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Joanna Russ’s Kittatiny: A Tale of Magic

Breaking up Borders and Spaces of Confinement in Joanna Russ’s Kittatiny: A Tale of Magic

Isabel Morales Jareño, Universidad Camilo José Cela, Madrid, España1

ABSTRACT Joanna Russ (1937-2011) has taken her readers into a world of fantasy with the adventure story Kittatiny: A Tale of Magic (1978). Although it is seemingly a fantasy narration for children and follows the structure of the traditional hero’s tale – separation, initiation, and return – Kittatiny is pervaded with the author’s usual radical feminist and sexual touches, characteristic of a good part of her literary production. The narrative contrasts with Russ’s usual science fiction short stories, novels, novellas, and critical essays because of its resemblance to the fantasy genre. This study highlights the book’s valuable contribution to the literary feminism of the 1970s and analyzes Russ’s treatment of the traditional fantasy literature for children from a feminist perspective. The focus is on Kit’s journey across natural environments, where she can live in her own space of uncertainty without social or emotional rules and is free to live her own experiences without any ties and confinements.

JOANNA RUSS: THE FANTASY WRITER In the 1970s radical feminism and sexuality played an important role in the US panorama, prompting the appearance of social and political groups. Joanna Russ was one of the representatives in the literary spheres and also a writer and critic of traditional folktales and mythology. The 1960s and 1970s were not only political periods about civil rights movements, feminism, or anti-war movements, but also a time of political radicalism on all levels across the nation (Grant, 2006). Russ expressed particular admiration for Carla Fraiser, activist and writer who in 1967 set up the Radical Women (RW) group-aimed to teach women leadership, theoretical skills, and class-consciousness. Joanna’s introduction to Clara Fraser’s Revolution, She wrote (1998) is a praise of her courage and socialist revolutionary ideas and an appreciation of successfully combining feminism and socialism for twenty-nine years. Fraser was also the originator of the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP) based on Leon Trotsky’s ideas, where women, people of color, and sexual minorities (such as homosexuals) struggled for their liberation. Inspired by these ideas, fervent American feminist writers like Betty Friedan 1926-2006)– writer and founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW)– the radical and unconventional Kathy Acker (1948-1993), Alice Sheldon- James Tiptree Jr. (1915-1987), and Joanna Russ (1937-2011) expressed sharp criticism about “the social pressure on girls to be nice rather than authentic and honest, thus becoming “female impersonators,” who must fit their whole selves into small crowded Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal Volume 13 Number 1 (2016) ISSN 1209-9392 © 2016 Women in Judaism, Inc.

Russ was influenced by this revolutionary context of protests and radicalism led by women’s determination to end patriarchy, as the most necessary step towards a truly free society. She, therefore, attempts to struggle for such feminist ideas as social pressure, love, and family relationships through a fantasy tale for children. As a fantasy story, Kittatiny: A Tale of Magic (1978) epitomizes a new shift in Russ’s literary production, which includes a number of science-fiction short stories and novels, as well as critical academic writings. However, Joanna Russ is not in the only one to write feminist fairy tales, and other works also exalt womanhood and girlhood in the limited patriarchal frames. Anne Sexton’s poems, Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty) and Little Red Riding Hood, both published in 1971, show women’s oppressive stances. Other feminist fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood (1977) by Olga Broumas, The Moon Ribbon (1976) by Jane Yolen, Angela Carter’s The Donky Prince (1970) and Tanith Lee’s Petronella (1979) are only a few epitomes of this style of writing. Literary fairy tales as Jack Zipes describes, “… are socially symbolical acts and narrative strategies formed to take part in civilized discourses about morality and behavior in particular societies and cultures.” (Zipes 1994, 19) Russ’s fantasy tale appeared only three years after the publication of one of her most renowned feminist SF2 novels, The Female Man (1975). At that period, she also published some of her most famous titles of SF genre, among them And Chaos Died (1970), The Adventures of Alyx (1976), We Who Are About to (1977), and Two of Them (1978). However, Kitattiny: A Tale of Magic is not a SF story or a feminist polemic; it is, however, an adventure narration where fantastic and imaginary characters help the writer tell a magic tale. Is it a children’s fairytale? What is the aim of writing about feminism through a fantastic tale? As this paper attempts to show, Kitattiny thoroughly represents Russ’s feminist and sexual insights concerning the cultural ambivalence

