Notes Preface 1. Cristina Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 68. 2. Catherine Orenstein, ‘Dances with Wolves: Little Red Riding Hood’s Long Walk in the Woods’, available online at http://www.msmagazine.com/ summer2004/danceswithwolves.asp, p. 5. The tale’s socio-cultural transition and its contemporary revisions are further elaborated in Orenstein’s book Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale (New York: Basic Books, 2002). Introduction 1. Catherine Clement, The Newly Born Woman (written with Helene Cixous, first published in 1975 as La Jeune Nee, repr. London: IB Tauris, 1996, trans. Betsy Wing), p. 6. 2. Isabel Cristina Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 70. 3. See Linda Williams’ article ‘When the Woman Looks’, The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (University of Texas Press, 1996). 4. Brigid Cherry, ‘Refusing to Refuse to Look: Female Viewers of the Horror Film’, Horror: The Film Reader, ed. Mark Jancovich (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 172–74. 5. Ibid., p. 176. 6. Pinedo, Recreational Terror,p.69. 7. Although the female equivalent of Stand By Me exists in the form of Then and Now (Lesli Linka Glatter, 1995), the film simply substitutes identical female figures for the male characters in Reiner’s film, yet notably exchanges the narrative task from the discovery of a dead body to the investigation of a suspected murder, even involving a séance in a graveyard in order to ‘feminise’ the subject matter. 8. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975), pp. 6–18. 9. Elizabeth Wanning Harries, Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 104. 10. Ibid., p. 101. 11. Carol Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Horror Film (London: BFI Press, 1992), p. 12. 12. Robin Wood, Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 70. 173 174 Notes 13. James B. Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 7. 14. Ibid., p. 66. 15. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws, pp. 10, 19. 16. Ibid., p. 17. 17. Twitchell, p. 66. 18. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairytales (London: Penguin Books, 1976, repr., 1991), p. 12. 19. Sibylle Birkhauser-Oeri, The Mother: Archetypal Image in Fairy Tales (1977, Toronto: Inner City Books, 1988), p. 9. 20. Maria Tatar, Off With Their Heads!: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 46. 21. Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 33. 22. Ibid., From the Beast to the Blonde, pp. 24, 297. 23. Ibid., pp. 318, 351. 24. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 3. 25. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws,p.18. 26. Ibid., p. 231. 27. Pinedo, Recreational Terror,p.4. 28. Ibid., pp. 70, 95. 29. Stephen King, quoted by Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws,p.3. 30. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws, pp. 3, 6. 31. Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, p. xvi. 32. Vera Dika, Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th and the Films of the Stalker Cycle (New Jersey: Associated University Press, 1990), p. 87. 33. Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, p. 195. 34. Pinedo, Recreational Terror,p.39. 35. Tatar, Off With Their Heads!,p.39. 36. See Alison Lurie’s introduction to Clever Gretchen and Other Forgotten Folktales (New York: Thomas Y Crowell, 1980, pp. xi–xiii). 37. Birkhauser-Oeri, The Mother, pp. 18–19. 38. Tatar, Off With Their Heads!, pp. 226, 228. 39. Ibid., p. 230. 40. E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 201. 41. George Beahm also describes Carrie as ‘The Catcher in the Rye with a supernatural element’, yet unlike Salinger’s teenage protagonist, Holden Caulfield, who recognises and rejects the ‘phoniness’ of the adult world while opting out of school, Carrie’s tragedy is her naive wish to be accepted by the very world that rejects her. The Stephen King Story (London: Warner Books, 1994), p. 78. 1 Telling tales: Fairy tales and female rites of passage narratives 1. Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures,p.7. 2. Twitchell’s view that horror cinema is essentially conservative is shared by Tony Williams who claims that while films of the 1970s were critical Notes 175 of the family, the 1980s was an ‘era pathologically affirming conservative family values’ (‘Trying to Survive on the Darker Side: 1980s Family Horror’, The Dread of Difference, p. 165), while Christopher Sharret agrees that the majority of horror films in this decade were a reactionary defence of family values and patriarchy (‘The Horror Film in Neo-Conservative Culture’, The Dread of Difference, p. 253). 3. Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment,p.73. 4. Not only were women the principal tale-tellers in the home, as Marina Warner has pointed out, they were also responsible for spreading stories to a wider audience. Maria Tatar asserts that while the Grimms used sources of mixed gender for their collection of tales, most were attributed to female informants, including Dorothea Viehmann, Jeanette Hassenpflug, and Dorothea Wild. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (orig pubd 1987, 2nd edn, Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 25. In addition, while Charles Perrault remains well known for writing tales in 17th century France, a number of women were also engaged in this role, as Marina Warner and Elizabeth Wanning Harries have sought to remind us. 5. Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, p. xix. 6. The pain inflicted on Andersen’s female characters is as curious as their redemption. See, for example, ‘The Little Mermaid’ and ‘The Red Shoes’, in which young girls are mutilated prior to being allowed into heaven. 7. This aversion to mature females has been attributed to Andersen’s homo- sexuality, as much as his religious beliefs, and a recent biography argues that promiscuous female relatives led to this antipathy, citing Andersen himself stating that girls older than 12 made him ‘shudder’. See Hans Chris- tian Andersen: A New Life by Jens Andersen (trans. Tiina Nunnally, Overlook Duckworth Press, 2005). 8. Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon Books Inc., 1949), p. 10. 9. Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde,p.17. 10. Wanning Harris, Twice Upon a Time,p.17. 11. Jack Zipes, The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 23. 12. Ibid., p. 24. 13. Ibid. 14. Tatar, Off With Their Heads!,p.96. 15. Tatar, The Hard Facts, pp. 29–30. 16. Zipes, The Brothers Grimm, p. 149. 17. Tatar, The Hard Facts, pp. 4–9. 18. Zipes, The Brothers Grimm, p. 151. 19. In Tatar’s view ‘the facts of life seemed to have been more disturbing to the Grimms than the harsh realities of life’ – causing them to remove sexual content more readily than instances of cruelty and violence. The Hard Facts, p. 11. 20. Zipes, The Brothers Grimm, pp. 24–5. 21. Ibid., p. 25. 22. Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, p. 207. 23. Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment,p.73. 24. Tatar, Off With Their Heads!, p. 141. 25. Ibid., p. 146. 176 Notes 26. Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, p. 244. 27. In the version Tatar alludes to Red Riding Hood and her Granny survive by boiling sausage on the fire and thus enticing the wolf down the chimney and boiling him alive, while the Grimm’s appended finale has him drown outside in a trough filled with sausage water. However, in other versions of ‘Red Riding Hood’ the heroine participates in such activities as unwittingly eating her grandmother’s body and even engaging in sexual relations with the wolf, demonstrating the variations that have occurred around the story. The Hard Facts, pp. xvi, 23. For a chronological account of the tale’s transition, see Jack Zipes’ (ed.), The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood (London: Routledge, 2nd edn 1993). 28. Zipes, The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, pp. 24, 26. 29. Tatar, The Hard Facts,p.47. 30. Zipes, The Brothers Grimm, p. 149. 31. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws,p.12. 32. Pinedo, Recreational Terror,p.76. 33. Tatar, The Hard Facts, p. xix. 34. Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, p. 213. 35. Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, p. 245. 36. The origins of fairy godmothers and maternal spirits are instructive. In his analysis of ancient myths, Campbell has noted that supernatural aid would often come from a crone who presents an amulet or some other form of assistance (The Hero With a Thousand Faces, p. 69) and points out that her precursors are the protecting goddesses found in Greek myth (p. 71). This protection is usually given to a male hero by a female deity, yet we should not forget the importance of Demeter – who forced Zeus’s intervention in her daughter Persephone’s abduction by Hades. The relevance of the myth, and its role as a primary example of the mother-avenger, will be discussed in Chapter 6. 37. Zipes, The Brothers Grimm, pp. 137–8, 141. 38. Ibid., p. 142. 39. Cristina Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales,p.56.