “Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Postmodern.” The Lesbian Postmodern. Ed. Laura Doan. Between Men-Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 137-155.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1961. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1963.

Farwell, Marilyn R. “The Postmodern Lesbian Text: Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry and Written on the Body.” Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives. Ed. Karla Jay. The Cutting Edge: Lesbian Life and Literature. 7. New York: New York UP, 1996. 168-194.

Freedman, Ralph. The Lyrical Novel: Studies in Hermann Hesse, Andre Gide, & Virginia Woolf. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1963.

---. “Romantic Imagination: Hermann Hesse as a Modern Novelist.” Hermann Hesse: A Collection of Criticism. Ed. Judith Liebmann. New York: McGraw Hill Inc., 1977, 38-54.

Freud. Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. Ed. James Strachey. Trans. James Strachey. 1961. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989.

---. “The Uncanny.” Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader. Ed. David Sandner. Westport & London: Praeger, 2004. 74-101.

---. “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through: Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. Trans. Joan Riviere. 1914. London: The Hogarth Press & The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1924. 147- 156.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton UP, 1957.

Haase, Donald. “Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship.” Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches. Ed. Donald Haase. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2004. 1-36.

106

Hesse, Hermann. The Fairytales of Hermann Hesse. Trans. Jack Zipes. New York: Bantam Books, 1995.

---. If the War Goes On: Reflections of War and Politics. Trans. Ralph Manheim. 1914. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.

Heuscher, Julius, E. A Psychitric Study of Myths and Fairy Tales: Their Origin, Meaning, and Usefulness. 2nd Edition. Springfield: Charles C. Thomas Publisher, 1974.

“History of Giustiniani from Genova (Italy).” Giutiniani. Web 25 Oct 2008. .

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory Fiction. 1988. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Jacobi, Jolande. Complex/Archetype/Symbol in the Psychology of C.G. Jung. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Bollingen Series LVII. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1959.

Jameson, Fredric. “The Political Unconscious.” The Norton Anthology of Theory &Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.

King Barnard Hall, Caroline. Anne Sexton. Ed. Warren French. Twayne’s United States Authors Series. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989.

Liebmann, Judith. Hermann Hesse: A Collection of Criticism. New York: McGraw Hill Inc., 1977.

Luethi Max. Once Upon a Time: On the Nature of Fairy Tales. Trans. Lee Chadeayne & Paul Gottwald. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1970.

Lynn-Preston, Cathy. “Disrupting the Boundaries of Genre and Gender: Postmodernism and the Fairy Tale.” Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Appraoches. Ed. Donald Haase. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2004. 197-212.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. 1979. Trans. Geoff Bennington & Brian Massumi. Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 10. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

McAFee, Noelle. Julia Krsiteva. Routledge Critical Thinkers: Essential Guides for Literary Studies. New York: Routledge, 2004.

107

Makinen, Merja. The Novels of Jeanette Winterson: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. Ed. Nicolas Tredell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Martin, Sarah. “The Power of Monstrous Women: Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves ofA She-Devil (1983), Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984), & Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989).” Journal of Gender Studies 8.2 (1999): 193-210.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. 1987. New York: Routledge, 2001.

McHutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. 1988. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Mileck, Joseph. Hermann Hesse: Between the Perils of Politics and the Allure of the Orient. Ed. Irmengard Rauch. Berkeley Insights in Linguistics and Semiotics.Vol. 55. New York: Peter Lang, 2003.

Propp, Victor. Morphology of the Folktale. Ed. Louis Wagner. 2nd Edition. Austin & London: U of Texas P, 1968.

Roessner, Jeffrey. “Writing a History of Difference: Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry and Angela Carter’s Wise Children.” College Literature 29.1 (2002): 102-122.

Rowe, Karen E. “Feminsim and Fairy Tales.” Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England. Ed. Jack Zipes. New York: Methuen, 1986. 209-226.

Rozett, Martha Tuck. “Constructing a World: How Postmodern Historical Fiction Reimagines the Past.” Clio 25 (1996): 145-164.

Sanchez, Victoria. “A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Fairytale Romance.” Southern Folklore. 52.1 (Spring 1995):33-52.

Serrano, Miguel. C.G. Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships. Trans. Frank MacShane. New York: Schocken, 1966.

Sexton, Anne. Transformations. 1971. First Mariner Books Edition. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

Smith, Angela Marie. “Fiery Constellations: Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry and Benjamin’s Materialist Historiography.” College Literature 32.3 (2005): 21- 50.

108

Tartar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales. 1987. 2nd Edition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966.

Von Franz, Marie-Louise. The Feminine in Fairy Tales. 1972. Boston: Shambhala, 1993.

---. Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales. 1974. Boston: Shambhala, 1995.

Wanning-Harries, Elizabeth. Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.

Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. 1994. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996.

Winterson, Jeanette. Sexing the Cherry. New York: Grove Press, 1989.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. New York: A Harvest Book. Hartcourt Inc., 1989.

---. Orlando. 1928. New York: Hartcourt, Inc., 2006.

---. Three Guineas. 1938. New York: A Harvest Book. Hartcourt, Inc., 1966.

Ziolkowski, Theodore. Introduction. Pictor’s Metamorhoses and Other Fantasies. By Hermann Hesse. Trans. Rika Lesser. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1982. vii-xxiv.

Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. 1979. New York: Methuen, 1984.

---. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. 1983. 2nd Edition. New York: Routledge, 2006.

---. When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition. New York: Routledge, 1999.

---. Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre. New York: Routledge, 2006.

109