All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors. 2 Joanna Russ’s Kittatiny: A Tale of Magic about women and their emotional and cognitive skills to behave with authenticity and honesty under social pressure. As Marge Piercy (2001) suggests, the range of concerns that runs through the body of Russ’s work includes “…survival, alienation, loneliness, community, violence, sex roles, the nature of oppression both external and internal, the necessity and the nature of further civilization.”3 The references to Joanna Russ’s magic tale, as in the Cyclopedia of World Authors (Magill 1997, 1287), are usually non-existent or brief: “Kittatiny: A Tale of Magic is written to provide young girls with a positive female figure for the genre of fantasy.” There is, largely, a lack of awareness or minor interest in a story like Kittatiny, since she is considered a successful SF writer with her noted work The Female Man (1975). And although Kittatiny4 has not been recognized as one of her award-winning works, it should be claimed as another notable representation of Joanna Russ, as a feminist writer. Furthermore, given that this story has been scarcely analyzed, this essay aims to analyze its valuable contribution both as another feminist literary depiction of the 1970s and as a fantasy-inspired manifestation of Joanna Russ’s feminist leanings. It focuses on how Russ treats women’s gender roles and sexuality through a narration replete with many characteristics of the traditional fantasy literature for children. Among those, it is necessary to investigate how two different spaces, fantasy and reality, converge and influence the hero throughout her journey, in the course of which accidental imaginary characters and natural landscapes are also protagonists. These rhetorical elements are all part of a quest, and particularly, a young girl’s quest. Throughout the girl’s journey, there exists a tight relationship between the natural environment and the girl, which Russ joyfully deals with, and no ties or confinements, either psychological or physical, can be found. Intentionally, these openness and psychological freedom show how women can live in their own space of uncertainty, where no social or emotional rules are a condition any more. During her quest, she ventures into imaginary episodes where she experiences vulnerability and uncertainty, and meanwhile she finds herself surrounded by amazing natural elements and events. In this way, she finds no social confinements, limits, or pressures, and becomes connected to an open world. Nature is a habitual element that Russ uses to provide the reader with either a disconcerting taste of natural spaces as in Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal Volume 13 Number 1 (2016) ISSN 1209-9392 © 2016 Women in Judaism, Inc.

The Adventures of Alyx (1976)5, or else, descriptions of her deep love for natural beauty, as in On Strike against God (1980). Both as a SF and critical essayist, Russ has thoroughly defended a strong feminist position. And her anger, wit and strength shown in her fictional writing is further incremented by her publications as a critical feminist writer, including How to Suppress Women’s writing (1983) and To Write Like a Woman (1995). And among her SF works, there are three representative examples: When It Changed (1972, the short story precursor of The Female Man), Picnic on Paradise (1968, her first SF novel collected in the Adventures of Alyx), and the 1982 Hugo Award novella, Souls. The condition of uncertainty in Kittatiny sets the stage for the dramatic tension of women’s struggle to get rid of social and cultural ties. As Dennis Lindley states: “Uncertainty does not refer solely to you or solely to the world, but describes a relationship between you and the world.” (Lindley 2006, 2) Such a relationship is precisely the space that women have been striving to live in for long. From socially and culturally subdued women to a variety of representative types, they all have struggled to break out of spatial confinements and demand their physical, social, and psychological spaces. Such literary manifestations as that of Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto (1967), offer arguments to justify that men have ruined the world and have to be eliminated. In this sense, Russ seems to have drawn upon Valery Jean Solanas’s position to create Whileaway, The Female Man’s fictional world where only women live because men were killed off in a plague. However, no other venue would be more representative and usefully mirrored than a non-existing fictional world, that is, a place where women are open to the world, space and time are uncertain, and women’s social and psychological confinements do not exist. In response to world openness and the elimination of these social and psychological constraints, Virginia Woolf has said: ‘As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the world” (Woolf 2007, 861). In the theory of ‘the rescue of the female girl’ that Russ proposes in her critical essay “Recent feminist utopias,”6 (1995) women can establish their own relationships with an open world and cross their psychological confinements so that they feel free from the physical and social space limits. Russ suggests that young girls should be brought up as boys, that is, under equal sexual, social, and family conditions out of the Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal Volume 13 Number 1 (2016) ISSN 1209-9392 © 2016 Women in Judaism, Inc.

