Of Swords and Parasols

This retelling of thirteen fairy tales begins with a short tale of Cinderella dancing with her prince at the ball, realizing that he wasn’t what she really wanted, and running off with her fairy godmother. While this may sound like a flippant, possibly tongue-in-cheek retelling, nothing could be further from the truth. You see, the prince offered a life of comfort, but he did not know or understand the real Cinderella, while the Fairy Godmother gave her hope, and brought her out of the depression caused by her mother’s death.

Here, much of the magic and fantasy of fairy tales is stripped away and turned into metaphor and symbolism, a fairy tale interpretation given to reality. At the end of the first story, The Tale of the Shoe, Cinderella asks her fairy godmother who she was before she was her fairy godmother, thus setting the trend for each woman’s story to be told at the behest of another woman. Older women become young until villainesses become heroines, until we reach the beginning, where another woman saves a young girl by allowing her to make her own choices.

The book is almost wholly female centric. Each of the main characters and most of the supporting characters are female, and almost all the important relationships are between women. Here, stepmothers aren’t inherently evil, witches are just as likely to be good-and have their own stories-and girls don’t run off and marry princes they barely know. Positive or negative, the focus is consistently on women and their relationships with each other, and tales that traditionally have an evil woman are rewritten so that the focus is not on their rivalry or the prince, but on their relationship.

Actually, while the relationships between women cover the entire spectrum, I can’t think of a single positive relationship between a man and a woman, or even a positive male character, with the possible exception of Cinderella’s prince. I tend to consume most fiction paying attention to both the surface narrative and the meta narrative, and typically, if one is going to cause a hitch with me and not the other, it’s the meta narrative catching my attention with something that the surface narrative ignores or uses to enforce an irritation point with me. Here, what’s going on at the meta narrative level regarding relationships between the genders filled me with glee, while I kept getting caught up on the surface narrative, and saying “but…not all relationships between men and women are bad, or less important…” But hey, given how the bulk of fiction still focuses on males and relationships focused on males, and how negative relationships between women and making the female part of a relationship less important are still such an easy fallback for fiction (and reactions to fiction) it’s not exactly holding me back much.

There are tons of interesting things here, and the book’s structure reminds me of Catherynne Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales, only more streamlined, and leading to new stories, instead of stories within stories within stories, so that my automatic tendency to map these things as I read doesn’t cause my brain to break down. Each story is also written in the individual women’s voices, and the story is not third person prose or even traditional first person prose, but the character’s dialogue as she relates her story when asked by the previous heroine. All the way from the end to the beginning, when Cinderella asks “Who were you before you walked into my kitchen?”

I also find it interesting (though not surprising) that several of the stories reach a turning point when the heroine reaches puberty. And I like that the nature of the emotions between many of the characters is never quite clear. Some are clear, some are vague, and some indicate one type of connection without committing, but all are crucial. I also like how, as the book progresses, it becomes clearer and clearer with each story that we are not seeing the entirety of their lives, that who they are is not this one moment in time, but rather, they are simply relating a turning point in their lives, with gaping, important parts of those lives left to the reader’s imagination.

I feel like I could go on and on about this for pages, but I suspect I’d just be repeating myself without realizing it.

Anyone have opinions on Donoghue's other books?

ETA:  Spoilers for Demon Ororon in comments.