REINVENTING FANTASY SPACES THROUGH A FEMINIST TALE OF MAGIC Fantasy and its relation with new temporal and physical spaces offer Russ the structures in which to write a fairy tale or create the conditions for a feminist fantasy narration. There are two overlapping genres: SF and fantasy. For Ursula K. Le Guin, “…fantasy is the oldest kind of literature that is still practiced, and science fiction one of the youngest.”9 Le Guin describes SF as an outgrowth of realism, and states that both SF and fantasy are forms of literature that allow a range of imaginative possibilities or alternatives (alternative societies, politics, cultures, genders). However, whereas fantasy does not distinguish between future and present times, science fiction is based on future events. As Rocio G. Davis (2000, 491) claims, “...fantasy genre is not an easy genre to define;” however, the characteristics of Russ’s fairy tale reveal how she wittily couples

Literature (1998), is the mythical trickster of Greek mythology, Athene, “… goddess of wisdom, who puts in practice tricks that are particularly effective to undermine male hierarchy and transform social values.” (30) Kit enters a fantasy world that offers her a way-out from reality and makes her face situations that require value and intelligence. In contrast, the real world provides her with the elements she is running away from. In the former, she encounters imaginary, fantastic, and mythological characters ruled by other temporal laws whose main aim is to teach and delight. Regarding these features, Kittatiny does fall into the category of a fantasy story for children. It reinvents a children’s tale whose world of fantasy is mixed up with gender identity elements, and as seen later, it is embellished, in some moments, by a burlesque tone.

In addition to SF, fantasy borders on magic(al) realism. As Maggie Ann Bowers (2004) explains, either magic or magical could further be interpreted as follows: In magic realism ‘magic’ refers to the mystery of life: … in marvelous and magical realism ‘magic’ refers to any extraordinary occurrence and particularly to anything spiritual or unaccountable by rational science. The variety of magical occurrences in magic(al) realist writing includes ghosts, disappearances, miracles, extraordinary talents and strange atmospheres, but does not include the magic as it is found in a magic show. (19)

In this sense, Bowers points out that there are authors who have been associated with magical realism: …the development of magic(al) realism in its recognized forms…of modernist and postmodernist modes of writing from Europe in the early twentieth century, and Latin America and the English-speaking world in the second half of the twentieth century. (7)

Such a postmodernist trend seemingly affects Russ, and in particular Kittatiny, whose fantasy exceeds its limits and is mixed up with reality in moments where a timeless development of the secondary world leads to a real future time and space. In Russ’s narrative, this is how the real and fantastic planes overlap and create a new reality. The magic and fantasy of Kittatiny comes out beautifully. First, the aesthetics of the book cover,10 which shows a beautiful drawing of a red dragon (one of the fantastic protagonist) standing out on a grey background, is more characteristic of fantastic stories for children than of feminist literature. Second, the atypical book size and shape, one that is more typical of a story for children, as well as the paper texture are also far different from any conventional soft cover pocket-like SF book. Likewise, the illustrations designed by Loretta Li are used to make it more fantasy-like. It is not unusual to find a dragon or a woman warrior in an aggressive attitude taking up weapons, either under subjection or in battle. Such drawings normally accompany most of Russ’s SF or fantastic writings. Kittatiny reflects the so-called “domestic fantasy,” whose real space permits children to live a representation of the real world, and often, to start a journey. Usually, these spaces have a familiar configuration. Hence, there are two ways of introducing fantasy: by joining it with real life or making children enter a secondary world. This is the passport to a fantastic plane and escape from reality. As in Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) and other well-known books of children’s fantasy literature, Kittatiny initially aims to instill education and culture in society (as does the Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal Volume 13 Number 1 (2016) ISSN 1209-9392 © 2016 Women in Judaism, Inc.

Bildungsroman or novel of education), and later, that of delighting. Another characteristic that fantasy creates involves solving real problems imaginatively and making the child face situations that require value and intelligence, like Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Grimm’s Rapunzel and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1857); or, even the more contemporary, Roald Dahl’s Matilda (1988). All these young heroes share similar backgrounds: either they feel orphans, condemned or separated from their parents, thus making them live with autonomy and independence. A feeling also shared by Kittatiny Blue-eyes before, during and after her journey. In an attempt to interrupt the development of the story, Russ speaks with the reader to make him/her part of the narration in a casual, almost conspiratorial tone and to achieve mutual understanding: “…there were blossoms and smelled as good as the jasmine had only spicier, like a cloud of face-powder. That is what you and I know; Kit had never seen face-powder.” (Russ 1978, 12) In other moments, it is not just a simple timeless element out of the narrative line like a face powder, but an ordinary life situation: She could imagine how worried her mother and Dad would be, and how her Dad would pretend he didn’t care, as he always did when anything went wrong, and get stern and brusque with Mother, who would then have to comfort him, all the time pretending that she was the weak one. (8)

As in Carroll’s adventure, the journey shows how the real and fantastic planes converge in a fantasy tour. Such heroes of fantasy stories include the children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Lewis 1950), Dorothy in Wizard of Oz11 (Baum 1900) or the Darlings —Wendy, Michael and John— in Peter Pan or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (Barrie 1904). Is this a mere coincidence? Frank Baum married Maud Gage, a daughter of Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898), a famous women’s suffragist, and feminist activist. TWO CONVERGING WORLDS: FANTASY AND REALITY As the title of this paper suggests, in Kittatiny: A tale of Magic, borders are broken up in order for the hero to freely walk into fantasy from reality and vice versa and to shed oneself of confinements. In this way, fantasy and reality intermingle almost imperceptibly. But who is responsible for violating the limits of fantasy and reality? A blue-eyed girl, Kittatiny or Kit for short, as the author calls her, is the hero responsible

As in Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, this is exactly when the journey starts. Kit runs away without realizing that she is getting lost and is about to go through an unforgettable adventure, an unintentional journey with no destination. But, where will the journey take her? And where does the secondary world originate? The journey starts as an unplanned walking, apparently in the real world, but it changes quickly and a sequence of fantastic unexpected episodes appear in another weird unknown world. No sooner does Kit escape than she encounters animals and other imaginary and legendary characters that influence her. An apparently “magic” wolf appears. At first, she is afraid of the wild animal, but soon she starts to trust him. It surreptitiously teaches Kit the way to walk on and behaves as if he were going to speak with her: “… she wasn’t anywhere and he seemed to know where he was going.” (10) Shortly after, the protagonist turns up at a party in the middle of the forest, and sees naked individuals (fauns and nymphs which she did not recognize) dancing around an open fire: “… the men weren’t wearing trousers at all but were naked and had legs like goats’ legs covered with coarse fur.” (13) She keeps on walking aimlessly through diverse landscapes. However, she only wants to find her way back home. In contrast with Carroll’s hero or Peter Pan, real physical needs and feelings are constantly mixed up with fantasy: hunger, sleepiness, fatigue and fear. Nevertheless, unlike other children’s adventures, neither is Kit homeless nor does she return home to resume her usual family life. Rather, the lack of loneliness never lets her hero feel alone or live her adventure by

This baby faun hidden behind a bush will be Kit’s companion. As she does not know his name and Russ does not want to reveal his identity either, Kit decides to call him “Baby Brother,” B.B. for short. He is a special baby, as he can speak. He convinces her to take him with her, and she does so. And as he says, Kit only has to carry him piggybacked and does not need to feed him, because her heartbeats and songs nurture him: “And if you sing to me once in a while, that will feed me too.” (16) At the same time, Kit is also nurtured by his magic: “I’ll feed you; I’m a magic baby and you won’t need to eat while I’m with you.” (16) Throughout the journey, Kit and B.B. complement each other while trying to find their way back home. They both cross-change imaginary landscapes; they fight against woman-faced storms; they escape from a vampire-like sleeping beauty and battle against a dragon. As the adventure progresses, the little faun grows up and changes his physical aspect, and towards the end of the narration B.B. is fully transformed into a human. But, who is B.B.? Who has changed the magic baby? Russ does not want to reveal his identity until the end of the intriguing plot, the moment she resolves his masked identity on the mirror. Kit can see herself; she is B.B. in the mirror, her alter ego: “B.B. said in the mirror, “I’ll always be with you,” but it was Kit herself who had spoken.” (89) In addition to talking animals, like B.B., Kit encounters other fantastic creatures. Among those, she has to fight against huge boulders with enormous open eyes that come to life. These creatures are called ‘slonches’ and are illustrated as the Pac-man ghosts of early videogames. Also, she comes across other characters, which are, by no coincidence, female characters: An Asian woman warrior, a female dragon called Taliasin, a vampire-like sleeping beauty, and a mermaid called Russalka. All of them, either in a friendly or hostile attitude, will eventually help her manage to resume a seemingly endless journey, which ends when she recognizes her Valley after a journey

Now fantasy and reality merge. The faun as well as the dragon’s sword, Taliasin, come from the fantasy world and become real for a while. Both characters gain importance and influence in Kit’s real life. B.B. hands the Taliasin’s sword to Kit, as a symbol of a new life, and a prop not to forget what she has learnt in order to reinvent life while projecting memories from the past into the future: Kit was about to protest that what she’d said didn’t mean anything, but then B.B. added quickly, ‘Here is something you’ll need,” and handed Kit little Taliesin with its sheath and belt. Kit had entirely forgotten about her sword from the moment she’d set foot in the Valley. It seemed to her now that she had been living two lives for the last seven years. (88)

Russ’s feminist concerns emerge when she forces spatial time planes, fantasy and reality to converge, which allows her protagonist’s life to be resolved to start another adventurous real life and make her projected desires come true. Mysteriously, Kit is tangled with her real life free from conventions and a seldom present family; however, aided by a range of ‘magical occurrences’ (a woman warrior, a sleeping beauty, a mermaid, a dragon, etc.) that appear fortuitously, yet intentionally on scene, Russ manages to bring her hero back home. She also draws the reader into traditional children’s literature, introducing creatures, such as talking animals that are reminiscent of Aesop’s Fables and mermaids of Andersen’s fairy tale, The Little Mermaid (1837). In Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal Volume 13 Number 1 (2016) ISSN 1209-9392 © 2016 Women in Judaism, Inc.

All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors. 11 Joanna Russ’s Kittatiny: A Tale of Magic these fairy tales dragons, treasures, and giants are part of the story, similarly to the Blunderbore giant in Jack the Giant Killer (1711) and Snowwhite and the Seven Dwarfs (1812) by the Grimm Bothers, where stories of princesses and vampires are told. (An unexpected story about a sleeping beauty girl turned into a vampire.) Micro-stories are commonplace in the literary universe of the writer. It is Kittatiny’s Russalka, a fairy tale about a mermaid in love with a human prince, and the use of storytelling in The Female Man: “Once upon a time a long time ago there was a child who was raised by bears. Her mother went into the woods pregnant (for there were more woods than there are today) and gave birth to the child there.” (Russ 1975, 96) Through these short stories, she also writes wonderful descriptions of fantastic events: how a mound is transformed into a female dragon, “…what she had thought were treasure chests were now the dragon’s feet; what she had taken for a heap of gold coins was now a body covered with glittering scales.” (1978, 27) And abruptly wonderful places change and become unstable. Kit walks across deserts away from the sea and enters dissimilar landscapes. She also crosses mountains that suffer fantastic changes or even encounters old city ruins. With a combination of fantasy and magic, the fictional reality is transformed to influence the protagonist’s uncertain space, which will allow her to live her own reinvented story. Time and space are indispensable components for fantasy stories and for Russ’s story. They play a determining role. Usually, in fantasy narratives, girls and boys start a journey ruled by a temporal clock, either a natural, psychological or real time, but without minutes or hours, as it is the case of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as well as The Wizard of Oz. In these tales, the girls travel to a different world and live there for some uncertain time, although they have really slept just a few hours. As is also the case of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the real time is paralyzed during their adventure when the kids are in Narnia, but as soon as they come back to England through the wardrobe, they return to their real life and to the same place where they started their journey. In Narnia, Tunmus the faun describes the country as a place that is always in winter under the possession of the witch, and regulated by both the seasons and their corresponding celebrations. In Peter and Wendy Pan, the time of the real world runs regularly, whereas in Neverland the seasons co-exist in different places and kids never grow up. Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal Volume 13 Number 1 (2016) ISSN 1209-9392 © 2016 Women in Judaism, Inc.

In Kittatiny, there is a second world created for Kit where time and seasons go by as the adventure progresses. Kit runs away, and no clock seems to exist. However, her fantasy time span lasts eight years, roughly as long as women’s adolescence, a period that Russ suggests living better off as a fantasy journey. After traveling for several years, she becomes an eighteen-year old young woman, a fact that Kit finds misleading: It seemed to her that she had been living two lives for the last seven years: one in which she’d run away from home and had adventures and another in which she’d stay in the Valley, gotten her “courses” (this is what the Valley people call menstruation) and become friendly with Rose. The two lives were blending now in the most confusing way. (88)

The continuum of fantastic scenes is further embellished with micro-stories, and momentarily the narration is stopped by a micro-tale, told by the protagonist. This happens when Kit encounters some old city ruins hidden under a sand bump, where she finds a fairy tale called Russalka13 that she begins to read, urged by B.B., who insistently asks her to do it. The micro-tale is about a mermaid, who was “…a heiress among the sea-folk and this made her an awful snob.” (43) Russalka falls in love with the prince of Bohemia and leaves her sea life in order to live with a human Prince on land. Russ conveys, through Kit, that the mermaid decided to give up her most precious sea life for human-love. Is the story a hint that all women have to change when they decide to ‘marry’ and become wives? After all, Russalka was different because she was a mermaid, not a human, and could not change her food habits nor her physical needs. For this reason, the Prince decided to call several wizards to turn her into a land-woman, “the woman he wanted her to be.” However, he did not know or did not want to know what she actually wanted, and in fact, all that she wanted was just to go back to the sea. As a consequence of the spell the wizard had put onto her, instead of turning her back into a mermaid, she was magically transformed into an enormous frog. What comes next is one of the most representative moments of the story, regarding women identity and gender roles. Russalka ‘the frog’ or the woman that the Prince had been stubbornly trying to transform, was “…a sea-maid dying for love of him…Only when he was very old and getting a bit silly would he hug himself in secret and say, I am the only Prince in the whole, wide world who had a sea-maid die for love for him.” (51)

This is how Russ breaks the development of the adventure. She tells a different fairy-tale to catch the reader’s attention and present metaphorically the social patterns of heterosexual love as well as criticize male patterns of superiority over women. And only in an attempt to break the reader’s comforting sweet spell, the author speaks through the mouth of the frog-woman: He took hold of her arm. Her extra eyelid went up, leaving her eyes blank. She tried to speak in the thin bright air, but all came out was a feeble, hissing sound; then in spite of the pain (for she was drowning in the air) Russalka managed to say one word, the only word she had ever spoken to him. She meant it for both of them. “Fool!” she said. And at his feet she bowed, she fell, she lay down; at his feet she bowed, she fell, she lay down dead; at his feet she bowed, she fell, she lay down well. (51)

Now the princess is different and from then onwards she will be able to live by herself, deal with her own difficulties and reach freedom. Here, Russ’s radical feminism emerges when, by turning the princess into a frog, she suggests that women would rather live in an only-women world like Whileaway, without harmful men and far from overprotection and inequality. SPACES OF UNCERTAINTY AND VULNERABILITY Russ establishes the limits of women’s spaces and demonstrates how they are created in relation to gender roles. While she is using fantasy to free women from their limitations, she is also making references to real life in order to define women’s uncertainties and vulnerabilities as well as criticize some ridiculous behaviors. With great irony and humor, Russ describes Rosy Bottom’s mother, Mrs. Bottom, and criticizes her tacky behavior and manners: Rose had learnt to imitate her mother, silly Mrs. Bottom; she would blink her pale eyes, pull her shawl hard around her, crouch down in her skirt (Rose wasn’t allowed to wear work pants), and say, just like her mother, Oh, I’m so nervous! I’m a wreck. (4)

Despite the sarcasm, irony, and mockery used to speak about the Bottoms in the protagonist’s real life, Rosy is a key character in the dénouement of the story. She is delicate and blonde, whereas Kit is described as an ordinary girl: “…Kit looked like everybody else: chunky and short with brown eyes and black hair.” (3) Because of their own physical appearance, and according to Jodi Manning, both girls represent established social conventions: “Many stereotypes have also surfaced assigning attributes to women based solely on the appearance of head hair. Stereotypes related to

In an attempt to justify these men-like women descriptions, it is imperative to consider the context of radicalism shown by many feminist writers of the 1970s, who present women as socially independent and sexually self-sufficient, as well as vulnerable and uncertain in the patriarchal frames. And particularly, in fantasy or SF creations, women want to break those patriarchy rules. There was an anti-male assumption that, “…all female space would necessarily be an environment where patriarchy and sexist thinking would be absent,” (Watkins 2000, 2) and many feminist activists responded to male domination with anger. Such is the case of Russ when criticizing Rose’s mother, as the typical stereotype of homemakers. She is mocked because of her arrogant movements and impertinent talking. Even when Kit tries to forget how frightened she was in the middle of the dark night, she calls Mrs. Bottom to console and cheer her up: “…she tried to make a joke of herself imitating Rose Bottom,

The story is also inspired by Russ’s theory of rescuing the female child and educating young women like young men. Here sexuality is based on sexual permissiveness, which does not mean ownership, reproduction, and social structure. (Russ 1995, 139) As Joanna Russ states in her article, this is quite a familiar idea for the radical wing of the feminist movement that allows for sexual openness, both homosexuality and heterosexuality. In line with Russ’s views on homosexuality, in Kittatiny, there are allusions to lesbian love and attraction to women. Kit discovers that the faun, her adventure company, is not an animal nor a boy, but a girl, and even if she sees her other ‘I’ reflected on the mirror, it is B.B. who tells her, “I’ll always be with you,” but it was Kit herself who had spoken.” (1978, 89) Such an ambiguity shows the girl-faun representing her own sexuality and inclinations towards women,14 and more

Rosy Bottom becomes a more pronounced figure in the narrative towards the end of the story. Why does this change occur when she has not had a relevant role during the adventure? Is she another hero? She is another female child rescued from social and psychological confinements. Both heroes have discovered one another and decided to start a new journey together, a new life. When starting a new journey or adventure (a new life journey), social, personal, and sexual constraints for women are broken up and women’s relationships are established with the open world. As the narrator speaks in the first person, “there is no home, really, and no end to traveling, even if you stay in one place, except for people who shut their eyes and try to live exactly as people have lived before them, whether it suits them or not.” (92) CONCLUSION Through the use of the fantasy genre, “the writers of feminist fairy tales address society at large, question recurrent patterns of values and the stable expectations about roles and relations.” (Zipes 2001, xii) To talk about feminist fairy tales, as Zipes states, one must talk about power, violence, alienation, social conditions, child rearing, and gender roles. Although both Joanna Russ (1937-2011) and Margaret Atwood (1939-) have written SF and utopian stories as feminist fairy tale writers, Russ’s Russalka and Atwood’s Bluebird’s Egg respectively, are structured on the conceit of fantasy. With Russ’s story, new perspectives are open in societal, political, and cultural realms, because the

All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors. 17 Joanna Russ’s Kittatiny: A Tale of Magic aesthetics of the feminist fairy tale demands an open-ended discourse, which calls for readers to complete the liberating expectations of the narrative in terms of their own experience and their social context. “…a feminist fairy tale conceives a different view of the world and speaks in a voice that has been customarily silenced.” (Zipes 2001, xi) As this analysis of the fantasy tale Kittatiny: A tale of Magic demonstrates, Joanna Russ uses fantasy to weave a beautiful thread of adventures in two discrete spatial planes, the female protagonist’s reality and fantasy, which eventually wed and project her future ‘real’ life. From this perspective, Russ moves away from SF, where reality is never mixed up with or influences ‘real life,’ as in The Female Man (1975) or Picnic in Paradise (1968), which depict utopian or unreal worlds that never intermix with a presumed reality. Here, the two young women, Kittatiny and also Rose at the end of story, demand their own space in society, a space full of uncertainties, which can be easily removed by struggling against them. If a hero can fight against magical creatures in a world of fantasy, she will also be a hero capable of struggling for social freedom and equality in the real life. Russ rescues the female child through fantasy by creating young heroes who can travel without established social ties and face puberty out of patriarchy. And she describes her theory as, “.... an alternative for young women and allows the girl to move into a full and free adulthood.” (Russ 1995, 143) The girl is rescued by an adult woman, who she admires and is attracted by her strength, intelligence, and autonomy. She is the male-looking, dark bronze skin and long-legged visitor coming from another world in “The Second Inquisition” (1976) and also the masculine and utopian character coming from Whileaway in The Female Man (1975). By combining fantasy with the protagonist’s story, Russ changes the protagonist’s reality to alter her uncertain space and allows her to live her own reinvented free story. Therefore, both spaces amazingly become one in order to free women from their limitations, where reality serves to refer to women’s uncertainties and vulnerabilities, as well as criticize and ridicule their behaviors, and fantasy to break boundaries. As described above, such a tight relationship between the natural environment and the girl explains the lack of psychological or physical ties, and intentionally, this openness and freedom removes women’s social or emotional rules.

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Notes:

1 I am grateful to Dina Ripsman Eylon, the editor-in-chief of Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal, for her courtesy and acceptance to publish this article. Thanks are also due to Emilio Cañadas, friend and colleague at the University, Gustavo Sánchez Canales and Victoria Aarons for their valuable advice, encouragement and support. 2 SF will be used for Science fiction for further references. 3 Digital publication by Marge Piercy on Joanna Russ, 2001. Consulted 9th December and available at: Joanna Russ Biography 4 Kittatiny will be used for further references. 5 The Adventures of Alyx (1976) is a fiction series. Alyx, a Greek thief woman from Alexandrian times, is the protagonist and also the heroine of the novel Picnic on Paradise (1968) and a number of short stories: ‘Bluestocking’ (‘The Adventuress’, 1967 as appeared in Orbit 2); ‘I Thought She Was Afeard Till She Stroked My Beard’ (‘I Gave Her Sack and Sherry’, 1967, as appeared in Orbit 2); ‘The Barbarian’ (1968 in Orbit 3); ‘The Second inquisition’ (1970, in Orbit 6). 6 “Recent Feminist Utopias” was first published in Future Females: A Critical Anthology (Marleen S. Barr, 1981). However, we are referencing the version appearing in her collection of critical essays To Write like a Woman published in 1995. 7 Since the publication of Karen E. Rowe’s article “Feminism and Fairy Tales” in Women’s Studies (1979), ‘…both feminism and the study of fairy tales have emerged as growth industries and have become institutionalized’ (Haas, 2004: xiii). She demonstrated how scholars based on fairy tales to study and understand sociocultural meaning. 8 Retrieved from a Special Collection & University Archives at the University of Oregon Guide to Joanna Russ Papers, (1968-1989) coll. 261. Consulted 2nd October 2016 and available at: http://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv52000#historicalID Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal Volume 13 Number 1 (2016) ISSN 1209-9392 © 2016 Women in Judaism, Inc.

9 An interview to Ursula K. Le Guin published in Fantasymundo and conducted by Alejandro Serrano, consulted 11th December 2015 and available at: http://www.fantasymundo.com/articulos/1157/fantasymundo_entrevista_ursula_k_ 10 The only edition by Daughters Pub. in 1978. 11 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, as it was originally published in 1900. 12 In the story, the Valley has no name. However, Kittatiny, girl’s name, is the area known as Kittatiny Valley, which forms a section of the Great Appalachian Valley in Sussex and Warren County in northwestern New Jersey. 13 Russalka or The Sea Coast of Bohemia, is the title of the fairy tale included in Kittatiny: A Tale of Magic. Also published as a feminist fairy-tale in the collection, Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary feminist fairy tales in North America and England by Jack Zipes in 2012. 14 As Narcissus when he fell in love with himself reflected in a pool of water.